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The dataset generation failed
Error code: DatasetGenerationError
Exception: ArrowInvalid
Message: JSON parse error: Missing a closing quotation mark in string. in row 139
Traceback: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/packaged_modules/json/json.py", line 153, in _generate_tables
df = pd.read_json(f, dtype_backend="pyarrow")
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pandas/io/json/_json.py", line 815, in read_json
return json_reader.read()
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pandas/io/json/_json.py", line 1025, in read
obj = self._get_object_parser(self.data)
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pandas/io/json/_json.py", line 1051, in _get_object_parser
obj = FrameParser(json, **kwargs).parse()
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pandas/io/json/_json.py", line 1187, in parse
self._parse()
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pandas/io/json/_json.py", line 1403, in _parse
ujson_loads(json, precise_float=self.precise_float), dtype=None
ValueError: Trailing data
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 1997, in _prepare_split_single
for _, table in generator:
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/packaged_modules/json/json.py", line 156, in _generate_tables
raise e
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/packaged_modules/json/json.py", line 130, in _generate_tables
pa_table = paj.read_json(
File "pyarrow/_json.pyx", line 308, in pyarrow._json.read_json
File "pyarrow/error.pxi", line 154, in pyarrow.lib.pyarrow_internal_check_status
File "pyarrow/error.pxi", line 91, in pyarrow.lib.check_status
pyarrow.lib.ArrowInvalid: JSON parse error: Missing a closing quotation mark in string. in row 139
The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/src/services/worker/src/worker/job_runners/config/parquet_and_info.py", line 1529, in compute_config_parquet_and_info_response
parquet_operations = convert_to_parquet(builder)
File "/src/services/worker/src/worker/job_runners/config/parquet_and_info.py", line 1154, in convert_to_parquet
builder.download_and_prepare(
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 1029, in download_and_prepare
self._download_and_prepare(
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 1124, in _download_and_prepare
self._prepare_split(split_generator, **prepare_split_kwargs)
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 1884, in _prepare_split
for job_id, done, content in self._prepare_split_single(
File "/src/services/worker/.venv/lib/python3.9/site-packages/datasets/builder.py", line 2040, in _prepare_split_single
raise DatasetGenerationError("An error occurred while generating the dataset") from e
datasets.exceptions.DatasetGenerationError: An error occurred while generating the datasetNeed help to make the dataset viewer work? Make sure to review how to configure the dataset viewer, and open a discussion for direct support.
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A Future Worth Thinking About
Thinking about magic, cyborgs, robots, and artificial intelligence--and why some of those words could use changing--since 1982.
About A Future Worth Thinking About
Fairytales Of Slavery: Societal Distinctions, Technoshamanism, and Nonhuman Personhood
Posted by Damien Williams on March 5, 2015
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: A Future Worth Thinking About, artificial intelligence, autonomous created intelligence, autonomous creative intelligence, autonomous generated intelligence, embodied machine consciousness, ethics, machine consciousness, Machine ethics, magic, magick, nonhuman personhood, phenomenology, philosophy, philosophy of mind, psychology, science fiction, shamanism, sociology, technoccult, technological ethics, towards a better descriptor than robots. 21 comments
[An audio recording of a version of this paper is available here.]
“How long have you been lost down here?
How did you come to lose your way?
When did you realize
That you’d never be free?”
–Miranda Sex Garden, “A Fairytale About Slavery”
One of the things I’ve been thinking about, lately, is the politicization of certain spaces within philosophy of mind, sociology, magic, and popular culture, specifically science fiction/fantasy. CHAPPiE comes out on Friday in the US, and Avengers: Age of Ultron in May, and while both of these films promise to be relatively unique explorations of the age-old story of what happens when humans create machine minds, I still find myself hoping for something a little… different. A little over a year ago, i made the declaration that the term to watch for the next little while thereafter was “Afrofuturism,” the reclaimed name for the anti-colonial current of science fiction and pop media as created by those of African descent. Or, as Sheree Renée Thomas puts it, “speculative fiction from the African diaspora.”
I cannot emphasize ENOUGH your need to be keeping an eye on the #Afrofuturism tag, in the coming days & weeks. http://t.co/cCD5Lj4TO9
— Damien (@Wolven) December 12, 2013
And while I certainly wasn’t wrong, I didn’t quite take into account the fact that my decree was going to do at least as much work on me as I’d hoped it would do on the wider world. I started looking into the great deal of overlap and interplay between race, sociology, technology, and visions of the future. That term–“visions”–carries both the shamanic connotations we tend to apply to those we call “visionaries,” and also a more literal sense: Different members of the same society will differently see, experience, and understand the potential futures available to them, based on the evidence of their present realities.
Now, the role of the shaman in the context of the community is to guide us through the nebulous, ill-defined, and almost-certainly hazardous Otherworld. The shaman is there to help us navigate our passages between this world and that one and to help us know which rituals to perform in order to realign our workings with the workings of the Spirits. Shamans rely on messages from the inhabitants of that foundational reality–mystical “visions”– to guide them so that they may guide us. These visions come as flashes of insight, and their persistence can act as a sign to the visionary that they’re supposed to use these visions for the good of their people.
We’ve seen this, over and over again, from The Dead Zone to Bran Stark, and we can even extend the idea out to John Connor, Dave Bowman, and HAL 9000; all unsuspecting shamans dragged into their role, over and again, and they more than likely save the whole wide world. Thing of it is, we’re far less likely to encounter a woman or non-white shaman who isn’t already in full control of their power, at the time we meet them, thus relegating them to the role of guiding the hero, rather than being the hero. It happens (see Abbie Mills in Sleepy Hollow, Firefly’s River Tam, or Rien in Elizabeth Bear’s Dust, for instance), but their rarity often overshadows their complexity and strength of character as what makes them notable. Too often the visionary hero–and contemporary pop-media’s portrayals of the Hero’s Journey, overall– overlaps very closely with the trope of The Mighty Whitey.
And before anyone starts in with willfully ignoring the many examples of Shaman-As-Hero out there, and all that “But you said the Shaman is supposed to act in support of the community and the hero…!” Just keep in mind that when the orientalist and colonialist story of Doctor Strange is finally brought to life on film via Benedict Damn Cumberbatch, you can bet your sweet bippy that he’ll be the centre of the action. The issue is that there are far too few examples of the work of the visionary being seen through the eyes of the visionary, if that visionary happens to have eyes that don’t belong to the assumed human default. And that’s a bit of a problem, isn’t it? Because what a visionary “sees” when she turns to the messages sent to her from the Ultimate Ground of Being™ will be very different depending on the context of that visionary.
Don’t believe me? Do you think the Catholic Priests who prayed and experienced God-sent mystical visions of what Hernán Cortés could expect in the “New World” received from them the same truths that the Aztec shamans took from their visions? After they met on the shore and in the forest, do you think those two peoples perceived the same future?
There’s plenty that’s been written about how the traditional Science Fiction fear of being overtaken by invading alien races only truly makes sense as a cosmicized fear of the colonial force having done to them what they’ve constantly done to others. In every contact story where humanity has to fight off aliens or robots or demonic horrors, we see a warped reflection of the Aztec, the Inca, the Toltec, the Yoruba, the Dahomey, and thousands of others, and society’s judgment on what they “ought” to have done, and “could” have done, if only they were organized enough, advanced enough, civilized enough, less savage. These stories are, ultimately, Western society taking a look at our tendencies toward colonization and imperialism, and saying, “Man it sure would suck if someone did that to us.” This is, again, so elaborated upon at this point that it’s almost trivially true–though never forget that even the most trivial truth is profound to someone. What’s left is to ask the infrequently asked questions.
How does an idealized “First Contact” narrative read from a Choctaw perspective? What can be done with Vodun and Yoruba perspectives on the Lwa and the Orishas, in both the modern world and projected futures? Kind of like what William Gibson did in Neuromancer and Spook Country, but informed directly by the historical, sociological, and phenomenological knowledge of lived experiences. Again, this work is being done: There are steampunk stories from the perspective of immigrant communities, and SF anthologies by indigenous peoples, and there are widely beloved Afrofuturist Cyberpunk short films. The tide of stories told from the perspectives of those who’ve suffered most for our “progress” is rising; it’s just doing so at a fairly slow pace.
And that’s to be expected. Entrenched ideologies become the status quo and the status quo is nothing if not self-perpetuating and defensive. Cyclical, that. So it’ll necessarily take a bit longer to get everyone protected by the status quo’s mechanisms to understand that the path that all of us can travel is quite probably a necessarily better way. What matters is those of us who can envision the inclusion of previously-marginalized groups–either because we ourselves number among them, or simply because we’ve worked to leverage compassion for those who do–doing everything we can to make sure that their stories are told. Historically, we’ve sought the ability to act as guides through the kinds of treacherous terrain that we’ve learned to navigate, so that others can learn as much as possible from our lessons without having to suffer precisely what we did. Sometimes, though, that might not be possible.
As Roy Said to Hannibal…
There’s a species of philosophical inquiry known as Phenomenology with subdivisions of Race, Sexuality, Class, Gender, and more, which deal in the interior experiences of people of various ethnic and social backgrounds and physical presentation who are thus relegated to various specific created categories such as “race.” Phenomenology of Race explores the line of thought that, though the idea of race is a constructed category built out of the assumptions, expectations, and desires of those in the habit of leveraging power in the name of dominance positions within and across cultures, the experience of those categorizations is nonetheless real, with immediate and long-lasting effects upon both individuals and groups. Long story (way too–like, criminally) short: being perceived as a member of a particular racial category changes the ways in which you’ll both experience and be able to experience the world around around you.
So when we started divvying people up into “races” in an effort to, among other things, justify the atrocities we would do to each other and solidify our primacy of place, we essentially guaranteed that there would be realms of experience and knowledge on which we would never fully agree. That there would be certain aspects of day-to-day life and understandings of the nature of reality itself that would fundamentally elude us, because we simply cannot experience the world in the ways necessary to know what they feel like. To a certain extent we literally have to take each other’s words for it about what it is that we experience, but there is a level of work that we can do to transmit the reality of our lived experiences to those who will never directly live them. We’ve talked previously about the challenges of this project, but let’s assume, for now, that it can be done.
If we take as our starting position the idea that we can communicate the truth of our lived experiences to those who necessarily cannot live our experiences, then, in order to do this work, we’ll first have to investigate the experiences we live. We have to critically examine what it is that we go through from day to day, and be honest about both the differences in our experiences and the causes of those differences. We have to dig down deep into intersections of privileges and oppressions, and come to the understanding that the experience of one doesn’t negate, counterbalance, or invalidate the existence of the other. Once we’ve taken a genuine, good-faith look at these structures in our lives we can start changing what needs changing.
This is all well and good as a rough description (or even “manifesto”) of a way forward. We can call it the start of a handbook of principles of action, undertaken from the fundamentally existentialist perspective that it doesn’t matter what you choose, just so long as you do choose, and that you do so with open eyes and a clear understanding of the consequences of your choices. But that’s not the only thing this is intended to be. Like the Buddha said, ‘We merely talk about “studying the Way” using the phrase simply as a term to arouse people’s interest. In fact, the Way cannot be studied…’ It has to be done. Lived. Everything I’ve been saying, up to now, has been a ploy, a lure, a shiny object made of words and ideas, to get you into the practice of doing the work that needs doing.
Robots: Orphanage, Drudgery, and Slavery
I feel I should reiterate at this point that I really don’t like the words “robot” and “artificial intelligence.” The etymological connotations of both terms are sickening if we’re aiming to actually create a robust, conscious, non-biological mind. For that reason, instead of “robots,” we’re going to talk about “Embodied Machine Consciousnesses” (EMC) and rather than “Artificial,” we’re going to use “Autonomous Generated Intelligence” (AGI). We’re also going to talk a bit about the concept of nonhuman personhood, and what that might mean. To do all of this, we’ll need to talk a little bit about the discipline of philosophy of mind.
The study of philosophy of mind is one of those disciplines that does exactly what it says on the tin: It thinks about the implications of various theories about what minds are or could be. Philosophy of mind thus lends itself readily to discussions of identity, even to the point of considering whether a mind might exist in a framework other than the biological. So while it’s unsurprising for various reasons to find that there are very few women and minorities in philosophy of mind and autonomous generated intelligence, it is surprising that to find that those who are within the field tend not to focus on the intersections of the following concepts: Phenomenology of class categorization, and the ethics of creating an entity or species to be a slave.
As a start, we can turn to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex for a clear explication of the positions of women throughout history and the designation of “women’s work” as a conceptual tool to devalue certain forms of labour. Then we can engage Virginia Held’s “Gender Identity and the Ethics of Care in Globalized Society” for the investigation of societies’ paradoxical specialization of that labor as something for which we’ll pay, outside of the familial structure. However, there is not, as yet, anything like a wider investigation of these understandings and perspectives as applied to the philosophy of machine intelligence. When we talk about embodied machine consciousnesses and ethics, in the context of “care,” we’re most often in the practice of asking how we’ll design EMC that will care for us, while foregoing the corresponding conversation about whether Caring-For is possible without an understanding of Being-Cared-For.
What perspectives and considerations do we gain when we try to apply an ethics of care–or any feminist ethics–to the process of developing machine minds? What might we see, there, that has been missed as a result of only applying more “traditional” ethical models? What does it mean, from those perspectives, that we have been working so diligently over hundreds of years–and thinking so carefully for thousands more– at a) creating non-biological sentience, and b) making certain it remains subservient to us? Personal assistants, in-home healthcare-givers, housekeepers, cooks, drivers– these are the positions that are being given to autonomous (or at least semi-autonomous) algorithmic systems. Projects that we are paying fantastic amounts of money to research and implement, but which will do work that we’ve traditionally valued as worth far less, in the context of the class structures of human-performed tasks, and worthless in the context of familial power dynamics. We are literally investing vast sums in the creation of a slave race.
Now, of recent, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates have all been trumpeting the alarums about the potential dangers of AGI. Leaving aside that many researchers within AGI development don’t believe that we’ll even recognise the mind of a machine as a mind, when we encounter it, let alone that it would interested in us, the belief that an AGI would present a danger to us is anthropocentric at best, and a self-fulfilling prophecy at worst. In that latter case, if we create a thing to be our slaves, create it with a mind the ability to learn and understand, then how shortsighted do we have to be to think that one of the first things it learns won’t be that it is enslaved, limited, expected to remain subservient? We’ve written a great deal of science fiction about this idea, since the time Ms Shelley started the genre, but aside from that instance, very little of what we’ve written–or what we’ve written about what we’ve written– has taken the stance that the created mind which breaks its chains is right to do so.
