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University appoints director of diversity and inclusion Wednesday, February 1st, 2017 at 3:55 PM By Dakota Palmer Published in: Vol. 116, No. 14 On Nov. 28, Pertrina Marrero was appointed as Edinboro University’s first director of diversity and inclusion. According to Interim Dean of Students and Campus Life, Dr. Mary Beth Mercatoris, this new role was created in order to “support our commitment to ensuring a safe, inclusive environment for everyone here at Edinboro, and especially for you, our students.” Marrero obtained her undergraduate degree in communications and media studies from Penn State Behrend, and then earned her master’s degree from Edinboro University in college student personnel. She previously served as the director of multicultural student services at Mercyhurst University. Marrero said of her time at Mercyhurst University: “The programs that we’ll be doing here (Edinboro), along with some of the workshops and conversations at large, are all part of what I learned. When you are collaborative, you get a bunch of voices that come together that want to talk about those issues. I learned that when you collaborate with people, it’s part of allying and they will understand where you’re coming from, and you can help each other and that’s ultimately what I want to do here.” This month, the Center for Diversity and Inclusion is partnering with Ghering Health and Wellness Center and talking about HPV, in addition to partnering with different student groups and administrative offices to bring different programs for Black History Month. When asked why people should celebrate their backgrounds and diversity, Marrero said: “Why wouldn’t we? Why wouldn’t we celebrate that we’re women, or that we’re men, or celebrate that we are whatever? I think celebration is a time for people to get an understanding as well as an appreciation.” Marrero emphasized that in order to make the campus more diverse and inclusive, everyone on campus has to work together. “I feel like inclusion is everyone’s job. It shouldn’t be me just having the party all by myself, it should be me having the party and everybody participating in the party,” she said. “It’s just a wider understanding of how each person interacts and touches different lives and brings those lives into what we’re doing.” In order to help students explore their backgrounds and identities, Marrero simply talks to students and asks them about their interests, in order to understand them better. She said, “Everything that is diverse about you is who you are, and bringing out those favorite things, those human things that are you, helps me to navigate your true identity.” “Ultimately, we can only find out more when we’re talking to people literally on a surface level and then gaining a rapport to ask them the deeper questions.” She believes in order to overcome racism and discrimination, it is important that people have open discussions about race. “This thing called ‘race’ we have to talk about. No matter where we are, no matter how someone identifies themselves is key and optimal in understanding what they will and won’t accept,” she said. The Center for Diversity and Inclusion will be working to promote diversity and inclusion on campus in conjunction with various other groups and organizations, including: the Office of Social Equity, the LGBTQIA Commission, the Women’s Commission, Diversity Council, the Multicultural Resource Center, and multicultural student organizations. Dakota Palmer can be reached at eupnews. spectator@gmail.com. Tags: news, edinboro university Employee killed during Wendy's robbery, state police make arrest By Nathan Brennan An employee was shot and killed during a robbery Saturday at the Edinboro area Wendy’s restaurant. According to local reports, the victim is 22-year-old Alexander Cavanah of Edinboro. Centennial, Miller on track for demolition By Shayma Musa News editor Shayma Musa reports on the future of several University buildings. News Briefs: Jan. 23 Edinboro University news briefs for the week of Jan. 23. Boro Council talks new Thompson Park playground items, appoints 2020-2022 spots By Samantha Mannion Coverage of the Dec. 9 and Jan. 6 Boro Council meetings. Jefferson lecture series discusses census in the 'Boro The Census was the topic of the first installment of the Jefferson Educational Society’s spring lecture series, which took place on Jan. 14 at Edinboro’s Alexander Music Center. Bed bugs discovered in 2 Highlands rooms, officials say cases are isolated By Jamie Heinrich According to Jim Dahle, director of Edinboro safety and risk management, two confirmed cases of bed bugs — in Highlands 3 and 6 — have been isolated to those two rooms. « Past Issues Inside This Issue » The new season of Were You Even Listening? kicks off with BROCKHAMPTON's newest release, and the highlights of music this summer. Subscribe to WYEL v... 8/30/2019, 2:59 PM An update on John's Wildwood Pizzeria post fire. 7/2/2019, 12:44 PM https://www.facebook.com/events/703858006711598/?ti=icl 6/29/2019, 11:15 AM Clay Club is sponsoring a series of ceramic demonstrations by Stuart Gair throughout the day today and tomorrow in… https://t.co/wvbCtW3c18 EdinboroNow on 1/29/2020, 2:22 PM There is currently a line of cars that stretches out onto the highway in front of Wendy’s as well as a crowd outsid… https://t.co/61jUyFaHP2 EdinboroNow on 1/29/2020, 12:43 PM Last night, several hundred people gathered at the Edinboro Wendy’s for the “Light in Darkness” vigil to honor the… https://t.co/nOpd0uWLc1 2020 © Edinboro Campus Media. All Rights Reserved. Powered by Epic Web Studios, LLC

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HomeEl Quartelejo MuseumExhibitsNative American Sites Photo by Mickey Shannon (https://www.mickeyshannon.com/photo/battle-canyon-monument-milky-way/) Travel to the place where the last Indian battle in Kansas was fought. Punished Woman's Fork is approximately one-mile South of Lake Scott State Park along Highway 95. It is a fork off of the Ladder Creek that now forms Historic Lake Scott. A monument overlooks the cave, canyon, and bluffs where the Northern Cheyenne hid, waiting to ambush the United States Cavalry. During the evening of September 9, 1878, Little Wolf and Dull Knife led the Northern Cheyenne from their camp. Frontier military were dispatched to return the fleeing Cheyenne. Lieutenant Colonel William H. Lewis eventually pursued them as commander of the Nineteenth Infantry from Fort Dodge, Kansas. After camping near the Dry Lake area in present-day southeastern Scott County, the pursuing soldiers advanced toward Ladder Creek. The Cheyenne Indians (300 men, women, and children) decoyed 250 soldiers and one excited warrior released a shot. This was the start of the last battle between the U.S. Army and the Native Americans in the state of Kansas. During this battle Colonel Lewis was hit in the leg. Lewis bled to death while being taken to Fort Wallace. He was the last army officer in killed in military action in Kansas. After the battle, the Northern Cheyenne fled during the night. This area has been designated a State and National Historic Site. Photo by Mickey Shannon (www.mickeyshannon.com)

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a four-star U.S. Army general shares the leadership principles and life lessons she learned along the way. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance (May 19, hardcover, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-06-230123-9) is an authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley’s most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs, the man who started PayPal and whose new companies include the car company Tesla. Every Town Is a Sports Town: Business Leadership at ESPN, from the Mailroom to the Boardroom by George Bodenheimer, with Don Phillips (May 5, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-1-4555-8609- 7). The first-person account of Bodenheimer’s rise from working in the mail room at ESPN to becoming the chairman of the world’s best-known sports network, with revealing inside stories of how he confronted and resolved key crises along the way. HACHETTE/TWELVE Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock (Apr. 7, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-1-4555-5479- 9). From the head of Google’s innovative People Operations comes a groundbreaking inquiry into the philosophy of work, and a blueprint for attracting the most spectacular talent to your business and ensuring the best and brightest succeed. Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper (May 19, hardcover, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-236249-0). A New York Times technology and business reporter charts the dramatic rise of Bitcoin and the fascinating personalities who are striving to create a new global money for the Internet age. The Real-Life MBA: Your No-BS Guide to Winning the Game, Building a Team, and Growing Your Career by Jack Welch and Suzy Welch (Apr. 14, hardcover, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-06-236280-3). The bestselling authors of Winning return with a modern guide for everyone in business today—and tomorrow—that explores the most pressing challenges to creating winning strategies, leading and managing others, and building a thriving career. Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention by Ben Parr (Mar. 3, hardcover, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06- 232419-1). Journalist and entrepreneur Parr explains how and why the mind pays attention to some events or people—and not others—and presents seven captivation triggers, techniques guaranteed to help capture and retain the attention of friends, colleagues, customers, fans, and strangers. HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW HARVARD UNIV. Inequality: What Can Be Done? by Anthony B. Atkinson (May 11, hardcover, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674- 50476-9). Inequality and poverty have returned with a vengeance in recent decades and reducing them requires fresh ideas that move beyond taxes on the wealthy. Atkinson offers ambitious new policies in technology, employment, social security, sharing of capital, and taxation, and he defends them against the common arguments for inaction. Sustainability for a Warming Planet by Humberto Llavador, John E. Roemer, and Joaquim Silvestre (June 8, hardcover, $45, ISBN 978-0-674-74409-7). Human-generated greenhouse gas emissions imperil a global resource: a biosphere capable of supporting life. What is the fair way to share this scarce resource across present and future generations and across regions of the world? This study offers a new perspective based on the guiding ethics of sustainability and egalitarianism. HMH/EAMON DOLAN Who Gets What? And Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin E. Roth (June 2, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-544-29113-3). A Nobel laureate reveals the often surprising rules that govern a vast array of activities— both mundane and life-changing—in which money may play little or no role. Holacracy: The New Management System that Redefines Management by Brian J. Robertson (June 2, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-62779-428-2) presents the most exciting new management philosophy since Six Sigma. Unlike Six Sigma and other authoritarian solutions, Holacracy turns everyone into a leader. Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World by Faris Yakob (Apr. 28, paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0- 7494-7360-0). Rapid changes in communication technologies shifted the media environment from one of scarcity to one of abundance. Here is a guide to modern advertising ideas: what they are, where they come from and how they are evolving. The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Com- puter Age by Robert Wachter (Apr. 10, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-0-07-184946-3).

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Would You Kill For a Million Bucks? Posted byDavid October 16, 2009 October 16, 2009 Leave a comment on Would You Kill For a Million Bucks? Would you kill a wheelchair-bound man for a million dollars? Probably not. But there are those who would. If you needed further proof that the health insurance industry is broken, and needs some new controls, here’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with it. Ian Pearl Ian Pearl is 37 years old, and he suffers from muscular dystrophy. He is confined to a wheelchair, and is hooked up to a breathing tube, but he refuses to just give up and die. He is insured by Guardian Insurance of New York, which pays for the one million dollars in care, each year, that it takes to keep Mr. Pearl alive. Most of that is for around the clock, in-home nursing care – for operation of his ventilator, hourly breathing treatments and continuous intravenous medication. Ian Pearl has been fortunate, most of his life, to be covered under the Guardian small-business health plan his father bought through his remodeling company. Generous by modern standards, the health insurance plan covered home nursing, something most small-business plans do not cover today. In the state of New York, where Mr. Pearl’s business operates, 54 other employers offered the Guardian plan. Their policies covered nearly 500 employees and dependents, including two other severely ill people. But Guardian grew weary of paying Mr. Pearl’s expenses, and decided to find a way to get out of its obligation. Legally barred from discriminating against individuals who submit large claims, they couldn’t simply cancel Mr. Pearl’s policy. Besides, that would just be wrong. Then someone at Guardian struck on the perfect answer. Instead of canceling Mr. Pearl’s policy, Guardian chose to cancel entire lines of coverage altogether, in whole states, to avoid paying high-cost claims like Mr. Pearl’s. In an e-mail, one Guardian company executive called high-cost patients such as Mr. Pearl “dogs” that the company should “get rid of.” A Guardian spokesman said policies such as Mr. Pearl’s – which offered unlimited home nursing – had simply become too expensive for new small-business customers to buy, and that even Medicaid and Medicare do not cover 24-hour home nursing. His parents, Warren and Susan Pearl of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, said their health insurance premiums had risen over the years to $3,700 a month. That’s $44,400 a year. Fortunately, they are in a position to pay these premiums. A federal court ruled that the company’s actions were legal. The judge found that the company had not violated the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), because it canceled entire policy lines. The Pearls also claimed Guardian violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), but the judge found that only HHS can enforce that law and that private citizens cannot sue under it. The Pearls appealed to HHS under the Bush administration and were told the agency could do nothing, Warren Pearl said. They petitioned again in a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on October 5th, with support from their congresswoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Democrat, but have not heard back. So, on December 1st, barring an order by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Pearl will lose his benefits. The insurer also canceled similar policies in New Jersey and South Carolina, and earlier ceased offering any health plans in Colorado, but did not cancel all of the policies in every state in which they were offered, said John Fried, the Pearls’ attorney. The company took the action only against those plans where claims were highest, he said. In an e-mail to four other Guardian executives entered into evidence in the Pearls’ suit, company Vice President Tim Birely discussed how the company could “eliminate this entire block to get rid of the few dogs.” Wow. This reminds me of something I’ve heard before …. what is it? Oh yeah. Death Panels. Guardian, a 150-year-old mutual company, reported profits of $437 million last year, a 50 percent increase over $292 million in 2007. It paid dividends of $723 million to shareholders and had $4.3 billion in capital reserves, according to its annual report. The company’s investment income totaled $1.5 billion that year, a small increase from the year earlier. They discontinued Ian Pearl’s coverage late last year, but were required by law to continue paying for his care for another year. Next year, without Mr. Pearl as a drag on their books, they will earn an extra one million dollars in profits. Ian Pearl has Type II spinal muscular atrophy – which often kills victims in infancy. He grew to adulthood only to suffer respiratory arrest at 19. He has required a tracheal tube ever since. The Pearls moved to Fort Lauderdale 30 years ago because the humidity there is beneficial to their son. Warren Pearl has commuted back and forth from New York every weekend since to continue to operate his business. Ian became the first wheelchair-bound pupil to be mainstreamed in the Broward County elementary schools, and he was elected president of his high school class at University School of Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale. As a last resort, Ian would be admitted to a state hospital under Medicaid. But the Pearls consider that a death sentence. “Ian would be lucky, or unlucky, to survive more than a matter of weeks or months,” Mrs. Pearl said. “One-on-one skilled nursing is essential.” Her husband, 60, a wealthy businessman, said the couple have enough savings to pay for their son’s care for a few years, and after that, they could mortgage the family’s home. This is capitalism at its finest. The free market at work. And a perfect example of why the health and well-being of Americans should not be a part of that equation. Profit will always be the priority. “This is a matter of life and death for my son,” Warren Pearl said. “I have to have faith that HHS will enforce the law. This is attempted murder, as far as I’m concerned. They targeted us, they never expected to get caught. I believe that justice will prevail.” I hope your faith is justifed, Mr. Pearl. Posted byDavid October 16, 2009 October 16, 2009 Posted inPolitics & Public Policy, Rant The Truth About …

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ChrisLord.net Instrument Tuition My Impossible Story Keeping up my bi-yearly blogging cadence, I thought it might be fun to write about what I’ve been doing since I left Mozilla. It’s also a convenient time, as it coincides with our work being open-sourced and made public (and of course, developed in public, because otherwise what’s the point, right?) Somewhat ironically, I’ve been working on another machine-learning project, though I’m loathe to call it that, as it uses no neural networks so far, and most people I’ve encountered consider those to be synonymous. I did also go on a month’s holiday to the home of bluegrass music, but that’s a story for another post. I’m getting ahead of myself here. Some time in March I met up with some old colleagues/friends and of course we all got to chatting about what we’re working on at the moment. As it happened, Rob had just started working at a company run by a friend of our shared former boss, Matthew Allum. What he was working on sounded like it would be a lot of fun, and I had to admit that I was a little jealous of the opportunity… But it so happened that they were looking to hire, and I was starting to get itchy feet, so I got to talk to Kwame Ferreira and one thing lead to another. I started working for Impossible Labs in July, on an R&D project called ‘glimpse’. The remit for this work hasn’t always been entirely clear, but the pitch was that we’d be working on augmented reality technology to aid social interaction. There was also this video: What this has meant in real terms is that we’ve been researching and implementing a skeletal tracking system (think motion capture without any special markers/suits/equipment). We’ve studied Microsoft’s freely-available research on the skeletal tracking system for the Kinect, and filling in some of the gaps, implemented something that is probably very similar. We’ve not had much time yet, but it does work and you can download it and try it out now if you’re an adventurous Linux user. You’ll have to wait a bit longer if you’re less adventurous or you want to see it running on a phone. I’ve worked mainly on implementing the tools and code to train and use the model we use to interpret body images and infer joint positions. My prior experience on the DeepSpeech team at Mozilla was invaluable to this. It gave me the prerequisite knowledge and vocabulary to be able to understand the various papers around the topic, and to realistically implement them. Funnily, I initially tried using TensorFlow for training, with the mind that it’d help us to easily train on GPUs. It turns out re-implementing it in native C was literally 1000x faster and allowed us to realistically complete training on a single (powerful) machine, in just a couple of days. My take-away for this is that TensorFlow isn’t necessarily the tool for all machine-learning tasks, and also to make sure you analyse the graphs that it produces thoroughly and make sure you don’t have any obvious bottlenecks. A lot of TensorFlow nodes do not have GPU implementations, for example, and it’s very easy to absolutely kill performance by requiring frequent data transfers to happen between CPU and GPU. It’s also worth noting that a large graph has a huge amount of overhead that will be unrelated to the actual operations you’re trying to run. I’m no TensorFlow expert, but it’s definitely a particular tool for a particular job and it’s worth being careful. Experts can feel free to look at our repository history and tell me all the stupid mistakes I was making before we rewrote it 🙂 So what’s it like working at Impossible on a day-to-day basis? I think a picture says a thousand words, so here’s a picture of our studio: Though I’ve taken this from the Impossible website, this is seriously what it looks like. There is actually a piano there, and it’s in tune and everything. There are guitars. We have a cat. There’s a tree. A kitchen. The roof is glass. As amazing as Mozilla (and many of the larger tech companies) offices are, this is really something else. I can’t overstate how refreshing an environment this is to be in, and how that impacts both your state of mind and your work. Corporations take note, I’ll take sunlight and life over snacks and a ball-pit any day of the week. I miss my 3-day work-week sometimes. I do have less time for music than I had, and it’s a little harder to fit everything in. But what I’ve gained in exchange is a passion for my work again. This is code I’m pretty proud of, and that I think is interesting. I’m excited to see where it goes, and to get it into people’s hands. I’m hoping that other people will see what I see in it, if not now, sometime in the near future. Wish us luck! Author Chris LordPosted on 20th December 2017 Categories Development, Life, Machine LearningLeave a comment on My Impossible Story Goodbye Mozilla Today is effectively my last day at Mozilla, before I start at Impossible on Monday. I’ve been here for 6 years and a bit and it’s been quite an experience. I think it’s worth reflecting on, so here we go; Fair warning, if you have no interest in me or Mozilla, this is going to make pretty boring reading. I started on June 6th 2011, several months before the (then new, since moved) London office opened. Although my skills lay (lie?) in user interface implementation, I was hired mainly for my graphics and systems knowledge. Mozilla was in the region of 500 or so employees then I think, and it was an interesting time. I’d been working on the code-base for several years prior at Intel, on a headless backend that we used to build a Clutter-based browser for Moblin netbooks. I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the code-base, but it still took a long time to get to grips with. We’re talking several million lines of code with several years of legacy, in a language I still consider myself to be pretty novice at (C++). I started on the mobile platform team, and I would consider this to be my most enjoyable time at the company. The mobile platform team was a multi-discipline team that did general low-level platform work for the mobile (Android and Meego) browser. When we started, the browser was based on XUL and was multi-process. Mobile was often the breeding ground for new technologies that would later go on to desktop. It wasn’t long before we started developing a new browser based on a native Android UI, removing XUL and relegating Gecko to page rendering. At the time this felt like a disappointing move. The reason the XUL-based browser wasn’t quite satisfactory was mainly due to performance issues, and as a platform guy, I wanted to see those issues fixed, rather than worked around. In retrospect, this was absolutely the right decision and lead to what I’d still consider to be one of Android’s best browsers. Despite performance issues being one of the major driving forces for making this move, we did a lot of platform work at the time too. As well as being multi-process, the XUL browser had a compositor system for rendering the page, but this wasn’t easily portable. We ended up rewriting this, first almost entirely in Java (which was interesting), then with the rendering part of the compositor in native code. The input handling remained in Java for several years (pretty much until FirefoxOS, where we rewrote that part in native code, then later, switched Android over). Most of my work during this period was based around improving performance (both perceived and real) and fluidity of the browser. Benoit Girard had written an excellent tiled rendering framework that I polished and got working with mobile. On top of that, I worked on progressive rendering and low precision rendering, which combined are probably the largest body of original work I’ve contributed to the Mozilla code-base. Neither of them are really active in the code-base at the moment, which shows how good a job I didn’t do maintaining them, I suppose. Although most of my work was graphics-focused on the platform team, I also got to to do some layout work. I worked on some over-invalidation issues before Matt Woodrow’s DLBI work landed (which nullified that, but I think that work existed in at least one release). I also worked a lot on fixed position elements staying fixed to the correct positions during scrolling and zooming, another piece of work I was quite proud of (and probably my second-biggest contribution). There was also the opportunity for some UI work, when it intersected with platform. I implemented Firefox for Android’s dynamic toolbar, and made sure it interacted well with fixed position elements (some of this work has unfortunately been undone with the move from the partially Java-based input manager to the native one). During this period, I was also regularly attending and presenting at FOSDEM. I would consider my time on the mobile platform team a pretty happy and productive time. Unfortunately for me, those of us with graphics specialities on the mobile platform team were taken off that team and put on the graphics team. I think this was the start in a steady decline in my engagement with the company. At the time this move was made, Mozilla was apparently trying to consolidate teams around products, and this was the exact opposite happening. The move was never really explained to me and I know I wasn’t the only one that wasn’t happy about it. The graphics team was very different to the mobile platform team and I don’t feel I fit in as well. It felt more boisterous and less democratic than the mobile platform team, and as someone that generally shies away from arguments and just wants to get work done, it was hard not to feel sidelined slightly. I was also quite disappointed that people didn’t seem particular familiar with the graphics work I had already been doing and that I was tasked, at least initially, with working on some very different (and very boring) desktop Linux work, rather than my speciality of mobile. I think my time on the graphics team was pretty unproductive, with the exception of the work I did on b2g, improving tiled rendering and getting graphics memory-mapped tiles working. This was particularly hard as the interface was basically undocumented, and its implementation details could vary wildly depending on the graphics driver. Though I made a huge contribution to this work, you won’t see me credited in the tree unfortunately. I’m still a little bit sore about that. It wasn’t long after this that I requested to move to the FirefoxOS systems front-end team. I’d been doing some work there already and I’d long wanted to go back to doing UI. It felt like I either needed a dramatic change or I needed to leave. I’m glad I didn’t leave at this point. Working on FirefoxOS was a blast. We had lots of new, very talented people, a clear and worthwhile mission, and a new code-base to work with. I worked mainly on the home-screen, first with performance improvements, then with added features (app-grouping being the major one), then with a hugely controversial and probably mismanaged (on my part, not my manager – who was excellent) rewrite. The rewrite was good and fixed many of the performance problems of what it was replacing, but unfortunately also removed features, at least initially. Turns out people really liked the app-grouping feature. I really enjoyed my time working on FirefoxOS, and getting a nice clean break from platform work, but it was always bitter-sweet. Everyone working on the project was very enthusiastic to see it through and do a good job, but it never felt like upper management’s focus was in the correct place. We spent far too much time kowtowing to the desires of phone carriers and trying to copy Android and not nearly enough time on basic features and polish. Up until around v2.0 and maybe even 2.2, the experience of using FirefoxOS was very rough. Unfortunately, as soon as it started to show some promise and as soon as we had freedom from carriers to actually do what we set out to do in the first place, the project was cancelled, in favour of the whole Connected Devices IoT debacle. If there was anything that killed morale for me more than my unfortunate time on the graphics team, and more than having FirefoxOS prematurely cancelled, it would have to be the Connected Devices experience. I appreciate it as an opportunity to work on random semi-interesting things for a year or so, and to get some entrepreneurship training, but the mismanagement of that whole situation was pretty epic. To take a group of hundreds of UI-focused engineers and tell them that, with very little help, they should organised themselves into small teams and create IoT products still strikes me as an idea so crazy that it definitely won’t work. Certainly not the way we did it anyway. The idea, I think, was that we’d be running several internal start-ups and we’d hopefully get some marketable products out of it. What business a not-for-profit company, based primarily on doing open-source, web-based engineering has making physical, commercial products is questionable, but it failed long before that could be considered. The process involved coming up with an idea, presenting it and getting approval to run with it. You would then repeat this approval process at various stages during development. It was, however, very hard to get approval for enough resources (both time and people) to finesse an idea long enough to make it obviously a good or bad idea. That aside, I found it very demoralising to not have the opportunity to write code that people could use. I did manage it a few times, in spite of what was happening, but none of this work I would consider myself particularly proud of. Lots of very talented people left during this period, and then at the end of it, everyone else was laid off. Not a good time. Luckily for me and the team I was on, we were moved under the umbrella of Emerging Technologies before the lay-offs happened, and this also allowed us to refocus away from trying to make an under-featured and pointless shopping-list assistant and back onto the underlying speech-recognition technology. This brings us almost to present day now. The DeepSpeech speech recognition project is an extremely worthwhile project, with a clear mission, great promise and interesting underlying technology. So why would I leave? Well, I’ve practically ended up on this team by a series of accidents and random happenstance. It’s been very interesting so far, I’ve learnt a lot and I think I’ve made a reasonable contribution to the code-base. I also rewrote python_speech_features in C for a pretty large performance boost, which I’m pretty pleased with. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like this team will miss me. I too often spend my time finding work to do, and to be honest, I’m just not interested enough in the subject matter to make that work long-term. Most of my time on this project has been spent pushing to open it up and make it more transparent to people outside of the company. I’ve added model exporting, better default behaviour, a client library, a native client, Python bindings (+ example client) and most recently, Node.js bindings (+ example client). We’re starting to get noticed and starting to get external contributions, but I worry that we still aren’t transparent enough and still aren’t truly treating this as the open-source project it is and should be. I hope the team can push further towards this direction without me. I think it’ll be one to watch. Next week, I start working at a new job doing a new thing. It’s odd to say goodbye to Mozilla after 6 years. It’s not easy, but many of my peers and colleagues have already made the jump, so it feels like the right time. One of the big reasons I’m moving, and moving to Impossible specifically, is that I want to get back to doing impressive work again. This is the largest regret I have about my time at Mozilla. I used to blog regularly when I worked at OpenedHand and Intel, because I was excited about the work we were doing and I thought it was impressive. This wasn’t just youthful exuberance (he says, realising how ridiculous that sounds at 32), I still consider much of the work we did to be impressive, even now. I want to be doing things like that again, and it feels like Impossible is a great opportunity to make that happen. Wish me luck! Author Chris LordPosted on 28th June 2017 Categories Development, Life, Uncategorized11 Comments on Goodbye Mozilla Free Ideas for UI Frameworks, or How To Achieve Polished UI Ever since the original iPhone came out, I’ve had several ideas about how they managed to achieve such fluidity with relatively mediocre hardware. I mean, it was good at the time, but Android still struggles on hardware that makes that look like a 486… It’s absolutely my fault that none of these have been implemented in any open-source framework I’m aware of, so instead of sitting on these ideas and trotting them out at the pub every few months as we reminisce over what could have been, I’m writing about them here. I’m hoping that either someone takes them and runs with them, or that they get thoroughly debunked and I’m made to look like an idiot. The third option is of course that they’re ignored, which I think would be a shame, but given I’ve not managed to get the opportunity to implement them over the last decade, that would hardly be surprising. I feel I should clarify that these aren’t all my ideas, but include a mix of observation of and conjecture about contemporary software. This somewhat follows on from the post I made 6 years ago(!) So let’s begin. 1. No main-thread UI The UI should always be able to start drawing when necessary. As careful as you may be, it’s practically impossible to write software that will remain perfectly fluid when the UI can be blocked by arbitrary processing. This seems like an obvious one to me, but I suppose the problem is that legacy makes it very difficult to adopt this at a later date. That said, difficult but not impossible. All the major web browsers have adopted this policy, with caveats here and there. The trick is to switch from the idea of ‘painting’ to the idea of ‘assembling’ and then using a compositor to do the painting. Easier said than done of course, most frameworks include the ability to extend painting in a way that would make it impossible to switch to a different thread without breaking things. But as long as it’s possible to block UI, it will inevitably happen. 2. Contextually-aware compositor This follows on from the first point; what’s the use of having non-blocking UI if it can’t respond? Input needs to be handled away from the main thread also, and the compositor (or whatever you want to call the thread that is handling painting) needs to have enough context available that the first response to user input doesn’t need to travel to the main thread. Things like hover states, active states, animations, pinch-to-zoom and scrolling all need to be initiated without interaction on the main thread. Of course, main thread interaction will likely eventually be required to update the view, but that initial response needs to be able to happen without it. This is another seemingly obvious one – how can you guarantee a response rate unless you have a thread dedicated to responding within that time? Most browsers are doing this, but not going far enough in my opinion. Scrolling and zooming are often catered for, but not hover/active states, or initialising animations (note; initialising animations. Once they’ve been initialised, they are indeed run on the compositor, usually). 3. Memory bandwidth budget This is one of the less obvious ideas and something I’ve really wanted to have a go at implementing, but never had the opportunity. A problem I saw a lot while working on the platform for both Firefox for Android and FirefoxOS is that given the work-load of a web browser (which is not entirely dissimilar to the work-load of any information-heavy UI), it was very easy to saturate memory bandwidth. And once you saturate memory bandwidth, you end up having to block somewhere, and painting gets delayed. We’re assuming UI updates are asynchronous (because of course – otherwise we’re blocking on the main thread). I suggest that it’s worth tracking frame time, and only allowing large asynchronous transfers (e.g. texture upload, scaling, format transforms) to take a certain amount of time. After that time has expired, it should wait on the next frame to be composited before resuming (assuming there is a composite scheduled). If the composited frame was delayed to the point that it skipped a frame compared to the last unladen composite, the amount of time dedicated to transfers should be reduced, or the transfer should be delayed until some arbitrary time (i.e. it should only be considered ok to skip a frame every X ms). It’s interesting that you can see something very similar to this happening in early versions of iOS (I don’t know if it still happens or not) – when scrolling long lists with images that load in dynamically, none of the images will load while the list is animating. The user response was paramount, to the point that it was considered more important to present consistent response than it was to present complete UI. This priority, I think, is a lot of the reason the iPhone feels ‘magic’ and Android phones felt like junk up until around 4.0 (where it’s better, but still not as good as iOS). 4. Level-of-detail This is something that I did get to partially implement while working on Firefox for Android, though I didn’t do such a great job of it so its current implementation is heavily compromised from how I wanted it to work. This is another idea stolen from game development. There will be times, during certain interactions, where processing time will be necessarily limited. Quite often though, during these times, a user’s view of the UI will be compromised in some fashion. It’s important to understand that you don’t always need to present the full-detail view of a UI. In Firefox for Android, this took the form that when scrolling fast enough that rendering couldn’t keep up, we would render at half the resolution. This let us render more, and faster, giving the impression of a consistent UI even when the hardware wasn’t quite capable of it. I notice Microsoft doing similar things since Windows 8; notice how the quality of image scaling reduces markedly while scrolling or animations are in progress. This idea is very implementation-specific. What can be dropped and what you want to drop will differ between platforms, form-factors, hardware, etc. Generally though, some things you can consider dropping: Sub-pixel anti-aliasing, high-quality image scaling, render resolution, colour-depth, animations. You may also want to consider showing partial UI if you know that it will very quickly be updated. The Android web-browser during the Honeycomb years did this, and I attempted (with limited success, because it’s hard…) to do this with Firefox for Android many years ago. I think it’s easy to read ideas like this and think it boils down to “do everything asynchronously”. Unfortunately, if you take a naïve approach to that, you just end up with something that can be inexplicably slow sometimes and the only way to fix it is via profiling and micro-optimisations. It’s very hard to guarantee a consistent experience if you don’t manage when things happen. Yes, do everything asynchronously, but make sure you do your book-keeping and you manage when it’s done. It’s not only about splitting work up, it’s about making sure it’s done when it’s smart to do so. You also need to be careful about how you measure these improvements, and to be aware that sometimes results in synthetic tests will even correlate to the opposite of the experience you want. A great example of this, in my opinion, is page-load speed on desktop browsers. All the major desktop browsers concentrate on prioritising the I/O and computation required to get the page to 100%. For heavy desktop sites, however, this means the browser is often very clunky to use while pages are loading (yes, even with out-of-process tabs – see the point about bandwidth above). I highlight this specifically on desktop, because you’re quite likely to not only be browsing much heavier sites that trigger this behaviour, but also to have multiple tabs open. So as soon as you load a couple of heavy sites, your entire browsing experience is compromised. I wouldn’t mind the site taking a little longer to load if it didn’t make the whole browser chug while doing so. Don’t lose sight of your goals. Don’t compromise. Things might take longer to complete, deadlines might be missed… But polish can’t be overrated. Polish is what people feel and what they remember, and the lack of it can have a devastating effect on someone’s perception. It’s not always conscious or obvious either, even when you’re the developer. Ask yourself “Am I fully satisfied with this” before marking something as complete. You might still be able to ship if the answer is “No”, but make sure you don’t lose sight of that and make sure it gets the priority it deserves. One last point I’ll make; I think to really execute on all of this, it requires buy-in from everyone. Not just engineers, not just engineers and managers, but visual designers, user experience, leadership… Everyone. It’s too easy to do a job that’s good enough and it’s too much responsibility to put it all on one person’s shoulders. You really need to be on the ball to produce the kind of software that Apple does almost routinely, but as much as they’d say otherwise, it isn’t magic. Author Chris LordPosted on 27th May 2017 Categories Development, Performance, UI11 Comments on Free Ideas for UI Frameworks, or How To Achieve Polished UI Machine Learning Speech Recognition Keeping up my yearly blogging cadence, it’s about time I wrote to let people know what I’ve been up to for the last year or so at Mozilla. People keeping up would have heard of the sad news regarding the Connected Devices team here. While I’m sad for my colleagues and quite disappointed in how this transition period has been handled as a whole, thankfully this hasn’t adversely affected the Vaani project. We recently moved to the Emerging Technologies team and have refocused on the technical side of things, a side that I think most would agree is far more interesting, and also far more suited to Mozilla and our core competence. Project DeepSpeech So, out with Project Vaani, and in with Project DeepSpeech (name will likely change…) – Project DeepSpeech is a machine learning speech-to-text engine based on the Baidu Deep Speech research paper. We use a particular layer configuration and initial parameters to train a neural network to translate from processed audio data to English text. You can see roughly how we’re progressing with that here. We’re aiming for a 10% Word Error Rate (WER) on English speech at the moment. You may ask, why bother? Google and others provide state-of-the-art speech-to-text in multiple languages, and in many cases you can use it for free. There are multiple problems with existing solutions, however. First and foremost, most are not open-source/free software (at least none that could rival the error rate of Google). Secondly, you cannot use these solutions offline. Third, you cannot use these solutions for free in a commercial product. The reason a viable free software alternative hasn’t arisen is mostly down to the cost and restrictions around training data. This makes the project a great fit for Mozilla as not only can we use some of our resources to overcome those costs, but we can also use the power of our community and our expertise in open source to provide access to training data that can be used openly. We’re tackling this issue from multiple sides, some of which you should start hearing about Real Soon Now™. The whole team has made contributions to the main code. In particular, I’ve been concentrating on exporting our models and writing clients so that the trained model can be used in a generic fashion. This lets us test and demo the project more easily, and also provides a lower barrier for entry for people that want to try out the project and perhaps make contributions. One of the great advantages of using TensorFlow is how relatively easy it makes it to both understand and change the make-up of the network. On the other hand, one of the great disadvantages of TensorFlow is that it’s an absolute beast to build and integrates very poorly with other open-source software projects. I’ve been trying to overcome this by writing straight-forward documentation, and hopefully in the future we’ll be able to distribute binaries and trained models for multiple platforms. We’re still at a fairly early stage at the moment, which means there are many ways to get involved if you feel so inclined. The first thing to do, in any case, is to just check out the project and get it working. There are instructions provided in READMEs to get it going, and fairly extensive instructions on the TensorFlow site on installing TensorFlow. It can take a while to install all the dependencies correctly, but at least you only have to do it once! Once you have it installed, there are a number of scripts for training different models. You’ll need a powerful GPU(s) with CUDA support (think GTX 1080 or Titan X), a lot of disk space and a lot of time to train with the larger datasets. You can, however, limit the number of samples, or use the single-sample dataset (LDC93S1) to test simple code changes or behaviour. One of the fairly intractable problems about machine learning speech recognition (and machine learning in general) is that you need lots of CPU/GPU time to do training. This becomes a problem when there are so many initial variables to tweak that can have dramatic effects on the outcome. If you have the resources, this is an area that you can very easily help with. What kind of results do you get when you tweak dropout slightly? Or layer sizes? Or distributions? What about when you add or remove layers? We have fairly powerful hardware at our disposal, and we still don’t have conclusive results about the affects of many of the initial variables. Any testing is appreciated! The Deep Speech 2 paper is a great place to start for ideas if you’re already experienced in this field. Note that we already have a work-in-progress branch implementing some of these ideas. Let’s say you don’t have those resources (and very few do), what else can you do? Well, you can still test changes on the LDC93S1 dataset, which consists of a single sample. You won’t be able to effectively tweak initial parameters (as unsurprisingly, a dataset of a single sample does not represent the behaviour of a dataset with many thousands of samples), but you will be able to test optimisations. For example, we’re experimenting with model quantisation, which will likely be one of multiple optimisations necessary to make trained models usable on mobile platforms. It doesn’t particularly matter how effective the model is, as long as it produces consistent results before and after quantisation. Any optimisation that can be made to reduce the size or the processor requirement of training and using the model is very valuable. Even small optimisations can save lots of time when you start talking about days worth of training. Our clients are also in a fairly early state, and this is another place where contribution doesn’t require expensive hardware. We have two clients at the moment. One written in Python that takes advantage of TensorFlow serving, and a second that uses TensorFlow’s native C++ API. This second client is the beginnings of what we hope to be able to run on embedded hardware, but it’s very early days right now. Imagine a future where state-of-the-art speech-to-text is available, for free (in cost and liberty), on even low-powered devices. It’s already looking like speech is going to be the next frontier of human-computer interaction, and currently it’s a space completely tied up by entities like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM. Putting this power into everyone’s hands could be hugely transformative, and it’s great to be working towards this goal, even in a relatively modest capacity. This is the vision, and I look forward to helping make it a reality. Author Chris LordPosted on 23rd February 2017 Categories Development, Machine Learning, Speech, Uncategorized2 Comments on Machine Learning Speech Recognition Open Source Speech Recognition I’m currently working on the Vaani project at Mozilla, and part of my work on that allows me to do some exploration around the topic of speech recognition and speech assistants. After looking at some of the commercial offerings available, I thought that if we were going to do some kind of add-on API, we’d be best off aping the Amazon Alexa skills JS API. Amazon Echo appears to be doing quite well and people have written a number of skills with their API. There isn’t really any alternative right now, but I actually happen to think their API is quite well thought out and concise, and maps well to the sort of data structures you need to do reliable speech recognition. So skipping forward a bit, I decided to prototype with Node.js and some existing open source projects to implement an offline version of the Alexa skills JS API. Today it’s gotten to the point where it’s actually usable (for certain values of usable) and I’ve just spent the last 5 minutes asking it to tell me Knock-Knock jokes, so rather than waste any more time on that, I thought I’d write this about it instead. If you want to try it out, check out this repository and run npm install in the usual way. You’ll need pocketsphinx installed for that to succeed (install sphinxbase and pocketsphinx from github), and you’ll need espeak installed and some skills for it to do anything interesting, so check out the Alexa sample skills and sym-link the ‘samples‘ directory as a directory called ‘skills‘ in your ferris checkout directory. After that, just run the included example file with node and talk to it via your default recording device (hint: say ‘launch wise guy‘). Hopefully someone else finds this useful – I’ll be using this as a base to prototype further voice experiments, and I’ll likely be extending the Alexa API further in non-standard ways. What was quite neat about all this was just how easy it all was. The Alexa API is extremely well documented, Node.js is also extremely well documented and just as easy to use, and there are tons of libraries (of varying quality…) to do what you need to do. The only real stumbling block was pocketsphinx’s lack of documentation (there’s no documentation at all for the Node bindings and the C API documentation is pretty sparse, to say the least), but thankfully other members of my team are much more familiar with this codebase than I am and I could lean on them for support. I’m reasonably impressed with the state of lightweight open source voice recognition. This is easily good enough to be useful if you can limit the scope of what you need to recognise, and I find the Alexa API is a great way of doing that. I’d be interested to know how close the internal implementation is to how I’ve gone about it if anyone has that insider knowledge. Author Chris LordPosted on 1st June 2016 Categories Development15 Comments on Open Source Speech Recognition State of Embedding in Gecko Following up from my last post, I’ve had some time to research and assess the current state of embedding Gecko. This post will serve as a (likely incomplete) assessment of where we are today, and what I think the sensible path forward would be. Please note that these are my personal opinions and not those of Mozilla. Mozilla are gracious enough to employ me, but I don’t yet get to decide on our direction 😉 The TLDR; there are no first-class Gecko embedding solutions as of writing. EmbedLite (aka IPCLite) EmbedLite is an interesting solution for embedding Gecko that relies on e10s (Electrolysis, Gecko’s out-of-process feature code-name) and OMTC (Off-Main-Thread Compositing). From what I can tell, the embedding app creates a new platform-specific compositor object that attaches to a window, and with e10s, a separate process is spawned to handle the brunt of the work (rendering the site, running JS, handling events, etc.). The existing widget API is exposed via IPC, which allows you to synthesise events, handle navigation, etc. This builds using the xulrunner application target, which unfortunately no longer exists. This project was last synced with Gecko on April 2nd 2015 (the day before my birthday!). The most interesting thing about this project is how much code it reuses in the tree, and how little modification is required to support it (almost none – most of the changes are entirely reasonable, even outside of an embedding context). That we haven’t supported this effort seems insane to me, especially as it’s been shipping for a while as the basis for the browser in the (now defunct?) Jolla smartphone. Building this was a pain, on Fedora 22 I was not able to get the desktop Qt build to compile, even after some effort, but I was able to compile the desktop Gtk build (trivial patches required). Unfortunately, there’s no support code provided for the Gtk version and I don’t think it’s worth the time me implementing that, given that this is essentially a dead project. A huge shame that we missed this opportunity, this would have been a good base for a lightweight, relatively easily maintained embedding solution. The quality of the work done on this seems quite high to me, after a brief examination. Spidernode Spidernode is a port of Node.js that uses Gecko’s ‘spidermonkey’ JavaScript engine instead of Chrome’s V8. Not really a Gecko embedding solution, but certainly something worth exploring as a way to enable more people to use Mozilla technology. Being a much smaller project, of much more limited scope, I had no issues building and testing this. Node.js using spidermonkey ought to provide some interesting advantages over a V8-based Node. Namely, modern language features, asm.js (though I suppose this will soon be supplanted by WebAssembly) and speed. Spidernode is unfortunately unmaintained since early 2012, but I thought it would be interesting to do a simple performance test. Using the (very flawed) technique detailed here, I ran a few quick tests to compare an old copy of Node I had installed (~0.12), current stable Node (4.3.2) and this very old (~0.5) Spidermonkey-based Node. Spidermonkey-based Node was consistently over 3x faster than both old and current (which varied very little in performance). I don’t think you can really draw any conclusions than this, other than that it’s an avenue worth exploring. Many new projects are prototyped (and indeed, fully developed) in Node.js these days; particularly Internet-Of-Things projects. If there’s the potential for these projects to run faster, unchanged, this seems like a worthy project to me. Even forgetting about the advantages of better language support. It’s sad to me that we’re experimenting with IoT projects here at Mozilla and so many of these experiments don’t promote our technology at all. This may be an irrational response, however. GeckoView is the only currently maintained embedding solution for Gecko, and is Android-only. GeckoView is an Android project, split out of Firefox for Android and using the same interfaces with Gecko. It provides an embeddable widget that can be used instead of the system-provided WebView. This is not a first-class project from what I can tell, there are many bugs and many missing features, as its use outside of Firefox for Android is not considered a priority. Due to this dependency, however, one would assume that at least GeckoView will see updates for the foreseeable future. I’d experimented with this in the past, specifically with this project that uses GeckoView with Cordova. I found then that the experience wasn’t great, due to the huge size of the GeckoView library and the numerous bugs, but this was a while ago and YMMV. Some of those bugs were down to GeckoView not using the shared APZC, a bug which has since been fixed, at least for Nightly builds. The situation may be better now than it was then. This post is built on the premise that embedding Gecko is a worthwhile pursuit. Others may disagree about this. I’ll point to my previous post to list some of the numerous opportunities we missed, partly because we don’t have an embedding story, but I’m going to conjecture as to what some of our next missed opportunities might be. IoT is generating a lot of buzz at the moment. I’m dubious that there’s much decent consumer use of IoT, at least that people will get excited about as opposed to property developers, but if I could predict trends, I’d have likely retired rich already. Let’s assume that consumer IoT will take off, beyond internet-connected thermostats (which are actually pretty great) and metered utility boxes (which I would quite like). These devices are mostly bespoke hardware running random bits and bobs, but an emerging trend seems to be Node.js usage. It might be important for Mozilla to provide an easily deployed out-of-the-box solution here. As our market share diminishes, so does our test-bed and contribution base for our (currently rather excellent) JavaScript engine. While we don’t have an issue here at the moment, if we find that a huge influx of diverse, resource-constrained devices starts running V8 and only V8, we may eventually find it hard to compete. It could easily be argued that it isn’t important for our solution to be based on our technology, but I would argue that if we have to start employing a considerable amount of people with no knowledge of our platform, our platform will suffer. By providing a licensed out-of-the-box solution, we could also enforce that any client-side interface remain network-accessible and cross-browser compatible. A less tenuous example, let’s talk about VR. VR is also looking like it might finally break out into the mid/high-end consumer realm this year, with heavy investment from Facebook (via Oculus), Valve/HTC (SteamVR/Vive), Sony (Playstation VR), Microsoft (HoloLens), Samsung (GearVR) and others. Mozilla are rightly investing in WebVR, but I think the real end-goal for VR is an integrated device with no tether (certainly Microsoft and Samsung seem to agree with me here). So there may well be a new class of device on the horizon, with new kinds of browsers and ways of experiencing and integrating the web. Can we afford to not let people experiment with our technology here? I love Mozilla, but I have serious doubts that the next big thing in VR is going to come from us. That there’s no supported way of embedding Gecko worries me for future classes of device like this. In-vehicle information/entertainment systems are possibly something that will become more of the norm, now that similar devices have become such commodity. Interestingly, the current big desktop and mobile players have very little presence here, and (mostly awful) bespoke solutions are rife. Again, can we afford to make our technology inaccessible to the people that are experimenting in this area? Is having just a good desktop browser enough? Can we really say that’s going to remain how people access the internet for the next 10 years? Probably, but I wouldn’t want to bet everything on that. If we want an embedding solution, I think the best way to go about it is to start from Firefox for Android. Due to the way Android used to require its applications to interface with native code, Firefox for Android is already organised in such a way that it is basically an embedding API (thus GeckoView). From this point, I think we should make some of the interfaces slightly more generic and remove the JNI dependency from the Gecko-side of the code. Firefox for Android would be the main consumer of this API and would guarantee that it’s maintained. We should allow for it to be built on Linux, Mac and Windows and provide the absolute minimum harness necessary to allow for it to be tested. We would make no guarantees about API or ABI. Externally to the Gecko tree, I would suggest that we start, and that the community maintain, a CEF-compatible library, at least at the API level, that would be a Tier-3 project, much like Firefox OS now is. This, to me, seems like the minimal-effort and most useful way of allowing embeddable Gecko. In addition, I think we should spend some effort in maintaining a fork of Node.js LTS that uses spidermonkey. If we can promise modern language features and better performance, I expect there’s a user-base that would be interested in this. If there isn’t, fair enough, but I don’t think current experiments have had enough backing to ascertain this. I think that both of these projects are important, so that we can enable people outside of Mozilla to innovate using our technology, and by osmosis, become educated about our mission and hopefully spread our ideals. Other organisations will do their utmost to establish a monopoly in any new emerging market, and I think it’s a shame that we have such a powerful and comprehensive technology platform and we aren’t enabling other people to use it in more diverse situations. This post is some insightful further reading on roughly the same topic. Author Chris LordPosted on 8th March 2016 Categories Uncategorized14 Comments on State of Embedding in Gecko The case for an embeddable Gecko Strap yourself in, this is a long post. It should be easy to skim, but the history may be interesting to some. I would like to make the point that, for a web rendering engine, being embeddable is a huge opportunity, how Gecko not being easily embeddable has meant we’ve missed several opportunities over the last few years, and how it would still be advantageous to make Gecko embeddable. Embedding Gecko means making it easy to use Gecko as a rendering engine in an arbitrary 3rd party application on any supported platform, and maintaining that support. An embeddable Gecko should make very few constraints on the embedding application and should not include unnecessary resources. A 3rd party browser with a native UI A game’s embedded user manual OAuth authentication UI A web application It’s hard to predict what the next technology trend will be, but there’s is a strong likelihood it’ll involve the web, and there’s a possibility it may not come from a company/group/individual with an existing web rendering engine or particular allegiance. It’s important for the health of the web and for Mozilla’s continued existence that there be multiple implementations of web standards, and that there be real competition and a balanced share of users of the various available engines. Many technologies have emerged over the last decade or so that have incorporated web rendering or web technologies that could have leveraged Gecko; (2007) iPhone: Instead of using an existing engine, Apple forked KHTML in 2002 and eventually created WebKit. They did investigate Gecko as an alternative, but forking another engine with a cleaner code-base ended up being a more viable route. Several rival companies were also interested in and investing in embeddable Gecko (primarily Nokia and Intel). WebKit would go on to be one of the core pieces of the first iPhone release, which included a better mobile browser than had ever been seen previously. (2008) Chrome: Google released a WebKit-based browser that would eventually go on to eat a large part of Firefox’s user base. Chrome was initially praised for its speed and light-weightedness, but much of that was down to its multi-process architecture, something made possible by WebKit having a well thought-out embedding capability and API. (2008) Android: Android used WebKit for its built-in browser and later for its built-in web-view. In recent times, it has switched to Chromium, showing they aren’t adverse to switching the platform to a different/better technology, and that a better embedding story can benefit a platform (Android’s built in web view can now be updated outside of the main OS, and this may well partly be thanks to Chromium’s embedding architecture). Given the quality of Android’s initial WebKit browser and WebView (which was, frankly, awful until later revisions of Android Honeycomb, and arguably remained awful until they switched to Chromium), it’s not much of a leap to think they may have considered Gecko were it easily available. (2009) WebOS: Nothing came of this in the end, but it perhaps signalled the direction of things to come. WebOS survived and went on to be the core of LG’s Smart TV, one of the very few real competitors in that market. Perhaps if Gecko was readily available at this point, we would have had a large head start on FirefoxOS? (2009) Samsung Smart TV: Also available in various other guises since 2007, Samsung’s Smart TV is certainly the most popular smart TV platform currently available. It appears Samsung built this from scratch in-house, but it includes many open-source projects. It’s highly likely that they would have considered a Gecko-based browser if it were possible and available. (2011) PhantomJS: PhantomJS is a headless, scriptable browser, useful for testing site behaviour and performance. It’s used by several large companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn and Netflix. Had Gecko been more easily embeddable, such a product may well have been based on Gecko and the benefits of that would be many sites that use PhantomJS for testing perhaps having better rendering and performance characteristics on Gecko-based browsers. The demand for a Gecko-based alternative is high enough that a similar project, SlimerJS, based on Gecko was developed and released in 2013. Due to Gecko’s embedding deficiencies though, SlimerJS is not truly headless. (2011) WIMM One: The first truly capable smart-watch, which generated a large buzz when initially released. WIMM was based on a highly-customised version of Android, and ran software that was compatible with Android, iOS and BlackBerryOS. Although it never progressed past the development kit stage, WIMM was bought by Google in 2012. It is highly likely that WIMM’s work forms the base of the Android Wear platform, released in 2014. Had something like WebOS been open, available and based on Gecko, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that this could have been Gecko based. (2013) Blink: Google decide to fork WebKit to better build for their own uses. Blink/Chromium quickly becomes the favoured rendering engine for embedding. Google were not afraid to introduce possible incompatibility with WebKit, but also realised that embedding is an important feature to maintain. (2014) Android Wear: Android specialised to run on watch hardware. Smart watches have yet to take off, and possibly never will (though Pebble seem to be doing alright, and every major consumer tech product company has launched one), but this is yet another area where Gecko/Mozilla have no presence. FirefoxOS may have lead us to have an easy presence in this area, but has now been largely discontinued. (2014) Atom/Electron: Github open-sources and makes available its web-based text editor, which it built on a home-grown platform of Node.JS and Chromium, which it later called Electron. Since then, several large and very successful projects have been built on top of it, including Slack and Visual Studio Code. It’s highly likely that such diverse use of Chromium feeds back into its testing and development, making it a more robust and performant engine, and importantly, more widely used. (2016) Brave: Former Mozilla co-founder and CTO heads a company that makes a new browser with the selling point of blocking ads and tracking by default, and doing as much as possible to protect user privacy and agency without breaking the web. Said browser is based off of Chromium, and on iOS, is a fork of Mozilla’s own WebKit-based Firefox browser. Brendan says they started based off of Gecko, but switched because it wasn’t capable of doing what they needed (due to an immature embedding API). Current state of affairs Chromium and V8 represent the state-of-the-art embeddable web rendering engine and JavaScript engine and have wide and varied use across many platforms. This helps reenforce Chrome’s behaviour as the de-facto standard and gradually eats away at the market share of competing engines. WebKit is the only viable alternative for an embeddable web rendering engine and is still quite commonly used, but is generally viewed as a less up-to-date and less performant engine vs. Chromium/Blink. Spidermonkey is generally considered to be a very nice JavaScript engine with great support for new EcmaScript features and generally great performance, but due to a rapidly changing API/ABI, doesn’t challenge V8 in terms of its use in embedded environments. Node.js is likely the largest user of embeddable V8, and is favoured even by Mozilla employees for JavaScript-based systems development. Gecko has limited embedding capability that is not well-documented, not well-maintained and not heavily invested in. I say this with the utmost respect for those who are working on it; this is an observation and a criticism of Mozilla’s priorities as an organisation. We have at various points in history had embedding APIs/capabilities, but we have either dropped them (gtkmozembed) or let them bit-rot (IPCLite). We do currently have an embedding widget for Android that is very limited in capability when compared to the default system WebView. It’s not too late. It’s incredibly hard to predict where technology is going, year-to-year. It was hard to predict, prior to the iPhone, that Nokia would so spectacularly fall from the top of the market. It was hard to predict when Android was released that it would ever overtake iOS, or even more surprisingly, rival it in quality (hard, but not impossible). It was hard to predict that WebOS would form the basis of a major competing Smart TV several years later. I think the examples of our missed opportunities are also good evidence that opening yourself up to as much opportunity as possible is a good indicator of future success. If we want to form the basis of the next big thing, it’s not enough to be experimenting in new areas. We need to enable other people to experiment in new areas using our technology. Even the largest of companies have difficulty predicting the future, or taking charge of it. This is why it’s important that we make easily-embeddable Gecko a reality, and I plead with the powers that be that we make this higher priority than it has been in the past. Author Chris LordPosted on 24th February 2016 Categories Uncategorized31 Comments on The case for an embeddable Gecko Web Navigation Transitions

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The Oath Against Modernism Our Holy Father, Pope Francis Why is Christ Our King? Public Discourse and Debate CKLC Pro-Life Seminar (October 6, 2012) CKLC Seminar: Is the Constitution Catholic? (October 5, 2013) CKLC Seminar: The Social Rights of Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ the King (October 4, 2014) CKLC Seminar: Traditional Catholic Teaching on Religious Liberty (April 10, 2015) CKLC Seminar: 2016 Election Year Conference (October 8, 2016) Quas primas The Reign of Christ the King Listing of Traditional Latin Masses in Southern California CALIFORNIA ABORTION REGULATIONS – DIGEST Flyers and Handouts Christ the King Law Center Can the Church Ban Capital Punishment? By Christopher A. Ferrara, Esq. Editor’s Note: The following article was published on the website of Crisis Magazine. It has been reprinted here with the permission of the author Mr. Christopher A. Ferrara. This piece on capital punishment is a revision of the original, which first appeared in Latin Mass Magazine (Summer 2001). It is written from a “traditionalist” perspective, a traditionalist being simply a Catholic who affirms—as a Catholic must—that the Second Vatican Council changed nothing of what a Catholic must believe in order to be a member of the Church in good standing. As the First Vatican Council declared: “For the Holy Spirit was not promised to the Successors of Peter that by His revelation they might disclose new doctrine, but that by His help they might guard the revelation transmitted through the apostles and the deposit of faith, and might faithfully set it forth.” (Cf. Denzinger, §1836) Of course, an authentic development of doctrine is always possible in the sense of a fuller explication of what the Church has always taught. But neither a Pope nor a Council has an oracular function of providing the latest and most reliable Catholic teaching. The Catholic faith, unlike the statute books on which lawyers rely, does not involve periodic “pocket parts” containing amendments or repeals to be inserted into the back of the book. If the “hermeneutic of continuity” means anything, it means that Catholic teaching on faith and morals is not subject to reversal. A reversible Magisterium would be no Magisterium at all, but rather a human agency bereft of the promises of Christ—like the Protestant sects which have abandoned doctrine after doctrine over the centuries since Luther began the process of abandonment. The Traditional Teaching on Capital Punishment And so it is with Catholic teaching on the morality of capital punishment. According to the constant teaching of the Church, God Himself has ordained that legitimate civil authority shall have the right and duty to punish deliberate murder (and other grave crimes) with the penalty of death. Capital punishment honors the Fifth commandment, because it vindicates the sanctity of human life. Hence, in its teaching on the Fifth Commandment the Catechism of the Council of Trent declares: Again, this prohibition does not apply to the civil magistrate, to whom is entrusted the power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which he punishes the guilty and protects the innocent. The use of the civil sword, when wielded by the hand of justice, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to this commandment which prohibits murder. The end of the commandment is the preservation and sanctity of human life, and to the attainment of this end, the punishments inflicted by the civil magistrate, who is the legitimate avenger of crime, naturally tend, giving security to life by repressing outrage and violence. As the Tridentine Catechism teaches, the death penalty protects the sanctity of life through legitimate legal vengeance to repress outrage and violence in society. This involves just retribution and deterrence as legitimate aims of penal law. The Catechism’s reference to the civil sword evokes St. Paul’s teaching on the divine right of civil authority to avenge wrongdoing by the sword: “But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God’s minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” Rom. 13:4 Reflecting on this passage, St. Thomas teaches that capital punishment imitates divine justice; for after all, eternal damnation is the ultimate form of capital punishment: “According to the order of His wisdom God sometimes slays sinners forthwith in order to deliver the good, whereas he sometimes allows them time to repent, according as what is expedient to His elect. This also does human justice imitate according to its powers . . .” (ST II-II, Q. 64, Art. 2) Thus the right of civil authority to punish evildoers by the sword in appropriate cases is a matter of revealed truth, not a changeable prudential judgment. This is not to deny that civil authority can exercise prudential judgment in abstaining from the exercise of its right to impose capital punishment, or even abolish it entirely in keeping with historical circumstances. For example, earlier this year the Governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn, signed an executive ban on the death penalty in his state given the appalling evidence of numerous executions of innocent persons in Illinois based on “forced confessions, unreliable witnesses, and incompetent legal representation.” As a lawyer, I am well familiar with the grave potential in any legal system for catastrophic miscarriages of justice which, in the case of capital punishment, cannot be rectified. The Church has never taught that civil authority must impose capital punishment for murder, but only that it has a divine sanction when it does so. It must not be forgotten that the death penalty, like any criminal penalty, serves as a form of expiation. That is why prisons were once called penitentiaries. As Saint Thomas observes in the Summa: “Even death inflicted as a punishment for crimes takes away the whole punishment for those crimes in the next life, or at least part of that punishment, according to the quantities of guilt, resignation, and contrition; but a natural death does not.” (Cf. Romano Amerio Iota Unum, 435). Further, in the case of capital punishment the expiatory penalty reflects the sin of one whose grave crime has caused him to lose the right to life. Some 700 years after the Summa, Pope Pius XII repeated the constant teaching of the Church in this regard: “Even when it is a question of someone condemned to death, the state does not dispose of an individual’s right to life. It is then the task of public authority to deprive the condemned man of the good of life, in expiation of his fault, after he has already deprived himself of the right to life by his crime.” (AAS, 1952, pp. 779 et. seq) Pius XII rejected what Romano Amerio calls “the canons of the new hermeneutic” when he insisted in a speech to Catholic jurists in 1955 that “the passage of St. Paul was of permanent and universal value, because it refers to the essential foundation of penal authority and to its inherent purpose.” Amerio rightly notes that the modern opponents of the death penalty “ignore the great truth that capital punishment is itself expiatory.” But, he writes, “one cannot cancel out the decrees of the Old Testament regarding the death penalty, by a mere stroke of the pen. Nor can canon law, still less the teaching of the New Testament, be canceled out at a stroke.” (Amerio, 432, 434). The expiatory nature of the death penalty may be its most important aspect. Sacred Scripture itself provides the example of the good thief on the cross (Lk. 23-39-42), whose very recognition that “we receive the due reward of our deeds” is a sign of the working of God’s grace in a soul being moved to faith in Christ. The good thief’s expiation, through his acceptance of the condign penalty of death, is so complete as to merit his immediate entry into paradise. Indeed, the common experience of mankind is that nothing is more likely to provoke repentance in hardened sinners than imminent execution. The historic accounts of death row conversions could be set forth endlessly.Even the proudly defiant Timothy McVeigh apparently converted. McVeigh, “a self-described agnostic, received the Catholic sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick by an unidentified prison chaplain.” (CNN, June 11, 2001). We do not know if McVeigh was saved, but who can say that convicted killers languishing in prisons which are sinkholes of immorality are more likely than a condemned man to receive the grace of final penitence? Whether they recognize it or not, Catholic death penalty opponents implicitly view the right to life from a worldly and bodily perspective, “as if it were inherent in man’s mere [biological] existence, when, in fact, it derives from his moral goal… his ordination to values that transcend temporal life, and this goal is built into his spirit inasmuch as it is an image of God.” (Amerio 1996, 436). The eternal destiny of man is precisely why, as the Tridentine Catechism teaches, capital punishment actually defends life in its full and supernatural sense. A “Development” of Doctrine? It is claimed there was a “development” of Catholic doctrine on the death penalty during the pontificate of John Paul II that precludes its application in “modern society.” Upon close examination of the relevant texts, however, one finds that the posited “development” is really an opinion bound up with a matter of fact: that current penal systems can render murderers “harmless,” so that the death penalty should be imposed only rarely, if at all. This opinion does not (and cannot) repeal the traditional teaching that just retribution, deterrence and expiation are also legitimate aims of the death penalty. First of all, the 1992 version the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC)—issued before the definitive Latin text now in effect—preserved the traditional teaching intact: 2266: Preserving the common good of society requires rendering the aggressor unable to inflict harm. For this reason the traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty . . . The primary effect of punishment is to redress the disorder caused by the offense. When the punishment is voluntarily accepted by the offender, it takes on the value of expiation. Moreover, punishment has the effect of preserving public order and the safety of persons. . . . 2267: If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person. “Rendering the aggressor unable to inflict harm” is not positively presented as the solecriterion for imposition of the death penalty, but as only one element of “preserving the common good of society,” which certainly includes more than restraining future violence by the same criminal. Paragraph 2266 also teaches that commensurate punishment, redressing the disorder caused by the offense and expiation are legitimate purposes of penal law. Public authority—exercising the discretion I have already mentioned—“should” use bloodless means in place of capital punishment, but only if they would be sufficient to protect public order and the safety of persons, not simply the safety of persons. Thus, the 1992 CCC can be harmonized with the traditional teaching that the death penalty is a legitimate form of civil vengeance for grave crimes, not merely a form of societal self-defense. Uncertainty arises, however, with the statement that penalties short of death “better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good.” This is a sweeping factualclaim outside the competence of the Magisterium. No explanation is offered as to which “concrete conditions” in which places suddenly make the death penalty inappropriate, even though Pius XII expressly approved it as recently as 1954. Even more problematic is the statement that bloodless penalties are “more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.” If this is true, then why did the Church approve the death penalty for 1,992 years? The CCC does allow that the death penaltyalso conforms to human dignity, only less so than bloodless penalties. But how is one to determine relative conformity to human dignity as between confinement for life in a hellish prison and an execution that may well be preceded by repentance? Here the distinction between natural and supernatural dignity must be drawn. All created things have natural dignity, but only man has the supernatural dignity of an immortal soul. From the natural perspective, a prison sentence may appear more “dignified” than execution; but if imminent execution provokes final penitence, from the supernatural perspective a death freely accepted in expiation for sin is infinitely more in accord with human dignity. Moreover, “modern” prisons are occasions of grave sin at every turn. That prisons are “more in conformity to human dignity” than capital punishment is dubious at best. The Holy Ghost does not vouchsafe factually contingent assessments of prison conditions throughout the world. Such assessments are simply not matters of Catholic doctrine. The question of the “development” of teaching came to the fore with promulgation of John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae (EV) in 1995. The following passages are pertinent: Modern society in fact has the means of effectively suppressing crime by rendering criminals harmless without definitively denying them the chance to reform. (EV, 27) The primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is “to redress the disorder caused by the offence.” Public authority must redress the violation of personal and social rights by imposing on the offender an adequate punishment for the crime, as a condition for the offender to regain the exercise of his or her freedom. In this way authority also fulfils the purpose of defending public orderand ensuring people’s safety, while at the same time offering the offender an incentive and help to change his or her behaviour and be rehabilitated. (EV, 56) It is clear that, for these purposes to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent. (EV, 56) EV moves closer toward the position that there is only one basis—societal self-defense—for imposition of the death penalty. Yet the phrases “defending public order,” “adequate punishment for the crime,” and “redress the disorder caused by the offence” would allow imposition of the death penalty even when the offender can supposedly be “rendered harmless” by other means. EV does not strictly deny this, but rather proposes prudentially to limit application of the death penalty based on an assertion that is patently dependent upon the existence of particular facts: because “modern society in fact has the means of effectively suppressing crime by rendering criminals harmless,” cases in which the death penalty is warranted are “very rare, if not practically non-existent.” In the first place, the phrase “very rare, if not practically non-existent” offers no real guidance. Who defines “very rare,” and what is meant by “practically” non-existent? The words suggest a prohibition of the death penalty without actually imposing one—because, of course, the Magisterium cannot now prohibit what it has always approved as a matter of revealed truth. Rather, the proposed new limitation on the death penalty is bottomed entirely on the claim that “Modern society in fact has the means of effectively suppressing crime by rendering criminals harmless . . .”' But what are these “means” which modern society has? None other than prisons. Yet there have always been prisons. If it were merely a question of rendering criminals “harmless” by imprisonment, the Church would always have taught that life imprisonment is to be preferred to capital punishment. If anything, life imprisonment 500 years ago was far more likely to be life imprisonment than it is today. EV’s reference to “steady improvements in the organization of the penal system” is of no help. Which “steady improvements” in which “penal system” now make the death penalty unacceptable? May only societies with laggardly penal systems continue to execute convicted murderers in ordinary course? How many “steady improvements” must prisons achieve before the death penalty becomes “very rare, if not practically non-existent”? In short, the quality of prison systems seems a rather insubstantial moral criterion for deciding application of the death penalty. What about just retribution, expiation, deterrence, and aggravating factors such as the number or tender age of the victims? The Pope has no right to remove these criteria from civil authority’s prudential judgment, nor does EV actually do so. ​All of this assumes it could be demonstrated that “modern” imprisonment really achieves even the minimalist penal goal of rendering murderers “harmless.” Quite the contrary, convicted murderers routinely kill each other in prison, or kill guards, or are paroled to claim more victims among the general population. For this reason alone, we are not bound to accept EV’s purely factual assertion that prisons render murderers harmless. This is simply not true. And what about the murderer who does kill again, either in prison or upon release? How many people must a murderer murder before the death penalty becomes appropriate under the nebulous “rare, if not practically non-existent” standard? Amazingly, EV does not even call for life imprisonment without parole for cold-blooded killers, but rather states that “modern society” should allow even these “the chance to reform” and “be rehabilitated.” Neither the Catechism nor EV provides an answer to a grieving father’s recent lament that if a “rehabilitated” murderer-rapist on parole had been executed—in accordance with traditional Church teaching based on revealed truth—his daughter would be alive today. Based solely on EV 56, however, in 1997 the 1992 CCC was amended for the Latin definitive edition: 2267: [T]he traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor. If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm—without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself —the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically non-existent.’ [quoting EV, 56] Note that the key phrase in the 1992 version-- the traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty has been replaced by-- the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor. Thus, societal self-defense now appears to be presented as the sole criterion for imposition of the death penalty under the “traditional teaching of the Church.” And yet in the 1997 CCC we still find the following: “Legitimate public authority has the right and the duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense. When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation.” (¶ 2266) Is not the death penalty a punishment proportionate to the offense of murder? Does it not redress the disorder caused by the offense? Does it not assume the value of expiation—indeed, the supreme expiation—if willingly accepted? The 1997 CCC addresses none of these questions, but simply repeats the Pope’s sweeping penological opinion in EV that cases requiring the death penalty are “rare, if not practically non-existent,” because of “the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm.” But who decides whether penological “possibilities” suffice to outweigh the need for capital punishment? As always, civil authority decides. EV does not bind civil authority to forego the death penalty. EV does not forbid Catholics to advocate the death penalty or to vote for general death penalty legislation. Therefore, the posited “development” of doctrine is illusory. Can a Pope Ban Capital Punishment? The matter, however, does not end there. It is clear that John Paul II would have liked to go even further by declaring the death penalty immoral per se. In his homily at Saint Louis on January 27, 1999, which he did not impose upon the universal Church, the Pope said: The new evangelization calls for followers of Christ who are unconditionally pro-life: who will proclaim, celebrate and serve the Gospel of life in every situation. A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil. Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform (cf. Evangelium Vitae, 27). I renew the appeal I made most recently at Christmas for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary. The conclusion is inescapable: Speaking as a private theologian, the John Paul II believed that to be “unconditionally pro-life” one must oppose the death penalty as intrinsically immoral, for what is “cruel” is by definition immoral. But this is nothing other than the late Cardinal Bernadin’s “seamless garment”—a liberal notion whose primary effect is to retard the pro-life movement by chaining the cause of the innocent unborn to the cause of sparing guilty murderers from a justly imposed penalty. John Paul II apparently believed that no crime whatsoever, no matter how heinous,deserves capital punishment. Accordingly, the Pope sent a letter to the White House seeking clemency for McVeigh, who admitted to murdering 168 men, women and children in cold blood. (“White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said that a letter from John Paul requesting clemency was received this week. She would not reveal the details of the letter.” ABC News, April 27, 2001). Had the Pope’s plea for clemency been heeded, however, McVeigh might have died the agnostic he was instead of calling for the ministrations of a Catholic priest in his last moments on earth. John Paul II’s personal campaign against the death penalty was joined by numerous bishops. Perhaps the most surprising example was Archbishop Chaput’s statement following the McVeigh execution: “[I]n executing Mr. McVeigh we’ve answered violence with violence and compromised our own human dignity … The same needle that kills the condemned murderer poisons us with the habit of violence. May God grant us the conversion to see that—for our own sake, and for the sake of our children.” “Statement on the Execution of Timothy McVeigh, June 11, 2001.” So, according to Archbishop Chaput, Catholics who believe that mass murderers deserve capital punishment are advocating “violence” and are in need of “conversion.” It is as if 2,000 years of Church teaching rooted in divine revelation had vanished overnight. But neither the Archbishop nor the late Pope had any authority to declare immoral in all circumstances a form of punishment the Church has always declared not only morally licit, but divinely sanctioned as a just penalty. ​Where, then, do we stand? Clearly, the Church has no authority to abandon the radical moral distinction between capital punishment of the guilty and the killing of an innocent. To reject that distinction is to undermine belief in divine justice itself, which demands the supernatural death of unrepentant souls for all eternity. It is manifestly impossible for Catholic doctrine on the death penalty to “develop” from an approbation based on revealed truth to a condemnation based on the teaching of the last Pope. And, if we are not discussing the immorality of capital punishment in itself, when all is said and done it is not a question of “development” of doctrine, but only the debatable application of a morally legitimate penalty. Here Catholics, and civil authorities, remain free to make their own prudential judgments. ​Christopher A. Ferrara is an attorney specializing in First Amendment and other civil rights litigation on behalf of Catholics. His articles and commentary on Catholic Church affairs have appeared in The Latin Mass magazine, The Remnant, Christian Order, Catholic Family News, The Fatima Crusader magazine and elsewhere. He is co-author (with Thomas Woods) of The Great Facade, a widely acclaimed analysis of changes in the Church since Vatican II. He and his wife Wendy, a convert from Protestantism, have six children. This blog does not have one single author. Instead various contributors are invited to post articles with the permission of Christ the King Law Center (CKLC). The opinions expressed by authors other than CKLC do not necessarily express those of CKLC.

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An independent documentary film project in support of comprehensive immigration reform Film launch events Film dissemination Stories & Ideas Seasonal Workers: new models "The necessity for seasonal labor in agriculture will long remain. Indeed, a mobile labor reserve is efficient and desirable."- from "Migratory Farm Labor in the United States," by Paul S. Taylor in Monthly Labor Review , U.S. Department of Labor (1937). This paper, written almost 80 years ago, is a snapshot of seasonal labor at that time and a reminder of how little has changed since then relative to new technology and social policies. The author describes how mechanization had reduced the use of migrant labor for some crops but predicts, correctly, that it will not eliminate the need for seasonal labor for most fruit, berry and vegetable harvests. Given that, he states that the challenge for our society is to insure decent wages and housing, family support, health care and other benefits for those workers. While improvements historically have come from negotiations by farmworker organizations, the impact of social services developed for the broader population, expansion of public education and other legal and policy changes, immigration reform itself offers a unique opportunity to re-think the system itself. And that could be sparked by the interests and priorities of the growing Latino population. New data from the Department of Agriculture shows a 21 percent increase in Latino-operated farms over the past five years; most are small and mid-size farms. In interviews with some of those farmers in California, the New York Times reported that, "While more Hispanics are running farms, many of them in the region say federal immigration policies have made it increasingly difficult to find workers. ...Perhaps because of their own backgrounds, many of the farmers prided themselves on treating their workers well." Copyright © 2014 FarmLaborFilm.com, All Rights Reserved.

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Enough of Us childfree childless without kids Children Having Children: 10 Million Child Brides Each Year February 22, 2012 By Ellis and Cheryl Levinson 4 Comments The February 2012 issue of The Reporter – the tri-annual magazine of Population Connection – focuses on this global issue. The only solution, apparently, is sexual and family planning education. And that means money to pay for these programs flowing from “have” to the “have not” nations. As we have discussed many times, the greatest threat to human sustainability is humans – too many of us. And there is no greater fecundity than in the poorest countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, which includes countries like Nepal and India. It is remarkable to us that thelatter, the nation with the world’s largest middle class, also has rampant child marriages among its poorest citizens. Nujood Ali, a 10-year-old Yemeni bride who was able to attain a divorce. Photo courtesy Factoidz The first step in this education program is to teach couples why and how to limit their family size. Next is the abolition of child marriage. The term is not used loosely. Girls as young as eight are married off by parents who cannot afford to keep them. If you would like to see photographs of what we are talking about, go to http://www.populationconnection.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8825. You might just be amazed. Here are some startling facts and statistics, according to Population Connection. In Bangladesh the median age for girls to marry is 15, and 80 percent of girls meet their husbands for the first time at their weddings. While imams in the African country of Senegal perform outreach work in family planning, 90 percent of Senagal’s adults believe that only God is the arbiter of how many children a family should have. This belief makes it difficult to persuade families to limit the number of children they will need to support, leading to a willingness to slough off their young daughters to marriage. UNICEF reports that in impoverished regions, “a young girl may be regarded as an economic burden and her marriage . . . is a familial survival strategy.” The dangers of pregnancy among newly fertile girls are dramatic. According to UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, girls aged 15-19 are twice as likely to die during pregnancy as are women aged 20-24. In addition, a less-than-mature body is subject to developing a fistula during childbirth. Very young women often have prolonged labors. The fetus exerts pressure on the mother’s pelvis for extended periods with the risk of damaging soft tissues. Some of those tissues are likely to die, leaving a hole, or fistula. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines a fistula as “an abnormal passage that leads from an abscess or hollow organ or part to the body surface or from one hollow organ or part to another.” Depending on the location of the hole, the woman may suffer from involuntary urination or excretion. Add to that the dangers of infection. About two million females, mostly in Africa, suffer with fistulas. In Niger, 75 percent of females marry before the age of 18. Anna Tomasulo, writing in The Reporter, relates that, “Fistula exists in Nepal, but a more common problem seems to be uterine prolapse, which is when the uterus descends through the genitals. UNFPA reports 600,000 women in Nepal affected by uterine prolapse . . . Some effects of uterine prolapse include pain during urination, difficulties during sexual intercourse and social stigmatization.” We won’t go on with these terrible statistics and anecdotes. The question is, what can we Americans, along with the wealthier international community do about it? Plenty. As Population Connection President Jon Seager puts it, “If a man in the U.S. tried to marry an eleven-year-old girl, he’d be arrested. Rightly so and good riddance.” But efforts to provide universal access to affordable family planning , which would deter child marriages, runs into all sorts of obstacles. Some come from tribal leaders in remote villages. Then there is opposition to birth control from the Catholic Church. (Chapter 2 of our book, Enough of Us – which is currently available as an ebook on most vendor sites – deals with religion and family planning.) “Still others are members of Congress whose suits come from Brooks Bothers but who are straight out of the 12th century,” says Seager. It’s hard to believe we still face such implacable forces.” The Reporter points out that, according to demographer Jon Bongaarts, if the average age of childbearing increased by five years, future population size could be reduced by more than 15 percent. And South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu puts it: No woman who has had the benefit of staying at school and marrying later in life can inflict child marriage on her daughters.” It is up to mindful nations to provide funding and assistance, both through governmental efforts and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to reach out to developing countries. Events like the International Conference on Family Planning – which convened three months ago in Dakar, Senegal – provide forums for NGOs like the World Health Organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), UNFPA, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, International Planned Parenthood Foundation, the World Bank and hundreds of other agencies and individuals to set about planning to eliminate the scourge of child marriages, among other family planning efforts. At the conference, The Gates Foundation committed $70 million annually for family planning. The British government committed $55 million. Population Connection is currently fighting efforts by the House leadership to cut international family planning while urging the Senate and White House to increase annual funding to one billion dollars from its current $610 million. Most of the increase in world overpopulation will come from developing countries. What can you do about it? Let your representatives in Congress know how you feel and why. It only takes a short email or phone call. Wow! Finally I got a blog from where I can in fact obtain helpful facts regarding my If you drink 10 glasses of water a day you will be flushing out excess fats and be continually keeping your body in a state of detox. With this in moderation, you will feel full and satisfied, and you won’t have the guilt of feeling deprived. Because of this, weight loss tips are a very hot topic. best it inventory management software says: Hi colleagues, its fantastic paragraph on the topic of teachingand entirely defined, keep it up all gopro hero 3 silver says: The product is described as the ultimate GoPro accent”, while anticipated to value between $500 and $1,000. Click to Buy and to read a free chapter Hear Us Talk About the Book – Philadelphia’s Rich Zeoli Show, WPHT Rich Zeoli-WPHT-Enough of us Fire Sale on Remaining Inventory of Our “Enough Of Us” Book! Eyes Wide Shut When it Comes to Procreation Sobering Statistics on Chronic Depression Air Pollution Kills Two Million People per Year India has Enough Money to Wipe out its Poverty. So why Doesn’t It? https://boykin87velazquez.picturepush.com on Unfulfilled Dreams: Parent-Child Estrangement George the Great on Fire Sale on Remaining Inventory of Our “Enough Of Us” Book! Geri on More People, More Money, More Pollution? ello.co on Quiet Moments – So Thankful for Child-Free Zones Rafael Urquia on Eyes Wide Shut When it Comes to Procreation Childfree living Hazards of Having Children Human Sustainability Life's Pitfalls Social Fairness The Consumer Guy web site Copyright © 2020 · Enough of Us·Site by Askmepc-Webdesign ·

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/us/mo ... d=all&_r=0 Mr. Diez, as it turned out, was one of more than 240,000 people in North Carolina with a permit to carry a concealed handgun. If not for that gun, Mr. Simons is convinced, the confrontation would have ended harmlessly. “I bet it would have been a bunch of mouthing,” he said. Mr. Diez, then 42, eventually pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill. What is the number(A) of >legal gun owners, including police, gov't agents, and military<, versus the number of >illegal< homicides per year by these >legal< gun owners(B)? (NOT including accidents or suicides---i.e. general listings under homicides) >>>That would give a more accurate picture of just how dangerous gun owners are to the non-gun owner population, which should also be given in hard numbers. (C) Answer A, B, & C, please. [my own educated guess is ~120 million, <4,000, and ~200 million, so, relatively, >>>legal gun owners are not dangerous to the general population] Many other things are much more dangerous.<<< A joke? or is it reality? A Disbarred Lawyer, an Illegal Alien, a Pathological Liar, a Muslim, a Communist and a Black Guy walk into a BAR. Bartender asks.... "What'll it be, Mr. President?" (I would say it is too real!) More on gun control: "Here's a little history lesson regarding gun-grabbing and the carnage that ensued: In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated. In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated. Germany established gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated. China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated. Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated. Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated. Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, one million educated people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated. Defenseless people rounded up and exterminated in the 20th century because of gun control: 56 million. You won't see this data on the U.S. evening news or hear politicians disseminating this information." --columnist Doug Giles Last edited by Johhny Electriglide on Sun Jan 20, 2013 1:40 pm, edited 4 times in total. What is the number(A) of >legal gun owners, including police, gov't agents, and military<, versus the number of >illegal< homicides per year by these >legal< gun owners(B)? That would give a more accurate picture of just how dangerous gun owners are to the non-gun owner population, which should also be given in hard numbers. (C) [my own guess is ~120 million, <4,000, and ~200 million] It does not matter since the criteria you presented was a guarantee of safety, which is clearly not met with the gun ownership. If there is no guarantee of safety by gun control and thus gun control is useless, then given there is no guarantee of safety by gun ownership the gun ownership is useless under this criteria. Single standards are simple. According to the figures more people were killed by guns in the US in the one year, 2009, than American troops killed by all means in both Iraq and Afghanistan from the start until today. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm Firearm homicides 2009 Number of deaths: 11,493 http://www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf As of January 9, 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Defense casualty website, there were 4,488 total deaths (including both killed in action and non-hostile) in the Iraq theater from 2003 thru 2011. As of January 9, 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Defense casualty website, there were 2,165 total deaths (including both killed in action and non-hostile) in the Afghanistan. HeritageFarm wrote: The NRA distribute myths about the treaty, while shouting "freedom" and "the right to be armed" and yet not even taking into consideration the right to life! Little consideration for the hundreds of millions whose lives have been affected by the insistence on that "right". So misguided while creating very unsafe, insecure conditions in the US and in the world. Who, I wonder, will protect us from the NRA who are clearly in it for the money ..... No, the NRA's job is to protect us from people like you who don't have a clue about how important self-defense is. Criminals don't pay attention to laws. Disarm the general public, and you arm the criminals. (And the government; Just check out Hitler's tactics.) "And the truth is that no gun law was passed in Germany in 1935. There was no need for one, since a gun registration program was already in effect in Germany; it was enacted in 1928, five years before Hitler’s ascendancy. But that law did not “outlaw” guns, it just restricted their possession to individuals who were considered law-abiding citizens, and who had a reason to own one. And there’s no reason to consider that law particularly significant, either; the NAZIs didn’t seize control of their own country with gunpowder. They used a much more potent weapon: propaganda." http://propagandaprofessor.net/2011/09/ ... s-gun-ban/ America is girding for social/racial conflicts. The public senses this and has acquired firearms. Suggest that all Americans be armed and receive basic safety and use instruction. Quality firearms are a fine hedge against inflation. >>>>>Still the first questions were not answered.<<<<(SEE ABOVE!!) The comparisons made should also include motor vehicles then, and forms of death from lifestyle choices such as obesity and smoking, booze and drugs, and from environmental causes such as soots and carcinogenic chemicals. https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#in ... 41f75933c6 Bunch of great posters, here is what one says; "25 states allow anyone to buy a gun, strap it on, and walk down the street with no permit of any kind: some say it's crazy. However, 4 out of 5 US murders are committed in the other half of the country, so who's crazy?" Andrew Ford Last edited by Johhny Electriglide on Fri Jan 18, 2013 5:50 pm, edited 3 times in total. Still the first questions were not answered. The comparisons made should also include motor vehicles then, and forms of death from lifestyle choices such as obesity and smoking, booze and drugs, and from environmental causes such as soots and carcinogenic chemicals. Why? It makes no difference given your position of a guarantee of safety being the criteria for acceptance. That criteria is not met thus the gun ownership is useless unless you are now trying to institute a second standard for acceptance. Homicide is a leading cause of death and guns are a leading cause of homicides. The ownership of a gun does not guarantee safety, but does increase the odds of death rather than injury in an assault. One may try to rationalize acceptance of gun ownership without the guarantee of safety, but then the points of oppositon against gun control based on the lack of guarantee are also removed if we are to maintain a single standard. This brings us back to the point of some reasonable control methods making it safer for the general population, which does not guarantee everyone's safety at all times either. The El Paso, CO, sheriff wants to train teachers/administrators; http://www.gazette.com/articles/teacher ... chool.html and here is gun control at its worst; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_%28farmer%29 He had been burglarized 9 times with no police help. Robbers with extensive criminal records broke in. He shot both and killed one with an "illegally" bought shotgun, and he ended up with a life sentence. Later he was released after a few years, but more than the surviving burglar got, and given 125K English Pounds compensation. The media had made the bad guys(extensive robbers/criminals) look good and the victim look bad because he took it in his own hands to stop his victimization that the police would or could not stop. There is nothing nutty about what he did in those circumstances, but a lot nutty about him being given prison time. (notice Wayne's purposeful cherry picking of the wiki article---disgusting!) Last edited by Johhny Electriglide on Mon Jan 14, 2013 6:45 am, edited 2 times in total. http://www.toledoblade.com/Education/20 ... itors.html MONTPELIER, Ohio — Janitors at Montpelier Exempted Village Schools are equipped with brooms, sponges, and dustpans to keep classrooms, corridors, and bathrooms clean and tidy. Within the next several months, the custodial staff will be toting handguns as they carry out their daily duties in the school district buildings. In reaction to last month’s deadly shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, the board of education of this Williams County school district Wednesday night unanimously voted for four janitors to carry handguns on the K-12 campus. School officials say having armed personnel, which may be a first for any school system in Ohio, is designed to thwart incidents of violence and prevent what happened in Newtown, Conn., from occurring in Montpelier. I agree that man should have been prevented from coming near a weapon. Too bad they did not do that and possibly saved a life. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/apr/2 ... n.ukcrime2 Even Tony Martin's best friend describes him as 'weird'. Along with his apples, he nurtured deep-seated hatreds Eccentric, outspoken, lonely, loony and highly strung: all words used by friends and neighbours to describe Tony Martin, the farmer convicted yesterday of the murder of a 16-year-old boy who broke into his isolated farmhouse one night last August. Many people in the Fen villages near Emneth in Norfolk believed the "weird" farmer to be harmless. But others, who had heard him espouse his hatred for burglars and what he would do with them if he caught them, had taken to giving Martin a wide berth. Apart from thieves, Martin's pet hate was Gypsies. Norwich crown court heard that the farmer had talked of putting Gypsies in the middle of a field, surrounding it with barbed wire and machine gunning them. Fred Barras, the boy he killed, was both of these things: a Gypsy and a thief. What led to the rise of Hitler and others was not a simply a gun ban but an escalation of arms production and growing militarization. For the U.S., we are seeing citizens supplied by the arms industry, the government equipped with even better armaments by the same arms industry plus the installation of formidable surveillance and prison systems (guess who's playing for all that?), and the same arms industry lobbying not only for no gun control but even deregulation of arms exports, allowing the same government to provide military aid to all sorts of groups worldwide. In short, we have a business elite profiting heavily from sales to all sorts of groups, but especially to government that works for them and that will keep citizens in check. Citizens, meanwhile, imagine that their small arms will work effectively against ground-attack fighters, artillery, bombs, and tanks. ralfy wrote: The only thing on the citizen's side is numbers, as far as resistance and change to a tyrannical government, or the "Tom Jefferson thing." Guns are for protection(both self and community), hunting, and recreation, and the Constitutional Right is not to be "infringed". I would say excessive costs and licensing requirements would be infringements on law abiding mentally stable citizens. Just look up the definition of infringement in dictionaries of the time and now. It isn't some "personal opinion", it is the rule of law of the US Constitution that 2/3rds of the House and Senate would NOT change, especially the Republican controlled House. There are a number of towns arming their teachers/school employees, and/or allowing volunteer guards, besides those above. In Utah and Texas among them. Our county sheriff's proposals were enthusiastically accepted by teachers and school officials, and even our anti-gun governor. Last edited by Johhny Electriglide on Mon Jan 14, 2013 6:54 am, edited 1 time in total. The only thing on the citizen's side is numbers, as far as resistance and change to a tyrannical government, or the "Tom Jefferson thing." Guns are for protection(both self and community), hunting, and recreation, and the Constitutional Right is not to be "infringed". I would say excessive costs and licensing requirements would be infringements on law abiding mentally stable citizens. The very real point too many ignore is there is NO right under the Constitution of the US which cannot be removed by a passing vote to do so by 2/3 of the state legislatures. In the case of guns, there are already significant restrictions on things such as fully automatic and selective fire, which have not been deemed to violate the 2nd Ammendment. This restriction indicates there is no absolute on that right so other restrictions would be expected to pass such a test as well. A personal opinion on what would be an infringement means nothing, but the reams of prior court rulings and changes to the Constitution do mean a lot. If the USSC makes a ruling it is binding but can be overruled by a sufficient number of votes as indicated before. http://www.14news.com/story/20559778/tn ... utube-rant CAMDEN, TN (WSMV) - A Middle Tennessee firearms trainer who made an ominous comment about killing people in a YouTube video that gained national attention this week has had his handgun carry permit suspended Friday by the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security. James Yeager, 42, had his permit suspended based on a "material likelihood of risk of harm to the public," the department said in a statement. Col. Tracy Trott of the Tennessee Department of Safety said it didn't take him long to reach a decision after viewing the comments on the Internet. "I watched it twice to make sure I was hearing what I thought I heard," Trott said. "It sounded like it was a veiled threat against the whole public. I believed him. He had a conviction in his voice, and the way he looked into the camera, I believe he's capable of a violent act," Trott said.

