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From The Cutting Room Floor This page contains which are not marked for translation. Welcome to The Cutting Room Floor. 13,861 articles and counting! The Cutting Room Floor is a site dedicated to unearthing and researching unused and cut content from video games. From debug menus, to unused music, graphics, enemies, or levels, many games have content never meant to be seen by anybody but the developers — or even meant for everybody, but cut due to time/budget constraints. Feel free to browse our collection of games and start reading. Up for research? Try looking at some stubs and see if you can help us out. Just have some faint memory of some unused menu/level you saw years ago but can't remember how to access it? Feel free to start a page with what you saw and we'll take a look. If you want to help keep this site running and help further research into games, feel free to donate. Featured Article Super Mario Maker Developer: Nintendo EAD Group No.4 Publisher: Nintendo Released: 2015, Wii U Super Mario Maker is every Mario fan's dream come true; the ability to make their own courses. Longtime fans and newcomers can experiment with all possibilities like putting wings on blocks or enemies, and even stacking a ton of Piranha Plants on top of a Firebar. It was so well-received, it even got a 3DS port. This game contains a LOT of leftovers including items with different graphic styles, early variants of items, and even leftovers of items from an earlier iteration of Splatoon! It is quite an interesting read. Read more... All Featured Articles |
As developers focus more on functions than underlying infrastructure, that infrastructure remains more important than ever before. What is serverless architecture and why does it matter to your business? Forrester Research principal analyst Jeffrey Hammond spoke with TechRepublic about the basic tenets of serverless computing, and how companies are using it in next-generation infrastructure. Despite the rise of cloud computing, containers, and a zillion other things that superficially seem destined to pulverize the operating system, Linux (and Windows) keep chugging away. In fact, if anything, the OS has become more relevant than ever. How did this happen? A place to call home Everything about the cloud seems like it should be a major downer for the OS. Most recently, serverless computing has gained momentum, with developers increasingly fixated on their application code without much thought to underlying operating systems. And yet...even in serverless land the OS remains critical, in large part because no enterprises are 100% invested in any one public cloud, not to mention the reality that all enterprises of any scale have acres of legacy infrastructure sitting around. SEE: Serverless computing: The smart person's guide Into this world of hybrid infrastructure steps the OS, as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has said: The vast majority of customers I speak with plan to use more than one public cloud. So portability becomes a major requirement. And since [the] OS is where the application ultimately touches computing resources, having an OS that can consistently run across all major platforms becomes even more important. As with any single platform provider, optimizations for provider-unique hardware, architectures, or services may address specific situations in the OS and we have all seen how that played out in the single-source, vertically integrated Unix stacks - hence Linux. The reality of enterprise IT is that developers introduce new or different infrastructure into the organization on a regular basis as they seek services to support their applications. The best a CIO can hope for is, as Whitehurst suggested, to put a common layer across these disparate services, bringing sanity back to an otherwise chaotic mess. The OS is this harbinger of restored sanity. Growing old with you A second and related benefit of an OS is that it allows for long-term support. The public cloud vendors have been amazing at introducing new innovations, whether Google BigQuery or Azure Functions or AWS Aurora. They've been far less inclined to stop the cycle of innovation long enough for CIOs to build out long-term support plans. Indeed, the clouds seem almost allergic to this concept. SEE: The 2 biggest problems with serverless computing Not so the OS vendors. Red Hat, SUSE, and others offer 10-year support life-cycles for patching and supporting their enterprise OSes. To accomplish this they have to invest over half of their engineering resources on old technology. This simply isn't the business model for the clouds, and likely won't become such for many years. Importantly, and a third reason for the persistence of the OS, Whitehurst called out that "new application models like containers and microservices are bringing the operating system to the forefront." Though it's easy to overlook the importance of the OS in this containerized, cloudy world, Whitehurst stressed: "Each and every container has its user-space dependencies in Linux in it, and therefore requires management of those components in the container regardless of where that container runs." All of which means that, as much as we've been trying to minimize the importance of the OS with things like serverless, the reality is that operating systems, and particularly Linux, promise to play a central role in enterprise computing for years to come. Data Center Trends Newsletter DevOps, virtualization, the hybrid cloud, storage, and operational efficiency are just some of the data center topics we'll highlight. Delivered Mondays and Wednesdays Sign up today Also see |
By 21st Century Wire says… Even on a corrupt country like Mexico, not everyone is bought and paid for. Residents of this relatively poor Campeche region of Mexico have kicked out GMO ‘gene giant’ Monsanto Corp, located in the southwestern portion of the Yucatán Peninsula, have a set of cojones which have long since become extinct in the US and Europe. How did they do it? The Latin American Bureau explains: “The contemporary Mayan heirs of great millennial civilizations are the pivotal inhabitants of this land and everywhere match the state’s rich biodiversity. The great transnational corporation Monsanto just learned this the hard way. A company fabricated out of thin air; based essentially on bits of paper filed somewhere in a secretary of state office in the U.S. less than a half generation ago; this fictive entity that is now considered a person by the delusional Supremes just found out what it is like to go up against a bunch of deep rooted angry Indians [sic]. Why the anger? Essentially, because Native beekeepers are against the presence of GMOs of any kind in the pollen that bee populations are exposed to.” CORPORATE SOCK PUPPETS CLUELESS: “What about GMOs? Look, we bought General Motors already.” Back at home, things are more pathetic by an order of magnitude, where the corruption has been cemented within government institutions through share holding, promises of boardroom positions, perks and other bribes. Washington, London and Brussels have failed to protect the public interest regarding food security and generational health while acting like Banana Republics themselves – only with a lot more bling, more concrete and flexing its corporate media muscle to brainwash its own populations. But ‘relax’ we are told, “We have freedom and democracy, we aren’t corrupt”. Time to learn a trick from the Mayans who, unlike western legion of nanny-states, have some clue who they are, and what it means to live… Natural Health Warriors Mayans of the Campeche Region have just won a two-year legal battle to get rid of Monsanto and their GMO soybeans (suicide beans). Following the ban of GM maize in Mexico, this ancient and agriculturally savvy culture has won a major battle against biotech monopolies around the globe. The Second District Court ruled in favor of three Mayan communities from the Hopelchén township who dared to take on the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock , Rural Development, Fisheries and Food ( Sagarpa) and the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources ( SEMARNAT). This means that Saragapa now must make a concerted effort to be sure that no GM soybeans are planted throughout Pachen and Cancabchen communities in Hopelchén. Just two years ago, the same agency allowed Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready GMO soybeans to be planted in the region – infecting more than 253,000 hectares with suicide seeds that cause human infertility and poison the environment. Seven states were under Monsanto’s reign – free then to plant their GM seeds wherever they liked within those borders, including the municipalities of: Campeche, Hopelchén , Tenabo , Calkiní , Escárcega, Carmen and Palisade. In just a few of these places, the authorities were angry that the government had given Monsanto authorization, and they decided to fight the ruling. Campeche beekeepers were especially upset since this would affect bee-keeping negatively in the region. They called Monsanto’s influence, ‘pollution of production,’ resulting in loss of income and closing of markets for many bee keepers with international contracts. After two years of litigation, and arguing that the planting of GM soybeans was in direct opposition of traditional beekeeping practices, AND that it was in violation of their right to a healthy environment – pointing out that increased use of herbicides and deforestation were both outcomes of GM planting – the Mayans won their case. These small indigenous communities have taken on the multi-billion-dollar biotech and Big Ag companies and won. They are an example to us all. Original Source: naturalsociety.com Join the next March Against Monsanto on May 24th in your area: http://bit.ly/1gCpTgf Related: France Bans GMO Corn Maize Despite EU Commission Pressure READ MORE GMO NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire GMO Files |
Climate change has not always commanded the attention it deserves, particularly in recent years. Two events this week have reminded us why we cannot afford to forget about it. On Tuesday President Obama called for national and international action to tackle global warming. Less than 24 hours after he finished speaking, the independent Committee on Climate Change warned [pdf] that the UK is not on track to meet its carbon reduction targets. Their report highlights the grave threats but also the outstanding opportunities that combating climate change presents us with. The case to act is both clear and compelling. Our climate is changing. The causes are man-made. And we are already feeling the effects. This shouldn’t be a matter of debate. The scientific consensus is overwhelming and includes 97 per cent of 4,000 academic studies carried out over the last 20 years. As the President said himself on Tuesday, we don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. He has listed Republican politicians who publicly deny climate change on his website. Judging by the noises that have been coming out of the Conservative Party over the past few weeks, we have enough material to start our own version here. First the Energy Minister, Michael Fallon, dismissed climate change as “theology”. Then Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary, denied that the climate has changed – despite the twelve warmest years ever recorded all coming in the last fifteen. He added that any action to combat climate change may do more harm than good. Elsewhere, Michael Gove is planning to airbrush climate change from the geography curriculum for key stage 3 students. And on the Tory backbenches, their ‘Alternative Queen’s Speech’ includes a bill to abolish the Department for Energy and Climate Change altogether. Taken in isolation and any one of these examples would be cause for concern. Together, they paint a deeply disturbing picture. What is even more alarming than what Tory ministers are saying, is what David Cameron is not saying. At a time when world leaders such as Obama and President Hollande of France are speaking up about why we desperately need to seize this moment, our Prime Minister has apparently lost his voice when it comes to talking about climate change. Remarkably, David Cameron hasn’t made a single speech on climate change in the three years since he became Prime Minister. This is the same David Cameron who hugged huskies; said “Vote Blue, Go Green”; promised that his would be “the greenest government ever.” But when you look at this Government’s appalling green record, it’s understandable why he is keeping quiet. Our greenhouse gas emissions are going up rather than down: the UK’s carbon output jumped by 18 million tonnes in 2012 – more than any other country in Europe. Investment in clean energy has plummeted to a seven-year low. Less people are insulating their homes and the Green Deal, the Government’s flagship energy efficiency programme, isn’t working. Now the government’s own independent advisors have warned that the UK has fallen behind on meeting our carbon reduction commitments. It shows what a complete folly it was for the Government to ignore the Committee for Climate Change’s recommendation to set a decarbonisation target in the Energy Bill currently progressing through Parliament. Pledging to clean up our power supply by 2030 would provide a shot in the arm for our flat-lining economy and give the certainty to investors which they are crying out for. The combination of anti-green rhetoric and inaction also weakens our hand when negotiating with other nations for a new global climate change agreement. We are approaching the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. We need to take every opportunity to build support for an international climate treaty before then and the UK should be at the forefront of that effort. Regrettably, the Prime Minister decided to omit climate change from the official agenda for the G8 leaders meeting in Northern Ireland. When I asked him about this last week, he said he didn’t see the point of having “a long conversation about climate change.” Climate change isn’t something that we can wait to talk about next week, next month or next year. Only a few weeks ago the concentration of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere passed through the landmark threshold of 400 parts per million. We have to act now. If we do there is a chance we can avoid a rise in global temperatures of above 2C – the level that scientists have deemed to be dangerous. With the right strategy, commitment and ingenuity, we can create a new green economy in the UK and unlock massive job opportunities in the process. Delay or hesitate and we risk being left behind by other countries more willing to face the future and catastrophic consequences for future generations. It’s time the Prime Minister broke his silence and did something before it’s too late. |
SEATTLE -- I know if life gives you lemons you're supposed to make lemonade. But, what are you supposed to make if life takes those lemons away? According to the Seattle Police Department, two men beat up and robbed a shopper for half-a-dozen lemons Saturday night in Rainier Beach, according to the Seattle Police Department. The victim had just purchased the lemons at a store in the 9000 block of Rainier Avenue South and was walking across the parking lot shortly after 10:30 p.m when he noticed five men and women following him. According to the police report for the incident, one of the men suddenly punched the victim in the side of the face from behind then hit him in the shoulder. A second man reportedly kicked the victim in the leg and took his lemons. The victim told officers he ran back to the store with all five people chasing after him. When he got back to the store, he yelled for security, and a store employee called 911 for him. Officers arrived too late to catch the alleged lemon thieves but believe they may have been captured on the store's surveillance cameras. |
Moving the Mail Location is Key APO stands for Army or Air Force Post Offices, while FPO represents Fleet Post Offices, serving the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. Using a number assigned to an APO/FPO as an address provides flexibility and security if and when a military unit changes location. The APO number 96490 example on this poster represented the 1st Calvary Division, Airmobile, stationed in Vietnam, located at An Khe as of November 1967. Waterproof, camouflage mailbag for experimental use during Vietnam conflict. Courtesy U.S. Postal Service Letter on Quartermaster Department stationery from Civil War. Aircraft carrier crew members carry mail sacks from a helicopter on a flight deck, 2003. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 1st Class Arlo K. Abrahamson. Mail delivery must overcome the complexities posed by troop movements, supply lines, and transportation means. The most challenging and time consuming part of moving mail arises in a theatre of operation. Issues of security, difficult terrain, and transportation resources can slow dispatches. At times, limiting the size and weight of mailed items has helped to ensure that the mail goes through. “I am truly glad to hear that you had rec’d some of my letters. I have the advantage of you. I know where to write to you. Your home is stationary, mine is upon the wide world, wherever I pitch my tent there is my home for the time being. A soldiers’ life is uncertain & his abode more.” —Lieutenant William McKean to his father, November 13, 1846 No Easy Task Delivering mail in war zones is fraught with difficulty. During the American Revolution, postal couriers scoured the countryside to find George Washington’s elusive army. Two hundred years later during the Vietnam War, the military experimented with using bags like this one to drop mail from helicopters. Unfortunately, this type of bag blended in with the jungle too well, making it difficult to locate. An “Outrageous” Bill Creating and maintaining the system that made delivering military mail possible was expensive, requiring the government to devote vast resources to the task. Postal and military officials tried many ways to coordinate management and decide financial responsibility. In this 1862 letter, an officer from the Quartermaster General’s Office questioned the transportation costs charged by the Post Office Department. |
A standard gun and unmarked bullets, made by Cavim and issued to police officers, are arranged for a photograph in Caracas, Venezuela, on Thursday, March 12, 2015. The Venezuelan military's failure to comply with bullet coding laws is fueling the world's second-highest murder rate and enriching black market speculators, according to lawmakers, police officers and activists. Photographer: Meridith Kohut/Bloomberg via Getty Images Here's some common sense for you. I want gun ownership to be as boring and annoying as car ownership. I want you to go to some Department of Weapons and sit for hours. I want folks who own guns to prove their skill, their mental and physical health, and to be licensed and reviewed over the years just as happens with our driver's licenses. You earn the right to own and drive a vehicle; earn the right to own and use a gun. Quibble with me over semantics if you want to; what is a "right" vs. what is a "privilege." I'll be busy with my friends and colleagues trying to prevent more unnecessary deaths. Gun ownership isn't some inalienable right granted by God. Remember, the Constitution was written by men coming out of a long and bloody war near the end of the 18th century. It was written for their time. It also included the "right" to own a human being. Things change. Folks evolve. I want a voluntary federal buyback program for firearms, with hunting weapons and vintage/historic weapons exempt. I want the sale of weapons to be even more tightly controlled than the sale of Xanax and other controlled substances. I want advertising for firearms to be as regulated as DTC (direct to consumer) advertising for pharmaceuticals ("May cause shortness of breath, long-lasting boners, etc.") We can do all of this. It'll likely create jobs, believe it or not: regulators, educators, enforcers. It will not end murder. It won't end rape or robbery either. It will make it harder to commit those crimes. There will be a black market for guns as there is for any coveted item in a capitalist society. (And I'm not anti-capitalism, btw. I'm a big fan! Sorry, hippies. I do love you guys, by the way, you're very nice people with good instincts.) Continuing education credits for gun owners should be required, just as they are with medical professionals. When you have a greater ability to take a human life, you have a greater responsibility to prove your fitness to wield the tools that may create that end. And that's how the fuck you well-regulate a goddamn American militia. This post originally appeared on Medium. Also on HuffPost: |
Mostly, it is odd to green light a sequel before the original has come out, but if you have read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, they you can see why its not so strange after all. Lionsgate has jumped on the obvious hit series to go ahead and green light the sequel, which really means the whole trilogy will most likely be adapted. Lionsgate has already announced the release date for the sequel,Catching Fire. The date has been set for November 22, 2013, and now, The Wrap’s “Deal Central” reports that Oscar-winning screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, who previously worked on Slumdog Millionaire was hired to write the adaptation for Collins’ second book. It was also reported that Gary Ross who co-wrote and directed The Hunger Games, the first book of the series and the upcoming film, is overseeing Beaufoy’s work and has been confirmed to return as director for the sequel. It has also been confirmed that four of the cast–Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Woody Harrelson and Liam Hensworth–will also be returning for the sequel. Here is the mega- cast list for the film: Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen Josh Hutcherson as Peeta Mellark Woody Harrelson as Haymitch Abernathy Willow Shields as Primrose Everdeen Liam Hemsworth as Gale Hawthorne Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket Lenny Kravitz as Cinna Paula Malcomson as Mrs. Everdeen Amandla Stenberg as Rue Alexander Ludwig as Cato Dayo Okeniyi as Thresh Isabelle Fuhrman as Clove Jacqueline Emerson as Foxface Leven Rambin as Glimmer Jack Quaid as Marvel Donald Sutherland as President Snow Stanley Tucci as Caesar Flickerman Wes Bentley as Seneca Crane Latarsha Rose as Portia The Hunger Games is out on March 23 and now it looks like its sequel Catching Fire is still on track for its planned release date of November 22, 2013. I think it was a smart move for Lionsgate to go ahead and start production on the second film, if you have watched the trailer for the film you can tell it is going to be a hit. The film looks amazing and the books were phenomenal. Lionsgate definitely knows what it is doing by green lighting this project. You can watch the trailer below and see how awesome it looks: Share this: Twitter Tumblr Facebook Reddit Google Pinterest Like this: Like Loading... |
Ninjas in Pyjamas innan finalen i Katowice. Foto: ESL The Ninjas in Pyjamas lost an extremely close finals against their arch rivals Fnatic during ESL One Katowice. A couple of days after the loss, and with Gfinity around the corner, Patrik ”F0rest” Lindberg talks about the future with Allu, how the team made it to five major finals – and his feelings after a weak T-side on Inferno. – I’m deeply disappointed in my performance and I know I can do better, the NiP star tells Aftonbladet Esport. Swedish CS:GO-fans received a real treat this weekend when the dream finals between Ninjas in Pyjamas and Fnatic during a major became a reality once more. But in contrast to the finals in Cologne, this time Fnatic came out on top, becoming the first team in CS:GO history with double major titles. For NiP, the preparations were hectic once more as they switched AWP:ers only weeks before another major, when Mikail ”Maikelele” Bill had to make room for Aleksi ”Allu” Jalli. ”Didn’t have time to prepare one hundred percent” During the tournament, Allu was one of the most standout players in NiP and it now looks as if he’s closer to transforming the tryout contract into a full-time version. – With both Maikelele and Allu we made it to a major finals despite a short practice time. Of course you have to think about that too, that we didn’t have time to prepare one hundred percent, especially since Allu doesn’t even speak Swedish. But we only think we can become better from here on forward, so it feels good, Patrik ”F0rest” Lindberg tells Aftonbladet Esport and continues: – The way it feels right now Allu is a given in the team. As long as he feels happy and satisfied we’ll continue with him and see where it takes us. ”Our timing was off during our T half” Against Fnatic, NiP lost Dust2 narrowly, only to come back on Cache with a solid performance ending the map 16-10. But when it was time for the decider on Inferno, the map that gave NiP their major win at ESL One Cologne, F0rest and his teammates saw themselves at a huge disadvantage after the T-side. – The rounds we were gonna do didn’t click and things didn’t turn out the way we planned. They picked us off one by one, that’s how I saw the game during our T half. Our timing was off and it put us in a hard position. ”I see things I could’ve done ten times better” And for Lindberg personally the first half was a disaster as he after 15 rounds only managed three kills. – During the game I don’t put much weight on it, I just want the team to win. As long as we take rounds I’m happy, but afterwards when you look at how the game turned out and what could’ve been done better I’m deeply disappointed in my performance. I see the mistakes I did, things I could’ve done ten times better, and it takes a toll on me when it happens on a map where it can’t happen. But I know I can do better and I’m trying to not get myself down because of it. Sometimes it happens to the best, he says. As CT F0rest, who recently switched positions with Christopher ”GeT_RiGhT” Alesund, performed better but he still has some thoughts about the way he played. – I don’t think I had the strongest of CT sides either, I could’ve done better. When it came to retakes on the A site I was a bit absent. I haven’t had much practice since we switched positions but the team says they trust me and that I can do better. – I’ve been playing the A site for many years but sometimes you need changes to get a new frame of mind. We’re happy with the switch but it’s just about getting more practice. ”You can’t bring yourself down because of a second place” Fnatic could then secure the win even though NiP managed to come back from 11-4 to 15-13. But a few days after the finals, F0rest is still happy with what the team showed in Katowice. – Once we’ve processed the whole finals we realized we’re pretty satisfied. Not completely satisfied, but we performed well. We just have to look at the mistakes we did and try to do it better next time and I’m sure we’ll win the next finals. – I always try to look at things with a positive mindset and you can’t bring yourself down because of a second place. It’s an amazing accomplishment that we, out of the best teams in the world, manage to make it to the finals. Fnatic have been there three times and we’ve been there five times. At least we make it there and then it’s down to very small things that decide wether or not we win. ”We have to be the team with the strongest psyche” And Lindberg says he’s impressed with the way his team handled the deciding map even though they had an ”impossible” obstacle to climb. – What impresses me the most and what I’m trying to say is that right now we have to be the team with the strongest psyche when it comes to these kind of games. That we, in a finals this big, managed to make Fnatic doubt themselves and become uncomfortable even though they had such a big lead, that we can come back the way we did. Our whole team believed we would take it to overtime and win it, so we felt good. ”I believe in keeping a positive attitude” I’ve seen some comments about your POV streams and how you always manage to stay so calm and focused despite being behind. How have you managed to get that kind of communication and mood in the team? – It’s a pretty early mentality we’ve had and something I’ve believed in for a long time. To keep a positive attitude and believe in each other. You can’t sit there and be negative even if a person makes a mistake. There’s no need to point out and will only hurt the team spirit, plus the person in question will feel worse. At the end of the day we know that mistakes will happen and we have to make as few as possible. But when they do happen you have to support the player and raise the level, and that goes for the whole team. We have a calm tone when we play and compete and we try to get each other psyched. We try to do that when we practice too. ”It’s a shame Fnatic aren’t coming to Gfinity” Now, NiP are looking forward to Gfinity this coming weekend and after the finals in Katowice they will be viewed by many as the favourites to win the event. – We haven’t been the favorites at an event for four months but I guess we’re the favorites now. But EnVyUs is a strong team so we can’t count them out. Virtus.Pro will also be there and Titan will be looking to avenge themselves. I don’t know where we stand and I think the tournament is pretty open but we have a lot of confidence after Katowice. It’s a shame that Fnatic aren’t coming, so we would have a chance at a quick revenge. ”BO5 finals are fun for those watching” The groups at Gfinity are BO3:s and the finals is a BO5, something F0rest thinks can benefit NiP, who have historically been bad at BO1 groups. – I think we peak in BO3:s. The whole team becomes more comfortable and less random things can happen. On one map, everything can go to hell but over three maps it can’t. What are your thoughts on a BO5 finals? – I talked to the team about it and as long as it’s on a separate day we’ll manage it. We practice 7-8 hours each day so it shouldn’t be a problem. I would’ve loved BO5 in Katowice, haha. – And it’s fun for those watching, so they can get the most out of the games. |
Some experts warn of deflation risks, core inflation dips to 3.4% ISLAMABAD: Inflation in Pakistan continued to drop, falling to a low of 1.3% in September, sparking at least some economists to warn of the risk of deflation. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), the indicator that captures prices of 481 commodities every month, rose by just 1.3% in September on a year on year basis, according to data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) on Thursday. It was the lowest level since July 2003. Although much of the reduction in inflation was attributed to steep decline in commodity prices, even core inflation, which strips out the effect of volatile food and energy prices, was lower. Core inflation clocked in at 3.4% on a year-on-year basis in September, a decline of 0.6% over the previous month. The steady decline led some economists to argue that the government should abandon austere fiscal policies and undertake an economic stimulus to prevent the economy from spiraling into deflation. Read: Inflation slows down to 1.7%, lowest since 2003 “The government is not taking its own inflation figures serious, which suggest the country has entered a deflationary period,” said Ashfaque Hasan Khan, Dean of School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the National University of Science and Technology. But while fiscal policy may remain austere, monetary policy has become far more accommodating. The State Bank of Pakistan has recently cut interest rates to a 42-year low of 6% in order to support growth and keep the outlook for future inflation consistent with the target. However, the reduction in discount rate is not helping, as there is little credit left for the private sector to borrow. While the CPI is in disinflation, the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) is already depicting deflationary trends and was negative by almost half percentage points for ten consecutive months. The negative trend in wholesale prices may spill over to retail prices. The WPI-based rate of inflation contracted by 3.1% in July-September period of this year as compared to the previous year, according to the PBS. The CPI-based inflation rate for July-September period also remained at 1.7%, suggesting that overall inflation rate for the current fiscal year 2016 will remain far below the official target of 6%. Read: Inflation dips to 12-year low at 1.8% in July According to the PBS, prices of food and non-alcoholic beverages dropped by over 1% in September over a year ago. Perishable food prices decreased over 8% on a year-on-year basis in September. However, prices of pulses increased in the range of 16% to almost 50% due to shortage of the commodities. The government has already allowed import of pulses to stabilise their prices. In the energy group, the kerosene oil prices were one-fourth less than the previous September while petrol rates were also lowered by 22% as compared to the last year. Published in The Express Tribune, October 2nd, 2015. Read full story |
I have a cat, Cleo, and was so excited to participate in the Presents for Pets exchange and get something new for her to enjoy. When the package showed up last night, I couldn't wait to rip into it! I was matched to a lovely woman named Debbie, who owns several dogs, and she did a great job shopping for Cleo's present!!! She sent Cleo a catnip mouse, some hard treats, some soft treats, and a feather toy on a springy stick. And let me tell you, Cleo loves her presents! She could smell the catnip right away and was all up in there trying to get at it. I know she's going to love the treats, too - she's a chubby girl and she's all about food, so she'll be thrilled once I decide to open them and let her have some. But the all-time favourite is the feather toy on the springy stick. She LOVES that thing!! My boyfriend picked it up and held it towards her, and she wound up playing with it for ages. She loves that thing, and I have many blurry photos on my phone of her attacking it already. I took a video, too, to show how much she loves it! Debbie, thank you so much for thinking of my kitty and picking out some great presents for her. You did a fantastic job and she loves them. On behalf of both Cleo and myself, thank you!!! |
Woodberry Down is a vast north-east London council estate undergoing an ambitious transformation. But while eager developers court foreign buy-to-let investors, are they casting aside long-term residents like 'social rubbish'? We spent six months on site to hear the locals' stories Google Tony Pidgley, chairman of one of Britain’s biggest housebuilders, and you’ll find a video in which he shows off his latest toy. The plaything in question is a giant council estate that his firm, Berkeley Homes, is smashing up and building over. A squat, punchy figure, he shows a reporter around the new towers – and the gashed old blocks that, we’re informed, were used in Schindler’s List as a stand-in for the Warsaw Ghetto. “You can understand why they used it in the film,” begins Pidgley in a reasonable tone. “It looks like a concentration camp.” Forget for a moment that the Warsaw Ghetto was not a concentration camp, or that practically every large inner-London estate has featured in some film in the role of Ominous Backdrop. Ignore the crassness of a man who, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, is worth £160m casually rubbishing the homes of thousands of families poorer than him. Concentrate instead on the rare sight presented in that clip: a businessman at the height of his powers. Pidgley is one of the most lavishly paid executives in his industry. The firm he helms is enjoying bumper profits, thanks to a taxpayer-funded housing boom in Berkeley’s key market of London and the south-east. And the building site where he’s playing the tour guide – Woodberry Down in Manor House, north-east London – is one of the largest housing-estate redevelopments in Britain. By 2031, around 2,000 council or former council homes will have been demolished and replaced with more than 5,500 units on the estate: some social housing; some for “key workers”, the euphemism now used for low-paid public servants, and the majority to be sold on the open market. The flagship private block in Woodberry Down, looking on to a lovely reservoir, has been sold largely to foreign investors, with one flat going for a million pounds (tell a Londoner that flats in Manor House are going for a million quid and see how low their jaw drops). Woodberry Park, the new development taking the place of the Woodberry Down council estate in Hackney, east London. Photograph: Alamy Pidgley began touting Woodberry Down as a “blueprint for regeneration and all the new development Britain needs to beat the housing crisis” in February. Although it has only just got going on a job that will last 25 years, Berkeley Homes published a scientific-looking survey that neatly showed residents to be delighted with the results so far. At a corporate meeting this February to publicise the poll, coalition planning minister Nick Boles gave a warm keynote speech and the Times led the media applause: “Schindler’s estate is now a blueprint for urban happiness”. Within the grasp of Pidgley’s team is a tantalisingly large prize. If Berkeley can establish itself as the pre-eminent name in regeneration, it will put itself front of the queue for what is a roaring business. It will also have even greater sway with local authorities, London city hall and Westminster. Executives at the FTSE-250 company estimate that, of every four houses they build, one is on a former council estate somewhere in the capital. But the potential business is much larger: 1.69 million people in England were waiting for local authority accommodation last year; over 344,000 in London alone. Unprecedented cuts have left town halls up and down the country less cash to maintain their existing housing stock – giving them little choice but to turn to Pidgely and co. These public-private partnerships are relatively recent and haven’t come under much serious scrutiny, either in the press or in parliament. Yet they are widespread. The Guardian asked London’s local authorities about their schemes to redevelop public housing with a private builder, in which at least some of the dwellings would be sold on the open market. Our map shows the results: of the capital’s 32 councils, 18 are in such partnerships with the private sector, many across multiple estates. As the financial crisis recedes into the middle distance, London has been colonised by builders’ hoardings and cement mixers. Hospitals are being transformed into luxury flats; school fields littered with concrete boxes, and public housing turned into not-so-public housing. With politicians of all stripes looking for ways to drum up millions of new homes, Berkeley and its rivals will become ever more important to Britain’s future. By the time Pidgley began his Woodberry Down PR push, we had spent many hours talking to its residents. Our interest was aroused by the claims being made for it: Hackney council officials described it privately as its “greatest success”; the commitment to making 40% of the new development affordable homes. To critics, regeneration is simply code for gentrification, which is often a fancy term to describe how poor people are cleared from valuable land to make way for the rich. But here was a scheme promising regeneration with a conscience, creating a genuinely mixed community. Council and the builders sang the same song: Woodberry Down represented private-led redevelopment at its best – a model to be followed. Except the residents on the estate consistently demonstrated that the claims about its transformation were untrue. Berkeley’s survey – the subject of laudatory column inches – turned out to be about as methodologically robust as the science part of a L’Oreal advert: it was massively skewed towards those settling into the new towers, when the vast majority still live in the old blocks, and will do for years. And it omitted entirely the number of residents who were moved off the estate. Among the more than 50 interviewees we spoke to over six months, there was naturally a range of views about what benefits had been brought by regeneration. But the majority talked of pensioners offered inadequate sums for their leaseholdings, and being forced to move far from their families; of business owners promised a place in the new development only to be turfed out later, losing small fortunes in the process. Their neighbourhood was an endangered species: a patch of inner London belonging to the elderly, the working poor, the unemployed. Now it was being broken up to suit an international company selling homes to the well-off. The fact their council was leading this dismemberment made some especially angry. Even tenants in the new social housing reported how they or neighbours had been plunged into debt because of the higher bills incurred through having a private housing association as a landlord. Despite Berkeley’s promise to “bring together all people in Woodberry Down”, social tenants reported that those living in the expensive private blocks “cross the road to avoid us”. They had been made to feel like second-class citizens in their own home. What follows are stories of the people best placed to tell you about what regeneration does to a community: the ones who come from it. Some have lived on Woodberry Down for more than six decades; others are in their 20s. Their photos don’t feature in the civic-centre case studies or corporate press releases. They haven’t got local elections to win, or a profit target to chase. They’ve just got to live with the results. Jane In all her 65 years on Woodberry Down, Jane Frost has never had to deal with anything like this. Around six or seven on most evenings, a mystery man comes to her flat and pees against the balcony outside. Jane’s the only resident left on the entire floor; and there’s no neighbor, no security guard to pop out and see who the pest is. The 71-year-old cleans up the puddles herself. All five storeys of Jane’s council block have been emptied. Almost everyone else has been rehoused, either in the new blocks opposite or in a different area. But Jane is disabled and, even after years, the council has yet to find her suitable accommodation. Which leaves her stuck here, with so few neighbours that she finds it “creepy”. Too creepy for her friends, who don’t visit after dark for fear of muggers – or worse. “When I come up the stairs late at night my heart’s going boom-boom-boom-boom,” she says. “If I’m taken bad I no longer have anyone’s door I can knock on.” The afternoon light streams into Jane’s lounge, playing on a lifetime’s worth of ornaments and porcelain. But outside her front door, “it’s absolutely horrible. I’m a nervous wreck.” Since the regeneration began she’s been diagnosed with depression. One night she went out for a loaf, got chatting to a woman selling the Big Issue and let slip where she lived. The homeless woman was so worried for Jane’s safety that she walked her home – and wouldn’t even take anything for the trouble. Out on the pensioner’s deserted balcony you see the thing she blames most for leaving her “abandoned”. It’s the towers springing up opposite, and the changes they’ve ushered in. All that activity on the other side of the road – the cranes, the 400-plus builders charging around in white hard hats – could be described as rejuvenation: bringing new life to decades-old dereliction. “A Place in the Making,” Berkeley Homes calls it. They’ve slapped the phrase on hoardings everywhere, and rechristened the area Woodberry Park. Visitors to the 64-acre estate now have two maps to navigate. On one is the old council layout of Woodberry Down, each block assigned a starchily municipal name: Bayhurst, Delamere, Whittlebury. On the other is a Technicolor guide to Woodberry Park and its landmarks: Residence, Watersreach and, less dreamily, Berkeley Homes Marketing Suite. Yet marketing won’t totally obliterate history as long as people such as Jane and her childhood friend Sheila Coxon are knocking around. They met on this estate in 1949, the year after it opened. “You’d have parties in the courtyards,” remembers Jane. Sheila chimes in: “You had a community.” You also had heroic public investment. Woodberry Down was the brainchild of Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, Labour MP Herbert Morrison, who wanted to rehouse working-class Londoners living in inner-city squalor – even if it meant compulsorily buying up the homes of the well-to-do residents of Manor House. “Morrison drives out mansion owners,” thundered the North London Recorder in November 1938 under the headline: “£1,000,000 slum dwellers’ paradise”. It ran a photo of a resident standing pensively by the reservoir and warned, “Hundreds of shouting children will take the place of this solitary silent man.” But soon “everybody wanted to be here,” says Jane. She tells a family legend about how her mum lobbied the then-MP for Westminster Abbey: “He said: ‘What do you want? A flat in Westminster?’ And she said: ‘No … on the Woodberry Down estate.’ He told her she was asking the world, the absolute world. That’s how good this estate was.” Council housing is now synonymous with cheap boxes, built grudgingly, and piled up to the sky. But, however rundown, the low-rise redbrick blocks of Woodberry Down still look solid – reminders of their prideful days as an “estate of the future”, toured by policy-makers in order to glean lessons. With a health centre opening in 1952 and Britain’s first purpose-built comprehensive soon afterwards, it was also a showcase for the cradle-to-grave welfare state. “The estate was the estate and everybody had it the same,” says Sheila. Then she nods towards the building works: “It’s segregation, isn’t it?” She’s referring to the way the different classes of resident live in different blocks: social tenants on subsidised rent in one, part-owners of “affordable” homes in another, and the private residents in their own flagship tower. “The private properties are being built around the reservoir, with just a few token flats for council residents. The private buyers have got the best part of the estate.” Gentrification The term “gentrification” was coined just down the road from Woodberry Down, about 15 years after Jane and Sheila moved into their new homes. Living in Islington, north London, sociologist Ruth Glass noticed a rapid change among her neighbours. “One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes – upper and lower,” she wrote in an article published in 1964. “Shabby, modest mews and cottages … have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences … Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts … it goes on rapidly until … the original working-class occupiers are displaced, and the social character of the district is changed.” This is gentrification as we still discuss it: the invisible hand of the market moving inexorably but gently (it waits until the leases expire) to gentrify an area. The squatters beget artists, who beget the public-sector middle-class, who beget banker families, who just stay put in their stucco-fronted Georgian houses, endlessly decorating and redecorating. A doleful bugle sounds for the demise of the family-run cobbler, soon drowned out by buzz over the gelato parlour that’s replaced it. This long, slow process of gentrification does not describe what’s happening in Woodberry Down, or on mammoth estates from Greenwich’s Ferrier (which, in Berkeley’s hands, is being remoulded into Kidbrooke Village) to the Heygate in Elephant and Castle. Many of the made-up “villages” and “parks” mushrooming across the capital owe nothing to age-old market forces and everything to councils eager to upgrade their housing stock without eating into already-stretched budgets. They pass control of their inventory to a private housing association (Genesis, in the case of Woodberry Down) and lease the land for a few centuries to big developers. The builders put up new “affordable” homes to be sold or rented at below market rates, and cross-subsidise them by constructing expensive private homes. This planned poshification has been given a name by Paul Watt at London’s Birkbeck: state-led gentrification. