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Friday, May 24, 2013
12:22 pm, Tuesday, September 18, 2012 -- How can it be that the Beatles' "Love Me Do" is 50 years old? But that's no surprise to singer Mark Benson of "1964: The Tribute," who plays the role of the young John Lennon in the acclaimed Beatles act. As the Beatles continue to defy the rules of what once considered disposable pop music,...
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© 2013 Hearst Communications Inc. | {
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Every person dreams of having a beautiful smile and healthy teeth. A beautiful smile is a proof of your health and sometimes your welfare. If you have any problems with your bite or teeth it is recommended to begin treating or perform prevention from early childhood in order to avoid the problems in the future.
Improperly aligned teeth and bite cause different problems with chewing food, with the gastrointestinal tract, with breathing, and many other problems. That is why it is very important to straighten teeth and to fix bite as soon as possible. But unfortunately, a great number of people in the world suffer from these problems.
An uneven bite and crooked teeth are the results of hereditary and genetic anomaly, as well are connected with problems with maturation, pernicious habits in childhood. Sometimes teeth may be too big for a jaw and begin to grow in a wrong way. Crooked teeth may lead to appearing some diseases: headaches, diseases of ears, throat, nose, stomach and many more. People with crooked teeth usually do not have clear diction. Moreover, such teeth can be easier destroyed because pieces of food stuck between them promote the development of caries. Crooked teeth make your smile not attractive, while the smile is important for communication and success.
If recognized and treated in early childhood it is much easier to improve the situation and to prevent the improper bite and crooked teeth with the help of some exercises, gymnastics and to normalize nutrition and breath, in other words to eliminate the disorders without expensive treatment and special devices. But adults who wish to solve these problems should use a special therapy and proper combination of treatment. Many of them apply for bracets usage.
Bracets are a line of little locks that are attached to the teeth with the help of special orthodontic glue and are fastened by a stainless steel wire that puts pressure upon the teeth and straighten them. There are different types of bracets according to the material they are made of and the way of fastening on the teeth. Sometimes bracets usage can be at the outer side of the teeth, but many patients prefer the bracets to be invisible for other people and they have them fastened at the inner, lingual side of the teeth. Such bracets are called lingual bracets.
Bracets usage has become very popular last decades, especially between young people. New technologies allow producing bracets from different materials: stainless steel, plastic, sapphire, gold, and ceramics. In the United States more than 50% of pupils and students wear bracets. Patients can select the material for their choice, they can order any color of wires. If a patient needs the bracets usage, his age is not important. Usually the period of treating may consist from six months to several years, according to the level of the deformation.
It is very easy to take the bracets off. This process is painless. After removing the surface of the teeth should be polished and remineralizating therapy takes place to achieve better results.
Thus the bracets usage is easy and wide spread in the world. Many stomatologic clinics and centers may offer their services to those who need this kind of treatment. | {
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… And God Created Gisele
Bounding down the stairs of her Greenwich Village town house to greet a visitor, Gisele Bündchen commands the shock value of a close encounter with a giraffe: you can hardly believe an earthly creature is built this way.
Everything about her is so elongated and slender—those impossibly attenuated limbs! the swanlike neck!—that she seems almost preposterous, like a cartoon figure. Nearly six feet tall by the age of 13, she spent her childhood being teased by classmates who called her Olive Oyl.
But Popeye’s rail-thin girlfriend never tantalized anyone with the luscious curves that catapulted Gisele to stardom in her late teens, replacing the pale, wasted “heroin chic” of that era with “the return of the sexy model.” Since then, the tanned, athletic Brazilian beach babe who seemed born to wear a bikini has become the world’s most successful supermodel, amassing a fortune estimated at $150 million; last year alone, according to Forbes, Gisele earned $35 million. The 16th-richest woman in the entertainment industry, she has been featured on more magazine covers than any other model and has appeared as the face of more than 20 brands internationally, with current contracts including Dior, Versace, Max Factor, Ebel watches, and the Dolce & Gabbana fragrance The One.
At 28, Gisele has already spent 14 years in front of the cameras, not to mention in the gossip columns—and now she’s begun a whole new chapter of her life. On February 26, seven days after our cover was shot, she married New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady in a private twilight ceremony at a Catholic church in Santa Monica that was followed by a small gathering at the couple’s home in Brentwood.
Although the union had the iconic inevitability of typecasting, all-American-style—“the jock marries the prom queen,” as one Web site put it—the news surprised even their friends. Earlier the same week, Gisele had been partying at Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, where she made an appearance for Pantene hair-care products that was widely photographed—and then she suddenly turned up married in Los Angeles. But Gisele, who once described her ideal wedding as “a simple ceremony,” always knew she didn’t want an enormous extravaganza. “I don’t like parties. I prefer something more intimate, just for the closest people.”
Which was precisely what she got. Crestfallen, the paparazzi press had to settle for an after-the-fact description of Gisele’s attire: “The bride, 28, donned a form-fitting ivory lace strapless gown with a trumpet skirt, scalloped edges, long train and a floor-length veil with attached handmade satin roses and attached satin headband, all by Dolce & Gabbana. Her three dogs also wore matching Dolce & Gabbana floral lace collars,” Us Weekly reported.
To Gisele, getting married was merely a formality. “I already feel that way,” she told me a few days before the wedding. “We’ve been together over two years; we’ve been living together. My idea of that is you have a partner who’s got your back. When I’m weak, you can be strong; when I’m strong, you can be weak. That’s what I believe marriage is. Loving someone, you want to grow with them, share with them, share the same values, the same feelings about things, the same beliefs.”
And Gisele—who was raised in a large Catholic family by parents who have been married for 37 years—is convinced she has found her soulmate in Brady. “He’s very close to his family,” she said. “He’s Catholic. His parents have been married 40 years. He’s got a pure heart. That’s all that matters—he’s got the purest heart. I feel grateful because I have a lot of love in my life. I found the person I’m sharing my life with. I have a good man.”
In the months leading up to the wedding, the tabloids buzzed excitedly with rumors of impending nuptials, claiming that Brady had proposed on a private jet on Christmas Eve or that he had gotten down on one knee with a diamond solitaire in mid-January—neither of which was true, according to Gisele, who says they were secretly engaged for considerably longer but she avoided wearing her ring in public because she didn’t want to draw any more attention to herself. The fact that their stealth wedding remained dignified and discreet, and that the news didn’t leak until after it was over, represented a noteworthy victory over the celebrity media that have remained obsessed with Gisele’s every move since she became Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend nine years ago.
Heightened by the raging “Leo-mania” that followed Titanic’s popularity as the highest-grossing film of all time, the irresistible pairing of gorgeous supermodel and heartthrob superstar kept the gossip columns in overdrive throughout their five-year relationship, which was fraught with dramas that included an eight-month breakup, a reconciliation, and recurring reports of Gisele’s exasperation at Leo’s womanizing ways.
Even the end of their romance, in 2005, failed to stem the flow of slavering updates: Leo still can’t believe Gisele dumped him because he refused to make a commitment! Leo drunk-dials Gisele just to hear her voice! Leo wants his current girlfriend, Israeli model Bar Refaeli, on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue—just to irritate Gisele!
But Gisele herself had moved on. At the end of 2006, she fell in love with Tom Brady—an event she describes as practically instantaneous. “I knew right way—the first time I saw him,” she says. “We met through a friend. The moment I saw him, he smiled and I was like, That is the most beautiful, charismatic smile I’ve ever seen! We sat and talked for three hours. I had to go home for Christmas, but I didn’t want to leave. You know that feeling of, like, you can’t get enough? From the first day we met, we’ve never spent one day without speaking to each other.”
Until then, Gisele was happy to be on her own. “I’d been single for a year, and I wasn’t looking for a relationship,” she says. “I’d always been in serious relationships, but you learn a lot about yourself when you’re by yourself, and I was enjoying that process. But you don’t choose.”
Not when it comes to a coup de foudre, anyway. Does she believe in love at first sight? “I believe in feeling connected. Love is something that grows, that comes from nourishment; it builds. But there is a great feeling that happens, that is telling you, I don’t want to leave this room! Whatever that’s called, that’s what happened.”
Their initial bliss was soon dispelled by an unwelcome development. Brady had recently broken up with his girlfriend of the previous three years, Bridget Moynahan, a model and an actress. Soon after he got involved with Gisele, Moynahan announced that she was pregnant with Brady’s child and would have the baby on her own.
“It was definitely a surprise for both of us,” Gisele acknowledges with a rueful smile. “In the beginning you’re living this romantic fantasy; you’re thinking, This can’t be true, it’s so good! And then, Whoops—wake-up call!” She rolls her eyes. “We were dating two and a half months when he found out, and it was a very challenging situation. Obviously, in the beginning, it’s not the ideal thing.”
Moynahan’s pregnancy made Gisele wonder whether she should encourage Brady to re-unite with his former girlfriend. “You question at times—‘Should I stay here? Maybe you should work this out,’” she admits. “But when people break up, it’s for a reason.”
In retrospect, she believes that dealing with the challenge only strengthened her commitment to Brady. “I think it was a blessing, because otherwise I don’t think I would have known what he was made of, and he wouldn’t have known what I was made of,” she says. “I wouldn’t have seen the integrity in him—the way he was a good person through all the times. I was like, You have the heart in a good place! It made me feel more in love with him; it made me realize who he was. Our relationship has become so much stronger, and I think I wouldn’t be as certain as I am today if it weren’t for that.”
After John Edward Thomas Moynahan was born, in August 2007, Brady and Gisele began shuttling between Boston, where Brady’s football team is based, and Los Angeles, where Moynahan lives. “When we are in L.A. we have Johnny 50 percent of the time,” Gisele says. “He’s a little angel—the sweetest, most cuddly, loving baby. I feel blessed to have him in my life.”
Last year she and Brady purchased an $11.7 million plot of land in a gated community in Brentwood. Despite their commitment to spending time with John, however, Gisele has never met his mother. “I understand that he has a mom, and I respect that, but to me it’s not like because somebody else delivered him, that’s not my child. I feel it is, 100 percent,” Gisele says. “I want him to have a great relationship with his mom, because that’s important, but I love him the same way as if he were mine. I already feel like he’s my son, from the first day.”
One of six sisters, Gisele is also eager to have her own children. “I would like a big family,” she says. “I love children. When you come from a big family, you see that growing up you’re learning how to share. Your sisters have got your back; you’re not alone in this—‘We all support you!’ Your family provides that; it gives you a sense of safety, and it’s a very grounding feeling. That’s why I feel I can fly away, because I have those roots and they’re so deep. This is what I want to have in my life. This is why you get married—you want to create those roots together; you want to give that to your kids. I would also love to adopt a child from Brazil. When you come from São Paulo, you see five-year-olds sniffing glue on the corner. You think, If you make a difference in the life of one of them, that makes your time on this earth worthwhile. I will have a colorful family, like a rainbow. I have dogs from rescue; they are all my dogs. Children are like little angels—there’s no way you can’t love them.”
Recounting all this, Gisele has been talking in her usual mile-a-minute torrent of words, which is virtually unstoppable and exuberantly high-spirited. Whether she is telling the story of her life for hours on end or working from eight a.m. until dark at a photo shoot, her energy doesn’t flag. “I never get physically tired,” she tells me the next day in the ninth hour of a shoot that has her posing outdoors in 40-degree weather wearing only a Dior corset. (“If it’s not torture, it’s not fashion,” she mutters with a mischievous grin.) After every interruption, her running commentary instantly starts up again as if someone has simply flipped the “on” switch.
Some interviewers have made sport of Gisele’s accent, which “can best be described as Continental,” one wrote. “She seems to have learned English from Italian designers, German hairstylists, and French makeup artists. Her enunciation is equal parts Donatella, Hans and Franz, and Maurice Chevalier.” That reporter didn’t mention how many languages he himself has mastered, but Gisele speaks fluent English, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish in addition to some German and some French—no small achievement for a girl from the backcountry of Brazil who left school at 14.
No matter which language she’s burbling along in, she is warm, friendly, humorous, and gaily self-deprecating. Right now we’re sitting at the dining table on the ground floor of her town house, where she is nibbling delicately at lamb chops and vegetables ordered from a nearby restaurant. Quivering with anticipation, her Yorkshire terrier sits slavishly at her feet.
“Vida, Vida, Vida,” Gisele croons. “‘Vida’ means life; she’s the golden girl—that’s why I call her Golden. She loves the bone. She deserves a little bone!” Cooing, Gisele hands a lamb chop to Vida, who snatches it and runs. “Vida, let’s make a deal: I’ll give you a bone every day—you live forever!”
Gisele has already paid her own respects to the lamb chops by putting her hand over them and saying a silent prayer. “I eat a lot of meat, and I bless my food before it enters my body, because I need to be aware of what I’m eating,” she explains. “You bless it first and say, ‘Thank you for giving your life.’ This animal has given its life for me. You’ve got to be grateful; you’ve got to be conscious. You can’t just take it for granted. How many people in the world have no food? I think it’s important to acknowledge that.”
An avid reader, Gisele has been deeply influenced by Buddhism. (Her current view of the church she grew up in: “O.K., Catholic religion, we’ve got to update!”) These days she tries hard to practice the concept of mindfulness, which—when combined with her characteristically sunny, upbeat outlook—seems to produce an ebullience so consistent that somebody should bottle it and sell it. Her positive mental attitude proved a considerable asset after Brady learned that his ex-girlfriend was having his child.
“We are saying, ‘What can we learn from this? How can we make the best out of this?’” Gisele says. “We both grew a lot. There is good in everything; it’s just how you choose to look at it. Everything that’s worth it has a price. For me to be a model—I had to leave my family. Do you think I liked that? No! There are sacrifices. Life is meant to be a challenge, because challenges are what make you grow. How boring it would be if we knew what was going to happen tomorrow!” She beams. “Life always surprises me—in a very good way.”
“She is the most positive and energetic person I have ever met,” says Brady. “She always looks at challenges as her greatest opportunities.”
For Gisele, the surprises began when she was “discovered” by a modeling scout at the age of 14. She grew up in Horizontina, a small town in southern Brazil where “there were no buses, no subway—there’s not even a traffic light in my village,” she says. The local population is dominated by Brazilians of German descent, and Gisele’s ancestry is German on both sides of her family. She and her fraternal twin, Patricia, were the middle daughters among six girls, all of whom are good-looking. In the youthful photograph that occupies a place of honor on the big desk that dominates Gisele’s living room, her father is handsome and her mother is strikingly beautiful.
The family’s circumstances were modest. “I grew up in a house with two bedrooms and two bathrooms, for eight people,” Gisele says. “We weren’t considered poor; we were considered middle-class. My mother was a cashier in a bank for 35 years. My father had many jobs: he was in construction, then he did something with packaging milk, then he worked for Amway; he gave courses about self-awareness. He was away a lot. My mother was, like, the one who was more concerned about how to bring home the bacon; she worked and devoted herself to us. She is my hero. She did everything. She was a really great mother; she was always teaching us, helping us, talking to us. My father was more the philosophical person; my mother was the realist.”
Gisele’s childhood world revolved around her sisters, but she stood out even then. “I was extremely hyper when I was a kid, like bouncing off the walls,” she says. “I think that if I was in America they’d probably give me medication.”
Her twin describes her as bold and fearless. “Unlike me, Gisele was very talkative, and she wasn’t afraid to be away from home for some time even when she was little,” says Patricia. “She was very brave, and she was always trying to protect her sisters—something like ‘Don’t mess with my sisters or you’ll have to deal with me!’”
The girls participated in every activity available in their small town. “We did ballet, gymnastics—I think my mom was trying to keep us busy,” Gisele says. “She had to work, so we went to a modeling course—me and my twin and one of our sisters, Gabby, who’s like the second twin because we’re one year apart. We were the Three Musketeers, and we did everything together.”
The modeling course culminated in an excursion to a São Paulo amusement park. “We had to drive 29 hours to go there,” Gisele says. “I couldn’t be more excited! I was eating at a food court in the shopping mall, and this guy from Elite came and said, ‘You should be a model.’ It was the first time in my life that someone thought I looked pretty.”
Until then, Gisele regarded her appearance as an affliction rather than an asset. “I was tall and really thin; the kids in school called me Olive Oyl and Saracura, which is a bird with really skinny long legs,” she reports. “I was taller than every guy in my class. Especially at that age, you think you’re the weirdest thing that ever walked on earth.”
Despite knife-blade cheekbones, wide-set navy-blue eyes, a dazzling smile, and that mane of honey-colored hair, Gisele didn’t consider herself to be beautiful, and she thought her nose was too big. Every one of her sisters was many inches shorter, and all of Gisele’s clothes were hand-me-downs. “I had to wear my sister’s jeans; they were, like, to here on me,” she says, pointing to her knee. “I wasn’t so popular; my twin sister was definitely more popular than I was. She has a great personality—everyone liked her. But I was an A student, and the way I got friends was I used to give help to somebody else. And I’ve always been very athletic; I was captain of the volleyball team. I was such a tomboy. The ‘in’ people weren’t so much into me, but I didn’t care. My sisters were my best friends, always. It was a great life, and obviously it made me know who I am. If I were told I could come back as anything, I would have chosen the same life, the same family, the same experiences, the same friends.”
But her time in that safe, protected world was about to end, and when Gisele returned alone to São Paulo for a modeling contest, her introduction to big-city life was a shock. “The first time I traveled by myself, it was to a city of 22 million people. My father gave me $50, and I was supposed to get a cab to go to the models’ apartment—but I said, I’ll take the subway,” she recalls. “I was thinking about saving some of the money to buy some clothes, because everything I was wearing was my sister’s. I thought I was being very smart. So I get to the station, I went to open my backpack, and my wallet was gone. I had no idea somebody would rob me! In my city, nobody ever robbed anybody; it was all a big happy family. So I was crying. How am I going to get from here to where I am going? I’m asking people for money so I can go in a pay phone and call my father. He’s like, ‘Why didn’t you take the cab? You should listen to your father!’ I walked like 30 minutes and finally got there.” She sighs. “There was a lot of those times, but I learned pretty fast. I never was fearful. I think my parents did a good job; we were very independent kids, because my parents were always working. I was in the worst places and never felt afraid. I always felt like everything was going to be O.K.—and it was.”
Learning how to model was another challenge. “In the beginning I had no idea what I was doing,” Gisele admits. “I had no idea what modeling was. I didn’t know it’s about becoming something—embodying something. It’s not you. I didn’t understand that. I was like this!” She bares her teeth in a horrible rigor-mortis grin. “I wasn’t aware of my body. All my life I felt awkward about myself.” But the idea that somebody had found her attractive was intoxicating. “Out of those 50 girls, that guy thought I was pretty,” she recalls, a dreamy look softening her face. “People weren’t calling me Olive Oyl. It was a different standard of beauty.”
And yet, even as a novice, Gisele had a sturdy sense of her own self-worth that helped her keep the rigors of modeling in perspective. “Some people were like, ‘She’s never going to make it!’ But not everybody has to like me,” she says. “Some people like watermelon; some people like pineapple. It doesn’t mean that watermelon is better. People have different tastes.” She shrugs.
“Her willpower made her successful,” says Patricia. “She has never let the critics put her down, and this has never changed. She has the most amazing body, but what has really made her successful is her personality, her way of doing things, her professionalism.”
As an athlete, Brady says he admires Gisele for “being a ferocious businesswoman who is ultra-competitive and intent on being the best at what she does.”
As the demand for Gisele’s services grew, she felt compelled to accept every job that was offered. “I was just going 100 miles an hour,” she says. “You don’t want to say no, because you don’t know how long it’s going to last, and you have to prove yourself.”
But the frenetic pace finally caught up with her. “When I was working every day I was completely detached from my emotions, and I didn’t know the toll it was taking on me,” she says. “I was traveling everywhere, not having stability. I was very abusive of myself. I wouldn’t sleep; I was eating junk food every day and working 10 to 12 hours. No wonder! How much can your body take? I felt overwhelmed by the whole thing. I went through a time when I was very sensitive and felt very fragile. I would cry, but you don’t know where it’s coming from. When I was 22 I hit a point where I thought, I miss my mom. I want to go home! I want to take six months off. I want my support system; I want that grounding thing my family gives me. I wanted to bond with them. I felt like, ‘I’m part of this family—take me back, please!’”
The sabbatical was just what she needed: “It was great. I took my parents to Africa. I felt nourished and loved again, so I could come back and start all over again. But I was humbled by the whole thing.”
When Gisele returned to work, she stopped smoking and started taking better care of herself. Exercise was never a problem; ever since childhood, she has displayed an alarming appetite for extreme sports. “If somebody had something broken, it was me,” she admits. “I did skydiving, bungee-jumping, kayaking, surfing, jumping horses—my horse was 18 hands and it stepped on my foot and I couldn’t walk. Everything I’ve ever been afraid of, I’ve tried to overcome. I was always on planes, and I always used to be apprehensive, so I thought, I’ve got to find a way to not be afraid. So I started jumping out of planes.”
Her determination is particularly apparent in kung fu, a discipline she has taken up with a vengeance since moving to Boston. “She wants it every day; we actually trained Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day. There’s no day off,” says Yao Li, her teacher at the Boston Kung Fu Tai Chi Institute. “I think part of her has a macho spirit. Tom teases her: he’s a fan of Bruce Lee movies, and he calls her Gise-Lee.”
Athletic and down to earth, Gisele—who wears as little makeup as possible and spends her off-hours in jeans and T-shirts—is very different in daily life from the glamorous persona she creates for the camera. “When I go to work, I do pretend,” she explains. “I call it ‘Her.’ Like, ‘I think She needs to be a little bit more like this.’” She tilts her head, sucks in her cheeks, and pantomimes an exaggerated attitude. “It’s almost like some on-and-off button. I don’t see myself as Her. My perception of myself is very different from the perception people have of me.”
Despite all her years at the top, co-workers say, she retains a healthy understanding of the difference between real life and the hype of the job. “When this all ends, she’ll be fine,” says a makeup artist who has worked with Gisele since she was a teenager.
Gisele-watchers who pore over red-carpet photographs often assume she has a fabulous lifestyle crammed with parties and A-list events. “Are you kidding? I like to be in bed by 10:30,” she exclaims. “I’m up at 6:30, doing yoga at 7 a.m. I went to a gallery for my friend’s exhibition last night, because he was my friend and asked me to come. It was a scene, and I was just like, No! No! I have to go! On the way home I walked into this place where they have the best burger in the world, and I was just thinking to myself, Oh my god, I am so lucky to have my life! I’m having a great time here! I just came back from this place where it’s about appearance and who’s wearing this and who’s talking to that, where I felt suffocated, and I’m so happy that’s not my life!”
Not that she hasn’t enjoyed her success and its rewards—she is as excited as a little girl as she shows me photographs of the remodeling job she gave her parents to spruce up their home. The business of being Gisele has also enabled her to employ four of her five sisters. For her work in Brazil, Patricia is her manager, Gabriela is her lawyer, and Raquel does accounting. Rafaela works on Gisele’s Web site. The other sister, Graziela, is a judge.
But Gisele takes even more satisfaction in having earned such success without compromising herself. “I’m really happy with the way I’ve lived my life,” she says. “I’m an honorable person. I’m proud of the way I’ve done things. I’ve never in my life acted in any way that wasn’t of the highest integrity that I was raised with. I’m the same person—with different life experience, but the things that make me happy are the same things. Having barbecue with my family, hanging out with my friends, being with animals, riding bikes—that’s what made me happy all my life. I feel really good about that. I want to finish this life and say, ‘I did the best I could. I lived my values. I kept my integrity.’”
Gisele’s values have also been shaped by her reading, which ranges from the teachings of Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh to her current favorites, Don Miguel Ruiz’s books of Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements, The Mastery of Love, and The Voice of Knowledge. Such works have helped to give her a newfound sense of inner peace. “Everything became so much simpler,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Oh—now I get it!’ You have this kind of epiphany—I don’t need to sweat the small stuff! Enjoy the journey, not the destination. I want to be happy every day. I want to live life to the fullest, feeling joyful. If I don’t, I’ve got to stop and question why, because I think our natural state should be that. Reading things is so important to me—things that can open up your mind. You need to feed your mind.”
She has even achieved a beatific attitude toward DiCaprio, about whom she has nothing bad to say. “Leo is a really wonderful person,” she says. “We still speak sometimes, and I’m friends with his mom. He still has one of my dogs. He’s done a lot for the environment, and I admire what he’s done. We know what we had; we were very young, and we grew together in a lot of ways. We were just not meant to be boyfriend and girlfriend, but I respect him enormously, and I wish him nothing but the best.”
Environmental causes remain among Gisele’s top priorities. According to her manager, Anne Nelson at IMG, she donates a portion of the profits from her Brazilian line of flip-flops, Ipanema Gisele Bündchen, to protect Amazon rain-forest water sources through Y Ikatu Xingu (Save the Good Waters of the Xingu River), as well as supporting several other Brazilian programs to protect waterways and restore deforested areas. The Bündchen family has started Projeto Agua Limpa (Project Clean Water) to reforest the land and improve water quality along riverbanks in the region where Gisele was born.
She has also created the Luz Foundation, a project to empower girls and help them deal with self-esteem issues. Last summer Gisele and her yoga teacher, Amy Lombardo, did some volunteer work with Portuguese-speaking teenagers in the Boston suburbs. “She’s always trying to find ways to use her celebrity to good cause, and we talked to them about media images and the effects on young girls,” Lombardo explains. “Gisele is a natural yogi; she’s constantly trying to find new ways to learn, and she has a genuine desire to better herself as a person. Yoga provides her with a way to be who she is, not the image in the media. I think she’s going to be a role model for young women. She’s very passionate about the idea of helping people have access to raising their own level of awareness. We’ve only begun to see what she’s capable of.”
Gisele “has her heart set on making the world a better place,” says Brady.
As her ambitions evolve, Gisele is scaling back her modeling work. “I have a lot of things to juggle. I have a family that comes first; my job already comes second,” she says. “But everything I’ll do in the future has to be something that’s related to higher consciousness. I don’t think I’ll be happy unless I do this. It’s all about using what you’ve got, and what I’ve got is a voice.”
And she wants to use that voice to counterbalance the inadvertent messages that are inevitably communicated by her extraordinary face and figure. “This is just a shell”—Gisele gestures dismissively at her formidable body—“and the shell is going to be changing. You’re going to be 30; you’re going to be 50. That’s why I think it’s important to focus on what matters. Everyone has talents—you’ve just got to find them—and everyone has flaws. Wishing to be something you’re not is the biggest recipe for a sad life. All of us are special. Embrace all that you are! Treat yourself as the special being you are!”
And if you do, she believes, you can accomplish anything. After all, it worked for her. She flashes a radiant smile. “All you have to have is a dream, and then you make it happen,” she says. | {
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content supplied by
Did you know that women are three times more likely to die of heart disease than breast cancer?
In the years following the menopause, your risk of getting heart disease rises significantly. But you can take simple steps to protect yourself.
If your blood pressure or cholesterol level is higher than it should be, this increases your risk of heart disease. Your GP can suggest lifestyle changes or, if necessary, prescribe medication to reduce your blood pressure or cholesterol.
Read more about the NHS health check for over-40s.
2. Stop smoking
You’re twice as likely to have a heart attack if you smoke. Over the past few decades, men have increasingly quit smoking but women haven’t been stopping smoking as much. In fact, more young women now smoke than young men. Stopping smoking will lessen your chances of developing heart disease.
Find out how the NHS can help you stop smoking.
3. Get moving
Only about one woman in four in England does enough physical activity to protect her heart. Try to do more exercise, including regular aerobic exercise such as walking and swimming. To protect your heart, you need to do at least 150 minutes (2 hours and 30 minutes) of moderate-intensity aerobic activity (such as cycling or fast walking) every week.
Read more about how to get fit.
4. Lose weight if you need to
About six in every ten women in England are either overweight or obese. Carrying excess weight puts a strain on your heart, and you’re more likely to have high blood pressure and high cholesterol, which also increase the risk of heart disease.
Read more about how to lose weight.
5. Change shape
Your shape matters as well as your weight. Like many women in the 40-60 age group, you may be apple shaped, where excess weight settles around your waist. Being apple shaped puts you at higher risk of heart disease than being pear shaped, where excess weight is concentrated on the hips. Aim for a waistline of less than 80cm (31.5 inches).
Read more about why your body shape matters.
6. Drink wisely
Drinking a little alcohol regularly may be good for your heart, but make sure you stay within the recommended limits. Drinking more will increase your risk of heart problems. Heart healthy drinking for women is one or two units of alcohol a day. If you drink more than this, you’ll increase your risk of heart disease. Too much alcohol, or binge-drinking, can damage the heart muscle leading to abnormal heart rhythms or heart failure.
Read more about alcohol units and how to cut down your drinking.
7. Balance your diet
Eat healthily and be especially careful not to eat more salt than is recommended (no more than 6g a day) and to cut down on the amount of saturated fat you eat.
8. Don’t rely on hormones
Doctors used to think that using hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopausal symptoms also protected women against heart disease. Research now suggests that HRT isn’t heart protective and, as with all drug treatments, there are side effects. Take HRT if you need it to relieve menopausal hot flushes and night sweats, but don’t expect it to help your heart.
Read more about HRT.
9. Manage your stress
Some studies have suggested that stress can contribute to heart disease. If you feel under a lot of stress, it's important to learn how to relax. There are some simple techniques you can learn to help you cope with stress. If you feel so stressed and anxious that it's affecting your daily life, your GP can help you deal with it.
Read more about how to manage stress.
© Copyright 2001-2010 Newsquest Media Group | {
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2012-13 North Georgia Men's Tennis News
April 12, 2013
Friedrich and Guida Earn North Georgia's First-Ever All-PBC Recognitions
FLORENCE, S.C. – The Peach Belt Conference released the 2013 men's tennis All-Conference teams Thursday night during a banquet on the eve of the league tournament which will be contested in Florence, S.C. this weekend. University of North Georgia senior Felipe Friedrich became the first North Georgia tennis athlete to ever be named to the first team as a singles player while doubles partner Matheus Guida joined him as the Saints' first-ever second team selection.
April 10, 2013
Women's Tennis Wraps up Season with 6-3 Victory Over Newberry, 32nd-Ranked Men Fall 5-4
NEWBERRY, S.C. - The University of North Georgia tennis teams wrapped up the 2013 regular-season on the road at Newberry College. The women finished their season strong with their third win in a row, a 6-3 victory over the Wolves, while the men dropped a heartbreaker 4-5.
April 9, 2013
Women Conquer USC Aiken 5-2, #32 Men Fall 2-5 to 30th-Ranked Pacers
DAHLONEGA, Ga. - The University of North Georgia tennis teams split their matches with the University of South Carolina Aiken as the Saint women claimed their final Peach Belt Conference match of the season 5-2 over the Pacers. The 30th-ranked Pacer men defeated the 32nd-ranked Saint men by a similar 5-2 score at the USC Aiken Tennis Complex.
April 3, 2013
Tennis Squads Sweep Carson-Newman with Matching 8-1 Victories
WOODSTOCK, Ga. ââ¬â The University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis squads claimed identical 8-1 victories over Carson-Newman College Wednesday afternoon at the Eagle Watch Neighborhood in Woodstock, Ga in a neutral location match.
April 2, 2013
#32 Men's Tennis Claims 7-2 Win Over #26 Young Harris, Women Fall 7-2 to #34 Mountain Lions
DAHLONEGA, Ga. – The 32nd-ranked University of North Georgia men's tennis team captured a 7-2 Peach Belt Conference victory over the 26th-ranked Mountain Lions of Young Harris College Tuesday afternoon. The 34th-ranked Young Harris women defeated the Saint women by an identical 7-2 score at the North Georgia Tennis Complex.
March 29, 2013
Women's Tennis Earns 5-4 Win Over Lander, #32 Men Fall 2-7 to #7 Bearcat Men
DAHLONEGA, Ga. – The University of North Georgia women's tennis team did something Friday afternoon that they have never done before: beat Lander University. The Saint women claimed a 5-4 victory over the Bearcat women at the North Georgia Tennis Complex while the 32nd-ranked men's team fell 7-2 to the No. 7 Lander men.
March 28, 2013
Friedrich Moves up to 31st in Country, Men's Tennis Slips to 32nd
SKILLMAN, N.J. – University of North Georgia senior men's tennis player Felipe Friedrich moved up into the national rankings as a singles player in the Intercollegiate Tennis Association's (ITA) first individual rankings of the year.
March 26, 2013
Tennis Matches with Newberry and Lenoir-Rhyne Cancelled
DAHLONEGA, Ga. – For the second time this season, the University of North Georgia tennis teams' matches against Newberry College have been cancelled while Saturday's home match against Lenoir-Rhyne University has also been cancelled.
March 21, 2013
Men's Tennis Checks in at 10th in First Region Rankings of Regular-Season
SKILLMAN, N.J. – The University of North Georgia men's tennis team, ranked 30th-nationally, fell to 10th in the first Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) Southeast Region rankings of the regular-season released Wednesday. But the Saints (7-6, 1-6 PBC) also saw some improvements individually.
March 20, 2013
Women's Tennis Earns 8-1 Win Over North Greenville, Men Win 7-2
TIGERVILLE, S.C. – The University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis teams each collected a win Wednesday afternoon, the third in a row for both programs, as the Saints swept the Crusaders of North Greenville University in non-conference action.
March 19, 2013
Saint Men and Women Defeat Belmont Abbey 8-1 in Tennis
BELMONT, N.C. – The University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis teams each continued their non-conference Spring Break road trip with wins over Belmont Abbey College. The No. 30 Saint men earned an 8-1 win over the Crusaders while North Georgia's women stepped up to claim an 8-1 victory.
March 18, 2013
Tennis Matches at Belmont Abbey Rescheduled
BELMONT, N.C. – The University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis matches at Belmont Abbey College that were originally scheduled for today, Monday, Mar. 18 have been moved back to Tuesday, Mar. 19 at 2:00 p.m. due to the threat of inclement weather.
March 17, 2013
North Georgia Men and Women Claim 9-0 Wins Over Lees McRae
SALISBURY, N.C. – The University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis teams each stepped out of their Peach Belt Conference schedule Sunday with a dual match against Lees McRae College in Salisbury, N.C., a neutral location for both schools. The 30th-ranked Saint men earned a 9-0 victory over the Bobcats with the women earning a similar 9-0 victory.
March 15, 2013
Georgia College Deals Saint Men and Women 7-2 Losses
DAHLONEGA, Ga. – Friday afternoon, the University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis teams dropped a pair of Peach Belt Conference matches to Georgia College, ranked 18th-nationally in both men's and women's tennis. The Bobcats claimed matching 7-2 decisions at the North Georgia Tennis Complex.
March 15, 2013
North Georgia Student-Athletes Share Love of Sports with Elementary School Students
GAINESVILLE, Ga. – For many great athletes, their passion for sports started in with someone who had succeeded at a particular sport sharing their love of the game. Perhaps that will be the case at Sardis Enrichment School following a pair of visits by several University of North Georgia student-athletes.
March 13, 2013
Men's and Women's Tennis Claims Matching 7-2 Victories Over Georgia Southwestern
AMERICUS, Ga. – The University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis teams both went on the road Wednesday afternoon and claimed matching 7-2 wins over Georgia Southwestern State University in Peach Belt Conference action.
March 9, 2013
Augusta State Defeats North Georgia 7-2 in Men's Tennis, 8-1 in Women's
DAHLONEGA, Ga. – The University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis teams continued their Peach Belt Conference schedule Saturday as the Saints hosted Augusta State University at the North Georgia Tennis Complex. The Jaguar men, ranked ninth in the nation by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) and fourth in the Southeast Region, defeated the Saint men 7-2 while the No. 46 ASU women, ninth in the region, defeated North Georgia's women 8-1.
March 3, 2013
Both Tennis Teams Fall 5-4 at Flagler
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. – Following a bout with the No. 1 teams in the nation Saturday, the University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis teams continued their long road trek with a trip to Flagler College down in St. Augustine, Fla. where the Saints battled hard in a marathon match that lasted nearly six and a half hours. The Flagler Saints were able to hold off North Georgia, earning 5-4 victories in both the men's and women's matches.
March 2, 2013
No. 1 Armstrong Claims Pair of 9-0 Victories Over Saints in Tennis
SAVANNAH, Ga. – The University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis teams traveled to Savannah, Ga. Saturday afternoon to take on their toughest opponent of the season, top-ranked Armstrong Atlantic State University. The Pirates are ranked No. 1 by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association for both men and women and proved how good they are with a pair of 9-0 wins Saturday afternoon.
February 27, 2013
Saints Tennis Sweep Mars Hill on the Road, Men Win 9-0
MARS HILL, N.C. – The University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis teams both defeated the Mountain Lions of Mars Hill College Wednesday afternoon. The 23rd-ranked men (3-2) won 9-0 while the women (1-5) claimed an 8-1 victory over the Southeast Region opponent.
February 27, 2013
Matheus Guida Named PBC Men's Tennis Player of the Week
AUGUSTA, Ga. – University of North Georgia men's tennis player Matheus Guida has been named the Peach Belt Conference Men's Tennis Player of the Week as announced by the league office.
February 25, 2013
Tennis Matches at Brevard to be Rescheduled Due to Weather
DAHLONEGA, Ga. – Due to nearly a 100% chance of rain on Tuesday in Brevard, N.C., the University of North Georgia and Brevard College have agreed to reschedule their men's and women's tennis matches to a later date. The date for the match will be announced at a later time.
February 21, 2013
Tennis Matches with USC Aiken Rescheduled
DAHLONEGA, Ga. – Due to the threat of inclement weather on Saturday afternoon, the Peach Belt Conference tennis match between the University of North Georgia and the University of South Carolina Aiken have been rescheduled to Tuesday, Apr. 9.
February 20, 2013
No. 23 Men's Tennis Falls 7-2, Women 8-0 to #7 Columbus State
COLUMBUS, Ga. – The University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis teams fell Wednesday afternoon in Peach Belt Conference action at the hands of Columbus State University, both Cougar teams are ranked No. 7 by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association. The No. 23 men fell 7-2 while the women fell 8-0.
February 16, 2013
No. 23 Men's Tennis Fall 4-5, Women 1-8 to Nationally-Ranked Francis Marion
DAHLONEGA, Ga. – The University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis teams battled hard Saturday, but were unable to claim a win over the nationally-ranked tennis teams from Francis Marion University. The Saints' men's team, ranked No. 23 in the nation, fell 4-5 to the 20th-ranked Patriots while the Saint women fell 1-8 to the 10th-ranked women of FMU at the North Georgia Tennis Complex.
February 11, 2013
Tuesday Tennis Matches with Newberry Rescheduled
DAHLONEGA, Ga. – The tennis matches between the University of North Georgia and Newberry College have been rescheduled for March 26. The Saints and Wolves will now play at 2:00 p.m. that day.
February 9, 2013
#23 Men's Tennis Earns 7-2 Win Over Erskine
DUE WEST, S.C. – The 23rd ranked University of North Georgia men's tennis team traveled to Due West, S.C. Saturday for a region match against the Flying Fleet of Erskine College. The Saint men were victorious over the Fleet, returning home to Dahlonega with a 7-2 victory to improve to 2-0 for the season.
February 6, 2013
Tennis Splits with Shorter, 23rd-Ranked Men Win 5-4
DAHLONEGA, Ga. – The University of North Georgia men's and women's tennis teams were finally able to start their 2013 Spring schedules Wednesday afternoon after having last weekend's matches postponed due to inclement weather. The nationally 23rd-ranked men took down the Hawks of Shorter University 5-4 while the women fell 4-5 to the Hawks at the North Georgia Tennis Complex.
November 17, 2012
Men’s Tennis Moves up Two Spots to 23rd in Preseason National Poll
SKILLMAN, N.J. – The Intercollegiate Tennis Association released the 2013 NCAA Division II Campbell/ITA Preseason rankings Friday evening and the North Georgia College & State University men's tennis team will commence the upcoming campaign ranked 23rd in the nation.
September 24, 2012
Weekly Athletics Release Five – Monday, September 24, 2012
September 23, 2012
Tennis Completes Time in ITA Southeast Region Championships with Strong Showing
SUMTER, S.C. – The North Georgia College & State University men's and women's tennis teams were in action again this past weekend as they competed in the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) Southeast Regional Championships.
September 18, 2012
Tennis Opens Fall 2012 Season with Strong Showing in Columbus Fall Invitational
COLUMBUS, Ga. – The North Georgia College & State University men's and women's tennis teams began their 2012 fall campaign this past weekend at the Columbus State University Fall Invitational. Within the field of four men's teams and five women's were six teams ranked in the top-25 of the nation giving the Saints some of the best competition they could hope to face to start the year. | {
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Grace: A Memoir [Hardcover] by Grace Coddington (Author)
It won’t be out in time until November but you must must must put add Grace Coddington’s upcoming memoir on your wish list. At least we now know what the cover looks like.
‘Grace Coddington, is now 70, and “has been the Creative Director of American Vogue magazine for the past 20 years. Her candour, her irascibility, her commitment to her work, and her always fresh and original take on fashion has made her, after Anna Wintour, the most powerful person in fashion. Acquired after an intense auction among every major publisher, this woman who became an unwilling celebrity captured the hearts of everyone when she was revealed in “The September issue” as the creative force behind the throne at Vogue. Having grown up on a backwater island in Wales, she came to London just in time to be discovered as a dazzling model by the famous Norman Parkinson, then went on to shape the pages at Vogue for 19 years where she worked as Creative Director with many luminaries including the young Wintour. Lured by Calvin Klein to run his New York operation she then jumped back to American Vogue when Wintour returned to America in 2003. She has been there ever since.’
‘The book, reported the Observer, was sold to Random House for a cool (and rumored) $1.2 million. “I’m not telling secret stories,” Grace tells the New York Post’s Cindy Adams. “Not writing ugly bad things to get back at anyone. This book’s not gossipy. It’s more a record. I’ve kept a diary since I was a tiny kid trying to find my way, and going through all my written records reminds me of shoots and jogs my memory.” says Huffingtonpost.com
The book is out in November : Just in time for Christmas: Can’t wait !
Pre order $18 Publisher: Random House (November 20, 2012) Amazon.com | {
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23 Tips to Protect Yourself and Enjoy in Summer (India)
Article by Rajesh Vadlamani.
If you think of India, what comes to your mind? Culture, food, language, religions and what else? SUMMER! Summer in India can be very hot and at times I feel that I am thrown into Sahara desert. The temperature can reach up to 45 degree centigrade and even higher.
I remember my childhood days, when I used to visit my mom’s native town called Ongole (Andhra Pradesh) for summer vacation. My cousins, friends and myself would play indoor Cricket, Snake and Ladder, Judo and watch many movies via cable connection. We were blessed with water melons, “hard rock” curd and lemonade which were well prepared by my granny to beat the S factor.
I vividly remember one miserable experience I had during those days. On one summer noon, we all went for a short picnic to nearby paddy fields. It was very hot that day as Mr. Sun showed no mercy on us. That night I felt ill and very feverish because of Sunstroke. I felt very weak due to the loss of electrolytes and was not even able to move. If any of you had gone through the similar experience, you know what I am talking about.
I am posting down some tips here to help you from this deadly S factor. Try following these tips carefully and you can guard your dear ones and yourself in summer.
1. If you wear dark clothes, you have to pay for it. Try to wear simple and light colored cotton dresses. If you are in Chennai, you can get nice clothes at damn cheap prices, at shopping markets like Pondybazar and Purasaiwakam.
2. Avoid makeup as possible as you can. While you go out in Sun, apply moisturizing cream which has SPF (Sun protecting factor).
3. To keep your lips healthy, apply milk cream (a thin layer of cream that is formed on the surface, when you warm up the milk and then cool it down).
4. Massage your head with coconut oil once a week. If you apply oil to your head daily, it causes dust to stick to your hair and your face also looks greasy!
5. Keep a clean kerchief at handy always, to wipe your face. Try not to use tissue papers because you can help save trees!!
6. Take bath twice a day. Use a lemon flavored soap or a soap that contains tea tree oil. Tea tree oil helps your skin free from pimples and fungal infection. If you cannot afford it, try adding Neem leaves to your bathing water before you take bath.
7. You may apply talcum powder to keep yourself from excessive sweating. Nycil and Shower to Shower brands may help you in this regard.
8. Eyes are very delicate to the Sun's rays. You can protect your beautiful eyes by wearing goggles that cover your entire eye part. I recommend goggles which has UV protecting stuff in it.
9. If you are a traveling buff, you may be prone to eye infection, commonly called as Madras Eye in South India. No need to spend too much money on medication for curing Madras Eye. There are proven and much cheaper alternatives like Neem tube paste which is available in many medical stores.
10. You can expect heavy “snow” during summer. It is dandruff falling off your hair when you comb. These snowflakes are due to a fungal infection. You can prevent or get rid of dandruff easily by maintaining hygienic practices such as using a clean comb and a separate towel for yourself. Apply mild shampoo daily while having head bath. Dry your scalp completely. Thumb rule: “where it is wet on your body skin for a long time, some fungal infection may happen”.
11. Yummy! King of fruit (Mango) hits market every summer in India. Mango is a very good source of vitamins and fiber. Be careful not to be carried away by its tastiness. Eat it in the right amount!
12. Succulent fruits such as cucumber, water melons, tomatoes, kiwis, peaches etc are refreshing and also help your body to maintain its water levels. Come on, fill your refrigerator with these fruits rather than carbonated soft drinks. Fresh fruits are good source of anti-oxidants, vitamins and minerals. Some fruits even have the ability to prevent deadly cancer. So come on, go green guys and move to veggie and fruits.
13. Many people experience the problem of bad odor due to sweating. In my opinion, one should not try to avoid sweating by using antiperspirants. I would prefer to use talc, lavender oil or sandal wood oil instead of deodorants. In many cases, these essential oils are cheaper and better than branded deodorants. These are more eco friendly as they do not contain aerosols.
Some other miscellaneous tips to have a safe and enjoyable summer:
14. Do not work out during noon. It can lead to loss of ions and minerals, and quicken dehydration.
15. Try to avoid your children from going out especially during 10am-3pm. It has been proven that UV radiation is very high during this period.
16. If someone is sick due to Sunstroke, offer them electrolyte water, glucose water, tender coconut water or diluted buttermilk. This is the best first aid in my opinion.
17. Summer is the best season to start growing some plants in your gardens, or in pots or wherever you can find place in this “concrete jungle”. Plants add an aesthetic look to your home other than the benefit of providing fresh air. They can also prevent some dust from entering your home.
18. Try to avoid using air conditioners in your office and home. Rather go green! In that way, you can save electricity and cut down CFC (chloro fluro carbons). Use Vetiver mats. These “root mats” help keep your rooms cool. A little labor is required to sprinkle water over it. Encourage your children to do this work so they can learn some new stuff.
19. Enjoy indoor games like Chess, Snake and ladder, Scrabble, Caroms.
20. Teach your children to keep your home clean. Help them cultivate indoor hobbies.
21. Sleep on terrace during nights so you can save electricity. You will also get fresh air!
22. Learn about solar panels and start installing and using them.
23. Always carry an aluminum bottle for drinking water sake. If you are always going to buy packaged water, remember that you are polluting the environment. In a recent survey, it is found that less than twenty percent of drinking bottles are recycled in India.
Wish you a Happy Summer!
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Madrid is undoubtedly one of the interesting cities in Europe with countless culture, history and things to do. Madrid is located in the center of Spain and is also the capital with a rich history. As a city, Madrid combines in extraordinary form its classical past with the modern entrepreneurial drive of the present. Located in the center of the Spanish peninsula it is also a hub for may flights to and from Europe.
Madrid has attractions for virtually all types of travelers, offering everything from fun active spaces for young tourists (with great nightclubs, amusement park and shopping centers), with spaces for recreation and entertainment for kids (zoo, acuapark, Warner Park) and popular landmarks for tourists interested in making contact with various artistic expressions, and traces of different eras and cultures over the centuries merged into Spanish territory. In addition, Madrid is a city known worldwide for spaces for sports activities (the most famous building is the football stadium of Real Madrid), and cultural, politics and technologies conventions that are made throughout the year (in the Palacio de Congresos de Madrid)
To serve these purposes, there is a great range of accommodation offered by the city. Although many of the hotels can be expensive, as in all European capitals, the truth is that there are countless cheaper accommodations such as “pension” and low to mid range hostels and guest houses.
Once you check into a nice hotel Madrid offers a plethora of activities to choose from. We suggest planning several routes with itineraries that include both the center of the city and the outskirts of the city, which bear interesting attractions to enjoy. Fortunately, the Madrid Metro network and the network of surface transportation through bus, allows you to easily and quickly transported anywhere in the city or region. There is an unique ticket valid for metro or bus transportation and you can purchase it at shops located in the street called “Estancos”. If you are planning to do multiple trips by subway or bus, or if you plan to stay several weeks in Madrid, you may want to acquire in these same store monthly transportation bonds, called “BonoBus” that guarantee unlimited transfers.
Some places we suggest are:
1) Prado, Reina Sofia and Thyssen-Bornemisza Museums: If you like art in its various forms, we suggest taking the time to visit these three museums. You can find the classics of European painting in the Prado Museum and Thyssen-Bornemisza, and in contrast to modern art at the Reina Sofia, with the climax of this tour, in the Guernica of Picasso access. Reduced rates are available for groups, tours and days with payment waiver of entry fee.
2) While you’re doing this tour, you can enjoy buildings such as the Tropical Park in Atocha RENFE Station, and the emblematic Neptuno Square. In addition, we suggest you approach the Buen Retiro Park, a space that was once owned by the Spanish royal family and was transferred to the Spanish people for their comfort and entertainment and offers a wide range of impressive facilities and walkways.
3) The center of the city (Sol, Opera and Sevilla metro stations) is a beautiful example of classical Madrid and is at the same time, the center of much of the business in town. From there you will have access to the Puerta del Sol, the Plaza Mayor (Madrid Town Hall), the Opera House (surrounded by stores selling musical instruments), the Cathedral of Madrid, El Palacio Real and a large amount of construction classic city represent an interesting walk both day and night (because the dramatic lighting installed on them).
From Madrid, you can easily visit all the cities that interest you in Spain. Mainly due to the radial network of rail service in Spain (RENFE) that offers great connection with the whole country. May want to consider choosing Madrid as your starting point due to great rail connections and affordable flights. From their website (http://renfe.es) you can also plan your trip and purchase tickets. | {
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Thursday, January 31, 2008
The estimate is not based on the results of six Länder, as would be usual, but rather has been arrived at on a limited data basis with more forecasting was applied than usual. Consequently, the result here involves larger uncertainties. The reason is that the regular changeover of the consumer price index from base year 2000 to the new base year 2005 has not been completed yet.
On 29 February 2008, the final result for January 2008, the provisional result for February 2008 and recalculated results from January 2005 on the new basis 2005 = 100 will be released. Then the price trend will be shown in a breakdown by product groups again.
The year-on-year rate of change of the harmonised consumer price index for Germany, which is calculated for European purposes, is estimated at +3.0% for January 2008. In December 2007, the rate of change was +3.1%. Compared with the previous month, the index will be down by 0.3% in January 2008.
According to provisional results of the Federal Statistical Office retail trade decreased in December 2007 a nominal 4.9% and a real 6.9% compared with the corresponding month of the previous year. The number of days open for sale was 24 in December 2007 and 24 in December 2006, too. Obviously there is a certain base effect here given the pre VAT increase in sales in December 2006, but still, the level is really shockingly low.
When adjusted for calendar and seasonal variations (CENSUS-X-12-ARIMA), the December 2007 turnover was in nominal terms 0.4% and in real terms 0.1 smaller than that of the preceding month.
In 2007 turnover in retail trade in Germany was in nominal terms 1.2% and in real terms 2.2% smaller than that of the previous year.
Sales, adjusted for inflation and seasonal swings, declined 0.1 percent from November, when they dropped 1.9 percent, the Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden said today. Germans seem to have maintained a rather discrete level of spending after inflation accelerated last year to the fastest pace since records began in 1996, driven by a higher sales tax and rising energy prices. Retail sales fell for a fourth month in January, the Bloomberg PMI showed yesterday.
Consumer prices rose 3 percent from a year earlier in January using a harmonized European Union method, the statistics office reported today. That's well above the European Central Bank's 2 percent limit on annual price gains.
Consumer spending appears to have been hit recent by fears about inflation – German retail sales fell by 1.8 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year, according to official figures. Employment data appeared to paint a more upbeat picture - German seasonally-adjusted unemployment fell by a sharper-than-expected 89,000 this month to the lowest level for 15 years - however unemployment trends have a well known tendency to lag behind other developments in economic activity.
Eurozone inflation has soared to a 14-year high of 3.2 per cent, adding to the European Central Bank’s case a hard-line stance on future interest rate moves.
The unexpected rise from 3.1 per cent in December suggests that the “hump” in inflation caused by higher energy and food prices will prove larger and longer-lasting than anticipated by the ECB. January’s rate was the highest since the Frankfurt-institution took responsibility for monetary policy in the region in 1999.
Employment growth remained robust in December 2007. According to provisional calculations of the Federal Statistical Office, the number of persons in employment in December was up by 596,000 or 1.5% on December 2006. Compared with November 2007 the number of persons in employment was down by 139,000, which was a smaller decline than is usual at this time of the year. In December 2007, there were 40.15 million persons in employment whose place of residence was Germany.
The relative increase compared with December 2006 (+1.5%) was slightly smaller than the respective increases for September, October and November (+1.6% each on a year earlier). However we need to take into account of the favourable employment situation in December 2006 (the high base effect).
As is usual at that time of the year, the number of people in employment decreased in December 2007 on the previous month. Compared with November, it was down by 139,000. That was a markedly smaller decrease than the November-to-December decreases observed on an average of the previous five years (–178,000).
The impression of robust growth is supported by the trend of the seasonally adjusted number of persons in employment, that is upon elimination of the typical seasonal fluctuations. Compared with November, the number was up by 37,000 persons. The growth of the seasonally adjusted number of persons in employment even increased slightly since July.
Based on the labour force survey, Destatis published a seasonally adjusted 3.35 million unemployed for December 2007. Compared with the same month a year earlier (December 2006), the number of unemployed was down by 530,000 persons or 13.6%. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate – which is harmonised at the EU level and measured as the share of unemployed in the total labour force – amounted to 7.8% and was thus considerably below the level of the corresponding month of the previous year (9.0%).
Friday, January 25, 2008
The sub-indicator measuring willingness to spend rose to minus 8.8 from minus 10.7 and households are more optimistic about the economic outlook, with a gauge rising to 28.7 from 23.6. But perhaps most importantly, the measure of consumers' income expectations fell to minus 4.7 from minus 1.7.
For income expectations to ``stabilize, it is essential that some calm returns to price developments,'' GfK said in its statement. German inflation accelerated last year to 2.3 percent, the fastest pace since harmonized euro-region records began in 1996, driven by a higher sales tax and rising energy prices, while consumer-price inflation slowed to 3.1 percent in December from 3.3 percent in November.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
As regards the use side, economic growth was based on both foreign and domestic demand. Price-adjusted exports saw a by far higher rise (+8.3%) than imports (+5.7%). The increased export surplus (net exports) contributed 1.4% percentage points to GDP growth, while the contribution of domestic uses was one percentage point. This development was above all determined by gross fixed capital formation in machinery and equipment: In 2007, capital formation of enterprises in new machinery, equipment and vehicles again increased considerably (+8.4%) on a year earlier. Final consumption expenditure contributed 0.2 percentage points to economic growth. However, only final consumption expenditure of general government had a positive impact (price-adjusted growth rate +2.0%), while the real final consumption expenditure of households declined 0.3% on a year earlier. On an annual average in 2007, the economic performance was achieved by slightly more than 39.7 million persons in employment, which was an increase of 649,000 persons (+1.7%) compared with the preceding year.
According to provisional calculations,net lending and net borrowing of general government (including central government, state government, local government and social security funds) were in balance in 2007. When put in relation to the GDP at current prices the financial position ratio is in the black. On 14 February 2008, the Federal Statistical Office will publish first national accounting results for the fourth quarter of 2007 and the revised results for the year 2007 (only GDP); on 26 February, the detailed results will be released.
On an annual average in 2007, the economic performance was achieved by slightly more than 39.7 million persons in employment, which was an increase of 649,000 persons (+1.7%) compared with the preceding year. Hence employment reached its highest level since German reunification in 2007. According to provisional results of the labour force survey, the number of unemployed persons (international definition) decreased by 641,000 (−15.1%) to 3.6 million. Increases in labour productivity measured as the price-adjusted gross domestic product per person in employment and per hour worked amounted to 0.8% each in 2007. Hence they were clearly below the growth rates (+2.2% and +2.4%, respectively) observed in 2006.
As regards the production side of the gross domestic product (price-adjusted), all economic sectors had a positive impact on economic growth in 2007. Industry experienced a particularly strong growth. Its gross value added was up 5.2% on a year earlier. Economic performance also saw a clear rise in trade, transport and communications (+2.3%), in financial, real-estate, renting and business activities (+3.1%) and in agriculture, hunting, forestry and fishing (+2.7%). Furthermore economic performance improved by 1.7% in construction. However, the economic upturn which started in 2006 (at that time, price-adjusted gross value added increased 5.4%) thus slowed down markedly.
Gross value added of other service activities increased 0.6% on the previous year. As regards the use of the gross domestic product, economic growth in 2007 was based on both foreign and domestic demand. The continued foreign demand for German goods and services led to an 8.3% increase in exports. The rise observed in imports was 5.7% and hence clearly below the export level. The resulting price-adjusted export surplus (net exports) contributed 1.4% percentage points to GDP growth. Domestic uses contributed one percentage point to growth based, above all, on gross fixed capital formation. In price-adjusted terms, the latter saw an increase of 4.9% on 2006. Gross fixed capital formation in machinery and equipment again had a substantial effect on growth: Capital formation of enterprises in machinery, equipment and vehicles increased 8.4% on a year earlier.
However, gross fixed capital formation in construction was up not more than 2.0%. This increase was almost completely attributable to gross fixed capital formation in non-residential buildings, which rose 4.3%. Hence the positive development of 2006 continued (+4.3%, too). Price-adjusted gross fixed capital formation in residential construction climbed only 0.3%. Thus the growth rate was clearly smaller than the rate recorded a year earlier (+4.3%). Final consumption expenditure contributed 0.2 percentage points to economic growth.
However, only final consumption expenditure of general government had a positive effect on growth (price-adjusted growth rate +2.0%). Final consumption expenditure of households declined 0.3% in 2007 on a year earlier, which resulted in a negative contribution to growth of 0.2 percentage points. In 2006, final consumption expenditure of households still made a positive contribution to growth (0.6 percentage points). Certainly, the above two results also reflect the rise in value added tax which led to purchases in 2006 that had originally been planned for a later time. The national income (factor costs), the two components of which are compensation of employees and property and entrepreneurial income, rose to EUR 1,825 billion (+ 4.2%) in 2007. While compensation of employees (EUR 1,180 billion) was up 2.6% on a year earlier, property and entrepreneurial income saw an increase of 7.2% to EUR 645 billion.
The share of compensation of employees in the national income at factor costs (wage ratio) declined to 64.6%; that was one percentage point less compared with the previous year. Gross wages and salaries increased to EUR 954 billion (+3.1%) in 2007. The last time a higher increase was recorded was in 2000 (+3.4%). Net wages and salaries, which are obtained after deduction of wage tax and employees’ social contributions, amounted to nearly EUR 620 billion and hence were 2.3% above the level of the previous year. While employees’ social contributions recorded a comparatively moderate rise of 2.7%, employee wage tax was up 6.2% according to first provisional results. This strong increase was, among other things, due to the clear rise observed in the number of jobs fully subject to social insurance contributions and to changes in income tax law (for instance, elimination or restriction of commuter tax allowance).
The number of employees was up 1.7% in 2007. Average gross wages and salaries (per employee) climbed 1.3%, while average net wages and salaries increased 0.5%. In 2007, the disposable income of households rose 1.6% to EUR 1,518 billion. Compared to 2006, consumer reticence of households was again stronger in 2007 so that the growth (+1.4%) of household final consumption expenditure (at current prices) was even smaller than the moderate increase observed in the disposable income. The saving ratio climbed to 10.8%, which was an increase of 0.3 percentage points on a year earlier. According to provisional calculations,net lending and net borrowing of general government (including central government, state government, local government and social security funds) were in balance in 2007. When put in relation to the GDP at current prices the financial position ratio is in the black. On 14 February 2008, the Federal Statistical Office will publish first national accounting results for the fourth quarter of 2007 and the revised results for the year 2007 (only GDP); on 26 February 2008, the detailed results will be released.
The results published in August 2007 for the years 1991 to 2006 have not been revised, as is always the case at this time of the year. The above and other national accounts data may be accessed via the internet (http://www.destatis.de/). In addition, more detailed results are published in Fachserie 18 “Volkswirtschaftliche Gesamtrechnungen”, Reihe 1.1 “Erste Jahresergebnisse” (order number 2180110). The above and other publications can be downloaded free of charge from the Publication Service of the Federal Statistical Office at http://www.destatis.de/publikationen.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The priciple resonsibility for the accelerated price trend in 2007 lies with energy prices and the increase in VAT and insurance tax at the beginning of the year. In 2007, prices of energy products (household energy and motor fuels) rose 3.9%. Among all energy prices, electricity prices increased most strongly (+6.8%). Mineral oil products in 2007 were on average by 3.0% more expensive than in 2006 (of which motor fuels: +4.1%; liquid fuel: –1.2%).
Stripping out energy prices, the annual average of the year-on-year rate of price increase would have been 1.9%. The marked rise in the annual year-on-year rate of price increase in 2007, exceeding the two-percent threshold, was increasingly driven in the second half of the year by successive price rises for food (+3.1% on an annual average in 2007), in particular for some milk, flour and fat products by two-digit rates (including butter: +19.1%; flour: +15.4%; curd: +12.0% and full-cream milk: +10.3%).
Furthermore, the higher prices of education had an impact on the rate of price change already since April 2007, especially because of the introduction of tuition fees in some Länder. Also, prices of alcoholic beverages and tobacco (+3.1%) increased above average on an annual average in 2007; however, price increases were smaller than the total consumer price increase, for example, for consumer durables (+0.9%), clothing (+0.8%) and communication (+0.2%).
In December 2007, the consumer price index was up 2.8% on December 2006. Since September, the year-on-year rate of price increase constantly exceeded the two-percent threshold. November saw the annual peak (+3.1%), while in December the price rise slowed down a little (+2.8%). Compared with the previous month, the index was up 0.5% in December. In a year-on-year comparison, energy prices had an upward effect in December 2007, as was the case in the previous months, although prices of mineral oil products decreased towards the end of the month (including motor fuels: +11.9% on December 2006 and –5.4% on November 2007). Not considering the price trend of energy products (household energy and motor fuels), the year-on-year rate of price increase in December 2007 would have been only 2.2%. Mineral oil product prices were up 14.5% (including liquid fuel: +25.1%). Electricity prices, too, rose above average in December 2007 (+8.2% on a year earlier), whereas gas prices were down 2.4%.
Food prices in December 2007 were up an average 6.0% on December 2006. Prices rose considerably – as in the previous months – especially for oils and fats (+25.5%; including butter: +44.9%) as well as milk, cheese and eggs (+17.3%; including curd: +37.8%). Prices of bread and cereals, too, were markedly higher than a year earlier (+6.0%), including flour: +27.6%. For some items, however, price rises were markedly smaller than total consumer prices, that is, among other things, communication (+0.8%) and clothing (+0.1%). The marked 0.5% increase in the price index from November 2007 to December 2007 was mainly due to seasonal price trends.
What should especially be mentioned apart from price increases for some fruits and vegetables (including grapes: +16.0% and lettuce: +13.1%) is common price rises caused by the seasonal highlights (Christmas and New Year’s Eve) for package holidays (+32.5% on November 2007) and accommodation services (+20.8%). Seasonal month-on-month increases were also observed towards the end of the year for air fares (on average +6.7%) and rail fares (on average +3.6%). A consumer-friendly month-on-month trend was however shown especially by motor fuel prices (–5.4%; including supergrade petrol: –5.9%). For clothing and footwear, too, first price reductions on the previous month were observed (–1.0%) because of the coming seasonal change from the winter to the spring collections.
The harmonised consumer price index for Germany, which is calculated for European purposes, rose 2.3% on an annual average in 2007. In December 2007, the harmonised consumer price index was up 3.1% on December 2006. Compared with the previous month, the index climbed 0.7%. The estimates of 28 December 2007 were thus confirmed both for the consumer price index and for the harmonised consumer price index. Detailed information on consumer price statistics is contained in Fachserie 17, Reihe 7, which is available free of charge from the publication service of the Federal Statistical Office at www.destatis.de/publikationen, search word “Verbraucherpreisindex
Consumer prices rose 2.3 percent in 2007, using a harmonized European Union method, the Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden said in a statement today. It's the first year the increase in Europe's largest economy breached the European Central Bank's limit. Measured by national rules, inflation averaged 2.2 percent, the highest level since 1994.
As the effect on inflation of an increase in value-added tax last January wanes, ECB policy makers are concerned that rising oil and food prices will lead workers to seek higher pay and spark a wage-price spiral.
``It's a dramatic figure, but it was boosted by the VAT hike,'' said Luigi Speranza, an economist at BNP Paribas in London. ``While the inflation rate has peaked, elevated food prices will keep it above 2 percent until at least mid-year.'' The ECB targets an increase of just below 2 percent.
In December, inflation slowed to 3.1 percent from 3.3 percent the previous month, matching both the median in a survey of 29 economists and preliminary figures from Dec. 28. From November, consumer prices rose 0.7 percent.
Electricity & Butter
The price of butter rose 19 percent last year, and the cost of milk gained 10 percent, the statistics office said. Electricity prices increased 6.8 percent and car fuel rose 4.1 percent. Excluding energy costs the national inflation rate was 1.9 percent. Heating oil costs declined 1.2 percent.
In the euro area, European inflation averaged 2.1 percent in 2007, staying above the ECB's ceiling for an eighth year even after policy makers doubled interest rates in the 18 months through June last year. Inflation stayed at the highest in more than six years in December as food and energy costs soared.
ECB council member Axel Weber said yesterday that the bank won't tolerate pay increases that fuel inflation. ``There are indications of intensifying wage pressure, in particular in the public service,'' Weber said. ``We'll counter second-round effects as well as other risks'' to price stability ``resolutely.''
German public-sector workers want the biggest pay raise in 16 years. Ver.di, Germany's second-biggest labor union, is seeking 8 percent more for about 1.3 million workers on federal and local government payrolls.
Expectations, as measured by the break-even level of 10-year inflation-linked French government bonds, have risen 11 basis points to 2.19 percent since the ECB shelved plans to raise interest rates on Sept. 6 following a rout in U.S. subprime mortgages.
The Federal Statistics Office will publish a flash estimate of January inflation on Jan. 31. The six German states that provide the data for the estimate will not release figures separately this month, resuming normal procedure in February.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Today we also learnt from the Federal Statistics Office that German economic growth slowed to 2.5 percent in 2007 from 2.9 percent in 2006. At the present moment the Bundesbank is predicting growth of some 1.9 percent this year, but it is evident that the number of downside risks to this forcast are now growing almost by the day.
German industrial production, exports and retail sales all declined in November, suggesting the economy is gradually losing momentum as a stronger euro makes exports less competitive even as the global economy slows, and record oil and food prices drive up inflation. Higher credit costs will may also restrain company investmen. The Munich based Ifo institute said in December that it expects company spending on equipment to grow about 4 percent in 2008 after increasing by 9.2 percent in 2007.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Retail sales in November also dropped 1.3 percent. More importantly ..."as shown by estimates of the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), the 2007 nominal retail turnover in Germany is expected to be between 0.7% and 1.0% smaller than in 2006."
Also industrial production fell 0.9 percent in November from October, the Economy Ministry in Berlin said today. Equally importantly construction output was down 1.6 percent from October.
Entering Reform Fatigue?
One of the thing which strikes me about all those false hopes for a sustained recovery that people are forever being offered in Germany and Japan is the corrosive effect that this can have on the psychology of all the ordinary people who are on the receiving end.
What Claus and I have been noticing is just how hard it is for people to take seriously the idea that there may be a long term underlying problem in these countries associated with years of very low fertility and population ageing. In both countries now, after years of hard and difficult reforms - what the Economist calls "cultural changes" - people may be less ready to receive yet another dose, and will quite possibly be willing to try different ideas and other formulas. Some indication of this is to be seen in the recent defaut of the LDP in the Japanese Upper House elections and the early departure of Abe.
So enter another argument. Consumption is weak because wages and salaries are too low. Companies in Germany and Japan have lots of profits,while what they don't have are wages, and hence internal consumption. To some extent, of course, this is the case. The question is why.If wages are trending downward in Italy, Japan and Germany as aggregate population age rises there may be some productivity and human capital related explanation for this, as I explain in my recent extensive study on the German labour market.
So it may be that - as the Financial Times reports this morning - we see some serious attempt in the short term to raise wages.
"German government and union officials gather on Thursday in the baroque town of Potsdam outside Berlin to start wage negotiations for the country's 1.3m civil servants, kicking off what the head of the country's largest trade union predicted would be a year of "mega-wage deals". After years of wage stagnation in Europe's biggest economy, calls for substantial pay increases are growing louder – and prompting warnings from economists about the potential impact on jobs and inflation."
