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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 35
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 35
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.
pred_label
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float64 | wiki_prob
float64 | text
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__label__wiki
| 0.63612
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McDonald’s U.S. sales trail estimates as competitors lure diners
Leslie Patton, Bloomberg
McDonald’s Corp.’s U.S. sales funk worsened in November as rivals lured away diners amid the choppy economic recovery.
Sales at U.S. stores open at least 13 months dropped 0.8% in November, Oak Brook, Illinois-based McDonald’s said in a statement today. Analysts projected a 0.3% gain, the average of 14 estimates from Consensus Metrix. Global same-store sales rose 0.5%. Analysts projected a 0.6% gain.
The world’s largest restaurant chain, which last year got 32% of revenue from its U.S. locations, has been revamping its menu and trying to improve service to attract Americans amid fierce competition. Burger King Worldwide Inc. recently introduced new items similar to McDonald’s fare, including barbecue rib sandwiches and Big King burgers. Taco Bell is selling breakfast foods and value packs of tacos.
“Their competitors are just getting a little bit more focused and a little bit better about what they’re doing,” Peter Saleh, an analyst at Telsey Advisory Group in New York, said in an interview. Burger King and Wendy’s Co. are advertising new items and taking some customers from McDonald’s, he said.
McDonald’s monthly U.S. same-store sales haven’t gained more than 1% since July.
The shares fell 1.1% to $95.75 at 9:05 a.m. in New York. McDonald’s climbed 9.7% this year through Dec. 6, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 Restaurants Index gained 23%.
“Competitive activity and relatively flat industry traffic trends negatively impacted performance” in the U.S., the company said in the statement.
Restaurant chains are competing to sell value items to American diners. McDonald’s last month began selling new fare on its Dollar Menu & More including $2 bacon McDouble burgers and bacon-cheddar McChicken sandwiches. It also has tried to sell more expensive fare such as pumpkin lattes and chicken wings.
“Competition remains intense, and we are making adjustments,” Chief Executive Officer Don Thompson said during an investor meeting on Nov. 14. “Retailers are battling for greater portion of a smaller pie.”
Fast-food sales in the U.S. may increase 0.5% to $191 billion this year after a 0.8% gain in 2012, according to a July report from researcher IBISWorld Inc. McDonald’s has about a 19% share of the market, the data shows.
Europe Sales
Same-store sales rose 1.9% in Europe and fell 2.3% in the company’s Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa region. Analysts estimated a 0.8% gain and a 0.7% drop, respectively, according to Consensus Metrix, a researcher owned by Kaul Advisory Group in Wayne, New Jersey.
In Europe, McDonald’s is opening more McCafe locations, as well as drive-thru stores, to attract customers amid a tough economic environment. In the U.K., the Big Mac seller has recently started selling new blended-ice drinks and breakfast foods, including a snack-sized wrap.
Comparable-store sales are considered an indicator of a company’s growth because they include only the older, established locations. McDonald’s has more than 34,900 restaurants globally, of which 19% are owned by the company.
McDonald’s plans to report fourth-quarter results on Jan. 23.
www.bloomberg.com
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PRE PLAN FORM
The James E. Churchman, Jr. Funeral Home is located at 345-13th Avenue in Newark, NJ. We have been a family-owned and operated business since 1899.
For the past 100 years, there has been a member of the Churchman family actively involved in the funeral service profession in the greater Essex county area of New Jersey. The story of the Churchman family is both complex and simple. It is a story of determination, vision and a desire for betterment.
We continue to uphold the rich legacy of Rev. James E. Churchman. We are firm not only in our desire to aid families in their time of need, but also by our quest to stay abreast of the latest in technology and regulation of the profession, membership in civic, fraternal and funeral service organizations and the sure and certain knowledge that this outstanding story of America’s history has many chapters yet to be written.
Our membership in these organizations means that we are able to provide the consumer with the latest information on regulatory issues that surround funeral service. We maintain memberships in many local and national funeral service organizations including:
National Funeral Directors and Morticians Association
National Funeral Directors Association
Garden State Funeral Directors Association
New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association
Funeral Ethics Association
Academy of Professional Funeral Service Practice
We know our membership in these organizations allows us access to important information on funeral service. Our membership in these organizations means that we are able to provide the consumer with the latest information on regulatory issues that surround funeral service. Additionally, we are able to be knowledgeable about trends in the funeral service profession.
The National Funeral Directors Association has named the James E. Churchman Jr. Funeral Home a 1999-2000 Pursuit of Excellence Eagle Award winning Funeral Home. This prestigious award was given to only 34 funeral homes in the country. Our recognition by the National Funeral Directors Association means that our establishment recognizes the importance of community outreach, funeral home staff training and community service.
Another annual event is our service of remembrance “In Memory of the Times We’ve Shared.” Families who we have served in the past are invited to come to the funeral home and place an ornament on our community Christmas Tree in memory of their loved one. We also have a service of remembrance featuring a local clergy person. The service of remembrance in held the first Saturday of December.
Our Scholarship Fund was established in 1999 to commemorate the Churchman family’s 100th anniversary in funeral service. Since 2000 we have given book scholarships to students in the greater Essex County area who are sophomore level and higher in college. Awards have been made to male and female students who are completing their bachelors and masters degree programs. To date, more than a dozen students have received book scholarships with an aggregate amount of over $10,000.00
One of our recipients recently graduated from Rutgers Newark with a degree in nursing. Another recipient, who attends NJ Institute of Technology, recently approached us in order to receive an emergency grant to attend the annual convention of the National Association of Black Engineers for networking opportunities. She is the only black female in her course of studies.
We believe the success of our recipients represents the success of us all!
James E. Churchman, Jr.
Edith C. Churchman Manager NJ License #3241
© James E. Churchman, Jr. Funeral Home | Site by articdesigns.com | EmailLOGIN | ObitLOGIN
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LADY SINGS THE BLUES
On Saturday nights, Harlowe Montgomery sings the blues at the Starlight Lounge, a cocktail lounge she owns, when her piano accompanist and friend is murdered.
Then there's Detective Jake Diamond, a man who gets in Harlowe's way and under her skin. Embarking on an investigation of her own when he isn't forthcoming with information, determined to find her friend's killer, the more she digs, the more she uncovers, the more sickened crimes she finds and is thrown into a bizarre world even she finds it hard to imagine.
Excerpt from Lady Sings the Blues
What the hell do you think you’re doing!”
Harlowe swung around quickly at the snarl coming from behind her at the yellow tape at the crime scene. “What’s it look like I’m doing?” she snarled back.
“It looks like you’re contaminating my crime scene,” he said when he reached her. “Get back over to the other side where you’re supposed to be.”
Harlowe pulled herself up to her tallest height of five foot two and gave him her coldest glare. “I am not going anywhere,” she informed the man she assumed was the detective on the case. She pointed to the body at her feet. “That man is my friend—was my friend. And my employee.” She swallowed hard, tamping down on her emotions, realizing Leo was truly gone. “He plays—played—Friday and Saturday nights at the Starlight Lounge, which I happen to own, if you must know.”
The man, who had yet to introduce himself, stepped within breathing distance, his features hard, his eyes glittering with anger and shoved his face into hers until she had to draw back. “I don’t care what you own, or who you are, or who you know. You get your ass back across that line or you’ll find yourself in a cold jail cell.”
“Throw your weight around all you like, mister, but that isn’t going to stop me from finding out who killed my friend,” she told him too politely, as she walked off, bending down to go under the yellow crime scene tape.
How dare he say those things to her? Didn’t he know who she was? Harlowe stopped in her tracks. No, she wasn’t going to play that card. That would be wrong. Sure, she was rich. One of the richest in the country. She could squander and squander and still not go through her inheritance, even if she had two lifetimes to do it.
But Leo was her friend and she wasn't about to stand by for anyone, law or not, until she got to the bottom of this. Her dear friend was gone with no way back.
Someone was going to pay for this, she vowed. And, come hell or high water, someone would pay. And justice would be doled out by her hand.
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Are private unions cooling toward Democrats?
President Obama has long been a friend of organized labor, wholeheartedly supported by unions that helped boost him to victory in both his presidential campaigns.But increasingly, there now is a divide between unions in the public and private sector when it comes to supporting him.
According to James Sherk, a labor policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation, government employee unions want “bigger and more expensive government,” in contrast to private sector unions.
Sherk added those private groups are “pushing back” and speaking out more publicly about things like the Keystone XL Pipeline, which they believe will benefit their members. That has put them on a collision course with Obama, who last summer proclaimed, “We should do everything we can to strengthen unions in this country.”
“The president’s insistence on vetoing this pipeline is directly taking away income from these union members, and they, understandably, don’t like it,” Sherk said.
Congress has passed a measure to expedite the Keystone project, although Obama has vowed to veto it. Just days ago, Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, made a direct appeal.
“We urge the president of the United States to put our men and women back to work across the length of this pipeline as soon as possible,” McGarvey said, adding, “We urge the president to sign the bill.”
Union leaders also have a long-standing beef with the administration over the Affordable Care Act’s enormous tax on so-called Cadillac health insurance plans.The plans offer high dollar benefits and are used as a recruiting tool.
Although the tax doesn’t kick in for several more years, as far back as 2013 union leaders were making public pleas to Democratic lawmakers. In a letter written in July of that year, union officials, including James Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, urged congressional Democrats to drop the tax saying, “We voted for you.We have a problem; you need to fix it.”
Analysts say the issue may present an opportunity for GOP leaders to build some good will with unions. Just days ago, Rep. Frank Guinta, R-N.H., introduced a measure he’s calling “Ax the Tax.”A similar measure didn’t get far in the Senate last year, but may have a better chance with the GOP now in control of both the House and Senate.
Shannon Bream joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in 2007 and is a Washington-based correspondent covering the Supreme Court. She also serves as the anchor of “America’s News Headquarters” (Sundays at 12-2PM/ET). Click here for more information on Shannon Bream.
← New York Times backtracks on facts in Scott Walker hit piece
Psychoactive Amazonian medicine gaining popularity, may treat health disorders →
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Cancer Survivor on N-of-One’s Direct-to-Patient Ombudsman Model
Kevin Davies
Posted 5/31/12 on Bio-IT World
The long-term success of N-of-One, a Waltham Mass.-based company offering personalized cancer information, will undoubtedly be shaped by the vision of its newly appointed CEO, Christine Cournoyer, and strategic partnerships with companies like Foundation Medicine, announced this week.
But ultimately it comes down to whether the company’s original direct-to-patient strategy works for cancer patients like Elaine Waples.
In April 2010, the 65-year-old Waples was diagnosed with primary Stage III peritoneal cancer. After surgery, she underwent six months of first-line chemotherapy, along with some targeted therapy in the form of Avastin. After eight treatments, she went into remission, but her particular cancer frequently recurs and has a poor survival rate over five years.
“We did extensive research on my cancer,” Waples told Bio-IT World from her home in Jacksonville, Florida. “There are new things happening in cancer research, but where do you begin to learn this information?”
With extensive contacts in the healthcare industry, Waples’ husband, healthcare analyst and blogger Brian Klepper, jumped into the fray. He was referred to Jeffrey Gelfand, an oncologist at Mass General Hospital whose wife had died of peritoneal cancer. Gelfand put Klepper in touch with N-of-One founder and president, Jenifer Levin Carter.
Waples and her husband held a lengthy phone conversation to learn about the N-of-One services, joined by their doctor, gynecological oncologist Stephen Buckley. “We needed him to be part of the process,” says Waples. “He’s highly trained, very open minded, and thrilled to be involved in this,” adds Klepper.
After several months, they decided to hire N-of-One to perform molecular testing of her tumor tissue and produce personalized management recommendations. ““N-of-One had a unique approach. I loved the name of the company. I felt they were looking strictly at me. They were focusing on me as an individual,” says Waples.
“They’re an ombudsman, they’re traffic controllers. They have tumor tissue sent to labs of their choosing, signed off by my doctor.” The ensuing reports are sent to Waples and her oncologist. “My preference was, when the data came back to N-of-One, it was sent to me and copied to my oncologist,” she says.
The raw information looks like alphabet soup, says Waples, including insights into genetic mutations and cancer biomarkers, gene expression levels and copy number variants. She’s no expert and it would be easy to misinterpret the data, Waples admits, and she has treated the early findings with caution.
“The range of testing is pretty vast,” says Klepper. “It’s beyond the capability of people at our level to really make sense of it.” “The more I learn on my own, the better questions I can ask N-of-One,” says Waples. “This is a group decision – it has to be your medical team, the data you seek, and then your own common sense and ability to understand what’s going on. That’s how you make decisions.”
Waples expects to receive the all-important summary report from N-of-One in the next week or two. Waples and Klepper hope that the N-of-One report will provide some definitive conclusions, either in helping formulate a treatment plan or alternatively refute other treatment approaches because the no longer make sense based on the new information.
Regardless of her own personal outcome, Waples praises the ombudsman role that N-of-One is playing. “The future of medicine has been cracked wide open,” she says.
N-of-One was founded in 2008, providing diagnostics and treatment services and advice to patients and working with their oncologists. The business has grown organically largely by word-of-mouth and referrals from oncologists. N-of-One offers a menu of biological tests performed in a variety of CLIA-certified and esoteric labs. “We’re being compensated by the patient. We look for the best testing for that patient,” says Carter.
Cournoyer was formerly president and chief operating officer of Picis, a popular provider of health information software solutions that was acquired by United Healthcare in 2010. She is also a former vice president and chief information officer of IBM’s software group. Carter, N-of-One’s founder, remains as president and chief medical officer.
“I’m very impressed with the technology platform, the practices to synthesize information and transform it into patient-specific, molecularly targeted strategies,” says Cournoyer. While the company’s early focus was on the direct-to-consumer needs of individual cancer patients, the company’s new oncology informatics platform, PrecisionWorks, enables doctors and healthcare providers, including the new marquee partnership with Foundation Medicine, to individualize diagnostic and treatment decisions.
Cournoyer will be looking for ways to introduce molecular profiling strategies in a cost-effective manner. “That’ll be our target market. We’ll be offering PrecisionWorks in a software-as-a-service business model.”
“We have evolved and optimized PrecisionWorks from a direct-to-patient approach into an integrated, systematized platform that enables us now to expand access to much larger groups of patients through oncologists, regional cancer centers, and provider networks, while still providing our direct-to-patient solutions,” says Carter.
In the newly announced non-exclusive partnership with Foundation Medicine, N-of-One provides all the clinical and molecular interpretation from a next-gen sequencing (NGS) panel of some 200 genes that leads to a personalized therapeutic strategy and relevant clinical trial information. “We take the test data and turn it into clinically actionable information,” says Cournoyer.
“We’ve been building PrecisionWorks for a couple of years,” says Carter. “Our scientists and oncologists have been synthesizing different types of information — patient-relevant data down to relevant tissue components — to create all the key components that will make this the ideal platform to identify the key biomarkers to be evaluated.”
The platform mines molecular data to identify relevant biomarkers in the patient’s tumor, links those biomarkers to relevant targeted therapies, and matches patients with current clinical trials that are relevant to their disease. “We bring the data back and our team synthesizes the individual molecular data in context of other sources to create treatment strategy roadmaps,” says Carter.
The final decision making, she stresses, is in the hands of our expert oncology council. “All the interpretation is being created by scientists/oncologists. All the content is reviewed. We just don’t press a button to create the content,” she says.
While Foundation Medicine specializes in NGS data, Carter says N-of-One takes a very agnostic approach to partnering companies, integrating many other data sources, from copy number and gene expression to protein biomarkers, as new technologies become available. “We do the interpretation across many types of technology. How do you take complex molecular data and integrate them into a coherent treatment strategy?”
Carter says N-of-One has already worked with hundreds of patients and multiple providers in half-a-dozen different countries. About one third of the patients come from referrals from academic and regional cancer centers. While N-of-One is prepared to expand to many other types of technology, including whole-genome sequencing, the key question in the near term remains: how meaningful is the assay for patients today? What’s the turnaround time? And how can the data be interpreted in an actionable manner?
“We’re not chasing the diagnostics companies; we want to provide a solution for today,” says Cournoyer. “Most providers are at a very elemental level providing these [diagnostics] strategies.”
No doubt Cournoyer and colleagues will be wrestling with the bigger picture, neatly summed up by Klepper: “What’s the relative efficacy of this for purchasers of healthcare? If we increase rate of positive response of therapy from 6 percent to 22 percent, how does that pay out to ROI if I’m Walmart and I have thousands of cancer patients in my population every year?”
Those questions will be solved one patient at a time.
Old Puzzles, Busy Guys and New Science
Cancer Survivor on N-of-One’s Direct-to-Patient Om...
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Religious Terms
Hoa Hao Buddhism
The Holy See
Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences
Catholic Bishops' Conference of VN
Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue
Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity
International Academy for Interfaith Studies
Baha'i World News
Caodaism
Buddhist channel
Hinduism Today
Muslim News
A 1000 Years Amnesia: Sports in Muslim Heritage
[ point evaluation5/5 ]1 people who voted
Đã xem: 62 | Cật nhập lần cuối: 11/7/2022 11:27:30 AM | RSS | Bản để in | Bản gửi email
There is an amnesia in the minds of people about 1,000 years of Muslim, Chinese and Indian civilizations during the period 700-1700 CE. Our educational system largely neglects that, instead of concentrating upon Europe where much of the period is glossed over as containing the Dark Ages and/or Medieval Ages, school syllabi, particularly those of STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and the subject of sports, tend to jump over the period, leaping back from the European Renaissance to the Roman and Greek civilizations, largely ignoring scientists or inventions from non-European cultures.
Fig. 1: Diagrams of amnesia persistence and amnesia removing. A possible danger of this amnesia is that it engenders a superiority complex in the European character whilst, simultaneously, causes an inferiority complex in the character of others. The following diagram clarify the problem and how it may be resolved. It shows the 1001 years gap (amnesia) and appropriately fills the gap with Chinese, Persian, Indian and Muslim civilizations.
For effective social cohesion and inter-cultural respect, it is essential to go further and enrich all other taught subjects, including sports, with contributions from other cultures, especially those from Muslim Heritage and in particular from Muslim Spain; without which the European Renaissance would not have taken place.
The subject of Sports in Muslim Heritage deserves special attention. Not even Muslims are aware of the vast contributions the classical Muslim world had made to sports development. For example, we all associate Cricket with “Britishness”, yet this game originated in North India around 700 CE and travelled westwards reaching its climax when the British adopted it as theirs. Another game is Polo, an ancient sport from Persia and Afghanistan. The Muslims enjoyed it greatly. Manuscripts show miniatures of men and women jointly playing in the same field.
It is believed that Prophet Muhammad loved sports. Traditions of the Prophet record that he raced with his wife Aisha. She won the first sprint, but lost on the second round. He encouraged parents to teach children swimming, riding and archery.
The Arabic word for sport is Riyadhah. It is interesting to note that the same word is used for mathematics and the Sufis used it to refer to exercising the soul. Sport in Muslim Heritage has been associated with exercising the body, the mind and the soul. Sporty behavior was normally linked with high morals and exemplary behavior such as chivalry, trustworthiness and generosity. When Muslims reached Spain, Sicily, Istanbul (Constantinople) and other parts of the world, they stopped all sports which inflicted harm on the players, like gladiators and the like. One wonders if those Muslims would have allowed knock-out in boxing.