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Woodberry Down estate in Manor House, London. Photograph: Martin Godwin This is the unwinding of the process that created Woodberry Down. Herbert Morrison built municipal housing to shield Londoners from a broken market; his successors in local government are exposing their constituents to market forces in a manner not seen in postwar Britain. In 1981, 57.5% of homes in Hackney were rented from the council; by the last census in 2011, that had more than halved to 23.8%. Over that same period, the proportion of homes in the borough rented privately leapt from 17.8% to 29%. The same trend applies across inner London. By Watt’s rule of thumb, if a London tenant pays weekly rent of £100 to the council, their counterpart in the private sector will typically give £400 to a landlord or landlady. And they will have much less protection. Maxwell “It makes me want to cry, to be honest,” says Maxwell O’Hajah, thumbing through Berkeley Homes’ sales brochure for Woodberry Park. His cracked white fingertips are a tell-tale sign of 20 years in construction. “I’m looking through this and all the amenities that we had already, they’re bragging about. The reservoir, the sailing club, the parks, the local markets: they’ve always been there. I don’t know what they’re actually adding.” Now 46, Maxwell moved to Woodberry Down in his teens. He joined the residents’ regeneration committee after finding out his flat would be one of the first to be demolished. At that point, early last decade, he became an eyewitness to the state-led gentrification of Woodberry Down. When putting the development out to tender, Hackney council created footage to show developers. “They made it look like a hell hole. They played the theme music from a horror film and made Woodberry Down out to be some kind of project in America.” Experts note that this is a common tactic used by local councils: running down the existing area to whip up support among tenants for a private-led regeneration. As a tenant rep, Maxwell saw Berkeley Homes present its bid for the project. “There were a few residents, a few people from the council, and 11 of them. They felt really heavy handed. Every single one was in a blue suit. Every single one had a tie on. They were all men.” Then began negotiations with tenants. “Residents were like: ‘A sports centre – that would be nice … Ooh, and a swimming pool, yeah.’ They were asking for things like kids in a sweet shop. They thought this regeneration was for them. But Berkeley Homes are hard-nosed business people. We were never going to get our way.” The gym on the estate is only for those in the private block; the same will go for the swimming pool featured on builders’ hoardings. When Maxwell realised how much his living costs would increase in the new flats, with a housing association as landlord rather than the council, he moved off Woodberry Down. “I’m glad. This is a regeneration if you’re coming from the outside. If you’re already on the inside it’s just destruction. It’s blatantly obvious that they don’t want us to live there any more. It’s just ghettoisation – that’s what this model of regeneration is.” Gina Woodberry Down estate, now a regeneration project. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian Gina O’Raegan can give you a tour of what’s wrong with where she lives. Tugging along her staffie, Shumba, the itinerary is a litany of horrors: the corner flat with such bad subsidence that it’s now uninhabitable; the courtyard where dealers were hanging out last summer, since they could no longer ply drugs over by the new-builds, and the boarded-up properties whose residents have left. She lives up the road from Jane, in what locals call the Seven Blocks (although she’d rather you didn’t use that nickname: “It sounds like a prison”). These are the most dilapidated buildings on the estate, so bad that Gina never lets on to workmates or acquaintances her address in case they work out where she lives. Her home makes her ashamed. Gina and her 20-year-old son James live in “limbo”, in the gulf between regeneration-speak and practice. In 2006, the council laid out key principles for which parts of the estate would be replaced first. Top of the list was: “Replacing the worst first”. Residents were led to understand that this meant those living in the Seven Blocks would be first into the new flats, and their old buildings demolished. Then plans changed. All of a sudden, the most marketable land around the reservoir was first in line for new flats. Other residents say they’ve heard Berkeley executives admit in meetings: “There’s no revenue in knocking them [the Seven Blocks] down.” Now Gina and James will have to wait until at least 2020, possibly 2021, to move. “We don’t look over the reservoir so we’re being punished. Simple as.” Inside her flat, long, wide cracks snake across the ceiling. The old metal toilet cistern drips water, but the council won’t replace it – because that counts as a major repair, unnecessary on a estate due for rebuilding. “I’ve got to live with this dripping on me for the next seven years.” Her bedroom has splotches of brilliant white paint, to cover up the mould. “I’ve had black mould on my bedding.” She keeps clothes in plastic laundry bags for protection. The curtains are rotten with damp from condensation: “They rip like paper.” Council officials say the blocks were not so long ago fitted with double-glazing; residents say that that has made the condensation worse. On Gina’s bedside table is a damp trap, which after a month has collected over two inches of water. She has had a chest infection for the past couple of years: whatever the doctor tries doesn’t shift it. Among all this wreckage, the usual domestic touches – children’s photos, embroidered cushions reading Stay Calm and Smile – seem forced. A Hackney surveyor came round last year to look at the mould. On being told that Gina paid her full rent and deserved a proper service, he replied, “Some people may argue that you pay subsidised rent because you live in a council property” (Hackney acknowledges such language is “unacceptable”). “They think: “You’re poor, be grateful.” Like many others here, Gina chafes against the stereotypes hung round her neck by others. She wants you to know that she works two jobs and “isn’t on Benefits Street”. Jane stresses that before becoming a pensioner, she never took any welfare. One Turkish shopkeeper introduces himself with: “I’m not a refugee – I work and pay tax.” Gina looks around the flat where she and James have their stress-fuelled arguments; where her 20-year-old hates bringing a girlfriend home. “This regeneration isn’t about decent homes,” she says. “If it was about decent homes then I wouldn’t be living here. Yes or no?” The town hall You won’t find in Woodberry Down the usual stories of epic bungling and back-scratching that mark so many land deals between town halls and big developers. There aren’t any tales of a council spending so much on evicting its own residents to make way for developers that they lose millions on the entire deal (as is reportedly the case with Southwark council and the Heygate). Or of officials flogging public land to big companies and not even getting any affordable homes in return (as Haringey council has done with the new £400m Spurs development. As Hackney officials like to boast, they have armwrestled a good deal out of their builders. Just over 40% of the new estate will be affordable homes. Not only that, tenants will be moved (“decanted” in regeneration-speak) only once, and the flats they move into will be guaranteed a certain size. Put all that together with the state Woodberry Down had reached by the 90s – and if private-led renewal is going to work anywhere, it’s here. But stripping away the usual gaffes shows up the underlying problems of the model. Take the most basic step, the tendering of a building contract, which Maxwell witnessed. Hackney councillor Karen Alcock acknowledges that there aren’t many developers qualified to take on a project such as Woodberry Down. And developers demand fat returns for doing such work. The usual profit target is 21%, says Duncan Bowie, a former member of the Mayor of London’s planning team – any slippage leads to the kind of language heard by Gina. Put those two factors together and you have the potential for major compromises: for some blocks being put back in the project, even if that means people live in squalor for years; for the builder to eat up courtyards and recreational areas in order to cram in more flats. And ultimately, building the wrong homes for the residents. Jane Frost in her flat in Woodberry Down. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian Before Woodberry Down began its metamorphosis into Woodberry Park, it had 1,555 social rented homes: 78.5% of the entire estate. By the time it finishes, it will have only 1,088 socially rented homes. That is a huge drop in a borough that already has more than 15,000 applicants on its housing waiting list – many with a family. True, there will be another 1,177 “affordable” homes – although many leaseholders on the estate told us they couldn’t afford them. Nearly 60% of the overhauled site will be private homes. The showroom On a bright Saturday morning, Naoufal Dhimi parks his SUV outside Woodberry Down’s marketing suite. The camel-coated property agent buys and sells London homes, primarily for investors in Asia and the Middle East. Although sceptical about the investment value of paying nearly £400,000 for a two-bed flat in what remains a deprived patch of inner London, he’s scouting out the development for a client in Singapore. Hearing his explanation, the white-shirted saleswoman points through the windows to the reservoir: “That water outside: very attractive to Asian buyers. We’ve had families from Singapore who take a unit here to rent out, but really keep it to send their children when they’re old enough to go to the LSE [London School of Economics] or wherever.” When marketing began, Berkeley concentrated its efforts on east Asia and ended up selling around 55% of the first phase of buildings to overseas investors. That’s unusually high for this area. Going through Land Registry records, estate agents Knight Frank calculated that overseas residents bought 49% of all newly built property in the plushest parts of central London in the year to June 2013; that proportion dropped to 20% across inner London and to less than 7% in outer London. This estate sits slap-bang on the divide between inner and outer London, yet its towers have lured a greater proportion of foreign buyers than those in Kensington and Westminster. How did Berkeley manage that? Expert marketing. The firm has sales offices in Singapore, Hong Kong and, as of last autumn, Beijing. To flog Woodberry Park, it hired out ballrooms and conference suites in hotels thousands of miles away and talked to small Asian families about the profit to be made from letting apartments in London. According to the British Property Federation, 61% of all new homes sold in the capital last year were bought not to live in but solely as an investment. The vast majority of them would have been rented out; 5% were flipped back onto the market. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Woodberry Down regeneration project in Manor House, London. New builds near the reservoir and old flats nearer Seven Sisters Road. Photograph: Martin Godwin The saleswoman hands over goodybags with brochures that resemble coffee table books. They paint the area in terms no local would ever recognise. Expertly shot panoramas of the estate and the London skyline make it seem a mere jog from the City. Distances to airports are listed, along with cafes “on your doorstep” that are in nicer areas at least 20 minutes schlep away. This isn’t Manor House at all, but an invented place wrenched away from terra firma and now hovering somewhere between a street of chichi cafes and the financial district. At Berkeley, Matt Bell defends the marketing: “If you go ‘it’s 20 minutes from Knightsbridge’, people go online and … you look a complete monkey.” He obviously hasn’t read his own brochure, which claims Woodberry Down is just “23 minutes” from Knightsbridge. Later, Dhimi recounts how a client bought an apartment here off-plan from one of those hotel suites a world away. When it was finished, he drove her directly from Heathrow to have a look. “As we got closer, the surroundings got rougher and she went quiet. And when we arrived she said: ‘Dhimi, I can’t stay here: put me in a hotel.’ The next morning she wanted to sell up. Immediately.” As the saleswoman shows us around the two-bed showflat, she admits that, on turning up at the marketing suits in this still-gritty part of North London: “I thought head office were punishing me!” By the architects’ model of the estate, she explains to us, her prospective buyers, how any unit we’d buy would be safely away from the social tenants. This development “is going to end up like an island”, insulated from the surrounding deprivation. Leafing through the hardback, one other thing jumps out: all the models in it – sleek young couples sipping rose – are white. According to the 2011 census, Hackney’s population is 45% black and minority ethnic; yet Berkeley’s dream community is as multicultural as a Boden catalogue. This is in a brochure whose primary readership is east Asian. As we drive past the doner places and charity shops that go unmentioned in the marketing, Dhimi is surprisingly agitated. The real-estate dealer says he was raised in a council house and was “shocked” at the language used by the saleswoman. “What kind of city are we becoming: like Paris, where we chuck all the ‘social rubbish’ on the edges out of sight?” Veronica and Nanette It takes two buses, one train and two and a half hours for Veronica Mensah to get from her new home to her old one on Woodberry Down; and it costs her £22.95 – almost a third of her weekly state pension. “I’m worried the fares will keep going up, but there are some things you can’t put a price on: my family and friends, they’re all here. So I’ll just have to sacrifice things to be able to afford it. I have built my world here.” This time she has come down for a prayer meeting of the Franciscan order to which she has belonged for over a decade. After, she catches up with two other members, Elizabeth and Betty, who she met while on the estate. Veronica asks who wants tea. Softly spoken, she wears a long grey skirt and a lavender scarf. Have they known each other long? “Oh yes!” they chorus, before a flurry of anecdotes begin, overlapping and hard to make out – organising church bazaars, living in the same blocks, having children grow up together. Elizabeth looks up and laughs: “We’ve known each other for ever.” Veronica moved to Woodberry Down in 1979 with her then-husband to start a family. After their third child, their two-bedroom flat was no longer big enough and they registered to be transferred. They remained on the council’s transfer list for 17 years. In that time Veronica became a respected figure on the estate and beyond. She worked in health and childcare, volunteered for two charities and got heavily involved in her local church. Her parents – now in their 80s – live 15 minutes up the road from Woodberry Down, and she would often take them to hospital appointments and look after them when they were ill. As Veronica’s three children turned into teens, they needed more space. “They had nowhere to do their homework.” So in 2000, now-divorced Veronica bought her flat under right-to-buy. The plan was to sell it after the stipulated minimum ownership period of three years and buy a bigger place for her family elsewhere on the estate. “It wasn’t really something I could afford to do. But I just had to find a way to get more space for my family.” Six months later, Hackney council announced the regeneration and Veronica could no longer sell up. She and her two adult children had lost all the rights they had as longstanding tenants. Those renting from Hackney were guaranteed a home; leaseholders only got a compensatory offer on their homes, and a shot at the new affordable units. To stay on the estate, Veronica would have to wait over a decade until her flat was due for demolition. The alternative was to sell her home back to the council and leave. “I took the decision not to live somewhere until my 70s and then move. It would be a big upheaval, whereas if I left while still mobile and relatively fit, it wouldn’t be as bad.” After over two years of back and forth, Hackney offered Veronica £220,000 for her two-bedroom flat. Allowing for mortgage and service charges, and giving her children, who still lived with her, some money to help them move elsewhere, Veronica had a budget nearer £150,000. On state pension and so ineligible for a mortgage, she had to buy outright. She couldn’t find anything nearby: even the one-bedroom ex-council flat next door to the prison was way above her price limit. “I would have had to move so far out of London it would have been the same travel-time back to my family as moving away completely.” Last summer she bought a house on a similar housing estate – this time in Ipswich, 80 miles away from her the place she still calls "home". “The most stressful part was leaving my parents behind. It took me a while to accept that I was going to have to do that.” She’s not alone in being displaced. Around one in five of Woodberry Down residents are leaseholders, and we met a number who were moving to the outskirts of London and the home counties. Life in Ipswich is “unsettled”. The new house is bigger than her old flat, but it needs major work so she hasn’t been able to move all her things in. Her busy life in London is now limited to monthly visits, hectic long weekends crammed with friends and family. It’s the opposite in Ipswich. “My day-to-day now is just going to the shops for a newspaper. I don’t go out as much now, at all – to the extent that I still regularly phone people back on the estate to talk, and it’s costing me quite a lot of money. But I haven’t made any friends there. Things are not the same as in London. “And leaving two of my children was a wrench. They wanted to be in London for work. My main worry is that they won’t be able to stay because they’re not rich. Our teachers, our nurses, our carers – they’re being priced out like I was. And we need them. Nobody’s dealing with that.” Run Veronica’s story by those pushing through the regeneration and the responses vary in tone but amount to the same. Hackney council stresses its commitment to keeping the Woodberry Down residents on the estate, but councilor Karen Alcock says the pledge doesn’t apply to leaseholders. After listening to the story, Piers Clanford, managing director of Berkeley Homes (Capital), says, “Well, I’d like to live in Mayfair.” But the difference is he doesn’t already live in Mayfair; Veronica has been winched out of her home. “Hmm.” Veronica’s daughter Nanette bought a one-bedroom flat in the new development, through the shared-ownership scheme. Sitting in the Happy Man estate pub – soon to be demolished to build more flats – the charity worker says: “I know the area, I’ve grown up here, I know people; so I wanted to stay here.” The same goes for her brother (who has asked not to be named), who slept on Nanette’s sofa for six months because he wanted to find another home on the estate rather than move away. He now pays a private landlord £1,400 a month to rent a one-bedroom flat in a new block just across the road from the one in which he was raised. “When I was growing up here I would see about five or 10 people to talk to a day. And recognise about 10 or 20,” she says. She’s happy to have stayed on the estate, but life in the new flat has brought less tangible encounters: “I know a lot of people in my block by email, now. You don’t really see people.” She contrasts the young professionals in the new blocks to the large population of families and elderly people on the original estate. “You can definitely tell the difference between the old and the new. There have been a few tensions,” she says, referring in particular to race. “There’s a clear segregation of income.” So why cling to a home that’s disappearing? “Because I want to claim my land. That sounds funny, doesn’t it? But it’s the estate where my mum lived and I want to show: you can’t get rid of me that easily”. Mehmet Mehmet, who lost his chippie in Woodberry Down and has opened a new takeaway in Edmonton. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian Mehmet Kerem keeps a photo of himself on his shop wall. It’s just over a year old, yet customers regularly comment on how different he looks now. Next to the picture, the 45-year-old looks greyer, thinner. “I thought it was a photo of his brother,” says one of the regulars. The family snapshot was taken as Mehmet moved to his new takeaway in Edmonton, on the outskirts of London. The opening cost him about a hundred grand in lease, counters and other fixtures, “everything new” – and he’s struggling to make back his lifesavings and family loans. For nearly a decade, Mehmet ran a chippie on the little parade of shops at the heart of Woodberry Down. Over there, he’d take about £2,500 a week; here, a 45-minute bus ride away, it’s roughly half that – despite working seven days a week, from eight in the morning till almost midnight. When the regeneration began, Mehmet and his fellow shopkeepers were promised units in the rebuilt estate. Every retailer we’ve spoken to is clear that the offer was made in meetings with Hackney council (who ran the leases) and Berkeley. They were shown plans and invited to put in for their chosen premises. Then that promise was broken. Now only some businesses were going to transfer across, and that didn’t include the takeaways (different reasons are given as to why: the most common is simply that flat-buyers would find it harder to get big mortgages for flats above a takeaway). Mehmet offered a compromise: “A nice Turkish restaurant”. But no. Nor could he agree another suitable site with the council. In 2012, Hackney gave him £9,000 and told him to leave. Some of the teatime trade have been listening in. At the end, one mutters, “Nine grand and they throw him away like rubbish.” Mehmet counts how much he spent on the shop at Woodberry Down: £100,000. He borrowed from everyone – friends, brothers and sisters in Cyprus – to set up his new, now-failing business. Those aren’t the only losses. Soon after Mehmet was kicked out of Hackney, his father died – he thinks because of the stress. Money worries led to a breakup with his girlfriend of six years, also the mother of his daughter. Recounting all this, he tugs at his polo shirt and begins shouting, “Everything is lost. Ten years of working for nothing.” Sitting behind the counter is Mehmet’s mother. “He’s cracking up, he’s nervous all the time, he’s ageing,” she says. “He was never angry before.” Despite the promises, a mere handful of the old businesses remain on the rebuilt estate. Many of them are badly missed by the residents, especially the semi-legendary Chinese takeaway. A petition was started to save the shops. which got over 600 signatures, but ignored. Mehmet spots racism in these choices; but former off-licence manager Cigdem Garip puts it more broadly: “We didn’t fit in.” The residents of Woodberry Down are being provincialised: Veronica has literally been carted off to the provinces, but some of those who remain feel their tastes are not rarefied enough for their new home. As Jane’s friend, Sheila says, “We’re not allowed a Chinese, we’re not allowed a fish and chip shop.” An adviser to the residents carries around a presentation of the shops Berkeley suggested as examples for the new development. One is Labour & Wait in Shoreditch: a homeware store where a “Japanese kettle” costs £86. But posh boutiques also suit councillors, now running an increasingly-unequal borough. Hackney is at the same time among the most deprived in England and also more prosperous than the national average. To cater for the new wealth, the town hall is creating a £100m “fashion hub” selling top labels. It also wants to dilute the presence of ethnic-minority restaurants in the borough. The Guardian has seen a letter from a senior council officer asking restaurateurs to consider setting up in Dalston. It states: “The offer at the moment is essentially Turkish and African ... We are keen to attract a wider offer and a style of restaurants to the area.” Of the entire parade, the electrical-goods shop was the oldest. Jonathan Devan inherited it from his father; it finally shut just after the 59th anniversary. A road on the estate has been named in the family’s honour: Devan Grove. As Jonathan wanders around the estate he still calls “home”, old ladies struggling with their grocery shopping stop to say hello. He tells one: “I’m not my own boss any more, I work for someone else – much less of a headache.” He has gone from proprietor to part-time helping hand in a friend’s shop, but accepts the change as “inevitable”. He gestures at the just-opened juice bar, selling thimble-sized cupcakes for £1.95 a bite: “I was never going to fit in with that, was I?” Micky You can spot Micky’s launch party from 100 metres away. The rest of the strip is quiet, with businesses yet to move into the empty units, but the entrance to his barbershop has a bunch of young men in suits tussling with silver balloons. Inside, past the toddlers in waistcoats and the young women in makeup, is Micky Souleiman himself: 26, suited and booted and apparently relaxed about taking on his first business. That champagne glass must be helping; but up close there are flecks of white emulsion on his fingers, proving he was up till 4am doing the finishing touches. Micky has known Mehmet for years and feels bad about what’s happened to him. But he’s positioned himself to take advantage of the opportunities offered by his home moving upmarket. Not for him the trad barbers up the road, with their big black-and-white photos of men in buzzcuts; here everything is monochrome and co-ordinated. When the inevitable pictures do go up, they’ll be of Ali and De Niro. “This is high-end,” he says, gesturing at the decor. “It’s gonna be luxury.” How so? “It will be more English-style than other ones around here.” Ask Berkeley which local businesses they see prospering and Micky is one they mention. You can see why: he’s young and has an affable smartness that deserves a spot of sunshine. “The regeneration is definitely a good thing,” he says. “Everyone’s getting new flats, the place is being done up.” So what does it need next? A Turkish restaurant, he says, before correcting himself: “Mediterranean. A nice Mediterranean.” Three flat-capped old geezers turn up. One of them peers around and says in a accent straight out of central-casting East End: “It’s like a fucking club, not a barber’s.” Ian and Yvonne On the top floor of one of the new blocks for those paying subsidised rents live Ian and Yvonne Kleinberg. If you can peel your eyes away from their view, Ian will show you the photos of his three kids and reel off their careers: America, teaching, osteopathy … “I always say that if you want to, you can make it from Woodberry Down,” he says. If anyone in this tableau should consider themselves winners, it’s these two. They have moved from crocked council housing into the kind of apartment that would go like a hotcake on the open market; the kids have done well and ahead lie the pleasures of the first phase of retired life. The couple go along with that story, but then point out a few downsides. Yvonne: “When we walk outside, the tenants from the private block actually cross the road to avoid us.” Ian: “Say you’re social [tenants in subsidised rental accommodation] around here and you go down like a bacon sandwich at a Jewish wedding.” The move also means a different rental arrangement: they no longer rent from the state, but from a private-sector housing association, Genesis. They now have fewer rights as tenants but, they say, worse service and higher bills. “There are pensioners in this block getting themselves in debt just to afford the heating,” says Ian. Maxwell outside at the new regeneration site at Woodberry Park. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian The couple met on this estate, when as a teenager Yvonne used to hang around watching Ian play football. Public space plays an important part in Woodberry memories: Sheila and Jane used to run about in apple orchards; Veronica would call in Nanette from playing in the courtyard. When the estate was built, 20 of the 64 acres were designated for playgrounds, tennis courts and a community centre. But the public space is being swallowed up by concrete as the developers cram in more flats to maximise profit. The best way to picture what’s going on is by imagining the patch of grass in the middle of an athletics track, which normally comes to one hectare. Before regeneration, about 83 homes were on each of those grass patches. Berkeley planned to more than double that, to 194 dwellings a hectare. Last summer, it announced that it would build even more homes on the estate. That patch of grass will now have 224 homes on it. Paul Paul O’Neill sits on a cafe terrace in Stoke Newington, still in Hackney but a quarter of an hour east from Manor House and around £100,000 north in property prices. Tearing into his croissant, he tells us that it’s here he really wanted to live. But he and his girlfriend couldn’t afford the rents nearby, so became some of the first tenants in the flagship tower. Last September, Paul left a comment on a blog about the regeneration. Far from being defensive, he was clear-eyed: “It was a big risk for us moving here … the area was already known for its anti-social behaviour … but I simply couldn’t afford anywhere else in London.” That said, Woodberry Park isn’t affordable either: they pay £300 a week for “a kitchen-cum-living room and a tiny bedroom.” Young skilled professionals, Paul and his heavily-pregnant girlfriend are the pandas of London’s housing market: the ones every politician coos over, while fretting that without a major intervention they may soon die out in the capital. “David Cameron’s dream” is how Paul ironically refers to himself. Matt Bell at Berkeley argues that the real gap in the London market is starter homes for young professionals on £30-40,000 a year. But Woodberry Park isn’t going to fill that hole: a one-bed flat there can go for up to £400,000 – and no lender currently offers mortgages worth 12-times salary. Micky in his trendy new barber's shop in Woodberry Park. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian Paul has a mental map of the London he can afford: it comprises only the edges and even they keep shrinking as prices “gallop away”. At the moment the budget just about stretches to a home in Walthamstow, on the northern periphery of London – but he reckons that once the baby comes and the family’s settled down: “It will probably be too expensive, so we’ll be looking for the next place out of London, which is … I don’t even know. “My eventual dream is to live in Italy: your lovely little house in Tuscany, doing web design, eating Italian food all day. But if I’m honest, the reality is I’ll end up moving miles out of London, paying exorbitant train fares, desperately scrambling to find a nice school for the kids.” Paul leases his flat from a Singaporean investor who he’s never met: “All of my neighbours rent from foreign absentee landlords." This fits the picture drawn in the property pages of the British press, which often depict would-be London housebuyers as battling an army of invisible competitors: Russian oligarchs, Saudi sheikhs and, at the other end of the market, anxious Greek professionals and Asian nuclear families. Yet the forces that have driven Singaporeans over here are rarely spelt out. Let us try. From the Land Registry records, we see that Paul’s landlord lives near Changi airport in an ochre public housing block, in an area carpeted with other public blocks. No shame there: about 85% of all Singaporeans live in Housing and Development Board quarters, or HDBs for short. In the wealthy entrepot, interest rates are also bumping around record-low levels and property prices have taken off. The big difference is that since 2009, Singapore’s government has chucked bucket after bucket of cold water onto the overheating housing market. It’s clamped down on loans, jacked up stamp duty, punished people who sell property they’ve bought only recently – and levied punitive taxes on foreigners buying homes. In short, almost every policy urged on David Cameron over the past few years – and left unwrapped – has been deployed by Lee Hsien Loong. The message is simple: Singapore doesn’t welcome property speculation. But the island’s dentists and middle managers and other cautious savers are welcomed by the overseas agents of Berkeley and its competitors, offering rental units in the no-questions-asked capital of the world. This new market has brought with it a new speculative architecture, says Duncan Bowie, now at the University of Westminster. Developers are responding to the demands of investors wanting one- or two-bed flats to rent out, rather than family homes to live in. That produces an odd Animal Farm-ish logic: “Council high-rises are bad; private high-rises apparently good.” A few weeks before we went to press, Paul and his girlfriend became parents to Zara: brown hair, blue eyes and 3.3kg at birth. Around the same time, their landlord sold the flat, apparently to a cash buyer from Germany. Paul and family have found another apartment in the same development. All’s fine now, he reports, but it was a lot of stress at the time. Urchins Every building worth a damn sets in concrete (or glass or Jura limestone) the social tensions of its age. As Herbert Morrison was dreaming up Woodberry Down, the fundamental argument was over the rights that should be afforded the only recently enfranchised working class. On hearing the MP’s plans to stick municipal housing on their doorstep, one Stoke Newington resident objected to “all these urchins from the East End coming round my drinking water”. Nimbyism was evidently more plainspoken in 1936. By the estate’s completion in 1948, the argument had been won. Britain was entering its high-point as an economic democracy, with electricity, rail, even the Bank of England put into public hands. Woodberry Down was part of that: a physical assertion that the capital belonged to its working classes as much as to anyone else. Contrast that with the era embodied by Woodberry Park. The rebuild comes after 30 years in which our major public assets – water, gas, council housing – have been sold dirt-cheap, to end up in the hands of a small elite. More and more parts of London, too, are off limits to Londoners. Think of those unaffordable super-rich islands; the privately-owned finance tracts such as Canary Wharf; the gated communities. Listen to the constant uptick of house prices, that metronome for commuters in the capital. Most blatantly, there is the coalition’s cap on housing benefit, which will expunge the inner city of its privately-renting poor. Woodberry Park is part of this new culture. Houses as speculative assets, not homes. Houses as speculative assets, not homes. Paul will tell you of the human fallout. Financial viability trumping desperate need? Speak to Gina. Woodberry Down’s residents were initially told that this rebuilding was for them. A few years on, it isn’t working out like that. Veronica and other leaseholders have been hoisted off; social housing on the site will plunge; remaining tenants will have higher outgoings and less green space. Park any cynicism you may have about big builders and accept for a moment that this is a textbook example of public-private regeneration. Then look at the stories above and ask if the textbook doesn’t need major revision. The tour In the same spot that Naoufal Dhimi pulled up in his SUV weeks earlier, eight people bundle out of a minivan, to be greeted by Emma – a smiling representative from Berkeley Homes. She leads them into a room with a large model of Woodberry Park at the centre. The famous resident survey booklet is handed out. The visitors are from Brixton, south London, sent here by Lambeth council to draw lessons for their own regeneration. “Woodberry Down is very much a partnership,” says Emma. “It’s not just: ‘Hi we’re Berkeley, we’re going to knock everything down, build and see you later’.” She lists the community assets, including a primary school, a health centre and a church that have all existed on the estate for decades. But when a guest asks about the project’s financing, they’re stonewalled: “In money terms, I couldn’t answer.” Now comes the grand tour. Pulling out notebooks, the visitors spill out into the sunshine, ready to be inspired. |
Here at Spurs we are proud of our traditions. The list is as long as it is illustrious, dotted with as many legendary players and record-breaking stats as there are stars in the sky; The first post-war British club to win a European trophy. The first post-war league and cup double. Top-flight English football’s all-time record goalscorer, Jimmy Greaves. The fastest Premier League goal courtesy of Ledley King. Special, special memories. Yet there is one tradition even longer and more richly detailed than any of those previously mentioned. It is rarely spoken of – a hushed whisper, as soft as the night breeze. We all know it’s there, we just show enough decorum and tact to not mention it. I am of course talking about Spurs’ glorious history of signing the next great white hope, nay, the future saviour of the game as we know it. Fans dance in the streets and managers sit beamingly in the press conferences like Midas atop his empire of gold. Only it then turns out that the signing is a bit shit. And then they get shipped off. After about one season. One really, really average season. So, what better way to start off this list than with the very embodiment of the ‘Spurs signing’, as it should be known if it isn’t already. Young Timothée (with a hard ‘th’, don’t you dare call him Timothy) arrived at the Lane at the very zenith of his career. Having played more than one-hundred games in the Swiss first division, he had recently won the double with FC Basel in the ’01-’02 season and was all set to fix Spurs’ left-back problems for years to come. However, it turns out that Jacques Santini’s judgement was slightly off, a rare lapse indeed. Rangy, lean, tricky: all words used to veil the fact that he was uncoordinated, lanky, and tripped over the ball more than your average five year old in the back garden. Perhaps most fondly remembered for his knack of attempting long throw-ins that traveled about ten yards, he was also the master (creator?) of the ‘step-over in your own area’ maneuver which in hindsight is a terrible idea, flawed in just about every respect. Poor Paul Robinson must have nearly had a coronary when Atouba, lacking the vision to play a simple hoof up the pitch towards the target man, decided to embark on a mazy run back towards his own goal before laying it off to the befuddled stopper. Eighteen appearances and one admittedly astonishing goal against Bobby Robson’s Newcastle later big Timmer was out the door to Hamburg. He then proceeded to give the finger to the crowd twice, getting beer (or what he hopes was beer) chucked all over him for his troubles. Three seasons later he was due for a medical at Newcastle, the one team to ever see him have a good game, only to baffle Hamburg staff by turning up to training that afternoon. He now plays for Ajax, which is incidentally the third time he’s found himself under Martin Jol – the only man who ever loved him. By Callum Tennent |
Former Australia captain Steve Waugh believes that now the focus should move back to the cricket in what has been an intriguing Test series so far between India and Australia (1:01) The ICC has confirmed that it will not be pressing charges against Australia captain Steven Smith, India captain Virat Kohli, or any other players in relation to the DRS incident in the Bengaluru Test. ESPNcricinfo understands that the ICC reached out to both boards after they released statements during the day standing by their respective teams, and that it is unlikely either board will take this matter further. ICC chief executive David Richardson said in a statement: "We have just witnessed a magnificent game of Test cricket where players from both teams gave their all and emotions were running high during and after the match. We would encourage both teams to focus their energies on the third Test in Ranchi next week. Ahead of that, the match referee will bring both captains together to remind them of their responsibilities to the game." Following India's win in Bengaluru, Kohli had said Australia took help from their dressing room on at least three occasions before making their mind up on DRS reviews in the Test. Kohli said he had made the umpires aware of the matter on two occasions before the third one played out in full view on the final day, when Smith looked towards the dressing room after having chatted with non-striker Peter Handscomb when given out lbw in a tense chase, apparently for clues on whether to review the call or not. Umpire Nigel Llong intervened immediately, and sent Smith on his way. In his post-match conference - which happened before Kohli's - Smith put his actions down to a "brain fade". The match officials, the CEO of either board or the CEO of the ICC could have laid charges in this matter. Kohli's comment could have been seen as "serious public criticism" of Australia, which qualifies as a level 2 offence under the ICC code of conduct. Smith's transgression was already dealt with, in that he was prevented from taking help from the dressing room. Had he still insisted on using the review, the umpires wouldn't have allowed him. However, he could still be charged for acting against the spirit of cricket under the ICC code of conduct. Any of these charges would have resulted in a thorough investigation. The ICC would have then had to then prove the charges in a court of law because these would constitute level 2 charges and upwards, and any sanctions under these charges could have been appealed. Earlier today, Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland had said: "I find the allegations questioning the integrity of Steve Smith, the Australian team and the dressing room, outrageous. Steve is an outstanding cricketer and person, and role model to many aspiring cricketers and we have every faith that there was no ill-intent in his actions." Later the BCCI put out a statement saying: "The BCCI, after due deliberation and seeing the video replays of the episode, steadfastly stands with the Indian cricket team and its captain Mr Virat Kohli." The third Test between the two teams kicks off in Ranchi on March 16 with the series level at 1-1. |
Ron Paul triumphant at the National Press Club, against a hostile host and hostile questioners. UPDATE from Joshua Crosby: “I think what makes this forum so powerful for Ron is that he was allowed to give extended answers and he was able to show the logical foundation for his answers. In most of his interviews, he has to jump straight to the conclusion and it is so foreign to the prevailing groupthink that it makes him sound irascible. I wish in those interviews he were allowed to give more than a soundbite because it is when you really have the underpinning for what he’s saying that you find that he is only saying what you knew to be true all along.” Thanks to Travis Holte for the playlist See the Ron Paul File The Best of Ron Paul |
