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What if they threw a taser party and no one came?
Fort Myers gun shop hosts Taser party, but guests are no-show
Owner says his plan may need tweaking
BY GABRIELLA SOUZA • GSOUZA@NEWS-PRESS.COM • AUGUST 31, 2008
First it was Tupperware and Mary Kay cosmetics.
Now it's Tasers.
Fort Myers gun shop Guns R Us is the latest to sell its wares via a community gathering, or a party, of sorts. But unlike mascara and food storage containers, this product is a nonlethal weapon capable of giving an attacker a 50,000-volt jolt.
Guns R Us' owner Brian Waldron decided to hold the parties at his shop at 2075 Broadway because an influx of people came to his shop within the last six months inquiring about Tasers. Waldron estimates he's sold about 30 Tasers in the last two months. Tasers carry the jolt to the attacker by firing two darts.
"We've been running into more and more people who aren't gun friendly," he said.
On Saturday, Waldron planned to hold the first party. He'd scheduled a certified Taser instructor, passed out about 400 flyers and laid out refreshments.
But by noon, an hour after the party's scheduled start, no one had showed up. Waldron said he had been expecting about 50 people.
"You go and do it, and now where is everybody that wants to do it?" Waldron said.
But he wasn't dismayed. This was, after all, the first try, and Waldron admitted maybe his plan needed tweaking. Perhaps he should hold a party in a woman's home, channeling the success of those party products that have come before the Taser, he said.
The $300 Taser model Waldron was peddling is different from the one carried by law enforcement. On the law enforcement Taser, the darts the device fires can travel 30 feet and a civilian Taser travels 15 feet.
That's to ensure in a civilian-officer confrontation the officer would have advantage, said Charlie Mesloh, associate professor in the Division of Justice Studies at Florida Gulf Coast University and director of its weapons and equipment research institute.
Mesloh said Waldron's idea is not unique; he has heard about Taser parties occurring across the country. And Taser International, the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company that makes the weapon, also holds seminars on Tasers.
"It's certainly a good marketing technique," he said.
Carrying a Taser for self defense does not require a permit in Florida, although you must be authorized to have one at a school. And if you buy one, Taser International will do a background check and if you have felony arrests, you may have to give back the Taser and receive a refund.
Lt. Dennis Eads of the Fort Myers Police Department has no problem with his neighbor Guns R Us holding the gathering, although he said if it was up to him he wouldn't call it a party.
"It's not different than if they were having a firearms display," he said.
Eads, who trains new officers in Taser protocol, has been Tasered at least half a dozen times. "It hurts," he said. "It's like losing all control of your entire body. You can't move; it completely immobilizes you."
Eads said he only knows of bounty hunters and bail bondsmen who own Tasers now, but could see more people in the future opting to buy Tasers.
Lorie Fridell, associate professor of criminology at the University of South Florida, said her worry about the availability of Tasers was the device could fall into the wrong hands. "It could be used by a spouse against a spouse, a parent against a child," said Fridell, who is doing research on Tasers.
Eads' concern with more people buying Tasers is owners won't know how to properly work it, since no training is required to have one. Hitting someone with the darts isn't as easy as it looks, Eads said. "It could be as dangerous as it is helpful," he said.
Posted by Reality Chick at 07:14 1 comments Links to this post
Labels: citizen tasers
Family wants inquiry into taser death
MONTREAL - Ask Marie-Jésula Registre whether she feels any anger over the fact a police taser that fires a 50,000-volt charge was used six times on her son Quilem and she replies softly, her eyes rimmed with tears. "I'm a Christian. I don't keep anger in my heart. But this has been devastating blow for myself and our family. He was our only son."
Maria-Jesula, her husband Augustin-François and their, daughters Francine and Chantal, met with reporters Friday after a Quebec coroner added more questions to those the Registre family have had since Quilem's death on Oct. 18, 2008, days after being tasered by Montreal police officers.
"The main question is: 'Why?'," said Evans Sanelus, Quilem's cousin, "No one deserved the fate (Quilem experienced), no matter what they've done in life. If a (police officer) is there to do their job, their first objective is to protect and to analyse a situation before intervening."
Quilem's father called for an independent, public inquiry into his son's death, an exercise he said would result in "justice" being done.
That call for a public inquiry, echoed by Dan Philip of the Black Coalition of Quebec, follows the publication of a coroner's report into Registre's death that concludes that while the cocaine and alcohol in Registre's system may have contributed to his demise, the fact police found it necessary to subdue him with six 50,000-volt electrical charges made it "difficult to believe (the taserings) played no role in his death."
Coroner Catherine Rudel-Tessier was also critical of the lack of information personnel at Sacré Coeur Hospital received about Registre's condition once he was transported by Urgences Santé from the scene of his arrest on Rivard St. for running a stop sign. "Mr. Registre was first received at Sacré Coeur Hospital as a traffic accident victim who was intoxicated," she wrote. "The treating physicians deplored ... the fact they had been given so little details on the use of (a Taser) and Mr. Registre's condition beforehand."
Rudel-Tessier also noted she was unable to personally interview the two officers who arrested Registre, their version of events provided to her only in incident reports filed two days after his arrest on Oct. 16 and one day before his death.
"I therefore have no explanation why the use of other forms of force (rather than the Taser) were insufficient or inefficient," she wrote. "I had no access to the process of their decision making nor any details on their strategic thinking. We can ask if there was another way, other means of subduing Mr. Registre and calming him. Since he was visibly agitated, one would think back-up could have been called in, ambulance technicians in particular, since this was a medical emergency. Even if Mr. Registre did not pull a gun, was the fact he didn't respond to an order to raise his hands sufficient reason to immediate resort to (the Taser)?"
What the coroner did glean from the police reports was that only one of the two officers who arrested Registre - who they described as being "hysterical" after attempting to drive away from the traffic stop and slamming his car into another vehicle parked nearby - was trained to use a Taser.
Rudel-Tessier recommended that the Montreal police ensure all members of a team equipped with a Taser be trained to use it, and that training programs educate officers in how to restrain a suspect once they've been it with an electrical charge.
She also called on Quebec's Public Security Department to examine the possibility of ordering the province's police departments to equip their tasers with cameras to record the circumstances of their use.
A spokesperson for Claude Dauphin, chairperson of the city's executive committee and responsible for public security, said the police department has been asked to examine the coroner's findings and produce a report that would detail what changes, if necessary, would be made to existing procedures.
Labels: contributing factor, dr. catherine rudel-tessier, montreal, quebec, quebec black coalition, quilem registre
Montreal family wants public inquiry after coroner says taser use avoidable
MONTREAL — The family of a Montreal man who died after police zapped him several times with a Taser says a coroner's report still leaves questions unanswered about his death.
Quilem Registre died last year, four days after Montreal police subdued him using a Taser. A Quebec coroner's report into his death suggests that had the officers been better trained they could have brought the agitated Registre under control without using a Taser.
Registre's family gathered at the offices of a local community organization Friday to demand an independent public inquiry.
"All we feel is that if we have our questions answered and we have the policemen's version, we will feel a little bit better," Registre's cousin Evans Sanelus said during a news conference at the Black Coalition of Quebec. It still won't bring Quilem back. But if we have justice, then maybe we will feel a little bit better."
The family said they want to hear from the police officers.
"If they would have taken the time to use better judgment, maybe the situation would have been different." Sanelus said. "We're asking for a public inquiry to re-evaluate the entire situation."
Registre, 38, was stopped by Montreal police in October 2007 for driving erratically.
Police have said he was intoxicated and aggressive and they used the stun gun - which emits a 50,000-volt electrical charge - to subdue him.
In her report, coroner Catherine Rudel-Tessier said the Taser cannot be blamed for Registre's death. However, she said the fact he was struck six times may have been a contributing factor.
Rudel-Tessier said electronic stun guns can be effective policing tools and should be used instead of firearms whenever possible.
Registre's loved ones, meanwhile, do not want his death to be in vain. "Life goes on, he's dead but we're still alive," Sanelus said. "We have to ask for justice. That's the only thing we can do right now and that's what Quilem would have wanted."
Labels: contributing factor, dr. catherine rudel-tessier, montreal, quebec, quilem registre
My Magic Gun
Kate Slater, a lady we have come to admire and are getting to know through this website, sent the following poem to me this week, saying "here's a poem for your mother."
I hope that Kate was inspired by the song my mom recently wrote called "Taser Me Baby."
Thank you, Kate - you are an inspiration to both of us too!
Kate Slater
I'll tase you till you're down and twitch
So my partner can handcuff you.
No, I'll tase you till you produce your hands
And a jolt so you'll stand up too.
I'll tase you till I figure out
Just what I want you to do.
Don't say you won't, my magic gun
Won't never ever ever harm you.
Don't say you can't, you'll take the ride
It's your fault if it hurts you.
Hey, I let them tase me right in the back.
I yelled and I fell over too.
I did what was expected, not scared and not mad,
So why don't you do that too?
I'll hold down the trigger till you do.
The docs say if you're delirious
the magic gun might not stop you.
to fire quicker and a lot to save you.
The docs say if you're delirious,
it just might damage you.
Which of the docs is telling the truth?
And what's a policeman to do?
I'll trust my trainer, he says that it's fine
And he trusts his trainer and so on up high.
They all pass on the latest information
And no one has a reason to lie.
And no one had a reason to die.
If you think, if you think, that you're scared it will hurt
You'll say "Don't tase me bro!"
If you think, if you think, that you're scared it will kill
You'll raise you hands and go.
So thanks to all the folks who up and die,
As long as we can claim it ain't so.
If I think, if I think, it won't do any harm
I'll blow cartridges at thirty bucks a pop.
And if you suffer from "unanticipated death"
Well, it's your fault anyway, because --you--
weren't right in the head, didn't comply with orders, did all that coke,
had a bad heart, or were black or white or red or human,
or leaking scary sweat, or you wanted to die, or you had a stapler,
or you swore at me, --or you had a bad day--
or I did.
Cause I didn't intend to kill you.
It's a non-lethal weapon, they say. And non-lethal means
it's a weapon used by men who don't intend to kill.
If it did, it was your fault that you died in hell.
And if I had thought that it would kill you, --well-- . . .
Labels: song - my magic gun, song - taser me baby
New website: Prevent Dangerous Harm
Please see the new website, Prevent Dangerous Harm.
"This advocacy group was established subsequent to the death of our son and brother, Patrick D. Hagans. On May 13, 2007, in Franklin County, Ohio during an altercation with law enforcement officers, a Taser was used. Patrick became unconscious and was admitted to a local hospital. Having never regained any awareness, Patrick was removed from life support and passed away May 16, 2007. The task of our advocacy organization is to support agencies that are demanding further research and stricter regulations regarding the use of Tasers for both law enforcement officers and private citizens. If your belief is “SAFETY, NOT HARM” please join us in this crusade to make our world a much more protected place for all. Help support our efforts in furthering education and awareness of Taser usage in your community and others."
I encourage your support of this advocacy group and, to that end, you may wish to purchase one or more "Don't Taser Me" wristbands at this site.
New Zealand: taser decision unprincipled and dangerous
Press Release: Campaign Against the Taser
Campaign Against the Taser (CATT) has expressed deep concern about the Police Commissioner's decision to introduce Tasers, describing it as unprincipled and dangerous. "Our analysis of the preliminary information about the trial initially released by the police indicated that more than 40% of incidents between just September 2006 and March 2007 were in breach of the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) drawn up to regulate Taser use during the trial period", spokesperson Marie Dyhrberg said today.
"The Police Commissioner's decision has been made despite repeated calls for delay until the public had had the opportunity to view and comment on all relevant information about the trial, not just the summaries released by Police, which the Chief Ombudsman called "sanitised". Despite the Chief Ombudsman's recommendation in May that wrongly withheld information be released to CATT, the police have still not provided information covering the full year of the trial."
In CATT's report, Stun guns in Aotearoa New Zealand? The shocking trial, serious concerns were raised about inappropriate and dangerous use of Tasers during the trial, such as use of the weapons in service stations, on individuals in mental health crisis, on people whose behaviour was not assaultive, and the disproportionate number of Maori and Pacific people targeted with Tasers. In addition, it highlighted the increasing controversy over the use of Tasers overseas as the death toll among those struck by police Tasers continues to rise, and the United Nations Committee Against Torture's description of the use of TaserX26 weapons as constituting a form of torture which could in certain cases cause death.
"There has been no public discussion of these concerns, and without the complete set of information about the New Zealand trial, it has not even been possible for the public to properly assess the trial. The trial has been run by Police, assessed by Police, and now the decision has been made by Police, with no transparency or openness in the process", Dyhrberg said. "Transparency is especially important in a trial, which is supposed to provide an opportunity for reflection and considered debate - this trial has had neither."
"The Police Commissioner said that the debate in the House on Wednesday did not raise any new issues. That is no wonder - how can the matter be properly debated when most of the relevant information is kept secret? A decision such as this, which will change the face of policing in New Zealand, should be subject to a rigorous democratic process and public scrutiny. The decision is both unprincipled and dangerous, and the lack of process and transparency around it is unacceptable in a modern democracy."
It is inevitable that at some point there will be serious injuries or deaths related to Taser use, and that the introduction of the Taser will needlessly increase the violence of policing in New Zealand. CATT remains concerned about the lack of thorough and independent investigations into Taser use and its effects. The Campaign is also concerned that Tasers will be used as a tool of routine force, not of last resort, and that vulnerable groups (such as those with mental health issues) will again be inappropriately subjected to electric shocks.
Labels: campaign against the taser, new zealand, protest
Put tasers away until study is released, professor tells cops
By MICHAEL STAPLES, The Daily Gleaner (New Brunswick)
Police forces should impose a moratorium on stun guns until ongoing studies into their safety are completed, says an associate professor of criminology at St. Thomas University. Michael Boudreau said police forces across the country should stop using tasers until a report by the Canadian Police Research Centre is released.
The much-anticipated report was expected to be unveiled this week at a meeting of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police in Montreal but will remain under wraps until next year. The report will be subjected to an independent peer review and will only be released in 2009, with a longer-term study due in 2010, Steve Palmer, the executive director of the Canadian Police Research Centre, said earlier this week.
"There have been far too many deaths related to the use of tasers," Boudreau said. "So, if the police feel that they need more time to study this issue, fine, but in the interim, rather than declare that tasers are an acceptable intermediate force option, police forces across the country should impose a moratorium on their use until the report is released. Otherwise, a cloud of doubt will continue to hang over the effectiveness of tasers."
Boudreau said it would appear that the police, including the RCMP, are finally listening to the mounting criticism of taser use and are taking the time to study this issue. In addition to the ongoing study, the provinces need to commission independent bodies, separate from the police services, to conduct detailed investigations of taser use, he said.
"While further study into taser use is certainly needed, a delay this long means that full police accountability of taser use will not be forthcoming," he said.
Labels: canadian association of chiefs of police, canadian police research centre, michael boudreau-st. thomas university
Missouri man dies after being tasered
Stanley James Harlan, 23, Moberly, Missouri
Taser ban not the answer, OPP chief argues
JASON MAGDER, The Montreal Gazette
Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Julian Fantino says Taser stun guns shouldn't be banned, but perhaps the training methods on the devices should be reviewed. "The debate has gone off the rails," said Fantino, who is in town to attend the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police at the Palais des congrès.
"We've got into this big debate about banning (Tasers). In my experience, conducted energy devices save lives. It's an intermediate tool that police officers should have available to them. What we need to debate is the proper use of the tools, and the accountability."
Since 2001, 280 people in the U.S. have died after being shot by a Taser stun gun, and Tasers were found to be a possible cause or contributory factor in 30 of those deaths, Amnesty International reports. In Canada, there were 15 deaths as of May, but none has been directly attributed to the use of a Taser.
Fantino would not comment on the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, who died after he was shot with a Taser stun gun at Vancouver airport in October. Autopsy results have not yet been made public.
On the heels of that incident, the association ordered a study into whether the weapon is safe, but that study will only be completed by 2009 at the earliest. Yesterday morning, Steve Palmer, who is heading the research as executive director of the Canadian Police Research Centre, met with reporters.
While interim results of his report were expected to be made public at this week's conference, Palmer said a decision was made last weekend at a meeting with the executive of the Canadian Association of Police Chiefs to cancel that briefing.
"We decided to pass it out to an independent body so that the work that comes back has all that scientific rigour and validity that goes into a peer-reviewed document."
He said the decision was not related to the fact that Taser International is a major sponsor of the annual meeting. Until the study is completed, Palmer said, police forces can use the recommendations on the use of the weapon made in 2005, which said the device is safe.
Yesterday, Stephen Tuttle, the vice-president of communications for Taser International, was displaying the device and the latest products the company is offering at the conference's hall of exhibitors. The company was also showing a tiny device known as an extended range electronic projectile. It's the size of a 12-gauge shotgun shell, and can be fired from a shotgun to incapacitate a person with an electric shock from a distance of about 20 metres.
Tuttle said people should wait for the reviews of cases like the Dziekanski incident to draw conclusions about the safety of the Taser. "We stand behind the safety of our technology," Tuttle said. "First and foremost, you have to look at what are the alternatives to use of force."
The conference wraps up today. Sûreté du Québec deputy chief Steven Chabot, the association's president, is to give a briefing to reporters this morning.
Labels: canadian association of chiefs of police, canadian police research centre, conflict of interest, julian fantino, ontario provincial police, taser international
taser report expected in 2009
The Montreal Gazette
MONTREAL - The man studying the use of Tasers and other stun guns said he won't make any recommendations about the use of the weapons until 2009. Steve Palmer, the executive director of the Canadian Police Research Centre, said his report will be submitted for review by independent peers. That is why it will take so long, the force made public today.
Palmer was mandated by the Canadian Association of Police Chiefs to conduct the study, and he was expected to present an interim report at the association's annual meeting, being held in Montreal this week. Palmer met with media this morning, though only to answer questions about the scope and the methodology of his report.
Labels: canadian association of chiefs of police, canadian police research centre
Iowa man dies after being tasered
Ronald Adkisson, 59, Creston, Iowa
Report finds no wrongdoing in man's death
Associated Press - November 3, 2008 10:54 AM ET
CRESTON, Iowa (AP) - A report shows that Creston police officers did nothing wrong when they Tasered a man who died minutes after being released from jail. Police used force, including a Taser, to subdue 59-year-old Ronald Adkisson on Aug. 25 after a disturbance at a Fareway grocery store. Officials said Adkisson had a seizure at the store and became combative when officers tried to arrest him. He was found dead on the sidewalk outside the jail 15 minutes after he was released. An autopsy showed he died of a seizure disorder. A report by the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation and the autopsy report were reviewed by Union County Attorney Timothy Kenyon. It found that officers followed department protocol and that their actions did not cause Adkisson's seizures.
Labels: seizure disorder
Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police conference cancels taser report
Jason Magder, The Gazette
MONTREAL - A much-anticipated interim report on the use of Taser stun guns in law enforcement that was to be presented Monday afternoon was cancelled.
Steve Palmer, the Executive Director of the Canadian Police Research Centre, was commissioned by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police to conduct a full-scale review of stun gun use. The review was ordered after Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski died after being stunned by at Taser gun RCMP officers at the Vancouver International Airport.
Palmer was expected to present an interim briefing to the law enforcement officials at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police in Montreal Monday afternoon.
However, over the weekend, officials decided to cancel the briefing. The Canadian Police Research Centre operates under the banner of Defence Research and Development Canada, a special operating agency of the Ministry of National Defence.
Taser International, the company that manufactures stun guns for many law enforcement agencies, is one of the main sponsors of the annual conference.
"It was decided it would be more valuable to have the study stand up to the rigours of peer review before being released," said a spokesperson for Defence Research and Development Canada.
The spokesperson didn't know if the interim report is expected to be made public. The final report has not yet been completed.
The main theme of the conference's theme is "better diversity management through partnership," and workshops will deal with issues of racial profiling, as well as reasonable accommodation.
The conference is being held at both the Palais de Congrés and the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth hotel. It began last night and will run until Wednesday.
Labels: canadian association of chiefs of police, canadian police research centre, conflict of interest, taser international
No charges to be laid in death of Italian immigrant in Quebec City
QUEBEC — No criminal charges will be laid after an Italian immigrant died in police custody two days after he was shocked four times with a stun gun.
Crown prosecutors say there is no evidence Quebec City police used more force than necessary in apprehending Claudio Castagnetta last September. The Crown decision came after it studied the autopsy report into Castagnetta's death as well as the findings of a Quebec provincial inquiry into the incident. And the Crown says there is nothing in the autopsy report to indicate Castagnetta's death was caused directly by the stun gun.
Castagnetta died Sept. 20 from self-inflicted head wounds while he was being detained by Quebec City police. His death came two days after he was shocked four times by police using a stun gun when they were called to a convenience store. At that time, Castagnetta appeared disoriented and refused to leave. Witnesses said he resisted when police attempted to handcuff him and he was struck several times with the stun gun.
The Italian government complained to the Quebec government about the speed with which the province addressed the matter.
Labels: claudio castagnetta, quebec
Police chiefs to talk tasers
Canwest News Service
MONTREAL (CNS) -- Police chiefs will spend three days in Montreal next week talking about reasonable accommodation, racial profiling and Taser use, among other subjects.
The theme for the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, which starts on Sunday and runs until Wednesday, is better diversity management through partnership. The theme was chosen a year ago, but it couldn't be more timely considering recent events.
A Montreal police officer shot and killed Fredy Villanueva, 18, in Montreal North last week, prompting a riot in the streets and criticism that members of ethnic minority groups who live in that area are often harassed by police.
Last fall, the RCMP's methods of dealing with immigrants was called into question when Robert Dziekanski died at Vancouver International Airport. He didn't speak any English and was trying to meet his mother who had come to the airport to pick him up. However, after many hours of waiting, he had become agitated. He died after RCMP officers tried to subdue him with a Taser stun gun.
The use of Taser guns is under review and police chiefs are expected to be given an update on the findings at the conference next week. However, it's unclear if media will get access to that report. Reporters were told Thursday they won't have access to the conference, but might be able to interview some of its participants.
"It's always been like that," said Patrice Cardinal of the Surete du Quebec, a spokesperson for the conference's organizing committee. "The conferences are really just for participants of the conference."
Reporters will be invited to meet some of the event's sponsors, and there will be a news conference on Wednesday so the association can present recommendations on police policy made by conference participants.
Labels: canadian association of chiefs of police, conflict of interest, taser international
Not-guilty plea by cop in taser death
A former Winnfield police officer pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges of manslaughter and official malfeasance in the racially explosive case of a 21-year-old African-American man who died after being shocked with a Taser nine times while handcuffed and in police custody.
Scott Nugent, 21, will remain free on $45,000 bond. He faces up to 45 years in prison if convicted.
Nugent, who is white, was fired from the police force four months after Baron Pikes' death.
Labels: barron pikes, cause of death, contributing factor, manslaughter
Please help me keep track
This week, I am asking my readers for a little help. I'm on vacation and will not be able to monitor the taser news as closely as usual. PLEASE, if you learn of any taser-related deaths, post a comment to this thread and I will update the site as soon as possible. Thank you for your assistance.
Homeless man robbed and attacked with taser in Calgary
"This is fairly unusual in Calgary," said Constable Gord Denis.
That's only because this is just the beginning - we are going to see many more instances of citizens attacking each other with tasers. Wait for it.
NADIA MOHARIB, The Calgary Sun
Police are looking for two men who launched an unprovoked attack on a homeless man, hitting him across the head and repeatedly jolting him with a Taser before swiping his cellphone and bike.
Const. Gord Denison said although incidents seeing crooks armed with Tasers are rare, any case is disturbing. "This is fairly unusual in Calgary," he said yesterday.
"But they're a weapon and no different than a knife or any other weapon" when used with violent intent, he added.
Denison said the unsuspecting man in his 40s was ambushed as he walked near 5 St. and 23 Ave. S.W. just before 4 a.m. on Aug. 11.
"The victim was a harmless, homeless guy minding his own business, walking his bike," Denison said.
"This was for no apparent reason."
The man was reaching for his cellphone to offer to one of the strangers, who had asked to borrow it, when a second man jumped from the bushes and began hitting him with what might have been a metal pipe.
The first suspect then repeatedly jolted the victim with a stun gun.
Then the suspects took the man's cellphone and mountain bike, leaving him with contusions to his head and neck area as well as bruising and burn marks to his back.
Police said a Good Samaritan phoned for help upon hearing the commotion.
Police are now trying to find the victim again to see how he is faring while hoping to get leads on finding suspects behind the cowardly crime.
Anyone with information about the attack is asked to call Denison at 403-567-6100 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.
The suspects are said to be two white men about 6-ft.-tall with heavy builds, one bald and the other dark-haired.
There may have been a possible third suspect who rode away on the stolen bike.
Labels: calgary
RCMP emails reveal chaotic time after airport taser death
VANCOUVER — While RCMP brass and its media relations division scrambled to keep from being "crucified" over Taser use and the death of a man at Vancouver's airport, they also had to deal with an increasing barrage of complaints accusing officers of being everything from clowns to killers.
Email documents, released to The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act, showed great concern from Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day's office down to the RCMP's British Columbia media relations office over the public's perception about the death of Robert Dziekanski.
"I am going to get some advice, but I think I might wade in here to set some of the record straight with the media," RCMP Chief Supt. Dale McGowan wrote in an email to the Cmdr. Peter German.
"We are being crucified on why the Taser usage and our members' actions at the preliminary stages."
German later replied that he had "just watched the Taser video on BBC TV in Australia!"
Weeks before, RCMP media spokesman Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre wrote to management that Cpl. Dale Carr - the media spokesman for the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team - had concluded there was a possibility of an "international incident" because of Dziekanski's death.
In one email days after the death, Day's office issues an "urgent" request to RCMP to see the latest media lines Mounties have sent out on the Taser incident.
Lemaitre outlined suggestions for what the RCMP should tell the media, including that the death was being reviewed on several levels and that the investigation was continuing.
On October 14, 2007 Dziekanski spent hours in the international arrivals area at the Vancouver airport before he was confronted by four RMCP officers.
A bystander's video of the confrontation shows the officers attempting a brief conversation with the confused and sweating Polish man before Dziekanski was jolted twice with a Taser.
He died minutes after the officers pinned him to the ground.
Sgt. Tim Shields - who has just taken over the communications section at E Division in Vancouver - said in an interview last week that the entire issue has hurt the Mounties' public image.
"Yes, of course it has," he said. "And we hope that when more of the facts are made public ... it will present a clearer picture of truly what happened."
The eyewitness video was seized by officers at the scene for evidence, and the owner later threatened legal action to get it back, saying he wanted to release what he recorded to the media.
In the hours after the death, Lemaitre told the media that officers at the scene attempted to calm the man, but they felt threatened.
When the eyewitness video was finally released, it showed police using the Taser less than half-a-minute after first confronting the man.
After the tape was aired around the world, the RCMP were inundated with angry emails.
"Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre should be fired for purposely misrepresenting the facts and suppressing the video on a false premise," wrote one person who's name was removed from the documents. "It appears you have been caught in an outright lie," wrote another, whose name was also stripped from the email. The email had a subject line reading "state-sanctioned murder."
Lemaitre told one correspondent he had to work with the information that he was given by the investigation team, and he suggested that if he had it to do over again, he would have said nothing.
"In the world of communications, police have often been criticized for not giving details and/or information regarding an incident resulting in allegations that we are hiding something," Lemaitre wrote.
He told the complainant several investigations will reveal why officers did what they did. "As for myself, as a spokesperson, in the future, I will consider saying that we have no comment, there's an ongoing investigation, and weather the storm of media criticism that we are not forthcoming."
Despite Lemaitre's comment, Shields said police haven't changed the way they deal with the media. "We have to ensure that we have an open relationship with the media because we rely on the media to get the message out to the public," he said.
Another member of the public wrote asking police "So how are you going to lie your way out of this one?" and made reference to the Mahar Arar where RCMP handed over inaccurate information about the Canadian man to U.S. authorities. "You clowns are nothing but a sad, expensive joke," the writer ended.
Later correspondence grew increasing hostile and is riddled with foul language. Some are even threatening. "When will charges of manslaughter be brought against the officers?" asks a member of the public. "Seeing as there will be no proper action taken against the criminals, I should hope a similar fate befalls their families."
Carr and Lemaitre responded to several of the writers.
It is vitriol Shields said he's never seen before from the public.
"After the millions of good things that we have done, it was very disheartening to see that level of backlash and anger from the public."
Not all the emails were negative. Chris Newel of the Clearwater RCMP wrote to Lemaitre suggesting police put out a news release indicating how many times a Taser was used successfully. "I see on the news eight people have died in five years - that's about 1.5 a year. How many would have died if we didn't have the Taser?" Newel wondered. "Of those eight, how many had pre-existing conditions that likely contributed, if not were the cause, of death?" "Thanks for that," Lemaitre replied. "Stand by for the autopsy results! We might be in for a surprise, like Tasers didn't kill this guy, pre-existing medical conditions and or drugs in the system, wait and see."
No drugs or alcohol were found in Dziekanski's body, but the cause of death still hasn't been released.
A briefing document written in November 2007 for RCMP Commissioner William Elliott said it was the B.C.'s Coroner's Office that left police in an embarrassing position after RCMP refused to release the bystander's video before it was used at the coroner's inquest.
Elliott said the coroner, "in an unprecedented action and in contradiction to his request of the prior week," sent a letter to the Integrated Homicide Investigative Team saying the coroner's office instead had no problem with the videotape being released. "This left no legal basis for the videotape to be held," Elliott wrote.
The reverberations from Dziekanski's death and the release of the videotape are still being felt, with most of the investigations ongoing, including a public inquiry which will begin hearing witnesses testify in October about the night Dziekanski died.
The B.C. Crown is looking at a police report into whether charges should be laid against the officers involved.
Labels: braidwood inquiry, british columbia, integrated homicide investigation team, rcmp, robert dziekanski, stockwell day, vancouver
Confidence in SIU has eroded
Robyn Doolittle/Joanna Smith, The Toronto Star
Rob Maltar had been waiting nearly a year for the thick envelope to land on his doorstep.
Expecting to find answers about how his brother died while in police custody, he ripped open the package. Out tumbled a stack of paper. Scanning it, his heart sank. Inside, sent from the Attorney General's office, was his own testimony, a collection of newspaper clippings, a series of memos between government officials. And not much else.
"They didn't give me anything I didn't already know," he said.
Maltar's frustration is not unique.
Twenty-two individuals have been fatally shot by police in Ontario over the past five years. Like Maltar, many of their families feel robbed of an explanation by the only agency that could give them answers: an agency that twice in the past decade has been told in government reviews that it needs to become more transparent.
The week his brother died – Sept. 18, 2005 – Maltar filed an access-to-information request for all the records involving his brother's death. James Maltar died in a Port Credit police detachment; the SIU cleared police after ruling that he shot himself with an officer's gun.
Maltar was denied the director's report, follow-up reports, the police witness list, witness statements, investigator's notes, police officer's notes, police communication, a compact disc of images, scene videos and any records from the Centre of Forensic Sciences.
"I got a bunch of letters from one person to another person about information they were sending back and forth, but I never got the information they were sending," the 44-year-old Maltar said.
The SIU is unique in Canada as the only fully civilian agency that investigates police. Police agencies are required to call the SIU whenever a civilian is seriously injured or killed in Ontario and police are involved.
Operated under the umbrella of the Ministry of the Attorney General, it has 41 civilian investigators:
Twelve are full-time, stationed at the SIU's Mississauga office.
Twenty-nine are strategically located throughout the province.
Of the full-time investigators, five are former police officers (who are barred from investigating their former forces). Seven have experience in various government agencies, labour, immigration, corrections, the legal profession or medicine..
Once an incident is investigated, findings are submitted to the SIU director, currently former Crown attorney James Cornish, who decides whether to clear or charge police officers. From there, the report is sent to the Attorney General. No one else gets access to it.
The unit's creation in 1990 was trumpeted as a landmark of police accountability in Canada. But today, there are signs that confidence in the SIU has eroded.
Governments and their agencies often cite the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act when withholding information, says lawyer Barry Swadron, a prominent Toronto social justice lawyer. For example, witness testimony is often withheld to protect the identity of the witness. But the content could be released if the names are blacked out, he said.
"They hide behind legislation too much." Maltar was told the records he requested are protected under the act, which states a ministry "may refuse to disclose a record that is a report prepared in the course of law enforcement, inspections or investigations."
Former Ontario judge George Adams first called for greater transparency in 1998. He had been asked by the provincial government to find ways to improve the SIU after years of tension with police.
He recommended the SIU director submit his reports not just to the attorney general after each investigation, but also to the public whenever no charges were laid.
The Attorney General's office declined to comment on this story.
In 2003, when Adams reviewed the SIU again, reports were still being withheld.
The SIU's summary of the 2003 report on its website states: "both the police and community groups see value in the director's report being available to the public."
Adams said at the time that releasing the reports would require an amendment to freedom of information and privacy legislation, and called it "central to providing the necessary accountability and community confidence."
And he acknowledged the agency had moved toward adopting the spirit of the recommendation by including more details in its media releases and debriefing families.
Today, the SIU is again under investigation by a government agency, this time the Ontario Ombudsman. Citing this probe, expected out next month, the SIU declined to participate in the Star's story.
"As the interview you seek directly relates to matters the Ombudsman's Office is investigating, out of deference to the Ombudsman's process, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on these matters," Cornish said in a letter couriered to the Star.
Nov. 3, 2006. Julian Falconer had been debating this moment for months. The prominent trial lawyer, who specializes in police accountability, was about to publicly lambaste the SIU – an agency he had spent a decade championing.
And he was going to do it on a legal panel at the Criminal Lawyers' Association's annual conference, while sitting directly alongside SIU director Cornish.
Falconer blasted the erosion of "accountability" and "leadership" within the agency, and questioned if the SIU was earning its tax dollars. He highlighted a case in which his client, Hafeez Mohamed, was beaten "within an inch of his life" after Durham police found him driving drunk. The SIU cleared police of all wrongdoing.
Sitting in his Yorkville office two weeks ago, Falconer thumbs through a stack of graphic photos taken after Mohamed's arrest. They show his face was beaten raw.
"You can't measure the quality of the organization or its institutional progress by the number of charges it's laying per se," he said recently. "That's not a fair way to measure. On the other hand, extremes do tell a story.
"For years to have gone by without a charge being laid under the directorship of Cornish, it's probably an indicator that we ought to be asking more questions."
Since 2003, the SIU has cleared police of wrongdoing in 29 of 31 fatal shooting cases. Two are ongoing.
The SIU hasn't charged an officer after a fatal shooting in nearly a decade: The last was March 31, 1999. York Region police Const. Randy Martin was charged with second-degree murder in the 1998 killing of Tony Romagnuolo. A jury cleared the officer the following December.
Prior to that, the SIU charged York police Det. Robert Wiche in the fatal shooting of Faraz Suleman on June 19, 1996. After being acquitted in court, Wiche launched a $30 million lawsuit against the SIU. It was thrown out in May 2001.
A search by the Star unearthed only one case since 1994 in which an SIU firearms charge against a police officer was upheld in court. Det. Const. Carl Sokolowski was convicted by a judge of careless use of a firearm, relating to the 1991 shooting of Jonathan Howell. Howell was left disabled.
Sokolowski was convicted, but granted an absolute discharge, meaning he did not have a criminal conviction registered against him.
At the end of 2006, Falconer took his concerns to the Ontario ombudsman, André Marin. A little over a year ago, Marin announced he would be launching a full-scale investigation into the agency.
Marin, who helmed the SIU for two tumultuous years ending in 1998, said his office has received 20 complaints since the beginning of 2006. His probe will focus on eight of the most "compelling" cases. Hafeez Mohamed is one of them. So is the death of James Maltar.
Even when some families manage to find some of the dots, they can't figure out how the SIU connected them. Simone Wellington's 15-year-old son, Duane Christian, was shot and killed by Toronto police shortly before dawn on June 20, 2006. The SIU cleared police two months later.
By the end of the year, Wellington, her brother Roy Wellington and her lawyer Peter Rosenthal were able to meet with Cornish and the case investigator for an explanation.
Based on that meeting, the family launched a $2 million lawsuit against the province, Cornish, and then-deputy director James Ramsay – who had made the final decision while Cornish was on leave – for "the negligence of the SIU investigation."
None of these allegations have been proved in court.
SIU spokesperson Frank Phillips confirmed the agency had been named in the suit, but said since it is before the courts, it would be inappropriate to comment further. "The allegations contained in the statement of claim have not been proven and a statement of defence will be filed," he said.
The statement of claim alleges the SIU was negligent in closing its investigation before receiving the pathologist's report. The claim also alleges it did not compare Const. Rowena Edey's initial interview with the final autopsy results.
The statement of claim also alleges the SIU was negligent because its investigators did not interview Const. Steve Darnley, the officer who shot Christian, even though he volunteered his account; did not ask Edey "obvious" questions such as why she drew her firearm; allowed the officers to keep their firearms until about seven hours after Christian had been shot and did not compare Edey's account with forensic evidence.
During their Dec. 19, 2006 meeting, Cornish "claimed that the SIU's investigation was thorough," the statement alleges. According to the statement, Cornish said he "might have" chosen to interview Darnley, and did not know why Ramsay had decided against it. He dismissed proposals to reopen the probe, the statement alleges.
Simone Wellington said she had trouble understanding how Ramsay came up with his decision to say the officers were "legally justified" in shooting her son. "I know that there is no way – based on the information they gave me – there's no way that any sane, logical person would see that that makes sense," Wellington said. "I don't understand. I still don't understand."
A patchwork of police oversight models exist across the country. Some police leaders bring in another force to conduct a sensitive investigation – whether by choice or as a matter of policy. Other forces have ad hoc arrangements in which observers are brought in to keep an internal investigation in check.
The closest system to the SIU is in Alberta, where the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team was created on Jan. 1. It is headed by a Crown attorney, and has 10 current police officers acting as investigators, along with seven civilians.
In other parts of the country, there is a similar information lockdown to Ontario's, says Falconer.
In part, this is because all police are subject to legislation that prevents them from releasing information. Also, he says, "there is a tendency on police services when investigating police to be very sparse with information."
The creation of the SIU as a civilian agency was supposed to change that. "What was expected to be a major advance in transparency and accountability has fallen flat in regards to families getting information," Falconer said. "It has always been the expectation that the recommendations in the Adams Report would be fulfilled and one of the hallmark recommendations was the sharing of the SIU reports.
"There is simply no excuse for this to have not been done."
The RCMP generally does not release details of its internal investigations, either. Even so, the chairperson of its public complaints commission, Paul Kennedy, said transparency is the best way to instill public confidence when investigating police.
"There is an issue of public perception as to the partiality or impartiality in terms of these investigations and whether or not `the police officer' is being treated in a similar fashion as a member of the public would," he said in an interview.
"There is a need, I think as a matter of policy, for greater transparency saying what the decision was. If it's to prosecute, it's clear in court. If it's not to prosecute: why?
"I think that's just a reflection of the evolving public expectations ... The public cynicism about public institutions is ... higher now, it's more cynical now and for that I think we collectively have a responsibility to look at how we do business and make greater efforts to be transparent if we can."
Sitting at her dining room table in Hamilton, Karyn Graham scans through a diary she dutifully kept after her son Trevor was fatally shot by police in Nov. 2007. Trevor, a crystal meth addict, was robbing a drugstore at the time.
The latter pages of Graham's book are filled with questions she had for the SIU following its decision to clear the officer. She posed all 31 to the SIU investigators during her meeting with them.
Can I get a copy of the director's report? No. Could they prove to me this was just and definite? That's not our mandate.
Why not wait until he went outside to arrest him? Unclear. She felt her life was in danger. Does the evidence at the scene prove her life was in danger? They couldn't answer that.
"I've never had a clear explanation of what happened," she said. "They did tell me that within eight seconds of him going through to the checkout, to the time he went past the magazine stands and into the exit door, he was shot."
Graham has asked the privacy commissioner's office for all records, documents, video, audio and photographs relating to her son's death. Staff were quick to advise her some of it may not be accessible.
With files from Noor Javed
Labels: alberta serious incident response team, ontario, siu
If you don't do another thing today, be sure to stop by Excited-Delirium for a strong dose of reality. Make it part of your day - every day.
Police defend right to use 'less-lethal' weapons
MATTHEW TREVISAN, Globe and Mail
Rick Anthony remembers a time in policing when there weren't many options available to officers faced with a life or death situation. "Your gun was your distance weapon and your baton was your close-up weapon," said Mr. Anthony, a detective with the Victoria police. "Your mouth was both."
But now, many forces across the country use a variety of "less-lethal" weapons - that is, a weapon less lethal than a gun but still able to inflict fatal damage - in their arsenal.
One of those weapons, the taser, has generated controversy in high-profile instances such as the death of Robert Dziekanski, who died last fall after being tasered by RCMP at Vancouver International Airport. But another weapon, which has been in some police arsenals for more than a decade, has also had its fair share of publicity. And police have recently said that it is more reliable than the taser and can be used at a much greater distance.
Developed originally as a way for police to control crowds during unrest in Northern Ireland, the ARWEN, the acronym for Anti-riot Weapon ENfield, fires plastic bullets and is used by law enforcements agencies across the country, said Brian Kirkey, president of Police Ordnance, the company based in Markham, Ont., that manufactures and distributes the gun worldwide.
"It would be fair to say most medium to large agencies in Canada have an ARWEN system in their equipment inventory for both their tactical team and their public order unit," he said.
The current model, the ARWEN 37, fires plastic bullets at a rate of 74 metres a second and can be used as far as 100 metres away. Getting hit by one of the bullets feels the same as getting beamed by pitch hurled by a major league pitcher, Mr. Kirkey said.
Tactical officers who fire the guns aim for a suspect's stomach, or extremities such as the upper thigh and lower arm, as a way to disarm suspects or get them to comply with police. "It'll break bones if it hits," Mr. Kirkey said. "You don't want to hit them in the head. You don't want to hit them in the neck. That's where you have a potential fatality."
In August of 1984, Sean Downes died after he was hit in the chest by a plastic bullet fired by a Northern Ireland police officer, an incident that garnered attention because of a photo of Mr. Downes's body showing a huge bruise on his chest.
In Canada, the gun first garnered attention in Vancouver in 1994 when, during a Stanley Cup riot after the Vancouver Canucks lost in Game 7 to the New York Rangers, a man was shot in the head by one of the plastic bullets.
In 2001, the man's civil suit against the Vancouver police force and the city of Vancouver was dismissed, and a B.C. Supreme Court judge found that the officer who shot the man, Ryan Berntt, acted reasonably, according to news reports at the time.
Despite the potential for serious harm, Inspector Clark of the Calgary police tactical team, said the ARWEN is instrumental in providing an opportunity for police to disarm a suspect without inflicting a fatal wound.
The Calgary police department has been using the gun since 2007 and has discharged it five times.
Police forces across the country that employ the ARWEN include Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Halton and Victoria. ***
The ARWEN 37T Tactical
Claimed to be the first less lethal tactical weapon to combine lightness, high accuracy and the ability to fire up to five shots without reloading.
Rotary magazine
Light weight with minimal rotational torque. Semi- automatic function - can fire five rounds in four seconds
37 mm foam, wood or tear- gas ammunition
Telescoping butt stock
The ARWEN is 64 - 69 cm long
Rifling:Five lands / five grooves
Rate of twist: One in 540mm right hand twist
Weight unloaded: 2.98 kg
Weight loaded with five rounds:3.61 kg
NINIAN CARTER/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Labels: arwen, calgary, vancouver, victoria
Florida man dies
Kenneth Oliver, 45, Miami, Florida - died on August 15, 2008
Taser-use study to be presented
MONTREAL -- Steve Palmer, executive director of the Canadian Police Research Centre, will give an update of his organization's study of Taser use in Canada, at a meeting of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police Aug. 24-27 in Montreal.
The research centre, an arm's-length organization that falls under the Department of National Defence, was asked to conduct the review by the association after a Polish man, Robert Dziekanski, died when he was shocked with a Taser by police at Vancouver airport last October.
Palmer's presentation will be an overview of the report, which is not yet complete. The final report is expected next year.
"It's looking at safety issues, the medical literature (and) usage statistics," he said.
Taser International, manufacturer of the weapons, is a "platinum" sponsor of the conference, meaning it will get an advance list of participants and be able to attend conference sessions, display banners and signs and provide promotional items to delegates.
Other platinum sponsors include Loto Quebec, Motorola and the RCMP.
Labels: canadian association of chiefs of police, canadian police research centre, conflict of interest, department of national defence, taser international
Italy demands answers in death of man shot by taser
Marianne White, Canwest News Service
QUEBEC - The Italian ambassador to Canada criticized the Quebec government Friday for failing to provide explanations for the sudden death of an Italian immigrant almost a year ago.
Claudio Castagnetta, 32, died Sept. 20, 2007, while in custody of Quebec City police. He was reportedly shocked four times with a police Taser and jailed without receiving medical care.
"One year to find out what happened is not acceptable. You expect that possibly in some distressed, out-of -control African place - but not on this continent," Ambassador Gabriele Sardo said in an interview with Canwest News Service.
He said the handling of Castagnetta's death and other Taser-related incidents in the country conveys a negative image of Canada.
Twelve people have died in Canada since 2005 after police jolted them with electric stun guns.
"People will wake up to this reality, so before taking a trip to Canada you'd better be aware that you can be shot (with a Taser) under some conditions and these are not the ones one would reasonably expect across the ocean," Sardo said.
His comments come as the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police is preparing to meet Aug 24 in Montreal where new research into stun gun safety will be presented.
The review was commissioned after a Polish man, Robert Dziekanski, died last October when he was shocked with a Taser by police at Vancouver airport.
The Italian government stepped up its pressure for answers about Castagnetta's death in the light of Dziekanski's death. Last December, the Italian Foreign Ministry took the unusual step of summoning the Canadian ambassador to Italy to complain about the pace of the investigation and request more information.
Castagnetta was arrested last Sept. 18 outside a convenience store in Quebec City for public disorder. He was walking barefoot in the store and refused to leave the premises. Eyewitnesses recounted he looked confused and disoriented.
The police said Castagnetta resisted arrest by stiffening his body and they had to use a stun gun.
He was taken into custody and the next day, during his transportation back to the jail from the courthouse, he was seen banging his head several times. He was not taken to the hospital and a day later died from what a preliminary coroner's report called self-inflicted wounds to the head.
Castagnetta's family and friends are upset he was not taken to the hospital even though he went into convulsions while in jail and showed signs of psychological disorder.
In a letter sent to Italian-Canadian MP Joe Volpe, Castagnetta's father asked him to put more pressure on Canadian authorities.
"It would appear that there is a desire to simply shelve the results of this inquiry and never share information with my family," Corrado Castagnetta wrote earlier this month. His letter was published by the Canadian Italian daily, Corriere Canadese.
The Italian ambassador lamented that despite numerous interventions from his country's authorities no information surrounding Castagnetta's death has been released.
"It's very, very disappointing, to say the least," Sardo said. "And it's something that inevitably would make you lose trust in the work of authorities."
The provincial police have completed their investigation and handed in the report to the public security ministry. A spokeswoman for Quebec's chief Crown prosecutor said a decision on whether charges could be laid against police or prison guards will be made "in the next few weeks."
The Italian ambassador expressed his frustration in a letter sent this week to Quebec Premier Jean Charest. Sardo also said Italian officials boycotted the events related to the 400th anniversary of Quebec City this summer to send a "strong message" to the government.
A spokesman for the premier said a reply to the ambassador's letter is expected.
Labels: claudio castagnetta, italy, quebec
Editorial: MORE THAN A PERCEPTION
If anyone still needs a reason why the police can't be trusted to be objective about the safety of tasers, consider that the manufacturer of the electric stun gun is a major financial backer of a Canadian police chiefs conference this month. Taser International is a platinum sponsor, which means it gave $25,000. Banners will praise its name. Delegate kits will sing of its wonders.
Imagine that Health Canada were to hold a conference sponsored by the manufacturer of a controversial drug currently under review. There would be outrage. How could the body that reviews drug safety accept money from drug manufacturers? It would not be done.
Yet that is similar to what the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police is doing. It is currently reviewing taser safety. If that review concludes that tasers are more dangerous than previously thought, police forces across Canada would have no choice but to make drastic changes to their taser policies. At the moment, those policies generally allow police to use tasers even where no major threat of physical harm exists. The policies couldn't exist in their present form if the police accepted that tasers can kill people. In spite of the 22 deaths in the past five years in Canada that followed police taser use, police forces still teach their members that tasers don't kill. (That teaching, in the face of those deaths, is reason enough not to trust the police to be objective about tasers.)
The coziness between Taser International and the police stinks. One of the authors of a 2005 study on tasers by the Canadian Police Research Centre (the research arm of the police chiefs) was Sergeant Darren Laur of the Victoria Police, who had received several payments from Taser International since 1999, including stock options for a holstering system he helped design for the taser. And over at least the past five years, the company has been a sponsor of many police chiefs' conferences, and contributed an estimated $100,000, according to Peter Cuthbert, the association's executive director. This relationship fuels public cynicism about the police.
Mr. Cuthbert doesn't deny that the public believes police are in a conflict of interest. "Oh, there's a perception there," he says. But "nobody says you have to buy that product from them."
This conflict of interest is not only perceived; it's real and direct. While the police chiefs don't directly determine policy for individual chiefs or police forces, and have no power to impose their views on anyone, in practice their research provides the foundation for taser policies around Canada.
That foundation has been fatally eroded. The police chiefs' blatant coziness with the manufacturer of the electric stun guns makes clear that elected representatives and other civilian authorities, and not the police themselves, need to redraw taser-use policies around the country.
Labels: canadian association of chiefs of police, canadian police research centre, conflict of interest, darren laur, editorial, taser international
What does a taser do to the human heart?
By Dayo Olopade | TheRoot.com
August 1, 2008--On January 17, 21-year-old Baron Pikes was stopped by the police. Nearly half a million volts of electricity later, he died on the street. Handcuffed, held down and stunned with a Taser-brand electro-weapon seven times before he died (and then twice more after that), Pikes' heart, the coroner notes, simply gave out. Amnesty International estimates that in the past seven years, 150 people have been killed after being shocked by stun guns like Tasers. But that's still a very small fraction of the population, even that fraction being stunned by police officers or worried civilians. So just how can a Taser—designed to be non-lethal force—kill you?
Tasers, often shaped like pistols, use compressed nitrogen to fire two darts at a target. The darts are connected to the gun by insulated wires that give it a range of up to 21 feet. Once the darts make a connection with a target, the Taser sends 50,000-volt electric pulses into the victim's body, causing intense muscle spasms and sharp pain. Seized, the victim often falls to the ground.
While 50,000 volts sounds like a lot, humans are actually able to conduct electricity—which is why we tend to steer clear of open sockets or stick forks into toasters that could give us a nasty shock. But despite the high voltage of a Taser's current, the relatively low amperage on the device is what allows it to immobilize but not kill you. (Being struck by lightning, by comparison, kills frequently because it sends an exponentially greater amount of voltage and amperage through a victim, at levels that our bodies just can't handle.)
Still, Taser shocks are dangerous in general because they interfere with the most important muscle in the body—the heart. When your heart beats normally, it is, like the rest of the body, already in the process of conducting electricity. The biological process that lets your heart rhythmically contract and pump blood represents "electricity going to the heart in an organized way," says cardiologist Abraham Kocheril, a specialist in electrophysiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. So if someone gets a mini-jolt of electricity from the outside, be it from a live socket or a hospital defibrillator, they'll probably live.
But the shock had better be at the right place and the right time. Each time the heart beats, it charges and discharges stored electricity. In between contractions, the heart automatically goes into a brief recovery mode called diastole. In that tiny window of recovery time, a sudden jolt of electricity could cause the heart muscle to go into ventricular fibrillation (VF), which is essentially the first stage of a heart attack. The heart begins to pump erratically, if at all, and blood pressure drops to nothing, leaving no oxygen available for brain and body cells.
The effects of any major disruptions during this brief diastolic window can be swift and catastrophic. When young children are hit by a baseball or athletes are struck forcefully in the chest, these blows can be transduced into an electric jolt. If these shocks occur while the victim's heart happens to be vulnerable, the rhythm is disturbed and the body goes into VF, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or cardiac arrest. This possibility is the most common explanation of sudden, sports-related deaths.
So what about Baron Pikes? Well, if somebody is prone to dying suddenly or has a weak heart, then a 50,000-volt stress would precipitate it. Some prior Taser deaths, such as one in Fayetteville, N.C., occurred because the victim was in an altered state, on drugs. Another death, in Colorado, was chalked up to the vigorous foot chase that preceded the police's use of the Taser. But people at risk of this outcome are typically those who have had heart disease, heart failure or certain congenital abnormalities.
In the case of Pikes, a healthy 21-year-old, the initial six shocks probably got him at a time when his heart was contracting, and he was not adversely affected (beyond the muscle spasms, confusion and immobility). Cuffed on the ground and in the back of a squad car, he would not have been exerting himself—nor were there more than trace amounts of drugs in his system. But that seventh time, the Taser more than likely hit Pikes' heart when it was in diastole, sending him into VF and toward sudden death.
Once a person is in VF, spontaneous recovery is rare. Ironically, the solution to the problem is to administer another electric shock—well-known to provide instant theatrics for so many network hospital dramas. In one reported case, a man was Tased while suffering from atrial fibrillation (which affects the upper chamber of the heart, not the part responsible for pumping blood. The Taser shock turned out to be therapeutic, bringing his heart back into correct rhythm. In Pikes' case, the police did continue to Tase him, without the happy ending. The coroner's report states that the last two shocks were administered after he was dead.
So the Taser, while marketed as an effective way to stop a bad guy cold without killing—and even, at times, as a women's fashion accessory—is actually a form of physiological Russian roulette. The odds of the unthinkable increase the more times one is subjected to the powerful electric current. Cruelly, Pikes made it through six rounds, which would have emptied a gun clip in a real game of chance. Tase me once, shame on me. Tase me nine times—well, the odds aren't good.
Dayo Olopade is a reporter at the New Republic.
Labels: atrial fibrillation to normal, barron pikes, cardiac arrest, diastole, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, ventricular fibrillation
High profile Victoria police chief quits, discipline hearing cancelled
VICTORIA — Victoria is looking for a new police chief after the city's mayor announced the immediate resignation of embattled former chief Paul Battershill under mysterious circumstances.
Battershill has been on paid administrative leave since last October and was facing a disciplinary hearing next Monday, but what prompted the leave has never been made public.
Mayor Alan Lowe said Wednesday that Battershill's resignation means the hearing has been cancelled. Lowe wouldn't give details about what's behind Battershill's departure.
"I would like to announce today that the (Victoria Police) board has accepted the resignation of Paul Battershill effective immediately as a result of a loss of confidence in his leadership of the Victoria Police Department," said Lowe during a press conference at Victoria Police headquarters.
"The disciplinary hearing set for Aug. 18 will no longer proceed due to the resignation of Battershill," he said. "The police board will not be paying a severance to Battershill. We will contribute a sum of $15,000 towards Battershill's legal fees as part of the settlement agreement. The Victoria Police Board considers this matter closed."
But Lowe suggested the Battershill matter could still face public scrutiny. The office of B.C.'s police complaints commissioner is entitled to review the findings of an RCMP investigation it ordered and has the power under the Police Act to call a public hearing, he said. "A public hearing could be held if (the commissioner's) office believes that the issues are such that they are in the public interest," Lowe said.
Police Complaints Commissioner Dirk Ryneveld was not immediately available for comment.
Lowe said an RCMP investigation of the allegations, which were never made public, against Battershill found nothing criminal against the former chief. "The investigation completed by the RCMP did not find that Battershill had committed any criminal acts, had any involvement with any criminal activity, nor did it find any financial impropriety," he said.
Lowe did say the allegations against Battershill were a personnel matter, but refused to go further. Lowe said Battershill's annual salary was $167,000.
The mayor defended the actions of the Victoria Police Board, saying the board was looking to protect taxpayers with regards to the Battershill matter. "We as a police board have acted very appropriately and we are looking after the best interests of the taxpayers," he said. "There are some things within the last nine-and-a-half months that we are unable to disclose only due to the fact that we are bound by the settlement agreement at this time."
Lowe said he believes the police board had no other choice but to suspend Battershill.
Deputy Chief Bill Naughton will remain as interim chief, said Lowe, but the police board has already hired a firm to begin looking for a new chief, who should be hired by November. Naughton said the issues involving the chief proved challenging for the department's rank-and-file members, but the officers never wavered from their duties to the public. "This department has a long and proud history," he said. "The record of accomplishment since October speaks for itself," said Naughton, citing several successful police operations, including the arrest of suspects in connection with a deadly downtown shooting. Naughton said he has not seen the investigation reports on Battershill. He would not say if he will apply for the chief's position.
Battershill, a 20-year Vancouver city police veteran, became Victoria's chief constable in 1999. He was known for supporting innovative policing techniques and led high-profile reviews on the use of Taser stun guns by police and an investigation into alcohol-related incidents at the West Vancouver Police Department.
Ryneveld ordered the RCMP to conduct an investigation under the Police Act but refused to disclose the reason. The entire matter was under a news blackout until a sensitive legal document was leaked to the media last November.
Victoria lawyer David Mulroney said at the time he wrote a letter to the law firm that represents the police department suggesting possible conflicts of interest surrounding the police chief and his knowledge of freedom of information requests involving himself. Mulroney said he represents a client who filed several freedom of information requests that name Battershill and suggested a link between his client's information request and the RCMP's investigation.
The access requests targeted four areas, including the Victoria police department's dismissals without cause, suspensions with pay, expense accounts and employment contracts involving pay equity.
One package of documents Mulroney's client received revealed Battershill had credit card expenses of more than $90,000 since 2004. The documents also show the city paid up to $600,000 in severance to former police department members and officials. The request also asked for all expense and accounting records of the two high-profile reports compiled by Battershill. Mulroney has yet to receive those documents. He asked for all expenses and accounts from the Taser Technology Review conducted by Battershill and its preliminary recommendations in September 2004.
It also asked for all expenses and accounts relating to Battershill's investigation of Const. Lisa of the West Vancouver Police Department on behalf of the B.C. Police Complaints Commissioner.
Labels: chief constable paul battershill, OPCC, taser technology review, victoria police department
Taser firm sponsoring police chiefs conference
Taser International has also paid $25,000 to sponsor the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in November 2008 in San Diego.
"Take advantage of this unique opportunity available to only one company to sponsor all of the aisle signs in the exhibit hall. Each aisle sign is 4’ x 10’ and will display the aisle number along with the sponsor’s logo and booth number on the bottom in a 4’ x 4’ area. Over 50 aisle signs with your company’s information will be hung above the exhibit floor making this a tremendous exposure opportunity.
Available Sponsorship: 1 , Sold: 1 Cost: $25,000.00"
JOHN COTTER, The Canadian Press
Taser International is a major sponsor of a coming police chiefs conference where new research into electronic stun gun safety will be presented.
The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police commissioned a review of conducted-energy weapons last fall after Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski died at Vancouver International Airport when he was hit with the device by RCMP. At least five other Canadians have since died after being tasered by police.
Steve Palmer, executive director of the Canadian Police Research Centre, said he will present an overview of the report at the conference this month in Montreal, but said the full review of the weapons commonly known as tasers is not yet complete.
"It's an update," said Mr. Palmer, who declined to give details. A final report is expected by next year after a full and independent peer review.
Called RESTRAINT (Risk of Death in Subjects That Resist), the review compares tasers with other methods police use to subdue difficult people.
It also looks at the characteristics of those who have been zapped, including excited delirium, a condition in which suspects are in a heart-pounding state of agitation. Excited delirium has been repeatedly cited to explain the sudden deaths of people after being tasered.
Taser International is one of the platinum sponsors of the conference that runs Aug. 24-27. The corporation has sponsored similar events in Canada and around the world.
For a minimum $25,000 fee, platinum sponsors can display their name on banners and signs, provide promotional items in delegate kits, be given an advance list of participants and attend conference sessions.
Steve Tuttle, vice-president of Arizona-based Taser International, said the company's presence is important. "You have to be there. It is a major sales event. It is advertising," said Mr. Tuttle, who will be at the conference to answer questions about his company's products.
Mr. Tuttle said that, while the new Canadian research is important, he has DVDs that contain 130 studies that have found the devices to be safe. "You want to be there to be a conduit for information because clearly we have controversial issues in Canada, and the last thing that we want to be is shy. We stand behind our technology."
Hilary Homes of Amnesty International Canada, which has called for a moratorium on stun guns, said having Taser as a sponsor and exhibitor sends a mixed message. "It is very troubling," Ms. Homes said from Ottawa. "What we need now is an objective discussion and accountability, and this doesn't seem to be creating the proper context for what needs to be a very frank and open debate."
Officials with the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police were not available for comment.
Taser staff will be on hand to exhibit the company's trademark X26 model used by the RCMP and other Canadian police forces. Taser is not listed as an exhibitor under its own name, but under its Canadian distributor, M.D. Charlton Co. Ltd.
The company will also be promoting new products such as a wireless taser round that is fired from a shotgun and has a range of 20 metres, he said. There will also be information on new products being developed, including a system called Shockwave that fires multiple taser rounds that can incapacitate a number of people in an area up to 100 metres.
A special video camera and audio device that police can wear to show what happens when an officer restrains someone is also in the works. A video of Mr. Dziekanski's death that was shot by a member of the public made headlines around the world, but there was no police video of the encounter.
Labels: canadian association of chiefs of police, canadian police research centre, conflict of interest, excited delirium, international association of chiefs of police, shockwave, taser international
Media Advisory - Canadian Association of Police Boards Conference
Strange that Taser International is *not* a sponsor of this conference.
TORONTO, Aug. 14 /CNW Telbec/ - Minister of Public Safety, Stockwell Day, former Commissioner of the OPP, Gwen Boniface, and Toronto Chief of Police William Blair, are among the speakers scheduled to address policing governors from across Canada at their annual conference beginning Friday at the Toronto Hilton, 145 Richmond Street West.
Some 200 delegates are expected for the two and a half days of sessions of the Canadian Association of Police Boards (CAPB). Minister Day is scheduled to speak after a luncheon on Friday, August 15 while Chief Blair will address conference delegates at the Saturday evening banquet.
The conference theme is 'Civilian Governance and Social Responsibility: Safety, Community and Sustainability'. Glen Murray will reflect on civilian police governance facing a changing urban landscape and Thomas Homer-Dixon's session is entitled 'The Upside of Down: Complex Forces at Work in Our World'. Other sessions will explore greening of police services, the use of Tasers by police officers, issues of ethics and accountability and police chiefs' and police associations' expectations of police boards and commissions.
During the association's Saturday business meeting, delegates will debate eight resolutions ranging from advocating for stricter penalties for crimes of violence involving knives to the creation of a conducted energy weapon working group and a request for immediate action on lawful access. Approved resolutions are forwarded to the federal government for action.
CAPB is made up of volunteer members of police commissions and boards across Canada that provide civilian governance and oversight of municipal police.
Labels: canadian association of police boards, stockwell day, toronto police
Former cop indicted in taser death in Louisiana
By Howard Witt, Chicago Tribune
NEW ORLEANS - Ruling in a racially explosive case that some forensic experts have described as police torture, a grand jury in the small Louisiana town of Winnfield indicted a white police officer Wednesday on charges of manslaughter and official malfeasance for repeatedly shocking a handcuffed black suspect with a Taser device, resulting in the man's death due to cardiac arrest.
After two days of closed testimony, Winn Parish District Atty. Chris Nevils announced that the grand jury had indicted Scott Nugent, 21, for the death in January of Baron "Scooter" Pikes, 21, while in police custody. Two other Winnfield police officers who were present during the incident were not charged.
Nugent, who was fired from the police force in May, could face up to 45 years in prison if convicted on the charges. He surrendered to sheriff's deputies immediately after the indictment was issued, a spokesman for Nevils said, and a $45,000 bond was set.
"It is our intention to show at trial that Mr. Nugent caused the death of Baron Pikes by 'Tasing' him multiple times, unnecessarily and in violation of Louisiana law, and by failing to get him medical attention when it was apparent he needed it," Nevils said in a statement. "In a civilized society, abuse by those who are given great authority cannot be tolerated."
Nugent's attorney has said previously that his client was following police procedures during Pikes' arrest.
Pikes, wanted on a drug possession warrant, was apprehended and handcuffed Jan. 17 after a foot chase. Although Nugent's police report of the incident stated that Pikes did not resist or struggle after being handcuffed, the officer administered nine 50,000-volt Taser shocks to Pikes' body after he was slow to respond to Nugent's order to stand up.
Witnesses said Pikes pleaded with Nugent to stop Tasering him. But within 39 minutes after he was first subdued, Pikes was dead.
Winnfield police claimed that Pikes told them during the incident that he suffered from asthma and was high on PCP and crack cocaine. But Winn Parish Coroner Dr. Randolph Williams found no evidence of such drugs in Pikes' system or any sign that he suffered from asthma. He ruled Pikes' death a homicide and noted that Pikes was unconscious when the last two Taser shocks were administered, after he had been loaded into a squad car and delivered to the police station.
Both Williams and Dr. Michael Baden, a nationally prominent forensic pathologist who reviewed the case, said the incident "could be considered to be torture."
The Pikes' case, first recounted in the Tribune in July, aroused fears of a cover-up among family members and civil rights groups because Winnfield, the birthplace of Louisiana Govs. Huey and Earl Long, has a long history of political corruption.
Nevils' predecessor as district attorney committed suicide amid allegations that he had skimmed $200,000 from his office accounts and demanded payoffs from criminal suspects. The former police chief, who was Nugent's father, also killed himself, after losing a close election campaign marred by fraud allegations. The current police chief was convicted of drug possession as a young man and was pardoned by former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, who is now serving a federal prison sentence for corruption while in office.
Earlier this week, the mother of Pikes' 4-year-old son filed a wrongful-death suit in federal court against Nugent, Winnfield city officials and Taser International Inc. The suit accuses city officials of civil rights violations in Pikes' death.
RCMP taser trainer guilty of assault with stun gun
Susan Lazaruk, The Province
An RCMP officer who trains other officers in the use of Tasers has been found guilty of assault in 100 Mile House while using a stun gun.
Const. Dan Cameron was found guilty in provincial court after a four-day trial. He remains on active duty awaiting sentencing and also faces possible internal discipline.
Cameron responded to a disturbance outside Jake's Bar early on Dec. 17, 2006, and ordered Kevin Campbell, a shirtless, drunken patron who had been swearing at another officer, to get out of a vehicle or he would be hit with 50,000 volts of electricity, according to court documents.
Cameron said he had been told there was a fight outside the bar and thought Campbell was involved in it and so had reasonable grounds to arrest him. Campbell was combative and resisted arrest, according to testimony, so Cameron used the Taser against him.
Judge Lynne Dollis ruled that Cameron didn't have reasonable and probable grounds to arrest Campbell for causing a disturbance for fighting and therefore "was not acting in the execution of his duty when he applied the Taser to Mr. Campbell and is guilty of assaulting Mr. Campbell with a weapon, a Taser."
RCMP spokesman Sgt. Tim Shields said the force will have a "code of conduct investigation" to determine if any discipline is necessary against Cameron, which could range from verbal reprimand to dismissal.
He said the incident would not affect RCMP Taser policy because the issue in this case was improper arrest and not improper use of the stun gun.
Labels: british columbia, dan cameron, rcmp
RCMP officers will have to appear before taser inquiry
Chad Skelton, Canwest News Service
VANCOUVER - The four RCMP officers who Tasered Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski will almost certainly appear before the inquiry into his death when it resumes this October, inquiry lawyer Art Vertlieb said Tuesday.
Under B.C.'s Public Inquiry Act, retired judge Thomas Braidwood, who is heading the inquiry, has the power to force the officers to testify.
However, Vertlieb said he doesn't think that will be necessary. "We're confident the RCMP is going to want to co-operate in a voluntary way," said Vertlieb. "This is a totally independent commission and this is the best opportunity for people to tell the commission what happened."
Dziekanski died at Vancouver International Airport on Oct. 14, 2007, shortly after being Tasered by RCMP officers.
The integrated homicide investigation team completed its investigation into Dziekanski's death in June and forwarded its report to Crown counsel.
None of the officers has been charged.
On June 25, Braidwood wrapped up the first "study" phase of his inquiry, which looked at how police use Tasers in general. Braidwood heard from about 50 presenters and received more than 40 written submissions.
On Oct. 20, the second phase of the inquiry will begin, looking specifically at the circumstances of Dziekanski's death. The second phase, unlike the first, gives Braidwood the power to make findings of misconduct against individuals, and to order people to testify before him.
On Tuesday, the inquiry officially began accepting applications from those who want to appear before it.
However, Vertlieb noted several agencies have already expressed an interest in appearing, including the Polish government, the Canada Border Services Agency, the B.C. Ambulance Service, the Vancouver airport, the RCMP and Richmond Fire-Rescue.
Inquiry representative Chris Freimond said not all those who apply will be allowed to appear. "They have to have some constructive input," said Freimond.
The second phase of the inquiry is expected to last six weeks, though it could go longer.
Braidwood's report covering the first phase of the inquiry is scheduled to be delivered to B.C. Attorney General Wally Oppal on Nov. 30.
The report on the second phase of the inquiry will likely be completed some time in 2009.
Labels: braidwood inquiry, british columbia, robert dziekanski
Taser International a major sponsor of the 2008 Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police conference
I guess I spoke too soon - Taser International IS, once again, a platinum sponsor of the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. I should have known it was too reasonable (see below) to be true. So much for progressive change.
Originally posted on June 26, 2008:
Taser International NOT a major sponsor of the 2008 Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police conference
Back in November, I made some noise here about Taser International's major sponsorship of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police annual conference. My opinion was that this posed an enormous conflict of interest and compromised the Association's integrity.
I first noticed the strange phenomenon of Taser International's sponsorship of this particular conference in 2004, the year my brother died.
Although many companies are listed as conference sponsors of the 2008 conference, Taser International is conspicuously *not*.
The Association's tagline is "Leading Progressive Change in Policing".
Is this progressive change, or what?
Grand jury weighs charges in taser death
WINNFIELD, La. (AP) - A grand jury in central Louisiana is probing the death of a man who was handcuffed when a police officer repeatedly jolted him with a Taser. Winn Parish District Attorney Chris Nevils convened the grand jury Tuesday to consider criminal charges against former Winnfield police officer Scott Nugent in the death of 21-year-old Baron Pikes. A spokesman for Nevils said the grand jury could wrap up its probe by the end of the day. Pikes was shocked nine times with a 50,000-volt Taser as he was arrested on a drug possession warrant in January.
Nugent was fired but is appealing his dismissal. Nugent's lawyer says his client followed department protocols and didn't use excessive force. A coroner has ruled that Pikes' death was a homicide.
taser targets lucky they weren't shot
Raise a Little Hell with Tom Brodbeck
The Winnipeg Sun
The 42-year-old man who fell on his head after being Tasered by police over the weekend was lucky he wasn’t shot with a Glock. If information by police is correct that the suspect refused to drop his knife, police may have been within their rights to shoot him.
A Taser is considered an intermediate weapon that falls into the same category as batons and pepper spray. According to an RCMP use-of-force expert from B.C. who testified at the Dumas inquest, intermediate weapons are not supposed to be used by police when suspects come after them with sharp objects.
They’re supposed to draw their service pistols.
The reason for that is Tasers aren’t fool proof. I believe the expert said they work in about 80% of cases. Which means if an officer’s life is in danger, they can’t rely on an 80% success rate. They need a reliable means of stopping the threat at that point and the only option is a firearm.
The expert was asked at the inquest whether a Taser would have been a viable option for Const. Dennis Gburek, who shot Dumas (if Tasers were available to Winnipeg police in 2005). He said it would not have been an option, especially in the winter when the success rate falls even further because of heavier clothing.
So these guys brandishing knives should count their lucky stars they were only Tasered. They probably should have been shot.
Labels: craig mcdougall, michael langan, taser failure, winnipeg police
Dutch police to use "stroomstootwapen" in trial period
Here's our Dutch lesson for today: A taser by any other name is still potentially lethal. But, in Dutch, it almost sounds like a toy: "stroomstootwapen."
"The Taser is to be used as an alternative to firearms." Gee, where have we heard THAT before?! Here's a new term for the next Dutch dictionary - according to Yahoo! Babel Fish translation, "usage creep" in Dutch is "gebruiks kruipen."
"The manufacturer of the electroshock gun denied that the shocks are lethal. Jelle Egas, a spokesperson for the Dutch Council of Police Chiefs, said that a dog bite or a bean bag shot causes more injuries." Hey, according to the manufacturer, the taser is safer than TYLENOL. Funny how I can't find any record of 367+ people dropping dead from Tylenol! Looks like the Dutch police have bought the propaganda - lock, stock and barrel.
xinhuanet.com
BRUSSELS, Aug. 12 (Xinhua) -- Special Dutch police teams will use electroshock weapons by the brand name "Taser" for a trial period of one year, Dutch papers reported Tuesday.
The Taser gun disables its targets by giving them a 50,000-volt electric shock. Six police squads and a military police team will take part in the trial which starts around New Year's Eve.
Dutch Interior Minister Guusje Ter Horst will decide whether the electroshock guns will become part of the regular equipment of the special squads after the trial period.
The Taser is to be used as an alternative to firearms. It fires two hooks connected to the Taser gun by leads which temporarily paralyze a victim within eight meters of the shooting, making it much easier to arrest aggressive suspects. The Taser gun has been in use in the United States for years, but has received a lot of criticism. Amnesty International has reported that 200 individuals worldwide were killed after one or several electro-shocks had been administered.
The manufacturer of the electroshock gun denied that the shocks are lethal. Jelle Egas, a spokesperson for the Dutch Council of Police Chiefs, said that a dog bite or a bean bag shot causes more injuries.
The Dutch police chiefs have been urging for the procurement of electroshock guns since 2006. "A lot of research has been conducted in America, England and Canada. We have studied these reports and now want to test the guns," said a spokesperson of the Interior Ministry.
Labels: netherlands, propaganda, usage creep
North Carolina man hospitalized after tasing
Boy, do I count myself lucky that I didn't end up in the neuro intensive care unit after I fell and banged my head on the rock-hard, frozen-solid ICE at the skating rink last winter!! I could have used a couple of extra-strength Tylenol except that I heard somewhere that they were less safe than tasers.
By Richard Gould | Hickory Daily Record
Michael Douglas Connor, 25, of Hickory is in the Neuro Intensive Care Unit at Frye Regional Medical Center after being Tasered by a Hickory police officer Monday.
Hickory Police Capt. Clyde Deal said Connor ignored verbal commands and ran after the officer tried to serve an outstanding warrant for drug and alcohol related charges. The officer caught him on Ninth Ave. and fired his Taser, Deal said.
The suspect again refused to cooperate with the officer and a second 50,000 jolt was delivered. The second charge caused Connor to fall to the ground and hit his head on a railroad tie, Deal said.
Two other recent Taser incidents involving police - one in Statesville and one in Charlotte - resulted in the deaths of two suspects.
Dziekanski inquiry gears up for second phase
Chad Skelton, Vancouver Sun
VANCOUVER - Those wanting to appear before the inquiry into the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski must apply before Sept. 5, the inquiry announced Tuesday.
On June 25, retired judge Thomas Braidwood wrapped up the first phase of his inquiry, which looked at the general issue of how police use Tasers. Braidwood heard from about 50 presenters and received more than 40 written submissions.
On Oct. 20, the second phase of the inquiry, looking specifically at the circumstances surrounding Dziekanski's death, will begin. Dziekanski died at the Vancouver International Airport on Oct. 14 shortly after being Tasered by RCMP officers.
Details of how to apply to appear before the inquiry are available online at www.braidwoodinquiry.ca. Applicants must detail their expertise and explain why they believe they have something to add. Inquiry spokesman Chris Freimond said not all those who apply will be allowed to appear. "They have to have some constructive input," said Freimond. Those wanting to appear before the inquiry have until Sept. 5 to apply. Written submissions on policy issues will be accepted until Nov. 28. The second phase of the inquiry is expected to last six weeks, though it could go longer.
Braidwood's report covering the first phase of the inquiry is scheduled to be delivered to B.C. Attorney-General Wally Oppal on Nov. 30.
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Taser guidelines needed
Lawsuit filed over taser death
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Are stun guns too deadly? Louisiana case adds to d...
Ex-sheriff's deputies in Mississippi charged in ta...
Illinois man dies
Wecht to do second autopsy on man police tasered
Judge doubts cause of death in Summit jail case
Editorial - Shattering public trust
Looking at deaths from arm's length
California man dies
PSP to market taser competitor in Canada
One step closer to a police state?
Study looks into whether Swiss police should be ar...
Swiss police task force to assess taser risks
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Police complaints in British Columbia need fixing ...
Pennsylvania man dies
Texas man dies
Makers of tasers aiming to appeal to public
Man shot to death after taser fails, Winnipeg poli...
Letter from a concerned citizen
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Turtle Creek Gardens LLC, is located just north of Delavan, in the southeastern corner of Wisconsin. The farm was named for geographical features in the area: Turtle Creek (meandering to the east), Turtle Creek State Wildlife Area, Turtle Valley Conservation Area, and Turtle Lake (just north of the farm).
Seventeen acres of the 80-acre farm have been set aside for organic vegetable and fruit production.
The remaining acreage is pasture, soon to be used to custom-raise beef for one of our partner farms.
Going Organic--Certification in 2012
The 17 acres designated for vegetable and fruit production were formerly planted in conventional corn and soybeans. Transitioning land from conventional agriculture to organic agriculture is a process that requires 3 years under the USDA's National Organic Program standards, in order to build fertility and enhance microbial life in the soil.
In the spring of 2010, we began the transition period by planting cover crops, fruit trees, several species of berries, and rhubarb and asparagus crowns. As a soil-building stragegy, cover crops are used to protect the soil from erosion, build top soil, and stimulate microbial activity, which is the main source of fertility on an organic farm. In our case, we chose winter rye and red clover as our cover crop mix. Like other grasses, winter rye has a large root system that adds biomass and helps break up compacted soils and hardpans that impede water drainage and the development of living soil.
The richest soils in our nation are the prairie soils that were once composed prim arily of perennial grasses, with their extensive root systems growing 20 or more feet deep into the ground. To give a perspective on how we have depleted our top soils in America, prairie soils were up to 10 or more feet deep before the beginning of the 20th century. Today, top soil on our agricultural lands is only about 2 feet deep at best, and most areas suffer from only a few inches.
Along with winter rye, we planted red clover, a legume. Legumes--such as beans, alfalfas, clovers, and vetch--take nitrogen from the atmosphere and "fix" it in the their root systems in the form of nodules. When the leguminous plant is mown or dies during tilling, the nitrogen in the nodules is released into the soil where it becomes available to successive crops. Similarly, grasses and legumes provide livestock fodder. Animal manure gathered at the end of the season from a barn or lounging area is spread onto the vegetable fields and tilled under. Over the course of winter, the manure composts naturally, adding valuable nitrogen to the soil. These systems make the addition of synthetic fertilizers--such as those used in conventional farming--unnecessary.
Greenhouse and Season Extension Hoop House
Over the course of 2010, we constructed two major outbuildings for growing our crops: the greenhouse and the season extension hoop house. The 20' x 72' greenhouse is used primarily to sow seeds of crops that can be easily transplanted into the field as soon as the soil thaws in spring and can be tilled. The greenhouse's outer covering consists of a double layer of plastic. A small fan blows air between the layers, which helps insulate the building during spring and fall. When temperatures reach below the mid-50s F, a propane heater kicks in to prevent small seedlings from freezing.
The first crops we sow in the Spring (early March) are the Alliums (onions, shallots, and leeks). Alliums are a longer-season crop and require a long period of time to photosynthesize before developing bulbs, which begins soon after summer solstice. In addition, since onions are a high-demand food in a CSA, and can tolerate some cold, it's smart to get them sown and transplanted as early in the spring as possible.
But a greenhouse isn't just for starting spring crops. We use it throughout the season to sow continuous successions of crops. Lettuce, for example, needs to be sown every two weeks to provide a weekly allotment of this crop to CSA members. We also have multiple spring and fall successions of the Brassicas (the mustard family) which includes broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, turnips, and brussels sprouts
The greenhouse also allows us to get a head start on growing heat-loving plants like basil, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, melons, and summer squash, rather than waiting until it is warm enough outside. Generally, all of these plants do better if started in a greenhouse as it provides a protective environment. High winds, heavy rains, and cool spring and fall nights can damage and kill tender seedlings. A green house acts like an incubator for plants until they can be moved to a transitioning space known as the "hardening-off area". Most hardening-off areas consist of structures with walls that can be removed, or opened and closed as weather permits. A fragile seedling needs to be slowly exposed, over the course of a week or more, to the often harsh conditions of life in the field. A hardening-off area allows some wind and rain to buffet small plants until they develop stronger stems and "harden" to outside conditions. Once hardened, these crops can be transplanted as vigorous plants better able to fend off predators and abusive weather.
The second outbuilding constructed in 2010 was the season extension hoop house. This building is similar in size (30x72 ft) and construction to the greenhouse, except it has only one layer of heavy plastic.
Hoop houses primarily serve as a heated space to grow plants in the ground. The clear plastic traps heat from the sun, which warms the soil inside the hoophouse, so it can be used earlier in the spring and later in the fall to grow crops that normally do not grow well in the cold, thus extending the normal outdoor season. Hoop houses are also commonly used for growing plants such as tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, among others which thrive in hotter temperatures. We expect to use our hoop house both for season extension and for summer crops.
Fruit Trees and Shrubs, and Berries!
Our first year at the farm also saw the planting of our perennial crops of fruit trees, berries, rhubarb, and asparagus. With the help of workershares and friends, we planted more than 40 dwarf apple, pear, and peach trees, and several rows of raspberries, currants, black berries, and strawberries. Perennial plants grow continuously year after year, and require several years to produce fruits or otherwise reach maturity, unlike annual plants that complete their growth cycle and can be harvested in less than a year. While we wait for our perennial crops to bear fruit, we will continue to bring in fruit from other farms, such as apples from Ela Orchard in Rochester.
In 2011, we established hives and honey bees on the farm. Our longtime friend and beekeeper, Dan O'Leary of Honey Valley Apiary, helped with the setup and monitors the hives throughout the season. Dan has over 60 hives located around the East Troy area, including at the Zinniker Family Farm. When Dan is ready to extract the honey from the hives, he keeps our honey separate from what's been collected at the other sites. Honey we sell comes directly from the hives at Turtle Creek Gardens.
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Women shine at Anzisha Awards 2018
Created: Tuesday, 30 October 2018 14:00
The Mastercard Foundation and African Leadership Academy have announced that 22-year-old healthcare entrepreneur Melissa Bime has won the US$25,000 grand prize at the eight annual Anzisha Prize awards gala in Johannesburg, South Africa
Bime is the founder of INFIUSS, an online blood bank and digital supply chain platform that ensures patients in 23 hospitals in Cameroon have life-saving blood when and where they need it. She is the second woman to win the grand prize since Best Ayiorworth in 2013.
Melissa Bime during her acceptance speech, said, “Today, I stand here to represent every young girl out there that just has her dreams. I stand here to represent this amazing group of entrepreneurs that I am a part of. With these people, the future of Africa is very bright. We are going to change this continent.”
Melissa was selected from among 20 finalists during a ceremony on 23 October that was live-streamed to more than 3,000 viewers and created a social media buzz across the continent.
Joan Nalubega, 21, was the second-runner up. She is the co-founder of Uganics, which produces mosquito-repellent soap to combat malaria in Uganda. With the US$12,500, she will conduct a certification study for the company’s products and prepare Uganics for export to neighbouring countries which will help to widen her impact in the fight against malaria.
Koffi Assouan, program manager, Mastercard Foundation, added, “We are proud of all 20 finalists and are excited to see two young and dynamic women taking home top prizes.”
“Their contributions will continue to impact their countries and they are role models for other young women across the continent. They are demonstrating how to turn obstacles into opportunities that create value and jobs for others,” concluded Assouan.
Applications for the next cycle of the Anzisha Prize will be open from 15 February 2019.
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Tbilisi's new boutique hotel The Terrace opens tomorrow
13.02.2015 (Hvino News). Tbilisi's new boutique hotel The Terrace opens tomorrow at 7, Polikarpe Kakabadze Street.
The hotel belongs to Maia Sidamonidze, former head of Georgia's Tourism Administration.
Thanks to prestigeous Mtatsminda hill location, hotel's guests will be able to enjoy a panoramic view of Tbilisi. The 4-star hotel has 26 rooms, a restaurant offering Georgian traditional cuisine, and a conference hall.
The project investment amounted to 1 million US dollars. Rooms rates start from US $80, and booking will begin soon.
Flights to Spain and Germany may be performed from Kutaisi airport
11.02.2015. (Hvino TOUR News) In 2014, the number of passengers carried on regular and charter flights from Georgia’s four airports amounted to 2 million people. This figure has increased by 9.5% compared to 2013.
During the reporting period, the Tbilisi international airport served 1 575 million passengers. This figure has increased by 9.7% compared to 2013.
Batumi International Airport handled 213.439 passengers, which is increased by 2.15%. Mestia airport served 1 343 people, which is 51.75% more than in the previous year.
As for the Kutaisi international airport, in total 218 thousand passengers were carried on regular and charter flights that is 16% more. Georgian Commersant FM radio spoke about the Kutaisi international airport’s operation with Ketevan Aleksidze, Georgian Airports Union's director.
She says that 2014 was extremely successful for the Kutaisi international airport. Two new destinations were added - Vilnius and Budapest, as well as current directions were maintained. In total, 218 000 passengers were handled throughout the year.
Bulgaria simplifies tourist visa procedure for Georgians
10.02.2015. (Hvino News). Tourism and Foreign Ministers agreed to simplify tourist visa procedures for citizens of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Georgia.
The measure is aimed at boosting visitor numbers from traditional markets such as the former Soviet countries, according to the press office of Bulgaria’s Tourism Ministry.
It is also part of a campaign aimed at countering the downward trend in early bookings from these countries for the 2015 summer season.
The new regime envisages the issuance of short-term double-entry and multiple-entry visas for organized trips.
This type of visa has a validity period of up to one year and is available to citizens who have already used Bulgarian visas.
Vinotel: Wine and hotel
04.02.2015. If we say that Georgia is the cradle of wine-making, from the beginning, it should mean the considerable attempt of enlarging the wine education and promoting among consumers to obtain the right approach to the wine culture. All this will be very helpful proper to display the Georgian culture and traditions to a foreign guest.
On January 30th the list of high class wine locations was enriched with an interesting place, the Hotel Vinotel, which is located in the center of Tbilisi, at #4 Elene Akhvlediani Street. The hotel location as well as its functional design is a part of a vivid concept and a kind of guarantee for the successful business project. While having an insight into the vision of idea authors and founders, it becomes clear that this business, is rather sophisticated and firm will of popularizing the Georgian wine and the Georgian culture in general.
There is almost everything in the hotel that might give to a foreign tourist a good perspective of the authentic Tbilisi. The concept of the project aims to blend the 19th century Tbilisi spirit with the natural winemaking and slow food philosophy. Antique and handmade furniture, walls and ceiling decorated by hand try the best in creating a very comfy and natural environment.
Georgia joins world’s biggest Tourism Trade Fair
02.02.2015. Georgia’s the most significant places and uniqueness of ancient culture were displayed to millions of people at Spain’s leading Tourism Trade Show.
Ten Georgian tourism agencies were took part among more than 9 000 companies from 169 countries at the FITUR 2015, International Tourism Fair in Madrid. For Georgia it is the eighth year of participation in the exhibition.
9,107 companies and more than 200,000 visitors from around the world were presented at the World's biggest tourism fair.
Spain is one of the target markets for Georgia. To compare visitors statistics in 2013, tourist arrivals from Spain to Georgia increased by 14 percent in 2014.
Within the international tourism fair Head of Georgia’s Tourism Administration Giorgi Chogovadze met with Secretary-General of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation Taleb Rifai. At the meeting the pairs discussed cooperation issues between Georgia and the World Tourism Organisation.
"I was in Georgia three times, but even ten is not enough. At the small territories the mountains, the sea and diverse relief are gathered. But your nation is unique, everyone is ready to talk with you and treat you with great hospitality,” Taleb Rifai said.
FITUR International Tourism Trade Fair held in Madrid from January 28 to February 1.
E-visa facility launching in Georgia
29.01.2015. In a move which will give a major boost to the tourism sector, the Georgian Government will launch the electronic visa (e-visa) facility from February, 2015, announced the Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili.
This initiative is part of the strategy which the Government’s economic team set in order to maintain the long-term stability of the GEL. The measures are about encouraging export, tourism and direct foreign investments’ (FDI) inflow in Georgia.
We want to increase the number of tourists visiting our country. For this purpose electronic visas will be launched in Georgia. This will simplify the procedures of visiting Georgia for the tourists,” Garibashvili said.
Meanwhile, the Government is working on the investment project ideas which should be implemented in different regions of Georgia.
"We have already created a very attractive offer for the investors. This offer includes creating the favorable conditions for the investors in different regions of Georgia. The projects that are planned to be implemented are about building the hydro power stations, developing and promoting the local production, etc. Now we are in the process of establishing communication with the businessmen, who should be interested in investing in the regions. We will do our best to encourage the private business,” Garibashvili said.
New program to help Georgian tourism micro-entrepreneurs
24.01.2015. A large-scale project will soon be implemented in two of Georgian regions to help poor communities and micro-entrepreneurs in tourism sector. The World Bank, as the administrator of grant funds provided by the government of Japan through the Japan Social Development Fund, and Biological Farming Association Elkana have signed today a Grant Agreement on a 2.5 million USD project - Empowering Poor Communities and Micro-entrepreneurs in Georgia Tourism Sector.
The agreement was signed by World Bank Acting Regional Director for the South Caucasus, Joseph Melitauri, and Director of Elkana, Mariam Jorjadze. This three year project will be implemented in close cooperation with the Ministry of Regional Development and Infrastructure of Georgia, the Municipal Development Fund, and the Ministry of Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied Territories, Accommodation and Refugees of Georgia.
The overall objective of the project is to generate employment and increase household income of poor and vulnerable communities in the Kakheti and Imereti regions, where there are ongoing World Bank-financed regional development projects to support tourism development and urban regeneration. The Japanese funding will now support communities to start/grow small and micro enterprises (SMEs) in the tourism and organic food processing sectors and implement small community works in vicinity of cultural heritage sites.
"The New York Times": A wine revival at the foot of the Caucasus
12.01.2015. (Hvino News). The New York Times in its Travel section has published "52 Places to Go in 2015", including Georgia at 25th place, and specially mentioning several wineries and other wine-related destinations:
Georgia has all the makings of the next great wine destination: the world’s longest-running unbroken wine tradition (underground fermentation in clay vessels), hundreds of indigenous grape varieties, stunning landscapes and a band of vintners espousing natural methods. Its output has all become easier to sample, too, thanks to wine bars in the capital, Tbilisi (Konka, Vino Underground), a marked wine trail in Kakheti and wineries (Pheasant’s Tears, Iago’s Winery, Winery Khareba) serving traditional and modern Georgian cuisine. Those varietals will be feted this year at four major events: the New Wine Festival, Wine City Tbilisi at Tbilisifest, Telavino and the Tbilisi Cheese Festival...
The piece on Georgia in The New York Times is authored by Robyn Eckhardt, a freelance food writer based in Penang, China.
"The Telegraph" on Georgian wine-making
09.01.2015. Britain's The Telegraph has named Georgia as one of the most extraordinary destinations in the world.
“You might not have heard of Kakheti but you’re almost guaranteed to have enjoyed its most famous invention: wine. The Georgians have been making wine for 8,000 years and there’s recently been a revived interest in traditional wine-making techniques, with some of the country’s best wines now appearing on the wine lists at The Fat Duck, Hibiscus and Nobu.
Highlights of Kakheti include the 3,000 year old Uplistiske Rock City with its industrial-scale wine presses; the Ikalto Monastery where Orthodox priests kept meticulous viticulture records; fortified sacramental wine cellars larger than the churches they supplied; and the vineyards and wine cellars of Lagvinari, Georgia’s premier wine producer”, – the The Telegraph article says.
Electronic visa applications available from February 1
09.01.2015. Head of the National Tourism Administration George Chogovadze has announced that the Georgian government will present an online form for visa applications on February 1. According to Chogovadze, in 2014 Georgia was visited by 5,493,492 international travelers, 1.9 percent more than in the previous year but falling below predicted numbers.
Chogovadze stated that a number of factors resulted in fewer visitors than experts forecasted. “First of all, it is the current situation in the region, including the events that unfolded between Russia and Ukraine. However, the tightening of visa regulations may also have affected the number of tourists. In the near future, the Government will introduce an electronic visa application form which will simplify the procedure for obtaining Georgian visas for tourists,” said Chogovadze, further noting that the electronic visa application form is expected to be available from February 1.
More than 5.4 million visitors embrace Georgia this year
07.01.2015. Georgia is fast becoming a tourism destination by guests from all over the globe, with latest figures revealing more than a 5.4 million visitors spent time in Georgia this year.
Latest figures from the Ministry of Internal Affairs revealed a boost in 2014 year when 5, 493, 492 people crossed Georgian borders. To compare this date the same time period of 2013, the number of visitors to Georgia in 2014 increased by 1.9 percent.
While, number of tourists experienced Georgia’s unique culture, traditions and landscape increased this year and reached 2, 218 050 people complete period of this year. When compared to the same time period of 2013, the number of tourists traveled in Georgia in 2014 increased by 7.4 percent.
Latest figures from the Ministry of Internal Affairs revealed a boost in December when 433, 660 people crossed Georgian borders. This was a 10.5 percent increase on December 2013.
Last month of the year the highest number of visitors came from Turkey, followed by Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia and Ukraine.
The Ministry said the data showed a positive trend where more visitors from European Union countries continued to visit Georgia.
The number of visitors from Latvia, Latvia, United Kingdom, Poland, Kazakhstan, the Middle East, Israel, Belarus and Moldova also increased from year to year.
Georgia on my mind as the fog of Abu Dhabi clears
by Peter Hellyer
06.01.2015. It’s become a family tradition in recent years to slip away over New Year to somewhere not too far away – no point in spending too many hours on a plane – yet a place that offers markedly different attractions from the UAE. For four years, we’ve chosen Istanbul, for its architecture, for the delights of a Bosphorus cruise and, of course, for the shopping.
This year, we opted for something entirely different and went to Georgia. Once our friends realised that we weren't flying all that way across the Atlantic for a mere three or four days, their response was mainly one of curiosity. Nestled in the south-western Caucasus, this small country clearly has a long way to go in attracting tourists from the Emirates, despite direct flights from Sharjah and Dubai. That said, we were happy to find some other UAE citizens and expatriate residents in the hotel we had selected.
A quick internet check told us some of what to expect: mountains and river valleys and a n abundance of ancient castles, churches and monasteries, for Georgia is overwhelmingly Christian, the religion having arrived there in the 1st century AD. Indeed the Georgian alphabet is said to have been created in the 5th century for the purpose of translating the Bible into the Georgian language.
InterContinental to open new hotel in Tbilisi
05.01.2015 (Hvino Tour News) InterContinental Hotels Group announced that it will open the InterContinental Tbilisi in Georgia in 2016. The hotel will be the company’s first property in the country, and will operate in conjunction with existing owner partner Adjara Group.
Of the hotel’s 200 rooms, 15 will be suites, including a Presidential Suite. The property will feature a large multifunctional conference hall, ballroom, conference center, and multiple meeting rooms. Also on the premises will be an all-day dining restaurant, InterContinental Club Lounge, lobby bar, spa, and an indoor and outdoor pool.
The building that will house the hotel is a former printing warehouse. Centrally located in the heart of the capital, the hotel will be within walking distance of the city’s major landmarks, neighboring embassies, and business centers.
IHG’s chief executive officer of Europe, Angela Brav, said "We’re thrilled to be signing a property under our flagship InterContinental Hotels & Resorts brand in Georgia. We look forward to further expanding our presence in this region,” Brav said.
Georgia-EU: Has Georgia made the grade?
19.12.2014. The European Parliament yesterday ratified the Association Agreement between the EU and Georgia. 490 deputies voted for the document, 76 were against, 57 deputies abstained. During the vote in the hall of the European Parliament were the current president of Georgia, Giorgi Margvelashvili, and ex-President Mikhail Saakashvili, who has been put on the wanted list in his country.
Economic expert Irakli Lekvinadze said what Georgia expects from the Association except the opening of borders. "This is a very important agreement for us, both politically and, of course, in economic terms. One of the points of the agreement is free trade, and for us this is very important. In the first place, of course, those companies that export their products from Georgia to Europe will benefit: before September 1, they paid customs tariff, from September 1 this tariff does not exist. This will affect those Georgian companies that export wine and various fruit concentrates to the EU, providing additional revenue. This is one of the benefits that we got in Georgia after ratification of the treaty," the expert said.
Georgia to launch e-visa scheme with 102 countries
17.12.2014. Georgia is preparing to launch an electronic visa (e-visa) facility in the near future, allowing tourists from 102 countries the possibility to apply for a Georgian visa in simple steps, say official Tbilisi.
E-visa’s would boost Georgia’s tourism sector and offer hassle-free travel to foreign nationals, in light of the country’s new visa rules which had created "some difficulties” for tourists, believed Giorgi Chogovadze, head of the National Tourism Administration, which is responsible for the tourism sector development in the country.
"The date of the service launch has not yet been defined. However we have to test the traffic of the users that will be able to use the electronic travel authorization scheme,” Chogovadze told industry insiders while presenting his vision and goals for developing the country’s tourism sector.
Chogovadze was confident the government was actively working to correct current deficiencies to simplify issues relating to the new visa regulations, which came into force on September 1, 2014.
Over 300 executives to meet for aviation event
16.12.2014. A decision by United Airports of Georgia to host the Routes Silk Road event for the second year running is largely due to the success of the 2014 event [read more here] and a number of key routes which were negotiated during Routes Silk Road 2014. Air Arabia and Aeroflot commenced new routes from Tbilisi International Airport in October 2014 (to Sharjah and Moscow respectively). Etihad Airways is due to begin flights from Tbilisi to Abu Dhabi in October 2015. Furthermore, UAG is currently in the process of active negotiations with two airlines to begin routes from Kutaisi International Airport.
Routes Silk Road is the route development forum that connects CIS, Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Asia and was held for the first time earlier this year. The event, which will once again take place in the beautiful and historic capital of Georgia, will offer attendees the perfect platform to do business and improve air transport networks to, from and within the region. Over 300 senior level executives from airlines, airports, tourism authorities and other aviation stakeholders are expected to attend to discuss air service development.
Georgian tourism companies join national airline in protest
12.12.2014 (Hvino News). A rally held by Georgian Airways in protest of the unlimited flow of Russian airlines to Georgia, was joined by Georgian tourism companies on December 11. The companies stated that the country lacks regulations that support the local industry.
Georgian Airways released an eight-point list of demands on December 10, out of which only one was met. Two Russian companies Aeroflot and S7 will be able to carry out 10 flights a week instead of 14.
However, Georgia Airways leadership claims that the decision will not solve the problem and insist that all their demands are fulfilled. These include the rejection of the July 8 decree that allows Russian companies to undertake unlimited flights to the Tbilisi-Moscow-Tbilisi route, restoration of flights between the two countries that existed in 2006, negotiations with Russian representatives in Georgia, separation of the National Aviation Agency from the Ministry of Economy and making it a separate entity, hiring qualified staff for the agency and resuming the status of a flagman to Georgian Airways. Otherwise the company threatens to block the airport.
“Georgia’s airport is owned by a Turkish company, while the sky is going to be possessed by Russian companies. There is no space left for Georgian companies,” General Director of Georgian Airways Iase Zautashvili said.
Georgian Airways strike gains momentum
12.12.2014. One of the country’s top tourism agencies is publicly supporting the Georgian Airways strike as airline officials threaten to "paralyze” Tbilisi International Airport if its demands are not met.
The Georgian Airways protest is gaining momentum and has affected flights in and out of Georgia’s capital city Tbilisi.
The founder of one of the top tourism company "All Tours” Maia Mchedlidze said her company and others were in solidarity with the demands of Georgian Airways, who today pledged to ramp up their strike if their demands remained unanswered.
Mchedlidze noted that local tourism companies operated in harsh conditions as there were no regulations to enable them to compete with foreign companies.
"We make charters through Georgian Airways therefore we are dependent on each other,” she said.
"Our problem is that foreign tourism companies are trying to swallow us. Egyptian and Turkish aviation companies are entering Georgia with very low prices, they decrease their prices and we are forced to do the same, which, due to our limited resources, causes great problems for Georgian tourism companies. Their resources however enable them to act like this,” Mchedlidze said.
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Home Schools Washington Middle School WMS News Middle School Band and Choir Concerts Februrary 5th
Middle School Band and Choir Concerts Februrary 5th
The Washington MS Music Department presented two concerts back to back on February 5th. The choirs performed their concert first at 6:30 directed by Jonathan Runaas, accompanied by pianist, Brian Houts. Combinations of the Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced choirs performed a Pops concert. Their selections, with years listed when they were popular included:
Advanced Choir "That's the Way it Is", "Yesterday-Michelle", "Take the 'A' Train", "Breakaway", Intermediate Choir "The Rose", Beginning and Intermediate Choir "Singing in the Rain" & "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" Intermediate and Adv. Choirs "The Climb" and Comined Choirs "Sir Duke" Music instructors Craig McClenahan and Don Hughes were guest faculty artists on "Take The A Train".
The bands performed started at 7:30 and were directed Craig McClenahan. The intermediate band played four selections including: "G Force Five", "Ancient Hunters", "Cayuga Lake Overture" and Strauss's "Radetsky March". The Advanced Band played "March of the Irish Dragoons", "Declaration in Blue", "Slane", and "Ghost Dancing". The final group to perform was Middle School Jazz Band with guest trumpet artist: Don Hughes. Their selections included "Come Fly with Me", "Brazil" and "Watermelon Man". The Jazz Band will compete at the SEIBA Jazz Festival in Iowa City on Saturday, March 2nd and the Advanced Band will perform at large group contest on March 9th in Durant.
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by Dr. Tel-Oren
_10 REAONS FOR AVOIDING GMOs
Aricle written by Jeffrey Smith, a leading consumer advocate, and posted on August 25, 2011
1. GMOs ARE UNHEALTY.
Numerous health problems increased after GMOs were introduced in 1996. The percentage of Americans with three or more chronic illnesses jumped from 7% to 13% in just 9 years; food allergies skyrocketed, and disorders such as autism, reproductive disorders, digestive problems, and others are on the rise. Although there is not sufficient research to confirm that GMOs are a contributing factor, doctor groups, such as the AAEM, tell us not to wait before we start protecting ourselves, and especially our children, who are most at risk. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) urges doctors to prescribe non-GMO diets for all patients. They cite animal studies showing organ damage, gastrointestinal and immune system disorders, accelerated aging, and infertility. Human studies show how genetically modified (GM) food can leave material behind inside us, possibly causing long-term problems. Genes inserted into GM soy, for example, can transfer into the DNA of bacteria living inside us, and the toxic insecticide produced by GM corn was found in the blood of pregnant women and their unborn fetuses.
The American Public Health Association and American Nurses Association are among many medical groups that condemn the use of GM bovine growth hormone, because the milk from treated cows has more of the hormone IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor 1)―which is linked to cancer.
2. GMOs CONTAMINATE-- FOREVER.
GMOs cross-pollinate and their seeds can travel. It is impossible to fully clean up our contaminated gene pool. Self-propagating GMO pollution will outlast the effects of global warming and nuclear waste. The potential impact is huge, threatening the health of future generations. GMO contamination has also caused economic losses for organic and non-GMO farmers who often struggle to keep their crops pure.
3. GMOs INCREASE HERBICIDE USE.
Most GM crops are engineered to be “herbicide tolerant”. Monsanto, for example, sells Roundup Ready crops, designed to survive applications of their Roundup herbicide.
Between 1996 and 2008, US farmers sprayed an extra 383 million pounds of herbicide on GMOs. Overuse of Roundup results in "super weeds", weeds, resistant to the herbicide. This is causing farmers to use even more toxic herbicides every year. Not only does this create environmental harm, GM foods contain higher residues of toxic herbicides. Roundup, for example, is linked with sterility, hormone disruption, birth defects, and cancer.
4. GMO CREATES DANGEROUS SIDE EFFECTS.
By mixing genes from totally unrelated species, genetic engineering unleashes a host of unpredictable side effects. Moreover, irrespective of the type of genes that are inserted, the very process of creating a GM plant can result in massive collateral damage that produces new toxins, allergens, carcinogens, and nutritional deficiencies.
5. GOVERMENT OVERSIGHT IS LAX.
Most of the health and environmental risks of GMOs are ignored by governments’ superficial regulations and safety assessments. The reason for this tragedy is largely political. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for example, doesn’t require a single safety study, does not mandate labeling of GMOs, and allows companies to put their GM foods onto the market without even notifying the agency. Their justification was the claim that they had no information showing that GM foods were substantially different. But this was a lie. Secret agency memos made public by a lawsuit show that the overwhelming consensus even among the FDA’s own scientists was that GMOs can create unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects. They urged long-term safety studies. But the White House had instructed the FDA to promote biotechnology, and the agency official in charge of policy was Michael Taylor, Monsanto’s former attorney, later their vice president. He’s now the US Food Safety Czar.
6. THE BIOTECH INDUSTRY USES "TABACCO SCIENCE" TO CLAIM PRODUCT SAFETY.
Biotech companies like Monsanto told us that Agent Orange, PCBs, and DDT were safe. They are now using the same type of superficial, rigged research to try and convince us that GMOs are safe. Independent scientists, however, have caught the spin-masters red-handed, demonstrating without doubt how industry-funded research is designed to avoid finding problems, and how adverse findings are distorted or denied.
7. INDEPENDENT RESEARCH IS ATTACKED AND SUPPRESSED.
Scientists, who discover problems with GMOs, have been attacked, gagged, fired, threatened, and denied funding. The journal Nature acknowledged that a “large block of scientists . . . denigrate research by other legitimate scientists in a knee-jerk, partisan, emotional way that is not helpful in advancing knowledge.” Attempts by media to expose problems are also often censored.
8. GMOs HARM THE ENVIRONMENT.
GM crops and their associated herbicides can harm birds, insects, amphibians, marine ecosystems, and soil organisms. They reduce bio-diversity, pollute water resources, and are unsustainable. For example, GM crops are eliminating habitat for monarch butterflies, whose populations are down 50% in the US. Roundup herbicide has been shown to cause birth defects in amphibians, embryonic deaths and endocrine disruptions, and organ damage in animals even at very low doses. GM canola has been found growing wild in North Dakota and California, threatening to pass on its herbicide tolerant genes on to weeds.
9. GMOs DO NOT INCREASE YIELDS. THEY WORK AGAINST FEEDING A HUNGRY WORLD.
Whereas sustainable non-GMO agricultural methods used in developing countries have conclusively resulted in yield increases of 79% and higher, GMOs do not, on average, increase yields at all. This was evident in the Union of Concerned Scientists’ 2009 report Failure to Yield―the definitive study to date on GM crops and yield.
The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report, authored by more than 400 scientists and backed by 58 governments, stated that GM crop yields were “highly variable” and in some cases, “yields declined.” The report noted, “Assessment of the technology lags behind its development, information is anecdotal and contradictory, and uncertainty about possible benefits and damage is unavoidable.” They determined that the current GMOs have nothing to offer the goals of reducing hunger and poverty, improving nutrition, health and rural livelihoods, and facilitating social and environmental sustainability.
On the contrary, GMOs divert money and resources that would otherwise be spent on more safe, reliable, and appropriate technologies.
10. BY AVOIDING GMOs, YOU CONTRIBUTE TO THE COMING TIPPING POINT OF CONSUMER REJECTION, FORCING THEM OUT OF OUR FOOD SUPPLY.
Because GMOs give no consumer benefits, if even a small percentage of us start rejecting brands that contain them, GM ingredients will become a marketing liability. Food companies will kick them out. In Europe, for example, the tipping point was achieved in 1999, just after a high profile GMO safety scandal hit the papers and alerted citizens to the potential dangers. In the US, a consumer rebellion against GM bovine growth hormone has also reached a tipping point, kicked the cow drug out of dairy products by Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Dannon, Yoplait, and most of America’s dairies.
NOTE: As an additional motivation to avoid GMOs, you may wish to take a lesson from the animals. Eyewitness reports from around the world describe several situations where animals, when given a choice, avoid genetically modified food. These include cows, pigs, geese, elk, deer, raccoons, mice, rats, squirrels, chicken, and buffalo. We’re pretty sure the animals didn’t read the above 10 reasons.
The Campaign for Healthier Eating in America is designed to achieve a tipping point against GMOs in the US. The number of non-GMO shoppers needed is probably just 5% of the population. The key is to educate consumers.
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EXPERIENCE AWARENESS
Read Tomorrows News, Today
NewsWars
‘Serial’ Presents An Intimate Look At The Everyday U.S. Justice System
10 months ago Cornelius Rupert T.
Click here for the original Source of the article
After more than two years of waiting, one of the world’s most popular podcasts has returned with its third season. “Serial” dropped its first two new episodes on Thursday morning.
First exploding onto the platform as a viral hit in 2014, “Serial,” an offshoot of “This American Life” and hosted by NPR veteran Sarah Koenig, introduced us to Adnan Syed, and the concept of telling true crime stories via podcast. Koenig’s thoroughness in investigation and willingness to be wrong created a 12-episode story that became the most popular podcast in the world. Whether or not the listener believed Adnan’s claim to innocence, or thought the jury got it right, “Serial” presented an undeniably addictive format for intricate storytelling.
Two years after the final installment of the whirlwind second season of “Serial” featuring Bowe Bergdahl, Koenig is back with not one new story, but many. Each episode of season three takes place in the Cleveland Justice Center Complex, where Koenig and her producer, Emmanuel Dzotsi, spent more than a year taking in the justice process, interviewing the prosecutors, judges, defenders, and the accused.
Cleveland was chosen simply for Koenig and team’s unfettered access to every corner of the complex. Unlike the first season, which followed Syed through a high-profile murder trial, season three focuses on generally smaller criminal matters in Ohio’s second-largest urban center. Each episode will focus on one individual, rather than a long story spread out over the whole season.
While the premise may superficially seem less exciting than the preceding two seasons, the third season offers an incredibly new perspective on the world of criminal court, and the justice system as a whole.
Koenig masterfully presents the information as she perceives it. She doesn’t have an axe to grind, she just wants to know what happens to a person in Cleveland after the cuffs go on. She follows her subjects from incarceration, to courtroom appearances, to jail time, to probation, and to what happens when the justice system cuts them loose.
In the first episode, the subject, “Anna,” has been arrested for a bar fight. She’s a young, white woman who was at a shady bar with some shady friends when some men began harassing her. She admitted to being drunk, out of place, and possibly overly aggressive. One thing led to another, and she ended up punching a police officer.
Anna’s saga is followed for about a year, and while her final outcome seemed to be a light punishment on paper, the repercussions were far greater. She lost her job, spent an evening in a police car, was jailed for four days, and had a court tab that put her into collections. Sure, she made a mistake. A big one. But the supposedly “light” punishment put her so far into the hole that it will take years of struggle and luck to be able to live life above-board.
The second episode focuses primarily on Judge Daniel Gaul, a Democrat who has a reputation in the Justice Center Complex for coloring way outside the lines of constitutional law, and practicing racial prejudice with reckless abandon. The first soundbite we hear of Gaul in his courtroom is during one of his famous lectures.