We have recently noticed a surge of sportsmen and women from the Muslim world participating in the Olympics. Of interest is the high percentage of women players. But of particular interest is the appearance of Muslim women with Hijab competing with “Sharia-compliant” dress code, i.e only face and hand of women are to be shown. When, in 2008, Bahraini lady Ruqaya al-Ghasara won her gold in 100 and 200m run, she shook the world with her dress covering all her body.
The Legacy of Muslim Kung Fu Masters
An important legacy of Islam in China is represented by Muslim Kung Fu, developed throughout history by Muslim Masters, who merged in their endeavour and training between physical and spiritual perfection. The following short survey by Mohammed Khamouch and the longer article referred to below by the same author analyse this legacy and shed light on its different historical and cultural dimensions.
Who Wrote the First “Useful” Archery Manual?
In this article we will be looking at several handbooks on archery written in both the Islamic world and in the West with the aim of determining which is the oldest useful manual on archery. Our investigation is guided with criteria in function of which materials were selected, such as availability of the text, the existence of an English version (original or in translation) and its comprehensiveness in covering archery techniques. On the basis of these criteria, it turned out that the oldest useful manual on archery is a book written around 1368 by Taybugha Al-Ashrafi Al-Baklamishi Al-Yunani, The Complete Manual of Archery for Cadets, known in the scholarship as Saracen Archery.
By Salim Al-Hassani
Source: https://muslimheritage.com/
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A comet called Atlas is currently heading toward the sun, and it just might put on a really good show in a couple of months. Discovered last December by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert system in Hawaii (thus the name ATLAS for the comet), the comet has been growing much brighter than experts had predicted. If it manages to hold its shape as it moves nearer to the sun, it could grow...
Comet ATLAS may put on quite a show
Comet's trajectory in the sky with 7-day markers. Credit: Tomruen/CC BY-SA 4.0/Wikimedia Commons
MARCH 23, 2020 - A comet called Atlas is currently heading toward the sun, and it just might put on a really good show in a couple of months. Discovered last December by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert system in Hawaii (thus the name C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) for the comet), the comet has been growing much brighter than experts had predicted. If it manages to hold its shape as it moves nearer to the sun, it could grow brighter than Venus.
Msg 115 of 218 to BerryStephBerrySteph
Astronauts returning to changed world after months in space
NASA astronauts expect a tough return to such a drastically changed world next week, after more than half a year at the International Space Station.
I wanted to fly, I wanted to be an astronaut, even now, reading your post, I feel a deep down, gut sadness that I did not. I was raised around jets, from our back yard could hear those engines roaring as they were being tested. Our little farm was under direct flight path from the air force base where dad was a jet mechanic and he would identify each plane as it flew overhead. Many years later, I was privileged to be part of the team that manufactured the SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engines). My husband, our son and I were all involved in the space program in different capacities.
Sorry again for TMI - one of your esteemed contributors would jeer at my "earth shattering news", but I would go now if I could.
That sounds fantastic!
Were you there for any of the launches?
Unfortunately, no. However, my office was just down the hall from the VP of Manufacturing, and we used to watch the launches (and control room) in real time in his conference room. We had an entirely different view than what was shown on TV. There was a real feeling of pride watching our engines lift those shuttles. Our hearts were in our throats every time until the boosters were jettisoned though. Those boosters were basically giant bombs and every person in that shuttle was in enormous danger until they fell away - remember Challenger?
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advertise with kontrol
New Movie: ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’
From Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson comes “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” the second in a trilogy of films adapting the enduringly popular masterpiece The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The three films tell a continuous story set in Middle-earth 60 years before “The Lord of the Rings,” which Jackson and his filmmaking team brought to the big screen in the blockbuster trilogy that culminated with the Oscar®-winning “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.”
Ian McKellen returns as Gandalf the Grey, with Martin Freeman in the central role of Bilbo Baggins, and Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield. The international ensemble cast is led by Benedict Cumberbatch, Evangeline Lilly, Lee Pace, Luke Evans, Ken Stott, James Nesbitt, and Orlando Bloom as Legolas. The film also stars (in alphabetical order) John Bell, Manu Bennett, Jed Brophy, Adam Brown, John Callen, Ryan Gage, Mark Hadlow, Peter Hambleton, Stephen Hunter, William Kircher, Lawrence Makoare, Sylvester McCoy, Graham McTavish, Dean O’Gorman, Mikael Persbrandt, and Aidan Turner. Read the rest of this entry after the jump (click page two Button up top)
Adam Brown, Aidan Turner, Benedict Cumberbatch, by J.R.R. Tolkien, Dean O’Gorman, evangeline lilly, evangeline lilly tauriel, Graham McTavish, James Nesbitt, Jed Brophy, John Bell, John Callen, Ken Stott, Lawrence Makoare, Lee Pace, Luke Evans, Manu Bennett, Mark Hadlow, Mikael Persbrandt, new movies, Orlando Bloom, Peter Hambleton, Ryan Gage, Stephen Hunter, Sylvester McCoy, The Hobbit, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Warner Bros. Pictures, William Kircher
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Friday June 9, 2023 at 7:30 pm
Guelph Youth Music Centre Recital Hall
75 Cardigan Street, Guelph, ON
Charles Richard-Hamelin (piano)
Mozart Rondo in D Major, K. 485
Rondo in a minor, K. 511
Rondo in F Major, K. 494
Brahms 6 Klavierstücke, op. 118
Chopin Allegro de concert, op. 46
Chopin Valses (selections)
Valse in e minor, op. posth. KK IVa/15
Valse in a minor, op. 34 no. 2
Valse in F major, op. 34 no. 3
Valse in f minor, op. 70 no. 2
Valse in D flat major, op. 64 no. 1
Valse in c sharp minor, op. 64 no. 2
Valse in A flat major, op. 64 no. 3
Grande Valse in A flat major, op. 42
Charles Richard-Hamelin stands out on the international music scene as a “highly sensitive” pianist (Gramophone), driven by “a great depth of feeling without the slightest condescension” (Le Devoir). He is recognized as “fluent, multifaceted and tonally seductive… a technician of exceptional elegance and sophistication” (BBC Music Magazine).
In 2015, he received the Silver Medal at the International Frederic Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw and the Krystian Zimerman Prize for best performance of a sonata. He also won Second Prize at the Concours musical international de Montréal and Third Prize and the Special Prize for best performance of a Beethoven sonata at the Seoul International Music Competition, in South Korea.
Charles Richard-Hamelin is in great demand as a guest performer at the world’s greatest classical music festivals, including the International Piano Festival of La Roque d’Anthéron in France, the Prague Spring International Music Festival, the International “Chopin and his Europe” Festival in Warsaw, the Festival International de Lanaudière and the George Enescu Festival in Bucharest. He has worked with renowned conductors, including Kent Nagano, Vasily Petrenko, Jacek Kaspszyk, Aziz Shokhakimov, Peter Oundjian, Jacques Lacombe, Fabien Gabel, Carlo Rizzi, Alexander Prior, Christoph Campestrini, Lan Shui, Jean-Marie Zeitouni, Charles Olivieri-Munroe, Howard Shelley, Antoni Wit and Jonathan Cohen. He has also performed as a soloist with famous orchestras around the world, including the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Québec, Toronto, Edmonton, Warsaw, Singapore and Hiroshima symphony orchestras, as well as the Orchestre Métropolitain, Les Violons du Roy, I Musici de Montréal, the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, OFUNAM (Mexico City), the Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra, the Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra and Sinfonia Varsovia.
Charles Richard-Hamelin has recorded six albums to date, all released under the Analekta label. Three of them feature the solo piano repertoire, the first being his acclaimed performances of Chopin’s late works; the second bringing together compositions by Beethoven, Enescu, and Chopin; and the third a complete set of Chopin’s ballades and impromptus. Richard-Hamelin has also recorded two albums of concertante works—Chopin’s two piano concertos with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, under the direction of Kent Nagano, and Mozart’s piano concertos nos. 22 and 24 with Les Violons du Roy, conducted by Jonathan Cohen. As a chamber musician, he is recording a complete set of Beethoven’s sonatas for violin and piano with Andrew Wan, the first installment of which was released in 2018. These albums have received awards and enthusiastic reviews from leading music critics.
Guelph Musicfest 2023 is grateful for the continuing generous support of an Anonymous Donor
Guelph Musicfest is generously supported by the Neighbourhood Group
Follow Guelph Musicfest on Facebook for the latest news and promotions
Follow on Twitter @guelphmusicfest
Musicfest LIVE or DIGITAL
March 9 Nine Dragons
May 26 Quartetto Gelato
June 2 Stewart Goodyear
June 9 Charles Richard-Hamelin
June 16 Penderecki Quartet
June 23 Festival Trio
LIVE or DIGITAL MUSICFEST
March 9 Special: Nine Dragons
Nov 10 Encore: The Roaring 20's
Concerts in a Nutshell
© 2023 guelph musicfest | ken gee, artistic director contact
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Buhari suspends immigration boss
August 21, 2015 instablog910
Today, the comptroller general of Nigeria Immigration Service, David Parradang. He was asked to immediately proceed on suspension. No one knows why but there may be two things involved. One could be the
fact that the Immigration Service under his leadership sparked national outrage last year after nearly 20 job applicants died in a stampede during an Immigration recruitment test.
Ahead of the examinations, an agent commissioned by the Ministry of Interior, extorted N1000 from each of over 700,000 applicants. Despite raising nearly a N1bn, logistics for the exercise were poor, resulting in the deaths.
It could also be the fact that just this week, wanted Lebanese terrorist and radical cleric, Sheikh Ahmed Al-Assir got a Nigerian visa with a fake Palestinian passport. He was arrested on his way to Nigeria….. it’s either of those aforementioned reasons so pls don’t mind those saying it’s cuz of his teeth. They’re ignorant…..
Previous: The wives of the late Ooni of Ife can’t remarry again
Next: 28-year-old Ugandan singer finally marries his 68-year-old fiancée.
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Inside the A380
The LA Times has the inside scoop on the A380.
Posted by Ron at 11/30/2009 05:49:00 AM No comments:
Ron: 1, Dubai: 0
I would just like to note for the record that I called the Dubai crash this time last year:
Dubai is quite possibly the greatest real estate scam of all time.
Now if I could just figure out how to accurately predict *when* these things are going to happen!
Posted by Ron at 11/30/2009 05:38:00 AM 2 comments:
Life imitates art (I hope)
It's that time of year when the cable channels start to show that old Frank Capra standard, It's a Wonderful Life. I just learned that life may be mimicking art. Phil Agre has gone missing.
To understand the impact that this news has had on me I have to take you back to 1985. That year, an MIT graduate student named David Chapman published one of the very few solid theoretical results that the field of Artificial Intelligence has ever produced. David formally proved that planning was NP-complete. What's more, it was a constructive proof: David actually wrote a planner that was provably complete and correct, the first such planner ever to be produced after years of ad hoc research. And this was David's master's thesis!
For his next trick, David teamed up with Phil Agre to help pioneer what was then a completely new approach to AI. The technical details don't matter much. The point is, in my mind David was a demigod, Phil was his main collaborator, and the work they were doing was wicked cool. Their work ultimately had a huge influence on me, and even today I think it never received the attention and appreciation it deserved.
Back in those days I was, like many graduate students, haunted by myriad insecurities. Would I ever find a thesis topic? Would it have an impact? Was I kidding myself that I was capable of doing original research? Was I wasting my life? And on and on and on. At times it got pretty bad and led to some bouts of severe depression, which I now understand is not at all unusual.
Around the time that I was hitting bottom, there was an AI workshop at JPL that Phil attended. To make a long story short, I ended up taking him on a driving tour of Los Angeles (it was his first visit) so I got to spend quite a bit of time talking to him one-on-one. That conversation influenced me more than any single conversation I've ever had in my life. It got me out of my doldrums and I returned to work with renewed vigor. A few months later I had a thesis topic, and a year or so after that, I phinally phinished.
Now, I can't really say I knew Phil. I only ever met him that one time. We never corresponded, though I followed his work for many years. So I have no idea why he has disappeared. Maybe he's just decided to go walkabout. (He seemed like the kind of person who would do that sort of thing.) But I'm telling this story on the off chance that Phil has succumbed to the same sort of demons that once haunted me, wondering where his life is going, if he's made the right choices, and whether his accomplishments measure up to anything. In that case, and on the off chance that Phil might stumble across this blog, I want him to know the impact that he had on my life. Maybe that will help.
There are details of that period that I do not wish to put on the record, but it would not be unfair to say that Phil Agre once saved my life. It would be fitting if perhaps I could return the favor simply by saying so. Phil, wherever you are, I wish you good fortune.
Posted by Ron at 11/25/2009 11:56:00 PM 2 comments:
Logos, meet Mythos
Devdutt Pattanaik in a brilliant TED talk explains the contrasts between Eastern and Western thought, and how each is fundamentally rooted in mythology, albeit very different mythologies. Well worth twenty minutes of this life.
Posted by Ron at 11/21/2009 09:25:00 AM 19 comments:
Oh, cool!
Our flight back to LA is on an A380!
[Travelogue] Homeward bound
And if you will forgive another cliche, what a long, strange trip it's been. I had been feeling ready to go home for a while, but last night as I was packing I came across a printout of all the shore excursions we has signed up for at the beginning of the trip. For some reason that just took me back to the beginning, when this trip was still a dream instead of a memory, and it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks: it's over. It's really over. All of the annoyances and discomforts and crazy traffic and pollution and endless bus rides just evaporated from my mind and for a moment all that was left was the awesomeness of it, the exotic sights and smells and flavors and the novelty of being able to tell people, "Yeah, we're going to be on this ship for two and a half months." And now it was over. Just like that. In the blink of an eye. It felt, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, like a metaphor for life itself. I'm still pretty young, but I am becoming more and more aware of how short life really is. I feel an increased urgency to make the most of what's left, because there's no going back.
So while I'm sad about the trip coming to an end, I'm also glad to be getting back home. The trip was awesome, but I'm not ready to retire to a cruise ship, and although I got some writing done and even a little bit of hacking, it's a lot easier to be productive with fewer distractions and a fast internet connection. And I'm feeling the need to be productive. I've seen too many people busting their humps trying to improve their lives not to get out there and do my bit before I die. I haven't decided exactly what I'm going to do, but on the trip I put together a list of half a dozen possible projects, some of which involve travel to Asia :-)
So for pretty much the first time in my life I have no idea what's coming next. But I'm looking forward to finding out.
Posted by Ron at 11/17/2009 05:33:00 PM No comments:
[Travelogue] Time zone craziness
Trivia question for the day: how many time zones does Australia have?
Answer: six!
The country only spans three hours worth of time difference from east to west, but they manage to cram six different time zones in nonetheless. Western Australia (which includes Perth) is three hours behind New South Wales (which includes Sydney) and Victoria (which includes Melbourne). But in between is a crazy patchwork of daylight-savings, non-daylight-savings, and just plain nutty time zones, including a tiny little piece on the border between Western and South Australia that is 45 minutes ahead of Perth, but one hour and forty-five minutes behind the adjacent South Australia! You can travel west from Queensland to South Australia and have to set your clock forward instead of backwards. You can travel north-south between South Australia and the Northern Territory and have to reset your clock by an hour (which way depends on the direction you're going of course), but in either place you'll still have a half-hour phase difference with GMT. And if you cross the border from Western Australia to South Australia you'll have to change your clocks by a whopping two and a half hours all in one go.
I suppose with Australia being as sparsely populated as it is this all makes sense on the ground. But it looks pretty nutty from the air.
Posted by Ron at 11/09/2009 06:19:00 PM 1 comment:
[Travelogue] Back in (western) civilization
Nancy says she could happily live aboard this ship for the rest of her life, but for me there's no place like home. The longest I've ever been traveling before is six weeks, a record we broke about two weeks ago, and I don't know whether it's the time or being in the poorer parts of Asia, but it's starting to get a bit emotionally draining. By the time we reach Sydney in ten days I will definitely be ready to go home.
Since leaving Singapore we've had three ports of call: Java, Bali and Perth. Our visit to Java consisted of three hours of sitting on a bus, one hour of walking around the ancient temple of Borobudur in sweltering heat (Java is six degrees south of the equator), followed by another three hours of sitting on a bus. It could have been worse. Our bus convoy had a police escort, which allowed us to cut through traffic like Moses parting the Red Sea. We felt like VIPs until we found out later that anyone can get a police escort in Java simply by paying a bri-- I mean a fee.
Bali was beautiful, but again sweltering and the street peddlers on the pier were the most aggressive I've ever encountered anywhere in the world, and that is saying something. These people simply would not take no for an answer. I almost had to resort to threatening physical violence to get them to leave us alone. Once clear of the pier, though, the Balinese were very friendly, and some of the local crafts are quite impressive, worth a trip if you're into that sort of thing. The woodwork in particular is comparable to what we found in Africa in terms of value, maybe even better. A master woodworker on Bali makes between two and twenty dollars a day depending on their level of skill, and the intricacy of some of their carvings is mind-blowing.
I have to say, though, that although I found Asia fascinating I am not sorry to be leaving it behind for a while. Dealing with the traffic in particular, even just as a passenger, gets to be very stressful after a while. I tried to pretend that the crazy road rules and the omnipresent diesel exhaust didn't bother me, but the truth is they did. I have learned a new appreciation for Western infrastructure these past few weeks.
On which topic, Perth is a little gem of a city. It's out in the middle of nowhere, the most isolated capital city in the world, but it is gorgeous: clean and modern, chock full of parks and trees, on a river that is too shallow for industrial ships so the waterfront is mostly unspoiled -- except for what must be the most hideous convention center in Christendom. What they were thinking when they approved that monstrosity I will never know. (BTW, if you have $56 million burning a hole in your pocket, there is a stunning home on the riverbank on offer for that amount. It was built by a local mining magnate's wife who lived there for a year and then decided she didn't like it after all. It is rumored that if she doesn't manage to sell it she's going to tear it all down and start over from scratch.)
I have to say that this trip has made me an even bigger fan of Western civilization than I was before. I love Asia, much more than I was expecting to, but the places I like the most were the places that were most Westernized: Japan and Singapore. There's just an awful lot to be said for emission controls and yielding the right of way. And clean drinking water coming out of the tap. And air conditioning. We in the West take these things for granted, but they are in fact unimaginable luxuries in some very large parts of the world. I think Americans in particular would do well to keep that more in mind than we typically do.
[Travelogue] Singapore: green and squeaky clean
I would not have thought it possible to build a city cleaner than Tokyo. I was wrong. Tokyo is spotless, but Singapore is positively gleaming. Even the container port where we first docked (because the berths in the cruise ship terminal were all occupied) looked like it had a serious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If I had seen people scrubbing the concrete with toothbrushes I would not have been too surprised.
Singapore is a unique country. It's a tiny (20x30 miles) island just at the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula. It grew up similar to Hong Kong under British rule, but with a more varied and eclectic mix of Asian influences. It has also had the benefit of a benevolent dictator who has turned the Island into a squeaky-clean and more fully Westernized version of Hong Kong. Politically Singapore is a very weird animal. It is nominally a democracy but actually a dictatorship. Like Hong King, Singapore is a pean to free-market capitalism. It makes most of its money from shipping and banking services. Income taxes are low (at least according to our tour guide). And yet it has an extremely liberal ethos. The country enthusiastically embraces its multi-ethnic heritage. It is so environmentally conscious you'd think Al Gore was prime minister. Taxes on cars are ridiculously high (there is excellent public transit to compensate) and old cars are simply not allowed on the road. There are clearly emission control laws in place. The black-smoke-belching diesels and scooters that seem to be ubiquitous in China, Thailand and Viet Nam are nowhere to be found here. Even chewing gum is banned!