Such an attempt to increase the wages share in German National Income in not supported by productivity and value chain shifts will, unfortunately, do more harm than good by slowing down the pace of job creation, and pushing up inflation in the short term. Since this will be unsustainable, as the economy slows the danger can then very rapidly shift from inflation to deflation. There are now no easy "instant coffee" policy solutions available to the underlying problem in Germany. The first step in begining to make the best of a bad job would be to recognise that what is happening actually is happening. Reading the majority of commentators at this point I fear we are still a long way from that recognition, so it seems things will continue to get worse before there is any chance of them getting better. I emphasise, the most important step towards begining to do what can be done now in Germany passes through a general recognition of the problem being faced. Without this there is little hope of real progress.
Conclusion, Have We Been Here Before?
To close, just a couple more graphs. We can see from the most recent export y-o-y chart that export growth is now slowing significantly, and that we are now entering the downward phase of the whole cycle. We have, of course, been here before, after the collapse of the internet boom.
It may be worth reminding ourselves at this point what ectually happened last time round, ie the last time the acceleration in the Y-o-Y growth rates in German exports effectively stalled. That was back in early 2000, as we can see from the chart below. And what happened at that next? Well the fed was easing as the US entered recession, and the euro was to some extent rising, both of which put a strong break on German exports. And after export growth collapsed, German GDP growth wasn't far behind. So it isn't the rise in the currency alone that matters, you have to think about the whole environment which produces it. Why your currency is rising, while someone else's is falling. And of course, in German export terms, after the rise comes the fall. This is the cost of not being able to depend on your own internal demand, you have to depend on someone else's demand.
Secondly, we should also think about what happens to employment creation and unemployment as GDP growth stalls. The chart below offers a comparison of movements in the two main unemployment indicators for Germany - the ILO comparable one, and the national German one - from the early 1990s to date. As can be seen the stall in GDP growth produced the rapid rise in umeployment after the summer of 2000, as win-win became lose-lose. I don't see why the picture shoud be that different this time round. The ageing population component in the slowdown will - if anything - be worse this time (the median age is higher). The labour market arguments are outlined in much more depth in this post.
The German economy is losing momentum as a stronger euro makes exports less competitive and near-record oil prices drive up inflation, leaving households with less money to spend. German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck said today the government may cut its 2008 growth forecast.
Construction output was also down in November 2007, falling 1.6% from October.
Germany's IWH institute last month cut its growth forecast for 2008, citing both weaker exports and consumption. The pace of expansion may slow to 1.7 percent this year from 2.5 percent in 2007, Halle-based IWH said Dec. 20. It previously forecast growth of 2.5 percent for this year. The German government may lower its 2008 growth forecast when it publishes a new projection later this month, Steinbrueck said in an interview today.
``I think we're not going to face the same economic growth rate as in 2007,'' Steinbrueck said. ``Perhaps 1.9 percent or 1.8 percent'' instead of the 2 percent currently projected.
Adding to signs of slowdown, German business confidence fell to the lowest in almost two years in December and investors were the most pessimistic since January 1993.
The euro increased 11 percent against the dollar last year, reaching a record $1.4967 on Nov. 23. The currency, used in 15 European countries, traded at $1.4704 at 1 p.m. in Frankfurt. Todays report showed that exports rose 3.2 percent during 2007. The trade surplus, adjusted for seasonal swings and working days, widened to 19.8 billion euros -- the most since records began in 1950 -- as imports dropped more than exports.
Monday, January 7, 2008
The above charts are striking, as is the entire recent performance of the German economy in terms of job creation, but before we go any further I think at this point it is also worth taking into account the following information release on German unemployment statistics from the EU Statistics Office, Eurostat (full reference at the foot of this post):
Monthly data for Germany from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) is only available since early 2005, and this is not sufficiently long a time series to enable reliable seasonal adjustment using standard techniques. Eurostat considers the minimum length of a series for testing the extraction of the seasonal pattern to be four years for the monthly unemployment data. It is thus unlikely that seasonal patterns in the unemployment directly measured by the LFS are sufficiently known until early 2011. Until then an alternative method, such as using information from auxiliary sources, needs to be applied.
I introduce this quote at this stage in the argument, since it is important to note that nothing - or virtually nothing - here is what it seems to be. Germany has recently introduced a whole new methodology for measuring unemployment - a monthly (as opposed to an earlier annual) labour force survey (more below) and this fact alone already makes inter-temporal comparisons of unemployment data tricky, to say the least.
Nonetheless there can be no doubt that unemployment is falling, and quite rapidly, in Germany. It is how to interpret this data which is what we need to think about. In its most recent monthly report for example the Federal Labour Agency said seasonally-adjusted unemployment had dropped by 78,000 to 3.4m, almost twice the average monthly fall in the past year. Altogether, more than half-a-million people have come off jobless benefits in the past year. The internationally comparable (ILO harmonised) jobless rate, whose publication lags one month behind the national data, stood at 7.9 per cent in November - the lowest level since the end of 2001 – thanks to robust economic growth, an increase in hiring, and a fall in the number of people claiming unemployment benefits.
More surprising to many of us who are watching the current course of the German economy than the figures themselves was the publication of a series of business sentiment surveys which appear to show continued resilient hiring intentions among managers even as the German economy shows visible signs of slowing. These suggest the improvement in the data we are receiving for the labour market should continue, and that the decline in the numers of unemployed - which has now been taking pace for some 21 months - should continue at least into the near future. The Ifo institute’s employment barometer, for example, stood at 106.8 points in December, markedly above the average registered over the past 12 months. So what is actually happening? Well my guess is that nobody really knows. And I do not pretend to have the magic lantern here, but I have spent considerable time over the past 24 hours trying to find some light at the end of the cavern, and what follows is a provisional account of my finding.
The Hartz Reform
Now the more astute among you will have noticed that in the above chart for unemployment rates, I present Germany's unemployment as measured on two different concepts. The first is the new German Labour Force Survey Methodology - which as I have already pointed out was only introduced last October - and the second is measured using the internationally comparable ILO methodology. The basic difference is that the ILO methodology uses the idea of actively seeking work, while the Federal methodology has previously been based on the concept of simply being registered, irrespective of whether or not the intention is to find work. Naturally the level as measured using ILO criteria (although this is a rather complex issue) has tended to be lower. But the even more astute among you will have noted that over the last two years these two measures have gradually come together. As far as I can see this growing similarity between the two readings is the result of a confluence of two factors. Firstly the new methodology the Federal Statistics Office introduced last October (2007), and secondly the series of reforms which have come to be known as the "Hartz Concept".
Now as regards the first, starting from the release of 31 October 2007 the Federal Statistics Office has replaced their earlier, temporary, method of calculating harmonised monthly unemployment for Germany by a new method. This new method bases the unemployment estimates on the new continuous (monthly) German Labour Force Survey (LFS), and in so doing Germany has brought itself into line with the methods used for the other Member States of the European Union.
The reason for this change is that Germany's earlier methods of gathering employment and unemployment data was, to put it rather mildly, in something of a mess. Now regulation EC 1991/2002 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 8 October 2002 made the continuous, quarterly LFS mandatory for all Member States from 2003, although it did specifically provide, among other things, a transitional period for Germany, a period which could last until 2005.
Basically in all the countries of the European Union, the LFS is used to derive quarterly results, however, in order to provide unemployment rates and data with a monthly frequency, short-term trends from unemployment registers are also used to update the much more detailed findings of the quarterly LFS. Now, prior to 2005, the Labour Force Survey was only conducted on an annual basis in Germany. During one week every spring, information concerning labour force status was provided by respondents during detailed interviews. This methodology was considered to be totally unsatisfactory when viewed from the persective of establishing a harmonised EU unemployment measure, consequently the German system has been in transition, and it is this transition that can best be seen in the way in which the German rate has steadily come closer to the ILO methodology one.
However, as luck would have it, precisely in January 2005, at exactly the time the new continuous LFS commenced in Germany, the German Federal Government introduced an extensive reform of the social security system, areform which included among its objectives the bringing together under one roof of unemployment and social welfare benefits. The measures involved are usually referred to as Hartz IV. Since the Hartz concept effectively involved a redefinition of what constituted unemployment, and more importantly who would be entitled to benefit, it was already anticipated at the time of framing the legislation that there would be significant effects on the registered level of unemployment at the system was introduced.
Therefore, the assumption was from the outset that the register of unemployment as measured in the annual LFS would not give a very accurate reading of the level of German unemployment over an unspecified period, and that this period of uncertainty and undecideability would commence in precisely January 2005. During the transitional period it was not considered practical for the Federal Labour Agency ito maintain a separate time series, and thus the compromise solution was adopted that they would continue to use the old definitions of registered unemployment.
Under those circumstances it proved impossible to produce reliable harmonised monthly unemployment rates for Germany. While work was ongoing to make the continuous LFS suitable for the production of monthly unemployment figures, Eurostat and Destatis looked for a temporary alternative. For this purpose Destatis expanded the ILO Monthly Telephone Survey (MTS) that had been running from April 2003 as a pilot survey to 30 000 interviews per month. The MTS would run until April 2007. Eurostat agreed to use, for a limited time, the results from the Monthly Telephone Survey for estimating the harmonised unemployment rate for Germany. When the temporary measure of basing the unemployment estimation on the Monthly Telephone Survey was introduced the effect was a downward shift in the time series for the total unemployment rate for Germany. And, of course, it is this effect that we are now seeing.
Within Europe, the German Labour Force Survey is the largest household survey of its kind. The average sample size per month is around 30 000 dwellings, with completed interviews of persons of working age approximately 35 000 on average each month. The survey is part of the German Micro-Census and has a very high response rate (approx. 95% annually) compared to other Member States and a relatively low rate of proxy6 answers (approx. 27%). All households are visited and interviewed by specially trained interviewers using portable computers, but those respondents who so wish can complete the questionnaire on their own on paper.
The replacement of the provisional unemployment figures based on the Monthly Telephone Survey by the estimates from the LFS results in a major upward revision. The LFS measures a significantly higher level of unemployment in Germany than the MTS. The chart below - which was prepared by Eurostat, shows the level of unemployment in Germany from 2000 to September 2007, showing the previous Eurostat estimates based on the Monthly Telephone Survey as well as the revised estimates based on the Labour Force Survey.
Some indication of the chaos and confusion which all this has caused can be seen in this extract from the Federal Statistics Office report on the changeover. According to the Federal Statistics Bureau
The number of unemployed as determined according to the ILO concept in January 2005 (3.99 million) was by about one million below the number of registered unemployed in the same month according to the Social Security Code (5.04 million). According to the results of the telephone survey, about 1.2 million persons were recorded as unemployed who indicated not to be registered as unemployed. On the other hand, 2.2 million respondents who, as indicated by themselves, were registered as unemployed were not unemployed according to the ILO concept. As is shown by experience acquired in the pilot surveys, the resulting difference between unemployment (ILO concept) and registered unemployment (Federal Employment Agency) is larger in winter than on an annual average due to seasonal factors. Also, it is assumed that the statistical “Hartz IV effect” contributed to the difference observed in January this year. While the Hartz IV reform increased the registered unemployment according to the Social Security Code, as observed by the Federal Employment Agency, beyond the level that is usual at this time of the year, the ILO unemployment figure is not influenced by such statistical effects caused by changes in law.
Well I think we can leave this part of the story there. Unemployment either was always much higher than was officially recognised, or never rose as much as it appeared to at the start of 2005. Choose your own version. But what we should be aware of is that the reduction in unemplyment which appeasr to be taking place in Germany needs to be handled with a good deal of care.
The Hartz Concept
According to Wikipedia, the Hartz Concept may be defined as follows:
The Hartz concept is the name given to the recommendations resulting from a commission on reforms to the German labour market in 2002. Named after the head of the commission, Peter Hartz, it went on to become part of the German government's Agenda 2010 series of reforms, known as Hartz I - Hartz IV. The reforms of Hartz I - III took place between January 1, 2003 and 2004; Hartz IV began on January 1, 2005.
On February 22, 2002, the "Hartz Commission" was founded; its real name was die Kommission für moderne Dienstleistungen am Arbeitsmarkt - the Commission for Modern Services on the Labour Market. Its 15 members were led by Peter Hartz, then Volkswagen's personnel director.
The commission came up with thirteen "innovation modules" suggesting changes to the German labour market system. These were then put into practice as Hartz I - IV.
In January 2005, Germany's unemployment rate - as predicted in advance by many observers - rose instead of falling. As suggested above, this rise was not due to any sudden and rapid deterioration in Germany's economic situation. Rather it was due to a kind of statistical effect, and in part, as the unemployment figures come down and down in Germany we are seeing some sort of "obverse" reflection of this statistical effect, and this is why the data needs to be treated with so much caution, especially given the role which inflation wage push concerns in Germany - via the good offices of the Bundesbank - are playing in policy making at the ECB at present. Indeed, ECB President Jean Claude Trichet specifically singled out German postal workers when he indicated his ongoing intentions to exercise inflation vigilance rather than monetary loosening in the face of the eurozone's growing economic headwinds.
Under the new legislation introduced in that month, all people deemed capable of work but without a job found themselves with the obligation of registering as unemployed with the Federal Labour Offices. This marked a change since previously such registration had not been necessary for recipients of social assistance (and the whole issue of registration or non-registration lies at the heart of the methodological disputes about German unemployment). When the Hartz concept was introduced the Institute for Employment Research (In-stitut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB)), the Federal Employment Services' research institution, forecast the number of people affected by this measure would be approximately 300,000. In reality the problem proved to be even worse than the forecast, since in January 2005 the Federal Employment Service announced the unemployment figure to stand at 5,037,000, an increase of over half a million on the December 2004 number (with roughtly 225,000 of these being attributable to the Hartz reform).
Now one of the key features of the reform concerned unemployment benefit, since entitlement to maximum benefits was considerably reduced. Starting on January 1st 2004 the maximum period of entitlement to such benefit was reduced to 32 months as a transitional measure. But for new claims presented after January 31st 2006 the entitlement generally lasts for a maximum of 12 months, and for persons older than 55, for a maximum of 18 months. A very simple calculation should show us that for anyone registered on 1st January 2004, benefit will have run out around September 2006. I think we are lead to the unescapable conclusion that some portion of the frenetic rise in the German employment levels of late is a by-product of the increasing number of people who are facing the imminent prospect of having their benefit terminated. This could also be a factor in squaring why all the extra employment, far from producing optimism, is leading to a growing feeling of pessimism in the consumer sentiment indexes. Especially given the nature of much of the employment being created (see below) and the general economic conjuncture in which Germany finds itself.
The high withdrawal rates for additional income earned while unemployed - which Hartz introduced - have been and still are a crucial problem. The problem hangs around the difficulty that - by differentiating between income from a regular job on the first labour market on which the high withdrawal rates have to be applied - and income from doing community services (so called 1-Euro-jobs, see below) for which lower rates hold, a bias towards jobs in the second labour market has been enforced. This of course is part of the intention.
Many voices have been raised in Germany to argue that with the introduction of class II unemployment benefit a kind of "wage dumping" process was initiated since the unemployed people were effectively forced to accept any job no matter the wage, solely to keep their benefits. The fact that one of the results of the introduction of the Haryz concept is that more people work in jobs with low incomes seems to me to be undeniable. This is exactly what the reform aims for: the creation of a low wage sector in which people with low-skills, who have been disproportionately unemployed, can find a job. A quite separate question revolves around why there are so many low skilled persons in Germany, and around the macro economic consequences of a structural increase in such forms of employment, and these will to some extent be addressed below.
Before moving on to this we might note in passing that it is far from surprising that Hartz has lead directly into the current debate about whether or not it is desireable to establish a statutory minimum wage in Germany, since I feel many of the people who endorsed Hartz never really understood what the underlying issue was, nor why Germany's economic performance was giving the results it was. Of course, as far as the present argument goes, what needs to be born in mind is that such a minimum wage would in fact conflict with the core objectives of the Hartz social and labour market reform and in this sense would be counterproductive, since precisely the kinds of work which is now being created would disappear, and the consequence would be that the people concerned went back to unemployment rather than the creation of a larger number of better paid jobs.
One Euro Jobs?
The so called One-Euro-Jobs – the official name is MAE (Mehraufwandsentschädigung, compensation for additional effort) - are forms of community-related employment available to the unemployed at very low salaries (hence the "one euro" label), sufficiently low as to not imply the total loss of benefit. The underlying philosophy is that they should be thought of as a graduated step into work. In fact recipients of type II unemployment benefit are virtually obliged to accept such jobs or face benefit curtailments. Rejection is normally followed by benefit cuts (in the first instance by 30 percent, but repeated refusals ultimately lead to a statutory minimum of rent plus food stamps). In Berlin, One-Euro workers get 1,50 Euro an hour (although sometimes this may be as low as 1,20 Euro). Normally such workers work 30 hours per week. They are entitled to earn around 180 Euros MAE on top of Alg2 (Type II benefit) plus rent. The One-Euro agencies or contractors get 500 Euros per month for each MAE job (for management expenses and qualification efforts).
It is a legal requirement that the One-Euro-Job is “additional”, i.e. such employment should not put regular jobs at risk. One-Euro-Jobs do not constitute an employment contract so employment rights (like sick pay, holiday pay or the right to go on strike) do not apply (hence the low levels of social security registration being noted, see below).
In Germany a total of 176.000 MAE jobs had been created by the middle of 2005. I have no recent data on MAE jobs, so if anyone reading this can update me, I would be grateful. One thing which immediately becomes clear to me at this point is the large difference which exists between Germany and Southern European countries like Spain and Italy in this regard, since in Southern Europe the MAE type jobs are being systematically filled by new migrants (care for the aged would be the obvious example here), while in Germany it is the native born population which is being moved over into such activities, this seems to fit in with the general picture we have been receiving from Research organisations like the Lisbon Council about the poor quality of much of the human capital which Germany faces going forward, and some of the difficulties this represents in the context of a rapidly ageing society.
Where we are now?
The first thing to recognise is - whatever data interpretation issues we may have - the Hartz reforms have resulted in a real decline in unemployment, and a significant increase in the volume of new jobs created. According to first provisional calculations of the Federal Statistical Office , the number of people in employment in Germany in 2007 averaged 39.7 million. This represented an increase of 649,000 people employed or a rise of 1.7% over the 2006 number. So the increase in employment is real enough. This increase follows a rise of 242,000 persons (or +0.6%) on 2005, so the rate of increase accelerated, and the average number of persons in employment reached its highest level since German reunification.
The problem we have, and this is the point of all the rigmorole I have gone into above, is in deciding - from a macroeconomic viewpoint - what significance can be attach to this process? Certainly there is a fiscal impact, and this we are seeing, as part of the burden of supporting the poorer sections of German society falls on the citizens themselves. This is clearly a net plus.
Also it is important to note that the average increase in employment in 2007 was largely driven by an increase in the number of employees, which rose by 595,000 persons (+1.7%) to just under 35.3 million compared to the previous year. Hence the number of employees was only slightly below the all-time high registered in 2001 (35.3 million, but note the date here, as it is significant, as we will see below). The positive effects of the reform and Germany's economic expansion also had an impact on the number of jobs subject to social insurance contributions, which after falling for several years, once more started to increase in 2006:
However we should note that, as a proportion of total employment, these social security covered jobs have been declining steadily, year by year (and indeed during 2007 the percentage has remained very near the 2006 level of 67.5% according to my own very rough and ready calculations). So what we are seeing is a very large increase in temporary, part time, or other more fragile forms of employment, which, welcome as it is, needs to be but into perspective if we are to think about the robsutness of the German recovery, and the ability of domestic consumption to sustain economic growth at some point in the future.
We also know that the number of German workers in part time jobs has been rising steadily as a percentage of the total workforce (see chart below).
Human Capital and OutSourcing
Now another way of looking at this whole situation is to ask what exactly is happening to Germany's human capital stock at the present time. It is evident that in the context of ongoing demographic shifts developing and maintaining the human capital is going to play a key role in determining future economic prosperity. Germany's median age is rising, and is projected to rise, quite rapidly, much more rapidly, say, than that of France.
At the same time the key 25 to 49 age group reached its maximimum weighting as a proportion of the total population back in the mid 1990s, and is now falling.
Meanwhile at the extremes - the oldest and the youngest ages, the paths completely diverge, as the proportion of the young population declines and the proportion of the older groups increases. The important thing to realise is that this change is permanent, it is not simply the passing through of a "baby boom", and German society needs to make long term changes to adjust to this reality.
In the above chart - which shows the relative changes between the 0 to 14 and the 65 to 79 populations, I have intentionally not made use of any of the future projections, since I want to emphasise that the argument we are persuing on this blog is that these age structural changes are having a real impact in the here and now, and not something which might hypothetically happen 30 or 50 years from now.
Human Capital Index
Precisely in order to address this sort of concern, and in an attempy to try to measure the development of human capital in European Union member states the Lisbon Council and Deutschland Denken! have created the European Human Capital Index - a ranking index of 13 the European Union member states. You can find the various editions of the index on this page here.
Essentially the index looks at each country's ability to develop and deploy its human capital resources. This is important since one of the core explanations as to why the population ageing process can take place in a reasonably painless fashion is that leveraging human capital resources can help less people be as effective economically as more people were previously (ie the economy can still grow even with a reducing workforce). This is one of those ideas which sounds awfully good on paper, but may turn out to be much more complicated to apply in practice, and one of the reasons for writing this lengthy post and thinking about this so much is that in those countries most directly affected at the present time - Germany, Japan and Italy - we seem to be observing not the promised surge in the quality of the aggregate human capital deployed, but rather a steady decline, and in particular as reflected in the wages and salaries paid as the median age rises. Indeed, it is rather noteworthy in this connection to note that as the speed of the expansion in Germany slows (January 2008), record numbers of employees are still being added to the labour force.
In order to try to carry out a quantitative comparison between countries the Lisbon Council defined human capital as the cost of formal and informal education - as expressed in euros - and multiplied this result by the number of people living in each country. They also adjusted their calculations to take account of ongoing demographic developments, provisioning for the loss of human capital due to declining workforces and shifting population patterns across the EU countries. What they found in their 2006 edition was as follows:
Some countries – notably Germany and Italy – are courting disaster by allowingtheir human capital to stagnate through high workforce exclusion andchronic underinvestment in education an training. Unless reversed, these trends will lead to a deterioration of human capital in those countries – countries which traditionally served as the engine of European economic success. That, in turn, will have devastating economic consequences for the citizens of those countries which can already be forecast today. For example, if current trends are not reversed, the citizens of Germany and Italy could find themselves with up to 50% lower gross domestic product per head (a standard measure of basic prosperity) than people in Sweden, Ireland or the United Kingdom by 2030 – an historic reversal of Europe’s traditional pattern of economic distribution, brought on in no small part by the poverty of contemporary policies towards human capital in those countries.
In fact Sweden topped the European Human Capital Index in 2006, while Germany and the Mediterranean countries marked the bottom (Germany was in tenth place out of thirteen, just above Portugal, Spain and Italy, in that order). Indeed the study found that high-skill immigrants tend to go to countries that are prosperous and offer attractive job opportunities.
As growth and wealth diverge, highly-skilled citizens from stagnating economies are unlikely to merely watch their standard of living decline relative to their European neighbours. German doctors working in the Nordic economies, or London’s pull on financial-service workers, are examples of a phenomenon that is likely to become more widespread – with ultimately negative consequences for countries that are unable to attract and retain their best and brightest workers. This migration of highly-skilled labour will amplify economic divergence, reducing economic growth further in the economies at the bottom of the table and enhancing the position of those at the top.
Human Capital Utilization
The Lisbon Council also found significant divergence in degrees of human capital utilisation across the European Union, with levels varying from those encountered in Italy - where a scoreof only 52% was registered - to the Netherlands - where the equivalent level was 64%. However they found that this gap had been reducing, since the spread had previously been even wider, with some countries at one point utilising only 40% of their available human capital.
They found that, over the last two decades, Human Capital Utilisation across the EU had risen to 58%, up from the earlier average of 50%. During that time, three countries were found to have exhibited particularly stellar performances, rising from the bottom all the way to the top – the Netherlands, Spain and Ireland.
At the other extreme the worst performer was found to have been Germany, where they found that Human Capital Utilisation had actually fallen or stagnated. As shown in the charts above, as populations more and more human capital is vested in the over 60s. If current retirement patterns do not change, the average level of German Human Capital Utilisation will fall to 52% by 2030 based on current demographic trends. If this happens, it will roll back and reverse all of the achievements in effective Human Capital Utilisation made over the last 20 years. This is why what is happening in Germany's labour market at the present time is so important.
And the point is that retirement patterns are changing, and more and more people over 60 are going to work - in Germany, Japan and Italy - but the kinds of jobs they are doing are generally ones with a much lower value content than those they did when they were under 55, and this is what is being reflected in the very weak upward movement in aggregate wages and salaries in these countries of late.
The employment rate of older workers (as shown in the chart above) is calculated by dividing the number of persons aged 55 to 64 in employment by the total population of the same age group. This age - while still not especially high for Germany - has been rising steadily of late, as has the average age of exit from the labour force (see chart below).
The magnitude of the demographic trends we are looking at varies greatly from one country to another across Europe. France, Ireland and Sweden, for example, have been able to maintain their birth rates around or near to replacement levels. In Germany and Italy, on the other hand, fertility has been unable to break out of the 1.3 tfr zone, and has been at very low leves for decades now, hence all the available alarm bells should be ringing. If current employment and immigration patterns continue, the thirteen countries analyzed in the European Human Capital Index will lose 12.4 million employees by the year 2030, a loss of close to 8% of the workforce. Of these, Germany will lose 5.2 million and Italy 3.5 million employees, jointly accounting for an incredible 70% of the total European drop. In Germany, the shortfall will be equivalent to about six age cohorts that should be working instead of retiring – or in other words the average effective retirement age would have to move to 66 by 2030, up from 60 today, in order to neutralize the demographic change. In Italy the shortfall is closer to seven age cohorts, and the effective retirementage would have to rise to 68 in 2030, up from 61 today.
But of course even as the proportion of people over 60 is going up, what we are seeing is that the economic value of their contribution is going down. So the very big question is really why this is happening? Why is Germany's human capital so evidently in jeopardy, just at the time when the German economy appears to be performing so exceptionally well in terms of new job creation. And in particular why is it that Germany is producing so many low-skill jobs at just the time when skill shortages in the higher value work seem to be presenting themselves on an ever increasing basis.
And again all of this takes on some importance in the context of the present debate about the dangers of wage push inflation as Germany's labour market tightens. If we look at the chart for total wage costs, we can see these have been pretty weak over quite an extended period of time now.
But if we come to look at the path of total wages over the last 12 months we will find that one important reason why German wage costs have remained so flat even while unemployment has declined has been that total wage cost increases have been offset to some extent by a one-off reduction in non-wage costs, but this is coming to an end as we enter 2008, which is one reason why all the parties concerned are extremely nervous.
In December 2007 the Bitkom industry association - which includes industry "heavyweights" like Deutsche Telekom, Microsoft Germany and SAP - produced a report which argued that two-thirds of German high-tech firms consider that their operations are being hampered by a lack of IT experts.
Indeed, we are faced with the curious anomaly that even though some 3.8 million Germans remain unemployed, the country's recent growth spurt has left businesses unable to fill an estimated 600,000 vacancies, including many high-skilled jobs, according to research last year by the IW economic institute in Cologne. Among these missing skilled workers are some 48,000 engineers, whose absence the Institute estimates cost Germany last year about €3.5 billion in lost output.
Well part of the answer to our question is possibly to be found in some recent research carried out by the Munich-based economist Dalia Marin. In a paper entitled "Is Human Capital Losing from Outsourcing? Evidence for Austria and Poland", Marin and her colleagues argue that:
"multinational firms in Austria and Germany are outsourcing the most skill intensive activities to Eastern Europe taking advantage of cheap abundant skilled labor in Eastern Europe. We find that the firms’ outsourcing activities to Eastern Europe are a response to a human capital scarcity in Austria and Germany which has become particularly severe in the 1990s."
(see detailed link and full references at the foot of this post, together with details of other related material - including a link to the PhD thesis of Marin's student Alexander Raubold, on which much of the resulting research seems to be based).
Now this finding when I discovered it some months ago really rather surprised me, although perhaps, with hindsight it shouldn't have. I had imagined, like many others doubtless also do, that Germany and Austria were outsourcing primarily unskilled, or lower skilled work (this is, for example, the situation in Sweden, see the Becker et al paper referenced below). But then reflecting a little on simple economic theory, and taking on board the fact that both Austria and Germany are now suffering relative shortages of young people, and the huge differential in skilled wages which exist between East and West , then it may well make sound economic sense for German and Austrian companies to employ relatively more intensive quantities (in terms of labour-capital ratios) of relatively cheap skilled labour in the East, and this does seem to be what has been happening.
Corporations’ outsourcing of skill intensive firm activity to Eastern Europe has helped to ease the human capital crisis in both countries. We find that high skilled jobs transferred to Eastern Europe account for 10 percent of Germany’s and 48 percent of Austria’s supply of university graduates in the 1990s.
The Austrian number seems really enormous, the German one less so, but it is still important. In addition Marin produces data which shows that German affiliates in the accession countries were paying (prior to 2004) 17 percent of their German parent wages but had been able to increase their productivity to 60 percent of the parents’ productivity level. Simple mathematics therefore suggests that they were able to reduce the labor costs by some 70 odd percent relative to their parent-firm cost in Germany.
On examining the pattern of multinational investment and outsourcing across sectors Marin found that German investment was predominantly engaged in manufacturing activity in Eastern Europe (almost 60 percent of total investment), of which manufactured goods and machinery and transport are the most important sectors. She also found that some 90 percent of German investment in machinery and transport were outsourcing (rather than local market oriented) investments.
Marin then went on to look at the levels of skill intensity for outsourced work and asked just how skill intensive the activity undertaken by German affiliates in Eastern Europe actually was when compared to their parent firm activity in Germany. She used two indicators to measure the skill intensity of German affiliates in Eastern Europe:
a) the share of workers with a university or college degree and
b) the share of personnel engaged in R&D or engineering activities in the manufacturing and service sector.
The data she studied suggest that the high-skill ratios of affiliates (the number of university or college workers in percent of total affiliate workers) are 2 to 3 times as large as that of German parent firms in the Eastern Accession Countries. The share of university or college graduates among affiliate workers in Eastern Europe was found to vary between a high of 86 percent (Czech Republic) and low of 8 percent (Slovenia).
The most skill intensive activity was being undertaken by affiliates in the Czech Republic (with a skill share of 86 percent), and Slovakia (skill share of 40 percent). This compares with an average share of university or college graduates of German parent firms of 18 percent only. Thus, measured by the number of university and college graduates, German affiliates in Bulgaria were found to be 12 times as skill intensive than their German parent firms, and affiliates in the Czech Republic 5.5 times as skill intensive. Only affiliates in Hungary were found to have a skill share below that of German parent firms.
A similar picture emerged when she looked at the skill intensity of German affiliates as measured by the share of workers engaged in R&D and engineering. The R&D personnel ratios of affiliates in Eastern Europe ranged between 4.0 percent (Slovakia) and 27.8 percent (Croatia and Russia). This compared with an average R&D personnel share of 13.6 percent of German parent firms. Thus, German affiliates in the Czech Republic are 1.7 times as R&D intensive as their German parent firms.
These are striking and puzzling numbers. German and Austrian multinationals tend to outsource the most skill and R&D intensive activities to Eastern Europe. Why is this happening? Well according to Marin:
Economic theory guides us to look at the factor endowment of these countries for an answer. If countries outsource the most skill intensive activities to other countries, then these countries must be poorly endowed with skills relative to their trading partners.When Germany and Austria’s endowment with skills is compared to Eastern Europe.....we find.....the Baltic States, Russia, Hungary, and Bulgaria are the most skill rich countries as measured by the share of the labor force with a tertiary education level. Germany’s education level lies below the OECD average and roughly matches that of the accession countries average. In particular, Germany is less skill rich than the Baltic States, Russia, and Hungary. In this ranking of countries Austria turns out to be the most skill poor country.
In order to examine Marin's thesis a little for my own satisfaction I thought it might be interesting to examine the services trade balance situation in the EU 10 economies. As is relatively well known most of these economies run a much stronger position on their services trade than they do on their goods trade. In order to examine this I broke the EU 10 down into two groups. A first group - Poland, Hungary, Estonia, the Czech Republicand Slovenia, who as can be seen are all doing reasonably well (these are absolute not proortional values - millions of euros - so it is the slope not the level of the line that matters). Poland is doing particularly well, which must be seen as some sort of indication of the quality of the human capital which it still has available at this point (remember, many of these countries can themselves soon face the problems which Germany now faces due to demographic ageing as the reserves are steadily used up).
Then we have a second group - Slovakia, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria - which do far less well. Bulgaria - as Marin found - seems to have a lot of potential, but the data fluctuates cyclically, although the general ine is clearly up. Romania seems to do the worst, but none of the other three are particularly impressive. In general, of course, this data is far more interesting for what it reveals about the mid term underlying structural dynamics of the EU10, but it also does give an interesting picture of what is actually happening right now.
And especially when we come to look at the negative goods trade balance position of these countries (with the exception of Hungary - which now of course has an internal demand recession - and the Czech Republic).
Obviously, looking at the strong downward line for Romania, we have a clear warning of what is about to come in that country, but this is not our point of interest here. What we can see is that these countries are to some extent (given the importance of Germany in their overall trade) importing finished manufactured products from Germany and paying for these with service exports. This to a considerable extent reverses the normal trading dynamic between developed and emerging economies, and is why Marin described - in a cryptic reference to the tarde links between Mexico and the USA - what was happening as being Maquiladoras in reverse (Maquiladoras are affiliates of US multinationals in Mexico which specialize in the low skill intensive part of the value chain).
So what conclusions can we draw from all of this. Well arguably not the sort of standard ones you will find in the Economist or Bloomberg, or the Financial Times.
The data is the latest evidence that the German economy has proven resilient despite strong economic headwinds, defying the global financial market turbulences and credit squeeze, the sharp rise in the euro, rising raw materials and energy prices, and the marked US slowdown.
Conclusion, Have We Been Here Before?
To close, a few more charts. We can see from the most recent export y-o-y chart that export growth is now slowing significantly (see below), and that we are now entering the downward phase of the whole cycle.
We have, of course, been here before, after the collapse of the internet boom, so it may be worth reminding ourselves at this point what ectually happened last time round, ie the last time the acceleration in the Y-o-Y growth rates in German exports effectively stalled. That was back in early 2000, as we can see from the chart below. And what happened at that next? Well the fed was easing as the US entered recession, and the euro was to some extent rising, both of which put a strong break on German exports. And after export growth collapsed, German GDP growth wasn't far behind. So it isn't the rise in the currency alone that matters, you have to think about the whole environment which produces it. Why your currency is rising, while someone else's is falling. And of course, in German export terms, after the rise comes the fall. This is the cost of not being able to depend on your own internal demand, you have to depend on someone else's demand.
Secondly, we should also think about what happens to employment creation and unemployment as GDP growth stalls. The chart below offers a comparison of movements in the two main unemployment indicators for Germany - the ILO comparable one, and the national German one - from the early 1990s to date. As can be seen the stall in GDP growth produced the rapid rise in umeployment after the summer of 2000, as win-win became lose-lose. I don't see why the picture shoud be that different this time round. The ageing population component in the slowdown will - if anything - be worse this time (the median age is higher). The labour market arguments are outlined in much more depth in this post.
Two Documents I have found particularly useful in preparing this post are:
Revision of the monthly harmonised unemployment figures for Germany, Eurostat, European Commission, 2007.
Hartz IV – The German “Word of the Year 2004” and the Country’s Hope to overcome its Problem of Unemployment, Tim Lohse, University of Hanover Discussion Paper, February 2005.
The Wikipedia entry on The Hartz Concept is also reasonably informative.
The Federal Statistics Office page on the ILO Methodology
ILO Seasonally Adjusted Unemployment Statistics as presented by the Federal Labour Office.
Some explanation of the ILO methodology implications According to the can also be found from the Federal Statistics Bureau here.
What Explains Germany’s Rebounding Export Market Share?
Stephan Danninger and Fred Joutz
IMF working paper WP/07/24
Overall Development in Foreign Trade 1950 - 2006. German Statistical Office.
Order of Rank of Germany's Trading Partners. German Statistical Office.
German exports in April 2007: +13.1% on April 2006,German Statistical Office, 8 June, 2007.
Labour costs in the first quarter of 2007 and in an EU-comparison for 2006, German Statistical Office, 8 June, 2007.
Is Human Capital Losing from Outsourcing? Evidence for Austria and Poland
Andzelika Lorentowicz,Dalia Marin, Alexander Raubold: University of Munich, Department of Economics, Discusion Paper
A New International Division of Labor in Europe: Outsourcing and Offshoring to Eastern Europe Dalia Marin GESY Discussion Paper 80, September 2005
Impacts of outsourcing on Germany and Austria's human capital, Alexander Raubold. Phd Thesis. Munich.
‘A Nation of Poets and Thinkers’ - Less So with Eastern Enlargement? Austria and Germany, Delia Marin, University of Munich, Department of Economics, Discussion Paper 2004-06.
Location Choice and Employment Decisions: A Comparison of German and Swedish Multinationals
Sascha O. Becker and Karolina Ekholm, Working Paper August 2005 | {
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Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Anderson, IN, US
Versatile and prolific, the American writer Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, was born Phyllis Dean Reynolds in Anderson, Indiana. She is best known for her books for children and young adults. Her most famous is the novel Shiloh (1991; film, 1996), which won the Newbery Medal. The two sequels are Shiloh Season (1996; film, 1999) and Saving Shiloh (1997; film, 2006). Since the appearance of the story collection The Galloping Goat (1965) and the children's novel What the Gulls Were Singing (1967), Naylor has published more than 120 books; among them are the Bessledorf comic mysteries for children (The Mad Gasser of Bessledorf Street, 1983), two gothic Witch trilogies (Witch's Sister, 1975; The Witch Returns, 1992), and the York trilogy (Shadows on the Wall, 1980), about a teenage time-traveler seeking a cure for Huntington disease. Her most popular series has followed Alice McKinley, a motherless girl, from sixth grade in The Agony of Alice (1985) to her high school years in Alice on Her Way (2006); there are more than 15 books in the series.
Calling Naylor a craftsmanlike writer with a distinctive voice, critics appreciate her ability to create believable, appealing young adults dealing with such serious issues as death (A String of Chances, 1982), mental illness (The Keeper, 1986), and right-wing militia movements (Walker's Crossing, 1999). Other popular books include Night Cry (1984) and Bernie Magruder and the Bats in the Belfry (2004). Also notable are the children's comedy Beetles, Lightly Toasted (1987); and the picture book Please Do Feed the Bears (2002).
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U.S. drug regulators approved another new weight-loss pill July 17. It's the second approval in the last month, and may be the more effective of the two. Together, they are the first new prescription weight-loss drugs in the last 13 years. The newest drug, called Qsymia, is made by Vivus Inc. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the first approval in late June. That drug, Belviq, is made by Arena Pharmaceuticals. Qsymia is a combination of 2 drugs already on the market. Phentermine suppresses the appetite. Topirimate makes people feel satisfied and full longer. In the 1990s, doctors often prescribed phentermine along with a different drug, fenfluramine, for weight loss. But in 1997 the combination was linked to heart-valve problems. Fenfluramine was withdrawn from the market. The FDA is requiring further safety testing of Qsymia after approval. In prior studies, people who took the drug for a year lost 7% to 9% of their body weight. That's about double the 3% to 3.9% lost in studies of Belviq. The Associated Press wrote about the FDA decision.
By Mary Pickett, M.D.
Harvard Medical School
What Is the Doctor's Reaction?
In the last month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved two new weight-loss drugs. Neither one is a miracle cure.
The FDA had earlier rejected Belviq because it caused tumors in animals. In June, it was approved. However, it won't be available for another half year while the FDA considers what restrictions it will place on the drug. At high doses, it causes hallucinations, like the street drug LSD. There is concern that it may be used like a drug of abuse.
The other drug, Qsymia, was approved this week. This pill combines two drugs that are already on the market, phentermine and topiramate (Topamax). Last year the FDA said it would not approve Qsymia because there was "no long-term safety information." This year, with two years of safety data instead of one year, the FDA has given approval.
But how long do you need to take this drug? For that matter, how long do you need to take Belviq? If you choose either of these new drugs, you are supposed to take them "forever." If you don't, the small amount of weight they help you to lose will come back. Qsymia will be available only through a restricted program. The program must ensure that women taking this drug are using reliable birth control because Qsymia can cause birth defects.
There is no good drug on the market that can help people lose weight.
First, we can take over-the-counter drugs off your list. These include dietary supplements and pills that suppress your appetite. They don't have a strong effect on weight loss, but they cause side effects.
Prescription weight-loss drugs do get some results, but every one of them has drawbacks.
Weight loss figures listed below are compared with a group that took placebo (fake) pills. People in the studies also made diet and exercise changes. The available drugs are:
- Belviq (lorcaserin)
- Weight loss: Half of the people who use this drug lose 5% of body weight, if they are obese to begin with. Half lose less weight than this. Hardly anyone loses more than 5%. People with diabetes lose less weight with this drug.
- Side effects: depression, migraine, memory lapses, lack of focus, low blood sugar reactions, fatigue and (in men) painful erections that last for many hours and may require emergency room treatment
- Qsymia (phentermine plus topamax)
- Weight loss: an average of 15 extra pounds lost in the first year
- Side effects: memory loss, suicidal feelings, heart rhythm problems and birth defects.
- Adipex or Ionamin (phentermine)
- Weight loss: an extra 2 to 13 pounds after 1 to 4 years
- Side effects: rapid heartbeat, high blood pressure, restlessness, anxiety and diarrhea.
- Xenical or Alli (orlistat)
- Weight loss: an extra 6 pounds after 1 to 4 years
- Side effects: oily stool, grease spots on underwear and uncomfortable urges to have a bowel movement in up to 1 out of 3 people who take it. Orlistat also may decrease the absorption of vitamins from food.
- Acomplia (rimonabant) (available in some European countries)
- Weight loss: an extra 10 pounds after 1 to 4 years
- Side effects: depression, anxiety or insomnia in up to 1 out of 4 users. Rimonabant increases suicide risk.
Meridia (sibutramine) was withdrawn from the market in 2010. Studies showed its long-term use caused heart attacks and strokes.
The new drugs may cost more than $1,000 a year. Cost is one reason that a lot of users don't stick with weight-loss medicines. Fewer than 10% of people stay with orlistat for at least a year. Fewer than 2% of people stay with any weight-loss drug for 2 years.
What Changes Can I Make Now?
As old-fashioned as it sounds, diet and exercise are still the best way to lose weight.
- Exercise regularly.
- Reduce portion sizes.
- Choose lower-calorie foods, and make sure they are nutritious.
- Increase your fruits and vegetables. These should take up half your plate.
- Eliminate "junk foods."
- Reduce sugars in your diet. Drink no sodas.
- Eat regular meals and don't skip meals.
- Get enough sleep. This aids weight loss.
For the right person, obesity surgery can be a successful treatment. I rarely recommend weight-loss surgery. It is not an easy way out of obesity. Complications and side effects are common.
Overall, surgery has more benefits than risks for young people with extreme obesity a body mass index (BMI) of 45 or higher. A woman in her early 40s who has a BMI of 45 could add 2½ to 3 years to her life expectancy by having surgery. For older patients and for men, the benefit is smaller.
What Can I Expect Looking to the Future?
Losing weight is hard work. If a company ever invented a drug for weight loss that is both safe and effective, we would be in "Fat City." So are we there yet?
In a word, no. If a drug is our answer to obesity, researchers are going to have to keep working on it. | {
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Cheers and Jeers: Feb. 2, 2013
Published: Saturday, February 2, 2013 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, February 2, 2013 at 1:18 a.m.
Getting the call – Tommy Hodson is considered one of the greatest quarterbacks to have ever donned the green and gold of the Central Lafourche High School Trojans and the purple and gold of the LSU Tigers.
During his playing days, Hodson led the Trojans to the Class 4A state semifinals and helped rewrite the LSU and Southeastern Conference record books.
Those accomplishments helped guide Hodson to one of the greatest honors bestowed upon athletes who have either called Louisiana home or have played in the Bayou State. Hodson will be taking his rightful place in the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame.
Hodson is part of a nine-member class that includes NBA All-Star Shaquille O’Neal, tennis great Chanda Rubin and eight-time NFL Pro Bowler Kevin Mawae. The 2013 induction class will be enshrined June 29 in Natchitoches to culminate the June 27-29 Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame Induction Celebration.
With Hodson’s addition, there will be nine athletes with ties to the area in the Hall of Fame.
Skating forward — “We’re entering the building phase. The train is out of the station, it’s moving, and we are going to go ahead and get this thing constructed as soon as they can get it agreed to.”
That was the assessment of Terrebonne Parish President Michel Claudet of the status of Houma’s skate park.
Fireman’s Skate and Bike Park will be an enduring legacy of longtime Bayou Cane Fire Chief Jerry Gautreaux who left in his will $10,000 to get the project going — as long as it would not be named after him.
And going it is. The time is quickly approaching when the young folks will have another outdoors option, and that is the best news of all.
In a nation and region as given to obesity and all the health problems associated with it, we need to be encouraging activity, not stifling it. Because of safety concerns, though, bikes and skateboards just aren’t appropriate everywhere.
Thanks to Gautreaux, the Terrebonne Parish government and the many dedicated residents who have not given up on this project, they will have a good, safe place for their activities. If all goes as planned, it should be ready by the end of the year.
Tax assistance — It is that time of year, the time between when workers get their income tax forms from their employers and when they get their tax returns filed.
This needn’t be an anxiety-filled time, though. There is help for many of those who might need it.
If you can afford to take your taxes to a professional, do it. If you feel comfortable filling out the forms yourself, do that as well.
But if you meet some income criteria and need some help with your taxes, you might just have to go to the library.
Catholic Charities is offering help for low-income local residents through the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program.
“We saw a need for it and thought it would be very valuable. It allows us to help residents save the $200 or $300 they would otherwise have to spend,” said Jennifer Gaudet, associate director of individual and family assistance for Catholic Charities Houma-Thibodaux. For information, call Catholic Charities at 876-0490.
Family fun — Carnival festivities in New Orleans have a bawdy reputation for irreverence and indulgence.
Closer to home, our parades tend to be more family-friendly. But there are options for people who want to enjoy the sights and sounds of the parades without being around any alcohol and tobacco use. For those, there are the alcohol-free zones being sponsored in Houma by the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Council for South Louisiana and in Thibodaux by the city, the Lafourche School Board, the mayor’s office and the Bayou Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse.
In Houma, the zone will be at the Good Earth Transit Depot, 7617 Main St. In Thibodaux, the zones will be on East Seventh Street from East Thibodaux Middle to Thibodaux Elementary, and in Chiasson Park at Jackson and West 10th streets.
However you choose to enjoy the parades, there are good options right here in Houma and Thibodaux.
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged. | {
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The Bald Truth
Before he ever threw a big-league pitch, Mark Prior was heralded as a once-in-a-generation talent. He had the size, the demeanor, the poise, the mound presence, the intelligence, the command and the maturity of legend. And oh, did he ever have the stuff.
His mechanics? Perfect. One expert after another said that with his mechanics, he'd never get hurt.
When the Twins passed on him to draft their hometown boy, Joe Mauer, they were ridiculed for being stupid, cheap or both. (I guess now is as good a time as any to say their decision has turned out OK.)
The Cubs gave Prior such a huge signing bonus after they selected him in 2001 - $10.5 million - that it's still a record today.
Think about that. Think about how salaries in sports - baseball especially - have escalated. And yet this guy's bonus of eight years ago remains the gold standard.
The first time Mark Prior pitched for the Cubs, it was obvious he had "it" - that special something separating the superstars from everybody else.
Fans had such high expectations for him that I took to calling him Messiah Mark. Some ripped me for "making fun" of Prior, but the more observant readers realized I was poking fun at the worshippers, not the faux deity. (Besides, I liked how Messiah Mark Prior sounded. Kinda rolls off the tongue, no?)
He went 18-6 in 2003, his first full year in the majors. In the second half of that season, he was 10-1 with a 1.52 ERA. He was simply the best pitcher in the world, A SURE THING.
Prior continued to shine in the postseason and was only five outs away from a shutout victory that would have vaulted the Cubs into their first World Series in six decades. Though he, like his teammates and manager, choked away that game, his potential obviously was limitless.
More than a few surveys of GMs, managers, scouts and sportswriters concluded that, after old-timers Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson and Tom Glavine reached the 300-win plateau, it wouldn't happen again until Prior got to 300 some 15 or so years down the line.
Then came the injuries. One after another after another.
As the injuries piled up, experts began blaming flaws in his pitching mechanics for his plight. Some were the same experts who just a few years earlier had said his mechanics were perfect.
Many fans who once worshipped Messiah Mark suddenly were all over him. Baseball people, including some in the Cubs organization, were calling him a wimp.
He didn't know the difference between soreness and injury, they said. He had a low pain threshold. He was too selfish, too worried about his next contract, to man up.
What a wuss!
I wasn't Prior's friend or fan - that's not my job - but I did feel sorry for him, and I said so in several columns back then.
I didn't feel that way because of his ailments. After all, injuries are part of sports. And certainly not because the money train had stopped pulling into his depot. With the millions he made, he should be set for life.
No, I felt sorry for him because total strangers were questioning his integrity, passion, manhood and will to compete. These idiots somehow felt qualified to look into his brain and his heart. It wasn't until the surgeries began that people finally acknowledged: "Hey, you know what? This guy actually might be hurt."
As it turns out, he threw his final big-league pitch in 2006. The Cubs let him go a year later. The Padres signed him. More surgery followed. Last week, Prior was cut loose.
He is a 28-year-old has-been.
Although it has anything but a happy ending, his is among the most interesting stories of recent times. The cautionary tale to end all cautionary tales.
Whenever some young gun is compared to the all-time greats, I always think of Mark Prior.
And whenever a team drafts the next Can't Miss Kid, I say: "Hey, if Messiah Mark can miss, anybody can."
The Balder Truth
Pirates rookie Andrew McCutchen was so incredible Saturday - 4 hits, 4 runs, 3 HRs, 6 RBI - that he was honored as Future Red Sox Or Future Cub Of The Day.
THE BALDEST TRUTH
I promise. I'll never capitalize the "w" in Dewayne again.
The White Sox media guide lists the now-famous Perfect Game Preserver as DeWayne Wise. So do the lineup sheets and press notes that the team publishes on game days. But Wise says he wants the "w" lower-cased.
His wish is my command: Dewayne Wise, it is.
By the way, I really would have been impressed had Wise preserved a perfect game for Mark Buehrle on Sunday against the Yankees. Considering that Buehrle allowed seven runs on 12 hits in 4 1/3 innings, the Sox would have needed about 14 Dewaynes on the field (and maybe a couple on the other side of the outfield wall).
You know, there's only one word to describe this latest Buehrle performance: aWful. | {
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River Ranch Fresh Foods has issued a recall of retail and food service bagged salads because of a possible Listeria monocytogenes contamination.
The Food and Drug Administration announced Saturday that the recall applies to salad products distributed nationwide. Various sizes and packages sold throughout the United States and Canada are under the recall.
The recalled retail salad bags were packaged under the brand names of River Ranch, Farm Stand, Hy-Vee, Shurfresh and The Farmer’s Market. Food service salad products were also packaged in various sizes and under the brand names of River Ranch and Sysco.
The bagged salads have best-by dates between May 12, 2012 and May 29, 2012. The best-by code can usually be found in the upper right hand corner of the bag.
The Salinas, Calif. company expanded this voluntary recall because of the possible health risk. The FDA states there have been no reported illnesses associated with this recall.
Listeria monocytogenes is an organism which can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and others with weakened immune systems.
Read here for the FDA’s list of specific information regarding the recalled salad bags.
Consumers who have purchased this product should not consume it and are urged to return it to the place of purchase for a full refund. Consumers with questions can contact River Ranch at their 24-hour customer service center at 1-888-624-2569. | {
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Warren Buffett's Secret Millionaires Club "Grow Your Own Business Challenge" Announces Finalists! Almost 4,000 Kids From Across the Country Competed for a Chance to Present Their Ideas to Warren Buffett!
NEW YORK, April 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- As part of the NYSE celebration of Financial Capabilities Week, last years' Secret Millionaires Club 'Grow Your Own Business Challenge' Grand Prize Winner, Aria Eppinger helped ring the closing bell at the NYSE and announced this year's Finalists. Almost 4,000 kids ages 7 to 16 entered their creative business ideas to the competition for a chance to win the grand prize of $5,000 and an opportunity to present their ideas to Warren Buffett.
The Secret Millionaires Club is an animated series created by A2 Entertainment airing on The HUB Network and with online webisodes, featuring the voice of Warren Buffett as a mentor to a group of kids as they learn important financial and entrepreneurial lessons.
The "Grow Your Own Business Challenge" is a part of the Secret Millionaires Club Learn and Earn financial literacy promotion which is sponsored by the Fairholme Foundation and reaches over 100,000 classrooms with tools and lessons for teaching good financial habits to youth. By Kids For Kids Co (BKFK) administered the challenge and CEO/Founder, Norm Goldstein joined Aria on the podium at the NYSE for the bell ringing. The program is a national online competition that ran from December 5, 2012 to February 15, 2013. Five individuals and three team finalists will be flown to Omaha, NE in May to present their winning ideas to Mr. Buffett and a panel of VIP judges. One Grand Prize individual and one Grand Prize team will each be awarded $5,000. The runners up will each receive $500. Each of the finalist teams and individuals will be able to nominate a teacher or mentor who was most inspirational to join them in Omaha.
Following are the Secret Millionaires Club "Grow Your Own Business Challenge" finalists:
Max, 16 - Natick, MA
Business Idea: Bedbug Exposing Device (BBED)
Krissa, 11 – Savage, MD
Business Idea: Cupcakes for Literacy
Fabian, 15 - Conroe, TX
Business Idea: H2O Saltwater to Freshwater as You Pedal
Alexis, 16 – Colts Neck, NJ
Business Idea: PAPA (Pool Accident Prevention Association)
Matthew, 9 – Cincinnati, OH
Business Idea: Right-Writer
Business Idea: Food & Family = F2
Molly, 13 - Willoughby Hills, OH
Michael, 13 - Willoughby, OH
Charles, 12 - Kirtland, OH
Austin, 13 - Painesville, OH
Business Idea: Kidtreprenuer Kits
Sawyer, 10 - Liberty, KY
Kennedy, 13 - Lexington, KY
Spencer, 16 - Lexington, KY
Business Idea: WiNWiN Products
Clarissa, 10 - Seattle, WA
Esai, 10 - Seattle, WA
"These kids truly embody the American spirit," says Andy Heyward, co-president A2 Entertainment. "We received so many original and smart ideas. It is amazing to see how inspired kids are by the program. We are looking forward to hearing their presentations to Mr. Buffett in Omaha."
Beginning May 6 and running through May 13, you can help choose the "Grow Your Own Business Challenge" winners by voting for their favorite idea at: www.smckids.com/vote.
For more information, visit www.smckids.com
Secret Millionaires Club Copyright © 2011 A Squared Entertainment
About A Squared Entertainment LLC
A Squared Entertainment (A2) creates, produces, acquires and distributes digital kids' entertainment in all formats across all channels. Headquartered in Los Angeles, A2 is managed by Co-Presidents Andy Heyward and Amy Moynihan Heyward. Among current brands include, lessons in business with Warren Buffett in "Secret Millionaires Club", "Stan Lee and the Mighty Seven", the latest superhero creation from Stan Lee, and the brand management and licensing for Build-a-Bear Workshop.
About Fairholme Foundation
The Fairholme Foundation invests in under-valued paths to improving education. Our key: Ignore the crowd by circumventing long-standing roadblocks to progress. The Foundation is a 501(c)3 organization solely funded by Fairholme Capital Management and its affiliates.
About By Kids For Kids
By Kids for Kids® (BKFK®) is a platform that empowers youth invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. BKFK promotes youth social innovation and partners with leading corporations to inspire product development, crucial technology skills, invention, and innovation in young people from 8 to 22. BKFK provides a unique platform for young people to develop, showcase, and commercialize their products, inventions and entrepreneurship. BKFK's "cycle of innovation" develops critical 21st Century skills in our nation's youth. The company provides educational resources — curriculum and challenges that promote social change, product development and entrepreneurial endeavors. Learn more: www.bkfk.com.
For BKFK: Judy Klym | 203-921-9039 | [email protected]
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Fall 2015: Majors Course Descriptions
English 107: Introduction to Literary Studies I
Dr. Matthew Cella | MWR 9:00 - 9:50 AND MWF 10:00 - 10:50
English 111: Introduction to Literary Studies II
Dr. Richard Zumkhawala-Cook |TR 11:00-:5
English 233: American Literature I
STAFF | TR 9:30 - 10:45
English 234: American Literature II
Dr. Michael Bibby | MW 2:00 - 3:15
English 236: British Literature I
Dr. Shari Horner | MWF 2:00 - 3:15
English 237: British Literature II
Dr. Mary Libertin | TR 5:00 - 6:15
We will read and study literature from 1789 to today in all genres—plays, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. We will explore the cultural contexts to find out how each work is informed by industrialism, abolition, women’s rights, philosophy and science. Pragmatism, or Peircean semiotics, will be used as methodology.
You will write one short and one long essay and take two objective tests, on the Romantic and the Victorian periods respectively. We will use The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, 9th ed.
Your grade will be based on:
English 238: Technical/Professional Writing I Dr. Carla Kungl
- 10% -- quizzes or journals
- 20% -- an identification exam on the Romantic period
- 20% -- an identification exam on the Victorian period
- 20% -- a short essay (1500 words analyzing a modernist element in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway)
- 30% -- a longer essay at the end of the course (2500 words analyzing the evolutionary style and the learning process in James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man.
You are expected to attend and participate in class. Feel free to email me at [email protected] for more information.
| TR 12:30 - 1:45
You know what? Descriptions of technical writing classes can be sound really boring: you'll write memos, business letters, a status report, and a resume; you learn how to write formal, research-based documents; how to work collaboratively to finish a project; how to design documents using technical writing conventions and paying attention to audience and purpose. Nothing too exciting, right?
But the truth is, you'll learn more about the intricacies of being a good writer than you could have imagined. Technical writing is all about conciseness, precision, clarity, and meeting the needs of an audience. Thus, regardless of your major, if you want practice in these skills, this is the writing class for you.
Another plus: because this course is required for the Technical/Professional Communications Minor, it fills up fast with students from many different majors. You'll learn a lot from interacting with other students who have such a variety of interests, career goals, and writing backgrounds.
Text: Markel, Mike. Technical Communication. 10th ed. Bedford/St. Martins, 2013.
English 240: World Literature
Introduction to Modern World Dramatic Literature—Realism and After
Dr. Tom Crochunis | MW 2:00 - 3:15
In this course, we will read plays first performed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on realism’s emergence as a strategy in Western drama, on varied ways of adapting realistic dramaturgy in relationship to other cultural traditions, and on the intellectual and cultural sources that lead dramatists to extend beyond realism. Students in the class need not begin the course with an extensive background in reading drama. Plays read for the course will include works by European, Asian, African, and North and South American writers that either define or serve to extend the strategies of theatrical realism. We will engage with the course’s plays through careful reading, viewing, discussion, writing, and in some cases performing or theatrically envisioning scenes. Major course assignments will include two short (4-6 page) papers engaging with individual plays and their critical reception, regular short in-class writing assignments, and one longer comparative study and presentation that connects a play read for the course to other plays that preceded or followed it.
English 243: Art of the Film
Dr. Michael Pressler | M 12:00-12:50, W 12:00-1:50, F 12:00-12:50
English 245: Women's Literature
Dr . Laurie Cella | TR 9:30 - 10:45
Education 290: Introduction to English Language Arts
Dr. Erica Galioto | TR 8:00 - 9:15
This course offers Secondary English certification students their foundation in English/Language Arts education. As the first of three pedagogy courses, Introduction to ELA Education provides students with necessary background on the teaching profession and the fundamentals of educational and adolescent psychology and then moves to a more specific focus on the secondary ELA classroom. Students will be introduced to the philosophical beliefs and practical realities of American education (with a special focus on middle and high schools), the array of learning and development theories that inform effective educators, and the range of effective literacy practices involved in ELA teaching and learning at the secondary level. Curriculum, student diversity, assessment, technology, differentiation, and classroom management are some of the topics that will be explored both generally and then with an ELA focus as students work toward becoming reflective collaborative decision-makers. Readings, assignments, and practical demonstrations will provide students with an opportunity to engage with theory and research that will be relevant to their future coursework and eventual middle and high school ELA classrooms. Our primary concern will be the joining of theory about teaching and learning with the practical methods of implementing such theory in a secondary classroom. This course is a prerequisite for ENG-426: Teaching Adolescent Literature and EDU-422: Teaching English in the Secondary Schools.
English 304: Literary Criticism
Dr. William Harris | TR 5:00 - 6:15
English 308: Poetry Writing
Dr. Nicole Santalucia | TR 2:00 - 3:15
English 308: Fiction Writing
Prof. Neil Connelly | MWF 12:00 - 12:50
During the first half of the semester, students will be introduced to key concepts of narrative through lectures, readings, and sometimes unusual exercises. All of this will lead toward the creation of an original literary short story. The second half of the semester is dedicated to workshopping these pieces, with each student having a day dedicated to his/her fiction. No prerequisite save the desire to write compelling stories.
English 330: Shakespeare
Dr. Deborah Montuori | TR 11:00 - 12:15
English 335: Creative Nonfiction Writing
Dr. Kim Van Alkemade | TR 5:00 - 6:45
English 336: Theories and Approaches
Dr. Shannon Mortimore-Smith | W 6:30 - 9:15
English 358: Ethnic Literature
Dr. Raymond Janifer TR 12:30 - 1:45
English 376: Studies in Medieval Literature
Dr. Shari Horner | MWF 11:00 - 12:15
English 378: Studies in Early American Literature
Dr. William Harris | TR 2:00 - 3:15
English 380: Studies in 19th Century British Literature
Dr: Catherine Dibello - TR 11:00 - 12:15
Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed an extraordinary increase in the number of women writers. While some of these women achieved great commercial success, many also faced hostile critics who either dismissed their work as trivial or objected to their treatment of taboo topics and creation of unconventional heroines. In this course, we will analyze four novels by women (Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and George Eliot's Middlemarch) and read secondary sources in which nineteenth-century and more recent critics respond to these books. This student-centered course emphasizes discussion and includes a paper, an annotated bibliography, a final essay exam, and an oral report.
English 381: Studies in 19th Century American Literature Dr. Erica Galioto |TR 9:30 - 10:45
Duplicates, Dupes, and Deceptions: Unacknowledged Doubleness in the 19th Century will examine the concepts of identity, identification, and knowledge through their related presentation in nineteenth-century American fiction. Our central focus will be to analyze works of fiction through the lens of the following questions: How is identity formed? How do we communicate that identity to others? To what extent can we identify with another’s experience? Is reading an experience of easy identification? Is it ever possible to know the self or an other (whether actual or fictional) completely? How do we come to know anything at all? We will begin by studying double internal identity in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables (1851) and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). Next, we will analyze the external performance of identity in Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson (1894) and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1856). Finally, we will complicate the effectiveness of sentimentalism in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (18?). We will move from one canonical text to the other based on how each internally displays manifestations of flawed identification and externally disrupts the reader’s own sense of seamless identification. Students in this course will also be exposed to criticism and psychoanalytic theory related to the fiction and the concept of identification. Three papers and one presentation are required, as well as periodic written responses and active discussion.
Education 422: Methods of Teaching English in Secondary Schools Dr. Thomas Crochunis | W: 8-10:50 AM
“Methods” aims to prepare you for the experience of student teaching, and beyond that for the work of being an early career teacher. Our course will center on several essential questions:
* What does it mean to teach English in a contemporary American secondary school setting? What are the conceptual, practical, and personal dimensions of the job? How does one do it well?
* What roles does an effective teacher need to play to make the classroom, the school, and the community in which s/he teaches places where young people can learn what reading and writing have to teach them?
* What happens in classrooms and schools—educationally, socially, culturally? What can we learn from observing, investigating what we see and hear, and reading about issues in contemporary education?
* How do young people develop as readers and writers? What can teachers do to lead their students beyond the required skills they need to achieve to open their minds to the potential power of reading and writing in their lives?
Activities and projects we will engage in during the course include the following:
* Extended field observations and collaborations on teaching in varied school settings
* Research into a teaching approach that seems likely to be useful in your student teaching placement
* A series of planning assignments that lead to planning of a unit or set of extended learning sequences for your student teaching experience
* Regular collaboration with classroom and practitioner peers in planning, leading classroom experiences, and analyzing problems of English teaching practice
* In-depth reading and thinking about English teaching generally, writing development and teaching, and the interaction between standards, reading, and literature
NOTE: In order to take full advantage of the field experiences that are part of the Methods class, you are strongly advised to schedule as few classes as possible in the mornings (8-12) of your Methods semester.
English 426: Teaching Adolescent Literature Dr. Shannon Mortimore-Smith
| TR 12:30 - 1:45
English 428: Advanced Fiction Workshop
Prof. Neil Connelly - MWF 12:00 - 12:50
Open only to those who have successfully completed English 308, this course opens with a series of directed writing prompts but moves swiftly to workshop, when each student contributes his/her own fiction for the class's consideration. The class concludes with a week long discussion of publishing.
English 464: Seminar in Major Author
Dr. Cathy Dibello | TR 9:30 - 10:45
Although Jane Austen wrote her novels two centuries ago, they remain remarkably popular. In fact, the past twenty years have seen a dramatic increase in Austen's popularity, as evidenced by the many films and television adaptations, "sequels," and the new editions of the novels themselves. What explains Austen's enduring appeal? To answer this question, we will read five of Austen's novels and the critical articles in Jane Austen in Hollywood. In addition, we will watch clips from various video versions of Austen's books. As we analyze differences between the novels and the recent film adaptations, we will speculate about what these changes indicate about the nature of film and our own culture.
Required Texts: Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. Troost and Greenfield's Jane Austen in Hollywood (2nd ed.).
Required Activities: Analytical paper, annotated bibliography, oral report on an article, video presentation, daily work
English 490: Selected Topics in English
Dr. William Harris | TR 2:00 - 3:15 | {
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Week 11 NFL preview
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Buffalo Bills at Cincinnati Bengals
It's been a tough go for the T.O. and Ocho show of late, especially with quarterback Carson Palmer throwing easily pickable airballs to enemy defenses. But if Palmer can't get it to his No. 1 and No. 2 receivers against this defense, Marvin Lewis might want to consider benching Palmer for his younger brother, Jordan - the Bills rank 28th in Defensive DVOA against No. 1 and No. 2 receivers. One thing is for sure - the Bengals won't miss right tackle Andre Smith, who's been put on the shelf for the rest of the season with a foot injury, raising further questions about his ability to stay healthy and in shape. Smith gave up two sacks in just four starts this season.
Detroit Lions at Dallas Cowboys
Cowboys quarterback Jon Kitna had best be aware against the Lions' front four - he was able to hang in the pocket and burn the Giants deep in an upset win last week, but the Lions have the NFL's most quarterback hits this season (35), and they rank seventh in Football Outsiders' Adjusted Sack Rate metric. If you want to know why defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh is running away with the Defensive Rookie of the Year award, this is a good place to start. The Cowboys have allowed 33 hits this season, but just six in the three weeks that Kitna's been a starter in place of Tony Romo.
Washington Redskins at Tennessee Titans
The challenges don't get any easier for Redskins safety LaRon Landry after his debacle against the Eagles' deep passing game. As we've detailed before, the Titans' Vince Young has the best average pass length this season (11.87 yards per) and he's second behind Pittsburgh's Ben Roethlisberger in average pass length per completion (8.94). However, Young has just 11 "big plays" (completed passes of 25 yards or more), while NFL leader Philip Rivers has 32. Still, with a week of game tape of the Redskins' deep pass defense and Randy Moss in his arsenal, don't be surprised if Young airs it out to an extreme degree. If he doesn't, he can always hand off to Chris Johnson, who can make tracks against a Washington front seven that ranks 29th in Defensive Adjusted Line Yards.
Arizona Cardinals at Kansas City Chiefs
The Chiefs have experienced quite the little freefall after their hot start. In just the last two weeks, Todd Haley's team has dropped from first to 15th in Football Outsiders' DVOA rankings, and their chances of making the playoffs, based on advanced efficiency metrics, has dropped from 94.2 percent to 48.0 percent. Even Jamaal Charles, who's been one of the game's most efficient running backs, managed just 2.9 yards per carry in a 49-29 beat-down against the Denver Broncos. Perhaps the Chiefs should get Charles going more often in first down - despite having just 127 carries this year, Charles has 478 of his 760 yards on first down, and that comes in just 67 carries (a 7.6 yards-per-carry average). Charles is also a hot starter in the first quarter; in fact, his highest YPC totals and all of his touchdowns come on first-down, first-quarter situations.
Green Bay Packers at Minnesota Vikings
The Vikings currently have the NFL's worst giveaway/takeway ratio at -11, but that's not on running back Adrian Peterson. After fumbling four, nine, and six times in his first three regular seasons, Peterson hasn't fumbled once this season. The problem, obviously, resides with Brett Favre, who has thrown 16 picks through nine games after giving the ball away just seven times through the air in 2009. Add in his three fumbles, and you have to wonder how much good Favre is doing his team at this point. Green Bay's Aaron Rodgers has a team with a +6 balance on the turnover side (tied for fourth-best in the league), and he's right in line with just nine picks and no fumbles. Part of Favre's problem is that he's been hit in the pocket 34 times, the most among all NFL quarterbacks.