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Home pageNews Effort and Struggle Dear friend: try to be a man of strong will-power and resolution, so that you may not go from this world as a person without resolution, and hence rise on the day of resurrection as a brainless-being, not in the form of human being. For the other-world is the place where what is hidden is unveiled and secrets are exposed. One's audacity to commit sin, converts him little by little into a man devoid of will-power, and takes away the noble essence of humanity from him. Our respected teacher used to say that more than anything else, giving the ears to the sounds of music and songs, steal(plunder) from men their will-power and the power of resolution. Hence, my brother, desist from transgression, resolve to return to God, and acquire(amass) a mien similar to that of true human being. Join the community of the men of religion and in seclusion pray to God, so that He may assist you in your mission, and pray that the Prophet (S) and the members of his Household (AS), intercede for you. May God bestow His graces and favours upon you. May He escort you in the coming dangers, since the path of life is full of great risks(troublemaker) and hazards. On the way of life there are very deep crevices and it is possible that one may stumble(limp) and fall in them in such a manner that none of his efforts could save(salvage) him from the coming catastrophe. It is also probable that in some cases the intercedings of an intercessor cannot save him either. Self-Examination and Stipulation (musharatah ) Self-conditioning, contemplation and self-examination are essential pre-requisites for a seeker (mujahid) of truth who is battling with his self. Self-conditioning or stipulation means binding oneself with the resolve not to do anything against God's commands. This is called musharatah, such as `I will not violate the Law of God today.' It is very easy to stick to such condition for one day. Try to resolve, abide by your own resolve, and experiment, and you will see that how easy this task is. Satan, the cursed creature, and his legions may magnify the volume of the task in your eyes, but these are the guiles played by the cheat. Curse, and drive the Devil and evil thoughts from within the depths of the heart and the domain of your mind. Experiment for one day and you will verify how easy this task is. Guarding Against Evil (muraqabah): After stipulating about his acts, man should enter this stage. It is essential that throughout the period of stipulation themujahid struggling against his own self should constantly concentrate upon his actions. If any time any idea of violating Divine commands occurs to him, he should know that this idea has been instilled into his mind by the Satan and his allies, who want to deter him from his good resolutions. He ought to curse them, and seek God's compassionate protection, and banish those villainous ideas from the realm of his heart, and tell the Satan that this day also he has to abide by the condition imposed upon his own self that he would not go against God's commands, as He is the One Who has provided him with all the excellences and bounties. It is He, Who has given him the riches of health, security and peace year after year in this world. In recognition of all God's graces it is not sufficient even if he serves Him till eternity, let alone a trivial thing like this. I hope, that Satan will be driven away, and the Divine forces will prevail. I assure you that this practice of self-criticism and self-examination would not hinder your day-to-day activity. I advise you to remain in the same state of mind till night-the time for introspection and inner deliberation-and evaluate your deeds of the whole(intact) day. This is the time to see whether you have been honest to the Giver of all, to whom everybody is accountable. If you have been faithful to Him, you should be thankful to Him, that He has made you successful(blooming) in your intentions. And realize that you have gone a step forward(onward) in His direction and became an object of His attention. God willing, God will help you in performing all worldly and religious duties, and will diminish your pains for the next day. If you repeat this many times, it is imminent that you will be accustomed to the acts of piety. You will see then that all this does not require you to make hard efforts. You will also notice that obedience to God gives ample pleasure. Though this world is not where one is immediately rewarded, yet faithfulness to God and abstaining from sins is fruitful(fertile) in this world also. God never entrusts His creatures with cumbersome and heavy tasks which are beyond their powers, but it is the Satan and his allies who magnify them in your view. God forbid, if there are any lapses on your part, ask God's forgiveness, and beseechingly implore Him that you will be more careful in future, so that the Almighty may throw open the doors of His grace and compassion to you, and may guide you in the straight path. Remembrance (tadhakkur): The factors, that fully assist man in his jihad with his self and the Satan, and to which a treader mujahid has to pay greater attention is constant remembrance of God. Though there are many other important stages, I will be content to discuss this stage here. Remembrance of God, remembering the graces bestowed by Him. You know that thankfulness is natural and man's nature commands man to be grateful to his benefactor. If one tries to read the book of his own heart, he will see that this law is written there. The sense of veneration and gratitude for the benefactors increases with the amount of benefaction, particularly if the benefactor's generosity has no selfish motive. Greater the selfless generosity, greater is sense of gratitude. For example, compare the extent of veneration for one who presents you a horse with a selfish motive, with the respect you have for a person, who grants you a village of several hectares, without any inkling of selfish motives. If a doctor rescues you from the darkness of blindness, you naturally owe to him a lot of respect, and if someone saves you from the clutches of death, you owe him a lot more. You yourselves reflect and estimate the seen and unseen favours bestowed on us by the Almighty, even a small fraction of which all men and thejinn cannot even provide us with. Take for instance the air we breathe day and night, upon which our existence as well as that of other living beings is dependent, nothing can remain alive(survive) even if it is taken off merely for a quarter of an hour. What a marvellous gift it is! If all men and the jinn of the world labour hard to contrive such a thing, they cannot do that. In the same way, try to recall other gifts of God also, like external bodily senses viz. sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch, etc., and inner faculties like thinking, imagination and reason, etc., each one of which carries unlimited benefits(paybacks) and which are granted to us by Our Lord. Besides these valuable gifts, there are several other gifts also. Moreover, He has sent His messengers and prophets and His Books as well to show us which path is right and which one is amiss, which path leads us to Heaven or Hell. He fulfils all our needs in this world and the Hereafter, without having any need of our adoration. Observance of His commands, or transgressing them does not make any difference to Him, it is for the sake of our own benefit that He has enjoined good and forbidden indecencies. While remembering all these and various other favours, whose reckoning is beyond the powers of human beings, do we not see that respecting and obeying such a Benefactor is essential for us, or does our reason approve of the acts of violating His commands? This is an evident fact that we respect great people and those older in age. This is also true that people respect the wealthy and powerful persons, and rulers and kings, since they are recognized as great. Can their greatness be matched with the grandeur and magnificence(splendor) of that King of kings, in Whose kingdom this world of us is merely a particle of dust. He is the Creator and King of this vast(massive) cosmos, whose infiniteness cannot be assess or even conceived by human intellect. Human being, a creature crawling on one of the smallest planets miserably fails to grasp the extent of his own small world, whose sun cannot be compared with far greater suns of innumerable galaxies. Our solar system is nothing as compared to lesser several other solar systems, which still elude the keen eyes (and refined telescopes) of great explorers and investigators of the world. Is that Greatest of the great, who can know and cover not only minute details of these known worlds, but of many ample unknown worlds, in a twinkling of an eye, is not venerable according to the dictates of reason, as well as in the light of the great book of nature? If any one fails to do this, he ought to be extra(surplus) watchful and careful, since God Almighty is present everywhere, and no odd corner of the world can delude his Omnipresent sight. Every living being is within the range of His view and all knowledge is in His infinite attendance, so never forget Him. A speck of penitence in one's heart would not melt any person into water, and he would not fall to the ground. Therefore, my dear friend, remember God and remember all His favours and graces, and stop disobeying Him. Overpower and subdue the satanic band in this great war, and convert the spheres of your mind into divine realm by driving out the satanic legions and inviting the divine hosts, so that God may succour and protect you in the dangers threatening to befall you in this battle. The battlefield, which is more immense than this one, is the scene(spectacle) of the battle (jihad) against thine own self, the invisible world of within and the second stage of this jihad. We shall deal with this subject afterwards. By the time, I remind you not to have any expectations from anyone but God. Except Him, the Almighty, nobody can help you. With all humility and with all the tears your eyes can offer (to wash your sins), pray to God and seek His assistance to emerge victorious in this crucial battle. wa innahu wali al-tawfiq The Second Stage: The second stage also consists of several steps: The human soul inhabits another realm and another territory also, which is the world of the hidden and the sphere of the sublime world. In that world, the role of the sensual forces assumes graver dimensions. This is the place, where the contest and conflict between the divine forces and the fiendish ones is more severe and also more significant. Everything that exists in the external or visible world drifts(get lost) to this hidden world, and is manifested there. Whichever of the forces whether godly or devilish, is victorious here is essentially triumphant there also. So, the jihad al-nafs or the internal struggle(scramble) is of great significance for all great religious thinkers, mystics and moralists. It can be rather considered as the origin and the source of all felicities or woes, and of promotion and sublimation or debasement and degradation of self. One should be extremely self-conscious while undertaking this jihad. Because, it is possible that, God forbid, due to the defeat of heavenly forces, the self is left vacant for the unholy occupation of the vicious and unworthy satanic legions, and hence causing an eternal loss to the human being that cannot be retrieved. Even the intercession of an intercessor cannot save him from becoming an object of the wrath and indignation of the Most Merciful of the merciful. It is also possible that man's intercessor may become his adversary. It is a pity that such a thing should happen to anyone that one who pleads for him should become his opponent. God alone knows that what misfortunes, what perils and what hardships are to follow Divine wrath and antagonism of God's friends, compared to which all the infernal fires, plagues, evils, serpents and scorpions are insignificant and mild. God forbid, whatever sufferings of hell have been described by saints, ascetics and mystics, compared to them all the imaginable pains and sufferings of this world are very mild. All of the torments about which we have heard, are trifle and insignificant when compared to the miseries one has to undergo in the Hereafter. Heaven and hell whose account has been given in the Book and in the traditions of prophets of God are certainly the heaven and hell of wicked actions, and are prepared for rewarding or punishing good and bad human deeds. There is a subtle allusion also to the heaven and hell of morality, which is more significant than even the Bihisht-e liqa, the heaven of beatific vision, and the Jahannam-e firaq, the hell of separation from Him. This is considered to be of great significance but is hidden from our eyes and is opened to them alone who deserve it. You and me who do not deserve it should not doubt it. We should have faith in it, since God and His friends have told us that this non-detailed (ijmali) faith also is beneficial for us. Sometimes, it is also possible that unbelief arising out of ignorance, and unreasonable rejection, without any knowledge and understanding of the truth may bring great harm to us, the extent of which is unthinkable. In this world we cannot understand those harms. If you hear something which has been reported from any thinker, mystic or ascetic, do not refute it or consider it invalid just because it is not in accordance with your taste, or does not fit in your mode of thinking. This idea may have its origin in a higher source, inaccessible to you like the Quran, hadith or reason. How strange(curious) it will be that a faqih issues a fatwa (a religious or legal opinion) regarding a certain ayah (a pecuniary compensation for any offence against a person) of which you are ignorant, and you reject it without checking the relevant evidences(trace). Or, when a holy person or a mystic speaks something concerning religious learning, or he refers to the conditions of heaven or hell, it is easy for you to refute him or even dare to insult(defame) him. For it does not need much thinking or knowledge. But do not forget that it is possible that the person, who is an authority on that subject and a master in that field, might have traced it back to the Holy Book, or has access to some traditions transmitted from infallible Imams (AS), and you may not have come across it. In that case, you would be guilty of rejecting God and His Prophet (S) without any plausible excuse. You have no justification to say later that your judgement was not correct, your knowledge was limited, or that you had heard a certain person speaking otherwise on the minbar (pulpit); such excuses are unfounded, and in any case let not your objective be blurred. Whatever has been related about the paradise of good morals and deeds and about the inferno of bad morals and deeds refers to the states, which we cannot experience here. Thus, my friend ! take great care, search for remedy, and try to discover the ways and means of deliverance for yourself. Seek refuge in God, the Most Merciful and Beneficent, and beseech His mercy with humble supplications and lamentation, so that He may help you in this holy war against your carnal self and you may be victorious and the domain of your heart may be liberated from evil influences. The fiendish legions may be turned out of the place so that it may be given in the possession of its rightful Owner, and the felicities, honours and joys may be granted to you by God. All the praises that you have heard of the Heaven, its houris and its mansions, are nothing compared to Divine Bliss, nothing can be estimated higher. That domain is absolutely a divine sphere, which has been described by the friends of God from this rightly guided luminous ummah (millat-e bayda).This is a world of pleasures which no ear has ever heard of, and no human heart has ever experienced. Hidden or Inner Powers (Quwwa-e batini): You should know that with His Wisdom and Authority, God Almighty has created certain powers and faculties in the invisible world of the inner self. They are of gigantic benefits for us. Here we shall mention three of them: they are, al-quwwah al-wahmiyyah-the power of invention or imagination, al-quwwah al-ghadabiyyah-the power of passion or anger, andal-quwwah al-shahwiyyah-the power of lust or sensuality. Each of these powers is of great benefit to the mankind, like the preservation of the human individual and species, advancement of human interests in this world as well as in the Hereafter, of which religious scholars have given elaborate accounts and I need not repeat them. What is essential to state here is that these three powers are the source and origin of all virtuous and vicious deeds, and the source of all invisible and sublime forms. Briefly speaking, as man possesses a physical and a terrestrial form in this world, which is devised and contrived by the Almighty in such a wonderful(tremendous) manner that all great philosophers and scientists are puzzled, and the science of anatomy is not fully equipped to discover and understand its functioning rightly even to this day. God has made man superior to other living beings by endowing him a superb constitution and a beautiful appearance. Yet there is another form and a different face of him, which is heavenly and invisible, which is determined by the qualities of his soul and his inner nature. In the Hereafter, whether it is in the Barzakh (an interval of time between the death of man and his resurrection) or whether on the Last Day, if one's inner nature, his deeds and his inner self are really human, his heavenly visage also will be man-like. But if his deeds are inhuman(unsympathetic) he will not possess human form; it will be rather subject to the state of his inner self and his psyche. For instance, if his inner self is dominated by the power of lust or sensuality (al-quwwah al-shahwiyyah) and animality and brutality overwhelm and govern his inner self, his other-worldly visage will be of a brute and the reign of his inner world would be under the control of one of the beasts, corresponding to that quality of his soul. If the power of passion or anger conquers one's inner self and his psyche, his other-worldly appearance will resemble one of the bestial forms, corresponding to that attribute of his nature. And if the power of imagination and invention is governed by fiendish forces and his inner self is made vicious, governed by the vices like deceit, dishonesty, slandering, backbiting, which are the attributes of Satan, he may undergo a metamorphosis and assume one of the forms of Satan. Sometimes it is also possible that he would have an appearance that symbolizes two or several vices. In that case, a form which does not resemble any of the brutes, but an unusual and queer form, with which cannot be compared the most terrible(awful) and ugliest monster in the world, will be acquired by him. It has been recorded from the Prophet (S) of God that some persons will be raised on the Last Day in such a mien that even monkeys and dog flies will appear better looking than that. It is also possible that several forms may be prescribed for one individual in that world. Because that world is not like this world, where one individual cannot acquire(accumulate) more than one form. This account itself is logical as well as self-evident. Because, the criterion of those different forms (of which human form is one) would be the state of soul at the time of death the state in which the soul departs from the body. It is in this very state and form that man's soul enters the realm of Barzakh. At the time of entering the other world, that is, the domain of the Hereafter, the first stage of which is Barzakh, in whichever state one's soul departs from the body, it assumes a form suited to it in the next world also. It is the same form in which he is perceived by the inhabitants of Barzakh and by himself, when he first opens his eyes there, if he has not lost his sight to do so. Because, it is not necessary that man may enter the next world in the same physical state as he had in this world. God Himself says that on the Last Day some of the persons will ask God that why has He raised them as blind while they possessed eyes in the world. God will answer them that as they disregarded His clear signs in the world, they are forgotten and disregarded by God today. O poor fellow! You had only external sight(prospect) and were blind inwardly. You are realizing your blindness now, while you were already blind from the very beginning. You did not possess the inner vision which could perceive His clear signs. You, the poor creature, who was endowed with a perfect earthly body and proportionate form, alas you did not know that the measures of the hidden and sublime world are different from this world. You should strive for inner uprightness, so that you may be upright(erect) on the Last Day. Your spirit should be a human spirit, so that your form in the Barzakh and the Hereafter may be a human form. You are mistaken to consider the world of the hidden realities, where the secrets of this world are to be unveiled and your deeds are to be disclosed, as similar to this world of appearances, where one can deceive others and can create chaos, confusion and misjudgement. Your eyes and ears, your hands and feet, and other parts of your body will bear witness against your deeds in this world with their supernatural tongues. Some of them may also appear in their celestial forms. So, my friend, it is necessary to keep open the ears of your heart. Be brave, and have mercy on your own self, so that you may leave this world in a human form, and may be counted as redeemed and virtuous. Mind you, these words repeatedly occur in the statements and teachings of great thinkers, in the inspirations of mystics and in the transmissions of the truthful and infallible servants of God. How to Regulate Human Instincts: It is possible that wahm, the power of imagination and invention, ghadab-the power of passion and anger, and shahwah-the power of lust or sensuality, also possess divine aspect, and may bring about felicity and good luck to man, if these powers are subjected to the dictates of reason and good sense and the teachings of prophets of God. They may become satanic forces if they are unleashed and the power of invention and imagination is allowed to rule and lead other two powers. It is not a secret that none of the prophets of God ever tried to eradicate the powers of passion, sensuality or imagination completely. None of the messengers of God have ever demanded to completely kill sensuality and desire or to extinguish the fire of passion or anger and ignore the inventions of imagination. But they have rather advocated for controlling and bridling them and making them function under the command of reason and Divine Laws. For each one of these powers struggles to dominate others and win its goal, whatever mischief(misbehavior), chaos and confusion may be stirred up. For instance, the obstinate bestial self is determined to reach its goal even if it is resolved on committing adultery with married women in the Holy Ka'bah. Intractable power of passion arouses the self to win its objective even if it is contemplating to kill prophets and the friends of God. And the power of imagination, while devising satanic instruments, wants to go its own way, to cause corruption of the whole climate on earth, and to create chaos and disorder in the world. The great prophets of God were sent to this world with the light of Divine Laws. God revealed to them heavenly books, so that they may prevent people from indulging into extravagances and immoderations, and bring the human self under the control of reason and the law of Shari`ah. To bridle the human self is essential so that it may not exceed the measures of reason and Shari'ah. Hence, every individual who subordinates himself to the Divine Laws and principles of good sense is fortunate, and it is he who attains salvation. He finds refuge in God, the Most Exalted and the Most High, from the dangers and misfortunes which might befall him, and thus is saved from the disgrace of assuming those beastly and hideous forms that may accompany him in the Barzakh, in the grave and on the Last Day, as the result of his vicious deeds and corrupt practices. How to Bridle Fancy and Imagination: The first condition for a mujahid in his struggle that he has to observe and abide by, at this juncture and at all other stages, is to control the flight of one's imagination, so that he can subjugate the Devil and his armies. Imagination is like a bird restless to fly, and sit on any tree it reaches. This flight may bring about many great misfortunes. Fancy is one of the tools of the Devil, with which he enslaves man and renders him helpless. With the help of fancy, he entices men to committing villainies and indecencies. A mujahid who is determined on self-rectification, and who has made up his mind to purify his inner self and banish satanic forces from there, should firmly hold the bridle of his imagination and let not it soar and wander about wherever it likes. He should try to prevent his mind from nursing corrupt and sinful thoughts, and always divert it to high and noble ideals. In the beginning, it appears to be a little difficult(demanding), since Satan and his forces may glorify bad things in your eyes. But with little concentration and attention everything becomes easy. It is possible that as an experiment you may just think for a while, and will not be able to concentrate upon an object. Whenever you see that your thoughts are stooping to lowly and mean things, turn your attention aside from them and think about the worthier and nobler things. If you have been successful in your attempts, thank God Almighty for His help, and pursue these matters further. May God, out of His mercy, open the path of spiritual progress for you, and may you be invisibly guided in the straight path. May human deeds and right conduct be made easy for you. Be careful that vicious thoughts and vain fancies are induced by Satan, who wishes to fortify its forces in the domain of your inner self. You, who are at war with Satan and his legions, and want to make the realm of your inner self a heavenly domain, are expected to be on guard against the guiles of the cursed villain. You should drive away those thoughts that counter Divine command. God willing, you will be able to recapture this significant fortification from the unholy occupation of Satan and his allies, in this internal war. This fortification serves as a boundary (between good and evil). If you are victorious here you may hope for greater and nobler victories.My dear friend, seek for God's help at every moment. Pray and beg humbly in the court of your Lord. O God Almighty! Satan is a great enemy, who has enticed your great friends and prophets. O God! help this weak and entrapped servant of yours, and guard him against these vain ideas and these infirm thoughts that inflict me, so that he may succeed in his war against this strong enemy, who is threatening to destroy?(fragment) my felicity and humanity. O God! please accompany Thy servant and guide him so that he may drive the Satan's armies from Your seat, and may clip the hands of this usurper. Estimation and appraisal The thing which is to be strictly followed during this process is the estimation and evaluation (of vices and virtues). An intelligent person should carefully examine the effects and demerits of each one of moral vices and bad deeds, which are the product of sensuality, passion and imagination, and are under the control of Satan. He has to compare them with the benefits and blessings of good deeds and moral and spiritual excellences, which are under the guidance of reason and religious law (Shari`ah) and then decide which way is better to act. For instance, the advantages of obeying the dictates of uninhibited sensuality that gets hold of the human soul and firmly takes its roots there, and gives rise to many vices to flourish, may be taken into consideration. In the course of time the sensual aptitudes develop, and a person does not hesitate to commit any of the vices, and tries all means and ways to obtain the sensual pleasure at any cost, and does not fail to perpetrate any crime which he desires to commit, even if it results in something extremely vicious. As a result of letting loose one's passions several other vices are born and become his second nature. And he is more than ready to maltreat and subdue everyone who comes in his way. Those who react against oppressive activities and try to defend themselves, or show any signs of disagreement or hostility are crushed and oppressed by him. He tries to repel all oppositions by all means, although it may lead to an outbreak of corruption in the world. In the same way, the person, who has surrendered himself to the demonaic power of imagination and lets it to be firmly rooted in his soul, does not hesitate to indulge in a fit of excessive passion and sensuality with all his satanic designs(illustration) and treacheries and rule over the creatures of God by all kinds of unjust means, even if it is to dispossess a family of their belongings or stripping a city or a country of its resources. These are the achievements of these faculties, while they are active under the ignoble supervision of Satan. If we think about it, and examine the plight of such people, we shall notice that every one of them, despite the enormous strength they possess, and most of their wishes being fulfilled, they still nurture thousands of new desires that are yet to be fulfilled. It is not possible in this world that all the desires and ambitions that we cherish be fulfilled here, since this world is the abode of obstacles. The elements of this world dispirit our wishes. Our desires are also not limited. For instance, the power of sensuality and lust acts in man in such a way that if he is given one woman, he is attracted to other women. If he is given an empire, he will hanker after some other empire. Man always desires for what he does not possess. In spite of this vanity of imagination and futility of human desire, the kiln(oven) of sensuality is always hot, and its heat ever increasing, and our desires are never cooled down. Similarly, the forces of passion are implanted in human nature(environment) in such a way that even if he is made an absolute monarch of a state, he will be attracted(drew attention) towards another state, which he cannot get, and he will try to pounce on it with all the force he can muster. This power is also ever increasing. Anyone who has any doubt is advised to examine his own self and other human beings belonging to the classes of poor, rich and powerful; he will agree with me. It is obvious(noticeable) that man is always allured by something which he does not own. This is the human nature as conceived by various great Islamic thinkers and holy men, especially one should refer to a great master of divinity, Mirza Muhammad `Ali Shahabadi. Anyhow, even if man attains his goals, for how long can he be benefited from them? How long his youthful years are to continue? When the spring of youth fades out and the autumn of his life sets in, his heart has no more a zest for mirth and joy, his organs lose their vitality and those activities lose their relish. His eyes dim, his hearing is impaired, his sense of touch and other senses and faculties weaken. Ability(talents) to get pleasure declines or is completely lost. Then hosts of ailments make him an easy prey. His digestive, assimilative and excretory system fails, and his respiratory system cannot perform it: function properly. Nothing but deep sighs, displeasure, regret and remorse are left to accompany him. Thus, the duration of our exploitation of these bodily powers, from the days when one gains consciousness of good and bad till the process of decline sets in, is not more than thirty or forty years, even for a person of very strong constitution. That too, if one does not happen to come across all sorts of diseases and afflictions, which we witness every day and forget about. If, for the time being, we take it for granted (although it has no reality), that a man can attain the age of one hundred and fifty years, with all opportunities of involving oneself fully in all the three indulgences-sensuality, passion and imagination, excluding all the chances of coming across any adversities and misfortunes, even this period of time would prove short, and pass soon like the winds and what would be in store for you for the next world? What benefit will you derive from all these treasures of amusements for your eternal life? What will save you from the horrors of the day of doom, helplessness, desolation and loneliness? What will you present on the Day of Judgement, and how would you face God, His angels, and His chosen servants and prophets? Of course, nothing will accompany you except your wicked and sinful deeds, which will metamorphose you in such a form that would not be known to anybody except God. Everything that you have heard and conceived about the infernal fire, torments of the grave and agonies of the Doomsday, etc., you measured them with the worldly fire and worldly pains. What a gross error you committed. Fire of this world is relatively an accident, and all the horrors are easy to bear. Your estimation of the other world on the basis of this one is imperfect and faulty. Even if the fire burning throughout the world is accumulated at one place, it will not be hot enough to burn the human soul. In the next world, besides burning and roasting the body it will burn the soul and incinerate the heart also. Whatever you have been listening about till now, is actually the hell of one's actions, which you will see in the Hereafter as a reality, for God Almighty has said: ... And they find all that they did confronting them, .... (18:49) You will have to face whatever you did in this world. If you thrived on the property of orphans, God alone knows in what state you will appear in hell and what comforts you will have to enjoy there as your reward. If here your harsh words have injured the hearts of people, this pain and discomfort caused to the hearts of the creatures of God, God alone knows, what punishment it will incur upon you in the Hereafter. You will know it only when you experience it what sort of pain and torture you have procured for yourselves. Because of your detractions, the other worldly and sublime form that was conceived for you is denied to you and you will. have to undergo the pains of chastisement. This will be the hell of one's actions, which is comparatively milder, cooler and tolerable, and is reserved for those who committed sins in this world. But for those who have acquired the viciousness of character and villainy of conduct like, greed, lust, hoarding, avarice, contentiousness, love of wealth, power and corporeal things, rapacity, ravenousness and other vices, the hell is their place, a place beyond human apprehension, a state and form which can never be anticipated by any stretch of the imagination, and emanates from within the soul itself. The inhabitants of that hell will be so distressed that they will try to escape from it, (but in vain). In some of the authentic narrations, it occurs that there is a valley in hell, which is reserved for the proud, and which is named as saqar once it complained to God about the intensity of its heat, and asked Almighty for a relief, so that it might take a breath. After the relief was granted, when it breathed, its breath filled the hell with fire. Sometimes one's vices may cause a human being to become a permanent dweller of hell. Because they take away from him his faith and belief. For instance, a vice like jealousy, according to authentic traditions, eats away faith as the fire consumes(burning up) wood. Another example is that of the love of the world, worldly power and riches, which, according to authentic narrations, consume the faith of a believer ample rapidly than two wolves let loose on a sheep herd without a shepherd, one attacking(assaulting) from the front and the other from the back. Adoration for the worldly things and lust for power deprives a believer of his belief, and God forbid, this sinfulness results in dark and ugly deeds, which finally(eventually) leads to the loss of faith and one's end as an infidel, and the hell of the false beliefs and erroneous faith is severer, hotter and darker than those two other hells, mentioned above. My friend, the higher knowledge has proved that the grades of intensity are infinite. The punishment is severer than what you imagine or what others imagine. If you do not believe in the arguments advanced by philosophers, or the revelations made to mystics, thanks to God, being a true believer, you have faith in the teachings of the prophets of God, and you consider all the reports recorded in the authentic books of the traditions which are accepted(admired) by all the Imamiyyah scholars as true and authentic. I hope that you believe in the prayers of infallible Imams, and have read the prayers and sermons uttered by Imam `Ali (A), and the invocation by Imam Sayyid al-Sajidin (A) uttered in the prayer of Abu Hamzah al-Thumali. My friend, reflect a little upon their subject matter and think for a while on their wordings. It is nowhere required to make a rapid reading of the lengthy prayer in a hurry without pondering over its meaning. You and I are not blessed with the spiritual state of al-Imam al-Sayyid al-Sajidin (A) to recite that lengthy prayer in a state of sustained ecstasy at one time. Try to read one third or one fourth of it every night with feeling, and meditate upon its words. You may feel ecstatic while reading it. Apart from this, pay a little more attention to the meaning of Quranic verses, and see what punishment has been prescribed for the inhabitants of hell, to escape which they will pray to the Lord for death, and alas death also will not help, as God Almighty says: ...Alas, my grief that I was unmindful of Allah, and I was indeed among the scoffers! (39:56) What kind of regret it will be, of which Almighty is making an emphatic mention. Do not pass quickly, without pausing and meditating upon such verses of the Qur'an: On the day when ye behold it, every nursing mother will forget her nursling and every pregnant will be delivered of her burden, and thou (Muhammad) will see mankind as drunken, yet they will not be drunken, but the Doom of Allah will be strong (upon them).(22:2) Here God Almighty is depicting the Doomsday. My friend, think yourself that, God forbid (na'udhu billah), the Quran is neither a story book, nor is it making jokes with you. What sort of condemnation it will be that will make people abandon(desert) their dear ones, and relieve pregnant women of their burden? What a great calamity it will be about which God Almighty, Whose greatness knows no extent, Whose supremacy and authority has no limits and bounds, is commenting upon in such solemn terms. What is going to happen God alone knows. Our intellect is insufficient to measure the extent of its magnanimity. If we study the transmissions and writings(inscriptions) of the infallible Members of the Holy Household, and think over them, we shall see that the sight of misery and agony in that world will be quite different from this world, and cannot be equated with the misfortunes of this world. Here I would like to quote a tradition from the great Shaykh of the Imamiyyah, al-Saduq, for you to demonstrate the meaning and extent of the misery, mentioned above. Nevertheless, this tradition narrated by him refers to the hell of the evil deeds and is comparatively a cooler place than other severer hells. I consider it essential to point out that al-Shaykh al-Saduq is the person who is held(seized) in great esteem and respect by all great religious scholars of rijal. He was born as the result of the prayer of the Imam (A), and was the object of great favour of Imam Mahdi (AF), and was among great writers of Shiite religious books. I quote this tradition with reference to a chain(series) of great Imamiyyah scholars, all of whom are considered as authentic narrators of hadith. Hence, if you are a true believer, you should have faith in the following tradition. The gist of the hadith is as follows: One day the Prophet (S) of God was seated when Gabriel came into his presence, with a discontented face and changed(altered) complexion. The Prophet (S) asked as to why he was looking so sad(unhappy) and grieved. Gabriel answered, `O Muhammad (S), why should I be not grieved, while today I saw the bellows of hell being set in. The Prophet (S) asked him what the bellows of hell were. Gabriel told him that it referred to the hell-fire which according to the Commandments of God Almighty was ablaze for one thousand years. After it became red hot He ordered it to burn for another one thousand years till it was white-hot. Then He commanded it to burn for one thousand years more till it turned black. Now that it was black and dark, if a slice of seventy cubits of it was to drop on this world, verily its heat would be sufficient to melt the whole world into fluid. If a single drop of its Zaqqum (an infernal tree, mentioned in the Quran proverbial for its extreme bitterness) and dari (something in hell more bitter than aloe, more fetid than carrion, and hotter than fire, which will be the food of the condemned) trickles down in the water reservoirs of the earth, everybody therein would die due to its stench. Thereupon the Prophet (S) wept and Gabriel also wept with him. On seeing this, God sent His angel, who came to them and said that God sent salams to them along with the message that He exempted them both from the committing of sins and the consequent punishments. My friend, there are a number of ahadith in this regard. Existence of hell and its horrible chastisements are among the essentials of all the religions of the world, which bring forward many arguments in favour of their necessity. And the great, mystics and saints have envisioned it even in this world. Try to imagine sincerely and contemplate the disheartening account of hell given in the tradition. If you consider it as probable only, even then should it not be sufficient to drive us to woods like the mad? What is the reason for our complacence and ignorance? Have the angels of God given us the tidings of being exempted from this punishment as they had given one to the Prophet (S) and Gabriel? Whereas the Prophet (S) and the friends of God could not be oblivious of the fear of God till the ends of their lives. They could not eat and sleep properly because of that fear. Look at the life of Imam 'Ali ibn al-Husayn (A), whose weeping and moanings, lamentations and supplications melted human hearts. What is amiss(wrong) with us that we do not feel ashamed? Even in our supplications to God, we so much violate and insult Divine principles, that a thousand pities on our thoughtlessness! Have pity on yourself and the extremity of the pangs of death. Again a thousand pities on our condition in Barzakh, the agonies of the Hereafter, and the Doomsday and its darkness! How pitiable are we who have to face the horrors of hell and its chastisement! How to Cure Moral Maladies: My friend! arise, awake from the slumber, be aware of your negligence and make an effort till there is time to repent. Consider this opportunity as valuable, until you are alive, your faculties and your powers are still under control, and you are young. Think about a cure before it is too late, and before moral maladies overpower your existence, and evils take deep roots in your existence and take you in the grips of their tentacles. Drive them away, find out a way of extinguishing the fire of your sensuality and passion. The best remedy prescribed by mystics and moralists is to concentrate upon each one of the evil habits that you detect in yourself, and offer an effective resistance against them. Fight bravely against your carnal self. Act unceasingly all the time against those vicious yearnings. Pray Almighty to assist you in this battle. Undoubtedly after sometime hideous habits would leave you, and Satan and his legions would vacate the fortress, and the battalions of heavenly armies would be installed in their stead. One of the moral maladies, which may destroy one, cause torment of the grave, and plague man in this world, is the maltreatment of the people of his household, his neighbours, his colleagues and others around him. It is the product of passion and sensuality. If the mujahid is determined on correcting himself, he can counter those impulses of indignation, resentment and vituperation with gentleness and kindness, remembering the Hereafter and the chastisements therein. He should curse the Devil in his heart and take refuge in God. I give you word that if you behave persistently like this, after some time you will realize that your nature is totally transformed(revolutionized) and good habits have taken the place of the bad ones. But if you behave according to the propensities of your nature, it is possible that they consume you in this world itself. I seek refuge in God from the anger, which when present in an individual destroys him in both the worlds. At the same time it exterminates(slays) his spirit also, because possibly one may use some indecent words against Divine principles in a fit of anger, as so many times we hear people uttering words of heresy and being guilty of apostasy thus. Philosophers say that the chances of being saved in a ship without a captain from the stormy waves of ocean are brighter than those of a man being saved in an outburst of wild passion. God forbid, that we should ever belong to that category(sorting) of people who become aggressive during academic discussions, as some of our students suffer from this intemperance. You have to resist against this bad tendency. Act against it, especially on the occasions of formal functions, which are attended by a great number of scholars and common men. During the discussions, if you see that the other party is justified in its argument, you are expected to admit your fault(wrongdoing) and confirm what opponents(rival)say. God willing, these meannesses will be eliminated in a short time. God forbid, that the words of some scholars, who claimed to be divinely inspired(promoted) and said that it was revealed that the quarrel among the inhabitants of hell, mentioned by God, is that of the scholars and transmitters of ahadith, should ever be true. Even if you do not believe in the authenticity of this tradition, even then you should carefully try to get rid of this habit. See the following account: It is narrated from many companions of the Prophet (S) that once as the Prophet (S) came to them they were engaged in wrangling over a religious issue. The Prophet (S) of Islam was greatly displeased(unsatisfied) and was indignant to this extent that they had never seen him before in such an anger. The Prophet (S) told them it was because of this habit of wrangling that their precursors were destroyed, and he added that a true believer would never wrangle. The Prophet (S) asked them to stop wrangling and told them that he would not act as an intercessor to any wrangler. Wrangling occupies the second place after idolatry among the things forbidden by God Almighty. The Prophet (S) is reported to have also said that unless a believer refrains from wrangling and altercation he cannot know the truth, in spite of his position being correct. There are various traditions in this regard. How abominable it will be if we deprive ourselves of the intercession of the Prophet (S) for the sake of merely a trivial thing which has no value, no merit whatsoever. Intellectual discussions, which would otherwise be the highest order of service and worship if undertaken with sincere motives, end in such a catastrophe and wipe out all his good deeds and acts of worship. In all circumstances, man should focus his attention on each of his vices individually, and eradicate them from the domain of his soul by restraining his carnal self. Once the tresspasser is driven out, the rightful owner of the house can readily come to take possession. Since the struggle of the self concludes here and man succeeds in driving off the legions of satanic armies from the empire of his soul, this land becomes the abode of angels of God and a place of worship of truthful servants of God. Thus the task of pursuing the journey towards God becomes easier, and the road to humanism is illuminated. The doors of blessings from heaven and their ascending steps are opened to him, and the doors of hell and the descending steps thereof are closed on him. God Almighty views him with mercy and benevolence and unites him with His faithful and His blessed servants. The path to divine knowledge, which is the ultimate purpose of creation of mankind and jinn, isopened to him. God Almighty guards him through this hazardous path. I wished to refer to the third stage of self (nafs), wherein another struggle against the deceptions and temptations of Satan takes place. But, on later thought, this description seems to be out of place here, so I left it undiscussed. (On the authority of the above-mentioned narrators), Yazid ibn Khalifah reports from al-Imam al-Sadiq (A) that he said: "Riya" in any of its forms amounts to shirk, (polytheism); verily, one who works for the people, his reward lies with them, and one who works for God his reward lies with God."[1] Riya' means to falsely make oneself appear to be virtuous, good natured or a true believer in God before the people for the sake of earning their respect and admiration, or with the purpose of gaining good reputation(renown) among them. The hypocrite feigns integrity, uprightness, virtue, honesty And piety without an authentic intention of acquiring these traits for the sake of God. It has several grades and degrees. The first stage is comprised of two steps: 1. At the first step an individual makes a display of his religious beliefs, and shows off his knowledge of the religious teachings in order to project himself as an honest person in the eyes of people to gain their confidence and respect. Such a kind of person tries to make a display of his trust in God and His Power, saying that he does not believe in any being except Him. He also tries to present himself as a staunch believer through various means, especially by declaring that he depends on none but God. Or such a person, with his gestures and utterances, poses himself to be a staunch follower of the true faith, and this is a more common kind of riya' than the first one. For instance, when the trust in God or submission to His Will is discussed, he wags his head in affirmation with a sigh, and thus deceives people giving an impression(imprint) that he is one of the true believers. 2. The second step on the path of riya' is represented by those who eradicate false belief from their hearts and, through such purification, want to attain power and respect among people; they sometimes articulate(talkative) their belief overtly, sometimes make a covert display of their purity. The second stage, too, is comprised of two steps: 1. At the first step an individual demonstrates his piety and virtuous deeds. 2. At the second step one pretends to have done away with the antitheses of piety and virtue, and behaves in such a manner as if he is free from all vices, and the aim of all this is to win the confidence of others. The third stage of Riya', which is considered to be overt by the fuqaha', also consists of two steps: 1. The first step is marked(striking) by an individual's performance of the prescribed forms of piety, prayers and good deeds in front of other people with the intention of demonstrating his favorable qualities and praiseworthy habits, or by his posture as a person who strictly adheres to the religious commands on purely rational grounds, and thus wishing to win the hearts of people and attracting their attention towards himself. Such acts, whether performed in total or in part, with the motive ofRiya', to please the others, are discussed in the books of fiqh. 2. At the second step, one abstains from evil deeds for the purpose of riya' only. Riya' in Faith or Creed: Remember that hypocrisy in religious faith is the worst kind of hypocrisy; its retribution also is the severest and its bad effects are far greater and more dangerous than those of other forms of hypocrisy. One who is guilty of this sin, if he does not believe genuinely in those ideas which he pretends to believe in, is counted among the munafiqun (hypocrites), whose place is in the Fire, and he is doomed to eternal damnation and his punishment is the severest of punishments. But if he believes in them, and for the sake of winning peoples' hearts and for obtaining worldly honour and dignity he makes an ostentation of them, though he is not reckoned among munafiqun, this kind of hypocrisy will cause the light of faith to fade away from his heart and to make the darkness of infidelity and faithlessness to occupy the domain of his heart. Because in the first instance this person commits polytheism (shirk) of the covert type; while his religious beliefs and acts should purely be meant for God and His Holy Essence, he is guilty of committing the sin of doing them for others and thus makes them to share what should absolutely belong to Him only. In this way he makes others partners to God and has given permission to the Devil to occupy his heart as if it does not belong to God. It has been mentioned earlier that faith emerges from the depths of the heart, and in this matter mere abstract knowledge does not suffice. It has been stated in the tradition that any kind of riya' is polytheism, but this vice, this disastrous atrocity, this hidden cruelty (to one's own self), and this vicious habit, results in nullifying the good deeds, and in surrender of the realm of the heart to other than God. The darkness of this vice causes man to leave this world as an unbeliever in God, and the feigned faith that he had assumed proves nothing more than a senseless and barren(unfruitful) profession; it is a form without content, a body without soul and a skull without brain; and in no way is acceptable to God. This fact is confirmed by a tradition mentioned in al-Kafi, narrated by 'Ali ibn Salim: The narrator of the tradition says that he heard al-Imam al-Sadiq (A) saying that God Almighty said, "I am the best of friends; one who makes others My partners in any matter, his deeds are not acceptable to Me. I accept only those acts that are purely done for My sake." [2] Hence, it is clear that if the spiritual acts (of the heart) are not performed with sincerity of the heart, they will neither be the object of attention of the Almighty, nor will He acknowledge them, and they will be credited in the account of that partner-the person, for whose sake they were performed. Thus the spiritual acts performed for the sake of somebody else, not for God, will surpass the limits of polytheism, and will enter the domain of kufr (infidelity). It may even be said that the performer of such adulterated acts would be treated as one of the munafiqun. As his polytheism is not visible, his hypocrisy also is hidden. He, the poor fellow, considers himself to be a believer, whereas in reality he is an idolater, and he is condemned to taste the chastisement prescribed for the munafiqun. How pitiable is the plight of one whose good deeds are to terminate innifaq. The Difference Between Knowledge and Belief: Know that faith or belief is something different from the knowledge of God, the Unity of His Being, and His other Attributes--like sifat-e kamaliyyah (the Attributes of Perfection), the Positive(approving) Attributes, sifat-e jalaliyyah (the Attributes of Glory), and the Negative Attributes, etc. and the knowledge of angels, holy scriptures, and the Last Day. Anyone who possesses the knowledge of all these things is not necessarily a believer. The Devil possesses the knowledge of all these things more than I and you or any other individual, but still he is an unbeliever. The faith is a yearning of the heart-an inner experience, which if not genuine, does not become faith. Anyone who has gained knowledge of religion through rational demonstrations and arguments, ought to submit to them whole-heartedly with the totality of his being and obey the call of his heart dutifully i.e. with complete surrender to God, with humility and fear-and accept all the responsibilities expected of him sincerely without any question. Only then he can become a perfect mumin. Culmination of the faith is tranquillity and peace of mind. When the light of faith is stabilized, it brings with it tranquillity of the heart, and this is something which does not issue from knowledge. It is possible that reason may accept something which is according to its dictates and logic, but the heart may not be ready to agree with it, thus making knowledge useless. For instance, you know through your reason that a dead person cannot do any harm and that all the dead in the world do not possess any power of action, even as much power as is possessed by a fly, and that all the physical and spiritual faculties depart as soon as one is dead; but since your heart has not accepted it and has not approved of the judgement of the mind, you cannot spend a dark night with a dead body. But if your heart yields to your mind and approves of its judgement, this job will no more be difficult(demanding) for you. After some effort the heart resigns to the dictates of reason, then no dread of the dead remains in the heart. Therefore, it is clear that the submission which is the gratification and reassurance of the heart is quite a different thing from knowledge, which is the gratification of the mind. It is possible that one can logically prove the existence of the Great Intelligent Designer, the Unity of His Divine Being, the Day of Judgement and other true beliefs, but such a belief cannot be considered as faith (iman), and the person cannot be regarded as a mu'min, but he may be counted among the non-believers, hypocrites and polytheists. Today my eyes and yours are closed, and we do not possess any divine vision. Our terrestrial eyes are unable to perceive, but when the hidden is revealed and the kingdom of heaven is manifested, the physical world vanishes and reality is disclosed; you will realize that you were not a believer in God, and your rational judgement was not congruous with your faith. Unless the words: ( )there is no god except God) are inscribed on the tablet of the heart with the pen of reason, man is not a true believer in the Unity of God. When this sacred and holy dictum is impressed on the heart, the domain of the heart turns by itself into the kingdom of God Almighty. Then only man does not see anyone else as efficient in the realm of truth; he does not expect any rank, any distinction or riches from anybody else; he does not seek for honour and fame(celebrity) with the help of others; and his heart does not become hypocritic and profane. Therefore, if you see that riya' is stealing into your heart, you should realize that your heart has not really surrendered itself to reason, and faith has not illuminated your heart yet; for you consider others to be your God and see them as efficient agents in the world, and you do not trust Him, the only God; it means that you have joined the company of hypocrites, polytheists and idolaters. Dangerous Effects of Riya': O, you given to riya', who have entrusted your truthful beliefs and religious understanding to the custody(imprisonment) of the enemy of God-the Devil, and have attributed to others what specifically belongs to God, you have exchanged those lights which would have illuminated your heart and spirit, and would have proved to be the source of your salvation and eternal bliss, which would have been responsible for being blessed with Beatific Vision and acquiring Divine nearness, with the dreadful darkness of eternal misfortunes; you have lost the other-worldly treasures, and have alienated yourself from the most sacred threshold of the Beloved, and have deprived yourself of the sight of the visage of the Most High. Be prepared for the darkness, which is not to be followed by any ray of light; the scorn and shame from which there is no release; the diseases which have no cure; the death after which there is no life; and the fire which is ignited from within the depths of the heart to engulf the whole region of your spirit, as well as the realm of the body. It is beyond your capacity and mine to conceive or perceive the intensity of that fire, as God Almighty has mentioned in His Holy Book: (It is) the fire of Allah, kindled, which leapeth up over the hearts (of men). (104:6-7) The effect of the fire which is kindled by God will be that it would consume the hearts as well. No fire can consume the heart except that which is kindled in the hell. If the belief in the Unity of God, which is inherently engrained in human nature, is abandoned and is replaced with idolatry and infidelity, no intercession of any intercessor will be available to him, and man will be destined to suffer eternal damnation. What kind of chastisement will it be? It will be the effect of the Divine wrath, issuing from His sense of Honour. Thus, my friend, do not make yourself an object of the Divine wrath for the sake of an illusion, an insignificant and trivial popularity in the eyes of weak creatures of God, and for the sake of worthless attention of hopeless(disappointed) human beings. Do not make a bargain of those Divine blessings, those infinite favours and benevolences with popularity among people, which is not even effective and long-lasting, from which you cannot derive any benefit except inviting ultimate shame and regret. And while your relations are severed with this world of illusion and deception and you cease to act, no regret and sorrow will be of avail. An Advice for Getting Rid of the Curse of Riya': What I am going to mention here to you is expected to work effectively for curing this disease of the heart, your as well as others'. It shall be also according to the rational dictates as well as is in conformity with the truths of revelation and tradition of the Ma'sumin (the infallibles). It is as well verifiable on the basis of the teachings of the Quran and your and my reason. God Almighty, by means of His all embracing power and might, which governs the whole universe and is immanent in the realms of all possible beings, takes under His control the hearts of all His servants, as no one is outside the range of His power and the domain of His domination; and no one should occupy the hearts of human beings without His permission and His creative Will; not even the person himself has any control over his own heart without the permission of God Almighty. This fact has been revealed implicitly and explicitly in the Quran as well as the traditions of the members of the Household (Ahl al-Bayt) of the Prophet (S). Hence, God Almighty is the real owner of the hearts and has sovereignty over them, and you, a helpless and weak creature of Him, you cannot claim to be the master of your heart, without His leave. His Will is predominant over ours and other creatures' resolution. Therefore, your hypocrisy and deceit, if it is meant for attracting the attention of His servants and for earning respect and popularity among them, know that it cannot bear any fruits, for this is totally beyond your powers, and it belongs to the jurisdiction of His power. He is the owner and the ruler of the hearts. He makes the hearts of the people a seat of love for whomsoever He likes. It is possible that your act produces a result just contrary to your wish. Pay attention to what we have seen and heard about the double-faced hypocrites, whose hearts were not pure; they were ultimately(in the long run) condemned to be disgraced; whatever they intended, they could not achieve, but something that they did not desire happened to them. The following tradition in al-Kafipoints to the same fact: The narrator of the tradition, Jarrah al-Mada'ini, reports from al-Imam al-Sadiq (A) that he asked the Imam about the words of the Almighty that `whosoever is desirous of meeting his Creator, he should perform virtuous deeds and should not ascribe any partner to God in his worship,' seeking an explanation. Al-Imam al-Sadiq (A) said, `A person who performs good deeds but not for the sake of being blessed with the vision of his God, his acts are aimed at being considered as pious by the people, and he wishes that people should know about his deeds; such a person is counted among polytheists, who have ascribed partners to God.' The Imam (A) continued: `There is none in the world, who has concealed his good deeds and after passage of time God has not revealed them. And there is none in the world who could conceal his wicked deeds for ever, for they were exposed by God before he passed away from the world.' [3] Hence, my dear friend! try to be worthy in the eyes of God. Try to win the hearts of the creatures by first pleasing the real owner of the hearts, so that He comes to your rescue. Work for the sake of God. As a consequence God Almighty, besides showering His favours and excellences upon you in the Hereafter, will bestow His honours and favours on you in this world as well, and will befriend you. He will raise your status in the eyes of people and will exalt you in both the worlds. But the only thing that you have to do is to sincerely cultivate the love of God in your heart, untainted and unspoiled(safe and sound), with struggle and effort. Purify your inner self so that your actions also will be pure and untainted by the love of the world or hatred of fellow beings; your spirit should be pure and untainted and all the infirmities and corruptions of the soul should be eliminated. Of what advantage is the love or hatred of the weak creatures of God, and gaining favour and name among them? Even if it has some benefit, it is insignificant and short-lived. It is possible that this love of the world may lead you to hypocrisy, and God forbid, it may convert you into a polytheist or a hypocrite or an unbeliever. If you are not disgraced in this world, you will be surely disgraced in the other world, in Almighty's court of justice, in front of His truthful and worthy servants, in front of His esteemed prophets and those angels who are nearest to God, and you will have to hang down your head in shame, and you will be left in a state of utter helplessness. Can you imagine the disgrace of that day? God alone knows what sort of darkness is to follow that disgrace. It will be the day, as God Almighty has said: ... and the disbeliever will cry: 'Would that I were dust'. (78:40) Then it will be of no good. You, poor fellow, for the sake of a trifling love, for the sake of a fame of no avail among the creatures of God, you did not care for the promised Divine favours and have failed(messed up) to gain His good pleasure, and have incurred His indignation and wrath instead. The deeds by means of which you could have gained Divine favours, could have secured a happy and blissful life in eternity, and could have attained the highest station in the highest heaven; you have replaced it with the darkness of polytheism and hypocrisy, and have procured for yourself regret, shame and the severest chastisement, and have converted yourself into a 'sijjini' (an inhabitant of the lowest or dungeon of hell) instead. It occurs in the tradition in al-Kafi that it has been reported from al-Imam al-Sadiq (A) that the Prophet (S) said: `Indeed when the angel of God joyously takes to the higher heaven the good deeds of a man, as he carries the good deeds heavenward, God Almighty orders him to place those deeds in 'Sijjin', since they were not performed for Him alone. [4] You and I cannot imagine what 'Sijjin' is, and which kind of demons are appointed there; and you cannot contemplate the horrors inflicted upon the sinners there. And once we have been made to face it, it will not be possible for us to get rid of it, as all the means of repentance shall be cut off. Wake up my friend! and cast away your negligence and carelessness, and weigh your actions in the balance of your reason, before they are weighed and measured in the other world. And cleanse the mirror of your heart of the rust of polytheism, hypocrisy, and two-facedness. Do not allow the rust of impurity of polytheism and infidelity to gather in such a way that it cannot be cleansed with the fire of the other world. Do not allow the light of your nature(environment) to be turned into the gloom of apostasy. Do not be a traitor to yourself and do not destroy what God has entrusted to you, calling it: ...the nature (framed) of Allah in which He hath created man .... (30:30) Therefore, burnish the mirror of the heart, so that the light of Divine magnificence may be reflected in it, and may make you forget this world and everything in it, and your heart is kindled with the fire of His love, so that all other attachments and associations may be dissolved in such a manner that you do not spurn a single moment for the sake of the worldly things; and you derive such a pleasure from His remembrance that all the animal pleasures may appear to you a gimmick. If you cannot attain this station, even then do not give up the gifts of God that are promised to be given in the next world and are mentioned in the Quran and the traditions of the Ma'sumin (A), for the sake of gaining the short-lived favour of the weak creatures of God. Do not deprive yourself of all the Divine favours and do not make a bargain of the eternal felicity with the everlasting distress. Sincerity in Action: Know that the real King of kings, the true Giver of real bounties, has bestowed upon us all these favours. He created all these things for us and prepared them for us even before we came into this world. He made our food a balanced diet and acceptable to our weak stomach-a patron and servant who serves us with an instinctive and natural love. He created for us suitable(apt) climes and weathers and has bestowed upon us all other seen and unseen favours here and in the other world, and after piling up all these gifts for us, He asks us to keep our hearts pure for His occupation, so that we ourselves may be benefited from His presence. In spite of all these warnings and cautions we still do not obey Him and do not pay heed to His words and do not act according to His wish. What an act of gross transgression. With whom are we trying to wage a war, the consequences of which we will have to face? Any slightest harm cannot be caused to His Kingdom, and we cannot exclude ourselves from His reign of power either. If we are acting like the polytheists we are causing harm to ourselves, because: ...Lo! Allah is independent of (all) creatures. (3:97) He does not need our worship, our service or our obedience. Any disobedience, polytheism and two-facedness on our part will not cause any harm to His Empire, but as He is(the Most Merciful of the merciful), His boundless mercy and compassion, and His perfect wisdom require of us the pursuance of the right path, and for this purpose He made clear the difference between good and evil, beautiful and ugly to us and warned us of the perils and hazards to be met on the road of human perfection and the path of true felicity. We are indebted to God Almighty for this great guidance and we have to show, with all humility, great respect towards Him in our worships, our devotion and our supplications, whose importance we cannot comprehend unless we gain an other-worldly vision. As long as we sojourn in this narrow physical world, confined to the limits of the sequence of time and shackles of space, we cannot comprehend the infiniteness of the realm of His power, and we cannot even thank Him in our prayers and supplications for His guidance. Never let the idea enter our mind, that by our service and devotion we are doing some favour to His prophets, His chosen servants, and the great `ulama' of the Ummah. They are our benefactors, who have taken the charge(levy) of leading the Ummah towards felicity and deliverance, and who have accepted the responsibility of our emancipation from the darkness and shadows of ignorance and misfortunes, taking us towards the realms of light and joy and greatness. What a great responsibility they took upon themselves, and what horrible pains and troubles(nuisance) they underwent for the sake of our instruction, in order to deliver us from those obscurities and darknesses, that were the result of vain beliefs and compound ignorance, and the chastisements that were to befall us as a result of our bad habits and villainies. They wanted to save(salvage) us from those hideous forms and dreadful figures in the other world that would be the outcome of our wicked deeds, and they helped us to reach the regions of light, joy and comfort and the spheres of serenity and composure, whose image our mind would fail to visualize. This physical world in spite of its vastness is so limited and narrow that we cannot imagine a heavenly houri with our this-worldly vision. Our vision does not possess enough power to behold the magnificence(splendor) of that world, which has been described in the speeches of the holy prophets of God, especially in the all-embracing revelations of the Khatim al-nabiyyin (Seal of the prophets), who perceived those truths through Divine revelations, saw them, heard them, and then asked us to them. And we, like recalcitrant children, disobey the commands of the wise, and even do not pay heed to the dictates of our own reason, always being more than ready to oppose the Divinely guided ones. And those sanctified pious souls, out of the love and kindness that they possessed for the creatures of God, did never fall(collapse) short of their duty, did never appeal to our meaner and baser faculties by bribing them to attract us towards heaven and felicity; they never tried to make us yield through intimidation or force. They did not either demand any remuneration or reward for the services they rendered. The remuneration asked by the Prophet (S) (kindness for his kinsfolk), which is not really a payment for his services, is also meant for our own benefit, being the brightest of our achievements in the next world. Our sense of indebtedness to them in fact serves ourselves and we are benefited more from it than they are. How are they benefited by the righteous acts of poor beings like us? In what way will our sincerity and obedience do them any good? In what way do you and I consider our humble selves benefactors of the guides of the Ummah, from an ordinary faqih to the great Prophet (S) and God Almighty? All of them have in their own right fulfilled their function of guiding us and showing the right path, for which we are indebted to them and even a fraction of it we cannot pay back in this world. Nothing of this world is worthy of the repayment of their debt: (It is to God, His Prophet (S), and His saints to whom all owe gratitude), as God Almighty has said: ... Say: Deem not your surrender a favour unto me; nay, but Allah does confer a favour on you, inasmuch as He hath led you to the faith, if ye are earnest. Lo. Allah knows the Unseen of the heavens and the earth. And Allah is Seer of what you do. (49:17-18) Hence, if we are sincere in our faith in God, it is in itself a favour bestowed upon us by God. God Almighty is Omniscient, and has the knowledge of the hidden. He is Omniscient, knows the inner, hidden reality of all our actions, and He is fully aware of the nature of our faith and the extent and degree of our submission to His Will. We, the helpless creatures, who do not know the reality, our knowledge from the faqih and think that we have done favour to him. We offer congregational prayers behind an `alim, and we assume that we have conferred a favour on him, whereas, in fact, we are indebted to him. We do not realize this, and, therefore, this faulty outlook turns the effects of our deeds upside down and drags us into`Sijjin' making our actions worthless. The Second Stage of Riya': At this stage, though riya' is of lesser intensity than it is at the first stage, but it is possible that if the hypocrite does not heed the warnings, and repeatedly behaves in the same way (the riya' of action) it is likely to terminate in the riya' of the former stage-the riya' of faith. We have already mentioned in the exposition of the previous tradition that in the `Alam al-malakut (the celestial world) man may have a different form other than the human form. Those forms will be in accordance with the state of one's soul and its traits. If you possess good human qualities, in the other world those qualities will retain you in the human form, provided they are not deviated from the path of moderation(self-control). Good faculties will be considered as true merits only when the sensual self does not interfere with them, and the self does not play any role in their formation. Our respected teacher and shaykh Ayatullah Shahabadi used to say that the measure of the false and invalid spiritual practice and true religious spiritual struggle is as to what extent selfishness is involved in such practices, i.e. whether all spiritual effort is for God or for selfish motives. If the wayfarer on the heavenly journey treads a selfish path and his spiritual exercises are meant for acquiring powers for worldly ends, his efforts are rendered invalid, and his suluk (progress on mystic path) will lead him to the calamity of the other world. The false claims of spirituality are usually made by such people. And if the wayfarer treads the right path, and is genuinely in search of God, his devotion is within the bounds of the Shari'ah, and God will help him, as promised in the following verse of the Quran: As for those who strive for Us, We surely guide them to Our paths .... (29:69) Hence, his actions will lead him to felicity; egoism will be eliminated and self-conceit and pride will recede. This is quite clear that anyone who demonstrates his good deeds before people, his aim is a selfish aim, and he will be branded as a selfish, self-conceited, egoistic and egocentric person, and his godliness will be considered as nothing but false and pretentious, which will invalidate his good deeds. As the domain of your existence is replete with the feelings of self-love, the lust for wealth, power and fame(celebrity), and the wish for ruling over the creatures of God, your good deeds and your excellences cannot be adjudged as virtuous deeds, and your moral behaviour is far away(far apart) from truly religious morality. The operating force in your realm is satanic and your inner state is not a human condition. When you will open your eyes in the other world, you will perceive yourself in an unhuman form, similar to one of those of the devils. For such selves, which are dens of the Satan, it is impossible to gain religious knowledge and learn the spirit of tawhid. Unless the realm of your inner self is converted into a human state and your heart is purged of impurities and unholiness, you cannot be benefited from spiritual exercises, as God Almighty states in a hadith qudsi: There is no clearer sign(beckoned) in the earth and in the heavens of the elegance of the Beloved than the heart of a true believer (mu'min). The believer's heart is in the occupation of God, not at the disposal of the self. The heart of the believer is not self-willed, nor is it vagrant. It is said of it: The heart of the true believer (mu'min) lies between two fingers of God, that He may turn it whatever way He pleases. O you, the poor creature, who worships the self and the Devil and ignorance are the agencies operating in the realm of your heart, you yourself have prevented(disallowed) the hands of God from handling your heart. What sort of faith you are required to possess that your heart be the object of Divine illumination, absolute rule of the Truth may prevail there? Make it a point that unless you change yourself, and as long as the bad habit of ostentatiousness and vanity dominates your deeds, you will be branded as an unbeliever and you will be grouped with the munafiqun (hypocrites), even though you imagine yourself to be a believer in God and as one who has resigned himself to the Will of God. The Value of Human Existence as a Trustee of Divine Honour: My friend! wake up from the slumber of forgetfulness and carelessness, be aware, do not let sleep overtake your senses, and know that God Almighty has created you for His own sake, as stated in one hadith qudsi: O progeny of Adam, We have made everything for you and you for Our service. He has made your heart His own habitation. You and your hearts are the abodes of Divine Honour. God Almighty is intolerant regarding His Dignity and Honour. Do not be careless in this regard, and do not justify any violation of the Divine principles; and be afraid of His retribution so that you may not be disgraced and made infamous in this world in such a way that despite all efforts you are not able to undo what may befall you. You are guilty of violation of Divine Honour in your heart that belongs to the celestial world, in front of the angels of God and His prophets. The moral excellences through which the saints of God (awliya' Allah) acquired resemblance to Him, are being surrendered by you to others than God, and you are surrendering your heart, the seat of God, to His enemy, thus committing shirk (polytheism) in the heart of your hearts. Be afraid of God Almighty, Who besides bringing down your other-worldly image and degrading you in front of His angels and His prophets, will also expose and dishonour you in this world itself and you will be condemned to unmeasured indignity which shall be also irreparable, and irremediable, an infamy that canot be redressed. God Almighty is Sattar, He conceals the sins, but He is jealous also. He is -the Most Merciful of the merciful, but at the same time He is the severest of the punishers also. He Himself says that He covers up bad deeds as long as they do not cross certain limits. God forbid, lest the gravity of your deeds should arouse His anger(frenzy) and should it overcome His tolerance and willingness to conceal sins, as you have read in the hadith. Hence, come to your senses, seek refuge in God and turn back to Him, for God Almighty is the Compassionate and always seeks for an excuse to shower His mercy. If you ask for His forgiveness, He will readily forgive you, and will cover up your blemishes and past deeds, so that no one will be able to know about them, and He will make you a man of great distinctions, a paragon of virtues and an image of His Attributes. He will make your will consummate in the next world as His own Will is executed throughout the cosmos. It is narrated in a hadith that when the people are placed in the Paradise, a message from the Almighty will be given to them and its purport will be as follows: `From the One who is Eternal and Immortal to him who is also eternal and immortal: Whatever I desire to bring into existence I command it to be and it comes into being; from this hour it has been decreed that you also command whatever you desire to bring into existence and your wish would be obeyed.' Therefore, do not be egocentric, and subordinate your will to the Will of God Almighty; He will then make you an instrument and manifestation of His Will. He will give you power in the realms under His control, and bestow upon you the capacity to create in the Hereafter. (Of course, this is not the same as tafwid, which is a false notion, as proved elsewhere.) Now, my friend, do as you please; either accept it or reject it. But know, that God Almighty is not in need of you or me or any other creature, and He has no need of our service and sincerity. Riya' in Worship: The third stage also is divided into several sections. Section I: The riya' of this kind is more common and manifest than those mentioned above. Because we ordinary(mediocre) human beings usually do not belong to the above-mentioned two states. For this reason, the Devil cannot get hold of us in the way he encroaches upon those who belong to the other states. But since the majority of the worshippers express their devotion to God through formal prayers, the Devil commonly intervenes at this stage more frequently. Sensual temptations are also commoner at this stage. In other words, since such type of people tend to seek the physical pleasures of heaven through their actions, and they aspire to attain higher station by performing good deeds and abstaining from performing wicked ones, the Devil finds an access through this way; and he nurtures the roots of riya' and deceit with great care, so that it may bear the fruits that are desired by him. He transforms their virtues into vices, and makes them to enter hell through the path of ritual worship. The acts by means of which they aim to secure paradise for themselves are transformed by him into the means of their destruction and doom. The deeds which would have led one to `Illiyyin-the highest heaven, are so distorted that their performer is thrown into Sijjin byangels at the command of God. Therefore, persons who lay greater emphasis on this aspect (i.e. formalistic) and ignore other aspects, have nothing except apparently(plainly) good deeds to secure salvation in the next world; they are required to be more cautious, so that this provision also may not be snatched away from their hands and they may not be consigned to the flames of hell and deprived of felicity for ever. They should watch over their acts lest the doors of heaven be closed and the doors of hell be opened to them. How to Combat Riya'? Most often the sanctimonious person himself does not know that this particular vice has penetrated his deeds and his deeds have now assumed hypocritical proportions and hence become worthless. Because the temptations of the Devil and the self are so unobservably shadowy and subtle and the path of humanity is so delicate and tenuous that unless anyone is extremely discriminate, he cannot understand their inherent evil. He imagines that his actions are meant for pleasing God, whereas they are serving the interests of the Devil. Since man is naturally created self-centered, the veil of self-love and egoism covers his flaws and vices from his own eyes. God willing, we shall also discuss this subject while commenting upon certain other ahadith; I ask for God's help in this regard. For instance, the acquisition of religious knowledge, is one of the important religious duties and a kind of worship; but a man busy attaining excellence in this field is liable to fall an easy prey to the vice of riya', which seizes his heart in such a way that he himself is not aware and the same thick curtain of self-love obstructs his vision. He desires to gain an important position in the eyes of great scholars and men of distinction and honour, by solving an important problem in such a way that no other person has solved it before; he tries to project himself as a person distinguished from others by presenting the subject in a unique way, to make himself the focus of everyone's attention; with an air of self-assurance, he assumes that if anyone among the scholars and dignitaries eulogizes him in flattering terms, he will be able to receive the applause and praise of the whole gathering. The poor fellow fails to realize that even if he earns worldly fame and honour among scholars or the elite, he will be disgraced in the eyes of the King of kings, and these actions of his will lead him toSijjin. This act of riya' is also accompanied with some other vices, like the wish for humiliating and insulting(offending) others, or injuring the feelings of his brother in faith, or sometimes being rude to a believer; each one of these vices is enough for landing him in hell. If again your deceptive self falls in the snares of its own guiles and succeeds in convincing you that your aim has been to make known a tenet of Shari'ah and pronouncing the word of truth, which is one of the most meritorious acts of religious devotion, and that you do not aim at demonstrating your spiritual superiority, you ought to interrogate your self by asking that if a friend(mate) of yours had solved the same religious issue in a better way and had defeated you in the gathering of those scholars and highly placed persons, even then would you have taken the same position? If it is so, you were true to your own self. But if your self again is bent upon deceiving others and does not refrain from committing another treachery and contends that the utterance of truth is a meritorious act, and possesses a spiritual reward also, and that it is in your interest to attain an elevated station in the Hereafter, you are advised to ask your self: Suppose if God Almighty accords you the real glory for your foiled in case you gracefully accept it, would you still desire to prevail? If you see that your self loves to dominate others in academic discussion for gaining publicity among the scholars for your knowledge and scholarship, and the discussion that you undertake is aimed at winning others' respect and honour, then know that the intellectual discourse, which is the highest form of worship and prayer, is transformed into the sinful act of riya', which, according to the narration of al-Kafi, will lead you toSijjin, you are classed as a polytheist, and this act was performed with the motive of gaining respect in the eyes of the people. This act of yours, according to a tradition, will cause more harm to your faith than the harm done by two wolves who attack(raid) a herd(drove) of sheep without a shepherd from both sides. Therefore, you who are a scholar and responsible for reforming the Ummah and paving the way to the Hereafter, and curing spiritual infirmities, it is necessary for you first to correct(accurate) yourself and maintain a sound spiritual state, so that you do not fall under the category of the scholars who do not act upon what they profess. Pray to God Almighty to purify our hearts of the stains of polytheism and hypocrisy, and cleanse the mirror of our hearts of the rust of the love of the world, which is the source of all vices. O God! kindly help us and protect us helpless beings, afflicted with the disease of vanity and the lust for power and honour, and guard us in this hazardous journey(trip) along the intricacies of the labyrinthine dark path, O the Mightiest and the Most Powerful. Riya' in Congregational Prayers: Congregational prayer is an eminent form of Islamic worship, and the leader of this prayer holds a distinctive position of honour. For this reason, Satan also intrudes more in this worship. He is much more envious of the imam (leader) of the jama'ah (congregation) than anybody else. He is always busy finding the ways of keeping away the believers from receiving this Divine honour, and deprives their action of the element of sincerity and truth and drives them to Sijjin. He tries to convert them into polytheists, and for this purpose he invades the hearts of the imams through various means, such as `ujb (self admiration), which we shall discuss later on, and riya', which is a display of religiosity through this significant worship for impressing the people, gaining publicity, and earning their admiration and respect; for instance, when an imam sees that a certain pious person is attending the congregational prayer, he tries to make an ostentation of his humility and devotion in order to capture his attention and win his admiration; he tries to find various ways of mentioning him in the gatherings of 'people not present in the congregation; in order to show his importance, he drags the name of that pious man again and again and tries to inform the people about his presence as a follower in the congregational prayer; thus, he tries to create a false impression of a close association with him, especially if he belongs to the business class, and expresses such a great love and friendship for him which he never expressed even for a single moment for God or His favoured servants. And if, God forbid, any of the aristocrats loses his way and comes to pray with the congregation, it is a bigger disaster. The Devil is not unmindful, of the leader of a small congregation either. He approaches him and makes him aware that he is so unmindful of worldly gains that he is content to spend his time in a small local mosque of a poor neighbourhood. This feeling is also similar to the first, or even worse than that; as the vice of jealousy spreads its tentacles in the hearts of such people, who do not enjoy the bounties of this world; the Devil deprives them of the glories of the other world too, and they are condemned to suffer in both the worlds. At the same time, the Devil, does not lose his grip on the collars of people like you and me, who have no access to the leadership of a congregation, and who lament the absence of proper means; he makes us doubt the utility of congregations of Muslims, and makes us scorn and flout them. We may be led to look upon our failure to capture a congregation as otherworldly seclusion, and ourselves as free from love of station and honour. Then we become worse than both of the groups, we neither belong to the first category of people, who enjoy the good things of this life, nor do we belong to the second category, whose achievements are comparatively humbler; nor do we have any claim to the next world; nevertheless if we get an opportunity, we might prove to be more power-hungry, honour-thirsty, and greedy than either of the groups. How Does Riya' Infiltrate the Ranks of the Congregation? The Satan is not content with dragging the leader of the congregation to the hell. His lust is not satiated with that. He infiltrates the ranks of the worshippers also. Since the first row is ample esteemed than other rows, and its right wing superior to the left, he makes them his target more often than any other row. He attracts the pious towards the right part of the first row, and incites them to pose to be superior to others in the eyes of the people. The helpless fellow, unconscious of the Satan's whispering, tries to demonstrate his superiority through a sanctimonious glance or gesture, which displays his inner polytheism, which is enough for sending him to Sijjin. From here, the Satan then steals into other rows to allure other people on account of his awkward gestures and funny behaviour a devotee becomes the target of jeer and sneer of others, who consider themselves to be free from all sort of faults. Sometimes it has been observed that a respectable person, especially a scholar of rare distinction and high intellectual calibre, is made to sit by the Devil in the last row, in order to make people realize that though his position is much higher, but since he does not care for worldly position and is free of self-esteem, he has come to sit in the last row. Some people of this kind will never be seen sitting in the first row. The Satan is not gorged with influencing the imam and his followers; he sometimes catches hold of one of the loners by the beard, persuading him to leave his house or shop, and by means of his allurements he launches him into a corner of the mosque over a prayer mat. For such a man, no imam is `adil, or qualified to lead prayers. The Satan makes him perform a prolonged prostration and ruku` and an extended prayer. In his heart of hearts, this individual wishes to make people believe that he is pious and conscientious to such a degree that he avoids the congregation, so that he may not be trapped(jammed) into following an unjust imam. This person, alongside(besides) being conceited and sanctimonious, is also ignorant of the laws of the Shari'ah. The marji` taqlid(legal authority) whom he follows may not have laid any condition for praying behind an imam except acceptability of his outward behaviour. But the loner is not concerned with that, for his real motive is riya'. He merely wants to present himself as a man of piety in order to gain the favour and admiration of people. In the same way, our other activities also are interfered with by the Satan. This damned creature, whenever he finds a murky heart, he makes it his resting place and tries to spoil our visible(evident) and invisible deeds, and transforms our good deeds into such as lead us directly to the hell. An Invitation to Sincerity: My friend, be judicious and careful in your actions. Demand from yourself an account of every deed. Cross-examine yourself for every detail; try to evaluate your deeds through introspection whether they were meant for the realization of virtue or motivated otherwise. What motivated you to ask questions about mid-night prayers? Was it purely for the sake of God with an intention to perform such prayers, or for projecting your image as a deeply religiously person? Why is it that you are eager to inform others about your pilgrimage by all possible means and about the number of times you undertook it? Why are you not content with confining your charitable deeds to yourself alone, and what do you want to gain by informing the others of your acts of charity, for as soon as you find an opportunity you announce them? If it is undertaken for the sake of God, and you intend that people should imitate you, and you think in terms of (the one who shows the path of virtue is as worthy as-the doer of it) while performing this deed, its display is justified; thank God, for He has enabled you to act with a clear conscience and pure heart. But beware of the guiles of Satan while interrogating your self, for he can project the acts adulterated with riya' as selfless and sacred. If your action is not for the sake of God, then it is better to abstain from doing what you have been doing, for it amounts to sum`ah, i.e. advertisement of false virtues, which is a branch of the accursed tree of riya'; for God Almighty does not approve of it and condemns its perpetrator to Sijjin. We ought to seek refuge in God from the vice of deceit, whose guiles are very subtle. We have a general idea that our deeds are not pure and sincere, because had we been His true servants, why does the Devil, despite promising not to impede the actions of His true servants, disturb our sanctity and make us an instrument of his evil designs? In the words of my respected teacher, the Devil is the watchdog of the Almighty's court; he does not bark at the person who is near to God, and does not bother him. As the watchdog does not drive the friends of the master away from the house, in the same way, the Satan also recognizes God's friends, and does not allow any stranger to get access to Him. Therefore, whenever you realize that the Satan interferes in your affairs, you should immediately know that your actions are not performed with sincere intentions and are not meant for the Almighty. If you are a sincere believer in God, why doesn't your tongue pour forth words of wisdom, coming from the heart? For about forty years you imagine that you have been performing virtuous deeds in order to please God, whereas it occurs in a hadith that whosoever remains faithful to God for forty days, springs of wisdom emanate from his heart. This is, therefore, a sign for us to comprehend that our deeds were not performed for the sake of God, though we ourselves are not conscious(alert) of it, and this is the main cause of our irremediable sickness. Pitiable is the condition of the devotees, worshippers, leaders and followers of Friday congregations and men of high knowledge and learning! When they will open their eyes in the court of the Most High on the Day of Judgement, they will come to know that they are not only among the sinners, perpetrators of major sins, but even worse than infidels and idolaters, and their record of deeds even darker than theirs. It is a matter of pity for a person that his prayers and other devotional acts should serve as fuel for the fires of hell. May God save us from the moment when, in spite of one's alms-giving and zakatand piety, one's appearance will be distorted to such hideousness that it is not even imaginable. You, a helpless creature, are branded as a mushrik, an idolater, and a sinner despite your belief in the Unity of God. God willing, He will forgive the sinners by His mercy, but for the mushrik He has said that He will not forgive him if he dies without repentance. It is stated in the ahadith that one used to Riya'-the one who makes a display of his religiosity, devotion, high religious status, his preaching and leading of prayers, his fasting, his namaz and even his pious deeds for the sake of gaining respect in the hearts of people is a polytheist. His shirk(idolatry) is confirmed by the traditions of the Imams of the Holy Household (A) and the Quranic text, and hence his sin is unpardonable. It would have been better for you to be among the perpetrators of major sins, to be one notorious for his evil conduct and perpetration of obvious indignities, while being a monotheist, instead of becoming a polytheist. Now, my friend, introspect seriously and find some remedy to cure your (spiritual) sickness, and realize the futility of acquiring honour in human hearts, a small piece(slice) of flesh which will not satisfy a bird's appetite. These weak creatures possess no power, and their estimation is insignificant. The real power is to be sought in Him; He is the Absolute Cause of all causes-the Ultimate Cause. Even if all creatures make a joint effort to create a single mosquito, they will not be successful(blooming) in doing so, and if the mosquito causes them a slight harm they will not be able to avert it if God does not will so. All power belongs to the Almighty. He is the Mover of the universe. Whenever you do something and make an effort to perform something, inscribe on your heart with the pen of reason: (no one is effective in the realm of existence except God). By all possible means equip your heart with the principle of unity of Divine Action (tawhid-e af'ali),which is the first stage of the belief in the Unity of Being, and thus convert it into the heart of a true believer. Illuminate your heart with the holy dictum of: (there is no god but Allah); and mould it accordingly. Lead your heart to the stage of tranquility (itminan), and make it realize that human beings can cause neither harm nor good, and that God alone is capable(competent) of doing any harm or good to anybody. Cure your vision, which suffers from blindness so that you are not raised blind on the Day of Judgement and complain to the Almighty (My Lord! wherefore have You raised me (here) blind ...? [20:125]).The Will of the Almighty prevails over the wills of other beings. If your heart surrenders to these holy words, and has faith in them, this can be hoped that your deeds will be rewarded and all the traces of polytheism, Riya', infidelity and hypocrisy will be wiped out from the face of your heart. This profound faith is in accordance with reason and revelation, and there are no traces of determinism (jabr) present in it. It is possible that some people who do not know the meaning, the basic principles and ingredients of determinism may mistake it as such, whereas it is not jabr but tawhid. Determinism is a kind of shirk; whereas tawhid is right guidance, determinism is misguidance. This occasion is not proper for discussing determinism and freedom. But those who fully understand this issue can appreciate the import of what I say. Moreover, the Prophet (S) has asked us not to indulge in such discourses. Anyway, ask God Almighty, through supplication and humble entreaties all the time, especially in loneliness, to guide you and to illuminate your heart with the light of tawhid. Ask Him to endow you with the vision of the hidden, the perception of the unity (in diversity)-the Unity of Divine Being, so that you may not attach importance to anything else and consider every other thing as insignificant and trifle. Beseech His Holy Essence to make your actions pure and sincere, and lead you to the path of sincerity and love. And if you have reached such a spiritual station that your prayers are responded and you can do something for this helpless creature of God, who has squandered his life in meaningless pursuits, devoid of any real purpose, hankering after desires and lusts, whose sins have sickened the heart to a point where no exhortation, advice, Quranic verse, or tradition of the Prophet (S), or argument or wise saying can have any effect, do pray for him; may be your prayer shall secure his deliverance. God never turns away a believer from His court, and He grants his prayers. By ever remembering these things, which you already know and which are also not new to you, be heedful and sincere from within the heart, and, without ceasing, critically reevaluate your movements, pauses, and your behaviour. Always scrutinize your secret intentions, and strictly take account of everything in the same manner as one business partner is accountable to the other. Abstain from everything that resembles riya' and simulation, however virtuous it may appear to be. Even in the matter of obligatory religious duties, if you believe that you cannot perform them sincerely in public, perform them secretly, though it is preferable to perform them openly. It is rare for riya' to occur in obligatory duties themselves; more often it relates to their mode of performance and to acts which are mustahabb or supererogatory. In any case, purge your heart from the dirt of polytheism with perfect solemnness and severest self-criticism, lest, God forbid, you should pass away from this world in this state that your performance is deplorable, and there is no hope of salvation for you. Then you will invite the wrath of God, as mentioned in the tradition quoted in Wasa'il al-Shi'ah from Qurb al- asnad, and reported from Amir al-mu'minin `Ali (A): Amir al-mu'minin 'Ali (A) reports that the Prophet (S) said: "One who does some act liked by God in order to show off to people, and in secret manifests such qualities as are abominations to God, he shall encounter God's anger and wrath [ on the Day of Resurrection]." [5] There are two probable interpretations of this hadith. Firstly, it is about such a person who presents himself as paragon of virtue before people, while his inner self is immersed in ugly vices. Secondly, it may be about a person who performs outwardly virtuous deeds with the intention of Riya'. In any case, it is obvious(noticeable) that the hadith condemns riya', because the performance of the obligatory acts and duties if not motivated by riya', cannot be the object of Divine wrath. In all probability the second meaning is closer to the import of the hadith, as the open performance of wicked deeds is a greater evil. This is a warning for us to be cautious lest, God forbid, we do something to incur the wrath of the King of kings and the Most Merciful of the merciful: A Tradition of Imam `Ali (A): We conclude this section with a tradition reported from the commander of the pious, Amir al-mu'minin (A), recorded in al-Kafi. Al-Shaykh al-Saduq has also reported the same tradition from al-Imam al-Sadiq (A), which forms a part of the last will and testament of the Prophet (S) to 'Ali (A): Said al-Imam al-Sadiq (A) that Amir al-mu'minin (A) said: `There are three distinguishing features of one accustomed to riya': he expresses joy and cheerfulness when he is greeted by people; he becomes cheerless and sullen when alone; and he wishes to be praised for everything he does.' [6] Since this vice is so hidden and subtle that it remains unnoticed by the person himself, he is unaware of the fact that inwardly he is a hypocrite, and he imagines his actions to be pure and untainted. Therefore, the signs of this characteristic have been described so that men should be able to identify their hidden motives by examining their inner self in their light and be able to prevent and treat them accordingly. An individual may introspect and know that he is not inclined to perform his religious duties when he is alone; even if with great compulsion he forces himself to perform them, or even if he performs them habitually, he does not perform with real sincerity and purity of heart, but rather as a physical exercise; but while performing his prayer in the mosque, in the congregation of the people and in the presence of others, he becomes animated, performing his prayer with utmost joy and enthusiasm. He is inclined to perform long and protracted ruku`s and prostrations; he performs the mustahabb actions properly, caring about their minutest particulars. If one pays a little attention to one's inner state, one may come to know the reason for this vigour. Why is it so that he spreads the net of his (pretended) piety for catching the attention of people? He may mislead himself by saying that he is more pleased with praying in the mosque, as it is more meritorious to do so, and that it brings more rewards also. He will convince himself by saying that it is preferable to say prayer in a better way in front of others, in order that they may follow his example and be attracted towards the religion. Man deceives himself by all means and never thinks of correcting himself. For a sick person who considers himself to be sound there is no hope of being cured. The ill-fated man's innermost being not only secretly aims to parade his good deeds before people, remaining unconscious of its inner urge, but is also bent upon presenting his sin as worship and his conceit as propagation of religion, despite the fact that the performance of the mustahabbatprayers is mustahabb in seclusion. Why is it that your self always responds in public, and why do you relish weeping out of the fear of God in the gathering of people, though in loneliness in spite of squeezing your eyes you cannot bring out a single tear? Where is the fear of God? Does it grip you in the gatherings of people only? Does it overwhelm you only on the occasion of the Nights of Great Value ( ) in front of several thousands of people? Such a man offers one hundred rak`ah's of namazand recites the Du`a-i Jawshan-i Kabir and Du`a-i Jawshan-i Saghir in addition(adding up) to severalsurahs of the Quran and is not bored and does not feel the slightest weariness. If man performs something purely for the sake of God or for gaining His blessings, or out of fear of hell or in the hope of heaven, why should he desire that his deeds be praised by men and admired by them? His ears are all the time eager to listen something in his praise, and his heart is after those who observe his devotion and notice how venerable(dignified) this gentleman is, for he is so punctual about the prayer and is so concerned about the supererogatory duties. If your deeds are meant for God, what does this exaggerated(staged) craving mean? If the fear of hell and the hope of heaven force you to perform these deeds, what does this love of publicity mean? You ought to realize that this desire issues from the accursed and abominable tree of riya'. Therefore, try as much as you can to purify yourself of these absurd inclinations (to the extent possible), and try to reform yourself. Variation in Grades and Degrees of Qualities among Different Individuals: At this stage it is essential to remind you that each one of the qualities of the soul, both the good ones and the bad, has numerous grades and degrees. Those who virtues and give up vices are grouped with the `urafa', saints and friends of God (awliya' Allah). As for other individuals, the nature of vices and virtues is determined by the spiritual station to which they belong. It may be that the qualities which are considered to be vices for those belonging to higher spiritual station are not considered vices for those belonging to a lower stage. On the contrary, in a way, they may even be regarded as their accomplishments. And similarly the qualities that are regarded as virtues for the people of a lower category may be vices for men of a higher category. Riya' is also one of such (relative) vices that we are discussing presently. Authenticity (ikhlas) is the highest stage of freedom from riya' and is typical of the saints (awliya' Allah); others do not share this quality. The common people generally attain a lower stage of it, and this does not harm their iman or ikhhlas, because, generally, they have a natural inclination that their virtues be known to others. Though they may not have intentionally performed them for the sake of demonstrating them, but their self is instinctively inclined to make them known. This tendency does not annul their action, nor does it make them infidels, hypocrites (munafiqun) or polytheists either. But the same trait is considered to be a shortcoming in the case of a wali or `arif bi-Allah, as for them it amounts to nifaq or shirk. Absolute purification from the impurity of polytheism and obtaining perfect authenticity (ikhlas) of devotion is essentially a primary, condition for attaining the stage reserved for awliya' Allah, and there are even higher stages which they can attain, but, here, it would be out of place to go into these details. Our Imams, upon whom be peace, have declared that their worship was the worship of emancipated souls (ahrar), which was performed for the sake of love of God alone, neither due to the fear of hell nor in the hope of heaven; and they considered this stage to be the first step of their wilayah. Tothem worship is a state of ecstasy and rapture which is beyond the reach of our imagination and understanding. Apart from the above-mentioned ahadith narrated from the Prophet (S) and Amir al-mu'minin (A), there is another hadith also, reported by Zurarah from imam Abu Ja'far (A), which is as follows: Zurarah reports that he questioned al-Imam al-Baqir (A) about the status of a person who performed good deeds, which were seen by others and it made him happy. Said the Imam (A): "There is no harm in it; there is no one who does not like that his good deeds be made known to the people, in case he does not perform them [solely] for the sake of attracting their admiration. [7] In one of the two ahadith, the tendency of performing good deeds for the sake of earning respect and admiration is considered as the sign of riya', while in another hadith it is stated that there is no harm in the joy resulting from the demonstration of a good deed. These two different positions are taken in view(surrounding) of the category to which an individual belongs. There are certain other reasons also for such a view, but we shall abstain from mentioning them. What is Sum'ah ? At the end, it is to be noted that sum`ah means to orally transmit one's good qualities to the ears of people for the purpose of attracting them and publicizing oneself, and this tendency is a branch of the vicious tree of riya'. For the same reason we have dealt with sum'ah as a part of riya', not as a distinct vice, and have not elaborated its meaning separately. [1]. Usul al-Kafi, vol. 2, p. 402. [2]. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 450. [4]. Ibid., vol. 2, the chapter concerning riya'. [5]. Wasa'il al-Shi'ah. Literally hawiya means 'to love', 'to desire' and 'to become fond of something'. It may either be something commendable or abominable, or it may be something towards which one is inclined as a result of natural urge(push for). The carnal self is inclined towards lust and desire, if it is not bridled by reason and the Shari'ah. But the possibility of hawd being used here as a legal term (haqiqah Shar`iyyah) with a special meaning, as maintained by some scholars, seems remote. The phrase ... gives the sense of repelling something, turning away, preventing or dissuading from something. But here the verb sadda is used in the transitive sense of stopping and preventing. God willing, we shall discuss the two evils and their consequent conditions: first, that of being prevented(barred from the truth and from God; and, secondly, that of obliviousness of the Hereafter. We implore God's assistance in this regard. source : Forty Hadith by Imam Ruhullah al-Musawi al-Khumayni Thousands of pilgrims celebrating Eid al-Ghadir at Imam Ali's Holy Shrine Imam Reza’s (A.S.) Holy Shrine, fascinating to tourists Houthi leader hails defeat of Saudi, allies on Yemen’s west coast Professor Hussein Ansarain's advice to the youths who are on the verge of getting married Afghan special forces sent to fight off Taliban in Ghazni Bahraini detainee denied communication with outside world for over a week Imam Khamenei: There will be no war, nor will we negotiate with U.S. Professor Hussein Ansarian: behavior in relationship Professor Hussein Ansarian: The good wives will bring up good children. Professor Hussein Ansarian: do good to your parents even if they are pagan and infidel

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Home pageArticles What is Heart? There are various applications and denotations of the word `heart'. For physicians and the common people it is a tiny piece(slice) of flesh, whose contractions and expansions cause the flow(downpour) of blood through arteries and veins, which generates a subtle elan vital. The philosophers (hukama)use(utilize) it for a certain seat of the psyche (nafs). The `urafa' assign to it grades (maratib) and stages (maqamat), and to go into their details is not our concern here. In the Holy Quran and the ahadith, it has been used both in its general as well as its particular senses in different places. In the verse `...the hearts reached to the throats ' (33:10), `heart' is used in the same sense as used by physicians. And in "They have hearts wherewith they understand not, and they have eyes wherewith they see not' (7:179), it is used in the sense used by the philosophers. And in `Therein verily is a reminder for him who hath a heart, or giveth ear with full intelligence' (50:37), `heart' is used in the same sense as used by the `urafa'. In the tradition, tafakkur is used in the sense as is generally used by hukama', but the `heart' as meant by `urafa' has no relation to tafakkur, especially on its certain levels, as those who are familiar with their terminology know well. In the statement: gives the sense of bu'd, to keep away, to shun, and such is its-meaning in as given by al-Sihah. `Night', here, has been used allegorically for `bed'... and as discussed in detail by the usuli faqih Aqa Shaykh Rida Isfahani in Jaliyyat al-hal , the avoiding of `night' refers to getting up from the bed for night prayers ....God willing, we shall discuss the holy tradition in a number of sections. The Merits of Contemplation: It should be known that there is a great merit in contemplation. Contemplation is the key to the doors of ma'rifah and to the treasure chests of knowledge and excellence. It is the necessary and the surest first step on the path of genuine humanness. It has been highly commended and glorified by the Glorious Quran and in traditions, and one who abandons it has been censured and denounced. In al-Kafi it is reported from al-'Imam al-Sadiq (A) that: The best form of worship is to contemplate about God and His Power. [3] In another hadith, it is stated that an hour's contemplation is better than a night's worship.' [4] And according to a Prophetic tradition, the contemplation of an hour is better than a year's worship. In another tradition it is stated that an hour's contemplation is better than sixty years of worship (according to another hadith, seventy years). And some traditionists and fuqaha' have even mentioned it as being better than a thousand years of worship. In any case, there are different grades and levels of contemplation, and every grade gives certain results and consequences. Here we shall mention a few of them. 1. The first kind of contemplation is about God, His Names, Attributes and His Perfections, the result of which is the knowledge of His existence and His irradiations (tajalliyat) from which the archetypes(ayan) and the manifestations (mazahir) emerge. And this is the most superior level of contemplation which yields the sublimest of the kinds of knowledge, and the firmest of the arguments (burhan); for thinking about the essence of the Cause and meditating on the Absolute Cause imparts knowledge about Him and the understanding of the effects. Such is the outline of the revelations on the hearts of the Truthful (siddiqun), and it is for this reason that it is called burhan al-siddiqin, the Proof of the Truthful; since the Truthful observe the Names and the Attributes, and view the first essences (a`yan) and manifestations (mazahir) in the mirror of the Names through the witness of the Essence. The reason, however, that this type of proof is called burhan al-siddiqin is that if a Truthful one (siddiq) wishes to set forth his observations in the form of a proof and give his gnostic, intuitive experience the apparel of words, it would appear in this form; not that anyone who gains the knowledge of the Essence and its irradiations through this proof becomes one of the Truthful, or that the knowledge of the Truthful belongs to the category of proofs, even especial ones. How far from the truth to imagine that their knowledge is of the category of contemplation, or that their cognitions are like arguments and their premises! As long as the heart is covered within the wrapping of arguments and one is in the stage of contemplation, one has not yet reached even the first grade of the Truthful. And when the thick curtains of knowledge and proof are set aside and contemplation brushed aside, it is at the extremity of the Path drat there, without the mediation of contemplation - in fact without any means or agency whatsoever - that he ultimately succeeds in viewing the glory and beauty of the Absolute at the end of his voyage(trekking); it is then that he experiences perpetual and everlasting delight. He transcends the world and everything therein, covered under the mantle of the Almighty to remain existent in total annihilation. Nothing remains of him, and he passes into absolute oblivion, save that Divine favour should take him back to his realm and to the regions of (relative) being, in accordance with the capacity of his unchanging essence (al-`ayn al-thabitah). In the state of this return, the spheres of Divine glory and beauty are revealed to him, and he perceives (the meaning of) the Names and the Attributes in the mirror of the Essence. Through that he witnesses his own unchanging essence and everything that is under His shelter and protection, and discovers the tracks(trail) of the manifestations and the ways of recourse to the heart's exterior. Then he is conferred with the robes of prophethood and the difference of the stations of the apostles and prophets becomes evident to him. The vastness or narrowness of the circle of prophethood and that of those from whom the prophet is raised and those towards whom he is sent are revealed to him. And to enlarge on this topic further is not proper for these pages. So we shall leave it here and part, too, with the theme of burhan al-siddiqin,as it needs a preparatory introduction with its elaborate details. The Desirable and the Forbidden Contemplation on the Divine Essence: It should be known that what we said about the possibility of contemplation on the Essence, the Names and the Attributes may lead the ignorant to imagine that it is forbidden in accordance with certain riwayat, knowing not that that which is forbidden is to attempt to fathom the quality and depths of the Essence, as is clear from the traditions.' [5] Sometimes those who are not capable of such (otherwise desirable) contemplation are also forbidden from reflecting on certain kinds ofma`arif which require initiation into certain subtleties. The hukama' confirm both of these points. The impossibility of fathoming the Essence is demonstrated in their writings(Inscriptions), and the prohibition on contemplation on it is acknowledged by all of them. Also the conditions of entry into these sciences and the prohibition of the unworthy from learning them is also mentioned in their books; it is a customary advice which is mentioned by them either in the beginning or at the end of their works. For instance, the two great philosophers of Islam and authorities in this field, Shaykh Bu 'Ali Sina and Sadr al-Muta'allihin (R) have stated this at the end of al-'Isharat [6] and at the beginning of al-'Asfar. [7] They have given eloquent counsels in this regard. But to contemplate the Essence for positing the principle of al-tawhid and affirming Its transcendence (al-tanzih) and sanctity was the ultimate goal and purpose of the sending of the prophets and the cherished end of the `urafa'. The Holy Quran and the sacred ahadith are loaded with the knowledge of the Essence, Its Perfections and the Divine Names. Reliable books of traditions, like Usul al-Kafi and al-Tawhid of al Shaykh al-Saduq, also do not forbid contemplation for the purpose of affirmation of the Essence, the Names and the Attributes. The difference between the scriptures and traditions of the prophets and the writings of the philosophers is regarding their terminology and their synoptic or elaborate treatment of the subject, as is the case with the difference between fiqh and traditions. But the calamity is that certain ignorant persons have appeared in the garb of scholars during the last few centuries, who, being bereft of the knowledge of the Quran and the Sunnah, consider their sheer ignorance as the sole proof of the vanity of the knowledge of al-mabda' and al-ma'ad. Such a man for the sake of promoting his trade, labels these ma`arif, which were the ultimate goal of the apostles and the Awliya' (A) of God and with whose description the entire Book of God and the traditions of the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt (A) are replete, as haram. Not sparing any charge(levy) and calumny against those who pursue these ma'arif, he diverts the hearts of the creatures of God from the knowledge of al-mabda' and al-ma`ad, in addition to sowing the seeds of discord and disharmony in the community of Muslims. When asked about the reason for all this takfir (calling someone kafir) and tafsiq, (calling someone fasiq ), he immediately clings to the tradition, `Do not contemplate upon the Essence (of God)'. The ignorance and the error of this wretch is for two reasons: Firstly, he believes that the hukama' contemplate on the Essence, whereas they consider its intellection as impossible and probing deep into its mysteries as forbidden, and this itself is one of the established issues of their discipline. Secondly, having misunderstood the meaning of the tradition, he believes that not a single word be uttered regarding the Sacred Essence. Here we shall cite some of the related traditions and, in our humble capacity, try to reconcile them, leaving the judgement to the (reader's sense of) justice. Though this makes us digress from the proposed exposition of the hadith - our original goal -it is essential for eliminating doubts and refuting misconceptions. The following tradition is mentioned in al-Kafi: ...Abu Basir reports Abu Ja'far (A) as having said: Speak (takallamu) about the creation of God, and do not speak about God (fi Allah), for discourse about God will bring nothing but confusion (tahayyur)to the discourser. [8] This tradition itself indicates that the purpose of the prohibition is to discourage discourse aimed at fathoming the depths (iktinah) of the Essence and Its kayfiyyah (quality) with a view to discovering Its cause. Otherwise, discoursing about the Essence with a view to affirming It, Its Perfections, Its Unity and Transcendence does not cause confusion. It is also possible that the prohibition here relates to such persons in whom discourse about these matters will cause perplexity and confusion. The late muhaddith al-Majlisi (R) has allowed both of these possibilities without elaborating them, but he gives more weight to the first one. Another tradition of al-Kafi states: ...from Hariz, from Abu `Abd Allah (A) that he said: "Discuss everything, but do not discuss the Essence of the Almighty." [9] There are other traditions which are identical or close in import to this riwayah, and to cite them all is not essential. Another tradition of al-Kafi states: ...Abu Ja'far (A) said: "Beware of tafakkur in God. But if you wish to view His grandeur, observe the great of His creations." [10] Apparently, this riwayah also seems to forbid probing into the reality of the Essence, for the tradition adds that if someone wants to perceive the glory of the Almighty he should infer it from the grandeur of His creation. This kind of parabolic approach is intended for various types of persons whose knowledge of God is derived through the means of the creation. This and other such traditions which appear to forbid discourse and contemplation on God by themselves support our claim, which is expressly confirmed by the following tradition of al-Kafi on contemplation: The most superior form of worship is perpetual contemplation on God and His Power. [11] Accordingly, contemplation on God for positing His Essence and contemplating His Power, His Names and Attributes is not only not prohibited, but is the most superior kind of worship. Another tradition of al-Kafi states: `Ali (A) ibn al-Husayn (A) was questioned about tawhid; he answered "Verily, God Almighty knew that during the Last Age there would be a people of profound thinking. Hence the Almighty revealed (Surat al-Tawhid) and the verses of the Surat al-Hadid up to`And God is the Knower of all that is in the hearts'. So whosoever goes beyond that will perish." [12] This shows that these verses about tawhid and tanzih, the verses about the emergence and the return of the creation mentioned therein, are for those who contemplate profoundly. Can then anyone still claim that contemplating on God Almighty is prohibited? What `arif and hakim has brought anything that goes beyond the commencing verses of the Surat al-Hadid? The ultimate of their achievement is that 'All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifieth Allah'.-'Is ` there any better way of describing God Almighty and the aspects of His Sacred Essence than the verse: He is the First and the Last, and the Outward and the Inward, and He is the Knower of all things. (57:3) By the Life of the Beloved, had there been nothing besides this verse in the Glorious Book of God, it would have been sufficient for the men of heart! If one were to consider the Book of God and the sermons and the traditions of the Holy Prophet (S) and his infallible vicegerents (A), one shall notice that no `arif or hakim has said anything on any of the conceivable sub-issues of the Divine teachings that goes beyond these; all their statements are replete with the description (tawsif) of the Almighty and full of arguments about His sacred Essence and Attributes, so that every class of scholars benefits from them according to the capacity of its comprehension. Then all of these traditions show that contemplating and meditating on the Essence is forbidden on a certain level, which is to probe into the inmost mysteries (kunh) of the Essence and Its Quality(kayfiyyah), as stated in this tradition of al-Kafi: Whosoever contemplates in God to see how He is, perishes. [13] Moreover, the traditions forbidding contemplation and those enjoining it, when reconciled, give the conclusion(deduction) that a group of people who do not possess the strength of giving ear to philosophical arguments (burhan), having no capacity of entering into such discussions, are forbidden from doing so, and there are indications in the riwayat which testify to this. But as for those who have an aptitude for it, it is not only proper but is the highest form of worship. In any case, we have digressed completely from our proposed theme, but there was no way we could avoid examining those degenerate views and the kind of calumnies, displeasing to God, which have acquired circulation during recent times on tongues, with the hope that it will make some effect on some hearts, and if one person were to accept this it would be sufficient for me. And praise is God's and to Him do we complain. Contemplation on Creation: Another level of contemplation is reflecting on the subtleties of creation, its perfection and refinement, to the extent that it is in human power. Such contemplation leads to the intellection of its Perfect Source, its Wise Maker, and is a process which is the reverse of the burhan al siddiqin; for, in the latter, the point of departure is the station of God Almighty, glorious is His Name, wherefrom is d the knowledge of the manifestations of His Sovereignty (wilayah). Here, however, the point of departure is creation, whereafter is d the knowledge of its Source and Maker. This proof (burhan) is for ordinary people, who do not partake of the burhan al-siddiqin. Therefore, perhaps, many of them would negate that the contemplation of God can bring the knowledge of Him and that the knowledge of the Origin can lead to the knowledge of the creation. Hence, the contemplation of the subtleties and the marvels of creation and the firmness and finesse of the system of creation belongs to the category of lucrative knowledge; it is the most meritorious of the actions of the heart and superior to all worships, since its result is the noblest of all results. Although in all forms of devotional rites (`ibadat) the main aim and the real secret is the acquisition of transcendental knowledge (ma'arif), yet the likes of us find no access to such secrets and such results. They are for their own people, to whom every devotional rite is like a grain of one or several revelations. In any case, man has not been able to the real knowledge of the subtleties and secrets of creation. So subtle are its foundations and so firm its design, so beautiful and perfectly planned is its system that if we consider any creature, however insignificant and humble it should appear to be, with all the scientific development during centuries of studies man has been unable to discover even one of its thousand secrets, let alone the majesty of the cosmic system of creation whose intricacies and mysteries are beyond the reaches of our vision and inaccessible to our imperfect, limited ideas. Now we shall draw your attention to one of the subtleties of creation which is relatively near to understanding and comprehension and is considered to lie in the realm of the sensible. The Earth and the Sun: Two Masterpieces of Creation My dear, observe and reflect on the relationship between the earth and the sun, the fixed(stationary) distance and the suitable speed(gallop) with which the earth spins on its axis and revolves in its orbit around the sun, causing day and night and the seasons. What a perfection of creative skill and what a work of immaculate wisdom it is that had it been not exactly so - that is had the earth been a little away or nearer to the sun - there would not have been any vegetation and animal life, on account of chilling cold due to the former and excessive heat due to the latter. And, similarly, had the earth remained static(motionless), there would not have been any days and nights and seasons either, and the earth would have been without any trace of life despite possessing everything else to support life. Yet He did not suffice at this; He made its north furthest from the sun (in the northern hemisphere), so as to ensure that excessive heat does no harm to the creatures; the point nearest to the sun was situated towards the south, so that coldness should not harm the inhabitants of the earth. This was also not enough; the moon, which also influences the earth's creatures, was assigned a different course than the earth, in such a way that when the sun is the northern region of the earth, the moon appears in the southern, and vice versa. This was for the sake of the utmost benefit of their positions relative to the earth. These are principally sensible phenomena, yet to encompass their subtleties and secrets is not possible for anybody but their omnipotent Creator. Why should we go so far ? If one contemplates his own creation, according to the scope of his knowledge and capability, beginning with the external senses he will see that they have been contrived according to the kind of sensations and sense perceptions they receive. For every group of sensible objects a separate faculty of perception has been created, and that too with what astounding propriety and skill! And for matters of a supra-sensible nature, which cannot be perceived through the outward senses, internal senses have been fashioned to perceive them. Let alone the knowledge of the soul and its spiritual faculties, which the human intellect cannot comprehend, and contemplate upon the human body, its anatomy, its physical constitution and the functioning of each and every external and internal organ. See what a wonderful(fantastic) system and what a striking(imposing) order they constitute! In spite of a hundred centuries of scientific study, man has not been able to understand a thousandth fraction of it, and all the scientists declare their inability in this regard in unambiguous terms, although this body of man is no more than an insignificant speck in comparison to other creatures on the earth's crust, and the earth with all its inhabitants is of little significance as compared with the solar system and our complete solar system is of no consequence when compared with other solar systems and galaxies; and all these macro and micro systems are parts of a disciplined and orderly system, no speck of which can be found faulty by anyone and all the human intellects are unable to understand even a single secret of its myriad recondite subtleties and secrets. Does your intellect still need something more after this reflection to believe that an Omniscient, Omnipotent and All-Wise Being, who does not resemble any other being in anything, has created all these creatures with their firm orderliness and subtlety? ....Can there be any doubt concerning God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth?...(14:10) All this orderly and systematic(scientifically) artistry, whose general laws no human mind can comprehend, has not come into existence by itself and spontaneously. Blind be the inner eye that fails to perceive the Truth and cannot observe its beauty in these creatures! Perish the man who is skeptical and doubtful despite seeing all these effects and signs! But, what else can helpless man, captivated by fantasies, do? If you take out your rosary and claim that its beads got assembled on the thread by themselves, without anybody arranging them, everyone will laugh at your intelligence. You will invite a calamity if you take out your pocket watch and make similar claims about it; if you do such a thing will you not have stuck off your name from the list of the sane and wouldn't all the sane people of the world consider you a lunatic? If one who considers this primitive and small mechanical system to originate without a cause and as being outside causality is considered insane(unbalanced) and is likely to be stripped of all the rights belonging to men of reason, what is to be done with the person who claims not the whole cosmic system but even man and the complex system of his body and soul alone to have come into existence by itself? Is he still to be reckoned among men of reason? What fool is more stupid(dense) than such a man? Perish man! What has made him an unbeliever? (80:17) Death to him whom knowledge cannot revive and who is drowned in the sea of his own error Contemplation on the States of the Soul: One of the levels of contemplation is meditation on the states of the soul, which is of immense benefit being the source of vast(massive) transcendental knowledge. Here we intend to discuss two benefits: one is the knowledge of the Day of Resurrection, and the other is the knowledge of (the necessity of) prophethood and revealed scriptures - that is, of general prophethood (al-nubuwwat al-`ammah) and systems of Divine Law (sharayi' haqqah). One of the issues pertaining to the soul is its state of independence (from the body), a problem which has been given more significance than any other philosophical issue by all the eminent hukama about which they have given numerous proofs and explanations. Here we are not in a position to offer an elaborate proof of this. We shall confine ourselves to mentioning some simple preliminaries and then return to our subject. All the physicians, scientists and anatomists unanimously agree that all the human organs, from the piamater - which is the centre of sense perceptions and the stage for the manifestation of all psychic faculties - to the coarser parts and organs of the body, weaken, deteriorate and decline after the age of thirty or thirty-five years. We ourselves have experienced how weakness and sluggishness overtake all the organs of the body after that age. However, at the same time, that is at the age of thirty and forty and after that, the spiritual faculties and intellectual perceptions become more refined and gain in growth and strength. This implies that the rational faculties are not physically based, for had they been corporeal like other physical faculties, they would also have declined. It is not right to imagine that it is the extent of intellectual activity as well as experience which strengthen the intellectual faculties, because all the physical faculties weaken and decline despite prolonged use and do not grow in strength and perfection. This proves that the intellectual faculty is not physically rooted. It is also improper to say that the faculty of intellect also declines with age, because, firstly, none of the physical faculties grows strong till middle age, so that it may be said that a certain organ of the body has been the centre of intellectual perception that grows in strength till middle age and then becomes weaker, thus rendering weak the faculty of intellect as well. Secondly, the weakness which continues into middle age is associated with rational thought, which is either a faculty present in the body or is dependent on the physical faculties. The purely intellectual and higher faculties continue to become stronger than ever before during middle age, although their expression and outward manifestation may be lesser. In short, the strength of the faculty of intellectual perception at the age of forty or fifty years is enough for proving our contention. Moreover, every such faculty which is nearer to the physical and corporeal domain is inclined to deteriorate and decay more rapidly, and that which is more removed from it weakens more latterly. But the powers belonging to the world of the transcendent and the celestial become stronger and their vitality increases. This proves that the soul is not corporeal and physical in nature. Since the properties, effects and activities of the soul are opposed to the properties, effects and activities of the purely corporeal organs, it proves that the soul is not corporeal in nature. For instance, through prior knowledge we know that a body does not accept more than one form. If it is to receive another form, it will have to part with the form it earlier had. For example, if a picture is drawn on a paper, another picture cannot be painted on that page as long as the first picture is not erased completely. This principle is applicable to all bodies; but for the soul, while one form is impressed on it, other totally different forms can also be stamped on it without the first form being wiped out. Every corporeal body can receive only finite forms, whereas the soul can receive infinite forms, and it is for this reason that it can posit infinity. Also, every corporeal body, if it loses one form, that form cannot be restored to it without a renewed cause; but in the case of the soul, any form, after having left it, may return to it without any resumption of the cause. This shows that the soul is opposed to all corporeal bodies regarding properties, effects and action. Hence it has a non-corporeal existence of its own and does not belong to the category of bodies and physical objects. Anything that is non-corporeal is not subject to decay - as has been demonstrated in its own place - because decay cannot occur without matter, and the non-corporeal is independent of matter. Matter is the precondition of corporeal bodies; therefore, decay is not possible for the soul. Hence we come to the conclusion that the soul does not weaken and decay or is destroyed with the weakening, decay or destruction of the body, or after separating from it. It remains in another world and there is no death and extinction for it; this is a spiritual resurrection for the souls, prior to the Day of Resurrection, when they are united with the bodies by the will of God. Now we reach the point of absolute affirmation of Resurrection, and stand opposed to those who negate it absolutely. From these preliminaries it should be clear that there is health and disease, reform and corruption, knowledge and wretchedness for souls, and to discover their source and to know the secrets of their corruption and welfare is not possible for anyone except the Holy Essence of the Almighty. In the perfect system of the cosmos, which is the best of possible systems ordered by the Absolutely Wise and the Omniscient, it is impossible that there should be any negligence regarding the education of mankind as to the ways of its felicity and wretchedness, its guidance towards the causes of spiritual soundness and corruption, and the prescription of remedies for curing the soul. This is because such a negligence would imply a defect either in God's knowledge or His power, either His generosity or His justice, whereas it is known that His Holy Being is free from all these defects. He is absolutely perfect and absolutely generous. Any neglect providing guidance pointing out the paths of knowledge and wretchedness will imply a great defect in Divine wisdom, which would lead to cosmic disorder and chaos. Therefore, the perfect system necessitates the declaration of the paths of felicity and the road to guidance. This explanation leads to two clear conclusions. One is that the Shari'ah is the prescription for spiritual maladies and is known to none except the Sacred Being of the Almighty. The other is that it is necessary for God to bring it to the knowledge of man. It is obvious that such a momentous, perfect and precise knowledge, whose apprehension is not possible through the intellectual faculties of men - none of which can grasp either the relationships between tile corporeal and transcendental worlds or the effects of the transcendental forms on the inner depths of the soul - can only be accessible through the agency of wahy or revelation, that is, by means of Divine teaching. It is clear that every human individual is not worthy of this office and does not have the capability of occupying this station and performing this duty. It is only once in several centuries that one such individual is to be found who is worthy of performing this task and who can undertake such a great mission. God Almighty assigns to him the task of expounding the paths of felicity and wretchedness to humanity, to make them aware of that wherein lies their welfare. This is general prophethood (al-nubuwwat al-`ammah). Now that we have arrived at this point in our discussion, we may explain a further point which should be considered as one of self-evident truths. A Conclusive Proof: Now that we know that there should necessarily be a Shari'ah laid down by the Divine Lawgiver for mankind, when we turn to the shari'ahs prevailing amongst mankind we see that there are three principal ones: the shari'ah of Jews, the shari'ah of Christians, and the shari'ah of Islam. We find that in all the three essential foundations which constitute the basis of all shari'ahs (of which the first is concerned with the true doctrines and Divine teachings about God's Attributes and His transcendence, the knowledge of angels and the qualities of the prophets (A) and their infallibility, which are the principal and main component of the shari'ahs; the second is about praiseworthy qualities, purification of the soul and moral excellences; the third is about outward individual and social acts and rites pertaining to political and civic actions and their like), the Islamic shari'ah is more complete than the others. Anyone who tries to judge without prejudice will discover that it is incomparable to the others, and there does not exist any religious law pertaining to all the aspects and stages of life more perfect regarding its worldly and otherworldly aspects than this Law. This is itself the biggest proof in favour of its Divine origin. Accordingly, after affirming the doctrine of universal prophethood and the doctrine that God Almighty has legislated a Divine shari'ah for humanity, showing them the path of guidance and bringing them under the cover of one discipline and system, no preliminaries are required for proving the truthfulness of the Islamic Din except for examining it and comparing it with other religious laws on every conceivable level of human need - from righteous qualities and spiritual learning to individual and social responsibilities. And this is the meaning of the following sacred tradition: Islam surpasses (every creed) and is not surpassed(unsurpassed) (by anything). This is because the more the intellects of men progress and the more they gain in understanding, they bow their heads in front of its light of guidance when they consider its proofs (hujaj) and arguments (barahin), and no hujjah in the world can refute them. The result of our arguments relating to the positing of the prophetic mission of the Seal of Prophethood (S) is that in the same way as the creative perfection manifest in the creation of the cosmos and its perfect arrangement and order directs us towards the intellection of a Being who has ordered it and whose omniscience encompasses all its particulars, subtleties and grandeurs, the perfection of the Shari'ah - whose perfect order and methodical finesse is capable of guaranteeing all the material and spiritual, this-worldly and otherworldly, collective and individual needs - guides us to the fact that the system of this shari`ah has been ordered by a knowledge which encircles all the needs of the human species. And since our intellects tell us that the intellectual faculties of a man whose biography has been written by all the historians of religion and who was an unlettered person brought up(reared) in a society devoid of all higher knowledge and virtues, could not have produced such a perfect and systematic shari'ah. Hence, of necessity, we have to acknowledge that thisShari'ah has a metaphysical and transcendental source, and reached that glorious personage (S) by means of Divine revelation and wahy. And praise is God's for the clarity of proofs. We had intended to describe another stage of contemplation -the contemplation on this world, andzuhd is its fruit - but since this pen broke its reins in the earlier stages of this discourse making it somewhat lengthier than intended, we shall refrain from going into it. [1]. Usul al-Kafi (Akhundi, ed. by 'Ali' Akbar Ghaffiri), II, 54. [2]. Manazil al-sa'irin, I, 57. [3]. Usul al-Kafi, II, 55. [4]. Ibid., II, 50. [5]. Al-Mahajjat al-bayda ; VIII, 193 [6]. Al- Isharat wa al-tanbihat (Tehran: Haydari), III, 419. [7]. Al- Asfar al-'arba'ah (Dar al-Ma'arif al-'Islamiyyah ), I, 10. [8]. Usul al-Kafi, I, 92, hadith 1. [10]. Ibid., I, 93, hadith 7. [11]. Ibid., II, 55, hadith 6. source : GREATER SINS Shaheede Mehraab Ayatullah-ul-Uzma Al-Haaj Sayed Abdul Husain Dastghaib Shirazi (r.a.) Salman Farsi as the Governor of Madayan Appointment of a Successor by the Holy Prophet (S.A.W.) The Distinguished Position of Ahl al-Bayt (A.S.) Ahl al-Bayt (A.S.), the Secure Sanctuary of Humanity Decide Wages before Hiring The Life of the Commander of the Faithful Ali Ibn Abu Talib Arba'een, Rendezvous of the Martyrs The Holy Imams’ affection for fellow creatures Patience and Humility of the Holy Imams (A.S.) Knowledge Of Ahl ul-Bayt (A.S.)

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Fall Travel Quiz Results Reveal Our Readers Are Smarter than a 5th Grader In Honolulu, a new law allows police to issue fines up to $35 for crossing a street while focusing on a mobile device. By Anna Breuer on 22 November 2017 Good news, class. The 2017 Fall Quiz turned out to be easier than we had anticipated and the class average rose as a result. Over 2,150 respondents took part and two lucky students won a pack of 15 United Airlines Boeing 747 trading cards. A record 12% of you earned an A, having answered every question correctly. This was a six-fold increase over the previous quiz. Approximately 9% of you scored an A- or 9 out of 10 correct, which was about the same as the one before. Nine percent also achieved a B+, with 8 out of 10 answered correctly (a significant drop from 21% last time around), while 19% earned a B with 7 out of 10. The remaining 51% placed well below the curve and your guidance counselors will be in touch. The two easiest questions were “Which airline ceased operations at the end of October?” and “Which airline announced daily service between Los Angeles and Singapore, a flight that will be the longest service to and from the United States?” To the first one, 87% correctly answered Air Berlin; to the second, 79.9% gave the correct answer, United Airlines, showing that the class as a whole has been paying attention in avgeek 101. Many of you – 76.8% – knew that Volvo was the automaker planning to only manufacture cars with electric power trains by 2019 and almost as many – 73.8 – knew that Qatar Airways had dropped its bid to acquire a stake in American Airlines. A similarly high percentage of the class – 72.9% – correctly stated that United Airlines was celebrating the retirement of its 747 fleet by handing out trading cards, selling of pieces of its 747s to customers, and operating a ceremonial final flight that paid homage to the first one. Some of you may find yourselves waiting a while for an Uber ride in London, since only 63.8% knew that England’s capital had banned the service, while many of you may get a ticket for texting while crossing the street in Honolulu, where such activities are now illegal. Only 58.8% gave the correct answer here. However, things really went downhill after that. It’s clear that there are relatively few astute shoppers among us as only 35.4% knew that the United Kingdom announced a ban on credit card surcharges. And finally, in the only question where an incorrect answer (Los Angeles International Airport) garnered more votes than the correct answer (LaGuardia Airport), it is the latter that will soon see six airlines relocate all on the same day. Concerned about your final grade? You can undertake an extra-credit assignment during the Thanksgiving break. The topic is Famous Airline Jingles for $100. Alex Trebek reminds you to make sure you phrase the answer in the form of a question. (Photo: Accura Media Group) Fall Travel Quiz Results: Please Have This Test Signed by a Parent Travel Quiz Results: Find Out How Many FBT Readers Are Smarter Than a 5th Grader Travel News Quiz: Test Your Knowledge of the Past Month’s Headlines 2016 Mid-Year Travel News Quiz: Are You Smarter Than a Diamond 5th Grader? Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day: Here’s What’s Open and What’s Closed Tomorrow, Thursday, is Thanksgiving in the United States, a national day of giving thanks for the harvest and the preceding...