He addresses a defendant as a cartoonish old schoolmaster would an unruly student: “You’re pathetic, dude. You’ve got a mortal character flaw.” He further berates another defendant, “Tyrell,” asking him where his dad is, and if his siblings are half or full, hazarding a guess that he grew up in a fatherless family. He often addresses African-American defendants as “dude” or “brother” and refers to “baby mommas” and “baby daddies” when discussing family life of the accused.
In the episode, we hear Gaul threaten more than one client with jail time if he finds out they are having a child out of wedlock, making it a term of their probation. At one point he says, “You’re on probation to me and you have more kids out of wedlock that you can’t afford to pay for, I’m gonna send you right back to the institution.”
Dzotsi seems genuinely shocked by the blatant un-constitutionalism of this threat, only to learn that it is par for the course for Gaul. The judge sees his habitual use of empty threats and demeaning slang as way to, as the judge puts it, “connect” with defendants. “I want to speak to them in their idiom. In language they can understand… ‘Hey, dude, get real.’”
Because of legislation in recent years aimed at lowering prison populations, Ohio courts have had much greater ability to grant probation over jail time in lower felony charges. This is a delight to Gaul. He views putting defendants on probation as a way to keep tabs on them for years to come, to be involved in their lives, claiming to want to make them better but truly controlling them. He boasts, “I put more people on probation than anyone else in this courthouse.”
“Vivienne” pleaded to felony drug possession in 2015. Gaul gave her probation. At her fifth violation, Vivienne’s attorney asked for her to be transferred to drug court, a courtroom specifically created for non-violent addicts. In drug court, the emphasis isn’t on punishment as much exploring the best way to help people get better. It’s proven to work for many addicts, at least better than traditional criminal court.
Gaul seemed almost offended by the request to have her moved from his watchful eye. The request was flatly denied, and never revisited.
After some time, Vivienne had violated her probation several more times, and is portrayed as begging Gaul to send her to inpatient care. “I have a sickness,” she says. The judge, after calling her “pathetic,” retorts, “You call it a sickness and I call it a crime.”
That begs the question: if there were a better option for her, why wouldn’t he let her take it? How could a judge enjoy seeing a woman continually violate her probation with no sign of improvement? It remains to be seen whether his portrayal on “Serial” will affect his upcoming election, but the Cleveland Plain Dealer has endorsed his opponent, Republican Wanda C. Jones, after previously endorsing Gaul.
Each episode promises a deep dive into a case or system that will undoubtedly compel the listener. The inner workings of the court are nothing like what is dramatized for television, and even unlike what people likely know from highly publicized trials.
Gaul estimates he has seen 40,000 cases in his 27 years on the bench. The figure is astounding, and gives us an idea of how many of our fellow Americans have been through criminal court in their lives. Like any system, this one is flawed.
It can also be great. It can save lives, and it can condemn them—both through inflamed sentences and through the trauma of being put through a year-long court battle. Fairness and justice is often at the hands of a single person, and he doesn’t always get it right.
“Serial” has tapped into an underreported and fascinating mine of story material, which I am already enthralled by. Season three promises to give a voice to the voiceless, to humanize those so often underserved by the public, and to tell some fascinating stories. New episodes are released Thursdays on any podcast platform.
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....of which was squandered away or wasted, never to be seen again. This is more than twice the amount given to Texas & Florida combined. I know the people of Puerto Rico well, and they are great. But much of their leadership is corrupt, & robbing the U.S. Government blind! (@realDonaldTrump)
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« An Essay On Art Through The Ages | An Essay Avalanches And Landslides »
Barbados is a small country located in the Caribbean Sea. The capital is Bridgetown with a population of about 8,789. The head of state of Barbados is Queen Elizabeth II and she is represented by General Dame Nita Barrow. The total population of the country is around 252,000. The main language is English and the predominant religion is Christianity. Their date of independence was November 30, 1966
Barbados is the eastern most Caribbean Island. It is about 200 miles North-North East of Trinidad and about 100 miles East- South East of St. Lucia. It is the second smallest country in the Western Hemisphere. The major urban centers in the area include Bridgetown, Speightstown, Oistins, and Holetown. The land is mainly flat except for a series of ridges that rise up to about 1,000 feet and then falling towards the sea
The climate of the region consists of tropical temperatures influenced by the Northeast trade winds. The average annual temperature is approximately 77 degrees Fahrenheit. The daily temperatures rarely get above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The dry season is cool, while the wet season is slightly warmer. The main rains come during the months of July, August, September, October, and November. The annual average rainfall is 40 inches in the coastal areas and 90 inches in the central areas
The net migration into Barbados is 4.82 per 1000. The annual growth rate is 0.4%, which is one of the lowest in the world. The annual birthrate is 15.45 per 1000, and the annual deathrate is 8.27 per 1000. Barbados ranks fourth in the World in population density with the overall density being 1526 per square mile. The whole island is inhabited, leaving no sparsely populated areas. The main race is Negro, which is about 92% of the population. The remainder of the population is consists of Whites (3.8%), Mulattoes (3.8%), and East Indians (0.4%). About 70% of the population is Anglican. The other 30% belong to various denominations such as Moravian, Methodist, and Roman Catholic
Barbados was once under British control from 1624. Its House of Assembly, which began in 1639, is the third oldest legislative body in the Western Hemisphere. By the time Britain left in 1966, the island was completely English in culture. The British influence is still seen today in quaint pubs, cricket games on the village greens, and in the common law
Barbados' government is British Parliament. The queen is the head of state and she is represented by the governor general. The governor general appoints an advisory council. The executive authority is the Prime Minister who is Owen Seymour Arthur which came into power on September 6, 1994. The Deputy Prime Minister is Billie Miller who also came into power on September 6, 1994. The democratic government works well in the country. They have had three general elections and one smooth transfer of power from the Democratic Labor Party to the Barbados Labor Party. Barbados carries on trade with other Caribbean nations and does have diplomatic relations with Cuba. Their closest relations are with the United Stated, and the United Kingdom. Barbados joined the United Nations is 1966
The economy of Barbados is one of the 35 upper middle-income countries of the world. They have a free-market economy, but the dominant sector is private. Their economy is based on sugar and tourism, but the government has encouraged a policy of diversification in order to achieve a more stable nation. They also depend on a light manufacturing industry. Their monetary unit is the Barbados dollar. The coins are made in 1, 5, 10, and 25 cents. The paper money is made in 1, 5, 10, 20, and 100 dollar bills. One U.S. dollar is equal to 2.01 Barbados dollar (1975)
About 60% of the land is cropland. The agriculture industry employs 7.4% of the labor force and contributes about 8.7% to the Gross Domestic Product. Sugarcane makes up over half the acreage. Bananas are also grown, but only on a limited scale. Sea island cotton is also grown. All of the farmers are
required by regulations to plant at least 12% of their arable land with some food crop
Barbados' natural resources include petroleum, fishing, and natural gas. The fishing industry employs about 2,500 people and 500 small boats. There are no natural forests in the country. Manufacturing contributes about 11.2% to the GDP. Manufacturing and mining employ about 18.9% of the labor force. The majority of the industrial establishments are engaged in some form of sugar processing. Sugar is the principal export. The principal imports include machinery, motor vehicles, lumber, and fuels. Barbados' per capita income of $9,200 makes it one of the highest standards of living of all the small island states of the Eastern Caribbean. Barbados is also one of the many transshipment points for narcotics bound for the U.S. and Europe
Some of the current issues in the country consist of the pollution of coastal waters from the waste disposal ships, soil erosion, and illegal solid waste disposal that threatens contamination of aquifers. Barbados is also plagued with natural disasters such as hurricanes and landslides. Their hurricane season is between the months of June and October, which is the same season as the U.S
an, barbados, essay
المواضيع المتشابهه للموضوع: An Essay Barbados
Barbados Large Flag
Barbados Flag
Hamid, Karrypto, Marlo and Garik Barbados
Basir, Ali, Ernesto and Hamid Barbados
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August-Issue-4 2015
Movers & Shakers 8/23/15
Cary Deck, a professor of economics at the University of Arkansas and the director of its Behavioral Business Research Laboratory, will serve as the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Rasmuson Chair of Economics for the 2015-16 academic year. Within UAA’s College of Business and Public Policy, Deck will work with faculty to promote research and teaching excellence. He will engage students in the classroom and will advise them on undergraduate research projects. Deck’s research uses controlled laboratory experiments to investigate a wide array of topics from risk taking to choice overload. His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Federal Trade Commission, and has been published in leading journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, and Review of Economic Studies, among others.
Dan Nichols is the new WHPacific Facilities Director in the company’s Anchorage office. Nichols has more than 10 years licensed experience in civil and arctic engineering and project management. In this role, Nichols oversees the Anchorage offices’ architectural, electrical, and mechanical projects. Previous to WHPacific, Nichols worked as a civil engineer and project manager for Dowl Engineering in Anchorage. Nichols’ past project experience includes projects in Emmonak, Kotzebue, Gukana, Selawik, Bethel and Red Dog Mine. Nichols is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Mitch Jackson, formerly a commercial banker with Wells Fargo, was hired as the commercial sales and leasing associate for Carlton Smith Company in Juneau. Jackson comes to the Carlton Smith Company with more than five years as a banker, including three years as a commercial relationship manager with Wells Fargo in Anchorage and, since 2012, in Juneau. Jackson is a member of the Juneau Economic Development Council board of directors, the Juneau Downtown Business Association, and the Gastineau Rotary Club. The Carlton Smith Company is in its 25th year as Southeast Alaska’s only real estate brokerage dedicated to commercial sales and leasing.
Arctic IT announced the addition of Mary Gasperlin to their team as an account executive. In her new role, Gasperlin will work with Alaska companies to find solutions to their IT needs with a focus on TotalCare, Arctic IT’s managed service. With more than two decades of business development and sales experience in the Alaska market, Gasperlin’s career includes growing market share for a Fortune 500 company doing business in Alaska, executing a revenue growth plan for companies that provided multi-year, multi-million dollar service contracts, and a long career in the aviation industry. Gasperlin is a long-time Alaskan resident and supports many business and non-profit organizations.
Mel “Hutch” Hutchison, a 35-year veteran of the electric utility industry, has joined ARECA Insurance Exchange as the insurance company’s new director of Loss Control effective Aug. 17. Originally from Reno, Nevada, Hutchison began his career in the electric industry as a high voltage lineman in the United States Air Force from 1980 to 2000. Following his retirement from the military, Hutchison took his skills to Chugach Electric Association, the state’s largest electric cooperative. While at Chugach, Hutchison worked as a safety specialist, manager of revenue metering, manager of maintenance and operations, and manager of safety and industrial hygiene. Hutchison most recently worked for Homer Electric Association as the systems operations supervisor. He also has numerous industry-related certifications that will assist him with his work at AIE.
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June-Issue-2 2012
EDITORIAL: Council, trawlers must be accountable for bycatch
Two out of three ain’t bad, unless you’re talking about trawl halibut bycatch.
As this issue of the Journal went to press, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council was kicking off 20 hours of staff reports, public comment, and ultimately, final deliberations in Kodiak about the decades-old issue of reducing the allowable bycatch of halibut by trawlers and cod longliners in the Gulf of Alaska.
Inside the thousands of pages of documents prepared over the years dealing with halibut bycatch is one bit of information that council members should keep at the top of their minds as they make a decision.
According to data collected by the International Pacific Halibut Commission, 62.5 percent of trawl halibut bycatch by weight are fish larger than 26 inches. With an annual bycatch limit of about 4.4 million pounds that has barely been adjusted since 1985, that amounts to 2.75 million pounds per year of fish larger than 26 inches taken by trawlers.
Why does this matter? It matters because the amount of halibut estimated to be larger than 26 inches is the basis of the harvest quotas set annually by the IPHC. Halibut must be larger than 32 inches, not 26, to be retained, but at current $6 per pound prices it’s a safe estimate that trawlers take legal-sized halibut worth upward of $10 million each year.
Trawl fleet representatives have aggressively pushed the information from the same analysis that shows three out of four fish in their bycatch are less than 26 inches, but never do they mention the fact that roughly two out of every three pounds are not.
They’ve also pointed fingers at wastage in the commercial halibut fishery where some sub-legal fish die after being discarded.
Some comparisons are apples to oranges. This argument is more like apples to hamburgers. When a halibut is caught by a trawler, it’s a death sentence more than 80 percent of the time for fish big or small.
The discard mortality rate for sublegal halibut by longliners is estimated to be 16 percent.
This leads nicely to another argument the trawlers are making — that this is really about allocation and not conservation because the halibut they aren’t allowed to take will be harvested by the commercial and recreational users instead.
Bycatch is not an allocation issue. Allocation fights are between directed users — commercial, sport and subsistence. For trawlers and cod longliners, halibut is a prohibited species catch. By definition, they shouldn’t be taking any of it.
Fisheries management allows for takes of certain amount of bycatch, but the North Pacific council cannot allow for preserving the bycatch status quo for a few boats to take precedence over their primary responsibility to manage the Gulf of Alaska sustainably for all users.
Some members of the council have attempted to cop out of bycatch cuts by arguing the North Pacific doesn’t have a halibut management plan. Indeed that is true, but it does have a groundfish plan that includes halibut bycatch limits and requirements for closures if a sector exceeds its limit.
That begs a simple question: If halibut bycatch has no impact, why have a limit or require closures at all?
In fact, it’s already an established part of council management that halibut bycatch has impacts and they must be controlled.
Now is not the time for the council to shrink from its job to live up to the “Alaskan model” it so often lauds itself for, especially at a time when the IPHC is doing everything it can to conserve the halibut resource that provides a livelihood for thousands of Alaskans as well as our friends in Canada and the Lower 48.
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Commission on Judicial Performance
The Commission on Judicial Performance (CJP) is an independent agency responsible for investigating judicial misconduct and disciplining state judges. It has jurisdiction over former judges for conduct prior to their leaving the bench and has shared authority with local courts over court commissioners and referees. The commission’s jurisdiction includes all judges of California's superior courts and the justices of the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court. But it does not have authority over federal judges, judges pro tem or private judges.
The Commission on Judicial Qualifications was established by the voters in November 1960 when they approved Proposition 10, which amended the state Constitution. The “Administration of Justice” amendment created a nine-member body comprised of five judges, two lawyers and two citizens to investigate allegations of judicial misconduct.
It also provided for the removal of judges from office by the state Supreme Court based on recommendations by the commission. Proceedings before the commission would be confidential until a recommendation was made by the commission to the Supreme Court for the judge’s removal.
The commission was amended five times, over the years, evolving from a purely investigative body to one with strong sanction powers. Its jurisdiction expanded, its operations became more transparent and its judicial composition gave way to a public-member majority.
Proposition 1a, passed by the voters in November 1966, tweaked the amendment by simplifying some of the language and adding censure as a sanction that could be imposed by the Supreme Court in addition to removal from office.
In November 1976, California voters passed Proposition 7, changing the panel’s name to the Commission on Judicial Performance. The proposition also added provisions for the removal or retirement of a Supreme Court justice. It added private admonishment as a sanction to be imposed by the commission, rather than the Supreme Court, and clarified a reference to “habitual intemperance” as grounds for discipline to be “the use of intoxicants or drugs.”
Voters made more changes in 1988. Proposition 92 gave the commission authority to open hearings at the request of the respondent judge or when the charges involved moral turpitude, corruption or dishonesty. The amendment also provided for public statements by the commission. Public reproval was added as an intermediate sanction between censure by the Supreme Court and private admonishment by the commission.
In 1994, Proposition 190 added more than a dozen significant changes. Open hearings were mandated in all cases involving formal charges. The commission replaced the Supreme Court as the authority for censure and removal determinations and took over the authority for promulgating its governing rules from the Judicial Council. Commission membership increased to 11 and its composition changed to three judges, two lawyers, and six citizens.
Proposition 221 in 1998 gave the commission shared authority with the superior courts for the investigation and discipline of subordinate judicial officers.
California was the first state in the country to set up a permanent body to address judicial misconduct. Today there are comparable bodies in all fifty states and in the District of Columbia, many of which were initially modeled after "the California Plan," now known as the Commission on Judicial Performance.
Mandate & Legislative History (CJP website)
What it Does:
The Commission on Judicial Performance is composed of 11 members: three judges appointed by the Supreme Court; two attorneys appointed by the governor; and six lay citizens, two of which are appointed by the governor, two of which are appointed by the Senate Committee on Rules, and two who are appointed by the Speaker of the Assembly. Members are appointed to four-year terms and may serve two terms. They do not receive a salary.
There were 1,774 judgeships and 392 court commissioners and referees within the commission's jurisdiction as of 2010. In what was a typical year statistically, the commission disposed of 1,133 cases. It dismissed 988 cases after an initial review; closed 96 cases without disciplinary action; and issued 31 advisory letters, eight private admonishments, four public admonishments and three public censures. Three judges retired or resigned with proceedings pending.
Since its inception in 1960, the commission has called for nine removals, 28 public censures, 17 public reprovals and 66 public admonishments.
Prior to 1995, the state Supreme Court had the authority to censure or remove judges from office and, upon the recommendation of the commission, called for 15 removals and 20 censures.
The California Commission on Judicial Performance receives about 1,000 complaints a year. Anyone can file a complaint, including the public, lawyers, judges, court staff and litigants.
Ninety percent of the complaints, however, allege some form of legal error rather than judicial misconduct that is more appropriately handled through the appellate court process. They are dismissed by the staff. The remaining 10% are investigated by the commission, which meets seven times a year.
Complaints are confidential and can be made anonymously.
Judicial misconduct involves violations of the Code of Judicial Ethics. Examples can include intemperate courtroom behavior, bias, sexual harassment, conflict of interest, public comment about a pending case or delay in performing judicial duties. It can also include off-the-bench conduct such as substance abuse, improper political activities or driving under the influence of alcohol. About 25 types of misconduct have been identified by the commission.
Legal error is not misconduct.
Once the commission determines that a complaint falls under its jurisdiction, the staff opens an investigation. If the complaint has merit, the judge is asked to comment. If the investigation determines “relatively minor” misconduct, the commission may send the judge a confidential letter of disapproval. If the misdeed is significant, the judge may get a confidential letter of admonishment.
It is only when a matter is considered serious that the commission may elect to go public with an admonishment or censure. The commission can remove a judge from office after a public hearing.
Once all commission procedures are completed, the judge can appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court.
Who Is Disciplined?
Over the course of two decades leading up to 2010, studies indicate that judges on small courts are more likely to be disciplined than those on large courts; complaints about male and female judges are equal but female judges are disciplined less often; elected judges are disciplined more often than appointed judges; age and judicial experience have no bearing; and judges who have received prior discipline are more likely to receive discipline.
From 2000-2009, “demeanor/decorum” was the cause of 19.9% of those disciplined. Around 9.7% were found to have abused authority on-bench, 9.4% showed bias, and 9.3% failed to ensure rights of courtroom participants.
Judicial Code of Ethics (pdf)
Organization of the Commission (CJP website)
Summary of Discipline Statistics, 1990-2009 (by Russell Ganzi, Erica Kang, and David Rizk, Stanford University, Graduate Policy Program) (pdf)
California Constitution (pdf)
Case Statistics (CJP website)
2010 Annual Report (CJP website) (pdf)
Public Discipline & Decisions 1961–Present (CJP website)
Where Does the Money Go:
All of the commission’s funding, $4.2 million in 2011-12, was allocated from the state General Fund. Seventy-seven percent of that is spent on salaries and benefits for its staff. The rest is spent on operating expenses and equipment.
The budget appropriation the year before was roughly the same as 2011-12. In that fiscal year, approximately 41% of the commission's budget went to support its investigation functions, 20% was for administration/general office, 20% for facilities, 7% as legal advisor, 6% for formal proceedings and 6% for general operating expenses.
In 2003-2004, and again in the 2008-2009, the commission's budget was reduced by 10%—a 20% reduction in the span of five years. None of the funding has been restored.
The members of the commission receive no salaries. Because the performance of the commission's core functions is dependent upon the services of its legal and support staff, the commission's budget is largely allocated to personnel expenses. Since 2003-2004, the commission has had to maintain reduced staffing levels in order to achieve the required savings.
The commission has 27 authorized staff positions: 16 attorneys and 11 support staff. Several positions have been kept vacant and other positions have been filled part-time as a cost-saving measure. This resulted was an overall staffing reduction of approximately 26% in 2010.
The Commission’s Budget (CJP website)
3-Year Budget (pdf)
2010-11 Expenditures Chart (pdf)
Commission Investigates the Supreme Court on Television
Governor Jerry Brown appointed Rose E. Bird as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1977 and they both immediately came under fire for her lack of judicial experience, her liberal inclinations and her personal style. She was also the first female member of the high court.
The court itself had been criticized during the previous decade for a host of reasons. Reagan had appointed a former aide, William P. Clark, who lacked a law degree. Senile Justice Marshall McComb had to be pressured into retirement in 1977 by the Commission on Judicial Performance. And the court was criticized for a series of decisions construed as being “soft on crime.”
California Supreme Court justices are regularly confirmed by voters, and Bird was narrowly returned to office in a 1978 election. But a controversy erupted on election day over allegations that the court had withheld release of a controversial decision, People v. Tanner, to enhance the re-election of four justices, including Bird.
Tanner, on a 4-3 vote, nullified a law-and-order measure making prison terms mandatory for people convicted of using guns during the commission of a crime. While three justices ruled that the “use a gun, go to prison” law was constitutional but inapplicable in the case, Bird had written that the law was applicable but unconstitutional.
The court eventually revisited the case and a reversal of position by Justice Stanley Mosk upheld the law. But the initial court decision set off a firestorm.
People called for Bird’s impeachment, a legislative inquiry, a grand jury investigation or an open probe by the commission.
What they got was a televised spectacle that mesmerized the state after Justice Bird ordered the commission to conduct a hearing. The panel, led by its chairman Judge Bertram D. Janes, sorted through private communications among the staff and justices, laying bare the inner workings of the court. Accusations about the political motivations of the court were argued as well as the damage done to the judicial system by exposing the confidential deliberations and thought processes of judges to public scrutiny and censure.
The public got more than a glimpse of the human beings beneath the black robes. They saw the pragmatism, nit-picking, crusading and wheeling and dealing along with the bickering, vindictiveness and suspicion among the court members.
In many ways, the commission hearing was conducted like a criminal trial. Lawyers objected to evidence, privileges were invoked, justices were cross-examined. In other ways it wasn’t. The commission declared it wasn’t bound by the rules of evidence and, in the words of Justice Mosk, “permitted reports on corridor gossip among law clerks, inquiries into intent, motivation, and speculation, and it welcomed the rankest type of hearsay as well as multiple hearsay evidence.”
Justices were asked to comment on why their secretaries didn’t receive carpeting and why one justice wouldn’t speak to another justice without a note-taking clerk present.
The media and the public scrutinized every twist and turn over a five-week period, judging the judges on their intelligence, knowledge and veracity.
Justice Bird worried afterward about the damage done to the court when she said, “we have thrown very delicate china into a laundermat.”
Justice Mosk refused to testify in public and petitioned the Superior Court to quash the commission’s subpoena. He argued that the public hearing violated the state Constitution. Justice Mosk lost, but won in the appellate court. The hearing was closed. But the Mosk case was appealed to the Supreme Court, an awkward situation that became even more awkward when one of the justices under investigation, Justice Frank Newman, refused to disqualify himself from the case. So the rest of the pro tempore court gave him the boot.
Finally, the public hearing was ordered permanently behind closed doors. On November 5, 1979, almost one year after the initial debate began, it ended. The commission issued a one-paragraph decision that the case was closed and no formal charges would be brought against any justices.
The commission also issued a two-page report that indicated it was being forced by the pro tempore court to remain silent about its decision and that it would seek a constitutional amendment to expand its disciplinary power and give it more flexibility in making reports public.
It wasn’t until 1988 that voters approved Proposition 92, which gave the commission authority to open hearings at the request of the respondent judge or when the charges involved moral turpitude, corruption or dishonesty. The amendment also provided for public statements by the commission.
Afterward, Justice Mosk was withering in his condemnation of the commission that “wasted both time and money by failing to exercise restraint before conducting proceedings.”
“The information the Commission members had before they donned their makeup for television performances was that there was no basis for charges against any member of the court,” Justice Mosk said.
When he toted up the winners and losers, Justice Mosk deemed the commission among the former. “They received personal recognition and adulation from professional court detractors. Some members of the Commission counsel staff won. One assistant is now running for Congress on the strength of the attention he received.”
The big loser: the Supreme Court.
Trying California’s Judges on Television: Open Government or Judicial Intimidation? (by Laurence H. Tribe, ABA Journal)
The Wages of Secrecy (by Carol Benfell, ABA Journal)
Judge as Statesman, Judge as Pol (by Alan M. Dershowitz, New York Times book review)
Chilling Judicial Independence—The California Experience (by Justice Stanley Mosk) (pdf)
People v. Tanner (Supreme Court of California Resources)
In 1998, the commission made a highly unusual move when it accused a veteran state appeals court judge of “willful misconduct” in connection with a dissenting opinion he wrote the year before.
The decision Kline objected to involved a controversial California practice—already rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court—in which parties to a lawsuit can, in effect, wipe earlier judicial decisions off the books if they settle a case. Critics say it is a way for wealthy litigants to buy their way out of precedents they don’t like.
Justice J. Anthony Kline stated in the dissent that “as a matter of conscience” he could not adhere to a state Supreme Court precedent. The precedent in question was “destructive of judicial institutions,” he wrote. Trial judges and appeals court justices are expected to follow the precedents set by the Supreme Court, but when they do not do so, the usual remedy is for the Supreme Court to reverse their rulings. At the time of the controversy, the commission had never before moved to discipline an appeals court jurist for a written opinion.
The commission contended that Kline violated two canons of the state Code of Judicial Ethics—one that says judges must act so as to promote “public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary” and a second that states that “a judge shall be faithful to the law.”
The accusation against Kline by the commission was also surprising because appellate judges hear cases in three-judge panels and Kline's statement came in a dissent—a judicial statement that has no legal effect other than to state a judge's opinion. The precedent involved in this case was a controversial one among lawyers and had been criticized extensively in the past by legal scholars.
Kline was accused of “conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice that brings the judicial office into disrepute, improper action and dereliction of duty,” which were charges that could lead to censure or even removal from the bench. New York University law professor Stephen Gillers, who specializes in legal ethics, commented publicly on the Kline case, saying it was sure to generate broad discussion in the legal world because “it goes to the very heart of judicial administration and conscience.” According to Gillers, if public officials do not follow the decisions of the Supreme Court, there would be no system governed by the rule of law and we would have “anarchy.”
Many critics felt the charges against Kline were excessive and controversial because the commission was threatening possible censure just because Kline expressed his belief that the Supreme Court should reconsider a decision.
The proceedings against Kline created a firestorm among lawyers and judges around the country. The American Bar Association and several local bar associations urged the commission to drop the charges.
In his letter to the commission, Kline defended himself, writing that “unlike the ordinary case filed by the commission, the allegations against me do not claim that I acted for an improper purpose or involve ‘moral turpitude, corruption or dishonesty’ of any kind.”
Professor J. Clark Kelso, a constitutional scholar at University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law, said he was “outraged” by the commission's action. Kelso told the Los Angeles Times that the commission appeared to be asserting a power to set itself up as a shadow Supreme Court, where if it doesn't like how an appellate justice votes or writes an opinion, then it can institute proceedings against him, creating “an intolerable intrusion on judicial decision-making and independence.”
In August 1999, more than a year after the commission brought its charges, it ruled that Kline did not act in bad faith and therefore did not violate the Code of Judicial Conduct.
Panel Contends Judge's Dissent Was Misconduct (by Henry Weinstein, Los Angeles Times)
Panel Drops Case Against State Appeals Court Judge (by Henry Weinstein, Los Angeles Times)
Panel Dismisses Judicial Misconduct Charges (Los Angeles Times)
Actions by the Commission
Over the years, the commission has been criticized for the low percentage of complaints it receives actually ending in judicial sanctions. Here are five cases where punishment was meted out.
· Riverside County Superior Court Judge Paul E. Zellerbach was publicly admonished in 2006 for refusing to return from a 2004 Angels baseball playoff game to handle a verdict in a murder trial. Zellerbach had arranged for another judge to handle any questions from the jury while he was at the ballpark, but when informed by court officials that the jury had a verdict refused to let another judge handle it.
· Former Orange County Superior Court Judge Ronald C. Kline was barred in 2006 from receiving work from state courts after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography.
· Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Patrick B. Murphy was removed from the bench and censured in 2001 after the commission charged him with malingering, excessive absenteeism and attending a Caribbean medical school while on the judicial payroll. He resigned, citing ill health, the same day the commission announced its decision.
· Monterey County Superior Court Jose Angel Velasquez was removed from the bench in 2007 for an “egregious pattern of misconduct.” He “incarcerated several defendants without respect for their constitutional rights; he increased sentences and showed irritation when defendants asked him straightforward and respectful questions about their sentences; he interfered with defendants’ exercise of the right to trial by jury and coerced defendants into diversion; he expressed his unhappiness with attorneys by not recalling bench warrants for the arrest of their clients and by making disparaging remarks regarding attorneys; and he used inappropriate humor about incarceration.”
· Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kevin A. Ross was ordered removed from the bench in 2005. Among his offenses were: incarcerating a defendant without any pretense of due process, questioning a defendant who had requested counsel, calling a defendant a pathological liar, discussing details of a pending juvenile case on television and “acting as a private arbitrator during filming of a pilot television program for a possible reality series.”
Judge Delayed Murder Verdict to Watch Game (by Maeve Reston, Los Angeles Times)
Former O.C. Judge Won't Get State Work (by Sara Lin, Los Angeles Times)
Panel Fires Judge Who Resigned (by Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times)
Inquiry Concerning Judge Jose A. Velasquez (CJP website)
Inquiry Concerning Judge Kevin A. Ross ((CJP website)
Suggested Reforms:
The commission regularly fine tunes its internal rules after circulating proposed changes for public comment. In March 2011 it adopted more than half a dozen additions and amendments.
Among the changes was a decision, in the future, to disclose to the Fair Political Practices Commission any information it uncovers that reveals possible violations of the Political Reform Act. Another rule allows the commission to pursue complaints about “subordinate judicial officers” that had been closed because the person being investigated had retired or resigned.
Report Concerning Adoption on March 23, 2011 of Additions and Amendments to Rules of the Commission on Judicial Performance (pdf)
Debate:
Does the Commission Protect the Public or Judges?
What is the practical role of the Commission on Judicial Performance? Does it protect the public from judicial misconduct or protect judges from the prying eyes of a skeptical public?
It Protects Judges and the Judicial System
Critics of the judicial performance commission system used in various forms across the country often point to what they perceive as its greatest weakness: it is primarily lawyers and judges judging judges. Non lawyers sitting on California’s Commission on Judicial Performance are regarded as tokens. The real power lies with the judges and no amount of tweaking the system changes that.
They are all members of the same professional community. They read the same legal journals, attend the same schools, are members of bar associations, socialize at legal gatherings, identify with each other’s role and generally empathize with each other.
The proof of how ineffectual such a system is, they say, the very low rate of punishment handed out. Since its inception 50 years ago, only nine judges have been removed from office and only 28 have been publicly censured. In the 1,133 cases concluded in 2010, no judges were removed and only three were publicly censured. Four were publicly admonished.
Is that proof of a well-behaved judiciary or a lax commission?
The vast majority of complaints are dismissed without comment, much less investigation. And despite five constitutional amendments over the years meant to make the system more transparent, the Commission on Judicial Performance performs mostly in secret.
Even when it is admonishing judges for misdeeds, the finger-wagging is most often done behind closed doors. The public good is hardly served by politely asking a judge in private not to do what he is already doing although it does preserve judicial decorum and collegiality.
Cynics wonder if the few cases that actually result in public punishment are just efforts to head off larger scandals before they hit the news media or, perhaps, political payback.
Accountability is the bulwark of a democracy. Although many judges are elected, few are judged on their records because the records are unknown. Grassroots efforts by concerned citizens to gather records of judicial decisions for dissemination on scorecards are generally scorned by the profession. It doesn’t want to be policed by the electorate or judge its own.
The Demise of Justice in the U.S. (Tulanelink.com)
Discipline—State Court Judges (Citizens for Judicial Accountability)
It Protects the Public
Blame it on Judge Judy.
Mike Farrell, former television star of M*A*S*H and civilian member of California’s Commission on Judicial Performance in 2000, says that public respect for judges and suspicion about their ethical performance is a direct result of the televised histrionics of fake judges and fake courtroom proceedings that Americans religiously watch.
“I find it of particular concern that the current crop of pseudo-court shows is thought by the television audience to be authentic,” Farrell said, noting that complaints about judges on the shows are regularly made to the commission.
“As television's treasury is fattened, the public's faith in the dignity of the courts is diminished.”
Amid this general disregard for the legal profession and judges in particular is a legitimate suspicion by the public of secrecy in government. But defenders of the commission and its procedures argue that the judicial branch of government, unlike its executive and legislative brethren, have a special obligation to maintain a certain level of confidentiality.
A 2007 decision by the state 2nd District Court of Appeals laid out the reasons for the commission’s secrecy. The commission had refused a Superior Court order to surrender the complaint record sought by an accused criminal of a judge in whose court he had appeared. The Court of Appeals sided with the commission.
“The confidentiality of the Commission's investigations is based on sound public policy,” the court said. It encourages the filing of complaints and the participation of citizens and witnesses by protecting them from retribution and recrimination. It protects judges from unwarranted complaints by disgruntled litigants or attorneys. And it protects the rights of judges, who are guaranteed the confidentiality of a private admonishment (should circumstances dictate it) by the state Constitution.
“No prescience is needed to foresee the flood of unfounded complaints” that would result if the commission’s secrecy is not respected, the court concluded.
Even with confidentiality, the “flood of unfounded complaints” continues unabated. The reason the vast majority of complaints to the commission are dismissed by the staff without a full investigation is that they fail to meet the basic standard for acceptance: they aren’t about judicial misconduct.
The majority of complaints allege the types of legal errors or “miscarriages of justice” meant to be handled through the court appeals process, not the commission.
Perhaps a less cynical reading of the low rate of misconduct unearthed by the commission might be that the judicial system actually has a relatively low rate of misconduct and that the commission is contributing to that by deterring bad behavior.
Among the more virulent complaints about the commission is that it is judges judging judges, protecting their own in a hermetically sealed, incestuous zone of comfort. However, only three of the California commissioners are judges. Two are lawyers and six of the 11 are public members.
Some of the commission’s critics are motivated by ideology and politics, with a built-in suspicion of a judicial system that is soft on crime and mushy about protecting their cultural values. They seek to influence judges who are making sound decisions based on laws that they happen to disagree with, by putting them under a spotlight of notoriety.
Former Justice Stanley Mosk once noted that the founding fathers hoped the judicial branch would be “above the fray, impervious to the political winds. . . . I regret that in this age of cynicism about all government I am no longer confident of that protection, nor am I sanguine about the future.”
He wrote that in arguably far less cynical times, 30 years ago.
There's Disorder in the Court—and Television Stands Accused (by Mike Farrell, Los Angeles Times op-ed)
Commission on Judicial Performance v. Superior Court of Los Angeles (FindLaw.com)
California Code of Judicial Ethics
Former Directors:
Judith McConnell, 2009-2012
Frederick P. Horn, 2007-2009
Marshall T. Grossman, 2005-2007
Vance W. Raye, 2004-2005
Rise Jones Pichon, 2002-2004
Michael A. Kahn, 2001-2002
Daniel M. Hanlon, 1999-2000
Robert Bonner, 1997-1999
William A. Masterson, 1995-1997
Eugene M. Premo, 1993-1994
Arleigh Maddox Woods, 1988-1993
John T. Racanelli, 1981-1987
Bertram D. Janes, 1975-1980
A.F. Bray, 1960-1964. First chairman of the panel, originally known as the Commission on Judicial Qualifications.
Where Does the Money Go
Suggested Reforms
Annual Budget: $4.1 million (Proposed FY 2012-2013)
Official Website: http://www.cjp.ca.gov/
Simi, Lawrence
Commission Chairman
The Commission on Judicial Performance broke precedent when Lawrence J. Simi was elected its first non-lawyer chairman in March 2012.
Simi has a bachelor of arts degree in political science from San Francisco State University and a master of arts in government from California State University, Sacramento. He was a program manager for San Francisco Mayors Joseph Alioto, George Moscone and Dianne Feinstein from 1972 to 1980.
He left government in 1980 and joined Pacific Gas & Electric as a public affairs representative, rising through the ranks to become public affairs manager, regional public affairs director, division manager and then director of community relations and local government relations.
In a moment of striking candor about his employer, Simi was quoted in 1992 in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. “In order to supply the electricity needs of California, we burn fossil fuels, we discharge hot water into San Francisco and Monterey bays and the Pacific Ocean, we cover open hillsides with noisy, ugly windmills, we dam wild and scenic rivers, our power lines emit electronmagnetic fields—and we run a nuclear power plant. And you think your clients have image problems?”
Simi became PG&E’s director of legislative and regulatory projects in 1997, and its director of governmental relations and political resources in 2004. He retired in 2010.
While working at PG&E, Simi participated in numerous nonprofit and community organizations. He was a board member and San Francisco County chairman of United Way of the Bay Area from 1993-1997, on the board of Saint Vincent de Paul Society of San Francisco from 1996-2000, president of the St. Ignatius Pastoral Council 2002-2006, on the board of directors at the Coro Center for Civic Leadership 2008-2010 and board president of the Pine View Housing Corporation 1991-2011.
Simi was first appointed to the Commission on Judicial Performance by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005 and was reappointed in 2009.
Lawrence J. Simi (LinkedIn)
Schwarzenegger Reappoints Lawrence Simi to CJP (Metropolitan News-Enterprise)
McConnell, Judith
Previous commission chair
First appointed chairperson in March 2009, Justice Judith D. McConnell remained on the commission after stepping down in March 2012.
McConnell received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1966 before earning a law degree from Boalt Hall School there in 1969.
She joined the California Department of Transportation as a lawyer after college before entering private practice in 1976 at Reed, McConnell & Sullivan.
From 1978 to 1980, she was a judge of the San Diego Municipal Court and from 1980 to 2001 a judge of the San Diego Superior Court. As a Superior Court judge, she served as presiding judge of the Juvenile Court and supervising judge of the Family Court and was elected by her colleagues to serve as assistant presiding judge in 1988 and as presiding judge in 1990, serving two years in each position.
McConnell served as Associate Justice of the Court of Appeal, Fourth Appellate District, from 2001 to 2003 and has been its Administrative Presiding Justice since 2003.
She served as a member and vice-chair of the Judicial Council Task Force on Jury System Improvement from 1998 to 2003, and as chair of the Task Force on Judicial Ethics Issues from 2003 to 2004.
McConnell was appointed to the commission in 2005 as the Court of Appeal judicial member by the Supreme Court and reappointed in 2009. She was the commission’s vice-chairperson in 2007 and 2008 before becoming chairperson in March 2009.
McConnell is a founding member of the Lawyers Club, an organization begun in the early ‘70s and credited with helping pave the way for female attorneys in a profession that had few at the time. She was the first woman in California to preside as judge over the courts of a major city when she became presiding judge of the Superior Court in 1990, according to San Diego Magazine.
Judith McConnell (Judgepedia.com)
Commission Members (CJP website)
Commission on Judicial Performance Announces the Election of Justice Judith D. McConnell as Chairperson (CJP website)
Judith McConnell (by Kim Cromwell, San Diego Magazine)
Chevron Pleads No Contest, Agrees to Pay $2 Million for Richmond Refinery Fire
PG&E Declares War on Oakland Gnomes, then Quickly Grants Reprieve
Record Number of High-End Home Sales in California
Munger Siblings Matched Labor's $85 Million Election Contribution
Hospitals Double-Billed for Spinal Surgeries…Gaining $67 Million in One Year
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DATE News (chronologically)
Weekend NASCAR Daytona TV Times
Saturday, February 17 Location TV Times Net
NASCAR Xfinity - Qualifying Daytona 9:30am-11:00am (L) FS1
NASCAR Cup - Final Practice Daytona 12:00pm-1:00pm (L) FS1
NASCAR Xfinity - Race Daytona 2:00pm-3:30pm - pre-race (L)
2:30pm-5:30pm - race (L) FS1
Sunday, February 18 Location TV Times Net
NASCAR Cup - Daytona 500 Race Daytona 1:00pm-2:30pm - pre-race (L)
2:30pm-6:30pm - race (L) FOX
Legend: D = delayed; L = live
GEICO signs extension with Germain Racing
Germain Racing is pleased to announce that longtime primary sponsor, GEICO, has signed a sponsorship extension that will find the famed Gecko adorning the hood of the No. 13 Camaro ZL1 through at least the 2020 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season.
The relationship between Germain Racing and GEICO spans over a decade and has evolved from a NASCAR Xfinity Series entry in 2008 to a current day, charter-owning Cup Series organization that competed for wins during the 2017 season with driver, Ty Dillon.
Read more & Comment...
David Gilliland Wins Daytona Truck Series Pole
David Gilliland won the pole for Friday night's season-opening NextEra Energy 250 NASCAR Camping Truck Series race for his first-career truck series pole.
Wheeling a Kyle Busch-owned Toyota Tundra normally driven by his son, Todd, Gilliland clocked in at 183.61 mph to secure the pole in just his 11th-career truck series start.
Cosworth frustrated IndyCar can't land a 3rd OEM
2004 CART Cosworth V8-turbo IndyCar engine
As AR1.com has stated for many years, IndyCar is not going to land a 3rd engine manufacturer until it has a better TV package so that a manufacturer will get some good exposure for the $100 million+ investment they will be making.
And so far we have been 100% correct. Mark Miles, and those before him have struck out time and time again. With a new TV deal on the horizon, this is Mark Miles chance to change things by signing a 100% network TV deal in conjunction with good international TV distributions/deals.
If they sign another cable TV deal, ratings will be minuscule and exposure for a new OEM minimal. There's an old saying, "when in doubt, just do what's right."
2018 Chevrolet NASCAR Preview
2018 Chevrolet Season Preview; Jim Campbell, Chevrolet U.S. Vice President of performance vehicles, Richard Childress, Richard Childress Racing,Chip Ganassi, Chip Ganassi Racing, Rick Hendrick, Hendrick Motorsports, Richard Petty, Richard Petty
Daniel Suarez Fastest In Friday's Second Daytona 500 Practice Session
Daniel Suarez continued to lead the way during Thursday's Cup Series practice sessions for Sunday's 60th running of the Daytona 500, leading the second session of the day with a quick lap of 203.179 mph.
Suarez had led the opening afternoon practice session, but the second session held about and hour later proved to be much faster, with laps speeds averaging as much as four miles-per-hour quicker than in the earlier session.
Ryan Newman was second fastest, running 202.945 mph, followed by Michael McDowell (202.867), A.J. Allmendinger (202.739) and Kyle Busch (202.689).
PRACTICE RESULTS
Pos # Driver Sponsor/Make Time Speed Laps Behind
1 19 Daniel Suarez ARRIS Toyota 44.296 203.179 27 ---.---
2 31 Ryan Newman Bass Pro Shops/Cabela's Chevrolet 44.347 202.945 20 -0.051
3 34 Michael McDowell Love's Travel Stops Ford 44.364 202.867 20 -0.017
4 47 AJ Allmendinger Kroger ClickList Chevrolet 44.392 202.739 19 -0.028
5 18 Kyle Busch M&M's Toyota 44.403 202.689 16 -0.011
6 21 Paul Menard Omnicraft Auto Parts/Quick Lane Tire Ford 44.421 202.607 10 -0.018
7 78 Martin Truex Jr. Bass Pro Shops/5-hour Energy Toyota 44.447 202.488 24 -0.026
8 95 Kasey Kahne Procore Chevrolet 44.457 202.443 23 -0.01
9 2 Brad Keselowski Discount Tire Ford 44.573 201.916 25 -0.116
10 4 Kevin Harvick Jimmy John's Ford 44.591 201.834 19 -0.018
11 17 Ricky Stenhouse Jr. Fastenal Ford 44.6 201.794 20 -0.009
12 41 Kurt Busch Haas Automation/Monster Energy Ford 44.604 201.776 20 -0.004
13 14 Clint Bowyer Rush Truck Centers Ford 44.61 201.748 19 -0.006
14 10 Aric Almirola Smithfield Ford 44.614 201.73 28 -0.004
15 3 Austin Dillon Dow Chevrolet 44.629 201.663 5 -0.015
16 20 Erik Jones DEWALT Toyota 44.72 201.252 13 -0.091
17 6 Trevor Bayne AdvoCare Ford 44.726 201.225 17 -0.006
18 0 Jeffrey Earnhardt VRX Simulators Chevrolet 45.089 199.605 9 -0.363
19 42 Kyle Larson Credit One Bank Chevrolet 45.106 199.53 24 -0.017
20 24 William Byron # AXALTA Chevrolet 45.113 199.499 24 -0.007
21 88 Alex Bowman Nationwide Chevrolet 45.12 199.468 34 -0.007
22 9 Chase Elliott NAPA Auto Parts Chevrolet 45.12 199.468 24 0
23 48 Jimmie Johnson Lowe's for Pros Chevrolet 45.121 199.464 42 -0.001
24 7 Danica Patrick GoDaddy Chevrolet 45.328 198.553 14 -0.207
25 13 Ty Dillon GEICO Chevrolet 46.364 194.116 6 -1.036
26 22 Joey Logano Shell Pennzoil Ford 46.442 193.79 14 -0.078
27 38 David Ragan Speedco Ford 46.901 191.894 10 -0.459
28 12 Ryan Blaney Menards/Peak Ford 46.947 191.706 11 -0.046
29 1 Jamie McMurray McDonald's/Cessna Chevrolet 47.002 191.481 18 -0.055
Juncos Racing Seat Fitting and Driver Open House 2018
Rene Binder and Kyle Kaiser look forward to the 2018 IndyCar season with Juncos Racing.
2018 Penske Games Teaser
Uh oh. Here comes trouble.
Full Interview: Jeff Gordon Talks with Fernando Alonso
Ahead of the 56th running of the Rolex 24 At Daytona, four-time Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series champion Jeff Gordon sat down with Fernando Alonso to discuss with the two-time Formula 1 champion his goals and his mindset ahead of the iconic race.
Daniel Suarez Leads Friday Daytona 500 Practice
Pete McCole/AR1
Daniel Suarez led the field in the third Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series practice session for Sunday's season-opening Daytona 500.
Suarez posted a speed of 199.84mph in the No. 19 Toyota Camry, leading a trio of Toyotas that included Daytona 500 outside polesitter Denny Hamlin (199.743 mph) and defending Cup Champion Martin Truex, Jr. (199.694 mph).
David Ragan was the fastest Ford, posting the fourth-fastest speed of 199.65 mph. Danica Patrick led the Chevrolet camp with the fifth-fastest speed, running 199.406 mph.
F1 Explained: 2018 Tires
We've got a full Pirelli rainbow of tires for 2018. But how much will the new selection of tires affect racing?
Legend of Daytona: Narrated by Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. tells the story of NASCAR's most prestigious race track before its most coveted race, the 60th running of the Daytona 500.
Daytona Clash attendance plummets without Dale Jr.
Chase Elliott leads in the 2nd Duel-150
Sarah Crabill/Getty Images
AR1.com predicted that the loss of Dale Earnhardt Jr. would result in a significant drop in attendance for the NASCAR races this year. The majority of NASCAR's Earnhardt's fans give a dam about the new replacements.
Last night's two NASCAR Can-Am Duel races, which drew over 100,000 for decades, only drew an estimated 35,000 fans to Daytona Int'l Speedway, a "slim crowd, by historical standards."
Crutchlow and Rins top first day in Thailand
Cal Crutchlow (LCR Honda Castrol) topped the first day of testing at Chang International Circuit in Thailand, taking over from reigning Champion Marc Marquez (Repsol Honda Team) later in the session to set a 1:30.797. Despite setting the fastest lap so far by a MotoGP rider at the new venue, the Brit was nevertheless only 0.012 ahead of a late charge from Alex Rins (Team Suzuki Ecstar) by the end of action. Marquez was third, just 0.033 ahead of 2017 Championship rival Andrea Dovizioso.
IMSA Appoints Snyder, Maesky to New Race Director Roles
IMSA today appointed veteran race officials Todd Snyder and John Maesky to new race director roles for IMSA-sanctioned single-make and challenge series.
Maesky, a fixture in IMSA race control over the past several seasons, takes on new responsibilities as race director for both the Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge USA by Yokohama and the Ultra 94 Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge Canada by Yokohama for the 2018 season.
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Starting lineup for the 60th Daytona 500
Polesitter Bowman ran at the back in his 150-mile Duel race
The lineup for the 60th Daytona 500 was finalized Thursday night in the Can-Am Duels at Daytona International Speedway.
Alex Bowman has the pole and Denny Hamlin starts second. They earned those spots in pole qualifying on Sunday.
Ryan Blaney starts third and Chase Elliott starts fourth after they won their qualifying races.
Driver Dead, Instructor Injured After Track Day Crash
Porsche Track Day at Roebling Road
A track day at Roebling Road Raceway in Bloomingdale, Georgia, ended in tragedy last weekend when a car crashed into a wall at high speed, killing the driver and severely injuring the instructor on board, reports WTOC. The event was a high-performance driving school put on by the Porsche Club of America, which gives owners the chance to drive their Porsches the way they were meant to be driven away from public roads.
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Select one... 05/10/00 to 05/31/00 05/31/00 to 06/07/00 06/07/00 to 06/15/00 06/16/00 to 06/23/00 06/24/00 to 06/30/00 07/01/00 to 07/05/00 07/06/00 to 07/10/00 07/11/00 to 07/16/00 07/17/00 to 07/21/00 07/22/00 to 07/31/00 08/01/00 to 08/04/00 08/05/00 to 08/06/00 08/07/00 to 08/10/00 08/11/00 to 08/15/00 08/16/00 to 08/22/00 08/23/00 to 08/31/00 09/01/00 to 09/09/00 09/09/00 to 09/19/00 09/20/00 to 09/28/00 09/29/00 to 10/06/00 10/07/00 to 10/14/00 10/15/00 to 10/22/00 10/23/00 to 10/27/00 10/28/00 to 11/04/00 11/05/00 to 11/10/00 11/11/00 to 11/23/00 11/24/00 to 12/04/00 12/05/00 to 12/10/00 12/11/00 to 12/19/00 12/20/00 to 12/31/00
Select one... 01/01/01 to 01/06/01 01/07/01 to 01/18/01 01/19/01 to 01/27/01 01/28/01 to 02/08/01 02/09/01 to 02/14/01 02/15/01 to 02/20/01 02/21/01 to 02/25/01 02/26/01 to 03/02/01 03/03/01 to 03/09/01 03/10/01 to 03/15/01 03/16/01 to 03/26/01 03/27/01 to 04/04/01 04/05/01 to 04/10/01 04/11/01 to 04/18/01 04/19/01 to 04/23/01 04/24/01 to 05/01/01 05/02/01 to 05/09/01 05/10/01 to 05/19/01 05/20/01 to 05/27/01 05/28/01 to 06/03/01 06/04/01 to 06/11/01 06/12/01 to 06/17/01 06/18/01 to 06/26/01 06/27/01 to 07/10/01 07/11/01 to 07/18/01 07/19/01 to 07/26/01 07/27/01 to 08/02/01 08/03/01 to 08/11/01 08/12/01 to 08/24/01 08/25/01 to 09/03/01 09/04/01 to 09/15/01 09/16/01 to 09/29/01 09/30/01 to 10/11/01 10/12/01 to 10/23/01 10/24/01 to 11/02/01 11/03/01 to 11/13/01 11/14/01 to 11/29/01 11/30/01 to 12/11/01 12/12/01 to 12/22/01 12/23/01 to 12/31/01
Select one... 01/01/02 to 01/09/02 01/10/02 to 01/18/02 01/19/02 to 01/24/02 01/25/02 to 02/03/02 02/04/02 to 02/09/02 02/10/02 to 02/17/02 02/18/02 to 02/25/02 02/26/02 to 03/02/02 03/03/02 to 03/09/02 03/10/02 to 03/16/02 03/17/02 to 03/24/02 03/25/02 to 03/31/02 04/01/02 to 04/07/02 04/08/02 to 04/12/02 04/13/02 to 04/19/02 04/20/02 to 04/26/02 04/27/02 to 05/03/02 05/04/02 to 05/10/02 05/11/02 to 05/16/02 05/17/02 to 05/22/02 05/23/02 to 05/29/02 05/30/02 to 06/05/02 06/06/02 to 06/11/02 06/12/02 to 06/17/02 06/18/02 to 06/24/02 06/25/02 to 06/30/02 07/01/02 to 07/07/02 07/08/02 to 07/14/02 07/15/02 to 07/21/02 07/22/02 to 07/29/02 07/30/02 to 08/07/02 08/08/02 to 08/15/02 08/16/02 to 08/23/02 08/24/02 to 08/29/02 08/30/02 to 09/06/02 09/07/02 to 09/13/02 09/14/02 to 09/20/02 09/21/02 to 09/27/02 09/28/02 to 10/06/02 10/07/02 to 10/11/02 10/12/02 to 10/19/02 10/20/02 to 10/28/02 10/29/02 to 11/05/02 11/06/02 to 11/11/02 11/12/02 to 11/20/02 11/21/02 to 11/28/02 11/29/02 to 12/05/02 12/06/02 to 12/12/02 12/13/02 to 12/18/02 12/19/02 to 12/26/02 12/27/02 to 12/31/02
Select one... 01/01/03 to 01/08/03 01/09/03 to 01/15/03 01/16/03 to 01/22/03 01/23/03 to 01/29/03 01/30/03 to 02/05/03 02/06/03 to 02/12/03 02/13/03 to 02/18/03 02/19/03 to 02/23/03 02/24/03 to 02/27/03 02/28/03 to 03/04/03 03/05/03 to 03/08/03 03/09/03 to 03/14/03 03/15/03 to 03/21/03 03/22/03 to 03/27/03 03/28/03 to 04/05/03 04/06/03 to 04/11/03 04/12/03 to 04/17/03 04/18/03 to 04/23/03 04/24/03 to 04/29/03 04/30/03 to 05/06/03 05/07/03 to 05/12/03 05/13/03 to 05/19/03 05/20/03 to 05/24/03 05/25/03 to 05/29/03 05/30/03 to 06/05/03 06/06/03 to 06/12/03 06/13/03 to 06/20/03 06/21/03 to 06/28/03 06/29/03 to 07/05/03 07/06/03 to 07/12/03 07/13/03 to 07/18/03 07/19/03 to 07/25/03 07/26/03 to 07/31/03 08/01/03 to 08/07/03 08/08/03 to 08/13/03 08/14/03 to 08/20/03 08/21/03 to 08/27/03 08/28/03 to 09/02/03 09/03/03 to 09/09/03 09/10/03 to 09/16/03 09/17/03 to 09/22/03 09/23/03 to 09/29/03 09/30/03 to 10/05/03 10/06/03 to 10/11/03 10/12/03 to 10/17/03 10/18/03 to 10/24/03 10/25/03 to 10/31/03 11/01/03 to 11/06/03 11/07/03 to 11/13/03 11/14/03 to 11/20/03 11/21/03 to 11/27/03 11/28/03 to 12/05/03 12/06/03 to 12/14/03 12/15/03 to 12/22/03 12/23/03 to 12/31/03
Select one... 01/01/04 to 01/07/04 01/08/04 to 01/14/04 01/15/04 to 01/20/04 01/21/04 to 01/26/04 01/27/04 to 01/31/04 02/01/04 to 02/06/04 02/07/04 to 02/12/04 02/13/04 to 02/19/04 02/20/04 to 02/27/04 02/28/04 to 03/05/04 03/06/04 to 03/11/04 03/12/04 to 03/18/04 03/19/04 to 03/25/04 03/26/04 to 03/31/04 04/01/04 to 04/08/04 04/09/04 to 04/17/04 04/18/04 to 04/26/04 04/27/04 to 05/04/04 05/05/04 to 05/11/04 05/12/04 to 05/17/04 05/18/04 to 05/23/04 05/24/04 to 05/28/04 05/29/04 to 06/05/04 06/06/04 to 06/13/04 06/14/04 to 06/18/04 06/19/04 to 06/23/04 06/24/04 to 06/28/04 06/24/04 to 06/29/04 06/30/04 to 07/04/04 07/05/04 to 07/12/04 07/13/04 to 07/19/04 07/20/04 to 07/25/04 07/26/04 to 08/02/04 08/03/04 to 08/06/04 08/06/04 to 08/12/0408/13/04 to 08/18/0408/19/04 to 08/26/0408/27/04 to 09/02/0409/03/04 to 09/09/0409/10/04 to 09/15/0409/16/04 to 09/22/0409/23/04 to 09/27/0409/28/04 to 10/04/0410/05/04 to 10/10/0410/11/04 to 10/16/0410/17/04 to 10/22/0410/23/04 to 10/30/0410/31/04 to 11/09/0411/10/04 to 11/17/0411/18/04 to 11/23/0411/24/04 to 11/29/0411/30/04 to 12/05/0412/06/04 to 12/14/0412/15/04 to 12/22/04
Select one...12/23/04 to 01/03/0501/04/05 to 01/09/0501/10/05 to 01/14/0501/15/05 to 01/19/0501/20/05 to 01/24/0501/25/05 to 01/28/0501/29/05 to 02/03/0502/04/05 to 02/08/0502/09/05 to 02/13/0502/14/05 to 02/17/0502/18/05 to 02/22/0502/23/05 to 02/27/0502/28/05 to 03/02/0503/03/05 to 03/06/0503/07/05 to 03/11/0503/12/05 to 03/16/0503/17/05 to 03/19/0503/20/05 to 03/24/0503/25/05 to 03/30/0503/31/05 to 04/04/0504/05/05 to 04/09/0504/10/05 to 04/13/0504/14/05 to 04/18/0504/19/05 to 04/24/0504/25/05 to 04/29/0504/30/05 to 05/04/0505/05/05 to 05/10/0505/11/05 to 05/16/0505/17/05 to 05/20/0505/21/05 to 05/25/0505/26/05 to 05/31/0506/01/05 to 06/06/0506/07/05 to 06/11/0506/12/05 to 06/16/0506/17/05 to 06/19/0506/20/05 to 06/24/0506/25/05 to 06/29/0506/30/05 to 07/06/0507/07/05 to 07/11/0507/12/05 to 07/17/0507/18/05 to 07/22/0507/23/05 to 07/27/0507/28/05 to 07/31/0508/01/05 to 08/07/0508/08/05 to 08/12/0508/13/05 to 08/17/0508/18/05 to 08/21/0508/22/05 to 08/26/0508/27/05 to 09/01/0509/02/05 to 09/06/0509/07/05 to 09/09/0509/10/05 to 09/14/0509/15/05 to 09/18/0509/19/05 to 09/22/0509/23/05 to 09/27/0509/28/05 to 10/01/0510/02/05 to 10/07/0510/08/05 to 10/13/0510/14/05 to 10/18/0510/19/05 to 10/26/0510/27/05 to 11/01/0511/02/05 to 11/06/0511/07/05 to 11/13/0511/14/05 to 11/17/0511/18/05 to 11/22/0511/23/05 to 11/30/0512/01/05 to 12/03/0512/04/05 to 12/07/0512/08/05 to 12/12/0512/13/05 to 12/16/0512/17/05 to 12/21/0512/22/05 to 12/30/05
Select one...12/31/05 to 01/04/0601/05/06 to 01/09/0601/10/06 to 01/13/0601/14/06 to 01/18/0601/19/06 to 01/22/0601/23/06 to 01/25/0601/26/06 to 01/28/0601/29/06 to 02/01/0602/02/06 to 02/06/0602/07/06 to 02/10/0602/11/06 to 02/15/0602/16/06 to 02/19/0602/20/06 to 02/23/0602/24/06 to 02/27/0602/28/06 to 03/02/0603/03/06 to 03/06/0603/07/06 to 03/09/0603/10/06 to 03/12/0603/13/06 to 03/15/0603/16/06 to 03/17/0603/18/06 to 03/21/0603/22/06 to 03/24/0603/25/06 to 03/28/0603/29/06 to 03/31/0604/01/06 to 04/04/0604/05/06 to 04/08/0604/09/06 to 04/12/0604/13/06 to 04/17/0604/18/06 to 04/21/0604/22/06 to 04/26/0604/27/06 to 04/30/0605/01/06 to 05/03/0605/04/06 to 05/06/0605/07/06 to 05/10/0605/11/06 to 05/12/0605/13/06 to 05/15/0605/16/06 to 05/19/0605/20/06 to 05/22/0605/23/06 to 05/25/0605/26/06 to 05/29/0605/30/06 to 06/02/0606/03/06 to 06/06/0606/07/06 to 06/10/0606/11/06 to 06/14/0606/15/06 to 06/17/0606/18/06 to 06/21/0606/22/06 to 06/26/0606/27/06 to 06/30/0607/01/06 to 07/06/0607/07/06 to 07/10/0607/11/06 to 07/14/0607/15/06 to 07/19/0607/20/06 to 07/24/0607/25/06 to 07/27/0607/28/06 to 07/31/0608/01/06 to 08/06/0608/07/06 to 08/11/0608/12/06 to 08/16/0608/17/06 to 08/22/0608/23/06 to 08/26/0608/27/06 to 08/31/0609/01/06 to 09/05/0609/06/06 to 09/08/0609/09/06 to 09/13/0609/14/06 to 09/18/0609/19/06 to 09/24/0609/25/06 to 09/28/0609/29/06 to 10/03/0610/04/06 to 10/08/0610/09/06 to 10/14/0610/15/06 to 10/17/0610/18/06 to 10/22/0610/23/06 to 10/27/0610/28/06 to 10/31/0611/01/06 to 11/05/0611/06/06 to 11/09/0611/10/06 to 11/16/0611/17/06 to 11/21/0611/22/06 to 11/26/0611/27/06 to 11/30/0612/01/06 to 12/04/0612/05/06 to 12/08/0612/09/06 to 12/14/0612/15/06 to 12/19/0612/20/06 to 12/30/06
Select one...12/31/06 to 01/04/0701/05/07 to 01/08/0701/09/07 to 01/11/0701/12/07 to 01/17/0701/18/07 to 01/21/0701/22/07 to 01/25/0701/26/07 to 01/29/0701/30/07 to 02/03/0702/04/07 to 02/08/0702/09/07 to 02/12/0702/13/07 to 02/16/0702/17/07 to 02/21/0702/22/07 to 02/26/0702/27/07 to 03/01/0703/02/07 to 03/05/0703/06/07 to 03/08/0703/09/07 to 03/12/0703/13/07 to 03/14/0703/15/07 to 03/17/0703/18/07 to 03/21/0703/22/07 to 03/25/0703/26/07 to 03/28/0703/29/07 to 04/02/0704/03/07 to 04/04/0704/05/07 to 04/08/0704/09/07 to 04/11/0704/12/07 to 04/13/0704/14/07 to 04/17/0704/18/07 to 04/20/0704/21/07 to 04/24/0704/25/07 to 04/28/0704/29/07 to 05/02/0705/03/07 to 05/05/0705/06/07 to 05/08/0705/09/07 to 05/11/0705/12/07 to 05/14/0705/15/07 to 05/17/0705/18/07 to 05/21/0705/22/07 to 05/24/0705/25/07 to 05/29/0705/30/07 to 06/03/0706/04/07 to 06/06/0706/07/07 to 06/08/0706/09/07 to 06/11/0706/12/07 to 06/13/0706/14/07 to 06/15/0706/16/07 to 06/18/0706/19/07 to 06/21/0706/22/07 to 06/26/0706/27/07 to 06/29/0706/30/07 to 07/01/0707/02/07 to 07/04/0707/05/07 to 07/07/0707/08/07 to 07/12/0707/13/07 to 07/16/0707/17/07 to 07/19/0707/20/07 to 07/21/0707/22/07 to 07/25/0707/26/07 to 07/30/0707/31/07 to 08/03/0708/04/07 to 08/08/0708/09/07 to 08/13/0708/14/07 to 08/19/0708/20/07 to 08/23/0708/24/07 to 08/27/0708/28/07 to 08/30/0708/31/07 to 09/03/0709/04/07 to 09/06/0709/07/07 to 09/10/0709/11/07 to 09/12/0709/13/07 to 09/14/0709/15/07 to 09/18/0709/19/07 to 09/22/0709/23/07 to 09/26/0709/27/07 to 09/29/0709/30/07 to 10/02/0710/03/07 to 10/04/0710/05/07 to 10/07/0710/08/07 to 10/11/0710/12/07 to 10/14/0710/15/07 to 10/16/0710/17/07 to 10/18/0710/19/07 to 10/21/0710/22/07 to 10/25/0710/26/07 to 10/28/0710/29/07 to 10/31/0711/01/07 to 11/04/0711/05/07 to 11/08/0711/09/07 to 11/13/0711/14/07 to 11/17/0711/18/07 to 11/22/0711/23/07 to 11/28/0711/29/07 to 12/04/0712/05/07 to 12/07/0712/08/07 to 12/12/0712/13/07 to 12/17/0712/18/07 to 12/25/07
Select one...12/26/07 to 01/03/0801/04/08 to 01/08/0801/09/08 to 01/12/0801/13/08 to 01/15/0801/16/08 to 01/20/0801/21/08 to 01/23/0801/24/08 to 01/27/0801/28/08 to 01/30/0801/31/08 to 02/03/0802/04/08 to 02/06/0802/07/08 to 02/08/0802/09/08 to 02/12/0802/13/08 to 02/14/0802/15/08 to 02/18/0802/19/08 to 02/21/0802/22/08 to 02/25/0802/26/08 to 02/28/0802/29/08 to 03/04/0803/05/08 to 03/08/0803/09/08 to 03/11/0803/12/08 to 03/13/0803/14/08 to 03/16/0803/17/08 to 03/19/0803/20/08 to 03/21/0803/22/08 to 03/25/0803/26/08 to 03/28/0803/29/08 to 04/01/0804/02/08 to 04/04/0804/05/08 to 04/07/0804/08/08 to 04/10/0804/11/08 to 04/14/0804/15/08 to 04/17/0804/18/08 to 04/20/0804/21/08 to 04/24/0804/25/08 to 04/26/0804/27/08 to 04/30/0805/01/08 to 05/03/0805/04/08 to 05/05/0805/06/08 to 05/07/0805/08/08 to 05/09/0805/10/08 to 05/12/0805/13/08 to 05/15/0805/16/08 to 05/17/0805/18/08 to 05/21/0805/22/08 to 05/23/0805/24/08 to 05/26/0805/27/08 to 05/29/0805/30/08 to 06/01/0806/02/08 to 06/05/0806/06/08 to 06/06/0806/07/08 to 06/09/0806/10/08 to 06/11/0806/12/08 to 06/13/0806/14/08 to 06/14/0806/15/08 to 06/17/0806/18/08 to 06/19/0806/20/08 to 06/21/0806/22/08 to 06/24/0806/25/08 to 06/28/0806/29/08 to 07/01/0807/02/08 to 07/03/0807/04/08 to 07/06/0807/07/08 to 07/10/0807/11/08 to 07/13/0807/14/08 to 07/17/0807/18/08 to 07/19/0807/20/08 to 07/22/0807/23/08 to 07/25/0807/26/08 to 07/28/0807/29/08 to 07/31/0808/01/08 to 08/05/0808/06/08 to 08/08/0808/09/08 to 08/13/0808/14/08 to 08/17/0808/18/08 to 08/20/0808/21/08 to 08/22/0808/23/08 to 08/26/0808/27/08 to 08/29/0808/30/08 to 09/02/0809/03/08 to 09/05/0809/06/08 to 09/08/0809/09/08 to 09/11/0809/12/08 to 09/13/0809/14/08 to 09/17/0809/18/08 to 09/21/0809/22/08 to 09/23/0809/24/08 to 09/26/0809/27/08 to 09/29/0809/30/08 to 10/02/0810/03/08 to 10/04/0810/05/08 to 10/07/0810/08/08 to 10/11/0810/12/08 to 10/14/0810/15/08 to 10/16/0810/17/08 to 10/18/0810/19/08 to 10/22/0810/23/08 to 10/26/0810/27/08 to 10/29/0810/30/08 to 11/02/0811/03/08 to 11/05/0811/06/08 to 11/10/0811/11/08 to 11/14/0811/15/08 to 11/19/0811/20/08 to 11/24/0811/25/08 to 11/29/0811/30/08 to 12/03/0812/04/08 to 12/07/0812/08/08 to 12/11/0812/12/08 to 12/16/0812/17/08 to 12/22/08
Select one...12/23/08 to 01/02/0901/03/09 to 01/07/0901/08/09 to 01/11/0901/12/09 to 01/15/0901/16/09 to 01/19/0901/20/09 to 01/22/0901/23/09 to 01/24/0901/25/09 to 01/27/0901/28/09 to 02/01/0902/02/09 to 02/04/0902/05/09 to 02/07/0902/08/09 to 02/10/0902/11/09 to 02/12/0902/13/09 to 02/14/0902/15/09 to 02/17/0902/18/09 to 02/21/0902/22/09 to 02/24/0902/25/09 to 02/27/0902/28/09 to 03/03/0903/04/09 to 03/07/0903/08/09 to 03/10/0903/11/09 to 03/13/0903/14/09 to 03/16/0903/17/09 to 03/17/0903/18/09 to 03/19/0903/20/09 to 03/21/0903/22/09 to 03/24/0903/25/09 to 03/26/0903/27/09 to 03/30/0903/31/09 to 04/01/0904/02/09 to 04/02/0904/03/09 to 04/03/0904/04/09 to 04/08/0904/09/09 to 04/12/0904/13/09 to 04/15/0904/16/09 to 04/17/0904/18/09 to 04/20/0904/21/09 to 04/23/0904/24/09 to 04/25/0904/26/09 to 04/28/0904/29/09 to 05/01/0905/02/09 to 05/04/0905/05/09 to 05/06/0905/07/09 to 05/08/0905/09/09 to 05/11/0905/12/09 to 05/14/0905/15/09 to 05/16/0905/17/09 to 05/18/0905/19/09 to 05/20/0905/21/09 to 05/21/0905/22/09 to 05/23/0905/24/09 to 05/27/0905/28/09 to 06/01/0906/02/09 to 06/04/0906/05/09 to 06/06/0906/07/09 to 06/10/0906/11/09 to 06/12/0906/13/09 to 06/15/0906/16/09 to 06/19/0906/20/09 to 06/23/0906/24/09 to 06/27/0906/28/09 to 07/02/0907/03/09 to 07/06/0907/07/09 to 07/09/0907/10/09 to 07/12/0907/13/09 to 07/16/0907/17/09 to 07/19/0907/20/09 to 07/22/0907/23/09 to 07/25/0907/26/09 to 07/29/0907/30/09 to 08/03/0908/04/09 to 08/08/0908/09/09 to 08/13/0908/14/09 to 08/18/0908/19/09 to 08/21/0908/22/09 to 08/26/0908/27/09 to 08/30/0908/31/09 to 09/05/0909/06/09 to 09/09/0909/10/09 to 09/13/0909/14/09 to 09/20/0909/21/09 to 09/24/0909/25/09 to 09/29/0909/30/09 to 10/03/0910/04/09 to 10/08/0910/09/09 to 10/13/0910/14/09 to 10/16/0910/17/09 to 10/20/0910/21/09 to 10/26/0910/27/09 to 10/30/0910/31/09 to 11/04/0911/05/09 to 11/09/0911/10/09 to 11/15/0911/16/09 to 11/19/0911/20/09 to 11/22/0911/23/09 to 11/29/0911/30/09 to 12/03/0912/04/09 to 12/09/0912/10/09 to 12/13/0912/14/09 to 12/18/0912/19/09 to 12/26/09
Select one...12/27/09 to 01/04/1001/05/10 to 01/07/1001/08/10 to 01/12/1001/13/10 to 01/17/1001/18/10 to 01/21/1001/22/10 to 01/26/1001/27/10 to 01/29/1001/30/10 to 01/31/1002/01/10 to 02/03/1002/04/10 to 02/07/1002/08/10 to 02/11/1002/12/10 to 02/15/1002/16/10 to 02/19/1002/20/10 to 02/23/1002/24/10 to 02/26/1002/27/10 to 03/03/1003/04/10 to 03/07/1003/08/10 to 03/10/1003/11/10 to 03/13/1003/14/10 to 03/16/1003/17/10 to 03/18/1003/19/10 to 03/22/1003/23/10 to 03/25/1003/26/10 to 03/27/1003/28/10 to 03/31/1004/01/10 to 04/05/1004/06/10 to 04/08/1004/09/10 to 04/12/1004/13/10 to 04/15/1004/16/10 to 04/17/1004/18/10 to 04/21/1004/22/10 to 04/26/1004/27/10 to 04/29/1004/30/10 to 05/03/1005/04/10 to 05/06/1005/07/10 to 05/09/1005/10/10 to 05/12/1005/13/10 to 05/14/1005/15/10 to 05/16/1005/17/10 to 05/18/1005/19/10 to 05/20/1005/21/10 to 05/22/1005/23/10 to 05/25/1005/26/10 to 05/27/1005/28/10 to 05/28/1005/29/10 to 05/31/1006/01/10 to 06/04/1006/05/10 to 06/08/1006/09/10 to 06/11/1006/12/10 to 06/12/1006/13/10 to 06/16/1006/17/10 to 06/19/1006/20/10 to 06/23/1006/24/10 to 06/25/1006/26/10 to 06/27/1006/28/10 to 07/01/1007/02/10 to 07/02/1007/03/10 to 07/03/1007/04/10 to 07/07/1007/08/10 to 07/10/1007/11/10 to 07/15/1007/16/10 to 07/17/1007/18/10 to 07/20/1007/21/10 to 07/23/1007/24/10 to 07/26/1007/27/10 to 07/30/1007/31/10 to 08/02/1008/03/10 to 08/07/1008/08/10 to 08/13/1008/14/10 to 08/18/1008/19/10 to 08/22/1008/23/10 to 08/26/1008/27/10 to 08/27/1008/28/10 to 08/28/1008/29/10 to 09/02/1009/03/10 to 09/07/1009/08/10 to 09/10/1009/11/10 to 09/15/1009/16/10 to 09/20/1009/21/10 to 09/24/1009/25/10 to 09/29/1009/30/10 to 10/02/1010/03/10 to 10/06/1010/07/10 to 10/10/1010/11/10 to 10/15/1010/16/10 to 10/20/1010/21/10 to 10/26/1010/27/10 to 10/30/1010/31/10 to 11/04/1011/05/10 to 11/07/1011/08/10 to 11/11/1011/12/10 to 11/14/1011/15/10 to 11/18/1011/19/10 to 11/24/1011/25/10 to 11/30/1012/01/10 to 12/05/1012/06/10 to 12/09/1012/10/10 to 12/13/1012/14/10 to 12/18/1012/19/10 to 12/25/10
Select one...12/26/10 to 01/04/1101/05/11 to 01/09/1101/10/11 to 01/13/1101/14/11 to 01/19/1101/20/11 to 01/23/1101/24/11 to 01/27/1101/28/11 to 01/29/1101/30/11 to 01/31/1102/01/11 to 02/02/1102/03/11 to 02/05/1102/06/11 to 02/06/1102/07/11 to 02/07/1102/08/11 to 02/10/1102/11/11 to 02/15/1102/16/11 to 02/20/1102/21/11 to 02/25/1102/26/11 to 03/01/1103/02/11 to 03/03/1103/04/11 to 03/08/1103/09/11 to 03/12/1103/13/11 to 03/15/1103/16/11 to 03/18/1103/19/11 to 03/20/1103/21/11 to 03/23/1103/24/11 to 03/25/1103/26/11 to 03/28/1103/29/11 to 03/31/1104/01/11 to 04/04/1104/05/11 to 04/07/1104/08/11 to 04/11/1104/12/11 to 04/14/1104/15/11 to 04/15/1104/16/11 to 04/18/1104/19/11 to 04/23/1104/24/11 to 04/28/1104/29/11 to 04/30/1105/01/11 to 05/04/1105/05/11 to 05/06/1105/07/11 to 05/08/1105/09/11 to 05/11/1105/12/11 to 05/13/1105/14/11 to 05/14/1105/15/11 to 05/16/1105/17/11 to 05/18/1105/19/11 to 05/19/1105/20/11 to 05/20/1105/21/11 to 05/21/1105/22/11 to 05/23/1105/24/11 to 05/25/1105/26/11 to 05/26/1105/27/11 to 05/27/1105/28/11 to 05/31/1106/01/11 to 06/02/1106/03/11 to 06/05/1106/06/11 to 06/09/1106/10/11 to 06/11/1106/12/11 to 06/14/1106/15/11 to 06/17/1106/18/11 to 06/22/1106/23/11 to 06/24/1106/25/11 to 06/27/1106/28/11 to 07/01/1107/02/11 to 07/04/1107/05/11 to 07/07/1107/08/11 to 07/08/1107/09/11 to 07/11/1107/12/11 to 07/16/1107/17/11 to 07/20/1107/21/11 to 07/22/1107/23/11 to 07/24/1107/25/11 to 07/28/1107/29/11 to 07/29/1107/30/11 to 08/02/1108/03/11 to 08/05/1108/06/11 to 08/08/1108/09/11 to 08/12/1108/13/11 to 08/17/1108/18/11 to 08/20/1108/21/11 to 08/24/1108/25/11 to 08/26/1108/27/11 to 08/29/1108/30/11 to 09/02/1109/03/11 to 09/06/1109/07/11 to 09/09/1109/10/11 to 09/12/1109/13/11 to 09/15/1109/16/11 to 09/19/1109/20/11 to 09/23/1109/24/11 to 09/27/1109/28/11 to 09/29/1109/30/11 to 10/01/1110/02/11 to 10/04/1110/05/11 to 10/07/1110/08/11 to 10/10/1110/11/11 to 10/13/1110/14/11 to 10/16/1110/17/11 to 10/19/1110/20/11 to 10/23/1110/24/11 to 10/26/1110/27/11 to 10/29/1110/30/11 to 11/03/1111/04/11 to 11/07/1111/08/11 to 11/10/1111/11/11 to 11/14/1111/15/11 to 11/17/1111/18/11 to 11/22/1111/23/11 to 11/27/1111/28/11 to 12/01/1112/02/11 to 12/06/1112/07/11 to 12/12/1112/13/11 to 12/18/1112/19/11 to 12/27/11
Select one...12/28/11 to 01/03/1201/04/12 to 01/08/1201/09/12 to 01/11/1201/12/12 to 01/13/1201/14/12 to 01/16/1201/17/12 to 01/20/1201/21/12 to 01/25/1201/26/12 to 01/28/1201/29/12 to 01/31/1202/01/12 to 02/04/1202/05/12 to 02/07/1202/08/12 to 02/10/1202/11/12 to 02/14/1202/15/12 to 02/17/1202/18/12 to 02/21/1202/22/12 to 02/26/1202/27/12 to 02/29/1203/01/12 to 03/03/1203/04/12 to 03/06/1203/07/12 to 03/08/1203/09/12 to 03/11/1203/12/12 to 03/13/1203/14/12 to 03/16/1203/17/12 to 03/19/1203/20/12 to 03/22/1203/23/12 to 03/24/1203/25/12 to 03/28/1203/29/12 to 04/01/1204/02/12 to 04/04/1204/05/12 to 04/08/1204/09/12 to 04/11/1204/12/12 to 04/13/1204/14/12 to 04/16/1204/17/12 to 04/20/1204/21/12 to 04/25/1204/26/12 to 04/27/1204/28/12 to 05/01/1205/02/12 to 05/05/1205/06/12 to 05/08/1205/09/12 to 05/11/1205/12/12 to 05/12/1205/13/12 to 05/14/1205/15/12 to 05/16/1205/17/12 to 05/19/1205/20/12 to 05/23/1205/24/12 to 05/24/1205/25/12 to 05/25/1205/26/12 to 05/28/1205/29/12 to 05/31/1206/01/12 to 06/02/1206/03/12 to 06/06/1206/07/12 to 06/08/1206/09/12 to 06/11/1206/12/12 to 06/14/1206/15/12 to 06/16/1206/17/12 to 06/20/1206/21/12 to 06/23/1206/24/12 to 06/28/1206/29/12 to 07/02/1207/03/12 to 07/05/1207/06/12 to 07/06/1207/07/12 to 07/08/1207/09/12 to 07/14/1207/15/12 to 07/18/1207/19/12 to 07/20/1207/21/12 to 07/24/1207/25/12 to 07/27/1207/28/12 to 07/30/1207/31/12 to 08/03/1208/04/12 to 08/08/1208/09/12 to 08/14/1208/15/12 to 08/18/1208/19/12 to 08/23/1208/24/12 to 08/26/1208/27/12 to 08/30/1208/31/12 to 08/31/1209/01/12 to 09/03/1209/04/12 to 09/06/1209/07/12 to 09/09/1209/10/12 to 09/14/1209/15/12 to 09/19/1209/20/12 to 09/23/1209/24/12 to 09/28/1209/29/12 to 10/01/1210/02/12 to 10/05/1210/06/12 to 10/10/1210/11/12 to 10/13/1210/14/12 to 10/17/1210/18/12 to 10/21/1210/22/12 to 10/25/1210/26/12 to 10/29/1210/30/12 to 11/03/1211/04/12 to 11/07/1211/08/12 to 11/11/1211/12/12 to 11/15/1211/16/12 to 11/17/1211/18/12 to 11/21/1211/22/12 to 11/23/1211/24/12 to 11/28/1211/29/12 to 12/03/1212/04/12 to 12/09/1212/10/12 to 12/13/1212/14/12 to 12/17/1212/18/12 to 12/25/12
Select one...12/26/12 to 01/03/1301/04/13 to 01/08/1301/09/13 to 01/10/1301/11/13 to 01/15/1301/16/13 to 01/21/1301/22/13 to 01/26/1301/27/13 to 01/31/1302/01/13 to 02/05/1302/06/13 to 02/07/1302/08/13 to 02/11/1302/12/13 to 02/15/1302/16/13 to 02/19/1302/20/13 to 02/21/1302/22/13 to 02/24/1302/25/13 to 02/26/1302/27/13 to 03/01/1303/02/13 to 03/05/1303/06/13 to 03/08/1303/09/13 to 03/10/1303/11/13 to 03/11/1303/12/13 to 03/13/1303/14/13 to 03/17/1303/18/13 to 03/21/1303/22/13 to 03/23/1303/24/13 to 03/28/1303/29/13 to 04/03/1304/04/13 to 04/05/1304/06/13 to 04/09/1304/10/13 to 04/13/1304/14/13 to 04/17/1304/18/13 to 04/19/1304/20/13 to 04/22/1304/23/13 to 04/27/1304/28/13 to 05/03/1305/04/13 to 05/07/1305/08/13 to 05/10/1305/11/13 to 05/12/1305/13/13 to 05/14/1305/15/13 to 05/16/1305/17/13 to 05/18/1305/19/13 to 05/21/1305/22/13 to 05/23/1305/24/13 to 05/26/1305/27/13 to 05/31/1306/01/13 to 06/05/1306/06/13 to 06/09/1306/10/13 to 06/14/1306/15/13 to 06/19/1306/20/13 to 06/21/1306/22/13 to 06/23/1306/24/13 to 06/27/1306/28/13 to 06/30/1307/01/13 to 07/04/1307/05/13 to 07/05/1307/06/13 to 07/09/1307/10/13 to 07/12/1307/13/13 to 07/15/1307/16/13 to 07/19/1307/20/13 to 07/24/1307/25/13 to 07/29/1307/30/13 to 08/02/1308/03/13 to 08/07/1308/08/13 to 08/11/1308/12/13 to 08/16/1308/17/13 to 08/21/1308/22/13 to 08/23/1308/24/13 to 08/26/1308/27/13 to 08/29/1308/30/13 to 09/01/1309/02/13 to 09/05/1309/06/13 to 09/08/1309/09/13 to 09/11/1309/12/13 to 09/16/1309/17/13 to 09/20/1309/21/13 to 09/24/1309/25/13 to 09/29/1309/30/13 to 10/03/1310/04/13 to 10/07/1310/08/13 to 10/11/1310/12/13 to 10/15/1310/16/13 to 10/18/1310/19/13 to 10/23/1310/24/13 to 10/26/1310/27/13 to 10/31/1311/01/13 to 11/04/1311/05/13 to 11/08/1311/09/13 to 11/14/1311/15/13 to 11/17/1311/18/13 to 11/21/1311/22/13 to 11/27/1311/28/13 to 12/04/1312/05/13 to 12/10/1312/11/13 to 12/15/1312/16/13 to 12/21/13
Select one...12/22/13 to 01/01/1401/02/14 to 01/05/1401/06/14 to 01/09/1401/10/14 to 01/13/1401/14/14 to 01/16/1401/17/14 to 01/20/1401/21/14 to 01/23/1401/24/14 to 01/25/1401/26/14 to 01/27/1401/28/14 to 01/30/1401/31/14 to 02/04/1402/05/14 to 02/09/1402/10/14 to 02/12/1402/13/14 to 02/16/1402/17/14 to 02/19/1402/20/14 to 02/21/1402/22/14 to 02/25/1402/26/14 to 02/28/1403/01/14 to 03/03/1403/04/14 to 03/06/1403/07/14 to 03/10/1403/11/14 to 03/12/1403/13/14 to 03/13/1403/14/14 to 03/14/1403/15/14 to 03/16/1403/17/14 to 03/19/1403/20/14 to 03/22/1403/23/14 to 03/26/1403/27/14 to 03/28/1403/29/14 to 04/01/1404/02/14 to 04/05/1404/06/14 to 04/09/1404/10/14 to 04/12/1404/13/14 to 04/16/1404/17/14 to 04/19/1404/20/14 to 04/23/1404/24/14 to 04/26/1404/27/14 to 04/30/1405/01/14 to 05/03/1405/04/14 to 05/06/1405/07/14 to 05/08/1405/09/14 to 05/10/1405/11/14 to 05/12/1405/13/14 to 05/14/1405/15/14 to 05/17/1405/18/14 to 05/20/1405/21/14 to 05/22/1405/23/14 to 05/26/1405/27/14 to 05/30/1405/31/14 to 06/01/1406/02/14 to 06/05/1406/06/14 to 06/08/1406/09/14 to 06/13/1406/14/14 to 06/15/1406/16/14 to 06/20/1406/21/14 to 06/24/1406/25/14 to 06/27/1406/28/14 to 07/01/1407/02/14 to 07/04/1407/05/14 to 07/09/1407/10/14 to 07/12/1407/13/14 to 07/16/1407/17/14 to 07/18/1407/19/14 to 07/22/1407/23/14 to 07/25/1407/26/14 to 07/31/1408/01/14 to 08/01/1408/02/14 to 08/03/1408/04/14 to 08/08/1408/09/14 to 08/12/1408/13/14 to 08/16/1408/17/14 to 08/20/1408/21/14 to 08/22/1408/23/14 to 08/25/1408/26/14 to 08/31/1409/01/14 to 09/04/1409/05/14 to 09/08/1409/09/14 to 09/11/1409/12/14 to 09/15/1409/16/14 to 09/18/1409/19/14 to 09/23/1409/24/14 to 09/27/1409/28/14 to 10/02/1410/03/14 to 10/07/1410/08/14 to 10/10/1410/11/14 to 10/13/1410/14/14 to 10/16/1410/17/14 to 10/18/1410/19/14 to 10/21/1410/22/14 to 10/24/1410/25/14 to 10/28/1410/29/14 to 10/30/1410/31/14 to 11/01/1411/02/14 to 11/04/1411/05/14 to 11/07/1411/08/14 to 11/09/1411/10/14 to 11/13/1411/14/14 to 11/16/1411/17/14 to 11/20/1411/21/14 to 11/23/1411/24/14 to 11/28/1411/29/14 to 12/02/1412/03/14 to 12/07/1412/08/14 to 12/11/1412/12/14 to 12/16/1412/17/14 to 12/23/14
Select one...12/24/14 to 01/03/1501/04/15 to 01/05/1501/06/15 to 01/07/1501/08/15 to 01/10/1501/11/15 to 01/12/1501/13/15 to 01/14/1501/15/15 to 01/19/1501/20/15 to 01/21/1501/22/15 to 01/23/1501/24/15 to 01/24/1501/25/15 to 01/25/1501/26/15 to 01/29/1501/30/15 to 02/02/1502/03/15 to 02/04/1502/05/15 to 02/07/1502/08/15 to 02/09/1502/10/15 to 02/12/1502/13/15 to 02/13/1502/14/15 to 02/15/1502/16/15 to 02/17/1502/18/15 to 02/18/1502/19/15 to 02/19/1502/20/15 to 02/20/1502/21/15 to 02/23/1502/24/15 to 02/25/1502/26/15 to 02/27/1502/28/15 to 03/03/1503/04/15 to 03/06/1503/07/15 to 03/07/1503/08/15 to 03/09/1503/10/15 to 03/11/1503/12/15 to 03/13/1503/14/15 to 03/15/1503/16/15 to 03/17/1503/18/15 to 03/18/1503/19/15 to 03/19/1503/20/15 to 03/20/1503/21/15 to 03/21/1503/22/15 to 03/25/1503/26/15 to 03/26/1503/27/15 to 03/27/1503/28/15 to 03/28/1503/29/15 to 03/31/1504/01/15 to 04/03/1504/04/15 to 04/06/1504/07/15 to 04/08/1504/09/15 to 04/09/1504/10/15 to 04/10/1504/11/15 to 04/11/1504/12/15 to 04/14/1504/15/15 to 04/16/1504/17/15 to 04/17/1504/18/15 to 04/18/1504/19/15 to 04/21/1504/22/15 to 04/24/1504/25/15 to 04/25/1504/26/15 to 04/28/1504/29/15 to 04/30/1505/01/15 to 05/01/1505/02/15 to 05/02/1505/03/15 to 05/04/1505/05/15 to 05/05/1505/06/15 to 05/06/1505/07/15 to 05/07/1505/08/15 to 05/08/1505/09/15 to 05/10/1505/11/15 to 05/12/1505/13/15 to 05/14/1505/15/15 to 05/16/1505/17/15 to 05/19/1505/20/15 to 05/21/1505/22/15 to 05/22/1505/23/15 to 05/24/1505/25/15 to 05/27/1505/28/15 to 05/29/1505/30/15 to 05/31/1506/01/15 to 06/03/1506/04/15 to 06/05/1506/06/15 to 06/09/1506/10/15 to 06/11/1506/12/15 to 06/12/1506/13/15 to 06/13/1506/14/15 to 06/15/1506/16/15 to 06/18/1506/19/15 to 06/20/1506/21/15 to 06/23/1506/24/15 to 06/25/1506/26/15 to 06/27/1506/28/15 to 06/30/1507/01/15 to 07/03/1507/04/15 to 07/06/1507/07/15 to 07/10/1507/11/15 to 07/13/1507/14/15 to 07/16/1507/17/15 to 07/21/1507/22/15 to 07/25/1507/26/15 to 07/29/1507/30/15 to 07/31/1508/01/15 to 08/02/1508/03/15 to 08/08/1508/09/15 to 08/13/1508/14/15 to 08/17/1508/18/15 to 08/20/1508/21/15 to 08/22/1508/23/15 to 08/26/1508/27/15 to 08/28/1508/29/15 to 08/31/1509/01/15 to 09/04/1509/05/15 to 09/08/1509/09/15 to 09/11/1509/12/15 to 09/14/1509/15/15 to 09/17/1509/18/15 to 09/21/1509/22/15 to 09/25/1509/26/15 to 09/28/1509/29/15 to 09/30/1510/01/15 to 10/05/1510/06/15 to 10/08/1510/09/15 to 10/09/1510/10/15 to 10/13/1510/14/15 to 10/16/1510/17/15 to 10/20/1510/21/15 to 10/22/1510/23/15 to 10/23/1510/24/15 to 10/25/1510/26/15 to 10/28/1510/29/15 to 10/31/1511/01/15 to 11/04/1511/05/15 to 11/07/1511/08/15 to 11/10/1511/11/15 to 11/13/1511/14/15 to 11/16/1511/17/15 to 11/18/1511/19/15 to 11/19/1511/20/15 to 11/21/1511/22/15 to 11/22/1511/23/15 to 11/26/1511/27/15 to 11/27/1511/28/15 to 12/01/1512/02/15 to 12/03/1512/04/15 to 12/07/1512/08/15 to 12/10/1512/11/15 to 12/15/1512/16/15 to 12/18/1512/19/15 to 12/22/1512/23/15 to 12/30/15
Select one...12/31/15 to 01/04/1601/05/16 to 01/07/1601/08/16 to 01/11/1601/12/16 to 01/15/1601/16/16 to 01/19/1601/20/16 to 01/21/1601/22/16 to 01/24/1601/25/16 to 01/26/1601/27/16 to 01/28/1601/29/16 to 01/29/1601/30/16 to 01/30/1601/31/16 to 01/31/1602/01/16 to 02/02/1602/03/16 to 02/04/1602/05/16 to 02/08/1602/09/16 to 02/11/1602/12/16 to 02/13/1602/14/16 to 02/16/1602/17/16 to 02/18/1602/19/16 to 02/20/1602/21/16 to 02/22/1602/23/16 to 02/23/1602/24/16 to 02/25/1602/26/16 to 02/26/1602/27/16 to 02/28/1602/29/16 to 03/02/1603/03/16 to 03/05/1603/06/16 to 03/08/1603/09/16 to 03/10/1603/11/16 to 03/12/1603/13/16 to 03/15/1603/16/16 to 03/17/1603/18/16 to 03/18/1603/19/16 to 03/19/1603/20/16 to 03/23/1603/24/16 to 03/26/1603/27/16 to 03/29/1603/30/16 to 03/31/1604/01/16 to 04/01/1604/02/16 to 04/04/1604/05/16 to 04/07/1604/08/16 to 04/11/1604/12/16 to 04/14/1604/15/16 to 04/16/1604/17/16 to 04/19/1604/20/16 to 04/21/1604/22/16 to 04/22/1604/23/16 to 04/23/1604/24/16 to 04/26/1604/27/16 to 04/28/1604/29/16 to 04/30/1605/01/16 to 05/03/1605/04/16 to 05/05/1605/06/16 to 05/08/1605/09/16 to 05/11/1605/12/16 to 05/12/1605/13/16 to 05/13/1605/14/16 to 05/14/1605/15/16 to 05/16/1605/17/16 to 05/18/1605/19/16 to 05/20/1605/21/16 to 05/22/1605/23/16 to 05/25/1605/26/16 to 05/26/1605/27/16 to 05/27/1605/28/16 to 05/28/1605/29/16 to 05/30/1605/31/16 to 06/01/1606/02/16 to 06/03/1606/04/16 to 06/05/1606/06/16 to 06/09/1606/10/16 to 06/11/1606/12/16 to 06/14/1606/15/16 to 06/17/1606/18/16 to 06/18/1606/19/16 to 06/19/1606/20/16 to 06/22/1606/23/16 to 06/24/1606/25/16 to 06/25/1606/26/16 to 06/29/1606/30/16 to 07/01/1607/02/16 to 07/04/1607/05/16 to 07/07/1607/08/16 to 07/09/1607/10/16 to 07/13/1607/14/16 to 07/15/1607/16/16 to 07/19/1607/20/16 to 07/23/1607/24/16 to 07/27/1607/28/16 to 07/28/1607/29/16 to 07/29/1607/30/16 to 07/31/1608/01/16 to 08/04/1608/05/16 to 08/09/1608/10/16 to 08/14/1608/15/16 to 08/18/1608/19/16 to 08/19/1608/20/16 to 08/23/1608/24/16 to 08/26/1608/27/16 to 08/30/1608/31/16 to 09/02/1609/03/16 to 09/03/1609/04/16 to 09/07/1609/08/16 to 09/10/1609/11/16 to 09/13/1609/14/16 to 09/16/1609/17/16 to 09/19/1609/20/16 to 09/23/1609/24/16 to 09/27/1609/28/16 to 10/01/1610/02/16 to 10/05/1610/06/16 to 10/07/1610/08/16 to 10/11/1610/12/16 to 10/16/1610/17/16 to 10/19/1610/20/16 to 10/22/1610/23/16 to 10/25/1610/26/16 to 10/28/1610/29/16 to 11/01/1611/02/16 to 11/05/1611/06/16 to 11/10/1611/11/16 to 11/12/1611/13/16 to 11/15/1611/16/16 to 11/17/1611/18/16 to 11/21/1611/22/16 to 11/24/1611/25/16 to 11/26/1611/27/16 to 11/30/1612/01/16 to 12/02/1612/03/16 to 12/05/1612/06/16 to 12/07/1612/08/16 to 12/11/1612/12/16 to 12/13/1612/14/16 to 12/17/1612/18/16 to 12/21/1612/22/16 to 12/29/16
Select one...12/30/16 to 01/03/1701/04/17 to 01/06/1701/07/17 to 01/09/1701/10/17 to 01/12/1701/13/17 to 01/16/1701/17/17 to 01/19/1701/20/17 to 01/23/1701/24/17 to 01/26/1701/27/17 to 01/27/1701/28/17 to 01/28/1701/29/17 to 01/29/1701/30/17 to 02/01/1702/02/17 to 02/05/1702/06/17 to 02/07/1702/08/17 to 02/09/1702/10/17 to 02/10/1702/11/17 to 02/13/1702/14/17 to 02/16/1702/17/17 to 02/20/1702/21/17 to 02/23/1702/24/17 to 02/26/1702/27/17 to 02/28/1703/01/17 to 03/02/1703/03/17 to 03/05/1703/06/17 to 03/08/1703/09/17 to 03/10/1703/11/17 to 03/13/1703/14/17 to 03/17/1703/18/17 to 03/18/1703/19/17 to 03/22/1703/23/17 to 03/25/1703/26/17 to 03/28/1703/29/17 to 03/31/1704/01/17 to 04/03/1704/04/17 to 04/05/1704/06/17 to 04/07/1704/08/17 to 04/10/1704/11/17 to 04/14/1704/15/17 to 04/17/1704/18/17 to 04/19/1704/20/17 to 04/21/1704/22/17 to 04/24/1704/25/17 to 04/27/1704/28/17 to 05/01/1705/02/17 to 05/05/1705/06/17 to 05/10/1705/11/17 to 05/11/1705/12/17 to 05/12/1705/13/17 to 05/15/1705/16/17 to 05/17/1705/18/17 to 05/18/1705/19/17 to 05/19/1705/20/17 to 05/21/1705/22/17 to 05/24/1705/25/17 to 05/25/1705/26/17 to 05/26/1705/27/17 to 05/28/1705/29/17 to 06/01/1706/02/17 to 06/04/1706/05/17 to 06/07/1706/08/17 to 06/09/1706/10/17 to 06/14/1706/15/17 to 06/16/1706/17/17 to 06/17/1706/18/17 to 06/20/1706/21/17 to 06/22/1706/23/17 to 06/23/1706/24/17 to 06/26/1706/27/17 to 06/29/1706/30/17 to 07/05/1707/06/17 to 07/07/1707/08/17 to 07/08/1707/09/17 to 07/11/1707/12/17 to 07/14/1707/15/17 to 07/17/1707/18/17 to 07/23/1707/24/17 to 07/26/1707/27/17 to 07/27/1707/28/17 to 07/28/1707/29/17 to 07/29/1707/30/17 to 07/31/1708/01/17 to 08/03/1708/04/17 to 08/06/1708/07/17 to 08/09/1708/10/17 to 08/11/1708/12/17 to 08/16/1708/17/17 to 08/19/1708/20/17 to 08/23/1708/24/17 to 08/24/1708/25/17 to 08/25/1708/26/17 to 08/28/1708/29/17 to 08/31/1709/01/17 to 09/02/1709/03/17 to 09/06/1709/07/17 to 09/11/1709/12/17 to 09/14/1709/15/17 to 09/15/1709/16/17 to 09/17/1709/18/17 to 09/21/1709/22/17 to 09/23/1709/24/17 to 09/26/1709/27/17 to 09/29/1709/30/17 to 10/02/1710/03/17 to 10/04/1710/05/17 to 10/06/1710/07/17 to 10/10/1710/11/17 to 10/13/1710/14/17 to 10/17/1710/18/17 to 10/20/1710/21/17 to 10/24/1710/25/17 to 10/28/1710/29/17 to 11/02/1711/03/17 to 11/06/1711/07/17 to 11/09/1711/10/17 to 11/11/1711/12/17 to 11/15/1711/16/17 to 11/19/1711/20/17 to 11/23/1711/24/17 to 11/25/1711/26/17 to 11/28/1711/29/17 to 12/01/1712/02/17 to 12/05/1712/06/17 to 12/10/1712/11/17 to 12/13/1712/14/17 to 12/18/1712/19/17 to 12/24/17
Select one...12/25/17 to 01/03/1801/04/18 to 01/07/1801/08/18 to 01/11/1801/12/18 to 01/15/1801/16/18 to 01/18/1801/19/18 to 01/21/1801/22/18 to 01/24/1801/25/18 to 01/26/1801/27/18 to 01/27/1801/28/18 to 01/28/1801/29/18 to 01/30/1801/31/18 to 02/03/1802/04/18 to 02/06/1802/07/18 to 02/08/1802/09/18 to 02/10/1802/11/18 to 02/14/1802/15/18 to 02/15/1802/16/18 to 02/16/1802/17/18 to 02/19/1802/20/18 to 02/22/1802/23/18 to 02/25/1802/26/18 to 02/27/1802/28/18 to 03/01/1803/02/18 to 03/04/1803/05/18 to 03/06/1803/07/18 to 03/08/1803/09/18 to 03/09/1803/10/18 to 03/11/1803/12/18 to 03/14/1803/15/18 to 03/16/1803/17/18 to 03/17/1803/18/18 to 03/20/1803/21/18 to 03/22/1803/23/18 to 03/23/1803/24/18 to 03/25/1803/26/18 to 03/29/1803/30/18 to 04/04/1804/05/18 to 04/05/1804/06/18 to 04/06/1804/07/18 to 04/09/1804/10/18 to 04/12/1804/13/18 to 04/13/1804/14/18 to 04/17/1804/18/18 to 04/20/1804/21/18 to 04/24/1804/25/18 to 04/26/1804/27/18 to 04/29/1804/30/18 to 05/02/1805/03/18 to 05/06/1805/07/18 to 05/10/1805/11/18 to 05/12/1805/13/18 to 05/15/1805/16/18 to 05/16/1805/17/18 to 05/17/1805/18/18 to 05/18/1805/19/18 to 05/20/1805/21/18 to 05/23/1805/24/18 to 05/24/1805/25/18 to 05/25/1805/26/18 to 05/28/1805/29/18 to 05/31/1806/01/18 to 06/04/1806/05/18 to 06/07/1806/08/18 to 06/11/1806/12/18 to 06/15/1806/16/18 to 06/16/1806/17/18 to 06/17/1806/18/18 to 06/21/1806/22/18 to 06/22/1806/23/18 to 06/24/1806/25/18 to 06/28/1806/29/18 to 07/02/1807/03/18 to 07/06/1807/07/18 to 07/07/1807/08/18 to 07/10/1807/11/18 to 07/13/1807/14/18 to 07/17/1807/18/18 to 07/19/1807/20/18 to 07/21/1807/22/18 to 07/26/1807/27/18 to 07/27/1807/28/18 to 07/29/1807/30/18 to 08/02/1808/03/18 to 08/05/1808/06/18 to 08/09/1808/10/18 to 08/11/1808/12/18 to 08/16/1808/17/18 to 08/20/1808/21/18 to 08/23/1808/24/18 to 08/24/1808/25/18 to 08/26/1808/27/18 to 08/28/1808/29/18 to 08/30/1808/31/18 to 09/01/1809/02/18 to 09/04/1809/05/18 to 09/06/1809/07/18 to 09/09/1809/10/18 to 09/13/1809/14/18 to 09/15/1809/16/18 to 09/19/1809/20/18 to 09/22/1809/23/18 to 09/25/1809/26/18 to 09/28/1809/29/18 to 10/02/1810/03/18 to 10/05/1810/06/18 to 10/10/1810/11/18 to 10/12/1810/13/18 to 10/15/1810/16/18 to 10/18/1810/19/18 to 10/22/1810/23/18 to 10/25/1810/26/18 to 10/27/1810/28/18 to 10/30/1810/31/18 to 11/04/1811/05/18 to 11/08/1811/09/18 to 11/11/1811/12/18 to 11/15/1811/16/18 to 11/20/1811/21/18 to 11/23/1811/24/18 to 11/26/1811/27/18 to 11/29/1811/30/18 to 12/01/1812/02/18 to 12/03/1812/04/18 to 12/05/1812/06/18 to 12/09/1812/10/18 to 12/13/1812/14/18 to 12/18/1812/19/18 to 12/22/18
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Limbo Time at the Statehouse
March 2, 2015 Hamilton Davis
Town meeting week is usually a brief respite in the headlong scramble by the Vermont legislature to get the peoples’ business completed by late April or early May. Legislators go home to attend their meetings and to assess where their constituents stand on pressing issues; advocates and the press get a short break. The kids are out of school for the week. The occasional footsteps echo in the marble hallways.
This year, however, seems somehow different. State government appears to be stuck in a strange limbo, a lingering hangover from last November’s unusual election that recast the state’s policy and political landscape. Peter Shumlin, a third-term Democratic governor in a very blue state, seems to have no traction at all. The state budget is in deficit, and no one seems to have a very clear idea what to do about it. Single payer health care reform, the governor’s signature issue for the last four years, is dead in the water.
Real leadership is in perilously short supply. The Governor says repeatedly that he is “open to new ideas”, which ends up sounding like, “Somebody please throw me a rope.” Shap Smith, the powerful Speaker of the House, has so far at apparently declined to issue his committees any clear directions on where to go. Smith, a Democrat, and the Republican Lt. Gov. Phil Scott, have begun to position themselves for the 2016 state election, but neither has said enough to provide a hint on where the state might go.
Two of the most critical players at the committee level—Janet Ancel, chair of House Ways and Means, and Tim Ashe, chair of Senate Finance—are still holding their fire on both the budget and health reform dilemmas. The health care committees in both chambers are still in the very early stages of figuring out where to go on reform…
In short, the whole 180-member body seems be drifting, with nearly half the session gone. The health care committees have just four working days left to “crossover”, the point at which a bill originating in one chamber needs to go the other. The money committees have just eight days left to cross over. These deadlines can be slipped, but it only makes sense to do that if there is real movement toward a consensus. No such consensus is visible yet.
There are some glimmers of light. One of the most important is that Peter Shumlin seems to be running hard. He isn’t yet getting very far, but he is not mailing it in. There is no way to tell what or how long it will take him to regain the mojo that took him through his first three years, but he at least seems to be fully engaged.
There are some indications that one of the most corrosive of the failures in managing health care reform—the failure of Shumlin’s office to adequately manage and coordinate the operations of their own office, the Obamacare Exchange, and the Green Mountain Care Board—may be easing.
Moreover, there is some movement toward new thinking and initiatives on the financing side of the single payer program.
It is also true, however, that these glimmers of light will remain just glimmers for the remainder of the current legislative session. The administration and the legislature will have to patch together some kind of fix for the budget deficit. But health care reform is probably far too complex for the legislature to master in the time left this year.
All of which points to the 2016 session as the first real chance to determine where the state will go politically, financially and policy wise, especially on health care.
Over the next week or so, I’ll revisit these issues in detail. First up, the politics, always the father of public policy; then health care. On the budget, I have no idea what will happen, but I am comforted by the belief that nobody else does either.
← A Matter of StyleAl Takes Exchange Guys to the Woodshed →
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Tracking Bags Drives 66% Improvement In Baggage Delivery
Written by Abu Dhabi Airports
Improvement reflects benefit of tracking bags as they are loaded onto the aircraft
Airlines that are adding tracking at more points of the baggage journey are enjoying a huge
improvement in bag delivery globally. The SITA 2019 Baggage IT Insights – officially launched at an event in Abu Dhabi International Airport today – shows that where tracking is done at check-in and loading onto the aircraft, the rate of improvement is as high as 66%.
These results come as the record drop in the baggage mishandling rate achieved globally over the past decade plateaus, with the rate steady at around 5.7 bags per thousand passengers over the past three years. In 2018 the rate was 5.69 per thousand passengers.
Over the past year, an increasing number of airlines and airports have started to introduce tracking at key points in the journey – check-in, loading onto the aircraft, transfers and arrival – to improve baggage management and further reduce the chances of a bag being mishandled. SITA’s research provides the first glimpse of the success of this tracking. It reveals that where bags were being tracked when loaded onto the aircraft, the level of improvement ranged between 38% and 66% depending on the level of tracking introduced.
Peter Drummond, Director of Baggage at SITA, said: “While the mishandling rate has started to plateau over the past few years, this comes against a continued growth in passenger numbers and their bags. In 2018, 4.36 billion travelers checked in more than 4.27 billion bags. More bags makes things more challenging. Everyone across the industry needs to look beyond the process and technology improvements made in the past decade and adopt the latest technology such as tracking to make the next big cut in the rate of mishandled bags.”
Ahmed Juma Al Shamsi, Acting Chief Operations Officer at Abu Dhabi Airports, said: “For our passengers the timely delivery of baggage is key to ensuring a seamless passenger experience and therefore an area in which we continue to make further improvements. Looking forward, baggage tracking is fundamental to driving more accurate bag delivery not only at Abu Dhabi International Airport but across the entire passenger journey. We have led the way with the introduction of tracking on arrival and we have already seen significant improvements.”
Transferring baggage from one aircraft, or airline, to another remains a pinch point in the journey and in 2018 it was again the main reason for bags being mishandled. Transfer bags accounted for 46% of all mishandled bags.
Drummond added: “Transfer is by far the most difficult stage to track a bag as there are multiple airlines and airports involved. However, data from this year’s report shows that tracking at key points in the journey such as transfers will go a long way to eliminating mishandling and will allow airlines and their passengers to keep tabs on where their bags are at every step of the way.”
Over the past decade, total mishandled bags per annum have plummeted 47% from 46.9 million in 2007 to 24.8 million in 2018 while the annual bill footed by the industry has shrunk 43% to $2.4 billion, down from $4.22 billion in 2007.
Published in ABU DHABI AIRPORTS COMPANY
Abu Dhabi Airports
Latest from Abu Dhabi Airports
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T: 0115 984 3119 - E: info@charmhrm.co.uk
About CHaRM
HR and employment law compliance
Employee Relations - Avoiding People Problems
Optimising Business and Employee Performance
HR Support Solutions
HR and L&D Professional Qualifications
Management Development Programmes
Skills Coaching for Managers
In-house bespoke training
Learning and Development Update
Employment Tribunal fees ruled unlawful
Employment Tribunal fees ruled unlawful - what does this mean for employers?
The HR news has been full of the fact that the Supreme Court ruled in July 2017 that the fees charged by the Government for employees and workers to bring claims against employers was unlawful. Not only unlawful, but also unconstitutional - denying working people access to justice. £32m has been paid in fees over the last four years and the Government is now required to pay that back. The Government is considering how to do that and a decision is expected in September 2017.
One question we had been asking ourselves, was what would happen to all those claims that were not heard over the last four years? Well that question has now been answered in part and it looks likely that claims which were struck out during the last four years will be reinstated. This includes appeals that were not taken up to the EAT because of the fees issue. A particular case that has been given the go-ahead to proceed is one brought by Miss Dhami, who tried to bring a claim against Tesco for disability and age discrimination. Her claim was filed within the three month time limit, but her request for assistance with the fees was rejected. Miss Dhami did file a second claim against Tesco but as it was presented out of time the Tribunal agreed with Tesco that it should refuse to hear her claim. The claim can now be heard because of the particular way it has been worded since the Supreme Court ruling. This does not mean however that every claim that was not brought over the last four years will proceed. Decisions will be made on a case by case basis in line with normal Employment Tribunal rules, but some employers may be required to defend claims that are up to four years old. It will be interesting to see how the Tribunals deal with such claims.