Houston Texans at New York Jets
One of the week's best matchups will be Houston's running game against the Jets' front seven. Rex Ryan's defense ranks first in Defensive Adjusted Line Yards, allowing just 3.3 running back yards per carry. Meanwhile, Houston's Arian Foster is the NFL's most efficient and productive runner on a cumulative and per-play basis, per our advanced numbers. Quarterback Matt Schaub has been dealing with knee injuries this week, which could put the Jets in more eight-in-the-box situations. However, with Darrelle Revis still recovering from injuries and a case of contractitis early this season, the Jets rank 15th in Defensive DVOA against No. 1 receivers, and 27th against No. 2 receivers.
Oakland Raiders at Pittsburgh Steelers
All of a sudden, we have to look at the Oakland Raiders and wonder if they could pop up and win a very weak AFC West. The offense is humming along rather nicely with Jason Campbell and Darren McFadden, and the defense is performing at a Top 10 level despite shutdown corner Nnamdi Asomugha being in and out of the lineup over the last month. On the other hand, if you have Raiders tight end Zach Miller in your fantasy lineup and Miller overcomes his recent foot injury, see if you can manage to start him twice - especially if cornerback William Gay is lined up over him. Last week against the Patriots, Gay was beaten outright on two of the three touchdowns caught by rookie tight end Rob Gronkowski, and he was slow to cover on the other one. Ben Roethlisberger's main problem will be pass protection; the Raiders bring their first-overall Adjusted Sack Rate against a patchwork offensive line that has looked awful in recent games.
Baltimore Ravens at Carolina Panthers
We know that Carolina's offense is nothing to worry about, especially with quarterback Brian St. Pierre and running back Mike Goodson as injury replacements, but it's time to give a few kudos to one underrated Panthers defender. Linebacker James Anderson, a third-round pick in 2006, currently leads all NFL defenders in Football Outsiders' Defeats metric (plays that prevent positive plays and short-yardage conversion), and he ranks third in Successes (based on conversion percentage and incompletions/interceptions) behind Pittsburgh's Lawrence Timmons and Tennessee's Stephen Tulloch.
Cleveland Browns at Jacksonville Jaguars
The Browns hear it a lot - they're the best 3-6 team in the NFL, and they're probably sick and tired of it. Moral victories don't get you very far. However, there's statistical proof that it is indeed so. The Browns currently rank 14th in overall efficiency, and their Estimated Wins total (a figure based on efficiency metrics) is 5.0. Meanwhile, the 5-4 Jaguars rank 22nd in team efficiency, and their Estimated Wins total is 3.9. Moral of the story: The won-loss total tells you where a team is in the standings, but it doesn't tell you where a team is going, how it got there, or how lucky/unlucky they are. Last week, the Jags won a game on the most improbable Hail Mary you'll ever see, and the Browns lost a game with just seconds left in overtime.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers at San Francisco 49ers
Every quarterback has his security blanket of a receiver. For Troy Smith, who has started the last two 49ers games, that man has been tight end DeLanie Walker. Often obscured by Vernon Davis as a pure pass-catcher, Walker has amassed nine catches for 165 yards in those last two games after picking up just seven passes for 65 yards with Alex Smith under center. The Bucs' defense is about league average against tight ends, ranking 16th in Defensive DVOA against that position.
Seattle Seahawks at New Orleans Saints
With Reggie Bush back in the Saints' lineup for the first time since Week 2, the Seahawks' defense finds itself in a bit of a poke. With Bush lining up all over the place, New Orleans' offense becomes much more multi-dimensional. Drew Brees has managed to keep the passing game afloat, but with Bush and Pierre Thomas out at various times with injuries, the Saints have had just three productive rushing days per FO's opponent-adjusted DVOA efficiency metrics. Seattle's run defense received a boost when defensive tackle Brandon Mebane returned from a calf injury last week, but Seattle's linebackers will be tested against this particular rushing attack, especially with Aaron Curry being used more as an edge rusher or blitz addition in certain packages.
Atlanta Falcons at St. Louis Rams
Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan will have to keep a sharp eye on Rams defensive end Chris Long (son of Howie). One week after demolishing 49ers right tackle Anthony Davis, Long will go up against right tackle Tyson Clabo, who's already allowed four sacks this season after giving up four all of last season. Long already has 5.5 sacks - add nine quarterback hits to that total, and it's clear that he's developed into one of the best pure pass-rushers in the league. He's had at least one sack in each of his last four games, and he's one of many reasons that the Rams' defense is surprising people this season.
Indianapolis Colts at New England Patriots
The Patriots' passing offense may be more conservative this season, with more two-tight end sets and Randy Moss out of the picture, but that doesn't mean it's more consistent in one particular area. With a litter of young receivers, Tom Brady has experienced the highest number of receiver drops in the league with 27. Colts quarterback Peyton Manning is undergoing a similar experience with a young group of receivers in his injury-plagued offense - Indianapolis ranks third in receiver drops behind the aforementioned Patriots and the Detroit Lions. The classic Patriots-Colts matchups of yore, with the two best quarterbacks on earth leading precision aerial attacks, may now come down to the short-yardage efforts of underrated running backs - the Colts' Javarris James (the cousin of former Indy great Edgerrin James), and New England's BenJarvus Green-Ellis.
NY Giants at Philadelphia Eagles
When facing the Michael Vick-led Eagles offense, one must look hard for signs of encouragement. Here's one: It seems that if you force the Eagles to run the ball, they're not very good at it after a while. Philly has the NFL's best yards per carry in rushing attempts 1-10 per game (5.8), but fall to 20th (3.8) on carries 11-20, and 29th (0.0) from 21 on. No mystery there - when the Eagles are trying to establish a lead, Vick's more likely to make a designed run, especially if his reads are covered, and he's run 10 times or more in just two games. Also, LeSean McCoy's per-carry average drops a full yard from 1-10 to 11-20 - from 5.0 to 4.0. So, hang in there, Giants ... perhaps slowing this offense down is just a matter of time?
Monday, November 22
Denver Broncos at San Diego Chargers
Mike Vick may have taken some of the steam out of Philip Rivers' MVP candidacy, but there's no denying the season Rivers is having. We already detailed his ability to make big plays with an undermanned receiver corps; he's also going to be a major problem for any defense at home, where he's completing over 72 percent of his throws. Of course, let's not sleep on Denver's Kyle Orton - right now, Orton ranks first overall in cumulative opponent-adjusted quarterback efficiency, and he ranks third in per-play production. Denver "superczar" Josh McDaniels has his faults as a personnel man, but he does know how to build offenses in which quarterbacks can succeed beyond their wildest dreams - remember that he was the man behind the Patriots' all-time 2007 passing game. | {
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Realtor Amanda DiVito Parle, a thirty-year-old Platinum Club and Hall of Fame member with RE/MAX Alliance in Arvada, has been awarded the Arvada Young Professionals (AYP) Leadership Award for her outstanding service and commitment to the Arvada Community.
A selection committee of 12 AYP members meets annually to review the year’s nominations and select the winners of this award. AYP selects ten leaders to receive this prestigious Leadership Award that have shown innovation, entrepreneurship, professional accomplishment, community leadership, and are under the age of 40.
“I feel very fortunate to be among this incredible group of young leaders in my community, a list I was very impressed with,” said Amanda. “It's an honor and I am humbled to be a part of AYP. I know so many young professionals that are working their tails off to make a name for themselves and to get ahead in these challenging economic times.”
Amanda is a second generation REALTOR® who believes that serving the real estate community is as important as serving her clients. “I am a lively, high-energy personality and love this path I have chosen. I am very proud to be a REALTOR® and a RE/MAX Alliance agent,” says Amanda. She is a highly educated Realtor with designations that include, ABR, CRS, CDPE, CLHMS, and SRES.
Amanda is dedicated to using her passion and energy to give back to the community. She currently serves as the Director for the Jefferson County Association of REALTORS and Colorado Young Professional Network (CYPN) Advisory Board Chair, which is an organization she helped co-found. Amanda was recently appointed to serve on the National Association of REALTORS (NAR) Strategic Planning Committee.
“I feel I have been very successful early in my career because of the principle of high integrity instilled by my father, mentor and business partner Joe,” she said. “He helped me realize my life's direction early in my career, which has set me on a straight and clear path to success. I am continually working really hard and do what I say I am going to do, which has gotten me a long way! I feel like when you're young and find a career that is your passion it's easy to set your goals high and strive to be the best.”
Amanda has volunteered for numerous community activities and projects. She continues her many years of volunteering at West Woods Elementary carnivals and other events. Amanda also facilitates events supporting Jefferson County’s Developmental Disabilities Resource Center. She recently added another year under her belt as a volunteer at Alice 105.9’s 36 Hours of Kids event to raise money for the Children’s Hospital. She is a continuous supporter and donor to Children’s Miracle Network. Each year, Amanda also participates in numerous fundraisers and toy drives to provide gifts to senior citizens and children.
Visit www.TheDiVitoDreamMakers.com or call 303-456-2111 for more information about Amanda DiVito Parle and the Denver real estate market she serves. | {
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A farmer reaps wheat in Pakistan, where prices for the crop have jumped 16 percent since June 2010.
The head of the World Bank says a sharp rise in food prices has pushed 44 million people into extreme poverty. World Bank President Robert Zoellick is calling on the Group of 20 leading and emerging economies to put food first on its agenda.
The World Bank's latest food price index is just three percent below its 2008 peak. Wheat and maize prices have gone up about 75 percent since last June. According to report, wheat increased 54 percent in Kyrgyzstan, 45 percent in Bangladesh, 37 percent in Tajikistan, 33 percent in Mongolia, 31 percent in Sri Lanka, 19 percent in Afghanistan and 16 percent in both Sudan and Pakistan.
According to Zoellick, high and volatile food prices are a key challenge in the developing world, where the most vulnerable people spend more than half their income on food.
"Even before these latest price hikes, there were already more than 900 million people going hungry each day," he says. "Now, with an estimated 44 million more people living in extreme poverty, it shows this year is shaping up to be a very tough year for the chronically malnourished."
This year is not as bad as 2008, when prices hit record highs. That's because grain stocks are somewhat larger, maize harvests in Africa were good, and rice prices have not risen as much as other grains. But Zoellick says the upcoming growing season will be especially important.
"We already are in stress points in a number of markets. If this trend continues, if we don't get a relief on the weather side, then I foresee conditions getting worse. And, mistaken policy actions such as export bans and other types of price controls will just exacerbate the problem."
Drought in the Black Sea region cut Russia's wheat harvest by a third in 2010. A subsequent ban on wheat exports drove prices up.
Last summer, Russia banned wheat exports after a major drought. Rice export bans were blamed for worsening price spikes in 2007 and 2008 that led to some food riots.
Speaking ahead of this week's G-20 finance ministers meeting in Paris, Zoellick discourages export bans and called for a global code of conduct that would at least exempt humanitarian shipments from restrictions.
He believes high and unstable prices are likely to be a long-term trend, in part because of the rising demand for biofuels and the growing appetite for meat in developing countries.
"What we're now seeing is a trend punctuated by some great volatility," says Zoellick, "and the poor and vulnerable have got no cushion when the prices spike."
To help offset the problem, he's calling for global action to provide better safety nets for pregnant women and young children and to improve developing-world farmers' access to better seeds, fertilizer and markets. | {
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“We decided to call this album Revelation because we want to make music that reveals something to people about their lives and their world,” says Jojo Garza. He’s talking about the new release by Los Lonely Boys, the close-knit Texas trio that the bassist/vocalist shares with his brothers Henry (vocals, guitar) and Ringo (drums, vocals). “As musicians and artists, we’re here to connect with people, and to share our view of things.”
Revelation — to be released on the band’s own LonelyTone imprint Jan. 21, 2014, in association with the respected Austin-based indie Playing in Traffic — is a landmark release for the siblings. While maintaining the infectiously melodic mix of bluesy rock ’n’ roll and rootsy brown-eyed soul that’s long endeared Los Lonely Boys to its fiercely loyal fan base, Revelation adds an expansive range of new sonic elements, e.g. the conjunto touches of “Blame It On Love,” the reggae groove of “Give A Little More,” the rustic acoustic textures of “It’s Just My Heart Talkin’ and the baroque pop elements of “There’s Always Tomorrow.”
“We’re always trying to broaden our horizons and advance musically, and that’s something that we were very conscious of in making this record,” Jojo states. “We’re always looking for new ways to communicate and reach people, so we experimented with a lot of different sounds and production approaches.”
Toward that end, the brothers also collaborated with an eclectic cast of co-writers in assembling the dozen new original songs that comprise Revelation, including alt-country icon Radney Foster, in-demand pop tunesmiths Matthew Gerrard and David Quiñones, Black-Eyed Peas collaborators George Pajon Jr. and Keith Harris, and Raul Pacheco of Ozomatli.
Revelation also marks Los Lonely Boys’ first recording work since Henry Garza sustained serious injuries in a fall from the stage during a February 2013 performance in Los Angeles, necessitating a lengthy and ongoing recovery period.
“We nearly lost Henry, man, and that was a big change for us,” Jojo acknowledges. “The whole experience was a wake-up call for us. It made us rethink every aspect of our lives and our careers, and it reminded us of what’s really important to us.”
The abiding sense of family unity and creative rapport that allowed the band to weather such a potentially devastating event has been built into Los Lonely Boys from the beginning. Indeed, Henry, Jojo and Ringo have been making music together for their entire lives. Their father, Ringo Garza Sr., was a member of another sibling band, the Falcones, which played throughout southern Texas in the ’70s and ’80s. When that group disbanded, Ringo Sr. went solo, and recruited his three young sons to back him. The family relocated to Nashville in the ’90s, and soon Henry, Jojo and Ringo Jr. began writing and performing their own material as a trio.
After moving back to Texas, the brothers recorded their eponymous debut album in 2003 at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales studio in Austin, with Willie himself guesting on the sessions. Although originally released on small Or Music label, Epic Records picked up Los Lonely Boys for major-label distribution in early 2004. The album quickly won the band a large national audience. Its lead single “Heaven” became a Top 20 pop hit, reached the #1 spot on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart, and eventually won a Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.
After a prominent guest appearance on the 2005 Santana album All That I Am, Los Lonely Boys solidified their success with 2006’s Sacred, which brought two more Grammy nominations, and 2008’s Forgiven, as well as the holiday-themed Christmas Spirit. Meanwhile, the band continued to build its reputation as a singularly powerful live act.
In early 2009, Los Lonely Boys made their LonelyTone/Playing in Traffic debut with the all-covers EP 1969, followed by the unplugged Keep On Giving: Acoustic Live! Those releases set the stage for the band’s acclaimed 2011 album Rockpango, and for the creative leap forward that Revelation represents.
“We want to make music that brings people together, not music that divides people,” Jojo states. “We’re all about having a good time, but we also make an effort to write about things that really matter. A lot of people write songs about superficial things, like how you look and what kind of car you drive and how much money you have, but we’re not interested in that. We want to create music that’s about the love and the energy and the spirit that we all carry as people.”
“We’re very thankful that God blessed our family with a drummer, a guitar player and a bass player, and that the three of us get to make music together,” Jojo concludes. “There’s been a few bumps in the road here and there, but that happens in any family and in any band. The main thing is that we stick together, and that we’re trying to pass on that feeling of brotherhood, of familia, in the music that we make.”
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KBS Shafts succeeding on pro circuits
Friday, March 14, 2014
It is not often that one shaft manufacturer receives a rave review from another shaft company, but what the heck, shaft wizards Kim Braly and Gawain Robertson are buddies.
"Except for (True Temper) Dynamic Gold," said Robertson, co-founder of Accra Golf Shafts, "just about every iron shaft on the PGA Tour was designed by Kim. He really is amazing."
Braly designed Rifle and Project X shafts before creating the KBS brand. Considering there was no such thing as a KBS shaft before 2008, Braly's achievements with his most recent shafts are staggering.
Looking at the official survey results from the major professional tours for the last six years, it's a matter of record: more than 100 victories for KBS, including the Open Championship in 2012 (Ernie Els) and 2013 (Phil Mickelson), the Masters in 2013 (Adam Scott), the U.S. Open in 2013 (Justin Rose), plus the Senior PGA Championship and U.S. Senior Open (both in 2013 by Kenny Perry).
"It has been unbelievable," Braly said. "This thing has come on much, much, muck quicker than I anticipated. I knew we'd be successful, but I didn't know it would happen this fast."
All this from a guy without a college degree who has been consumed for decades by the search for the perfect golf shaft.
"I attended plenty of (college) classes," said the 58-year-old Braly of his stint at Wake Forest, "but I wanted the knowledge, not the degree.
"I learned about the stiffness of tubular products by studying flag poles, ship masts, fishing poles, things like that. There was literally nothing on golf clubs. It wasn't a science at all."
There can be no discussion of Braly without mentioning his father, Dr. Joe Braly. The father-son duo helped turn the study of golf shafts into a science.
In his lifetime, Joe Braly has been an engineer, aviator and veterinarian. He remains a golf nut and avid supporter of his son's lifelong golf endeavors. The elder Braly invented the Console wedge, with an aerodynamic sole that acted much like a wing. The younger Braly was in grade school at the time.
A few years later they were testing clubs and shafts on a robot owned by Wilson Golf when the precocious son proclaimed, "Hey, Dad, there's something wrong with these shafts."
The shafts didn't match. This led to the invention of frequency matching shafts.
"My dad invented frequency matching," Kim acknowledged. "I was the guy who did the shaft design. He left that to me."
Designing golf shafts may seem like a weighty project for someone in his early 20s, but it seemed like the natural thing to do for a young man consumed with the game.
"I thought I was the world's best golfer," Kim said, "but it didn't quite work out that way."
What did work out was the strategy employed by the Bralys:
"We did our research on Tour," Kim said. "We followed the Tour around. We would have the best players in the world hit these various shafts."
In 1977 they formed a company, Precision Shafts, and patented a frequency analyzer. Soon their FM (Frequency Matched) Precision rose in popularity on the PGA Tour. Precision was sold to Brunswick Corp. in 1986, the primary supplier of their FM shafts. The Bralys went to work for Brunswick, and soon thereafter Kim invented the Rifle shaft.
In 1996, Brunswick sold Precision to a group of private investors. The Bralys stayed with the company, and Kim created Project X.
In 2006 shaft giant True Temper purchased the company, and Kim was on his own. In partnership with a shaft manufacturer called FST Shafts, he formed KBS in 2007.
Here is a rundown of eight KBS steel iron shafts. Weights are listed for taper-tip shafts. Better players often prefer taper-tip, although many KBS shafts are available in parallel tip as well.
- C-Taper: Low spin, low launch for advanced players. Taper tip, 110-130 grams.
- C-Taper Lite: Mid-high launch, firm tip, soft butt section. Features a constant taper design. Taper tip, 105-115 grams.
- Tour: The original KBS shaft with a mid trajectory. Taper tip, 110-130 grams.
- Tour-V: For players who prefer a lighter weight with less ball spin. Features tight shot dispersion. Taper tip, 100-120 grams.
- Tour-V Wedge: Piercing ball flight with a lower-mid trajectory. Taper tip, 125 grams.
- Tour 90: The lightest KBS shaft. High trajectory, additional spin. Taper tip, 95-102 grams.
- Wedge: Similar feel to KBS Tour. Firm tip, 110-130 grams.
- Hi-Rev: Mid trajectory with increased spin rate on short-range shots. Features an active tip section to provide maximum ball spin. Taper tip, 115-135 grams. | {
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Maine's Japanese Conundrum
Camden Hills & Penobscot Bay — Anybody who has ever heard me talk about the Maine economy has heard me bring up Japan on a regular basis. At first blush, the connection between us here in the Pine Tree State and an entire nation half a world away might seem tenuous. However, when you look at things through the prism of demographics, Japan has some sobering and important lessons for Maine and the Midcoast region specifically.
First, a brief history lesson. Many of you may recall that during the 1980s much punditry was expended on the idea that Japan was going to both overhaul the USA as the world’s wealthiest economy and buy up much of corporate and cultural America in the bargain. Indeed, the Japanese economic miracle in the years following World War II through the early nineties was incredibly impressive and by the eighties did indeed appear to outstrip an America that seemed to be in decline. But then through the nineties the Japanese economy faltered and stagnated while the US economy revived and surged forward (albeit on some shaky foundations: more on that in later columns).
What explains Japan’s reversal of fortune? As just about everybody knows, the basic ingredients for economic growth are supply and demand. Demand suffers (as we are experiencing globally right now) when over-inflation of value in one or two areas of the economy (real estate, for example) implodes, leaving behind debt and default to consume income, depriving goods and services of their markets. But what about supply?
Decline in demand is pretty obvious: less stuff is sold, less money is made. Decline in supply capacity is a little more intangible but equally as concerning, and I would posit that it has been the fundamental issue with the Japanese economy (and where the parallels with Maine are most apparent and concerning).
Supply forms an economy’s productive potential, which is comprised of three things:
Capital- access to money to invest- is a no brainer (and one that is being depressed by the current ructions in the economy). Without ideas (new products, new processes, or new pricing) there is nothing to invest in. Population (or more crucially, population growth) provides the productivity that turns the combination of capital and ideas into profit and thus economic growth. And without population, the first two elements- capital and ideas- are also exponentially more difficult to generate.
In the early nineties Japan lost access to capital through market collapse, to ideas through protectionist impulses designed to preserve existing industries rather than explore new ideas and to population growth through restrictive immigration policies, low birth rate, and a declining available workforce due to a rapidly aging population. Does any of this sound uncomfortably familiar?
Many of us working in economic and community development have known for a long time what recent census data reported here on Village Soup tells us: Maine is getting older and at a faster rate than the rest of the United States while our population growth- especially in the traditional working age demographics- is an anemic shadow of what it needs to be to support services for the 90% increase in people aged 75 and over in Maine projected for the next 20 years. There’s nothing wrong with a large number of older citizens as the knowledge base and other gifts they bring are invaluable, but a broad age pyramid is a basic fact of societal sustainability and something we need to find how to address quickly.
Without age (and I would argue, ethnic) diversity of sufficient magnitude we risk narrowing the capacity of our workforce, and with that we also begin to lose access to a sufficient number of ideas and input of capital to maintain the economic component of our fabled quality of life. That’s Maine’s Japanese conundrum, and we must focus on solving it- all of us, both young and old! | {
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How do you screen a tenant with no credit history? Learn how to proceed with this tutorial on tenant credit history.
When we say someone lacks a credit history, it either means he has no Fico Score or no record was found.
What No Fico Score Means: The tenant had no credit activity reported to the credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion) in the past 6 months. In other words, the tenant didn't touch any credit cards, loans or mortgages in the last 6 months (or at least one that reports to credit bureaus).
So a tenant with no Fico score isn't necessarily a bad thing - It just indicates that he wasn't involved in (reported) credit or debts recently.
What No Record Found Means: Incorrect tenant information was submitted OR The tenant hasn't established a credit record yet.
Incorrect tenant information submitted: Were there any typos or missing information when you were applying for your tenant credit reports? It's also possible that your tenant provided you with incorrect personal particulars (by accident or on purpose).
Tenant hasn't established a credit record: Young renters and new immigrants often fall into this category. Most of the time it's because they don't have any personal income yet (e.g. students) or they haven't incurred any debts yet.
Let's get something out of the way first: Zero credit history is better than bad credit history. Even if someone has no tenant credit history, there are still other effective ways to screen him or her.
Ask your tenant applicants for their previous rental records: three previous addresses, the rental dates and contact details of former landlords.
As a rule of thumb, you would want someone who has stayed at least for a year at each of the previous addresses (longer is better). You should also call or email at least 2 former landlords to ask for their references.
Request for their employment records as well. Useful information includes: current salary, (previous + current) work addresses and (previous + current) duration of employment. What you hope to see is someone who has worked at least 6 months at his or her current job and draws a salary that is at least 3 times higher than your asking rent.
If your prospective tenants are willing, you can also ask them for your bank account statements. He should have at least enough money in the bank for at least 2 months of rent (6 months would be ideal).
My Tip for Tenant Credit Checks Not rated yet
Some potential renters are highly concerned with any negative and false information that may show up when you run a landlord tenant credit check on them. … | {
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Issue 40 Hair Winter 2010/11
Of Mice and Mania
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery—always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?
If you give a mouse a haircut, he might want another. And another. And another. And it’s not actually a haircut. It’s a pluck. Sometimes a nibble. When a mouse goes to a barber, he or she loses some whiskers or some fur. And usually it happens again and again.
Barber mice, as they are known, remove the fur or whiskers of other mice (and somewhat less frequently, their own). They tend to be female, but aren’t always. And they are, as far as I can tell, only to be found among captive mouse populations, be they in laboratories or pet owners’ homes. The online message boards for mouse-rearing humans (who raise them as pets or for “fancy” mouse shows) are full of hair removal stories. They post photos of mice and rats with little bald spots on their heads, reverse mohawks, or hairless facial patches shaped like tiny Phantom of the Opera masks. Perplexed, the rodents’ keepers ask questions like, “Tache seems unable to go more than two weeks in a cage with other mice without beginning to barber again. … Today I returned her to the big tank with Pu Manchu and Mrs. Beach … but I expect by the end of two weeks she’ll be barbering again. How to solve this problem?”2
Some fanciers and breeders claim the behavior is about displaying dominance (i.e., the barbering mouse is boss). Others say it happens because of overcrowding or lack of stimulation: a lab mouse—even if it is born and bred to be one—still has sensory, social, and environmental needs that a cage, even a pleasant one filled with exercise wheels and colorful plastic tunnels, will have difficulty providing. What is not debatable is that barbering is simply normal grooming behavior gone awry. Usually mice groom by scratching themselves with their hind feet, washing their face or fur with their front paws (using their own saliva), and smoothing or cleaning their hair with their teeth. Barber mice take these behaviors in a more extreme direction by removing hair on others (and sometimes themselves) with their teeth. Barber mice don’t usually injure the mice whose fur or whiskers they nibble or pluck. In fact, it seems that their clients may enjoy it—that is, they will sometimes follow the barber mouse around until she or he plucks them—even when what results is the complete loss of whiskers or an un-ironic mouse mullet.3
Given their extensive experience with mice in the laboratory, a few researchers have suggested that the barbering rodents might help us better understand overzealous hair removal in humans.4 In people, repetitive hair pulling (which leaves pluckers with bald spots and sometimes even interferes with their daily life) is diagnosed as trichotillomania.5 Not unlike mice, most human pluckers are female. The disorder affects roughly 1.5% of men and 3.5% of women in the United States,6 though trichotillomania may be far more widespread than we think because people are often embarrassed by their bald spots and can be quite good at covering them up. Studies using mice as stand-ins for human pluckers have tried various techniques to get the mice to start barbering in the first place (that is, if they haven’t started doing it themselves) and investigated the effects of antidepressants on the behavior. The fact that humans tend to pluck themselves and mice tend to pluck each other hasn’t stopped the use of mouse experimental models—since both the barber mouse and her client engage in the process by choice, even when it must be somewhat painful, researchers have tended to assume, for better or for worse, that the behavior found in a single human being is simply spread between two individual mice.
In humans, the most common sites of plucking are the scalp, eyebrows, eyelashes, beard, and pubic area. People may start plucking one specific area, like eyebrows, but then, over time, switch to pulling from another region. Sufferers say that the plucking is usually preceded by some sort of tension that the pull itself releases, though it can also happen when people are relaxed or distracted (i.e., when reading a book or watching television).7 Nevertheless, anxiety, anger, and sadness often do increase the urgency and frequency of hair pulling.8
There is still a good deal of confusion about how the disorder should be classified. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM) has situated hair plucking under “Impulse-Control Disorders Not Elsewhere Classified” and counsels that this behavior should not be considered a compulsion. Unless plucking is associated with obsessive thoughts, the DSM stresses that it is also not an obsessive-compulsive disorder (since the plucking is not usually performed along a framework of rigid rules in the way that obsessive-compulsive hand-washing or lock-checking can be).
The DSM’s claims notwithstanding, the behavior often does resemble a habit, an addiction, a tic, or an obsessive-compulsive disorder. More recently, researchers have begun to view it as part of a family of “body-focused repetitive behaviors,” along with skin picking and nail biting.”9 Whatever its etiology, trichotillomania is in the DSM because most people don’t do it. We need our hair for all sorts of reasons, some physiological, most not. Bald patches or missing eyebrows may make social situations more awkward and the time spent plucking may interfere with other things in one’s life. The habit might be a symptom of anxiety or depression, but mostly it just makes the sufferer look odd and this is when it tends to be diagnosed. Some trichotillomania sufferers, particularly children, may pull hair from other people, or even pets. And it is common for people to either play with, or eat, their plucked hairs.10
In this, like so many of our neuroses, we are not alone. Hair pulling has been reported in six different non-human primate species, and, in addition to mice, has been observed among rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, sheep, musk oxen, dogs, and cats.11 Just as with mice, researchers who conducted a study on feather-plucking parrots suggested that they would be a good experimental model for trichotillomania-suffering humans.12 And like overgrooming dogs (who will sometimes lick themselves bare and oozy, a condition diagnosed as Acral Lick Dermatitis), birds have been treated with the same drugs used to treat compulsive behaviors in humans.
For captive gorillas, the most common sites for hair plucking are forearms or shins, but I have seen plucked patches wherever the apes can reach. Gorillas, unlike us, can pluck almost anywhere since they have more and thicker body hair than we do. Some gorillas, like some people, eat their hair after plucking it.
As primatologists such as Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall have observed, nonhuman animals can and do have culture, defined here as knowledge passed down from one generation to another or passed from one group to another, as in the famous case of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) teaching one another to wash and season their yams in the ocean because the salted yams tasted better.13 So it may be with plucking—both in people and other animals. The babies of gorillas who pluck often turn out to be pluckers themselves. And troops that have never exhibited plucking sometimes start when a new plucker arrives in their midst. At the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, none of the gorillas pulled out their hair until two young males—Little Joe and Okie—arrived in 1997 from Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. Within months, a number of the troop members in Boston were plucking.
Just as in humans, no one knows exactly why gorillas do it—except that, as it does for us, plucking may offer some sort of psychic balm or release of tension and it may be greatly influenced by one’s environment.14 There also may be a genetic component. An experiment conducted in 2002 demonstrated that mice bred without a group of key developmental genes (including the Hoxb8 gene, fundamental in the development of immune cells called microglia found in the brain) became severe self-barbers. The mutant mice didn’t stop at hair trimming and whisker plucking but also used their paws to scratch bald spots and sores on their rumps. A later study, published last May in the journal Cell, transplanted bone marrow (containing healthy microglia cells) from a group of control mice into the population of barbers. Four weeks after the transfer, when the new microglia had made it to the mutant mouse brains, many of the barber mice (who had been using their teeth to pluck the hair on their own chests, stomachs, and sides) stopped over-grooming. In three months, their hair had grown back.15 While no one is suggesting that human trichotillomania sufferers sign up for bone marrow transplants anytime soon, researchers are trying to understand the links between the brain’s immune system and the expression of mental disorders such as trichotillomania, OCD, autism, and depression.
Like the Hox genes themselves, overgrooming behaviors may be present, in some form or another, in all vertebrates with something to pluck, lick, or pull out. While such behaviors are probably not attributable to genetics alone, a predisposition to over-grooming may exist in certain individuals, who when exposed to the right combination of stressors exhibit such behaviors. Within the avian veterinary literature, feather plucking—termed “Feather-Picking Disorder” or “Feather Destructive Behavior” if it is unrelated to a separate medical condition, such as allergies—can stem from boredom, frustration, and stress, or be related to sexual behavior, premature weaning, attention seeking, overcrowding, separation anxiety, and/or changes in routine. Virtually anything that could be upsetting to a parrot can trigger the behavior.
Phoebe Greene Linden has lived with parrots for more than twenty-five years and is an expert on captive parrot behavior—fielding questions from hundreds of parrot owners online and in person. She claims that “solutions to stopping feather destructive behavior are as individual as strategies tailored for human individuals. Enriching their environments and helping them learn new behaviors when the parrot is healthy, ready to learn, physically active and mentally engaged, is best. And making sure that they have opportunities to fly, forage, and socialize is key.”16 However, in chronic cases, SRRI’s like Prozac have been useful, as have Xanax, Valium, and other medications.
A group of cockatoos who plucked their feathers responded (albeit somewhat unevenly) to Clomipramine, a tricyclic anti-depressant sold under the brand name Anafranil and most often prescribed to humans as an anti-obsessional medication.17 Another study on both plucking cockatoos and African greys tested their response to a different antidepressant, Doxepin (it worked, but not uniformly, for most parrots involved in the study). And veterinary staff at the Tufts Animal Behavior Clinic in Massachusetts documented the marked effect of SSRI’s like Prozac on feather picking in Amazonian, African grey, and Eclectus parrots.18
The question underlying all of this—especially the experiments on over-grooming mice, birds, cats, dogs, and other nonhumans—is whether or not these animals’ behaviors can actually shed light on ours. Just because plucking in mice, gorillas, or cockatoos resembles our own, does it mean that the nonhuman in question is having similar thoughts? Of course, we cannot know. Even in the realm of human relationships, we all know that just because you ask a person what they’re thinking or how they’re feeling doesn’t mean that they’ll be able to tell you—they may not know why they’re pulling their hair out, or even how they feel when they do it.
Shared language in no way guarantees revelation between two beings. Just as we seek to understand mental states in humans who can’t (or won’t) talk to us, I believe we should do the same with other animals. Critics may consider this just another form of anthropomorphism, but I think that is far too narrow a view. We have long looked to other animals to better understand ourselves—using them as experimental subjects, objects of philosophical inquiry, companions with whom we soothe or challenge ourselves, or as the raw material of moral lessons. Human relationships with other animals continue to center around observations and a certain amount of projection is inherent to the act of watching and interpreting what other animals are doing with their time. Our lives with other creatures are rife with instances of both good and bad projections. A human who takes Spot to the door on a rainy afternoon might see the dog pause at the threshold, nose in the air. Depending on the person, this might be understood to mean, “Spot hates going outside in the rain and so I should buy him a cute little slicker and set of rain boots so that he’ll go out without a fuss.”
Within the scientific community, fear of projections like this one have sometimes crippled our understanding of shared animal experience. Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of “human” characteristics to nonhuman animals or objects, has been something of a dirty word in the behavioral sciences. Such fears have long informed studies such as one I once worked on in southeast Alaska. We were observing grizzly bears and their interactions with human fishermen along a salmon stream in Katmai National Park. The same bears came back summer after summer to fish, bicker, and raise their cubs and were easily recognizable by their scars, fishing styles, and personalities. And yet, as researchers, we were instructed only to use numbers to refer to the bears lest our use of human names for them might cause us to attribute human desires and thoughts to the bears as well. But outside of our official survey forms and notes, we all used names for them, like “Diver” for a bear who was fond of diving to the bottom of the river to catch his salmon. As far as I know, calling him Diver did not encourage us to assume that he was engaged in anything but bearish behavior—but that was the concern.
Thankfully, such practices have begun to change somewhat. The Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, for example, has long used Biblical names to refer to individual baboons he studies in Kenya. Despite the holy handles, his work has not suffered and neither has that of the numerous other scientists who have more recently veered into what may have, not long ago, seemed like anthropomorphic territory. In Sapolsky’s case, it may even have helped—getting to know the personalities of his individual baboons, on their own terms and his, may have encouraged him to make the leap that their stress responses approximated our own, research that has since revolutionized how we think of the affects of chronic and acute stress on the human brain.
Projecting, in and of itself, is not a problem. And if this wasn’t true, animal models for mental disorders from trichotillomania to depression would simply not be as present in the scientific literature as they are. This isn’t to say they aren’t problematic. We cannot assume that a rat=parrot=dog=human. But if it sounds like a duck, walks like a duck, and plucks like a human—it just may be a duck we can identify with.
Laurel Braitman is a historian and anthropologist of science currently completing her doctorate at MIT. Her book Animal Madness is forthcoming from Simon and Schuster.
Cabinet is published by Immaterial Incorporated, a non-profit organization supported by the Lambent Foundation, the Orphiflamme Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Danielson Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Katchadourian Family Foundation, and many generous individuals. All our events are free, the entire content of our many sold-out issues are on our site for free, and we offer our magazine and books at prices that are considerably below cost. Please consider supporting our work by making a tax-deductible donation by visiting here.
© 2010 Cabinet Magazine | {
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Dr. Max Gerson's
Nutritional Therapy for Cancer and Other Diseases
by Katherine Smith
story of Doctor
Max Gerson and the nutritional therapy he
developed for cancer and other diseases is another sad chronicle of
the suppression of a therapeutic program which has the power to
help - if not cure - many people who would otherwise suffer continuing
illness and death.
Born in 1881 and raised in Germany, Dr. Gerson began the development
of his nutritional therapy in an effort to find relief from the
crippling migraine headaches from which he suffered as a young man.
Working on a hunch that a chemical imbalance in his body might be
responsible for the painful headaches which plagued him, Gerson
decided to alter his diet and see if his condition improved.
After trying a milk-based diet, using the rationale
that milk was the primary food of mammals, he tried treating himself
with a diet comprised mainly of raw foods, and found that his
migraine headaches disappeared. Dr. Gerson then tried out the
therapy on those of his patients who suffered from migraines, and
found that they too found relief, and this painful condition
One of the people Dr. Gerson treated for migraine headaches also
suffered from lupus vulgaris - a so-called "incurable" disease.
To Gerson's surprise, not only did this patient's migraine attacks
disappear after beginning the nutritional therapy, but his lupus was
Dr. Gerson successfully treated other people suffering from lupus
with his diet therapy. Then, since lupus vulgaris is also
known as tuberculosis of the skin, Gerson had the inspiration to
begin treating people suffering from other forms of tuberculosis. In
1933, he published his book, Dietary Therapy of Lung Tuberculosis.
Unfortunately, the rise of Hitler to power in Germany meant that he
was unable to publicly demonstrate his discoveries to the Berlin
Medical Association. Paced with a deteriorating political situation
in his homeland Dr. Gerson went to work in Vienna and
France, as well as giving lectures throughout Europe. Finally, as
the clouds of war gathered ever more ominously over Europe, Gerson
left Europe in 1936 to begin a new life in America.
Unfortunately for Dr. Gerson - not to mention the thousands upon
thousands of people who could have been helped by his therapy - the
U.S., while a haven from Hitler, was far from being the land of the
free. Gerson found that publishing his work - which was a relatively
easy proposition in Europe - was an almost impossible task in the
Perhaps part of the reason why Gerson's work was not
enthusiastically supported by his medical peers in the United States
may have been that he was German, and therefore to be treated with
suspicion, as a member of an enemy nation, even though he had
qualified to practice medicine in the United States in 1938.
However, a more important reason was that his treatments for cancer
challenged the orthodox methods. In the 1930s and 1940s, according
to the orthodox mind-set, cancer was to be treated in two basic
ways: surgically to remove the offending tumor (when it was
operable) and then with radiation to kill the cancerous cells.
Dr. Gerson's conception of cancer went far beyond merely viewing the
cancer as a spontaneous eruption within a healthy body. Rather he
saw cancer as the end result of generalized degradation of the
bodily systems, especially the liver. Such concepts were quite
foreign to the vast majority of the medical profession at that time,
when doctors could not adequately account for the cause of cancer,
nor inform people how to avoid this life threatening disease.
According to Gerson, the way to prevent cancer was by,
"...preventing damage to the liver. The basic
measure of prevention is not to eat the damaged, dead, poisoned
food which we bring into our bodies. Every day, day by day, we
poison our bodies."
Gerson's nutritional therapy worked on the principle
that in order to cure a serious disorder such as cancer, treatment
of the symptoms of the disease was not sufficient to restore the
patient to health.
He wrote in his book
A Cancer Therapy - Results of
Fifty Cases in 1958 that the "whole body" or "whole metabolism" had
to be treated to "correct all the vital processes" in order to
effect a cure.
The basis of Dr. Gerson's nutritional program to strengthen the body
to allow healing to take place is a diet comprised mostly of raw
foods, especially freshly-made fruit and vegetable juices, green
salad, and a soup cooked at a very low heat. Some cooked fruit and
vegetables are also permitted in the first six weeks of his dietary
plan. However, no canned, salted, pickled, bleached, sulphured,
frozen or smoked foods in short no denatured foods of any kind - are
permitted at any time during the Gerson regime.
The therapy Dr. Gerson devised was also designed to be high in
potassium and low in sodium.
The soup mentioned above is especially
high in potassium, which helped to correct a too-high ratio of
sodium to potassium suffered by many people with cancer, especially
those with moderate or advanced cancer. Dr. Gerson discovered that
restoring a favorable potassium/sodium balance could reverse some of
the cell damage caused by an excess of sodium.
The function of the freshly-made fruit and vegetable juices in the
program is to detoxify the body and provide oxidizing enzymes to
assist in the rehabilitation of the liver. Other techniques to
support the liver and detoxify the body are also used in the
program, including coffee enemas to stimulate the flow of bile and
safely dispose of toxins, the juice of raw calves' liver, and
injections of crude liver extract.
(Liver juices and extracts are no longer used by
people following a Gerson program in the 1990s, due to the
contamination of the liver with pesticides and bacteria. Spirulina
and carrot juice may be taken instead to provide nutritional iron
and pro-vitamin A. Desiccated liver tablets may be used instead,
since these are thought to contain fewer toxins.)
Gerson also supplemented the diet of people in his care with
addition-al potassium salts, as well as organic and inorganic
iodine. Fluoride-contaminated water or other products are forbidden
because of fluoride's toxicity to valuable enzymes.
Animal fats are
excluded. Dr. Gerson's program was originally completely free of
fats and oils (excluding the small amount of fat present in the
calves' liver), but after experimentation, Gerson modified his
program to include a small amount of flax seed oil to supply
essential fatty acids.
After six weeks of detoxification using the diet and supplements
out-lined above, patients in Gerson's care graduated to a diet which
included small amounts of the protein foods such as yogurt, cottage
cheese, and natural buttermilk. (Foods containing protein had been
previously restricted to allow the body adequate time to detoxify
and begin to break down tumor tissue.)
These, then, were the basic theories and therapy which Dr. Gerson
had developed by the time that he came to the United States in 1936.
In January 1948 - almost twenty years after he had first successfully
treated cancer in Germany in 1928 - he went to work at New York's
Gotham Hospital. However, Gerson's efforts to publish his
discoveries consistently met with a negative response from the
publishers of medical journals.
His article "Cancer, A Deficiency Disease" was rejected by the New
York State Journal of Medicine in 1943.
The next year another paper,
"Dietic Treatment of Malignant Tumors," was also rejected by every
medical journal to which it had been sent. In 1945, he finally
succeeded in publishing "Dietary Considerations in Malignant
Neoplastic Disease," which appeared in the November-December edition
of Review of Gastroenterology.
His work might have been destined to
obscurity forever, but for an investigative reporter who discovered
the good doctor working quietly to cure cancer with his most
unorthodox therapies, and determined to bring Dr. Gerson's
life-saving discoveries to public attention.
Raymond Swing, an ABC radio journalist, proposed that Dr. Gerson be
called to testify before the Senate which was debating a bill to
allocate funds for cancer research. Raymond Swing's efforts on Dr.
Gerson's behalf were successful and the doctor, together with five
of his patients, went before a sub-committee of the Senate in 1946
and told their stories.
All of the five patients had had a positive
response to Dr. Gerson's therapy, and had been told by their former
doctors that there was no longer any hope for them.
a woman with breast cancer who had undergone
mastectomy and radiation treatments to no avail. Her cancer had
disappeared after nine months of the Gerson therapy; a fifteen
year old girl had been paralyzed by a tumor in her spinal cord.
Her tumor had vanished after 8 months of Gerson therapy;
a soldier with an inoperable tumor which had
grown from his neck into his skull, making radiation treatment
impossible because of the risk of brain damage - a year after
commencing the Gerson therapy he was completely free of cancer;
a woman who had suffered from a malignant
sarcoma. Prior to beginning the Gerson therapy, she had large
tumors in her groin, neck and abdomen. After a year on the
Gerson therapy she was completely free of cancer.
Unfortunately, Dr. Gerson's successful treatment of
these and other patients who otherwise had been doomed to die did
not earn him the respect and recognition from the medical community
that he deserved.
Quite to the contrary.
The public display of Dr. Gerson's successful but unorthodox treatment of cancer victims
further alienated him from main-stream medicine. An abusive
editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association in
November 1946 followed Dr. Gerson's appearance in front of the
The editorial celebrated the unfortunate fact that,
despite the amazing and incredibly newsworthy results of Dr.
Gerson's therapy, his presentation before the Senate sub-committee
"little, if any newspaper publicity"
- as if the
lack of mainstream publicity itself was an indictment of the
treatment! The editor further denigrated his work by splitting
hairs as to what precisely constituted a "cure."
Dr. Gerson, he wrote,
"admits lack of any actual cure, claiming only
that patients seemed improved in health and that some tumors
were delayed in growth or became smaller."
In one final coup against Dr. Gerson, who for years
had been submitting work to the journal for publication without
success, he wrote that,
"the journal has on several occasions requested
Dr. Gerson supply details of the method of treatment but has
thus far received no satisfactory reply."
This editorial was just the beginning of a
concentrated campaign of harassment against Dr. Gerson and the
people who were working with him in his Research Foundation. Between
1946 and 1954, Dr. Gerson was investigated five times by the Medical
Society of the County of New York. After each investigation, the
Research Foundation requested that the investigators give a
statement, and in each case the request was denied.
However, in 1948, Dr. Gerson and his Research Foundation were left
in no doubt as to what the medical establishment thought of them
when a review of their work was published in the Journal of the AMA.
The review was entitled "Frauds and Fables," in which the journal
suggested that Gerson was a fraud. The Research Foundation
threatened to sue the AMA and were able to stop reprints of the
damaging article. However, as a con-sequence of the damaging
publicity, Gotham Hospital refused to allow Dr. Gerson to work on
its premises after 1950.
Moreover, Dr. Gerson was not able to restore his good name within
the medical profession in America. It became impossible for him to
publish a single piece of research in any medical journal from the
end of 1949 until the end of his life, despite (or perhaps because
of) his thousands of success stories.
In addition, Gerson was
prevented from presenting patients at a hearing of the House of
Commerce Committee in 1953, which was investigating therapies for
cancer and other diseases. Despite requests from his patients that
he be allowed to present his findings, as well as a letter from Dr.
Gerson himself, the chairman of the committee failed to offer Dr.
Gerson the chance to demonstrate his findings.
With his work increasingly under fire in the United States, Dr.
Gerson went to Europe in order to publish his discoveries. A German
journal, Medizinische Klinik, published two of the reports which
U.S. journals had refused to print: "Cancer: A Problem of
Metabolism" and "No Cancer in Normal Metabolism." He was also
invited to the University of Zurich in 1952, after attending the
International Cancer Congress in Berchtesgaden.
When Dr. Gerson returned to the United States from Europe, however,
he faced still more hurdles. In 1957, he was investigated by the
Licensing Board of New York State. Even more damaging to his work,
his malpractice insurance was terminated.
In 1958 Gerson was
suspended from the Medical Society of the State of New York, and the
laboratories which Dr. Gerson's Research Foundation used for X-rays,
blood, and urine analyses were warned that should they continue to
do work for Dr. Gerson and his patients, they would be put out of
business. Dr. Gerson died in 1959.
The harassment of Dr. Gerson by the medical establishment, while
both unethical and immoral, is understandable within a commercial
context. If Gerson's methods of curing cancer had replaced the
"conventional" cancer treatments, the profession's investment in
expensive equipment such as surgical facilities and radiation
treatment apparatus would have been lost, to say nothing of
However, it was not just Dr. Gerson and his colleagues who had to
Patients who sought out the Gerson treatment in
preference to orthodox medicine were also harassed by members of the
orthodox medical community. In many cases, doctors harangued
patients so persistently that they abandoned Gerson's therapy - even
when it appeared to be helping them - and accepted conventional
medical treatment for their cancer.
These tactics compelled Gerson to write to a close
friend in 1957 that:
The most difficult and inhuman part of the
measures taken against me is that the physicians approach the
best and almost completely cured patients and try to have them
returned to their hospitals. Here they man-age with orthodox
treatments to kill them. I lose in this manner some-where
between 25 and 30 percent of my best cases.
This sort of harassment of people using the Gerson
therapy occurred even after Dr. Gerson's death, with doctors going
as far as phoning patients in residence at the La Gloria Hospital
in Mexico, which was set up in 1977 to provide Dr. Gerson's therapy
on an in-patient basis.
In 1998, the climate of mainstream medical hostility towards Dr.
Gerson's unorthodox therapy program has not changed. "Anti-quackery"
laws forbid the practice of the Gerson therapy in California and
other states of the U.S. by medical doctors. People with cancer who
reject the options of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy offered to
them by the major cancer hospitals must either struggle to pursue a Gerson-type program in their own homes without adequate medical
support, or find the money necessary to travel to Mexico and pay for
treatment at La Gloria Hospital, near Tijuana.
The parents of a growing number of children with cancer are even
less able to choose what they believe is the most suitable treatment
option for their son and daughter, since by law all children in the
United States who have cancer must be given chemotherapy, or their
parents may be imprisoned. Even a demonstrable improvement in the
child's condition using non-toxic methods of cancer treatment will
not forestall the application of this barbarous law.
Gerson's therapy remains on the "Unproven Methods List" of the
American Cancer Society, despite ample evidence in Dr. Gerson's book
A Cancer Therapy: The Results of Fifty Cases, as well as testimony
from former cancer patients whose cancerous conditions have been
healed by Gerson's techniques.
Dr. Gerson's therapy has now been practiced for over
60 years, and patients of La Gloria Hospital experience an average
improvement rate of 80 percent in early to moderate cancer and even
more amazingly a 40-50 percent rate of improvement in people with
so-called "terminal" cancer. Other benefits of the Gerson therapy
for cancer sufferers included a marked reduction in pain, and also
control of the acute infections which often led to the death of
(The clinic does however, have a general rule of not
accepting people who have previously undergone chemotherapy, since
due to the damage that chemotherapeutic drugs inflict upon the liver
and other organs of the body, sustained improvement in the condition
of these cancer patients is much less likely. The medical director
has also stated that people with tumors which have spread into the
brain and begun to damage the delicate regulatory mechanisms within
it are also less likely than most patients to respond to the Gerson
In 1995, the Gerson Research Association and the Cancer Prevention
and Control Program of the University of California published the
results of a fifteen-year retrospective study which evaluated the
success of Gerson therapy in treating malignant melanoma.
The results of this study showed that people with melanoma who used
Gerson therapy survived longer than people using conventional
One most encouraging finding was that 100 percent of 14 people with
stage I and II (localized melanoma) survived for five years,
compared to 79 percent of 15,798 people who did not follow the
For people with melanoma classified as IIIA and IIIB (regionally
metastasized), 70 percent of 33 Gerson patients lived for five
years, compared to 41 percent of 134 melanoma patients under the
care of the Fachklinik Hornheide.
Of those patients with melanoma which had metastasized to distant
lymph nodes, skin areas or subcutaneous tissue - 39 percent of 18 Gerson patients were alive after five years. By comparison, just 6
percent of 194 patients under the care of the Eastern Cooperative
Oncology Group survived five years.
Despite these impressive results of Dr. Gerson's therapies,
mainstream medicine is even less receptive to his ideas and
treatment plans now than when he began publishing the results of his
work in the United States in the 1940s.
In January 1945, the then manager-director of the American Cancer
Society Mr. C. C. Little wrote (to a doctor):
It seems to me that since Dr. Gerson has frankly
stated in detail what his diet is and in addition has given the
theory on which he personally believes its claimed efficacy is
based, that his material should receive publication and proper
attention and criticism by the medical profession. I sincerely
hope it will be possible to arrange this.
When both the American Cancer Society and the
National Cancer Institute were approached about the Gerson therapy
in the 1980s however, both organizations denied having even seen a
copy of A Cancer Therapy: The Results of Fifty Cases, despite the
fact that due to the heroic efforts of Dr. Gerson's daughter,
Charlotte Gerson Strauss, the land-mark book has remained in print
for 40 years.
In 1984, the American Cancer Society, along with the
House of Representatives Select Committee on Aging declared that the
"Gerson method of treating of cancer is of no value."
Although the "Unproven Methods List" is updated every six months,
Gerson's therapy is not likely to be deleted from the list in the
The Unproven Methods Committee, according to the
director of the Unproven Methods Office, G. Congdon Wood, supposedly
makes its decisions on the medical literature. More recent
information which supports his therapies, such as that published in
the 1978 Journal of Physiological Chemistry and Physics seems to
have been ignored - a spokesperson for the ACS explaining that they
"had not seen" the article.
Government agencies such as the FDA. are also consulted in the
review process. Unfortunately for people's health, the FDA. is
notorious for its prejudice against vitamins and other natural
When Charlotte Gerson Strauss was attempting to find a
publisher for her father's book, some of the publishing houses
considering the book received threats from the FDA, which had
recently (May 1992) made a raid on the Tahoma (natural health)
Clinic in Washington State, and seized vitamins and patient records,
among other things. It is obviously not the sort of agency you would
expect to endorse Gerson's therapy any time in the near future.
The National Cancer Institute is another agency that gives the
Committee information about therapies on the Unproven Method's List.
This agency long ago rejected Dr. Gerson and his work.
Would you reasonably expect a prestigious national
institute to sully its good name as the Castle of the Valiant
Knights in White Coats battling the twentieth century scourge of
cancer by associating with a "quack" who was expelled from his own
State Medical Society?
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Back to Industry "Weapons" for Earth's | {
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I have recently been in contact with an ex Holbay employee (1959 - 1963) in my quest for information on period Formula Junior heads. He advised the following :
"I worked for Holbay 1959 to 1963. During that period I have no recollection of Ford supplying special heads. We used to buy complete 105E engines from Ford and strip them down. We retained the standard block (bored out) and standard head castings with extensively re-worked ports with with larger valves".
It appears from this that at least in the period up to 1963 Holbay developed Ford race engines from new stock they obtained from Ford.
hatrat, do you reckon your ex Holbay contact is mates with any ex Holbay fellows from 63 to 66,67 or thereabouts?
The reason I'm harping on is that now I'm intrigued to learn to what extent Holbay used 105E blocks in conjunction with 116E/120E blocks when the five bearing ones became available. Or, did they cease using three bearing blocks at the end of the FJ era (or at some later stage and move soley to five bearing ones)? I'm working from a very small sample from 1965, but Dad's S65 and the R65 (dinky di F3 997cc engine in the article PS30-SB turned up) both apparently 1965 vintage engines, both definitely employed five bearing blocks, one small bore, the other large bore. I suppose it depends what type of racing engines (or, rather, how many racing types) they were trying to cover. I keep forgetting to take account of saloon car racing when thinking about these things........
For their Sports Racing S65 engine, they had a 105E head, downdrafted, on the 120E block, I suspect, 1) because they could with SRC rules/regs & 2) cause an Anglia head allowed for little combustion chambers on a small capacity engine that therefore allowed them to get the compression ratio they needed.
So, a bit more scratching around has revealed another period commentary on Ford's engines of the period, this time in Autocar, 7 January, 1966 where Sports Editor, Peter Garnier on page 37 in his "The Sport" column. It doesn't shed any light on what block types Holbay were using, but it does give Holbay a bit of a chuck on the shoulder and feeds my bias in their favour!!!
"British Saloon car Championship , ...being run to Group 5, works supported teams of Cortinas and Anglias will take part. In the 1000cc class two Anglias entered by Broadspeed, with engines modified by Cosworth, will be driven by John Fitzpatrick and Peter Procter. In the up to 1300cc class, two 1200 cc Anglias, prepared by John Young of Superspeed Conversions, will be driven by Mike Young and Chris Craft.
Team Lotus, with Jim Clark, Jack Sears and Peter Arundell, will run two Group 5 Cortina Lotuses in the Championship races. Because Group 5 allows so many more modifications - in fact you can do pretty well anything you like provided you don't increase the capacity above the top limit of the class into which the engine originally fell, and don't change the camshaft(s) position - the engines will be specially prepared by BRM. They will have dry sump lubrication, and a new Lucas fuel injection system......
Added to all this, there are Ford's formula 2 and 3 acivities. Dominating formula 2 since its early beginnings, the Cosworth Type SCA engine, based on the Ford 1500cc, 5-main bearing block, is now producing more power since it has been fitted with fuel injection ( the Edward Eves article, Cosworth SCA 65 in Autocar 16 April 1965 has customer engines equipment as two Weber 40 DCM2 carburettors with 32 mm chokes) and is being used by several of the main contenders during 1966......
In formula 3, Holbay and Cosworth prepared Ford units have swept the board.
Finally, Ford say that Cosworth Engineering, in conjunction with Ford of Britain, are well advanced with their programme for a new formula 2 unit (for the new formula 2) as well as the formula 1 engine recently announced...." (and we all know where those two power plants went).
Anyway, the point of my reproduction of all that is that it's nice to see Holbay mentioned in their "niche" in the same breath as the colossus of Cosworth on an equal footing as far as F3 is concerned. Peter Garnier's point was that Ford rate the publicity of competition success very highly and pity the fact that other manufacurers didn't feel the same way............
Makes me wonder in these engines, how big an issue bearing drag was/is versus valve train integrity/valve spring rates/breathing in general and whether or not Holbay spent just many, or many, many hours on different camshaft variations......
Is Laurence 'Slim' Coe still with us?
If your Holbay contact was prepared to comment on the blocks and even the Anglia head on five bearing block theory I'd be all ears!!!
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Lucy H.Y. Young, M.D., Ph.D., FACS
Macular Degeneration Unit
Mass. Eye and Ear
243 Charles Street
Boston, MA 02114
|Office Hours:||Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.|
Mass. Eye and Ear, Stoneham
One Montvale Avenue
Stoneham, MA 02180
|Language:||Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese|
|Ph.D.||Ph.D. Biology, Harvard University|
|M.D.||University of Wisconsin School of Medicine|
|Residency||Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School|
|Fellowship||Vitreoretinal Surgery, Mass. Eye and Ear|
|Teaching Affiliation||Associate Professor of Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School|
After receiving a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University, she obtained her medical degree from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine. She then completed her ophthalmology residency at Harvard Medical School, followed by a fellowship in vitreoretinal surgery at Mass. Eye and Ear.
A Senior Scientist at Mass. Eye and Ear and Associate Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Young conducts research on intravitreal drug toxicities, retinal infections, retinal complications associated with KPro implantation, ocular toxoplasmosis, retinal vascular occlusions, ocular immunology, and HIV-related retinal complications. Currently, she is interested in determining whether there are specific factors that determine disease outcome in patients infected with Toxoplasma gondii. Dr. Young has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed research articles, reviews, and book chapters. Additionally, she has been a member of the investigative team for 25 clinical trial reports.
Committed to the education of medical students, residents, and clinical fellows, Dr. Young has formally supervised over 70 trainees, many of whom have gone on to faculty positions. In addition to helping junior residents interpret fluorescein angiograms, she works with intermediate residents who rotate through her clinics and assist her in surgery and teaches them the basic concepts of retinal detachment surgery, diabetic vitrectomies, and repair of trauma-related vitreoretinal complications. Since 2002, she has served as Director of the Lancaster Course in Ophthalmology, which is the world’s oldest and largest ophthalmic educational and draws ophthalmology practitioners and trainees worldwide.
For her work in ophthalmology education, Dr. Young was recognized with the First Annual Vitreoretinal Fellowship Teaching Award from Mass. Eye and Ear and was nominated for the A. Clifford Barger Award for Excellence in Mentoring from HMS on several occasions. Her clinical expertise has been recognized in America’s Top Ophthalmologists, Best Doctors in America, Top Doctors by US News & World Report, and Boston Top Docs.
Diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, retinal detachment, trauma-related retinal complications, AIDS-related retinal infections, uveitis, ocular toxoplasmosis, retinal vascular occlusions
Diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, retinal detachment, trauma-related retinal complications, AIDS-related retinal infections, uveitis, ocular toxoplasmosis, retinal vascular occlusions, ocular immunology
For a full publication list, please see her CV.
Transcriptional analysis of murine macrophages infected with different Toxoplasma strains identifies novel regulation of host signaling pathways. Melo MB, Nguyen, Cordeiro C, Hassan MA, Yang N, Mckell R, Rosowski EE, Julien L, Butty V, Darde ML, Ajzenberg D, Fitzgerald K, Young LH, Saeij JPJ. PLOS Pathog. 2013;9(12):e1003779.
Interleukin-6 gene polymorphism (-174 G/C) is associated with Toxoplasmic retinochoroiditis. Cordeiro CA, Moreira PR, Bessa TF, Costa GC, Dutra WO, Campos WR, Orefice F, Young LH, Teixeira AL. Acta Ophthalmol. 2013 Jun; 91(4):e311-4.
Progressive outer retinal necrosis presenting as cherry red spot. Yiu G, Young LH. Ocul Immunol Inflamm. 2012 Oct; 20(5):384-6.
Ocular toxoplasmosis: advanced in detection and treatment. Englander M, Young LH. Int Ophthalmol Clin. 2011 Fall;51(4)53-66.
Increased serum levels of soluble tumor necrosis factor receptor-2 (sTNFR2) in patients with active Toxoplasmic retinochoroiditis. Bessa TF, Cordeiro CA, Goncalves RM, Young LH, Campos WR, Orefice F, Teixeira AL. Braz J Infect Dis. 2012 Nov-Dec;16(6):540-4. | {
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houses a number of tenants who's work throughout the local community is invaluable.
- Ballymun Communications
- Ballymun Housing Taskforce
- Ballymun Welfare Rights
- Breaking Ground
- Community Action Programme (CAP)
- Community and Family Training Agency (CAFTA)
- Local Drugs Task Force
- Rehabilitation & Integration Service Ballymun
- Sportslife International
- Young Ballymun
To contact any of these Community Organisations, call axis'
reception on (01) 883 2100, then chose 'Option 3' for a list of these organisations. | {
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| Daily Standard
China's Ruling Party Is Stoking the Fires of Nationalism
In 2002, the movie Hero became an instant hit in China, where it was made by Zhang Yimou, perhaps the best-known Chinese director. When it opened in America last year–complete with an above-the-title imprimatur by haute auteur Quentin Tarantino–it was billed as an action-romance of the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon variety, complete with wire-guided swordfights and a melodramatic ménage-a-trois love angle. Yet, in addition to being a piece of post-modern eye candy, the film had a distinctly pre-modern theme: the glories of Chinese nationalism. The movie’s central plot swirls around martial arts master Jet Li’s decision to abandon his mission to kill the Qin emperor, who is marching his army to conquer Jet Li’s homeland of Zhao. The hero recognizes that the establishment of “our land”–greater, imperial China–is a cause far greater than the enslavement of his native people. As New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis (a student of the Maureen Dowd school) summed up Hero‘s message: “Roll over, Chairman Mao, and tell the comrades the news: the history of the empire now comes wrapped in kaleidoscopic kung fu cool.”
Unquestionably, nationalism is intended to be cool in China these days. Indeed it has become the replacement for communist ideology as the Chinese Communist party seeks to maintain its hold on power while embracing capitalist economics. The government is ritualistic in its fanning of the flames of this nationalism–the “spontaneous” anti-Japanese protests in Chinese cities on the first three weekends of April bore the unmistakable marks of Beijing’s stage management. As student protestor Sun Wei told Joseph Kahn of the New York Times, “I felt like a puppet.” The rally in Beijing ended when police told the crowds they had “vented their anger” long enough, shuffled them on to busses back to their campus. “It was partly a real protest and partly a political show,” Sun declared.
The protests began in the city of Chengdu, in southwest China, April 2, but when they hit Beijing a week later they grew in size and seriousness; they were the biggest to take place in China since 1999, when huge crowds expressed their anger over the inadvertent bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade during the war in Kosovo. That the demonstrations continued into a third weekend is a measure both of the depth of Chinese anti-Japan sentiment and the level of official tolerance of such feelings. In Beijing, units of police and interior ministry troops were mobilized as protection for the Japanese embassy and the Japanese ambassador’s residence, but they didn’t prevent the crowds from throwing stones and bottles, or from looting Japanese businesses.
The roots of China’s anti-Japanese anger are deep, based not just on the events of the World War II era but also the earlier flowering of Japanese power at the turn of the 20th century. Their devastating defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 is widely regarded in China as a watershed event marking China’s weakness before imperial powers, leading even intellectuals to fear national extinction. As J.A.G. Roberts writes:
The disastrous defeat in the Sino-Japanese War destroyed the credit of the self-strengtheners [in China] and raised acute fears for the nation’s survival. In the aftermath, in response to the scramble for China, a determination to preserve all practical means to preserve China may be observed. . . . From these incidents and from the social changes which occurred in the late nineteenth century, there developed the sentiment which may properly be called Chinese nationalism.
Further, the Chinese Communist party bases much of its claims of legitimacy–and its dispute of Guomindang legitimacy–on its record of fighting the Japanese invasions of the 1930s and 1940s. As the Economist succinctly puts it in its explanation of the recent protests: “Animosity towards Japan is regarded as the hallmark of a [Chinese] patriot.”
It also appears that anti-Japanese sentiment is a particularly useful tool for Beijing in its drive to assert both a global and a regional leadership role. For example, reminding East Asians of Japanese atrocities during World War II is an effective tool amongst Koreans. The visits of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to Yasukuni, the Shinto shrine to Japan’s war dead, have been pilloried as honoring “war criminals.” The immediate spark for the latest demonstrations in China was the publication in Japan of an allegedly revisionist textbook playing down the atrocities, which also plays into the Beijing line that Japan has not sufficiently apologized for its past. Moreover, Japan’s emerging new role as a “normal” geopolitical power and its renewed alliance with the United States–based in great measure upon fear of rising Chinese military power–and calls to make Tokyo a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council have focused the Chinese regime’s interest in stoking anti-Japanese feelings.
Finally, it’s almost certain that Chinese leaders are attempting to siphon a whole host of social troubles–economic and labor unrest, internal political repression, corruption, and the general lack of political development–into expressions of anger at Japan and other foreign sources. Murray Scot Tanner, a senior political scientist at RAND Corporation and perhaps the leading authority on rising unrest in China, observes:
China has taken a much riskier step beyond its emerging protest strategy of “permissive containment and management” by trying to tacitly “stage manage” angry young nationalist protestors. The leadership clearly hopes to ride this wave, buttress its popular nationalist credentials, and mobilize this popular anger as a diplomatic tool in its dealings with Japan over such issues as textbooks, Security Council membership, and cooperation with the U.S. to protect Taiwan. China can now claim–probably correctly–that its people would not stand for significant concessions on these issues.
But Beijing has chosen to run major risks that could end up creating serious challenges for its domestic stability and its foreign policy. By aligning itself with the protestors (not withstanding its public calls for restraint), it risks having its policies boxed in or manipulated by protestor demands. . . . Perhaps worse, if Beijing finds it must use coercion to limit the protestors, it risks putting its security forces in the dangerous position of being seen as the “protectors” of the “unrepentant Japanese”–a very dangerous situation for a government that has staked its claims to legitimacy on nationalism and economic growth.
But Chinese nationalism sees many devils other than the Japanese. Indeed, beginning with the Opium War of the 1840, there began what Sinologists call a “victimization narrative,” essentially a chronicle of Western exploitation of–and contribution to–Chinese military and political weakness. Naturally, this victimization narrative contrasts Chinese nationalism with Western imperialism, and often–with the Boxer Uprising of 1900 taken as the mythic prototype–calls forth a peasant movement in response. This also serves to link the narrative of modern Chinese history with the dynastic cycles of the more distant past. Thus the late Qing period is described as China’s “century of humiliations,” with the strong implication being that this pattern has been broken by the rise of the Communist party to power and now, with China’s emergence as a regional and global power.
To today’s Chinese nationalists, the United States stands as the ultimate Western hegemon and practitioner of, in the government’s favorite phrase, “power politics” aimed at blocking Beijing’s rightful place in the international order. However, in this view, the narrative of the 21st century will have quite a different outcome than that of the 19th century: In their 1996 screed Surpassing the USA, authors Xi Yongjun and Ma Zaithun declare that “China’s rise is the sign for America’s fall.” This is the strong belief of the so-called “fourth generation” of Chinese Communist party leaders, the generation of Hu Jintao, who, “because of the education they have received, in their subconscious the West, and the U.S. in particular, has always been our enemy, oppressing us, invading our motherland; and even killing our countrymen.”
The character and virulence of modern Chinese nationalism goes a long way toward explaining Beijing’s response to the crisis over the mid-air collision between a Chinese fighter and a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft in early 2001. Although it was almost immediately clear that the incident resulted from overly aggressive tactics on the part of the Chinese pilot and a fatal error on his part, there seemed to be no way that the Beijing government could admit the facts, especially to its own people, and thus bring the crisis to resolution. Viewed as an element in the narrative of Chinese nationalists, the crash of the Chinese MiG and the death of the pilot were evidence of continuing attempts by the United States to humiliate China, consequently a hostile response was the only palatable option for the government in Beijing. Such are the dangers to the leadership of “riding the tiger,” as Murray Scot Tanner puts it, of Chinese nationalism.
In theory, the phenomenon of nationalism, the love of one’s country, or patriotism, is neither good nor evil. At the core of American “nationalism” is the narrative of the Declaration of Independence–a document often targeted by Chinese nationalists as indicative of the immaturity of American culture–with its enunciation of natural, universal political rights. Even “Chinese” nationalism, as now expressed in Taiwan, can be energetically, even brawlingly, democratic.