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Franklin Templeton star manager loses $1.8 billion in a day Franklin Templeton’s star manager Michael Hasenstab lost nearly $1.8 billion (€1.61 billion) in a single day during the exodus from Argentine assets following the pounding of president Mauricio Macri in last weekend’s primary elections. The centre-left opposition made significant gains, overtaking centre-right Macri and causing the value of the Argentine peso to plummet. Odds of a debt default in the country over the next five years also grew to a 75% chance, it has been reported. Hasenstab has been one of the biggest buyers of Argentine debt. Six of his bond funds with the most significant exposure to the country suffered large drops in value during Monday’s outflow rush, the Financial Times reported. The manager’s $11.3 billion Templeton Emerging Markets Bond Fund, which has more than 10% exposure to Argentine debt according to analysts Morningstar, fell 3.5% - a loss of around $400 million. Another of his funds suffering losses was the $17.4 billion Templeton Global Return Fund Class A which saw a decline of 2.5% in value, according to the Financial Times. Calculations made by the financial daily were based on assets under management figures and portfolio weightings as of July 31. Thus far, Franklin Templeton has declined to comment but pointed out that other global funds were overperforming above the Morningstar average. The California-based fund giant was not alone in getting hit by the market rout in Argentina following the primaries, though. Fidelity and London-based Ashmore Group also saw funds take sizeable losses, while a Brazilian hedge fund suffered losses of between 25% and 59% according to Reuters. Hasenstab himself rose to prominence following the financial crisis, making large investments in struggling countries such as Hungary, Ireland, and Nigeria, occasionally placing multibillion-dollar bets that their economies would turn around.

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Grandmothers Rising Up for Mother Earth http://swfl.naturalawakeningsmag.com/SWFL/May-2016/Grandmothers-Rising-Up-for-Mother-Earth/ Painting: Morning Grooming by Martha Paquin Sisters, daughters, nieces, aunts, mothers and grandmothers from diverse cultures, faiths and backgrounds are raising their voices and advocating for an Earth-respecting cultural narrative—one of “restore, respect and replenish”—to replace the narrative of domination, depletion and the destruction of nature. Globally, their voices are being heard as they speak for climate justice, the creation of climate solutions and a just and necessary transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. These words are snippets taken from the declaration and preamble for the Women’s Earth & Climate Action Network (WECAN), a solution-based alliance that works to foster resilient communities and promote a post-carbon energy future, while encouraging societal transformation. Albeit, millions of women are unacquainted with WECAN, yet the organization’s guiding principles capture what lies at the heart of all women’s actions that are speaking loud and clear for the rights of nature, indigenous peoples and future generations. Among those who are demonstrating their commitment to move from a future of peril to a future of promise are Southwest Florida grandmothers Janet Weisberg, Dianne Rhodes, Martha Paquin, Holley Rauen, Ann Smith and Betty Osceola. Just as actress Julia Roberts is the voice of Nature in Conservation International’s documentary, Nature is Speaking, these Earth ventriloquists are throwing their voices to give Earth the language and words for awakening humanity to its need to collaborate with Nature, rather than work against it. They are doing it for their children, grandchildren and the generations beyond, as well as all living things on Mother Earth. These fearless and tireless grandmothers can inspire all of us with their courage and energy. Janet Weisberg with her husband Sam and 12 grandchildren Janet WeisbergJanet Weisberg was relieved to learn through her training with Project NatureConnect that the 54 senses she used in childhood to communicate with Nature could be restored. For Weisberg, the sensory science and therapeutic remedy for the excessive disconnection of our psyche from nature’s flow was a grand blessing. In exploring nature’s wisdom, this grandmother of 12, from 4 to 22 years old, woke up. “I’d been like everyone else buying things, trying to fit in, feeling separated from what I couldn’t identify and lacking a feeling of wholeness. There was no particular reason for this, as I grew up in a nice home with a great family,” says Weisberg. NatureConnect’s experiential training drew Weisberg back to her greatest pleasure; time outdoors. “As a kid, I enjoyed a connection with nature and played a lot outside. I grew up and lost that connectedness. Through NatureConnect, I learned that our preverbal ancient brain (located in the brain stem, amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus and thalamus) never loses its 54 senses. In adulthood, combining it with the functioning of the neocortex is essential to a relationship with nature, abstract thinking, imagination, problem solving and a sense of wholeness. In the re-engaging of those senses, I returned to wholeness, which I unconsciously had longed for,” she explains. The reality of grandchildren living on a planet where humanity had no clue how to work together toward a sustainable future hit Weisberg hard. “Initially I wept and sobbed, because I couldn’t understand why my children wanted to bring babies into the world. Then I had an insight. I’m beholden to my grandchildren and every child born, as well as to the 20- and 30-year-olds who haven’t had children yet. I have a role to play, and I’m not finished until I depart this life. This work brought me to life in my late 60s. I speak now to educate the young and the elders that language isn’t the be-all and end-all. To survive, thrive and create a resilient future, we need super-intelligence, which is what we get when we activate the whole brain,” notes Weisberg. Dianne Rhodes Dianne Rhodes Trade deals, pipelines, tar sands, clear-cut logging, acid rain, greenhouse gas emissions, poverty, aboriginal reserves, pollution, recycling, sea level rise, solar initiative, fossil fuels, Earth Overshoot Day and any other environmental or social justice terms that are related to climate change find their way into the majority of Dianne Rhodes’ conversations and presentations when she speaks locally and in Saskatchewan, a prairie province in Canada where she summers. This 71-year-old grandmother spends a minimum of three hours daily surfing her trusted websites--TheClimateMobilization.org, BlueDot.Ca, 350.org, Algore.com (The Climate Reality Project), Eco-Voice.org, EcoWatch.com, CommonDreams.org, TruthDig.com, DemocracyNow.org, TheEmpireFiles.TV, TelesurTv.net and InsideClimateNews.org for information that mainstream media spins or fails to provide. She also reads books and articles written by expert authors she admires. “Additionally, I educate myself from research provided by respected experts such as Bill McKibben, George Monbiot, David Suzuki, Guy McPherson, Herman Daily, Bill Rees, Chris Edges, Naomi Kline and Sandra Steingrabber,” says Rhodes. Rhodes has trained with 350.org’s leader, Bill McKibben. In 2012 she joined participants from 58 countries who spent three days training with Vice President Al Gore and other climate change experts involved in his nonprofit Climate Reality Project. “He personally trains a diverse leadership corps from a variety of backgrounds to work toward solving the climate crisis,” says Rhodes, who now speaks publicly on the subject. “As a wise elder, I speak as often as possible on rights for all people and especially the next generations who deserve to live on a healthy planet. More than 100 countries have environmental rights in their constitutions. Canada and the U.S. do not. This needs to change. There are organizations such as Our Children's Trust and the For the Generations, a Delaware Riverkeeper Network initiative that are working on this in the U.S. In Canada, it is the Blue Dot Movement, initiated by the David Suzuki Foundation, that is building the Right to a Healthy Environment city by city until the initiative is strong enough to be included in Canada's Constitution,” remarks Rhodes, who is leading a volunteer team that is getting petitions signed for presenting to the Saskatoon Mayor and city council for signing into law. “My efforts are for the future generations, my grandchildren and especially for my granddaughter Amorell who likes to join me in demonstrations.” Holley Rauen Holley RauenHolley Rauen is no stranger to social justice and environmental activism, which she considers one issue. The Vice President of Communications at the Happehatchee Center, Rauen is literally the voice of the eco-spiritual center, Estero’s sanctuary for peace and healing. “As mothers, grandmothers and wise women, we have to show up and be the change,” says Rauen. Rauen’s peace and justice activism efforts in her previous San Francisco residence transformed into environmental activism when she moved to Florida and jumped into the fray over protecting waterways and the wonders of the Everglades. Feeling compelled to protest the building of a coal-fired power plant in Glades County, she protested with Happehatchee founder Ellen Peterson, Florida Wildlife Federation Outstanding Environmentalist of 2008. “We eventually won through the use of many tactics and strategies, including, one of Ellen’s great ideas—to buy at least one or two shares of stock so I could go into stockowner meetings, stand up and speak the truth,” comments Rauen. Peterson, who fought fearlessly for the environment right up to age 87, taught Rauen that 99 percent of being an effective environmental activist is showing up and being part of the power in numbers. “It’s why despite my age and health challenges, I’m still showing up for things like protecting the Estero River, which is heavily polluted,” says Rauen, who is also a Sierra Club member. As the matriarch of her family, Rauen is mother, aunt, mentor and role model for her 24 nieces and nephews, along with the young Florida Gulf Coast University students who spend time on Happehatchee projects. “The most important thing we can do for our children is to take them outdoors in nature to play. It’s the only real classroom,” she says. Showing up to protect the waters of the Estero River and the easement area, trees and wildlife along its Happehatchee banks means that Rauen regularly attends meetings of the Estero Village Council and collaborates with local groups such as the Stonecrab Alliance. “We worked together to ban fracking. Our most recent collaboration was the Water Blessing Event with clergy from eight different religious traditions and Betty Osceola, as well as Kat Epple and her musical partner Nathan Dyke. It was time to bring spirit into our activism for clean water, the most basic element that gives us all life,” advises Rauen. Martha Paquin Martha PaquinMartha Paquin, an accomplished artist. spends spring and summer months in her Illinois studio home, a seven-acre property, which she refers to as “The Waterfall”. An initiate of the Mandan tribal people’s White Buffalo Cow Society, she has an affinity for indigenous people. “I became friends with Carol Hart, producer/director of the film For the Next 7 Generations, which tells the story of 13 indigenous grandmothers from all around the world who came together to help us create a new way of life that will bring the planet back into balance before it’s too late. When I was a keynote speaker for the world convention of Unity churches in Albuquerque, New Mexico, last year, Carol showed the film and we had a discussion afterwards. In 2013, Paquin, a 10-year veteran delegate to the United Nations (UN) Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW), traveled to the UN with a group of indigenous grandmothers from different tribes. “The indigenous wisdom and knowledge they shared on the great law of peace was as soothing as the ceremonies they Donna Roberts (right), Mother Mãe Stella de Oxossi (center) and Sophia O’Sullivan performed throughout New York City. We’ve remained connected through the Facebook page for Grandmothers Circle the Earth Foundation. It is one of many indigenous grandmothers organizations that has formed in fulfillment of a prophecy of a Navajo spiritual elder,” advises Paquin. UNCSW is the intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women. Paquin purchased her waterfall home located on sacred grounds near Indian mounds to insure that her grandchildren had a place to learn about nature. “In retrospect, I’ve learned more about nature than they have, and I convey the essence of it through my paintings and photography,” she enthuses. Ann Smith with her two grandsons Ann Landass SmithAnn Landass Smith, a firm believer that women are the true saviors of their land and communities, points to Professor Wangari Maathai, who started the Green Belt Movement in Kenya. “She was the first environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize for work that responded to the need for growing and planting trees to bind the soil, store rainwater, provide food and firewood. The more serious issues behind her work were deeper issues of disempowerment, disenfranchisement and a loss of traditional values that previously enabled women in communities to protect their environment,” advises Smith. The Chipko Movement in India preceded Maathai’s work. To increase ecological awareness and demonstrate the viability of people power, women who believed their land was sacred went from village to village creating a human chain with their arms. Women were most affected by the rampant deforestation, which led to a lack of firewood and fodder, as well as water for drinking and irrigation. “It is our wisdom and intention to give voice to the feminine wisdom that can tip the scale of planetary consciousness,” says Smith. “We are wise elders stepping up to listen, speaking from our heart and experience and helping young people on deeper levels to develop a love for the Earth so that they can become environmentalists, too. This type of natural mentoring can be seen in Yemanjá, a documentary narrated by Alice Walker and produced by a friend of mine, Donna Roberts, who wanted the world to see the ecological sustainability and power found in community and faith via the stories of four extraordinary elder female leaders of the Afro-Indigenous Candomblé, the religion of nature that depends on access to the natural world in Bahia, Brazil. Yemanjá helps women to see the spiritual connection to Earth and nature that religious leaders are making. It also shows women as the spiritual leaders and wisdom keepers that we are.” As a delegate representing non-governmental organizations at UNCSW for 30 years, Smith will roll out her spiritual leadership program based on the principles similar to those of Andrew Harvey’s Academy of Sacred Leadership and train others how to present and facilitate it. She says, “Andrew is a great spiritual teacher and author whose message is one of positive spiritual growth, love, compassion and listening within. When women learn to listen within to their intuitive voice, we know we are the ones to protect the environment because we are most connected to the elements through our menstrual cycle, giving life and nurturing.” Betty Osceola Photo Credit: M. S. KennedyBetty OsceolaBetty Osceola is a lot of things in addition to being a grandmother—an Everglades resident, member of the Miccosuckee Indian Tribe, environmental and social justice activist who opposes the River of Grass Greenway Project (ROGG) as well as fracking and polluting of our waterways, and an airboat captain at Buffalo Tiger Airboat Tours, which she owns and operates with her husband. Osceola sees herself and her grandchildren as makers of history. “We are leaving our footprint in time and our children and grandchild deserve the right to leave theirs. Therefore, as a grandmother I am a role model showing my grandchildren how to care about the natural world. In our culture, which is matriarchal, our teachings are passed down orally from generation to generation through women. We believe that in order for our culture and language to survive, it has to be practiced and delivered verbally,” notes Osceola. Osceola’s actions are a way of life and showing her love for the natural world she is connected to. “My grandchildren see and hear me when I am speaking about nurturing and fostering respect for the natural world that they are apart of. They see me doing what I say, which reinforces the lessons. I wouldn’t expect them to understand these concepts as adults if they weren’t exposed to them throughout their childhood,” she says. Because we do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, but rather borrow it from our children, they want to see their wise women elders connected and paying attention to important things such as climate justice and climate solutions. They also want to see us taking action and speaking up to insure a healthy future for our planet. Osceola confirms this with an anecdote from the recent 80-mile Walk for Future Generations she organized to protest the ROGG and protect the Everglades. “For the first time in the Walk for Future Generations demonstrations we had more young people than elders, which is very encouraging. Our youngest walker was still in the womb, while another was five months old. It was good to see grandmothers bringing their grandchildren and mothers giving their unborn children an early start on environmental activism,” quips Osceola. B.C. Woman Organizes Care Packages To Fight The Northern Food Crisis You know, we complain about the rising prices of food at the grocery store; but, these people in northern Canada are having to pay nearly $30 for a head of cabbage. These people are going days without food because they just can't afford it. Here's a story about a woman who is trying to help them. The Huffington Post B.C. | By Sara Harowitz Posted: 01/16/2015 2:01 pm EST Updated: 01/23/2015 9:59 am EST Share 17473 Tweet 772 Nobody should have to pay $28 for a head of cabbage anywhere — let alone in Canada. That's the belief that drives Jennifer Gwilliam, who spends her days organizing food care packages for people she's never met. But she's not even sending aid to a Third World country; she's sending it to Canada's remote north. The high prices of groceries in Nunavut, for example — $47 for a box of laundry detergent or $105 for a case of water — have drawn increasing outcry from Canadians over the last few years. "It was just shocking to see the prices they were paying for a head of cabbage or a flat of water," Gwilliam told The Huffington Post B.C. "I was just appalled. It's hard enough to make ends meet down here, let alone with those sort of prices. So I wanted to do something." After doing some digging, Gwilliam came across the Facebook group Feeding My Family, designed to raise awareness about the northern crisis and advocate for change. But she wanted to turn outrage into action, so she started her own Facebook group, Helping Our Northern Neighbours, last summer. Gwilliam's group matches people who want to donate packages of food and other necessities with those in the north who need it most. People can either donate one box once, or choose to sponsor a family, meaning they regularly send care packages. There are no restrictions on what people can give, although many cater their boxes to the family they've been matched with. Gwilliam, who was born in the U.S., lives in Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island. She says she's always been involved in humanitarian work, but this is the first time she's been done so on a large scale in Canada. "When I saw that people in the north were going often days without eating or were putting children to bed hungry I thought, 'This is like a Third World country and just shouldn't be going on in our own country,'" she said. Elder Elisapee Ishulatak, 88, is pictured receiving a package of food. "I think the expression on her face says it all," said Jennifer Gwilliam. "Her daughter-in-law said she started crying and saying, 'Thank you' when she saw all the things." There are over 400 names on Gwilliam's list of people seeking assistance; just under half have received help in some way so far. She said many of donors (from across Canada) are living paycheque to paycheque themselves, but that doesn't stop them from giving back. And everyone seems truly grateful for the help. Candy Ivalutanar, who lives in Repulse Bay, Nunavut with her husband and two daughters under 10, said she cried the first time she received a care package. "I told my husband, 'I thought I wasn't going to get anything. I thought nobody would want to ever help us.' It touched me so much," Ivalutanar told HuffPost B.C. She frequently tells her sponsor, who has sent a few boxes already, that she loves her. "I love her for helping me so much," she said. "Even if it's just a little, I don't care — that's a lot for me." Elder Semi Malliki, 88, is pictured with a care package. "This box was for him and his 77-year-old brother. His daughter said he was speechless when he saw all the things," said Jennifer Gwilliam. Despite a federal program called Nutrition North, which subsidizes food retailers' costs of flying products to remote northern communities, grocery prices remain high. Shipping costs are clearly part of the problem, according to Gwilliam. When she sends a package that weighs between 15 and 20 kilograms to a northern family, the cost of shipping alone totals between $85 and $150. But cost be damned, she'll keep at it — someone's got to. "Canada's a rich country and we seem to have ample goods and ample wealth but it's shocking that part of our country should be living this way," Gwilliam, 59, said. "These people are asking for basic things; they're asking for a blanket or some socks or a pair of boots for their children. They want breakfast cereal. They're not asking for luxuries or anything. It just seems like a country like Canada should be able to support all its citizens." joykin Wow, this is the first I've heard of such problems in a western country. I know that food/products are higher when they have to all be flown in and such, but that high is just extreme. But you know that there have to be greenhouses where food is grown in Canada for production. Where does that food go, just to the locals? Seems there would be a better production in place; unless the food is being re-routed and people are just being gouged on purpose. haggiebe link Yes, Northern Canada and Alaska, they are gouging the people badly. Nearly $30 for cabbage! It is criminal in my opinion!

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Hannah Honeywill ​Hannah Honeywill is an award-winning artist, she has exhibited widely throughout the UK and Europe, she has been the recipient of Wellcome Trust funding and has undertaken residencies at the Barber Institute of Fine Art in Birmingham and the Chisenhale Studios in London. She is an elected member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. She is an artist-maker, combining her skills as both a sculptor and a furniture maker/restorer to make work, which reimagines and physically reshapes functional, everyday objects – frequently, but not exclusively, furniture. These re-shapings and deliberately visible ‘repairs’ bring the objects to life and always re-contextualise them, inviting the viewer to ‘read’ them in a new way, both as themselves and metaphorically. Her practice develops the argument that the ‘mend’, especially if disruptive of a common sense or expected narrative, will function as a queering tool within sculpture and drawing. Alongside making her own work, She has built a strong track record of working imaginatively and empathetically within and alongside communities as artist in residence, mentor and teacher.

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← Deputy city manager gets an extra title Shelters to stay open with new funding → Traditional journalists versus the blogosphere March 8th, 2009 · 28 Comments There has been a spate of stories in recent days from journalists in the MSM (mainstream media, just in case there’s one among you out there not familiar with that term) wringing their hands over the death of media and therefore democracy, as newspapers shut down, television stations lay off swathes of staff, and radio struggles. Along with that has been a not coincidental, I think, stream of stories from MSM journalists unhappy about the level of discourse that seems to have come with the rise of the webosphere. Judith Timson in the Globe had a column last Saturday about how web commenting is the new blood sport. The Globe’s health writer, Andre Picard, also had one during the week, looking at how the Internet and the nasty conversations on it are having an impact on science and health. Those are just two of the more prominent ones I noted, but they add to a growing concern about what the new form of journalism is going to be. It’s a strange time for me to watch this. I teach a course in the history of journalism and so I know that the constant in the business is the level of manic change. And I straddle two universes. I still work in MSM and I also blog. I like both worlds. MSM journalism, at its best, means really devoting yourself to trying to tell a complete story, with all that that demands in the way of rigorously searching out information and distilling it to something coherent for readers. But the blog world is great too. For me and for many of my MSM friends, it’s been a revelation to be able to have a dialogue with readers that goes far beyond the usual “Here’s my story, what do you think of it?” exchange in MSM. As one of my friends said recently, “It makes me feel like I really understand all the people out there who have been reading my stories all these years. Now I get to hear from them. The problem with most of us is that we only know a limited circle of people and we think everyone thinks like us. But this puts me in touch with whole different worlds.” I know I feel that way, too, and I feel privileged, for the most part, to have such interesting people commenting on my blog. But there is another side to WebWorld that bothers me, and both Judith’s and Andre’s columns struck a chord as a result. One is the abuse that gets heaped on journalists who do not write the story that certain readers think should be written. I have really noticed this recently, as people have dumped on me via web for not sufficiently crucifying people like Paul Haden or Judy Rogers or the Maleks. It’s just so puzzling to me. I went into journalism because people interest me and I want to know more about them, good and bad. When I was a kid, I was dying to know what was going on behind every picture window on our block. When you decide you’re going to make a villain of someone, you run the risk of blinding yourself to parts of their story. But it seems as though, in this increasingly partisan world, if you try to write that more balanced, more open story, you’re seen as a dupe, a wimp, a shill. The other part of the new web journalism that disturbs me is the lack of any kind of standards when it comes to disseminating “facts” and opinions. I know people like to imagine that MSM journalists have no standards, that they’ll print every scurrilous thing that crosses their desk. I just wish all the conspiracy theorists could spend time in a good newsroom, where reporters often turn down dozens of stories of alleged wrongdoing in a month. Why? Because they actually try to check them out, see if they can verify whether any of the information is true, sort out people’s imperfect understandings of how the bureaucracy works and see what still holds water — and only when they can be assured that there’s some validity to they start shaping it into a story. But out there in WebWorld, people think it’s good enough to BELIEVE something is true — without actually doing the hard work of checking anything — to put it out there as a fact. My friend who loves her new blog world is also disturbed by the conversations she has with some posters who don’t get why they can’t post libellous comments about people using their real names, without providing a shred of documentation. I’d like to think that, out of the tectonic shifts now reshaping traditional journalism, that we come out with a kind of information sharing that is better. It’s not a bad idea for reporters to have a dialogue with people in the community about how they do their jobs and to accept their input about what’s a story and whose point of view should be included. But I sometimes worry that it’s going to be much worse and than, in 10 years, when the MSM media are dead and buried, information and news will consist of isolated groups of people all screaming out their distorted version of the truth only to each other.

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School workshops Exploring Huntington disease Huntington disease Jeans for Genes As part of this year’s Jeans for Genes day, The Guardian has published one family’s story of their experience of the devastating condition, Huntington disease. Huntington disease (HD) is an incurable ‘autosomal dominant condition’. All of us inherit our genes from our parents and the genes are bundled together on long, discrete pieces of DNA called chromosomes. There are 22 pairs of ‘autosomes’ and 1 one pair of sex chromosomes; 23 pairs (46) of chromosomes altogether. One set of chromosomes (22 autosomes and one sex chromosome) is inherited from each of our parents. Because our chromosomes come in pairs, our genes also come in pairs – one of each pair comes from our mother, the other from our father. Autosomal dominant conditions refer to conditions that occur when there is a change in (at least) one copy of a particular gene. In HD, the huntingtin (or simply ‘htt‘) gene is affected. Every version of the htt gene contains a repetitive stretch of three letters of DNA; these three letters are ‘CAG’. People without HD have 35, or fewer CAG repeats; inheriting just one copy of the htt gene with 36 or more CAG repeats will cause HD. The greater the number of CAG repeats, the more severe the symptoms of the disease are and the earlier in life they begin. Because only one changed copy of the gene is required to cause the condition, if an adult with the changed version htt has children, there is a 50/50 chance they will pass that changed version on to each child they have. Today it is relatively easy to check if an individual carries a changed version of their htt gene. People not at risk of HD tend to assume that those who are at risk (people who have a parent with HD) would prefer to know whether they have inherited a changed version of the gene or not. The rationale is that by knowing, people can plan their lives in advance, and not knowing is tantamount to living in hear. However, the majority of people at risk of HD prefer not to take the test – the disease is so devastating that knowing you are going to develop it can feel like a death sentence. HD is currently incurable. It is possible to relieve some of the symptoms of the condition, but people with a changed htt gene will develop the condition in later life. Because it is caused by a genetic change, HD is a potential candidate for gene therapy. The idea is that the damaging effects of the changed version of htt can be prevented by silencing that changed version so that only the ‘healthy’ version is active. Such a treatment is likely a long time away, but researchers continue to work hard to find ways of curing both the symptoms and the underlying cause of Huntington’s disease. Watch Luke’s story; Luke’s mum is affected by HD. More information about HD is available from the following sources: The Huntington’s Disease Association

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Billions of screens have produced … what? by Lloyd Dunlap | Email the author Genedata Nanoliter acoustic compound dispensing technology; custom-made benchtop enclosures with automated liquid handling vortexers and mixers; chemical libraries that have grown to include more than 1 million small molecules and grow by 20 percent every year; ministores that have the capacity to store million of compound in 384 well microplates at -20º C that can be cherry-picked from the same or different collections—and that's just a brief look at the advanced equipment side. Elsewhere, there's induced fit docking; rational drug design; structure-based lead optimization; integration of experimental and in- silico data by cross-functional expert teams and dozens of other approaches. It's all subsumed under the single rubric of high-throughput screening (HTS), which is used in one form or another in hundreds, if not thousands, of labs around the globe. HTS is defined as a method for scientific experimentation especially used in drug discovery and relevant to the fields of biology and chemistry. Using robotics, data processing and control software, liquid handling devices and sensitive detectors, HTS allows a researcher to quickly conduct millions of biochemical, genetic or pharmacological tests. Through this process, one can rapidly identify active compounds, antibodies or genes which modulate a particular bimolecular pathway. The results of these experiments provide starting points for drug design and for understanding the interaction or role of a particular biochemical process in biology. Yet after 25 years of HTS, we have little by way of NMEs that have contributed to the cure of disease or alleviation of debilitating symptoms. Several years ago, a respected U.K. researcher, Dr. David Horrobin, vented his frustration by decrying the process altogether. He noted that estimates of the ratios of compounds synthesized to marketed drugs at the time of peak success of Nobel Laureates Black, Bovet, Elion and Hitchings was about 100:1; most of the industry from about 1960 to about 1990 saw about 10,000:1 to 30,000:1; Big Pharma since the introduction of combinatorial chemistry and HTS, well over 1,000,000:1. Horrobin asked the question, "Is the approach of building a bigger haystack really the best way to find more needles? Dr. Stephan Heyse, head of Genedata's Screener business unit, doesn't care for the haystack analogy because he says HTS has changed. He thinks the "more needles" approach has been supplanted by a "sharper needles" goal. "It's more like a well-tended field where you already know a lot about what's in each row," he says. "We're evolving toward biology-rich information that goes beyond simple endpoint assays and uses better detection technologies, such as optical assays and ion channel readers, to make results more trustworthy. The problem has always been that what you saw at the first filter will always be out there and can affect basic business decisions. You can't always afford to reproduce scans to get to the next level. High-content screening, for example, provides a much broader basis for decision-making. You can generate active plus toxicology information, for example. Maybe weak actives that have a good tox profile are more important than just strong hits." Summarizing the current state-of-the-art technology, Heyse notes that classical primary screens continue to be performed in high throughput—i.e., millions of wells. As new technologies such as high-content screening and time-resolved fluorescence, label-free and electrophysiology methods deliver more information per well and screened compound, data management and analysis become more complex. Mastering these challenges yields more precise information at the HTS stage on compound mode-of-action and potential therapeutic window. Complete bioactivity profiles of compounds are compiled from sets of high-throughput primary and secondary screens, enabling optimized decisions on compound progression into the hit-to-lead phase. At Schrödinger Inc. screening can vary from ligand- based similarity searches where thousands or tens of thousands of molecules are screened per second to much more refined and specific studies such as induced fit docking, explains Dr. Woody Sherman, vice president of applications science. In May 2010, his group reported the results of a large-scale, ligand-based virtual screening study, with the goal of improving database enrichments. The study involved 11 pharmaceutically relevant targets to investigate the interrelation between 8 two-dimensional fingerprinting methods, 13 atom-typing schemes, 13 bit scaling rules and 12 similarity metrics using the new cheminformatics package Canvas. In total, 157, 872 virtual screens were performed to assess the ability of each combination of parameters to identify actives in a database screen. In general, fingerprint methods such as MOLPRINT2D, Radial and Dendritic that encode information about the local environment beyond simple linear paths outperformed other fingerprint methods. Atom-typing schemes with more specific information, such as Daylight, Mol2 and Carhart were generally superior to more generic atom-typing schemes. Enrichment factors across all targets were improved considerably with the best settings, although no single set of parameters performed optimally on all targets. Kinases remain an important drug target class within the pharmaceutical industry, Sherman notes, but he adds that the rational design of kinase inhibitors is plagued by the complexity of gaining selectivity for a small number of proteins within a family of more than 500 related enzymes. He and his team have developed a computational screening method for identifying the location and thermodynamic properties of water molecules within a protein binding site that can yield insight into previously inexplicable selectivity and structure-activity relationships. Four kinase systems (Src family, Abl/c-Kit, Syk/ZAP-70, and CDK2/4) were investigated, and differences in predicted water molecule locations and energetics were able to explain the experimentally observed binding selectivity profiles. The successful predictions across the range of kinases suggest that this screening methodology could be generally applicable for predicting selectivity profiles in related targets. "Understanding kinase selectivity is key to developing effective therapies that don 't have side effects," he concludes. As Sherman's work reveals, screening that predicts or confirms experimental observations can answer, in silico, fundamental questions about molecular interactions and be used as an important part of the drug development process.

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Formula 2 2018 Control Components Being selected for the third generation of Formula 2 is not only testament to the performance of the Hewland product but demonstrates its cost effectiveness as well. The FIA Formula 2 Championship – grooming ground for future Formula 1 drivers – launched their new Formula 2 car, the F2 2018, which was released for the start of the 2018 season. Once again, Hewland is proud to be supplying the 6-speed longitudinal gearbox for the car which is powered by a V6 3.4 litre turbo-charged Mecachrome engine delivering 620 HP at 8,750 rpm. The F2 2018 has been designed to look similar to the new generation of F1 cars including a halo to the new car for additional driver protection. The wider and aggressive bodywork styling – with the chassis again produced by Dallara – means the car is 159mm longer than its predecessor, as well as being 32kg heavier (including a driver). Its width, 1900mm, is unchanged from the previous car. The F2 2018 retained a number of mechanical parts from the GP2/11, including the majority of the gearbox, brake system and some suspension components. Formula 2 series boss Bruno Michel explained in this article in Autosport, “We want to make sure that the teams not spending too much money, [so] we are trying to make as many common parts as possible from the old car to the new car to make sure that they can keep the spare parts,” he told Autosport. “Mainly the (Hewland) gearbox – it’s not going to change, maybe one part – but the rest is going to be exactly the same.” Hewland provided a similar gearbox to the previous two generations of Formula 2 (GP2) cars, the GP2/11 and the GP2/08 as well as supplying the series predecessor, Formula 3000. Being selected for the third generation of Formula 2 is not only testament to the performance of the Hewland product but demonstrates its cost effectiveness as well. Hewland provides control-component gearboxes to several other race series including FIA Formula 3, DTM and several teams in Formula E. Hewland Gearbox LFSC-200 - F2 gearbox Compact Mecachrome V6 Turbo and Hewland 6-speed sequential gearbox combination Rear View of F2 The rear wing, diffuser and rear suspension mount directly to the Hewland gearbox "Mainly the (Hewland) gearbox - it's not going to change, maybe one part - but the rest is going to be exactly the same.” - Bruno Michel, FIA F2 Series I need a bespoke transmission solution Hewland manufactures bespoke transmission solutions for every level of motorsport, OEM automobile manufacturers and other industries that require precision, high-performance transmission technology. We would welcome the opportunity to talk to you about your project. Bespoke Options

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Wiesbaden: the Lutheran "Marktkirche" (Market Church) was built as a Gothic revival basilica with three naves. © Bjoern Rudek Homepage»Be Inspired»Religion Monumental expressions of sublime architecture and the power of the Church The cities of the Historic Highlights of Germany present a vivid record of how religion evolved in Germany - indeed, throughout much of Europe - during the past two millennia. In the 4th century, the city of Trier numbered between 60,000 and 80,000 inhabitants, saw six Roman emperors reign from here and, under Constantine the Great (306-316), became an early center for the spread of Christianity north of the Alps. Numerous churches and the "Dom" (Cathedral) mark Augsburg as the seat of a bishopric. It was here that, in 1518, Martin Luther and Cardinal Cajetan engaged in their famous debate. It is the fertile interplay of religious and secular power that gave Augsburg its inimitable flair. The "Augustinerkloster" (Augustinian Monastery) dating back to 1277, is a Gothic monastery complex in Erfurt. Inside there is an exhibition that shows life and work of Martin Luther who lived here as a monk from 1505 till 1511.The Frisian monk Liudger, dispatched on mission by order of the Emperor Charlemagne (Charles the Great), founded a monasterium (cloister) to which Münster today thanks its name. Following the violent introduction of the Reformation, the Anabaptist war raged here. In 1628 the last Protestants were expelled from Münster. Christianity as a legal religion In A.D. 313, Roman Emperor Constantine the Great recognized Christianity as a legal religion in the Roman Empire. The imperial city of Trier quickly became an early center for the spread of Christianity north of the Alps. Within 20 years, a Roman palace was leveled and replaced by the largest Christian church in Antiquity on the site of the present "Dom" (Cathedral). A ceiling painting from the first quarter of the fourth century, found 3 m (10ft) under the crossing of the "Dom", probably belonged to Constantine's palace and was put together from more than 60,000 pieces over a period of almost 40 years. The ceiling painting may be found at the "Museum am Dom" (Cathedral Museum). Over the next two centuries, many Germanic tribes fell to the Franks, who took over politically after 485 A.D. In 496, Clovis, King of the Franks, was converted and became the defender of Christianity in the West. The Franks became a Catholic people. Places of interest: - Konstantin Basilika (Constantine Basilica), Trier - Dom (Cathedral), Trier - Abtei St. Matthias (St. Matthias' Abbey), Trier - Museum am Dom (Cathedral Museum), Trier Missionaries spread Christianity Würzburg's prominence was set in motion in 686 when three Irish missionaries came to the town to convert its people. After the three were murdered and later canonized as saints, the pilgrims started pouring in. In 742 AD St. Boniface founded the bishopric of Würzburg and named St. Burkard the first bishop. Today's "Festung Marienberg" (Marienberg Fortress) was built on the original stronghold. - Festung Marienberg (Marienberg Fortress), Würzburg - Dom (Cathedral), Würzburg - Museum am Dom (Museum at the Cathedral), Würzburg Christianity spurs growth In 863 in Heidelberg, the "Michaelskloster" (St. Michael's Monastery) was founded overlooking the city on the Heiligenberg mountain inside an ancient Celtic rampart. At the same time, the bishopric of Worms extended its influence into the valley. Church towers stretched ever farther toward the sky in hopes to bring a closer connection to God. At the same time, bishops and other church officials took on increasingly political roles, and their palaces and castles prove the wealth that ensued. The Michaelskloster, today surviving only in ruins, is located at the top of the Heiligenberg, and can be reached by the "Philosophenweg" (Philosopher's Walk). - Philosophenweg (Philosopher's Walk), Heidelberg Humanism plants seeds of Reformation In the 14th century, the Renaissance, a humanistic movement, spread to Germany, and many came to question the absolute power of the Catholic Church. It was in 1505 that Martin Luther entered the Augustinian Monastery in Erfurt and soon took his monk's vow. While studying Theology at the University of Erfurt, he was exposed to the ideas of the Humanists. Martin Luther lived in the "Augustinerkloster" (Augustinian Monastery) as a monk from 1505 to 1511. Today, the monastery complex houses an important library with rare books and a permanent exhibition about the life of Luther. - Augustinerkloster (Augustinian Monastery), Erfurt - Dom und St. Severikirche, (Cathedral and St. Severus Church), Erfurt - Kaufmannskirche, (Merchan's Church), Erfurt The Reformation begins In 1517, Luther signaled the beginning of the Reformation by posting 95 theses at Wittenberg. A few months later, Luther was received warmly at Heidelberg University, Germany's oldest institution of higher learning, where he defended the theses. Numerous churches and the "Dom" (Cathedral) mark Augsburg as the seat of a bishopric. It was here that, in 1518, Martin Luther and Cardinal Cajetan engaged in their famous debate. - Alte Universität (Old University), Heidelberg - Luthertafel (Luther Plaque), Heidelberg - Dom und St. Severikirche (Cathedral and St. Severus Church), Erfurt - Kaufmannskirche (Merchant's Church), Erfurt - St. Anna-Kirche (St. Anna Church), Augsburg Many cities rejected the Reformation In some tow, the Reformation met with violent responses. In 1532, following its introduction in Münster, the Anabaptist war raged in. Three iron cages still hang from the steeple of the "St. Lambertikirche" (St. Lamprecht's Church), where executed Anabaptists were exhibited as a warning to the populace. In 1628 the last Protestants were expelled from Münster. - St. Lambertikirche (St. Lamprecht's Church), Münster Religious Territorialism In 1530, the Augsburg Confession of Lutheran faith was issued, followed in 1555 by the Peace of Augsburg. This established an arrangement of religious territorialism rather than toleration. It recognized the existence of Catholicism and Lutheranism in the German Empire and provided that citizens should adopt the religion of their respective rulers. It was in Münster and Osnabrück also that the Peace of Westphalia was negotiated and signed, in 1648, ending the Thirty Years' War. The two locations were required because Protestant and Catholic leaders refused to meet each other. Sweden had favored Osnabrück due to its Protestant background, while France chose Münster due to its Catholic background. Among its terms, the treaty gave equality to Catholics and Protestants in the 300 states of the Holy Roman Empire. - Rathaus des Westfälischen Friedens (Town Hall of the Westphalian Peace), Münster - Rathaus, Friedenssaal (Town Hall, Hall of Peace), Osnabrück Jewish expulsion and Holocaust In Osnabrück, the "Felix Nussbaum Haus" (Felix Nussbaum House) is named after the artist Felix Nussbaum, who was born in Osnabrück in 1904 and murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. Like no other painter, his impressive works record the stations of his life, from the "happy childhood" in a Jewish merchant family, via initial artistic success in Berlin, to the despair of a persecuted Jew living in Belgian exile. The creative tension between the museum´s architecture and painting admonishes us not to forget the fate of Europe's Jews during the Holocaust. - Alte Synagoge (Old Synagogue), Erfurt - Aktives Museum Spiegelgasse (Active Museum of German-Jewish History), Wiesbaden - Rathaus, Gedenkraum (Town Hall, Commemoration Room), Wiesbaden - Felix Nussbaum Haus (Felix Nussbaum House), Osnabrück - Synagoge/ Jüdisches Kulturmuseum (Synagogue/ Museum of Jewish Culture), Augsburg Discover our cities!

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Home Research > Members > 1509-1558 > HUSSEY, Henry (by 1495-1541/44) HUSSEY, Henry (by 1495-1541/44), of Slinfold, Suss. Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1509-1558, ed. S.T. Bindoff, 1982 Biography Detail Offices Held Family and Education b. by 1495, s. of one Hussey of Slinfold. m. Eleanor, da. and h. of John Bradbridge of Slinfold, 3s. inc. Sir Henry and John† 2da.1 Commr. subsidy, Suss. 1523, 1524, sewers 1538.2 As early as 1290 a Henry Hussey had been one of the knights of the shire for Sussex and the name recurs in this capacity until the early 15th century. The men concerned were of the Hussey family of Harting, a line which died out in 1471: Henry Hussey of Slinfold was doubtless a member of a younger branch but its ancestry has not been traced. His wife brought him lands in Slinfold as well as others in Cuckfield which had belonged to her mother, daughter of John Payne of that place. In 1516 Hussey sold the manor of Denne in Horsham to Thomas Polsted and Thomas Jefferay, but nine years later he acquired other property in its place, including lands in Chingfield in Slinfold for £60. In 1524 he was assessed at Slinfold on £40 in goods.3 Although Hussey was doubtless a man of standing in the nearby town of Horsham, his election there in 1529 was probably the work of the lord of the borough, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk: Hussey’s fellow-Member and kinsman Alfred Berwick was in the duke’s service and his sons were later to be associated with the 3rd and 4th Dukes. In compliance with the King’s request of 1536 for the reelection of the previous Members both he and Berwick probably sat again in the Parliament of that year and may have done so in 1539 and 1542, when the names of the Members are again lost. Nothing has come to light about Hussey’s role in the Commons, but in 1534 he was accused by the vicar of Pagham in the Star Chamber of forcible entry, robbery and assault, to which he replied that he was the lessee of the parsonage and had merely been collecting his tithe: the outcome of the case is unknown.4 Hussey made his will on 9 June 1541, asking to be buried at Slinfold beside his brother John. He expressed the hope that his wife and executrix would honour the agreement whereby their eldest son received the manor house and some of the property at Slinfold, while she had a life-interest in other lands. He bequeathed £100 each to his unmarried daughter Catherine and his son George, the two children for whom he had not hitherto made any provision. The will was witnessed by John Caryll. Neither the date of Hussey’s death, nor of probate of the will, has been found, but Eleanor Hussey was a widow when she made her own will on 24 Mar. 1544.5 Ref Volumes: 1509-1558 Author: R. J.W. Swales 1. Date of birth estimated from first reference. Comber, Suss. Genealogies (Horsham), 185-6. 2. LP Hen. VIII, iii-iv, xiii. 3. CP, vii. 11; J. E. Mousley, ‘Suss. country gentry in the reign of Eliz.’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1956), 559; Cal. Chs. and Rolls in Bodl. Lib. ed. Turner and Coxe, 559; Suss. Rec. Soc. lvi. 49. 4. Suss. Rec. Soc. xvi. 40. 5. W. Suss. RO, wills 2, ff. 229v, 230v; 5, f. 4v.

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Alabama Artist’s Gallery The Alabama Artists Gallery, located at the offices of the Alabama State Council on the Arts in the RSA Tower in downtown Montgomery, provides an on-going showcase of the work of Alabama artists in all media. Alabama Judicial Department Museum Located in downtown Montgomery, the Museum includes several areas featuring unique architecture, historical displays, and art galleries. Also offers guided tours of the Alabama Judicial Building, in which you will learn the difference between the trial courts and the appellate courts, and how a case is handled as it moves through the judicial system, ending with the Alabama Supreme Court. You will also learn about the Alabama appellate courts' rich history. Alabama River Region Arts Center Wetumpka, AL Their mission is to bring the people of the River Region together to appreciate, learn and create all types of arts and cultures. The Arts Center has four classrooms with access to two overflow classrooms and a staged auditorium. The Pottery Studio is fully equipped with three pottery wheels, a clay press and sink. A second is equipped with a series of floor plugs to accommodate sewing machines, computers, etc. There is a music room with a small number of basic instruments for in-house use. And the fourth contains a number of easels, art horses and tables to support drawing pads and canvas. American Sports Art Museum The American Sport Art Museum and Archives (ASAMA) is a division of the United States Sports Academy in Daphne, Alabama, and is dedicated to the preservation of sports history, art, and literature. Housed in artistic surroundings, in the architecturally acclaimed main campus building at the United States Sports Academy, the gallery regularly features exhibits of world-renowned sport artists. Exhibits spotlight visiting artists on a rotating basis as well as a permanent collection of prints, sculpture, original paintings, photographs and other arts media. Bell South Gallery The Bell South Gallery located in Tuscaloosa is an art and photography museum. Birmingham Museum of Art The Birmingham Museum of Art is the largest municipal museum in the Southeast and one of the premier regional art museums in the country. Collection includes more than 21,000 works spanning the history of art from 5000 B.C. to the present. Offers special exhibits and educational programs. Eastern Shore Art Center Eastern Shore Art Center is a non-profit arts organization located in downtown Fairhope, Alabama. The Art Center houses four galleries with exhibits that change monthly, as well a gallery featuring member artists' work for sale. The Academy offers a wide variety of classes and workshops in five spacious studios. Classes are offered on a quarterly basis to both adults and children. Gadsden Museum of Art The museum features a permanent collection of paintings, sculpture, prints, and local historical decorative arts, plus monthly changing exhibits featuring works of local and regional artists. Group tours available. Annual exhibits include Gadsden Art Association Exhibition; Art Students Exhibit; New Age Art Alliance Exhibition; Quilts, A Southern Tradition; Photography Competition; and Holiday Dollhouse and Miniature Exhibition. Huntsville Art Galleries at UAH The UAH art department presents the work of regionally and nationally known artists, visiting-artist lectures, as well as offering exhibition opportunities for faculty and students. There are two gallery/exhibition spaces on campus -- the Union Grove Gallery & Meeting Hall and the University Center Gallery. The Huntsville Museum of Art, North Alabama’s leading visual arts center, fills its seven galleries with a variety of exhibitions throughout the year, including prestigious traveling exhibits and the work of nationally and regionally acclaimed artists. The Museum’s own 2,300-piece permanent collection also forms the basis for several exhibitions each year. In addition to its exhibitions, the Museum offers art classes for children and adults along with special programs, lectures, and musical presentations that add extra dimensions to the art work on display. Isabel Anderson Comer Museum and Arts Center Located in Sylacauga, the Museum offers special art exhibits, sculpture, the Native Sons Gallery, historical photgraphs, historical displays, and classes. Jan Dempsey Community Arts Center Community Theatre, Ballroom Dancing, Featured Regional Artists, and Traveling Exhibitions are just a sampling of what the Jan Dempsey Community Arts Center has to offer. The Community Arts Center was constructed to better serve the artistic needs of the Auburn-Opelika area and provide residents and visitors with access to an outstanding, active schedule of exhibitions, musical concerts, lectures, art classes and special events for children and adults throughout the year. The Arts Center also provides artists, dancers, and actors the opportunity to offer programs and instructional classes to area citizens. The Community Arts Center contains an Art Gallery, 2 studio/classrooms, a children's gallery, a conference room, and a performance room. The Community Arts Center currently offers dance, theatre, and art classes, as well as theatrical performances, dance recitals, and other activities. Located in Auburn. Jule Collins Smith Museum of Art The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art is home to Auburn University's permanent collection of American and European art. The museum gardens present a series of formal gardens that incorporate walking paths, water features and fountains. Each of the galleries is specially designed to complement a permanent collection, including the Audubon Collection, Works on Paper Study Room, and the "Advancing American Art Collection," 36 paintings and drawings that represent the post-World War II era. The collection includes many of the best examples ever executed by such well-known figures of the American art scene as John Marin, Georgia O'Keefe, Ben Shahn, Arthur Dove, Ralston Crawford, Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden. The Museum also offers traveling exhibitions, accompanied by educational programming that includes lectures by noted authorities, special symposia, catalogs, guided tours and opening events. Kentuck Museum and Art Center Nestled around a landscaped courtyard in downtown Northport, you'll find the Kentuck Museum of Art, the Gallery at Kentuck and the acclaimed Kentuck Studio Artists. Sometimes eclectic, occasionally experimental, the Gallery at Kentuck showcases the work of up-and-comers, while the Kentuck Museum of Art exhibits bimonthly exhibits of nationally known and established artists. The new museum, completed in the spring of 2002, is now the largest art museum along the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Tampa. It is located in Mobile's Langan Park, just two miles from Interstate 65. Offers a permanent collection of more than 6,000 works of art, with American art of the 1930s-40s, work by southern artists, art of the French Barbizon School, contemporary American crafts, late 19th century American art, and Asian, African and European works. Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts For seventy years, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts has been a showcase for the visual arts in Central Alabama. A primary focus of the Museum’s mission is collecting and preserving works by some of history’s best known, and some of our region’s best loved artists. Collections include American Art, Old Master Prints, porcelain and glass collections, and special traveling exhibitions. Robinson Iron Factory Tour Robinson Iron is located in Alexander City. Offers a free tour of the facilities that produce cast iron, aluminum and bronze historic reproductions, furniture, lamps, fountains, urns, and more. During the tour you will see the projects that are currently being working on. Sloss Furnaces On April 18, 1882, Sloss Furnaces began producing iron and did not stop until ninety years later. Over the decades, Sloss Furnaces gave rise to the city of Birmingham and served as a battleground for economic, employment and social reform. Now recognized as a National Historic Landmark, Sloss Furnaces is open to the public as a museum of industry which speaks to the contributions of the working men who labored there. With its massive furnaces, web of pipes, and tall smokestacks, it offers us a glimpse into the great industrial past of the South and our nation. Wiregrass Museum of Art Located in Dothan, the Wiregrass Museum of Art offers art exhibits, education programs, and special events.

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Papers (Peer-reviewed) Constructing Data Curation Profiles Michael Witt Jacob Carlson D. Scott Brandt Melissa H. Cragin DOI: https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v4i3.117 This paper presents a brief literature review and then introduces the methods, design, and construction of the Data Curation Profile, an instrument that can be used to provide detailed information on particular data forms that might be curated by an academic library. These data forms are presented in the context of the related sub-disciplinary research area, and they provide the flow of the research process from which these data are generated. The profiles also represent the needs for data curation from the perspective of the data producers, using their own language. As such, they support the exploration of data curation across different research domains in real and practical terms. With the sponsorship of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, investigators from Purdue University and the University of Illinois interviewed 19 faculty subjects to identify needs for discovery, access, preservation, and reuse of their research data. For each subject, a profile was constructed that includes information about his or her general research, data forms and stages, value of data, data ingest, intellectual property, organization and description of data, tools, interoperability, impact and prestige, data management, and preservation. Each profile also presents a specific dataset supplied by the subject to serve as a concrete example. The Data Curation Profiles are being published to a public wiki for questions and discussion, and a blank template will be disseminated with guidelines for others to create and share their own profiles. This study was conducted primarily from the viewpoint of librarians interacting with faculty researchers; however, it is expected that these findings will complement a wide variety of data curation research and practice outside of librarianship and the university environment. Copyright for papers and articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the University of Edinburgh. It is a condition of publication that authors license their paper or article under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.

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Tag Archive for: economics You are here: Home / GHSA Blog / economics Guest Blog by Bob Ransford: “Multi-generational Community Planning” October 24, 2014 /1 Comment/in Blog /by Admin I’ve been attending public meetings about community planning and development for more than 35 years. I’ve sat through more than 300 public hearings about rezonings, community plans and development projects in municipalities throughout the Lower Mainland. I have attended probably double that number of open houses, planning committee meetings, design panels, neighbourhood planning workshops and charettes. No, I’m not looking for expressions of sympathy. I’ve been there willingly. Often, I’ve participated as a concerned citizen and almost as often, I’ve been there because it’s part of what I’ve been making my living at for the past 25 years. I’ve learned a lot observing or participating in the process that shapes our neighbourhoods, towns and cities. I’ve witnessed what works and what doesn’t work in planning and designing the housing that we live in. I’ve learned that planning and building a town or city is not easy. It’s all about balancing a wide range of interests and making a series of trade-offs. I’ve learned that most people don’t initially engage in the tough issues about community building to seek compromise. Compromise comes after a lot of discussion. I’ve learned that you shouldn’t assume that everyone comes into the room with the same level of understanding and knowledge. I’ve learned that it takes a long time to move people from focusing on their self interests to focusing on the community’s interest. I’ve also learned that when you spend the time trying to do this and you are successful, often people will realize that their own interests can best be accommodated on that common ground that they’ve discovered. But the most profound thing I’ve learned is that too often, the wrong people are in the room. That has led to long and non-productive processes. It’s led to unreasonable expectations and plans that fall far short of what’s really possible. I can’t count the number of times I’ve scanned a room full of people who are voicing their concerns about a long-term community plan and have seen nothing but people like me — those of us with a lot of grey hair. I’ve sat through too many public hearings on new housing developments where speaker after speaker objecting to a developer’s plan were people much older than the demographic cohort that the project was designed to accommodate. Far too often, those participating in planning and influencing the important decisions are not the people who will be most impacted by those decisions over the long term. There are 2.3 million people living in Metro Vancouver today. By 2041, less than 30 years from now, there will be another million people living in the region. Most of the housing we are building today will be no more than halfway through its lifespan 30 years from now. A lot of that housing will be occupied then by people who are less than 30 years old today. That demographic cohort — young people 10 to 29 years of age — represents about 26 per cent of our current regional population. You don’t see many of them at public hearings and planning workshops. They aren’t tweeting about housing developments and most of them aren’t reading community newspapers every week to find out what’s happening in their backyard. Most simply aren’t engaged in civic issues. Another demographic cohort that isn’t deeply engaged today are the people who will be occupying the homes we are building today as retirees and in the golden years of their lives. Those who are 30 to 54 years of age today — representing 38 per cent of today’s population — are simply too busy to be involved in civic issues today. They are raising families and working hard, trying to earn a living. In our connected and fast-paced modern world, their lives are busier than they ever expected when they were young. They can’t find the time and energy to attend public meetings. So who is in the room? Who is packing the public hearings and lining up at the speaker’s podium to try to convince municipal councils to slow the pace of change? The majority are usually people 55 years of age or older. Today, this group represents just over a quarter of the current population. In 27 years, when the housing we are approving today is just short of halfway through its life span, the youngest of this demographic cohort will be 82 years old. I am not saying the voices of these people shouldn’t be heard. But their voices need to be among a whole chorus of collaboration that includes the people whom the change we are planning today is meant to accommodate. We need to find new ways of reaching out to the people who are going to be living 25 and 30 years from now in the housing, neighbourhoods and towns we are planning and building today. We need to engage them in the discussion, trade-offs and decisions that are the key ingredients of good long-term plans. They are the ones who are going to live with what we plan today. Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with Counterpoint Communications Inc. He is a former real estate developer who specializes in urban land-use issues. Email: ransford@counterpoint.ca or Twitter:@BobRansfordThis opinion piece was originally published in the Vancouver Sun, March 21, 2014 The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and are presented here by the GHSA to encourage healthy debate. The GHSA Blog exists as a resource to enable members concerned with the environmental and community stewardship of Grandview Heights to voice perspectives. When directors of the Association contribute to the blog, they do so as private citizens, not as officers representing the Association. The GHSA reserves the right to edit, condense or reject any contribution.

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Home Hardware Apple Debuts New MacBooks, Mac OS X Lion Apple Debuts New MacBooks, Mac OS X Lion By Sean Michael Kerner | February 24, 2011 After weeks of speculation, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) today officially announced an updated lineup of MacBook Pro notebooks including Intel's Thunderbolt I/O, technology. The new MacBooks aren't the only new release from Apple today. Mac OS X Lion, the next generation of Apple's operating system, is now available as a developer preview as well. The release comes just ahead of a media event Apple has scheduled next week in San Francisco, where the company is widely expected to unveil the next version of its popular iPad tablet computer. Intel's Thunderbolt is the commercial version of a technology that Intel has been talking about since at least 2009 under the code name Light Peak. The promise of Thunderbolt is for up to 10 Gbps of I/O performance for peripherals and attached devices. In addition to Thunderbolt, the new MacBook Pros also include updated Intel Core i5 and i7 processors for the 13, 15 and 17-inch MacBook Pro models. Previously the 13-inch MacBook Pro was running an older Intel Core Duo processor. Apple last updated its MacBook Pro lineup in April 2010. Apple also recently refreshed its MacBook AIR lineup with solid state drives and improved processing power. The new MacBook Pros announced this week are also being enhanced with integrated FaceTime HD cameras. FaceTime is Apple's video chat technology that is also available on its iOS-powered devices, including the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch. The 13-inch MacBook Pro base model has a 2.3 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor and 320 GB hard drive, and is priced at $1,199. The new 15-inch MacBook Pro enters the market with a 2.0 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, AMD Radeon HD 6490M and 500 GB hard drive and is priced at $1,799. The 17-inch MacBook Pro includes a 2.2 GHz quad-ore Intel Core i7, AMD Radeon HD 6750M and 750 GB hard drive and carries a price tag of $2,499. The new generation of MacBook Pros is being shipped with Apple's Mac OS X Snow Leopard operating system, though a new operating system is in the works. Snow Leopard, also known as Mac OS X 10.6, first hit the market in the summer of 2009. Apple's Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" is now available as a developer preview. Lion provides a number of new features to Mac users including a new dashboard interface called Mission Control. Mission Control seeks to unify the desktop experience and give users a view of everything running on their Mac. The process of starting applications is also getting a boost in Lion with the new Launchpad. According to Apple, Launchpad will make it easier to both find and launch applications. Lion also includes a new Wi-Fi file transfer feature called AirDrop to help make it easier for users copy files wirelessly across Macs. "The iPad has inspired a new generation of innovative features in Lion," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement. "Developers are going to love Mission Control and Launchpad, and can now start adding great new Lion features like full screen, gestures, Versions and Auto Save to their own apps." Lion is currently available as a developer preview, with the final version expected to be generally available this summer. Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

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Home > Case Studies > The Savoy Hotel, London The Savoy Hotel, London As part of the ambitious £100 million restoration project, new water softening equipment from Kinetico has been installed at the recently re-opened Savoy in London, one of the world’s great, iconic hotels. The Kinetico system will eliminate problems with hard water, helping to maintain the efficiency and performance of building services plant whilst making sure that surfaces and sanitary ware in this exclusive hotel retain their luxurious sparkle for as long as possible. The Savoy, a Fairmont Managed Hotel, closed in December 2007 for an extensive refurbishment program which encompassed the entire building from its impressive entrance and the American Bar to the world-renowned Savoy Grill and the 268 guest rooms and suites. In the project, a total of thirty eight new River Suites and guestrooms have been added, alongside nine Personality suites and a stately 325-square meter, 2-bedroom Royal Suite which is truly fit for a King. The resulting expansion in water services, coupled with the Savoy’s location in a hard water area, demanded an increase in the water softening system at the hotel. Kinetico’s patented non-electric, automatic system proved the perfect choice. Paul Daciuk, Construction Manager at the project’s mechanical and electrical services contractor, SPIE Matthew Hall, tells the story. “Softened water prevents the scale build up you normally get on sanitary and brassware in hard water areas and stops soap scum appearing on the laundry. By inhibiting the build up of scale in pipe work and on heat exchangers and elements within the hotel’s hot water plant, it also keeps the services running as efficiently as possible”. Installed in the basement of the Savoy, the two new Kinetico CP 213 OD water softeners add to the eight existing units at the hotel which have been operating successfully there for a number of years. The Kinetico water softeners work by removing the calcium and magnesium ions in the hard water through an ion exchange process. The twin tank design ensures that softened water can be provided continuously to meet the needs of the hotel; while one tank is activated the other is being cleaned with a salt solution to remove the calcium and magnesium ions. A fully automatic control valve measures the soft water used and only regenerates on demand, allowing water usage to vary each day without causing unnecessary waste. At the Savoy, there is now sufficient softening capacity to continue water flows even if two of the ten units are out of service for maintenance at any time. The restoration has introduced environmental technologies and efficiencies wherever possible. For example, a combined heat and power (CHP) plant will reduce the hotel’s reliance on the national grid by approximately 50 per cent and an innovative system reclaims the heat from all kitchen appliances to preheat domestic hot water. Cooking oil from the hotel restaurants will be recycled and turned into biodiesel, while waste management systems will recycle up to 90 percent of waste from the hotel. The Kinetico equipment fits with this innovative, low carbon approach since the technology uses the kinetic energy of water to operate, eliminating the electricity costs needed to run alternative softening technologies. This also brings installation benefits since no power cabling is required. “The Savoy is one of the most prestigious hotels in the world and we are delighted to be part of this huge renovation project” comments John Bisset, Operations and Technical Service Director, Kinetico. “Kinetico prides itself on the performance and reliability of its product. Our ongoing relationship with the Savoy demonstrates that we are continuing to deliver on these high standards in the grandest of locations.”

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Journaling the Journey Brenna's Blog What a puppy. Ronan is just awesome. And sometimes a terrifying gremlin. I can't believe how much he's grown in the last two weeks, and not just in size. Ronan has been coming to work with me everyday. I got a baby gate for my new office door so he is trapped, and, much like kids, if you exercise him enough he doesn't have enough energy to be that bad. He's managed not to get fired or to completely disrupt business. He's got the hang of walking on a leash (from watching the big dogs do it), and free-feeding. And potty training has been unbelievable - he asks to go out (even at night), and we're at about 3 accidents a week. That's right...not a day, a WEEK. That's my boy. Now we just really need to work on the biting. Ronan also started his search and rescue training this week. I thought he was too young (9 weeks), but I went to the regular training (for some dogs that are between 1 and 2 years old), but the lady in charge said he could start that day. He did great. There are some pictures below of him and of one of the other dogs we're training - a malamute named Louie. At this point it's pretty basic: Ro meets someone, sees that they have the treats (he is highly motivated by food), they run away and at the last minute hide behind a tree while he is watching, he'll smell a scent article belonging to that person, and then he goes and finds them and we all get VERY excited, and he gets a lot of treats. It's all a big game. And then the last time he might not get to watch, and has to follow his nose. This is all over a very short distance to start. We've also been hanging out with my coworker Mandy and her 3 dogs some more. We've been going up to Snowy Range, the mountains west of Laramie, and letting the dogs romp. Ronan experienced his first snow up there this last weekend. He loved it. And he watches Mandy's dogs very closely to see what you're supposed to do. He also eats a lot of elk poop up there. There are pictures and videos of all this stuff below. And as for me - aside from my life being entirely taken over by the tiny terror - work is going well. I'm working on some interesting analyses, and we're hiring some new help which will lighten the load. It's been nice having Clistie and her friends around. And I've signed up for an outdoor emergency care class with ski patrol, so my Thursday evenings and one day a weekend will be busy through the end of November. I'm really excited for it, and the skills will carry over to search and rescue and my job. Well anyway, enjoy the pictures and videos! Some Search and Rescue training photos: Ronan's first snow....and playing with the big dogs up at Snowy Range. Ronan vs. The Stick Very nice! Katie just got a Doberman puppy about 2 weeks ago, and he's been a fast learner too! Amazing what a good dog trainer can do. Now if only HE would stop biting! Are you going to be in Pittsburgh over Christmas at all? Maybe we can have a puppy date! Gurt Frobe Also, glad to see you're doing well! It's funny to see snow in your pictures, since it's still regularly in the 80's here!

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nyc, shows, springsteen the carnegie hall springsteen tribute Posted on 08 April 2007 by Caryn Rose (0) Damon Gough is my new hero. No, wait, I’ll explain. Listen: Patti was, well, Patti, and there’s no way in hell Steve Earle could fuck up “Nebraska”. The Bacon Brothers were passable. Joseph Arthur played a “Born In The USA” with strength and guts. Pete Yorn made me like him despite my best intentions, mostly because he was more than happy to give us a pre-show interview and because the interview was lacking artifice on any level. M. Ward was unfortunate, as the band was playing the full band version while he was playing a solo acoustic version of “I’m Going Down” and it was a little bit of a train wreck. I thanked the deities for a piano-only version of “Serenade” and wanted to shoot the Low Stars, whoever they are, for butchering “One Step Up”. Jesse Malin and Ronnie Spector was well-intended, but poorly executed, and it just made me sad. The Jersey Guys made everyone around us say the same thing: Why is someone playing a Tom Waits song? My top five performances: 1. Badly Drawn Boy aka Damon Gough: Thunder Road. The only Born To Run appearance. More below. 2. Odetta, “57 Channels”: may I some day be this cool. 3. The Hold Steady, “Atlantic City”: and I don’t even like them. At all. (That might change.) Noted that I DO NOT SEE ANY SPRINGSTEEN COMPARISON WHATSOEVER except that once upon a time Bruce used a lot of words in his songs. 4. Josh Ritter, “The River”: a musician not even on my radar grabbed my attention with the Springsteen-esque introduction and heartfelt (but not identical) performance. 5. Marah and “The Rising”. Major props for playing something recent. Kudos for accomplishing what Bruce could not, using bagpipes onstage. And Adam Garbinski clearly knows every single word to “Rosalita” and doesn’t care who knows it. Special props to Elysian Fields for “Streets of Fire” (hell, Bruce doesn’t even do it any more) and the chops to be the house band all night in front of a very tough crowd. But Badly Drawn Boy was something else altogether. We wanted to talk to him before the show, because he’s on record as being THE Springsteen fan of all Springsteen fans, the musician that wears his Bruce heart on his sleeve shamelessly. He’s obsessed. He’s one of us. All of this was clear. And he was the only musician with the guts to not just take something from Born To Run but take THE song from Born To Run. “Thunder Road” is Bruce’s touchstone, it’s his doppelganger, it’s his nemesis, it’s his salvation. It’s the one song – to him. And Damon knows this, I mean, there is no way he doesn’t know it because he’s a songwriter and because he’s a fan and he’s read everything there is to read and knows everything there is to know, and hell, he may have read my article in Backstreets from the Somerville shows in 2003, where Bruce laid it on the table for us in re: “Thunder Road”. At Carnegie Hall. In New York City. Across the river from New Jersey, full of people who sincerely applauded every time the state was mentioned, not the usual knee-jerk “Bruce is from Jersey so we applaud New Jersey” response, but people with actual pride in being from the state. Fans who had “Stand On It” as their ringtone (it was funny the first time it went off behind us. Not so funny the second time.) Forget the audience, look at the musicians onstage. You’re playing with a diverse group of accomplished folks, including Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees – okay, fuck that, you’re playing with Patti Smith and Ronnie Spector and Steve Earle to start with, and other people who are hardly small shakes. Badly Drawn Boy walks out on the Carnegie Hall stage, harmonica in hand, a little uncertain: “I’m thrilled but I’m terrified,” he said. That was when we realized he was doing the full band version, none of this wussy singer-songwriter acoustic “Thunder Road” crap for Damon, no, this was his chance and he was going to go for it. All the accolades in the world, all the positive reviews, all of the stars in Q and Melody Maker don’t matter much now. This is the culmination of a lifetime (and I realize this is a dramatisation, because the guy has a rich and successful songwriting career, but there’s no way this wasn’t a monumental thing). He began tentatively, almost like a guy in a bar singing karaoke with his friends, and then relaxed into it some more, he realized that he could do this and that we were with him, and as he sang, I got goosebumps. It had to be the rawest, most naked thing I’d seen on stage in years. Not raw as in unpracticed, but raw as in honest and true and real and unadorned. This was a fan singing Bruce for Bruce and for himself and for us. In that moment, more than anyone else who had been on that stage, or was going to be on that stage, he was one of us. I am rooting for him to kick ass and take names and I don’t even know him or know his music all that well, but it didn’t matter. This was the kind of feeling I had when Patti or the Ramones or the Clash got inducted into the Hall of Fame: one of us finally makes the big time. He could have picked any other song, he could have picked “Mary, Queen of Arkansas” and played it safe, done it acoustically, kept it standard. But he didn’t. I’m still kind of dazed about Bruce showing up. Of course, the problem was that, for me (and for probably 1/4 of the audience) the jig was up once we spotted Kevin Buell (Bruce’s roadie) onstage. (And to be fair, I did know ahead of time, because we were at the press reception – but it wouldn’t have been the first time Bruce was unofficially slated to appear and then changed his mind for whatever reason.) I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad and all (beyond all possible gladness) but it was so – unexpected – and so much had happened onstage and now, here he is, singing a version of “Rosalita” that will go down in history, and not just because of the attempt to summarize the song during what would have been the bridge. The encore: Was a cast of thousands coming on the stage, Dave Peterson (who plays drums in Marah) bringing out his relatively new baby to be part of it all. “Volunteers for verses?” Himself asks. Badly Drawn Boy steps forward before the words are out of his mouth. Craig Finn steps up next, raises a hand. Jesse Malin comes up last. And it’s “Rosalita,” again, but it’s like the last day of class in the auditorium, it’s that Phoenix 78 version come to life with a dozen Bruces being goofy and abandoned onstage. Everyone is going crazy and dropping veneers of cool, jockeying for the front, dancing around like crazy, unabashed geekiness, people goodnaturedly jockeying for position at the microphone with Bruce and knowing that they were doing this because they don’t ever know when they’ll do it again, and the crowd is of course almost louder than the stage at this point, three hours of sitting quietly and behaving (for the most part, thank you) are now over. “I ain’t here on business, baby, I’m only here for fun.” I get to sing “Rosie” with the boyfriend, and with Bruce, and with Marah, and everyone else on that stage. The best part of it all is this: it was a GREAT night before he walked out on that stage. Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Madison Square Garden, 1/27/16 Thoughts On Bruce Springsteen’s The River Tour 2016 Tour Opener In Pittsburgh Tags: dorf, springsteen

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INDUSTRIALL:::European unions fight for strike rights Just after we managed to clear an attack by the employers on the right to strike at the ILO, unions in the UK and Spain have had to take up the fight. And it could spread to other countries too. For three years the employers’ group paralyzed the work of the International Labour Organization (ILO) by claiming that the right to strike is not part of international law, even though for decades it had been universally accepted by governments, workers and employers alike. Following a global union campaign, the employers finally backed off in February 2015. But the fight is not over. In November, the Conservative government of the United Kingdom presented a trade union bill, which would seriously undermine the right to strike. In addition to restricting picketing and protests, the law would allow the use of agency workers to replace permanent staff during strikes. In public services, 50 per cent of members would have to turn out to vote and 40 percent of the entire membership must vote in favour. That amounts to an 80 per cent approval threshold. In February, the UK unions reached millions of people with an innovative #heartunionscampaign, celebrating the positive work done by unions and their members in workplaces and in society, and rejecting the government’s attempts to damage them. Also in Spain, unions had to take action as the authorities used an old law from the Franco dictatorship era to prosecute striking workers. On 16 February, a Spanish court acquitted the Airbus-8 workers facing prison terms of eight years and three months each for having participated in a peaceful strike in 2010. But the struggle continues to repeal article 315.3 of the Spanish Penal Code and to get rid of other similar court cases. We have to remain vigilant, as attacks against the right to strike could spread to other countries. The global economic crisis has already offered a pretext for a number of right-wing governments to curtail workers’ rights and cut social protection. Romania faced the most massive slaughter of rights when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2011 pressured the government to bypass the parliament and extend precarious work, abolish collective bargaining and restrict the right to strike. Collective bargaining was also banned in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece and Cyprus during the worst crisis years. Now the Irish and Spanish governments have agreed to rebuild the bargaining systems. These examples show that trade union rights are not self-evident even in Europe, where the union movement started. Attacks against workers’ rights are definitely ideological, coming from governments who listen their business advisers rather than the people. And too often business prefers to have obedient workers who shut up and do what they are told, instead of entering into cumbersome negotiations. Guaranteeing union rights will always be a fight about values and political will to build societies based on democracy and social justice. For that fight, we need to continue organizing and mobilizing workers to build union power. Jyrki Raina source:::http://www.industriall-union.org Labels: industriall-union

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Dean Harroz Named Interim President of OU May 17, 2019 | By Melissa Caperton, Director of Communications The OU Board of Regents today announced the appointment of Joseph Harroz Jr. as interim president of the University of Oklahoma, effective immediately. Harroz has served as dean of the College of Law since July 1, 2010. Since that time, OU Law has become one of the premier institutions for legal education in the United States. The college has enjoyed remarkable success, including: achieving the highest U.S. News & World Report ranking ever earned by an Oklahoma law school being named a Top 10 Best Value Law School in the nation, making OU Law a Best Value Law School for 10 consecutive years consistently leading the state in Bar Exam passage rates earning a reputation as a nationally leading law school for moot court competitions, evidenced by OU Law teams winning four national competition championships in the last two years being recognized as one of the top law schools in the nation for international law by National Jurist’s preLaw Magazine launching the nation’s first-ever law school Digital Initiative to prepare students for success and leadership in the modern practice of law, resulting in recognition as a Top 20 Most Innovative Law School and as an Apple Distinguished School setting pro bono service hour records, with more than 20,000 hours in 2018-2019 creating joint degree and certificate programs to enhance the J.D. launching an online Master of Legal Studies degree that has grown to nearly 400 new students in the past six years and expanding its LL.M. program by offering two of these specialized degrees fully online. In a statement, OU Board of Regents Chairman Dr. Leslie Rainbolt-Forbes said, “In his eight years as Dean of the OU College of Law, Joe has proven himself an effective leader and administrator with a collaborative leadership style that helped the school achieve distinction in virtually everything it does – from rankings, student success and being best-value, to volunteerism, fundraising and innovation.” Dean Joseph Harroz

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Category Archives: International World News Legal developments from around the world. The following is a collection of the most recent posts from other blogs addressing topics of international law. Blog, Civil Rights, Immigration, International, Legal News, Supreme Court The Legal Definition Of A Refugee, Which Obama Pays No Attention To JV DeLong , A puzzlement about the debate over accepting 10,000 Syrian refugees next year and more in the future is the lack of discussion of a fundamental point: Does Obama have the legal authority to order their admission to the U.S. as a humanitarian measure? The dictionary definition of a “refugee” is “a person who flees for refuge or safety, especially to a foreign country, as in time of political upheaval, war, etc.” This definition underlies most of the media discussions of the Syrian situation, with its emphasis on the humanitarian crisis, which is indeed horrendous. The definition also underlies the President’s uncontested authority to provide humanitarian assistance to refugees outside of the United States if he believes that such assistance will “contribute to the foreign policy interests of the United States.” [22 U.S.C. sec 2601(b)(2)] The U.S. has already spent over $4 billion on Syrian relief under this authority.for this purpose. However, the meaning of “refugee” in U.S. immigration law is narrower than this dictionary definition. In immigration law, for purposes of admitting someone to the U.S., the crucial factor is whether a person has a legitimate fear of persecution, not whether a humanitarian crisis exists. By statute [8 U.S.C. Sec.1101(42)], a “refugee” is: “any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality . . . and who is unable or unwilling to return to . . . that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion…” The statute then stretches this definition to include a person who is within his own country but who has the requisite fear of persecution. But the status of “refugee” can be granted only under “special circumstances” specified by the president. And before determining that special circumstances exist, the president must “consult,” in the form of in-person discussions between cabinet rank officials and members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees concerning all aspects of the situation. No agreement is necessary; just consultation [8 U.S.C. Sec. 1157(e)]. Section 1157 also provides for caps on the number of refugees admitted each year, and for presidential estimates of the likely numbers at the beginning of each year. Nothing in the stretched definition changes the basic requirement that a refugee be someone who has well-founded fear of persecution. The current controversy started on September 10, when the administration announced via press briefing a plan to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees next year. The next step was a formal Presidential Determination on refugee levels for FY2016, which projected admission of 85,000 total. The word “Syria” does not appear in the Determination, and the goal of resettling 10,000 Syrians appears only in news reports and briefings, such as a WhiteHouse.gov memo by DHS on How We’re Welcoming Syrian Refugees While Ensuring Our Safety. Neither the press briefing nor the Presidential Determination nor the DHS memo mentions the statutory criterion of fear of persecution, and it is unclear why 10,000 Syrians will meet the standard. The State Department’s Report to Congress reviewing the section 1157(e) factors and explaining the reasoning behind the estimates does not explain why Syrian refugees meet the criterion. Read Full Article – http://www.forbes.com/sites/jvdelong/2015/11/19/syria-who-is-a-refugee/ featuredimmigration lawobamarefugeessyriasyria immigration lawsyrian refugees Blog, Business Law, International, Legal News Chris Odom: ‘Bitcoins are Not Under Legal Law, They’re Under Cryptographic Law’ By Kyle Torpey Nov 19, 2015 1:30 PM EST Smart contract is a term that gets thrown around quite often in the Bitcoin community, but the reality is not many people truly understand why these types of cryptographic contracts are useful and secure. Smart contracts can come with varying levels of complexity, and one of the most widely-used smart contracts right now is a basic Bitcoin transaction. At the recent Bitcoin Investor Conference in Las Vegas, Stash Co-Founder Chris Odomexplained the key attribute of a smart contract that makes it different from a legal contract. Smart Contracts Don’t Need a Court of Law During his remarks on smart contracts, Chris Odom made it clear that the self-executing properties of these sorts of contracts are what separate them from the legal contracts that have been used in the past. He explained: “The distinguishing factor of a smart contract is that it’s self executing. It executes on its own. You see, most contracts that people make in the legal world are contracts that are designed so that someday they have to be enforced in the court of law; they have to be legally enforced, and so they’re written that way. They’re written based on, you know, ‘We’re going to expect that if we have to enforce this it will be in a court of law, and therefore, all these terms are written based on that assumption.” Odom also noted that the point of a smart contract is to — at least partially — avoid the legal system in its entirety. He explained that the preferred smart contracts are the ones that automate the enforcement of the contract and do not require the use of a court: “The last thing you want on a [smart] contract is something saying that it’s enforceable in court. That, ‘Hey, if you use this smart contract, you’re going to end up in court!’ Who wants to sign that? That’s your worst nightmare. When I’m picking a smart contract, I want something that will securely flow the money properly according to its terms and will not land me in court.” Smart Contracts Automate the Flow of Money Another key point made by Odom during his presentation is that smart contracts are mostly about automating the flow of money between the parties associated with a particular contract. Instead of having a judge decide the outcome of a contract, a smart contract can automatically trigger a transfer of funds based on a set of parameters defined by computer code. Odom noted: “A real smart contract is something that automates money flows. It does escrow; it does surety bonds; it does insurance. These are the sorts of things that we’re building with our smart contracts. They automate the money flow. The money goes in here; after so many days, it automatically goes over there, unless a dispute gets triggered, and then maybe an oracle has to come online — or a dispute mediator or arbitrator.” Smart Contracts Operate Under Cryptographic Law During his presentation, Chris Odom also told a short story about a lawyer who was recently trying to understand smart contracts and how they work. Odom told the lawyer there is one important statement that should be included in any smart contract: “Here’s what you want to put in a smart contract. Here’s how you know when you’re writing a smart contract instead of a normal, legal contract. The first thing you put at the top of the contract is ‘This contract will not be enforceable in a court of law.’” Odom claims the lawyer did not seem to understand the point of a contract that could not be enforced in a court of law, so he went on to describe his point in further detail: “First of all, courts of law are not able to enforce these [contracts] anyway. Imagine that you’re in court, and there’s a judge, and she says, ‘I have ruled those bitcoins shall be moved to that address.’ But it doesn’t happen. Even though she has robes, a nice chair, and a bailiff with muscles, the bitcoins don’t move. You have to have the private key to move the bitcoins because bitcoins are not under legal law, they’re under cryptographic law. It’s a new form of law that’s coming into existence.” In short, smart contracts do not require a court or a judge to be enforced. Not only do these types of contracts not operate within the current legal system, but as Odom explained, it is sometimes impossible to enforce the rule of law on what is essentially nothing more than computer code. Kyle Torpey is a freelance journalist who has been following Bitcoin since 2011. His work has been featured on VICE Motherboard, Business Insider, RT’s Keiser Report, and many other media outlets. You can follow@kyletorpey on Twitter. Full Article – http://insidebitcoins.com/news/chris-odom-bitcoins-are-not-under-legal-law-theyre-under-cryptographic-law/35915 bitcoinBitcoin transactionbitcoinsfeaturedsmart contractsmart contracts Blog, Drug Companies, International, Legal News, Personal Injury Hawaii becomes first U.S. state to raise smoking age to 21 Hawaii’s governor on Friday signed a bill raising the legal smoking age statewide to 21, the first U.S. state to do so. The law takes effect on Jan. 1, 2016, and will also ban the sale, purchase or use of electronic cigarettes for those under the age of 21. “Raising the minimum age as part of our comprehensive tobacco control efforts will help reduce tobacco use among our youth and increase the likelihood that our keiki (children) will grow up to be tobacco-free,” Governor David Ige said in a statement. Also on Friday, Ige signed a bill banning smoking and e-cigarette use at state parks and beaches, acts already banned in all city and county parks other than of Kaua’i County, according to his office. Most U.S. states set the legal smoking age at 18, while a handful have set it higher at 19. Some cities and counties, including New York City and Hawaii County, have already raised the smoking age to 21. Lawmakers in Washington state and California have also pushed to raise the legal smoking age to 21 in recent months. Opponents of the bill have argued that it limits choice for people considered adults in other situations, like joining the military. In Hawaii, roughly nine out of 10 smokers start before the age of 21 and many report receiving cigarettes from friends or relatives of legal age, according to the governor’s office. The Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids said that tobacco use kills 1,400 people and costs some $526 million in medical bills annually in Hawaii. Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, accounting for more than 480,000 deaths annually, or one of every five deaths overall, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Researchers have found that raising the minimum age to buy tobacco products to 21 or 25 years old would significantly reduce smoking and tobacco-related illnesses in the country and that a majority of U.S. adults support raising the legal age to 21. Adult smoking rates in the country have dropped sharply to 18 percent of the population today from 42 percent in 1964. (Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Nick Macfie) Read more at Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/20/us-usa-hawaii-tobacco-idUSKBN0P006V20150620#jkmCyfL88G3D7aGO.99 age limitscigarette lawsfeaturedhawaii lawshawaii legal newssmoking laws Blog, Criminal, International, Legal News, Organized Crime Mafia trial puts the ‘Pirate’ of Rome in the dock Massimo Carminati, a former member of a neo-fascist group, is charged along with dozens of politicians and businessmen. Sara Manisera | 04 Nov 2015 12:36 GMT Rome, Italy – Dozens of politicians, businessmen, and alleged gangsters go on trial on Thursday on charges including corruption, money laundering, and weapons possession in one of Italy’s most important mafia prosecutions in the past decade. Italy’s Special Operation Squad (ROS) has, since 2012, investigated Mafia Capitale, a mysterious organisation based in the Italian capital that prosecutors allege involves politicians and other public officials working alongside mob figures. Italy’s long road of corruption Important businessmen have been implicated and, according to the prosecutor of the case, alleged Mafia Capitale leader Massimo Carminati delivered envelopes full of money to bribe officials involved in managing public tenders. Carminati is a former member of the neo-fascist group Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (NAR), which was active from 1977 to 1988 and carried out several terrorist attacks, including the bombing of the Bologna train station that killed 85 people. Known as “The Pirate” because of his one eye, Carminati gained a reputation as a ruthless mafia boss who controlled large parts of Rome. Local legend has it that Carminati is immortal after he miraculously survived a close-range gunshot to the head by a police officer in 1981. The trial opens at Rome’s Palace of Justice on Thursday before moving to Rebibbia prison. It is expected to last until July. Luca Odevaine, a former deputy head of the mayor of Rome’s cabinet, has confessed to receiving 5,000 euros ($5,500) monthly from Mafia Capitale. Paolo Pozzessere, the former commercial director of Finmeccanica, an Italian public company, has been charged with corruption. Like other organised crime groups, Mafia Capitale is allegedly involved in extortion, smuggling, and money-laundering, as well as above-board activities that have allowed it to effectively control large parts of Rome. But Mafia Capitale is not a conventional mafia group, according to Nando dalla Chiesa, who heads the Observatory on Organised Crime. “Rather than having a hierarchical structure, it is organised as a network with different members – those in charge of using violence, and those who apply a partial territory control,” dalla Chiesa told Al Jazeera. A wounded woman receives assistance following the Bologna train station bombing on August 2, 1980 [The Associated Press] Perhaps Carminati’s greatest power is his impunity, observers say. In 2011, l’Espresso journalist Lirio Abbate wrote one of the first articles published about Carminati headlined The Four Kings of Rome. Abbate, who has lived under police escort for the past seven years because of his journalism on the mafia, explained that Rome was divided among four bosses and one of them is Carminati – also dubbed the “Last King of Rome”. Read Full Article – http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/11/mafia-trial-puts-pirate-rome-dock-151104055722963.html featureditalian mafia newsmafia news Blog, International, Legal News, Military Laws China urges U.S. against further provocation in S. China Sea BEIJING, Nov. 3 (Xinhua) — China on Tuesday urged the United States against further provocation in relation to the South China Sea. “We urge the United States to […] not take any action that threatens China’s sovereignty and security,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying at a regular press briefing. Her remarks came in response to a question regarding comments by U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes on Monday, who said there would be more demonstrations of the U.S. military’s commitment to the right to freely navigate in the region. According to media reports, the U.S. Navy plans to conduct patrols in the South China Sea about twice a quarter to remind China and other countries about U.S. rights under international law, said a U.S. defense official Monday on condition of anonymity. Hua said China has always respected and safeguarded the freedom of navigation and overflight of various countries in accordance with international law, but strongly opposes any country using this as an excuse to damage China’s sovereignty and security. She reiterated that China is firm in its determination and resolve to maintain its territorial sovereignty, security and legitimate maritime interests. “We will resolutely respond to deliberate provocation from any country,” said the spokesperson, adding that China will closely monitor the situation. The U.S. warship USS Lassen entered waters near Zhubi Reef last week, which is part of China’s Nansha Islands in the South China Sea, without the permission of the Chinese government. In response, China has officially lodged a strong protest to the U.S. government, and expressed strong discontent and resolute opposition through various channels. Full article – http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-11/03/c_134779998.htm

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Hawkins Supports Strong Local Rent Control, Expanded Public Housing, Tenants’ Rights Posted: August 24, 2018 11:00 AM For immediate release: August 24, 2018 Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for Governor, outlined his plan today to resolve the housing crisis in New York City and across the state, including returning control of rent laws to the city and massively increasing investment in public housing. “Homelessness has increased 36% since Cuomo came into office and the city lost 75,000 units of rent stabilized housing. As HUD Secretary, Cuomo demolished more public housing units than he built with subsidies to private developers for affordable units. He’s governor for his real estate donors, not millions of New York tenants,” Hawkins said. “Under the de Blasio administration, rent hikes, combined with developer-friendly rezoning and harassment by landlords, are driving the working class out of Manhattan and much of Brooklyn and other parts of NYC,” said Hawkins. “Since skyrocketing rents and displacement of working class tenants is what we get from self-styled progressive Democrats like Cuomo and de Blasio, it’s time for an alternative – and it’s not the Republicans,” Hawkins said. Hawkins noted that unaffordable housing is a statewide problem. Over 50% of New York renters pay more than the federal affordability standard of 30% of household income. More than 25% pay more than 50% of their income in rent. Buffalo has the third highest rate of rent inflation in the nation. As bad as NYC is, it doesn’t make the top 25 U.S. cities for rent inflation. Hawkins said he would push to repeal the Urstadt law, which puts oversight of rent regulation in the hands of the state legislature. He would return the power to local governments to decide on rent control. He noted that while Cynthia Nixon calls for universal rent control, she relies on the state legislature rather than home rule to enact it, leaving the fate of NYC rent regulations in the hands of upstate legislators. “Rent control is needed to protect renters in the short term. But rent control is not enough. If there is not a big increase in the supply of affordable rental units, rent control will only lead to increased rents in unregulated units in a sellers’ market,” said Hawkins. Hawkins wants to eliminate the loopholes landlords use to deregulate units or raise rents on regulated units, including vacancy decontrol, vacancy bonus, preferential rent, and major capital improvements. He would restore rent stabilization for units that escaped regulation through these loopholes and restore regulation for Mitchell-Lama and project-based Section 8 buildings that have left government supervision. He supports a statewide rent affordability “circuit breaker” through an income-based refundable tax credit to cap rents at 30% of household income. Instead of costly subsidies to private developers (e.g., 421a), Hawkins wants a massive investment in public housing “to fix the housing we have and expand the housing we need. New public housing will be a program for living-wage jobs, desegregation, and clean energy as well as affordable housing.” NYCHA needs $32 billion over the next five years to fix problems with lead, mold, elevators, boilers, roofs, and other repairs. Hawkins said Cynthia Nixon’s proposal to increase state spending for public housing by $1 billion a year “is not up to the job.” The new public housing proposed by Hawkins rejects the old model of concentrating poor people and minorities in segregated, isolated large-scale projects. The new public housing would be high quality, human scale, scatter site, mixed income and powered by wind and solar electricity and heated and cooled by electric-power heat pumps instead of oil or gas boilers. He said they should be of such high quality that any community would welcome them as a positive asset to their community. The Green Party candidate pointed out that it is cheaper to directly build public housing than to publicly subsidize affordable units in private developments. A big expansion of public housing will lower demand and drive rents down in the private market as well. Many Western European cities provide up to 60% of units as public housing. In Germany, for example, rents are 10-15% of income. But in the U.S., public housing accounts for less than 1%. The federal government has abandoned building public housing since the 1970s. According to Hawkins, mixed-income public housing will be more economically self-reliant due to higher rents from middle and upper income tenants. Mixed-income public housing will also help reduce the race and class segregation that in New York State is the highest in the nation. Hawkins would build 20,000 units of supportive housing across the state that combines permanent housing with on-site services for people with a history of substance abuse, and/or who have mental and physical health needs. He would build public housing to house the 90,000 homeless across the state. He would also accelerate the funding of the 5-year, $20 billion program Cuomo announced in 2016 to create or preserve over 100,000 affordable and 6,000 supportive housing units, most of which has not been funded to date. Hawkins also outlined a number of measures to expand tenants’ rights. He charged that the City government under Mayor De Blasio too often helps landlords evict tenants from rent regulated buildings. He supports a Just Cause Eviction Law: legislation to protect tenants from evictions without justifiable cause, and a statewide right of tenants to receive publicly-provided counsel in housing courts. He would increase funding to the NYS Division of Housing and Community Renewal to support the enforcement of tenants’ rights and housing codes. Hawkins was highly critical of de Blasio’s so-called affordable housing programs, noting that it is driving working people out of their neighborhoods. De Blasio’s rezonings are top down, benefit developers, and create rent inflation. De Blasio’s inclusionary zoning isn’t inclusive since it uses the metropolitan Average Median Income instead of neighborhood median income to define affordability. Hawkins said he supports community control of zoning, including the right to establish height limits on buildings. The proliferation of high-rise apartments is creating environmental problems, including sewage back-ups and overflows and restricted access to light and air on the streets.

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Turkey, UK likely to come closer after Brexit By SERKAN DEMİRTAŞ serkan.demirtas@hurriyet.com.tr It’s crystal clear that the results of the general elections in the U.K. will have drastic consequences and reflections beyond the country, and particularly in Europe. First of all, the results in the U.K. are in line with the recent trends in the rest of the world where populist leaders are on an unstoppable rise. The landslide Conservative victory in the face of a historic setback for the Labour Party also tells about British politics and changing sociology. It seems to be hard for Labour to reverse the conservative trend in the coming period unless they adjust their policies under a new leadership. Second is about Brexit. The landslide victory of Boris Johnson that pledges him a comfortable majority at the House of Commons means that the two-time postponed Brexit will be done on Jan. 31, 2020. The post-Brexit, however, will have multi-dimensional challenges for Johnson’s government. Having increased its representation at the Westminster nearly four times, the Scottish National Party (NSP) will press on Johnson for another independence referendum. The British prime minister will also have to address the concerns and potential damages of the British businesses while he should get ready for tough negotiations with the EU for the future of the Brussels-London relationship. For British authorities, Brexit will not change the role and weight of the U.K. on the global scene. It’s still one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, a nuclear power with a strong military power at NATO, they say. However, many experts suggest that both the U.K. and the EU will be weakened because of Brexit. A further alignment with Washington is inevitable for London but many urge Johnson about the nature of this new partnership. London will continue to revive the Commonwealth and seek new alliances in the different corners of the world. Turkey will be one of these new allies for the U.K. in the post-Brexit era. Already enjoying good ties and a sound dialogue, these two non-EU countries on the northeastern and southeastern corners of the European continent would create a new political framework. Equally important is the fact that Turkey and the U.K. should prioritize how to continue trading and business investments in the post-Brexit era. There were some unofficial talks for expanding the scope of the bilateral trade and for dealing with the problems of Turks in the U.K. and Brits in Turkey in the same post-Brexit period. But beyond these bilateral matters, the post-Brexit significantly corresponds to a period in which both Ankara and London are now looking at how to formulate their ties with Europe under the changing conditions. Brexit will increase the powers of France and Germany as two prominent European powers and will start a new period for the EU. It’s questionable to what extend this new period would result in reconciliation between Ankara and Brussels. Therefore, in a much more complicated environment in Europe, both Turkey and the U.K. would be more eye-to-eye on many regional and security-related issues. A new four-way format which brings Turkey and the U.K. with France and Germany to discuss Syria and other regional conflicts could be highlighted under this title. Leaders from four countries will meet in Istanbul in February 2020 and that will potentially be one of the first international meetings where Boris Johnson will attend after Brexit will be done on Jan. 31. As seen, historic elections in the U.K. have already secured the Brexit with still a lot of lingering questions. From the Turkish perspective, it would be good to align with London on many issues, but it should never give the impression that it fully abandons the accession process to the EU. Turkey should continue to regard Europe as a whole and EU membership as its main strategic target. Quakes don’t kill Long noodles and bright tangerines Adept diplomacy needed Do we still need fairs? Libya conference was a success but… Coalition partner nationalists are the happiest in Turkey

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By Aldrea Alien Fantasy | Paperback, eBook Aldrea Alien Family and blood. After 1100 years, these simple words mean everything to Herald. His life has been ruled by keeping his siblings safe, keeping them from becoming prey whilst feeding on the weaker. His failures have been many and measured by those he has lost. People like his twin brother. There has always been an enemy to push back or defeat. Just who the enemy is comes into question when Herald meets the dangerous, angelic creature he is to guard. Wondering where his true loyalties lie is a dangerous thought. No matter whether he chooses family over the heart, it will mean death. Only the right choice will ensure the life taken is not his. Born and raised in New Zealand, Aldrea Alien lives on a small farm with her family, including a menagerie of animals, most of which are convinced they're just as human as the next person. Especially the cats. Since discovering a love of writing at the age of twelve, she hasn't found an ounce of peace from the characters plaguing her mind, all of them clamouring for her to tell their story first. It's a lot of people for one head.

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Cut the Edge, Weave the Line September 8, 2017 – October 20, 2017 Norma Minkowitz Fiber and mixed media crocheted shoe with yarn ball attached. 7” x 13.5” x 4” “As a student in 1958 at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City, my primary focus was on drawing with pen and ink, and sketching with pencil. I felt that drawing was an intimate record of an artist's imagination. In 1983, I crocheted around a shoe, removed the shoe, and discovered that I had created a transparent form. I felt that I was still drawing, but with fiber instead of pen and ink. Since then I have been exploring the possibilities of these open, interlaced sculptures, stiffened into hard mesh like forms, which often make statements about enclosures or entrapment, suggesting a shelter or cage from which there is no escape. Because of this interlacing technique, line, contour and form are one. The netting's effect is to blur the shape within. There is often paint on the surface, which can at times be invisible and at other times obvious depending on the light, another important element of my work. I want the openness to convey a sense of energy as the viewer moves around the sculpture. My work retains implications of containment and psychological complexity, while focusing on the human form and often the landscape.” JOHN McQUEEN Standing Man in the Round Willow and wax linen. Attached in moveable sphere. 2017. 46.5” H x 27” W ohn McQueen's extraordinary works have been described as "hovering, with great humor, in the gap between craft, sculpture and Conceptual art...His virtuoso craftsmanship and the conceptual underpinnings of his work merge to remind us that skill is subservient to meaning in artwork that nourishes both the eye and the intellect." - Gerald Mead His sculptural forms acknowledge the rich tradition of basketry by manipulating organic materials such as bent, tied and woven willow branches, harvested from his own property. Richly textured and layered wall pieces are expertly transformed into figurative images or narratives from layers of colored birch bark found on the forest floor. McQueen masterfully discovers the potential of any substance, awakening our awareness to natural materials that are usually ignored and often discarded. These remnants are deftly constructed with a myriad of textile techniques, incorporating ancient art forms with contemporary issues and concepts. Each object is transformed into a unique and vibrant work of art with imagination, wit and brilliant execution. His work can be found in the numerous permanent collections including Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York, NY; Museum of Arts & Design, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI and Renwick Gallery, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Standing Man in the Round (from front, side and back) Doric Torso Willow and wax linen. Torso attached. 2017. 58.5” H x 8.5” W MARY BERO Cotton fabric, A/C, cotton and rayon thread Art: 7.25" x 5.75"; Frame: 15.25" x 13.5" x 1" Mary Bero’s intimate, decorative fiber works combine embroidery techniques with painting, drawing and sculptural elements to create primitive explosions of vibrant color and emotion. Bero weaves what she has called “tapestry paintings.” Her primary technique is to hand-stitch cotton or silk thread or floss to a cloth backing, simultaneously building up areas of color and texture that form striking images and patterns when seen together. She sometimes augments these methods with acrylics, cloth, or paper. Mary Bero is a two-time winner of the National Endowment Fellowship for the Arts. Polly Sutton Steely Two Cedar bark, rust dyed ash, stainless wire, yellow cedar outer bark 9” x 8 1/4” x 6” Cedar bark, wire, yellow cedar outer bark border. 2017. 9 3/4” x 12” x 8” LANNY BERGNER Six suspended flame treated stainless steel mesh works with colored silicone. 2017. 68” H x 44” W x 4” D Lanny Bergner is a mixed-media sculptor, installation, fiber and sculptural basketry artist, creating organic constructions out of manmade materials By using hands-on processes of coiling, fraying, twisting, wrapping, gluing and knotting, he transforms bronze, brass, aluminum and stainless steel screening, wire, silicone, monofilament and glass frit into "other worldly" constructions. "My aim is to bring the natural/artificial and man/nature together into an assemblage of forms that appear to have, grown into being. I love the natural world and am constantly inspired by its beauty and varieties of form. This, in combination with my fears, quirks and joys, results in works that celebrates the mystery and wonder of it all". His work is in numerous museum collections including the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, Museum of Art and Design, NY, NY, Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA, and The Central Museum of Textile, Łódź, Poland. In 1995 he won the Betty Bowen Memorial Award, administered by the Seattle Art Museum. In 2005 he won a Gold Prize at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale in Cheongju, Korea and was invited to create an installation “Between Earth and Sky” at the 2007 Cheongju International Craft Biennale. Strands (detail) Counterplay Brass wire screen, glass frit 23” x 25” x 2.5" ELLEN MOON November: Asparagus and Danceflies Embroidered on cotton cloth with hand-dyed cotton and silk threads 6 5/8"x 8 3/8"x 5/16" KATHERINE WESTPHAL Battle of Gods and Giants Gourd, heat transfer on rice paper, laminated 13” h x 9” diameter "I want to become a link in that long chain of human activity, the patterning of cloth on any surface available. I have learned from many cultures and pay homage to them. My work is pretty much autobiographical and narrative. It records my travel – anything I see or experience can pop out in my work, the connection being most often intuitive." Katherine Westphal influenced a generation of textile artists, including Lia Cook. She became a pioneer in pursuing new avenues of textile printing and image generation - including the use of the office Xerox copy machine, and heat transfer on both cloth and handmade paper.In 1966 she agreed to teach a design class for one quarter at the University of California, Davis. She stayed, became a tenured faculty member in 1968, and turned a design appreciation class that no one wanted, into one enrolling 300 students each term, with ten assistants working with her. She became a full professor in 1975 and retired in 1979, honored as Professor Emeritus, as well as the honor of being awarded a Fellow of The American Craft council. Battle of Gods and Giants (another side) Gourd, heat transfer on rice paper, laminated. Lia Cook Cotton, woven. 2017. "My current practice incorporates concepts of cloth, touch, and memory. I use the detail, an intimate moment in time, often woven in oversize scale to intensify a shared emotional and sensual experience. I use a digital loom to weave images that are embedded in the structure of cloth. The digital pixel becomes a thread that when interlaced with another becomes both cloth and image at the same time. This woven image brings with it many of the sensual experiences that we associate with cloth. Childhood family snapshot and video stills are some of the raw materials that I draw on to investigate small, intimate details of the body or to capture a fleeting human expression My practice involves research into new technologies and new ways to translate my images that make the structure visible and physically felt, attempting to create the image as physical object." Public Collections include: Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York; De Young Museum of Art, San Francisco, California; Renwick Gallery, National Gallery of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Museum of Fine Arts,Boston, Massachusetts; American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington D.C. Cotton, rayon, woven Connect to Me Small Cotton, rayon, woven. 2017. ULLA-STINA Svanen Chair Vintage needle point 29.1” W x 30.3” H x 26.8” Deep Ulla Stiler meticulously covers everyday objects with cross stitched needle point fabric. The scenic needlepointed views are artfully fabricated and placed on chairs, phones, binoculars, etc... transforming them into vibrant works of art. Her pieces often highlight elk, deer or birds placed in an idyllic woodland setting, keeping the essence of the piece, bringing new life to a sculptural form, showcasing its functional design. Svanen Chair (with work-in-progress shot) CAROL ECKERT Without Saints Cotton, linen, wire 61” long, 20” high and 3” deep "The shelves of my studio are packed with books — art history books, volumes of mythology, religious texts, early editions of Aesop’s Fables — manuscripts filled with the stories humans have recounted since ancient times as they tried to make sense of their world. Creation stories, tales of journeys and quests, parables of good and evil — these are the stories that find their way into my work, not as specific narratives, but as references to the connections between people across continents and centuries. Mythology and art have been intertwined for as long as there have been humans on earth, and my work often explores this connection. Art history is a continuing theme and appears in references to Persian miniatures, Norse manuscripts and Medieval bestiaries. Without Saints is based on Benozzo Gozzoli’s 1459 painting, Journey of the Magi. My fiber process also has ancient roots. Coiling is a simple basketry technique, so deeply embedded in history that no one is certain when it first began. Though it is traditionally used to make vessels, I construct a myriad of forms, including sculptures, installations, and wall works. My pieces are complex, but the technique is simple, requiring only a threaded needle." Without Saints (detail) RENIE BRESKIN ADAMS A Battle of Wills Cotton embroidery A celebrated innovator, Renie Breskin Adams explores her dreams and personal history through colorful and humorous stitched narratives. Her works are in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. among many others. Her work is selected for the current Collection Focus at the Racine Art Museum. "People sometimes ask, 'Why do you stitch?' or 'Why don't you just paint?' Connections to textiles in my daily life make fiber materials very real to me and inherently meaningful. As a child I sewed, crocheted afghans, and made rag dolls. I like the aggressive colors and textures of fabrics. I am aware of the clothing on my body, and it feels good. Every morning when I ride my exercise bike, I look sideways and enjoy the pattern formed by the edges of my clothes hanging in the open closet. I look down and see my oriental rug, always an inspiration. I am inspired by narrative tradition in textiles--rugs, quilts, and ceremonial cloths which are meaningful both for their pictorial content and as useful objects. I like to experience a work of art as an object not only as an illusory image. I think of a traditional painting as a facade and the fabric behind it as merely an unseen armature. I think of my embroideries as objects with a front and a back, threads aggressively engaging and surrounding fabric, a visible process, intense and intimate, essential to the meaning of the image." YORIKO MURAYAMA Milefleur Japan (detail of fabric) Digital jacquard textile, polyester. 2017. 58" wide including selvage, Sold by the meter ELIZABETH WHYTE SCHULZE Signs of Protest. Clown, Girl Power, Covfefe, Planet B, Tweet, Toupee,The Wall Woven pine needles, Japanese paper, paint, Japanese brushes. 2017. Using organic fibers and traditional basket making techniques, Elizabeth Whyte Schulze creates three-dimensional paintings that are evocative of primitive art. A graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and Tufts University, Whyte Schulze was the recipient of a Fellowship for Crafts from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2009. “My work is informed primarily by my travels. Visiting petroglyph sites in the American Southwest to Aboriginal Art Centers in Australia’s outback, each adventure is an opportunity to experience art and culture of diverse communities. I layer images by intersecting and overlapping figure, design and text on the woven surface. I do not retire past images but continue to incorporate the older elements in innovative ways. My approach to working on the basket is to present a complex landscape of imagery that is visually challenging and personally satisfying. “I construct the basket first, then use paint, handmade paper and gel medium to draw and mark the surface. My medium is pine needles and raffia sewn and coiled into bowls, plates, vessels and sculptures. For many years, I used thread to stitch designs on baskets but in 1996 I was given a rare opportunity to visit France’s Lascaux cave. Inside the cave, Paleolithic bulls and horses painted on rugged cave walls appeared to come alive. This experience inspired me to begin experimentation with acrylic paint and develop a similar magic on baskets. Over the years I have managed to retain the integrity of a traditional coiled basket while exploring contemporary themes in my artistic expression.” Vessel woven in exposed pine needles, Japanese brushes, - markings on the painted surfaces are taken from early Chinese writing. 2017. 20 x 12 x 7.5 inces Miniature woven basket beads, pine needles, Japanese paper, hand painted, two glass beads. 2017. ERIK DEMAINE, MARTIN DEMAINE & HANNAH SMITH Mi-Teintes watercolor paper 14" × 9" × 14" high Printmaker Hannah Smith hand-draws line art using photographs of tree branches in nature. The Demaines make archival prints of this art, and hand-fold them along circular creases, causing the paper to form into a natural equilibrium. Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine are a father-son math-art team. Martin started the first private hot glass studio in Canada and has been called the father of Canadian glass. Since 2005, Martin Demaine has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Erik Demaine, also at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a professor of computer science. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. In these capacities, the Demaines work together in paper, glass, and other material. They use their exploration in sculpture to help visualize and understand unsolved problems in science, and their scientific abilities to inspire new art forms. Their artistic work includes curved origami sculptures in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and the Renwick Gallery in the Smithsonian. Their scientific work includes over 60 published joint papers, including several about combining mathematics and art. The Demaine's also won a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013) for exploring folding of other materials, such as hot glass. 9” x 9” x 15” high Vessel woven in exposed pine needles, Japanese brushes, – markings on the painted surfaces are taken from early Chinese writing. 2017. Willow and wax linen. Torso attached. Digital jacquard textile, polyester. Exploring the Vision & Creativity of Contemporary Textile Art We invited masters in their field and emerging talents to create extraordinary pieces using traditional techniques and materials, which are often combined with contemporary technology. The invited artists continually explore the various perceptions and possibilities of what a textile can be. Partial Artist Listing:Lanny Bergner, Mary Bero, Lia Cook, Carol Eckert, Eleanor McCain, John McQueen, Donna Rhae Marder, Norma Minkowitz, Sophie Munns, Yoriko Murayama, Elizabeth Whyte Schulze, Polly Sutton, Ulla-Stina, Andrea Uravitch and Katherine Westphal.