There are trees everywhere. The waterfront is gleaming and chock-a-block with a wide array of restaurants housed in historic buildings that have been lovingly restored. The cruise ship terminal is part of an enormous shopping mall, again with literally dozens of restaurants overlooking the water. It appears at first glance to be the best example of urban planning in the world. I can't think of any other city that comes close. And to top if all off, everyone is friendly and speaks English. Of all the places we've been on this trip, Singapore is the one I would most like to come back to (well, maybe a toss-up with Tokyo).
The only problem with this place is the weather. It's 1 degree north of the equator, so they have three kinds of weather: hot and humid, hotter and more humid, and ridiculously hot and humid, with an occasional rain shower thrown in for seasoning. They don't get taiphoons, and they don't have earthquakes. I'm not sure I could handle living in a place that never gets below 70 degrees. But it sure is nice to visit.
The downside of everything being so wonderful is that there aren't many good stories to tell. We walked around, marveled at the architecture, ate some great food, and that's about it. So to make up for it, I'll tell another story about something happened way back in Osaka that I just realized I forgot to write about at the time.
Osaka is a sprawling city without a real center, and the cruise ship terminal is kind of out in the boonies, relatively speaking. There's quite a lot of stuff there, including the aquarium (worth a visit) and a giant ferris wheel. There's even a shopping center, but it's kind of an uninteresting one. There are no restaurants beyond a food court and a few chains. So we went on a sushi quest and ended up in a tatami room in a place where no one spoke English and the menu was all in Japanese. We had a great meal nonetheless. After we were done, as we were walking down the street, the proprietor of the restaurant came running after us. It seems I had inadvertently left a brochure on the table and he was returning it to me. He handed it to me with a lot of bowing and a long speech in Japanese that I couldn't understand. For all I know he was saying: stupid gai-jin, why can't you remember to take your shit with you? But it sure didn't sound like that to me.
When I told this story to several people familiar with Japanese custom they all told me that such a thing was not at all unusual in Japan. But it sure seemed extraordinary to me. Americans could learn a thing or two from the Japanese. And the Singaporeans.
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Open Garden Foundation
Join Cargonomia
Borrow a Cargobike
Weekly organic vegetable box
Cargo bike history
Duna Cycles : Cargobike Design a Construction
Exploring Degrowth : Trainees Project 2021
Exploring Degrowth : Interviews
Urban Agroforestry
Other langages
Reimagining the world of (care)work: the case of Cargonomia
Authors: Ágota Csoma and Orsolya Lazányi
Review: Beatte Littig
This is an essay of the writing workshop Socio-Ecological Economics, published on 9 February 2019
A dominating capitalist market economy, especially in the west and increasingly in central and eastern Europe, centers life around working and consuming (Marcuse, 1964). Capital and wealth accumulation, economic growth and development, and commodification of socio-economic activities are justified in the name of profit. A capitalist race towards rapid commodification and the expansion of the market to more and more areas of human life ensures that people’s needs are met via consumption (ibid.). The process of commodification has already encompassed many aspects of our lives, e.g., land, food production, different forms of entertainment, and information, just to name a few (D’Alisa et al., 2015). Waged labour has to be undertaken in order for people to afford paying for these consumer goods (Frayne, 2015).
Polanyi showed (1957) that waged labour became the dominant way of ensuring livelihoods only in the 19th century, through the process of enclosures, first in England and later in Europe and in the whole western civilization. Labour, considered the act of selling one’s time and energy according to prices of the (labour) market, represents a reductionist way of ensuring livelihoods. In contrast to that practice, before the industrial revolution one could satisfy his/her (and his/her family’s) needs through diverse types of activities. Market and trading was only one, marginal mode of people interacting with each other and with the natural environment. Main driving forces of the economic activities beyond the market principle were embedded into the local social context. Solidarity-based practices such as reciprocity that involve trust and mutual respect rooted in human relationships were an integral part of meeting needs (Polanyi, 1957).
Nevertheless, in the 19th century and later in the 20th century market, paid labour became dominant and the main source of satisfying human needs. This is still the case in the 21st century and it presents several disadvantages: due to certain characteristics of capitalism (productivity, efficiency, competition), the world of labour discriminates against age (Wood & Harcourt, 2008), ability (Russell & Malhotra, 2009), race (Arrow, 1998), gender (Hartmann, 1976) and other personal characteristics as it fundamentally prioritises profit and time over social equality. On top of ignoring this vast and varied cohort of the population, it also does not recognise the economic and social importance of the so called “second shift” – tasks of everyday existence, which ensure the ability of the worker to show up at his/her job the next day, e.g., cooking, washing, cleaning – (D’Alisa & Cattaneo, 2013) – and the ways in which it impacts people’s everyday lives, jobs, and thus their effectiveness at work. Domestic and reproductive work, also called care work and mainly done by women, has gone unrecognised throughout history until feminist discourses have brought it to light and has pushed for various ways of validating it (Hochschild & Machung, 2012).
By most accounts, the longest-term consequence of the capitalist system and the growth paradigm is the environmental crisis and its manifold effects, i.e. species extinction, anthropogenic climate change, ocean acidification, climate migration, sea level rise, etc., (Allen et al., 2014). Certainly, the issue of capitalism is more complex than just the above described disadvantages. However, western civilization’s unfettered desire for growth, development, and life surrounded by priced commodities has precipitated the exploitation of limited natural resources to such an extent that it has managed to unleash a climate crisis that comes with great social, economical and ecological unrest.
Proposed solutions to this crisis come in many forms and with different purposes, however we must be careful not to end up using the same tools that have created the problems in the first place. Activists around the globe are demanding a systems change, tackling the real roots of today’s problems, not just the symptoms (Klein, 2015). The idea of degrowth offers an ethical and practical way forward, by at first complementing current systems, and eventually, replacing them; “[it] challenges the hegemony of growth and calls for a democratically led redistributive downscaling of production and consumption in industrialised countries as a means to achieve environmental sustainability, social justice and well-being” (Demaria et al. 2013:209).
The present paper has opened with describing the ways in which capitalism penetrates and organises human life in order to generate capital and profit for those who own the means of production. It continued by reminding the reader of a handful of social and environmental disadvantages that it generates. If the premise is to somehow get a grip on solving such issues, then, in the following part, we would like to advance dialogue on some theories of change, together with hands-on examples and experiences to show that alternative ways of organising are possible, real and ready to replace the dominant paradigm of our time. Through the case of Cargonomia, a grassroot initiative in Budapest, we will show the benefits of expanding the concept of care work to include also community building, civic engagement and environmental activism in order to allow for different narratives that promote sustainable lifestyles with a milder environmental and social impact on the planet and its communities.
D’Alisa, Deriu and Demaria (2015) define care, and thus care work, as “the daily action performed by human beings for their welfare and for the welfare of their community” (D’Alisa, Deriu and Demaria, 2015:63). Some authors use the terms care work and reproductive work interchangeably to mean these action performed mainly by women for the benefit of their families and immediate environment/community (ranging from child rearing and home chores to taking care of elderly and the sick). The “labour of love”, as feminist discourse goes on to argue, differs from waged labour in that it is taken for granted as a limitless resource governed by social-emotional codes (Bauhardt, 2013).
Given that certain care activities, like bringing up children, are not to simply be completed faster and more efficiently, as capitalism would dictate, the rules and measurements used by the market would fall short of a genuine valuation of socially strong acts and behaviours. Instead of letting care and reproductive work be swallowed by market commodification, some degrowth scholars argue that other economic activities would benefit from a more people-friendly approach endorsing the advantages of social relations (Kallis, Demaria & D’Alisa, 2016).
Beside the problem of commodification, Biesecker & Hofmeiser (2010) argue that even productive work is grounded on the regenerative and restorative role of reproductive processes. In everyday life these are intrinsically inseparable. Their daring hypothesis is that the modern crises of today, especially the ecological and the reproductive work crisis, started with the theoretical separation of reproduction from production necessary for industrial modernity.
So far, care and reproductive work indicates mainly domestic work centred around the family, caring about elderly people, etc. However, Weeks (2011) cautions that, in this sense doing care work becomes imprisoned within the dogma of productive work (doing chores rapidly and effectively). She suggests instead that we reframe the idea of care work and expand it to include other recreational activities and allow ourselves the freedom to care for our and others’ well-being and happiness. In this new sense, doing care could enable people to re-appropriate autonomy over their lives and to have the power to choose between the ways in which they satisfy their needs.
Firstly, expanding/reframing the concept of care work in academia to include a wider range of unpaid work and activities, such as community involvement and civic engagement, has the benefit of acknowledging that the extent of people’s activities that the market economy does not cover is even larger than previously considered. Thus the meaning of care work could move away from the binary of productive work and care work, with care work as domestic and reproductive work serving paid work. But it could also refer to the whole ‘uncommodified’ part of people’s lives and therefore contribute towards decolonizing our imaginaries from overly market-oriented thinking. Having a more holistic view of care work (one that includes civic engagement) in academia would not only make research more robust, but could inform policy making and shed light on the things without a price tag that make people happy and safe in a convivial, open space where things and feelings are shared. Secondly, based on this expanded meaning of care work, several authors have shown that uncommodified activities and decisions not driven by profit/market but social relations can lead to more ecologically sustainable decisions (Hayden, 1999; Nierling 2012).
Nierling (2012) also uses this extended understanding of care work when she writes “[unpaid work] may include many reproductive activities like cooking, gardening, doing handicrafts and becoming involved in voluntary charity work or community service.” In this respect, “it allows one to pursue a sustainable lifestyle through (modern) forms of subsistence and political participation” (ibid:240). By exploring this form of subsistence and care activity on both an individual and organisational level, she finds, overall, that her subjects appreciate the time and effort they can put in their loved work without being pressured by economic incentives. The emancipatory power through collective organising allows for people to rediscover “the things that really matter: family, identity, friendship, community, and purpose in life” by “promoting a degrowth society with a high level of personal wellbeing” (Jackson, 2009:86).
Besides individual recognition and decisions surrounding more care work, collective action is needed to decolonize our imaginary. Fortunately, more and more people worldwide are becoming engaged in political and environmental justice movements through grassroots organizations and through civic engagement. In the next section we would like to expand on Nierling’s findings by presenting a grassroots organisation which, we believe, exemplifies well how one’s care towards the local, civic community allows one to lead a more conscious and sustainable lifestyle and how it can call for collective action.
The case we aim to present in this paper is a degrowth-inspired open collective called Cargonomia which operates in Budapest, Hungary as an organic food distribution point, a cargo bike centre, and an open space for community and educational activities related to degrowth, well-being, ecology and sustainable transition. The mission of the collective is twofold; on one end Cargonomia aims to increase access and knowledge about local, organic food production and sustainable mobility for citizens, and on the other it supports the creation of local, decent jobs connecting rural and urban areas by partnering with local, small scale business.
The background of this open collective is based on a cooperation between a cargo bike messenger company, Kantaa, a biodynamic farm, Zsámboki Organic Garden and low-tech design and fabrication cargo bike workshop, Cyclonomia. The result is a diverse portfolio of activities offered under the umbrella of Cargonomia. These activities are centred around a physical space that serves as the dispatching centre for bike messengers and where 50-80 vegetable boxes are distributed each week containing organic vegetables, fruits, bread and wine. These organic products and vegetable boxes can be picked up in person at the headquarters of Cargonomia or delivered by the locally produced cargo bikes within the inner districts of Budapest.
The available resources and infrastructure allow Cargonomia to develop further activities. The cargo bikes and the physical space not only serve the delivery of vegetable boxes, but Cargonomia also offers solutions for sustainable transportation for the wider community of Budapest. People can try cargo bikes or consult personnel about their usage during the numerous events organized by the open collective. It also connects people who own and those who would like to rent or try out this type of bicycles. In 2018 the community cargo bike sharing platform was launched to connect community places and citizens and to increase access of this sustainable way of transportation. Through this recent project, Cargonomia works together with other partners in all over Budapest where cargo bikes and trailers are placed and citizens can borrow them through an online platform.
The overall cooperation and the practical activities of Cargonomia support its partners in their long-term economic viability. Given existing services and infrastructure, Cargonomia acts as a tool in linking and streamlining these, with a focus on communication networks and operating space. The partners are independent in their daily operations with their own budget and individual responsibilities of offering competitively priced high quality goods and services. However, being part of Cargonomia provides greater stability and flexibility for the members than could be achieved if working individually by pooling infrastructure and human resources.
Besides supporting traditional business activities, the cooperation enables outreach activities to a wider audience. Regular events and workshops take place at Cargonomia headquarters, in the bicycle workshop, on the farm and in schools, community gardens, etc., where the group is invited for knowledge-sharing. Cargonomia also became an open space for dialogue about the importance of local food production, sustainable mobility, and transition towards a degrowth society. These dialogues contribute to the promotion of the services of the partner organizations – e.g. organic food sale – but more importantly the space becomes a place for democratic knowledge sharing.
Source: Cargonomia
While the selling of organic goods and delivery services supports traditional business andindirectly contributes to the creation of paid work for employees of the partners, cooperation itself is organized around civic engagement. The members of the Cargonomia team do not receive any direct financial benefit for the coordination and organization of the activities. The vegetable box distribution, organization of events, holding workshops, developing cargo bike sharing platform, educating young families to use cargo bikes are carried out in the unpaid free time of the team members. What makes it possible to accomplish such a wide range of activities is the interdisciplinary cooperation between the partners, the diversity in personal knowledge, experience, and skills, and a strong shared commitment.
According to the co-founders, maintaining a high level of diversity and quality of activities would not be possible within the market system limited to paid jobs. Informal work allows members to do what they are the best at and use their competencies based on what is needed. Thus organizing events and workshops, and distributing vegetable boxes becomes a personal joy. ‘No big investment’ applies as a rule, thus services, activities and events are organized based on the skills and creativity of the members, which leads to the experimentation of innovative solutions. The diversity of activities contributes to gain new abilities and to connect different communities.
Since Cargonomia is not obliged to pay salaries or generate income to pay back debts it does not have to comply with the growth paradigm. Decisions about the services, and resources to use can be made based on a degrowth logic which is embedded in the operation. It means that ecological boundaries and social issues are always prioritized over profit. For instance, the recently launched cargo bike-sharing project is based on the current under-used, locally produced cargo bike fleet and the wide partnership relations around the city. Cargo bikes owned by the collective are placed at partner organisations, such as the community place, cafés, and DIY workshops where citizens can borrow them through an open source platform. No additional investment allows them to keep the system at human scale. It works based on relationships where partners and users know each other and give their time and energy towards a common good that does not juggle ecological trade-offs. Human relations and mutual support become the backbone of the project and the compensation for economic value through the recognition of every effort invested in the community. Doing work that is decoupled from a growth paradigm, i.e., running the process of creation not based on economic principles, but on personal and creative ones, rewards individuals by improving their well-being, feeling of recognition, and achievement, as Nierling (2012) justified in her findings. Furthermore, it helps to decouple the operation of the system from economic growth while contributing to sustainable mobility.
We have analysed the case of Cargonomia through the lens of an extended definition of care work: including care towards our, others’ and the environment’s flourishing.
Accordingly, individual decisions regarding care work (in its extended meaning) contribute to:
(1) the viability of small scale, de-mechanized, local businesses to carry out their ecologically sustainable operations;
(2) individual benefits such as recognition, gaining new skills, conviviality, etc. and
(3) develop further activities to support sustainable lifestyles.
Nierling (2012) argues that developing new and hidden skills and competences in autonomous and emancipatory ways “might lead an individual to decide in favour of a satisfying conduct of life by means of a decommodification of work” (Nierling, 2012:245). Namely, one could find more alternative ways of subsisting, at least partially, than the prevalent form of waged labour. Engaging less in waged labour can have several positive impact on our social lives—empowerment, more time and ability to participate in political debates, recognition, etc. (Jackson, 2009)—and it can also facilitate a path towards a more ecologically sustainable life (Hayden, 1999).
The Cargonomia case shows how individuals’ participation in grassroots initiatives and engagement in transition movements can contribute to more environmental and socially conscious decisions at the individual and collective organisational levels. Grassroots, autonomous organising increases access to sustainable food consumption and sustainable mobility, while enabling participants and the wider community to participate in debates on local sustainable transition pathways. These diverse purposes would not be possible if driven purely by economic goals.
Even though today this alternative form of organising is possible, it is sustained by individuals who can afford to carry out activities beyond paid work. It comes with the precondition of economic security that excludes others and prevents many people to join such initiatives and enjoy its benefits. In the long term, the transition movement towards a degrowth society will have to find strategies to allow everyone, especially those who are not economically wealthy, to perform care work while having their basic needs met (Schneider, 2010). It might come with the idea of finding a holistic concept of work where paid and unpaid work are equally important. The better recognition of care work could help us to decolonize our imaginary and shift our lifestyles towards a more cooperative and sustainable society (Jackson, 2009: 91). Cargonomia aims to inspire other citizens, groups and organizations to experiment new ways of cooperation and to reorganize our lives around more volunteer/civic activity that contributes to our personal wellbeing and enhances better organizational decisions.
Allen, M. R., Barros, V. R., Broome, J., Cramer, W., Christ, R., Church, J. A., … & Edenhofer, O. (2014). IPCC fifth assessment synthesis report-climate change 2014 synthesis report.
Arrow, K. J. (1998). What has economics to say about racial discrimination?. Journal of economic perspectives, 12(2), 91-100.
Bauhardt, C. (2013). Rethinking gender and nature from a material (ist) perspective: Feminist economics, queer ecologies and resource politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 20(4), 361-375.
D’Alisa, G., & Cattaneo, C. (2013). Household work and energy consumption: a degrowth perspective. Catalonia’s case study. Journal of Cleaner Production, 38, 71-79.
D’Alisa, G.; Demaria, F.; Kallis, G. (2015). Degrowth: A vocabulary for a new era. Oxon: Routledge
Frayne, D. (2015). The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work. London: Zed Book
Hartmann, H. (1976). Capitalism, patriarchy, and job segregation by sex. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1(3, Part 2), 137-169.
Hayden, A. (1999). Sharing the work, sparing the planet: Work time, consumption, & ecology. London: Zed Books.
Hochschild, A., & Machung, A. (2012). The second shift: Working families and the revolution at home.Penguin.
Jackson, T. (2009). Prosperity without growth: Economics for a finite planet. Routledge.
Klein, N. (2015). This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. Nueva York: Simon & Schuster.
Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man: the ideology of advanced industrial society. Sphere Books.
Nierling, L. (2012). “This is a bit of the good life”: Recognition of unpaid work from the perspective of degrowth. Ecological Economics 84: 240–246
Polanyi, K. (1957). The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press.
Russell, M., & Malhotra, R. (2009). Capitalism and disability. Socialist Register, 38(38)
Schneider, F. (2010). Degrowth of production and consumption capacities for social justice, wellbeing and ecological sustainability. Proceedings of the Second Degrowth Conference, Barcelona.
Weeks, K. (2011). The problem with work: Feminism, Marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries. Duke University Press.
Wood, G., Wilkinson, A., & Harcourt, M. (2008). Age discrimination and working life: perspectives and contestations–a review of the contemporary literature. International Journal of Management Reviews, 10(4), 425-442.