Yet modern Chinese mainlander nationalism is marked by a number of darker qualities, as Yu Maochun of the U.S. Naval Academy argues. It is deeply chauvinistic, celebrating not only millennia of Chinese civilization but the virtues of the Han people. And it is an important staple of Chinese popular culture–or at least that popular culture endorsed and promoted by the government. Observes Yu:
[I]nternalized chauvinism in China’s popular culture remains pervasive among ordinary Chinese citizens. The Chinese government in its vigorous campaign of “Patriotic Education” strongly endorses “patriotic songs” that blatantly advocate chauvinism. Earlier this year, the [Party] authorities in Shanghai endorsed three such songs for all high schools in the region. One of them is called “The Chinese,” by the pop star Liu Dehua. The lyric defines what qualifies one as a “Chinese,” [that is,] one must have “yellow face and black eyes.” . . . Perhaps the most popular “patriotic song” in the last 25 years in China is Zhang Mingmin’s “Dragon’s Descendents,” which defines a Chinese as someone with “black eyes, black hair, and yellow skin.” The latest “patriotic song” performed at every major national TV event is Ye Fan’s “Dear China, I Love You!,” which goes even further by claiming that “my yellow skin is china’s national flag.”
It’s important to note that there are alternative interpretations of Chinese tradition that would make for a less disturbing form of nationalism. The assimilative notion of “Sinicization” for centuries turned Tibetans, Mongols, Turkic peoples, Muslims, Buddhists, Koreans, and others into Chinese; in this narrative of Chinese history, acculturation was a means to civilize the barbarians. Thus conquerors became dynasts; outsiders were integrated into Chinese politics.
But that’s not the kind of nationalism that appeals to the leadership in Beijing today. Thus the notion of China’s “peaceful rise,” so appealing to Western Sinologists, is difficult to square with the chip-on-the-shoulder attitudes that percolate under the banner of modern Chinese nationalism. Thus Yu Maochun’s review of Zhang Yimou’s movie Hero is much darker than that of the New York Times. The “biopic,” as he calls it, of emperor Shi Huangdi, who militarily “unified” China in 221 B.C., is more than kaleidoscopic kung fu cool. It’s also is a thinly veiled argument for an attack on Taiwan as well as an expression of an aggressive nationalism. “Through stunning cinematography, the movie reminds” Yu of Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, in which Hitler and National Socialism are equated with German nationalism. Hero‘s message “is unmistakable–no matter how brutal a dictator might be, no matter how many people he might have to murder, as long as he could unify China by any means, he is China’s hero.”
Whether or not Hu Jintao imagines himself as such a hero is impossible to know. But in promulgating such a model of heroism in service to an imperial ideal, the Chinese Communist leaders are riding a very powerful tiger, notorious through history for slipping the leash.
Tom Donnelly is a resident fellow at AEI.
There are no comments available.
1150 17th Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036
© 2015 American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research | {
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Niece getting married
I just received a shower invitation for a shower for my niece. Now, I donÂt truly have a question, just want to vent!
Several years ago, after her parents broke up in a nasty separation (so I do understand where the hurt came from) she told some members of my family that she didnÂt want to have anything to do with us. She had been close to my daughter (who is just a few months younger than she is). We were told that although we had not done anything to her YET, she just couldnÂt trust any of us. Now for the part that is hurtful to me  my family had never been supportive to her. All contact was broke with us, but contact was maintained with one of my sisters (who partied with the nieceÂs dad). Family friends in another state heard over a year ago about the upcoming wedding. We have not been told anything nor have we been invited to the wedding.
So, now I have an invitation to the shower, given by the brideÂs sister. By the way, MOB was a BIG etiquette snob that told my family that we were gauche. Invitation as said is from immediate family, plus it has registry information printed on the bottom of the invitation. Plus, when I did go look at the list, there are two different dates for the wedding, one about 6 months from now, the other in 2007!
Now, as I said  this was to vent. Yes, she is my niece and despite some callous treatment by a very immature young lady, I will respond as a loving Aunt, even if the wedding invitation never is sent  but needed to get some grief out of my system! I see a Bridezilla on her way . . .
The shower is several hours from where I live, and as a joke, I have considered arriving to "Surprise" my nieces and announce that I was "staying with them to catch up". Of course, I would never do that, but it is fun to roll it around a bit. | {
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OWS Is Trigger For Major Shift in Global Consciousness
by Allen L Roland and Jim Fetzer
The rapidly expanding “Occupy Wall Street” movement is reacting to anxiety, frustration and fear but it is being fueled by a powerful and worldwide desire for a major change in moral priorities, where cooperation and altruism replace selfishness and greed. OWS is in essence a worldwide intervention on a corrupt and greed addicted corporate state and the people will lead this evolutionary shift in global consciousness by demanding truth, fairness and justice.
“Such is the irresistible nature of truth that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.” – Thomas Paine
Top down change is fueled by a selfish corporate state whose primary focus is profit and eventually leads to greed, deception and corporate fascism.
Bottom up change is fueled by empowered people whose primary demand is truth, fairness and justice which eventually leads to social cooperation, altruism and true democracy.
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators marked their 51st day of occupation yesterday, maintaining their Bottom up grassroots protest against financial greed, corruption, and the restoration of social and economic equality ~ and now the movement has spread like wildfire to hundreds of cities around the globe.
As Naomi Wolf writes in AlterNet, ~ “Suddenly, the United States looks like the rest of the furious, protesting, not-completely-free world. Indeed, most commentators have not fully grasped that a world war is occurring. But it is unlike any previous war in human history: for the first time, people around the world are not identifying and organizing themselves along national or religious lines, but rather in terms of a global consciousness and demands for a peaceful life, a sustainable future, economic justice and basic democracy. Their enemy is a global “corporatocracy” that has purchased governments and legislatures, created its own armed enforcers, engaged in systemic economic fraud, and plundered treasuries and ecosystems.”
The enemy has been identified, the war has begun and the people will not only prevail but a major shift of global consciousness is already happening.
The three stages of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement appear to be:
Stage 1. Occupy and establish a visible presence and a moral vision opposing wars of aggression, corporate welfare, cuts in social programs, and the subversion of the Constitution.
Stage 2. Demand the truth, including “9/11 Truth”, reform or abolition of the FED, the prosecution of Wall Street fraud and an end to the exploitation of the public by banks and other financial institutions.
Stage 3. Strike, revolt and demand real change, a living wage, where corporations are required to promote the general welfare and where stakeholders ( everyone effected including the environment ) are given priority over stockholders.
The OWS movement has already established a highly visible presence throughout America and is in the process of establishing a moral vision of fairness, cooperation, distributive justice and social responsibility. The diagnosis is fairly obvious and the OWS movement is part of the cure ~ which starts with truth and transparency.
As Robert Reich writes in truth-out.org on November 3rd ~ “The disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation hasn’t been this wide since the late 1960s. The two worlds are on a collision course: Americans who are losing their jobs or their pay and can’t pay their bills are growing increasingly desperate. Washington insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans, diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the lobbyists’ wealthy patrons on Wall Street and in corporate suites haven’t a clue or couldn’t care less. I can’t tell you when the collision will occur but I’d guess 2012. Look elsewhere around the world and you see a similar collision unfolding. The details differ but the larger forces are similar. You see it in Spain, Greece, and Italy, whose citizens are being squeezed by bankers insisting on austerity. You see it in Chile and Israel, whose young people are in revolt. In the Middle East, whose “Arab spring” is becoming a complex Arab fall and winter. Even in China, whose young and hourly workers are demanding more – and whose surge toward inequality in recent years has been as breathtaking as is its surge toward modern capitalism. I spent part of yesterday in Oakland, California. The Occupier movement is still in its infancy in the United States, but it cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game – an economy that won’t respond, a democracy that won’t listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards ~ Here, as elsewhere, the people are rising.”
The people are rising, indeed, and soon it will be time to demand the truth about this rigged game and our lost moral values ~ that in many ways started with the 9/11 cover up and has accelerated ever since.
Jim Fetzer, the former Marine Corps officer, McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth and founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, also recognizes the next step for the OWS movement ~ “What the movement eventually must appreciate is that their concerns about wars of aggression, including the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, have been justified on the basis of a theory about 9/11 that cannot possibly withstand critical inspection. The “official account” of 9/11 has 19 Islamic fundamentalists hijacking four commercial carriers, outfoxing the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, and committing these atrocities under the control of a guy off in a cave in Afghanistan. And yet the government has never been able to prove that any of those hijackers were aboard any of those planes. We know all those phone calls were faked. And the government has yet to produce even one of millions of uniquely identifiable parts from any of those four aircraft.”
“It is startling to realize that Flights 11 and 77 were not even scheduled to fly that day and that the planes corresponding to Flights 93 and 175 were not de-registered by the FAA until 28 September 2005. So how can planes that were not in the air have crashed or planes that crashed have still been in the air four years later? If the planes were faked ~ if they were just as phony as the rest of The 9/11 Report ~ then there are no hijackers; and without hijackers, there are no Islamic terrorists to blame; and without Islamic terrorists to blame, there is no basis for the ‘war on terror’”.
Jim also wrote on September 10th, 2011 ~ 20 Reasons the “Official Account” of 9/11 is Wrong, which makes abundantly clear that what we have been told by our government cannot possibly be true. And in “Peeling the 9/11 Onion: Layers of Plots within Plots” (with Preston James) how the convoluted politics of 9/11 was designed to deceive the public about responsibility for 9/11. And how the mass media has become massively complicit in misleading the public, “The BBC’s instrument of 9/11 misinformation“ (with Joshua Blakeney).
So why is re-opening the 9/11 wound so important? Because the 9/11 cover up is at the very root of our economy draining wars and occupations, our growing expensive and intrusive surveillance system and the anxiety, frustration and fear associated with our present state of being and economic depression. But above all, it’s responsible for the lack of moral trust in our government since the vast majority of the American people do not believe the official 9/11 cover story nor the severely tainted 9/11 Commission Report.
The big lie of 9/11 is slowly unraveling as more than 1,000 worldwide architects and engineers now support the call for a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Like an alcoholic who won’t face their addiction, the United States won’t give up its addiction to a thoroughly discredited 9/11 official story to justify and maintain its War on Terror, global military superiority and political domination over friends and enemies alike ~ and always at the expense of the people and tax payers.
Our point here is that one of the principle demands of the OWS movement is the demand for truth and transparency from our government ~ and that must eventually lead to 9/11 and the governments role in either condoning this tragedy or aiding in its implementation.
Wall Street is being targeted because the average Wall Street salary grew over 16% last year to $361,330 ~ which is five times the average salary of a private sector worker in the city. A recent study at the University of Michigan showed that banks did not significantly increase lending after their trillions of dollars in bailouts but instead invested (gambled) in risky securities that profited from short term price movements ~ Main Street be damned. And guess who has benefited, more than all the GOP candidates combined, in campaign donations from financial firm employees ~ President Obama to the tune of $15.6 million
In essence, the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is a form of massive intervention by the American people on a political system that is addicted to deception and not only will not listen to them but is quite literally afraid of the truth. Millions of Americans are demanding the truth, fairness and justice and are showing themselves willing to shut down the government to obtain it ~ just as the city of Oakland was shut down last Wednesday.
Don’t think a country cannot be shut down, because this is already happening in Greece ~ where ordinary Greeks are taking matters into their hands and inspiring the Occupy Wall Street movement in the process. The Greeks grassroots refusal to put up with austerity is quickly gaining momentum, as people give up on mainstream politics ~ which we may very well soon be doing. Authors Hara Kouki and Antonis Vradis, Common Dreams, elaborate ~ “People here feel the country is gradually sinking, carrying them down a path dug in arbitrariness and injustice. Yet at this very moment – when it is not only the rules of the game that are challenged but the game itself – they seem to feel empowered to act in ways that would not have appeared feasible in the past: they physically attack politicians, mock and cancel military-inspired national public parades and humiliate army officials attending them, participate in neighborhood assemblies and mass demonstrations (irrespective of the amount of tear gas thrown against them by the police), create grassroots trade unions to demand their labor rights, occupy workplaces, disrupt public services and protest in violent, impulsive, unpredictable ways.”
As America enters Stage Two of “Occupy Wall Street” ~ the demands for fairness, justice and truth will resonate throughout the entire country and world and if Obama, Congress and other world leaders continue to ignore this rising tide of revolt ~ we will soon have a situation similar to what faced Hosni Mubarak in Egypt ~ where Mubarak saw himself fully in charge of a country while the people of his country were occupying the streets and actively planning how they would run the country without him and his corrupt corporate cronies.
In other words, any President, politician or world leader who ignores the scope of the Occupy Wall Street movement will soon be looking back at the bus that ran over them.
Like the Germans in the 30’s, locked into a deep recession, we are being manipulated and conditioned by fear by the corporate state to slowly give up our rights, liberties, guns and freedom ~ and all in the name of National Security and the never ending so called war on terror
If you’re not deeply concerned, speaking out or taking to the streets, you’re not part of the revolution which is, in reality, a shift in global consciousness ~ and true change will become a consequence of it as it once did 235 years ago.
“What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the American revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 – 1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.” – John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, August 24, 1815
This revolution or war will be much shorter because no world leader or corporate state can withstand the vast masses demanding truth, fairness and justice ~ and armed with the proven capability of closing down any corporation, city, state or government which does not honor those moral values.
These are indeed exciting times for true change is just around the corner and we, the people, are making it happen. It’s not politics as usual anymore ~ it’s a brand new ballgame and OWS is setting the agenda.
OWS Is Trigger For Major Shift in Global Consciousness | Veterans Today | {
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Remembering Wolf Bayou
Wolf Bayou is in the northeast part of Pemiscot County. It runs roughly parallel to the Mississippi River and the levee. In my boyhood, the bayou area was wooded, but now only a band of trees surrounds it.
The bayou is a mile or so long, and it peters out into what was variously called Island Bayou or Sample Bayou. This small bayou meandered through the woods southward and emptied into Big Lake-later called Sharp's Lake-and is now fertile farm land. During late summer Island Bayou would dry up into a series of long pools.
Fishing in those pools was good but not many casual fishermen found them. Two or three times as a boy I'd be fishing there, and Mrs. Nora Williams would come to the place in her buggy, tie her horse to a bush and enjoy the fun. She'd catch fish, too.
The fish were mostly bream, but occasionally a grinnel (bowfin) would get on the line. They were large, scaled fish that really put up a battle, and our tackle would seldom last until one was landed. They were fighters.
A family of people named Yeager came to our community on a visit to the Valentine family. They heard of those fish, and a group of them went to the Island Bayou with the proper tackle for landing fish and really caught a large number of them.
Those fish weren't highly prized by gourmets because their flesh was soft and not tasty. I did hear of one recipe: build a large fire of wood and burn it down to a bed of coals. Place the fish, intact, on the fire until the exterior is thoroughly charred. Eat the charred skin and throw everything else away. Never tried it!
Wolf Bayou could be a souvenir of the earthquake of 1812. The sides of it drop so steeply and it is so deep that it is difficult to imagine it being washed out. Besides that, water will erode land rapidly only by speed or to circumvent an obstruction. The ground there is flat. What could divert or obstruct water enough to make a hole that deep and long?
The primeval forest must have been a wonderful sight! When I was a young man I knew an old man named John Choin. He told me that the woods there were so clear of underbrush that one could be where the levee now is and see the opening | {
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Hand Wringing Over Medellin: Texas has defied the entire civilized world by refusing to delay the execution of confessed rapist/murderer Jose Ernesto Medellin, according to this story by Alan Turner from today's Houston Chronicle. Medellin. a Mexican citizen, was convicted 15 years ago of the gang-rape and strangulation murder of two teen-aged girls in Houston. A 1963 treaty, "the Vienna Convention on Counselor Relations", required Houston police to notify the Mexican consul of Medellin's arrest, but they failed to do this. The World Court's Avena decision in 2004, announced that in such situations, the convicted murderer is entitled to a court hearing to determine if his defense was undermined by the failure to notify. The claim today is that Medellin is entitled to such a hearing. One minor detail.....Medellin got his hearing on state habeas corpus in 1994 and the habeas judge held that the failure to notify the Mexican consul did not prejudice his case. The father of one of the murdered girls properly characterized the current outcry, "It's just a last-ditch effort to keep this scumbag breathing."
Sex Offenders Lose College Aid: An education bill adopted by Congress last week includes a provision which prevents violent sex offenders from receiving Pell Grants to pay college expenses. Associated Press writer Ryan Foley reports that the new restriction only affects sex offenders confined in treatment facilities beyond their sentences due to their high probability for re-offending. Apparently some of these offenders were applying for Pell Grant funds by signing up to take classes, then dropping them after receiving the money.
Too Fat to Execute? An Ohio double-murderer has filed a federal lawsuit challenging his upcoming October execution, arguing that he is too fat for lethal injection. An AP story by Andrew Welsh-Huggins reports that Richard Cooey, who is 5 ft. 7 and weighs 267 lbs, also takes medication for migraines that may interfere with the anesthesia given during the lethal injection process. Cooey was sentenced to die for killing college students Dawn McCreery and Wendy Offredo on Sept. 1, 1986. At around midnight Cooey and two friends threw a large concrete chunk off a freeway overpass which struck the car in which McCreery and Offredo were traveling, disabling it. Cooey then presented himself to the young women as a good Samaritan, offering to drive them to a telephone to call their parents. Once in his car, Cooey robbed, raped and beat the women with a nightstick before strangling the pair with a shoelace. | {
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Alcohol concern: Alcohol and young people: A toolkit
Supporting vulnerable young people at risk of alcohol-related harm.
'Alcohol and young people: A toolkit supporting vulnerable young people at risk of alcohol related harm' provides guidance on supporting young people who are experiencing, or at risk of, alcohol-related harm. It has a particular focus on young people in the looked-after system and those with special educational needs.
The guidance is primarily for workers who are not alcohol specialists. However, sections of the toolkit are also relevant to specialist alcohol and drug staff and commissioners.
The toolkit is the result of a collaboration between Calling Time - the South West Alcohol Improvement Programme and Alcohol Concern. It builds on relevant policy, research and guidance and is informed by consultation with a number of professionals and young people from across the South West and in particular from Torbay.
You can download the toolkit which has been kept as brief as possible.
A fuller version with references and more detailed evidence will be available from Alcohol Concern. Please contact [email protected] for more details. | {
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Hungarian Defence Force
|This article needs additional citations for verification. (January 2013)|
|Hungarian Defence Forces
Flag and emblem of the Hungarian Defence Force
|Founded||16 May 1848|
|Current form||15 March 1990|
|Service branches||Hungarian Ground Forces
Hungarian Air Force
|Commander-in-Chief||President János Áder|
|Minister of Defence||Csaba Hende|
|Chief of staff||Colonel General Tibor Benkő|
|Military age||18–40 years of age|
|Conscription||No (Suspended on 3 November 2004)|
|2,349,948 males, age 16–49 (2010 est.),
2,290,568 females, age 16–49 (2010 est.)
|1,902,639 males, age 16–49 (2010 est.),
1,897,378 females, age 16–49 (2010 est.)
|59,237 males (2010 est.),
55,533 females (2010 est.)
|Active personnel||29 700|
|Reserve personnel||17000 (2013)|
|Deployed personnel|| Afghanistan - 100
Bosnia and Herzegovina - 160
Congo - 2
Cyprus - 77
Egypt - 26
Georgia - 8
Kosovo - 203
Lebanon - 4
Mali - 15
Somalia - 4
Western Sahara - 7
|Budget||HUF 241.559 billion (2014)
(~ $ 1.08 billion)
|Percent of GDP||0.79% (2014 est.)|
|Foreign suppliers|| Sweden
|History||Military history of Hungary|
|Ranks||Military ranks of Hungary|
- 1 Name
- 2 Current military
- 3 History
- 4 See also
- 5 References
- 6 External links
Hungarians call their army the Honvédség, which literally means "corps of homeland defenders" and originally referred to the revolutionary army established by Lajos Kossuth and the National Defence Committee of the Revolutionary Hungarian Diet in September 1848 during the Hungarian Revolution. Later, in accordance with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, Hungarians won the right to have their own Landwehr, a homeland army alongside the existing Imperial and Royal Army (or Common Army). Thus the Royal Hungarian Landwehr, also known in English as the Honved, was established as a specifically Hungarian army within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, separate from the Austrian Landwehr and the Imperial and Royal Army (or Common Army) of the Empire as a whole. After the First World War, it became the Royal Hungarian Army which subsequently fought on the German side in World War II.
Throughout both eras, from 1867 to 1945, the army's Hungarian name remained Magyar Királyi Honvédség (literally: "Royal Hungarian Homeland Defence") and the term Honvédség has been used to refer to the Hungarian military since 1848, referring to its purpose (Hon meaning "homeland" and véd meaning "defender" or "defence"; thence Honvéd meaning "homeland defence"). Until 1945 it was qualified by the term "royal" (Királyi). Today, the Hungarian Defence Force is called the Magyar Honvédség and a private soldier is a Honvéd.
This term is also used in the name of the Hungarian football club, Budapest Honvéd FC, originally the Army football team.
Since 2007, the Hungarian Defence Force has been under a unified command structure. The Ministry of Defence maintains the political and civil control over the army. The military leadership is exercised by the Defence Staff of the Ministry of Defence. A subordinate Joint Force Command coordinates and commands the HDF corps.
Structure of modern day Hungarian Defence Forces
- HDF Recruitment and Central Registry Command
- HDF Operations Center
- NATO/EU positions
- HDF 5th ’István Bocskai’ Infantry Brigade
- HDF 12th ’Arrabona’ Air-defense Missile Regiment
- HDF 25th ’György Klapka’ Infantry Brigade
- HDF 25/88th Light Mixed Battalion
- HDF 34th ’László Bercsényi’ Special Operations Battalion
- HDF 59th ’Dezsõ Szentgyörgyi’ Tactical Fighter Base
- HDF 86th ’Szolnok’ Helicopter Base
- HDF 43rd 'József Nagysándor' Signal and Command and Control Support Regiment
- HDF 54th ’Veszprém’ Radar Regiment
- HDF 93rd ’Sándor Petõfi’ NBC Battalion
- HDF ’Artúr Görgei’ NBC Information Center
- HDF Civilian–Military Cooperation and Psyops Center
- HDF 1st Honvéd Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Warship Regiment
- HDF Peace Support Training Center
- Hungary has one of the heaviest and most qualified warship battalion in East-Central Europe, only Hungary operates river-based military forces of the surrounding NATO-members. The Home Defence Pyrotechnician and Warship Battalion of the Hungarian Defence Forces based in Újpest Port, on the River Danube, Budapest. In the 2000s (decade), the army bought new minesweepers, restored or retired the old ones. On national holidays warships come along the River Danube in Budapest.
- MH 37th ’Ferenc Rákóczi II’ Engineering Regiment
Service – Support
- HDF Aircraft Repair Plant
- HDF Bakony Combat Training Center
- HDF Medical Center
- HDF Geoinformation Service
- HDF 64th ’József Boconádi Szabó’ Logistics Regiment
- HDF Logistic Center
- HDF Military Transport Center
- HDF Pápa Base Airport
- HDF ’Vitéz Sándor Szurmay’ Budapest Garrion Brigade
- HDF NCO Academy
- HDF EUFOR Althea Contingent, Bosnia and Herzegovina
- HDF Mi-17 Air Advisory Team Afghanistan
- HDF KFOR Contingent Kosovo
- HDF Military Advisory Team, Afghanistan
- HDF Support Platoon, Afghanistan
- HDF Special Operation Team Afghanistan - objectives: Recon and Support (The Hungarian Government hands it in top secret)
- HDF MFO Contingent, Sinai
- HDF UNFICYP Contingent, Cyprus and specific other missions.
The Hungarian armed forces have severely reduced the number of battle tanks in service, and put most IFV's in reserve. A large number of garrisons were shut down, some of them sold to municipal authorities for peaceful uses.
In 1997, Hungary spent about 123 billion HUF ($560 million) on defence. Hungary became a member of NATO on 12 March 1999. Hungary provided airbases and support for NATO's air campaign against Serbia and has provided military units to serve in Kosovo as part of the NATO-led KFOR operation. Hungary has sent a 300 strong logistics unit to Iraq in order to help the US occupation with armed transport convoys, though public opinion opposed the country's participation in the war. One soldier was killed in action due to a roadside bomb in Iraq. The parliament refused to extend the one year mandate of the logistics unit and all troops have returned from Iraq as of mid-January 2005. Hungarian troops are still in Afghanistan as of early 2005 to assist in peace-keeping and de-talibanization. Hungary will most probably replace its old UAZ 4x4 vehicles with the modern Iveco LMV types. Hungarian forces deploy the Gepárd anti-materiel rifle, which is a heavy 12,7 mm portable gun. This equipment is also in use by the Turkish and Croatian armed forces, among other armies.
New transport helicopter purchases are on the list before. Most probably this will happen before 2015.
In a significant move for modernization, Hungary decided in 2001 to buy 14 JAS 39 Gripen fighter aircraft (the contract includes 2 dual-seater airplanes and 12 single-seaters as well as ground maintenance facilities, a simulator, and training for pilots and ground crews) for 210 billion HUF (about 800 million EUR). Five Gripens (3 single-seaters and 2 two-seaters) arrived in Kecskemét on 21 March 2006, expected to be transferred to the Hungarian Air Force on March 30. 10 or 14 more aircraft of this type might follow up in the coming years.
Ancient, medieval, and early modern military
The Hungarian tribes of Árpád vezér who came to settle in the Carpathian Basin were noted for their fearsome light cavalry, which conducted frequent raids throughout much of Western Europe (as far as present-day Spain), maintaining their military supremacy with long range and rapid-firing reflex bows. Not until the introduction of well-regulated, plate-armored knight heavy cavalry could German emperors stop the Hungarian armies.
During the Árpáds the light cavalry based army was transformed slowly into a western-style one. The light cavalry lost its privileged position, replaced by a feudal army formed mainly from heavy cavalry.
The Hungarian field armies were drawn up into an articulated formation (as it happened in Battle of Przemyśl (1099), Battle at Leitha (1146), Battle of Morvamező (1278), (1349), in three main battle (formation) (1146, 1278, 1349). According to the contemporary sources and later speculations, the first line was formed by light cavalry archers (Battle of Oslava (1116, 1146, 1260, 1278). Usually they started the battle followed by a planned retreat (1116, 1146), Battle of Kressenbrunn (1260). The major decisive battles of the Hungarian army were placed in the second or third lines consisted mainly of the most valuable parts of the army - in general heavy cavalry (1146, 1278, 1349).
The commanders of the Hungarian Kingdom's army used different tactics, based on a recognition of their own and the enemies' (Holy Roman Empire, Pechenegs, Uzes, Cumans, Mongols, Byzantine Empire) abilities and deficiencies.
The Hungarian knight army had its golden age under King Louis the Great, who himself was a famed warrior and conducted successful campaigns in Italy due to family matters (his younger brother married Joanna I, Queen of Naples who murdered him later.) King Matthias Corvinus maintained very modern mercenary-based royal troops, called the Black Army. King Matthias favoured ancient artillery (catapults) as opposed to cannons, which were the favourite of his father, Johannes Hunyadi, former Regent of Hungary.
During the Ottoman invasion of Central Europe (between late 14th century and circa 1700) Hungarian soldiers protected fortresses and launched light cavalry attacks against the Turks (see Hungarian Hussars). The northern fortress of Eger was famously defended in the autumn of 1552 during the 39 day Siege of Eger against the combined force of two Ottoman armies numbering circa 120,000 men and 16 ultra-heavy siege guns. The victory was very important, because two much stronger forts of Szolnok and Temesvár had fallen quickly during the summer. Public opinion attributed Eger's success to the all-Hungarian garrison, as the above two forts have fallen due to treason by the foreign mercenaries manning them. In 1596, Eger fell to the Ottomans for the same reason.
In the 1566 Battle of Szigetvár, Miklós Zrínyi defended Szigetvár for 30 days against the largest Ottoman army ever seen up to that day, and died leading his remaining few soldiers on a final suicide charge to become one of the best known national heroes. His great-grandson, Miklós Zrínyi, poet and general became one of the better known strategists of the 1660s. In 1686, the capital city Buda was freed from the Ottomans by an allied Christian army composed of Austrian, Hungarian, and Western European troops, each roughly one third of the army. The Habsburg then annexed Hungary.
Habsburg Hungarian military
Under Habsburg rule, Hungarian Hussars rose to international fame and served as a model for light cavalry in many European countries. During the 18th and 19th centuries hundreds of thousands of forcibly enrolled Hungarian males served 12 years or more each as line infantry in the Austrian Imperial Army.
Two independence wars interrupted this era, that of Prince Francis II Rákóczi between 1703 and 1711 and that of Lajos Kossuth in 1848–1849. A July 11, 1848 act of parliament in Budapest called for the formation of an army, the Honvédség, of 200,000 which would use the Magyar language of command. It was to be formed around already extant imperial units, twenty battalions of infantry, ten hussar regiments, and two regiments of Székely from the Transylvanian Military Frontier. They were further joined by eight companies of two Italian regiments stationed in Hungary and parts of the Fifth Bohemian Artillery Regiment.
In 1848–1849 the Honvédség (mostly made up of enthusiastic patriots with no prior military training) achieved incredible successes against better-trained and -equipped Austrian forces, despite the obvious advantage in numbers on the Austrian side. The Winter Campaign of Józef Bem and the Spring Campaign of Artúr Görgey are to this day taught at prestigious military schools around the globe, including at West Point Academy in the United States. Having suffered initial setbacks, including the loss of Pest-Buda, the Honvéd took advantage of the Austrians' lack of initiative and re-formed around the Debrecen-based Kossuth government. The Hungarians advanced again and by the end of spring 1849, Hungary was basically cleared of foreign forces, and would have achieved independence, were it not for the Russian intervention. At the request of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, the Russians invaded with a force of 190,000 soldiers - against the Honvédség's 135,000 - and decisively defeated Bem's Second Army in Transylvania, opening the path into the heart of Hungary. This way the Austrian-Russian coalition outnumbered Hungarian forces 3:1, which led to Hungary's surrender at Világos on 13 August 1849. Sándor Petőfi, the great Hungarian poet, went missing in action in the Battle of Segesvár, against invading Russian forces.
In April 1867, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was established. Franz Josef, the head of the ancient Habsburg dynasty, was recognized as both Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. Nevertheless, the issue of what form the Hungarian military would take remained a matter of serious contention between Hungarian patriots and Austrian leaders. As the impasse threatened the political union, Emperor Franz Josef ordered a council of generals in November of the same year. Ultimately, the leaders resolved on the following solution: in addition to the joint (k.u.k.) army, Hungary would have its own defence force, whose members would swear their oath to the King of Hungary (who was also Emperor of Austria) and the national constitution, use the Hungarian language of command, and display their own flags and insignia. (Austria would also form its own parallel national defence force, the Landwehr.) As a result of these negotiations, on 5 December 1868, the Royal Hungarian Landwehr (Magyar Kiralyi Honvédség, or Defence Force) was established.
The Honvédség was usually treated generously by the Diet in Budapest. By 1873 it already had over 2,800 officers and 158,000 men organized into eighty-six battalions and fifty-eight squadrons. In 1872, the Ludovika Academy officially began training cadets (and later staff officers). Honvédség units engaged in manoeuvres and were organized into seven divisions in seven military districts. While artillery was not allowed, the force did form batteries of Gatling guns in the 1870s.
In the midst of trouble between the imperial government and the parliament in 1906, the Honvédség was further expanded and finally received its own artillery units. In this form, the force approached the coming world war in most respects as a truly "national" Hungarian army.
World War I
Hungarian soldiers "fought with distinction" on every front contested by Austria-Hungary in the First World War. Honvédség units (along with the Austrian Landwehr) were considered fit for front line combat service and equal to those of the joint k.u.k. army. They saw combat especially on the Eastern Front and at the Battles of the Isonzo on the Italian Front. Out of the eight million men mobilized by Austria-Hungary, over one million died. Hungarians as a national group were second only to German Austrians in their share of this burden, experiencing twenty-eight war deaths for every thousand persons.
After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in late 1918, the Red Army of the Hungarian communist state (Hungarian Soviet Republic) conducted successful campaigns to protect the country's borders. However, in the Hungarian–Romanian War of 1919 Romanian troops eventually crushed the communists in the spring of 1919, notably at the Battle of Tisza. Hungary came under occupation by Romanian, Serbian, American, and French troops.
In accordance with the Treaty of Bucharest, upon leaving, the Romanian army took substantial compensation for reparations. This included agricultural goods and industrial machinery as well as raw materials. The Trianon Treaty limited the Hungarian National Army to 35,000 men and forbad conscription. The army was forbidden to possess tanks, heavy armor, and an air force.
On 9 August 1919, Admiral Miklós Horthy united various anti-communist military units into an 80,000-strong National Army (Nemzeti Hadsereg). On 1 January 1922, the National Army was once again redesignated the Royal Hungarian Army.
During the 1930s and early 1940s, Hungary was preoccupied with the regaining the vast territories and huge amount of population lost in the Trianon peace treaty at Versailles in 1920. This required strong armed forces to defeat the neighbouring states and this was something Hungary could not afford. Instead, the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, made an alliance with German dictator Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. In exchange for this alliance and via the Vienna Awards, Hungary received back parts of its lost territories from Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. Hungary was to pay dearly during and after World War II for these temporary gains.[clarification needed]
On 5 March 1938, Prime Minister Kálmán Darányi announced a rearmament program (the so-called Győr Programme, named after the city where it was announced to the public). Starting 1 October, the armed forces established a five-year expansion plan with Huba I-III revised orders of battle. Conscription was introduced on a national basis in 1939. The peacetime strength of the Royal Hungarian Army grew to 80,000 men organized into seven corps commands.
In March 1939, Hungary launched an invasion of the newly formed Slovak Republic. Both the Royal Hungarian Army and the Royal Hungarian Air Force fought in the brief Slovak-Hungarian War. This invasion was launched to reclaim a part of the Slovakian territory lost after World War I.
On 1 March 1940, Hungary organized its ground forces into three field armies. The Royal Hungarian Army fielded the Hungarian First Army, the Hungarian Second Army, and the Hungarian Third Army. With the exception of the independent "Fast Moving Army Corps" (Gyorshadtest), all three Hungarian field armies were initially relegated to defensive and occupation duties within the regained Hungarian territories.
World War II
In April 1941, in order to regain territory, Hungary joined the Germans in the invasion of Yugoslavia.
After the controversial Kassa attack, elements of the Royal Hungarian Army joined the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. In the late summer of 1941, the Hungarian "Rapid Corps" (Gyorshadtest), alongside German and Romanian army groups, scored a huge success against the Soviets at the Battle of Uman. A little more than a year later and contrasting sharply with the success at Uman, was the near total devastation of the Hungarian Second Army on banks of the Don River in December 1942 during the Battle for Stalingrad.
During 1943, the Hungarian Second Army was re-built. In late 1944, as part of Panzerarmee Fretter-Pico, it participated in the destruction of a Soviet mechanized group at the Battle of Debrecen. But this proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. Unable to re-build again, the Hungarian Second Army was disbanded towards the end of 1944.
On 28 December 1944, a provisional government under the control of the Soviet Union was formed in liberated Debrecen with Béla Miklós as its Prime Minister. Miklós was the commander of the Hungarian First Army, but most of the First Army sided with the Germans and most of what remained of it was destroyed about 200 kilometres north of Budapest between 1 January and 16 February. The pro-Communist government formed by Miklós competed with the pro-Nazi government of Ferenc Szálasi. The Germans, Szálasi, and pro-German Hungarian forces loyal to Szálasi fought on. On 20 January 1945, representatives of the provisional government of Béla Miklós signed an armistice in Moscow. But forces loyal to Szálasi still continued to fight on.
The Red Army, with assistance from Romanian army units, completed the encirclement of Budapest on 29 December 1944 and the Siege of Budapest began. On 2 February 1945, the strength of the Royal Hungarian Army was 214,465 men, but about 50,000 of these had been formed into unarmed labor battalions. The siege of Budapest ended with the surrender of the city on 13 February. But, while the German forces in Hungary were generally in a state of defeat, the Germans had one more surprise for the Soviets.
In early March 1945, the Germans launched the Lake Balaton Offensive with support from the Hungarians. This offensive was almost over before it began. By 19 March 1945, Soviet troops had recaptured all the territory lost during a 13-day German offensive.
After the failed offensive, the Germans in Hungary were defeated. Most of what remained of the Hungarian Third Army was destroyed about 50 kilometres west of Budapest between 16 March and 25 March 1945. Officially, Soviet operations in Hungary ended on 4 April 1945 when the last German troops were expelled.
Some pro-fascist Hungarians like Szálasi retreated with the Germans into Austria and Czechoslovakia. During the very last phase of the war, Fascist Hungarian forces fought in Vienna, Breslau, Küstrin, and along the Oder River.
On 7 May 1945, General Alfred Jodl, the German Chief of Staff, signed the document of unconditional surrender for all German forces. Jodl signed this document during a ceremony in France. On 8 May, in accordance with the wishes of the Soviet Union, the ceremony was repeated in Germany by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. On 11 June, the Allies agreed to make 9 May 1945 the official "Victory in Europe" day. Szálasi and many other pro-fascist Hungarians were captured and ultimately returned to Hungary's provisional government for trial.
During the Socialist and the Warsaw Pact era (1947–1989), the entire 200,000 strong Southern Group of Forces was garrisoned in Hungary, complete with artillery, tank regiments, air force and missile troops (with nuclear weapons). It was by all means a very capable force that made little contact with the local population. Between 1949 and 1955 there was also a huge effort to build a big Hungarian army. All procedures, disciplines, and equipment were exact copies of the Soviet Red Army in methods and material, but the huge costs collapsed the economy by 1956.
After the autumn 1956 revolution was crushed in Budapest, the Soviets took away most of the Hungarian People's Army's equipment, including dismantling the entire Hungarian Air Force, because a sizable percentage of the Army fought alongside the Hungarian revolutionaries. Three years later in 1959, the Soviets began helping rebuild the Hungarian People's Army and resupplying them with new arms and equipment as well as rebuilding the Hungarian Air Force. Satisfied that Hungary was stable and firmly committed once again to the Warsaw Pact, the Soviets offered the Hungarians a choice of withdrawal for all Soviet troops in the country. The new Hungarian leader, János Kádár, asked for all the 200,000 Soviet troops to stay, because it allowed the socialist Hungarian People's Republic to neglect its own draft-based armed forces, quickly leading to deterioration of the military. Large sums of money were saved that way and spent on feel-good socialist measures for the population, thus Hungary could become "the happiest barrack" in the Soviet Bloc.
The Army consisted of two parts. Surface Forces and Air-defense forces:
- 5th Hungarian Army at Székesfehérvár
* 7th Motor Rifle Division at Kiskunfélegyháza * 8th Motor Rifle Division at Zalaegerszeg * 9th Motor Rifle Division at Kaposvár * 11th Tank Division at Tata
- 3rd Army Corps at Cegléd
* 4th Motor Rifle Division at Gyöngyös * 15th Motor Rifle Division at Nyíregyháza
Air-defense forces Headquarters at Veszprém
- 1st Air-defense Division at Veszprém
* 47th Fighter Regiment at Pápa * 31st Fighter Regiment at Taszár * 104th Air-defense Artillery Regiment Nagytarcsa after Szabadszállás
2nd Air-defense Division at Miskolc
Training for conscripts was poor and most of those drafted were actually used as a free labour force (esp. railway track construction and agricultural work) after just a few weeks of basic rifle training. Popular opinion grew very negative towards the Hungarian People's Army and most young men tried to avoid the draft with bogus medical excuses.
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Military of Hungary.|
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What do you call alternative medicine that's been proven to work? MEDICINE!
– Tim Minchin
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Do Not Vaccinate Your Child, Helsinki, 2009
My gym teacher almost died of New Age.
I was in high school. I'd never been much good at gym class at school, mostly because I believed I was the clumsy, nerdy kid who isn't good at gym class. In retrospect, that doesn't make all that much sense, considering that I biked to school on most days, which was about 9 kilometers either way, and since I was (still am) chronically late, I usually cycled really fast in the morning. However, even though I was in pretty good shape, I was no good at running after a ball, and consequently hated gym class and got lousy marks in it.
Until high school. That teacher was different. His approach was to figure out what each of us liked to do for sport, and then encouraged them to do that. Thanks to him, I found my way to aikido, and stuck with that for a few years. My marks went up, too, not to mention my body image and physical self-confidence.
He was into New Age big time. He followed a macrobiotic diet, went on about how the Atlanteans, who were really astronauts, built the pyramids in Egypt and Central America, how you can bend spoons with your mind if you try hard enough, and all that kind of stuff. That was harmless and a bit endearing, until he got a strep throat and refused to take antibiotics because he figured that homeopathy and holistic medicine would do the job better. The pustules in his throat grew so big he couldn't breathe properly anymore, and someone finally dragged him to the hospital. The doctors had to lance and curette the pustules out, and then put him on IV antibiotics.
This isn't why I have such an intense dislike of New Age. I had that before. Perhaps it sealed the deal, though.
While I am some sort of rationalist, I don't make a religion of it. We humans are, generally, pretty irrational. We waste our time doing stuff we know doesn't make much sense – smoking, drinking, eating too much, playing video games, blogging, getting into arguments about semantics on the Internet, collecting comic books, that sort of thing. Personally, I try to keep my irrationality to areas where it does as little harm as possible, to myself and others, but I don't pretend to be rational except in some limited areas of my life. I'm not particularly offended by irrationality, whether it's of the religious or secular variety.
I am offended by harmful irrationality, though. The kind that hurts people. And New Age irrationality is a very serious offender.
New Age fosters a particular kind of woolly-headedness: the kind that makes for a fertile ground from which exploitative gurus sprout up like poison ivy; the kind that makes people withhold vaccines from their children, treat cancer with energy healing, or (nearly) get themselves killed from a simple bacterial infection that's routinely treated every day in every polyclinic on the planet with a cheap life-saving drug that's been available for half a century.
It's also intellectually a horrible mess.
Many oriental philosophies are coherent, practical, and often useful. They have conceptual frameworks that make a great deal of sense in the contexts in which they're used. For example, the stuff related to yoga has concepts like the chakras, prana, kundalini, meridians, and what have you. My mother is a physician and yoga instructor, as well as being congenitally allergic to anything smacking of woo, and she says that you can experience the chakras and stuff related to them – like colors – if you're doing yoga, and you can actually make use of them in some ways that go completely over my head. I believe her. And I can't stop wondering how she copes with all the chinking crystals and whispering angels endemic to yoga circles.
What I don't like is when some jackass takes all this out of context, parrots it to an adoring audience, and then starts directing the flows of kundalini energy between the chakras of his followers to rid them of their delusions, transmit shaktipat, and solve all of their personal, interpersonal, health, and spiritual problems forevermore, throwing in a bit of palmistry, crystals, The Secret, and Tibetan astrology into the bargain. Om tantra rama rama om. That irritates me just about exactly as much as when some other jackass starts jabbering about quantum shifts and the wave-particle duality and etheric vortices to prove the existence of poltergeists, or something. In each case, you have somebody who really has no fucking clue what they're talking about, but just lifts a bunch of fancy words and disconnected concepts, and then blends it into a fluffy mess that smells like incense and patchouli but is actually pure unadulterated shit. It's not spirituality, it's not religion, it's not even art, and it's a hell of a long way from science.
In our neck of the woods, Buddhism is right bang in the middle of it all, and I hate that.
The relentlessly cheerful and all-around good egg Markus "Uku" Laitinen, who is also the instructor and founder of Dogen Sangha Finland and as such an emerging public face of Zen around here, just did an interview (PDF) for Voi Hyvin, a New Age-ish lifestyle magazine. (Voi Hyvin is by no means the worst offender. Still, the headline articles in the latest issue include "Energy from Crystals," "Grandma's 54 Pieces of Life Wisdom," "Get to Know Macrobiotic Food," and "Clairvoyant Niina-Matti Juhola: Nobody Walks Alone.")
I read the interview. It was pretty good.
My problem is that the association between Buddhism in the West and New Age is very strong. Buddhist books are published by New Age publishers and sold at New Age bookstores. New Age mags publish articles by and about Buddhists and Buddhism. I've been asked if what I do is New Age, and I've had to explain that yes, we do burn incense and meditate, but no, we don't tinkle any crystals, we don't play mood music, nor do we compliment each other's auras, do energy healing, nor commune with ancestral spirits. While I had been interested in Buddhism for years – at least since I first encountered it "in the flesh" as it were, in Nepal in 1987 – I never even bothered checking out the Buddhist groups here, because I was so certain they'd have nothing to do with the real deal that I had seen. In fact, the first Buddhist group I did check out was pretty much that – lots of fluffy talk about everybody being your kind mother and all your problems disappearing, a gently hummed prayer to Shakyamuni Buddha (to New Age mood music), and "meditation" where we sat very very quietly as the instructor repeated the salient points of his dharma talk in what was intended to be a hypnotic monotone, not to mention that he was constantly singing the praises of his guru. Yuck.
By some miracle, I didn't stop there, and eventually discovered people such as Uku who hadn't checked their brains at the door.
Buddhism is not New Age. It's about as Old Age as the Old Testament. It's also a demanding, rigorous, and coherent system of thought, ritual, and practice. It's gotten that way through a couple of thousand years of progressive, gradual, evolutionary change, as it's adapted to new cultures and circumstances and slowly incorporated innovations from them. I hate it when New Agers appropriate its words and mangle its concepts and repackage it as something that looks superficially the same but really isn't. It's even more annoying if it's presented in a Buddhist context, as Buddhism.
That's why I get annoyed at folks like Ken Wilber and Genpo Roshi who inject New Age pop philosophy from a dumbed down Carl Jung or an already dumb Eckhart Tolle into it, trademark it, and market it to gullible buyers. If somebody shits in the pool, I don't want to swim in it, even if there's only a little shit in it.
Idealism? Perhaps. In the short time I've practiced Zen, I've found it much tougher and more demanding than I could ever have expected, but also much more meaningful and rewarding. I think it has a great deal to offer to a great many people – but not as New Age Dharma-Burgers. That's why I'd be a great deal more impressed if Uku scored an interview with Tekniikan Maailma the next time around.
And given a choice, I'd much rather die of old age than New Age.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Laughing Buddha At Chinese Restaurant, Helsinki, 2005
If some early bird around six o'clock on a March Sunday morning had happened to look in through the window of the classroom in Pernaja that we had converted to a zendo, I don't think he'd have had many doubts on this score. He would have encountered a pulsating growl of two score people chanting something along the lines of...
Kanzeon...with a dignified lady in freshly pressed black robes performing prostrations on a pale yellow mat before a bronze statue on a makeshift altar, with someone else beating a wooden drum shaped like a fish's head and another one sounding a big bell that looks like a cauldron (with the Lord knows what in it).
Praise to the Buddha
All awaken to the Buddha
Buddha, Dharma, Sangha
Eternal, joyful, egoless, pure
All the day Kanzeon
All the night Kanzeon
This moment is born of Mind
This moment is Mind
In fact, he'd probably have called the police. Or an exorcist. And had he happened by later, during our yoga interlude, when we were tugging at our earlobes in complete silence with frighteningly concentrated expressions, an ambulance.
If Zen isn't a religion, it sure looks and sounds like one. However, in other ways it is significantly different from what we in the part of the world that used to be called Christendom understand by it. Western Christianity has been very much focused on questions of doctrine and belief, from the Christological debates of late antiquity, through the scholasticism and heresies and inquisitions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, to the dogmatic disputes of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, ultimately to the tone of discourse set by Biblical literalists of our time. Protestantism has taken this near its logical conclusion, as it painted over the images of saints in churches and made religion a matter between the believer and God, and sola scriptura its ultimate authority.
I think Zen may have more in common with Judaism than Western Christianity. It's not so much about believing anything in particular is it is about following a practice. I don't think it's a coincidence that there are so many Jews among Zen teachers and practitioners in the West: they already know how to practice, which gives them a huge head start. The rest of us have to first figure out what practice even is, before we can get started on it. Even more than Judaism, Zen is about orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy: doing things rather than believing things.
The problem with characterizing Zen as a religion – or not – is largely due to our reflexively seeing religion in terms of orthodoxy. By those terms, it's not really much of a religion. It's apatheistic, beliefs are pretty much optional, and doctrinal disputes are about the how rather than the what. Brad Warner thinks koans will fuck you up and it's better just to sit quietly and let things happen; Kapleau Roshi thinks that you have to give yourself to the practice body and soul1 and chip away at the roots of your delusions wielding the koan given you by your teacher, or you might as well not bother.
There is a huge amount of conceptual apparatus around Zen, from the core described already in the Pali Canon to contributions by the likes of Ashvagosha and Nagarjuna, Hakuin and Dogen, not to mention the anonymous authors of the Mahayana sutras.2 Much of it is intellectually highly attractive – practical, coherent, logically sound. Much is dense, opaque, and difficult, and does not make a whole lot of sense unless you're already pretty far in your practice.3
Together, this corpus does constitute a philosophy, every bit as much as, say, Marxism or Platonism or post-structuralism, and from where I'm at, it has a good deal more intellectual coherence and rigor than some of the above. But that's not all Zen is either, any more than it is only meditation or only ritual.
Ultimately, it boils down to the pithy subtitle of Philip Kapleau's book – enlightenment, teaching, and practice. Buddha, dharma, sangha. Whether that constitutes a religion is something of a matter of opinion. It's pretty pointless to argue about it, really, very much including this little ramble. Personally, I think I'm only interested in the question because I haven't thought of myself as religious or spiritual since I gave up on Christianity around the age of ten or eleven, and I'm rather surprised that I find rituals like chanting the Kannon sutra so easy and natural, or that when I recite the Four Vows, I actually mean them, at that moment, as silly as it may sound.
If your definition includes belief in the supernatural, blind faith, or ideas of absolute right or wrong, then Zen is not a religion. If it doesn't, Zen probably is a religion. Ultimately, the whole question is just about slapping a label on an abstraction, and abstractions definitely have no independent existence of their own – no matter what you think about anatta.
1 Which are illusions, naturally. Uh, right?
2 No, I don't believe they were really dictated by the Shakyamuni and then hidden by dragons for a few hundred years, before being conveniently discovered inside treetrunks and under rocks by monks who felt Buddhism had gotten too self-absorbed. That's just silly.
3 Anyway, I hope that's the reason, and not just that I'm too hopelessly dense.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Guarding Ground Zero, Beirut, 2005
I have a complicated relationship with war.
First, in the spirit of Confucian Rectification of Names, let's make it clear what I'm talking about here. War. Not the metaphorical kind, like the war on poverty, or ignorance, or crime, or drugs, or terror. Not what one gang of meatheads from one neighborhood does to another gang of meatheds from another neighborhood. Not defending yourself or another from violent attack by some random stranger. We're talking the kind of stuff that's fought with sword and fire, guns and bombs and armies, in or out of uniform.
Or, put more academically, organized violence perpetrated by one imagined community on another imagined community.
Like most people of my age who have been lucky enough to grow up in our relatively secure part of the world, I have no personal experience with war.
Perhaps I'm a little bit closer to it than some, though. Like most Finnish men, I've done my military service, and I grew up listening to my grandfather's stories, many of which were about war. More significant than that is that my wife is from Lebanon, and grew up there during its fifteen years of civil war. I've visited many times, and seen some of the ravages of that war, on the land and on the people. I even got to visit the UNIFIL peacekeepers in Southern Lebanon once, when Israel was still occupying that part of the country.
Back in 2006, when there was that little affair between Hezbollah and Israel, war came pretty close. Bridges I had crossed were bombed out. The beach where I swam was inundated with a black tide of fuel oil when the IAF bombed out the Jiyyeh power plant, releasing an oil slick all over the coast. There were fresh shrapnel marks here and there the next time I visited. I wasn't there. I was safely in France, watching the action unfold on television.
Yet it hurt. I felt a sheer, helpless, irrational rage, of the kind that made it very easy to understand why Hezbollah does not find it difficult to find recruits.
At the same time, I'm fascinated by war. I like to read about military history and strategy, about tactics and weaponry and the evolution of organized killing into ever more refined and lethal forms. I've sunk inordinate amounts of time into war games, mostly on the computer, but also on the tabletop and pen and paper gaming. I've gotten absorbed in reading about the battle of Agincourt or that of Cannae; about Mongolian combined-arms tactics, or the ways the Hezbollah stopped the Tsahal in its tracks in that 2006 mess. I've read Mao's manual on guerrilla warfare, and Sun Zi's timeless Art of War. I can quote a bit of Clausewitz on demand, and I can wax eloquent about British naval tactics in the Napoleonic wars. I loved Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky with its ridiculously long battle scene on the lake, and the charge of the Rohirrim in The Return of the King brings a tear to my eye, in the book and in the movie.
While I mostly hated military service, it was cool to blow stuff up and shoot guns, and I was good enough at it to get some shiny badges and plaques for it. The organizational and tactical aspects of it were also interesting enough to make the whole thing feel like not a complete waste of time. When one of the officers asked if I'd be interested in staying on after my year finished, or perhaps getting into one of our peacekeeping units, I refused… but not before just a tiny pause to give it some consideration. By then, though, I was so deeply sick of the twisted irrationality of the military, that that pause only lasted a moment.
I remember the exact moment the absurdity of the whole exercise struck home to me. That was close to the finish of my year, and I was assigned to oversee the new recruits returning from their first evening leave. One of them was a guy about ten years older than I am, a physician, and someone who took another option – military service with conscientious objection to bearing a weapon. That's the toughest choice of all, because you get to go through all the pointless reprogramming they throw at recruits, and everybody sneers at you for not being man enough to shoot a gun. He was standing there at attention, tense and nervous as hell, reporting in, and I just thought, what the FUCK? What kind of system makes someone like him stand quaking in his polished jackboots in front of someone like me?
War sucks. Despite all the guts and glory and lofty narratives and high causes we erect around it, there's really nothing glorious about it. It's just people killing other people for some stupid made-up reason. It really makes no sense that it has the power to snag the imagination and the emotions like it does, but then if it didn't, there wouldn't be any war. It's deeply built into us. A delusion, perhaps, but if so, it's one of the most evil, destructive, and tenacious ones we have to deal with.
I would love to be a pacifist, along the lines of Gandhi or Martin Luther King and all those other guys. Yet whenever I start to think of the implications – really think about them – I start running around in a labyrinth and find no way out that leads to pacifism without altogether leaving this mess of a world we live in.
Is there such a thing as a just war? If so, from whose point of view? By which criteria?
Let's break a taboo. This is so hard it makes me physically uncomfortable to think these thoughts, let alone type them.
What if nobody had resisted Hitler's little program to rearrange the map? What if he could have marched his troops to the Urals as easily has he took the Sudetenland, and realize his dream of the Reich? Would it have been worse than what actually happened? Would he even have been able to perpetrate his Endlösung without the brutalization caused by years of total war? If so, would he have been able to murder more than he actually did? Would those murders have been worse than all the other murder, death, and destruction that happened – Europe devastated from Calais to Moscow, 60 million dead, and still with half the continent under the thumbs of dictators just about as evil as the one that met his miserable end in that Berlin bunker?
It would have sucked to grow up under Nazi rule, or under Communist rule for that matter. But lots of people did, and most of them turned out OK.
Hitler wasn't the first warlord with plans to take over the world, and it's unlikely he'll be the last. The Mongols were far more successful, and at least as brutal. If Chinggis Khan had been able to hold his liquor better, even us here in the West might all be wearing little fur hats, and, perhaps, be good, peaceful Buddhists of the Tibetan variety. Where they met resistance, they left behind a desert where nothing would grow and no-one would survive. That guy in the Eisenstein movie – Alexander Nevsky – was sainted by the Russians. Why? Not for that little skirmish he won against the Teutons. For not resisting the Mongols, but rather traveling to Sarai and offering his fealty, thereby saving Novgorod from sword and fire. Sensible guy.
What's more, very few wars really are just, even if you can find one that is. Most are just painted that way, by the people who want them. All of them are believed just by those waging them; otherwise they wouldn't. Hitler's twisted motives made perfect sense if only you accepted his mental framework of the hierarchy of races and the manifest destiny of the Arisch to rule the world. Given any random war, you're much more likely to be fighting in an unjust cause than a just one.
So much for the case for pacifism. If I can make a case – even to myself – that resisting a monster like Hitler is not an open-and-shut case, then what's causing me problems?
Only this: I get very upset at injustice, even if it's as trivial as some jackasses being pettily cruel on an Internet forum. I just cannot bring myself to condemn someone who picks up a weapon to defend against injustice, once all other avenues have been exhausted. I cannot find it in my heart to consider someone defending his home and hearth immoral. I cannot help but be thankful to my grandparents' generation for the sacrifices they made. Had I been there when the tanks rolled over the border seventy years ago, it's unlikely that I would have refused to be drafted and been shot for cowardice instead (never even mind that I'm too much of a coward to choose that option, moral considerations aside).
My wife says that when war comes your way, you get down and stay down, or get the hell out of the way. She's been there, so she knows what she's talking about, and that position is just as morally defensible as the imperative to defend your country, as far as I'm concerned. But when the rubber meets the road, I don't know just how much of a pacifist I really am, but I hope to God I never have to find out. And that has fuck all to do with the Buddha.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Sexual Harassment, May Day 2005, Helsinki, Finland
That weekend retreat was way more intense than I expected. It's almost ridiculous how much of it was exactly what people like Philip Kapleau and Brad Warner and what have you describe in their books – the emotional roller-coaster ride, the feeling of abject misery and self-loathing giving way to elation, the Zen teacher deflating my expectations rather than acceding to them, the hurty legs, the crazily energetic, light-headed, and "purified" feeling afterwards. And the fact that it really is a rough ride, even if it is only two days.
A part of the whole point is, clearly, to push the limits. The discipline serves that purpose, because pushing the limits is uncomfortable, physically and mentally. Often – and probably for most people – the outcome is positive: you get rid of some nasty baggage you were carrying, and end up with a lighter backpack.
But sometimes it isn't. Sometimes you don't bend and stretch and emerge the better for it. You break, and the pieces rearrange themselves into some much nastier configuration. Then really bad things can happen. You can go into psychosis, or leave everything to pursue some phantom in the hills, or start to think you're a great enlightened master with some flavor of crazy wisdom and start a sangha of your own. There are plenty of stories like that around, although for some reason not a lot of them make it into books or blogs or pop culture.
There's a lot of gentle but relentless social pressure in my sangha to practice more. Since most people – most definitely yours truly – often struggle with maintaining the motivation to keep practicing, this serves a purpose. On that retreat, the social pressure to conform to the discipline was overwhelmingly strong (which is a part of the deal, of course), and the pressure to participate in stuff that wasn't strictly obligatory – yaza, free sitting at night – was pretty damn strong too.
There are some safeguards in place to prevent things from going too far. I'm sure the sensei and instructors kept a close eye on how things were going, and would have intervened had they noticed someone starting to seriously crack up. I had to apply for the retreat, and I had to sit a zazenkai or two before even applying. I've heard that the teachers don't accept everybody for sesshins.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that the balance of the pressure is in the other direction, and despite the senseis' repeated stressing that breath counting really is a very good practice, much of the talk is about koans and sesshins, people often recommend going to stay at Zengården for a while, and that sort of thing. All this is very valuable, and I by no means think that sesshins or retreats or koans should be dropped to make room for people who aren't up to handling that kind of thing.
However, I think that we could use a little more instruction on when not to sit, or go on retreat, or on a sesshin. There was one guy there who looked pretty miserable at the end of the retreat, and I sure hope that he wasn't left all alone with that misery. (Of course, I was too blissed out to be the one to do anything about it, and now I feel a bit bad about that.)
Not everybody is able or willing to climb the steep paths, and I believe that it would not hurt those who are some way up to think of more ways to support less intensive kinds of practice as well. If someone who "only" sits a half hour a day and shows up at the zendo every couple of weeks feels like a second-class Zennie, then something isn't quite right.
I had a very good retreat. It was much tougher than I expected, and I'm much weaker than I like to think, but I feel much better about it. It was important. But I am going to put my ideas of jumping straight into a sesshin the first chance I get on hold for a while, and just stick to my regular practice and maybe do another weekend retreat in the autumn, or next year, and then we'll see. I ain't no leatherneck Marine of mysticism, and dressing up like one isn't going to do anyone any good.
As a postscript, I coincidentally happened on this funny story just now, illustrating one incident of somebody going a bit too far and cracking up. It has a happy ending and makes you laugh, but that guy Robert could actually have gone to the lake and jumped in, and not come up again. Worth thinking about.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Spiral Staircase, Bengtskär, 2008
I just got back from my first weekend Zen retreat. It was nothing like I expected, and not at all what I wanted, but it may have been just what I needed. That 48 hours included about 15 hours of formal zazen, complete silence, some work periods, some recitation, and dokusan. And an emotional roller-coaster ride that went from abject misery and self-loathing to near-euphoric elation, with hefty side servings of pain and perhaps just a bit of practice and tranquility.
There's been some discussion on a few blogs here and there about how important Zen teachers really are, with some people arguing that you can practice by yourself almost or quite as well. At least I just figured out first-hand one of their most important and perhaps irreplaceable functions: the ability and will to expertly puncture an ego that's getting too inflated for its own good, and that without the tiniest shred of malice. I'm sure there's no permanent harm done, since it'll no doubt inflate right up again, but I will try to remember this experience.
I might write a bit more about this some other time. Or not, as it may turn out. Not right now, though.
Monday, March 8, 2010
I just realized I hadn't been doing my duty as a citizen of the consumer society since Christmas. Apart from food and a couple of comics, I hadn't actually bought a damn thing. I tried to go buy a pair of shoes the other day, since my winter shoes are falling apart at the seams, but just couldn't stand it and left. Then I came home and remembered I had an old pair of winter shoes in the cupboard. I took them out, polished them up, replaced the shoelaces, and now they're good to go for the rest of the winter. Perhaps we won't even have a proper winter next year, so I'll avoid the chore of replacing them altogether.
To fix that, today I made a precision strike to the local electronics hell, and came back with a pair of desktop computer speakers. I had a perfectly good pair, only they'd developed a little hiss in the left one that was just noticeable enough to be annoying when there's nothing playing. I took those to the office, where the A/C covers the hiss. Since I liked everything else about the ones I had before, I stuck with the same brand, only I went one model up. My Creative Gigaworks T20 Series 1's spot on my desk has now been taken by a pair of T40 Series 2's.
Gigaworks is a damn stupid name, if you ask me, but that's what Creative calls their top-range line of 2.0 desktop speakers. They're intended primarily for music. There's no subwoofer. Most are a bit bulky for desktop speakers, and the T40's are the bulkiest of all. They have two midrange drivers and a tweeter; the T20's make do with one driver. They also have something called BassXport, which means a hole at the top that's supposed to make the bass sound better.
When I got the T20's, I was amazed by the quality of sound that came out of something that's so small and so cheap. I paid maybe 60 euros or so for the T20's, and a bit over 100 for the T40's. There's just one major qualifier: they sound fantastic as long as you're sitting between them at the computer. Get up and take a few steps, and the sound immediately goes muddy. They're very directional. I'm sure that's a conscious trade-off. In other words, if you want something to fill the room with ambient sound, there's probably something better suited for it out there, even in this very low price range.
With that caveat, the T40's sound fantastic. They're crisp and very precise, the stereo image they create is very vivid, and even small nuances come through beautifully. The sound is also surprisingly rich and full for something this small. I mostly listen to "small band" music – singer-songwriters like Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, or Jacques Brel, Latin stuff like Ibrahim Ferrer, Omara Portuondo, Cesaria Evora, or solo or chamber music such as Glenn Gould playing Bach, which is on right now. (He could stop humming.) The speakers handle all of this really well – this music is every bit as enjoyable this way as sitting on the couch listening to it through my "real" stereo.
However, there is music that's just too much for these little things to handle. I tried listening to the first movement of Bruckner's sixth, and that didn't go so well. A full symphony orchestra opening up is a lot to handle, both dynamically and in terms of frequency range, and where the "smaller" music just sounds like music, that sounded like Bruckner's sixth playing on too small speakers. Magnificent music, but that was in spite of the speakers rather than because of them. I wouldn't expect Phil Spector's stuff to sound that hot over them either.
But then again, I only listen to stuff like that maybe once a year, and then not at my computer. And I don't even like Phil Spector.
So, how do they compare to the T20's? Well, they're similar. Whether they're worth the 50% markup is debatable. They're certainly not 50% better; more like 10 to 20% better. The biggest difference is that I have to turn the T20's up about 3/4 of the way before they open up, whereas the T40's sound good even at low volume. Other than that, they sound maybe just a hair "bigger." The physical design is also somewhat improved from Series 1 -- these don't fall over as easily as the T20's, the over-bright blue LED has been replaced with a more discreet blue ring around the volume/power dial, and there's a port for Creative's iPod dock at the back. I liked the gray metallic finish of the Series 1's better than the glossy black with tiny blue flecks finish of the Series 2, which looks maybe just this side of garish. Not obnoxious or anything, just not as classy.
The bottom line? Both Gigaworks speakers I've used are really, really good for the price. They're way better than any comparably priced 5+1 setup (unless your main criterion of quality is bass that kicks you in the nuts), and come this close to a real hi-fi listening experience, as long as your ass stays on the chair. Whether the T40's are worth the extra cost and size is a matter of opinion. Then again, in absolute terms, neither of these is expensive at all. I don't know if they're all this good, but I doubt there's all that much out there that's much better anywhere near this price. The T40's are perhaps just punchy enough that they might be worth considering for a cheap home theater setup -- they're certainly miles better than the built-in speakers on most TV's, and if you can figure out a way to hook them up, a couple of pairs might make for quite decent satellites. It's amazing how far this stuff has come.
And actually Glenn Gould hums pretty well.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
The Blessing, Nice, 2006
Over its long history, Buddhism has evolved into a variety of traditions. Many of these have emerged when a Buddhist tradition encountered a non-Buddhist one. Buddhism + Taoism = Zen. Buddhism + Bon = Tibetan Buddhism. Similarly, the various Buddhist traditions have interacted with and cross-fertilized each other.
Some results of this mixing and matching have endured and become traditions of their own. The Harada-Yasutani line in which I practice is a relatively recent fusion of Soto and Rinzai Zen, for example. Others have lingered around a while before either turning into something no longer recognizably Buddhist, or disappeared after their founders or their immediate successors go the way of all that is mortal.
Many prominent Buddhists – not least the Dalai Lama – caution against carelessly mixing traditions. At the same time, especially we in the West have a unique opportunity of being able to study and experiment with many of them. There are even a few efforts at creating an explicitly ”ecumenical” Buddhism that draws from several traditions. The Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) is probably the best-established of these movements.
Ultimately, the question of mixing practices comes back to the fundamentals. Why practice at all?
I do a certain amount of physical exercise. I do this partly because I enjoy it, but mostly because I only have this one body, and I want to take as good care of it as I reasonably can.
However, I do not have any particular ambitions to build muscle, or strength, or flexibility, or endurance, or speed, or the rest of it, beyond what I need to do the stuff I want to do. That means that it doesn't really matter what kind of physical exercise I do. If I get bored with gym, I can try chi-gong. If I get bored with cycling, I can try running. The main thing is that I don't completely slob out: any fitness practice is much better than no fitness practice. I'll never become really extremely good at any of it, but it gives me what I want from it in a varied and enjoyable way.
For someone who practices Buddhism for the kinds of reasons I practice physical fitness, mixing traditions makes perfect sense. Meditation practices have immediate benefits. I feel much better when I'm sitting regularly and sitting well than when I'm not. I don't believe that the actual practice you happen to be doing makes a huge amount of difference with regards to these benefits, as long as it isn't something that's completely inimical to your mental make-up. So if your objective is ”bompu Zen” – meditating to feel better – I have a hard time believing that there's any harm in trying tonglen if you get bored with following the breath; meditating on a koan if you get bored with vipassana. Any practice is better than no practice, and if your practice goes so stale you'd stop it if you didn't change it, I believe that changing it is definitely the better alternative.
On the other hand, if you practice for similar reasons a great violinist practices her art, or an Olympic-level athlete practices her sport, things just might look a bit different.
There are musicians who have mastered a variety of instruments. However, they did not usually get there by practicing a bit of violin, then a bit of piano, then a bit of tenor sax, then the accordeon. They immersed themselves deeply in the instrument of their choice, and then extended that to other areas. They had demanding teachers that drilled them and tested them. Even so, most of them retain a main instrument – a great pianist might also be a great cembalist, and she might also be a competent violinist, but it's rather unlikely that she'd be a great one.
I believe that there lies the drawback of freely mixing traditions. It would probably be a lot more difficult to become really good at Buddhism – whatever that may mean – if you hop from one practice to another as your interest takes you, the same way it's a lot more difficult to become a great musician if you hop from one instrument or one style to another. To accomplish that, a teacher and a coherent tradition are if not indispensable, at least of great benefit.
Of course, nobody says you have to practice in order to become really good at it, any more than anybody says that you have to do gym in order to build a body that looks like one of those Belgian Blue oxes. That's nobody's business but yours.
Unfortunately, sticking with a tradition has its downsides as well. Fundamentalism: coming to believe that your tradition is the 'true' one, and other approaches are invalid. Getting discouraged: if the tools your tradition has for surmounting obstacles just don't work for you, for whatever reason, you'll probably just quit, and be worse off for that. There are no easy answers there.
There is another pitfall with mixing traditions too. This one isn't as much of a concern for the lone practitioner, because it involves teachers and sanghas. Highly innovative, nontraditional teachers have a track record that's... mixed. This is largely because going off the rails is an occupational hazard for spiritual teachers.
Whether teachers like it or not, their students want to give them enormous amounts of power over them. Good teachers are able to handle this without turning into cult leaders. Not-so-good ones... not-so-well. Many teachers – even very good ones – often become at least a little eccentric, and I believe a big part of the reason is the sheer weight of the expectations laid on them by their students. They're only human, after all. And, sadly, every once in a while one of them goes spectacularly nuts, turning into Zen Master Rama or Andrew Cohen or Shoko Asahara.