Going forward, it is worth remembering that claims to an Employment Tribunal must be brought within three months of the date of termination of employment. If ACAS early conciliation is taken up, the time period is halted while early conciliation takes place. The conciliation period is normally 28 days, which can be extended for a further 14 days if both parties agree. The clock starts ticking towards the end of the three month time period once the early conciliation certificate has been issued.
So who can bring a claim and what will it all mean for your business?
Not everyone can bring a claim against their employer. To bring a claim for unfair dismissal the employee has to have been employed for two years. Discrimination claims can be brought from day one of employment, so there is no qualifying service for this type of claim. In some cases, the two different types of claim are linked together to enable a claimant to put their unfair dismissal claim before the Employment Tribunal.
We have always recommended a three step process for all dismissals, regardless of the length of service. This is to reduce the risk of a 25% uplift in any award for a successful discrimination claim where the three step process has not been followed. The removal of Tribunal fees will now make this three step process more important where there is any risk of an ex-employee bringing a two-fold claim, i.e. for discrimination and unfair dismissal (even without the two years service for unfair dismissal). The three step process consists of:
Inviting the individual to a meeting and laying out the reasons for considering dismissal
Holding the meeting and listening to what the individual has to say
Confirming the decision in writing and if it was dismissal, allowing the right of appeal.
The documents concerned in this process will have to be written in a certain way to protect the organisation. If you are in this situation and need help writing the letters and conducting the meeting, give the friendly CHaRM team a call on 0115 984 3119.
The importance of training Managers
Here at CHaRM we have always said that it is essential that managers understand their legal obligations in managing staff. This includes having a basic understanding of contract law and how their actions can damage the Company if they act unlawfully. In light of another recent case law ruling which found against an employer who did not follow a correct procedure for dismissal, we feel even more strongly that management training is essential. In that case, the ex-employee who was rightly dismissed for her actions, won her claim for unfair dismissal because proper processes were not followed. Legal commentary following the case said that having basic employment policies in place is essential, but of itself that is not sufficient. "Those who apply the policies must undersand the law that sits behind the policies and understand how they should act." That is why training for line managers is so important.
Our on-line course booking page gives details of our next Employment Law for Line Managers course on 27 February 2018. Don't run the risk of letting your managers cost you money because they don't know how to follow basic procedures.
“We've been really happy with the service you and the team have provided; it's not been the most straightforward of years for us!”
T: 0115 984 3119 | E: info@charmhrm.co.uk
CHaRM Management Specialists Ltd 2019 | Web Design - WidaGroup
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« Marriage has meant one thing from the beginning of time
What do the bible say »
Heads I’m right tails you’re wrong
Dec 24th, 2008 | By Ophelia Benson
Now look here – let’s get something straight. If a fundamentalist literalist bible-bashing preacher says something, then it is hate speech to disagree with him*. Not only that, it is also Christophobia, demonization, and hatred of the people in their glorious majority.
[Warren] says the criticism of him in the wake of his selection has been characterized by “a lot of hate speech” and by “Christophobia — people who are afraid of any Christian. Our nation is being destroyed by the demonization of differences.”…He reiterated his opposition to same sex marriage, but said he is in agreement with “the view of the vast majority of the world and the vast majority of religions.”
And the view of the vast majority is necessarily right on any given subject and not to be disputed or declared unconstitutional or in violation of human rights. Unless of course the vast majority disagrees with Rick Warren, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. The point now is that disagreement with Rick Warren is entirely illegitimate on a variety of grounds, also known as, any port in a storm.
“Free speech has to be free speech for everybody,” he says. “Some people feel today if you disagree with them that’s hate speech.”
Er – yes – as in the bit where he said ‘the criticism of him in the wake of his selection has been characterized by “a lot of hate speech” and by “Christophobia”‘…How quickly he seems to forget.
“I’m doing this because I love America and it’s a historic opportunity and it’s an honor to be a part of any inauguration of any president,” he says.
Indeed it is, and that’s exactly why we don’t want Warren to have the honor. We think he’s the wrong kind of person for a Democratic president to give that kind of honor. In fact a lot of us think he’s the wrong kind of person for any president to give that kind of honor at a secular government ceremony.
*Literalist fundies don’t go in for no women preachers, so ‘him’ is the right pronoun.
Heads God wins, tails you lose
Heads I win tails you lose
Heads we win, tails we win
Which purpose?
4 Responses to “Heads I’m right tails you’re wrong”
Eric MacDonald
Ol’ Rick Warren is losing a bit of his cool. Do you think ‘No Drama Obama’ will still want him to talk to god on the 20th? People keep it up and he’s going to be one big liability come January ’09.
He already is. I daresay Obama is regretting the whole thing now…but he won’t drop him. (He can’t very well. Even I don’t think he should drop him, because it’s too late for that. But he should never have invited him.)
Claire Ramsey
It’s convenient, though, that Mr. Ricky has a bit of extra pre-inauguration slack rope to hang himself with by making idiotic pronouncements. Not very reflective a fellow is he? “Demonization of differences. . .” That is rich.
I think “Christophobia” is the wrong construction. I don’t think he thought it through before he introduced it. (God, I hope it’s not a conventional term). I parse it as “fear of Christ” or “fear of Christo.” I would make “christian-o-phobia” the word for fear of christians.
I hate the idea of a speaker w/o a good command of morphology being allowed to invoke at the inauguration.
Yeah I was just thinking that, and saying it in a comment elsewhere. At least Mr Ricky is getting a lot of unwelcome attention now, and fewer people will be fooled in future into thinking he’s not so bad for an evangelical type. Ohhhhhhhh yes he is.
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The US-Japan Alliance under the Trump Administration and Its Future Development Trend By Ling Shengli& Liu Qi
As Japan is an important ally of the U.S. in the Asia-Pacific region, the adjustment of the US-Japan alliance will influence the implementation of the Asia-Pacific strategy of the U.S., and exert major impacts on regional security and order of the Asia-Pacific as well as the global security landscape. In dealing with this alliance, the Trump administration has followed a policy highlighting “transactionalism”, which has brought about a “Trump shock” to the US allies in the Asia-Pacific region, giving rise to the adjustment of the US-Japan alliance. These new trends deserve our close attention.
I.The Basic Features of Trump’s Foreign Policy
To face the complex internal and external environment, what diplomatic concepts Trump is to take and what foreign policy he is to make during his term of office have attracted much attention. Having analyzed the foreign policy Trump has pursued since coming to power, we have found the following four characteristics.
First, insisting on “America First”, highlighting a strong tendency of isolationism. The internal and external policy orientation of the Trump administration is seen as “domestic matters first”. Like his predecessors, Trump will not give up the global hegemony of the U.S., but unlike his predecessors, he would like to maintain the US global hegemony at a low cost. Relative to the international rules and order, he has laid more emphasis on the strengthening of American real strength, viewing the US power as the core basis for American hegemony.
Second, pursuing a policy of “economy first”, with an emphasis on “minorlateralism”. The chief goal of Trump’s economic policy is to revitalize the American economy, create jobs, and reduce the trade deficit. Excessive meanness of the Trump administration on economic and trade matters has given rise to the adjustment of its economic and trade relations with the allies, likely at the cost of security cooperation within the alliance. Internationally, the Trump administration champions “unilateralism” and “minorlateralism”, withdrawing from several important international agreements and organizations, such as the TPP, the Paris Agreement, and the UNESCO, and preferring bilateral talks to multilateral mechanisms. All of these have manifested the policy tendency of “minorlateralism”.
Third, insisting on “realism” in foreign policy, featuring “opportunism”. Trump’s foreign policy gives priority to practical interests at the expense of ideology, facilitating the political operation of his power by linking various issues in the foreign policy. Trump believes, a cooperation mechanism of “equal rights and responsibilities” should be established between the U.S. and its allies, with its allies sharing the US military expenditure and providing financial support. This political thinking focusing on immediate benefits is characterized by strong opportunism.
Fourth, managing the alliance by applying “transactionalism”, and shifting burdens onto its allies. Since taking office, Trump has remained dependent on the allies in his foreign policy, but he has attached greater importance to American interests, and seen the security protection the U.S. provides its allies as goods with prices. On issues relating either security or trade, the Trump administration has demanded the allies undertake more costs and responsibilities.
II.The US-Japan Alliance under the Trump Administration
Since the beginning of the Trump administration, important members of the US and Japanese governments have kept very close communication by exchanging several visits and calling each other several times. However, the unique style of Trump’s foreign policy has brought about a “Trump shock” to the US-Japanalliance. Although the U.S. and Japan have maintained close political, economic and security cooperation, there are also differences existing between them.
In politics, since Trump taking office, the leaders of the U.S. and Japan have maintained close communication through bilateral and multilateral meetings and calling each other, with the trade and economic issues, the bilateral alliance and the North Korean nuclear issue as the major topics of their communication. The trade and economic issues mainly concern how to reduce Japan’s trade surplus with the U.S., and renegotiation of the bilateral trade agreements; on the alliance, the main issues relate to how to re-distribute the rights and responsibilities within the alliance, and make Japan undertake more responsibilities of the alliance; and on the North Korean nuclear issue, the focus is on how to strengthen the joint response of the alliance to the issue. On the whole, within the US-Japan alliance, the political communication has been much strengthened since Trump coming to power, but differences exist between them under the cover of their intimacy. In economic and security fields, Trump’s “over-expectation” of Japan would be the source of trouble for the US-Japan alliance.
In economy, the importance attached by the Trump administration to economic issues has made the U.S. more concerned with its economic and trade interests with the alliance, as seen: a) As soon as taking office, Trump declared the withdrawal from the TPP, exerting a great impact on the Abenomics as it is built on the TPP. b) The Trump administration has put pressures for several times on Japan on the issue of its trade surplus with the U.S. despite the US-Japan alliance, and raised the tariffs on parts of the steel and aluminum products Japan exports to the United States. As the issue of trade frictions is very important to the US-Japan alliance and concerns broad domestic interests of both countries, it is very hard for the U.S. and Japan to properly resolve this issue in the short run, while persistent trade frictions will bring difficulties to the US-Japan alliance.
In security, the US-Japan security relationship is the keystone for the US-Japan alliance. In recent years, the U.S and Japan have kept consulting each other on sharing the responsibilities within the alliance, conducting overseas military operations, and defending the Diaoyu Islands. Facing the higher USdemand of Japan to undertake more responsibilities for defense, Japan will have bigger space for military development, while the Self-Defense Force of Japan will have opportunities to participate in overseas military operations. Moreover, the U.S. and Japan have maintained very close coordination on the North Korean nuclear issue. Although there are some differences existing between the U.S. and Japan, the security cooperation within the alliance is continuing to strengthen, which will bring about increasing impact on regional and even global situation.
Since coming into office, Trump has given up the Asia-Pacific strategy of his predecessor without working out his own, but the American dependence on the alliance with Japan will be hard to change. The characters of the Trump administration’s foreign policy have determined that the trade and economic issue between the U.S. and Japan as well as the issue of sharing responsibilities within the alliance are two issues that are bound to bring about frictions between them. In addition, Trump’s intention to “encourage” Japan to increase its military capabilities will give Japan bigger space for military development, which will raise the influence of the alliance over the region and the world, but at the same time increase the hardship of coordination within the alliance.
III.The Reasons for the Trump Administration toAdjust Its Policy toward Japan
The Trump administration’s adjustment of its Japanese policy is closely associated with the internal and external environment facing the U.S., and its overall policy orientation. Faced with an international environment and domestic economic situation full of uncertainties, the U.S. has to maintain its global hegemony by depending on cooperation with its allies, which has also exerted a profound impact on the Trump administration’s adjustment of its Japanese policy.
First, trying to get bigger support politically from Japan. In recent years, the change in international power comparison has made the U.S. anxious about its hegemonic position, wishing to strengthen its comprehensive national strength by revitalizing domestic economy and enhancing the alliance with its allies. Sincecoming to office, Trump has intentionally promoted the Indo-Pacific strategy, expanding the Asia-Pacific region into a broader Indo-Pacific region, hoping to strengthen cooperation with allies and strategic partners so as to enhance the influence and control of the U.S. over the Indo-Pacific region. Whether the Asia-Pacific or the Indo-Pacific, Japan is a fatal ally of the U.S., as strengthening alliance with Japan will be an important support to the US global hegemony.
Second, insisting on “America First” economically, that calls for the improvement of trade relations with Japan. Trump is viewing the US economic connection with the outside world from a perspective of economic nationalism, giving more emphasis on fare trade rather than free trade, resulting in his inclination to view the economic relations among nations from a zero-sum perspective when formulating the US foreign policies. As Japan is both an important ally and a major trade partner of the United States, the Trump administration has to take great care in managing the security and economic relations within the alliance, to address the issue of trade deficit with Japan without weakening the US-Japan alliance.
Third, strengthening the alliance with Japan to “seek peace with strength” in security. As Trump believed, military strength is the important foundation for American hegemony. As an important strategic fulcrum of the U.S., Japan is a key partner the U.S. seeks to build a strong military chain in the Asia-Pacific region. When visiting Japan in November of 2017, Trump paid a special visit to the American military base at Yukota, showing the importance he attached to the US military forces stationed in Japan and the US-Japan alliance. The strengthened US-Japan alliance will help the U.S. remain as the dominant force in the Asia-Pacific region, and make its ability to maintain hegemony more accordant with its goal.
IV.The Development Trend of the US-Japan Relationship under the Trump Administration and Its Impact
Although there have been differences within the US-Japan alliance since Trump taking office, their bilateral relations remain intimate on the whole. As the American strategic interests remain as they used to be, the Trumpadministration cannot completely overturn the consistency and coherence of the US foreign strategy. The political intention to keep the US dominance in the international system will surely reflect itself in the foreign policy of the Trump administration. In its policy toward Japan, the U.S. will take providing protection as a bargaining chip to link different issues together so as to streamline its trade relations with Japan, and strengthen the US-Japan alliance. Although the US-Japan relationship is no longer adjusted in accordance with the “Asia-Pacific rebalancing strategy”, Trump’s Asia-Pacific alliance strategy does not change subversively, compared with the one pursued by the Obama administration. As a major ally of the U.S. in the Asia-Pacific region or in the world, the U.S. is in need to get Japan’s support. From such important reports as the US National Security Strategy and the US National Defense Strategy issued by the Trump administration, the Asia-Pacific region still occupies an important position in the US national strategy. In view of the importance attached by the Trump administration to the Asia-Pacific region, the US-Japan alliance will definitely play an important role in the Asia-Pacific strategy of the United States. Although the “America First” and “transactionalism” insisted on by the Trump administration in its foreign policy have brought about a “Trump shock” to the relations between the U.S. and Japan, the strengthening trend of the US-Japan alliance will not change. With China’s growing strength posing greater challenges to the US-Japan alliance, the China factor has become an important factor influencing the US-Japan alliance. However, as there are differences existing on the policy toward China within the alliance, China may exert influence over the US-Japan alliance through diplomatic, economic and security means so as to mitigate the pressure imposed by the US-Japan alliance on China’s rise.
(About the Authors: Dr. Ling Shengli is Associate Professor from the Institute of International Relations, China Foreign Affairs University; and Liu Qi is Graduate Student from the Institute of International Relations, China Foreign Affairs University. This article was received on June 10, 2018.)
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Leon Isaac Kennedy.
St. John's Confidential File
Leon Isaac Kennedy Delivers Knockout
HELLO AMERICA!—It’s always a fantastic, overwhelming experience when watching one of our iconic entertainers, whether it be in film or theatre, rock an audience with a level of dramatic excellence not expected. Film actor, radio headliner Leon Isacc Kennedy does exactly that; escalating his public image to the level as another Cagney or Bogart. The potential is riveting!
His electrifying performance as Martel “Too Sweet” Gordone, in (1,2,3) various installments of “Penitentiary” films, which banked millions for everyone concerned. The films dealt with the wrongful imprisonment of a black youth which, obviously, the nation identified within every way. Again, Leon proved what he could do once given an opportunity, as he did years before when beginning his career in Detroit, Michigan as a young DJ.
Kennedy, as a disc jockey during the late 60s was known as “Leon the Lover.” His following exploded among, not only among the young, but musicians and people involved seriously in every facet of the entertainment business. The powers-that-be realized that this young 19 year-old with a rather magic, contagious smile affecting everyone around him had something different, and marketable that was very fresh and special. In other words, the kid was considered a “find” in the business, one that could easily be sold. Leon had everything going for him: good looks, charm, articulate and when sitting or standing before a microphone proved to be a kind of magnet, attracting millions of listeners to his smooth sounding voice and teasing showbiz banter.
When Leon arrived in Hollywood, he married Jane Kennedy, 1970s “Miss Ohio.” They both took the town by storm. Leon with many of his Motown buddies in the business as well as locked on to new powerful forces in Tinseltown. It became obvious very quickly that this guy meant business. Not wasting time, along with helping to build his wife Jane’s career, he also did more radio and participated in many Hollywood specials and humanitarian projects. It was long before he was approached to star in such screen projects as “Body and Soul” and eventually to star in the films “Penitentiary” 1, 2 & 3; powerful, timely “Penitentiary” films, produced by Jamaa Fanaka and others which quickly became box office winners.
Leon is currently married to Lolita Ambrister, former Bahamas 1978 beauty queen; they reside in Burbank. Leon is in a business partnership with a close friend, Smokey Robinson. Kennedy created a Brand Company for the legendary Smokey. The successful SMOKEY ROBINSON FOODS was placed in over 3,500 stores. It was the first minority food company to be taken nationally by the billion-dollar food chains, Albertsons and Safeway. He not only came up with the idea & star, but raised the million plus dollars and most importantly, found the distributors for marketing the product. One has to admit, this is quite a guy, indeed.
It is easy to predict when the world sees him as the devastating frustrated ex-boxer in the Pre-Broadway with music from “I FEEL SIN COMIN’ ON,” scheduled to open in Atlanta, and run from July 12 thru July 26 at the Rialto Theater Center and then off to Washington, D.C., Philly, Boston and the New York City, it will serve as a treat for everyone involved.
I Feel Sin Comin' On
Leon Isaac Kennedy
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Tag: Officer-involved shooting
Officer Identified In Hollywood Division Shooting
Donald - Jan 2, 2019
HOLLYWOOD HILLS—The Los Angeles Police Department revealed on Wednesday, January 2, 2019 that Police Officer 3 Joseph Marx, Serial No. 37650 who is assigned...
Officer-Involved Shooting At Gym Under Investigation
HOLLYWOOD—An officer-involved shooting transpired at a 24-Hour Fitness Gym in Hollywood that left Albert Ramon Dorsey dead. Officials from the LAPD’s Force Investigation Division...
Man With Pick Axe Shot
Candace - Jun 12, 2018
PACOIMA—The Los Angeles Police Department 's Force Investigation Division are investigating an officer-involved shooting that transpired on May 30. Foothill Division officers arrived on...
Shaggy Bandit Killed In Shootout
Candace - Apr 23, 2018
WOODLAND HILLS—Two Topanga Division officers from the Los Angeles Police Department were involved in a shooting earlier this month, with one of the officers...
Joseph Carver Killed In OIS
Donald - Apr 17, 2018
TOPANGA—The Los Angeles Police Department’s Force Investigation Division are investigating an officer-involved shooting (OIS) that transpired in a Topanga Division neighborhood on Monday, April...
Officer-Involved Shooting In Topanga
Donald - Jan 10, 2018
TOPANGA—The Los Angeles Police Department reported that on December 23, 2017, around 7:15 p.m., a Topanga Gang Enforcement Officer responded to a radio call...
Cop In Officer-Involved Shooting Identified
Casey - Aug 30, 2017
HOLLYWOOD—The Los Angeles Police Department Officer involved in a shooting that left a man dead has been identified. The officer involved in the July...
Erick Bogart Identified In Officer-Involved Shooting
Donald - Aug 21, 2017
PACIFIC PALISADES—The Los Angeles Police Department has revealed the name of the officers and the suspect who was fatally shot after firing upon officers....
Suspect Found Dead After Standoff In Pacific Palisades
Joanne - Aug 10, 2017
PACIFIC PALISADES—A man was found dead in a Pacific Palisades mansion on Thursday, August 10 following an hours-long standoff, during which an officer-involved shooting...
Officer-Involved Shooting In Hollywood Leaves Suspect Dead
Donald - Aug 7, 2017
HOLLYWOOD—A suspect was killed after shooting transpired on July 27 involving a Los Angeles Police Department Hollywood Area officer. According to the LAPD blog,...
Man Arrested After Standoff In Hollywood
Joanne - Jul 18, 2017
HOLLYWOOD—A man who barricaded himself inside a Hollywood residence on Friday, July 14 was arrested following a standoff, during which an officer-involved shooting transpired,...
Elderly Man Injured In Officer-Involved Shooting
Joanne - Jun 20, 2017
SHERMAN OAKS—An elderly man who was allegedly armed with a steak knife was wounded in an officer-involved shooting in Sherman Oaks on Monday, June...
Man Fatally Shot By California Highway Patrol Officers
Arjun - Feb 8, 2017
SANTA MONICA—A man was shot and killed by California Highway Patrol (CHP) around 12:20 a.m. near the intersection of Pico and Interstate 10 on Monday,...
Man With Rifle Fatally Shot By Officers
Casey - Sep 14, 2016
HOLLYWOOD—Officials from the Los Angeles Police Department shot a man who was armed with a rifle in the region of Sunset Boulevard and Hobart...
Struggle For Officer’s Gun Ends In Suspect Being Shot
HOLLYWOOD—Authorities from the Los Angeles Police Department are investigating an incident that resulted in an officer-involved shooting that took place on August 2 at...
Armed Robber Fatally Shot By LAPD Officers
HOLLYWOOD—An armed robber was shot by officers from the Los Angeles Police Department after a confrontation with authorities on January 16, which resulted in...
Ambush Suspect Shot By Police
HOLLYWOOD—Authorities from the Los Angeles Police Department shot a man who planned to ambush three males on May 24. Officers from the Hollywood Area...
SWAT Team Barricades Home
Ezra - Jan 8, 2015
STUDIO CITY—On Monday, January 5, at around 7:30 a.m., officers from North Hollywood Division responded to reports of a man brandishing a handgun on the...
Suspect Killed At Touristy Hollywood Intersection
Ezra - Dec 11, 2014
HOLLYWOOD—Two Hollywood Division bicycle officers, responding to a report of an assault with a deadly weapon, shot and killed a suspect brandishing a pocketknife...
Murder Suspect Wounded In Officer-Involved Shooting
Ezra - Dec 4, 2014
HOLLYWOOD—On Sunday, November 30, a suspect who is identified as Dirck White, was wounded in an officer-involved shooting in the Hollywood Division. At around 10:00 a.m.,...
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Law around non-consensual taking, making and sharing of sexual images to be reviewed
Review to ensure the law protects victims and is fit for the modern age.
Cyber-flashing’, ‘deepfake’ and revenge porn among issues to be examined
a public consultation will be launched to help assess whether the law needs to change
Laws around the making and sharing of non-consensual intimate images are to be reviewed under plans to ensure protections keep pace with emerging technology.
Justice Minister Paul Maynard and Digital Secretary Jeremy Wright have asked the Law Commission to examine whether current legislation is fit to tackle new and evolving types of abusive and offensive communications, including image-based abuse, amid concerns it has become easier to create and distribute sexual images of people online without their permission.
The review, which will be launched shortly, will consider a range of disturbing digital trends such as ‘cyber-flashing’ – when people receive unsolicited sexual images of someone over the phone – and ‘deepfake’ pornography – the degrading practice of superimposing an individual’s face onto pornographic photos or videos without consent.
The move builds on government action in recent years to better protect victims and bring more offenders to justice, including making ‘upskirting’ and ‘revenge porn’ specific criminal offences.
The review will also consider the case for granting automatic anonymity to revenge porn victims, so they cannot be named publicly, as is the case for victims of sexual offences.
Justice Minister Paul Maynard said:
No one should have to suffer the immense distress of having intimate images taken or shared without consent.
We are acting to make sure our laws keep pace with emerging technology and trends in these disturbing and humiliating crimes.
This review will build on our recent work to make ‘upskirting’ and revenge porn illegal to protect victims and ensure perpetrators feel the full weight of the law.
DCMS Secretary of State Jeremy Wright is to announce the review during a speech at the NSPCC conference today (26 June 2019). Speaking ahead of the event he said:
Too many young people are falling victim to co-ordinated abuse online or the trauma of having their private sexual images shared. That’s not the online world I want our children to grow up in.
We’ve already set out world-leading plans to put a new duty of care on online platforms towards their users, overseen by an independent regulator with teeth. This Review will ensure that the current law is fit for purpose as we deliver our commitment to make the UK the safest place to be online.
Tackling sexual offences is a priority for this government, and in many cases this behaviour will already be caught by a number of existing offences such as ‘voyeurism’ under the Sexual Offences Act 2003.
However, ministers are committed to ensuring the right protections are in place for the modern age, and alongside the review, a public consultation will be launched on strengthening the law – seeking views from victims, groups representing them, law enforcement, academics and anyone else with an interest in the issue.
This review is part of joint work between the Ministry of Justice and Department for Digital Culture, Media and Sport and Government Equalities Office to consider reform of communications offences, examining the glorification of violent crime and the encouragement of self-harm online, and whether co-ordinated harassment by groups of people online could be more effectively addressed by the criminal law.
Professor David Ormerod QC, Criminal Law Commissioner at the Law Commission said:
Behaviours such as taking, making and sharing intimate images without consent or co-ordinated online harassment causes distress and can ruin lives.
If the criminal laws are not up to scratch, we will propose reforms that simplify the current patchwork of offences to provide more effective protection for victims.
The Law Commission Review
The Terms of Reference for the Review will be published on the Law Commission’s website.
The review will commence on July 1st 2019 and report back in the summer of 2021.
During Report stage of the Voyeurism (Offences) (No.2) Bill in the House of Commons, former Justice Minister Lucy Frazer announced that we would be asking the Law Commission to take forward a more detailed review of the law around the non-consensual taking and sharing of intimate images, following the completion of the current DCMS commissioned review into online abuse.
The Law Commission published Phase 1 of their review of Abusive and Offensive Online Communications on 1 November 2018. The Ministry of Justice and DCMS and Government Equalities Office are now jointly engaging the Law Commission to conduct Phase 2 of this report, assessing the law on offensive and abusive online communications, including the non-consensual taking and sharing of intimate images specifically
This review will consider the meaning of terms such as ‘private’ and ‘sexual’ in the context of the taking and sharing of images without consent.
The review will not make recommendations about the existing law on the creation and dissemination of indecent images of children, including communication with or of anyone under the age of 18 years, as these laws are already appropriately robust, extensive and well-established.
Further guidance:
In many cases, this behaviour will be caught by the offence of voyeurism under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which criminalises certain non-consensual photography taken for sexual gratification. It carries a 2-year maximum prison sentence and, in some circumstances, sexual offender notification requirements
Disclosing private sexual photographs and films without consent and with intent to cause distress (behaviour often known as posting ‘revenge pornography’) was made a criminal offence under section 33 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015.
While we feel the law in this area is robust, we are not complacent and continue to keep it under review.
The government launched, and supports with £80,000 of annual funding, the Revenge Porn Helpline to support victims which has received over 14,000 contacts since it opened in February 2015.
Social media companies are expected to take down obscene and offensive material that contravenes their terms of use. Twitter pledged to introduce tougher rules for removing this sort of material.
Publication may also potentially fall foul of the Section 127(1) of the Communications Act 2003, s.1 Malicious Communications Act 1988, or the Obscene Publications Act 1959 in some cases.
If a person discloses the image with the intention of causing distress to the person in the image, then this behaviour could potentially be captured by section 33 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, commonly known as the ‘revenge porn’ offence.
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Author Jesse Nadelman
Jesse Nadelman
What Should The New York Mets Do At The Trade Deadline?
Major League Baseball, National League, National League East, New York Mets, Rumors
Entering the All-Star break, the New York Mets currently sit six games back of the Washington Nationals for first place in the National League East, and are tied with the Miami Marlins for the final wild-card s...
Ten MLB Trade Deadline Ideas
American League, Major League Baseball, National League, Rumors
It’s only June 1, but the MLB season is quickly moving along, and you know what that means: Trade season is near. The trade deadline is still two months away, but over the next several weeks many teams will ...
Mets Could Go After Mark Teixeira at Deadline
American League East, Headlines, Major League Baseball, National League, National League East, New York Mets, New York Yankees, Offseason
Who says enemies can't help each other? If Lucas Duda, and the New York Yankees each continue to struggle the way they have this season, the New York Mets could be a potential landing spot for Yankees’ veter...
The Diamondbacks’ New Weakness is the Same as Their Old Weakness
Arizona Diamondbacks, Opinions & Predictions
The excitement over the new uniforms, prized free-agent signings, and splashy offseason moves has calmed down in the desert. The Arizona Diamondbacks are just 12-18 after last night's loss to the Miami Marli...
Mets Seem Primed to Take NL East Crown
Major League Baseball, National League, National League East, New York Mets, Washington Nationals
Watch out, the New York Mets are hitting their stride. The Mets potentially have the best rotation in baseball, consisting of Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, Bartolo Colon, and Zack...
The Mets’ Offense Needs to Wake Up
New York Mets, Opinions & Predictions
PANIC CITY, NY—David Wright is right, there’s no need to open the gates for Panic City after the New York Mets' 2-3 start to the season, including back-to-back losses to the lowly Phillies at home this past wee...
Upbeat Buzz Surrounding Mets After Postseason Magic Depleted By Yet Another Lackluster Winter
Features, Headlines, Major League Baseball, National League, National League East, New York Mets, Offseason, Rumors, Transactions
Years ago, when the New York Mets' owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon were in the midst of a Ponzi scheme famously conducted by Bernie Madoff, the owners promised one thing to the fans after the franchise slashed payr...
The Mets Need To Spend The Money For Cespedes
Features, Headlines, Major League Baseball, New York Mets, Opinions & Predictions
Let's start off by saying that 2015 was a remarkable year for the Mets. After a 15-year absence, the Amazin's were back in the fall classic. Not only that, but the future looks bright for the Mets. As we saw la...
Five Trades That Should Happen At The Winter Meetings
American League, American League Central, American League East, Arizona Diamondbacks, Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Headlines, Los Angeles Dodgers, Major League Baseball, Miami Marlins, National League, National League Central, National League East, National League West, New York Mets, New York Yankees, Offseason, Opinions & Predictions, Rumors, San Diego Padres, St. Louis Cardinals, Transactions, Washington Nationals
Ah, the Winter Meetings. The craziest, most-frenzied time of the year for MLB Front Offices, where executives are dealing left and right, making moves almost 24/7 to help improve their clubs. As the meeting...
Dodgers Reportedly Acquire Closer Aroldis Chapman From Reds
Cincinnati Reds, Features, Headlines, Los Angeles Dodgers, Major League Baseball, National League, National League Central, National League West, Offseason, Rumors
The winter meetings in Nashville have officially begun, and they've started out with a bang. Per Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports, the Dodgers and Reds have agreed in principle to a deal that sends Reds' closer Arol...
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Book Review: Christmas in America: Historical Romance Anthology
If Holly Bush writes a book or story, then I want to read it. I love her historical romances. So when she offered me a copy of the anthology her newest story is in, I jumped at the chance to read it. Here is more about the book and my thoughts.
Christmas in America: Historical Romance Anthology
Authors: Holly Bush, Piper Huguley, Joanna Shupe, Donna Thorland
The celebration of Christmas is a magical time for love. A new anthology filled with America's rich history and Christmas traditions from four of your favorite historical romance authors.
“Christmas at Mount Holly” by Donna Thorland
The Jerseys, December 23rd, 1776 - The American Revolution is on the brink of total collapse. The Rebels have lost New York, the Continental Army has endured a disastrous retreat through New Jersey, and Washington is about to lose what remains when enlistments expire on New Year’s Eve. The cause needs a miracle, but Christmas is a time for wonders: as Angela Ferrers—the woman known to history as the Widow of Mount Holly—will discover when she sets a honey trap for Hessian Colonel Count Carl Emil Urich von Donop, only to find herself ensnared in mutual attraction.
“Miracle on Ladies’ Mile” by Joanna Shupe
New York, 1895 - After losing his beloved wife, department store owner Alexander Armstrong seems incapable of anything other than work, despite his ache to be a better father to his daughter. When the pair encounters Grace, a charming shop girl designing the store’s Christmas window displays, he struggles to accept that perhaps miracles do happen in the most unlikely of places…
“The Cowboy’s Christmas” by Piper Huguley
Smithson, Oklahoma Territory, 1893 - Postponing her missionary trip to Africa, apprentice teacher Serena Newcomb must travel west to face the unrequited love of her past -- rebel cowboy Baxter Smithson. Banished from his Georgia home for the crime of falling in love with the wrong woman, Baxter is surprised that his Christmas gift is a grown-up Serena, ready to confront him for ignoring his duty and to show him that the true meaning of Christmas is love.
“Into the Evermore” by Holly Bush
Virginia, 1842 - Eleanor McManus, upright daughter of a minister, is rescued from kidnappers somewhere in the deep forest wilderness by a rough and tumble fur trader, Beauregard Gentry. With his help, Eleanor makes her way back to her intended groom who declares her soiled, and she finds herself alone, pressured to make life decisions without benefit of family or others she can trust. Beauregard and Eleanor agree to begin a life together, build their legacy together, and their growing devotion to each other is witnessed one cold, crisp Christmas morning.
My 5-Star Review:
I’ll be completely honest here – I only read Holly Bush’s story in this anthology. But if the others are even half as good as hers is, then you are in for an amazing read.
Set in 1842, Into the Evermore starts out running and keeps up a good pace throughout. Eleanor McManus, the daughter of a devout minister, has been taken captive in the wilds of Virginia after her parents and siblings are murdered. Just as she is about to be sold to some ungainly men, Beauregard Gentry comes to her rescue. He escorts her to the nearest town where her betrothed decides she is unfit after what has happened to her. Again, Beau comes to her aid by helping her bury her family and then finds her a decent place to stay for the time being. As the two grow close, they decide to begin a life together.
Into the Evermore is the first in a new series by Holly Bush. It sets the stage nicely for the next installment. I truly enjoy Holly’s writing style and her expert dialogue. It’s easy and enjoyable to picture in your mind what her words are painting. I’m looking forward to this series and highly recommend you read this anthology.
Check out my other reviews of Holly Bush’s books:
Train Station Bride
Contract to Wed
The Maid’s Quarters
Her Safe Harbor
Charming the Duke
Cross the Ocean
Romancing Olive
Reconstructing Jackson
Labels: book review, Christmas in America Anthology, Donna Thorland, historical romance, Holly Bush, Joanna Shupe, Piper Huguley
Book Review: Faithful by Alice Hoffman
If you love a book with deep drama and desperate characters, this one is for you. Although it can be heavy at times, I still enjoyed this novel by author Alice Hoffman. Here is my review.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage of Opposites and The Dovekeepers comes a soul-searching story about a young woman struggling to redefine herself and the power of love, family, and fate.
Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt.
What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor, filled with emotion—from dark suffering to true happiness—a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world. A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls—including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.
Here is a character you will fall in love with, so believable and real and endearing, that she captures both the ache of loneliness and the joy of finding yourself at last. For anyone who’s ever been a hurt teenager, for every mother of a daughter who has lost her way, Faithful is a roadmap.
Alice Hoffman’s “trademark alchemy” (USA TODAY) and her ability to write about the “delicate balance between the everyday world and the extraordinary” (WBUR) make this an unforgettable story. With beautifully crafted prose, Alice Hoffman spins hope from heartbreak in this profoundly moving novel.
Publish Date: November 1, 2016
Life can change in an instant and that is exactly what happens one night to sixteen-year-old Shelby Richmond on an icy highway. She may have been the one to walk away from the accident, but she is just as damaged as her best friend who is left in a coma. Shelby struggles to find a way to continue living when she feels completely at fault for her friend’s situation. She feels cold and unlovable, unable to face the world. And as time goes by and she slowly rejoins life – if rather reluctantly – she soon finds a way to connect with others whose lives haven’t been easy either.
This story is not for the faint of heart. If you are looking to for a feel-good story – this one isn’t for you. It’s raw and emotional, and digs into your heart. But between the beautiful writing and the interesting characters, you just can’t stop turning the pages.
A hauntingly beautiful story of finding yourself after the worst thing can happen.
Alice Hoffman was born in New York City on March 16, 1952 and grew up on Long Island. After graduating from high school in 1969, she attended Adelphi University, from which she received a BA, and then received a Mirrellees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which she attended in 1973 and 74, receiving an MA in creative writing. She currently lives in Boston and New York.
Hoffman's first novel, Property Of, was written at the age of twenty-one, while she was studying at Stanford, and published shortly thereafter by Farrar Straus and Giroux. She credits her mentor, professor and writer Albert J. Guerard, and his wife, the writer Maclin Bocock Guerard, for helping her to publish her first short story in the magazine Fiction. Editor Ted Solotaroff then contacted her to ask if she had a novel, at which point she quickly began to write what was to become Property Of, a section of which was published in Mr. Solotaroff's magazine, American Review.
Since that remarkable beginning, Alice Hoffman has become one of our most distinguished novelists. She has published a total of eighteen novels, two books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her novel, Here on Earth, an Oprah Book Club choice, was a modern reworking of some of the themes of Emily Bronte's masterpiece Wuthering Heights. Practical Magic was made into a Warner film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Her novel, At Risk, which concerns a family dealing with AIDS, can be found on the reading lists of many universities, colleges and secondary schools. Her advance from Local Girls, a collection of inter-related fictions about love and loss on Long Island, was donated to help create the Hoffman (Women's Cancer) Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA. Blackbird House is a book of stories centering around an old farm on Cape Cod. Hoffman's recent books include Aquamarine and Indigo, novels for pre-teens, and The New York Times bestsellers The River King, Blue Diary, The Probable Future, and The Ice Queen. Green Angel, a post-apocalyptic fairy tale about loss and love, was published by Scholastic and The Foretelling, a book about an Amazon girl in the Bronze Age, was published by Little Brown. In 2007 Little Brown published the teen novel Incantation, a story about hidden Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, which Publishers Weekly has chosen as one of the best books of the year. In January 2007, Skylight Confessions, a novel about one family's secret history, was released on the 30th anniversary of the publication of Her first novel. Her most recent novel is The Story Sisters (2009), published by Shaye Areheart Books.
Hoffman's work has been published in more than twenty translations and more than one hundred foreign editions. Her novels have received mention as notable books of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People Magazine. She has also worked as a screenwriter and is the author of the original screenplay "Independence Day" a film starring Kathleen Quinlan and Diane Wiest. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, Redbook, Architectural Digest, Gourmet, Self, and other magazines. Her teen novel Aquamarine was recently made into a film starring Emma Roberts.
Labels: Alice Hoffman, book review, contemporary women's fiction, Faithful, NetGalley
I was lucky enough to get a copy of this amazing novel ~ Letters from Paris by Juliet Blackwell ~ and I'd love to share it with you. It's a must read for anyone who loves a good story and great writing!
Letters from Paris
Juliet Blackwell
After surviving the accident that took her mother’s life, Claire Broussard has worked hard to escape her small Louisiana hometown. But these days she feels something is lacking. Abruptly leaving her lucrative job in Chicago, Claire returns home to care for her ailing grandmother. There, she unearths a beautiful piece of artwork that her great-grandfather sent home from Paris after World War II.
At her grandmother’s urging, Claire travels to Paris to track down the century-old mask-making atelier where the object, known only as “L’Inconnue”—or The Unknown Woman—was created. Under the watchful eye of a surly mask-maker, Claire discovers a cache of letters that offers insight into the life of the Belle Epoque woman immortalized in the work of art. As Claire explores the unknown woman’s tragic fate, she begins to unravel deeply buried secrets in her own life.
Beautiful. Intriguing. Captivating. These three words just begin to describe how I felt about this novel. The writing, the setting, and the storyline were all beautiful. The characters were intriguing. And what Claire uncovers in Paris is captivating. It is a story that holds your attention and keeps you wanting more.
Claire’s life in Chicago does not give her all she desires so when her grandmother becomes ill, she goes home to Louisiana, the place she once couldn’t wait to flee. There, she is confronted with her sad childhood and finds the mask in the attic where she used to hide, the mask of the beautiful lady who she’d confide all her secrets and desires to. Her grandmother tells her she should go to Paris to find answers about the mystery of the lady of the mask. With nowhere else to go, Claire heads to Paris and embarks on an adventure. What she finds is a brusque but intriguing mask-maker, a long-hid secret, and even a secret from her own past that startles her to her core.
I highly recommend this novel to anyone who loves a well-written story with wonderful characters and an intriguing story. Escaping to Paris for a few hours isn’t too bad either.
(I received this novel from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review.)
Juliet Blackwell was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, the youngest child of a jet pilot and an editor. She graduated with a degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and went on to earn master’s degrees in anthropology and social work. While in graduate school, she published several articles based on her research with immigrant families from Mexico and Vietnam, as well as one full-length translation: Miguel León-Portilla’s seminal work, Endangered Cultures. Juliet taught medical anthropology at SUNY–Albany, was producer for a BBC documentary, and worked as an elementary school social worker. Upon her return to California, she became a professional artist and ran her own decorative painting and design studio for more than a decade. In addition to mainstream novels, Juliet pens the New York Times bestselling Witchcraft Mysteries and the Haunted Home Renovation series. As Hailey Lind she wrote the Agatha Award–nominated Art Lover’s Mysteries series. She makes her home in northern California, but spends as much time as possible in Europe and Latin America.
I hope you'll give this book a try!
Labels: book review, contemporary women's fiction, Juliet Blackwell, Letters from Paris, NetGalley
Book Review: Christmas in America: Historical Roma...
Book Review: Letters from Paris by Juliet Blackwel...
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DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest
Just what the world needs, another blog
Archive for the ‘DVD’ Category
Blu-ray: The State of Play – 2017
Saturday, June 2nd, 2018
Welcome to another edition of our annual Blu-ray sales analysis, where we look at how Blu-ray has performed over the last year.
The data used in this analysis derives from our weekly updates, based on figures released by Media Play News (previously known as Home Media Magazine). Some of the historical figures you’ll see have also been adjusted, due to slight tweaking of the metrics used by MPN to create these sets of data, although the changes have been very subtle and does not change the bigger picture in any way.
The conclusion from last year’s report centered on the fact that while Blu-ray revenue made a slight recovery off the launch of 4K Ultra HD and the better caliber of releases from 2016, Blu-ray revenue’s peak seems to have been reached in 2013.
Read on to find out if this is still true, or if UHD has helped Blu-ray turn a corner!
Blu-ray Market Share
As has been the case with all of our “Blu-ray: The State of Play” reports in the past, we start with the ever wider Blu-ray Market Share graph. Blu-ray market share represents weekly Blu-ray sales as a percentage of total packaged disc sales. So a Blu-ray market share of 45% means that 45% of all disc packages sold in that week contained a Blu-ray disc (inversely, this also means that 55% of disc packages sold only contained the DVD version of the content). With the way sales figures are reported, any edition that includes a Blu-ray version of the film is counted as a Blu-ray package (even if the package also contains a DVD version of the film). Ultra HD Blu-ray sales are also counted in the Blu-ray column. In the graph below, we also point out some of the more obvious milestone releases. 2017’s major releases, at least those that had a significant impact on Blu-ray market share for the week that they were released, were Moana, Rogue One, Logan, Beauty and the Beast, The Fate of the Furious, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man: Homecoming and Cars 3.
Blu-ray Market Share – 2008 to 2017 – Click to see larger version
Note that because Blu-ray market share is proportional to DVD market share, any drop in DVD sales will also result in a higher Blu-ray market share, even if Blu-ray sales are steady. With DVD on a steady decline, Blu-ray market share will continue to rise as long as it’s own sales decline is slower than that of DVD’s.
Below is the same data condensed and with a trend line added. The trend line does seem to indicate some kind of flattening for most part of 2017, and certainly the peak recorded in 2016 (for ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’) was not bested in 2017, although there were a few smaller peaks that, had it not been for the record breaking week in 2016, would themselves have been record breaking. The standout releases were ‘Rogue One’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’, both of these did much better on Blu-ray than your typical release, hence the peaks in the graph.
Blu-ray Market Share – 2008 to 2017
Blu-ray Revenue
For actual revenue, unfortunately, no records were broken as you can see from the graph below. In fact, none of 2017’s releases managed to beat 2017’s The Force Awakens, and even the important Black Friday/Cyber Monday and holiday sales weeks were lower in 2017 than compared to the same week in 2016. 2017’s peaks were also somewhat lower than even 2015’s, but the record remains with 2013 (and may always be the case). 2013 being the peak Blu-ray year, at least when it comes to revenue, remains a likely fact for the foreseeable future – it’s not so much that disc sales were so much higher, but that discs costs less per unit than they did in 2013 – so more sales could still mean less revenue.
Blu-ray Revenue Growth – 2010 to 2017
2016 vs 2017 Comparison
So let’s take a closer look at how 2017 did compared to 2016, starting with Blu-ray market share as shown in the graph below. Overall, it looks like 2017’s market share was, in most weeks, better than 2016’s. This may have more to do with the decline in DVD revenue being faster than the decline in Blu-ray revenue, which causes Blu-ray market share to naturally rise.
Blu-ray Sales Market Share: 2016 vs 2017 Comparison
Revenue wise, the differences between 2016 and 2017 were less visible. It was mostly an up and down affair, with some weeks being higher, some being lower, although 2017 really failed to hit the peaks that 2016 did, especially towards the important end of the year holiday sales period.
Blu-ray Sales Revenue: 2016 vs 2017 Comparison
We can get a clearer picture by looking at the raw numbers. Out of the 52 reporting weeks in 2017, 23 of them were better than the same week in 2016, with 29 being worse. This is almost a complete reversal of 2016, and is actually more similar to 2015, when 31 weeks had a weekly revenue worse than the same week in 2014. It appears that without record breaking huge releases, Blu-ray is definitely experiencing a steady decline.
Average Blu-ray market share was 39.6% in 2017 compared to 36.36% in 2016.
As a result, Blu-ray revenue continued the decline first seen in 2014. Total Blu-ray revenue for 2017 was $1.88 billion, compared to $2.02 billion in 2016, a decline of 6.74%.
To sum up:
Blu-ray market share grew, but it may largely be due to the decline in DVD than any rise in Blu-ray sales
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was the title to beat in 2017
Blu-ray revenue continues its decline
These results still seem to confirm that 2013 was the peak for Blu-ray sales, and that the “Rey” of hope for in 2016 may have been just a temporary one. There are some bigger releases in 2018, including The Last Jedi, the latest Avengers movie and surprise mega-hit Black Panther, but even these may not be enough to slow or stop Blu-ray’s decline.
Posted in 3D, DVD, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), Movies, Video Technology | Comments Off on Blu-ray: The State of Play – 2017
Weekly News Roundup (May 27, 2018)
Welcome to another edition of the WNR. Hope you’ve had a pretty good week, and now you’re ready for this pretty poor excuse of an WNR. Yes, once again, the news Gods haven’t smiled upon us this week, but there are still things to talk about. So let’s get started!
Copyright extension will endanger creativity and cultural preservation
Will it ever end? The US Congress is considering extending the copyright term again, this time to 144 years. This means that recordings from as old as 1923 won’t fall out of copyright protection until 2067. Worst of all, the extension will be applied across the board automatically, as opposed to requiring rights holders to apply for the extension. This is all and well for recordings for which the current rights holders are still receiving royalties for, but for “orphan works” where the owners have long given up practical ownership of the work, the extension to 2067 will hamper efforts to (legally) preserve and archive these works, and so many may be lost forever.
It’s often easy to forget that it is as important for copyright protection to exist as it is for it to expire. Big media and the copyright lobby has placed most of the focus on copyright’s ability to protect the owners from earning royalties, which is important. However, if this was the only goal of copyright, then why did it originally have a component which will see it automatically expire after a set term (usually the life of the creator, plus X number of years). In other words, why should copyright expire and simply not exist indefinitely?
The reasons why copyright should expire is also the reason the copyright lobby cites in their argument for the strengthening of copyright – creativity. When works expire into the public domain, these works can then be referenced, remixed, edited freely or otherwise used to create new works. It is the reason why Disney can take classic stories such as Pinocchio and Snow White and create new (copyrighted) works from them without the hassle of buying the rights to these stories. And without anyone owning exclusive rights on something, it is also the reason why studios other than Disney can take the same stories and create their own copyrighted works, such as Universal’s ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ or Relativity Media’s ‘Mirror Mirror’. It’s also the reason if the original Star Wars trilogy ever falls out of copyright, someone other than Disney/Lucasfilm can take a shot at it. But at this rate, you and I would be long dead before that ever happens, if it ever happens at all. Plus there’s that tricky thing called trademarks, that will prevent anything real from materialising. #Sad.
The other reason is much more for works that are less well known than Snow White or Star Wars, and it’s about the preservation of these works for future generations. With automatic copyright extension and orphaned works, any effort to digitize and archive these works may be deemed illegal until their copyright expires, by which time, it may be technically impossible to preserve them.
So let’s not be too shortsighted when it comes to copyright, as it’s most than just about money and protecting the interests of a few big corporations.
Blu-ray sales for 2017 may disappoint despite gains made by Ultra HD Blu-ray
I know I’m a little late this year in publishing our annual Blu-ray: The State of Play report, but rest assured, it’s coming soon. And before that glorious day occurs, I thought I would just share with you a preview of what you might expect. As you might have guessed, things aren’t looking great for physical media. But how not great, I hear you ask.
Well, the last State of Play report saw Blu-ray revenue make a small comeback, rising slightly even. At that time, I put that down to the better caliber of releases for 2016 (compared to 2015), as well as the positive effect of Ultra HD Blu-ray. The same factors still applied for 2017, but unfortunately while UHD continued to grow, the caliber of releases was comparatively lacking, and these two factors failed to arrest the decline of physical media sales in general. As a result, Blu-ray revenue fell by more than 6%, and the majority of weeks in 2017 was poorer than the same week in 2016, in terms of sales.
The full report will have lots of other juicy details such as a list of the year’s best selling Blu-ray titles and a closer look at Blu-ray’s market share. Look out for the full report here in the coming days (although with my track record, it will be more likely weeks/months).
Looks like we’ve reached the end of another WNR. See you next week!
Posted in Copyright, DVD, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), Movies, News Roundup | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (May 27, 2018)
Welcome back from a “much longer than I thought it would be” hiatus. A combination of travelling, getting sick from travelling and then lack of news meant that the WNR had to be postponed. Until now!
So we finally do have news this week, not too much, but enough to get the old keyboard out and write up a WNR.
Roku accidentally blocks YouTube and Netflix for suspected piracy
There’s been a bit of an unwanted copyright spotlight on Roku, with the company facing legal action in Mexico. This is probably why Roku has decided to take a more proactive strategy towards anti-piracy enforcement, and they have started to remove channels that aren’t solidly in the legitimate camp in terms of content.
This strategy appears to have caused some friendly fire last week, when Roku decided that both YouTube and Netflix were no longer on the right side of the (copyright) law, and blocked both channels with their now infamous “FBI warning screen” (where they explain why the channel was removed).
Facing a customer backlash, Roku quickly took to Twitter to explain the whole thing had been a mistake, and that the channels may have been inadvertently blocked during one of Roku’s anti-piracy actions (when they were trying to block another channel).
With the creative industry taking aim at all streaming related activity, I guess it’s only wise on Roku’s part to take proactive action. Just not so proactive that they start blocking the likes of Netflix and YouTube, obviously.
4K Ultra HD Blu-ray is the only physical media format that’s not in serious decline
The latest DEG report on the state of the (US) home entertainment industry is out for Q1 2018, and it pretty much reads as you would expect it to read. Almost everything digital is doing great, particularly streaming, and that’s more than making up for losses in physical media sales and all kinds of rentals.
Of particular interest to loyal readers of this feature will be the near 29% increase in revenue for subscription streaming compared to Q1 2017, shows that there seems to be still room to grow for the streaming business. 4K Ultra HD sales are booming as well, with sales up 130% and now accounting for 12% of all Blu-ray sales. And 35 million households now have at least one 4K TV set.
So it seems that the home entertainment industry is moving towards digital, streaming and 4K and a rather rapid pace, and it seems this time at least, they are ready to take advantage (with a little bit of help from Netflix, Amazon, Apple and other tech companies).
Short and sweet one this week. No idea if the next week is going to be better, or worse, or absolutely amazing. Hoping for the latter then!
Posted in Copyright, DVD, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), Movies, News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (May 20, 2018)
Weekly News Roundup (April 8, 2018)
Just a heads up that the next few weeks might be light in terms of news and roundups, as I’m going on a small trip. Luckily, there were a few things to talk about this week, as otherwise, it would be a rather long break without a WNR. The things that we talk about are rather related too, as you’ll find out.
So without wasting any more time …
The problem of leaked screeners has gotten bad enough that the MPAA has finally decided to seek external help to get the problem under control. The MPAA has partnered with the Content Delivery & Security Association to created the Trusted Partner Network (TPN), a group that will try to ensure standards are being met in terms of the secure storage and distribution of entertainment content, including screeners.
TPN will set out to raise awareness of proper security protocols, and TPN approved assessors can provide auditing to content owners and vendors who wants to ensure they aren’t the weak link in the distribution chain.
You can’t blame them for taking some action though, because screener leaks and even major hacks have become so common, they’re no longer even news worthy. That’s not to say that the problem is so big that the revenue lost, and the jobs associated with it, has become news worthy as a result. If anything, it appears that the movie business has never been better.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi was the top movie domestically
Don’t think that’s the case? Then why not check with the MPAA, who’s most recent report paints a very rosy picture of the film business. The last 3 years have been record years, domestically, for the movie industry, and globally, 2017 was a record breaking year.
Box office receipts are up, especially in emerging markets like in Asia, and not only that, home entertainment profits are up as well. The latter might be surprising because the same report paints a dire picture for physical media, with revenue down some 41% since 2013. But as luck would have it (or not luck at all, but just common sense), the rise of digital has more than offset the losses with physical media. This has meant an overall increase in consumer spending, meaning that despite some of the money going to the likes of Apple, Google and Netflix, digital is actually more profitable than physical (or maybe more precisely, the ease of use of digital now means people are consuming more content than ever). Who would have thought that innovation and user friendliness are the keys to success? I certainly didn’t in 2009 or even earlier if I had bothered to search through WNRs from before then.
But the focus on piracy still hasn’t decreased, because in the eyes of the MPAA and its members, it’s still “money lost” despite there being very little evidence that stopping piracy entirely (not possible anyway) would lead to a surge in profits. For me, the transition to digital would not have gone so smoothly had there not been pirate applications that had already gotten people used to consuming digital media. Kind of like how without MP3 piracy, Apple would have found it a lot harder to launch the iPod and iTunes, because there just wouldn’t have been a market for the entire ecosystem. And without the price pressures put on the industry by piracy, Spotify would have never existed for the same reasons Netflix might have never been.
Digital, more precisely, digital subscriptions, are helping the music industry recover financially
And as we’re on the topic of music, it’s a bit of a coincidence, or not, that the RIAA also released their own report on the state of the music in industry, and it’s starting to look brighter too. Again, digital is playing a key role in the “revival” of the industry (following it’s “collapse” due to piracy if you believe the RIAA, or more likely, the transition from CDs to digital). And within the larger physical to digital transition, and as we are also seeing within the movie industry, there is also a transition from ownership to subscription. From iTunes to Apple Music, or iTunes again to Netflix.
And hysterical claims from the RIAA about the lousy royalties from streaming, it’s actually paid subscriptions that’s driving industry profits forward – both digital downloads and physical media sales were down, but total revenue grew by 16.5% thanks to a 56% rise in the number of paid subscription.
Things will never go back to the heydays of CDs, but so many things have changed since then (um, the Internet, for one), so is it really realistic to expect business to stay the same?
You can’t blame everything on piracy.
And on that note, we come to the end of another WNR. There might still be one next week before I leave for my trip, unless I run out of time packing, which is very likely. See you … when I see you again!
Posted in Copyright, DVD, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), Movies, News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (April 8, 2018)
Weekly News Roundup (February 25, 2018)
Welcome to another edition of the WNR, one that, unlike in recent times, is actually full of stuff to talk about. Yeah well, I don’t know what happened either. Maybe it was the post Valentine’s Day euphoria that got the news juices flowing, but I think it’s just lucky timing.
Alright, let’s not waste any time …
Redbox scores a win in its lawsuit with Disney
I didn’t really expect this to happen, but Disney’s lawsuit against Redbox isn’t going to be as easy as they thought it would be, with a judge having denied Disney’s request for a preliminary injunction. Lawyers usually don’t ask for preliminary injunctions (or even file the lawsuit in the first place) if they didn’t have a reasonable expectation of success. But sometimes all it takes is a good argument, and a judge willing to consider it, for the tables to turn, and turn they have.
U.S. District Court Judge Dean Pregerson ruled that Disney was engaged in “copyright misuse”, by attempting to bundle too many conditions to the redemption and use of the digital copy that comes with Disney combo packs. Specifically, Disney tried to “tie” the ownership of the digital copy to the ownership of the discs in the combo packs, and this meant that users had to give up their right to resell the discs if they wanted to redeem the digital copy, and that, the judge said, was beyond what Disney’s copyright allowed them to do.
It wasn’t a complete slam dunk for Redbox though, as they failed to get the judge to recognise that the “first sale doctrine” applied to the redeemable digital copy, as in the judge’s opinion, the digital copy doesn’t actually exist at the time of sale (it only exists after the buyer redeems the code). Without being able to rely on the “first sale doctrine”, which limits the ability for the rights-holder to control the product after the first sale has occurred (and is the basis that allows us to resale our legally purchased goods), Redbox’s assertions that they had a right to sell the digital codes might not be an easy argument to make.
Interestingly, the judge found issue with the wording of the “Codes are not for sale or transfer” condition on Disney’s combo packaging, which does not make it clear that opening the package is considered acceptance of the conditions. Expect changes to the packaging to happen sooner rather than later.
Speaking of changes, those that have used Google Image search in the last week would have noticed a rather big, and annoying, change. Google has removed the “View Image” and “Search by Image” links in its image search results, meaning that it’s now much harder to download the original, unedited versions of any image. And that’s the whole point really, because Google has come under pressure copyright wise (via a Getty Images lawsuit) to stop making it so easy to download images via its image search function.
As expected, users have not reacted positively to these changes, and who could blame them. Also as expected, website owners have welcomed these changes, many of whom have long accused Google of “stealing” their images by directly linking to them (allowing users to download them without the need to visit the publishing website). The same problem exists with snippets (you know, live sports scores, weather, and things of that nature), but at least with snippets, some websites are actively providing the content to Google. Not so with images, and many webmasters have even gone as far as install scripts on their site to prevent direct linking.
While one fire has been potentially put out, expect the conflict between publishers and Google to intensify with Google’s other features.
Is Denuvo a performance killer?
Does Denuvo affect gaming performance? There’s evidence to suggest that it does, and there’s also evidence to suggest it doesn’t. But I think what is clear is that Devnuo has the *potential* to affect performance, and if the cat and mouse game between Denuvo and crackers continue and Denuvo start to use more and more complicated means to protect games, then yes, performance will eventually become a big issue. Anything that potentially makes hundreds if not thousands of calls per second will take something away from the gaming performance, even if these calls are super efficient.
Denuvo isn’t the only anti-tampering game in town though. Arxan is another company that’s promoting their anti-tampering tech, and it has already been used in some games. It has been used in games for Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform, which allows game publishers to use a single API set to publish games for a wide variety of Microsoft devices. UWP features not one but 5 layers of DRM to protect its games, and was previously though to be impenetrable. Try telling that to a hacker though! This week, a UWP game and its 5 layers of DRM (MSStore, UWP, EAppX, XBLive, and Arxan) were all cracked by group CODEX, allowing the game ‘Zoo Tycoon Ultimate Animal Collection’ to be pirated. It’s hardly a game that pirates have been waiting for, but as a proof of concept that UWP can be cracked, it is just as effective as a AAA game.
Disney’s upcoming streaming service won’t compete with Netflix (says Disney at least)
Not content with having control over all of the most profitable franchises (and making a zillion movies for each franchise), Disney is in the process of buying another major studio Fox. This, along with their plans to pull new content from Netflix starting in 2019, all bodes well for the studio’s upcoming streaming platform. It has already been discussed as a potential “Netflix killer”, but Disney says that’s not what it is at all.
Instead, Disney’s streaming offering will be a more streamlined affair, offering 500 movies compared to Netflix’s 4000+ at launch. The price for the service, according to Disney, will also be lower than Netflix’s.
So the new service may not be a Netflix killer, but it might injure it some, considering how many good movies Disney (and Fox) has at their disposal.
I think that’s all we have this week, hope you found it all interesting. See you next week!
Posted in Computing, Copyright, DVD, Gaming, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), Movies, News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (February 25, 2018)
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Pink Floyd: P. U. L. S. E. Live at Earls Court (I)
The Medici: Makers of Modern Art
The Birth of Rock
St Peter and the Papal Basilicas of Rome
Zeitgeist Moving Forward
Strangest Alien Worlds
George Harrison Living in the Material World 1 of 2
Is Gun Crime a Virus
Kurt Cobain Montage of Heck
Sex, Death And The Meaning Of Life
Do You See What I See
Science Britannica: Frankenstein Monsters
"Cinematography" Sort by
Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman
Feature length documentary chronicling the 35 year racing career of Paul Newman -- Showcasing Newman's prolific racing career as both a driver and an owner. As a driver Paul Newman won four SCCA National Championships, 24 Hours of Daytona, took true second at Le Mans (winning his class) and won multiple professional Trans Am races. Newman also owned Newman/Haas Racing with Carl Haas. Together with drivers Mario Andretti, Michael Andretti, Sebastien Bourdais and others, they were one of the most prolific Indycar teams in history, winning 8 Championships. Newman lived and breathed racing -- This is his story.
A look at the very real impact the Back to the Future movies have had on our culture. What was once a little idea that spawned a tightly-focused documentary has grown into something truly amazing over two years of filming. Back in Time is a cinematic monument to the vastness of the trilogy's fandom. In addition to the footage and interviews revolving around the time machine itself, the crew found that simply by delving into the impact of the trilogy an epic journey began to unfold before them. The crew captured countless hours of footage during filming. From Steven Spielberg to Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, to the Sheas and Hollers, and from James Tolkan and Lea Thompson to Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox, Back in Time features interview after interview that simply must be seen.
For the Love of Spock
Last year, just before Thanksgiving, I approached my dad, Leonard Nimoy, about the possibility of working together on a film about Mr. Spock. I had skimmed through some of the books on the making of Star Trek and felt there was so much more to explore about the creation and development of Mr. Spock. And the timing seemed right, as the 50th anniversary of Star Trek the original series was not that far away. Dad agreed that now was the right time, and that he was 100% committed to collaborating with me on this project. He also reminded me that we were (then) just days away from the 50th anniversary of the start of production on 'The Cage,' the original pilot for Star Trek in which dad first appeared as Mr. Spock.
Woody Allen A Documentary 2
The film chronicles Allen's career - from teen writer to Sid Caesar's TV scribe, from stand-up comedian to award-winning writer-director averaging one film-per-year for more than 40 years. Exploring Allen's writing habits, casting, directing, and relationship with his actors first-hand, new interviews with A-listers, writing partners, family and friends provide insight and backstory to the usually inscrutable filmmaker.
Series: Woody Allen A Documentary
What if we could explore the vastness of Space? Science fiction has always fed upon our need to explore – to wonder what is out there. Space journeys from Jules Verne’s earliest ideas about attempts to leave our planet, to the Star Wars far away galaxy through to Nichelle Nichols revealing how her groundbreaking role as Lt. Uhura in Star Trek led to her participation in the recruitment of NASA’s astronauts. It explores the deep sea inspiration for Avatar, finds out why Ursula K Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness and discovers how Stanley Kubrick was able to make 2001: A Space Odyssey seem so believable. In addition, the program looks at the way Dune and The Mars Trilogy embraced the challenge of world building and discusses the appeal of the beaten up ‘dirty space’ of Dark Star and Firefly. From the horrifying scenes of Alien, to the epic spectacle of Star Wars, this is a journey to the stars and the alien encounters that await us there.
Series: The Real History of Science Fiction
P.U.L.S.E
Seven Ages of Rock
George Harrison Living in the Material World
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Easton Corbin All Over The Road Single Review
Posted on January 18, 2013 by Vickye
Single Review: Easton Corbin All Over The Road, Has It Got The Staying Power?
I have to say apart from “Lovin’ You Is Fun” I had never really listened to Easton Corbin. So when I first heard this song, I was bowled over by how purely 90s it sounded (I’d like to clarify that I mean that positively!) Although I don’t listen to any particular artists from the 90s, sometimes I put on 90s country internet radio just to relax with, and if I had heard this song play on it, I wouldn’t have been any the wiser. Easton’s voice has that tonal quality to it, and the production that surrounds it, to make it a real tribute to that sound from 20 years ago.
Tribute to 90’s Country, but Modern Too.
However, despite the musical era it’s rooted in, there are elements of modernity. For example, the
guitar solo reminds me of the songs of some of the biggest stars in Nashville right now. When the
final chorus kicks in, the instrumentation is suddenly stripped back to the acoustic guitar playing
a melody-based pattern, something which has often been used and is very effective. As expected,
the drums then kick in, and the steel guitar and other instruments join it to complete the song as it
began.
Relaxing Quality But Is That Enough?
As a song it’s fairly simple, it’s foot-tapping, head-bobbing, and is perfect for the car radio, or
perhaps a bar. However, the beat is slower than other songs of its type, and doesn’t encourage
liveliness. Rather, it’s a cheerful, fun song that asks you to chill with a beer for a bit. The melody is
simple and easy to sing along to, there’s not a huge range of notes, and it perfectly functions as
something to have on while you’re relaxing. Lyrically it repeats a lot of the ideas recycled again and
again in country music, about driving with his girl, getting a little frisky, high on life, and not being
able to wait until he can get her home.
May Not Have Staying Power.
This is well and good and I like the song, but it’s not a song I can get very excited about. It doesn’t
hit me in any sort of which way, and unfortunately, it feels a little average.
Songs to ‘have on in the background’ aren’t necessarily the ones to stick around. ‘Lovin’ You Is Fun’
Easton’s previous release, did so well because it had that catchy hook. Whilst this song has kind of
catchy elements, it blends into the wallpaper of country music far more, and I fear it will get lost
among the rest. I think it will do fairly well in the charts because Easton’s star is growing, particularly
after his previous single being the 8th top selling country song in all of 2012 (according to Billboard’s
end of year charts), but it won’t be one that people remember particularly, not as far as I can see.
Looking for A Stronger Follow Up Single.
It’s a good song and I’m quite happy to listen to it, have it on the radio, but it doesn’t make me want
to buy the album, and I think after his previous single Easton needed a stronger song to follow up,
to convince people he’s not ‘just another country star’. The 90s thing probably doesn’t help either,
in that while a good sound, recycling musical and production ideas from an entire decade doesn’t
usually make for something new and original, something that’s going to hit you in the face and make
you remember it (when I say 90s I should say middle-of-the-road commercial country of the 90s, just
to clarify, I’m aware there was a lot more than that going on).
So when this song comes on the radio, I would actively recommend turning it on, I would even
suggest downloading it from iTunes here. Still, I don’t think it’s has the staying power it needs. But maybe I’m wrong.
Vickye is a guest contributor! Find her on Twitter: @planmymistake or her own site: www.forthecountryrecord.com!
Find the most current Easton Corbin tour dates from our partners at Country Music On Tour, your trusted country concert ticket source!
Country Music News Blog participates in advertising programs that help fund the operation of this site. For more information please visit our privacy statement. This entry was posted in Album Review, Easton Corbin, Featured and tagged All Over The Road, Easton Corbin, Review by Vickye. Bookmark the permalink.
About Vickye
Vickye was born and continues to live in England, and discovered country music at the age of 13 through the internet. She loves Miranda Lambert, Brad Paisley and Dolly Parton among others, but Taylor Swift is a secret guilty pleasure because she used to be a proper fangirl! She's in her final year of doing 'Popular Music Studies' at college, loves reading country music academia and has her own blog on country music, For The Country Record. She hopes one day to finally visit Nashville.
View all posts by Vickye →
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Opportunity Knocks: Everybody Loves Draymond
By Eric Weiss and Kevin O'Connor
There are numerous psychological factors at play when it comes to finding the right fit and making it in the NBA. These become even more important for players who don't have the nine lives of their lottery land brethren. These factors are detailed at length in Opportunity Knocks: How Situation Impacts Success.
In 2012, Draymond Green slipped all the way to #35, despite plenty of pre-draft buzz that had him looking like a potential first round pick. Green was, unsurprisingly, impressive during his pre-draft interviews and his on-court growth and overall performance were well-regarded by media and scouts alike.
Despite this acclaim, Green fell victim to the standard talk-yourself-out-of-him evaluation that often happens to low upside upperclassmen, including here on DraftExpress: Isn't quick or athletic
Too small to play power forward ... Too slow to defend small forwards.
There is always someone younger and more explosive to be had in the draft and while these players have theoretically superior upside, the bottom line is that you typically end up with a fringe rotation player at best, particularly outside of the lottery.
With production being a crapshoot in this range, why not bank on the upside of a player with off-the-charts intangibles?
The Warriors did just that; and three years later, Green is the leader of the best team in the NBA and will almost undoubtedly land a contract offer close to or possibly at the max this summer in restricted free agency.
You're the voice of this team, league MVP Stephen Curry said during his award speech to Green, Your voice and your spirit every single day, whether it's going well, whether you're making shots or missing shots, it doesn't matter, you're the same person and we can count on that every single night. That's what makes you who you are as a part of your story and your journey.
Situation Factors: Individual Story & Anticipated Role
Green's story began as a top 100-RSCI high school recruit and two-time state champion from Saginaw, Michigan. After a rollercoaster recruiting ride, Green ultimately landed at Michigan State, where everything worked out perfectly; he would become one of the greatest Spartans in the school's history, according to head coach Tom Izzo, who called him the perfect Spartan.
Day-Day would exchange all of his points, rebounds and assists for wins, Izzo told ESPN in 2012, well before Green would become an NBA star. A lot of people say that publicly, but they don't really feel that way. He feels it. There's not a question in my mind that Day-Day is all about winning.
This is not surprising, considering that Green's greatest measurable traits are both his Dominance, (88th percentile) and Team Identity, (91st percentile) ratings. These categories are defined as being attentive to others, unpretentious, assertive, uninhibited, and group-oriented.
Out of over 900 players in the SA database, Green ranks fifth for being a Rainmaker, a quality of many overachievers who have the natural ability to connect with others, gain their trust, and align their goals with those of the team. Rainmakers are also defined by their Internal Motivation, (91st percentile) but Green didn't enter college with that mindset.
"Early in his freshman year he wasn't practicing real hard, Spartans assistant coach DJ Stephens told the Detroit Free Press. So I had one of the managers go get a red practice jersey and bring it to (Green). I told him he was gonna wear it because we were going to redshirt him. I don't know if I ever saw him that angry."
Motivated, Green started working harder and smarter during the summer of his sophomore season to eventually become the Big Ten Player of the Year as a senior. No other player in the Sports Aptitude database rates out higher, collectively, in those three key categories. There are a number of highly successful players in the league who were labeled as having questionable work ethic initially, but measured out well in Internal Motivation.
As is often the case, the situations these players were placed in had a negative impact on their understanding of what hard work truly required. Often times they've had high-level success and reached their competitive goals doing things their way.
The key for Green and all the others was being placed in a situation where they were faced with their own limitations and forced to adapt in order to live up to the expectations placed on them Rainmakers thrive in such situations.
After four collegiate seasons, Green's progression was undeniable. Per Synergy Sports Technology, after relying on pick-and-roll and cuts to score a bulk of his points as an underclassman, Green eventually flipped the script and saw his usage and production rise down on the block and behind the arc. Green's dramatic points per possession increase on isolation plays are unheard of for his position.
Green came to school as a pudgy, undersized center and left as a ball handling, passing wizard and a 38% three-point shooter. As Jonathan Givony wrote in a 2011 scouting report, there is not a more skilled and versatile power forward in the country, as Green can score, rebound, and pass the ball at an elite level on any given night.
Still, Green's lack of a true position, uninspiring athleticism, and average lateral quickness was a problem, which is why it was tough to project him as an adequate NBA defender. This helps describe why he wasn't a lottery pick, but it doesn't explain why he was only projected as a late-first or early-second round selection.
Situation Factors: Team Environment & Opportunity Given
Despite all the hours poured into the exhaustive pre-draft process, Green's tantalizing psychological profile gave way to a litany of players who had safer positional projections, athleticism, and youth. No one could've expected him to become the star that he is today, but in college he maximized his production by dramatically improving on all his weaknesses to become one of the NCAA's best all-around players, and his progression in the pros has virtually mirrored that story.
"I hate to say this, but the intangibles he brings to your team can't be measured," Warriors assistant head coach Alvin Gentry said to the Free Press. "The guy really is a coach's dream. You can't place a value on that. Use every cliché you can. His teams always win. The squad you put him on in a scrimmage, his team is going to win."
Contrary to the above sentiment, Green rated as the #1 profile of his draft class, in terms of his measurable personality traits. There is no replacement for physical ability, but the best players from pick #20 and on almost all slot according to their measurable intangibles when doing a re-draft.
Green entered the NBA knowing he'd have to fight for a role, and he did just that by taking advantage of his most exceptional qualities. Like many second round picks, Green's greatest opportunity to gain a foothold on his team would be by building relationships and gaining champions for his cause among the more established players.
This is second nature for a player who is 42% more Direct, 36% Warmer, and 25% more Group-Oriented than the average NBA player. Simply put, Green puts tremendous stock in how he is perceived by those around him.
However, this by itself isn't enough, as there are many players who focus too much on the social side of the NBA lifestyle and forget about the work that needs to be done. Green was fortunate that the Warriors had a solid organizational direction that would provide continuity and the opportunity to make a mark.
When Brandon Rush and Richard Jefferson got injured during his rookie year, he stepped in and filled the void without looking back. And for a team looking for more defensive tenacity, David Lee's injury opened the door for Green to carve out a feature role on the NBA's best team.
This is where Green's killer instinct helped him take advantage of opportunity when it presented itself, while garnering the support necessary to grow beyond the bounds of that initial role.
Green is labeled as a Bold/Combative competitor in the SA classification system. This category is filled with some of the best and brightest in the NBA. Green ranks in the 94th percentile in this category, 26% higher than the average player. These types of ratings can lead to issues for players lacking the charisma and empathy for others that Green possesses. The combination of the two, however, is a recipe for success.
Despite being such a young player, Green quickly became the vocal leader of the Warriors after his former head coach Marc Jackson encouraged him to pursue the role. But Green may not have needed the push, because he is who he is: the tone-setter of his locker room, both on and off the court, the player who establishes the culture.
Green is the opposite of a mixer, he is the one who speaks his mind and holds others accountable, while doing it in a fair, political way. The Warriors, a team filled with more lead-by-example types, needed this socially bold, dominant personality to lead them, and he has.
The average Player Efficiency Rating for picks #21 to #40 is 11.9, with only a slight drop in average PER as the draft slips into he second round. That level of production is hardly worth swinging for the fences when you have a player with Green's otherworldly observable and measurable personality characteristics sitting in your lap. A culture-setting personality and a plan of action is never a bad starting point when you are looking for the true high upside gems in the land of the 20% hit rate.
Historically, players with Green's range of personality attributes almost always find success, though not always with the team's they start off with. Like most highly competitive players, Green needed a situation that would place a level of expectation on him and provide a path to opportunity.
Green also benefited by building relationships with players who had the right stuff to become winners in an organization that was heading in the right direction. If he had gone to a team with a turnstile roster and little clarity on where they were going, Green's best qualities could have laid dormant for years. Fortunately for both Draymond Green and the Golden State Warriors, that wasn't the case.
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Twitter @DraftExpress
Follow @draftexpress
Tweets by @DraftExpress
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(Kings College, Cambridge)
One of our old friends from Taipei, Ken, now lives in Cambridge. Although he offered to come down to London for the day to see us, we thought it was a perfect opportunity to get out of London for the day and explore a new town. We got on the tube at Willesden Green, transferred at Finchly Road, hopped off at Kings Cross station and jumped onto a train. One hour later we were in Cambridge, and Ken was there to meet us.
(Paul and Ken in Cambridge)
(Queenie and Paul in Cambridge)
Once we found Ken we jumped onto a bus and went into the center of the town. The first sight that greeted us when we jumped off the bus was a trickster playing with a soccer ball and asking for money. He could do a great many tricks with a soccer ball and Ken suggested that he joins the premiere league. No doubt he would make a faster buck there!
(Football Busker)
The Old Town and Market
We then walked through the old streets and found some interesting markets selling all kinds of wares. One of the stalls sold a wide variety of sweets and candy. Another sold dried fruits from all over the world. We also met a vendor from Fujian in China who gave Queenie a Chinese newspaper. He was really excited to be able to find someone to speak mandarin to. We did not linger in the market for long as we wanted to explore some of the older buildings and perhaps catch a bite to eat for lunch. Of course, in one part of the town, outside one of the old Churches, were two violinists, busking!
(Hot Dog Stand)
(Buskers)
Ancient Buildings
We also went for a walk through some of the schools that allowed visitors to pass through, although some of the areas were closed off in certain areas. The architecture of these ancient University Buildings was astounding and certainly reflects the origins of this university, which does date back quite a few centuries and boasts a large number of Nobel Prize winners. Of course, for us visitors the prestige of the University is not as important as the antiquity of the buildings and the beauty of the town.
(Ken, Paul, Queenie and Mom)
We first walked through King’s college. Perhaps at this point a student of architectural history could tell you many interesting facts about the building. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) we are not and therefore cannot tell you anything significant about the buildings. We can tell you that the so many old and beautifully designed structures take your breath away. There is no describing the feeling of looking at these old buildings. And to think these were designed and built without any modern technology blows the mind.
(Kings College Entrance)
We continued to meander our way through the over touristed streets of Cambridge and, after a bit, built up a large appetite, which was well and good. Ken invited us to lunch in the first pub he ever went to in Cambridge, The Eagle.
(The View in Cambridge)
The Eagle
The Eagle must be Cambridge’s most famous pub. Many a famous academic, including Crick and Watson (the DNA guys) drank a pint or two in the Eagle. In fact one of them sold the final part of the DNA riddle in the pub over a pint (or so it is rumored). Therefore this pub has become quite the hangout for tourists.
(Plaque outside the Eagle)
We trundled in at around 2:00pm and all the tables were full. We were lucky to eventually find a free table inside or else we would have had to sit outside in the cold. Queenie and Mom ordered sausages and Mash and Paul and Ken had the steak ale pie. Both meals were amazing. We caught with Ken and his news and he was anxious to find out about Taipei. He has lived there on and off for more than 10 years and has real affection for the city. We were happy to tell him that Taipei was still around and that all his mates (as far as we could tell) were doing well.
(Mom in the Eagle)
Punting on The Cam
After the big lunch we headed off to the river Cam and the punters boats to be punted along the river. By this time the temperature had dropped significantly. We bought our £10 per person ticket and were herded into a 12-seat boat. The punter assured us that we would not fall into the water and that we were perfectly safe. We were not so sure.
(Paul and Queenie in the Boat)
(Ken and Mom in the Boat)
The punt up the river included a punter that gave an introduction to some of the buildings, the history of some of the colleges and some of the stories and facts and figures of the University. Some of the stories are below:
One of the colleges stopped admitting girls in 1988. In protest students wore white armbands to their lectures. To this day, whenever there is a formal dinner, the students will were white armbands to remember the protest of a previous generation.
Prince Charles attended Trinity College. His bodyguard attended too. Upon graduating, his bodyguard had done better than Prince Charles.
One of the scenes for Harry Potter was filmed at one of the colleges (cannot remember the name).
During the World War II there was a tax on glass to discourage the use of windows. This is where the term “daylight robbery” allegedly originated.
During World War II a tax was also levied on any newly completed construction. During this time a certain individual erected a bridge over the river Cam for the public. To prevent himself from paying tax he cut out ¼ of one of the spheres of that decorated the bridge handrail to ensure that the bridge was incomplete and to thereby avoid paying the tax.
The mathematical bridge was named as such because Isaac Newton designed and built the bridge using geometric principles and not a single bolt or screw. Later engineers tried to understand the design by taking the bridge apart. When the bridge was reconstructed, nails and bolts were needed.
The ride on the boat (punt) was actually very relaxing (and interesting). Just sitting in the boat was very soothing. The punter did all the work. Our punter was fairly young, we guess he is a student and he will be heading off to the US next week for a vacation. We wish him well.
Along the river we actually crashed into a few other boats. Many of those punting had little or no experience and this led to us having quite a few crashes with other boats piling into ours. Some of the punters in the other boats nearly fell into the river. They were really struggling. Although neither of us tried it, we could imagine how difficult punting actually is.
(Some Views from the Boat)
After 30 minutes on the river we were freezing cold and it was time to get off the boat. We immediately headed off to find a coffee shop to drink something warm and eat something to make us feel better. We used this last opportunity to catch up with Ken and the stories of his life in Cambridge.
Ken told us that he will come to Taipei in the near future so we look forward to seeing him then.
Anyway, once again thanks for reading.
We will see you next time
Labels: London, Travel
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You are here: Home / Freehold Township
History of Freehold Township
This land was first sighted by European Venetian John Cabot while sailing along the coast in 1498. The Lenni Lenape Indians originally inhabited the area called Freehold Township.
It wasn’t until September 1609 that the first European actually set foot at Sandy Hook. The Dutch West India Com., formed in Holland in 1671, developed commerce in the New World and in 1623 organized the New Jersey-Hudson River area into the Province of New Netherlands.
On June 23, 1664, the Duke of York granted a patent to Sir George Carteret and John, Lord Berkely for the entire area of what now constitutes New Jersey. The area was first settled in 1685 by a group of Scottish reformers fleeing religious persecution. Freehold Township was formally established by an act of the Legislature on October 31, 1693, one of the three original townships in Monmouth County. We celebrated our Tricentennial in 1993.
Throughout the intervening three centuries it has been a place where people could raise their families, earn their living and live out their life in some measure of peace. Then as now, it has been a community of farms and churches, homes and neighborhoods. It has strong roots in a rich colonial tradition and an illustrious past. The Battle of Monmouth (probably the turning point of our War of Independence) was fought at its doorsteps on a scorching day in June 1778. Every major American military leader of the time participated: George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, Benedict Arnold, Anthony Wayne, Charles Lee, Alexander Hamilton, Nathaniel Greene, Friedrich van Steuben and the non-military Molly Pitcher. Most of the history made here, however, has been of the personal kind; of families and arms and small businesses, and the enduring values these institutions produce now and in the future. We invite all residents to know some of the heritage and become part of it.
For further information you may contact the Historic Commission at
Freehold Twp. Historic Preservation Commission
1 Municipal Plaza
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RACV Royal Pines Resort
Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia 30 Nov 2017 - 03 Dec 2017
Beef set for Gold Coast debut
Andrew Johnston (Getty Images)
Affable Englishman Andrew ‘Beef’ Johnston will make his debut at the Australian PGA Championship from November 29 – December 2, 2018, at RACV Royal Pines Resort on the Gold Coast.
Aussie golf fans will get their slice of Beef when he tees up alongside home favourites Marc Leishman and Cameron Smith when golf is celebrated on the Gold Coast.
“I’m really looking forward to getting back to Australia in the summer and I definitely couldn’t call myself a proper Englishman if I haven’t ticked the Gold Coast off my list,” said Johnston.
“To be part of the last professional tournament in Australia for the year will be pretty cool too; it will be good fun celebrating the year Down Under with everyone.”
Since winning twice on the Challenge Tour in 2014, Johnston has been a regular fixture on the European Tour and broke through with his maiden win in 2016 at the Real Club Valderrama Open de España, hosted by the Sergio Garcia Foundation.
In 2018 he has recorded three top-10 results including a runner-up finish at Hero Indian Open after making the playoff against fellow Englishman Matt Wallace.
Gavin Kirkman, CEO of the PGA of Australia, which owns the ISPS HANDA PGA Tour of Australasia, said that Johnston is a great addition to an event that has created a festival atmosphere on the Gold Coast.
“The Australian PGA Championship is all about celebrating golf - it is a fun-filled week which welcomes and embraces all sports fans. Having created this young and energetic atmosphere our aim each year is to attract players which personify those traits and Beef certainly does.
“Beef is a sociable character with an exciting golf game which people love to watch. I am sure that he will be a hit with the crowds and will add to the on-course action at the Australian PGA Championship.”
Tourism Industry Development Minister Kate Jones said the Australian PGA Championship continued to demonstrate its value to the It’s Live! in Queensland major events calendar.
“It’s great to see the Australian PGA Championship drawing world-class talent to the Gold Coast,” she said.
“Attracting high-profile golfers to the event helps showcase Queensland and the Gold Coast to the world and helps to lure visitors to the region.
“Beef is a real character and I’m sure he’ll be a crowd favourite. I hope he stays after the tournament and gets to experience what we have to offer here in Queensland.
“We’re proud to support events like the Australian PGA Championship because they help to solidify Queensland’s reputation as a world-class destination for major events.”
The Queensland Government, via Tourism and Events Queensland, is proud to support the Australian PGA Championship, which features on the It’s Live! in Queensland events calendar. Your perfect next event is in Queensland where live events combine with the most incredible destinations, and life is beautiful one day, perfect the next.
Tickets to see Marc Leishman, Cameron Smith and Andrew ‘Beef’ Johnston play in the Australian PGA Championship from November 29 -December 2 at RACV Royal Pines Resort are now on sale at Ticketmaster.
General admission to the Australian PGA Championship is $25* when purchased at the gate or via Ticketmaster, with children aged 16 and under granted free admission when attending with a paying adult. If a marquee is more your style, a number of different corporate hospitality options are also available, please visit pgachampionship.com.au.
* Ticket prices include GST. Transaction fees apply. Please note the booking terms and conditions when purchasing your tickets through www.ticketmaster.com.au
1 SMITH, Cameron AUS 18 -18
2 ZUNIC, Jordan AUS 18 -18
3 BLAND, Adam AUS 18 -17
T4 BRANSDON, David AUS 18 -14
T4 LEISHMAN, Marc AUS 18 -14
6 VARNER III, Harold USA 18 -12
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Europizzi
Warp-knit fabrics
Shuttle-woven fabrics
EUROPIZZI GROUP
In spring 1968, driven by undiminished enthusiasm and sound expertise, the production activities were inaugurated with the dyeing of Rachel and Valenciennes lace types. Meanwhile, the market demand, constantly changed, imposing a corresponding adjustment of the entire textile system. To meet the end consumers’ increasingly diversified demands and behaviour (that by then regarded not only the clothing sector but also the fields of furniture, healthcare, sports, industrial applications and leisure, etc.), it was necessary to provide functional, hygienically-safe, aesthetically pleasing and economically advantageous products. It was the genius of Luigi Chiappini, in collaboration with his friends and business partners Italo Pilenga and Renzo Colombo, who anticipated these evolutionary changes, dyeing activities focused on technological and organisational innovation. This was a courageous choice for the small industrial dyeing company that would have influenced every single decision from that moment onwards. Therefore, other types of product and fibres were introduced: polyamide-fibre (nylon) warp-knit fabrics (velveteen, charmeuse, shirt fabrics), polyester, acetates and triacetates, cotton, artificial and acrylic fibres and then, shortly after, circular-knit fabrics.
In 1977, a new dyeing department was designed and put into operation, in which warp and weft textile items in cotton/linen, viscose rayon and acetate, nylon/cotton, polyester/cotton for the furnishing, clothing sectors and for the most diverse applications; during the same period, by applying the solutions provided by Information Technology to its systems, Europizzi S.r.l. has succeeded in managing processing operations in accordance with the criteria of flexibility and rapidity. The need to have the utmost flexibility in accepting several work orders and to meet them with the perfect qualitative correspondence has brought our company to be structured as per type of item and processing operation.
In 1988, the Textile Auxiliary Division was established. This choice was taken to create and make the most of opportunities of synergy with other dyeing and printing departments from which important elements have been taken to achieve the improvement of products used at that time. Here the fundamental components for dyeing, printing and finishing operations were made, used in textile ennobling processes. To these types of operation, new product lines to be used in the construction industry, waste water treatment, additives for the plastic industry were gradually added.
Currently, Europizzi S.r.l. Textile Auxiliary Division collaborates with important research centres and leading companies within the chemical-textile sector in various innovative projects. The last in chronological order is within the 7th framework programme of the European Company and has, as its objective, the use of nanotechnologies for the improvement of the fire-retardant treatment of cotton and polyester. The Europizzi S.r.l. Textile Auxiliary Division can provide complete plant-engineering/production know-how relating to the following production lines.
Currently, Europizzi S.r.l. has 110 employees and covers and indoor surface area of 36,000 m2. The production is mostly destined for the European market through national customers that are regular exporters.
http://www.europizzi.it/wp-content/uploads/page/TINTORIA-EUROPIZZI-2017.mp4
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Man guilty of stalking women who worked at massage parlors
May 16th, 2019 by Associated Press in Missouri News
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A 67-year-old man accused of stalking several women who worked at massage parlors has been found guilty on eight of 10 federal charges against him.
Robert Gross, who has a criminal record dating back to the 1960s, was convicted Wednesday on two of four stalking charges and six gun-related charges.
The Kansas City Star reported federal prosecutors accused Gross of stalking several women between Oct. 1 and Dec. 22, 2017, mostly employees of massage parlors in Lawrence and Johnson County, Kansas. The women told police their cars were keyed, screws drilled into their tires and their windows smashed out.
The Star reported in a 2018 series of stories that law enforcement officers suspect Gross is responsible for the killings of several people, including two women who worked in the massage business. He has not been charged in the homicides.
Gross' attorney presented no evidence during the trial.
He was arrested in December 2017 after buying two guns in Liberty.
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out-of-towner elena ghisellini
out-of-towner nancy gonzalez
Can a great accessory bring you joy? We’re talking about poppy candy-colored clutches and handbags, luxe material and funky, flirty detail. That’s just what Nancy Gonzalez’s pieces do. The Colombian-born designer debuted her first collection at Bergdorf Goodman in 1998, where she made her mark early with bold colors, innovative ideas, and meticulous quality. There’s a fantasy element at play here. “I incorporate elements into each piece that make us smile—a color, a texture, a detail, a surprise,” Nancy says of her work. Joshua Schulman, president of Bergdorf Goodman, even recognizes her as one of the keystone brands in their accessories department. “She is a true visionary who has revolutionized the market with her mix of unconventional colors and design,” he says. Her pieces are made in her native Cali, Colombia by local artisans with expert old-school craftsmanship, and reflect her dedication to the indigenous community. Nancy Gonzalez the brand has gained popularity around the world—her collections calling over 300 luxury retailers home, and garnering an extensive list of celebrity fans. In 2007 she was honored by the Accessories Council with Brand of the Year, a highly coveted award that only solidifies her place as a key player in the accessory industry. Gonzalez is launching an exciting new shoe collection exclusively with Bergdorf Goodman that will be available at select Neiman Marcus locations throughout the country in December. So when she’s in LA, what sparks joy for her? –Courtney Fortune
out-of-towner chloe gosselin
It’s been an exciting couple of months for luxury footwear designer Chloe Gosselin. She has just earned her spot as a finalist for the prestigious CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund prize, only two years after launching her namesake label. The French model-turned-designer may be new on the scene, but she’s far from green. Chloe has been a student of art and fashion her whole life; her collection expresses a storied understanding of shape, texture and a tradition of Italian craftsmanship. She got her start at the La Cambre Fine Arts Program in Brussels, and from there she entered the fast-paced world of fashion as an internationally acclaimed model. But after a whirlwind decade of travel, photoshoots, and runway work, she craved a way to express herself more creatively. She pursued shoemaking and production at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and Ars Sutoria in Milan, before launching the Chloe Gosselin brand in 2014. Soon she was catching the attention of celebrities like Madonna, Taylor Swift, and Kate Winslet. Her collection ranges from colorful, functional flats to exquisitely designed pumps, evoking feminine elegance and sensuality. She characterizes each style with the name of a poisonous flower—beautiful and dangerous, elevated by elements of exotic materials, bright colors and fierce design details. So when she travels to Los Angeles, where does this designer on the rise, mom, and fiancé of illusionist David Copperfield go for a drink? –Courtney Fortune
out-of-towner massimiliano giornetti
Salvatore Ferragamo’s creative director, Massimiliano Giornetti, certainly has his finger on the heartbeat of the iconic brand. A ten-year veteran of the company, Giornetti began his career at Ferragamo as an assistant to the knitwear designer in menswear, and soon stepped into the role of creative director for the men’s division. In January 2010 he began designing the women’s ready-to-wear collection, and within a few months was appointed creative director of the entire Ferragamo brand. Now with the reopening of its Beverly Hills flagship boutique, lead by Giornetti, the Italian luxury fashion house unveils its impressive new retail concept by architect William Sofield, that showcases the brand’s Hollywood roots (Ferragamo was founded there 100 years ago!) –Courtney Fortune
out-of-towner philipp plein by courtney fortune
It’s all neon and noir in the world of Philipp Plein. With a flair for dramatics, the designer’s head-turning creations deliver luxury with an edge and burst of pop that’s, let’s face it, just so LA. ¶ Born in Munich in 1978, Plein found a fascination for art, architecture and travel at an early age. He got his start working with leather and steel furnishings, which soon turned into experimentations with hard and soft leather garments and accessories. Abandoning his law studies for fashion, he launched his own label in 2004. Two major milestones followed with the opening of his first flagship store in Monte Carlo and first commercial showroom in Milan in 2008. Philipp Plein, the man and the brand, soon commanded the scene with his innovative aesthetic, combining young rock ‘n’ roll style with lush luxury fabrics and quality craftsmanship. ¶ Plein, who makes his home in Lugano, Switzerland, stands out as a savvy and affluent designer with a finger on the pulse of what’s happening on trend, while pushing the limits. He’s curator of wild parties and supercharged store openings that combine his love of entertainment, fun and culture. It seems his message is being heard around the world loud and clear, and now Plein is bringing it to Beverly Hills with his latest store, which opened on Rodeo Drive in October. Now that he’s set up shop in Los Angeles, he likes to spend time in Bel-Air and hit the waves in Malibu. –Courtney Fortune
out-of-towner kristy caylor
out-of-towner donna karan
out-of-towner alex gilbert gaines
out-of-towner charlotte dellal
out-of-towner georgina chapman
georgina chapman, the marchesa designer, chimes in on her favorite travel tips
out-of-towner isabel marant
out-of-towner nadja swarovski
out-of-towner tadashi shoji
out-of-towner sandra choi
out-of-towner jean claude jitrois
out-of-towner johanna johnson
out-of-towner vera wang
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Geoscience Education & Outreach
Earth Science Week in the Limelight
October was a busy month for the earth sciences. Teacher Michael Wagner and his science classes at Heritage High School in Leesburg, Va., collected cloud-observation data as part of an intense observation period for NASAs SCOOL (Students Cloud Observations Online) program. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History hosted an Antiques Rock Show, where geologists were on hand to identify rocks brought in by museum visitors. Students at the University of Dayton hosted an earth-science career fair, guest lectures and a geo-movie night. And fourth-grade students from the Tampa-St. Petersburg area in Florida visited the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Center for Coastal and Watershed Studies to explore the ways scientists monitor Earth.
All of these events marked the celebration of the sixth annual Earth Science Week, held Oct. 12-18. Created by the American Geological Institute (AGI) to promote understanding and appreciation of the value of earth science research and its applications and relevance to our daily lives, Earth Science Week encourages geoscientists to share their knowledge and enthusiasm about Earth with the public. This years event celebrated the theme Eyes on Planet Earth: Monitoring Our Changing World.
President George W. Bush officially recognized Earth Science Week and released a presidential message on Oct. 10, applauding the efforts of scientists, educators and parents to raise awareness about the importance of studying Earth. In addition, at least 21 governors proclaimed Earth Science Week in their states.
To help facilitate planning, AGI distributed more than 11,000 Earth Science Week information kits, which contained educational and outreach tools for teachers and event organizers. Materials in the kits included NASA lithographs of satellite images, the new AGI Petroleum and the Environment poster, a set of classroom activities entitled Tracking Change Through Time from USGS and the jointly produced USGS/AGI Global GIS North America CD-ROM.
Included with the CD-ROM was a guided activity to introduce students to the use of powerful GIS software in earth science applications. Initial feedback about the kits indicates that they are a high-quality resource for teachers and geoscientists, who are teaching students and the public about the earth sciences.
AGI also maintains a popular Web site dedicated to promoting the week. Receiving more than 15,000 hits in October, the site includes information about participating in Earth Science Week for geoscientists, teachers, students and the media. It also includes a searchable database of events and a comprehensive listing of events planned during the week all over the world.
This year, in all, leaders in the earth science community organized more than 200 events in all 50 states and in countries around the world as part of the week. Earth Science Week even made it on television, with NASA airing a special program, Virtual Earth, on Public Broadcasting Service stations and NASA TV, in honor of the week.
In Tennessee, Gov. Phil Bredesen urged citizens to join him in the observance of Earth Science Week. In doing so, Governor Bredesen recognized the importance of geology and other earth sciences in each of our lives, wrote Tennessee State Geologist Ron Zurawski. From the role they play in supporting mineral and water resources, preparing for and mitigating natural hazards, solving environmental problems, and dealing with complex ecological issues, the earth sciences are crucial to sound decision-making and effective stewardship of our natural environment.
As part of Earth Science Week, the American Geological Institute organizes four contests open to school-aged children and the public. These include an art contest for elementary school children, an essay contest for middle and high school students, a lesson plan design contest for educators and a photography contest open to the public. The following winners received cash prizes and subscriptions to Geotimes:
VISUAL ARTS CONTEST:
Christina Gill, Herndon, Va., “Keeping an Eye on Our Earth” [see sidebar below]
ESSAY CONTEST:
Jessica Taylor, Cary, N.C., “Who is a volcanologist and what do they do?”
PHOTOGRAPHY CONTEST:
Ben Kennedy, Montreal, Canada, “Tengar Caldera and Mt. Semeru, Indonesia”
LESSON PLAN DESIGN CONTEST:
Mary Ball, Jefferson City, Tenn., “Monitoring our Changing World: The USGS Stream Gage Network”
Eyes on Christina Gill
Eight-year-old Christina Gill from Herndon, Va., was the winner of this years Visual Arts contest. A third-grade student at Cross Field Elementary school, Christina already has a keen interest in learning about the earth sciences. She may even become an earth scientist when she grows up, following in the footsteps of her grandfather, who was a geologist from Peru.
Christina is generously donating her cash award for winning the visual arts contest to two fellow students so that they may attend the U.S. Geological Survey summer camp next August. She met the two students while taking science lessons from older Girl Scouts during the fall of 2003, and she would like to help her classmates who could not otherwise afford to participate in the science camp.
Are you wondering how you can get involved? The American Geological Institute is already planning next Octobers event. The theme is Living on a Restless Earth, and will take place from Oct. 10-16, 2004. The restless nature of our planet affects the global community every day. For example, earthquakes rattle the islands of Japan, volcanic activity closes resorts in Italy, the fishing industry in Peru struggles to survive changes in ocean temperature caused by El Niño, and a sinkhole in the karst terrain in Florida causes the sudden collapse of a building. Earth scientists study dramatic phenomena such as these in order to understand their causes and minimize their impact on society. Share your knowledge and enthusiasm about studying our dynamic Earth with others by getting involved in Earth Science Week. To learn how, visit www.earthsciweek.org.
Martinez is the manager of the Earth Science Week program at the American Geological Institute (AGI). Email: cmm@agiweb.org.
AGI organizes Earth Science Week, with support from USGS, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists Foundation, NASA and the National Park Service.
Earth Science Week home page
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columbia school of journalism gay talese thomas kunkel steve coll columbia university school of journalism
Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker
Columbia School of Journalism Dean Coll Moderates Conversation with Authors Gay Talese & Thomas Kunkel
January 18, 2016 / Upper West Side Neighborhood / Manhattan History / News Analysis & Opinion / Gotham Buzz.
I received an invitation to attend a conversation at the Columbia School of Journalism about a new book covering the professional life of one of the most prominent writers of The New Yorker magazine. The Columbia University School of Journalism is easily one of the most prestigious journalism schools in the nation; and Columbia also hosts the judging for the Pulitzer Prize, which is considered one of the highest awards a journalist or author can receive.
It was a fairly warm October evening as I made my way north on the subway along the Upper West Side. I got off at 116th Street and walked east through the main campus to the Faculty House. The Faculty House sits atop the Morningside Heights ridge overlooking Harlem, the Upper West Side and the rest of Manhattan.
The entrance into the Faculty House was from an interior courtyard where Columbia University students were hanging around in casual conversations. Once inside, I was directed to an upper floor where the event was being held.
Seated at the head of the room was Gay Talese, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of numerous books including The Kingdom & The Power. He was in the company of the Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, Steve Coll, who is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning author having penned several tomes about issues in Asia, most notably the Middle East. And of course, there was the guest author of the evening, Thomas Kunkel, who is the President of St. Norbert College in Wisconsin and who had penned the book being discussed this evening entitled Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker.
Click here to read the rest of our report regarding a conversation about the recently published book Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker at the Columbia School of Journalism.
Columbia School of Journalism Dean Coll Hosts Discussion with Authors Gay Talese & Thomas Kunkel
January 18, 2016 / Upper West Side Neighborhood / Manhattan History / News Analysis & Opinion / Gotham Buzz. Continued.
Thomas Kunkel Author of Three Books About The New Yorker
I had met Thomas Kunkel through his prior book – Harold Ross: Genius in Disguise – a copy of which he had given my father which I found lying on Dad's coffee table on a visit home. My father and Thomas Kunkel had met each other at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin where my father was a faculty member and Kunkel was President. Both men were former newspapermen, and shared an interest in the profession. My father's newspaper struggle against Gannett had been documented in the book entitled Chain Gang by Richard McCord. And at the time, Kunkel was the author of two books about Harold Ross, founding Editor-in-Chief of The New Yorker magazine.
The discussion of Kunkel’s book about Joseph Mitchell, was underway as I took my place in the back of the room. Joseph Mitchell was a prominent writer for The New Yorker magazine during its Harold Ross heydays in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s. Mitchell held a position there until his death in 1996. The New Yorker – with writers like Mitchell - covered and brought to life people, subjects and situations that provided a fresh perspective on the world as we knew it.
Kunkel tells us Mitchell spent his time gathering fresh material with what one might call both the regular and irregular New Yorkers. Mitchell's writings cover a mix of people and a cast of characters that he had met frequenting places like McSorely’s Pub in the East Village, and on the docks of New York City’s seaport - prior to when ocean liners were eclipsed by international air travel. Mitchell started in journalism as a beat reporter and eventually graduated to penning literary journalistic pieces, which are interpretive stories laden with facts.
Kunkel in Conversation with Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Gay Talese
My interest in the attending this event grew when I learned that Gay Talese, author of The Kingdom and the Power, would also be speaking at the forum. The Kingdom and the Power is a book my Father had mentioned on numerous occasions over the course of his lifetime, because it’s about the power and attendant responsibilities of newspaper publishers, and specifically the New York Times.
According to Random House, publisher of The Kingdom and the Power, Talese's book is,
“… regarded as a classic piece of journalism … is as gripping as a work of fiction and as relevant as today's headlines.”
Gay Talese, Journalist & Writer, Explores the Boundaries of Storytelling
I started reading up on Gay Talese’s work, during which time a discussion about the boundaries separating journalism and fiction came to the fore. This is a subject that’s become of increasing interest to me as I write narrative pieces for a couple of web magazines in metropolitan New York City. And while I don’t aspire to fiction at this time, I periodically find a straight recitation of the facts too limiting to capture the real interest and essence of a story.
This subject is not new to the journalism profession, as facts can be reported in an interesting fashion by getting creative with how they’re presented - which can be done without fictionalizing them. It appears that both Talese and Kunkel have succeeded at this, as is evident by their books, as both authors draw their readers into real life stories in a fashion that gives the reader the feel of reading a novel.
Columbia University School of Journalism - Journalists' Issues
This issue – fact versus fiction – is what came to the fore in the conversation about Kunkel’s book – Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker.
As I tuned in, the speakers were talking about how to present context in impactful ways. Thomas Kunkel remarked that in fiction this is done by shortening timelines, building composite people [characters exhibiting the qualities or traits of several real life people] and by including interpretations about what folks are thinking. The question to be answered is whether literary journalism can draw from this body of techniques, without tampering with the truth.
Gay Talese remarked that tape recorders capture the facts, but not in interesting ways. A verbatim is not as good as an authored comment because people don’t speak in literary sentences. He recalled doing an interview with Floyd Patterson who, he told us, talked in long run on sentences.
Talese spent three days interviewing Patterson and came away with the copy he was looking for through an ongoing dialogue. Talese opined that in some measure journalists collaborate with their subjects in order to tell interesting stories. He remarked that many authors today resort to a question and answer format, which he opined, is like reading a court report. He finished by telling us he didn’t like tape recorders.
Columbia University Center for Oral History - A Large Repository of Source Material
Kunkel went on to talk about the source material he used, which included hours of interviews with Joseph Mitchell by University of Massachusetts at Amherst Professor Norman Simms. Kunkel found these interviews at the Columbia Center for Oral History, which contains over 20,000 hours of recordings and over 8,000 interviews covering American culture. The center opened in 1948 under the name of Oral History Research Office and its name was changed in 2011.
Thomas Kunkel as Author(ity) on The New Yorker
Thomas Kunkel is as thorough a researcher as he is a lucid writer. It’s somewhere between possible and likely that Thomas Kunkel is one of the most pre-eminent living authorities on life at The New Yorker magazine from its inception through the mid 20th century. All of the books he's written on the subject demonstrate the pains he has taken to collect, organize and make sense of source material.
Kunkel told us that the reason Mitchell’s work endures is because it captures some of the universalities of human nature. He told us that in Mitchell's story entitled Mr. Hunter’s Grave, the long loopy sentences contain undercurrents of the state of the human condition. Kunkel went on to tell us that he had met Joseph Mitchell while doing research for his previous book, Harold Ross: Genius in Disguise and that it seemed that Mr. Mitchell was someone that “he needed to know”.
Gay Talese: Journalists as Creative Authors
Gay Talese talked about the prose Mitchell used in the story entitled Thirty-Two Rats From Casablanca [1944]. Talese said that the sentences in this particular story are short and driving with momentum, while its peculiar facts were so curiously stated. He noted that Mitchell had an eye for detail and a literary vision with imagination.
Columbia University School of Journalism: Questions & Answers
It was at this point that the forum was opened to the audience for questions.
Columbia Center for Oral History: 20th & 21st Century Source Material
Ronald J. Grele, Director Emeritus of the Columbia Center for Oral History, opined that tape recordings are a reference and thus provide a reliable source of information, while narrations depend on the trustworthiness of the narrator. He said that he never became a writer because he couldn’t talk and think metaphorically, and that the facts oftentimes destroy stories in order to provide a factual history. He concluded by informing us that some 2,000 published works had relied on the Columbia Center for Oral History to obtain source material, including the book being discussed in this conversation.
Were Joe Gould & Joseph Mitchell Inspiration for the Oral History Research Office?
Kunkel noted that one of Joseph Mitchell’s most famous works is entitled Joe Gould’s Secret. Joe Gould was a real person, a Harvard graduate in Anthropology, who lost his job as a writer. Joe Gould (d)evolved into a Bohemian New Yorker who lived on the streets, conversing and in some measure living off shopkeepers and barkeepers, while he collected information for what he would tell people was the longest book ever written or - An Oral History of Our Time.
Mitchell’s story in the 1942 New Yorker begins with this in the first paragraph,
"Profile of Joseph Ferdinand Gould, Harvard graduate, hobo panhandler and writer of "An Oral History of Our Time". … "There's nothing accidental about me," he [Joseph Gould] once said. "I'll tell you what it took to make me what I am today. It took old Yankee blood, an overwhelming aversion to possessions, four years of Harvard and 25 years of beating the living hell out of my insides with bad hooch and bad food. I'm out of joint with the rest of the world.”
This story was published on December 12, 1942 - less than a week after Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese, and the United States entered WWII. Three years after the war, the University of Columbia opened up the Oral History Research Office. I supposed one might fairly ask whether Joe Gould and Joseph Mitchell might have been, in part, their inspiration.
Subject & Author: Did Joe Gould's Secret Become Joseph Mitchell's Secret?
Kunkel talks about how Joe Gould was the subject of a follow on story, and eventually a book, by Joseph Mitchell. In the book Mitchell stated that he didn’t believe that Gould had written ‘the longest book ever written’ and that this was a fabrication. The irony is that for somewhere near the last thirty years of his life, Joseph Mitchell is reported to not have written much of anything either, even though he said he was, and he went to work at the New Yorker every day.
Mitchell reportedly spent his time cloistered in his office, door closed, with notebook, pen and typewriter. Near the end of his life Mitchell told someone that he’d written things in his mind and that there was an irony about how he had turned out to be a bit like the Joe Gould he’d written about. Joe Gould died in 1957 to very little fanfare.
Journalism as Archeology: Unearthing Truth & Issues
There are revelations in Kunkel’s book upon which others remarked. For instance that characters in one or more of Joseph Mitchell’s Profiles – like King of the Gypsies - had turned out to be composite characters [meaning the characteristics of several people rolled up into one person] and hence fictitious fabrications. And he notes that Editor-in-Chief Harold Ross would have known.
Someone asked the speakers whether they thought James Joyce used his imagination in writing Ulysses. Ulysses is considered by many to be one of the greatest non-fiction literary works of the 20th century. Ulysses was published in 1922 as governments tried to censor it for its attempt to publicly depict a fuller view of life, through the inclusion of private obscenities, masturbations and other behaviors flouting the conventions of the time.
Public & Private Sensibilities: Reporters, Trust & New Media
Talese seemed a bit wistful in responding to the question of whether he thought that any of the people like those covered in Mitchell’s Profiles, existed today. He said that publishers and subjects just don’t spend the time to get such stories, as they require developing a trust between subject and author. Someone mentioned something about how people today seem to open up publicly with very private matters on some of the blogs and social media like Facebook.
Talese returned to the story he did on Floyd Patterson upon which he spent days. During the breaks in the interview, Talese said he would imagine what it would have felt like to get knocked out.
Talese talked about one of his most famous stories, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold [Esquire 1965]. He told us that it took about a week to get the story because Frank Sinatra was feigning a cold. Sinatra didn’t want to be interviewed by any reporter, because he didn’t trust them.
Esquire kept pushing Talese to complete the story, but Talese couldn’t get near Sinatra, because Sinatra’s publicist kept telling Talese that ‘Frank Sinatra had a cold’. Talese stayed and did the story by observing Sinatra from a distance, since he had seen Sinatra moving around just fine and without the cold. Over the course of the week Talese worked on the story, it seems Sinatra came to trust him, and the story went on to include comments later obtained by Talese from Sinatra’s family, which Talese opined that Frank Sinatra surely knew about, and must have approved.
Journalism in the 21st Century: Thoughts on a Changing Environment
Time was running out and the formal part of the forum was over. The Faculty House served hors d’oeuvres and wine, while the audience had an opportunity to meet the speakers, purchase books and have them signed by the authors.
Since attending that event I’ve given some thought to Thomas Kunkel’s book and the conversation hosted at the Faculty House by the Columbia University School of Journalism. There’s been a sort of disaggregation of the media over the past couple decades, as the search engines slice and dice content creators’ works, and subsequently serve them up in bits and bytes to the entire world.