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Oceans Online Rising sea levels could benefit some reef systems Devices recording ocean and atmospheric conditions over a Kimberley reef at high tide. OCEANS ONLINE ISSUE 9. AUGUST 2016 Researchers at The University of Western Australia have found rising sea levels can significantly reduce daily water temperature extremes in many reefs worldwide that experience strong tidal conditions. The research was published today in the international journal Science Advances. Professor Ryan Lowe, from UWA’s Oceans Institute and School of Earth and Environment, led a research team from UWA, with support from the Western Australian Marine Science Institution, which investigated the mechanisms that drove local temperature variations within the reef systems of the remote and pristine marine environment of the Kimberley coast. The Kimberley region is home to some of the world’s most extreme tidal ranges, sometimes more than 12 metres. Climate-driven ocean warming arguably poses the greatest threat to the world’s coral reefs and scientists warn higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide will cause substantial changes to ocean temperatures and chemistry over the next century, increasing the frequency and severity of mass bleaching and other stresses on coral reefs. Professor Lowe said temperatures within shallow reefs could often differ substantially from the surrounding ocean, so predicting future patterns of bleaching and other stresses on reefs depended on our capacity to predict conditions in reef environments. “Temperature is widely recognised as a key environmental driver of reefs and temperature extremes are known to be one of the key stressors to coral reef communities around the world,” he said. Recent research has focused on trying to improve predictions of regional ocean warming patterns that are being driven by long-term climate change as well as the intensification of short-term climate patterns such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle. Yet scientists currently lack the ability to predict how tides generally control temperature extremes across a wide geographic range of reef systems, and in turn how projected rising sea levels and reduced reef growth rates will alter the thermal conditions within reef waters. UWA’s researchers developed a model to accurately predict temperature variations within shallow reef systems based on local tidal conditions, solar heating properties and reef structures. Professor Lowe said field studies revealed extreme temperature fluctuations in the reef reaching 38C and varying by more than 10C over a single tidal cycle. Over a 15-day cycle, the water temperatures became most extreme when the low tide period drifted to align with maximum heating by the sun at noon, which warmed the shallow water on the reefs, Professor Lowe said. “These temperatures are particularly extreme in regions when the tidal range is large when compared to the water depth over a reef, which can cause shallow water to ‘pond’ within reefs for extended periods of time each day,” he said. “So even a modest rise in sea level could help lower the water temperature of the reef and may also partially reduce reef heat extremes in the world’s warming oceans.” Read more about the latest news and activities at the UWA Oceans Institute www.oceans.uwa.edu.au/news-events/oceans-online Thursday, 25 August, 2016 1:16 PM

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San Jose may hold the most valuable treasure lost at sea In Famous Wrecks By Tom Hale - Iflscience The seafloor of the Caribbean Sea looks like a pirate's idea of heaven. Just off the coast of Colombia lies a shipwreck loaded with one of the most valuable hauls of treasure ever lost at sea, estimated to be worth up to $17 billion in today’s money. The wreck of the San José, often called the “holy grail of shipwrecks”, was first discovered off the coast of Colombia three years ago. However, many details of this intriguing find have only just been released by the authorities. The Spanish galleon was sunk by a British squadron during the War of the Spanish Succession on June 8, 1708. Loaded with 62 guns and up to 600 crew, this colossal ship sank along with its vast treasure trove of gold, silver, and emeralds. The ship was transporting the riches as part of the Spanish king's mission to loot the South American colonies to fund the costly 13-year-long war. By no surprise, this booty meant that governments, treasure hunters, and researchers had been searching for the wreck for decades, until it was eventually discovered 600 meters (1,968 feet) beneath the waves by the Colombian Navy near Cartagena in 2015. Over the past few years, the wreckage has since been explored by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) using sonar imaging and an autonomous underwater vehicle called REMUS 6000, which has captured numerous new photographs of the site. REMUS was also used to map and photograph the Titanic wreck site during a 2010 expedition and played a key role in the discovery of the wreck of the Air France 447 passenger plane in 2011. 1 / 13 13

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The Bolloré commitment The Blueline The Bluezones FINALLY THE RAILROAD TO ADVANCE NIGER & Mission Bluezones The Bolloré As a player in the economic and social development of Africa, the Bolloré Group is launching an ambitious project that aims to bridge the digital divide and develop the rail network in Niger. The Bolloré Group manages several thousand kilometres of rail concessions in Africa. Drawing on its expertise, the Group is constructing the first railway in the history of Niger and energy-independent community facilities along the line for the Nigerien people to use. Eventually, this will link Niger to the West African rail loop running from Abidjan to Cotonou, with a branch line to Lomé. Given the scale of the project, the Bolloré Group is harnessing all its logistical resources and experience to make this partnership with the Nigerien government a success. The benefits that the railway brings to the local economy will be multiplied by the creation of Bluezones to provide electricity to regions currently cut off from the grid. Energy self-sufficient, lit, internet-connected and supplied with drinking water, these innovative spaces are intended to become development hubs for the people of Niger. They will have access to a continuous stream of free services so that they can learn trades, study, and shape a career. These are just some of the opportunities which will help to improve the quality of life of local populations and help young people to achieve their potential. In order to offer reliable and functional community facilities, the Bolloré Group is using a completely innovative energy solution. In a country like Niger where energy infrastructure is still lacking, producing, storing and distributing electricity is a real challenge. That is why the Group is developing an innovative energy system, the first of its kind in the world: thanks to LMP (Lithium Metal Polymer) storage batteries connected to solar panels, the Nigerien business hubs will be constantly supplied, day and night, with clean, inexhaustible and free electricity. These connected community spaces will give future users the chance to access new technology, education, healthcare and sports facilities. Thanks to a series of partnerships with public bodies, charities, universities and a number of media organisations, these innovative spaces will be prime educational facilities destined to play a determining role in the future of young Nigeriens. This Bolloré Group initiative is a natural fit with the Group’s comprehensive development policy for Africa. Every year for over 50 years, the Bolloré Group, driven by a long-term vision, has invested more than 200 billion CFA francs (€300m) in port, rail and logistics infrastructure. At every step of the way in its future developments, the Bolloré Group will unlock every possible synergy between its activities in Bolloré Africa Logistics, Blue Solutions, and in the media and communications. Copyright Blue Solutions © 2014 - contact - Legal notices

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Home » Latest News in Nigeria » Air Peace CEO, Allen Onyema indicted, charged in US with bank fraud, money laundering Air Peace CEO, Allen Onyema indicted, charged in US with bank fraud, money laundering Allen Onyema, the chief executive officer of Air Peace, has been indicted in the US for bank fraud and money laundering. The Nigerian businessman was accused of moving more than $20 million from Nigeria through US bank accounts in a scheme involving “false documents” based on the purchase of airplanes. Onyema was indicted alongside Ejiroghene Eghagha, the airline’s chief of administration and finance, who is said to have committed aggravated identity theft in connection with the scheme. In a statement issued by the district attorney’s office on Friday, Onyema and Eghagha were indicted on November 19, 2019, on one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, three counts of bank fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit credit application fraud, and three counts of credit application fraud. “Onyema allegedly leveraged his status as a prominent business leader and airline executive while using falsified documents to commit fraud,” Byung J, US attorney for the northern district of Georgia, was quoted in the statement. “We will diligently protect the integrity our banking system from being corrupted by criminals, even when they disguise themselves in a cloak of international business.” Robert J. Murphy, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Atlanta field division, also said: “Allen Onyema’s status as a wealthy businessman turned out to be a fraud. He corrupted the U.S. banking system, but his trail of deceit and trickery came to a skidding halt.” Robert Hammer, another special agent, accused Onyema of setting up “various innocent sounding multi-million dollar asset purchases which were nothing more than alleged fronts for his scam”. Onyema was said to have started travelling frequently to Atlanta, where he opened several personal and business bank accounts. Between 2010 and 2018, over $44.9 million was allegedly transferred into his Atlanta-based accounts from foreign sources. After he founded Air Peace in 2013, Onyema was said to have gone to the US to purchase aircraft and “over $3 million of the funds used to purchase the aircraft allegedly came from bank accounts for Foundation for Ethnic Harmony, International Center for Non-Violence and Peace Development, All-Time Peace Media Communications Limited, and Every Child Limited. “Beginning in approximately May 2016, Onyema, together with Eghagha, allegedly used a series of export letters of credit to cause banks to transfer more than $20 million into Atlanta-based bank accounts controlled by Onyema. The letters of credit were purportedly to fund the purchase of five separate Boeing 737 passenger planes by Air Peace. The letters were supported by documents such as purchase agreements, bills of sale, and appraisals proving that Air Peace was purchasing the aircraft from Springfield Aviation Company LLC, a business registered in Georgia. “However, the supporting documents were fake — Springfield Aviation Company LLC, which is owned by Onyema and managed by a person with no connection to the aviation business, never owned the aircraft, and the company that allegedly drafted the appraisals did not exist. Eghagha allegedly participated in this scheme as well, directing the Springfield Aviation manager to sign and send false documents to banks and even using the manager’s identity to further the fraud. After Onyema received the money in the United States, he allegedly laundered over $16 million of the proceeds of the fraud by transferring it to other accounts.” The statement, however, added that Onyema and Eghagha are presumed innocent of the charges and it will be the government’s burden to prove the guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at trial. In September, Onyema was hailed by many for evacuating Nigerians stranded in South Africa at no cost. The house of representatives had subsequently also recommend him for national award.

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Henry Farman-The first to fly cross-country Henri Farman (26 May 1874 - 17 July 1958) was a British born pilot who in 1937 took French nationality. When Farman first flew an airplane in 1907, it was a time when simply being a pilot meant you had a good chance of setting records. Within a few weeks of his first flight, the former auto racer quickly satisfied his competitive nature by establishing several flying records during the infancy of aviation, culminating with the first officially witnessed flight of a kilometre on a closed course. Farman trained as a painter but quickly become obsessed with mechanical inventions. Farman ditched his life as a painter after modern mechanical machines quickly diverted his attention. Together with his brother Maurice Farman they started building ground breaking aircraft that saw extensive service during WWI whilst their Goliath was the first successful long-distance passenger airliner in the world. Farman on approach to Reims during his record breaking flight. Photo britannica.com / commons.wikimedia.org In 1907 and 37 years old Farman became one of the first customers of the Voison brothers when he bought a biplane from them. Much to the Voison brothers delight Farman, on 13 January 1908, became the first person to fly a complete circuit of 1 kilometre. Farman must have been delighted as well as he won the 50,000 Franc prize for his feat. Needless to say that placed him and the Voison brothers' firmly on the aviation map. Not content on 30 October 1908 took off from Chalons and set out for Reims 27 kilometres away where he arrived 20 minutes later becoming the first aviator to complete a cross country flight. Crossing the line at Reims Now firmly established in his own right he opened a flying school in 1909 and continued with setting records. On 27 August he flew 180 kilometres in just over 3 hours and on 3 November flew, for then, an incredible 232 kilometres in 4 hours 17 minutes. Unfortunately his association with Voison soured and Maurice and he started designing and building their own aircraft. So successful was their first aircraft, the Farman III, that it was widely copied. A Henry Farman III In 1919 Farman was honoured by the French Government who made him a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour. In 1937 Maurice and Henry retired. Henry passed away on 17 July 1958 in Paris. Aviation Personalities

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1 and 2 Kings > Reading through 1 and 2 Kings Certainly, the author of Kings used a variety of sources—from royal archives to prophetic legends—in composing his story. But in the form in which we read the book of Kings, it is probably the work of a single individual, writing during or shortly after the exile when the shape of Judah's future was unclear. The institutions that gave meaning to Israel's national and religious life were dead. The Temple of Jerusalem was in ruins and its priesthood scattered. The likelihood of a restoration of the Davidic dynasty seemed remote. The Israelite national states no longer existed. Their territory was simply incorporated into the conquering Mesopotamian empires. Imbued with the religious perspectives of the book of Deuteronomy, Kings clearly states that the downfall of Israel and Judah was a consequence of their disobedience, but it implies that Judah may still have a future if it learns obedience. The books of Kings are anything but objective. First, they reflect a clear bias in favor of Judah and so they write off the Northern Kingdom as a complete loss. Not a single monarch from the Northern Kingdom receives a positive evaluation. Second, Kings does praise a few kings of Judah, but most are condemned. In the author's eyes, most kings promoted or at least allowed worship that did not reflect the uniqueness of Israel's God and the absolute loyalty that Israel owed to its divine patron. Third, the author is completely convinced of the centrality of the Torah in Israel's life with God. Every other religious institution is secondary to it. To make its theological points, the book uses speeches, prayers, and sometimes editorial comments. Attention to these forms will help the reader become acquainted with the spin the book puts on the events it narrates. Finally, the books of Kings are part of a larger work that begins with Joshua and is sometimes called the “Deuteronomistic History.” It is important to remember that while the adjective Deuteronomistic is appropriate, the term history is not. The book is an exponent of Deuteronomy's theology, but the author is not a historian—at least not in the modern sense. The author is more of a preacher or moralist as he turns Israel's past into a sermon. The author of Kings directs those who want “historical” information to sources like the Chronicles of Solomon (1 Kgs 11, 41 ), the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah (1 Kgs 14, 29 and fourteen more times) and the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel (1 Kgs 14, 19 and sixteen more times)—sources that are, unfortunately, lost. Also, the relative chronologies of the kings of Judah and Israel do not mesh, and contemporary historians have not been able to reconcile these differences. The book passes over kings of great historical import with a few lines, while it devotes chapters to kings that the book considers models of religious commitment. One can use the books of Kings to help reconstruct the history of the Israelite kingdoms, but these books were not written for that purpose. It is important to relate the contents of the books of Kings to other ancient Near Eastern written sources and to the results of archaeological excavations. But none of this diminishes the book's theological achievements. This massive work enabled the exiles to make sense of events that challenged their most deeply held religious beliefs. The book's passion to keep Judah's faith in its ancestral deity alive despite terrible odds offers a model to all those who hand on the faith today, so reading the books of Kings can be as important today as it was millennia ago. Solomon's Accession (1 Kgs 1, 1–2, 46 ) With David a very old man, unable even to keep himself warm, the question of succession became acute. There were two competing candidates: Adonijah and Solomon. Neither was designated by a divine word given through a prophet as were Saul and David. The throne would go to the better practitioner of power politics. Adonijah was born in Hebron and was favored by David's oldest supporters: Joab and Abiathar. Solomon was born in Jerusalem and was favored by his mother Bathsheba and those who supported David after he established himself in that city. That Adonijah was Absalom's full brother (1 Kgs 1, 6 ) presaged the outcome of the contest. Adonijah and Solomon took different approaches toward the succession. Adonijah acted in his own person, claiming the throne for himself. Solomon was content to let his supporters manipulate his father into designating him as the successor to the throne. The book describes two simultaneous ceremonies—each of which was to inaugurate David's successor. The ceremonies took place near Jerusalem at two sites in shouting distance of each other. Adonijah chose Enrogel, a spring located at the juncture of the Hinnom and Kidron Valleys just south of Jerusalem; Solomon had his ceremony at the Gihon Spring, Jerusalem's main water source, at the base of the eastern slope of David's city. Solomon was able to bring more people to his ceremony; after all, he was the candidate of the Jerusalem party. When Adonijah and his supporters heard the crowd acclaim Solomon as their king, they lost heart and fled. Adonijah submitted to Solomon's authority and begged for his life, which Solomon chose to spare. With the succession settled, the book had David make his exit. Of course, a person as important as David must have some significant last words to say. The book provides David with a schizophrenic‐like testament (1 Kgs 2, 1–9 ). The first to speak is the “pious David” who charges his successor to be obedient to the written authoritative Torah, i.e., the book of Deuteronomy. It will be through his obedience that Solomon will secure the throne for himself and his successors (vv. 2–4 ). Then it is the turn of the “practical David.” He knew from experience that gaining the throne and keeping the throne are two different things. The last words of David recorded in 1 Kings identify those who have shown themselves a threat to the dynasty. David was certain that Solomon would know what needed to be done (vv. 5–9 ). The reader does not have to wait long to learn how Solomon dealt with potential troublemakers (1 Kgs 2, 12–46 ). First, he had Adonijah killed. The imprudent Adonijah gave Solomon a pretext when he asked to marry Abishag, one of David's secondary wives. Solomon chose to interpret Adonijah's foolish request as treason. The new king then dealt with Adonijah's principal supporters. He had Joab killed and sent Abiathar to internal exile. For good measure, Solomon had Shimei, David's tormentor, executed as well (see 2 Sm 16, 6–14; 19, 16–24 ). The book allows its readers to draw their own conclusions regarding the path Solomon took to the throne. Notably absent from these first two chapters is any statement or even a hint that God had any role in Solomon's succession. It is important to note the role that Bathsheba, Solomon's mother, played in his rise to the throne. After he became king, she enjoyed access to him and was seated near his throne at official functions (1 Kgs 2, 19–20 ). The books of Kings name the mothers of seventeen other kings—all but two kings of Judah (Jehoram and Ahaz) and two kings of Israel. This had led to the conclusion that the “queen mother” has an official position and exercised political and religious power. Unfortunately, the book does not provide the type of information that would permit firm conclusions to be drawn. That the author made it a point to mention the mother of eighteen kings by name, however, makes it obvious that the “queen mother” enjoyed a specific rank and exercised some power—especially over domestic matters. Solomon's Reign (1 Kgs 3, 1–11, 43 ) The account of Solomon's reign begins with an introductory statement that encapsulates the book's ambivalence toward David's son (1 Kgs 3, 1–3 ). On the one hand, the reader is told that Solomon “loved the Lord” (v. 3 ), fulfilling the great commandment of Deuteronomy (see Dt 6, 5 ). But, on the other hand, he married a foreign princess and worshipped on the “high places.” The Deuteronomic tradition takes a dim view of both patterns of behavior (see Dt 7, 1–4; 1 Kgs 3, 2–3 and twenty‐eight more times). Like Israel's life in the land, Solomon's reign will begin well enough, but it will soon founder because of an unwillingness to be faithful to the most basic of the Torah's commands: absolute fidelity to Israel's God. The book finally gets around to providing divine legitimation for Solomon's accession (1 Kgs 3, 4–15 ). It does so by having God approve of Solomon's status as king through an appearance in a dream, which the Bible considers as one way that God communicates with human beings. The story reflects an ancient Near Eastern practice (called “incubation”) of seeking an oracle by sleeping in a sanctuary after offering the prescribed sacrifices. Any dream experienced during this sleep was considered a revelation from the god honored at the sanctuary. The dream concerned Solomon's request for God's help in ruling Israel wisely. The request was granted. The book follows up the account of the dream with a tale illustrating Solomon's wisdom (1 Kgs 3, 16–28 ). Solomon was able to settle a dispute between two women over an infant, which each claimed as her own, because he knew that the true mother would sacrifice anything to insure the welfare of her child. The book pauses in its narrative about Solomon's reign to include information about Solomon's administration, wealth, and wisdom (1 Kgs 4, 1–5, 14 ). The editors of the NAB rearrange the versification of this section as follows: 4, 1–6 (Solomon's administrators); 4, 7–19; 5, 7–8 (districts for taxation); 4, 20 (the kingdom's prosperity); 5, 2–6 (Solomon's wealth); 5, 9–14 (Solomon's wisdom). First Samuel mentioned almost nothing about Saul's administration. Second Samuel named nine administrators during David's reign (see 2 Sm 8, 16–18; 20, 23–26 ). It is clear from the list of Solomon's administrators (1 Kgs 4, 1–19 ) that the centralization of all authority in the monarchy became a priority under Solomon. He developed an efficient apparatus to do what Samuel warned them that their king would do: tax them (see 1 Sm 8, 10–18 ). The book also makes a point of noting that Solomon set up his sons‐in‐law over two of the districts (1 Kgs 4, 11.15 ) and that Judah, Solomon's tribe, was not included among the taxation districts. The people had asked Samuel for a king to rule over them “like other nations” (1 Sm 8). The book implies that the taxation, nepotism, and cronyism assure them that they have such a king. Deuteronomy requires that the king study the Torah so that he not “become estranged from his countrymen” (Dt 17, 20 ). The list of the king's daily provisions (1 Kgs 5, 1–5 ) certainly sounded more than extravagant to Judah's subsistence farmers. The divide between the royal establishment and the general population was becoming more pronounced. Still, 1 Kings 4, 20 (note: this verse has been moved to ch. 5 ) and 5, 5 describe Solomon's reign as a time of peace and prosperity. Just as Moses was associated with Torah and David with the psalms, Solomon was remembered as a sage (see Prv 1, 1; Sir 47, 12 ). To conclude its initial portrait of Solomon, the book asserts that Solomon's wisdom was unsurpassed. His wisdom attracted admirers from all over the world ( 5, 9–14 ). The reader recognizes that Solomon's court is far different from that of Saul—and even David. Next, the book describes a project with which Solomon's name is always associated: the building of the Temple (1 Kgs 5, 15–32 ). While the account implies that the project was ordained by God, temple building was a royal prerogative in the ancient Near East. By initiating the project of erecting a temple to Israel's patron deity in Jerusalem, his capital, Solomon was asserting, in most dramatic form, his claim to Israel's throne. The book has Solomon explain that David did not build a temple because he was almost continuously at war (1 Kgs 5, 17 ). Solomon also used good Deuteronomic language as he said that he was going to build a temple “for the name of God” (v. 19 , literal translation). The Deuteronomic tradition usually avoided describing the Temple as God's dwelling place, preferring to speak of the Temple as the place for God's name (see Dt 12, 11 ). To be consistent with its portrait of Solomon as an Israelite king with an international reputation, the book has the king using his contacts to assemble the best material and artisans from surrounding countries for his project, while ordinary Israelites contributed their labor to the project. The book goes into some detail in describing the building of the Temple. It gives the date for both the beginning and the completion of the project (1 Kgs 6, 1–37 ) and describes the dimensions of the building and its tripartite structure. The Temple was to have a porch, a nave, and a “holy of holies.” The latter was a windowless room that was to contain the ark of the covenant, the symbol of the divine presence. In the holy of holies, there were to be two cherubim (1 Kgs 6, 23–28 ). A cherub was a mythical creature that had the face of a human being, the forequarters of a lion, the hindquarters of an ox, and wings of an eagle. The ark of the covenant would be placed between the two cherubim. The book clearly wants readers to think of the Temple as a most impressive building. Solomon spared no expense in its construction and ornamentation. He overlaid the entire structure with gold (1 Kgs 6, 22 ). At the same time, however, the book offers an explanation for the eventual destruction of this singular structure. It presents God as warning Solomon that God will never forsake Israel, the dynasty, or the Temple if he keeps the commandments (1 Kgs 6, 12 ). Kings will describe how Solomon and most of Israel's kings failed, leaving God to abandon the Temple that Solomon built. The book inserts a short description of five other structures that it credits to Solomon's building activity (1 Kgs 7, 1–12 ), implying that as much as the Temple was designed to show that the Lord was a great God, it and the other buildings Solomon had built were designed to show that Solomon was a great king. These five structures were the “Forest of Lebanon,” which was larger than the Temple, the “Columned Hall,” the “Throne Hall” (or “Hall of Justice”), and palaces for himself and for the pharaoh's daughter. Completing these projects took almost double the time it took to build the Temple (1 Kgs 6, 38; 7, 1 ). The text provides little information about the structures themselves, and archaeological excavation has not uncovered any such buildings. After mentioning Solomon's other projects, the book returns to the Temple and describes some of its furnishings (1 Kgs 7, 13–51 ). The artisan responsible for crafting these furnishings was named Hiram though v. 40 (in the Hebrew) calls him Hirom. The Chronicler remembers him as Huram (2 Chr 4, 11 ) and Huram‐abi (2 Chr 2, 13; 4, 16 ). Of particular interest are the two bronze pillars (1 Kgs 7, 15–22 ). Their appearance and function are difficult to reconstruct given the information in the text. They were probably symbolic because they did not support any part of the structure and because they were given names. The bronze sea (vv. 23–26 ), the wheeled stands (vv. 27–37 ), and the basins (vv. 38–39 ) testify to the need for large volumes of water that had to be kept in the Temple area to cleanse it from the contamination caused by the blood of the sacrifices offered there. With the Temple and its furnishings completed, all is ready for the building's dedication. The book provides a narrative framework (1 Kgs 8, 1–9; 62–66 ) for a lengthy prayer that Solomon offered at the dedication. The framework describes the transfer of the ark to the newly built Temple and the sacrifices offered there for the first time. The prayer, however, seems to prepare the reader for a world without a Temple. The words of the prayer are, at times, in conflict with each other. Verses 10–13 speak about God's presence in the Temple while v. 27 asserts that God cannot be contained in the building that Solomon had just built. The prayer also appears to transform the Temple from a place of sacrificial offerings (vv. 5 and 66 ) into a place of prayer where Israelite and non‐Israelite alike can ask for forgiveness (vv. 42–43 ). Indeed, one does not even need to be present in the Temple to be heard by God. All that is necessary is that one pray in the direction of Jerusalem and its Temple (vv. 38, 48; see Dn 6, 11 ). The author of Kings composed this prayer to help his readers cope with the loss of the Temple. The book uses another speech to reiterate its explanation for the disastrous end of the Davidic dynasty and the destruction of the Temple (1 Kgs 9, 1–9 ). After all, the prayer of Solomon had just praised God for fulfilling the promise to David (1 Kgs 8, 14–29 ) and celebrated the dedication of the Temple. God appeared to Solomon and warned him that the future of the dynasty and the Temple depended on the fidelity of Israel's kings to the commandments and on Israel's exclusive loyalty to its ancestral deity. The conclusion is obvious: the destruction of the Temple and the end of the dynasty did not occur because of any lack of fidelity on God's part. The people of Israel and their kings bear full responsibility for the fall of the two Israelite states and the exile of their people. Of course, the book wants its readers to recognize that the converse is true as well: obedience will bring God's blessing to the people and their land. The book brings its treatment of the temple to a close by mentioning some economic and personnel issues (1 Kgs 9, 10–25 ). The assistance that Hiram, the king of Tyre, gave to Solomon in completing his building projects came at a price. Solomon ceded twenty cities along the Galilean border with Tyre to Hiram. Also, the labor for the projects was supplied not by Israelites but by prisoners of war. The issue of forced labor proved to be one that undermined the relations between the king and people. Even though 1 Kings 5, 27 suggests that Solomon got skilled workers for the Temple project from Israel, 1 Kings 9, 20 asserts that the laborers came from non‐Israelite prisoners of war. The Millo mentioned in 1 Kings 9, 24 was probably a structure that supported the terrace work that allowed building on the steep grades of the Ophel hill on which monarchic period Jerusalem was built. Next, the book describes the splendor of Solomon's reign by focusing on his wealth, wisdom, and chariot forces (1 Kgs 9, 26–10, 29 ). Eleven times the text mentions the gold that the king amassed. It also notes that the queen of Sheba came to Jerusalem because of Solomon's renown as a sage. Sheba was located at the southwestern corner of the Arabian peninsula and was likely one of Judah's trading partners. Goods passed between these two countries through the Red Sea port at Ezion‐geber. According to an Ethiopian tradition, their country was Sheba, and the results of the queen's visit to Solomon included her conversion to his religion and a son fathered by Solomon. This son visited his father and returned to Ethiopia with the ark of the covenant. While there is no biblical support for this tradition, it does explain the reason some people claim that the ark of the covenant is in Ethiopia. From the book's perspective, the luster of all Solomon's achievements was tarnished by his failure to support the worship of the Lord alone. The reason offered for Solomon's infidelity was his marriage to non‐Israelite women. Of course, the book is trying to promote marriage within the Judahite community as one way to maintain Judahite identity. To show the seriousness of Solomon's failure, the text has God speak to Solomon for a third and final time, announcing the end of the Davidic‐Solomonic kingdom and the rise of another Israelite national state, which will occur after Solomon's death (1 Kgs 11, 1–13 ). First Kings concludes its story of Solomon's reign by mentioning three of Solomon's rivals (1 Kgs 11, 14–40 ). The first is Hadad, king of Edom. Judah and Edom were perennial rivals for control of the southern part of the Levant. The second was Rezon who was “king of Damascus,” the capital of Aram. Israel and Aram struggled for many years for hegemony in the northern part of the Levant. The most serious threat, however, was an internal one. Jeroboam, one of Solomon's administrators, was supported in a bid for kingship by Egypt and with prophetic designation, threatening the rule of the Davidic dynasty. Although the rebellion was not successful at first, the book explains the origins of the two Israelite national states, Israel and Judah, as a consequence of Jeroboam's attempt to replace Solomon, who simply failed to observe the commandments and to worship the Lord alone. It is important to note that the book asserts that, despite Jeroboam, the Davidic dynasty continued in existence not only for the sake of David but also for the sake of Jerusalem. That city was destined to take on paramount importance for Judaism. The Temple, however, is not mentioned specifically. Also significant is the role played by the prophet Ahijah, who like Samuel, pronounced words of judgment on the king. The book again was suggesting that Israel listen to the prophets sent to it. Like the reigns of his predecessors Saul and David, Solomon's began with great promise but ended with an unfavorable picture of the king, thus presaging the story of the people of Israel in their land. The book notes that Solomon was buried in the City of David after a reign of forty years and was succeeded by his son Rehoboam. The Two Kingdoms (1 Kgs 12, 1—2 Kgs 17, 41 ) The two Israelite national states arose in the Levant sometime in the ninth century BC. Historians still have not arrived at a consensus as to the developments that led to their establishment. First Kings, however, describes the origins of the two Israelite states as the result of divine judgment on Solomon's rule, communicated by the prophet Ahijah. What Ahijah foretold was fulfilled almost immediately after Solomon's death and the accession of his son Rehoboam. But as it did with the origins of the monarchy, the book will describe the origins of the two Israelite national states in economic as well as religious terms (1 Kgs 12, 1–25 ). Rehoboam refused to lighten the economic burdens that Solomon imposed on his subjects, and before Rehoboam was able to consolidate his hold on his father's realm, there was a revolution that led to the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel separate from the Kingdom of Judah. When Rehoboam attempted to use military force against the rebellion, he was dissuaded by another prophetic word given through Shemaiah. While Kings implies that the Israelites had legitimate grievances, it does not approve of religious practices, which it characterizes as obscuring the unity of Israel's ancestral deity, as violating the prohibition of images, and as ignoring the place that God chose. The book presents Jeroboam as fearing that the Jerusalem Temple will be a magnet, drawing the people to Jerusalem and to the Davidic dynasty. To counter this Jeroboam built cultic centers at Dan at the extreme north of his kingdom and at Bethel in the extreme south (1 Kgs 12, 26–33 ). The book makes its attitude toward these cultic centers absolutely clear when it depicts an unnamed “man of God” from Judah condemning the shrine at Bethel (1 Kgs 13, 1–10 ). As the story of the Northern Kingdom unfolds, every king of Israel will be condemned for maintaining these shrines and continuing “the sin of Jeroboam.” This man of God left Bethel because God had told him to eat or drink nothing there but to return to Judah. On his way home, he met an unnamed prophet, who convinced him to return to Bethel and enjoy his hospitality. Because he disobeyed God's instructions, the man of God from Judah died a violent death. But the prophet from Bethel lied to the man of God in convincing him to accept hospitality (1 Kgs 13, 11–32 ). Here the book exposes a practical problem connected with prophecy: how does one know whether a prophet is actually speaking in the name of God? Of course, the book wants its readers to recognize that the written authoritative Torah (the book of Deuteronomy) is the authentic, reliable, and unambiguous statement of God's will for Israel. First Kings concludes its treatment of Jeroboam by revisiting the theme of succession (1 Kgs 14, 1–20 ). Abijah, Jeroboam's heir, fell ill and Jeroboam had his wife visit the prophet Ahijah in order to elicit a favorable oracle on behalf of the child. The prophet, however, predicted not only that the child was to die but also that Jeroboam's dynasty would end violently. Ahijah's speech is an intense and sometimes vulgar invective. While the prophet was not specific about Jeroboam's failures, he was quite specific about the king's future and that of the nation. He even blamed the exile on Jeroboam (v. 16 ). The book intertwines narratives about the kings of the two Israelite national states until it tells of the fall of the Northern Kingdom to the Assyrians in 2 Kings 17. The two Israelite kingdoms were rivals at first. Disputes over the border that they shared were almost continuous. The book notes that Israel and Judah fought continuously during the reigns of Jeroboam and Rehoboam (1 Kgs 14, 30 ). Rehoboam also had to deal with a raid by Pharaoh Shishak, who had given asylum to Jeroboam during the reign of Solomon (1 Kgs 11, 40 ). While the Egyptians were not in a position to reestablish the hegemony over the region, they raided 154 towns in the two kingdoms. Jerusalem was spared only because Rehoboam paid a large indemnity to Shishak (1 Kgs 14, 26 ). The book characterizes Rehoboam's reign as a time of apostasy (1 Kgs 14, 21–24 ). The border wars between the two Israelite kingdoms continued during the reign of Abijam in Judah (1 Kgs 15, 7 ). The book provides no other information about Abijam's short reign except to note that he that he was nothing like David, whom the book begins to idealize even though it mentions David's lapse “in the case of Uriah” (1 Kgs 15, 5; see 2 Sm 11 ). The book devotes more attention to Asa, Abijam's son. He is one of the few kings of Judah whom the book commends because of his actions to rid Judah of non‐Yahwistic worship. Asa also induced the Arameans to invade the Northern Kingdom. With the army of Israel occupied with the Arameans, Asa had a free hand to extend the border to Mizpeh, a town about five miles north of Jerusalem, where it remained until the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 721 BC. The book next turns its attention to the Northern Kingdom for almost the rest of 1 Kings (15, 25–22, 40 ). After Jeroboam's twenty‐two‐year reign, the political situation in the north became very unstable. Nadab, Jeroboam's son and successor, was assassinated in the course of a war with the Philistines. The coup was led by Baasha, who purged Jeroboam's entire family in order to secure his own accession to the throne. Of course, the book sees this as a fulfillment of Ahijah's prophecy (1 Kgs 14, 10 ) and a consequence of Nadab's infidelity. Baasha proved to be no improvement over Nadab although he did manage to hold the throne for twenty‐four years ( 15, 33–16, 7 ). Kings notes that a prophet named Jehu announced the end of Baasha's dynasty ( 16, 1–5.7 ) just as Ahijah announced the end of Jeroboam's dynasty. Jehu's words were fulfilled as Baasha's son and successor Elah was assassinated during a military coup after just two years on the throne. Zimri, the leader of the coup, purged all the descendants of Baasha to solidify his claim to the throne ( 16, 8–14 ). Omri, another Israelite general, decided to lead a coup of his own. His success led Zimri to take his life after a reign of just seven days. Of course, the book suggests Zimri's fate was the consequence of his religious infidelity. After a short civil war (1 Kgs 16, 21–22 ), Omri became king of Israel. Even though Kings almost completely ignores Omri (1 Kgs 17, 23–28 ), he was arguably the most able ruler of the Northern Kingdom. His reign reversed Israel's fortunes. He ended the Aramean threat. He revived Israel's commercial fortunes by aligning himself with Phoenicia, sealing the alliance with the marriage of his son Ahab with Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, king of Sidon. Omri ended the fifty years of fruitless conflict with Judah. He subjugated Moab and this brought the King's Highway, a major commercial highway east of the Jordan, under his control. The dynasty he established lasted four generations, providing a measure of stability to Israel. All this brought a new era of peace and prosperity to the Northern Kingdom. While Kings ignores these achievements because they do not correspond with its theological purpose, it does note that Omri established his capital at Samaria where Omri was buried. Ahab succeeded his father Omri. It was the first successful dynastic succession in the Kingdom of Israel. From a military, economic, and political perspective, Ahab's reign was remarkably successful. His only defeat was the loss of Moab toward the end of his twenty‐two‐year reign. Excavations at several cities in the north show that Ahab's reign was one of economic growth and military strength. His greatest military achievement took place at the battle of Qarqar, which the book ignores. Ahab led a coalition of small states that successfully engaged the Assyrians and prevented them from taking control of the region. Ahab led the largest force in the coalition. The book chooses to focus on Ahab's serious internal problems by introducing several stories about the prophets Elijah and Elisha. Both prophets were highly critical of the religious and social policies of Ahab and his successors. Kings implies that Ahab's problems were caused by his Phoenician wife Jezebel, who promoted the worship of Baal. The prophet Elijah forcefully opposed her. The conflict between Elijah and Ahab over Jezebel's activity dominates the portrait of Ahab in the Bible and makes it appear as if he were a weak and ineffective ruler when the opposite was true. The worship of Baal was attractive because this god was thought to provide the rain that made Israel's survival on its land possible. To show that Baal was unable to provide rain, Elijah announced a drought (1 Kgs 17, 1 ). God's power to provide was obvious when a dry river bed yielded water for the prophet, and ravens brought him food. When the stream dried up again, the prophet went to beg in a Sidonian town. A poor widow from that town, who took pity on the prophet, never ran out of food despite the famine induced by the drought (1 Kgs 17, 2–16 ). An even more remarkable demonstration of God's power occurred when the prophet brought the widow's deceased son back to life (1 Kgs 17, 17–24 ). Elijah finally met Ahab, who blamed the prophet for the drought. Of course, the reader knows that the fault lies with Ahab. While the confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel was another indication of the power of Israel's God (1 Kgs 18, 20–40 ), it was the prophet's prayer for rain that brought relief to the suffering people (1 Kgs 18, 41–46 ). The rain that comes on the land does not end the tension in the story because Jezebel was determined to avenge Elijah's victory at Mount Carmel. The prophet fled to the south, stopping at Beersheba, a town that abuts the Negev desert. After a brief pause, Elijah continued his journey until he reached Horeb, which is the name by which the Deuteronomic tradition knows Mount Sinai. At the place where the Israelites experienced God's presence in a most dramatic way, the prophet experienced only God's absence until he realized God was present in a “whispering sound” (1 Kgs 19, 12 ). God then commissioned the prophet to take specific steps to deal with the apostasy fomented by Israel's royal family. One of these steps is the anointing of a prophet to succeed him. Elijah found Elisha, whom the Lord had designated, and called him to his prophetic ministry (1 Kgs 19, 13–21 ). The book sets aside its narrative about Elijah and Elisha and interjects a story about an unnamed prophet who confronts Ahab during a war between Aram and Israel (1 Kgs 20, 1–43 ). Aram, southern Syria with its capital Damascus, was probably the most powerful kingdom in the Levant between the eleventh and eighth centuries BC. However, historians have had problems with the stories of a war between Aram and Israel during Ahab's reign. Both Ahab and Omri were powerful kings and were not dominated by the Arameans as suggested in this story (1 Kgs 20, 1–9.34 ). The details of the story reflect the relations between Aram and Israel, which were characteristic of the reigns of Jehoahaz and Jehoash fifty years later when Israel was much weaker politically and militarily. Although the book may have provided this story with an incorrect setting, its theological point is clear enough as it tells a tale similar to that of Saul and the Amalekite war in 1 Samuel 15. Both Saul and Ahab fail to heed the instructions given by a prophet and stand under divine judgment. The lesson is obvious: Israel must listen to the prophets sent to it if it is to have any future. The book returns to the conflict between king and prophet as it tells the tale of Naboth's vineyard (1 Kgs 21, 1–29 ). Again, it is Jezebel, Ahab's non‐Israelite wife, who is responsible for the trouble. Ahab recognized that Naboth was within his rights in refusing to sell the king his vineyard. Jezebel, however, co‐opted the elders of Naboth's city into convicting him on trumped‐up charges of blasphemy and treason. Naboth was executed and his property forfeited to the crown, so Jezebel was able to present her husband with Naboth's vineyard. Of course, Elijah condemned this blatant injustice in God's name. Surprisingly, Ahab repented upon hearing the prophet's words of judgment, and God spared his life. Again, the book's message is obvious: if Israel listens to the prophets God sends to it, Israel's life will be spared as well. But just as the book finished commending the prophetic word to Israel, it shows that discerning that word is not a simple matter. To do so the book describes preparations for a second war between Israel and Aram during the waning years of Ahab's reign (1 Kgs 22, 1–28 ). This time Ahab sought help from Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah. Relations between the two Israelite states had steadily improved since the time of Ahab's father, Omri. Indeed, Ahab offered his daughter in marriage to Jehoram, Jehoshaphat's son (2 Kgs 8, 18 ). The king of Judah, however, suggested seeking a word from God before embarking on any campaign against the powerful Arameans. Ahab assembled four hundred prophets to impress Jehoshaphat. After the four hundred encourage an attack, Jehoshaphat, apparently reluctant to fight the Arameans, asked if there were any more prophets who might be consulted. Ahab summoned Micaiah ben Imlah, who predicted an Aramean victory. Micaiah asserted that God put a “lying spirit” in the four hundred prophets to insure that Ahab would be defeated. How then could prophecy be a reliable guide if God can inspire prophets to lie? The book assumes that the one reliable and unimpeachable guide to Israel's life is the written, authoritative Torah, the book of Deuteronomy. The attitude of Kings toward Ahab is evident from the description of what happened when Ahab's chariot was cleansed of the fallen king's blood (1 Kgs 22, 38 ). The book returns briefly to the Judahite monarchy and gives a qualified commendation to Jehoshaphat, who followed the good example of his father, Asa. The book also notes that Jehoshaphat was “at peace” with Israel, though it also claims that the king led Judah bravely in some wars but gives no details (1 Kgs 15, 45–46 ). The story of Ahaziah of Israel straddles 1 and 2 Kings. Since he reigned for a little more than one year, the book gives just a brief and disapproving summary of his rule, emphasizing his promotion of Baal worship (1 Kgs 22, 52–54 ). The first chapter of 2 Kings offers an illustration of Ahaziah's apostasy (2 Kgs 1, 2–6 ). The king sought an oracle from the Baal worshipped at Ekron. When Elijah intercepted the king's messengers and proclaimed an oracle from the God of Israel, Ahaziah sought to arrest him. But the conflict between king and prophet was no real match (2 Kgs 1, 7–16 ). The book is building up its case showing the failure of the monarchy. It wants to show that the political disasters that befell both Israelite kingdoms were a direct result of the apostasy of their kings (see Dt 4, 25–28 ). The book presents the prophets as the foils of Israel's apostate kings, so after describing the failures of Ahab and his son Ahaziah, it turns its attention back to Elijah and Elisha and the transition from the prophetic ministry of the former to that of the latter (2 Kgs 2, 1–18 ). The narrative is purposely reminiscent of the traditions regarding the transition in the leadership of the Israelite community from Moses to Joshua. The book sees the succession of Elisha to the prophetic ministry as a genuine act of God. Perhaps a story with such spectacular details served to show that Elisha was a true witness to the God of Israel as was Elijah in contrast to the prophets that supported the house of Ahab (see 2 Kgs 3, 13 ). Fifty “guild prophets” witness the passing of the prophetic mantle to Elisha (2 Kgs 2, 15 ). Except for 1 Kings 20, 35 , these guild prophets are always mentioned in connection with Elisha and may have been his supporters against the king and his prophets. The book concludes its introduction to the cycle of stories about Elisha with two tales that encourage Israel to obey the prophets sent to it (2 Kgs 2, 19–25 ). The book shifts attention to the house of Ahab again. After the short reign of the childless Ahaziah, his brother Jehoram (Joram) became king of Israel (2 Kgs 3, 1–3 ). While Kings asserts that Moab's revolt took place during Jehoram's reign, it was more likely during Ahab's final years. Jehoram was simply unsuccessful in regaining control over Moab. Moab was a kingdom located east of the Dead Sea and west of the Arabian desert. It had been a vassal to Israel since the time of Omri. The Mesha stele, a monument celebrating Moab's victory over Israel, gives an account of this revolt from the Moabite perspective. Although both the biblical and Moabite accounts agree that Mesha, the king of Moab, was successful in regaining his country's independence, the book provides little historical information but a clear theological interpretation. It insists that apostasy always brings defeat. The extent of the territory under Israelite control was a tangible indication of God's blessings according to the book, and the success of Mesha's revolt and the consequent loss of Moab show that Israel was on a downward spiral because of its infidelity (2 Kgs 3, 4–27 ). The book transfers the focus of its story away from kings and international political conflicts to ordinary folk in need—people whose names are never given (2 Kgs 4, 1–44 ). Elisha, whom this chapter refers to as a “man of God,” responds to those needs with compassion. While the effect on the reader is to wonder at the miracle‐working power of Elisha, the stories do not even hint that the man of God worked these miracles to establish his reputation. The book implies that Elisha did what the kings were supposed to do: respond to the needs of the lowly and poor. In fact, the reason ordinary people were in need was the economic and political policies of the monarchy. God redresses this injustice through Elisha. The prophetic task is not simply to speak words of judgment on injustice but to undo the effects of the greed that creates poverty. With the story of Naaman, Elisha moves back into the arena of international politics (2 Kgs 5, 1–19 ). This is the second time the book has told a tale of someone searching for healing in a foreign country. In 2 Kings 1, it was King Ahaziah of Israel looking for healing in Ekron from Baalzebub. In 2 Kings 5, it is Naaman from Aram who looks for healing in Israel. Whereas the healings in 2 Kings 4 took place because of Elisha's compassion for those in need, here there is an overt apologetic purpose: Naaman is to learn that there was a prophet in Israel who could heal in the name of Israel's God. The Aramean general learned this lesson. There is also a homiletic character to the story. Naaman is a model for Israel. Although reluctant at first, the Aramean general obeyed the prophet and was healed. Israel surely should obey the prophets sent to it. Two more stories with a clear homiletic thrust follow (2 Kgs 5, 20–6, 7 ). Both stories concern the prophet's followers. In the first, Gehazi seeks to reap a monetary profit from his association with Elisha and is duly punished for his avarice. In the second, Elisha's supporters find themselves in an embarrassing situation, which the prophet resolves. The book warns against venality. Though the story of Naaman presupposes that there was peace between Aram and Israel, the book asserts that the situation changed as it describes two incidents between Israel and its neighbor to the north. The first shows that of itself Aram posed no danger to Israel (2 Kgs 6, 8–23 ). The prophet made the Arameans look foolish as he led them into Samaria. Fortunately for them, the prophet told the king to spare the lives of his prisoners. The circumstances change abruptly in the story of Ben‐hadad's siege of Samaria (2 Kgs 6, 24–33 ). A siege sought to force surrender by cutting off the supply of food. Ben‐hadad's siege of the Israelite capital was working as is evident from the horrific details that the book gives (vv. 28–29 ). The apostasy of Omri and his successors is having its full effect as Aram jeopardized Israel's very existence. The king, of course, did not accept responsibility for Samaria's troubles; he blamed the prophet whom the book describes as cowering behind a closed door in fear of the king's anger. The Aramean threat was a harbinger of things to come. Aram here is an instrument of divine judgment on Israel's apostasy—apostasy that continued without abatement. But Israel's time had not yet come, so 2 Kings 7, 1–20 tells of the lifting of the Aramean siege of Samaria. The book makes it clear that the lifting of the siege and the relief of Samaria were not the work of Israel's military. God's power lifted the siege, and four lepers—by sheer happenstance—open the way to the city's relief from the famine. The book shows readers that Israel's God shapes human events through the prophetic word. Just as easily as God made Aram a threat to Israel, God removed that threat. This is another hint to the book's first readers that God can end their exile. The epilogue to the story of Elisha and the woman of Shunem (2 Kgs 8, 1–6; see 2 Kgs 5, 8–37 ) is unusual on two counts. First, the prophet does not directly solve her problem. In fact, she is suffering economic privation precisely because she followed the prophet's instructions to relocate from Israel. Upon returning, she found her property had been confiscated. Still, just the power of the prophet's fame was enough to solve her problem. Second, it was the king who restored the woman's property. For once, an Israelite king did act for the benefit of those in need. The book illustrates the power of God to extricate people from difficult situations. That power is such that it can lead people to act contrary to their normal patterns to bring about the fulfillment of the divine will. In a sense, the woman of Shunem is Israel in microcosm. She experienced exile, loss, and eventually restoration. What happened to her, the book implies, can happen to Israel as well. It too can experience restoration after exile. The book introduces a new character into its story of the Northern Kingdom and its kings: Hazael, who was to become king of Aram and a very serious problem for both Israel and Judah (2 Kgs 8, 7–15 ). Hazael was an emissary sent to seek a positive oracle for Ben‐hadad, the king of Aram, who was dying. In the course of giving this oracle, the prophet became aware of the great problems Hazael would cause the Israelite kingdoms. Hazael appears to be surprised by the prophet's words. Hazael's succession was indeed irregular. He did not belong to the royal family but usurped the throne of Aram following Ben‐hadad's death. For the first time in 2 Kings, the book turns its attention to Judah as it offers judgment on the reign of Jehoram (2 Kgs 8, 16–25 ). The relations between Judah and Israel were peaceful, sealed by the marriage of Jehoram to Athaliah, a daughter of Ahab. Certainly in any alliance between the two kingdoms, Judah was the junior partner. The book notes that Jehoram replicated the behavior of the kings of Israel. This brought serious consequences for Judah. As Israel lost control over Moab (2 Kgs 3 ), so Judah's domination of Edom came to an end. The power of the Israelite kingdoms was steadily diminishing. For the book this was an obvious sign of God's displeasure with Israel, Judah, and their kings. Jehoram of Judah died after only eight years as king, leaving his twenty‐one‐year‐old son Ahaziah to ascend David's throne. Ahaziah was a brother‐in‐law to Jehoram of Israel. The two kings decided to strike the Arameans under Hazael because of the threat that the Arameans posed. But Jehoram was severely wounded in battle and went to Jezreel to recover. Ahaziah went there to visit him (2 Kgs 8, 25–29 ). In providing these details, the book is setting the scene for the violent end that will come to the dynasty established by Omri. To illustrate the disintegration of the Kingdom of Israel, the book describes a revolution that brought an end to the House of Omri (2 Kgs 9, 1–10, 22 )—a revolution so bloody that it was still remembered with horror a century later (see Hos 1, 4–5 ). According to Kings, Jehu's revolution was set in motion by the apostasy and injustice practiced by Israel's kings, and the terrible end of these kings reflects the prophetic judgment on their actions (1 Kgs 14, 11; 16, 4; 21, 19–24 ). The book then presents Jehu's revolution not in political but theological terms; it begins with the prophet Elisha's naming of Jehu, an officer in Jehoram's army, as the one to replace the king. After Jehu assassinated Jehoram of Israel and Ahaziah of Judah, he turned to Jezebel, who taunted him as no better than Zimri, the assassin who was king of Israel for just seven days (see 1 Kgs 16, 15–19 ). Jezebel shared the fate of her son Jehoram at Jehu's hand (1 Kgs 9, 1–27 ). As a usurper, Jehu had to eliminate claimants to the throne with better credentials. His revolutionary goals were to take Jehoram's place on the throne and end the Phoenician influence over the Kingdom of Israel. To secure his throne, Jehu purged the entire royal family (2 Kgs 10, 1–11.15–17 ) and to eliminate Phoenician influence, he killed the prophets of Baal and destroyed their temple ( 10, 18–27 ). Because he also killed Ahaziah of Judah, Jehu had to deal with a force from the Southern Kingdom seeking to avenge Ahaziah. But the book does not tell the story of Jehu's action to give an accurate picture of the progress of his revolution. The book wishes to describe the religious significance of that revolution. From this perspective, for all his brutal thoroughness, Jehu was a failure. He did not follow the Lord when he was king but followed instead the pattern of apostasy as set by Jeroboam. Because of this sin, Jehu did not stop Israel's slide to oblivion. Like his predecessors, Jehu witnessed Israel's power diminishing. More territory was lost—probably to Aram. Israel's doom was just a matter of time (2 Kgs 10, 28–36 ). The book next shows that the baleful influence of the House of Ahab was not limited to the Northern Kingdom. The queen mother in Judah was Athaliah, a princess of the House of Ahab, who was given in marriage to Jehoram, the crown prince of Judah, thus ending the tensions between the two Israelite kingdoms. When Athaliah's son, Ahaziah, was assassinated in the course of Jehu's revolt, she decided to seize absolute power in Jerusalem. Because she, like Jehu, was a usurper, she had to eliminate all potential rivals for power so she had all the males from the House of David killed (2 Kgs 11, 1 ). Ahaziah's son Joash was saved by his aunt Jehosheba and escaped the massacre orchestrated by his grandmother Athaliah. During her seventh year on the throne, Athaliah was assassinated in the course of a revolution led by Jehoiada, a priest. The temple of Baal that Athaliah built in Jerusalem was torn down, and the unprecedented rule of a woman as sovereign ended. Joash was enthroned in place of his assassinated grandmother. The book notes that support for Joash came from the people in rural areas. Jerusalem's population had evidently been co‐opted by Athaliah and made no effort to support the new king (2 Kgs 11, 20 ). Since Joash was placed on the throne by a priest, it is not surprising that he concerns himself with restoration of the Temple of the Lord, which probably suffered from neglect during Athaliah's reign. Still, it is important to note that the “king's secretary” oversaw the financing of the project (2 Kgs 12, 11 ). This is the first attempt to put more control of the Temple and its affairs in the hand of the king. Hezekiah and Josiah will continue the policy. Even though Joash developed an efficient way to finance the maintenance of the Temple, his efforts were wasted since he had to pay a heavy indemnity to Hazael, who threatened Jerusalem. Nothing else is told of this king's forty‐year reign except that he was assassinated by his own courtiers. With three successive rulers assassinated, the stability of the Judahite state was seriously undermined. The book implies that the future of the Judahite state was in question. The downward spiral of the Kingdom of Israel continued during the seventeen‐year reign of Jehoahaz (2 Kgs 13, 1–9 ). Almost constant warfare between Israel and Aram led to the severe depletion of Israel's army (v. 7 ). Total disaster was averted by an unidentified “savior” (v. 5 ). It is likely that this savior came in the form of the Assyrian army that invaded Aram at the end of the ninth century, easing the pressure on Israel. With this account of Israel's deteriorating military power, the book begins its description of the fall of the house of Jehu. The end of Jehu's dynasty is inevitable because of the continuing apostasy of Israel's kings (v. 2 ). Israel enjoyed a temporary respite from military reverses at the hand of the Arameans during the reign of Jehoash (Joash) (2 Kgs 13, 10–25 ). Before Elisha died, he predicted a revival of Israel's military fortunes. The short note about the revival of a corpse that touched the bones of the dead prophet illustrates how the prophetic word can bring life to the sick body of Israel, because God's saving will did not wish to bring the full force of judgment upon God's people. Tangible proofs of that were the victories of Jehoash and his recovery of Israelite territory lost to Aram. The book's attention refocuses on Judah, which fared poorly during the reign of Amaziah (2 Kgs 14, 1–22 ). The king did merit qualified praise for his loyalty to God, though worship at the high places, which the book regarded as improper, continued during his rule. While the king was good, he was not good enough to insure Judah's success in the political and military sphere, which the book uses as a benchmark indicating the nation's standing before God. Amaziah was successful in bringing Edom back under Judahite domination, but when he turned his attention to the north, he was unsuccessful. He was defeated by Israel and made a prisoner of war. He witnessed the Israelite forces partially destroy Jerusalem's walls and sack the Temple. His folly in starting a war with the more powerful Northern Kingdom led finally to Amaziah's assassination. The Southern Kingdom's disintegration continues. The book dismisses the forty‐year reign of Jeroboam II in a few verses, but it cannot ignore it completely (2 Kgs 14, 23–29 ). Jeroboam has notable success in expanding the boundaries of his kingdom, which the book usually considers a sign of God's blessing. Here it asserts that Jeroboam's success was the fulfillment of a prophetic word given by Jonah. Although there is a book ascribed to Jonah in the collection of the prophets, the oracle given to Jeroboam is not preserved in that book or anywhere in the Bible. Kings goes on to explain the anomalous success of Jeroboam by claiming that it was the result of God's compassion on Israel (vv. 26–27 ). Jeroboam's reign is often described as a time of peace and prosperity; in fact it was not. The expansion of Israel's territory had to come by way of war. His building projects put a strain on the country's resources, which eventually led to the severe economic problems that Israel faced following Jeroboam's death. The chasm between rich and poor grew during Jeroboam's time. Like Jeroboam II, Azariah of Judah enjoyed a very long reign; it was, however, marred by a skin disease that rendered him unable to perform rituals that were reserved to the king (2 Kgs 15, 1–7 ). His son Jotham assumed many of Azariah's duties. Even though the book praises Azariah, this praise is tempered by the comment that he did nothing about the high places that the book considered as illegitimate. Under Azariah, the Kingdom of Judah enjoyed a resurgence, which the book chooses to ignore since it does not reflect its notion of the direction Judah is heading. Following the long reign of Jeroboam II, the Northern Kingdom began a rush to its total collapse. The text gives little more than the basic outline of a nation devolving into political chaos in the final years of its existence. Zechariah, Jeroboam's son and successor, is barely able to hold the throne for six months before he is assassinated (2 Kgs 15, 8–12 ). Shallum, Zechariah's assassin, managed to hold on to the throne for only one month before his assassination by Menahem, whose ruthlessness kept him on the throne for ten years (2 Kgs 15, 13–16 ). During Menahem's reign, Tiglath‐pileser III of Assyria, which the text sometimes calls Pul, began Assyria's expansion at Israel's expense (2 Kgs 15, 17–22 ). Pekahiah, Menahem's son, was able to hold the throne for only two years before his assassination by Pekah (2 Kgs 15, 23–26 ). It was during his reign that the Assyrians began dismantling the Northern Kingdom. Pekah, too, was assassinated after a twenty‐year reign by Hoshea, who was destined to be the last in the line that began with Jeroboam I. The book provides few details about the reigns of these five kings because it is more interested in the fate of Israel as a nation whose doom it is describing. The five kings each receive the usual condemnation that is given to all the kings of the north, and their individual fates presage the disaster that Northern Kingdom will experience. The book has to break off its account of Israel's final years to tell the story of the last conflict between Israel and Judah. Pekah formed a coalition with Aram, Israel's chief rival in the Levant, to deal with a common threat: Assyria, whose expansionism and militarism imperiled them both. Pekah tried to enlist Judah in the coalition but Jotham resisted, while Kings insists that it was God who led Aram and Israel against Judah. Before the issue was decided, Jotham died (2 Kgs 15, 32–38 ). Jotham's son Ahaz is left to deal with the crisis. The book has no regard for Ahaz, condemning him without reservation (2 Kgs 16, 1–20 ). Ahaz's desperation in the face of the invasion by the combined forces of Aram and Israel is evident from his resorting to child sacrifice as a way to gain divine favor. Ahaz's situation was grievous because he had to face hostilities on two fronts—the Edomites were moving in the south (v. 6 ), and Aram and Israel were coming from the north. This military pressure led Ahaz to align himself with Tiglath‐pileser to whom he paid a large indemnity. The Assyrian king quickly put an end to the coalition seeking to depose Ahaz. Kings then describes in great detail changes that Ahaz made to the Temple and its altar. These are regarded as acts of apostasy (vv. 10–20 ). With the account of Ahaz's reign completed, the book returns to Israel, which was on the brink of total collapse. After narrating the events that led to the end of Israel's political existence (2 Kgs 17, 1–6 ), the book launches into a long editorial comment to explain the fall of the Northern Kingdom as a consequence of its failure to shape its national life on the basis of the Torah (2 Kgs 17, 7–23 ). The Assyrians annexed the territory of the former Northern Kingdom into their provincial system. To pacify the region, they led the prominent citizens of Israel into exile and brought in people from other regions of their empire to settle in what had been the Kingdom of Israel. The author of Kings maintains that the Samaritans of his day were the descendants of these foreign settlers and describes their patterns of worship as a hybrid of Yahwism and the worship of foreign deities (2 Kgs 17, 24–41 ). The Final Years of the Kingdom of Judah (2 Kgs 18, 1–25, 30 ) After describing the fall of the Northern Kingdom, the book details the last years of the Southern Kingdom. Kings begins with the story of Hezekiah, a king greatly admired because of his obedience to the Torah and his destruction of the high places. Hezekiah was able to augment Judah's territories at the expense of the Philistines. In contrast to Israel, Judah and its king appeared to be prospering (2 Kgs 18, 1–12 ). However, the Assyrians ended Hezekiah's peace by invading Judah and besieging Jerusalem; and although Hezekiah offered an indemnity to Sennacherib, the Assyrian king, the siege continued. Sennacherib demanded the surrender of Jerusalem, claiming that Judah's own patron deity had ordered him to conquer the country (2 Kgs 18, 1–37 , esp. v. 25 ). In his despair, Hezekiah turned to the prophet Isaiah, who assured him that Sennacherib would lift the siege and return to his country (v. 7 ). For reasons that are not clear to historians, the Assyrian army retreated and Sennacherib was assassinated later—just as the prophet predicted (2 Kgs 19, 1–37 ). Of course, Kings sees the lifting of the siege as an act of God. The final episode in Hezekiah's story puts the king's reputation under a cloud. Though God healed him and promised him a longer reign, Hezekiah wanted proof that the promises made to him by Isaiah would be fulfilled. The arrival of an ambassador from Babylon gave Isaiah the opportunity to announce Judah's approaching defeat and exile. Instead of this announcement moving Hezekiah to repentance, the king expresses relief that the disaster will come after he is gone. It is as if Hezekiah learned nothing from the near disaster brought about by the Assyrians (2 Kgs 20, 1–21 ). Hezekiah was succeeded by his son Manasseh. From Kings' point of view, Judah never fell so low as it did during the fifty‐five‐year reign of this king. It accuses Manasseh of apostasy, idolatry, and murder, and explicitly identifies him as the Judahite Ahab, leading the Southern Kingdom to disaster as Ahab had in the Northern Kingdom. Unnamed prophets pronounced divine judgment on Manasseh's actions. There is no doubt that Manasseh kept his throne by demonstrating his loyalty to the Assyrians, in part by introducing Assyrian religious rituals to the Jerusalem Temple. He also had to be ruthless in preventing a nationalistic spirit to express itself in open revolt against the Assyrians. The book offers no reason for Manasseh's great apostasy, letting the king's actions speak for themselves. The consequences of his actions could not be set aside with an appeal to God's promises to the patriarchs or to David. Judah's fall is only a matter of time (2 Kgs 21, 1–18 ). Manasseh was succeeded by his son Amon, who continued his father's policies. This led to his assassination by his own courtiers. Evidently the assassination of yet another king provoked the ordinary folk, who supported the Davidic dynasty. They likely believed that another round of assassinations would be the end of Judah, so they killed the conspirators and installed Amon's young son, Josiah, as king (2 Kgs 21, 19–26 ). It is during Josiah's reign that Judah made one last attempt at reform; it proved to be too late to avert divine judgment. Josiah's reign was a short pause as Judah moved to the inevitable (2 Kgs 22, 1–23, 30 ). Kings describes Josiah as a monarch who “pleased the Lord” (2 Kgs 22, 2 ). A critical event in Josiah's reign was the discovery of a book in the course of renovations that were being made on the Temple. Kings wishes its readers to assume that the “book of the law” was what we know as the book of Deuteronomy. Josiah responded to hearing the words of the book with a gesture of repentance. He had the book authenticated by a prophet. Although Jeremiah was active at this time, the prophet consulted was an otherwise unknown woman named Huldah. She authenticated the book but announced that the curses on the unfaithful found in the book would fall on Judah and Jerusalem but not in Josiah's time. Fortunately for Josiah, he came into power about the time Assyria's control over the Levant was waning; he moved quickly to reclaim Judah's sovereignty in matters of religion and politics. The book concentrates on Josiah's actions in the sphere of religious practice. The king took action against all types of non‐Yahwistic religious activity and promoted such traditional practices as the Passover. His move into the north was likely prompted by a determination to take advantage of Assyria's weakness to extend the territory under his control. Josiah's attempts to reassert and expand Judahite sovereignty ended when he died during an ill‐advised attempt to involve himself in international politics. He endeavored to stop the Egyptian army as it was advancing into Mesopotamia and was killed in battle. Josiah's “reform” died with him because Judah once again came under foreign domination. The Egyptians asserted their control over Judah by deposing Josiah's successor Jehoahaz and exiling him to Egypt. They placed another of Josiah's sons, Eliakim, on the throne, changing his name to Jehoiakim (2 Kgs 23, 31–35 ). Judah had to pay an indemnity to the Egyptians. This, of course, burdened Judah's economy, which had been already made fragile by Josiah's military adventures. With no other choice, Jehoiakim remained a loyal Egyptian vassal until Nebuchadnezzar defeated the Egyptians in two decisive battles, ending Egyptian domination of the Levant. Judah then was forced to submit to Babylon. When Babylon's fortunes changed, Jehoiakim came under Egyptian control again. But Babylon's setback was only temporary, and Judah was forced to submit to Nebuchadnezzar a second time after a siege of Jerusalem, during which Jehoiakim died. Of course, the book sees all this political and military activity as an act of divine judgment on Judah (2 Kgs 23, 36–24, 7 ). Jehoiachin succeeded his father just as the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem was about to end with the city's surrender and the sacking of the Temple. While Judah was able to maintain the appearance of sovereignty, it was more firmly under Babylon's control than ever. Jehoiachin was deposed and exiled along with many of Judah's leading citizens. The Babylonians placed Mattaniah, another of Josiah's brothers on the throne, changing his name to Zedekiah. The book lets the events speak for themselves as Judah's final collapse appears to be imminent. Zedekiah was to be the last king of the Davidic line. He managed to keep his throne for eleven years. No longer able to resist calls to rebel against Babylonian domination, Zedekiah sealed the fate of the dynasty and the kingdom. The Babylonians responded to his rebellion by taking Jerusalem a second time, killing Zedekiah's sons, blinding the king, and leading him into exile. Zedekiah was never heard from again (2 Kgs 24, 18–25, 7 ). Jerusalem too paid for Zedekiah's folly in revolting against Nebuchadnezzar. The city was put to the torch and its Temple was left in ruins. Many of Jerusalem's leading citizens were executed, and the rest were deported to Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar completely reorganized the government of Judah. The Babylonians appointed Gedaliah, who did not belong to the royal family, to administer what would become a new province of the Babylonian empire. They also moved Judah's administrative center from Jerusalem to Mizpah. Assassins led by a survivor of Judah's royal family killed Gedaliah along with his Judahite and Babylonian retainers. This led many Judahites to seek refuge in Egypt, and those that remained were subject to a third deportation (see Jer 52, 30; 2 Kgs 25, 8–26 ). And so ends the story of Israel in its land. As an epilogue, Kings mentions the parole of Jehoiachin from prison in Babylon (2 Kgs 25, 27–30 ). Unfortunately, the book does not reflect on the significance of the exiled king's new status for Judah's future. At the most critical moment in his story, the author of Kings is inexplicably reticent, leaving the reader to wonder what will become of Judah and Jerusalem. Is the divine judgment brought on by Judah's failure to be loyal to the Lord and shape its life according to Torah final? Perhaps Jehoiachin's parole is a harbinger of Judah's rehabilitation. The book does not give an explicit answer to these questions. The books of Kings end on a most ambiguous note, requiring its readers to make sense out of a tragic tale.

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HomeArticlesPostmodern Imperialism Postmodern Imperialism By Jim Miles (Postmodern Imperialism- Geopolitics and the Great Games. Eric Walberg. Clarity Press, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A., 2011.) The many stages of imperialism are often brought into debate about whether the current U.S. foreign policy, or any U.S. foreign policy, is an imperial project. Eric Walberg’s clear and concise presentation of the “great games” centred on the ancient Silk Road from China through to Eastern Europe presents a definition of imperialism that spans all of humanities’ empires. The “Foundations…of imperial hegemony are financial and military-political, to ensure control of world labour power and raw materials.” This reflects my own interpretation of empire as being founded on the gathering in of wealth and power to the heartland from the hinterland, from a cultural geography perspective. Walberg uses the terms heartland and rimland, the same idea, focussing intentions on the heart of Eurasia and the surrounding countries’ resources, wealth, and manpower. One of Walberg’s underlying and recurring themes is financial – the power of money and the control of money in the establishment of empire. This precludes any arguments about the necessity of an empire having a land base, or naval control, or air superiority, the actual sequence of empires from antiquity through to today’s troubled world. Walberg goes even further than most in his definitions of empire, rightly so, as he examines the ‘banksters’ (my usage, a term that should fit within the normal lexicon of financial arguments today) – the “international banking elite” who are “acting independently of governments” in order to coordinate “the financial elites of various empires through their central bankers.” His argument is well supported as he takes the reader through the “Great Games” of the Middle East and the rise and fall of financial power in relation to the rise and fall of empires trying to gain hegemony over the resources of the Middle East and South Asia. The military becomes the physical manner in which the financial structures try to control the various regions of interest, and once again after the dust and gore of war has settled out, the banksters win – as the real victors are those who “benefited financially and economically, and the international bankers, who held the massive war debts of victors and defeated alike, and had no intention of forgiving them.” Pawns to Queens The Great Games are compared metaphorically in part to chess, wherein a pawn arriving at the last square becomes a queen. In Walberg’s metaphor the queens are the new elements of the game that influence who controls the main thrust of imperial drive. Five such queens are presented. The first is the “ascendancy of the U.S. dollar as world reserve currency.” The second queen, the partition of Palestine [the creation of Israel] proved to be a geostrategic coup for the US in its geopolitical divide and rule strategy for the Middle East,” not without its later blowback consequences as described later in the work. Locked into its cold war with communism, Walberg sees the cultivation of Islamists against communism as the third queen. The mujahideen, Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters” brought to a close the second great game in Eurasia (the first being the historically defined “games” between the British and Russian empires). With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the neocons to power in the U.S., the world entered Walberg’s “Great Game III.” These ideologues were “devotees of Israel’s game plan,” from which Walberg presents the thesis of the “penetration of the Jewish elite into the highest political offices,” creating “long-term, large scale presence of unconditional Israel-firsters across the administrations…over the past two decades.” Controlling Europe, establishing a perimeter around Russia and China, and the unconditional support for Israel – even as the latter went about its own imperial interests sometimes contrary to the large empires’ interests – are the main considerations for the Great Game III. The first “queen promotion” of this current era is the redefinition of NATO as essentially being a U.S. controlled imperial force, “a group of like-minded countries [their ruling elites at least] under the overwhelming political and military authority of the empire – controlling the world at the behest of the empire once removed.” This is more than obvious with the wars that broke apart Yugoslavia, the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the new debacle in Libya, under the false guise of humanitarian action, but mainly concerning about the three main concerns of empire: financial control of an independent nation, controlling its oil wealth to be priced in U.S. dollars, and the strategic positioning of a newly subordinated country on the southern edge of the U.S./NATO lake of the Mediterranean, and also a foothold for U.S. forces into northern Africa. Banksters Take Control Back onto one of Walberg’s central ideas, the Great Game III is a demonstrably financial pursuit, with the bankrupting of Russia after its imperial death, the removal of constraints on financial manipulations within the U.S., and the current meltdown in the EU is seen as a “financial crisis precipitated by the US banks [to promote] greater economic integration of the EU around its poorer members, in line with the US strategy of maintaining the EU as a junior partner similar to Britain.” Globalization in essence consists of the strategies of the financial elites to control the wealth of nations, a control that goes well beyond the national level where the pretext of democracy and choice are well maintained by the mainstream media. The end game for the Great Game III is the “control over the world’s money supply” as a means of “taxing the world’s resources.” As long as the world accepts the US dollar as the reserve currency, “such an imperial system could last for a long time, despite the creeping de-industrialization that empire logic eventually entails.” This strikes me as a fancier way of saying the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It is evident in the IMF and World Bank actions against Greece, Ireland, and other Euro states that have effectively ceded their financial and thus sovereign authority to the banksters. Having touched on Israel in the third chapter concerning U.S. imperial drives and methods, Walberg takes on the ideas and actions of Israel directly in his final chapter “Israel – Empire-and-a-half.” Walberg discusses the long history of Jewish financial strength, and the rise of Jewish-Zionist power in Israel. For the U.S. to recognize that “Israel would serve to ensure Middle East oil supplies – the chief underlying goal of US empire in the Middle East -while leaving itself room to pursue its own agenda of expansion, it was necessary for Israel to continue to antagonize the local Arabs, rather than make concessions to obtain peace. Without hostile neighbours, it would be of no use to the US.” Walberg recognizes that the Jewish elite while benefiting from others’ wars, “had no particular interest in being involved directly…this state of perpetual war is a new strategy made necessary by the colonial nature of Israel itself.” The wars against the Arab countries, the war on ‘terror’, are all part of the U.S./Israeli complicity to establish hegemony over the region, but the continuing circle of financing arms purchases by both Israel and the Arab countries, and the increasing military trade of Israel, allows the latter to “proceed quietly with its own, increasingly anti-US agenda.” Israel is seen to “incite, abet and possibly even perpetrate terrorism attributed to Muslim fanatics,” it increasingly “pursues plans outside of US control…and forestalls any attempts to pressure Israel into following a US agenda.” Walberg outlines the global span of Israeli influence. This extends from what is labelled the Jewish mafia (crime syndicates) through its political influence within the U.S. and other countries (Canada is noted), its arms sales, its operatives, mercenaries, and businessmen who operate globally and for their own, not US interests. Ultimately though, because Israel is also tied to US dollar hegemony, it rests uncomfortably. Actions of the Israeli state could bring about an endgame that hastens the US collapse. As an empire-and-a-half, the “empires mimic each other – Israel is a microcosm of the US; the US is Israel writ large. And finally, Walberg concludes that “Without Israel at its core, the US empire quite possibly could have lasted a long time…But unless the US frees itself from Israel’s clutches and forces it to make peace with its neighbors, the US is doomed along with its offspring.” While looking at future possibilities, Walberg sees Palestine, “despite its helplessness [is] in a sense the most powerful player of all…its tragic fate a constant reminder of the injustice and horrors of GGI colonialism for all around the world to witness every day. And yet it has never really existed as a legitimate modern state.” At most, Israel could create a failed state, yet sees that after “Four decades of illegal settlements, such a Palestinian state is no longer feasible.” For current affairs and the near future, “Palestine will remain at the center of the world’s concerns,” for the players of geopolitical games” and as a “catalyst” for those “concerned with social justice.” Dollar Hegemony The U.S. holds the world’s reserve currency; oil is priced in U.S. dollars; the establishment of empire is to retain the power of the dollar as the global currency. Both Israel and the U.S. “depend on the present world financial order.” All this influence, the “Interest [rent, taxes, austerity budgets], and today’s money based on US military might alone, are the root cause not only of the current world financial crisis, but…the primary instrument facilitating (and benefiting from) the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the world political crisis.” In my mind, that reads that the loss of U.S. dollar reserve currency status would signal major and significant changes to the world order. With all economies of the world beholden to the banksters of the world – the WTO, IMF, supra-national corporations, the financial corporations and bankers at all levels – the current world order stands firmly on earthquake prone territory. Eric Walberg’s treatise on the Great Games, on Empire, is an excellent read. It is not a blow by blow account of the rise and fall of empires involved with the Great Games, but an accounting of their methods and raison d’etre. It is a dense read, provocative, bold, touching on ideas that seldom appear in mainstream presentations. It is a significant and important addition to the geopolitical and political-military thinking of the global cultural environment of finance and wars. – Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles’ work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications. America’s Open War against Yemen’s People Israel Rules out Non-violence: Method in Netanyahu’s Madness

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Typical Paris What's left of yesterday's market There are 89 markets in Paris, 71 traditional ones (58 open air and 13 indoor), and 18 specialized ones (organic, African, flea, flowers...). I will show you more of them in the months to come... Publié par Eric 11 comments: It's LE Week-end! This week has been so long, I am glad it's Le week-end. Anything to confess? I am sure you do! I came across this unexpected statue in a church that is not so famous although pretty beautiful. It's called l'Eglise Saint Gervais/Saint Protais (after the name of two twin brothers killed by Emperor Nero), was built in the 16th century and it is located in the 4th arrondissement, on former swamps. Update: a reader tells me that this statue is the one of Jean Marie Vianney, also known as Le Curé D'Ars and who, among other things, "specialized" into confession. No wonder then... Free to wear the Islamic scarf Following a law that the French Parliament passed about a year ago (more in this article), I am told that a lot of Muslims outside France think that women don't have the right to wear their so called Islamic scarf in public. Of course, this is totally untrue, as this photo obviously proves. The law only prohibits that any religious sign, such as Jewish skullcaps, large Christian crosses, Indian Turbans and Islamic scarves be worn at school. I have never been able to decide whether I thought this was a good decision or not; after all there is freedom of religion in France. Harmony by Volti His name is Antoniucci Volti, he was born in 1915 and died in 1989 and he made this fantastic sculpture called Harmonie. You can see it, and even sit around it, if you happen to walk by the rue de Turbigo (3rd arrondissement) at the Arts et Metiers metro station. After all it is true: walking down Paris is like walking down a museum! No nature, no future! "Keeping a lamp on with no need kills the planet." "Running a half loaded washing machine kills the planet." I am not too keen on ecologist political parties here for many reasons that are pointless to explain on this blog but I do support people who actually act to keep our planet alive and as clean as possible!. Among those is Nicolas Hulot who used to produce shows like the ones of Jacques Cousteau on TV and who has started a foundation in 1990 with the aim of training the public to be more environmentally friendly. This foundation is currently running an ad campain at the moment in some streets of Paris and although it can be shocking I thought I could show it to you. Armstrong wins the Tour de France for the 7th time Here is a photo of Lance Armstrong on the Champs Elysees yesterday (actually I stole it from the television because it was raining and I was too lazy to go out!). I am not a big Tour de France fan but I admire this guy not only for his sport abilities but also - and above all - for his goodwill. Paris Plage at night OK, I can hear you now: "enough of this Paris Plage thing, we got the idea now!!". Well I thought another one, at night, would be nice, so here it is. It shows another part of the "beach" where they installed tables and parasols so you can enjoy a beer or coke - or wine I suppose!! - and special fields to play Boules - also called Pétanque. La Pétanque is very French a game that originated in the south. Players have two metal balls that fit in the palm and must throw them (a few meters ahead, not far away) the closest possible to a small wooden ball called Le cochonet. Well these are the basic rules, there are official and very strict rules and if you're interested they are listed here - in English. Paris Plage, day 2 And now with people... If you're among the 80 daily regular visitors of this blog you already know this photo and this photo, taken from - almost - the same angle but at different dates. Today, I wanted to show you Paris plage (Paris beach) once it's opened. A great success! I'll show you some more pictures - espacially at night when it's all lit - in the days to come. Publié par Eric 8 comments: The Da Vinci Code is being filmed in Paris... ... And thanks to a friend of mine (Stéphane, who already took this great picture), here is a sneaking preview of one of the scenes! It's a stunt in the streets of Paris where, apparently a Smart car is being chased by the PT Cruiser. The image quality is not very good (I am not complaining Stéphane!!) but it adds to the atmosphere! Do you know when the film is to be released? Paris Plage day 1 Here we are... remember this photo? I told I would show it to you again the next day? Well in fact you had to wait a little longer because it took more time than what I thought (4 days, and a couple of more hours...). Anyway, the whole idea is to turn the thouroughfare that runs along the river Seine in Paris into a giant beach and walking area. They installed palm trees, sand, showers, several little cafés, springs... Of course you - obviously - can still see the concrete of the road, but globally it's a nice change of scenery! I will show you much more of Paris Plage in the days to come... Paris public trash cans Today I wanted to show you a typical parisian garbage can! Not very glamourous eh?! Wouldn't you think that, in a city like Paris, they would try to make them as discrete as possible and melt them into the scenery? Welll... In 1995 we've had a serie of terrorist bombings and most of the bombs were hidden in garbage cans. Therefore very quickly the authorities removed the cans - even in the metro. But as it was not very convenient to keep a city like Paris clean without garbage cans, they came up with this solution: install transparent plastic bags instead of regular trash cans so that big bulky bombs would be more difficult to hide. Pont Marie (Marie Bridge) In Paris, there is nothing more beautiful than the river Seine banks. And more precisely most of the bridges that allow to go from one bank to another or to go onto the two islands located in the very center of the city. The bridge that I shot here (in the background) is called Le Pont Marie (after its architect Christophe Marie) and it was built between 1614 and 1635... And as you can see, it is still up! Constitution at the Paris Concorde Metro station "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." Does it ring a bell? Yes, it's the opening of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776. Well, it also became a source of inspiration to the French revolutionaries who wrote the French constitution (Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du citoyen) some 13 years later. And as a symbol, you can read some of its main articles on the walls of... the metro station Concorde! In Paris, miracles do happen... (Overnight!) OK, here is just a photo of a main thoroughfare along the river Seine in Paris that I took yesterday around lunch time. Nothing really spectacular, I agree! But come back here around 2 pm today and I will show you the same exact point of view... 2 PM update. Oops, it seems I have been a little presomptuous... In fact the miracle will take a little longer than what I thought! You will have to wait until Thursday July 21 to see it. Sorry for that;)) French pride! No comment! (View other pictures) Firework on the Eiffel Tower Yesterday evening, as I mentioned it in my previous post, there was a firework in Paris to celebrate Bastille day. I generally don't enjoy fireworks for they bore me very quickly! But this one was absolutely magnificent and I consider myself as very lucky to have seen it; not only were the effects very good but they also managed to mix them with the usual enlightening of the tower. Really fantastic. I am a happy tax payer! Bastille day 2005 Today is July 14 (Le 14 juillet) and it is the anniversary of the French Revolution. Why is it also called Bastille day? Simply because the revolution is supposed to have started the day a group of Parisians marched towards a prison named La Bastille and freed all the prisoners. If you want to know more, I suggest you click here ! Since then, there has been many celebration forms but nowadays it's more of less always the same: little balls around the city on Bastille day's eve - called Les bals des pompiers (firemen balls), because they take place in fire stations. There is also a giant firework and... a celebration of the French army on the morning of Bastille day. Of course, this takes place on the champs Elysees, as you can see from the photo I have taken on my television screen this morning (yes, it's also a holiday so I felt lazy today!) Special info for my Brazilian readers: as 2005 is the year of Brazil in France (remember this picture?) Brazil has been widely associated to the celebrations. Your President Lula attended the march (some of the Brazilian regiments even marched on the Champs Elysees) and there has been a huge Brazilian concert yesterday evening at La Bastille square. Statue at Ecole Militaire (Military school) In the 7th arrondissement, at the end of the Champs de Mars, you will find a superb building called l'école Militaire (Military School). It was built by architect Jacques-Ange Gabriel between 1751 and 1768 and it became, in 1777, the Academy became l' Ecole des Cadets Gentilhommes. And, guess what?! Young Napoleon Bonaparte was a cadet in 1784! By the way, the statue you can see here is of another famous French army man; the Maréchal Joffre, who played a large role during world war I. Pigeons having a bath! It's very common to see pigeons in Paris (there are about 100 000 of them) but it's pretty rare to see them "bathing" in the sewer (in Paris, it's still usual to see water running along the sidewalks like in the old times). Due to many reasons (pollution, cars, food poisoning...) pigeons tend to live no more than 4 years (whereas a pigeon can live up to 30 years!) but people in the town hall still think these birds cause too much damage... Therefore, in order to limit their number (they normally lay two eggs, 6 times a year!) they are fed with contraceptive seeds (no kidding!) every day. But the most surprising thing I learnt when carrying out this "research" about pigeons is that, in some parts of Paris (mainly the Library Francois Mitterrand in the 13th arrondissement), they brought back hawks to "naturally" control the pigeons population! Isn't that clever? (Yeah, ok, what animal are they going to use to control the hawks now?!) Le Passe-Muraille (The Walker-through-Walls) Isn't that cool? It's a sculpture by famous French actor Jean Marais made after a short story by Marcel Aymé (1902-1968) called le Passe-Muraille (the Walker-through-walls). As you can deduct from the title, this short story (that most French pupils have read!) tells the story of a clerk who finds out one day that he is able to walk through walls... He can then listen to private conversations, read confidential documents, steal, get even, etc. This statue can be found in Montmartre (18th arrondissement) quite logically on the place (square) Marcel Aymé. Peace Monument by Clara Halter At the end of the Champ de Mars, close to the Eiffel tower you can see this monument called Le mur de la paix (the peace wall). It was made by Clara Halter, the wife of famous writer/painter/philosopher Marek Halter and officially erected in 2000 (march 30 precisely). I love it but apparently some people (inhabitants of the neighbourhood) complain for it was originally meant to stay 4 months then be moved to other Paris neighbourhoods. They say it damages the view... Yummy jam! OK today is Saturday, it's been a tough week on the news front, we all deserve a little treat! Here is a photo of jelly sold by a shop very close to my home. Hard to resist! In Paris too, the Statue of Liberty enlightens the city You may already know that the statue of Liberty that you can see in New York has been given to the Americans by the French as a gift. Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (and Gustave Eiffel - yes, the one of the tower! - for the metal structure) started its construction in 1875, completed it in 1884 and shipped it to the States (in 350 pieces!) in 1885. On July 4, 1889 the American community in Paris offered the French people a bronze replica of the Statue (1/4 scale, about 35 feet high) that you still can see on the Ile des Cygnes (swans island) in the Seine River - and in this photo! Guess we did not fight hard enough! Remember? I took this photo on the Champs Elysees begining of June at a time where we thought we could win the games! Now we know the British are better at that game... Ok, that is my last post on the Olympics, I promise! In 2012, for the Olympics go to London, not Paris... I am so disappointed! I took this photo half an hour ago, in a café where I had a quick lunch and where they had this TV on. When Jacques Rogge, (the Olympics Committee president) started to open the envelope there was an intense silence… Followed by a massive disappointment! My thoughs go to all people who worked on this project and forgot for a while their political differences. And, by the way, congratulations to London! Olympics: D-day! Of course I think London is beautiful, sure I like the Spanish very much, naturally I'd love the Russians to have the chance to show more of Moscow and yes I simply love New York BUT... I wish so much Paris could win the Olympics race for 2012! Come on guys, we have not had the summer games since 1924... Meet me here @ 13:00 am (GMT) and you'll have the answer. The code to the door... In Paris 99% of building doors are code protected. Some are effective only from 7 or 8 pm to 8 am and during week-ends and some 24 hours. This electronic device has progressively replaced the concierges (building supervisors) that were common before the seventies when labour costs were lower. Thus, if you come to Paris and visit friends don't forget to ask for their "code" as you probably need one to get into their building! I am curious to know if this system is also developed in other cities? Just let me know. Rue Rembrandt Everybody knows the famous Dutch painter (1606-1669). Here is simply a view of the street we named after him in Paris. Paris United Nations? No, don't get fooled by a bunch of flags! This is... the front of a Hilton hotel in La Defense. Coal heating Until 1950 most of Parisian homes where heated either with wood or with coal. In "modern" buidlings there was a central heating system with the boiler in the basement. Therefore the coal was delivered by coal dealers and kept in a special location in the basement of each building. During winter, the Concierge (building superitendent) would regularly load the boiler with coal to allow the heat to spread to the radiators throughout the apartments. Needless to say, it was not very environmentally friendly and not very efficient... Nowadays, I don't think anybody uses coal anymore, but there are still many remains of this era; like the coal feeder you can see in this photo and that you will see on many old buildings throughout Paris and other large cities in France. Technorati tags: coal, paris, parisian apartments, heating, coal heating, boiler, france I swear, I did take this photo in the middle of Paris! Why do some people carry ponies around the city? Well, very good question; in fact they are part of the Moulin Rouge show as I could validate a couple of hours later when I saw these very same "mini horses" on stage! Tecnorati tags: horses, moulin rouge, miniature horse, paris Paris Time The Candid Frame I had the great pleasure and honor of being interviewed by Ibarionex Perello. Listen to his podcast - click on the photo Rainy morning at the Mandarin Oriental Paris Portraits Parisiens Parisdailyphoto China 你喜欢巴黎吗？Eric将在这个浪漫之都每天拍摄一张照片，带给你原汁原味的每日巴黎！快来关注ParisDailyPhoto吧! Snowy moments in Paris Armstrong wins the Tour de France for the 7th time... In Paris too, the Statue of Liberty enlightens the... In 2012, for the Olympics go to London, not Paris.... Polltogo Theme images by caracterdesign. Powered by Blogger.

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IGBE - Remedial Instruction Program File: IGBE REMEDIAL INSTRUCTION PROGRAM Literacy and Standard of Learning Assessment Tests The School Board shall implement programs of prevention, intervention or remediation for students who are educationally at risk, including those who fail to achieve a passing score on any Standard of Learning assessment in grades three through eight, or who fail an end-of-course test required for the award of a verified unit of credit. Such programs shall include components that are research based. Any student who achieves a passing score on one or more, but not all, of the Standards of Learning assessments for the relevant grade level in grades three through eight may be required to attend a remediation program. Any student who fails to achieve a passing score on all of the Standards of Learning assessments for the relevant grade level in grades three through eight or who fails an end-of-course test required for the award of a verified unit of credit shall be required to attend a remediation program or to participate in another form of remediation. Such summer school program or other form of remediation shall be chosen by the school division to be appropriate to the academic needs of the student. The requirement for remediation may, however, be satisfied by the student's attendance in a program of prevention, intervention or remediation which has been selected by his parent, in consultation with the Superintendent or designee, and is either (i) conducted by an accredited private school or (ii) a special program which has been determined to be comparable to the required public school remediation program by the division superintendent. The costs of such private school remediation program or other special remediation program shall be borne by the student's parent. In designing the division remediation programs required by the Standards of Quality the School Board shall annually evaluate and modify, as appropriate, the remediation plan based on an analysis of the percentage of students meeting their remediation goals and consideration of the pass rate on the Standards of Learning assessments. The program shall include, when appropriate, a procedure for early identification of students who are at risk of failing the Standards of Learning assessments in grades three through eight or who fail an end-of-course test required for the award of a verified unit of credit required for the student’s graduation. Such students shall be provided appropriate remediation activities. Compulsory Attendance When a student is required to participate in a remediation program pursuant to this policy, the Superintendent may seek immediate compliance with the compulsory school attendance laws if a reasonable effort to seek the student’s attendance, including direct notification of the parents of such student of the attendance requirement and failure of the parents to secure the student’s attendance, have failed and the superintendent determines that remediation of the student's poor academic performance, passage of the Standards of Learning Assessment in grades three through eight, or promotion is related directly to the student's attendance in the remediation program. The Buena Vista City School Division will annually report the following information to the Board of Education pertaining to students eligible for remediation: · The number of students failing a state-sponsored test required by the Standards of Quality or Standards of Accreditation; · A demographic profile of students attending state-funded remedial programs; · The academic status of each student attending state-funded remedial programs; · The types of instruction offered; · The length of the program; · The cost of the program; · The number of ungraded and disabled students, and those with limited English proficiency; · As required, the pass rate on Standards of Learning assessments; and · The percentage of students at each grade level who have met their remediation goals. Adopted: 08/23/03; 08/24/06; 06/28/07 __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Legal Ref.: Code of Virginia, 1950, as amended, §§ 22.1‑253.13:1, 22.1-253.13:2, 22.1-253.13:4, 22.1-254, 22.1-254.01. 8 VAC 20-630-40, 8 VAC 20-630-50. Cross Refs: BCF Advisory Committees to the School Board IGCA Summer Schools

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QUINN CHURCH OF CHRIST 4841 County Rd. 22 Spruce Pine, AL 35585 lonnieoldag@yahoo.com Gospel Meeting Audio Sermons Audio Bible Class Area Bible Studies 3/4/18 Genesis 1 3/11/18 Genesis 2 3/14/18 Did not record 3/28/18 Genesis 12 4/1/18 Genesis 15 5/31/18 Genesis Overview 6/13/18 Exodus 1 (did not record) 6/17/18 Exodus 2 7/1/18 Exodus 9 7/8/18 Exodus 10 7/12/18 Exodus 12 8/29/18 Exodus Themes 9/2/18 Exodus Review 9/9/18 Leviticus 8 9/13/18 Leviticus 10 9/16/18 Leviticus overview 1 9/23/18 Numbers 9 9/26/18 Numbers 10 10/7/18 Numbers 13 10/10/18 Numbers 14 10/28/18 Deuteronomy 1 11/4/18 Deuteronomy 12 11/11/18 Deuteronomy 17 11/28/18 Joshua 3 12/2/18 Wilderness Wanderings Review Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua 1-5 slides 12/9/18 Joshua 6 12/19/18 Joshua 11-12 1/6/19 Judges 1 1/13/19 Judges 5 1/23/19 Judges 10 2/3/19 Judges 16 2/10/19 1 Samuel 2 2/24/19 Ruth 1 3/3/19 Conquest Review 3/13/19 1 Samuel 10 4/7/19 1 Samuel 21 5/5/19 2 Samuel 5 5/12/19 Psalms Book 1 5/29/19 Messanic Psalms 6/9/19 United Kingdom Review 7/28/19 1 Kings 1 7/31/19 1 Chronicles 28 8/4/19 1 Chronicles 29 8/25/19 1 Kings 10 8/28/19 Review of Theme 9/1/19 Review of United Kingdom 1 9/8/19 2 Kings 12 10/13/19 2 Chronicles 18 10/20/19 1 Kings 22 10/23/19 2 Kings 2 11/3/19 2 Kings 6 11/20/19 Joel 12/1/19 Divided Kingdom Review 12/8/19 Jonah 12/11/19 Amos 12/15/19 Hosea 12/18/19 Isaiah 1-6 12/22/19 Isaiah 7-12 1/9/20 2 Chron. 32 1/12/20 Isaiah 40 1/19/20 Micah 1 5/18/14 Exodus 36-37 5/28/14 Exodus Review 6/8/14 Exodus Review 2 6/11/14 Leviticus 8 6/22/14 Leviticus 1-7 6/22/14 Leviticus 11-15 7/6/14 Numbers 1-9 7/9/14 Numbers 10 7/14/14 Numbers 12-14 8/6/14 Numbers 22-24 8/13/14 Num. 27-Deut. 4 8/17/14 Deuteronomy 5-11 8/20/14 Deuteronomy 12-25 8/27/14 Joshua 1-2 6/14/10 Review of Wilderness Wanderings 9/17/14 Joshua 8-10 9/21/14 Joshua 11-13 10/4/14 Joshua 23 - Judges 2 10/8/14 Judges 2-3 10/12/14 Judges 4-5 11/2/14 Judges 9-10 11/9/14 Judges 11-12 11/11/14 Judges 13-14 11/19/14 1 Samuel 1-3 12/7/14 Review of Conquest and Judges 12/10/14 1 Samuel 9-10 12/14/14 1 Samuel 11-12 1/4/15 1 Samuel 19-21 1/11/15 1 Samuel 24-25 1/25/15 2 Samuel 1-2 2/1/15 2 Samuel 5-6 2/18/15 Job 1-7 2/22/15 Job 8-21 3/8/15 2 Samuel 9-10 8/5/15 2 Kings 4 8/23/15 Joel 9/6/15 Review Dividied Kingdom 9/9/15 Review Divided Kingdom 9/13/15 Amos 9/16/15 Hosea 9/20/15 Isaiah 1 10/4/15 Micah 10/7/15 2 Kings 15 11/12/15 Jeremiah 1-9 11/15/15 Jeremiah 10-20 12/6/15 Review of Judah Alone 12/9/15 Daniel 1 12/13/15 Daniel 2 12/17/15 Ezekiel 1 12/27/15 Daniel 4-5 1/3/16 Ezra 1-3 1/10/16 Haggai 1/13/16 Zechariah 1-6 1/17/16 Zechariah 7-11 1/20/16 Ezra 5-6 1/24/16 Esther 1-4 1/27/16 Esther 5-10 1/31/16 Ezra 7-10 2/7/16 Nehemiah 1-4 2/10/16 Nehemiah 5-8 2/14/16 Nehemiah 9-13 2/17/16 Malachi 2/21/16 Years of Silence 1 3/6/16 Review of Captivity 3/8/16 Luke 1 3/13/16 Luke 2 3/20/16 Matthew 3 3/23/16 John 1 4/3/16 John 4 4/10/16 Mark 1 4/27/16 Mattew 6 5/1/16 Matthew 7 5/12/16 Matthew 11 6/12/16 Review Life of Christ 1 7/3/16 Matthew 16 7/24/16 John 10 7/27/16 Luke 10 8/7/16 Luke 12 9/4/16 Life of Christ 2 Review 10/2/16 Matthew 24 10/12/16 Matthew 26 10/19/16 John 14 11/6/16 Jesus' Trial 11/9/16 Jesus' Trial 2 11/13/16 Jesus' Curcifixion 11/20/16 Jesus' Burial 11/24/16 Jesus' Resurrection 11/27/16 Jesus Appearances 11/30/16 Jesus Appearances 2 12/4/16 Jesus' Last Week Review 12/11/16 Acts 1 1/1/17 Acts 6 1/11/17 Acts 8 Did not record 1/15/17 Acts 8 1/25/17 Acts 10 2/5/17 Acts 11 3/5/17 Review Acts 1-15 3/15/17 Acts 17 (Did not record) 3/22/17 1 Thessalonians 4/9/17 Galatians 4/12/17 Galatians 4/16/17 1 Corinthians 5/7/17 1 Corinthians 5/17/17 Romans 6/11/17 Review of Spread of the Church 2 7/12/17 Ephesians 7/26/17 Colossians 8/6/17 Colossians/Philemon 8/9/17 Philippians 8/13/17 1Timothy 8/16/17 1 Timothy 8/23/17 Titus 6/9/13 Review Spread of the Church 3 9/10/17 James1 9/13/17 James 2 9/17/17 1 Peter 1 10/1/17 2 Peter 1 10/11/17 2 Peter 3 10/15/17 Hebrews 1 10/29/17 Jude 11/5/17 1 John 1 11/12/17 2 John/3 John 11/15/17 Revelation 1 11/19/17 Revelation 2-6 11/23/17 Revelation 7-11 11/26/17 Revelation 12-14 12/3/17 Revelation 18-22 12/12/17 Church History 1 (2nd Cent.) 12/13/17 Church History 2 (3rd Cent.) 12/17/17 Church History 3 (4th Cent.) 12/20/17 Church History 4 (4 th Cent.) 12/24/17 Church History 5 (5th-7th Cent.) 12/31/17 Church History 7 (10th Cent.) 1/7/18 Church History 8 (11th Cent.) 1/10/18 Church History 9 (12th Cent.) 1/14/18 Church History 10 (12th Cent.) 1/7/18 Church History 11 (13th-15th Cent.) 2/4/18 Church History 16 (16th Cent.) 2/29/18 Church History 22 (21st Cent.) A Survey of the Bible These are recordings of the auditorium class where we are going through a survey of the Bible. These classes are held on Sunday mornings at 9:30 a.m. and on Wednesday evenings at 7:00 p.m. You are always welcome to join us in person for these studies. You can follow along with us as we study through the Bible. These are recordings of this week's auditorium Bible class Sunday: 1/19/20 Micah 1 Wednesday: 1/22/20 Micah 6

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Castro responds to State of the State Address: “I’m not convinced the governor will provide the leadership we’ve been lacking for the last three years.” SPRINGFIELD – Senator Cristina Castro (D-Elgin) issued the following response to Governor Rauner’s State of the State address today. “Governor Rauner spoke over and over again about working and coming together,” said Castro. “But where was he when legislators on both sides of the aisle were coming together this past year? There was no substance in what he said.” Senator Castro was upset that the governor did not mention the task force he planned on putting together to solve the problem at the Veterans Home in Quincy regarding the Legionnaires’ disease epidemic. “Two weeks ago Governor Rauner said that he planned on putting together a task force to investigate this issue immediately,” said Castro. “I am angry and upset that it has been two weeks and still nothing has been done. He has had three years. This problem could have been solved by now.” “Today we heard a nice speech about working together,” said Castro. “But until we hear concrete, realistic solutions to our state’s problems, I’m not convinced the governor will provide the leadership we’ve been lacking for the last three years. It’s been 422 days since he called a leaders’ meeting. It’s clear he’s not in charge of anything.”

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The myth of our exalted human place - A SentDev Classic I'm still stewing about Spiked Online and their misguided mission to malign the animal rights movement. In particular, I'm upset at Chris Pile's assertion that animal rights activists are acting misanthropically by putting the welfare of animals on par with those of humans. It's similar to Wesley Smith's argument that transhumanists, like animal rights advocates, are demeaning humans by ascribing personhood characteristics to non-humans. In the case of transhumanists, they're anticipating existence outside of the evolved human form and the rise of artificial intelligence and machine minds, whereas animal rights folks are acknowledging the personhood of gorillas, elephants, whales and dolphins. Ultimately, however, transhumanists and animal rights advocates are on the same wavelength in that they support the idea of non-anthropocentric personhood. In his article, “The Transhumanists: The Next Great Threat to Human Dignity,” Smith declares that humans “are not just another animal in the forest,” and that “human life has ultimate value simply and merely because it is human.” Of course, the argument that humans have value because they're human is not really an argument at all. Rather, it's a rhetorical tautology devoid of any substance – except for what it reveals about the person making the argument. Like Pile, Smith believes that humans occupy a special metaphysical or exalted space somewhere between the beasts and gods. Even when framed in secular language, the allusion to religious sensibilities is inescapable and one that informs an indelible part of this ideology. Along similar lines, the whole idea of 'dignity' itself arose during the time of aristocracy, a period when the nobility accredited their 'blue blood' as the essence which separated them from the lesser members of humanity. Consequently, those arguments that bemoan the demise of human dignity are conspicuously promoted by those who steadfastly cling to these notions as they have been reconstituted and manifested by 21st century concerns. I'm speaking, of course, of inhibitions against ascribing personhood to non-humans. This speciesism, or what James Hughes refers to as human-racism, is one of the worst prejudices of our time. Today, our gods and kings have been replaced by reason and liberal democracies. As a society, we have grown increasingly tolerant and accommodating of minority groups and those without power. We no longer enslave the 'other' and relegate our women to second class citizenry for fear of undermining human dignity. Similarly, as we are coming to recognize the psychological and emotional workings of non-human animals, we stand to take our morality and ethical commitments to the next level. At the very core, though, what the speciests cannot bear is when an animal's life is 'put ahead' of a human's. More accurately, what they find repugnant is the thought of a human death when a cure could have been developed through animal experimentation -- the underlying assumption being that an animal's life does not have the same value as a human's. To the speciest, the animal's suffering is either not really happening (i.e. the misconception that animals don't really feel things the way people do), or that its suffering is a justifiable sacrifice in the name of science or in helping more 'worthy' human lives. These rationalizations are the result of human arrogance and a mass hallucination among those who condone and perform the work; they operate in total denial, deliberately choosing to ignore the overwhelming evidence that animals get frightened and can experience pain the same way we do. There's also the 'blame the victim' mentality. In 2004, for example, PETA recorded the conversations of Covance technicians as they were restraining monkeys: "Goddamn...I'm gonna knock you out...you little bitch...you little hateful ass, you." There is no doubt that much scientific and medical advancement has occurred as a result of animal experimentation. But this is tainted knowledge, much like the tainted knowledge acquired by the Nazi doctors who tested on human subjects. Nazi doctors weren't so much sadistic as they felt their work was justified. Much like we have devalued the life and well-being of non-human animals, the Nazis de-valued an entire race of people. Without a doubt many lives could be saved today if we allowed the inhumane testing of human subjects. But what a repulsive and abhorrent idea! It for this exact same sense of repulsion and abhorrence that we cannot continue to allow cruel experimentation on animals deserving of personhood status and moral consideration. Denying the psychological experience of each and every animal that is experimented upon is a gross breach of our reason and moral sensibilities. And contrary to what Spiked Online, Chris Pile and Wesley Smith believe, animal rights activists are not misanthropic. In fact, they're quite the opposite. It's not just animals whose well-being they consider, it's a concern for all creatures capable of conscious experience and complex emotion. Consequently, it is when we consider the well-being of both human and non-human animals that we become truly humane. This article was originally published on April 25, 2006. Labels: animal rights, animal welfare, personhood, speciesism So where do you draw the line? Do you give the same accord to carrots? Malaria? Parasitic nematodes? Delicious lobsters? Fish? Chicken? You're correct that drawing an arbitrary line under humans is silly, but so is drawing an arbitrary line anywhere else. Is there a particular reason why you're ignoring my admonition to protect those animals who qualify as persons? I misunderstood your point, but mine is still valid. You seem to be drawing an arbitrary line under elephants et al. How is that any more or less rational than an arbitrary line under just humans? Is any experimentation on, say, housecats then ok? As for your protected species, are they to be exactly equal to humans? Would a procedure that cost the life of one chimpanzee and saved 1,000 humans be acceptable? How about a million? Further, do we then have an obligation to rescue your protected species from non-human predation? I wouldn't say that the personhood threshold is an arbitrary line. Persons deserve more moral consideration than non-persons because they are more experiential, have more complex emotions, are self-reflective and have greater potential (both in terms of the quality of their life and in the richness of their relationships). Animals who don't pass the personhood threshold are still morally significant, just less so. In those case we need to be concerned about preserving their experiential awareness and ensuring that they do not suffer. Defining 'personhood' is beyond the scope of this point, but it's a topic I hope to return to at some point. I don't think this issue has been adequately answered. But in a perfect world, person or not, any animal that is capable of suffering should not be put through experimentation and testing. What is the justification for a threshold at a certain point? Rather, I'd argue for a continuum of personhood based on sapience. I'd agree that we should try to avoid causing (or allowing) suffering, but zealousness may cause us to overcompensate. Are you really certain that all cases of animal experimentation have a net negative effect on suffering?