Established traditions have at least some built-in safeguards against teachers going off the rails. If a sangha splits off from the tradition where it originated, or claims lineage from a variety of traditions, or none at all, I consider that a bit of a warning sign. It's at least possible that the leader of the group has fallen afoul of the safeguards in his tradition, and has taken off on his own for that reason, whatever he may tell himself.
Many of these problems take a long time to manifest. It's often only possible to tell that an innovative tradition was solid a generation or two after it was established. Therefore, I would tend to be cautious about relatively young and relatively innovative groups like the FWBO or Geshe Kelsang Gyatso's New Kadampa Tradition. Had I made like Philip Kapleau Roshi in the 1950's and gone in search of a Zen teacher, I would probably not have gravitated toward the then relatively new Harada-Yasutani line. It turned out that Kapleau Roshi made a good call: the tradition has since established itself and is soldiering on with no more than the usual amount of scandal. Perhaps he was an excellent judge of character, or perhaps he just got lucky. I would not have risked it.
That is why I tend to fall on the traditionalist side of the fence. I'm not entirely sure why I practice, but I feel there's something to the reasons that's more than "bompu Zen." I'm somehow convinced that the Way leads somewhere I want to go, even if I don't know where that is. I've – slightly – explored a few of the traditions available in my neck of the woods, and have found one that meshes well with my worldview and personality. I intend to stick with that to see where it takes me, as far as I'm able. | {
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Talent is the future of supply chain management
At MIT’s Research Expo 2014, the future of supply chain was on display.
in the NewsState of Logistics 2016: Pursue mutual benefit NYK is latest ocean carrier to opt for INTTRA’s eVGM Service NYK is latest ocean carrier to opt for INTTRA’s eVGM Service Peak Season dynamics continue to see changes AAR reports carload and intermodal declines for week ending July 16 More News
Editor’s Note: This article was originally posted on the web site of Modern Materials Handling, LM’s sister publication.
You would think that issues like cost reductions, customer service levels and fuel prices would top the list of things that keeps distribution, transportation and supply chain managers up at night. After all, those are the items by which we are most often measured when bonuses are handed out.
But at every industry conference I have attended in the last year, the paucity of talent has been topic number one. That was true at ProMat last January, at the MHI fall meeting, and at the APICS and CSCMP annual conferences.
It could explain why supply chain management is the hot new MBA, according to the Wall Street Journal, or why it was the leading topic of discussion at all four of the Material Handling & U.S. Logistics Roadmap round table meetings last summer. I just published a provocative piece out of Penn State on the coming supply chain talent perfect storm in the January issue of Supply Chain Management Review.
At the same time, there is a generation of young, dedicated professionals training for roles in our industry in colleges and universities around the country. Last night, I got a glimpse into the up and comers at MIT’s Research Expo 2014.
Part of the program included fast and furious presentations from faculty members such as Yossi Sheffi, Bruce Arntzen, Jim Rice and Chris Caplice. They provided concise overviews of research they’re conducting around topics such as visualizing supply chain flows, the role of logistics clusters as economic engines and demystifying supply chain innovation.
But the real stars were the students and the projects they are working on for corporate sponsors such as Boeing, Proctor & Gamble, Niagara Bottling and Ralph Lauren. Nearly 90 projects were on display. They were a window into both the kinds of issues that corporate America is grappling with as well as the ingenuity of the students tackling these problems. They ran the gamut from the esoteric to the prosaic. As one MIT dean put it, they’re not solving the flashiest problems, but they are tackling some of the biggest problems. So, what did I see?
First, there are problems that have plagued our industry inside and outside the four walls of the distribution center for years and will probably continue to plague us for years to come. For example, a student from Ecuador displayed a network design project he completed for Kentucky Fried Chicken, recommending that the Colonel expand from two to three distribution centers in that country. The annual savings were less than $50,000 a year in cost reductions. However, the third DC allowed for faster time to market, fresher food and improved customer service in areas in Southeastern Ecuador where KFC wanted to expand its presence.
A student from Brazil satisfied my obsession with pallets through his project to improve warehouse processes for AmBev. The culprits in the warehouse that led to slowdowns on the production line will sound familiar to North American readers – non-productive lift truck operators and broken wooden pallets. Among his recommendations – switch to a plastic pallet. Who’d think I’d go to MIT to learn about pallets.
I also met with two students in the early stages of a project on mitigating risk and improving resiliency in the supply chain of a high fashion retailer. They are trying to identify what happens if a supplier fails to ship or a distribution facility is shut down and how quickly can the retailer bounce back from those kinds of events. Another student was working on an investigation into 3D printing for a supplier to big box retailers who wants to quickly and inexpensively create production molds to prototype new products. Right now, that supplier just shows its customers concept drawings of what’s on the drawing board because prototyping is so expensive. 3D printing could allow it to create actual prototypes in a cost effective way.
What struck me most wasn’t how bright these students were. You expect that at MIT. Rather, it was how enthusiastic they were about an industry that young people once shunned in favor of finance and business management. Let’s hope it’s an indicator of the health of the industry going forward.
About the AuthorBob Trebilcock Bob Trebilcock, editorial director, has covered materials handling, technology, logistics and supply chain topics for nearly 30 years. In addition to Supply Chain Management Review, he is also Executive Editor of Modern Materials Handling. A graduate of Bowling Green State University, Trebilcock lives in Keene, NH. He can be reached at 603-357-0484.
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2016 State of Logistics: Third-party logistics 2016 State of Logistics: Ocean freight View More From this Issue | {
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Thanks to Liam Neeson, Taken Works
- Annabelle Robertson Crosswalk.com Contributing Writer
- 2009 1 Jun
DVD Release Date: May 12, 2009
Theatrical Release Date: January 30, 2009
Rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of violence, disturbing thematic material, sexual content, some drug references and language)
Run Time: 91 min.
Director: Pierre Morrel
Actors: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Xander Berkeley
Tired of seeing Liam Neeson as an aging mentor who dies in the first 30 minutes of a film? Then step right up and pay yer money, folks. Here, Neeson is transformed into a gun-toting, knife-wielding vengeance machine who will stop at nothing to get his daughter back.
Bryan Mills (Neeson) is a retired CIA operative who can’t connect with his teenage girl, Kim (Maggie Grace, of TV’s Lost). Kim has moved in with her mother, Lenore (Famke Janssen) and Lenore’s absurdly wealthy new husband, and she seems worlds away from Bryan’s life in his dingy little apartment. Bryan tries hard, but he just doesn’t get it. For Kim’s 17-year-old birthday, he brings her a karaoke machine. But even that is usurped by the stepfather, who gives Kim a horse—in front of all the party guests, who are enjoying champagne on his palatial estate. Meanwhile, Lenore just smirks.
Depressed and despondent, Bryan goes home and flips through photo albums of his former life. Some former military buddies show up with beer and convince him to join them on security detail for a pop star. After the singer is attacked, Bryan gets to show off his action skills.
When Lenore and Kim request his permission for Kim to spend a few weeks in France, unchaperoned, Bryan shakes his head. He knows “how the world really works,” and he’s not going to allow his daughter to take that kind of risk. But a few nasty comments from Lenore and a temper tantrum from Kim persuade this dutiful dad to relent. He does, only to discover at the airport that Kim is actually going to be following U2 around Europe all summer—with Lenore’s blessing. Against his better judgment, Bryan allows her to board the plane.
Less than 12 hours later, he’s on the phone with her as she witnesses her friend’s kidnapping. He has a few precious minutes to give her instructions before she, too, is taken. Because she left her cell phone on during the attack—and because her attacker actually picks it up and speaks—Bryan gets to run the tape through voice-recognition technology, which identifies him as an Albanian sex trafficker. According to his friend’s information, Bryan has 96 hours to find his daughter or she’ll disappear forever.
Aside from a really slow first 20 minutes, viewers will have to put up with some problematic credibility issues—like being able to identify the name, hometown and standard operating procedure of an international criminal, based on two words of speech; the extraordinary athleticism of a 50-something dad, whose abs and pecs we never even see; 17-year-old U2 fans in the year 2009; and the likelihood of a pop singer giving voice lessons (plus an agent introduction) to a young girl she’s never heard sing, to name just a few. French mega-producer Luc Besson, who wrote the film, also kept the dialogue pretty lame. But fortunately, Neeson gets one really good monologue, and it makes the film take off like the Batmobile:
"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you ... and I will kill you."
With echoes of Harrison Ford’s 1988 Frantic, where he searched for his wife through Parisian back alleys, Taken is a decent thriller. It could have been more creative and more subtle, but it works, largely due to Neeson’s acting skills. Its message? Unless you have an ex-husband who can maul, murder and maim with action-hero acumen—and no scruples about doing so—you’d better watch your kids. The world is a cold, cruel and place.
That this film, with its startling number of killings and torture scenes, would qualify for a PG-13 rating—while Slumdog Millionaire got an R—just proves that there is little logic at the Motion Picture Association of America. So the kids might end up seeing it without your permission. The good news, however, is that if your teen does, she probably won’t ask to travel without a chaperone. So maybe that’s the strategy behind the rating. Either way, few will be disappointed, and many will enjoy Taken.
- Drugs/Alcohol: Characters drink and smoke throughout film, usually in social contexts.
- Language/Profanity: A moderate amount of profanities and obscenities, some strong.
- Sexual Content/Nudity: Very strong sexual themes, including the sex traffic of young women that is prevalent in Europe, and the high price that virgins can fetch on the black market. Brief, partial nudity and sexual situations with minors and/or very young women, all in the context of prostitution.
- Violence: Very strong, including more than a dozen murders (seen partially offscreen and/or at a slight distance); one extended torture scene; car chases and ensuring crashes and several fights/shoot-outs. | {
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Man Who Fled To Colorado With Kids After Allegedly Killing Their Mom, Grandfather Gets Competency Review A man charged with killing his ex-girlfriend and her father in southwestern Michigan is getting an examination to determine whether he's competent to stand trial.
Teen Killer Gets Life In Michigan Couple's Murder At Missouri Vacation HomeA 19-year-old man will spend the rest of his life behind bars for the deaths of a Michigan couple.
3rd Suspect In Double Fatal Detroit Firebombing Arrested In West VirginiaA woman accused in a deadly Detroit firebombing late last year is in custody.
Ex-Con Sentenced To 45-70 Years In Deaths Of Downriver Mother, SonAn ex-convict who was living with a woman and her young son in metro Detroit has been sentenced in their deaths.
Ex-Con Faces 70 Years Prison For Murder Of Southgate Mother, SonAn ex-convict who was living with a woman and her son in their Downriver apartment has pleaded guilty to killing them.
Amber Alert Cancelled: Sisters Found Safe In Colorado With Father Suspected In Double MurderAuthorities say an Amber Alert issued for two Michigan girls has been cancelled after they were found safe more than 1,000 miles away from home.
Michigan Man Suspected In Double Murder Kills Himself At Buddhist TempleInvestigators found the man's body inside an SUV at a Buddhist temple near Holland on Tuesday.
Man Gets Life Sentence In Fatal Shootings Of 2 BrothersA man found guilty but mentally ill in the fatal shootings of two brothers has been sentenced to life in prison without parole in northern Michigan.
Convictions Stand For Man In 1987 Murders Of Sister, Her HusbandProsecutors said Ryan Wyngarden killed the couple to cover up a past incestuous relationship.
Police Identify Person Of Interest After 2 Fatally Stabbed In Home InvasionThree more people were stabbed in the attack around 6 a.m. Saturday in York Township.
Ex-Con Charged In Deaths Of Woman, 10-Year-Old Son In SouthgateA man who was living with a woman and her son in a Downriver apartment has been charged in their deaths.
'It Was Self-Defense,' Says Boyfriend Charged With Stabbing Death Of Girlfriend, BabyThe 30-year-old said it was actually his live-in girlfriend who stabbed the couple's 13-month-old daughter to death. | {
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Cartoon By Dedini Party In France 1950
Click thumbnails for expanded view.
- Quantity Available: 1
Cartoon By Dedini Party In France 1950 This is a nice color January 1950 cartoon by Dedini. Couple seated on bench at a party. Man is embracing the young lady, and she is struggling. She is saying to her girl friend, We should not have come to this party, all the French I know is encore. Suitable for framing. In excellent condition. Photo is taken through plastic and may show wrinkles or crookedness that is not in the ad. This original magazine tear sheet measures 9 3/4 inches wide by 13 1/4 inches tall.
Shipping:Negotiated with Seller
- Reference #
- Books, Paper & Magazines
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- Depth: 0 inch
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Gov't programs in place to help young people start businesses
May 21, 2014, 12:06 am TWN
TAIPEI--President Ma Ying-jeou said Tuesday that the government will help young people to start up business in an address to mark the sixth anniversary of his May 20, 2008 inauguration.
Meanwhile, a source from the National Development Council (NDC) said that 13 government agencies already have support programs in place to help young people to reach this goal.
The president said in the address that his administration has not ignored young people's anxieties and will help young people to put what they have learned to good use, encourage them to start up businesses, step up efforts to bring about "housing justice" to allow young people to be able to afford to live in Taiwan, and let young people participate in policy making.
To date, the 13 government agencies have launched several support programs to help young people start businesses through improving sharing of resources and removing barriers to business start-ups, according the NDC source.
These support programs include providing preferential business loans for young people. An estimated NT$3 billion (US$99.7 million) will be invested in these programs in three years, according to the source.
Among these programs, a "business angel" project was formally activated Dec. 16, 2013 and an estimated NT$1 billion will be invested over five years to help 60 enterprises a year to set up businesses, rising to 300 companies in five years.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs also introduced a program in January, offering NT$18 million in loans for young people to start their own businesses. | {
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St. Monica Mariners Grow Bigger, Eager For 2013 Football Season
Posted Aug. 21, 2013, 2:06 pm
Roger Morante / Sports Editor
The St. Monica Mariners will kick off their football season Aug. 30 boasting a strong team that has been itching to return to the field of battle after making it all the way to the CIF Semifinals in 2012.
St. Monica edged-out hard-hitting teams in the playoffs such as Kern Valley and Boron to finish strong at 8-5 for the 2012 season.
St. Monica Football Head Coach Adam Guerra said the Mariners have practiced hard in the off season and are ready for the upcoming 2013 football season.
Guerra said the commitment of the players in his program is at an all-time high.
"We have a lot of guys that have been consistent in the program and have been here for two or three years and that makes the world of difference," said Guerra. "Our offensive line is much bigger this year and the whole group is back to carry the load and pave the way for our young group of quarterbacks and running backs."
The strength of the Mariners can be found in their returning squad of linemen set to battle it out in the trenches led by three year starter Andrew Miller who returns to play tight end along with a well-balanced, big, and seasoned offensive line.
At quarterback, the Mariners have had to make some changes after expected starter quarterback and senior Chris Henderson broke his collarbone in preseason camp and has been sidelined with the injury.
Yet Guerra said Henderson is still a force on the sidelines as a leader.
"Chris is a great leader for the young guys but this has created a situation where sophomore is going to get to start for us at quarterback," said Guerra. "Our starter Cameron Nuslein has an arm like a cannon, but he is a sophomore."
Fortunately for untested Nuslein, the enormous offensive line that will be protecting him include Miller 6'4" 200 lbs along with Angel Galdamez 6'2" 280 lbs, Adam Martillo 6'3" 240 lbs, Patrick Mora 5'11 270 lbs, and Andrew Saucedo 6'4" 240 lbs.
A concern for the Mariners is their running game that could use more depth after the loss of star running backs Kevin Holubowski and Nick Pegnato to graduation.
Guerra assured that the new squad of running backs emerging in summer ball would be given a good offensive line to run behind.
Junior Jason Thomas and senior Jonah Tecarro are still battling it out for number one and number two at the running back position.
Linemen Erik Reese 6'2" 220 lbs and Elias Hackney 6'2" 240 lbs will also add some depth to both the offensive and defensive lines.
But Guerra said the tight end position seems to be the category in which the Mariners are the deepest.
"We have three great tight ends," said Guerra. "Andrew Miller is our starter and he's our guy at 6'3" 200 pounds, but there are also our sophomores Nick Allegrette who is 6'7" 210 pounds who is doing well and Christian Gabbard 6'2" 190 pounds. They are learning from Andrew and it's a good set up."
On defense Miller emerges as a dominant force again starting at outside linebacker and will be counted on to lead the defensive squad to battle.
Thomas and Tecarro look to add some depth to the linebacker corps on defense along with linebacker Jonathan Diaz who should be a force to defend for the Mariners.
Another player to watch that Guerra noted on defense was sophomore Chase Bryan who will start at strong safety for the Mariners and will be tested in the upcoming 2013 football season.
"We are really excited about Chase," said Guerra. "He has the chance to be a real special player."
Guerra said that he was confident with the Mariners secondary to balance out the Mariners defensive package which includes a strong mix of speed and agility found in corner backs David Araujo, Jack Cain, and Ryen Wilson.
"I love our secondary, there are a lot of guys who got reps last year," said Guerra. "David Araujo, who led the team in interceptions at corner back, is playing free safety now and Jack Cain and Ryen Wilson played a lot for us in our nickel and dime packages."
Sammy Saldibar, the kicker who booted the Mariners into the semi-finals of the 2012 CIF playoffs with his last second kick over top-seeded Boron, is also returning.
First game of the 2013 season is at home against Village Christian with the opening kickoff at 7 pm. | {
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Harvard Women’s Law Association Conference
Posted by The Situationist Staff on February 10, 2011
Health & Equality
There is a burgeoning awareness that access to health care is an equality issue. With inadequate resources to access basic health services, women around the globe are impaired from functioning at the highest level. At the same time, health disparities perpetuate other disparities, leaving women who lack these resources behind their counterparts elsewhere. Women’s reproductive health needs make this question all the more stark. Our panel brings together leading experts in legal and nonlegal fields, who have a holistic perspective on health that grounds legal answers in community-based approaches.
Equality & Economics
Economic inequality influences people’s choices and shapes their worldviews. As such, it is necessary to continually interrogate the changing role of women in the economy. This panel brings together women who have broken through social and cultural barriers to begin to equalize economic environments. Coming from different fields in the public and private sector, each panelist has a unique perspective on what it means to equalize the workplace, as well as the broader economy.
Equality on Both Sides of the Bench
Women represent a rapidly rising percentage of litigators and judges. However, courtrooms remain one of the least gender-balanced arenas. In this panel, we have brought together leading judges and litigators who have been experience in breaking through inequality on both sides of the bench. We hope that a conversation between litigators and judges will lead to a broad and fruitful discussion about what it means to be a woman in the courtroom, and how we can work to build off of their foundational work to eliminate gender discrimination in courtroom settings.
Equality for Girls
When envisioning the future we want to see, it is imperative to think about how the next generation of women will be educated and nurtured. Continual efforts to eliminate gender discrimination in the schools and on the streets for girls around the world represent the best chance to positively affect the change we wish to see. Our girls panel brings together the women who are doing exactly this: influencing the lives of young women around the globe through legal, social, economic, and cultural means.
More details here. | {
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To find Morgan Freeman, you have to drive for miles through the rural Delta country of northwest Mississippi, past cotton fields and fried-catfish joints, to arrive at the city of Clarksdale, population 22,000. Implausibly located in its rundown center is Madidi, a fine- dining establishment co-owned by Freeman that features honey-coated salmon with horseradish and roasted red pepper fondue on its menu. This is the Oscar-winning actor’s preferred place to socialize and conduct business. It represents his deep emotional and financial commitment to his home state.
Looking every bit the cool cat in blue jeans, Freeman arranges his six-foot-two frame in a chair next to a window in the empty restaurant, leans back, and props his cowboy boots up on a table. “I have deep genetic roots in Mississippi,” he says. Freeman, 70, and his wife, Myrna, live down the road in Charleston, on a 126-acre ranch with a large, gracious main house, peach trees, and stables. He built the ranch on the same patch of land his grandparents worked, where he spent much of his childhood.
By grounding himself here, far from the warping influences of Hollywood, Freeman paradoxically safeguards his box-office appeal. For while his superstardom is the result of an abundance of natural talent and years of dedication to his craft, he also embodies a virtue that is sorely needed, in the culture at large as well as in films: authenticity. In his new movie Feast of Love, an ensemble meditation on romance, costarring Greg Kinnear and Jane Alexander, Freeman plays a retired college professor whom people seek out for guidance. “Morgan and Paul Newman have the greatest moral stature among American actors,” says Feast of Love director Robert Benton. “Dustin Hoffman said you can’t act certain things: you can’t act eroticism or a moral quality. And Morgan certainly represents the moral center.”
By grounding himself here, far from the warping influences of Hollywood, Freeman paradoxically safeguards his box-office appeal.
In his greatest roles, Freeman has elevated that essential goodness to heroic stature with his physical grace and exquisitely modulated voice: as the dignified chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy, the runaway slave and Union army sergeant in Glory, the decent convict in The Shawshank Redemption, and in his Academy Award-winning portrayal of a washed-up fighter in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby. For all that, he says he has more fun playing villains, such as the vicious pimp in Street Smart. That role put him on the map, earning him his first Oscar nomination in 1987 and prompting critic Pauline Kael to ask rhetorically, “Is Morgan Freeman the greatest American actor?”
These days he doesn’t get the chance to take on roles that would tap the dark or twisted sides of his nature. And though he never asked to be our national truth teller, he’s too classy to complain, especially since the perks are exceptional: he is respected all over the world and commands up to $20 million a picture. “I’m saddled with it,” he says, deadpan.
The trust factor has allowed Freeman, in summer blockbusters, to convincingly break color barriers that have yet to be smashed in real life. When he appeared in Deep Impact as the president of the United States, audiences didn’t think of him as a black president—he was, simply, Our President. In The Sum of All Fears he played the head of the CIA. Freeman has even portrayed an insouciant, sneaker-clad incarnation of the Creator in the comedies Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty.
Freeman himself downplays the significance of race. Or, rather, “I don’t downplay it,” he says crankily, “I just don’t play it.” Like Bill Cosby, Freeman has long encouraged people of color to accept personal responsibility for their lives. When 60 Minutes reporter Mike Wallace asked him, “How can we get rid of racism?” in 2005, Freeman’s reply was swift and blunt: “Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man, and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.”
The actor’s eminence can be intimidating, says Ben Affleck, who directed Freeman playing a Boston police captain in Gone Baby Gone, coming out this fall. “Morgan is so imposing,” says Affleck. “He’s like a sage. He spends a lot of time on set making jokes—he’d rather have people be comfortable than genuflecting and babbling, making fools of themselves.”
Freeman has a third film coming soon: The Bucket List, an odd-couple romp that opens at Christmas. He plays a mechanic who befriends a billionaire, played by Jack Nicholson, when they both receive terminal-cancer diagnoses. The guys make a list of the things they always wanted to do in life, and flee the hospital together to pursue them. “It’s not a downer,” says Bucket List director Rob Reiner. “It’s about living your life and finding joy.”
Reiner contrasts the acting styles of his two stars. “Jack is all over the place in a way, like a brilliant abstract artist. Morgan is a Zen master—he’s so centered and elegant.” Reiner offers his opinion on Freeman’s reluctance to discuss race: “Morgan’s whole being is about transcendence,” he says, “and that makes a powerful statement.”
For his part, Freeman calls working with Nicholson one of the great thrills of his career, and launches unprompted into an imitation of how Jack, an inveterate script tinkerer, approached him on the set each morning with dialogue changes. “‘You know, Morgan, I was just thinking,’” he drawls. “‘Y’ know I don’t sleep at night, so, well, this is what I thought…how does this sound?’” Freeman laughs heartily. “‘I love it, Jack. Whatever you want to do—I don’t care.’”
On the last day of filming, feelings were running high on the set. “We’re not going to hug each other, are we?” Nicholson muttered to Freeman. But after the final shot wrapped, Freeman told his costar, “This has been a dream come true for me.” “Likewise,” said Nicholson, and the two men shared a bear hug, to the applause of the cast and crew.
I remember something my father would say to me when I was growing up,” says Morgana Freeman, 36, a beauty salon owner in Atlanta and one of the star’s four children. “If I was complaining about something that wasn’t going right, he would say, ‘Now what? You are still in the race.’ He made me see that I could keep going, readjust the plan.”
He is respected all over the world and commands up to $20 million a picture. 'I’m saddled with it,' he says, deadpan.
Freeman has lived by his own advice, rising to stardom only after 50, following decades of struggling in the New York theater and in small film and television roles. Born in Memphis in 1937, he had a chaotic childhood: his mother, a domestic worker, split with his alcoholic father, a barber, when her five children were young, and the family moved frequently. When they fell on hard times in Chicago, his mother’s parents drove north, picked up the children, and brought them back to Charleston, Mississippi. Eventually Freeman’s mother, Mayme Edna, moved to nearby Greenwood and made a home for her children there. In the ’40s and early ’50s, Greenwood was a racially tense community. Just ten miles north of the town, young Emmett Till was murdered for (supposedly) flirting with a white woman in 1955, the year Freeman graduated from Broad Street High School.
Although its students made do with hand-me-down books, all-black Broad Street High provided Freeman with a first-rate education, he says. “You had to stand up in class and quote the prologue to The Canterbury Tales and passages from Macbeth.”
“Morgan was a skinny guy, a good student, and a high stepper, the drum major in the school band,” recalls his friend Benjamin Nero, a Philadelphia orthodontist. “Even though he had a comedic personality, he was a shy-type guy.” Freeman’s English teacher, Leola Gregory Williams, recognized his talent and challenged him to enter regional drama competitions, where he won prizes. “She thought I was God’s gift to the world,” he says. “She expressed that to me and everybody who would listen. When that is happening to you, well, you just step up another rung.”
His biggest fan, though, was his mother, who by now was remarried and working as a nurse’s aide while also playing piano in church. Freeman says he learned to act by watching Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, and Sidney Poitier at the local cinema, then racing home to practice their moves in the mirror. “I’m going to take you to Hollywood!” his mother would say.
Although he very much wanted to act and had even been offered some scholarships to study theater, Freeman also dreamed of flying. Seduced by the military movies he’d seen as a kid, Freeman joined the Air Force. But when he had the chance to train as a fighter pilot toward the end of his enlistment period, he realized he wanted nothing to do with killing people in a real-world war. “I had this very clear epiphany,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘You are not in love with this; you are in love with the idea of this.’ So off I went to Hollywood.”
From that moment, Freeman’s commitment to acting never wavered. He worked as a clerk in Los Angeles and took acting, singing, and dancing lessons at night. Sensing more opportunity back east, he moved to New York City. There he honed his craft in off-Broadway shows. In 1967 he landed a Broadway gig in Hello, Dolly!, starring Pearl Bailey. Freeman eventually nabbed a spot on the public-TV kids’ show The Electric Company.
Had Freeman’s life been a movie, the years that came next would have been the part where the hero hits rock bottom. Despite steadily turning up for casting calls, Freeman couldn’t make the transition to movies. He grew disheartened, and by the late ’70s his life was in a shambles. He had fathered two sons out of wedlock by different women before he married Jeannette Bradshaw in ’67 and adopted her daughter, Deena; the couple had a second daughter, Morgana, in ’71. But Freeman’s marriage was disintegrating, and he was drinking heavily.
“I was depressed,” he says. “I was doing a television show, and I hated it. So I was very upset with myself, because now I’m doing something I no longer want to be doing, just for the money, and that’s a bad place to be.” Freeman gave up drinking after “waking up face-down on the floor in the hallway in my New York apartment.” Does he think he inherited his father’s predisposition to alcoholism? “No,” he says. “I’m not addicted to anything, really—I can go headfirst into anything and stay with it for a while, and then I’m done with it.”
Freeman finally caught the breaks he needed in the 1980s. He married his current wife, Myrna, a costume designer, in ’84. He headlined bigger and better stage productions such as Mother Courage and Othello, “the only role I’ve been intimidated by.” And he broke through to stardom in films. After earning raves as the sordid pimp in Street Smart, he veered to the saintly in his first starring role, as Jessica Tandy’s chauffeur, Hoke, in Driving Miss Daisy. Wearing a gray wig and adopting an arthritic gait, he gave a nuanced performance that melded the deference and self-respect he had personally witnessed in Southern blacks who served white employers. “I knew who that man was, how the whole song was sung,” he said.
Some African Americans viewed Hoke as an Uncle Tom and were discomfited by his passivity. But Freeman wasn’t about to inject artificial rebelliousness into the character to avoid catching flak. “Hoke was certainly not kowtowing to that lady, and he had a lot of dignity and strength,” says Driving Miss Daisy’s director, Bruce Beresford. “Morgan was aware that some people wouldn’t like it, but characteristically he said, ‘I can’t help that.’ ”
Last June, while filming the fantasy action film Wanted in Prague with Angelina Jolie, Freeman hit a milestone: to mark his 70th birthday, the cast and crew serenaded him and presented him with a cake. When asked how it feels to be 70, he answers with no hesitation: “Great. Fabulous.”
He radiates good health and ease—and he works at staying fit. He enjoys the beef tips and fried oysters at Madidi, for instance, but he is careful not to overeat, does yoga, and works out in his gym at the ranch to keep his frame lean. He says he has not noticed any decrease in his energy as he has gotten older.
Maybe one way Freeman stays youthful is by learning new skills, tackling each one obsessively until he masters it. He rode until he became an adept horseman. Then for years, if he wasn’t working, he could be found on his ketch Sojourner, which he sailed around the Caribbean. “Some people feel insignificant out at sea,” he says. “I feel the most significant, like I have wings.”
Five years ago he got even closer to sprouting wings, taking flying lessons. He and his best friend, Bill Luckett—Freeman’s partner in Madidi and other Clarksdale ventures—teamed up to buy a twin-engine Cessna 414 and a Cessna Citation jet. They fly together frequently, on fishing trips to Montana or business jaunts to New York or Los Angeles, trading off on the controls. And recently Luckett introduced Freeman to golf. “Morgan had never picked up a golf club,” Luckett says. “He took to it like a duck to water; he has a beautiful golf swing. Once he gets onto something, he’s on it.”
Freeman’s family life, which he once described as “convoluted,” has stabilized. He and Myrna pursue their own interests; if he’s not working, he’s usually flying somewhere, while she loves to take care of the Charleston house and garden. When asked now what the key is to his long marriage, Freeman lets out a big laugh. “Sh-t, I don’t know,” he says.
He knows what kind of father he has been, though: “Not much, I don’t think. When my kids were growing up, I was off working. Two of them I didn’t even have any truck with at all.” Once his two sons, who were raised by their mothers, became adults, he established relationships with them. Alfonso, an actor, has a small part playing his son in The Bucket List. “He’s in St. Louis right now rehearsing for Othello,” says Freeman with pride. Saifoulaye, a stay-at-home dad, lives in Michigan; daughter Deena, a hairdresser for films, is in South Carolina.
“In my opinion he was a great father,” says Morgana. “He’ll say he wasn’t, and I can’t say his being away a lot didn’t make it hard, but we learned to deal with it. When he was there, he was there, and his words were always very helpful.”
Freeman has no desire to slow down his work pace—“I love moviemaking,” he says. He will produce and star in a film about Nelson Mandela that tells the story of the 1995 rugby World Cup, held in South Africa. “That’s gonna be a real challenge,” he says. He hopes to persuade Clint Eastwood to direct, which would afford him the pleasure of joining two of the three people he says he most admires: Mandela, Eastwood, and the Dalai Lama.
The suffocating midday heat has abated, and Freeman has a date with Luckett at the local golf course. Luckett, a lawyer, is the hands-on impresario of an ever-increasing network of business and charitable ventures that enmeshes Freeman in Mississippi. They founded Madidi and the nearby Ground Zero Blues Club partly for selfish reasons: they both love great food and good music, and there was no place local to go. Clarksdale, known as the birthplace of the blues, has long attracted pilgrims who come to see the sleepy crossroads town where such greats as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Ike Turner all lived, performed, or recorded; even Elvis played here as a youngster. “This town is legendary, but there was nothing here to support the legend,” explains Freeman. He and Luckett admit they lose money on both the restaurant and the club, but their losses are offset by profitable investments, including in real estate.
Freeman is low-key about his charitable endeavors, but through his Rock River Foundation he has given millions to 4-H clubs, Teach For America, and other educational institutions. While most of his efforts are dedicated to the Mississippi Delta region, after Hurricane Ivan in 2004 Freeman helped the Grenada Relief Fund, established to rebuild the devastated Caribbean island.
More than five decades ago, when he left Mississippi, Freeman couldn’t imagine ever wanting to return. But around 1990, with his mother growing older, he moved back to spend time with her. By then she was living in what had been her parents’ house in Charleston, and Freeman bought adjacent land to build his own home next door
While he was growing up in Mississippi, his professional prospects and even his options for self-expression were limited; for a black man, defying a white person in power could have fatal consequences. A vivid measure of the distance Freeman has traveled occurred in 2000 when he took part in the tribute to Eastwood at the Kennedy Center Honors annual gala in Washington, D.C. At the dinner, says one source, an intermediary approached Freeman with a request from Mississippi senator (and former segregationist) Trent Lott—could Lott come to the star’s table to meet him? “I don’t see any reason why,” Freeman calmly replied. “Tell him you can’t find me.”
Freeman’s ancestors worked this soil, and his mother is buried on his land, where her modest house still stands, a reminder of where he came from. “You know, you go around the world, and you have eaten in the best restaurants and stayed in the best hotels,” he says. “But here, there is peace and quiet and solitude. And the realization that this has always represented safety.” What kind of safety? Freeman taps the side of his head. “Psychic safety. So I tell people I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
West Coast editor Nancy Griffin profiled Helen Mirren for the March & April issue.
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Ancient stones, steep stairs, and sparkling fresh air greeted me upon arrival in Assisi, Italy, a month ago. Lush olive groves, leaves iridescent in the sun, offset the city stones. “What sort of place is this, that shaped St. Francis 800 years ago?” I asked myself. Eager to deepen my understanding of the saint, I had returned to Assisi to walk in the footsteps of St. Francis.
Profligate playboy, drama king, dejected knight, young Francis lived life large. He grew up in turbulent times, with civic unrest in Assisi and war with nearby Perugia surrounding him. Returning from a year as a prisoner of war in Perugia, sick and weak, Francis drifted. When he sold his cloth merchant father’s wares to repair a church, his father chained him in punishment. Francis stripped in public, denouncing his father. Unlikely material for a saint.
Yet God shaped Francis over time, and Francis yielded. A simple saint, Francis wanted one thing. Nothing but God, he proclaimed, shedding all else. He chose a life of simplicity, serving the poor, and calling the church to reform.
I watch with interest as Pope Francis embarks on his first trip to Assisi tomorrow, a pilgrimage with eight cardinals, to celebrate the feast day of St. Francis. Pope Francis will walk in the footsteps of the saint as he visits various Franciscan sites. I picture the places he will visit and wonder what impact they will have on him. At the same time, Pope Francis teaches me what it means to walk in the footsteps of St. Francis as I re-enter my life in a twenty-first-century, North American world.
Eschewing the pomp of the papacy, Pope Francis, like St. Francis, has chosen simplicity. He lives in the modest Vatican guest house, for example, instead of in the papal suite in the Apostolic Palace where his predecessors lived. Furthermore, Pope Francis, like St. Francis, has made it his priority to serve the poor and preach peace. Everywhere he goes, he seeks out marginalized people for his services and conversations. He advocates the use of empty convents as refugee shelters rather than income-generating hotels. He took a stand for peace in Syria and around the world, exclaiming, “Never again war! We want to be men and women of peace.”
Finally, Pope Francis, like St. Francis, is reforming the church. He has dedicated the first three days of October to meeting with the eight cardinals who will work with him on reforming the Vatican administration, restructuring the church to serve the world rather than itself. It is no coincidence that this is the group that will travel to Assisi tomorrow, drawing inspiration from one of the greatest reformers of the church, who, like them, lived in a time of materialism, violence, and a self-serving church.
Tomorrow, Pope Francis walks in St. Francis’ footsteps in Assisi. The next day, he will continue to show us what it looks like to walk in St. Francis’ footsteps in our world today. May our imaginations be ignited with the possibilities he inspires. | {
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DJ is back with another holiday classic for his Phase 3 series. In this lesson, DJ teaches the electric guitar parts to "Jingle Bell Rock" as performed by Brian Setzer.
Taught by DJ Phillips in Songs with DJ Phillips seriesLength: 26:34Difficulty: 2.5 of 5
DJ Phillips lends his expertise to popular music with a blend of ultra in-depth song tutorials!
DJ Phillips breaks down the 70's hit "Free Ride" by The Edgar Winter Group.Length: 61:33 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips teaches his funk tune "Melon Baller."Length: 22:20 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips demonstrates how to play the song "Stray Cat Strut" by The Stray Cats.Length: 79:03 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips breaks down the epic progressive rock tune "Song for America" by legendary artists Kansas.Length: 117:24 Difficulty: 4.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips breaks down Kansas' popular classic "Carry On Wayward Son."Length: 90:14 Difficulty: 3.5 Members Only
DJ Phillips teaches both the acoustic rhythm and lead sections of Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again."Length: 32:42 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ Phillips breaks down the rhythm and lead sections of The Flaming Lips' song "Do You Realize??"Length: 37:34 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips breaks down the Great White hit "Once Bitten Twice Shy." This song propelled the band to stardom, but is actually a cover from another artist.Length: 67:03 Difficulty: 3.5 Members Only
Originally written in 1963 by Latin Jazz musician Tito Puente, "Oye Como Va" was made famous by Santana's 1970 cover. In this lesson, DJ breaks down the rhythm and lead sections to this influential song.Length: 55:14 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ Phillips breaks down the rhythm and lead sections to the Cheap Trick song "On Top of the World."Length: 64:01 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ Phillips demonstrates how to play the song "So Good to See You" by Cheap Trick.Length: 28:20 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ Phillips breaks down the electric rhythm, acoustic, and lead portions of "Slide" by Goo Goo Dolls.Length: 42:23 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ teaches and demonstrates the punk song "Walk Away (Maybe)" from Good Charlotte.Length: 33:13 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips breaks down and demonstrates the rhythm, lead and harmony guitar sections for the .38 Special song "Back Where You Belong."Length: 84:37 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
DJ demonstrates and teaches the guitar sections to his former band Brother Big Bad's song "Jenny."Length: 70:29 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ Phillips demonstrates and breaks down the parts to the song "Name" by Goo Goo Dolls.Length: 63:15 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips provides a thorough lesson on the Goo Goo Dolls single "Ain't That Unusual". This song was a hit off of their album A Boy Named Goo prior to their adult contemporary sound taking hold.Length: 46:07 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ Phillips provides a lesson on a punk-inspired tune from Goo Goo Dolls entitled "Only One". One of their early hits from "A Boy Named Goo," this song was popular before Goo Goo Dolls hit it big with...Length: 69:35 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
For his "Style of Keith Urban" series, DJ wrote and composed a song that takes a nod towards this guitarist. Incorporating classic country, rock, chicken pickin', and melodic elements, this song is a study...Length: 97:06 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
DJ is back with another epic song lesson! This time, he teaches The Doobie Brothers' song "Long Train Runnin'". Initially created as a jam track used for live performances, "Long Train Runnin'" went on...Length: 35:48 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips returns with another song lesson in his Phase 3 lesson set. This time around, DJ is teaching the classic rock hit "Amie" from Pure Prairie League. He breaks down the three different acoustic...Length: 73:21 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
DJ is back with a mouthful of a lesson! This time he teaches Alan Jackson's snub to the industry, "Three Minute Positive Not Too Country Uptempo Love Song." In this lesson, DJ breaks down the main acoustic...Length: 66:19 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
DJ returns to his phase 3 series with yet another classic rock song. In this lesson, DJ teaches the main electric guitar parts for "Rock 'N' Roll Fantasy" by Bad Company.Length: 20:04 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips is back with another classic country tune. In this lesson, DJ teaches the acoustic and electric guitar sections for "Angels from Montgomery" by John Prine.Length: 21:32 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
In his 25th song lesson with JamPlay, DJ Phillips breaks down the acoustic and electric guitar parts for the classic country western tune "Amarillo by Morning." Originally written by Terry Stafford and...Length: 29:07 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
In this Phase 3 song lesson, DJ breaks down the funk classic "Super Bad Super Slick" by James Brown. In addition to the guitar on the original recording, DJ has also transcribed several other instruments...Length: 42:06 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ is back with another holiday classic for his Phase 3 series. In this lesson, DJ teaches the electric guitar parts to "Jingle Bell Rock" as performed by Brian Setzer.Length: 26:34 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ is back with another lesson in his Phase 3 series! In this lesson, he teaches both the acoustic and electric parts to the iconic song "Peaceful Easy Feeling" by The Eagles.Length: 41:38 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
Here is an old song about a coal miner. First recorded by Merle Travis in 1946, this song has been covered by countless artists. In this lesson, DJ teaches you the lesser known instrumental version recorded...Length: 33:37 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
Here is a nice country/blues song from contemporary Christian singer/songwriter Karen Staley. The song has both acoustic and electric guitar parts. The electric part features a simple, riff-like lead that...Length: 20:00 Difficulty: 1.5 Members Only
Here is a song by singer/songwriter Anita Cochran from "The Dukes of Hazzard" soundtrack. This song has both acoustic and electric parts, and it features more chicken pickin' than you can shake a stick...Length: 48:36 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
Here is "Take This Job and Shove It," which was written by David Allan Coe and made popular by Johnny Paycheck. This song has relatively simple acoustic and electric parts, but the timing may give beginners...Length: 26:00 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips is back with another great 90's rock tune! He breaks down the parts to the song "Follow You Down" by Gin Blossoms.Length: 46:31 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
Here is Alan Jackson's 18th no. 1 hit single "Where I Come From". This is a hot country song served with all the fixin's like chicken pickin', slide guitar, and more. While the rhythm is great for beginners...Length: 35:16 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
Here is a country rock song from the band Her & Kings County. This song is very dynamic and has acoustic, electric, and slide playing throughout. Beginners, you're gonna love the rhythms, but you may struggle...Length: 30:00 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ Phillips is back with a lesson on the classic blues song "Tush" from rockers ZZ Top! This lesson features a full breakdown and the correct tunings for both the rhythm guitar and slide guitar parts....Length: 32:12 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
Here is a song from Chad Kroeger of Nickelback that was released on the Spider-Man soundtrack back in 2002. The song became a tribute to the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on America.Length: 22:00 Difficulty: 1.5 Members Only
Here is an alternative country rock song from The Jayhawks. This song was released in 1992 on the Hollywood Town Hall record.Length: 50:00 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
Here is the theme song for The Dukes Of Hazzard TV show that was popular in the 80's. Released in 1980 on Music Man, this song quickly became a #1 hit for Waylon Jennings.Length: 23:00 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
Here is a song that's been recorded by many different artists and was originally written by Geoff Mack in 1959. The version DJ teaches was recorded by Johnny Cash in 1996.Length: 26:00 Difficulty: 1.5 Members Only
DJ is back with another great classic rock hit! This time he offers up a lesson on "Ramblin' Man" from The Allman Brothers. This tune has a mix of catchy riffs and driving rhythms that explode in an all...Length: 70:22 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips is back to his song lesson series with a look at the gritty "Revolution" from The Beatles. DJ breaks down all three electric guitar parts, then discusses the tone used in this song.Length: 55:03 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ is back with another epic Beatles tune! In this song lesson, he breaks down the acoustic guitar part for the iconic "Hey Jude". Additionally, he has transcribed several of the string instrument lines...Length: 33:57 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
DJ is back with another modern rock guitar lesson! This time, he covers the 2000's hit Echo by the band Trapt.Length: 25:04 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ returns with another modern metal favorite from the band Trapt. This time, DJ takes a look at the song "Headstrong," which was one of the band's first major hits.Length: 31:43 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips returns with a look at a classic country tune made popular by Patsy Cline. Originally written by Willie Nelson, "Crazy" is a staple of the classic country sound.Length: 29:56 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips returns with a look at one of the 80's biggest hits! This time around, we're looking at the Back to the Future favorite "Power of Love" by Huey Lewis & the News.Length: 40:40 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
DJ is back to his song lesson series with another great Huey Lewis and the News hit! This time he takes a look at "The Heart of Rock and Roll".Length: 42:12 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips is back with a look at another classic country tune. In this lesson, he teaches the acoustic and electric parts to Willie Nelson's "Funny How Time Slips Away".Length: 24:26 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
DJ Phillips returns to his song lesson series with a look at a popular country song from the Dixie Chicks. "Goodbye Earl" combines two different acoustic guitars and a layered electric to sink your teeth...Length: 51:23 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
Haven't had your fill of 90's rock?!? DJ amps up the grunge with a look at a big title from the mid 90's! In this lesson, you'll learn "Far Behind" by Candlebox.Length: 43:56 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ Phillips returns with another look at a staple from the 80's! This time it's Living Colour's hit "Cult of Personality"!Length: 38:07 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ is back with another classic rock tune for your ears! This time he's taking a look at "Wild Thing!" Originally written by The Troggs, the version we're looking at here is as recorded by Jimi Hendrix.Length: 22:13 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ Phillips is back once again with a great rock ballad from the 90's. This time he breaks down the popular Collective Soul hit "December".Length: 41:30 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
DJ returns to his song lesson series with a look at a rock country style tune from Collective Soul. "Heaven's Already Here" appeared on the band's debut album and is a great ballad for a starter.Length: 25:03 Difficulty: 2.0 Members Only
DJ is back with another early country classic for his song series. In lesson 59, he takes a look at the classic song "Hey Good Lookin'" by Hank Williams Sr.Length: 40:17 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ Phillips returns with a look at another Hank Williams Sr. song. This time he breaks down the guitar, fiddle and steel arrangements for "Your Cheatin' Heart".Length: 39:35 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
In lesson 61 of his songs series, DJ is back with another classic country tune. This time he breaks down the parts to the iconic "Mama Tried" by Merle Haggard.Length: 30:42 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
DJ Phillips returns with a look at another country classic. In lesson 62 of his songs series, he teaches "Workin' Man Blues" by Merle Haggard.Length: 32:12 Difficulty: 2.5 Members Only
About DJ Phillips
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Like many guitar players who began playing around the same time, DJ began plunking out Nirvana and Soundgarden tunes when he first picked up the guitar in the mid-nineties. While these grunge-y roots certainly have their merit, it wasn't until DJ's eldest sister took him to a Led Zeppelin laser light show that the full potential of the guitar began to come into focus.
With Jimmy Page's Les Paul pyrotechnics as his inspiration, DJ began fervently practicing for hours on end in the suburban jungle of Southwestern Ohio. This newfound passion (combined with his complete lack of athletic prowess and physical coordination thus completely ruling out all sports) led him to form rock bands in junior high and high school. He grew to love the performance aspect of music and soon decided on it as a career path.
College led him to Nashville, Tennessee where he began to pursue a degree in Commercial Music at Belmont University. He also started another band and got his first professional theater gig the following summer. Since that summer, DJ has spent nearly every waking hour finding ways to play music and avoiding a real contribution to society in any other way.
He moved to Minneapolis after college, rocking out between theater gigs with his current rock band Brother Big Bad. He has now convinced the band to move to Nashville where music flows like water.
DJ is elated to be a part of JamPlay and is thankful for everyone's warm welcome and says "Now, let's ROCK, people."
Our acoustic guitar lessons are taught by qualified instructors with various backgrounds with the instrument.
Orville Johnson introduces turnarounds and provides great ideas and techniques.Free LessonSeries Details
Marcelo teaches the eight basic right hand moves for the Rumba Flamenca strum pattern. He then shows you how to apply it...Free LessonSeries Details
Lesson 40 takes a deeper look at slash chords. Mark discusses why they're called slash chords, and how they are formed.Free LessonSeries Details
Miche introduces several new chord concepts that add color and excitement to any progression.Free LessonSeries Details
Jessica kindly introduces herself, her background, and her approach to this series.Free LessonSeries Details
Pamela brings a cap to her first 13 JamPlay lessons with another original etude inspired by the great Leo Brouwer. This is...Free LessonSeries Details
Lesson 7 is all about arpeggios. Danny provides discussion and exercises designed to build your right hand skills.Free LessonSeries Details
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In this lesson Randall introduces the partial capo (using a short-cut capo by Kyser) and talks about how it can make the...Free LessonSeries Details
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Learn a handful of new blues techniques while learning to play Stevie Ray Vaughn's "The House Is Rockin'".Free LessonSeries Details
JamPlay introduces Nashville session player Guthrie Trapp! In this first segment, Guthrie talks a little about his influences,...Free LessonSeries Details
Do you want to play more musical sounding solos? Do you want to play solos with more emotion behind them? Maybe you're the...Free LessonSeries Details
Kris analyzes different pick sizes and their effect on his playing. Using a slow motion camera, he is able to point out the...Free LessonSeries Details
Lisa breaks into the very basics of the electric guitar. She starts by explaining the parts of the guitar. Then, she dives...Free LessonSeries Details
Brendan demonstrates the tiny triad shapes derived from the form 1 barre chord.Free LessonSeries Details
Lauren Passarelli offers up her wisdom on purchasing a guitar. She also includes information regarding proper setup and care....Free LessonSeries Details
Learn Nashville style country guitar from one of the most recorded guitarists in history. Check out rhythm grooves, solos,...Free LessonSeries Details
JamPlay is proud to welcome senior professor and Coordinator of Guitar Studies at the University of Colorado at Denver,...Free LessonSeries Details
Emil takes you through some techniques that he uses frequently in his style of playing. Topics include neck bending, percussive...Free LessonSeries Details
Take a minute to compare JamPlay to other traditional and new methods of learning guitar. Our estimates for "In-Person" lessons below are based on a weekly face-to-face lesson for $40 per hour.
|Price Per Lesson||< $0.01||$4 - $5||$30 - $50||Free|
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|Learn Any Style||Sorta|
|Multiple Camera Angles||Sometimes||-||Sometimes|
|Learn in Sweatpants||Socially Unacceptable|
|Gasoline Needed||$0.00||$0.00||~$4 / gallon!||$0.00|
Mike H."I feel like a 12 year old kid with a new guitar!"
I am 66 years young and I still got it! I would have never known this if it had not been for Jamplay! I feel like a 12 year old kid with a new guitar! Ha! I cannot express enough how great you're website is! It is for beginners and advanced pickers! I am an advanced picker and thought I had lost it but thanks to you all, I found it again! Even though I only play by ear, I have been a member a whopping whole two weeks now and have already got Brent's country shuffle and country blues down and of course with embellishments. Thank you all for your wonderful program!
Greg J."With Jamplay I can fit in a random session when I have time and I can go at my own pace"
I'm a fifty eight year old newbie who owns a guitar which has been sitting untouched in a corner for about seven years now. Last weekend I got inspired to pick it up and finally learn how to play after watching an amazing Spanish guitarist on TV. So, here I am. I'm starting at the beginning with Steve Eulberg and I couldn't be happier (except for the sore fingers :) Some day I'm going to play like Steve! I'm self employed with a hectic schedule. With Jamplay I can fit in a random session when I have time and I can go at my own pace, rewinding and replaying the videos until I get it. This is a very enjoyable diversion from my work yet I still feel like I'm accomplishing something worthwhile. Thanks a lot, Greg
Bill"I believe this is the absolute best site for guitar students."
I am commenting here to tell you and everyone at JamPlay that I believe this is the absolute best site for guitar students. I truly enjoy learning to play the guitar on JamPlay.com. Yes, I said the words, ""enjoy learning."" It is by far the best deal for the money. | {
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Over recent weeks, Radamel Falcao has been the subject of intense transfer speculation, with reports linking the Atletico Madrid star with a summer transfer to Manchester United.
So far there has been talk of Javier Hernandez going the other way, whilst rumours persist suggesting Wayne Rooney could yet move to big spenders Paris Saint-Germain to help fund any potential move. This has had fans around the world debating who should be on United's summer transfer wish list.
With this I mind, and with the summer window just a few months from opening, I think it is a good time to look at the top five players linked with a summer move to the Red Devils. United fans, who do you want to see sign for the Old Trafford club this summer?
5. Angelo Ogbonna | Torino
The Torino defender is one of the latest players to be linked with United. Sir Alex Ferguson will feel his defence needs strengthening as Ferdinand and Vidic continue to age.
Speaking about the rumours, Ogbonna told Tuttomercatoweb: "This obviously pleases me, but right now I do not think about the future. I live in the present. I, just like all my team-mates, think only about saving Turin."
Could he be set for a move to Old Trafford?
4. Viktor Fischer | Ajax
This young forward currently playing for Ajax has been monitored closely by United for some time.
The 18-year-old is regarded as one of the top young players in world football and it is no surprise he is catching the eye of Europe's elite.
United are always looking for bright young talent and it seems that Fischer could tempt a summer bid from United.
3. Mario Gotze | Borussia Dortmund
A long-time admirer of Gotze, Alex Ferguson would be keen to see such a talent in the red of Manachester. Arsenal are said to be keen to buy the Borussia Dortmund star but comments from the player of late may tempt United into a bid.
"I am very happy at Dortmund and satisfied with the way we are progressing as a team," he told reporters. "Any thoughts about playing for another team are very much for the future, but Real Madrid, Barcelona or Manchester United could be interesting."
2. Radamel Falcao | Atletico Madrid
Former Atletico player David de Gea could be a reason for Falcao to make the switch, especially if United claim the league title.
With other big name strikers such as Fernando Torres and Sergio Aguero opting for the Premier League, it would be no surprise to see Falcao line-up for United next season.
1. Cristiano Ronaldo | Real Madrid
The much-loved former golden boy of Old Trafford has been linked with a return to United in what would surely be the most spectacular transfer U-turn of all-time.
Ronaldo has dominated La Liga since joining Real Madrid but reports of unrest and his love for United has led to claims Ronaldo could return.
Ronaldo himself has not ruled out the move but did state he aims to see out his contract with Real. Could the Premier League see the return of Ronaldo this summer?
DISCLAIMER: This article has been written by a member of the GiveMeFootball Writing Academy and does not represent the views of GiveMeFootball.com or SportsNewMedia. The views and opinions expressed are solely that of the author credited at the top of this article. GiveMeFootball.com and SportsNewMedia do not take any responsibility for the content of its contributors. | {
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“O” Yeah! It’s a Trade.
September 4th, 2011 by slangon
A while back, Ryan from “O” No! Another Orioles Blog had contacted me about having some cards from my Mets wantlist. Obviously, I’m always down to chip away at the holes in my Mets collection, so a deal was struck, cards were mailed out and delivered, despite not one, but two natural disasters taking place. The majority of the cards that he sent happened to fall into the span that I was out of collecting, the mid 90′s through the late 00′s. That actually worked out really well for me since I tend to not pay as much attention to those sets as I should considering how many cards from that period I still need. Ryan seemed pretty pleased with the cards that I sent his way, now let’s take a gander at some highlights of the cards he sent.
First off he sent me a couple of Rickeys.
Even waaaay before Rickey joined the Mets, he was always one of my favorite players. I remember almost freaking out when I heard the Mets signed him. You know, like those little girls in old footage of Beatles concerts. Back in 2003, when I got married, as part of my bachelor party, we went to a Newark Eagles minor league game and Rickey happened to be playing on the team. He actually hit a home run that day.
What would a trade with an Orioles fan be without a couple of Eddie Murray cards?
I particularly like the 1994 card because every time I look at it I keep thinking he’s calling his shot ala Babe Ruth. I guess it’s appropriate that the Mets are playing the Cubs. Of course when you look at it for more than a second, you realize that he’s really just telling the runner at second not to try and move up on a ball that kind of got away from the Cubs catcher, Rick Wilkins I believe that is.
Ryan also sent some cards that I needed for my 2011 Mets team set, which I am trying to put together without buying a single pack of 2011 Topps.
As you can see, they’re all guys who played important roles for the Mets this year. Emaus hit .162 over 14 games for them before being returned to the Blue Jays. Chris Young made 4 starts for them before blowing out his arm (although in his defense, he pitched awesomely in the those 4 starts with a 1.88 ERA and 22 K’s over 24 innings). I guess K-Rod really did play an important role by getting traded. Now the Mets don’t have that ridiculous $17 million dollar vesting option to worry about.
How about a card of a guy who really did play a pretty key role for the Mets this year?
He stepped up pretty good when the Mets, who at the time were only about 7 games out of the Wild Card race, traded away their star closer. He only allowed 1 earned run in his first 7 appearances after Frankie Rodriguez was traded and racked up 5 saves and 1 win during that stretch. Of course it all came crashing down on August 1st when he gave up 4 runs to the Marlins in the top of the 10th inning. When he picked up his 300th save, I was kind of shocked to realize that at that point I didn’t own any Isringhausen cards as a Met and was forced to make one. Now I have this guy, though.
I also got this card.
I don’t have anything particularly interesting to say about Alex Ochoa. I just think this is a very hilarious choice of a photo to put on a baseball card.
Ryan also sent along some cards of guys who have been some of my favorite Mets from the last decade or so.
Finally, what would a Condition: Poor trade be with out some beat up vintage? Ryan also sent these three beauties my way.
I think that Bob Taylor might possibly be the Poorest of all Condition: Poor cards I ever received in a trade. Kudos to you, Ryan. I was also realizing that with the addition of these 3 cards, I’m actually only 3 cards away from completing the 1964 Mets set, which would supplant the ’69 set as my oldest complete set.
Thanks again for the great cards, Ryan. | {
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Pacifica's Joe DiMaggio baseball team, the Gamecocks, tried to accomplish a feat their predecessors of the past 45 years were not able to achieve - finish the regular season undefeated.
The Gamecocks carried a perfect 18-0 league record into their last two games last Sunday. Unfortunately, the team lost its final two games, losing to San Bruno in a double header. The team was playing without several of its players due to other commitments.
The losses did not interfere with their goal of winning the Northern Peninsula Division championship. The 18-2 placed them ahead of league opponents, San Bruno, South San Francisco and Millbrae.
Pacifica will participate in the divisional playoffs this Sunday at Marchbank Field. Should they win the tournament, they qualify for the State championship, the Joe DiMaggio World Series, to be held at Half Moon Bay on July 26.
In the final league game last Sunday, Pacifica lost 5-4 in 11 innings. Pacifica scored three runs in the bottom of the seventh to tie the game, but in extra innings could not capitalize with runners in scoring position.
In the first game of the doubleheader, San Bruno scored four runs in the fourth to win 5-3. The team was missing two of its heavy hitters, Jacob Martinez and Austin Youngdale.
Pacifica played in the Keith Connelly July 4 tournament in Yountville. Pacifica won its bracket in three games before facing defending State champion Tri-County.
Tri County came into the game with a 16-0 record against Pacifica's 17-0 record. Tri County won the game, 3-2.
Many of the teams that played in the July 4 tournament will meet in the World Series later this month.
"The teams that do well at the July 4th tournament will be the teams that advance to the State championship," said Gamecocks manager Bryan Powers. "It was a chance for us to go there and mark our dominance. We played a great game; we just missed a couple of timely hits".
"The loss just shows the team that when you don't play your best game, you are going to lose," added Powers. "We're looking forward to the division playoffs and hopefully advance to the State championship. Because of our league record, we have to be beaten twice in the division playoffs."
Pacifica is seeking its fifth State championship. Pacifica last won the title in 2006. Powers was a member of that team, coached by Mike Hughes.
"We've got a great chance to get to the State tournament," exclaims Powers. "This is a very talented team. We've got two of the best athletes who played in the North Peninsula League for their respective schools this year, Jacob Martinez for Terra Nova and Brett Berghammer of Half Moon Bay."
Martinez was named Player of the Year in the North Peninsula League Bay Division.
Berghammer is joined on the mound by Terra Nova pitcher Steven Segasty and Beau Eastman. "These are our go-to guys for pitching," adds Powers.
"Joey Pledger, who played as a sophomore at Terra Nova, has proven that he is one of the best young players in the league right now; he's hitting above .500 and he's a terror on the field," said Powers of his catcher.
Other players who are helping to carry the team are Anthony Gordon, a very good shortstop, sluggers Austin Youngdale and Tyler Armstrong.
"We've never had a set lineup because of personal responsibilities by many of the players," said Powers. "That's the great part of this team. There's always someone who can fill in at other roles. The athletes play well together."
Pacifica won the State championship in 1970, 1980, 2004 and 2006. | {
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Nearly all tobacco use begins in youth and young adulthood—88% of adult daily smokers smoked their first cigarette before turning 18. Approximately 18% of high school students smoke cigarettes. Nearly 10% use smokeless tobacco, and young people who use smokeless tobacco are more likely to become cigarette smokers as adults.
By helping teens and young adults avoid using tobacco, we will help them live longer and healthier lives. We can make the next generation tobacco free.
Is your child at risk of using or becoming addicted tobacco? Learn the signs and factors in this Office of Adolescent Health (OAH) resource.
Learn the basics and start a conversation with your kids about the dangers of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs. Use this healthfinder.gov resource as your guide.
Use this lesson plan from the CDC to demonstrate what goes into a person's lungs with each puff of a cigarette and how that smoke affects a person's body.
Promote healthy alternatives to tobacco use with these CDC fact sheets, handouts, and guides. | {
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Tuesday, May 31, 2016
The Teen Creative Writers Workshop Spring Reading
The Somers Library is very proud of our teen creative writers. This group of young people worked very diligently honing their writing skills during the winter. Lead by Christine Adler as
their teacher and mentor, the Teen Creative Writers Workshop started in the cold month of January and met bi-weekly through April. On May 12 th 2016, this wonderful group presented readings of their creative writing pieces to an audience of parents, friends, and library staff.
The Somers Library would like to thank the teens who participated in the Teen Creative Writers Workshop, Christine Adler for all her hard work and dedication to this group, the Friends of the Somers Library for their partial funding support, and Poets & Writers, Inc. for the bulk of thefunding that made this workshop and reading possible.
Posted by Somers Library at 1:18 PM | {
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LOS ANGELES (AP) – Clayton Kershaw followed up his sensational one-man show on opening day with seven innings of two-hit ball and nine strikeouts in a spirited duel with A.J. Burnett, and the Los Angeles Dodgers beat Pittsburgh 1-0 Saturday night for their second straight shutout win over the Pirates.
Kershaw (2-0) walked one and retired 17 consecutive batters after giving up a leadoff single in the first inning to Starling Marte. Last Monday, the 2011 Cy Young Award winner threw a four-hitter against the World Series champion Giants and broke a scoreless tie with his first major league home run.
Kershaw’s latest gem came one night after Zack Greinke held the Bucs to two hits over 6 1-3 innings in a 3-0 victory.
Brandon League followed Paco Rodriguez and Kenley Jansen out of the bullpen and pitched a hitless ninth for his second save.
Burnett (0-2) was charged with a run and four hits in 5 1/3 innings, walked four and struck out nine – including Matt Kemp all three times he faced him.
The right-hander, returning to the ballpark where he won his major league debut in 1999 with the Marlins, was coming off a 10-strikeout, 3-1 loss to the Chicago Cubs in the Pirates’ opener.
Burnett is 1-7 with a 3.04 ERA over his last nine starts since the beginning of last September, receiving fewer than three runs of support in eight of them — and the Pirates have been shut out four times during that stretch.
Carl Crawford drew a leadoff walk in the Dodgers’ first and stole second, but was stranded there as Burkett struck out Mark Ellis, Kemp and Adrian Gonzalez. Crawford stole second again after his two-out single in the third, and Ellis drove him in with a ground single through the left side.
The Dodgers have won 11 of their last 12 games against the Pirates and eight straight in Los Angeles. The only loss came in their final meeting of last season, when Garrett Jones hit a pair of three-run homers in support of Burnett’s 10-6 victory.
The Pirates haven’t hit a home run through their first five games — tying the 1998 and 1967 squads for the club’s longest drought from the start of a season since the middle of World War II (11 games in 1943). That year they hit only two in their first 26 contests.
Kemp has struck out five times in five official career at-bats against Burnett, and has walked twice. He grounded into an inning-ending double play with two on in the seventh against Mark Melancon, and is off to a 1-for-18 start. ... Kershaw, who has made 151 regular-season starts, posted consecutive complete games only once. That was June 20-26 at Dodger Stadium, when he threw 112 pitches in a two-hit, 4-0 victory over Detroit and then used 114 pitches to beat the Angels 3-2. He struck out 11 in both games, then fanned 10 Angels six nights later in a 7-1 loss at Anaheim. ... Entering this start, Burnett had allowed as many hits as he had strikeouts (1,981). ... Kershaw’s first three pitches were put in play. Marte singled, was bunted to second by Neil Walker and got thrown out at third by shortstop Justin Sellers on Andrew McCutchen’s fielder’s choice grounder. Gaby Sanchez ended the six-pitch inning with a flyball. ... The Pirates lost three times by 1-0 scores last season and were shut out 15 times altogether. | {
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40th Church of Christ, Scientist
Los Angeles, CA (Near LAX)
Sundays - 10:00 AM
All children up to the age of 20 learn from the Bible and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, which elucidate the Scriptures. The goal of Sunday School is to "open the way for Christian Science to be understood, and make the Bible the chart of life, where the buoys and healing currents of Truth are pointed out." (Science & Health, page 24, line 7)
Child care is provided for those too young to attend Sunday School or Church services.
The Mother Church provides an exciting website for young people at christianscience.com/youth. | {
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Winter 2007 - Volume 10 Number 1
|Upon Which Conception of Citizenship Should We Build a Model for Civic Education? Rethinking a Deliberative Context for Teacher Education from the Aims of Citizenship Education in the New Quebec Education Program
"For our part, we believe that free education must be understood exclusively as denoting education which is as free as it can be within the constraints of an overall educational program and within the constraints of the social environment. Thus may it always turn out, and, in fact, it often turns out that the child’s behaviour is far from the same thing as the interests of the group. Then conflict may always arise, which, without forcing the child to do anything in particular, will make him see the value of changing the way he behaves so as to accord with the interests of the group. The school routine should be so organized that the child finds it best to go in step with the group, in the same way as when he is at play; that any departure from the group seems just as meaningless as quitting a game. Just like playing a game, life should demand a constant straining at the leash, a constant joy in concerted activity" (Vygotski, 1926).
Within the framework of current reflection of a philosophical nature on citizenship, citizenship education and the training of those who will take on this type of teaching, we hope to achieve a double objective that can be summarized thus:
This investigation, which is organized into two segments, takes inspiration most notably from certain American authors who have already presented work along similar lines examples being Amy Gutmann (1999) and Stephen Macedo (2000). On the other hand, reflections of this nature have never been put forth in terms of the Quebec context. Yet, at this present time, when work on the application of major educational reforms which prescribe the implementation of a new citizenship education program is being undertaken, clarifying the notion of citizenship should in fact be an essential prerequisite step before attempting elaboration on the types of training to be involved. This present exercise in clarification is stimulated, then, on the one hand, by the absence, within the Quebec educational reform project, of references in its undertakings to political philosophy, philosophy of law, or democratic theory, and on the other, by the fact that the term “citizenship” is employed by the Minister of Education without this notion being specifically conceptually defined from the outset, in what is a relatively young debate within Quebec.1 Obviously, the resulting confusion cannot but impact initial training of teachers within Quebec’s universities, considering especially that it is the teachers who are principally responsible for the transmission of knowledge connected to concepts more or less well-defined in the field of citizenship studies.