PRYPYAT, Ukraine (Reuters) - Any Ukrainian over 35 can tell you where they were when they heard about the accident at the Chernobyl plant. An interior view of a building in the abandoned city of Prypiat, near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, February 24, 2011. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich “I remember calling my husband. There had been rumors for days about a nuclear accident. We had even hung blankets on the windows to stop radiation because we didn’t know what to do,” said Natalya, a 46-year-old financial analyst in Kiev, whose husband was a journalist on a daily newspaper. “He told me there had been a fire at the atomic plant in Chernobyl. That was for me the first confirmation that the reactor had collapsed,” she said this week, seated at her desk in her central Kiev office. “We had no idea what to expect. It was awful.” As Japan battles to prevent a meltdown at its earthquake-hit Fukushima Daini nuclear plant, the people of Ukraine are preparing to mark the 25th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear accident. The physical and financial legacies of that disaster are obvious: a 30-km uninhabited ring around the Chernobyl plant, billions of dollars spent cleaning the region and a major new effort to drum up 600 million euros ($840 million) in fresh funds that Kiev says is needed to build a more durable casement over the stricken reactor. Just as powerful are the scars that are less easily seen: fear and an abiding suspicion that despite the reassuring reports by authorities and scientific bodies people may still be dying from radiation after-effects. While debate about the health impact continues, there is little doubt people in Ukraine and neighboring Belarus carry a psychological burden. Repeated studies have found that “exposed populations had anxiety levels that were twice as high” as people unaffected by the accident, according to a 2006 United Nations report. Those exposed to radiation were also “3-4 times more likely to report multiple unexplained physical symptoms and subjective poor health than were unaffected control groups.” There are, of course, crucial differences between Chernobyl and the disaster unfolding in Japan. The Chernobyl accident was the product of human error when a test was poorly executed, while the Japanese failure was triggered by an earthquake and tsunami. Chernobyl occurred in a secretive Soviet society which reformer Mikhail Gorbachev was only just opening up. The authorities embarked on an attempted cover-up and only partly admitted the truth three days later, denying themselves the chance of rapid international aid. Despite criticisms that Tokyo could be a lot more transparent, Japan’s disaster has taken place in a relatively open society and international help has been quick to come. Most importantly, thick containment walls at the Fukushima Daini plant shield the reactor cores so that even if there was a meltdown of the nuclear fuel it’s unlikely to lead to a major escape of dangerous radioactive clouds into the atmosphere. At Chernobyl, there was no containment structure. “When it blew, it blew everything straight out into the atmosphere,” said Murray Jennex of San Diego State University. Despite those differences, though, the Chernobyl experience still contains lessons for Japan and other countries, says Volodymyr Holosha, the top Ukrainian Emergency Ministry official in charge of the area surrounding the Chernobyl plant. “We were not ready for it — neither technologically nor financially,” Holosha told reporters in Kiev last month. “This is a priceless experience for other countries.” EXPERIMENT GONE WRONG In the early hours of April 26, 1986, in the model Soviet town of Prypyat, a satellite of the much bigger Chernobyl, workers at a nuclear power plant demobilized the safety systems on the number four reactor, which had come on line only three years previously. It was a risky experiment to see whether the cooling system could still function using power generated from the reactor alone in the event of a failure in the auxiliary electricity supply. It could not. There was a massive power surge that blew off the reactor’s heavy concrete and metal lid and sent smoldering nuclear material into the atmosphere. Dozens of plant staff died on the spot or immediately afterwards in hospital. Hundreds of thousands of rescue workers, including Soviet Army conscripts, were rushed to the site to put out the fires, decontaminate it and seal off the damaged reactor by building a concrete shell around it. At first, authorities denied there was a problem. When they finally admitted the truth more than a day later, many thousands of inhabitants simply picked up a few of their belongings and headed off — many of them to the capital Kiev 80 km (50 miles) to the south, never to return. Iryna Lobanova, 44, a civil servant, was due to get married in Prypyat on the day of the explosion but assumed all ceremonies would be canceled. “I thought that war had started,” she told Reuters this week. “But the local authorities told us go on with all planned ceremonies.” Nobody was allowed to leave the town until the official evacuation was announced on the Sunday” — 36 hours later — “following an order from Moscow,” she said. Lobanova went ahead with her wedding — and left the next day with her husband by train. A LEGACY OF BAD HEALTH The make-shift concrete shelter hastily thrown up in the months after the explosion is often referred to as a “sarcophagus”, a funeral term made even more fitting by the fact that it houses the body of at least one plant worker who rescuers were unable to recover. The official short-term death toll from the accident was 31 but many more people died of radiation-related sicknesses such as cancer. The total death toll and long-term health effects remain a subject of intense debate even 25 years after the disaster. “(The disaster) brought suffering on millions of people,” said the Emergency Ministry’s Holosha. “About 600,000 people were involved in mitigating the consequences of the accident. About 300,000 of them were Ukrainians. Out of those, 100,000 are disabled now.” A 2008 United Nations study cited a “dramatic increase in thyroid cancer incidence” in the Ukraine and just across the border in Belarus. Children seemed to be especially vulnerable because they drank milk with high levels of radioactive iodine. “One arrives at between 12,000 and 83,000 children born with congenital deformations in the region of Chernobyl, and around 30,000 to 207,000 genetically damaged children worldwide,” German physicians’ organization IPPNW said in a report in 2006. Those figures are far lower than health officials had predicted. Indeed, the UN says that overall health effects were less severe than initially expected and that only a few thousand people had died as a result of the accident. But a 2009 book by a group of Russian and Belarussian scientists published by the New York Academy of Sciences argued that previous studies were misled by rigged Soviet statistics. “The official position of the Chernobyl Forum (a group of UN agencies) is that about 9,000 related deaths have occurred and some 200,000 people have illnesses caused by the catastrophe,” authors Alexei Yablokov, Vasily Nesterenko and Alexei Nesterenko wrote in “Chernobyl: Consequences of the catastrophe for people and the Environment”. “A more accurate number estimates nearly 400 million human beings have been exposed to Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout and, for many generations, they and their descendants will suffer the devastating consequences.” The authors argued that the global death toll by 2004 was closer to 1 million and said health effects included birth defects, pregnancy losses, accelerated aging, brain damage, heart, endocrine, kidney, gastrointestinal and lung diseases. “It is clear that tens of millions of people, not only in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, but worldwide, will live under measurable chronic radioactive contamination for many decades,” they wrote. SEALED-OFF ZONE The most severe contamination occurred within the so-called Exclusion Zone, a circular area around the power plant with a radius of 30 kilometers (19 miles) that has been deemed unsuitable for living and is closed to unsanctioned visitors. Several villages and a whole pine forest in the zone were bulldozed and buried shortly after the disaster. Other small settlements are overgrown with trees and bushes that have made the red and white brick houses barely visible. Prypyat, built to house Chernobyl power plant workers and their families and with a bright future ahead of it as a model Soviet ‘atomgrad’ town, had a pre-disaster population of about 50,000. Now it is a ghost town that greets its rare visitors with eerie silence. A shop building in the center is full of rubble and broken furniture — remnants of years of looting which the government could not prevent and which spread hazardous substances across the country. A portrait of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin lies on the floor, covered by a thick layer of dust. At a children’s amusement park, a Ferris wheel due to be launched less than a week after the disaster is rusting away. Prypyat’s residents, mostly young families, were evacuated in a six-hour operation which began more than 36 hours after the accident. In the days that followed, as the fallout was driven by a south-east wind across neighboring Belarus, the Soviet government evacuated thousands of people from other areas under threat. “We were evacuated on May 4,” said Makar Krasovsky, 73, who lived in the Belarussian village of Pogonnoye 27 km (17 miles) from the plant. “Children had been evacuated earlier, on May 1. Nobody knew anything. Nobody told us anything.” “We were told to take with us clothes for the next three days but nothing else because everything was contaminated. They promised us the reactor would be shut down and we would return in three days,” he said by telephone from the town of Khoyniki. Pogonnoye is still sealed off and visits are only allowed once a year — on a day when local Orthodox Christians attend the graves of their ancestors. FINANCIAL BURDEN The accident prompted former Socialist bloc nations to shut down reactors of the same design. But the Chernobyl plant itself kept running until 2000 when Ukraine agreed to shut it down after Kiev was promised European aid. The European Commission and international donors have since committed about 2 billion euros to projects aimed at cleaning up the area and securing the plant. Another 740 million euros remains to be raised: 600 million for the new casement and 140 million waste storage facilities. Holosha says Ukraine itself has spent much more. “Since Ukraine gained independence (after the collapse of the Soviet Union), $12 billion has been spent on dealing with the consequences (of the accident),” he said. “Most of the expenditures were linked to maintaining the exclusion zone and providing healthcare and social assistance to those who had lived in the affected area.” The key new project at the plant is the construction of the so-called New Safe Confinement — a massive convex structure which will be assembled away from the damaged reactor and then slid into place over the existing sarcophagus. The original concrete tomb was built hastily, is supported in part by the damaged walls of the reactor building, and has already had to be reinforced. The new structure is designed to last 100 years and should allow the reactor to be dismantled without the risk of new contamination. The project requires 600 million euros ($840 million) in additional financing and is likely to miss the 2012 completion target by a few years due to problems such as radioactive debris encountered during excavation works. Ukraine hopes to raise most of the funds at an international donors conference set to take place in Kiev next month on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the grim event. Officials say Ukraine is likely to spend billions of euros on confinement upkeep costs before it finds a way to bury the reactor components, perhaps under layers of underground granite rocks. Even then the area around the plant will remain unsuitable for thousands of years. Asked how long before people can settle down and grow crops at the site, Chernobyl power plant director Ihor Gramotkin said: “At least 20,000 years.” Yury Andreyev, shift chief at the plant’s number two reactor on the night of the explosions and now head of a non-government body representing the interests of those who fought to control the disaster, sees no danger of the Japan drama taking on the seriousness of Chernobyl. “The scale of the destruction (in Japan), both nuclear and radiation, is 10,000 times lower that what happened to us in Chernobyl. About 30 tonnes of nuclear fuel were discharged (at Chernobyl). Here (in Japan) there was not the same discharge,” he told journalists on Tuesday. POLITICAL FALLOUT Despite the scale of the Chernobyl disaster, both Ukraine and Belarus still rely heavily on nuclear energy, having no developed hydrocarbon resources. In the coming months, both plan to borrow billion of dollars from Russia to finance the construction of new reactors of Russian design. But that doesn’t mean people have forgotten. Locals in Kiev, 80 km (50 miles) from Chernobyl, will still tell you that they heard no birdsong in the Spring of 1986 and that the leaves of the elegant chestnut trees that line the capital’s boulevards turned yellow a month early. Slideshow (3 Images) The disaster and the government’s handling of it highlighted the shortcomings of the Soviet system with its unaccountable bureaucrats and entrenched culture of secrecy. Journalists subsequently uncovered evidence that the children of Communist apparatchiks had been evacuated well before others and some staff died at the plant because they had not been given orders to leave. Mikhail Gorbachev has since said he considered the disaster one of the main nails in the coffin of the Soviet Union which eventually collapsed in 1991. The nuclear disaster in Japan is unlikely to break the country’s political system. But Tokyo should not underestimate the profound power of a nuclear meltdown — physical and political. (Olzhas Auyezov reported from Prypyat, Richard Balmforth from Kiev; additional reporting by Andrei Makhovsky in Minsk, Natalya Zinets and Pavel Polityuk in Kiev, and Elaine Lies in Tokyo) |
Even the so-called egalitarian and loosely structured societies known to anthropology, including hunters such as Inuit or Australian Aborigines, are in structure and practice subordinate segments of inclusive cosmic polities, ordered and governed by divinities, ancestors, species-masters, and other such metapersons endowed with life-and-death powers over the human population. “The Mbowamb spends his whole life completely under the spell and in the company of spirits” (Vicedom and Tischner). “[Araweté] society is not complete on earth: the living are part of the global social structure founded on the alliance between heaven and earth” (Viveiros de Castro). We need something like a Copernican revolution in anthropological perspective: from human society as the center of a universe onto which it projects its own forms—that is to say, from the Durkheimian or structural-functional deceived wisdom—to the ethnographic realities of people’s dependence on the encompassing life-giving and death-dealing powers, themselves of human attributes, which rule earthly order, welfare, and existence. For, Hobbes notwithstanding, something like the political state is the condition of humanity in the state of nature; there are kingly beings in heaven even where there are no chiefs on earth. I am a Cartesian—a Hocartesian. I want to follow Hocart’s lead in freeing oneself from anthropological conventions by adhering to indigenous traditions. “How can we make any progress in the understanding of cultures, ancient or modern,” he said, “if we persist in dividing what people join, and in joining what they keep apart?” ([1952] 1970: 23). This essay is an extended commentary on the Hocartesian meditation encapsulated in Kings and councillors by “the straightforward equivalence, king = god” ([1936] 1970: 74). I mean to capitalize on the more or less explicit temporality entailed in the anthropological master’s exegesis of this equivalence, as when he variously speaks of the king as the vehicle, abode, substitute, repository, or representative of the god (Hocart 1933, [1936] 1970, [1950] 1968). The clear implication is that gods precede the kings who effectively replicate them—which is not exactly the common social science tradition of cosmology as the reflex of sociology. Consider time’s arrow in statements such as: “So present was this divine and celestial character to the Polynesian mind that they called the chiefs lani, heaven, and the same word marae is used of a temple and a chief’s grave” (Hocart [1927] 1969: 11). Kings are human imitations of gods, rather than gods of kings. Kings and councillors: The machinery of government was blocked out in society long before the appearance of government as we now understand it. In other words, the functions now discharged by king, prime minister, treasury, public works, are not the original ones; they may account for the present form of these institutions, but not for their original appearance. They were originally part, not of a system of government, but of an organization to promote life, fertility, prosperity by transferring life from objects abounding in it to objects dependent on it. ([1952] 1970: 3) That was the dominant view in Christendom for a long time before the modern celestialization of sovereignty as an ideological expression of the real-political order. From Augustine’s notion of the Earthly City as an imperfect form of the Heavenly City to Carl Schmitt’s assertion that the significant concepts of the modern state are “secularized theological concepts” (2005: 36), human government was commonly considered to be modeled on the kingdom of God. Based on his own view of the ritual character of kingship, however, Hocart’s thesis was more far-reaching culturally and historically: that human societies were engaged in cosmic systems of governmentality even before they instituted anything like a political state of their own. From the preface of In effect, Hocart speaks here of a cosmic polity, hierarchically encompassing human society, since the life-giving means of people’s existence were supplied by “supernatural” beings of extraordinary powers: a polity thus governed by so-called “spirits”—though they had human dispositions, often took human bodily forms, and were present within human experience. The present essay is a follow-up. The project is to take the Cartesian thesis beyond kingship to its logical and anthropological extreme. Even the so-called “egalitarian” or “acephalous” societies, including hunters such as the Inuit or Australian Aboriginals, are in structure and practice cosmic polities, ordered and governed by divinities, the dead, species-masters, and other such metapersons endowed with life-and-death powers over the human population. There are kingly beings in heaven where there are no chiefs on earth. Hobbes notwithstanding, the state of nature is already something of a political state. It follows that, taken in its social totality and cultural reality, something like the state is the general condition of humankind. It is usually called “religion.” For example: Chewong and Inuit Go to Abstract For example: Chewong and ... Why call them spirits? Social relations of peopl... Metaperson powers-that-be The cosmic polity Determination by the reli... To conclude Coda References Notes Let me begin with a problem in ethnographic perspective that typically leads to a cultural mismatch between the ancestral legacy of the anthropologist and her or his indigenous interlocutors. I know this is a problem, since for a long time I lived with the same contradiction I now see in Signe Howell’s excellent study of the Chewong of the Malaysian interior. Although Chewong society is described as classically “egalitarian,” it is in practice coercively ruled by a host of cosmic authorities, themselves of human character and metahuman powers. The Chewong are a few hundred people organized largely by kinship and subsisting largely by hunting. But they are hardly on their own. They are set within and dependent upon a greater animistic universe comprised of the persons of animals, plants, and natural features, complemented by a great variety of demonic figures, and presided over by several inclusive deities. Though we conventionally call such creatures “spirits,” Chewong respectfully regard them as “people” (beri)—indeed, “people like us” or “our people” (Howell 1985: 171). The obvious problem of perspective consists in the venerable anthropological disposition to banish the so-called “supernatural” to the epiphenomenal limbo of the “ideological,” the “imaginary,” or some such background of discursive insignificance by comparison to the hard realities of social action. Thus dividing what the people join, we are unable to make the conceptual leap—the reversal of the structural gestalt—implied in Howell’s keen observation that “the human social world is intrinsically part of a wider world in which boundaries between society and cosmos are non-existent” (2012: 139). “There is no meaningful separation,” she says, “between what one may term nature and culture or, indeed, between society and cosmos” (ibid.: 135). So while, on one hand, Howell characterizes the Chewong as having “no social or political hierarchy” or “leaders of any kind,” on the other, she describes a human community encompassed and dominated by potent metapersons with powers to impose rules and render justice that would be the envy of kings. “Cosmic rules,” Howell calls them, I reckon both for their scope and for their origins. The metahuman persons who mandate these rules visit illness or other misfortune, not excluding penalty of death, on Chewong who transgress them. “I can think of no act that is rule neutral,” Howell writes; taken together, “they refer not just to selected social domains or activities, but to the performance of regular living itself” (ibid.: 140). Yet though they live by the rules, Chewong have no part in their enforcement, which is the exclusive function of “whatever spirit or non-human personage is activated by the disregard of a particular rule” (ibid.: 139). Something like a rule of law sustained by a monopoly of force. Among hunters. When Signe Howell first visited the Chewong in 1977, she found them obsessively concerned with a tragedy that happened not long before. Three people had been killed and two injured for violating a weighty taboo on laughing at animals: a prohibition that applied to all forest creatures, the breach of which would potentially implicate all Chewong people. The victims had ridiculed some millipedes that entered their lean-to; and that night a terrific thunderstorm uprooted a large tree, which fell upon them. Here it deserves notice that while the Chewong profess to abhor cannibalism, like animist hunters generally, they nevertheless subsist on “people like us,” their animal prey. Likewise similar to other hunters, they manage the contradiction by the ritual respects they accord wild animals: in this case, by the prohibition on ridiculing forest creatures—which also, by positioning the animals outside familiar human relations, apparently erases the cannibal implications from overt consciousness (cf. Valeri 2000: 143). Since the forest animals are not really like us, we can beat the cannibal rap. The severe punishments for disrespecting forest creatures originated with certain immortals of the Above and the Below: the male Thunder God, Tanko, and the female Original Snake, whose abode is the primordial sea under the earth—and who is most responsible for maintaining rules of this type. There were never any humans the likes of Tanko and the Original Snake among Chewong themselves: no such human powers, whatever the conventional wisdom says about divinity as the mirror image of society. Tanko lives in the sky, whence the thunder he unleashes on taboo-violators is aptly said to be the sound of him laughing at the human predicament. His thunderbolts are also known to punish incest, causing severe joint pain and, if the behavior persists, death. On his frequent visits to earth, he indulges in contrasting sexual behavior—relations with distantly rather than closely related women—and with beneficial rather than fatal results: for without his sexual exploits there could be no Chewong people. Tanko descends to have intercourse with all human and animal females, which is what makes them fertile. Menstrual blood represents the birth of children he has sired, children unseen and unknown to their mothers, as they ascend to the heavens to live with their father. The semen of human males, however, is unable to procreate children until Tanko has copulated with the women concerned, which is to say until they have menstruated—from which it follows empirically that the god was indeed the condition of possibility of human reproduction. The Original Snake is sometimes identified as the sky-wife of Tanko, a culture heroine who gave Chewong fire, tobacco, and night; but in her more usual form of a huge snake dwelling in chthonian waters, she is especially known for her malevolent powers. Knocking down trees and houses, her breath creates the destructive winds that punish people who violate the ordinances on the treatment of animals. She may also be provoked into moving while in the subterranean sea, causing an upwelling of waters that drowns the offenders—upon which she swallows them body and soul.1 Not that the Original Snake is the only man-eater among the myriad indwelling and free-ranging metahumans whom Chewong encounter, more often for worse than for better. Without replicating the extraordinary catalogue compiled by Howell (1989), suffice it for present purposes to indicate the range: from female familiars who marry the human individuals for whom they serve as spirit guides; through various kinds of ghosts especially dangerous to small children and the creatures upon whose good will fruits bear in season; to the twenty-seven subtypes of harmful beings who were once human, and of whom Chewong say, “They want to eat us” (ibid.: 105). If there is indeed no boundary between the cosmos and the socius, then it’s not exactly what some would call a “simple society,” let alone an egalitarian one. I hasten to reply to the obvious objection that the potent deities of the Chewong reflect a long history of relationships with coastal Malay states by noting that basically similar cosmologies are found among basically similar societies situated far from such influences. For an initial example the Central Inuit; thereafter, Highland New Guineans, Australian Aboriginals, native Amazonians, and other “egalitarian” peoples likewise dominated by metaperson others who vastly outnumber them. The powers that rule the earth and all the animals, and the lives of mankind are the great spirits who live on the sea, on land, out in space, and in the Land of the Sky. These are many, and many kinds of spirits, but there are only three really great and really independent ones, and they are Nuliajuk, Narssuk, and Tatqeq. These three are looked upon as directly practicing spirits, and the most powerful of them all is Nuliajuk, the mother of animals and mistress both of the sea and the land. At all times she makes mankind feel how she vigilantly and mercilessly takes care that all souls, both animals and humankind, are shown the respect the ancient rules of life demand. Of the Inuit in general it is said that a person “should never push himself ahead of others or show the slightest ambition to control other people” (Oosten 1976: 16), and in particular of the Netsilik of the Central Canadian Arctic that “there were no lineages or clans, no institutionalized chiefs or formal government” (Balikci 1970: xv). On the other hand, of the same Netsilik, Knud Rasmussen (1931: 224) wrote: Ruling their respective domains—Nuliajuk or Sedna, the sea and the land; Tatqeq, the Moon Man, the heavens; and Narssuk or Sila, the meteorological forces of the air—these three “great spirits” were widely known under various names from East Greenland to the Siberian Arctic—which affords some confidence in their antiquity and indigeneity. While always complementary in territorial scope, they varied in salience in different regions: the Moon Man generally dominant in the Bering Strait and Sila in Greenland; whereas Sedna, as Franz Boas wrote, was “the supreme deity of the Central Eskimos,” holding “supreme sway over the destinies of mankind” (1901: 119).2 The Central Inuit and Sedna in particular will be the focus here: “The stern goddess of fate among the Eskimos,” as Rasmussen (1930: 123) characterized her. In command of the animal sources of food, light, warmth, and clothing that made an Inuit existence possible, Sedna played “by far the most important part in everyday life” (ibid.: 62). She was effectively superior to Sila and the Moon, who often functioned as her agents, “to see that her will is obeyed” (ibid.: 63). Accordingly, in his ethnography of the Iglulik, Rasmussen describes a divine pantheon of anthropomorphic power ruling a human society that was itself innocent of institutional authority. So whenever any transgression of Sedna’s rules or taboos associated with hunting occurs, the spirit of the sea intervenes. The moon spirit helps her to see the rules of life are daily observed, and comes hurrying down to earth to punish any instance of neglect. And both sea spirit and moon spirit employ Sila to execute all punishments in any way connected with the weather. (Rasmussen 1930: 63; cf. 78) Scholars perennially agonize over whether to consider the likes of Sedna as “gods.” Too often some promising candidate is rejected for failing to closely match our own ideas of the Deity: an act of religious intolerance, as Daniel Merkur observed (1991: 37–48), with the effect of promulgating the Judeo-Christian dogma that there is only one True God. But, “Why not call them gods?”; for it happens that Hocart thus posed the question in regard to a close analogue of Sedna among Winnebago people, a certain “immaterial being in control of animal species” ([1936] 1970: 149; cf. Radin 1914). More than just species-masters, however, Sedna, Sila, and the Moon had the divine attributes of immortality and universality. All three were erstwhile humans who achieved their high stations by breaking with their earthly kinship relations, in the event setting themselves apart from and over the population in general. Various versions of Sedna’s origin depict her as an orphan, as mutilated in sacrifice by her father, and/or as responsible for his death; the Moon Man’s divine career featured matricide and incest with his sister; Sila left the earth when his parents, who were giants, were killed by humans. Much of this is what Luc de Heusch (1962) identified as “the exploit” in traditions of stranger-kingship: the crimes of the dynastic founder against the people’s kinship order, by which he at once surpasses it and acquires the solitude necessary to rule the society as a whole, free from any partisan affiliation. And while on the matter of kingship, there is this: as the ruling powers of earth, sea, air, and sky, all of the Inuit deities, in breaking from kinship, thereby become territorial overlords. Transcending kinship, they achieve a kind of territorial sovereignty. The passage “from kinship to territory” was an accomplished fact long before it was reorganized as the classic formula of state formation. This is not only to say that the origins of kingship and the state are discursively or spiritually prefigured in Inuit communities, but since, like Chewong, “the human social world is intrinsically part of a wider world in which boundaries between society and cosmos are non-existent,” this encompassing cosmic polity is actually inscribed in practice. Like the Chewong, the Inuit could pass for the model of a (so-called) “simple society” were they not actually and practically integrated in a (so-called) “complex society” of cosmic proportions. In the territories of the gods dwelt a numerous population of metahuman subjects, both of the animistic kind of persons indwelling in places, objects, and animals; and disembodied free souls, as of ghosts or demons. “The invisible rulers of every object are the most remarkable beings next to Sedna,” Boas wrote: “Everything has its inua (owner)” ([1888] 1961: 591).3 All across the Arctic from Greenland to Siberia, people know and contend with these inua (pl. inuat), a term that means “person of” the noun that precedes it. Or “its man,” as Waldemar Bogoras translates the Chukchee cognate, and which clearly implies that “a human life-spirit is supposed to live within the object” (1904–9: 27–29). (Could Plato have imagined the perspectival response of Chukchee to the allegory of the shadows on the wall of the cave? “Even the shadows on the wall,” they say, “constitute definite tribes and have their own country where they live in huts and subsist by hunting” [ibid: 281].) Note the repeated report of dominion over the thing by its person—“everything has its owner.” Just so, as indwelling masters of their own domains, the gods themselves were superior inuat, endowed with something akin to proprietary rights over their territories and the various persons thereof. J. G. Oosten explains: “An inua was an anthropomorphic spirit that was usually connected to an object, place, or animal as its spiritual owner or double. The inuat of the sea, the moon, and the air could be considered spiritual owners of their respective territories” (1976: 27). Correlatively, greater spirits such as Sedna, mother of sea animals, had parental relations to the creatures of their realm, thus adding the implied godly powers of creation and protection to those of possession and dominion. Taken in connection with complementary powers of destruction, here is a preliminary conclusion that will be worth further exploration: socially and categorically, divinity is a high-order form of animism. That’s how it works in Boas’ description of Sedna’s reaction to the violation of her taboos on hunting sea animals. By a well-known tradition, the sea animals originated from Sedna’s severed fingers; hence, a certain mutuality of being connected her to her animal children. For its part, the hunted seal in Boas’ account is endowed with greater powers than ordinary humans. It can sense that the hunter has had contact with a corpse by the vapor of blood or death he emits, breaking a taboo on hunting while in such condition. The revulsion of the animal is thereupon communicated to Sedna, who in the normal course would withdraw the seals to her house under the sea, or perhaps dispatch Sila on punishing blizzards, thus making hunting impossible and exposing the entire human community to starvation. Note that in many anthropological treatments of animism, inasmuch as they are reduced to individualistic or phenomenological reflections on the relations between humans and animals, these interactions are characterized as reciprocal, egalitarian, or horizontal; whereas often in social practice they are at least three-part relations, involving also the master-person of the species concerned, in which case they are hierarchical—with the offending person in the client position. Or rather, the entire Inuit community is thereby put in a subordinate position, since sanction also falls on the fellows of the transgressor; and as the effect is likewise generalized to all the seals, the event thus engages a large and diverse social totality presided over by the ruling goddess.4 – The marrow bones of an animal killed by a first-born son are never to be eaten with a knife, but must be crushed with stones (ibid.: 179). – A man suffering want through ill success in hunting must, when coming to another village and sitting down to eat, never eat with a woman he has not seen before (ibid.: 182). – Persons hunting seal from a snow hut on ice may not work with soapstone (ibid.: 184). – Young girls present in a house when a seal is being cut up must take off their kamiks and remain barefooted as long as the work is in progress (ibid.: 185). – If a woman is unfaithful to her husband while he is out hunting walrus, especially on drift ice, the man will dislocate his hip and have severe pains in the sinuses (ibid.: 186). – If a woman sees a whale she must point to it with her middle finger (ibid.: 187). – Widows are never allowed to pluck birds (ibid.: 196). – A woman whose child has died must never drink water from melted ice, only from melted snow (ibid.: 198). In the same vein, the many and intricate taboos shaping Inuit social and material life entail submission to the metaperson-others who sanction them, whether these prohibitions are systematically honored or for whatever reason violated. Of course, submission to the powers is evident in punishments for transgressions. But the same is doubly implied when the proscriptive rule is followed, for, more than an act of respect, to honor a taboo has essential elements of sacrifice, involving the renunciation of some normal practice or social good in favor of the higher power who authorizes it (cf. Leach 1976; Valeri 2000). In this regard, the existence of the Inuit, in ways rather like the Chewong, was organized by an elaborate set of “rules of life,” as Rasmussen deemed them, regulating all kinds of behavior of all kinds of persons. For even as the main taboos concerned the hunt, the disposition of game, and practices associated with menstruation, childbirth, and treatment of the dead, the enjoined behaviors could range from how one made the first cut of snow in building an igloo, to whether a pregnant woman could go outside with her mittens on—never (Rasmussen 1930: 170). Rasmussen’s major work on the “intellectual culture” of the Iglulik includes a catalogue of thirty-one closely written pages of such injunctions (ibid.: 169–204). As, for example: Commented Boas in this connection: “It is certainly difficult to find out the innumerable regulations connected with the religious ideas and customs of the Eskimo. The difficulty is even greater in regard to customs which refer to birth, sickness and death” ([1888] 1961: 201–2). All the creatures we have to kill and eat, all those we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls like we have, souls which do not perish with the body, and which therefore must be propitiated lest they should revenge themselves on us for taking away their souls. (1930: 56) The greater number of these “rules of life” were considerations accorded to Sedna. When they were respected, the sea goddess became the source of human welfare, providing animals to the hunter. But when they were violated, Sedna or the powers under her aegis inflicted all manners of misfortune upon the Inuit, ranging from sicknesses and accidents to starvation and death. Punishments rained upon the just and the unjust alike: they might afflict not only the offender but also his or her associates, perhaps the entire community, though these others could be innocent or even unaware of the offense. As it is sometimes said that Sedna is also the mother of humankind, that is why she is especially dangerous to women and children, hence the numerous taboos relating to menstruation, childbirth, and the newborn. But the more general and pertinent motivation would be that she is the mother of animals, hence the principle involved in her animosity to women is an eye-for-an-eye in response to the murder of her own children (cf. Gardner 1987; Hamayon 1996). Again, everything follows from the animist predicament that people survive by killing others like themselves. As explained to Rasmussen: There are never any definite rules for anything, for it may also happen that a deceased person may in some mysterious manner attack surviving relatives or friends he loves, even when they have done nothing wrong. … Human beings are thus helpless in the face of all the dangers and uncanny things that happen in connection with death and the dead. (1930: 108) There is hardly a single human being who has kept the rules of life according to the laws laid down by the wisdom of the ancients. (1930: 58) Among Netsilik, Iglulik, Baffin Islanders, and other Central Inuit, the disembodied souls of the dead, both of persons and of animals, were an omnipresent menace to the health and welfare of the living. “All the countless spirits of evil are all around, striving to bring sickness and death, bad weather, and failure in hunting” (Boas [1888] 1961: 602; cf. Rasmussen 1931: 239; Balikci 1970: 200–1). In principle, it was the persons and animals whose deaths were not properly respected ritually who thereupon haunted the living. But in this regard, Rasmussen confirms what one may well have surmised from the extent and intricacy of the “rules of life,” namely that the gods often act in ways mysterious to the people: In a way, the reign of the metaperson powers-that-be was classically hegemonic, which helps explain the seeming conflict between the common travelers’ reports of the Inuits’ good humor and their sense that “human beings were powerless in the grasp of a mighty fate” (ibid.: 32)—“we don’t believe, we fear” (ibid.: 55). The ambivalence, I suggest, represents different aspects of the same situation of the people in relation to the metaperson powers-that-be. What remains unambiguous and invariant is that for all their own “loosely structured” condition, they are systematically ordered as the dependent subjects of a cosmic system of social domination. Hobbes spoke of the state of nature as all that time in which “men lived without a common power to keep them all in awe.” Yet in Rasmussen’s accounts of the Inuit, a people who might otherwise be said to approximate that natural state, “mankind is held in awe”—given the fear of hunger and sickness inflicted by the powers governing them (1931: 124).5 If this accounts for the people’s anxieties, it also helps explain the reports of their stoic, composed, often congenial disposition. This happier subjectivity is not simply seasonal, not simply due to the fact that times are good in terms of hunting and food supply, for that in itself would be because the people have been observant of Sedna’s rules, and accordingly she makes the animals available. There is a certain comfort and assurance that comes from the people’s compliance with the higher authorities that govern their fortunes—or if you will, their compliance with the “dominant ideology” (cf. Robbins 2004: 212). In the upshot, it’s almost as if these polar inhabitants were bipolar—except that, beside the fear and composure that came from their respect of the god, on occasion they also knew how to oppose and defy her. More precisely, if great shamans could on occasion force the god to desist from harming the people, it was by means of countervailing metapersons in their service: familiar spirits they possessed or who possessed them. Thus empowered, the shaman could fight or even kill Sedna, to make her liberate the game (upon her revival) in a time of famine (Weyer 1932: 359; Merkur 1991: 112). More often, the dangerous journeys shamans undertake to Sedna’s undersea home culminate in some manhandling of her with a view to soothing her anger by combing the sins of humans out of her tangled hair. Alternatively, Sedna was hunted like a seal from a hole in the ice in winter: she was hauled up from below by a noose and while in the shaman’s power told to release the animals; or she was conjured to rise by song and then harpooned to the same effect. The last, the attack on the god, was the dramatic moment of an important autumnal festival of the Netsilik, designed to put an end to this tempestuous season and ensure good weather for the coming winter. Again it was not just the stormy weather with its accompaniment of shifting and cracking ice that was the issue, but the “countless evil spirits” that were so manifesting themselves, including the dead knocking wildly at the huts “and woe to the unhappy person they can lay hold of” (Boas [1888] 1961: 603). Ruling all and the worst of them was Sedna, or so one may judge from the fact that when she was ritually hunted and harpooned, the evil metahuman host were all driven away. Sedna dives below and in a desperate struggle manages to free herself, leaving her badly wounded, greatly angry, and in a mood to seize and carry off her human tormenters. That could result in another attack on her, however, for if a rescuing shaman is unable to otherwise induce her to release the victim, he may have to thrash her into doing so (Rasmussen 1930: 100). Although the shamans’ powers to thus oppose the god are not exactly their own, may one not surmise there is here a germ of a human political society: that is, ruling humans qua metapersons themselves? inua” as a general technical term for all animistic forms of indwelling persons, whether of creatures or things—and whether the reference is singular or plural. I use “metaperson” preferably and “metahuman” alternately for all those beings usually called “spirits”: including gods, ghosts, ancestors, demons, inua, and so on. Aside from direct quotations, “spirit” will appear only as a last resort of style or legibility, and usually then in quotation marks—for reasons to which I now turn, by way of the life story of Takunaqu, an Iglulik woman: One day I remember a party of children out at play, and wanted to run out at once and play with them. But my father, who understood hidden things, perceived that I was playing with the souls of my dead brothers and sisters. He was afraid this might be dangerous, and therefore called upon his helping spirits and asked them about it. Through his helping spirits, my father learned … there was … something in my soul of that which had brought about the death of my brothers and sisters. For this reason, the dead were often about me, and I did not distinguish between the spirits of the dead and real live people. (Rasmussen 1930: 24) A word on terminology. Hereafter, I use “” as a general technical term for all animistic forms of indwelling persons, whether of creatures or things—and whether the reference is singular or plural. I use “metaperson” preferably and “metahuman” alternately for all those beings usually called “spirits”: including gods, ghosts, ancestors, demons,, and so on. Aside from direct quotations, “spirit” will appear only as a last resort of style or legibility, and usually then in quotation marks—for reasons to which I now turn, by way of the life story of Takunaqu, an Iglulik woman: Why call them spirits? Go to Abstract For example: Chewong and ... Why call them spirits? Social relations of peopl... Metaperson powers-that-be The cosmic polity Determination by the reli... To conclude Coda References Notes Sometime before Hocart was asking, “Why not call them gods?” Andrew Lang in effect asked of gods, “Why call them spirits?” Just because we have been taught our god is a spirit, he argued, that is no reason to believe “the earliest men” thought of their gods that way ([1898] 1968: 202). Of course, I cannot speak here of “the earliest men”—all those suggestive allusions to the state of nature notwithstanding—but only of some modern peoples off the beaten track of state systems and their religions. For the Inuit, the Chewong, and similar others, Lang would have a point: our native distinction between spirits and human beings, together with the corollary oppositions between natural and supernatural and spiritual and material, for these peoples do not apply. Neither, then, do they radically differentiate an “other world” from this one. Interacting with other souls in “a spiritual world consisting of a number of personal forces,” as J. G. Oosten observed, “the Inuit themselves are spiritual beings” (1976: 29). Fair enough, although given the personal character of those forces, it is more logical to call spirits “people” than to call people “spirits.” But in either case, and notwithstanding our own received distinctions, at ethnographic issue here is the straightforward equivalence, spirits = people. As opposed to naturalism, which assumes a foundational dichotomy between objective nature and subjective culture, animism posits an intersubjective and personalized universe in which the Cartesian split between person and thing is dissolved and rendered spurious. In the animist cosmos, animals and plants, beings and things may all appear as intentional subjects and persons, capable of will, intention, and agency. The primacy of physical causation is replaced by intentional causation and social agency. (2016: 3) The recent theoretical interest in the animist concepts of indigenous peoples of lowland South America, northern North America, Siberia, and Southeast Asia has provided broad documentation of this monist ontology of a personalized universe. Kaj Århem offers a succinct summary: inua, for it equally characterizes people’s relations to gods, disembodied souls of the dead, lineage ancestors, species-masters, demons, and other such intentional subjects: a large array of metapersons setting the terms and conditions of human existence. Taken in its unity, hierarchy, and totality, this is a cosmic polity. As Déborah Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2017: 68–9) very recently put the matter (just as this article was going to press): What we would call “natural world,” or “world” for short, is for Amazonian peoples a multiplicity of intricately connected multiplicities. Animals and other spirits are conceived as so many kinds of “‘people” or “societies,” that is, as political entities. … Amerindians think that there are many more societies (and therefore, also humans) between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy and anthropology. What we call “environment” is for them a society of societies, an international arena, a cosmopoliteia. There is, therefore, no absolute difference in status between society and environment, as if the first were the “subject” and the second the “object.” Every object is another subject and is more than one. It only needs be added that given the constraints of this “animist cosmos” on the human population, the effect is a certain “cosmo-politics” in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s sense of the term (2015). Indeed, the politics at issue here involves much more than animist, for it equally characterizes people’s relations to gods, disembodied souls of the dead, lineage ancestors, species-masters, demons, and other such intentional subjects: a large array of metapersons setting the terms and conditions of human existence. Taken in its unity, hierarchy, and totality, this is a. As Déborah Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2017: 68–9) very recently put the matter (just as this article was going to press): In what follows I offer some selected ethnographic reports of the coexistence of humans with such metapersonal powers in the same “intersubjective and personalized universe”—just by way of illustration. But let me say here, and try to demonstrate in the rest of the essay, the implications are world-historical: for if these metaperson-others have the same nature as, and are in the same experiential reality with, humans, while exerting life-and-death powers over them, then they are the dominant figures in what we habitually call “politics” and “economics” in all the societies so constituted. In the event, we will require a different anthropological science than the familiar one that separates the human world into ontologically distinct ideas, social relations, and things, and then seeks to discount the former as a dependent function of one of the latter two—as if our differentiated notions of things and social relations were not symbolically constituted in the first place. inua of the