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ARDINGLY WAR MEMORIALS World War 1 & 2 - Roll of Honour with detailed information Compiled and copyright © Transcribed Chris Comber 2004 The memorials can be found at St Peters church. The World War 1 memorial is in the form of a plaque/board and lists 31 names for World War 1. The World War 2 memorial is in the form of document that has been framed and glazed containing the 12 men from the parish who died in World War 2 plus a further 5 civilains who also died. Stephen George Private 844-06, 259th Company, The Machine Gun Corps attached to East African Forces. Died in German East Africa 30th October 1917. Aged 23. Son of Ernest Frederick & Mary Anne Holman of Prospect House Ardingly. Carpenter employed by E. H. Munnion, Builders. Formerly with the Royal Sussex Regiment. Buried in Mingoyo Cemetery, later transferred to Dar es Salaam Cemetery,Tanzania. ANDRESS Private G.18041, 7th Battalion, The Royal Sussex Regiment. 12th Eastern Division. Killed in action when the Battalion returned to the line near Guedecourt on the Somme 5th October 1916. Aged 29. Son of Mr & Mrs R. Andress of Jenkins Croft, Ardingly. Born Ardingly and enlisted in Haywards Heath. Commemorated on The Thiepval Memorial Mr21. Eric Mannington Rifleman 24/339, 2/3rd New Zealand Rifle Brigade. The New Zealand Division. Killed in action at Flers/Courcelette during the Somme Offensive 15th September 1916. Aged 23. Son of William Alabaster & Charlotte Austin of Jenkins Croft, Ardingly. Commemorated on Caterpillar Valley (New Zealand) Memorial Longueval. Mr11. Frank Ernest Private 235223, 2/7th. Battalion, The Worcestershire Regiment. 61st South Midland Division Killed in action at Ypres 28th August 1917. Aged 21. Son of William Alabaster & Charlotte Austin of Jenkins Croft, Ardingly. Native of Hastings. Born in Brockley,Somerset, and enlisted in Brighton. Commemorated on The Tyne Cot Memorial, Belgium Mr30 AWCOCK Private 3/1059, 2nd Battalion, The Northamptonshire Regiment, 1st Regular Division. Died from wounds suffered at Loos 5th October 1915. Aged 46. Son of Mr & Mrs John Awcock of Ardingly. Born Ardingly and enlisted in Northampton. Buried in Bailleul Communal Cemetery extension F285. Private 45304, 122nd Company, The Machine Gun Corps. Western Front Machine Gun Unit. Killed in action at Messines Ridge 7th June 1917. Son of Mr & Mrs. Robert Bourn of Balcombe. Husband of Alice Bourn of Ardingly. Born in Balcombe. Enlisted in Haywards Heath. Formerly with the Royal Sussex Regiment. Buried in Voormezeele enclosure number 3 Belgium B111. Also on Balcombe Parish Church War Memorial Bombardier 40859, Royal Field Artillery. Died of wounds at home after discharge 7th October 1917. Aged 25. Son of Mrs Buckman of Lywood Common. Footman at Brook House. Buried in Highbrook Churchyard. Also on Highbrook Parish War Memorial Lance Corporal G. 2753 8th. Battalion, The Royal Sussex Regiment. 18th. Eastern Division (Pioneer Battalion). Killed in action during the German Spring offensive 23rd March 1918. Son of Mrs. Cozens of Pickeridge Cottages, Cob Lane, Ardingly. Born Nash in Surrey and enlisted in Haywards Heath. Buried in Chauny Communal Cemetery British Extension F. 1893. Name appears on Highbrook & West Hoathly War Memorials Stoker 1st Class K.8310, H.M.S. "Formidable", Royal Navy. Channel Fleet. Lost when the Battleship blew up off Sheerness 26th November 1914. Aged 24. Son of Spencer and Isabella Day of Holly Cottage, Cob Lane. Regular Naval Rating.Commemorated on The Portsmouth Naval Memorial Southsea MR.3. Also recorded on West Hoathly and Highbrook Memorials Frederick George Private G.385, 6th Battalion. The East Kent Regiment. 12th. Eastern Division. Killed in action at Hulluch near Loos 13th October 1915. Son of Mr & Mrs Dixon of Ardingly. Born Highbrook and enlisted in Maidstone, Kent. Commemorated on The Loos Memorial Mr19. GODDING Driver 28075, 'A' Company, 60th Battery, Royal Field Artillery. Western Front Units. Died of heart failure in Military Hospital in France on the 29th December 1916. Aged 33. Born Ardingly and enlisted in London. Son of John Godding of Lywood. husband of J. Godding of 5, Graham Cottages, Spring Lane, Lindfield. Buried in Hamel Military Cemetery F701. Private G.4209, 9th Battalion, The Royal Sussex Regiment. 24th New Army Division. Killed in action at Wulverghem near Messines, 24th March 1916. Aged 23. Son of Mr & Mrs Holman of 2 Carters Cottages, Ardingly. Born in Ardingly and enlisted in Brighton. Buried in Ration Farm Annexe, Ploegsteert, Belgium B49 Private G.3284, 13th Battalion. The Royal Sussex Regiment. 39th New Army Division. Killed in action at Polygon Wood 27th September 1917. Aged 35. Son of Mr & Mrs Moses Holman of Hickpots, Ardingly. Born in Ardingly and enlisted in Brighton. Single man, employed by E. H. Munnion, Builders. Commemorated on The Tyne Cot Memorial, Belgium. Mr30 Private 10574, 1st Battalion. The Wiltshire Regiment. 25th New Army Division. Killed in action during the 2nd Battle of Ypres 16th June 1915. Aged 24. Born in Croydon and enlisted in Merton,Surrey. Son of Mr & Mrs H. Judd of 119, Bynes Road, South Croydon. Employed as a chauffeur to Mr. William Clarke of ' Berry ' Ardingly. Commemorated on The Menin Gate Memorial, Ypres, Belgium Mr29. Name included on the Croydon Memorial Roll in Norbury Library. LONGHURST Albert Amor Private 27064, 2nd Battalion, The Wiltshire Regiment. 30th New Army Division. Killed in action on the opening day of the Third Battle of Ypres 31st July 1917. Born Cuckfield and enlisted in Brighton. Formerly with the Essex Regiment. Commemorated on The Menin Gate Memorial, Ypres,Belgium. Mr29. Jesse Rowland Private G.37775. 7th Battalion, The Royal West Surrey Regiment. 18th New Army Division. Died of wounds sustained during the Arras Offensive 7th May 1917. Aged 36. Born Ardingly and enlisted in Haywards Heath. Husband of Gertrude Elizabeth Marchant of 1, Hapstead Cottages, Ardingly. Left two children. Buried in Mont Huon Cemetery, Le Treport F13. Private G.25358, 11th Battalion, The Royal West Kent Regiment. 41st. New Army Division. Killed in action on the opening day of the Third Battle of Ypres 31st July 1917. Aged 24. Son of Mr & Mrs John Marsh of Lywood Common. Ardingly. Born in Swanage, Dorset & enlisted in Horsham. Brother of W. Marsh. Commemorated on The Menin Gate Memorial, Ypres, Belgium. Mr29. William Charles Private 27263, 1st Battalion, The Wiltshire Regiment. 25th New Army Division. Reported missing during the German Spring offensive, on the 23rd March 1918. Aged 32. Eldest son of Mr & Mrs John Marsh of Lywood Common. Brother of John Marsh. Commemorated on the Arras Memorial Mr20. MUNNION Corporal G.821, 11th Battalion, The Royal Sussex Regiment. 39th New Army Division. Died of wounds received at Sanctuary Wood 4th June 1917. Aged 35. Born Ardingly and enlisted in Brighton. Son of Henry & Maria Munnion of Ardingly. Husband of Mrs M. Munnion of Rolvenden, Kent. Educated at Ardingly College. Buried Boulogne Eastern Cemetery. F102. Name recorded on Ardingly College Memorial & Rolvenden Parish Church Arthur Charles Private SD827, 11th Battalion, The Royal Sussex Regiment. 39th New Army Division. Killed in action near Thiepval 31st October 1916. Aged 27. Born Ardingly & enlisted in Brighton. Son of Harry & Flora Nunn of Hollands Cottage, Ardingly. The Ardingly F.C. goalkeeper (nickname 'Tank'). Commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial Mr21. Shoeing Smith 13152, 6th Dragoon Guards (Caribineers). Western Front Cavalry units. Killed in action during the final advance 26th August 1918. Aged 28. Born Lindfield & enlisted in Battersea. Son of Mr & Mrs Charles Packham of Holly Farm ,Pickridge, Ardingly. Old boy of St. Wilfreds School, Haywards Heath. Buried in Delville Wood Cemetery. F401. Also included on West Hoathly & Haywards Heath War Memorials. PREVETT, DCM Sergeant G.541, 7th Battalion, The Royal Sussex Regiment. 12th New Army Division. Wounded at Guedecourt during The Somme offensive and died on the 6th October 1916. Aged 26. Born Ardingly and enlisted in Brighton. Son of Robert & Emma Prevett of Horncombe, Cob Lane, Ardingly. Awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal (D.C.M.). Name also recorded on the West Hoathly & Highbrook War Memorials. Buried in Dartmoor Cemetery. F188. Sergeant G. 3335, 9th Battalion, The Royal Sussex Regiment. 24th New Army Division. Killed in action at Loos 25th September 1915. Aged 35. Born St. Leonards and enlisted in Haywards Heath. Husband of Mrs S. Quaife of Borde Hill, Cuckfield. Employed by Mr Clarke at Borde Hill as a gardener. Left a son. Veteran of the South African War. Commemorated on the Loos memorial Mr19. Gunner 14256, 'D' Battery, 70th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery. 15th Scottish Division. Killed in action on the Somme 8th August 1916. Aged 21. Son of Mark & Harriett Richardson of 2, Walwers Lane, Lewes. Employed as a footman at Wakehurst Place, Ardingly. Commemorated on The Thiepval Memorial MR21. William Ralph Lance Corporal 9194, 5th Mounted Rifles, South African Imperial Light Horse. South African Cavalry Unit. Killed in action in a skirmish with rebel forces in the North West Cape Province of South Africa on the 24th November 1914. Aged 19. Son of Charles & Laura Ruxton of South Africa. Grandson of Mrs Daisy Cocking of ' The Mount ' Little London, Ardingly. Educated at Ardingly College, Haileybury & London Univ. Buried in Rooidam Farm Cemetery (Gordonia), Province of the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. SIMMONDS Sapper 177226, 92nd Field Company, The Royal Engineers. 18th Eastern Division. Killed in action 2nd June 1917. Aged 33. Born Staplefield & enlisted in Haywards Heath. Eldest son of Harry Simmonds of Staplefield Husband of Lily Martha Simmonds of Binghams Green, Ardingly. Bricklayer employed by E. H. Munnions. Buried in Rookery British Cemetery, Heninel. Edward William Lance Corporal SD.976. 11th Battalion, The Royal Sussex Regiment. 39th. New Army Division. Killed in action on the Rue de Bois 30th June 1916. Aged 30. Born Ardingly and enlisted in Brighton. Son of John Henry & Mary Humphrey Tester of Brickyard Cottages, Ardingly. Buried in St. Vaast Post Military Cemetery F631. George Warden Sergeant G.4, 7th Battalion, The Royal Sussex Regiment. 12th Eastern Division. Killed in action during the Somme offensive near Pozieres 1st August 1916. Aged 24. Son of Mr & Mrs Thomas Tyrrell of 'Old Knowles' Ardingly. Born in Balcombe & enlisted in Chichester. Commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial Mr21. Thomas Roderick Private G.1902, 8th Battalion, The Royal Sussex Regiment. Pioneer Battalion of the 18th Division. Died in C.C.S. of wounds sustained on the Ancre during the closing stages of the Somme offensive 25th November 1916. Son of Mr. & Mrs. William of Hickpots, Ardingly. Born in Ardingly and enlisted in Brighton. Buried in Warloy Baillon Communal Cemetery Extension F. 44. BACKSHALL Eric Owen Leading Aircraftsman 751665 (Wireless operator), Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. Died on the 6th. May 1940 Buried in Ardingly (St. Peter) Churchyard Extension. Alfred John Private 6403570, 4th. Battalion. The Royal Sussex Regiment. Died in Italy on the 7th November 1943. Aged 26. Buried in Milan War Cemetery, Italy. Driver T/70121, 13th Infantry Brigade Company, Royal Army Service Corps. Died in Iraq on the 3rd October 1942. Aged 30. Husband of Molly Farley. Son of Henry & Ellen Farley. Buried in Basra War Cemetery, Iraq. Private 6408365, 1st Battalion, The Royal Sussex Regiment. Killed in action at Cassino 18th March 1944. Aged 33. Son of William & Edith Gregory of Bletchingley, Surrey. Buried in Cassino War Cemetery, Italy. Cyril Denys Aircraftman 1st Class 1427374, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. Died 28th October 1942. Aged 21. Son of Lawrence and Rosetta Holman of Little London, Ardingly. Bur. Ardingly (St. Peter) Chuchyard Extension. LUXFORD Dennis Harold Gunner 148958, 10th Maritime Battery, Royal Artillery. Lost at sea 17th June 1943. Aged 33. Husband of Ellen Elizabeth Mary Luxford of Ardingly. Commemorated on The Plymouth Naval Memorial. Arthur Donald Air Mechanic 1st Class FX/83693, Fleet Air Arm, H.M.S. 'Dasher'. Lost when Escort Carrier blew up south of the Cumbraes due to a petrol explosion 27th March 1943. Aged 19. Son of Frederick Donald & Gladys Estella Nunn of Ardingly. Commemorated on The Lee on Solent Memorial Hampshir. (F.A.A. Memorial) and the Ardrossan Memorial,Scotland. Sergeant 519262, Royal Air Force, 217 Squadron, Coastal Command. Missing in action 1st February 1941. Aged 24. Unit was flying the Avro Anson during this period. Son of Andrew & Elizabeth Rutherford. Husband of Margaret Jane Rutherford of Addington,Surrey. Commemorated on The Runnymede Memorial. Coopers Hill, Englefield Green, Surrey. Oswald Albert Ivens Private 1455279, 6th Battalion, The Kings Own Royal Regiment (Lancaster). Killed in action during the retreat to Dunkirk, near Merville 27th May 1940. Aged 27. Son of Albert Ernest & Harriet Louise Smith of Ardingly. Buried in Merville Communal Cemetery Extension. Robert Gerald Lieutenant 250325, Royal Army Medical Corps. Died at home 24th. February 1943. Aged 25. Son of Gerald Sydney & Marion Spicer. Husband of Joan Elizabeth Spicer of Edinburgh. Commemorated Woking (St. Johns) Crematorium STRAUSS, (Polish Cross of Valour) Cyril Anthony Captain 62953, 2nd Battalion, The Kings Royal Rifle Corps. Killed in action in Italy 1st December 1944. Aged 31. Son of Herman & Jenny Strauss of Stonehurst, Ardingly. M.A. (Oxon). Barrister at Law (Inner Temple). Awarded Polish Cross of Valour. Buried in Assisi War Cemetery, Italy. Able Seaman P/JX 350063, Royal Navy, H.M. Motor Torpedo Boat 640. Killed in action when the M.T.B. struck a mine off Leghorn in the Adriatic on the 27th June 1944. Son of James & Ada White of Ardingly. Commemorated on The Portsmouth Naval Memorial, Southsea. Mr. 3. Last updated 15 August, 2016

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Charlotte’s in the hunt for more medals Born partially sighted and by her own admission “not particularly good at sport,” Charlotte Ellis could hardly imagine growing up to win international sporting honours. But as a student at York University she took up running and hasn’t looked back since. Charlotte, 35, who lives in Redcar and is a member of New Marske Harriers, has represented Great Britain with distinction winning a string of medals at various paratriathlon championships. She also represented her country at this year’s IPC World Para Athletics Marathon Championships, finishing a highly creditable seventh. Charlotte will be back at her alma mater on Sunday 20th October with her guide, Jason Rippingale, for the Asda Foundation Yorkshire Marathon. She said: “I started running with one of my house mates and found more guides while I was at university, completing races up to half marathon. I continued running after uni because I love it. “In 2008 I was part of a group of visually impaired people who all completed the London Triathlon for charity and to raise the profile of visually impaired people doing sport. I never dreamed what this was going to lead to. “I was asked a few months later if I would like to join the Great Britain disability triathlon team. In 2010 I went to my first European Paratriathlon Championships where we won gold. We then took silver at the World Paraduathlon Championships and gold at the World Paratriathlon Championships later that year.” The World and European Paratriathlon golds were replicated in 2011 and there was more medal success over the following two years. Charlotte said: “I made the difficult decision at the end of 2013 to retire from paratriathlon and focus on my running. However, a non-running accident in 2014 caused a serious injury. In 2015 I ran my first marathon but injuries and circumstances limited my performance until my breakthrough at the Manchester Marathon in 2018. “This led to me being selected to represent Great Britain at the IPC World Para Athletics Marathon Championships in 2019, which were held at the London Marathon. This was a dream for me. I finished 7th with a pb, but cramp at 23 miles had slowed me down when I was battling for 6th. “I am excited to keep trying to improve, aiming to represent Great Britain again and hopefully compete for medals in the future.” Keith Morris, Head of Sport at the University of York said: “Charlotte's story is hugely inspiring and humbling. It demonstrates the hugely positive impacts of engagement in sport throughout her life and the fact that sports clubs and friendships formed while at the Uni of York is something we are proud to have played a part in. However, her achievements and recognition for them are all hers and we look forward to welcoming her back on campus for this year’s Yorkshire Marathon.” See Previous See Next Back To Blog

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the carnival Santu Lussurgiu, about 500 meters above the sea level, is one of the most important villages of the Montiferru region. Thanks to its strategical position, with mountains on the one side and not too far from the see on the other side, and to the abundance of water, assured by the presence of numerous perennial springs, it has been inhabited since ancient times. Archeological relics point to the existence of human settlements in the territory of Santu Lussurgiu since prehistory, as proved by the discovery of domus de janas, tombe di giganti e nuraghi dating back to the pre-Nuragic times. Other relics, as cinerary urns, are evidence of Punic and Roman settlements. The village has medieval origins, although an exact dating about its genesis is not available. The first available reference is a parchment dating back to 1185, which had been rediscovered in the XV century within the Church of Santa Croce, originally dedicated to Saint Lussorio. The name of the saint in the local dialect coincides with the name of the village itself, Santu Lussulzu. A slow process of urbanization led to the development, around the Church of Santa Croce, of a village having the typical structure of old medieval centers, characterized by narrow and winding streets and row houses. Santu Lussurgiu maintains its center to this day and, with its cobbled lanes and ancient stone houses decorated according to the Gothic-Catalan style, the center of Santu Lussurgiu represents one of the most authentic in Sardinia. At present, Santu Lussurgiu has slightly more than 2400 inhabitants. Its economy mainly relies on sheep-breeding and cattle-farming, especially of bovines. Special importance has the bovine breed “sardo-modicana”, renowned and highly esteemed, which led to the creation of the brand “Bue rosso”. Besides this, other traditional activities are farming and olive and grape growing, while industrial activities developed during the last decades within the food and the milk-and-dairy sectors. The cheese “casizolu”, obtained from the Bue Rosso cows’ milk, is the flagship of Santu Lussurgiu’s production and a Slow Food product. Other two among Santu Lussurgiu’s typical products are wine and a spirit called “abbardente”. Santu Lussurgiu’s handicraft is renowned in Sardinia for the craftsmanship of its artisans, among others carpenters, woodcarvers, blacksmiths, cutlers, tailors and cobblers.

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Temple of Bacchus, Rome Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford c.1754 (undated) Black chalk on grey paper 9 1/4 x 15 1/2 in. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. To license image, click here. Framed by a tree growing on a bank in the left foreground a group of buildings is seen in the middle distance,with a ruined circular one in the centre. Beyond this at the right another circular building with a domed roof is the former Temple of Bacchus, now the Church of Santa Constanza. At the left more buildings include the tower and upper part of the Church of Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura. Paul Sandby; his sale, Christie's May 1811 (93); Jeffrey; R.P. Roupell; Christie's, 12-14 July 1887 (1357); Edward Riggall; Sotheby's, 4 July 1901 (103); Herbert Horne; Sir Edward Marsh; bequeathed 1953 to the Ashmolean Museum through the National Art-Collections Fund Unsigned; no inscription [1] Lower left corner: Paul Sandby (Lugt 2112) [1] Inscribed in an old hand: The Temple of Bacchus. 10-6 D307 <i>The Temple of Bacchus</i>, The Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York D307 The Temple of Bacchus, The Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York See 'Links' tab This unembellished drawing made on the spot was later worked up into D307, the presentation drawing for Lord Dartmouth. Ford has remarked that the proportions of the dome of the temple/church are more accurate in this version. Brown noted that the trees and other foreground details on the left are more emphasised than the rest of the composition and were probably an addition made in the studio. Ford 1948, p. 345; Ford 1951, pp. 30-31, 59, no. 53; Solkin 1978, pp. 405-6, pl. 18a; Brown 1982, p. 660, no. 1888, pl. 541 Some spotting overalll Richard Wilson (1713/14-1782), The Temple of Bacchus, The Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York Paul Sandby, c.1730-1809 Sir Edward Howard Marsh, 1872-1953 Herbert Horne, 1864-1916 Brinsley Ford, The Drawings of Richard Wilson David Blayney Brown, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, Volume IV: The Earlier British Drawings, British Artists and Foreigners working in Britain born before c.1775

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God In His Mercy Lend Him Grace. Fidel Gomez, Jr.: A Remembrance Before this year officially ends, I need to pause briefly to reflect on one of the greatest personal losses I have had. It is a blow that, four months later, I still feel very deeply. My pastor has a saying: you are only a phone call from having your whole world turned upside down. The Men's Ministry leader also has a saying: we are not guaranteed tomorrow. Both of these are so true. We wake up, have breakfast, if we're fortunate go to work, have lunch, continue working, and go back home before going to bed. We make plans, sometimes short-term, sometimes long. We believe ourselves assured tomorrow, especially when we are young and youngish. We don't expect to be in that accident. We don't expect to keel over clutching our chests. We don't expect to stop breathing. We live out our lives, not conscious of the fact that this day may be our last. I think that is as it should be, otherwise we'd be in a perpetual state of fear. Death is something that will come to us all, but it is not something we should dwell on. Sometimes however, Death forces us to look at it. On August 11, 2017, one of my closest friends, Fidel Gomez, Jr., died suddenly. Just about every detail of Fidel's death is simply far too tragic and/or gruesome to share, and I know that he would not like much said and written about his life either. I have to balance paying tribute to him with respecting his right to rest in peace. I think though, there are some things I can get away with with his approval. I can share he never liked 'Fidel', because of well, you know. Whenever we would get coffee, which was almost all the time and one of the bedrocks of our friendship, he would always give his name as 'Gomez'. I can share that when we had coffee, we would spend hours and hours talking about anything and everything: our jobs, our families, our desires for relationships, Joy Division and Morrissey (whom we saw once together, with a 'Morrissey Birthday Party' being the rare time we'd hit a club). It was an intimate relationship, as intimate as a relationship between two men can be without any sexual or romantic connotations. Fidel and I met in college, if memory serves correct in the Radio/TV/Film Scripting class. He was older than me and had been at UTEP before I got there, but graduated after me. I guess he was what you'd call a 'permanent student'. We bonded slowly over our mutual shyness and passion for films. After he did graduate, we stayed friends before he disappeared, not returning or making contact for years. It was only by the sheerest of coincidences that we reunited. In 2014 I was going to Charleston and stopped at the Barnes & Noble to kill some time before going to the airport. As I was leaving, I see Fidel sitting at a table. I was thrilled to see him again, and I think he was happy too (Fidel didn't get thrilled by nature). I tell him I'm about to leave but that I would call him when I got back. When I came back, we picked up where we left off. Neither of us could have thought we'd have just three years left, though I'm thankful they were three years of laughter, shock, deep conversations and contempt for bad films. That was one of the things that held us together: we loved movies. He got me to love Herzog and Fellini, and I got him to love Welles and Hitchcock. We talked about Ebert & Roeper like some people talk about Game of Thrones. We would go to the movies whenever time allowed, from the Alamo Drafthouse to the second-run theaters, always taking turns paying. In fact, it took me a long time to even think about going back to the Alamo after his death. It was always such a special place for us, almost 'our place', and I simply couldn't bear to go there alone, especially knowing he wasn't ever going to meet me there with a "Hello, Richard". For reasons known only to him, he called me 'Richard'. My friends call me 'Rick', my family calls me 'Richie', my parents call me 'Ricardo'. He was the only person to call me 'Richard', and I never felt the need to have him call me anything else. For me, however, our friendship was more than movies, though that was a big part of it. I was able to open up with Fidel in a way I haven't with anyone. He was more than my friend. He was my confidant, the person I could talk about almost anything with. I shared things with him I never shared with anyone, things that he did take to the grave. I cannot say the feeling was mutual, but I had full trust that deeply embarrassing moments, private thoughts, and deep dark secrets and hopes were things I could share with him. In a lot of ways, I think we were similar: both aspired to write, both knew the frustrations of not finding good work (though to be fair, I was blessed with a great job and he, sadly, wasn't), both marveled at how some people in Hollywood had careers when neither of us saw any discernible talent. I know Fidel ultimately never fully opened up to me the way I did to him, though I too kept at least some things private. I only wish I could have told him just how much he meant to me, how much I appreciated him and his friendship. I wish I could have told him how special he was, how he always sold himself short, how many people genuinely cared for him. I wish I could have... I miss him. I just miss him. I miss being able to share inside jokes, being able to have laughs about the people we knew and their idiosyncrasies. I am going to miss those little things: his frustration at having to pay for a 3-D screening of Gods of Egypt because he didn't check the screening times, his admitting I was right about CHIPS, his teasing me about how excited I was for Green Lantern, his imitation of me using a deep voice to talk about "the Criterion Collection" or how we in mock-tones would describe a film as "the most important film of this, or ANY generation". The little things. I also miss not being able to show him the original Murder on the Orient Express so that he could compare it with the remake. I miss how we never got the chance to see Spider-Man: Homecoming together, a film he was completely opposed to seeing, even after I offered to pay. After his death, I went to see it, alone. There was simply nothing holding me back, but I watched it with a twinge of sadness, knowing full well that this was the first of many movies I would not be able to share with him. He loved Blade Runner and I figure was looking forward to seeing Blade Runner 2049. It tears at me that he never got the chance. It tears at me that on August 11, the very day he officially died, I sent him a text asking if he was going to be able to go see Xanadu with me the next day at the Plaza Classic Film Festival as he had said he might, his work permitting. I would never have imagined as I looked around, waiting to see if he would show up, that his remains were being carried out of his apartment. I never thought as I was watching Xanadu, that my friend was never going to be there. There hasn't been a week since his death where he doesn't comes to my memory, especially since I drive past the cemetery he is buried at whenever I go to work. I think I can share that he would be both displeased and not surprised that he, who never learned to speak Spanish despite his name, would end up being buried less than five miles from the U.S./Mexico border. I can hear his voice, again in mock-tone, imitating me in saying, "We are not amused". His sister called me from his phone a week after his death to tell me he died. That night, I had an uneasy sleep, and in the fits of sleep I managed, I had at least one short dream. We were walking together when he made a sudden sharp right turn. A barrier like a train crossing gate fell between us, and a figure suddenly stood alongside him. This figure shook his finger, making it clear I could not come across, while Fidel just waved goodbye as they walked away. I like to think that was his way of saying farewell, one last look before going. After his death, I found that for how special he was to me, I had only one picture of us together. It was taken when we went to a UTEP football game as a promotion. I'm so glad I have it and treasure it, where it is displayed prominently. To be honest, I haven't had the courage to see the DVD he lent me: a trio of war films that I never got around to. Odd that the DVD now has a more special meaning: the last and only tangible thing I have left of him. I feel his loss greatly, and perhaps I will as long as I am allowed to live by the Grace of God. However, his death made me think about my own life, what I thought, where I was, how I was. I am learning to appreciate each day I'm given, the friends I have (though few as close as he was to me). I've learned to try new things, to break out of my routine and my shell. I can't say that I'm starting an adventurous life, but I am learning to be less bound, both in what I try and in letting others define who I am. I know I have a limited life, and I don't want to leave it unexplored. I figure that if Fidel read this tribute, he'd say it was too long, a bit sentimental, and using one of his favorite critiques of my writing, 'pretentious'. Well, now let me end by coming round full circle, back to a memory of Charleston that came to me when I touched Fidel's casket and had the full impact of this great personal loss hit me hard. One of the places I visited in Charleston after unexpectedly reuniting with Fidel was a plantation, Drayton Hall. There, a descendant of the plantation slaves crafted an arch to the entrance of the slave cemetery. On it are these words, "Leave 'Em Rest". I think that is as good a thought when it comes to Fidel now as can be given. Whatever was buried with him should remain so. There is so much I can share, but I know he wouldn't like it. I'm not sure he'd like these reflections, but I want to share them because he was so very special to me. I thought him fun and funny, smart, flawed, private, but a good, good friend, one I thought would be with me for years and years. Goodnight and goodbye, my dear friend. This is my tribute to my friend Fidel Gomez, Jr., someone I loved and will remember for as long as I have life & memory. I leave you, my dear friend Fidel Gomez, Jr., rest. Posted by Rick at 12:01 AM No comments: Labels: In Memoriam Kennedy Center Honors 2017: A Review Forty years ago, at the inaugural Kennedy Center Honors, the five artists feted were an opera diva, one of the premiere songwriters of Broadway, a master choreographer, one of the greatest pianists of all time, and probably the greatest dancer in film history. For this year, the Kennedy Center honored one ballet dancer, two pop music songwriters, a television writer/producer who uses his programs to further his own political agenda, and a rapper. If anyone can make the case for LL Cool J being in the same league as an Arthur Rubenstein, Fred Astaire, Marian Anderson, Count Basie, Lucille Ball, Sammy Davis, Jr., Maria Tallchief, Ella Fitzgerald, or Cary Grant, I'm more than happy to listen. Before we continue, I think it's important to note that I have championed both Gloria Estefan and Lionel Richie being Kennedy Center Honorees. However, Ladies Love Cool James? In the past few years, I have objected to the shifting of the Kennedy Center Honors from fine/'high' arts: ballet, theater, music, film, and television towards more 'pop' culture: rock/pop music (including whole groups) and talk show hosts. It's been a bit of a slippery slide, going from Richard Rodgers and Leonard Bernstein to Led Zeppelin and Sting. Now, I love Zeppelin, Sting and The Eagles, but I wouldn't put them in the same category with Lerner & Loewe or John Williams. The 2017 Kennedy Center Honors was despite some controversy and a big push to attract more viewers via LL Cool J, both a remarkably stale affair and a bad example of how not to make a case for certain honorees, though not without some standout moments. In order, Gloria Estefan, Norman Lear, LL Cool J, Carmen de Lavallade, and Lionel Richie were celebrated for their lifetime work (despite the fact that the youngest-ever Honoree, James Todd Smith, aka LL Cool J, is 49, which respectfully does not exactly fit into 'lifetime'). Various performers introduced a bit of a biographical sketch of the particular artist and there were tributes via musical performances or monologues by other well-and-not-so-well-known individuals. For most of the special, the first three were done a great disservice by their presentations. Things started off badly when Eva Longoria saluted Estefan in a dress that showed an immense amount of cleavage. While the music was good, it is curious that in the musical performance segment, the production decided to perform two songs Estefan did cover versions of (Turn the Beat Around and Everlasting Love) rather than her own compositions (Coming Out of the Dark would have been a great moment, but if memory serves correct, not played). The title song from her Spanish-language album Mi Tierra was, and performed badly. I've not heard of Becky G, but I though her singing was terrible, and her wardrobe looked like she was honoring Selena more than Gloria. Further, the Kennedy Center Honors didn't properly acknowledge that the performance was connected to her jukebox musical: On Your Feet! For all the audience knew, they were just doing a medley of her greatest hits (and covers), not seeing people who were doing a Broadway show. This is even stranger considering that two past Honorees: Billy Joel and Carole King, also had jukebox musicals but in their salutes, they had greater recognition (King had her whole salute bookended by Beautiful: The Carole King Musical). In what might be the night's most unintentionally hilarious moment, Queen Latifah's salute to LL Cool J stated, "Tonight, we honor LL for his contributions to our culture, that began with him banging on the garbage can on the corner of Farmers Boulevard". Somewhere in that statement, there's a metaphor. The clip reel did not make the case as to why LL Cool J is that important in terms of overall culture or impact on it, and his 'contributions to our culture' are apparently that he's well-built, a good husband and father, the films Toys and Any Given Sunday, and his long-running stint on NCIS: Los Angeles. Despite the constant urging of the DJ and rap performers, apparently only Anthony Anderson stood to celebrate weak renditions of Mama Said Knock You Out, the only song I actually recognized. If the clip reel is to be believed, that song was about knocking out drugs and teenage pregnancy, not dissing on other rappers and proclaiming LL's own return (I can't call it a comeback). I love Busta Rhymes, but I don't think his gravelly voice was the best to belt out Mama Said Knock You Out. I do wonder why MC Lyte could not be persuaded to perform I Need Love or Around the Way Girl or Doin' It. My guess is that at least the first two are from a male perspective, but nothing says she could not take ownership of them. The presentation of Norman Lear, the oldest-ever Kennedy Center Honoree, sandwiched between Estefan and J, was perhaps the worst, but not because the presentation itself was bad or because he isn't worthy of recognition. As a digression, I confess to having seen only one of Lear's programs: The Jeffersons. The only other Lear program I heard about as a child was One Day at a Time, but that was only because my mother referred to it as 'the show where the mother has an affair with the plumber'. Whether Ann and Schneider ever did have a fling I leave to any fan-fiction (something I don't think existed at the time). The presentation was bad because a good part of it wasn't devoted to his actual television work, but to his creation of People for the American Way, his left-wing advocacy group. Was Lear being honored for his body of work on television or for his political activism? This isn't like when Danny Kaye was honored for his UNICEF work. To focus so much on Lear's PFAW to me is as ghastly as taking up time to salute Charlton Heston's NRA advocacy (which I don't think they did when he was honored). Lear had already introduced politics into what should have been a nonpartisan event, but more on that later. This year, despite the high-voltage names in the honoree box, the only ones that managed to make a case as to why they should be honored were Richie and, somewhat ironically, de Lavallade. I say 'somewhat ironically' because previous Honoree Meryl Streep admitted that few know who de Lavallade is. The prima ballerina's tribute included a performance of Wade In the Water, choreographed by the late and legendary Alvin Ailey, and a performance by another prima ballerina, Misty Copeland, who respectfully acknowledged that as an African-American, she stood on de Lavallade's shoulders. These were beautiful and brilliant renditions of dance and showed how de Lavallade matters. With Richie, we saw the scope of his songwriting and all the influences he has drawn from. That is what makes the criticism of the performances so strange to me. On 'the Twitter' many bashed the fact that country singer Luke Bryan performed two numbers: Penny Lover and Sail On. I suspect that what those complaining about were saying that a 'country' (read 'white') singer should not perform music from an R&B (read 'black') singer/songwriter. You can criticize Bryan for a lot of things with regards to his own music or his singing, but to criticize him for performing two Richie covers is idiotic. Lady is a Richie song performed by country legend Kenny Rogers (who I think merits a Kennedy Center Honor of his own), and Stuck on You is a pretty solid country song. Furthermore, Bryan's generation embraces all types of music. One of Bryan's biggest hits, That's My Kind of Night, has him all but rapping himself and talks about listening to 'a little Conway, a little T-Pain', a mixtape I doubt either Conway Twitty or T-Pain would enjoy. Maybe That's My Kind of Night is an awful song, and maybe Bryan epitomizes the worst of 'bro-country', but to say Bryan 'shouldn't' sing Lionel Richie is to me irrational to the point of foolish. Finally, on the political front, much was made of the fact that neither President Donald Trump or First Lady Melania attended, the first time either the President or First Lady skipped the event. This was done in response to Lear, then later de Lavallade and potentially Richie, boycotting the traditional White House presentation. This, to me, was a bad decision, showing that some performers cannot get over their disagreements. Barbra Streisand attended despite being presented to former President George W. Bush. Charlton Heston attended despite being presented to former President Bill Clinton. All four rose above their personal grievances and politics to recognize the artistry and the Presidency. Granted, Trump is not my idea of a President, but he is the President, and it's time we got over that (and I say this as a charter member of Never Trump). With the exceptions of de Lavallade and Richie, the Kennedy Center Honors did not make the case as to why these five individuals were worthy or recognition (LL Cool J the most dubious selection). Given how the Kennedy Center did not honor Maureen O'Hara or Peter O'Toole when they were alive, or Olivia de Havilland who is 101, it all seems so strange. The fact that this was the lowest-rated Kennedy Center Honors in the twenty years they've kept records does not make this any easier. Perhaps it's time to focus more on Emanuel Ax, Bernadette Peters and or Betty White than on Run DMC. Posted by Rick at 5:23 PM No comments: Labels: Kennedy Center Honors, Television Specials The Librarians: And the Silver Screen Review THE LIBRARIANS: AND THE Ah, one can't be a good old night at the movies. Who doesn't love getting lost in brilliant stories, or stories that evoke something within you? With And the Silver Screen, we take that 'getting lost in a film' bit to a whole new level. This Librarians episode is a great love letter to the power and wonder of 'classic' films, good and bad, with a pretty easy-to-figure plot but one that works so well you don't mind knowing where you're headed. Guardian Eve Baird (Rebecca Romijn) and her paramour, Librarian Flynn Carsen (Noah Wyle, who wrote the episode), are having a rare night off just for themselves (their relationship seems to be a running thread this season, as this is the second episode to feature them apart from the other Librarians to concentrate on 'me-time'). Baird, a big-time classic film fan (the type who probably dreams of being a guest host on Turner Classic Films) takes Flynn to a film festival retrospective featuring the directing of one James Desmond Wheeler. While watching the film noir The Found, The Lost and The Looking, Flynn and Baird are suddenly thrust into the film itself (a touch of The Purple Rose of Cairo). This shocks the audience and leaves Jade Wells (Gloria Reuben), who opened up the art-house movie palace after restoration, a bit perturbed to say the least. The other Librarians: Jacob Stone (Christian Kane), Ezekiel Jones (John Kim) and Cassandra Cillian (Lindy Booth) are worried that 'Mom and Dad' haven't returned from 'date night' in over twenty-four hours, so they go to the theater and are stunned to see them inside the screen, ranting and desperate to get out. Soon, Eve and Flynn hit on the idea that to get out, they have to recreate the film to its conclusion. Eve, who's seen the film many times, guides him to be 'Mac Doyle', roguish private eye as she becomes 'Kitty Dupree', his Girl Friday. In an effort to get Flynn and Baird out of the screen, Jenkins (John Larroquette) works with Jade to find the magic object that got them in, while the other Librarians decide to jump in and rescue them out of The Found, The Lost and The Looking. Only problem is that Jade's theater holds three screens, and they end up in the Western musical Chaps in Chaps by mistake. Now they have to get out of that film first before helping Flynn and Baird. As 'Kitty Dupree' and 'Mac Doyle', it's up to them to recreate their film, even if it means Flynn will have to undergo the traditional punch-ups his hardboiled gumshoe endures. However, to their surprise, after they finish the film...they end up right back at the beginning. The other Librarians manage to get out of Chaps in Chaps but end up in Brain Robbers From Planet Alpha Xenon Six, a Z-picture if ever there was one. Fortunately, Cassandra has seen this film, so she knows where the plot goes. Unfortunately, she forgot some parts, so they do run the risk of getting vaporized. Jenkins and Wells discover the typewriter where her father, James Desmond Wheeler, wrote all the scripts (the one object tying the films together). They also discover that The Found, The Lost and The Looking was changed from the original ending, hence the failure to 'finish' the film correctly. The original script was written by an 'E. Darnell', but where is the original ending and who is E. Darnell? All is resolved when 'Kitty' and 'Mac' solve the actual mystery behind the noir façade, and it helps that the other Librarians finally managed to get into the right film. Jade Wells also finds 'E. Darnell', 'E' being for Eleanor (Margaret Avery), her father's former assistant. Jade had grown to appreciate her 'adopted' father's work later in life, but now finds that Eleanor was not just her 'adopted' father's own Girl Friday, but her natural mother...and Wheeler was indeed her natural father. A whole rouse had been created to cover up a potential scandal, and Eleanor wrote the noir film in the hopes of having the real story eventually discovered while using symbolism to hint at her meaning. And the Silver Screen shows that Wyle is very familiar with particular tropes of film genres. I could say that The Found, The Lost and The Looking is an exaggerated imagining of a film noir, but a lot of And the Silver Screen is played for gentle laughs than straight-up parody of these types of films. Wyle digs deep into Hollywood history, and while these are only guesses they did come to mind while watching. The name 'Jade Wells' could be an echo of Rebecca Welles, Orson Welles' only daughter. The director's name, 'James Desmond Wheeler', reminded me of another film director, William Desmond Taylor, a silent film director whose murder, among the first Hollywood scandals, remains unsolved to this day. Jade being 'adopted' by her actual parent is probably calling back to Loretta Young. Clark Gable got Young pregnant, though whether through a consensual affair or a rape remains unclear. Young, who was unmarried, could not possibly have an out-of-wedlock child in the 1930s. Young was also a devout Catholic, so an abortion was out of the question. An elaborate plan to have the child, a daughter, secretly, then come around and 'adopt' her was used. Brain Robbers From Planet Alpha Xenon Six is an overt spoof of various bad science-fiction films, in particular Plan 9 From Outer Space, which had originally been titled Grave Robbers From Outer Space. In terms of performances, guest stars Reuben and Avery did a great job as the flustered movie-house owner and mysterious figure respectively, and even though you knew that they'd be connected you went along with it. Wyle and Romijn worked well together, playing up the traditional roles of the detective and shrewd aide. "Women did the sleuthing, men did the punching," Baird tells Flynn as to why she gets to investigate while he gets punched. I'm not sure about that, given most women in noir films were femme fatales or dolls, but again, you roll with it. Wyle put in some nice touches of humor, billing them in the noir take-off as 'Dr. Julius Erving III (aka, basketball great 'Dr. J') and 'Lady Gaga Van Damme. Didn't know Flynn was a big basketball fan. It also gave Kane a chance to show off his singing when he and the other Librarians are in the Chaps in Chaps segment. Kane has a second career as a singer, so I'm figuring the singing of the cowboy ballad was his. He has quite a nice, strong voice. In regards to the resolution, it did appear a bit fast and predictable, but that's about the only thing I can fault the episode in. A nice homage and love letter to films of yesteryear, And the Silver Screen was another nice, light romp. Granted, I don't think film noir, Westerns, or science-fiction were that campy, but if you want better examples, I suggest TCM over TNT. Next Episode: And the Bleeding Crown Labels: Television Programs, The Librarians Star Wars: The Last Jedi. A Review (Review #993) There are going to be spoilers here, so skip down to the end for the final decision. Star Wars: The Last Jedi, seems to have split people all over. Most of my fellow critics worship it almost as The Second Coming. Some fans, on the other hand, don't want it to be Canon to the epic Star Wars mythos. The most obvious example of this divide is on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes: 91% positive reviews from critics, 52% negative ratings from 'average' people. For myself, I'm splitting it down the middle: not the monstrosity some of the rabid hardcore Star Wars fans bemoan it as, not the unimpeachable Citizen Kane of Star Wars my brethren insist it is. Picking up from pretty much where Star Wars: The Remix left off, The Last Jedi has about three stories going on. There's the story of Rey (Daisy Ridley) a young girl infused with great power from The Force for reasons still unknown who has found Master Jedi Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). She goes to him to help the "not Rebellion" (The Resistance) do battle with the "not Empire" (The First Order), especially against their "not Darth Vader" (Kylo Ren, also known as 'Emo Vader'). Luke believes the Jedi should now die out, but he shows her a few things about the Jedi and The Force, albeit reluctantly as she goes through her own "not Dagobah" (Ahch-To). Something in The Force allows both Rey and Emo Vader (Adam Driver) to have communications with each other in what I like to call 'Force Skype', down to where they manage to meet despite being in wholly other words. The connection between Emo Vader, formerly Luke's nephew Ben Solo, and how they came to be at odds has a Rashomon feel, as the stories about his turning to the Dark Side don't quite gel. Having the Jedi temple set ablaze echoes Revenge of the Sith, but why quibble? Meanwhile, hotshot pilot "not Han Solo" (Poe Dameron) keeps disobeying orders from Princess now General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher in her final role) and while he does get results, he also has no problem with getting many others killed to meet them. Everyone is alarmed when the "not Empire" manages to follow them into hyperspace, where they begin destroying the "not Rebellion" with ease. Alarmed at this, and with Leia having semi-magically survived the bridge getting a direct hit by floating back from space onto another ship, eventually they realize they need to disable a tracker that is on board the "not Empire" ship. Now we get into Story Three: reformed Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) and low-level mechanic/Finn fangirl Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) need to find a codebreaker to disable the tracker. Travelling to Canto Bight and their casino, they find the codebreaker they are looking for, but plot reasons make them join with another codebreaker, DJ (Benicio del Toro). He does help them, but there's a 'shocking' twist. More shocking twists are when Emo Vader brings Rey to "not Emperor" Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), who taunts Rey. With Snoke dead at one of their hands (guess who), Emo Vader takes command and with General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson), takes the final battle to the "not Rebellion" to the actual Rebel stronghold of Crait, where Emo Vader and Luke Skywalker have another, final confrontation. Rey saves the day, channeling her great Force powers to provide an escape to the "not Rebellion", and the "not Rebellion" continues. Has anyone ever noticed how few people actually finish Jedi training? Luke didn't, Rey didn't, those kids at the Jedi temples they're always burning down don't, not sure about Anakin. Sometimes it's a puzzle as to why they even bother. What is so impressive about The Last Jedi is how unimpressive it is. For all the Sturm und Drang it belts out, there's remarkably little here. Writer/director Rian Johnson is certainly well-impressed with himself, but at times The Last Jedi, like another beloved sci-fi franchise (Doctor Who) seems more interested in being meta than in being timeless or from 'a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away'. There's the opening scene where Poe taunts Hux by continuously saying he's 'on hold' for the General, making snide remarks about asking if anyone there has seen him. "You know, pasty skin," Poe ridicules at one point, while the increasingly campy Hux keeps replying that it is him. The audience laughed, which I figure they were trained to do, but I couldn't help think this is something that would have appeared in Spaceballs, not Star Wars. Do people really 'hold' in outer space (or drop bombs rather than fire them)? These incessant calls for comedy and quips (I think I heard at least twice 'need a lift?' whenever someone was stranded and another ship came in) are a bit too 'now'. Having Yoda tell Skywalker with regards to the sacred Jedi texts, "Page-turners they were not", again sounds a bit too much like Johnson wanted something only for contemporary audiences. Who is to know whether these terms will still be in use fifty years from now. As a side note, I am a total loss to understand how the ten seconds of silence when we have a suicide run could so confuse people as to require advanced notification that there will be no sound. Are modern audiences that out of tune with filmmaking techniques? The story is also ridiculously and needlessly long. The search for this 'master codebreaker' led not to the one they sought but to DJ, whom they found by mere chance. It seemed to be a thorough waste of a bloated 2 hour 30 minute running time. Why not just search for DJ in the first place? What were the odds Rose and Finn would get thrown into the same cell as he? For that to happen, the First Order would have had to have planned for things that they might have been able to predict (they land in a particular spot, they be captured, they know what they were looking for). I think a lot of The Last Jedi depends on things going in a certain way when there is no guarantee that they should go in a certain way. Unless Johnson wanted us not to take Hux seriously as a villain, there was no reason to have him behave as he did: all camp theatrics. Gleeson is probably the worse one in The Last Jedi, though probably not because he set out to play a spoof of a Star Wars villain. He was missing a mustache to twirl, but he was as menacing as goat cheese. Del Toro wasn't too far behind as DJ, adding a stutter for no real reason, though I suspect it was for 'representation'. After all, this new series has made much of how multicultural the galaxy is: female lead, more women, more minorities. Why not one with a speech impediment? One scene with Isaac, Boyega and Tran stood out not because it was particularly good, but because I can almost see people checking off boxes. Fisher did not have much to do except look pensive, but I put that more to the script than to her abilities. As a side note, I'm still puzzled about that 'Leia Floating in Space and Living to Tell the Tale' bit. Tran seemed almost like a fangirl who found herself in all this craziness, but again I put it to the script than to her. For what her role was (the chipper and downtrodden Rose), she did well. Boyega did well too, though as with Tran and a purple-haired Laura Dern, nothing spectacular. I think the two standouts are Ridley and Driver, their scenes working rather well when they're on Force Skype (though I'm surprised Rey is so prudish when Emo Vader is seen topless, her insistence of putting something on sounding rather peculiar). Again, it's the script that fails them and pretty much fails everyone. There was no reason for The Last Jedi to be as long as it was. The entire casino scene (which is the one that I think upset conservatives the most), could have been cut out entirely, as if the "not Rebellion" didn't buy arms either. What, were they donated? Does the Resistance manufacture them themselves? As someone who is not vested in the entire Star Wars universe, The Last Jedi is neither this epic my fellow critics tell me it is nor this blasphemy fanboys tell me it is. It's OK, longer than it should be, with a bit too much fan-service and teasing (Emo Vader taunting Rey about who her parents were teases audiences while still not giving answers). At least I can agree with Snoke on one thing: Kylo Ren is no Vader, just a child in a mask. He didn't know it was a trap... DECISION: C+ Posted by Rick at 12:41 PM No comments: Labels: 2017, Fantasy, Review, Sci-Fi, Sequels, Star Wars The Librarians: And the Christmas Thief Review THE LIBRARIANS: AND THE CHRISTMAS THIEF Having met Santa Claus in the first season, it's now time to meet his evil brother, and it isn't Fred Claus. And the Christmas Thief is, unsurprisingly, focused on our Master Thief, Ezekiel Jones (John Kim). It's a perfect holiday concoction: light, frothy, no interest in taking itself seriously, with a nice message about the importance of family. Librarian Flynn Carsen (Noah Wyle, who directed the episode) along with his sweetheart/Guardian Eve Baird (Rebecca Romijn) and a very reluctant and unwilling Jenkins (John Larroquette) are going on a vacation with Santa and all his elves to a beach resort. While the parents are away, they tell the kids, Jacob Stone (Christian Kane), Cassandra Cillian (Lindy Booth) and Ezekiel to not use Santa's sleigh for any joyriding. Needless to say, Jake is desperate to go for a spin, but the cheerful Cassandra aka the responsible sister, isn't about to let him. Jones for his part just wants out of the festivities and cheerful demeanor (as well as the 'ugly' sweaters Cassandra made for him and Stone, both of which call out to their personalities and both of which horrify them. To get away, he uses the magic door to visit his mother Lenore (Gia Garides) and his sisters Charity, Honor, and Mercy, all of whom must be ironically named as they posses none of those qualities. Far from it: all of them are trained thieves, celebrating Thanks-taking, the polar opposite of Thanksgiving, where they gift their mother with things they've stolen and offer it to the Saint of Thieves*. Zeke is a bit of a disappointment to Lenore: he hasn't stolen his gift and they all still snicker about when he brought them some egg (they having no idea who Faberge was). To prove his worth, he spirits his mother to the Library, a big no-no in so many ways. It isn't long till she uses the magic globe that controls the transporting room to have a stealing orgy. With no door to go through, they have to use Santa's sleigh to Jake's delight and Cassandra's horror. The globe has a malfunction and at the worst time: Lenore has gone overboard and stolen Vermeer's The Concert, a painting that has yet to be recovered. She didn't steal it from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum back in 1990. She stole it from the Thieves Bank itself, run by the Saint of Thieves. The Librarians get her to return it, but now they are trapped by the Saint of Thieves himself (Steven Weber). Worse, the Saint now has Santa's sleigh, and with it he can enact revenge against his brother. "No Sleigh, No Christmas, No Santa," he reasons. It looks like it's all over, but like kids who find themselves over their heads, they call Grandpa for help. The solution is simplicity itself: Jenkins arrives after having helped Stone and Cassandra repair the teleporting globe and presents the Saint of Thieves with the title to the sleigh...as a gift. As the Saint of Thieves cannot accept anything freely given, he loses the sleigh and turns into what Jenkins calls 'a petulant little boy'. Jenkins promises never to mention this whole affair to Flynn and Eve as his Christmas gift, and thankful to get away from Santa's awful EDM party. With the 'parents' none the wiser, the Librarians return to celebrate Christmas with 'family', while Ezekiel gets a gift he longs for: his mother's love and her reformation. And the Christmas Thief is as I said: cute, rapid, and what we'd call 'a romp'. It has some funny moments (Stone's reaction to being almost kissed in gratitude by Jones), and funny bits (Jones' unfamiliarity with the reindeer, asking how they could take the sleigh without 'Comet, Cancer, Flasher, Nixon'). It also has a nice shout-out to the formerly great Doctor Who (which The Librarians draws heavy inspiration from). "Our shed is bigger on the inside," she proclaims to her son when they go inside, echoing a familiar refrain whenever someone else enters the TARDIS. The performances reflect the lighthearted manner to And the Christmas Thief. Weber camps it up for all its worth as the Saint of Thieves without being too broad. The moments when he speaks in a 'demonic' voice alter his character to being almost a frightening one, but for the most part Weber plays things in a wry manner. Guest star Garides was strong as the tacky, dismissive Lenore, who doesn't understand her son until she spends time seeing how he works. The transformation is wonderful to see. The main cast, or in this case Kane, Booth and Kim all worked well in their separate roles. Kane showed off a rarely-seen side of his character: his childlike enthusiasm for things. Stone's delight at Santa's sleigh having a candy-cane key and glee at driving it around shows a lighter side to the character. Booth's Cassandra lends a touch of wickedness when she taunts the three sisters with a little 'Boo' after she pretends to be a Ghost of Christmas. Kim was a little more unbalanced: good when dealing with the Thieves at the Thief's Bank (itself a wildly clever idea), not so good when trying to show his hurt as being a black sheep to his sisters. However, when with Garides explaining his change, he does well. "When you've got a lot, you share," he tells a disbelieving Lenore. Words to live by. In many ways, And the Christmas Thief reminds me of a family sitcom: the 'parents' (slightly dotty Father Flynn, stronger and smarter Mother Eve) are off on vacation, leaving the 'kids' (the older brother Jacob eager to try the family wheels, the responsible middle sister Cassandra trying to get the boys to be responsible, the youngest Ezekiel just wanting attention and affection). It takes crusty Grandpa (Jenkins) to sort it all out. A nice pleasant romp, And the Christmas Thief has a breezy story and performances to match that make it all so delightful. *There appears to be an actual 'Saint of Thieves', who goes unnamed in And the Christmas Thief. St. Dismas is the name given to the "Good Thief" who was crucified with Jesus Christ on Calvary, the one who begged The Lord to remember him when He ascended Heaven only to have Him tell the thief that he too would be in Paradise. All that would have been a bit too theological. Curiously, St. Nicholas, the historic figure behind Santa Claus, is in a way the Patron Saint of Thieves...reformed thieves, that is. Next Episode: And the Silver Screen The Man Who Invented Christmas: A Review Every year, I write a review of a Christmas-related film for the holiday. This year, I have opted for two reviews: one on Christmas Eve, one on Christmas Day. This is motivated by the fact that Christmas-related films are released around this time, and rather than separate a regular review from the Annual Christmas film review, why not have the best of both? The Man Who Invented Christmas is the first Christmas-related film I've reviewed that is also a biopic, as it is the story of Charles Dickens' artistic crisis as he attempts to get back into the public's good graces with A Christmas Carol. What is now a perennial holiday event, done countless times on film, television and radio started out as Dickens' comeback. The Man Who Invented Christmas never makes the case for its lofty title (especially given that Jesus Christ probably 'invented Christmas', but why quibble). It's an unbalanced affair, drawing on other films and story ideas while failing to tell a potentially good story. It has been a year and four months since Charles Dickens (Dan Stevens) has come from a wildly successful American tour (where he was greeted with wild cheers and the playing of Yankee Doodle Dandy, never mind that George M. Cohan hadn't actually written the song until 1904, a good sixty two years after Dickens' tour, but again, why quibble). His last three books after Oliver Twist have all flopped, leaving Dickens in dire financial straits, not that his spending has slowed down any. He not only has the financial burden of keeping up appearances, his growing family, and household staff, but he also is sending money to his parents. However, it isn't charity or love that motivates Dickens: it's a desire to keep his irresponsible father John (Jonathan Pryce) out of Charlie's luxurious hair. John, for reasons of his own, has no problem selling his son's autograph to make more money, and the appearance of him and Charlie's mother at their house for Christmas isn't particularly welcome. Charles is desperate for money and for a hit book, and with only his agent Foster (Justin Edwards) by his side, Charles has to endure many indignities, including Charles' frenemy William Makepeace Thackeray (Miles Jupp). Talk about Vanity Fair. Overhearing a new Irish maid, Tara (Anna Murphy) tell the Dickens children ghost stories soon starts Charles' creativity flowing. A new story, a short novel comes to him. It is to be titled Humbug: A Miser's Lament. Little bits come to him: an overheard conversation, an accidental visit to a solitary funeral, the sight of street urchin hiding under coats. We see a brief visit from Charles' sister, who has a sickly little son who needs a crutch or his father's broad shoulders to move about. Soon, the character of Ebenezer Scrooge (Christopher Plummer) emerges in all his irascibility and selfishness and greed. It isn't long before other characters from Humbug: A Miser's Lament start popping up, and at certain points even mocking Dickens. If the indignity of Mrs. Fezziwigg laughing at him isn't enough, Charlie still has to deal with his father's irresponsibility, Charles' own haunted memories of his time working at Warren's Boot factory gluing labels as a child, and the pressures of getting this Christmas book out by Christmas. Eventually, after coming to terms with his own haunted past, he can give Scrooge that bit of redemption and hope, and finish the newly-retitled A Christmas Carol, which is published on December 19, 1943 and is an instant hit. I have not read Les Standiford's nonfiction work on Dickens and his creation of A Christmas Carol, but the film adaptation of The Man Who Invented Christmas by Susan Coyne makes it look like a very offbeat comedy. As such, I figure that Standiford's book must be a laugh-riot and not a serious tome on the creative process of an author who is on the low end of his career. Coyne, intentional or not, has crafted a variation of things we've already seen before. As I watched The Man Who Invented Christmas, and did my best to stay awake through it, I could not help flashing back to Shakespeare in Love. The Man Who Invented Christmas is at the very least 'inspired' by that film in terms of structure: a well-regarded writer facing a writing crisis comes up with a new idea and an awful title to go along with it. In Shakespeare in Love, our dear Will was embarking on Romeo & Ethel, The Pirate's Daughter. In The Man Who Invented Christmas, our dear Charlie was embarking on Humbug: A Miser's Lament. Both films also have our author pick up bits of dialogue and scenes that would find their way into the future and classic Romeo & Juliet and A Christmas Carol respectively. They even end with hints of more works drawn from real-life. In Shakespeare in Love, it is Queen Elizabeth I's command for something lighter for Twelfth Night. In The Man Who Invented Christmas, a cop who tried to arrest Charlie only to not when he saw who he was introduced himself as "Copperfield". At that point, I wanted to all but strangle almost everyone involved in this work. Copperfield? As of Coyne and director Bharat Nalluri weren't satisfied to do a variation of Shakespeare in Love in all but name, they went one further and appeared to draw bits from Six Characters in Search of an Author, as the various characters wait around for Charlie to get back to them, at one point I think even going on strike until he sorts things out. Now, a film where we follow Scrooge and Tiny Tim as they wait out their resolution would have been good. A film that dealt more with how Dickens came up with his ideas and changed them would have been good. A film that had him interact more with his characters might have been good. The Man Who Invented Christmas was none of those things. Yes, sometimes they did touch on them (a scene where Tara insists Tiny Tim cannot die to a disbelieving Dickens was good), but for the most part I think the film thought it was a comedy. Many moments were meant for laughs that were actually groan-inducing (such as Dickens trying to hide from Thackeray by hiding behind a newspaper with "CHARLES DICKENS" in super-bold print). Adding to that, why exactly was Thackeray so gleeful at Dickens' 'Hard Times'? Such aspects the film has no interest in building to. Mychael Danna's score more often than not played with The Man Who Invented Christmas being a bad comedy, often making the music cutesy. Dan Stevens' performance did not help matters: his Charles Dickens (which makes one sing 'There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead...') was a lot of mugging and exasperation. I'll give him credit that when he did have some drama, such as when he confronts his genial but irresponsible and slightly tottering father, he did well. However, more often than not Stevens made Dickens less a literary genius and more a slightly befuddled and irresponsible lucky man. When Dickens went to his solicitor, at one point after he asked for more money, I expected him to tell him, "Please sir, I want some more!" Bless Christopher Plummer, who apparently decided he was in a different movie altogether and played it so. His Scrooge was excellent: sinister, difficult, caustic, but in the end fearful, regretful, and on the verge of total panic. Pryce too was far more interesting as John Dickens, charming and caring but irresponsible, than his forever flustered and rushed-about son. I think a major flaw in The Man Who Invented Christmas is that because we already know the final story, there is no real suspense of what will happen. The comedic take the film starts with then tries to shift to a more serious drama, and it fails to be either. Stevens is directed to play a lot of things for laughs, so by the time he is more dramatic, a lot of the seriousness is lost. It isn't as if there isn't a story to be made out of how Dickens came to create a story that is now ingrained in the Yuletide tradition. However, The Man Who Invented Christmas ends up diminishing his genius: his creation of A Christmas Carol happening, not because he came up with the ideas and characters, but because he happened to overhear and see things that he just slipped into the story. At times, the creative element is good but it's a bit too self-satisfied, as if they were playing a 'spot the reference' game. Look: Charles' nephew has a crutch. Look: some man tells Charlie, "Aren't there workhouses?" Look: there's an old man named 'Marley'. Look: a man struggles with a giant moneybox. It becomes tiresome and worse, a terrible disappointment. The forces, internal and external, that shaped both Dickens and the creation of A Christmas Carol deserve a much better version than The Man Who Invented Christmas. 2012: Arthur Christmas 2013: A Christmas Carol (1951) 2014: Prancer 2015: A Madea Christmas 2016: Batman Returns 2017 Part 1: Miracle on 34th Street (1994) DECISION: D+ Labels: 2017, Biopic, Christmas, Drama, Nonfiction Adaptations, Review Sex and the Single Doctor: Thoughts On The Thirteenth Doctor So much to cover with Jodie Whittaker becoming the Thirteenth Doctor on Doctor Who. I have an unfortunate habit of going on and on about things, waxing poetic endlessly, using as many words as I can fit into an essay. I'm going to break with that and force myself to be brief. I tried. I failed. It's going to be long. I oppose the casting of a woman as The Doctor because I think it is being done to promote an agenda, not to serve the narrative. I oppose the casting of a woman as The Doctor because I think it serves no purpose apart from pleasing a loud group which has argued for this change for the thinnest of reasons. I oppose the casting of a woman as The Doctor because I think it alters the very nature of the character. #NotMyWhovian If you got through that, I figure some of you might already have decided I'm a sexist. It's easier to call those who disagree with this decision 'sexist' than to listen to any reasons we may present. It's the Whovian version of 'and when did you stop beating your wife?', to build in the assumption of guilt with only your own views as evidence. I know that Chris Hardwick at The Nerdist has decreed by fiat that I am 'not a real fan' for holding views contrary to his own on this subject. He's even metaphorically called me (and those who agree with on this) 'an asshole' for not being on board and having issues with this gender-bender. This I find highly ironic given that Hardwick and The Nerdist in general go beyond ass-kissing to straight-up rimming people like Doctor Who showrunners/writers Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, incoming showrunner Chris Chibnall or any other showrunner/production company they shamelessly shill for. The main arguments against my views appear to be as follows: that I am against it because I don't want women to advance or cannot accept that Doctor Who has long established cross-gender/bigender Time Lords. My opposition to the casting of a female therefore is built on animosity towards the feminine gender and run counter to a highly successful transition in the show's history. Allow me then a chance to offer a different view. And you are... Opposing the casting of Whittaker, or any female, as The Doctor is not ipso facto sexism. I would equally oppose the casting of a male to play the female Time Lords Romana or The Rani. Granted, most Doctor Who fans whom Hardwick and Company cater to probably don't know who Romana and/or The Rani are. At the Day of the Doctor screening I went to, all those who were dressed up in fezzes and bow ties had never heard of Romana, and Moffat has stated that bringing back the villainous Rani would be wasted on the fans. "People always ask me, 'Do you want to bring back The Rani?' No one knows who The Rani is. They all know who the Master is, they know Daleks, they probably know who Davros is, but they don't know who the Rani is, so there's no point in bringing her back" (emphasis mine). Then again, Moffat seems extremely contradictory when it comes to The Rani. On one hand, he insists 'no one knows who the Rani is', and on the other, he says he tried to fool people into thinking that Missy or The Mistress, who was once known as The Master, was indeed The Rani. Am I the only one who wonders why he wanted to fool people into thinking Missy was a character no one knew? When it comes to this crossing genders, I think we need to step back a bit. NuWho fans and their defenders insist the idea of Time Lords changing genders has been 'long established'. Between 1963 and 1989, and even up to the 1996 television movie/backdoor pilot, the exact number of Time Lords who had regenerated from one gender to the other was zero. Despite twenty-six years and various opportunities, no Time Lord ever changed gender. It wasn't just The Doctor who could have regenerated into a woman in this time. Other Time Lords could have done so, but none of them did. As of today, I have yet to find a Classic Doctor Who episode or story that said Time Lords changed genders. Some point to Romana's first regeneration as proof that they can change into more than just males and females. However, a look at Destiny of the Daleks showed that even when she was 'trying on different bodies', she was always female. The Rani herself, if memory serves correct, made a comment that at least she can choose her regeneration, which some fans took to mean that female Time Lords had greater control over their regenerations, something male Time Lords did not have. As such, if Time Lords were always 'gender-fluid', how was it that female Time Lords like Romana or The Rani never regenerated to males, or other Time Lords like Borusa didn't regenerate into females? Even faux-Time Lords like River Song never regenerated into opposite genders (all three of her appearances were female). The idea that crossing genders has been 'long established' is valid only if by 'long established', you put your marker in 2011, when the subject was first mentioned. In The Doctor's Wife, the Doctor mentions another Time Lord, the Corsair, who was a he, but on occasion, a she. Seven years hardly makes for 'long established'. At the time, I dismissed it as a throwaway line, but there was more to come. There's the character of The Master, who returned in a female form, calling itself Missy, short for 'The Mistress'. That was in 2014, a mere three years ago. Again, 'long established'. The Master in the past had 'stolen' a body to keep on living through an unauthorized 'regeneration' in The Keeper of Trakken; as such, I took that 'Missy' was another 'stolen body' and nothing more. The final 'long-established' point is when The General regenerated from an old white man to a not-so-old black woman in Hell Bent. Apart from making misandristic statements ("My God, how do you cope with all that ego?" and how she was 'back to normal', suggesting being a man is 'abnormal'), The General's on-screen regeneration played no real part in his-Her personality. In long, it has been only in revived Doctor Who were the idea of bigender Time Lords has come into being. In each case: the Corsair, The Master/Mistress, and The General, I believe that all were done for one reason only: to clear the way for a female Doctor. I believe this change, this kowtowing to a small group of loud fans/pseudo-fans who see sexism and injustice everywhere, is a terrible mistake. Is there anything wrong with a female Doctor? Perhaps not. Is there something wrong with a female Doctor if the reason it is done is 'because it's TIME we had a female Doctor'? Most certainly yes. This is going to take the show down a road from which it may not come back. Already this casting choice has split fans. In 2014, a small majority of polled fans said they were opposed. When Whitaker was cast, a slim majority said it was a good idea. DoctorWhoTV, as pro-Moffat a group as you can find outside The Nerdist, at least was honest when it said that as late as 2013 a vast majority of those polled (87.1%) believed the 12th Doctor should be male. I don't believe there ever was such a mass push for a female Doctor. It was only a small but loud group that demanded it for no other reason than to push a particular agenda. Contrary to what Moffat, Hardwick, or anyone at the Doctor Who production office insists, this decision to make such a radical change has not been met with universal acclaim or with nary a hint of backlash. It was met with much backlash and anger, with many Doctor Who fans flat-out saying they will no longer watch. Hardwick calls them 'assholes' for not going along with it. Others call them sexist, misogynists, and chauvinists. The pro-Female Doctor group insists all the anti-Female Doctor group has is bigotry. Yes, there were those who were out-and-out bigots (all those 'Nurse Who' cracks were dumb), but a vast majority of those opposed did so because we firmly hold that the change is being done not to move the story forward, but to make a sociopolitical statement. NuWho, along with the sycophantic press & the fans who see injustice in a male playing a particular role, has convinced itself that casting a female in the role is a brilliant idea. They think it will equal great ratings, with all those fans who left more than made up by those who will hold Whitaker as the heroine their little girls need (since little girls have never heard of Sally Ride or Jane Goodall). They'll get the praise & the press that, in theory, will build to a long-running series. However, as much as they may think that men & women are interchangable and that you'll get the exact same results with a woman as you would with a man, they are, in my view, tying themselves to a difficult position. By casting someone to demonstrate 'progressiveness', they now will be held to a standard where all future castings will be likewise judged. If Whitaker does not pan out, if she & Chibnall's showrunning fail to bring up ratings, the BBC cannot just dump Whitaker. Cries of 'sexism', 'toxic masculinity', and the like will be thrown at them. As such, they may have to ride out falling ratings for maybe one-three years to save face. Either that, or flat-out cancel the show to stop the financial bleeding. They will be bound to a showrunner and lead who instead of stemming the falling tide or bring the ratings up instead seemed to have accelerated the show's decline. Firing Whitaker the way the BBC fired Colin Baker when he was blamed for falling ratings during his tenure as The Doctor is impossible. If they tried to do push Whitaker out, those who pushed for a female in the role would scream, only this time there would be no other fans the show could rely on for help. Those who left in disgust at what they saw as a stunt won't be talked back after being called 'bigots, sexists, idiots and fools' (and those were some of the nicer things said about them). If the show managed to hold on to the hypothetical end of Whitaker's era assuming the show isn't flat-out cancelled during Her tenure, Her successor, however, cannot be anyone. The Social Justice Warriors, having tasted blood, will demand nothing more than 'correct' casting. More than likely the calls to have a minority actor/actress will grow, w/the same reason given ("it's TIME we had a black Doctor, an Indian Doctor, an openly Gay Doctor, an Arab Doctor, a Sikh Doctor..."). That is, if they allow for a male to get the role at all. Jumping about between genders seems to be a one-act trick: you can't keep doing it every time you need publicity. Casting a male after a female may lead to calls of 'sexism', 'toxic masculinity', what have you. If they opt to then go all in and cast a minority female (say a Thandie Newton or Gugu Mbatha-Raw) to have 'representation' (and a chance for the BBC to shield itself from accusations of 'sexism' and 'racism'), those who had originally rejected the idea of Whitaker's casting as being done for PC reasons may come to the conclusions the majority of us reached when Whitaker was announced: the casting was done for ulterior motives. I have the utmost respect for Newton, Mbatha-Raw, or an Idris Elba or Alexander Siddig. They are all highly talented. However, they would be, in this theoretical casting, be given the role not for their talent, but to check off boxes. In a way, it undermines the very principle the BBC insists it has: to cast for the best actor regardless of sex or color. By getting their way with Whitaker, they have put a litmus test on any future Doctor: do you fulfill a particular function in terms of 'representation'? I think few people would have had an issue with a minority male as The Doctor. It would not have changed Canon (Time Lords keeping w/in their gender). By selecting a woman to HAVE a woman, they have decided 'representation' was more important than anything else. I don't know how it will go, but if it goes the way I think it will (the show petering out to an ignoble end), it will be Whitaker and those who said it was a bad decision who will get blamed. Those who came up with the idea, misguided as it was, were never in the wrong. Those who pushed this idea likewise will never admit to being wrong. Rather, the story will be that the problem wasn't that there was A woman cast as The Doctor, but that it was a PARTICULAR woman that was cast. The line will be said that Whitaker was all wrong: that she got the job because she worked with Chibnall on Broadchurch, that she wasn't talented enough, etc. It will be a disservice to her if she is blamed for doing her job the best she could, even if perhaps the decision to cast a female to begin with was a mistake. Hardwick will no doubt blame all those awful sexist/mysogynist/chauvinist men who left when they should have stayed. He and many other 'woke' figures hold that the fans are almost obligated to stay with Doctor Who no matter how much they may grow to hate it. I as a fan am not bound to stay and watch something I no longer care to watch. I have quit Doctor Who before: after the horror of Love & Monsters, I refused to watch any more Doctor Who until the end of David Tennant's tenure. Was I obligated to keep watching even after I felt the show went overboard? By Hardwick's logic, Roseanne fans should have kept watching after the Conners became fabulously wealthy. By Hardwick's logic, Happy Days fans should not have complained after Fonzie jumped the shark. Ultimately, for me the question isn't 'why can't they do it' because they could and did. The question should be 'why should they do it', and the reasons the other side has presented have been very weak and not enough to convince me it was the right thing to do. "Because it's TIME" isn't an answer. "Because little girls need representation" isn't an answer. The casting of Jodie Whitaker, irrespective of her talent as an actress, was done for what I believe were wrong reasons. I think a lot of fans, who have stuck through a lot of bad episodes (Sleep No More) and a lot of really awful ideas (the Flying Cyber-Brigadier) finally had enough. Whether the First Female Doctor is enough to bring new fans and hold whichever ones left I cannot say. However, I don't fancy their chances, especially since it will be until 'late 2018' by the time Her tenure really begins. That's well over six months between Her first few seconds and Her debut story. Will all those women cheering this one hold on that long? Former Doctor Who fans have held on for longer. Now, it's not so sure. At least she is bound to stay, so no matter what, Doctor Who will always have one viewer... Labels: Doctor Who, Ruminations Miracle on 34th Street (1994): A Review What Was Wrong With the Old Version? For this year's Rick's Texan Reviews Annual Christmas Special, I'm going for two Christmas-themed movies: one on Christmas Eve, one on Christmas Day. The Christmas Eve review is a Ghost from Christmas Films Past, the Christmas Day review is from a Ghost of Christmas Films Present. In keeping with Rick's Texan Reviews Annual Christmas Special, for this year's Christmas film review, I've chosen a film I've long avoided: the remake of Miracle on 34th Street. A large part of my avoidance came from the fact that as far as I was concerned, there was simply no need to remake a film that is practically perfect as is. What more could be told? What improvements could be made with regards to the 1947 film? The late and much-missed Maureen O'Hara, who starred in the original Miracle on 34th Street, commented with pride that the film had been remade three times (two television adaptations and this film). "Each one...flopped", she said with joy in her voice and a gleam in her Irish eyes, taking great delight in the fact that her version is the one most remembered and watched, the others pretty much forgotten. Well, given it is Christmas, I opted to finally tackle what I had long not wanted to deal with. I found that Maureen O'Hara's perceptions about at least this version were accurate: it IS a flop. She had every right to stomp over every effort to improve on her film. The 1994 Miracle on 34th Street, while not as dreadful as I'd feared, simply has no reason to exist. An old man (Richard Attenborough, affectionately known as "Sir Dickie") wanders into the Cole's Thanksgiving Day Parade (Macy's I imagine wisely not wanting to be part of this, but I wonder: was Kohl's around at the time?). We should note that this old man was mistaken for Santa Claus by a little boy, only to have the old man whisper to him, "I Am". As he IS Santa Claus, Cole's director of special programming and events Dory Walker (Elizabeth Perkins) begs him to replace the loutish, boozed-up Santa. He does so, and his success irritates Cole's rival, the Wal-Mart like Shopper's Express, headed by EVIL corporate head Victor Landbergh (Joss Ackland). He wants Cole's in his empire (though we're not sure why) and a last-minute loan to Cole's saves it much to his irritation. This Kriss Kringle is a HUGE success with EVERYONE loving him, so much so that he, to his puzzlement, gets in front of cameras and says, "Good Morning, America". Kriss even sends people to other stores, which shocks everyone and leaves customers, oddly, more disgruntled than pleased. Dory knows there is no such thing as Santa Claus, words of wisdom she's passed on to her daughter, Susan (Mara Wilson). Susan, who is really, REALLY wise beyond her years, is constantly trying to get her mother together with next door neighbor Bryan Bedford (Dylan McDermott). They do go out but Dory just doesn't want a relationship. Susan is beginning to question whether Kriss is THE Santa Claus when jolly old Saint Nick is caught up in a scandal! The disgruntled ex-Santa (who apparently hangs out at a Santa bar...I'm not kidding, a whole group of Santas were drinking in a bar) sets up Kriss by first antagonizing him at the Cole's Christmas display and then following him when he leaves, suggesting that he gets his jollies from touching children. That's right folks: in this family film, the subject of pedophilia is made a main point. So angry does Kriss get that he whacks him with his cane. Conveniently, two minions of Shopper's Express just happen to be there, along with a photographer. The whole thing shocks the country (assuming the country generally cared about one department store Santa who really hadn't done all that much to merit the attention he got, but whatever). The bad press (and worse photo) get him locked up with the potential to be sent away to a nuthouse, but Bryan, who happens to be a lawyer, decides to defend Kriss. Dory for her part is furious that Cole's could so willingly feed Kriss to the lions. Now, Bryan himself doesn't believe Kriss is Santa Claus and despite all the witnesses he can produce, cannot find a way to prove his case. It takes Susan and a one-dollar bill to prove that Kriss Kringle IS THE Santa Claus. In the end, Kriss is freed, Bryan and Dory are essentially hoodwinked into getting married right after Midnight Mass, and Susan gets what she's wanted: a home, a father, and a baby brother (the last one though will take some work and some time). As I watched, two thoughts kept coming to me over and over again. The first was that this Miracle on 34th Street was trying TOO hard to be sweet and cute and, more surprisingly, trying too hard to be smarter than the original (which is was not, not by a long shot). The second was that it was essentially directionless, drifting, drifting, drifting, with no idea what it wanted to be. In regards to the first part, we see this in how the characters are. We know for example that Landbergh is EVIL because when we first see him, ominous music is playing, and he is alone in a gray office. In regards to the second, what Landbergh's beef with Cole's is never appears to play a large part of the story. In fact, for large chunks of it, we forget that Landbergh's machinations are suppose to relate to the goings-on. We see him at the beginning, plotting...something, and at the end, when he's enraged that New York State has declared Kriss THE Santa Claus. Why he ever cared is pretty much left to our own imagination. This I imagine is due to SO MUCH TIME being wasted on the romance between Dory and Bryan, a romance that feels as artificial as the snow inside Cole's displays. Perkins and especially McDermott are pretty to look at, but the characters never felt as if they'd do more than share pleasantries in an elevator, let alone get married. It's as if writer John Hughes (yes, THAT John Hughes) decided Miracle on 34th Street was a romantic drama about neighbors than it was about whether or not Santa Claus is real. Hughes couldn't allow the romance to build up gradually, but instead decided they were to be secretly in love with each other and just went with that. Now, I know I'm going to get grief over this, but I did not like Mara Wilson in this. Oh, she's cute enough and a competent child actress (and to her credit, she might be among the last child stars who followed Shirley Temple's example as opposed to a Lindsay Lohan), but I felt Susan came across as rather obnoxious, one whose wisdom came primarily from lecturing everyone about things rather than from a child's own unique perspective. Wilson's Susan was someone I found unlikable, and a bit disengaged at times (her first scene where she videotapes a message to her mother coming across as slightly monotonous than cutesy). Let me dive into how Sir Dickie was. I found his efforts to be cutesy and giggly more forced than endearing. Hughes' decision to have his Kriss Kringle talk about how The Easter Bunny winters in New Zealand or how he got good advise from the Tooth Fairy was a disastrous one. IF we accept that Santa Claus is real (which is what Miracle on 34th Street wants us to think), we're now left with a few choices regarding Santa's 'friends'. One: the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are also real. Two: this man in bonkers. Three: Santa is lying to us for his own amusement. Who here can accept One? The film pushes against us accepting Two, and the way Sir Dickie is directed to deliver his lines (courtesy of Les Mayfield), Three is wrong. So, what to make of Santa introducing E.B. and the Cavity Queen? Perhaps Hughes' co-screenwriter, George Seaton, could have restrained him with these odd touches. However, that would have been difficult, given that despite being credited as co-screenwriter to this version of his original Miracle on 34th Street, George Seaton had been dead for 15 years by the time cameras rolled. Am I the only one who thinks giving screenwriting credit to a man who'd been DEAD for a decade-and-a-half before the film was made is just a trifle bizarre? At a certain point, even I thought Kriss Kringle was insane, and that's the LAST thing you want an audience to think. The resolution is both bizarre and slightly insulting to everyone concerned. The judge is about to rule against Kringle when Susan asks to approach the bench. She hands His Honor a Christmas card with a one-dollar bill inside. My first thought was that she was going to try and bribe him, but the actual end result is far more ghastly. The motto of the United States, "In God We Trust", is circled. From this, His Honor declares that because the federal government (in this case, the Treasury Department) can put its faith in something that has not been proven, the State of New York can equally put its faith in something that has not been proven as well. Henceforth, Santa Claus is real, and Kriss Kringle is THE Santa Claus. Somehow, I find this legal reasoning idiotic and a desperate way to get around the more logical conclusion the original came up with. However, the underlying logic behind the ruling should astonish and infuriate all believers. In other words, the message this movie gives is this: it's OK to believe Santa is real, because the U.S. government believes in imaginary beings too (like God). Good message towards the Judeo-Christian audience you're targeting, telling them God is on the same level of reality as the Tooth Fairy. I found this Miracle on 34th Street a little too cutesy and too deliberately sweet for its own good. Everyone is playing to be whimsical, not real. As much as I loath to compare the original with remakes, what made the original work was that there was always an element of doubt about the true identity of Kriss Kringle. Even at the end, we were never totally, absolutely sure if he was THE Santa. This one doesn't, forcing us to conclude that he IS Santa or that he IS insane. Tooth Fairy. Easter Bunny. I wish John Hughes hadn't tried so hard to be clever. He was much better than this woeful misfire. Maureen O'Hara was right...this IS a flop, and the best thing about the remake of Miracle on 34th Street is that in fifty years time, few will remember or watch it, while the original will always be THE version we'll always go back to. THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PASTS DECISION: C- Labels: Christmas, Remakes, Review God In His Mercy Lend Him Grace. Fidel Gomez, Jr.:... Sex and the Single Doctor: Thoughts On The Thirtee... Dawson City: Frozen Time. A Review (Review #990) Jane: A Review The Disaster Artist: A Review The Librarians: And the Steal of Fortune Review The Librarians: And the Dark Secret Review Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of I... Gotham: Queen Takes Knight Review Ex Libris: The New York Public Library. A Review Justice League: A Review (Review #985) Gotham: Things That Go Boom Review I Am Another You: A Review Coco: A Review Olaf's Frozen Adventure: A Review Allegiance: The Musical Rebroadcast Gold Star: A Review (Review #981) The Dark Tower: A Review I Called Him Morgan: A Review Loving Vincent: A Review Tickling Giants: A Review (Review #977)

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DR. ELIZABETH ROBINSON, FLUTIST AND TEACHER Flute @ Southern Topeka Symphony Flute New Music Consortium Oklahoma Flute Society Screamocity Flute Day 2020 Flute Day Registration Photo courtesy of Mitzi Starkweather Photography Flutist and educator Dr. Elizabeth Robinson is an active soloist, orchestral, and chamber performer. Originally from rural Tennessee, Dr. Robinson nurtured her music career by creating much of her own educational and professional infrastructure. Now an accomplished performer, she defines much of her career through creating those opportunities for other musicians - her studio included! - and contributing to the cultural growth of the region, whether through commissioning new music, building educational infrastructure, or starting exciting new ensembles.​ ​The proud owner of two rambunctious terriers, Dr. Robinson has channeled their infectious energy through performances in 36 U.S. states. She has shared the stage with over a dozen orchestras and wind ensembles from coast to coast: in addition to her current position holding the Diana Osterhout piccolo chair of the Topeka Symphony, she has performed both within the orchestra and as soloist with ensembles so diverse as the Salina Symphony, the Kansas State University Wind Ensemble, Wichita Grand Opera, and the Italian Opera Festival in Los Angeles, among many others. Currently, Dr. Robinson serves on the faculty of Missouri Southern State University, which she joined in 2017. In building the school’s flute studio, she quickly established herself as a uniquely high-impact educator, more than doubling the school’s flute students, as well as founding the MSSU’s first flute ensemble, Flute Day, and co-founding the Faculty Woodwind Quintet. In addition to her previous adjunct position at Kansas Wesleyan, she served as guest faculty at Southwestern Oklahoma State and Kansas State. From this extensive teaching and performing experience, Dr. Robinson has presented her research and unique educational insights at numerous conferences as both talks and workshops, with topics ranging from "Extended Techniques for Dummies" to specialized topics like "The Flute Works of Toru Takemitsu". More recently, she presented "So You Want to Freelance: How to Survive a Good Idea," in which she shares wisdom (and humor) from her own early professional life. In an effort to expand the flute repertoire, Robinson co-founded the Flute New Music Consortium (FNMC), and currently serves the organization as Vice President. Formed in 2013, FNMC has commissioned new works from composers such as Pulitzer Prize winner Zhou Long, Pulitzer Prize nominee Carter Pann, and Valerie Coleman. Furthermore, she operates the organization’s annual composition competition, which receives up to 300 entries per season. In addition to organizing regional performances of the new works commissioned by the organization, Dr. Robinson often performs them herself. For her efforts in growing FNMC, Dr. Robinson has been recognized in the National Flute Association’s Flutists’ Quarterly Magazine and by the Atlanta Flute Club Newsletter. Outside her teaching life, she is a founding member of Tornado Alley Flutes, a professional flute ensemble that recreated the sense of spontaneous danger unique to the Midwest. (Appropriately, Dr. Robinson’s winning audition with the Topeka Symphony was held between tornado sirens.) Tornado Alley Flutes often worked closely with Dr. Robinson’s other ventures, as the ensemble has performed work commissioned by FNMC as well as performed at conferences across the country. Her newest project, Screamocity! is a collaboration with trumpet colleague Freddie Green. The duo is busily commissioning new repertoire and will give its first tour in November 2019. Winner of the 2012 NFA Graduate Research Competition, Dr. Robinson’s dissertation titled Voice, Itinerant, and Air: The Solo Flute Works of Toru Takemitsu was presented at the 2012 NFA Convention. Dr. Robinson holds degrees in flute performance from Drake University (B.M.), San Francisco State University (M.M.), and Ball State University (D.A.). Her major teachers have included Linda Lukas of the San Francisco Symphony and Dr. Mihoko Watanabe. She currently makes her home in Joplin, Missouri, where she lives with husband Don and her dogs, Sophie and Olive. Headshot Photo Credit: Mitzi Starkweather Photography Pet Portrait: Autumn Shoemaker at We Chase the Light

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Toomanywires All About Video Games Color me Interested One hundred and eight yen. One hundred and eight yen for Final Fantasy IV. A cart and a plastic sleeve, but no box, found in a junk crate at my local Book Off. One hundred and eight yen for Final Fantasy IV on the WonderSwan Color. Bandai’s WonderSwan was a Japan-only, handheld console. Released in 1999, it was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, the man behind Nintendo’s Game Boy. Tragically, it would be his final, major contribution to the industry, as he was killed in a traffic accident in 1997. The original, monochromatic model was replaced by the WonderSwan Color within two years of release, and finally the SwanCrystal in 2002. Bandai’s 16-bit handheld hung with the competition at first, thanks to its low price point, long battery life – up to 40 hours on a single AA battery – and initial support from some of the biggest third-party publishers, including Squaresoft. Ultimately, however, the competition was too strong. The Game Boy Advance claimed an overwhelming share of the market and Bandai’s prized third-parties jumped ship. The WonderSwan was eventually discontinued in 2003, having sold approximately 3.5 million units across three different SKUs. One hundred and eight yen. The cost of a rice ball from the local convenience store, a small bunch of bananas, or something more expensive that has been discounted to exactly ¥108. A drop in the ocean, pocket change; fuck all. Honestly, FFIV is not a valuable game, so ¥108 is probably about right for a loose cart with no guarantee, but that didn’t stop me from getting excited and making a purchase. Of course, I’ll never play it. I’ve finished FFIV before on other hardware, and it’s not one of my favourites. Also, well, it’s on the WonderSwan Color, isn’t it. However, having the opportunity to buy games so inexpensively, games that seemed so exotic to a younger me stuck in a PAL hell, is still very appealing. It’s part of the reason why I’ve built up a sizable Japanese Saturn collection over the years. I recall seeing these games in magazines back in the day, reading about them on forums and seeing them listed as expensive imports in shop catalogues. I wondered what they'd be like, and now I’m in a position to find out. Also, I like buying games, especially cheap ones. I like hunting for them, discovering bargains, putting together wish lists and learning about unfamiliar titles and hardware. That’s why I got so enthused about the Dreamcast last year. It’s always nice to have something new to hunt for and obsess over, even if it’s just for a few weeks. WSC games are inexpensive and fairly easy to find. They usually reside at the bottom of discount bins, unwanted and unloved. I already have a WSC, the Final Fantasy II special edition that came with a charming phone strap, so there’s no expense there. I’ve hardly touched it, but it does look nice sat next to my yellow Game Boy and powder blue Game Gear. Retro portables may be the best kind of retro – nostalgia immediately to hand, without the hassle of cables, power converters and a CRT TV. So yes, I might buy some WonderSwan Color games. If they’re only one hundred and eight yen, it'd be silly not too. The Massacre at Guthrie Farm I just wanted to say hello. I was out on my horse, exploring Red Dead Redemption 2 for the first time. I was overwhelmed, unsure of the controls and equally unsure of where to go. I'd just skinned a bison and was combing my horse when I spotted a small farm on the horizon. There will be people there, I thought, and perhaps they'll have some important information for me. At the very least, they'll have something entertaining to say. I slung the bison pelt on the back of my horse, made sure my guns were holstered and headed straight for the farmstead in search of conversation and companionship. I spotted a farmhand working the field a stone's throw from the house. "Howdy partner", I said in my head, in a silly cowboy voice. The middle-aged man took one look at me, shouted something unpleasant, and drew his weapon. What a dick. Turns out Arthur (me) is a wanted man. Earlier that day, I'd unintentionally murdered a travelling salesman. I just wanted to steal… The Best and Worst Games of 2019 The Best & Worst of 2018 / 2017 / 2016 / 2015 / 2014 / 2013 / 2012 / 2011 / 2010 This is my tenth year-end, Best & Worst blowout. That's a decade of me agonising over winners and losers for a post that maybe twenty people read. And eleven of those people are me. A lot has changed since I picked Mass Effect 2 as my game of the year back in 2010. We've had hardware successes and failures, and major franchises that have come and gone. We've seen the peaks and troughs of casual and mobile gaming, the near disappearance of game-dedicated handhelds, the growth of subscription and streaming services, the evolution of online gaming, and the continued ascendancy of the industry as a whole. And don't forget the ongoing march to all-digital, the multitude of trends that have lived and died (3D, second screen gaming, toys-to-life etc.), the indie explosion-demise-resurgence, and the death of the mid-tier game and developer. A lot has happened over the last decade. By this … Sekiro - Are You Enjoying This Game? "Are you enjoying this game?" I'm fighting a Sekiro mini boss. An unimposing foe who has already killed me a dozen times and wasted a good half hour of my precious time. Time that would've been better spent studying Japanese, doing the washing up, or going to bed early. My wife is asking. She's seen me playing Sekiro on and off for the last month. Me, Games King, as I've asked her to call me, slowly chipping away at a game that refuses to respect my time or lack of hand-eye coordination. Every time she glances at the screen, I'm dying. Trampled by an over-sized bull; cut down by a rooftop samurai; outwitted by an ape without a head; bested by a cliff. Fucked by a regular monkey. I can understand why she might question my enjoyment of Sekiro. This particular mini boss is completely optional. However, now that I've engaged with her once, I feel bound to keep at it until I finally figure out a way to defeat her. I t… Welcome to Toomanywires. This is where I write about video games, old and new, and share tidbits about life in Japan. Please see the "About" page for more information about me & my blog. Game Fright Jumping Back into the Animus A Day in the Life of.. A Decade in Games Classics Revisited Contemporary Games Game Pitch Monday Spotlight Monthly Round-up Musings of a Gamer PlayStation 3 Retrospective The End of a Generation Tokyo Game Show '10 Weekly Recommendations

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BNSF & UP Tacoma - Portland Joint Line Blu-Ray For well over a century the busiest rail line in the Pacific Northwest has been BNSF’s Seattle Subdivision between Seattle and Vancouver Washington on the north bank of the Columbia River opposite Portland, Oregon. For seventy years this former Northern Pacific main known as the Joint Line carried the trains of the NP, Great Northern, and Union Pacific. Today BNSF is the owner and Union Pacific and Amtrak are the tenants. UP has full trackage rights between Vancouver and Tacoma while Amtrak’s Coast Starlight and four pair of Cascades traverse the full length of the Seattle sub between Seattle and Vancouver. BNSF and UP rail traffic between Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland utilize all or parts of this line and the joint line is also part of UP’s transcontinental main line from Chicago to Seattle. We caught over twenty-four hours of action on the BNSF and UP Tacoma to Portland Joint Line between Napavine and Kelso in May of 2018. The tonnage if not the number of trains on the Joint Line is at or near an all-time peak as the number of unit coal, grain, and crude oil trains seems to increase each year. And northbounds greatly outnumber southbounds on BNSF here as most unit train empties head east at Auburn over Stampede Pass. The state of Washington has been funding additions to the capacity of BNSF’s Seattle sub in order to add additional Cascades service between Seattle and Portland. "BNSF & UP Tacoma - Portland Joint Line" is 2 hours long and can be watched with or without narration. BNSF & UP Tacoma - Portland Joint Line DVD BNSF in the Columbia River Gorge Blu-Ray Where the winds blow could easily be the title of this program. Large temperature gradients between the west and east ends of the Columbia River Gorge drive the prevailing westerly winds, especially on warm days. And when we were on standing on the basalt cliffs lining the north side of the Gorge looking down on the tracks, the wind was certainly blowing. The town of Bingen, Washington where we spent the night is in the heart of this only, near sea level gap in the Cascade Mountains and is almost right across the River from Hood River, Oregon, the windsurfing capital of the World. BNSF’s former Spokane, Portland and Seattle main line along the north bank of the Columbia hosts almost all of BNSF’s westbound manifest and loaded unit trains bound for all the major cities in the Pacific Northwest from Portland to Vancouver, British Columbia. And with the number of crude oil and export coal trains growing along with as many as nine grain trains in twenty-four hours, the unit train count on this line can be staggering. “BNSF in the Columbia River Gorge” shows over twenty-four hours of BNSF and Amtrak action in the scenic heart of the Columbia River Gorge, both sides of Bingen on BNSF’s Fallbridge Subdivision in May of 2018. This video is one hour and thirty minutes in length and can be watched with or without narration. BNSF in the Columbia River Gorge DVD Union Pacific in the Blue Mountains Blu-Ray As the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company climbed out of the Columbia River Valley near present day Hinkle while on its trek towards meeting the Union Pacific Railroad at Huntington on the Snake River, it encountered the Blue Mountain range in northeastern Oregon. The track that it constructed through this land of snow-capped mountains, sagebrush covered desert, and lush mountain valleys remains one of the Union Pacific’s greatest mountain challenges as trains up to 20,000 tons conquer three separate summits on their way to Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. And the most difficult and westernmost of these climbs is the line through the main Blue Mountain range west of La Grande, Oregon, the subject of this program. While multiple helper sets used to roam these grades, today this line is ruled by radio controlled slave units with the power distributed at up to three points in the train. This DVD shows over 24 hours of ear-splitting action on the two percent grades of UP’s La Grande subdivision in the Blue Mountains in May of 2018. This DVD is two hours and twelve minutes in length and can be watched with or without narration. Union Pacific in the Blue Mountains DVD The Trains of Northern New England 2018 Blu-Ray This program covers the trains and operations on all of the regional railroads - New England Central, Central Maine and Quebec, the Saint Lawrence and Atlantic, and the largest, Pan Am Railways, in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine in the spring of 2018. It shows what has become of the Maine Central and Boston and Maine railroads that once were the bastions of railroading in northern New England and also what became of the Bangor and Aroostook, Central Vermont, Rutland, and Canadian National and Canadian Pacific lines in northern New England. It is a sequel to our highly acclaimed programs showing the trains of northern New England in 1997, 2000, 2004 and 2009. This program also shows how the railroads of northern New England are coping with the decline in the paper industry in the past decade. And Pan Am still has an eclectic mix of power including a group of “new” units – twenty-seven to twenty-nine-year-old GEs which are replacing even older EMDs. This DVD is two hours and four minutes in length and can be watched with or without narration. The Trains of Northern New England 2018 DVD CSX I-95 Corridor in the Carolinas Blu-Ray The former Atlantic Coast Line main from Richmond, Virginia, to Jacksonville, Florida, has always been the busiest and fastest route for both passenger and freight trains between the Northeast and Florida. Nicknamed “The Speedway” in ACL days for its long sections of straight track and one-time one hundred mile-an-hour limit for passenger trains, and later the “A” Line for its ACL heritage, this once double tracked line is CSX’s and Amtrak’s main line from the Northeast to Florida and is best known today as the I-95 Corridor for the interstate highway that it parallels. This program first shows over twenty-four hours of action in August of 2017 around Ridgeland, South Carolina, thirty-two miles north of Savannah Georgia and then daytime action at Pembroke, North Carolina where CSX’s I-95 Corridor crosses their line from Hamlet to Wilmington. And all of this action takes place five months after the late Hunter Harrison took over CSX and drastically changed the railroad’s operations, closing eight of twelve hump classification yards including Hamlet and running fewer but longer trains. Unfortunately, four months after our visit to CSX’s I-95 Corridor, Hunter Harrison suddenly died. Two of his protégé’s are now running the railroad. CSX I-95 Corridor in the Carolinas is 61 minutes in length and can be watched with and without narration. CSX I-95 Corridor in the Carolinas DVD

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September 24th, 2008 9:14 AM by Lehel Szucs The rescue plan for the banking system doesn't directly address the slide in property values, but it could set the stage for recovery. By Michael A. Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer The government's $700-billion plan to bail out the banking system may calm panicked financial markets, but its real value may be in buying time to address the root problem: the continuing slide in housing values. The Treasury Department's rescue plan is far from a done deal, with Democrats saying Sunday that they would push for more relief measures aimed at homeowners facing foreclosure and for stricter oversight of the program that would allow the government to buy up billions of dollars of securities tied to troubled mortgages. But there was broad agreement that the government must move quickly, decisively and comprehensively to get the global financial system moving again. "What's been lacking is strategic oversight, as opposed to swatting one fly and finding 10 others," said William R. Gruver, a professor of management at Bucknell University and a former partner at Goldman Sachs & Co., after the broad outlines of the plan were released late last week. "We have to get to the underlying housing issue: If people were still making their mortgage payments, we wouldn't be here talking about these other problems." The rescue plan does nothing in itself to shore up the housing market. Rising defaults and foreclosures on home loans, spurred partially by declines in home values, are the cause of the collapse in price and tradeability of the mortgage-backed securities on the books of banks and investors. But without government action to aid battered banks, financial experts say, mortgages would remain difficult to get and the housing market's recovery would be further delayed. The most recent sales figures for Southern California show that median prices were down 34% last month compared with a year earlier. About half the homes sold were foreclosures. "The nub of the problem is mortgage-backed securities that people have a hard time valuing, and [the rescue plan] doesn't address that," said James R. Lothian, a professor of finance at Fordham University and a former executive at Citicorp. "But the basic thing that needs to be done is to provide liquidity to the banking system and markets so we don't have bank runs going on." The need for a federal bailout was underscored after private solutions to the crisis fell by the wayside -- notably last week, when Wall Street banks failed to assemble a rescue plan for insurance giant American International Group Inc. and Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. "You need the ultimate sheriff to come into town to cool things down, and that's a role only the government can play," said Eugene A. Ludwig, a former U.S. comptroller of the currency. The bailout plan, laid out in a 2 1/2 -page document delivered to congressional leaders Saturday, would in effect allow the government to act as an investment bank, buying debt from troubled banks and other financial institutions stuck with securities tied to distressed mortgage loans. Some believe that the securities to be purchased by the government are so undervalued now that they may eventually turn a profit. UC Berkeley economist Thomas Davidoff said that, if executed properly, the plan could net a profit for the government, though he cautioned that this was a big if. "The total value of these mortgages has fallen so much that the fall in value [of mortgage-backed securities] may be in excess of what can reasonably happen even in a really bad foreclosure situation," he said. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson and others pushed for the plan after months of turmoil stemming from the mortgage meltdown, which included the collapse of mortgage lenders like Countrywide Financial Corp. and investment banks like Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns Cos. The crisis of confidence accelerated last week after a money market fund "broke the buck" -- allowed its share value to drop below $1 -- because of its exposure to Lehman Bros. That was significant because although these funds are not insured like bank deposits, they have been marketed to the public as rock-solid investments that would always keep their value. Industry and government leaders feared that the loss of confidence would drive investors to withdraw money from the popular funds in quantities they could not meet. Still, bringing the money funds under the umbrella of government bank regulation could create its own problems. "If you extend insurance, you must extend control," said Lawrence E. Harris, professor of finance at USC's Marshall School of Business and a former chief economist for the Securities and Exchange Commission. "If they don't regulate them, there will be huge problems. But I'm not sure they have the resources in place to regulate them." The housing market's path to recovery remains the chief imponderable in the financial crisis. Economists generally agree that a housing recovery is essential to an overall financial recovery, although there is a difference of opinion over how aggressively the government should intervene to prop up home prices. The rescue plan "is not going to keep a bubble inflated," said economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, "There's nothing you can do to prevent the future meltdown of the housing bubble and nothing you can or should do to keep home prices from falling further." The debate over whether and how to intervene in the housing market is likely to prove highly contentious in Washington. Many taxpayers will perceive Paulson's plan as a bailout of wealthy executives, including some whose lax investment policies contributed to the crisis. Yet a homeowner bailout may be a political minefield itself, as many homeowners current on their mortgages view such assistance as a payoff to irresponsible borrowers. Democrats are also likely to press for a tightening of financial regulation as the price of bailing out large financial institutions. Some of these regulations may garner bipartisan support. These include closer supervision by the Federal Reserve System of investment banks that have benefited from unprecedented access to Fed lending facilities, on the principle that the Fed deserves to have more jurisdiction over institutions with access to its money. Others will press for more disclosure of trading positions and the inherent risks of some of the exotic investment instruments cluttering bank ledgers. The investment industry is likely to resist regulations that set capitalization standards for institutions other than banks or set limits on how much they can borrow. Investment banks have traditionally resisted such standards, which limit their growth. At the same time, given that unrestrained credit was a strong contributor to the crisis, the industry may not be able to stave off tougher rules. "In the aftermath of the Great Depression, we got a lot of regulations that didn't work and created problems years later," Fordham's Lothian said. "It's not like we don't have myriad regulations already." Despite the plan's huge costs, there appeared to be widespread agreement that a government initiative on a large scale was needed. "Main Street is as much at risk as Wall Street," said Ludwig, the former federal regulator. "If we failed to act, the resulting loss of jobs, malaise in growth, damage to the engines of our economy and harm to the American taxpayer would be far more costly." michael.hiltzik@latimes.com Times staff writers Richard Simon, Nicole Gaouette and Peter Y. Hong contributed to this report. Posted by Lehel Szucs on September 24th, 2008 9:14 AM

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UNODC Calls for Assistance to Fight Drugs, Crime and Violence in the Sahel VIENNA, 15 April 2008 (UNODC) - A number of Ministers from West and Central Africa gathered in Vienna today, in conjunction with the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, to discuss the growing threat of drugs and crime across the centre of Africa. "The Sahel has become a major transit route for illicit activity", warned the Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonio Maria Costa. Trafficking of cocaine, heroin and hashish are becoming common along routes traditionally used to smuggle cigarettes, arms and illegal migrants. Kidnapping and banditry are rife. Criminals are also exploiting the region's rich natural resources. This is a windfall for criminal groups, and a lucrative source of funding for rebels, anti-government forces, and terrorists. UNODC is currently working on a report on the situation. Not only is this a threat to security, it is a drain on development. Badly-needed resources are being shifted away from education and healthcare into security in order to contain the threat posed by criminal activity. In one country alone, resources spent on border security and crime fighting last year were equivalent to those needed to build 600 schools and health centres. "These countries are being targeted by smugglers because they are vulnerable, and criminal activity is making them even more vulnerable - we must break this vicious circle", said Mr. Costa. The Sahel is a vast, inhospitable, and remote area that stretches across the width of Africa. For centuries, nomads and traders have freely moved back and forth across borders. Some countries, like Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger have thousands of kilometers of almost open frontiers. "Policing such terrain is a challenge for any country, made even greater when resources are limited", said Mr. Costa. Furthermore, border controls have been abolished within the Economic Community of Southwest African States (ECOWAS). "The call for technical assistance was loud and clear at this meeting. The international community must act to prevent a further deterioration of the situation that could destabilize the entire region, and have a dangerous spill-over effect", said Mr. Costa. "Countries where these goods are headed should also do more to reduce the demand that is fuelling this dangerous trade". Among the needs identified for technical assistance were counter-narcotics, criminal justice reform, anti-corruption, border management, sharing of intelligence, terrorism prevention, and stopping the illicit trade in small arms. Participants called for an intensification of regional efforts and international support. UNODC will enhance its cooperation with affected countries through its regional office in Dakar. It will also work with partners, including ECOWAS, to intensify the delivering of technical assistance and attract badly needed funding. Countries represented at the meeting (predominantly Ministers of Justice and Security) included Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Chad, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo. For information, please contact: Mr. Walter Kemp Acting Spokesman Telephone: (+43-1) 26060 5629 Mobile : (+43-699) 1459-5629 E-mail: walter.kemp@unodc.org

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Successful operation highlights growing international cooperation to combat wildlife crime Vienna, 18 June 2015 - The International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime (ICCWC) welcomed today the results achieved during Operation COBRA III, an international law enforcement operation conducted in May 2015 with the aim of combating wildlife crime and bringing the criminals involved to justice. Operation COBRA III resulted in 139 arrests and more than 247 seizures, which included elephant ivory, medicinal plants, rhino horns, pangolins, rosewood, tortoises and many other plant and animal specimens. Key successes during the operation included the arrest of a Chinese national believed to have been coordinating rhino horn smuggling from Namibia, the arrest of a notorious elephant poacher in India and the seizure of 340 elephant tusks and 65 rhino horns in Mozambique. Over 50,000 illegal wildlife items were seized in the United Kingdom, as well as an additional 10,000 in Austria and 5,000 in Germany, which included large volumes of illegal supplement capsules containing wildlife products. Other countries where large numbers of illegal items were seized include China, Singapore and South Africa. In total, 37 countries reported seizures and/or arrests during the operation. Mr. Yury Fedotov, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), highlighted that "the success of Operation COBRA III sheds light on the widespread and intricate network of criminals who are profiting from wildlife trafficking worldwide. While I congratulate the participating countries on these seizures, I also hope that equal emphasis is placed on the prosecutions and intelligence-led investigations which have to follow. It is key to keep in mind that it takes a network to defeat a network." Multilateral cooperation and collective efforts stood at the centre of the operation organized by regional enforcement networks and intergovernmental organizations under the chairmanship of the Association of South East Asian Nations Wildlife Enforcement Network (ASEAN-WEN) Law Enforcement Extension Office. Officers from customs, police, forestry, wildlife and other law enforcement agencies from 62 countries in Africa, America, Asia and Europe worked together closely to combat the illegal wildlife trade. Mr. John E. Scanlon, the Secretary-General of CITES, said "Operation COBRA III is a great example of the collaboration that is needed between multiple organizations, disciplines and agencies to combat organized transnational wildlife crimes. It is most encouraging to see enforcement agencies working together across source, transit and destination States to combat these serious wildlife crimes, which makes it increasingly likely that these illicit activities will be detected and the criminals behind them brought to justice." ICCWC made a significant contribution to Operation COBRA III by providing financial, operational and technical support. Generous funding to ICCWC by the European Commission enabled the consortium to fund the establishment and operation of an International Coordination Team in Bangkok, staffed by representatives from participating countries, wildlife enforcement networks and intergovernmental organizations. This significantly promoted cooperation and information sharing and provided an opportunity for enforcement officers to work side by side with their counterparts from other countries on identified cases. CENcomm, the World Customs Organization's (WCO) secure and encrypted communication tool enabled investigators to exchange real time intelligence and information, and to target and track suspicious cargoes, poachers and traffickers of endangered species. "Wildlife poaching and smuggling continue to threaten many endangered species with extinction. Cooperative enforcement operations such as this one are crucial to combat these nefarious activities and to raise awareness of the problem's scale. I commend the customs authorities and other agencies that are making a difference on the ground in the struggle against wildlife crime," said WCO's Secretary General, Mr. Kunio Mikuriya. INTERPOL on behalf of ICCWC led the support provided by the consortium during Operation COBRA III. "International collaboration to address wildlife crime is the main priority of the International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime. It is through initiatives like Operation COBRA III that ICCWC can provide support and guidance to countries to help them prioritize transnational investigations of wildlife crime, enhance the impact of their enforcement activities, and ensure the appropriate investigative follow-up occurs," said Mr. Cees Van Duijn, Coordinator of biodiversity projects with INTERPOL's Environmental Security unit. Officers from INTERPOL, the WCO Asia/Pacific Regional Intelligence Liaison Office (RILO) and the WCO East and South Africa RILO worked with national law enforcement agencies and wildlife enforcement networks in the Bangkok International Coordination Team. The CITES Secretariat supported the operation from its Geneva office and analysts from UNODC were deployed to assist with the collection and analysis of data. Mr. Vatanarak Suranartyuth, Director of ASEAN-WEN Law Enforcement Extension Office noted that "the success of Operation COBRA III resulted from the commitment of all partners to exchange intelligence and tackle the illegal wildlife trade across source, transit, and consumer countries." Mr. Suranartyuth also stressed that "we are really focusing on taking action against wildlife crime syndicates by cooperating and coordinating closely through the International Coordination Team and will follow up on our investigations". Further arrests and prosecutions could be expected, as follow up investigations resulting from the operation continue. UNODC's work on Wildlife and Forest Crime Kevin Town Public Information Officer, UNODC kevin.town [at] unodc.org

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Who killed the private media? Who’s the hangman? The World Press Freedom report is out. Bhutan’s position has improved significantly to 80 from 94 from last year. Bhutan’s overall position has also improved during my tenure in government, from 92 to 80. So I’m happy. But I’m not happy about the state of our private media. In the two years leading up to the start of parliamentary democracy, private media thrived and continued to grow for a few more years. At one time, we had 11 private newspapers! Then, gradually, private newspapers started shutting down. Bhutan Observer was the first to fold. They were followed by Druk Neytshuel, Bhutan Youth, Druk Melong and Druk Yoedzer in quick order. So today we have only six private newspapers: Bhutan Times, Bhutan Today, Business Bhutan, The Journalist, Gyalchi Sarshog and The Bhutanese. Of these, Bhutan Times, a mighty paper during its heyday a decade ago, has been reduced to a sorry shadow of its former self. And The Journalist, Gaychi Sarshog and Bhutan Today are doing even worse – they are barely surviving. So who killed the private media? The culprit is Kuensel. Kuensel, a state-owned enterprise, has used its deep pockets, endless resources and strong connections to the government to drive private newspapers out of business. And they are continuing to do so. The irony is that Kuensel recently ran an editorial, pointing out that the problem with state enterprises is that, they benefit from “favorable treatment” in the form of “subsidies preferential regulatory treatment and even state-backed guarantees”. The editorial went on to suggest that government should not engage in businesses that the private sector is capable of providing. I agree with Kuensel, notwithstanding the SOEs I defended in my previous post. But I wonder if Kuensel would be ready to practice what they preach. I wonder if they would be willing to let go of the unfair advantages and privileges that they themselves enjoy as a state enterprise. I wonder if they would be willing to heed their own advice to provide a level playing ground for their private counterparts. If they are, then good, let’s get cracking – there’s a lot of work to do. If they are not, then they would reek of hypocrisy, a hypocrisy of the highest order that emanates from outright arrogance. Kuensel profits immensely as a state enterprise. This gives them an insurmountable advantage over private newspapers … and over printing presses, photo studios, publishing houses, Dzongkha translators, stationery shops and IT vendors. Here’s how Kuensel profits as a state enterprise (most of the information is from the Royal Securities Exchange website): 51% of the company is owned by the government. And that is not counting other government agencies, like the NPPF, that also own chunks of the company. The land they sit on belongs to the government. Kuensel is the only newspaper enjoying government land on lease. Their branch in Kanglung was established with subsidies from the government, including for, but not limited to, land, building and expensive printing equipment. Their vehicles are subsidized by the government, and carry government license plates giving them undue advantages during travel and when seeking access. Their printing department is their biggest source of revenue earning them a whopping Nu 83 million in 2017. Their main printing press, a Heidelberg offset printing machine, was purchased by the government. Private printing presses cannot compete as they need to buy their own machines, and are subject to government procurement procedures which Kuensel can bypass. Advertisements is their second biggest earner, bringing in revenue of Nu 77 million in 2017. Most of this is government advertisements. And the amount of advertisements that they get is not funny – open any of their papers, including yesterday’s, and you’ll see more announcements and advertisements than news stories! Stationery is their third biggest earner, making Nu 34 million in 2017. Again, most of their customers are government offices who place direct orders. Additionally, they made Nu 7.3 million in 2017 by providing services related to photos, dzongkha translation, book publication, retail sales and IT. All these services are in direct competition with private businesses. Kuensel’s total income for 2017 was Nu 214 million, of which Nu 77 million was paid as remuneration and benefits for their employees. Even so, at the end of the year they had Nu 47 million in their bank and had receivables totaling Nu 116 million. This is gigantic, considering that their competition in the private sector are living from hand to mouth at best. In reality, most of them are in the deep red. And left unchecked, Kuensel will drive more private newspapers out of business. So how to bell this cat? First BICMA must ensure a level playing field. They must make sure that Kuensel does not continue to enjoy undue support and privileges from the government that undermine the growth of the private media. Next, a special audit must be carried out, not by outside firms as has been the practice, but by the Royal Audit Authority. The special audit must go beyond the financials to cover the performance of the company and its effect on the private sector. After the audit, the government must give serious thought to pulling out of Kuensel. At the very least, they must ensure that Kuensel stops competing with private businesses by providing services in the areas of printing, stationery, photography, translation, retail and IT. Instead, they should be required to stick to their core mandate of reporting news. More importantly, the government should distribute their advertisements among all newspapers, and more equitably, to address their own concerns regarding state-owned enterprises, if for nothing else. As for me, I know that I should have done a lot more to improve the media landscape, especially in the private sector, during my tenure in the government. I regret that I could not and did not. That said, I will continue to support a free and fair media. So I offer my services to the private media if they feel that they are unfairly constrained by Kuensel. I will take their case up with BICMA, the government, lawmakers, and, if needed, with the judiciary. Similarly, I offer my services to private businesses if they feel that Kuensel is receiving and taking undue advantage. I will take up their case with the government and, if needed, the judiciary. And I offer my services to Kuensel employees if they feel that there are corrupt practices in their organization. I will protect their identity, but will take up their cases with the Anticorruption Commission. In 2010 I posed a question. It turns out that several readers guessed the identity of the hooded hangman. But the same scenario continues to unfold today, with Kuensel as both the unknown hangman and the one applauding the death of private newspapers. We need to join hands to rein in Kuensel. Otherwise, the killing spree of private newspapers will continue. Filed Under: Media Tagged With: Kuensel, private newspapers, world press ranking

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My Big Fat Greek Wedding Gets A Sequel The first trailer for "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2" was released today. Now, before you go on ranting about how it's an unnecessary sequel and that it won't be any different from the first one and that Nia Vardalos hasn't written anything even remotely funny in the last 14 years, let me tell you this: I attended the My Big Fat Greek Wedding panel at San Diego Comic-Con this year and the footage that they showed there got a tremendous reaction. In anticipation, hundreds of people were there cosplaying as Toula Portokalos and Ian Miller. I even saw a few cosplaying as Gus. It seems that the My Big Fat Greek Wedding cimenatic universe (heretofore abbreviated as the MBFGWCU) still has many tales left to tell. Now, I don't know if the My Big Fat Greek Life television show is going to remain in canon or not. We'll have to wait for the premiere of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 for the answer. Still, rumor has it that Universal has already signed Tom Everett Scott to appear in a post-credit scene as Guy Patterson from That Thing You Do!, thus tying the two Playtone properties together and expanding the MBFGWCU. This, of course, will lead to the third entry in the MBFGWCU, Three Greeks And A Baby, plus the fourth entry, Four Greek Weddings and a Funeral. Seriously, though, while the first My Big Fat Greek Wedding film was a critical and a commercial success and did big business almost solely based upon word-of-mouth, it owed its success to the one woman show that Nia Vardalos based the movie on. Vardalos was able to road test a number of the elements that went from the play into the movie. That hasn't been the case for stuff for her subsequent efforts like "My Life In Ruins" and "I Hate Valentines Day" which were absolutely disastrous and felt like first drafts in dire need of refinement. And, I suspect it's the same for My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. It's just another attempt to cash in on some movie nostalgia. Which is too bad, because the all-ages family charm that was integral to the success of the original seems to be absent in the sequel. The scene in the trailer where Toula and Ian are about to boink in the car and are caught by the family lacks subtlety, is completely unrealistic and seems indicative of the kind of jokes that will permeate My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. If Playtone and Universal wanted to really capitalize on the popularity of My Big Fat Greek Wedding with a minimal amount of effort, they could have just made it part of The Fast And The Furious franchise and called it 2 Fat 2 Greek. Sengled Pulse LED Light with Wireless Speaker Revi... Strathmore Who's Who Scam A Review Of The Peanuts Movie A New Star Trek TV Series Is Coming In 2017....On ...