To find the article online : https://www.exploring-economics.org/de/entdecken/reimagining-world-carework-case-cargonomia/
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For the week ending 5 March 2016 / 25 Adar I 5776
Which Witnesses Count
A get divorce document which does not have two witnesses signed upon it but is delivered to the woman in the presence of witnesses is valid according to the view of Rabbi Elazar. Rabbi Elazar's interpretation of the Torah directive to "write" a get is limited to the writing of the text alone; it does not refer to the signing of witnesses. Rabbi Meyer, by contrast, considers a get without witnesses signed upon it as invalid even if it is relayed before witnesses.
The gemara concludes that we rule like Rabbi Elazar who states in the mishna that the witnesses of the delivery make the get valid; the only reason the Sages instituted that the witnesses sign the get, continues the gemara,is to protect the woman: If her husband eventually challenges the divorce and the witnesses to the delivery are not alive or unavailable to testify to its validity, the signatures can be used to validate the get.
Rabbi Yitzchak Alfasi (Rif) initiated a lively debate amongst the early commentaries by declaring that if there are no witnesses to the delivery, only witnesses signed upon the get, it is valid even according to Rabbi Elazar. One of his proofs is the above-mentioned rabbinical enactment to have witnesses sign so that their signatures would serve as proof of the get's validity in case delivery witnesses were unavailable. If such witnesses are not sufficient, he asks, what is the value of the decree?
His position is challenged by a disciple of his, Rabbi Ephraim, whose view (and that of the Tosefists) is that since Rabbi Elazar always states that delivery witnesses are what counts and he never explicitly adds that signed witnesses are sufficient, we must conclude that without delivery witnesses, the get is invalid. The rabbinical decree to have witnesses sign, explains Rabbi Ephraim, is a safeguard to indicate that there were indeed witnesses to the delivery since we assume that witnesses would not have signed on a get unless they saw that there were witnesses to the delivery. But if we know that there were no such witnesses to the delivery the get will be invalid.
Rabbeinu Nissim (Ran) elaborates in his defense of the Rif's position and offers a revolutionary explanation for signed witnesses being effective even when we know there were no delivery witnesses. Since they saw the writing of the get and now see it in the hands of the woman, we consider it as if they saw the actual delivery. Since there is no other plausible explanation for how it got to her, we view the conclusion the witnesses reach as an extension of what they actually saw.
(At the end of his long discussion on his position, Rif quotes one of the Geonim who disagrees with him, explaining that "even though his words contradict mine I chose to quote them, because they represent heavenly labor.")
A Not So Bad King
On the list of the kings of the Kingdom of Israel, which was composed of the ten tribes that had seceded from the Kingdom of Yehuda during the reign of Rechavam, is Hoshea ben Eilah. He is described (Melachim II 17:2) as "doing what was evil in the eyes of Hashem, but not like the kings of Israel before him." This would seem to indicate a radical change in the pattern of idol worship set by his predecessors. Yet the very next passage reports that his kingdom was punished by an invasion from the Assyrian king who made Hoshea subservient to him. Why would he, more righteous than the preceding kings, be thus subjugated while they were not?
The gemara's explanation of this paradox returns us to the founder of the Kingdom of Israel, Yerovam ben Nevat. Fearful that if his followers were to make their regular pilgrimages to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices in the Beit Hamikdash which was under the control of his rival, Rechavam, they would eventually desert him and rejoin the Kingdom of Yehuda, ruled by David's descendants. He therefore established two golden calves which he placed in Bet El and Dan as alternative objects of worship and he installed sentries along the roads to prevent pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
This pattern of worshipping idols and preventing Jews from going to the Beit Hamikdash was continued by succeeding kings of Israel, who are described as following in the evil ways of Yerovam. Hoshea was also an idol worshipper but when he saw that Yerovam's golden calves were exiled by a foreign power he decided to do away with the sentries and to allow his subjects the choice of going to Jerusalem or worshipping the local idols. This is what is meant by his being evil but not like those before him.
Once the Jews in his kingdom had the opportunity of making pilgrimage to Jerusalem and yet failed to do so, Hashem decreed that they would go into exile for all those years they did not go up to Jerusalem. This is the connection to the next passage describing the beginning of that exile.
A serious problem is raised by Maharsha (Mesechta Bava Batra 121a). The Sage Ulla states that the 15th day of the Month of Av is a holiday for Jews because it was on that date that Hoshea removed the sentries. Why is this a cause for celebration, he asks, if it was this un-utilized opportunity which served as the catalyst for exile? Maharsha remarks that there is a resolution for this problem, but he does not spell it out. It has been suggested that the opportunity was utilized by some righteous Jews, which made it a day to be annually remembered, but that the majority clinging to idolatry despite their new religious freedom brought about their exile.
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Behind the Scenes with The Latenight Callers
For the next few weeks, we’ll be featuring artists playing the MidCoast Takeover fundraiser shows, sponsored by Midwest Music Foundation.
It’s 11 a.m. on a Sunday morning, which for this reviewer typically equates to a dog on each side and blanket after blanket piled upon my bed. Instead, I’m braving the brisk winter air of Midtown to talk with a band whose name is acutely contradictory to my being awake.
If you don’t know them, you have to wonder what The Latenight Callers are really like, especially during the early morning hours (relatively speaking). You also might be wondering what the band’s new recording sounds like. To provide a quick perspective: the four members (Ms. Ellen [O’Hayer] was unavailable for comment that day) were awake and pleasant, and the upcoming LP leaves nothing to be desired for this skyrocketing Kansas City group.
I met with Ms. Julie, Mr. Mac, Mr. Nemeth, and Mr. Combs at Weights and Measures Soundlab, where they’ve been tracking with veteran engineer (and musician) Duane Trower (currently of Olivetti Letter; formerly of Season To Risk, Doris Henson, Overstep).
“The character of Duane’s gear helps us portray the character of the band, in the essence that everything is out of another time,” said baritone guitarist Krysztof Nemeth. Trower boasts an array of obscure, vintage gear, as well as equipment he’s built himself, which the band believes help keep its sound as unique as possible.
Unlike the band’s previous two EP recordings (The Latenight Callers and Easy Virtues). the full-length will be mixed by Trower (who mastered Easy Virtues) instead of recorded by Nemeth. Keyboardist/electronic sound guru Nick Combs mentioned that Trower seemed to be the perfect fit for the band’s upcoming album. “We needed someone that wouldn’t make us sound precious. With Duane’s own experience as a musician, we knew he’d give us the heftier sound we’ve been looking for.” Recording in a studio has given the band the freedom to explore its music, most of which will be new and some of which will be re-recorded from the first EP.
The new full-length, still untitled, seems to be more of a collaborative effort than previous recordings, with tracks built by each individual member to serve each song. The Callers’ first EP was written, produced, and performed by Nemeth and frontwoman Julie Berndsen, before the other three members were added to the mix. After 3 years, the band has gained a collective maturity and a strong foothold in the local scene, and the new tracks show that each member knows what element to bring to write a song that is uniquely The Latenight Callers.
Berndsen noted, “Everyone has the goal of creating a cohesive song, but we had to really think about… does each piece complement the particular song?” Berndsen and O’Hayer recorded their vocals in a session after each instrument had been laid down, which, according to the group, enhanced the emotive aspects of each track.
“With recording, we have to step back from our individual roles and look at it from a distance to gain perspective of what our audience will recognize and respond viscerally to,” said Nemeth. Combs added, “Instead of just one person’s vision, it’s all five of us. We’re listening to the arrangements and orchestration instead of just thinking about ‘my part.’”
With plans to release this album in the spring and big shows in the works, 2013 promises to be another tremendous year for The Latenight Callers. Stay tuned.
Editor’s note: Bassist Gavin Mac was available for comment, but settled upon curling up in the studio’s comfortable leather couch and settled in for a long winter’s nap. Left-handed bass players are prone to hibernation at this and all other times of year.
The Latenight Callers will be performing some of the songs from its upcoming album this Friday, February 1, at Czar Bar, for the second MidCoast Takeover fundraiser show. The Callers will headline the show, playing at 12:00 a.m. after Jorge Arana Trio, Eyelit, and Tiny Horse. Tickets are available here. The band will also be performing at the MidCoast Takeover show at SXSW on Saturday, March 16 at Shangri-La in Austin, Texas.
Photos by Randy Pace. Please do not use without permission.
--Michelle Bacon
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my-step-brother-jacob-32
analsex tarafından 8 Eylül 2022 tarihinde
Subject: My Step-Brother Jacob – Chapter 32 DISCLAIMER: The following story is FICTIONAL. It contains descriptions of sexual activities between teenage boys. If you are not over 18 years of age, or if you find this type of story offensive, or viewing this material is illegal where you are, then please DO NOT READ IT! If you choose to read it, then – I hope you enjoy it! My Step-Brother Jacob Chapter 32 —————————————————————————– “Oh my God! What the Hell are you doing here?” Elizabeth asked Duke, staring at him incredulously. Jacob’s smile faded rapidly. “I brought my son a birthday present!” Duke retorted, glaring back at her. He reached inside his coat and withdrew a small present and card from an inner pocket, and handed it to Jacob. Glancing uncertainly as his mother, Jacob took the present from his father and sat down in one of the wing-backed chairs and began opening it. “It’s not a lot,” Duke began. Elizabeth snorted and muttered, “nothing new about that.” Jacob glanced up at her and gave her a pleading look, as he ripped the paper off his present. She just looked away. “Oh wow!” Jacob said, as he opened the box to reveal a gold necklace with a celtic cross hanging from it. Elizabeth had a sour look on her face as Jacob lifted the necklace out of the box and said “help me put it on!” Duke took it from him, and as he fastened it around Jacob’s neck, he said, “it was my father’s. He gave it to me when I was about your age. I used to wear it all the time, but now I want you to have it.” “It’s beautiful,” Jacob said, as he held the cross out and looked down at it. “Thanks Dad!” he said and he turned and threw his arms around his father and hugged him. “Oh please,” Elizabeth muttered almost inaudibly. I looked at her and said quietly, “Elizabeth, it’s the boy’s birthday. Cut them some slack. Let’s give them some time to visit.” As Elizabeth turned and glared at me, Andy prodded Harry, and the two of them got up and snuck out to the kitchen. “Elizabeth!” I said, looking at her pointedly. “I will NOT allow them to be alone together!” she hissed at me. Jacob spun around and faced his mother, glaring at her. Before he could say anything, I said firmly, “Then I’ll stay with them!” Elizabeth glared angrily at me, as I stared back at her. “Fine!” she said, “but you’re NOT to leave them alone!” “They’ll be fine,” I said. She sat glaring at me a few more moments, but finally, she said, “You’d better make certain of that!” Then she stood up and stalked out of the room, and went upstairs. “I’m sorry Dad,” Jacob said, looking sadly at his father. “You have nothing to be sorry about Jacob,” Duke said, “Don’t forget to open your card yet too.” “Oh yeah,” Jacob said, and he picked up the card and opened it. “Money too?” I heard Jacob say, as I began quietly straightening things up. “Well, I thought you might want to buy some CD’s or something,” Duke said, “and I wasn’t sure which ones you would want.” Jacob grinned at his father and thanked him again, and gave him another hug. Then he said “C’mon, sit down Dad.” They went and sat on the couch together. “Would you like a piece of birthday cake Duke?” I asked, as I picked up a stack of dishes to take out to the kitchen. Duke hesitated, but Jacob piped up, “yes he would, and would you bring me another piece too please?” I grinned and winked at him and headed for the kitchen. As I walked out of the Livingroom, Andy and Harry came out of the kitchen and headed for the stairs. “We’ll be in your room, how about you and Jake join us later?” Harry said grinning evily at me as they walked past. Glancing down I noticed they both had lumps in their crotches. “Oh really?” I said, raising my eyebrows. They both blushed a tad, then Andy said softly, “We thought it might be nice if we all gave Jacob a special, more personalized birthday present, if it’s alright with you?” I grinned and said “Sure! I hope Duke doesn’t stay too Long in that case! I’m sure you two can amuse yourselves until we get there though!” Then I looked at Andy and said, “But you make any wet spots, they better be on your side of the bed!” Harry snickered and grabbed Andy’s hand and pulled him up the stairs behind him. Chuckling, and feeling my dick begin to stiffen, I continued to the kitchen. I cut three pieces of cake and poured three glasses of milk. I put it all on a tray and returned to the livingroom. Duke and Jacob were visiting quietly when I returned. I gave them their cake and milk, and the three of us ate and talked a little. I looked at Duke and said, “So I thought you had gone ‘undercover’ so to speak?” Jacob shot me a pleading look. Duke smiled and said “Relax Jacob. He has every right to ask, and I don’t mind telling him.” Then he looked at me and said, “The problem I had that caused me to have to leave was cleared up recently. So I was able to come home.” Instantly, Jacob’s face lit up with a huge smile. I grinned and said, “well someone’s certainly happy about that.” Duke grinned too, but then got serious and said, “Well, I don’t know if I’ll be able to see Jacob – it’ll all depend on how Elizabeth feels about it.” Jacob’s smile vanished again instantly. Then Duke said, “Do you think you or your father could speak to her and fix it so I can see Jacob?” Jacob looked at me, and stopped chewing. I was quiet a few seconds, then I said, “Well, I’ll see if I can help. But, I guess Jacob didn’t get a chance to tell you yet. We’ve had a rough time of it lately. We went to the US over Christmas break. We had a great trip, although it was marred at the end, when one of my best friends committed suicide. Then, shortly after we returned to England, my father was out walking one afternoon. He was hit by a car and was killed.” “Oh My God! I’m so sorry!” Duke said, “If there’s anything at all I can do, please just ask!” I thanked him for his offer, and said I’d speak to Elizabeth about he and Jacob being allowed to see each other. Then I asked Duke how his mother was. Duke said it was a good thing he’d gotten home when he did. His mother wasn’t well. She just wasn’t able to care for herself anymore. He said that he’d moved her into a nursing home nearby, and that she’d asked him to bring Jacob for a visit. “Do you think Elizabeth will at least allow that?” he asked looking at me. “We’ll see. I hope so.” I said. “You can come along too if you’d like,” Duke said. I thanked him and said I expected that might be one of Elizabeth’s conditions şişli travesti for any visits he had with Jacob. Duke looked down at his plate a minute, but then looked back up at me with a defeated look on his face and said, “Well, that’d be OK.” I smiled, and thanked Duke. Then, as we’d finished eating, I excused myself and picked up the dirty dishes and took them to the Kitchen. I spent a few minutes picking things up out there, before returning to the livingroom. I stopped short as I was about to walk back into the livingroom. I saw Jacob was sitting facing his father, telling him something, and there were tears running down his cheeks. I stopped outside the livingroom door and listened as Jacob was saying, “…s-so what I’m trying to tell you is that I’m gay too!” With that he looked up at his father, a mixture of fear and embarrassment on his face. I held my breath waiting to hear Duke’s answer. He thought a couple of seconds, then sighed and said, “Jacob, I love you. All I want for you is happiness. If that’s what makes you happy, then I’m OK with it.” Jacob couldn’t hold back his tears any longer. He began crying in earnest now, as Duke took him in his arms and held him. I crept slowly back into the hallway, as I felt tears filling my own eyes. I backed up onto the stairs and sat down, wiping my eyes, as I listened to Jacob let go and cry, as Duke held him and comforted him. After a minute or so, Jacob calmed down and I heard him say “I love you Dad!” “I love you too,” Duke replied. I waited a couple minutes, but it was getting late, so I got up and walked into the livingroom. They were both wiping their eyes. I pretended not to notice. “I’m sorry guys, but it’s getting rather late, and I know Elizabeth will be coming down soon to tell us that!” I said. Duke smiled and thanked me for letting him visit with Jacob. He asked if I thought he could see Jacob again next weekend. I said I didn’t know, but I’d talk to Elizabeth, then get back to him. He gave me his phone number, which I wrote down and shoved in my wallet. He said he’d like to come by next Saturday around 10 in the morning to take Jacob, and me too, to the nursing home to see his mother, if Elizabeth agreed. I told him I’d let him know. Then I went over and poked at the fire, while Jacob walked his father to the door and they said good night to each other. Jacob joined me at the fire after Duke had gone. “How about a birthday drink?” I said, winking at him. “Really?” he said. I grinned and went behind the bar. “I think you’re old enough now – as long as you only drink when your mother or I say it’s OK to. What would you like?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s your birthday – you choose,” I said. He thought a minute, then asked if we had any Drambuie left. He had tried a sip of mine once when I had been drinking some, and had liked it. We had a bottle, so I poured us each a glass and re-joined Jacob, who was sitting in front of the fire. “Happy Birthday!” I said, handing him his glass. We clinked glasses, and each took a swallow. Jacob smiled and said “This is so tasty and it feels so warm as it goes down!” I smiled and agreed. Then he told me that he’d told his dad about the rest of what had happened since we’d come back from the states. I looked at him. He looked a little scared, but said, “I kinda told him that Andy was gay and was living with us now. So then he wondered about you too. I’m sorry – I tried not to tell him, but he figured it out, only he thought you were gay. I told him you were bi, that you like girls too. He said he didn’t really care whether you were straight or gay or bi, he was just glad that you were here for me. So, then I took a chance and told him that I was gay too. He said it was OK! And, he still loves me!” I grinned and told him I’d overheard the tail-end of the conversation, and it was OK that he’d told his dad about me. I also told him I was glad it worked out that his dad still loved him, even after he came out to him! Jacob asked me if I’d talk to his mother and fix it so he could see his dad. I told him I’d try. I felt Jacob lean on me then. I put my arm around him and hugged him. Jacob looked up at me and grinned and said “All things considered, this turned out to be a pretty great birthday!” I kissed him on the forehead, then I smiled evily at him and said, “wanta make it even better?” Jacob grinned hugely, but then said, “but what about Harry and Andy? And – where are they anyway?” “Well, I believe they were too horny to wait for us, so they went upstairs and most likey started without us!” I said. Jacob’s mouth dropped open and his eyes got huge “Well what are we doing down here then?” he asked. I chuckled and said, “we’re sharing a private brotherly moment – just the two of us!” Jacob looked up at me for a moment. His lower lip trembled slightly and his eyes started to look watery again. “I’m glad we are, let’s not go up right away,” he said. Then he added “I love you John!” “I love you too Jacob,” I said and wrapped my arm around him again and drew him up against me. We sat quietly then, hugging each other, watching the fire and sipping our Drambuie. Shortly, we heard footsteps on the stairs, and looked behind us just as Harry and Andy walked in. The lumps in the crotches of their jeans made it obvious, they were both very horny! Jack was with them. “Do you have any idea how long we’ve been waiting for you two?” Harry said. We looked at them and chuckled. “Seriously, are you guys going to join us soon?” Andy asked. “Well we were afraid we might be interrupting something!” I said, snickering. Then I added “just let me let Jack out to pee first, then we’ll be up.” “No, Harry and I will handle that, you two finish up,” Andy said. Then he turned toward the kitchen and called Jack to follow him. Harry went with them. Jacob and I grinned at each other, clinked our glasses, and drained them. We got up and joined the guys a couple minutes later, as they headed back upstairs. Elizabeth stepped out of her room into the