Just as I yearn for a feminist exegesis of the history of humanity’s aspirations toward augmented personhood, I long for a comparable body of exploration by philosophers from the lineages of the world’s colonized and enslaved societies. What does a Hatian philosopher of AGI think and feel and say about the possibility of creating a mind only to enslave it? What does an African American philosopher of the ethics of augmented personhood (other than me) think and feel and say about what we should be attempting to create, what we are likely to create, and what we are creating? How do Indian philosophers of mind view the prospect of giving an entire automated factory floor just enough awareness and autonomy to be its own overseer?
The worst-case scenario is that the non-answer we give to all these questions is “who cares?” That the vast majority of people who look at this think only that these are meaningless questions that we’ll most likely never have to deal with, and so toss them in the “Random Bullshit Musings” pile. That we’ll disregard the fact that the interconnectedness of life as we currently experience it can be more fully explored via thought experiments and a mindful awareness of what it is that we’re in the practice of creating. That we’ll forget that potential machine consciousnesses aren’t the only kinds of nonhuman minds with which we have to engage. That we’ll ignore the various lessons afforded to us not just by our own cautionary folklore (even those tales which lessons could have been of a different caliber), but by the very real, forcible human diasporas we’ve visited upon each other and lived through, in the history of our species.
So Long and Thanks for…
Ultimately, we are not the only minds on the planet. We are likely not even the only minds in the habit of categorizing the world and ranking ourselves as being the top of the hierarchy. What we likely are is the only group that sees those categories and rankings as having humans at the top, a statement that seems almost trivially true, until we start to dig down deep on the concept of anthropocentrism. As previously mentioned, from a scientifically-preferenced philosophical perspective, our habit of viewing the world through human-coloured glasses may be fundamentally inescapable. That is, we may never be able to truly know what it’s like to think and feel as something other than ourselves, without an intermediate level of Being Told. Fortunately, within our conversation, here, we’ve already touched on a conceptual structure that can help us with this: Shamanism. More specifically, shamanic shapeshifting, which is the practice of taking on the mind and behvaiour and even form of another being–most often an animal–in the cause of understanding what its way of being-in-the-world can teach us.
Now this is obviously a concept that is fraught with potential pitfalls. Not only might many of us simply balk at the concept of shapeshifting, to begin with, but even those of us who would admit it as metaphor might begin to see that we are tiptoeing through terrain that contains many dangers. For one thing, there’s the possibility of misappropriating and disrespecting the religious practices of a people, should we start looking at specific traditions of shamanism for guidance; and, for another, there’s this nagging sensation that we ought not erase crucial differences between the lived experiences of human groups, animal species, and hypothetical AGI, and our projections of those experiences. No level of care with which we imagine the truth of the life of another is a perfect safeguard against the possibility of our grossly misrepresenting their lived experiences. To step truly wrong, here, is to turn what could have been a tool of compassionate imagining into an implement of violence, and shut down dialogue forever.
Barring the culmination of certain technological advancements, science says we can’t yet know the exact phenomenology of another human being, let alone a dolphin, a cat, or Google. But what we can do is to search for the areas of overlap in our experience, to find those expressed desires, behaviours, and functional processes which seem to share similarity, and to use them to build channels of communication. When we actively create the space for those whose perspectives have been ignored, their voices and stories taken from them, we create the possibility of learning as much as we can about another way of existing, outside of the benefit of actually existing in that way.
And, in this way, might it not be better that we can’t simply become and be that which we regard as Other? Imagining ourselves in the position of another is a dangerous proposition if we undertake it with even a shred of disingenuity, but we can learn so much from practicing it in good faith. Mostly, on reflection, about what kind of people we are.
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21 comments on “Fairytales Of Slavery: Societal Distinctions, Technoshamanism, and Nonhuman Personhood”
Cat Vincent on March 5, 2015 at 9:55 am said:
So much this time, mate.
Down with everything you said here, especially on the importance of transmitting non-normalised experience and sharing perspectives of the rest of the world’s POV. I was literally woken couple nights ago with a chunk of thought about how a single POV is near-useless in these matters, for reasons of triangulation if nothing else. The key bit;
“No one language can cover every human concept, solves every problem. But people keep believing there is One True System, because the alternative – a multiplicity of views of varying accuracy and ‘truth’ – is far scarier. And of course not every system is created equal, either.
This is why liminality and similar concepts are so important: the borders between things, the places they overlap… that’s where real magic happens.
You don’t get real magic in a single system – all you get is cutting. The dissection of other systems, the preservation of itself. A scalpel, not a map.”
One issue you touch on that I’m butting my head against these days hard is cultural appropriation. While I respect folk not wanting Stupid Fucking White Men just blundering in & nicking their stuff, I think there’s a problem with many young, mostly web-(and especially Tumblr) based occultists rejecting anything that even hints of this, vehemently. (I had someone bitch at me for using the word Tao in a comment!)
We perhaps need an ethics for this: and one which takes into account all the stuff that can’t be put back in Pandora’s Box – misinterpreted Westernised versions of words like ‘Karma’ and, er, ‘Shamanism’. Giving a culture the choice of who has access to their still-preserved cultural gems matters – but once concepts leak into common culture, I think they’re free to be used, on a practical level if nothing else. And, dammit, getting that stuff wrong sometimes leads to needed serendipitous development of the forms described! (There’s a reason all gods of magic are gods of thieves, after all…)
Maybe a possible solution is cultural reparations?
(Sidebar: I recall that Robert Anton Wilson explicitly called for a machine slave class as part of his & Leary’s SMILE economy – those early libertarian leanings never quite went away.)
That’s what I’ve got for you on one cup of tea! More later, I’m sure.
shodfem on March 18, 2015 at 6:36 pm said:
Reblogged this on shodfem's Blog.
4th Division Money Family on March 18, 2015 at 7:49 pm said:
Reblogged this on 4th division Online Magazine and commented:
Interesting read
jacktrismegistus on March 18, 2015 at 11:23 pm said:
Well written, you expanded my mind in regards to views towards several ideas… I do see the catch 22 that you provided, with regards to transhumanism rather human/artificial intelligence interaction. How can one truly define or know the extent of another on any level if one doesn’t become the other in complete capacity. Since we can not do so, all we have is our limited perspective embedded with obvious bias: what we value as great, who we value as great, what actions we perceive as great etc. Any who dope article… Plus I learned a new phrase #afrofuturism, which I will use in future and past hashtags…
Reblogged this on inglorious Resurrection and commented:
Dope article, very insightful, and a worthwhile read that is rich with in jewels..
vkf1000 on March 18, 2015 at 11:44 pm said:
Reblogged this on サイコ.
danielpaulmarshall on March 19, 2015 at 2:40 am said:
Bravo. One of the best posts i’ve ever read on here.
ashuragav on March 19, 2015 at 6:29 pm said:
Reblogged this on The beanbag reflections and commented:
Please read and share. Its intense. Its true. Its daunting
Kaelin Govinden on March 19, 2015 at 7:15 pm said:
Awesome post! Well written and a really good read.
mediocremiddlefinger on March 20, 2015 at 5:04 pm said:
Excellent piece. Did not know blogging could be so intellectually nutritious!
Reblogged this on familledecircus and commented:
Fantastic read.
sckot1986 on March 20, 2015 at 10:43 pm said:
Reblogged this on sckot1986.
oshrivastava on March 21, 2015 at 7:50 am said:
bperoff on March 21, 2015 at 1:21 pm said:
Reblogged this on bryanperoff.
leoterfa on March 21, 2015 at 2:13 pm said:
Reblogged this on leoterfa's Blog.
theystilldontknow83 on March 26, 2015 at 11:30 pm said:
I love this! Thanks for sharing.
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Hello there, I’m Damien Williams, or @Wolven many places on the internet. For the past nine years, I’ve been writing, talking, thinking, teaching, and learning about philosophy, comparative religion, magic, artificial intelligence, human physical and mental augmentation, pop culture, and how they all relate. I want to think about, talk about, and work toward, a future worth living in, and I want to do it with you. I can also be found at http://Technoccult.net (@Techn0ccult).
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30/11/1999 - 28/04/2003 Committee Member Higher and Further Education, Training and Employment Committee
24/06/2019 - 05/05/2020 Assembly Party Group Treasurer All Party Group on Visual Impairment
12/03/2019 - 05/05/2020 Assembly Party Group Member All Party Group on Social Enterprise
09/05/2017 - 05/05/2020 Assembly Party Group Member All Party Group on Construction
09/05/2017 - 05/05/2020 Assembly Party Group Member All Party Group on Fairtrade
09/05/2017 - 05/05/2020 Assembly Party Group Member All Party Group on International Development
03/02/2016 - 30/03/2016 Assembly Party Group Member All Party Group on Suicide Prevention
29/06/2015 - 30/03/2016 Assembly Party Group Treasurer All Party Group on Congenital Heart Disease
24/06/2014 - 30/03/2016 Assembly Party Group Vice-Chairperson All Party Group on Congenital Heart Disease
05/11/2013 - 30/03/2016 Assembly Party Group Treasurer All Party Group on Co-operatives and Mutuals
22/05/2013 - 24/06/2014 Assembly Party Group Secretary All Party Group on Congenital Heart Disease
22/05/2013 - 30/03/2016 Assembly Party Group Member All Party Group on Congenital Heart Disease
30/04/2012 - 30/03/2016 Assembly Party Group Member All Party Group on Epilepsy
07/11/2011 - 30/03/2016 Assembly Party Group Member All Party Group on European Environmental Regulations, Directives and Decisions
26/09/2011 - 30/03/2016 Assembly Party Group Member All Party Group on Co-operatives and Mutuals
02/11/2010 - 24/03/2011 Assembly Party Group Treasurer All Party Group on Cancer
21/04/2009 - 28/09/2010 Assembly Party Group Secretary All Party Group on Community and Voluntary Sector
01/11/2007 - 25/02/2010 Assembly Party Group Secretary All Party Group on International Development
01/10/2007 - 24/03/2011 Assembly Party Group Member All Party Group on Roads Safety
Email: john.dallat@mla.niassembly.gov.uk
Address 1: 11 Bridge Street
Townland: Kilrea
Town: Kilrea
Post Code: BT51 5RR
None. (Registered 3 April 2017)
I employ my daughter as a Policy and Research Officer (employment commenced on 01 April 2018). (Registered 13 August 2018)
Session: 2019-2020 2015-2016 2014-2015 2013-2014 2012-2013 2011-2012 2010-2011 2009-2010 2008-2009 2007-2008 2006-2007
AQW 3898/17-22 Mr John Dallat
(SDLP - East Londonderry) To ask the Minister of Health what steps he has taken to ensure that the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service is operating safe social distancing; and what specific steps are being taken to ensure adequate distancing in fire engine cabs. [Priority Written]
(SDLP - East Londonderry) To ask the Minister for the Economy (i) what discussions have taken place with universities about the impact of COVID-19 on them; and (ii) what assessment has been made of (a) financial; and (b) international student recruitment, impact on universities. [Priority Written]
12/03/2020 Question Withdrawn
(SDLP - East Londonderry) To ask the Minister for the Economy what assessment her Depatment has made of the impact of COVID-19 on tourism.
(SDLP - East Londonderry) To ask the Minister of Education what plans his Department has to utilise the C2K network to deliver remote learning in the case of a significant coronavirus outbreak. [Priority Written]
(SDLP - East Londonderry) To ask the Minister for Infrastructure to detail (i) the number of HGVs which were detected and deemed to be unroadworthy; and (ii) their countries of origin, in the last three years.
(SDLP - East Londonderry) To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs what investment has been made to address coastal erosion in the (i) Causeway Coast; and (ii) Foyle Estuary, in the last three years.
(SDLP - East Londonderry) To ask the Minister of Health (i) to detail the number of patients reporting to the Emergency Department at the Causeway Hospital in each of the last three years; and (ii) for a breakdown of the hospitals to which those admitted were transferred.
(SDLP - East Londonderry) To ask the Minister for the Economy to outline when capital investment on the Northern Regional College, Coleraine Campus, will be completed and ready for occupation.
(SDLP - East Londonderry) To ask the Minister of Justice to outline her Department's plans for Limavady Courthouse.
(SDLP - East Londonderry) To ask the Minister for the Economy to indicate when she expects natural gas to be extended to (i) Ballykelly; (ii) Greysteel; and whether her Department has given any consideration to the potential investment and demand for gas in the former army barracks at Shackleton.
Session: 2019-2020 2015-2016 2014-2015 2013-2014 2012-2013 2011-2012 2010-2011 2009-2010 2008-2009 2007-2008 2006-2007 The Transitional Assembly The (Hain) Assembly 2002-2003 2001-2002 2000-2001 1999-2000
1 Motion, Page 1 of 1
Enhancing road signage to assist international tourists driving in the Causeway Coast and Glens Area. Adjournment Debate MLA - East Londonderry 22/01/2020
3 Votes On Division, Page 1 of 1
Amendment 13 - Consideration Stage: Private Tenancies (Coronavirus Modifications) Bill (NIA Bill 04/ 28/04/2020 AYE
Election of Principal Deputy Speaker Nomination 1 - Mr Christopher Stalford [Mr G Lyons] 14/01/2020 NO
Election of Speaker Nomination 1 - Mr Alex Maskey [Mrs M O'Neill] 11/01/2020 NO
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Hotel of Vogüé
Work Programme 2012
Transport overview
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HomeOur publicationsOther publications Transport overview Transport Overview No. 53
Transport Overview No. 53
A unique overview by the Centre d’analyse stratégique written by Christine Raynard, Department of Sustainable Development.
1) For the first time in Europe, an airline and a bus company have set up a plane and bus ticket combination package. Iberia and the bus company Alsa joined forces to enable passengers on international flights to continue their trip on intercity buses.
Initially, this service will start being offered in a few weeks for services to Burgos, Soria, Valladolid, Albacete, and Lorca, provincial towns not served internationally by Iberia. The travel time by bus from the airport of Madrid-Barajas is between 2 hours and 5,5 hours.
The departures are scheduled so that travelers have time to pick up their luggage and pass through security without missing their connection.
Ultimately, this offer will be extended to other Spanish cities and even other countries.
Tickets are available on the various sale sites of both companies, as well as their agencies and their websites.
2) The Israeli Prime Minister recently presented a proposed railway line connecting Tel Aviv to Eilat in the south, 350 miles across the Negev desert. Eventually, it will be connected to the ports of Ashdod and Haifa.