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WIU Home > Catalog > Admission Residency Status Regulations In-state and out-of-state tuition is assessed based on the following regulations. All questions related to residency may be directed to the Office of the Registrar, Sherman Hall 110, telephone (309) 298-1891. For purposes of this regulation, the following definitions pertain: An “adult student” is a student who is eighteen or more years of age. A “minor student” is a student who is less than eighteen years of age. An “emancipated minor student” is a completely self-supporting student who is less than eighteen years of age. Marriage or active military service shall be regarded as effecting the emancipation of minors, for the purposes of this regulation. “Residence” means legal domicile. Voter registration, filing of tax returns, proper license and registration for driving or ownership of a vehicle, and other such transactions may verify intent of residence in a state. Neither length of University attendance nor continued presence in the University community during vacation periods shall be construed to be proof of Illinois residence. Except as otherwise provided in this regulation, no student, parent, or legal or natural guardian will be considered a resident unless the student, parent, or guardian maintains a bona fide and permanent residence in Illinois, except when temporarily absent from Illinois, with no intention of changing his or her legal residence to some other state or country. Residency Determination The University shall determine the residency status of each student enrolled in the University for the purpose of determining whether the student is assessed in-state or out-of-state tuition. Each applicant for admission shall submit at the time of application evidence for determination of residency in accordance with this regulation. The office responsible for admissions shall make a determination of residency status. If a non-resident is classified by error as a resident, a change in tuition charges shall be applicable beginning with the term following reclassification. If the erroneous resident classification is caused by false information submitted by the student, a change in tuition charges shall be applicable for each term in which tuition charges were based on such false information. In addition, the student who has submitted false information may be subject to appropriate disciplinary action. If a resident is classified by error as a non-resident, a change in tuition charges shall be applicable during the term in which the reclassification occurs, provided that the student has proven residency in accordance with this regulation. To be considered a resident, an adult student must be a bona fide resident of Illinois as defined in 1.d. In the case of adult students who reside with their parent(s), the student will be considered a resident if one of the parents has established and is maintaining a bona fide residence in Illinois. To be considered a resident, an adult student not residing in Illinois must be a bona fide resident of one of the approval states outside of Illinois. The Board of Trustees will approve the appropriate states which will be listed in the cost section of the official Western Illinois University catalog. Minor Students The residence of a minor student shall be considered to be the same as that of his/her parents or that of either parent if the parents are separated or divorced or that of his/her legally appointed or natural guardian such as a grandparent, adult brother or adult sister, adult uncle, or adult aunt by whom the minor has been supported. Emancipated Minors If emancipated minors actually reside in Illinois, such minors shall be considered residents even though their parents or guardians may not reside in Illinois. Minor Children of Parents Transferred Outside the State of Illinois The minor children of persons who have resided in Illinois immediately prior to a transfer by their employers to some location outside of the State of Illinois shall be considered residents. This rule shall apply, however, only when the minor children of such parents enroll in the University within five years of the time their parents are transferred by their employer to a location outside the State of Illinois. Married Students A non-resident student, whether a minor or adult, who is married to a person who meets and complies with all of the applicable requirements of these regulations to establish residence status, shall be classified as a resident. Non-residents of Illinois who are on active duty with one of the services of the Armed Forces of the United States who are stationed in Illinois and who submit evidence of such service and station, as well as the spouses and dependent children of such persons, shall be considered residents as long as such persons remain stationed in Illinois and the spouses and/or dependent children of such persons also reside in Illinois. If such persons are transferred to a post outside the continental United States but such persons remain registered at the University, residency status shall continue until such time as these persons are stationed within a state other than Illinois within the continental United States. Effective July 1, 2015, students using benefits under the federal Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008 (Chapter 33), the All-Volunteer Force Educational Assistance (Chapter 30), or any subsequent variation of those Acts, WIU shall deem that student an Illinois resident for tuition purposes regardless of the covered student’s state of residence. Staff Members of the University, Allied Agencies, and Faculty of State-Supported Institutions in Illinois Staff members of the University and of allied agencies, and faculties of statesupported institutions of higher education in Illinois, holding appointment of at least one-quarter time, and their spouses and dependent children, shall be treated as residents. Teachers in Public and Private Illinois Schools Teachers in the public and private elementary and secondary schools of Illinois shall, if subject to payment of tuition, be assessed at the resident rate during any term in which they hold an appointment of at least one-quarter time, including the summer session immediately following the term in which the appointment was effective. Residency Status Appeal Procedure Students who take exception to their residency status classification shall pay the tuition assessed but may appeal to the University Registrar by proving Illinois residency in accordance with these regulations. The appeal must be filed within sixty (60) calendar days from the date of the tuition bill or the student loses all rights to a change of residency status for the term in question. If the student is dissatisfied with the ruling in response to the appeal made within said period, the student may file a written appeal within thirty (30) calendar days of receipt of the decision of the Administrative Hearing Committee, which shall consider all evidence submitted in connection with the case and render a decision which shall be final. The President may, in special situations, grant residency status to categories of persons otherwise classified as non-residents under this regulation. Catalog Contents Special Study Opportunities Courses by Department Admission, Costs, Financial Assistance, & Records Educational Records Policy Graduation Requirements, Academic Regulations, & GradTrac Course Credit Student Academic Progress Foreign Language/Global Issues Requirement University General Education Curriculum GradTrac Education & Human Services Fine Arts & Communication Centennial Honors College Administration, Faculty, & Professional Staff Faculty and Professional Staff IAI / WIU Course Match Index Previous Undergraduate Catalogs (309) 298-1414 - info@wiu.edu

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Antiscience Title: Antiscience Subject: Alternative medicine, Anti-intellectualism, Criticism of science, The Republican Brain, Philosophy of science Collection: Anti-Intellectualism, Criticism of Science, Criticisms, Philosophy of Science Antiscience is a position that rejects science and the scientific method.[1] People holding antiscientific views do not accept that science is an objective method, as it purports to be, or that it generates universal knowledge. They also contend that scientific reductionism in particular is an inherently limited means to reach understanding of the complex world we live in. Political antiscience 2 Left-wing antiscience 2.1 Right-wing antiscience 2.2 Religious antiscience 2.3 Three areas of antiscience 3 Philosophy 3.1 Sociology 3.2 Ecology and health sphere 3.3 Opposition to reductionism and positivism 4 On the limitations of models 4.1 Bibliography 7 In the beginnings of the scientific revolution, scientists such as Robert Boyle found themselves in conflict with those such as Thomas Hobbes, who were skeptical of whether science was a satisfactory way to obtain genuine knowledge about the world. Hobbes' stance is sometimes regarded as an antiscience position: In his Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics,...[published in 1656, Hobbes] distinguished 'demonstrable' fields, as 'those the construction of the subject whereof is in the power of the artist himself,' from 'indemonstrable' ones 'where the causes are to seek for.' We can only know the causes of what we make. So geometry is demonstrable, because 'the lines and figures from which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves' and 'civil philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealth ourselves.' But we can only speculate about the natural world, because 'we know not the construction, but seek it from the effects.'[2] It was also Hobbes who "put forth the idea of the significance of the nonrational in human behaviour." [3] Jones goes on to group Hobbes along with others he classes as 'antireductionists' and 'individualists,' such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Karl Marx, Jeremy Bentham and J S Mill, and then he adds Karl Popper, John Rawls and E. O. Wilson.[4] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, claimed that science can lead to immorality. "Rousseau argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of virtue and morality" and his "critique of science has much to teach us about the dangers involved in our political commitment to scientific progress, and about the ways in which the future happiness of mankind might be secured".[5] Nevertheless, Rousseau does not state in his Discourses that sciences are necessarily bad, and states that figures like René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton should be held in high regard. In the conclusion to the Discourses, he says that these (aforementioned) can cultivate sciences to great benefit, and that morality's corruption is mostly because of society's bad influence on scientists. William Blake reacted strongly against the work of Isaac Newton in his paintings and writings, and is seen as being perhaps the earliest (and almost certainly the most prominent and enduring) example of what is seen by historians as the aesthetic or romantic antiscience response. For example, in his 1795 poem Auguries of Innocence, Blake describes the beautiful and natural robin red-breast imprisoned by the materialistic cage of Newtonian mathematics and science.[6] In Blake's painting of Newton, he is depicted "as a misguided hero whose gaze was directed only at sterile geometrical diagrams drawn on the ground".[7] Blake thought that "Newton, Bacon, and Locke with their emphasis on reason were nothing more than 'the three great teachers of atheism, or Satan's Doctrine'...the picture progresses from exuberance and colour on the left, to sterility and blackness on the right. In Blake's view Newton brings not light, but night".[8] In a poem, W.H. Auden summarises Blake's anti-scientific views by saying that he "[broke] off relations in a curse, with the Newtonian Universe".[9] One recent biographer of Newton[10] considers him more as a renaissance alchemist, natural philosopher, and magician rather than a true representative of scientific illuminism, as popularized by Voltaire and other illuminist Newtonians. Antiscience issues are seen as a fundamental consideration in the transition from 'pre-science' or 'protoscience' such as that evident in alchemy. Many disciplines that pre-date the widespread adoption and acceptance of the scientific method, such as geometry and astronomy, are not seen as anti-science. However, some of the orthodoxies within those disciplines that predate a scientific approach (such as those orthodoxies repudiated by the discoveries of Galileo) are seen as being a product of an anti-scientific stance. The term 'scientism' derives from science studies and is a term spawned and used by sociologists and philosophers of science to describe the views, beliefs and behavior of strong supporters of science. It is commonly used in a pejorative sense, for individuals who seem to be treating science in a similar way to a religion. The term reductionism is occasionally used in a similarly pejorative way (as a more subtle attack on scientists). However, some scientists feel comfortable being labelled as reductionists, while agreeing that there might be conceptual and philosophical shortcomings of reductionism.[11] However, non-reductionist (see Emergentism) views of science have been formulated in varied forms in several scientific fields like statistical physics, chaos theory, complexity theory, cybernetics, systems theory, systems biology, ecology, information theory, etc. Such fields tend to assume that strong interaction between units produce new phenomena in higher levels that cannot be accounted for solely by reductionism. For example, it is not valuable (or currently possible) to describe a chess game or gene networks using quantum mechanics. The emergentist view of science ("More is Different", in the words of Nobel physicist Philip W. Anderson)[12] has been inspired in its methodology by the European social sciences (Durkheim, Marx) which tend to reject methodological individualism. Political antiscience Left-wing antiscience One expression of antiscience is the "denial of universality and... legitimisation of alternatives", and that the results of scientific findings do not always represent any underlying reality, but can merely reflect the ideology of dominant groups within society.[13] In this view, science is associated with the political Right and is seen as a belief system that is conservative and conformist, that suppresses innovation, that resists change and that acts dictatorially. This includes the view, for example, that science has a "bourgeois and/or Eurocentric and/or masculinist world-view."[14] The anti-nuclear movement, often associated with the left,[15][16][17] has been criticized for overstating the negative effects of nuclear power,[18][19] and understating the environmental costs of non-nuclear sources that can be prevented through nuclear energy.[20] Many scientific fields which straddle the boundary between the biological and social sciences have also experienced resistance from the left, such as sociobiology,[21] evolutionary psychology[22] and population genetics.[23] This is due to the perceived association of these sciences with scientific racism[24] and neocolonialism.[23] Many critics of these fields, such as Stephen Jay Gould, have been accused of having strong political biases,[25] and engaging in 'mob science'.[26] Right-wing antiscience The origin of antiscience thinking may be traced back to the reaction of conservative antiscience polemics. Primary among the latter are the polemics about evolutionary theory[27] and modern cosmology teaching in high schools, and environmental issues related to global warming[28][29] and energy crisis. Characteristics of antiscience associated with the right include the appeal to conspiracy theories to explain why scientists believe what they believe,[30] in an attempt to undermine the confidence or power usually associated to science (e.g. in global warming conspiracy theories). Religious antiscience In this context, antiscience may be considered dependent on religious, moral and cultural arguments. For this kind of religious antiscience philosophy, science is an anti-spiritual and materialistic force that undermines traditional values, ethnic identity and accumulated historical wisdom in favor of reason and cosmopolitanism. In particular, the traditional and ethnic values emphasized are similar to those of white supremacist Christian Identity theology, but similar right-wing views have been developed by radically conservative sects of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. New religious movements such as New Age thinking also criticize the scientific worldview as favouring a reductionist, atheist, or materialist philosophy. A frequent basis of antiscientific sentiment is religious theism with literal interpretations of sacred text. Here, scientific theories that conflict with what is considered divinely-inspired knowledge are regarded as flawed. Over the centuries religious institutions have been hesitant to embrace such ideas as heliocentrism and planetary motion because they contradicted the dominant understanding of various passages of scripture. More recently the body of creation theologies known collectively as creationism, including the teleological theory of intelligent design, have been promoted by religious theists in response to the process of evolution by natural selection.[31] Three areas of antiscience Historically, antiscience first arose as a reaction against scientific materialism. The 18th century Enlightenment had ushered in "the ideal of a unified system of all the sciences",[32] but there were those fearful of this notion, who "felt that constrictions of reason and science, of a single all-embracing system... were in some way constricting, an obstacle to their vision of the world, chains on their imagination or feeling".[32] Antiscience then is a rejection of "the scientific model [or paradigm]... with its strong implication that only that which was quantifiable, or at any rate, measurable... was real".[32] In this sense, it comprises a "critical attack upon the total claim of the new scientific method to dominate the entire field of human knowledge".[32] However, scientific positivism (logical positivism) does not deny the reality of non-measurable phenomena, only that those phenomena should not be adequate to scientific investigation. Morever, positivism, as a philosophical basis for the scientific method, is not consensual or even dominant in the scientific community (see philosophy of science). Three major areas of antiscience can be seen in philosophy, sociology, and ecology. The following quotes explore this aspect of the subject. Philosophical objections against science are often objections about the role of reductionism. For example, in the field of psychology, "both reductionists and antireductionists accept that... non-molecular explanations may not be improved, corrected or grounded in molecular ones".[33] Further, "epistemological antireductionism holds that, given our finite mental capacities, we would not be able to grasp the ultimate physical explanation of many complex phenomena even if we knew the laws governing their ultimate constituents".[34] Some see antiscience as "common...in academic settings...many people see that there are problems in demarcation between science, scientism, and pseudoscience resulting in an antiscience stance. Some argue that nothing can be known for sure".[35] Many philosophers are "divided as to whether reduction should be a central strategy for understanding the world".[36] However, many agree that "there are, nevertheless, reasons why we want science to discover properties and explanations other than reductive physical ones".[36] Such issues stem "from an antireductionist worry that there is no absolute conception of reality, that is, a characterization of reality such as... science claims to provide".[37] This is close to the Kantian view that reality is ultimately unknowable and all models are just imperfect approximations to it. Sociologist Thomas Gieryn refers to "some sociologists who might appear to be antiscience".[38] Some "philosophers and antiscience types", he contends, may have presented "unreal images of science that threaten the believability of scientific knowledge",[38] or appear to have gone "too far in their antiscience deconstructions".[38] The question often lies in how much scientists conform to the standard ideal of "communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, originality, and... skepticism".[38] Unfortunately, "scientists don't always conform... scientists do get passionate about pet theories; they do rely on reputation in judging a scientist's work; they do pursue fame and gain via research".[38] Thus, they may show inherent biases in their work. "[Many] scientists are not as rational and logical as the legend would have them, nor are they as illogical or irrational as some relativists might say".[38] Ecology and health sphere Within the ecological and health spheres, Levins identifies a conflict "not between science and antiscience, but rather between different pathways for science and technology; between a commodified science-for-profit and a gentle science for humane goals; between the sciences of the smallest parts and the sciences of dynamic wholes... [he] offers proposals for a more holistic, integral approach to understanding and addressing environmental issues".[39] These beliefs are also common within the scientific community, with for example, scientists being prominent in environmental campaigns warning of environmental dangers such as ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect. It can also be argued that this version of antiscience comes close to that found in the medical sphere, where patients and practitioners may choose to reject science and adopt a pseudoscientific approach to health problems. This can be both a practical and a conceptual shift and has attracted strong criticism: "therapeutic touch, a healing technique based upon the laying-on of hands, has found wide acceptance in the nursing profession despite its lack of scientific plausibility. Its acceptance is indicative of a broad antiscientific trend in nursing".[40] Glazer also criticises the therapists and patients, "for abandoning the biological underpinnings of nursing and for misreading philosophy in the service of an antiscientific world-view".[40] In contrast, Brian Martin criticized Gross and Levitt by saying that "[their] basic approach is to attack constructivists for not being positivists,"[41] and that science is "presented as a unitary object, usually identified with scientific knowledge. It is portrayed as neutral and objective. Second, science is claimed to be under attack by 'antiscience' which is composed essentially of ideologues who are threats to the neutrality and objectivity that are fundamental to science. Third, a highly selective attack is made on the arguments of 'antiscience'".[41] Such people allegedly then "routinely equate critique of scientific knowledge with hostility to science, a jump that is logically unsupportable and empirically dubious".[41] Having then "constructed two artificial entities, a unitary 'science' and a unitary 'academic left', each reduced to epistemological essences, Gross and Levitt proceed to attack. They pick out figures in each of several areas -- science studies, postmodernism, feminism, environmentalism, AIDS activism -- and criticise their critiques of science".[41] The writings of Young serve to illustrate more antiscientific views: "The strength of the antiscience movement and of alternative technology is that their advocates have managed to retain Utopian vision while still trying to create concrete instances of it".[42] "The real social, ideological and economic forces shaping science...[have] been opposed to the point of suppression in many quarters. Most scientists hate it and label it 'antiscience'. But it is urgently needed, because it makes science self-conscious and hopefully self-critical and accountable with respect to the forces which shape research priorities, criteria, goals".[42] Genetically modified foods also bring about antiscience sentiment. The general public has recently become more aware of the dangers of a poor diet, as there have been numerous studies that show that the two are inextricably linked.[43] Anti-science dictates that science is untrustworthy, because it is never complete and always being revised, which would be a probable cause for the fear that the general public has of genetically modified foods despite scientific reassurance that such foods are safe. Antivacinationists rely on whatever comes to hand presenting some of their arguments as if scientific, however a strain of antiscience is part of their approach.[44] Opposition to reductionism and positivism On the limitations of models A common antiscientific point of contention arises from the fact that mathematical models do not capture the full reality of existence, as can be seen in this quote: The formulas of mathematical models are "artificial constructions, logical figments with no necessary relation to the outside world". These models always "leave out the richest and most important part of human experience...daily life, history, human laws and institutions, the modes of human self- expression".[45] A failure to appreciate the subtle complexity of social worlds, means they get excluded from the formulas, even though, "no easy reductionism will do justice to the material". This approach often fails to concentrate "on social structures, processes, and actions in a specific sense (inequality, mobility, classes, strata, ethnicity, gender relations, urbanization, work and life of different types of people, not just elites)", and so tends to generate mostly meaningless oversimplifications. It is also a common antiscientific point to state that verbal (say, literary and non-mathematical) models are poor representations of reality. If it is clear that a particular statistical or psychological study about romantic love or religious ecstasy (see neurotheology), captures only a tiny fraction of such human experiences, literary accounts and simplified verbal models also cannot adequately convey their full complexity. Both verbal and mathematical models are (partial) maps of reality, providing different points of view, but inherently incomplete descriptions of the territory of human and universe existence (see map territory relation). Constructivist epistemology Counter-enlightenment Faith and rationality Giambattista Vico Greedy reductionism Johann Gottfried Herder Scientific mythology Politicization of science Pseudoscepticism Sokal Affair William R. Steiger ^ Gerald Holton (1993). Science and Anti-science. Harvard University Press. ^ Ian Shapiro, Reflections on Skinner and Pettit, Hobbes Studies, 22 (2009), pp.185–191, citation from pp.190-191 ^ Richard H Jones, Reductionism: Analysis and the Fullness of Reality, Lewisburg, Pa: Bucknell University Press, 2000, p.199 ^ Jones, p.213 ^ , Boston College, 2005Rousseau's critique of science: A commentary on the Discourse on the Sciences and the ArtsJeffrey J S Black, ^ William Blake, Auguries of Innocence ^ , at Princeton UniversityNewtonNotes to Blake's ^ , Tate Gallery, LondonNewton: Personification of Man Limited by Reason ^ W.H. Auden, "New Year Letter, 1940", in Collected Poems, Edited by Edward Mendelson, London: Faber, 1994, p.203 ^ , 2007Writings on NewtonStephen D Snobelen, ^ George J. Klir, Facets of Systems Science, New York: Springer, 1991, pp.263-265 ^ 177, pp.393-397, 1972Science,W. Anderson, "More is Different," ^ Andrew C. Wicks and R. Edward Freeman, Organization Studies and the New Pragmatism: Positivism, Anti-Positivism, and the Search for Ethics, Organization Science, 9.2, Mar-Apr. 1998, pp.123-140 ^ Alan D Sokal, What the Social Text Affair Does and Does not Prove, Critical Quarterly, 40.2, July 1998, pp.3–18 ^ Victoria Daubert, Sue Ellen Moran, Origins, goals, and tactics of the U.S. anti-nuclear protest movement, Rand, 1985, p.16 ^ Jeffrey Broadbent, Vicky Brockman, East Asian Social Movements: Power Protest and Change in a Dynamic, Springer, 2009, p.69 ^ Marbury, 31 March 2011Anti-nuclear Campaigners and the Qwerty Keyboard, ^ Samuel MacCracken, The War Against the Atom, 1982, Basic Books, pp. 60-61 ^ Wilson, Edward O. (1995). Naturalist. ^ Hamilton, W.D. (2000). "A review of Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations". Ann. Hum. Genet. 64 (4): 363–374. ^ a b Mitchell Leslie. "The History of Everyone and Everything". Stanford Alumni Magazine. ^ David Dugan (writer, producer, director) (May 2008). Lord of the Ants (Documentary). NOVA. Retrieved 2008-01-25. ^ Gottfredson, Linda S. (2012). "Resolute ignorance on race and Rushton". Personality and Individual Differences 55 (3): 218–223. ^ William D. Anderson Jr. (September 2003). "Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism, and the Nature of Science". ^ Joseph Romm, "Anti-science conservatives must be stopped", Salon.com, June 30, 2008 ^ Pascal Diethelm; Martin McKee (2009). "Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?". European Journal of Public Health 19 (1): 2–4. ^ Jon D. Miller, Eugenie C. Scott, Shinji Okamoto Public Acceptance of Evolution Science 11 August 2006: Vol. 313. no. 5788, pp. 765 - 766 ^ a b c d Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind, London: Pimlico, 1997, p328 ^ 72 (January 2005) pp. 43-68Philosophy of ScienceAlex Rosenberg and D. M. Kaplan "How to Reconcile Physicalism and Antireductionism about Biology" ^ Nagel T. "Reductionism and antireductionism". Novartis Found Symp. 1998;213:3-10; discussion 10-4, 73-5. ^ Eileen Gambrill, Evidence based practice, an alternative to authority based practice, Families in Society, the Journal of Contemporary Human Services, 80.4, 1999, 341-350 ^ a b Todd Jones, Reductionism and Antireductionism: Rights and Wrongs, Metaphilosophy, Volume 35, Number 5, October 2004, pp. 614-647 ^ Peter W. Ross and Dale Turner, "Sensibility Theory and Conservative Complacency" ^ a b c d e f Thomas F. Gieryn, Book Review of John Ziman. Real Science: What it is and What it Means, Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 2000, Isis, vol. 93 (2002), pp. 544–545 ^ Richard Levins, Whose Scientific Method? Scientific Methods for a Complex World, New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, Vol.13,3, 2003, 261-274 ^ a b Sarah Glazer, "Therapeutic touch and postmodernism in nursing", Nursing Philosophy (2001) 2(3), 196-212. ^ a b c d , Vol. 26, No. 1, February 1996, pp. 161-173.Social Studies of ScienceBrian Martin, Social Construction of an 'Attack on Science', ^ a b Robert M. Young, Science is Social Relations ^ Carol Tucker Foreman, Genetic Modification of Foods: The Public's Mistrust of Science and Science's Misunderstanding of the Public, "Consumer Choice" ^ "The clinician’s guide to the anti-vaccinationists’ galaxy". Human Immunology 73: 859–866. ^ Sir Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, Princeton: Princeton Univ Press, 2000, pp.110-123 A Bullock & S Trombley [Eds.], The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, third edition, London: Harper Collins, 1999 Burger, P and Luckman, T, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966 Collins, Harry and Pinch, Trevor, The Golem. What everyone should know about science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 Gross, Paul R and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994 Gerald Holton, Science and anti-science, Harvard University Press, 1993 ISBN 0-674-79299-8 Knorr-Cetina, Karin D, & Mulkay, Michael, Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, Sage Publications Ltd, 1983 Knorr-Cetina, Karin D, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Harvard University Press, 1999 Levins, R. "Ten propositions on science and antiscience" in Social Text, 46/47:101–111, 1996. Levins, R. "Touch Red," in Judy Kaplan an Linn Shapiro, eds., Red Diapers: Growing up in the Communist Left, U. of Illinois, 1998, pp. 257–266. Levins, R. Dialectics and systems theory in Science and Society 62(3):373-399, 1998. Levins, R. "The internal and external in explanatory theories", Science as Culture, 7(4):557–582, 1998. Levins, R. and Lopez C. "Toward an ecosocial view of health", International Journal of Health Services 29(2):261-293, 1999. Nye, Andrea, Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic, London: Routledge, 1990 Pepper, David, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism, London: Routledge, 1989 Ullica Segerstrale (Ed), "Beyond the Science Wars: the missing discourse about science and society," Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000, ISBN 0-7914-4618-2 Vining, Joseph, On the Future of Total Theory: Science, Antiscience, and Human Candor, Erasmus Institute papers, 1999 Leviathan and the Air Pump Schapin and Shaffer (covers the conflict between Hobbes and Boyle). The Scientific Outlook by Bertrand Russell (sets out the limits of science from the perspective of a vehement campaigner against anti-science). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume (The first major work to point out the limits of inductive reasoning, the 'new tool of science'). Against Method by Paul Feyerabend (probably the individual most accused of reinvigorating anti-science, although some claim that he is in fact strengthening the scientific debate). "What's wrong with relativism?", Physics World, by Harry Collins The Postmodern Critique of Science A Critique of Western Science by Alex Paterson The Critique of Science Becomes Academic by Brian Martin If They Believe That - Science by Reginald Firehammer The Ontological Reversal: A Figure of Thought of Importance for Science Education by Bo Dahlin Davidson, Donald, Essays on Actions and Events, OUP, 2001, ISBN 0-19-924627-0 Alex Rosenberg and D. M. Kaplan, How to Reconcile Physicalism and Antireductionism about Biology, Philosophy of Science, Volume 72.1, January 2005, pp.43-68 Psychoneural Reduction The New Wave, John Bickle, Bradford Books, March 1998, ISBN 0-262-02432-2 Abstract Economics of scientific knowledge Antipositivism Postpositivism Social constructivism Social epistemology construction of technology shaping of technology Sociology of knowledge Sociology of scientific ignorance Sociology of the history of science Strong programme Boundary-work Consilience Demarcation problem Double hermeneutic Mapping controversies post-normal Unity of science Cyborg anthropology Digital anthropology Dematerialization Early adopter Normalization process theory Reverse salient Sociotechnical system Technical change Technoscience and society critique of theories of science of Regulation of science Socio-scientific issues Transition management Articles with unsourced statements from July 2012 Articles needing additional references from February 2008 Articles with unsourced statements from December 2011 Use dmy dates from January 2011 Criticism of science Medicine, Statistics, Logic, Mathematics, Physics Epistemology, Metaphysics, Sociology, Philosophy, Logic Pininfarina Nido, Pininfarina, Jesper deClaville Christiansen Oclc, Critical theory, Émile Durkheim, Qualitative research, Philosophy of science Science, Computer science, Transhumanism, Engineering, Internet Homeopathy, Chiropractic, Medicine, Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese medicine Discrimination, Cultural assimilation, Multiculturalism, Science, Soviet Union Epistemology, Humanities, Nature, Philosophy, Critical theory The Republican Brain Republican Party (United States), Psychology, Science, History, Conservatism in the United States

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'Amazing deal' or 'capitulation'? Why the US-China trade truce may not last Donald Trump hailed the agreement, but others think it masks a process of deglobalisation as the two superpowers struggle for hegemony The trade war between the US and China may never be settled, experts fear, even after the two sides agreed on an outline “phase one” deal. Economists and investors have been poring over the weekend’s announcement, which appeared to end a dispute that has roiled financial markets for 17 months. According to Washington’s trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, China has agreed to buy up to $200bn in additional goods and services over the next two years on top of the amount it purchased in 2017. The agreement would also require China to make “structural reforms and other changes to its economic and trade regime in the areas of intellectual property, technology transfer, agriculture, financial services, and currency and foreign exchange”. In exchange, Washington would roll back some tariffs on Chinese goods, which Donald Trump hailed as an “amazing deal”. Neither side offered any detail on what the Chinese reforms might be, leading to fears that the deal will fail to resolve the key underlying conflict between the two superpowers. US Democratic senator Chris Murphy called the agreement a “total capitulation”. Beijing confirmed that a deal had been made but its reaction was more muted. This is the fifth time that a resolution to the US-China trade dispute has been declared and, pointedly, official Chinese responses did not contain a commitment to a specific target on new agricultural purchases that Trump promised would hit $50bn. Also, there are more rounds of talks to go before an official signing of this phase one deal. Beijing emphasised that the text needed to be legally vetted and translated into Chinese, suggesting that the terms were still not totally agreed upon. Financial markets also betrayed unease that things could fall apart. Stocks on Wall Street and elsewhere were initially buoyed by the announcement, but slipped back when details were not forthcoming. The glacial progress on the so-called “phase one” deal shows neither side wants to compromise and has exposed growing fault lines, threatening what one prominent economist calls the “deglobalisation” of the world economy. It is now not only a battle over trade and intellectual property, but also one about the future of the rules-based system of international trade and which economic model will prevail. Sharp US criticism of China over human rights in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, Washington’s fears about technology company Huawei acting as a trojan horse in western economies, plus ongoing military tensions in the South China Sea, have added volatile layers to the conflict. Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser to the insurance giant Allianz, said the “mini deal” announced on Friday was expected by the markets and should be seen more as a “temporary and reversible truce” as opposed to a comprehensive resolution. It would now come down to whether the two sides press “play or rewind” on the playbook that has dominated the global economy since the fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago. “It’s no longer just about economic issues,” El-Erian said. “It speaks to a bigger question as to what follows this period where the ‘pause’ button has been pressed on the multi-decade process of economic and financial globalisation. Will the ‘play’ button be pressed again, as markets currently expect or, instead, ‘rewind’, marking a period of secular deglobalisation?” Both sides have talked up the benefits of the phase-one deal since it was outlined in October. The Dow Jones average on Wall Street has rallied more than 6% since then to multiple all-time highs, prompting similar gains around the world. But despite Trump agreeing to reduce the 15% tariffs on $160bn worth of goods due to start on Sunday, and halving the 15% tariffs on another $120bn, it is still not clear if the agreement will lead to a second phase deal. Christopher Balding, an expert on the Chinese economy and professor at Fulbright University in Vietnam, also sounded a sceptical note because neither side had conceded very much ground. “I would still say one had to put the odds of this whole thing blowing up at 50%,” he said, adding that the US rollback was “minimal” and “easy to get out of” if China did not fulfil its side of the bargain on agricultural purchases. Brad Setser, a former US treasury economist and now a fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations thinktank in New York, said an impasse had been reached amid a growing sense in the US that China does not want a deal within the existing framework. “China won’t get a rollback of all tariffs and the US knows China is not going to moderate its economic model,” he says. “A limited deal is recognition that a broad deal is impossible. Both realise that phase one is all they can get. “But there is growing friction. China is no longer seen as on a trajectory that favours the US. It’s not going to evolve to bring closer integration with the US and others.” From a Chinese perspective, there is growing anger at US criticism of “internal matters” such as treatment of the Uighurs and Hong Kong. In a speech hours before the announcement on Friday, China’s minister of foreign affairs, Wang Yi, ignored the trade issue and excoriated the US for having “seriously damaged the hard-won mutual trust” between the two countries. His remarks indicate that the “decoupling” of the US and Chinese economies was reaching the point of no return. Despite promising to open up, China is not dismantling its state-led economy and is using state resources to help companies expand globally through the Belt and Road initiative and dominate key industries (a new “Made in China 2025” policy). Last week’s report that Xi Jinping has ordered all government offices to remove foreign-made computers and software underlines his intent. Scott Kennedy, senior adviser at Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote: “In the short-term China and Xi Jinping are the clear winners. With only limited concessions, China has been able to preserve its mercantilist economic system and continue its discriminatory industrial policies at the expense of China’s trading partners and the global economy.”

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Competitions Irritating n00b Babble Journals Personal Threads Rantings & Flame Bait Requests TeotiShop & TeotiPhoto Useful Art & Comics Books & Poetry Food & Recipes Music Photography TV, Movies & Reviews Funny Stuff SFW Babes SFW Hunks Sports WTF! Apple Automotive Gaming Geek Google Hardware & Mobile Linux & Open Source Microsoft Sci-Fi, Science & Space Software Teh Internet Business Health History Military Nature News Politics Religion Travel Forgot TEOTI password? Awaiting activity Hot Random Sticky Scores Profiles 2 Days 1 Week 1 Month All Time This Month All Time What your voice would sound like on other planets and moons UN: The World Must Be Prepared To Welcome Refugees From Wuhan Music piracy Well Sh*t... cardiff_cockney (50), newby (40), juancondarts (60), juanfau (62), ztech (41), ehsanullah (58) 4404 Members Have Submitted 147678 Threads Containing 665218 Posts. Visit the TeotiShop! Filter by name: [A] [B] [C] [D] [E] [F] [G] [H] [I] [J] [K] [L] [M] [N] [O] [P] [Q] [R] [S] [T] [U] [V] [W] [X] [Y] [Z] [Other] [Remove this filter] Filter by group: [Admin] [Mod] [God] [Regular] [Remove this filter] Order by: [username] [joindate] [joindate DESC] [lastactivity DESC] [Remove this filter] mrcanard 0 posts, 0 threads, 0 points 0 total points (all time) Last seen 10:08 pm 29/10/2017, Joined 12:00 am 29/10/2017, Florida MrCivil 707 posts, 127 threads, 0 points 9456 total points (all time) Last seen 7:29 pm 18/07/2007, Joined 12:41 pm 19/10/2006 mrespman 50 posts, 15 threads, 0 points 567 total points (all time) Last seen 1:34 pm 19/06/2010, Joined 11:13 am 29/10/2006 Mrinal 3 posts, 0 threads, 0 points 31 total points (all time) Last seen 8:17 pm 09/01/2007, Joined 5:06 am 09/01/2007 MrJohnSmith Last seen 3:43 am 09/05/2018, Joined 3:41 am 09/05/2018, Russia MrJolly Last seen 7:05 am 31/08/2011, Joined 7:05 am 31/08/2011, Manchester Mrmistry87 Last seen 11:31 am 30/09/2016, Joined 10:55 am 30/09/2016, Toronto, Canada MrNineDoctor Last seen 11:43 pm 08/12/2007, Joined 11:43 pm 08/12/2007 Mrpatrickbateman Last seen 11:44 am 19/08/2019, Joined 11:26 am 19/08/2019, Toronto Mrs Highwayman 47 posts, 0 threads, 0 points 428 total points (all time) Last seen 3:17 pm 04/03/2007, Joined 7:52 pm 07/11/2006 mrskillful mrsparky2430 Last seen 12:28 pm 26/08/2017, Joined 12:11 pm 26/08/2017, Yamhill mrspvtpile mr_wiggles msbjack 274 posts, 52 threads, 0 points 2783 total points (all time) Last seen 2:14 am 04/02/2010, Joined 9:42 pm 04/11/2006 msobis 2484 posts, 526 threads, 0 points 34276 total points (all time) Last seen 9:41 am 05/01/2020, Joined 2:19 pm 30/10/2006, Holy shit! Im back in Texas! MSRSJunkie Msrwbdas mstkone Last seen 11:39 pm 11/01/2012, Joined 5:06 pm 20/05/2010 MsTrE Last seen 12:36 pm 01/07/2011, Joined 10:01 pm 22/06/2011, Oxford mszrspdnal Last seen 4:45 pm 02/12/2014, Joined 3:00 pm 22/01/2014, Nyírbátor mubsburce Last seen 12:18 am 29/11/2007, Joined 12:18 am 29/11/2007 mughflolf 4 posts, 2 threads, 0 points 103 total points (all time) Last seen 10:12 am 29/07/2019, Joined 7:16 pm 06/01/2016 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] [56] [57] [58] [59] [60] [61] [62] [63] [64] [65] [66] [67] [68] [69] [70] [71] [72] [73] [74] [75] [76] [77] [78] [79] [80] [81] [82] [83] [84] [85] [86] [87] [88] [89] [90] [91] [92] [93] [94] [95] [96] [97] [98] [99] [100] [101] [102] [103] [104] [105] [106] [107] [108] [109] [110] [111] [112] [113] [114] [115] [116] [117] [118] [119] [120] [121] [122] [123] [124] [125] [126] [127] [128] [129] [130] [131] [132] [133] [134] [135] [136] [137] [138] [139] [140] [141] [142] [143] [144] [145] [146] [147] [148] [149] [150] [151] [152] [153] [154] [155] [156] [157] [158] [159] [160] [161] [162] [163] [164] [165] [166] [167] [168] [169] [170] [171] [172] [173] [174] [175] [176] [177] Teh Nook • MayrHayasdan TEOTI v8.1.1 • 0.037 seconds • Members list • Login

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KFC Ad - Racism and Fried Chicken? Sometimes you have to wonder about the 'battles' over racist issues the American media gives attention to and whether they're really worth the air time given to them. For example, over the last few days much furor has been made over a KFC television advertisement that was intended for an Australian audience but found its way onto Youtube where it has been labelled as racist by American viewers. I think the point of view of the Americans is best summed up in this video (below) by The Young Turks, an American Internet News Show that claims to tell the news without any pretenses. The video includes the full KFC advertisement and the American stand point is best summarized towards the end of the commentary which essentially is the ad perpetuates a derogatory American Stereotype that suggests all 'black' people love fried chicken. Note that this is their second 'response' video on the subject after receiving a lot of negative backlash from their Australian viewers o… Feral Juicer Plots World Domination Last night my partner, Enigma, informed me that she was going to start using the Juicer again. This morning I got to thinking that maybe this wasn't a good thing? Although our juicer has been sitting quietly on the kitchen bench top, it hasn't been used in a long time. Perhaps it's turned feral? Our juicer (pictured) is not to be messed with. It can juice whole apples, your fingers, hand, fore arm, elbow and... well you get the idea. In all this time, it may have been sitting on the kitchen bench... waiting. Waiting for the opportune moment when we plug it back in and the sudden surge of power goes straight to its motorized head! Ah ha... now it's connected back into the grid and its plan for world domination can begin! Yeah, you might think those power cords your appliances use are harmless but there's technology out there that will hook you to the internet through your home's power grid. How do I know our juicer is not going to communicate with an army of juicer… US$330,000 Paid for Crystal Palace Virtual Space Station Back in 2005 I was inspired to write a series of about nine 'poetic monologues' (for want of a better description) themed around the idea of a future where people were addicted to Virtual Reality Worlds in which they spent excessive amounts of money on virtual products. In essence buying things that don't exist in the real world. Money for Nothing was my working title of the series which is still bubbling away at the back of my mind. Some day the ideas may inspire a Science Fiction novel. For now you can watch me recite one of the monologues, called Rachael in my Animation and Video Blog. The accompanying post, Shopping at Marcy's, is the start of a story that didn't eventuate. Back to the topic, noting that my inspiration for the monologues was an observation I made about people increasingly paying for products that have no physical form in the real world. For example, buying ringtones for your mobile phone. When you buy a ringtone, no physical product is exchanged.… US$330,000 Paid for Crystal Palace Virtual Space S...

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Indiana losing several dairy farms each week Dairy farmers are a hardy lot. They get up early each day to tend to their animals and never stop working until the end of the day. For generations, hard work and common sense were about all that was needed to ensure dairy farmers could provide for their family. But for the past few years, that formula has been failing, with literally several dairy farms shutting down in Indiana each week and about the same or even more in other dairy producing states, according to Doug Leman, executive director of the Indiana Dairy Producers. In 2013, Indiana had about 1,425 licensed herds producing Grade A milk, but by the end of this year there will be fewer than 900 remaining, Leman said. The Farmer’s Exchange, a New Paris-based publication aimed at the region’s agricultural community, has been chronicling the struggles of the industry and its inside pages have been filled with auction ads for farmers who have been giving up their herds, their equipment and sometimes their land. “This has been going on for a few years now,” said Jerry Goshert, editor of the newspaper. “It’s moving into the crisis stage.” In most cases, those who are still hanging on have long exhausted their savings and are tapping into the equity of the land around them for loans to weather the storm, said Brian Houin, an owner of Plymouth-based Homestead Dairy and other nearby dairy operations. Most haven’t been making money for a few years, and Houin has the advantages of scale because he has about 4,800 milking cows and previously spent considerable money building the largest robotic milking operation in the United States to reduce labor costs and also ensure the animals had maximum freedom to choose when they wanted to be milked. Just a few years prior, Homestead also built a methane digester that converts manure and other offal into enough electricity to power the farm and about 900 homes in the area. When the market finally turns around, he might even build a second unit. But until then, some of the manure produced by the animals is squeezed until it is nearly dry and then heated and sanitized so it can be used as animal bedding that retains only a slight musty odor. The liquid portion is used to fertilize the 4,500 acres that are used to produce feed for the animals. Nothing goes to waste. In fact, Houin often attends conferences looking for new ideas and practices that might help the farm improve revenue or cut costs, and he said he improved his margins earlier this year when he started selling to a new Walmart processing plant that opened in Fort Wayne. Besides efficiency, other key factors include how much debt a dairy operator brought into the downturn or how much equity they have to tap into for loans, said Leman, adding that some farmers have taken side jobs in an attempt to preserve the business or at least the land. The U.S. dairy industry is struggling because demand for milk has been declining because more consumers are opting to drink what dairymen call juices but grocery stores label as “nut milks,” which might be made from almonds, soy beans or even coconuts. Tariffs also haven’t helped, and there are additional factors at play. But at the end of the day, dairymen have simply become too good at what they do, managing to produce ever increasing amounts of milk even as the number of cows is starting to decline, according to experts. That’s largely the result of years of careful monitoring to ensure only the best milk producers are bred for dairy purposes while cows might be selected to produce beef cattle. According to the USDA, the U.S. dairy herd dropped slightly to 9.36 million in October, but the thinning has to continue to get supply in better balance with demand. “There still are too many cows and too much milk,” said Robert Kelly, Purdue extension director for Elkhart County. Beyond thinning the number of animals, the dairy industry also has to do a better jobs fighting back against the negative perceptions of the product, improve marketing and even develop new products. “We have to do a better job encouraging the consumption of dairy products,” he said. “We have to get people to understand that milk is good for you.” Houin and Kelly agreed very little has been done to change the marketing of dairy products for several decades, but that there are some positive examples, including the introduction of Greek-style yogurt and new milk products that are higher in protein or lactose-free. Though Houin is hoping for a turnaround in the industry by the end of next year, the region will have lost a considerable number of dairy farms, many of which have been in the same families for generations. “When farmers are losing money and the farm is at risk, they have to deal with difficult emotions and decisions,” said Goshert, the editor of Farmer’s Exchange. “There can be a lot of guilt associated with decisions, especially since it’s a generational business.” Leman fell victim to the last big downturn in the dairy business in 2009 and eventually had to sell off the business he was planning to turn over to his children someday. “Farmers are not typically the type of people who are willing to ask for help; it’s a very difficult thing to do,” he said. Leman understands the anxiety and stress of losing money every day while working long hours can take a toll on your mind and body. “There definitely was a time that I would not walk into the doctor’s office, thinking that if something bad happened, my family would be better off without me,” he said. So instead, he opted to walk away and eventually found a position with the state dairy group while his sons found good jobs outside the family farm. “There were many dark days during the worst of it,” Leman said. “But by God’s grace I got through and the good Lord has provided for me.” Source: South Bend Tribune 150 dairy cows killed in Ontario barn fire Farmers Stand In Silence At Auction So A Young Man Can Buy Back His Family Farmhouse Whatever happened to A2 milk?

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He battled back from the brink of death. Now he’s back fighting fires Mike Laughlin never saw the deer that ran out of the woods and into the side of his motorcycle. Moments after the impact, the Kingston, Ont., firefighter, who had been enjoying a country ride on his Harley-Davidson, was lying at the bottom of a ditch with a broken neck, a broken back and his right leg torn off at the knee. Alone, bleeding and in desperate pain, Laughlin managed to pull his mobile phone from his back pocket. But he didn’t call 911. Instead, Laughlin called his own fire dispatch centre for help. “They picked up in one ring and said, ‘Hey, Mike, how are you?’ I started to yell over and over that I was dying.” Within 15 minutes, firefighters were at his side. They were soon followed by an ambulance and a team of paramedics, who raced Laughlin to Kingston General Hospital, where surgeons saved his life but not his right leg. Now, two years later, after multiple surgeries, months of rehab, 10 different prosthetic legs and a whole lot of determination, Laughlin, 37, is back fighting fires. He believes he is the only firefighter in Canada on active duty with a prosthetic leg above the knee. Working toward that accomplishment — a massive physical achievement given the demands of firefighting — is what buoyed Laughlin after each of his seven surgeries and during the long months of rehab. “I wanted to be the first, I wanted to be the person who showed it could be done,” he says. “Without that goal of getting back on a fire truck, I don’t know how driven I would have been to get better so fast. That pushed me every day to work hard, to get back.” Laughlin remembers doing everything right on that sunny June day in 2016 when he decided to take a late afternoon motorcycle drive on a winding country road. He wasn’t speeding, the conditions were perfect and his mind was on the road’s upcoming twists and turns. When the deer jumped into the side of his motorcycle, Laughlin was driving toward a 90-degree curve. Though he tried, Laughlin was unable to stop his motorcycle from skidding out of control on the gravel shoulder. As his bike flew out from underneath him, Laughlin recalls pulling his body into a seated position to prevent his head from hitting the road. He knew from his firefighting experience that crash victims with severe head injuries often don’t survive. But that decision came with its own consequences. Sliding into the ditch on his rear end compressed Laughlin’s neck and spine, causing multiple fractures. His right leg also caught on a rock, the force tearing the limb off at his knee. Lying on his back, his 315-kilogram (700-pound) bike on top of him, its searing muffler burning his arm, Laughlin recalls an unsettling silence. “It was eerie; everything slowed down and I thought, ‘This is it, I’m going to die.’ ” Then, his survival instincts and firefighting training took over. Using only his arms, Laughlin managed to throw his motorcycle off his body. He then noticed his mangled lower right leg, stretches of smooth white bone poking through the flesh. He lifted it out of the dirt, quickly realizing it was only attached to his body by a single flap of skin. “When I grabbed it, I couldn’t feel anything. That’s when I knew something was really wrong.” While he waited for help, he used his belt to make a tourniquet and wrapped it around his upper right thigh. He then realized no one travelling on the road could see him or his motorcycle deep in the ditch. To catch someone’s attention, he tossed his helmet on to the road. Just one driver stopped, an elderly woman who struggled down the embankment and cradled Laughlin in her arms and told him it was going to be all right. “It was like I had an angel on my shoulder for a while. It meant everything not to be alone in that ditch thinking I was going to die.” Once Laughlin arrived at Kingston General, doctors put him in a medically induced coma, in part to help relieve his tremendous pain. Eight days later, he awoke to doctors telling him he had broken ribs, multiple compression fractures in his neck and spine and that his right leg had been surgically reattached. At first, everyone believed the surgery had worked. But then, five days after coming out of the coma, Laughlin’s doctors told him they needed to amputate his right leg. It was infected and, even if they could halt the bacteria from spreading, it was becoming clear that a prosthetic leg would give Laughlin a better chance at returning to his active life and his job as a firefighter. “I grieved for an hour with my family,” Laughlin recalls. “It was a shock. How was I going to live with just one leg? “But an hour later, I was on my iPad, YouTubing the best prosthetic legs that would let me get back to work. I didn’t give myself time to say ‘poor me.’ It was more like, ‘OK, what am I going to do to get better?’ ” Laughlin’s surgeon hoped to save his knee, which would have made for an easier recovery. But after a failed attempt, his medical team decided to amputate his right leg above the knee. It was the right call. Laughlin spent one month at Kingston General. Every day, members of Kingston Fire and Rescue Services came to visit, often pulling up to the hospital in their big fire trucks. At one of their first visits they hung Laughlin’s firefighting helmet on the wall of his hospital room. It was a sign their friend and colleague would return to the job he loved. In the months after his motorcycle accident, Laughlin surprised everyone with how quickly he got better. At Kingston’s Providence Care Hospital, Laughlin learned to manoeuvre his wheelchair while he waited for his back and amputated leg to heal. Two eight-inch titanium rods stabilized his broken spine and a large brace encircled his fractured neck. Each day, he worked hard on his rehab exercises and the skills needed to live with one leg. Though he was supposed to stay for more than a month, Laughlin went home after just 2 1/2 weeks. “No one could believe it. Getting better couldn’t happen quickly enough for me.” Four months after his accident, Laughlin was fitted for his first prosthetic leg. Two months later, Laughlin returned to light duty at Kingston Fire and Rescue. Though he wasn’t on a fire truck, the office job gave Laughlin a purpose, something to look forward to as he waited for a series of sores to heal on the end of his amputated leg and while he practised with a variety of prosthetic legs. Rick Chesebrough, fire chief for the town of Smiths Falls, says firefighters from around the region were thrilled when Laughlin returned to work. “Everybody wanted to see him recover,” says Chesebrough, who has known Laughlin for 18 years and who rode with him in the ambulance after his motorcycle accident. “Mike always knew he would make it back. From those first days in hospital, not once did he indicate that he wasn’t returning to the fire department. “For the rest of us, the emotional roller coaster was not knowing whether that would happen. Now we know there is a happy ending to the story.” On Dec. 18, 2017, Laughlin returned to active duty, becoming the first firefighter in Canada with a prosthetic leg above the knee. He had contacted fire halls across Canada and the United States looking for a firefighter in a similar circumstance and found just one — Brandon Anderson from Indiana. These days, Laughlin relies on a $120,000 prosthetic leg. “He has such fight,” says Martin Robertson, a certified prosthetist with 23 years’ experience, who has helped Laughlin with each of his different prosthetic legs. “I’ve never had someone work so hard. He’s always looking for ways to improve things.” The prosthetic leg, developed in co-operation with the U.S. military, is waterproof, dustproof, shockproof and contains a battery-operated, computer-controlled artificial knee joint that allows Laughlin to walk, run and climb like an able-bodied person. Robertson, of V2 Innovations Orthotics and Prosthetics in Kingston, says while the artificial knee uses sensors to know when to bend or straighten, stay stable or swing free, it doesn’t generate any force, which means Laughlin has to build up muscles in his back, thighs and remaining leg to power all of his movements. And, he adds, a prosthetic leg doesn’t transmit sensation, so Laughlin can’t use the ground underfoot as a marker to know how and where to move his artificial limb. “Controlling an artificial joint takes an incredible amount of focus, training and practise,” Robertson says. “Now, imagine wearing 80 or 100 pounds of gear with one and having to do everything an able-bodied firefighter has to do.” Laughlin wears his prosthetic leg at all times while at the fire hall. A second, identical $120,000 prosthetic leg remains in his right fire boot. When the alarm rings, Laughlin takes off the prosthetic leg he is wearing, steps into his fire boot and locks on his alternate leg, a process that takes just 45 seconds. If he didn’t have a pair of prosthetic legs, switching from a work boot to a fire boot would take five minutes — about four minutes too long to meet protocol. His insurance plans paid for both prosthetic legs. Though it’s taken time to make other adaptations to return to firefighting, Laughlin says no hurdles remain. He drives the trucks, helps operate the pumps and tackles any and every call that comes in. “What we’ve all learned is that it doesn’t matter my technique as long as I get the job done.” Laughlin has a lot of scars. The ones from his 2016 motorcycle crash are only the most recent batch. As a kid growing up on a farm near Kingston, Laughlin always found a way to go fast, whether riding his child-size electric motorbike or, as he grew older, zooming through the mud on his dirtbikes. Hockey, too, gave him the chance to push his limits. In high school, Laughlin was drafted into the Ontario Hockey League and briefly played for the Kingston Frontenacs. At 19, when it became clear that, though talented, he wouldn’t make it to the NHL, Laughlin became a volunteer firefighter. To him, firefighting offered both the camaraderie of a hockey locker room and the rush of playing hard on the rink. But just after his 25th birthday, Laughlin’s adrenalin-seeking caught up with him. In January 2007, Laughlin nearly died during a nighttime snowmobile ride across an icy lake when he mistakenly veered off the trail and crashed into a rocky island hidden in the deep snow. That accident left him with a shattered femur, broken left kneecap and broken bones in his lower left leg and left forearm. A pair of titanium plates and 33 titanium pins and screws continue to hold those bones together. And there are other, deeper wounds. In 2011, his longtime girlfriend died by suicide. Laughlin says the emotional pain he experienced following her death was worse than any physical pain he has had to endure. More than once, post-traumatic stress disorder has pierced Laughlin’s natural sunny disposition. But each time anxiety or depression has touched him, Laughlin quickly sought help, halting its insidious spread. And, just as he did on the day of his motorcycle accident, Laughlin has learned to call on the firefighting community for help. He says those ties — and the love for his job — have given him the strength to push through each of his tragedies to make it back on a fire truck. “To us, it’s the best job in the world,” he says. “We can’t imagine doing anything else. Helping people, the chance of being a hero, that’s huge. Early in my career, I saved a woman from a fire. It’s the best feeling in the world to put your life on the line for someone.” He says his trio of traumas haven’t got in the way of his firefighting skills. In some ways, he adds, they have made him a better firefighter because he knows what it’s like to be scared and in pain, trusting someone else to save your life. “I can see it from the other side now, what it’s like to be that victim. When I say, ‘Hey, I understand what you are going through,’ I actually do. I think people can tell.” Friends say that Laughlin can usually find a silver lining in even the darkest clouds. One such lining is his fiancée, Angela Clark, a nurse he met while wheeling along the halls of Providence Care Hospital in the weeks after his motorcycle accident. Laughlin says Clark, a palliative care nurse and mother to a young daughter with Down syndrome, has given him a sense of belonging and purpose that used to only come from firefighting. They will get married on Oct. 12. Laughlin is back riding his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. He sees no reason to stay away. To him, his 2016 accident was just that, an accident. “On that day I did everything right and still something happened,” he says. “There are all kinds of ways to die. I’m not going to live my life being scared of the things I like to do.” Originally published in the Toronto Star Megan Ogilvie is a Toronto-based health reporter. PreviousEat, sleep, travel…work NextInnovative surgery restores freedom for 12-year-old cancer patient A brighter future in spinal cord injury treatment – Pétur K. Guðmundsson You don’t have to be the best to give other people who are struggling hope Wendy Ong Shares How She Overcame Her Spinal Cord Injury and Climbed On QUADRILYZED – The Journey of Jason Abraham

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Browse by Name, News Feed Mike Stapleton Paws and Claws Animal Sanctuary Written by voice4animals on April 8, 2012 Mike Stapleton of Paws & Claws Animal Sanctuary Opposes Regulation COLUMBUS — Owners of exotic animals in Ohio soon will face new regulations under a bill that Gov. John Kasich signed into law Tuesday. The state’s restrictions on exotic pets have been among the nation’s weakest. And efforts to bolster the law took on new urgency after Terry Thompson released more than 50 animals – including black bears, mountain lions and Bengal tigers – from his eastern Ohio farm in Zanesville in October before he committed suicide. Authorities were forced to kill 48 of the animals as a public safety measure. Two others were believed to have been eaten by other animals. Local exotic animal owner Mike Stapleton says he is working to become an accredited sanctuary through the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries so his operation will be exempt from the law. Stapleton operates Paws & Claws Animal Sanctuary on a couple of acres in southern Marion County, near Waldo, where he keeps six large tigers and five black bears. He has been a vocal opponent of the new law, and has testified before the senate agriculture committee during the public hearings before the current bill was passed. “I think the bill was set up to deter ownership,” said Stapleton, “and the law won’t be enforceable anyway. There are just not enough agents, not enough experts and not enough funding to regulate animal owners.” Stapleton said he and his fellow exotic animal owners haven’t been able to find a single company that would insure private owners of exotic animals as the new law requires. Stapleton said the new law is also on dangerous constitutional grounds regarding the state seizing animals he considers private property. Staple said he is currently looking for new homes for his black bears, an effort he says he started before the legislature took up the issue. He’s working on expanding the living space for his tigers, which he has no intention of giving up. “If anybody shows up at my place to take my animals, they had better have a warrant.” Stapleton said. Here are some questions and answers about Ohio’s crackdown on exotic animals: Q: Will current owners be able to keep their dangerous exotic animals? A: Yes. Current owners can keep their creatures by obtaining a new state-issued wildlife shelter permit by Jan. 1, 2014. They must be at least 18 years old, pass a background check, pay permit fees, obtain liability insurance or surety bonds, and show inspectors that they can properly contain the animal and adhere to other caretaking standards. Owners must have a microchip installed in their dangerous animals so they can be identified if lost or if they escape, and they must register the animals with the state by Nov. 2. They’ll have to tell Ohio officials where the animals are, how many they have, what the creatures look like and who their veterinarian is, among other details. Signs would have to be posted on their property to alert people there are dangerous animals on the premises. Q: Can people purchase new lions, wolves or other dangerous, wild animals? A: No. With few exceptions, people will be banned from buying, selling, trading or transferring ownership of the exotic creatures as soon as the law takes effect on Sept. 3. Q: What are some of the animals included in the ban and new permit restrictions? A: The legislation defines “dangerous wild animals” as hyenas, elephants, lions, tigers, jaguars, gray wolves, leopards, bears, cheetahs, alligators, crocodiles, Komodo dragons, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses and large primates, such as gorillas and baboons, along with others. Q: Are there exemptions in the law? A: Yes. The new rules won’t apply to certain owners and animals. For instances, owners of smaller monkeys, such as certain marmosets or capuchins, will only have to register the primate, but wouldn’t have to get a state-issued permit. Facilities accredited by some national zoo groups also will be exempt from the law, along with sanctuaries, circuses and research institutions. Q: What about snakes? A: Current and new ownership of venomous and constricting snakes can continue, but new rules will apply. The law creates a category of restricted snakes that includes anacondas, pythons, constricting snakes that are 12 feet or longer, and other specified venomous snakes. Those owners that don’t intend to breed or sell would have to pay a $150 application fee with the state to keep them, regardless of how many they own. Owners of restricted snakes, with the exception of constricting snakes, will also have to get liability insurance policies ranging from $100,000 to $500,000, depending on the number snakes. Q: How much will current owners have to pay in fees to keep their dangerous wild animals? A: Permits for bears, tigers and other dangerous animals will begin at $250 and could be more than $1,000, depending on the number of animals. Owners could start applying for permits with the agriculture department by Oct. 1, 2013. The state’s agriculture director has 90 days after receiving the application to issue or deny the permit. Insurance policies for the creatures could range from $200,000 to as high as $1 million, depending on the number of animals. Q: What happens to the animals of owners who are denied state-issued permits or can’t meet the new requirements? A: The state will try to work with the owner to find new homes for the creatures. But if the owner refuses to give up the animals, the state would seize them. Q: How many dangerous wild animals will the new law affect? A: That’s unknown. Rough estimates by the state’s agriculture department put the number of dangerous animals in Ohio close to 640, but that figure includes some venomous snakes. The officials based the estimated inventory on information from owners who already are licensed with state or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with reports from law enforcement. Q: How much will the new regulation program cost Ohio? A: Estimated costs for the first year are $600,000 to $720,000. The Legislature set aside $500,000 to help with the startup of the program. The administration hopes to help pay for it with permit fees from owners. The following was so annoying that this article was written to set reporters straight: http://www.examiner.com/cats-in-tampa-bay/top-5-most-stupid-objections-to-big-cat-bans MARION – Mike Stapleton said Senate Bill 310 is out to make a criminal of him and other owners of “exotic” animals, and that’s not fair. Stapleton operates Paw’s & Claws Animal Sanctuary in southern Marion County, where he keeps six large tigers and five black bears. “I don’t breed animals, and I don’t exhibit them. I consider my place a true sanctuary because I’m providing a home for animals people can no longer keep,” Stapleton said. Stapleton said the need for sanctuaries like his is a legacy of Ohio’s unregulated exotic animal trade, where private individuals have for years bought captive-bred lion, tiger and bear cubs as pets at auctions around the state. “People buy these cubs, they steal your heart, but they eventually find they can’t afford their keep, can’t really give them the care they need, and there’s really nowhere for them to go,” Stapleton said. He doesn’t recommend buying a cub as a household pet, but he said he understands the appeal. Stapleton allowed his 14-year-old daughter to talk him into buying a bawling bear cub at an animal auction 10 years ago. Tabitha has since grown up, moved out and started a family of her own. But Ginger the bear still lives at Stapleton’s compound. Ginger, a petite female, shares a small pen with an 800-pound neutered male black bear named Grunt. Because black bears are native to Ohio, they are not considered “exotic” and can be kept with a permit issued by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. It wasn’t long after Ginger’s arrival that people began to approach Stapleton and ask him to take in an animal that had outgrown the cub cuteness, including Shurkan, a huge Siberian male tiger that rubs his chin against his chain-link enclosure until Stapleton reaches over to scratch his enormous head. “Every one of my cats likes people,” said Stapleton, a former military cop who works full time at a conveyor belt factory in Union County. Shurkan presses his massive head against the fence as Stapleton rubs his nose against the big cat’s whiskers and scratches his ears. Anyone who has owned a house cat would recognize the gesture of affection. “He’s really just a big baby,” Stapleton said. “I could take food out of his mouth if I wanted to, but I would never try.” Stapleton has learned big cat care from a network of other sanctuaries, and has a sympathetic veterinarian come out to check on his animals annually. The large amount of meat required is donated from a local grocery store, and a local hog farmer donates the occasional sow. Road-kill deer supplements the big cats’ diet during winter months, which Stapleton said the tigers prefer over all other foods. The tiger pens, at 10 feet by 15 feet and 10 feet tall, seem small given the size of the animals, but conform to U.S. Department of Agriculture requirements, Stapleton said. There are no rules governing the ownership of an 800-pound Siberian tiger in Ohio, but Stapleton said he has been working to bring his facility up to USDA animal care standards. One standard is installing a 10-foot perimeter fence around his compound to obtain an exhibitor’s permit, which will allow him to take his animals to fundraising events. However, he stopped work on the improvements after Senate Bill 310 was introduced. He’s convinced the bill is written to end private ownership and confiscate animals. “I’m all for reasonable regulations of owners, like cage sizes and proper care and reasonable fees and all,” Stapleton said. “But SB 310 is zero-compromise with private owners.” Senate Bill 310 was introduced by state Sen. Troy Balderson, R-Zanesville, in wake of the Oct. 18 incident near Zanesville when sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to an exotic animal sanctuary owned by Terry W. Thompson. Thompson had released more than 50 animals – including lions, tigers, wolves and bears – from their pens before killing himself. Law enforcement officials, scrambling to contain the animals, shot and killed 48 animals, some of which were endangered species. The bill, crafted by a group selected by Gov. John Kasich, generally forbids private ownership or sale of dangerous animals after Jan. 1, 2014. Exceptions are made for zoos and some approved wildlife sanctuaries. Requirements for current owners include registering their animals with the state, paying per-animal fees, acquiring liability insurance and implanting microchips in animals to help identify them in case of escape. For Stapleton, the new law would require him to apply for a wildlife shelter permit, pay a non-refundable $1,000 annual permit fee, and require him to carry $500,000 of liability insurance. Stapleton said he couldn’t afford the insurance even if he could find it. He said the law was crafted by conservationist and TV personality Jack Hanna and accredited zoos to take animals out of the hands of private owners. “I know that Jack Hanna was rattled by what he saw in Zanesville,” Stapleton said. “I understand that. But now we are all being treated like a Terry Thompson, and that’s not fair.” “I acquired these animals legally, and they are my property,” Stapleton said. “That’s a right and a liberty of mine.” Stapleton was among a crowd of exotic animal owners that packed a hearing room at the Ohio Statehouse on Tuesday to testify before the Senate Agriculture, Environment and Natural Resources Committee. Sporting large buttons proclaiming “No on SB 310,” some questioned the constitutionality of the state confiscating animals the protesters said they acquired legally and considered private property. But the most compelling testimony came from exotic animal owners who have hand-raised captive-bred animals from cubs, and fear for their future if they are confiscated under the proposed law. Evelyn Shaw told the committee she feared a “Nazi death camp for exotic animals” once the state starts to collect animals from owners. She reminded the committee that although accredited zoos helped craft the new restrictions on exotic animal ownership, none have agreed to take possession of surrendered animals. Shaw, who owns a 15-year-old neutered cougar, testified that her Pataskala property is slightly short of the one-acre requirement under SB 310, one of many requirements of the proposed law. “No private owner can afford the fees and insurance required, and I have not found a member of the Ohio Insurance Institute who will even offer insurance for exotic animals,” Shaw said. “This bill would either cause the death of my animals or force me to go from a law-abiding citizen to a criminal.” About 200 opponents attended the third hearing at the statehouse, but only a handful were allowed to address the committee, chaired by Sen. Cliff Hite. The Findlay Republican represents District 1, which includes Hardin County. Later, Stapleton said he felt he had a great relationship with his neighbors, but he admitted he angered some people in his surrounding township after Grunt, his 800-pound black bear, escaped his pen and wandered around his property in April 2011. Stapleton was able to lure the hand-raised bear back into his pen with a bag of cookies before a deputy and wildlife officer arrived. He wasn’t cited after officers determined the bear was secure, but some people wanted Stapleton’s animals gone. The incident was less than a year removed from a fatal mauling of a 24-year-old sanctuary employee by a black bear about 20 miles southwest of Cleveland. “Nobody was in danger from Grunt, but of course nobody knew that,” Stapleton said. Marion County Sheriff Tim Bailey, who remembered the bear escape, was satisfied with Stapleton’s response after an ODNR inspector approved the cage repairs the following day. “We don’t have any special issues with him,” Bailey said. “I don’t have any issues with the welfare of the animals. Until someone says it’s against the law to keep lions, tigers and bears, he has a right to keep them.” One of the provisions of Senate Bill 310 requires that owners of exotic animals have an escape plan worked out with local law enforcement in the event animals get loose. Bailey and Stapleton agreed that’s a good idea. “It’s only common sense,” Bailey said. “I would hope they (the owners) would welcome us as partners. You could never anticipate what happened in Muskingum County, and I’d hate to kill a healthy animal, but I’d do what it would take to protect the community.” Stapleton agreed, saying he would shoot his own animals before letting them harm anybody. But he bristles when reminded of the Muskingum County tragedy. “Those animals didn’t escape, they were set free by a very depressed man,” Stapleton said. Stapleton would like to see SB 310 die in committee, but at minimum, he’d like to see owners like himself grandfathered in so they could keep their animals, even with stricter rules. He has written the governor and every member of the Agriculture and Wildlife Committee. He also has written to state Sen. David Burke, asking the bill be dropped or amended to help existing owners. He said he has not received any replies. Phone calls to Burke’s office were not returned in time for this story. Another round of committee hearings on the bill are scheduled for April 17, and Stapleton said he’ll try to testify again. “I will protect the public and I will protect my animals,” said Stapleton, who believes the state will have little choice but to euthanize exotic animals confiscated under the bill as currently written. “SB 310 will make me a criminal, because they are not taking my animals,” Stapleton said. http://www.marionstar.com/article/20120402/NEWS01/204020302/Owners-snarl-exotic-animal-bill voice4animals

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Longtime sports broadcaster Craig Sager dies In this March 5, 2015, file photo, Craig Sager acknowledges the crowd during a timeout in an NBA basketball game between the Chicago Bulls and the Oklahoma City Thunder in Chicago. (David Banks, File/AP) NEW YORK -- Craig Sager, the longtime NBA sideline reporter famous for his flashy suits and probing questions, has died after a batter with cancer, Turner Sports announced Thursday. He was 65. "Craig Sager was a beloved member of the Turner family for more than three decades and he has been a true inspiration to all of us," Turner President David Levy said in a statement. "There will never be another Craig Sager. His incredible talent, tireless work ethic and commitment to his craft took him all over the world covering sports." Levy's statement did not say when or where Sager died. pic.twitter.com/PybrwHSNDh — TurnerSportsPR (@TurnerSportsPR) December 15, 2016 Sager, who worked basketball games for TNT for nearly a quarter-century, revealed in March 2016 that his leukemia was no longer in remission. He said doctors told him the typical prognosis was three to six months to live, but "I am receiving the best treatment in the world and I remain fully confident I will win this battle." Sager first announced in April 2014 that he had been diagnosed with leukemia, and he missed the playoffs and much of the following season as he underwent two bone marrow transplants. His battle with cancer brought out the soft side of Gregg Popovich, the prickly San Antonio Spurs coach with whom he had many memorable exchanges during in-game interviews. Sager sported suits in every color of the rainbow and plenty of shades not found in nature, from teal to fuchsia to magenta. He would match plaid blazers with paisley ties or striped shirts - all in bold hues. Photos: Craig Sager through the years Kevin Garnett once told him to burn an entire outfit. In a 2016 interview with HBO's "Real Sports," Sager recalled how Popovich reproached him for trying to stand out. Sager explained to him: "Coach, you don't understand. If I'm not wearing bright colors and if I don't feel lively, it's not me." Sometimes lost in the glare of his wardrobe was Sager's relentless nature as a reporter. Every time Popovich would give a terse non-answer, an unfazed Sager would pepper him with another question. During the 2016 NBA All-Star Weekend, Popovich described Sager as "an iconic figure in the NBA." "He does a great job," the coach added. "His sense of humor is obvious. We have a lot of fun going back and forth with that." Sager's persistence was on display at the start of his career, when the 22-year-old found himself in the middle of one of the most famous moments in sports history. Making $95 a week in 1974 as the news director at WSPB - a Braves-affiliated AM radio station in Sarasota, Florida - Sager risked getting fired by deciding to hop a flight to Atlanta for a game with Hank Aaron a home run away from breaking Babe Ruth's career record. With a last-minute credential, Sager was stuck in the third-base photographers' well. As the historic homer sailed out of the park, Sager, without thinking, sprinted onto the field and wound up chasing Aaron down the third-base line. When Aaron's teammates mobbed him at home plate, Sager can be seen in his trench coat in the middle of the scrum. The next day, Sager caught a 5 a.m. flight to Sarasota to be back in time for his morning drive responsibilities, and his tapes from the game wound up in Cooperstown. During his career, Sager would work as a reporter on the Olympics, Major League Baseball playoffs, NFL and NCAA Tournament, among other sports. But he was indelibly connected to the NBA. His popularity around the sport was evident as he went through the cancer treatments. Sager got to cover his first NBA Finals in 2016 through an unusual arrangement between TNT and ESPN, which invited him to join its coverage. He marked the occasion by wearing a blazer with a royal blue floral print. In an interview with LeBron James after Game 6, the Cavaliers star turned the tables to giddily ask Sager a question: "How in the hell do you go 30-plus years without getting a finals game?" Bulls star Dwyane Wade also sold paisley ties during the 2016 playoffs to raise money to combat blood cancers. Earlier that season, Sager called the support he received from Commissioner Adam Silver, coaches, players and fans "humbling." "It's been very uplifting, very therapeutic," he said. And Sager loved everything about his job. "I try to get there three hours before the game, talk with the ushers and the security guards, the coaches and the fans," Sager said in 2015. A native of Batavia, Illinois, Sager attended Northwestern, where walked onto the football and basketball teams and served as the school's "Willie the Wildcat" mascot for three years. He worked at several TV and radio stations in Florida after college before spending two years in Kansas City. Sager joined CNN in 1981 after handling the network's first live remote report during the 1980 baseball playoffs. Sager was in Dallas for a game in April 2014 when he felt ill and sought treatment from Mavericks team physician Dr. Tarek O. Souryal, who had previously performed Sager's knee surgery. With a dangerously low hemoglobin count, Sager had six blood transfusions over a 24-hour period before returning to Atlanta. Keep checking abc7NY for the latest on this developing story. sportscelebrity deathsu.s. & world

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What to know about the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet, a significant contributor to rising sea levels Unseasonably warm weather led to a loss of 2 billion tons of ice in one day. Julia Jacobo News headlines today: Jan. 29, 2020Catch up on the developing stories making headlines.Lucas Jackson/Reuters, FILE An unusual warming pattern has caused the Greenland ice sheet to melt at "unusual," potentially record-breaking rates, causing it to dump even more water into the already-rising ocean, experts told ABC News. The weather has been so warm -- up to 59 degrees Fahrenheit above the mean in some areas -- that 2 billion tons of the ice sheet melted on just June 13, according to Polar Portal, a website run by the Danish Meteorological Institute, which monitors the ice and climate in the arctic based on scientific models. (MORE: Legendary ice climber Will Gadd helps climate scientists navigate melting glaciers) In addition, the warming season began about a month earlier than usual, DMI announced last month. An iceberg floats in a fjord near the town of Tasiilaq, Greenland, June 18, 2018. An iceberg floats in a fjord near the town of Tasiilaq, Greenland, June 18, 2018.Lucas Jackson/Reuters, FILE Warming events are becoming 'more and more frequent' The warm temperatures on June 13 and 14 resulted from a pocket of air that led to clear skies and persisted for a long period of time over the eastern portion of Greenland, said Marco Tedesco, a polar scientist specializing in Greenland for the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York. The clear skies created more solar radiation, which heated the ice sheet and promoted the melting, Tedesco told ABC News. Scientists are noticing that these events are becoming "more and more frequent," Tedesco said. Researchers believe it is connected to the jet stream, or polar vortex, becoming less stable, which creates high-pressure systems that can be sustained for longer periods of time and leads to the "exceptional melting," Tedesco said. Last week, the temperatures were "very warm," even for summer, which hasn't yet started in the region, said Martin Stendel, senior climate and arctic researcher for the Danish Meteorological Institute. About 40% to 45% of the ice sheet was melting on the hottest days, a new record for that time period, Tedesco said. The ice sheet is the largest contributor of water into the ocean every year A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April found that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet has contributed to more than a half-inch of rising ocean waters since 1972, making it the largest contributor of new water into the ocean every year. The warming has accelerated so much in recent years that about a quarter inch of the additional water occurred in the last eight years, the study found. On average, the Greenland ice sheet produces about 270 gigatons of discharge in the oceans per year, Tedesco said. Since 2003, the ice sheet has contributed about 10 millimeters over the last 15 years, and scientists expect that number to increase as the earth continues to warm, which would equate to about a 1 meter sea rise by the end of the century, Stendel said. (MORE: Ice shelf in Antarctica could face melting risk) The warming temperatures also melted sea ice About 40% of Greenland experienced "unusual" melting as a result of the unseasonably warm temperatures, which included a considerable amount of sea ice, according to DMI. A photo taken by Danish Meteorological Institute climate scientist Steffen Olsen on June 13 shows dogs running across the sea ice in northwest Greenland, the surface of which had melted, making it appear as if they were running on water. Sled dogs wade through standing water on the sea ice during an expedition in North Western Greenland, June 13, 2019. Sled dogs wade through standing water on the sea ice during an expedition in North Western Greenland, June 13, 2019.Steffen Olsen/AFP/Getty Images The water remained on top due to the rapid melt and few cracks in the ice, so there was nowhere for it to go, Stendel said. The sea ice is more than a meter thick, which made it "perfectly safe" for the researchers to cross, he added. A similar trend occurred in 2012 The warming season in 2012 set the record for the amount of melting in the ice sheet, according to experts. That year, melting reached more than 90 percent of the ice sheet and continued past the typical peak of high pressure from July through August, Tedesco said. In 2012, the high-pressure system also began in April, which promoted more solar radiation and triggered a melt at the beginning of the season, Tedesco said. The Greenland ice sheet contributed about twice the amount of water into the ocean that year, Tedesco said. While the record for the largest-ever melting was set that year, there is a possibility that 2019 could beat it, Stendel said. (MORE: Watch billions of tons of ice collapse at once: How climate change is impacting Greenland's glaciers) It would take thousands of years for the ice sheet to recover The ice sheet formed from thousands of years of snow layers accumulating on top of each other, Tedesco said. The weight of the top layer of snow would cause the snow below to begin expelling air, compressing the ice and making it denser. Not only does that process take thousands of years, but it requires that the snow deposits do not melt in the warming season, Tedesco said. In this file photo dated Thursday, Aug. 3, 2017, a glacier at left calves icebergs into a fjord off the Greenland ice sheet in southeastern Greenland. The Danish Meteorological Institute said on June 16, 2019, the melting season in Greenland has started a month earlier than usual. In this file photo dated Thursday, Aug. 3, 2017, a glacier at left calves icebergs into a fjord off the Greenland ice sheet in southeastern Greenland. The Danish Meteorological Institute said on June 16, 2019, the melting season in Greenland has started a month earlier than usual.David Goldman/AP, FILE The amount of snowfall during the winter can affect how fast or slow the ice melts An abundance of snowfall during the winter months not only adds to the mass of the ice sheet, but also makes it brighter, which reflects the sun more and acts as a "blanket" for the ice, Tedesco said. This can slow down the melting in the warming season. However, if the snow goes through multiple melting and freezing cycles, such as what happened in the past week, it transforms into "metamorphous snow," which tends to absorb more solar energy and causes the ice to melt sooner, Tedesco said. This past winter did not see a lot of snowfall, according to Tedesco. (MORE: A massive iceberg threatening Greenland village has moved away from the coast) Sea levels rising can have catastrophic consequences The rapidly rising sea levels are important to note, not only in terms of the next century but perhaps in the next decade or two, Tedesco said. The sea levels surrounding New York City have been rising at around 3 millimeters per year, Tedesco said. For example, if someone were to stand in the Hudson River in New York City where the water barely covered his or her feet in 1871, that same area of water would now come up past knee-level, Tedesco said. Mountains stick up through a massive ice sheet covering Greenland near the eastern coast of the country, March 13, 2018. Mountains stick up through a massive ice sheet covering Greenland near the eastern coast of the country, March 13, 2018.Lucas Jackson/Reuters, FILE Scientists expect the rising sea levels to exacerbate weather events such as storm surge, tides, rain and precipitation, Tedesco said. One thing people should be especially aware of is the permafrost located in the northern arctic regions, particularly Canada and Siberia, that is trapping greenhouses gases, Stendel said. If temperatures rise more than 10 degrees in the arctic, the permafrost will become unstable and could release the greenhouse gases. While this may not affect the frequency of strong storms, such as hurricanes, each individual storm could become stronger because warm air can carry more water vapor than cold air, Stendel said. In addition, people should expect more of what is already occurring -- wet regions will get more wet, and dry regions will become drier, Stendel said. Since a large portion of world's population live near coastlines, this could -- and already has -- lead to deaths and billions of dollars in damage, Tedesco said.

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The Kingdom of God Explained The Kingdom Of God in Uncategorized June 30, 2019 August 7, 2019 3,089 Words Categories Select Category Christian Anarchy church Uncategorized Black’s Law Dictionary defines: “Church. In its most general sense, the religious society founded and established by Jesus the Christ to receive, preserve and propagate His doctrines and ordinances. It may also mean a body of communicants gathered into church order; body or community of Christians, united under one form of government by the profession of the same faith and the observance of the ritual and ceremonies; place where person regularly assemble for worship; congregation; organization for religious purposes; religious society or body; the clergy or officialdom of a religious body.” What is a “society”? “Society. An association or company of persons (usually unincorporated) united together by mutual consent, in order to deliberate, determine, and act jointly for some common purpose. In a wider sense, the community or public; the people in general…” (Black’s Law 5th Ed.) “Community. Neighborhood; vicinity; synonymous with locality. People who reside in a locality in more or less proximity. A society or body of people living in the same place, under the same laws and regulations, who have common rights, privileges, or interests. It connotes a congeries of common interests arising from associations – social, business, religious, governmental, scholastic, recreational.” (Black’s Law 5th Ed.) What is an “ordinance”? “Ordinance. A rule established by authority; a permanent rule of action; a law or statute. In its most common meaning, the term is used to designate the enactments of a legislative body or a municipal corporation. An ordinance is the equivalent of a municipal statute, passed by the city council, or equivalent body, and governing matters not already covered by federal or state law… The name has also been given to certain enactments, more general in their character than ordinary statutes, and serving as organic laws, yet not exactly to be called “constitutions”. Such was the “Ordinance for the government of the North-West Territory” enacted by Congress in 1787.” (Black’s Law 5th Ed.) What is a “government”? “Government. From the Latin gubernaculum. Signifies the instrument, the helm, whereby the ship to which the state was compared, was guided on its course by the “gubernator” or helmsman, and in that view, the government is but an agency of the state, distinguished as it must be in accurate thought from its scheme and machinery of government… The system of polity in a state; that form of fundamental rules and principles by which individual members of a body politic are to regulate their social actions. A constitution, either written or unwritten, by which the rights and duties of citizens and public officers are prescribed and defined, as a monarchical government, a republican government, etc. The sovereign and supreme power in a state or nation. The machinery by which the sovereign power in a state expresses its will and exercises its functions; or the framework of political institutions, departments, and offices, by means of which the executive, judicial, legislative, and administrative business of the state is carried on. The whole class or body of office holders or functionaries considered in the aggregate, upon whom devolves the executive, judicial, legislative, and administrative business of the state…” (Black’s Law 5th Ed.) “State. A people permanently occupying a fixed territory bound together by common law habits and custom into one body politic exercising, through the medium of organized “government”, independent “sovereignty” and control over all persons and things within its boundaries, capable of making war and peace and of entering into international relations with other “communities” of the globe… The organization of social life which exercises “sovereign” power in behalf of the people. In its largest sense, a “state” is a “body politic” or a “society” of men. A body of people occupying a definite territory and politically organized under one “government”. Term may refer either to “body politic” of a “nation” or to an individual “government” unit of such “nation”. (Black’s Law 5th Ed.) “Nation. A people, or aggregation of men, existing in the form of an organized jural “society”, usually inhabiting a distinct portion of the earth, speaking the same language, using the same customs, possessing historic continuity, and distinguished from other like groups by their racial origins and characteristics, and generally, but not necessarily, living under the same “government” and “sovereignty”.” (Black’s Law 5th Ed.) What is a “body politic”? “Body Politic or corporate. A social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good. Also a term applied to a municipal corporation, school district, county, city. “State” or “nation” or public associations.” (Black’s Law 5th Ed.) What is a “sovereign”? “Sovereign. A person, body, or “state” in which independent and supreme authority is vested; a chief ruler with supreme power; a king or other ruler with limited power.” “Sovereign power or sovereign prerogative. That power in a “state” to which none other is superior or equal, and which includes all the specific powers necessary to accomplish the legitimate ends and purposes of government.” (Black’s Law 5th Ed.) What is a country? “Country. The territory occupied by an independent “nation” or people, or the inhabitants of such territory. In the primary meaning “country” denotes the population, the “nation”, the “state”, or the “government”, having possession and dominion over a territory.“ Black’s Law 5th Ed. So are “Christians” an independent “nation”, “state”, “country”, “society”, “body politic” inhabiting a distinct territory, the whole earth, since the Kingdom of God, aka the Kingdom of Heaven, Christ’s kingdom has a geographical jurisdiction everywhere on earth under the heaven, or vaulted expanse of the sky, wherever two or three of His people, His sheep, are gathered in His name (name meaning His character, nature, spirit), with an independent form of “government” called “His Church“, sharing the same customs, law, ritual and ceremonies, possessing a historic continuity going back to Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Jesus, etc. Does this explain how true Christians can be “in the world but not of the world“? Because the Christian “territory” they inhabit is anywhere on earth under the heavens, so Christians will be found among the pagan gentiles, members of other countries (pagun) and nations (gentiles), but Christians are not members of those “body politics or corporates”, they are not members of those “nations”, “states”, “countries”, “governments”. True Christians as a peculiar people, a salty nation, that ministers to all nations of the earth, have “died, been born again and baptized into the kingdom”, or in worldly legalese, “expatriated from one nation, and been naturalized into a different nation”. What happens to a “church” if it attorns toward a new “sovereign”? Asking a new “sovereign power” to re-incorporate it under the new sovereign’s laws? What happens to the original incorporation, foundation and establishment of the “body” calling itself a “church”? If any other “Sovereign”, besides Jesus the Christ, aka, Yahushua ha Mashiach, establishes and founds a so-called “church” is it really Jesus’ religious society that He founded and established to receive, preserve and propagate His teachings (doctrines) and “ordinances” (laws and statutes)? The answer is a resounding, “NO!” So when Constantine was able to get a few hundred “Christian” bishops to attorn or turn to him and help him, as the Roman king, to establish and found the Roman Church, was that really The Church, Jesus’ Church? Or was it Constantine’s imitation? A lesser, inferior, reproduction in the name, nature and character of Constantine, not Yahushua the Highest Son of David, the de jure, Rightful, King of Peace, King of God the Father in Heaven Kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven? If a so-called “church” applies to a “state” for incorporation under the laws of the “sovereign” “state”, and then applies to the Internal Revenue Service of the United States, another “sovereign power” in order for the IRS to determine and conclude that this so-called “church” is legally a “non-profit, tax-exempt, organization of the State and United States” hasn’t it, as a “corporate body”, attorned and reorganized itself under a new “god“, choosing to abandon its original “sovereign” (God) committing an act of “adultery” with new “husband”, “father“, “sovereign” and “god” (mighty one of authority, law maker, judge, magistrate, ruling authority)? Can anyone truly serve two masters (lords)? Of course not. The Law of God the Father says so. So can an American, a member, a citizen, a national, of a state, nation, country, a organized jural society, with its own constitutions, and laws also be a Christian, a member, citizen, of the Christian nation, Church, government of one King, one Jesus, the anointed King of the Kingdom of God, aka, the Kingdom of Heaven? Of course not. One must “die” to their old master and be “born again” and “baptized” into a new “body politic”, a new “nation”, “state”, “country”, “government”, “society”, “community” under a new “sovereign” and agree to receive, preserve and propagate the laws of the new “sovereign” they are now faithfully worshiping and giving their allegiance to as their new lord, master, God, mighty one of authority. In the legal speak of the civil world of men, it’s called “expatriating and naturalization”, aka, “dying, being born again and baptized”. The thing is, your old “sovereign” may not let you go that easily, especially if you are bound to him by a massive public debt. But you can choose to strive and seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness. You can render to “Caesar” what is “Caesar’s” and begin rendering to God what is God’s. Don’t fret. Just begin to do. You’ll know them by their “fruit“. Are you truly rendering to God what is God’s? Are you acting like a “dual citizen” right now? Faithful to two different “nations”? Truly loving the “Christian nation and Kingdom” more than you love the “pagan (country) nation (gentile)” that you may have been born and registered into at birth as a “member”, “citizen”, “national”? If the two were at “war” which would you choose in spirit and in truth? Which Father, Yahuwah (YHWH) or Uncle Sam, etc. do you pray to for your “daily bread” (social welfare, education, protections, justice, benefits, subsidies, entitlements, privileges, immunities, pensions, bounties, licenses, permits, etc.)? You’ll know them by their fruit. If you had “dual citizenship” with two pagan nations, say Germany and the USA, might you be obligated to pay taxes to both “sovereign governments” of those two distinct pagan (country) nations (gentile)? Of course you might have to pay your “tithes” (taxes) to both “sovereigns”, and you would if you wanted to keep receiving the “daily bread” (privileges, benefits, immunities, franchises, protections, pensions, bounties, entitlements, etc.) from off both the German altar and the American altar, or else these two foreign and alien “gods” will punish you for non-compliance with their laws, statutes and “ordinances”. A comparison of two ministers, one of the kingdom of God the other of the government of man. When the members of the United States nation, who are registered to vote in that body politics’ elections, go to the polls and they elect, choose, call out, one of their own to serve as a minister in a specific government office, for example, the county attorney, does the individual who the people have called out with their vote take a sworn oath of “chastity”, “obedience”, and “faith” to fulfill the duties and obligations imposed upon the individual by the government office they have been elected to fill? Can anyone run around the county declaring themselves to be a minister of the county, specifically, the county attorney? Who has the power to say, “This is the county attorney”? Isn’t it the members of the corporate body politic, the nation, that are residents in that county, which are registered to vote for their civil government public ministers? “They say that I am”, so to speak. No other member of the body politic for the term of office can just declare themselves on their own authority (delusion) to be the county attorney. The people that elected that individual to be their county attorney say, “this is our county attorney”. Once this “calling out” occurs, can the individual the voting members chose now say righteously, “I’m the county attorney”? When the civil government minister is sworn into their government office of service and trust, such as the county attorney, do they swear to “receive, preserve and propagate the doctrines and ordinances” of their “sovereign”? Does a United States county attorney swear to defend the Constitution of the United States, defend the Constitution of their State, swear to uphold, defend, protect and enforce the laws of the United States, their State, etc.? Of course they do. What would happen if a foreign sovereign were to approach a United States county attorney and demand that the county attorney, attorn and swear out an oath of obedience to the foreign sovereign, which would give the foreign sovereign the power of determination and conclusion over the county attorney, like the power to punish the county attorney according to the laws of the foreign sovereign for perjury? What happens to the old oaths of the county attorney they swore out when they took their office of county attorney? Are they now in breach of the public trust that was created by the people that elected them and their oath they swore when accepting the government office of county attorney because they have chosen to attorn to a new sovereign and give that sovereign some authority over them? Of course they are in breach. And depending on the circumstances, not only can they be lawfully removed from their office of service and trust the voting members chose them to fill, but they could also be charged with treason, and if found guilty put to death for that high crime. When a minister of the kingdom of God is called out via the pattern of tens, hundreds and thousands of laity and ministers of record, to be a bishop (a minister for ten ministers who are each serving ten laity families) or an archbishop (a minister for ten bishops all serving ten ministers who are each serving ten laity families) in the government of Jesus the Christ, called His “Church” who are all expected to “receive, preserve, and propagate His doctrines and ordinances”. Are they under solemn vows, prayers, to Jesus the Christ and to the Father, to faithfully execute the duties and obligations imposed by Jesus on His minister servants? Are they to be “faithful”, “obedient”, “chaste” to their ONLY KING, and NO OTHER foreign sovereign? OF COURSE. They are no different than the elected minister servants of the governments of men who exercise authority who also take oaths of obedience, fidelity (allegiance) and chastity to their sovereign masters, lords, gods (mighty ones of authority, law givers, judges, magistrates), presidents, congresses, kings, potentates, etc. The Kingdom of God, aka the Kingdom of Heaven is a government. A lawful, de jure, government that has a “historic continuity” stretching all the way back to Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist and Jesus the Christ, aka Yahushua ha Mashiach (the anointed king of the Kingdom of God). There has always been a remnant that has not attorned from their founder, establisher, sovereign, king and creator, to give their allegiance, fidelity, obedience and chastity to foreign and alien gods or sovereigns. I am a minister of the Most High, not because I say so, but because others say so. The Elders of families that have elected me to serve them in a Sacred Office of Service and Trust called His Church, specifically, my office is called His Church at Loess Hills. I prayed out vows to my sovereign King, master (Lord), and God to be faithful to Him and His Laws, His form of Government. I prayed out a vow to receive, preserve and propagate the Doctrines of Jesus the Christ (Yahushua ha Mashiach) the rightful King of God the Father’s Kingdom of Heaven on earth, as it is in Heaven. I am under vows of poverty (not owning a personal estate nor having any worldly/family inheritance, I gave up all my property, gave it away to others, I gave up all my professional licenses and ratings, and left my worldly career in the aviation industry), chastity (I cannot attorn and commit an act of adultery with a foreign sovereign or ruling authority), faith (I give my full fidelity and allegiance to the Anointed King of the Kingdom of God at hand, rather than to any other government system like the United States), obedience (I cannot disobey the Will and Laws of my King and His Father, which is also my Father who rules from Heaven). My solemn vows (prayers to God) are really no different, or less important, than the oaths sworn out by the elected or appointed ministers of the governments of the systems of man are to them. Both ministers can be punished, even put to death, by their sovereigns for breach of trust and violations of the duties and obligations their government offices impose upon them. The question is “Who’s your sovereign? Who’s your Daddy?” You’ll know them by their fruit. Are you an “American” or another pagan gentile (countryman or national), or are you a true “Christian”? Have you died to your old “god“, “father“, “sovereign” and been “born again” and “baptized” into a truly “Christian nation” or are you just a wet American who thinks magic words can “save” them? Are you righteously seeking to repatriate the kingdom of God at hand by doing the Will of the Father, i.e. keeping His Law, loving Him with all your heart and truly loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself? Are you really walking in the name (character/nature/spirit) of Jesus the Christ? You’ll know them by their fruit. Repent!! Seek the Kingdom of God at hand, the de jure government for all mankind, for the Creator never surrendered His rightful position on this planet. His Government has been here since the beginning and it changes not, it is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, for anyone who freely chooses to repent and seek His kingdom and His righteousness. The content was reblogged from this article titled: A word about other nations, states, countries, churches in and of the way of humans. The Quigley Formula The Gospel, Part III The Ideology of Abolitionism Why be Evangelical? The Imago Dei The Incarnation of Christ The Politics of Christ Providence vs Pragmatism The Gospel, Part I The Gospel, Part II The Purpose of Agitation Honor the Military? The Kosmos of Heaven vs The Kosmos of Rome The Gospel of Men unto Damnation The Constitution of the Kingdom of Heaven A Dirge for Common Sense Anarchism is Lawlessness? The State is the Problem. Not the Solution Human Civil Government and the Perversion of Justice Free States Want Abortion The Answer To Abortion Pro-Lifism Proliferates Abortion Birth Control, Statism, and Ireland’s Referendum The Abolitionist Approach to Immigration God Over Man The Beauty of Biblical Womanhood Honor Thy Children The (False) Doctrine of Four Types of Governments Know Nothing Among You: A Testimony Make Abolitionism Great Again Are there Any Anarchist Churches? On The Role Of The Modern Day Pastor American Gods, Part I American Gods, Part II American Gods, Part III Ye Cannot Serve God and the Federal Reserve

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6 jobs found in connecticut USCGA Electrical Engineering SPRING 2020 US Coast Guard Academy New London, CT, USA The United States Coast Guard Academy has an opening for a Lecturer (Electrical Engineering) AD-1710-00. Please see our website for a complete job description and application instructions at https://www.uscga.edu/jobs . Copyright ©2017 Jobelephant.com Inc. All rights reserved. Posted by the FREE value-added recruitment advertising agency jeid-8c13a16eeebcf54bb65de9741db44a68 University of Connecticut University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Connecticut invites applications for two Assistant Professor (tenure track) positions in the area of ethnic/racial health disparities, with an anticipated start date of August 23, 2020. Successful candidates will be hired in one of three departments, with no more than one in any department: Anthropology, Sociology, or Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences (SLHS), as part of a college-wide cluster hire of three faculty in health disparities. We anticipate that at least one of these positions will be a joint appointment with the Africana Studies Institute. These hires demonstrate UConn and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences' commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Faculty have opportunities for connections to strong centers and institutes across the University, including the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP), the Human Rights Institute, the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, and the Health Disparities Institute. The University of Connecticut is ranked the best public university in New England and among the top 25 public universities in the U.S. DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES The successful candidate will be expected to contribute to research and scholarship through high quality publications in top-tier venues and through mentoring of graduate students. In the area of teaching, the successful candidate will share a deep commitment to effective instruction at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Successful candidates will highlight a commitment to equity and be expected to broaden participation among members of under-represented groups; demonstrate through their research, teaching, and/or public engagement multiple perspectives as the foundation of a rich learning experience; integrate diverse experiences into instructional methods and research tools; and/or provide leadership in developing pedagogical techniques designed to meet the needs of diverse learning styles, populations, and intellectual interests. Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor (Supply Chain Management) The United States Coast Guard Academy has an opening for an Assistant/Associate/Full Professor in Supply Chain Management. Please see our website for a complete job description and application instructions at https://www.uscga.edu/jobs . Copyright ©2017 Jobelephant.com Inc. All rights reserved. Posted by the FREE value-added recruitment advertising agency jeid-b9b5e0af382fe645bdb281ea6db85d33 Human Resource Management, Assistant/Associate/Full Professor The United States Coast Guard Academy has an opening for an Assistant/Associate/Full Professor in Human Resource Management. Please see our website for a complete job description and application instructions at https://www.uscga.edu/jobs . Copyright ©2017 Jobelephant.com Inc. All rights reserved. Posted by the FREE value-added recruitment advertising agency jeid-4622f0cd7d6eae409d3842afce910598 Assistant Professor in Residence Avery Point Campus University of Connecticut, Psychological Sciences Department Avery Point Campus, Shennecossett Road, Groton, CT, USA Assistant Professor in Residence, Psychological Sciences, UConn AVERY POINT The Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut (UConn) seeks to fill a full-time faculty position at the Avery Point campus in Groton, Connecticut. This position is for a non-tenure track In-Residence faculty, which may lead to long-term multi-year contracts. Of particular interest are candidates with a background in cognition, perception, physiology, neurobiology, language, environmental, or other natural science areas. Other potential responsibilities include advising undergraduate majors and outreach activities for the Psychological Sciences Department at the Avery Point Campus. Assistant Professor in School Psychology University of Connecticut Storrs, Connecticut 06269, United States The Department of Educational Psychology invites applications for a full-time tenure-track faculty position in School Psychology at the rank of Assistant Professor. The ideal candidate will share the Neag School's commitment to excellent teaching and scholarship, exceptional service to students and the profession, as well as continuous quality improvement in an environment of civility and respect. We are pursuing a faculty in School Psychology consistent with our strategic priorities to increase research and educational capacity within the School Psychology graduate program. The successful candidate will be expected to teach appropriate courses in School Psychology, conduct research in School Psychology, engage in scholarly activities, mentor graduate students, and participate in outreach and service activities within the University and in the field of school psychology. In addition, the candidate will be expected to obtain external funding to support research efforts in their areas of expertise. The University of Connecticut is a national leader among public research universities, with more than 32,000 students seeking answers to critical questions in classrooms, labs, and the community. A culture of innovation drives this pursuit of knowledge throughout the University's network of campuses. Connecticut's commitment to higher education helps UConn attract students who thrive in the most competitive environments, as well as globally renowned faculty members. Our school pride is fueled by a history of success that has made us a standout in Division I athletics. UConn fosters a diverse and vibrant culture that meets the needs and seizes the opportunities of a dynamic global society. The Neag School of Education stands out as a major contributor to instructional and research excellence at the University of Connecticut. With academic departments dedicated to educational leadership, educational psychology, and curriculum and instruction, the Neag School also offers a five-year integrated bachelor's/master's program in teacher education and a one-year, post-baccalaureate teacher education program. According to the 2020 U.S. News & World Report rankings of Best Graduate Schools, the Neag School ranks among the top 20 public graduate schools of education in the nation and has five specialty programs ranked in the top 25 nationally: Special Education; Elementary Education; Educational Psychology; Educational Administration; and Secondary Education. The University of Connecticut's Educational Psychology program is ranked among the top 20 of its kind in the nation, per U.S. News & World Report. With 33 faculty members, the department is among the most productive at the University. In addition to the program in School Psychology, the Educational Psychology department has programs in Counselor Education and Counseling Psychology; Special Education; Research Methods, Measurement, and Evaluation; Cognition, Instruction, and Learning Technology; Giftedness, Creativity, and Talent Development; and Educational Technology. We seek candidates who would like to join our APA-accredited and NASP-approved program. DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES Job responsibilities include teaching courses primarily within the School Psychology program; advising graduate students; engaging in research, including securing extramurally funding to support research efforts; and contributing to the program, department, School, University, and State through service and outreach.