wild, the Mbowamb spend their lives “completely under the spell and in the company of spirits. … The spirits rule the life of men. … There is simply no profane field of life where they don’t find themselves surrounded by a supernatural force” (Vicedom and Tischner (1943–48, 2: 680–81). Yet if the “other world” is thus omnipresent around Mt. Hagen, it is not then an “other world.” These people, we are told, “do not distinguish between the purely material and purely spiritual aspects of life” (ibid.: 592). Nor would they have occasion to do so if, as is reported of Mae Enga, they conducted lives in constant intersubjective relations with the so-called “spirits.” “Much of [Enga] behavior remains inexplicable to anyone ignorant of the pervasive belief in ghosts,” reports Mervyn Meggitt. “Not a day passes but someone refers publicly to the actions of ghosts” (1965: 109–10). Or as a missionary-ethnographer recounts: For the Central Enga the natural world is alive and endowed with invisible power. To be seen otherwise would leave unexplained numerous events. The falling tree, the lingering illness, the killing frost, the haunting dream—all confirm the belief in a relationship between the physical world and the powers of earth, sky, and underworld. (Brennan1977: 11–12; cf. Feachem 1973) Not to separate, then, what peoples of the New Guinea Highlands join: surrounded and outnumbered above, below, and on earth by ghosts, clan ancestors, demons, earthquake people, sky people, and the manyof the wild, the Mbowamb spend their lives “completely under the spell and in the company of spirits. … The spirits rule the life of men. … There is simply no profane field of life where they don’t find themselves surrounded by a supernatural force” (Vicedom and Tischner (1943–48, 2: 680–81). Yet if the “other world” is thus omnipresent around Mt. Hagen, it is not then an “other world.” These people, we are told, “do not distinguish between the purely material and purely spiritual aspects of life” (ibid.: 592). Nor would they have occasion to do so if, as is reported of Mae Enga, they conducted lives in constant intersubjective relations with the so-called “spirits.” “Much of [Enga] behavior remains inexplicable to anyone ignorant of the pervasive belief in ghosts,” reports Mervyn Meggitt. “Not a day passes but someone refers publicly to the actions of ghosts” (1965: 109–10). Or as a missionary-ethnographer recounts: Such metapersonal powers are palpably present in what is actually happening to people, their fortunes good and bad. Hence Fredrik Barth’s own experience among Baktaman in the Western Highlands: “The striking feature is … how empirical the spirits are, how they appear as very concrete observable objects in the world rather than ways of talking about the world” (1975: 129, emphasis in original). Supporting Barth’s observation from his own work among nearby Mianmin people, Don Gardner adds that “spirits of one kind or another are a basic feature of daily life. Events construed as involving ‘supernatural’ beings are commonly reported and discussed” (1987: 161).6 Mutatis mutandis, in the Amazonian forest, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro comes to a similar appreciation of the gods and dead as immanently present for Araweté. Listening to the nocturnal songs of shamans summoning these metaperson-others to the village, the ethnographer came to perceive the presence of the gods, as the reality or source of examples, in every minute routine action. Most important, it was through these that I could discover the participation of the dead in the world of the living. (1992: 13–14) The presence of maï [‘gods’] in daily life is astonishing: for each and every purpose, they are cited as models of action, paradigms of body ornamentation, standards for interpreting events, and sources of news … . (1992: 74–75)7 The general condition of the cohabitation of humans and their metapersonal-alters in one “real world” is their psychic unity: their mutual and reciprocal status as anthropopsychic subjects. The venerable anthropological premise of “the psychic unity of mankind”has to be more generously understood. For as Viveiros de Castro says, “There is no way to distinguish between humans and what we call spirits” (ibid.: 64). In effect, the so-called “spirits” are so many heterogeneous species of the genus Homo: “Human beings proper (bide) are a species within a multiplicity of other species of human beings who form their own societies” (ibid.: 55).8 As is well known, the statement would hold for many peoples throughout lowland South America. Of the Achuar, Philippe Descola writes that they do not know the “supernatural as a level of reality separate from nature,” inasmuch as the human condition is common to “all nature’s beings. … Humans, and most plants, animals, and meteors are persons (aents) with a soul (wakan) and individual life” (1996: 93). In speaking of the “own societies” of the metaperson-others as known to Araweté, Viveiros de Castro alludes to the “perspectivism” that his writings have done much to make normal anthropological science. Well documented from Siberia as well as Amazonia, the phenomenon offers a privileged instance of the coparticipation of humans with gods, ghosts, animal-persons, and others in the same complex society. In consequence of differences in their perceptual apparatus, both people and animals live unseen to each other in their own communities as fully human beings, bodily and culturally; even as each appears to the other as animal prey or predators. In this connection, the common ethnographic observation that because the non-human persons are as such generally invisible, they must inhabit a different, “spiritual” reality, is a cultural non sequitur for Araweté and other perspectivists. In Lockean terms the differences are only secondary qualities: due to perception—because of the different bodily means thereof—rather than to the thing thus perceived. In practice, moreover, the socius includes a variety of metapersonal communities: not only those of the animal inua, but also the villages of the gods, the dead, and perhaps others, all of them likewise cultural replicas of human communities. Accordingly, the human groups are engaged in a sociological complexity that defies the normal anthropological characterizations of their simplicity. A lot of social intercourse goes on between humans and the metahuman persons with whom they share the earth, as well as with those who people the heavens and the underworld. Apart from shamans, even ordinary humans may travel to lands of the metaperson-others, as conversely the latter may appear among people in human form. Human and nonhuman persons are often known to intermarry or negotiate the exchange of wealth—when they are not reciprocally eating one another. Social relations of people and metaperson-others Go to Abstract For example: Chewong and ... Why call them spirits? Social relations of peopl... Metaperson powers-that-be The cosmic polity Determination by the reli... To conclude Coda References Notes A woman sits in a corner of the house, whispering to a dead relative; a man addresses a clump of trees. … When an illness or misfortune occurs, a father or neighbor will break knotted strips of cordyline leaf, talking to the spirits to find out which one is causing trouble and why. (Keesing 1982: 33) This passage is one of many that exemplify how Roger Keesing makes good on the introductory promise of his fine monograph on the Kwaio people of Malaita (Solomon Islands): namely, “to describe Kwaio religion in a way that captures the phenomenological reality of a world where one’s group includes the living and the dead, where conversations with spirits and signs of their presence and acts are part of everyday life” (ibid.: 2–3; cf. 33, 112–13). Likewise, the human world of the Lalakai of New Britain is “also a world of spirits. Human beings are in frequent contact with non-human others, and there is always the possibility of encountering them at any time” (Valentine 1965: 194). Yet beyond such conversations or passing encounters with metaperson-others, from many parts come reports of humans entering into customary social relations with them. Inuit know of many people who visited villages of animal-persons, even married and lived long among them, some only later and by accident discovering their hosts were animal inua rather than Inuit humans (Oosten 1976: 27). A personal favorite is the Caribou Man of the northern Algonkians. In one of many similar versions, Caribou Man was a human stranger who was seduced by a caribou doe, went on to live with and have sons by her, and became the ruler of the herd (Speck 1977). French-Canadian trappers were not off the mark in dubbing Caribou Man “le roi des caribou,” as the story rehearses the archetypal stranger-king traditions of dynastic origin, down to the mediating role played by the native woman and her foundational marriage to the youthful outsider. Besides the hierogamic experiences of Chewong women and the marriage of the gods with dead Araweté women, there are many permutations of such interspecies unions: some patrilocal and some matrilocal, some enduring and some ended by divorce due to homesickness. A Kaluli man of the New Guinea Southern Highlands may marry a woman of the invisible world, relates Edward Schiefflin (2005: 97); when the man has a child by her, he can leave his body in his sleep and visit her world. Reciprocally, people from that world may enter his body and through his mouth converse with the people present. Then there was the Mianmin man of the Western Highlands who, beside his human wife, formed a polygynous arrangement with a dead woman from a different descent group. The dead wife lived in a nearby mountain, but she gardened on her husband’s land and bore him a son (Gardner 1987: 164). Don Gardner also tells of the time that the Ulap clan of the Mianmin saved themselves from their Ivik enemies by virtue of a marital alliance with their own dead. The Ivik clan people were bent on revenge for the death of many of their kinsmen at Ulap hands. Sometime before, the big-man of the Ulap and his counterpart among their dead, who lived inside the mountain on which the Ulap were settled, exchanged sisters in marriage. When the big-man of the dead heard the Ivik were threatening his living brother-in-law, he proposed that the two Ulap groups exchange the pigs they had been raising for each other and hold a joint feast. In the course of the festivities, the ancestral people became visible to the Ulap villagers, who were in turn rendered invisible to the Ivik. So when the Ivik enemies came, they could not find the Ulap, although three times they attacked the places where they distinctly heard them singing. Throughout the Western Mianmin area, this account, Garner assures us, has the status of a historical narrative. We need not conclude that relations between humans and their metaperson counterparts are everywhere and normally so sympathetic. On the contrary, they are often hostile and to the people’s disadvantage, especially as the predicament noted earlier of the Inuit is broadly applicable: the animals and plants on which humans subsist are essentially human themselves. Although some anthropologists have been known to debate whether cannibalism even existed, it is hardly a rare condition—even among peoples who profess not to practice it themselves. As already noticed, in many societies known to anthropology, especially those where hunting is a mainstay, the people and their prey are involved in a system of mutual cannibalism. For even as the people kill and consume “people like us,” these metaperson-alters retaliate more or less in kind, as eating away human flesh by disease or starvation. All over the Siberian forest, for instance, Humans eat the meat of game animals in the same way that animal spirits feed on human flesh and blood. This is the reason why sickness (experienced as a loss of vitality) and death in the [human] community as a whole are understood as a just payment for its successful hunting both in the past and the future. (Hamayon 1996: 79) Married to the sister or daughter of the “game-giving spirit,” an elk or reindeer, his brother-in-law the Siberian shaman thus enters an affinal exchange system of flesh—the meat of animals compensated by the withering of people—on behalf of the human community. Thus here again: “Being similar to the human soul in essence and on a par with hunters in alliance and exchange partners, spirits are not transcendent” (ibid.: 80). It is, to reprise Århem’s expression above, “an intersubjective and personalized universe.” Metaperson powers-that-be Go to Abstract For example: Chewong and ... Why call them spirits? Social relations of peopl... Metaperson powers-that-be The cosmic polity Determination by the reli... To conclude Coda References Notes inua in their purview. These hierarchies are organized on two principles which in the end come down to the same thing: the proprietary notion of the higher being as the “owner”—and usually also the parent—of his or her lesser persons; and the platonic or classificatory notion of “the One over Many,” whereby the “owner” is the personified form of the class of which the lesser persons are particular instances. One can find both concepts in Viveiros de Castro’s discussion of the Araweté term for metahuman masters, nā: The term connotes ideas such as leadership, control, responsibility, and ownership of some resource or domain. The nā is always a human or anthropomorphic being. But other ideas are involved as well. The nā of something is someone who has this substance in abundance. Above all, the nā is defined by something of which it is the master. In this last connotation, he is at the same time “the representative of” and the “represented by” that something. (1992: 345)9 The metahuman beings with whom people interact socially are often hierarchically structured, as where gods such as Sedna and species-masters such as Caribou Man encompass and protect the individualin their purview. These hierarchies are organized on two principles which in the end come down to the same thing: the proprietary notion of the higher being as the “owner”—and usually also the parent—of his or her lesser persons; and the platonic or classificatory notion of “the One over Many,” whereby the “owner” is the personified form of the class of which the lesser persons are particular instances. One can find both concepts in Viveiros de Castro’s discussion of the Araweté term for metahuman masters, Although, in a spasm of relativism, Pascal famously said that a shift of a few degrees of latitude will bring about a total change in juridical principles, you can go from the Amazon forests or the New Guinea Highlands to the Arctic Circle and Tierra del Fuego and find the same ethnographic descriptions of greater metapersons as the “owners”-cum-“mothers” or “fathers” of the individual metapersonal beings in their domain. Urapmin say “that people get into trouble because ‘everything has a father,’ using father (alap) in the sense of owner. … In dealing with nature then, the Urapmin are constantly faced with the fact that the spirits hold competing claims to many of the resources people use” (Robbins 1995: 214–15). (Parenthetically, this is not the first indication we have that the “spirits” own the means of production, an issue to which we will return.) Among Hageners, the Stratherns relate, all wild objects and creatures are “owned” by “spirits,” and can be referred to as their “pigs,” just as people hold domestic pigs (1968: 190). “Masters of nature,” to whom trees and many other things “belong,” these kor wakl spirits are “sworn enemies of mankind” because people tend to consume foods under their protection without proper sacrifices. “The people are terribly afraid of them” (Vicedom and Tischner 1943–48, 2: 608, 659). In the Siberian Arctic, large natural domains such as forests, rivers, and lakes had their “special owners,” as Waldemar Bogoras calls them. The forest-master familiar to Russo-Yukaghir had “absolute power” over the animals there; he could give them away as presents, lose them at cards, or round them up and cause them to depart the country (Bogoras 1904–9 285). Not unusual either is the compounded hierarchy of metahuman owners, composed of several levels of inua-figures: as among Tupi-Guarani peoples such as Tenetehara and Tapirapé, where species-masters are included in the domains of forest-masters, who in turn belong to the godly “owners” of the social territory. Similarly for Achuar, the individual animal inua are both subsumed by “game mothers”—who “are seen as exercising the same kind of control over game that mothers exercise over their children and domestic animals”—and also magnified forms of the species—who, as primus inter pares, watch over the fate of the others. The latter especially are the social interlocutors of the Achuar hunter, but he must also come to respectful terms with the former (Descola 1996: 257–60). The chain of command in these hierarchical orders of metaperson “owners” is not necessarily respected in pursuing game or administering punishments to offending hunters, but it is quite a bureaucracy. As I say (and so have others), this sense of belonging to a more inclusive power can be read as membership in the class of which the “owner” is the personified representative—that is, a logical and theological modality of the One over Many. The ordering principle is philosophical realism with an anthropomorphic twist, where a named metaperson-owner is the type of which the several lesser beings are tokens. In a broad survey of the concept in the South American lowlands, Carlos Fausto (2012) uses such pertinent descriptions of the species-master as “a plural singularity” and “a singular image of a collectivity.” Anthropologists will recognize classic studies to the effect: Godfrey Lienhardt (1961) on the totems or species-beings who subsumed the forms of the same kind; and Edward Evans-Pritchard (1956) on the Nuer “God” (Kwoth), manifested in a diminishing series of avatars. (Parenthetically, as species-masters are more widely distributed in the world than totems proper, the latter may be understood as a development of the former under the special influence of descent groups or other segmentary formations.) In his own well-known wandering minstrel tour of animism—rather like the present article, composed of ethnographic shreds and patches— E. B. Tylor conceived a similar passage from “species-deities” to “higher deities” by way of Auguste Comte on the “abstraction” thus entailed and Charles de Brosses on the species archetype as a Platonic Idea (1903: 241–46).10 inua all the way down. A bisexual snake identified with the Milky Way, the autochthonous Ungud made the world. Les Hiatt summarized the process: Natural species came into existence when Ungud dreamed itself into new various shapes. In the same way Ungud created clones of itself as wonjina [local versions of Dreamtime ancestors], and dispatched them in various places, particularly waterholes. The wonjina in turn generated the human spirits that enter women and become babies. … Ungud is thus an archetype of life itself. (1996: 113) That divinity originates as a kind of animism of higher taxonomic order is not a bad (Platonic) idea. Consider this notice of Sedna: “In popular religious thought, the Sea Mother is an indweller. She indwells in the sea and all of its animals. She is immanent in the calm of the sea, in the capes and shoals where the waters are treacherous, and in the sea animals and fish” (Merkur 1991: 136). Analogously, for the Aboriginal peoples of Northwest Australia, the cult of their great Rainbow Serpent, Ungud, could be epitomized asall the way down. A bisexual snake identified with the Milky Way, the autochthonous Ungud made the world. Les Hiatt summarized the process: In his informative account of the local Ungarinyin people, Helmut Petri specifies that the numerous wonjina were transformed into “individual Ungud serpents,” such that “Ungud appeared in the Aborigines’ view at one time as an individual entity, at another time as a multiplicity of individual beings” ([1954] 2011: 108). This included the spirit children whom the wonjina deposited in the waterholes: they were given by Ungud. Hence the One over Many, down to individual human beings, for each person thus had an “Ungud part” (see also Lommel [1952] 1997). It only needs to be added, from Nancy Munn’s revelatory study of analogous phenomena among Walbiri, that in participating intersubjectively in an object world created by and out of the Dreamtime ancestors, human beings experiencing “intimations of themselves” are always already experiencing “intimations of others”: those Dreamtime heroes “who are superordinate to them and precede them in time” (1986: 75). Accordingly, violation of any part of the country is “a violation of the essence of moral law” (ibid.: 68). While clearly different from other societies considered here, these no less “egalitarian” Australian Aborigines are thus no less hierarchical. “It’s not our idea,” Pintupi people told Fred Myers in regard to the customs and morality established in perpetuity by the Dreamtime ancestors. “It’s a big Law. We have to sit down beside that Law like all the dead people who went before us” (Myers 1986: 58). The cosmic polity Go to Abstract For example: Chewong and ... Why call them spirits? Social relations of peopl... Metaperson powers-that-be The cosmic polity Determination by the reli... To conclude Coda References Notes By way of integration of themes presented heretofore, there follows a sketch of the cosmic polities of the Mountain Ok-speaking Min peoples of New Guinea.11 There was no visible or proximate political state in the center of New Guinea, the region of the Fly and Sepik River headwaters traditionally inhabited by the Mountain Ok or Min peoples. All the same, the Telefolmin, Urapmin, Feramin, Tifalmin, Mianmin, and others could be fairly described as governed by metahuman powers whose authority over otherwise politically fragmented peoples was exercised through obligatory rules effectively backed by punitive force. The Hocartesian question might well be, “Why not call it a state?” Or else, if this cosmic polity were unlike a state in that the controlling powers largely outnumbered the civil society of humans, their regime could be all the more dominating. Experientially, the people live in a condition of subjugation to a host of metaperson powers-that-be, whose numerous rules of order are enforced by the highest authorities, often through the offices of the lesser personages in their aegis. Among the Central Min peoples, where this regime achieved its most integrated form, it was dominated by the cosmocratic duo of Afek, mother of humans and taro, and the serpentine Magalim, who preceded her as the autochthonous father of the numerous creatures of the wild (Jorgensen 1980, 1990a, 1998). Parents of all, Afek and Magalim were themselves children of none. The beginnings of their respective reigns were marked by violent breaches of kinship relations, giving them the independence that was the condition of their universality. Afek was notorious for committing incest with her brother, whom she later killed (and revived). Magalim was born of himself by intervening in the sexual intercourse of a human couple. Emerging as a serpent, he was subsequently rejected by his would-be mother, swallowed his foster-father, and killed his father’s brothers. Magalim has been likened to the Rainbow Serpent figures of Aboriginal Australian traditions: among other resemblances, by his habitation of subterranean waters, from which he rises when irritated to cause destructive floods (Brumbaugh 1987). Afek adds to the analogy by her own resemblance to Australian Dreamtime ancestors, creating features of the landscape and endowing the customs of the human groups she gave rise to in the course of her travels. Thereafter Afek’s presence would be mediated primarily by the human ancestors whose cult of fertility she established, whereas Magalim as indwelling “boss” of the land acted through the multifarious inua of its creatures and features. Although in effect they thus organized complementary domains—Afek the human sphere and Magalim its untamed environs—through their respective human and metahuman subjects each extended into the jurisdiction of the other—often there to do harm.12 Much of Min cultural order, including the taboos that sanction it, is the codification of the legendary doings of Afek in the mode of mandatory custom. “Since that time,” Tifalmin people say, “men and women have known how to do things” (Wheatcroft 1976: 157–58). The precedents thus set by episodes in the epic of Afek’s advent include the different social and sexual roles of men and women and the rituals and practices of menstruation, initiation, childbirth, and death. Indeed, death itself was initiated by Afek along with the westward journey of the deceased on the underground road to the land of the dead—whence in return come life-giving shell valuables, hence Afek is also the originator of wealth, exchange, and long-distance trade. Afek bore the taro plant that iconically distinguishes the Min people, making a complementary schismogenesis of it by destroying the swamps in the Telefolmin region, thereby marking the contrast to lowland sago peoples. Along her journey, she established the men’s cult houses where the remains of the ancestors of each Min group and the associated initiation rituals would guarantee the growth of their youth and their taro. Afek’s ritual progress culminated in the construction of her own great cult house, Telefolip, in the Telefolmin village of that name. In Telefolmin religion, Afek remains present and accessible. Taro fertility is a visible sign of her power, just as her bones are the visible signs of her presence. … Thus the Falamin, when addressing the local ancestors in ritual, consider that they are heard by Afek as well. When stronger reassurances are needed, the local ancestor is bypassed, new personnel take charge of the ritual and Afek is invoked directly. Groups without access to bones of Afek—it seems that not all groups have them—are covered by Afek’s promise to hear and respond when she is called upon for taro. (1990: 67) Afek’s house became the ritual center of the Mountain Ok region, thus giving the Telefolmin people a certain precedence over the other Min groups. Rituals performed in connection with the Telefolip house radiated Afek’s benefits in human and agricultural fertility widely among the other Min communities. If the house itself deteriorated, the growth of taro in the entire region would decline in tandem. The several Min groups of a few hundred people each were thus integrated in a common system of divine welfare centered on the Telefolip shrine. The overall effect was a core–periphery configuration of peoples in a tribal zone with the Telefolmin custodians of Afek’s legacy at the center. As described by Dan Jorgensen (1996: 193): “The common linkage to Afek locates Mountain Ok cults in a regional tradition. Myths concerning Afek not only account for the features of a particular ritual system or aspects of local cosmology, but also place groups relative to one another in terms of descent from Afek (or a sibling)” (cf. Robbins 2004: 16–17). “A surprisingly ambitious ideology,” comments Robert Brumbaugh, “because it does not link up with any economic or political control from the center” (1990: 73). Here is another instance where the superstructure exceeds the infrastructure. What does link up with the superiority of Telefolmin, as Brumbaugh also says, is Afek’s continued presence: But “Magalim always ruins Afek’s work,” Telefolmin say, breaking her “law” by deceiving men into killing their friends, seducing women, driving people mad, causing landslides and floods, and wrecking gardens (Jorgensen 1980: 360). Capricious and malicious, Magalim is oftimes (but not always) the enemy of people: a menace especially among the Central Min, where he is the father, owner, and thereby the common form in the persons of the animals, plants, rocks, rivers, cliffs, and so on, that inhabit and constitute the environment—where human persons hunt, garden, and otherwise traverse with disturbing effects. “All things of the bush are Magalim’s children, Magalim man,” Jorgensen was told. “If you finish these things, Magalim is their father and he will repay you with sickness, or he will send bad dreams and you will die” (ibid.: 352). The wild has its own hierarchy: at least three levels of Magalim-persons, encompassed by the archetypal All-Father serpent. Jorgensen notes that certain species-masters of distinct name “look after” marsupials and wild pigs, even as Magalim himself looks after snakes. But all are in turn encompassed in Magalim, as “All these names are just names. The true thing is Magalim” (ibid.). Likewise for Urapmin, Joel Robbins refers to intermediate species-masters controlling their particular animal-persons; these “owners” being in turn subsumed in the greater Magalim-Being. Certain “marsupial women” are guardians of the many marsupial kinds that people hunt and eat. Taking a fancy to a hunter, a marsupial woman may have sex with and marry him. Thereafter she comes to him in dreams to inform him about the whereabouts of game. But marsupial women have been known to become jealous of their husband’s human wife, especially if the latter is too generous in sharing marsupials with her own relatives. Then the hunter has accidents in the bush or falls sick, or even dies if he does not leave his human spouse (Robbins 2004: 210). In any case, where Magalim reigns, the principle holds that all particular inua, whether of living creatures or natural features, are also forms of him. The individual Magalim-persons who cause Feramin people trouble may be treated as acting on their own or as agents of Magalim All-Father. The people may say, “Tell your father to stop making thunderstorms—and not to send any earthquakes either” (Brumbaugh 1987: 26). Magalim, however, is not always causing trouble for Feramin. Without changing his notorious disposition, he may turn it on strangers, whom he is reputed to dislike, and thus become protector of the local people. Indeed, he defends Feramin tribal territory as a whole. The Feramin were divided into four autonomous communities (“parishes”); but Magalim’s remains were in the care of a single elder, and when ritually invoked before battle, they made all Feramin warriors fierce and their arrows deadly. “Without subdivision by parishes,” Brumbaugh writes, “the territory of Feramin as a whole is considered under the influence of Magalim, who watches over its borders and the well-being of the traditional occupants” (ibid.: 30). Protector of the entire territory from an abode within it, a subterranean being who can cause earthquakes, Magalim is the indwelling inua of the land itself: “boss of the land,” the people now say. Indeed, if all the creatures and prominent natural haunts of the wild are so many aliases of Magalim, as Jorgensen puts it, it is because he is “identified with the earth and its power.” “Everything depends on Magalim,” Jorgensen was often told, including Afek and all her people who “sit on the top of the ground” (1998: 104). Kinship to territory: the self-born Magalim, slayer of his foster-kin, becomes god of the land. Hence add gardeners to the tragic predicament of the animist hunters. The Urapmin, according to Robbins, are constantly aware they are surrounded by “nature spirits” (motobil) who are original “owners” of almost all the resources they use (2004: 209–10). Consequently, “every act of hunting or gardening causes some risk,” even on non-taboo grounds, should it disturb the metaperson-owners—who would thereupon punish the person responsible “for failure to observe their version of the laws” (ibid.: 211). Interesting that New Guineans and Australian Aborigines, although without any native juridical institutions as such, have been quick to adapt the European term “law” to their own practices of social order. In other contexts, Robbins speaks of “the law of the ancestors,” apparently referring to the numerous taboos based on traditions of Afek that organize human social relationships. The Urapmin term here translated as “law”—awem (adj.), aweim (n.)—maps a moral domain of prohibitions based “on kinds of authority that transcend those produced simply by the actions and agreements of men” (ibid.: 211). Otherwise said, these laws are “sacredly grounded prohibitions aimed at shaping the realm of human freedom” (ibid.: 184). Given the range of social relationships and practices established by Afek, it follows that the laws were “complex” and “left everyone laboring under the burdens of at least some taboo all the time” (ibid.: 210–11). Although Urapmin boast of having been the most taboo-ridden of all Min people, it could not have been by much. Among others, the Tifalmin knew taboos that were likewise “very powerful … sustaining and interpenetrating many other normative and ethical aspects of everyday life” (Wheatcroft 1976: 170). This could be true virtually by definition, inasmuch as by following Afek’s precedents, the entire population would be ordered by taboos marking the social differences between men and women and initiatory or age-grade statuses. Negative rules predicate positive structures—and at the same time uphold them.13 sinik), inua who struck down people with disease or ruined their gardens. The last suggests that even people who adhere to Afek’s food taboos may thereby suffer the vengeance of the species-masters—that is, for killing and eating the latter’s children. As Don Gardner observed for Mianmin, since every animal has its “mother” or “father,” human mothers and children become vulnerable to an equivalent payback for what was done to the species-parent’s child. And among the Central Min, where the parent is an All-Father like Magalim, the threat is apparently constant as well as general in proportion. Brumbaugh writes of Magalim: All smells connected with women and children bring danger from Magalim. He may make women pregnant, eat an unborn child and leave one of his own, or come unseen between a couple having intercourse in the bush to give his child instead; it will then be a contest between the power of the man and the power of Magalim that determines the future of the child. (Brumbaugh 1987: 27) In Telefolmin, Urapmin, and probably elsewhere, violations of Afek’s taboos were as a rule punished occultly, without Afek’s explicit intervention. On the other hand, in Tifalmin the metaperson-powers of both the village and the bush were actively engaged in sanctioning the many taboos of “everyday life.” Often punishments emanated from the prominent ancestors whose remains were enshrined in Afek’s cult house. Alternatively, they were inflicted by the “vast congresses” of thinking and sentient animal “ghosts” (),who struck down people with disease or ruined their gardens. The last suggests that even people who adhere to Afek’s food taboos may thereby suffer the vengeance of the species-masters—that is, for killing and eating the latter’s children. As Don Gardner observed for Mianmin, since every animal has its “mother” or “father,” human mothers and children become vulnerable to an equivalent payback for what was done to the species-parent’s child. And among the Central Min, where the parent is an All-Father like Magalim, the threat is apparently constant as well as general in proportion. Brumbaugh writes of Magalim: It follows that to the extent people are socially objectified in terms of the wild foods they could or could not eat, they are in double jeopardy of suffering harm: whether magically or indirectly from Afek, mother of humans, for eating wrongly; or from the mother or father of the animal for eating it at all. Here again are “cosmic rules” of human order, enforced throughout the social territory by metaperson authorities to whom it all “belongs.” Determination by the religious basis Go to Abstract For example: Chewong and ... Why call them spirits? Social relations of peopl... Metaperson powers-that-be The cosmic polity Determination by the reli... To conclude Coda References Notes Today, Masters of land and water own the domains of water and jungle … both of whom acquired their control over these habitats at the end of mythical time. These two spirits guard their respective domains, protect them, make fertile their inhabitants, and punish those who endanger their life forces. They also cooperate as guardians of garden food. The relevant point is obviously that the inhabitants of land and water are not owned by man. (1983–84: 341) Of the South American lowland people, the Piaroa, Joanna Overing writes: Since, as a general rule, the peoples under discussion have only secondary or usufructuary rights to the resources “owned” by metaperson-others, it follows that their relations of production entail submission to these other “people like us.” In conventional terms, it could justifiably be said that the spirits own the means of production—were it not that the “spirits” so-called are real-life metapersons who in effect are the primary means-cum-agents of production. Fundamental resources—plants, animals, celestial and terrestrial features, and so on—are constituted as intentional subjects, even as many useful tools are “person-artifacts.”14 Marked thus by an intersubjective praxis, this is an “economy” without “things” as such. Not only are metahuman persons ensouled in the primary resources, they thereby govern the outcome of the productive process. As intentional beings in their own right, they are the arbiters of the success or failure of human efforts. For theirs are the life-forces—which may be hypostatized as mana, hasina, wakan, semengat, orenda, nawalak, or the like—that make people’s gardens grow, their pigs flourish, and game animals become visible and available to them. Some decades ago, Jonathan Friedman and Michael Rowlands put the matter generally for “tribal” peoples: “Economic activity in this system can only be understood as a relation between producers and the supernatural. This is because wealth and prosperity are seen as directly controlled by supernatural spirits” (1978: 207). Of course we are speaking of the people’s own notions of what there is and how it comes to be: a culturally informed reality they share with metaperson-others to whom they are subjected and indebted for life and livelihood. When faced with the assurance of Kwaio people that their prosperity is “a result of ancestral support,” Roger Keesing refrains from the temptation “to say that the sacred ancestral processes are a mystification of the real physical world,” for, “in a world where the ancestors are participants in and controlling forces of life, this conveys insights only at the cost of subjective realities” (1982: 80). But why, then, “subjective realities”? If the ancestors participate in and control the people’s everyday existence—if they are “empirical,” as Fredrik Barth might say—the demystification would shortchange the “objective” realities.15 Not to worry, however: in due course, with a few pertinent ethnographic notices in hand, I consider what scholarly good or harm would come from crediting such “determination by the religious basis.” When we bring secretly hunted marsupial species into the anawok [men’s cult house] during ceremonies, we tell the amkumiit [ancestral relics] and the pig bones [of feasts gone by], “you must take care of us and make our pigs grow fat and plentiful, and our taro immense.” As soon as we told them this, shortly afterwards we see the results in our gardens. They do just what we petitioned. (Wheatcroft 1976: 392) It is not as if the producing people had no responsibility for the economic outcome—even apart from their own knowledge and skill. The Inuit shaman explains that: “No bears have come in their season because there is no ice; and there is no ice because there is too much wind; and there is too much wind because we mortals have offended the powers” (Weyer 1932: 241). Even so, something then can be done. Around the world, the common recourse for this dependence on the metaperson agents of people’s prosperity is to pay them an appropriate tribute, as in sacrifice. Sacrifice becomes a fundamental relation of production—in the manner of taxation that secures benefits from the powers-that-be. As Marcel Mauss once put it, since spirits “are the real owners of the goods and things of this world,” it is with them that exchange is most necessary ([1925] 2016: 79). A Tifalmin man tells how it works: For all this hubris, however, the Tifalmin are not really in control. Edmund Leach notably remarked of such sacrifices that the appearance of gift and reciprocity notwithstanding, the gods don’t need gifts from the people. They could easily kill the animals themselves. What the gods require are “signs of submission” (Leach 1976: 82–93). What the gods and the ancestors have, and peoples such as the Tifalmin seek, is the life-force that makes gardens, animals, and people grow. The metahuman powers must therefore be propitiated, solicited, compensated, or otherwise respected and appeased—sometimes even tricked—as a necessary condition of human economic practice. Or as Hocart had it, based on his own ethnographic experience: “There is no religion in Fiji, only a system that in Europe has been split into religion and business.” He knew that in Fijian, the same word (cakacaka) refers indiscriminately to “work”—as in the gardens—or to “ritual”—as in the gardens. Sila Inua, the Air, and the bears themselves who make hunting successful? In a golden few pages of his recent work Beyond nature and culture (2013), Philippe Descola argues persuasively that our own common average native notion of “production” fails to adequately describe human praxis in a metahuman cosmos. Where even animals and plants are thinking things, the appropriate anthropology should be Hocartesian rather than Cartesian. Rather than a subject–object relation in which a heroic individual imposes form upon inert matter, making it come-to-be according to his or her own plan, at issue here are intersubjective relations between humans and the metaperson-others whose dispositions will be decisive for the material result. Descola can conclude from his Amazonian experience that it is “meaningless” to talk of “agricultural production” in a society where the process is enacted as interspecies kinship: Achuar women do not “produce” the plants that they cultivate: they have a personal relationship with them, speaking to each one so as to touch its soul and thereby win it over; and they nurture its growth and help it to survive the perils of life, just as a mother helps her children. (2013: 324) So why call it “production”? How can we thus credit human agency if the humans are not responsible for the outcome: if it is the ancestors according to their own inclinations who make the taro grow; or if it is, the Air, and the bears themselves who make hunting successful? In a golden few pages of his recent work(2013), Philippe Descola argues persuasively that our own common average native notion of “production” fails to adequately describe human praxis in a metahuman cosmos. Where even animals and plants are thinking things, the appropriate anthropology should be Hocartesian rather than Cartesian. Rather than a subject–object relation in which a heroic individual imposes form upon inert matter, making it come-to-be according to his or her own plan, at issue here are intersubjective relations between humans and the metaperson-others whose dispositions will be decisive for the material result. Descola can conclude from his Amazonian experience that it is “meaningless” to talk of “agricultural production” in a society where the process is enacted as interspecies kinship: Not to forget the mistress and mother of cultivated plants, Nankui, described by Descola elsewhere (1996: 192ff.): the goddess whose presence in the garden is the source of its abundance—unless she is offended and causes some catastrophic destruction. Hence the necessity for “direct, harmonious, and constant contact with Nankui,” as is successfully practiced by women who qualify as anentin, a term applied to persons with the occult knowledge and ritual skills to develop fruitful relations with the goddess. The way Simon Harrison describes the agricultural process for Manambu of the Middle Sepik (New Guinea), people do not create the crops, they receive them from their ancestral sources. “What could pass for ‘production,’” he writes, “are the spells by which the totemic ancestors are called from their villages by clan magicians to make yams abundant, fish increase, and crocodiles available for hunting” (1990: 47). For “yams are not created by gardening,” but, like all cultivated and wild foods, “they came into the phenomenal world by being ‘released’ from the mythical villages by means of ritual” (ibid.: 63). Note that this is a political economy, or, more exactly, a cosmopolitical economy, inasmuch as the human credit for the harvest goes to those who gained access to the ancestors by means of their secret knowledge—rather than the gardener who knew the right soils for yams. Of course, one may accurately say that, here as elsewhere, human technical skills, climatic conditions, and photosynthesis are responsible for the material outcome, for what actually happened; but also here as elsewhere, the decisive cultural issue, from which such specific political effects follow, is, rather, what it is that happened—namely, the clan magicians summoned the yams from the ancestral villages. Such is the human reality, the premises on which the people are acting—which are also the beginnings of anthropological wisdom. inua-owners of the wild—are the agents of human welfare: In trade and economic affairs … in campaigns of war or at great festivals, any success is seen as the result of the help of benevolent spirits. … Benevolent spirits are said to “plant our fields for us” and to “make our pigs big and fat.” … They are said to “raise the pigs.” (Strauss [1962] 1990: 148) Further ethnographic notices of the spiritual nature of the material basis are easy to come by. I close with a final one that has the added advantage of addressing the issue, raised in Harrison’s work, of human power in a cosmic polity. The site will be Melpa and their neighbors of the Hagen region. Here a variety of metahuman beings—Sky People deities (including their collective personification in “Himself, the Above”); “Great Spirits” of the major cults; the human dead, both recently deceased kin and clan ancestors; and the numerous “nature spirits” or-owners of the wild—are the agents of human welfare: The functions of these metaperson-kinds are largely redundant; many are competent to promote or endanger the well-being of the people. It will be sufficient to focus on a few critical modes of life and death from the metapersons—with a view also to their constitution of human, big-man power. inua of the wild. As recipients of frequent sacrifices, the recent dead protect their kin from accidents, illness, and ill fortune. “They will ‘make the fields and vegetable gardens for us … raise pigs for us, go ahead of us on journeys and trading trips, grant us large numbers of children … stay at our side in every way” (ibid.: 272). So likewise, on a larger scale, as when a meeting house is built for them, will the clan spirits “make our fields bring forth … our pigs multiply, protect our wives, children, and pigs from plagues and illness, keep sorcery and evil spirits at bay” (ibid.: 279). But if the gardens are planted without proper sacrifices, “the owner-spirit digs up the fruits and eats them” (Vicedom and Tischner 1943–48, 2: 677). By contrast to this constant attention, the Great Spirits of the collective cults are ceremonially celebrated only at intervals of years. On these occasions, the large number of pigs sacrificed testifies to the deities’ exceptional ability to multiply things themselves by promoting the people’s growth, fertility, and wealth. In such respects both the dead and the cult deities are particularly useful to big-men and would-be big-men, that is, as the critical sources of their human power: We rich people [i.e., big-men] live and sacrifice to the Kor Nganap [Female Great Spirit]; this enables us to make many moka [pig-exchange festivals]. Through this spirit we become rich, create many children who remain healthy and alive, and stay ourselves healthy. Our gardens bear much fruit. All this the Kor Nganap does, and that is why we sacrifice to it. (Vicedom and Tischner 1943–48, 2: 794) Whereas the Sky People originally “sent down” humans and their means of existence, it is the recent dead and clan ancestors who are most intimately and continuously responsible for the health and wealth of their descendants—though for punishing people they usually enlist the ill-intentionedof the wild. As recipients of frequent sacrifices, the recent dead protect their kin from accidents, illness, and ill fortune. “They will ‘make the fields and vegetable gardens for us … raise pigs for us, go ahead of us on journeys and trading trips, grant us large numbers of children … stay at our side in every way” (ibid.: 272). So likewise, on a larger scale, as when a meeting house is built for them, will the clan spirits “make our fields bring forth … our pigs multiply, protect our wives, children, and pigs from plagues and illness, keep sorcery and evil spirits at bay” (ibid.: 279). But if the gardens are planted without proper sacrifices, “the owner-spirit digs up the fruits and eats them” (Vicedom and Tischner 1943–48, 2: 677). By contrast to this constant attention, the Great Spirits of the collective cults are ceremonially celebrated only at intervals of years. On these occasions, the large number of pigs sacrificed testifies to the deities’ exceptional ability to multiply things themselves by promoting the people’s growth, fertility, and wealth. In such respects both the dead and the cult deities are particularly useful to big-men and would-be big-men, that is, as the critical sources of their human power: The Stratherns relate that when a big-man goes on a journey to solicit valuables, he asks his clan-ancestors to come sit on his eyelids and induce his trading partner to part with his valuables. Big-men are also helped by the ghosts of close relatives, who may be enlisted by partaking of the pig backbone cooked especially for them. The same ancestors and ghosts are with the big-man in the ceremonial ground when he makes the prestations that underwrite his fame and status (Strathern and Strathern 1968: 192). In another text, Andrew Strathern notes that traditional Hagen big-men had “a multitude of sacred and magical appurtenances which played an important part, from the people’s own perspective, in giving them the very access to wealth on which their power depended” (1993: 147). Strathern here addresses a range of leadership forms in a variety of Highland New Guinea societies—including Baruya, Duna, Simbari Anga, Kuskusmin, and Maring, as well as Melpa—to show that the “ritual sources of power” amount to a Melanesian Realpolitik: the condition of possibility of human authority, as regards both the practices by which it is achieved and the reason it is believed. All the same, we need not completely abandon historical materialism and put Hegel right-side up again, for in these big-man orders one may still speak of economic determinism—provided that the determinism is not economic. To conclude Go to Abstract For example: Chewong and ... Why call them spirits? Social relations of peopl... Metaperson powers-that-be The cosmic polity Determination by the reli... To conclude Coda References Notes To conclude: we need something like a Copernican Revolution in the sciences of society and culture. I mean a shift in perspective from human society as the center of a universe onto which it projects its own forms—that is to say, from the received Durkheimian, Marxist, and structural-functionalist conventions—to the ethnographic realities of people’s dependence on the encompassing metaperson-others who rule earthly order, welfare, and existence. For Durkheim, God was an expression of the power of society: people felt they were constrained by some power, but they knew not whence it came. But if what has been said here has any cogency, it is better to say that God is an expression of the lack of power of society. Finitude is the universal human predicament: people do not control the essential conditions of their existence. I have made this unoriginal and banal argument too many times, but if I can just say it once more: if people really controlled their own lives, they would not die, or fall sick. Nor do they govern the weather and other external forces on which their welfare depends. The life-force that makes plants and animals grow or women bear children is not their doing. And if they reify it—as mana, semengat, or the like—and attribute it to external authorities otherwise like themselves, this is not altogether a false consciousness, though it may be an unhappy one. Vitality and mortality do come from elsewhere, from forces beyond human society, even as they evidently take some interest in our existence. They must be, as Chewong say, “people like us.” How to account for the coexistence of, on one hand, a “loosely structured” organization (few social categories, absence of global segmentation, weak institutionalization of interpersonal relations, lack of differentiation between public and domestic spheres) with, on the other hand, an extensive taxonomy of the spirit world … an active presence of that world in daily life, and a thoroughly vertical “gothic” orientation of thought … ? Societies such as the Araweté reveal how utterly trivial any attempts are to establish functional consistencies or forced correspondences between morphology and cosmology or between institution and representation. (1992: 2–3) But so far as the relation between the cosmic authorities and the human social order goes, in both morphology and potency there is no equivalence between them. As I have tried to show, especially by egalitarian and chiefless societies, neither in structure nor in practice do they match the powers above and around them. Among these societies there are no human authorities the likes of Sedna, Sila, Ungud, the Original Snake, Afek, Magalim, Nankui, or the New Guinea Sky People. 