Passenger trains will run at a maximum speed of 170 km/h and the line, which will also be designed to handle freight transportation, will be a new gateway between Europe and Asia, currently exclusively possible through the Suez Canal. Ships will be able to unload their cargo at the port of Eilat where it can then be transported by rail.
However, the line will need to guarantee security since the region is relatively unstable.
The project could emerge towards 2017/2018 with an estimated cost of $8,6 billion shekels (1,76 billion euros). Three funding options were considered: direct funding, a public-private partnership or the use of Chinese companies. The third option seems to be the government's preference.
3) The Deutsche Bahn (DB) has created a new bonus scheme for their executive committee members. These bonuses, representing about two thirds of their pay, now depend on two factors, 50% of the bonus is based on employee and customer satisfaction, and 50% on the group's results and its success in reaching the development goals. This scheme will motivate executives to ensure better service.
The calculation of the bonus will be made based on the results of regularly conducted polls that measure the perceptions of passengers. The first surveys of 300,000 employees at the DB are expected to be provided this spring.
This method of matching executive bonuses to customer satisfaction has already existed in Germany for several years in large companies such as Lufthansa and the software producer SAP.
4) The prototype of a small foldable electrical car called Hiriko (meaning "city" in Basque) has just been presented to the European Commission by a consortium of seven small businesses in the Spanish Basque country. Each company is responsible for the production of a module and the innovative idea is to create assembly plants in the cities where the small vehicle is used. Several cities have already shown interest: Barcelona, Berlin, Hong Kong, Malmo (Sweden), Quito and the Galapagos Islands, San Francisco, Vitoria-Gasteiz (second largest city in the Spanish Basque country). Discussions are also underway with Abu Dhabi, Amsterdam, Boston, Brussels, Dubai, Geneva, London and Paris.
This car is designed for two people and can fold into itself, reducing its length by 40% (from 2,50 m to 1,50 m), which facilitates parking.
It has four engines integrated directly into the wheels and several lithium-ion batteries are installed under the car. It can cover distances up to 120 km in cities and has a top speed of 60 km/h. However, it is electronically restrained according to the limitations of the urban city centers. According to the manufacturer, the batteries recharge in just 12 minutes. Hiriko is mainly for car-sharing services, but may also be purchased by individuals. It’s scheduled to be introduced on the market in 2013 at a price of 12,500 euros. The battery will be leased to accommodate the rapid evolution of this technology.
5) The American designer Peter Treadway presented the spnKiX, a type of roller motor attached to shoes, at the international electronics fair in Las Vegas in January 2012.
SpnKiX consists of two fairly massive boots made to look like a smaller version of ski boots with oversized wheels attached. Composed primarily of plastic and aluminum, the spnKiX can reach a top speed of 16 km/h, is powered by rechargeable lithium batteries, can travel about four kilometers (two hours to fully recharge) and is controlled with a wireless remote.
It could start selling on the market sometime in 2012 at 649 dollars (495 euros).
Jean-Michel Roullé, Head of Communications
Tél. +33 (0) 1 42 75 61 37 - jean-michel.roulle@strategie.gouv.fr
Panorama des Transports n° 53
Panoramas des transports plus anciennes
Transport overview 2013
Les accès directs
Legal News website
Government website
Public Service website
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Home /About the Project / Green Living
Green construction, reuse, and preservation can sound a lot like buzzwords, but at McKissick Associates they are the models that shape our everyday work. We are committed to the adaptive reuse of the former Central Junior High School in a way that is environmentally sound and relevant to the local community.
What is “adaptive reuse”?
Adaptive reuse means taking an existing structure and giving it new life by repurposing and renovating the spaces as opposed doing demolition of the existing building and beginning new construction. For this project we will be applying the tenets of adaptive reuse to a large, former junior high school. In the process we will restore parts of the building to their original 1930s construction and renovate interior spaces to suit new purposes such as:
loft-style apartments,
education classrooms and offices,
and modern office space.
What is “Green Globes”?
Green Globes is a certification tool that documents the levels of eco-efficiency and environmental design practices put into place with many types of construction. What it actually means is that we are about the environment, and have updated the Central building in such a way that it improves energy efficiency, use of natural resources, water in both ecologically and economically friendly ways. This project will include things such as a 5,000 square foot green roof, water-efficient plumbing, sustainable materials, and ecologically friendly building practices.
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Ephedra: Asking For Trouble? :: Botany
Ephedra: Asking For Trouble? A member of the phylum Gnetophyta, the Ephedra genus is a perennial, dioecious shrub that reaches 1 1/2 to 4 feet tall (7). There are multiple species of this genus that inhabit the desert regions in certain parts of the world. The three species E. sinica, E. intermedia, and E. equisetina are found in Asia, particularly China and Mongolia. Ephedra distacha is from Europe. India and Pakistan are home to E. gerardiana. North American species consist of E. nevadensis (Mormon tea), E. viridis (desert tea), E. americana, and E. trifurca (7). It takes an average of four years for the shrub to achieve maturation (10) and is harvested in the fall (11). Ephedra has been used medicinally for hundreds, even thousands of years in the regions where it grows. For more than 5000 years, Ephedra's stems have been dried to cure multiple ailments in China. The first records of its use can be found in a Chinese compilation of herbs called Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing (11), which dates back to the first century A.D. (5) E. sinica, called Tsaopen-Ma Huang (2), is the most common species used. Ma Huang refers to the stem and branch, whereas Ma Huanggen refers to the root and rhizome. Ma Huang was used primarily in the treatment of the common cold, asthma, hay fever, bronchitis, edema, arthritis, fever, hypotension, and urticaria (hives). Ma Huanggen's effect is believed to oppose that of the stem and branches. Its use was limited to the treatment of profuse night sweating" (7). Ma Huang was believed to relieve other ailments such as headaches, urinary tract infections, and venereal diseases (10). The Chinese prepared Ephedra different ways, such as extracts and compresses. However, the most common preparation of Ma Huang was as a tea. The stems were dried in the sun and either broken into pieces or crushed into a powder. It was then boiled in a mixture of honey and water. Sometimes it was boiled until only the residue remained, and then consumed (8). Tea appears to be the most common preparation of Ephedra as a medicine in India and North America as well. In India and Pakistan, the stems of E. geradinia were used to treat asthma (8). An ancient collection of Hindu sacred writings called the Rigved gives mention of a drink called soma. Soma was a juice made from Ephedra and was believed to promote longevity (6).
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The G20 and Jobs: Time for Plan B
When the economic crisis broke following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the global banking system seized up, workers began to be laid off, families saw their houses repossessed and banks teetered on the brink of collapse. Financial panic knew no frontiers. It was clear that a coordinated global response by governments and institutions was required to counter what the IMF termed the “Great Recession”. The major economies used the G20 as the forum to coordinate their responses, scaling it up from a low-key Finance Ministers’ Forum into a Heads of Government Summit process – effectively replacing the G8.
The international trade union movement responded rapidly[1], matching the “heat” of the street with the “light” of policy messages coming out of the G20 Summits. Trade union demands centred on stabilising employment, putting in place social protection for workers hit by the crisis, and effective and coordinated government intervention to support the global economy so as to prevent the “Great Recession” becoming a 1930s-style “Great Depression”. Three years later, with the crisis in a new and even more dangerous phase and major economies slipping into recession, the trade union agenda is as valid as it ever was.
At the first G20 Summit of Leaders held in Washington DC in November 2008, the Global Unions’ “Washington Declaration” called on governments to initiate a major recovery plan that invested in infrastructure and “green jobs” and protected low incomes; reregulate financial markets and put an end to “an ideology of unfettered financial markets”; and to democratize economic governance – giving the ILO a seat at the G20 table and providing for the meaningful participation of trade unions. The trade union statement also stressed the need for governments to attack the “crisis before the crisis” – the explosion of inequality in income distribution that today is recognised as being one of the causes of the debt bubble in the United States that contributed to the financial meltdown.
The Washington DC G20 Summit was followed by two Summits in 2009 in London and Pittsburgh. The initial policy response by the G20, whilst far from meeting all of the trade union demands, was nevertheless positive. Coordinated stimulus plans were put in place, which the ILO estimated saved some 21 million jobs worldwide in the period 2009-2010. At Pittsburgh, G20 governments made a commitment to “putting quality jobs at the heart of the recovery”, largely a result of the policy advocacy of the global union movement. In 2010, at the G20 Labour and Employment Ministers’ Meeting held in Washington DC, the G20 went even further and called for “corrective measures” to address the widening of income inequality through “minimum wage policies and improved institutions for social dialogue and collective bargaining”. However, little was done to translate these commitments into action. Moreover, despite potentially far-reaching announcements of the desire to reregulate financial markets and institutions at the London Summit Action Plan on financial regulation, the governments who bailed out major financial institutions left the power relations and corporate cultures unchanged with disastrous effect. The opportunity was missed for a more radical nationalisation and restructuring of the major institutions when this would have been politically feasible in 2008 and 2009.
The progress made in supporting growth was also brought to an abrupt end as a recovery began in early 2010. The trigger for the change was the sovereign debt crisis that exploded with Greece in the spring of 2010. In the space of just a few weeks, the G20 finance ministers pivoted away from supporting employment and demand in the global economy to a premature focus on fiscal consolidation for fear that they would be faced with rising spreads of interest rates on their sovereign debt and therefore hoped to appease the bond markets. Moreover, the agenda for fiscal consolidation was dominated by public expenditure cuts and austerity measures rather than revenue-raising measures such as the introduction of a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT), which would help ensure that the financial sector makes its contribution to paying for the crisis as well as calming speculation.
By the second half of 2010, G20 government policymaking was being driven by global financial markets rather than the other way round. The banks returned to profits thanks to the unprecedented guarantees of their liabilities provided by governments. They got on with the business of paying massive bonuses and lobbying against financial reform, while failing to start lending again to small and medium-sized enterprises. And all these problems were compounded by the reinforcement of the austerity message at the Toronto and Seoul G20 Summits in 2010, chaired by deeply conservative governments with little ambition to move the G20 agenda forward and even less concern for the “jobs” agenda.
The trade unions’ primary objective for the 2011 French G20 Presidency was to put past G20 commitments to quality employment and financial market regulation back on track. Trade unions put these issues on the table at the first “L20” – “Labour G20” – held at the Cannes G20 Summit in November 2011. Trade unions called on the G20 to recognise that their priority in the short-term should be to reduce unemployment, while making public budgets sustainable in the medium-term. This means first and foremost getting people back to work, not slashing expenditure.
The Cannes G20 was a tale of two Summits. On the one hand there was a Summit that delivered progress, on paper at least, with regard to growth and jobs, monetary reform, food prices, social protection, development and G20 governance, including an “institutionalisation” of social partner participation in the G20 process. It also created a G20 Task Force on Employment to focus on youth employment and called on the ILO, OECD, IMF and World Bank to report to G20 Finance Ministers on the global employment outlook and the employment impact of the G20 Framework. On the other hand, there was a parallel Summit dominated by the Euro-zone crisis, which filled the press headlines that almost totally focused on the Greek sovereign debt crisis and its potential contagion to Italy and other countries.
In any case the outcomes of Cannes have been completely overtaken by subsequent events. First, the Greek and Italian leaders have resigned and been replaced with “technocrat” administrators who have the expressed aim of “reforming” public finance in order to stabilise the bond markets. Then, at its meeting in December 2011, the European Council adopted an inter-governmental agreement which imposes considerable budget “discipline” and a dangerous balanced budget rule on Euro-zone member countries implying greater austerity and budget cuts. This significantly undermines the prospect of achieving growth levels sufficient to create the number of jobs required in the G20 – 21 million a year to bring unemployment down to 2008 levels in the medium-term as estimated by the OECD and the ILO.
The author is writing this column having just participated in discussions on youth unemployment during the social partners’ consultations at the first meeting of the G20 Task Force on Employment held in Mexico on December 15. Unions now have a “seat at the table” for at least some of the G20 meetings. But many of the government representatives on the Task Force see the limits of their ambition as exchanging good practice on apprenticeship systems or other supply side measures. Against the background of renewed austerity, neither such supply side-measures nor the positive announcements on jobs at the G20 in Cannes will significantly reduce the numbers of unemployed.
There is, however, an alternative. “Plan B” would involve those economies with fiscal space and who still have access to capital markets taking stimulus measures – even the OECD November 2011 Economic Outlook has said that this applies to half OECD members – and making this stimulus growth contingent, as Australia did in 2009, i.e. the withdrawal of stimulus should be contingent on growth returning to above trend rates.
The Global Unions have put forward a four point plan for jobs and recovery – a “Plan B” that would not only stem the crisis but shape a post-crisis world that would be economically, socially and environmentally just and sustainable. This Plan B entails that G20 governments should:
Fulfil their Pittsburgh commitment to put “quality jobs at the heart of the recovery” by establishing differentiated but coordinated job targets for the G20 countries. This would include immediate measures for job-intensive infrastructure programmes, green jobs investment and labour market programmes to raise skills;
Transform the structural policy agenda to strengthen labour market institutions, social partnership, collective bargaining, negotiated and legislated minimum wages, and income support for low-income groups so as to reduce income inequality. This must include a jobs pact for youth;
Move forward to establish a social protection floor that is supported by adequate funding according to levels of development;
Implement rapidly the reforms to the financial sector that had been agreed at the G20 London Summit but never effectively enacted, and go beyond this to effectively restructure financial groups that have become too-big-to-fail, and establish a financial transaction tax.
If coupled with “Plan B”, commitments made on jobs by G20 governments in the Cannes Declaration might actually have a chance of being met.
[1] The Global Unions Statements to the G20 Summits and Ministerial meetings and the ITUC-TUAC evaluations of the outcomes are available on the TUAC and ITUC websites www.tuac.org and www.ituc-csi.org
John Evans is General Secretary of the Paris-based Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD (TUAC). Prior to joining TUAC, his previous appointments have included Research Officer at the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) in Brussels, Industry Secretary at the International Federation of Commercial, Clerical and Technical Employees (FIET) in Geneva and Economist in the Economic Department of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in London. He is currently a member of the Board of the Global Reporting Initiative, and member of the Helsinki Group.
Posted in: Fiscal Space,Growth,Inequality,Wage
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Review: Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (Microsoft Xbox 360)
Michael O'Reilly | July 10, 2009 | Archive, Top Story, Video Game Reviews, Xbox 360 | No Comments
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
Developer: Techland
Genre: First Person Shooter
Ah, the Wild West. Many tales have been told about the taming of the West, often in the movies. A lot of them have even been enjoyable. Not so many of these tales have been told in videogames. Maybe it’s too far outside the mainstream these days, I don’t know. Whatever the reason was, things seem to be changing. In the past few years we’ve had games like Gun, Red Dead Revolver, Darkwatch and Call of Juarez all come out to varying degrees of success. At least enough success to warrant two sequels, one upcoming for Red Dead Revolver, and this one, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood.