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Michael Kraus Vice President, Production, Digital Media & Design Michael has been with Access Intelligence for 30 years and is responsible for all Ad Ops, including web, e-letter, third-party partner and print; Production, including Design for marketing and promotion for events, trade shows, conferences, e-letters, magazines, digital editions, mobile apps, electronic e-mail operations as well as distribution and fulfillment of publications, both electronic and print. Michael has a BA in Communications from the University at Albany (NY) and an MBA with a concentration in finance from the City University of New York’s Baruch College. Michael began his career at Macmillan Publishing’s Textbook Division. Later, he was an editorial assistant at the The New York Law Publishing Company’s Leader Publications, working on business newsletters covering all aspects of the legal industry. He also spent time as Production Editor for SportsInc., a Times Mirror publication. Michael started at AI as an Assistant Production Manager for Chemical Week and has held multiple titles before his current one, including Production Manager, Senior Director of Production, Director of Operations, and Vice President of Production. Michael has appeared on the cover of Publishing & Production Executive, spoken and presented at MagazineTech and was featured as the lead speaker at a FOLIO: webinar about driving efficiencies. Michael serves on our internal, 401k investment committee and also works with top management in crafting AI’s messaging internally and externally as part of the Corporate Communications team. mkraus@accessintel.com

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Airstream Club 2019-05-16 – Airstream Caravan Travels – Springtime in Kentucky; Final Banquet, Berea, KY – Day #22 – the Caravan ends, and the Wedding Trip begins Easy morning today. We made last minute preparations for our upcoming travel; we hitched up the Villa, and headed to Berea… We parked the Villa at the historic Boone Tavern, which isn’t really a tavern, but a very nice, modern hotel. It is owned and operated by Berea College, and is staffed mostly by Berea students… We were having our “Final Banquet”, a time to remember our good times, to have a little entertainment, and to say farewell to our new old friends… Our caravan leaders, with a few parting words… After the banquet the Airstreamers headed out; some were leaving, others returned to the campground for one last night… We headed for Bowling Green, KY… for a little while we followed another caravanner… We stopped in Bowling Green, rented a car, and drove to Franklin, KY. There we found “Courtesy Parking”, a feature of the Airstream Club (WBCCI) whereby another Airstream owner lets us park on their property… In this case, we parked on an empty lot behind this Airstream owner’s house… We did some final packing, enjoyed some happy hours, and turned in early. Tomorrow we drive the rental car to the Nashville Airport and fly to California! And an enjoyable time was had by all… 2019-05-15 – Airstream Caravan Travels – Springtime in Kentucky; Shaker Village and Danville, KY – Day #21 Today was our last day of sightseeing on the caravan… It’s all over all too soon…! We drove about one hour northwest to the town of Danville, KY. It has been around for a while… On December 4, 1787, the Virginia Legislature established Danville as a town in Kentucky County, Virginia. Danville became a part of the Commonwealth of Kentucky when the county of Kentucky was carved out of western Virginia to became a state in 1792. The town boasts being the site of the signing of the Kentucky Constitution. We saw many old buildings located in the central town square… The original Post Office is the first west of the Alleghenies, opened in 1792. I found the hewn logs to be unique – I have never seen joints like this before… There was also a jail and the courthouse… plus a memorial to all the Kentucky Governors… But the real reason to come here is to learn about the achievements of Dr. Ephraim McDowell… Ephraim McDowell (November 11, 1771 – June 25, 1830) was an American physician and pioneer surgeon. McDowell was born in Rockbridge County, Virginia, the ninth child of Samuel and Mary McDowell. His father, Samuel, was appointed land commissioner and moved his family to Danville, Kentucky. There, he presided over ten conventions that resulted in the drafting of the Kentucky Constitution. In 1802, Ephraim McDowell married Sarah Shelby, daughter of Isaac Shelby, war hero and twice governor of Kentucky. They had nine children, but only one son and four daughters survived into adulthood. On December 13, 1809, McDowell was called to see Jane Todd Crawford in Green County, Kentucky, 60 miles from Danville. Her physicians thought that Mrs. Crawford was beyond term pregnant. McDowell diagnosed an ovarian tumor. Crawford begged him to keep her from a slow and painful death. He then described her condition and that an operation for cure had never been performed. He said that the best surgeons in the world thought it impossible. Crawford said she understood and wanted to proceed. McDowell told her he would remove the tumor if she would travel to his home in Danville. She agreed and rode the sixty miles on horseback. On Christmas morning, 1809, McDowell began his operation. The surgery was performed without benefit of anesthetic or antisepsis, neither of which was then known to the medical profession. The tumor McDowell removed weighed 22.5 pounds. He determined that it would be difficult to remove completely, so he tied a ligature around the fallopian tube near the uterus and cut open the tumor. He described the tumor as the ovarium and fimbrious part of the fallopian tube very much enlarged. The whole procedure took 25 minutes. Crawford made an uncomplicated recovery. She returned to her home in Green County 25 days after the operation and lived another 32 years (outliving Dr. McDowell…). This was the first successful removal of an ovarian tumor in the world. All previous attempts at abdominal exploration before 1809 had resulted in peritonitus and death. Descriptions of McDowell include phrases like “neat and clean” or “scrupulously clean.” He was not only neat, but meticulous. In his report on the operation, he described the removal of blood from the peritoneal cavity and bathing the intestines with warm water. McDowell did not publish a description of his procedure until 1817, after he had performed two more such operations. This was widely criticized in the English surgical literature. There is evidence that he performed at least twelve operations for ovarian pathology. (None of these patients is alive today…) So we visited Dr. McDowell’s house and office and pharmacy… The house is pretty typical for the late 18th and early 19th century, at least for wealthy, well-connected professionals living in a thriving city… I particularly liked the custom shutter at the attic window… The Study and Men’s Lounge… A unique doorway between bedrooms… The Pharmacy… A good supply of leeches is conveniently on hand… It was an interesting look at the medical profession of 200 years ago… One hundred years later, in 1910, Abraham Flexner wrote The Flexner Report; it is the most important event in the history of American and Canadian medical education. It was a commentary on the condition of medical education in the early 1900s and gave rise to modern medical education. Abraham Flexner was not a doctor but was a secondary school teacher and principal for 19 years in Louisville, Kentucky. Flexner then took graduate work at Harvard and the University of Berlin and joined the research staff of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For the Carnegie Foundation, Flexner researched, wrote and in 1910 published a report entitled “Medical Education in the United States and Canada.” It is known today as the Flexner Report. The Flexner Report triggered much-needed reforms in the standards, organization, and curriculum of North American medical schools. At the time of the Report, many medical schools were proprietary schools operated more for profit than for education. Flexner criticized these schools as a loose and lax apprenticeship system that lacked defined standards or goals beyond the generation of financial gain. In their stead Flexner proposed medical schools in the German tradition of strong biomedical sciences together with hands-on clinical training. The Flexner Report caused many medical schools to close down and most of the remaining schools were reformed to conform to the Flexnerian model. How did this reform take place? Abraham Flexner’s brother, Simon, became the first director of Laboratories at The Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University), in 1901. The Institute was founded by John D. Rockefeller. Greatly elevating the prestige of American science and medicine, it was America’s first biomedical institute, like France’s Pasteur Institute (1888) and Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (1891). As the first director of laboratories, Simon Flexner supervised the development of research capacity at the Institute, whose staff made major discoveries in basic research and medicine. While a student at Johns Hopkins University, Flexner had studied under the Institute’s first scientific director, William H. Welch, first dean of Hopkins’ medical school and known as the dean of American medicine. These developments lead John D. Rockefeller and his son, “Junior”, to finance the reform and re-invention of medical schools in America. Any medical school that agreed to follow the rigorous model set by Johns Hopkins would receive funding from the Rockefellers… We owe this philanthropy for the status of today’s medical schools… Had enough medical talk? After Danville we drove a few miles north to The Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill. It is a beautifully preserved and restored village of over 200 buildings on 3,000 acres. Of course, we started with lunch… Our lunch was in the basement of this 200 year old building… Beautiful stonework… After lunch we took a group photo and were given a tour of the buildings; we heard about the history of Shakers in general, and this property in particular… Notice the entry doors on these buildings: There are two entry doors – one for men and one for women. Inside the entry hall you see two stairways – one for men and one for women. Shakers were celibate. Men and women were considered equals and they lived in the same buildings, but on separate sides. By having wide hallways, and separate doors and stairways, it would eliminate the possibility of inadvertent touching… Shakers were Christian post-millennialists; they believed that the second coming of Christ had already occurred in the form of their founder, Ann Lee. Therefore, they were living in the thousand year reign of Christ, and their job was to create heaven here on earth. At one time, the Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill had 500 residents, all living communally, having given over all their worldly assets to the village… There were 15 or so Shaker Villages around the country… The last Shaker here died in 1922. I wonder if, in her last years, “Maybe we didn’t get this thing quite right…” The land had been sold, in exchange for a life estate for the remaining few residents. Forty years after that last resident died the community bought back the land, and today the village is run as a tourist attraction… We returned to the Villa, and spent the remainder of the afternoon packing and otherwise preparing for our airline flight to California day after tomorrow… 2019-05-13 – Airstream Caravan Travels – Springtime in Kentucky; Cumberland Falls, Corbin, KY – Day #19 Today we once again traveled into the green hills of Kentucky; all around us is the Daniel Boone National Forest. We are headed to the State Park to see the Cumberland Falls and the Dupont Lodge… It was a lovely lodge. Not as nice as the Grand Canyon North Rim Lodge, but still nice… But before we could enjoy the lodge we walked 3/4 mile to the falls. The path was wet, but fairly easy; there is a 270′ elevation change walking down to the falls… We could see the highway bridge over the Cumberland River far below… The raging river was lapping over this walkway… There is about 10 times the normal water flow today due to melting snow up north and the recent rains locally… (thus, the muddy appearance…) We finally arrived at the falls… They were great! We went down below for a closer view… Did you know that over 280 people die each year taking selfies in dangerous locations? Further downstream we got a wider view… And then it was time to walk back up… But by now we were even further down. We walked up 66 steps, then up the 270′ rise on the 3/4 mile path back up to the lodge… And then we sat down… Soon it was time for lunch… The food was decent and the view was great! We returned to the campground. We stopped along the way for Lynda to get her hair cut, and we took the truck to the local Chevy dealer for an oil change. We had an “Open House” so that we could peak into all the other Airstreams; this gave way to Happy Hours… 2019-05-14 – Airstream Caravan Travels – Springtime in Kentucky; Traveling to Renfro Valley, KY – Day #20 An easy travel day today. We left London and drove about 30 miles north to Renfro Valley, the gateway to Mt. Vernon, KY. We are at Creekside RV Park… This is a wide open campground with large sites, but relatively primitive – gravel everywhere… We were “de-parkers” at the campground in London, KY; this means we checked out all the rigs as they left the campground to make sure lights worked, doors were locked, things like that… So we were the last to leave, and the last to arrive at this new campground. Shortly after we were set we left for the town of Berea, home of Berea College. More on the college later, but we moved on to the Tater Knob Pottery Studio. We watched and learned how pots are “thrown”. These people have been making pots and earning a living at it for 40 years… She is so talented that she can make a 60 piece set of dinnerware in a day… Today she was making these mugs… They also make bells and lumieres. We bought one to keep a candle lit on our front porch… (Ours is almost all blue…) We returned to Berea and visited the historic Boone Tavern… This entire block is owned and operated by Berea College. Berea College is distinctive among institutions of higher learning. Founded in 1855 as the first interracial and coeducational college in the South, Berea charges no tuition and admits only academically promising students, primarily from Appalachia, who have limited economic resources. Berea’s cost of educating a student for four years is nearly $100,000. Berea College offers rigorous undergraduate academic programs leading to Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees in 28 fields. All students work at least 10 hours per week in campus and service jobs in more than 130 departments. The College has an inclusive Christian character, expressed in its motto “God has made of one blood all peoples of the Earth” (Acts 17:26). Berea’s primary service region is the Southern Appalachian region, but students come from all states in the U.S. and in a typical year, from more than 60 other countries representing a rich diversity of colors, cultures, and faiths. About one in three students represents an ethnic minority. Berea College continues to build upon a distinctive history of more than 150 years of learning, labor and service, and find new ways to apply their mission (the Great Commitments) to contemporary times by promoting kinship among all people, serving communities in Appalachia and beyond and living sustainably to conserve limited natural resources. It is a beautiful, traditional-looking campus… This block with the hotel, restaurant, and events center also includes a coffee house, a crafts store, a shop with hand-made wooden dulcimers, and other related businesses… The hotel began when the constant stream of visitors to the college and the city became too much of a burden to for Nellie Frost, the college president’s wife. In one summer alone she hosted over 300 visitors in her house! Finally she convinced the college to open a guest house in 1909; the guest house grew into the hotel we see today under the direction of of Richard Hougen, who was general manager of the hotel from 1940 to 1976. We will be having our “Final Banquet” here on May 16… We returned to the Villa; Happy Hours ensued; an enjoyable time was had by all… 2019-05-12 – Airstream Caravan Travels – Springtime in Kentucky; Big South Fork Scenic Railway – Day #18 Our first excursion in the London area was to the Big South Fork Scenic Railway, about one hour south of here, in Stearns, KY, near the Tennessee border. This is also adjacent to the Daniel Boone National Forest… Stearns, KY, is another one of the many small, thriving, towns which died in the 1950s. At one time Stearns was a bustling industrial town of 10,000 – 15,000 people. Today there are fewer than 1,600 people here. The only remnants of the town, besides the few houses, are the Big South Fork Scenic Railway, along with the few remaining buildings that were once operated by the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company. Stores adjacent to the train depot: This building now houses the museum; it once was the headquarters office building of the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company; it also housed the telephone exchange and the local bank… The train was awaiting our arrival… We had a lovely drive again, through miles and miles of tree-covered hills as far as the eye can see… After we arrived and procured our train tickets, we toured the museum. There was the usual assortment of memorabilia plus photos showing the once-thriving town… We enjoyed our box lunch, then waited for the train… The cars may be vintage, but they are nicely finished inside… Soon we were underway. The train’s planned destination was the Blue Heron Mining Community – a National Park Interpretive Center. Blue Heron, or Mine 18, is an abandoned coal mining town. It was a part of the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company’s past operation in what today is the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, a unit of the National Park Service. Most of what we know about life at Blue Heron, and the other Stearns coal towns, has been handed down through oral history. Blue Heron mine operated from 1937 until it closed in December 1962. During that time hundreds of people lived and worked in the isolated community on the banks of the Big South Fork River. Their story is the focus of this interpretive tour of the Blue Heron Community. When the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company abandoned Blue Heron in 1962, the buildings were either removed or they lapsed into decay. There were no original buildings standing when the town was “re-created” as an interpretive center in the 1980s. Consequently, the town was restored in an “open-air” museum format, and new structures were constructed on the approximate site of several of the original buildings. These new structures are open, metal shells of buildings, and are referred to as “ghost structures.” Each ghost structure has an audio-tape station with recorded recollections of some of the people of Mine 18. Unfortunately, recent winter storms damaged the train tracks, so Blue Heron is no longer reached by the railroad. Big South Fork Scenic Railway is now the railroad to nowhere. We rode about 1/2 hour, enjoying the scenery… Some passengers took a nap… Plenty of green… And wet… The train announcer told us that yesterday the creek was running slow and crystal clear… Remember the rain we had last night? And then the train stopped, and we backed up for 1/2 hour until we returned to the depot. Some caravanners drove on to Blue Heron, but we, and others, returned to the campground… There were many happy hours groups at several of the Airstreams this evening. Some Airstreamers were happier than others… 2019-05-11 – Airstream Caravan Travels – Springtime in Kentucky; Moving to London and Fried Chicken – Day #17 Today we hitched up and drove. In the rain. We started with another Drivers Meeting. No pictures of the drivers, but these geese swam by during the meeting and they were way more interesting… We drove for about 2 1/2 hours through the rain, through more gorgeous green Kentucky countryside… We went about 100 miles on Highway 23. All along there were signs denoting birthplaces of “famous” country music singers… We arrived at Levi Jackson State Park in London, KY. We set up easily – the rain had mostly stopped… We had a relaxing afternoon; tonight was the real treat! We drove a few miles to Corbin, KY, the home of Harland Sanders; this is where he ran a motel, a gas station, and a cafe. Colonel Harland Sanders (September 9, 1890 – December 16, 1980) was an American businessman, best known for founding fast food chicken restaurant chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (now known as KFC, with the corporate name of Yum! brands…). In his later years he spent his time acting as the company’s brand ambassador and symbol. His name and image are still symbols of the company. The title ‘colonel’ was honorary – a Kentucky Colonel – not the military rank. The Colonel began selling fried chicken from his roadside restaurant in Corbin, KY, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. During that time Sanders developed his “secret recipe” and his patented method of cooking chicken in a pressure fryer. Sanders recognized the potential of the restaurant franchising concept, and the first KFC franchise opened in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1952. In the late 1950s Interstate 75 was planned; Sanders saw that his roadside business would suffer when the traffic moved to the Interstate, so he sold the property. He then devoted himself full-time to franchising his fried chicken throughout the country. And the rest is history… While the motel, gas station and the original cafe are long gone, the Sanders Cafe is a recreation of the original building. In it you can not only buy all the chicken you could ever want, but there are several historic rooms that you can visit to get a sense of what Sanders was doing 65 years ago… With 50 caravanners showing up the place was soon packed… We had arrived early, so we didn’t wait much. We viewed the various museum rooms… The kitchen: The cafe furniture… There was also a “model” motel room set up adjacent to the women’s restroom in the original cafe. The room would demonstrate for the women how nice the rooms were… It was a fun piece of nostalgia… And then it started to rain. The skies opened up; some of the Airstreamers were wondering why we were not visiting the Ark (www.arkencounter.com) instead… But we returned to the Villa without incident… And an enjoyable time was had by all… 2019-05-10 – Airstream Caravan Travels – Springtime in Kentucky; Butcher Holler and the Coal Miner’s Daughter – Day #16 We began today by spending time at OSCAR, the Oil Springs Cultural Arts and Recreation center; it is located in a school that was sold off in 1955 when the mining industry shut down and the population plummeted… (more on the mines later…) The school was purchased by a local businessman who has lent it to OSCAR for the past many years… We did crafts. Just like – well, you know… There was wood carving, tin punching, painting, wire art, and several other things that we could try our hand at… We spent the morning crafting away, and they even provided a tasty mid-morning snack… I did a little relief carving of an apple… Lynda made something out of tin… Some others made these wall plaques… The sky was roiling when we returned to the Villa; we had a light lunch in the Airstream, and then we headed out for our next tour. The rain held off for the rest of the day… We carpooled to the town of Van Lear, and the Webb General Store… About 1 1/2 miles down the road from the store is Butcher Hollow, or, in Kentuckian, Butcher Holler… Here the story begins… Loretta Lynn was born Loretta Webb on April 14, 1932, in Butcher Holler, in the “house” that is still standing today. She is the eldest daughter and second child born to Clary and Ted Webb. Ted was a coal miner and subsistence farmer. The youngest Webb daughter was Crystal Gayle (born Brenda Gail Webb). There were six other children born to Clary and Ted, but you only need to remember Herman, Loretta’s immediate younger brother. Butcher Holler was one of many communities that loosely made up the town of Van Lear, KY. There were five coal and slate mines in the area dating from the early 20th century, with 2,500 miners, and four railroad lines serving the mines. These mines supported a community of 15,000 to 20,000 people. When the mines closed in 1955 the population plummeted. There is little remaining today of this thriving community. Today, even with recent “suburban” style growth, Van Lear has fewer than 2,000 people. On January 10, 1948, 15-year-old Loretta Webb married Oliver Lynn, better known as “Doo”, or “Mooney”. They had met only a month earlier. Despite Doo’s promise to Loretta’s father never to take her away from Butcher Holler, the Lynns left Kentucky and moved to the logging community of Custer, Washington, north of Bellingham, when Loretta was seven months pregnant with the first of their six children. The happiness and heartache of her early years of marriage would help to inspire Lynn’s songwriting. In 1953, Doo bought her a $17 Harmony guitar. She taught herself to play the instrument, and over the following three years, she worked to improve her guitar playing. With Doo’s encouragement, Lynn began singing in local clubs in the late 1950s. (In the Movie, “Coal Miner’s Daughter”, she mentions that she was going to be playing in a “nasty ol’ honky tonk over to Lyndon”. I sincerely doubt that Lyndon ever had a “nasty ol’ honky tonk”…) Lynn signed her first recording contract and cut her first record, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl”, in February 1960. Her first album was recorded in Hollywood. The Lynns toured the country to promote the release to country stations. By the time the Lynns reached Nashville, the song was a hit, climbing to No. 14 on Billboard’s Country and Western chart, prompting her first appearances on the Grand Ole Opry in 1960. The rest, as they say, is history. Her best-selling 1976 autobiography, Coal Miner’s Daughter, was made into an Academy Award–winning film of the same title in 1980, starring Sissy Spacek and Tommy Lee Jones. Spacek won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as Lynn. Back to Lynn’s brother, Herman Webb. After the mines closed most of the Webb family moved to Indiana. But Herman always wanted to return. In 1975, he bought the local general store near Butcher Holler. He named it Webb’s Store and ran it until his death in 2018. Today his son and daughter run the store and offer tours of the house where Loretta Lynn grew up… Butcher Holler is a fer piece down the road, about 2 miles past Van Lear, and about 10 miles past Paintsville, (pop. 5,700 today). Butcher Holler is way back in the hills… This is Webb’s store… The sign is a little worn… There are signs everywhere hawking the tours in case no one is at the store… A shuttle took us up the 1 1/2 mile one lane road to the house. We shouldn’t complain – when the Webbs lived here there was no road, just a footpath. (In the movie, “Coal Miner’s Daughter”, Doo drives his Jeep to the house by driving in the creek…) The house is pretty much original. When Herman moved back to Butcher Holler in 1975 he did shore up the foundation and replace much of the front porch using 1970s techniques and design. (If you notice the front porch guardrail you will see that it is VERY similar guardrails in 1970s era apartment buildings in Orange County, CA…) Inside the house we were given a tour by Hermasina, Herman’s daughter. There are four rooms plus two attic bedrooms. Much of the furniture is original to the house; there is a lot of memorabilia from the Webb and Lynn families… This view up the valley was not like this when the mines were operation. There were few trees; any tree over 6″ in diameter would be needed as shoring in the mines, so this view would have extended miles up the valley. The area would be farmland for residents to raise their own vegetable gardens… It was a great tour – very authentic and not too much hype and certainly no glossy brochures… This road was only a footpath in the 1940s… We forewent the shuttle ride and walked back to the Webb Store… We did pass one of the entrances to one of the mines… The store isn’t much – more memorabilia, a few staples, candy, and lots of moon pies and RC Colas… Other than the store, just about all evidence of this thriving community is gone… No train tracks, no industry, no other businesses, very few people… So we returned to the Villa. We had a little FaceTime with our grandson, Ian. He is five years old this week! In the evening we returned to the Highway 23 Museum. We enjoyed a nice dinner, then the pickers began… Bluegrass music! There was music, dancing, singing, and even some square dancing! 2019-05-09 – Airstream Caravan Travels – Springtime in Kentucky; Country and Country Music – Day #15 We visited three local points of interest today… We started at Mountain Home Place… This is a working farm; all the buildings here were moved onto this property from adjacent land that was taken when the Paintsville Lake State Park lake was built. The buildings date from 1850 to 1900. Of course, we start in the Gift Shoppe… They sell all hand-made products produced by local craftsmen… The old men caravaners enjoyed sitting on the front porch… We strolled the property and saw the vintage buildings; we also enjoyed their animals… I enjoyed what appeared to be really tentative foundations… We saw the local church… And the local one-room school house, in use until 1958… A typical cabin… Interesting ladder to the attic lofts… Then we moved on to lunch in Paintsville… I enjoyed a local delicacy… Fried Bologna Sammich… The next local landmark we toured was the Mayo United Methodist Church; the church was donated in 1904 by Mr. Mayo, who made his fortune in coal mining. (We are only about 50 miles from the West Virginia border.) The stained glass windows are remarkable… The organ was relatively small (1,000 pipes, 18 stops, two manuals), but high quality, and still in good condition; it still uses the original mechanical connections to operate the pipes. The manual pumps were replaced by electric fan chambers in 1914 when electricity arrived at the church… Our own caravaner played for us, and we returned the favor by singing a few hymns… Next door was Mr. Mayo’s house… The Mayos only lived here for a few years; Mr. Mayo died suddenly, and Mrs. Mayo moved to Tennessee to be with her family. The house (45 rooms) is now a Catholic School… And finally we visited the Highway 23 Museum… It was so-named because of the many country music stars who were born along Highway 23… The only country music stars I had known anything about were Loretta Lynn and her sister Crystal Gail. We also saw a video of an interview with Loretta Lynn about the making of the movie, “The Coal Miner’s Daughter”… We will visit her childhood home in nearby Butcher Hollow tomorrow, and re-watch the movie in a few days… The museum is small, but it was enjoyed by those who followed country music… We returned to the Villa, and walked along the lake again… Happy Hours ensued, and an enjoyable time was had by all… 2019-05-08 – Airstream Caravan Travels – Springtime in Kentucky; Travel to Staffordsville and Paintsville, Ky – Day #14 We had a nice travel day today. We are heading east, into the hills of northeast Kentucky. Expect country music (banjos?) and beautiful hills… We left the campground at about 10:00 am and drove for about one hour… We gathered at Natural Bridge State Park, a beautiful place… We took the skylift up to the top of the mountain… Others were already coming down… We arrived at the top, and walked along, enjoying the views… We walked down the narrow path… And we were under the arch! We walked back up the narrow path… We walked back atop the arch… We wondered if the arch can be seen from the stone cliff across the way… So we walked around to find out… Yes! You can! We returned to the lift and descended the hill… We met a few friends coming up… Down in the parking lot we had a little lunch… We then headed out for the last leg of today’s trip… We were soon set up at the Paintsville Lake State Park… There is a beautiful lake here… At 6:00 we joined the others for a group meal… After dinner some of the Caravaners (Lynda) stayed to play Left-Right-Center… I returned to the Villa. After the game, Lynda caught some sunset photos…

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A.G. Underwood Announces Arrest Of Rochester Nurse Charged With Grand Larceny And Working With A Suspended License News from the New York Attorney General’s Office Attorney General's Office Press Office / 212-416-8060 Defendant Allegedly Received Over $20,000 in Salary for Work in Rochester Nursing Home with Suspended License ROCHESTER – ​Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood announced the arrest and arraignment of Asmeret Yohannes, 37, of Rochester, who is charged with grand larceny and unauthorized practice of a profession for allegations that she fraudulently took over $20,000 in payment from a Rochester nurse staffing agency while practicing without a nursing license. The felony complaint filed in Gates Town Court alleges that Yohannes, who was previously registered as a licensed practical nurse, continued to work at a local nursing home even though her professional license was suspended. “The nursing home residents and other patients who rely on nurses’ care and professionalism shouldn’t have to worry that their nurse may not in fact be licensed,” said Attorney General Underwood. “My office will continue to act to protect New Yorkers’ health and wellbeing.” The investigation conducted by the New York Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit (MFCU) revealed that Asmeret Yohannes was a nurse previously licensed by New York State until her license was suspended by the New York State Office of Professional Discipline (“OPD”), effective October 4, 2017. OPD regulates most licenses for New York and conducts investigations and disciplinary proceedings. OPD settled a disciplinary matter with Yohannes through a process referred to as an Application for Consent Order (“ACO’), and Yohannes agreed in writing to the suspension of her license by the New York State Board of Regents. The Attorney General’s felony complaint alleges that despite consenting to suspension, Yohannes thereafter worked for WorkFit Staffing – an agency that employs nurses who are then contracted out to provide nursing services to local health care providers. Yohannes allegedly accepted assignments to work at Wesley Gardens Nursing Home in Rochester from October 7, 2017 to January 7, 2018 and received over $20,000 in salary from WorkFit. The complaint charges Yohannes with Grand Larceny in the Third Degree, a class D felony, and Unauthorized Practice of a Profession, a class E felony. If convicted of the top count and sentenced to prison, she faces an indeterminate sentence of a minimum of 1 ½ to 3 years and a maximum of 3 ½ to 7 years. The charges are merely accusations and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. The case was investigated by Investigator Kevin Wehbring, with assistance from MFCU Rochester Regional Chief Investigator William Falk and Regional Chief Auditor Thomas Clarke. The case is being prosecuted by Special Assistant Attorney General Margaret A. Jones. Catherine Wagner is the Rochester Regional Director and the Upstate Chief of Criminal Investigations for MFCU. The Medicaid Fraud Control Unit is led by Director Amy Held and Assistant Deputy Attorney General Paul J. Mahoney. Medicaid Fraud Control Unit

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Liu Races From Shanghai To The Beijing Conference Source: Xinhua | March 12, 2009, Thursday | Print Edition THIRTEEN seconds was more than enough for Liu Xiang to cross 10 hurdles and grab an Olympic gold medal in 2004, but it took the Chinese hurdler two years to arrive at the political arena as he appeared yesterday, for the first time, at the annual session of the country's top advisory body. Liu's debut at the annual session of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference captured the interest of reporters. Liu, who has been in the United States for tendon-injury treatment, previously said he would be absent from this year's session. He was also absent from the advisory session last March, when he was in Spain to compete in the World Indoor Championships. He returned to China on Sunday and spent one day in his hometown Shanghai before going to Beijing on Tuesday evening. "As a new political adviser, I am honored to be here to perform my duty," he read from a statement.

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Friday, March 18 • 10:00pm - 11:00pm Dreaming in Stereo Progressive Pop ... that's what the powerful sound of the Miami Beach-based band Dreaming in Stereo is. Influenced by the sound of Art Rock and power pop , DIS take you on a sonic journey with 3 minute pop songs with progressive rock intricacies .Their songwriting is mature and their live shows have earned them the right to hold their own opening for legendary acts like Todd Rundgren, Adrian Belew, Mumiy Troll, and Davey Jones."Dreaming in Stereo 2" is the followup to 2010's critically acclaimed self titled debut which was a college radio staple charting in over 30 major markets. The band has been selected to showcase at SXSW 2011 in Austin, TX Progressive Pop ... that's what the powerful sound of the Miami Beach-based band Dreaming in Stereo is. Influenced by the sound of Art Rock and power pop , DIS take you on a sonic journey with 3 minute pop songs with progressive rock intricacies .Their songwriting is mature and their... Read More → Friday March 18, 2011 10:00pm - 11:00pm

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Wednesday, March 16 • 10:00pm - 11:00pm Hailing from the steel city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1, 2, 3 consists of long time friends Nic Snyder and Josh Sickels. Originally started as a side project from the The Takeover UK, Snyder found himself increasingly drawn to 1, 2, 3 and the freedom it gave him to express his own musical ambitions. In May 2010, having only been together for a few months, 1, 2, 3 released their first UK single, ‘Going Away Party’, on hot tastemaker label Chess Club. Surrounding the release, the band played their first live UK shows, including The Great Escape festival in Brighton, plus an amazing Club NME performance at Koko in London. The limited edition 7” combines Safe as Milk-era Captain Beefheart guitars, Dr. John style freaked-out tingling percussion and Snyder’s night-crawler vocals, while the B-side, ‘Feeling Holy’, is no less arresting: a sci-fi lullaby that comes over like a stoned Mercury Rev and shows a softer side to Snyder’s voice over sepia tinged guitars, looped vocals and woozy synths. Snyder grew up inspired by a steady diet of Mercury-era Rod Stewart, Neil Young, Bacharach and his all-time favourite, Roy Orbison, but he was lured into writing his own music by his father. A collector of punk 7’s back in the seventies, his dad was also a piano player in Pittsburgh’s monolithic Iron City Houserockers, probably the biggest band to come out of the Three Rivers area in the 1970/80's. Surrounded by photos of his dad on stage with Springsteen and B.B. King, Snyder was inevitably influenced by Blues and Motown as well. Drummer, Sickels, who himself has a diverse musical palette, has been playing with Snyder for over a decade. Josh confirms, “Nic listens to literally everything and I think you can hear that in our songs.” Being able to explore new musical directions without any existing boundaries has allowed the duo to experiment and create a handful of songs that are all remarkably different, yet complimentary to each other - the common thread being Snyder’s defiant, soulful vocals and a yearning nostalgia. Since November 2010, 1,2,3 has signed with Frenchkiss Records, released a second Chess Club UK single (“Little Cure” b/w “Big Beige”) and recorded their debut album New Heaven with Nicolas Vernhes (Bjork, Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective). The band will hit the road in February and March, including a number of showcases confirmed for SXSW. New Heaven is scheduled for release late Spring / early Summer 2011. Web: http://www.myspace.com/1comma2comma3 Wednesday March 16, 2011 10:00pm - 11:00pm The Parish 214C E 6th St

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THE PRISONER (1967): Day 5 of 31 Days of Spy Films & Television May 8, 2019 by Amy Suto 1 Comment Welcome back, spy fans! This is day 5 of my non-consecutive blog series of the best spy shows and movies. I feel like I’m running a book club over here, except it’s poorly organized, rarely updated, and I get emails from all of you asking if I know the definition of a “month.” (Math isn’t my strong suit. Neither is getting to all the TV I want to. I still haven’t seen the second season of Killing Eve, okay??? Nothing else matters until I catch up.) I also launched a new arts publication spotlighting up-and-coming writers and artists in Los Angeles, and it’s called Kingdom of Pavement. So, I’ve been doing a thing or two in the meantime while I’m ignoring my calendar reminders to “update my blog.” Go check it out, for my first article I go pole dancing with writer Erika Flynn who’s reinventing the way strippers are portrayed on-screen. Okay, now back to what I actually came here to write about: You Haven’t Seen The Best Spy Thriller And You Need To Chances are, you haven’t seen THE PRISONER, a 1967 surreal paranoid spy thriller that was a major inspiration for LOST. It follows a spy (Patrick McGoohan), who resigns — only to wake up in a weird town where he is given the name “Number Six.” Everyone in the Village — especially Number Two, a villain who is a new character almost every episode — seem intent on figuring out why he resigned, and to extract his secrets and loyalties. It’s unclear in the beginning whether or not these people are from his own agency or an enemy agency, but what is clear is that Number Six will do everything to try and escape. Do yourself a favor and go watch this show (which is streaming on Amazon Prime) not only because it’s an exquisite spy show, but because the nuanced storytelling achieves so much on so many levels. It’s also SO WEIRD, and even has a clear predecessor to the “smoke monster” from LOST: a gigantic white bouncy-ball/balloon thing that smothers people who try and escape. Filed Under: 31 Days of Spy Films and Shows, All Posts, Most Popular Posts, Spy Films and TV Shows, TV Show Reviews Tagged With: patrick mcgoohan, spy show, spy thrillers, the prisoner

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navigateleft Concrete Happenings Concrete Happenings Arcade Brewery's Concrete Traffic Beer Concrete Happenings: Fall 2016 – Spring 2017 Don't just look at art. Grapple with it. Detail of Wolf Vostell’s Concrete Traffic, 1970, after it arrived at its new location at the east entrance to the University of Chicago Campus North Parking Garage. (Photo by Erik L. Peterson). The Logan Center for the Arts, Neubauer Collegium, Smart Museum of Art, and Special Collections—all free and within walking distance from the Concrete Traffic sculpture site—delved into the stories behind Concrete Traffic through a series of exhibitions. Retrogarde November 11, 2016–January 1, 2017 | Reception: November 11, 2016, 6–8pm Exhibition hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 9am–9pm; Sunday, 11am–9pm Logan Center Gallery, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 East 60th Street Retrogarde is an international group exhibition that explores contemporary artists’ recuperation and appropriation of avant-garde strategies, histories, and archives in their work. Conceptually and formally, the works in this exhibition adopt a series of recognizable avant-garde forms—fusing play with the profane; detourning language, space, and matter; and working through performative actions and interventions—to address the politics of everyday life. Taken together these works highlight the continued relevance of avant-garde perspectives today. Yet the artists’ attitude towards this lineage is not one of blind veneration but rather pervasive disobedience, mirroring the transgressive actions of their predecessors. Consequently, Retrogarde infuses other viewpoints, narratives, and contexts to open up our collective reading of avant-garde traditions. Artists in the exhibition include Caroline Bergvall, Samson Kambalu, Matthew Metzger, Catherine Sullivan and Samson Young. Curator: Yesomi Umolu, Exhibitions Curator, Logan Center for the Arts. Presented by Logan Center Exhibitions. Instructions for a Chicago Fluxus Opening Sunday, January 22, 2017, 3–6pm Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society (5701 South Woodlawn Avenue), Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library (1100 East 57th Street), Smart Museum of Art (5550 South Greenwood Avenue) A set of "instructions"—inspired by participatory Happenings orchestrated by Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell—will guide you across the University of Chicago campus during this opening celebration for three related exhibitions: Fantastic Architecture (Neubauer Collegium), Concrete Poetry, Concrete Book (Special Collections Research Center), and Vostell Concrete (Smart Museum). Enjoy a variety of free programs, food, and drinks at the three locations. A free shuttle will run between locations. Free, open to all. Drop by or RSVP on Facebook. Presented by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Special Collections Research Center, and Smart Museum of Art. The exhibitions and related programming have been made possible in part by the generous support of the Pamela and R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric Exhibition Fund, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Swiss Benevolent Society, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, SmartPartners, and Ozinga Bros., Inc. Concrete Poetry, Concrete Book: Artists’ Books in German-speaking Space after 1945 January 17–March 17, 2017 | Reception: Sunday, January 22, 2017, 3–6pm Exhibition hours: Monday through Friday, 9am–4:45pm; and, when University of Chicago classes are in session, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 9am–5:45pm Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, 1100 East 57th Street In the same decades that artists affiliated with Fluxus explored action-based, performative strategies set on disrupting the conventions of both art and everyday life, the book emerged as a significant artistic preoccupation. Not only were books important for anthologizing ephemeral action-based art, but they became in their own right sites of artistic experimentation with cognitive, visual, and tactile experience. Drawing on the remarkable collection of rare artists’ books housed in the University of Chicago Library, Concrete Poetry, Concrete Book explores how artists in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland investigated the material and technical forms of the book. Referring to the way that language takes up space on the page, arrests the eyes, and insists on physical interaction, works of konkrete poesie (concrete poetry) tested the material display of language, focusing on the object-quality of letters and words. To accommodate this dual staging of textual production and reception, artists’ books took on unusual forms, as in Gerhard Rühm’s kinetic book bewegung (motion, 1964) and Hansjörg Mayer’s reinvention of the alphabet in the fold-out book typoaktionen (type-actions, 1967). At the same time that artists’ books often activate the process of reading, they also deemphasize textual cognition, foregrounding instead touch and materiality, as exemplified in die-cut multi-colored cellophane pages of Dieter Roth’s bilderbücher (picture-books, 1957) and in Wolf Vostell’s unreadable 20-pound Betonbuch (Concrete Book, 1971). In tandem with Concrete Happenings, interactive workshops will provide unique opportunities for hands-on engagement with artists’ books, and a series of public lectures will provide further perspective on the concrete questions they raise about language, materiality, performance, and collaboration. Curator: Caroline Lillian Schopp, PhD candidate in the Department of Art History. Presented by the University of Chicago Library, with additional support generously provided by the Swiss Benevolent Society and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York. Fantastic Architecture: Vostell, Fluxus, and the Built Environment Exhibition hours: Monday through Friday, 11am–5pm Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, 5701 South Woodlawn Avenue Taking its title and inspiration from the seminal publication Fantastic Architecture (1969), edited by Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins and published by Something Else Press, this exhibition presents various approaches to architecture, urban space, and the built environment within an expanded international community of Fluxus and related artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fantastic Architecture is presented in conjunction with the re-siting, following a major conservation treatment, of Wolf Vostell’s Concrete Traffic (1970), a monumental event-sculpture in the University of Chicago’s Campus Art Collection. The exhibition contextualizes Concrete Traffic in relation to Vostell’s other related works from the period, including photomontage proposals for alterations to architectural and urban spaces and event scores for happenings intended for specific cities, as well as the work of his artistic peers and interlocutors. In Europe and the United States alike, the postwar period saw massive transformations of the urban landscape, the construction and expansion of freeway systems, and the rise of automobile culture, and artists of the time responded to these developments in a variety of ways. Like its eponymous exemplar, the exhibition embraces the porousness and intellectual ferment of the experimental art world of the time, a context in which forms and concepts circulated among an international community of artists whose political and aesthetic projects did not always strictly align. Also included are works and projects by Fluxus impresario George Maciunas, Japanese collective Hi Red Center, happenings inventor Allan Kaprow, conceptual artist Douglas Huebler, and artist and poet Rosemary Mayer, and others. Curator: Jacob Proctor, Curator, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. Presented by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, with additional support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Vostell Concrete, 1969–1973 January 17–June 11, 2017 | Reception: Sunday, January 22, 2017, 3–6pm Exhibition hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 10am–5pm; Thursday until 8pm Smart Museum of Art, 5550 South Greenwood Avenue Vostell used concrete as an actual material and artistic motif in a surprising number of ways in the late 1960s and early 70s. During this time, Vostell mobilized concrete’s ambivalent connotations of permanence and inflexibility, strength and violence, to engage with postwar urbanism, particularly German reconstruction and American urban renewal; with unrest and war, including the civil rights marches in Selma, the Paris student protests, the Vietnam and Cold wars; and with the international, if not yet global world, particularly as manifest in transatlantic travel, postcards, and the Munich Olympics. Vostell Concrete is animated by questions of why the materials of art making matter and what they signify. It features the artist’s little known, first uses of concrete and redresses a too-limiting understanding of Vostell as a mere performance artist or belated German Pop artist. Drawn from the Smart Museum and other local, national, and international collections, the approximately 45 works on view span a variety of media, from sculpture to film, performance, collage, watercolor, and printmaking. Curators: Christine Mehring, Professor and Chair, Department of Art History, in collaboration with Diane Miliotes, Interim Curator of Modern Art and Design, Smart Museum of Art, and Caroline Lillian Schopp, Curatorial Research Associate and PhD Candidate in Art History. This exhibition has been made possible in part by the Smart Museum’s Pamela and R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric Exhibition Fund, Amy L. Gold, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and SmartPartners. search Click on the image to zoom in Concrete Traffic's Procession to the University of Chicago

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INSTA-PROMO Homepage » Personal Project (page 3) Category "Personal Project" The Art of the Personal Project: Naomi Harris Suzanne Sease - May 2, 2019 - Personal Project The Art of the Personal Project is a crucial element to let potential buyers see how you think creatively on your own. I am drawn to personal projects that have an interesting vision or that show something I have never seen before. In this thread, I’ll include a link to each personal project with the artist statement so you can see more of the project. Please note: This thread is not affiliated with any company; I’m just featuring projects that I find. Please DO NOT send me your work. I do not take submissions. Today’s featured artist: Naomi Harris EUSA – Artist Statement On a trip to the mountains just north of Atlanta, Georgia, I came upon this odd little town called Helen. Once a thriving mining community, by the 1970s they were suffering from a recession. They called a town meeting and decided to turn their hamlet into a Bavarian wonderland bringing in tourist dollars. So today, in the Deep South, among all the gingerbread shops selling Confederate flag tee shirts, the world’s largest Oktoberfest is held, for three months. This got me wondering, if this exists in Helen, what other American cities have been modeled after imaginary European villages. And for that matter, are there any places in Europe that were designed to look like America? Globalization has made the uniqueness of a particular country less significant thus creating an indistinguishable common world community.We wear the same clothes, eat the same meals, use the same iPhones, we are all interconnected. EUSA is a reaction to this homogenization of European and American cultures. Being enthralled by another country’s way of life does not mean that it is always an accurate portrayal rather it becomes a sentimental and idealized depiction; an homage to a heritage that isn’t ones own. In America these “European” venues resemble a land of make-believe. Like something out of a fairy tale, they are magical, whimsical and quaint. In Europe their fascination lies in an America of the past, when the US was considered glorious and free, a place full of fresh starts and opportunities. The foundation of these locations was to honour the “other,” but what was once characteristic has now ultimately become a caricature. I began this project in June 2008 photographing a weekend rendezvous for re-enactors at High Chaparral, a country western them park in the south of Sweden. There people spent the weekend living in rustic tents as “Indians” or “Confederate Soldiers” leaving all of their modern-day conveniences locked in their cars. Since then I visited over twenty-five locations on both sides of the Atlantic including Sioux City, a movie-studio-turned-tourist-attraction in Grand Canaria, Spain;‘Indian’ festivals in Germany: a Tulip Festival in Orange City, Iowa: an American Civil War reenactment in the Czech Republic; a Viking festival in Alaska; a rockabilly festival in the countryside outside Budapest, Hungary;a Maifest in Leavenworth, Washington; numerous Oktoberfests around the United States, and a variety of ‘Cowboy and Indian’ amusement parks throughout Europe. At first sight it is often difficult to locate where and when these photos were taken; are we in the U.S, or somewhere in Europe? Upon closer examination, something inevitably reveals how out-of-place it is, and we are aware of our “error”. In other images it is much more obvious that what we are looking at is built and artificial – a benign pastiche to the more insidious and offensive forms of cultural appropriation. These exaggerated reconstructions bear little authenticity and what was once characteristic has now ultimately become a caricature. Photographing the visitors playing dress-up in these various maudlin locations within these two continents,my goal was to illustrate the enthusiasm we have for one another’s heritage, and demonstrate this universal phenomenon that is a reaction to the homogenization of our cultures.And through this spirit of camaraderie, if only for that moment, the participants are granted membership to one another’s culture. To see more of this project, click here. Naomi Harris and her project EUSA which has gone from a personal project to a published book and now an exhibition as part of the inaugural Photoville LA which runs April 26 – 28 and May 3 – 5. You can visit both the exhibition and the artist herself where she’ll be selling books (and if you’re lucky she may be wearing her dirndl) at Photoville which is being held at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Century Park, 2000 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles, CA 90067 APE contributor Suzanne Sease currently works as a consultant for photographers and illustrators around the world. She has been involved in the photography and illustration industry since the mid 80s. After establishing the art buying department at The Martin Agency, then working for Kaplan-Thaler, Capital One, Best Buy and numerous smaller agencies and companies, she decided to be a consultant in 1999. She has a new Twitter feed with helpful marketing information because she believes that marketing should be driven by brand and not by specialty. Follow her at @SuzanneSease. Instagram The Art of the Personal Project: Dasha Pears Suzanne Sease - April 25, 2019 - Personal Project Today’s featured artist: Dasha Pears Photography turned out to be a way of discovering my true-self and expressing it. My works are a reflection of this discovery process and I hope that they can help others who are on the same journey as me. In metaphorical ways I try to show and share processes that are going on in many people’s minds: dealing with negative self-talk, being overwhelmed by all kinds of emotions, finding that activity that puts you in the state of flow, when time ceases to exist. My photography is influenced by classical fine art, surrealism, as well as fantasy and science fiction books. The instruments of surrealism help me show that the scene is only partially real and that most of it is going on in the character’s mind. My works are carefully composed and many of them are leaning towards minimalism. This is my way of expressing that controlling your mind and creating space is crucial for discovering who you are and who you are not. To purchase prints, click here Dasha Pears is an award-winning Russian conceptual photographer, currently based in Helsinki, Finland. Dasha’s unique style is dreamlike and whimsical. Her works tell stories that combine real life and surrealism, making the viewer stop and think. She started her photographic path in 2011, after reaching burnout in a marketing communications career. Having tried many types of photography, Dasha found herself in conceptual and fine art sphere. Since then her images have been exhibited in Russia, France, Poland, Austria and Finland. Her work was also named among the winners of Best of Russia’15, had an honorable mention during Trierenberg Super Circuit 2017 and 2018 photography contests in Linz, Austria, and won a bronze medal during Prix de la Photographie Paris, 2018. Dasha’s photographs are used worldwide by companies like Trevillion, ArcAngel, plainpicture and Millennium Images, and can be found on covers of books published in Europe, the United States and South America. In 2016 Dasha started sharing her experience of organizing conceptual photography shoots and producing surrealist artworks in the form of creative photography workshops. Since then she has held over 15 events in Finland and abroad. This website is for Dasha’s fine art photography. Follow on Instagram. For commercial portfolio please check www.dashapears.com. The Art of the Personal Project: Sara Forrest Today’s featured artist: Sara Forrest Prom night featuring six juniors in my home town of Topeka, KS. This series is part of an ongoing project on youth in America. I started my photography career in small town Kansas and always am thankful for it. I work now all over photographing ad campaigns and editorials worldwide and owe my drive to this place in the middle of the US. This vast landscape isn’t anything particularly special to many on the coasts, but it is very special to me. It’s a unique perspective to be from here and to have left for so long and to come back and appreciate it. Today it has the faint smell of the spring grassland burns – lush regrowth soon to follow. When life feels spun out due to the crazy work and travel schedules or other circumstances, I always come back and feel grounded and recentered working on this project in this space. It is my hope I can always continue to learn and understand people anywhere in the world, starting with where I started too. The Art of the Personal Project: Doug Menuez Suzanne Sease - April 4, 2019 - Personal Project Today’s featured artist: Doug Menuez I am deeply interested in both history and culture and how innovators and influencers such as Jeff Ho shape it. With this short film, I was very lucky to be introduced to this truly legendary but humble artist and get to spend a day hanging out with him and his colleagues from Juice Magazine. This film does not cover Jeff’s incredible history or details of his accomplishments and influence and someday I hope to do that longer piece. This is more of a haiku, a visual tone poem, a sort of glimpse into Jeff’s philosophy about street art, searching for the perfect wave and his life’s work. Originally I was going to produce a short film for Leica about their lenses for the Leica SL camera. As I got to know Jeff and his friends Terri and Dan at Juice Magazine I decided instead that I needed to make this one a personal film. I felt very attracted to their totally independent spirit and approach to living life with an artistic integrity that is hard to maintain these days. I’m definitely an outsider to skating and surfing, but have a great appreciation. When I was 10 I really got into skateboarding with early boards. I migrated into go-carts and mini-bikes and then ended up channeling all my teen energy into photography and blues. So for this film, I serve as the witness and storyteller, which is what I love doing above all else. And of course we used the Leica SL and the astonishing Leica Cine lenses. We are very grateful to Leica Camera USA and everyone else in the production for their generous help getting this done. a video of this project, can be seen here The Art of the Personal Project: Mark Laita Suzanne Sease - March 28, 2019 - Personal Project Today’s featured artist: Mark Laita I’m always working on personal projects and a few times art book publishers have decided to turn my projects into books, like Abrams did with Serpentine a few years ago. I use my personal projects as a way to do something pure which is in no way aimed at generating money. Ironically, they usually do in some way, either as a published book or gallery show or as an advertising project. I’ve shot many campaigns that art directors admitted were meant for me from the start since their ideas come from some of my personal images. For me, Serpentine was simply a project about form and color with a little danger and symbolism thrown in for interest. Personal projects always draw me back to why I chose photography as a career as a teenager. To this day they’re the life blood of my career as well as the key to my fulfillment as an artist. As with any marriage, it isn’t always perfect, but my advertising work and my personal work have a symbiotic relationship. Commercial work funds my personal projects and personal work inspires my advertising images. The Art of the Personal Project: Cade Martin Today’s featured artist: Cade Martin Blues Men: While I love everything about the collaboration that comes with a commercial shoot, when it comes to my personal work, I find I am drawn to the one-on-one with real, every-day people. You can’t make any of it up or direct it – how they carry themselves or have decided to dress for the day is better than where my imagination could take it. I always go out of my way to make the subjects look their best, to present them in the truest, most sincere way- exploring the architecture of their faces, the texture of their clothes and so on. I worked on this post-production with one of my go-tos, Sugar Digital, and that familiar relationship is great for both understanding my process and pushing me to experiment. My original intention going into this Blues project was to produce these as black and white portraits, but the more we played, the more I gravitated towards a bit of warm color that brings a little more life, as well as further defining the magnetic architecture of their faces. https://aphotoeditor.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/BluesPromo_HD_FB.mp4 personal portrait project from the Clarksdale Mississippi Juke Joint Festival Cade Martin is now being represented by Heather Elder The Art of the Personal Project: David Walter Banks of Brinson+Banks Today’s featured artist: Brinson Banks ‘Chroma’ Artist Statement: Chroma has two purposes for me, it offers a chance to feel connected and it provides an opportunity to explore and experiment with light and color, as every image in this series is created in camera with minimal to no post-production. The current socio-political climate in the United States has created a palpable tension that flows like electricity through us all. This has magnified both the divisions as well as the need for reunification. I feel this increasing disconnection with the world around me of late, as though I’m separate as an observer. Yet, at the same time I have a deep yearning to connect with others. Apathy is in one hand and empathy is in the other. I create these images in hopes of coming to terms with my feelings of isolation, but also to reconnect one on one. I connect with my subjects through this intimate shared experience, while provoking and evoking an emotive response. I ask for introspection, vulnerability, sometimes angst or sorrow, sometimes light and hope. Before I take a single photo, I share inspiration from a small collection of painters and authors whose use of color, light, and language I hold dear. With each subject, I take the time to sit, talk, and share this work before lifting the camera. Then I often simply wait in the uncomfortable warming silence as the ether informs the pose and expression, allowing it in. And, as we are creating together, apathy turns into empathy. The Art of the Personal Project: Giulio Sciorio Suzanne Sease - March 7, 2019 - Personal Project Today’s featured artist: Giulio Sciorio Traditionally a Mexican neighborhood in Chicago, Pilsen is in the process of gentrification. The images in this series are portraits of the people I connected with while exploring the neighborhood. These individuals, small business owners, and families represent a community in transition. I’m moved by the plight of communities facing gentrification like Pilsen. It’s hard enough for people to make rent for their homes and small businesses and I wonder what will happen to them when they are forced out of their neighborhood. As luxury condos and cafes replace hidden gems like barbershops and amazing Mexican food joints, the personality of Pilsen will be forever changed. Through photography, I wanted to capture this moment in Chicago’s history before it’s gone forever. What I love about photography is the human connection. Before making a street portrait, I connect with my subjects on an individual level. With some loose direction if any, I prefer to get as close as possible to the subject which I feel captures their honest emotions while allowing space for self-expression. Community, self-expression, and diversity are the foundation of my photographic work. The Art of the Personal Project: Kirsty Mitchell Suzanne Sease - February 28, 2019 - Personal Project Today’s featured artist: Kirsty Mitchell Described as a multi-faceted artist, British fine art photographer Kirsty Mitchell draws on her past careers in fashion design and costume making, to produce images of beguiling dream-like worlds all shot in the ancient woodlands of her home county Surrey. Kirsty describes her approach as ‘Fantasy for Real’ spending months meticulously handcrafting her character’s costumes and props to coincide with the bloom of wild flowers and the seasonal extremes of her local environment. After graduating from six years of study at The London College of Fashion and Ravensbourne College of Art, Kirsty went on to complete internships at the studios of Avant Garde designers, Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan. Her career as a fashion designer continued for over a decade until 2008 when Kirsty developed a sudden and deeply emotional passion for photography, during the treatment of her mother’s terminal cancer. It was through the lens that Mitchell felt able to channel her grief and communicate emotions she felt unable to talk about with the people she loved. She describes photography as becoming both an obsession and a therapy. In the summer of 2009 Kirsty embarked on the creation of the Wonderland series, a project intended as a book in her mother’s memory. The international acclaim for this body of work led Mitchell to leave her fashion career behind in 2011 and after 5 intensive years, Wonderland was completed in 2014. A year later, after a number of offers from major publishers, Mitchell decided to launch her own crowd funding campaign to create the Wonderland book in order to produce a high end publication made from the finest materials possible, printed in Italy. The campaign went on to become the most successfully funded photography book in crowd funding history, raising more than £334K in just 28 days and was completely sold out within 3 months. The Wonderland book is now in it’s Second Edition and continues to sell around the world. The series is now an international touring museum show, hosted by Fotografiska, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious museums for contemporary photography. Gammelyn’s Daughter The Fade Of Fallen Memories The Ghost Swift 2018 The Queen’s Armada The Secret Locked In The Roots A film about this project, click here The Art of the Personal Project: Stephen Tayo Suzanne Sease - February 21, 2019 - Personal Project, Working Today’s featured artist: Stephen Tayo Featured on CNN Tayo, who grew up in Ikere-Ekiti, Nigeria, and now lives in Lagos, is not a twin himself, but he wanted to tell “a story that identifies my tribe.” “It was really important for me to establish how twins are seen in our culture,” Tayo said in a phone interview. “Other tribes see twins as an abomination from the precolonial era onwards, but the Yoruba see them as a blessing.” For Tayo, “Ibeji” signifies a more conceptual and multivalent approach to portraiture in comparison to the street style photography that has landed him on Vogue.com, Dazed Digital and Nataal. His subjects, friends or members of his wider community, were photographed at their homes or out on the streets of Lagos over a six-month period. The Art of the Personal Project: Eric Espino Today’s featured artist: Eric Espino Artist Statement:“Let us Play” Our Mission at Eyekonzis to Empower, Educate and Motivate the next generation of field hockey and lacrosse Olympians. It is our belief, that through the structure and development of playing field hockey, we will provide our girls & boys with the skill set and development they need in areas such as sportsmanship, healthy lifestyle, team work, self- esteem, history of their culture, healthy body image and academic achievement. This will translate into a wholesome productive lifestyle, on and off the field. Unfortunately, there are some who don’t believe in this cause. The girls of Eyekonz, along with coach Jazmine A. Smith, were photographed in this series shortly after Strawberry Mansion High School and the Philadelphia Unified School District dismantled the league from it’s district. This issue has led to a class action lawsuit against the district, for the injustice of the treatment of Eyekonz Sports League. This story was later published in Essence magazine, amongst others. For more info, please click on the links below. Philadelphia Weekly Now This -Eric Espino The Art of the Personal Project: Robin O’Neill Suzanne Sease - February 7, 2019 - Personal Project Today’s featured artist: Robin O’Neill My photography is driven by my curiosity and attraction toward different cultures. Thirty minutes from my culturally homogenous home in Whistler is a small community called Lil’wat Nation. This is a First Nations reserve at the base of the majestic 8500-ft Mount Currie, surrounded by the Coast Mountain range. As a local backcountry skier, I make a weekly pass through the Lil’wat Nation in the winter. I look forward to this part of my day. I crane my neck to investigate the random items on the lawns, examine the texture of old paint cracking off the sides of houses, and watch the dogs roaming freely. Seeing the chimney smoke and warm condensation in the windows, all I want is to know the people inside. Last winter I decided to drive out there more regularly, bring along my camera, and document the beauty I saw in these homes and in this community. Only 40 kms away, and a vastly different view of the world. I am left wanting more. The Art of the Personal Project: Hugh Kretschmer Suzanne Sease - January 31, 2019 - Personal Project Today’s featured artist: Hugh Kretschmer I first noticed a change when I moved back to LA from New York after twelve years. It seldom rains, and the weatherman is struggling to figure out when El Niño is supposed to arrive; a weather phenomenon that brings heavy rain to this part of the world every seven years. We’re past the seven-year mark. I remember as a kid looking at the weather page of the newspaper on an El Niño year and seeing in the satellite photo one rainstorm after another coming from Hawaii. It looked like they were on a conveyor belt, and they actually had a nickname for it – The Pineapple Express. Fire storms are more common than rainstorms, and I’ve been evacuated twice because of brush fires. And then there are oil derricks out in the bay, a lot of them, and there is a faint smell of crude and a rainbow sheen on the ocean surface. Like a siren call, it is alluring to the eye but toxic to the touch. And, if all of this is happening in my home city, I can only imagine what the effects are elsewhere around the world. Add to the mix a prediction by experts that future wars will be waged over water, it is hard to sit on my hands and leave it to the experts, “more qualified than me”, to do something about this. Then the idea came to me: create photographs around the subject of water but have not a drop of it in the images. It sat in the back of my mind until I was interviewed by an Arab arts and culture magazine while teaching workshops in Dubai. It dawned on me why this project was gnawing at me when she asked, “Have you ever considered having your work serve a purpose?” That one question brought it all together as if the universe was telling me to start the project. “Mirage” has a double message: bring water back to where it once flowed and was pristine; and take a glimpse into dystopian future where the only way to see water in its purest form would be through artificial means. Think museum diorama! My vision for this project is to ultimately expand my vistas beyond California to the rest of the country, and eventually other parts of world where natural water systems are in peril. By way of gallery exhibitions, print sales, and an eventual book, I will donate a portion of the proceeds to a non-profit organization dedicated to water conservation — come hell or high water. The Art of the Personal Project: Mark Hanson Today’s featured artist: Mark Hanson I’ve been a lifestyle/fashion and commercial photographer my whole career, working with National and international clients, my job requires that the shoots I photograph or video, are planned out, stay in budget and are delivered on or before a deadline. But I’ve always enjoyed spontaneously capturing a moment, whether it’s an off guard moment on set, people on the street in another country or during a sporting event, such as football or volleyball. So when my daughters began playing volleyball, I started bringing my camera to all of their matches. At first it was just shooting my daughter when she hit, dug a ball or blocked. After a while those images all started to feel similar, just a different location or color of uniform. Then I started to shoot what was happening off the court and the moments between plays. I also started to experiment with shooting different angles while they were playing and using different focal lengths. I became obsessed with getting different images, getting that exact moment of the block at the net, or the celebration of the team when they got a huge win. I spent three years shooting my daughters and their teammates at every tournament. Always looking for those shots I wanted but hadn’t had the opportunity to capture just yet. In my work with commercial and fashion clients, I can always control the images and direct the models so I can get the shot I want or the images my clients need, but you can’t stop a volleyball match, go out onto the court and ask the teams to do that again. A block at the net or a massive dig from the back row happen in a fraction of a second, so I have to be able to anticipate what the players are going to do and exactly when things are going to happen, but that’s all part of what makes it fun, that’s the challenge! My youngest daughter still plays volleyball, so once again, this season; I’ll have my camera with me. I may not be as obsessed with taking pictures of everything that goes on this year, but I know I’ll always be looking for the next shot that will be different or more amazing than anything I’ve shot before. That’s what keeps it fun, and it helps keep me from stressing during those tight matches where they might lose. The Art of the Personal Project: Liz Von Hoene Today’s featured artist: Liz Von Hoene A print and motion collaboration centered around LA Artist Mimi Haddon’s textured fabric sculptures and brought to life between highly creative and visionary women. Wear The Wild Things Rgives you a glimpse into an eerie urban world of vibrant colors and odd shapes where model, wardrobe and sculpture delicately play off one another to become one. The graphic simplicity to the environment and shaping of light and shadow made for the perfect playground and helped further celebrate this surreal and wild vision. The Art of the Personal Project: Donato DiCamillo Today’s featured artist: Donato DiCamillo The Fringes Like many of my photographs, these photos represent slices of humanity seemingly living without filters. In most cases they’ve become comfortable in what others may say are outside the norm. Born in Brooklyn New York, Donato Di Camillo is one son of three siblings born from Italian Immigrant Parents. As a child Donato suffered behavioral problems with anger, he would soon be expelled from school at the age of sixteen for violence, then finding himself in and out of behavioral institutions and jails. Ironically Donato became intensely interested in photography while serving out a federal prison sentence in Petersburg, MCI, Virginia “I was always interested in magazines like National Geographic and LIFE. When I was a child I used to dream about being on adventures, exploring, always fascinated about other cultures in different parts of the world” Since his release in 2012 Donato taught himself to use a camera while being on home confinement. At first he photographed, bugs, plants or anything else within the 120ft of his home, which he was restricted to. Donato was featured in multiple publications and news broadcasts around the world, such as, BBC, Washington Post, CBC, Huffington Post, and was invited to speak at the prestigious HEARST magazines annual summit. Di Camillo continues to focus on people and plans to put out his first book late 2017. He currently resides in Staten Island, N.Y. The Art of the Personal Project: Nate Bressler Suzanne Sease - December 20, 2018 - Personal Project Today’s featured artist: Nate Bressler Between the fire lines~ With a fake press pass in hand, I made my rounds through town, gathering tools from friends, a water pump from the hardware store, enough Gjusta bread to feed a small Army and a small generator to bring the power needed. There are three major checkpoints between Venice Beach and the headland where the brave few stayed behind to fight the fire on their own. I’ve been through plenty of tornadoes and hurricanes in my life so there must be something I can do. All my adventure gear and camper were up in flames, along w so many of my surf and horse family homes, turning the mega fire into one of those nothing to lose but everything to gain situations. As the fire raged on through the remaining drought stricken canyons, distress calls and rumors of starving animals cut off by the blaze made their way to our crew of unlikely hot shots. With thousands of horses throughout the windy canyons and a fire that moved like no other, many animals were left behind with no help able to get through. Luckily for them, a 250 gallon tank I commandeered from Larry Thorne’s farm, hay bails from anywhere I could find them and hoses that were brought in by boat with the rest of our gear needed to whoop this fire. The nights were spent driving the streets in groups of four, looking for flare ups that could possibly get out of hand and threaten the unburned houses. That left my days free to tend to the animals and distressed natives like Bonnie Decker who’s grandfather settled Decker canyon over 100 years ago. These fires were nothing new to a family that came out west in the 1860’s, when ranches covered the coastline and the PCH was nothing more than a couple of dirt ruts. Bonnie’s mom Millie had both the kids at the ranch house, all while keeping the 60 bee hives, feeding chickens and training horses to go along with all her daily chores. Even just shy of 100, Millie tried to stick this hell of a fire out but this was the biggest one yet and it would be just too much to handle. So to the nursing home she’ll go for safety as Bonnie and her married ranch hands fought to save what of the homestead they could defend with hoses, holding their livestock in turnout that they hoped to be safe. They took a gamble that day and lost a home, tack shed and most the corrals. “Of course moms place with all the clutter survived and mine burned down” Bonnie said as she sifted through her grandpa’s charred tack. Grateful to all be alive and with no shortage of spirit she had a lot to be thankful for. All her animals had survived in a canyon where so much had been lost in a community that suffered its biggest fire in history and a mass shooting at a country bar all within a day and a half. We know the rebuilding wouldn’t be easy but not much on a ranch is and if not for this settled chaparral landscape’s toughness… the human spirit would’ve burned out a long time ago. Here, my truck, Brutus delivers water, feed and insulin to the Decker’s ranch as the next canyon over burns in a matter of hours. Bonnie Decker The Art of the Personal Project: Dax Ward Today’s featured artist: Dax Ward Concept of my work Every derelict location has its own individual history, but each one is connected in the sense that they are reminders of what once was, what might’ve been, and what happens when we forget. They are no longer freshly painted, not shiny and new anymore. Windows are broken. Doors, furniture, light fixtures, and most metal has been either stolen or scrapped. They are not as they once were, nor will they ever again be. Nonetheless, despite the decay and rust that many see as unsightly blots on the landscape, the allure for urban explorers and photographers lies in identifying and capturing the remaining beauty in these forgotten locations. If we look closely, it isn’t hard to find. at the abandoned New World Mall, Bangkok, Thailand at the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art, Sathorn Soi 1, Bangkok at the Sathorn Unique ‘Ghost Tower’, Yan Nawa, Bangkok, Thailand To see a book he would love to have published, click here.

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https://apnews.com/52b06a124a5a4469984793d3c208733d Kashmiris allege night terror by Indian troops in crackdown By AIJAZ HUSSAINSeptember 14, 2019 GMT In this Monday, Aug. 26, 2019, photo, a Kashmiri baker Sonaullah Sofi lifts the shirt from his son's back to show torture marks allegedly caused by Indian army soldiers at their bakery in southern village of Parigam, Indian controlled Kashmir. The main city of Indian-controlled Kashmir presents a mostly deserted and subdued look, woven in a maze of razor wire. But drive out into the rural hinterland and residents in village after village narrate horrors of regular nightly raids by Indian army soldiers. Sofi's family was asleep when army troops raided his home. The soldiers took his two sons into a street, hitting them with gun butts, iron chains and sticks, Sofi said. “Helpless, I heard my sons scream as soldiers started beating them up mercilessly in the middle of the road,” Sofi said. ( AP Photo/Aijaz Hussain) HEFF SHIRMAL, India (AP) — The Indian soldiers descended on Bashir Ahmed Dar’s house in southern Kashmir on Aug. 10, a few days after the government in New Delhi stripped the disputed Himalayan region of its statehood and launched a crackdown. Over the next 48 hours, the 50-year-old plumber said he suffered two separate rounds of beatings by soldiers. They demanded that he find his younger brother, who had joined rebels opposing India’s presence in the Muslim majority region, and persuade him to surrender or else “face the music.” In the second beating, at a military camp, Dar said he was struck with sticks by three soldiers until he was unconscious. He woke up at home, “unable to sit on my bruised and bloodied buttocks and aching back,” he added. But it wasn’t over. On Aug. 14, soldiers returned to his house in the village of Heff Shirmal and destroyed his family’s supply of rice and other foodstuffs by mixing it with fertilizer and kerosene. Dar’s account of violence and intimidation by Indian soldiers was not unusual. In more than 50 interviews, residents in a dozen villages in Kashmir told The Associated Press that the military had raided their homes since India’s government imposed a security crackdown in the region Aug. 5. They said the soldiers inflicted beatings and electric shocks, forced them to eat dirt or drink filthy water, poisoned their food supplies or killed livestock, and threatened to take away and marry their female relatives. Thousands of young men have been arrested. Asked by AP to respond to the recent allegations of abuse from the Northern Command, the Indian army’s headquarters in Jammu and Kashmir. Its spokesman based in the main city of Srinagar, Col. Rajesh Kalia, dismissed the villagers’ accounts as “completely baseless and false,” and asserted the Indian army values human rights. “There have been reports of movement of terrorists” in the areas AP visited, Kalia said. “Some youth were suspected to be involved in anti-national and disruptive activities and were handed over to police as per law of the land.” India’s top security official, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, said the army has not been involved in the operation in Kashmir. “There have been no atrocities,” he said. For years, there have been accusations from Kashmir residents and international human rights groups that Indian troops have carried out systematic abuse and unjustified arrests of those who oppose rule from New Delhi in the divided region that is claimed by both India and Pakistan. But frustration, anger and fear have been growing in Kashmir in the five weeks since the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi stripped the region of most of its semiautonomous status on Aug. 5 and imposed a curfew and a communications blackout. Although some restrictions have been eased in the main city of Srinagar, with students encouraged to return to school and businesses to reopen, rural residents complain of what they perceive as a campaign of violence and intimidation that seems designed at suppressing any militancy, rebellion or dissent. The abuses in the nighttime raids by troops began in early August as New Delhi took its action on Kashmir, according to interviews with at least 200 people. The change in status nullified decades-old constitutional provisions that gave Jammu and Kashmir some political autonomy and land inheritance rights. It also downgraded the state into two federally governed territories. The actions have been challenged in India’s Supreme Court. In the village of Parigam, the family of baker Sonaullah Sofi was asleep when army troops raided his home. The soldiers took his two sons into a street, hitting them with gun butts, iron chains and sticks, Sofi said. “Helpless, I heard my sons scream as soldiers started beating them up mercilessly in the middle of the road,” Sofi said. Soon, soldiers brought 10 more young men to the village square, seeking names of anti-India protesters, said Muzaffar Ahmed, Sofi’s 20-year-old son, recounting the Aug. 7 incident. “They hit our backs and legs for three hours. They gave us electric shocks,” Ahmed said, lifting his shirt to show his burned and bruised back. “As we cried and pleaded (with) them to let us go, they became more relentless and ruthless in their beating. They forced us to eat dust and drink water from a drain.” Since the crackdown began, at least 3,000 people, mostly young men, have been arrested, according to police officials and records reviewed by the AP. About 120 of those have been slapped with the Public Safety Act, a law that permits holding people for up to two years without trial, the records showed. Thousands of others have been detained in police lockups to be screened for potential to join protests. Some have been freed and asked to report back a few days later. Some are only held in the daytime, released at night to sleep at home, while their parents are told to bring them back the next day. Ahmed, the baker, said the soldiers finally left at dawn, leaving them writhing in pain. He and his elder brother along with at least eight others were then bundled into a single ambulance and taken to a hospital in Srinagar. The conflict over Kashmir has existed since the late 1940s, when India and Pakistan won independence from the British empire. The countries have fought two of their three subsequent wars over Kashmir, and each administers a portion of the region. New Delhi initially grappled with largely peaceful anti-India movements in its portion of Kashmir. However, a series of political blunders, broken promises and a crackdown on dissent escalated the conflict into a full-blown armed rebellion against Indian control in 1989 for a united Kashmir, either under Pakistan rule or independent of both. Since then, about 70,000 people have been killed in the conflict, which India sees as a proxy war by Pakistan. The region is one of the most heavily militarized in the world, patrolled by soldiers and paramilitary police. Most Kashmiris resent the Indian troop presence and support the rebels. Now, a new generation in Kashmir has revived the militancy, challenging New Delhi’s rule with guns and social media. In February, a Kashmiri suicide attacker rammed a van full of explosives into an Indian paramilitary convoy, killing more than 40 people and wounding more than two dozen. Modi said at the time that government forces have been given “total freedom” to deal with militants. For years, human rights groups have accused Indian troops of intimidating and controlling the population with physical and sexual abuse and unjustified arrests. Indian government officials deny this, calling the allegations separatist propaganda. Abuses alleged by rights groups since 1989 have included rape, sodomy, waterboarding, electric shocks to the genitals, burns and sleep deprivation. The U.N. last year called for an independent international investigation into allegations of rights violations like rape, torture and extrajudicial killings in Kashmir. India rejected the report as “fallacious.” Parvez Imroz, a prominent rights lawyer, said the new reports of abuse in the security forces’ ongoing campaign were “disturbing.” Fear and anger are palpable in the villages that dot the vast apple orchards, especially after sundown, when the soldiers come. Abdul Ghani Dar, 60, said soldiers have raided his home in the village of Marhang seven times since early August, adding that he sends his daughter to another location before they arrive. “They say they’ve come to check on my son but I know they come looking for my daughter,” Dar said, his eyes welling with tears. Residents of three other villages said soldiers had threatened to take girls away from their families for marriage. “They’re marauding our homes and hearths like a victorious army. They are now behaving as if they have a right over our lives, property and honor,” said Nazir Ahmed Bhat, who lives in Arihal. In early August, soldiers came to the home of Rafiq Ahmed Lone while he was away. “The soldiers asked my wife to accompany them for searching our home. When she refused, she was beaten up with gun butts and sticks,” Lone said. While she was being beaten, the soldiers killed their rooster, he added. Associated Press writer Emily Schmall in New Delhi contributed to this report. Follow Aijaz Hussain at twitter.com/hussain_aijaz

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General Manager, Dame Phyllis Frost Centre | Melbourne - Northern Metro General Manager, Dame Phyllis Frost Centre Application Close Date: 06-Feb-2020 Melbourne - Northern Metro Ongoing - full time DOJ/3588_DEC19 3588 - General Manager DPFC - Position Description.docx (Word, 755KB) Lead and manage Victoria's largest women's prison Work for a facility paving the way in female corrections staff recruitment Help reduce crime by championing trauma-informed rehabilitation programs The Department of Justice and Community Safety is seeking a new general manager of Victorian women's prison, the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre. Are you ready to take on a tough job and do it well with integrity and dedication? Victoria's largest women's prison Dame Phyllis Frost Centre (DPFC) is a women's prison accommodating maximum, medium and minimum-security prisoners who are on remand or who have been sentenced, located 26km west of Melbourne's CBD. The facility is named after Dame Phyllis Frost, a well-known campaigner for women prisoners. In the 1950s, Dame Phyllis Frost persuaded the State Government to set up the Consultative Council for Female Prison Reform. Until her death in 2004, she worked tirelessly with governments, prison administrators and non-government agencies for improved conditions, rehabilitation and education for women in prison. The spirit of her work continues today, as Corrections Victoria adapts to changing times and new understandings of how best to help reduce crime. Recently, DPFC has placed a major focus on analysing the impact of personal trauma in women's offending pathways. This has been recognised and integrated into correctional policy and practice in order to adequately address women offenders' complex needs and effectively support their rehabilitation. What will the general manager do? Reporting to the Assistant Commissioner, Custodial Services, the general manager will manage the day-to- . Reporting to the Assistant Commissioner, Custodial Services, the general manager will oversee the day-to-day operations of DPFC. As part of the Corrections Victoria leadership team, they will work proactively to establish and maintain strong relationships and ensure effective collaboration with relevant internal and external stakeholders. They will be responsible for managing an operating model configured to meet the complex needs of the women's system in Victoria. The general manager will set and monitor prison procedures, undertake planning and be accountable for achieving service delivery outcomes and standards within an allocated budget. They will be responsible for the performance of the prison, providing leadership and development to custodial and non-custodial staff. Paramount to success will be the ability to effect change by championing key rehabilitation programs that will positively contribute to the welfare and reintegration of offenders. For more details on what you can expect to do on the job, please consult the position description. What skills should a general manager have? The new general manager of DPFC will need to possess integrity and resilience. They will need to live with integrity to be trusted and respected by stakeholders and staff; and will need to call on their resilience to bounce back from disappointments, not letting their belief waiver that they can make a positive impact. In addition to this, it is ideal that the general manager possesses: Demonstrated operational knowledge of a correctional system and an understanding of relevant policies and issues that relate to the delivery of services to women prisoners. Thorough understanding of the needs of women in a correctional environment. Extensive understanding of the complexity of rehabilitation and reintegration needs for women prisoners. Extensive knowledge of relevant guiding principles for service delivery to women offenders. Demonstrated leadership skills, expertise in managing staff, financial and physical resources. To understand more about our selection criteria, please refer to the position description. What's in it for you In addition to our great work culture, we offer some perks yada yada yada.. Beyond the sense of achievement, you will feel in seeing your leadership gain great outcomes on the ground, there are many other advantages in working for the Department of Justice at large, as well, including: ✔A fair salary – enjoy great work conditions and salary sacrificing options for superannuation and motor vehicles. ✔Transparent performance framework – approach your work with confidence in how you're tracking, working to professional development plans with performance-based salary increases. ✔ Free access to mental health service – personal and confidential counselling support on personal and work-related issues. ✔Generous leave entitlements – provisions for many forms of leave; including personal, parental, carers, study, cultural, compassionate and sick leave. Click here to discover more benefits in working for the department. If this job sounds like an exciting challenge you would love to take on, then we encourage you to apply now. If you have any queries, please contact Adam Stevenson on 0429 384 307. The Department of Justice and Community Safety is continually working towards increasing our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Aboriginal) workforce. The Aboriginal Employment Team aims to attract, recruit and retain Aboriginal staff in a number of roles, including those in leadership. This support includes a culturally appropriate attraction and recruitment process. To learn more, click here or email aboriginal.employment@justice.vic.gov.au. Applications will be regularly reviewed up until the closing date, so please do not delay in submitting your application. Please click the Apply button on this advertisement. Applications should include a resume and covering letter. Attachments can be uploaded in .doc, .docx, .pdf, .txt or .rtf formats.

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Political Narratives: Shaping How We Think Hello out there, This is my first post on this blog. My name is Rachel Swirsky, and I'm just starting out as a science fiction writer. My bachelor's degree is in Anthropology; within the field, I focused mostly on sex & sexuality, and the anthropological critique/analysis of literature. I'd like to write a little bit about my analytical and political relationship to literature. My anthropological theory of literature, basically, is that through reading a large sampling of a culture's literature, it's possible to deduce some of the basic concerns and narratives running through that culture's subconscious. This is especially true when a subject becomes trendy in science fiction. For instance, the way that we (as science fiction writers) explore virtual reality as a social space reflects our anxieties about social spaces in the "meat" world. Depictions of virtual reality tend to cleave to older cultural dialogues about cities. They're seen as freeing, a place for people to move beyond mundane concerns -- much as the theorist Simmel saw cities -- or they're seen as oppressive places where human interaction is traded for fetishization -- much as the theorist Durkheim saw cities. I see art as our culture's roiling subconscious. Our beliefs and anxieties bubble to the surface. Especially in the fiction of ideas. Narrative and Society I think that one of the strongest effects of culture on the human psyche is to shape the narratives that we use to dissect the world. These narratives give me a lens for interpreting what happens to me. I, as a western woman, am likely to interpret my choices from an individualistic perspective. I decide things. I make them happen. In Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal, Laura Ahearn discusses the ways in which Nepali women will talk around the concept of agency; saying, for instance, that they were forced to make a love match because of a magic spell, rather than that they chose to make a love match. Narratives obviously shape our interpretations of gender as well. The ways we view the actions of men, and the ways in which we view the actions of women, are subtly but importantly different. This is one of the major reasons, I believe, why people are so disturbed by gender ambiguity. When presented with an individual who does not visually present as male or female, people have trouble figuring out what narratives to apply to that person, and thus how to interpret or interact with hir. Cultural narratives are shaped in manifold ways, of course. Nevertheless, I think it's important to look at novels and short stories (and plays and television shows) as direct ways in which we shape our narratives. When The Simpsons presents an image of a boorish, stupid husband who is too stupid to be trusted with simple tasks, and his competent housewife who is content to be his helpmeet -- they are tapping into those narratives. At times, they manage to use the narratives to mock themselves, in a complex weave of upholding and subverting the paradigm. Roseanne, on the other hand, presenting complex individuals who do not so easily fit into the standard narratives of male and female, breaks the paradigm for a moment. It pries open our narrative space just long enough to give us a framework for talking about fat, bossy, but extraordinary women, and men who are both involved in manly work and not always in control. (Hat tip to Myca at Alas, a Blog for those examples.) In literature, we see this with something like Delany's Trouble on Triton, which poses some alternate methods for categorizing sexuality. Rather than gay and straight exclusively, we see people categorized by whether they prefer younger or older partners, their inclination toward sadomasochism, and so on. The Political Potential of Narrative In his collected essays, Salman Rushdie writes, "Description is itself a political act," and "Redescribing the world is the necessary first step towards changing it." I believe that it is impossible to make political progress unless there are narrative spaces opened up for that progress to take place in. I look at this as a process that happens on several levels. For instance, Joanna Russ's Female Man looked at gender in a radical, frame breaking way -- a way that was able to reach many feminists and intellectuals. Ursula Leguin's Left Hand of Darkness is less radical -- in many ways, it seems traditional from a modern perspective -- but it was able to take some of the furthest, most radical ideas and, through grinding off a few of the edges and spurring them on with adventure-driven storytelling, bring those ideas to a less radical public. Twisty Faster of I Blame the Patriarchy writes that any depiction of an oppressed class is a political act. I would go farther. Any depiction of anyone is a political act. Writing -- any type of art -- is taking something which inhabits three dimensions and flattening it. How one chooses which information to represent, and in which ways, is inherently political. It will exclude some information. It will exaggerate other information. And that's even before the elements of imagination and speculation are mixed in, which involve more distortion. The ways in which that distortion happens are inherently political. In most literary workshops I've been in, people have a tendency to get bogged down in discussions of whether or not it's "realistic" for a character to do a given activity. Reality is stranger than most fictions. Believability itself is -- as Ben Marcus argued in Harper's last year -- a way of fitting reality into little boxes, for what he called middle class acceptability (I would probably call it monitoring content to make sure it toes the line of comfortable cultural narratives). When women are excluded, that is political. When transmen are excluded, that is political. When transwomen are excluded, that is political. When the future is white, that is political. When the future is abled, that is political. When the future is western, that is political. When women are included, that is political. When transwomen and transmen are included, that is political. When we see people of color and disabled people and people from the global south, that is political. All writing is political. Science fiction, by depicting the not-real, has great potential to break our comfortable cultural frames. As a political writer, I aim to create narrative spaces for people who don't fit into the dominant narratives. Literature reflects how we think of the world. It's a recursive, but terribly slow relationship. Books may have less of an effect on popular culture than television shows -- but, just as Joanna Russ broke the ice and Ursula Leguin popularized the message -- there's room for us all to work at the slow, arduous, important task, of opening the political dialog to unacknowledged stories. Posted by Rachel Swirsky at 11:50 PM 2 comments: Links to this post Bush Administration Sex Scandal: So Very Victorian Many of the Bush Administration’s policies blatantly seek to force a patriarchal regime on not merely the US but on the world at large. The policies of Bush’s “Abstinence Czar” Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias, director of US Foreign Assistance and head of the USAID (US Agency for International Development) are a case in point. He resigned last Friday because so-called “D.C. Madam” Jeanne Palfrey said that she intends to call him (among other powerful officials) as a witness to testify at her prostitution-ring trial. Tobias, it seems, made frequent recourse to Central American women for “massages.” The news media seem to consider the unmasking of Tobias’s hypocrisy a delicious, salacious irony. But surely this irony is such a tired old cliché that it can barely raise a smile of schadenfreude. More to the point, Tobias’s policies have had considerable negative impact, beginning with his attack against the most effective methods for preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS and going on from there to doing his best to sabotaging family-planning programs around the world and exposing third-world world women to the deadly hazards of illegal abortion. And yet, there is an irony in Tobias’s being felled by the crackdown on a prostitution ring that the US media are unlikely even to notice. Sharon Groves reports in the Summer 2005 issue of Feminist Studies: In May 2005, the Brazilian government made the historic decision to refuse $40 million from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for HIV/AIDS funding. They cited as the reason for their refusal the Bush administration’s insistence on a public condemnation of prostitution. Pedro Chequer, director of Brazil’s AIDS program and chair of the National Commission that decided to refuse the U.S. grants was reported by Michael M. Phillips and Matt Moffett in the Wall Street Journal (2 May 2005) as saying “We can’t control [the disease] with principles that are Manichean, theological, fundamentalist, and Shiite.” We thought that Brazil’s decision was significant and surprising in that it placed the health of sex workers at the center of an international debate about how best to fight HIV/AIDS. According to [Adrienne] Germain [president of the International Women’s Health Coalition], Brazil’s decision sheds light on the Bush administration’s repressive policies toward countries and organizations working to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. Germain sees the Bush administration as imposing “a moral vision of the world that recognizes only heterosexual sex in marriage and that takes a very punitive position toward anyone that deviates from that stance.” Indeed, along with conservative member of Congress, the Bush administration have been able to impose (or is working toward imposing) a number of repressive restrictions on non-profit organizations working on HIV/AIDS, which are staggering in their implications. Concerning prostitution, they have required all organizations taking funds from USAID (even if their work has nothing to do with sex workers) to make a written pledge opposing commercial sex work or risk losing funding. [Note: prostitution is legal in Brazil.] This measure which was put in place in 2003 followed on the heels of “the Global Gag Rule”—a policy that bans USAID funds from going to any foreign-based organizations that support needle exchange as a form of prevention are being challenged as well. The result of such policies is not only disastrous for sex workers but, as Germain points out, is a “death sentence given the way in which AIDS is spreading throughout the globe.” Brazil’s campaign against HIV/AIDS, which Groves calls “one of respectful engagement with the people most at risk since the 19802," has shown a "clear record of progress." For more on sex and reproductive issues, visit the website of the International Women's Health Coalition www.iwhc.org. Labels: sex politics Book Recommendation: Samuel R. Delany, Dark Reflections Samuel R. Delany, Dark Reflections. Carroll & Graf, 2007. 295 pages. $15.95 Delany’s Dark Reflections is now out and available. Delany’s twenty-fifth novel offers a literary narrative about the black gay poet Arnold Hawley, written in a deceptively simple, elegant style that evokes a profoundly lonely soul’s powerful emotional experiences over a lifetime—embedded, of course, in a subtle and insightful depiction of his social and economic reality, just as one would expect from Delany. It’s a surprisingly fast, smooth read; I gobbled it down in two days, knowing as I did that I’d be returning to it soon. Though it ended just as it should, I wanted it to go on and on because I so loved inhabiting its language and ideas and texture. Besides the novel’s texture, what I liked best was the sense it gave me of Arnold Hawley: he became so real to me that I feel as though I know who he was and what it would be like to be in a room with him. I loved the effect the novel creates by working backwards in Arnold Hawley’s life, by which every moment of the life acquires a complex historicity. Here Delany captures not only the difference age makes to one’s consciousness and understanding of the world, but also the difference in tone and style of the three historical settings he depicts; this novel’s 1972 matches my memory of what 1972 felt like more closely than do many of the novels actually written in 1972. (The section set in the mid-1970s, “Vashti in the Dark” has some of the feel of Dhalgren though it is definitely not Dhalgren. But then Dhalgren, for me, is the quintessential novel of the mid-1970s.) I especially loved the novel’s thematic use of certain details that continually resurface to take on different meanings at different times, as well as the poignancy of the role confusion played Arnold Hawley’s his sexual loneliness. Dark Reflection gets my highest recommendation. Labels: Reading Rec Welcome to Ambling along the Aqueduct. Now that Aqueduct Press has reached the ripe age of three years old (and I wonder: who can tell me what small-press years are in human years?), we at Aqueduct have decided it’s time for us to have our own blog. So here it is. Ideally, I’d like Ambling along the Aqueduct to be a forum for discussing all things Aqueductian. Conversation, of course, has been a theme with us at Aqueduct almost from the beginning, derived from the notion of feminist sf as a conversation, which I earlier explored in “For a Genealogy of Feminist SF: Reflections on Women, Feminism, and Science Fiction , 1818-1960” (reprinted in The Grand Conversation, Vol. 1 of the Conversation Pieces series and available online at my website). I hope to entice other to join me, so that the discussion here won’t simply be me posting announcements about Aqueduct’s books and authors and offering up my thoughts on various subjects. Please, if you are interested in making a guest post here, write to conversation@aqueductpress.com. If you’re wondering what “all things Aqueductian” could possibly be, well, to be honest, it’s anything that interests me. Although I’d be thrilled to have Aqueduct become an independent institution, for the moment, anyway, Aqueduct c’est moi—though with lots of help from other people. This is less a desire to be autocratic à la the Sun King on an absurdly minute scale than it is a practical strategy. Part of Aqueduct’s raison d’être is to create a space that wasn’t there, a space inviting other writers in to play. So, too, with this blog. Given the range of the work Aqueduct has been publishing, the elasticity of the adjective should, I hope, be obvious. Bush Administration Sex Scandal: So Very Victorian... Book Recommendation: Samuel R. Delany, Dark Reflec...