16 What Viveiros de Castro says in this regard to the Araweté and Tupi Guarani peoples generally can be widely duplicated among the classically “acephalous” societies: Even apart from the numerous malevolent, shape-shifting beings with superhuman powers of afflicting people with all kinds of suffering, Viveiros de Castro describes a society of immortal gods in heaven without equal on earth, who make people’s foods and devour their souls, who are capable of elevating the sky and resurrecting the dead, gods who are “extraordinary, splendid but also dreadful, weird—in a word, awesome” (ibid.: 69).17 But they do have shamans, precisely of similar powers (ibid.: 64)—as do many other such societies. Even where there are no chiefs, there are often some human authorities: big-men, great-men, guardian magicians, warriors, elders. Yet, given the basis of their authority, these personages are so many exceptions that prove the rule of domination by metaperson powers-that-be; for, like Inuit shamans or Hagen big-men, their own ability to command others is conveyed by their service to or enlistment of just such metaperson-others. Indeed, as Vicedom and Tischner write of Hageners: “Any manifestation of power in people or things is ascribed to supernatural or hidden power,” whether in the form of good harvests, many children, success in trade, or a respected position in the community (1943–48, 1: 43). In insightful discussions of the Piaroa of the Orinoco region, Joanna Overing (1983–84, 1989) notes that human life-giving powers were not their own, but were magically transmitted to individuals from the gods by tribal leaders. By means of powerful chants, the ruwang, the tribal leader, was uniquely able to travel to the lands of the gods, whence he brought the forces for productivity enclosed within “beads of life” and placed them in the people of his community. Overing points out that this is no political economy in the sense that tribal leaders control the labor of others. But as they absorbed more divine powers than others, they were responsible for building the community: “Without the work of the ruwang, the community could not be created, and because of his greater creative power, he was also the most productive member of the community” (1989: 172). In such cultural-ontological regimes, where every variety of human social success is thus attributed to metapersonal powers, there are no purely secular authorities. Roger Keesing relates of an ambitious young Kwaio man that he is well on his way to big-manship, as evidenced by his staggering command of genealogies, his encyclopedic knowledge of traditions of the ancestors and their feuds, his distinction as a singer of epic chants, and his acquisition of magical powers. Accordingly, he is “not only acquiring an intellectual command of his culture, but powerful instruments for pursuing secular ambitions as a feast-giver” (Keesing 1982: 208). Or for an Australian Aboriginal example: Helmut Petri concludes that the reason certain Ungarinyin “medicine men” and elders are leading and influential men of their communities is that they “are regarded as people in whom primeval times are especially alive, in whom the great heroes and culture-bringers are repeated and who maintain an inner link between mythical past and present” ([1954] 2011: 69). Not that those who so possess or are favored by divine powers are necessarily placed beyond the control of their fellows, for popular pressures may be put on them to use such powers beneficently. Here is where the famous “egalitarianism” of these peoples becomes relevant. Tony Swain (1993: 52) notes that the native Australian elders’ shared being with the land entails the obligation to make it abound with life—a duty the people will hold them to. Swain is careful to insist that the leaders’ access to ritual positions amounts to a certain control of “the means of production,” hence that this is not the kind of communalistic, nonhierarchical society “imagined by early Marxists.” But then, ordinary people, without direct access to metapersonal sources of fertility, “can and do order ritual custodians to ‘work’ to make them food: ‘You mak’em father—I want to eat.’” All of which brings us back to the issue of mystification. Earlier, I warned against too quickly writing off the human dependence on gods, ancestors, ghosts, or even seal-persons as so much mistaken fantasy. Well, nobody nowadays is going to attribute these notions to a “primitive mentality.” And from all that has been said here, it cannot be claimed these beliefs in “spirits” amount to an ideological chimera perpetrated by the ruling class in the interest of maintaining their power—that is, on the Voltairean principle of “There is no God, but don’t tell the servants.” Here we do have gods, but no ruling class. And what we also distinctively find in these societies is the coexistence in the same social reality of humans with metahumans who have life-giving and death-dealing powers over them. The implications, as I say, look to be world-historical. As is true of big-men or shamans, access to the metaperson authorities on behalf of others is the fundamental political value in all human societies so organized. Access on one’s own behalf is usually sorcery, but to bestow the life-powers of the god on others is to be a god among men. Human political power is the usurpation of divine power. This is also to say that claims to divine power, as manifest in ways varying from the successful hunter sharing food or the shaman curing illness, to the African king bringing rain, have been the raison d’être of political power throughout the greater part of human history. Including chiefdoms such as Kwakiutl, where, The chiefs are the assemblers, the concentrators, and the managers of supernatural powers. … The human chiefs go out to alien realms and deal with alien beings to accumulate nawalak [generic life-giving power], and to concentrate it in the ceremonial house. When they have become centers of nawalak the salmon come to them. The power to draw salmon is equated with the power to draw people. The power to attract derives from nawalak and demonstrates its possession. (Goldman 1975: 198–99) It was not military power or economic prowess as such that generated the dominance of the Abelam people over the various other Sepik communities of New Guinea eager to adopt Abelam cultural forms; rather it was the “supernatural power” that their successes signified. “Effectiveness in warfare and skill in growing yams, particularly the phallic long yams,” Anthony Forge (1990: 162) explains, “were in local terms merely the material manifestations of a more fundamental Abelam domination, that of power conceived essentially in magical and ritual terms.” What enabled the Abelam yams to grow larger, their gardens to be more productive, and their occupation of land once held by others was their “superior access to supernatural power.” Accordingly, the political-cum-cultural reach of the Abelam extended beyond their actual grasp. Beyond any real-political or material constraints, the Abelam were admired and feared for their superior access to cosmic power in all |
To be fair, they did keep it a secret, offering it as a surprise free download on the site Bandcamp (but seriously, who does that?!). When a legendary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group whose first album turned 30 earlier this year releases a brand new one in 2017, it should be cause for celebration, right? After all, how many other Hall of Fame acts whose careers began that long ago are still releasing albums on a regular basis, i.e., every couple of years or so? And when that RRHoF group is a black hip-hop act who was among the first of its genre to be included in music’s hallowed Hall, and that group still has its core membership, you’d think the music world would be in jubilee reveling in the moment. At least, it should be. But in 2017, the legendary hip-hop group Public Enemy, whose new album Nothing’s Quick in the Desert was released in late June and available as a free download on the group’s Bandcamp through July 4, is about as relevant today as other ’80s relics like the Rubik’s Cube or worse, those Cabbage Patch dolls. As case in point, PE hasn’t reached the American album charts since 2006 and hasn’t placed in the top half of the Billboard 200 since 1994 (when Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age reached No. 14). Given its limited availability and untraditional release structure, Nothing’s Quick will likely follow the path of the band’s recent albums and miss the Billboard charts altogether. And that’s sad, especially considering how good the album is. Radio certainly won’t play PE (although, admittedly, outside of “Fight The Power” and “Can’t Truss It,” it rarely ever did), the new album isn’t being carried on major streaming services (again, admittedly, by their own doing… I was only able to find the album on YouTube where it’s been uploaded by several users), and the group is, well… considered old by today’s standards. (And since I’m on a roll with admissions, so am I, lest I wouldn’t even be covering PE). Most likely it’s that last fact – their age – that contributes to their near-forgotten status in today’s hip-hop universe. The three longest-tenured (and principal) members of PE – Chuck D, Flava Flav and Professor Griff – are all north of their 55th birthdays. Both Chuck D and Flav will be 60 before this decade is over. Yet, they charge on with the same hard-hitting, confrontational and unapologetically progressive political messages that their music has always contained – and with no less power than they ever did. In fact, they pull few punches when it comes to the ever-popular and most convenient punching bag that is POTUS #45. The problem isn’t PE’s message – which is just as relevant today, if not more so – than it was in say, 1989. It’s who’s delivering it – and the hip-hop and political landscape in which it’s now being played out. Counterculture and rebellion – the two main tenets of PE’s vast music catalogue (including the current album) have always been a young man’s domain. When Chuck D was spitting knowledge in the late 1980s and early ’90s – and forging his group’s Rock Hall of Fame career along the way – he was still approaching his 30s and the group’s hard-hitting themes were new to the mainstream. America – and black American youth in particular – had never heard its plight spoken so directly and forcefully when PE first hit with classics like “Rebel Without a Pause,” “Don’t Believe the Hype” and “Fight the Power.” Those vibes exist on the new album in songs like “Toxic,” where Chuck D. equates #45’s antics to “ballin’,” while average citizens (presumably poor white people included) suffer. Another example of this is the song, “sPEak,” a rock and funk-infused call-to-arms for resistance against oppression and one of the album’s best tracks. Yet, on Nothing’s Quick, when PE waxes political and rails against the current president, it’s from a perspective that no longer seems limited to a singularly oppressed race of people. Trump’s America is one that equally offends many (including some of those whose votes he garnered, whether they know it or not). For that reason, PE’s messages, which have already been voiced by others in many protests and resistance movements around the world, no longer seem groundbreaking. Yet, while it’s clear that PE is not forging any new ground with Nothing’s Quick, whether it’s because their sermon is rehashed from ones they already delivered decades ago, or because there’s a new crop of rappers with whom today’s music consumers primarily identify that are singing similar tunes, PE’s method is still unique. When Chuck D. says, “can a song save the world in this time of 45?” in the tune “Toxic,” you’d swear you’ve heard Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole or Chance the Rapper say something similar on their most recent albums. But PE’s words come across grittier – no doubt helped by the musical styles they use throughout the album. In fact, the major difference between PE and today’s hip-hop artists is their music. Public Enemy’s rhymes are mostly delivered over rock and funk tracks – sometimes both in the same song – and old-school hip-hop drum beats, with the group’s DJ Lord scratching on the turntables. There isn’t a trap beat among the 13 songs that make up Nothing’s Quick. True to its Rock Hall of Fame inclusion (and with Chuck D’s and DJ Lord’s still-active liaison with members of Rage Against the Machine for the super hip-hop/rock group Profits of Rage), PE had become somewhat of a rock-rap hybrid itself. Musically, that’s a blessing to older hip-hop heads (like myself) who’ve grown weary of the incessantly monotonous beats that inhabit the latest hits by today’s rap superstars like Future, Migos and other trap and mumble rap artists. But sales-wise that will likely be a curse to PE (assuming the album is made more commercially available in the coming weeks). Today’s kids want to party and bop their heads to every half-beat that punctuates today’s hip-pop, not be sonically tantalized by the stellar tempo changes that PE uses to great effect in songs like “Yesterday Man” or “Sells Like Teen’s Hear It.” Speaking of those two songs, both those tunes acknowledge the PE guys’ old-man status. Yet, while “Yesterday Man” serves as a reminder to the young cats that PE has been doing this since some of them were still in diapers (if they were even born), “Sells Like Teens Hear It” takes a more conciliatory approach – particularly to mumble rap – with the refrain: “I’m not that old-head who be side-line booing what my generation calls mumble, go to it. Listen to it closer as you get near it, smells and sells like teens hear it.” The message there being that older generation rappers were equally criticized by “adults” for the trendiness that had teenagers buying their records decades before. And if one takes the time to really listen, there’s a nugget in there somewhere. It’s a message that is consistent with what Chuck D. said in a trade press interview was the meaning behind the album’s title, with the “desert” representing the music industry and the notion that the industry is still thriving – it just needs redefining. That being said, all in all Nothing’s Quick in the Desert offers nothing terribly new. It still has the revolution-inciting tunes (“So Be It”), the Afrocentrism (“Exit Your Mind”) and socially conscious wake-up calls (the title track and many others). But it’s nonetheless a great collection of new tracks from an old familiar RRHOF group who have just as much to say now as they did in 1987. The only difference is that their audience, oddly enough, is much smaller today – despite their messages being more relevant now than they were 30 years ago…even if the group itself isn’t. It must be due to their senior-citizen status, which in hip-hop and counterculture is a no-go. Or maybe it’s because PE took themselves out of the corporate promotion game many moons ago. How else could you explain that an outfit of Public Enemy’s caliber can release a new album and it go relatively unnoticed? DJRob Best tracks on Nothing’s Quick in the Desert: “sPEak” “Sells Like Teens Hear It” “So Be It” “Rest in Beats” (a tribute to the many fallen hip-hop legends and other artists who’ve passed) “SOC MED Digital Heroin” (addresses the millennial age and our addiction to social media) PS: Click the YouTube clip below to get a listen to the entire album, or go to YouTube where you can enjoy the album’s tracks individually. Advertisements Like this: Like Loading... |
The Dog body pillow is a life-sized Labrador that acts as a body pillow, and is a creepy replacement for lonely people that don't want or can't have a real dog, although it's not quite as creepy as the Muscular Arm Body Pillow, or the Fake Girlfriend Body Pillow. Take solace in knowing your watch dog will protect you during the night while you straddle and scissor him, dreaming about finding someone that will finally love you back. The Labrador body pillow is made from super soft and dense poly-acrylic fur, features realistic dog-like features, and has bean sacks sewn into the paws and the mid-section to add realistic weight. The pillow measures 45 inches long, comes in white, brown, and black colors, and even comes in different animals such as an elephant body pillow, a bear, a panda, or a polar bear to assist you in your terrible sleeping habits. |
January 31st, 2012 Ross Wolfe Platypus Review 43 | February 2012 [PDF] On December 16, 2011, Ross Wolfe interviewed David Graeber, Reader at Goldsmiths College in London, author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), and central figure in the early stages of the #Occupy Wall Street Movement. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. Ross Wolfe: There are striking similarities between the #Occupy movement and the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle. Both began in the last year of a Democratic presidency, were spearheaded by anarchists, motivated by discontents with neo-liberalism, and received the support of organized labor. As an active participant in both the anti/alter-globalization and the #Occupy movements, to what extent would you say that #Occupy is a continuation of the project inaugurated at Seattle? What, if anything, makes this movement different? David Graeber: I think a lot of the people involved in the globalization movement, myself included, felt this was a continuation of our efforts, because we never really felt the globalization movement had come to an end. We’d smash our heads against the wall every year, saying “Oh yes, this time we’re really back. Oh wait, maybe not.” A lot of us gradually began to lose hope that it was really going to bounce back in the way we always thought we knew it would. And then it happened, as a combination of tactics of trying to create prefigurative models of what a democratic society would be like, as a way of organizing protest or actions that were directed against an obviously undemocratic structure of governance. At the same time, I think one reason why the tactics seem appropriate in either case is because, in a way, we’re talking about two rounds of the same cycle of really the same debt crisis. One could make the argument that the world has been in one form of debt crisis or another since the seventies, and that for most of that time, the crisis was fobbed off onto the global South, and to a certain degree held off from the North Atlantic, countries and places with the most powerful economies, which more or less use credit as a way of staving off popular unrest. The global justice movement ultimately was a quite successful form of popular uprising against neoliberal orthodoxy, Washington Consensus, and the tyranny of the debt enforcers like the IMF and the World Bank. It was officially so successful that the IMF itself was expelled from large parts of the world. It simply can’t operate at all in many spaces within Latin America anymore. And it eventually came home. So it’s the same process: declaring some kind of financial crisis which the capitalists themselves are responsible for, and demanding the replacement of what are termed “neutral technocrats” of one type or other, who are in fact schooled in this kind of neoliberal orthodoxy, who’ve been in the economy for wholesale plunder on the part of financial elites. And because #Occupy is reacting to the same thing as the Global Justice Movement, it’s not surprising that the reaction takes the same form: a movement for direct democracy, prefigurative politics, and direct action. In each case, what they’re saying is that the tools of government and the administration are inherently corrupt and unaccountable. RW: Against the malaise that followed from the dissolution of the anti/alter-globalization movement after 9/11, you argued that the primary reason for its eventual defeat was that it did not know how to handle the shock of its early victories, its participants had become “dizzy with success” along the way. “[O]ne reason it was so easy for [the global justice movement] to collapse, was…that once again, in most of our immediate objectives, we’d already, unexpectedly, won.”[1] In other words, for you the path to defeat was largely paved by victory. In an uncanny way, this appears to mirror, albeit from the opposite direction, Karl Marx’s counter-intuitive understanding of June 1848. Marx wrote that “only the June defeat has created all the conditions under which France can seize the initiative of the European revolution. Only after being dipped in the blood of the June insurgents did the tricoleur become the flag of the European revolution—the red flag!”[2] For Marx, then, the path toward victory was seen to be paved by defeat. How, if at all, are these two seemingly opposite views related? Do they mutually exclude one another, or are they perhaps complementary? Is it proper or even possible to speak of a “dialectics of defeat”?[3] DG: That’s an interesting analogy. One would have to ask: “Was Marx right?” He said that defeat was necessary for the ultimate victory, but it’s not clear that that victory ultimately did occur. It’s certainly true that certain sorts of defeat can be mythologized, and may turn into victory, or things that seem like defeats on the field are in fact victories that you didn’t realize you had. I think that happens quite regularly in revolutionary history. In a way, tactical defeat is almost randomly related to strategic victory. There’s no predictable pattern, kind of like Immanuel Wallerstein’s idea of the series of world revolutions starting with the French revolution, the world revolution of 1848, which didn’t achieve tactical victory anywhere, but radically transformed the way governments operated in Europe. That’s where you get universal education, redistricting, etc. RW: The French Revolution even failed internally, insofar as it was turned into an empire by Napoleon. But it still helped spread the nationalist and liberal/republican ethos. DG: Absolutely. There were institutional, concrete forms that came out of that that have remained with us ever since. Same thing with 1917: It only was successful in Russia, but it had almost as much of an effect on other countries as it did at home. Nothing was the same afterwards. Basically, Wallerstein argues that 1968 was a similar revolutionary moment, sort of along the lines of 1848. He’s now talking about the world revolution of 2011. But it really isn’t clear which model this is going to resemble. This made me think of what neoliberalism is really about: It’s a political movement much more than it is an economic movement, which is a reaction to those series of victories won by social movements in the sixties, whether the anti-war movements, feminism, the counterculture, and so on. That became a kind of a sanction, in achieving political victory by preventing any social movement from feeling that it had been successful in challenging capitalism in any great, empowered way, or providing any sort of viable alternative. So it became a propaganda war that was continually hierarchized, over creating an actually viable capitalist system. The way the Iraq War was conducted is another great example of that. It’s very clear that the real obsession on the part of the people planning the war was to overcome what they called “the Vietnam syndrome,” i.e., the wave of anti-war demonstrations in the sixties that had really prevented the U.S. from deploying large ground forces in any kind of major land war for 30 years. In order to get over that, they needed to fight the war in a way that would prevent widespread opposition and resistance at home. What they calculated was that “body count is everything,” therefore they had to create rules of engagement such that few enough American soldiers would die that there would be no mass uproar in the form of an anti-war movement. Of course, in order to do that, their rules of engagement meant that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians died, which in turn pretty much ensured they couldn’t win the war. But it seemed more important to them to prevent the anti-war movement than to win the war. Of course, the anti-war movement of the last decade was put in a terrible situation by the attacks of 9/11, an attack on U.S. soil on a scale that hadn’t ever happened. Now, it’s also true that there’s a pattern where 9/11 came at a very opportune moment, and had it not been for that attack, they probably would have tried to come up with some other excuse for an overseas war. Because it seems that when you finally see a grassroots political movement, whether it’s the civil rights movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the global justice movement, or any kind of glimmering, that is what happens. The remarkable thing to me is how immediately the ruling class panicked and felt that they had to make massive concessions and invariably seem to commence some sort of overseas war. It seems like they’ve trapped themselves in something like a box. It’s clear that we’ve got a situation here in America, but it’s not really clear who they’re going to attack, or who they could attack overseas. RW: One of the central debates within #OWS is over the degree to which the movement remains ideologically inclusive and open to all. From early on, the demonstrations at Liberty Plaza drew a number of neoliberal ideologues: Ron Paul supporters, Tea Partiers, and right-wing conspiracy theorists. While their visibility within the movement has perhaps diminished in recent weeks, they remain an undeniable, if marginal, presence at #Occupy events. Some have rejected the very idea of being placed along the political spectrum of “left” and “right,” as they both consider these categories to be too constrictive and fear that identification with one or the other risks alienating potential supporters. Would you say the language of “right” and “left” still has any utility with respect to #Occupy Wall Street? Does #Occupy represent a new popular movement on the Left? DG: There is an unfortunate tendency to identify “the Left” not as a set of ideals or ideas but of institutional structures. A lot of individualists, anarchists, insurrectionists, and primitivists see the Left as the various leftist political parties, labor unions, what we would generally call “the verticals,” and I can see why one would feel rather chary about wanting to identify himself with these. But at the same time, we’ve been hearing at least since the end of World War II that the difference between right and left is no longer relevant. It’s something that’s said about every five years in making some great pronouncement. And the fact that they have to keep doing it so regularly shows that it isn’t true. It’s sort of the way that people keep making these grand declarations that the whole narrative of progress is gone. They make that about once every generation. But why would they have to announce this every generation if it was actually gone? So I think that these concepts remain. The Tea Party was also claiming that they weren’t a right-wing group and that they were a broad populist rejection of the structure of the existing political order, in the same way that people want to see #Occupy Wall Street. But one is a very right-wing populist rejection, while the #Occupy movement is inspired by left-wing principles. And a lot of it has to do not even with one’s attitude towards market economics but corporate capitalism. It has this utopian ideal about what capitalism should be, which is actually far more utopian than any conception of what socialism, or whatever else would exist for the Left, would be. So the ultimate utopias of the Tea Party and #Occupy are profoundly different, which indicates a difference in their basic orientations. And #Occupy Wall Street is, in the end, anti-hierarchical. And I think that’s the key. The Right is not, in the end, anti-hierarchical. They want to limit certain types of hierarchy, and promote other types, but they are not ultimately an egalitarian movement. So I think that ignoring that broad left legacy is kind of silly. It strikes me as patently dishonest. I understand that it is sometimes tactically useful to throw as broad a net as possible, because there actually is a lot of common ground. Many right-wing populists have certain sincere objections to, for example, the monopolization of culture, or the fact that there is objectively a cultural elite. A certain social class monopolizes those jobs whereby you get to engage or pursue forms of value that aren’t all about money. The working classes have an overwhelming hatred of the cultural elite and a celebration of the army, to support our troops. It comes down to the fact that if you come from a working-class background, you have a very slim chance of becoming a successful capitalist, but there’s really no possibility that you could become a drama critic for The New York Times. I think it would be wonderful if we could find a way to appeal to such people in a way that wouldn’t be patronizing. But still, rejecting this split between the Right and the Left entirely, strikes me as going in completely the wrong direction. What we have is this terrible synthesis of the market and bureaucracy which has taken over every aspect of our lives. Yet only the Right has a critique of bureaucracy. It’s a really simple-minded critique, but the Left really doesn’t have one at all. RW: Some have characterized the #Occupy movement as sounding the alarm for “class war.” They cite the now-ubiquitous #Occupy Wall Street motto, “We are the 99%!” as evidence of this fact. As the ostensible originator of this slogan, do you believe that #Occupy Wall Street is an outward manifestation of the latent class struggle underlying civil society? Whatever its rhetorical effect, does this metric provide an adequate framework for the analysis of class struggle? DG: I don’t think of it as an analysis so much as an illustration. It’s a way of opening a window on inequality. Of course, a slogan doesn’t ever answer the real structural question of how social classes get reproduced. What a slogan does is point you to how you can start thinking about a problem that you might not have even known existed. It’s been remarkably effective at that, for two reasons: one, because it points out just how small the group of people who have been the beneficiaries of the economic growth, of our productivity has been. They basically grabbed everything. Also, the slogan has successfully made #Occupy inclusive in a way that other social movements have had trouble with before. So I think that’s what was effective about it. Obviously there are infinite shades of difference between us, and class is a much more complicated thing than just the fact there is a certain group of people that is super rich or has a lot of political power. But nonetheless, it provides people with a way to start talking to each other about what they have in common, thus providing the form in which the other things can come to be addressed. You have to start with what you have in common. And that’s one thing we’ve had a really hard time doing up till now. RW: Most within the #Occupy movement recognize the raw fact of dramatic social inequality, but disagree over the method to pursue in looking to resolve this problem. Many hope that #Occupy will provide the grassroots political momentum necessary to pass a set of economic reforms, which typically would come by way of legislation passed through the existing channels of government. Others see #Occupy as potentially revolutionary, as pointing to something beyond the merely “economic.” These two perspectives seem to indicate radically different directions this movement might take. Would you characterize this movement as “anti-capitalist”? Should it be? If so, what is the nature of its “anti-capitalist” politics? DG: I’ll start by saying that the people who were originally involved in the creation of #Occupy were overwhelmingly anti-capitalist, very explicitly. Whether we thought we were going to be able to overthrow capitalism in one go, well, obviously no. We’re working toward that as an ultimate goal. That’s why it’s key to have an effect that will genuinely benefit people’s lives. #Occupy certainly doesn’t contradict that revolutionary impulse, and helps move us in a direction towards greater freedom and autonomy, by which I mean freedom from the structures of both the state and capitalism. Now, to create broad alliances along those lines, you’d have to be very careful about your organizational and institutional structures. Because one of the things that is revolutionary about the #Occupy movement is that it’s trying to create prefigurative spaces in which we can experiment and create the kind of institutional structures that would exist in a society that’s free of the state and capitalism. We hope to use those to create a kind of crisis of legitimacy within existing institutions. Of course, I can only speak for myself. But most of the people I was working with, who were putting the vision together, had this belief in common: that the great advantage we had was that people across the political spectrum in America shared a profound revulsion with the existing political system, which they recognize to be a system of institutionalized bribery that has very little to do with anything that could be meaningfully called democracy. Money clearly controls every aspect of the political system. Thus, we would only had to delegitimate a system that has already almost entirely delegitimated itself. We adopted what amounts to a “dual power strategy.” By creating autonomous institutions that represent what a real democracy might be like, we could provoke a situation for a mass delegitimation of existing institutions of power. Obviously, the ones that are the most violent are the hardest to delegitimate. In American society, for various ideological reasons, people hate politicians, but they have been trained to identify with the army and police to a degree that is hardly true anywhere else in the world. There’s been relentless propaganda to create sympathies for soldiers and policemen, ever since the cowboy movie turned into the cop movie. I think that it would be a terrible mistake to go from these prefigurative structures to running some sort of political candidate. But even the idea of turning into a lobbying group pursuing a specific reformist agenda is wrongheaded. The moment you engage with a system, you’re not only legitimating it, you’re delegitimating yourself, because your own internal politics become warped. Even accepting money has pernicious effects. But the moment you’re interfacing with vertically organized structures of power, which are ultimately based on coercion, it poisons everything. By actively delegitimating the structure, we are in a position, perhaps as a side effect of our actions, to create the forms that will actually be of the most benefit to ordinary people. RW: One division that emerged early on among the occupants concerned the need to call for demands. You have in the past rejected the idea of politics as policy-making, feeling that demands focused on electoral reform or market regulations would only steer the movement in a conservative direction. If not demands, what kind of “visions and solutions,” as you’ve put it, do you think the #Occupy movement should provide? DG: There is a profound ambiguity in the language of protest politics. I always point to the grammar of signs or slogan. Someone says “Free Mumia” or “Save the whales.” But who are you asking to do that? Are you talking about pressuring the entire system do so? Or are you calling on us as a collectivity to pressure them to do so? So yes, one could make the argument that the distinction between “visions,” “demands,” and “solutions” is somewhat arbitrary. When we were first putting together the idea for #Occupy Wall Street, there were some who argued that we could make a series of demands that are part of the delegitimation process, by making demands for things that are obviously commonsensical and reasonable, but which they would never in a million years even consider doing. So it would not be an attempt to achieve the demands, but rather it would be a further way to de-structure the authority, which would be shown to be utterly useless when it came to providing what the people need. What we’re really talking about here is rhetorical strategies, not strategies of government, because #Occupy Wall Street does not claim to take control of the instruments of power, nor does it intend to. In terms of long-term visions, one of our major objectives has already been achieved to a degree which we never imagined it could have been. Our goal was to spread a certain notion of direct democracy, of how democracy could work. For spreading the idea, the occupation of public space was very fruitful. It was a way of saying, “We are the public. Who could possibly keep us out of our space?” They adopted a Gandhian strategy. By being studiously non-violent, a group of people who couldn’t possibly pose a threat to anyone might bring out how much the state is willing to react with extreme violence. Of course, the problem with the Gandhian strategy has always been that you need the press to cover it that way. One reason the window-breaking in Seattle happened was that a majority of the people involved had been forest activists who had previously used exclusively Gandhian tactics — tree-sitting, chaining themselves to equipment to prevent the destruction of old-growth forests, etc. The police reaction was to use weaponized torture devices. So these activists had decided that Gandhian tactics don’t work; they had to try something else. Now suddenly the Gandhian approach has been relatively successful. There has been this window, and it’s interesting to ask yourself: “Why?” RW: One of the tropes of #Occupy Liberty Plaza was that its participants were working together to build a small-scale model what an emancipated society of the future might look like. This line of reasoning posits a very intimate connection between ethics (changing oneself) and politics (changing the world). Yet it is not difficult to see that most of the services provided at Liberty Plaza were still dependent on funding received from donations, which in turn came from the society of exchange: Capitalism. Since the means for the provision of these services can be viewed as parasitic upon the capitalist totality, does this in any way complicate or compromise the legitimacy of such allegedly prefigurative communities? DG: I think the “capitalist totality” only exists in our imagination. I don’t think there is a capitalist totality. I think there’s capital, which is extraordinarily powerful, and represents a certain logic that is actually parasitic upon a million other social relations, without which it couldn’t exist. I think Marx veered back and forth on this score himself. He did, of course, support the Paris Commune. He claimed that it was communism in action. So Marx wasn’t against all experimental, prefigurative forms. He did say that the self-organization of the working class was “the motion of communism.” One could make the argument, if you wanted to take the best aspects of Marx (though I think he was deeply ambivalent on this issue, actually) that he did accept the notion that certain forms of opposition could be acted out prefiguratively. On the other hand, it’s certainly true that he did have profound arguments with the anarchists on this matter, when it came to practice. I think that the real problem is Marx’s Hegelianism. The totalizing aspect of Hegel’s legacy is rather pernicious. One of the extremely important disagreements between Bakunin and Marx had to do with the proletariat, especially its most advanced sections, as the necessary agent of revolution, versus the peasants, the craftsmen, or the recently proletarianized. Marx’s basic argument was that within the totality of capitalism, the proletariat are the only ones who are absolutely negated and who can only liberate themselves through the absolute negation of the system. Everyone else is some kind of “petit-bourgeois.” Once you’re stuck with the idea of absolute negation, that opens the door to a number of quite dangerous conclusions. There is the danger of saying that all forms of morality are thrown out the window as no longer relevant. You no longer know what form of morality will work in a non-bourgeois society, thus justifying a lot of things that really can’t be justified. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s much more sensible to argue that all social and political possibilities exist simultaneously. Just because certain forms of cooperation are only made possible through the operation of capitalism, that consumer goods are capitalist, or that techniques of production are capitalist, no more makes them parasitical upon capitalism than the fact that factories can operate without governments. Some cooperation and consumer goods makes them socialist. There are multiple, contradictory logics of exchange, logics of action, and cooperative logics existing at all times. They are embedded in one another, in mutual contradiction, constantly in tension. As a result, there is a base from which one can make a critique of capitalism even at the same time that capitalism constantly subsumes all those alternatives to it. It’s not like everything we do corresponds to a logic of capitalism. There are those who’ve argued that only 30–40% of what we do is subsumed under the logic of capitalism. Communism already exists in our intimate relations with each other on a million different levels, so it’s a question of gradually expanding that and ultimately destroying the power of capital, rather than this idea of absolute negation that plunges us into some great unknown. RW: The version of anarchism that you subscribe to stresses this relationship of means to ends. You’ve written that “[anarchism] insists, before anything else, that one’s means must be consonant with one’s ends; one cannot create freedom through authoritarian means; in fact, as much as possible, one must oneself, in one’s relations with one’s friends and allies, embody the society one wishes to create.”[4] It seems that you tend to endorse a “diversity of tactics” approach to direct action. If one insists upon a strict identity of means and ends, might not a violent course of action violate the principle of attaining a non-violent society? DG: The idea of the identity of means and ends particularly applies to the way revolutionaries deal with one another. You have to make your own relations with your fellow comrades, to be an embodiment of the world you wish to create. Obviously, you don’t have the liberty to make your relationship with the capitalists or the police into an embodiment of the world you wish to create. In fact, what I’ve found ethnographically is that this boundary has to be very clearly maintained. People used to criticize the global justice movement because it would use terms like “evil,” but really what that word indicated was a borderline. There are certain institutions that we can at least deal with, because they’re not fundamentally inimical to what we’re trying to do. There are others that are irredeemable. You just can’t talk to them. That’s why we refused to deal with the WTO. “Evil” meant, “we can’t extend that prefigurative logic to them.” When dealing with people who are “in” the circle of our prefigurative practice, you have to assume everyone has good intentions. You give them the benefit of the doubt. Just as (and this is another anarchist principle) there’s no way better to have someone act like a child than to treat him as a child, the only way to have someone act like an adult is to treat him as an adult. So you give them the benefit of the doubt in that regard, as well-intentioned and honest. But you have to have a cutoff point. Now, what happens at that cutoff is where all the debate takes place. What would one do in a free society if he saw people behaving in ways that were terribly irresponsible and destructive? RW: While the democratic ideology it represents has certainly helped popularize the #Occupy movement, many have complained that within the consensus decision-making model, process ultimately becomes fetishized. The entire affair can be massively alienating, as those with the greatest endurance or the most leisure time can exert an inordinate amount of influence the decision-making process. Another perceived problem with consensus decision-making is that only the most timid, tentative, or lukewarm proposals end up getting passed. Either that, or only extremely vague pronouncements against “greed” or “injustice” get passed, precisely because the meaning of these terms remains underdefined. The structure of consensus, passing proposals that most people agree upon already, tends to favor the most unambitious ideas, and seems to me an inherently conservative approach. Do these criticisms have any legitimacy with regard to the #Occupy movement? DG: You can’t create a democracy out of nothing without there being a lot of kinks. Societies that have been doing this over the long term have come up with solutions to these problems. That’s why I like to talk about the example of Madagascar, where the state broke down, but you couldn’t even really tell. People carried on as they had before, because they were used to making decisions by consensus. They’d been doing it for a thousand years. At the moment they have a military government. But in terms of the day-to-day operation of everyday life in a small community, everything’s done democratically. It’s a remarkable contrast to our own society, ostensibly more democratic in terms of our larger structures. When was the last time a group of twenty Americans (outside of #OWS) sat down and made a collective decision in an equal way? Yes, you’re right: you’ll only get broad and tepid solutions if you bring everything to the General Assembly. That’s why we have working groups, empower them to perform actions, and encourage them to form spontaneously. This is another of the key principles in dealing with consensus and decentralization. In an ideal world, the very unwieldiness of finding consensus in a large group should convince people not to bring decisions before this large group unless they absolutely have to. That’s actually the way it’s supposed to work out. RW: To what extent do you think that the goal of politics should be freedom from the necessity of politics? Is ethics even possible in a world that hasn’t been changed? Theodor Adorno remarked in Minima Moralia that “the wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” In other words, can we even speak of ethics in the Aristotelian sense of the good life within the totality of the wrong? Or would this require a prior political transformation? DG: I think that kind of totalizing logic ends up requiring a total rupture. Perhaps after the revolution we can imagine a rupture, whereby we now live in a totally different society, but we all know it’s not going to happen through a total rupture. And if you really adopt that Hegelian logic, it begins to seem as if it’s not possible at all. It almost necessarily leads to profoundly tragic conclusions and extremely quietist politics, as indeed it did with the Frankfurt School. I don’t think that politics can be eliminated. And just as the perfect life cannot be achieved, the process of moving toward it is the good life. I think that in terms of ethics that is the case. I can’t imagine a world in which we aren’t revolutionary ourselves, and revolutionizing our relations with one another, and revolutionizing our understanding of what is possible. That doesn’t mean that we will not someday—perhaps someday soon, hopefully—achieve a world whereby the problems we have today will be the sort of things to scare children with stories of them. But that doesn’t mean we’ll ever overcome the need to revolutionize ourselves. And the process by which that comes about is the good life. RW: So does the movement itself become the goal? Must this process become an end-in-itself? DG: It has to be. I mean, what else is there to life? |P 1. David Graeber, “The Shock of Victory,” in Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (New York: Minor Compositions, 2010), 17.↑ 2. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1851, in Collected Works, Volume 10: 1849–1851 (New York: International Publishers, 1977), 70. Available online at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/index.htm>.↑ 3. See Platypus’ discussion at the 2009 Left Forum: Dialectics of Defeat: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression. Available online at <http://www.archive.org/details/PlatypusDialecticsofDefeatLeftForum2009NYC041809>.↑ 4. David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 7.↑ |