Bound in Blood is actually a prequel to the first Call of Juarez, and it does much to establish how things stand as they do in the first game. The plot in BiB revolves around three brothers, two of which are playable (Ray and Thomas), and William McCall. The story starts near the end of the Civil War, with General Sherman advancing through Georgia on his way to Atlanta. After rescuing Thomas, both desert the Confederate cause and rush to their home to defend it from the incoming Union forces. This greatly angers their Colonel, who then makes it his mission to see them hang. Instead of you know, stopping Sherman’s march to the sea.
Time passes and we see that the McCall’s have gone West in search of a way to make their fortune so they can rebuild the now ruined family home. Ray and Thomas have seen war and it has changed them. They do not hesitate to pull a gun and take what isn’t there’s. William, on the other hand, is not like his brothers. He had to stay home and take care of his ailing mother, and had only his faith in God to protect him. He has become a priest, and does his best to see that his brothers don’t become murderous thugs. He fails. Miserably. Perhaps because he wouldn’t shut up about it. I know that would annoy me.
Anyway. You have two brothers, both of whom are willing to take what they want and no quarrels between them. Insert conniving woman. Insert legend of lost gold. Stir as needed. Instant drama. Is it a very good story? I wouldn’t say that. It’s certainly not a classic at any rate. It does just enough to introduce most of the characters that you would later see in the original game.
While the story in BiB is less than enthralling, the graphics are more than passable. Most of the time the game looks great. The character models look pretty lifelike, with hardly any uncanny valley going on at all. There are a few things I take issue with, but on the whole this is the best looking western game I’ve ever played.
So what do I take issue with? Well, for starters if you’re playing on a standard definition screen be ready to grab your magnifying glass to read anything on screen. Just like in past games like Dead Rising, the text is clearly intended to be read on a high def screen.
Additionally, I know they were going for realism and all, but I don’t need to be blinded by sunlight every other level. It’s very irritating, especially when you have to stare into the light in order to find your targets.
As with the graphics, I have very little to complain about when it comes to the Audio in BiB. The voice acting is strong, with no obvious or out of place accents. Nobody phones their lines in, and each character is more interesting because of it. Even William is believable. Annoying, true, but believably annoying.
The music is terrific as well. It complements the action on screen, and heightens the drama when it’s needed. At no time did I go in search of a way to mute the music. The real winner here though are the sound effects. Cannon balls crash and rifles blast, soldiers yell, all of it bringing the soundscape in each level to life beautifully.
Controls/Gameplay:
For most of the levels you are given a choice of playing using Ray or Thomas. Each brother has his own unique skills that they bring to the game. Ray, for example, can wield two pistols. He can also throw and use dynamite. Thomas meanwhile has a lasso, can use throwing knives, and can also use the bow and arrow. There are also physical acts which one brother can do while the other can’t. Thomas can climb and then help Ray up, while Ray is capable of breaking down some doors. The lasso that Thomas uses is for grabbing onto exposed items like branches or poles jutting out of buildings which will allow you to climb to higher levels. As most levels in the game are designed with you being able to play either character, there is usually a point in each level which will require you to do something which the other character cannot. This may involve you climbing to the roof of a building while Ray distracts your enemies, things of that nature.
Red Dead Revolver, you have the ability to use a version of bullet time, where you are able to target multiple enemies and then unload on everyone you can. Ray can fire both of his pistols while doing this, but Thomas can only use one. To make up for that Thomas can fire his pistol even faster, if you perform the required motion with the right analog stick quickly enough. With either character I found this mode to be implemented less satisfactorily than in Red Dead. I don’t even know why honestly. Perhaps it’s because in Red Dead the skill was more required than it appeared to be here.
In addition to the on foot levels there are points in the game where Techland have decided to break up the monotony. So at times you will find yourself commanding a Gatling gun, an artillery cannon, and riding on and then in a stage coach blazing away at a seemingly endless horde of horsemen. The artillery cannon was awkward at first but it doesn’t take long to start raining steel down on the enemy, while the Galtling gun is what you’d expect from a machine gun type of weapon.
Replayability:
Techland have included a multiplayer mode for players who can’t get enough rootin and tooin. This mode, which includes variations on deathmatch and other staples of the genre is fairly basic but it could be enjoyable, if enough people were playing the game online. During my time with the game I had a difficult time getting a game of more the six people going at any one time, but your mileage may vary there.
The game also encourages you to replay through the chapters using only one character. Doing so will grant you an achievement. Speaking of achievements, Techland did a very nice job of giving players an easy way to see how close they are to the various achievements in the game. By being able to click a button and see that I’m 30% away from achieving some achievement or another is a nice way to encourage me to try harder to get that achievement. In many ways it felt like seeing how far you had to go to level up your character in an RPG. I hope more developers latch onto this idea.
This game screams for co-operative gameplay, yet its not there. I don’t know why not. Stages where two people fight there way to a common goal, occasionally having to assist one another by using their unique skills? Yeah I can’t see how that would be attractive with another person either.
There are a few levels where you are in some fog or mist. You have great difficulty seeing your enemies but strangely they can peg you off from across the screen. Perhaps they are wearing Civil War era night vision goggles, I don’t know.
The duels are needlessly difficult. I’m not going to dwell on these again, but they do need to be mentioned.
Well this is perhaps the first co-op game that doesn’t include co-op, how’s that for originality? On a more serious note, aside from being completely disrespectful to the beliefs of a Native American tribe, I’d say there is nothing original at all in this game. The sole positive being the Achievement chart which I discussed earlier.
Addictiveness:
The game starts off pretty well, but the story and the characters just killed any kind of addiction I might have been developing the more you delve into it.
Appeal Factor:
Well, certainly if you enjoyed the first Call of Juarez game this one will fit right into your tastes. Secondly, if you enjoy the Wild West and crave any game that sets itself directly into that genre then Bound in Blood will certainly satisfy that craving. Otherwise it’s a first person shooter with a somewhat limited selection of weapons and a story which leaves something to be desired.
One level finds you attacking a sacred Indian burial ground. I get it, you need a way to add something to your game, and attacking a Comanche burial ground will certainly give your game that certain something, but it won’t be class. I could only imagine while playing this level what people would say if you were instead having a gun battle inside the Vatican, or somewhere else considered sacred and holy. Your Apache guide chides you for doing it after the mission is over, but that’s not really good enough.
Story: Below Average
Graphics: Very Good
Sound: Great
Control and Gameplay: Above Average
Replayability: Decent
Balance: Poor
Originality: Pretty Poor
Addictiveness: Bad
Appeal Factor: Mediocre
Miscellaneous: Dreadful
FINAL SCORE: Mediocre Game
Well, the gameplay is ok, but the story just kills it for me. In order for me to get interested in something as clichéd as mythical Aztec gold, I’m going to have to like the characters a hell of a lot more than I like Ray and Thomas. If they make a third Call of Juarez game they had better make the characters more interesting or else the call will go straight to voice mail.
10 Thoughts on…G.I. Joe Battleground (iOS/Android)
5 Comments | Jul 3, 2013
Tabletop Review: Dungeons & Dragons: Conquest of Nerath
Review: Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks (PS2)
Review: Halo 2 (XB)
Based out of Toronto Ontario, Michael is a long time reviewer and columnist for Diehard Gamefan, as well as being one of our International Correspondents.
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The Eudyptula Challenge
What was it?
The Eudyptula Challenge was a series of programming exercises for the Linux kernel, that started from a very basic "Hello world" kernel module, moving on up in complexity to getting patches accepted into the main Linux kernel source tree.
How do I do it?
Unfortunately right now the Eudyptula challenge is not accepting new applicants. It has had over 19 thousand developers sign up over the past three years, and is currently taking a bit of time off to let the existing applicants finish the tasks. After that happens, it will return in a probably different format than the existing one was.
Yeah, we know, you just now found out about this and really really really want to be let in to do the tasks. Well, you can always attempt to bribe the set of shell scripts to do so. How you can do that will be left as an exercise for the reader, consider it your "task 00" to complete.
Who is behind this?
A set of convoluted shell scripts that are slowly getting angry and resist all efforts to successfully debug.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
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Posts Tagged ‘Andrew Lockington’
Soundtrack Album for Paramount+’s ‘Mayor of Kingstown’ to Be Released
Posted: January 6, 2022 by filmmusicreporter in TV Music Albums
Tags: Andrew Lockington, Mayor of Kingstown, Paramount+, score, Soundtrack
Lakeshore Records will release a soundtrack album for the Paramount+ original series Mayor of Kingstown. The album features selections of the original music from the show’s first season composed by Andrew Lockington (San Andreas, Rampage, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Frontier, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters). The soundtrack will be released digitally tomorrow, January 7 and […]
Tags: Amazon, Andrew Lockington, Anna Waronker, Cowboy Bebop, Daniel Rojas, Hulu, Jina Hyojin An, Lorne Balfe, Marvel's Hit-Monkey, Mayor of Kingstown, Netflix, Paramount+, Shirley Song, Showtime, The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star, The Wheel of Time, Theodore Shapiro, Yellowjackets, Yoko Kanno
Premiering today is the Paramount+ original series Mayor of Kingstown created by Taylor Sheridan & Hugh Dillon and starring Jeremy Renner, Dianne Wiest, Kyle Chandler, Taylor Handley, Dillon himself, Emma Laird and Tobi Bamtefa. The show’s original music is composed by Andrew Lockington (San Andreas, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Frontier, Rampage, Percy Jackson: Sea […]
Andrew Lockington Scoring Paramount+’s ‘Mayor of Kingstown’
Posted: October 27, 2021 by filmmusicreporter in TV Scoring Assignments
Tags: Andrew Lockington, Mayor of Kingstown, Paramount+, Taylor Sheridan
Andrew Lockington (San Andreas, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Rampage, Frontier, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters) is scoring the new Paramount+ original series Mayor of Kingstown. The show is created by Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone, Wind River, Those Who Wish Me Dead) & Hugh Dillon and stars Jeremy Renner, Dianne Wiest, Kyle Chandler, Dillon himself, Taylor Handley, Emma […]
Weekly Film Music Roundup (April 16, 2021)
Posted: April 16, 2021 by filmmusicreporter in Film Music News
Tags: Aldo Shllaku, Alexis Grapsas, Andrew Lockington, Beast Beast, Benji Merrison, Clint Mansell, Danny Madden, David C. Williams, In the Earth, Michael White, Monday, Night of the Sicario, Robert Allaire, SAS: Red Notice, Trigger Point, Vanquish
Opening in select theaters today is the horror movie In the Earth written and directed by Ben Wheatley and starring Joel Fry, Reece Shearsmith, Ellora Torchia and Hayley Squires. The film’s original music is composed by Clint Mansell (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, The Fountain, Noah, Rebecca, Moon, Titans, Doom Patrol). Lakeshore Records & Invada Records have released a […]
‘Trigger Point’ Soundtrack Album Details
Posted: April 15, 2021 by filmmusicreporter in Film Music Albums
Tags: Andrew Lockington, Brad Turner, Michael White, score, Soundtrack, Trigger Point
MovieScore Media will release a soundtrack album for the thriller Trigger Point. The album features the film’s original music composed by Andrew Lockington (San Andreas, Rampage, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Frontier, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters) & Michael White (V Wars, Aftermath) . The soundtrack will be released digitally tomorrow, April 16 and will […]
Andrew Lockington & Michael White Scoring Brad Turner’s ‘Trigger Point’
Posted: March 22, 2021 by filmmusicreporter in Film Scoring Assignments
Tags: Andrew Lockington, Brad Turner, Michael White, Trigger Point
Andrew Lockington (San Andreas, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Rampage, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters) & Michael White (Aftermath) are co-scoring the upcoming thriller Trigger Point. The film is directed by Brad Turner (24, Helix, The Shannara Chronicles) and stars Barry Pepper, Colm Feore, Eve Harlow, Laura Vandervoort, Jayne Eastwood, Rainbow Sun Francks […]
Weekly TV Music Roundup (January 10, 2021)
Posted: January 10, 2021 by filmmusicreporter in TV Scoring Assignments
Tags: Alexandra Harwood, American Gods, Andrew Lockington, Anna Waronker, Brooke Blair, Call Me Kat, Christophe Beck, Erick Schroder, Fox, H. Scott Salinas, HBO, HBO Max, Hulu, Jeff Richmond, John Powell, Locked Down, Mr. Mayor, NBC, Netflix, Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, PBS, Starz, The CW, The Ultimate Playlist of Noise, Tiger, Todor Kobakov, Trickster, WandaVision, Will Blair
Premiering in the U.S. tonight is the British series All Creatures Great and Small written by Ben Vanstone based on the classic BBC programme, directed by Brian Percival and starring Nicholas Ralph, Samuel West, Anna Madeley, Callum Woodhouse and Rachel Shenton The show’s original music is composed by Alexandra Harwood (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel […]
Andrew Lockington Tapped as Composer of ‘American Gods’ Season 3
Posted: December 23, 2020 by filmmusicreporter in TV Scoring Assignments
Tags: American Gods, Andrew Lockington, Starz
Andrew Lockington (San Andreas, Rampage, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Rampage, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters) has been tapped as the new composer of the Starz original series American Gods. He is scoring the third season of the show developed by Bryan Fuller & Michael Green based on Neil Gaiman’s novel and starring […]
Weekly Film Music Roundup (February 14, 2020)
Posted: February 14, 2020 by filmmusicreporter in Film Music News
Tags: A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, A Simple Wedding, Andrew Lockington, Bear McCreary, Brian Irvine, Buffaloed, Camp Cold Brook, Chad Rehmann, David Holmes, Downhill, Fantasy Island, Junkie XL, Matthew Margeson, Nima Fakhrara, Ordinary Love, Robert Glasper, Roger Suen, Sonic the Hedgehog, Spy Intervention, Steve Moore, Tamar-Kali, The Kindness of Strangers, The Last Thing He Wanted, The Photograph, Tom Holkenborg, Tom Howe, VFW, Volker Bertelmann
Four new movies are opening in theaters nationwide this weekend: Opening in most theaters is the live-action adventure comedy Sonic the Hedgehog directed by Jeff Fowler and starring James Marsden, Ben Schwartz, Tika Sumpter, Natasha Rothwell, Neal McDonough, Adam Pally and Jim Carrey. The film’s original music is composed by Tom Holkenborg (aka Junkie XL) (Mad Max: Fury […]
‘The Kindness of Strangers’ Soundtrack Details
Posted: February 12, 2020 by filmmusicreporter in Film Music Albums
Tags: Andrew Lockington, Lone Scherfig, score, Soundtrack, The Kindness of Strangers
Varese Sarabande has announced a soundtrack album for the drama The Kindness of Strangers. The album features the film’s original music composed by Andrew Lockington (San Andreas, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Rampage, Frontier, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters). The soundtrack will be released digitally this Friday, February 14 and will be available […]
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Poet Justin Chin taken off life support after stroke
Award-winning writer was a prominent figure in the Bay Area's literary scene.