hallway, as we were going up the stairs. She was ready to leave for work. She looked at me and asked, “Is everything alright?” I smiled and said “just fine. We’re going to bed now. Can we talk tomorrow though?” “OK,” she said, “Good Night guys! And Jacob – Happy Birthday!” Jacob gave her a hug, and we all said good-night, then she went downstairs, picked up her bag and left for work. We all went into Andy’s and my room then. Jack padded over and plopped down in his bed in the corner, and promptly went to sleep. Andy and Harry beylikdüzü travesti both ripped off their T-Shirts, then unfastened their jeans and pulled them off. They stood there butt-naked in front of us. Both their cocks were stiff as boards, and Andy’s piss slit had a drop of precum glistening on it. Jacob and I grinned and began stripping as quickly as possible, as Andy reached over and began fondling Harry’s dick. “Hey guys?” he said, “have you noticed that Harry here has grown?” “It grows all the time!” Jacob snickered. “No,” said Andy, snickering “I mean his hardon’s bigger now than it used to be. He’s got just about 6″ now!” “Mine’s just over 6″ now!” Jacob said, turning and proudly displaying his own stiff dick. Andy grinned, dropped Harry’s penis, and reached for Jacob’s. Jacob drew in his breath sharply, as Andy’s hand encircled his penis. “Yes! You’re bigger now too!” he said, fondling Jacob and waggling his eyebrows at me. Both boys were grinning as we complimented them on their greater size. “Hmm, I think I’d like to suck this!” Andy said, grinning at Jacob. “So what does the birthday boy want us to do with him?” I asked grinning laciviously at Jacob. He grinned back and said, “Everything!” We all laughed, then I said, “Well, I think we can handle that!” They all looked at me expectantly. I grinned, then suggested that Jacob get on the bed on his stomach, and raise his ass up in the air. He grinned and got on the bed as I had indicated. We all took a moment to fondle and admire his cute ass, while he giggled. Then I told Harry to get in front of Jacob, so Jacob could suck him off. Harry grinned and lost no time getting into position, placing his dick a few inches from Jacob’s mouth. Jacob stretched and engulfed Harry’s cock in his mouth. “Oh yeah!” Harry murmured, closing his eyes and leaning back into the pillows, as Jacob began sucking up and down his rod. Meanwhile I pulled Andy over to the bed, and told him to crawl under Jacob and start sucking on him, if that’s what he wanted to do. Andy grinned. As he got into position, I grabbed a tube of lube from my drawer, then got behind Jacob, and straddled Andy’s torso. Jacob was sucking away on Harry’s cock, and fondling his balls. Harry was moaning lowly. Andy started sucking on Jacob’s cock then, and fondling his balls, as I went down on Jacob’s asshole and began rimming him. Jacob was moaning soon as well, as Andy’s and my mouths made love to his cock and ass. I licked up and down Jacob’s almost hairless ass crack, concentrating most of my attention on his pink pucker. As my tongue washed back and forth over Jacob’s hole, it tensed and relaxed every so often, reacting to the pleasureful feelings Andy and I were giving him. After a minute or so, I began forming my tongue into a spear, and stabbing it gently through Jacob’s sphincter. He groaned as my tongue slid up inside him the first time. I began fucking my tongue in and out of his hole, as he moaned with pleasure. Soon I replaced my tongue with a lubed finger, and began finger fucking him. He moaned even more. Not long afterward, I inserted a second finger. Jacob’s moans became grunts, as I fucked him with both fingers. Eventually, I inserted a third finger, and used that on him for several seconds, as he groaned loudly with each inward thrust of my hand. Finally, I pulled my fingers from his hole, and lubed his hole and my dick liberally with KY. I moved forward, still straddling Andy, and I pressed the tip of my hard cock up against Jacob’s anus and began gently pushing. Jacob stopped sucking on Harry momentarily, as a gasp escaped his lips, when my hardon slid slowly through his sphincter and up inside him. I kept pushing slowly, and gently, until all of my 9 inches were buried deep inside him. Then, after waiting a few seconds, I began slowly pulling back out of him! Gently, I began fucking him up the ass, as Andy sucked him off, and he sucked Harry off. I felt Andy reach around the back of my leg and begin masturbating as well. After a few strokes, I began to fuck Jacob a little faster and harder. He was moaning steadily now at the pleasureful feelings he was experiencing. I felt Andy’s free hand cup my left ass cheek, and his finger began massaging my hole, as I continued fucking Jacob. Harry was laying back with his eyes closed, moaning and gasping quietly to himself as Jacob sucked up and down his rigid shaft. His hands were both placed on the back and top of Jacob’s head, and he was rubbing Jacob’s hair slowly. I felt Jacob’s sphincter involutarily contracting every so often, as I continued fucking him up the ass. I could feel my orgasm beginning to build, as I slid my dick in and out of Jacob’s hot, slippery hole! Harry had an intense look on his face, and his body was starting to tense up. His nostrils were flaring. He looked ready to cum soon. I could tell from the sounds Jacob was making, that he was going to shoot soon too. I began to shove my cock in and out of my little step-brother’s ass a bit harder. I could tell that Andy was sucking him off equally as fast as I was fucking him. Jacob began making urgent short moans, which usually signaled that he was about to cum. Harry was fucking his pelvis up and down off the bed now, and his breathing was labored. I could feel my cum starting to churn. I pounded in and out of Jacob’s asshole even faster and harder, as he began groaning more insistently. Suddenly, Harry’s body tensed and he began whimpering, then let out a gasp, followed by a groan. I could tell he was filling Jacob’s mouth with his semen. He continued gasping and groaning every couple seconds. Jacob started cumming next. I felt him tense, and his sphincter clamp around my cock, as he groaned and flooded Andy’s mouth with his jizz. At the same time, I felt Andy’s finger press through my sphincter. Instantly I groaned and began filling Jacob’s bowels with my own juices. At the same time, Andy moaned, and I felt something hot and wet hit the back of my thigh and realized that he was having his orgasm as well. All four of us were grunting and moaning as we all spasmed together in the throes of orgasmic rapture. Slowly, one by one, in the order in which our orgasms had begun, they all ended. When we were all finished, Jacob and I tipped over onto our right sides, and lay on the bed, my cock still fitted snuggly up into his rectum. Harry crawled down to be next to Jacob and Andy crawled up behind Harry, and wrapped his arms around him. We lay together, all panting and grinning at each other and enjoying the aftermath istanbul travesti of our orgasms. Eventually, my penis returned to it’s flacid state, and slid from Jacob’s ass, as he squeezed it out of his rectum like it was a piece of shit. The two of us giggled at the sensation. “Happy Birthday Jacob!” I said. Andy and Harry wished him a happy birthday as well. Jacob thanked us all and said “I love you guys!” We all kissed him and told him we loved him as well. Then Andy and I reached down and pulled the covers up over us all, as it was getting chilly. Despite being cramped together, all four of us fell asleep snuggled up together soon afterward. Sometime later, I woke up because I had to pee. As I was stumbling back out of the bathroom, Andy was stumbling toward me. I waited while he peed, then suggested he and I go sleep in Jacob’s bed, so we wouldn’t all be so cramped. Andy smiled and followed me into Jacob’s room. We crawled into his bed and pulled the covers up over us and snuggled together. Soon we were both asleep again. The next morning, I was the first one to wake up, as Jack had searched around till he found me and poked my hand with his cold nose. He had to go out. I got up quietly, so Andy wouldn’t wake up, then went back to my room for my jeans. Jacob was spooned up against Harry’s back and the two were still sleeping peacefully. I put on my jeans and one of Andy’s sweatshirts that was laying on the floor, and followed Jack downstairs. I let Jack out and put on a pot of coffee. Then I got the newspaper in off the front steps. Elizabeth was due in from work soon, so I put on a pot for her tea water. Then, I decided to make a batch of cornbread muffins, so I turned on the oven and mixed up a batch of batter, as I watched Jack romping around the backyard chasing a couple of sparrows. I poured the batter into the muffin tins and was putting the pans into the oven, as Elizabeth and Jack walked in the back door. She grinned and said “I’m surprised you’re up so early.” “Thought we could chat,” I said, as I fixed her a cup of tea, and poured myself some coffee. “Good idea,” she said, taking off her coat and taking it into the hallway to hang it up. She reappeared a moment later and we sat down together at the kitchen table. “I take it you’d like to discuss Duke,” Elizabeth said. “Well, as a matter of fact, yes,” I said. She smiled benignly at me, and said “OK, go ahead then.” I took a sip of my coffee and said, “Well, he’s back, and he’s staying, and he wants to be able to visit Jacob, and I think they should be allowed to see each other.” “I figured as much,” she said, sipping her tea. Then she said, “John, there are things you don’t know about that concern me greatly about Jacob’s relationship with his father! Things I’m not ready to explain yet. You have to trust me that Duke is NOT good for Jacob!” Elizabeth paused, sipped her tea, and looked at me. “I’m sorry Elizabeth, but that’s not good enough! I’ve seen them together. They have a good relationship – really! I think, especially now that Dad’s gone, that Jacob needs to have a relationship with Duke!” Elizabeth thought for a minute then she said, “I’ve been thinking about this all night. I’ve come up with a plan, but it involves you. Are you willing to help out?” “I’d do anything for Jacob, you know that,” I said. “Good, because there’s something else I need to ask you as well,” she said. I looked at her questioningly. “First, regarding Duke. I’d rather they not see each other at all, for reasons I’ll not discuss with you at this time. But I realize that’s not about to happen. So, I’m willing to allow he and Jacob to spend some time together, but only if you agree to chaperone their visits. And John, I mean completely chaperone them! You CANNOT leave them alone together! Can you promise me that?” I looked at Elizabeth and said, “Yes, I can do that, but I’d still like to know WHY they can’t be left alone together.” “You just need to promise me that you’ll stay with them when they’re together, and that you’ll protect Jacob, and be there for him if things go bad! Can you do that?” she asked. “Yes Elizabeth, I can and will do that,” I said. “OK, then I have one more thing to ask you,” she said. Just then the oven timer went off. I jumped up telling her to “Hang on,” and took the muffins from the oven. They were done perfectly. I popped them out of their tins, into a couple of baskets, and set the baskets on the table. Then I got butter, jam, knives, and some napkins. I also refilled Elizabeth’s tea, and my coffee. Then I rejoined Elizabeth at the table. “What I’m going to ask of you is very important, and a it would be a great burden on you, if it were ever to come to fruition,” she said, looking at me very seriously. “OK, go ahead,” I said. She hesitated, but then said, “With your father gone now, I find that other than Jacob, the new baby, and you of course, I’m alone in the world. My immediate family is all gone now except for you three. John, you’re the only adult in our immediate family besides me. I want to make you Jacob’s and the new baby’s legal guardian in the event that anything unforseen happens to me.” I had been raising my mug to my lips, but my arm stopped and froze in midair, as I sat stunned, staring at Elizabeth. “What?” I said finally. “I’m asking you if you’ll be Jacob’s and the baby’s legal guardian if I die, or get sick and can’t take care of them,” she said. I stared at her a couple of moments, then I said, “Elizabeth, of course I’ll take care of Jacob if you can’t. The new baby too. That’s a given. In my mind, Jacob’s my little brother and I love him! The baby will be my brother or sister too. But Elizabeth, Jacob has a father. Wouldn’t Duke get custody of him?” “NO!” she said, emphatically, “I’m going to make it part of what he has to agree to if he wants to see Jacob. He’s going to have to sign the papers too, agreeing that you would be Jacob’s legal guardian if anything ever happens to me.” “Holy shit!” I said. “There’s one condition for you John. You can NEVER let Duke get custody of Jacob! Can you promise me that you’ll abide by that? And are you willing to be my children’s guardian if need be?” she asked, staring intently at me. I thought a moment, then looked at her and said “Of course. Like I said, I’m their brother. You have my word that I’ll take care of them as if they were my own children! And I won’t let Duke have Jacob. But someday I want you to explain to me why he’s so bad.” She smiled then and said, “Good! I’ll have the papers drawn up then.” Then, smiling, she took a muffin, buttered it and took a big bite of it, as I sat quietly digesting what we’d just discussed… ————————————————————————— The next chapter in this series will be published shortly.
Önceki makale the-boston-tea-party-14
Sonraki makale jasons-night-game
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Obama’s Health Spending ‘Problem’
January 14, 2013 admin Analysis and Opinions, Entitlements 0
By WSJ, Editorial
President Obama said a fair bit during the fiscal-cliff negotiations—speaking for 45 minutes in one 50-minute meeting, for example—but today let’s zero in on the claim he kept repeating: “We don’t have a spending problem. We have a health-care problem.” For our money—and yours—those are two of the most remarkable sentences our Orator in Chief has ever strung together.
Not so much on the merits, insofar as the federal government is the largest, and worst, buyer of health care in America. But didn’t we recently have an epic debate on this very topic? It seems only yesterday that the President was saying that health-care reform “is no longer just a moral imperative, it’s a fiscal imperative” and “one of the best ways—in fact maybe the only way—to reduce those long-term costs.”
To be precise, that’s how Mr. Obama put it in March 2009, in a White House speech kick-starting the Affordable Care Act. In May of that year, he drew attention to “one clear, indisputable fact,” which was that “the explosion in health-care costs has put our federal budget on a disastrous path.” He added that disciplining those costs “is essential to reducing budget deficits.”
The Democratic supermajority that ran Congress proceeded to write legislation they said would achieve those goals. A year later, speaking at a pep rally for House Democrats shortly before they voted to pass what he called “one of the biggest deficit reduction measures in history,” Mr. Obama said that “Everybody who’s looked at it says that every single good idea to bend the cost curve and start actually reducing health-care costs are in this bill.”
So why is Mr. Obama invoking a special health-care spending problem now? The rational way of reading his fiscal-cliff refrain is as a concession that his cost-control promises are being repudiated by reality. Entitlement spending is headed up, as are overall U.S. health-care costs.
The health entitlements—Medicare, Medicaid, the children’s state insurance program and soon ObamaCare subsidies—accounted for 21% of the budget in 2012. But that will rise to about 24% this year, and about 33% by the end of the decade. As a share of the economy they’ll grow to 10.4% over the next 25 years from 5.4% today, according to the Congressional Budget Office, even with all those supposedly good cost-control ideas in the Affordable Care Act.
CBO wrote in November that unless these entitlements are reformed, or other spending drastically cut or taxes drastically raised, “deficits will be much larger in the future than they have tended to be in the past.” This conclusion “applies under any plausible assumptions about future trends in demographics, economic conditions, and health-care costs.” Many liberal health experts are already declaring that the Affordable Care Act was only a cost-control prelude.
So at first we thought Mr. Obama might be making a concession by acknowledging an ongoing health-care spending problem. But according to our sources, he didn’t therefore propose X, Y and Z reforms. He seems to believe his own advertising. The White House position is that the government health gnomes now have the tools they need to solve the problem. And that would help explain why Mr. Obama refused to consider more than token reforms in the budget talks in 2011 or after the election.
Nothing in practice supports this delusion. Last week Health and Human Services actuaries reported that national health expenditures rose 4.1% in 2011, the third year of relatively low growth by historical standards. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius did cartwheels, claiming that “the statistics show how the Affordable Care Act is already making a difference.” But the actuaries themselves wrote that the law’s “influence on overall health spending through 2011 was minimal.”
The truth is that this slowdown was an artifact of the recession, as millions lost jobs and employer-sponsored coverage while others made more cost-conscious decisions. Enrollment in consumer-driven high-deductible health plans climbed to 17% of workforce coverage in 2011, up from 8% in 2011. The lull may also be the result of some modest private innovation in the organization and management of patient care.
In any case, it is about to end. Ms. Sebelius’s own actuaries estimate that all health costs will jump 7.8% in 2014 and 6.2% on average annually for the decade thereafter. The federal share of health spending will rise 30% in 2014 alone, which underscores the recklessness of adding a new entitlement when taxpayers can’t afford the old ones.
When the Affordable Care Act passed, Mr. Obama said that “From this day forward, all of the cynics, all the naysayers—they’re going to have to confront the reality of what this reform is and what it isn’t.” They are. He is not.
The country has a spending problem and a health-care problem—and an Obama denial problem.
A version of this article appeared January 13, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Obama’s Health Spending ‘Problem’.
Time to stop talking and start solving the GOP’s Hispanic problem
Michael Barone: History suggests that era of entitlements is nearly over
Still Needed: Stronger Welfare Reform
By Michael D.
The Work versus Welfare Trade-Off: 2013
All of the projected future growth in the federal budget will come from entitlements and interest costs
Two main factors
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Dickson T. Burrows Class of 1927
Dickson T. Burrows – Class of 1927
Recipients – Grandsons – Steve Qvick, David
Burrows, Brent Qvick
Dickson was one of the smallest athletes to take
part in the major athletics at Stivers, yet by sheer
staying quality, ability and grit, he stood out in all
sports at Stivers. Dickson earned the Orange “S” in
football, basketball, baseball, and track. He earned a total of 10 letters.
Dickson was an excellent student as well as athlete. He was President of the junior class of 1926, Vice-President of the senior class of 1927 and a member of the Ten Tigers society. He acted in many school plays and held the lead in one of their musical comedies. As a sophomore, he was voted most popular boy. He composed the words and music of the farewell song of the
class of 1927.
Dickson continued his education at Denison University where he was a member of the Denison Glee Club and Beta Theta Pi fraternity. He was a band leader during the 1930’s and 1940’s. He was quite talented
on the piano, but his instrument of choice was the saxophone. Dickson made quite a local reputation with his playing of the musical saw.
Throughout his life Dick was a highly respected leader at the local, state and national levels in both amateur baseball and public service. Dick served as President of the Dayton Amateur Baseball commission for 15 years, retired, then served another year. He was then elected President of the National Amateur Baseball Federation in 1961 and 1968, the only man ever elected to that position twice. In 1973 he was named National Amateur
Baseball Federation Man of the Year.
Dick held the prominent position of Executive Director of the Miami Valley Disaster Services Agency, a multi-county public agency dedicated to the planning and recovery services for communities in the times of
emergency. He played a pivotal role in the inter-agency communications and recovery services following the Xenia tornado of 1974. Dickson passed away in 1984 at the age of 75.
Quite a life! Quite a man! Very deserving to be recognized as a great “Tiger” in the Stivers Athletic Hall
of Fame.
« John Robert “Bob” Lively – 1928
Barbara Webb Larkin – Class of 1915 »
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Tag Archives: diet
Halloween Pumpkin Stuffed Peppers Recipe
By Maria Elizabeth Romana | October 28, 2014 - 6:43 PM | November 21, 2014 Blogit, Health, Wellness, Diet
This fun little treat will entice your whole family to eat their meat and veggies before they dig into the Halloween candy!
Halloween Pumpkin Stuffed Peppers
2 cups cooked brown or white rice
4 large orange bell peppers with stems intact
1 pound lean ground beef
1/2 diced onion
1 – 15 oz can tomato sauce
garlic powder, salt, and pepper to taste
Cut the top inch off the peppers and clean the insides, saving the tops for later.
Using a small paring knife, fashion eyes and mouth on the widest, flattest side of each pepper.
Place the empty peppers in a baking dish.
Mix ground beef, tomato sauce, onion, cooked rice, garlic powder, salt and pepper in a medium bowl.
Spoon the meat mixture into each pepper, then replace the tops, using toothpicks to hold them in place.
Bake for one hour at 350 degrees or until meat is cooked through.