Conservative essayist Bethany S. Mandel, who has been awash in a deluge of social media abuse since she began denouncing Donald Trump, finally purchased a handgun over the weekend. “It’s a .22 magnum revolver,” says Mandel, the mother of two young children, who applied for a firearms permit at her local suburban police department after absorbing a fusillade of vile, anti-Semitic tweets and Facebook messages in recent months. “I’m picking it up,” Mandel says about her firearm, “after the shop’s background check comes back.” Having practiced at a New Jersey firing range, she prefers a revolver to a pistol because “my aim is far better,” she says. “My husband [New York Post Op-Ed page editor Seth Mandel] isn’t happy about it,” she says about her new acquisition. The 29-year-old Mandel, who writes for The Federalist, a conservative/libertarian website that often inveighs against Trump, is a pugnacious online presence who frequently crosses swords with self-avowed acolytes of the Republican presidential frontrunner. She has especially tangled with Breitbart News, the rabble-rousing, Trump-friendly website—named for its late founder, culture warrior Andrew Breitbart—that regularly savages the GOP establishment, the media elite, the Washington consultant class, and the Fox News Channel, which it likes to portray as the willing enabler of all these sinister forces. “When I went to my local police department and applied for the gun permit, they said, ‘Maybe you should stop writing things that make people angry,’” Mandel recounts. “And I said, ‘OK, I’ll give that some consideration.’ ‘You have kids. Why would you do that?’ ‘Because I want to leave them a world that is worth living in.’” Yet one can hardly fault Mandel’s feelings of vulnerability. Typical online insults (screenshots of which she provided to The Daily Beast) included “you deserve the oven,” complete with the image of a Domino’s Pizza oven—this from an apparent Trump fan who goes by the Twitter handle @dinguscout. After Mandel observed: “Another night blocking all the anti-Semites who are helping Trump make American[sic] great again,” a second apparent Trump supporter, @unusr1, tweeted at her: “Missed one, you slimy Jewess.” It is entirely predictable that, among other news outlets—including The Drudge Report, The New York Times and The Washington Post—the Twitter feeds of Mandel’s Trump-fan assailants often include links to stories on Breitbart News, and even to audio clips from Breitbart News Daily, the SiriusXM satellite radio program hosted by Breitbart executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon and Breitbart News editor in chief Alex Marlow. Nicknamed “Trumpbart” by detractors, the outlet claims 17 million readers, and is widely seen as a credulous purveyor of Trump’s angry populist, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim message, and as an enthusiastic booster of the reality show billionaire’s candidacy. Thus Mandel—who prefers Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or, as a desperate last resort, even Hillary Clinton to Trump—recently engaged in an online skirmish with Breitbart’s Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle. The night of last Thursday’s raucous Republican debate in Houston—which the mainstream media reported as the frontrunner’s defensive attempts to fend off sharp attacks by Rubio and Cruz—the 28-year-old Boyle tweeted: “The story of the night: @realDonaldTrump: ‘WE ARE BUILDING A NEW REPUBLICAN PARTY.’” Mandel retorted: “A dispatch from Trump headquarters, delivered via their secretly paid surrogate.” “I wish I got paid,” Boyle replied to Mandel, rejecting an oft-denied but persistent rumor that Trump allegedly helps finance the news site. “I don’t [get paid] by anyone other than Breitbart & Breitbart is completely independent of any candidates.” Mandel has disregarded the recent warning of a Trump fan with the Twitter handle @johnny-nimble. “Never fuck with Breitbart. Ever,” @johnny-nimble cautioned. This pseudonymous tweeter had earlier answered Mandel’s observation—“I never received so many anti-Semitic tweets since Trump’s rise. Not even when I tweeted about Israel during wars”—with the vow: “Ain’t seen nothing yet.” Both Bannon and Marlow disown such malevolence. “It has nothing to do with Breitbart—we don’t direct people on social media,” Marlow tells The Daily Beast. “I think this is more about what it’s like in the Twitterverse. It’s toxic the way we talk to one another in that place.” Bannon, meanwhile, calls the notion that his news site is stoking the ugliness “absurd.” But, he adds, “If a guy comes after our audience—starts calling working-class people vulgarians and brownshirts and Nazis and post-literate—we’re going to leave a mark. We’re not shy about it at all. We’ve got some lads that like to mix it up.” Trump naysayer and Breitbart critic John Podhoretz, editor of the neoconservative journal Commentary, received the Breitbart treatment in an article that derided him as a “boorish” establishment pundit who “likes to throw hissy fits” and “believes the ‘unwashed masses’ should not know about the cozy and incestuous relationships in the permanent political and media class that Trump is exposing.” Podhoretz compares Breitbart News to a fanzine. “They’re like a Tiger Beat for Trump, a Sixteen magazine for Trump. It’s kind of a nonsense fan site,” he says. Without asserting a cause-and-effect relationship, Podhoretz says that in the months since being featured on Breitbart he’s traded Twitter insults daily with “literally neo-Nazi White supremacists, all anonymous… and there is some overlap here [with Breitbart and Trump]. Something happened in 2015 with the emergence of Trump—who I’m loath to admit has millions of people who are going to end up voting for him, and it looks like he’ll be the Republican nominee for president. “I don’t think I can attribute being a supporter of Trump to being a validator or an expresser of these opinions,” Podhoretz continues, “but something was let loose by him. This code language—‘It’s time to stop being politically correct’—is something he never defines. One can presume what he meant by it is that before you were not allowed to say Mexicans should be deported, Muslims should be arrested or to talk about the terrorism problem or the Muslim problem. It’s liberating, but there’s no limiting factor, and somehow he has let loose this dark force and turned over these rocks.” Podhoretz adds: “I feel no compunction about insulting and making fun of these anti-Semites on Twitter, which makes my wife nervous. She thinks I should stop it.” Radio host and conservative activist Erick Erickson, another prominent Trump detractor, has been the target of unpleasant and occasionally threatening communications from anonymous Trump enthusiasts. Erickson says that in the wake of Breitbart News stories concerning his anti-Trump statements and actions, he and his family have been victimized by a torrent of abuse from anonymous strangers—not only online, but via letters in his mailbox, phone calls to his home, and worse, prompting the occasional complaint to law enforcement authorities. “There have been a couple of staff-reporter pieces on Breitbart, and Trump himself has come after me on Twitter,” says the Georgia-based Erickson, the former chief executive of the conservative site RedState, who famously disinvited Trump from a RedState gathering last August after the candidate attacked Fox News’s Megyn Kelly with an apparently misogynistic reference to her menstrual cycle. (Erickson is a Fox News contributor.) Shortly after Erickson issued his condemnation of the candidate, he was featured in an Aug. 11 Breitbart story that led with Trump’s tweet calling him “a major sleaze and buffoon who has saved me time and money.” “The Donald may be on to something,” opined Breitbart News’s Kevin Scholla, adding that Erickson is a hypocrite and a “RINO on steroids.” “Somehow or other, our address got out there,” Erickson says, “and for awhile, my wife and I have had to have our mail screened and won’t let the kids get the mail. It’s pretty nasty, angry mail, more unhinged than I expected, with vulgarities written on the outside of the envelope. ‘Fuck you,’ ‘Go to hell,’ that kind of thing.” Erickson says that as a result of his dustup with Trump, “some of my advertisers on my radio show were harassed by clearly organized phone calls to get them to ditch me as an advertiser. All of them very graciously stood by me.” Florida Republican political consultant Rick Wilson, an ardent supporter of Rubio—whom Breitbart’s writers continually portray as a liar who favors amnesty for illegals—has become a favorite Breitbart target since Trump’s rise in public opinion polls. During a confrontational CNN appearance opposite Breitbart’s Marlow in August, Wilson derided the news site as Trump’s “Pravda” and referred to Trump fans as “low-information supporters.” The next day, Bannon used his radio show to essentially declare war on the Rubio backer. He referred to Wilson as “a Republican paid consultant [who] viciously attacked the grass roots.” The bald, bespectacled Wilson, who has written for The Daily Beast, quickly became a Breitbart whipping boy in a series of articles that variously described him as “Republican establishment cheerleader” and “Gollum-in-glasses” (Breitbart columnist John Nolte’s epithet is a reference to the slimy, power-mad character in Lord of the Rings.) “It was a planned deployment,” Wilson says. “After I criticized Breitbart and criticized Trump, they decided they were going to weaponize themselves and go after me.” Around the same time, Wilson says, strange and alarming incidents began befalling him and members of his family. Internal emails obtained by The Daily Beast indicate that Bannon and Breitbart’s Boyle worked to obtain a comprehensive list of Wilson’s political clients (with the intention of making them feel uncomfortable about hiring him, Wilson believes). Around the same time, Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh “made repeated calls to the press office of my U.S. Senate candidate [Rubio ally Carlos Lopez Cantera], asking, ‘When will you fire Rick Wilson?’” he says. A list of questions emailed by a Breitbart reporter to the Cantera campaign cited Wilson’s retweeting of blog post in which Breitbart News was criticized as “racist,” and demanded, “Why are you employing someone who is calling conservatives racists?’” (Breitbart editor in chief Marlow defended the tone of the inquiry. “When a staffer/consultant voluntarily puts opinions into the public domain,” he emailed, “it is absolutely appropriate to ask the people he represents if that viewpoint is a reflection of how they feel as well. If they don’t like that, maybe they should instruct their consultants to be more guarded about their personal opinions. We will aggressively pursue stories like this in the future.”) Meanwhile, Wilson says he learned that his credit report had been ordered by an unknown third party, and anonymous trolls—some apparently active on an online forum associated with white supremacists—posted photoshopped sexual images of his college-age daughter, claimed she’d had a child with an African American, threatened gang-rape, and claimed Wilson’s teenage son was a pimp. When Wilson tweeted complaints about the online abuse, Breitbart’s Nolte accused him of “us[ing] a threat of rape against his own daughter as a political talking point to attack Breitbart News.” The situation got even more heated when Trump backer Ann Coulter tweeted: “Hilarious public meltdown: THEY’RE THREATENING TO RAPE MY DAUGHTER! #RickWilsonIsAGirlInAPinkPartyDress”—and Wilson replied to Coulter, “Does Trump pay you more for anal?” Prompted by his wife, Molly, who was less than thrilled with her spouse’s crude riposte, Wilson deleted the offending tweet and apologized, but not to Coulter. “My comment was shocking to many of you,” he tweeted to his followers, “and for that I offer a sincere apology. I’m more sorry for the people this impacted in my family, and my circle of friends.” (Breitbart News, of course, covered Wilson’s angry outburst in excruciating detail.) Meanwhile, according to Molly Wilson, an art gallery owner, the “targeted harassment” against her family, as she calls it, has included deliveries of unordered pizzas, packing boxes, Qurans and various religious tracts, incessant prank phone calls and, last month, a bogus Craigslist ad for a yard sale at their home. “It said we were selling and giving away the entire contents of our house because we were going to Africa for mission work,” she says. “People were coming up to the house and driving into our yard.” Early one morning, Rick, an avid gun enthusiast, “almost killed a guy on the back porch who was looking in with a flashlight,” Molly Wilson says. “If there’s one guy on earth I wouldn’t fuck with, it’s a guy who builds AR-15’s as a hobby,” says Wilson’s close friend, fellow Rubio backer and Republican consultant Jacob Perry (also a Breitbart target, who says he sustained a sore thumb from the repetitive stress of blocking hundreds of nasty tweeters, and also fielded half a dozen abusive phone calls and voicemail messages from anonymous apparent Trump supporters, after the news site profiled him as a member of “The Consultant Class” experiencing a “serial-meltdown over the rise of Donald Trump”). Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks didn’t respond to a detailed email requesting comment, though Trump acolyte Roger Stone, a longtime operative famous for his hardball tactics, speculates that whatever trouble Wilson has experienced “is probably the handiwork of overzealous and misguided supporters of Trump. The idea that Trump himself or his people would do this is absurd. They have bigger fish to fry. When you go on social media and say controversial things, you’re going to have consequences. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.” In an interview, Bannon claimed zero knowledge of the misery allegedly being visited upon Wilson and his family. Referring to how Boyle and McHugh tried to track down Wilson’s clients, Breitbart’s publicist, Kurt Bardella, wrote in a follow-up email: “Bannon wanted to make sure you knew and had in the story that the direction on Rick Wilson came from him specifically.” Bannon revels in what he likes to call a Fight Club ethos. A Breitbart insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says that “they’re the kind of people who, if you accidentally brushed against their shopping cart in the supermarket, their response is to burn down your house.” Asked about this characterization, Bannon didn’t deny it. Quite the opposite, he laughed uproariously. This never-back-down philosophy was reflected in the way top editor Marlow responded when presented with a series of tweets by Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh that many people would find highly offensive. Among them: “It’s important to keep families together. We must deport anchor babies along with their illegal alien parents”; “Mexicans wrecked Mexico & think invading the USA will magically cure them of their retarded dysfunction. LOL”; and “Indian tribes never bothered to build any kind of civilization. They killed each other and chased bison. Yawn~”. Marlow’s reaction: “Neither Steve nor I are big fans of Twitter, but after reviewing these tweets, we’re considering giving Katie a weekly column.” Perhaps such a column could elaborate on a McHugh tweet from last September: “British settlers built the USA. “Slaves” built the country much as cows “built” McDonald’s. Amateur…” The site has been especially disparaging of Florida Sen. Rubio, the reality show billionaire’s most persistent antagonist in the recent days, and a declared enemy of Breitbart during an appearance a week ago Saturday on the Fox News Channel. Rubio condemned the news site, claiming “they’re basically conspiracy theories and oftentimes manipulated.” He added, “We don’t even credential them for our events.” Breitbart.com fired back a few hours later with a story by Washington political editor Boyle under the headline: “Full Panic Mode: Rubio Caught Lying…” and pointing out that Rubio had given an interview only a few days earlier to Breitbart reporter Charlie Spierling. “We’re going to be relentless on Rubio,” Bannon promises. “Every time he opens his mouth he virtually has a misrepresentation, and if Fox is not going to hold him accountable, and the rest of the Republican media establishment who depends on Fox, if they’re not going to correct him, then we’re going to be guardians of truth. We’ve never had to retract one thing we’ve written about Rubio. They’ve never asked for a correction. Trust me, brother, we’re coming. We’re not backing off.” “I don’t have anything to add to what Marco said on FOX,” Rubio campaign spokesman Alex Conant said in an email to The Daily Beast. As for Matthew Boyle, jaws dropped during a recent dinner attended by political journalists—around the time of the Iowa caucuses, according to a witness—when he was heard boasting that he will be named White House press secretary in the incoming Trump administration. It wasn’t clear if Boyle was joking, says the witness, when he announced that one of his first acts on behalf of President Trump will be to ban Fox News from the White House press room. “I talk a lot of trash at private dinners over beers—just like any guy from Boston,” Boyle said by email to The Daily Beast when asked about these comments. “Deal with it.” |
Note: Brewery President, Mike Stevens, told an industry publication this week that 1,000 cases will be allocated across 15 states. Original post here. Below: Press Release (Grand Rapids, MI) – Founders Brewing Co. Vice President/Director of Marketing Dave Engbers announced today that the highly anticipated Canadian Breakfast Stout (CBS) will be the second release in the company’s 750mL “Backstage Series”. It will be released to the market on October 3, 2011, with a taproom release party on October 1. There has been a great deal of anticipation and speculation regarding the upcoming release after the success of Blushing Monk, the series’ debut, earlier this year. Canadian Breakfast Stout is the epitome of why Founders launched the Backstage Series: it brings some of the brewery’s most sought-after beers, which have been available primarily at the taproom or at a few select events, to a much larger audience. Canadian Breakfast Stout is an Imperial Stout brewed with a blend of coffees and imported chocolates, then aged in spent bourbon barrels that have most recently been aging pure Michigan maple syrup. The final product has had stellar reviews and is currently the fifth highest rated beer in the world on www.BeerAdvocate.com. “Releasing small specialty batches is a great way for us to connect to our core beer enthusiast,” Engbers explains. “Fundamentally, we are a small brewery, and we love to do things our own way. This isn’t about flooding the shelves with a beer that we hope people will try; it’s about producing the best damn beer we can brew and offering it to those enthusiasts who have supported our passion for great beer.” The company is not revealing any additional releases in the series, but Engbers says they will consist of many of the “popular one-offs” that have been offered in the taproom over the years and have become favorites among patrons and brewery staff. “I think part of what people love about Founders, besides our beer, is that we listen to what they are saying,” says President Mike Stevens. “With our new line, now we can offer them more of what they’ve been asking for.” The company expects to release one more product in the 2011 Backstage Series later this year. Founders Brewing Company opened their doors in 1997 with the vision of creating some of the most unique craft beer in the world. Today, Founders has a loyal following with several beers lauded as winners of national and international awards in their respective categories. In 2009, they were ranked as the second fastest growing brewery in the United States, and they are currently rated the second highest brewery in the world by RateBeer.com. Founders Brewing Company, 235 Grandville Avenue SW in downtown Grand Rapids, is a proud member of the Michigan Brewers Guild. www.michiganbrewersguild.org. |
VIDEO-Dick Cheney: There Will Be Another 9/11-Type Attack On US Soil Before 2020 | Truth Revolt Wed, 25 Jun 2014 19:52 According to former Vice President Dick Cheney, there will be another 9/11-type attack on U.S. before the decade is out, and this time, "it's likely to be far deadlier than the last one." The former Vice President was a guest on the Tuesday night Hugh Hewitt Show, generally discussing foreign policy and his new think tank The Alliance for a Strong America. They spoke about the march of the terrorist group ISIS and the failure of the Obama administration to generate an agreement with Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki. Finally, Hewitt asked Cheney to look ahead to the possibility of another attack on U.S. soil and what will happen if that attack is nuclear: Hewitt: Do you think we get through this decade without a massive attack on the homeland? Cheney: I doubt it. I doubt it. I think there will be another attack. And next time, I think it's likely to be far deadlier than the last one. You can just imagine what would happen'... Hewitt: Yeah. Cheney: '...if somebody could smuggle a nuclear device, put it in a shipping container, and drive it down the Beltway outside of Washington, D.C. Hewitt: And do you, by the way, if that were to happen, do you see the government reconstituting? Because it would have to be military rule for a period of time at least. |
OSEN via Nate1. [+967, -75] I would've gotten a nose bleed if Hyuna sang it2. [+487, -43] The song got popular off of Hani but I doubt it would've been as successful for so long without Solji's vocal talents; the fame would've been short lived. The song just purely belongs to EXID.3. [+101, -7] I feel like Hyuna would've matched it but then I remember that she wouldn't be able to pull off the chorus so it wouldn't work ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ4. [+31, -11] I think Hyuna could've pulled it off5. [+24, -2] The song would've been banned from broadcast if Hyuna sang it...6. [+22, -11] The song requires a lot of vocal talent, Hyuna couldn't have pulled it off...7. [+22, -2] Hyuna would faint before she could finish singing the whole song live8. [+21, -2] Oh, I think Hyuna or Ailee would've fit the song as well. It would be such a sexy stage... I'd love to see the two of them perform it for a special stage somewhere.9. [+20, -9] Song would've hit #1 for 9 weeks if Hyuna sang it10. [+17, -5] World would explode if Hyuna sang it |
CONWAY, SC (WBTW) - The Horry County school system remains locked out of several servers after a ransom computer virus got into the system last week. Charles Hucks is the executive director of technology for Horry County Schools, he's had non-stop 20 hour days this past week to try to restore locked up data. The virus was discovered last Monday. Servers were immediately shut down to stop the malware from spreading further, and that did interrupt some online services. Hucks says HCS was not targeted to gain access to data, but a high-level encryption was used to lock up the data on the schools' servers. As far as they can tell, nothing was stolen or removed, and staff and student information is safe. Hucks says they have been able to back up most of the lost data, but 25 servers with information for elementary schools are still encrypted with no way to get in. "And the only way we'll get it back is to pay," said Hucks. Administrators approved an $8,500 ransom to unlock the servers, but they've had trouble making the payment. Hucks says the ransom had to be paid in Bitcoins, but purchasing them is more difficult than going to your local bank. The digital currency is available online from dealers in the U.S. and abroad; so they are being careful who they make a purchase from. "In the next few days we should know. We're going server by server, back up by back up, to see exactly what we have and the time that it takes to back up, so that will be a business decision," said Hucks. Hucks says they're willing to pay because it's a small amount compared to the man hours already lost trying to solve the problem. Even if the ransom is paid, and the data restored, there's no guaranteed way to stop the same kind of thing from happening again, although Hucks says a repeat attack is highly unlikely. "From what we know from this variant, it does not have a component that sticks around. That is not typically the objective of these types of malware," said Hucks. Hucks says beyond looking for anomalies and keeping software patches up to date there is simply no guarantee there's not a virus still lurking. "That's most technology management folks worst nightmare is, for there to be something in the network and you don't know it's there," he said. Hucks says viruses and malware are more and more common, so they are stepping up their security. "External visibility of servers and access and account level changes," are areas he's looking to improve security. Horry County Schools was even investigating the possibility of hiring an outside security provider a month before the attack, they were just waiting for an official proposal when hit. The school system did reach out to SLED and the FBI, but Hucks says there is simply no way to determine where the attack came from. Hucks believes the breach occurred in an older server with software that contained out of date applications. |
This is going to be long! I promise it is worth the read. I have been thinking of writing this for a while because the consultants of LuLaRoe need a voice, along with straight out warning anyone contemplating joining this company so they can make an informed decision for their family and friends. This LuLa journey affects a consultant’s inner circle financially, emotionally, and socially. What you need to know: yes, I am an ex-consultant and the details highlighted here have been experienced by your very own consultants at LuLaRoe. I made money with LuLaRoe, and I am sad because of the way they treat their money makers — their consultants, both their leaders/top earners down to someone waiting to onboard/join. When I opened the door for consultants’ viewpoints, more than 65 current and past consultants poured out their LuLa journeys with me within a couple hours. I had to stop collecting their comments for time’s sake!! If I gave them longer, I can only imagine the responses. Some have been with the company for only a few months, and some have been with the company for years. All of their stories are shockingly similar to mine. The best way to share it? In bullets because there is so much that needs to be shared! Feel free to comment, but please remember that if the responses sound too good to be true, it probably is. LuLaRoe will do ANYTHING to protect its so-called culture and positive image. Negativity and valid questions are not allowed within LuLaRoe. If it looks like a LuLaRoe duck, well… Questions and comments are allowed here because we are adults with our own intelligent brains. LuLaRoe has claimed for years that it had faster than anticipated growth and that everyone needs to be patient with them, regardless of their mistakes. Don’t worry, they love you! When will they stop using the excuse that they are a new company? They are almost 4 years in. A four-year old is not a baby and knows many, many things….maybe more than LuLaRoe? There was dishonesty and lack of transparency with charging sales tax when LuLaRoe outright knew it was wrong. It was not a glitch in the system as they are using as a cover-up now. They tell their consultants to stitch up damages and sell them. Or, how about being told by numerous LuLaRoe leaders to pretend that there is new inventory and post a shop the box event? How about the “part-time work for full-time pay” when consultants regularly work around the clock? What about the consultants that are trying to truly run their businesses part-time and not round the clock? Where are the resources to help them? Consultants are told to check their own inventory for damages. There is no quality control before the clothing leaves the warehouse in CA. Greed and condescending nature for consultants to buy, buy, buy so more sells, sells, sells. If someone has a question or concern? Don’t have a “tantrum!” Consultants go to the people being compensated to help them, their sponsors, and these sponsors delete comments if a question is asked on a team page because it looks negative. Help is usually offered from other consultants, not from the leaders making money off their team. Consultants are told that they are retailers and can run their businesses how they like. Hmmmm, does never being able to choose specific patterns or colors in an order and having to buy at least 33 items (50 items minimum in a holiday release) for an average of $500 each order, being told where they can and cannot sell the clothing that they own, being told what prices they can sell at and do not hold sales although all other retailers hold sales to move inventory, needing to have any business cards or signs approved by home office, being sent heavy Nicole dresses in the middle of summer, needing to use only LuLaRoe processing system for sales so company can collect the additional fees and pay those bonuses too, and being told by “the LuLa sisterhood” that they are not working hard enough if they do not sell enough to qualify for the LuLaRoe incentive cruise, sound like running one’s own “business?” LuLaRoe is micromanaged, and it is more like a franchise situation versus owning one’s own business. There is a lack of leadership. New consultants teach the higher-ups new technology and ways to sell. Rumor says that family and friends are in on the LuLaRoe business and are posing as top sellers with bigger teams in the company. They didn’t need to buy their own inventory. History shows that the family has been involved in many get-rich quick businesses. LuLaRoe is the current one. Are they jumping ship soon? Consultants that joined a year or more ago are able to make money. The ones that joined recently or are joining now, they are most likely to be in LuLa debt. 250 to 500 consultants are onboarded a day. That is 250 to 500 new people selling LuLaRoe a day. LuLaRoe will say that it cannot be an oversaturated market. Check your favorite consultants’ pages and notice many sites are dead — no sales. Who makes money when people onboard? It’s a whooping $5,000 to $7,000 approximate investment that LuLaRoe gets right then and there from each of those onboarded consultants. About a year ago, there were about 5,000 consultants. Now, there are approximately 77,000. Do the math. That’s a lot of money a day, and it does not matter to LuLaRoe if the consultants ever buy a stitch of clothing again or if they are successful. The high earners/coaches are promised big bonuses, so they keep recruiting to make more. Big bonuses and favoritism are given to the top sellers. They get items in their order when other consultants are not able to, and they get the best prints. They get “elite customer services.” The rest of the consultants? They wait on hold for hours, deal with LuLaRoe tech issues, and get 10 Cassie skirts in the same poop print. Yep, some prints literally look like dog shit. Are there only a few thousand of each print out there? Cannot be true if one consultant has 10 dog shit print Cassie skirts. It’s likely that the top sellers never had a poop print. While we’re talking about the prints, let’s talk fabrics. They may be soft, but they are THIN. See-through dresses for $45 and up for sale!! Brand new $25 leggings that tear when delicately put on like pantyhose? Don’t miss out on holey leggings straight from the package! Don’t forget that the lines and prints probably don’t match up and there are sizing inconsistencies from when they were hand stitched in another country. LuLaRoe was made in the U.S.A. for a millisecond. LuLaRoe technology sucks. When ordering, the system never knows how many items are in stock. It breaks down when trying to process invoices, and don’t forget the security breach of the fantastic Audrey system last April. Why was there never a technology that could include pictures of the consultants’ clothing items and easily create an invoice on the spot similar to Amazon or any other online shopping experience? Yes, technology roll-outs take time and testing, but LuLaRoe simply has excuses about its technology over the years. It costs money, money that LuLaRoe doesn’t feel like spending. There is a new processing system now. LuLaRoe sold all consultants’ private information for this new processing system, even if the consultants did not sign the agreement. If LuLaRoe had the person’s information, they sold it to the merchant company. Consultants were promised that there wouldn’t be a credit check. Oops, there was a credit check. Oops, it was a hard check. That affected people’s credit scores. Get an iPhone or iPad because that is the only way the new system will work. Don’t worry, says Home Office, it’s a business expense and there are refurbished ones for a value. Consultants used to be marked as “inactive” if they didn’t buy a certain amount of items in a given amount of time. On the same day, right before the selling of all the consultants’ information to that outside merchant company, all consultants were marked as “active” in the LuLaRoe system. Was this to show a larger number for retention of consultants or to sell everyone’s private information? Training? LuLaRoe training is a bunch of ladies wearing 3 to 5 pieces of LuLaRoe each, pattern matched to look like they are trying out for Ringling Brothers. Brainwashing occurs, courtesy of the top sellers with huge bonus checks & big teams, and no one is taught anything about making their “businesses” better. Consultants are not heard or helped. When they call home office, they wait on hold for 2 to 3 hours and sometimes the phone disconnects. When they get someone on the other end of the phone line, they are given a different answer than other consultants or they are told that “a ticket will be submitted” about this. That ticket will go no where. Call or email again about the same issue? If someone gets a response, it will be different than any other responses. It’s easy to run one’s own LuLaRoe “business.” “Everything sells!” Ugly duplicates in one’s inventory that aren’t selling? Consultants are told, “You must not be marketing them right.” The policies change with the drop of a hat. Someone breaks a “rule,” even though everyone is a business owner, and another consultant rats the person out. “Compliance” emails within two hours to follow-up on the “rule breaking,” but send an email about any other topic and one may drop dead before there is a response. Home Office takes no responsibility for mistakes. They pin it on their consultants or technology. Home Office says that consultants should be refunding damaged items. Well, Home Office does not pay its consultants back for those damages. Many times, Home Office states that the item can and should be sold and to “think like a retailer.” If they are paid back for the damages, it sits in a credit in the consultant’s account until they place their next order; it is not credited back immediately to the consultant’s credit card as it should be. The unlawful charging of sales tax was a “glitch in the system,” although consultants were outright told to charge the tax. Problems like the small arms in Irmas and see-through Perfects were not fixed; instead, Patricks were launched. Instead of fixing problems, more people are recruited and more items are sold. Webinars are on Tuesdays, smack in the middle of the day when many consultants are working other jobs. Remember, “part-time work?” No vital information is given during the webinars, and there is a pep rally berating, pompous attitude. You don’t want it badly enough. You don’t like it, kick rocks. And, don’t wear jeans!! They have too many shoes and oh, the private jets! Consultants are treated like crybabies when legitimate questions are asked – Don’t have a tantrum! Feed your kids spaghettios or cereal, hire a house cleaner, so one can hustle “the business” instead. The leaders of an organization are the role models of its philosophy and beliefs. Is the puzzle starting to fall together? Take a moment to reflect on the style sense of its leaders, too. Consultants wait on back orders for months and need to follow-up to get items they already paid for, although technology said that the items were available when they ordered them. Consultants also receive many shipments with missing items that were already paid for. Lacking quality control here also. Time to be patient – again -and wait for those items for months or for a credit to sit in the consultant’s account. Yes, I’m going here… The clothing is overpriced for what you get. The clothing is not worth it. Yes, I’m going here also….this one is a doozy that needs to be said because LuLaRoe’s culture created this monster. The customers buy a lot of items and the consultants make a good deal of money, myself included. LuLaRoe customers were trained to expect giveaways because consultants are told to “bless” others with free items, and many would only join Facebook groups for the giveaways, never intending to buy anything. Many of the customers are very appreciative and kind, and then there is the LuLaRoe-bred-culture-of-customer: one that is extremely needy, helpless, irresponsible, and unappreciative of the consultant’s time. They ask a million questions, ask for additional pictures of the items even after most consultants have professional looking pictures, ask for consultants to hold items, ask if they can pay once their payday comes around, ask for items to be delivered, do not return items that they tried on and did not buy, request returns long after limits of return policy, expect answers ASAP round the clock and then never respond to the consultant, and/or need reminders to pay for the clothing they claimed after asking the one million questions. LuLaRoe-bred-culture-of-customers are tiring, and they will hopefully realize that this behavior is not respectful, kind, or adult-like. No other clothing company pumps out and ships out as many products as quickly. How can it all sell? Who cares because LuLaRoe already made its money when the consultants placed their orders! Oh, the shipments may take forever to get to consultants — take the holiday orders that many even paid for expedited 2-to-3-day shipping. Their orders arrived one month later, after anyone was buying for that specific holiday!! Consultants can do better in other jobs with less hours and paid time off. In other jobs, there are paid vacation weeks and paid sick days, too. Many leave LuLaRoe to go back to school or go back to a job that was less stress. Information is given to the leaders in the company. Then, through a telephone game type of dissemination of information, everyone else gets the myriad of details. Here comes the worst part. When a consultant sees all the writing on the wall and wants to get out before she/he loses money – or loses any more money – it is EXTREMELY difficult on purpose. Consultants are not employees of LuLaRoe, but they are asked to write a “resignation” letter and have it notarized and then email a screenshot of it to LuLaRoe. If they are lucky enough to get a response from their email, their contract is terminated. They may never get a response (see above about communication style). If the consultant has items left in her/his inventory, which is very likely due to those dog shit print Cassies, she/he has the option to send the items back to LuLaRoe. LuLaRoe will keep 10% or 25% of the wholesale cost of each item; no one knows if it is 10% or 25% because until the bitter end, LuLaRoe policies change on the dime. Or, consultants can sell their items on their own and discount. If they are still officially a consultant at this point, they can bet another consultant will rat them out to Home Office. They will receive an email within hours about their “rule breaking” from Compliance. If the consultant has a credit for damaged items or missing items from previous orders, she/he can expect to email and call time and time again to receive their money back. Lawyers may be needed to get this money back. Although it is customary for a company to refund as soon as asked and to pay one back in the manner it was paid to them, LuLaRoe withholds the money. Interest gained, people!! It may not be much money to each consultant, but with so many damages with the declining quality and so many missing items in almost every order, that is a lot of money earning interest for LuLaRoe spread over 77,000 consultants’ credits in their accounts. If you hear the “I only work 8 to 11pm each night,” it’s not true. Successful consultants, even part-time ones, work A LOT of hours. There is always so much to do. Orders to place, boxes to inventory, emails to send about missing items, clothing to hang, fold, and take out of packaging, pictures to take, pictures to load, events to post to, posts to write, questions to answer, events to book, events to pack up for, events to get to, events to unpack from, invoices to send, invoices to follow-up on, paid orders to ship, damages to submit, damages to follow-up on, etc., etc., etc. What is one willing to sacrifice to do this for peanuts per hour in the end? Crunch those numbers from so-called successful consultants. 50% of what they made was spent on their inventory, and then factor in the initial cost of their inventory that they may still be paying off, business costs, hours put in each day, and hours spent away from those they love. Also, who are they willing to sacrifice relationships with to do this “business?” Relationships will suffer a bit, children will be ignored to work the “part-time business.” Ask any honest LuLaRoe consultant. If you hear differently, keep asking until someone spills a bit. If someone tells you only positives about LuLaRoe, talk to someone else. Rainbows are not around all.the.time. Unicorns are not real. There are negatives!! There are positives. I met so many fabulous people. I enjoyed making people happy with the clothes, but did you see all these other bullets??!! When people left LuLaRoe, their smiles were enormous and they felt freedom. They felt like they got themselves back again. One more important thing — many joined LuLaRoe to find happiness and purpose. It is heart-breaking to hear the stories of people struggling with depression and anxiety who joined LuLaRoe as a means to assist in getting better. Their depression and anxiety got worse. If you are struggling with something similar, please go to your support circle and find a great therapist that you can trust, don’t turn to LuLaRoe. That was a lot of information. I am not making any of it up; I am not a liar like many at LuLaRoe. I have lived through all of this myself and have seen those 65 other consultants go through the exact same experiences. We are not angry, just pouring out our hearts so others are well-informed. My advice? Say no to LuLaRoe. That should become a motto similar to “say no to drugs!” No to joining LuLaRoe, No to buying LuLaRoe, No to wearing LuLaRoe and supporting their vision of lies and hurt. A company that portrays itself as blessing lives and families but truly tears its people down is a NO. Thanks for reading. If you are thinking of getting out, please don’t send your clothing back to LuLaRoe and give them more of your money. Look for discounted groups to sell in and discount in your own group. You can do it and be free. Much love and true happiness to you!! Advertisements |