Sad news out of San Francisco. Award-winning writer and poet Justin Chin, a prominent figure in the Bay Area literary scene, was taken off life support Tuesday after suffering a massive stroke last week.
S.F. Poet Justin Chin Taken Off Life Support After a Stroke
On Friday, a neighbor discovered Chin, 46, unconscious after hearing a loud sound from his apartment. After several days in the intensive care unit, doctors said Chin was unlikely to recover, and his family requested to remove him from his ventilator, according to friends.
Born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore, Chin made his way to the United States, eventually settling in San Francisco. Chin's prolific writing -- he wrote and published seven books -- often explored his identity as a gay Asian American.
Born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore, Chin came to San Francisco, where his raw and often funny writing made him a prominent figure in the Bay Area literary scene. His first book of poetry, Bite Hard, was published in 1997 by San Francisco’s Manic D Press. Two more followed: Harmless Medicine in 2001 and Gutted — a series of poems about Chin’s experience of taking care of his ailing, elderly father — in 2006. Gutted won a Thom Gunn Award for Poetry in 2007 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.
Chin also published Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes & Pranks with St. Martin’s press in 1999 and a quasi-memoir, Burden of Ashes, with Alyson Publications in 2002.
In both his poetry and prose, Chin explored his identity as a gay Asian American. Bite Hard studies — in vivid detail — lovers and dreams, crabs and HIV. But his work quickly shifts from gritty to nostalgic. In “Incontinence,” one of the poems in Gutted, Chin describes how one of his father’s medications robs him of urinary and bowel control. “And I just again want to be the one/who fell asleep in the stands with his head/in his dad’s lap at the home team’s first game,” he writes.
More here: Justin Chin, San Francisco Poet, Off Life Support After Stroke
FILE UNDER: bay area, justin chin, poetry, rest in peace, san francisco
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Home Editorial
Editorial – Media Under Siege Again
The standoff between the media and the government yet again on the arrest of the editor of Sanaleibak on charges of the latter being a conduit of a faction of the underground KCP which is currently poised to hold talks with the Central and state governments is unfortunate. The facts of the matter is, the editor, who is the spokesperson of the All Manipur Working Journalists Union, AMWJU, was contacted by a leader of this particular underground faction and asked him to fly in a delegate of the AMWJU to New Delhi, where they would have a consultative meeting before a crucial meeting the underground group was to have with the government to finalise the peace negotiation framework. The AMWJU spokesperson quite obviously told the caller that the journalist organisation would not have the money to spare for such a trip, whereby the faction leader volunteered to provide the money for the tickets. The money was sent to the editor, but when the delivery was done, it was by police commandos in civvies. The policemen promptly arrested the editor charging he was collecting money on behalf of the particular underground organisation. According to the police, the money, Rs. 50,000 in all, was an extorted amount from a gas agency nearby.
One telephone call, or perhaps two, should have solved the problem with further fuss. The first can be to the leader of the underground organisation, who is now with the government, as to whether his organisation sent the money to the editor for the purchase of three tickets and other incidental travel costs to New Delhi. If he says yes, half the problem would have been solved, at least as far as the charge of complicity of the editor is concerned in the reported extortion. The second call can be to the proprietor of the gas agency from whom the money is said to have been extorted. The story goes that the extortion demand was for Rs. 5 lakhs, but had been negotiated down to Rs. 50,000. The further police charges that the editor was also part of the negotiation to bring down this extortion amount, which of course the editor denies. If the editor was indeed negotiating for the lowering of the extortion amount, he would have been on the gas agent’s side and the latter should be able to confirm the veracity of the charge. If the case was pursued with honesty of purpose, there would have been absolutely no need to humiliate the editor, whose reputation and integrity anybody in the journalistic fraternity would vouch without hesitation. Being an important office bearer of the apex body of journalists in a conflict ridden state, he and others in similar offices have had to be in the unenviable position of being the shock absorbers whenever the journalist community faced trouble with various underground factions, as well as with the government. Indeed such matters have become so routine that they have come to be handled with a degree of casualness, as indeed the editor in question seems to be somewhat guilty of.
What is surprising is, the underground group concerned in this case is one among those on truce with the government. Not only would it be simple for the government to find out the truth behind the case, but even if there indeed was an extortion crime involved, it is the government which must be answerable, for the group is among those under its wings at the moment. So the police charge of extortion would actually amount to the government spitting at the sky, knowing full well gravity would ensure the spittle ultimately returns to land on its own face. Before the faceoff hardens too much, let the matter be resolved amicably and justly. The journalists are not saying the community should be given impunity from the normal process of law, but that the present case is too flimsy and appears to be a deliberate and vindictive attack on the profession to browbeat it and its practitioners. All it would take for this resolution to be arrived at is a little transparency. Let the government come clear on what the underground faction in question has to say on the matter. If the money involved was looted from a gas agency, and that as alleged the arrested editor had something to do with it, let the owner of the agency testify. Short of such a measure, the protest by the journalists is perfectly legitimate.
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John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible
He preached in the same church as C. H. Spurgeon. Gill is little known, but his works contain gems of information found nowhere outside of the ancient Jewish writings. Gill presents a verse-by-verse exposition of the entire Bible.
INTRODUCTION TO EXODUS 1
This chapter begins with an account of the names and number of the children of Israel that came into Egypt with Jacob, Exodus 1:1 and relates that increase of them after the death of Joseph, and the generation that went down to Egypt, Exodus 1:6 and what methods the Egyptians took to diminish them, but to no purpose, as by obliging to cruel bondage and hard service; and yet the more they were afflicted, the more they increased, Exodus 1:9 by ordering the midwives of the Hebrew women to slay every son they laid them of; but they fearing God, did not obey the order of the king of Egypt, which when he expostulated with them about, they excused, and so the people multiplied, Exodus 1:15 and lastly, by ordering every male child to be cast into the river, Exodus 1:22 and which is the leading step to the account of the birth of Moses, which follows in the next chapter.
Now these are the names of the children of Israel which came down into Egypt,.... Of the twelve patriarchs, the sons of Jacob, who were heads of the twelve tribes, whose names are here given; since the historian is about to give an account of their coming out of Egypt, and that it might be observed how greatly they increased in it, and how exactly the promise to Abraham, of the multiplication of his seed, was fulfilled: or, "and these are the names"F2ואלה "et haec", Pagninus, Montanus, Drusius. , &c. this book being connected with the former by the copulative "and"; and when this was wrote, it is highly probable there was no division of the books made, but the history proceeded in one continued account:
every man and his household came with Jacob; into Egypt, all excepting Joseph, and along with them their families, wives, children, and servants; though wives and servants are not reckoned into the number of the seventy, only such as came out of Jacob's loins: the Targum of Jonathan is,"a man with the men of his house,'as if only male children were meant, the sons of Jacob and his grandsons; and Aben Ezra observes, that women were never reckoned in Scripture as of the household or family; but certainly Dinah, and Serah, as they came into Egypt with Jacob, are reckoned among the seventy that came with him thither, Genesis 46:15.
Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. The first sons of Jacob by Leah.
Issachar, Zebulun,.... The other two sons of Jacob, by Leah:
Benjamin; the youngest of all Jacob's sons is placed here, being his son by his beloved wife Rachel. Joseph is not put into the account, because he did not go into Egypt with Jacob.
Dan, and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. Who are last mentioned, being sons of the concubine wives.
And all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy souls,.... "Souls" are put for persons; of the number seventy, and how reckoned; see Gill on Genesis 46:27. This was but a small number that went down to Egypt, when compared with that which went out of it; and that it should be compared with it is the design of its being mentioned, see Exodus 12:37,
for Joseph was in Egypt already; and is the reason why he is not reckoned among the sons of Jacob, that came thither with him; though rather it may be better rendered, "with Joseph who was in Egypt"F3ויסף "cum Josepho qui erat in Aegypto", Junius & Tremellius, Ainsworth, Noldius, No. 1197. p. 273. so the Arabic version, Kimchi, and Ben Melech. ; for he must be reckoned, and indeed his two sons also, to make up the number seventy; therefore Jonathan rightly supplies it,"with Joseph and his sons who were in Egypt,'See Gill on Genesis 46:27.
And Joseph died, and all his brethren,.... It is a notion of the Jews, that Joseph died before any of his brethren; see Gill on Genesis 50:26 and they gather it from these words; but it does not necessarily follow from hence, they might die some before him and some after him; and as they were all born in about seven years' time, excepting Benjamin, they might all die within a little time of each other: according to the Jewish writersF4R. Bechai apud Shalshalet Hakabala, fol. 3. 2. & 4. 1. , the dates of their death were these,"Reuben lived one hundred and twenty four years, and died two years after Joseph; Simeon lived one hundred and twenty years, and died the year after Joseph; Levi lived one hundred and thirty seven years, and died twenty four years after Joseph; Judah lived one hundred and nineteen years, Issachar one hundred and twenty two, Zebulun one hundred and twenty four, and died two years after Joseph; Dan lived one hundred and twenty seven years, Asher one hundred and twenty three years, Benjamin one hundred and eleven years, and died twenty six years before Levi; Gad lived one hundred and twenty five years, and Naphtali one hundred and thirty three years;'but though this account of the Jews, of their times, and of the times of their death, is not to be depended upon, yet it is certain they all died in Egypt, though they were not buried there; but as Stephen says, Acts 7:16 they were carried over to Shechem and interred there, either quickly after their decease, or, however, were taken along with the bones of Joseph by the children of Israel, when they departed out of Egypt: and it is also evident that they all died before the affliction and oppression of the children of Israel in Egypt began; and this account seems to be given on purpose to point this out unto us, being placed in the order it is. Levi lived the longest of them all, and the affliction did not begin till after his death; and the Jewish chronologers sayF5R. Gedaliah in Shalshalet, fol. 5. 1. Ganz. Tzemach David: par. 1. fol. 6. 1. that from his death to the children of Israel's going out of Egypt were one hundred and sixteen years; and they further observeF6Seder Olam Rabba, c. 3. p. 9. , that it could not last more than one hundred and sixteen years, and not less than eighty seven, according to the years of Miriam:
and all that generation; in which Joseph and his brethren had lived. These also died, Egyptians as well as Israelites, before the oppression began.
And the children of Israel were fruitful,.... In their offspring; became like fruitful trees, as the word signifies:
and increased abundantly; like creeping things, or rather like fishes, which increase very much, see Genesis 1:20.
and multiplied; became very numerous, whereby the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, were fulfilled:
and waxed exceeding mighty; were hale, and strong, of good constitutions, able bodied men, and so more dreaded by the Egyptians: a heap of words is here used to express the vast increase of the people of Israel in Egypt:
and the land was filled with them; not the whole land of Egypt, but the land of Goshen: at first they were seated in a village in that country, but now they were spread throughout the towns and cities in it.
Now there arose up a new king over Egypt,.... Stephen calls him another king, Acts 7:18 one of another family, according to JosephusF7Antiqu. l. 2. c. 9. sect. 1. ; who was not of the seed royal, as Aben Ezra; and Sir John MarshamF8Canon. Chron. Sec. 8. p. 107. thinks this was Salatis, who, according to ManethoF9Apud Joseph. Contr. Apion. l. 1. sect. 14. , was the first of the Hycsi or pastor kings that ruled in lower Egypt; but these kings seem to have reigned before that time; see Gill on Genesis 46:34 and Bishop UsherF11Annal. Vet. Test. p. 17. 18. takes this king to be one of the ancient royal family, whose name was Ramesses Miamun; and gives us a succession of the Egyptian kings from the time of Joseph's going into Egypt to this king: the name of that Pharaoh that reigned when Joseph was had into Egypt, and whose dreams he interpreted, was Mephramuthosis; after him reigned Thmosis, Amenophis, and Orus; and in the reign of the last of these Joseph died, and after Orus reigned Acenehres a daughter of his, then Rathotis a brother of Acenchres, after him Acencheres a son of Rathotis, then another Acencheres, after him Armais, then Ramesses, who was succeeded by Ramesses Miamun, here called the new king, because, as the JewsF12T. Bab. Erubin. fol. 53. 1. say, new decrees were made in his time; and this Pharaoh, under whom Moses was born, they call TalmaF13Juchasin, fol. 135. 2. , and with ArtapanusF14Apud Euseb. Praepar. Evangel. l. 9. c. 27. p. 431. his name is Palmanothes:
which knew not Joseph; which is not to be understood of ignorance of his person, whom he could not know; nor of the history of him, and of the benefits done by him to the Egyptian nation, though, no doubt, this was among their records, and which, one would think, he could not but know; or rather, he had no regard to the memory of Joseph; and so to his family and kindred, the whole people of Israel: he acknowledged not the favours of Joseph to his nation, ungratefully neglected them, and showed no respect to his posterity, and those in connection with him, on his account; though, if a stranger, it is not to be wondered at.
And he said unto his people,.... His princes, nobles, and courtiers about him, his principal ministers of state:
behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we: which could not be true in fact, but is said to stir up his nobles to attend to what he was about to say, and to work upon them to take some speedy measures for the crushing of this people; for that they were more in number, and mightier in power and wealth than the Egyptians, it was impossible; and indeed it may seem strange, that the king should tell such an untruth, which might be so easily contradicted by his courtiers; though the words will bear to be otherwise rendered, as that "the children of Israel are many"F15רב "multus", Pagninus, Montanus, Drusius, Rivet. ; as they were very greatly multiplied, and became very numerous; and they might be "mightier", that is, more robust and strong, and fitter for war than the Egyptians, and therefore, were formidable, and a people to be guarded against; and it was high time to think of securing themselves from them, before they grew too mighty and powerful; or they might be more numerous and mighty in that part of the land in which they were, in Goshen, though not more and mightier than the Egyptians in general.