Over the past decade the print publishing business, as defined mostly by newspapers and magazines, has lost about $25 billion in revenue. Coincidentally the largest search engine in the world has grown revenue by about the same figure. Content creators are being disaggregated from their revenue sources, while audiences are being distanced from the original information sources and the full context of the works.
Trusted Information Sources: The Ubiquity of Fact & Fiction on the Internet
The benefit, of course, is that today anyone can publish anything and make it available to the world. The downside is that published pieces may be shabbily researched and written, or that opinions and fabrications may be presented as facts. Over the past decade or so I’ve witnessed many undisciplined authors and readers re-publish and reiterate factually incorrect information they picked up on the internet, and they parroted the web publisher as if they were recounting a truth from god.
Given the advances in technologies, and the attendant lag in people learning how to manage them, I expect the debate of fact versus fiction in story telling to continue. The proliferation of easily-available, infinite information makes knowing the integrity of an information source even more challenging. Audiences are increasingly obtaining their information from filtered sources such as search engines and second [3rd, 4th, 5th ...] sourced and crowd-sourced social media.
Even news reporters and news organizations are becoming disaggregated from observing or researching events first hand. It’s not uncommon to see one report, one poll, one perspective on an event become the defacto standard / truth for that event, because the report of it is so mercilessly multiplied by resource-starved media organizations which increasingly rely upon others work for first person accounts. This ubiquitous, present-day, media multiplier effect brings to mind Andy Warhol’s depiction of the mass marketing of images / impressions to the consuming audience.
The State of Journalism: Where are we Going?
Our information is no longer gathered, written, reviewed and edited by a well-paid, elite intelligentsia - but rather developed and disseminated by the mass of humanity that uses the web.
And our information is organized, filtered and prioritized by machines - the software programs built by engineers working at the search engine and social media companies.
And thus the viewer – the audience – is left to prioritize, edit, source-verify and fact-check the information they consume on their own.
New Media: Freedom or Chaos?
Is this freedom or is this chaos? I reckon that like all great changes, perhaps it is a bit of both.
Many Thanks to the Columbia School of Journalism, Steve Coll, Thomas Kunkel & Gay Talese
Congratulations to Author Thomas Kunkel on another fine book. And thanks and appreciation to Thomas Kunkel, Gay Talese and Steve Coll for an informative conversation.
Addendum: The Faculty House Lunches & Space Rentals
I met Alice Newton, Deputy Director of Seminars, who gave me a quick tour of the Columbia University Faculty House, which is open for lunch daily, Monday through Friday, from 12 noon to 2 pm. They also rent the space for private events and the Faculty House has a beautiful view of the Upper West Side, Harlem and other parts of Manhattan.
By Michael Wood
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BTEC Business students raise over £3,000 for charities
Congratulations to students studying the Extended Diploma in Business who managed to raise £3,052 for charity.
Students organised and held various events including cake sales, a quiz night at The Bull in Henley, an auction at the Town Hall, live music in Wallingford, bingo at Lashbrook Care Home and the Over 60’s Club in Henley. The final event was a football tournament at Gillotts School.
Hannah McPhee, Business and Travel and Tourism teacher, said: "I was very impressed by the way the students organised themselves in their own teams. They had their own agenda and allocated the workload between them. I was pleasantly surprised to see their competitive spirit come through to achieve the accolade of being the group who wanted to raise the most money". Jodie Hill, BTEC Business student, helped organise the quiz at Henley Town Hall, said: "I found organising the event a lot easier than planning it. We really had to rely on working well as a team throughout. The legal part of the event was quite difficult because I did not realise how much was involved. The actual event itself was a great success with many people attending and we felt a great sense of achievement from it all and felt very proud to have earned a large sum of money for our chosen charity, Sue Ryder".
£430 was donated to Response, a local charity and £2,622 was donated to Sue Ryder in Nettlebed. Over the last 4 years, BTEC Business students have raised a whopping £10,000 for local charities.
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(513) 338-1952 En Español
EB-1 Priority Workers
EB-2 Professionals / Advanced Degrees
EB-3 Skilled Workers / Basic Degrees
EB-4 Special Immigrant Religious Workers
EB-5 Investors
Marriage Visa – Adjustment of Status
Marriage Visa – Consular Processing
L-1 Intracompany Transfer Visas
O-1 Extraordinary Ability Worker Visas
P-1 Artists and Athletes Visas
TN Visa for Canadian Citizens
Employer I-9 Compliance
9089 for Employees
9089 for Employers
G-325A
I-129 for Employees
I-129 for Employers
The Alien of Extraordinary ability category is, in effect, reserved for that small percentage who has risen to the very top of their field of endeavor. This subcategory covers aliens possessing extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business or athletics. The extraordinary ability subcategory does not require a specific job offer, so long as the alien states that he/she will continue to work in the field of their extraordinary ability in the US. This means that the alien may file a petition on his/her own behalf, rather than having an employer file for them.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) regulations define extraordinary ability as a “level of expertise indicating that the individual is one of those few who have risen to the top of the field of endeavor.” In order to show that an alien has “extraordinary ability”, the alien must show three of the following ten types of evidence:
Receipt of lesser national or international prizes or awards for excellence in their field of endeavor
Membership in associations in the field of endeavor that require outstanding achievements of their members
Published material about the alien and his work in professional journals, trade publications, or the major media
Participation, either in a group or alone, as a judge of others in the same or a similar field
Original scientific, scholarly, or artistic contributions of major significance in the field of endeavor
Authorship of scholarly articles in the field, published in professional journals or the major media
Display of the alien’s work at artistic exhibitions or showcases in more than one country
Performance in a lead, starring, or critical role for organizations with a distinguished reputation
Commanding a high salary compared to others in the field
Commercial success in the performing arts, as shown by box office receipts and sales
The EB-1 is a good option for those applicants who do not wish to file for labor certification (PERM). Only the “alien of extraordinary ability may sponsor his or herself.
The EB-1 alien of extraordinary ability or outstanding researcher is a great way to avoid the arduous PERM process; however, it must be done correctly to prevent a dreaded “request for evidence” issued by USCIS. The Fleischer Law Firm LLC has developed a strong strategy for obtaining a successful alien of extraordinary or outstanding researcher petition.
When a researcher, physician, scientist or other qualifying professional files an EB-1 petition, there is rarely, if ever an “interview” with an USCIS adjudicator. Therefore, the Fleischer Law Firm requires all of their clients to write a “personal statement” in support of their petition. This person statement is a chance for an applicant to “speak” to the adjudicating officer; it is not a time to be shy or modest, but to fully demonstrate your qualifications and achievements as one of the top professionals in your field. While using language a lay person could understand (i.e. minimal scientific or field-specific jargon), a successful applicant should clearly elucidate the applicants IMPACT on his or her field, and how the applicant’s work relates to the criteria listed above.
The Fleischer Law Firm LLC has been success in obtaining Alien of Extraordinary Ability petitions for dancers, doctors, businessmen, scientists, researchers, athletes, artists and other occupations.
DISCUSS YOUR CASE
‘Advanced degree’ means a US degree or a foreign degree equivalent to a US degree above that of a baccalaureate. A United States baccalaureate degree or a foreign equivalent degree followed by at least five years of progressive experience in this specialty shall be considered the equivalent to a master’s degree. If a doctoral degree is customarily required by the specialty, the alien must have a United States doctorate degree or a foreign equivalent degree.
‘Exceptional ability in the sciences, arts or business’ means a degree of expertise significantly above that ordinarily encountered in the sciences, arts or business. Exceptional ability is a very high standard, but is less than that of ‘extraordinary ability’ found in the ‘priority worker’ category, thus a degree by itself is not enough.
Unlike the EB-1 category, the EB-2 category requires an employer and a labor certification. There is however an exception to this rule. If the alien’s job is deemed to be “in the national interest” of the United States there is a “waiver” of the labor certification requirement. Obtaining this waiver is beneficial because the processing times will be greatly reduced.
For more information, please read about National Interest Waivers.
‘Skilled’ worker means an applicant who is capable, at the time of petitioning for this classification, of performing skilled labor (requiring at least two years training or experience) not of a temporary or seasonal nature for which qualified workers are not available in the United States. Relevant post-secondary education may be considered as training for the purposes of this provision.
‘Professional’ means a qualified alien who holds at least a United States baccalaureate degree or an equivalent degree and who is a member of the professions.
‘Other worker’ means a qualified alien who is capable, at the time of petitioning for this classification, of performing unskilled labor (requiring less than two years training or experience), not of a temporary or seasonal nature, for which qualified workers are not available in the United States.
All petitions filed in the EB-3 category require a job offer and a labor certification, now called PERM. The requirement of a labor certification is essentially a statement from the Department of Labor that there are no qualified available US workers willing to fill the position offered and has been part of US immigration law since 1965. Before then an immigrant worker could not be excluded unless the Attorney General issued a statement saying that there was no shortage of US workers and that admission of the alien workers would harm the position of US workers. The labor certification applies to all workers in the EB-3 preference category and most workers in the EB-2 category. Aliens in the EB-1 preference are exempt from the requirement.
The question answered by the labor certification is whether there are any “able, willing, qualified, and available” US workers. US workers include citizens, permanent residents, and anyone authorized to work in the US whose work authorization is not tied to a specific employer. In most labor certifications, the qualified US worker need only meet the minimum qualifications for the position. The exceptions are for teachers at colleges and universities and aliens of exceptional ability in the performing arts, in which the US worker must be as qualified as the alien worker.
Learn more about the Permanent Labor Certification or contact us with any questions.
A religious worker is a person who for at least two years immediately preceding the filing of a petition, has been a member of a religious denomination which has a bona fide nonprofit religious organization in the United States. The applicant must also be coming to the United States solely for the purpose of carrying on the duties of (1) a minister of that religious denomination or (2) working for the organization in a professional capacity in a religious vocation or occupation for the organization or (3) in a religious vocation or occupation for the organization or its non-profit affiliate.
Further, religious workers must have been performing the vocation, professional work or other work continuously (either abroad or in the United States) for at least the two year period immediately preceding the filing of the petition.
Such a person may come as a minister, work in a professional capacity or other work.
‘Minister’ means an individual duly authorized by a recognized religious denomination to conduct religious worship and to perform other duties usually performed by an authorized member of the clergy of that religion. There must be a reasonable connection between the activities performed and the religious calling of the minister. This term does not include a lay preacher, not authorized to perform such duties.
‘Professional capacity’ means an activity in a religious vocation or occupation for which the minimum of a United States baccalaureate degree or a foreign equivalent degree is required.
‘Religious occupation’ means an activity, which relates to a traditional religious function, such as by way of example liturgical workers, religious instructors, religious counselors, canters, catechists workers in religious hospitals or religious health care facilities, missionaries, religious translators or religious broadcasters. This does not include janitors, maintenance workers, clerks, fundraisers or a person solely involved in solicitation of donations.
The minimum amount of investment is either $500,000.00 or $1,000,000.00. Threshold investment amounts to $500,000.00 in areas of high unemployment or in a rural setting and reserves 3,000 visas of the 10,000 for this ‘targeted employment area’. The $1,000,000.00 minimum is for areas other than a targeted employment area, but may also be in a targeted employment area. The Act further says that such an investor must provide at least ten full-time jobs for US citizens, residents or ‘other immigrants lawfully authorized to be employed’ in the US. It is this employment provision which made this section politically acceptable to the Congress so that receiving residence through investment could be passed.
The regulations also say that there may be no passive investment. However, the investor only has to have a place on the board of directors and does not have to take a more active role if that is not wanted.
There is a major difference between obtaining permanent residence through this category and the other employment categories. The initial grant of residence through the ‘investor’ category is called ‘conditional’ permanent residence. What this means is that residence is granted conditionally for two years. At the end of this time a second form is filed with the USCIS showing that the required amount of investment is there, as is at least ten full-time employees that were hired because of the investment. Of course, they don’t have to be the same employees. When these conditions are met, the ‘conditional’ part of the conditional permanent residence is dropped. The only equivalency for this kind of provision is in the marriage category where conditional permanent residence is given to a spouse of a US citizen or legal permanent resident who hasn’t been married for two years before residence is given.
What is PERM?
Affective March 28, 2005, the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA) published new regulations guiding the requirements and processes for an employer to obtain a permanent labor certification for a foreign worker.
A permanent labor certification allows an employer to hire a foreign worker to work permanently in the United States. In order for a permanent labor certification to be approved, the Department of Labor (DOL) must certify to the USCIS that there are no qualified U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to accept the job at the prevailing wage for that occupation in the area of intended employment and that employment of the alien will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers.
How do I Apply for PERM?
In order for a United States employer to hire a foreign worker permanently, the employer first files an Alien Employment Certification, ETA Form 9089. The date the labor certification application is filed is known as the filing date and is used by USCIS and the Department of State as the priority date. Once the application for Alien Employment Certification is approved by the DOL, the approval should then be filed with the USCIS service center with form I-140, Immigrant Petition for Alien Worker.
An application for Permanent Employment Certification can be filed either electronically or by mail. However, the Department of Labor recommends that the employer files electronically. Electronic filing is faster and will ensure that the employer has provided all required information as an electronic application cannot be submitted if the required fields are not completed.
In order to file electronically, the Online Permanent System requires an employer to set up an individual account. The employer must go to www.doleta.gov and set up a profile by selecting the appropriate profile option in the Online System. After registering and establishing an account, the employer can fill out and submit an Application for Permanent Employment Certification, ETA Form 9089.
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Home Small Business Opti Files Suit Against AMD
Opti Files Suit Against AMD
By David Needle | November 18, 2006
Opti announced it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit on Friday against AMD over three patents under the umbrella name of "Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses."
In a release, Opti said AMD infringes the patents by making, selling, and offering for sale CPUs and core logic products based on and incorporating Predictive Snooping technology and inducing and contributing to the infringement of the patents by others.
The suit was filed the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
An AMD spokesperson said the company had not seen the suit and had no comment at this time.
But Bernard Marren, president & CEO of Opti, said the company first approached AMD four years ago.
"Back then, they were only using [the technology] in their chipsets, not in big volume," Marren told internetnews.com. "This is a more serious case because it's across the board," he said, referring to AMD's Opteron processors.
Mountain View, Calif.based Opti is mainly focused on licensing patents it attained during its years as a chipset designer, which it stopped doing about five years ago.
According to Merran, Opti settled a similar case, involving the same patents, with nVidia in August for $11 million and a royalty fee of $750,000 per quarter starting next year. He also said Opti struck a cross-licensing deal with Intel years ago that netted the firm $13.5 million and protects Intel from being sued in this matter.
The Intel settlement followed Opti's failed attempt to get a license to Intel's Pentium III and IV processors, which, according to Merran, led to the company leaving the chipset design business.
An Intel spokesman said the company had no comment Opti's patent claims.
The three patents at issue in the lawsuit against AMD are U.S. Patent No. 5,710,906, U.S. Patent No. 5,813,036 and U.S. Patent No. 6,405,291, all entitled Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses.
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Pizza Saves the World
The personal blog of Jerry Snook. Community Specialist, writer, broadcaster, musician, tech nut, and gamer for life!
Ten Spooky Flicks for Halloween 2012
If you're like me, you LOVE horror movies. Personally, I'm not a fan of the gore-and-guts-style of horror; I prefer atmospheric and spooky. Back in 2008 I put together a blog post with some horror movie recommendations. Time for a 2012 update!
1. And Soon The Darkness (1970)
There was a 2010 movie released with the same name. Make sure you're watching the right one!
IMDB link here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065398/
Actress Pamela Franklin was in a couple of really great spooky films, including The Innocents, The Legend of Hell House, and Necromancy!
Watch it: This somewhat-previously-obscure film is quite easy to find nowadays thanks to instant streaming! Currently available for streaming on Netflix.
(Image taken from Black Hole Reviews. Click the poster to read their review!)
This movie is an excellent choice for people looking for an older film, and for folks who prefer creepy atmosphere to action and violence (although there is a small amount of it, relatively tame by today's standards.) Besides actress Pamela Franklin being quite easy on the eyes, she's also perfectly suited to playing the role of a girl who finds herself in an essentially alien environment. Jane (Franklin) and Cathy are bicycling across France when Cathy disappears; the rest of the film centers on Jane's attempts to both find her friend and avoid what she increasingly understands to be a horrific fate.
What makes this movie interesting, among other things, is the way it doesn't really tell you exactly what's going on. Events and people are hinted at, and conversations take place in their original language (without subtitles!) but for the most part, you are in the dark to follow Jane through her eyes until the end. This movie is fairly slow-paced, although I didn't find it boring. I thought the pacing added to the sense of dread. Since you aren't being told what to think very often, it leads you to come up with your own ideas about what's happening in a way I found to be creepy and unusual. I also thought the ending was satisfying, and am glad that it did answer the questions you asked it throughout the viewing experience.
Tags: Retro, 70's, Killer, French, Mysterious
2. Insidious
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1591095/
The budget for this film was reported to be about one and a half million dollars.
Watch it: This movie is available on both Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon. I would recommend watching this film on as large a screen as you have, and in as good quality as you can manage. I haven't seen the Blu-Ray of this, but I kinda wished I'd seen it in high-def first.
(Poster Image from GeekTyrant, an excellent geek-filled web site and Google+ feed.)
This movie touts itself as "...from the directors of Saw and Paranormal Activity!", which, in my opinion, isn't really a good thing. That said, this is probably the best horror film I have seen in the past decade! I was surprised as how truly creepy and scary I found this film. I'm kind of a jaded horror movie watcher; I've seen everything, and it's pretty hard to creep me out. This film managed to do it! When I finished watching it for the first time, I thought to myself that this perhaps was the scariest movie I'd seen since the first time I watched The Shining as an early teen (or preteen? Can't remember.) I was surprised at how effective this movie was. I really can't recommend this movie enough. That's not to say this is a perfect film: The audience begins the movie following one person, and about half-way through, that person becomes a background player to a second character, who then becomes the lead. There are also a few cheap jump scares in it. But - it's all forgivable, especially when the scary stuff is this unsettling.
The "Saw" bit also initially is the reason I avoided this film. I dislike serial killer movies and slasher films in general (with the exception of Silence of the Lambs, Manhunter, and the first Halloween.) This isn't that kind of movie! There is very little gore in this flick. Instead, it's an incredibly atmospheric, moody, and frightening look at a family being haunted. The first act sets the stage, the second act explains what's going on, and the third act dives deep into an almost Poltergeist-like trip to spooksville.
Besides some truly scary stuff (I will never look at a baby monitor the same way again!), this movie also has incredibly effective cinematography and direction. One of the things I find most impressive is that it manages to accomplish so much on a relatively small budget. The film-makers truly understand the horror viewing experience, and are experts at coaxing out unique and unusual scares from their material. The story itself is somewhat of a horror movie staple, but it's the way the story is presented, and the way it unfolds, that makes this film so effective.
Tags: Modern, Haunted House, Creepy, Ghosts
3. The House of the Devil (2009)
Director Ti West is quite hot right now in horror-film-land, if there was a "horror movie hipster" award, he'd probably win it. I mean that in a good way! This guy knows his stuff.
If you do enjoy this movie, I'd also recommend West's followup, The Innkeepers. I didn't like it quite as much, but it was also really fun to watch.
Watch it: This movie is available for streaming online at Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes.
(Image taken from Schlockmania, which also has a nice article about this film.)
This movie is an obvious homage to the films director Ti West grew up watching: Dario Argento flicks like Suspiria, slasher films like Halloween and Friday the 13th, and the original "the call is coming from INSIDE OF THE HOUSE!!!" film When a Stranger Calls (1979). That said, it's also unique in a way only a dyed-in-the-wool horror movie aficionado could re-imagine. This films knows you've seen all of the source material; like Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill", it revels in the knowledge that you'll "get" the references, and get more from seeing them presented to you like a movie mixtape. That said, West also plays on your expectations. You think X will happen, and when it doesn't, you've essentially had the scare as if it had happened. You'll notice that I'm speaking about the director as much as I am about the movie. This is an absolute auter flick, the film is about the people making it as much as it is about the movie itself.
However, this movie also delivers some great atmosphere, a creative retro look and feel, and a payoff ending that made the wait worthwhile (at least for me.) The basic plot revolves around a college-age babysitter (with super-late-70's/early-80's hair, even though the films takes place in modern-day) who is hired for a slightly different reason than she originally expected. As the film progresses, you are taken away from her perspective several times to see what's really going on, and because of it you'll be screaming at your television, "DON'T DO THAT!" even as she's blissfully unaware of what's about to happen.
It's telling that some of the imagery that will stay with you will be the protagonists hair and clothes, the retro furniture and decor, and a scene where the babysitter (kinda) eats a slice of pizza, rather than the gore or the killer. If it sounds like I'm trying to explain to you why you might hate this film, well, it's because I am. I loved this movie, but I know several people who would absolutely loathe it. This is a film where pretty much nothing happens until the very end. If you can't handle that, do not watch this movie. If you can handle it, especially if you consider yourself a bit of a "horror movie expert", then I'd highly recommend this movie. It's unique, well-made, and will stick with you long after you've watched it.
Tags: Retro, Hipster, Killer, Satanic Stories
4. The Eclipse (2009)
I found the haunting in this film to be realistic. If there were ghosts, I think this is what it'd be like to be haunted by them.
This is a collaboration between a playwright and a novelist.
Just a heads-up for people making movies: If you want your film to be found by other folks online, naming it very similarly to a teen vampire novel-turned-pop-culture-phenomenon it not recommended.
Watch it: iTunes, Amazon, Netflix
This is a great choice for people looking for a classy, romantic ghost story. The film takes place in Ireland, and involves writers re-discovering love while experiencing a haunting. The less said about the plot, the better here, so I won't get into it too much. This is my Halloween choice for the NPR/PBS crowd :), but I really loved it. Beautiful cinematography, Oscar-quality acting, fantastic, believable writing and characters. Overall, a gorgeous Irish ghost story. This film also sent Ciarán Hinds into my list of Great Actors. This might be a good choice if you have extended family over, or are looking for something to watch with your parents or grandparents.
Tags: Classy, Irish Countryside, Romance, Ghosts, Novelists
5. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)
When you ask yourself, "Where have I seen Tucker before?" the answer is that he's been in a lot of television, including the Joss Wheden shows "Firefly" and "Dollhouse."
Watch it: Netflix, Amazon, iTunes
(Image comes from the Alamo Drafthouse web site.)
On the exact opposite side of the scale from The Eclipse, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is raunchy, incredibly juvenile, disgusting, and funny. The film is a big joke about the "rednecks are evil - especially if you're a rich suburbanite" thing that tends to be a staple of the slasher genre. If you are looking for a funny (adult-level) Halloween party flick, this is a good choice. This movie is quite gross, but it's also genuinely funny, mostly due to the performances of Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk.
Tags: Cult Horror, Comedy, Gross-out Camp
6. Abesntia (2011)
This low-budget movie was initially funded through Kickstarter, and, for some indie filmmakers, served as an example to point to that crowdsourced funding could be the future of making this kind of movie. IMDB puts the budget at around $70,000 total!
(Image taken from Killerreviews.com, a pretty great place to find cult horror and other films.)
Another movie with genuinely creepy moments! This super-low-budget film relies on mood and an unusual story to set itself apart from the crowd. This film appears to be shot in a very typical neighborhood, but the filmmakers make the most out of the "normal" landscape in order to contrast it with a horrific tale of people being stalked by a monster. A lot of the scares to be found in this film, other than the monster stalking its prey, comes from the "this could happen anywhere" factor. The film starts off telling the story of a woman whose husband disappeared years ago, in a neighborhood where an unusually large number of pets have gone missing, but soon veers into a twist that I would not want to spoil for you. Due to the low budget, you don't really see much of the monster at the center of this story, but what you do see is quite effective. I also found the final moments of this movie to be quite effective, particularly in the way the monster responds to one of the final requests of the protagonist to spare someone she loves.
Tags: creepy, low-budget, indie
7. The Possession of David O'Reilly (2010)
Watch it: Netflix, iTunes
(Image taken from Netflix)
This is another film that will be appreciated by some, disliked by others. While not a "found footage" movie, it bears a resemblance to these kind of films due to its "shaky-cam" style of cinematography, and down-to-earth "realistic people" performances. The ending in particular may leave some folks cold, since it is a bit on the obscure side in regards to what happens. That said, I found the overall vibe of this movie to be very effective, and thought a couple of scare scenes in particular were extremely well done. The plot centers around the haunting (stalking?) of a man who flees to his best friend's house thinking that the evil wouldn't follow him there. Ummm...why would you think that? I'm not sure, either. There are some really strong performances in this movie, and enough creepy moments to justify it as a recommendation for anyone looking for a genuinely frightening film this Halloween.
Tags: Documentary-style, Possession, With Friends Like These...
8. Lake Mungo (2008)
The director of photography has a nice blog article about the making of this film here.
(I had difficulty finding a good source for the poster, but this comes from some Spanish blog.)
This is my "found footage" selection for this article. In general, I'm not a fan of this trend, since it's become quite the cesspool of bad jump scares, "OMG he's like over the person's shoulder!!!", and poor acting. However, when done well, it can add a touch of realism to the proceedings. This Australian film is shot in a fake documentary-style and centers on the family of a girl who drowned several years prior to the start of the movie, and the haunting that ensues. This movie effectively makes you like the people you are watching, and has a pretty well-written mystery at the core of the story. Even the "people-running-around-so-much-you-can't-see-anything" moments of this "found footage" flick worked for me, which is quite rare. You can tell that intelligent people worked on this film. This movie is as much a mystery and drama as it is a ghost story, which works in its favor.
Tags: Found Footage, Ghost Story, Haunting, Family Drama, Australian
9. The Devil Within Her (1975)
This film had several titles, including "Sharon's Baby" and "I Don't Want To Be Born!"
Watch it: Netflix
(Image taken from a great article about this movie from the excellent web site Cool Cinema Trash. Highly recommended!
If you like unintentionally jaw-droppingly funny, super-cheesy, super-70's shlock horror, this is a rare and good one! There are few films that dare to have the baby itself jump out of a crib and attack people, but this film has the guts to do it. :) Starring Joan Collins as the frequently-screaming woman who gives birth to a demon-baby (thanks to a curse given to her from a short person at the burlesque house where she works, I'm not kidding!), this film has several moments that are so bad and funny, you simply won't believe your eyes. Your mind will be blown by just how insane and bad this movie is! I loved, loved, loved this movie, because it speaks to my particularly strange brain. If you like cult Z-grade horror, this is a truly fantastic must-see.
Tags: Insane, Z-Grade, Low-Budget, Unbelievable, Rosemary's Baby Knockoff, Demonic Baby
10. Phenomena (1985)
This is a film from Dario Argento, so expect it to make absolutely no sense.
The fashion in this movie was done by none other than Giorgio Armani!
The excellent Italian prog rock band Goblin does the music for this movie.
Watch it: Unfortunately, this is the one film in the list that's unavailable for legal streaming online. You'll need to buy a physical copy from Amazon or someplace like that.
(Image source from some Italian site, unknown. Click, though, to read a nice writeup on this film from Kinoeye.)
This movie is my other "so crazy it's great" selection for this article. If you've ever seen a Dario Argento movie before, you know what you're in for: great music by Goblin, an absolutely incoherant plot, young girls being terrorized in gruesome ways, and some seriously batshit insane happenings. In this case, it's a monkey that knows how to defend itself...If you are looking for strange and trippy, here's my pick for the year! Also a very early starring role for Jennifer Connelly, who does a great job in her role despite probably having no clue about what the heck she's supposed to be doing. Technically, this movie centers on Jennifer's growing ability to attract friends from nature, while attending some kind of school in Switzerland, and there's a serial killer around for some reason. Honestly, don't try to make sense of the plot, it's typical Argento. This is a pretty gory movie though, be warned. Also, Donald Pleasance!
Tags: Argento, Italian, Prog Rock, Fashion, Child Star, Crazy, Insane, Monkey to the Rescue
That's it! Hope you enjoyed this article, and feel free to offer your own suggestions and/or comments on my picks in the Comments section below! Happy Halloween!
- Jerry Snook, October 2012
Posted by Unknown at 10/21/2012 01:35:00 PM
Labels: Argento, cult horror, film, Halloween, horror films, horror movies, movies, ten picks, top ten
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Ledger Online / November 6, 2012 / No Comment
Conversation with… Etgar Keret
Acclaimed author and filmmaker represents the new Israel
By Judie Jacobson
Internationally acclaimed Israeli author and filmmaker Etgar Keret will open the 20th Annual Mandell JCC Jewish Book Festival in West Hartford when he joins New York Magazine film critic David Edelstein in conversation on Sunday, Nov. 18 at 7 p.m.
Born in Ramat Gan in 1967, Keret is the son of Holocaust survivors. The author of several bestselling books that have been published in 31 languages and 35 countries, Keret’s latest book is “Suddenly, A Knock on the Door.” In addition, he has written several feature screenplays, including “Skin Deep (1996), which won First Prize at international film festivals and was awarded an Israeli Ophir film prize. His film “Jellyfish,” co-directed by his wife, Shira Geffen, who also wrote the screenplay, won the coveted Camera d’Or prize for best first feature at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. In 2006, his film “Wristcutters: A Love Story” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. “$9.99,” a stop-motion animated feature film, was released in 2009. Written by Keret and directed by Tatia Rosenthal, it is an Israeli/Australian co-production featuring the voices of Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia and other leading Australian actors. Keret has also worked in Israeli television, including three seasons as a writer for the popular sketch show “The Cameri Quintet.”
Keret recently made headlines when, on Oct. 20, he took up temporary residence in a Warsaw, Poland art installation designed especially for him by Polish architect Jakub Szczesny. Billed as the world’s narrowest house, the structure – known as Keret House – is wedged between two 1960s buildings located near the old World War II Jewish ghetto. It measures just shy of four feet across at its widest point.
“I needed to design an architectural structure that would envelop life — a revitalization of an empty space, a connector. I also needed an Israeli freaky enough to stay in a very narrow space, who would play the role of an external eye observing and commenting on how Warsaw is changing drastically and rapidly,” says Szcaesny. “The idea was to say [to Israelis], ‘Look – a guy from your country is not just treating this as a space to run from; he has his second residency here.’”
At the time, Keret’s works were starting to appear in Polish. “He was the representation of ‘new Israel’ to me,” says Szczesny. Szczesny made contact and flew to Tel Aviv to meet Keret. The two worked together for three years to make Keret House a reality.
Recently, the Ledger asked Keret about his books, his films, and his new residence.
Q: Regarding Keret House – the narrow house built on the edge of what was the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, not far from where your mother, a Holocaust survivor lived and where much of your family perished – you were quoted by the New York Times as saying: “For me, it’s a kind of metaphor for my family reclaiming a place in Poland.” When you went to Poland for the home’s opening, did you feel as if you were going home?
A: I didn’t feel as if I was going to my own home, but to my family’s home. For me the house is a way to commemorate the memory of my dead grandparents and uncle whose death had left no mark in Poland until now: They have no grave, their house was demolished during the war and this narrow house is a way of saying that our family is still a part of the city.
Q: Did your mother share your excitement and eagerness to “reclaim” your Polish roots? Has she been back to Poland?
A: My mother had never returned to Poland. She is afraid of the memories and traumas such a trip could bring. She does take great pride in my success in Poland and was very happy to hear about the Narrow house project.
Q: Your latest book, “Suddenly, A Knock on the Door,” was translated by Nathan Englander. Do you think his translation was influenced at all by his own writing style? And, if so, is that a plus or a minus?
A: I’ve felt that Nathan’s translation was sensitive to my original text but the fact that he is a talented writer was an amazing gift since his translation wasn’t only loyal to the original text but also to the spirit of storytelling.
Q: What writers are you inspired or influenced by?
A: The writer who gave me the courage to write was Kafka. I read “Metamorphosis” during my basic training and I’ve not only felt that this writer knew something about my soul, but also that a writer could be a flawed creature sharing his flaws with his readers. This model of writing was very different from the Israeli one in which the writer was always a pillar of wisdom and morality leading the way.
Q: Clearly, you are of a very different generation than other well-respected Israeli writers such as Amos Oz, David Grossman and certainly Aharon Appelfeld. How do you think your generational vantage point — as an Israeli born in 1967 – has given you a different take on life in modern Israel? In other words, how is your perspective on modern Israel different than theirs…and how is that difference reflected in your work?
A: The first thing that comes to mind when I think of the generational difference is the language we use. I feel that the writers of the older generation treat Hebrew with a care and respect of those who had just received a new gift. I feel that writers of my generation feel more comfortable when it comes to using a lower register of the language or colloquial speech, making the historical distance between the spoken language and the written one less noticeable.
Q: Your film “Jellyfish,” which will be screened in Hartford in a couple of weeks, doesn’t seem to have a political bone in its body. That is, no one seems to be beating his or her breasts over the ‘occupation,’ the treatment of Palestinians, the country’s claim to statehood, or any other of Israel’s moral sins, imagined or otherwise. Kind of odd for an Israeli film, no?
A: Filmmaking is very individual and I feel that people should be true to the story they want to tell. I do not think political movies are any worse or better than non- political ones. I did feel that in the case of “Jellyfish” we wanted to film a fairy tale taking part in Israel and it seemed as if the obvious political issues would seem forced.
Q: Along the same lines… In discussing his recent film “Footnote” – which also is not political – Joseph Cedar was quoted as saying: “I’m used to speaking to journalists as an Israeli, and it always has a political side to it.” Do you find that’s true for yourself as well? And, if so, can the world accept an Israeli film that isn’t, well, an Israeli film?
A: The world for sure, can accept such a film and the Israeli audience too. And the fact that Footnote and Jellyfish brought big audiences both in Israel and overseas proves that people are open to hear all kind of stories as long as they’re true and are told well.
Comments? Email judiej@jewishledger.com
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Amit Jain
Department of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh
Background and Aim: Intrathecal (IT) neostigmine has been used as an adjunct to spinal anesthesia. The purpose of this study was to determine whether a combination of low-dose neostigmine IT would enhance analgesia of a fixed dose of fentanyl IT, in patients undergoing unilateral total knee replacement (TKR) surgery with spinal anesthesia. Settings and Design: Forty-five patients scheduled for unilateral TKR were randomized to one of the three groups (n = 15) and prospectively studied using placebo-controlled, double-blinded design. Materials and Methods: A 19-G epidural catheter was introduced through the L3-L4 interspace with patient in the sitting position, followed by spinal anesthesia administration through the L3-L4 interspace. Fifteen milligrams of hyperbaric bupivacaine (3 ml) plus the test drug (0.5 ml) was administered IT. The test drug was normal saline (0.5 ml) in group I; fentanyl 20 mcg (0.4 ml) and normal saline (0.1 ml) in group II; and fentanyl 20 mcg (0.4 ml) and neostigmine 1 mcg (0.1 ml) in group III. Characteristics of sensory and motor block, heart rate, and blood pressure were recorded intraoperatively. Postoperatively, pain scores, postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV) scores, and sedation scores, and postoperative analgesic dose were recorded. Results: Forty-five patients were enrolled in this study and 43 patients were subjected to statistical analysis. Overall 24-h visual analog score in group III was significantly less than in those who received fentanyl alone (P = 0.00). The durations of complete analgesia and effective analgesia were longer for all patients in group III compared with group II (P < 0.05) and group I (P < 0.005) patients. The total number of epidural top ups (rescue analgesia) required was less in group II (P < 0.05) and group III (P < 0.005) patients, compared with the control group. The incidence of nausea and vomiting was not increased in group III patients. Conclusions: The addition of 1 mcg neostigmine IT increased the duration of analgesia and decreased the analgesic consumption in 24 h in TKR. There was no increase in the incidence of adverse effects.
Jain A
Jain K
Bhardawaj N
Intrathecal fentanyl
intrathecal neostigmine
spinal neostigmine
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“Judicial Process” Needed for Targeted Killings
National security was at stake, President Richard Nixon contended, when he ordered the FBI early in the 1970s to wiretap the telephones of suspected domestic subversives. The threat was too serious and too urgent, Nixon and his lawyers reasoned, to go to court first for warrants to authorize the taps.
In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court decisively rejected Nixon’s claim of unilateral authority to order electronic surveillance in the name of national security. Justice Lewis F. Powell’s opinion in United States v. U.S. District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972), noted “the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest” and “the danger of abuse” in ruling that the executive could not bypass the courts even when supposedly necessary to keep the country safe.
Today, the Obama administration is claiming an arguably more far-reaching executive power: the power to kill a U.S. citizen thought to be actively engaged in plotting terrorist attacks against the United States. From the administration’s view, the need to give the executive a relatively free hand is as clear as it was to Nixon. And the threat posed by Al Qaeda terrorists is evidently much more real than the supposed danger posed by the Vietnam-era political dissidents.
Despite its best efforts, however, the administration has not made a convincing case for the necessity of bypassing the courts in carrying out targeted killings. The claimed power to kill a U.S. citizen away from an active combat zone differs in kind from the president’s traditional powers as commander in chief. And the practical problems that administration officials point to, including the need for secrecy and speed, can be accommodated by a carefully designed system of judicial review.
Attorney General Eric Holder laid out the legal rationale for targeted killings of U.S. citizen-al Qaeda terrorists in rationale in a speech at Northwestern University Law School last week (March 5). Without naming any individual, Holder was evidently attempting to justify the use of a CIA-controlled drone in the Yemeni desert in late September to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and ranking Al Qaeda operative. Awlaki was thought to have been the architect of the foiled bombing attempt of a U.S.-bound aircraft on Christmas Day 2009 by “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as well as the foiled plot against U.S. cargo planes the next fall.
On paper, the administration’s rules appear to be calibrated to comply with legal as well as moral requirements. Holder laid out three conditions (“at least”) that would make it lawful to use “lethal force” against a senior al Qaeda leader who was “actively engaged in planning to kill Americans.” The government first must have determined, “after a thorough and careful review,” that the individual poses “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” Second, “capture is not feasible.” And, third, the operation “must be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles” – which he later listed as including the need to target only military or cooperating civilians and to minimize collateral damage.
Holder also acknowledged the domestic law consideration, taken straight from the Bill of Rights, that the government cannot deprive a citizen of “life, liberty or property” without “due process of law.” But he was unbending in rejecting any judicial role for passing on the executive’s decision to kill a U.S. citizen. “‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security,” Holder said. “The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”
National security operations are “core functions” of the executive branch, Holder explained, that require decision-making based on information and expertise that only the executive branch can possess in real time. To buttress the point, Holder pointed to an unspecified court decision that he said “makes clear” that the president needs no judicial approval before using force against a senior leader of a foreign terrorist organization “even if that individual happens to be a U.S. citizen.”
In that decision, U.S. District Court Judge John Bates in December 2010 rejected a suit by al-Awlaki’s father seeking to nullify the targeted killing order against his son. In addition to rejecting the father’s legal standing to bring the suit, Bates also ruled that the suit presented a political question, not one for the courts to decide.
The course of the suit, however, belies one of the administration’s arguments that time considerations preclude the courts’ involvement. Al-Awlaki was on the target list for well over a year before his death. The administration had ample time to lay out the evidence against al Awlaki. And contrary to Holder’s suggestion judicial review could be accomplished without putting a judge in the situation room to pass on specific tactical decisions.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, created by Congress to review requests for foreign intelligence wiretaps, could be a model to look to in creating judicial review of targeted killings, as the New York Times has advocated editorially. That court has provided some independent check on potential executive branch overreaching even if its record of nearly always approving electronic surveillance requests disappoints civil libertarians.
Obama is not Nixon, and al Qaeda is not SDS. But the courts have a role in protecting U.S. citizens’ rights even in times of real wars and real dangers. A judicial process for targeted killings could safeguard those rights without jeopardizing national security.
Supreme Court Showdown for Health-Care Reform
In New Jersey, a Just Verdict for a Hateful Crime
A Free Pass for Foreign Companies for Rights Abuse...
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HUNTINGTON, W.Va.-Marshall Athletics has announced the format for Saturday's annual Green and White game, which is set for 3:30 p.m. at Joan C. Edwards Stadium.
As has been the case throughout spring practice, the offense will wear green and the defense will wear white. The first two quarters will consist mostly of starters versus starters with a running clock. This year's scoring system will be a bit unconventional and points will be awarded by Marshall coach Doc Holliday and the staff as they see fit.
"The spring has been all about effort, and becoming a team, so we will decide which side of the ball deserves points on each series and will award accordingly," Holliday said.
Similar to the team's previous spring scrimmages, after the first half is complete, there will be another untimed series of plays that will be situational. Field goal attempts during the game will be live, all other special teams will be situational.
"Our offense vs. defense philosophy for the spring game gives us the best chance to improve as a team," said Holliday. "You will see our best against our best during the majority of the day. We are really young out there and loaded with talent. With only twelve days in pads it is important to make each day count. Our fans will we get an in-depth look at all areas of our team and see some guys they might not know much about."
The West Lot will open at 10:30 a.m. Saturday for tailgating.
"I encourage our fans to become better at tailgating just like I encourage our young men to become better football players," said Holliday. "We have some of the best fans in the country and it is time for them to raise the bar. (Athletic Director) Mike Hamrick and I will be circling the parking lots looking for the best tailgate and the winner will take home some season tickets and a cash prize."
Tickets for the game are $5 and parking passes are $20 per spot and can be purchased in advance by calling 800-THE-HERD or visiting HerdZone.com. Tickets and parking passes will also be available for purchase the day of the game. The Gate A ticket office at Edwards Stadium will open at 1:30 p.m. for the Choose Your Seat program. Ticket Office representatives will be available to answer all questions regarding season tickets.
Gates will open for all Green and White game fans at 2 p.m. Seating will be on the west side only and all fans, including MU students, must enter through Gates A, B and C. Seating is on a first come, first served basis. Students will need to show their valid MU ID at the gate upon entering.
The turning on of the Memorial Fountain ceremony will take place at 12:30 p.m.
The Family Fun Zone in the Chris Cline Athletic Complex will be full of inflatables for kids and will open its doors at 1:30 p.m. You must have a Green and White Game ticket to enter. All fans are encouraged to bring their kids and view the new facility.
The Thundering Herd softball team will also be in action Saturday with a doubleheader starting at 1 p.m. against FIU.
Weather permitting, fans will be allowed on the field after the Green and White Game to a meet and greet autograph session with players along with being a part of the "Championship Belt" presentation.
For any questions regarding the weekend activities, please call 800-THE-HERD.
Marshall Athletics thanks their friends at Kroger for sponsoring The Green and White Game.
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WHO: Fight Ebola Now, Solve Patent Issues Later
06/09/2014 by Catherine Saez, Intellectual Property Watch 2 Comments
The world and the global health community have been taken by surprise by the worst outbreak of Ebola so far. The World Health Organization today (5 September) said a vaccine could be available in November 2014 if proven safe. So far, according to the WHO, intellectual property issues have not acted as a barrier to accessing potential treatments and vaccines, and the focus for now is on emergency measures to find health solutions.
The WHO convened a two-day meeting of international experts ending today to evaluate potential Ebola therapies and vaccines. A vaccine could be available in November if proven safe, according to Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO assistant director general, Health Systems and Innovation, speaking at a press briefing at the close of the second day of the WHO consultation on potential Ebola therapies and vaccines.
According to a statement on the conclusions of the consultation, over 150 participants [pdf] attended the meeting. Experts agreed to recommend using the blood of people who have recovered from the illness to cure sick people. They said the use of whole blood therapies and convalescent blood serums needs to be considered as a matter of priority.
Safety studies of the two most advanced vaccines identified are being initiated in the United States and will be started in Africa and Europe in mid-September, the statement said. If proven safe, a vaccine could be available in November, Kieny said, and this vaccine would be used in priority for healthcare workers in affected countries.
Patent Negotiations to Come
Asked about the potential barrier that could constitute intellectual property rights on the virus or on the potential treatments, Kieny said the WHO had not had time to assess the intellectual property characteristics of all those new medicines.
“It is most likely that there are IP rights and patents which have been filed,” she said, but “so far we have seen absolutely no problem and no barrier to the development and most rapid use of these drugs.”
“At the end, when the Ebola outbreak will fortunately be terminated, there will need to be discussions with the owners of the patents and the manufacturers who are making these products to see how they can be made available at appropriate and affordable cost to the populations who need them,” she added.
Oyewale Tomoro, professor of virology at Redemer’s University in Nigeria, told the press briefing, “if you do what needs to be done,” the disease can be brought under control. He underlined the importance of detection material and communication to explain how the disease is spread.
According to Samba Sow, director general, Center for Vaccine Development at Bamako, Mali, this outbreak is historical for several reasons. The first one is that there has never been such a fast killer in this part of the world. It also affects the poorest countries in the world with limited resources and health infrastructures and almost no border, which makes control very difficult, he said.
Mali has been selected to run vaccine trials, he said, explaining that Mali had not experienced an Ebola epidemic yet and presents a similar environment to places facing an Ebola outbreak. If a vaccine were available, he said, “I would love to be the first African to test the vaccine,” explaining that he is working in close contact with patients.
The expert consultation also concluded that in addition to blood therapies and candidate vaccines, it is worth considering “the availability and evidence supporting the use of novel therapeutic drugs, including monoclonal antibodies, RNA-based drugs, and small anti-viral molecules,” as well as the potential use of existing drugs approved for other diseases, according to the statement.
The statement also underlines the scarcity of the supplies of experimental medicines, and the efforts underway to accelerate production. The prospects of having larger supplies of vaccines rapidly “look slightly better,” it says.
According to a background document [pdf] on potential Ebola therapies and vaccines set out at the start of the meeting, the WHO “estimates that from six to nine months will be needed to control the outbreak.”
The WHO also released today (5 September) the Ebola Response Roadmap Situation Report 2 [pdf], which is the second report in a series of updates on the Ebola Response Roadmap.
MSF Cites Need to Navigate Patents
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors without Borders) is calling on manufacturers, biotechnology firms and researchers to provide updated estimates of product quantities, they told Intellectual Property Watch.
MSF also urged manufacturers to provide “access plans” including immediate donation of products for compassionate use, and said additional manufacturing capacity must be identified and harnessed to scale up production of the most promising products.
They referred to patents on medical products. “Although a number of patents have already been issued on the Ebola virus itself and various vaccines and treatments for Ebola,” they said. “We stress that patents cannot stand in the way of affordable and accessible treatments.”
“If other companies can scale up manufacturing capacity rapidly, patents and other know-how should be made available to these companies, whether through voluntary licence agreements with relevant patent holders or via governments using public health safeguards to enable scale up of production,” they added.
Pharma Consortium for Fast-Track Vaccine Trials
At the end of August, GlaxoSmithKline announced that human trials of a candidate vaccine, co-developed by the US National Institutes of Health and GSK were to be accelerated with funding from an international consortium.
A “£2.8 million grant from the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) will allow a team …to start safely tests of the vaccine alongside similar trials in the USA run by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,” according to the release.
According to the WHO, as of 31 August, 3,685 (probable, confirmed and suspected) cases and 1,841 deaths were reported in the current outbreak of Ebola virus disease by the Ministries of Health of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
In issuing an “international rescue call” UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon today said, “We need contributions – people, material and funding – from Governments, the private sector, financial institutions, non-governmental organizations and other groups at the grassroots.”
“At the meeting [in the US] we have just held, we agreed to establish an Ebola crisis centre to bring synergy and efficiency to the efforts of these many partners within and beyond the United Nations,” he said.
The goal is to stop Ebola transmission in affected countries within six to nine months, and to prevent the international spread of the virus,” he added. “This can be done only if the urgent and necessary mobilization is done both in the affected countries and by the international community.”
Catherine Saez may be reached at csaez@ip-watch.ch.
"WHO: Fight Ebola Now, Solve Patent Issues Later" by Intellectual Property Watch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Filed Under: IP Policies, Language, Themes, Venues, Access to Knowledge/ Education, Development, Enforcement, English, Health & IP, Human Rights, Innovation/ R&D, Patents/Designs/Trade Secrets, Technical Cooperation/ Technology Transfer, WHO
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MainOpEds Building Must Come From the Destruction
Building Must Come From the Destruction
About a month and a half after the deportation of the Jews from Gush Katif and northern Samaria and the handing over of the area to the Arab enemy, we still cannot absorb the dimensions of the horror, but there is one thing that we do know: this cannot go on!
Nadia Matar, 06/10/05 15:35
Nadia Matar
Arutz 7
Nadia Matar is co-Chairwoman of Women in Green (Women for Israel's Tomorrow), sharing the idealistic challenge with Yehudit Katsover.
About a month and a half after the deportation of the Jews from Gush Katif and northern Samaria and the handing over of the area to the Arab enemy, we still cannot absorb the dimensions of the horror, but there is one thing that we do know: this cannot go on! The government plans more uprootings, further deportation of Jews, further handing over of parts of the homeland to the enemy, another surrender to terror. The question arises: Is it possible to stop further deterioration? In my humble opinion, the answer is yes, provided that we learn the correct lessons.
This summer we repeated the scenario of the sin of the spies. Political leaders slandered the land, saying that Samaria and the Gaza region is "a land that devours its settlers," and saying of the Arab enemy that "we cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we." (Numbers 13:31-32) Ariel Sharon's "disengagement" plan of a return to the 1967 lines - if not the 1949 lines - is remarkably similar to what the Israelites said in the wilderness (Numbers 14:3): "Why is the Lord taking us to that land to fall by the sword? ...It would be better for us to go back to Egypt!"
But there is a significant difference between now and the time of the wilderness. In the wilderness, the slanderers actually did so out of weakness, a lack of faith and the "grasshopper syndrome" ("...and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them." - Numbers 13:33). Today, the situation is much more serious: the program of flight from Judea, Samaria and Gaza is a tool in the hands of the leftist elites - headed by Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres - to attempt and break the Jewish camp in Israel, and thereby attain the timeworn dream of the Left: turning Israel into a state of all its citizens, a secular state, totally detached from Judaism.
It is crucially important to understand that the Left's method of disengaging from the Jewish character of the state consists of disengaging from parts of Eretz Israel. The Left's method of breaking the Jewish camp in Israel consists of the misuse of the state's institutions - the army, the police, the State Attorney's Office, the media - in order to physically eliminate the Jewish settlement in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. And this, of course, is only the first step. The elimination of all the settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, Heaven forbid, will be followed by the elimination of the Zionist and ultra-Orthodox yeshivot, and the destruction of everything that even smells of Judaism. And if this is so, if Eretz Israel is the arena of the struggle, by means of which we will also save the people of Israel and the Torah of Israel, then it is clear how we can try to stop the deterioration. Not by "Christian" and galuti (diasporic) declarations such as "We will win with love" and "Let us continue by disseminating the spirit" - slogans that are suitable for Jewish communities in Brooklyn and London - but by returning the concept of Eretz Israel to the center of our spiritual and practical lives.
The response to the slander of the Land is that of Caleb and Joshua: "Let us by all means go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it," (Numbers 13:30) and, "It is an exceedingly good land." (Numbers 14:7) This requires a revolution both in thought and in values, with an accompanying revolution in deeds. Wherever the authorities seek to destroy and demolish, the Jewish camp must call for building and expansion. Any place that the authorities want to abandon, the Jewish camp must demand to return there.
Just what are we talking about, in concrete terms? On the declarative level, we must proclaim to all the world: "There is no Torah, moral or public validity for any relinquishing of parts of Eretz Israel. The Holy One, blessed be He, gave Eretz Israel to the people of Israel for all eternity, and no one has the right to relinquish a single part of it."
Until recently, this was said not only by our rabbis, such as Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, but even by the founders of secular Zionism, such as David Ben-Gurion:
"No Jew is entitled to waive the right of the Jewish people in Eretz Israel. No waiver of this type is binding and does not obligate the Jewish people. Our right to the land, to all the land, exists forever, and until the implementation of the full and complete redemption, we shall not budge from our historic right." (Zikhronot [Memoirs], vol. 5, p. 392)
A referendum, or a majority in the government and the Knesset, do not make any abandonment of Eretz Israel legal and moral, and such decisions may not be obeyed, not even by a soldier or policeman.
Just as we do not recognize any surrender of Shechem, Bethlehem, Kalkilya or Jericho, so, too, we do not recognize the surrender of the Gaza district and northern Samaria. Every day, we shall demand, and act, to return there. We must constantly declare that what was done this summer in Gush Katif and northern Samaria is a crime, and not only because of the deportation of Jews and their transformation into refugees: it is a crime because parts of Eretz Israel were handed over to foreigners.
On the practical level, there is much to do. The following are only a few examples:
Once and for all, we must abolish the acceptance committees that, for years, have limited the expansion of the settlements in Judea and Samaria, and begin the massive construction of apartments in Judea and Samaria.
People must move to Judea and Samaria, especially to the 32 settlements that are on the operating table according to Sharon's mouthpiece, Uzi Dayan. There is no stronger response to the destruction program than the implementation - specifically now - of an operation to double the population of each of these settlements.
Settlement groups must be formed that, when the time comes, with God's help, will return to Gaza, northern Samaria, Jericho, Shechem, Kalkilya and Bethlehem, to settle there forever.
New outpost settlements must be established everywhere throughout Judea and Samaria.
In order to deliver a clear message against further uprootings and deportations, we must advance the "We will neither forget nor forgive" campaign, and call for the placing on trial of the architects and implementers, on all levels, of the crime of deportation, from Prime Minister Sharon to petty clerks such as Yonatan Bassi, to the last of the soldiers and policemen.
Parents of youth must organize and sign petitions saying that we will not send our sons to the pre-military academies and Hesder yeshivas that oppose refusing orders to deport and hand over Eretz Israel to the enemy. Education that teaches the youth that the state and the army are above the commandments of the Torah and above the sanctity of Eretz Israel is a fascist education, and the youth are to be kept away from such places.
All these actions require a true revolution in our thinking. The veteran and official leadership of the religious and national camp is not mentally prepared for such a drastic conceptual change. We shall not forget that a considerable portion of this official leadership participated in this sin of slandering the Land, when they vigorously opposed refusing orders, and instead hugged, danced and "made deals" with the architects and implementers of the deportation crime.
Only the youth can save us from additional deportations, that wonderful youth that fought and showed such self-sacrifice for Gush Katif and northern Samaria. This apparently was understood also by Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephuneh. After the sin of the spies, we do not hear about Caleb and Joshua until the entry to Eretz Israel. What did they do during the course of those thirty-eight years? I am certain that they trained and prepared the youth for the conquest of the Land. Today, we must train, educate and prepare the youth for the struggle over Eretz Israel, that is the struggle for the people of Israel and the Torah of Israel, and for the character of the State of Israel. Please G-d, a true national leadership will emerge from within this wonderful youth that will struggle for Eretz Israel. In the wilderness, it took thirty-eight years because Caleb and Joshua were only two. Today, there are already thousands who are mentally ready for this Jewish revolution and, therefore, we hope that this will take considerably less time.
May it be His will that the year 5766, that comes to us for goodness, will be a year in which the Jews shall prevail over their enemies, both internal and external.
Shanah Tovah! May it be a wonderful year for all of us!
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Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa - A comparative study
Rohan2
Post subject: Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa - A comparative study
The Dipavamsa, the earliest extant chronicle of Sri Lanka, of unknown authorship, deals with the history of the island from earliest times up to the reign of Mahasena (325-352). Erudite opinion holds that it is not the work of a single author but of several authors. Considering the nature of ancient chronicle of the island, we can believe that there is a certain element of truth in it, particularly calculated to be the vehicle of history in early times, when literary facilities were scanty. There is also the opinion that Dipavamsa was the work of two nuns Sivala and Maharuha from India.
Aryadasa Ratnasinghe
The island / 24May1998
As the title indicates, the Dipavamsa contains the history of the island. The preamble to the chronicle, (as translated into English by B. C. Law) reads: "Listen to me! I shall relate the chronicle of the Buddha's visits to the island, the arrival of the Tooth Relic and the Bodhi tree, the advent of the Buddha's doctrine, the rise of the teachers, the spread of Buddhism in the island and the coming of (Vijaya) the Chief of Men".
According to B. C. Law, "Dipavamsa contains many stages of development concluding at different important historical events. There is an apparent lack of uniformity, an unevenness of style, incorrectness of language and metre and numerous repetitions, apart from many other imperfections which indicate it to be the outcome of a series of traditions collected together as a first attempt to record a connected history of the island".
The chronicle embodies the oral tradition of the country handed down from the time of the advent of Buddhism to the island. With all its drawbacks, both literary and grammatical, it is a very useful source of information dealing with the ancient times, and written in Pali.
Mahavamsa
The Mahavamsa, similar to the Dipavamsa, is written in Pali. It deals with the history of the island, from legendary beginnings, also up to the reign of Mahasena. This great chronicle is said to have been written by Ven. Mahanama Maha Thera, an uncle of king Dhatusena (460-478), who lived in the Dighasanda Senapathi Pirivena, which belonged to the Maha-vihara Fraternity in Anuradhapura. His work ends with Ch. 37:50. The rest of the Mahavamsa is known as Culavamsa, especially after Prof. Wilhelm Geiger, who is said to have made the division.
The preamble to the Mahavamsa reads: "Having made obeisance to the Sam-buddha the Pure, sprung from a Pure Race, I will recite the Mahavamsa, of varied content and lacking nothing". (Rendered into English by Prof. Geiger). When Maha-vamsa appeared after the Dipavamsa, it assumed such popularity and importance that it not only superseded the earlier work, but also prompted authors to gradually produce supplementary work based on it.
The later chronicles of the island, written from time to time, are the Attana-galu Vihara Vamsa, the Dhatuvamsa, the Elu-Attanagaluvamsa, the Elu-Bodhivamsa, the Maha Bodhivamsa, the Thupavamsa, the Daladavamsa, the Viharavamsa etc.
In the Culavamsa, it is stated that king Dhatusena, ordered the Dipavamsa to be publicly recited at the annual Mihindu festival held in Anuradhapura (Ch. 38:58). This indicates that at time it was available in some coherent form. The authors of Culavamsa, who made additions to it from time to time, were Ven. Mugalan Maha Thera of Thupa-ramaya in Polon-naruwa, Ven. Dharma-kirti Maha Thera who lived during the Dambadeniya period (1220-1293), Ven. Tibbotuwawe Sri Siddhartha Buddha-rakshita Maha Thera, who lived during the reign of Kirti Sri Rajasinha (1747 - 1780), and Ven. Panditha Yagirala Sri Pragnananda, the Chief Sangha Nayaka of Gonagala Sudharma-kara Pirivena.
Dissimilarities
Oriental scholars are of opinion that the Mahavamsa is more authoritative than the Dipavamsa, and when compared there are dissimilarities which are clearly evident. According to the Dipavamsa, the three visits of the Buddha to the island were in the 1st, 5th and 8th year after Englightenment. The Mahavamsa refers to the visits by the respective months, i.e. on the Duruthu fullmoon day, Bak newmoon day and Vesak fullmoon day. The Dipavamsa does not make any specific reference to the 'minipalanga' mentioned in the Mahavamsa.
The Mahavamsa says that the Buddha, during his third visit to the island, had visited nine places, i.e. "Kelaniya, Samanala-kanda (Sri Pada), Divaguhawa, Digha-vapiya, Maha Megha-vanaramaya, Sri Maha-bodhi Isthanaya, Swarnamali Chaitya Isthanaya, Thuparama Isthanaya, Sila chaitya Isthanaya." Dipavamsa mentions the places as Kelaniya, Digha-vapiya, the place where the Bo-sapling was later planted within the Maha Mewna-uyana and the Megha-vanaramaya. It does not make any mention of the Buddha's footmark atop the Sama-nalakanda. We cannot construe with assurance the reference to Maha Meghavana-ramaya, since it was a place later presented to Arahat Maha Mahinda, the great apostle of Buddhism, by king Devanampiyatissa (BC 247-207), after the demise of the Buddha in 543 BC.
According to tradition, it was an Aryan who first came over and settled down in Sri Lanka. The circumstances under which this first Aryan, prince Vijaya by name, happened to come to the island, are mentioned in the Mahavamsa. Aryan is a name given to a broad division of the human race who are supposed to have inhabited the vast stretch of country from Central Asia to Eastern Europe, and to have reached India about 3000 BC.
According to the story in the Maha-vamsa, the country of Vanga was ruled by the king of Vangas, whose queen was the daughter of Kalingas, when a daughter was born to them, it was predicted that, when she comes of age, a lion would cohabit with her. Fearing what was foretold, she left the palace one day in disguise and joined a caravan going from Vanga to Magadha. As the caravan was going through a forest in Lala country, it was attacked by a lion, and took the princess away. With their union, she gave birth to twins whom were named Sinhabahu and Sinhasivali. (Ch. 6:8).
The author of the Dipavamsa has, however, tried to be more factual in referring to the husband of the princess as a man named Sinha who was an outlaw that attacked caravans en route. In the meantime, Sinha-bahu and Sinhasivali, as king and queen of the kingdom of Lala, "gave birth to twin sons, sixteen times." The eldest was Vijaya and the second was Sumitta. As Vijaya was of cruel and unseemly conduct, the enraged people requested the king to kill his son. But the king caused him and his seven hundred followers to leave the kingdom, and they landed in Sri Lanka, at a place called Tamba-panni, on the exact day when the Buddha passed into Maha Parinibbana in 543 BC.
The Dipavamsa mentions that the children of king Panduvas-deva (BC 504-474) were Abhaya, Tissa, Uttiya, Asela, Vibha-taya, Rama, Siva, Matta, Mattakala and Ummadachitra. The Mahavamsa does not give weight to these names, as mentioned in the Dipavamsa. The children of king Mutasiva (BC 367-307), according to Mahavamsa, were Abhaya, Devanam-piyatissa, Mahanaga, Uttiya, Mattabhaya, Mitta, Mahasiva, Suratissa, Asela and Kira. But, the name of his daughters are simialr in both chronicles.
The union of prince Gamini and Umma-dachitra, the childhood days of prince Pandu-kabhaya, the building of the Mahamewna-uyana, the questions asked by the Arhat Maha Mahinda from king Devanampiya-tissa, the ordination of Anula and other women, the stone pillar erected within the precincts of the Ruvanweliseya etc., are not mentioned in the Dipavamsa, but the Mahavamsa describes them in detail. The Pirivenas Kalapasada, Lohapasada, Suna-hatha, Dighachan-kamana, Phalagga and Therapassa, built by king Devanampiya-tissa, are not mentioned in the Dipavamsa, but the Mahavamsa makes mention of them to prove the spiritual zeal of the king.
Sect Rivalry
The Dipavamsa does not mention the cause for the separation of the Abhayagiriya fraternity from that of the Mahavihara, and the formation of the Dhammaruchi sect of the Mahayana tradition. As regards the schism and rivalry that prevailed between these two sects, and the mischievous activities of Sona and Mitta in planning the destruction of the Hinayana bhikkus of the Mahavihara, are not properly accounted therein.
Although the Mahavamsa mentions the names of those who came to the island along with Arhat Maha Mahinda, it does not refer to those who came along with the Theri Sanghamitta carrying the Bo-sapling from India. Dipavamsa mentions them as Uttara, Hema, Masaragalla, Aggi-matta, Dasika, Pheggu, Pabbatamatta, Malla and Dhammadasi. Most of the bhikkunis who assisted Theri Sanghamitta in the propagation of the Dhamma and Vinaya are found in the Dipavamsa only. The planting in the soil of Sri Lanka the Bo-saplings of the three previous Buddhas is not mentioned in the Mahavamsa though Dipavamsa makes reference to them.
The Mahavamsa covers ten chapters pertaining to the activities of king Dutugemunu and his religious zeal, but Dipavamsa does not contain more than ten stanzas and makes the story short. The Sirisanghabo story is well described in the Mahavamsa, but the Dipavamsa says that the king ruled for two years only. The arrival of the heretical bhikku Sanghamitta, during the reign of Gotabhaya (302-315), and the establishment of the 'Vaitulya' doctrine in the island is not mentioned in the Dipavamsa.
The controversy that arose between the two Naga kings Mahodara and Chulodara, to possess the jewel-throne, and how the Buddha averted a serious offensive by reconciling the two contending factions, during his second visit to the island, is not clearly mentioned in the Dipavamsa, although Mahavamsa mentions about it (CH. 1:47).
Prof. Geiger is of the view that the "defects in the Dipavamsa, which, naturally, could neither nor should be disputed, concern the outer form and not the contents. But, that the author of the Dipavamsa, simply invented the contents of his chronicle, is a thing impossible to believe. The Dipavamsa is a sort of chronicle of the history of the island from the legendary beginning onwards and presents the first clumsy reaction in Pali. The Mahavamsa is a new treatment of the same thing distinguished by greater skill in the use of the Pali language by more artistic composition and literal use of the material contained in the original work."
When Sir Alexander Johnston (1811-1819), Chief Justice, desired to obtain the most authentic information that could be obtained relative to Buddhism, usages, manners, and feelings of the people who professed the faith, he was presented with the two books Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa as the main authority. These two chronicles, according to their considered opinion, "contained the most genuine account of the origin of Buddhism, its doctrine, its introduction into the island and of its effects, both moral and political. With the displacement of the Dipavamsa, as a result of the appearance of the Mahavamsa, the authority and the value of the latter chronicle has always remained the outstanding treatise."
Buddha Maitreya
According to the account found in the chronicles Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa, the earliest period to which reference is made deals with the time of the Buddha Kakusanda, the first of the Buddhas belonging to the maha Bhadra Kalpa, during which five Buddhas appear to relieve mankind from the evils of suffering. The present Buddha Gautama is the fourth in lineage. The last is Buddha Maitreya who is supposed to come into the world in another 2500 years time. The chronicles also say that Sri Lanka, during the dispensation of Buddhas Kaku-sanda, Konagama, Kasyapa and Gautama, was respectively known as Ojadipa, Varadipa, Mandadipa and Lankadipa. The capital cities were Abhyapura, Vaddha-mana, Visala and Anuradhapura respectively.
In 1874, the then Governor, Sir William H. Gregory, having consulted the scholars of oriental studies in England, assigned the translation of the Mahavamsa, from Pali into Sinhala, to the reputed and erudite scholars who were Ven. Hikkaduwe Siri Sumangala Nayaka Thera of the Vidyodaya Pirivena, and Ven. Batuwantudawe Sri Devarakkhitha Maha Thera (later known as Panditha Batuwan-tudawe). Their work was highly commen-ded and honoured by those scholars who were not proficient in Pali. However, the initiative to have the chronicle translated into Sinhala came first from the Governor Sir William Henry Robinson. In the meantime, George Turner had translated the first 37 chapters of the Mahavamsa into English, having secured the required information from the Malwatte and Asgiriya Chapters in Kandy.
According to Mahavamsa, the monastic institution next in importance to the Mahavihara of the Theravada tradition is the Abhayagiri Vihara built by king Vatta-gamani Abhaya (AD 78-88). When he became the undisputed ruler of the country, he demolished a monastery belonging to the 'nighanta' Giri, and built in its place the Abhayagiri vihara, enjoining the names Abhaya and Giri.
Later, a faction of bhikkus broke away from the Mahavihara and formed themselves into a new sect known as the Dhammaruci Nikaya. The thera Mahatissa, who helped king Vattagamani Abhaya to recover the lost sovereignty, was given the incumbency of the newly built Abhayagiri Vihara. The Mahavihara, which assumed in no time a supreme place in the religious and educational life of the country, held its authority until the Abhayagiri Vihara entered into the scene.
The second famine known as 'beminitiya-says', lasting twelve years, is said to have occurred during the reign of Vattagamani Abhaya. The Maha-vamsa does not mention of such a famine, but says "in the fifth month after Vatta-gamani ascended the throne, a brahmin in Rohana named Tissa, encouraged by a prophecy of another brahmin, that he was destined to be the ruler of the country, revolted against the king. At the same time seven Tamils from India came to the island and marched against the king, who managed to escape with barely his life." The Rajavaliya mentions of the famine, said to have occurred" due to the curse of a brahmin woman whose husband was unjustly killed on the orders of king Milinda because he coveted his wife."
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Tania Rodriguez: Leading the recall on Islamophobia in Plano
Tania Rodriguez is part of the movement to recall Councilmember Tom Harrison’s seat on the Plano City Council; Councilmember Harrison fell under fire after he shared a video on his Facebook account, calling for a ban of Islam in schools. Rodriguez and fellow community members in the City of Plano have acted to remove Harrison from the council, including filing a petition that garnered over 4,400 signatures to recall his election. Now, Rodriguez hopes to utilize her experience mobilizing her community in an effort to eliminate hate speech and discrimination through the local organization Our Plano, One Plano. Rodriguez wants to eliminate discrimination, saying “it has no place in this community of ours.”
Rodriguez (head of table) verifying signatures for the recall petition
Rodriguez spent her early childhood in Mexico, living with her grandparents until she was five. She remembers her grandfather, who was a professor of history and geography, speaking to her about local politics. On one occasion, Rodriguez recounts her grandfather bringing her to a political party headquarters in Mexico. The party was gearing up for a presidential election, so all team members were in full swing to get out the vote, including her grandfather who was assisting with the selection of polling locations. Rodriguez recalls this as her first exposure to politics. Rodriguez looked up to her grandmother, who regularly accompanied her grandfather at these political events. Not only did Rodriguez’s grandmother raise four children, but she also vested her time in local politics. Rodriguez said, “she would take care of business at home and also take care of business in the community.”
Rodriguez’s politically riddled childhood prepared her for the moment she realized she had a personal interest in politics: the 2014 Texas Gubernatorial race. When Rodriguez heard about the renowned filibuster gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis conducted, she wanted to take part in the movement where women could rise up and speak out. It was then that Rodriguez began to recognize the disparity between men and women in political representation. She quickly teamed up with IGNITE, a nonprofit dedicated to building political ambition in women, to help more women, like Wendy Davis, get elected to office. Rodriguez currently leads the IGNITE Chapter at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Now, Rodriguez has taken on a new cause: she is fighting against Islamophobia in North Texas. On February 13th, Plano City Councilmember Tom Harrison shared an anti-Islamic video to his Facebook news feed depicting children in schools wearing traditional hijabs. The post said, “share if you think Trump should ban Islam in American schools.” Immediately, Rodriguez jumped into action and connected with like-minded folks in the City of Plano, keen on eliminating outward displays of xenophobia. Our Plano, One Plano, an organization dedicated to shifting the narrative on social equality in Plano, filed a petition to recall Councilmember Harrison’s seat that garnered 4,425 signatures from residents. Rodriguez knew she had to take action when she saw the video reposted on Facebook, saying “Discrimination, xenophobia, islamophobia – it has no place in this community of ours.” As a result of the petition and sequential hearing, Councilmember Harrison will undergo a recall election in November to determine whether he will be removed from the council.
Rodriguez wants other young women inspired to make change not to be afraid. She tells them, “Don’t be afraid to be smart. Don’t be afraid to share your intellect. Don’t be afraid to be the person that changes someone’s life.” Currently, Rodriguez is completing her Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas, and one day, she hopes to have a career focused on making impactful changes to the community.
Author: Brooke López
Founder & Executive Director
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Cannes 2019: Did Deepika Padukone just drop a major hint about her red carpet look?
Deepika Padukone won over social media with her look for the Met Gala 2019. The stunner opted for a Zac Posen gown with voluminous ruffles for the do. It was slightly cinched at the bust. The lady completed it with a gleaming diamond hairband, dark lips, colourful eyeshadow and lots of bronzer. Deepika Padukone looked every inch a diva and everyone fell hard for her yet again. While that was that, we can't wait for her to shine at the 72nd Festival De Cannes at French Riviera.
Reportedly, DeePee will walk (read slay) the red carpet on May 16 and while we are not exactly sure what she is going to wear, we do know which colour it just might be! If you haven't seen it yet, the actress has taken to Insta stories to drop some of them cues and apparently it's going to be red! In a poll question, the Chhapaak actress asked fans if she should wear red on a red carpet and something tells us this is about her Cannes 2019 lewk.
Seriously, the wait to see Deepika sashay at the coveted film festival just got harder. In fact, we can't wait for Indian beauties to steal all the limelight. If you haven't heard already, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is still figuring out the date with her team. And while nothing has been confirmed yet, it seems like it will be May 19 when she will descend as she does. On the other hand, Sonam Kapoor has confirmed May 20 and 21 for her appearances at the French Riviera. Meanwhile, Kangana Ranaut will be walking the red carpet on May 16.
On the work front, Deepika has started the shooting of Chhapaak, which is directed by Raazi helmer Meghna Gulzar. The film also stars Vikrant Massey and is expected to hit the screens on January 10, 2020. The film is produced by Deepika Padukone and is based on the life of acid attack survivor Laxmi Agarwal. The film will clash with Ajay Devgn, Saif Ali Khan and Kajol starrer Tanhaji:
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Trump: “In Putin’s Pocket"
[postlink]http://www.mikebarnicle.tv/2018/07/trump-in-putins-pocket.html[/postlink][starttext]
“To use a phrase: Yesterday really was a day to cry for the country. This great republic that means so much to so many around the world. To see the president of the United States, Mr. Trump, shrink – shrink – next to Vladimir Putin, to drop his oath of office, to drop his duty on a world stage — to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. And then to have so many here in this country, on TV programs like this one say, ‘what a surprise.’ No, this was not a surprise. This was Mr. Trump in full view of the world. This is who he is: ignorant, narcissistic, all involved with himself. His priority is himself, not the country, not the presidency. He is unaware of history. He was unaware certainly yesterday of anything that this republic has stood for through the ages. The only thing he was aware of, clearly, was that he was in Putin’s pocket,” says veteran columnist Mike Barnicle as the Morning Joe panel talks about the fallout from President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, the day after the gathering between the two leaders, where President Trump sided with President Putin over US intelligence on the topic of Russian interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Listen to more of the discussion here.
Does Russia have “compromising material on Preside...
Trump and Putin
Trump’s new conditions on Mueller
Pompeo’s North Korea Plan
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Gemma Appleton/Hannah Browne/Anne-Marie Creamer/Stuart Croft/
Jan Mladovsky/Michael Ridge/Freya Smith/Holly Sutton/Mathew Noel-Tod/
Mark Aerial Waller/Liz Wright/Natalie Zervou
The title of the exhibition is paraphrasing Goethe's novel Elective Affinities and in the context of the novel, the well-established chemical term “elective affinities” - relating to the mysterious behaviour of chemical elements - is extended to cover human relationships, both personal and political. Like alkalis and acids, the words and images of Goethe’s characters - even if diametrically opposed - have a curious affinity for one another.
Goethe was an artist as well as scientist and believed that both art and science search for the same truth. He states that art “rests upon the deepest foundations of knowledge, upon the being of things, insofar as we are permitted to know it in forms we can see and grasp”, that knowledge based on experience of nature is merely an ideal and that it reveals itself in the work of art, when it becomes perceptible reality. “Artists must confront the naked truths that are not very comforting…Art is long, life short, judgment difficult and opportunity transient”.
Contemporary communications seem to demand new forms of expression reflecting the channelling of images, words and sounds into a stream of information. The exhibition ‘Selective Affinities’ explores how the participating artists’ work - using images, sounds and words - represents reality and whether the various strategies employed enjoy a harmonious kinship, engage in skirmishes, or seek to destroy one another. The history of iconoclasm and its periodic ebb and flow tells us about the ideological stakes of the debate.
The established artists in the exhibition live and practice outside the region, but began to interact professionally through their teaching involvement with the New Media pathway at Norwich School of Art & Design. Pursuing the collective ethos of those staff associated with the Norwich course, they now want to contribute this project to the wider context of the city, by inviting the students to exhibit alongside the tutors on the common - external to the art school - ground of the OUTPOST gallery. ‘Selective Affinities’ thus provides a platform to explore new pedagogic models. “As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live…then… whatever you can do, you can begin – boldness has genius, power and magic in it” Goethe.
Art schools have traditionally been regarded as part of the art-world, at least by the art-world itself. This is where new generations of artists come from. However, as publicly funded and regulated institutions, they may be primarily expected to fulfil educational roles and to be integrated within the academic establishment. By exhibiting their work together at OUTPOST and by taking part in the debate, the artists and the students associated with New Media Fine Art at NSAD want to demonstrate not only the affinity of their creative practices, but also their affinity to the idea of art schools as part of the art-world, and the value of such a concept to the regional community.
Jan Mladovsky - Exhibition Curator
Katherine Mager - Assistant Curator
Tuesday 1st May,
St. Simon & St. Jude church,
3.30 – 5.30pm
Anne-Marie Creamer
Stuart Croft
Simon Granger
Derek Mace
Lynda Morris
Neil Powell
Michael Ridge
Sue Tuckett
Natalie Zervou
Jan Mladovsky
Selective Affinities is a metaphor for the process of becoming an artist, a process central to the story of art and well known largely through the biographies of famous artists. Its social dynamic however is intertwined with the history of the institution of the Art Academy and the theory of Art Education.
The proposition for the debate accompanying the exhibition is to examine the current relationship between the Art School institution, the personal journey of becoming an artist and its relevance vis-à-vis the contemporary art world. The discussion will be informed by the personal contributions of the panel, representing the broad perspectives of the artist, the student, the curator and the art educationalist.
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Seri Thai Movement (เสรีไทย) : Covert Operations in Southeast Asia
In contingent with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in the last month of 1941, the Japanese Imperial Army marched into Southern Thailand from Malaysia, calling for free passage into the country. Phibun Songkhram, both Commander and Chief of the Royal Thai Army and the Prime Minister at the time, allowed Japanese entry, vowing to maintain Thai independence in lieu of Japan's colonial activities enacted against neighboring Southeast Asian countries. As Japanese troops within the country and demands to utilize Thai facilities and resources increased, Thailand was now fully engulfed by the war. By January 1942, Bangkok declared war on Great Britain and the United States.
On the opposite side of the globe, Thai students studying in the United States were facing a predicament; their country had declared an alliance with an Axis power and they were studying within the confines of a now declared, Allied nation. Thailand’s Ambassador in Washington, M.R. Seni Pramoj, refused the Thai-Japanese alliance. While his colleague in Britain announced Thailand’s declaration of war, Seni Pramoj refused to deliver the declaration to the U.S. government. In response, the U.S. also refrained from declaring war against Thailand.
Through Seni Pramaoj’s leadership, a coalition of overseas Thai was built that would support the Allied war efforts. Thai university students studying in MIT, Harvard, and Cornell were recruited to work with Gen. William Donovan’s United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a wartime intelligence agency that was a predecessor to the CIA. The Free Thai Movement was thus born.
War Time Operatives:
Although the Seri Thai Movement’s activities were mostly done underground, over 50,000 Thai Volunteers underwent excruciating training and dangerous missions and treks to collect and report finding to supporters in China and other areas of Indochina. While some made it back to their designated bases to report on the Japanese Army’s location, others were either captured, killed, or disappeared. Ironically, Thai nationals were walking on thin ice in their own homeland.
The movement’s main base of operations was in Phrae Province, under the jurisdiction of Pridi Panomyong and Thong Kantatham. Pridi, the Regent of Thailand and founder of Thammasat University, was already well known in Thai politics for his involvement with the Siamese Revolution of 1932 which changed the system of government from that of an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. Both men led and launched Operation Hotfoot and Operation Numeral, parachuting operations that helped deploy weapons, supplies, and medicine to supporting troop members. The lives of Thai volunteers were constantly endangered, having to navigate around Allied bombing campaigns, rescuing fallen foreign soldiers, avoiding Japanese detection, all while broadcasting findings and weather reports to partners in the U.S.
Finally, on October 5, 1944, the OSS Detachment in Szemao, China, received an important radio message from Free Thai agents in a safehouse based in Bangkok, allowing Allied forces to be dispatched in strategic locations within the country via submarine, airdrop, or seaplane. By 1945, the war was over in Thailand. Seri Thai not only became a crucial source of military intelligence for Allies hoping to win back the Southeast Asian region, but paved the way for the country’s post-war independence a few years to come.
Post-war:
Due to the contributions of the many volunteers within the Free Thai Movement, the U.S. refrained from prosecuting Thailand as an enemy country in post-war tribunals and peace negotiations. On September 2, 1945, many Seri Thai members received the Medal of Freedom from the U.S. government including: Air Chief Marshall Tavee Julasup, Major General Boonmark Tesabutr, Commander Vimol Viriyavidh, Mr. Piset Pattaphongs, M.C. Yuthisatien Sawadivatana, M.L. Ekachai Kumpoo, Mr. Anond Srivardhana, Dr. Sala Tsanond, Air Marshal Sith Savetsila, Mr. Umnuay Poonpipatana, Mr. Udomsak Pasavanij, Mr. Kusa Punyarchun, and Mr. Somjit Yos-sunthorn.
Various monuments and local attractions were installed to celebrate Seri Thai’s achievements throughout the war. The Free Thai Movement Museum (พิพิธภัณฑ์เสรีไทย) is located on Yantarkitkosol Road, Phrae, Thailand, purposefully as a dedication to the town’s importance as the base of operations for the Seri Thai Movement. The museum highlights military maneuvers and covert operations conducted by both Thais and U.S. soldiers alike. The museum is privately financed by Puchong Kanthatham, son of Thong Kanthatham, the leader of the Free Thai movement in Phrae.
Another attraction includes the Seri Thai Cave located in the province of Sakhon Nakon. The attraction includes the statue of Tiang Sirikhanth, the founder of the Free Thai within the province. The cave is dedicated to the farmers and villagers that sacrificed their lives to swift undergo military training to combat Japanese forces.
More recently in 2017, the U.S. Ambassador to Thailand and his Thailand staff members visited Phrae to learn about growing vocational opportunities as well as to pay respects and celebrate U.S.-Thai relations during the war. While it has been about 74 years since the end of the war, undoubtedly, the continuous bond built between the two nations are growing stronger than ever.
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2008-featured-story-archive/free-thai-movement.html
The Thai Resistance Movement During The Second World War, John B. Haseman, Chalermnit Press, Bangkok.
http://www.insigne.org/OSS-Thai.htm
https://th.usembassy.gov/ambassador-davies-visits-phrae/
Check out our publication and read more!
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Home In The News Cree to Invest $1 Billion to Expand Silicon Carbide Capacity
May 9, 2019 mpdigest 0
Cree to Invest $1 Billion to Expand Silicon Carbide Capacity
As part of its long-term growth strategy, Cree, Inc. will invest up to $1 billion in the expansion of its silicon carbide capacity with the development of a state-of-the-art, automated 200mm silicon carbide fabrication facility and a materials mega factory at its U.S. campus headquarters in Durham, N.C. It marks the company’s largest investment to date in fueling its Wolfspeed silicon carbide and GaN on silicon carbide business. Upon completion in 2024, the facilities will substantially increase the company’s silicon carbide materials capability and wafer fabrication capacity, allowing wide bandgap semiconductor solutions that enable the dramatic technology shifts underway within the automotive, communications infrastructure and industrial markets.
“We continue to see great interest from the automotive and communications infrastructure sectors to leverage the benefits of silicon carbide to drive innovation. However, the demand for silicon carbide has long surpassed the available supply. Today, we are announcing our largest-ever investment in production to dramatically increase this supply and help customers deliver transformative products and services to the marketplace,” said Gregg Lowe, CEO of Cree. “This investment in equipment, infrastructure and our workforce is capable of increasing our silicon carbide wafer fabrication capacity up to 30-fold and our materials production by up to 30-fold compared to Q1 of fiscal year 2017, which is when we began the first phase of capacity expansion. We believe this will allow us to meet the expected growth in Wolfspeed silicon carbide material and device demand over the next five years and beyond.”
The plan delivers additional capacity for its industry-leading Wolfspeed silicon carbide business with the build out of an existing structure as a 253,000 square-foot, 200mm power and RF wafer fabrication facility as an initial step to serve the projected market demand. The new North Fab is designed to be fully automotive qualified and will provide nearly 18 times more surface area for manufacturing than exists today, initially opening with the production of 150mm wafers. The company will convert its existing Durham fabrication and materials facility into a materials mega factory.
“These silicon carbide manufacturing mega-hubs will accelerate the innovation of today’s fastest growing markets by producing solutions that help extend the range and reduce the charge times for electric vehicles, as well as support the rollout of 5G networks around the world,” said Lowe. “We believe that this represents the largest capital investment in the history of silicon carbide and GaN technologies and production with a fiscally responsible approach. By using existing facilities and installing a majority of refurbished tools, we believe we will be able to deliver a state-of-the-art 200mm capable fab at approximately one-third of the cost of a new fab.”
The expanded campus also creates high-tech job opportunities and will serve as an advanced manufacturing workforce development initiative. Cree plans to partner with state and local community and four-year colleges to develop training programs to prepare its workforce for the long-term, high-quality employment and growth opportunities the new facilities will present.
tags: WOLFSPEED A CREE COMPANY
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Widespread Panic Cuts New Album, Maps Out Preview Tour
After selling some 175,000 copies of its 1998 live double album, "Light Fuse Get Away," Southern trip-poppers Widespread Panic have convened into a studio with long-time friend and producer John Keane to work on the band's sixth studio album, tentatively due out on July 27.
The Panic have been cutting material at John Keane's Studios in the band's hometown of Athens, Georgia, for the last three weeks, and have so far laid down 13 original tracks and three cover tunes. Guests who have dropped by to lend a hand include the horn section from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Big Ass Truck percussionist and DJ, Colin Butler.
Sessions will continue and off for the next few weeks, after which Widespread Panic plan to head out on its home-away-from-home (the road) for a short preview tour in April and May. Last year the band, which has become known for its jam-heavy performances, pulled in more than $8 million from touring and was one of the Top 40 draws of 1998.
Dates for the Panic's
spring tour:
4/8 - Hampden-Sydney, VA @ Hampden-Sydney College
4/9 - Salem, VA @ Salem Civic Center
4/10 - Philadelphia, PA @ Electric Factory
4/13 - Columbus, OH @ Mershon Auditorium
4/14 - Ann Arbor, MI @ Michigan Theater
4/16 - Starkville, MS @ Mississippi St. University
4/17 - Huntsville, AL @ Von Braun Civic Center
4/19 - Lake Buena Vista, FL @ House Of Blues
4/22 - Boone @ NC @ Appalachian State University
4/23 - Lexington, KY @ University Of Kentucky
4/24 - Charlotte, NC @ Central Cityfest
4/27 - Jacksonville, FL @ Moran Theatre
4/28 - Pensacola, FL @ Bayfront Auditorium
4/30 - New Orleans, LA @ Jazz & Heritage Festival
5/1 - New Orleans, LA @ Memorial Lounge
5/2 - Atlanta, GA @ Music Midtown Festival
5/4 - Myrtle Beach, SC @ House Of Blues
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Cyclones and Its Types in India
May 10, 2019 by Editor
The earth and the atmosphere around it have an intense connection with one another. The weather depends on the balance of heat and moisture in the area. When this balance is disturbed, climatic anomalies develop. One such natural anomaly, that is common in both northern and southern hemispheres, especially during the summer months are cyclones. It is an intense storm that has the power to rip apart everything that is placed in its path.
In normal storm formations, the wind blows from one direction to another. In case of a cyclone, the wind swirls up. This continuous spinning movement of the air makes the cyclones more devastating. The winds travel up, and when they reach the cool areas of the upper atmosphere, they develop into clouds. Thus, cyclones are always accompanied by torrential rains and thunderstorms. When charged storm clouds pass one another, they create intense electrical charges, which are fatal and destructive.
Types of cyclones
The word ‘cyclone’ is a common term that is used to define several kinds of storms. Some of these storms may develop on a landmass, while others are created over oceans. Depending on the nature of the storm and the origin, cyclones can be broadly categorized in three groups.
Tropical cyclones – As the name suggests, these storm formation take place in the tropical areas. These happen every year during the summer months. These are also called Hurricanes. These only form in the northern hemisphere, and develop between 10 degree North and 25 degree North latitudes.
For this storm to develop, the surface temperature of the sea and the ocean must be either 28 degrees Celsius or more. This temperature causes the air over the ocean surface to travel upwards. As this happens, cold air from the land takes up the vacant place, thereby causing high-intensity tropical depression. It is near this depression that a thunder storm develops. As the temperature of the area soars up, the wind develops a twirling motion.
As these spinning storm formation dashes towards the land mass, it paves the path for massive destruction and devastation along the coastal areas. As hurricane travels over the land, it slowly loses its power and fizzles out. If another depression develops over the ocean in the meantime, then the former storm system will attain more power. To make things worse, the people living in the coastal areas will have to face torrential rain, along with thunder and lightning.
Polar cyclones – These storms systems are also called mid-latitude cyclones. The mid-latitude or polar cycles are common during the winter seasons. Countries like Greenland, Antarctica and Siberia face the wrath of these storms. Instead of rain, the storms bring in a blinding blanket of ice and blizzards. As these countries are not very populated, the damage percentage is also low.
Mesocyclone – These are also known as supercell thunderstorms. These are high intensity tornadoes where you will see an updraft of wind. As the storm gains momentum, it forms a cloud wall. This wall of charged clouds gradually descends. The residents of USA face around 1,700 such storm formations on a yearly basis.
How does a tropical cyclone develop?
The best way to develop a tropical cyclone is to circular storm that is dense and compact. The average diameter of the storm formation is 320 kilometers. It has a low-pressure core. It gains momentum from the rotational movement of the Earth. The path of wind movement is generally counterclockwise in Northern hemisphere. The storm has a circular outer area. It is in the shape of ring. It is the outer most part of the cyclone. The radius of this outer ring is 160 kilometers. The next ring has a radius of around 30 to 50 kilometers. The wind speed in this area is faster and the spinning motion is also brisk.
The innermost area of the cyclone is known as the eye of the cyclone. It is the most devastating part of the cyclone and the wind speed is highest in this part. But after the eye passes over a certain area, people in that area will experience a temporary calmness. But it will be short-lived as the other part of the eye will soon pass over the same area. Then the second ring and finally the outer most rings will pass over the area. Scientists are conducting researches to figure out the pattern of the storm movement. But it seems impossible to figure out the whims of nature.
The crucial relation between the updraft and the downdraft will create the perfect conditions for the development of a cyclone. The light and warm moisture containing air moves up, and it sets the updraft in motion. It is the first step that will set in the next set of events, which will ultimately form an intense cyclone. The disparity in the temperature between the land breeze and sea breeze sets the system in motion. As the warm air goes up from over the sea, the heavy land breeze flows in swiftly. These two actions create a tropical depression. Here, the winds tend to pick up force and move in circular motion. Then the entire cyclone travels towards the nearest landmass. Each year, such tropical cyclones form over the Bay of Bengal. The coastal areas of Odisha, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh suffer due to these powerful winds.
Precautions to be taken before and during the cyclone
Man has no power over nature. If a cyclonic formation has developed, it will run it will course. There is nothing one can do to stop it. Damage to property and life can be minimized if one observers certain precautions before and during the cyclone.
Prior to the cyclone:
It is important for the people to remain calm. Spreading rumors will only make the situation worse.
It is best to keep all communication gadgets on full charge. If there is outage of power, you will not have to worry about a dying phone.
Calling may not help as the communication towers will cease to function. Thus, it is best to send SMS rather than making calls.
Tune in news channels to keep a tab on what the weather office announces.
It is best to keep all necessary documents in a plastic container. It ensures that they will not be damaged by water. Keep these documents within easy reach.
Stock up general medicines and ready the emergency first aid kit.
Make sure that your pets and cattle are sheltered properly.
During the cyclone:
Make sure that the main power switch and the gas connection has been turned off.
All windows and doors of the house must be securely shut.
If you live in an old house that may not be able to tolerate the harsh wind blows, then it is better to evacuate in advance.
Refrain from drinking well or tap water as the lines may be contaminated. Boiling water before consumption will ensure safety.
Standing near damaged building, trees and power polls must be avoided at all cost.
Do not venture near any sea or ocean. These areas suffer the most damage.
The central and the state governments take necessary steps to ensure minimum damage in case of natural calamities. A rescue and disaster management team is always ready to come to the rescue of the people, after the cyclone passes. The task of the state government is to measure the damage, and take reconstruction actions accordingly. Awareness among the people will reduce the number of casualties by leaps and bounces.
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Senegalese forward Macoumba Kandji linked with Sanat Naft [Report]
Posted by Mir Farhad Ali Khan on Tuesday February 19
Tasnim – ABADAN, Iranian football club Sanat Naft Abadan is reportedly going to sign Macoumba Kandji.
The 33-year-old Senegalese striker most recently played for Finnish football club Honka.
Kandji started his playing career at American club Atlanta Silverbacks in 2007.
He has also played at New York Red Bulls, Colorado Rapids, Greek team Levadiakos, HJK of Finland, Saudi Arabian Al-Faisaly and Inter Turku.
Sanat Naft, headed by Portuguese coach Paulo Sergio Bento Brito, sits 11th in Iran Professional Leahue (IPL) table.
Recent Headlines:
Milad Mohammadi joins Belgian club KAA Gent
Iran learn fate at Qatar 2022 & China 2023 race
Ramin Rezaeian on verge of Persepolis return: Report
AFC Asian Qualifiers: Excitement builds ahead of second-round draw
Lazio reignites interest in Sardar Azmoun: Report
Nigerian defender Baker joins Zob Ahan
Iran B, U23 football teams share spoils
Dragan Skocic appointed as Sanat Naft coach
Dragan Skocic linked with Sanat Naft job
Gabriel Calderon named Persepolis coach [Official]
ACL: Zob Ahan to host Al Ittihad in Doha
Persepolis confirm negotiations with Gabriel Calderon
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October 13, 2017 archive
Fossil Fuel Producer Partners With Clean Energy Producer to Roll Out EV Charging Stations
A leading global oil and natural gas producer, will purchase a top European operator of electric vehicle charging stations in an effort to roll out the technology at its service stations, according to a report in The Hill. Royal Dutch Shell announced Thursday that that it would purchase Netherlands-based NewMotion, which has produced more than 30,000 private charging …
BLM Sued to Invalidate Nine Colorado Oil and Gas Leases in Favor of Gunnison Sage Grouse
A Colorado lawsuit filed in Denver federal court on Tuesday alleges the U.S. Bureau of Land Management failed to consult with wildlife managers and complete endangered species reviews before selling leases in March, according to a report by The Associated Press. The lawsuit — filed by San Miguel County, Rocky Mountain Wild, San Juan Citizens …
State Water Resources Board Grants Sardis Permit to Oklahoma City
By a vote of 6-1, the Oklahoma Water Resources Board voted Tuesday to grant a permit to Oklahoma City to transfer water from the Sardis Lake reservoir in southeastern Oklahoma, according to a report by The Oklahoman. The single vote against granting the permit came from a board member who resides in southeastern Oklahoma. OK …
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← Territoriality
Lost Girl Cast News (Lisa Berry, Rachel Skarsten, Lyndie Greenwood, Kris Holden-Ried) →
“The Arrival Is Upon Us”
PROJECT BLUE BOOK – Season 1 Episode 5 – SPOILERS
Susie (Ksenia Solo) about to remove the sunglasses that conceal the black eye she got from her ‘associate’ (whose name we still don’t know)
Because Susie (Ksenia Solo) rescued Mimi from Lieutenant Fuller in the previous episode, she gets a visit from Captain Quinn (Michael Malarkey), who is suspicious because, though Susie says she lived in New York City, he can find no record of her being there. (One would think Soviet spies would have created at least a flimsy fake background record, but apparently they did not.) She also gets a black eye from her “associate”. She doesn’t get upset about any of this, but instead keeps her appointment with Quinn the next morning and asks him out for a drink.
Lieutenant Fuller: “Write ’em down.
They will save your lives”
As he prepares to climb a radio tower in Terre Haute, Indiana, Lieutenant Fuller (Matt O’Leary) tells police to remember the numbers three, forty-two, eleven, seventy-six, and seventy-nine because they will save their lives. (He says the numbers twice so there can be no mistake.) General Harding (Neil McDonough) gives that sequence of numbers to Hynek, not as distinct numbers, but written as a string of digits with a zero added (between the seven and the six) which makes them correspond to digits 91 to 100 of Pi.
Quinn (Michael Malarkey) and Hynek (Aidan Gillen) in Missouri. Behind them is Quinn’s 1950 Chevy
That leads Hynek to a short wave radio broadcast the source of which is a photography studio specializing in pinups and lingerie shoots. When he explains how he located the place, Kelly (who runs the studio and is paid anonymously to maintain the broadcast) gives him an envelope with two photos in it. One is of a squadron of P-61’s. The other is a picture of earth taken from an altitude of about 12,000 miles (roughly the orbit of a GPS satellite). Quinn tells Hynek that the planes in the photo are the 415th night fighter squadron. Hynek apparently already knows this, and tells Quinn that squadron was the first to report sighting Foo Fighters, and says the sightings happened over Germany in 1944.
Patrick Gallagher as fictional former fighter pilot Randall Kavanaugh.
In actuality, the 415th was in southern France in 1944, supporting the 7th army, and were flying Bristol Beaufighters. In the spring of 1945 they moved to Germany and started flying P-61s, but flew only a few missions in them before the war ended.
One night in November 1944, a Beaufighter with pilot Edward Schlueter, navigator Donald J. Meiers, and intelligence officer Fred Ringwald on board, was flying along the Rhine river north of Strasbourg when the three crewmen saw eight to ten bright orange lights off their left wing, flying at high speed. The objects did not register on anyone’s radar. When Schlueter turned toward the lights, they disappeared. Later they appeared farther away. The display continued for several minutes and then ended abruptly.
Meiers, who was from Chicago, named the objects Foo Fighters, a nonsense word frequently used in the Smokey Stover comic strip, which ran in the Chicago Tribune from 1935 to 1973.
Smokey Stover the Foo Fighter
The objects were sighted many times by pilots on both sides of the conflict. They never interfered with the aircraft they were following (so it is unlikely they were a weapon). And they never showed up on radar. It seems possible that their purpose was to illuminate the aircraft they followed to make them more easily observed from a distant vantage point (perhaps 12,000 miles above the earth).
Many of the (fictional) airmen interviewed by Hynek and Quinn believe that they can communicate with extraterrestrials. (The fictional Hynek points out logical reasons why this cannot be so.) Meanwhile, Fuller steals a car, and is able to start it without a key by passing his hand over the ignition switch.
Hynek tells Quinn about the abandoned amusement park and takes him there, but the indoctrination facility he found on the way back from Fargo (see Episode One) has been removed. Fuller also turns up at the amusement park. Hynek shows Fuller the drawing he made of one of the alien pictographs, and asks him if he knows what it means. Fuller promptly douses himself with gasoline and sets himself alight.
Donna (Heather Doerksen), the neighbourhood busybody, arrives
bearing cookies
General Harding later suggests to General Valentine that someone flipped Fuller’s “off switch”. Was Fuller programmed to self-destruct when shown that image?
Mimi’s neighbour Donna (Heather Doerksen) stops by with cookies. She is very curious about the soldier guarding the Hynek house, and asks just what kind of a name Hynek might be. (Mimi responds with incredible politeness to these inquiries.) Donna hurries home to watch DRAGNET which debuted on NBC on 15 December 1951. A historical reference in Episode Three is also from 1951 (the third Soviet nuclear test, which occurred on 18 October of that year).
PROJECT BLUE BOOK has been renewed for a second ten-episode season by The History Channel.
Kelly (Nadine Lewington) shows Hynek the equipment that continually broadcasts the message: “The arrival is upon us.”
Nadine Lewington (Kelly) will be Geraldine in THE POISON ROSE, based on Richard Salvatore’s 2018 novel of the same name. In the book, Carson Phillips, an ex-football player turned detective, is hired to return to his hometown to find a missing person. After he discovers that his long-lost daughter is the prime suspect, Phillips is caught up in a complicated mixture of blackmail, drug smuggling, and murder in an effort to prove her innocence. John Travolta will star as Phillips, and Morgan Freeman will be Doc, a Galveston, Texas crime boss. THE POISON ROSE completed production last summer, and will be released in The Netherlands on 21 November.
Laura Mennell (Mimi) was asked by Crookes Magazine if she had ever experienced a ‘close encounter’. She replied: “I might very well have. I was with my boyfriend in the summer looking up at the sky and saw this light that was bigger than a planet. It wasn’t blinking like the usual aircrafts one might see at night and there was no sounds of jet engines. It was flying in our direction for a a short time, then just seemed to stop in mid-air for at least ten minutes. It was bizarre. Who knows, maybe it was something out of the ordinary, but I guess I’ll never really know for sure.”
Robert Stromberg, who directed “The Fuller Dogfight“, will direct RELATIVITY, a biopic inspired by the true story of Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić. The film will chronicle Mileva’s relationship with Albert Einstein through love, science, marriage, and scandal. (Einstein and Marić were married in 1903 and divorced in 1919.) Written by Emiliana Monahan Dore and Adrienne Lusby, RELATIVITY should begin production in Prague later this year.
Posted in Project Blue Book, TV Tagged Ksenia Solo, Laura Mennell, Matt O'Leary, Michael Malarkey, Nadine Lewington, Patrick Gllagher, Robert Stromberg, The Poison Rose permalink
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IBM. The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon
Autor: CORTADA, James W.
Enlace: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ibm
A history of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.
For decades, IBM shaped the way the world did business. IBM products were in every large organization, and IBM corporate culture established a management style that was imitated by companies around the globe. It was “Big Blue, ” an icon. And yet over the years, IBM has gone through both failure and success, surviving flatlining revenue and forced reinvention. The company almost went out of business in the early 1990s, then came back strong with new business strategies and an emphasis on artificial intelligence. In this authoritative, monumental history, James Cortada tells the story of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.
Cortada, a historian who worked at IBM for many years, describes IBM's technology breakthroughs, including the development of the punch card (used for automatic tabulation in the 1890 census), the calculation and printing of the first Social Security checks in the 1930s, the introduction of the PC to a mass audience in the 1980s, and the company's shift in focus from hardware to software. He discusses IBM's business culture and its orientation toward employees and customers; its global expansion; regulatory and legal issues, including antitrust litigation; and the track records of its CEOs. The secret to IBM's unequalled longevity in the information technology market, Cortada shows, is its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances and technologies.
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Home » FEATURE STORY, INDYCAR
Team Penske Looking Strong In Elkhart Lake
Info Manager | , RacinToday.com Saturday, June 24 2017
Josef Newgarden dashes through the woods at Road America on Friday. He and Team Penske mates ruled the road during practice. (Photo courtesy of INDYCAR)
Team Penske flexed its collective muscle during Friday’s practice for the Kohler Grand Prix at Road America, locking down the top four positions on the combined time sheet after a pair of 45-minute sessions.
Josef Newgarden led the Penske parade in Elkhart Lake, Wis., setting fast lap in the No. 2 DeVilbiss Team Penske Chevrolet at 1-minute, 42.8229-seconds/140.537 mph around the 4.014-mile/14-turn permanent road-course. Track activity will continue Saturday with Verizon P1 Award pole qualifying. The race, the 10th of 17 on this year’s Verizon IndyCar Series schedule, is set for Sunday afternoon.
“I was happy with today,” said Newgarden, the winner earlier this season on the road-course at Barber Motorsports Park in Birmingham, Ala. “I thought it got a little loose in the afternoon with the temperature coming up slightly. We were working on that, but pretty smooth run on the (Firestone alternate) reds, which was nice to see. We’ll try to carry it into tomorrow and see what we’ve got.”
Directly behind Newgarden on the time sheet were teammates Will Power, driver of the No. 12 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet (1:42.8720); Simon Pagenaud in No. 1 Menards Team Penske Chevrolet, (1:43.1370) and Helio Castroneves in the No. 3 REV Group Team Penske Chevrolet, (1:43.2227).
“Definitely we just keep learning off each other,” said Power, the defending race winner. “That’s going to be the key this weekend. I’m pretty sure we’ll all be at the front in qualifying. It’s about doing a good job and trying to get the most out of your car, and understand where your teammate’s faster.”
The first non-Penske and non-Chevy on the combined speed chart was driven by Alexander Rossi, whose lap of 1:43.3285 in No. 98 NAPA Auto Parts/Curb Honda topped the morning practice and held up for fifth quick on the day.
Rossi, however, had issues on two occasions in the afternoon practice. First, the Andretti Herta Autosport with Curb-Agajanian driver slid off-course in Turn 14 and contacted the tire barrier to bring out a red-flag stoppage. Later in the session, Rossi skidded through the grass in Turns 12 and 13 before regaining control and pulling into the pits.
“We set our quickest lap on the second run on reds (Firestone alternate tires),” Rossi said.” I think the fact that we were able to do that shows there’s inherent speed in the car. It was a bit of a disjointed session with the off in the beginning, so we were kind of playing catch-up after that but I think the car is good. We need to make a couple of little tweaks overnight to get me more comfortable, but I feel good about the pace the car had today.”
Esteban Gutierrez, who made his series debut three weeks ago with Dale Coyne Racing at the Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix, was named Thursday to drive the team’s No. 18 Honda for the remainder of the season. Gutierrez, of Mexico, was 17th in practice Friday with a lap of 1:44.0868. He is subbing for the recuperating Sebastian Bourdais, who suffered back and hip injuries in a crash during qualifying for the 101st Indianapolis 500 on May 20.
“I enjoyed a lot competing in INDYCAR (at Detroit) and, therefore, we tried our best to continue for the rest of the season,” said Gutierrez, who spent the 2016 FIA Formula One World Championship schedule with American-owned Haas F1 Team. “Here we are. So I’m very, very happy.
“It was a bit of a mixed day. Obviously driving at Road America is always a pleasure, so I really enjoyed it. We had a small issue in the first session that cut our session a bit short. In Practice 2, it was slightly better, but I’m still not 100 percent comfortable with the car on braking, so this is an area that we need to focus on and fix for tomorrow.”
Touring car driver Robert Wickens was a quick-fix substitute for Mikhail Aleshin in the No. 7 SMP Racing Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Honda, after visa issues prevented Aleshin from returning to the United States from his native Russia in time for Friday’s on-track activity. Wickens, who tested a Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Indy car in February as part of a ride swap with friend James Hinchcliffe, ran 20th in each of the sessions with a best lap of 1:44.7085.
“I’m really happy with today,” Wickens said. “Obviously, you always want to make as much progress as possible, and you never know if you’ve done enough or if I should achieve more. The biggest thing for me is the car is still in one piece and I haven’t made a terminal error yet. The Schmidt Peterson Motorsports team has done a fantastic job getting me up to speed and making me comfortable.”
Schmidt Peterson Motorsports is hopeful Aleshin will arrive in time to be in the car Saturday.
“It’s been a strange day because I’m not really sure if I’m doing the next session, since I don’t know when Mikhail is arriving or if he’s arriving,” Wickens said. “So I’m going to work overnight as if I’m driving tomorrow morning, and if not, then hopefully I can help out the team somehow.”
A third practice is scheduled for noon (EDT) Saturday that will stream live on RaceControl.IndyCar.com. Three rounds of knockout qualifying begin at 4 p.m. and conclude with the Firestone Fast Six to decide pole position. NBC Sports Network will air a same-day telecast of qualifying starting at 5 p.m. (EDT).
Sunday’s race is set for 55 laps around the iconic circuit _ five laps longer than a year ago. Live coverage will begin at 12:30 p.m. (EDT) on NBCSN and the Advance Auto Parts INDYCAR Radio Network.
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Anderson.Paak - Oxnard
By Jared Rubin
Brandon Paak Anderson, better known as Anderson .Paak, stylized with an out of place period (which I will get to later), has become paramount to today’s West Coast R&B sound. Paak rose to prominence after appearing multiple times on legendary cali artist Dr. Dre’s 2015 album Compton. However, he entered differently into the music scene than most artists of his genre, starting out as a drummer in sixth grade. He went on to drum in a church band as a teen, and eventually became the drummer in the band of American Idol contestant Haley Reinhart. Paak’s affinity for percussion is evident in his music which is often carried by a unique drum pattern. Oxnard proves that there are still unique sounds to be made and new directions that R&B can move in.
Although Paak grew up hanging out at his church as opposed to experiencing the violent gang tendencies common to the Cali rappers before him, he still faced tough times and loss. When he was seven he had to call the police on his father after seeing him attack his mother. His father subsequently went to jail for fifteen years, and that was the last time that Paak saw his father until his funeral. Hard times returned when Paak was working on his self funded, self produced debut album, and was fired from his marijuana farm job. He was put into a situation of mass debt due to recording costs, rendering him, his wife, and their infant son homeless. He persevered, scoring a job as a studio assistant, where he was able to finish his album on the side. The album, titled O.B.E., Vol. 1, released in 2012 under the name Breezy Lovejoy, received little to zero mainstream success. Yet as music reviewer Anthony Fantano put it, “it’s hard to imagine living in a world where this man would not eventually become famous.” Two years later Paak went on to release Venice, the relaxing first installment of his beach album trilogy. This was followed two years later by the second installment Malibu, which finally earned Paak mainstream recognition. Malibu received a Grammy nomination for Best Urban Contemporary Album and Paak was further nominated for Best New Artist. On top of these nominations, Paak signed a contract with Dr. Dre’s Aftermath record label. Hot off of mainstream recognition, Paak put out the final chapter of the beach trilogy, titled Oxnard in late 2018.
Oxnard is a perfect illustration of Paak’s lively disposition together with his unique approach to making music. “The Chase” opens up the album, bursting with cinematic drums, horns, strings, and organ, reminiscent of an L.A. based blaxploitation inspired film such as Jackie Brown. After a minute, Paak begins his melodically rapped verse, characterized by the signature tinge of rasp in his voice. The ninth track of Oxnard, “Brother’s Keeper”, has instrumentals that possess the same cinematic ambience as “The Chase”. A jazzy guitar riff contrasted with a more electronic drum beat backs up a Pusha T verse that wasn’t particularly different from other verses lent by the seemingly out of place GOOD Music crack dealer turned rapper. However, Pusha T ironically raps about how it’s a challenge to change our ways, no matter how devious, with on the nose lines such as “It’s hard to leave your foundation” and “I’m still rhyming ‘bout the you know” (Oxnard, 2018). This tendency to indulge in illicit behaviors contributes to one of the main themes of Oxnard, which is embodying a spirit of youthful mischievousness.
Paak’s affinity for funk, soul, hip-hop and everything between is evident throughout the album. For example, the track “Anywhere” serves as a tribute to 1990’s G-funk, a genre born from the marriage of West Coast gangster rap and 1970’s funk. And who else but Snoop Dogg, a father of this sound, could supply the first verse, where he confirms “This the beat that make reminisce on G-funk”? Snoop leisurely raps over an equally laid back beat consisting of smooth high hats and a funky bass line. Paak develops his neo soul/contemporary R&B sound on songs such as “Who R U?” and “Mansa Musa” which may serve as a trailblazer for other top artists of the genre such as Frank Ocean and The Weeknd. Along with subdued hip hop and jazzy R&B, these songs feature futuristic tones such as the echoey bounce of synth in “Who R U”. Similarly, “Mansa Musa” features a pleasant electronic tone that thumps like a pulsating, muted tuba as the backbone of the beat. The experimentation of “Mansa Musa” is balanced by the old school flow of none other than hip hop pioneer Dr. Dre, who also serves as executive producer of the album.
Production is another place where Oxnard stands out because Paak had a lot to do with it. This should be no surprise though—seeing how creative of an artist he is, it makes sense that he has an active role in his music’s production. This responsibility that Paak puts on himself is a testament to the period that he stylizes his name with (I told you I would get to it). He said in an interview with NPR that “The dot stands for detail” and serves to remind himself and others that he would always pay attention to detail when working on his craft.
There are, however, moments in Oxnard w here I personally feel Paak could have paid a little bit more attention to the detail. Musically, I believe this album is fantastic, but certain styles and ideas in songs such as “6 Summers”, and “Left to Right” let me down. It pains me to criticize “6 Summers” as it is one of my favorite songs off of Oxnard to listen to, but as a political anthem it is lacking in significant commentary. The song starts with Paak belting a line involving Trump’s hypothetical lovechild, who Paak hopes is buckwild, sips mezcal, and kisses señoritas. It is a playful metaphor, but offers little serious commentary on our country’s political climate. In addition, the song contains lyrics that criticize capitalism—but Oxnard was released by Aftermath Entertainment, founded and run by Dr. Dre, who’s arguably one of the most successful rapper turned billionaire entrepreneur of all time. My final criticism is on the last song of the album, “Left to Right”. For some reason Paak sports an artificial Jamaican accent throughout the entirety of the song, and it’s cringeworthy. The beat of this song is as pleasing as any other from Oxnard, but Paak’s rude boy alter ego creates a dissatisfying conclusion.