“We have a long history of competing on the PC platform, and we’re very excited to expand to touch screens. Vainglory has a rapidly growing competitive community that we want to be a part of from early on. We look forward to competing in future tournaments around the world” said Kemal Sadikoglu, Team Director at Team Secret. 2: Lunar New Year will arrive to the Halcyon Fold in February Vainglory Update 1.14 will be a celebration of the Lunar New Year. The Halcyon Fold will have a new Lunar-themed map, including fireworks and other visually stunning effects. A new hero will enter the Fold, celebrating the Year of the Monkey: Ozo is an acrobatic jungler with distinct and rewarding weapon and crystal build paths. Ozo seeks out fights, bounces between targets (literally) and delivers devastating area-of-effect damage with his razor-sharp ring. We are also adding a new limited-edition Lunar New Year skin for Koshka, only available in Update 1.14, as well as introducing the Fury Rona Tier I skin. Full release notes for 1.14 coming soon! 3: We have partnered closely with VGL to move to a more unified global eSports Structure We have hired the largest community-run Vainglory eSports organization, Vaingloryleague (VGL) to bring competitive Vainglory events to the community. VGL has run tournaments in Europe and North America, and we’re excited to announce that South America and Korea will have their own qualifying structures under the VGL umbrella. We look forward to the first-ever South American VGL Qualifiers as well as the first Southeast Asian official qualifier tournaments: the Tesseract Qualifier Series that will be organized by our community in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and India under the banner of Tesseract eSports. Growing our global structure with VGL is a natural step for us, as the organization has been part of the larger Super Evil Megacorp family well before Vainglory launched globally. We are very pleased to have the founders Tomek “bluberryz” Borowka and Jonathan “DonJon” Sakoucky join our Super Evil team full-time. Our aim is to build a game together with our community that is played for decades to come also on the competitive front. We continue to work together with our community and will support other community-run initiatives as usual, including tournaments run around the globe. 4: Winter Championship Dates Confirmed - Tickets on Sale now We have confirmed the dates for the Winter Championships! The eight top teams in Europe and North America will compete for the season’s championship and bragging rights. North American players will return to the eSports Arena in Santa Ana, California March 11-13. In Europe, the event will be held at the London at the Gfinity Arena March 18-20! Tickets for both are now available and can be purchased for $12 at: http://vainglorywinterna.eventbrite.com (North America) http://vainglorywintereu.eventbrite.com (Europe). Get your tickets now! Also, check out this brand new video about last year’s eSports highlights: |
Desperate for new leads to solve a homicide mystery, OPP planned to text about 7,500 people on Thursday whose phones were near a Nepean intersection 10 months ago. Police want to know transient Frederick “John” Hatch, 65 — last seen at a dollar store at the intersection of West Hunt Club and Merivale roads on the afternoon of Dec. 16 — wound up dead about 450 kilometres away near Erin, Ont., where his partially-burned body was found in a ditch. Police call it a “legal, useful and innovative investigative technique.” But an expert on information law argues it raises troubling implications about the lack of advocacy for the privacy of ordinary people when police seek vast “tower dumps” and lack of oversight of what then happens to that information. Det.-Supt. Dave Truax said Wednesday that detectives had exhausted every conventional tool. “We believe this text message canvas will reach potential witnesses who may not be aware of this murder but can help us solve it,” he said, asking for help alerting people that the text is no hoax. Truax said helping to solve a homicide is a “greater good” that outweighs getting an unsolicited text. Recipients can call a toll-free number or follow a link to respond “entirely voluntarily” to a few questions, including providing contact information. “If it was your brother, your uncle, your cousin, I think each of you individually or the general public as well would expect us to carry out every possible investigative avenue to identify this individual’s killer,” Truax said as reporters grilled him about the privacy implications. “If it was your loved one, would you not expect the police to do everything possible to identify the person or persons responsible?” Police have made appeals for information, issued a $50,000 reward, and driven around a van with a picture of Hatch and his distinctive denim vest with Mickey Mouse characters on the back. They got nowhere in solving the murder of the pensioner who once lived in Toronto but hitchhiked around, staying with friends or on the street, and whose family called him kind and non-violent. So detectives went to an Ontario justice of the peace — they won’t say where or when — seeking a production order for cellphone numbers that were active at the intersection where and when Hatch was last seen. Truax stressed that police don’t have names or addresses attached to the cellphone numbers and promised that the numbers would be kept confidential – though he conceded they won’t be discarded until the “challenging” case wraps up. That’s just one of the concerns raised by Teresa Scassa, Canada Research Chair in Information Law at the University of Ottawa who rejects the idea that this is just door-to-door canvassing for the digital age. While police have long used cellphone data to link suspects to a crime – and their advocates can question whether police properly obtained the evidence — that’s not the case with these thousands of potential witnesses. Nor are there restrictions on what happens to the data after police are done with it. “These are ordinary individuals who haven’t committed any crimes. They don’t have a trial in case they will be claiming their Charter rights are violated,” Scassa said. “Essentially there’s there’s nobody to stand up and say on their behalf, ‘This raises privacy concerns,’ and so this is a huge issue.” Implications could be far-reaching — such as new phishing scams by fraudsters impersonating police. “We can’t even know if this is really the first time the technique has been used,” Scassa said. “They may have used it already in other cases. There’s no advocate for the public with these production orders, so who knows?” Scassa said. “People are going to talk about it if they start getting text messages from the police, so it might be the first time in Canada.” Next time police could ask for customer names and addresses – and the contact from police could be a knock at the door. “It may then very quickly start to shift and evolve,” Scassa said. “I recognize the public interest in investigating serious crimes like this. I think there’s also a strong public interest in stepping back and really examining what the impacts are and what the boundaries need to be.” |
Stephen Bannon on Monday called out GOP leaders who have failed to support Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, telling a crowd at a rally ahead of the special election that there is a "special place in hell for Republicans who should know better." Bannon, President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE's former campaign chief and senior strategist, took aim at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office | Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion | Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE (R-Ky.), Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby Richard Craig ShelbyBottom Line Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl How the border deal came together MORE (R) and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a campaign rally the night before Moore faces off against Democrat Doug Jones. "Mitch McConnell and Sen. Shelby, and Condi Rice and all that, Little Bobby Corker, all the establishment out there doesn't have Trump's back at all," Bannon said, suggesting they are just using Trump to eke out "a tax cut." ADVERTISEMENT "There's a special place in hell for Republicans who should know better," he added, to the sound of a applause. Bannon is campaigning for Moore in a heated race that has captured the national spotlight after a handful of women came forward last month and accused the candidate of making unwanted sexual advances when they were underaged teenagers and he was in his 30's. Breitbart's executive chairman's remarks appeared to make a dig at Trump's eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, who said there is a “special place in hell for people who pray on children” after the allegations surfaced. One woman claims she was 14 years old at the time Moore touched her sexually. Moore has denied the allegations of wrongdoing and pushed forward with his campaign. |
#901201 +( 3192 )- [X] <DrBob> You'll never get it. Men weren't meant to understand women. <Odin> not true. <Odin> I've managed to solve for the fundamental logic operation of women. <DrBob> It's just best to let them do what they want, so they'll let us do stuff to them. <Odin> Nono let me explain. <Odin> Women are fundamentally amplifiers. <Odin> Anything you give them expect to get back multiplied <Odin> give them money you don't have in the form of a credit card, expect a huge debt <Odin> give them a little love, and they'll give you a lot of love back <Odin> give them a little DNA in the bedroom <Odin> and they give you a baby <Odin> So if you give them crap, you'd better be ready to recieve a ton of shit |
Today, the Colorado State Senate gave its to a bill that would do away with Colorado sex laws that date back to the '50s. Continue Reading To be more specific: the 1850s. Yep, legislation now headed to the desk of Governor John Hickenlooper (who's expected to sign it) is designed to wipe from the books statutes whose roots stretch back more than a century and a half. What exactly would it do -- and allow you to do? We've photo-illustrated the details below. Adultery The current statute cited in House Bill 13-1166, shared below in its entirety, reads: "Any sexual intercourse by a married person other than with that person's spouse is adultery, which is prohibited." That means anyone who cheated on his or her betrothed since the period prior to the Civil War wasn't only acting like an asshole. No, they were also breaking the law in Colorado, before the territory had even graduated to statehood! Granted, no one's been prosecuted for this offense in a very long time. Otherwise, a lot of us, and our parents, would have spent significant time in the hoosgow. As a bonus, the repeal frees up the Hickenloopers, who are currently separated, to exercise their prerogatives before their divorce is finalized without fear of the Booty-Call Police fitting them with handcuffs. Not that we're suggesting they'd engage in extra-curricular behavior before their split is made permanent. Or that they'd enjoy wearing handcuffs.... Continue for more about legislation allowing deviate sex at hotels and adultery. Promoting Sexual Immorality, Part 1 How do you promote sexual immorality? Well, it's a bit like promoting a concert for sexy rock stars, in that somebody's going to get laid, but it won't be you. The first part of the statute reads, "Any person who, for pecuniary gain, furnishes or makes available to another person any facility, knowing that the same is to be used for or in aid of sexual intercourse between persons who are not husband and wife...commits promoting sexual immorality." In other words, any hotel owner who rents a room to certain twosomes wanting to have sex is, under current Colorado law, a variation on a pimp -- profiting from improper sex while helping to coarsen the nation's morality. And we're not just talking about adultery here. The law also gets an innkeeper in trouble if the couple in question has not yet tied the knot. Getting married the next day? Still terribly, terribly wrong -- for now. Continue for more about legislation allowing deviate sex at hotels and adultery. Promoting Sexual Immorality, Part 2 Also verboten under the "promoting sexual immorality" language is "any person who, for pecuniary gain, furnishes or makes available to another person any facility...in aid of deviate sexual intercourse, or who advertises in any manner that he furnishes or is willing to furnish or make available any such facility for such purposes, commits promoting sexual immorality." And what exactly is "deviate sexual intercourse"? Well, in Oregon, according to this website, it's "sexual conduct between persons consisting of contact between the sex organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another," which covers a lot of territory. But we're thinking 1850s standards were probably even tougher -- as in, any sex not conducted in the missionary position between married couples strictly for the purposes of procreation would put the participants on an express train to hell And don't even get us started on threesomes. Or foursomes. Or fivesomes. Or.... Continue for more about legislation allowing deviate sex at hotels and adultery. These rules seem ridiculous in 2013? Maybe -- but the votes in favor of getting rid of them weren't unanimous. As pointed out by Fox31, the Senate count was 23-10, with only three Republicans voting in favor of the bill. Moreover, Senator Kevin Lundberg -- who last year pitched a proposal that would have made it harder for parents to divorce -- argued passionately against the repeal. In his words, "Laws to uphold moral standards are just as important in the 21st century." No word about whether he's thinking about writing legislation for next session to impose mandatory castration as a masturbation cure. But if he does, we're safe. We swear! Here's the complete bill. More from our Politics archive: "Photos: 'Pro marriage' supporters protest civil union bill at State Capitol." |
SAN FRANCISCO, March 9 (UPI) -- San Francisco officials said the mess left by this year's massive Valentine's Day pillow fight has led them to take another look at the "flash mob" phenomenon. The pillow fight, which marked its fourth year in February, involved an estimated 1,500 to 3,000 people at Justin Herman Plaza and left the city with thousands of dollars worth of damages and cleanup costs, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday. Lisa Seitz Gruwell of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department said organizers of the event must begin taking responsibility for the event, "otherwise we are going to have to find a way to shut it down." However, officials said it is difficult to track down the organizers of the pillow fight since it is part of the flash mob fad, in which events are largely promoted through the Internet, text messaging and word of mouth. Flash mobs typically involve a large group of people gathering in a public place, engaging in unusual behavior and dispersing. Mohammed Nuru, deputy director of the Department of Public Works, said the city had to dispatch 69 employees and an extra street sweeper truck to clean up after this year's pillow fight. "It was quite a mess, much more than we have experienced in previous years," he said. "Everywhere was feathers." |
We have been following the beef between Dog the Bounty Hunter and someone claiming to be ‘War Machine’s brother’ very closely today, with extremely harsh comments coming from an account that claimed to belong to War Machine’s brother, Michael Koppenhaver. Several minutes ago I got off the phone with Michael Eugene Koppenhaver, War Machine’s brother, who passionately and emotionally told me that the Tweets being sent to Dog the Bounty Hunter were in fact from a fake account that did not belong to him. He gave us his personal Twitter handle and we verified the information, which is true. The account the Tweets were coming from @AlphaMaleSeeJay was changed from self promotional music to making false claims about being War Mcahine’s brother on August 9th. The user at that time Tweeted the following: Hahahah outchea trollin folks doin what i do best hahaha makinnem so mad — ALPHAMALESHIT (@AlphaMaleSeeJay) August 10, 2014 Michael Eugene Koppenhaver, whom we spoke on the phone with, told us that statements released by Christy Mack were not entirely true. The events that occurred on the night are as follows according to Michael. Christy Mack and War Machine were in fact still together, and were seen at a Bellator event several weeks ago. He returned to her home to find her having sex with another man. War Machine and the other man got into a physical altercation and Christy grabbed a knife, and War Machine in fact fought for his life, much like he claimed on Twitter when the incident first occurred. Michael went on to tell us that the reason War Machine hasn’t turned himself in is because the judge from his last stint in jail would be his judge in this case, and he feels that she wouldn’t grant him a fair trial. This story is far different from the one given by Christy Mack, which you can read here. Michael assured us that he would never say the things that were said on the fake Twitter profile, and went on to tell us about his work as an EMT, and his happy life with his family, that would never involve doing things his brother did, or saying things that were said on the fake Twitter profile. We would like to sincerely apologize to Michael Eugene Koppenhaver, and clear his name. As a result all articles or posts regarding comments made from the fake Twitter account have been removed from our website as well as BJ Penn’s Facebook. |
In physics, the fine-structure constant, also known as Sommerfeld's constant, commonly denoted by α (the Greek letter alpha), is a dimensionless physical constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between elementary charged particles. It is related to the elementary charge e, which characterizes the strength of the coupling of an elementary charged particle with the electromagnetic field, by the formula 4πε 0 ħcα = e2. Being a dimensionless quantity, it has the same numerical value in all systems of units, which is approximately 1/137 . Definition [ edit ] Some equivalent definitions of α in terms of other fundamental physical constants are: α = 1 4 π ε 0 e 2 ℏ c = μ 0 4 π e 2 c ℏ = k e e 2 ℏ c = c μ 0 2 R K = e 2 4 π Z 0 ℏ {\displaystyle \alpha ={\frac {1}{4\pi \varepsilon _{0}}}{\frac {e^{2}}{\hbar c}}={\frac {\mu _{0}}{4\pi }}{\frac {e^{2}c}{\hbar }}={\frac {k_{\text{e}}e^{2}}{\hbar c}}={\frac {c\mu _{0}}{2R_{\text{K}}}}={\frac {e^{2}}{4\pi }}{\frac {Z_{0}}{\hbar }}} where: The definition reflects the relationship between α and the permeability of free space µ 0 , which equals µ 0 = 2hα/ce2. In the 2019 redefinition of SI base units, 4π × 6993100000000082000♠1.00000000082(20)×10−7 H⋅m−1 is the value for µ 0 based upon more accurate measurements of the fine structure constant.[1][2][3] In non-SI units [ edit ] In electrostatic cgs units, the unit of electric charge, the statcoulomb, is defined so that the Coulomb constant, k e , or the permittivity factor, 4πε 0 , is 1 and dimensionless. Then the expression of the fine-structure constant, as commonly found in older physics literature, becomes α = e 2 ℏ c . {\displaystyle \alpha ={\frac {e^{2}}{\hbar c}}.} In natural units, commonly used in high energy physics, where ε 0 = c = ħ = 1, the value of the fine-structure constant is[4] α = e 2 4 π . {\displaystyle \alpha ={\frac {e^{2}}{4\pi }}.} As such, the fine-structure constant is just another, albeit dimensionless, quantity determining (or determined by) the elementary charge: e = √4πα ≈ 6999302822120000000♠0.30282212 in terms of such a natural unit of charge. In atomic units (e = m e = ħ = 1 and ε 0 = 1/4π), the fine structure constant is α = 1 c . {\displaystyle \alpha ={\frac {1}{c}}.} Measurement [ edit ] Two example eighth- order Feynman diagrams that contribute to the electron self-interaction. The horizontal line with an arrow represents the electron while the wavy lines are virtual photons, and the circles represent virtual electron positron pairs. The 2014 CODATA recommended value of α is[5] α = e2 / 4πε 0 ħc = 6997729735256640000♠ 0.007 297 352 5664 (17) . This has a relative standard uncertainty of 0.23 parts per billion.[5] For reasons of convenience, historically the value of the reciprocal of the fine-structure constant is often specified. The 2014 CODATA recommended value is given by[5] α−1 = 7002137035999139000♠ 137.035 999 139 (31) . While the value of α can be estimated from the values of the constants appearing in any of its definitions, the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) provides a way to measure α directly using the quantum Hall effect or the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. The theory of QED predicts a relationship between the dimensionless magnetic moment of the electron and the fine-structure constant α (the magnetic moment of the electron is also referred to as "Landé g-factor" and symbolized as g). The most precise value of α obtained experimentally (as of 2012) is based on a measurement of g using a one-electron so-called "quantum cyclotron" apparatus, together with a calculation via the theory of QED that involved 7004126720000000000♠12672 tenth-order Feynman diagrams:[6] α−1 = 7002137035999173000♠ 137.035 999 173 (35) . This measurement of α has a precision of 0.25 parts per billion. This value and uncertainty are about the same as the latest experimental results.[7] Physical interpretations [ edit ] The fine-structure constant, α, has several physical interpretations. α is: The square of the ratio of the elementary charge to the Planck charge α = ( e q P ) 2 . {\displaystyle \alpha =\left({\frac {e}{q_{\text{P}}}}\right)^{2}.} The ratio of two energies: (i) the energy needed to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between two electrons a distance of d apart, and (ii) the energy of a single photon of wavelength λ = 2πd (or of angular wavelength d ; see Planck relation): α = e 2 4 π ε 0 d / h c λ = e 2 4 π ε 0 d × 2 π d h c = e 2 4 π ε 0 d × d ℏ c = e 2 4 π ε 0 ℏ c . {\displaystyle \alpha =\left.{\frac {e^{2}}{4\pi \varepsilon _{0}d}}\right/{\frac {hc}{\lambda }}={\frac {e^{2}}{4\pi \varepsilon _{0}d}}\times {\frac {2\pi d}{hc}}={\frac {e^{2}}{4\pi \varepsilon _{0}d}}\times {\frac {d}{\hbar c}}={\frac {e^{2}}{4\pi \varepsilon _{0}\hbar c}}.} r e = α λ e 2 π = α 2 a 0 {\displaystyle r_{\text{e}}={\frac {\alpha \lambda _{\text{e}}}{2\pi }}=\alpha ^{2}a_{0}} α = 1 4 Z 0 G 0 {\displaystyle \alpha ={\tfrac {1}{4}}Z_{0}G_{0}} The optical conductivity of graphene for visible frequencies is theoretically given by πG 0 / 4 , and as a result its light absorption and transmission properties can be expressed in terms of the fine structure constant alone.[10] The absorption value for normal-incident light on graphene in vacuum would then be given by πα / (1 + πα/2)2 or 2.24%, and the transmission by 1 / (1 + πα/2)2 or 97.75% (experimentally observed to be between 97.6% and 97.8%). The fine-structure constant gives the maximum positive charge of an atomic nucleus that will allow a stable electron-orbit around it within the Bohr model (element feynmanium). [11] For an electron orbiting an atomic nucleus with atomic number Z , mv 2 / r = 1 / 4 πε 0 Ze 2 / r 2 . The Heisenberg uncertainty principle momentum/position uncertainty relationship of such an electron is just mvr = ħ . The relativistic limiting value for v is c , and so the limiting value for Z is the reciprocal of the fine-structure constant, 137. [12] For an electron orbiting an atomic nucleus with atomic number , . The Heisenberg uncertainty principle momentum/position uncertainty relationship of such an electron is just . The relativistic limiting value for is , and so the limiting value for is the reciprocal of the fine-structure constant, 137. The magnetic moment of the electron indicates that the charge is circulating at a radius r Q with the velocity of light. [13] It generates the radiation energy m e c 2 and has an angular momentum L = 1 ħ = r Q m e c . The field energy of the stationary Coulomb field is m e c 2 = e 2 / 4π ε 0 r e and defines the classical electron radius r e . These values inserted into the definition of alpha yields α = r e / r Q . It compares the dynamic structure of the electron with the classical static assumption. with the velocity of light. It generates the radiation energy and has an angular momentum . The field energy of the stationary Coulomb field is and defines the classical electron radius . These values inserted into the definition of alpha yields . It compares the dynamic structure of the electron with the classical static assumption. Alpha is related to the probability that an electron will emit or absorb a photon. [14] Some properties of subatomic particles exhibit a relation with α .[15][16][17] A model for the observed relationship yields an approximation for α given by the two gamma functions Γ(1/3) | Γ(−1/3) | ≈ α−1 / 4π . When perturbation theory is applied to quantum electrodynamics, the resulting perturbative expansions for physical results are expressed as sets of power series in α. Because α is much less than one, higher powers of α are soon unimportant, making the perturbation theory practical in this case. On the other hand, the large value of the corresponding factors in quantum chromodynamics makes calculations involving the strong nuclear force extremely difficult. Variation with energy scale [ edit ] According to the theory of the renormalization group, the value of the fine-structure constant (the strength of the electromagnetic interaction) grows logarithmically as the energy scale is increased. The observed value of α is associated with the energy scale of the electron mass; the electron is a lower bound for this energy scale because it (and the positron) is the lightest charged object whose quantum loops can contribute to the running. Therefore, 1/137.036 is the value of the fine-structure constant at zero energy. Moreover, as the energy scale increases, the strength of the electromagnetic interaction approaches that of the other two fundamental interactions, a fact important for grand unification theories. If quantum electrodynamics were an exact theory, the fine-structure constant would actually diverge at an energy known as the Landau pole. This fact makes quantum electrodynamics inconsistent beyond the perturbative expansions. History [ edit ] Based on the precise measurement of the hydrogen atom spectrum by Michelson and Morley,[18] Arnold Sommerfeld extended the Bohr model to include elliptical orbits and relativistic dependence of mass on velocity. He introduced a term for the fine-structure constant in 1916.[19] The first physical interpretation of the fine-structure constant α was as the ratio of the velocity of the electron in the first circular orbit of the relativistic Bohr atom to the speed of light in the vacuum.[20] Equivalently, it was the quotient between the minimum angular momentum allowed by relativity for a closed orbit, and the minimum angular momentum allowed for it by quantum mechanics. It appears naturally in Sommerfeld's analysis, and determines the size of the splitting or fine-structure of the hydrogenic spectral lines. With the development of quantum electrodynamics (QED) the significance of α has broadened from a spectroscopic phenomenon to a general coupling constant for the electromagnetic field, determining the strength of the interaction between electrons and photons. The term α/2π is engraved on the tombstone of one of the pioneers of QED, Julian Schwinger, referring to his calculation of the anomalous magnetic dipole moment. Is the fine-structure constant actually constant? [ edit ] Physicists have pondered whether the fine-structure constant is in fact constant, or whether its value differs by location and over time. A varying α has been proposed as a way of solving problems in cosmology and astrophysics.[21][22][23][24] String theory and other proposals for going beyond the Standard Model of particle physics have led to theoretical interest in whether the accepted physical constants (not just α) actually vary. In the experiments below, Δα represents the change in α over time, which can be computed by α prev − α now . If the fine-structure constant really is a constant, then any experiment should show that Δ α α = d e f α p r e v − α n o w α n o w = 0 , {\displaystyle {\frac {\Delta \alpha }{\alpha }}\ {\stackrel {\mathrm {def} }{=}}\ {\frac {\alpha _{\mathrm {prev} }-\alpha _{\mathrm {now} }}{\alpha _{\mathrm {now} }}}=0,} or as close to zero as experiment can measure. Any value far away from zero would indicate that α does change over time. So far, most experimental data is consistent with α being constant. Past rate of change [ edit ] The first experimenters to test whether the fine-structure constant might actually vary examined the spectral lines of distant astronomical objects and the products of radioactive decay in the Oklo natural nuclear fission reactor. Their findings were consistent with no variation in the fine-structure constant between these two vastly separated locations and times.[25][26][27][28][29][30] Improved technology at the dawn of the 21st century made it possible to probe the value of α at much larger distances and to a much greater accuracy. In 1999, a team led by John K. Webb of the University of New South Wales claimed the first detection of a variation in α.[31][32][33][34] Using the Keck telescopes and a data set of 128 quasars at redshifts 0.5 < z < 3, Webb et al. found that their spectra were consistent with a slight increase in α over the last 10–12 billion years. Specifically, they found that Δ α α = d e f α p r e v − α n o w α n o w = ( − 5.7 ± 1.0 ) × 10 − 6 . {\displaystyle {\frac {\Delta \alpha }{\alpha }}\ {\stackrel {\mathrm {def} }{=}}\ {\frac {\alpha _{\mathrm {prev} }-\alpha _{\mathrm {now} }}{\alpha _{\mathrm {now} }}}=\left(-5.7\pm 1.0\right)\times 10^{-6}.} In other words, they measured the value to be somewhere between 3005530000000000000♠−0.0000047 and 3005330000000000000♠−0.0000067. This is a very small value, nearly zero, but their error bars do not actually include zero. This result either indicates that α is not constant or that there is experimental error that the experimenters did not know how to measure. In 2004, a smaller study of 23 absorption systems by Chand et al., using the Very Large Telescope, found no measurable variation:[35][36] Δ α α e m = ( − 0.6 ± 0.6 ) × 10 − 6 . {\displaystyle {\frac {\Delta \alpha }{\alpha _{\mathrm {em} }}}=\left(-0.6\pm 0.6\right)\times 10^{-6}.} However, in 2007 simple flaws were identified in the analysis method of Chand et al., discrediting those results.[37][38] King et al. have used Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to investigate the algorithm used by the UNSW group to determine Δα/α from the quasar spectra, and have found that the algorithm appears to produce correct uncertainties and maximum likelihood estimates for Δα/α for particular models.[39] This suggests that the statistical uncertainties and best estimate for Δα/α stated by Webb et al. and Murphy et al. are robust. Lamoreaux and Torgerson analyzed data from the Oklo natural nuclear fission reactor in 2004, and concluded that α has changed in the past 2 billion years by 45 parts per billion. They claimed that this finding was "probably accurate to within 20%". Accuracy is dependent on estimates of impurities and temperature in the natural reactor. These conclusions have to be verified.[40][41][42][43] In 2007, Khatri and Wandelt of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign realized that the 21 cm hyperfine transition in neutral hydrogen of the early universe leaves a unique absorption line imprint in the cosmic microwave background radiation.[44] They proposed using this effect to measure the value of α during the epoch before the formation of the first stars. In principle, this technique provides enough information to measure a variation of 1 part in 7009100000000000000♠109 (4 orders of magnitude better than the current quasar constraints). However, the constraint which can be placed on α is strongly dependent upon effective integration time, going as t−1⁄ 2 . The European LOFAR radio telescope would only be able to constrain Δα/α to about 0.3%.[44] The collecting area required to constrain Δα/α to the current level of quasar constraints is on the order of 100 square kilometers, which is economically impracticable at the present time. Present rate of change [ edit ] In 2008, Rosenband et al.[45] used the frequency ratio of Al+ and Hg+ in single-ion optical atomic clocks to place a very stringent constraint on the present-time temporal variation of α, namely α̇/α = 3016839999999999999♠(−1.6±2.3)×10−17 per year. Note that any present day null constraint on the time variation of alpha does not necessarily rule out time variation in the past. Indeed, some theories[46] that predict a variable fine-structure constant also predict that the value of the fine-structure constant should become practically fixed in its value once the universe enters its current dark energy-dominated epoch. Spatial variation – Australian dipole [ edit ] In September 2010 researchers from Australia said they had identified a dipole-like structure in the variation of the fine-structure constant across the observable universe. They used data on quasars obtained by the Very Large Telescope, combined with the previous data obtained by Webb at the Keck telescopes. The fine-structure constant appears to have been larger by one part in 100,000 in the direction of the southern hemisphere constellation Ara, 10 billion years ago. Similarly, the constant appeared to have been smaller by a similar fraction in the northern direction, 10 billion years ago.[47][48][49] In September and October 2010, after Webb's released research, physicists Chad Orzel and Sean M. Carroll suggested various approaches of how Webb's observations may be wrong. Orzel argues[50] that the study may contain wrong data due to subtle differences in the two telescopes, in which one of the telescopes the data set was slightly high and on the other slightly low, so that they cancel each other out when they overlapped. He finds it suspicious that the sources showing the greatest changes are all observed by one telescope, with the region observed by both telescopes aligning so well with the sources where no effect is observed. Carroll suggested[51] a totally different approach; he looks at the fine-structure constant as a scalar field and claims that if the telescopes are correct and the fine-structure constant varies smoothly over the universe, then the scalar field must have a very small mass. However, previous research has shown that the mass is not likely to be extremely small. Both of these scientists' early criticisms point to the fact that different techniques are needed to confirm or contradict the results, as Webb, et al., also concluded in their study. In October 2011, Webb et al. reported[52] a variation in α dependent on both redshift and spatial direction. They report "the combined data set fits a spatial dipole" with an increase in α with redshift in one direction and a decrease in the other. "Independent VLT and Keck samples give consistent dipole directions and amplitudes...."[clarification needed] Anthropic explanation [ edit ] The anthropic principle is a controversial argument of why the fine-structure constant has the value it does: stable matter, and therefore life and intelligent beings, could not exist if its value were much different. For instance, were α to change by 4%, stellar fusion would not produce carbon, so that carbon-based life would be impossible. If α were greater than 0.1, stellar fusion would be impossible, and no place in the universe would be warm enough for life as we know it.[53] Numerological explanations and multiverse theory [ edit ] As a dimensionless constant which does not seem to be directly related to any mathematical constant, the fine-structure constant has long fascinated physicists. Arthur Eddington argued that the value could be "obtained by pure deduction" and he related it to the Eddington number, his estimate of the number of protons in the universe.[54] This led him in 1929 to conjecture that the reciprocal of the fine-structure constant was not approximately the integer 137, but precisely the integer 137. Other physicists neither adopted this conjecture nor accepted his arguments but by the 1940s experimental values for 1/α deviated sufficiently from 137 to refute Eddington's argument.[55] The fine-structure constant so intrigued physicist Wolfgang Pauli that he collaborated with psychoanalyst Carl Jung in a quest to understand its significance.[56] Similarly, Max Born believed that would the value of alpha differ, the universe would degenerate. Thus, he asserted that 1/137 is a law of nature.[57] Richard Feynman, one of the originators and early developers of the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), referred to the fine-structure constant in these terms: There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e – the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly! Richard Feynman, Richard P. Feynman (1985). QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton University Press. p. 129. ISBN 978-0-691-08388-9. Conversely, statistician I. J. Good argued that a numerological explanation would only be acceptable if it could be based on a good theory that is not yet known but is a "exists" in the sense of a Platonic Ideal.[58] Attempts to find a mathematical basis for this dimensionless constant have continued up to the present time. However, no numerological explanation has ever been accepted by the community. In the early 21st century, multiple physicists, including Stephen Hawking in his book A Brief History of Time, began exploring the idea of a multiverse, and the fine-structure constant was one of several universal constants that suggested the idea of a fine-tuned universe.[59] Quotes [ edit ] The mystery about α is actually a double mystery. The first mystery – the origin of its numerical value α ≈ 1/137 – has been recognized and discussed for decades. The second mystery – the range of its domain – is generally unrecognized. Malcolm H. Mac Gregor, M. H. MacGregor (2007). The Power of Alpha. World Scientific. p. 69. ISBN 978-981-256-961-5. See also [ edit ] |
With the announcement of any official Nexus accessory comes the certainty of months of speculation as to if, when and where it'll eventually be released. So was the case with the Nexus 4's official Qi-based wireless charging station, first shown on launch day back in November, and increasingly elusive since that time. Today the official orb-shaped charger has shown up for pre-order on Norwegian retailer Dustin Home, priced at 739 kr (around $114 U.S.) That might sound like a lot of cash for a charging orb, but we suspect that won't be indicative of U.S. pricing when it officially arrives in the States. (It's also worth remembering this price will include Norwegian VAT at 25%.) Dustin Home has an estimated shipping date of Feb. 12, so you'll be waiting a while if you decide to get your order in early. There are cheaper alternatives available, as the Nexus 4 will work quite happily with any Qi-compatible charging mat. But if you're holding out for something a little more stylish, the mid-February shipping date suggests that wider orb availability may be upon us sooner rather than later. If you're interested in using wireless charging on your Nexus 4, have you already picked up a mat, or are you holding out for the official charging orb? Let us know in the comments! Source: Dustin Home; via: Reddit |
Get the biggest politics stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email UKIP leader Paul Nuttall should “sod off back to where he came from” and stop trying to exploit Brexit in a crunch by-election, Labour’s candidate sensationally stormed. Mild-mannered Gareth Snell tore into Mr Nuttall, insisting he had no ties to Stoke-on-Trent. The pair go head to head on February 23 in a poll showdown where Labour is desperately defending a 5,179 majority. Liverpudlian Mr Nuttall is tipped to win the constituency, where nearly 70% of voters opted to Leave the EU. But, speaking exclusively to the Mirror, Mr Snell fumed: “Stoke is a convenient stop for Paul Nuttall on his way to Westminster. (Image: PA) “If someone can tell me he has a genuine love for The Potteries I will be amazed. “There are plenty of campaigns he could have been involved when he was an MEP – he has not had any interest in them whatsoever. “All of a sudden, because there was a big Leave vote and a timely parliamentary by-election, he wants to brand himself Mr Stoke. “Paul has come here to make his name, I came here to make my life. “So far all he has talked about is his own prominence as a national politician and how as the leader of UKIP he can do things in Parliament that no-one else can. “Well, if he’s only interested in being the leader of UKIP in Parliament he should take his bags and sod off back to where he came from.” (Image: Daily Mirror) Mr Snell moved to The Potteries 13 years ago and is a Newcastle-under-Lyme councillor. He lives with wife Sophia and their daughter Hannah. In contrast, Mr Nuttall is under investigation by police over claims he does not live at the Stoke address he registered for the by-election. The UKIP chief, an MEP, has lost four previous Westminster elections. Taking over from Nigel Farage in November, he vowed to target Jeremy Corbyn ’s party in its Midlands and Northern strongholds. (Image: Daily Mirror) Mr Snell said: “He’s been sent packing from other parliamentary constituencies. “Win or lose, I’m not going anywhere whereas I suspect if Paul Nuttall loses, come February 24 he will be on the first train back to Liverpool.” Stoke’s “reputation would be inherently damaged” if Mr Nuttall wins, his rival warned. “Business would suffer, the reputation of Stoke would take nosedive,” he feared. “For too long Stoke has had a reputation as being somewhere that is on the decline, and that’s wrong because actually the city has an awful lot to offer. “We’ve got so much going for us but that will be overshadowed if we have a UKIP MP that says, ‘It’s all about Brexit and that’s why I’m your MP’.” (Image: Daily Mirror) While June’s referendum had “not shot UKIP’s fox”, he urged voters to look beyond Brexit when they cast their ballot. “We’re not interested in rehashing the debate that’s just been had,” insisted Mr Snell, who backed Remain and once tweeted that Brexit was “a massive pile of s***”. He now vows to support leaving the EU, saying: “I recognise the vote we had in the referendum was quite strong for Leave here.” He even praised Mr Corbyn for forcing Labour MPs to back triggering Article 50, deepening Labour’s civil war. “We’re a democratic party and we have to respect what the wishes of our voters are,” said Mr Snell. “Jeremy got it right.” (Image: Daily Mirror) His support for the party leader is significant; last year he branded Mr Corbyn an “IRA supporting friend of Hamas”. Mr Snell also fears some disillusioned Labour supporters could actually hand victory to Theresa May by switching to UKIP. While UKIP was second in the seat in 2015, the Tories were only 33 votes behind. He warned the Conservatives could sneak in “through the middle”. Stepping up the attack on Mr Nuttall, former Shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson said: “He can put on a flat cap and pretend he’s the voice of the working class but when he did stand in is own place where he was born and bred and they know him best – Bootle – he got sent away with a flea in his ear. (Image: Getty Images Europe) “Paul Nuttall has not nothing to do with this city and just sees it as a PR opportunity for UKIP.” Another Labour source said: “He’s a scouser who dresses like a fox hunter.” What the people of Stoke had to say (Image: Daily Mirror) Sales adviser Mark Richards, 34, said: “I’m going to vote UKIP, I think they’re more for the people of Stoke, especially Paul Nuttall – he’s putting housing for the local people first. It makes no difference to me that he’s not from round here – he’s still British. I voted to get out of the EU and I think UKIP will be better for Brexit.” (Image: Daily Mirror) Nursery nurse Hayley Ellams, 22, said: “I will probably vote Labour – my parents are voting Labour. I wanted us to stay in the EU - I don’t like Brexit, or Donald Trump for that matter. I don’t think being outside the EU will do anything for us. Labour are obviously more pro-EU than UKIP, so they will probably be getting my vote.” (Image: Daily Mirror) Retired potteries worker Jeff Turner, 62, said: “I’ll be voting for UKIP. They’re fairer and will try and sort out things I agree with like the NHS and housing. Nigel Farage started Brexit and we will better off. I’ve never voted Labour and I don’t agree with what they’re putting forward. I don’t think a lot of Jeremy Corbyn – he’s a bit silly.” (Image: Daily Mirror) Retired off licence manager Helen Morton, 61, said: “I haven’t decided yet. They all say they’re going to do things before the election but then we don’t seem for the next 12 months. Brexit will be good for this country – think of the millions we have been paying the EU only to put the money back here. But it’s not all about Brexit for me.” |