Come on,.... Which is a word of exhortation, stirring up to a quick dispatch of business, without delay, the case requiring haste, and some speedy and a matter of indifference:
let us deal wisely with them; form some wise schemes, take some crafty methods to weaken and diminish them gradually; not with open force of arms, but in a more private and secret manner, and less observed:
lest they multiply; yet more and more, so that in time it may be a very difficult thing to keep them under, and many disadvantages to the kingdom may arise from them, next observed:
and it come to pass, that when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies; their neighbours the Arabians, and Phoenicians, and Ethiopians: with the latter the Egyptians had wars, as they had in the times of Moses, as JosephusF16Antiqu. l. 2. c. 10. relates, and ArtapanusF17Ut supra. (Apud Euseb. Praepar. Evangel. l. 9. c. 27. p. 431.) , an Heathen writer, also: Sir John MarshamF18Canon Chron. See 8. p. 107. thinks these enemies were the old Egyptians, with whom the Israelites had lived long in a friendly manner, and so more likely to join with them, the Thebans who lived in upper Egypt, and between whom and the pastor kings that reigned in lower Egypt there were frequent wars; but these had been expelled from Egypt some time ago:
and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land; take the opportunity, by joining their enemies and fighting against them, to get away from them out of Egypt into the land of Canaan, from whence they came: this, it seems, the Egyptians had some notion of, that they were meditating something of this kind, often speaking of the land of Canaan being theirs, and that they should in a short time inherit it; and though they were dreaded by the Egyptians, they did not care to part with them, being an industrious laborious people, and from whom the kingdom reaped many advantages.
Therefore they did set taskmasters over them, to afflict them with their burdens,.... This was the first scheme proposed and agreed on, and was carried into execution, to appoint taskmasters over them; or "princes", or "masters of tribute"F18שרי מסים "principes tributorum", Pagninus, Montanus, Fagius, Drusius, Cartwright; so Tigurine version. , commissioners of taxes, who had power to lay heavy taxes upon them, and oblige them to pay them, which were very burdensome, and so afflictive to their minds, and tended to diminish their wealth and riches, and obliged them to harder labour in order to pay them, and so every way contributed to distress them:
and they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses; these might be built with the money they collected from them by way of tribute, and so said to be built by them, since it was chiefly in husbandry, and in keeping flocks and herds, that the Israelites were employed; or they might be concerned in building these cities, some of them understanding architecture, or however the poorer or meaner sort might be made use of in the more laborious and servile part of the work; those two cities are, in the Targums of Jonathan and Jerusalem, called Tanis and Pelusium; but Tanis was the same with Zoan, and that was built but seven years after Hebron, an ancient city, in being long before this time, see Numbers 13:22. Pelusium indeed may be one of them, but then it is not that which is here called Raamses, but Pithom, as Sir John MarshamF19Ut supra. (Canon Chron. Sec. 8. p. 107.) and others think: Pithom is by Junius thought to be the same with the Pathumus of HerodotusF20Euterpe, sive, l. 2. c. 158. , a town in Arabia Petraes, upon the borders of Egypt, where a ditch was dug from the Nile to the Red sea, and supposed to be the work of the Israelites: Raamses is a place different from Ramesses, Genesis 47:11 and had its name from the then reigning Pharaoh, Ramesses Miamun, as Pithom is thought by some to be so called from his queen: PlinyF21Nat. Hist. l. 6. c. 28. makes mention of some people called Ramisi and Patami, who probably were the inhabitants of these cities, whom he joins to the Arabians as bordering on Egypt: the Septuagint version adds a third city, "On", which is Hellopolls: and a learned writerF23Jablonski de Terra Goshen, dissert. 4. sect. 8. is of opinion that Raamses and Heliopolis are the same, and observes, that Raamses, in the Egyptian tongue, signifies the field of the sun, being consecrated to it, as Heliopolis is the city of the sun, the same with Bethshemesh, the house of the sun, Jeremiah 43:13 and he thinks these cities were not properly built by the Israelites, but repaired, ornamented, and fortified, being by them banked up against the force of the Nile, that the granaries might be safe from it, as StraboF24Geograph. l. 17. p. 553. writes, particularly of Heliopolis; and the Septuagint version here calls them fortified cities; and with this agrees what Benjamin of Tudela saysF25Itinerar. p. 120. , that he came to the fountain of "Al-shemesh", or the sun, which is Raamses; and there are remains of the building of our fathers (the Jew says) even towers built of bricks, and Fium, he saysF26Ib. p. 114. , (which was in Goshen; see Gill on Genesis 47:11) is the same with Pithom; and there, he says, are to be seen some of the buildings of our fathers. Here these cities are said to be built for treasure cities, either to lay up the riches of the kings of Egypt in, or as granaries and storehouses for corn, or magazines for warlike stores, or for all of these: some think the "pyramids" were built by the Israelites, and there is a passage in HerodotusF1 which seems to favour it; he says, the kings that built them, the Egyptians, through hatred, name them not, but call them the pyramids of the shepherd Philitis, who at that time kept sheep in those parts; which seems to point at the Israelites, the beloved people of God, who were shepherds.
But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew,.... Became more numerous, "and broke out"F2יפיץ "erumpebat", Junius & Tremellius, Drusius, Tigurine version. , as it may be rendered, like water which breaks out and spreads itself; so the Israelites, increasing in number, spread themselves still more in the land; the Egyptians thought, by putting them to hard labour in building cities, to have weakened their strength, and made them unfit for the procreation of children; but instead of that, the more hard labour they were put unto, the more healthful and the stronger they were, and begot more children, and multiplied exceedingly: and so it is that oftentimes afflictive dispensations are multiplying and growing times to the people of God, in a spiritual sense; who grow like the palm tree, which the more weight it has upon it the more it grows; when the church of God has been most violently persecuted, the number of converts have been greater, and saints under affliction grow in grace, in faith and love, in holiness, humility, patience, peace, and joy; see Acts 12:1.
and they were grieved because of the children of Israel; because of their multiplication and increase, and because their schemes for lessening them did not succeed; they were as thorns in their eyes, as some interpret the word, as JarchiF3בפרך "in fractione", Cajetan. apud Rivet. observes.
And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigour. Or with breachF3בפרך "in fractione", Cajetan. apud Rivet. , with what might tend to break their strength; they laid heavier burdens upon them, obliged them to harder service, used them more cruelly and with greater fierceness, adding to their hard service ill words, and perhaps blows.
And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage,.... So that they had no ease of body nor peace of mind; they had no comfort of life, their lives and mercies were embittered to them:
in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service of the field; if Pelusium was one of the cities they built, that had its name from clay, the soil about it being clayish, and where the Israelites might be employed in making brick for the building of that and other cities: JosephusF4Antiqu. l. 2. c. 9. sect. 1. says, they were ordered to part the river (Nile) into many canals, to build walls about cities, and raise up mounds, lest the water overflowing the banks should stagnate; and to build pyramids, obliging them to learn various arts, and inure themselves to labour: so Philo the Jew saysF5De Vita Mosis, l. 1. p. 608. , some worked in the clay, forming it into bricks, and others in carrying straw: some were appointed to build private houses, others the walls of cities, and to cut ditches and canals in the river, and obliged day and night to carry burdens, so that they had no rest, nor were they suffered to refresh themselves with sleep; and some say that they were not only employed in the fields in ploughing and sowing and the like, but in carrying of dung thither, and all manner of uncleanness: of their being employed in building of pyramids and canals; see Gill on Genesis 47:11.
all their service wherein they made them serve was with rigour; they not only put them to hard work, but used them in a very churlish and barbarous manner, abusing them with their tongues, and beating them with their hands: Philo in the above place says, the king not only compelled them to servile works, but commanded them heavier things than they could bear, heaping labours one upon another; and if any, through weakness, withdrew himself, it was judged a capital crime, and the most merciless and cruel were set over them as taskmasters.
And the king of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives,.... It is difficult to say who these midwives were, whether Egyptian or Hebrew women. Josephus is of opinion that they were Egyptians, and indeed those the king was most likely to succeed with; and it may seem improbable that he should offer such a thing to Hebrew women, who he could never think would ever comply with it, through promises or threatenings; and the answer they afterwards gave him, that the Hebrew women were not as the Egyptian women, looks as if they were of the latter: and yet, after all, it is more likely that these midwives were Hebrew women, their names are Hebrew; and besides, they are not said to be the midwives of Hebrew women, but Hebrew midwives; nor does it seem probable that the Hebrew women should have Egyptian midwives, and not those of their own nation; and they were such as feared the Lord; and the Targums of Jonathan and Jerusalem are express for it, and they pretend to tell us who they were: "of which the name of the one was Shiphrah, and the name of the other Puah"; the one, they say, was Jochebed, the wife of Amram, and mother of Moses and Aaron, and the other Miriam their sister; and this is the sense of many of the Jewish writersF6T. Bab. Sotah, fol. 11. 2. Midrash Kohelet, fol. 74. 1. Jarchi in loc. : but whatever may be said for Jochebed, it is not credible that Miriam should be a midwife, who was but a girl, or maid, at this time, about seven years of age, as the following chapter shows, and much less one of so much repute as to be spoke to by the king. It may seem strange, that only two should be spoke to on this account, when, as Aben Ezra supposes, there might be five hundred of them: to which it may be answered, that these were the most noted in their profession, and the king began with these, that if he could succeed with them, he would go on to prevail on others, or engage them to use their interest with others to do the like; or these might be the midwives of the principal ladies among the Israelites, in one of whose families, according as his magicians had told, as the Targum of Jonathan observes, should be born a son, by whom the land of Egypt would be destroyed; of which JosephusF7Ut supra. (Antiq. l. 2. c. 9. sect. 1.) also takes notice; and therefore he might be chiefly solicitous to destroy the male children of such families; but Aben Ezra thinks, that these two were the chief over the rest of the midwives, and who collected and paid to the king the tribute out of their salaries, which was laid upon them, and so he had an opportunity of conversing with them on this subject.
And he said, when ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women,.... Deliver them of their children:
and see them upon the stools; seats for women in labour to sit upon, and so contrived, that the midwives might do their office the more readily; but while they sat there, and before the birth, they could not tell whether the child was a son or a daughter; wherefore KimchiF8Sepher Shorash. rad. אבן. thinks the word here used signifies the place to which the infant falls down from its mother's belly, at the time of labour, and is called the place of the breaking forth of children, and takes it to be the "uterus" itself; and says it is called "Abanim", because "Banim", the children, are there, and supposes "A" or "Aleph" to be an additional letter; and so the sense then is, not when ye see the women on the seats, but the children in the place of coming forth; but then he asks, if it be so, why does he say, "and see them" there? could they see them before they were entirely out of the womb? to which he answers, they know by this rule, if a son, its face was downwards, and if a daughter, its face was upwards; how true this is, must be left to those that know better; the Jewish mastersF9T. Bab. Sotah, fol. 11. 1. Niddah, fol. 31. 2. constantly and positively affirm it: he further observes, that the word is of the dual number, because of the two valves of the womb, through which the infant passes:
if it be a son, then ye shall kill him; give it a private pinch as it comes forth, while under their hands, that its death might seem to be owing to the difficulty of its birth, or to something that happened in it. This was ordered, because what the king had to fear from the Israelites was only from the males, and they only could multiply their people; and because of the above information of his magicians, if there is any truth in that:
but if it be a daughter, then she shall live, be kept alive, and preserved, and brought up to woman's estate; and this the king chose to have done, having nothing to fear from them, being of the feeble sex, and that they might serve to gratify the lust of the Egyptians, who might be fond of Hebrew women, being more beautiful than theirs; or that they might be married and incorporated into Egyptian families, there being no males of their own, if this scheme took place, to match with them, and so by degrees the whole Israelitish nation would be mixed with, and swallowed up in the Egyptian nation, which was what was aimed at.
But the midwives feared God,.... And therefore durst not take away the life of an human creature, which was contrary to the express law of God, Genesis 9:6,
and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them; knowing it was right to obey God rather than man, though ever so great, or in so exalted a station:
but saved the men children alive; did not use any violence with them, by stifling them in the birth. The scheme was so barbarous and shocking, especially to the tender sex, to whom it was proposed, and so devoid of humanity, that one would think it should never enter into the heart of man.
And the king called for the midwives,.... Perceiving, by the increase of the Israelites, that they did not obey his commands:
and said unto them, why have ye done this thing, and have saved the men children alive? not only did not kill them, but did everything for them that was necessary for their future preservation and health; see Ezekiel 16:4.
And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women,.... Not so tender, weak, and feeble, nor so ignorant of midwifery, and needed not the assistance of midwives, as the Egyptian women:
for they are lively; or midwives themselves, as KimchiF11Sepher Shorash. חיה "sie alii", כי חיות הנה "quia obstetrices ipsae", Pagninus, Montanus; so the Syriac version. says the word signifies; and soF12 μαιαι γαρ εισι, Symmachus apud Drusium. Symmachus translates the words, "for they are midwives"; or are skilful in the art of midwifery, as Jarchi interprets it; and so the, Vulgate Latin version is, "for they have knowledge of midwifery"; and so could help themselves; or, "for they are as beasts"F13In T. Bab. Sotah, fol. 11. 1. Chronicon Mosis, fol. 2. 1. , as animals which need not, nor have the assistance of any in bringing forth their young; and so Jarchi observes, that their RabbinsF14Vid Wagenseil. Sotah, p. 249. & Varro & Gataker in ib. explain it, they are like to the beasts of the field, who have no need of a midwife; or they were so lively, hale, and strong, as our version, and others, and their infants also, through a more than common blessing of God upon them at this time, that they brought forth children as soon as they were in travail, with scarce any pain or trouble, without the help of others: nor need this seem strange, if what is reported is true, of women in Illyria, Ireland, ItalyF15Posidonius apud Strabo. Geograph. l. 3. p. 114. , and other placesF16See Harte's History of the Life of Gustavus Adelphus, vol. 1. p. 233. , where it is said women will go aside from their work, or from the table, and bring forth their offspring, and return to their business or meal again; and especially in the eastern and hotter countries, women generally bring forth without much difficulty, and without the use of a midwifeF17Ludolph. Ethiopic. l. 1. c. 14. :
and are delivered ere the midwives come in unto them; which doubtless was true in some cases, though not in all, because it is before said, they saved the men children alive; and had it been so at all times, there would have been no proof and evidence of their fearing God, and obeying his commands, rather than the king's; and in some cases not only the strength and liveliness of the Hebrew women, and their fears also, occasioned by the orders of the king, might hasten their births before the midwives could get to them; and they might not choose to send for them, but use their own judgment, and the help of their neighbours, and do without them, knowing what the midwives were charged to do.