Despite my aforementioned personal judgements of Oxnard, I still believe this is a high quality album that showcases the talent and versatility of Anderson .Paak. This album may not be monumental in itself, but it shows what Anderson .Paak is capable of, and has the possibility go down as monumental in Paak’s career. In addition, Oxnard shows that there is a new direction that this particular subgenre of R&B can go towards, and it sounds damn good when Paak takes it there.
Earl Sweatshirt - Some Rap Songs
December 10, 2018 Hannah Morrison
By Jack Hernstadt
On Some Rap Songs, Earl Sweatshirt strives for simplicity. As he explained in an interview with Vulture earlier this week, “Incomplete sh*t is really stressful to me, and the concept of unsimplified fractions is really stressful to me.” This philosophy explains the minimalist title, but does the music on the album follow suit? Despite its fragmented nature, SRS still manages to feel complete, honest, and pure.
While this album has very little single power, as a front to back listen it is perhaps Earl’s most focused artistic statement to date. It is comprised of fifteen songs, but clocks in at a brief 24 minutes long. Each track acts as a tiny window into a musical landscape where the listener must take in as much as they can before the song vanishes in a haze.
Very few songs on the album feel resolved, usually ending with a vocal or instrumental sample that sounds like it was cut off a few seconds too soon. This takes away any feeling of resolution from even the catchiest songs, like Ontheway! and Cold Summers. When listened to all the way through, however, this creates an interesting effect, like mindlessly surfing through radio frequencies. It also echoes the style of one of Earl’s biggest influences, M.F. Doom, specifically his classic Madvillainy.
In stark contrast to the crisp, electronic production that dominates the popular sphere of hip hop, the songs on SRS are muddy and smeared, refreshingly human and organic. There are very few musical detours, with each track generally revolving around a single loop or sample. The lo-fi production proves to be detrimental to some songs, like on the second track, Red Water. On this song Earl’s vocals are muffled, dampened and ultimately overpowered by the loop he is rapping over.
This album’s feeling of completeness comes chiefly from its beautifully raw bars. Earl has cut out all the fat, with his usually tongue twisting and image laden verses largely missing from this project. Instead, Earl delivers painfully intimate and piercing lyrics concerned with mental health, addiction, and family relationships.
Some Rap Songs stands as an unflinching personal document of the mind of Thebe Kgositsile. While at times dark, this project is an undoubtedly inspiring and therapeutic listen. While Earl Sweatshirt brings his inner turmoil to the surface for all to hear, the listener comes away from these songs with feelings of solidarity and catharsis: the signs of a truly effective piece of art.
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- Sam Heughan
Scottish scientist and Coast star Xanthe Mallet discusses her new life in Australia
14:39, 9 Jun 2014
By Steve Hendry
FORENSICS expert Xanthe, who swapped Dundee for New South Wales in 2012, presents the Australian version of Coast with fellow Scots star Neil Oliver
Xanthe films at the Great Barrier Reef for Coast Australia, investigating the site of a 1911 shipwreck
XANTHE Mallett used to see the River Tay on her way to work in Dundee.
Now, when she gets to leave her office, she takes in the glorious coastline of Australia.
The scientist is one of the presenters of Coast Australia, the Antipodean version of BBC2’s long- running series.
She swapped Tayside for New South Wales in 2012 after five years working alongside the world-renowned Professor Sue Black at the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID), based at the University of Dundee.
She had also embarked on a fledging TV career with appearances on History Cold Case with the CAHID team and National Treasures.
But when she headed Down Under to take up a post as forensic criminologist at the University of New England, the 37-year-old thought the plug had been pulled on her television stint.
She couldn’t have been more wrong. As well as Coast Australia, she is also a regular expert on Wanted – the Aussie version of Crimewatch – and her star is rising in her adopted home.
She said: “When I relocated, I had no idea whether or not the TV stuff was over. I’d really enjoyed it but thought I might well be leaving it behind.
“Then I got here and pretty soon was approached to do Coast Australia.
“I had just arrived and was being asked, ‘Would you like to travel round the coast of Australia and see all the most beautiful bits?’ Well OK then.
“They normally give me sites where a lot of people died – war graves, shipwrecks, that sort of thing.
“They try to work some forensics into it. This year, I have done a segment with the police diver training unit looking at body recovery from nets. It’s amazing.
“I am so lucky, I get to go to places most people don’t. Australians who watch the series often say I’ve seen more of Australia than they have.”
Xanthe with a human skull filming the History Cold Case TV show
Xanthe, who was born in Alexandria, Dunbartonshire, but schooled down south, is not the only Scot exploring Australia – one of her co-presenters is UK Coast stalwart Neil Oliver.
The Aussie series, now being shown on BBC2, launched to record ratings on Foxtel’s The History Channel and has
been a huge success.
But away from the sweeping coastal panoramas and the colourful history of the communities and industries which are based there, Xanthe’s day job – as a human identification specialist and criminologist – is much more down to earth.
In some cases that can mean right down to the grave, analysing and helping to identify skeletal remains. It’s demanding work and keeping her working life and home life separate is vital.
She said: “I have always been really good at compartmentalising.
“You can see some terrible things and you have to look at it like you’ve got a puzzle and you are offering the information to solve it.
“The day I go home and something triggers a memory, a flashback, I will walk away from it because it starts impacting on you psychologically.
“At the moment, I can still do what I need to do then go home and not think about it.”
Xanthe’s move to Australia has seen her expand her role as a forensic anthropologist to criminologist.
She said: “I enjoy looking at the behavioural side of it, why something is done a certain way.
“I really see a link between criminal behaviour and how the scene presents, in terms of how someone gets killed.
“It has a lot to do with the relationship between the victim and the offender.”
Her fame has gone down better with some colleagues than others but Xanthe, who trained as a dancer, sees it as a tool in reaching out to the public.
She said: “It’s like anything in academia. Some think you shouldn’t branch out into the media because you are selling out, almost dumbing down.
“But I see it as part of my job to take information to the public and make it more accessible.
“My immediate colleagues couldn’t be more supportive but not everyone has been as keen.”
She doesn’t regret her move Down Under and has now become an Australian citizen.
She said: “Who knows what I will be doing in a year’s time. Things have changed so much. I’ve had so many opportunities, I didn’t expect to have. I’m having a ball.”
• Coast Australia is on BBC2 on Wednesday at 9.10pm.
Scots TV presenter Neil Oliver remembers the men of Skye who lost their lives in World War I due to German Maxim machine guns
Australia celebrates cultural links with Scotland in major art exhibition
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Intentionally, and with Precision
Cada Guaraguao Tiene Su Pitirre
Is Not a Language
Bernard Hopkins: Alien
Book Review: 'Heart of the Order,' Edited by Gabriel Fried
Book Review: 'Ropes,' by Derrick Harriell
Issue 1 : Winter 2014
Issue 2 : Spring/Summer 2014
Issue 3: Fall 2014
"...but in joy create for others the house, the poem, the game of athletic beauty" — Dudley Randall
by Patrick Rosal
Then they put on weird clothes, space helmets, robes, flowing capes. They did rituals, played in rituals, evoked lost civilizations, used strangeness to teach us open feeling as intelligence.
— “Sun Ra”, Amiri Baraka
We are your future. You are the past.
— “Looking For the Perfect Beat”, Afrika Bambaataa
One reason I watched November’s Light Heavyweight Championship boxing card was because I wanted to see if Bernard Hopkins, a man going on fifty years old, could retain his world title against a much younger man, a bona fide heavy-duty puncher, in Sergey Kovalev.
I was hoping B-Hop would come away with the win, but Kovalev was sharp and extremely patient. The challenger moved better than I thought he would, especially with an impressive feint-and-fill-the-space hook that put Hopkins on his ass in the second round. The rest of the fight Hopkins never hit the canvas again and there were short flashes where you thought he might be able to drag Kovalev into a messy clinch. Maybe Hopkins could steal some rounds by half wrestling, half roughing him up on the inside. But that never quite happened. Even though the forty-nine-year-old fighter managed to float Kovalev into the late rounds past the eighth, where his less experienced opponent had never been, Hopkins couldn’t finish him off. The reigning champ lost to the young Russian by unanimous decision (106-120, 107-120, 107-120).
The other reason I watched the fight was because I’ve been intrigued by the Philadelphia boxer’s name change. I’ve been fascinated by The Alien. Last year, Hopkins replaced his hangman’s hood. He walked up the aisle of the Karo Murat fight wearing instead a bright green mask with a huge cranium, tapering to a narrow chin, small mouth, and big black eyes.
I know a little something about aliens. I was born to a pair of them. I remember, when I was a kid, seeing the documents that proved my parents’ identity — their Resident Alien cards. To this day, in parts of the country, I walk into a room and still get that “You’re not from around here” look. Sometimes people will just say it to me out loud. My mother and father were both eventually naturalized — for as we well know, aliens exist against the natural order. By definition, they originate from some elsewhere — exotic or galactic or both — a place outside the sanctioned borders.
In the essay, “Black to the Future: Afrofuturism 1.0”, Mark Dery points out the connection between sci-fi tropes and the history of slavery: “African-Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees.” Turns out, you can look at Hopkins’ Alien not just as boxing kitsch, but as a figure in the black tradition of Sun-Ra, Parliament Funkadelic, Ikon, Brother from Another Planet, and more, which is to say, the Alien is also a manifestation of Black Power and Black Arts and can be traced back through the Harlem Renaissance, the blues, Negro spirituals and the Middle Passage.
Let’s not forget that aliens very often have a more sophisticated knowledge of earth than earthlings themselves do. I imagine that’s one of the things that make aliens somewhat terrifying to ordinary humans. The power of aliens often comes from their acute observation of earth and its inhabitants. These highly cultivated habits of attention make aliens more prepared to adapt — and survive.
Days before the fight, Hopkins was talking his usual shit. He told reporters at the presser that Kovalev would step into the ring on Saturday and find out that the 31-year-old could only be what he is — slow footed and predictable. Really, Hopkins was pointing to a quality of his own unbelievable success: adaptability.
You may know that Bernard Hopkins was sentenced to 18 years in prison for armed robbery at the age of 17. In many interviews, he has repeated the catalog of terrible scenes he witnessed while incarcerated. “When I saw a guy murdered for a lousy pack of cigarettes, something in me snapped,” Hopkins told The Atlantic. In 1988, when Hopkins was released with nine years parole hung on him, the warden at Graterford told him it was just a matter of time before he would see him again in one of those cells. The young man, who started boxing while doing time, told the warden, “I ain’t ever coming back.”
Despite Hopkins’ determination to be a great pro fighter, he lost his very first fight to Clinton Mitchell. Hopkins didn’t step into the ring again for another a year and a half — a very long layoff for a new fighter. When he returned, he reeled off 21 wins in a row, knocking out 16 of his opponents along the way.
He climbed the middleweight ranks as a skilled defender and boxer. He moved very well, faster and slicker than most of his opponents. His fists found their target in quick well-timed swarms. In 1992, Hopkins took on a new name: The Executioner. He played up the role when he walked up the aisle and into the ring, looking over the ropes at the crowd, making an “X” with his forearms, drawing his hand across his neck like a murderer, an assassin. But Hopkins was also the executioner, that is, one who could carry out a plan.
He got his first world title shot against another up-and-comer named Roy Jones Jr. In that world-class matchup, he met a faster, slicker fighter and lost by unanimous decision. That was 1993 — only Hopkins’ second loss. But it was time for another change.
Hopkins, even more committed to his craft, slowed the pace in the ring and became more deliberate, controlling the tempo. He went on to win an amazing 24 fights in the next 12 years without losing. (He had one draw and one no-contest during that stretch.) He beat excellent competition in Glen Johnson, Syd Vanderpool, Felix “Tito” Trinidad, William Joppy, and Oscar de la Hoya.
In 2005 that string ended abruptly. He lost twice in a row, dominated both times by Jermain Taylor. While fans and commentators said the Executioner was done, Hopkins made another change; he moved up to compete at light heavyweight. He kept his name but evolved his style a bit further. Mostly he became an expert at frustrating his opponents. He had gradually become unhittable. Fighters had trouble finding him.
During that period, Hopkins had a no-contest and a loss in two absolutely sloppy back-to-back fights against Chad Dawson. But it was as if he was working through his transformations in the ring, because, soon after, Hopkins appeared to have perfected the ragged style he had been cultivating by beating a tough Jean Pascal and becoming the oldest fighter ever to win a world title at the age of 46. Two years later, at 48, The Executioner looked masterful in his title defense against Tavoris Cloud, who was a decade and a half Hopkins’ junior.
His victory last year against mandatory challenger Karo Murat marked Hopkins’ last shape-shift: the black mask of the axman was gone. In the post-fight interview, Hopkins was asked how he was still a dominant champion at the age of 48. He responded, “I’m a freakin’ Alien.”
How else could a man nearly a half-century old beat full-grown professional fighters young enough to be his sons? Hopkins’ success, of course, has much to do with his mind-and-body pre-fight preparation. It has to do with strategy. He still executes as good as anyone in the ring. In the current Bernard Hopkins decade, he has slowed down his fight tempo even more; he is even more controlled. He tangles fighters up quite a bit more in the clinch. He’s gotten even cagier, sometimes throwing low blows or tripping his opponents. He has wily techniques to knock fighters off balance or shove them out of position. His style has gotten — well — awkward. And that’s different from clumsy.
For Hopkins, awkward is a choice. The word that gets thrown around more often is ugly. That, too, makes the Alien moniker a good fit, for aliens (by earthly standards) are not handsome creatures.
And when I think back on “ugly” in boxing, I think about Muhammad Ali ridiculing Joe Frazier in front of press and crowds: ugly. That’s the word Ali used to demoralize Frazier. I think about how painful that was for the tough Philly future Hall of Famer — to be degraded publicly like that right smack in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, to be turned into the ape, the savage, the grotesque Negro.
Hopkins, on the other hand, chose his ugliness. I think by winning ugly, he has cleverly shown that even ugliness has symmetry and function. I wonder if we couldn’t say that Hopkins has rescued ugly from these particular sorrows of boxing history.
In addition to adaptability, there is another characteristic of aliens that might be even more important to consider: aliens operate outside the normative, rational world. They don’t make sense.
When Hopkins says that the horrors of prison made something inside him “snap”, I wonder if that was the sound of an American myth finally breaking.
The warden — within the rules of his world, a world that he owns and enforces — was right. In his America, on the third planet from the sun, it is completely within the logic of his galaxy that a young black man just released from prison should get picked up again in no time and sent back to be locked up. It is the same world and same set of logic by which an unarmed black youth is simply gunned down without consequence or repercussion.
Bernard Hopkins’ metaphor is particularly moving for me tonight. For the last week or so, many of us in the country have been waiting to see if a Grand Jury will indict the Ferguson, Missouri police officer who, this past summer, shot the unarmed Michael Brown, 18, dead. Kimani Grey was 16. Sean Bell was 23. Oscar Grant was 22. Even Eric Garner, when killed by police, was 43, younger than Hopkins as a World Champion. And at this very moment, my news feeds are flashing headlines of Akai Gurley, 28, unarmed and shot dead by police in a Brooklyn stairwell.
That’s the thing. Hopkins, a black man, at almost the age of 50 has outlived every other champion of any color and race in the fight game; he has outlived the black men in the imagination of the warden; he has defied whole sets of powerful rules in this universe that insist that should not be the case. Hopkins comes from a world where the rules of the warden's universe don’t apply.
An alien is also capable of saying and doing things that ordinary humans can’t seem to do or say. If you aren’t governed by a set of ordinances, you can determine your own limits of speech and action. You can speak out, for example, against the prison industrial complex. Hopkins has. (Other professional athletes have not been so vocal on the subject.)
Hopkins’ record of beating the odds had me wondering whether or not he might turn the fight around in those last four rounds. He was actually battered pretty bad in the twelfth. B-Hop slips or rolls with a punch as good as anyone. He’s also good at concealing weakness and pain. So when I saw him off balance and wobbling a bit in the last round, I knew he’d been rocked. A man who had made a career – perhaps a life – of being real close to danger but avoiding its worse consequences was getting caught. The last round completed the narrative of this particular fight, but it was a minor byproduct of a much longer, much more complicated text.
For me, the meaning in this fight didn’t reside in the fact that Bernard Hopkins was defeated by Sergey Kovalev. It would have meant only slightly more and no less if he had beaten the Russian. It means exponentially more to me that Hopkins has arrived to us from a time on a planet that is much like our own, but where black people are alive. He is one figure along a great tradition of black figures who travel to us from our own yet-to-come, our own failed American imaginations turned upside down, our tomorrow-selves. He's here to tell us that there is a future, another story, an alternate narrative not only about blackness or black people, but about our dominant culture as a whole. Like every alien, he has come to show us the possibilities of living by defying the limits and very assumptions of our conventional world.
PATRICK ROSAL is the Editor-in-Chief of Some Call It Ballin'.
Copyright © 2014 Some Call It Ballin'
Cover images by Owl's Flight and Sean Winters
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About Bulgaria
The Economy of Bulgaria
Bulgaria has an emerging market economy in the upper middle income range, where the private sector accounts for more than 80 per cent of GDP. From a largely agricultural country with a predominantly rural population in 1948, by the 1980s Bulgaria had transformed into an industrial economy with scientific and technological research at the top of its budgetary expenditure priorities.
Bulgarian GDP (PPP) per capita stood at 47 per cent of the EU average in 2012 according to Eurostat data, while the cost of living was 49 per cent of the average. The currency is the lev, which is pegged to the euro at a rate of 1.95583 levа for one euro. Bulgaria is not part of the Eurozone and has abandoned its plans to adopt the euro.
Economic indicators have worsened amid the late-2000s financial crisis. After several consecutive years of high growth, GDP contracted 5.5 per cent in 2009 and unemployment remains above 12 per cent. Industrial output declined 10 per cent, mining by 31 per cent, and ferrous and metal production marked a 60 per cent drop. Positive growth was restored in 2010.
Economic activities are fostered by the lowest personal and corporate income tax rates in the EU, and the second-lowest public debt of all member states at 16.5 per cent of GDP in 2012. In 2012, GDP (PPP) was estimated at $104 billion, with a per capita value of $14,235. Sofia and the surrounding area are the most developed region of the country with a per capita GDP (PPS) of $23162 in 2009. Bulgaria is a net receiver of funds from the EU. The absolute amount of received funds was 589 million euro in 2009.
The labor force is 2.45 million people, of whom 7.1 per cent are employed in agriculture, 35.2 per cent are employed in industry and 57.7 per cent are employed in the services sector. Extraction of metals and minerals, production of chemicals, machinery and vehicle components, petroleum refining and steel are among the major industrial activities. Mining and its related industries employ a total of 120 000 people and generate about five per cent of the country's GDP. Bulgaria is Europe's sixth-largest coal producer. Local deposits of coal, iron, copper and lead are vital for the manufacturing and energy sectors. Almost all top export items of Bulgaria are industrial commodities such as oil products, copper products and pharmaceuticals. Bulgaria is also a net exporter of agricultural and food products, of which two-thirds go to OECD countries. It is the largest global producer of perfumery essential oils such as lavender and rose oil. Agriculture has declined significantly in the past two decades. Production in 2008 amounted to only 66 per cent of that between 1999 and 2001, while cereal and vegetable yields have dropped by nearly 40 per cent since 1990. Of the services sector, tourism is the most significant contributor to economic growth. In recent years, Bulgaria has emerged as a travelling destination with its inexpensive resorts and beaches outside the reach of the tourist industry. Lonely Planet ranked it among its top 10 destinations for 2011. Most of the visitors are British, Romanian, German and Russian. The capital Sofia, the medieval capital Veliko Tarnovo, coastal resorts Golden Sands and Sunny Beach and winter resorts Bansko, Pamporovo and Borovets are some of the locations most visited by tourists.
Bulgaria's strategic geographic location and well-developed energy sector make it a key European energy centre despite its lack of significant fossil fuel deposits. Nearly 34 per cent of its electricity is produced by the nuclear power station at Kozloduy and public opinion strongly supports nuclear energy development. The rapid expansion of alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power stations make Bulgaria one of the fastest-growing wind energy producers in the world. The country aims to produce 16 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2020.
The national road network has a total length of 40,231 kilometers (24,998 mi), of which 39,587 kilometers (24,598 mi) are paved, but nearly half fall into the lowest international rating for paved roads. Railroads are a major mode of freight transportation, although highways carry a progressively larger share of freight. Bulgaria has 6,238 kilometers (3,876 mi) of railway track and currently a total of 81 km of high-speed lines are in operation. Rail links are available with Romania, Turkey, Greece, and Serbia, and express trains serve direct routes to Kiev, Minsk, Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Sofia and Plovdiv are the country's air travel hubs, while Varna and Burgas are the principal maritime trade ports. Varna is also scheduled to be the first station on EU territory to receive natural gas through the South Stream pipeline.
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1999 Honda NSR125/150 - Added by webmaster.sportbikerider.us on 21-Jun-2019
Uploaded for: d0lek
More Information on the Honda NSR125/150
The Honda NSR125 is a 125 cc (7.6 cu in) sport bike produced between 1988 and 2001 by Honda. The bike is powered by a two-stroke, RC-valve equipped, single-cylinder engine with a redline at 11,000 rpm. The name NSR125 is taken from the NSR500 GP bike.
There were two models of the NSR125; the JC20 produced between 1988 and 1994 and the JC22 Foxeye produced between 1994 and 2001. They are easily distinguished by the headlights. The JC20 had double round headlight, while the JC22 had a "foxeye" headlight hence the nickname.
Following the success of the NS125 (an earlier model to the NSR), the NSR125 JC20 was designed and assembled by Honda Italia Industriale S.p.A. in Rome, Italy. Grimeca was contracted to produce the aluminium cast frame (2-piece, die-cast, bolt together construction), wheels and brake assemblies. The engine was manufactured by Girardoni with Dell'Orto supplying the carburetor. Marzochi supplied forks and suspension while Pagani provided instrumentation and lighting. The Grimeca rear wheel was 18 inch in diameter, while the front was 17 inch and shod in Pirelli MT-45 tires.
The NSR125 JC22 is mostly of Japanese manufacturing, with the engine parts and other key elements of the running of the motorbike produced in Japan, it was then assembled in Italy and supplied to its mainly European market. Design changes saw the JC22 to receive a steel fuel tank and visual trim resembling the NR750.
Although it is a common mistake to believe the NSR continued production until 2003. This is not the case as they ceased production in 2001 but had leftover stock until 2003/5.
The NS125 which was available as an "F" naked, or "R" fully faired is commonly mistaken as an NSR of earlier production, although shares no real parts or design similarities. This model is most easily identifiable by its singular square headlight, rather than the earlier NSR's dual round headlights or the later NSR's "foxeye" design.
The photo honda-nsr125-99-504473.jpg (1999 Honda NSR125/150 - Uploaded for: d0lek) was uploaded by: webmaster@sportbikerider.us.
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안으로의 표시
Plenary opening - Welcome adresses
Marc Durando
Executive Director - European Schoolnet
Marc Durando, Executive Director of EUN, has over 35 years' experience in the field of education and training, both at European and national level. He has worked in the education and training area since 1983, where, after five years in the field of continuing education for enterprises, he developed specific expertise on European cooperation in the field of education and training. Since September 2006, Marc Durando joined the European Schoolnet network as Executive Director of EUN.
Evarist Barolo
Minister for Education and Employment - Malta
Evarist Bartolo was born on 14 October 1952 in Mellieha and has three brothers and three sisters. His father worked as a primary school teacher. He is married to Gillian and they have two children, Katrin and Louisa. In 1975 Bartolo graduated from the University of Malta with a B.A. (Hons) degree in English Literature and continued his studies in journalism at Stanford University. He also read for a Master's in Education at the University of Cardiff. Bartolo has taught at every level of the education system from kindergarten to university. He spent three years teaching at De La Salle College as well as working with the national broadcasting station and editor of numerous media organisations. A member of parliament since 1992, he worked mostly in Education, European affairs and Tourism as well as serving as Minister of Education and National Culture under a Labour government between 1996 and 1998. Evarist Bartolo took office as the Minister for Education and Employment on 13 March 2013.
Dr Ian Borg
Minister for transport - Malta
Dr Ian Borg was appointed Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Capital Projects in June 2017. His current role encompasses a wide portfolio ranging from major infrastructural projects, to the construction and maintenance of the country's infrastructure, the transport scenario, and planning and property. In the year and a half since his appointment, the Minister has overseen projects on the main arteries and junctions all around the island, projects in the maritime and aviation sectors as well as initiatives that aim to start creating a culture shift moving from the use of the personal vehicle to the use of alternative means of transport. During the previous legislature, Dr Ian Borg also served as Parliamentary Secretary for the EU Presidency 2017 and EU Funds. His political career started in 2005 with his election as Mayor of his hometown Dingli, which was reaffirmed in 2008 and 2012. Dr Borg graduated as a Doctor of Laws from the University of Malta in 2012, after successfully reading a Doctoral degree in Laws, a Diploma in Public Notarial Practice and a Bachelor's Degree in Law.
Philippe Martin
Acting Head of Academic R&I Unit - Directorate B - Open Innovation and Open Science, DG Research and Innovation - European Commission
Philippe Martin puts his creativity at the service of society and the environment. Phil currently heads the "Academic Research and Innovation" Unit in the Open Science and Open Innovation Directorate of the Research and Innovation Directorate General of the European Commission. His achievements span finance, technical, non-technical, and social innovation, the risk assessment of emerging technologies, and climate science. In particular, he created new financial instruments for research and innovation, for ecoinnovation and for social innovation. He co-authored the EU Action Plan on nanotechnologies. He facilitated the identification of EU GHG emission reductions for the Kyoto negotiations, explained fast climate/vegetation feedbacks, predicted changes in malaria receptivity with climate change, co-authored the first report on climate change and US water resources, and contributed to the IPCC from its creation. He supported the drafting of the Lisbon Declaration on Social Innovation. Phil earned an MBA from ESSEC in Paris in Decision and Negotiation Analysis, a DEA in Energy Economics and Geopolitics from the University of Paris and the French Nuclear Commission and, as a Fulbright Scholar, an MS and a PhD in Energy and Resources from the University of California at Berkeley. He wrote his PhD thesis in environmental physics and climatology on vegetation/atmosphere interactions at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, USA.
Joseph Bugeja
CEO of Transport Malta
Since June 2018 he is the Chairman and CEO of Transport Malta. Joseph Bugeja is a fellow member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport with over 40 years of experience in the maritime sector. He has served 32 at Sea Malta Co. Ltd wherein he held the post of General Manager. During the past twelve years, he has served as General Manager for MMOS- Malta Motorways of the Sea Ltd (Grimaldi Group), General Manger for Sullivan Maritime Limited and as CEO & Board Member of the Malta Maritime Forum.
Keynote adresses
Anja Monrad
Chair of the Governing Board of the Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition, Senior Vice President & General Manager - Dell (Video message)
Ms. Anja Monrad serves as General Manager of Dell Central & Eastern Europe. She is Senior Vice President of Dell Central and Eastern Europe and the chair of the Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition Governing Board. The Governing Board provides strategic leadership and gives high-level advice to improve the functioning and the impact of the Coalition as well as monitoring its overall progress.
Alexa Joyce
Director, Education System Leaders - Microsoft corporation
Alexa leads the global strategy at Microsoft for engaging and support education system leaders as they transform their school systems. She was formerly EMEA Director of Policy, Teaching and Learning, focusing on supporting national device deployments across the region. Prior to Microsoft, she was Senior Business Development Manager at European Schoolnet. At Schoolnet, she engaged 60 million people across Europe through awareness raising campaigns on digital skills. Previously, she worked at UNESCO Bangkok, coordinating the pilot Southeast Asian Schoolnet and equipping Ministries of Education and schools with ICT infrastructure. Alexa was Executive Advisor to the Hewlett Packard STEM+ Catalyst global program for education and an executive committee member of the European Centre for Women and Technology and the European e-Skills Association. She has a Masters in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford, an MBA from Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Belgium, and a Post Graduate Certificate in Education Technology from the Institute of Education, University College London (UCL).
Parallel session 1: Contextualisation of STEM education in Europe
Yves Beernaert
Former member of the DG Research Science Education Expert Group, Senior Education Consultant - Educonsult
After 18 years as a language teacher, a teacher trainer and an inspector in the Congo and Belgium, Yves worked for 12 years in several technical assistance offices of the European Commission and European organisations dealing with school and teacher education EU programmes. He was for five years the rapporteur of the Cluster Maths, Science and Technology (STEM) of DG EAC. For DG EAC he has published several country reports on STEM policies and has developed a STEM compendium. In 2015, he was one of the experts that drafted the DG R&I Science report "Science education for responsible citizenship". For 2 years he worked for the Bulgarian Ministry of education on upgrading VET education.
Stephan Griebel
Business Development and Alliances Europe - Texas Instruments
Stephan Griebel has worked at Texas Instruments since 1997. Currently he is responsible for business development and alliance for Texas instruments' Educational Technology solutions. This involves the development of the educator network T3 – Teachers Teaching with Technology, collaboration with textbook publishers and other suppliers of educational content, and last but not least the support of pilot sites in the field of math, science and STEM education in close cooperation with Ministries of Education including didactical research. Before joining Texas Instruments he worked as teacher for mathematics and physics in Gymnasium in Bavaria, Germany. Stephan is member of the board of Initiative D21, leading there the education workgroup since 2010.
Dr Anne-Gret Iturriaga Abarzua
Head of Communications - INEOS Manufacturing Deutschland GmbH
Dr Anne-Gret Iturriaga Abarzua is the Head of Communications for INEOS in Cologne. Next to her communication and anthropology studies in Vienna, she worked as a freelance journalist for Austrian and German media as well as for PR and marketing agencies. As consultant in a PR agency in Vienna she helped clients of the plastics and wood industry shaping their reputation. Before arriving to INEOS in Cologne, she was the Communications Manager for EVC (now INOVYN) in Germany. Anne-Gret won several international awards for communications and public relations. She is an IPRA Board member and active in two EPCA councils. Anne-Gret lives in Germany with her family, enjoys an active lifestyle and Austrian cuisine.
Jeannette Axisa
Chief Officer Strategy and Corporate Services - Transport Malta
Jeannette Axisa has made her mission to market various industrial/technical careers to students in various educational institutions starting from 12 years of age and promote active partnerships in all types of government and private traineeship schemes as an agile response to an ever-changing cultural and societal strata and to make education a force for development and training to build organisational capabilities in a sustainable manner.
Ana Albalat
Deputy Director General of Research and Digital Culture - Generalitat de Catalunya
She is the Deputy Director General of Research and Digital Culture of the education ministry of Catalunya. In 2017-2018 she coordinated the STEAMcat innovation pedagogical program. Before that, she worked 10 years as a high school professor of technology. She holds a master's degree on education and ICT (e-learning), a postgraduate in direction of educational centers and a postgraduate in gender equality policies in the public administration.
Ana Isabel Montenegro-Garcia
Chemical Engineer - Repsol, Chair - Young EPCA Think Tank
Ana Montenegro is a Spanish Chemical Engineer actually working in Repsol Chemical business leading all cross-cutting projects that ensure the innovation and continuous improvement. She has an experience of 20 years in chemistry having passed through different positions within Repsol: technical assistance and development of polyolefins manager, product manager in pipes, cables, Auto,
Polypropylene, EVA and EBA, etc. In addition, she has been the president of the Spanish Committee of Plastics for Agriculture in Spain (CEPLA) and vice president of the international committee (CIPA). Currently, she is Chair of the Young EPCA Think Tank (YETT) as a professional committed to the evangelization of chemistry in society.
Vladimíra Pavlicová
Consultant, Centre for International Cooperation in Education (DZS) - Ministry of Education in the Czech Republic
Vladimíra holds a master's degree in teaching maths and geography as well as a master's degree from the Faculty of International Relations. Since 2014 she works at DZS as a consultant for eTwinning and European Schoolnet. She coordinates activities to support especially STEM education, she was a national coordinator of the MENTEP project. She is a member of Interactive Classroom WG and Ministry of Education STEM WG.
Olga Svyrydenko
Teacher Engagement Manager, Microsoft HQ in Central and Eastern Europe - Microsoft corporation
In her current role, Olga works across 33 countries in Central and Eastern Europe Area to support implementation of Microsoft's programs aiming to empower every student and teacher to achieve more. Most notable, Microsoft Education Transformation Framework, Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert, Microsoft Showcase School, Microsoft Imagine Academy, Microsoft Educator Community and numerous national and Area initiatives where pedagogy enhanced by technology leads to greater academic outcomes and getting students future-ready. Olga is thrilled to be leading Microsoft's educator development programs as well as working to create a rich portfolio of online and face to face professional development offerings for educators and school systems. Before joining Microsoft, Olga spent 10 years driving education and citizenship programs in Ukraine and Caucasus part of public diplomacy programs under US Department of State and later US Agency for International Development. In all roles Olga worked with policy-makers, as well as grass-roots initiatives to drive social and digital transformation projects.
Gareth Cullen
Talent Acquisition Manager for Ireland - DELL
Gareth has worked at Dell since 2006 and has held a number of roles since joining. In 2011 Gareth became the Talent Acquisition Manager for Ireland. Dell employs 6,000 people in Ireland. Gareth leads a team of 18 team members across the three Irish sites; Cork, Dublin and Limerick. Gareth's team own the attraction and selection strategy resulting in 1,200 hires last year alone. The TA Ireland Team also get involved in driving key programmes including Diversity & Inclusion and University Relations. Dell Ireland have been awarded Best Employer in Ireland the last two consecutive years. Gareth is also the Founder of the Talent Ireland Forum to connect likeminded companies. The objective of the forum is to drive improvement and promote Ireland as a location of choice for talent.
Elisa Martin Garijo
Chief Technology Officer - IBM Spain corporation
Elisa Martin Garijo is Chief Technology Officer for IBM Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel, a Distinguished Engineer, and a member emeritus of the IBM Academy of Technology. In her CTO role, Elisa leads technology and innovation in the country with the main objective of stimulating smart and cognitive solutions in Spanish companies and institutions using technology and innovation as drivers. In this role her responsibility is to transmit innovative experiences and technology to enterprises and society as well as bringing value by connecting clients with IBM Research.
As a member of IBM's Academy of Technology Leadership team, Elisa participates in investigative studies on international and national levels. She holds two patents and several written collaborations / studies about technical products and processes. As an executive, she is responsible for maintaining excellence and vitality in the technical community of SPGI market supporting the second IBM value, "Innovation that Matters", for clients and society.
With a Mathematics degree from the Complutense University of Madrid, Elisa's experience extends over 35 years in the industry and technology sectors.
Parallel session 3: Strengthening STEM community
Dr Agueda Gras
Scientix Project Manager, Science Programme Manager - European Schoolnet
Dr Agueda Gras-Velazquez (Astrophysicist / Management) is the Science Programme Manager of European Schoolnet (EUN). As Head of the Science Education Department at EUN, she is in charge of overseeing and coordinating all the Maths and Science projects in which EUN is involved. Additionally, she is in charge of the day-to-day management of "Scientix" (the community for science education in Europe, http://scientix.eu), coordinates EUN's Ministries of Education STEM representatives Working Group and from January 2017, she manages the European Schoolnet Academy. In her over 10 years at EUN, Agueda has been involved in over 35 European Commission funded projects and 13 private funded ones; and sits in the advisory board of a number of projects. Prior to joining EUN in May 2008, she worked as an independent eLearning Professional, as Tutor, Content designer, IT manager, Administrator, Project Manager and Consultant for international projects. She has co-authored several papers in the area of Science Education Research and has a PhD in Astrophysics from Trinity College Dublin, which she carried out at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland.
Miguel Silvestre
Executive Director - Óbidos Technological Park
Miguel Silvestre currently serves as Executive Director of OBITEC, where he is responsible for managing the Óbidos Technology Park and he also work as a consultant in innovative development policies. In the past we was the coordinator of the participation of the Municipality of Óbidos in the URBACT program in networks such as Creative Spin III, led by the City of Birmingham, and Creative Clusters in Low Density Areas", part of the European URBACT II program, in which was Óbidos the Lead Partner. He was coordinator of the local strategy Creative Óbidos, namely REC - Creative Spaces Network, which aims to change the commercial dynamics of Óbidos promoting a more creative and differentiated approach by the artist. He has authored several strategic documents, such as the Local Action Plan entitled Óbidos Creative Footprint - The next big step will be made of many of small steps; and also Creative Óbidos: Future History. He has been invited to speak at different national and international forums on creativity (Brazil, Brussels, Vienna, Austria, Denmark, England, etc.) and the economy. Silvestre was previously Deputy Mayor of Óbidos and had as one of his missions the implementation of Óbidos Creative strategy. Miguel Silvestre also took over the coordination of the Network for Research, Innovation and Knowledge of Óbidos, which featured 19 research projects from Universities and Portuguese Academic researchers. This project is in its final phase of implementation.
Dr Marko Krstić
Acting director of the Center for the Promotion of Science - Belgrade, Serbia
Marko Krstić received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2007, 2009, and 2016, respectively, at the University of Belgrade. He is currently Assistant Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering. He co-authored more than 20 scientific papers published in international peer-review journals and received several national recognitions. He is a Co-Chair of the Organizing Committee of the VII International School and Conference on Photonics: PHOTONICA 2019, to be held in Belgrade in 2019. Since June 2018, he serves as the Acting Director of the Center for the Promotion of Science, a government institution competent for the promotion and the popularization of science, which is currently active in two European projects with scope on STEM: Scientix and STEM School Label.
Sid Mysore
STEM – ICT – Digital4Education, SCRIPT (Department of Coordination of Educational and Technological Research and Innovations) - Ministry of Education in Luxembourg
From a Mathematics and Computer Science background, Sid Mysore specialized in financial mathematics and statistical engineering before choosing a career in teaching in a pilot secondary school with a focus on participative and collaborative learning. Currently, he coordinates projects in the domains of Digital Education and STEM Education for the Department for the Coordination of Research and Pedagogical and Technological Innovation of the Luxembourg Ministry of Education, Childhood and Youth.
Mario Cardona
Head of Technical College - Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology
Mario Cardona graduated with a B.Ed. (Hon.) in History and Early and Middle Years from the University of Malta. He subsequently focused on adult education and training, and community development, with a Laurea from Roma Tre University, an M.Ed. from the University of Malta and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. He has an academic and professional interest in adult education and training, community education and development, co-operatives, VET, visual and performing arts, and issues related to education and social justice. He participates in European policy fora and has published books and papers related to his area of expertise. He carries out voluntary work in a rural co-operative at Manikata and in a community-based music school at Qormi.
Plenary session: Report on Day 1 workshop outcomes & recommendations
Round table 1 – Making a cooperation between Ministries of Education and industry a norm in European education
Anastasiya Boiko
Project Manager of Science projects - European Schoolnet
Christel Op de Beeck
Policy Officer at the Flemish Government, Department of Education and Training, Horizontal Policy Division - Ministry of Education in Belgium (Flanders)
Mainly in charge of STEM and the preparatory work for the new attainment goals, which will be implemented as from Sep.1, 2019, and which will -for the first time- contain STEM-goals. In charge of international development policy in South-Africa between 1999 and mid-2013. The way STEM is approached in Flanders holds many aspects of the systemic project management approach. As such, STEM is not "a Project" or a multitude of projects, but a systemic, long term Programme.
Mar Camacho
Director General of Innovation, Research and Digital Culture - Generalitat de Catalunya
M.del Mar Camacho, Director General of Innovation, Research and Digital Culture PhD. Lecturer on Educational Technology at the Faculty of Education of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Catalonia). She taught in graduate and postgraduate programs related to Educational Technology, with particular emphasis on Mobile Learning and emergent technologies. Co-author of the first monography on Mobile Learning in Spain, Portugal and Latin America, she has been leading a nation-wide research on the use of tablets in schools and their impact on learning. Other international collaborations on this field include institutions such as UNESCO and the International Telecommunications Union (United Nations). She has given keynotes to international audiences and is author of more than 60 scholarly articles. Appointed Director General of Primary and Childhood Education at the Catalan Ministry of Education in July 2018 and Director General of Innovation, Research and Digital Culture in December 2018.
Danny Gooris
Senior Managers - Oracle Academy EMEA
Danny joined Oracle in January 2013 with more than 15 years of experience managing vendor-led technology education programs. He was formerly the EMEA program leader at Learning@Cisco. He has worked with Ministries of Education around the world from Russia to Africa. Danny's global experience contributes to his passion for ensuring that young people develop the skills to become the leaders and entrepreneurs of the future. Danny looks after the Oracle Academy EMEA, as Senior Manager, is responsible for strategic initiatives & private-public partnerships, works closely with the European Union Digital Skills & Jobs Coalition, and is board member of the European e-Skills Association, and is involved the ICT Foundation Body of Knowledge, and member of Educational Private Sector Advisory Council for the World Bank.
Francesca Falco
CSR Manager for Europe - Samsung
Francesca Falco is Samsung Electronics' CSR Manager for Europe. Prior to joining Samsung, Francesca was Project Manager at DIGITALEUROPE, where she managed, among the others, the eSkills for Jobs 2015-16 Awareness Raising Campaign and the Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition on behalf of the European Commission. Francesca's main areas of interest are digital skills, STEM, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Head of Agrupamento de Escolas Marinhas do Sal - Portugal
Teacher of mathematics and natural sciences for 30 years with extensive experience in European Projects, namely in Comenius, Erasmus, Ingenious and Scientix (ambassador). Currently Director of the school Marinhas do Sal, Rio Maior - two years. School with a strong relationship with local companies, to develop activities with students and as sponsors of the school projects.
Round table 2 – How could Europe support the STEM education agenda in all countries
Evita Tasiopoulou
Stefaan Hermans
Director for Policy Strategy and Evaluation, DG EAC - European Commission
Stefaan HERMANS is Director of Policy Strategy and Evaluation in the Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture at the European Commission. Before joining DG RTD in 2008 as Head of the 'Universities and Researchers' Unit, he was Secretary of the European Employment Committee following several other functions in DG Employment, Social Affairs, Industrial Relations and Equal Opportunities. He also worked as project officer in Education and Training at the European Commission.
Gaetano Bugeja
Director for Learning and Assessment Programmes Department for Curriculum, Lifelong Learning and Employability - Ministry for Education and Employment, Malta
Director Learning and Assessment Programmes Directorate within the Ministry for Education and Employment (Malta). I have started my career as a teacher of Physics and Chemistry. I have also taught ICT for some years and always sought ways to link science and ICT in the classroom. I have actively participated in a number of EU funded projects, attended several seminars and visited a number of schools in different countries. Today I am responsible for the teaching, learning and assessment of the curriculum in both primary and secondary. The link between education and industry has been promoted in recent years in Malta through STEM subjects and through the vocational subjects.
Karsten Simons
Regional Manager Corporate Affairs Europe, CIS, Russia & Israel - Cisco
Head of the Corporate Affairs for Europe, Russia, CIS and Israel at Cisco Systems, Karsten is responsible for implementing Corporate Social Responsibility activities with a focus on digital entrepreneurship, digital literacy and ICT training across Europe. The Cisco Networking Academy, its flagship program, equips more than 270,000 students and job seekers per year with the digital skills required to succeed in today's connected economy. Karsten joined the Cisco team in 2010 as Business Development Manager in EMEAR education, where he was responsible for driving partnership engagements with the National Research and Education Networks. Previous to that he had worked for more than 10 years in the German public sector, particularly as the Marketing and Product Management Lead at bol Behörden Online GmbH – a daughter company of British Telecom – and also as a Marketing Lead for Public Sector at Microsoft Corporation, where he was responsible for the Government and Education programs. He also holds a master's degree in computer science.
Albert Forn
Director mSchools- GSMA
Albert Forn leads the mSchools Program at GSMA, a public-private partnership that empowers teachers to integrate mobile technologies into the classroom, opening up new ways of teaching and learning that improve learner engagement, achievement and employability. To date, over 180.000 students and 3.700 teachers are part of the mSchools community.
Plenary closing remarks
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Medical Solutions Ranks as One of U.S.’ Top Healthcare Staffing Companies
Medical Solutions, the nation's third-largest Travel Nurse staffing company, has a strong showing in recent Staffing Industry Analysts' research.
We strive to always put culture and people first, and have found that when our company invests in employee happiness and job satisfaction, our business also reaps many benefits. I credit our continueed impressive growth to the quality of our people.
Omaha, NE (PRWEB) August 05, 2014
Medical Solutions, the third-largest Travel Nurse staffing company in the nation, is happy to announce it has ranked as one of the largest healthcare staffing firms in the U.S., in a recent research report by Staffing Industry Analysts.
For 2014, Medical Solutions was named as one of the:
Largest U.S. Healthcare Staffing Companies (#13)
Largest U.S. Staffing and Talent Engagement Companies (#107)
Fastest-Growing U.S. Staffing and Talent Engagement Companies (#41)
According to 2011 U.S. Census Bureau information, there were more than 12,000 companies in the temporary staffing services industry overall.
“We’re honored to be included in Staffing Industry Analysts’ 2014 rankings in these areas,” says Medical Solutions’ Vice President of Sales, Joel Tremblay. “Healthcare Staffing, particularly Travel Nurse staffing, is a major growth industry right now, and we are working hard and smart to keep pace with growing needs within the industry. It’s great to see proof that our efforts are succeeding and we’re continuing to grow.”
Medical Solutions has four offices in the United States (Omaha, San Diego, Cincinnati, and Tupelo, MS) and has a strong focus on maintaining an exceptional corporate culture. The company works to always provide “Service that inspires” across the board, to its internal staff, Travel Nurses, and Client Hospitals alike.
“We strive to always put culture and people first, and we’ve found that when our company invests in employee happiness and job satisfaction, our business also reaps many benefits,” says Craig Meier, President/CEO at Medical Solutions. “I credit our continued impressive growth to the quality of our people and strong company culture.”
Click here to read more about Medical Solutions’ rankings in Staffing Industry Analysts’ 2014 research.
ABOUT MEDICAL SOLUTIONS: Medical Solutions L.L.C. is a healthcare staffing firm that specializes in placing registered nurses in temporary travel assignments throughout the nation. The company became the third-largest in the country for travel nursing with its acquisition of OA Nurse Travel in 2013, and has locations in Omaha, San Diego, Cincinnati, and Tupelo, MS. Medical Solutions was one of the first Travel Nursing and Allied Healthcare staffing companies to be certified by the Joint Commission and has been continuously certified since 2004. Medical Solutions was named one of the top three staffing firms to work for in Staffing Industry Analysts’ 2013 “Best Staffing Firms to Work For,” and has also been named six times to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies. A nationwide network of qualified healthcare providers allows Medical Solutions to help its client hospitals continue to provide excellent patient care amidst a nursing shortage. Medical Solutions has contracts with 1,500+ client hospitals nationwide and is one of the fastest-growing companies in the Travel Nursing industry. Visit MedicalSolutions.com to learn more.
Sarah Wengert
Medical Solutions
+1 866.633.3548 Ext: 1331
Jeff Long
866.633.3548 1105
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Spanish (es)Suiza desmantela defensas de la Guerra Fría
HIDDEN DEVICES Switzerland to dismantle Cold War defences
By James Shotter
The explosive-laden bridge linking Bad Säckingen on the German side with Stein in Switzerland
(picture alliance)
With its cobbled streets and ornate houses, there is not much of the front line about Bad Säckingen. But until recently, that is exactly how Swiss military planners conceived the picturesque town on the banks of the river Rhine.
Like numerous other crossings between Switzerland and Germany, the bridge linking Bad Säckingen on the German side with Stein in Switzerland was fitted with explosives so that it could be detonated in the event of an attack.
The incendiary devices were part of a defensive system built to protect Switzerland during the Cold War. It is only now, 25 years after the collapse of communism in eastern Europe, that the last vestiges of that system are being dismantled.
Scheduled to be completed by year-end, by a quirk of fate the conclusion of the process comes just as east-west relations are at their lowest ebb since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Switzerland installed the explosives at strategic locations along its borders and key transport routes as early as the 19th century, and did so on a larger scale during the Second World War.
But it was only in 1975, with the introduction of what was known as the Permanent Explosive Deployment 75 programme, that it took a more systematic approach to where it planted the hidden charges.
At its peak, the Swiss defensive network involved roughly 2,000 separate structures fitted with explosives. These ranged from bridges to tunnels, such as the famous Gotthard Tunnel through the Alps, to roads and airstrips.
The idea was that the explosive-laden structures would deter aggressors considering an invasion. Failing that, the series of defensive lines would slow down and use up the resources of the invaders to give the Swiss time to prepare their defences.
Although the existence of the explosive network was publicly known, the fact that so many structures were armed until so recently - some Rhine bridges were disarmed only in October - has taken some people aback, particularly on the German side of the border.
“I had absolutely no idea, it was a complete surprise,” says one cyclist making the short journey over the bridge that links Bad Säckingen to Stein.
Even Michael Rohrer, head of the town building authority in Bad Säckingen, says he was unaware of the explosive potential of his town’s river crossing. “I assume the explosives must have been in there for a while,” he says.
The decision to wind back the system was taken after the end of the cold war.
According to Christoph Brunner, a Swiss army spokesman, the reason that it has taken until now to complete was the size and complexity of the task.
“It is a very laborious process. You have to consider that it affects several hundred objects,” he says. “[But it] will be finished by the end of this year.”
The presence of so much ordnance across Switzerland has raised questions of safety. In 2001, a collision between two lorries sparked a huge fire in the Gotthard Tunnel, not far from where explosives had been installed, according to press reports from the time.
Mr Brunner insists there was never any danger of an explosion in connection with the Gotthard fire. He says it was not safety concerns that led to the decision to remove the explosives, but the changing nature of the threats facing Switzerland.
Technological advances mean that mobile defensive resources can now be just as effective as their static predecessors - and maintenance costs are lower.
“It is to do with how the small, neutral state of Switzerland wants to defend herself and protect her independent sovereignty,” Mr Brunner says.
Some, particularly those who used to serve in the military, regret the decision, arguing that it would have been better to leave enough of the defences in place so that the positions could be built up again if necessary.
On the sleepy streets of Bad Säckingen, however, most people seem to think that the removal of the ordinance was the right move.
“It is a good idea,” says one local. “There are lots of Germans in Switzerland, and the Swiss come here to shop. Switzerland is neutral, and Germany and Switzerland get on well. The border is open.”
Copyright: Financial Times Ltd
There are 5 comments on this article.
Switzerland to dismantle Cold War defences James Shotter Dec 30, 2014 - 11:00 With its cobbled streets and ornate houses, there is not much of the front line about Bad Säckingen. But until recently, that is exactly how Swiss military planners conceived the picturesque town on the banks of the river Rhine. Like numerous other crossings between Switzerland and Germany, the bridge linking Bad Säckingen on the German side with Stein in Switzerland was fitted with explosives so that it could be detonated in the event of an attack. The incendiary devices were part of a defensive system built to protect Switzerland during the Cold War. It is only now, 25 years after the collapse of communism in eastern Europe, that the last vestiges of that system are being dismantled. Scheduled to be completed by year-end, by a quirk of fate the conclusion of the process comes just as east-west relations are at their lowest ebb since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Switzerland installed the explosives at strategic locations along its borders and key transport routes as early as the 19th century, and did so on a larger scale during the Second World War. But it was only in 1975, with the introduction of what was known as the Permanent Explosive Deployment 75 programme, that it took a more systematic approach to where it planted the hidden charges. At its peak, the Swiss defensive network involved roughly 2,000 separate structures fitted with explosives. These ranged from bridges to tunnels, such as the famous Gotthard Tunnel through the Alps, to roads and airstrips. The idea was that the explosive-laden structures would deter aggressors considering an invasion. Failing that, the series of defensive lines would slow down and use up the resources of the invaders to give the Swiss time to prepare their defences. Although the existence of the explosive network was publicly known, the fact that so many structures were armed until so recently - some Rhine bridges were disarmed only in October - has taken some people aback, particularly on the German side of the border. “I had absolutely no idea, it was a complete surprise,” says one cyclist making the short journey over the bridge that links Bad Säckingen to Stein. Even Michael Rohrer, head of the town building authority in Bad Säckingen, says he was unaware of the explosive potential of his town’s river crossing. “I assume the explosives must have been in there for a while,” he says. The decision to wind back the system was taken after the end of the cold war. According to Christoph Brunner, a Swiss army spokesman, the reason that it has taken until now to complete was the size and complexity of the task. “It is a very laborious process. You have to consider that it affects several hundred objects,” he says. “[But it] will be finished by the end of this year.” The presence of so much ordnance across Switzerland has raised questions of safety. In 2001, a collision between two lorries sparked a huge fire in the Gotthard Tunnel, not far from where explosives had been installed, according to press reports from the time. Mr Brunner insists there was never any danger of an explosion in connection with the Gotthard fire. He says it was not safety concerns that led to the decision to remove the explosives, but the changing nature of the threats facing Switzerland. Technological advances mean that mobile defensive resources can now be just as effective as their static predecessors - and maintenance costs are lower. “It is to do with how the small, neutral state of Switzerland wants to defend herself and protect her independent sovereignty,” Mr Brunner says. Some, particularly those who used to serve in the military, regret the decision, arguing that it would have been better to leave enough of the defences in place so that the positions could be built up again if necessary. On the sleepy streets of Bad Säckingen, however, most people seem to think that the removal of the ordinance was the right move. “It is a good idea,” says one local. “There are lots of Germans in Switzerland, and the Swiss come here to shop. Switzerland is neutral, and Germany and Switzerland get on well. The border is open.” Copyright: Financial Times Ltd
Cold War defence Army to find and dispose of hidden explosives
The Swiss army has admitted that there are still piles of explosives hidden around the country, mostly near borders, which were part of a Cold War ...
Army munitions to remain underwater
Swiss army munitions dumped in lakes from the 1940s to the 1960s will not be retrieved as a recovery operation would be more dangerous than ...
By Scott Capper
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Title: Quantum of Solace
Subject: Spectre (2015 film), 14th Empire Awards, Gemma Arterton, James Bond in film, Mathieu Amalric
Collection: 2000S Action Thriller Films, 2000S Spy Films, 2008 Films, 20Th Century Fox Films, Best Thriller Empire Award Winners, British Adventure Films, British Films, Central Intelligence Agency in Fiction, Columbia Pictures Films, Eco-Terrorism in Fiction, English-Language Films, Environmental Films, Film Scores by David Arnold, Films About Privatization, Films About Revenge, Films About Terrorism, Films Directed by Marc Forster, Films Produced by Barbara Broccoli, Films Produced by Michael G. Wilson, Films Set in Austria, Films Set in Bolivia, Films Set in Haiti, Films Set in Italy, Films Set in London, Films Set in Russia, Films Set in South America, Films Shot in Austria, Films Shot in Chile, Films Shot in England, Films Shot in Italy, Films Shot in Madrid, Films Shot in Mexico, Films Shot in Panama, Films Shot in Wales, James Bond Films, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Films, Pinewood Studios Films, Quantum of Solace, Screenplays by Paul Haggis, Sequel Films, Works About Coups D'État
British cinema poster for Quantum of Solace, designed by Empire Design
Michael G. Wilson
Barbara Broccoli
Neal Purvis
Robert Wade
by Ian Fleming
David Arnold
Roberto Schaefer
Matt Chesse
Rick Pearson
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
29 October 2008 (2008-10-29) (London, premiere)
31 October 2008 (2008-10-31) (United Kingdom)
$586.1 million[2]
Quantum of Solace (2008) is the 22nd coup d'état in Bolivia to seize control of that country's water supply.
Producer Michael G. Wilson developed the film's plot while Casino Royale was being shot. Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis contributed to the script. Daniel Craig and Marc Forster had to write some sections themselves due to the Writers' Strike,[3] though they were not given the screenwriter credit in the final cut. The title was chosen from a 1959 short story in Ian Fleming's For Your Eyes Only, though the film does not contain any elements of the original story. Location filming took place in Mexico, Panama, Chile, Italy, Austria and Wales while interior sets were built and filmed at Pinewood Studios. Forster aimed to make a modern film that also featured classic cinema motifs: a vintage Douglas DC-3 was used for a flight sequence, and Dennis Gassner's set designs are reminiscent of Ken Adam's work on several early Bond films. Taking a course away from the usual Bond villains, Forster rejected any grotesque appearance for the character Dominic Greene to emphasise the hidden and secret nature of the film's contemporary villains.
The film was also marked by its frequent depictions of violence, with a 2012 study by the University of Otago in New Zealand finding it to be the most violent film in the franchise. Whereas Dr. No featured 109 "trivial or severely violent" acts, Quantum of Solace had a count of 250 – the most depictions of violence in any Bond film.[4] Quantum of Solace premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square on 29 October 2008, gathering mixed reviews, which mainly praised Craig's gritty performance and the film's action sequences, but feeling that the film was not as impressive as its predecessor Casino Royale. As of November 2012, it is the third-highest-grossing James Bond film, without adjusting for inflation, earning $586 million worldwide.
Development 3.1
Filming 3.2
Effects 3.4
Merchandise 4.1.1
Home media 4.2
Reception 5
Box office 5.1
Critical response 5.2
Accolades 5.3
James Bond is driving from Quantum. M's bodyguard Craig Mitchell, a double agent, attacks M, enabling White to escape. Bond chases Mitchell and kills him. Bond and M return to London and search Mitchell's flat, discovering through tagged banknotes that Mitchell had a contact in Haiti. Bond tracks the contact, Edmund Slate, and learns that Slate is a hitman sent to kill Camille Montes at the behest of her lover, environmentalist Dominic Greene. While observing her subsequent meeting with Greene, Bond learns that Greene is helping an exiled Bolivian General, Medrano—who murdered Camille's family—to overthrow his government and become the new president in exchange for a seemingly barren piece of desert.
After rescuing Camille from Medrano, Bond follows Greene to a performance of Tosca in Bregenz, Austria. En route, the CIA head of the South American section, Gregg Beam, strikes a non-interference deal with Greene to maintain access to assumed stocks of Bolivian oil. Bond infiltrates Quantum's meeting at the opera, exposing the identities of Quantum's executive board to Tanner, and a gunfight ensues. Greene's men kill a Special Branch bodyguard working for Quantum member Guy Haines, an adviser to the British Prime Minister, after he fights with Bond. M assumes that Bond killed him, and has his passports and credit cards revoked when he refuses to return home and debrief.
Bond heads to Italy and convinces his old ally René Mathis to accompany him to Bolivia. At the La Paz airport, they are greeted by Strawberry Fields, an MI6 officer, who demands that Bond return to the UK immediately. Bond seduces her before they attend a fundraising party Greene holds that night. At the party, Bond again rescues Camille from Greene. Leaving, Bond and Camille are pulled over by Bolivian police working for Medrano. They had earlier attacked Mathis and put him in the boot of Bond's car to frame Bond; and, in the ensuing struggle, Mathis is killed.
The following day, Bond and Camille survey Quantum's intended land acquisition by air; their plane is shot down after a brief air battle and they skydive out of the burning plane into a sinkhole. In the cave, Bond and Camille discover Quantum is damming Bolivia's supply of fresh water to create a monopoly. Back in La Paz, Bond meets M and learns that Quantum murdered Fields by drowning her in crude oil. M orders Bond arrested for disobeying orders but he escapes. He risks capture by doubling back to tell M that Fields demonstrated bravery in the field, and this is enough to convince M that Bond can be trusted.
Bond meets CIA agent Felix Leiter, who discloses Greene and Medrano will meet in the Atacama Desert to finalize the coup. Warned by Leiter, he evades the CIA's Special Activities Division when they attempt to kill him. At an eco hotel in the desert, Greene reveals his true plans to Medrano: now that he controls the majority of Bolivia's water supply, Greene forces Medrano to accept a new contract that makes Greene Planet Bolivia's sole water utility company at significantly higher rates. Bond infiltrates the hotel, kills the Chief of Police for betraying Mathis, and confronts Greene. Meanwhile, Camille kills Medrano, avenging the murders of her parents and sister. The struggle leaves the hotel largely destroyed by fire. Bond then captures Greene and interrogates him about Quantum, before leaving him stranded in the desert with only a can of engine oil. Bond and Camille kiss before they part.
Bond travels to Kazan, Russia, where he finds Vesper Lynd's former lover, Yusef Kabira, a member of Quantum who seduces women with valuable connections. Bond tells Kabira's latest target, a Canadian Intelligence agent, of his true intentions, thus sparing her Vesper's fate. He spares Kabira's life and allows MI6 to arrest him. Outside, M tells Bond that Greene was found in the middle of the desert dead, shot twice and with engine oil in his stomach; Bond denies knowing anything. M also reveals that Leiter has been promoted and has taken Beam's place. She reinstates Bond as an agent; he tells M that he never left. As he leaves, he drops Vesper's necklace in the snow.
Daniel Craig as James Bond. Craig's physical training for his reprise of the role placed extra effort into running and boxing, to spare him the injuries he sustained on his stunts in the first film.[5] Craig felt he was fitter, being less bulky than in the first film.[6] He also practiced speedboating and stunt driving. Craig felt Casino Royale was [physically] "a walk in the park" compared to Quantum of Solace,[7] and required a different performance from him because Quantum of Solace is a revenge film, not a love story like Casino Royale.[6] While filming in Pinewood, he suffered a gash when kicked in his face,[8] which required eight stitches, and a fingertip was sliced off. He laughed these off, noting they did not delay filming, and joked his finger wound would enable him to have a criminal career (though it had grown back when he made this comment).[6] He also had minor plastic surgery on his face.[9] The actor advised Paul Haggis on the script and helped choose Marc Forster as the director.[10]
Olga Kurylenko as Camille Montes, a Bolivian agent with her own vendetta regarding Greene and Medrano. Forster chose her because out of the 400 women who auditioned, she seemed the least nervous.[11] When she read the script, she was glad she had no love scene with Craig; she felt it would have distracted viewers from her performance.[12] Kurylenko spent three weeks training to fight with weapons, and she learnt a form of indoor skydiving known as body flying.[13] Kurylenko said she had to do "training non-stop from the morning to the evening" for the action scenes, overcoming her fears with the help of Craig and the stunt team.[14][15][16] She was given a DVD box set of Bond films, since the franchise was not easily available to watch in her native Ukraine.[13] Kurylenko found Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies inspiring "because she did the fight scenes by herself."[11] The producers had intended to cast a South American actress in the role.[17] Kurylenko trained with a dialect coach to perform with a Spanish accent.[15] She said that the accent was easy for her because she has "a lot of hispanic friends, from Latin America and Spain, and it's an accent I've always heard".[18] When reflecting on her experience as a Bond girl, she stated she was proudest of overcoming her fears in performing stunts.[19]
Mathieu Amalric as Dominic Greene, the main villain. He is a leading member of Quantum posing as a businessman working in reforestation and charity funding for environmental science. Amalric acknowledged taking the role was an easy decision because, "It's impossible to say to your kids that 'I could have been in a Bond film but I refused.'"[13] Amalric wanted to wear make-up for the role, but Forster explained that he wanted Greene not to look grotesque, but to symbolise the hidden evils in society.[8] Amalric modelled his performance on "the smile of Tony Blair [and] the craziness of Sarkozy," the latter of whom he called "the worst villain we [the French] have ever had ... he walks around thinking he's in a Bond film."[20] He later claimed this was not criticism of either politician, but rather an example of how a politician relies on performance instead of a genuine policy to win power. "Sarkozy, is just a better actor than [his presidential opponent] Ségolène Royal—that's all," he explained.[21] Amalric and Forster reconceived the character, who was supposed to have a "special skill" in the script, to someone who uses pure animal instinct when fighting Bond in the climax.[22] Bruno Ganz was also considered for the part,[17] but Forster decided Amalric gave the character a "pitiful" quality.[22]
Gemma Arterton as MI6 Agent Strawberry Fields, who works at the British consulate in Bolivia. Fields, who is merely an office worker as described by M, takes herself seriously and tries to overpower Bond when the pair meet. She is later seduced by Bond, infiltrates Greene's fund raiser party with him and ends up paying the ultimate price. Forster found Arterton a witty actress and selected her from a reported 1,500 candidates. One of the casting directors asked her to audition for the role, having seen her portray Rosaline in Love's Labour's Lost at the Globe Theatre.[23] Arterton said Fields was "not so frolicsome" as other Bond girls, but is instead "fresh and young, not ... a femme fatale."[24] Arterton described Fields as a homage to the 1960s Bond girls, comparing her red wig to that of Diana Rigg, who played Tracy Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Rigg, alongside Honor Blackman, is one of her favourite Bond girls.[23] Arterton had to film her character's death scene first day on the set, where she was completely covered head to toe in non-toxic black paint. Although she found the experience unpleasant, she believes the scene will be an iconic part of the film.[25] The character's first name, which is a reference to the Beatles song "Strawberry Fields Forever", is never actually uttered on screen; when Bond asks her for her name, she replies, "Just Fields." Robert A. Caplen suggests that this is a conscious effort to portray a woman "whose character attributes are neither undermined nor compromised" by her name, even though her name may have sexual overtones reminiscent of earlier Bond girls.[26]
Giancarlo Giannini as René Mathis, Bond's ally who was mistakenly believed to be a traitor in Casino Royale. Having been acquitted, he chooses to aid Bond again in his quest to find out who betrayed him.
Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter, Bond's ally at the CIA. This marked the first time the same actor played Leiter twice in a row. Only David Hedison had previously played the character twice, in Live and Let Die (1973) and Licence to Kill (1989), but these performances were not consecutive.[13] Early script drafts gave Leiter a larger role, but his screentime was restricted by on-set rewrites.[27]
Judi Dench as M. Forster felt Dench was underused in the previous films and wanted to make her part bigger, having her interact with Bond more because she is "the only woman Bond doesn't see in a sexual context," which Forster finds interesting.[28]
Anatole Taubman as Elvis, Greene's second-in-command. Taubman wanted to make Elvis "as colorful, as edgy and as interesting as possible", with one of his suggestions being the bowl cut.[29] Amalric and Taubman improvised a backstory for Elvis: he is Dominic's cousin and once lived on the streets before being inducted into Quantum. He called Elvis "a bit of a goofball. He thinks he's all that but he's not really. ... He's not a comic guy. He definitely takes himself very serious, but maybe by his taking himself too serious he may become friendly."[30]
David Harbour as Gregg Beam, the CIA Section Chief for South America and a contact of Felix Leiter.
Fernando Guillen Cuervo as Carlos, the Colonel of Bolivian Police, the chief of all police forces, and the contact of René Mathis in Bolivia.
Jesper Christensen as Mr. White, whom Bond captured after he stole the money won at Casino Royale in Montenegro.
Rory Kinnear as Bill Tanner, M's aide.
Paul Ritter as Guy Haines
Tim Pigott-Smith as the British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.
Neil Jackson as Edmund Slate, a henchman who fights Bond in Haiti.
Simon Kassianides as Yusef, a member of Quantum who seduces female agents and manipulates them into giving away classified information. He is indirectly responsible for Vesper Lynd's death.
Stana Katic as Corrine Veneau, a Canadian agent and Yusef's latest target.
Glenn Foster as Craig Mitchell, M's bodyguard and a double agent.
Oona Chaplin as Perla de las Dunas' receptionist, a woman saved by Camille Montes in one of the last sequences.
Lucrezia Lante Della Rovere as Gemma, Mathis' girlfriend.
Elizabeth Arciniega as Mr. White's girlfriend.
Marc Forster asked his friends and fellow directors Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón to appear in cameos. Cuarón appears as a Bolivian helicopter pilot, while del Toro provides several other voices.[31]
"If you remember in Chinatown, if you control the water you control the whole development of the country. I think it's true. Right now it appears to be oil, but there's a lot of other resources that we don't think about too much but are all essential, and they're very limited and every country needs it. Because every country knows that raising the standard of living (and populations are getting bigger) is the way we're all going."
— Michael G. Wilson on the plot.[27]
In July 2006, as Casino Royale entered post-production, Eon Productions announced that the next film would be based on an original idea by producer Michael G. Wilson.[32] It was decided beforehand the film would be a direct sequel, to exploit Bond's emotions following Vesper's death in the previous film.[33] Just as Casino Royale 's theme was terrorism, the sequel focuses on environmentalism.[21] The film was confirmed for a 2 May 2008 release date, with Craig reprising the lead role.[34] Roger Michell, who directed Craig in Enduring Love and The Mother, was in negotiations to direct, but opted out because there was no script.[35] Sony Entertainment vice-chairman Jeff Blake admitted a production schedule of 18 months was a very short window, and the release date was pushed back to late 2008.[36] Neal Purvis and Robert Wade completed their draft of the script by April 2007,[37] and Paul Haggis, who polished the Casino Royale script, began his rewrite the next month.[38]
In June 2007, Marc Forster was confirmed as director.[39] He was surprised that he was approached for the job, stating he was not a big Bond film fan through the years, and that he would not have accepted the project had he not seen Casino Royale prior to making his decision: he felt Bond had been humanised in that film, arguing since travelling the world had become less exotic since the series' advent, it made sense to focus more on Bond as a character. Born in Germany and raised in Switzerland, Forster was the first Bond director not to come from the British Commonwealth of Nations, although he noted Bond's mother is Swiss, making him somewhat appropriate to handle the British icon.[40] The director collaborated strongly with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, noting they only blocked two very expensive ideas he had.[17] The director found Casino Royale 's 144-minute running time too long, and wanted his follow-up to be "tight and fast ... like a bullet."[41]
"Because Bond plays it real, I thought the political circumstances should be real too, even though Bond shouldn't be a political film. I thought the more political I make it, the more real it feels, not just with Bolivia and what's happening in Haiti, but with all these corporations like Shell and Chevron saying they're green because it's so fashionable to be green. During the Cold War, everything was very clear, the good guys and the bad guys. Today there's much overlapping of good and bad. It isn't as morally distinct, because we all have both elements in us."
— Marc Forster on the political landscape of the film.[42]
Haggis, Forster and Wilson rewrote the story from scratch.[43] Haggis said he completed his script two hours before the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike officially began.[40] Forster noted a running theme in his films were emotionally repressed protagonists, and the theme of the picture would be Bond learning to trust after feeling betrayed by Vesper.[44] Forster said he created the Camille character as a strong female counterpart to Bond rather than a casual love interest: she openly shows emotions similar to those which Bond experiences but is unable to express.[45] Haggis located his draft's climax in the Swiss Alps,[46] but Forster wanted the action sequences to be based around the four classical elements of earth, water, air and fire.[47] The decision to homage Goldfinger in Fields's death came about as Forster wanted to show oil had replaced gold as the most precious material.[42] The producers rejected Haggis's idea that Vesper Lynd had a child, because "Bond was an orphan ... Once he finds the kid, Bond can't just leave the kid."[48] The water supply issue in Bolivia was the main theme of the film, with a story based on the Cochabamba Water Revolt.[49]
Michael G. Wilson decided on the film's title Quantum of Solace only "a few days" before its announcement on 24 January 2008.[24] It was the name of a short story in
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Articles containing potentially dated statements from November 2012
Official website not in Wikidata
2000s action thriller films
2000s spy films
20th Century Fox films
Best Thriller Empire Award winners
British adventure films
Central Intelligence Agency in fiction
Columbia Pictures films
Eco-terrorism in fiction
Environmental films
Film scores by David Arnold
Films about privatization
Films about revenge
Films about terrorism
Films directed by Marc Forster
Films produced by Michael G. Wilson
Films produced by Barbara Broccoli
Films set in Austria
Films set in Bolivia
Films set in Haiti
Films set in Italy
Films set in London
Films set in Russia
Films set in South America
Films shot in Austria
Films shot in Chile
Films shot in England
Films shot in Italy
Films shot in Madrid
Films shot in Mexico
Films shot in Panama
Films shot in Wales
James Bond films
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films
Pinewood Studios films
Screenplays by Paul Haggis
Sequel films
Works about coups d'état
Empire Award for Best Thriller
Quantum of Solace (2009)
Sherlock Holmes (2010)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
Headhunters (2013)
The Imitation Game (2015)
Everything Put Together (2000)
Monster's Ball (2001)
Finding Neverland (2004)
Stay (2005)
The Kite Runner (2007)
Machine Gun Preacher (2011)
All I See Is You (2016)
"Another Way to Die"
Casino Royale (2006 film)
"Quantum of Solace" (short story)
List of films
Dr. No (1962)
From Russia with Love (1963)
Goldfinger (1964)
Thunderball (1965)
You Only Live Twice (1967)
Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
George Lazenby
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)
Live and Let Die (1973)
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
Moonraker (1979)
For Your Eyes Only (1981)
A View to a Kill (1985)
The Living Daylights (1987)
Licence to Kill (1989)
The World Is Not Enough (1999)
Die Another Day (2002)
Spectre (2015)
Non-Eon films
Never Say Never Again (1983)
Quantum of Solace – official site
Quantum of Solace at the Internet Movie Database
Quantum of Solace at AllMovie
Quantum of Solace at Rotten Tomatoes
Quantum of Solace at Box Office Mojo
Bond on Set: Filming Quantum of Solace, Greg Williams, DK ADULT (20 October 2008), ISBN 0-7566-4120-9
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^ "'"Forster back in action with 'Bond 22.
^ a b Terrence Rafferty (9 December 2007). "A License to Pursue the Inner Bond".
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^ a b "Seeking Solace on the Bond set".
^ a b Richard Owen (13 August 2007). "Bond has activists on his tail over new film's 'brutal' horse race finale".
^ "Filming locations for Quantum of Solace". imdb.com. 11 November 2008. Retrieved 2 June 2009.
^ "Bond 22 filming takes place in Madrid, Spain during last week of August".
^ a b "Newswrap No. 2 video".
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^ a b "Production Diary (16)".
^ a b c d "Production Diary (19)".
^ a b Tim Marsters (25 January 2008). "Behind the scenes on the Bond set".
^ a b c "Quantum of Solace – Production Diary (7)".
^ Rebecca Connop Price (30 October 2008). "Barracks and airport provide location for Bond film". Get Hampshire. Archived from the original on 13 September 2011. Retrieved 18 November 2008.
^ a b Edward Douglas (10 November 2008). "Marc Forster Finds His Quantum of Solace". ComingSoon.net. Retrieved 10 November 2008.
^ "Production Diary (9)".
^ "Production Diary (17)".
^ a b Anthony Breznican (4 April 2008). "James Bond series takes a 'Quantum' leap". USA Today. Retrieved 4 April 2008.
^ Simon Gardner (2 April 2008). "James Bond has new nemesis: irate Chilean mayor". Reuters. Retrieved 13 September 2008.
^ Mayor' protests on Chile 007 set"'".
^ "¿Apoya Ud. las protestas del alcalde de Sierra Gorda por la filmación de James Bond en su comuna?".
^ Nick Pisa (22 April 2008). "Driver of James Bond's Aston Martin cheated death in dramatic crash".
^ Paul Bompard (24 April 2008). "James Bond production halted amid fears of a curse".
^ a b Quantum of Solace' set visit: filming in Austria; Craig's next Bond moves; 007's new foes; rumors laid to rest"'".
^ Quantum of Solace' wrap party held on Saturday night, David Arnold confirms"'".
^ "Peter Lamont bows out from Bond 22, Dennis Gassner to be Production Designer".
^ Olly Richards (24 January 2008). "Daniel Craig Talks Quantum of Solace".
^ a b "Capone talks with James Bond himself, Daniel Craig, and Quantum of Solace director Marc Forster in London!!!".
^ "James Bond: licence to redesign".
^ "Jasper Conran Spring Summer 2008 Collection". Jasperconran.com. Retrieved 12 September 2010.
^ Jessica Fellowes (22 October 2008). "James Bond week: 007 and his girls are back with a crisp new look".
^ Jessica Fellowes (22 October 2008). "Necklace with a starring role".
^ Mark Caro (9 November 2008). "15 James Bond facts you need to know".
^ Bill Desowitz (16 January 2009). "MK12 Has a Blast with Quantum Main Titles". VFXWorld. Retrieved 26 January 2009.
^ Yves Peters (19 December 2008). "MK12 Create Custom Type for Quantum of Solace Title Sequence".
^ "Aston Martin DBS to star in new James Bond film".
^ Borys Kit (4 September 2007). "Bradley tapped to aid Bond stunts".
^ "Dan Bradley interview". Bourne Stunt Simulator. Retrieved 16 January 2008.
^ Moore, Malcolm (28 April 2008). "James Bond filming suspended after third accident leaves stuntman in coma".
^ a b c d e f g Bill Desowitz (3 December 2008). "A Quantum of VFX for James Bond". VFX World. Retrieved 4 December 2008.
^ a b c d Bill Dawes (16 November 2008). "Back into Bondage".
^ Chris Reidy (12 May 2008). Snakehead" films James Bond dogfight footage""".
^ "For Your Eyes Only: RT in Austria with James Bond".
^ "Your Quantum of Solace Questions Answered!".
^ Tommy Pearson,
^ Mark Beaumont (18 October 2008). "The Midas touch of David Arnold and his influence on Bond".
^ Crawl, End Crawl' track from 'Quantum of Solace' now on iTunes"'".
^ "Alicia Keys, Jack White Team For Bond Theme".
^ "Quantum of Solace – News – Alicia Keys, Jack White Team For "Quantum of Solace" Theme Song (Press Release)" (PDF).
^ a b "Jack White Talks Bond".
^ a b Brian Hiatt (2 October 2008). "Jack White and Alicia Keys: Bond's New Duo".
^ "'"Winehouse working on 'Bond theme.
^ "Troubled Winehouse 'not ready' for Bond theme".
^ Quantum of Solace" World Premiere Announced""".
^ Olly Richards (19 March 2008). "Quantum of Solace Gets Earlier Release".
^ Columbia Pictures (21 August 2008). "Quantum of Solace Moved Back a Week". ComingSoon.net. Retrieved 21 August 2008.
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^ Steve McGinty (27 October 2008). "Does this mean Bond's past his sell-by date?".
^ "Bond girl Olga Kurylenko introduces Ford Ka at Paris Motor Show (video)," MI6-HQ.com (10 March 2008). Retrieved 8 November 2008.
^ "Avon to introduce Bond Girl 007 fragrance with Gemma Arterton".
^ Mark Sweney (11 September 2008). "Coca-Cola launches ad featuring Jack White's Quantum of Solace music".
^ "Mission for a Million".
^ "New 007 Toys & Gadgets 2008".
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^ "New Corgi Action Figures".
^ "Scalextric 007 Racing Sets Unveiled".
^ "Swatch Launch 007 Villains Watches".
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^ Amazon.com listing. Retrieved 24 May 2008
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^ Pamela McClintock (8 November 2008). Quantum' leap in overseas box office"'".
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^ Review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 12 November 2008
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^ "Empire Awards nominate 'Quantum of Solace' five times, vote now online".
^ "Nominations for the 35th Annual Saturn Awards".
^ Michael Moran (20 November 2008). "The 20 greatest car chases in movie history".
Outline of James Bond
The film was nominated for Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Visual Effects, Film and Sound Editing at the 2008 Satellite Awards, winning Best Song.[145] It was nominated for Best Action Movie at the 2009 Critics' Choice Awards,[146] and at the Empire Awards, which is voted for by the public, it was shortlisted for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Newcomer, Best Thriller and Best Soundtrack.[147] It was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Action/Adventure/Thriller Film, while Kurylenko and Dench were both nominated for the Best Supporting Actress award.[148] An editorial by The Times also listed the film's pre-titles sequence as the tenth-greatest car chase in film history.[149]
Not all the reviews were as critical. Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph, in a reflective review of the film in 2013, was positive. He praised the film's shorter runtime, claiming that many other Bond films run out of steam before the end, and included Casino Royale in this category. Describing the film as having a "rock-solid dramatic idea and the intelligence to run with it", he gave the film four stars out of five.[144]
Screen Daily says, "Notices will focus—rightly—on Craig's magnetism as the steely, sexy, murderous MI6 agent, but two other factors weigh in and freshen up proceedings: Forster's new technical team, led by cinematographer Roberto Schaefer and production designer Dennis Gassner. And the ongoing shift of M, as played by Judi Dench, to front and centre: the Bond girls fade into insignificance as she becomes his moral counterpoint and theirs is the only real relationship on screen." The review continues, "Bond is, as has been previously noted, practically the Martin Scorsese of the BAFTAs: 22 films later, with grosses probably close to the GDP of one of the small nations it depicts, it's still waiting for that Alexander Korda award. The best Casino Royale could achieve was a gong for sound. Will this be the year that changes its fortunes?"[140] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who praised the previous film, disliked Quantum of Solace. He wrote that the plot was mediocre, characters weak and that Bond lacked his usual personality, despite his praise for Craig's interpretation of the role. Throughout his review, he emphasised that "James Bond is not an action hero."[141] Kate Muir wrote in The Times that "The Bond franchise is 50 years old this year, and the scriptless mess of Quantum of Solace may be considered its mid-life crisis", before she went on to praise the film's successor Skyfall as a "resurrection".[142] Some writers criticised the choice of Quantum of Solace as a title. "Yes, it's a bad title," wrote Marni Weisz, the editor of Famous, a Canadian film publication distributed in cinemas in that country, in an editorial entitled "At least it's not Octopussy."[143]
Roger Moore, the third actor to play Bond in the films, said that Craig was a "damn good Bond but the film as a whole, there was a bit too much flash cutting [and] it was just like a commercial of the action. There didn't seem to be any geography and you were wondering what the hell was going on."[136] Kim Newman of Empire gave it 4/5, remarking it was not "bigger and better than Casino Royale, [which is] perhaps a smart move in that there's still a sense at the finish that Bond's mission has barely begun." However, he expressed nostalgia for the more humorous Bond films.[137] The Sunday Times review noted that "following Casino Royale was never going to be easy, but the director Marc Forster has brought the brand's successful relaunch crashing back to earth – with a yawn"; the screenplay "is at times incomprehensible" and the casting "is a mess." The review concludes that "Bond has been stripped of his iconic status. He no longer represents anything particularly British, or even modern. In place of glamour, we get a spurious grit; instead of style, we get product placement; in place of fantasy, we get a redundant and silly realism."[138] The Guardian gave a more positive review, rating it as 3/5 stars, and was particularly fond of Craig's performance, saying he "made the part his own, every inch the coolly ruthless agent-killer, nursing a broken heart and coldly suppressed rage" and calling the film "a crash-bang Bond, high on action, low on quips, long on location glamour, short on product placement"; it concludes "Quantum of Solace isn't as good as Casino Royale: the smart elegance of Craig's Bond debut has been toned down in favour of conventional action. But the man himself powers this movie; he carries the film: it's an indefinably difficult task for an actor. Craig measures up."[139]
Reviews for Quantum of Solace have been mixed. Of the 244 reviews listed on Rotten Tomatoes, 65% are positive, with an average rating of 6.1/10.[133] Metacritic calculated a score of 58 out of 100 from 38 reviews, indicating a "mixed or average" response.[134] Critics generally preferred Casino Royale, but continued to praise Craig's depiction of Bond, and agree that the film is still an enjoyable addition to the series. The action sequences and pacing were praised, but criticism grew over the realism and serious but gritty feel that the film carried over.[135]
Critical response
The film grossed $27 million on its opening day in 3,451 cinemas in Canada and the United States, where it was the number one film for the weekend, with $67.5 million and $19,568 average per cinema.[130] It was the highest-grossing opening weekend Bond film in the U.S.,[131] and tied with The Incredibles for the biggest November opening outside of the Harry Potter series. The film earned a B- from CinemaScore's audience surveys.[132] From the 31 October British opening through to the 14 November U.S. opening weekend, the film had grossed a total $319,128,882 worldwide. As of 10 February 2010, it had grossed the equivalent of $417,722,300 in countries other than Canada and the U.S., where it grossed $168,368,427, to give a total of $586,090,727.[2]
The following week, the film was playing in sixty countries. It grossed the equivalent of $39.3 million in the UK, $16.5 million in France and $7.7 million in Germany on 7 November 2008.[128] The film broke records in Switzerland, Finland, United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, Romania and Slovenia. Its Chinese and Indian openings were the second largest ever for foreign-language films.[129]
Upon its opening in the UK, the film grossed £4.9 million ($8 million), breaking the record for the largest Friday opening (31 October 2008) in the UK.[125] The film then broke the UK opening weekend record, taking £15.5 million ($25 million) in its first weekend, surpassing the previous record of £14.9 million held by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It earned a further £14 million in France and Sweden—where it opened on the same day. The weekend gross of the equivalent of $10.6 million in France was a record for the series, surpassing what Casino Royale made in five days by 16%. The $2.7 million gross in Sweden was the fourth-highest opening for a film there.[126][127]
Quantum of Solace was released on DVD and Blu-ray by MGM via 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment in Australia, the UK and North America from 18 to 24 March 2009. At the DVD sales chart the film opened at No. 3, grossing $21,894,957 from 1.21m DVD units sold.[123] As of 1 November 2009, 2,643,250 DVD units were sold, generating $44,110,750 in sales revenue.[123] These figures do not include Blu-ray sales or DVD rentals. The DVDs were released in both a standard one-disc set and a deluxe two-disc special edition. There are no audio commentaries or deleted scenes on these editions.[124]
Though the screenplay did not get made into a novel despite its original storyline, Penguin Books published a compilation of Fleming's short stories entitled Quantum of Solace: The Complete James Bond Short Stories, with a UK release date of 29 May 2008[121] and a North American release date of 26 August 2008.[122] The book combines the contents of Fleming's two short story collections, For Your Eyes Only—including the original "Quantum of Solace" short story—and Octopussy and The Living Daylights.
die-cast toy vehicles.[116][117] They also created 7-inch figures of characters from the previous films.[118] Scalextric released four racing sets to coincide with the film.[119] Activision released their first James Bond game, also titled Quantum of Solace, which is based on both Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. It is the first Bond game to feature Craig's likeness and the first seventh generation console game in the series. Swatch designed a series of wrist watches, each of them inspired by a Bond villain.[120]
Returning product placement partners from Casino Royale included Ford, Heineken, Smirnoff, Omega SA, Virgin Atlantic and Sony Ericsson.[110] A reported £50 million was earned in product placement, which tops the Bond film's record of £44 million for Die Another Day.[111] The 2009 Ford Ka is driven by Camille in the film.[112] Avon created a fragrance called Bond Girl 007 with Gemma Arterton as the "face" of the product.[113] Coca-Cola became a promotional partner, rebranding Coke Zero as "Coke Zero Zero 7." A tie-in advert featured the orchestral element of "Another Way to Die."[114] In the film, Coca-Cola was briefly seen being served at Dominic Greene's party. Sony held a competition, "Mission for a Million," enabling registered players to use their products to complete certain tasks. Each completed "mission" gives consumers a chance to win $1 million and a trip to a top secret location.[115]
The film premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square on 29 October 2008. Princes William and Harry attended, and proceeds from the screening were donated to the charities Help for Heroes and the Royal British Legion.[106] The film was originally scheduled to be released in the UK and North America on 7 November; however, Eon pushed forward the British date to 31 October during filming,[107] while the American date was pushed back in August to 14 November, after Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had been moved to 2009, thereby allowing the distributors to market the film over the autumn blockbuster Thanksgiving holiday weekend.[108] In Australia, the film was moved a week to 19 November, after 20th Century Fox chose to release Australia on Quantum of Solace 's original date of 26 November.[109]
Jack White of The White Stripes and Alicia Keys collaborated on "Another Way to Die," the first Bond music duet.[100][101] They had wanted to work together for two years beforehand.[102] The song was recorded in Nashville, Tennessee; White played the drums while Keys performed on the piano.[103] The Memphis Horns also contributed to the track.[102] White's favourite Bond theme is John Barry's instrumental piece for On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and he watched various opening credit sequences from the series for inspiration while mixing the track.[103] Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse had recorded a demo track for the film,[104] but Ronson explained Winehouse's well-publicised legal issues in the preceding weeks made her "not ready to record any music" at that time.[105]
David Arnold, who composed the scores for the previous four Bond films, returned for Quantum of Solace. He said that Forster likes to work very closely with his composers and that, in comparison to the accelerated schedule he was tied to on Casino Royale, the intention was to spend a long time scoring the film to "really work it out." He also said he would be "taking a different approach" with the score.[97] Arnold composed the music based on impressions from reading the script, and Forster edited those into the film.[98] As with Casino Royale, Arnold kept use of the "James Bond Theme" to a minimum.[47] Arnold collaborated with Kieran Hebden for "Crawl, End Crawl," a remix of the score played during the end credits.[99]
The Moving Picture Company created the climactic hotel sequence. The fire effects were supervised by Chris Corbould, and post-production MPC had to enhance the sequence by making the smoke look closer to the actors, so it would look more dangerous.[92] A full-scale replica of the building's exterior was used for the exploding part Bond and Camille escape from. The boat chase was another scene that required very little CGI. Machine FX worked on replacing a few shots of visible stuntmen with a digital version of Craig's head,[93] and recreated the boats Bond jumps over on his motorcycle to make it look more dangerous.[92] Crowd creation was done for the Tosca scene by Machine FX, to make the performance look like it had sold out.[93] Forster edited the opera scene to resemble The Man Who Knew Too Much.[63] In total, there are 900+ visual effects shots in Quantum of Solace.[92]
The free-fall scene involved its own set of challenges, Craig disliked the idea of "being hung by wires and blown by a large fan in front of a green screen" but actual sky diving coverage has serious drawbacks. It's not only difficult, dangerous and time-consuming, but nearly always results in problematic head-replacements for close-ups. Stunt co-ordinator Gary Powell and VFX Designer Kevin Tod Haug, presented the idea of filming the scene in a large vertical wind tunnel in Bedford in order to do this sequence as practically as possible. While a great solution for the actors' performances the technique presented enormous VFX challenges: relighting shots captured in a tall white tube to match the sky over the Bolivian desert, and the impossibility of filming medium to wide shots of the actors. An array of eight Dalsa Origin cameras (supported by seven HD cameras and a 35mm hand-held camera, all running in sync) was used to create a virtual camera with which to shoot the actors floating in the simulator. Ged Wright and his team at Double Negative[93] developed a method to use the data from these cameras that allowed these real performances to be placed in a synthetic environment as seen by a synthetic camera. During the shooting in the wind tunnel Craig and Kurylenko wore wind-resistant contact lenses that enabled them to open their eyes as they fell. For safety and comfort, they only shot for thirty seconds at a time.[96] Forster wished he had more time to work on the free-fall scene.[92]
To film the aerial dogfight, a "Snakehead" camera was built and placed on the nose and tail of a Piper Aerostar 700. SolidWorks, who provided the software used to design the camera, stated "pilots for the first time can fly as aggressively as they dare without sacrificing the drama of the shot." The camera could turn 360 degrees and was shaped like a periscope.[94] The crew also mounted SpaceCams on helicopters, and placed cameras with 1600 mm lenses underground, to cover the action.[55] Forster wanted to film the plane fight as a homage to Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and chose planes like the Douglas DC-3 to suit that.[80][95]
Fourteen cameras were used to film the Palio di Siena, footage which was later edited into the main sequence. Aerial shots using helicopters were banned, and the crew were also forbidden from showing any violence "involving either people or animals."[52] To shoot the foot chase in Siena in April 2008 four camera cranes were built in the town, and a cable camera was also used.[57] Framestore worked on the Siena chase, duplicating the 1000 extras during principal photography to match shots of the 40,000 strong audience at the real Palio, removing wires that held Craig and the stuntmen in the rooftop segment of the chase, and digital expansion of the floor and skylight in the art gallery Bond and Mitchell fall into.[92] The art gallery fight was intended to be simple, but during filming Craig's stunt double accidentally fell from the construction scaffolding. Forster preferred the idea of Bond hanging from ropes reaching for his gun to kill Mitchell, rather than having both men run out of the building to continue their chase as specified in the script, and the number of effects shots increased.[92]
Quantum of Solace was the last in Ford Motor's three-film deal that began with 2002's Die Another Day. Although Ford sold over 90% of the Aston Martin company in 2007, the Aston Martin DBS V12 returned for the film's car chase around Lake Garda;[88] Dan Bradley was hired as second unit director because of his work on the second and third Bourne films, so the film would continue the gritty action style begun in Casino Royale.[89] He had intended to use Ford GTs for the opening chase,[90] but it was replaced by the Alfa Romeo 159.[91] After location filming in Italy, further close-ups of Craig, the cars and the truck were shot at Pinewood against a bluescreen.[92] Originally three Alfa Romeos were in the sequence: but Forster felt the scene was running too long and re-edited the scene so it only looked like two Romeos were chasing Bond.[93] Six Aston Martins were destroyed during filming, and one of them was purchased by a fan.[6]
Aston Martin DBS V12 on display at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con International
The film returns to the traditional gun barrel opening shot, which was altered into part of the story for Casino Royale where it was moved to the beginning of the title sequence. In this film the gun barrel sequence was moved to the end of the movie, which Wilson explained was done for a surprise,[85] and to signify the conclusion of the story begun in the previous film. The opening credits sequence was created by MK12. Having worked on Forster's Stranger than Fiction and The Kite Runner, MK12 spontaneously began developing the sequence early on in production, and had a good idea of its appearance which meant it did not have to be redone when the title singer was changed. MK12 selected various twilight colours to represent Bond's mood and focused on a dot motif based on the gunbarrel shot. MK12 also worked on scenes with graphical user interface, including the electronic table MI6 use,[86] and the Port-au-Prince, Haiti title cards.[87]
Louise Frogley replaced Lindy Hemming as costume designer, though Hemming remained as supervisor. Hemming hired Brioni for Bond's suits since her tenure on the series began with 1995's GoldenEye, but Lindsay Pugh, another supervisor, explained their suits were "too relaxed." Tom Ford was hired to tailor "sharper" suits for Craig. Pugh said the costumes aimed towards the 1960s feel, especially for Bond and Fields. Prada provided the dresses for both Bond girls. Jasper Conran designed Camille's ginger bandeau, bronze skirt and gold fish necklace,[82] while Chrome Hearts designed gothic jewellery for Amalric's character, which the actor liked enough to keep after filming.[83] Sophie Harley, who created Vesper Lynd's earrings and Algerian loveknot necklace in Casino Royale, was called upon to create another version of the necklace.[84]
Production designer Peter Lamont, a crew member on eighteen previous Bond films, retired after Casino Royale.[78] Forster hired Dennis Gassner in his stead, having admired his work on The Truman Show and the films of the Coen brothers.[44] Craig said the film would have "a touch of Ken Adam,"[79] while Michael G. Wilson also called Gassner's designs "a postmodern look at modernism."[60] Forster said he felt the early Bond films' design "were ahead of their time,"[44] and enjoyed the clashing of an older style with his own because it created a unique look unto itself.[80] Gassner wanted his sets to emphasise Craig's "great angular, textured face and wonderful blue eyes," and totally redesigned the MI6 headquarters because he felt Judi Dench "was a bit tired in the last film, so I thought, let's bring her into a new world."[81]
Filming took place at the floating opera stage at Bregenz, Austria, from 28 April – 9 May 2008. The sequence, where Bond stalks the villains during a performance of Tosca, required 1500 extras.[73] The production used a large model of an eye, which Forster felt fitted in the Bond style, and the opera itself has parallels to the film.[74] A short driving sequence was filmed at the nearby Feldkirch, Vorarlberg.[75] The crew returned to Italy from 13–17 May to shoot a (planned) car crash at the marble quarry in Carrara,[76] and a recreation of the Palio di Siena at the Piazza del Campo in Siena. 1000 extras were hired for a scene where Bond emerges from the Fonte Gaia. Originally, he would have emerged from the city's cisterns at Siena Cathedral, but this was thought disrespectful.[58] By June the crew returned to Pinewood for four weeks,[74] where new sets (including the interior of the hotel in the climax) were built.[43][60] The wrap party was held on 21 June.[77]
From 4–12 April the main unit shot on Sienese rooftops.[58] Shooting on the real rooftops turned out to be less expensive than building them at Pinewood.[1] The next four weeks were scheduled for filming the car chase at Lake Garda and Carrara.[58] On 19 April, an Aston Martin employee driving a DBS to the set crashed into the lake. He survived, and was fined £400 for reckless driving.[71] Another accident occurred on 21 April, and two days later, two stuntmen were seriously injured, with one, Greek stuntman Aris Comninos, having to be put in intensive care. Filming of the scenes was temporarily halted so that Italian police could investigate the causes of the accidents.[72] Stunt co-ordinator Gary Powell said the accidents were a testament to the realism of the action.[46] Rumours of a "curse" spread among tabloid media, something which deeply offended Craig, who disliked that they compared Comninos' accident to something like his minor finger injury later on the shoot (also part of the "curse"). Comninos recovered safely from his injury.[6]
While filming in Sierra Gorda, Chile, the local mayor, Carlos Lopez, staged a protest because he was angry at the filmmakers' portrayal of the Antofagasta region as part of Bolivia. He was arrested, detained briefly, and put on trial two days later. Eon dismissed his claim that they needed his permission to film in the area.[67][68] Michael G. Wilson also explained Bolivia was appropriate to the plot, because of the country's history of water problems,[66] and was surprised the two countries disliked each other a century after the War of the Pacific.[69] In a poll by Chilean daily newspaper La Segunda, 75% of its readers disagreed with Lopez's actions, due to the negative image they felt it presented of Chile, and the controversy's potential to put off productions looking to film in the country in the future.[70]
Marc Forster chose the Atacama Desert to represent Bond's vengefulness in the climax.
Shooting in Panama City began on 7 February 2008 at Howard Air Force Base. The country doubled for Haiti and Bolivia, with the National Institute of Culture of Panama standing in for a hotel in the latter country. A sequence requiring several hundred extras was also shot at nearby Colón.[62] Shooting in Panama was also carried out at Fort Sherman, a former US military base on the Colón coast. Forster was disappointed he could only shoot the boat chase in that harbour, as he had a more spectacular vision for the scene.[63] Officials in the country worked with the locals to "minimise inconvenience" for the cast and crew, and in return hoped the city's exposure in the film would increase tourism.[64] The crew was going to move to Cusco, Peru for ten days of filming on 2 March,[62] but the location was cancelled for budget reasons.[1] Twelve days of filming in Chile began on 24 March at Antofagasta. There was shooting in Cobija, the Paranal Observatory, and other locations in the Atacama Desert.[65] Forster chose the desert and the observatory's ESO Hotel to represent Bond's rigid emotions, and being on the verge of committing a vengeful act as he confronts Greene in the film's climax.[51][66]
Quantum of Solace was shot in six countries.[1] Second unit filming began in Italy at the Palio di Siena horse race on 16 August 2007,[52] although at that point Forster was unsure how it would fit into the film.[47] Some scenes were filmed also in Maratea and Craco, two small distinctive towns in Basilicata in southern Italy.[53] Other places used for location shooting were Madrid in August 2007;[54] Baja California, Mexico in early 2008, for shots of the aerial battle;[55][56] Malcesine, Limone sul Garda and Tremosine in Italy during March,[57] and at Talamone during the end of April.[58] The main unit began on 3 January 2008[17] at Pinewood Studios. The 007 Stage was used for the fight in the art gallery,[13] and an MI6 safehouse hidden within the city's cisterns,[59] while other stages housed Bond's Bolivian hotel suite,[60] and the MI6 headquarters.[59] Interior and exterior airport scenes were filmed at Farnborough Airfield and the snowy closing scenes were filmed at the Bruneval Barracks in Aldershot.[61]
During filming, after the strike ended, Forster read a spec script by Joshua Zetumer, which he liked, and hired him to reshape scenes for the later parts of the shoot, which the director was still unsatisfied with.[43] Forster had the actors rehearse their scenes, as he liked to film scenes continually.[21] Zetumer rewrote dialogue depending on the actors' ideas each day.[21]
According to a December 2011 interview with Craig, "We had the bare bones of a script and then there was a writers' strike and there was nothing we could do. We couldn't employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, 'Never again', but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes—and a writer I am not."[3] He said that he and Forster "were the ones allowed to do it. The rules were that you couldn't employ anyone as a writer, but the actor and director could work on scenes together. We were stuffed. We got away with it, but only just. It was never meant to be as much of a sequel as it was, but it ended up being a sequel, starting where the last one finished."[3]
Near the end of the film, the Camille Montes character and Bond have a discussion about their individual quests to avenge the deaths of their loved ones. Montes asks Bond to "let me know what it feels like" when he succeeds, the implication of the title being that it will be a small amount of solace compared to his despair. Bond's lack of emotion when he does exact revenge shows this to be the case. [6] Craig noted the letter Q itself looks rather odd.[51]
Bbc, Eton College, Casino Royale (novel), Secret Intelligence Service, The Times
The Living Daylights, A View to a Kill, Ian Fleming, GoldenEye, Live and Let Die (film)
Spectre (2015 film)
Skyfall, Sam Mendes, Casino Royale (2006 film), Quantum of Solace, London
14th Empire Awards
YouTube, Quantum of Solace, Wall-e, The Dark Knight (film), Empire Awards
Quantum of Solace, Kent, Authority control, England, Clash of the Titans (2010 film)
James Bond in film
Harry Saltzman, Albert R. Broccoli, Michael G. Wilson, Maurice Binder, NaN
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Gregory McClune
After serving as outside counsel on several legal issues, I served on the San Francisco Zen Center Board for about six years ending in 2012, I believe. However, even after I ceased being a Director, I continued to assist Zen Center with a number of legal issues, principally employment related.
In 2016, Susan O’Connell asked me if I was interested in serving on a Board in formation, which was to be populated by nominees affiliated with SF Zen Center and the Kendal Organization, headquartered in Philadelphia. It was explained to me that the goal was to jointly develop a senior living center in Northern California. The project sounded intriguing; I immediately expressed interest and was, soon thereafter, appointed to the first board of an organization whose title has gone through several iterations but is now officially known (at least to the IRS) as “Kendal at Sonoma, A Zen Inspired Community.” In my service on that Board I have become acquainted with the members who were nominated by Kendal and, as I have got to them know them and the Staff at Kendal, I have become increasingly impressed with their knowledge, their organizational skills and, above all, their principles and values. These are good people. I also have become increasingly aware of how important this project is to Zen Center. This importance and the growing relationship between the two organizations reminded me of the how much I had enjoyed my first period of board service and so, when I was asked if I was interested in returning to the SF Zen Center Board, I did not hesitate.
I hope to be able use such talents, knowledge, and experience as I have to help further the goals and principles of Zen Center. I hope and believe that my service on the Board of Kendal at Sonoma will make me a more valuable member of the Zen Center Board, while my increasing immersion in the current issues at Zen Center will, hopefully, make me a more knowledgeable member of the Kendal at Sonoma Board.
I am a recently retired partner in the San Francisco office of the national law firm Foley & Lardner LLP and the former national chair of the firm’s Labor and Employment Practice. I grew up in what was then known as Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), graduated from the University of Cape Town, South Africa (LL.B., B.A.), and practiced as an attorney in the High Court of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), before immigrating to the United States. I am married and my wife and I have four daughters and, to date, five grandchildren. We have lived in San Francisco since 1977.
I thank San Francisco Zen Center for inviting me back and I am grateful for the opportunity to serve two such principled and dynamic organizations.
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September 30th, 2008 12:05 PM by Lehel Szucs
by Michael E. Lewitt
"Examining the record of past research from the vantage of contemporary historiography, the historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. Even more important, during revolutions scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community had been suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well. Of course, nothing of quite that sort does occur: there is no geographical transplantation; outside the laboratory everyday affairs usually continue as before. Nevertheless, paradigm changes do cause scientists to see the world of their research-engagement differently. In so far as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world."
Thomas S. Kuhn1
The problem with trying to legislate in the middle of a revolution is that you aren't sure whether you are governing the world that is being destroyed or the one that is coming into being. There can be little question that the Wall Street that existed at the beginning of this year is no longer the industry that Congress is seeking to rescue from its own excesses. The financial world has been permanently altered by the collapse of the debt bubble that inexorably built up over the past three decades. Now Congress is trying to design a rescue plan for a world whose shape is highly contingent and unstable. Such an undertaking requires more than two weeks of work. Conventional thinking tells us that the government must do something to stabilize the markets immediately, and that doing something is better than doing nothing. Once again, conventional thinking is wrong. Congress would be much better advised to take the extra few days or week it would take to structure a plan that the world is going to have to live with for a very long time. As we were completing this newsletter, the House of Representatives voted down the emergency package and the financial markets are panicking. Such panic is unwarranted. The world should take a deep breath and consider whether defeat of a deeply flawed bill should be treated as a catastrophe or a rallying cry to develop a better plan that addressed the underlying issues that need to be fixed.
The Paulson Plan
HCM has been warning for years that all of the king's horses and all of the king's men wouldn't be able to put this mess back together again. It is now time for America to take the pain and figure out how to move forward. Any plan that is adopted must include a sufficient dose of strong medicine to prevent the culture of self-delusion and moral hazard that created the current crisis from further perpetuating itself. The purpose of the Paulson Plan has to be to rebuild confidence in the financial system. The manner in which the plan was presented and debated rendered that more difficult but hopefully not impossible. For any plan that fails to bring confidence back to the market will not work.
The great economic historian Charles Kindleberger wrote in his seminal study of financial crises, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, that, "[f]or historians each event is unique. Economics, however, maintains that forces in society and nature behave in repetitive ways. History is particular; economics is general."2 This is a very important observation. While each financial crisis is unique in terms of its causes and the types of assets that it engulfs, the conditions that led to it are always driven by human irrationality and hubris. Financial busts are preceded by financial bubbles. The current bust was preceded by a debt bubble whose unique manifestations were debt securitization and credit derivatives. Underlying these novel debt structures were the human emotions of greed and fear that led to abuses by even the most sophisticated individuals and most highly respected institutions in the market. While these human attributes are the most difficult to legislate, their ability to wreak havoc is clear evidence that they must be regulated in a thoughtful way.
Recently, former New York Federal Reserve Governor Gerald Corrigan led a group of market experts that released a report entitled Containing Market Risk: The Road to Reform, The Report of CRMPG III (Corrigan III) (August 6, 2008). In that report, Mr. Corrigan and his colleagues wrote the following very wise words:
"The fact that financial excesses fundamentally grow out of human behavior is a sobering reality especially in an environment of intense competition between large integrated financial intermediaries which, on the upside of the cycle, fosters risk taking and on the downside, fosters risk aversion. It is this sobering reality that has, for centuries, given rise to universal recognition that finance and financial institutions must be subject to a higher degree of official oversight and regulation than is deemed necessary for virtually all other forms of commercial enterprise."
What is lacking from the public debate is a serious understanding of the difference between treating the symptoms of the crisis and trying to cure the disease. The disease is a total loss of confidence in the American model of debt-engorged free enterprise, and American economic and political leadership. The cure is regaining that confidence.
In his new book, economic consultant David M. Smick writes,
"the survival of the world financial system depends on an elaborate confidence game. The size of the financial markets, relative to the governments, has become so monstrously huge there is no other means of maintaining stability than to establish a psychology of confidence. The governments themselves cannot by edict restore order. They can only project to the markets a sense that they know what they're doing."3
What Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke are desperately trying to explain to Congress is that America's leadership must immediately restore the world's confidence in American economic and political leadership. But the Paulson Plan was generated under impossible conditions. Were it to succeed, the best that could be expected at this point is a slow revival of the credit system. To hope for more is sheer folly. It is a certainty that America, and then the rest of the world behind it, is going to experience a severe recession the likes of which it hasn't seen for decades. Frankly, HCM can't see any way that such a slowdown can be avoided, although HCM has some ideas on how to begin to work out of it. Moreover, if by some miracle it were to be avoided, it would merely delay the inevitable purging of the psychological and financial excesses that have been piling up in our economic system over the past thirty years. One of the problems plaguing America is that we have become so frightened of short-term pain that we are willing to risk incalculable long-term suffering. Any plan that treats the symptom (the loss of confidence) and not the disease (the underlying problems that caused the loss of confidence) will not solve the real problem.
At one point during the bailout negotiations, Henry Paulson was seen genuflecting at the feet of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a fitting emblem of just how far the credibility of the Bush Administration has fallen.4 Earlier policy blunders are now haunting a lame-duck Administration. The Paulson Plan is being pushed with the same kind of urgency that pushed the U.S. to invade Iraq, and the President has no more weapons of mass destruction to sell. There are legitimate fears that anything approaching the Paulson Plan, like the Iraq War, will get quickly bogged down in the complexities and contingencies that will be encountered on the battlefield. Despite the cries of pain from the credit markets, HCM has never believed that the world would spin off its axis if a deal is not rushed to completion in the next few days. A bad deal would be worse than no deal at all.
There is one practical problem that will plague the Paulson Plan and any plan that involves the government purchasing distressed assets from financial institutions. These assets are NOT(!!!) accurately valued on the books of financial institutions.5 Accordingly, these institutions are not in a position to sell them to the government at current fair market value. Any sales at current market value would inflict huge losses on these institutions. The alternative is for the government to grossly overpay for these assets, which would constitute a disguised capital infusion into these firms that would short-change the American taxpayer. This flaw in the plan is why members of Congress from both sides of the aisle insisted on some kind of profit-sharing structure that would compensate taxpayers in the event the government pays above-market prices for assets. HCM fears that very little of the $700 billion is going to be spent in the near future because of the reluctance of banks to part with assets at anywhere near their current value, and the government's reluctance to overpay for these assets.
HCM views the Paulson Plan as a matter of form over substance. The details of how the plan will work are ultimately less important than whether the plan succeeds in rebuilding market confidence. In order to be successful, the Paulson Plan needs to be followed up by comprehensive regulatory reform that accomplishes the goals of convincing the public that the financial system will be fairer in the future than it has been in the past (i.e. that the gains will be spread more equitably and that failure will not be rewarded) and that strong steps will be taken to prevent the oversights that led to the current instability from being repeated.
An Alternative Bailout Plan
A successful plan must address the following elements:
Confidence: It must restore market confidence by convincing both Wall Street and Main Street that the government will stand behind the mortgage obligations that are the weakest part of the financial system.
Time: It must provide time for financial institutions to earn profits that can be used to absorb future losses on bad mortgage paper. The primary way financial institutions make money is by borrowing money at one rate and lending it out at a higher rate. The cost of money for financial institutions must be lowered immediately.
Prevention: It must convince both the American people and the global community that the regulatory lapses that allowed this disaster to occur will not happen again, and that the system will be fairer in the future. This is closely tied to the issue of restoring confidence in the markets as well as in American economic and political leadership.
The government's plan must restore market confidence, give companies the time to heal their balance sheets, and prevent a recurrence of the most abject series of regulatory lapses in the history of Western financial markets. For the sake of contributing to the public debate, which will continue even after the initial plan is adopted by Congress, HCM suggests that the government move ahead with the following measures in an effort to restore order and stability to the global credit and financial markets:
The HCM Bailout Plan
The government should announce that it will effectively stand behind the U.S. financial system against failure through some sort of guarantee or insurance program. The government has already done this with respect to money market assets.
Mark-to-market accounting for financial institutions should be suspended for an indefinite period. Since nobody knows what these assets are worth, we should not drive the system into insolvency trying to place a value on assets that nobody is willing to purchase at the current time.
The Federal Reserve should reduce the overnight interest rate by 75 basis points immediately. This will allow financial institutions to begin to earn more on their assets, which will begin the process of rebuilding their balance sheets.
The Securities and Exchange Commission should announce the formation of a study group that will report back no later than December 31, 2008 on a comprehensive regime for regulating the credit default swap market.
As noted above, HCM is concerned that the plan to purchase mortgage assets from financial institutions will not produce the intended results because of the difficulty of reaching agreement on price without inflicting too much further damage on the sellers' balance sheets. That is why we favor a guarantee or insurance program rather than the Paulson proposal.