This article is over 1 year old US-based company becomes the first large sportswear brand to manufacture a performance hijab Nike has taken another step into the lucrative Islamic clothing market by unveiling a hijab designed for female Muslim athletes. The product, which has been in development for a year, was tested by athletes including figure skater Zahra Lari. The pull-on hijab is made of light, stretchy fabric that includes tiny holes for breathability and an elongated back so it will not come untucked. It will come in three colours: black, grey and obsidian and goes on sale in 2018. Lari, a hopeful for the Winter Olympics next year in Pyeongchang, South Korea, posted photos of herself wearing the hijab on her Instagram page. Lari is from Abu Dhabi and represents the United Arab Emirates. “Can’t believe this is finally here!!” she wrote. The launch was also welcomed on social media. ✨ (@melaninist) Nike is launching a hijab collection line for Muslim female athletes. This is the future 🙌🏾 pic.twitter.com/tUwF2jXu7f Aisha Baker Parnell (@bakedtheblog) This is the most amazing thing!! Imagine how comfy it's gonna be - better than those other scarf things hijabis have to wear now. https://t.co/QqPfR1FlUF But some users argued the company was not doing anything particularly groundbreaking. Fardousa (@Fardousie) Slightly torn- Sport hijabs have been around 4 awhile & I can't see anything special (expect the nike tick) about the design #NikeProHijab Aaisha Dadi Patel (@aaishadadipatel) Most patronising. I've been wearing a scarf and exercising fine for years, just as small businesses have BEEN making scarves for activewear. https://t.co/BFpjn8jdCR Footybedsheets (@_shireenahmed_) But before Nike, there were companies doing this work. @Capsters @Resporton_Hijab and @friniggi + more who have been doing this A LONG time. Last summer, fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad of New York became the first Muslim American woman to compete for the United States wearing a hijab at the Olympics. She earned a bronze medal at the Rio Games. Generation M: how young Muslim women are driving a modest fashion revolution Read more The U-17 Women’s World Cup last October in Jordan marked the first time Muslim players wore headscarves during a Fifa event. Football’s international governing body formally lifted a ban on head coverings in 2014, recognising Muslim and Sikh players. Meanwhile, the governing body for basketball, Fiba, has come under fire for banning headscarves during international competition. Nike has also been making a play for Muslim customers in the Middle East in recent years, opening stores in the region and launching a training app in Arabic. The Islamic market is projected to be worth more than $5tr by 2020. Associated Press contributed to this report |
The king of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz, passed away on Thursday evening, according to the Saudi government. He was 90 years old and has been in ill health for some time. Saudi Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who is 79 years old, has been named the new king. The new crown prince is Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who is 69 years old. Both Salman and Muqrin are younger brothers of Abdullah. Saudi Arabia has clear lines of succession so the world can expect an orderly of transition of power. However, 69-year-old Muqrin is the youngest brother in his immediate family's generation, so at some point soon the crown will need to pass to the next generation, which has many dozens of members jockeying for power . This sets up Saudi Arabia for a possible succession crisis at a fragile time in the country's history. What this means for Saudi Arabia Don't expect any chaos or instability in the immediate term. There's no evidence that anyone will challenge new King Salman's claim to the throne, and Salman has a new crown prince already lined up behind him. You shouldn't expect major changes to Saudi Arabia's notoriously repressive practices, either: "Salman is thought of as a conservative, which is saying something in Saudi Arabia, and [new crown prince] Muqrin is an Abdullah loyalist," Slate's Joshua Keating explains. But there's trouble on the horizon. Given Salman's age, he probably won't be able to hold onto power for too long. And Muqrin is only ten years younger, which makes him the youngest of Abdullah's brothers. It's not clear who in the next generation would take power after him, or when that question will be forced. Meanwhile, the new Saudi king has a lot of problems on his hands. Saudi Arabia has an extremely young population; "64 percent of its 19.4 million citizens [are below the age of 30," Caryle Murphy writes for the Wilson Center. IMF projections suggest it will be difficult for Saudi Arabia's private sector to grow fast enough to provide enough jobs for them. Moreover, the younger generation of Saudis is somewhat more skeptical of the regime's theocratic legal system than are their parents. It'll be up to Saudi Arabia's aged leadership to ensure these youth are successfully integrated into Saudi society. Saudi Arabia hasn't faced a major Arab-spring like uprising, partly because the Kingdom's immense wealth has helped it buy the loyalty of its younger citizens. That may not be sustainable forever. The international environment is also tough. Saudi Arabia, one of the world's three-largest oil producers, is dealing with record-low oil prices. It's jockeying for influence against Iran — and other Gulf states such as Qatar — in Syria, where Saudi Arabia has supported the rebellion against leader Bashar al-Assad. Saudi Arabia is also deeply concerned about Iran's nuclear program, and the American effort of negotiating with the Iranian government. So congratulations, King Salman: you'll have to hit the ground running. Further reading What King Abdullah's death could mean for oil prices The new Saudi King is so old that his father was born in 1876 |
5yo boy accidentally shoots and kills 2yo sister Posted A two-year-old girl has become the second child in the US to be shot dead by a sibling this week, after her five-year-old brother shot her with a rifle designed for children, officials revealed on Wednesday. Officials in Kentucky say the five-year-old boy was playing with a rifle designed for children and given to him as a gift, when he accidentally shot his younger sister. The two-year-old girl was pronounced dead after being rushed to a hospital following the shooting on Tuesday in rural Kentucky, police said. The death follows a similar incident on Monday where a five-year-old girl in a remote Alaska community was reportedly shot and killed by her eight-year-old brother. Cumberland County coroner Gary White identified the two-year-old Kentucky girl as Caroline Starks and said the children's mother was cleaning the house at the time and had stepped outside onto the porch. "She said no more than three minutes had went by and she actually heard the rifle go off. She ran back in and found the little girl," Mr White said. The .22 calibre rifle had been given to the boy last year and was kept in the corner of a room. The parents did not realise a shell had been left in it. "It's a Crickett," Mr White told the Lexington Herald-Leader. "It's a little rifle for a kid ... the little boy's used to shooting the little gun." The Crickett is just one of many child-sized rifles on the market and is sold with the tag line 'My First Rifle'. It comes in a number of child-friendly barrel designs and colours, including hot pink for little girls. A host of accessories are also available, like story books and a gun-toting beanie baby of the rifle's mascot, a cartoonish cricket. An autopsy was set to be conducted but Mr White said he expects the shooting will be ruled accidental. "Just one of those crazy accidents," Mr White said. Gun control debate The US has been embroiled in a heated debate over gun control and gun culture in the wake of a horrific December shooting at a school in Newtown, Connecticut that killed 26 young children and educators. US president Barack Obama has pushed for tougher federal gun laws that require universal background checks on gun buyers and called for a ban on assault weapons like the one used in Newtown. But last month, his background check proposal - condemned by the powerful National Rifle Association as an infringement on Americans' constitutional right "to keep and bear arms" - failed to muster the necessary 60 votes needed to clear the US Senate. There were 851 deaths caused by accidental discharges of firearms in the US in 2011, according to the latest data from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. A further 14,675 people were injured by accidental discharges of firearms in 2011, of whom 7,991 were under the age of 18 and 3,569 were under the age of 13. No efforts have been made to prevent children from using firearms for hunting and sporting purposes, a treasured tradition for many American families. AFP Topics: accidents, disasters-and-accidents, accidents---other, united-states |
A Fox News medical expert on Tuesday argued that President Barack Obama’s administration was wrong to force gender equality for health insurance rates because men “only have the prostate,” while women “have the breasts, they have the ovaries.” “Look, it’s not bias, I’m not saying this as a man,” Fox News Medical A-Team contributor Dr. David Samadi told the hosts of Fox & Friends. “They go through a lot of preventive screenings, they give birth, they have the whole mammogram, the Pap smear. Guys, we don’t like to go to doctors, right? Seventy percent of health care decisions are made by women. In my own practice, I see it’s the women who bring the guys, who say, go get screened.” “Yeah, but shouldn’t that earn us a discount?” Fox News host Gretchen Carlson interrupted. “Basic fact that we are responsible for getting our men to come to the doctor? And what about the fact that women, because they do all this preventative care, maybe their health issues end up costing less than men’s, who don’t go to the doctor until it’s a crisis and a big deal.” “Yes, that’s a good point, except that, you know, women live longer,” Samadi asserted. “Women live until age 81 and men live only until 76. So, we’re using the health care system much less.” “In this case, it’s not equal,” co-host Brian Kilmeade agreed. “You have a better time on Earth than we do, you’re here a lot more. You have six years of heaven, where you just have no men around.” Carlson pointed out that women were blamed for maternity costs, “but men and women have babies together.” “I agree with you that it’s a shared responsibility,” Samadi said. “But just the way the system are — in my field, we only have the prostate. Women have the breasts, they have the ovaries, they have the uterus. They get checked in every part.” “1-800-GOD, can we change the organs of a woman so that she doesn’t cost so much?” Carlson joked. In a column for Time last week, Hadley Heath also made the case that women should pay more for health care. “Women’s greater attentiveness to their own health likely also contributes to their longevity,” she wrote. “After all, women may reap the benefits of this behavior by living longer lives; they should also take on the costs.” Watch this video from Fox News’ Fox & Friends, broadcast Aug. 27, 2013. (h/t: Media Matters) |
USDA via Stop Animal Exploitation Now A goat with a tumor on its neck, photographed by a USDA inspector at Santa Cruz Biotechnology. One of the world's largest suppliers of antibodies for scientific research on Friday agreed to pay a record $3.5 million fine and stop selling its products to settle government allegations it abused goats and rabbits. Santa Cruz Biotechnology, based in Dallas, resolved U.S. Department of Agriculture allegations dating to 2012 that its mistreatment of animals at a California facility violated the Animal Welfare Act. Government inspectors said they found sick and injured goats not receiving medical care, a goat that was shot in the head without euthanasia, and a barn full of hidden animals. Santa Cruz neither admitted nor denied the USDA allegations. Still, the company agreed to surrender its license as a dealer of antibodies, and to end its registration as an animal research facility. The $3.5 million fine, due by May 31, is the largest ever under the Animal Welfare Act, according to the Humane Society of the United States. Santa Cruz did not immediately respond to requests for comment. "This is the most significant victory in the area of animal research for the animal rights movement, ever," said Michael A. Budkie of the nonprofit Stop Animal Exploitation Now. "I’m speechless." The antibodies Santa Cruz extracted from the blood of its goats and rabbits were widely used in biomedical research labs across the globe. A 2012 survey by The Scientist found that more than half of labs using antibodies were working with specimens from Santa Cruz. The company first came under fire in 2005, when it paid a $4,600 fines to the USDA to settle citations that included improper euthanasia and keeping more animals than it was authorized. Since 2012, the company has been hit with three additional complaints, most recently in 2015, when USDA charged it had "willfully violated" the Animal Welfare Act. Inspectors found “repeated failures to provide minimally adequate and expeditious veterinary care and treatment to animals,” according to the complaint. USDA via Stop Animal Exploitation Now A goat with a wound on its hind leg, as photographed by a USDA inspector at Santa Cruz Biotechnology's California facility. Goats referenced in the complaint had an array of ailments, including leg injuries, respiratory issues, dermatitis, anemia, weight loss and a rattlesnake bite. Some of the ailing goats went days before a veterinarian saw them, and some died during the wait. Rather than give dying goats euthanasia, the USDA said one goat was shot in the head and another was allowed to suffer for two weeks. USDA officials discovered a secret barn during a 2012 inspection near the company’s facility in San Luis Obispo, where it was keeping more than 800 goats -- at least 12 of them sick -- out of view of regulators. USDA said "the existence of the site was denied even when directly asked." The company's problems worsened in February -- two months before a scheduled hearing on the USDA allegations -- when Nature reported that government inspectors found that thousands of animals at the California facility had disappeared. It remains unclear what happened to them. The disappearance of the animals sparked a boycott of Santa Cruz by scientists. The massive USDA penalty "should serve as a loud and clear message to all research facilities, animal dealers, exhibitors and airlines regulated under this law," Cathy Liss, president of the Animal Welfare Institute, said in a statement. |
It's a quintessential American narrative. A picture rises from humble beginnings on the streets of Los Angeles to become a pop culture icon — and later gains entry to one of the nation's leading art museums. That's the trajectory of Shepard Fairey's portrait of Barack Obama, which will soon be hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. The museum announced Wednesday that it has added a collage version of the picture -- which evolved from a piece of street art into the symbol of Obama's historic presidential campaign -- to its collection. The work was donated by Heather and Tony Podesta. The Portrait Gallery is better known for its collection of Gilbert Stuart paintings of George Washington than for street art, but curator Carolyn Kinder Carr said museum leaders felt that they had to have it. "We all fell in love with it," said Carr, who is the deputy director and chief curator. "We always like portraits that reflect a particular moment in history, and we like the fact that it is an image that resides in popular culture." Carr pointed out that there is a history of street art being adopted into the canon. "The posters of [Henri de] Toulouse-Lautrec are essentially street art," she said. Fairey's collage will likely be on view at the Portrait Gallery by Jan. 17 — just in time for Inauguration Day. It will be installed on the first floor of the museum in an exhibition titled "New Arrivals" — a not-quite-accidental double entendre, according to Carr. — Kate Linthicum Picture credit: Barack Obama by Shepard Fairey, via National Portrait Gallery |
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Presidential hopeful Rand Paul is gunning for the youth vote. He's already attacked his opponents on Pinterest and copped his logo from Tinder, but now the Kentucky senator is getting familiar with Snapchat. In a recent interview with Politico's Mike Allen, Paul took some time to outline his Snapchat-focused game plan for getting teenagers to vote for him. Snapchats for Rand "We reach thousands of kids that we might not ever have reached before," Paul said. "In fact, we're probably reaching some kids who aren't yet 18, that will be 18 when the elections roll around the next time. We'll have whole classrooms sometimes do a Snapchat to us." "Like 30 or 40 kids in a high school class will do a quick Snapshot [sic] to us," he added. A whole classroom of Snapshots! Just think. Rand first announced he'd be using Snapchat as a campaign tool back in January, and that his handle would be SenatorRandPaul. Rand also doled out some advice that should resonate with teens: "You don't want to replace your parents with the government." That's true, but — hear me out — what if we replaced the government with Snapchat? |
Times are tough in B.C.'s mining sector but today the B.C. government announced a measure it hopes will help companies struggling with the downturn. Premier Christy Clark says a program is in the works to allow mines to defer their electricity bills during bad times. "[We] are working on a plan so that mines can defer some of their very considerable power costs until commodity prices bounce back," Clark told the conference. Clark made the announcement at the opening of the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia's Roundup Conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre. Speaking to a room full of mining professionals Clark described the program as a "last resort" for companies, and said it was important for government to "get it right" and not put taxpayers at risk. Clark also announced the extension of the mining exploration tax credit and the B.C. mine flow-through share tax credit. "It has been a rough year for mining in Canada," she said. "We know when a mine goes to waste all those mines and all those communities that have been founded on a mine disappear over night." |
Even in Somalia, the best way to shut down a terrorist group is to go after the money. This morning, an African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia is hemming in Somalia’s powerful Al Shabab militia – a group that has paid allegiance to Al Qaeda – inside Somalia’s largest marketplace, the Bakara Market in Mogadishu. Al Shabab taxes the shopkeepers and traders of Bakara Market, using those proceeds to fund their operations. Al Shabab also controls the busy port city of Kismayo and derives income by taxing exports and imports that come through that port. Together with the shaky but recently trained and rearmed troops of the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, the African Union force – made up of 5,000 Ugandan troops and 3,000 Burundian troops – has increasingly taken territory away from Al Shabab and its allies, Hizbul Islam. In a statement this morning, AU spokesman Paddy Ankunda told reporters that the AU force would not enter Bakara Market, but instead would lay siege to the market in an effort to starve out Al Shabab. "We crossed the Wadnaha road, al Shabaab's main route in, and we are at the edge of Bakara now," Reuters news agency quoted Mr. Ankunda as saying. "We do not want to enter Bakara, we want to lay siege to it." In addition to denying tax revenues to Al Shabab, taking back Bakara Market would also put an end to Al Shabab’s use of the market as a base for military operations. Shabab fighters often launch mortar attacks from Bakara onto AU peacekeeper positions at the presidential palace compound, in hopes of provoking AU artillery retaliation into Bakara’s heavily populated areas. A spate of recent fighting in central Somalia and in Mogadishu itself would seem to be part of an oft-discussed “offensive” by the Transitional Federal Government of President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. President Sharif’s government, which suffers from corruption and frequent internal disputes, has lost hundreds of fighters, recently trained by Somalia’s allies, because of the Sharif government’s inability to pay regular salaries. But with the apparent surge of African Union peacekeepers (under the African Union Mission in Somalia -- AMISOM), Shabab forces have found that their tacit control of Somalia is no longer a given. Contributing the largest number of peacekeepers to AMISOM is Uganda, which has rededicated itself to the peacekeeping mission in Somalia despite Shabab threats to repeat its twin suicide bombing attack of last July, which killed dozens in the Ugandan capital of Kampala. “It seems that the AMISOM offensive has been successful, and Al Shabab and its allies are in disarray,” says a Western diplomat in the region, requesting anonymity. Al Shabab – a breakaway group that emerged after a year-long Ethiopian occupation force toppled the Islamic Courts Union government of Somalia in December 2006 – has fallen on hard times recently. Once the dominant force in southern and central Somalia, Al Shabab has seen a rival moderate Islamist militia – Ahlu Sunna Wal Jama’a – taking away territory in the central region of Galgadud. In the South, forces opposed to Al Shabab have declared their own autonomous state of Jubaland, an attempt to form a buffer zone that prevents Shabab’s easy access to arms, money, and recruits coming in from Kenya’s expatriate Somali community. Yet as Shabab forces continue to be hemmed in, there is little sign of weakness or willingness to come to a negotiated settlement with the Transitional Federal Government of President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. President Sharif’s government itself remains shaky and heavily reliant on the whims of a loose confederation of clan elders from across Somalia, most of whom are reluctant to cede actual power or to donate substantial numbers of fighting men to the federal government that they, in theory, serve. Despite this, President Sharif continues to talk tough, and his government retains the military support of most of his nation’s neighbors, as countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti, and Uganda provide military and police training for TFG forces. "Al Shabab is on the verge of collapse," Sharif told reporters in Mogadishu as recently as March, after a recent surge of AU-TFG fighting against Shabab. "We shall also sweep them from Mogadishu. Our enemies have suffered a great loss, it is obvious they will run away from many towns." |
(S01E03) When does Gotham’s trash hang overhead? When a man with weather balloons wants that trash dead. When raising Bruce safely where is the border? It isn’t the fencing. It’s the eating disorder. When will the cops care? Depends on the line. Is it colored blue with a cop’s body behind? And what of the Penguin’s Arkham-themed plan? Wait until next week. Let’s talk “The Balloonman”. Show Notes Ratings for ‘The Balloonman’ Gotham 1×04 Promo “Arkham” Vicki Cartagena (Montoya) Pulling a “Question” on set Nicholas D’Agosto is Harvey Dent Alfred engaged in a bit of swordplay with…THE JOKER This Week’s Audible Recommendations: Click here to get your FREE audiobook from Audible. Overcome Fear of Heights: Keep calm and relaxed and learn to enjoy high places. By Darren Marks The Balloon Man by Charlotte MacLeod Contact Us: E-mail: legendsofgotham@gmail.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/LegendsOfGotham Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LegendsOfGotham Voicemail Number: (424) 274-2352 Like this: Like Loading... |
Firstly, thanks for stopping in as always, I’m sorry the website has taken a bit of a back seat this year but anyone that follows my work will know I’ve taken up residence over at Motorsport.com working alongside the one and only Giorgio Piola, although I’ve maintained the tech galleries after each race as always. As brilliant as the blog has been over the years it does take a considerable effort to stay on top of everything I do, which also includes work for PlanetF1.com and a day job thrown in the mix for good. Both of these put some extra sheckles in my pocket, whereas the blog doesn’t, bar a six monthly payment from google ads for your kind clicks. And that’s ok, as I never anticipated that I’d end up where I am now when I started this back in 2012. However, I have been considering using Patreon as a method of rewarding yourselves with content in exchange for some of your cold hard cash. Perhaps pop some feedback in the comments section below if you think it’s something you’d like to see. Anyway, onward with the good stuff in a piece that has been requested by fellow panelist on the Missed Apex podcast - Anil Parmer, who wants to know more about the rumoured Red Bull VTT (Virtual Test Track). However, I can’t get straight into that and want to exorcise some associated demons first…. We all know that the on-track testing ban that came into force in 2009 has been a massive pain in the ass for the established big guns of the sport, with Ferrari and McLaren failing to secure titles in the years following. However, whilst those at the head of the sport believed costs would be reduced if teams stopped pounding around their dedicated test venues, they couldn't have been further from the truth. Formula One is frankly an industry like no other, the more you try to cut budgets the more the teams will try and find ways to spend that same amount of money to gain the same if not more performance elsewhere. The whimsical notion that cutting real world testing would reduce spend has been utterly fruitless and more money than ever has been spent on the simulation of these conditions at the factory instead, leaving us to question is one better than the other? Of course, you can argue that this can be seen as a big carbon offsetting schtick and claim that the sport is being more responsible to the environment as it no longer carts a spare car off to a test location but, the expansion of the race calendar from 18 races, in 2008, to 21 races in 2016 slightly belittles that argument, especially as the calendar has expanded ever outward from the euro-centric home of the team's (Ten European races, in 2008 vs Nine, in 2016, and that’s counting Baku as Europe even though it’s tenuous as to whether it is or not). Ok, ok, I hear those in the back shouting that the teams are testing in-season once again too and whilst that is true it is not the same level of testing that was done nearly a decade ago. These post race test sessions have been lambasted by many as a waste of time, money and resources and only attended because if they don’t it gives the other teams testing mileage they don’t get. I’d argue they are relative and are actually the future direction that the sport needs to take in terms of marketing the sport outside the walls of current convention, attracting fans they might ordinarily lose, but I digress onto a topic I’d have to spend further time explaining. Red Bull add kiel probe arrays behind the front wheels on the RB12 to collect data on how the front wing, nose, wheels etc interact with the airflow and will use the data to correlate their findings with the simulations conducted at the factory So, factory based work that is being conducted primarily revolves around the simulation of conditions seen at the circuit but because it’s not a real-world exercise we often see teams having to apportion some of their Free Practice time on a Friday to correlation work. This is when you’ll see teams run kiel probe arrays, flo-viz painted on the cars. infra-red or slo-motion camera’s mounted on the cars to establish deflection and of course more ride height sensors and pressure taps. The information gathered during these runs is used as a baseline in order to improve the accuracy of simulation techniques such as CFD, wind tunnel models, mechanical simulation rigs and the driver simulator. All well and good but still costly, in terms of creating these solutions, mounting them and the time spent on track dialing them in. Scale model in Sauber's wind tunnel in Hinwil One of the things that struck me as a cost misnomer back in the approach to the 2009 regulation shift was the change in scale for wind tunnel use. Whilst not every team had gone to the expense of creating and running a 100% scale tunnel, some of the lead teams had made that investment, cripes BMW even invested in a space at Hinwil that could have two models running one behind the other, albeit scaled. You can argue that the cost to run the a 100% scale tunnel has now exceeded the reinvestment needed to rescale to the 60% model limit set out in the regulations. However, what cannot be made up for is the results that can be achieved for said scaling difference. Furthermore, there is the initial outlay required to retool and create these models, although you’ll hear the argument that over a sustained period the costs have been recouped. I firmly believe this is why BMW, Honda and Toyota decided to step away from the sport. These three teams alone had sunk a monumental amount of money into the sport at this point, especially in terms of the investment in wind tunnel facilities, only for it to be pissed on and the rules changed so that they’d need to spend more. This can perhaps be seen as a bridge too far in terms of getting it passed a board of directors and shareholders, when the global financial system is already in meltdown… Anyway I’ve got off topic again, perhaps that’s what these blog posts can be about, a more irreverent look at the sport, rather than the melodic factoid style pieces I have to do elsewhere.. Ok, so point proven about costs? It’s a never ending chicken vs the egg scenario where overlap in terms of investment is crucial to exploiting regulatory change and is certainly something we’ve seen Red Bull and Mercedes exploit at the last two major turning points, in 2009 and 2014. With another change literally on the doorstep we are undoubtedly going to see another investment in infrastructure come to the fore and likely be key in the performance of the adopting teams results. The main purpose of this article could be just that, with rumours suggesting that Red Bull have invested in what has been dubbed as a VTT, which is what I’ll abbreviate it as for the remainder of the article but stands for Virtual Test Track. This is a story that was run some time ago by the German publication AMuS and even though I’ve asked the team to comment several times I’ve yet to have a concrete yes or no on whether it exists. Hardly surprising… Martin Brundle stands infront of a huge scalextric track which consists some of the best and well known sections of track on the Formula One calendar Now you might be thinking, what the hell does a VTT mean? Or have images of a huge Scalextric track in an underground bunker somewhere but, it’s a little more comprehensive than that when we consider the other simulation techniques in play. Furthermore, I think it’s important to know that Red Bull’s VTT builds upon the foundation of technology already in use amongst the other teams and has been earmarked as part of the initial success enjoyed by Mercedes since 2014. Chassis Dynamometer Those interested in the engine side of Formula One, or any motorsport or automotive endeavour may well already understand the importance of a dynamometer but, for those that don’t it’s imperative that an engine be tested under strict conditions before it even be mounted in a car. It’s essentially a test laboratory for the engine, with a huge amount of parameters run and problems diagnosed in advance of a situation arising that would impact life or performance. In terms of Mercedes, they understood that such was the complexity of the powerunit, with its various energy recovery systems, reliant on evolving track situations made it imperative that the powerunit and chassis divisions worked together to create a unified front. Chassis dynamometers pre-date the relatively recent adoption in Formula One, with car makers using it as a way of improving the dynamic relationship of their cars and is perhaps something that Stuttgart instigated. This original image is no longer available on their website but AVL Racing, who've been at the forefront of this chassis dynamomter technology are worth a visit if you really want to scrape beneath the surface of the VTT's I'm talking about. The marriage of chassis and powerunit means that more accurate data points can be created from which the team then build their understanding of the race weekend from, even before they’ve got to the venue. Software simulates the dynamic conditions the car would encounter at the track with the entire chassis mounted on a moving platform and 7 post rig (the latter much like the one used to test components in the factory and all-in-all very similar to the hexapod setup we’d associate with a simulator). These simulation of these dynamic loads are what it's all about, understanding what happens throughout a corner, a sequence of corners, an entire lap and even a grand prix distance allows the team to plan in advance, optimising strategies and energy recovery and deployment, be it electrical or petrochemical, with engine modes refined to extrapolate more power or less energy consumption based on dynamic and transient conditions that the entire car is subjected to, rather than just the powerunit in isolation. Think about it, the forces encountered during braking and cornering can be used to manage, recover and dispense energy. Understanding the nuances of this can lead to improvements that make up the difference between winning and being a few tenths off the pace. Energy recovery background The energy recovery systems used in the current crop of powerunits, coupled with the fuel flow restriction and fuel weight limit mean that the fastest way around a lap might not be the same as it was in the V8 era. These energy and fuel figures combine to create an energy matrix for the lap, however, how that energy is created and deployed isn’t a fixed metric, with conditions on track and variability deployed by the driver creates a host of scenario’s. That’s partly why the MGU’s energy deployment is left unlimited, with the 4Mj per lap electrical storage in the energy storage acting like a buffer, that can be topped up in combination with the energy being released and deployed between the two MGU’s (MGU-K and MGU-H). The dynamic information of how the car accelerates, brakes and moves does mean that the energy models can be tweaked, something you’ll often here referred to as the ‘engine map’, these are pre-set modes selected by the driver from the steering wheel and provide different levels of fuel, energy deployment and energy harvesting. A driver may choose for instance to use a more aggressive map to attack an opponent, which results in more fuel being used and energy being deployed throughout the throttle's application rather than at set increments. Furthermore, in this high energy mode harvesting is reduced, as this may ordinarily hold the car back during or at corner exit. However, running at this deployment level for long periods or at the start of a Grand Prix can deplete the battery store and cause what we’ve come to know as a ‘derate’, thanks to the circumstances surrounding Rosberg and Hamilton’s collision in Spain. Understanding when and how to use these tools is all part of the strategic battle that goes on between the driver and the pitwall and is often overlooked as it’s not seen as overwhelmingly interesting for the casual viewer, whilst the graphic overlays used by FOM on the world feed are also quite poor at showing how it works. Back to the Dyno... The more the chassis dynamometer is used as a driving and setup tool as opposed to just being used to validate the powerunits life cycle and performance the more that can be got from it, with more complex energy schemes used to improve on-track performance. This is where Red Bull seem to have stolen a march, with their fresh install of a chassis dynamometer reportedly paired to a new simulator that they had installed at the same time. In their case, rather than simply feed the chassis dyno with a set of logic based parameters they have their drivers ‘in-loop’ and driving the circuits in only ways they know how. For this it may help to read an article I did after visiting Ansible Motion in Norfolk , as Kia Cammaerts, the company's owner, made a statement to me that has stuck ever since - “Drivers often do strange things, things that a computer can’t account for but are often better off for it.” Of course he’s talking about driver nuances and styles, the things that us as humans do for no reason other than it is a trait that we’ve picked up and is how we often generalise the difference between F1 drivers too. He was also referring to the non-linear way in which one driver may apply the brakes, throttle or steering input when compared with say the expected rationale or another driver's baseline. As such, I can see why Red Bull wanted to include the drivers in their use of this going forward, as why follow Mercedes (and Ferrari who now have a chassis dynamometer too) when you can make progress with the technology. As Kia rightly pointed out, having the driver as part of the feedback loop you get a direct correlation with what is happening with the dyno in real time rather than being reliant on data fed into the software simulation, even if this is extrapolated from data previously gathered in simulation sessions and real world data. I’d assume it’s a two way experience too, as conditions and feedback ordinarily fed into the simulator by software, can be fed from the chassis dyno, improving the drivers correlation with the sim and real world environment and their understanding of how to maximise the setup of the car. Has this had an impact yet?.. What stands out to me this season in terms of Red Bull is not only how they’ve managed to leapfrog over Ferrari toward Mercedes but the fact that they’ve done it with the minimum amount of aero work. Ordinarily Red Bull are one of the busiest teams on the grid in terms of aero, with updates coming thick and fast. However, this year has been quite the opposite, which of course you could argue they’ve opted to spend their limited CFD and Wind Tunnel time apportioned to next year's car rather than this but I think it comes down to more than just that. Red Bull’s aerodynamic design philosophy is ingrained in their last 7 challengers (RB5 through RB12) and have all the hallmarks of Adrian Newey designed machines but, the last three cars have been heavily compromised, as they’ve had to marginalise their chassis to maximise the relatively poor performance of Renault’s powerunit. Like Mercedes they’ve been working on areas of the car that run into the grey, with tyres and kinematics a prime example of where their respective cars outshine the rest of the field and again allowing them to close the perceived gaps. However, since the use of the VTT I think where they’ve excelled is being able to define their limitations, rather than just thinking about setup, mechanical or aerodynamic, in a raw way. For example, there is no point being able to achieve 201mph on the pit straight for one lap if that means you’ve destroyed your energy matrix for the next five and can only achieve 195mph. You have to be smarter than that, pick your fights and know when the car, tyres and strategy allow you to deploy maximum attack. I believe the VTT is a big part of that jigsaw puzzle, as it not only hones these setup choices before getting to the circuits but also gives the drivers an insight into what they can achieve and why. |
INDEPENDENCE, Ohio -- The Cleveland Cavaliers’ message on Friday, considered the first official day that Tristan Thompson’s contract standoff with the team escalated to a “holdout” situation, was loud and clear: If you are not going to be present for training camp, you are not going to be weighing on our minds. “Right now, my thoughts are just about the guys that are here and how hard and how well they are working and no specific expectation otherwise,” said Cavs coach David Blatt when asked for his reaction to Thompson letting the Cavs’ one-year, $6.8 million qualifying offer for this season expire at 11:59 p.m. ET on Thursday without accepting it. “Just happy to see our guys working as well as they are." Blatt punctuated his indifference towards the free agent big man by revealing he didn’t even bother to stay up late Thursday night to find out Thompson’s decision. “I was liking the dream I was having,” Blatt said with a wry smile. “Usually I don’t go to sleep that early, but last night I was tired. We’re just back at it. We’ve got to focus on the now and here and that’s what we’re doing.” The Cavs spent Friday removing Thompson’s likeness from any signage that adorns Quicken Loans Arena, as captured in a tweet by Northeast Ohio Media Group’s Chris Haynes: An elevator at The Q is getting a facelift today... pic.twitter.com/naNoWilFjl — Chris Haynes (@ChrisBHaynes) October 2, 2015 They also removed all Thompson-related merchandise from the team stop at The Q as well as from their online store. Per league rules, a team cannot use a player that is not under contract for promotional or revenue-generating purposes. Courtesy of Dave McMenamin With the qualifying offer off the table, negotiations will shift to both sides focusing on a multi-year agreement. Thompson’s agent, Rich Paul, recently vacated a five-year, $94 million max contract demand for his client in favor of a preferred three-year, $53 million deal, per league sources. The Cavs have already tendered a five-year, $80 million offer to Thompson, according to sources. Friday was the fourth consecutive day of camp that Thompson missed, however Blatt was adamant that the big man’s absence has not caused a distraction as his team readies itself for the regular season. "We got a veteran group,” Blatt said. “We got a very professional group of guys going about their business and going about their jobs the way that they should. The team is working and we are going to continue to do so." |
Their dinner was no longer hot. The boy stared at the three plates and his mother’s empty chair. He and his father were sitting in the dining room — a part of the house where the central heat didn’t reach. The little boy felt cold. Very cold. As he sat there, trying not to shiver, he looked at this father. The old man was twirling his food with his fork and not eating. He looked beaten down and tired. But the little boy really didn’t know what normal was anymore, particularly when it came to his father’s looks. He was gone most of the time these days for reasons the little boy wouldn’t understand for decades. “Pass the salt,” the boy asked. His father handed him the salt and pepper shaker without a word. The boy noticed his giant, scarred hands were shaking too. “YOU’RE A SON OF A BITCH. THAT’S RIGHT. YOU ARE!” The boy winced. His mother had come into the room. The bitter smell of alcohol flowed from her words, wafting into room and joining the fight. The father just sat, not saying a word. He just took it as his wife berated him loudly in front of their son. The battles had broken him down. Defeat had crushed his will to fight back. The son leapt to his feet and tried to get in between his parents. He grabbed his mother to hug her as she shoved him away. These fights frightened him deeply. He felt like it was his job to calm his mother’s rage. It wasn’t of course. His job was to be a little boy. But if he wasn’t trying to stop her explosions, he was hiding her cigarettes or her wine bottles. He walked on eggshells daily, not knowing if she would explode. Normally, when you feel you are under attack, you go into fight-or-flight mode. The little boy had the choice of neither. He couldn’t run. Nor could he fight back. He just took the pain. Years later, it would wreck his self-esteem and leave his body and soul broken. A child who doesn’t know better will blame him or herself. The little boy thought everything that was happening that evening was his fault. Such is life living with a narcissist. His mother continued her profanity laced rant. Then he noticed his father quietly get up out of his chair, walk out the door and get into his car. The little boy ran to the window and watched as his father raced away. His whole world was crumbling around him. And now, he was alone now with her. She scared him. “What are you looking at?!?” she sneered. “Your father is a coward. You know that right?” He turned quickly and looked back out the window with tears in his eyes. On the windowsill, he saw a mockingbird. It just looked at him, not making a sound. Forty years later, the son sat at the graveside with his siblings. His mother’s coffin sat before them, covered with flowers that would soon be lowered into the ground with her. The previous years had been brutal. Their father had died.Then their mother struggled with her own illness. Many secrets had come out, explaining much of why their mother had struggled like she had. Hurt people hurt people after all and she was as broken of a person as there was. And like a drowning person, she tried to drag down everyone who tried to help her — if they didn’t help her in the way she thought was fit. It took all the siblings strength to care for her as the abuse rained down. The mother had done her best to publicly vilify the children after they refused to do things that would have been detrimental to her and their father. Lawsuits were threatened and nasty emails were sent by the flying monkeys her mother had befriended at the end. But they stuck by her as they struggled with her abuse. She had been lucky. If she had had any other children, she would have died broke in an institution. The cobalt blue sky blanketed the flat, dusty cemetery. The bright plastic flowers stuck out from the parched Mississippi August landscape. A hot wind blew, like Satan himself was voicing his disapproval. Water poured down their faces, but it was sweat not tears. The minister stepped up in front of the coffin and began her sermon. It was a average textbook service until the very end. Then the minister started lecturing the children about how they had treated their mother. The man looked at the minister in disbelief. He felt the hate swelling in his throat. How dare she? This wasn’t a “Forgiveness is the only way you will heal” speech. This was, “You were mean to your mother and you should forgive her for her behavior.” Anger continued to swell as the minister’s words continued to jab at their very souls. How dare she?!? How could a person of the Lord not understand? Then it happened. First it was one mockingbird, then two. Soon a dozen or more began join together as their cries reverberated through the cemetery. Soon no one could hear the minister’s words. The cacophony of mockingbird songs continued until she stopped — then their voices ceased. Healing silence blanketed the funeral tent. The children knew forgiveness would have to come eventually. But not in the form of a lecture from someone who didn’t understand the damage that had been caused. As the man looked at his mother’s coffin again, a mockingbird landed on it. It looked at him and nodded. God knew the pain the children had suffered. And He knew the pain they’d struggle with for years to come. But on that hot Mississippi day, He sent them relief in the form of a mockingbird’s cry. |
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