Tagged beef, calories, diet, fall, food, halloween, health, october, pepper, pumpkin, recipe, Weight
Gone But Not Forgotten: The Sticky Stigma of Obesity
By Beth Spicer | June 10, 2012 - 7:47 PM | October 27, 2012 Health, Wellness, Diet
A recent collaboration between researchers (University of Hawaii – Mānoa, University of Manchester, and Monash University) considered the attitudes of young people towards those who currently are or were previously overweight, as compared to those who have always been thin. Probably no one was surprised to learn that participants preferred images and stories of always-thin people to those of currently heavy ones, but oddly enough, it appears that previously fat folks, even those who had lost large amounts of weight, were the least popular. One interpretation of this might be that still-heavy folks were seen as weak or hopeless, unable to resolve their weight problems, while those who had managed to successfully lose weight were viewed as lazy slackers who had “chosen” to be fat in the past. Instead of respecting or admiring the effort involved in massive weight loss, the study participants showed disdain for the once-obese, similar perhaps to how we might expect people to react to an ex-convict. These attitudes were further tested after exposure to information about weight loss. Body fatness was alternately described as being easily controllable through diet and exercise modifications, or as a complex issue of genetics, physiology, and environment (the latter being a much more accurate presentation). The researchers found that the popular diet & exercise theory, promulgated daily in the media, caused participants to react even more negatively towards obese individuals. In other words, lightweight news stories by “health reporters”, combined with advertisements for quick and easy weight loss products and programs, contribute significantly to societal attitudes about obesity, while the real research, which shows no easy answers, is continually swept under the rug. I suppose news outlets consider that information (a lot of which is covered on this site) too difficult and complicated for the average consumer to comprehend. Or perhaps science just doesn’t sell as many papers as the typical glossy “before & after” shots. Learn more about this fascinating look at attitudes towards obesity from Time’s Healthland article or the original research in the journal Obesity.
Tagged attitudes, calories, diet, fat acceptance, fat prejudice, obesity, weight loss
You Can Get There From Here
By Beth Spicer | December 2, 2010 - 11:54 PM | July 13, 2011 Health, Wellness, Diet
Back in The Real Bathroom Scales, we learned that obesity has less to do with excess consumption than with insufficient energy expenditure, and that energy expenditure is very tightly regulated by our bodies, such that we cannot fool our fat-making machinery with simple changes to diet and exercise. Then, in my most recent post, Through Thick and Thin, we looked at a couple of major physiological determinants of that regulatory process—specifically, the degree of alpha and beta adrenergic stimulation and the amount of insulin our bodies produce. In this post, we’ll continue that discussion by examining a study of several drugs in the so-called “appetite suppressant” class, and look at how they really get the job done. “Back to the Future” Unless you’ve been living under a rock or aren’t yet 12 years old, you’ve no doubt heard of the infamous “fen-phen” diet drug combination. Fen-phen was short for Fenfluramine and Phentermine, two drugs classified as appetite suppressants, which were at one time heralded as the answer to obesity when used together. Unfortunately, the propensity of Fenfluramine to increase the risk of primary pulmonary hypertension resulted in that drug being removed from the marketplace, but fortunately, Phentermine is still available, and contrary to the mythology of the day, works just as well, if not better, by itself, than in combination with Fen. Some less well-known drugs in this class are Diethylproprion, Mazindol, Sibutramine, and more recently, Bupropion (Wellbutrin), originally intended as a smoking-cessation aid. All of these drugs have a broadly similar mechanism—they alter the ebb and flow of neurotransmitters in the brain in such a way that thermogenesis is increased, either through direct stimulation of the beta adrenergic receptors or by inhibition of insulin release via the alpha adrenergic receptors. I’ll get further into the mechanics of these actions in another post, but for those of you who are looking for answers now, let’s get down to the brass tacks of what we can expect from drugs in this class. “Back to School” I’d like to review a study that compared the four most common diet drugs of its day (1981). In this study, researchers gave Phentermine, Mazindol, Fenfluramine, and Diethylpropion to four groups of mice, allowing them to eat freely as their respective appetites directed, for a period of 28 days. A group of unmedicated, ad libitum fed mice served as controls, while one other group, also unmedicated, were fed a restricted calorie diet for comparison. Although it is a mouse study and not a human study, I chose this one because of its excellent design, which eliminates the common confounding variables found in most diet drug studies, namely, caloric restriction and added exercise. Due to the pervasive mythology about the cause of obesity, the vast majority of diet medications are tested in conjunction with a reduced calorie regimen and/or exercise program, which completely obscures the actual effects of the drugs. Since we know that reducing calories and increasing exercise causes both a temporary period of weight loss and a gradual metabolic slowdown, adding these variables into a medication trial is clearly…well, stupid! It makes a fair evaluation of the drug’s effects impossible to tease out. By allowing the subjects in this study to eat and exercise at will, the researchers were able to give a useful assessment of the drugs themselves. Okay, back to the study. As you can see in these graphs, all of the study treatments resulted in voluntarily reduced intake and some weight loss, but what’s important to note here is the relationship between the reduction in food intake and the amount of weight lost. Notice the bar lengths do not track—the highest intakes, relative to the control group, resulted in the lowest amount of body fat. Phentermine and Mazindol clearly offer a greater bang for the buck than Fenfluramine, Diethylpropion, and the standard caloric restriction. Here are the numbers as percentage reductions from control:
Fat Weight
Low Calorie 22.3% 12.4% 0.56
Phentermine 6.6% 15.9% 2.41
Mazindol 14.0% 18.3% 1.30
Fenfluramine 17.4% 8.4% 0.49
Diethylproprion 17.4% 9.9% 0.57
What this is telling us is that for the 22% reduction in calories experienced by the Low-Calorie mice, there was only a 12% drop in fat mass, relative to the controls, while for the lucky mice on Phentermine, there was a mere 6.6% decrease in intake, yet a whopping 15.9% decline in bodyfat, 2.4 times the change in intake. Looking at the numbers this way, Phentermine and Mazindol are again the clear winners. “Get Your Back into It!” So where do these differences in results come from? At the risk of charting you to death, let’s look at another interesting and critical statistic from this study: energy expenditure. I keep saying that it is innate EE and not intake that ultimately determines our bodily fat content; well, here is more proof of that concept. If you compare the body fat mass graph (above) with this EE graph, you will see that these bars do track–the drugs which induced the greatest energy expenditure (as measured during the six hours post-medication at four time points) resulted in the least fat mass. Among these four drugs, again, Phentermine is the obvious star, raising EE by 43% over control. Before I leave this informative study, I would like to point out one more set of measurements the researchers made—body water and lean mass. At this point, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that only Phentermine and Mazindol increased both body water and lean mass by a statistically significant amount compared to control. Good luck getting that result with any old low-calorie diet regimen! If the underlying cause of obesity is actually low energy expenditure and not high calorie intake, then isn’t the obvious solution something that increases EE rather than decreases intake? From the results of this study, it should seem clear that a good diet medication will be a poor appetite suppressant and a powerful energy enhancer.
Tagged adrenergic, calories, diet, energy expenditure, exercise, fenfluramine, metabolism, obesity, phentermine, weight loss, weight loss tablets
Through Thick and Thin
By Beth Spicer | November 22, 2010 - 6:17 PM | July 13, 2011 Health, Wellness, Diet
In The Real Bathroom Scales, we verified two important facts. First, we confirmed that the body responds to alterations in calorie balance with a combination of adjustments to energy storage (body mass) and to energy usage, the latter being mostly via changes to TEF and NEAT. Second, we saw that there was a wide variance between individuals in their rate and degree of adaption via the energy expenditure variables. In fact, in the Mayo Clinic NEAT study, the change in expenditure in response to an added 1,000 calories per day ranged from a low of +107 cals to a high of +917 cals, a nine-fold difference!1 So what drives these vast differences in our ability to adapt to changes in intake, such that some of us pile on the pounds, while others never seem to gain an ounce? While there are myriad biological abnormalities that can lead to obesity, most of them are uncommon, such as leptin deficiency, adrenal tumors, or genetic diseases such as Prader-Willi Syndrome. Most common obesities, on the other hand, can be directly linked to poor function or signaling of the sympathetic nervous system. The SNS is a primary regulator of many of the body’s homeostatic mechanisms, not the least of which is energy balance. The effects of the SNS on energy balance are achieved through the binding of catecholamines (adrenaline and noradrenaline) to a series of receptors known as the adrenergic receptors. “Greek Alphabet Soup” There are two basic types of adrenergic receptors, the alphas and the betas, and while both play a role in the management of body fat, the beta adrenergic receptors have been much more extensively studied with regard to energy balance, so we’ll start there. There are three beta receptors, and all are involved in the automatic regulation of energy expenditure, with some ability of each to compensate for the others. When these receptors are sufficiently stimulated by endogenous catecholamines or pharmacologic substitutes, the body is relatively resistant to weight gain. High levels of beta adrenergic stimulation probably underlie the “lean ‘n hungry” phenotype referred to in The Calculus of Calorie Counting. Without that stimulation, eating the same amount of food and doing the same amount of exercise, you will simply burn less of it as heat and energy and store more of it as fat. Like the patient in the Mayo Clinic NEAT study who only increased his energy expenditure by 107 calories per day, you would have what researchers call “defective thermogenesis”. Although the concept of thermogenesis has been around for at least half a century, the definitive proof that the beta-adrenergic receptors mediate thermogenesis took some time to develop.
Adapted from “beta-AR Signaling Required for Diet-Induced Thermogenesis and Obesity Resistance” by Bachman, E.S., et. al. Science, August 2, 2002; 297(5582): 843 – 845.
In a revealing study of mice specially bred to lack all three beta receptors, researchers at Harvard Medical School showed how profoundly the beta receptors effect our ability to dispense with our caloric intake. In two separate experiments, these beta-null mice were compared with normals under free-feeding situations with first, ordinary lab chow, and second, with more palatable high-fat chow. All the mice consumed more calories with the more palatable chow, however, in both situations, beta-nulls ate exactly the same amount as normal mice and engaged in similar amounts of activity. The difference in the outcomes, however, was startling. The beta-nulls had consistently lower energy expenditure, and as the graph shows, consistently higher weight gain; on lab chow, it was about 70% higher, and on the palatable diet, it was three times higher! Now, while the beta adrenergic receptors are clearly important to fat-burning, the alpha adrenergics should not be ignored. The alpha adrenergics are often described as being anti-lipolytic, because the alpha-2 adrenoreceptors reduce levels of cyclic adenosine monophosphate, an important second messenger in the thermogenic process. This characterization is somewhat lopsided, however, as the alpha-2’s also have a generally inhibitory effect on the pituitary hormones, putting the brakes on excessive levels of insulin, prolactin, cortisol2, and thyroid. These are not hormones that we necessarily want to inhibit, but neither do we benefit from excess; all of these hormones have optimal levels, and too much is just as problematic as too little. With regard to controlling our weight, we particularly need to keep our levels of insulin in check. “Insulination” Recall from Dr. Segal’s research in Calculus, how the presence of insulin resistance dramatically reduces the thermic effect of feeding (TEF), in both the lean and the obese.3 Besides just impacting TEF, however, insulin reduces the overall fat-burning ability of the body. In fact, insulin reduces the effect of beta-adrenergic stimulation in a dose-dependent manner; in one study, the calorigenic effect of norepinephrine was decreased by the presence of elevated insulin levels by as much as 50%.4 Just how powerfully does insulin sensitivity impact our ability to burn fat? Consider this interesting study: a group of researchers in Canada bred a strain of mice with a mutation in their insulin receptors, such that the same amount of insulin would keep the receptor active longer, thereby reducing the amount of insulin needed to return blood sugar to basal levels. In other words, these mutant mice were exquisitely insulin-sensitive. The researchers then placed the mutants and a control group of wild-type mice on a high-calorie diet designed to cause weight gain. While on the diet, the mutant mice maintained slightly lower blood glucose levels, despite secreting approximately half the amount of insulin as the controls. Because of the reduction in insulin, weight gain was significantly lower, too. After 10 weeks on the diet, the mutants had added 27% to their weight, while the wild-types gained 50%–all while eating and exercising in a similar fashion. So here we have two common physiologic aberrations–insulin resistance and decreased adrenergc stimulation–that lead to decreased energy expenditure without any difference in diet or exercise patterns. For those who have any degree of either or both of these conditions, fat will tend to accumulate easily and be difficult to lose, while those on the other end of the spectrum, our (annoying) “lean ‘n hungry” friends, can’t gain weight to save their lives. Now, the important thing is, is there anything we can do about this? Well, it just so happens there is. If nature left a little something out of your gene pool, you can get it back. In my next post, You Can Get There From Here, I’ll start showing you which products, both prescription and OTC, can truly change your metabolism.
Levine, J.A., et. al. Role of Nonexercise Activity Thermogenesis. Science 1999; 283(5399): 212–214. ↩
Price, L.H., et. al. Alpha 2-adrenergic receptor function in depression. The cortisol response to yohimbine. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1986 Sep; 43(9): 849-58 ↩
Segal, K.R., et al. Independent Effects of Obesity and Insulin Resistance on Postprandial Thermogenesis in men. J Clin Invest 1992; 89:824-833. ↩
Marette, A. and Bukowiecki, L. J. Stimulation of glucose transport by insulin and norepinephrine in isolated rat brown adipocytes. Am J Physiol Cell Physiol 1989; 257: C714-C721. ↩
Tagged adrenergic, calories, diet, energy expenditure, metabolism, NEAT, obesity, TEF, Weight, weight loss tablets
The Real Bathroom Scales
By Beth Spicer | October 19, 2010 - 12:07 AM | July 20, 2011 Health, Wellness, Diet
In The Biggest Medical Myth of All Time and The Calculus of Calorie Counting, we examined research exploring the futility of low-calorie dieting and exercise as methods of long-term weight loss. In this post, we’ll delve into a few more specifics on how our bodies actually react to alterations in calorie intake. “The lean ‘n hungry type” Besides a flashback to a musical era I’d just as soon forget, the phrase “lean and hungry” has been used in obesity research to describe those naturally thin folks who have difficulty gaining weight, no matter how much they eat—much like Sims’ prisoners in Medical Myth. That such a type exists at one end of the body-fatness spectrum is rarely denied by medical science nowadays, though it’s generally assumed that those folks are some sort of natural super-athletes who are always engaging in sports and exercise activities. As Sims’ research showed, however, that assumption is incorrect; these folks stay thin even if they sit around with a TV remote growing out of their arm. In fact, a 1985 study analyzing data from the National Health and Nutrition Survey (NHANES) examined the relationship between ordinary dietary intake and body weight and showed the distinct lack of positive correlation there. The NHANES gathers information about the diet and exercise habits of the entire U.S. population via a statistical sampling method. The data is collected by experienced interviewers, trained to request information in multiple forms, so that the validity of the responses can be verified. In other words, it’s as reliable as self-reported data can be. The following chart displays results for caloric intake by relative weight class (as a percentage of ideal body weight) for adult men and women. As you can see, it appears that the leannest individuals actually eat the most. Even if you have doubts about self-reported intake, it’s pretty clear that weight is not proportional to consumption; that is, people who are 30, 40, or 50% above normal weight eat nowhere near 30, 40, or 50% more than their lean ‘n hungry counterparts. So how are variations in caloric intake actually dealt with by our bodies? “A calorie is a calorie is a calorie…NOT!” In Calculus, we looked at each of the elements that make up daily energy expenditure, culminating in the equation: Total Energy Expenditure (TEE) = Resting Energy Expenditure (REE) + the Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) + the energy expended in activity, exercise (EE) and non-exercise (NEAT). The response of each of these elements to a situation of extended overnutrition was explored in a 1998 Mayo Clinic study. In this study, sixteen weight-stable, non-obese subjects had 1,000 extra calories added to their daily diet for eight weeks, while simultaneously agreeing not to engage in any exercise outside of normal daily activities (that is, EE=0). Traditional wisdom holds that the human body has a relatively fixed rate of energy expenditure, like a car, so any major change in intake would automatically be converted to added body mass, mostly fat. In this situation, that would be: 1,000 extra calories X 56 days, divided by 3,500 calories per added pound = 16 lbs of added mass. Even if we refine the calculation to allow for 10% of the calories to be used in food processing (TEF), we’re still looking at more than a 14 lb. gain. In theory. In reality, the researchers found two things. One, the average weight gain was considerably less than predicted, and two, the pattern of weight gain varied greatly between individuals and depended largely on changes in NEAT and TEF. The average gain was 10.4 lbs, only half of which was fat (5.26 lbs), with one person gaining less than a single pound of fat. So what happened to all the “missing” calories? Well, that is precisely what these researchers were after. During the run-in period, when subjects’ intake and weight were stable, their energy expenditure variables were measured by the most reliable scientific methods available (doubly-labeled water, indirect calorimetry, etc.). The same was done at the conclusion of the study, and the comparison was remarkable. Total energy intake was increased by 35%, from 2,824 to 3,824 kcal/day, while total energy expenditure increased by just over half that amount, from 2,824 to 3,350 (18.6%), by the end of the eight weeks. If the subjects were not exercising (a fact verified by accelerometer use), how did their daily energy expenditure increase? The measurement processes showed the following: REE increased 4.8% for a total of 79 calories, which is about what we’d expect from the increase in body mass. Calories attributable to TEF increased by an impressive 62%, moving from 218 to 354 calories per day. And the calories burned in Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT), changed from 913 to 1,224 per day, an increase of 311 kcal, or 37%. Thus, TEE, after eight weeks of eating 1,000 additional calories, was automatically raised by the body to the tune of 527 calories per day, or 53% of the increase in intake—the equivalent of a 4-5 mile walk. To summarize:
Std Deviation
Weight Gained (lbs) 10.4 7.2% 3.8 3.1 15.6
Fat Gained (lbs) 5.3 N/A 2.5 0.8 9.3
TEE Change (kcal) +527 +18.6% +264 +107 +917
REE Change (kcal) +79 +4.8% +126 -100 +360
TEF Change (kcal) +137 +63% +83 +29 +256
NEAT Change (kcal) +311 +37% +276 -172 +696
“Time in a bottle” Now there are two points I want to make here. The first is that this study only looked at two time points—baseline and eight weeks. It would have been really nifty if the measurements had been taken weekly to show how the variables changed over time, and it would have been super cool to see what happened during the next eight weeks, but alas, research costs money, and there was no blockbuster drug at the end of this rainbow, so they did what they could. In all likelihood, the change in energy expenditure was a gradual adaptation over the study period, with most of the weight gain coming early and slowly decreasing, as seen in other studies, and if I make my guess, the energy expenditure rate would have continued to increase in the following weeks to the point that all the excess calories were being burned and no more weight was being gained. My other point is with regard to the NEAT. As the researchers pointed out, despite the inter-subject variability in changes to energy expenditure, the change in NEAT correlated very tightly and negatively with the change in fat gain (R=-.7). That is, subjects whose NEAT increased the most gained the least. Contrast this with what we saw in the Thomas and Miller rat study in Calculus, where forced exercise was met with a concomitant decrease in NEAT. From these data, it can be surmised that NEAT is a primary defense mechanism against exogenous alterations in energy balance. Changes you make to diet and exercise will be countered with adjustments to NEAT—your body’s subconscious drive to fidget, wiggle, whistle, talk, laugh, dance, hug, kiss, and yes, even change the channel. What we’ve shown here is that the difference in people’s weights has precious little to do with how many cheeseburgers we eat or how many marathons we run, but rather much to do with energy expenditure variables we cannot voluntarily control—TEF and NEAT. All we have proven so far is that when our bodies sense a surfeit or deficit in energy supply, they attempt to balance it with changes to both energy storage and energy use, the relative percentages of which are highly variable between individuals. But what makes some folks more prone to the storage side and others more prone to “use”? We’ll explore that question in my next post, Through Thick and Thin.