Will The Paulson Plan Work?
The American taxpayer is going to suffer economically whether the Paulson Plan, or some variation on it, is passed or not. HCM does not believe for a second that taxpayers will profit from this bailout as some prominent commentators are arguing. The assets that are clogging bank balance sheets are highly complex and illiquid, and the time required for them to return to any reasonable value will consume their recovery value in present value terms. Nonetheless, voices considered wiser than ours are touting the plan as a good deal for the American taxpayer.
Bill Gross of PIMCO, for example, has argued that taxpayers could profit from the $700 billion plan put forth by the Bush Administration. According to Barron's, Mr. Gross "estimates that the average price of distressed mortgage debt that will pass from troubled financial institutions to Treasury will be about 65 cents on the dollar, representing about a one third loss for the seller from face amount. Financed at 3% to 4% by the sale of Treasury debt, Treasury will be in a position to earn a positive carry, or yield spread, of at least 7% to 8% on the purchases, even after taking into account severe assumptions of default rates and foreclosure recoveries."6 Mr. Gross to his great credit has offered PIMCO's services to the government gratis in this endeavor (provided his competitors do the same). In PIMCO's hands, he argues, the government will get a fair deal for the assets it buys. "'The prices that Treasury will get will be somewhere between par, which of course might screw the taxpayer, and a fire sale price of, say, 20 cents on the dollar, which would likely bankrupt some weak institutions and defeat the purpose of the bailout.'"
We think Mr. Gross is unduly optimistic from a couple of standpoints. First, he appears to be assuming that virtually all of the assets that the government will be purchasing will be AAA-rated mortgage securities, since these are the only mortgage securities trading remotely close to 65 cents on the dollar today. Unfortunately, many of the securities that are weighing down the balance sheets of financial institutions carry lower ratings, and many AAA-rated tranches are trading at well below 65 cents on the dollar today. (We would note that the Federal Reserve had already agreed to take onto its balance sheet much lower rated collateral, including equities, in order to support these same financial institutions.) Current trading prices may be unduly depressed by speculative shorting of the ABX indices as well as crisis conditions in the marketplace, but by all accounts AAA-rated tranches of 2006 and 2007 vintage collateralized mortgage obligations are deeply distressed due to inordinately high levels of defaults in the underlying pools of mortgages. While current prices may reflect unrealistically pessimistic projections of future mortgage defaults, the fact remains today's prices are today's prices. If the government pays more for these securities, it will be giving the seller a windfall. Mr. Gross's scenario glosses over this dilemma, which lies at the heart of why the Paulson Plan is unlikely to yield rapid progress in moving troubled assets off bank balance sheets.
Second, we have yet to see the non-financial economy bear the full brunt of the collapse of the financial economy. Main Street is only starting to pay for the sins of Wall Street. The stock market remains in deep denial about the scope and depth of the economic slowdown this country is about to face. As the consequences of tighter credit seep into the mainstream of the American economy, there is every reason to expect that mortgage default rates will rise and home prices will continue to fall, further depressing the value of the mortgage securities that the government is supposed to be purchasing under the Paulson Plan. We wish we could share Mr. Gross's optimism, but we question whether deep in his heart he isn't trying to use his bully pulpit to talk up the market.
Japan Redux?
One of the tough questions that deserve to be asked in the wake of the U.S. government's bailout of the U.S. finance industry is whether American prosperity of the 1990s and 2000s was as illusory as Japanese prosperity of the 1980s? Just as Japan's prosperity was based on a rigged economic system constructed out of a cheap currency, cross-ownership of institutions and a nonmark-to-market accounting system, America's recent prosperity was also built on a cheap dollar, a non-mark-to-market accounting system, and an addiction to debt. While this comparison can be debated endlessly, and will likely be the subject of many scholarly articles and books, the real question is whether the United States will suffer anything like the "lost decade" that haunted Japan (actually, it has been almost two "lost decades"). There are significant differences between Japan and the United States (the most troubling, perhaps, being that Americans do not possess nearly the savings that the Japanese did entering their difficulties), but the question will gain more attention in the coming months.
While it is too soon to make any judgments that far into the future, America is certain to see very slow economic growth in the immediate future. The world's only superpower may see its first trillion dollar deficit within the next couple of years, although Washington will try to dress up the number to keep it under thirteen figures (an unlucky number in too many ways to count). That alone should be sufficient to knock down American hegemony a further peg or two. Such a deficit will contribute to a further debasement of the U.S. dollar against Asian currencies and the Swiss franc.
The primary reason why economic growth is going to be sluggish is that credit is going to be strictly rationed for the foreseeable future, which means that only the most creditworthy borrowers will be able to access capital at a reasonable cost. Companies that need capital will be the ones that find capital most difficult and expensive to access. This means that many companies will have to pay exorbitant rates to borrow, and many highly leveraged companies that have to borrow will be forced into bankruptcy or capital restructurings in order to do so. Many leveraged companies are already drawing down their revolving credit lines before their banks withdraw them. General Motors was the most prominent company to have done this recently, but HCM is seeing this occur throughout the corporate credit market.
American Oligarchy
One of the most discouraging parts of the debate over the Paulson Plan was the discussion about limiting executive compensation for those firms that might benefit from the plan. While trying to help rebuild confidence in American capitalism, Mssrs. Paulson and Bernanke tried to convince Congress that bank executives would prevent their institutions from participating in the bailout if it meant that their compensation would be capped. One would think, as the financial system teeters on the brink of collapse, that the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve could make a more persuasive argument than one that poses the likelihood that corporate executives would knowingly violate their fiduciary duty and refuse to participate in a plan to rescue the financial system because it might limit their compensation. If troubled financial institutions are going to be run by individuals who would conduct themselves in such a manner, there isn't much hope that any plan is going to work. The mentality that led two of our best and brightest public officials to attempt to defend the kind of avaricious conduct that played a central role in the current crisis is something that must be changed if we are to avoid future market crises.7
This brings HCM to two related areas that need to be legislated immediately: financial institution leverage; and the taxation of highly compensated financial executives. There is a point when free enterprise tips over into a degree of economic and social inequality that is politically unacceptable, and the United States has reached that point. HCM is well aware that its views on this topic genuinely anger many of its readers, but this is an issue that must be addressed as an essential component of any program that will return confidence to the financial system. Free market economic policies, in particular tax policies, have led to the creation of an American oligarchy whose wealth and power is excessive. While not as pernicious as the oligarchy that rose from the ruins of the Soviet Union and now lords over Russia and spends its money garishly over the world, an American oligarchy has unduly benefitted from ill-advised tax and economic policies and must be reigned in as a sign to Main Street that the game will no longer be rigged against it.
We do not believe it is presumptuous to state that the debate over whether Wall Street firms were too leveraged is over. The decision by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley has decidedly ended the leveraged investment banking model that brought down Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. The profits that Wall Street generated over the past few years were not the result of some new-found genius in the executive suites, but were merely the product of adding unprecedented amounts of leverage to balance sheets. Unfortunately, compensation schemes did not take into account the fact that adding leverage is far different than adding value (i.e. compensation schemes were not properly risk-adjusted). As a result, compensation structures for these executives were largely asymmetrical, particularly with respect to the portion of their pay that was distributed in cash. Multimillion dollar cash payments for profits earned in a single year were not subject to being repaid if losses in later years wiped out those earlier profits. Too much cash exited these firms each year in the form of compensation, significantly weakening their capital bases. Fortunately, a significant amount of compensation was also paid in stock, which did not weaken these firms' balance sheets but still failed to instill sufficient caution in management when it came to assuming balance sheet risk.
In addition to the gargantuan amounts of compensation being paid out, the taxes paid on these amounts continued to drop over recent years. This is a result not only of reduced taxes on capital gains and dividends, which are only good economic policy up to a point, but on tax deferral schemes and other aggressive tax stances taken by corporate, private equity and hedge fund executives to reduce their taxes to unconscionably low levels.8 Private equity managers, for example, are able to treat their "carried interests" as capital gains and pay taxes at only a 15% rate. Yet these earnings are no less the product of their labor than a teacher's or a policeman's earnings are a result of his or hers. Last year, several private equity billionaires actually had the gall to lobby on Capitol Hill to retain the 15 percent tax rate on their "carried earnings." These individuals argued that if their taxes were raised, they would no longer be willing to take the kinds of business risks that lead to new job formation and economic growth. Attempts to require these over-indulged [fill in the blank]9 to pay the same taxes on their income as ordinary Americans were derailed in what must go down as one of the most cynical lobbying efforts in history. It would be one thing if private equity firms were funding innovation and job creation, but in the last few years they have done little more than use cheap financing to engage in speculative transactions that generate fees for themselves and what are going to turn out to be at best mediocre returns for their investors.
Hedge fund managers play their own games. The most popular tax reduction technique among this crowd is the formation of offshore trusts that enable them to defer their management and performance fees for periods as long as ten years. A ten year deferral of taxes reduces the effective tax rate paid on these managers' already huge earnings to virtually zero on a present value basis while they continue to enjoy the ability to profit from investments in America's (once) free markets. This tax deferral scheme, which comes in a number of variations, further separates the interests of those hedge fund investors who are paying taxes on their income from those of managers who are not. (Of course, investors don't mind as long as they are making money. Investors never mind as long as they are making money. That's the problem.) As one memorable television commercial put it, "it's not what you earn, it's what you keep." And hedge fund managers have figured out how to keep virtually everything for themselves. Now that the bloom has come off the rose for many hedge fund strategies, investors are going to discover just how one-sided was the deal they made with their managers. Redemption requests from hedge funds are expected to reach epic levels this year, yet many investors are going to be greeted with the unhappy news that they can't get their money back right now (or anytime soon) because it is stuck in illiquid, hard-to-value investments. Others will be told that it would be unwise for their funds to liquidate positions to meet redemptions in the middle of a financial crisis, failing to be informed of the likelihood that many of these securities will most likely be worth less in the future.
Fairly taxing the upper 1/10 of 1 percent isn't going to plug the gaping U.S. budget deficit, but it will go a long way to returning a sense of fairness to a system that has lost its moral compass.
1 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 111.
2 Charles Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes A History of Financial Crises (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 16. This book should be required reading in Congress.
3 David M. Smick, The World Is Curved (New York: Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2008), p. 23. Not that we need more things to worry about, but Mr. Smick also makes a compelling case for why we should be concerned about China's future economic stability in the near future.
4 According to The New York Times, September 26, 2008 ("Day of Chaos Grips Washington; Fate of Bailout Plan Unresolved", p. A1)"n the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulsen, Jr., literally bent on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, not to withdraw her party's support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal." Nothing else has worked, so why not try this?
5 Although in fairness all the blame for this can't be placed on these institutions. There is currently no market for many of these assets and placing a value on them would be an arbitrary exercise. This is why mark-to-market accounting should be suspended for an indefinite period of time.
6 Barron's, September 29, 2008, "Making A Mint," p. 30.
7 There were unconfirmed media reports late last week that certain Wall Street firms were marketing products to hedge funds that were designed to avoid the restrictions on short selling that were imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Whatever one thinks of the short-selling restrictions, which were far from optimal, the prospect of financial institutions trying to circumvent them suggests that even the biggest financial crisis since the Depression has been insufficient to instill good judgment into some of those in positions of responsibility on Wall Street. Anti-fraud rules are designed, among other things, to prevent individuals from doing indirectly what they can't do directly. Gaming the short-selling restrictions would be a perfect opportunity to teach somebody a lesson that there are things more important in this life than making money.
8 It would not seem unreasonable, particularly during a period when the government is going to be starved for revenue, to impose a higher capital gains tax of 20% or 25% at significantly higher levels of gain, so that a taxpayer would pay 15% on the first $1 or $2 million of gain and the higher rate on gains over that amount. In general, however, lower capital gains rates stimulate economic growth and should be maintained. Dividend tax rates should be maintained at very low levels since these earnings are already taxed once at the corporate level.
9 HCM always likes to identify cultural images that capture the spirit of the times. There is currently an exhibition of modern sculpture called "Beyond the Limits" being held in the gardens of Chatsworth House, home to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, in England. One of the works on display is entitled "Planet" by Marc Quinn; it is a giant white sculpture of a baby lying/floating on its side. "Planet," which belongs more to the category of stunt or spectacle than art, seems to be a perfect emblem of these private equity chieftains groveling for tax relief from our elected officials (although the baby is not sucking its thumb). To view "Planet" on-line, see www.chatsworth.org.
Posted by Lehel Szucs on September 30th, 2008 12:05 PM
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Tag: killed
Ageism and the Chemical Cosh
When I first commented on this a year or so ago, I was horrified by the estimate that in the previous five years, these medications were reckoned to have killed about seven hundred people – mainly through causing strokes and pneumonia. Now the estimates are between 1000 and 2000 elderly people being killed in this way every year yet the N.I.C.E. guidelines are that unless the patient is psychotic, these drugs should not be used to sedate them. They are so powerful that they are now being spoken of as a kind of “chemical cosh”, and the accusation is that this dangerous practice is simply to make these people less troublesome and easier to handle.
Twice before I have mentioned the scandal of people of a certain age who are more frail and confused than they used to be being knocked senseless by GPs with the use of powerful anti-psychotic drugs, and now this scandal is back in the news again.
Deliberate Mis-Prescribing
No-one is suggesting that the job of a GP is easy. A great number of the decisions a GP will make when considering whether to prescribe a certain medication or whether not to, will be a judgement call, and it is possible to get that wrong. That’s why they have advisory bodies like N.I.C.E. to give them guidelines.
The trouble is, quite a lot of GPs are ignoring the guidelines. These drugs are designed for people who are psychotic, but of the 180,000 people currently being prescribed these drugs in care homes, it is reckoned that about two-thirds of them aren’t psychotic – they are confused, suffering from some form of dementia or are just agitated about the transition of going into care.
The Telegraph’s Health Correspondent Beezy Marsh wrote:
The findings emerged in Keep Taking the Medicine, a report by Paul Burstow, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for older people, who obtained information through parliamentary questions.
Last night he said: “The chemical management of older people is a continuing scandal.
“It denies older people dignity and robs them of a better quality of life. Pressures on care providers are not an excuse for inappropriate medication.
The Telegraph again:
Frank Ursell, chief executive of the Registered Nursing Home Association, said accused Mr Burstow of “pointing the finger of blame”. He said: “We want to disassociate this idea of these drugs being used as a chemical cosh, because it is just not true.
“If you are running a home, you do not want people wandering around in a sleepy state. They can be useful to help people settle in, because it can be very traumatic for elderly people when they first arrive, to bridge that gap.
“It is the GP who prescribes the drug and to suggest that there is inappropriate prescribing is a scurrilous attack on GPs.”
“Help people settle in”? Settle in to what, a shroud? And this is not just a “suggestion” that the drugs are being mis-prescribed – clearly the guidelines are being ignored which is causing the deaths of over a thousand people a year!
Look, if someone is upset or agitated, or having trouble adjusting to a new way of life, you could just give ’em a Valium or something like that. You don’t have to put them on a tablet designed for something completely different that also has the slight drawback of killing a thousand people a year, thus deliberately ignoring the official guidelines that tell you not to do that. Forgive me, but that is not “a scurrilous attack on GP’s”. And yes, it is “pointing the finger of blame” because GP’s ARE to blame for that one! There are times, Mr Ursell, when pointing the finger of blame is entirely appropriate, and when GPs cause unnecessary deaths by choosing to ignore the official guidelines – not just once or twice but in thousands of cases annually, then clearly the blame lies WITH THEM… not with N.I.C.E., not with the care homes, not even in this case with the drug companies who manufacture the damn stuff, but the individuals that sign those prescriptions.
I did call it, last time, a Licence to Kill. GPs know that if any of these old folk die as a result, no-one is going to sue them personally. How is this different from Shipman’s arrogant assumption that he should remain untouchable if he killed people off with the inappropriate use of medication? And it is clearly ageism: would they even dream of deliberately knocking out any other section of the population en masse with these drugs? It isn’t really to help them settle in, otherwise it would be used on children during their first few weeks at boarding school. It isn’t really to manage difficult behaviour, otherwise the same drugs would be used on half the prison population, but no – these nasty, deadly drugs are only being mis-prescribed to the elderly. So Paul Burstow is right when he states that the chemical management of older people is a scandal.
I make no apologies for once more making the point that people like Edzard Ernst, who spend so much time atacking complementary medicine or trying to damn it with faint praise say nothing – NOTHING – about things like this, even though Ernst used to be actively involved in the work of the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency! No, conventional medicine and general practitioners can kill as many people as they like, that’s fine by Ernst. But he’ll be very quick to warn you about things like acupuncture or homoeopathy… as if that is where the danger lies!
This is just one of many examples that prove that the overall drive is to medicate, medicate, medicate. Not all doctors are pill happy but too many clearly are, and it is now killing people in vast numbers but for some really scary reason, the trend is to prescribe even more despite that, and the guidelines, well… they might as well be in the bin.
Central Hypnotherapy
Author chrisPosted on 14th November 2009 Categories Drugs on Trial, The Campaign, UncategorisedTags atypical anti-psychotic drugs, chemical cosh, complementary medicine, dementia, die, Edzard Ernst, kill, killed, N.I.C.E., pneumonia, psychotic, strokes
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Wipeout The Music
Sony Computer Entertainment Japan; Columbia
Catalog No.:
SONYTV06 CD; 481119 2
Buy Used Copy
Released in 1995, but set in 2052, Wipeout was a particularly futuristic zero-gravity racing game which featured amazing craft, deadly rivals, and also a unique electronic soundtrack. Wipeout The Music isn’t particularly representative of what can be heard in the game, since Tim Wright’s (CoLD SToRAGE) in-game tracks are absent and only a quarter of the contributions to this soundtrack actually feature in the game. Though this is confusing and a little frustrating, the featured techno, acid house, and alternative rock tracks stay rather true to the game’s futuristic and groundbreaking musical style.
The tracks featured on this album that are actually used int he game “Afro Ride,” “Chemical Beats,” and “Wipeout (P.E.T.R.O.L).” “Afro Ride” has an addictive beat and flavoursome backing motif. Although repetitive in places, it provides that futuristic and enduring sound perfect for the game. It was so fitting that it features in both Wipeout and the subsequent Wipeout 2097. The next contribution, “Chemical Beats”, is one of The Chemical Brothers most renowned creations and epitomises the big beat sound which they pioneered. To further put across how successful this track was for them, they actually renamed themselves after it, having previously being called The Dust Brothers. The track is undoubtedly strong, making use of a combination of industrial sounds, breakbeat sequences, hip hop rhythms, and a crazy techno synthesised melody. Still, out of the three that feature in the game, “Wipeout (P.E.T.R.O.L)” is actually my favourite and deserves to bear the game’s title. “Wipeout…” is a creation from brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll (Orbital), and takes upon a unique ambient techno sound. This theme received enough praise for the duo to later return to the series.
Out of the rest of the tracks featured on the album, there are certainly a few notable ones. “Age of Love (Jam & Spoon Mix),” for example, is a rendition of Age of Love’s self-titled track, widely seen as the earliest example of trance music. The track features a compelling vocal line over the creative backdrop of beats and synth sounds to create a fantastic ambient atmosphere. “One Love” by The Prodigy is another strong addition, and is distinctive from the others due to its inclusion of strings and high-pitched tribal chant. You may also enjoy the sounds of “Transamazonia (Deep Dish Rockit Express Dub Mix),” which features some innovative sequencing and an incomparable amount of bass development. It is “Captain Dread” from Dreadzone that I find to be the most enjoyable and original track though; making use of a simple fiddle motif and an upbeat techno rhythm, this fusion brings a more light-hearted feel to the album.
There are a couple of tracks which you may want to miss on this album though. “Circus Bells…” is the most annoying, droning, and repetitive track I’ve heard in a long time; any perceivable interesting qualities are lost with a snail-paced development over nine minutes. Furthermore, with The Manic Street Preacher’s “La Tristesse Durera..,” it’s hard to pull away from the grating vocals provided from the lead singer, despite having a more enjoyable direction. “Blue Monday (Hardfloor Mix),” though, is by far the album’s weakest track. A poor remix of the once highly successful dance track, it focuses on the original’s weakest parts. This sadly further draws away from the addictive and distinctive sound produced by New Order’s novel, throbbing, and inviting bass line.
The album features just three tracks from the game and the rest is made of other licensed music. As a result, Wipeout The Music is certainly not wholly comparative of the original gaming experience. Agreed, the album features some particularly strong tracks and creates that futuristic vibe which Wipeout is renowned for. Between some clear ‘misses’, the album features some truly memorable tracks and features a number of well-known artists. Those looking out for a collection of accessible techno and trance will find this album worth hunting down. Those looking to experience the music which is actually in the game, though, should just put the PlayStation game disc in a CD player, since it conveniently acts as an audio CD too.
Wipeout The Music Dave Valentine
Do you agree with the review and score? Let us know in the comments below!
Posted on August 1, 2012 by Dave Valentine. Last modified on August 1, 2012.
Dave Valentine
ASUKA 120% ~BURNING Remixes~ →
Raging Loop Original Soundtrack →
Final Fantasy XV Piano Collections: Moonlit Melodies →
AHI COMPILATION 10 →
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Home » Sharyl Attkisson Debuts With 28 Pages Report
Sharyl Attkisson Debuts With 28 Pages Report
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/10/sharyl-attkisson-returns-tv-news-look-911-classifi/
8 Minute Preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44vI3hzOsbg
In a preview of her new Sunday morning news broadcast, five-time Emmy winner and former CBS anchor Sharyl Attkisson will delve into the top-secret pages of Congress’ intelligence report on the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which are still kept under wraps 14 years later.
In the report, Ms. Attkisson speaks with current and former lawmakers and family members of victims of the 9/11 attacks to uncover why the documents, known as the “28 pages” are still undisclosed.
Super-Explosive Found in WTC Remains…
Did Al Qaeda Cash in on the 9/11 Attacks?…
The 1993 WTC Bombing Damage Myth…
Visibility 9-11 Welcomes National Security Whistleblower J. Michael Springmann…
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Texans contributed at least $206 million to races for state and federal office this year, helping finance campaigns ranging from district judge to president of the United States.That's a 31 percent increase over the amount of money Texans donated in the 2004 presidential election cycle, and all the money will not be accounted for until January.Read the article at the San Antonio Express-News
Texans boosted political funding 31% over 2004
By R.G. Ratcliffe
AUSTIN — Texans contributed at least $206 million to races for state and federal office this year, helping finance campaigns ranging from district judge to president of the United States.
That's a 31 percent increase over the amount of money Texans donated in the 2004 presidential election cycle, and all the money will not be accounted for until January.
Texas donations in races for president and Congress totaled $140 million, an increase of $15 million over 2004, according to data kept by the Center on Responsive Politics. Almost 70 percent of the additional money went to Democratic candidates.
Donations for campaigns for state office have hit $66 million so far for this year, almost twice what the Texas Ethics Commission reported for 2004. There were almost no major contests for state office that year, but this year there were major election battles for control of the Legislature and other down-ballot offices.
There's no limit on donations to state campaigns, and an individual is limited to $2,300 per election for any one candidate and a total of $108,200 a biennium in donations to federal political committees. The donations tracked don't include money given to the many county-level races in Texas this year.
“For a while there, we had statewide races where the Democrats weren't putting up a candidate at all or if they had a candidate they had chump change,” said Andrew Wheat of Texans for Public Justice, a nonprofit group that tracks Texas campaign finance.
“This year, the (Texas House) speaker is on the ropes, there are many competitive state races and there's a sense among Democrats that there's a chance for a comeback,” Wheat said.
There also was the excitement created in the Texas Democratic primary by the fight for the presidential nomination between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Republican John McCain also did not sew up his nomination until the Texas voting. Both parties had record primary turnouts.
Fundraising parity
In the presidential race, $63.5 million was raised in Texas for all candidates, including those in the primaries, according to the Federal Election Commission. Obama at $17.7 million essentially had parity with McCain, who raised $17.6 million in the state, though the Republican carried Texas on Election Day.
Texas bundlers, people who raise donations for a candidate, raised at least $2.5 million for Obama and $7.3 million for McCain, according to records from the Center on Responsive Politics.
In congressional races, Senate candidates in Texas raised $26.6 million in this cycle through Oct. 15.
That includes $7.6 million that San Antonio lawyer Mikal Watts gave to his own U.S. Senate campaign before dropping out of the race last year. Watts' campaign repaid him $5.4 million in loans.
The candidate with the most money was incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn, who raised $13.1 million after Jan. 1. Democrat Rick Noriega raised $3.6 million.
Candidates for the U.S. House raised $51 million this cycle.
Thirty-eight Texas donors gave more than $130,000 apiece to pump $14.5 million into state elections.
Among the mega-donors this year, Democratic money outpaced Republican, $7.5 million to $5.7 million. San Antonio grocery chain owner Charles Butt was the only major donor with widespread bipartisan giving — more than $1 million.
Texas' top donors
Houston home builder Bob Perry continues as Texas' top donor, giving $2.5 million so far in this election cycle, mostly to Republicans, according to state ethics commission records.
“The presidential campaigns have raised roughly a billion dollars (nationally). The Texas campaigns have raised well over $10 million in the past eight days,” said Perry spokesman Anthony Holm. “So Mr. Perry's contributions to good government are quite small in the grand scheme of things.”
But giving by some of the other traditional large Republican donors, while still substantial, is down from previous elections. San Antonio businessman James Leininger has given $720,000 this year so far. Leininger donated $4.9 million in 2006 and $801,000 in 2004.
On the Democratic side, trial lawyers continue to be the major financiers of the party and its candidates, accounting for about 90 percent of the money given by the party's large-money donors.
“Trial lawyers in Texas have rallied to try to roll back lawsuit reform, and that's what you see in those contributions,” said Sherry Sylvester of Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a committee that has been instrumental in supporting Republicans and conservatives in past elections.
San Antonio lawyer Watts, besides funding his own campaign this year, was the No. 2 donor to Democrats in state races. He contributed more than $1.2 million. He said he gives to level the playing field against “corporate chieftains” who finance Republicans.
“When three or four billionaires can get together and single-handedly bankroll the Republican Party in this state, that's not healthy,” Watts said. “When a guy like Bob Perry is out there donating $3 million to $4 million a cycle, it motivates me and some like-minded Democrats to try to offset his dominance.”
Much of the Democratic comeback in this year's election is due to Dallas trial lawyer Fred Baron, who died last week of cancer.
Baron, the year's top Democratic donor, made $2.2 million in contributions.
Labels: News Clips
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Monaghans All Stars 2018
A team of ‘Monaghans All Stars’ will once again be taking to the pitch for a charity football match at Sheffield United’s Bramall Lane. This year’s match will kick off at 6:45pm on Wednesday 23rd May and will be raising funds for Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice as part of Monaghans’ participation in this year’s Master Cutler’s Challenge.
The Company of Cutlers has a proud history of maintaining the standards and quality of Sheffield manufactured cutlery and steel products since 1624, and more recently has established a welcome tradition of the Master Cutler issuing an annual challenge to organisations across South Yorkshire to raise funds for a chosen charity – raising over £1.3 million for charity since 2008.
Master Cutler Ken Cooke’s chosen charity for 2018 is Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice, a charity dedicated to offering care and support to children and young adults with life-shortening and life-threatening conditions, both in their own homes and at their hospice in North Anston. All Bluebell Wood’s services are completely free to children and families, but it costs over £4 million a year to keep their doors open and they receive just 10% of their funding from statutory government sources. Everything else is funded by charitable donations…
So, as we seek to support Bluebell Wood, the highly anticipated football match will see a ‘Monaghans All Stars’ team, managed by Regional Director Tan Khan, face off against an ‘LSH All Comers XI’ captained by Lambert Smith Hampton’s Tom Burlaga. Playing on the Championship pitch with a full support crew of officials, mascots and stewards, we are looking forward to a competitive match!
Supporters, friends and family are warmly invited to come and join the atmosphere on match day; Admission is free, and gates will open at 18:00 with access through the Directors Lounge into the 1889 Bar ahead of kick off at 18:45.
In addition to this year’s opponents Lambert Smith Hampton, our thanks go to early supporters Clegg Construction, Scarborough Group, Southern Grove, and Henry Boot, who have already made significant contributions. With previous editions raising in excess of £5,000 for charity, we look forward to making a significant contribution to Bluebell Wood this year.
If you would like to donate to this worthy cause before, during or after the match please visit: www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/trebbi
Part of the Trebbi Family© 2019 Copyright Trebbi All Rights Reserved Terms and Conditions Privacy Policy Website Design by DS.Emotion
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Dr Chris McKay
Extraterrestrials, NASA, Science, Space
The Search for a 2nd Genesis of Life
AstroGeophysicist, NASA Ames Research Center, California, USA
Chris is a research scientist with the NASA Ames Research Center. His current research focuses on the evolution of the solar system and the origin of life. He is also actively involved in planning for future Mars missions including human exploration. Chris been involved in research in Mars-like environments on Earth, traveling to the Antarctic dry valleys, Siberia, the Canadian Arctic, and the Atacama desert to study life in these Mars-like environments. He was a co-I on the Titan Huygen’s probe in 2005, the Mars Phoenix lander mission in 2008, and the Mars Science Laboratory mission in 2011.
Dr Alex Pitcher, Cardiologist, John...
The World of Cell Biophysics
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“Atlantic Crossing” by Rod Stewart - album review
Having dumped all of his UK bandmates, the bold Rod was free to roam and play wherever and with whoever. He's losing me with each passing album as he shifts more and more towards the adult oriented rock scene beloved by the Americans. The very album title signifies both this continuing shift and the fact that Rod is now living in the States and has applied for citizenship, keen to escape the UK's 83 percent supertax for the rich! His soulful cover of “Drift Away” (originally done by John Henry Kurtz in 1972 and made famous by Dobie Gray in '73) is the only piece which really strikes a chord with me, although the vibrant pop-rocker “Stone Cold Sober” doesn't offend and the neatly picked ballad “I Don’t Want To Talk About It” (Crazy Horse, 1971) is pleasant. Bizarrely, the track would be deployed as a budget single (flipped by “The First Cut Is The Deepest”) in the Queen's jubilee year, 1977, suspiciously commanding the #1 spot ahead of the Sex Pistols “God Save The Queen”. Boo. Black mark to Rod Stewart. Within it's regular shelf-life, the album boasted two other hit singles; the sickly Muscle Shoals produced ballad “Sailing” (The Sutherland Bros. Band, 1972) gave him a UK #1 and a somewhat insipid reading of “This Old Heart Of Mine” (The Isley Brothers, 1966) gave him a #4 hit in the UK. A consistently popular singer, “Atlantic Crossing” gave him his fourth consecutive #1 in the UK and made #9 Stateside.
A1 [04:03] Rod Stewart - Three Time Loser (Rod Stewart) Blues Rock / Soul Rock
A2 [04:17] Rod Stewart - Alright For An Hour (Rod Stewart, Jesse Ed Davis) Reggae
A3 [05:02] Rod Stewart - All In The Name Of Rock And Roll (Rod Stewart) Rock
A4 [03:43] Rod Stewart - Drift Away (Mentor Williams) Blues Rock / Soul Rock
A5 [04:12] Rod Stewart - Stone Cold Sober (Rod Stewart, Steve Cropper) Rock
B1 [04:47] Rod Stewart - I Don’t Want To Talk About It (Danny Whitten) Pop Ballad
B2 [04:21] Rod Stewart - It’s Not The Spotlight (Barry Goldberg, Gerry Goffin) Soft Rock / A.O.R.
B3 [04:04] Rod Stewart - This Old Heart Of Mine (Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Eddie Holland, Sylvia Moy) Pop
B4 [05:08] Rod Stewart - Still Love You (Rod Stewart) Soft Rock / A.O.R.
B5 [04:37] Rod Stewart - Sailing (Gavin Sutherland) Pop Ballad
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“Heavy Weather” by Weather Report - album review
Seventh album from the New-York-based jazz-fusion outfit co-led by the Austrian-born keyboard player Joe Zawinul and the saxophonist Wayne Shorter of Art Blakey and Miles Davis fame. Completing the five-piece line-up were: Jaco Pastorius (fretless bass), Alex Acuña (drums, percussion) and Manolo Badrena (percussion). It was their greatest commercial success, giving them a #30 placing in the Billboard 200 and going on to sell 500,000 copies. For the fifth consecutive year, they were afforded the Down Beat Album of the Year status, securing their place as the leading force in their field as viewed by the serious critics. There's nothing here for me personally, the famous single “Birdland” and the tribal latin percussion piece “Rumba Mamá” (recorded at the Montreux jazz festival in the summer of '76) being the two which cause least offence to my central nervous system.
A1 [05:57] Weather Report - Birdland (Joe Zawinul) Jazz
A2 [06:51] Weather Report - A Remark You Made (Joe Zawinul) Jazz
A3 [02:51] Weather Report - Teen Town (Jaco Pastorius) Jazz
A4 [03:59] Weather Report - Harlequin (Wayne Shorter) Jazz
B1 [02:11] Weather Report - Rumba Mamá [live] (Manolo Badrena, Alex Acuña) Latin
B2 [04:46] Weather Report - Palladíum (Wayne Shorter) Jazz
B3 [05:03] Weather Report - The Juggler (Joe Zawinul) Prog
B4 [06:01] Weather Report - Havona (Jaco Pastorius) Jazz
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Viewpoint: A long future for France’s nuclear fleet?
France set out its energy transition roadmap in the recently proposed PPE plan. Included are challenging targets to gradually reduce the country's reliance on nuclear generation. Pierre George, senior director, and Claire Mauduit-Le Clercq, director, EMEA Utilities at S&P Global Ratings, explain the implications for France’s nuclear future and for the country’s sole nuclear operator, EDF.
Pierre George (left) and Claire Mauduit-Le Clercq (right) (Image: S&P)
Although it has long been considered a leading proponent of nuclear energy, France's energy mix looks set to change. On 27 November last year, President Emmanuel Macron unveiled the programmation pluriannuelle de l'énergie (PPE), a strategy document for managing the energy transition over the coming decades. At its core, the PPE aims to reduce France's utilisation of its nuclear fleet, which today represents around three-quarters of its generating capacity. By 2035, the PPE states, this figure should fall to around 50%.
This, of course, has direct implications for EDF, the country's monopoly nuclear operator. But the near-term ramifications could be less severe than some may first suspect. In fact, the PPE largely preserves the status quo: it does not accelerate the pace of France's energy transition; nor will it be likely to prompt anything but marginal revisions to EDF’s strategy, which already allows for introducing renewables to the grid. So, while structural challenges remain for EDF, nuclear generation will likely remain crucial for France’s grid - and for some time yet.
Strategy deviations likely to be marginal
What next for EDF? In order to fulfil the PPE's target, the utility looks set to shutter 12.6 gigawatts (GW) of capacity from its 63 GWe nuclear fleet by 2035.
The PPE offers some flexibility in achieving this: aside from the closure of the two Fessenheim reactors next year, there are currently no planned closures before 2027. But this could change as the energy landscape in Europe develops. For instance, the enforced rate of development of renewable energy sources could lead to grid oversupply at certain times and price volatility. In such a scenario, the PPE provides flexibility for the closure of an additional two plants in 2025 and 2026. For the most part, however, the shuttering of EDF's nuclear capacity should be gradual.
Additionally, we expect no material changes to EDF’s investment profile, either. For instance, France's EUR45 billion (USD51 billion) nuclear investment plan, known as the Grand Carénage, will continue. Much of this investment plan, which will allow EDF to extend the lifespan of the entire nuclear fleet to 50 years, should be completed by 2025.
France's ambitious energy plan will require substantial investment efforts over the next few years. Against this backdrop, the French government has expressed a willingness to propose a new remuneration framework for the existing nuclear fleet - though the timing and details of such a regulatory change remain uncertain and remote. What's more, the French state has opened the option of increasing its stake in EDF (currently 83.7%) by as early as 2019. If, or indeed when, these developments are implemented it could be credit positive.
The future for nuclear
The PPE does not herald the end for nuclear power in France. In fact, while the plan involves reducing nuclear capacity, it also highlights France's continued pro-nuclear stance for decades to come. We understand that after 2035, the share of nuclear in the energy mix will stay at about 50%. And currently there are no stated intentions in the draft PPE to reduce this share further.
As such, this would imply that further life extensions to the existing fleet as well as construction of new reactors may be necessary. While no decision has been made on the latter, new nuclear projects could be examined from as early as 2021. And, if economically viable, we understand that the French government would be in favour of new reactor building. French nuclear, then, though sure to decline in dominance, is still important for the future.
Energy policy France
Viewpoint: Building a belief in nuclear, financially and emotionally
Speech: The sustainability of used nuclear fuel management
Viewpoint: Chernobyl and a very modern safety culture
Viewpoint: Why we need nuclear power
Viewpoint: The advantages of Small Modular Reactors
Speech: The task ahead for nuclear energy
Viewpoint: Nuclear's small role in humanity's biggest adventure
Viewpoint: Five reasons nuclear energy will rebound in 2018
Nuclear Power in France
Macron clarifies French energy plans EDF results show expected rebound
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The Official Stephen King Thread
347 posts • Page 5 of 7 • 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Re: Doctor Sleep
by TheBaxter on Mon Sep 26, 2011 11:07 am
TheButcher wrote: From io9:
Listen to Stephen King read a chapter from the sequel to The Shining
Cyriaque Lamar wrote: At an awards ceremony at George Mason University last Friday, Stephen King regaled audiences with a chapter from Doctor Sleep, his upcoming novel about a grown-up Danny Torrance from The Shining.
In the book, Danny is a hospice worker who uses his powers to help ill patients to pass away without pain. Unfortunately, he runs afoul of a gang of wandering psychic vampires who feed on people's energy.
King is almost finished with the book — and here I imagined the sequel would be called The Shining 2: Johnny's Back!
Via Lilja's Library. Thanks Gregory!
i would've gone with The Shining 2: Electric BOO!-galoo
Re: The Official Stephen King Thread
by Hermanator X on Wed Nov 02, 2011 9:40 am
A good spoiler free review of Kings new book 11/22/63
Not a huge King fan, but like to dip into his books now and again. This sounds like a one I will be keen to pick up at launch, rather than just when I see it cheap in a book store.
I do like a good time travel yarn, and going by the reviewers assessment it sounds pretty well done. The mechanism of the time travel itself sounds like it has real promise in it for cool story choices.
Stephen King and Son Embrace ROAD RAGE with IDW
by caruso_stalker217 on Tue May 08, 2012 5:40 pm
Publication date set for Dr. Sleep, and a synopsis and such:
Stephenking.com wrote: U.S. publication date for Doctor Sleep has been tentatively set for January 15, 2013
Posted: May 8th, 2012 9:08:34 am EDT
Stephen King returns to the characters and territory of one of his most popular novels ever, The Shining, in this instantly riveting novel about the now middle-aged Dan Torrance (the boy protagonist of The Shining) and the very special twelve-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.
On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and tween Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the “steam” that children with the “shining” produce when they are slowly tortured to death.
Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.”
Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil, a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of hyper-devoted readers of The Shining and wildly satisfy anyone new to the territory of this icon in the King canon.
This sounds like Insomnia crossed with Dean Koontz crossed with shit. A triple-layer shit-burger with shit-toppings and an order of shit-dressing on the side and served on a steaming pile of shit.
"Aided by a prescient cat." Jesus.
Re: Jesus.
by justcheckin on Sat Jun 30, 2012 9:18 am
caruso_stalker217 wrote: Publication date set for Dr. Sleep, and a synopsis and such:
I liked the new dark tower book but is he going back through his books now and seeing which ones he can write sequels off of. Seems lazy...
justcheckin
Location: Down the street, take a left.
by so sorry on Sat Jun 30, 2012 1:00 pm
caruso_stalker217 wrote: This sounds like Insomnia crossed with Dean Koontz crossed with shit. A triple-layer shit-burger with shit-toppings and an order of shit-dressing on the side and served on a steaming pile of shit.
So a man and girl who can "shine", paranormal ghosts who haunt them, and polyester clad immortals don't phase you, but a sentient cat does?
by Peven on Sat Jun 30, 2012 2:16 pm
so sorry wrote:
a reader has to draw the line somewhere
by caruso_stalker217 on Sat Jun 30, 2012 3:43 pm
The rest sounds bad, too, but the cat just puts it over the top. Like I said, sounds like something out of a Koontz book.
I did listen to the first chapter on the audio version of The Wind Through The Keyhole and it was pretty good. It's the rest that gives me doubts.
by TheBaxter on Mon Jul 16, 2012 10:49 am
i'm pretty sure all cats are "sentient"
actually, a "prescient" cat isn't all that strange. you hear stories all the time about dogs and cats in nursing homes that seem to be able to sense when someone's on the way out and they go and sleep on their chests or rub up against them or something, and it sounds from the description like this is more in line with the type of cat in the story. now if we're talking about the cat psychically talking to him and saying "hey, buddy, the old lady in room 4B is about to kick the bucket, you might want to pay her a visit", then yeah, now that would be ALF. i think it's just the way they phrased it ... "aided by a prescient cat"... that makes it sound goofy, in context if it's done the way i think it won't be as goofy as it sounds.
by so sorry on Mon Jul 16, 2012 11:47 am
TheBaxter wrote:
Nice, the first post by you in weeks and its to call me out as an idiot!
by TheBaxter on Mon Jul 16, 2012 12:36 pm
i gotta pick my moments.
by caruso_stalker217 on Mon Jul 16, 2012 4:59 pm
Everybody knows that cats sleep on peoples' chests so they can steal their breath. It's science.
by TheBaxter on Mon Jul 16, 2012 6:09 pm
caruso_stalker217 wrote: Everybody knows that cats sleep on peoples' chests so they can steal their breath. It's science.
no no no. TROLLS steal your breath. cats protect you from the trolls.
Damn this American education system!
by justcheckin on Tue Jul 17, 2012 10:44 pm
The best part was what the record was playing.
by TheBaxter on Fri Nov 30, 2012 11:34 am
Under the Dome is officially becoming a miniseries now
hopefully it'll be better than the book was.
by so sorry on Fri Nov 30, 2012 11:46 am
TheBaxter wrote: Under the Dome is officially becoming a miniseries now
Not likely.
by Fievel on Fri Nov 30, 2012 12:48 pm
Looking back, typical King book. There's so much I like about it and an ending that left me flat.
Why does Network Television think they can get Stephen King right? His tone, at its best, is brutal and vicious, and not meant for children. This should be on cable at best, and really on HBO or Showtime. But standard King production warnings apply - Keep Mick Garris away from this.
And M.C. Gainey for Big Jim Renney. Although, I've seen Talkback suggestions for John Goodman that I can't fault, either.
by Fievel on Sat Dec 01, 2012 6:35 pm
Why the retread on this news?
Stephen King's 'Under the Dome' gets CBS series order
Notice the headline doesn't say miniseries.......
Fans of the novel shouldn’t expect an exact retelling of the same story. Last we heard, writer Brian K. Vaughan’s (Lost) script for Dome was wisely using the novel’s setup as a launch pad for its own TV-format-friendly version of the story and might even lay the groundwork for a different outcome than the novel’s ending. Also, the CBS version is definitely a series, not a mini-series, with a finale episode that will leave the story open for more seasons.
We need a WTF smiley.
by caruso_stalker217 on Sun Dec 02, 2012 12:03 am
I haven't read it, but the book is like a thousand fucking pages. They could squeeze at least three seasons out of this bitch.
by TheBaxter on Mon Dec 03, 2012 11:25 am
caruso_stalker217 wrote: I haven't read it, but the book is like a thousand fucking pages. They could squeeze at least three seasons out of this bitch.
hopefully the tv show has a better editor than the book.
or make that, hopefully the tv show has an editor, period.
by caruso_stalker217 on Fri Mar 01, 2013 3:05 pm
Doctor Sleep Cover Revealed
Very sexy.
by justcheckin on Wed Mar 06, 2013 8:30 pm
caruso_stalker217 wrote: Doctor Sleep Cover Revealed
by TheBaxter on Wed Jul 03, 2013 1:32 pm
just finished reading Joyland. this was a quick and fast read... which means by King standards, it's practically a short story. anyway, really good book, light on the horror/supernatural/mystery end (though it is in there), heavy on the coming-of-age, emotionally resonant stuff. so yeah, i liked it.
by so sorry on Wed Jul 03, 2013 1:38 pm
TheBaxter wrote: just finished reading Joyland. this was a quick and fast read... which means by King standards, it's practically a short story. anyway, really good book, light on the horror/supernatural/mystery end (though it is in there), heavy on the coming-of-age, emotionally resonant stuff. so yeah, i liked it.
I've read a few good reviews. I'll probably pick this up in paperback when it gets there.
by Fievel on Wed Jul 03, 2013 2:37 pm
It was released in paperback!
Fievel wrote:
with a cool cover too!
by TheBaxter on Fri Nov 08, 2013 1:21 pm
i just got done reading Doctor Sleep. it's got a couple minor flaws and one MAJOR (at least for me) flaw, but for the most part i really liked it. a little background: i realized when this book was announced that, despite having seen the film multiple times, The Shining was actually one of the few King books that had slipped by unread by me. and considering that King's unhappiness with the film adaptation, and the things that were changed or left out in it, were well known, i figured it was probably a good idea to go ahead and read that book first before i started this one. so i did just that (finished it up at the same time i was handing out Halloween candy last week, in fact) and then started in on Doctor Sleep. i'm glad i did, because the differences DO matter, but it's also at the heart of the major flaw i found with the new book.
first of all, i didn't find The Shining to be all that great a read. probably some of that is how i'm influenced by the movie, which i prefer. at the same time, i can totally understand King's unhappiness with the film. in particular, the de-emphasis of Jack's alcoholism and the way the film (and NIcholson's performance) make Jack seem too crazy too early. still, the film works better for me than the book. not that the film is necessarily better, but when they finally get to the hotel and the spooky stuff starts happening, it's a bit anticlimactic since i felt like i knew what was coming. that's kind of inevitable when you've seen the movie first i guess, but the supernatural parts of the book just didn't scare me much.
Doctor Sleep didn't scare me much either, but i actually enjoyed reading it more. i liked the characters better (i like adult Dan better than 5-year-old Danny) and i liked how the plot of the story progressed. and this is also one of King's better endings, which we all know can be a problem with his books sometimes. I really liked how it circled back into some stuff from The Shining, without going into too much detail.
as for the flaws: one of course is King's trouble with dialogue. it's not too bad here most of the time, but there's a couple of cringeworthy instances. surprisingly King does a pretty good job writing for a 13-year-old girl, but there's still a passage here and there that reminds you that King is getting a little old to write convincing dialogue for kids (though, thankfully, not nearly as bad as his kid-dialogue from Under the Dome). worse is some of the True Knot dialogue. there are a few passage here that, i swear, made me think King was engaging in some product placement. i don't know if it's that, or if King is trying too hard to prove that he's still "hip" and "with it" in regards to modern technology. but apparently there's some website out there that's MUCH better than Google Maps at providing satellite images, and King wants you to know all about it. another character gets really excited about his portable printer and sounds like he's reading ad copy. and the worst offender.... at one point, one of the characters has hacked into some website to get information, and another character asks him "how did you surf the internet while we're on the road?" to which he responds something like "it's 4G baby, welcome to the future". what makes this so bad is that, only a few paragraphs later, the character who asked the question is making a call with his iPhone. he owns and uses an iPhone, and yet he's puzzled about how another person can surf the web from inside their RV. that just hurt.
as for the major flaw, it revolves around the big "twist"/revelation of the book, so i'll go into spoiler-tag land to discuss that: so, we find out that Jack Torrance had an affair at some point after Danny was born and before dying at the Overlook. this is fine, there's nothing in The Shining that contradicts the possibility of that having happened. problem is (and having just read the Shining RIGHT BEFORE starting this book, it really jumped out at me) there's nothing in the Shining that supports it either. there are huge chunks of the Shining devoted to Jack Torrance's guilt: his guilt over his drinking, his guilt over breaking Danny's arm, his guilt over his inability to control his temper, his guilt over beating up one of his student's and losing his teaching job, his guilt at forcing Wendy and Danny into this position of having to come with him to the Overlook because it's his last chance. the entire book is pervaded with Jack Torrance's guilt. and yet, not a single mention of having cheated on his wife. you'd think, considering how guilty he is over these other things, that if he had cheated on his wife, that guilt would be right up there with those other things, right? of course, it's not there because when King wrote the Shining, the character hadn't cheated on his wife. if he had, the guilt of that would have been wrapped up along with all the other things that fueled his guilt, his pride, his anger, and ultimately allowed the Overlook to get inside him and manipulate him. this is one of those flaws that, if i had read the Shining 10 or 20 years ago, instead of just a week before, probably never would have occurred to me. but having the book fresh in my mind, it bothered me.
all that said, i did like the twist itself, just wish King could have made it all "fit" better.
oh, and one last thing:
TheBaxter wrote: actually, a "prescient" cat isn't all that strange. you hear stories all the time about dogs and cats in nursing homes that seem to be able to sense when someone's on the way out and they go and sleep on their chests or rub up against them or something, and it sounds from the description like this is more in line with the type of cat in the story. now if we're talking about the cat psychically talking to him and saying "hey, buddy, the old lady in room 4B is about to kick the bucket, you might want to pay her a visit", then yeah, now that would be ALF. i think it's just the way they phrased it ... "aided by a prescient cat"... that makes it sound goofy, in context if it's done the way i think it won't be as goofy as it sounds.
and....... i was right. that cat plays such a tiny role in the book, in fact, i'm surprised he was even mentioned in the publisher's blurb. it's nothing but a poorly-written blurb for the book, doesn't reflect the quality of the book itself at all.
by so sorry on Fri Nov 08, 2013 1:34 pm
Nice write up Baxter. How long do you think it'll be before Dr Sleep is turned into a movie?
i think it would work nicely as a movie (you know how sometimes King writes those books that feel like he's already thinking about how the movie version will play out as he's writing it? this is one of those books).
unfortunately, if this gets made as a movie, King will probably write the screenplay and then give it to his good buddy Mick Garris to direct for the TNT channel or something. maybe even make it a direct sequel to Garris' version of The Shining, which King loves of course because it's slavishly devoted to King's own novel-derived screenplay. i think we all know how that would turn out.
true story: in the author's notes at the end of the book, King writes about how hard it is to follow up a classic because you're competing with people's memories of the original. as an example, he cites Psycho, which he claims had one brilliant sequel: Psycho IV, directed by.... you guessed it.... Mick Garris. he actually says it was as good as the original. it would almost be funny if it weren't so sad. i'd like to think King is just tweaking people who hate on Mick Garris with that comment, but sadly, i think King might actually believe it.
on another note, my next King book will be On Writing. i'm excited about it.
by TheBaxter on Thu Nov 14, 2013 1:43 am
just finished king's On Writing. now i know how to write good.
this book was written in the late 90s. i chuckled at the part where he talks about how he detests flashbacks, knowing what a big fan of Lost he would later become.
thats 3 king books in a row. time to read somebody else.
by caruso_stalker217 on Thu Nov 14, 2013 1:49 am
I've finally committed to reading Doctor Sleep after a month and half of false starts and am about two hundred pages in. It is a book and so far a good one. I will enjoy further reading it with my eyes.
TheBaxter wrote: just finished king's On Writing. now i know how to write good.
It is by far the most useful book I've ever read about writing. The fact that it's probably the only book about writing I've ever read is probably irrelevant.
I have actually been unable to write anything since reading it, but I wasn't really writing before anyway.
by TheBaxter on Thu Nov 14, 2013 10:58 am
i've written several posts since i finished reading the book, including the one above. i think you can already see King's influence on my writing... i didn't use a single adverb.
by caruso_stalker217 on Thu Nov 14, 2013 1:10 pm
Natch.
by caruso_stalker217 on Wed Nov 20, 2013 3:45 pm
I too have now also completed finishing Doctor Sleep, a novel of the supernatural. I have thoughts.
Overall, an enjoyable experience. Not as good a book as The Shining, obviously. The Shining was written early in King's career, so it was exempt from later King themes, tropes and cliches. I don't believe he has written another book like The Shining, as he has not written another 'Salem's Lot or Dead Zone and so on. The Shining is an original and Doctor Sleep is not, because it is a sequel. But also because it feels too much like other stuff he's already written. A group of people coming together to fight Evil, kids with magic powers, precocious kids with magic powers, evil creatures that look human, evil creatures that look human feeding off peoples' auras/lifeforce/emotions, weak mundane villains that somehow manage to also be cartoonish and ridiculous and have silly names. I felt like I was being punished or something, having to see names like "Rose the Hat" and "Steamhead Steve" over and over.
Dan Torrance is a good character, but I couldn't help feeling that the whole "Doctor Sleep" thing was underused, or rather the main story with the True Knot sorta overshadowed it or made it feel kind of whatever the fuck. I hate to say it, but I think I'd rather read about Dan's work at the hospice and going to AA meetings than a tribe of incompetent middle-aged RV-driving vampires bumbling about the country and doing little of consequence. It doesn't help that it's strongly suggested thatthey will all die soon of the measles without any interference from the protagonists. And the main villain wears a hat and is named Rose the Hat.
A word about the third act twist/revelation: I thought that was kind of weird and maybe a little forced. But I will disagree with Baxter that it didn't gel with the stuff in The Shining, becauseI think King made an effort to suggest that Jack was probably so fucking smashed on the alcohol that he like blacked out or whatever and didn't remember. So maybe that was the one time he was unfaithful to Wendy and he didn't remember putting his dick in a strange pussy because he was drunk. But that sounds like the kind of excuse he'd make if Wendy had caught him or something.
Okay, I've changed my mind. That's pretty thin.
I was a little more disappointed in the resolution of the story. Setting it at the site of where the Overlook used to stand is a pretty good idea, but the execution was kinda weak. I would have liked it if it were tied into The Shining more. There is a moment where Rose the Hat gets into Dan's head and starts fucking with him, but he shuts her down pretty fast, because a strong and formidable antagonist would be boring I guess. I wouldn't have minded more mind games during this portion. Taking Dan back to his childhood, unleashing all those fears and shit, and Dan would have to finally face his past, which I figured was where King was going to go with the idea of the lockboxes back at the beginning. But he didn't. Dan just sets that Horace Derwent guy loose and he kills the dumpy broad with the speech impediment and that was it. And earlier he coughed out an old dead lady who then killed all the weak, uninteresting bad guys. And Ghost Jack showed up and punched Rose the Hat a couple times or some shit.
So that was a missed fucking opportunity I think. Although I did find it a little touching that Dan and Jack got to have a little moment, sort of.
The last scene was really good, I thought. I wish the rest of the book could have been more about that stuff and less about whatever the fuck was going on with those dopey steam-sucking fucks.
by TheBaxter on Wed Nov 20, 2013 4:32 pm
i agree the bad guys were the weakest part of that book. although i think at least part of the point was that these people weren't a threat to THE COUNTRY or THE WORLD or LIFE AS WE KNOW IT, but were really just a threat to Abra, and that regardless of the fact they were on the verge of extinction they'd still live long enough to kill her rather brutally before they went. after that lame kidnap attempt though, even that wasn't much of a threat. i mean, it's like he WANTED her to get away or something. but, i thought it was at least a little refreshing that the stakes were smaller, i mean, King already wrote the Stand, we don't need that again.
as for the twist/revelation, i thought the book made it pretty clear that there had been some kind of ongoing thing between Abra's gramma and Jack, at least from her perspective as she related it to Abra's great-gramma and she then related it back to Dan who later related it back to Abra's mom who was Dan's half-sister. but i returned the book to the library already so i can't look up the passage where they talked about that.
I guess the big problem for me was that I never felt that any of the characters were in any actual danger. I mean, Abra is totally OP from the start and Rose the Hat is consistently outmatched at every turn. I was actually surprised that none of the good guys got sacrificed at any point. It's rare in a King book for the heroes to emerge victorious without suffering at least one casualty. So I didn't mind that the stakes weren't too high, I just wish that it had at least been a challenge.
I think that's why I would have preferred a(n even) smaller, more character-driven approach. Maybe show more of the contrast between Dan and Jack, having the son triumph where his father failed. Instead of Dan getting sober within the first hundred pages, make that the main thrust of the story. Have him ultimately beat his demons, instead of being consumed by them as his father was. Maybe that's too typical or cliched, but I think there is more interesting material there than the True Knot stuff.
But I shouldn't be judging the book for what it isn't. That's kinda pointless and unfair.
Oh yeah, and that whole thing about PSYCHO IV in the author's note was pretty fucking incredible. I thought PSYCHO II was supposed to be the brilliant sequel.
King's getting soft in his old age. gone are the days when Johnny Smith dies at the end of the Dead Zone, or EVERYONE dies at the end of Pet Sematary. i would have preferred it if Dan had died... i really thought he was heading in that direction when he got sick towards the end. but, as i mentioned, i think King was already thinking about the inevitable TV-Movie adaptation and those Lifetime Channel viewers just wouldn't have it if he killed off the main character.
by caruso_stalker217 on Fri Nov 22, 2013 2:36 pm
Yeah, it's kinda bothersome. Just look at something like Wizard and Glass. Roland is a damn capable fourteen year old, but even he is overconfident at times and that ends up costing him greatly. I think there needed to be a good "too big for your britches" scene for Abra. Something costly. A somewhat inconvenient kidnapping just doesn't cut it.
But, yeah, no way this thing gets adapted as a feature film. First off, no one wants to follow Kubrick's film. Second, they really can't follow his film because Doctor Sleep is too tied in to the original book. Thirdmost...this ain't good enough to be a real movie. I'm not even sure it's worth shooting for television.
caruso_stalker217 wrote: But, yeah, no way this thing gets adapted as a feature film. First off, no one wants to follow Kubrick's film.
that's probably the biggest reason. that, and also, how long has it been since there's been a successful feature film adaptation of a King book? 1408? The Mist? and those weren't exactly blockbusters. King is pretty much a TV writer these days, and a lot of that is due to his unwillingness to let good writers and directors adapt his work, which is itself at least partly the result of The Shining (though also, in fairness, the result of some pretty crappy movies based on his books as well). i think King's control issues over his books is largely responsible for the switch to TV shows/movies.
caruso_stalker217 wrote: Second, they really can't follow his film because Doctor Sleep is too tied in to the original book.
i think they could get around that. the things that are different from the film aren't really central to the story. the main plot of the film involving Danny, Abra, and the True Knot really doesn't depend on anything from the Shining. some of the prologue stuff would have to change, but that would probably be cut out altogether anyway. the biggest difference would be explaining why the Overlook isn't around anymore, but i'm sure they can come up with something. or more likely, they'd change the ending so that the Overlook was still standing. maybe the True Knot bought it and turned it into their own private resort (like the mob had done in the past as King mentions in the original novel). they'd have to throw out all that lockbox stuff, but like you said, it didn't really amount to much anyway, and if the Overlook was still standing, it would give you that deeper tie-in to the Shining you wanted, maybe with the True Knot using the ghosts of his past against him, him having to face his past all over again, etc.
in some ways, this book would make for an easy sequel. no need to resign the cast members, as most are dead by the time this book takes place, and the one who isn't was a 5-year-old boy, so recasting is really not an issue. the only issue would be getting jack nicholson's cameo... but if he won't do it, they can just hire the wind from The Happening.
once again, though, the biggest impediment to that would be King. no way he'd allow the sequel to be adapted to account for the film version he prefers to ignore.
caruso_stalker217 wrote: Thirdmost...this ain't good enough to be a real movie. I'm not even sure it's worth shooting for television.
not good enough even for Mick Garris? damn, you really didn't like it!
by Bloo on Sat Nov 23, 2013 3:08 am
TheBaxter wrote: King's getting soft in his old age. gone are the days when Johnny Smith dies at the end of the Dead Zone, or EVERYONE dies at the end of Pet Sematary. i would have preferred it if Dan had died... i really thought he was heading in that direction when he got sick towards the end. but, as i mentioned, i think King was already thinking about the inevitable TV-Movie adaptation and those Lifetime Channel viewers just wouldn't have it if he killed off the main character.
Yes I'm still alive LOL My inital reaction on Facebook after finishing Dr Sleep was "this was awesome!" but Ithink that was because I liked the character of Dan so much. And I totally thought King was going to kill Dan in a spectacular fashion. Or at least the old man friend...or the doctor.
But I have zero interest in returning to the world of Dr. Sleep...unless it's a third book that is just about him putting old people to sleep and going to AA meetings. I agree with caruso, that stuff was great.
by caruso_stalker217 on Thu Dec 12, 2013 5:29 am
I watched the film INSIDIOUS for the first time yesterday and I've come to the conclusion that Patrick Wilson should play Dan Torrance in the eventual Lifetime Original Movie version of Doctor Sleep or whatever the fuck.
by caruso_stalker217 on Thu Dec 19, 2013 2:15 pm
New novel coming June 2014.
by TheBaxter on Thu Dec 19, 2013 3:58 pm
shades of The Dead Zone and 11/22/63. count me in.
in related (literally) news...
i've been reading NOS4A2 by joe hill. the apple does not fall far from the tree. this is the 2nd book of his i've read, Horns being #1 (which i liked better). i always had the impression that joe hill wanted to distance himself from his dad as much as possible, but this book really comes off like stephen king jr. it even has IT and dark tower references in it. also, like much of king sr.'s work, it could use some paring down. at 700pp it feels longer than it needs to be. like father, like son.
weirdly enough, having just recently read doctor sleep, i'm noticing some odd parallels between this book and that one. both feature a young female main character with psychic powers, a villain who is some kind of psychic vampire, both books feature large jumps forward in time, the kidnapping of a child, and even references to 9/11 in the story. they are still very different books otherwise, but that many coincidences between father and son books written at about the same time is almost spooky.
ETA: and only moments after posting this and going back to my book, i come across this line, spoken by the big baddie in NOS4A2 himself... "There is the True Knot, who live on the road and are in much the same line of work as myself. I leave them be and they are glad to return the favor." so yeah, i'd say joe hill is not too concerned with keeping a distance from his father's works after all.
by Bloo on Thu Dec 19, 2013 4:55 pm
TheBaxter wrote: shades of The Dead Zone and 11/22/63. count me in.
My favorite of Joe Hill's work is Heart-Shaped Box, and I think it was after that or Horns that his linage came to light and since then, Hill has been less concerned about making a name for himself on his own.
by caruso_stalker217 on Fri Dec 20, 2013 2:11 am
I liked NOS4A2 a lot. I think he's grown a lot as a writer and it may be his best-written yet, but Horns is probably his best overall cuz like emotions and such. I liked the King references and liked that his dad including NOS4A2 references in Doctor Sleep, because nerd shit.
Normally I wouldn't say this kind of shit, but I think Tim Burton could do a good NOS4A2 movie, but he'd probably cast Depp as Charlie Manx and nobody needs that shit.
Re: Doctor Sleep/Stand By Me
John Cusack Wants To Star In A Movie Version Of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep
TheButcher wrote: John Cusack Wants To Star In A Movie Version Of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep
i can see it.
seems like john cusack wants to be the leo dicaprio to king's marty scorsese.
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What have you been watching? (DVD or Films on TV)
6051 posts • Page 117 of 122 • 1 ... 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120 ... 122
Re: What have you been watching? (DVD or Films on TV)
by caruso_stalker217 on Sun Aug 19, 2012 2:21 am
Bloo wrote: I've had Killshot on my computer for awhile because you know its Mickey Rourke and Elmore Leonard and I love both of those guys not to mention my man boner for Tom Jane. But I've held back on watching this now I'm glad. thanks for the heads up (though knowing me I'll watch it sooner or later.
I've read up on the movie since then and there were a lot of reshoots and shit apparently, which makes sense. It feels very reshooty. The sleazy U.S. Marshall subplot was actually in the film at one point (with Johnny Knoxville in the role) but it got cut due to poor test audience reactions.
Now that I've thought about it, Rosario really is the best thing going for the film. I may have to rethink my position on Rosario Dawson, Actress.
So, yeah, I'd recommend skipping this. But like you said you'll probably get to it eventually. I would definitely recommend the book, though, if you haven't read it already.
I've been rereading Get Shorty and wanting to get the three Raylan Givens books because the Justified cats GET Elmore Leonard, but it's moving up to he top of my list. I want to reread Be Cool as well, hopefully it's not as shitty as the movie, I read it once and remember it well but could be wrong on that. LOL
I need to finish Get Shorty. I picked that up a couple years back when I never got around to finishing books. I think I've read more books so far this year than the last two or three.
by Bloo on Sun Aug 19, 2012 4:41 am
Get Shorty was the first Leonard book I read. I was working at a radio station where we played a pretaped program every 30 minutes so I really only had to work about 3, 4 hours out of a 6, 8 hour shift, so I was reading a lot. It's a great starter book to the world of Elmore Leonard. I like it but it's so different from so many of his other works (little focus on Miami, no Detroit).
I've been reading quite a bit here lately too, maybe I should talk about that in the "what have you been reading" thread
by caruso_stalker217 on Sun Aug 26, 2012 3:34 pm
Watched KLUTE, starring Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda's hard nipples. It was pretty good.
by so sorry on Tue Sep 04, 2012 2:43 pm
So thru no fault but my own, I witnessed perhaps the worst movie I've seen in many many years. The reviews were terrible, it was the butt of internet jokes across the web, and I knew damn well that it was going to be bad. But somewhere in the back of my mind I had a glimmer of hope that I'd get some perverse pleasure out of watching it stink....but no deal. It was putrid, with ZERO redeeming quality, and within 5 minutes of having it on I was embarrassed to be watching it.
Name that movie! It came out this year.
The Answer: Battleship
by TheBaxter on Tue Sep 04, 2012 4:40 pm
so sorry wrote: So thru no fault but my own, I witnessed perhaps the worst movie I've seen in many many years. The reviews were terrible, it was the butt of internet jokes across the web, and I knew damn well that it was going to be bad. But somewhere in the back of my mind I had a glimmer of hope that I'd get some perverse pleasure out of watching it stink....but no deal. It was putrid, with ZERO redeeming quality, and within 5 minutes of having it on I was embarrassed to be watching it.
The Dark Knight Rises?
by Indy Jones on Wed Sep 05, 2012 4:40 pm
Just saw Trollhunter. Very good for a "found-footage" movie, also it's CGI shots we're amazing.
Indy Jones
by Spandau Belly on Sun Sep 16, 2012 7:04 am
BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
I saw that intense trailer with all the Argento-Kubrick hybrid visuals and that synth music and had to see this movie. Watching BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW is like being molested by a lava lamp, hypnotic and violating. The film's driven by its look and atmosphere with plot and character taking a backseat, resulting in a movie that was less engaging than I would've liked. It's beautiful to watch and listen to, while also feeling incredibly creepy yet not terribly rewarding.
The plot is about Dr. Arboria, who creates a giant medical research complex full of Kubrickian minimalist decor and Argento lighting schemes, where he will create happiness through technology. There is a little girl who has been raised in the complex who is either a clone of Arboria's dead wife, or Arboria somehow injected his dead wife's psyche into a baby, I wasn't quite clear on that. Arboria turns into a fucked up Howard Hughes type living in his medical complex and leaves the upbringing of the little girl to a doctor named Barry, who looks like Christian Bale and who can seem smarmy and furious frequently at the same time. Naturally, the little girl wants out of this hellish discothèque.
I don't think most people would like this film. It's very dry, keeps a lot of distances from its characters, and its internal logic is hard to understand. But I did enjoy letting the atmosphere and imagery of it all wash over me.
Special note for comic book geeks: If they ever make a SPIDERMAN movie with Mysterio, this is exactly what I would want from that character. This is how I would want his illusions to look and feel.
by TheBaxter on Tue Oct 09, 2012 11:56 am
so i saw this movie V/H/S over the weekend that's been pretty heavily hyped on AICN. i'm generally a fan of the found footage horror genre and this movie was kind of touted as a found footage creepshow, so i was looking forward to it. unfortunately, all that hype was not earned.
it definitely is like a creepshow for the found footage genre. there's five separate stories, all connected by a sixth framing story. sadly, the anthology concept actually exposes alot more of the common flaws of this genre and the film can't overcome them. 3 things in particular that bothered me.
one, there's the whole "aesthetic" of these films. whether it's "shaky-cam", intentionally grainy or distorted video, jump cuts, etc. if you've seen more than one found footage film then you're familiar with them. this movie not only uses them all (sometimes using the same ones in different stories, and sometimes more creatively than other times) but it OVERUSES them to the point of distraction. how many times have you watched a digital cam, ipod or webcam video on youtube or facebook and seen digital distortion, interference, sudden cuts to old footage that somehow "peeks through" the new footage, or garbled audio. for me the answer is ALMOST NEVER. yet, every one of these films and almost all of the stories in this film have that crap all over them. they are beating you over the head to try to portray the footage as "real" but it actually just ends up being distracting and taking you out of the story because it's so unrealistic and so unlike how actual, average consumer-quality video recorders work. oh, and if you think the "V/H/S" title explains it by having all the stories take place a long time ago when stuff was recorded on video.... uhh, no. best i could tell, ALL the stories in this film take place in the modern era and were filmed digitally. (which raises another issue with why, in the framing story, all this stuff was transferred to VHS. the framing story is about guys breaking into a house to steal a particular VHS tape, and having to watch these other tapes to find it... so why were these obviously DIGITAL recordings transferred to VHS tapes? my guess is because having a bunch of guys sitting at a computer, sifting through some AVI files, would have been boring to watch. but really... VHS? why not DVD? i guess selling a movie called "DVD" might have produced some challenges, but the logic of it all is just mind-numbingly dumb. oh, and the payoff for that framing story is so lame and bad that the whole framing device is useless anyway. they could've just dispensed with it altogether.)
two, every one of these types of films starts off with a bunch of setup scenes at the beginning that introduces the characters, concept, and (usually) tries to explain why these people are filming whatever is going on. makes sense in the typical found footage film. problem is, when you have six separate stories, suddenly you now need six groups of setup scenes. these scenes are tedious and boring enough when you only have to sit through them once to get to the good stuff... when you've got to watch six of them, it really kills the momentum of the film. if the average film of this genre is like a rollercoaster ride, then this is like a really short rollercoaster ride that you have to keep getting off and then waiting in line another 10-15 minutes before you can get back on again. it also makes for a film that feels really long. i don't know exactly how long the film was, but it felt like at least a couple hours. they could have easily dropped one of the stories (and i have my idea of which one) and at least tightened it up some.
and finally, there's the whole business of explaining why they are filming, and why they KEEP filming when shit starts happening. this is always an issue for any film of this type, and some deal with it more cleverly than others. so it's no surprise that when you have 6 stories, some do a better job than others. i felt like only one of the films really cleverly deals with the issue (involving a guy wearing a pair of video-recording glasses). another one takes place entirely on webcam, which seems clever, until you get to a couple scenes where one character specifically mentions the fact that he wasn't recording their webcam chat. umm, then where did this video come from? in fairness, the way it ends up, it turns out he could have been lying... but then what was the purpose of him lying about it, and what is the purpose of him recording it after all? another one has a girl recording her road trip with her husband, and features the typical scenes of people filming shit they never actually film in real life, like her filming her husband pumping gas. who films their husband pumping gas for a road trip video? do they sit at home and watch it and say "ooh, remember that time at the exxon when you pumped gas? oh, what great memories!" and then some of the stories basically don't even bother trying to explain why they're filming.
as for the stories themselves, as you'd expect in an anthology film, it's hit and miss. i would say this one is more miss than hit. the first story, involving guys picking up chicks at a club to film them having sex, is pretty predictable, especially once you get your first scene of one of the "girls." it does have a pretty good ending scene though. the second one is the most different from the rest, as it's more of a violent torture-porn shock-based type story. it's got a couple pretty disturbing scenes (one that very cleverly plays on the whole "this is being filmed" idea that i don't want to give away cause it's a bit of a twist, the other just a really shocking violent gory scene) but it feels a bit out of place in the film, despite the fact that there's plenty of gore and violence to go around in a couple of the other stories. the 3rd story just made little sense to me, it involves some kids going to a lake on vacation and just seemed like a really lame stor, this is the one i would've dropped. the fourth is the webcam story with a girl calling her boyfriend during what seems to be a haunting. the ending "twist" of this one confused me, mostly in the failure to fully explain what it is that was "haunting" the girl. and the last one, i think, was probably the best story. actually, the story itself wasn't all that compelling, involving some guys going to a house where they think there's a halloween party and turns out, no, it's not. it's got the best visuals as they are running through the house with all kinds of crazy shit going on around them. finally, the framing story, like i mentioned, was lame and pointless and actually ends before the last tape even gets played, so they don't even really stick to the concept.
overall, if you're really a fan of this kind of film, it might be worth watching for a couple of the better stories, but don't expect much. if found footage films frustrate you, then you'd probably be 6 times as frustrated by this movie, so don't even bother.
by so sorry on Wed Oct 10, 2012 1:04 pm
TheBaxter wrote: so i saw this movie V/H/S over the weekend that's been pretty heavily hyped on AICN. i'm generally a fan of the found footage horror genre and this movie was kind of touted as a found footage creepshow, so i was looking forward to it. unfortunately, all that hype was not earned.
Coincidental timing: there was a review by "The Kidd" on the mothersite a few hours after you posted this.
So I got a free month of HBO, and have been using the HBO Go app on my iPad pretty much constantly for the past few weeks.
Watched the last two seasons of Entourage (stunk), last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm (good but not great), a few movies I've been meaning to catch up on (Black Swan, Horrible Bosses, the last two Harry Potters), and also a few that I never intended to watch but did anyway (The Dilemna and some stinker called The Cooler).
Gearing up to blow thru Game of Thrones and a few other movies by the end of this month. Then I'll make sure i don't get suckered into getting HBO (until the next free offer comes my way). Take that HBO!!!!
by travis-dane on Tue Oct 30, 2012 3:23 pm
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING
I dont know if you guys have seen Universal Soldier Regeneration. If you did, you know it is a great movie.
They bring back DOLPH and JCVD and they throw Andrei Arlowski into the mix as a new breed of UNI SOL, who gets out of control, bad things happen.
John Hyams reinvented the franchise and created a tense film with great action sequences. His dad, Peter Hyams, worked as the DP and the movie looked really good.
So, John Hyams did the sequel Day of Reckoning. They brought back DOLPH, JCVD, Andrei Arlowski and they add Scott Adkins. Shit goes down.
The movie is brutal and pulls no punches (or kicks). There is no CGI blood, the fights are shot clean and you can feel the impact of every blow.
Peter Hyams is not the DP anymore, but the movie looks really good, it was filmed in Baton Rouge, and it looks like a "real" movie, with nice crisp photography and long, clean shots, no avid farts and no washed out or tinted colors.
The story is crazy (in a good way) and takes the franchise in a whole new direction.
The last twenty minutes of the movie are an insane action and blood fest, the DOLPH vs. Adkins bout is one for the ages and JCVD vs. Adkins is done very well too.
Watch it when you get the chance, it is a really interesting movie with some nice twists and turns.
by travis-dane on Fri Nov 02, 2012 7:36 pm
TOTAL RECALL 2012
Okay, this is not a good movie. I was confused, like the movie is, about what this movie is about.
First, the movie tells me that it is based on the other movie called Total Recall. The screen writers of the other Total Recall movie even get writing credits. But the new Total Recall movie wants to be clever, so it remembers this in the closing credits. Because the new Total Recall is a modern movie, it has no opening credits. But it has some explaining to do in the opening, so the new Total Recall movie tells me some info before the movie starts via some title cards. The info it gives me is so important that no screenwriter could have written it into the dialogue of the movie. BUT the screenwriters do write the info into the movie. So there is some recalling going on. For me at least. I recalled the info from the begining when it was brought up again in the movie, even after the third time, I could Recall the info. But it is important.
After that we meet the new Quiad/Hauser in a intense action scene that turns out to be a dream. Colin Farrel plays the Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is confused, so is the character he plays. And me too.
Kate Beckinsale plays Sharon Stone, she is confused too, because she has no clue what her job is, she does not Recall, because Brian Cranston, who plays Ronnie Cox, did not tell her what she needs to know, so that she cant do her job right. Brian Cranston knows what to do, but he tells nobody.
Anyway, Kate tries to kill Colin, because she does not know that she's not supposed to kill Colin, because Brian did not tell her. After Colin escapes, Brian tells Kate not to kill Colin, but she does not listen to Brian, because he is her Boss. Later Brian confronts her about that, but she does not say "I did not Recall that order", a missed opportunity there.
Since nobody is there to play Michael Ironside, they just merge him and Sharon Stone into Kate Beckinsale. If I recall this right, the relationship between Ironside and Stone was important to the story, so this character merger brings up numerous problems in the new Total Recall movie. Kate just looks stupid because for her hating Colin without explanation, because she is not Michael Ironside, but has his character arc, it is strange that she hates Colin because he fucked Sharon Stone. Recall that!
But they go one step further and merge the Dream Doctor with the studly italian co-worker of Colin. Thats stupid too. Bokeem Woodbine plays them both. He recalls his important "this is all a dream" scene from the real Total Recall movie and gets shot in the head by Colin.
Jessica Biel plays Rachel Ticotin and she does the same stuff that Rachel does except grabbing Colins cock.
So everybody meets up at Bill Nighy's place, who plays nobody, because in the new Total Recall movie there are no mutants. But the woman with three boobs shows up, not at Bills place of course, that would be stupid, because there are no mutants in the new Total Recall movie. I bet that the Kuato puppet is not happy about that. Nobody plays the Kuato puppet, not even a CGI Kuato replacement for poor Kuato, he's out.
So Brian kills Bill, Brian wants Hauser back, he leaves with Kate and Jessica before Hauser gets his recall and Colin kills all the goons and goes after them.
I hope you recall the tile cards I mentioned in the begining of my review, because the title cards told me that there is a elevator between Europe and Australia. The elevator is called The Fall. The showdown takes place while The Fall is falling from Europe to Australia. Colin saves Jessica, Colin fights Brian ontop of The Fall and Colin stabs Brian in the gut. Then The Fall falls back in his hole and Brian dies in the explosion. Yes The Fall explodes because Colin planted about ten tiny bombs in The Fall. The Fall can hold up to fifty thousand people, but those ten bombs and the heat of the earth core where The Fall falls through bring The Fall down. FOR GOOD! A Fallout so to speak.
But Kate is not dead. Colin punches her and shoots her in the boobs. Then Kate is dead too and her storyarc of self betrayal and not knowing why she hates Colin so much is never recalled by anybody but me. And somewhere else Richter is at the party, because he's alive. He keeps death at arms reach. Good man, he loves his wife. I hope he gets over her soon.
No one in the new Total Recall movie recalls Mars.
by TheBaxter on Mon Nov 05, 2012 11:16 am
there should be a gov't recall of that movie.
by Al Shut on Mon Nov 05, 2012 2:49 pm
Wouldn't it been cool if they went to Mars
in an elevator
by TheBaxter on Mon Nov 05, 2012 3:22 pm
Al Shut wrote: Wouldn't it been cool if they went to Mars
it would have been about as believable.
by so sorry on Mon Nov 05, 2012 4:45 pm
There was a Bond marathon of sorts on yesterday (TNT I think). Caught the last 40 minutes of Casino Royale (with the rediculous poker game) and the beginning of Quantom of Solace. Man was that a stinker.
by TheBaxter on Tue Nov 06, 2012 11:27 am
i liked Casino Royale, but Quantum of Suckage i have mostly, thankfully, forgotten.
by Spandau Belly on Tue Nov 06, 2012 12:12 pm
I've been revisiting some of Bond films to get pumped up for SKYFALL, not on tv, but from my bluray set. I chose to watch the ones that I like, but don't watch as often. THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH continues to grow on me. I think when I first saw it, I got all hung up on how bad Richards was and how Begbie's henchman character gets hyped up as The Terminator and then never really delivers on that superhuman strength and numb-to-pain hype. I think Elektra King is actually one of the series's best villains. And theme song is definately the best of the last 30 years.
I haven't got around to revisiting either of the Danny Craig entries yet. I think because I wasn't blown away CASINO, I don't have the negative feelings everybody else seems to have about QUANTUM. The remember finding the villains somewhat underwhelming and not liking the shakey cam approach to filming the action, but there was lots of other stuff I did like about the film. I liked Olga. When they managed to keep the camera still, I liked the cinematography. And I really liked that part where they somehow get Gemma all covered in oil and get her all the way to her hotel bed without leaving a long greasey black streak going all the way through the hotel.
I'll probably revisit at least one of Craig's entries on the weekend before going to see SKYFALL.
by Spandau Belly on Sun Dec 16, 2012 2:17 pm
i revisited two movies I remembered seeing as a boy.
This film is a pure masterpiece. They're able shift between different tones pretty brilliantly in this film. I went between laughing at these characters and pitying them without it feeling jarring or too manipulative. The story develops in a natural way full of memorable and engaging scenes. It's also always nice to see these old movies from when New York was a shit-hole.
Jon Voight gives an amazing performance. He speaks in that same funny voice that Keanu Reeves did in DEVIL'S ADVOCATE, but it sounds more natural coming out of his mouth. His character is a moron, but that doesn't stop Voight from making him three dimensional. The film handles flashbacks well to show the sexual abuse Voight had endured that made him who he is and Voight is really good at showing the character's compartmentalization process in a way that makes it make sense how he can be so upbeat and sincere despite his background.
Dustin Hoffmann is an odd choice for the role of Ratzo, it seems like the type of role that would be a more obvious choice for John Cazale or Eli Wallach, but Hoffmann pulls it off. He does a solid job showing the character's vulnerability and patheticness that keeps him from simply being despicable.
I loved this film, I'm glad I watched it again and I will continue to revisit it in the future.
GORILLAS IN THE MIST
This is a biopic about Dian Fossey, who despite lacking an education in zoology suddenly felt compelled to abandon her normal life in America and head off to Congo (where you are the endangered species) to study gorillas in the 1960s. She quickly gets into conflict with poachers and dedicates her life to protecting gorillas. A lot of biopics meander and have problems with scope or knowing what story they want to tell. This film has good focus. Although I would've liked to have seen what happened with her fiancé. She's engaged to a man back in America when she first leaves to go to Congo. She initially planned to be there for 6 months and then go back and get married, but ended up staying there the rest of her life. I assume they broke up at some point, but we don't see that. Did he ever come to Africa and see what she was doing? Did they just break up in letters? I wanted to know that. It felt like a scene got cut that shouldn't have.
The film really captures the awe of exploring and interacting with exotic animals. The cinematography of the jungle is great and Rick Baker does incredible work making convincing fake gorillas. There were very few times when I even thought I wasn't looking at a real gorilla, most of those were with the baby gorilla that Fossey rescues from a poacher's van and nurses. That one looked a bit like a puppet sometimes.
I liked this movie. It was an interesting adventure and I liked the characterization of Fossey in that the film wasn't trying to make her look good all the time.
by Spandau Belly on Sun Jan 06, 2013 12:52 pm
This is the first film made by Christopher Nolan, a filmmaker who I like, but not as much as everybody else on the internet seems to. I have now seen every film this man has made, and I would say this is one of his best. Although set in present (the 1990s) day, it is a classic noir film involving all the classic elements: a small fry protagonist, a big crime lord, a seductive blonde woman, a big score etc.
The setup is that a young loser wannabe writer takes to following strangers around, seeing where they go and what their habits are, in hopes that one of them will inspire a character for a novel. He one day follows a burglar who notices he's being followed. The burglar is a posh and confident man who takes the writer under his wing. The two become burglars together and share not only in the voyeuristic joy of observing other people's lives, but also influencing those lives. When they break into the home of a beautiful woman, the writer guy decides he's going to follow her after the burglary and try to date her.....but she's more trouble than he can handle!
I found this film had a good minimalist Hitchcock feel with good focus, solid pacing, and simple intrigue. I also found the dialogue more natural and the characterization much more three-dimensional than Nolan's other movies. The acting is surprisingly good for such a low-budget film. I think this is a really good little noir film. I'm glad I rented it.
by Ribbons on Sun Jan 06, 2013 3:17 pm
Spandau Belly wrote: I have now seen every film this man has made,
(It's a student film, so I don't think many people have seen it)
I liked Following, and you're right about the dialogue being more naturalistic. Although it's hard to say because three of those are superhero movies. I was not a huge fan of the main actor, but Cobb was good (strangely he has done nothing since, because he totally looks like an actor). It also introduced me to Nolan's love of double-entendres (The Young Man's description of the story is referred to as "the following"). My favorite films of his are still Memento and The Dark Knight, but this is a solid entry.
Nolan apparently first came up with the idea for Inception during his Following days, which might explain why a movie about dreams primarily involves safes and guns.
by Spandau Belly on Mon Jan 07, 2013 8:09 am
Okay smartypants, I have not seen Nolan's student film.
I agree with you that the bloke playing Cobb seems like he would've had an acting career that went somewhere, at least as a bit part player on tv or something. Who knows, maybe he wasn't an actor or interested in acting, just a friend of Nolan's who did this movie then happily went back to his career as a dentist or whatever.
by Tyrone_Shoelaces on Tue Jan 08, 2013 3:02 am
Things I learned watching In Time:
Andrew Niccol has big, beautiful ideas but stutters a bit when trying to explain them.
Justin Timberlake was miscast.
That hairstyle looks terrible on Amanda Seyfried.
Alex Pettyfer is a better actor when he's not concentrating on an American accent.
I probably shouldn't have watched In Time.
by Ribbons on Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:42 am
It's time you'll never get back...
Ha! I bet I'm the first person to make that joke!
by Hermanator X on Tue Jan 08, 2013 5:31 am
Spandau Belly wrote: FOLLOWING
I like the fact that the writer has a batman logo sticker on his front door too. Long game plan or merely a coinkidink?
by Spandau Belly on Tue Jan 08, 2013 8:02 am
Yeah, I noticed the Batman sticker in FOLLOWING, too. I'd call it manifest destiny. He probably always liked the character and dreamed about making a Batman film.
Nolan has also referenced James Bond movies a fair bit in his films, so if he ever gets to make Bond film, it won't come as a surprise to me.
by Tyrone_Shoelaces on Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:29 pm
I should not have enjoyed The Sitter as much as I did. Delightfully inappropriate.
by Ribbons on Wed Jan 09, 2013 11:09 pm
Spandau Belly wrote: Nolan has also referenced James Bond movies a fair bit in his films, so if he ever gets to make Bond film, it won't come as a surprise to me.
He's apparently met with the Broccolis already, so at this point it's more than just a dream (within a dream within a dream). But it's funny, as hot a property as I'm sure Nolan is, I don't know if I can see them giving him enough creative control to make it worth doing. He's more commercially successful than QT ever was, but if they turned him away when he asked to make a Bond movie it could happen to anyone.
by Spandau Belly on Thu Jan 10, 2013 3:15 pm
Yeah, the Broccolis have always been protective and turned down plenty of high-profile bids in favor of maintaining control of their property.
I would love a Tarantino Bond film (I would probably want Tarantino to do a Bond movie more than any other filmmaker), but I can understand that he would make them apprehensive. He's a very edgy filmmaker. I've also heard the Broccolis are prejudiced against American directors, hence the only American to ever direct a Bond film was that one unofficial Bond NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN which was made outside of their influence.
However Nolan is pretty safe. He's not an edgy shock guy like Tarantino. Plus, he's English. I would tend to think that they'll keep him in mind as director next time they relaunch the series with a new lead actor.
by caruso_stalker217 on Sat Jan 12, 2013 7:30 pm
CARUSO REVIEWS TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME, OR FUCK YOU: THE MOVIE
This is the most pointless film ever made. I'm not sure who this is even for. People who aren't familiar with the show won't have any idea who any of these people are or what is going on, because there is no character development or story. And the people who have seen the show don't want to watch a fucking prequel.
This seems like a no-brainer to me. Your television show gets cancelled and ends on a gigantic cliffhanger. You get the opportunity to make a film and continue the story. If it's me, that's what I would do. If you're David Lynch you do the opposite and retread the same ground you covered on the television show. And you do it poorly.
So in addition to being the most pointless film in creation, it is also the biggest wasted opportunity of all time. And a waste of my fucking time.
I guess the protagonist this time around is Laura Palmer, a character who was dead for the entire run of the series. Every important and valuable piece of information there is to know about Laura Palmer is covered in the television series. It is also covered again here. There is nothing more to learn about the character, whose murder was solved halfway through season two, and there is no mystery here because, of course, we know who the killer is. Laura isn't a likable character. We understand why she behaves the way she does and I guess I should feel sorry for her, but I don't because she just isn't interesting. She spends the entire film either crying, yelling or snorting cocaine.
Her interactions with the other characters provide no further insights into who she is. People from the show pop up because they have to. If you don't know the show, you won't know the characters and you won't give a shit. I do know the show and the characters and even I don't give a shit. They are trapped in a bad script with no room to breathe.
One of the major problems with making a film centering around Laura Palmer is that you're stuck with the boring characters most directly relating to her. Characters like Leo and Bobby started off fairly one-dimensional, but became a lot more interesting as the show continued. You got to see different sides to them and you could relate to them. By making the film a prequel, you lose all of that. They're right back at square one with absolutely nothing to do. This is just bad writing. And a waste of my fucking time.
"You’re not just three guys on a fishing trip, you’re a whole damn town." From the episode where Deputy Andy finds out that his sperms are working. That line also applies here. Twin Peaks isn't a handful of boring douchebags. It's a town full of interesting and quirky characters that we have come to know and love...and none of them are in this film. It just isn't Twin Peaks without Sheriff Truman, Lucy, Andy, motherfucking Hawk, Audrey, Big Ed, Pete, Ben Horne and so on and so on. By setting the film before Laura Palmer's murder, you lose all of those interesting people.
So, in addition to not giving the audience what they want, this film is also just really poorly constructed. The first twenty minutes concern an FBI agent played by Chris Isaak who is obviously standing in for Kyle Maclachlan who didn't really want to be involved with the film. I guess I don't really have a problem with the character, except it fucks up the continuity of the show and goes absolutely nowhere. Isaak disappears for some reason and this is never followed up. Maclachlan shows up and just has zero fucking energy, zero interest. There is a mind-numbingly infuriating scene where David Bowie shows up and talks a lot of nonsense. This scene feels like it was just dropped in randomly. There is no context. It's a pointless distraction and again it leads nowhere.
After many false starts the action moves to Twin Peaks where whatever potential momentum this film might have had is lost for good. Nobody gives a shit about Laura Palmer. That story was told already. I don't need to see it repeated here for two tedious, humorless hours.
Since I'm not a complete asshole, I will list some things about the film I liked.
1) Moira Kelly taking over the role of Donna when Lara Flynn Boyle couldn't do the movie. She doesn't have that bitchy quality about her like Boyle does. She's really fucking pretty and I wish she had been in the television show.
2) The song that was playing in the nightclub scene with Laura and Donna was cool.
3) Moira Kelly and Sheryl Lee showed their boobs.
The 7.0 IMDb rating for this is absolutely ridiculous. This is a terrible film. Do not watch it.
by Al Shut on Sun Jan 13, 2013 6:33 am
Have to disagree a bit here, unfortunately it has been years since I saw it (or the series for that matter) so I'm not sure why I felt positively about the movie anymore.
I may be a bit of an exception having watched the first season on DVD but not the second. Here it is where my memory gets very fussy and I'm not sure whether I knew the first season when watching the movie or how much I knew about what was going on in Twin Peaks.
What's more important is that I'm part of what might be the actual target of the movie, people who couldn't make much sense out of David Lynch's work. If I remember correctly it was Fire walk with me that taught me a lot about how not literal I have to take a lot of things in his movies and how they might relate to reality that is somewhere hidden under all that weird stuff. I do think it greatly improved my understanding of movies like Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive at least in terms of what the hell is going on on a very basic level.
Also as I was notoriously confused it didn't matter much if the weird stuff has a point or leads somewhere, I enjoyed much of it for absurdity's sake
It's been a few years since I've seen FIRE WALK WITH ME too, but I think I agree more with Caruso. The movie has two aspects to it, neither of which really offended me, but neither of which interested me.
The first aspect was the more literal approach to the mythology. When you watch the tv show, you can almost take Bob and the Lodges as metaphors for unexplainable madness and evil. The movie seems more interested in the mechanics of these mythic elements and spelling out the rules, rituals, protocols etc of Bob and the Lodges etc with magic rings and exposition. If I wanted a bunch of yammering about the technical side of magic, I'd watch a Harry Potter movie. I preferred the show's more abstract approach.
The second aspect was the Laura Palmer prequel aspect. I always felt in the show that Laura was there as an allegory for whole town (the wholesome veneer covering the dark side). So for me, Laura Palmer was there as a device for the show's Jungian themes. I think she worked better as a symbol than as an actual character. And like Caruso said, the movie mostly just dramatized events that had been covered in the show through dialogue.
by caruso_stalker217 on Mon Jan 14, 2013 3:12 pm
Spandau Belly wrote: The first aspect was the more literal approach to the mythology. When you watch the tv show, you can almost take Bob and the Lodges as metaphors for unexplainable madness and evil. The movie seems more interested in the mechanics of these mythic elements and spelling out the rules, rituals, protocols etc of Bob and the Lodges etc with magic rings and exposition. If I wanted a bunch of yammering about the technical side of magic, I'd watch a Harry Potter movie. I preferred the show's more abstract approach.
And even then, the film doesn't actually explain anything. In fact, I feel like I know less about what was going on in the show than I did before I watched the film.
Spandau Belly wrote: The second aspect was the Laura Palmer prequel aspect. I always felt in the show that Laura was there as an allegory for whole town (the wholesome veneer covering the dark side). So for me, Laura Palmer was there as a device for the show's Jungian themes. I think she worked better as a symbol than as an actual character. And like Caruso said, the movie mostly just dramatized events that had been covered in the show through dialogue.
You explained my feelings exactly, although I doubt I've ever used "Jungian" in a discussion before. (or "veneer" for that matter)
by Al Shut on Mon Jan 14, 2013 4:03 pm
And yet he's starring at me right from your post
Al Shut wrote: And yet he's starring at me right from your post
Actually, I believe he's staring just to your left.
by caruso_stalker217 on Mon Jan 21, 2013 11:25 pm
CARUSO REVIEWS SEX AND FURY
At the not-actual-recommendation of my fellow OLEGer Spandau, I decided to watch this 1973 Japanese exploitation film. According to Wikipedia, this is a softcore pornographic film (or "pink film" as they are called in Japan) but I honestly didn't find it to be that. At least, not until the girl-on-girl scene that turned into a threesome. And the part where the heroine is chained up and whipped in a bondage-type situation. Then I saw what they were talking about. But aside from that, I thought it was more of a traditional revenge picture with the tits-and-ass thrown in.
The story concerns a naked woman named Ocho who goes undercover as a clothed woman to get revenge, but through the course of the film keeps losing her clothes. Then at the end she puts on some clothes and then she takes them off enough so we can see her boobs and she kills like twenty people.
There is also a guy in the movie who is trying to get revenge, too. He is also the worst fucking assassin in history. He makes three different attempts to kill the same guy and he fails every time. It might have had something to do with him running up and yelling something to the effect of "Hey, asshole, I'm going to fucking kill you!" instead of trying to be sneaky about it. Nobody likes a show-off.
Meanwhile, there is another naked woman who is pretending to be an English person with clothes, but is actually Swedish and a bad actress. Her name is Christina Lindberg and she is famous for being naked all the time. I can see why her most famous role required her to be mute, because her acting is garbage. Her body, however, is quite something. Those clever Swedes. She and the shitty assassin have a sex history and there are several funny scenes where they both converse in stilted English and confess their love for one another over and over.
I guess since this was meant to titillate with depictions of full-blown nudity and cunnilingus they could have just thrown a lot of that onscreen and called it good. But they actually managed to get a couple of pretty good scenes out of it. The obvious one would be when some assassins catch Ocho taking a bath and she gets into a full-on naked sword fight, cutting and stabbing dudes left and right while her boobs bounce around in slow-motion. I was able to appreciate this scene not on a sexy exploitative level, but on a badass action level. It actually works within the story and not as some throwaway gratuitous nudity. Ambushing somebody in the tub is not a bad idea and it shows that Ocho is such a badass that she can fight naked and still kick everybody's ass.
Like Viggo in EASTERN PROMISES, but with less dick-flapping.
I also had to give the movie props for the death-by-poisoned-cooch scene. I can honestly say I haven't seen that one before. And unless that is a staple of these softcore porn revenge movies, I doubt I'll see it again.
So thanks, Spandau, for directing me to this piece of '70s exploitation cinema. My 88 minutes were not wasted.
by BuckyO'harre on Tue Jan 22, 2013 2:22 am
caruso_stalker217 wrote: I also had to give the movie props for the death-by-poisoned-cooch scene. I can honestly say I haven't seen that one before. And unless that is a staple of these softcore porn revenge movies, I doubt I'll see it again.
Ninja Scroll.
BuckyO'harre
by caruso_stalker217 on Tue Jan 22, 2013 2:30 am
Japan is a weird place.
by Spandau Belly on Tue Jan 22, 2013 4:47 pm
caruso_stalker217 wrote: So thanks, Spandau, for directing me to this piece of '70s exploitation cinema. My 88 minutes were not wasted.
I'm glad you enjoyed SEX & FURY. I find it to be a very elegant movie with great production value for this type of film. It's got very strong style and I reflect on it fairly often.
Reiko Ike is a great leading lady for this type of film. Aside from being beautiful, I find she has a good authoritative presence and is willing to commit fully to these silly movies. I've seen her in a couple films, and liked this one the best. Although I do still want to find that crazy Japanese Hammer horror film she did.
I really love the set design, especially that room where the walls all are painted like those domino tiles they play with. I think in my next home I'll paint the walls of a room like that. The score is really nice doing that whole upbeat 60s thing. And I find the staging and shot compesition to be really good throughout.
I rented the sequel, FEMALE YAKUZA TALE: INQUISITION & TORTURE, a few weeks ago, and it just kinda lacked that elegance that made the first one so captivating. It was more outgrageous, that's for sure. Reiko Ike returns as Ocho and her investigation of The Crotch-Gouge Killer leads her to taking down a whole cartel that uses women's kunises for smuggling drugs. They went with the 'more is better' mentality and get 30 or so naked women all sword-fighting in a room with a wacky Dario Argento lighting scheme. I like that they all disrobe one by one in a row like they're The Rockettes or some shit. But the overall movie just wasn't as consistantly entertaining as SEX & FURY.
by caruso_stalker217 on Wed Jan 23, 2013 1:22 am
Spandau Belly wrote: They went with the 'more is better' mentality and get 30 or so naked women all sword-fighting in a room with a wacky Dario Argento lighting scheme.
And just like that, it's on my Netflix queue.
Spandau Belly wrote: Although I do still want to find that crazy Japanese Hammer horror film she did.
Was that the one with the Asian Christopher Lee? Because that trailer was insane.
by Spandau Belly on Wed Jan 23, 2013 9:16 am
Yup, that's the one. Christopher Li in full effect!
I can't find it on video or youtube, but I'll keep digging.
by Wolfpack on Thu Jan 31, 2013 10:27 pm
Just saw Captain America: The First Avenger on Netflix. It remembers what it's like to be a COMIC BOOK movie. It suffered from viewers being on a diet rich in gritty superheroes.
"Alright Shaggy - you and Scooby head over that way. The girls and I will go this way."
Location: Asheville, NC
by Spandau Belly on Sun Mar 03, 2013 12:50 pm
Spandau's Asian odessy!
LONE WOLF & CUB
I watched all six films in this series and consider it excellent entertainment. As most people probably know, it is a series of films that follow a once-prestigious Royal executioner who is frame by a mutinous clan (The Yagyu); he goes on the run with his son working as an assassin for hire while fending off attacks from his Yagyu nemesis, Lord Retsudo. It is a generally fun series, even though each installment follows a certain formula, the joy is found in its pulpy gimmicks. Lone Wolf pushes his son around in a cart, which has many funny surprise weapons, and Lone Wolf is a master of sensing an ambush.
The only thing I don't really like is that the series never reaches any kind of conclusion. They could've just as easily made more of these films. I would say the fourth film in the series (HEART OF THE PARENT, HEART OF THE CHILD aka BABY CART IN PERIL) is the best of the series. It is the only one directed by a different director than the other five films. I like it because it takes the series' main theme of child-rearing and uses it in an interesting way and because Lone Wolf's target is a cool character.
This series is generally well directed with decent production value, good shot composition, and fairly well choreographed action with lots of good comic gore. The acting is your usual intense Asian overacting, which suits the pulpy nature of the material.
FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION
I watched all four films in this series, and although I had a good time, I don't consider them terribly good films. They are somewhat similiar to the quiet slowpaced Swedish exploitation films that would typically star Christina Lindberg. I liked that the series had a plot and each installment would continue where the previous one left off while still being rewarding adventures in themselves. The hero is Scorpion, a convict who speaks very rarely and has incredible stength and stamina. She has one iconic outfit, which looks like a widow version of Carmen Sandiago's outift, but she doesn't always wear it because she is, as you may have guessed, frequently in prison. The series has some good ideas and crazy moments, the execution isn't always so great. The directing is clumsy and the films frequently go flat.
I would say the third one, BEAST STABLE, is the best. While on the run, a cop catches up with Scorpion, he handcuffs her to his arm, but she cuts his arm off and makes her way to the red light district, which is also the cemetary (?) where she makes friends with a local prostitute and discover that her madame is one of Scorpion's old rivals from prison. Scorpion must hide in the sewers to get away from the now one-armed cop and also take down the evil madame with a room-sized cage full of crows. This installment keeps its momentum the best and has the most crazy characters and crazy ideas. And the openning scenes of Scorpion running through the streets of Tokyo with a severed arm dangling from her are hilarious.
Overall, I wouldn't recommend this series to most people, but I am glad I watched it.
by Wolfpack on Sun Mar 03, 2013 8:55 pm
It took me almost 20 years, but I finally saw Pulp Fiction. Ving Rhames, I had no idea!
by TheBaxter on Fri Mar 08, 2013 6:25 pm
i saw Perks of Being a Wallflower a while back, but i guess i never got around to commenting on it.
i really really really liked the film... til the end. the ending kinda ruins it for me. without spoiling it, i'd just say it seemed to come out of nowhere and felt very tacked on. if you're going to do a story about child sexual abuse i think you need to earn it a little better. it's not really a subject you can just append to the end of a coming-of-age teen film and do justice to it. i'm sure if i rewatched it there would be hints and clues toward what happened, but the way it came about in the film just didn't feel right.
it was very frustrating because up until that point i could identify a lot with the main character who is kind of finding his way through HS, trying to figure out where he fits in, the group dynamics, the music, everything, it really worked wonderfully. there's a universality to the characters, not in the specific things that happen or who they are, but just that general feeling. the ending destroyed that universality by making it about such a specific topic. i'm sure if i had experienced sexual abuse myself i would have identified with the character even more, but that's the point: since i didn't have that specific experience, that identification i had been feeling throughout the film ended entirely. it goes from being universal such that many people can identify with the experiences in the film, to being very specific so that only a specific group can feel that identification. and that's fine if that's the film you're making, but you can't have it both ways. if you want to have a film that is universal or you want to have a film that is very personal and deeply felt or identified with by only a few, it's the filmmakers choice, but you can't have 90% of one and then suddenly become the other for the last 10%. i know this is based on a book, maybe the book handles the topic better. i could imagine a way a film could broach that topic without losing that feeling of universality, but the film just fails at it.
but... 90% of the film i really really liked.
though i do have a hard time buying that these kids didn't know the name of the "tunnel song" or who sang it. especially kids who are musically hip enough to be into the smiths
also, even the parts of the film i did like, didn't really feel as "john hughes"-ish as the reviews made out. this felt a little more real in some ways, more complex, a little more elevated and heightened in others, but not quite the tone of even the more serious hughes films like breakfast club. definitely no where near the humor of most of his other stuff.
by caruso_stalker217 on Sat Mar 09, 2013 2:43 am
I saw most of this the other day. I missed the first four DVD chapters, however the fuck much that is in movie-time. I thought I was going to grow a hipster neck beard watching this shit until Percy Jackson blacked out and became the Fist-Hitter. But since the movie isn't called PERKS OF BEING A FIST-HITTER I figured there wouldn't be any more fist-hitting. And I was right.
By the time the end rolled around, though, I thought what I'd seen was decent. I was really hoping Percy would get in that ass and I was right about that too. And maybe there was some heart, even if it was fake movie-heart. A load of bullshit, you might say.
Maybe I will go back and watch the whole thing some day. Emma Watson did a pretty decent American accent. That kid from KEVIN, WHO LIVES AT HOME seems like a pretty good actor. Maybe I will watch one of those movies where he plays a creepy weirdo.
by BuckyO'harre on Sat Mar 09, 2013 5:27 pm
TheBaxter wrote: i saw Perks of Being a Wallflower a while back, but i guess i never got around to commenting on it.
I don't think it's fair to say that the ending makes the film about sexual abuse. The particular type of trauma only affects the timing of his breakdown, not the themes of the film entirely. I thinks it's more about the dangers of isolation and repression; the specific trigger doesn't matter so much. Things could have played out pretty much the same even if he had only repressed the feelings of guilt over his aunt's death, and there had been no abuse. Let's also not forget the suicide of his friend which adds abandonment issues to the mix.
TheBaxter wrote: though i do have a hard time buying that these kids didn't know the name of the "tunnel song" or who sang it. especially kids who are musically hip enough to be into the smiths
From an interview with the author-
That’s the bone I wanted to pick, because I can’t believe the kids had never heard of “Heroes” until it came on the radio, and then still couldn't find the record or figure out for months who sang it. It’s one of David Bowie’s most famous songs!
[Laughs] You and John Malkovich and Jim Powers [both producers on the film] could all gang up on me and say, “We don’t believe it,” and I will put my hand on a Bible and say, “In the early 90s, David Bowie was ‘Let’s Dance’ to me. He was that guy.” The whole 70s Bowie, because I was more into grunge, I came late to him. Listen, if you say to me, “The kids not knowing ‘Heroes,’ it’s not realistic,” I will cop to it! Anyone who has a bone to pick, I can’t argue. But I swear to god, it was real!
caruso_stalker217 wrote: That kid from KEVIN, WHO LIVES AT HOME seems like a pretty good actor. Maybe I will watch one of those movies where he plays a creepy weirdo.
I'd watch 'Afterschool' first and then 'We Need to Talk About Kevin', but if you only see one then go with WNTTAK. It has some of Tilda Swintons best work.
by Spandau Belly on Sat Mar 09, 2013 7:16 pm
I will see WALLFLOWER eventually. Several zoners put it as one of their favourite movies of last year and despite it playing in cinemas where I live for a long time, I just never got around to it.
by TheBaxter on Mon Mar 11, 2013 10:01 am
BuckyO'harre wrote: I don't think it's fair to say that the ending makes the film about sexual abuse. The particular type of trauma only affects the timing of his breakdown, not the themes of the film entirely. I thinks it's more about the dangers of isolation and repression; the specific trigger doesn't matter so much. Things could have played out pretty much the same even if he had only repressed the feelings of guilt over his aunt's death, and there had been no abuse. Let's also not forget the suicide of his friend which adds abandonment issues to the mix.
that's actually a big part of my problem with it though. the film is NOT a film about sexual abuse. if the film HAD been about that, then that would have been fine. but just tacking it on to the end of a film that otherwise has nothing to do with sexual abuse pulled me out of it. i don't think you can use sexual abuse as a casual plot point like that, and that's a big part of where my problem with it lay.
by BuckyO'harre on Mon Mar 11, 2013 12:32 pm
TheBaxter wrote: that's actually a big part of my problem with it though. the film is NOT a film about sexual abuse. if the film HAD been about that, then that would have been fine. but just tacking it on to the end of a film that otherwise has nothing to do with sexual abuse pulled me out of it. i don't think you can use sexual abuse as a casual plot point like that, and that's a big part of where my problem with it lay.
To me, having it out in the open would force a different story structure and make for a more conventional and boring film. Even if the subject matter is rarely tackled it would still play out like many films about drug addiction or traumatic loss. You know the problem, see the protagonist struggle, they eventually fail or overcome.This film is doing something different. The nature of the film itself is repressed. Charlie is capable of progress, but it won't last until he deals with the real source of his trouble which eventually comes out. I can see why you think the reveal is a sucker punch, but in my mind that's what makes it work. And while you could manage without it, the more I mull it over the more I think sexual abuse was the most fitting way to go. I don't think it does any disservice to victims or makes light of the problem in any way.
I'd like to hear some more opinions on this.
Paging John Locke and bastard_robo...
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Join or Die!
Posted at 10:42 pm by 1909ventilo, on July 9, 2010
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
“Join, or Die” was drawn by Benjamin Franklin and appeared in conjunction with an editorial by him that addressed the dissatisfaction of the colonies and encouraged colonial unity.
America’s “birth certificate and century’s first great atlas map of America!
Posted at 6:44 pm by 1909ventilo, on July 9, 2010
The Elder Hondius’ Map Of America
America. Jodocus Hondius. Amsterdam, 1606 (1628). Excellent. One subtle printer’s crease near lower center. Full fine original color.
[sold]
A particularly beautioful example, in superb original color, of the seventeenth century’s first great atlas map of America.
Jodocus Hondius the elder is regarded as one of the foremost cartographers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. His acquisition in 1604 of the copper-plates used for the Mercator atlas launched the Dutch map trade into the new century and, in Koeman’s words, `won [the Mercator atlas] its proper fame’.
Love this beautiful map! You can read about all the interesting details at this site listed below! Not sure what this sold for? But look at the article below that was a nice find!
http://www.cosmography.com/06-03_main-maps.htm
The Renaissance map of the world, including America for the first time
A copy of the first map to portray the world as a globe has been bought for £545,600 at Christie’s in London.
The price paid for the 1507 drawing – the first to label the New World as “America” – is a world record amount for a single sheet map. London clock dealers Charles Frodsham and Co bought it, saying they were “over the moon” with their purchase.
The auction house also sold a recently discovered set of letters by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley for £45,600.
The map was made German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller, who followed the teachings of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
Vespucci was the first to claim the New World was a separate continent – as opposed to Christopher Columbus, who thought it was part of Asia.
The name “America” was derived from Vespucci’s first name, and the drawing was the first to distinguish North and South America and to show the Pacific Ocean.
Read the whole article!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4073292.stm
At a cost of $10 million, the Library of Congress is buying the first map to use the name America. The, map printed in 1507, is the first world map in which the name “America” appears for the lands of the New World. Historians say the 494-year-old map caused the hemisphere to be named for explorer Amerigo Vespucci instead of Columbus.
The evidence of this knowledge is in Waldseemueller’s world map of 1507, perhaps the most valuable of the 5 million maps owned by the Library of Congress. It was acquired for $10 million in 2003 and went on permanent display last year.
The 1507 Martin Waldseemüller map measures more than four feet by eight feet when assembled from its 12 separate sheets. The map has been referred to as America’s “birth certificate” because it is the first document on which the name “America” appears.
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Verb Publishing
Home of the 55-Minute Guide Series
The 55MG to…
Cross-cultural communication
User-centred design
It’s 15 years since the Service Profit Chain first demonstrated the causal link between employee engagement and business performance. Why, then, are so many organisations still so bad at doing it? Kevin Keohane, global head of brand and talent for MS&L (part of Publicis Groupe), argues that it’s mainly a failure to join things up. The Talent Journey presents a whole systems approach to brand and employee engagement, looking at how organisations can better communicate with people before, during and after their association with the enterprise. Full of no-nonsense ideas and tips for getting it right (and how not to get it wrong!) it’s a quick and deceptively simple guide to why internal communications is dead, but people communication is alive and well.
(If you need a shorter version of what is already a short book, there is a slideshare here.)
PRAISE FOR ‘THE TALENT JOURNEY’
“The title of this book could have been ‘No B.S.’ Kevin has chosen to give a simple, insightful guide to employee communication. He has the incredible talent of making complex things simple to understand and suggesting solutions that are easy to implement and effective. Everyone should read it.”