To fill these gaps, we propose to first explain why the conception of citizenship resting on the deliberative theory of law and of democracy reveals itself to be superior to predominant conceptions. In other words, we will show that the deliberative model rather than liberal or republican models is in a position to provide some of the requisites of democracy and of citizenship at this definite historical period. We will then attempt to define, using grand strokes, the normative framework of civic education which, within pedagogical practice, would conform best to the conventions of the conception of citizenship being here asserted. Our task will consist in the end of expressing as much the implications as the consequences of the deliberative conception in regard to the training of citizens, and this in order to give some direction to the mandate of Quebec’s citizenship education project as well as to define the idea of dialogical competence that the teacher himself will have to possess to confront the underlying issues at stake in educating the future citizen.1. Citizenship: A Notion to be clarified within Education Reform in Quebec
First and foremost, we can only be sympathetic to this educational policy of integration into the curriculum of instruction which encompasses citizenship education (Commission des États généraux sur l’éducation, 1996; Commission des programmes d’études, 1999; Conseil supérieur de l’éducation, 1998; Groupe de travail sur la réforme du curriculum, 1997; Inchauspé, 2001; Leblanc, 2000; Ministère de l’Éducation, 2002, 2001, 1999, 1998, 1997) 2
No attempt to describe, explain or define citizenship appears in Quebec’s school training program. It cannot thus be known in what the idea of democratic citizenship consists, either in terms of daily life or in its ideal sense. Indeed, Quebec’s project for citizenship education reveals itself to be as obscure as it is ineffectual, at the very least from the point of view of its content, because everything seems to take place “as if” this notion of citizenship had already been given an agreed-upon meaning. Yet, as demonstrated by a study published by the Éditions du Conseil de l’Europe, a report using the results of a questionnaire sampling more than 450 subjects and supposed to highlight perceptions of citizenship education by European citizens active within NGO’s, the definitions and representations of the term “citizenship” cover an immensely wide field of possible meanings in the minds of the European public, often even contradicting each other; multiplicity of meanings are demonstrated also in the Canadian context by the research of Will Kymlicka (1992). The concept of citizenship stretches across understandings encompassing political, juridical, ethical, social and cultural dimensions. To judge by respondent results in the enquiry to which we here refer, it is difficult, in this case, to have a clear grasp of the essence of the idea of citizenship as filtered through the biases of popular perception; it is impossible to consider this idea a plain and simple one in terms of aspects linked either to its ideal or to effective practice, or that its meaning can be determined satisfactorily by canvassing interpretations found in public culture; if the concept of citizenship, for the great majority of European citizens questioned, is that which “confers a collection of social, civic, and political rights,” it can also well involve certain other definitions of a more contractualist, substantive nature, sometimes mutually exclusive, sometimes totally compatible, depending on the interviewees, their age-group, or marital status: for example, “citizenship means the integration of the individual into the social or cultural structures of the society where they live”; “Citizenship is a political notion which establishes a contract between the individual and the state”; “Citizenship […] concerns cultural belonging as much as geographical position”; “[C]itizenship […] is […] a principle of equality and of social justice”; or again “Citizenship and civic responsibility are synonyms.” (Heydt, 2001, pp. 13,14)
In fact, citizenship has to be defined because its definition varies according to space, time, and social variation, according to a not so new but still relevant view:
“The problem of moral education is among those questions that are now undergoing a reassessment in psychology and in culture in the most decisive and most thorough-going fashion. The thousand-year link between morality and religion has been broken, and, under the force of analysis, morality is beginning to acquire an increasingly temporal character. It is now possible to establish beyond all reasonable doubt the experiential, temporal character of morality, and its dependence on historical and social conditions, and its class character. Every nationality and every epoch, and likewise every class, possesses its own morality, which is always a product of social psychology. There is the morality of the Hottentot, who, it is said, responds when asked the question, “What do you consider to be good, and what do you consider to be bad?” by declaring, “Good is when I steal a wife; bad is when I'm robbed.” Moral concepts and ideas vary depending upon the social environment, and what is considered bad at one time and in one place, elsewhere might be considered the greatest of all virtues. And if there are any common feature in all these different manifestations of moral consciousness that can be identified, this is only because certain common elements shared by every human society were once part of the social order. Thus, from the standpoint of social psychology, ethics must be looked upon as a certain form of social behaviour that was established and evolved in the interests of the ruling class, and is different for different classes. This is why there has always existed a morality of the ruler and a morality of slaves, and this is why epochs characterized by crises have represented the greatest crises of morality.” (Vygotsky, 1926)
Since it has never been clearly demonstrated that the exercise of citizenship within a democracy is a human activity susceptible to shaping at school, there is no way to defend the institutional changes being brought to the scholarly curriculum in regard to civic education. In fact, why not leave the responsibility of socializing the young individual and of “orienting his social conscience towards acting as a responsible and enlightened citizen” (Ministère de l’Éducation, 2001, p. 165) to the family or to civil society? Why should the state education system intervene in the matter? To these questions, precisely no beginnings of a governmental response have been furnished. Yet, these questions impose themselves in real and incontestable fashion, as it appears that currently the view that the responsibility for citizenship education rests firstly, and prior to at school, with the family, the parents and the child’s immediate environs is a widespread one. It is true that citizenship education refers generally, within public culture, to “a set of ideas grouping at once the civic and political socialization of the future citizen and his capacity to make sense of the humane values of a democratic society. This education into citizenship is a complement to civic instruction […],” if this latter is still interpreted at the level of his “cognitive aspect,” that is, that “the object of civic instruction is knowledge of rights and duties.” But it seems also that “citizenship education is, in the majority of cases, presented as having to remain the responsibility of the family […]”; said otherwise, it is a commonplace that “citizenship education remains in general the responsibility of the parents,” they being more in a position to intervene directly, and at the earliest possible moment, regarding the behaviour of their child or children who learn in any case first by imitation to “develop respect for common rules,” “individual responsibility within the collective welfare” or “respect for the law by […] setting an example.” (Heydt, 2001, pp. 19, 16, 23, 24) Even among the great thinkers of education, “numerous authors, among whom we find the philosopher Jacques Maritain, affirm that this education [of citizenship as learning of a sense of responsibility to the group, the collective and common good] depends above all on the family. They judge that “functions of school and state in regard to education play thus only auxiliary roles in relation to the familial group […]” (MARITAIN, J., L’Homme et l’État, p. 620) “because the primary educational sphere is that of the family” (MARITAIN, J., L’Éducation au bien-vivre, p. 1021) ” (Conseil de la coopération culturelle, 2001, p. 36)
This absence of precision of definitions is an undeniable obstacle for Quebec’s citizenship education program; if we do not address it, teaching of this type will acquire, at best, a status that is purely decorative and that is treated formulaically, and at worst, such a manifestly uncertain and unclear sense of direction that the teachers themselves will gradually set it outside their main pedagogical focus, according it a barely discernible position within the school-day timetable. For those initiating the reforms and designing the program, it ought to have been seen as imperative to pose themselves questions of a more general nature. For example:
What is citizenship?
How can we teach citizenship in the school?
Even though these questions seem to us to be entirely prerequisite to installing in any concrete way a citizenship education program, there is nevertheless no hint of any rigorous response to them emanating from the Department of Education. Behind the naïve allure of their wording, these questions open themselves to reflection leading down multiple paths, wherein attempts to answer can only be partial and revisable. Despite this, they remain central, especially in the current context of the application of the objectives and principles of Quebec’s educational reforms, where the idea of citizenship and that of forming the future citizen are employed time and again in inopportune manner and as if they went without saying.
It is true that the intervention of the philosophical disciplines would be relatively pointless if the concepts used were already clear and well-understood, if ideas were pooled so as to form a coherent whole, if the terms were made sufficiently explicit through consensually derived meanings. But here as elsewhere,3 debates on citizenship education have not yet fulfilled these ideal conditions of total conceptual clarity, of coherence fully attained and of complete absence of ambiguity. This moreover would confirm the ever-expanding abundance of contributions and publications in the domain of citizenship education. Each one of these authors tries to clarify things, to make terms more precise, to give sense to these questions, to understand them as much in theoretical terms as in practice, through an approach that almost always traces its roots to philosophical reflection on the connections between educational models and conceptions of citizenship. In fact, the point of departure here very often remains a general question of substructure: “Upon which conception of citizenship should we found a model of citizenship education?”2. Conceptions of Citizenship: Variables and Plurals. From Democratic Theory to Pedagogical Practice
We should make clear that our intention is not to review in detail conceptions of citizenship such as have shaped the history of modern politics. Other authors have already done this work brilliantly and thoroughly;4 we leave the concerns of historians and sociologists to continue their pursuits. We wish rather to propose a philosophical conception of citizenship which should stand or fall in the face of both reason and an already burgeoning literature in the domain of political philosophy and the philosophy of law, particularly that which turns on the theory of deliberative democracy. This theory inspired most notably by the Habermasian model of discourse provides a framework of analysis permitting a definition of the idea of citizenship from a normative perspective, because it demonstrates, as we will see, the “equiprimordial” aspect of individual rights and of democratic solidarity: it is via the participative deliberation of citizens that we establish and legitimate the rights that bring us together within a society, but at the same time, these are always already those same rights that render possible this participation on the context of communication and expression.
In order to study critically the dominant conceptions of citizenship, our point of departure rests specifically on a general exposé of the political theory of Jürgen Habermas, who summarized as his title suggests the “Three Normative Models of Democracy.” (Habermas, 1998, p. 259-274) This account plunges us immediately into the debate which interests us: it seeks to describe two models, two ideal-types, “opposed in polemical fashion, on the matter of their conception of the citizen […]” (Ibid., p. 259) and to propose a third way, which we designate as “deliberative.” In his comparison of the two models which dominate political modernity, Habermas presents first the historical foundations and characteristics both of the “liberal” model which articulates itself around the doctrine of rights (the partisans of liberty) and of the model which proceeds from the “republican” concept (the partisans of virtue). It then demonstrates how the deliberative conception of democracy can rectify where these two models appear to have gone wrong from the point of view of a critical eye. In effect one could place the different conceptions of citizenship within two great philosophical conceptions, both more encompassing than those modernity offers; and to effect this, beyond reference to Habermas, we can rely in particular on an essay by Daniel Weinstock orientated along these lines and bringing us also back to the diverse meanings of citizenship based on two prototypical conceptions of a more general type. In one of his texts, Weinstock states that the liberal concept, represented paradigmatically by a panoply of influential authors stretching back over the years and continuing up to the present day (John Locke, Adam Smith, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Charles Larmore, etc.), is that which, of the two dominant conceptions, “dominates modern Western political philosophy.” (Weinstock, 2000, p.18) This concept “emphasizes the juridical dimension of citizenship. The citizen is above all bearer of certain rights […] the principle function of which is to protect him against infringement upon his private sphere of autonomy […]. Thus, this conception […] conceives the activity of the citizen as centring […] on the private sphere.” (Ibid.) The second philosophical conception which characterizes more globally political modernity is that which one currently denotes the republican concept, of which contemporary authors like David Miller (2000), Benjamin Barber (1992), William Galston (1991) or Stephen Macedo (1990) are presently major promoters; this sits in the Rousseauist tradition of the search for a virtue that properly befits citizenship. This conception is described by Weinstock as an inversion of the liberal concept’s priorities: the republican concept more oriented towards the public sphere “puts […] the emphasis on the direct participation of the citizen […] in the pursuit of the common good” (Weinstock, 2000, p.19) and on a strong sense of belonging to the political community.
It is in this rather dualist context that certain authors, Habermas at the head of the list, judge it henceforth necessary to propose a third and new way that, for lack of a better term, we ourselves call, the “deliberative conception of citizenship”5 and which might constitute an interesting theoretical alternative to the classical opposition of liberal and republican values. This alternative to the current dualism would, in the deliberative conception, be leant support by the thesis of the co-originary character of private autonomy (founded on individual rights and subjective liberties) and public autonomy (resting on the solidarity and democratic participation of citizens).6 This is why the deliberative conception would accommodate as much the liberal as the republican version, from whence it would principally draw its strength and its superiority. It is from within this perspective that we advance the hypothesis that the deliberative conception of citizenship, constructed from out of a framework of analysis supplied by a discursive theory of law and of democracy, exemplifies better than the other conceptions though without rejecting them the ideal of an authentically democratic community of citizens.
At the heart of Habermasian theory of deliberative democracy, we find the general idea of a society for which business should be conducted via the application of the principles of democratic deliberation of all its members. The “principle of discussion” to the effect that norms which unify citizens be the result of a process of public discussion and the “principle of procedure” that the justification of norms be the result of a certain formal procedure of argumentation (respect of the other and of the fixed demands of a common agreement, responsibility for asserting the opinions one holds, etc.) correspond to two basic requirements within the model of deliberative democracy. These “discursive” and “procedural” dimensions involve, via their combination, a “principle of self-legislation,” where all citizens conceive themselves, by means of “procedure” and “discussion,” as the “authors” of the rights and norms that they must observe as “addressees,” in order to regulate and stabilize their shared life. More simply, the system of rights which protects individual liberties (or the private autonomous sphere) is felt to be legitimate as long as it is the result of the deliberative practice of all citizens (or of the exercise of public autonomy).
In this perspective, the primary interest of the theory of deliberative democracy would come principally from the fact that it ensues in a sense from an “educated mix” of liberal and republican visions, by conjoining certain apparently contradictory ideas drawn from each. In effect, we are relying here, as already mentioned, on the Habermasian thesis of the co-originary character of private and public autonomy, to demonstrate that the superiority of a deliberative conception of rights resides in the fact of its being at once entirely compatible with the achievements of liberal pluralistic democracies, recognizing the primacy of private freedoms of the rights-bearing subject and with the republican idea of participationist democracy calling for a more direct form of citizen involvement in public life. In the deliberative conception of citizenship linked to the theory of deliberative democracy, this compatibility is expressed in a manner foreign to the liberalism predominant in political modernity as well as to the philosophical tradition which revolves around a republican conception of the community of citizens. If this turns out to be defensible in real terms, the idea of deliberative democracy would involve a conception of citizenship that is itself quite singular, characterized by full compatibility with the two forms of autonomy (private and public),7 yet impossible to attribute either to the liberal or to the republican conception alone. According to the framework here proposed, the mode of social integration of citizens would work, following Habermas, through a communicative educational context, of which the effects make themselves felt even on into the domain of political socialization. (Habermas, 1998, p.155) In fact, this educational context is concerned with equipping (future) citizens: “at the level of information of which they make use, their capacity to reflect and take account of consequences of decisions which have a political impact, their willingness to formulate their interests taking into account […] those of their co-citizens […]; in a word, [it] is concerned with their ‘communicative competence’ […].” (Preuss, 1990, p. 125; cited and translated in Habermas, 1997, p. 445) This is why we speak of a “deliberative model” aiming to constitute a new intermediary position between the liberal and republican models, or again, between “the opposite pulls of ‘cold’ negative freedom and ‘warm’ intimate community,” to take up terms used by Ralf Dahlendorf. (cited in Campbell, 1996, p. 227; Zieba, 1994, p. 24-25)
Although perhaps appearing tangibly inadequate in terms of its defensibility and depth, this preparatory conceptual analysis remains all the same necessary so as to explain how our position aims to distinguish itself from the educational policies predominating in Quebec. Since our approach aims to take into account explicitly a normative conception of citizenship on which to found a model of civic education, this constitutes a considerable departure from the educational program put forward by government which does not identify clearly any particular conception of citizenship either capable of being or forcing itself to be prioritized within Quebec society. As a consequence, politicians, public functionaries and those working in collaboration with the Education Department tend to employ the idea of a program of civic education which prescribes and will prescribe the integration of a form of instruction which conceals more or less arbitrarily a form of noncommittal and undifferentiated interlacing of conceptions of citizenship. In effect, these tend to adopt according to circumstances and assimilate without distinction a typically individualist liberal vision of protected private autonomy via subjective rights (partisans of liberty) as well as a vision centred on strong adherence to self-styled values predominating within a national territory and on the valorization of certain collective duties of participation (partisans of virtue), without however demonstrating how it is possible to reconcile these tendencies within pedagogical practice, even when more often than not they oppose each other at the level of philosophical theory.
The distinctive mark of our approach reveals itself, by contrast, in the fact of its opting for a particular conception of citizenship which could serve as basis for constituting a model of citizenship education; regarding this, we will permit ourselves once more to delineate the essential elements of this conception simply by recalling the convergent positions of several authors who have defended a discursive-procedural theory of law and of democracy.8 Whether it be Amy Gutmann, Bernard Manin, Joshua Cohen, Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib or James Bohman, to name only six authors, for they are not alone in their position, all have at least one point in common, and that despite the variety and the originality of their fundamental and respective theses (which can obviously not be given account of within the confines of this article): decisions concerning the political community of citizens can claim legitimacy (and legality) when they are produced out of democratic deliberation by all members. In short, these authors affirm the idea that legitimate and acceptable norms uniting citizens in a democratic rights state must be the result of public discussion.
Let us, at the same time, underscore that the idea of democratic citizenship defended here can also gather credence from earlier works within this theoretical deliberative democracy movement. Dennis F. Thompson, well before the appearance of Democracy and Disagreement9 in 1996, argued in favour of a deliberative theory of democratic citizenship based on procedures of public discussion. Since 1970, Thompson had been issuing a caution which for us represents the nucleus of the problem of democratic citizenship and opens the way to the normative model defended by deliberative democracy theoreticians: “citizenship” does not come down simply to possessing certain rights, to the fact of living legally in a given national territory (liberal model), or simply to developing a patriotic loyalty to and strong sense of identification with one’s nation-state (republican model); it refers also and especially to the present and future capacity to influence political life and to be actively involved therein (deliberative model). (Thompson, 1970) And we infer from this that argumentative discussion as much as dialogue is central, for this latter model, since the satisfaction of the conditions of deliberative democratic participation rests, in large part, on reflexive practices of the language community, that is, on the free exchange of reasons and arguments. (Ibid.)
Admittedly, it is true that our penchant for a particular conception of citizenship could lead to a significant problem stemming from the theoretically and philosophically “non-neutral” perspective that we appear to advocate. Using the interrogative form, we could express the same idea accordingly: Is it possible to have a “predilection” for such and such a conception of citizenship without falling from an educational point of view into a form of “civic indoctrination” of the young? It is, perhaps, to skirt this question and its attendant dangers that some educational researchers preach rather an attitude of “neutrality” in regard to citizenship. One cannot here avoid mentioning the position of Michel Pagé, aligned exactly in this direction. In effect, this thinker sees citizenship education first as an occasion to present “a diverse menu of ways to live citizenship which can be proposed to young people, permitting a greater number to find a suitable one for themselves. In making their choice, they get to know other ways which, one day, may suit them better over the course of the development of their individual political and social consciousness.” (Pagé, 2001, p. 53) Following from this, “[a] citizenship education project cannot […] affirm the primacy of a given conception […].” (Ibid., p. 50) Yet, on the other hand, this position raises a question which is itself very problematic: On what normative basis will we thus be able to evaluate Quebec’s new educational policy for citizenship education? On this point, the neutrality of Pagé leaves an explanatory void and rejects all attempts to furnish, through rational exercise, what might be considered a critical and normative benchmark that is, an idealized framework for thought in light of which it becomes possible to judge and evaluate work and discussion now in progress regarding citizenship education and citizenship. Needless to say, we understand very well the reasons which spur certain authors to show themselves neutral, asserting the impossibility of opting for any particular conception. In fact, if we take a clear position in favour of one or other of the different conceptions, we expose ourselves to the question of how to reconcile citizenship education with the necessary neutrality of the school.10
Probably to avoid getting bogged down in one of the deepest controversies regarding this much argued-over question, a thinker of liberal allegiances like Brian Barry will go to the point of alleging that there is in the end no need to institute any robust method of citizenship education from a national point of view (Barry, 2001, pp. 194-249), since the capacity to become a responsible citizen in a liberal democracy will develop out of itself through the possession of that able dose of general culture which a “systematic instruction” must produce intergenerationally: “if we want citizens to be able to participate effectively in politics, what they need are skills that a good education will automatically provide: the ability to acquire and manipulate information and the ability to present an argument lucidly, both on paper and orally” (Ibid., p.228). Beyond this, in taking up here an argument from Harry Brighthouse, Barry rejects the relevance even of a “political education,” invoking the principle that a “[l]iberal democracy, unlike other forms of government, depends for its legitimacy on consent. But the quality of that consent is compromised if it is simply manufactured by the state through the school system.” (Ibid., p.231)
But Barry seems in turn to forget that this fear of heteronomy and of indoctrination within education is completely unjustified within a deliberative model of citizenship education, since it permits and recommends precisely discussion, evaluation and even revision of different conceptions of citizenship in play in a society. We can thereby even overcome the initial problem of neutrality, as favouring and choosing a deliberative conception as a normative model does not mean denying the diversity of conceptions of citizenship which coexist legitimately, on condition, of course, of consent to “the fundamental norm of equality integral to all citizens in a democratic society.” (Pagé, 2001, p.50) In fact, it is in defence of such a model that Gutmann “recognizes explicitly that certain conflicts concerning social justice cannot now (or perhaps can never) be resolved by a universally justifiable collection of substantive criteria. These conflicts are much better approached and resolved […] through concrete deliberation, through exchange of arguments respecting reasonable differences” (Gutmann, 2002, p. 54) Gutmann’s approach overlaps with a deliberative type of model of civic education inasmuch as the promotion of democratic participation converges with the perspective which states that future citizens be capable of understanding and evaluating multiple conceptions of the good life which enter into competition in the society. (Ouellet, 2000, p. 206) And it would here be difficult if we really wanted to give all our energy to a deliberation supported from generation to generation to neglect the properly “civic” dimension of education (Macedo, 2000, p. 275-279), or again, the necessity for a citizenship education based on a deliberative conception upholding the legitimacy of efforts intended to inculcate shared political virtues and aptitudes, while leaving to specific communities a large share of the questions relative to values and orientation.
Although an explicit analysis of arguments made in the context of a democracy is not as such here presented, all the same we have been able to note the importance that the Board of Governors for Education accord to the learning of deliberation,11 via the practice of peer discussion. The rationality for the development of the capacity to argue and deliberate democratically appears also to be of a “procedural” nature: this is not, moreover, by chance, if the Board insists rightly on the notions of “democratic deliberation” and of “regulated speech” within the educational process aiming to develop “[t]he capacity to debate one’s ideas and those of others” (Conseil supérieur de l’éducation, 1998, p. 23), through the participation of each student in discussion exercises on that which should reciprocally be demanded, permitted, or defended, within an educational establishment.
As a consequence, and inspired by the Board’s vision, we suggest that the well-established practices of the “democratic school,” of “school-based democracy” or of “democracy in the act of learning” (Meirieu, 1995, 1991, 1984; Develay, 1996) developed by a long line of educators, would be the ideal context in which to train students into citizenship. Among the principal representatives of this dialogical educative approach, the experiments in “self-government” by students as promoted by John Dewey and Jean Piaget,12 or those of the cooperative and institutional pedagogical approach of Célestine Freinet (1994, 1969, 1964, 1960) and of her school cannot go unmentioned; also relevant to this perspective is the method of moral dilemma, notably that which inspired the later works of Lawrence Kohlberg (1986, pp. 485-546), in the domain of educational psychology. These approaches which today find an echo in the numerous contributions to educational theory interested to install a “deliberating community of speech class” (Campbell, 1996, pp. 226f; Young, 1992, pp. 47-60) seem to us best placed to develop in students the capacity to take part in the democratic processes of deliberation and action, which would be able serve the cause of civic training, thus permitting more enriched reflection on citizenship itself. In fact, “[t]he orientation of the school towards a type of citizenship education […] and a putting into practice thereof [will be capable of] aiding […] reflection on the exercise of power and on the exercise of responsibilities within social interactions.” (Crémieux, 2001, p. 121) And regarding this maximization of complex and responsible social interactions, reference to the cooperative learning movement for example, the methods of Elizabeth Cohen could reveal itself as a path towards the concretization of “interactional” learning. To stress the point, the idea behind a “complex instruction” in cooperation promoted by Cohen is to vary the activity of learning as much as possible to the point that even the best in the class cannot possess and make use at the same time of all the “multiple skills” required, permitting the establishment of more egalitarian, democratic interactions, via the creation of mutual dependency between students in terms of completion of an activity the complexity of which extends beyond the specialized competence a single person can call on in a given situation. In a word, we all of a sudden ask a student to depend on others. (Cohen, 1994, p. 40)
It is then in this direction that we must point efforts to tackle on a deeper level the problem of citizenship education: it is a question of defending the idea that a deliberative conception of citizenship derives from that which entails and is demanded by education, in particular the demand for “school-based democracy”; conversely, the exercise of “school democracy” should serve to support a conception of citizenship and can help us to understand the conditions and aptitudes necessary to its practice. Consequently, we believe that is not necessary to settle even though it be of great importance for a “normative” and “deductive” discourse (which moves from a theory of citizenship to pedagogical prescriptions 13), but that, on the contrary, required also, as part of subsequent work on democratic citizenship education, would be adoption of an “inductive” approach which departs from already existing practices of school democracy in order to construct or redefine, when necessary, the contours of citizenship by democracy,14 meaning that we could not avoid being confronted with a self-referential, if still generative, circle: in fact, to close this section with the words of Charles Hadji, “to be able to educate democratically in terms of [citizenship], would it not be necessary to already live in a democracy, implying the existence of citizens already democratically educated into [citizenship]? True democracy could only be organized by a truly democratic regime… the existence of which is suspended during an education into democracy!” (Hadji, 1996, pp. 7, 8)
It must be said that these observations allow us to draw attention to two other correlates. First, the inductive method has acquaintances with historical thinking when it studies the many ways in which social problems are (or not) posed and resolved, and assesses the proposed solutions in relation to the evidential basis upon which they rest (Ethier, 2004). Second, the true democracy might mean a reciprocal society where human and natural resources are allot and production is set up by all humankind through deliberation with the intention of actualizing each one potential while having in mind durable development and equity. This, of course, counter-opposes to the class content philosophy of “equal possibility of obtaining inequality” that permeates capitalism and flows from its economic foundations, social relationships, and regulative norms.3. The Development of Aptitudes for Deliberative Citizenship: The Teacher Challenged within His Training
As for, more specifically, the situation in Quebec, as is known, we are presently (and will continue to be) moving from the exercise of citizenship to a specific kind of apprentice (especially in the secondary system where it will no longer only be a question of developing a so-called “transverse” competence as is the case at the primary/elementary level, but also competence of a more “disciplinary” nature) which must be integrated, to a great extent, into the teaching of history. (Groupe de travail sur la réforme du curriculum, 1997, p. 62) This is why, in the language of the reformers, we now speak of offering students a new type of formal instruction bearing on citizenship education. Obviously, this teaching includes (and will, by its very nature, always include) a mandate for intergenerational transmission of properly institutional, structural, cultural, historic and national knowledge serving as basis for state organization of law and of democracy and of their durability in and relevance to contemporary Quebec: as the Working Group on Curriculum Reform recommended in 1997, in its program, the study of institutions and their functioning (birth and development of types of democracy, functioning of political, judiciary and administrative powers), the rights of the person (instruments related to human rights, their mechanisms of protection), of the mutability of social relations (modes of living, collective values) and of issues of intercultural and international understanding (local, regional, national and even supra-national aspects). (Ibid.)
But in this context, we notice at the same time a rather strange situation which will do nothing to aid effective installation of a citizenship education program. Knowing even that it will be seen as bearer of the symbols of the State as state and as a primary force responsible for the transmission of that knowledge linked to the concepts and principles of citizenship more or less clear and precise from a theoretical and conceptual point of view capable of being differentiated into meanings that are multiple, changing and dependent on those interpreting them, the student undergoing initial teacher training in Quebec’s universities presently receives too little (or sometimes receives precisely no) specific training in this domain of citizenship studies (primarily composed of different streams of political theory, their conceptions of citizenship and their educational implications).15 This requires, however, the contribution of new content (associated with issues implicit to the education of the future citizen and to the complex challenges of such an education) and of new professional practices (connected to the great responsibility that a future teacher has as communicative agent of this content).16 Faced with this requirement that the school provide “to the student the privileged tools for social integration, which allow comprehension of the most important aspects of the functioning of societies and the organization of territories” (Ministère de l’Éducation, 2000, p. 267) some will still respond by asserting that it is not always necessary to offer formal teaching about citizenship to children and that, beyond this, we could be satisfied with the idea of a “hidden curriculum,” notably in the framework of university education programs; for example this is Gutmann’s position (1999), one for which she is well-known since the appearance of her book Democratic Education. And even if Gutmann reiterates several times that the development of aptitudes for deliberative citizenship is a necessary precondition for a civic education adapted to democratic society, she defines this educational task as being at times “unintentional” (operating in a sense by indirect methods), to the degree that the skill for deliberation can be inculcated without entirely self-aware or deliberate intervention: this insistence on deliberative citizenship, she writes, is not to imply that “cultivating deliberative citizenship should be the focus of all educational institutions or all educators. Parents, the primary educators of children, need not focus on educating their children for citizenship. Universities need not primarily aim at educating democratic citizens. Deliberative citizens may be the unintended by-product of educational efforts that aim at something else. A good liberal arts education, for example, is likely to cultivate many deliberative skills and virtues out of a commitment to critical inquiry.” (Ibid., p. xiii-xiv)
Nevertheless, a positive assessment of such a hidden curriculum as so described, while interesting, should not distract us or lead us to deny the fact that one finds also indicators that give us the inkling that an important relationship exists between the university curriculum and degree of citizen participation (a type of engagement that one can certainly hope to find among teachers who, for the most part, carry on their shoulders the responsibility for citizenship education); this, at least, was demonstrated to be the case by an American investigation conducted over the course of the 1990’s of several thousand undergraduate students most of whom were aged between 22 and 25. (Nie et Hillygus, 2001, p. 30-57) As a common sense hypothesis might suggest, students taking social science and humanities subjects were more involved in the political sphere and in civil society than those studying engineering, business or even education. (Ibid., p. 46-47) This difference appeared to show itself in several domains: rate of electoral participation, voluntary and community service, involvement in political parties, etc. For example, the effect of the social science curriculum on the community service dimension translates into a great improvement in individual involvement in voluntary and civil society activities, situated somewhere between the poles of family and the State (as is the case for the social causes promoted by charitable organizations): the number of hours devoted to community service tended on average to triple and even quadruple an increase in hours reserved for civic and community voluntarism being correlated to the quantity of credits accumulated in the social science domain. (Ibid., pp. 34, 48) To this could also be added the relationship between degree of political engagement and development of verbal aptitude (that is, argumentation): parameters of discussion and persuasion (linked notably to political allegiances as well as to choice of parties and of candidates) are generally considered in the analyses of political participation as an important indicator of civic and political engagement. (Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes, 1960; cited in Nie et Hillygus, 2001, p. 35) “Although political discussion does not fit the classic definition of political participation an attempt to influence government policy or the selection of government leaders who make that policy it is nonetheless an important characteristic of democratic citizenship”; the desire to discuss and to persuade regarding political issues reveals “both an individual’s level of political interest and his or her degree of political engagement,” if this desire “represents the attempt not only to defend one’s interests and preferences but also to get someone else to share and pursue those same interests.” (Ibid.) It is in this sense that Murray Edelman, who has never ceased to insist on the importance of language in politics, affirms that “language is an integral facet of the political scene: not simply an instrument for describing events, but itself a part of events, shaping their meaning and helping to shape the political roles officials and the general public play.” (Edelman, 1977, p. 4; cited in Nie et Hillygus, 2001, p. 42)
Certain recent empirical studies concluding thus that “verbal aptitude and a social science curriculum each seem to have an independent direct influence on political engagement and behaviour” (Ibid., p. 48) clearly concur with a strong assessment of the dimensions of social understanding and especially of dialogical competence within the framework of training teachers to teach citizenship education, an emphatic and especial component of our own conclusions.Conclusion
While liberal thought centres principally on education in subjective rights (and in their juridical mechanisms of protection) and the republican tradition supports rather the notion of a “virtuous” education guided by the value of active devotion to the public interest, we have suggested the idea that a deliberative conception of citizenship might be extended to pedagogy via a model of civic training characterized by a dialogic approach. To simplify for purposes of the limited constraints of this text, let us say that a model of citizenship education oriented toward this dialogical approach refers generally to the idea that the exercise of a form of direct and participative democracy in the school stimulating a free exchange of ideas and of points of view through procedures of argumentative discourse constitutes the ideal framework for training in citizenship in the context of a democracy founded on public deliberation. In other words, to promote a deliberative model of civic training is to recognize that, even within classroom settings, mutual understanding between participants comes at the price of argument, the future limits of which are a fully-constituted political community itself based on discussion. (Porcher et Abdallah-Pretceille, 1998, p. 113)
We find that there are certain procedural and conversational conditions which are constitutive of a deliberative conception of citizenship, from which we can derive the prescriptive preconditions for a model of citizenship education. These preconditions can be translated into requirements for a pedagogical program. Effectively, a model of civic education the inter-subjective dimension of which takes the deliberative conception as starting point must include at the minimum arrangements both for procedure and for discussion. We thus allow here for a concise formulation of these elements which must be integrated into a civic model of education which aims to stay true to such an active approach, but we insist also on the fact that this type of pedagogy requires principles which, arising out of theoretical reflection as they do, can never really be produced in some pure state in the real world and in the ever approximate application of our ideas:Procedural Requirements
In a deliberative educational context oriented according to specific elementary procedural conditions (symmetrical and equal treatment of concerned parties, absence of arbitrary internal and external constraints, etc.), students determine their own communal and reciprocal expectations, such that only the best argument can serve as instrument of proof of validity of a claim to normativity or prescriptiveness.Discussion Requirements
These young learners, with the teacher (and with his or her help) become full-fledged participants in a discussion in which they learn little by little to deliberate together (which is to say, to discern the pertinent characteristics of conflict-based discussion and to weigh all pros and cons before making collective decisions that have the strongest possible basis), in order to produce for themselves inter-subjective acts of agreement.
By doing this, as preconditions both of possibility and effectiveness for deliberative citizenship education, the teacher will have him- or herself to be in a position to provide in very precise manner a sequence of steps for argumentation which delimit conflict-based situations up to the proposition of argued-for solutions. We conclude therefore that it reveals itself as self-evident that it is essential, and this should be obvious to all, that, within the desired framework of a deliberative form of citizenship education, the (future) teacher develops this type of competence in dialoguing before himself demanding this from his students.References
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1 “The decision to situate formally a citizenship education program within the primary/elementary and secondary school curriculum is […] one that was made in Quebec only recently. It follows directly from the Estates General on Education which took place in 1995-1996.” (Lebuis, Lamer et Maher, 2001, p. 158)
2 See particularly Point 5.3, entitled “Social Universe,” in the “Educational Program,” where one can read that “[t]he disciplines of the domain of the social universe geography, history and citizenship education provide the student privileged tools for social integration, which permit comprehension of the major aspects of how societies function and of the organization of territories.” (Ministère de l’Éducation, 2000, p. 267).
3 It is worth noting that Quebec is far from keeping up with the debate and that discussions are presently in progress in numerous countries. In the other provinces of Canada, of course, the content of citizenship education programs also comprise the object of both intellectual and societal debates, following the example of France, Belgium, the US, Japan, Great Britain, Portugal, Brazil, etc.
4 We think, for example, of that excellent work from sociologist Dominique Schnapper (2000) who retraces the principal developments of the concept of citizenship through the study of the historical transformation of nations, while also presenting the great texts of the founders of political theory of yesterday and today.
5 Though he assimilates this into the typically republican conception, the formula “deliberative conception” appears already in Michel Pagé, in a sociological study on citizenship. (Pagé, 2001, p. 45).
6 But if political and private autonomy, being co-originary, are equally fundamental, then the democratic process of the formation of a system of citizens’ rights must always be founded on a collection of citizens’ equal liberties, including as much individual freedoms as freedoms of public expression, of democratic participation and of communication.
7 Note that we find this idea also in the work of Robert Alexy to whom we owe a rigorous theory of juridical argumentation when he affirms that the principle of autonomy plays in two directions. It refers to private autonomy as well as to public autonomy. The essence of private autonomy is individual choice and realization of a personal conception of the good. Public autonomy is defined by a collective choice and realization of a political conception of the just and the good. In public autonomy, human rights and democracy are necessarily linked. (Alexy, 1996, p. 209-210). And in concert with Habermas, Alexy thinks that to render possible and protect the two forms of autonomy is the principal function of the democratic constitutional State.
8 We can easily cite work which makes use of such theory, across a literature mainly with an interdisciplinary perspective. The impact of the theory of deliberative democracy on current developments in political philosophy and the philosophy of law is apparent in recent anthologies. (Bohman et Rehg, 1997; Elster, 1998; Macedo, 1999)
9 For several commentators (Duhamel et Weinstock, 2001, p. xviii-xx), the Anglo-American version of deliberative democracy is represented in paradigmatic fashion by the theses of Gutmann and Thompson (1996), while the Continental European version undergoes its most complete development in the works of Habermas (1998, 1997).
10 But it must at the same time be admitted that this question is far from being uniquely one for citizenship education; on the contrary, it can be posed at every juncture and for every pedagogical initiative: for example, during national elections, should teachers organize debates on the political (indeed partisan) issues, the programs of the principal parties and the different competing candidates, or instead, on the contrary, adopt a perspective of detachment and neutrality, even completely avoiding broaching those questions linked to the electoral opinions and choices and avoiding pronouncing on them at all?
11 We employ here the notion of “deliberation” in the limited sense of a discursive activity which leads back to a (common) resolution of practical (in the Kantian sense) questions. A deliberation can be called “practical” when it aims toward a decision; it connects the collective and contradictory examination of diverse arguments to the discussion such that one series or other of these arguments prevails (for example, for or against a decision).
12 It is indisputable that Piaget despised passivity in education, thus recalling “the well-known notion of self-government. […] To instil senses of discipline, solidarity and responsibility, the “active” school makes every effort to place the child in a situation such that he experiences directly these mental realities and discovers, little by little, within himself constitutional law. […] By themselves elaborating the laws which will regulate discipline within the school, by themselves electing the government charged with executing those laws, and by themselves constituting the judiciary power whose function is dealing with transgressions, children acquire the possibility of learning by experience what obedience to the rule, attachment to the social group and individual responsibility are.” (Piaget, 1997, p. 42)
13 From a normative point of view, Gutmann informs us admirably regarding the fact that an ideal conception of “[d]eliberative democracy underscores the importance of publicly supported education that develops the capacity to deliberate among all children as future free and equal citizens. The most justifiable way of making mutually binding decisions in a representative democracy including decisions not to deliberate about some matters is by deliberative decision making, where the decision makers are accountable to the people who are most affected by their decisions. Deliberative decision making and accountability presuppose a citizenry whose education prepares them to deliberate, and to evaluate the results of the deliberations of their representatives. A primary aim of publicly mandated schooling is therefore to cultivate the skills and virtues of deliberation ” (Gutmann, 1999, p. xii-xiii). This position describes in a paradigmatic way what citizenship education based on deliberative democracy should be: the shaping of citizens capable of deliberating together.
14 We pay here entirely ready recognition of the place of François Galichet who, through his fertile comments, brings our attention to how pertinent can be such reflection on citizenship education which is at the same time inductive and deductive.
15 Let us mention also that several European researcher-educators have been led to make essentially the same assertion for the European circumstance. (Tschoumy et Buffet, 1995, p. 109-179).
16 This perspective to the effect that teacher training is manifestly inadequate in proportion to the teacher’s new role in regard to citizenship education is expressed succinctly within this book: Quelle formation pour l’éducation à la citoyenneté ?, edited by Ouellet (2004).
This paper is based on a presentation made by the authors at the HICE Conference in Honolulu in January, 2007 and is published in the CQ with the permission of the French language Presses de l'Université Laval which has previously published a slightly different version of the article.
Marc Andre Ethier is a professor at the University of Montréal and can re reached at [email protected]
David Lefrancois is a FQRSC postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la formation et la profession enseignante (CRIFPE), Faculty of Education, Université de Montréal. He teaches ethics and citizenship education at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and can be reached at [email protected]
The views expressed by the authors are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The College Quarterly or of Seneca College.
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Family of 16-Year-Old Boy Diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy Files Suit Against Hospital
Recently, the family of a 16-year-old boy who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at birth has filed a lawsuit against the medical professionals who assisted in his birth. According to a recent article, the boy’s family is claiming that the delivering doctor was more concerned with the status of his BMW at the service station than he was about the delivery of the young child.
Evidently, back in March of 1998, the mother of the boy was admitted to the hospital shortly after midnight for the delivery of her son. After hours of labor, the doctor claimed that he was unsure of the mother’s ability to make the final push, so he used a suction machine, attached it to her child’s head, and pulled the baby out. As a result, the parents claim, their child was born with cerebral palsy and other related brain damage.
As evidence of the doctor’s negligence, the family is pointing to
cell-phone records from the day in question, showing that the delivering
doctor was on the phone with a BMW service station checking in on the
status of his vehicle just moments before the delivery. The family claims
that the doctor’s concerns over his car interfered with his judgment that day.
The child, who is now 16 years old, has the intellectual capabilities of a two-year-old. He will require constant care throughout his life.
Cerebral Palsy and Other Birth Injury Lawsuits
Despite the years of training they receive, doctors still make mistakes. Some birth injuries are caused by factors outside a doctor’s control, but there are a large percentage of birth injuries that could have been prevented had the proper preparation, diligence, and care been taken by the delivering physician.
In these cases, the families of children born with these tragic and preventable injuries may be able to hold the delivering physician accountable for their newborn child’s injuries.
Proving Liability in Birth Injury Lawsuits
Any time a child is born with an irreversible illness, it is a tragedy. However, the preventable birth injuries are some of the most tragic. They are also the injuries most likely to result in compensation for the family of the injured child.
Success in a birth injury lawsuit may depend on the plaintiff’s ability to show that the defendant did, or failed to do, something that resulted in the injury. This is not always an easy task, even when the physician is actually at fault. For example, the plaintiff in the lawsuit discussed above was able to secure the phone records of the delivering physician to show that he was dealing with a personal issue during the birth of their son. This kind of evidence is helpful when attempting to prove negligence.
Has Your Child Been Born with a Preventable Birth Injury?
If you have recently given birth to a child with a preventable birth injury, you may be entitled to monetary compensation based on the physician’s negligent conduct. To learn more about Maryland birth injury lawsuits, and to speak to an attorney about your case, call (410) 567-0800 to set up a free initial consultation with a dedicated and experienced birth injury attorney. | {
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—About this Film
Okay let me make a couple of things clear, I am a comic book fan and have been for years. While Batman may not be at the top of my list, he is among my top three comic book heroes of all time right there with Captain America and Spiderman. I have said it before and will say it again, comic books are as much for adults as they are kids and in some ways even more so for adults. Batman is a perfect example of that and thankfully, the new movie Batman Begins does justice to the character of Batman created by Bob Kane.
The person Bruce Wayne has a life filled with tragedy, heartache, and horror. He has gone through life blaming himself for the tragedies of his childhood. He is a character that many can relate to. The truth is, that unfortunately many have experienced tragedy and end up blaming themselves for those tragedies. While on the surface the concept of fear is approached, the story of Batman is about so much more than that. It is about each individual learning to deal with the tragedies of their youth, and discovering hope within their own lives and then doing something with that fear and hope for the humanity we can serve. Fear is just an obstacle that gets in the way. It is not the underlying theme or problem though and that is the mistake many make. While fear is in each persons life, just as in the life of Batman, it has to be attacked and conquered. For Bruce Wayne, overcoming fear would be a wonderful drama but it would not be a complete story. What to do once one has overcome fear, is the challenge and struggle that each of us must face. That in essence becomes the story of Batman. There must be a purpose in addressing fear. That is the struggle that Bruce Wayne faces and is what the story of Batman is all about.
One of the associations that many have to fear is darkness, it is a technique used by filmmakers and is a technique that is similar to the recent review I did of High Tension. Not just as a lighting effect, but as a story line. Don’t expect to leave this movie feeling great. The techniques are not comedy, brightness and wonderful events. The events include tragedy, despair, difficulty, death, and destruction. Notice the usage of darkness in this movie. There is not much hope or happiness. Corruption and greed run Gotham and we need to realize that Gotham don’t just represent New York City as many have implied, Gotham represents the world we live in. We are all residents of Gotham. The earth is seen as a place that is dark, greedy, and influenced by evil people, often times the evil that they do overpowering the good that others do. Just turn on the news and you will see an example of this. Kane in his original story line addressed all of the current problems of the time. Just as the time needed a hero in the inception of Batman, it still needs one, it needs one who will help society overcome fear, and return evil with good.
Without some personal comment one will not understand my own struggle and journey with the character of Batman. Please forgive me and let me give some of my life lessons. There are many reasons I identify and love the character, and journey of Batman. I won’t go into a ton of detail other than to say that as a child I was abused in every way you can imagine and grew up in a dark desolate place. A place filled with poverty, abuse, and crime. I became a part of that world, as much out of necessity as anything. That story is well documented and has been told around the country, yet, I still had hope, I still had dreams, not many, but they were there. I have never known a father, a similarity to Bruce Wayne. Having to grow up without father places a large amount of stress and thoughts into the mind of a young boy, just as it did Bruce Wayne. At some point in my life, things looked pretty dim and bleak. Then I developed a relationship with Jesus Christ and I found my own deliverer, my own Batman if you will. All of the principles that I have spoken about thus came into play. I had to overcome my fears, my own darkness and then do something about it.
Finding a way to overcome fear, and doing something about it is something most people face. It might be changing jobs, a death in the family, abuse, maybe a whole host of things. Truth is that we often attach large-scale things like dying, robbery, and the like to fear. My experience is that the small things also contribute to that attitude. It is often the little things that have the largest impact on our lives. Fear has not boundaries and must be attacked or it is just like we are told in the Bible; “it will consume us,” just as it almost consumed Bruce Wayne. Batman Begins is a wonderful story that illustrates that journey beautifully for Bruce Wayne. He is like a savior who continually reminded those he comes into contact with, “Don’t be afraid.”
Bruce Wayne begins his journey early in life, it is only when he has had a willingness to give up his own life that he identifies and understands his purpose. He must lead a life of serving others, and helping them overcome their fears. It is not just about overcoming fear though, it is about giving hope. He decides to take on a new, hidden identity to do good. He does not need the attention and he is not in it to be self serving. He understands that the bigger picture is about more than just him. He takes on a false identity. While we assume that the false identity is Batman, the truth is that the false identity is really Bruce Wayne. Batman, once his fears has been overcome, and he has discovered his purpose is really who he is. The old Bruce Wayne is but a reflection of his old character. The old Bruce Wayne has been put away, and he has become a new creature, the new creature of Batman. It is a concept that the old television series never seemed to get and understand. This movie gets it though. The character of Batman is about battling evil, and fortunately, he is a character that understands the difference between justice and revenge, otherwise he would be no better than the evil he is battling.
Fortunately, for Batman, there are those along the way to help. He has understood the importance of having support. Just as we must as we face the things we fear and then overpower them with hope. These individuals play critical roles in helping Batman along the way and will do so for us. They are examples of those that will need to help find purpose in life.
Enough on the sermonization of this movie let me say a few other things about it. Technically, this is a wonderful movie. I went in hoping that it would be as good as the first Batman with Michael Keaton, it was! The supporting cast, all of the way around, is better. There are many that are not “Big Name Stars” in title roles, with the exception of Michael Caine who plays an absolutely brilliant Alfred, Liam Nelson who plays a deliciously evil Henri Ducard, and Morgan Freeman who plays the tart character of Lucius Fox. There are others like Gary Oldman who plays Lt. Gordan but as a whole, the primary characters are not “big name actors.” That will soon change though because the supporting cast is brilliant. Regarding the cast, I must say that Christian Bale is Batman/Bruce Wayne!. He does a brilliant job in this role and I would have never dreamed that he would do as well as he has. There is also the villain of The Scarecrow/Dr. Jonathan Crane that is played wonderfully by Cillian Murphy. He is as wonderful in his role as Bale is at his.
In brief, how is this Batman? Well it has the best car, the best story, the best Alfred, the best villains, the best story, the best effects, and the best Batman. It is also the darkest, longest, most character development of any Batman. That being said, I’d say pretty darned good. I never got bored in the 2 ½ hours I was at the theater. It is well worth watching and well worth contemplating. Then after doing that, applying the lessons to your own individual life.
On a scale of 1-10 for the fact that I still think the two Spiderman Movies are better in their totality, I’ll give this one a well deserving and enjoyable 9.
—About this Film | {
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Hours after a jury delivered Tulsa Police Officer Betty Shelby a not-guilty verdict on a manslaughter charge, Rep. Monroe Nichols stood outside a Tulsa Regional Chamber luncheon at the Oklahoma State Capitol and pondered his identities: black man, father, lawmaker.
“When something like this happens, you feel incredibly powerless. You feel incredibly frustrated. You feel angry,” said Nichols (D-Tulsa). “It makes it hard to formulate words to tell people. We all want people to be peaceful and all that, but it’s hard to formulate words on all of this.”
Shelby was acquitted Wednesday night in the shooting death of Terence Crutcher, a black man from north Tulsa who was unarmed, intoxicated and unresponsive to Shelby’s commands as he walked around his vehicle, which was stopped in the middle of a street in September 2016.
“Because this issue becomes political, far too often we forget that there was a man who is not here anymore, and the crime that he committed was that his car stopped,” Nichols said Thursday. “This should come as a realization to the law enforcement community at the very least that there has to be substantial changes to the way officers are trained.”
Nichols argued that, had Shelby acted as a regular citizen and not a trained police officer, she would almost certainly have been convicted.
“I know Officer Betty Shelby continued to say, ‘My training, my training, my training.’ Well, if this is where training leads us, we really need to be looking hard at what we need to do differently as it relates to training,” Nichols said.
‘Make sure a regular traffic stop is not a death sentence’
Others at the Tulsa Chamber’s luncheon felt similarly.
“I think Rep. Nichols is 100 percent on target. I think there needs to be additional training,” said Rep. Eric Proctor (D-Tulsa). “It’s clear there is an issue in our community and across the country that this continues to happen. We need to support our police officers, but we also need to make sure a regular traffic stop is not a death sentence. I think additional training would be a positive thing.”
An hour earlier, Proctor had led the House chamber in prayer for his hometown. He called for wisdom, discernment and the “protection of all our citizens, including law enforcement.”
That request was echoed by Tulsa Fraternal Order of Police chairman Jerad Lindsey, who joined Proctor, Nichols and dozens of others in the governor’s blue conference room for the luncheon.
“Of course, we’re pleased that our member was cleared and received an acquittal, however this deal is not about wins and losses,” Lindsey said. “There are no winners in this. The Crutcher family has lost a family member that they cannot replace.”
Lindsey said he “absolutely” agrees with Nichols that police training can and should improve, though he specified he was only hearing the representative’s remarks secondhand.
“We agree with most of that. We also believe training has got to adapt. It’s got to adapt and move with society,” Lindsey said. “Another thing we need to look at is how citizens are trained to interact with the police. The police have to adapt to the citizenry, (…) but I’m an Oklahoman. When I went through school, I went through driver’s ed, and driver’s ed was provided by the school district. It’s no longer done like that because of budget cuts.”
Lindsey said young people today receive less education on law enforcement and the legal system than they used to.
“So we’ve got a generation now that didn’t go through state-sponsored driver’s ed. In mine, I believe it was part of the curriculum, we had a state trooper that came in and talked about car stops,” Lindsey said. “Those used to be things that were taught by the state of Oklahoma to their citizens. We don’t have that anymore. I come across a lot of young folks who are 16 or 17 years old who don’t know how to act on a car stop. They don’t know what to do.”
But in the case of Terence Crutcher, only one side of the interaction was armed: the police.
“What is clear is that the training they receive is woefully inadequate when we have example after example after example of individuals who are killed only to find out they had no weapon on them and they weren’t a real threat,” Nichols said. “And, because of training, nobody is held accountable for that.”
With a 9-year-old son and an uncle who serves as a police officer in Dallas, Nichols said he in no way believes police officers are “inherently bad.” His father was also a police officer in Houston.
But Nichols said Shelby’s apparent training resulted in a family losing a loved one.
“Until we address that issue, my concern is not necessarily with protests and things like that. My greater concern is with people who look like me who are going to get pulled over by police but decide they are going to keep going because they are fearful,” Nichols said. “My concern is with people who look like me who aren’t going to call the police anymore because they are too afraid of what will happen when the police show up.”
‘This is not a big enough issue for the people in this building’
To look at all of these issues, Nichols had filed HB 1353 at the start of the 2017 legislative session. The bill would have created the Oklahoma Community Policing Standards Task Force to examine policies, standards, best practices and training on the use of deadly force.
“The governor said she didn’t want any more task forces. It wasn’t heard in committee. It didn’t pass,” Nichols said. “The fact is that this is not a big enough issue for people in this building right now. It should be, but it’s not. So if it’s not a big enough issue for people here, why should anybody else care? We had the opportunity to put something together and bring law enforcement and the community and legislators together and do something.”
Nichols said task forces exist for industry issues, and the state just created a new one to look at opioid abuse. But Nichols’ attempt to look at police training as it regards the use of deadly force appeared to be a non-starter with state leaders.
“That’s just as sad as what happened in Tulsa several months ago and what happened last night,” Nichols said. “It puts members of the law enforcement community in a bad spot also.” | {
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Surviving Our Mistakes
I'm devastated by TWO stories this week of young people dying from allergic reactions, without their emergency medicine - a Kennesaw State University student who ate in a dining hall and a Fifteen-year-old who took one bite of a sample cookie in a Walmart.
I hope more than ever, we'll soon have an easier way to carry epinephrine or a cure.
With young children, whose parents have witnessed a reaction, we rarely leave the house without our emergency "pack". But what about teens? Young adults? Adults? I'm not always going to be there ~ following my kids with their medicine. (Wouldn't that be embarrassing on the first day of college? But, don't think I haven't thought about it...)
My heart breaks for the families that lost their children this week. I'm saving their stories, tucked away in a package for my future young adults to help prepare them for life after mom. I hope their stories will save countless others. But, It shouldn't have to happen like this. | {
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Pelbagai tipu helah dan propaganda dicuba oleh Kit Siang dan DAP untuk Guan Eng tidak lepaskan jawatan.
Konon ini bukan kes rasuah tapi konspirasi. Konon dakwaan tidak masuk akal. Semua ada disentuh dalam http://theunspinners.blogspot.my/2016/07/tony-pua-kantoi-helah-guan-eng-tak-jalan.html
Tulisan Joceline Tan dalam The Star menghuraikan niat sebenar enggan serahkan pada Rashid atau Ramasamy:
Critical time for DAP leader
by joceline tan
IT was almost 7pm but the sky was still bright when a convoy of cars emerged from the underground car park of Komtar, Penang.
The only hint that this was no ordinary caravan of vehicles was the flashing lights and siren from an accompanying police car.
The moment had finally come after weeks of speculation. Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng had been arrested and was being escorted to the MACC headquarters to be charged in court the next morning.
It has been a spectacular fall from grace for the DAP leader who rose to power on an awesome wave of popular support and who is known as “Tokong” among the Penang people.
Lim has claimed trial to two charges, one of which pertains to using his position to benefit his wife Betty Chew and himself in the rezoning of a piece of land belonging to a private company known as Magnificent Emblem in 2014.
Another charge is related to his purchase of a bungalow from businesswoman Phang Li Koon a year later at below market value.
Phang, a mysterious figure until thrust into the media spotlight, was charged with abetment in the property transaction.
Gossip and speculation about the nature of the charges have been brewing among the cafe society but everything should be clearer when hearing begins towards the end of the year.
Lim is not the first political head of state to have waded into troubled waters.
Former Selangor mentri besar Dr Mohd Khir Toyo is now on parole after spending six months in jail for purchasing an under-valued “Balinese palace” from a company that had business links with the state government.
Another former Selangor mentri besar, Tan Sri Muhammad Muhammad Taib, also lost his job following the Australian Gold Coast affair that saw him charged with possessing undeclared foreign currency.
The late Datuk Seri Harun Idris was forced by Umno to resign in the 1970s after he was charged for corruption.
Lim is also not the first to resist taking a leave of absence after being charged in court.
Former Sabah chief minister Tan Sri Joseph Pairin Kitingan clung on after being charged for corruption. He was eventually found guilty but his penalty was not great enough to cost him his seat.
But Pairin’s time was old politics and this is supposed to be the era of new politics.
The DAP central executive committee has given Lim a ringing endorsement to stay on in his job on grounds that “there is no question of conflict of interest as Lim has no influence or control over the prosecution”.
It is only expected of DAP to stand by their top leader because if the top man falls, the party will become shaky.
But it also means that DAP is unable to walk the talk. The party is famous for asking others to step down over issues big and small but is unable to live up to the same principle when it involves one of their own. It will be hard for the party to judge others from now on.
It has put DAP figures like their Selangor chairman Tony Pua in an awkward situation. Shortly after the bungalow issue erupted, Pua had said there was no need for Lim to go on leave unless charges were brought against him.
He was quoted in a pro-Pakatan Harapan news portal as saying: “When charged, then (the person) should take time off.”
But legally speaking, the Chief Minister does not need to go on leave even with these kind of charges hanging over his head.
According to a Selangor judicial figure, forcing him out would be pre-judging him.
“He can still chair meetings, make decisions over land and development and sign documents. He can even go on with that tunnel thing.
“But having said that, a politician’s life is not only about legalities but also perception. He is representing a party that lectures others what to do. Can they still do that?” said the judicial figure.
Moreover, the Chief Minister’s focus, said the judicial figure, will now be divided between his case and running the state. There will be complications as the court case drags on.
Lim may not have influence or control over the prosecution but as the Chief Minister, he has control over the civil servants who may be called to testify in his case.
It will be awkward for potential witnesses who are his subordinates because not many people would be comfortable going to court to testify against their boss.
His presence would also bring uncertainty to the state and investors do not like uncertainty.
Still, it is his call and he has the full support of his party including that of party doyen Dr Chen Man Hin whose reputation is impeccable.
The charges against Lim are quite serious and it is only natural that he is doing what it takes to defend himself. Being Chief Minister will give him that much needed clout and back-up to face the complications ahead.
Besides, there is talk of new charges in the works related to the Taman Manggis land and also involving a company with links to “Miss Phang”, as she is known.
But there is also another side to the story why DAP is reluctant to have an acting Chief Minister take over from Lim.
Lim’s deputies are Deputy Chief Minister I Datuk Rashid Hasnon from PKR and Deputy Chief Minister II Dr P. Ramasamy from DAP.
Either one of them could act in Lim’s place if he goes on leave. But the sentiment in this Chinese-dominated party is that senior state executive council member Chow Kon Yeow should be the acting Chief Minister.
DAP would look terrible if Chow leap-frogs over the two deputies. It would only reinforce the perception that DAP is a Chinese chauvinist party.
However, if either Rashid or Dr Ramasamy takes over, the party’s right-wing Chinese base would be badly affected. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, DAP probably thought it would be better for Lim to remain at the top.
DAP leaders have slammed the charges as baseless and an attempt to topple a democratically elected leader. It is quite clear they intend to approach this as a political trial and to win over the court of public opinion.
A lot of Lim’s time will be spent convincing the public that he is innocent and a victim. Events like “Walk with Guan Eng” and “Session with the People” have been planned for today.
His supporters have tried to liken his dilemma to what Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim went through in 1998. It is not the best of comparisons given that Anwar was able to galvanise a whole generation of young Malays who flooded the streets in anger.
What DAP may have failed to take note of was that many Chinese intelligentsia have been wary of Lim’s leadership since the Mercedes-Benz episode. Lim had opted for a Mercedes S300L as his official car a mere three months after the state purchased a new fleet of Toyota Camry for the state leaders.
This was evident in comments by the Huazong chairman of Negri Sembilan, Lau Zhi Wen, who is as anti-Barisan Nasional as one gets and has often run down the 1MDB issue.
Lau’s comments in the wake of the court case have gone viral among the Chinese-speaking circle.
He recalled the early days when Lim flew economy class and provided hope for change and greater transparency. He said the people had longed for another Datuk Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat who was respected for his simple lifestyle.
|57% AGREE BY EXPRESSING HAPPY WITH JOCELINE TAN'S COLUMN|
But Lau said that Lim changed after winning by a bigger majority in 2013.
“Many said you grew arrogant, others still deify you. You changed cars, flew business class and bought a RM5mil bungalow for RM2.8mil,” he said.
Lau said he had high expectations of the Penang Chief Minister but would no longer speak up for him.
The Chinese vernacular press that would have once defended him to the hilt was also visibly neutral. The thing is Lim does not have as many friends in the Chinese media as when he started out as Chief Minister.
The Chinese vernacular media was instrumental in helping to propel DAP to power. They put Lim on a pedestal but now, eight years down the road, many of them have stories to tell about how they were treated by Lim and his staff and they are not pleasant stories.
The same goes for some of the lawyers watching the drama at the Penang courts on Thursday. A few years ago, they would have come out for him but on that day, their response was: “Let justice take its course.”
DAP is hopeful and confident that the court case will swing sympathy and support towards Lim and arrest the resurgence of support for Barisan.
They are painting their secretary-general as a victim of selective prosecution. Lim has also been trying to tug at the heartstrings with famous sayings that he would prefer to die standing than live on bended knees, and playing up his overnight detention at the MACC headquarters.
The court case proper has yet to start but the court of public opinion is already in session.
Pendik kata. sebabnya rasis!
Mana ada untuk semua kaum dalam DAP dan gagasan Malaysian Malaysia hanya tipu daya yang menutup agenda semua cina untuk cina dan DAP parti keluarga Karpal SIngh dan Lim Guan Eng. Baiyi kerjasama kudakan Cina! | {
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With Tom Russo, Managing Partner at Gardner Russo & Gardner
As part of our new “Great Investor Series,” this is the first “What’s in Their Wallet” segment which can also be found here.
Tom Russo, Managing Partner at Gardner Russo & Gardner, a hedge fund managing about $12 billion, is a recognized thought leader in the field of investments and devotes time lecturing and educating students.
Before we see what makes Tom a Great Investor, it’s interesting to hear how it all began for him, how he segued from a career in law to the world of finance as a money manager when circumstance put one of the greatest investors of all time in his path.
An Early Lesson in Investing from Warren Buffett
As Tom tells it, he was a student in 1982 at Stanford’s Law and Business Graduate Program when his value investment professor brought in one of his colleagues to speak to the class—that colleague turned out to be Warren Buffett. Where most investment conversation at the time had to do with modern portfolio theory, Tom recalls that Mr. Buffett spoke about investing in businesses as though you owned them yourself with such “clarity of thought it that parted the way for me.”
At that defining moment of Tom Russo’s career, Buffett laid out a specific 3-prong analysis of what a business must possess to have a competitive advantage:
- The non-taxation of unrealized gains, which requires the investor to think about businesses that have the capacity to grow, the capacity to reinvest.
- Before investing, you must know that the management whom you trust to reinvest will do so with the owner’s, rather than the management’s, interest in mind.
- Invest in businesses that you like because you’ll probably work harder at it and be more intuitive about it.
By following these guidelines through the years, Tom says sixty-plus percent of his investments have been in family-controlled companies, which to some may imply more risk, but in actuality, there is less risk. In addition, the favored companies are ones that throw off a lot of cash, are able to reinvest that cash successfully, and have global aspirations and brand recognition.
A Great Investor Knows the Difference Between Instant and Slow Roasted Coffee
To be a smart investor, Tom advises, you must have a long-term view and the capacity to suffer; you want to invest in companies willing to make strategic moves in a timely mindful manner that will pay off in the future and one that is strong enough to keep corporate raiders from breaking through the door.
It took Nestle 15 years to perfect Nespresso, the most successful premium single-portioned coffee on the market. During those developmental years of laboring over the crema, the beans, the scent, the bar pressure, the technology, and the marketing strategy, imitators rushed to the scene, pushed their products out the door, and ultimately failed. Nestle, by taking its time, did it right and launched a classy, profitable member of the Nestle Group.
Stock Options: Who Wins And Who Loses?
One of the reasons Tom says he’s invested so highly in internationally based companies is that they use stock options as a far smaller portion of compensation than they do in the US, where the practice of dangling stock options has actually become a destructive practice.
Tom explains, “With options, you suddenly introduce into the equation of reinvestment an element called time. Your options are good for three years, and if the price isn’t $72.50 three years from now, they’re worthless. You as the manager have every ability to deliver the kind of results that Wall Street demands of you to get to $72.50 in three years, but that might actually come at the cost of the future because you may cut spending. You may make the numbers and ruin the value of the company in the process.”
When Scandal Strikes a Company Like Wells Fargo, Do You Stay or Go?
It’s difficult to get the facts straight when a Federal investigation intervenes, as also happened with the automobile and cigarette industries, so Tom says, “I’m inclined to stay put in a situation like this, generally, without heroics.” “When the hot animal spirits run, it’s not the time to establish the rights and the wrongs and the liabilities because it’s a political process. Over time we’ll better know.”
The Shared Philosophy of Warren Buffett and Aaron Burr
In the Broadway show Hamilton, Aaron Burr says to the young Alexander Hamilton, “Speak less, smile more.”
Warren Buffett’s advice to the young Tom Russo was Hamiltonian in the sense that investors should “think more and trade less.”
Disclosure: The opinions expressed are those of the interviewee and not necessarily United Capital. Interviewee is not a representative of United Capital. Investing involves risk and investors should carefully consider their own investment objectives and never rely on any single chart, graph or marketing piece to make decisions. Content provided is intended for informational purposes only, is not a recommendation to buy or sell any securities, and should not be considered tax, legal, investment advice. Please contact your tax, legal, financial professional with questions about your specific needs and circumstances. The information contained herein was obtained from sources believed to be reliable, however their accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. All data are driven from publicly available information and has not been independently verified by United Capital.
Steve Pomeranz: I’m excited to kick off our new “Great Investor Series” where we will identify and talk to the world’s most talented and successful investors. We also call it the “What’s in Their Wallet” segment to find out where these great investors see today’s greatest opportunities. So join me now and allow me to introduce Tom Russo. Tom is a partner at Gardner Russo & Gardner, a hedge fund managing about $12 billion. The partnership has managed to beat the S&P 500 handily since inception. Tom is also a thought leader in the field of investments and devotes time lecturing and educating students and others. He has kindly agreed to spend some time with us today.
Hey, Tom, welcome to the show.
Tom Russo: Thank you so much.
Steve Pomeranz: I’m so glad you’re here. I know that you initially set out to become a lawyer and, then in the 80s, you changed your mind. How did you end up as a money manager?
Tom Russo: I was blessed to have had some influences that helped shape my activities. I went to the Law and Business Graduate Program at Stanford and, little did I know, when I signed up, I learned thereafter, that the value investment professor with whom I studied had been a very, very early colleague of Warren Buffett’s. So in 1982, he had Mr. Buffett come to our class, and he spoke with a clarity of thought that parted the way for me because most of the investment conversation at Stanford—and most of the business schools in the country—have to do with modern portfolio theory; and Mr. Buffett and my professor spoke about businesses, investing in businesses as if you owned them yourself. Not a question of generalizations, but very specific analysis about what businesses possess a competitive advantage.
Mr. Buffett spoke about three things to our class. One, the non-taxation of unrealized gains, which require the investor to think about businesses that have the capacity to grow, the capacity to reinvest.
The second thing he mentioned was that when you reinvest money, you probably have to make sure that the management whom you trust to reinvest to do so with the owner’s interest in mind rather than the management’s interest in mind. What he refers to there is something called agency costs. That is the proclivity of managements to try to make owner’s wealth, their wealth. You look for businesses where the reinvestments are made for the benefit of the owners. Where I’ve discovered it with practice—and certainly where Mr. Buffett has developed it through his own endeavors—is that family-controlled companies often have the ability for managements to be supported by and also reviewed by owners at the board level. Sixty-plus percent of my investments at the moment and most of the past decades have been invested in family-controlled companies, which is quite unusual, and it has given us a slightly interesting benefit that to most investors, family-controlled companies suggest more risk, not less risk.
Steve Pomeranz: Right.
Tom Russo: I think it’s more risky because of the risk of self-dealing families.
Steve Pomeranz: Exactly, and with families’ interest coming number one, shareholder’s coming second, you’re finding those businesses where the family is looking to enhance wealth for shareholders and their family alike.
I would say that your strategy is to harness the power of compounding achievable in certain businesses. You’re looking for companies that throw off a lot of cash, but that alone is not what the driver is. It’s getting that cash successfully reinvested. It doesn’t sound to be that hard, but I think it is quite hard. Tell us about that.
Tom Russo: It’s terrifically difficult and basically some companies are landlocked, for instance. Some companies operate well in the United States. Think about H & R Block, which I once owned, they did a great job consolidating the US tax prep market, but thereafter they had no organic place to redeploy their capital and off they went on a mission.
Steve Pomeranz: Tangents, mortgages, and all kinds of investment brokers.
Tom Russo: Exactly, so that really took them off the hunt, but they had no shame of their own. They just couldn’t push that beyond. Our businesses ideally have their brands impregnated around the world in the minds of global consumers; and our job as business owners is to encourage management to invest the funds in advance of the expression of that demand, even at the cost of current income, so that they get first mover advantage.
Heineken opens up the premium beer market in the US, so that Brown-Forman opens up the American bourbon market worldwide so that Nestle opens up the single-serve coffee market. We want our company managements to know that it’s in our long-term collective best interest for them to invest deeply against future opportunities, even when it burdens current income; and they should know that family control in many instances is going to be valuable in keeping them out of harm’s way when current results are harder to report because of the investment spending abroad that will set us up for a brighter and richer future.
Steve Pomeranz: My guest is Tom Russo. He is a partner at Gardner Russo and Gardner and they have handily outperformed the S&P 500 over many, many years. We talked about this capacity to reinvest, but along with that comes the capacity to suffer. What does that mean?
Tom Russo: Just as I expressed. That is a very likely burden that a business manager will face when they spend the right amount of money preparing for the future demand well in advance of its current existence. When businesses go into markets and, for example, Nestle pioneered—just to take one business—the bouillon cube business in Nigeria. This is a product that, at the start, wasn’t very affordable to most consumers. It wasn’t expensive because it was sold one cube at a time, but that still stretched the finances.
As the GDP per capita rose in Nigeria and people had more spending power, they bought more of these over time, the loss-making startup factory became a flush with profits fully-committed factory years later. Then they added a second factory, which took returns down as the business that existed after the second factory completed was spread between two less profitable factories, and they both became full and now a third came along and a fourth. It’s that reinvestment even when up front before the capacity utilizes and profitable that it sets you up for a rich future. Focus on wealth, not reported profits.
Steve Pomeranz: One of the stories that you told as I was researching our discussion today was the story of Nestle and Nespresso. I happen to be a user of the Nespresso machine. I love it. It makes cappuccino and espresso coffee and it’s very convenient, extremely well-designed and so on. You said it took them 15 years to develop that.
Tom Russo: To break even.
Steve Pomeranz: To break even.
Tom Russo: I visited them through the process and they labored over the crèma, the scent, the beans, the technology, the bar pressure, all of that. While they were doing that, other companies rushed products to market, so there was a competitor that was in the coffee business and not only did they starve their long-standing soluble roast coffee business of marketing dollars to promote the product, but the product that they were trying to promote wasn’t really very good, so they gave up what they needed which was supporting the business that they already owned for a product that wasn’t well researched. Against that backdrop, the slow, methodical approach won out with Nespresso.
The other component of Nespresso is from the very earliest stage, this is where their management’s been so decisive and thinking beyond the current box. Even when they were creating it, they were trying to create a platform that they could go to market independently from supermarket pressure because as they looked forward into the competitors that they found that supermarkets through pressure of store brands and clouded purchasing, were increasingly trying to take manufacturer revenues away. They wanted a marketing channel that they could control from the start to the finish. They had the entire margin of that channel and nobody can deprive them of the margin on their cubes as a result.