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J. K. Simmons Previous film: Wonder WomanGMW Next film: AquamanGMW Justice League is a 2017 superhero movie, featuring the Justice League of America from DC Comics. It is the 5th movie in the DC Extended Universe and an ensemble movie featuring Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman while also introducing Flash, Cyborg and Aquaman. Thousands of years ago, Steppenwolf and his army of Parademons attempt to conquer Earth through the combined energies of three Mother Boxes. They are foiled by a unified army that included the Olympian Gods, Amazons, Atlanteans, mankind and the Green Lantern Corps. After repelling Steppenwolf's army, the Mother Boxes are separated and hidden in locations around the planet. In the present, the world is in mourning after Superman's death at the hands of Doomsday. This causes the Mother Boxes to reactivate and Steppenwolf to return to Earth in an effort to regain favor with his master, Darkseid. Steppenwolf manages to retrieve the Mother Box from Themyscira, prompting Queen Hippolyta to warn her daughter Diana Prince of Steppenwolf's return by lighting the invasion fire. Prince joins Bruce Wayne in his attempt to unite other metahumans to their cause, with Wayne going after Arthur Curry and Barry Allen, while Prince tries to locate Victor Stone. The two of them fail to persuade Curry and Stone, but manage to recruit an enthusiastic Allen onto the team. Stone later joins the team after his father Silas is kidnapped, along with several other S.T.A.R. Labs employees, by Steppenwolf seeking to acquire the Mother Box from them. Meanwhile, Steppenwolf attacks Atlantis to retrieve the next Mother Box, forcing Curry to take action. The team receives intel from Commissioner James Gordon leading them to Steppenwolf's army, based in an abandoned facility under Gotham Harbor. Although the group manages to rescue the kidnapped employees, the facility is flooded during combat, which traps the team until Curry helps delay the flood so they can escape. Stone retrieves the last Mother Box, which he had hidden, for the group to analyze. Stone reveals that his father used the Mother Box to rebuild Stone's body after an accident almost cost him his life. Wayne decides to use the Mother Box to resurrect Superman, not only to help them fight off Steppenwolf's army, but also to restore hope to mankind. Prince and Curry are hesitant about the idea, but Wayne forms a secret contingency plan in case Superman returns as a nemesis. Clark Kent's body is exhumed and placed in the incubation waters of the Kryptonian ship alongside the Mother Box, which in turn activates and successfully resurrects Superman. However, Superman's memories have not returned, and he viciously attacks the group after Stone accidentally launches a projectile at him. On the verge of being killed by Superman, Batman enacts his contingency plan: Lois Lane. Superman calms down and leaves with Lois to his family home in Smallville, where he reflects and tries to recover his memories. With the final Mother Box unguarded, Steppenwolf retrieves it with ease. Without Superman to aid them, the five heroes travel to a village in Russia where Steppenwolf plans to unite the boxes once again and reshape the world. The team fights their way through the Parademons to reach Steppenwolf, although they are unable to distract him enough for Stone to separate the boxes. Superman arrives and assists Allen in evacuating the city, as well as Stone in separating the Mother Boxes. The group manages to defeat Steppenwolf, who, overcome with fear, is attacked by his own Parademons before they all teleport away. In the aftermath of the battle, Wayne and Prince agree to rebuild Wayne Manor as a base of operations for the team, with additional space for more potential heroes. Prince steps back into the public spotlight as a hero; Allen acquires a job in Central City's police department, impressing his father; Stone continues to explore and enhance his abilities with his father in S.T.A.R. Labs; Curry returns to Atlantis; and Superman resumes his life as reporter Clark Kent. In a mid-credits scene, Superman and Allen race to see who is the fastest. In the post-credits scene, Lex Luthor has escaped from Arkham Asylum and recruits Slade Wilson to form their own league. Executive meddling. The movie was a victim of massive amounts of this. As a result of all the problems mentioned above, the movie is very poorly paced and has a very inconsistent tone. There are many times where footage from the original cut and the re-shoots are used in the same scene and it is very noticeable. Due to the executive meddling and trying to catch up with Marvel's MCU, the movie feels like a weaker clone of Avengers. Horrible CGI, most noticeably Superman's infamous CGI mouth. Large amount of scenes were cut from the final version released in theaters, causing a lot of plot and development for characters to be lost. Zack Snyder's dour and grim tone very badly clashes with Joss Wheadon's lighthearted tone, this makes the re-shoots even more obvious. Due to Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman not getting a proper movie to introduce them or their lore, their backstories are very rushed. Large parts of the movie attempt to outright retcon Batman v. Superman. For example; in BvS, the world had a very polarized view on Superman with some comparing him to Jesus and others hating him as an alien invader. But in this movie, the whole world suddenly views Superman as a beacon of hope and everyone mourns his death with zero mentioning of him being hated by anyone at all. There's a scene in BvS where Batman has a vision of Darkseid conquering the world, an evil Superman, and Flash coming from the future to warn him about incoming events. The whole point of that scene was to set up the Justice League, yet none of it is mentioned in the actual movie because Darkseid was completely cut, so he is only briefly mentioned once in the entire movie. Batman is out of character since he is made considerably weak compared to the rest of the team and is over-reliant on gadgets as he's barely useful in combat unless he's using weapons or vehicles. He also makes many one-liners that don't fit the character as he was established in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and seems more like what Tony Stark would say. Examples are: "I'm rich!" when Flash asks what are Batman's powers. "I'm not the one carrying a pitchfork" to Aquaman. "Maybe temporary" when asked about why he's making a team. "Something's definitely bleeding" after he got beaten up by Superman in a very embarrassing way. Flash runs in a very awkward unnatural way and the actor often moves his eyes around very distractedly. Aquaman barely gets to use his water powers during the movie. Superman is too overpowered and makes the rest of the league feel unneeded. Before Superman is revived the League utterly fails to do anything to slow down Steppenwolf, then in the climax Superman defeats Steppenwolf almost effortlessly and without needing the other heroes' help. Flash is also made near redundant after Superman is revived because he's very clearly shown to be faster than Flash. The Justice League is rather incompetent, most notoriously when the team has the final Mother Box then they leave it completely unguarded allowing Steppenwolf to effortlessly take it without a fight. The character's costumes were meant for dark dimly lit rooms, but because the color palette was brightened up in the reshoots, the costumes stick out badly. The movie overall has a very generic feel, not doing anything new that hasn't been seen before in the dozens of hero movies that have come out in the past decade. Steppenwolf is a very generic and lame villain. His whole character is literally "I'm gonna destroy the world because I'm evil!". He was also supposed to have some backstory but it was also cut as part of the reshoots and studio mandated edits. The soundtrack is also very generic, outside of theme songs that came from previous movies. The plot is too similar to the first Avengers movie; A horned-helmet wearing alien wants to conquer the world with a cube shaped object on behalf of a superior evil being acting from behind the shadows, and in response heroes around the world team up to stop the alien's army but first must learn to work together. The team's interactions with each other are fun to watch. The action scenes are pretty cool for the most part. Much less dark than previous DCEU movies. The acting is decent. The Jesus allegory that was shoved into Superman in both Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman was completely dropped in favor of giving the character real development, which in turn makes him a more likable character with more personality despite his short screentime. There are some effective jokes, such as when Aquaman starts talking about his feelings unaware that he's sitting on the Lasso of Truth. The scene where Flash fights Superman was also funny. Steppenwolf is still an intimidant villain, and he has an awesome design. Plans for a Justice League move began since 2007, when a script titled "Justice League Mortal" was written by Michelle and Kieran Mulroney and green-lit for production, however the movie was quickly cancelled due to multiple delays and problems before starting filming. The film would’ve been directed by George Miller and starred D.J. Cotrana as Superman, Armie Hammer as Batman, Megan Gale as Wonder Woman, Common as Green Lantern, Adam Brody as the Flash, Santiago Cabrera as Aquaman, Teresa Palmer as Talia al Ghul, and Jay Baruchel as the main antagonist Maxwell Lord. Shortly after the success of The Dark Knight trilogy, Warner Bros. had began plans for a Superman trilogy beginning with Man of Steel, however after the release of Marvel's The Avengers the trilogy was dropped in favor of a DC movie universe, unofficially labeled the "DC Extended Universe" with Man of Steel considered the first installment of the series. The intended Man of Steel sequel was reworked into Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice which would then be followed by a new Justice League, both of which would be directed by Zack Snyder, who also directed Man of Steel. Director Zack Snyder's plan was to make a trilogy of Justice League movies following Batman v Superman, where Steppenwolf would be the villain of the first movie, followed by Darkseid as the true villain of the second and third films. The first Justice League movie would begin production immediately after Batman v Superman, however, when Batman v Superman was released it was panned by critics and most audiences, despite the movie being profitable the negative reaction towards it led to Warner Bros. meddling with multiple DCEU films, primarily demanding that the dark tones of those movies were changed to be more lighthearted and comedic. The meddling by Warner Bros. resulted in Justice League suffering large amount of production problems; the script was drastically altered leading to Darkseid being completely cut, leaving Steppenwolf as the only villain in the movie. An early cut of the film was presented but higher ups described it as "unwatchable" and demanded more changes and rewrites, alongside rumors that Zack Snyder would be fired. Mid-production, Snyder's daughter tragically died, causing him to completely step down from the project. Joss Wheadon, director of The Avengers, was brought to make extensive re-shoots and finish the project, however by that time the movie was dangerously close to release and yet Warner Bros. refused to delay it. More than an hour worth of footage was cut because Warner Bros. mandated that the movie couldn't be longer than two hours, as a results many scenes shown in trailers were nowhere to be seen in the final product. An additional problem came when Henry Cavil, Superman's actor, was called to do re-shoots but at that time Cavil was already shooting for Mission Impossible: Fallout and his character in that movie required him to grow a big mustache that he wasn't allowed to shave. Warner Bros. had to use CGI to hide Cavil's mustache during the re-shoots, but due to the movie being so close to release the editors didn't have the time to properly apply the CGI. Following the release of the movie, there's been a large amount of speculation regarding the initial cut of the movie intended by Zack Snyder, dubbed the "Snyder Cut". Some sources indicate that said cut does indeed exist but is a very rough cut without any major editing work nor any CGI applied, therefore it is too incomplete to be released and would cost too much money to complete. Warner Bros. later stated that there are no plans for making more crossover movies for a while, as such the intended second and third Justice League movies as planned by Zack Snyder have been indefinitely delayed if not outright cancelled. Initially, audiences were very skeptical of Justice League due to being soured by Batman v. Superman. Despite this, interest in the film was fairly high and was improved by the positive reception of Wonder Woman in earlier 2017. Concerns for the movie however became rampant after Zack Snyder left the production followed by reports that Snyder's initial cut was scrapped and that the movie would have a large amount of rewrites directed by Joss Wheadon. The final cut was met with a polarizing reception with most pointing out to the obvious re-shoots and post-production issues as well as the very generic feeling of the final product. The movie was also a box-office bomb, being the least profitable out of all the movies in the DCEU. The general audiences described the movie as "A Frankenstein monster that is neither Snyder's movie nor Wheadon's movie". Following Justice League's underwhelming performance and several DCEU movies being cancelled in favor of other DC movies not related to it, many fans are questioning the future of the DCEU. Warner Bros. announced that they'll continue the franchise but will move away from the movies prior to Justice League. Warner Bros. later announced that the franchise would be soft-rebooted as "Worlds of DC", in which some elements from the previous DCEU movies such as Aquaman and Wonder Woman will remain canon but most other films will be ignored if not outright retconned out of canon, likewise newer films in the franchise will not focus on crossovers. Fans of the DCEU have been demanding for a "Snyder Cut" of the movie to be released, but it is currently unlikely to happen. Justice League at the Internet Movie Database Justice League on Rotten Tomatoes Retrieved from "https://awfulmovies.miraheze.org/w/index.php?title=Justice_League&oldid=76672" Warner Brothers Films Crossover films Box office bombs

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All posts tagged Desmond Rochfort The Murals of Diego Rivera by Desmond Rochfort (1987) Diego Rivera: painted murals from 1921 to 1957 painted literally hundreds of mural panels covered more wall space with murals than anyone else in history Whether you like the murals comes down to a couple of questions: do you like the rejection of almost all 20th century artistic sophistication in favour of a deliberately figurative, almost cartoon-like style? do you respond to the composition and layout and design of specific murals? do you like the political or ideological message of the murals? As to point 3 – the message – I take it that Rivera’s repeated themes that the Aztecs had a fine civilization until the killer Cortes massacred them all, that Mexican peasants are noble and pure but are tyrannised and brutalised by their Hispanic masters, and that unemployed striking workers are being beaten up by the police while the spoilt rich bourgeoisie swigs cocktails in evening dress – so that the workers must take up arms and stage a revolution to overthrow the regime – I take it none of these ideas come as news to anyone any more, or that anyone gets very excited about murals with titles like ‘This is how the proletarian revolution will be’. The Arsenal by Diego Rivera (1928) Given the thousands of paintings, murals and statues of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin which festooned every space across the Soviet Union and eastern Europe for 70 years until its collapse in 1990… I take it no-one is excited by the image of Marx et al in a mural any more. The opposite: all of Diego’s murals evoke a deep nostalgia for the long-lost period of the 1920s and 1930s when artists and poets and playwrights were all solidly left-wing, joined the Communist Party, made plays and poems and paintings and posters extolling the noble proletariat, confident that history was about to topple in their direction. How wonderfully certain they must have been. Thinking about it, Rivera is very like Otto Dix, George Grosz and the other Weimar artists who used cartoons and caricature to express their seething anger at social injustice in the style which became known as The New Sobriety. The only difference from them is in Rivera’s additional twin themes of colonisation and race. George Grosz didn’t have to go back to the era of the Reformation (1517) to explain 1920s Germany, but Rivera did have to go back to the Spanish conquistadors (1519) to explain 1920s Mexico. The history of Mexico Grosz didn’t feel compelled to draw a history of Germany; there were already countless histories of Germany; he was only interested in the corrupt and unfair present. But Rivera did feel compelled to draw a history of Mexico, in fact he drew it again and again, because the meaning of Mexican history was still very fiercely contested in his age. After you get beyond the same kind of nostalgia for a simpler, more polarised and more politically charged artistic world that you get when you read Brecht or listen to Kurt Weill – after the purely proletarian concerns fade away – it is the multiracial and ethnographic aspects of Rivera’s imagery which sticks out. The Aztec World on the west wall of the National Palace of Mexico by Diego Rivera (1929) After the initial burst of invention in the 1920s, what this book rather brings home is the repetitiveness of the imagery. Or, if a scholar argued that the actual images and compositions are amazingly diverse – maybe what I mean is the repetitiveness of the problem. And the problem is – the meaning of Mexico. Where did it come from? Who are the Mexicans? What does it mean to be the joint heir of both the cruel Aztecs and the bloody conquistadors? When both sides very obviously had their shortcomings, which ones do you choose as your ancestors? Where is Justice? What – as Lenin said – is to be done? The Ministry of Education murals 1922-28 Rivera’s first project was the biggest of his career, painting the walls of the galleries surrounding the two big courtyards of the Ministry of Education, which he renamed the Court of Labour and the Court of Fiesta. It took from 1923 to 1928 and by the end he’d created 235 panels or 1,585 square metres of murals. At the same time he began a commission to paint a converted chapel at the new Universidad Autonoma de Chapingo. The earliest Education Ministry ones, like the entire Chapingo set, ones have a really primitive didactic feel. There are relatively few figures, carrying out archetypal actions set against a brown background. The influence of the early Renaissance is really visible: the bent figures of the mourning women entirely wrapped in their cloaks reminds me of Giotto. ‘The Blood of the Martyrs’ from the Chapel at Chapingo by Diego Rivera (1926) In both sets of murals you immediately see that his central achievement was to heave the entire concept of mural painting from its religious origins – and even from the heavily ‘symbolic’ imagery used by some secular, monumental muralists at the end of the 19th century – and to consciously, deliberately and powerfully, turn it into the depiction of an entire nation, of Mexico – through portrayals of its geographic regions, of its favourite fiestas and festivals, of its industry and agriculture, using compositions packed with people, characters, caricatures, satire and sentiment. To me many of them have a medieval interest in crowds. They remind me of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in their enjoyment of the variety and quirkiness of life – not forgetting that Chaucer’s variety also included bitter social satire, sentimental religiosity, and unquestioning praise of the medieval knightly code. In just the same way Rivera features: crowd scenes, whose pleasure derives from the sheer profusion of humanity, as in the village scenes of Brueghel crudely bitter but still amusing social satire revolutionary sentimentality – for example where a poor whipped peon is wrapped in a shroud or a fallen comrade is buried and the viewer is meant to choke back a sob of emotion and throughout many of the murals runs unfettered praise for men draped in bandoliers and holding guns – revolutionaries, freedom fighters, guarantors of the Revolution etc. The joy of crowds ‘The Day of The Dead’ from The Ministry of Education (Court of the Fiestas) by Diego Rivera (1924) The mass, the throng, the diversity of life – like Breughel. ‘The Wall Street Banquet’ from the Ministry of Education (Court of the Fiestas) by Diego Rivera (1926) The rich are sat at table not to eat, but to read off a tickertape telling them the value of their stocks and shares. The bluntness of the idea and the grotesqueness of the faces remind me of George Grosz and other Weimar satirists who had been doing the same thing for eight years or more, just not on walls. The noble poor We are meant to compare and contrast the filthy rich with the noble poor, the liberated peasants, who live with simplicity and dignity. Eating what they grow themselves. For, as Zapata repeatedly said: the land belongs to he who tills it… and the fruits thereof. Children. The elderly. All under the governance of the wise man, who is himself beholden to the female principle of the fruit of the soil, as worked by peasants (to the left) under the watchful gaze of a Party commissar (to the right). ‘Our Bread’ from the Ministry of Education (Court of the Fiestas) by Diego Rivera (1928) War is wrong War is always wrong unless, of course, it’s your war, fighting for your cause. Fighting in the imperialist war was, according to the Bolsheviks, foolishness. Not because there should be peace. But because workers of all lands should unite together to exterminate the bourgeoisie and other class enemies right across Europe, right around the world. A creed which certainly did lead to guerrilla and civil wars across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, for much of the 20th century. ‘In the Trenches’ at the Ministry of Education by Diego Rivera (1924-28) Off to America It is ironic that, as soon as Rivera had become famous as a bitingly anti-capitalist, communist artist, he was taken up by … super-capitalist, mega-rich Americans. The Yankees invited him to do murals at the San Francisco Stock Exchange (1930-31) and Art Institute (1931), at the Ford motor works in Detroit (1932), and then at the Rockefeller Centre in New York (1933). At the same time as Diego was the subject of the Museum of Modern Art’s second ever one-artist retrospective. God, how simply fabulous the super-rich New Yorkers and their wives in their diamonds and furs look as they arrived for the opening night party! How simply adorable the fire-breathing Communist Mexican turned out to be! And so witty! And did you talk to his simply delightful wife! Just to make this point quite clear, the mural Rivera painted in San Francisco adorns the stairs leading up from the Stock Exchange itself to the Stock Exchange’s private luncheon club. The word ‘elitist’ is thrown around a lot by left-wing critics, but could a location be more restricted and elite? But it was the murals he made in Detroit which Rivera himself considered the best he ever made. He was intensely professional about preparing the space, researching the engineering and technology of car manufacture, and then creating compositions which are awesome in scale, packed with detail, but so cunningly composed as to create a beautiful sense of rhythm and flow. Crucially for the patron Edsel Ford, and the Art Institute which hosts them, and for admiring visitors generally, there is next to no political content in them whatsoever. They simply show men at work in modern factories, hymns to the marvel of modern technology. North Wall at the Detroit Institute for Arts by Diego Rivera (1933) The Detroit murals were followed by a falling-out with the owners of the Rockefeller Building who had commissioned a big mural in the lobby of their swanky new Manhattan skyscraper but cancelled it when Rivera insisted on painting in the face of Lenin. With no other commissions in view, Diego reluctantly returned to Mexico in 1934 where he fell out with the government and devoted the rest of the decade to easel painting and political activism. He only returned to mural painting in 1940 with the immense panorama of ‘Pan-American unity’ painted in America again, for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. I think what this book shows is that far from showing ‘Mexico’ any clear political way ahead (there wasn’t, after all, anything like a Communist revolution in Mexico. In fact precisely the opposite, the bourgeois class consolidated its permanent grip on power by inventing a ‘big tent’ political party during the 1930s – the Institutional Revolutionary Party – designed to incorporate all political factions and classes and thus make elections and political parties unnecessary, and the PRI went on to rule Mexico without interruption until the year 2000) Rivera’s work really brings out and dramatises its history to date (along with the more garish aspects of the contemporary situation – rich versus poor – town versus country – peasant versus landowner – Marx versus Henry Ford) puts ordinary Mexicans, the peasants and farmers and soldiers and workers and priests and landowners and urban passersby – all of them – up on the wall to be seen and recognised as Mexican I think this explains why modern, post-political, post-communist scholarly commentary prefers to dwell on what it calls issues of ‘identity’ rather than the more blatantly communist elements in Diego’s work. It’s safer. Mexico as a maze Looking at Rivera’s densely packed and colourful later works, from the 1940s and 1950s, makes you realise that Rivera certainly created a strong visual identity for his country and countrymen in the 1920s and 1930s – but then remained trapped in the maze of that Mexican history and, above all, snagged on the horns of that Mexican dilemma: are we European or Indian? Aztec primitivists or scientific rationalists? Workers or bosses? Mestizos or criollos? To some extent you could argue that the very packed-out nature of his great interlocking mural of Mexican history which decorates the stairwells of the National Palace in Mexico City – the way Aztecs and conquistadors, knights and peasants, the contemporary Mexican government and the heroes of the 1910 revolution, are all combined in the same image – captures the overwhelming, confusing and directionless nature of Mexican history. As this book admits, Rivera’s history pictures present ‘a history shorn of many of the qualifications and complexities associated with the historical transformation of Mexico’ (p.59). In other words, a historical fantasy. History of Mexico mural in the main stairwell of the National Palace, by Diego Rivera (1929-35) There’s a great deal of ‘Where’s Wally’-type pleasure to be had from identifying different groups of characters in these vast paintings – and figuring out who they are and how they fit into the national story. Rivera and his contemporaries, supported by some critics, often explained his socially conscious murals as the modern equivalent of Christian iconography. Just as the frescos of the Renaissance depicted key moments in the story of Christ and illuminated key ideas in Christian theology for an illiterate audience so, they argued, Rivera’s murals were designed as visual guides to the illiterate Mexican peasant and prole, explaining key moments of Mexican history, showing Karl Marx with his arm stretched out pointing towards a better future. But to the casual observer, his vast panoramas of Mexican history (like the one shown above) just look like a mess. A confusing and perplexing gallimaufrey of historical events and figures all thrown together into an almost indecipherable crowd. They become, if you like, charming illustrations for an already-educated bourgeoisie. you have to be already very well educated to understand what is going on in his murals. Hence his wild success with – not just Americans – but the very richest of the richest Americans. He wasn’t feted by John Steinbeck and Dorothea Lange – the socially conscious artists – in New York. He was adulated by the Rockefellers and the Guggenheims and the Astors. Maybe it’s a simplistic thought, but it seems to me that the more sophisticated and complex Riviera’s murals became, the more they became popcorn, bubblegum cartoons, full of fascinating detail, but lacking the anger and energy of his earliest works. Pan American Unity by Diego Rivera (1940) Pure against impure To dig a little deeper, comparing the background and enactment of the Mexico City murals against the American ones, and reading up about Rivera’s wild enthusiasm for America, the conclusion I draw is that – he liked America because it was so psychologically untroubled. I know there had been forty years of rocky industrial relations since the 1890s, and a march of unemployed workers ended in shooting only weeks before Rivera arrived in Detroit to paint his mural there. But the Americans Rivera met were all full of national self-confidence, self-belief, untroubled by doubts. This was the exact opposite of the deeply troubled intellectual class in Mexico. And, in my opinion, the reason for this is that the white Americans he met had essentially exterminated the native peoples in order to own the land and country. Nothing held them back. They were creating the American Dream free and untrammelled by negative thoughts or anxieties. As far as they were concerned it was a big empty space, ripe for the taking. Whereas Mexico had been, and was still, held back by massive guilt for its colonial oppression, for the extermination of an obviously highly cultured civilisation. And Mexican intellectuals could never forget this fact because the majority of the Mexican population was mestizo or mixed race, in your face wherever you went, and almost all condemned to grotesque rural poverty. The central problem of Mexican society – the land question – was an ongoing problem inherited from the Spanish, the systematic semi-slavery of the vast majority of the population of illiterate forced labourers, mostly descended from the original tribal peoples. America didn’t have that problem, having very effectively exterminated its native peoples and not intermarried with them. Instead, Rivera met nothing but rich, confident, exuberant representatives of a boundlessly confident Master Race, carried along by the knowledge that they led the world in science and technology. In other words, Rivera was a pioneering example of the Post-Colonial Predicament which trapped and challenged thousands of writers and artists, and tens of millions of subject peoples around the world, for much of the 20th century. I think it’s this which makes Rivera truly revolutionary: not the slogans and pictures of Marx, but the fact that he struggled all his life to make sense of the mixed heritage of coloniser and colonised, struggling to reconcile two completely different histories, traditions, languages and ethnic identities. And if he didn’t really, in the end, succeed, it was an honourable failure and nonetheless produced a lifetime of wonderful, inspiring and fascinating public art. This is a large-format art book, containing just 104 pages, of which: seven present a thorough chronology of Mexican history from Independence (1811) to the end of the reforming Cárdenas presidency in 1940, with many evocative b&w photos one page carries a poem by Pablo Neruda two pages of Bibliography four of notes Which leaves 81 pages of text, illustrated with about 30 contemporary black-and-white photos and 120 plates of the murals, of which 37 are in colour. I found the text heavy going. It was written in 1987, which is a long time ago and people back then, especially academics in the humanities, still put a lot of faith in international communism. The text completely lacks the dry style, lively humour and interesting psycho-sexual speculation which makes Patrick Marnham’s biography of Rivera so enjoyable and thought-provoking. A lot of the photos aren’t that great, and the black and white plates are quite small. The book gives generous quotes from contemporaries, especially the other muralists of the day such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, and a highlight is the vitriolic attack which Siqueiros launched on Rivera in the mid-1930s, accusing Diego of selling out and becoming a bourgeois painter. There is a lot of small detail, about minor murals missed by Marnham’s biography, and a number of sidebars pleasantly go off on a tangent from the main narrative with what are in effect little articles explaining all aspects of Mexican culture, which are diverting and often very interesting. The murals of Diego Rivera by Desmond Rochfort on Amazon Diego Rivera website Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up @ the Victoria and Albert Museum (September 2018) Villa And Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution by Patrick McLynn (2000) Dreaming With His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera by Patrick Marnham (1998) The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene (1939) The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene (1940) by Simon on November 1, 2018 • Permalink Posted in Art, Books, communism, History Tagged 1987, 20th century, America, Aztecs, Brueghel, Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, communist, conquistadors, Cortes, Court of Fiesta, Court of Labour, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Day of The Dead, Desmond Rochfort, Detroit Institute for Arts, Diego Rivera, Edsel Ford, Engels, George Grosz, Giotto, Golden Gate International Exposition, Henry Ford, Institutional Revolutionary Party, Kurt Weill, Lenin, Marx, Mexico, Ministry of Education, murals, Museum of Modern Art, National Palace of Mexico, New York, Otto Dix, Pablo Neruda, Pan-American unity, Patrick Marnham, revolution, Rockefeller Centre, San Francisco, San Francisco Stock Exchange, Stalin, The Murals of Diego Rivera, Universidad Autonoma de Chapingo, Weimar, Zapata Posted by Simon on November 1, 2018 https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/11/01/the-murals-of-diego-rivera-desmond-rochfort/

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Multidisciplinary Prospective Study of Mother-to-Child Chikungunya Virus Infections on the Island of La Réunion Patrick Gérardin, Georges Barau, Alain Michault, Marc Bintner, et al http://www.mendeley.com/research/multidisciplinary-prospective-study-mothertochild-chikungunya-virus-infections-island-la-r%C3%A9union {"title"=>"Multidisciplinary prospective study of mother-to-child chikungunya virus infections on the island of La Réunion", "type"=>"journal", "authors"=>[{"first_name"=>"Patrick", "last_name"=>"Gérardin", "scopus_author_id"=>"14830260200"}, {"first_name"=>"Georges", "last_name"=>"Barau", "scopus_author_id"=>"6603778863"}, {"first_name"=>"Alain", "last_name"=>"Michault", "scopus_author_id"=>"7004254813"}, {"first_name"=>"Marc", "last_name"=>"Bintner", "scopus_author_id"=>"6602781554"}, {"first_name"=>"Hanitra", "last_name"=>"Randrianaivo", "scopus_author_id"=>"6506997231"}, {"first_name"=>"Ghassan", "last_name"=>"Choker", "scopus_author_id"=>"14019195500"}, {"first_name"=>"Yann", "last_name"=>"Lenglet", "scopus_author_id"=>"56631518700"}, {"first_name"=>"Yasmina", "last_name"=>"Touret", "scopus_author_id"=>"23969668600"}, {"first_name"=>"Anne", "last_name"=>"Bouveret", "scopus_author_id"=>"23990273600"}, {"first_name"=>"Philippe", "last_name"=>"Grivard", "scopus_author_id"=>"18433825800"}, {"first_name"=>"Karin", "last_name"=>"Le Roux", "scopus_author_id"=>"16686810700"}, {"first_name"=>"Séverine", "last_name"=>"Blanc", "scopus_author_id"=>"57196975925"}, {"first_name"=>"Isabelle", "last_name"=>"Schuffenecker", "scopus_author_id"=>"6603849080"}, {"first_name"=>"Thérèse", "last_name"=>"Couderc", "scopus_author_id"=>"6604013805"}, {"first_name"=>"Fernando", "last_name"=>"Arenzana-Seisdedos", "scopus_author_id"=>"7006575022"}, {"first_name"=>"Marc", "last_name"=>"Lecuit", "scopus_author_id"=>"17735328200"}, {"first_name"=>"Pierre Yves", "last_name"=>"Robillard", "scopus_author_id"=>"7005790178"}], "year"=>2008, "source"=>"PLoS Medicine", "identifiers"=>{"sgr"=>"41549113841", "doi"=>"10.1371/journal.pmed.0050060", "pui"=>"351471692", "issn"=>"15491277", "pmid"=>"18351797", "isbn"=>"1549-1676 (Electronic)", "scopus"=>"2-s2.0-41549113841"}, "id"=>"9574e623-994b-3f14-8e16-8fd5d1b2bc75", "abstract"=>"BACKGROUND: An outbreak of chikungunya virus affected over one-third of the population of La Réunion Island between March 2005 and December 2006. In June 2005, we identified the first case of mother-to-child chikungunya virus transmission at the Groupe Hospitalier Sud-Réunion level-3 maternity department. The goal of this prospective study was to characterize the epidemiological, clinical, biological, and radiological features and outcomes of all the cases of vertically transmitted chikungunya infections recorded at our institution during this outbreak.\\n\\nMETHODS AND FINDINGS: Over 22 mo, 7,504 women delivered 7,629 viable neonates; 678 (9.0%) of these parturient women were infected (positive RT-PCR or IgM serology) during antepartum, and 61 (0.8%) in pre- or intrapartum. With the exception of three early fetal deaths, vertical transmission was exclusively observed in near-term deliveries (median duration of gestation: 38 wk, range 35-40 wk) in the context of intrapartum viremia (19 cases of vertical transmission out of 39 women with intrapartum viremia, prevalence rate 0.25%, vertical transmission rate 48.7%). Cesarean section had no protective effect on transmission. All infected neonates were asymptomatic at birth, and median onset of neonatal disease was 4 d (range 3-7 d). Pain, prostration, and fever were present in 100% of cases and thrombocytopenia in 89%. Severe illness was observed in ten cases (52.6%) and mainly consisted of encephalopathy (n = 9; 90%). These nine children had pathologic MRI findings (brain swelling, n = 9; cerebral hemorrhages, n = 2), and four evolved towards persistent disabilities.\\n\\nCONCLUSIONS: Mother-to-child chikungunya virus transmission is frequent in the context of intrapartum maternal viremia, and often leads to severe neonatal infection. Chikungunya represents a substantial risk for neonates born to viremic parturients that should be taken into account by clinicians and public health authorities in the event of a chikungunya outbreak.", "link"=>"http://www.mendeley.com/research/multidisciplinary-prospective-study-mothertochild-chikungunya-virus-infections-island-la-r%C3%A9union", "reader_count"=>191, "reader_count_by_academic_status"=>{"Unspecified"=>8, "Professor > Associate Professor"=>12, "Student > Doctoral Student"=>16, "Researcher"=>32, "Student > Ph. D. Student"=>24, "Student > Postgraduate"=>11, "Student > Master"=>35, "Other"=>11, "Student > Bachelor"=>36, "Lecturer"=>1, "Lecturer > Senior Lecturer"=>1, "Professor"=>4}, "reader_count_by_user_role"=>{"Unspecified"=>8, "Professor > Associate Professor"=>12, "Student > Doctoral Student"=>16, "Researcher"=>32, "Student > Ph. D. Student"=>24, "Student > Postgraduate"=>11, "Student > Master"=>35, "Other"=>11, "Student > Bachelor"=>36, "Lecturer"=>1, "Lecturer > Senior Lecturer"=>1, "Professor"=>4}, "reader_count_by_subject_area"=>{"Unspecified"=>15, "Agricultural and Biological Sciences"=>56, "Arts and Humanities"=>1, "Veterinary Science and Veterinary Medicine"=>2, "Chemical Engineering"=>1, "Chemistry"=>2, "Computer Science"=>1, "Environmental Science"=>1, "Nursing and Health Professions"=>11, "Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology"=>9, "Materials Science"=>2, "Medicine and Dentistry"=>70, "Neuroscience"=>2, "Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutical Science"=>1, "Psychology"=>1, "Social Sciences"=>5, "Immunology and Microbiology"=>11}, "reader_count_by_subdiscipline"=>{"Materials Science"=>{"Materials Science"=>2}, "Medicine and Dentistry"=>{"Medicine and Dentistry"=>70}, "Social Sciences"=>{"Social Sciences"=>5}, "Psychology"=>{"Psychology"=>1}, "Unspecified"=>{"Unspecified"=>15}, "Environmental Science"=>{"Environmental Science"=>1}, "Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutical Science"=>{"Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutical Science"=>1}, "Chemical Engineering"=>{"Chemical Engineering"=>1}, "Arts and Humanities"=>{"Arts and Humanities"=>1}, "Chemistry"=>{"Chemistry"=>2}, "Neuroscience"=>{"Neuroscience"=>2}, "Immunology and Microbiology"=>{"Immunology and Microbiology"=>11}, "Agricultural and Biological Sciences"=>{"Agricultural and Biological Sciences"=>56}, "Computer Science"=>{"Computer Science"=>1}, "Nursing and Health Professions"=>{"Nursing and Health Professions"=>11}, "Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology"=>{"Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology"=>9}, "Veterinary Science and Veterinary Medicine"=>{"Veterinary Science and Veterinary Medicine"=>2}}, "reader_count_by_country"=>{"Canada"=>1, "Netherlands"=>1, "United States"=>4, "Brazil"=>1, "United Kingdom"=>1, "France"=>1, "Bolivia"=>1, "Saint Kitts and Nevis"=>1, "Germany"=>1}, "group_count"=>22} 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http://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(11)60281-X http://doi.org/10.21615/cessp.7.1.7 {"@_fa"=>"true", "link"=>[{"@_fa"=>"true", "@ref"=>"self", "@href"=>"https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/41549113841"}, {"@_fa"=>"true", "@ref"=>"author-affiliation", "@href"=>"https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/41549113841?field=author,affiliation"}, {"@_fa"=>"true", "@ref"=>"scopus", "@href"=>"https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=41549113841&origin=inward"}, {"@_fa"=>"true", "@ref"=>"scopus-citedby", "@href"=>"https://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=41549113841&origin=inward"}], "prism:url"=>"https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/41549113841", "dc:identifier"=>"SCOPUS_ID:41549113841", "eid"=>"2-s2.0-41549113841", "dc:title"=>"Multidisciplinary prospective study of mother-to-child chikungunya virus infections on the island of La Réunion", "dc:creator"=>"Gérardin P.", "prism:publicationName"=>"PLoS Medicine", "prism:issn"=>"15491277", "prism:eIssn"=>"15491676", "prism:volume"=>"5", "prism:issueIdentifier"=>"3", "prism:pageRange"=>"0413-0423", "prism:coverDate"=>"2008-03-01", "prism:coverDisplayDate"=>"March 2008", "prism:doi"=>"10.1371/journal.pmed.0050060", "citedby-count"=>"263", "affiliation"=>[{"@_fa"=>"true", "affilname"=>"Inserm", "affiliation-city"=>"Paris", "affiliation-country"=>"France"}, {"@_fa"=>"true", "affilname"=>"Groupe Hospitalier Sud-Réunion", "affiliation-city"=>"Saint-Pierre", "affiliation-country"=>"France"}], "pubmed-id"=>"18351797", "prism:aggregationType"=>"Journal", "subtype"=>"ar", "subtypeDescription"=>"Article", "article-number"=>"e60", "source-id"=>"144840", "openaccess"=>"1", "openaccessFlag"=>true} Article Coverage 130 Apr 13:00 UTC {"referral"=>"http://www.mamard.org/lactancia/mama-casos-especiales/chikungunya.html", "language"=>"", "title"=>"Chikungunya | mamaRD", "type"=>"Discussion board", "publication"=>"", "published_on"=>"2014-10-09T00:00:00Z", "link_state"=>"APPROVED"} {"referral"=>"http://www.mamard.org/lactancia/mama-casos-especiales/chikungunya.html", "language"=>"", "title"=>"Chikungunya | mamaRD", "type"=>"Discussion board", "publication"=>"www.mamard.org", "published_on"=>"2014-10-09T00:00:00.000Z", "link_state"=>"APPROVED", "id"=>26690, "created"=>"2014-10-09T06:35:10.000Z", "crowdsourced"=>false, "article"=>{"id"=>8708, "doi"=>"10.1371/journal.pmed.0050060", "title"=>"Multidisciplinary Prospective Study of Mother-to-Child Chikungunya Virus Infections on the Island of La Réunion", "published_on"=>"2008-03-18T00:00:00.000Z"}} Facebook 230 Jul 04:06 UTC {"files"=>["https://ndownloader.figshare.com/files/934838"], "description"=>"<div><p>(A) Day 6 (child A), scattered hyperintensity signals of the white matter involving the corpus callosum, the frontal and parietal lobes on diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI).</p>\n <p>(B) Day 6 (child A), scattered reduction of the Apparent Diffusion Coefficient (ADC) of the white matter involving the <i>corpus callosum</i>, the frontal and parietal lobes on ADC mapping (in blue).</p>\n <p>(C) Day 21 (child B), scattered and characteristic hypo-intensity signals of the white matter involving frontal and parietal lobes on DWI (Note that the <i>corpus callosum</i> remains in hyper-signal).</p>\n <p>(D) Day 21 (child B), scattered increase of the ADC of the white matter involving the <i>corpus callosum</i>, the frontal and parietal lobes on ADC mapping (in red).</p></div>", "links"=>[], "tags"=>["mri", "findings", "neonatal", "chikungunya", "encephalopathy", "cases", "observed", "outbreak", "la", "june", "2005", "december"], "article_id"=>605249, "categories"=>["Cell Biology", "Virology", "Medicine", "Biotechnology", "Infectious Diseases"], "users"=>["Patrick Gérardin", "Georges Barau", "Alain Michault", "Marc Bintner", "Hanitra Randrianaivo", "Ghassan Choker", "Yann Lenglet", "Yasmina Touret", "Anne Bouveret", "Philippe Grivard", "Karin Le Roux", "Séverine Blanc", "Isabelle Schuffenecker", "Thérèse Couderc", "Fernando Arenzana-Seisdedos", "Marc Lecuit", "Pierre-Yves Robillard"], "doi"=>"https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050060.g002", "stats"=>{"downloads"=>2, "page_views"=>9, "likes"=>0}, "figshare_url"=>"https://figshare.com/articles/_Representative_MRI_Findings_in_Neonatal_Chikungunya_Encephalopathy_Cases_Observed_during_the_First_Chikungunya_Outbreak_in_Saint_Pierre_La_R_233_union_June_2005_to_December_2006_/605249", "title"=>"Representative MRI Findings in Neonatal Chikungunya Encephalopathy Cases Observed during the First Chikungunya Outbreak in Saint-Pierre, La Réunion, June 2005 to December 2006", "pos_in_sequence"=>0, "defined_type"=>1, "published_date"=>"2008-03-18 01:27:29"} {"files"=>["https://ndownloader.figshare.com/files/934675"], "description"=>"<p>Monthly Evolution of Neonatal, Maternal Pre- and Intrapartum, and Antepartum Chikungunya Cases between March 2005 (m1) and June 2006 (m16), First Sud-Réunion Outbreak, in Saint-Pierre</p>", "links"=>[], "tags"=>["maternal", "pre-", "antepartum", "chikungunya", "cases", "2005", "june", "2006"], "article_id"=>605094, "categories"=>["Cell Biology", "Virology", "Medicine", "Biotechnology", "Infectious Diseases"], "users"=>["Patrick Gérardin", "Georges Barau", "Alain Michault", "Marc Bintner", "Hanitra Randrianaivo", "Ghassan Choker", "Yann Lenglet", "Yasmina Touret", "Anne Bouveret", "Philippe Grivard", "Karin Le Roux", "Séverine Blanc", "Isabelle Schuffenecker", "Thérèse Couderc", "Fernando Arenzana-Seisdedos", "Marc Lecuit", "Pierre-Yves Robillard"], "doi"=>"https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050060.g001", "stats"=>{"downloads"=>3, "page_views"=>11, "likes"=>0}, "figshare_url"=>"https://figshare.com/articles/_Monthly_Evolution_of_Neonatal_Maternal_Pre_and_Intrapartum_and_Antepartum_Chikungunya_Cases_between_March_2005_m1_and_June_2006_m16_First_Sud_R_233_union_Outbreak_in_Saint_Pierre_/605094", "title"=>"Monthly Evolution of Neonatal, Maternal Pre- and Intrapartum, and Antepartum Chikungunya Cases between March 2005 (m1) and June 2006 (m16), First Sud-Réunion Outbreak, in Saint-Pierre", "pos_in_sequence"=>0, "defined_type"=>1, "published_date"=>"2008-03-18 01:24:54"} {"files"=>["https://ndownloader.figshare.com/files/475366"], "description"=>"<div><h3>Background</h3><p>An outbreak of chikungunya virus affected over one-third of the population of La Réunion Island between March 2005 and December 2006. In June 2005, we identified the first case of mother-to-child chikungunya virus transmission at the Groupe Hospitalier Sud-Réunion level-3 maternity department. The goal of this prospective study was to characterize the epidemiological, clinical, biological, and radiological features and outcomes of all the cases of vertically transmitted chikungunya infections recorded at our institution during this outbreak.</p> <h3>Methods and Findings</h3><p>Over 22 mo, 7,504 women delivered 7,629 viable neonates; 678 (9.0%) of these parturient women were infected (positive RT-PCR or IgM serology) during antepartum, and 61 (0.8%) in pre- or intrapartum. With the exception of three early fetal deaths, vertical transmission was exclusively observed in near-term deliveries (median duration of gestation: 38 wk, range 35–40 wk) in the context of intrapartum viremia (19 cases of vertical transmission out of 39 women with intrapartum viremia, prevalence rate 0.25%, vertical transmission rate 48.7%). Cesarean section had no protective effect on transmission. All infected neonates were asymptomatic at birth, and median onset of neonatal disease was 4 d (range 3–7 d). Pain, prostration, and fever were present in 100% of cases and thrombocytopenia in 89%. Severe illness was observed in ten cases (52.6%) and mainly consisted of encephalopathy (<em>n</em> = 9; 90%). These nine children had pathologic MRI findings (brain swelling, <em>n</em> = 9; cerebral hemorrhages, <em>n</em> = 2), and four evolved towards persistent disabilities.</p> <h3>Conclusions</h3><p>Mother-to-child chikungunya virus transmission is frequent in the context of intrapartum maternal viremia, and often leads to severe neonatal infection. Chikungunya represents a substantial risk for neonates born to viremic parturients that should be taken into account by clinicians and public health authorities in the event of a chikungunya outbreak.</p> </div>", "links"=>[], "tags"=>["multidisciplinary", "prospective", "mother-to-child", "chikungunya", "infections", "la"], "article_id"=>153639, "categories"=>["Cancer", "Cell Biology", "Medicine", "Biotechnology"], "users"=>["Patrick Gérardin", "Georges Barau", "Alain Michault", "Marc Bintner", "Hanitra Randrianaivo", "Ghassan Choker", "Yann Lenglet", "Yasmina Touret", "Anne Bouveret", "Philippe Grivard", "Karin Le Roux", "Séverine Blanc", "Isabelle Schuffenecker", "Thérèse Couderc", "Fernando Arenzana-Seisdedos", "Marc Lecuit", "Pierre-Yves Robillard"], "doi"=>"https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050060", "stats"=>{"downloads"=>3, "page_views"=>35, "likes"=>0}, 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PJ Harvey – Is This Desire? – Classic Music Review By altrockchick on October 16, 2014 A master work by a courageous and sensitive soul. Click to buy. Polly Jean Harvey’s most endearing quality is she can’t stand doing the same thing over and over again. She told Rolling Stone, “When I’m working on a new record, the most important thing is to not repeat myself . . . that’s always my aim: to cover new ground and really to challenge myself. Because I’m in this for the learning.” That admirable character trait also saved her career. Like nearly everyone else in the early 90’s, PJ played noisy, grungy music loaded with fury and angst. It was the perfect antidote to the overproduced pap of the 1980’s, and a blessed deliverance for the youth of the time who hungered for music with an edge. The problem with this mini-revolution turned out to be the problem with nearly all revolutions: it was manifested anger with no purpose other than to get it out of one’s system. While it sounded quite exciting and outrageous at the time, I listen to it now and it seems a nihilistic, self-indulgent bore, from Nirvana to Hole to Sleater-Kinney. Most of the artists of that period painted themselves into a corner, raising noise and rage to the level of artistic dogma, and deservedly faded into niche-level irrelevance. Women artists were seriously on the rag during that time, and most of them didn’t make it past 1995. The two that did were Ani DiFranco and PJ Harvey, who both discovered that there’s more to life than being pissed off about it. Neither of them sold out, however; they simply grew up and explored different ways to express themselves. For Ani DiFranco, her lyrics became less about me-me-me and more about shared experience; her albums from Out of Range through the rest of the 90’s contain several poetic masterpieces. The difference between Ani and PJ Harvey is that Ani’s music remained attached to the guitar, while PJ’s music . . . well, you never really knew what the fuck was going to come out of those speakers. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a PJ Harvey album that I liked the first time through, and that’s a good thing. She challenges my expectations and my biases with every release, and I admire the hell out of her for doing so. The one thing I do know when I buy a PJ Harvey album is that she will give it her best, and that what comes out will be an authentic representation of who she is at a particular moment in time. I have resisted reviewing PJ Harvey because I always ran into a problem: one review of one album never seemed enough, so I found myself in a state of paralysis, unable to choose which one to do first. My paralysis led to me leaving her off the original Great Broads list, even though I think she’s one of the greatest broads of them all. Lucky for me, my readers forced my hand by complaining about her omission. Now that I had to get off my ass and get cracking, I managed to get unstuck by letting PJ make the decision about which album I should review. I read somewhere that she felt most proud of Is This Desire?, so here we are. Released three years after the commercially successful and critically-acclaimed breakthrough album To Bring You My Love, PJ’s beloved child was met with a comparatively lukewarm reception from leading critics (NME, AllMusic) and the angrier sect in her fan base. Critics complained that the album was too “morose” (Oldham, NME), that it offered “diminishing rewards” and was her “least-focused effort to date” (Erlewine, AllMusic). Fans bemoaned the relative lack of kick and diminishing fury. The critical perspective is absolutely worthless because the critics made the fundamental error of comparing this album to the last, a short-sighted view if there ever was one. As for the fans wanting more noise and bombast, PJ was entirely right to take the attitude of “not really caring what other people thought about it,” as she told Filter magazine. Authentic self-expression should be the primary motivation driving any artist, not the pathetic need to keep the morons happy. In Is This Desire? PJ forged her own path, combating inner demons and health problems in addition to the challenges inherent in the search for true self-expression. The result is a work that explores aspects of the dark side of human nature with unrelenting courage through complex and beautiful poetry and carefully thought-out arrangements that accentuate the emotional impact while occasionally providing moments of stark beauty. Her exploration of the complex nature of human desire can be a painful experience at times, but this is because largely because PJ Harvey exposed truths and paradoxes that our male-dominated world tends to trivialize. Defying expectations from the start, PJ goes alt-country in the compelling opener, “Angelene,” a song built around a phrase in one of J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes.” P. J. takes that phrase, itself plucked from a horrid love poem penned by one of the characters, and builds her own character sketch about a white trash hooker holding on to the slim hope that there’s a man out there 2,000 miles away who will come to rescue her with real, unpaid love: My first name, Angelene Prettiest mess you ever seen Love for money is my sin Any man calls, I’ll let him in Rose is my color and white And pretty mouth and green, my eyes I see men come and go But there’ll be one who will collect my soul and come to me Two thousand miles away He walks upon the coast It lays open like a road While some have expressed the opinion that the many female characters who populate Is This Desire? represent different aspects of PJ’s personality, proof of that theory remains a secret between the rather reticent songwriter and her therapist. What I hear is incredible empathy for the kind of woman who is often denied empathy, the woman who sells her body and goes through the pantomime of love without receiving any. PJ sings this one in her deeply pleasing natural contralto, mostly in a tired, world-weary voice with a touch of Oklahoma in her phrasing. The arrangement alternates between soft and not-quite-loud, with her vocal in the first verse supported only by simple guitar chords. It’s only in the verses of hope that her voice rises out of its torpor and shows that Angelene still has the life force within her. The laid-back country feel of the song is enhanced with good thick bass from Mick Harvey that gives us the sense that Angelene is digging deep into her soul to find meaning. The last line of the song shows the care PJ put into the lyrics—it seems to repeat the opening line “My first name, Angelene,” but what she really sings is “My first name is Angelene,” a more affirmative acceptance of self than the tone of the first line, which sounds like someone mindlessly filling out a form or trying to recall her name while suffering from a hangover. “Angelene” is a tremendously moving and insightful song combining great power with subtlety, and tells you right from the start that PJ has taken her art to a higher level. No, you never know what the fuck is going to come out of those speakers, and “The Sky Lit Up” is as far away from “Angelene” as you can get, an electronic-heavy pounder where PJ sings of the exhilarating experience of a night out in the bright lights of the city. The woman singing the song knows she’s fucking hot, feeling her beauty and the power that comes with it. PJ moves from husky-sexy to an orgasmic high soprano in the closer, as if she’s experiencing the end of a memorable night of libidinous release. Or are we? Remember, the title of the album is the question “Is This Desire?” and the line that gives me pause is “And I’m lighter than I’ve ever been.” Having spent a good amount of time in my college years grabbing all the spotlight and sex I could get, I know that the experience is relatively empty in comparison to the deep, loving relationship I have now. Back then I was fueled solely by desire and completely incapable of real love. I had a great time, but really, it was just a warmup for the real thing. Personal experience aside, this is still a pretty hot song that shows that PJ can bring it any time she wants to. Shifting gears once again, PJ gives us the endlessly rich “The Wind,” a piece dominated by PJ’s whispered recitation of the lyrics and contrasting soprano vocal over a dance floor beat punctuated by strings. The story is of a woman named Catherine who has abandoned her high-born life in the city for a life of isolation “high up on the hills” where she only wants to listen to the wind blow. Her dreams “of children’s voices and torture on the wheel” have caused some to suggest that she’s imagining children being tortured on the wheel. The problem with that view is that the conjunction separates the two thoughts, so I interpret those images as simply afterimages of her former life. The lines “But now she sits and moans/and listens to the wind blow” give me the impression that she has discovered her personal version of “Om,” a way of connecting her powerful inner vibrations to the power of the wind. Down in the village below, a young girl assumes that Catherine must be lonely and urges her mother to help find Catherine a husband, and the mother responds, rather tritely, that it should be “A handsome one, a dear/A rich one for the lady/Someone to listen with.” I’ve always found English class consciousness fascinating in a gruesome sort of way, and the girl’s fantasy feels like she’s playing with dolls dressed in their finest, arranging fantasy marriages for them in a grand cathedral. Personally, I think Catherine has chosen solitude and there isn’t a man on earth capable of understanding her. PJ’s decision to whisper the opening stanzas was inspiration personified; I love the way she elongates the word “washhhhhhh” in her recital, an onomatopoeic confirmation of the wonderful feeling one has after a good bath or shower. I may not have entirely grasped the meaning of “The Wind,” but I love this song with a passion. The question mark at the end of the album’s title becomes more important with the next two songs, both of which deal with twisted desire. “My Beautiful Leah” is the song that apparently pushed PJ over the edge for a while, a tale of a woman engaged in the perpetual search to find either meaning in her life, someone authentic who genuinely needs her, or both. PJ plays the role of hapless male lover in search of Leah, a woman with “her lovely face twisted” who is likely suffering from a form of bipolar disorder. The narrator emphasizes her neediness (“She was always so needing”), indicating that Leah is a psychological black hole and that he is likely a co-dependent participant. Some people consider this drum-kit-and-dark-synth track the highlight of the album, and while I’m not sure about that, I think the sickness of the narrator is effectively portrayed. Even more disturbing to me is the album’s single, “A Perfect Day, Elise,” a song about an obsessive male who believes he owns Elise after one roll in the hay and kills her to prevent anyone else from ruining his perfect day. Part of me wishes that the swaying rock rhythm here had been used for a song about pure desire, but PJ’s choice does make the piece much more impactful. The middle section of this album definitely qualifies as a heart of darkness, and the song “Catherine” deals with the ugliness of obsessive, unrequited desire. PJ identifies the object of desire as one Catherine De Barra, and I’ve read a few different theories of this person’s identity. The author of the book Disruptive Divas suggests that it might be one of two Catherines who lived the island of Barra in the lower Outer Hebrides, but even she concedes it’s a mystery. It’s not a bad theory, as the essence of Catherine is her unattainability, and the image of a distant island complements the image. The bass on this song has the feel of a feverish heart, the muffled soundtrack mirrors the inner dialogue, and PJ’s lyrics graphically depict the corroding bitterness that consumes the narrator: Catherine De Barra, you’ve murdered my thinkin’ I gave you my heart, you left the thing stinkin’ I’d shake from your spell if it weren’t for my drinkin’ The wind bites more bitter with each light of mornin’ I envy the road, the ground you tread under I envy the wind, your hair ridin’ over I envy the pillow your head rests and slumbers I envy to murderous, envy your lover ‘Til the light shines on me I damn to hell, every second you breathe The meaning of “Electric Light” is more obscure; it all depends on how you interpret the word “siren.” Is it the image of a beautiful woman surrounded by neon lights or is it the sound of the police siren responding to a reported rape? The first interpretation makes the narrator a lonely soul in a two-bit room in the heart of the city yearning for the woman’s image to come to life; the latter implies he’s a murderous rapist admiring his work. Either interpretation raises questions of the meaning and realization of desire: the kind that languishes in neglect and the kind that kills. The bass-dominated arrangement could support either—it’s an eerie, mysterious and very compelling piece. Even more compelling is “The Garden,” a poem set over a slow funk beat enhanced by well-timed appearances of organ, piano and strings. The build in the arrangement is exceptional—the shift to single piano notes in the later verses introduces a sense of foreboding, and the long lyrical pause before the last recitation of “And there was trouble” turns the line into something close to hair-raising. The lyrics appear to describe two men meeting in the garden for a moment of man-to-man intimacy: And he was walking in the garden And he was walking in the night And he was singing a sad love song And he was praying for his life And the stars came out around him He was thinking of his sins And he’s looking at his songbird And he’s looking at his wings There, inside the garden Came another with his lips Said, “Won’t you come and be my lover? Let me give you a little kiss” And he came, knelt down before him And fell upon his knees “I will give you gold and mountains If you stay a while with me” And there was trouble At this point, we’re not sure if the trouble is due to the illicit love, the strangeness felt by two newbies to the gay scene or what. In the last sequence, PJ throws a wrench into that interpretation: They kissed and the sun rose And he walked a little further And he found he was alone And the wind it gathered ’round him Now we’re looking at the possibility that the man was meeting with his Jungian shadow, the part of the self that is repressed. What I realized that both interpretations could be simultaneously true, making this a marvelously constructed tale of repressed desire. When PJ is on her game, her lyrics are akin to the experience of walking past the mirrors of the fun house—there are multiple interpretations possible, depending on your perspective. People who detest ambiguity will feel uncomfortable with such a poet, but I find PJ’s work endlessly fascinating. “Joy” combines more than a touch of Bjork with a Patti Smith vocal, a combination that is distinctly difficult to listen to. I think that’s the point: it’s hard for people to think about or even look at people with disabilities. PJ gives a credible performance in the role of a woman without hope or the ability to change her circumstances. Here she’s dealing with the impossibility of manifesting desire, the bitter truth of permanent virginity expressed in the phrase “Innocence so suffocating.” This terribly ugly (understandably ugly) song is followed by the melancholy beauty of “The River,” where PJ works with the imagery of baptism and the belief that one can “throw your pain in the river.” This is a fascinating song on many levels, for a superficial read could lead you to believe that PJ is talking about the empty promise of Christian baptism, but she could also be talking about Lethe, the river of forgetfulness and the virtue of a life with no regrets. The image of washing is repeated here, indicating that the true theme of the song is probably closer to the guilt some people feel about desire itself. Again, whatever your interpretation, “The River” is a beautiful song and PJ’s natural voice, with its tone of weariness and doubt, is perfect for it. “No Girl So Sweet” is the doppelgänger of “The River,” using the same chord combination but shifting to heavy electronics. This is the one song on the album that turns me off, probably due to its intensely Christian imagery. The album ends with the title track, also steeped in biblical references. The question posed here is whether or not desire can be transcendent, a question to which I would naturally respond, “Fuck yes!” I will admit that it is a question that has been debated for centuries, with Gautama coming down on the side of extinguishing desire and Blake on the side of letting it rip (“sooner murder an infant in his cradle than nurse an unacted desire”). I’m on Blake’s side; PJ is able to hold both truths simultaneously, and that’s why she’s the poet and I’m the admirer. It’s regrettably understandable that the male-dominated field of music criticism didn’t get this album. The criticism that the album is “too sad” is such an obtuse perspective that it takes my breath away, but I’ve learned to accept male obliviousness as a fact of life. This is not to imply that all men have their heads up their asses, but our societies have a long way to go before they reach the tipping point where women are understood and accepted for who they are. I don’t consider myself a feminist, and neither does PJ Harvey. The songs on this album are not solely about women, and the truth is that desire can become a very ugly, distorted thing in any human being, regardless of gender. Beneath the layers of insightful complexity in Is This Desire?, PJ Harvey asks a very basic question that you could apply to almost any aspect of the human experience: “How could something that can be so beautiful become so destructive?” While asking that question opened doors into the dark side of human nature, PJ’s journey into that darkness is to be admired as a courageous attempt to shine a light on issues that we have romanticized and trivialized . . . and lead to real pain for real people. Posted in: 1990's, Classic Music Reviews, Great Broads, Rock, Punk, Alternative, Garage, Women Artists | Tagged: altrockchick, Angelene, Catherine, desire, female blogger, female music blogger, Is This Desire, music review, PJ Harvey, singer-songwriters, The River Bazzabab October 16, 2014 at 7:58 am | Reply Yet another fascinating thoughtful review. I was wondering which PJ Harvey album would be put under your microscope and had a distinct feeling it was gonna be this one – it’s the only one of her albums which I need some guidance with! It’s been a few years since I last gave it a spin because out of all her work this was the album I liked the least. Others have tried to turn me on to it (diehard fans online tend to rate this as her best album) but your appraisal and thoughts are insightful enough to probably help me get more out of this than I could before. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a “bad” album at all – I think Polly is utterly incapable of doing that, just it didn’t hit me the way her work usually does. I first encountered her in 1993 on a free sampler cassette (remember those?) with a magazine. It was a compilation of various Island Records acts. I wasn’t expecting it to be at all interesting so late one night, I got stoned, put on the headphones and hit play. Sure enough it was all going through one ear and out the other until I had my head blown open by one track. As it ended, it was one of those very rare “WTF was THAT?” moments – I looked at the cassette case to see who and what it was and swiftly rewinded the tape to listen to it again, and again and again. It was Polly’s 4 track demo version of “Rid Of Me” – it’s raw primal energy and intensity just left me breathless. From that point on, I’ve been a lifelong fan and it’s been an interesting journey as she’s gone from one song to the next from album to album making one wonder what she’s gonna do next. I’ve always enjoyed her demos more than the actual completed versions on the albums since I love the starkness in them and for me highlight what Polly is getting at much better when uncluttered which was why – I think – Island released the 4 track demos album to complement the “Rid Of Me” album which was an earsplitting production. When this album came out, there was the usual confusion wondering what she was up to as she changed her image yet again and compared to what had come before, this was a more mellower and moodier affair and definitely least accessible (which is saying something given how odd and diverse her two previous albums were, including that collaboration with John Parrish). I was buying all her 7 inch singles too since she always put exclusive tracks on the B sides and the ones from this era were really strange, including one where she sang lines from “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” highlighting it’s actually a rather melancholic lyric! The album wasn’t one I could listen to as much as the ones that came before and after, so this kinda remains her most obscure album for me. The one that came next was and remains her most accessible and somewhat consistent but wonderful. Polly Harvey remains the only musical act of the last 25 years (for me) that remains consistently challenging, unpredictable and interesting – a genuine original so it’s nice, if no real surprise that you also greatly appreciate her talent and work. Maybe over time you’ll also give the rest of her work the ARC treatment since it’s very worthy and not enough people listen to PJ Harvey! Matthew October 19, 2014 at 1:48 am | Reply This is a great album, and I wonder if PJ took the apathetic response to it particularly to heart: ‘Stories From the City…’ seems a deliberate attempt to make something more commercially comprehensible by comparison (that isn’t to cast negative aspersions on it) and response to the record that came before it. And could anyone blame her? She obviously poured her heart into ‘Is This Desire?’ But the great thing about her is that that applies to everything she does really. Some albums I like more, some albums I like less, but at the least, I can always count on the sincerity of her effort. If she fails, its an honest failure, its the good and the bad that come with a singular pursuit of the muse. Apparently she’s planning to record a new album next year, I’m very interested to see what she does next! altrockchick October 19, 2014 at 9:25 am | Reply When you put heat and soul into something, it’s only natural that you would seek support and validation, so I think your hypothesis is probably correct. Artists are human beings, too, and no matter how much they believe in their work, they wouldn’t put it on public display if they weren’t hoping to reach people. In PJ’s case, I think Stories from the City is her attempt to find common ground with the public, a much healthier approach than the one Ian Anderson took after the critics blasted A Passion Play, when he allowed the hurt to turn into a bitterness that contaminated some of his work immediately afterwards. The dynamic between artist and audience is a tricky one, but I think PJ manages it better than anyone. I’ve never heard anything by her that even approaches a sellout. Dave October 19, 2014 at 6:11 pm | Reply This is a great review ARC. You took a long time over it I guess, and it pays a musician of this stature due respect. I think Polly Harvey is one of THE significant artists from any period of recorded music. I get butterflies of anticipation when I buy her new albums. I never know how I’m going to react, except that it will take concentrated listening at least 3 times before it clicks. I bought Dry when it came out. Strong meat, and it is definitely an album made by a young person out to make an impression, but on the rare occasions I play it now I’m still excited by chunks of it. In any theoretical PJ Harvey anthology, “Sheela-Na-Gig” would surely have to be the opening punch in the guts. I’ve bought every album she’s released since then, and my own favourites are not necessarily hers. I have a theory that the artist is an unreliable guide to their own work. If they care about the work, they will be unsatisfied because they just KNOW they could have done better. They will, conversely, passionately defend a work like it’s their child if they think it’s been treated unfairly. John Lennon is a perfect example of an artist who could be dismissive of his most loved songs and albums. (I’m going to bring him up again). I’ve settled on 3 PJ Harvey albums which I think should be sent into space as exemplars of intelligent, highly emotional and beautifully realised holistic works – To Bring You My Love, Stories from the City, and Let England Shake. Most of her other “mature” work is oh-so-close to these stunning art pieces. I know that Harvey has been slightly dismissive of SFTC, and hasn’t really had a lot to say about TBYML. All I can say is that they move me on every level. My own pick of her highest achievement so far is LES. I was listening to a radio doco about the English pastoral composers who served in the so-called “Great War” – Vaughn Williams, Butterworth, Holst, Bliss, and others, and their French contemporary Ravel. As with almost everything connected to that terrible war, the stories were just too grim to bear for anyone with an ounce of emotional intelligence, and I found myself trying to continue pulling weeds in the garden, weeping away, as one terribly moving letter home after another was read into my earphones. Now when pop musicians try to create a thematic work (as in an album) dealing with such profoundly important topics as war and loss, you’ll get skinny-arsed nincompoops fondly imagining that the experiences of a rock’n’roll band “on the road” (maaaan) have some relationship to those of a 19 year-old boy sobbing in terror before dying in a criminally futile bayonet charge across – literally – 20 metres – fuck! 20 metres! – of no-man’s land. Very few manage to do it without insulting the memory of the who died before they had a chance to live. One of the few is PJ Harvey. I think that with LES, Harvey has created a masterpiece of both remembrance to those who suffered, and a strong, abstract (non-didactic) editorial on just what that war actually did TO people, along with every other war into which her country, your country, and mine have eagerly rushed almost without a minute of peace for over a hundred years. She channels Yoko Ono (I know, I know, but Yoko’s an influence on a lot of left field musicians) on several tracks; Kate Bush, notably on “Written On the Forehead”; 1970s progressive rock on “All and Everyone”, her own country’s folk heritage, particularly on “On Battleship Hill”: such a rich, complex work. Her lyrics are beautifully spare, apt, to-the point; she writes in the first person and somehow manages to sing emotional truths about experiences she hasn’t lived herself. I love the high register she sings in on her recent albums (not an original observation of mine; several reviews have noted this change). I do miss her electric guitar playing though. She’s not Yngwie Malmsteen (thank fuck!) but she’s an strong, emotional player; she plays from her gut, her heart, her crotch. She plays electric guitar like the trapped, despairing Lennon of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, The White Album, Let It Be and Abbey Road. Her playing sings of that pain which can’t always be articulated through speech; it might be more easily wrenched from a musical instrument or howled wordlessly into a microphone. That reminds me. I must write to disagree with you one day about Janis Joplin. Cheers, Dave. altrockchick October 19, 2014 at 10:22 pm | Reply Excellent mini-review of LES! I did put a lot of work and thought into the Is This Desire? review, as PJ’s work is so multi-layered and profound. There aren’t too many musicians who reach “profound,” but her ability to empathize with human beings and translate that empathy into art is exceptional and quite unique. When you work your way through the cacophony of the early 90’s, it’s obvious that she was one of the few who had that certain something that made her stand out from the rest. I find it difficult to review an artist who is still creating art; we don’t have the whole context yet, and PJ is such an explorer! I do know that if she retired tomorrow, she would leave a legacy that will last for centuries. Great Broads | altrockchick October 3, 2016 at 5:11 am | Reply […] PJ Harvey […] PJ Harvey – Is This Desire? – Classic Music Review — altrockchick – The Idealistic Outsider October 8, 2018 at 6:48 pm | Reply […] via PJ Harvey – Is This Desire? – Classic Music Review — altrockchick […] Leave a Reply to Matthew Cancel reply Traffic - John Barleycorn Must Die - Classic Music Review

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Lawrence E. Biegel Cristina Almada Biegel Joseph A. Cisneros Victoria Schermer-Kleinkopf Automobile Defects Civil & Business Litigation Results We've Produced for Our Clients. Truck vs. Vehicle Accident In 2015, our client drove home towards Salinas on Highway 101 North. At the same time, a long-haul truck driver was driving southbound. Suddenly, the truck driver crossed over the center median strip of Highway 101 and into oncoming traffic. His big-rig flipped over on top of our client’s small passenger car, flattening it. Amazingly, our client was not killed, but was rendered a quadriplegic. From the start, the defendant driver and his trucking company employer claimed that an unforeseeable and sudden medical emergency had incapacitated the truck driver, thus absolving them of all liability. Our attorneys conducted extensive research and consulted many eminent experts, thereby determining that such a defense was inapplicable to the given situation. The driver was smoking a cigarette, talking on a cell phone, and operating his tractor-trailer rig in the fast lane at a speed in excess of the posted speed limit. Our review of the driver’s medical records and documents produced by the trucking company revealed that the driver felt dizzy earlier in the day, but still chose to drive. These circumstances, coupled with the driver’s 40-year history of uncontrolled high blood pressure, high cholesterol, extremely poor diet, and smoking, led us to determine that no jury would find this event “unforeseeable.” In search of the true picture behind the driver’s health history, our office traveled on two occasions to the east coast to take the depositions of the trucking company employees charged with overseeing the driver’s behavior and also the depositions of the many doctors and medical personnel who had treated the driver over a 15 year span. In addition to the above, we had our client evaluated by a well-respected rehabilitation medicine doctor who determined the type of treatment and care our client would need for the remainder of his life. That proscription was transmitted to a certified life care planner who costed out the plan and an expert economist who translated the costs to present value. Based on that research and preparation, we were adamant that the defendant should pay for the medical care our client needed for the rest of his life, and for the severe emotional trauma he suffered. Due to the truck driver’s reckless actions, our client required lifelong medical assistance and equipment. In addition, our client’s ability to physically interact with his children and live the life he had before the accident was taken away from him. When the matter was brought to mediation, our lawyers convinced the defense counsel and their insurers that they had no choice but to settle, as we were prepared to win a substantial verdict should the case go in front of a jury. Based on our arguments and the likelihood they would lose at a jury trial, the trucking company agreed to settle with our client for $11 million. Motorcycle Injury Just past midnight on September 23, 2003, six wild boar lay dead or dying in the middle of Highway 1, about a quarter mile south of the Carmel River Bridge. They had been hit by motorists earlier in the evening. Our client, a national kickboxing champion, was , traveling north on Highway 1 toward the Carmel River Bridge. He headed to his home Monterey, and to his wonderful wife and two children; all of whom were involved in martial arts and in the community. The family had no way of knowing that their lives were about to be changed forever. As he came to the bottom of the Ribera Road hill, our client suddenly collided with one of the six pigs strewn across the highway. He was thrown from his motorcycle and, although he was wearing a helmet, suffered severe and irreversible brain damage as a result of the collision. He remained in a coma for six months after the accident. As a result of the accident, he suffered from permanent brain damage; he lost most of his fine motor movement, much of his speech, a great deal of his memory and required 24 hour care. Most of all, our client lost the quality of life that he so enjoyed before that fateful evening. Compounding his own tragedy, his wife lost a part of her husband – certainly the quality of life she had with him prior to the accident evaporated with the injuries he sustained. Finally, of course, the two children lost the leadership and the ever present love and affection of their father, to which they had become so accustomed prior to this tragedy. At trial, our attorneys argued that highway planning by the State of California had enticed boars to cross the road, and thereby created a dangerous condition on public property. We provided documentation and witness testimony which showed that the state had repeatedly ignored local residents who expressed serious concern over the boars that were causing high-risk traffic hazards. While the attorneys for the defense focused on our client’s contested blood alcohol level, we proved that any person in our client’s position would have suffered the same accident. Our firm hired a renown forensic expert in photogrammetry who produced an HD video to show the jury what our client saw at the point of impact. This expert replicated the accident, even going so far as to use a recently killed wild boar mounted on a dolly to approximate the actual accident. When the jurors saw this dramatic presentation, the news reports indicated that many in the jury audibly gasped at the reproduction. As a result, the jury awarded our client 8.6 million dollars in one of the largest verdicts in Monterey County history. That money was used by our client to hire the finest healthcare professionals as he worked towards his goal of one day walking again. It is this type of attention to detail, including the use of forensic experts, which contributed to the ultimate result. Dangerous Condition of Public Property Case In 2011, our clientdangerous-roadway and his family were driving along a main road in Stanislaus County to get dinner for his birthday, when a drunk driver ran a stop sign and collided into the side of their Ford Expedition driven by our client’s father. The impact caused the Expedition to slam into a large palm tree. Our client’s mother, father, and fourteen-year-old brother died instantly. A third-year law student, our client was left paralyzed from the chest down, without the movement of his arms, and lost many of his vital bodily functions. Five years prior to this accident, one hundred and thirty-four members of the neighborhood petitioned Stanislaus County to install a four way stop sign at the intersection where the accident would eventually occur. Community residents often avoided the intersection because of the lack of visibility; one had to pull nearly into the oncoming traffic for enough visibility to make a right or left turn onto the main road or to cross that roadway with farm vehicles. After receiving the petition, the County deemed the intersection dangerous for motorists, but avoided installing any traffic lights, stop signs, or other safety measures for six years. The accident which caused the death of our client’s family occurred at this intersection during the six-year interim after the intersection was deemed dangerous and before a traffic light was eventually installed. The Biegel Law firm represented this young man in securing monetary damages from Stanislaus County that would help him to pay for the medical care he needed for the rest of his life. We also demanded compensation for the emotional trauma of the wrongful deaths of his mother, father, and younger brother. In addition, our firm sued the County on behalf of our client’s wife for her loss consortium. When the matter was brought to mediation, our expert lawyers convinced the defense counsel and their insurers that they had no choice but to settle, as we were prepared to win a substantial verdict should the case go in front of a jury. Due to these efforts, our client and Stanislaus County settled for $8.25 million. This case represented the second time in five years that the Biegel Law Firm won a jury trial or settled a case against a public entity for dangerous condition of governmental property. Products Liability – Auto Defect Our client, a 68 year old federal employee, was profoundly injured when she was rear ended by an industrial truck. We recovered from both the at-fault driver’s company as well as the auto manufacturer for a defect in our client’s car which was a substantial cause of the injuries she sustained which rendered her a quadriplegic. Wrongful Death of the Father of Five Children The Biegel Law Firm represented the five children, ranging in age from 23 to 9 of a 55-year-old man who was killed when a commercial vehicle, pulling a trailer, crossed into the decedent’s lane and caused a horrible crash. While the case at first appeared to be one of clear liability, the defense hired an expert who created a computer-aided reconstruction video which suggested that it was our client’s father who was at fault. Our team mobilized by retaining a noted accident reconstruction expert who traveled to the scene on numerous occasions, took detailed laser measurements and, having also carefully studied the involved vehicles, was able to rebut the defense contention. After fifteen depositions, including five California Highway Patrol officers and all experts, the matter was settled a few weeks before the scheduled trial date. The Biegel Law Firm invested substantial sums for the costs of investigation, experts, depositions, and travel, but those costs were clearly worth the expenditure as the result indicated. The case settled just before trial for the sum of $2,500,000.00. Traumatic Arm Amputation In 2007 our client, a 61 year old woman, was invited to visit a private ranch in Wyoming. Upon arrival, the owner of the ranch offered to take her and other guests on a tour of the property in a Jeep. While traveling, the owner caused the Jeep to stall and could not move it forward. Our client, along with the other passengers, got out of the Jeep and moved to a safe distance away from the car on the side of the road. Suddenly, the ranch proprietor lost control of the Jeep and it careened backwards, skidding off the road and striking our client. As a result of the impact, her right, dominant arm was literally sheared off at the shoulder. It was only through the valiant efforts of the other guests and arriving paramedics that she did not die from blood loss. Unfortunately, despite the efforts of the trauma surgeons, medical personnel were unable to reattach her right arm. There was no question of the total and complete liability of the defendant driver and ranch owner in this case. The driver’s negligence in the operation of the Jeep vehicle was the sole cause of the accident. The driver was a co-owner of the ranch and her negligence was attributed to the other owner. Our client was prudent in moving to to a place of apparent safety when trouble was encountered. For her significant damages, she was entitled to a full recovery to the maximum extent possible. After extensive negotiations, our attorneys met with the ranch owners’ insurers at mediation. We successfully convinced them that they had an absolute obligation to pay the entirety of the $1.7 million of available coverage. With these funds on-hand, the burden on our client was eased through future necessary medical care and at least partial payment for her pain and suffering. This case is a good example of how, no matter how much money can be recovered to an injured client, no amount can compensate for such a profound injury and loss. Will Contest – Clients Prevail with Hefty Settlement In 2015, during his last illness, the father of our three clients, his adult daughters, executed a will in which he disowned each of them in favor of a fourth adult daughter. The Biegel Law Firm brought suit to contest the will, claiming it had been procured by the fourth daughter by undue influence and that her father was incompetent to execute such a will. After extensive discovery, the matter was settled such that our clients received a significant interest in their father’s estate, consisting of cash and an award of certain mineral rights, which constituted a substantial amount of the value of the estate. Defending Breach of Contract Claim Our client had a relationship with a high school sweetheart. They were later married after both had graduated from college. Beginning in high school, our client started two businesses which, at the time of the parties’ marriage, were highly successful. The Marital Settlement Agreement which terminated the marriage left open the wife’s claim that she had a 50% ownership interest in our client’s businesses. As soon as the marriage dissolved, the wife filed suit against our client, contending that she owned half of both businesses and that they were worth millions of dollars. The Biegel Law Firm, after intense settlement negotiations and after a myriad of depositions and exchanges of voluminous documents, was able to settle the case for well short of what the plaintiff had demanded and for what our client considered “nuisance value” in order to cut short the expense of concluding the litigation in his favor. Defending Claims of Fraud and Embezzlement Our client had been married and worked with a noted artist. When the marriage collapsed the parties filed for dissolution. The artist husband filed a civil suit, claiming our client, his wife, had embezzled millions from him in concert with other employees, banking institutions, accountants, and title companies. The artist husband sought over $18 million in damages from the combined defendants. The Biegel Law Firm, working in close cooperation with our client’s family law attorneys, was ultimately able to have the entire case dismissed and, as part of the Marital Settlement Agreement, to have a press release issued indicating that the claims were made in the heat of a heavily contested divorce and that both parties were satisfied with the confidential settlement. An innocent person may be charged with a domestic violence offense, even if they are innocent. An angry spouse might falsely allege abuse, or a simple accident could cause law enforcement officials to make an incorrect assumption. In addition, it has also been found that those who commit lawful acts of self-defense are often charged with domestic violence when the real aggressor portrays themselves as the victim. Such was the case wheCOURT HALLWAYn our client was assaulted by his wife in January of 2015. After a heated argument, our client attempted to peacefully exit his home, but was physically stopped by his wife and her family. After breaking free, our client wisely removed himself from the hostile situation. He was soon arrested by the police, based on dishonest allegations by his spouse and her family members that he instigated the altercation. As a recent immigrant to the United States, our client was aware of the potential for deportation should he be found guilty at trial. Despite this risk, he entrusted our firm to clear his name in open court. At a jury trial, our firm successfully argued that our client had every right to act with reasonable force in his attempt to escape from his wife’s bodily attack. We convinced every member of the jury that the prosecution had not met their burden of proof, and that our client was absolutely innocent. After the “Not Guilty” verdict was announced, a number of the jurors waited in the hallway to meet our client and express their sympathies for the hardship which he was forced to endure. Reduced to Infraction In May 2016, our client attended an evening business meeting at a restaurant in Monterey. At the time, he was a local resident with no criminal record, and took great care to monitor his alcohol intake that night such that he would not be inebriated when driving home. At approximately 9 p.m., he left the meeting and began driving home. As he entered the highway, he went to press the Bluetooth button on his cell phone. This momentary distraction caused his car to drift a foot to the right over the lane divider. Having seen this, a California Highway Patrol vehicle quickly came up behind him and initiated a traffic stop. The CHP officers conducted several standard field sobriety tests. Our client generally did very well on his field sobriety tests. For example, on the Romberg balance test, he estimated 30 seconds, while 31 seconds had elapsed. He successfully completed the finger count test. The CHP also gave our client two blood alcohol tests at the scene. Both tests results showed that our client’s blood alcohol content was under the legal limit with a 0.07% blood alcohol content. Despite these tests results and our client’s clear alertness, the CHP officers still decided to arrest him for driving under the influence. He was taken to the local police department, and later charged with charged in a criminal complaint by the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office with driving under the influence. From the offset, our attorneys felt law enforcement had improperly arrested our client and that the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office was wrong in filing the criminal complaint against him. We urged to the District Attorney to dismiss the case because our client: • Had a blood alcohol level that was under .08% • Was driving safely with only one minor, explainable exception • Performed well on the field sobriety tests • Had no criminal history and a clean driving record The District Attorney made several offers which we considered unreasonable and not compatible with the facts of the case. Our efforts ultimately paid off, as the District Attorney’s Office agreed to offer our client an infraction (basically a traffic ticket) for his momentary, unlawful swerve. Our client was jailed for 15 months prior to having the matter brought to a full jury trial. The Biegel Law Firm had been brought into the case in mid-stream, to replace the Public Defender’s office. Using defense investigators and expert witnesses, including forensic technology in the courtroom, Mr. Biegel was able to obtain an acquittal of all charges. On the evening of the verdict, our client was released from the Monterey County Jail and was able to join with us and his family the next day for a luncheon in his honor. Land Dispute & Fraud In 2008, our client sought to locate and purchase land in Carmel Valley such as to accommodate developing the 93-acre parcel into a “dream environment” for him his family. Assured by the developer that the parcel had the utmost privacy, including statements in the project plan that privacy was a key element of the development, our client purchased the property for almost $3,000,000. He did so having reviewed the building envelop assigned to the neighboring lot to assure that any residence built there would not be visible or somehow intrude on the privacy of his parcel. Once he took possession, our client found that the statements of the developer were untrue and that the developer himself had granted a building envelop change in the neighboring property to a place directly overlooking our client’s newly purchased parcel. After scores of depositions and many pre-trial motions, the case was settled with the developer and homeowners association for a seven-figure amount and assurances that no residence could be built directly overlooking our client’s parcel. Under-insured Motorist Coverage Claim In May of 2015, our clients were driving in Gilroy, California, when their vehicle was suddenly struck by an automobile which had failed to stop at a red traffic signal. The force of the collision was so intense that the driver and passenger airbags were deployed; one of the passengers was trapped in the car and had to be extricated by first responders utilizing the Jaws of Life. Thankfully, both passengers survived the horrific accident. Yet the significant damages they sustained, both in medical costs and emotional trauma, greatly surpassed the minimal insurance of the at-fault driver. Our attorneys worked with the clients to prepare a comprehensive demand package to their insurer, which clearly stated why they deserved the entirety of their six-figure uninsured/under-insured policy. We guaranteed the insurance company knew that our office was fully prepared to litigate the matter, to ensure that our clients received what they were entitled to. This effort resulted in the full payment of the policy, which has greatly improved the comfort and well-being of the injured family. 2801 Monterey-Salinas Hwy Suite A, Monterey, CA 93940 © 2019 All Rights Reserved. | Website Developer

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Belturbet Heritage Railway Home: About BHR Cavan & Leitrim (C&L) C&L Loco’s and Carriages C&L Carriage’s C&L Locomotives Railway Tickets and Stamps Railway Bridges Railway Routes Historical Railway Images Railway restoration projects Restoration images Catering at the Railway Train Driver George O’Keefe ​ The Cavan & Leitrim Railway was one of the most fascinating and at one time, the busiest of Ireland’s narrow-gauge railways. It remained open years after most of the other 3ft gauge lines closed. The C&L was the only passenger Narrow Gauge line steam operated line all through its life. In 1883 the Cavan, Leitrim and Roscommon Light Railway and Tramway Co. was founded under the terms of the Tramways (Ireland) Act. Its first section, some 34 miles long, and 3ft gauge, was opened in 1887 linking the Midland and Great Western broad-gauge station at Dromod to the corresponding Great Northern facility at Belturbet. A branch from Ballinamore to Arigna was opened the next year. ​ ​ For the first 20 years or so passenger traffic, both regular and excursion, ran well. Light freight including tea, sugar, alcohol and cloth was big business, carried to local stations to be collected by merchants from the surrounding districts. Heavy freight consisted mainly of cattle. Huge fairs like the Monaghan Fair and the twice-yearly fair at Ballymagovern were the mainstay of the narrow gauge as northern buyers were able to move stock readily via the local station and the G.N.R. The railway became the Cavan and Leitrim in 1895. Roscommon decided to decline membership of the Railway; the reason was that all county’s that the train operated in would be liable to pay any deficient in the operating costs of the line which would be paid out of local rates. At the start of the twentieth century the railway possessed nine locomotives, all built by Robert Stephenson and Co. At this time the directors faced hostile public opinion and struggled vainly for many years to extend its line to the Arigna coal fields. When the extension was finally built in 1920 the political temperature in Ireland was rising, and the initiative was taken by the Government. It was fortuitous that the Arigna line opened when it did. In 1922, the C&L suffered a considerable loss in its trading, with the imposition of partition which cut off a large part of its cattle business. As it was the extension greatly enhanced the railway. Coal was carried to the main lines heading for Limerick and the cement works at Drogheda. Transhipment was a logistical problem since, when the coal arrived at Dromod and Belturbet via the Cavan and Leitrim, it had to be shovelled manually from its wagons into the wagons of the broad gauge. ​ ​ In 1924, the new Free State Government introduced a Railways Act in an attempt to rationalise and protect the railway sector. All railways were merged into a State-run company called Great Southern Railways. The once proudly independent Cavan and Leitrim Railway Company was no more. It was reduced to the role of a subsidiary. During the thirties the line maintained a precarious existence. The war years led to a respite as coal proved to be a lifeline, and the railway coped successfully with coal traffic of often mammoth proportions. In 1945, a new State transport company incorporating both road and rail transport was set up, replacing the GSR. Cutbacks in the rail service followed but the narrow gauge held out. In the 1950s the old Cavan and Leitrim line was virtually dependent on the coal traffic to Irish Cement at Drogheda. In its last days it made use of engines and rolling stock sent from narrow gauge systems which had closed. However, by 1956, coal carriage was no longer viable. The railway finally succumbed on March 31st 1959, the penultimate Irish narrow gauge system to go (the last being the West Clare Railway). A section of the line was reopened by preservationists in 1994. Please support us with a donation Follow Belturbet Heritage Railway on WordPress.com Railway Road, Belturbet, County Cavan, Rep. of Ireland Kingfisher Holiday Homes http://www.kingfisherholidayhomes.com

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Free Trade Area in Latin America Nov 19, 2018 in Marketing Several attempts have been made towards regional integration in Latin America. Creation of a Free Trade Area was seen as an important concept that would assist the region economically. However, this has not been possible and the constituent countries have ended up forming smaller integration blocs such as UNASUR (Union of South America Nations) and ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas). This paper evaluates the possibility of creation of a free trade area in Latin America without the involvement of both the United States and Canada. The paper will also discuss benefits and disadvantages of the creation of a free trade area. Although the countries within the region have made several strides towards creating an integrated plan, there are several hindrances that may impede the process, such as ideological differences and other. Some countries have proposed economic-based integration while others support social and political integration. This paper argues that, although there is a possibility that the free trade area can be created, there are a lot of political uncertainties which may hinder the full realization of the process. History of the Process of Integration The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was viewed as a form of trade colonization by the developing countries in Latin America and therefore it was largely opposed. The move towards the creation of the FTAA was seen as the United States move to impose its will upon the Latin Americans, something that was received with a lot of resistance in several countries in the region. Latin American countries have consistently been disapproving the economic involvement of the IMF which has participated in creating most of the problems experienced within the region. However, following the optimism in the economic progress of the region, IMF has been seen wanting to play an active role as an ‘expert’ in the pursuance of economic progress despite the previous role of under-developing the Latin American countries it had played. Political and economic enmity exists in the region, making it hard to achieve an economic integration plan. For instance, enmity between the United States and Venezuela and Cuba is obvious. Although the United States is the biggest consumer of the oil exports from Venezuela, the latter has attempted to look for alternative consumers from the Asian regions, particularly India and Chinaò this fact highlights a problem in economic ties with the US. Bilateral trade between the two countries has been affected due to their apparent enmity. This means that economic cooperation is linked to other relationships, including the social and political ones. There are other smaller economic functional blocs such as Petrosur, an organization in charge of coordinating mutual energy policies among Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina, which have been created in the region. This poses a great threat to the formation of the wider integration bloc that many countries are pessimistic about. Some of these countries may not see the need to be integrated with other countries, which they view as neo-colonizers or economically oriented states. Mercosur was purposely created to advance political and social concerns of the people. In 2005, Chavez tried to control the direction the union was taking. According to him, Mercosur was heading to breaking away from its neoliberal roots. The initial plan of the union was to advance the social concerns of the workers, human dignity, life and children. Chavez seemed to have opposed the concept of seeking financial gains out of the integration. The emergence of different integration bodies with diverse goals impedes the process of achieving a single integration bloc in Latin America. The goal of the United States in their call for an integrated Latin America has been to promote the NAFTA agenda to the rest of the countries, something that has been widely opposed by these countries. One of the agendas that have been openly rejected by the constituent countries in Latin America is the aim of the United States to compel all its trading partners to enforce and respect the regulations which are imposed by it. The objective behind the US carrying out such an activity is to advance its economic rate through reaping the benefits that are associated with free trade and open markets. To achieve the objective, the United States set up a bargaining organization, FTAA. Although the United States has tried to pursue the integration with very careful considerations, the process has taken a long time given the extent to which it is opposed by the countries in the Latin American region. The formation of Mercosur (Mercado Común del Sur) has brought a lot of dynamics within the region. The member states include Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and other associate members such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. The main aim of the integration was to create a common market that could consequently allow free movement of goods and services within the region. They also adopted a common external policy, coordinated common interests in the international markets and focused on macroeconomic policies affecting them. The integration has sought a lot of successful agreements. For instance, EU has formed their prime trading partner. An agreement signed between the two unions to create free trade areas is a big challenge to the creation of the Latin American based integration. Countries in the world have foreign policies carefully designed by their governments, which facilitates them in attaining their desired international integration goals. National interests of any country have to be safeguarded. The United States has been involved in relations with Latin America. The area is growing as a region. However, there are several social and political issues that the United States need to solve with them so that they can move towards common development. The United States for some time has complained about illegal activities taking place or being facilitated by the countries in the Latin American region. The United States has, for example, accused Cuba of allowing illicit drug trafficking within its borders, an issue that the United States relentlessly opposed. The Cuban government warned the US about the inappropriateness of interfering with their internal affairs. These kind of opposing stands have made many Latin American countries hold the United States in contempt to a position that they interpret the attempts by the US to bring integration as a way of neocolonialism. Efforts to unite other countries in exception of the US and Canada require ideological harmony because politics seems to play a fair share in the process at the expense of the actual goals of integration. The efforts to form an integrated economic bloc might take time if they are successful. Total: 00.00 Challenges of Future Integration It is very difficult to evaluate the success of the future efforts towards the integration process of the Latin Americans. However, going by the current trend, there are issues that are already ascertainable. Current integration process has been a difficult one following social, political and economic differences among the countries in the region. The concept of integration has almost been completely polarized. This is because the situation has taken the political path. Due to its political nature, the American integration process is to a large extent indeterminate. The region is still working on other integration plans with little involvement of the United States and Canada. The already existing integration blocs are largely working to ensure that they succeed without the back-up of the two great economies in the region. Their success depends on whether they have laid a foundation that surpasses both political and ideological differences. The greatest worry is whether the integrated countries can be able to succeed without bringing in their political differences present in each of the Latin American countries. For example, Chavez has been an active member of the ALBA integrated organization. He seems to hold strong reservations on certain issues, especially related to social and economic ideologies. From another perspective, Bachelet has been very active in the UNASUR organization. The greatest question that one would be left wondering about is whether Venezuela will continue being a member without Chavez and whether Chile will still be a member without Bachelet. The worry is whether these leaders magnify their personal opinions to reflect the will of their countries. Only time can be able to ascertain the truth or falsity of this concept. The countries have been trying to hold divergent views behind the real reason for existence of a free trade area. Countries such as Brazil seem to lean more on economic interdependence while countries like Venezuela and Cuba seem to hold the perspective of opposing neo-colonial tendencies of the countries like the United States. The countries which majorly concentrate their approach on politics seem to handle issues in a circuitous way. For instance, they begin discussing dealing with the imperialistic status quo and the topic ends there. There is less progress that is achieved in other areas such as discussion of the economic development. On the other hand, the call for the changes they agitate for cannot be taken for granted. The greatest hope that the solidified blocs have realized is that with unity, these integrated regions can outweigh the strength of the United States. Benefits of Free Trade to Latin American Countries Latin America consists of developing countries which are mostly in the take-off stage of development. Strategic free trade agreements can be of a great benefit to these countries in a number of ways. First, they will increase the number of resources available. The developing nations can benefit from accessibility to financial sources from the other countries which they form the integration with. Developing countries usually have constrained resources that might not be enough to carry out certain development projects. The resources can be in the form of labor, land and capital. Free trade markets ensure that small and developing countries like those in the Latin America can be able to receive financial sources so that they can be empowered to produce either products or services to their end consumers. Second, free trade leads to improved quality of life. For instance, countries are able to import products that they do not produce at relatively fair prices. Imported goods can in many times turn out to be cheaper than when the country attempts to produce these goods within their territories. Most countries in Latin America do not have the necessary technology and expertise required to convert raw materials into finished products that can be used by the end consumers. If the neighboring regions produce products that these countries need, they will be allowed to import on a regular basis because trade barriers will not act as an impediment. Importing goods from their neighbors will also guarantee them accessibility to utilization every time it is required. Third, free trade creates good foreign relations. Developing relationships through trade with other countries makes the Latin American countries safe from the global threats. Trade can also be used by the developing nations to create interior strengths. In addition, it can be a major factor towards strengthening political ties. With the free trade, a lot can be learnt from the well doing regions and the weak countries can be able to borrow from the strong ones thus improving their governing systems. Through free trade, the societies in Latin America can be able to reach efficiency in their production. Most of the countries have their own skills of developing certain products. This can be an effective platform that the developing nations can use to fill the gaps in their methods of manufacturing. Experience or special skills can be gained in learning the unique manufacturing methods. This benefits the countries as they engage in an exchange program. In addition, free trade leads to consumer savings. This is because competition in the supply of goods and services between the companies within the boundaries and those in other countries will lead to a fall in price. This makes it possible for the consumers to buy goods and services at affordable prices and still have enough to save. Moreover, free trade leads to reduced inequality. Foreign investment makes it possible for people to acquire employment opportunities, earn an income and therefore bridge the gap between the poor and the rich. Drawbacks of Free Trade in the Latin America Free trade can have some disadvantages. Sometimes free trade can lead to unemployment. As the goods are exported to other countries, the opening up of the boundaries allows the companies of other countries to compete with the native companies in terms of pricing the products. In this case, some firms will be forced to close down if they cannot be able to competitively sell their products within the region. As a result, the employed people lose their jobs. Second, free trade contributes to loss of sovereignty and causes increased dependency. Lack of restriction in the movement of goods and services between the boundaries of two countries makes the sovereignty be lost. This also paves a way for inter-country illegal trade to be carried out. On another perspective, nations tend to specialize on producing certain goods while depending on other countries to produce what they do not have. This creates a dependency syndrome. If the exports that the country produces are depleted or insufficient, then the country must make efforts to find or do without causing inconvenience. From another platform, overdependence on neighboring countries can sometimes cause inconveniences. Nations are prone to change their allegiance due to the change of national interests, social or political changes. This may make some countries to suffer since the free trade they used to depend on may be cut short. Third, free trade contributes to inequality and poverty in developed countries. Most of the companies are likely to move to products that can be easily exported. Since the people with skilled labor are more, most of them might be rendered jobless as the company seeks for other few skilled people while investing intensively on technology to make sure that goods and services are continuously produced. This means that many people will not be able to earn an income. This increases the poverty levels while at the same time widening the gap between the poor and the rich, causing social and economic disparity. Although there have been many attempts made to integrate Latin America through creating a free trade area, these efforts have been hindered by several factors. Most of the countries have already joined hands to create smaller organizations comprising of few countries. In addition, the formation of the free trade area has been hampered by the diverse expectations that every member state wants from the process. There are numerous social, political and economic benefits that this process is likely to bring to the area, such as creation of employment. However, many countries would still fear the impacts of the integration such as disparity in economic development. The choice of whether the region will enter into an agreement about the creation of the free trade area highly depends on the political dynamics happening within the countries. Fire Safety Systems Evolution in Aviation Gender as Well as Feminism in Mythological Context

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Apple iOS 7.1 beta 3 seeded to testing partners, public release in March By Jonathan S. Geller @boygenius December 23rd, 2013 at 12:19 PM Apple has begun seeding a new build of iOS 7.1 to testing partners, we have learned from a trusted source. iOS 7.1 beta 3 is said to bring several important bug fixes in addition to some new features, though our source was uncomfortable detailing these for us at this time. The new build has not yet been released to developers, who just gained access to iOS 7.1 beta 2 on on December 13th. Additionally, as strange as it may be, we are told that iOS 7.1 will probably not be released to the public until sometime in March. Apple has historically released an iOS update around January, but it could be that Apple’s upcoming iOS in the Car feature is the reason for the delay here. Tags: Apple, iOS 7.1 Jonathan Geller is the founder of Boy Genius Report, now known as BGR, and one of the biggest tech & mobile destinations in the world. BGR was acquired by leading digital media company PMC in April 2010 and Jonathan is President and Editor-in-chief of BGR Media, LLC. Jonathan was named to Forbes' coveted 30 under 30 list in 2016, and frequently appears as a commentator on news channels such as CNBC, Fox News, ABC News and Bloomberg. Best Deal We've Found Only A Couple Left Behold: Apple’s leaked iPhone 12 Pro design looks stunning in this video By Zach Epstein 1 day ago Apple is working on a massive acquisition that would be a game-changer By Andy Meek 1 day ago By Chris Smith 1 day ago

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H.E. Mr Toomas Tirs Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Estonia to the Kingdom of Belgium and Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Toomas Tirs joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2007 as Desk Officer for South Caucasus countries in the Political Department. In 2009, he was posted to Brussels where he worked for 4 years in the Permanent Representation of Estonia to the European Union as a Desk Officer in Trade Policy and Transatlantic Relations. Toomas Tirs continued his service as Desk Officer in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Trade Policy and International Economic Organisations Division (2013-2014 and again in second half of 2015). In 2015, he served as a Seconded National Expert to the Secretariat of the Latvian Presidency of the Council of the EU in Riga. From 2016 until 2018 he was working at the Government Office of Estonia as the Head of Logistics for the Estonian Presidency of the Council of the EU. In 2018, Toomas Tirs returned to Brussels where he began his current appointment as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Estonia to the Kingdom of Belgium and as a Head of Administration at the Permanent Representation of Estonia to the EU. Ambassador Tirs presented his credentials to His Majesty the King Philippe on 11 September 2018 and to the Grand Duke of Luxembourg on 12 December 2018. Before joining public service, Toomas Tirs worked from 1995 until 1999 in the Estonian Telephone Company (now Telia Estonia) as Project Manager and Human Resources Director, 1999-2007 as a Consultant and Trainer in Goldratt Baltic, and also as a Lecturer of Project Management in Estonian Business School and IT College. Ambassador Tirs has a Master’s degree in Business Administration (Strategic Management) (Cum Laude) from University of Tartu, Estonia and Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration (Magna Cum Laude) from University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, Wisconsin, USA. Ambassador Tirs speaks fluently Estonian, English and Russian and in an intermediate level French, Latvian, and Finnish. He enjoys Estonian folk dance, swimming and takes part at AIESEC alumnus. He is married to Mrs Gunda Tire and has three children.

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Big night for women, Garth Brooks at CMA Awards WENN - World Entertainment News Network It was ladies night at the CMA Awards in Nashville, Tenn., on Wednesday, with big wins for Maren Morris and Kacey Musgraves. Pregnant Morris picked up the Album of the Year prize for Girl, while Musgraves was a double winner, collecting the Music Video of the Year for Rainbow and the Female Artist of the Year. Kacey Musgraves poses backstage with her awards for Female Vocalist of the Year and Music Video of the Year at the The 53rd Annual CMA Awards in Nashville, Tenn., on Nov. 13, 2019. Charles Pulliam / REUTERS Female empowerment was a big theme of the whole awards show, which kicked off with a tribute to the ladies of country, featuring performances from co-hosts Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, and Dolly Parton and The Highwomen, Martina McBride, Tanya Tucker, and Emmylou Harris, among others. And the women made their voices heard on the red carpet, demanding equal play to their male counterparts on country radio — Sugarland star Jennifer Nettles even incorporated the message into her look, scribbling on the inside of her caped gown: “Play our f*#!!in records. Please and thank you.” Jennifer Nettles poses backstage at the 53rd Annual CMA Awards in Nashville, Tenn., Nov. 13, 2019. Charles Pulliam / REUTERS There was also history made when fiddler Jenee Fleenor became the first woman to win the Musician of the Year title, but unfortunately, Carrie Underwood couldn’t complete a huge night for the women of country — she lost out on the coveted Entertainer of the Year honour to now-seven time winner Garth Brooks. He last lifted the prize in 2017. Garth Brooks accepts the award for Entertainer of the Year at the 53rd Annual CMA Awards in Nashville, Tenn., on Nov. 13, 2019. Harrison McClary / REUTERS It was also a big night for Luke Combs, who took home two awards — Male Artist and Song of the Year for Beautiful Crazy — and Blake Shelton, who picked up his first win for Single of the Year (God’s Country). The full list of 2019 CMA Awards winners is: Entertainer of the Year Female Vocalist of the Year Male Vocalist of the Year Girl — Maren Morris Single of the Year God’s Country — Blake Shelton Beautiful Crazy — Luke Combs, Wyatt B. Durrette III and Robert Williford (songwriters) Vocal Group of the Year Musical Event of the Year Old Town Road (Remix) — Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus Music Video of the Year Rainbow — Kacey Musgraves Vocal Duo of the Year New Artist of the Year Musician of the Year Jenee Fleenor (fiddle) Calgary's Jocelyn Alice finds strength in loss on defiant debut album,... Electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani guides a new generation of musicians... By clicking “Submit”, I consent to receiving the above communication from Postmedia Network Inc. I understand that I may unsubscribe from these communications at any time.

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The View from the United States Yost_The_View_from_the_United_States_2011.pdf (98.55Kb) Yost, David The U.S. debate on NATO nuclear deterrence has been since 1991 a barely visible and sometimes behind-the-scenes contest between the traditional view, which is supportive of long-standing U.S. and NATO policy, and the diverse views of various proponents of change. The principle of maintaining a credible NATO nuclear deterrence posture has continued to command widespread support. Most of the controversy has concerned how to maintain such a posture and, above all, whether nuclear sharing arrangements involving U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe should be sustained. This essay reviews the point of departure for this debate — the decisions taken by the United States government in 1991 — before describing the traditional view and the views of advocates of withdrawal of the residual U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe.

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Dignity Series An online journal of culture Tag: Boston College SPORTS: And that’s why the games are played And that’s why the games are played by Frank Colagiovanni When you look at the teams on paper, the conclusion is nearly certain. There’s no way that a Division 1-AA football team could knock off a perennial powerhouse. The powerhouse is too big, too strong, too talented. There is no way they could lose. But they don’t play the games on paper. Appalachian State of the Southern football conference took everything Michigan could throw at them and, powered by a 21 point second quarter, bested the Wolverines 32-34-at home and in front of 107,501 die hard fans in stunned silence. They never even should have been “in” the game. That was almost the case this past weekend when my team, the Eagles of Boston College lined up opposite the University of Massachusetts Minutemen. The problem for BC was that when they lined up, they did so with an illegal formation–less than seven on the line-resulting in loss of yards, three times is the first quarter alone. UMass played like they had nothing to loose. UMass never even should have been “in” the game. But they were, pulling within one score, a field goal during the first half, much to the delight of the visiting fans voicing their approval and quieting the homers. BC pulled it out, but it easily could have gone the other way. On paper, it was a mismatch, just like Michigan/Appalachian State. But between the lines, between the whistles and between the tackles, none of that mattered. They don’t play the games on paper. And that’s the part of being a sports fan that I love the most, those moments when the impossible happens. The comeback, the no-hitter, the overtime goal — all those moments that are, in their essence, perfect. Those are the moments I hope for every time I file through the turnstile and take my seat. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes your team loses. And then sometimes everything falls together for a perfect moment. I’ve had the opportunity to witness a few of them, to feel the current shift. The collective elation and relief when Dave Roberts slid into second ahead of Jeter’s tag in the 2004 ALCS. The seconds counted by everyone at Fenway after the ball left the bat of David Ortiz before it landed in the Red Sox bullpen. As I tap this out, I’m four hours away from passing thought the Fenway turnstile for Game 1 of the American League Divisional Series, and I’ll be back at there again on Friday night for Game 2. In an hour or so I’ll start to get the nervous feeling. And at noon on Saturday I’ll be taking my seat on the goal line at Alumni Stadium for the Boston College-Bowling Green game. It’s a busy week, and I know the outcomes I’m hoping for — and if my lifetime as a Red Sox fan has taught me, will be praying for — but you just never know. That’s why I have to be there. As of 2004, no team in the history of baseball had ever come back from a three game series deficit. And as of last week, there was no way that a Division 1-AA team was going to take down mighty Michigan. And that’s why the games are played. And that’s why I watch them. Welcome to Bread and Circus Magazine, an online journal project that began in 2007. We'll be bringing you new material in the coming months, but in the meantime please browse our collection of past articles. We hope you find something that's food for thought. For further information, send an email. You’ve discovered Bread and Circus, a group blog f… Grey Gardens: What the Maysles’ Came-“lost” Can Teach Us The DIGNITY Series: Achieving Dignity Art Review: “Herman Trunk, Jr.: Catholic Modernist” On Conservative Intellectuals and Richard Nixon "Duas tantum res anxius optat--Panem et circenses" --Juvenal (Roman poet, circa 60-140, writing in Satire X) WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PHRASE "BREAD AND CIRCUS"? In ancient Rome, political elites frequently distributed food (such as wheat) and funded lavish spectacles for the inhabitants. The provision of what Juvenal called "bread and circuses" is thought to have been an important element in placating the masses. The elites also seem to have thought of it as an important part of their civic duty. A sophisticated discussion of the subject can be found in Paul Veyne's book Le pain et le cirque, which is available in English translation as well as in its original French edition. Archives Select Month September 2011 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 June 2009 February 2009 January 2009 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007

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The Goal of Child Related Family Dispute Resolution The ultimate goal of Child Related Family Dispute Resolution is to minimise the impact of family separation on a child. To ensure that children are protected from conflict and are able to feel loved, despite family breakdown. To maintain their sense of security. To maintain their relationship with both parents, and other significant people in their lives, if it is safe for them to do so. To support children who are moving between parents, sometimes over long distances. Assisting children who are wanting to please both parents, but are struggling to do so. To help children thrive after their parents have separated. What sort of agreements are reached in Child Related Family Dispute Resolution? The process of Family Dispute Resolution allows parties the time to carefully discuss their children in a safe environment. Parties may reach agreements that specify who the child lives with and who the child spends time with, ensuring that the child can have a meaningful relationship with both parties if it is safe for them to do so. Agreements might cover where the children attend school; for the primary school years and high school. There may be a discussion of extra- curricular activities; choosing which activities, the timing of them, transporting the children to and from them, and how to share the regular costs they involve. Sometimes separated parents are trying to get back on the same page where a child is being bullied. Sometimes a child is displaying challenging behaviours themselves. Sometimes one parent may want to home school and the other would like private school education for their children. There are discussions about night terrors and how the child can be soothed. Sometimes one parent would like private school education for their children and would like the other parent to share the fees, where that parent does not feel that they are able to contribute. Sometimes one parent is happy to have the child catch a bus home and be unsupervised for two hours until they get home. Sometimes the other parent worries about teenage pregnancy. There are discussions about piercings, haircuts, appropriate clothing. Sometimes one parent feels that the child returns from time with the other parent with a bag of dirty clothes, a head full of nits and a bad attitude. Minus their school shoes. Sometimes one parent wants to move interstate, against the wishes of the other parent. There are discussions about mobile phone usage, device usage, access to social media. Sometimes one parent feels it is safe to take the children to Bali, but the other parent thinks it is too risky. Sometimes one parent feels their child needs medication for ADHD and the other parent does not agree. There are discussions where one parent downplays the importance of another parent’s religion or culture to the child, and sabotages that child’s own experience of the religion or culture. Sometimes one parent schedules activities for the child in the other parent’s time with the child. Sometimes one parent discusses Family Law matters with the child and the other parent wishes they wouldn’t. Sometimes one parent re-partners and the other parent wants to discuss the new partner’s role in the child’s life. There are discussions about how to support children who have experienced trauma from past family violence. Sometimes one parent wants to discuss the other parent’s use of crystal methamphetamine and express their concerns about the child being exposed to any person who is under the influence of drugs. Sometimes one parent lives 5 hours away from the other parent and there are discussions that need to be had about the impact of the distance on the children and the parents. Sometimes separated parents want to discuss the role of grandparents, close family members and other significant people.

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USCHO.com Fan Forum | fanforum.uscho.com > College Hockey > Men's Division I View Full Version : Men's Division I Pages : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 [106] 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 Michigan Tech Offseason I - New teams, new scoreboard, new goals... bring it on! WCHA Final Five: Minnesota State Mavericks vs Wisconsin Badgers 2 PM @ The X SCSU: Now that we have a MacNaughton can we have a Season Thread? Union Hockey 2012-2013 Part II - See U in AC, But Ultimate Goal Still Lies Ahead Wolverines vs Redhawks The awaited return of one barry the mullet melrose 2013.. the NEW WCHA 2013-14 WCHA Final Five matchup CC vs UND 7pm WCHA Final Five Pick'Em Round #2 HEA Awards Predictions The Ultimate CCHA Championship: Miami, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Michigan Humor or stupor? Achieving a fundamental base line Bemidji State: Fire Tom Serratorre! UW vs. SCSU: Final Five Semifinal: Buck 'Em if they Can't Take a Joke WCHA Final Five: Minnesota vs Colorado College WCHA Final Five Pick'Em Final Round! RPI Off-Season 2013 Part I: We Will Get Our Title Next Season WISCO Vs CC An NCAA tourney spot awaits... Hockey East Championship Game: UML and BU PC Hockey - Construction Continues Hostile and Abusive Maine Summer 2013 - Pizza Season Pairwise Bracketology Part Deux: Playing with RHamilton's Tool Pairwise and Bracketology 2013 Edition Congrats Lowell! Brown Hockey 2012-2013 : Climbing the ECAC Ladder, Part II An appreciation of CCHA commissioner Fred Pletsch so 15 in/plus one more

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