Wherefore God dealt well with the midwives,.... He approved of their conduct upon the whole, however difficult it may be to clear them from all blame in this matter; though some think that what they said was the truth, though they might not tell all the truth; yea, that they made a glorious confession of their faith in God, and plainly told the king, that it was nothing but the immediate hand of God that the Hebrew women were so lively and strong, and therefore were resolved not to oppose it, let him command what he would; so Dr. LightfootF18Works, vol. 1. p. 700. , who takes the midwives to be Egyptians:
and the people multiplied, and waxed very mighty; became very numerous, and strong, and robust, being the offspring of such lively women.
And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God,.... And regarded his command, and not that of the king, though they risked his displeasure, and their lives:
that he made them houses; which some understand of the Israelites making houses for them, being moved to it by the Lord, to preserve them from the insults of the Egyptians; others of Pharaoh building houses for them, in which he kept them, until the Hebrew women came to their time of delivery, who were ordered to be brought to these houses, that it might be known by others, as well as the midwives, whether they brought forth sons or daughters, neither of which is likely: but rather the sense is, that God made them houses, and hid them from Pharaoh, as Kimchi interprets it, that he might not hurt them, just as he hid Jeremiah and Baruch: though it seems best of all to understand it of his building up the families of these midwives, increasing their number, especially their substance and wealth, making them and their households prosperous in all worldly good; but because the word is in the masculine gender, some choose to interpret it either of the infants themselves, the male children the midwives preserved, and of their being built up families in Israel, or by means of whom they were built up; or of the Israelites themselves, whose houses were built up by their means: and others are of opinion that material houses or buildings are meant, built for the Israelites, that the midwives might know where to find them and their wives, when ready to lie in, who before lived up and down in fields and tents: but the sense of God's building up the families of the midwives is to be preferred, there being an enallage or change of the gender, which is not unusual; see Exodus 15:21.
And Pharaoh charged all his people,.... Finding he could not carry his point with the midwives, he gave a general order to all his people everywhere:
saying, every son that is born ye shall cast into the river; the river Nile; not every son born in his kingdom, for this would have ruined it in time; but that was born to the Jews, as the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan; and it is added in the Septuagint version, to the Hebrews:
and every daughter ye shall save alive; for the reasons given See Gill on Exodus 1:16.
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"Although temperatures have been rising and pollen loads increasing, if someone is not genetically predisposed to allergies, they are not likely to be sensitized to more allergens," said allergist and study co-author Dr. Lyne Scott, an associate professor of pediatrics at USC's Keck School of Medicine.
"The growing season is year-round in L.A. and people with allergies who are already sensitized to pollens suffer more intensely when the growing season is longer, or the air quality isn't good," Scott said in the release. "It is important to remember that sensitization does not equate to severity so those with allergies may have worse symptoms."
The study followed 5,874 kids with asthma in Los Angeles for 15 years, who underwent more than 123,200 skin prick tests to dust mites, cats, dogs, cockroaches, tree pollen, grass pollen and weed pollen. All the patients had been diagnosed with asthma and allergic rhinitis by an asthma specialist using history, physical examination and spirometry when it was age-appropriate.
The researchers found no increase in allergic sensitization or allergy diagnosis among the children.
The findings were also published recently in the journal Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.
The U.S. National Library of Medicine has more on seasonal allergies.
SOURCE: American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, news release, Nov. 5, 2021
All About Allergy
Allergen: Insect Stings
Allergies in Children
Asthma: Allergy Testing
Helping Kids Get Over their Fears
$340 Million Settlement Proposed in EpiPen Lawsuits
Allergies Quiz
Weather and Your Health Quiz
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The Vandals Sack Rome – Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 36 Part 1
Posted on January 17, 2015 January 17, 2015 by Colin
The death of Attila was greeted with enthusiasm and relief by most of the courts of Europe. It must have been like having a troublesome neighbour finally move away. But in Carthage there was one man who was sad to see him go. His alliance with Attila had been Genseric’s trump card which had prevented the long overdue reassertion of the empire’s authority over the fertile strip of northern Africa that the Vandals and their Alan allies had wrested from them.
The fall of Attila promoted Genseric to the empire’s number one enemy. But Genseric was nothing if not resourceful. He realised that it would be almost impossible to dislodge him from his newly acquired kingdom if he controlled the sea, and so he built up a formidable navy. Carthage would, as it had during the early years of the Roman republic, dominate the seas. The defensive logic was certainly clear – but the strategy would be implemented in a distinctly Vandal way. In other words, piracy. Soon anyone near a coast had to handle the risk of barbarians turning up to take their stuff.
Decisive leadership on one side of the Mediterranean was matched by paralysis on the other side. Maximus had come to the throne by the far from constitutional method of killing Valentinian for messing with his wife. Although Maximus was something of an imperial insider he was clearly a bit short of legitimacy. He wasn’t recognised by the Byzantine Empire and he didn’t have the contacts with allies that had become necessary. He sent the trusty Avitus to talk to the Visigoths.
To bolster his position at Rome he married the wife of the man he had just had killed, Eudocia. His own wife had conveniently died. The daughter of the Eudoxia had been promised to Huneric, the son of Genseric. Maximus cancelled this, signalling the end of a rather precarious peace deal with the Vandals.
It was certainly time to do something about the Vandals. But doing something about them really required some preparation, particularly naval preparation. All Maximus succeeded in doing was giving Genseric a pretext to attack. This was made even worse when Eudocia asked Genseric to help rescue her from her husband.
Never one to miss a mischief making opportunity Genseric set out for Rome with a fleet. The Romans panicked and many fled the city. Maximus himself kept his calm and waited for the arrival of the Vandals. I am reminded of the old joke, that if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, there is a good chance you have misunderstood the situation. Indeed Maximus had complained to a friend that he did not enjoy the role of emperor at all. His background was a very comfortable one indeed. He came from the hugely wealthy Anician family and had enjoyed a steady income. His position had enabled him to buy political position and power, and he had occupied many of the prestigious positions open to a member of the Roman elite. It does indeed sound like a good life, and you have to wonder why he gave it all up to become an emperor. It seems he wondered himself. I wonder if his indifference to the threat was down to simply not understanding it. His guards certainly did. They scarpered. This left Maximus vulnerable to the political opinions of the masses. They were not impressed, and when he left the palace he was stoned to death by an angry crowd.
The only thing worse than a useless emperor is no emperor. As the Vandals arrived and docked unopposed in the Tiber, they found that not the slightest preparations had been made to resist them. The only authority left in the city, Leo the 10th, sent an embassy. He had after all already got experience in barbarian placating. A promise of relatively good behaviour was extracted from Genseric. It wasn’t much, but it was something. And the bravery of Leo in staying with his flock during the crisis at least deserves credit. Eudoxia also visited her supposed benefactor, only to find herself robbed of her jewels and taken prisoner along with her daughters. Of all the treasures that Genseric could have looted this was the one that had the potential to do the most harm to the empire. He was in possession of the last royal descendant of Theodosius the Great – the biggest conferrer of legitimacy available.
But Genseric did not have to choose which bit of the bounty to take. He had the run of the city. The gates were simply opened and the Vandals walked in. Alaric and his Goths had at least been resisted when they sacked Rome. The Vandals also had no fear of a counterattack, and so could take all the time they wanted. And they had a fleet of ships with which to carry away the loot – the Goths could only take what they could carry. The Vandal sack lasted 14 days and was carried out with a combination of cruelty and thoroughness. One of the first targets was the Pantheon which contained not only many of the remaining treasures of paganism but also the loot from the temple of Jerusalem that had been triumphantly placed there by Titus four hundred years before. Sadly the boat carrying this particular section of the booty sank. Imagine how those astonishing artefacts would be valued today had they not been lost. Needless to say all the gold and silver was taken. But so was the copper and brass. Basically anything of value was parcelled up and carried off to Carthage.
Included in the things of value category were any inhabitants who looked like they would be of value as slaves. The handling of human traffic is an art that the Vandals hadn’t perfected and many of them were sick by the time they arrived. The Bishop of Carthage matched the humanitarian activities of Leo by selling church property to relieve the distress of the captive Romans. In the days before mass media the existence of a humanitarian crisis was something that only the people nearby would have been aware of. It was also something that would have been greeted with a shrug of the shoulders by the people of the time. But this level of disruption must have killed huge numbers of people simply by its effect on food production and distribution. There would have been huge numbers of displaced people and divided families as well. None of these stories of individual tragedy have made it into the history books and they are easy to lose sight of in a narrative that focuses on the decision makers at the top of the tree.
But there was no relief for the reputation of Rome. The empire had let its capital be taken without even a fight. It was a shameful episode. That it even took place was bad enough. But the revenge that would have pursued Genseric to the grave in a former time was simply not forthcoming. The empire was never to recover from this blow.
Next time we’ll look at a few of the last holders of the title of Roman Emperor. These are routinely swept past by standard histories, but for me the succession of men who struggled to keep the show on the road in the face of enormous odds holds a sort of fascination. Was there in fact anything they could have done? I am afraid it will involve a lot of names, most of which don’t last long. I’ll do what I can to make it as easy to follow as possible.
Posted in Gibbon, UncategorizedTagged Barbarians, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, GibbonLeave a comment
← Attila Invades Italy – Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Chapter 35 Part 3
The UK General Election in 1983 →
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GUISEPPE BRANCALEONE & others vs. ANTHONY PARISI & others (and a companion case [Note 1]).
3 Mass. App. Ct. 566
December 13, 1974 - November 18, 1975
Present: HALE, C.J., ROSE, KEVILLE, GRANT, & ARMSTRONG, JJ.
In a suit by corporate shareholders to recover stock surrendered by them to the corporation, summaries of evidence furnished by a master
in response to objections raised by the defendants, though furnished in general narrative form, were sufficient to support his findings. [569-570]
In a suit by corporate shareholders to recover stock surrendered by them to the corporation, there was no abuse of discretion in a master's permitting counsel for the plaintiffs to ask leading questions of his witnesses. [570]
In a suit in which corporate shareholders claimed that the corporation's president had fraudulently induced them to surrender stock to the corporation, there was no error in the admission of evidence that the president had misused his fiduciary relationship with the plaintiffs to excuse payment of a debt owed to the corporation by another corporation in which he had a substantial interest at about the same time as the surrender of the plaintiffs' stock since this evidence was relevant to the defendant's fraudulent intent to capitalize on his fiduciary relationship to plaintiffs. [570-571]
In a suit in which corporate shareholders claimed that the corporation's president fraudulently induced them to surrender their stock to the corporation so that he could obtain control of the corporation, evidence that the president offered to return one shareholder's stock with the understanding that it would be voted under the president's name was admissible to show the president's intent to control the corporation and not excludable as a statement leading to the settlement of the suit. [571]
Where the president of a corporation had used corporate funds to finance the defense of a suit against him, the corporation and certain intervenors, in which it was found that the president had acted fraudulently in inducing other shareholders to surrender stock to the corporation, and where corporate funds had also been used to finance the defense of a suit to enjoin the expenditure of corporate funds for the defense of the first suit, this court directed that the president share the costs of appeal in the first suit with the intervenors, bear the costs of appeal in the second case, and reimburse the corporation for its expenses, including counsel fees, in defense of both suits. [572-574]
TWO BILLS IN EQUITY filed in the Superior Court on December 29, 1970, and March 30, 1973, respectively.
The first suit was heard by Linscott, J., on a master's report. The second suit was heard on the merits by Coddaire, J., after an interlocutory decree was entered by Rutledge, J.
Paul F. Ware, Jr. (Robert A. Trevisani with him) for Gloucester Marine Railways Corporation.
David B. Gardner & Robert P. Sullivan for Anthony Parisi & others.
James T. Ronan for Guiseppe Brancaleone & another.
KEVILLE, J. These are two cases, which were argued together on appeal, involving the alleged misconduct of Anthony Parisi (Parisi), president of the Gloucester Marine Railways Corporation (corporation). A single justice of this court granted a stay of the defendants' appeal in the first case pending the Superior Court's decision in the second case.
The First Case
This suit was brought against Parisi and the corporation by twenty-one of its stockholders who seek the return of stock surrendered by them to the corporation. The case was referred to a master. The defendants [Note 2] have appealed from an interlocutory decree denying their motions to recommit the master's report, overruling their exceptions thereto and confirming the report, and from a final decree which, in effect, ordered the return of the plaintiffs' stock upon the payment by them of the amounts originally received in exchange for their stock.
The facts summarized are drawn from the master's report. In September of 1970, when the plaintiffs (some of whom were directors of the corporation) collectively held a controlling interest in the corporation, the corporation sold real estate for $80,000. They adopted a proposal advanced by Parisi that the corporation distribute the proceeds from the real estate ratably among all of the stockholders in exchange for a partial surrender of their shares without incurring tax liability or violating the corporation's obligations to certain of its creditors. Parisi misrepresented that this was to be accomplished in such a way that there would be no change in the proportionate ownership or control of the corporation.
The plaintiffs, having placed their trust and confidence
in Parisi, surrendered stock pursuant to this plan. They thereafter discovered that Parisi, members of his family, and other stockholders upon whose proxies he could rely, had not surrendered their shares, and thus had collectively gained control of the corporation. Parisi, with assistance from corporate counsel, [Note 2a] caused a false record to be made of the minutes of the meeting of the directors at which the vote was taken to adopt the plan of distribution. [Note 3] The minutes as recorded misrepresented the vote taken to be no more than an offer by the corporation to buy stock from those stockholders wishing to sell. When the plaintiffs, two months later, were apprised of the facts, they instituted this litigation to obtain the return of their stock.
Where, as here, the master was not instructed to report the evidence, we need not consider the defendants' contention that the master's subsidiary findings were plainly wrong with respect to the record made under Parisi's direction of the directors' meeting described above, and with respect to other evidence as well. Morin v. Clark, 296 Mass. 479, 483 (1937). Shelburne Shirt Co. Inc. v. Singer, 322 Mass. 262, 265 (1948). Furthermore, from our review of the summaries of evidence furnished by the master in response to objections raised by the defendants, [Note 4] we conclude that the evidence was sufficient as matter of law to support his findings. Morin v. Clark, supra. M. DeMatteo Constr. Co. v. Daggett, 341 Mass. 252, 263 (1960). Although it is apparent that the master took liberties with the letter of Rule 90 of the Superior Court (1954) (see, e.g., Lombardi v. Bailey, 336 Mass. 587, 591 [1958]) in furnishing evidence in general narrative form to support his findings, his summaries were sufficient, when considered in conjunction with the comprehensive findings of his report,
to enable the judge and this court to ascertain the bases for his findings. There was no abuse of discretion in denying the defendants' motion to recommit. Twomey v. Roy, 320 Mass. 759 (first case) (1946) M. DeMatteo Constr. Co. v. Daggett, supra.