Maurice Levy, Chairman and CEO, Publicis Groupe
“I was once told there are two types of people – those who make simple things complex, and those who make complex things simple. I was told to love the latter. As such I love the talent journey. It gets you thinking, it doesn’t preach or prescribe, it’s adaptable. Useful for any CEO, or those working with a CEO, who realise the value of an engaged, active work force, living out brand values.”
Simon Francis, CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi EMEA
“A bracing antidote to most of what’s written on ‘employee engagement’, full of common sense, and bang up-to-date.”
“This is a a great book that serves as an excellent reminder of all the things you know you should be doing as an internal communicator, but sometimes forget to do so. An inspiring and entertaining read.”
Louise Sturgess, Head of Internal Communications, Google Europe
“An informal yet informative view on employee communications which simplifies an often complex journey into digestible, bite-size chunks. A must-read for experts and novices alike.”
Stephen Mulvenna, European Talent Manager, The Coca-Cola Company
“Simple but inciteful. A great reminder of what happens when you strip away what you don’t need and focus on what you do.”
Peter Bell, Global CEO, Brand Engagement, The Brand Union
“An original take on the area of internal communication, looking at it as a journey from recruitment, joining working and even departing. Highly practical ,with an emphasis on action not theory.”
David Taylor, Founder and Managing Partner, The Brand Gym
“It really does what it says on the tin the Swiss Army Knife of employee engagement thinking – simple, insightful and readable in a single sitting.”
Marc Wright, Publisher, simply-communicate
ABOUT KEVIN KEOHANE
Kevin is a business consultant who specialises in organisational communication. He has spent more than 20 years in the field of brand and employee communication.
Currently, Kevin is a Partner at BrandPie, an agency of creative strategists specialising in brand Positioning, Identity and Engagement. Previously he built and led the Publicis Groupe’s Brand & Talent practice, a unique global network-within-a-network of agencies specialising in employee communications from its London hub, SAS. He writes a widely-read blog called Death To Internal Marketing and co-founded CommScrum.
After an education at The University of Denver and Georgetown University, his career took him to Australasia and Scandinavia, after which Kevin moved to London, UK, where he has made his home for more than 10 years. During this time he co-founded the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF) as well as the UK Usability Professionals’ Association (uk upa). He has sat on the UK board of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and holds professional accreditation from that organisation. He is also a Fellow of the British Association of Communicators in Business (CiB) and a fellow of the Royal Society For the Arts (FRSA). [An admittedly odd list from someone who by and large wouldn’t join any club that would have him as a member…]
His clients have included some of the world’s leading organisations, from American Express to Barclays to BP to BT to Coca-Cola to GlaxoSmithKline to HP to KPMG to Orange to Shell to Vodafone and beyond.
He is passionate about Triumph motorcycles and enjoys track days or long rideouts, in addition to a thrilling daily commute through Central London taking him past Parliament, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park twice a day. In his spare time he’s also a songwriter and bass player (www.brandviolet.com). Feel free to get in touch on LinkedIn.
One thought on “Employee Communication”
The Talent Journey – book now out « Death to internal marketing says:
[…] The Talent Journey […]
"A very skilfully crafted think-piece... Brilliantly thought-provoking."
"A must-read for experts and novices alike."
"Might just change the way you look at social media."
"Ro Gorell has placed a gem in my hands."
"A very useful, thoughtful and practical contribution to the field of leadership."
"Should be read and implemented by all members of an organisation."
"Some amazing wisdom. This is must read material."
'Who... Oh... Wow! The 55-Minute Guide to Corporate Branding' by Dave Allen
'Brand and Talent: The 55-Minute Guide to Employer Branding' by Kevin Keohane and Dan Gray
'Diversity Isn't A Dirty Word: The 55-Minute Guide to Equity, Diversity and Inclusiveness' by Shahid Bashir
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Death To Internal Marketing – Kevin Keohane's blog
Live Long and Prosper – Dan Gray's blog
The Intersection – Mike Klein's blog
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Archive for the ‘Samer Muscati’ Category
UAE: Human Rights Blogger, Sorbonne Lecturer Charged With ‘Humiliating’ Officials
Posted by 7starsdubai on June 17, 2011
source Human Rights Watchhttp://www.hrw.org
(Beirut) – The United Arab Emirates attorney general should
immediately drop all charges against five pro-democracy activists to
halt their trial, Human Rights Watch said today. The charges of
“humiliating” top officials relate solely to the defendants’ peaceful
use of speech to criticize the UAE government and therefore violate
their freedom of expression, Human Rights Watch said. UAE authorities
should release the activists unconditionally and without delay.
The five defendants, who include a leading human rights activist,
Ahmed Mansoor, and a university lecturer, Nasser bin Ghaith, pled not
guilty on June 14, 2011, during a closed-door hearing in Abu Dhabi’s
Federal Supreme Court. The trial follows a campaign of harassment
against the activists after they and dozens of other UAE nationals signed a petition published on March 9 that sought constitutional and parliamentary
changes in the Emirates and free elections in which all citizens could participate.
UAE rulers are prosecuting these activists solely for advocating democratic reforms,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The authorities should end this shameful crackdown on peaceful dissent.”
The five activists have been detained and denied bail since early April. Local news reports said that dozens of pro-government protesters holding banners and flags gathered outside the courtroom on June 14 and
shouted slogans condemning the activists. The next hearing is scheduled for July 18.
Authorities arrested Mansoor on April 8 and are holding him at the Al Wathba prison in Abu Dhabi. Mansoor has been a vocal proponent of the petition. Before his arrest, he gave numerous television and other media interviews on the issue.
Mansoor is a member of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East advisory committee.
On April 10, security forces detained bin Ghaith, an economics lecturer at the Abu Dhabi branch of Paris’ Sorbonne
University, who has criticized UAE authorities for failing to undertake significant political reforms. The three other detained online activists are Fahad Salim Dalk, Hassan Ali al-Khamis, and Ahmed Abd al-Khaleq.
In early June, UAE authorities charged the five detainees under article 176 of the Penal Code, which permits a sentence of up to five years in prison for “whoever publicly humiliates the State President, its flag or national emblem.” Article 8 of the code widens the application of the provision to include the vice president, members of the Supreme Council of the Federation, and others. The charges came after Attorney General Salim Saeed Kubaish said on April 25 that the
five detainees were in “preventive custody” for “instigation, breaking laws and perpetrating acts that pose a threat to state security,undermining the public order, opposing the government system, and insulting the president, the vice president and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi.”
In the weeks following the arrests, the UAE expanded its crackdown on civil society by dissolving the elected board of directors of both the Jurist Association and the Teachers’ Association. The decrees, signed by Social Affairs Minister Mariam Mohammed Khalfan Al Roumi, dismissed the boards and replaced their members with state appointees. Both associations, along with two other nongovernmental organizations, had signed a public appeal calling for greater democracy in the country on April 6.
The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders provides that countries should “take all necessary measures to ensure the protection of everyone against any violence, threats, retaliation, adverse discrimination, pressure or any other arbitrary action” as a result of their participation in human rights activity.
Article 32 of the Arab Charter on Human Rights, which has been ratified by the UAE, guarantees the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and to impart news to others by any means. The only restrictions allowed on the practice of this right are those imposed for “respect for the rights of others, their reputation, or the protection
of national security, public order, public health, or public morals.”
Posted in Ahmed Mansoor Human Rights Dubai, Human Rights Activst UAE, Nasser bin Ghaith, Samer Muscati, United Arab Emirates, Unrest Middle East | Tagged: Democracy Middle East, Human Rights UAE, Human Rights Watch, Nasser bin Ghaith | Comments Off on UAE: Human Rights Blogger, Sorbonne Lecturer Charged With ‘Humiliating’ Officials
Democracy and Human Rights-Middle East Unrest – Repression in the United Arab Emirates
June 2011 – source The Nation
For the past four months, hundreds of thousands of voices demanding variations on a theme—democracy, human rights, an end to torture, a stop to corruption—have echoed from Morocco to Yemen, each with its own local variation. In the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven small semi-autonomous sheikdoms, that voice sounded a little hoarse. More like a whisper, you might say. And then it went silent.
Unrest and Protest Middle East 2011 - Human Rights - Repression in the United Arab Emirates - Anna Louie Sussman The Nations
Since April 8 , 2011 the Emirati government has arrested five prominent Emiratis—activists, bloggers and an academic—for signing a petition calling for reform, and thrown them in jail, where they remain to this day. They are being held without charges, although they are in contact with their families and lawyers.
The five detainees are among over 160 professionals who on March 9 submitted what has to be one of the gentlest pleas for political reform in recent history, which included a request to make the Federal National Council, the UAE’s powerless legislative body, at least open to universal contestation. On February 24 President Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan announced he was doubling the pool of eligible voters, to around 12,000. That is still less than 2 percent of the Emirati population.
(For the record, here’s what Emirati rabble-rousing sounds like: “Please We, the undersigned, a group of people of the United Arab Emirates, rise up to serve your Generous Highness and Their Highnesses Members of Supreme Council of the Federation of deep appreciation and respect…” the petition begins. “Out of our deep concern for this nation, and its people, who are your sons…” it continues. A fiery battle cry it is not.)
But even this was too much. On April 8, at 3 am, several police asked Ahmed Mansoor, one of the signatories, a blogger and a member of the Human Rights Watch advisory committee, to come down to “answer some questions about his car.” (Incidentally, this was the same approach that security officials used to take Naji Hamdan, a United States citizen who allegedly was tortured in custody.) Fearing a trap, he refused to come down, but was taken away by a second group of security officers that same afternoon.
Two days later Nasser bin Ghaith, a prominent Emirati economist and lecturer at the Abu Dhabi branch of the University of Paris-Sorbonne, was also carted away. His ostensible crime was urging the UAE, on television shows and in panel discussions, to become more transparent, as a means to further economic development. In subsequent days, three other online activists, Fahad Salim Dalk, Hassan Ali al-Khamis and Ahmed Abdul Khaleq, were arrested. In the weeks that followed, the government dissolved the boards of two of the country’s oldest civil society organizations, the Jurists’ Association and the Teachers’ Association, for signing a similar petition.
continue reading The Nation
Posted in Ahmed Abdul Khaleq, Ahmed Mansoor Human Rights Dubai, Amnesty International, Democracy United Arab Emirates, Dubai Government, Fahad Salim Dalk, Human Rights Activst UAE, Middle East Unrest, Nasser bin Ghaith, Samer Muscati, United Arab Emirates, Unrest Middle East | Tagged: Ahmed Abdul Khaleq, Ahmed Mansoor, Fahad Salim Dalk, Hassan Ali al-Khamis, Nasser bin Ghaith, UAE Democracy CrackdownHuman Rights | Comments Off on Democracy and Human Rights-Middle East Unrest – Repression in the United Arab Emirates
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Fantasy Football – Playground Humour XI
Bryan McManus
Fantasy Football – Playground Humour XI |
I was sitting watching the build up to the Manchester United game last week; the pundits were discussing possible line ups and formations and it dawned on me how close these guys must come to saying but how difficult it must be for them not to say ‘ I wonder if there’s any chance we’ll get to see Nani tonight’. Juvenile, childish, playground humour I know but it’s still funny!!
It got me thinking, as well as regressing to be eleven, of what a commentators fantasy or more likely nightmare line up would be. There are obvious choices, particularly for Celtic fans the immediate name that springs to mind is Rafael Scheidt, however that’s too easy and there have been many more Scheidt centre backs at Celtic Park since him. Danny Shittu warrants a mention but fails to make the starting line up as he’s just not up to the jobby. There is also the rumour of an Algerian midfielder from the 70’s who went by the name of Ars Bandeet, many have bent over backwards trying to find out if this is true but it seems like it’s perhaps just part of football folklore. Apparently there was a player plying his trade in Luxembourg by the name of Frank Awanka but I couldn’t be bothered spunking time away trying to get this confirmed.
So I bring you the playground humour eleven, a team that would have the opposition beat by the time the team sheets were handed out – how could any manager give any semblance of a team talk when faced with these opponents?
Quim – Currently playing with Braga but made his name between the sticks for Benfica between 2004 – 2010 winning 5 major titles with the club. He gained 32 caps for Portugal playing at the 2006 World Cup Finals and at 2 Euro Championships. As a goalkeeper he has had some hairy moments as well as a couple of flaps but has shown over the years that he is capable of taking a pounding and still coming back for more.
Waldo Ponce – The defender has been capped 42 times for Chile and played in the 2010 World Cup Finals. Currently plays for Universidad de Chile and previously won the Argentinian Primera division with Velez Sarsfeld. Has played for many clubs but never signed on the basis of the contracts on offer, his decisions were always based on the lovely strips the team had.
Johan de Kock – Dutch internationalist who gained 13 caps for The Netherlands and played at Euro 96. He won the UEFA cup in 1997 with Schalke 04 and retired from the game in 2000. Recognised as a bit of a hard man however had a reputation of being pulled all over the field.
Rod Fanni – Currently playing with Marseille and has 5 caps for France. He had previously been heavily linked with Newcastle United and would have followed a long line of Fanni’s to have played for that club if he had signed.
Chiqui Arce – 61 appearances for Paraguay. He played at 1998 & 2002 World Cup scoring against South Africa in the 2002 finals. Played most of his career in Brazil. His real name was actually Francisco but insisted on Chiqui Arce on the back of his jersey. Quit the game after getting a bit of a bum deal from his last club.
Mark de Man – Started his career at Anderlecht and gained 5 caps for Belgium. He is currently playing in Belgian Pro League with Sporting Hasselt. Simply the greatest name for a defensive midfielder ever.
Brian Pinas – Left sided Dutch midfielder. Aptly signed for Newcastle United but never made a first team appearance for the magpies. Currently playing in Holland for RVVH though currently in dispute with the club after being rubbed up the wrong way.
Stefan Kuntz – Made 449 appearances and scored 179 goals in the Bundesliga. Played for Germany 25 times scoring 6 goals, Was never on the losing side when playing for Germany and holds the German record for most caps without defeat. Played at 1994 World Cup finals and was as part of the squad that won Euro 96 scoring the equaliser against England in the semi-finals leaving Terry Venables and the whole of England cursing the German Kuntz.
Andrei Arshavin – Currently registered with Arsenal and when he put pen to paper for the Gunners he was their most expensive signing. Russian international who has gained 75 caps for his country. Came to fame while playing for Zenit St Petersburgh with whom he won the UEFA Cup in 2008 against the now defunct Glasgow Rangers in what is widely regarded as the most one-sided football final ever due to the fact that only one team actually turned up to try to win the game.
Andre Muff – Swiss forward who gained 2 caps for his country retired in 2009 due to recurring injuries. Had a tendency to gain soft free-kicks and penalties for his team and gained a reputation as a bit of a diver.
David Goodwillie – Came to prominence with Dundee United and was widely regarded as having the capability of achieving great things in the game, then he signed for Blackburn. Has 3 caps for Scotland and scored a penalty against Spain in 2011. His career has been on the slide recently, seems like he has made a total balls of it and turned out to be a bit of a knob!
Coach : Uwe Fuchs – As a player he played 13 times and scored 9 goals for Middlesbrough helping them win promotion in 1995. Began coaching in 2001 with Fortuna Dusseldorf and last coached at VFL Osnabruck before leaving in 2011. Achieved practically nothing as a coach and his dismissive attitude gives the impression that he really couldn’t give a Fuchs.
The Playground Humour XI
Coach: Uwe Fuchs
Stadium: The Sports Direct Arena (it’s a much more embarrassing name than The Wankdorf Stadium)
Let us know your thoughts and predictions for the match in the comment section below or on Twitter @90MinuteCynic.
You can follow Bryan on Twitter: @BryanMcManus
About Bryan McManus
Living proof that Thomas Jefferson was wrong when he said “all men are created equal” although considering Thomas Jefferson also said an African nation would win the World Cup before the year 2000 why should anyone listen to him? Bryan has a passion for Celtic, a love of football and a tendency to make completely absurd statements in such a way that you might actually agree with them. Follow on twitter @bryanmcmanus
Eleven Men to Save the World – Fantasy Football
'Fantasy Football – Playground Humour XI' have 1 comment
March 13, 2013 @ 7:36 pm Neil Mason
you forgot Ralph Minge!!
Would you like reply to Neil Mason
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StoicJackal in Uncategorized June 28, 2019 July 3, 2019 11,800 Words
What follows is a transcript of a speech given by researcher, prolific author, and founder of Freedom Force International, G. Edward Griffin from 2007 entitled The Quigley Formula: The Conspiratorial View of History as Explained by the Conspirators Themselves. It details the state of the political system governing America today from the highest positions of power to the lesser magistrates. While we do not subscribe to his suggested solution of infiltrating the power centers, the bulk of his speech deftly serves as a warning against imagining that there is any efficacy to be found in democracy, or any cooperation to be had with American political parties. The speech is lengthy, but worth referencing. It continues as follows:
Thank you ladies and gentlemen.
I have a little bit of a surprise for you all, probably a greater surprise for Peymon than anybody, and that is that I’m not going to talk about The Federal Reserve today. {laughter}
I gave a lot of thought to that. I could have, of course, but I have a feeling that most of you here — or many of you anyway — are pretty familiar with that topic. You’ve probably heard my recording or read my book and heard other speakers on this topic, and I thought, well, why should I go over something that is well known, except for reinforcement which of course always has value, when I could cover something entirely new and something which, in my opinion at least, is just as important as The Federal Reserve System and just as important as the fraudulent tax system, and a topic which generally doesn’t get much exposure. So I’m going to do that tonight, something a little different, and I hope you feel that it’s worthwhile. It’s not a bait and switch; it’s just a switch is all. {laughter}
So, let’s start. It was “Show and Tell” day at the first grade, and all of the little kids were asked to bring to class with them something that was interesting, something that was new, and something that they could describe and, of course, they all brought toys — most of them did anyway — but little Johnny brought a brand new kitten. Well you can imagine the kitten stole the show — much more interesting than a plastic toy, even those with lead paint on them. So they all started to look at the kitten and after awhile the question came up, “Was this a boy kitten or a girl kitten?” Was it a boy kitten or a girl kitten? Well, there was a lot of discussion on that and the group pretty well divided up half and half, and the discussion got very heated and finally the teacher interrupted and she said, “Students, is there anybody here that can describe to the class how you can tell the difference between a boy kitten and a girl kitten?” Silence fell across the room. No one had a clue. Finally, Johnny raised his hand and he said, “I know.” The teacher was very nervous at this and she said, “Well, okay Johnny. How can you tell?” He said, “My father tells me that we live in a democracy and I think we should vote on it.” {laughter}
It’s true, isn’t it? You know right away that’s American school because we have been taught from the beginning that we do live in a democracy — we’ll talk about that word a little bit later — and in a democracy the majority should rule. The majority is always right and no matter what the issue is — in fact the more complex and the more important the issue is — the more necessary it is to submit it to a vote because the majority shall rule.
The purpose of my talk here tonight is to offer the idea that this — although it’s a cherished American tradition and in many other countries too, it is a dangerous tradition and in fact is being used against the common man to take away his freedom.
Now we’re going to travel through some strange and rough territory tonight, and the real title of my talk tonight is “The Quigley Formula,” and the subtitle rather explains it, which is “the Conspiratorial View of History as Explained by the Conspirators Themselves.” That’s my topic.
To begin, we should ask the question “Who is this man Quigley?” Carroll Quigley was a Professor of History at Georgetown University. He is deceased now, but he was teaching there at the time that our former President William Clinton was a student, and Clinton studied under Quigley. In fact, they became rather close I am told — so close that 27 years later when William Clinton received the nomination for President, in his nomination speech he mentioned Professor Quigley by name and paid homage to him and told how much of an influence Quigley had had on his own political thinking. After Clinton was elected President of the United States, in at least two other speeches that I have been able to discover, he did the same thing, he mentioned Quigley to his audience and paid homage to him.
Now, why is this significant? It is significant because Professor Quigley taught the conspiratorial view of history as explained by the conspirators themselves. Quigley was rather close to it if not a part of it. In his books which I’ll be describing in just a few moments, he said that he was very close to this group, he had studied their private papers for several years, he knew these people first hand — at least the ones that were living today — and he admired what they were doing. He said that his only objection to this conspiracy, as he described it, was that he felt that they should be public. He felt that it should not remain secret. He felt it was time now for them to come out in the open and take credit for all the great things that they had done. So Quigley was the rather official historian of the conspiracy and very proud to be that.
So when Clinton paid homage to Professor Carroll Quigley, it had a double meaning. For the average person who didn’t know who Quigley was or what his political views were, or what his specialty was, they thought, “Oh, how nice. Here’s President Clinton paying honor to a nice, kindly old professor who had a profound influence on his school years.” But for those who knew who Quigley was and what he wrote about and what he said and believed in, there was an entirely different embedded message that was to be delivered just to those few who knew. For those few, Clinton was saying, “I know about this conspiracy and I am now in its service.”
So what is this all about? First of all, we need to define this horrible word, conspiracy. A lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction to that. They talk about conspiracy theorists as though conspiracies weren’t real, and I feel sorry for these people because I know they have never read a history book because history is full of conspiracies. In fact, it’s hard to come up with a major event in history that wasn’t created to some large and significant extent by a conspiracy or more of them. Conspiracies are very real in history. They’re very real in our present day. If you doubt that just go to any courtroom and sit there and listen to the cases that come before the judge and before the jury, and a good percentage of them involve conspiracies of one kind or another. So when people talk about conspiracy theories, I have to laugh. It’s too bad they don’t know anything about history.
Nevertheless, the word does have some emotional overload to it, so let’s talk about it. What is a conspiracy? Most of the dictionaries define it rather straightforwardly. To be a conspiracy, there must be three elements present. First, there must be two or more people involved. The second element is that they are using deceit or force. And the third element is to accomplish an illegal or immoral objective. That’s a conspiracy. So the group that we’re going to be talking about today, as you’ve probably already guessed — you’re thinking ahead — they certainly involve two or more people, so that one is easy to check off. The second category, using deceit or force, is real easy to check off because these peoples are masters at deceit and certainly masters of coercion. It is part of the style that they have adopted and nobody challenges that. It’s the third element where we have somewhat of a debate. Is there goal illegal or immoral? Well, sometimes they engage in illegal activities because they really don’t care much about that, but for the most part — and their major operations are done entirely legally because, you see, many of these people write the laws. They contour the laws to force you and me to do what they want us to do, and if we resist we’re the ones that are acting in an illegal fashion.
Almost everything that this group is accomplishing is done entirely in accordance with the law. I can’t think of a better example than The Federal Reserve System. Sometimes I hear people say, “Well, they ought to audit The Federal Reserve. Do you know that The Federal Reserve has never been officially audited by an independent agency?” I don’t care if it’s audited. I don’t want to audit The Federal Reserve. I want to abolish it. {applause} Because I know that if they were to audit it, they’d find that The Federal Reserve was doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing according to the law. Everything is legal. They’re stealing your money and mine legally. So, you see, we’re coming back to this question of legality. So we cannot say that this group is doing things essentially illegal either, so that is a fact.
But now we deal to this question of moral. Is their goal moral or ethical? Well, you and I may not think so, but I’m here to tell you that these people do. They have their own set of values, their own ethics, their own morals, and ladies and gentlemen, they firmly believe — most of them — firmly believe that their goal is the highest morality, far higher than yours or mine. They are trying to build what they fondly call the New World Order, and to them this is high morality, and it’s the old Neanderthal throwbacks like you folks and me that insist on sovereignty and human dignity. We’re the ones that have mental problems or moral problems in their minds. They are pursuing the highest moral standards in accordance with their own convictions.
So if we rely on the traditional definition of a conspiracy, in their minds they are not involved in a conspiracy. However, in the minds of the rest of the people on this planet who have to live under the results of what they’re trying to do, I think the word conspiracy is a very adequate and appropriate word and that is the definition or the context in which I will be using it tonight.
Now Quigley described this conspiracy primarily in two books. Now I understand that he also lectured on it extensively and I’m sure that William Clinton kept extensive notes, but nevertheless, we don’t have to worry about his lectures or the possibility of notes because he published two books. Every detail that you could possibly wonder about is contained in those two volumes. The first one is called Tragedy and Hope and the other one is The Anglo-American Establishment. They are available. You can buy them on our website. You can go to Google and search for it, you can go to Amazon. These books are now available and I do urge you to read them. I have to warn you they’re dry reading and most of it is enough to put you to sleep because it’s dull history, but every once in awhile you’ll come across a passage that is so startling you’ll shake your head and say “Did he really say that?” and you’ll go back and read it and by golly, he really did say that. You really need to read these books.
For the purpose of our presentation here, I’d like to summarize what you will find. Now these will be my words. This is my best effort to summarize what Quigley was talking about and some others by the way, a few other people as well, and then having done that I will come back and give you some extensive quotations to show that my summary is accurate. Otherwise you may wonder that I’m perhaps exaggerating or leaving out some details. So here’s my summary:
* At the end of the 19th Century, a secret society was formed by Cecil Rhodes. Cecil Rhodes as all of you know, I’m sure, was one of the wealthiest men in the world. He was the political head man in South Africa, the chancellor I believe they called him, and while he was there he was able to acquire control over all of the diamond deposits and the gold deposits of South Africa — all of the mineral reserves, and in that period of time he amassed one of the greatest, if not, the greatest fortune in the world. What people don’t realize is that when he died, none of that money went to his heirs. Where did it go?
* It went through a series of seven wills to create a secret society. The purpose of the secret society was to create a structure that would literally control the world — from behind the scenes, in a fashion that the average man or woman would never see it or never suspect it even existed.
* The Rhodes Scholarship which most people know about was just the tip of the iceberg that created in one in one of the wills of Cecil Rhodes. The purpose of the Rhodes Scholarship was to provide a funnel or a recruiting mechanism to find the most appropriate, the most likely individuals — young men and women who could be recruited into this secret society. It should come as no surprise that William Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar. It fits perfectly into this scenario.
* This secret organization is not just of historical interest. It exists today and, according to Quigley and other observers who are close to it, it is the most important single historical force in the world since World War I. Now just think about that for a moment. Is it true? Well, we’ll cover a few facts and you judge it for yourself.
* The goal of the secret organization originally was to expand the British Empire and the men who were behind it — not necessarily the royalty, but the real political figures behind it, and I’ll mention some of their names in a moment — to extend the British Empire to control the world. Rhodes and his associates believed that the British had acquired the highest culture, the highest level of morality according at least to his definitions of morality, and the highest standard of living, the most perfect language. He felt that the race was superior and that for the benefit of the rest of the world, for their good, it was their responsibility — this group, using the British Empire — it was their responsibility to rule the world for the benefit of the world, of course. That was very carefully spelled out in their writings and their goals
* Now this evolved not too long after the organization was put into motion it changed. The goal changed. World domination didn’t change. Control from behind the scenes by a very small elect group didn’t change. But what did change is that the focal point for this was no longer the British or England, but it was to be a New World Order, international in scope and to be housed through an international organization of some kind. Initially they had hoped that it would be the League of Nations and all of their members worked very hard to create the League of Nations for that purpose. When that failed, then they set their sites on the United Nations, which finally was put into action and now is on a fast track to becoming the very structure which they had projected as their goal. And now, of course, the central of all of this instead of being in England is focused primarily in New York.
* Now the method by which this secret organization was to accomplish this incredible goal was not to be visible and not to go forth and influence the people directly. The people weren’t even supposed to suspect that such a thing was going on. The people were not even supposed to know the names primarily of the big players. They weren’t to be in the news at all. The way this was to be done was indirectly through the power centers of society, as they’re called. The strategists behind this are brilliant and they realized that human beings have a herd instinct. We clump together, most of us, a few hermits get off in the wilderness and do okay, but most of us get nervous out in the wilderness and we congregate into villages and cities and, beyond that, we come together in organizations like this. We have leaders. We join labor unions. We affiliate with political parties. We come together in church organizations and we send our kids to schools that are organized, and we have girl scouts and boy scouts. The way we operate is that we work through groups and organizations and we follow leaders. They had this all figured out. They said, “Therefore, the way for us to lead the masses is not directly one on one, but what we must do is control the leadership of the organizations to which people belong. We don’t need that many people to do that.” So with just one percent or one-tenth of one percent of the population, we can control the entire population by controlling the power centers of society. That was their strategy from the beginning, and it is their strategy today, and I might add, it is an extremely effective strategy.
* The structure of this secret organization was outwardly modeled after the Jesuit Order. Yes, incredible isn’t it. But Rhodes was an admirer of the organizational genius, in his mind, of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuit Order, and he said we should use that as our model. He didn’t take it straight across but he took many elements from it and, at the deeper level, though, it is interesting I think and very instructive to note that he borrowed the structure of classic conspiracy control directly from Adam Weishaupt. Now, those of you who have studied this thing, you recognize that name. Adam Weishaupt was the founder of the Illuminati and we all know a little bit about the Illuminati because it was disbanded in Bavaria shortly after it was formed, and their secret records and notebooks and so forth were seized and placed into the public records, so you can go to a library today and read verbatim the organizational structure of the original Illuminati. There is a debate as to whether or not the Illuminati really were destroyed or whether it just went underground and still exists today. I think that debate is interesting and I have my opinions about it, but they’re just opinions. In the final analysis, it’s not too important because we know that there are shoots coming up from the ground with identical structures all over the place. Now whether those shoots are coming up from seeds or roots, I don’t think makes too much difference. The fact is that we have had many organizational imitations of the Illuminati and this secret one that we’re talking about here created by Cecil Rhodes is a perfect example.
* Now what is that structure I’m talking about? It’s what they call rings within rings within rings. That’s the way they usually refer to it, and what that means is this: Weishaupt said that in the center of his Illuminati organization, there would be a controlling group of maybe three or four people — just a small number. These in turn would create a membership ring around them of a larger number of perhaps 20 or 30 or something like, and the members of that ring would not be aware that they were being dominated and controlled by the inner circle. Now that outer ring, in turn , thinking that they were the whole enchilada, would then create a larger ring around it comprising of hundreds or perhaps thousands of people, and those people would not suspect that they were being dominated and directed by an inner ring. And then finally that last ring would create still another one that would reach out to mass organizations — reach out to the masses. And in that fashion Weishaupt said that a few of us in the center through this carefully controlled structure or rings within rings can control the world, and the people being controlled would never know that that’s how it worked. Now that’s the structure that Weishaupt created and described at some length and it’s interesting to me that Rhodes selected that very structure for his secret society.
* Now, let’s take a look –{something dropped} I’m glad there’s not lead attached to that.{laughter} But the result of all this, ladies and gentlemen, is that this structure — this secret society – remains invisible to the average person. It remains invisible not only because of its structure and because of its secrecy, but also because it has had the foresight of not having a name. Now just think about that for a minute. If you say that you have an organization or you create an organization and somebody says, well what are we going to call ourselves, and the answer is we’re not going to call ourselves anything. We’re not going to have a name. That way, nobody can talk about us. Brilliant! And that’s what they decided to do. Quigley himself doesn’t know how to describe it. At some places in his books he calls it the network. In other places he calls it the Rhodes group. In other places he just calls it the group. It has no name. Therefore, it’s another reason that it’s invisible to the average person today.
* At the inner-circle of this organization that I am describing, that was called the “Society of the Elect.” It originally consisted of Cecil Rhodes and a small brain trust of his very wealthy and influential political cronies from British politics and British banking. The center of gravity, as I said earlier, shortly thereafter — after Rhodes death — didn’t take long before the center of gravity shifted away to the Rockefeller group which was very quick to move into that circle and now we see that there are centers or secondary centers of influence within the Rockefeller group and centers within such organizations as The Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, to name just a few. The goal shifted away from creating and world empire based in England to a world empire based in New York called the New World Order but based on the model of collectivism.
* The secondary rings around this Society of the Elect that Cecil Rhodes created were called “roundtables.” That’s the name they gave them — roundtables, and these existed in the United States, Britain and all of the former British dependencies. Finally there was a tertiary group or ring around that which was created. Each of those roundtables in each of the countries, created another ring larger around it, and they called those in most of the British dependencies “The Royal Institute for International Affairs.” You’ll find that in England, you’ll find it in Canada, and so forth. That’s what it’s called. It’s still there. Very powerful, prominent institutions in British politics and all of these countries. In the United States, for some reason which I’ve never been able to find out, they didn’t choose that name I suppose because royal wouldn’t be an acceptable word in the United States, so in the U S. they call it the Council on Foreign Relations. And ladies and gentlemen, after 100 years of penetration into the power centers of society, the Rhodesian Network, I call it — I have given it a name and I hope you’ll pick it up and use it because we have to identify this group — I call it the Rhodesian Network, or the Rhodesians — after 100 years the Rhodesians are very close to the final achievement of their goal in the western world.
* Now I add the phrase “in the western world” because we must not lose sight of the fact when we’re looking at this group, that there is another group out there which is just as dangerous, just as secret and just as cunning as the Rhodesians. And they, by the way, took a clue from the Rhodesians and they got rid of their name a few years ago. We used to call them Communists and then they got rid of the name. They pretended to go away; they pretended that they crumbled overnight — a great miracle. They’re still there! I call them the Leninists. They have never renounced the theories or the goals of Lenin, they just renounced Communism. Well, they never really had Communism in any of those countries any way, they always refer to themselves as Socialists or Leninists or what have you. But all the old former Communist commissars simply took their hat off that said Communist on the front of it and turned it around and now it says Social Democrat, but you notice it’s the same heads underneath the hats. The heads didn’t change, nor did their real policies.
* I want to emphasize that there is another very large and powerful and dangerous group out there which I call the Leninists. And the Leninists and the Rhodesians are often seen warring against each other. Let’s take a look at Mr. Bush in Washington, D.C. and in Venezuela we’ve got Chavez. Now there’s a perfect example of the Rhodesians versus the Leninists, and they fight each other, they’re opposed to each other, they criticize each other, they hate each other, but the world that they want is the same. The only thing they disagree with is not ideology; it’s who is going to run this New World Order — the so called left or will it be the so-called right, and when you peel off all of those labels and you look underneath, you’ll find that in all of these camps, what they really stand for is collectivism. That’s the word we should be using. They’re all collectivists in nature but then they wrap themselves in flags and different rhetoric and they appear to oppose each other, but I want to emphasize just because we are focusing tonight on one group goes not mean that that is the only place we need to keep our guard up, because we have another equally potential group very much alive in the world today.
Now that is my summary. It’s time now to let the conspirators describe it, and so I’m going to do some reading for you. I hate to read a lot in a speech, but in this case I feel that I have to because otherwise you’d think that I was making some of this up, so I’m going to do a little extensive reading and let you see that the conspirators themselves really have said basically what I have said. We’ll begin in Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley, and he says this:
“I know of the operation of this network [see, there he calls it a network] because I have studied it for 20 years and was permitted for two years during the 1960s to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have for much of my life been close to it and too many of the instruments. In general, my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown.”
Now in The Anglo-American Establishment, Quigley says this:
“The Rhodes Scholarship established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes’ seventh will are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire and what does not seem to be known to anyone is that this secret society continues to exist to this day. To be sure it is not a childish thing like the Ku Klux Klan, and it does not have any secret robes, secret hand clasps, or secret passwords. It does not need any of these since its members know each other intimately. It probably has neither oaths of secrecy nor any formal procedure of initiation. It does however exist and holds secret meetings. This group as I shall show is one of the most important historical facts of the 20th Century.”
Now one of the original leaders of this group, one of the organizers, was a fellow by the name of William Stead. William Stead was so important that he was the executor of Cecil Rhodes’ will, so he should know what he’s talking about. He wrote a book entitled The Last Will and Testament of C. J. Rhodes, and in that book William Stead said this:
“Mr. Rhodes was more than the founder of a dynasty. He aspired to be the creator of one of those vast, semi-religious, quasi-political associations which like the Society of Jesus have played so large a part in the history of the world. To be more strictly accurate, he wished to found an order as the instrument of the will of the dynasty.”
So, you see, they are looking at this like an Order. It’s not just a group or an organization; it’s an Order like the Knights Templar or something like that. It’s a “Chivalry Order.” In Cecil Rhodes’ hand-written manuscript — this was not published until fairly recently — we find this coming directly from Cecil Rhodes’ own pen. He said:
“I contend that we English are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. What scheme could we think of to forward this object? I look at the history and I read the story of the Jesuits. I see what they were able to do in a bad cause and I might say under bad leaders. In the present day I became a member of the Messianic Order. I see the wealth and power they possess, the influence they hold, and I think over their ceremonies and I wonder that a large body of men can devote themselves to what at times appear to be the most ridiculous and absurd rights, without an object and without an end — the idea gleaming and dancing before one’s eyes like a will o’ the wisp — at last frames itself into a plan. Why should we not form a secret society but with one object, the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule?”
So there you have it from the mind of the founder. Back to Quigley: In his own words, he says that the goal of the secret society was “nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands, able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.” The system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world, acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. Now you see the Trilateral meetings and The Bilderberg meetings begin to take on more significance when you realize that that’s really part of this plan.
On page four of The Anglo-American Establishment, Quigley says this:
“This organization has been able to conceal its existence quite successfully, and many of its most influential members satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power are unknown even to close students of British history, partly because of the deliberate policy of secrecy which this group has adopted [you see, here he calls it a group] partly because the group itself is not closely integrated but rather appears as a series of overlapping circles or rings partly concealed by being hidden behind formally organized groups of no obvious political significance.”
And then regarding the conspiratorial structure of this group, Quigley tells us this:
“In the secret society Rhodes was to be leader. Stead, Brett, Lord Dasher, and Milner were to form an executive committee called “The Society of the Elect.” Arthur, Lord Balfour, Sir Harry Johnston, Lord Rothschild, Albert Lord Grey and others, were listed as potential members of a circle of initiates. While there was to be an outer circle known as the association of helpers. [Those phrases, ladies and gentlemen, that I just read are lifted from Adam Weishaupt — those are his phrases.] This was later organized by Milner as the roundtable organizations [that I mentioned a moment ago]. After the death of Cecil Rhodes, the organization fell under the control of Lord Alfred Milner who recruited young men from the upper class of society to become part of the association of helpers [which as I mentioned became later known as the roundtables].”
This group of young men recruited from the higher levels of British society was unofficially called at that time Milner’s Kindergarten. Of course, they were young men, they were coming up in politics and in banking and they came from the finest families, but they called them Milner’s Kindergarten because they worked very closely together and they tutored them and helped them get into positions of authority, especially in government. They were placed into the power centers of society and eventually they became the roundtable organizations in each of those countries, and so they were the inner-circle of a larger circle around them.
While reviewing all of this it’s important for us to keep in mind that the primary purpose of a secret society is to keep secrets. That’s pretty obvious, but that means that one of their major objectives is deceit. You have to be deceitful if you’re going to keep secrets, even if you simply say I don’t know which, Hillary Clinton I was just informed, who probably attended the last Bilderberg meeting, when asked on camera did she attend The Bilderberg meeting she said, “I don’t know anything about that.” I guess the reporter said, well, your husband attended the last one, and she said, “Oh, he did? I don’t know anything about it.” That’s what you would expect if you have an affiliation with a secret society, you’d better be prepared for a little bit of deceit or you’re not a good member.
To the gullible public, these people deny their plans and their goals, obviously, because the public for the large part would not necessarily understand them in an approving way. So they lie a lot, but when they speak to themselves in their own private papers, and before conclaves which are expected to remain confidential, they often tell the whole unvarnished truth. Every once in awhile, if you’re researching all of their papers, you’ll find a little gem like the one I’m going to read to you now. This one was written by one of Milner’s Kindergarten. His name you’ll recognize, Arnold Toynbee. He’s a renowned historian, he was a Professor at the London School of Economics, he was a director of studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs which was a front for the roundtable, he was a British Intelligence Agent and the author of that very famous, 12-volume history of the world called A Study of History, which extols the virtue of world government and collectivism. And so he’s a big guy. In November of 1931, in that issue of International Affairs which was published as an insider publication just for members of that roundtable, this is what Toynbee said — and this is a gem — he said:
“I will hereby repeat that we are at present working discreetly but with all our might to rest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of the world. At all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands.”
And that, of course, makes sense. People want to go to the members on the Council on Foreign Relations and say, “Are you guys really planning world government and loss of sovereignty and so forth?” “Of course not,” they say. “Are you really planning to merge the United States with Canada and Mexico?” “Absurd!”
This is just part of the game and you must understand it. World government doesn’t just happen by writing some articles or books. Only when people are in control of power centers of society can they bring about massive changes like this. Not scholarship but power. Not public opinion but power. Power is the key and the power centers of society are what amalgamate and give these people power over their citizens.
How this came about: Quigley describes this. It’s very interesting what he says. How did this come about? Through Lord Milner’s influence, these men were able to win influential posts in government in international finance and become the dominant influence in British imperial affairs and foreign affairs up to 1939. In 1909 through 1913, they organized semi-secret groups known as roundtable groups [we’re covering the same ground here again] in the chief British dependencies and the United States. They still function in eight countries. The task was given to Lionel Curtis who established in England and each dominion a front organization to the existing local roundtable group. This front organization called The Royal Institute of International Affairs had as its nucleus in each area the existing submerged roundtable group. In New York, it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations and was a front for J. P. Morgan and Company.
At last we come to this ubiquitous Council on Foreign Relations. You here more and more about, even increasingly now on the news. They’ll say, “And here’s a word from so-and-so from the Council on Foreign Relations office,” and the average gum-chewing public says, “Huh, that sounds good. I wonder what that’s all about.” So increasingly this phrase, “CFR,” “Council on Foreign Relations,” is becoming more and more at least common. People don’t know what it is, but they’ve heard it so it’s no longer frightening when they hear it. So we are informed by Quigley and others that the Council on Foreign Relations was spawned by a secret society which still exists today that is a front for a roundtable group originally embodied in J. P. Morgan and Company, but now the Rockefeller consortium, and that it’s primary goal is no longer the expansion of the British Empire but global collectivism with control in private hands, administered in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, these are their words, not mine! Now why is this important? It is important because the members of the Council on Foreign Relations are the rulers of America. Can I back that up? I think I can. Who are the members of the Council on Foreign Relations? It’s a very long list — actually there are about 4,000 names. It’s available; by the way, if you write to the Council on Foreign Relations office on your own letterhead, especially if it’s a corporate letterhead, say I’d like a copy of the Annual Report and you’ll get it. I’ve been collecting these for many years, and in the back of each report they have a list of the current members. And here’s what I found.
Let’s start with Presidents of the United States. Council members include Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, James Carter, George Bush, Sr. and William Clinton. Now JFK once said that he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, but I’ve not been able to find his name on any of the member lists, so he’s confused over that. I guess he wanted to be but never quite made it in. Former presidential candidate John Kerry is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and, if anything should happen to President Bush, then Richard Cheney would become president and he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Secretaries of State, undoubtedly to this group, are more important than presidents because the presidents often just take advice. There’s so much going on, they’ve got their cabinet, they’ve got people telling them what to do, and so the Secretary of State is a critical figure, a critical position in this New World Order, and so it’s not surprising to find that just about every Secretary of State from the beginning has been a member of the CFR. Here’s the list: Dean Rusk, Robert Lansing, Frank Kellogg, Henry Stinson, Cordell Hull, E. R. Stettinius, George Marshall, Dean Atchison, John Foster Dulles, Christian Herder, Dean Rusk, William Rodgers, Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, Edmund Muskie, Alexander Haig, George Schultz, James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, Warren Christopher, William Richardson, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and, of course, Condoleezza Rice.
The Secretaries of Defense, a pretty important position if you’re going to build a New World Order and use coercion if necessary, include James Forrestal, George Marshall, Charles Wilson, Neil McElroy, Robert McNamara, Melvin Laird, Elliot Richardson, James Schlesinger, Harold Brown, Caspar Weinberger, Frank Carlucci, Richard Cheney, Les Aspin, William Perry, William Cohen, and Donald Rumsfeld.
CIA Directors: Walter Smith, William Colby, Richard Helms, Allen Dulles, John McCone, James Schlesinger, George Bush, Sr., Stansfield Turner, William Casey, William Webster, Robert Gates, James Woolsey, John Deutch, William Studeman, George Tenant, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden.
Some better known corporations with CFR members at the board or chief executive levels, which mean they exert dominance and for all practical purposes control over the policies of these large corporations — now this is a long list and I’m not going to read to you any more than just the tip of the iceberg, but they include: Atlantic Richfield Oil Company, AT&T, Avon Products, Bechtel Construction Group, Boeing Company, Bristol Myers Squibb, Chevron, Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola, Consolidated Edison of New York, Exxon, Dow Chemical, Dupont Chemical, Eastman Kodak, Enron, Estee Lauder, Ford Motors, General Electric, General Foods, Hewlett Packard, Hughes Aircraft, IBM, International Paper, Johnson & Johnson, Levi Strauss & Company, Lockheed Aerospace, Lucien Technologies, Mobile Oil, Monsanto, Northrup, Pacific Gas & Electric, Phillips Petroleum, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats, SBC Yahoo, Shell Oil, Smith Kline Beach and Pharmaceuticals, Sprint Corporation, Texaco, Santa Southern Pacific Railroad, Teledyne, TRW, Southern California Edison, Unocal, United Technologies, Verizon Communications, Warner Lambert, Weyerhaeuser, and Xerox, to name just a few.
Now in the media, a pretty important place to be if you want to control public opinion, we find CFR members in management and operational positions at the following media corporations: The Army Times, Associated Press, Association of American Publishers, Barons, Boston Globe, Business Week, Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News, Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, San Diego Union Tribune, Times Mirror, Random House, WW Norton and Company, Warner Books, American Spectator, Atlantic, Harpers, Farm Journal, Financial World, Insight, Washington Times, Medical Tribune, National Geographic, National Review, New Republic, New Yorker, Newsday, Newsmax, Newsweek, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Reader’s Digest, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, Time Warner, Time, US News & World Report, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, PBS, RCA, and the Walt Disney Company. Did we leave anybody out? I don’t think so.
[Someone in the audience mentioned a name but it was unintelligible.]
Not on the list yet. Could be, though. I just didn’t locate it.
[Someone else in the audience mentioned another name but it was unintelligible.]
I’m going to check into those guys. {laughter} Alright, the media personalities, the talking heads – not so important but still important: David Brinkley, Tom Brokaw, William Buckley, Peter Jennings, Bill Moyers, Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Katie Couric, and Andrea Mitchell, wife of Alan Greenspan (and by the way, Alan Greenspan, in case you were wondering, former chairman of The Federal Reserve System, is a member of the CFR).
Labor Unions with CFR members in key positions at the top, include AFL-CIO, United Steelworkers of America, United Auto Workers, American Federation of Teachers, Bricklayers & Allied Craft, Communications Workers of America, Union of Needletrades, and Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers.
In the tax exempt foundations and the think tanks which often creates policies which the government implements – the number of CFR members in controlling positions is 443, as of my last count. It could be more, it could be less today, but it’s in that range. Some of the better known names are the Sloan and Kettering Foundations, the Aspen Institutes, the Atlantic Council, Bilderberg Group, Brookings Institute, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carnegie Foundation, Ford Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Hudson Institute, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Rand Corporation, Rhodes Scholarships Selection Commission, Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Trilateral Commission, and the UN Association.
By the way, if you’ve ever wondered where all of these radical groups get their money that are agitating for all kinds of disruptive things in the United States, all of the radical La Raza groups, you know — a few years ago they had the little band of radicalized American Indians messing up the northwest — they are all funded by these organizations, tax exempt foundations. That’s where the money comes from.
Now in the universities, the number of CFR members who are or have been at the very top as professors, or presidents, or department heads, board members — the total number is 563. In the financial institutions such as banks, The Federal Reserve, stock exchanges and brokerages houses, the number of CFR members with controlling positions is 284.
As I mentioned before, the total membership in this group is approximately 4,000 people. There are a lot of organizations, a lot of church organizations in your hometown that have that many members or more. Now wouldn’t you be surprised that if you were to discover that the members of just that one local church dominated American politics and corporate structures and communications and universities, that they were controlling the United States, just that one little group, wouldn’t you be amazed, wouldn’t you wonder what’s going on? Would you start asking some questions? It would be pretty hard, however, for you to get answers to those questions if it turned out that the media and the channels through which those questions would be asked and answered were controlled by members of that same church. And that’s essentially the kind of a situation that we have facing America today.
Note that this group, this Council on Foreign Relations, is not the inner-core of a secret society. It’s the third ring or it is two rings out from the center, at least. What does that mean? It means a lot of those people don’t have the slightest clue as to who is directing them or why. And don’t forget that the ring beyond that is much bigger. That ring is called the Republican-Democrat Party. That’s the next ring out, and there are rings beyond that. None of those people know that they’re being directed from the inside, you see. So these people are unaware, most of them — some of them know, but most of them are totally unaware of the control or the purpose of the CFR. I think most of them are opportunists who look at the CFR as more or less a high-powered employment agency. If you are invited to become a member and you get on their membership list, you don’t have to worry about a good job ever again, because every time these people are looking for a reliable, trustworthy person with the right mental outlook, and they are looking for someone to hire, they look on that membership list and they know that that’s a safe list and so they’re always being offered jobs. And people know that even though they may not know why. So a lot of them are just opportunists.
You don’t get on that list just because you’re a good guy or because you’re a smart guy. You’ve been very carefully analyzed and you have to be invited by certain people, and you have been analyzed to show that you have this goal in your mind of internationalism, collectivism, and the New World Order. If you don’t express a sympathy with that goal, you will never be invited to join the CFR, and even if you do have that goal you may not be invited because now they want to look at you and see how potentially powerful you can be, how smart you are, what are your connections, what are you doing in life, and possibly they even look to see how ruthless you are, I don’t know.
I want to emphasize that just because people are in the Council on Foreign Relations does not mean that they’re part of the inner-core of the secret society.
There are three things we must understand about this group. One is they are not partisan. This is perhaps the most important thing for us to know today is that this is not an issue of Republicans versus Democrats. You find about an equal number of Republicans and Democrats on this membership list. To these people, political partisanship is a joke. They have much bigger fish to fry. They use partisan politics as a gimmick to manipulate the thinking and the loyalties and the activities of the common man. None of these people are Democrats or Republicans with the capital letters in front of them — only as a matter of convenience. That’s the first thing to know.
The second thing to know is that they are elitists. They intend to rule the world — for the world’s own good of course, you understand, but they really believe that their vision of the New World Order, based on the model of collectivism, is the highest morality and they intend to use any method whatsoever to bring that about. They consider that they are at war to bring that about, and people like you and me are the enemy in that war. We must be defeated. We must be annihilated. To them, they adopt the morality of war. What is the morality of war? In war time there is only immoral act and that is to lose. That’s their mentality. You keep that in mind when you’re dealing with these people. They are totally ruthless and if it’s necessary to put innocent people in prison, so be it. If it’s necessary to engineer an event that would cause the loss of thousands of American lives, so be it, because they are at war and they do not intend to lose.
The third thing to know is that the method by which they intend to rule is called democracy. We’re back to that word now — democracy. The problem arises: How does a ruling elite control the masses in an age where people have been conditioned to think that they should determine their own political destiny. We’ve been taught like in that classroom — we’ll vote on everything and our vote will make it correct, and as long as we’re given the vote, everything is fine. We’ve been taught that, so how does the ruling elite deal with that mass psychology where everybody thinks that they should have a right to vote on their leaders and on the issues and so forth? The answer is quite simple. How do you keep the gum-chewing public out of the way, and that leads to the title of my presentation which is The Quigley Formula.
Quigley answers that question in his book. He says to perpetuate the deception of democracy, to allow people to continue to think that they are participating in their own political destiny, all we have to do is create two political parties and control them both and let the idiots jump from one party to the next and choose one candidate adverse the other as long as they never get out of that two-box trap that we set for them. Let them really battle each other on secondary issues, but when it comes to the final endgame of building a New World Order — building a New World Order based on the model of collectivism — all candidates in both parties must be in total agreement. That’s the Quigley formula. Does that sound familiar? Did Quigley really say that? He did. Here’s what he said:
“The national parties and their presidential candidates with the eastern establishment assiduously fostering the process behind the scenes moved closer together and nearly met in the center with almost identical candidates and platforms. Although the process was concealed as much as possible by the revival of obsolescent or meaningless war cries and slogans, often going back to the civil war. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one perhaps of the right and the other of the left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy. Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it every four years if necessary by the other party, which will be none of these things but which will still pursue with new vigor approximately the same basic policies.”
That, ladies and gentlemen, is The Quigley formula, and if it sounds familiar, it’s because we have been living — we have been living under that formula since at least World War I. Just think about that. Not one in 1,000 people has been aware of it.
Now what are these basic policies that Quigley is talking about? It is anything that advances the New World Order based on the model of collectivism. The candidates and the parties should be fierce campaigners. They should attack each other with great vigor but, when the elections are over, they will work as a team for their common goals. All else is showmanship. As long as they are advancing the goal of the New World Order based on the model of collectivism, then everything else is just showmanship. Let’s turn to a couple of brief examples.
Just about every major political event in American politics since War II is a good example if you know what to look for. But let’s not go all the way back — pick it up with, let’s say, the Panama Canal. The Carter Administration gave away the Panama Canal, as you know, and nobody wanted that. The voters didn’t want that. Republican voters didn’t want that. Democrat voters didn’t want it. They conducted polls among the American people and the poll was overwhelmingly — I don’t know, 85% or something about save the Panama Canal for the American people, and the other 15% didn’t care. I mean, they just didn’t have an opinion. And yet they gave away the Panama Canal. Why? Who were these elected representatives serving? That happened to have been the goal of the Council on Foreign Relations and the drive to give away the Panama Canal was led on both sides of the aisle by members of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Now in a more current day the Republicans, of course, are clamoring for war in the Middle East and they advocate that we give more power to the UN. Now the Democrats, they’re different. They call for peace in the Middle East and advocate that we give more power to the UN. Of course, after the Democrats did win a majority in Congress, we thought, oh, now there’s going to be a big shift in policy. Well, there wasn’t, was there? Quigley called it exactly. They could argue about it in campaign days, but once you’re elected you go back to what you’re programmed to do, which is to follow the directives of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Republicans promote legislation to restrict rights in the name of terrorism. The Democrats give speeches of concern over that, and then they vote for those laws. There’s really no difference except the rhetoric. The electorate does not want that, but that is the goal on the Council on Foreign Relations. By the way, the legislation for the Patriots Act I and II and all the rest of these liberty-stealing acts that are coming through, all of those were written in principle before 9/11, and they were written by members of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Democrats promote legislation to restrict freedom in the name of stopping global warming. The Republicans object strongly to that, and then they vote for those laws. Now the electorate doesn’t want that, but that is the goal on the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Republicans are all for restricting freedom of speech in order to prevent sedition — anti-sedition laws to protect America and to protect the government, to protect our homeland. The Democrats don’t like that, but they promote similar laws in the name of stopping hate speech. Hate speech now is prohibited. The American people don’t want that — either of those, but both of those are the goal on the Council on Foreign Relations.
Republicans give speeches about the danger of illegal immigration. The Democrats give speeches about compassion, and then both of them join together and support measures and soon-to-be laws and treaties that will merge Canada, the United States and Mexico together as one political unit and there will no longer even be an issue of immigration, because we’ll all be one big country. The American people don’t want that, but that is the goal of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Republican leaders steal elections outright using electronic voting machines that were designed to be fraudulent — not something that was hacked into and some evil person figured out how to rig a perfectly innocent election voting machine. These machines were designed from the very beginning to do that. You would think the Democrats would be outraged because their candidates have lost elections with these rigged voting machines, but they’re not. Oh, they say “I wonder if we lost the election?” They do nothing. They remain silent because they know that rigged voting machines are really the ultimate form of The Quigley Formula. They know that this is the way — ultimately — to allow the American people to think that they’re participating in their own political destiny and they have no idea what’s going on in those machines and the newscasters will tell them how they voted — and they’re just waiting for their turn, the Democrats are. I think that they’ve been told next election is their turn so be patient.
You see people are like wrestlers, phony wrestlers. My grandmother used to watch wrestling matches. She’d get all excited. “Did you see that guy, man he hit him hard and threw him out of the ring.” “I said Grams, calm down, these are professionals. It’s all put on. They rehearse this stuff.” “Oh, I don’t think so, he really hit him hard.” I could never convince her that that was phony. “The guy with the red mask and the guy with the black tights, they’re mean looking guys. How could they be phony?”
That’s American politics, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a phony wrestling match, and these guys are in it and they can hardly wait until the American people are so dumbed down and so passive that they will accept electronic voting machines to tell them how they voted, and both political parties are in on that, at the top. Now there’s quite a grassroots movement to expose all of this and to reverse all this, but you’ll find that this is coming from the grassroots. There’s no support whatsoever from the top of either political party.
We have to talk about the cheerleaders. It’s not just the political candidates themselves, but the cheerleaders are out there to tell us how to think and to shape the debate, and they’re the ones that really have as much or maybe more influence on how we vote than the candidates themselves. So who are the cheerleaders? Rush Limbaugh, would be one. I would put him right up there at the top. If there was an award to give a The Quigley Formula cheerleader, he would get an award. He does a great job of exposing and ridiculing corrupt Democrats, but he never met a Republican he didn’t like, regardless. He’s all for the UN and will never mention the CFR — never.
On the other side, we’ve got such a nice likeable guy as Michael Moore. Now Michael does a great job of exposing and ridiculing corrupt Republicans, but he never met a Democrat he didn’t like, and he’s all for the UN and will never mention the CFR.
There’s an organization that you’ve all heard about called Accuracy in Media. I used to think they were pretty good because they did a great job of exposing the deceit and treachery within the ranks of Democrats, and then finally it dawned on me — hey guys, what about the other side of the aisle. They never mention deceit and treachery among the Republican groups, and they never mention the CFR.
There’s an organization called MoveOn. It does a great job of exposing deceit and treachery within the ranks of Republicans, but it never criticizes Democrats whatsoever, and never mentions the CFR. Are you beginning to get the picture here? We have cheerleaders that are on the payroll.
Now The Quigley Formula has turned voters into tennis balls. We have a tennis game with the Republican candidates on one side of the net and the Democrat candidates on the other, and we’re the tennis balls. We’re supposed to decide the outcome of our political destiny so we allow ourselves to be hit really hard by one of the players, and we bounce over the net. We get over there and say this is better, and then finally we get hit, and back and forth, back and forth. We don’t like this, we don’t like that, and what happens is that Americans begin to choose their candidates not on what they like but what they hate.
People used to vote for a man or a candidate because they liked him, now they vote because they hate the other one. It’s the politics of hate. We get hit so hard. We hate Bush, we hate Clinton, so I’m not going to vote for those guys, we’ll vote for the other ones. We won’t look at their record, we won’t look at their political principles, in fact we don’t even think about political principles. You’ll never find political principles discussed in the political debates. It’s always some issue which is devoid of principles.
Little kids in the first grade classroom voting on the gender of a kitten are more apt to come up with the right answer than the American people voting on political parties or candidates without any knowledge of political principles whatsoever. The kids stand a better chance. And so we’re like these tennis balls being thrown back and forth, back and forth. Well, the players can win a game, but the tennis ball never wins. And that’s where we are today.
And so we come to the end. What is the solution? Well, are you ready for this? There isn’t any. Ask anyone — they’ll tell you it’s all over. Collectivism has won. We are serfs in a modern, high-tech feudalism. Our lords and masters control us, they control our money, they control our media, they control our political parties, they control our educational institutions, they control the places where we work, they control everything — they control the military, they control the police. You think we’re going to change this? Those who benefit from this are too comfortable and happy with it, and those who suffer under it are afraid to speak out for fear they will be punished. So it’s all over. Get used to it.
Now wait a minute. I just had an idea. What would happen if just two percent of the American people came together, and knowing what we’ve been talking about tonight, they were determined to defeat this monster? Just two percent! What if they understood the principles of freedom? It’s not that they were just voting against something — “I don’t like this, I don’t like that.” What if they understood what they wanted? What if they had a creed of freedom? And really knew what freedom was based upon and cared — cared enough to study it and to teach it to their kids? What if they joined together in a network involving people with similar ideas from all nations, all cultures, all races, all religions, and formed into a true international brotherhood of freedom? And what if they understood — really understood the strategy of influencing society by influencing the power centers of society instead of just throwing themselves out randomly? What if they understood the structure of society and said, hey, we’re going to help each other and work with each other to become effective and dominant in the power centers of society and take them back, just the way we lost them? Do you think if we did that we could defeat this monster?
Yes, I think so too. In fact, I know we can. And fortunately there is an organization, a structure that is exactly like that. It’s called Freedom Force International. We have members already in 55 countries and we’re growing every day. It’s not my mission here tonight to talk about that. You all have a piece of paper where if you want to know more you can sign up and we’ll send it to you, or corner me outside, grab me by the lapel and say tell me more about it and I’ll be happy to talk about it. I invite you to learn about Freedom Force and then to become a part of it.
It’s difficult to close a topic like this on a light note. I wracked my brain — how do I do this? Finally it dawned on me. I’d like to return to the story of the kittens. I was raised by an old-maid school teacher aunt. We called her Aunt Alice, a lot of people did, but she wasn’t really my blood aunt but she raised me. She was like my mother and father all wrapped up in one. A wonderful woman and she was a school teacher and one of the amazing things of this woman is she could always tell in advance by looking at a little kitten — look at the litter kittens and she’d say well that one is a male and that one is a female and the rest are all females. And I’d say, “Aunt Alice, how can you tell?” I mean there’s no documentation available on these little kittens. “Just trust me.” Sure enough, every time I swear, those kittens would grow up to be cats and she would have named it correctly, and we always wondered how did Aunt Alice do that? What was the Aunt Alice formula? And finally one day she told me. She said “Edward, it’s really quite simple.” She said, “Give them a few days until they start to develop some fur and they begin to get bone structure, and then just take a look at their faces. The ones with the broad faces, broader than the rest, are going to be tomcats, and the ones with the little narrow faces are going to be female cats. It’s that simple.”
And, you know, she was right. If you know what to look for and you know what the secret is, it’s easy. I’ve been amazing my friends ever since using the Aunt Alice formula. And so I want to close by telling you that story as a reminder that sometimes the most difficult problems can be solved much easier than you think.
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Adrian Adams
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Adrian Adams has served as a member of our Board of Directors since completion of the Merger with Keryx in December 2018. From February 2016 to January 2019, Mr. Adams served as Chief Executive Officer of Aralez Pharmaceuticals Inc., a pharmaceutical company that focuses on the development, acquisition and commercialization of cardiovascular, pain and other therapies (now Old API Wind-Down Ltd.), and was a member of the Aralez Board of Directors from February 2016 to March 2019. From May 2015 to February 2016, Mr. Adams was the Chief Executive Officer and served on the Board of Directors of POZEN, Inc., a pharmaceutical company which was combined with Tribute Pharmaceuticals Canada Inc. to become Aralez Pharmaceuticals Inc. in 2016. Aralez voluntarily commenced restructuring proceedings in Canadian Court and its U.S.-based subsidiaries, including POZEN, Inc., filed voluntary petitions for relief under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, in August 2018. Previously, Mr. Adams served as Chief Executive Officer, President and a director of Auxilium Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a specialty biopharmaceutical company, from December 2011 until January 2015, when it was acquired by Endo International plc. Prior to these roles, Mr. Adams served in several chief executive officer positions at leading specialty pharmaceutical companies including Kos Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Sepracor, Inc. and Inspire Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Mr. Adams served as Chief Executive Officer of Neurologix, Inc., a company which filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 7 in 2012, from September 2011 until November 2011. Mr. Adams has also held general management and senior international and national marketing positions at Novartis, SmithKline Beecham and ICI (now part of AstraZeneca). Mr. Adams also serves as the Chairman of the Board of Directors at AcelRx Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Mr. Adams graduated from the Royal Institute of Chemistry at Salford University.
John P. Butler
John P. Butler joined Akebia as a director in July 2013 and was appointed as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Akebia in September 2013. Prior to joining Akebia, from 2011 until 2013, Mr. Butler served as the Chief Executive Officer of Inspiration Biopharmaceuticals, Inc. Mr. Butler led the transactions that resulted in the sale of its hemophilia assets to Cangene Corporation and Baxter International in early 2013 for total aggregate consideration that could exceed $1 billion. From 1997 to 2011, Mr. Butler held various positions at Genzyme Corporation, now Sanofi Genzyme, most recently serving as President of the company's rare genetic diseases business. From 2002 until 2010, Mr. Butler led Genzyme's renal division. Prior to his work at Genzyme, Mr. Butler held sales and marketing positions at Amgen and Hoffmann-La Roche. Mr. Butler currently serves on the Board of Directors of Zynerba Pharmaceuticals, Inc. From 2013 to 2016, Mr. Butler served on the Board of Directors of Relypsa, Inc. From 2015 to 2017, Mr. Butler served on the Board of Directors of Keryx and was Chairman of Keryx's Board of Directors from 2016 to 2017. Mr. Butler formerly served as a Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American Kidney Fund. Mr. Butler received a B.A. in chemistry from Manhattan College and an M.B.A. degree from Baruch College, City University of New York.
Mark J. Enyedy
Mark J. Enyedy has served as a member of our Board of Directors since completion of the Merger with Keryx in December 2018. Mr. Enyedy had served as a member of the Board of Directors of Keryx from September 2017 until completion of the Merger. He currently serves as President, Chief Executive Officer and a director of ImmunoGen, Inc., a biotechnology company focused on the development of antibody-drug conjugate therapeutics for the treatment of cancer, a position he has held since 2016. From 2013 until 2016, Mr. Enyedy served as Executive Vice President and Head of Corporate Development for Shire plc, a biopharmaceutical company, leading the company's strategy, merger and acquisitions, and corporate planning functions and providing commercial oversight for the company's pre-Phase 3 portfolio. Previously, Mr. Enyedy served as Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors of Proteostasis Therapeutics, Inc., from 2011 to 2013, following 15 years at Genzyme Corporation, now Sanofi Genzyme, a biopharmaceutical company, in diverse roles, most recently as president of the transplant, oncology, and multiple sclerosis divisions. Before joining Genzyme, Mr. Enyedy was an associate with the law firm Palmer & Dodge. Mr. Enyedy currently serves on the Board of Directors of The American Cancer Society of Eastern New England and served on the Board of Directors of Fate Therapeutics from July 2012 until May 2018. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.S. from Northeastern University.
Steven C. Gilman, Ph.D.
Steven C. Gilman, Ph.D., has served as a member of our Board of Directors since the Merger with Keryx in December 2018. Dr. Gilman had served as a member of the Board of Directors of Keryx from March 2016 until completion of the Merger. Dr. Gilman previously served as Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of ContraFect Corporation, a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of protein and antibody therapeutics for life-threatening, drug-resistant infectious diseases, from July 2016 to April 2019. From February 2008 until January 2015, Dr. Gilman served as Executive Vice President, Research & Development and Chief Scientific Officer of Cubist Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical company developing antibiotics, until its acquisition by Merck & Co. Prior to joining Cubist, he served as Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of ActivBiotics, a privately held biopharmaceutical company. Previously, Dr. Gilman worked at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc., where he held a number of senior leadership roles including Vice President and General Manager of Inflammation. Prior to Millennium, he was group director at Pfizer Global Research and Development, where he was responsible for drug discovery of several therapeutic areas, including immunology and antibacterials. Dr. Gilman has also held scientific, business, and academic appointments at Wyeth, Cytogen Corporation, Temple Medical School, and Connecticut College. He currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Vericel Corporation, SCYNEXIS, Inc., ContraFect Corporation and Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He is a past member of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Association, the Penn State University Biotechnology Advisory Board and the Northeastern University Drug Discovery Advisory Board. Dr. Gilman received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in microbiology from Pennsylvania State University, his post-doctoral training at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation and received a B.A. in microbiology from Miami University of Ohio. He has authored over 60 publications and is an inventor of seven patents.
Maxine Gowen, Ph.D.
Maxine Gowen, Ph.D., has served as a member of our Board of Directors since 2014. Dr. Gowen was the Founding President and Chief Executive Officer of Trevena, Inc., a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing G-protein coupled receptors biased ligands, from 2007 to October 2018 and has served as a member of Trevena's Board of Directors since 2008. Dr. Gowen previously held a variety of leadership roles at GlaxoSmithKline, or GSK, over a period of 15 years. As Senior Vice President for GSK's Center of Excellence for Drug Discovery, she developed an innovative new approach to externalizing drug discovery. Dr. Gowen was previously President and Managing Partner at SR One, the venture capital subsidiary of GSK, where she led its investments in and served on the boards of directors of numerous companies. Dr. Gowen also previously served as Vice President, Drug Discovery, Musculoskeletal Diseases at GSK, where she was responsible for drug discovery and early development for osteoporosis, arthritis and metastatic bone disease. Dr. Gowen served on the Board of Directors of Human Genome Sciences, Inc. from January 2008 to July 2012, when it was acquired by GSK. Dr. Gowen currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Idera Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Pagus: Africa and previously served on the Boards of Directors of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, or BIO, and BIO's Pennsylvania affiliate, LifeSciences Pennsylvania. Dr. Gowen graduated with a B.Sc. in biochemistry from the University of Bristol, U.K., received a Ph.D. in cell biology from the University of Sheffield, U.K., and received an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Michael T. Heffernan
Michael T. Heffernan has served as a member of our Board of Directors since completion of the Merger with Keryx in December 2018. Mr. Heffernan had served as a member of the Board of Directors of Keryx from June 2016 until completion of the Merger. Mr. Heffernan is the Founder and Chairman of the Board of Collegium Pharmaceutical, Inc., or Collegium, a specialty pharmaceutical company developing and commercializing products for people suffering from pain, and served as its President from 2002 through 2018. Prior to Collegium, he was the Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Onset Dermatologics, a dermatology focused company that was spun out of Collegium to create PreCision Dermatology, which was acquired by Valeant Pharmaceuticals International in 2014. Mr. Heffernan held prior positions as Co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Clinical Studies Ltd., a pharmaceutical contract research organization that was acquired by PhyMatrix Corp. and later served as President and Chief Executive Officer of PhyMatrix. Mr. Heffernan began his career at Eli Lilly and Company and served in numerous sales and marketing roles. Mr. Heffernan is currently the Chairman of the Board of Directors for Veloxis Pharmaceuticals (OTCMKTS: LFCYF). Mr. Heffernan earned his B.S. Degree in pharmacy from the University of Connecticut and is a Registered Pharmacist.
Jodie P. Morrison
Jodie P. Morrison has served as a member of our Board of Directors since completion of the Merger with Keryx in December 2018. She had served on the Board of Directors of Keryx from June 2016 until completion of the Merger and as Interim Chief Executive Officer of Keryx from April 2018 until completion of the Merger. Since February 2019, she has been the Chief Executive Officer of Cadent Therapeutics, Inc., a company developing therapies for patients with movement and neurological disorders. She served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Tokai Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (now Novus Therapeutics, Inc.), a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing therapies for prostate cancer and other hormonally driven diseases, from March 2013 until May 2017 and served on its Board of Directors from March 2013 until June 2018. From December 2006 until March 2013, Ms. Morrison held other senior positions with Tokai, including Chief Operating Officer, Head of Clinical Affairs and Program Operations and Vice President of Clinical Affairs and Program Operations. Prior to joining Tokai, Ms. Morrison served as Director of Clinical Operations and Medical Affairs at Dyax Corporation, or Dyax. Prior to joining Dyax, Ms. Morrison held clinical management positions at both Curis, Inc. and at Diacrin, Inc. Ms. Morrison currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Cadent Therapeutics, Inc. and Aileron Therapeutics, Inc. Ms. Morrison received a B.A. in neuroscience from Mount Holyoke College, her clinical research certification from the Boston University School of Medicine and her business training through the Greater Boston Executive Program at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Michael Rogers has served as a member of our Board of Directors since completion of the Merger with Keryx in December 2018. Mr. Rogers had served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Keryx from September 2017 until completion of the Merger, and a member of the Board of Directors of Keryx from March 2016 until completion of the Merger. He has been Chief Financial Officer of Aerpio Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company focused on advancing first-in-class treatments for ocular diseases, since November 2017. Prior to Aerpio, Mr. Rogers was Chief Financial Officer of Acorda Therapeutics, Inc., a biotechnology company developing and commercializing therapies to treat neurological disorders, from October 2013 to October 2016. From 1999 to 2009, Mr. Rogers was the Chief Financial Officer of Indevus Pharmaceuticals, Inc. until the company's sale to Endo Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He also served as Chief Financial Officer at BG Medicine, Inc., Advanced Health Corporation and Autoimmune Inc. Prior to his roles as chief financial officer, Mr. Rogers was an investment banker at Lehman Brothers and PaineWebber, where he focused on life sciences companies. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for EyePoint Pharmaceuticals, formerly pSivida Corp. Mr. Rogers received his B.A. from Union College and an M.B.A. from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.
Cynthia Smith has served as a member of our Board of Directors since August 2018. Since January 2017, she has consulted as a strategic advisor for biotechnology companies. Previously, she served as Chief Commercial Officer and a member of the Executive Committee of ZS Pharma, Inc., a specialty pharmaceutical company developing therapies for treatment of hyperkalemia and liver diseases, from 2013 to 2016, where she led efforts to transition the company from a development stage company to a commercial enterprise. ZS Pharma, Inc. was acquired by AstraZeneca in 2015. Prior to ZS Pharma, Ms. Smith served as Vice President, Market Access and Commercial Development at Affymax, Inc., from 2008 to 2013. From 2000 to 2008, she held various senior leadership positions in market access, corporate strategy, government relations and external affairs at Merck & Co. Before beginning her career in the biopharmaceutical industry, Ms. Smith served as a healthcare policy analyst in the Office of Management and Budget at the White House from 1995 to 2000. Ms. Smith currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Spero Therapeutics, Inc., and the French-American Foundation, and she served on the Board of Directors of Nivalis Therapeutics from 2016 to 2017. Ms. Smith earned a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.B.A. from the Wharton School and an M.S. in public policy from the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.
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Akron Public Schools » News » What's New » Students Find Support in Hyre Event
APS Community Supports Self Care
(Bob Jones for News5.com/WEWS TV 5)
Akron Public Schools officials, along with church and community leaders, are hosting an event designed to shine a light on the serious problem of self-harm among students.
"Ellet Day" will take place July 27 at Arlington Memorial Baptist Church on East Market Street from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The event will include a 5K run/walk, a neighborhood flea market, a classic car show and a Realm of the Reptile show. Sixty percent of the money raised will go to Hyre Middle School to help pay for speakers and programs to educate students about self-harm and drug use issues.
Larry Bender, the principal at Hyre Middle School, said since December, 83 of his sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders were referred for help after reporting hurting themselves in some way.
"Deep down in me, it just eats you away. I keep telling people we have to do something to save our kids," Bender said.
School officials said the number included kids who attempted suicide, but the majority involved non-suicidal self-injurious behavior from students who cut or burned themselves.
"Self-injurious behavior really is about stress, anxiety and really not having the necessary coping strategies to deal with adversity that a lot of students are presented with," said Dr. Erich Merkle, a school psychologist with APS.
Dave Bogue, the pastor at nearby Arlington Memorial Baptist Church, believes self-harm among kids is a crisis. His congregation felt the need to do something to bring awareness and talk about the problem in the open, which led to the formation of Ellet Day.
"This cannot go unresponded to," Bogue said. "We want to be a church family that's connecting with families in the community."
Bogue said a Facebook post on the event has garnered more than 16,000 hits, likes and shares. About $4,000 has been raised so far.
Organizers believe a variety of factors contribute to self-harm among kids, including social media comments, struggles with drugs in homes and pressure in school.
"At this point, I think a lot of students, not just in Akron but nationwide, are feeling a lot of stress and pressure," Dr. Merkle said.
The National Association of School Psychologists encourages school communities to be especially vigilant to students, or staff, who may be vulnerable and offered the following tips and resources:
Touching base with vulnerable students directly to check on their well-being
Conveying to students, staff and parents the message that there is hope and how to get help
Sharing the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255)
Alerting parents to be attentive and vigilant regarding any changes in their children’s behavior or mood
Sharing information with staff and families on risk factors and warning signs
Alerting crisis prevention/response teams at your schools to be attentive and vigilant regarding any rumors regarding students’ behaviors
Reviewing risk assessment and intervention procedures and protocols
Monitoring social media
NASP has suicide prevention resources online to share with students, staff and families. Additionally, they have released a new infographic to share on social media. For more information, visit the NASP website.
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Alamosa News
Bechaver to Serve LDS Mission
ALAMOSA — Landon Bechaver, Alamosa, has been called to serve in the Piura, Peru Mission, South America. Bechaver is a recent graduate from Centauri High School and the son of Brian and Leslie Bechaver. He will serve a two-year Spanish speaking mission and will report to the Missionary Training Center (MTC) located in Peru on June 13.
Bechaver has been planning on serving a mission since he was a young boy attending Primary classes. To prepare, he has studied the gospel all his life and has been saving his money to pay for the things he needs for the two years he will be gone. He wants to serve others and teach them about Jesus Christ.
He is also good with his hands and skilled in building trades and welding. To earn his Eagle Scout badge, he planned and organized the rebuilding of a water catchment on Mr. Greenie for the wildlife. He hopes these skills will benefit the people he serves as well. He is excited about this opportunity to serve and wants to learn from the people of Peru and about their way of life.
Landon Bechaver, Alamosa, has been called to serve in the Piura, Peru Mission, South America. Bechaver is a recent graduate from Centauri High School and the son of Brian and Leslie Bechaver.
2205 State Ave. Alamosa CO 81101
719-589-2553 • 719-589-6573
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TRAILER THURSDAY!
Get a load of a very young Jack Nicholson in the trailer for the 1967 biker flick Hells Angels on Wheels, directed by Richard Rush.
Tags: 1967, biker films, exploitation, jack nicholson, richard rush
Birth of the Living Dead (2013)
These days, it’s nearly impossible to meet someone who isn’t familiar with zombies. The undead are everywhere, devouring pop culture like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet. They have invaded video games, the local Regal Cinemas, Barnes and Noble, and even television sets on Sunday nights. Even my ninety-two year-old grandmother knows what a zombie is! It seems that with each passing day, the rotting ghouls get more and more popular with new movies, books, and video games rolling off the assembly line. If you’ve ever been curious where these cannibalistic ghouls originated, then you should seek out the zippy new documentary Birth of the Living Dead. Tugging us back to 1967, director Rob Kuhns sits down with zombie godfather George A. Romero, who reflects back on the making of his horror classic, Night of the Living Dead. Boasting numerous interviews with film historians, professors, critics, and even a producer of AMC’s The Walking Dead, and filled with electrifying stock footage and animated behind-the-scenes flashbacks, Birth of the Living Dead is an enlightening look back at one of the most beloved horror films of all time.
Birth of the Living Dead tells the story of how aspiring filmmaker George A. Romero went from shooting beer commercials and small segments of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to making Night of the Living Dead, one of the most popular horror films of all time. Inspired by Richard Matheson’s book I Am Legend and surrounded by supportive friends and family, Romero and his crew rented out an abandoned farmhouse and got to work creating a new monster that would become just as iconic as Frankenstein, Dracula, and the radioactive beasts of the Atomic Age. In the process, Romero would create a time capsule that captured the anger, confusion, and violence that gripped America in the late 1960s. As Romero reflects back on the making of Night of the Living Dead, a number of guests including independent filmmaker Larry Fessenden, The Walking Dead producer Gale Ann Hurd, Shock Value author Jason Zinoman, film critic Elvis Mitchell, film historian Mark Harris, and film professor Samuel D. Pollard dissect the film and explain why Night of the Living Dead is an essential piece of American independent filmmaking.
If you’re a massive fan of Night of the Living Dead—or George A. Romero—some of the information Birth of the Living Dead presents may not be exactly new or thrilling. There are discussions of the lack of a copyright on the film and the story of how Romero went from making commercials to horror films won’t have fan’s jaws on the floor. It’s stuff you would have heard about on the special features of the Dawn of the Dead DVD or read about in Joe Kane’s book Night of the Living Dead. However, hardcore fans can’t fully dismiss Birth of the Living Dead because the film dares to recreate what it was like behind-the scenes through quirky little animated segments provided by Gary Pullin. We get to see what it might have been like for softie star Duane Jones as he geared up for an especially violent scene here and Romero pouring over strips of film there. It’s pretty nifty, especially when iconic scenes from the film are given the comic book treatment complete with bright red splashes of blood. In addition to the charming cartoons, there is also plenty of jarring stock footage used during the critical analysis portion of the documentary. There are brutal images of the Vietnam War, racial violence, riots, and protests, all held up to images from Night of the Living Dead to effectively drive home the historical importance of Romero’s accomplishment.
What’s especially wonderful of Birth of the Living Dead is the interview with Romero, who seems as laid back as ever. He sits slumped on a couch, lighting up cigarettes, sipping a cup of coffee, and reminiscing about all of those who took a risk on this young college dropout. The camera is tight on Romero’s face, so close at times that you fear it might bump into his giant glasses and knock them off his face. On the Dawn of the Dead DVD, Romero would only mention Night of the Living Dead in passing, but here, he really digs deep. He reveals that he never truly had an agenda with the film, only that he just wanted to use the film to move on to bigger and better things. He wasn’t exactly keen on being labeled a horror director, but its something that he had grown comfortable with over the years. What’s especially interesting is seeing him shrug his shoulders over the lack of a copyright on the film. The glimmer of disappointment is apparent, but that discouragement is quickly masked with a warm smile that says he is just happy that the film has become as popular as it has. My personal favorite moment is when he reflects back on premiering the film at a local drive-in. He mentions grabbing some snacks and settling down to marvel at his achievement. It’s here that you realize why Kuhns has his camera so close—it was to capture the twinkling nostalgia in Romero’s eye.
As far as the rest of the interviewees go, they are all extremely passionate, as these are people who have been lifelong fans of the film and have analyzed it from every angle. They gush, ooze, and beam praise as they explain the film’s importance and what they personally took away from the film. Those who don’t worship at the altar of Romero would be surprised to learn that the film wasn’t initially met with praise from film critics. Initially, Night of the Living Dead was dumped in grindhouses and waved off by American critics as just another B-horror movie, but European film critics saw the film differently, encouraging those who had already reviewed the film to give it a closer analysis. It’s also very fun to hear stories from moviegoers who remember seeing the film when it was first released and being scared out of their minds by it. The gritty realism, the graphic gore, and the bleak ending shook up many moviegoers and sent horror-loving children away in tears. There is also a misty-eyed tribute to Bill Hinzman, the original “graveyard zombie” who has become one of the most adored zombies from Romero’s Dead series. Overall, if you’ve ever seen Night of the Living Dead and taken it at face value, you owe it to yourself to check out Birth of the Living Dead. It’s a captivating look at a tense time in America, and it acts as a glowing love letter to a tiny little midnight movie that created arguably the most popular horror subgenre.
Tags: 1967, 1968, 2013, dawn of the dead, documentary, elvis mitchell, gale ann hurd, george a. romero, jason zinoman, larry fessenden, mark harris, night of the living dead, samuel d. pollard
Wicked Witches: The Witches (1967)
With Hammer Films having their gothic claws around ghouls like vampires, Frankenstein monsters, mummies, werewolves, and psycho killers, it makes perfect sense that they’d also haunt the witch subgenre. In 1966, Hammer released director Cyril Frankel’s The Witches, a slow-burn effort that is based on the novel The Devil’s Own by Norah Lofts. Heavily lacking their trademark gothic atmosphere, The Witches doesn’t particularly feel like a Hammer horror film. If the credits didn’t tell you it was one of their releases, you’d have absolutely no idea they were even involved with it. With Hammer leaning so heavily on the atmosphere of their films, it is nice to find an effort that focused more on story rather than spooky graveyards and creaky old castles to really send a shiver. While the story driven approach is fine enough, The Witches suffers from a bit too much down time, resulting in a film that often times bores the viewer more than it entertains them. Despite the trudging pace and the laughable climax, the film does feature a strong performance from actress Joan Fontaine, who was the one who convinced Hammer to make the film in the first place.
The Witches introduces us to Gwen Mayfield (played by Joan Fontaine), a missionary working in Africa who has a traumatic encounter with a witch doctor. Three years after the traumatic experience, Gwen takes a job as a schoolteacher in the small English town of Heddaby. Gwen arrives in the tranquil village and slowly gets to know the locals, who all appear to be friendly enough. Life seems to be going great for Gwen until she notices a romance budding between two of her students, Ronnie (played by Martin Stephens) and Linda (played by Ingrid Boulting). The romance seems harmless enough until one day Ronnie reports that he saw Linda’s guardian, Granny Rigg (played by Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies), brutally punishing her. Gwen investigates the report but Linda and Granny dismiss the incident. As the days pass, Gwen begins to notice that the locals seem to treat Linda strangely, but things really get suspicious when Gwen finds a headless voodoo doll stuck in a tree and Ronnie mysteriously falls into a coma. After Ronnie’s father turns up dead and she has another voodoo-like encounter, Gwen is convinced that the seemingly cheery town is hiding something. To make things worse, she begins to suspect that there may be a sinister side to her wealthy employers, Alan (played by Alec McCowen) and Stephanie (played by Kay Walsh) Bax.
The Witches opens on a positive note, with an uneasy scare that leaves you wanting to see just what comes next. As voodoo drums bang on the soundtrack, Gwen and two petrified men quickly try to close up shop before a witch doctor and his followers can come bursting through the door to cast his awful spells. It’s intense enough and it leads you to believe that Frankel will be able to handle to the really creepy stuff with equal amounts of gusto. This sequence is grossly misleading. The Witches then switches over to mystery and suspicion as Gwen settles into her scenic new home. The scary stuff starts out small, with a strange occurrence here and there. There is Ronnie’s chilling story about Granny Rigg putting Linda’s hand in a clothes ringer and there is Granny Rigg encouraging a cat to follow Gwen home, all little things that suggest that there might be a sinister side to this seemingly happy community. Where Frankel really starts to botch it is when the bigger scares start to emerge. In one of the sillier moments, he zooms his camera in repeatedly on Gwen’s terrified expression, all while exaggerated music screams at us to react. This jolt doesn’t work, and it makes you wish that he had handled it with the same sort of casual style that he handled the first half.
Where The Witches really falls apart is during the ludicrous climax that has the villagers of Heddaby performing an unintentionally hilarious ritual that finds Stephanie, the head witch, hoping to literally get inside Linda’s skin. The climax finds Frankel working in the trademark gothic atmosphere we have all come to expect from Hammer, as the ritual takes place in a muddy tomb nestled in an overgrown graveyard. Despite the atmosphere, it can’t cover for the bizarre dance routines, the overacting, the fully clothed orgy that appears to take place, or the fact that the ritual can be stopped in the most nonsensical way possible. It’s not frightening by any stretch of the imagination and we certainly don’t fear for any of our protagonists. There is also the fact that it seems to be completely out of place when joined to the rest of the film, which worked hard to establish a subtler approach to the material. Had Frankel decided not to have the villagers hop around and rub up against each other like dogs, the ritual may have taken on a spookier vibe. He even could have cut a few of the lights he has shining down on the action to give the events taking place a bit of an ominous vibe. Sadly, he doesn’t and as a result he destroys his entire picture.
While the climax may shatter the entire film, the actors still manage to give some respectable performances before the project implodes on itself. Fonataine is strong and charismatic as Gwen, the blonde-haired detective of our witchy story. You will genuinely root for her to get to the bottom of all the suspicious events that are taking place within the community. You will also catch yourself fearing for her sanity when familiar voodoo dolls start popping up around her bedroom. Kay Walsh flaunts a sinister side as Stephanie, a seemingly skeptical individual who really is the head witch. It’s a shame that the silliness of the climax does her character in the way that it does. Stephens does a fine job with his small role as Ronnie, Linda’s concerned suitor who unknowingly gets in the way of evil, and Boulting oozes mystery as the seemingly sheltered Linda. Overall, while The Witches is beautifully shot and eerily composed early on, Frankel stumbles over the later scares and a climax that wouldn’t terrify a five-year-old. It’s a low point for Hammer, and it leaves you wishing that they had stuck to what they did best—vampires, Frankenstein monsters, mummies, werewolves, and psycho killers.
Grade: D+
The Witches is available on DVD.
Tags: 1967, alec mccowen, cyril frankel, gwen ffrangcon-davies, hammer films, horror, ingrid boulting, joan fontaine, kay walsh, martin stephens, norah lofts, supernatural horror movies, witch horror, witch movies
Death Rides a Horse (1967)
Most spaghetti westerns that emerged from Italy between the mid 1960s and mid 1970s didn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel. Most directors saw the success of Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy or caught a glimpse of Sergio Corbucci’s coffin-dragging gunslinger in Django and they quickly began trying to capitalize on the success of those cowboy epics. They poured in all the familiar ingredients and sometimes they even slopped on a bit more of the red sauce (blood) to cater to the exploitation crowds who ate up these foreign dishes. Yet every once and a great while, a formulaic spaghetti western would gallop along that had just the right amount of attitude to make it a minor and entertaining triumph. One of those formulaic but fun triumphs would be Giulio Petroni’s moody 1967 offering Death Rides a Horse, an odd-couple revenge tale that has a particularly dark opening sequence and an apocalyptic climatic shootout that will most certainly lodge itself in the viewer’s memory. It may not have the epic reach of a film by Corbucci or Leone, but Death Rides a Horse can be lively and menacing enough to lure spaghetti western nuts back for a second and even third viewing if they so desire. I’ve personally seen the film three times and I have to say, it has never lost my interest even if I have seen all of this done before.
As a young boy, the baby faced Bill (played by John Phillip Law) watched as his family was brutally murdered in cold blood by a group of masked bandits. Just before the bandits depart, they light the family’s house on fire and leave Bill to be burned alive. At the last second, another stranger who wears a skull necklace pulls the young Bill from the flames. Fifteen years later, Bill has grown up to be a deadly gunslinger searching for the men responsible for the death of his family. Meanwhile, the aging gunslinger Ryan (played by Lee Van Cleef) has just been released from prison and is searching for the gang that framed him. Ryan’s search leads him to nearby town where he meets Burt Cavanaugh (played by Anthony Dawson), one of the men who framed Ryan and who was also present the night that Bill’s family was murdered. Ryan demands $15,000 dollars from Cavanaugh, but he is reluctant to pay such a large sum of money. Just before Ryan has a chance to kill Cavanaugh, Bill shows up and guns the thug down. Realizing that they are after the same gang, Bill and Ryan begin racing each other to track down the rest of the gang. As they try to stay one step ahead of each other, they begin to realize that they may actually need each other if they want to stay alive.
While much of Death Rides a Horse is riddled with clichés, there are two parts of the film that are really allow it to stand out from the countless other spaghetti westerns released during this time. First is the opening sequence, which has to be one of the most gripping and terrifying scenes in any spaghetti western out there. You will be holding your breath as a group of masked bandits ride up to a small house in the middle of a thunderstorm, burst in on the happy family, gun down the man of the house as he reaches for a rifle, and then savagely rape the women on the dinning room table, all while a terrified and innocent young boy looks on. Then, to put the finishing touch on their heinous work, the bandits light the house on fire and ride away into the night. It is a scene that you would expect to open a really great horror movie rather than a rollicking cowboy picture. Then there is the climatic gunfight set right in the middle of a dust storm. It is ripe with apocalyptic doom as thick sheets of sand billow around and silhouette the gunfighters while they try to put each other six feet under. For as unsettling as the gunfight is, Petroni breaks it up by lacing it with a number of chuckles that have really held up over the years. While both of these set pieces send a chill, they are made even better through Ennio Morricone’s yowling score, which sounds like a terrifying Indian war chant erupting from the surrounding mountains. Good luck getting it out of your head.
In addition to these two sequences and Morricone’s hair-raising score, Death Rides a Horse is also worth the time for the performance from the always-welcome Lee Van Cleef. While he played second fiddle to Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name in For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, he is sneering and scowling front and center here. From the moment we see his aging and graying gunslinger, he shoots his viper-like gaze right through us and he continues to keep us on the edge of our seat with gravelly warnings like “revenge is a dish that has to be eaten cold.” For all his toughness, Van Cleef does show a softer side in Death Rides a Horse and it comes through when he is forced to play mentor to the young gunslinger Bill. As far as John Phillip Law’s performance goes, he does okay as Bill but he doesn’t hold us like Van Cleef does. Law is a fine enough actor, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes he seems like he is trying too hard to deepen his voice or look like a fierce bad boy (sounds sort of like Lou Castel in A Bullet for the General). You could see other spaghetti western tough guys laughing him out of the saloon if Law dared show up to their poker table. The bond that Van Cleef and Law’s characters form is certainly solid and multi-layered, at times being emotional and at times played for laughs. Law doesn’t miss a chance to bat an eye at Van Cleef’s aging wisdom and Van Cleef doesn’t shy away from chuckling at Law’s naivety.
There isn’t much depth to Death Rides a Horse but there is plenty to keep the viewer entertained and coming back for seconds, especially if they are fans of the Italian westerns. Quentin Tarantino fans will find plenty to like, as the spaghetti western-loving director littered Kill Bill: Volume 1 with numerous references to this particular film. The most obvious will be the use of Morricone’s stomping war-cry score, which is used during the showdown between the Crazy 88 and the Bride in the House of Blue Leaves. They’ll also notice that the flashbacks that Bill suffers from when he spots one of the bandits responsible for the death of his family look suspiciously similar to the flashbacks that Bride suffers from when she stares down one of her old colleagues. Oh, and how about the name “Bill?” I’ll leave the rest for you to discover on your own. Overall, almost every single supporting actor blends in with the scenery and the villains are so cookie cutter, they could have been borrowed from any other spaghetti western, but there is enough action, suspense, and charms here for me to give Death Rides a Horse a solid recommendation if you are in the market for some retro action. Just remember that this isn’t Leone or Corbucci territory you’re riding through.
Grade: B-
Death Rides a Horse is available on DVD, but it is very difficult to find a good transfer of the film. It is currently available on Netflix Instant Watch.
Tags: 1967, a bullet for the general, action, adventure, anthony dawson, ennio morricone, giulio petroni, italian cinema, john phillip law, lee van cleef, sergio corbucci, sergio leone, spaghetti westerns, westerns
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
With the western genre beginning to loose steam in America during the 1960s, new interest in the genre was sparked with the emergence of Sergio Leone’s dusty A Fistful of Dollars, a rock-n-roll reinvention of the fatigued western genre. A Fistful of Dollars was the first spaghetti western to land in America and introduce audiences to the rising star Clint Eastwood and his iconic Man with No Name, arguably the best western character ever created. The spaghetti westerns that were coming from Italy were rougher and tougher than the ones America was churning out, westerns where the line between right and wrong were blurred and the violence was cranked up to the max. A Fistful of Dollars is one of my favorite westerns and perhaps one of the most influential, boldly breaking new ground and embracing a dark edge inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. This is the first film that introduced many to the genius of Ennio Morricone and his whistling scores.
A Fistful of Dollars follows the Man with No Name (Played by Eastwood) as he arrives in a small town on the Mexican border. Once he arrives, the local innkeeper Silvanito (Played by José Calvo) informs him that the small town is caught in a deadly feud between two families—the Rojo brothers and the Baxters. The Man with No Name sees this feud as an opportunity to begin playing the two families against each other and make some large sums of cash in the process. The Man with No Name uses a group of Mexican soldiers mosey into town with a large shipment of gold as a chance to spark up a conflict. As the feud grows deadlier and deadlier, The Man with No Name pushes the malicious and clever Ramón (Played by Gian Maria Volonté), one of the leaders of the Rojo gang, a bit too far and puts his life in danger.
What is instantaneously atypical about A Fistful of Dollars is the fact that the film refuses to allow us to root for the sheriff of the small town, the ones who stand for law and order. It breaks the mold laid by the American westerns where you root for the honest, ethical, and steadfast. Here we root for a man who operates in a gray zone, someone only looking to benefit himself and no one else. He is better than the Rojo gang but the Man with No Name still operates outside the law. He is interested in personal gain and wealth, seeing the dispute as a game of chess, his squinty eyes carefully plotting his next move. He is shrouded in mystery, hidden in a poncho and always chewing on a cigar. What is his story? We find ourselves drawn to those we do not know and we actually like someone we know nothing about more than when we learn about their past, present, and future. This is precisely why the Man with No Name possesses a magnetism that in my eyes can’t be matched.
Leone’s portrayal of the west is another standout of A Fistful of Dollars, giving us a vision that is the furthest thing from romanticized. Much like the morals at their heart, the American western was concerned with presenting a glossed over version of the Wild West, a place where love stories flourished along with the good old boy heroes. Leone’s west wasn’t a place where the good guys wore white and flashed a badge and the mean old outlaw was dressed in rebellious black. Just like the fine line our hero walks, this west is shifty, deadly, and often repulsive. Here cowboys and outlaws chug whiskey, womanize, kill for entertainment, and pick gunfights out of boredom. For such a depraved place, Leone mirrors it in the run down builds that dot the town. Everything just seems like it is rotting away into the blowing sand right down to the sweaty close-ups that Leone loves to shove our faces in. Faces are weather worn, wrinkled, crack, toothless, and broken. It is a place where even the viewer keeps an eye on the gunslinger at the bar in the background, a place where apprehension rules every move we make. Leone, it appears, wouldn’t have it any other way.
Leone also finds beauty in silence and glances, a touch that would become increasingly popular in his work. In A Fistful of Dollars, the Man with No Name talks more than he does in For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Yet when dialogue is spoken, it is cynical and pessimistic, no one ever truly offering a word of hope that things will get better. Leone ties silence with tension, allowing faces and eyes to do all the talking and squinting to signal it was time to draw your pistol. These silences usually build up to explosive gun fights that last five seconds at their longest. This approach would go on to inspire Quentin Tarantino, who is very vocal about his love of Leone’s work. It is this approach that separates the loyal fans of Leone from the one’s who prefer films that are talkative. And yet the anti-social personality of his work mirrors the anti-social behavior of the characters he photographs.
In film school, one of my professors praised Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 epic The Wild Bunch as the film that captured the dramatic shifts in American society in the 1960s. He claimed that the film acknowledged the death of the conservative values and the beginning of a new era. I’ve always wondered where that left Sergio Leone’s work, especially his Dollars trilogy. Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars was one of the first to truly acknowledge the violent shift in American during the 1960s. Leone presented a west that would run John Wayne out of the town the film took place in and gave us a hero with distorted morals. The film was made in 1964 but was released in America in 1967, right smack dab in the middle of an angry America that was facing an unpopular war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, riots, protests, assassinations, the rising counterculture, and more. While I agree that Peckinpah’s film has a lot on its mind, I don’t believe that he was the first one to use the western to mirror the times and make a statement about the evolution of America. For a film genre that was American made, one where the good guys always prevail and the bad guys always loose, Leone was among the first to rip those black and white ethics to shreds, magnify our underlying violence, and in the process, created a classic film that is just as nasty today as it was back then.
A Fistful of Dollars is now available on Blu-ray.
Tags: 1964, 1967, 1969, akira kurosawa, clint eastwood, ennio morricone, for a few dollars more, gian maria volonté, italian cinema, josé calvo, sam peckinpah, sergio leone, spaghetti westerns, the bad, the good, the good the bad and the ugly, the wild bunch, westerns, yojimbo
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Click to copyhttps://apnews.com/e5cc455930dc4a6fb48baae489765cc3
AP Top News
Former CBS chief Moonves accused of more sexual misconduct
By MAE ANDERSONDecember 5, 2018
FILE - In this Sept. 19, 2017, file photo, Les Moonves, chairman and CEO of CBS Corporation, poses at the premiere of the new television series "Star Trek: Discovery" in Los Angeles. The New York Times says a report by CBS lawyers to board outlines more allegations of sexual misconduct by longtime chief Les Moonves. The report alleges that Moonves destroyed evidence and misled investigators as he attempted to protect his reputation and severance payments.(Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — An internal investigation of former CBS chief Les Moonves has turned up more evidence of sexual misconduct, as well as lying and destruction of evidence, throwing into jeopardy his $120 million severance package, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
A look at what’s known about the scandal so far:
Lawyers hired by the network allege in a draft report that the TV executive committed “multiple acts of serious nonconsensual sexual misconduct” before and after he came to CBS in 1995, according to the Times. He also deleted numerous text messages and was “evasive and untruthful at times” under questioning, the report says.
Among other things, investigators received reports about a network employee who was “on call” to perform oral sex on Moonves. Investigators also found that he received oral sex from at least four CBS employees “under circumstances that sound transactional and improper to the extent that there was no hint of any relationship, romance, or reciprocity.”
The investigators say they interviewed 11 of the 17 women they knew had accused Moonves of misconduct and found their accounts credible.
The 59-page report is to be presented to CBS’s board of directors before the company’s annual meeting next week, the Times said.
A lawyer for Moonves, Andrew J. Levander, said in a statement that Moonves said he cooperated “extensively and fully” with investigators.
The former CEO “vehemently denies having any non-consensual sexual relations. He never put or kept someone on the payroll for the purpose of sex,” the attorney said.
CBS declined to comment.
Moonves, largely credited with turning CBS around, was forced out in September, after The New Yorker published allegations from 12 women who said he subjected them to mistreatment that included forced oral sex, groping and retaliation if they resisted.
Moonves denied the accusations, though he said he had consensual relations with some of the women.
Moonves, 69, is one of the most powerful entertainment industry figures to be brought down by the #MeToo movement. Others include Hollywood studio boss Harvey Weinstein, NBC “Today” show host Matt Lauer and PBS talk show host Charlie Rose.
Moonves made his mark at CBS with sitcoms such as “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory,” reality TV such as “Survivor” and procedural dramas like “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and “NCIS.”
Moonves was one of the highest-paid executives in the nation, making a total of nearly $140 million in the two years before he lost his job.
In a move that appalled women’s activists and others, CBS said at the time of his departure that it set aside $120 million in severance for him. But the network warned he will lose the money if the board concludes it had cause to terminate him.
In their report, the lawyers say the network has grounds to deny him his severance. They say his pattern of behavior “arguably constitutes willful misfeasance and violation of the company’s sexual harassment policy.”
The investigation began in August and is being led by two former federal prosecutors now with highly regarded law firms: Nancy Kestenbaum and Mary Jo White, who was also head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In a statement to the Times, the investigators said: “Our work is still in progress and there are bound to be many facts and assessments that evolve and change as the work is completed.”
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Gaming & Culture —
Lumines dev bringing Rock Band to Japan
Harmonix is teaming up with Q Entertainment to localize Rock Band for the …
Andrew Webster - Jun 3, 2008 2:50 pm UTC
Rock Band made quite a splash when it was released in North America and, slowly but surely, the rest of the world is getting a chance to rock out as well. Having already announced the game for Europe, Harmonix now has its eyes set on Japan and will be partnering with Q Entertainment to bring the title to that country.
Harmonix says that Rock Band will be "the first US-originated rock music game to be heavily localized for the Japanese market." The localization done by Q will include a new set list featuring Japanese artists, as well as other unrevealed details.
Q has plenty of experience working on music games, having created titles such as Lumines, Every Extend Extra, and the recent Xbox Live Arcade port of Rez. No further information has been announced yet, such as what artists may be included or when the game will be released.
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Posts Tagged ‘Alice Liddell as ‘The Beggar Maid’
Exhibition: ‘Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London Part 1
Categories: beauty, documentary photography, English artist, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, painting, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: Alethea, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Alice in Wonderland, Alice Liddell, Alice Liddell as 'The Beggar Maid', Alice Liddell as Beggar Maid, Benjamin Woodward, British 19th century art, British 19th century photography, British art, British artist, British photographers, British photography, Charles Darwin, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Clementina Hawarden, Daisy Taylor, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edith Mary Liddell, Edith Mary Liddell Ina Liddell Alice Liddell, Ellen Terry at Age Sixteen, Father of Photoshop, female 19th century British artists, female British artists, female British photographers, Gerald Duckworth, Hallam Tennyson, historical painting, Ina Liddell, John Ruskin, Julia Jackson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Julia Margaret Cameron Alethea, Julia Margaret Cameron Alfred Lord Tennyson, Julia Margaret Cameron Alice Liddell, Julia Margaret Cameron Charles Darwin, Julia Margaret Cameron Daisy Taylor, Julia Margaret Cameron Ellen Terry at Age Sixteen, Julia Margaret Cameron Herschel, Julia Margaret Cameron Julia Jackson, Julia Margaret Cameron Julia Prinsep Stephen, Julia Margaret Cameron La Madonna Aspettante, Julia Margaret Cameron Marie Stillman, Julia Margaret Cameron Mary Ann Hillier, Julia Margaret Cameron Mary Fisher, Julia Margaret Cameron Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty, Julia Margaret Cameron Robert Browning, Julia Margaret Cameron Sir John Frederick William Herschel, Julia Margaret Cameron The Kiss of Peace, Julia Margaret Cameron Thomas Carlyle, Julia Margaret Cameron Virginia Dalrymple, Julia Prinsep Stephen, King Cophetua's Bride, La Madonna Aspettante, Lady Clementina Hawarden, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll Alice Liddell as 'The Beggar Maid', Lewis Carroll Benjamin Woodward, Lewis Carroll Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lewis Carroll Edith Mary Liddell, Lewis Carroll Edith Mary Liddell Ina Liddell Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll Hallam Tennyson, Lewis Carroll Ina Liddell, Lewis Carroll John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll Open your mouth and shut your eyes, Lewis Carroll The Rossetti Family, London, Marie Stillman, Mary Ann Hillier, Mary Fisher, Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty, national portrait gallery, National Portrait Gallery London, Open your mouth and shut your eyes, Oscar Rejlander, portraiture and narrative, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Robert Browning, Sir John Frederick William Herschel, studies of human emotion, The Birth of Art Photography, The Kiss of Peace, The Rossetti Family, Thomas Carlyle, Two Ways of Life, Victorian avant-garde, Victorian Giants, Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography, Victorian photography, Virginia Dalrymple, wet collodion process, William Frederick Gould
Exhibition dates: 1st March – 20th May 2018
Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography is curated by Phillip Prodger PhD, Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Cover of the catalogue for the exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London
A two-part bumper posting on this exhibition, Part 1 featuring the work of Lewis Carroll and our Julia… JMC, Julia Margaret Cameron, the most inventive, audacious and talented photographer of the era. In a photographic career spanning eleven years of her life (1864-1875) what Julia achieved in such a short time is incredible.
“Her style was not widely appreciated in her own day: her choice to use a soft focus and to treat photography as an art as well as a science, by manipulating the wet collodion process, caused her works to be viewed as “slovenly”, marred by “mistakes” and bad photography. She found more acceptance among pre-Raphaelite artists than among photographers.” (Wikipedia)
As with any genius (a person who possesses exceptional intellectual or creative power) who goes against the grain, full recognition did not come until later. But when it does arrive, it is undeniable. As soon as you see a JMC photograph… you know it is by her, it could be by no one else. Her “signature” – closely framed portraits and illustrative allegories based on religious and literary works; far-away looks, soft focus and lighting, low depth of field; strong men (“great thro’ genius”) and beautiful, sensual, heroic women (“great thro’ love”) – is her genius.
There is something so magical about how JMC can frame a face, emerging from darkness, side profile, filling the frame, top lit. Soft out of focus hair with one point of focus in the image. Beautiful light. Just the most sensitive capturing of a human being, I don’t know what it is… a glimpse into another world, a ghostly world of the spirit, the soul of the living seen before they are dead.
Love and emotion. Beauty, beautiful, beatified.
Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & Ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty.”
Julia Margaret Cameron to Sir John Herschel, 31 December 1864
This major exhibition is the first to examine the relationship between four ground-breaking Victorian artists: Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79), Lewis Carroll (1832-98), Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822-65) and Oscar Rejlander (1813-75). Drawn from public and private collections internationally, the exhibition features some of the most breath-taking images in photographic history. Influenced by historical painting and frequently associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the four artists formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future, standing as true giants in Victorian photography.
Figure 94 and 95 from the catalogue for the exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)
In 1856, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) took up the new art form of photography under the influence first of his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, and later of his Oxford friend Reginald Southey. He soon excelled at the art and became a well-known gentleman-photographer, and he seems even to have toyed with the idea of making a living out of it in his very early years.
A study by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over half of his surviving work depicts young girls, though about 60% of his original photographic portfolio is now missing. Dodgson also made many studies of men, women, boys, and landscapes; his subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues, paintings, and trees. His pictures of children were taken with a parent in attendance and many of the pictures were taken in the Liddell garden because natural sunlight was required for good exposures.
He also found photography to be a useful entrée into higher social circles. During the most productive part of his career, he made portraits of notable sitters such as John Everett Millais, Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron, Michael Faraday, Lord Salisbury, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
By the time that Dodgson abruptly ceased photography (1880, over 24 years), he had established his own studio on the roof of Tom Quad, created around 3,000 images, and was an amateur master of the medium, though fewer than 1,000 images have survived time and deliberate destruction. He stopped taking photographs because keeping his studio working was too time-consuming. He used the wet collodion process; commercial photographers who started using the dry-plate process in the 1870s took pictures more quickly.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Lewis Carroll (1832-98)
Alice Liddell as ‘The Beggar Maid’
also known as King Cophetua’s Bride
Albumen silver print from glass negative
16.3 x 10.9cm (6 7/16 x 4 5/16in.)
Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005
© Metropolitan Museum of Art
Known primarily as the author of children’s books, Lewis Carroll was also a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University and an ordained deacon. He took his first photograph in 1856 and pursued photography obsessively for the next twenty-five years, exhibiting and selling his prints. He stopped taking pictures abruptly in 1880, leaving over three thousand negatives, for the most part portraits of friends, family, clergy, artists, and celebrities. Ill at ease among adults, Carroll preferred the company of children, especially young girls. He had the uncanny ability to inhabit the universe of children as a friendly accomplice, allowing for an extraordinarily trusting rapport with his young sitters and enabling him to charm them into immobility for as long as forty seconds, the minimum time he deemed necessary for a successful exposure. The intensity of the sitters’ gazes brings to Carroll’s photographs a sense of the inner life of children and the seriousness with which they view the world.
Carroll’s famous literary works, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) and “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There” (1872), were both written for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of Christ Church, Oxford. For Carroll, Alice was more than a favourite model; she was his “ideal child-friend,” and a photograph of her, aged seven, adorned the last page of the manuscript he gave her of “Alice’s Adventures Underground.” The present image of Alice was most likely inspired by “The Beggar Maid,” a poem written by Carroll’s favourite living poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in 1842. If Carroll’s images define childhood as a fragile state of innocent grace threatened by the experience of growing up and the demands of adults, they also reveal to the contemporary viewer the photographer’s erotic imagination. In this provocative portrait of Alice at age seven or eight, posed as a beggar against a neglected garden wall, Carroll arranged the tattered dress to the limits of the permissible, showing as much as possible of her bare chest and limbs, and elicited from her a self-confident, even challenging stance. This outcast beggar will arouse in the passer-by as much lust as pity. Indeed, Alice looks at us with faint suspicion, as if aware that she is being used as an actor in an incomprehensible play. A few years later, a grown-up Alice would pose, with womanly assurance, for Julia Margaret Cameron.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Alice Liddell
Wet collodion glass-plate negative
6 in. x 5 in. (152 mm x 127 mm)
Purchased jointly with the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, with help from the Art Fund and the National Heritage Memorial Fund, 2002
© National Portrait Gallery, London and the National Media Museum (part of the Science Museum Group, London)
The fourth of ten children and later the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, Alice Liddell is the most famous of Carroll’s child sitters. Contrary to popular belief, Carroll did not photograph her particularly often, and never photographed her in the nude. Of the 2,600 photographs recorded by Carroll, only twelve solo portraits of Alice are known. By comparison, he made six individual portraits of Alice’s sister, Ina, and forty-five of another favoured sitter, Xie Kitchin (see preceding room). (Wall text)
Ina Liddell
5 7/8 in. x 5 in. (150 mm x 126 mm) uneven
Edith Mary Liddell; Ina Liddell; Alice Liddell
Wet collodion glass plate negative
6 in. x 7 1/8 in. (154 mm x 181 mm)
© National Portrait Gallery, London
6 1/8 in. x 6 7/8 in. (156 mm x 176 mm)
Edith Mary Liddell
Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson
5 1/8 in. x 3 7/8 in. (130 mm x 99 mm)
Purchased, 1977
Hallam Tennyson (1852–1928), Alfred Tennyson’s eldest son, was five years old when Carroll photographed him at Monk Coniston Park in the Lake District. Taken while the poet and his family were visiting friends, the portrait shows Hallam standing on a chair, holding what may be a hoop rolling stick. Carroll posed him with his legs crossed – a tricky stance for such a young child to maintain. As an adult, Hallam would marry May Prinsep, Julia Margaret Cameron’s niece. Carroll did make one portrait of Alfred Tennyson during his Lake District trip, but he was determined to make more. In 1864, he visited the Isle of Wight to try to photograph him again, armed with a ‘carpet bag full’ of his photographs to show Cameron and others. He was unable to photograph Tennyson, but Cameron and Carroll staged a ‘mutual exhibition’ in Cameron’s living room. (Wall text)
Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson, GCMG, PC (11 August 1852 – 2 December 1928) was a British aristocrat who served as the second Governor-General of Australia, in office from 1903 to 1904. He was previously Governor of South Australia from 1899 to 1902.