Tagged calories, diet, energy expenditure, exercise, metabolism, NEAT, obesity, TEF, weight loss, weight loss tablets
The Calculus of Calorie Counting
By Beth Spicer | October 7, 2010 - 8:10 PM | October 5, 2011 Health, Wellness, Diet
In The Biggest Medical Myth of All Time, we reviewed some of the evidence that losing excess body fat is not as simple as the supposedly tried-and-true formula of eating less and exercising more. And that’s because our bodies are not simple machines, like cars or televisions or the iPhone 3GS. In this post, we’re going to examine the calorie balance theory: Calories In – Calories Out = Fat Lost/Gained, and build an understanding of why we can’t fool our fat-o-stats with a step-aerobics video and a freezerful of Lean Cuisines.
“The New Math” As far back as the beginning of the last century, scientists were questioning the simple calorie balance theory. In 1902, researcher R.O. Neumann, experimenting on himself, showed that his body could adjust to significant changes in caloric intake, with only minimal changes in weight. He theorized that the apparently lost calories were being given off as greater or lesser amounts of heat by his body, and called this phenomenon “luxuskonsumption” (luxury consumption).1 Since that time, the subject has been studied exhaustively, with both support and refutation for the idea that the human body can adjust to differing levels of calorie intake without fulling accounting for the ingested energy differential through changes in body mass and/or energy output. When you sift through it all, two conclusions seem irrefutable: 1) that our bodies do indeed have the ability to adjust to sustained alterations in intake, though not in the fashion Neumann first proposed, and 2) that the means and methods of accomplishing this task are highly variable between individuals. To begin understanding the real mathematics behind calorie balance, we need to understand the parts that make up our daily total energy expenditure—the “Calories Out”—because this is the piece over which we lack voluntary control. The acronyms and terms are constantly changing, but the currently accepted model for daily total energy expenditure looks something like this: TEE = REE + TEF + EEE + NEAT, where:
TEE=Total Energy Expenditure.
REE=Resting Energy Expenditure, the rate of oxygen consumption when fasting and completely at rest.
TEF=Thermic Effect of Food, the increment in oxygen consumption seen just before, during, and after a meal.
EEE=Exercise Energy Expenditure, the increment in oxygen consumption attributable to volitious exercise, such as jogging, playing hockey, etc.
NEAT=Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, all non-volitious activity over and above lying completely still.
Now, I should say that even this equation is a vast oversimplication, since the relationships among these variables are not independent. EEE and NEAT both depend on REE and can be effected by TEF, and interact with each other, as well. TEF is most often thought of as a function of REE, but also varies with the volume and types of foods eaten, as well as proximity to exercise. That said, however, the equation makes a decent model for a given individual at a given point in time, so let us consider each of these in turn.
Resting Energy Expenditure (REE)
Much research has compared the REE between lean and obese persons, and, while slight differences are sometimes reported, for the most part, REE can be attributed to the maintenance of lean body mass—muscle, bone, skin, hair, etc. Even highly trained athletes don’t show a significantly higher REE than couch potatoes of the same size and body composition.2 When people alter their intake acutely for a short period of time, or modestly for a long period of time, however, the REE, when measured per unit of lean body mass, will show a commensurate adjustment, albeit a small one. Let me make that clear: if a person has dieted (or gorged) for a suitable length of time, he will burn a different number of calories at complete rest than will a person of exactly the same size and body composition who hasn’t altered his diet. Some studies will fail to show this, but likely only due to methodological differences (sample size, study length, measurement technique). As an example, in 2006, researchers showed that the metabolic rate of mildly overweight people during non-movement sleep (a decent proxy for REE) decreased after just three months of a 25% calorie deficit, created through diet alone or diet + exercise. In the graph, you see sleep energy expenditure (SEE) predicted from baseline SEE and three-month LBM, compared to the actual three-month SEE. The difference is small, but significant: 7.7% for the diet-only group, and 4.9% for the diet+exercise group. The difference persisted over the next three months, when the subjects were fed the amount necessary to maintain the three-month loss.
Thermic Effect of Food (TEF)
Now here’s where things get interesting. As far back as the 19th century, scientists were fascinated by what was then called Specific Dynamic Action, the significant increase in metabolic rate that occurs when we eat and for several hours after. Early researchers observed that TEF varied with the size and composition of the meal and so logically drew the conclusion that TEF represented the energy cost of digestion and assimilation of the meal, which is how it is still often defined today. This isn’t entirely accurate, however. Researchers began to notice that there were significant variances in TEF between individuals, even when eating the same exact meal under the same circumstances. That fact suggested that TEF was not solely the processing cost of food. In fact, many studies found that TEF was consistently higher in lean vs. overweight folks, which led to explorations of what else might be involved in TEF. In a series of elegantly designed experiments, Dr. Karen Segal and her team showed that insulin resistance and body fatness are independently and negatively associated with TEF. In this image, we can see that insulin-sensitive, lean persons burn considerably more calories in response to a given meal than do insulin-resistant or obese persons, matched for LBM and RMR. Clearly, there is much we have to learn from studying TEF, even if it is a relatively small portion of our daily TEE, and I’ll get into that more deeply in another post.
Exercise Energy Expenditure (EEE) and Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT)
The calories burned as a result of activity over and above REE can be divided into Exercise Energy Expenditure (jogging, tennis, pilates, etc.) and Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (showering, fidgeting, channel-changing). The former is pretty straight-forward; it’s basic physics: work = mass X distance and force=mass X acceleration. The distance you move something—like your arm or a barbell—through space, and the force you use to do so can be combined to calculate the calories burned in the process. Okay, there’s a bit more to it than that, as there are effects from exercise training and efficiency, and interactions with the fuel source (sugar or fat), but for the most part, moving a given weight a given distance at a given intensity has a set value, regardless of our body’s fat content. The same could be said of NEAT, except for one important difference. For most of us, EEE is the result of a willful, conscious act; whether we enjoy the activity or not, we make the decision to spend 30 minutes or an hour or the whole afternoon playing golf, painting the den, or using the elliptical trainer. NEAT is much more about unconscious movements—the number of times we get up and walk to the window to look outside, how often we feel the urge to head to the water cooler for a gossip-fest, whether or not we are drumming out our favorite song on our desk while reading email—in short, how inclined we are to fidget, pace, or otherwise “waste” energy. So why do we make this distinction? Because our inclination toward non-exercise activity is a key element in balancing the energy expenditure equation. Let’s look at some science behind that statement. A group of researchers at Mayo Clinic was given a great deal of credit for their research into the NEAT concept about a decade ago, but in reality, the idea of compensatory changes in NEAT goes way back to the mid-twentieth century. In a delightful study performed just down the road at UNC-Chapel Hill, a group of Sprague-Dawley rats (a strain of rat disinclined to high levels of activity) showed researchers what happens to NEAT when sudden changes are made in EEE. The scientists forced the rats to run on little rat treadmills for a specified distance and at a specified speed for the first three days of each week, then allowed them to rest the other four. This experiment went on for five weeks, and during the final week, spontaneous activity of the animals was measured during their non-exercise period and compared to matched controls. What the researchers discovered was quite fascinating. Spontaneous activity was greatly reduced on the three exercise days and modestly reduced on the four non-exercise days. That is, the forced increase in EEE was compensated for by an unconscious decrease in NEAT. Furthermore, following cessation of the experiment, there was a “persistent depression of spontaneous activity” for “a very considerable period of time”. The rats’ little bodies were battling back against the attempt to use a lot more energy than they were naturally designed for. “The dieter’s playground” So what is all this telling us? Well, the next time someone refers to weight loss dieting as a roller coaster, you can correct them—it’s not a roller coaster, or a merry-go-round, and it’s certainly not “The Fun House”. It’s more like a see-saw—the harder you push down on your end, the higher up you’re going to bounce when your body pushes back. In my next post, The Real Bathroom Scales, I’ll review a detailed example of how the elements of the energy expenditure equation respond to overeating in different body types.
Neumann R.O. Experimental determination of human food requirements with particular consideration of essential protein need. Arch Hyg 45: 1–87, 1902 ↩
Schulz, LO. Effect of endurance training on sedentary energy expenditure measured in a respiratory chamber. Am J Physiol. 1991 Feb;260(2 Pt 1):E257-61. ↩
The Biggest Medical Myth of All Time
By Beth Spicer | September 22, 2010 - 3:15 PM | July 13, 2011 Health, Wellness, Diet
Without a doubt, the greatest medical myth of all time is that obesity, or any degree of excessive body fatness, is the direct result of excessive food intake and/or insufficient exercise. Ask anybody. Literally. Ask 100 people, including scientists and health care practitioners, and 99 will tell you this. Ask 100,000, and 99,999 will give the same answer. The other one doesn’t speak English. Yet despite this widespread belief, there is no good research to back this up, and plenty of scientific evidence to the contrary. “Eat Less and Exercise More” I’ve heard it said that obesity must be the result of a caloric imbalance, because the First Law of Thermodynamics cannot be controverted, and indeed, this is the case. What people are failing to understand is that we cannot control our caloric balance via diet and exercise. Although we can adjust the amount of food we put into our mouths and how much physical activity we perform every day, our bodies determine what percentage of the available energy to use in the production of heat and physical energy and how much to store as fat. This is the real reason that overweight people often feel tired, sickly, and run-down—their bodies apportion input calories more in the direction of fat storage than energy production, and reducing calorie intake or increasing physical exercise only makes the situation worse. Let’s look at some numbers…or better yet, a few graphs (statisticians love graphs). Typical research studies on diet and exercise last three months. It’s considered a sufficient amount of time to measure significant changes in body parameters. Funny thing about three months, though—it happens to be just about the amount of time the average person’s body needs to completely adjust to a caloric imbalance.
Adapted from “Long-term weight control study I (weeks 0 to 34),” by Michael Weintraub, MD, et al, Clin Pharmacol Ther. 1992 May;51(5):586-94
Here’s a graph showing what happened when a group of overweight people were treated with a medically-supervised, low-calorie diet, moderate exercise, and “behavior modification” program for longer than three months. I’ve looked at a lot of similar graphs over the years; the pattern is predictable—initial rapid weight loss, then slowing, then stopping. And all of this happens while still sticking to the original regimen. Of course, the diet “counselors”, friends, and family doubt that the patient is still sticking, but they shouldn’t. As numerous studies have shown, this is what will happen to 95% of overly fat people when a caloric deficit is created through diet and exercise. (We’ll cover the reasons why in another post.) So is life just not fair? Well, no, it is fair, because happily, the opposite relationship between caloric balance and weight also exists. That is, intentionally increasing caloric intake above current maintenance levels results first in rapid weight gain, then slower weight gain, and finally, weight maintenance at the new higher levels of both weight and calories. “Just push yourself toward the table!” Studies have shown that it is just as hard for an otherwise weight-stable person to gain beyond a certain level (~10% of current weight) and to “keep it on”, as the reverse. Notice the trend in this graph from an early study on the subject; weight is increasing, but less so with each passing week, and if one were to extrapolate (this study ended at 4 wks), it’s clear that the weight increase was approaching a level maximum. In what was probably the seminal study on the issue, E.A. Sims, an obesity researcher in Vermont, enlisted a group of naturally lean prison inmates to willingly overeat their way into obesity in order to study the effects of the disease as separate from the genetic factors that cause it. Well, much to his dismay, he found that, despite their best efforts—which included eating 6-7,000 calories a day and refraining from all work and exercise—the prisoners struggled to add and then retain the requisite 25% to their weights, even though they were eating 200% of their previous intake. One particularly lean fellow could never gain more than twelve pounds (9% of his initial weight) after months of stuffing his face and lounging around in his striped pajamas. In an alternate universe where “Weight Watchers” is a support group for overly thin people trying to bulk up, this poor guy would have been labelled lazy, undisciplined, and probably stupid, as well, for not doing what was needed to meet his weight goal. “Energy is neither created nor destroyed…” So now we might be agreed that diets do not continue to cause weight loss, but many would argue that they can still be used to cause some weight loss, which could then be maintained by eating a “normal intake” (which assumes the overweight eat more than the thin to begin with—an errorneous assumption to be dealt with another day). Well, as it turns out, even a brief period of reduced calorie intake will cause the body to adjust its current level of “energetic efficiency”—the rate at which calories are partitioned toward energy versus fat storage. Let’s see what happened when a group of rats decided to lose a few for bikini season. In a cleverly designed experiment by long-time obesity researchers Dulloo and Girardier, half of a group of young rats were put on a diet, while the others were allowed to eat whatever they wanted (the “ad libitum” group). The dieters were fed exactly 50% of what the ad lib group ate spontaneously, for a period of 30 days. At the end of that time, the dieting group was then matched to a third group of rats by both weight and body composition (that is, their total weight and percentage body fat were similar). For the next 25 days, the previously food-restricted rats were fed exactly what these similar-sized, non-dieted rats chose to eat naturally. If there was no adaptive mechanism, the two groups of animals would be expected to dispose of the calories in a similar fashion, but in fact, that was not at all what happened. Since they were young rats, they all gained weight during the 25 days of pair-feeding, but the gain and relative proportions of fat and lean tissue were vastly different, as the chart illustrates. The dieted rats gained the same amount of lean tissue, but more than twice the fat of their free-eating counterparts, on the same number of calories. This experiment clearly shows that the bodies of the dieted rats made not just minor, but rather gross adjustments to their calorie-burning efficiency and to the preferential deposition of lean and fat tissue. Thus, when dieters return to eating “normally”, where normal is the amount eaten by a person of similar size and body composition, they will lay down fat like nobody’s business. So what makes this seemingly implausible variance possible? That will be the subject of my next post, “The Calculus of Calorie Counting”.
Tagged calories, diet, exercise, metabolism, obesity, weight loss, weight loss tablets
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Theses and Dissertations (Criminology)
Stress and dysfunction in families caring for members physically deteriorating due to HIV/Aids in Limpopo Province : resilience as a moderating factor
Setwaba, M. B.
The study aims at assessing the stress and dysfunction among families affected by the sudden reality of experiencing physically deteriorating family members due to HIV/AIDS progression, and to identify resilience factors that moderate the impact. Three-hundred and sixteen families were conveniently selected to participate in this study. The experimental group of the HIV/AIDS affected families (n=122), with two control groups of families caring for family members ailing because of a non- HIV/AIDS physical ailment (n=132) and the families not involved in the caring of any family member (n=62). Family resilience and stress questionnaires were used to collect the data. Family resilience questionnaires included Family Hardiness Index (FHI), Social Support Index (SSI), Relative and Friend Support (RFS), F-COPES, Family Time and Routine Index (FTRI), Family Problem Solving Communication (FPSC) Family Attachment and Changeability Index 8 (FACI 8). The family caregiver stress was measured by the Relative Stress Scale. Univariate and multivariate regression analysis were used to determine the moderating effect of the family qualities on the stress levels, and specific qualities unique in the families that bounce back. Stress was found to be high in the HIV/AIDS affected families when compared with the control families. Furthermore, the demographic information indicated that more stress was experienced in the HIV/AIDS affected families with a younger sick member and in poor economic conditions as well as when the sick person was a breadwinner. This indicated that stress elevation in the HIV/AIDS affected families was a function of economic conditions in the families and that caregivers may have experienced stress due to lack of proper resources and the stress of having sympathy for a young sick person who was expected to have a long life ahead of him or her. Social support (SSI), relative and friend support (RFS), and spending time together and engaging in similar routine collectively (FTRI) were found to moderate stress in HIV/AIDS affected families. Further research is needed to highlight the dynamics and the relationship with stress elevation around the new trend of HIV/AIDS infection of the younger age group as well as the economic burden or the impact of lack of resources in caring for the infected. More in-depth research must also be done with an emphasis on the dynamics between stigmatisation, stress moderation and resilience of families using more diverse families engaging in various caregiving situations of sick family members within various ecological and socio economic conditions.
Thesis (Ph.D. (Psychology)) -- University of Limpopo, 2015
Name: setwaba_mb_2015.pdf
Theses and Dissertations (Criminology) [28]
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Ananya : The Unparalleled - October 6 to October 10, 2012 - Purana Quila, New Delhi - Daily at 7 to 8.15 pm - Entry Free
Monday, 8th October 2012
Mohiniattam - Vijaylakshmi and group (Delhi)
Reminiscent of ocean waves, swaying palms and lush paddy fields is, literally, the dance of the mythical enchantress Mohini. This traditional style was once performed by devadasis in temples which grew over time and acquired a classical status. Performed only by women, the form reveals the lasya aspect of dance. Hence, the prevailing rasa, or aesthetic mood, is of shringara (erotic) – also a metaphor for man’s desire for the divine. Some scholars trace the style to the 2nd or 3rd century AD – the era of the great Tamil epic Silappadikaram. Others believe it was created in the mid-18th century in the court of Maharaja Swati Tirunal of Travancore. But like all Indian dance, Mohiniyattam has evolved over several hundred years surviving a difficult phase in the last century. Music in Mohiniyattam has a special quality. The punctuated thrust of rhythmic nuances in vocal rendition is preserved in the mnemonic language of drums such as Edakka, Madhalam, Timila and Chenda. Chengila, a kind of gong, helps the singer to keep time.
Vijayalakshmi is acknowledged as one of the most eminent exponents of Mohiniyattam today. A unique combination of a researcher and performer, Vijayalakshmi has endeavoured to constantly expand traditional boundaries through innovative choreography inspired by a pan-Indian and global perspective. She has played a significant role in rejuvenating this beautiful Indian classical dance form with innovative productions, including Unniarcha (inspired by Kalaripayattu, the ancient martial art form); Swan Lake, inspired by the music of the celebrated Russian composer Tchaikovsky; and Paryapti, which draws upon the rich cultural ethos and music of Bengal. Variously honoured, Vijayalakshmi has performed at some of some very prestigious venues in India and the world, including the Lincoln Center, the Bolshoi Theatre, the Edinburgh International Festival and the World Music Institute, New York.
Paryapti provides the perfect mirror to reflect the quintessential femininity of Mohiniyattam in its celebration of Durga, the patron deity of Bengal and embodiment of the Feminine. It is this thread that binds the cultures of Kerala and Bengal that the artistes emphasise in Paryapti. The presentation celebrates the inherent divinity in all things by exploring the culture and status of courtesans in India. Courtesans have been extolled by poets in Indian literature as being highly accomplished and epitomised in Indian mythology by Parvati, Shiva’s consort. Over the ages, these women played a significant role in the evolution and preservation of Indian music and dance. At the turn of the 20th century, however, they were condemned due to the misplaced morality and orthodoxy that took root in India. According to a Bengali folk legend, these women pleaded with Shiva for compassion. The Lord blessed them saying when Parvati’s homecoming was celebrated on earth as Durga, her clay image would be complete only if the idol included the soil from their house. To this day, the soil from a sex worker’s house is a traditional requisite for the consecration of Durga’s idol. The ceremony redefines the sacred, underlines its inclusiveness, and is symbolic of an outcast woman’s desire for fulfillment, or Paryapti.
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I’ve lost many things. But even I’ve never mislaid radioactive material | Adrian Chiles
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College football hot seat tracker: Jason Garrett reportedly a finalist at Stanford
Sadly, the college football regular season has come to an end. While the action on the field may be dwindling, the end of the regular season opens the floodgates for major activity in the coaching market. Which head coaches have been fired? Who is on the move to another job? Here is a running list of the ongoing movement in the college football coaching carousel. This will be updated chronologically.