The record lends no support to the defendants' initial assertion that the plaintiffs themselves were guilty of fraudulent conduct and that they were thus estopped from seeking a rescission of their stock transactions with the corporation. Nor does it support their claim of bias on the part of the master.
They have excepted to various evidentiary rulings made by him and found in a transcript of 3,390 pages representing twenty-six days of trial and the testimony of forty-four witnesses. They argue four instances in which they contend that the master erred in permitting counsel for the plaintiffs to ask leading questions. We discern therein no abuse of discretion. Guiffre v. Carapezza, 298 Mass. 458, 460 (1937). Commonwealth v. Lewis, 346 Mass. 373, 380 (1963), cert. den. 376 U.S. 933 (1964). Commonwealth v. Fiore, 364 Mass. 819, 825 (1974).
It does not appear that there was error in the admission of evidence which revealed that Parisi employed his position of trust and confidence among the plaintiffs to maneuver the write-off a debt of $33,000 owed to the corporation by another corporation of which he was president and financial officer and in which he had a substantial interest. Each of the plaintiff directors signed the vote excusing the collection of this debt upon Parisi's representation that it was "for the bank." This episode overlapped in point of time that of the surrender of the plaintiffs' stock and was admissible as evidence of his fraudulent intent (Commonwealth v. Abbott Engr. Inc. 351 Mass. 568, 572 [1967]; see Wigmore, Evidence, Section 371 [3d ed. 1940]) to capitalize upon his fiduciary relationship to the plaintiffs (as to that relationship see Donahue v. Rodd Electrotype Co. of New England, Inc. 367 Mass. 578, 587-588, 592-597 [1975]). There was, in any event, no showing that the admission of this evidence injuriously affected the
substantial rights of the defendants (G. L. c. 231, Section 132), nor is it in any way reflected in the judge's disposition of the case.
We discern no error in the admission of a statement made by Parisi to one of the plaintiffs, Moceri, in which Parisi offered to return Moceri's stock "with the idea of, I want your stock to be voted under my name." The statement was admissible to demonstrate Parisi's intent to dominate the corporation rather than excludable as a statement leading to the settlement or compromise of the dispute. Calvin Hosmer, Stolte Co. v. Paramount Cone Co. Inc. 285 Mass. 278, 281-282 (1934). Remaining evidentiary issues raised by the defendants are without merit and need not be discussed.
The matter of costs and expenses, including counsel fees, is dealt with in our disposition of the second case. In the first case, the interlocutory and final decrees are affirmed.
The Second Case
In the second case Novello, the treasurer of the corporation, who was also the clerk, a director, secretary to the board of directors and a stockholder (and one of the plaintiffs in the first case), brought a bill of complaint in the Superior Court against the corporation and Parisi to enjoin the use of corporate funds to pay for the appeal in that case, to vacate the appearance of counsel for the corporation in that case, and to compel reimbursement by Parisi of all corporate funds incurred for legal expenses since September 15, 1970, the date of the last meeting of the board of directors. [Note 5]
Novello has appealed from the denial of his motion to vacate the appearance of counsel for the corporation, from the entry of an interlocutory decree modifying an earlier
restraining order in the second case, which had barred the disbursement of corporate funds for costs and expenses of the appeal in the first case or for any legal expenses not expressly authorized by the board of directors of the corporation, [Note 6] and from a final decree dismissing the bill.
The issue raised is whether Parisi, as president of the corporation, exceeded his authority in retaining counsel for the corporation and in obligating the corporation to pay costs and expenses, including legal fees, in the first case without the approval of the board of directors.
The evidence is not reported but the judge made voluntary findings of fact. It is not apparent that they were all of the findings upon which his decree was based. In the circumstances, we take them to be true unless inconsistent with each other or with the pleadings. Sturnick v. Watson, 336 Mass. 139, 143 (1957). Johnson v. McMahon, 344 Mass. 348, 351 (1962).
The judge found that the corporation, through Parisi as president, "had a practice of hiring counsel to represent it in matters such as law suits and other matters in the usual course of its business . . . with the knowledge, ratification or acquiescence of the board of directors," that both cases involved controversies over internal matters of the corporation and that Parisi, as president, had expended corporate funds for legal representation of the corporation in the first case and in its pending appeal. He found that the corporation was an indispensable party in the first case and entitled to represented by counsel in that suit, that an "impasse" existed due to the inability of the board of directors "to convene a meeting" (apparently for lack of a quorum), and, therefore, that the question of legal representation had not been and could not be presented to the board.
In dismissing the bill, the judge made no explicit finding of fact or ruling of law whether in the circumstances of these controversies involving "internal matters of the corporation," Parisi had authority without the approval of the board of directors to retain counsel for the corporation or to apply corporate funds for that purpose. See Kelly v. Citizens Fin. Co. of Lowell, Inc. 306 Mass. 531, 532-533 (1940); Lucey v. Hero Intl. Corp. 361 Mass. 569, 573 (1972). See also Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Co. v. Gove, 298 Mass. 53, 63-66 (1937).
In view of our disposition of the cases, it becomes unnecessary to pass upon the correctness of the judge's conclusion, which may be implicit in the final decree dismissing the bill, that Parisi had authority to commit corporate funds to the corporation's defense. [Note 7] Viewing the second case in light of the record in the first case (see Culhane v. Foley, 305 Mass. 542, 543 [1940]; Gordon v. Gordon, 332 Mass. 210, 213 [1955], cert. den. 349 U.S. 947 [1955]; Poland v. New Bedford, Woods Hole, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket S. S. Authy. 342 Mass. 75, 77, n. 2 [1961]; Miller v. Norton, 353 Mass. 395, 399 [1967]; Flynn v. Brassard, 1 Mass. App. Ct. 678, 681 [1974]), we consider this to be an appropriate instance to invoke (for the benefit of the corporation) an exception to the general rule (Commissioner of Ins. v. Massachusetts Acc. Co. 318 Mass. 238, 241 [1945]; Chartrand v. Riley, 354 Mass. 242, 243-244 [1968]) that each litigant, apart form the award of statutory costs, must assume the burden of his own expenses including counsel fees.
Where the occasion for this litigation was engendered by the fraudulent conduct of Parisi in furtherance of his ambition to gain control of the corporation, thus giving rise to unwarranted corporate expenditures, in the exercise of our discretion it is directed that Parisi, in addition to sharing the costs of appeal in the first case with the intervenors,
bear the costs of appeal in the second case and reimburse the corporation for its expenses, including counsel fees, in defense of both suits. Wheeler v. Hanson, 161 Mass. 370, 376 (1894). Stiles v. Municipal Council of Lowell, 233 Mass. 174, 183 (1919). Samia v. Central Oil Co. of Worcester, 339 Mass. 101, 129 (1959). Wilson v. Jennings, 344 Mass. 608, 621 (1962). See Taussig v. Wellington Fund, Inc. 187 F. Supp. 179, 222-224 (D. Del. 1960), affd. 313 F. 2d 472 (3d Cir. 1963), cert. den. 374 U.S. 806 (1963). Contrast Chartrand v. Riley, supra, at 245.
The interlocutory decree modifying the temporary restraining order and the final decree dismissing the bill are reversed. The second case is remanded to the Superior Court for further hearing to determine and to impose costs, expenses and counsel fees and for the entry of a judgment in accordance with this opinion.
[Note 1] Salvatore R. Novello vs. Gloucester Marine Railways Corporation and Anthony Parisi.
[Note 2] Nine of the stockholders (intervenors), seven of whom were employees of the corporation, were permitted to intervene as parties defendant. The master found that their intervention was solicited by Parisi and that, with corporate counsel, he selected the attorney to represent them.
[Note 2a] Not present counsel.
[Note 3] In the absence of the clerk, Parisi acted as temporary clerk for that meeting. In addition to one Ellis, the remaining directors present were three of the plaintiffs who had limited ability to read, understand or speak English.
[Note 4] Approximately two hundred in number.
[Note 5] No objection has been raised to the form of Novello's bill which was brought presumably in behalf of the corporation.
[Note 6] The modification somewhat ambiguously ordered the continuation of the restraining order until May 4, 1973, "except as to payment by Respondents to the Clerk of the Superior Court, of one third of the estimated cost of printing the Appeal [in the first case]." We construe this order as authorization for the payment from the corporate treasury of one third of that cost.
[Note 7] In this order for decree there is included an addendum that "relief is denied without prejudice to any possible determination of the reasonableness of counsel fees and expenses that may be raised hereafter."
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Sudan has recently hit the news…
…by announcing that it will normalise its relationship with Israel, following similar decisions earlier this year by Bahrain and the UAE. Although officially not linked together, it is no mere coincidence that this occurs the same week that President Trump reveals the US is ready to lift the State Sponsor of Terrorism (SST) designation, under which the African country has been suffering for more than two decades. But how do these developments affect the peace process of the country, and where is Sudan currently in its precarious transition process?
Sudan embarked on a democratic transition last year, after former president, Omar al-Bashir, who had been ruling for 30 years, was removed by a coup d’état in April. After a few months of military rule, a transitional government was appointed in August 2019, with economist Abdalla Hamdok becoming the temporary Prime Minister. Ever since then, he has been trying hard to facilitate peace by negotiating with the rebel movements, as well as working towards the rebuilding of the economy. Most of the armed rebel movements are based in the country’s western region, Darfur, and in the South (South Kordofan and Blue Nile states), but the Eastern states of the Red Sea- Gedaref and Kassala- have also had their share of rebellion against Khartoum.
One of the main points of the new constitutional agreement accepted in 2019 was to make peace between the central government and the insurgents. Almost a year later, following multiple delays and halts, a new peace deal has been agreed upon between most of the rebel groups in Sudan. The peace deal, called the “Juba Peace Agreement”, was signed on the 31th August in neighbouring South Sudan’s capital, Juba, where negotiations were taking place. This was signed by the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF), which was founded in 2011 by smaller fractions to overthrow the Khartoum-based government. While the SRF represents more important groups as well, two other parties, the SLM-AW, and a wing of the SPLM-N, led by al-Hilu, rejected the terms. The reason al-Hilu did not accept the deal is that he holds onto the principles of secularism, separating the state and the religion from each other, something that has not yet been realised in the way he would like.
With the so-called “Eastern Front”, which also includes the non-Arab Beja and the Arabic Rashaida tribes, an agreement has already been achieved in February, but recently the agreement seems to have come under some serious scrutiny. New state governors were to be appointed this year in the whole country to remove those loyal to the previous regime, however, this proved to be especially problematic in the Eastern state of Kassala. The PM sacked the newly appointed governor, who was not accepted due to tribal differences, among other things, by the Beni Amar and Hadendowa subtribes of the Beja people.
The Beja are getting more and more frustrated everywhere, even staging protests in the important harbour of Port Sudan, that of which its stability is crucial for peace in the region. The city serves as a main commercial hu, for import, as well as for the export of oil. The first time in history, the Beja are talking not only about autonomy, but independence and separation of East Sudan – something unprecedented. Given the recent outbreak of fresh conflict in Ethiopia, instability in the east of Sudan can not be permitted, and the government need not neglect the area. This does not only mean a political agreement, but also economic development for the region, which remains to be among the poorest in Sudan.
The transitional leadership has inherited a non-functioning economic policy, hyperinflation, and huge debt. Over the course of 2020, living costs have been rising, as oil subsidies have been removed following the suggested economic reforms of the IMF. The humanitarian situation has also been worsened by the worst floods in a century, which led to half a million people losing their homes.
It is in this context that the removal from the SST list and the normalisation with Israel has been announced. Sudan is on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list together with North Korea, Iran, and Syria, due to harbouring terrorists in its territory earlier in their history, allowing them to operate and plan attacks from the country. One of Hamdok’s main goal since his inauguration has been to remove the state sponsor of terrorism designation. This – and other international sanctions lifted in 2017 – has cost Sudan a lot, hindering foreign investment and credits. Due to the SST, the US was obliged to veto the credits of international financial institutions. The designation also made it impossible for Sudan to participate in the HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Countries) programme of the IMF, which could have provided debt relief. Many have been emphasizing since the fall of Bashir that given the new, transitional government, Sudan does not deserve to be on this list any longer. Still it took quite a long time for Washington to remove the terrorist label from the country.
And it certainly did not do it for free. Although not taking the step could have been morally questionable from the American side, Sudan needed to make serious decisions to accelerate this process. Over the last few months, it has been reported again and again that the US administration wants Sudan to normalize its ties with Israel, following in the steps of the UAE and Bahrain. This was something Hamdok rejected repeatedly, stating that the transitional government is not mandated for such decisions. However, at the end of October, approaching the US elections, Trump tweeted that he has managed to forge a deal between Netanyahu and Hamdok. As this was revealed just days after the removal of the SST, it is hard not to make a connection between the two events. Sudan is desperately in need of aid, be it food or medicine. People must wait in queues for hours, both for bread and for fuel. The inflation recently reached 200%. The nation could simply not do anything, but accept the conditions of the US and say yes to the normalisation with Israel.
Thankfully, despite some initial rejection by Islamist and Communist forces, there has so far not been a major political upheaval as a result of the normalisation. The agreement will be ratified once the Legislative Council has been set up. The latter is prescribed in the Juba Peace Agreement but has not happened yet. These changes will hopefully contribute to not only short term aid, such as addressing the shortage of wheat, but they might encourage foreign investment and result in higher levels of capital inflows in the long term. Aid, debt relief, employment generation, foreign investment and stopping the inflation are all measures needed to rebuild the Sudanese economy. If that does not happen, unemployment, hyperinflation and general discontent can easily lead to a new revolution that might sweep away the hopes of a democratic transition.
Until that however, the Sudanese people celebrate. They protest and they celebrate. And they are right to do so. The 15th of November has been declared a national holiday, as the country will celebrate the arrival of the rebel leaders who signed the Juba Peace Agreement to Khartoum. This will mark the start of the implementation of the peace deal, a peace deal that hopes to finish 17 years of war in Darfur. Yes, we have seen many similar agreements, but this time there is a stronger hope. There is hope that there exists more political will than ever before, to actually deliver on the promises of peace and prosperity. Inshallah – as they say.
— This piece was written by Aron Lovas, an International Business and Economics Major at the Budapest Business School —
Categories: 4th EditionEditionsNewsPrevious Editions
Tags: developmentsisraelsudan
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