Tennyson was born in Twickenham, Surrey, and educated at Marlborough College and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was the oldest son of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and served as his personal secretary and biographer; he succeeded to his father’s title in 1892. Tennyson was made Governor of South Australia in 1899. When Lord Hopetoun resigned the governor-generalship in mid-1902, he was the longest-serving state governor and thus became Administrator of the Government. Tennyson was eventually chosen to be Hopetoun’s permanent replacement, but accepted only a one-year term. He was more popular than his predecessor among the general public, but had a tense relationship with Prime Minister Alfred Deakin and was not offered an extension to his term. Tennyson retired to the Isle of Wight, and spent the rest of his life upholding his father’s legacy.
‘Open your mouth, and shut your eyes’ (Edith Mary Liddell; Ina Liddell; Alice Liddell)
10 in. x 8 in. (254 mm x 203 mm)
The Liddell family arrived at Christ Church, Oxford in 1856, just as Carroll was beginning to take up photography. He and the family became close friends. Henry Liddell served as Dean of the College throughout Carroll’s career, and initially supported his photographic efforts. In 1863, Carroll and the family broke off relations for unknown reasons. Speculation has included disappointment that Carroll went against the family’s wishes by refusing to court their governess or one of the older Liddell children – Ina has been mentioned as a candidate. Carroll was enormously charmed by the Liddell children, all of whom he photographed, and nearly all of whom made their way into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and other, related writings. (Wall text)
The Rossetti Family
Given by Helen Macgregor, 1978
Carroll spent months trying to arrange an introduction to Rossetti (1828-82) so that he could photograph the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet, and his family. This is one of several photographs he made in the garden of Tudor House, 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, during a four-day session in which he photographed the family and some of Rossetti’s artwork, including drawings of his late wife, Elizabeth Siddal.
The relationship between Carroll, Cameron, Hawarden, Rejlander and the Pre-Raphaelites was complex. They had many common friends and associates, and it is believed that several Pre-Raphaelite painters used photographs as studies for their paintings and sculpture. However, all four photographers were attracted to later styles of painting, especially the Spanish and Italian National Portrait Gallery, London Baroque, and the Dutch Golden Age. Led by the cantankerous critic John Ruskin, an associate of Henry Liddell’s at Oxford (Alice Liddell’s father), the Pre-Raphaelites were opposed to such painting, which they considered too literal and mundane. (Wall text)
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a British poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.
Rossetti’s art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence, The House of Life. Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti’s work. He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as Goblin Market by the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti, his sister. Rossetti’s personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris. (Text from the Wikipedia website)
Benjamin Woodward
Late 1850s
Irish-born architect Benjamin Woodward (1815-61) is best known for having designed a number of buildings in Cork, Dublin and Oxford in partnership with Sir Thomas Deane and his son Sir Thomas Newenham Deane. Inspired by the writings of critic John Ruskin, his most important buildings include the museum at Trinity College, Dublin (1853-7). Through Ruskin, Woodward met Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelite artists, whom Woodward employed in 1857 to decorate his recently completed Oxford Union building. (Wall text)
3 1/2 in. x 2 1/4 in. (90 mm x 58 mm) overall
Given by an anonymous donor, 1973
John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, as well as an art patron, draughtsman, water colourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
His writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He penned essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. He also made detailed sketches and paintings of rocks, plants, birds, landscapes, and architectural structures and ornamentation. The elaborate style that characterised his earliest writing on art gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In all of his writing, he emphasised the connections between nature, art and society.
He was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft. (Text from the Wikipedia website)
Purchased with help from Kodak Ltd, 1973
Lewis Carroll took this photograph of himself with the assistance of Ina Liddell, Alice’s older sister. His diary records: ‘Bought some Collodion at Telfer’s […] and spent the morning at the Deanery … Harry was away, but the two dear little girls, Ina and Alice, were with me all the morning. To try the lens, I took a picture of myself, for which Ina took off the cap, and of course considered it all her doing!’ (Wall text)
Albumen carte-de-visite
3 1/2 in. x 2 1/4 in. (91 mm x 58 mm)
This is the only portrait of Alice that Carroll is known to have made after the publication of Alice in Wonderland, some seven years earlier. Showing Alice at age eighteen, the innocence of her earlier portraits has now completely drained away, replaced by a severe, inscrutable expression. The moment captured is unusually intimate, with Alice’s head lowered slightly and cocked to one side, looking up at the viewer, and her body slumped in a padded armchair. It is unclear whether Carroll orchestrated this pose, or whether Alice assumed it naturally. (Wall text)
The National Portrait Gallery is to stage an exhibition of photographs by four of the most celebrated figures in art photography, including previously unseen works and a notorious photomontage, it was announced today, Tuesday 22 August 2017.
Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography (1 March – 20 May 2018), will combine for the first time ever portraits by Lewis Carroll (1832-98), Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79), Oscar Rejlander (1813-75) and Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822-65). The exhibition will be the first to examine the relationship between the four ground-breaking artists. Drawn from public and private collections internationally, it will feature some of the most breath-taking images in photographic history, including many which have not been seen in Britain since they were made.
Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography will be the first exhibition in London to feature the work of Swedish born ‘Father of Photoshop’ Oscar Rejlander since the artist’s death. it will include the finest surviving print of his famous picture Two Ways of Life of 1856-7, which used his pioneering technique combining several different negatives to create a single final image. Constructed from over 30 separate negatives, Two Ways of Life was so large it had to be printed on two sheets of paper joined together. Seldom-seen original negatives by Lewis Carroll and Rejlander will both be shown, allowing visitors to see ‘behind the scenes’ as they made their pictures.
An album of photographs by Rejlander purchased by the National Portrait Gallery following an export bar in 2015 will also go on display together with other treasures from the Gallery’s world-famous holdings of Rejlander, Cameron and Carroll, which for conservation reasons are rarely on view. The exhibition will also include works by cult hero Clementina Hawarden, a closely associated photographer. This will be the first major showing of her work since the exhibition Lady Hawarden at the V&A in London and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1990.
Lewis Carroll’s photographs of Alice Liddell, his muse for Alice in Wonderland, are among the most beloved photographs of the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection. Less well known are the photographs made of Alice years later, showing her a fully grown woman. The exhibition will bring together these works for the first time, as well as Alice Liddell as Beggar Maid on loan from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Visitors will be able to see how each photographer approached the same subject, as when Cameron and Rejlander both photographed the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the scientist Charles Darwin, or when Carroll and Cameron both photographed the actress, Ellen Terry. The exhibition will also include the legendary studies of human emotion Rejlander made for Darwin, on loan from the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University.
Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography celebrates four key nineteenth-century figures, exploring their experimental approach to picture-making. Their radical attitudes towards photography have informed artistic practice ever since.
The four created an unlikely alliance. Rejlander was a Swedish émigré with a mysterious past; Cameron was a middle-aged expatriate from colonial Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); Carroll was an Oxford academic and writer of fantasy literature; and Hawarden was landed gentry, the child of a Scottish naval hero and a Spanish beauty, 26 years younger. Yet, Carroll, Cameron and Hawarden all studied under Rejlander briefly, and maintained lasting associations, exchanging ideas about portraiture and narrative. Influenced by historical painting and frequently associated with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, they formed a bridge between the art of the past and the art of the future, standing as true giants in Victorian photography.
Lenders to the exhibition include The Royal Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; Munich Stadtsmuseum; Tate and V & A. Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography will include portraits of sitters such as Charles Darwin, Alice Liddell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Carlyle, George Frederick Watts, Ellen Terry and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London, says: ‘The National Portrait Gallery has one of the finest holdings of Victorian photographs in the world. As well as some of the Gallery’s rarely seen treasures, such as the original negative of Lewis Carroll’s portrait of Alice Liddell and images of Alice and her siblings being displayed for the first time, this exhibition will be a rare opportunity to see the works of all four of these highly innovative and influential artists.’
Phillip Prodger, Head of Photographs, National Portrait Gallery, London, and Curator of Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography, says: ‘When people think of Victorian photography, they sometimes think of stiff, fusty portraits of women in crinoline dresses, and men in bowler hats. Victorian Giants is anything but. Here visitors can see the birth of an idea – raw, edgy, experimental – the Victorian avant-garde, not just in photography, but in art writ large. The works of Cameron, Carroll, Hawarden and Rejlander forever changed thinking about photography and its expressive power. These are pictures that inspire and delight. And this is a show that lays bare the unrivalled creative energy, and optimism, that came with the birth of new ways of seeing.’
Press release from the National Portrait Gallery
Julia Margaret Cameron
In 1863, when Cameron was 48 years old, her daughter gave her a camera as a present, thereby starting her career as a photographer. Within a year, Cameron became a member of the Photographic Societies of London (1864) and Scotland. She remained a member of the Photographic Society, London, until her death. In her photography, Cameron strove to capture beauty. She wrote, “I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.” In 1869 she collated and gave what is now known as The Norman Album to her daughter and son-in-law in gratitude for having introduced her to photography. The album was later deemed by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art to be of “outstanding aesthetic importance and significance to the study of the history of photography and, in particular, the work of Julia Margaret Cameron – one of the most significant photographers of the 19th century.”
The basic techniques of soft-focus “fancy portraits”, which she later developed, were taught to her by David Wilkie Wynfield. She later wrote that “to my feeling about his beautiful photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success”.
Lord Tennyson, her neighbour on the Isle of Wight, often brought friends to see the photographer and her works. At the time, photography was a labour-intensive art that also was highly dependent upon crucial timing. Sometimes Cameron was obsessive about her new occupation, with subjects sitting for countless exposures as she laboriously coated, exposed, and processed each wet plate. The results were unconventional in their intimacy and their use of created blur both through long exposures and leaving the lens intentionally out of focus. This led some of her contemporaries to complain and even ridicule the work, but her friends and family were supportive, and she was one of the most prolific and advanced amateurs of her time. Her enthusiasm for her craft meant that her children and others sometimes tired of her endless photographing, but it also left us with some of the best of records of her children and of the many notable figures of the time who visited her.
During her career, Cameron registered each of her photographs with the copyright office and kept detailed records. Her shrewd business sense is one reason that so many of her works survive today. Another reason that many of Cameron’s portraits are significant is because they are often the only existing photograph of historical figures, becoming an invaluable resource. Many paintings and drawings exist, but, at the time, photography was still a new and challenging medium for someone outside a typical portrait studio.
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79)
Mary Fisher (Mrs Herbert Fisher)
Julia Jackson
Born in Calcutta, Julia Prinsep Jackson (1846-95) was the youngest of three daughters of Maria Pattle and the physician John Jackson. Greatly admired by the leading artists of the day, both Edward Burne-Jones and G.F. Watts painted her and she was extensively photographed by her aunt and godmother Julia Margaret Cameron. Julia Jackson’s first husband, Herbert Duckworth, died in 1870 after only three years of marriage. She later married Leslie Stephen, editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. Together they had four children, including the painter Vanessa Bell and the writer Virginia Woolf. (Wall text)
Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty
© Wilson Centre for Photography
Positioned high in the frame against a dark neutral backdrop, with piercing eyes and determined expression, the Mountain Nymph reveals the psychological charge of Cameron’s best portraits. The title derives from John Milton’s poem L’Allegro (published 1645): ‘Come, and trip it as ye go / On the light fantastick toe, / And in thy right hand lead with thee, / The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty’. Little is known about the sitter, Mrs Keene. She may have been a professional model as she also sat for the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. (Wall text)
Virginia Dalrymple
Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Marie Stillman (née Spartali)
Albumen cabinet card
Given by Cordelia Curle (née Fisher), 1959
Marie Euphrosyne Spartali (Greek: Μαρία Ευφροσύνη Σπαρτάλη), later Stillman (10 March 1844 – 6 March 1927), was a British Pre-Raphaelite painter of Greek descent, arguably the greatest female artist of that movement. During a sixty-year career, she produced over one hundred and fifty works, contributing regularly to exhibitions in Great Britain and the United States.
‘La Madonna Aspettante’ (William Frederick Gould; Mary Ann Hillier)
Albumen carte-de-visite on gold-edged mount
‘The Kiss of Peace’ (Elizabeth (‘Topsy’) Keown; Mary Ann Hillier)
Albumen print on gold-edged cabinet
5 1/8 in. x 3 7/8 in. (131 mm x 99 mm) image size
Daisy Taylor
14 3/8 in. x 9 3/4 in. (364 mm x 247 mm) image size
‘Alethea’ (Alice Liddell)
12 3/4 in. x 9 3/8 in. (324 mm x 237 mm) oval
Lewis Carroll’s photographs of Alice Liddell are well-known; less familiar are the portraits Julia Margaret Cameron made of her years later, several of which respond directly to Carroll’s pictures. In this photograph, the twenty-year-old Alice is posed in full profile, much as Carroll depicted her in his famous seated portrait of 1858, shown nearby. However, Cameron shows Alice’s long wavy hair cascading in front of and behind her, merging with a background of blooming hydrangeas, the flowering of the plant echoing her coming of age. Cameron named the portrait after the Greek Aletheia, meaning ‘true’ or ‘faithful’. (Wall text)
Ellen Terry at Age Sixteen
With a stage career that began at the age of nine and spanned sixty-nine years, Ellen Alice Terry (1847-1928) is regarded as one of the greatest actresses of her time. She was particularly celebrated for her naturalistic portrayals. Already an established professional, she married the artist G.F. Watts, thirty years her senior, a week before her seventeenth birthday, the year this photograph was made. Although they separated after less than a year, Watts painted Ellen on several occasions. One such portrait is currently on view in Room 26, on the Gallery’s first floor. Cameron’s idea to use a photograph of a particular subject at a specific time to embody a broad, abstract concept was particularly bold. Many believed that photography was better suited to recording minute detail than communicating universal themes. (Wall text)
Dame Alice Ellen Terry, GBE (27 February 1847 – 21 July 1928), known professionally as Ellen Terry, was an English actress who became the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain. Born into a family of actors, Terry began performing as a child, acting in Shakespeare plays in London, and toured throughout the British provinces in her teens. At 16 she married the 46-year-old artist George Frederic Watts, but they separated within a year. She soon returned to the stage but began a relationship with the architect Edward William Godwin and retired from the stage for six years. She resumed acting in 1874 and was immediately acclaimed for her portrayal of roles in Shakespeare and other classics.
In 1878 she joined Henry Irving’s company as his leading lady, and for more than the next two decades she was considered the leading Shakespearean and comic actress in Britain. Two of her most famous roles were Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. She and Irving also toured with great success in America and Britain.
In 1903 Terry took over management of London’s Imperial Theatre, focusing on the plays of George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen. The venture was a financial failure, and Terry turned to touring and lecturing. She continued to find success on stage until 1920, while also appearing in films from 1916 to 1922. Her career lasted nearly seven decades.
Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson, formerly Mrs Duckworth)
Albumen print, oval
13 1/2 in. x 10 3/8 in. (344 mm x 263 mm)
Julia Prinsep Stephen, née Jackson (7 February 1846 – 5 May 1895) was a celebrated English beauty, philanthropist and Pre-Raphaelite model. She was the wife of the agnostic biographer Leslie Stephen and mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, members of the Bloomsbury Group.
Born in India, the family returned to England when Julia Stephen was two years old. She became the favourite model of her aunt, the celebrated photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, who made over 50 portraits of her. Through another maternal aunt, she became a frequent visitor at Little Holland House, then home to an important literary and artistic circle, and came to the attention of a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters who portrayed her in their work. Married to Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, in 1867 she was soon widowed with three infant children. Devastated, she turned to nursing, philanthropy and agnosticism, and found herself attracted to the writing and life of Leslie Stephen, with whom she shared a mutual friend in Anny Thackeray, his sister-in-law.
After Leslie Stephen’s wife died in 1875 he became close friends with Julia and they married in 1878. Julia and Leslie Stephen had four further children, living at 22 Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington, together with his seven year old handicapped daughter. Many of her seven children and their descendants became notable. In addition to her family duties and modelling, she wrote a book based on her nursing experiences, Notes from Sick Rooms, in 1883. She also wrote children’s stories for her family, eventually published posthumously as Stories for Children and became involved in social justice advocacy. Julia Stephens had firm views on the role of women, namely that their work was of equal value to that of men, but in different spheres, and she opposed the suffrage movement for votes for women. The Stephens entertained many visitors at their London home and their summer residence at St Ives, Cornwall. Eventually the demands on her both at home and outside the home started to take their toll. Julia Stephen died at her home following an episode of influenza in 1895, at the age of 49, when her youngest child was only 11. The writer, Virginia Woolf, provides a number of insights into the domestic life of the Stephens in both her autobiographical and fictional work.
Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson, formerly Mrs Duckworth); Gerald Duckworth
8 1/2 in. x 12 1/8 in. (216 mm x 309 mm)
© Wellcome Collection, London
Cameron had a genius for recognising the expressive potential of chance events in her work. In this incomparable portrait, she allowed the many speck marks that cover this picture, caused by dust or debris settling on the plate after sensitising, to remain as part of the image. As a result, the poet Browning (1812-89) becomes a transcendent figure, seemingly emerging from a field of stars. Browning developed an early interest in literature and the arts, encouraged by his father who was a clerk for the Bank of England. He refused to pursue a formal career and from 1833, he dedicated himself to writing poems and plays. In 1846 he married the poet Elizabeth Barrett. The couple lived in Italy until Elizabeth’s death in 1861, five years before this picture was taken. (Wall text)
Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. His poems are known for their irony, characterisation, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings, and challenging vocabulary and syntax.
Browning’s early career began promisingly, but was not a success. The long poem Pauline brought him to the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and was followed by Paracelsus, which was praised by William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens, but in 1840 the difficult Sordello, which was seen as wilfully obscure, brought his poetry into disrepute. His reputation took more than a decade to recover, during which time he moved away from the Shelleyan forms of his early period and developed a more personal style.
In 1846 Browning married the older poet Elizabeth Barrett, who at the time was considerably better known than himself, thus starting one of the most famous literary marriages. They went to live in Italy, a country he called “my university”, and which features frequently in his work. By the time of her death in 1861, he had published the crucial collection Men and Women. The collection Dramatis Personae and the book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book followed, and made him a leading British poet. He continued to write prolifically, but his reputation today rests largely on the poetry he wrote in this middle period.
When Browning died in 1889, he was regarded as a sage and philosopher-poet who through his writing had made contributions to Victorian social and political discourse – as in the poem Caliban upon Setebos, which some critics have seen as a comment on the theory of evolution, which had recently been put forward by Darwin and others. Unusually for a poet, societies for the study of his work were founded while he was still alive. Such Browning Societies remained common in Britain and the United States until the early 20th century.
Lent by Her Majesty The Queen
Cameron portrayed the eminent historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) completely out of focus – a disembodied, ethereal being, with light playing across his head, face, and beard.
Born in Scotland, Carlyle is considered one of the most important social commentators of his time. His ideas about the role of ‘great men’ in shaping history informed his lecture series and book On Heroes, Hero-Worship and The Heroic in History (1841). Instrumental in the founding of the National Portrait Gallery, he became one of its first Trustees. Carlyle was lifelong friends with Henry Taylor (shown in the next room), to whom Cameron was also close. (Wall text)
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Bt
Cameron portrayed astronomer and physicist John Frederick William Herschel (1792-1871) as a romantic hero, his wild white hair and shining eyes emerging from darkness. Cameron and Herschel were lifelong friends. They had met in South Africa in 1836, where he was mapping the sky of the southern hemisphere, and where she was recovering from illness. A pioneer in the invention of photography, Herschel was responsible for numerous advancements and is credited with coining the terms ‘negative’, ‘positive’, and ‘photograph’. He introduced Cameron to photography in 1839 and shared the results of his early experiments with her. Rejlander also photographed Herschel, several years previously. (Wall text)
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH FRS (7 March 1792 – 11 May 1871) was an English polymath, mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor, and experimental photographer, who also did valuable botanical work. He was the son of Mary Baldwin and astronomer William Herschel, nephew of astronomer Caroline Herschel and the father of twelve children.
Herschel originated the use of the Julian day system in astronomy. He named seven moons of Saturn and four moons of Uranus. He made many contributions to the science of photography, and investigated colour blindness and the chemical power of ultraviolet rays; his Preliminary Discourse (1831), which advocated an inductive approach to scientific experiment and theory building, was an important contribution to the philosophy of science. (Text from the Wikipedia website)
11 3/8 in. x 9 3/4 in. (289 mm x 248 mm)
Here, Cameron shows the poet emerging out of inky darkness, crowned by wild locks of hair on either side of his head, sporting an abundant beard, and framed by two points of his lapel. She positioned him on high, god-like and looking down, the viewer’s eye fixed at the height of his top button. (Wall text)
13 in. x 10 1/8 in. (330 mm x 256 mm)
In the summer of 1868, Darwin and his family rented a holiday cottage on the Isle of Wight from Cameron’s family. The visit gave Cameron the opportunity to make this famous photograph. Publically, Darwin wrote of this portrait: ‘I like this photograph very much better than any other which has been taken of me.’ Privately, he was less positive, describing it as ‘heavy and unclear’. This particular print once belonged to Virginia Woolf, who was Julia Margaret Cameron’s great niece. (Wall text)
St Martin’s Place
London, WC2H 0HE
Monday – Wednesday, Saturday – Sunday 10am – 6pm
Thursday – Friday 10am – 9pm
National Portrait Gallery website
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The New Woman in France: The Garçonne
by Jeanne Willette | May 3, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
In 1919, the French poet and intellectual, Paul Valery, wrote two letters in which he contemplated the end of the Great War. In his website, The History Guide, Steven Kreis noted that these famous letters were actually of English origin: “The Crisis of the Mind” was written at the request of John Middleton Murry. “La Crise de l’esprit” originally appeared in English, in two parts, in The Athenaeum (London), April 11 and May 2, 1919. The French text was published the same year in the August number of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise. In his first letter, Valery began by saying, “We later civilizations . . . we too know that we are mortal.” He made the point that history was replete with examples of fallen civilizations from ancient history, but the Great War, he acknowledged had ended a European civilization. “We are aware,” he wrote, “that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers. That is not all. The searing lesson is more complete still. It was not enough for our generation to learn from its own experience how the most beautiful things and the most ancient, the most formidable and the best ordered, can perish by accident; in the realm of thought, feeling, and common sense, we witnessed extraordinary phenomena: paradox suddenly become fact, and obvious fact brutally believed.” Valery continued, “An extraordinary shudder ran through the marrow of Europe. She felt in every nucleus of her mind that she was no longer the same, that she was no longer herself, that she was about to lose consciousness, a consciousness acquired through centuries of bearable calamities, by thousands of men of the first rank, from innumerable geographical, ethnic, and historical coincidences..The military crisis may be over. The economic crisis is still with us in all its force. But the intellectual crisis, being more subtle and, by it nature, assuming the most deceptive appearances (since it takes place in the very realm of dissimulation)…this crisis will hardly allow us to grasp its true extent, its phase..No one can say what will be dead or alive tomorrow, in literature, philosophy, aesthetics; no one yet knows what ideas and modes of expression will be inscribed on the casualty list, what novelties will be proclaimed.” Valery went on at great length and felt compelled to write a second latter, more anguished and more impressionistic, a epistle of darting sentences. By “Crisis of the Mind” Valery meant that the superiority of European civilization, society and culture was in doubt. His writing is full of dread that another force will come and dominate Europe. Today, over one hundred years later, we see his writing as a warning of things that would come to pass, but not in the way he expected. What he did not see, was events unfolding under his watchful eyes which were, apparently, turned elsewhere.
Paris after the War was the Mecca for the creation of the “modern,” which had created itself in ways that Valery had not anticipated. The city was full of displaced people, Russians driven out by the Communists, returning veterans, now “lost,” African-American refugees, musicians of Jazz and singers and dancers, like Josephine Baker, fleeing the brutal regime of segregation in the South, and the New Woman, newly independent, increasingly disruptive and completely determined to assert herself socially and creatively. The conservatives, led by religious leaders, managed to beat back early attempts to allow French women to vote, but no one could restrain the new invention, the Garçonne.
The post-war situation produced new kinds of women: those who were openly lesbian (to be discussed in another chapter) and those who were openly single. The War had taken the men who they would have married and did not return them and the women left behind had to make their way on their own. The War had trained women to be self-reliant and, except for the upper classes, they opted for jobs and increasingly looked to alternatives that were not domestic. The result was an extended national debate in France, which, at the time, seemed urgent, but in retrospect was probably futile. Undeterred by discourse, women were already self-fashioning themselves. It must be pointed out that there was a difference between women being without men because of the War and women being without men because they wanted to remain single. In addition, this kind of choice–to live without male protection–was more often played out in urban settings. It was here in the cities, whether Paris or London or New York, where the New Woman was to be found. France, for example, was a largely rural nation and would not become totally modernized until the late twentieth century. It was a nation that was “modern” only in parts and one should not confuse Paris with France. In reality the two were entirely different “nations,” so to speak. Therefore, during les années folles, one was more likely to meet the garçonne on the Boulevard Haussmann that in the streets of Besançon.
In her book, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927, Mary Louise Roberts wrote, “After the war, writers and social observers produced a new image of female identity: la femme moderne, they called the new creature, or sometimes la garçonne..Contemporaries saw the modern woman as ‘above all a creation of the war’ that had allowed her to work and live independently for the first time. As a popular image, she can be traced to the ‘new woman’ of prewar avant-garde circles..By contrast the femme moderne could be the bourgeois girl next door..even the clothes that la femme moderne wore reproduced her inability to be defined within the boundaries of traditional concepts of womanhood. Her lack of distinctly female form symbolized the unrestrained social and cultural space she seemed to inhabit. A ‘being’ without a waist, without hips, and without breasts, she symbolized a civilization without churches, without palaces, and without sexes.”
The new woman was talked about, written about, and, as shall be seen, designed for. One of the most famous books of the post war period was the shocking La Garçonne (The Bachelor Girl) by Victor Margueritte. Margueritte was the son of a famous French general and was a well known writer in 1922 when his book was published. Many of his prewar books were co-written with his brother Paul, and after the War, the brothers joined the ranks of those interested in emancipating women. La Garçonne, depicting the life of an independent woman in Paris, caused a great commotion among the ranks of the establishment which promptly relieved the author of his Legion of Honor in 1923. Today, the book seems quite tame, with its hero choosing,after sowing her wild oats, a heterosexual marriage and a conventional life.
But during the 1920s, La Garçonne was everywhere to be seen in Paris. Characterized as being “without” identifiable female bodily bulges, these women wore the new dresses with the new silhouette. As Akiko Fukai wrote in Fashion Game Changers: Reinventing the 20th-Century Silhouette, “The demands of the new society meant that a fundamental review of women’s functional clothing naturally occurred. Coco Chanel set up a new style that introduced men’s clothing for women and Madeleine Vionnet set the direction of fashion in the 1920s with her innovations in garment construction. Women’s clothing took on concise, rectangular silhouettes, and superfluous, flounced frills disappeared. They were linear-cut compositions fundamentally different from the previous styles that had used curves and darts to shape garments to the body.”
In the past women had worried about their figures and dieting was common, but corsets were on their side and lacing could be counted upon to hide weight gain. Now corsets were gone and the new clothes for the new woman were merciless, demanding a long lithe flat line, without bulges, even the natural ones. As Mary Jane Jacobs said of her new bra, when she looked into the mirror: “..I saw that I was flat and proper..” By the 1920s the extreme haute couture fashions of Coco Chanel forced all women to re-examine their bodies, not in terms of their natural shapes but in relation to her sleek and simple straight dresses.
In her chapter on the modern woman, “The Politics of Fashion in 1920s France,” Mary Louise Roberts wrote, “From this perspective, the new fashions look like an elaborate marketing ploy, which fed the growth of a bourgeoning beauty industry, including makeup and skin-care manufacturers, facturers, beauty salon and hair salon owners, diet specialists, as well as the haute couturiers. In this sense, postwar fashion can be understood as a sort of modern consumerism that exploited women in the pursuit of profit, as feminist historians have claimed. Far from enjoying joying freedom, women who bought into this quest for beauty found themselves locked into a relentless and time-consuming set of physical and financial constraints.” The author concluded her argument with the observation that what was being sold to women were illusions:
“Thinking about the new fashions as producing the illusion of freedom, rather than freedom itself, can help us determine their political importance. By conceiving of fashion as a language of movement and change, even when it was not, designers like Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel created a visual fantasy of liberation. Merchandisers succeeded in selling the new styles by projecting an image of liberation from constraint; the women who wore them were attracted to this fantasy and wanted to express it as their own. In defining fashion in terms of personal emancipation, feminists such as Verone and Misme also helped to define its cultural interpretation. The fantasy of liberation then became a cultural reality in itself that was not without political importance.”
However, this argument denies agency to women, who wanted these changes and were willing participants in the new and broadened fashion industries. Women pushed and sought ways and means to make themselves over, often braving social disapproval, and, as Roberts pointed out, endured inconveniences to enjoy the new clothing, new hair, and new make-up and so on. What is important to take in to consideration is the fact that women were in charge: they could remake their bodies, they could literally re-make their faces, they could select hairstyles that were becoming and suited their faces. Compared to the inconvenient and confining clothes of the previous eras, the short dresses and the comfortable undergarments allowed women to walk and run and climb easily into automobiles and drive away, going wherever they pleased.
True, the New Woman had exchanged the tyranny of the corset for the unexpected tyranny of the new active life style and the need for a figure that was “boyish.” With her short hair and flat chest, the New Woman became the Garçonne, a boyish female whose bareness and exposure would have made her grandmother blush. But the New Woman had arrived. She was here. Even today, a hundred years later, we tend to not give fashion its cultural due. Fashion does not seem to have the requisite gravitas for our serious consideration, but social and political changes wrought an innovation in the lives of the young half the population of Europe and America, altering their bodies, their minds and their hearts, reflected in the semiotic statements made by their clothing. The fashions worn by the new women, and the new men, were not mere outfits or fashionable garments but profound statements that their lives had changed irrevocably, that they were from their own future. These new existences had been redesigned by the will of women themselves, and these women would not go back to the old ways. Once again, a line had been crossed and the New Woman stepped into the Modern, redesigned for the new century.
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New Women’s Dormitory Launched at American University of Afghanistan
Kabul, Afghanistan – A new dormitory, designed to house 200 female students, was inaugurated today by U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan John R. Bass, USAID Assistant to the Administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan Gregory Huger, and American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) Registrar Dr. Julie Barker Holland. Constructed with support from USAID’s Promote Gender Equity and Women’s Empowerment program, the new facility is designed to increase female attendance at AUAF by providing a safe and secure living and learning environment.
The women’s dormitory is a state-of-the art three-story 3,000 square meter building that includes living quarters for up to 200 students, study and lounge areas, and administrative space. To expand housing opportunities to the broadest possible range of women, priority placement will be given to women from outside the capital, who are unable to commute to classes.
From its inception, the women’s dormitory was designed to advance women’s empowerment. Fifteen female engineering graduates from Kabul University participated in the dormitory’s design and construction, receiving on-the-job training and increasing their skills.
Since its establishment in 2006, the American University of Afghanistan has played a key role in educating the next generation of Afghan civic, business, and government leaders. With a nearly 50 percent female student body and with the addition of the women’s dormitory, AUAF is poised to continue advancing women’s education and economic opportunities. The United States is proud to partner with AUAF as it contributes to a more inclusive and prosperous future for Afghanistan’s women leaders.
With almost $17 billion spent on development programs in Afghanistan since 2002, USAID provides the largest bilateral civilian assistance program to Afghanistan. USAID partners with the government and people of Afghanistan to ensure economic growth led by the country’s private sector, to establish a democratic and capable state governed by the rule of law, and to provide basic health and education services for all Afghans.
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High spatial resolution continuum and Hɑ imaging of the high-redshift IRAS source FSC 10214+4724
Soifer, B. T. and Neugebauer, G. and Matthews, K. and Lawrence, C. and Mazzarella, J. (1992) High spatial resolution continuum and Hɑ imaging of the high-redshift IRAS source FSC 10214+4724. Astrophysical Journal, 399 (1). L55-L58. ISSN 0004-637X. http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20170301-070003738
Use this Persistent URL to link to this item: http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20170301-070003738
High spatial resolution images have been obtained of the high-redshift (z = 2.286) IRAS source FSC 10214+4724 at wavelengths corresponding to the optical continuum and Hɑ in the object's rest frame. The continuum shows two clumps separated by ~1" (~10 kpc) and aligned approximately north-south. The structure appears similar at rest wavelengths of 0.38, 0.64, and 0.67 μm. The continuum morphology suggests two separate concentrations of luminosity, likely the nuclei of interacting galaxies, although a large galaxy bifurcated by an immense dust lane cannot be ruled out. The southern component is predominantly extended in the east-west direction on a scale of -0."5 (5 kpc), consistent with the position and elongation of the radio source reported in 1992 by Lawrence et al. The Hɑ emission is centered on the southern component of the galaxy and is unresolved with a diameter smaller than 0."4 ( < 3.5 kpc). A simple explanation for the current observations is an interacting system comprised of two or more highly luminous (~10^(12) L_☉) galaxies, one of which contains a dust enshrouded quasar that generates the bulk of the bolometric luminosity (~ 5 x 10^(14) L_☉) of the system.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/186605 DOI Article
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1992ApJ...399L..55S ADS Article
Mazzarella, J. 0000-0002-8204-8619
© 1992 American Astronomical Society. Received 1992 June 25; accepted 1992 August 12. We thank Juan Carasco and Lee Armus for assistance with the observations and E. S. Phinney and M. Voit for helpful discussions. This research was supported in part by grants from the NSF and NASA. IPAC is supported by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA.
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)
NSF UNSPECIFIED
NASA/JPL/Caltech UNSPECIFIED
Subject Keywords:
galaxies: formation galaxies: interactions
CaltechAUTHORS:20170301-070003738
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20170301-070003738
Official Citation:
High spatial resolution continuum and H-alpha imaging of the high-redshift IRAS source FSC 10214+4724 Soifer, B. T., Neugebauer, G., Matthews, K., Lawrence, C., & Mazzarella, J. Astrophysical Journal, Part 2 - Letters (ISSN 0004-637X), vol. 399, no. 1, p. L55-L58.
No commercial reproduction, distribution, display or performance rights in this work are provided.
Ruth Sustaita
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We provide here a list of known ototoxic drugs and herbs that have been known to cause or exacerbate tinnitus. This list is for educational purposes only and is available as a resource to you to use in your discussions with your health care professional. We thank doctor Neil Bauman, Ph.D., for his expertise in this area and for compiling this list for us.
FACT: Some companies will try to point you to a miraculous tinnitus cure where a few pills will stop all signs of tinnitus. While much research has been done around the effects of medication and vitamin supplements on tinnitus, there is currently no proven tinnitus cure. Only tinnitus management devices and sound therapy have been proven to decrease the effects of tinnitus.
Tinnitus is the name for hearing a sound that is not physically present in the environment. Some researchers have also described tinnitus as a “phantom auditory perception.” People with tinnitus most often describe it as ringing, buzzing, cricket sounds, humming, and whooshing, although many other descriptions have been used. To hear some sound samples access the American Tinnitus Association website, where they have put together files of different manifestations of tinnitus to listen to for education purposes.
Cochlear implants are sometimes used in people who have tinnitus along with severe hearing loss. A cochlear implant bypasses the damaged portion of the inner ear and sends electrical signals that directly stimulate the auditory nerve. The device brings in outside sounds that help mask tinnitus and stimulate change in the neural circuits. Read the NIDCD fact sheet Cochlear Implants for more information.
Tinnitus is usually described as a ringing in the ears, but it can also sound like clicking, hissing, roaring, or buzzing. Tinnitus involves perceiving sound when no external noise is present. The sound can be very soft or very loud, and high-pitched or low-pitched. Some people hear it in one ear and others hear it in both. People with severe tinnitus may have problems hearing, working, or sleeping.
When TRT was developed in the 1980s by neuroscientist Dr. Pawel Jastreboff (now at Emory University in Atlanta), it was designed to be administered according to a strict protocol. Today, the term TRT is being used to describe modified versions of this therapy, and the variations make accurate assessment of its effectiveness difficult. Individual studies have reported improvements in as many as 80% of patients with high-pitched tinnitus. In a Cochrane review of the one randomized trial that followed Jastreboff's protocol and met the organization's standards, TRT was much more effective in reducing tinnitus severity and disability than a technique called masking (see below).
Tinnitus varies dramatically from person to person, so it is important that you visit an audiologist to learn more about your specific circumstances. Some of the causes result in permanent tinnitus and require treatment, while others induce temporary tinnitus that disappears on its own. To find out what causes tinnitus in your specific situation, contact Sound Relief Hearing Center today.
White noise machines. These devices, which produce simulated environmental sounds such as falling rain or ocean waves, are often an effective treatment for tinnitus. You may want to try a white noise machine with pillow speakers to help you sleep. Fans, humidifiers, dehumidifiers and air conditioners in the bedroom also may help cover the internal noise at night.
If your tinnitus is a symptom of an underlying medical condition, the first step is to treat that condition. But if the tinnitus remains after treatment, or if it results from exposure to loud noise, health professionals recommend various non-medical options that may help reduce or mask the unwanted noise (See Masking Devices below). Sometimes, tinnitus goes away spontaneously, without any intervention at all. It should be understood, however, that not all tinnitus can be eliminated or reduced, no matter the cause.
Serenade by SoundCure is based on S-tones. The MP3 player-like device was developed through research from the University of California, Irvine, where it was proven that the temporal-patterned sounds produced by SoundCure can suppress a patient’s tinnitus. Instead of drowning out tinnitus with another sound played at a louder volume, it actively reduces the condition. The therapy is custom-designed by a patient’s audiologist following testing.
Earwax (ear wax) is a natural substance secreted by special glands in the skin on the outer part of the ear canal. It repels water, and traps dust and sand particles. Usually a small amount of wax accumulates, dries up, and then falls out of the ear canal carrying with it unwanted particles. Under ideal circumstances, you should never have to clean your ear canals. The absence of ear wax may result in dry, itchy ears, and even infection. Ear wax may accumulate in the ear for a variety of reasons including; narrowing of the ear canal, production of less ear wax due to aging, or an overproduction of ear wax in response to trauma or blockage within the ear canal.
Many of the press headlines mentioned that listening to the sound of the sea could help tinnitus, with the Metro claiming this could cure the condition. However, sound therapies that try to neutralise tinnitus using soothing sounds, such as waves or birdsong, are not new, but are part of standard treatments for this condition. Also, the report in the Lancet did not state what kind of sounds were used as therapy. Sound therapy was not the only treatment approach used, but was given as part of a specialised treatment programme delivered by expert health professionals.
Your doctor will try to determine what is causing the condition. If it is not due to a medication side effect or a general medical condition (such as high blood pressure), he or she may refer you to an otolaryngologist (an ear, nose, and throat doctor) or an audiologist (hearing specialist). It is especially important to see an otolaryngologist if you experience tinnitus in only one ear, tinnitus that sounds like your heartbeat or pulse (pulsatile tinnitus), tinnitus with sudden or fluctuating hearing loss, pressure or fullness in one or both ears, and/or dizziness or balance problems. Unless the cause of the tinnitus is obvious on physical examination, a hearing test is usually required.
Tinnitus retraining therapy is a form of treatment that tries to retrain the nerve pathways associated with hearing that may allow the brain to get used to the abnormal sounds. Habituation allows the brain to ignore the tinnitus noise signal, and it allows the person to become unaware that it is present unless they specifically concentrate on the noise. This treatment involves counseling and wearing a sound generator. Audiologists and otolaryngologists often work together in offering this treatment.
The physician may also request an OAE test (which is very sensitive to noise induced hearing damage), an ECochG (looking for Meniere's disease and hydrops, an MRI/MRA test (scan of the brain), a VEMP (looking for damage to other parts of the ear) and several blood tests (ANA, B12, FTA, ESR, SMA-24, HBA-IC, fasting glucose, TSH, anti-microsomal antibodies).
The important thing to remember about tinnitus is that the brain’s response to these random electrical signals determines whether or not a person is annoyed by their tinnitus or not. Magnetoencephalography (MEG, for short) studies have been used to study tinnitus and the brain. MEG takes advantage of the fact that every time neurons send each other signals, their electric current creates a tiny magnetic field. MEG allows scientists to detect such changing patterns of activity in the brain 100 times per second. These studies indicated tinnitus affects the entire brain and helps with understanding why certain therapies are more effective than others.
Medication. Some medications are known to be ototoxic while others list tinnitus as a side effect without causing permanent damage to the ear structures. New medications come out so often that it is difficult to maintain an up to date listing; another option, if you are experiencing tinnitus and are curious if it could be your medication, is to talk to your pharmacist or look up your specific prescriptions online through a website such as www.drugs.com. You should never stop a medication without consulting with your physician, even if you think it may be contributing to your tinnitus.
Masking. Masking devices, worn like hearing aids, generate low-level white noise (a high-pitched hiss, for example) that can reduce the perception of tinnitus and sometimes also produce residual inhibition — less noticeable tinnitus for a short time after the masker is turned off. A specialized device isn't always necessary for masking; often, playing music or having a radio, fan, or white-noise machine on in the background is enough. Although there's not enough evidence from randomized trials to draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of masking, hearing experts often recommend a trial of simple masking strategies (such as setting a radio at low volume between stations) before they turn to more expensive options.
Persistent tinnitus may cause anxiety and depression.[14][15] Tinnitus annoyance is more strongly associated with psychological condition than loudness or frequency range.[16][17] Psychological problems such as depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances and concentration difficulties are common in those with strongly annoying tinnitus.[18][19] 45% of people with tinnitus have an anxiety disorder at some time in their life.[20]
About six percent of the general population has what they consider to be "severe" tinnitus. That is a gigantic number of people ! Tinnitus is more common with advancing age. In a large study of more than 2000 adults aged 50 and above, 30.3% reported having experienced tinnitus, with 48% reporting symptoms in both ears. Tinnitus had been present for at least 6 years in 50% of cases, and most (55%) reported a gradual onset. Tinnitus was described as mildly to extremely annoying by 67%.(Sindhusake et al. 2003)
When a medication is ototoxic, it has a toxic effect on the ear or its nerve supply. In damaging the ear, these drugs can cause side effects like tinnitus, hearing loss, or a balance disorder. Depending on the medication and dosage, the effects of ototoxic medications can be temporary or permanent. More than 200 prescription and over-the-counter medicines are known to be ototoxic, including the following:
Treatment of the underlying primary disorder may help to improve or cure rhythmic tinnitus. For example, the treatment of blood vessel disorders (e.g. dural arteriovenous shunts) can include certain medications or surgery. A surgical procedure known as sinus wall reconstruction can successfully treat pulsatile tinnitus due to sigmoid sinus diverticulum and dehiscence. In fact, most individuals have experienced complete resolution of their tinnitus following this surgery. Surgery may also be necessary for rare cases of pulsatile tinnitus caused by a tumor.
The researchers point out that up to one in five adults will develop tinnitus, a distressing disorder in which people hear buzzing, ringing and other sounds from no external source. Tinnitus can occur in one or both ears, and is usually continuous but can fluctuate. A randomised controlled trial is the best way of assessing the effectiveness of an intervention.
Until recently, most tinnitus patients had little reason to believe doctors would ever be able to completely cure or reverse the affliction. Drug therapies had consistently failed, and so had more invasive procedures — including some surgeries to remove the auditory nerve that transmits sound from the ear to the brain, according to past research. (1,2)
Technology and portable music devices also contribute to noise pollution, especially in younger people. Keep the volume of your phone, MP3 players or iPod on the lower end when listening to headphones, and don’t play very loud noises for long durations of time. To aid in tinnitus treatment, look out for changes in your ability to hear if you’re frequently exposed to loud noises, limit use of headphones or consider wearing earplugs.
If cerumen (more commonly known as ear wax) accumulates in your ear canal, it can diminish your ability to hear. Your auditory system may overcompensate for the loss, fabricating noises that do not exist. Your audiologist can safely remove the buildup, and in most cases, this will immediately alleviate your tinnitus. However, sometimes ear wax buildup causes permanent damage, resulting in chronic tinnitus.
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A Tribute to the Greatness that is Donnie Yen: Part VI – Old Man Yen
Allow me to be serious for a moment.
In 2008, Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen gave us the film Ip Man, a heavily fictionalized biographical-account of the life of the Wing Chun grandmaster of the same name.
Donnie Yen was 45 years old.
Throughout his career, Donnie Yen’s acting has been criticized for consisting of little more than him preening, posing, and more often than not, flexing his way through his films.
Yeah, kind of like that.
Ip Man gave us our first glimpse of a more restrained, more mature Donnie Yen.
Gone were the trademark leaping back-kicks. Gone were the cocky, “bring it on” eyebrows.
Even the cheesy windmill uppercut feints failed to make the cut.
Okay, that's not really a feint, but whatever.
Donnie Yen was 45 and finally ready to act his age.
The result was a gorgeous film that earned 2 awards out of 12 nominations at the 28th Hong Kong Film Awards.
One of those awards went to Sammo Hung for Best Action Choreography.
The other went to the production itself, as it just happened to be the award for Best Film.
While much of the film’s success could be attributed to Chinese nationalism (the plot concerns the Japanese occupation of China) and passion for martial arts culture, it’s hard to deny that the film is a solid contribution to the action-drama genre.
Production of Ip Man brought Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung together for the second time in their careers.
The first time was in SPL, where the two would clash onscreen for a climactic battle that, amazingly, matched the intensity of Yen’s alleyway duel with Wu Jing just minutes earlier within the same film. (See “Donnie Yen: Part IV – The Real Donnie Yen”)
This time around however, Hung would serve as fight choreographer, bringing his unerring cinematographic eye and untold years of experience to the production.
The above sequence, from the film in which Sammo Hung directed, choreographed, and co-starred, Wheels on Meals, (the third film to include the Peking Opera Trio of Hung, Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao) showcases the first of two epic battles between Jackie Chan, and American kickboxer, Benny “The Jet” Urquidez. This sequence is widely regarded as one of the finest sequences in screen fighting history, and is a testament to Mr. Hung’s skills behind the camera.
How’s that for credentials?
Seriously, do NOT fuck with this man.
Hung’s attention to detail and penchant for injecting his fights with realistic passion and violence made him perfect for the job.
Ip Man gave Hung the opportunity to explore and put on display a number of different martial arts, most notably, Wing Chun.
The simple fact that he was able to convey each of these styles largely through pure physical expression, rather than superfluous exposition, is a testament to Mr. Hung’s skills as a choreographer.
Donnie Yen’s movements as Ip Man clearly reflect the Wing Chun principles of countering and establishing a “line” with one’s opponent.
Fan Siu Wong’s character, Jin, effectively portrays a practitioner of Northern Kung Fu, relying on solid stances and aggressive circular strikes.
Hiroyuki Ikeuchi’s General Miura, as well as the other Japanese characters, all include the straight punches and mechanical blocking motions of Karate.
Mr. Hung managed to communicate all of this through nothing but body language.
"So... You wanna' like, do it?"
It’s interesting to note that, stylistically speaking, Donnie Yen, while versatile and athletic, is not really the first person that came to my mind in casting a master of Wing Chun.
For one thing, Mr. Yen has never studied Wing Chun, and for another, the fighting style he employed in most of his films prior to this is contrary to the principles of Wing Chun in that it utilizes wide, flashy kicks to the head, techniques Wing Chun places little emphasis on.
But that was the old Donnie Yen, not the old Donnie Yen.
As you can plainly see, Mr. Yen managed to get the hang of Wing Chun pretty handily.
Despite this, another challenge for Mr. Yen, and Mr. Hung for that matter, was in staging and planning the choreography in such a way that it matched the tone of every scene.
The sequence above took place at the end of the first half of the film, during which the tone is bright and lively, and the drama is largely restricted to standard genre fare I.E. squabbles between rival martial arts schools and principles.
The sequence below however, takes place midway through the second half of Ip Man, within which the tone, and color palette for that matter, become engulfed with darkness. As a result, the choreography becomes harsher, more violent, and altogether more intense. Even the soundtrack reflects this.
A tip of the hat to Mr. Yen and Mr. Hung… and a pat on the back to all those who may have been injured during the filming of this sequence.
Regardless of how much praise I shower upon it, Ip Man is not a great film.
It is however, a great kung fu movie.
Every cliche and trope you would expect to find in an entry from the genre is present here in some form, and I think that was the point.
Ip Man doesn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel, it merely tries it’s best to give it a spit shine and more importantly, do it with heart.
Sure, the story can be hokie at times.
Sure, the script was largely forgettable.
I’d sooner accept both of those shortcomings in exchange for a decent film with a handful of scenes where Donnie Yen beats people like a fucking drum.
You know you'd buy it...
End serious moment.
Well okay, maybe that wasn’t all that serious, but hey, I tried.
Check back for the exciting conclusion to my MASSIVE tribute to Donnie Yen, in “Part VII – Mr. Yen to the Future and Beyond!”
Filed under: Kung Fu, Movies, Uncategorized, Action, arts, awards, Benny, best, Biao, Chan, Chun, Donnie, Fan, Fu, Hiroyuki, Hong, Hung, Ikeuchi, Ip, Jackie, Karate, Kong, Kung, Man, martial, Meals, movie, Northern, on, Picture, Sammo, Shaolin, Siu, SPL, Urquidez, Wheels, Wilson, Wing, Wong, Yen, Yip, Yuen
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19C American Women
Ex-slave Lizzie Jones Remembers the beds & the food in 19C America
Ex-slave Lizzie Jones, about 86 years old
Lizzie remembered, "The slaves slep' on bunks of homemade boa'ds nailed to the wall, wid poles fer legs. They cooked on the fire-place. I did'n know what a stove was till after the war. Sometime they would bake co'n-bread in the ashes. Ebber bit of the grub they et come from the white fo'ks, an' the clothes too. I run them looms many a night weavin' cloth. In the summer time the Niggers had lots of turnips, turnip-greens, an' garden-stuff to eat. Master allus put up several barrels of kraut an' a smokehouse full of po'k fer winter. He giv' the Niggers kraut, salt-po'k, meal, an' tallow, but no flour or lard. Huntin' was good 'fore the war, and on Saturday the men could go huntin' an' fishin' an' catch fish, possum, rabbit, squirrel an' coon to eat."
Photos and quotes of former slaves used in these blog posts come from the Slave Narratives.
Posted by Barbara Wells Sarudy at 4:00 AM
Labels: 19C, Photos-African American, Slavery & Servitude
Fighting for Equality - The Women's Rights movement & the Anti-Slavery movement
Neither Ballots nor Bullets: The Contest for Civil Rights
"Women can neither take the Ballot nor the Bullet . . .therefore to us, the right to petition is the one sacred right which we ought not to neglect." Susan B. Anthony, Address to the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1863
Susan B Anthony 1820-1906
"It is, perhaps, too late to bring slavery to an end by peaceable means, -- too late to vote it down. For many years I have feared, and published my fears, that it would go out in blood. These fears have grown into a belief." Gerrit Smith, Utica Daily Observer,1859
Gerrit Smith 1797-1874
Two great early 19th-century social movements sought to end slavery and secure equal rights for women. Gerrit Smith and Susan B. Anthony helped shape these two movements. The anti-slavery movement grew from peaceful origins after the American Revolution to a Civil War, or War Between the States, that effectively ended slavery while severely damaging the women's rights movement. Wielding the ballot and the bullet as well as the petition to win the legal, political, and military contest of the Civil War, abolitionists decided the fate of slavery with the 1865 passage of the 13th Amendment. Seeking their own rights, women used more peaceful tactics but suffered long delays. Not until 1920 did women add the ballot to their arsenal of political tools.
The women's rights movement was the offspring of abolition. Many people actively supported both reforms. Several participants in the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls had already labored in the anti-slavery movement. The organizers and their families - the Motts, Wrights, Stantons, M'Clintocks and Hunts - were active abolitionists to a greater or lesser degree. Noted abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass attended and addressed the 1848 Convention.
Both movements promoted the expansion of the American promise of liberty and equality - to African Americans and to women. How did these two movements develop and how were they related to each other? How did each develop strategies and deal with the contradiction of violence and war that results from the advocacy of peaceful change?
"...the flagrant injustice and deep sin of slavery" Preamble to the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Constitution, 1833
After the American Revolution, northern states began to abolish slavery. Many slaveholders in the upper South also freed slaves. In 1817, the American Colonization Society formed to resettle freed slaves in Africa. However, the South depended on slave labor as cotton production expanded after the 1793 invention of the cotton gin. Repressive laws and public justification of slavery followed southern slave revolts in the 1820s and 1830s.
Religious revivals during the Second Great Awakening intensified anti-slavery activity after 1830. Seeking to perfect society, adherents targeted slavery as an evil that destroyed individual free will as moral beings. Abolitionists began to demand immediate, uncompensated emancipation of slaves. In 1833, William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator, Quaker Lucretia Mott, and several others formed the American Anti-Slavery Society. Women were a large part of the general membership and formed separate, local female anti-slavery branches. Mott also helped found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, an organization, noted for its promotion of racial and gender equality, that included African American and white women as leaders and members. Many anti-slavery reformers, like the Quakers, came from pacifist backgrounds or espoused nonviolent social reform. They shaped public opinion by distributing newspapers and tracts, sending out organizers and lecturers, and hosting fundraising fairs. Garrison, who saw the U.S. Constitution and federal government as pro-slavery forces, observed Independence Day as a day of mourning. Lucretia Mott and Thomas M'Clintock helped form the Philadelphia Free Produce Society, which boycotted slave-made products.
Between 1838 and 1840, the American Anti-Slavery Society split into three segments, in part over the issue of women's leadership, specifically Abby Kelley's appointment to the business committee. Radical abolitionists and women's rights supporters, known as "Garrisonian" abolitionists, remained in the American Anti-Slavery Society. The newly formed American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society restricted membership to males, with auxiliaries for females. The politically minded formed the Liberty Party, limiting women's participation to fundraising. The discrimination of women in abolition and other reform movements led them to advocate for women's rights.
Timbuctoo: Gerrit Smith’s Experiment. From 1846 through 1853, Gerrit Smith developed a plan to give away 120,000 acres of Essex and Franklin County New York, farmland to 3,000 free black men. He hoped to qualify the men to vote. Although Smith's supporters promoted the project in churches and conventions, the plan eventually failed due to poor soil, harsh Adirondack winters, and the inexperience of the farmers themselves.
"Justice and Equality:" Antislavery and Women's Rights
"…this is the only organization on God's footstool where the humanity of woman is recognized, and these are the only men who have ever echoed back her cries for justice and equality…. All time will not be long enough to pay the debt of gratitude we owe these noble men…who roused us to a sense of our own rights, to the dignity of our high calling." Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Address to the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860.
At the 1848 First Women's Rights Convention, the Declaration of Sentiments, drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Elizabeth and Mary Ann M'Clintock, was read and signed by 100 men and women. Claiming that "all Men and Women are created equal," the signers called for extending to women the right to vote, control property, sign legal documents, serve on juries, and enjoy equal access to education and the professions. Arguments for women's rights came from experiences in the anti-slavery movement. Angelina and Sarah Grimké of South Carolina were Quakers and effective anti-slavery speakers, although it was considered improper for women to speak before "promiscuous" audiences composed of both men and women. During a petition drive in Massachusetts in 1837, male listeners thronged to female-only lectures. While condemning slavery, the Grimkés upheld "the cause of woman as a moral being." "Sister Sarah does preach up woman's rights most nobly and fearlessly," reported Angelina to a friend. Rebuked by Congregational ministers and others for speaking to promiscuous audiences, they held their ground. To do otherwise would have been "…a violation of our fundamental principle that man & woman are created equal, & have the same duties & the same responsibilities as moral beings." As reformers, women developed organizational skills necessary for a successful social movement. They learned to write persuasively, raise funds, organize supporters and events, and speak to large groups of men and women about important political and social issues. In the service of anti-slavery, women found their voices. Between 1850 and 1860, women's rights advocates held state and national conventions and campaigned for legal changes.
The Emergence of Violence
By 1848, the Liberty Party, which had earlier split from the American Anti-Slavery Society, joined a coalition to create the Free Soil Party. Free Soilers sought to limit slavery by denying it to new territories entering the union. In July, 1848, a Free Soil Convention was held in Seneca Falls, just before the Women's Rights Convention. Some male village residents attended both conventions. Jacob P. Chamberlain and Saron Phillips, who signed the Declaration of Sentiments, were chosen as delegates to the Free Soil Party's national convention. The 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Law authorized federal marshals to seize and return fugitive slaves. Northern free blacks had little protection against false claims by southern slaveholders. While many free blacks fled to Canada, previously neutral northerners were enraged at the injustice.
As the U.S. expanded, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, allowing each new area to decide whether it would allow slavery. Slavery and anti-slavery supporters rushed into Kansas to claim it for their side. In 1856, after anti-slavery settlers died during an attack in Lawrence, Kansas, John Brown led a raid against pro-slavery homes along Pottawatomie Creek, killing five men in retaliation. With a warrant out for his arrest, John Brown returned east to plan a daring raid. He hoped to create a large slave insurrection in Virginia. Brown sought support among prominent abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's cousin, Gerrit Smith, provided financial support. A decade earlier, he had sold Brown a parcel of land in a settlement for free blacks in the Adirondacks. Now, Brown asked Smith to help finance his scheme. Smith agreed, becoming one of the "Secret Six" financiers of John Brown's raid. On October 16, 1859, John Brown and twenty-one followers launched an attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. When the anticipated slave revolt failed to materialize, the raid ended in dismal failure. Brown and his men were tried, convicted, and hanged. A letter in Brown's possession incriminated Smith, who went insane as a result of the publicity and threat of prosecution. A martyr in the eyes of non-violent abolitionists, Brown became a symbol of escalating violence in pursuit of emancipation.
"How Glass Our House Is" An Uneasy Truce with the War
"The death of my father, the worse than death of my dear cousin Gerrit, the martyrdom of that great and glorious John Brown, all conspire to make me regret more than ever my dwarfed womanhood.…in times like these, everyone should do the work of a full grown man." Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony, 1859
Many nonviolent reformers, concluding that slavery could only be purged by war, welcomed the outbreak of the Civil War in April, 1861. Even Quaker pacifists reluctantly supported the war if it would bring an end to slavery. David Wright's support of the war brought no criticism from sister-in-law Lucretia Mott, considering, "how glass our house is." She hoped the war "would be prosecuted with energy and faith since it was founded on so good a cause." When Horace Greeley and others pointed out that these hardly seemed the words of a pacifist, she responded, "…as the natural result of our wrong-doings and our atrocious cruelties, terrible as war must ever be, let us hope it will not be stayed by any compromise which shall continue the unequal, cruel war on the rights and liberties of millions of our unoffending fellow beings.…"
Meanwhile, the national conventions for women's rights ended. In 1864, the National Woman's Loyal League, headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, gathered 400,000 signatures on a petition for an immediate end to slavery. Having neither access to the vote nor military service, women used the petition to support the 13th Amendment. The Civil War ended in 1865, followed by passage of the 13th Amendment which outlawed slavery. In 1870, the 15th Amendment gave African-American men the right to vote. Stanton and others fought, and lost, the battle to include women in expanded suffrage. In victory over slavery, decades-long alliances were broken. The women's rights movement split and old friends in the abolition and women's rights movements parted company. Just as anti-slavery forces had divided, so too did organizations struggling for women's suffrage.
Labels: 19C, Slavery & Servitude, Women Working, Women's History, Women's Rights, Women's Suffrage
Fighting for Equality - Call to the 1st US Women's Rights Convention 1850
Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the National Portrait Gallery
A CONVENTION
Will be held at Worcester, Mass., on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of October next, (agreeably to appointment by a preliminary meeting held at Boston, on the thirtieth of May last,) to consider the great question of Woman's Rights, Duties, and Relations; and the Men and Women of our country who feel sufficient interest in the subject, to give an earnest thought and effective effort to its rightful adjustment, are invited to meet each other in free conference, at the time and place appointed.
The upward tending spirit of the age, busy in a hundred forms of effort for the world's redemption from the sins and sufferings which oppress it, has brought this one, which yields to none in importance and urgency, into distinguished prominence. One half of the race are its immediate objects, and the other half are as deeply involved, by that absolute unity of interest and destiny which nature has established between them.
The neighbor is near enough to involve every human being in a general equality of rights and community of interests; but, Men and Women, in their reciprocities of love and duty are one flesh and one blood -- mother, wife, sister, and daughter come so near the heart and mind of every man that they must be either his blessing or his bane. Where there is such mutuality of interests, such an interlinking of life, there can be no real antagonism of position and action. The sexes should not, for any reason or by any chance, take hostile attitudes towards each other, either in the apprehension or amendment of the wrongs which exist in their necessary relations; but they should harmonize in opinion and co-operate in effort, for the reason that they must unite in the ultimate achievement of the desired reformation.
Of the many points now under discussion and demanding a just settlement, the general question of Woman's Rights and Relations comprehends these: € Her Education, Literary, Scientific , and Artistic; € Her Avocations, Industrial, Commercial , and Professional; € Her Interests, Pecuniary, Civil, and Political; in a word € Her Rights as an Individual, and her Functions as a Citizen.
No one will pretend that all these interests, embracing, as they do, all that is not merely animal in a human life, are rightly understood or justly provided for in the existing social order. Nor is it any more true that the constitutional differences of the sexes, which should determine, define, and limit the resulting differences of office and duty, are adequately comprehended and practically observed.
Woman has been condemned for her greater delicacy of physical organization to inferiority of intellectual and moral culture, and to the forfeiture of great social, civil, and religious privileges. In the relation of marriage she has been ideally annihilated, and actually enslaved in all that concerns her personal and pecuniary rights; and even in widowhood and single life, she is oppressed with such limitation and degradation of labor and avocation as clearly and cruelly mark the condition of a disabled caste. But, by the inspiration of the Almighty, the beneficent spirit of reform is roused to the redress of these wrongs. The tyranny which degrades and crushes wives and mothers, sits no longer lightly on the world's conscience; the heart's home-worship feels the stain of stooping at a dishonored altar; Manhood begins to feel the shame of muddying the springs from which it draws its highest life; and Womanhood is everywhere awakening to assert its divinely chartered rights, and to fulfil its noblest duties. It is the spirit of reviving truth and righteousness which has moved upon the great deep of the public heart and aroused its redressing justice; and, through it, the Providence of God is vindicating the order and appointments of his creation.
The signs are encouraging; the time is opportune. Come, then, to this Convention. It is your duty, if you are worthy of your age and country. Give the help of your best thought to separate the light from the darkness. Wisely give the protection of your name and the benefit of your efforts to the great work of settling the principles, devising the method, and achieving the success of this high and holy movement.
Labels: 19C, Primary Source, Women's History, Women's Rights, Women's Suffrage
Fighting for Equality - Lucy Stone 1818-1893
Lucy Stone (1818-1893) was an early advocate of antislavery and women’s rights. She was born in Massachusetts. After she graduated from Oberlin College in 1847, she began lecturing for the antislavery movement as a paid agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. She said in 1847, “I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex.”
Lucy Stone did not participate in the First Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, but she was an organizer of the 1850 Worcester First National Woman’s Rights Convention. She also participated in the convention and addressed the audience. It is her 1852 speech at the National Woman's Rights Convention in Syracuse, New York, which is credited for converting Susan B. Anthony to the cause of women’s rights. Lucy Stone participated in the 1852, 1853, and 1855 national woman’s rights conventions, and was president of the 1856 National Woman’s Rights Convention held in New York, New York.
In 1855 Stone married Henry Blackwell. At the ceremony the minister read a statement from the bride and groom, announcing that Stone would keep her own name. The statement said that current marriage laws “refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer on the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess.” Women who followed her example called themselves "Lucy Stoners."
After the Civil War, Lucy Stone joined Frederick Douglass and others who supported the Fifteenth Amendment as a partial gain, as they continued to work for women’s rights. The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment outraged most women’s rights leaders’ because the word “male” was included for the first time in the Constitution. This debate divided the women’s rights movement. By 1869 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and others formed the National Woman Suffrage Association and focused their efforts on a federal woman’s suffrage amendment. Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe led others to form the American Woman Suffrage Association, which chose to focus on state suffrage amendments.
By 1871 Stone had helped organize the publication of The Woman’s Journal and was co-editing the newspaper with her husband Henry Blackwell.
Labels: 19C, Biography, Slavery & Servitude, Women Working, Women's History, Women's Rights, Women's Suffrage
Fighting for Equality - Paulina W Davis' Address 1850 Women's Rights Convention
Paulina W Davis
This leaves me at liberty to occupy your attention for a few moments with some general reflections upon the attitude and relations of our movement to our times and circumstances, and upon the proper spirit and method of promoting it. I do not even intend to treat these topics formally, and I do not hope to do it successfully; for nothing less than a complete philosophy of reform could answer such inquiries, and that philosophy, it is very certain, the world has not yet discovered.
Human rights, and the reasons on which they rest, are not difficult of comprehension. The world has never been ignorant of them, nor insensible to them; and human wrongs and their evils are just as familiar to experience and as well understood; but all this is not enough to secure to mankind the possession of the one, or to relieve them from the felt burden and suffering of the other. A creed of abstract truths, or a catechism of general principles, and a completely digested list of grievances, combined, are not enough to adjust a practical reform to its proper work, else Prophets and Apostles and earnest world-menders in general would have been more successful, and left us less to wish and to do.
It is one thing to issue a declaration of rights[2]or a declaration of wrong to the world, but quite another thing wisely and happily to commend the subject to the world's acceptance, and so to secure the desired reformation. Every element of success is, in its own place and degree, equally important; but the very starting point is the adjustment of the reformer to his work, and next after that is the adjustment of his work to those conditions of the times which he seeks to influence.
Those who prefer the end in view to all other things, are not contented with their own zeal and the discharge of their duty to their conscience. They desire the highest good for their follow-beings, and are not satisfied with merely clearing their own skirts; and they esteem martyrdom a failure at least, if not a fault, in the method of their action. It is not the salvation of their own souls they are thinking of, but the salvation of the world; and they will not willingly accept a discharge or a rejection in its stead. It is their business to preach righteousness and rebuke sin, but they have no quarrel with "the world that lieth in wickedness," and their mission is not merely to judge and condemn, but to save alike the oppressor and the oppressed. Right principles and conformable means are the first necessities of a great enterprise, but without right apprehensions and tempers and expedient methods, the most beneficent purposes must utterly fail. Who is sufficient for these things?
Divine Providence has been baffled through all the ages of disorder suffering for want of fitting agents and adapted means. Reformations of religion have proved but little better than the substitution of a new error for an old one, and civil revolutions have resolved themselves into mere civil insurrections, until history has become but a monument of buried hopes.
The European movement of 1848[3] was wanting neither in theory nor example for its safe direction, but it has nevertheless almost fallen into contempt.
We may not, therefore, rely upon a good cause and good intentions alone, without danger of deplorable disappointment.
The reformation which we purpose, in its utmost scope, is radical and universal. It is not the mere perfecting of a progress already in motion, a detail of some established plan, but it is an epochal movement-the emancipation of a class, the redemption of half the world, and a conforming re-organization of all social, political, and industrial interests and institutions. Moreover, it is a movement without example among the enterprises of associated reformations, for it has no purpose of arming the oppressed against the oppressor, or of separating the parties, or of setting up independence, or of severing the relations of either.
Its intended changes are to be wrought in the intimate texture of all societary organizations, without violence, or any form of antagonism. It seeks to replace the worn out with the living and the beautiful, so as to reconstruct without overturning, and to regenerate without destroying; and nothing of the spirit, tone, temper, or method of insurrection is proper or allowable to us and our work.
Human societies have been long working and fighting their way up from what we scornfully call barbarism, into what we boastfully call modern civilization; but, as yet, the advancement has been chiefly in ordering and methodizing the lower instincts of our nature, and organizing society under their impulses. The intellect of the masses has received development, and the gentler affections have been somewhat relieved from the dominion of force; but the institutions among men are not yet modelled after the highest laws of our nature. The masterdom of the strong hand and bold spirit is not yet over, for men have not yet established all those natural claims against each other, which seem to demand physical force and physical courage for their vindication. But the age of war is drawing towards a close, and that of peace (whose methods and end alike are harmony) is dawning, and the uprising of womanhood is its prophecy and foreshadow.
The first principles of human rights have now for a long time been abstractly held and believed, and both in Europe and America whole communities have put them into practical operation in some of their bearings. Equality before the law, and the right of the governed to choose their governors, are established maxims of reformed political science; but in the countries most advanced,[4] these doctrines and their actual benefits are as yet enjoyed exclusively by the sex that in the battle-field and the public forum has wrenched them from the old time tyrannies. They are yet denied to Woman, because she has not yet so asserted or won them for herself; for political justice pivots itself upon the barbarous principle that "Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow." Its furthest progress toward magnanimity is to give arms to helplessness. It has not yet learned to give justice . For this rule of barbarism there is this much justification, that although every human being is naturally entitled to every right of the race, the enjoyment and administration of all rights require such culture and conditions in their subject as usually lead him to claim and struggle for them; and the contented slave is left in slavery, and the ignorant man in darkness, on the inference that he cannot use what he does not desire. This is indeed true of the animal instincts, but it is false of the nobler soul; and men must learn that the higher faculties must be first awakened, and then gratified, before they have done their duty to their race. The ministry of angels to dependent humanity is the method of Divine Providence, and among men the law of heaven is, that the "elder shall serve the younger." But let us not complain that the hardier sex overvalue the force which heretofore has figured most in the world's affairs. "They know not what they do"[5] is the apology that crucified womanhood must concede in justice and pity to the wrong doers. In the order of things, the material world was to be first subdued. For this coarse conflict, the larger bones and stronger sinews of manhood are especially adapted, and it is a law of muscles and of all matter that might shall overcome right. This is the law of the vegetable world, and it is the law of the animal world, as well as the law of the animal instincts and of the physical organization of men; but it is not the law of spirit and affection. They are of such a nature as to charge themselves with the atonement for all evils, and to burden themselves with all the sufferings which they would remove.
This wisdom is pure, and peaceable, and gentle, and full of mercy and of good fruits.
Besides the feebler frame, which under the dynasty of muscles is degraded, there remains, even after justice has got the upper hand of force in the world's judgments, a mysterious and undefined difference of sex that seriously embarrasses the question of equality; or, if that is granted, in terms of equal fitness for avocations and positions which heretofore have been the monopoly of men. Old ideas and habits of mind survive the facts which produced them, as the shadows of night stretch far into the morning, sheltered in nooks and valleys from the rising light; and it is the work of a whole creation-day to separate the light from the darkness.
The rule of difference between the sexes must be founded on the traits which each estimates most highly in the other; and it is not at all wonderful that some of woman's artificial incapacities and slaveries may seem to be necessary to some of her excellencies; just as the chivalry that makes man a butcher of his kind still glares like a glory in the eyes of admiring womanhood, and all the more because it seems so much above and unlike her own powers and achievements. Nature does not teach that men and women are unequal, but only that they are unlike; an unlikeness so naturally related and dependent that their respective differences by their balance establish, instead of destroying, their equality.
Men are not in fact, and to all intents, equal among themselves, but their theoretical equality for all the purposes of justice is more easily seen and allowed than what we are here to claim for women. Higher views, nicer distinctions, and a deeper philosophy are required to see and feel the truths of woman's rights; and besides, the maxims upon which men distribute justice to each other have been battle-cries for ages, while the doctrine of woman's true relations in life is a new science, the revelation of an advanced age, - perhaps, indeed, the very last grand movement of humanity towards its highest destiny, - too new to be yet fully understood, too grand to grow out of the broad and coarse generalities which the infancy and barbarism of society could comprehend.
The rule of force and fraud must be well nigh overturned, and learning and religion and the fine arts must have cultivated mankind into a state of wisdom and justice tempered by the most beneficent affections, before woman can be fully installed in her highest offices. We must be gentle with the ignorance and patient under the injustice which old evils induce. Long suffering is a quality of the highest wisdom, and charity beareth all things for it hopeth all things. It will be seen that I am assuming the point that the redemption of the inferior, if it comes at all, must come from the superior. The elevation of a favored caste can have no other providential purpose than that, when it is elevated near enough to goodness and truth, it shall draw up its dependents with it.
But, however this may be in the affairs of men as they are involved with each other, it is clearly so in the matter of woman's elevation. The tyrant sex, if such we choose to term it, holds such natural and necessary relations to the victims of injustice, that neither rebellion nor revolution, neither defiance nor resistance, nor any mode of assault or defence incident to party antagonism, is either possible, expedient, or proper. Our claim must rest on its justice, and conquer by its power of truth. We take the ground, that whatever has been achieved for the race belongs to it, and must not be usurped by any class or caste. The rights and liberties of one human being cannot be made the property of another, though they were redeemed for him or her by the life of that other; for rights cannot be forfeited by way of salvage, and they are in their nature unpurchasable and inalienable.
We claim for woman a full and generous investiture of all the blessings which the other sex has solely or by her aid achieved for itself. We appeal from men's injustice and selfishness to their principles and affections.
For some centuries now, the best of them have been asserting, with their lives, the liberties and rights of the race; and it is not for the few endowed with the highest intellect, the largest frame, or even the soundest morals, that the claim has been maintained, but broadly and bravely and nobly it has been held that wherever a faculty is given, its highest activities are chartered by the Creator, and that all objects alike - whether they minister to the necessities of our animal life or to the superior powers of the human soul and so are more imperatively needed, because nobler than the bread that perishes in the use - are, of common right, equally open to ALL; and that all artificial restraints, for whatever reason imposed, are alike culpable for their presumption, their folly, and their cruelty.
It is pitiable ignorance and arrogance for either man or woman now to prescribe and limit the sphere of woman. It remains for the greatest women whom appropriate culture, and happiest influences shall yet develop, to declare and to prove what are woman's capacities and relations in the world.
I will not accept the concession of any equality which means identity or resemblance of faculty and function. I do not base her claims upon any such parallelism of constitution or attainment. I ask only freedom for the natural unfolding of her powers, the conditions most favorable for her possibilities of growth, and the full play of all those incentives which have made man her master, and then, with all her natural impulses and the whole heaven of hope to invite, I ask that she shall fill the place that she can attain to, without settling any unmeaning questions of sex and sphere, which people gossip about for want of principles of truth, or the faculty to reason upon them.
But it is not with the topics of our reform and the discussion of these that I am now concerned. It is of its position in the world's opinion, and the causes of this, that I am thinking; and I seek to derive hints and suggestions as to the method and manner of successful advocacy, from the inquiry. Especially am I solicitous that the good cause may suffer no detriment from the theoretical principles its friends may assume, or the spirit with which they shall maintain them. It is fair to presume that such causes as have obscured these questions in the general judgment of the governing sex, must also more or less darken the counsels of those most anxious for truth and right. If our demand were simply for chartered rights, civil and political, such as get acknowledgment in paper constitutions, there would be no ground of doubt. We could plead our common humanity, and claim an equal justice. We might say that the natural right of self-government is so clearly due to every human being alike, that it needs no argument to prove it; and if some or a majority of women would not exercise this right, this is no ground for taking it from those who would. And the right to the control and enjoyment of her own property and partnership in all that she helps her husband to earn and save, needs only to be stated to command instant assent. Her appropriate avocations might not be so easily settled that a programme could be completed on theoretical principles merely; but we need discuss no such difficulties while we ask only for liberty of choice, and opportunities of adaptation; and the question of her education is solved by the simple principle, that whatever she can receive is her absolute due.
Yet all these points being so easily disposed of, so far as they are mere matters of controversy, the advocates of the right need none the less the wisest and kindest consideration for all the resistance we must encounter, and the most forbearing patience under the injustice and insolence to which we must expose ourselves. And we can help ourselves to much of the prudence and some of the knowledge we shall need, by treating the prejudices of the public as considerately as if they were principles, and the customs of society as if they once had some temporary necessity, and so meet them with the greater force for the claim to respect which we concede to them. For a prejudice is just like any other error of judgment, and a custom has sometimes had some fitness to things more or less necessary, and is not an utter absurdity, even though the reason on which it was based is lost or removed. Who shall say that there is nothing serious, or respectable, or just, in the repugnance with which our propositions are received? The politician who knows his own corruption may be excused for an earnest wish to save his wife and daughter from the taint, and he must be excused, too, for not knowing that the corruption would be cured by the saving virtue which he dreads to expose to risk.
There may be real though very foolish tenderness in the motive which refuses to open to woman the trades and professions that she could cultivate and practice with equal profit and credit to herself. The chivalry that worships womanhood is not mean, though it at the same time enslaves the objects of its overfond care.
And it is even possible that men may deprive women of their property and liberties, personal and political, with the kindly purpose of accommodating their supposed incapacities for the offices and duties of human life. Harsh judgments and harsh words will neither weaken the opposition, nor strengthen our hands. Our address is to the highest sentiment of the times; and the tone and spirit due to it and becoming in ourselves, are courtesy and respectfulness. Strength and truth of complaint, and eloquence of denunciation, are easy of attainment; but the wisdom of affirmative principles and positive science, and the adjustment of reformatory measures to the exigencies of the times and circumstances, are so much the more useful as they are difficult of attainment. A profound expediency, as true to principle as it is careful of success, is, above all things, rare and necessary. We have to claim liberty without its usually associated independence. We must insist on separate property where the interests are identical, and a division of profits where the very being of the partners is blended. We must demand provisions for differences of policy, where there should be no shadow of controversy; and the free choice of industrial avocations and general education, without respect to the distinctions of sex and natural differences of faculty.
In principle these truths are not doubtful, and it is therefore not impossible to put them in practice, but they need great clearness in system and steadiness of direction to get them allowance and adoption in the actual life of the world. The opposition should be consulted where it can be done without injurious consequences. Truth must not be suppressed, nor principles crippled, yet strong meat should not be given to babes. Nor should the strong use their liberties so as to become a stumbling block to the weak. Above all things, we owe it to the earnest expectation of the age, that stands trembling in mingled hope and fear of the great experiment, to lay its foundations broadly and securely in philosophic truth, and to form and fashion it in practical righteousness. To accomplish this, we cannot be too careful or too brave, too gentle or too firm; and yet with right dispositions and honest efforts, we cannot fail of doing our share of the great work, and thereby advancing the highest interests of humanity.
Labels: 19C, Primary Source, Slavery & Servitude, Women's History, Women's Rights, Women's Suffrage
Fighting for Equality - Jane Clothier Master Hunt 1812-1889
Jane Clothier Master Hunt was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on June 26, 1812, the daughter of William and Mary Master. Her marriage to Richard Pell Hunt in November 1845 brought her to Waterloo as part of the extended family of Hunts, M'Clintocks, Mounts, Plants, and Pryors, all of them related to Richard P. Hunt as sisters, nieces, in-laws, or siblings of in-laws. At least one person from each of these nuclear families signed the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, including Jane and Richard Hunt, four M'Clintocks, Lydia Mount and her daughter Mary E. Vail, Hannah Plant, and George and Margaret Pryor. While these family ties seem complicated, all of them reflect the importance of sibling relationships and the responsibilities that brothers and sisters also felt for nieces and nephews. All of these families were of Quaker background. All of them had migrated to Waterloo either from Philadelphia or from eastern New York State.
Jane's marriage at age thirty-three made her the step-mother of three older children, all born to Richard's third wife, Sarah M'Clintock Hunt--Richard, born July 4, 1838; Mary M., born in 1839; and Sarah M., born in 1841. On October 6, 1846, two years after her marriage, Jane bore her own first child, a son named William Master Hunt. Less than a month before the Seneca Falls convention, on June 23, 1848, she gave birth to a daughter, Jane M., whom they called Jenny. Jane’s third child, George Truman Hunt was born on April 18, 1852. The Hunts named him after Jane’s brother in law, George Truman. Truman was married to Jane’s sister Catharine and was a Quaker minister and physician living in Philadelphia. He attended Richard P Hunt during his final illness in 1856. The Hunts, M’Clintocks and Trumans frequently visited each other in Waterloo and Philadelphia. A fourth child, Anna, died at birth in March of 1854.
In 1850, the Hunt household, like those of many other signers, included not only Jane and Richard Hunt and their children but also three non-related members. George Hunter was an Irish-born laborer, aged thirty. Ann McClelland, also Irish-born, was twenty-five. Both probably worked in the Hunt household. Elizabeth Kinnard, only thirteen years old, also lived with the Hunts.
Jane's marriage to Richard P. Hunt made her the wife of one of the richest men in Seneca County, and their home at 6 Main Street on the Seneca Turnpike (now Routes 5 and 20), just east of the village of Waterloo, reflected their prosperity. The house was an eleven-room brick Federal-style mansion with a central hallway, old-fashioned for the 1840s but commodious. They lived in considerable comfort, with carpeted floors, upholstered sofas, rocking chairs in the sitting room and the parlor, astral lamps, window shades (probably painted) in the parlor, curtained windows in the sitting room and bedrooms, and a full complement of dinner ware, silver teaspoons, glasses, and candle sticks. They kept a horse, four carriages, and a sleigh in the barn.
When several Quaker women decided to invite Lucretia Mott, a well-known minister and reformer from Philadelphia, to visit Waterloo in July 1848, Jane Hunt offered her house for the meeting. On Sunday, July 9, 1848, Mott arrived at the Hunt house with her sister, Martha Wright, from Auburn, New York. Mary Ann M'Clintock of Waterloo was also there. So was one other woman, the only non-Quaker, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton had first met Lucretia Mott at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, when Stanton was on her honeymoon. When the London meeting refused to admit women delegates from the U.S., Stanton remembered, the women had agreed to hold a meeting when they returned home solely to discuss the rights of women. Now, seeing Mott again after many years apart inspired Stanton once more. She "poured out her long-standing discontent."
The women decided to hold a meeting "for protest and discussion." Richard P. Hunt may have encouraged this decision, for family legend suggests that, practical Quaker that he was, he reminded them that "faith without works is dead." The women decided to meet quickly, before Mott returned home to Philadelphia. Around the Hunts' tea table, they drafted a brief notice announcing, "A Convention to discuss the social, civic and religious condition and rights of Woman will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls, N. Y., on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July. . . ." The notice was delivered to the offices of the Seneca County Courier in Seneca Falls, where it first appeared on Tuesday, July 11. Without that gathering of Quaker women who were experienced in the strategy and tactics of the abolition movement, energized by Stanton around Jane Hunt's tea table, there would have been no Seneca Falls convention.
Richard P. Hunt died November 7, 1856, leaving Jane a widow with six children eighteen years old and younger. Jane C. Hunt continued the family's tradition of philanthropy when she gave to St. Paul's Episcopal Church the land for St. John's Chapel on the east side of Chapel Street in Waterloo. She lived in the family home until her own death while on a visit to her daughter in Chicago on November 28, 1889, aged 77. She was buried next to her husband in Maple Grove Cemetery in Waterloo.
National Park Service by Judith Wellman
Fighting for Equality - Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815-1902
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), abolitionist and women's rights activist, lived for a time in Boston, where she befriended Lydia Child. With Lucretia Mott, she organized the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention for Women's rights; she also drafted its Declaration of Sentiments. Her "Woman's Declaration of Independence" begins "men and women are created equal" and includes a resolution to give women the right to vote. With Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton campaigned for suffrage in the 1860s and 1870s, formed the anti-slavery Women's Loyal National League and the National Woman Suffrage Association, and co-edited the weekly newspaper Revolution. President of the Woman Suffrage Association for 21 years, she led the struggle for women's rights. She gave public lectures in several states, partly to support the education of her seven children.
After her husband died, Cady Stanton deepened her analysis of inequality between the sexes. Her book The Woman's Bible (1895) discerns a deep-seated anti-female bias in Judaeo-Christian tradition. She lectured on such subjects as divorce, women's rights, and religion until her death at 86, just after writing a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt supporting the women's vote. Her numerous works -- at first pseudonymous, but later under her own name -- include three co-authored volumes of History of Woman Suffrage (1881-1886) and a candid, humorous autobiography.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton(1815-1902) is believed to be the driving force behind the 1848 Convention, and for the next fifty years played a leadership role in the women's rights movement. Somewhat overshadowed in popular memory by her long time colleague Susan B. Anthony, Stanton was for many years the architect and author of the movement's most important strategies and documents. Though she became increasingly estranged from the mainstream of the movement, particularly near the end of her career, she maintained to the end her long time friendship with Anthony.
Stanton had an early introduction to the reform movements, including encounters as a young woman with fugitive slaves at the home of her cousin Gerrit Smith. It was at Smith's home that she also met her husband Henry Stanton. Soon after their marriage in 1840 they traveled to London, where Henry Stanton was a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention. There she met Lucretia Mott, the Quaker teacher who served in many of the associated Temperance, Anti-Slavery, and Women's Rights organizations with which Stanton is associated. Denied her seat at the convention, as were all the women delegates, Mott discussed with Stanton the need for a convention on women's rights. The plan came to fruition when Mott again encountered Stanton in the summer of 1848 in the home of fellow Quaker Jane Hunt. After a month of missionary work on the Cattaraugus Reservation of the Seneca Nation, James and Lucretia Mott were attending the annual meeting of the Religious Society of Friends at Junius, near Seneca Falls, and staying at nearby Auburn with Lucretia Mott's sister, Martha Coffin Wright.
Stanton, Mott, Wright, Hunt, and Mary Ann M'Clintock made the plan to call the first women's rights convention, initiating the women's rights movement in the United States, and Stanton's role as a leader in that movement. In 1851, Susan B. Anthony was staying at the home of fellow Temperance worker Amelia Bloomer, while attending an anti-slavery meeting in Seneca Falls. Stanton encountered Bloomer and Anthony on the street. She recorded the meeting in her diary as follows: "How well I remember the day! George Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison having announced an anti-slavery meeting in Seneca Falls, Miss Anthony came to attend it. These gentleman were my guests. Walking home after the adjournment, we met Mrs. Bloomer and Miss Anthony, on the corner of the street, waiting to greet us. There she stood, with her good earnest face and genial smile, dressed in gray delaine, hat and all the same color, relieved with pale blue ribbons, the perfection of neatness and sobriety. I liked her thoroughly, and why I did not at once invite her home with me to dinner I do not know... "
History records the lasting relationship between these two women as well as the strains that resulted from their different roles and priorities. Unwilling to commit to a vigorous travel schedule until her children were grown, Stanton wrote many of her speeches for delivery by Anthony. As the years wore on the two held closely together, splitting with many other women as well as Gerrit Smith and Frederick Douglass, over the idea that suffrage for black men, after emancipation should take precedence over suffrage for women. Along with Matilda Joslyn Gage, the two led the National Woman Suffrage Association, opposing the concept of "precedence" accepted by the less radical American Woman Suffrage Association.
Almost thirty years after the Seneca Falls Convention, Stanton and Gage authored the Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States, which Anthony presented, uninvited, at the Centennial celebration in Washington in 1876. The Declaration was signed in the Centennial Books of the NWSA by Stanton, Anthony and Gage, as well as many later arrivals to the movement such as Virginia Minor and Lillie Devereux Blake. Also signing the original Declaration were Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann M'Clintock, and Amy Post, all of whom were present at the 1848 Convention.
Later in her career Stanton, like Gage, focused increasingly on social reforms related to women's concerns other than suffrage. The two worked together on Stanton's Woman's Bible a work rejected by many of the more conservative elements in the movement. The two also collaborated with Anthony in the first three volumes of A History of Woman Suffrage, covering the period 1848 to 1877. Though Gage split completely with Anthony over Anthony's successful effort to merge the NWSA with its more conservative counterpart into the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Stanton agreed to serve as President of the combined organization for a brief period. At the end she took to having her resolutions introduced by others, so fully was her leadership rejected by the newer forces, many of whom saw suffrage as a step toward introduction of a conservative religious social agenda that Stanton strongly and openly opposed. The resiliency of the friendship between Stanton and Anthony is illustrated in the photograph of the two at Anthony's home in Rochester late in their lives.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in 1902, and like Anthony and Gage, did not live to see women's suffrage in the United States. She is nonetheless regarded as one of the true major forces in the drive toward equal rights for women in the United States and throughout the world. The statue of Stanton, Mott and Anthony housed in the U.S. Capitol was used as the symbol of the American Delegation to the 1995 Peking Conference.
Fighting for Equality - A few words from Sarah Grimke 1792-1873 & Angelina Grimke Weld 1805-1879
Wood cut of Sarah Grimke (1792-1873) date of image is unknown. Library of Congress
Two early and prominent activists for abolition and women’s rights, Sarah Grimke (1792-1873) and Angelina Grimke Weld (1805-1879) were raised in the cradle of slavery on a plantation in South Carolina. The Grimke sisters, as they were known, grew to despise slavery after witnessing its cruel effects at a young age. Sarah later recalled that her father, the wealthy Judge John Fauchereaud Grimke, held his 14 children to the highest standards of discipline and sometimes required them to work in the field shelling corn or picking cotton. She observed, “Perhaps I am indebted partially to this for my life-long detestation of slavery, as it brought me in close contact with these unpaid toilers.”
At the age of 12 Sarah became godmother to her baby sister Angelina, promising “to guide and direct [this] precious child.” This commitment foreshadowed the lifelong bond the sisters had with one another and strengthened Sarah’s determination to fight for social justice. In 1819 Sarah accompanied her father to Philadelphia so he could receive medical treatment. There she encountered members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who helped her care for her dying father. After her father’s death she returned to Charleston, where her feelings of fierce opposition to slavery were quickly renewed: “…after being for many months in Pennsylvania when I went back it seemed as if the sight of [the slaves’] condition was insupportable…can compare my feeling only with a canker incessantly gnawing…. I was as one in bonds looking on their sufferings I could not soothe or lessen….” Much to the chagrin of her family, Sarah converted to Quakerism and moved to Philadelphia in 1821; by 1829 Angelina had also become a Quaker and decided to move north to be with her sister.
Angelina Grimke Weld (1805-1879) date of image is unknown. Library of Congress
The sisters’ conversion to Quakerism and subsequent move to Philadelphia made them virtual outcasts in the South, but they also found themselves at odds with many northerners after William Lloyd Garrison published a personal letter Angelina wrote to him in The Liberator. In her letter Angelina encouraged Garrison to stand his ground even in the face of mob violence: “If persecution is the means which God has ordained for the accomplishment of this great end, emancipation, then…I feel as if I could say, let it come; for it is my deep, solemn deliberate conviction, that this is a cause worth dying for….” Angelina chose not to recall the letter despite the outrage it caused among fellow Quakers who believed she was a radical abolitionist. Despite the disapproval they faced from fellow Quakers and from a society that did not accept women as public speakers on such controversial topics as slavery, the Grimke sisters found themselves caught up in the antislavery movement.
In 1836 Angelina wrote her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South imploring white southern women to embrace the antislavery cause. She wrote, “I know you do not make the laws, but I also know that you are the wives and mothers, the sisters and daughters of those who do; and if you really suppose you can do nothing to overthrow slavery, you are greatly mistaken.” Her writing drew the ire of southerners who opposed its abolitionist message and northerners who felt that women had no business writing or speaking about something as controversial as slavery. This outcry over women abolitionists prompted Sarah to write Letters on the Equality of the Sexes. By the late 1830s the Grimke sisters were known not only as abolitionists but also as proponents of women’s rights.
Although Sarah and Angelina did not attend the Woman’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls in 1848, Sarah received an invitation to the event from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as evidenced by this letter to Elizabeth M’Clintock: Grassmere [Seneca Falls] Friday morning [July 1848] Dear Lizzie, Rain or shine I intend to spend Sunday with you that we may all together concoct a declaration I have drawn up one but you may suggest any alterations & improvements for I know it is not as perfect a declaration as should go forth from the first woman’s rights convention that has ever assembled. I shall take the ten o’clock train in the morning & return at five in the evening, provided we can accomplish all our business in that time. I have written to Lydia Maria Child Maria Chapman & Sarah Grimke, as we hope for some good letters to read at the convention. Your friend. Elizabeth Cady Stanton The Stantons were good friends of the Grimkes: Elizabeth’s husband Henry served as best man at the wedding of Angelina Grimke and Theodore Weld, sent their oldest sons to the Grimke-Weld boarding school, and, in honor of Angelina’s husband, named their fourth son Theodore Weld Stanton.
Fighting for Equality - Martha Coffin Wright 1806-1875
Martha Coffin Wright (1806-75) was the youngest of 8 children; her sister Lucretia Coffin Mott was the second oldest. Throughout her life Martha worked in reform alongside her sister Lucretia Mott. Martha preferred to take a supportive role, frequently serving as secretary, while her more outgoing sister Lucretia was frequently the keynote speaker at public meetings.
In 1848, Wright was living with her husband David & 4 children in Auburn, New York, 10 miles to the east of Seneca Falls. Martha Wright was several months pregnant that summer, while Lucretia & James Mott were staying with Martha & her growing family. On July 19, 1848, the 1st day of the Seneca Falls First Women’s Rights Convention, Lucretia Mott & Martha Wright arrived by train from Auburn accepting Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s invitation to stay the night at her home before attending the 2nd day’s activities. At the afternoon session on the 1st day, the Report noted that “Lucretia Mott read a humorous article from a newspaper, written by Martha C. Wright.”
After helping organize the First Women’s Rights Convention, Martha Wright participated in many state & national women’s rights conventions in various capacities. She was secretary at the 1852 & 1856 National Women’s Rights Conventions, served as an officer at the 1853 & 1854 National Women’s Rights Conventions & presided over the National Women’s Rights Convention in 1855 in Ohio & the New York State Women’s Rights Convention held in Saratoga that year.
Martha C. Wright was also an ardent abolitionist & ran her home in Auburn as a station on the Underground Railroad, frequently allowing fugitive slaves to sleep in the kitchen. In a letter to her sister from Auburn, New York on December 30, 1860, Martha C. Wright wrote: …We have been expending our sympathies, as well as congratulations, on seven newly arrived slaves that Harriet Tubman has just pioneered safely from the Southern Part of Maryland.--One woman carried a baby all the way and bro’t [sic] two other chld’n that Harriet and the men helped along. They bro’t a piece of old comfort and a blanket, in a basket with a little kindling, a little bread for the baby with some laudanum to keep it from crying during the day. They walked all night carrying the little ones, and spread the old comfort on the frozen ground, in some dense thicket where they all hid, while Harriet went out foraging, and sometimes cd not get back till dark, fearing she wd be followed. Then, if they had crept further in, and she couldn’t find them, she wd whistle, or sing certain hymns and they wd answer.
Fighting for Equality - Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815-1902 - Solitude of Self 1892
Solitude of Self
Address Delivered by Mrs. Stanton before the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Congress, Monday, January 18, 1892 Reprinted from the Congressional Record
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (seated) with Susan B. Anthony (standing) Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Born November 12, 1815 in Johnstown and died October 26, 1902 in New York City
Mrs. Stanton's Address
Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee: We have been speaking before Committees of the Judiciary for the last twenty years, and we have gone over all the arguments in favor of a sixteenth amendment which are familiar to all you gentlemen; therefore, it will not be necessary that I should repeat them again.
The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul; our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment--our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.
Secondly, if we consider her as a citizen, as a member of a great nation, she must have the same rights as all other members, according to the fundamental principles of our Government.
Thirdly, viewed as a woman, an equal factor in civilization, her rights and duties are still the same--individual happiness and development.
Fourthly, it is only the incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter, that may involve some special duties and training. In the usual discussion in regard to woman's sphere, such as men as Herbert Spencer, Frederic Harrison, and Grant Allen uniformly subordinate her rights and duties as an individual, as a citizen, as a woman, to the necessities of these incidental relations, some of which a large class of woman may never assume. In discussing the sphere of man we do not decide his rights as an individual, as a citizen, as a man by his duties as a father, a husband, a brother, or a son, relations some of which he may never fill. Moreover he would be better fitted for these very relations and whatever special work he might choose to do to earn his bread by the complete development of all his faculties as an individual.
Just so with woman. The education that will fit her to discharge the duties in the largest sphere of human usefulness will best fit her for whatever special work she may be compelled to do.
The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right, to choose his own surroundings.
The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear, is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself. No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation. To guide our own craft, we must be captain, pilot, engineer; with chart and compass to stand at the wheel; to match the wind and waves and know when to take in the sail, and to read the signs in the firmament over all. It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman.
Nature having endowed them equally, leaves them to their own skill and judgment in the hour of danger, and, if not equal to the occasion, alike they perish.
To appreciate the importance of fitting every human soul for independent action, think for a moment of the immeasurable solitude of self. We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us; we leave it alone under circumstances peculiar to ourselves. No mortal ever has been, no mortal over will be like the soul just launched on the sea of life. There can never again be just such environments as make up the infancy, youth and manhood of this one. Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another. No one has ever found two blades of ribbon grass alike, and no one will never find two human beings alike. Seeing, then, what must be the infinite diversity in human, character, we can in a measure appreciate the loss to a nation when any large class of the people in uneducated and unrepresented in the government. We ask for the complete development of every individual, first, for his own benefit and happiness. In fitting out an army we give each soldier his own knapsack, arms, powder, his blanket, cup, knife, fork and spoon. We provide alike for all their individual necessities, then each man bears his own burden.
Again we ask complete individual development for the general good; for the consensus of the competent on the whole round of human interest; on all questions of national life, and here each man must bear his share of the general burden. It is sad to see how soon friendless children are left to bear their own burdens before they can analise their feelings; before they can even tell their joys and sorrows, they are thrown on their own resources. The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support. What a touching instance of a child's solitude; of that hunger of heart for love and recognition, in the case of the little girl who helped to dress a christmas tree for the children of the family in which she served. On finding there was no present for herself she slipped away in the darkness and spent the night in an open field sitting on a stone, and when found in the morning was weeping as if her heart would break. No mortal will ever know the thoughts that passed through the mind of that friendless child in the long hours of that cold night, with only the silent stars to keep her company. The mention of her case in the daily papers moved many generous hearts to send her presents, but in the hours of her keenest sufferings she was thrown wholly on herself for consolation.
In youth our most bitter disappointments, our brightest hopes and ambitions are known only to otherwise, even our friendship and love we never fully share with another; there is something of every passion in every situation we conceal. Even so in our triumphs and our defeats.
The successful candidate for Presidency and his opponent each have a solitude peculiarly his own, and good form forbide either in speak of his pleasure or regret. The solitude of the king on his throne and the prisoner in his cell differs in character and degree, but it is solitude nevertheless.
We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a broken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest ties, alone we sit in the shadows of our affliction. Alike mid the greatest triumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. On the devine heights of human attainments, eulogized land worshiped as a hero or saint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty, and vice, as a pauper or criminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs of our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded thro dark courts and alleys, in by-ways and highways; alone we stand in the judgment seat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the awful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities; hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing then that life must ever be a march and a battle, that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right.
To throw obstacle in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny the rights of property, like cutting off the hands. To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment. Shakespeare's play of Titus and Andronicus contains a terrible satire on woman's position in the nineteenth century--"Rude men" (the play tells us) "seized the king's daughter, cut out her tongue, out off her hands, and then bade her go call for water and wash her hands." What a picture of woman's position. Robbed of her natural rights, handicapped by law and custom at every turn, yet compelled to fight her own battles, and in the emergencies of life to fall back on herself for protection.
The girl of sixteen, thrown on the world to support herself, to make her own place in society, to resist the temptations that surround her and maintain a spotless integrity, must do all this by native force or superior education. She does not acquire this power by being trained to trust others and distrust herself. If she wearies of the struggle, finding it hard work to swim upstream, and allow herself to drift with the current, she will find plenty of company, but not one to share her misery in the hour of her deepest humiliation. If she tried to retrieve her position, to conceal the past, her life is hedged about with fears last willing hands should tear the veil from what she fain would hide. Young and friendless, she knows the bitter solitude of self.
How the little courtesies of life on the surface of society, deemed so important from man towards woman, fade into utter insignificance in view of the deeper tragedies in which she must play her part alone, where no human aid is possible.
The young wife and mother, at the head of some establishment with a kind husband to shield her from the adverse winds of life, with wealth, fortune and position, has a certain harbor of safety, occurs against the ordinary ills of life. But to manage a household, have a deatrable influence in society, keep her friends and the affections of her husband, train her children and servants well, she must have rare common sense, wisdom, diplomacy, and a knowledge of human nature. To do all this she needs the cardinal virtues and the strong points of character that the most successful statesman possesses.
An uneducated woman, trained to dependence, with no resources in herself must make a failure of any position in life. But society says women do not need a knowledge of the world, the liberal training that experience in public life must give, all the advantages of collegiate education; but when for the lock of all this, the woman's happiness is wrecked, alone she bears her humiliation; and the attitude of the weak and the ignorant in indeed pitiful in the wild chase for the price of life they are ground to powder.
In age, when the pleasures of youth are passed, children grown up, married and gone, the hurry and hustle of life in a measure over, when the hands are weary of active service, when the old armchair and the fireside are the chosen resorts, then men and women alike must fall back on their own resources. If they cannot find companionship in books, if they have no interest in the vital questions of the hour, no interest in watching the consummation of reforms, with which they might have been identified, they soon pass into their dotage. The more fully the faculties of the mind are developed and kept in use, the longer the period of vigor and active interest in all around us continues. If from a lifelong participation in public affairs a woman feels responsible for the laws regulating our system of education, the discipline of our jails and prisons, the sanitary conditions of our private homes, public buildings, and thoroughfares, an interest in commerce, finance, our foreign relations, in any or all of these questions, here solitude will at least be respectable, and she will not be driven to gossip or scandal for entertainment.
The chief reason for opening to every soul the doors to the whole round of human duties an pleasures is the individual development thus attained, the resources thus provided under all circumstances to mitigate the solitude that at times must come to everyone. I once asked Prince Krapotkin, the Russian nihilist, how he endured his long years in prison, deprived of books, pen, ink, and paper. "Ah," he said, "I thought out many questions in which I had a deep interest. In the pursuit of an idea I took no note of time. When tired of solving knotty problems I recited all the beautiful passages in prose or verse I have ever learned. I became acquainted with myself and my own resources. I had a world of my own, a vast empire, that no Russian jailor or Czar could invade." Such is the value of liberal thought and broad culture when shut off from all human companionship, bringing comfort and sunshine within even the four walls of a prison cell.
As women of times share a similar fate, should they not have all the consolation that the most liberal education can give? Their suffering in the prisons of St. Petersburg; in the long, weary marches to Siberia, and in the mines, working side by side with men, surely call for all the self-support that the most exalted sentiments of heroism can give. When suddenly roused at midnight, with the startling cry of "fire! fire!" to find the house over their heads in flames, do women wait for men to point the way to safety? And are the men, equally bewildered and half suffocated with smoke, in a position to more than try to save themselves?
At such times the most timid women have shown a courage and heroism in saving their husbands and children that has surprise everybody. Inasmuch, then, as woman shares equally the joys and sorrows of time and eternity, is it not the height of presumption in man to propose to represent her at the ballot box an the throne of grace, do her voting in the state, her praying in the church, and to assume the position of priest at the family alter.
Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one's self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, every where conceded; a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment, by inheritance, wealth, family, and position. Seeing, then that the responsibilities of life rests equally on man and woman, that their destiny is the same, they need the same preparation for time and eternity. The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce sterns of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer. Such are the facts in human experience, the responsibilities of individual. Rich and poor, intelligent and ignorant, wise and foolish, virtuous and vicious, man and woman, it is ever the same, each soul must depend wholly on itself.
Whatever the theories may be of woman's dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens. Alone she goes to the gates of death to give life to every man that is born into the world. No one can share her fears, on one mitigate her pangs; and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown.
From the mountain tops of Judea, long ago, a heavenly voice bade His disciples, "Bear ye one another's burdens," but humanity has not yet risen to that point of self-sacrifice, and if ever so willing, how few the burdens are that one soul can bear for another. In the highways of Palestine; in prayer and fasting on the solitary mountain top; in the Garden of Gethsemane; before the judgment seat of Pilate; betrayed by one of His trusted disciples at His last supper; in His agonies on the cross, even Jesus of Nazareth, in these last sad days on earth, felt the awful solitude of self. Deserted by man, in agony he cries, "My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken me?" And so it ever must be in the conflicting scenes of life, on the long weary march, each one walks alone. We may have many friends, love, kindness, sympathy and charity to smooth our pathway in everyday life, but in the tragedies and triumphs of human experience each moral stands alone.
But when all artificial trammels are removed, and women are recognized as individuals, responsible for their own environments, thoroughly educated for all the positions in life they may be called to fill; with all the resources in themselves that liberal though and broad culture can give; guided by their own conscience an judgment; trained to self-protection by a healthy development of the muscular system and skill in the use of weapons of defense, and stimulated to self-support by the knowledge of the business world and the pleasure that pecuniary independence must ever give; when women are trained in this way they will, in a measure, be fitted for those hours of solitude that come alike to all, whether prepared or otherwise. As in our extremity we must depend on ourselves, the dictates of wisdom point of complete individual development.
In talking of education how shallow the argument that each class must be educated for the special work it proposed to do, and all those faculties not needed in this special walk must lie dormant and utterly wither for want of use, when, perhaps, these will be the very faculties needed in life's greatest energies. Some say, Where is the use of drilling series in the languages, the Sciences, in law, medicine, theology? As wives, mothers, housekeepers, cooks, they need a different curriculum from boys who are to fill all positions. The chief cooks in our great hotels and ocean steamers are men. In large cities men run the bakries; they make our bread, cake and pies. They manage the laundries; they are now considered our best milliners and dressmakers. Because some men fill these departments of usefulness, shall we regulate the curriculum in Harvard and Yale to their present necessities? If not why this talk in our best colleges of a curriculum for girls who are crowding into the trades and professions; teachers in all our public schools rapidly hiring many lucrative and honorable positions in life? They are showing too, their calmness and courage in the most trying hours of human experience.
You have probably all read in the daily papers of the terrible storm in the Bay of Biscay when a tidal wave such havoc on the shore, wrecking vessels, unroofing houses and carrying destruction everywhere. Among other buildings the woman's prison was demolished. Those who escaped saw men struggling to reach the shore. They promptly by clasping hands made a chain of themselves and pushed out into the sea, again and again, at the risk of their lives until they had brought six men to shore, carried them to a shelter, and did all in their power for their comfort and protection.
What especial school of training could have prepared these women for this sublime moment of their lives. In times like this humanity rises above all college curriculums and recognises Nature as the greatest of all teachers in the hour of danger and death. Women are already the equals of men in the whole of ream of thought, in art, science, literature, and government. With telescope vision they explore the starry firmament, and bring back the history of the planetary world. With chart and compass they pilot ships across the mighty deep, and with skillful finger send electric messages around the globe. In galleries of art the beauties of nature and the virtues of humanity are immortalized by them on their canvas and by their inspired touch dull blocks of marble are transformed into angels of light.
In music they speak again the language of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and are worthy interpreters of their great thoughts. The poetry and novels of the century are theirs, and they have touched the keynote of reform in religion, politics, and social life. They fill the editor's and professor's chair, and plead at the bar of justice, walk the wards of the hospital, and speak from the pulpit and the platform; such is the type of womanhood that an enlightened public sentiment welcomes today, and such the triumph of the facts of life over the false theories of the past.
Is it, then, consistent to hold the developed woman of this day within the same narrow political limits as the dame with the spinning wheel and knitting needle occupied in the past? No! no! Machinery has taken the labors of woman as well as man on its tireless shoulders; the loom and the spinning wheel are but dreams of the past; the pen, the brush, the easel, the chisel, have taken their places, while the hopes and ambitions of women are essentially changed.
We see reason sufficient in the outer conditions of human being for individual liberty and development, but when we consider the self dependence of every human soul we see the need of courage, judgment, and the exercise of every faculty of mind and body, strengthened and developed by use, in woman as well as man.
Whatever may be said of man's protecting power in ordinary conditions, mid all the terrible disasters by land and sea, in the supreme moments of danger, alone, woman must ever meet the horrors of the situation; the Angel of Death even makes no royal pathway for her. Man's love and sympathy enter only into the sunshine of our lives. In that solemn solitude of self, that links us with the immeasurable and the eternal, each soul lives alone forever. A recent writer says:
I remember once, in crossing the Atlantic, to have gone upon the deck of the ship at midnight, when a dense black cloud enveloped the sky, and the great deep was roaring madly under the lashes of demoniac winds. My feelings was not of danger or fear (which is a base surrender of the immortal soul), but of utter desolation and loneliness; a little speck of life shut in by a tremendous darkness. Again I remember to have climbed the slopes of the Swiss Alps, up beyond the point where vegetation ceases, and the stunted conifers no longer struggle against the unfeeling blasts. Around me lay a huge confusion of rocks, out of which the gigantic ice peaks shot into the measureless blue of the heavens, and again my only feeling was the awful solitude.
And yet, there is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum of the oracle; the hidden chamber of eleusinian mystery, for to it only omniscience is permitted to enter.
Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take, dare take, on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?
Note from Author Barbara W Sarudy
Blogging is a joy - a total extravagance, a chance to explore endless curiosities. Searching for WHY human society changes & what those living before us declare in their own words & in their design & images of themselves & of the world around them.
Ex-slave Lizzie Jones Remembers the beds & the foo...
Fighting for Equality - The Women's Rights movemen...
Fighting for Equality - Call to the 1st US Women's...
Fighting for Equality - Paulina W Davis' Address 1...
Fighting for Equality - Jane Clothier Master Hunt ...
Fighting for Equality - Elizabeth Cady Stanton 181...
Fighting for Equality - A few words from Sarah Gri...
Fighting for Equality - Martha Coffin Wright 1806-...
Fighting for Equality - Mary Ann M’Clintock 1800-1...
Fighting for Equality - Lucretia Coffin Mott 1793-...
Lady Liberty in 19C America
1855 Country Life
1801 41-year-old Virginia Woman
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Blogs created by Barbara W Sarudy
17C-18C Goddess Flora by Rosalba Carriera (Italian artist, 1675-1757)
Early European Gardens
1671 Portrait of a woman standing amid the roses with garden fountains beyond
Early American Gardens
Plants in Early American Gardens - Borage
Madonnas & More
Morning Madonna
Portrait of 18C American Woman
Karl Ferdinand Wimar (1828-1862) The Indian Raid 1853
Women in History & Art
Biography - Marguerite de Valois, 1553-1615 Queen of France & target of Catherine de Medici
American Public Spaces
Charleston's Floating Bath Houses
16C Europeans Imagine American Women
Gardens & Gospels
The Old Testament - The Garden of Eden by Lucas Cranach (1472-1553)
Botany to Seed Catalogs
Historic American Plant Catalog
European Public Spaces
Sports & Games - Fishing in 17C-18C in England
© Copyright 2009-2018 Barbara Wells Sarudy
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