Steve Pomeranz: Very interesting.
Tom Russo: As a result of that. Holistically thought.
Steve Pomeranz: You talk about this capacity to reinvest, to have a long-term view, and the capacity to suffer, which also I think means the capacity for management to withstand a lot of the pressures that management is under. For example, if you take a look at the average company who has to report positive earnings on a very short term basis, if they don’t, then maybe corporate raiders will come in, pressure …
Tom Russo: Exactly.
Steve Pomeranz: Yeah, so how is a company like Nestle or any other company that has fit your criteria, how do they withstand those pressures?
Tom Russo: If you have the controlled shares, like Heineken owns 50.1% at the family level of the holding company shares which own 50.1% of the company shares. You have voting control in some level, and you can just send the company packing who comes by and wants to disrupt your business.
Steve Pomeranz: Buffett has the same thing with Berkshire Hathaway.
Tom Russo: Absolutely, absolutely. I’m actually a fan of structures that provide management who have the willingness to invest in the long term, that protection from the change of corporate control or not. One of the reasons why I’m 60-plus percent international in our composition portfolio holdings, as well as because over the years, the international based companies have used stock options as a far smaller portion of compensation whereas, in the United States, they’ve really become the kind of gluttony that they’ve become.
The reason it becomes so destructive isn’t just the fact that the dilution takes place without being identified when you’re giving away future shares. The future has a habit of coming to the present and suddenly you’ve got more shares outstanding and that’s a very corrosive process. If you’re giving away a tremendous number of shares, you end up diluting the investors.
The biggest problem, however, is that with options, you suddenly introduce into the equation of reinvestment an element called time. Your options are good for three years and if the price isn’t $72.50 three years from now, they’re worthless. You as the manager have every ability to deliver the kind of results that Wall Street demands of you to get to $72.50 in three years, but that might actually come at the cost of the future because you may cut spending. You may make the numbers and ruin the value of the company in the process.
Steve Pomeranz: You’re really sacrificing the future to make sure that everybody who’s got stock options is satisfied and happy and your shareholders are happy in the present, but at that date, but 15 years in the future you may have a much-weakened company. You said that you …
Tom Russo: You will find that you weakened it up by virtue of failing to expend the money for the very longest term. A great example of that would be General Mills with Chobani. Along came this upstart; General Mills looked at it from a distance; it didn’t seem so threatening. They had the colossal weight of the Yoplait business in their favor with 50% of the US market and, for a very small amount of money when Greek yogurt under Chobani first started out, they could have deflected the consumer by launching a Yoplait Greek and then capturing that phenomenon. But by waiting and not investing that money, which had no return, only losses up front, they ended up actually compromising the quality of the remainder of their time as a yogurt producer because, if the Greek section has taken up half the business and the old trademarks have a problem now crossing over to this business, now that the Greek-only franchises have owned those consumer goodwill points.
Steve Pomeranz: Tom, let me move on here a little bit in the interest of time. You have a reputation for holding onto companies for a very long time. I think most of your portfolio you’ve held on for more than 10 years.
I have a question about what happens when a company starts to exhibit characteristics that are not entirely suited to your strategy. I’m thinking in terms here of Wells Fargo. We’ve all considered Wells Fargo a wonderful company that actually enjoys a little extra premium because of the way they’ve run the business. Warren Buffett is a known investor, a lover of the company, and yet in the last few months, they’ve had a terrible scandal. A shameful scandal in my view, and it looks like it’s going to have an effect on the company for a few years to come. Nobody can really tell. How do you treat … What’s the big picture that you see when you look at a company in your portfolio that’s gone through this?
Tom Russo: The trouble with this particular situation is that it’s very hard to get the facts right and to get the orders of magnitude right when it’s an investigation in front of the House and the Senate that you’re observing. I see this over and over and over again.
When they brought the automobile industry down, when they bring the cigarette industry in, there is such a vilification that is so pressing. There are other aspects to the bank. There are other aspects to the story. There are other explanations as to how you end up with this occurring at what would seem like a greater frequency than you would have ever hoped for but, in the scheme of things, still the sort of thing that the bank will be in a full position to be able to restitute financially, and they’ll have to plead their case to restore their good will. When the hot animal spirits run, it’s not the time to establish the rights and the wrongs and the liabilities because it’s a political process. Over time we’ll better know.
Steve Pomeranz: Would you be buying … I’m not asking you personally for a buyer-seller recommendation…but in terms of your philosophy when the animal spirits are running and this way they’re running hot, they’re running negative. Is the time when you would many times come in?
Tom Russo: You’re supposed to be more of a buyer at a moment like that than the seller I can assure you if you believe in what you thought was there. At the moment, the only thing I have from the opposing camp is a very, very political moment that … I’m inclined to stay put in a situation like this generally without heroics.
The movement in the share price has been 7 or 8 percent relative to the release of the news, so it hasn’t been catastrophically adjusted. I generally have learned through Berkshire and one of the great lessons I learned from Warren at the very start watching him and then hearing his advice, is it’s been Hamiltonian where in the play of Hamilton, they say … Aaron Burr says to young Hamilton, “Speak less and smile more.” I think investors should think more and trade less.
My goal is really to stretch out that investment horizon and try to see what things might look like 5 to 10 years out. In that case, with Wells, you’ve got this magnificent internet bank percolating along. They’ve introduced some P to P capacities that will go after Venmo. There are a lot of interesting things happening. Right now the tension is pretty clouded. I hope that they’ll have the talent to address this crisis and its proper handling because it has to be completely addressed because it is at the heart of their good will.
Steve Pomeranz: Tom Russo, Managing Partner at Gardner Russo & Gardner. A little insight as to what makes a successful investment strategy with someone who is very well-reasoned and well-spoken. Thank you very much for joining me, Tom.
Tom Russo: Thank you. Pleasure. Bye. | {
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The chief spokesman for the Islamic State has called on the group’s supporters throughout the world to act on their own initiative to attack Western civilian and military targets in retaliation for the U.S.-led coalition’s aerial attacks in Iraq.
In his rambling diatribe, Adnani referred to the anti-Islamic State coalition as “crusaders,” called President Barack Obama “the mule of the Jews” and labeled Secretary of State John Kerry an “uncircumcised old geezer.”
“If you can kill a disbelieving American or European – especially the spiteful and filthy French – or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way, however it may be,” Adnani said, according to an English translation posted online by al Furqan Media, the communications arm of the Islamic State.
“Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone’s verdict,” he said. “Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for they have the same ruling.”
The White House said it would have no comment on the audiotape. There was no immediate indication that Adnani’s call for individuals to act on their own had prompted U.S. agencies to increase their terrorist warnings.
U.S. officials have said for years that the threat of terrorism has evolved in much of the world from carefully planned actions by groups to individual actions carried out by sympathizers not formally associated with any organization. The most recent example of the threat was the May 24 shooting at the Jewish Museum of Belgium, in Brussels, which left four people dead. The suspect is a French citizen who’s thought to have fought with the Islamic State in Syria.
Hundreds of Europeans and scores of Americans are thought to have traveled to Syria to fight with the Islamic State.
Last week, the director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, Matthew Olsen, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that a lone Islamic State supporter could stage an attack in the U.S.
“In the United States, the FBI has arrested more than half a dozen individuals seeking to travel from the U.S. to Syria to join the fighting there,” he said. “We remain mindful of the possibility that an ISIL sympathizer could conduct a limited, self-directed attack here at home with no warning.” ISIL is the government’s preferred abbreviation for the Islamic State.
On Monday, German authorities confirmed that they’d arrested a Turkish immigrant who’d recently returned from Syria and had charged him with fighting on behalf of the Islamic State. German authorities think that as many as 130 German residents have returned to the country after fighting in Syria.
Adnani predicted that the U.S.-led coalition would fail to defeat the Islamic State.
“O crusaders, you have realized the threat of the Islamic State, but you have not become aware of the cure, and you will not discover the cure because there is no cure,” he said. “If you fight it, it becomes stronger and tougher. If you leave it alone, it grows and expands.”
That warning, however, was at odds with later portions of the speech, when he claimed that the group hadn’t attacked the United States and was merely the victim of the West’s “transgression against us, and thus you deserve blame and you will pay a great price.”
This price, he said, will be paid “on your streets, turning right and left, fearing the Muslims. You will not feel secure even in your bedrooms. You will pay the price when this crusade of yours collapses, and thereafter we will strike you in your homeland, and you will never be able to harm anyone afterwards.”
Experts on the Islamic State said they found the tirade odd and not in keeping with previous Islamic State messages, which have been unusually well targeted.
“Adnani’s strategic advice is pretty odd, especially since he argues that America can’t stop the Islamic State no matter what it does,” said Will McCants, the director of the Brookings Institution’s Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, and a Johns Hopkins adjunct professor. “Attack or stay at home, it makes no difference. Why not argue that the U.S. shouldn’t be wasting its time on a group that had not sent a single operative against it? That talking point would resonate in the media here, particularly on the left.”
The current and former leaders of al Qaida, Ayman al Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, were “far more skilled at playing to Western fears about entanglements overseas,” McCants said. “Adnani is unfocused and thus ineffective.”
The contrast is especially stark given the v ideo released last week of British hostage John Cantlie, who, mouthing words that his Islamic State captors most likely forced him to say, promises a series of videos that will show how the reality of the group has been distorted by the media and how the U.S. and British governments bear responsibility for recent hostage executions because they refused to negotiate with the Islamic State.
Cantlie’s presentation was remarkably professional given the circumstances, and his presence behind a desk and conversational style were more reminiscent of a TV talk show than a video by a hostage whose life was on the line.
Adnani’s speech seemed unsophisticated and unhinged by comparison. He denied that the Islamic State had ever harmed Christians and other minority groups in Iraq or Syria, even as he vowed to shatter the crosses of Christianity. He blamed an orchestrated media campaign for trying to sully the Islamic State’s image, even as he took credit for the mass slaughter of captured enemy soldiers and other nonbelievers.
He referred to Iraq’s army as “rafidi-safavids,” a term that refers to Iranian dynasties, and “nusayri forces,” a derogatory term for Shiite Muslims, and said they served as “guard dogs of the Jews.” He called the Islamic State’s troops “muwahhidin,” meaning monotheists, a reference to the religious nature of the struggle.
Aymenn al Tamimi, who studies the group for the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based research center, said the audiotape seemed to reflect an internal conflict in what message it should be sending. On the one hand, it wants to excite its base of mostly disaffected young men seeking a combination of violence, excitement and cultural revenge for perceived or real slights. On the other, it wants to drive a wedge between Western supporters and opponents of military action.
“I think the biggest point one could make is that ultimately it’s incoherent,” Tamimi said. “He wants to say Western media are distorting IS’s image and yet have supporters kill Western citizens at the same time.”
The message, Tamimi said, perhaps best underscores the difficulty the Islamic State has in persuading mainstream Muslims to view the campaign against it as a Western-backed war on Islam.
“They are still trying that approach of trying to sow discord and lack of consensus among Western publics about precise action in order to hamper the war effort against them but yes, the ultimate descent into the anti-Semitic rant shows they ultimately cannot convey amenable messaging to audiences beyond their own ideological circles,” he said. | {
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Did Stalin Murder Lenin?
Did he do it? He would not be the first subordinate to seek to polish off his superior in an authoritarian system. History is replete with examples of a seemingly dutiful understudy scheming to remove his mentor.
I'm talking, of course, about Stalin and Lenin. The theory that Stalin sped along the demise of the old boy—who wasn't actually that old when he died, a mere fifty-four—has been around for decades. Now it is being revived. Last Friday, at the annual University of Maryland School of Medicine conference about the deaths of famous historical figures, the Russian historian Lev Lurie suggested that while Lenin was undoubtedly in poor health in the 1920s, Stalin hastened his death by having the Soviet leader poisoned. The convulsions Lenin suffered shortly before his death, Lurie says, are not consistent with the symptoms of the stroke he had experienced. If Lurie is right, it might turn Lenin into more of a martyr, at least in Russia. His specter continues to loom over the country. Almost instantly, the Bolsheviks transformed Lenin, whose corpse was embalmed and remains displayed in Moscow, into a cult figure, one that has outlived the regime itself. He serves as an important vestige of a neo-imperial past that postcommunist Russia apparently cannot afford to dispense with. What the historian Nina Tumarkin declared years ago in her scintillating book Lenin Lives! remains true today.
Certainly, Stalin had good reasons to hope Lenin would perish. It did not entirely escape Lenin's notice that the ambitious and young general secretary was taking control of the party machinery. Besides, as he complained in what has become known as his "testament," Lenin thought Stalin was "rude." Whether this would have translated into his demoting Stalin is another question. Lenin, after all, seemed to be complaining about bad manners. And Lenin himself was no shrinking violet when it came to taking out his enemies: he presided over the deaths of millions during the Russian Civil War and laid the foundations for the Gulag. Lenin's "Who Whom" question was no joking matter. It led to mass murder and totalitarian systems from Eastern Europe to China to Vietnam.
But unlike Stalin, Lenin does not seem to provide particular evidence of enjoying killing for its own sake. To Lenin applies the old line about loving humanity but despising individual humans. Stalin, by contrast, was a Georgian who relished feuds for their own sake. He seemed to take a lascivious pleasure in pitting his subordinates against one another, whether it was accusing them of plotting to subvert his leadership or simply forcing them to engage in endless drinking bouts while he mocked them. Stalin had no shortage of ways of rubbing out his real or perceived opponents, ranging from mass executions to more indirect methods—in his memoirs, Anton-Antonov Ovseyenko recounts, among other things, Stalin's proclivity for ordering medical operations that somehow ended fatally. But under Stalin's stewardship, the Soviet Union—the NKVD—became the supreme practicioner in the diabolical black arts of injecting victims with harmful potions. The NKVD has its own laboratory, which was revealed at the last major purge trial when its former director, Genrikh Yagoda, was accused in 1938 of having sought to use it to poison Stalin and other Bolshevik worthies. Today, Russia continues to enjoy a particular proficiency in this singular line of work, which is presumably why Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident and former FSB officer, had the misfortune to find himself ingesting polonium-210 in a fatal cup of tea in London in 2006.
Might the Soviet experiment, as it was known, have turned out differently in the event of Lenin's ruling the Soviet Union for several more decades? Could he have made a go of the enterprise? Would Trotsky and Bukharin have been promoted rather than Stalin, and would a kinder, gentler Soviet Union have emerged? | {
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New to the Oakhurst Library shelves this month are:
☆ All They Will Call You by Tim Z. Hernandez (Adult Nonfiction). The harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history” which claimed the lives of 32 passengers, including 28 Mexican citizens who were being deported. When media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican citizens, famed songwriter Woody Guthrie set out to pen one of the greatest protest songs of the 20th century. Hernandez takes a look at how this tragic event and the song that came from it affected the views on immigrants in the United States.
☆ The Mistletoe Murder by P.D. James (Mystery). P.D. James is often described as the queen of crime, and this collection of mystery stories shows exactly why. Daring rescues, dark family secrets and elusive cases await all who read this fantastic collection of one of mystery’s bestselling authors.
☆ It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover (Fiction - Romance). Sometimes, the one you love is the one that hurts you the most. This is the story of Lily, who hasn’t always had it easy. She’s escaped the small Main town she grew up in and graduated college. She’s started her own business and moved to a new city all on her own, but when a handsome neurosurgeon begins vying for her love, she thinks she’ll have it all - until her first love and only link to her past life in Maine shows up and threatens her new future, what and who will she choose?
☆ All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (Fiction). The lives of a blind French girl and a gadget-obsessed German boy are intertwined before and during World War II.
☆ The Secret Diary of Lydia Bennet by Natasha Farrant (Young Adult Fiction). Lydia is the youngest of the five Bennet sisters. She’s stubborn, untamed and can’t seem to keep her mouth shut. Dive into her world and see what she’s truly thinking in this modern and new point of view from one of literature’s most beloved classics.
Newest DVD titles
☆ Passengers (Science Fiction). On a routine journey through space to a new home planet, two passengers, sleeping in suspended animation, are awakened 90 years too early when their ship malfunctions. As Jim and Aurora face living the rest of their lives on board, with every luxury they could ever ask for, they begin to fall for each other, unable to deny their intense attraction until they discover the ship is in grave danger. With the lives of 5,000 sleeping passengers at stake, only Jim and Aurora can save them all.
☆ Sully (Fiction). On Jan. 15, 2009, Captain Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger and his copilot begin a routine flight that turns terrifying. Sully manages to pull off the impossible and lands his failing plane on the frigid waters of the Hudson river, saving all 155 lives on board. While he is heralded as a hero, the investigation that follows threatens to ruin his reputation and career.
☆ Alan & Naomi (Children’s Fiction). When Alan first meets Naomi, a young French girl whose father was killed by Nazis, her only response is to scream. Nothing he does seems to make a difference, until his friendly perseverance eventually pays off and the witty and adventurous Naomi emerges. This Focus on the Family feature film will warm the hearts of young and old alike.
☆ The Wonderful Things You Will Be by Emily Winfield-Martin (Picture Book). A rhyming, whimsical celebration of future possibilities and growing up with kindness, cleverness, and boldness.
☆ Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor, by Jon Scieszka (Fiction – Featured for Summer Reading). Frank Eistein is a kid genius and together with his robot Klink, they set out to create an anti-matter motor to win the Midville Science Prize.
☆ Women in Earth and Space Exploration, by Tammy Gagne (Nonfiction - Featured for Summer Reading). Women have achieved incredible things in science, technology, engineering, and math. Learn about the important innovators from history and discover how women are contributing to STEM fields today.
The Oakhurst Branch Library, located at 49044 Civic Circle Drive, is open 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., Monday - Thursday, and 10 a.m. - 2 p.m., Friday and Saturday. | {
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Did you ever have a time in your life when you put God on hold to get other things done? I don’t mean momentarily, like you forgot about him during the day. I mean, more like you no longer thought you needed Him, so you left Him as an afterthought. Maybe you hung up on Him altogether.
What happened when you picked up His line again? Was He still there?
Well, let me tell you, not only is He still there, but while He was waiting for you, He held the phone to His ear with his shoulder and continued to work on your behalf!
Years ago I thought I knew too much to concern myself with things of God. I had pushed my childlike faith aside for things of research. I contemplated grand ideas about the world and on occasion considered how a god might fit into it … somewhere.
This god was a small god in my mind. But even though I considered Him small, He still did big things in my life. For example, I can see many ways He’d been preparing me to be the mother of a special needs child. He led me to a story about a mute boy, which would become a favorite years before my son was born. This story taught me how to appreciate my son as nothing else could. God gave me a dog who had several chronic medical issues which required many of the same types of therapies I now use with my son. And He put me in a job with wonderful Christians at just the time I would require a faith before the coming storm.
He was on the line the whole time.
Still, it wasn’t just what he did for me, but how He used me to accomplish His Will even during my weakest (or non-existent) faith moments. There’s nothing like the feel of being an empty vessel of the Lord, even if you don’t know you’re being used at the time.
As a graduate student, I ran and lived in an all-male dorm while working on my counseling degree. This was a tenuous position and my new, all-male, staff let me know they were a little leery. Never before had a woman lived in the all-male dorms at this university. I’d been selected from the applicants who’d actually applied for the resident director position in the all-female hall.
At the first meeting I could sense my staff worried I’d paint the halls pink and hang lacey curtains in the lounges. They asked me pointed questions about my plans and showed their resistance to too much change—particularly since I’d come in mid-year.
It was my goal to develop a sense of authority, yet be sensitive (yes, I used that girly word) to their needs.
Then, my senior resident assistant informed me of a long-standing, streaking (yes, that means naked guys running) tradition the whole community had grown accustomed to and wondered what I’d planned to do about it. It was clear he expected me to do nothing, especially since that had been the protocol for the past several decades.
So here I am, The Woman in the building. I feared taking this tradition away would put me at odds with my staff before I even got started, so I did what the RA wanted. I sat on my hands.
You could say that wasn’t very Christian of me, since streaking in public is against the law and I should have trusted God to have my back while I did the right thing. However, that wasn’t even a consideration for me at the time.
You could say I was a coward for not doing the right thing and sticking to my guns. My only answer to that would be …
But there is one thing you could not say about me. You could not say God had forsaken me, because even though I’d neglected Him, He still used me as an empty vessel.
I muddled through that semester, the lone, twenty-something, woman living with hundreds of hard-partying, college-age (and hormonal) guys. To say the atmosphere was sexually charged would be a vast understatement. My building had the highest rate of Victoria Secret catalogues sent to it. The guys had to buy “lacy under-things” on a regular basis so they could continue to receive it.
While running this building, I endured being hit on in the hallways by droopy-towel-wearing men, I had to protect myself from attempts to get my white shirts wet, and shield myself from what felt like a constant x-ray body scan. On occasion, however, I planned some really cool programs, developed great relationships with guys who needed advice about women, and even got a little respect.
Though I ended up loving that job, for a number of reasons I decided not to continue the next year. Before I knew this would be the case, I worked to select my next-year’s staff. Among the candidates was a stern, thickly built, young man who wore an expression on his face that said, “Don’t mess with me.” He struck me as a man of character and I knew I wanted him working the hall known for the wildest parties. In fact, he’d already lived there. This was also the place my streakers lived.
For some reason, my boss did not like him, but I suspect it was more that she had other candidates in mind for those positions and saw him as a threat to her placing them. We went back and forth much on this issue, but I was not the one in the highest position of authority. I had to fight for this guy, but something told me I must. I did not make it a point to listen to the Holy Spirit regularly (if at all) back then, but I now believe that’s who I heard.
In the end, he got the job.
I later discovered this young man made his first order of business to end the decades-long streaking tradition. When I heard about it from one of my former staff I couldn’t help but smile. I didn’t realize then who was really responsible for this (God), but it felt good to have played a small role in it just the same (even unwittingly). This news also inspired me to be more courageous with my convictions as this young man had been. I’m sure he did not garner favor with his hall mates having taken away their “fun.”
I’ve always carried a certain respect for this guy. So much so that he inspired the character, nick-named Preacher, in my manuscript entitled One Among Men. Though Preacher is not the main character of this story, it was his parallel’s courage that caused me to write about the challenges a new Christian faces in the highly secular environment of a major state university—especially one who is a mid-twenties female living with hundreds of hard-partying, college guys—Sigh!
I love how God used this man’s courage as an example to me, even at a time I did not fully appreciate it. I hope I can do the same for others one day.
Who inspired you when you weren’t looking to be inspired?
Other posts you might like: | {
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“This is the last bike we’re buying you,” we said to my 11-year old son. He’s bigger than my wife now and has the same size feet as me. His “29er” mountain bike is dangerously close to being nicer than mine. I suddenly realized we’d reached the end of the evolution of family bicycles. Let’s see if I learned anything.
Bicycling is a gear-intensive sport. Multiple kids mean lots of bikes. Buying new gear can be intimidating and expensive. Work with your local bike shop, and they will alleviate your fear. A key part of cycling is recycling. First of all, several of your local bike shops or clubs may sponsor an annual bike swap where you can find pre-owned bikes for a reasonable price.
Whether you buy new or used, another way to recycle is to have hand-me-down bikes within your own family. Unless you have twins, you don’t need more than one bike at a time that’s the same size. Kind of like your kids, they can be spread out in size, from younger to older. Our crew went from a tricycle, to a bicycle trailer, to a tag-along, to a small bike with training wheels and coaster brakes, and, finally, to mountain bikes with gears and hand brakes. The tag-along (a child “bike” that is attached to the seat-post of an adult’s bike) was surprisingly useful and allowed family outings when our daughter was still too young to keep up on her own.
I’d add one missing item to our evolutionary chart. I’d get a balance bike. It’s a cycle with no training wheels and no pedals. They’d learn how to balance a two-wheeler and cruise along with “Flintstone” power. When you add pedaling later, maybe they won’t need training wheels.
How do you know when a kid needs to move up to a new bike? My son recently said, “I feel like a dork with my knees hitting my chin.” It’s pretty self-evident. When you move up a bike size, don’t go too big hoping the child will grow into it. A bike that’s too big may be worse than one that’s too small. You don’t want children flying into a ditch because they can’t control their oversized machine.
Should you buy a road bike or a mountain bike? Versatility is more important than specialization. They can ride a mountain bike anywhere. A road bike is a one-trick pony. From a safety standpoint, I’d rather have my kid on singletrack than on the road tangling with traffic.
My parting advice is to let the kid “take the lead.” Let them keep training wheels until they want to be set free. They should also make some trail choices. I pick trails that are easier than they can handle. Let them tell you they want something tougher. I’ve tried to force the issue by taking training wheels off and picking a tough trail. Learn from my mistakes. Relax and be patient. The last time I checked, there’s no prize for getting rid of training wheels first. Keep it calm and happy. That’s the point, after all. Have fun with your kids on bikes in the Northern Wilds.
This story was originally published in the Aug.-Sept. 2012 issue of Northern Wilds.
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Impotentie brengt een constant ongemak met zich mee, net als fysieke en psychologische problemen in uw leven cialis kopen terwijl generieke medicijnen al bewezen en geperfectioneerd zijn
Journal of Learning Disabilities and Offending Behaviour
Emerald Article: Deaths in custody: the role of restraint
Joy Duxbury, Frances Aiken, Colin Dale
To cite this document: Joy Duxbury, Frances Aiken, Colin Dale, (2011),"Deaths in custody: the role of restraint", Journal of Learning Disabilities and Offending Behaviour, Vol. 2 Iss: 4 pp. 178 - 189
Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/20420921111207873
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Joy Duxbury, Frances Aiken, Colin Dale, (2011),"Deaths in custody: the role of restraint", Journal of Learning Disabilities and Offending Behaviour, Vol. 2 Iss: 4 pp. 178 - 189http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/20420921111207873
Joy Duxbury, Frances Aiken, Colin Dale, (2011),"Deaths in custody: the role of restraint", Journal of Learning Disabilities and Offending Behaviour, Vol. 2 Iss: 4 pp. 178 - 189http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/20420921111207873
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Joy Duxbury, Frances Aiken and Colin Dale
Purpose – The practice of restraint is controversial as deaths in care or custody have been a
consequence of restraint. The purpose of this paper is to clarify research from national and international
literature to ascertain any common findings in order to provide guidance for staff on safe and effective
restraint techniques where there is no other resort in the management of violent and aggressive
Design/methodology/approach – The researchers undertook a review of the literature on the medical
theories relating to restraint-related deaths and an analysis of deaths in custody in the UK for the timeperiod 1 Jan 1999 to 1 Jan 2010.
Findings – Findings showed that certain groups are particularly vulnerable to risks while beingrestrained. There are also biophysiological mechanisms which staff need to be aware of when
restraining an aggressive or violent individual.
Originality/value – It is evident that those in vulnerable groups when restrained in a prone position, or ina basket hold, for a prolonged period and who are agitated and resistive, are most at risk of death incustody. Consistency in reporting relevant deaths locally and nationally is necessary to facilitate analysisof key information and prevent deaths in custody in the future. Staff training and awareness are also keyfactors.
Keywords Deaths in custody, Restraint techniques, Control, Management of violence and aggression,Training, Police custody, Patients
Controversy and debate is the consequence of any deaths that occur in custody andhealthcare. These cases distress the victims’ family and community; they also affect staff inall parts of the medical-legal community. Service reputations and community relationshipsmay be damaged. Further complicating the situation is the fact that there are often minimalphysical findings at autopsy, accompanied by sparsely detailed case information. Wherethese deaths have involved the use of restraint they can be among the most controversialbecause they have occurred as a result of the actions of representatives of the state. Thedeath of David ‘‘Rocky’’ Bennett in 1998 in a healthcare setting is an example of restraint-related deaths that demonstrate the need for clarity on methods of physical restraint that aresafe and humane in the management of aggressive or violent individuals.
The Independent Advisory Panel (IAP) which forms the second tier of the Ministerial Councilon deaths in custody, commissioned this review of the medical theories and researchrelating to restraint-related deaths. The researchers sought to clarify research from nationaland international literature to ascertain any common findings in order to provide guidance forstaff on safe and effective restraint techniques where there is no other resort in themanagement of violent and aggressive individuals. The methodology used was a literaturereview, analysis of cases reported in the press for the given time period, a gap analysis
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Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 2042-0927 DOI 10.1108/20420921111207873
and gathering expert opinion. The findings of the literature review and case analysis aredescribed below.
There are statistics held by the IAP on deaths in custody from the custody sectors onrestraint-related deaths. The Independent Police Complaints Commission also record deathsin police custody; these statistics include those who died under restraint (Grace, 2011). In theperiod of 2010-2011 seven people fell ill or were identified as being unwell at the point ofarrest. Of these seven cases, four of these were pronounced dead at the scene of arrest andthree were taken to hospital and died within an hour of arrival. Four involved some form ofrestraint by the arresting officers. There were also two restraint-related deaths reported for thisperiod where the death was in or following custody. There were also two restraint-relateddeaths where police had contact with the individual; in both these cases the police werecalled to a mental health hospital to assist staff with a patient. The IAP reported that betweenthe 1 January 1999 and the 31 December 2009, there were 6,151 deaths in state custody inall services. In 22 of these cases, restraint was identified as a cause of death at the coroner’sinquest (Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody, 2010).
Characteristics of individuals in UK restraint-related deaths 1999-2010
On analysis of the reports found through searching databases for this study the followingfeatures were found:
16 out of the 38 cases found that died between 1999 and 2010 had a history of mentalillness, specifically psychosis.
Three had a learning disability or pervasive developmental disorder such as autism.
15 were of Black or Minority Ethnic (BME) origin.
15 were males in the 30-40 years age group (only one was female). 12 were males in the40-50 years age group. One was a young male.
The deceased who had a history of mental illness may have been receiving neurolepticmedication which can have life-threatening adverse effects.
Six of the 38 had pre-existing conditions that may have increased the risk of cardiacarrest: one had ischemic heart disease, one had diabetes and four had epilepsy.
Five swallowed a drug package whilst being restrained, leading to leakage and a fataloverdose.
Positional asphyxia appears to be implicated for at least 26 of the 38 deaths (whether ornot given as a verdict) because of struggle/physical stressors prior to restraint, number ofstaff involved and, in particular, because of the length of time of the restraint and positionof the individual.
Verdicts of fatal excited delirium were given for five deaths. Accounts describe the individualas being restrained in a prone position, either flat or over a mattress/chair. The number ofstaff involved in the restraint was between two and 15 staff; the length of restraint wasbetween 10 minutes and 1 hr 40 minutes. Police were involved in the restraint incident for29 of the deaths, hospital staff for seven and Youth Offender Institute staff for one of thedeaths. Location of death was not always specified in reports. It is unclear from the accountswhether exhaustion due to prolonged struggle was a factor as the length of time of thedisturbed behaviour before the restraint incident has not been given.
Throughout the literature, research studies and debates there is evidence that certain groupsare more vulnerable to risks when being restrained, whether because of biophysiological,
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interpersonal or situational factors or attitudinal factors. These groups may be vulnerablebecause they are over-represented in the detained population in any case or through attitudesand situations they encounter whilst being detained and consequently restrained. There arealso others who are susceptible to medical harm because of biophysiological features suchas pre-existing conditions.
There is increasing awareness that people with a learning disability are likely to experiencemore health problems than the average person in the general population. Further, they mayhave higher levels of unmet healthcare needs, experiencing unrecognised and thus untreatedhealth problems including hypertension (Kerr, 2004). Particular problems identified, whichoccur with increased frequency in association with learning disability, include obesity, which isthe most commonly reported health problem, and heart disease (Disability Rights Commission,2004; Emerson and Baines, 2010). These health problems could adversely affect the individualin any restraint situation.
The increased prevalence of hearing and/or visual impairment (Vitiello and Behar, 1979) mayalso affect the person’s ability to communicate their distress or understand and respond torequests during restraint. This could perhaps increase the likelihood of a prolonged struggle,with its concomitant risks. When individuals with severe atypical autism are restrained theymay be unable to calm down as the physical restrictions will continuously trigger the fight/flightresponse leading to prolonged restraint with possible adverse reactions.
Compared with the general population, rates of sudden death are reported to be higher amongmental health service users for several reasons, including general neglect of health andincreased rates of damaging personal habits, for example, smoking, alcohol and othersubstance abuse, and poor diet (Mohr et al., 2003). In the community where police are called tothe scene of an incident where an individual is aggressive or violent, the arresting officer has tomake a rapid assessment of the individual and this requires basic mental health awareness,knowledge of local mental health services and an awareness of their legal powers. Watson andAngell (2007) and Cooper et al. (2004) suggest police officers routinely decide if the mentallydisordered person they are managing would be admissible or not to hospital or other carefacility. If arrested, the custody suite can be chaotic and the custody officer may have to makedifficult decisions, in particular, whether the individual has a severe psychotic illness or is underthe effects of drugs or alcohol. An appropriate place of safety under S.136 where permanent,full-time qualified staff can prevent aggression or manage someone with serious mental illnessmay not always be available. If the individual is drunk they may refuse to admit them:
Even when Section 136 units are operating successfully many will refuse to take detainees whoare violent or intoxicated as an assessment cannot be conducted unless a detainee is relativelycalm and sober (The Police Foundation, 2009).
Patients with dual diagnosis (mental illness and substance misuse) in a study by Wright et al.
(2002) were more likely to report a lifetime history of both offending and violence than patientswith psychosis only. Schizophrenia and other psychoses have been associated with violenceand violent offending with increased risk linked with substance abuse comorbidity (Fazel et al.,2009). Violence and aggression in prison as a result of untreated or deteriorating mentalhealth, and/or substance misuse, may increase the likelihood of being restrained.
Since David Bennett’s death after being restrained in 1998 there are still complaints of racismin healthcare: the Mental Health Act Commission’s (2008) 12th Biennial report found that:
Patients complained that nurses relied upon restraint, medication, and confinement to managethem. All this is occurring disproportionately to African-Caribbean’s who, as the Commission’s
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Count Me In Census 2007 indicates, are over-represented in acute settings as a proportion of thepopulation as a whole.
The National Mental Health Development Unit (2011) found no consistent evidence thatpeople from BME communities are subject to greater use of seclusion or physical restraintalthough patients in the hospitals with higher number of patients from BME communities dogenerally report feeling more coerced. However, African Caribbean service users are morelikely to be misdiagnosed and diagnosed with psychotic conditions and treated usingmedication, which is often of a higher dosage (Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, 2002).
Keating and Robinson (2004) in a study of treatment of Afro-Caribbean people with mentalillness found that when service users were seen as dangerous, aggressive or difficult tomanage, staff were said to employ control and restraint but culturally appropriate andacceptable behaviour has been wrongly interpreted as symptoms of abnormality oraggression (Inquiry into the death of David ‘‘Rocky’’ Bennet, 2003). Fear of mental illnessalso leads to a fear of rejection by others, and therefore, people who experience mentalhealth problems will make considerable efforts to hide this aspect of their lives (Keating andRobinson, 2004).
Obesity is known to increase the work of breathing (Hough, 2001) and reduce diaphragmmovement in the prone position (Hollins, 2010). Atypical anti-psychotic drugs can increasethe risk of obesity so making those with serious mental illness more vulnerable. Obesity wasalso one of the predisposing risk factors to police custody deaths in studies by Hick et al.
(1999), O’Halloran and Lewman (1993) and Southall et al. (2008). In Stratton et al.’s (2001)study of deaths from excited delirium, where obesity was defined as having a body massindex (BMI) . 29, 56 percent of the cases were obese. In O’Halloran’s (2002) study the casesof obesity (BMI . 25) was 75 percent.
Although females in acute mental health settings are restrained, for example, Whittington et al.
(2006) found that 46 percent of the incidents involved female patients, men are more likely tobe violent or aggressive and then restrained. In research in an acute mental health care trustthe mean age for men involved in restraint incidents was 35.0 years (Lancaster et al., 2008). Instatistics for restraint-related deaths, Stratton et al. (2001) give the mean age as 31 years old,Grant et al. (2007) as 38.5 years. In the literature review by the Task Force on excited delirium inthe USA (2009) more than 95 percent of all published fatal cases were males with a mean ageof 36. In O’Halloran’s study of 21 cases of restraint asphyxia, all were males with a median ageof early 30s.
Young people (under the age of 20) are vulnerable to harm when restrained because ofphysiological immaturity. The independent review of the use of restraint in juvenile securesettings (Smallbridge and Willaimson, 2008) found widespread acceptance that it wassometimes necessary to use force to restrain children in the secure estate (for those 17 yearsand under), where their behaviour posed a high degree of risk to themselves or others.
However, on the evidence available, they did not feel able to state that any one restrainttechnique would be completely safe to use on everyone in the juvenile secure estate. Sincethen, in the second inquest on Adam Rickwood in January 2011, the jury found that he hadbeen subjected to an unlawful restraint technique (face down) and hurt in a way (nosedistraction technique) that contributed to his taking his own life. This inquest came after threejudicial reviews challenging the first inquest; a high court judge then ruled the first verdictunlawful and ordered a second examination of the circumstances of his death. The Court ofAppeal in 2008 ordered that previous Amendment Rules for Secure Training Centres shouldbe quashed because they violated Articles 3 (right to be protected against torture
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or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment) and the right to private life under Article8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (The Children’s Commissioner, 2008).
The Royal College of Nursing’s (2010) guidelines state that restrictive physical intervention(direct physical contact between persons where reasonable force is positively appliedagainst resistance to either restrict movement or mobility or to disengage from harmfulbehaviour displayed by an individual) should only be used to prevent serious harm.
In one UK study volunteers with stable chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (Meredith et al.,2005) were randomly allocated to five positions. The response to the prone position with orwithout wrist restraint appeared highly individual, with some individuals tolerating the proneposition with no measurable clinical effects and others suffering a clinical worseningof symptoms. The reasons for this individual variation remained unclear. The small number ofsubjects in this study and the difficulty in applying it to mental health or custodial settingsdecrease its validity and relevance.
Exercise-related collapse in individuals with sickle cell anaemia is a rare but seriouscomplication. Local hypoxia causes intravascular sickling, in turn causing vascular occlusionand organ and tissue damage. This can result in rhabdomyolysis (the breakdown of musclefibres resulting in the release of muscle fibre contents into the bloodstream), myocardialischemia, arrhythmias and sudden death (Scheinen and Wetli, 2009). Incidence of restraint-related deaths of individuals with sickle cell anaemia is extremely rare but Dyson and Boswell(2006) found that:
Statistically, sickle cell could not possibly explain the highly raised overrepresentation of deathsof African-Caribbean males in custody.
This over-representation of Afro-Caribbean males is also evident in mental health settings.
The Mental Health Act Commission (2006) one day census found that Afro-Caribbean malesare three times more likely to be admitted to hospital and 44 percent more likely to besectioned under mental health legislation.
An abnormally enlarged heart has been reported as one of the predisposing factors that canlead to restraint-related death (Laposata, 2006; Southall et al., 2008). This abnormality hasbeen linked to chronic stimulant drug abuse (Schmidt and Snowden, 1999). In O’Halloranand Frank’s (2000) study of 21 cases of restraint-related deaths, on autopsy, 15 had heartdisease including an enlarged heart. Byard et al. (2008) stipulate that:
There may certain cases where underlying organic illness, such as cardiovascular or respiratorydisease is present that may be either unrelated to the terminal episode or, alternatively, may havepredisposed to positional asphyxia.
Chronic cocaine misuse has been found in a recent study (Aquaro et al., 2011) to lead tocardiac structural involvement which could lead to cardiac damage and become evidentlater in life. The researchers found that 83 per cent of people using cocaine over long periodshave suffered major structural damage to their hearts.
Post ictal aggression in epilepsy can occur when physical restraint is applied to a delirious orconfused patient. In particular, this can lead to a vicious circle of attempts to restrain andresulting resistive violence with fatal results (Devinsky, 2003).
Sudden unexpected deaths in epilepsy (SUDEP) may be caused by respiratory events,including airway obstruction. In addition, cardiac arrhythmia, during both the ictal andinterictal periods, leading to arrest and acute cardiac failure, play an important role(Harrison and Asplund, 2007). The additional factor of extreme exercise as in struggling inrestraint is therefore still unknown although in the UK one patient (Godfrey Mayo) died afterbeing restrained during a seizure:
It is currently unknown whether or not epileptics are more vulnerable to SUDEP if they choose toengage in vigorous physical activity. However, one could postulate that as physical exertion canlead to dehydration, electrolyte imbalances, hyperventilation secondary to increased oxygen
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demand, and hyperthermia – all of which are well known to decrease the seizure threshold in anepileptic (Harrison and Asplund, 2007).
In diabetes low blood sugar may precipitate sudden mood swings that could appear assudden anger or crying, sweating, nervousness, rapid heartbeat, confusion, and seizures.
Aggressive behaviour may appear similar to acute behavioural disturbance (ABD)(Padder et al., 2005).
The physiology of deaths under restraint in any setting where there is a duty of care, isdifficult to investigate as internationally the numbers of restraint-related deaths are small andclassification by pathologists varies in different countries. Findings from experimentalstudies are not completely valid as there is limited generalisabilty to the real physicalrestraint situation, they are run in a laboratory setting in controlled conditions and there is asubject selection bias as most subjects are healthy volunteers.
Ventilation in a healthy human involves two key factors: movement of the ribs by theintercostal muscles and movement of the diaphragm (Parkes, 2000; Reay et al., 1992). Thechest expands and the diaphragm contracts, drawing air into the lungs (inhaling). The ribsand diaphragm then relax, releasing air from the lungs (exhaling). When an individual isrestrained or contained in a prone position, three things happen that compromise the body’sability to breathe:
1. There is possible occlusion of the respiratory orifices (Belviso et al., 2003).
2. There is a compression by weights or restriction to movement of the ribs limiting their
ability to expand the chest cavity and breathe (Parkes, 2000; Stratton et al., 2001).
3. The abdominal organs may be pushed up, restricting movement of the diaphragm and
further limiting the available space for the lungs to expand (Parkes, 2000; Reay et al.,1992).
Consequently, even without any other contributing factors, simply restraining an individual ina prone position may be seen as restricting the ability to breathe, so lessening the supply ofoxygen to meet the body’s demands. Restriction of the neck, chest wall or diaphragm canalso occur when the head is forced downwards towards the knees. Asphyxia as a result ofrestriction under restraint has also been called ‘‘restraint asphyxia’’.
Parkes (2002) postulated that breathing can be reduced by 15 percent in a face downposition and by 23 percent if the person is bent in a face down position. Paterson andBradley (2010) state that the prone position is actually a range of procedures incurringpossible risks:
These multiple versions of prone actually share only one variable, which is that the individual isheld against resistance face down either by being physically held, via control of the limbs, theapproach most commonly used in the UK.
Excited delirium and acute behavioural disturbance
The state of excited delirium has been described as an agitated, aggressive, paranoidbehavioural disturbance where the individual also has great strength and numbness to pain(Paquette, 2003). It is a form of ABD:
Of all the forms of acute behavioural disturbance, excited delirium is the most extreme andpotentially life threatening (Faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine, 2010).
Fatal excited delirium was first described in seven cocaine users between April 1983 andMay 1984 in the USA (Sztajnkrycer, 2005). Incidence of increased drug-related deaths alongwith violent behaviour and use of restraints has coincided with increased cocaine use in theUSA (Grant et al., 2007). However, the exact incidence of excited delirium is impossibleto determine as there is no current standardised case definition to identify this state
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(American College of Emergency Physicians, 2009). It is currently not a recognised medicalor psychiatric diagnosis according to either the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of MentalDisorders (DSM-IVTR) of the American Psychiatric Association or the InternationalClassification of Diseases (ICD-9) of the World Health Organization (Samuel et al., 2009).
There are relevant research findings which have been published, mostly from the USA. In areview of excited delirium deaths during custody, victims were predominantly male(97 percent), had an average weight of 220 lbs. and a mean body temperature of 1048F (Ross,1998). Mash et al. (2009) found that victims were young (mean age 34.2), males, with a highbody mass. Mean body temperature was 40.78C, seizures were observed in 13 percent ofcases. Many of the deaths occurred one hour after initial police contact, cardiac arrestoccurred shortly after use of restraints.
The most striking feature of the excited delirium syndrome is the extreme hyperthermia(Bunai et al., 2008). Struggling while being restrained will also raise body temperature:
Being placed in police custody prior to death can also raise body temperature through increasedpsychomotor activity if the victim struggles in the process (Mash, 2007).
Otahbachi et al. (2010) found that the pathogenesis of excited delirium deaths was multifactorialand included positional asphyxia, hyperthermia, drug toxicity and/or catecholamine-inducedfatal arrhythmias. These deaths, he concluded, were secondary to stress cardiomyopathy.
Sudden death in adults, particularly young adults who are asymptomatic, may occur from theonset of ventricular tachycardia (a type of rapid heart rate) or other dangerous arrhythmias.
A genetic factor appears to influence which people with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy aremore prone to sudden death. In restraint-related deaths, extreme physiological stress andsudden exercise, e.g. violence and struggling, in an individual with genetic predisposingfactors, may result in fatal hypertrophic cardiomyopathy as has been seen in the suddendeath of young athletes (Maron et al., 1996; Frenneaux, 2004).
Recent research (Ho et al., 2009) indicates that physical struggle is a much greatercontributor to catecholamine surge and metabolic acidosis than other causes of exertion orstimuli. Michalewicz et al. (2007) saw catecholamine hyperstimulation as one of the riskfactors of restraint-related deaths.
Hick et al. (1999) found in five cases of sudden death that there may have been exacerbationof exercise-induced lactic acidosis by sympathetic-induced vasoconstriction, enhanced bythe actions of cocaine in at least some cases. Alshayeb et al. (2010) also noted that peopleexercising intensely, who are highly aggressive and then restrained, and have takencocaine, may develop lactic acidosis and subsequently suffer cardiac arrest. This process istypically not responsive to advanced cardiac life support.
Alcohol abuse is a predisposing factor for violence and aggression. Sudden death of anindividual with a history of alcohol abuse, and under the influence of alcohol, may occur duringa struggle. Alcohol is a recognised cause of a variety of atrial and ventricular arrhythmias.
A prolonged QT interval, a problem associated with sudden death, as well as increased levelsof norepinephrine may be present in prolonged alcohol abuse. These predispositions toarrhythmias can be exaggerated by catecholamines released during a violent struggle.
Paterson et al. (2003a, b) found that administration of neuroleptics increased the risk ofdeath during restraint by weakening the individual’s ability to swallow or expel leading to anincreased risk of the inhalation of vomit. In large well-conducted population studies the risk
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conferred by QT prolongation when taking antipsychotics, particularly thioridazine,droperidol, sertindole and ziprasidone, appears to be a modest increase in mortality andsudden death. Co-morbid physical illness, especially cardiovascular disease, is a furtherrisk factor (Abdelmawla and Mitchell, 2006).
Psychotropic medication given (pro re nata (p.r.n) or as required) has been noted asfrequently given for agitation or aggression in addition to prescribed antipsychotics withfurther risks of side effects and long-term implications to health (Joukamma et al., 2006).
Baker et al. (2008) found that p.r.n medication was an under-researched intervention andside-effects were not closely monitored:
Typical antipsychotic PRN undoubtedly contributes to antipsychotic polypharmacy and highdoses that individuals may receive.
After reviewing the comparisons of restraint-related deaths in the UK from 1999 to 2010 withthe literature available and then benchmarking the findings with expert opinion, it is evidentthat those in vulnerable groups when restrained in a prone position, or in a basket hold, for aprolonged period and who are agitated and resistive, are most at risk. The findings of thisresearch demonstrate that there are no absolute safe restraint positions. Mechanicalrestraints, fixation, confining the limbs to bed or a chair (as used in parts of Europe) all haverisks such as deep venous thrombosis (de Hert et al., 2010). Seclusion may be seen as theleast harmful method of managing a violent individual. However, this will be likely to mean theindividual has to be restrained first with the concomitant risks:
Getting a violent individual into seclusion against his/her will almost invariably involve some formof physical intervention and mechanical restraint as observed is clearly not without its own risks(Paterson and Bradley, 2010).
There is also no safe time limit for duration of any restraint; staff must be aware during anyphysical intervention of the signs of a medical emergency and have life support skills andequipment to respond to any emergency. They also need to bear in mind that cessation ofaggression may indicate collapse rather than the individual’s co-operation.
Early warning predictors and markers should be noted by staff for those who are becomingunwell with a pre-existing condition before potential collapse. Assessment of othervulnerabilities, such as mental health status, must be carried out by trained personnel incustodial settings. Consistency in reporting relevant deaths locally and nationally isnecessary to facilitate analysis of key information and prevent deaths in the future. NHSreporting systems (Mental Health Minimum Data Set Version 4.0, National Health ServiceConnecting for Health, 2011) now include recording restraint incidents; restraint-relateddeaths should also be a mandatory category.
1. Physical restraint is defined in this article as the lawful use of force involving the restriction of
2. David Bennet, a 38-year-old black man who died in the Norvic clinic in Norwich in October 1998. He
was restrained by at least three staff after attacking a female member of staff and his heart stoppedduring the restraint.
3. Deaths following police contact that are subject to an IPCC independent investigation.
4. When the state takes away the individual’s liberty and places him in custody or under the mental
5. For example, a previous death in 1995 of Zoe Fairley, a young woman with intellectual disabilities
suffocated and died when restrained face down for 50 minutes.
6. Atypical (second generation) antipsychotics are used in the acute phase of schizophrenia and
related psychoses and for long-term maintenance and prevention of relapse.
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There are no absolute safe restraint positions; mechanical restraints, fixation, confining the limbsto bed or a chair (as used in parts of Europe) all have risks such as deep venous thrombosis (deHert et al., 2010). Seclusion may be seen as the least harmful method of managing a violentindividual. However, this will be likely to mean the individual has to be restrained first with theconcomitant risks. There is also no safe time limit for duration of any restraint; staff must be awareduring any physical intervention of the signs of a medical emergency and have life support skillsand equipment to respond to any emergency. They also need to bear in mind that cessation ofaggression may indicate collapse rather than the individual’s co-operation. How ‘‘hazardous’’a restraint position is may be quite individualised, depending on characteristics of the personheld, the length of time, the forcefulness of the hold and a range of other factors including factorssuch as the levels of stress. Early warning predictors and markers should be noted by staff forthose who are becoming unwell with a pre-existing condition before potential collapse.
The end point of physical interventions is to return the individual to normative behaviours. Thereshould be use of a range of options to achieve this, e.g. time out, medication, with ongoingevaluation of effectiveness.
Consistency in reporting relevant deaths locally and nationally is necessary to facilitate analysis ofkey information and prevent deaths in the future. NHS reporting systems (Mental Health MinimumData Set Version 4.0) now include recording restraint incidents; restraint-related deaths shouldalso be a mandatory category.
Staff training in all services needs to include immediate life support skills as a minimumcertification level and advanced skills as a maximum level (for those working in emergencydepartments and acute medical admissions and paramedics). These skills and course providedto develop them are laid out by the Resuscitation Council (UK) (www.resus.org.uk/siteindx.htm).
There needs to be dissemination of medical theories into practice, e.g. dangers of restraint in aseating position. It is also about managing those risks. Effective training is about the cycle ofdecision making.
Abdelmawla, A. and Mitchell, A. (2006), ‘‘Sudden cardiac death and antipsychotics. Part 1: risk factorsand mechanisms’’, Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 35-44.
Alshayeb, H., Showkat, A. and Wall, B. (2010), ‘‘Lactic acidosis in restrained cocaine intoxicatedpatients’’, Tennessee Medicine, November-December, pp. 37-9.
American College of Emergency Physicians (2009), ‘‘White paper report on excited delirium syndrome’’,ACEP Excited Delirium Task Force, American College of Emergency Physicians, Irving, TX.
Aquaro, G., Gabutti, A., Meini, M., Prontera, C., Pasanisi, E., Passino, C., Emdin, M. and Lombardi, M.
(2011), ‘‘Silent myocardial damage in cocaine addicts’’, Heart Online First, Vol. 20, available at: http://heart.bmj.com/content/early/2011/06/04/hrt.2011.226977.short – aff-1, published on 20 June 2011.
Baker, J., Lowell, K. and Harris, N. (2008), ‘‘A best-evidence synthesis review of the administration ofpsychotropic pre re nata (PRN) medication in in-patient mental health settings’’, Journal of ClinicalNursing, Vol. 17 No. 9, pp. 1122-31.
Belviso, M., de donno, A., Vitale, L. and Introna, F. Jr (2003), ‘‘Positional asphyxia’’, American Journal ofForensic Medicine and Pathology, Vol. 24 No. 3, pp. 292-7.
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Byard, R., Wick, R. and Gilbert, J. (2008), ‘‘Conditions and circumstances predisposing to death frompositional asphyxia in adults’’, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, Vol. 15, pp. 415-19.
Children’s Commissioner (2008), ‘‘Children’s Commissioner welcomes court ruling on restraint of youngpeople’’, available at: www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk
Cooper, V.G., McLearen, A.M. and Zapf, P.A. (2004), ‘‘Dispositional decisions with the mentally ill:police perceptions and characteristics’’, Police Quarterly, Vol. 7, pp. 295-310.
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de Hert, M., Einfinger, G., Scherpenberg, E., Wampers, M. and Peuskens, J. (2010), ‘‘The prevention ofdeep venous thrombosis in physically restrained patients with schizophrenia’’, The International Journalof Clinical Practice, Vol. 64 No. 8, pp. 1109-15.
Devinsky, O. (2003), ‘‘Psychiatric comorbidity in patients with epilepsy: implications for diagnosis andtreatment’’, Epilepsy and Behaviour, Vol. 4, Supplement 4, pp. 2-10.
Disability Rights Commission (2004), Background Evidence for the DRC’s Formal Investigation intoHealth Inequalities Experienced by People with Learning Disabilities or Mental Health Problems,Disability Rights Commission, Manchester.
Dyson, S. and Boswell, G. (2006), ‘‘Sickle cell anaemia and deaths in custody in the UK and the USA’’,The Howard Journal, Vol. 45 No. 1, pp. 14-26.
Emerson, E. and Baines, S. (2010), Health Inequalities and People with Learning Disabilities in the UK:2010, Disability Rights Commission, Manchester.
Faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine (2010), ‘‘Acute behavioural disturbance: guidelines onmanagement in police custody’’, available at: www.fflm.ac.uk
Fazel, S., Gulati, G., Linsell, L., Geddes, J.R. and Grann, M. (2009), ‘‘Schizophrenia and violence:systematic review and meta-analysis’’, PLoS Medicine, Vol. 6 No. 8, p. e1000120.
Frenneaux, M. (2004), ‘‘Assessing the risk of sudden cardiac death in a patient with hypertrophiccardiomyopathy’’, Heart, Vol. 90, pp. 570-5.
Grace, K. (2011), ‘‘Deaths during or following police contact. Statistics for England and Wales 2010/11’’,IPCC Research and Statistics Series: Paper 21, Independent Police Complaints Commission, London.
Grant, J., Southall, P.E., Fowler, D.R., Mealey, J., Thomas, E.J. and Kinlock, T.W. (2007),‘‘Death in custody: a historical analysis’’, Journal of Forensic Sciences, Vol. 52 No. 5, pp. 11717-81.
Harrison, B.K. and Asplund, C. (2007), ‘‘Sudden unexplained death in epilepsy during physical activity’’,Current Sports Medicine Reports, Vol. 6 No. 1, pp. 13-15.
Hick, J.L., Smith, S.W. and Lynch, M.T. (1999), ‘‘Metabolic acidosis in restraint associated cardiac arrest:a case series’’, Academy of Emergency Medicine, Vol. 6 No. 3, pp. 239-43.
Ho, J., Dawes, D. and Ryan, F. (2009), ‘‘Catecholamines in simulated arrest scenarios’’, paper presentedat the Winter Symposium on Australasian College of Emergency Medicine, Darwin, 25 June.
Hollins, L. (2010), ‘‘Managing the risks of physical intervention: developing a more inclusive approach’’,Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, Vol. 17, pp. 369-76.
Hough, A. (2001), Physiotherapy in Respiratory Care: An Evidence-based Approach to Respiratory andCardiac Management, 3rd ed., Nelson Thornes, Cheltenham.
Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody (2010), ‘‘Report of the cross-sector restraintworkshop held in May 2010’’, available at: http://iapdeathsincustody.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Report-of-the-IAPs-Cross-Sector-Restraint-Workshop.pdf (accessed February 2011).
Joukamma, M., Heliovaara, M., Knekt, P., Aromaa, A., Raitasalo, R. and Lehtinen, V. (2006),‘‘Schizophrenia, neuroleptic medication and mortality’’, British Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 188, pp. 122-7.
Keating, F. and Robinson, D. (2004), ‘‘Fear, black people and mental illness: a vicious circle?’’, Healthand Social Care in the Community, Vol. 12 No. 5, pp. 439-47.
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Lancaster, G., Gillian, A., Whittington, R., Lane, S., Riley, D. and Meehan, C. (2008), ‘‘Does the position ofrestraint of disturbed psychiatric patients have any association with staff and patient injuries?’’, Journalof Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, Vol. 15, pp. 306-12.
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Mental Health Act Commission (2008), Risk, Rights, Recovery. Twelfth Biennial Report 2005-2007, TheStationary Office, London.
Meredith, C., Taslaq, S., Kon, O. and Henry, J. (2005), ‘‘The cardiopulmonary effects of physical restraintin subjects with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease’’, Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine, Vol. 12No. 3, pp. 133-6.
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Frances Aiken can be contacted at: [email protected]
To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected] visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints
VOL. 2 NO. 4 2011 jJOURNAL OF LEARNING DISABILITIES AND OFFENDING BEHAVIOURj PAGE 189
MERCY HOSPITAL DUNEDIN INFECTION CONTROL MANUAL MRSA Policy Page 1 of 17 Key Words: Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus , MRSA Policy Applies to: All staff employed by Mercy Hospital. Credentialed Specialists, Allied Health Professionals, patients and visitors will be supported to meet policy requirements. Related Standards: • Infection and Prevention a
Original Article Korean Diabetes J 2010;34:191-199 Effects of Rosiglitazone on Inflammation in Otsuka Long-Evans Tokushima Fatty RatsJin Woo Lee1, Il Seong Nam-Goong1, Jae Geun Kim2, Chang Ho Yun3, Se Jin Kim1, Jung Il Choi2, Young IL Kim1, Eun Sook Kim11Department of Internal Medicine, Ulsan University Hospital, Ulsan University Col age of Medicine,2Biomedical Research Center, Ulsan Univers | {
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In 1774, at the age of 23, Judith Sargent Stevens (Murray) of Gloucester, Massachusetts, decided to keep letter books – blank volumes into which she would make copies of the letters she was writing to her family and friends. This was not a haphazard decision; keeping letter books would have become part of her routine for the rest of her life.
Judith's world in 1774 was changing fast. Gloucester was a thriving seaport in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and there was talk of separation from Great Britain. Protests, port closings, the presence of troops in Boston – all of these events affected Gloucester and it was unclear how the conflict would be resolved. As a student of history, Judith knew how important it was to document what was going on – to provide a thoughtful, eyewitness account in real time to leave behind for future generations.
To begin her project, Judith purchased a small book of blank pages bound in soft brown leather and embossed with a decorative black border. On the first page of the volume she wrote a message to her readers, explaining that she had “committed to the flames” all of the letters she had written before 1765 as they were merely “a kind of history of [her] juvenile life” and could not be of interest to anyone. While Judith's intended audience was her direct descendant, we know from her plan to keep her correspondents “purposely involved in ambiguity” that she anticipated a wider readership. Ultimately, she wrote, she wished to “commend [her] volumes of letters to affectionate posterity.”
Following her opening statement, Judith initiated her recording system. She left the first few pages of the book blank and then copied what letters she had already written and saved, numbered each letter and every page. As tradition dictated, she included her return address in each of her letters, the date, a salutation, and an appropriate closing. When the book was full, Judith added an index to the empty opening pages, listing the recipient of each letter and the page on which that person's letter appeared.
After Judith's first volume of letters was complete she began work on Letter Book 2, not knowing how many she would complete in her lifetime. There would be twenty letter books in all, containing approximately 2,500 letters and spanning the years 1765 to 1818, from when Judith was 23 years old in Gloucester to age 67 in Boston.
She wrote all of this material by quill pen and by candlelight – a daunting, self-appointed task to be sure, especially for a wife, mother, professional essayist, poet, and playwright. But we know from Judith herself, through her letters, that she understood the historical value of what she was doing and even contemplated publishing the letter books herself.
Judith took the letter books with her when she moved from Boston to Natchez, Mississippi, in 1818 with her daughter, Julia Maria, who had married a Harvard student from Natchez. Judith died there soon after. For many generations, the letter books sat in the private library of an antebellum mansion called, “Arlington,” lovingly cared for by the owner but out of the public eye.
Those of us who tried to learn more about Judith Sargent Murray in the 1980s and earlier encountered the of-repeated “fact” first published in 1881 that her personal papers had been destroyed in Natchez. But in 1984, a Unitarian Universalist minister named Gordon Gibson, who was serving a congregation in the area, went searching for material anyway. At Arlington, he found the letter books – the treasure trove of information that Judith Sargent Murray had so painstakingly created for future generation.
The letter books have since been preserved and published on microfilm under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. They are housed at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History at Jackson – which is a lucky thing because Arlington's library was recently destroyed by fire.
Today, the letter books are being transcribed, indexed, and published to make the information more accessible. Two letter books are available in their own heritage, and two themed collections of the letters have been published.
What's in this new eyewitness account of American history? Briefly, they contain Judith's observations of:
• People (George Washington, John Adams, John Murray, Judith's husband and the “father” of organized Universalism in America)
• Places (towns, cities, and the countryside during her travels through New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania)
• Events (July 4, 1790 in Philadelphia, the laying of the cornerstone for the new state house in Boston in 1795)
• Attractions (museums, concerts, gardens, markets, public buildings)
• Daily life (meals, goods, clothing, medicine, weather, travel)
The letters also include Judith's thoughts on:
• female education
• women's political rights and female politicians
• the new American government
The letters document Judith's life as a daughter, wife, mother, friend, and loving aunt or adopted aunt to dozens of young people. They also document her career as an essayist, publisher, poet, and playwright – one of the earliest definers of a new American literature.
Finally, the letter books add color, depth, and insight to American history from the perspective of a woman and a professional writer.
In her opening statement in Letter Book 1, Judith tells her readers (us) that sheoped for affectionate posterity. She describes nothing less, and publishing her letter books is an important step in that direction. | {
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Mariang makiling, tagalog diwata of mt makiling fairy or spirit), guardian of mount makiling in laguna province in there are hella versions of the legend. Mt makiling is a dormant volcano located on the border of laguna province and batangas the mountain rises to an by jzonetravel. Legend of maria makiling according to legend, there was a time when the gods could live like ordinary mortals do although these gods were. About mt makiling mt makiling via sto tomas trail 1,090 masl time: 6-8 hours growing up in the southern part of luzon, laguna has been a common travel destination whenever my family. Mount makiling is a tourist spot in laguna the name was inspired by a famous filipino folklore of maria makiling a girl who was believed that went to the forest but did not come back. Mount makiling, or mount maquiling legends surrounding the mountain relates to maria makiling, which is said to be the 'guardian' of the mountain. Mariang makiling is a well known filipino folklore she is a fairy or diwata that can be seen in our very own mount makiling in laguna people say that maria makiling is the guardian of the. Who would not be familiar with mariang makiling mentioned in many alamat (legends) and kuwentong bayan (folklore), this enchanted fairy guardian of mt makiling is probably the most famous.
Maria makiling is a beautiful forest nymph who does not only protect mount makiling from invasive philippine myths & legends: maria makiling language origin of. We think that the legend of maria makiling is such a great story and gives great lessons in mount makiling,there lived a beautiful goddess name mariang makiling. The mountain goddesses of philippine folklore and myth all share similar legends the enchantress maria makiling (mountain goddesses of maria of mt makiling. Legend the mountain and its origin name relates to maria makiling, which is said to be the guardian of the mountain refer to this story: maria makiling story.
Long ago,in mount makiling,there lived a beautiful goddess name mariang makiling she is beautiful,kindhearted and loving she had a long shiny black hair and she often wear black pearls and. Mount makiling according to eyewitness, she was a young woman, tall and graceful with big black eyes and long and abundant hair.
I think that the legend of maria makiling is such a great story and gives great at laguna like pagsanjan falls and mtmakiling the legend was narrated. Mount makiling is a mountain filled with a lot of stories and legends inspired by maria makiling mount makiling rain forest park. Mount makiling , or mount other prominent examples being maria makiling of los baños and maria sinukuan of mount arayat the basic form of the legend is that. Maria makiling title maria makiling description protector of mt makiling gender female region philippines equivalent diwata maria makiling, sometimes spelled mariang makiling, in.
There are several variations to the legend of mariang makilingvariations aside, mariang makiling is the diwata (fairy or woodnymph) of mount.
The legend of mariang makiling-retold by jose rizal the many legends of mariang makiling tell of a young woman who lived on the beautiful mountain that separates the provinces of laguna and. As one drives along the wide south luzon expressway, mystical mount makiling looms on the horizon it is the same mountain that inspired the legend of maria makiling. Maria makiling's wiki: maria makiling, sometimes spelled mariang makiling, in philippine mythology, is a diwata or lambana (goddess,fairy or forest nymph) associated with mount makiling in. Mount makiling mount makiling in laguna is a legendary mountain that has inspired numerous tales, poems and legends owing to its mystical dweller and protector - maria makiling. Mt makiling - according to old legends, the slopes of mt makiling are shaped like that of a woman lying down some say that it is the profile of the sleeping mariang makiling who dwells in. Legend of maria makiling according to legend, there was a time when the gods could live like ordinary mortals do legend of mt, makiling essay. | {
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“All alone! Whether you like it or not, alone is something you’ll be quite a lot.” – Dr. Seuss.
We marvel at young children’s ability to find time and space to be alone.
This is especially true at Seedlings. Alone time is everywhere!
Young ones can often be found alone in the alley, up in the tower, looking at a book in the cozy corner, or possibly digging away in the sand. Once we observed a girl talking to herself in the mirror for close to a half hour as the world buzzed around her. It is so important to honor a child’s alone time by protecting it.
Time alone provides young children a chance to become lost in imagination, delve into an intrinsic interest, or simply to observe others. Many children have the ability to find alone time while surrounded by others, as if they found the space between the packs of cars on the highway.
“We must be careful not to give undue attention to what we label shyness.” – Bev Bos
Many adults associate being alone with loneliness or anti-social behavior. A child playing alone may quickly be labeled “shy.” The “shy” child may be ushered into social situations they are either not ready for or not interested in, and adults may determine they are not socializing correctly. It is a huge challenge, but important not to project our feelings on children’s play, especially when they are alone. Children are much better at immersing themselves in the moment while adults tend to stray off into a long-term frame of mind.
For the Adults
Another way to see the value in a child’s alone time is to see the value in ours. Technology continues to connect us at younger and younger ages, and we may be losing the opportunities to develop our ability to be alone. For adults, alone time has dwindled to where it is nearly non-existent. Explore how much time you spend each week truly alone. How would you feel if you left the house without your cell phone? Is alone time important to you, and if so how do you create it?
Learning to be okay alone is a lifelong task. Lifelong tasks need to begin early.
Here are some ideas on how to provide the children in your life the time and space to be alone:
- Most children’s rooms are filled with toys and books. Try designating some time each day for some room time.
- Alone time in a backyard or safe space outdoors has the added benefits of being surrounded by nature. Try bringing toys or inside activities out.
- Try setting up your child outside with their art materials while the sun sets and you make dinner.
- Set up the camping tent in the living room and make a cozy den.
Along with creating alone time, let’s protect the time when children discover it on their own.
© Jonathan Iris-Wilbanks and Sunflower Creative Arts, 2011
Photos © Haidor Truu and Sunflower Creative Arts, 2011 | {
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When A Hookup Is More Than Just Sex
25 Men Answer “What’s The Difference Between A Girl You Date And A Girl You Just Hook Up With?”
You may develop feelings for them, but do they now just see you as a hookup and nothing else? That seems to be the biggest problem in the dating world today. Signs you're just a hookup and nothing else. I have a good friend who, for some odd reason, doesn't like to date girls. He always sticks them in the “hookup” . 22 Jan If you know all of these things, you'll be able to weasel out who actually wants to date you and who's only sticking around for the hook up. Here are all the signs he wants to date you. He initiates conversations often. A guy who only wants to get in your pants won't reach out to you more than you do to him. 22 Oct Want to know if your guy is in it for the long haul or just looking for a hook up? Read on for the 5 signs that tell you he's just in it for the sex.
Unfortunately, not all of the men you're interested in are going to be interested in you--at least not in the way that you want them to be.
Now, of course, it goes without saying that if a one-night-stand is fine with you, then by all means, go for it. Remember, his desire to not be in a committed relationship is part of what can drive you to want his commitment. A guy who wants to get in your pants is going to make a move and make it fast. If he refuses to be seen with you in public, he wants to stay single.
Sometimes, all of their attention will fool you into believing that they want a legitimate relationship with you, but all they really want is to see what you look like naked. Being reduced to an "object" isn't any fun. Even though you could view it as a compliment, because it means that you're so physically attractive you've caused men to lie for a chance to sleep with you, it's hard to be happy when your heart is shattered.
Men should tell us exactly what they're looking for before they get us into bed with them, but some of them use our naivety to their advantage.
However, their tricks can't fool you forever. To avoid getting your heart broken, here are a few signs that he wants sex without an actual relationship:. A compliment is a compliment, right? If he wanted a legitimate relationship with you, then his compliments would extend beyond the physical.
He'd also tell you about how much he loved your laugh, the sound of your voice, and your sense of humor.