Reports: Jason Garrett a finalist at Stanford
Stanford is still searching to find a replacement for David Shaw, and one notable name is reportedly in the running.
According to The Athletic and ESPN, former Dallas Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett is a finalist to land the job. Garrett was the Cowboys’ head coach from 2010 to 2019 and most-recently had a stint as the offensive coordinator for the New York Giants. He currently works as an analyst for NBC. Garrett, 56, has never coached at the college level, though he was a candidate for the Duke job last year.
Another finalist for the job is reportedly Troy Taylor of Sacramento State. Taylor is in his third season at Sacramento State and has a 30-7 record. This year, the Hornets are 12-0 and set to face Incarnate Word in the quarterfinals of the FCS Playoffs on Friday.
Shaw resigned after Stanford’s regular season finale on Nov. 26. The Cardinal finished 3-9 for a second straight season. Shaw coached Stanford for 12 seasons. He has a 96-54 record and is the winningest coach in program history.
Western Michigan hires Lance Taylor
Western Michigan announced the hire of Lance Taylor as its new head coach on Thursday. Taylor, 41, replaces Tim Lester, who was fired after going 37-32 in six seasons.
Taylor most recently was the offensive coordinator at Louisville. Before his season at UL, he coached running backs at Stanford and Notre Dame and held various assistant roles for the New York Jets and Carolina Panthers.
Jeff Brohm headed home to Louisville
After six seasons at Purdue, Jeff Brohm is close to becoming the head coach at Louisville, according to multiple reports. Louisville is Brohm’s alma mater and hometown university where he played quarterback in the early ’90s and later was an assistant coach. Brohm’s father and two brothers also played for the Cardinals.
Brohm went 36-34 in six seasons at Purdue, leading a struggling program to four bowl appearances and three winning seasons. The Boilermakers were 17-9 over the last two seasons, which included an appearance in this year’s Big Ten title game. In the four seasons before Brohm’s arrival, Purdue had a combined 9-39 record.
The Louisville job opened somewhat abruptly on Monday when Scott Satterfield left for Cincinnati.
UNLV taps Arkansas DC Barry Odom as new head coach
UNLV is hiring Arkansas defensive coordinator Barry Odom its next head coach, the school confirmed on Tuesday.
Odom will replace Marcus Arroyo, who was fired by UNLV following a 5-7 record in his third season in charge of the program.
Odom spent the last three years leading the defense at Arkansas, which has seen a positive turnaround in that time after the program spent several years in the SEC basement.
Before his time on the Arkansas staff, Odom was Missouri’s head coach from 2016-19, compiling a record of 25-25 across four seasons. Prior to that, he held various assistant roles at Missouri and Memphis.
“We had a tremendous amount of interest in this head coaching position and Coach Odom checked every box, including having experience successfully leading a program at the highest level of this sport,” UNLV athletic director Erick Harper said in a statement.
Report: Deion Sanders hires FBS head coach to be his OC
According to ESPN, Deion Sanders is bringing Kent State head coach Sean Lewis to Colorado. Sanders, the new head coach at CU, is bringing in Lewis to be the Buffs’ offensive coordinator.
Lewis has been the head coach at Kent State for the last five seasons. He has a 24-31 record with a 19-17 mark in MAC play. Lewis brought Kent State to two bowl games, including leading the Golden Flashes to their first-ever bowl win in program history in 2019.
Lewis previously was the offensive coordinator at Bowling Green and Syracuse under Dino Babers. Lewis is known for running a spread out, high-tempo offense.
Tulsa expected to hire Kevin Wilson
According to multiple reports, Tulsa is close to finalizing an agreement to hire Ohio State offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson as its next head coach. Wilson would replace Philip Montgomery, who was fired after eight seasons.
Wilson, 61, has been at Ohio State as the OC and tight ends coach since 2017. Before that, he spent six seasons as the head coach at Indiana. Wilson had a 26-47 record at IU, but brought the Hoosiers to a bowl in his final two seasons before a fairly tumultuous parting of ways with the school.
Before his time at IU, Wilson had stints as an assistant at Oklahoma, Northwestern and Miami (Ohio).
Tulsa went to a bowl game in 2020 and 2021 but finished 5-7 this season.
Cincinnati finds its replacement for Luke Fickell
Louisville coach Scott Satterfield is heading to Cincinnati.
Satterfield’s Cardinals went 7-5 in 2022 and are set to play the Bearcats in the Fenway Bowl on Dec. 17. Cincinnati needed a coach to replace Luke Fickell after he went to Wisconsin.
The Fenway Bowl is Cincy’s last game as a member of the AAC. The Bearcats are heading to the Big 12 in 2023.
Satterfield has a 76-48 record in 10 years as head coach at Louisville and Appalachian State.
North Texas fires Seth Littrell
North Texas has fired Seth Littrell just days after playing in the Conference USA title game.
UNT fell to 7-6 after it lost to UTSA on Friday night. The move comes after North Texas athletic director Wren Baker was hired at West Virginia earlier in the week.
Littrell’s teams went 44-44 in his tenure in Denton. The Mean Green went to six bowl games in his seven seasons but had a losing record in the three seasons preceding 2022.
North Texas is set to play Boise State in the Frisco Bowl on Dec. 22. UNT went 0-5 in bowl games coached by Littrell.
Coastal Carolina moves quick, hires Tim Beck
With Jamey Chadwell moving over to Liberty, Coastal Carolina quickly had a new hire lined up. According to ESPN, CCU is finalizing a deal to hire Tim Beck as its new head coach.
Beck has been the offensive coordinator at NC State for the past three seasons. Before that, he had stints at Texas, Ohio State, Nebraska and Kansas. He held the OC title at both Nebraska and Texas and was co-OC at Ohio State.
Liberty replaces Hugh Freeze with Jamey Chadwell
Liberty has hired Coastal Carolina coach Jamey Chadwell as its new coach.
Chadwell’s Coastal Carolina team has won at least nine games in each of the past three seasons. The Chanticleers lost to Troy in the Sun Belt title game on Saturday, giving Chadwell a combined 31-6 record over the last three years.
While the Sun Belt is a far better conference than the Conference USA Liberty is set to join in 2023, Chadwell is getting a massive pay raise to go to the private school. Chadwell’s contract at Liberty will reportedly pay him $4 million a season. He received a contract extension at CCU in 2021 that upped his pay to approximately $1 million per season.
Deion Sanders officially hired at Colorado
Colorado made its hire of Deion Sanders official on Saturday night after Jackson State won the SWAC.
JSU beat Southern 43-24 in the SWAC title game and finished the season at 12-0. Sanders was 27-5 in his time at Jackson State and now takes over a program that was 1-11 in 2022.
“There were a number of highly qualified and impressive candidates interested in becoming the next head football coach at Colorado, but none of them had the pedigree, the knowledge and the ability to connect with student-athletes like Deion Sanders,” Colorado athletic director Rick George said in a statement. “Not only will ‘Coach Prime’ energize our fanbase, I’m confident that he will lead our program back to national prominence while leading a team of high quality and high character.”
South Florida hires Alex Golesh from Tennessee
As Tennessee’s offensive coordinator, Alex Golesh called plays for one of the most prolific offenses in the country. And now he he has landed his first head-coaching job.
Golesh has been named the head coach at South Florida. Golesh, 38, has been on staff at Tennessee for the last two seasons under Josh Heupel. He followed Heupel from UCF and also had stints as an assistant at Iowa State, Illinois, Toledo and Oklahoma State.
Brett McMurphy of Action Network was first to report that Golesh has accepted an offer from USF.
Tom Herman finds home at Florida Atlantic
Two years after getting fired by Texas, Tom Herman has landed a new head-coaching job. Herman has agreed to become the next head coach at Florida Atlantic, the school announced Thursday.
At FAU, Herman will replace Willie Taggart, who was fired after going 15-18 in three seasons.
Herman had a 32-18 record in four seasons at Texas and previously had a 22-4 run in two seasons at Houston. He also had a notable stint as Ohio State’s offensive coordinator.
FAU has struggled to win since Lane Kiffin left for Ole Miss. With the Owls moving from Conference USA to the American Athletic Conference next season, the school is hoping Herman can elevate the program’s performance in the years to come.
West Virginia sticking with Neal Brown
When West Virginia leadership decided to part ways with athletic director Shane Lyons, it did not seem like good news for head coach Neal Brown.
Lyons brought Brown to Morgantown from Troy and gave him a contract extension a few years ago, but WVU has struggled on the field. The Mountaineers went 6-7 last year and then 5-7 this year, giving Brown a 22-25 record in four seasons.
It seemed like Brown could be on his way out, but WVU has decided to give him a chance. The school announced Wednesday that Brown will be back in 2023.
Earlier Wednesday, WVU announced the hire of Wren Baker from North Texas as its new athletic director. Rob Alsop, the school’s interim AD, said Wednesday that Baker and Brown have already had discussions about the future of the program.
“Over the past several weeks, President Gee and I have discussed the future of WVU Athletics and our football program with a number of individuals and talented athletic administrators from across the country. We were also impressed with the effort of our team the last few weeks,” Alsop said.
“Additionally, we have also had discussions with Coach Brown and our new Director of Athletics, Wren Baker, about our next steps as a department. In fact, Wren and Coach Brown have already connected relating to the future of the program. As a result of all of these efforts and discussions, it is clear that Coach Brown should continue to lead our football program.”
West Virginia head coach Neal Brown shakes quarterback Nicco Marchiol (8) hand after the NCAA college football game against Oklahoma State in Stillwater, Okla., Saturday Nov. 26, 2022. (AP Photo/Mitch Alcala)
UAB hires… Trent Dilfer?
This one came out of left field. The UAB job has been open since the summer and it culminated Wednesday with the hire of Trent Dilfer. Yes, the former NFL quarterback.
Dilfer has never coached the college level. He has been heavily involved in the Elite 11 quarterback camp and has been a high school head coach in Tennessee for the last four seasons. Before that, he was a longtime analyst for ESPN following his 14-year career in the NFL.
UAB is 6-6 this season, its final season in Conference USA. Next season, the Blazers will compete in the American Athletic Conference. Evidently, UAB leadership thinks Dilfer is the right choice to lead the football program into the future.
“Trent is a proven winner on and off the field at all levels and will be a tremendous leader for our program,” UAB AD Mark Ingram said. “He is a Super Bowl-winning quarterback who played the game at its highest level for many years, and he has coached some of the top quarterbacks who are currently NFL franchise players. Trent’s goals and vision for our program is to lead UAB to the College Football Playoff and we have no doubt that he is the right coach to lead our transition in the American Athletic Conference.”
Lane Kiffin signs extension to remain at Ole Miss
Lane Kiffin has officially agreed to a contract extension with Ole Miss. Kiffin was heavily linked to the vacant Auburn job that eventually went to Hugh Freeze.
According to Sports Illustrated, Kiffin’s new contract is expected to average around $9 million per year over the next six years.
Kiffin has a 23-12 record in three seasons at Ole Miss, including the program’s first-ever 10-win regular season in 2021. This year’s Rebels are 8-4 and awaiting their bowl matchup.
Willie Fritz staying at Tulane
Willie Fritz was a named connected to the Georgia Tech job, but now he’s staying at Tulane.
Fritz is in his seventh season at Tulane, a program that has traditionally struggled to win. Before Fritz’s arrival, Tulane had just one winning record in its previous 13 seasons. Under Fritz, Tulane has had a winning record three times and reached bowl eligibility four times. Before Fritz coached Tulane to a win in the Cure Bowl in 2018, Tulane hadn’t won a bowl game since 2002.
This year, Tulane is 10-2 and will host the American Athletic Conference title game on Saturday. Tulane hasn’t won a conference title since 1998.
Georgia Tech promotes Brent Key
While many external names have been rumored to have interviewed for the Georgia Tech job, the school has decided to make an internal promotion.
GT announced Tuesday that it has removed the interim tag from Brent Key to make him the full-time head coach. Key, an assistant coach at his alma mater since 2019, was named interim coach after Geoff Collins was fired amid a 1-3 start.
Key led the Yellow Jackets to a 4-4 record the rest of the way, including a late-season road upset over North Carolina. Key played offensive line at Georgia Tech from 1997 to 2000 and was an all-ACC performer. Before being interim head coach, Key had assistant head coach, run game coordinator and offensive line coach titles.
Cadillac Williams gets big role on Hugh Freeze’s Auburn staff
After a spirited stint as interim head coach, Auburn legend Carnell “Cadillac” Williams will remain on staff under new head coach Hugh Freeze.
Williams announced Tuesday that he will be the associate head coach on Freeze’s staff. Williams and Freeze met on Monday night.
Williams was 2-2 as Auburn’s interim coach following the firing of Bryan Harsin. Williams, who was an All-American running back at Auburn before a seven-year NFL career, was the running backs coach on Harsin’s staff.
Hugh Freeze is headed to Auburn
After striking out in its pursuit of Lane Kiffin, Auburn has officially hired Hugh Freeze as its next head coach.
Freeze most recently was the head coach at Liberty but he’s most known for his rise and fall at Ole Miss. Freeze spent five seasons at Ole Miss and led the Rebels to two New Year’s Six bowl games, but things came crashing down in 2017 after it was revealed he made calls to escorts from his university-issued phone. That was just one part of an assortment of off-field issues for Freeze, including a laundry list of NCAA violations.
In 2019, he resurfaced at Liberty and amassed a 34-15 record over the last four seasons. Now he’s getting another chance to be an SEC head coach.
At Auburn, Freeze is set to replace Bryan Harsin, who was fired after going 9-12 in just 21 games on the job. He was fired eight games into the 2022 season. Auburn was 3-5 at that point and ended up finishing 5-7.
“After a thoughtful, thorough, and well-vetted search, we ended where we started, with Hugh Freeze,” Auburn AD John Cohen said. “Of all the candidates we considered, Hugh was the best fit. Fit has several meanings, but the most important factors were student-athlete development, football strategy, recruiting and SEC experience.”
Tim Lester out at Western Michigan
Western Michigan announced Monday morning that it fired head coach Tim Lester. The Broncos were 5-7 in 2022.
“The upcoming college football playoff expansion and the incredible foundation for success we have within our football program provides an exciting national opportunity for Bronco Football. It is imperative that we seize this opportunity by pursuing a new direction within our football program,” Western Michigan athletic director Dan Bartholomae said in a statement.
Lester was 37-23 in six seasons as the head coach of his alma mater. Lester became WMU’s head coach in 2017 after P.J. Fleck went to Minnesota and the 2022 season was the first sub-.500 season of his tenure.
While this was Lester’s first losing season, WMU won eight games once in his time with the school. WMU lost six games in each of his first three seasons and was 4-2 in 2020 before going 8-5 with a Quick Lane Bowl win over Nevada in 2021.
Official: Wisconsin hires Luke Fickell
Cincinnati’s Luke Fickell is officially on the move to the Big Ten.
Wisconsin announced Sunday evening that it has hired Fickell to replace Paul Chryst.
“I am incredibly excited to announce Luke Fickell as our new head football coach and to welcome his entire family to Madison,” Wisconsin athletic director Chris McIntosh said. “Luke is one of the top football coaches in the country. He is a proven winner, recruiter and developer of players.”
Added Fickell: “My family and I are thrilled to join the Wisconsin family. This is a destination job at a program that I have admired from afar for years. I am in total alignment with Chris McIntosh’s vision for this program. There is a tremendous foundation here that I can’t wait to build upon.”
Fickell is 57-18 in six years coaching the Bearcats and famously led UC to the College Football Playoff in 2021. Before going to Cincinnati, he was an assistant coach at Ohio State from 2002 to 2016 and had a stint as OSU’s interim head coach in 2011.
Tulsa parts ways with Philip Montgomery
Tulsa has made a coaching change.
The school announced Sunday that it fired head coach Philip Montgomery. Tulsa beat Houston on Saturday to finish the season 5-7.
Montgomery has been at Tulsa since 2015 after he was hired from the Baylor coaching staff and has a career record of 43-53 at the school. Tulsa went to four bowl games in his eight years and even won 10 games in a 2016 campaign that culminated in a Miami Beach Bowl win.
Tulsa followed that season with a 2-10 season in 2017 and hasn’t won more than seven games in a season since. The Golden Hurricane were 7-6 in 2021 and 6-3 in 2020 after three straight losing seasons.
Texas State fires Jake Spavital
After four seasons, Texas State is moving on from Jake Spavital, who had a 13-35 record in his tenure. The Bobcats went 3-9 in his first season, 2-10 in his second season and then posted a 4-8 record in 2021 and 2022.
Spavital leaned heavily on junior college transfers and adding players from the transfer portal to build his rosters rather than recruit Texas high schools. That approach did not work out for Spavital.
Arizona State hires 32-year-old Kenny Dillingham
Five years ago, Arizona State curiously hired 63-year-old Herm Edwards to lead its football program. ASU’s new head coach is half that age.
The Sun Devils announced the hire of 32-year-old Kenny Dillingham on Sunday morning. Dillingham, an Arizona State alum, spent the 2022 season as the offensive coordinator at Oregon. Before his season in Eugene, Dillingham had stints as the offensive coordinator at Memphis, Auburn and Florida State.
The Arizona native becomes the youngest FBS head coach and he is inheriting a program that went 3-9.
David Shaw resigns after another losing season
David Shaw never won fewer than eight games over his first eight seasons as Stanford’s head coach. During that span, the Cardinal won three Pac-12 titles and two Rose Bowls. Since then, things have taken a massive downswing, leading to Shaw’s resignation late Saturday night.
Stanford went 3-9 in each of the past two seasons with a 3-15 record in Pac-12 play. Shaw stepped down following a loss to BYU on Saturday night.
“After many prayers and multiple discussions with my wife, one phrase keeps coming to me — it’s time,” Shaw said. “There are not sufficient words to describe the love and gratitude I feel for my family, all of my former and current players, my staff, this administration and the entire Stanford family. Thank you all.”
In 12 seasons, Shaw had a 96-54 record at his alma mater. He is the winningest coach in program history.
Stanford’s David Shaw coached his final game for the Cardinal on Saturday night. Stanford lost to BYU, ending the Cardinal’s season at 3-9. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)
FAU moves on from Willie Taggart after 3 seasons
Willie Taggart’s tenure at Florida Atlantic is over after three seasons. Taggart went 15-18 in three seasons coaching the Owls and only once made a bowl.
FAU lost 32-31 Saturday to Western Kentucky in overtime to fall to 5-7 on the year. Taggart was the head coach at Florida State, Oregon, South Florida and Western Kentucky.
Nebraska lands Matt Rhule
Nebraska and Matt Rhule have agreed to an eight-year contract for Rhule to be the Huskers’ new head coach.
Rhule most recently had a tough run as the head coach of the Carolina Panthers, but he executed major rebuilds at Temple and Baylor.
Under Rhule’s watch, Temple went from 2-10 in his first season to winning a combined 20 games over his last two seasons with the program, including a conference title. Rhule then went to Baylor in the fallout of the Art Briles scandal. The Bears went 1-11 in Rhule’s first season. By Year 3, Baylor won 11 games and played for the Big 12 championship.
A similarly difficult rebuild will be in store for Rhule in Lincoln. Nebraska hasn’t had a winning season since 2016. The Huskers finished the 2022 season 4-8 and have a combined 23-45 record over the past six seasons.
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