5 Signs A Guy Just Wants To Hook Up With You - Everything For Women
Basically, a man who actually wants a relationship with you would love everything about you, see more not just the things he can see with his own two eyes. It's natural for you two to have some steamy conversations, especially when you're in the honeymoon stage and can't keep your hands off of each other. Of course, sex isn't the only thing you should be talking about.
If he considered you his girlfriend, then he would want to show you off. He'd bring you out to dinner, to the mall, and to his friend's parties without hesitation, because he'd want to show the world how lucky he is to have a wonderful woman like you.
10 TIPS FOR HOOK UPS!
That's why "Netflix and chilling" every single weekend is a huge red flag. Bringing you to his house to watch a movie and have sex isn't a legitimate date idea. If he refuses to be seen with you in public, he wants to stay single. He doesn't want to be seen with you, because he doesn't want to lose his chances with any other women out there. If a man really liked you for you, then he wouldn't mind waiting to sleep with you, even if it took a while, because he'd want you to feel completely comfortable.
That seems to be the biggest problem in the dating world today. A guy who wants to get in your pants is going to make a move and make it fast. Look, the one thing you have to be able to do is take the emotions out of the situation and be able to look at things with a cold critical eye. He doesn't want to be seen with you, because he doesn't want to lose his chances with any other women out there. Generally when you just hook up with someone, you get along with them well enough and find them pleasant to be around, but, speaking only for myself, you just know that there are larger compatibility issues that would prevent a relationship from thriving.
So if he's pressuring you to have sex, that's because sex is the only thing he's interested in. If you want to test him to see if he's only sticking around to get laid, then tell him that you're planning on waiting a while. If that makes him run the other way, it proves that he never really liked you to begin with. He just liked your body. If he only wants sex, then he's not going to go through the trouble of telling you about his childhood fears and his deep, dark secrets.
Instead, he'll spend his time charming you with meaningless conversations that don't tell you anything "real" about him. If building an emotional connection with you isn't on his to-do list, then he doesn't want you to be his girlfriend.
If he wanted a serious relationship with you, then he'd respect you inside and outside of the bedroom. So if he doesn't go visit web page on you or take part in How To Know Your Just A Hookup type of foreplay at all, it's a massive red flag. Either that or he's just plain selfish. Either way, it's proof that you shouldn't be wasting anymore of your time with him.
You can do better. If he's only with you for the sex, How To Know Your Just A Hookup he's not going to stick around until morning. He'll be out the door before you finish getting dressed.
Even if he dozes off and agrees to stay for a while, he'll still sneak away in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, if a man cuddles you, is actually there when you wake up in the morning, and goes as far as to make you breakfast, he's interested in something serious.
If he only wanted sex, then he would've left as soon as he got it. He wouldn't have any reason to stick around. Nighttime is when men make their booty calls.
He doesn't want a relationship. He doesn't want to call you his girlfriend.
He just wants you to invite him over for a "no strings attached" hookup that means absolutely nothing to him. Meanwhile, if he texts you as soon as he wakes up in the morning until he goes to bed at night, he's serious about you. So if the only times he contacts you is to ask for your photos, he's clearly only interested in your body. If he wanted you to be his girlfriend, then he would eventually set just click for source a dinner with his family, so that you could meet his parents.
After all, it's every mother's dream to see their son settle down with a nice young lady. Meanwhile, if he won't introduce you to the people who raised him, and won't even tell you their names, he definitely doesn't want to date you. Why would he introduce his parents to the random girl that he's been sleeping with? If he wanted to date you, then he wouldn't hesitate to answer your messages, no matter what time of day it was or how busy his schedule was. If you asked him a question, he would answer it.
It's as simple as that. They tell each other where they're going and whom they're going to be with. Meanwhile, if he's vague about where How To Know Your Just A Hookup going, or won't even answer your texts when you try to get ahold of him, then he doesn't think of you as a girlfriend.
Signs You're Just a Hookup
He just thinks of you as someone who can get him off. Everybody likes to be called by their real name, because it makes them feel special. However, if he calls just click for source by a generic nickname like "babe" or "sweets," then it's not the best sign.
If he's been hooking up with multiple women at once, using pet names is a great way to avoid calling out the wrong name in bed. He might not actually know who you are. Please support TheTalko so we can continue providing you with great content!
Please whitelist TheTalko or disable your ad blocker to continue. Close this popup and browse for 2 minutes. To avoid getting your heart broken, here are a few signs that he wants sex without an actual relationship: Give TheTalko a Thumbs up! Unique lists featuring pop culture, entertainment and crazy facts. Covering the hottest movie and TV topics that fans want.
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Harrowing television footages of distraught parents and traumatised students running around the campus, like a flock that has been attacked by bees, should not only worry us, but alarm us. There are close to 3000 students in that school and nobody knows what will happen next. We don’t know who else is living with the strange sickness.
Mr. President, the least you could do as the father of the nation is to spare at least five minutes of your time to address the students and help calm them down as school authorities and health personnel try to convince them not to go home for the fear of spreading the unknown disease. Elsewhere in the civilised world, the nation would have paused and paid attention to Kumasi Academy and call for external support in order to save the lives of the young ones. But it is sickening to admit that we don’t value human lives here and your attitude has confirmed it.
When the seven students died after the first disease outbreak in the school in March this year, the school appeared more interested in planning its 60th anniversary celebration than taking steps to safeguard the lives of the remaining students. Last week, when two of the students died, the school downplayed it. In the words of a source, “the school did not want the death to mar the anniversary celebration that was happening over the weekend so we hid news of the deaths.”
Mr. President, you were in Kumasi Academy for that 60th Anniversary programme last weekend, but your speech did not mention the deaths. I don’t blame you because my sources say the school authorities hid the news about the deaths from you. Elsewhere, the deaths and hospitalisation was enough reason to call off the celebration of the anniversary. This week, after the 60th anniversary event, two more students died and many more were rushed to the hospital.
Source : www.manassehazure.com/ | {
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I’ve got to stop doing this. I had most of a post written about this book for yesterday, didn’t like it and trashed the whole thing. This isn’t as analytical as I wanted to be, but it does a better job capturing what I felt about the experience, and I think I happier about that than I’d have been with my planned post.
Read: May 9 – 11, 2018
For many years [the Tufa] were on the wrong side of the South’s color line, and suffered for it. Their secretive ways and legendary musical aptitude spawned rumor and legend, which in turn prompted more and more withdrawal.
But now the twenty-first century, with its pervasive interconnectedness, pushed against this isolation. More and more Tufa risked the consequences of leaving and sought their way in the world. They all knew they would someday have to come back, since all Tufa were inextricably tied to Needsville. But they also knew that the seclusion of the past was no longer practical. Like it or not, the world now knocked on their door.
Such a depressing thought, but a pretty good summary of the State of the Tufa.
I still remember some of the reactions I had back in 2011 during my first read of The Hum and the Shiver and met the Tufa. There was something otherworldly, ethereal and haunting — and yet, very human, and even fun. It was, in short, magic. I thought the same when I re-read it before the sequel, and maybe it impressed me more that time. Each book since has felt the same — not all have them as successful as the first, but they’ve all had that same core magic.
When it was announced a couple of months ago that this was going to be the final novel in the series I was struck by two thoughts — the first, and strongest, was lament. The second was, “how?” There’s not an overarching narrative that needs tieing up, a goal to meet or anything. Partway through this book, I started to understand how Bledsoe was wrapping things up and concluding the series — and it felt perfect. I should add at this point that I was wrong about what he was doing, and that the reality was better than my guess.
As it’s the final book, all bets are off — the first novel contained many hints about the nature of the Tufa, but the successive books were less and less subtle in that regard, and ended up telling more than the previous. At this point, there’s no hinting, no suggesting — not only that, Bledsoe answers many questions readers have had since the beginning, and probably a few we should’ve had. And he does so in a way that enriches the series and the Tufa, not just something that reveals. There were so many little tidbits that came out that just made me smile or utter a quiet “Ah ha!”
I actually haven’t talked much about the plot yet — how odd. There are a couple of graduate students from a university in Tennessee — one in psychology (would be parapsychology if she could get away with it) and one in English with a focus in folk music as a way to improve his own music (minor spoiler: I spent a few pages waiting for him to be revealed to be a Tufa — nope, just a kindred spirit). These two have come across an old film — silent film old — shot near Needsville, showing a young woman losing her glamour and flying off on wings. There’s no way that it could be silent film quality FX, it’s a woman with wings. This town it was filmed in, Sadiesville, disappeared shortly afterwards. The two want to find this town and explore what happened to it.
Which brings them into contact with the people of Needsville — and the night winds have instructed them to help these two find what they’re looking for, despite the fact that no one in Needsville has a clue about the town. For readers, the idea that Tufa have forgotten anything that happened in their area is pretty astounding the kind of thing that piques your curiosity.
What happens next is wonderful, and horrible, and beautiful — awful in every sense, archaic and otherwise. I loved it and hated it while admiring how Bledsoe played this out. Structurally, tonally, thematically different from the rest (as each book in this series has been), yet undeniably part of the series. I loved seeing friends who’ve been around since The Hum and the Shiver or those as fresh as Gather Her Round just one last time (not that the new characters are slouches. For example, Veronica, our aspiring parapsychologist, is someone I’d hope to see if there was going to be a book 7).
There are a million little touches here — none of which I can talk about without ruining something, that make this good-bye the best installment of this series since The Hum and the Shiver. This is a must for Tufa fans (not that they need me to say it), and one more chance for me to suggest that people who haven’t started the series yet get on it. I don’t believe in actual magic — but Bledsoe’s series make me want to, especially if it looked like this. I hate to say good-bye to this series, but this is the way to do it. | {
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So proud of a nation spurred in to action.
HEARTBROKEN doesn't even begin to describe how I felt the week when THAT picture hit the headlines.
When babies wash up on the shores where we go on holiday you know something has gone hugely, tragically and horrifically wrong with the world.
Thankfully though, the image of the small Syrian child on that beach provoked a response beyond what most of us could have imagined.
Hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions urging the government to do more than the pitiful provision we had been offering displaced Syrians, and regular, everyday folk showed the world what really makes Britain great - its people!
One image circulating the internet designed to remind those less quick and keen to respond is a quote from Michael Bond's Paddington Bear.
It says this: "long ago, people of England sent their children by train with labels around their necks, so they could be taken care of by people in the countryside where it was safe. They will not have forgotten how to treat strangers."
Simplistic maybe but thought provoking enough to inspire a movement gaining momentum this week.
Project Paddington began with some families in Sheffield who decided to send their Paddington bear toys belonging to their children, to comfort young children in refugee camps. Now, with thousands on board the project is gaining recognition with many schools and churches now joining in too, with children sacrificially sending their own toy bears, with a hand-written letter, to kids enduring hell on earth.
The small gesture may not seem much but when some of the notes say "my gran gave me this teddy bear so I wouldn't be scared but now I want you to have it so you won't be scared either", you just know it's going to make a huge difference on the ground.
You can find out more by liking their Project Paddington Facebook page.
While my kids are contemplating which bears will be sent away, we have been deciding how we can help too. I mean, I'm not really moved if I don't actually move to take action, right? With that in mind we have signed up to look after unaccompanied refugee children though a fantastic organisation Called Home For Good.
Visit their website for more information on www.homeforgood.org.uk/refugees.
We can't do everything but we MUST do something.
A paramilitary police officer carries the lifeless body of Aylan Kurdi, three, who died as his family crossed the sea from Turkey to Greece | {
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While Valentine’s Day can be filled with yummy treats, chocolates, candies, and beautiful flowers, these items can pose serious health risks to our furry and feathered friends.
Chocolate. Chocolate contains caffeine and theobromine, both of which are toxic to dogs, cats, and birds. The darker the chocolate, the more danger it poses. As little as 1 ounce of baker’s chocolate or gourmet dark chocolate can cause toxic effects in a mid-sized dog or cat. Symptoms of chocolate poisoning are vomiting, diarrhea, increased thirst, and restlessness. In severe cases, seizures and heart failure can occur.
Xylitol. Xylitol is gaining popularity as a sweetener in many candies, sugar-free gum, and baked goods. While xylitol is completely safe for human consumption, it is extremely toxic to dogs. Small amounts can cause low blood sugar, seizures, liver failure, and even death. Signs of xylitol poisoning develop within 15 minutes of xylitol ingestion, and may include vomiting, weakness, lack of coordination, tremors, seizures, and coma. The most recent information shows that xylitol is not known to be toxic to cats, but since it’s always better ‘to be safe than sorry’, keep all treats away from cats and dogs!
Plants. Some plants can be toxic to your pet. Lilies are especially toxic to cats, causing kidney failure, so be sure to keep lilies out of special Valentine’s Day arrangements in your home. Luckily roses, everyone’s favorite Valentine’s bouquet, are non-toxic to dogs, cats, and birds!
Cellophane. Even the crinkly cellophane that your plants or flowers come wrapped in can pose a threat to your pets. The crinkly sound may be appealing to a cat or young puppy as a play toy, but if ingested, it can become lodged in your pet’s digestive system. Be sure to dispose of the wrapping properly and don’t leave cellophane or foil wrapping on plants you may receive.
This Valentine’s Day, keep all candies, chocolates, baked goods, flowers, and plants out of reach and away from curious pets. If you suspect that your pet has eaten a toxic product, contact your veterinarian right away. Your pet has a better chance of recovery if treated early. | {
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UC study seeks street trees that can cope with climate change
The changing climate predicted for California – including less rain and higher day and nighttime temperatures – is expected to cause chronic stress on many street tree species that have shaded and beautified urban areas for decades.
Realizing that popular trees may not thrive under the changing conditions, UC Cooperative Extension scientists are partnering with the U.S. Forest Service in an unprecedented 20-year research study to expand the palette of drought-adapted, climate-ready trees for several of the state's climate zones.
“The idea is to look at available but under-planted, drought-tolerant, structurally sound, pest resistant trees for Southern California that do well in even warmer climates,” said Janet Hartin, UCCE horticulture advisor in San Bernardino County.
Hartin, a 34-year veteran advisor, said the project is her first to stretch to 20 years; it will likely extend past her tenure with UCCE.
“I'd like to retire in five or six years,” she said. “But I'm very excited about being a pioneer in a study that will continue with my successors. I think it's important for our children and our children's children, as well as for the environment.”
At the end of 2019, with three years of data on tree health and growth rates, the scientists expect to be able to publish the first results and make them available to arborists, urban foresters and residents throughout the regions of the study.
Twelve tree species were selected for each climate zone in the comparative study, with several area parks used as control sites. Hartin and her Southern California research collaborators – UCCE advisors Darren Haver of Orange County and Jim Downer of Ventura County – worked closely with UC Davis plant biologist Alison Berry, UC Davis research associate Greg McPherson and USFS research urban ecologist Natalie van Doorn to select promising species.
They looked for trees that are already available at local nurseries, but are underutilized. The trees in the project exhibit drought tolerance and disease resistance, plus produce minimal litter. The researchers also sought trees that would provide ample cooling shade for a long time – ideally 50 years or longer.
The varieties come from areas around the world with climates similar to California. Two trees planted in replicated plots at the UC Riverside Citrus Field Station are native to Australia, two are native to Oklahoma and Texas, one is native to Asia and two are non-native crosses of other trees. Three of the trees are native to California: the netleaf hackberry, Catalina cherry and island oak.
“Trees are a long-term investment,” Hartin said. “A tree will live 50, 70, 90 years. The proper selection is very important to help ensure longevity.”
Making the long-term investment with the proper selection yields considerable returns. In a warming world, trees are natural air conditioners.
“Urban areas create heat islands, with dark asphalt surfaces reradiating heat. Cities can be 10 to 20 degrees warmer than the surrounding environment,” Hartin said.
Other tree benefits include soil health and stability, wildlife habitat and aesthetic beauty.
Following are a sampling of trees that are part of the comparative study:
Acacia – A 20-foot-tall, 20-foot wide evergreen that is drought resistant, and withstands moderate irrigation. Native of Australia.
Brazilian cedarwood – A native of Brazil and Paraguay, the deciduous tree grows to 50 to 65 feet. The tree produces pale yellow tubular flowers in the spring.
Catalina cherry – Native to the chaparral areas of coastal California, the Catalina cherry grows to 30 feet high. The evergreen tree tolerates drought when mature. It produces sweet purple-to-black edible fruit.
Chinese pistache – A deciduous tree with beautiful fall color. Grows to 35 feet tall, 30 feet wide. Drought resistant, but tolerates moist soil. Native to central and western China.
Desert willow – Growing to 30 feet tall and living 40 to 150 years, the desert willow tolerates highly alkaline soil and some salinity. A deciduous tree, it boasts large pink flowers all summer that attract hummingbirds and other wildlife. Native to the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico.
Escarpment live oak – Native to west Texas, this tree is cold hardy and drought tolerant. Typically evergreen, it can be deciduous in colder climates.
Ghost gum – Very tall at maturity and drought tolerant. An Australia native.
Indian laurel – Commonly called a ficus, this is a 35-foot-tall, 35-foot-wide tree at maturity that is drought resistant and tolerates highly alkaline and saline soils. Shade potential is high. Native of Asia and Hawaii.
Ironwood – A southwestern and northern Mexico native, Ironwood is semi-drought resistant once mature and tolerates alkaline soil. Ironwood, which grows to about 33 feet tall, can live 50 to 150 years.
Island oak – This tree is native to five of six California off-shore islands. Drought tolerant, it grows to nearly 70 feet tall when mature.
Maverick mesquite – Native to the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico, this tree does well in full sun and is drought resistant once established. The tree grows to 35 feet tall. The Maverick mesquite is a thornless variety.
Mulga – A versatile and hardy tree that grows 15 to 20 feet in height, the mulga – a Western Australia native – tolerates hot and dry conditions. The leaves are evergreen and the tree has yellow elongated fluffy flowers in spring.
Netleaf hackberry – A California native, the netleaf hackberry grows to 30 feet. Its deep root systems and heat resistance makes the tree idea for urban conditions.
Rosewood – Native to southern Iran, Indian rosewood grows to 65 feet tall, and 40 feet wide. Evergreen. Semi drought resistant and intolerant of alkaline soil.
Shoestring Acacia – Evergreen and 30 feet tall when mature, shoestring acacia is drought resistant and thrives in slightly acidic to highly alkaline soils. Native to Australia.
Tecate cypress – A native of Southern California and Mexico, the Tecate cypress is very drought tolerant. Its foliage is bright green. Young trees are pyramidal in shape, becoming more rounded or contorted with age.
Partners in the tree study are Los Angeles Beautification Team volunteers, LA Parks and Recreation team, Chino Basin Water Conservation District, and Mountain States Wholesale Nursery.
Funding and other support is provided by LA Center for Urban Natural Resources Sustainability, ISA Western Chapter, Britton Fund, USFS Pacific Southwest Research Station, and the UC system. | {
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As soon as this stunning young lady stepped out from the backstage curtain for her very first match, the nickname for Lexi Lane was born. And it's easy to see why she immediately became known as "Sexy Lexi"! The fans love to cheer on the exciting blonde battler and former high school cheerleader whenever she enters the ring. Still a relative rookie in the sport, this blonde stunner has already been making a name for herself in wrestling arenas all across the Midwest. The future looks wide open for the athletic and attractive "Sexy" Lexi Lane!
Lexi Lane's Stats...
- Height: 5' 3"
- Weight: 115
- Hair: Blonde
- Eyes: Brown
- Hometown: Columbus, Ohio (USA)
Lexi Lane's Profile...
- How It Started: As with many women in this business, I've been a HUGE fan since I was a little girl. When most girls were getting their first pair of high heels for their birthday, I got action figures and replica belts! Shortly after graduation, I saw a poster for a local indy show in my area and contacted the promoter immediately. We met that weekend at the show and I've been hooked like crazy ever since.
- Gimmick: My gimmick when I'm face (98% of the time) is a fun, spunky, sexy, girl-next-door with an edge. But when I step into the ring I'm all business and ready to do whatever to get the "W". When I'm heel (rarely), I play the "too good for you", self-absorbed, obnoxious bitch.
- Wrestling Style: Mainly technical, with a knack for throwing a mean variation of kicks. Watch out for my occasional high flying and submission spots to get the crowd going!
- Gear: My gear is mainly a pink/black or teal/black color scheme. Usually I show some skin, but keep it classy. Small tops with shorts or smaller tops with black pants. I either wear black boxing boots or wrestling shoes with teal kickpads.
- Titles Held: OCW Women's Championship.
- Biggest Win: My first singles match vs. Jayme Braxton in front of my old hometown
--at my old high school --with special guest referee Ivory. I learned a lot that night and it began my career in this business, which is still a dream come true!
- Worst Loss: My first battle with Hailey Hatred when she powerbombed me halfway to Hell and cheated to get the win!
- Favorite Type of Match: Mixed tag matches are always a fun change, but singles matches really let you shine the entire time!
- Favorite Moves/Holds: Mexican headscissors; reverse STO; various hurricanranas; wheelbarrow arm drag; mafia kick; calf kick; top rope crossbody.
- Finisher: DisLexia (a reverse STO)...but sometimes a quick roll-up is all it takes to get a win.
- Biggest Allies: Anyone who has helped me learn the ropes in this business, the easy OR the hard way! I'd say most of the people from OCW, my home promotion...particularly Jeff Cannon, my trainer. Also, Lorelei Lee and Nevaeh.
- Most-Hated Enemies: Sassy Stephie; Jessicka Havok; Portia Perez; Hailey Hatred.
- Toughest Opponent(s): Shantelle Taylor, ODB, Tracy Brooks and Hailey Hatred were all fierce competitors!
- Career Highlight: Getting to return to my old high school, collecting the "W" and making the crowd go nuts! First matches usually make a lasting impression I'm told...and that one may never be topped! Then again, I'm still learning and still climbing the ladder. More recently: my debut in Shimmer, which has been a goal of mine for awhile.
- Favorite Wrestlers: Trish Stratus; Rey Mysterio; Shawn Michaels; Chris Sabin; Alex Shelley. INDIES: Matt Mason; Jeff Cannon; Josh Prohibition. Daizee Haze, Shantelle Taylor and Angel Williams are all amazing workers as well.
- Wrestling Ambition: As with most indy wrestlers, being signed to WWE or TNA is always a goal and always a dream. But should that not happen, I'll be happy knowing that I'm living a small part of my dream already!
Lexi Lane's Personal Notes...
I'm currently a part-time college student studying Radiology.....In my time away from wrestling, school and work, I'm usually in the gym.....Competing in a professional figure competition is another goal on my extensive list of things to do.....Aside from all of that, I spend down-time with my family and friends who are the foundation of who I am and where I've come in my life. I have the best parents in the world, two older brothers who put the boots to me when I was young to prepare me for today, and a house full of animals including two golden retrievers, a cocker spaniel and two cats!.....In high school, I was a varsity cheerleader, homecoming queen, drama club geek and ran track...which could be why it strikes everyone as crazy that I do something as wild as professional wrestling | {
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The Sword Of Truth Series
Wishes and whims are not facts nor are they a means to discover them. In the eighth novel, Naked Empire, Richard and Kahlan are interrupted from their journey home to the New World to help free the Bandakar Empire, deep in the Old World, from the Imperial Order. The books follow the protagonists Richard Cypher, Kahlan Amnell and Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander on their quest to defeat oppressors who seek to control the world and those who wish to unleash evil upon the world of the living. Warheart was the last novel in the series. Offer ends 6/15.
He takes this opportunity to destroy the Palace, preventing Jagang from using the treasures it holds. Shop Now . Seriously. As her husband, Richard, desperately searches for his beloved, whom only h. They learn that the people of Bandakar are pristinely ungifted like Jennsen and Oba, and have been overrun by the Order because they have shunned all forms of violence, refusing to fight for their own lives. Richard Cypher, woodsman and warrior, is chosen to bear the powerful Sword of Truth. p.592. The main character is a young man named Richard Cypher, a Westland woods guide whose simple life is forever changed after he becomes the Seeker of Truth a position similar to that of a Confessor, requiring him to uphold justice in the world. Chainfire 10. Wizard's First Rule Epic Fantasy Aug-1994 Sword of Truth - 1 A SWORD OF TRUTH TO DESTROY A PRINCE OF LIES Twilight has fallen upon the Three Kingdoms: a grey time that could foretell either dawn or descent into bitter night.
internet download manager 3.21she looks so perfect summerTHE imitation is_safe:1big bang theory ita s01romi rain volmarvel now week empirescream web dlfoo fighters wembleyenrique iglesias - vivirwolf hall series 720p | {
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We recently delivered one of our Guardian Plus personal protection dogs to Las Vegas, NV. Jak is a sable male German Shepherd with unbelievable speed, power and focus. It has been a total pleasure working with him since day one, and his delivery was no exception: Jak quickly became accustomed to the fast pace of Las Vegas and fits right in at his new home. Jak is going to be keeping watch over the members of his family both in Nevada and away on business trips with his owner.
The high crime rate in parts of Las Vegas make personal protection dogs an important layer of security. After all, no criminal with even an ounce of good sense would want to mess with a dog like Jak when there are about 600,000 other potential targets in the city.
Before finding Jak, his new owner had researched many other companies looking for the best protection dogs to suit his lifestyle in Las Vegas. He had previously owned a protection dog from another company. Unfortunately, the dog ran out of his enclosure and was killed after being struck by a vehicle. This was a tragic example of how important functional recalls and stays in obedience training: with distractions around every corner, owners need to be 100% sure that their dogs will remain focused at all times. A big part of our protection training involves training in public, in places like Boston and Newburyport, MA so that our obedience and personal protection training will remain effective even in the presence of many people and vehicles.
Jak is trained not just to keep his family safe and follow their commands in obedience, he was also shown the rules of the household during his thorough delivery process. He was taught car manners, house manners, and how to behave properly with visiting people and dogs.
Below you can see two videos taken during our delivery process. The first shows the proud new Idaho owner of one of our personal protection dogs, Hans. You can see how this German Shepherd became part of the family, with even his young daughter being able to comfortably handle the dog in protection and obedience.
The second video shows the delivery of Aspen, one of our Guardian Plus level personal protection dogs who now lives in Oklahoma, working in a variety of training exercises during his delivery.
If you are interested in our Protector, Guardian or Guardian Plus training levels, we welcome you to browse our listing of protection dogs for sale. | {
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To be perfectly honest, I follow football the way I follow television. I read about it. (Breaking Bad sounds like something I should watch someday.) And the only reason I've been reading about football is my morbid fascination with the two major scandals in which the game has lately been sandwiched: the long-term harm caused by repetitive head injuries and the Sandusky pedophilia story. I can't stop wondering: Could they be related?
We now know that professional football players' helmets are not magically saving their brains from all the pounding they take. The New York Times reports that, to date, twenty NFL veterans have been shown to have suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) - a progressive decaying of the brain. Many more players have been living with the symptoms: early-onset dementia, erratic behavior, and major depression.
CTE can only conclusively be diagnosed in autopsy, and Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, the leading research institution in this field, has been doing most of the postmortems. At my own medical school, I arranged on this story a different kind of postmortem - an ethical one. Purposefully exposing young people to increased risks of major brain problems - even death - for sport is surely even more ethically complicated than sending young people into this same neurological danger zone as soldiers. So I invited the Times editor from this story to come talk with Northwestern University's doctors and coaches about this ethical problem.
At the session, I was dismayed to learn that life-changing head injuries from sports are not limited to NFL and NCAA players, but also can affect high schoolers and even younger children. Moreover, while the symptoms of CTE are perhaps the most striking, repeated head trauma could cause many more subtle neurological problems.
This got me thinking of my main line of work, sex research. As it turns out, another group of work acquaintances of mine, based at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, has been working to ascertain the bases for pedophilia. Although no one can point to a simple cause-effect chain for any sexual orientation, the Toronto group, led by psychologists Ray Blanchard and James Cantor, has found evidence that pedophiles, as a group, seem to have a greater history of childhood head trauma than non-pedophiles.
For example, a 2003 study of 685 men, published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that "pedophilic patients reported more head injuries before age 13 than did the nonpedophilic patients." While it is true that the head injuries we are now most concerned with in football occur after age 13, it is also true that most NFL and NCAA players and coaches (like Sandusky) are likely to have started getting their heads game-bashed as children.
Moreover, the medical literature contains reports of the onset of "hypersexuality" and altered sexual preference - including the development of pedophilic behaviors - following brain injuries in adulthood. When I asked psychologist Ray Blanchard about this, he expressed skepticism that this really represents a change of sexual orientation, given what researchers know about the nature of human sexual orientation.
Blanchard said he instead thinks it is "more likely that brain injuries in adulthood disinhibit sexual behaviors (including dormant paraphilias) rather than establishing them." In other words, after a brain injury, a man may no longer effectively suppress sexual desires he has already long had, and he may lose the ability to stop himself from harming others he sexually desires.
A study published last year in the Journal of Sexual Medicine reported on eight men who in mid-life showed evidence of "acquired pedophilic behavior from brain disease." Because some of these men also showed other forms of sexually abusive behavior, the authors of this report noted that certain brain injuries can result in "broader disinhibition deficit or hypersexuality . . . not just focused on children." Indeed, a general association between brain injury and poor sexual impulse control has now been well established.
Let's be clear: suffering brain injuries doesn't mean you'll become a pedophile, and a link between pedophilia and brain injuries doesn't mean we should "excuse" or condone pedophilic behaviors. But all this does leave me wondering whether we need to consider the possibility that sports head injuries can cause a much wider range of life-altering effects than is now being openly discussed. (And whether seminaries are rougher places than I've given them credit for.)
Whether or not additional research bears out the theory that head injuries can contribute to pedophilic behavior, the two ongoing scandals in football - repetitive head injuries and the possible cover-up of Sandusky's pedophilic activities at Penn State - do have one clear link: in both cases, those in charge have taken big risks in playing with the idea of putting the game first and the well-being of youngsters second.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected]. | {
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1. (orig. UK Und., also nobb) the head; thus constr. with a to mean each, a time.
|Dict. Canting Crew n.p.: Nob c. a head.|
|Vulgus Britannicus I 13: But were, as Nob declares in spite, / By dint of Number always Right.|
|New Canting Dict. [as cit. c.1698].|
|Tom Thumb I iii: Do pop up your nob again, / And ’egad I’ll crack your crown.|
|‘A Bloody Battle between a Taylor and a Louse’ in Roxburghe Ballads (1891) VII:2 478: He hit him o’er the Nob, made the taylor sigh and sob.|
|Discoveries (1774) 43: Mill his Nobb; break his Head.|
|Homer Travestie (1764) I 138: I plainly see, thy nob, old grandsire, / Is wiser far than other noddles.|
|Tony Lumpkin in Town (1780) 28: You’re to paint fine large powder’d pretty wigs upon every head in this room, at [...] half a crown a nob.|
|Humorous Sketches 155: Here no despotic power shews / Oppression’s haughty nob.|
|Both Sides of the Gutter part II 11: His speech in his fist, and his spectacles on his nob.|
|‘Lord Altham’s Bull’ in Ireland Ninety Years Ago (1885) 89: Oh! den he laid about wid his nob.|
|‘Honest Bob’ in Jovial Songster 115: In gay fangl’d garments I never was drest, / Nor stuck up my nob in a coach.|
|‘This London Agrah!’ Wellington’s Laurels 8: A great hulking fellow [...] gave me a terrible thump on the nob.|
|Devil and the Lady (1930) III i 55: I’ll [...] uncork The claret of your nob, and dim your daylights, And make your ivories chatter in the tusk-box.|
|York Herald 3 May 4/3: You blasted old governor, and I’m blest if I don’t burst open your jolly nob.|
|(con. 1715) Jack Sheppard (1917) 89: A well-directed hit on the nob.|
|‘Parson And The Quaker’ Dublin Comic Songster 37: A jolly-faced parson once happened to pop, / Into Simon Pure’s plain dealing every day shop, / To look out for a hat that would just fit his nob.|
|Satirist & Sporting Chron. (Sydney) 4 Feb. 2/2: He aimed a dreadful chopper at Baily’s nob.|
|New Sprees of London 13: This crib is open three nights a week; the charge, a duce a nob, the other cribs a win a nob, and mangling done every night.|
|Sam Sly 23 Dec. 4/3: Dick put a couple of balls in his nob, / And purwailed on him to stop.|
|‘Leary Man’ in Vulgar Tongue (1857) 42: And when you go to spree about, / Let it always be your pride / To have a white tile on your nob / And a bulldog by your side.|
|Bell’s Life in Sydney 23 May 2/7: Jones planted his left very slightly on the side of Tom’s nob.|
|‘A New Litany on Reform’ in Curiosities of Street Lit. (1871) 78: Dicky, how is your poor nob?|
|Wanderings of a Vagabond 312: But a rough-and-tumble bully soon discovered himself at a great disadvantage, when faced by a shoulder-hitter who could score one on his nob once a minute and coolly step out of the reach of punishment himself.|
|Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday 8 May 7/2: And a sorter radiant halo / Gleamed brightly round his nob.|
|Bulletin (Sydney) 7 Feb. 11/1: Why, boys have hit you on the nob, / And challenged you out for a bob.|
|Sporting Times 30 Jan. 6/1: Not a common, pokey little party at nine d. a nob for tea and cresses [...] but real good business, cocky.|
|Times-Democrat (New Orleans, LA) 9 July 3/6: Prize Ring Slang [...] ‘Brain canister’, ‘lob,’ ‘nob,’ ‘lolly,’ the head.|
|Sporting Times 4 Jan. 3: Get this fact into your nob, / You’re a broker ‘on your uppers,’ I’m a broker ‘on the job’.‘Jack and Jim’|
|’Arry Ballads 40: Why shouldn’t her stage trotter-out take his perks too at so much a nob.|
|Signor Lippo frontispiece: Though poor you be, try spare a bob / To engrave these lines just o’er my nob.|
|Truth (Sydney) 22 Apr. 1/2: The Belgian Society dame, who poisoned her relatives at £2000 a nob.|
|Bulletin (Sydney) 6 Sept. 25/1: If you want to get an idea of the art of up-to-date hair-dressing, put in some time at any of the Melbourne bun-temples and there study the crown-pieces of the waitresses. [...] A black velvet bow is aslant the ‘nob’ of one, Jap. ornaments stab another pile, a white satin bow rides the under-crest of another thatch, and so, in various ways, the coiffure take shape.|
|Sporting Times 1 Aug. 1/4: What makes me fairly mad / Is the fact that I’ve been cut out by my own bald-nobbed grand-dad.‘Lure of the Lucre’|
|‘Buccaneers’ Seven Seas Sept. in Amer. Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) n.p.: The skipper lay with his nob in gore, / Where the scullion’s ax his cheek had shore.|
|‘A Woman’s Way’ in Chisholm (1951) 88: I’ve got too wise a nob / To be took in.|
|‘You Nazi Man’ [comic strip] in Tijuana Bibles (1997) 129: They’ll get their nobs chopped off.|
|Jives of Dr. Hepcat (1989) 7: Before I come on with the gas I’ve got to pick up on a barber because my rug needs much dusting after I get with the moss snatcher the nob will be in great shape.|
|World’s Toughest Prison 810: nob – The head.|
2. (UK Und.) a hat.
|Muses Delight 177: She’d nail’d a rum cove of tilter and nob, / But in filing his tatler was routed.‘A Cant Song’|
|‘Gallery of 140 Comicalities’ Bell’s Life in London 24 June 1/4: I say, Bill, I’ve got his ticker! – pull his precious nob! [hat].|
3. in fig. use, to mean first or front.
|Anecdotes of the Turf, the Chase etc. 184: At the nob of the party were Headstrong Bob, Drunken Jack, &c.|
4. a blow on the head.
|DSUE (1984) 798: from ca. 1810.|
5. (UK Und.) a young boy prisoner who bullies weaker ones.
|Poverty, Mendicity and Crime; Report 9: There are what are called ‘Nobs,’ perhaps little boys not higher than the table. I have seen them myself, take a broomstick and strike a boy over the arm, almost to break it, and the other dared not say a single word to him.|
6. a sovereign.
|Worcs. Chron. 12 Nov. 4/1: I shall let old Abraham, the Sheeney, have it at four punt and half a nob (4l. 10s.).|
|Nott. Eve. Post 30 Apr. 6/3: Lesser known nicknames for sovereigns [...] ‘chip’ [...] ‘canary,’ ‘nob,’ ‘old Mr Gory’ [...] and ‘shiner’.|
|DSUE (1984) 798: ca. 1840–90.|
7. the penis [var. of knob n. (1d)].
|‘Silver Nob’ in Randy Songster in Spedding & Watt (eds) I 189: Since by your knife I’ve lost my nob, / To please my wife it will be a hard job.|
|‘Wry-Mouth Bob And His Jolly Red Nob’ in Cuckold’s Nest 45: Wry-mouth Bob had a jolly red nob, / In a place – but you all know where.|
|‘The Bastard King of England’ in Bawdy Ballads XI: The Royal nob hung next his knees / Twelve inches long and a two inch span.|
|Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1960) 101: Rule two tanners / Two tanners make a bob, / King George nevernevernever / shaves his nob!‘Noah’s Ark’|
|Train to Hell 21: What a fucking nob-headed, shit-faced, bollock-brained, turd-shaped, prick-arsed, wanker-faced cunt!|
|Salesman 100: Strides down, head down, nob in the gob.|
8. (mainly Aus.) a go, an item.
|Rogue’s Progress (1966) 99: Our Joe has a dinner every Good Friday, at half-a-crown a nob.|
|Sun. Times (Perth) 5 Aug. 4/8: The mob from Bayley’s mine / Paid forty bob a nob to wash the barmaid’s blouse in wine.|
|Sun. Times (Perth) 7 Mar. 45/7: Like lambs that are thirsty we rushed / The bob-a-nob, muddy shy-poo.|
|Dryblower’s Verses 63: ‘Peanuts, apples, lemonade!’ / Yelled the gallery man of old / While his aitches round were sprayed / As the bob-a-nob he strolled.‘Nickin’ In’|
|Sheepmates 72: There’s too big of a mob fer one man to shout the house on his pat at a zac a pop, so you shove in a deaner a nob and flip the rats an’ mice, see?|
|Men Without Wives II i: Three quid a nob fer bullocks don’t run ter trips south.|
|Sun Herald (Sydney) 14 Feb. 52.3: Get your juicy meat pies - only a bob a nob.|
9. (Aus., also knob) a double-headed penny, esp. as used in the game of two-up, produced by filing down standard coins and welding them together.
|Bulletin (Sydney) 1 Aug. 12/2: There are a lot of speculations as to what [his] ‘grossest case of robbery that has ever taken place in the colony’ is. The general opinion in sporting circles is that ‘someone has rung in the nob on the man who had the kip and let the mug collar the plunder’.|
|Materials for a Dict. of Aus. Sl. [unpub. ms.] 163: The only fraud possible [in two-up] is the substitution of either a two-headed or two-tailed penny – a trick known as ‘ringing in’ a ‘nob’ or a ‘gray.’.|
|Sun. Times (Perth) 22 May 4/8: I don’t spin a nob or a grey.|
|Eve. Teleg. (Charters Towers) 29 Apr. 2/5: Besides they claim two-up is a game of skill that defies police interference, yet (anyone who has ever played the game knows the only skill attached to it is ‘ringing in’ a ‘knob’ (two-headed coin), or ‘grey’ (two tails), which is termed ‘spinning the planet,’ and is usually done from a slot underneath the kip.|
|Mirror (Sydney) 31 Aug. 8/2: The ‘nob,’ or double-headed penny, and the ‘shieler,’ or double-tailed ‘woman,’ are made by filing the coins down and soldering them together again. Such good jobs are made of them that often it is very hard to detect the join.|
|(con. WWI) Gloss. Sl. [...] in the A.I.F. 1921–1924 (rev. t/s) n.p.: nob. A double headed penny (‘two-up.’).|
|Popular Dict. Aus. Sl. 41: Knob, a double-headed penny.|
|Canoe in Aus. 187: Pennies supplied by ‘school’ to avoid ‘nobs’, ‘jacks’, double-sided heads, ‘greys’, double-sided tails.|
|Lingo 150: Early kips (also called lannets) are said to have been masterpieces of carpentry often with secret compartments used to hide double-headed (nob, jack) or double-tailed (gray) pennies.|
10. see knob n. (1c)
11. a socially inept person [fig. use of sense 7].
|Campus Sl. Oct. 4: nob – nerd.|
|Sl. and Sociability 59: Derogatory epithets abound, for example [...] jerk face, nob, punk, quimp.|
see knob artist under knob n.
see knob-jockey under knob n.
see head rails under head n.
|F&H].Land at Last vii: You look, tho’ you’ve got a paucity of nob-thatch, and what ’air you ’ave is gray [|
a wig-maker; a hat-maker, thus nob-thatching, wig making.
|Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue (3rd edn).|
|Tom and Jerry I v: Now you can make an assignation with some of our dashing straw-chippers and nob-thatchers in Burlinton Arcade.|
|Modern Flash Dict. 23: Nob thatcher – a hat maker.|
|Flash Mirror 20: F. Flet’s swell tile and nob-thatching warehouse, where is daily on sale [...] rummy sconsers, cannister kivers, and nut toppers of every sort.|
|Flash Dict. in Sinks of London Laid Open [as cit. 1835].|
|Vocabulum 49: Knob-thatcher. A wig-maker.|
(UK Und.) ingenuity.
|Vocab. of the Flash Lang. in McLachlan (1964) 236: [...] a person who contrives by nob-work, or ingenuity, to live an easy life, and appears to improve daily in circumstances, is said to do it up in good twig.|
|Anecdotes of the Turf, the Chase etc. 23: He kept a book, and his reader, respecting the nob-work at Doncaster meeting, had often proved an interesting subject to him.|
to keep calm.
|Bulletin (Sydney) 7 July 14/3: The male, being the active agent and perennially affectionate, has everything to gain (in the face of rivalry and female impulsiveness) by avoiding the female corns at all times and ‘keeping his nob squared’ until the scarce and treasured reciprocation sets in.|
|‘Whiskey River take my mind’ at ihtgwsm.com 25 Jun. [Internet] I’m not alcoholic I just like getting so fucked off my nob that I wake up in a farm somewhere with 12 black guys with rifles pointing shit in my face.| | {
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Monday Night Football Sideline Reporter Nearly Broke The Internet [VIDEO]
Sergio Dipp was the sideline reporter for ESPN's second game Monday night and his initial report nearly broke the internet.
The young reporter sounded a bit nervous and the internet was not afraid to point it out. Now, we should note here that English is Sergio's second language and his primary assignment is on ESPN Deportes.
Some have suggested this was the worst report ever in sports, I would challenge that. Still, this young reporter was nervous and I'm sure if he could do it over he would.
Remember, it's a lot easier to critique someone on their skills if you've never done it. So let's give the kid a break. | {
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Tuesday, December 21, 2010
I had the van out in the driveway with one of the big doors open. I was clearing it out and shifting things about. It was nice out and I was in no big hurry so at one point the van was just sitting in the drive unattended.
Nate raced by to pick up a package and out of the corner of his eye he saw a brownish flurry of motion by the van followed by a clunk. When he came back he peered into the van and saw a little bird keeled over on his seat. The poor thing was still breathing but on its side. With a stick Nate gently righted the bird and then returned indoors to report that there was a bird on his seat.
ARK. Again I went into voice mail, but the Audubon Society's page linking to ARK was very helpful. I gathered up a small towel and a large shoebox and went to the van to see what I could do for the little wood thrush.
The bird was looking a little better, It was sitting up with it's black eyes wide open. However it was still very addled and it was even trying to escape. I gently placed the towel over the bird and oh so carefully scooped it into the box. I settled the towel around the bird, placed the lid on the box, and brought the box into the garage where it was a wee bit warmer. An hour or so later an ARK volunteer called back and instructed me to just place the opened box under a bush (is there were no cats present) and let the poor thing sort itself out.
And so I did.
The bird was very polite and waited for me to fetch my camera before flitting out of the box. It went through the bush and landed on the other side. It stood there for quite some time, most likely getting its bearings and dealing with a wicked headache. I was able to approach it and again it allowed me to take a few pictures. We all left the little ting again and an hour later it flew off. A very satisfactory ending.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Sunday, December 19, 2010
I have no idea what inspired this contract she wrote up or if she really expected anyone one to sign, but I find it hilarious. Jake thought it was funny too and offered to sign it under some sort of random name. Rebecca didn't go along with that idea, but she did see the absurdity of the whole thing.
You have to admit that it's all very straight forward and there is even a monetary penalty if you fail to live up to the contract. I think that the fine is the best part of the whole thing.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Jake and Rebecca needed new winter boots, Nate needed a new pair of gloves, and Max- well he just went along for the ride because he's a bit young to be left home alone.
It took three stores to find two pairs of acceptable winter boots. It's always been a challenge to find snow gear down here in the Virginia, but it was particularly difficult due to the recent winter snow event that resulted in the shelves being bare.
The first store was a complete bust boot wise, but I did score on some crazy cheap wrapping paper and Nate found some gloves he liked. He also found a dozen other things he wanted. Max wanted to go to the bathroom and then needed water. We then shuffled outside and headed to the next store which was conveniently located next door.
At the second store Rebecca found a pair she really, really liked. The store was down to one box and miracle of miracles it was her size. As she slid the boots on she declared them to be sooooo comfortable. Yay! One pair found, another to go. Meanwhile Nate found more stuff he wanted. I herded everbody outside and into the car and at some point Rebecca scraped her knee.
A short car ride across two parking lots we arrived at store three. Rebecca was issued a band-aid and we all went inside. After extensive searching we found the one pair of boots in Jake's size (9 wide for those keeping score) and he actually liked them. Then Nate wanted more shoes and Max was again dying of thirst. At this point I was mentally done with the whole thing and just wanted to get out. After I paid for the boots I literally said "Now that you have touched everything in the store it is time to leave."
So it may have been more efficient to take all four shopping, but I won't be doing that again for a long time.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Our school system threw in the towel last night, but only after every other school district declared a snow day. For a few hours last night I had a very sad twelve year old mooning about the house until the word came that school was off.
The snow took its own sweet time getting here. When it did finally arrive, oh boy did the roads get greasy fast. I was out at 11 to pick up a few things and it was not particularly fun. At least all the other drivers recognized the treacherous conditions and we all kept he speed well below the speed limit. Once I got back home, that was it for the day. No more last minute dashes to the store.
As for the kids, they enjoyed their day off in grand style. Plenty of Wii, the annual checking out of the snow gear (snow pants were good, but we need two pairs of boots), and an epic snow battle throughout the yard and into the woods. The only way it could get better would be if they could get tomorrow off .
With a bit of sleet that appeared at the end of the storm and the freezing temperatures the roads tomorrow morning the roads will be horrific. The school district has, wisely decided to cancel school on Friday.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Now that marching season (Who knew there was an official marching season?) is over, the symphonic band goes into full gear. During the school year they have been learning various pieces of music in band class. Last Thursday the 9th, the Symphonic Band (of which Jake is a member) along with the Wind Symphony jointly performed for the 2010 Holiday Concert.
The Symphonic Band and the Wind Symphony played three pieces of music apiece. Unfortunately my camera's batteries gave up the ghost very early on in the concert. I was only able to record just part of the first piece, "Christmas of the Toreador," performed by Jake's band.
I thought they sounded great. My camera, however, did a poor job capturing the richness of he band's sound. Even my entourage of Nate, Max and Rebecca found the concert to be pretty good. Rebecca particularly enjoined Carol of the Bells, the third and final selection of Symphonic.
What made the whole concert really amazing was that the schools bad director had just gone on maternity leave about a month ago. She was able to attend the concert with he wee babe, but purely as a member of the audience. Her substitute very ably picked of the reins and kept the band going during her absence.
I can't wait for the next concert when the band director is back. It should be fantastic.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
It had been raining heavily all weekend and in the wee hours of the morning the temperature dropped and the rain quickly turned to snow. The branches have are almost artistically frosted with snow and the flakes lay thickly on the deck and lawn, much to our dogs annoyance.
The kids, however, were delighted. But the roads had remained clear and school was still on. It didn't even rate a two hour delay.
The next big surprise has been the temperature. Normally It will be well above freezing during the day and come late afternoon the snow will be pretty much gone. Not so this time, the mercury has stubornly refused to go above freezing and the nights have been dipping down to the upper teens. It feels more like New England than the Mid-Atlantic.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Sunday, December 12, 2010
So instead, we arranged for me to come back another time sans children.
It's been over 18 years since I've last been on a horse, so I was just a wee bit apprehensive. I knew we were going to start out slow and the mare I would be riding was quiet and well mannered, but I knew I was going to hurt. It was just a question of how much. When I used to ride I was fairly decent and was at the point where I really used my legs. I remembered the last time I went on hiatus (it was only 7 years that time) my legs felt like jelly and I literally staggered away. Now I was 20 years older and certainly less fit.
I sent a half hour in the ring alone with the my steed getting a feel for her and remembering how to put it all together. Then we were off for an almost hour long trail ride. I'm proud to say I was not dumped, I did not fall off, and I was invited back again. As for for how I felt post ride- pretty good. I did not have jelly legs and it took about half an hour for my calves to decide I was an evil, evil person. Fortunately two ibuprofens did the trick and I felt fine after a day and a half.
When I went back last Friday I had my own boots and helmet. After such a successful first outing I was willing to get my own gear. Amazingly it went even better. We did a bit more cantering and attempted a couple of jumps. My calves had gotten over their pique from the previous time and I did not need any sort of pain relief.
It's nice to know that I'm not nearly as decrepit as I feared and I get to do something that I really enjoy doing.
Friday, December 10, 2010
The book meme has been floating around on the internets for some time. Basically it's list of 100 books and you get to check those you have read. If I counted right I have read 32 of the 100 books, well above the challenge statement: " We believe most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here."
Which ones have you read?
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
6 The Bible Various
7 Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
8 1984 George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations Charles Dickens
11 Little Women Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare William Shakespeare
15 Rebecca Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch George Elio
21 Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald
23 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
24 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams
25 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky
26 Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
27 Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll
28 The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
29 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
30 David Copperfield Charles Dickens
31 Chronicles of Narnia CS Lewis
32 Emma Jane Austen
33 Persuasion Jane Austen
34 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe CS Lewis
35 The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini
36 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin Louis De Bernieres
37 Memoirs of a Geisha Arthur Golden
38 Winnie the Pooh AA Milne
39 Animal Farm George Orwell
40 The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown
41 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
42 A Prayer for Owen Meaney John Irving
43 The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
44 Anne of Green Gables LM Montgomery
45 Far From The Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy
46 The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood
47 Lord of the Flies William Golding
48 Atonement Ian McEwan
49 Life of Pi Yann Martel
50 Dune Frank Herbert
51 Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons
52 Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen
53 A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth
54 The Shadow of the Wind Carlos Ruiz Zafon
55 A Tale Of Two Cities Charles Dickens
56 Brave New World Aldous Huxley
57 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Mark Haddon
58 Love In The Time Of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez
59 Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck
60 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
61 The Secret History Donna Tartt
62 The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold
63 Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
64 On The Road Jack Kerouac
65 Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
66 Bridget Jones’s Diary Helen Fielding
67 Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie
68 Moby Dick Herman Melville
69 Oliver Twist Charles Dickens
70 Dracula Bram Stoker
71 The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett
72 Notes From A Small Island Bill Bryson
73 Ulysses James Joyce
74 The Inferno Dante
75 Swallows and Amazons Arthur Ransom
76 Germinal Emile Zol
77 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackera
78 Possession AS Byatt
79 A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens
80 Cloud Atlas David Mitchel
81 The Color Purple Alice Walker
82 The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro
83 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
84 A Fine Balance Rohinton Mistry
85 Charlotte’s Web EB White
86 The Five People You Meet In Heaven Mitch Albom
87 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
88 The Faraway Tree Collection Enid Blyton
89 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
90 The Little Prince Antoine De Saint-Exupery
91 The Wasp Factory Iain Banks
92 Watership Down Richard Adams
93 A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
94 A Town Like Alice Nevil Shute
95 The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas
96 Hamlet William Shakespeare
97 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl
98 Les Miserables Victor Hugo
9Bleak House Charles Dickens
100 Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh
Thursday, December 09, 2010
After I took this picture of Rebecca and Nate lighting the menorahs my camera promptly announced that its card was full and shut down.
And I was perfectly fine with that.
I knew I had he picture I wanted and I was in no hurry to clear out the card for more pictures. Sometimes getting the shot you want is easy.
Larry took this picture of Max while we were at a friend's house. This is the same friend that I mentioned before with all the horses. Max climbed up on the fence to wait for his turn on the pony.
I was pretty amazed that he was interested in riding. He was quite adamant at home that he was NOT going to do any sort of riding. He was going to go along and check out the place and that was it.
But... after watching Rebecca and, most importantly, Nate have fun riding the very well mannered pony, Max decided to give it a shot. After a few laps around the ring Max was eager to go up to a trot. When his turn was up he reluctantly slid off the pony's back.
With drums, however, he never experienced any sort of uncertainty. He wanted to play drums and was very happy when we found him a teacher. Max started lessons last spring with Josh, the son of a friend of ours.
Josh and Max really hit it off and during the beginning of the video below Josh tells how much he likes Max. The performance lasted about a half hour with our family, including Grandma and Grandpa, in attendance.
Max did a great job and had a terrific time. If you last to the the end of the video you can see when Josh and Max had a little jam session.
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
With three menorahs in action you almost didn't need to have the lights on. It was a beautiful sight to behold.
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Last night was the sixth night of Hanukkah. Three of my crew got to light them. It looks like we'll have to get another menorah so that everybody will get to light one.
Since it is my birthday I'm being brief, Weezie's is calling my name.
Monday, December 06, 2010
Originally uploaded by
The ground was too warm for any sort of significant or lasting coverage, but it was pretty while it lasted. Grandma asked the kids if any of them had been dreaming of a white Hanukkah. Sadly by the end of the day Sunday it was all gone.
We all ate to nearly bursting, listen to the Rabbi's daughter sing and a few of us even danced. It was a lovely way to spend the fifth night of Hanukkah.
Sunday, December 05, 2010
However, that morning I also went horse back riding for the first time in oh... 18 years. It was a lot of fun and I'm proud to say I lasted an hour and did not fall off the horse. Unfortunately my calves made it very plain to me that I was a very bad person and it took a big dose of ibuprofen to get them to quite down (Yay, better living through chemistry!) So I was just plain wiped out at the end of the day. It's a minor miracle that I even took pictures. But... I did take pictures and this is our bicycle chain menorah. I found it at a funky little store in Careytown called Ten Thousand Villages last year. It's simplicity called out to me. Coupled with my renewed interest in biking , I couldn't resist it.
Weezie's and the 7:15 show at the Byrd Theater.
The food, as always, was fabulous. The movie, The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hool, was less so. It wasn't a bad movie (the CGI was impressive), but it really butchered the books. At least we had Bob and the mighty Wurlitzer and only paid two bucks a head.
So as you can see we have been a bit busy with even more to post later.
Friday, December 03, 2010
I almost forgot to post this. Essentially I remembered while lighting the candles for tonight before the candles for Shabbat. I had a great big duh moment as I was laying out the candles and looking for the camera. At least I took the pictures!
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
The day before the grand festival of food known as Thanksgiving, we visited a friend in a neighboring county. She has invited us a few times and enticed with the fact that she has many horses and one very patient pony. It was a beautiful day Wednesday and the kids had the day off from school. So we loaded up the van to go see and ride the horses.
Rebecca was ecstatic. She loves horses and this would be her first time really riding a pony. She has been you on a pony before, but the pony rides at the county fair don't quite count.
We groomed and saddled the pony, just using a bareback pad- I wanted my children to really feel the pony and not mess around with stirrups. After a few laps around the ring with me at the pony's head I let her go solo. She even got to ride at a trot for a fair bit.
I proud to say she did a fine job and had a nice seat even at a trot. All those years of having her sit up straight and tall at the piano has paid off in unexpected ways.
As for her piano playing, well that's the real reason she's the artist this week.
The weekend before Thanksgiving was Rebecca's Fall Recital. She did a nice job with her piece, Night Owl by Rollin.
Unfortunately I was a little slow off the mark in taping and missed the opening bit of the piece. However, poor camera work aside, you still get a good sense of the piece.
I love her poise at the piano and the big grin on her face as she returns to her seat.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
The chocolate course came about because Meryl wanted to bring something for Thanksgiving the first time she came over a few years ago. I had the meal well in hand and anything else other than chocolate would be akin to bringing coals to Newcastle. It was a huge hit and is now a permanent part of our Thanksgiving.
This year she went one better by bringing the centerpiece in the photo. It's a melted snowman made of fudge surrounded by a ring of maple sugar candy (melted snow) and an outer ring of chocolate sponge (mud). It's great fun and we are slowly chipping away at it.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Today's menu is as follows:
Stuffing with and without Sausage
Clover Leaf Rolls
A Chocolate Course
Served with a choice of cider, soda, and Les Heretiques red table wine
I hope you all have a happy and very tasty Thanksgiving.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
We have a friend with numerous horses and she's been wanting us to come out and ride for some time. Today we were finally able to coordinate schedules. Rebecca was beside herself with excitement, the boys less so (in fact Jake the whole thing a miss and stayed home). I wasn't sure at first if Nate and Max would ride, but in the end I got all three up, ride a bit on their own and even go at a trot. The pony was incredibly good natured about three kids going on and off. It wasn't until the end that she would head to the gate, indicating that she was done and wanted to go to her stall.
At some point I had given Nate a small pad of paper that was roughly 2 inches by 3 inches. I think it's original purpose was to collect friends' email addresses and phone numbers. However it he has long strayed from the pads original use. Just the other day he presented to me two slips of paper with sketches of essentially the interior of our house.
The top drawing is of our living room with dog on the far right corner of the carpet (it's a bit easier to distinguish in the original sketch). Nate intended the picture to be a some what abstract study of the room. I see the abstract elements, but it is still very clearly the living room.
The lower picture is a side view of the stairs leading up to the second floor. Again, he was going for a more abstract feel. Meanwhile I found this picture to be a dead-on representation. Nate's drawing has come a long way during the past 6 months. He took art the first quarter of the school year and it looks like he learned quite a bit.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Jake was shocked at how late my lunch was and asked me why.
So, I told him what I did between seeing he and his siblings off in the morning and picking him up from school.
I walked the dogs.
Goofed off on the computer for 20 minutes.
Returned some dishes to a kind neighbor.
Rescued my beloved chickadee cookie tin (sans cookies) from the high school.
Drove to Meryl's and together we ran errands (it's far more fun to do boring stuff with a friend.
The errands consisted of:
Dropping off Jake's trumpet to be repaired.
Treat shopping at the For Love of Chocolate with bonus purchase next door of a new camera bag (Dell keeps eating my camera bags).
Getting wine for Thanksgiving at the wine and cheese store J. Emerson.
More adult beverage shopping at Corks & Kegs.
Hardcore veggie shopping (Hee- or rather Haricot vert shopping).
A preemptive Costco run, I refuse to go there the Wednesday before Thanksgiving onto the Monday after. Around Thanksgiving Costco becomes an evil, evil place.
And then a quick stop at Trader Joe's.
Whew, Meryl and I packed in a whole lot of errands, but now we are done with Thanksgiving shopping and don't have to set foot in a store until next week.
After I finished reeling off all my accomplishments Jake, clearing stunned by it all, told me I deserved to goof off for far more than 20 minutes and then asked if I do that every day.
My answer was fortunately no.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Sunday, November 21, 2010
The musicals bits all went well, except for the fact that the recital was too dang long (two hours vs the normal one hour- long story and I hope it's not repeated). Which brings us to the movie.
It was glorious.
Yes it's dark, but then the last book is dark. The characters stayed true to the book and only a few liberties were taken. The stopping point chosen was logical and left us pining for the second half. Mind you it's not short, clocking in at 2 1/2 hours. However the movie was well paced and edited, fully utilizing that extra half hour. You really don't mind the length of the movie. I can't wait for the second installment come this July.
Friday, November 19, 2010
It is not great cinema, but it is a wonderful flick. It rips along with a great sense of humor and is just the right length. I don't want to say much more, because odds are I would end up spoiling it. Basically it's a boy meets girl, boy has to defeat exs of girl to win her type of movie.
I didn't write about the movie earlier because I hadn't much to say. But, since then I have started poking around on the movie's website. The site is turning out to be a glorious time suck of Avatar creation and YouTube remixes. It's a nice way to wind down the week.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
The dark red is Japanese Maple and the more washed out red and orange is my waaaay past peak Burning Bush (winged euonymus). Then down below there are bright splashes of red berries amongst the green leaves of my Heavenly Bamboo.
Interestingly two of the above are considered invasive species and should have never been planted in the first place. Which is a pity with the Burning Bush. I've haven't had any problems with it and I'm fond of the bright red it produces in early fall. The Heavenly Bamboo, however, I could happily rip it all out if it weren't so well established and... well invasive.
As for the bright orange pumpkins on the steps, they should have been tossed last weekend. They make for a pretty picture, but the insides are nightmarish to say the least.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
This picture is from a while back. She was home sick with her brother and was so cute cuddled up in bed I had to take a picture. It was just a touch of bronchitis, so apart from the cough she didn't seem at all ill, but she wasn't cleared for school. We just kept things on the quiet side and in no time at all she was back to school, both religious (aka Hebrew or Sunday school) and secular.
She has been going to Sunday school, since Kindergarten. It's the third go around (you could even say fourth as well because of the whole twin thing) for our family so we pretty much know what to expect for each grade when it's Max and Rebecca's turn. Once a year there is special event called Gesher when the parents are requested to attend to school. There is a discussion group during the first have with the Rabbi, then students and parents come together with some sort of craft. During the third grade Gesher the students got to make their own mezuzah.
Rebecca, being the girlie girl that she is, went for the pinkish white and fuchsia. She carefully molded it around a wooden cloths-peg and made the top and bottom nail holes. Once she was done constructing the holder it was taken back to the kitchen to be baked.
It turned out rather well and, miracle of miracles, survived the ride home. All that was left for us to do was insert the blessings and affix it to her doorway. She was delighted when I finally did my half of the job yesterday.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Anyhoodle, John doesn't wait for permission, he just helps himself whenever the mood strikes him. At least he has only been eating one pumpkin and has left it pretty much in place. At this point, two weeks plus post carving, not much is left. It looks like a small explosion of pumpkin pulp near the bottom of the steps.
As for Dell, he now doesn't approve of John's wanton destruction of the pumpkins. After I took the picture above of John, Dell bounced down the steps and gave John the hairy eyeball and stood by the pumpkins.
John's reaction was to casually stroll away, as though Dell had nothing to do with his moving off. I don't know if you can see it, but this picture captured the moment when Dell was standing in rigid disapproval next to the pumpkin. John, meanwhile, is halfway across the yard.
I found the whole thing hilarious. Dell has such a sunny, happy go lucky demeanor 99% of the time. However my chewing him out over the pumpkin lid really made an impression on our goofy boy. He has appointed himself defender of the pumpkins.
At least when I'm around. It wouldn't surprise me if he snuck in a few bites when I'm not present.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Either way, sit back and enjoy.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
I am a parent that will cheerfully and enthusiastically cater to whatever your birthday cake desires are. If you can envision it and clearly articulate what you want, I'll give it a shot. Nate's "The Horror of Cake War" cake was deemed epic by his friends.
I will go along with an endless Nerf gun battle in the house as long as my bedroom, my husband's study and the dining room remain off limits. I can deal with the eleventy billion foam darts littered throughout the house. I will calmly walk through the fire fight and ignore the darts flying around me. To their credit not a single dart hit me.
But I can't deal with loud voices at 2:00 am, every light turned on downstairs at 3:30 am, and bizarre questions about birthday presents at 4:00. The last bit resulted in my telling Nate that in all likelihood he was never having a sleepover again.
The boys weren't particularly awful or ill-behaved (well except for the question bit at 4:00am and that was my own child), in fact the two guests are a lovely pair of polite and well mannered children. I'm just getting to old to deal with the random interruptions in my sleep and the endless noise. I treasure the peace and quiet that descends on this house every night at 10:00 pm.
Friday, November 12, 2010
As per Nate's request I made him yet another war themed birthday cake and I really outdid myself this year.
I carved out craters on the top and sides, made two tanks (one intact, the other broken and trapped in a crater, and had a rather bloody Cake Corp on top.
The cake was a huge hit at the party. It was declared epic and all the boys liked the the red sparkly gel icing I applied generously to the downed soldiers. If you click on the picture it will take you to my Flickr page and the complete photo-set.
Bloody and gruesome is what 11 to 12 year old boys loved to have on their birthday cakes.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
My father served in WWII on a mine sweeper in the Pacific. This is one of the few photographs I have of him in uniform. He is on the front stoop with his Aunt and Uncle in his Navy uniform.
He looks so young, he had just turned 26 years old if it's the later part of March. And this was years before he even met my mother.
So once again thank you for all your sacrifices in keeping this nation safe and free.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I have to employ a form of ambush photography to capture my eldest child. It's not so much camera shyness as it is my son having an uncontrollable urge to make odd faces when a camera is pointed in his direction. The four pictures before this one consisted of him hiding behind his DS whatever gobbledygook that follows, a strange twisted open mouth, a squinty eyed duck face and one blurry action shot. Then I just sat near him and waited and got this fairly decent picture of him. He's looking down which makes it seem as though his eyes are closed, but really they are open.
The drawings in question are from Jake's technical drawing class in High School. I still can't get over the fact that I'm the mother of a high schooler. I'll always think of myself as riding heard on grade schoolers. Anyhoodle, he wanted to take Latin, but it did not fit in his schedule so he decided to take Basic Technical Drawing instead.
He has been having a great time in class. It is right up his alley, minutely examining things and getting them down just right. So far he is finding the class to be an easy A, a nice respite with an all honors course load. The whole class seems to be fairly effortless for him with the exception of one extra credit assignment, a film reel. He hasn't quite sussed out the best way to draw it. As he put it, it's all circles within circles and some oddball shapes thrown in for good measure. He'll get sooner or later, I have no doubt about that.
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
I have always viewed the word git to be a rather negative descriptor. The phrase "stupid git" springs to mind.
I even went so far as to look up the word. According to the dictionary a git is a worthless or foolish person, British origin.
So maybe I'm mistaken that it is part of the common lexicon. Possibly the result of watching far to much Monty Python in my formative years.
Then again Larry, who had a far less Anglophilic upbringing (My family maybe 13th generation American but we still cling to the oddest aspects of our UK heritage. Seriously, how on earth have we remained English, Scottish and Welsh? My generation is the first one to really venture out in the gene pool.), agreed it was the oddest choice in business names.
So what do y'all of you think of this?
Monday, November 08, 2010
Sunday, November 07, 2010
He is very quick to learn and eager to play, far more so than he ever was with piano (but ah, the groundwork had been laid). If fact his teacher is greatly impressed by his progress each week.
Unfortunately he only plays one recognizable tune, the classic coda from Black Sabbath's Iron Man. Which is not a bad song, but when you hear it over and over- day in and day out it gets a little tedious. I'm glad he is so enthusiastic to practice, I just wish there was a bit more variety.
Friday, November 05, 2010
Alright then. I've never made oatmeal cookies before, but I'm willing to give it a go. I've never been a big fan of oatmeal cookies and for that I blame the ubiquitous raisin. Since I was making them and my friend had requested no raisins I had a good feeling about the cookies.
I selected the The Best Cookie of 1900-1910 Oatmeal Drop Cookies from my Betty Crocker Cookie Book with of course various modifications by me.
1/2 cup shorteningThe cookies were scrumptious. Moist and chewy with a wonderful depth of flavor from the molasses and the chocolate. They were a big hit with the family and they are almost gone. I think the only reason any are left is that I made brownies a few days earlier. Oh and all the candy from Halloween too. I will definitely be making these again.
1 1/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup molasses
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
2 cups rolled oats
1 1/4 cup chocolate chips*
(*original recipe called for 1/2 cup chopped nuts and 1 cup raisins instead of the chocolate chips. I dislike both and my friend requested oatmeal chocolate chip)
Heat oven to 400 F
Mix shortening, sugar, eggs, and molasses thoroughly. Measure flour by dipping method or by sifting. Stir dry ingredients together; blend in. Stir in oats and chocolate chips (or raisins and nuts if you go that way). Drop dough by rounded teaspoonfuls about 2" apart on a lightly greased baking sheet (oops I forgot to do that and it really wasn't a problem). Bake 8 to 10 minutes, or until lightly browned. Cool on a wire rack and then enjoy!
Thursday, November 04, 2010
Doesn't it look delicious?
I thought so and took a picture of it when I made it way back in August.
This was what dinner was supposed to look like tonight. We were having make your own pizza night. However our oven had different plans.
It initially heated up to almost 450. Then, unbeknown to me, the bottom heating element gave up the ghost. I was happily watching the cheese brown unaware of the fact that the crust below really wasn't cooking. It wasn't until I started pulling pizzas from the oven that I discovered the true state of affairs.
It was then a mad scramble to figure out how to cook the pizza without a fully functional oven. In the end I decided to place the metal pans directly on the cook top and finish off the pizzas that way.
It was far from ideal, but it did work. The pizzas were a mess; cheese sliding off and a bit over done, the bottom of the crust a bit burnt in places. But, they were edible.
So it looks like I'll be buying a new heating element tomorrow.
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Until now I've been leery of setting them all loose with knives. Jake has been carving a little bit for the past couple of years, Nate even less so. I had some metal cookie cutters that were designed for walloping into a pumpkin and knocking out a shape. The forms came in a variety of shapes and sizes, but were honestly a real pain to use. They would get stuck in the rind of the pumpkin and would inevitably get battered and squished. It was a good idea, but was lacking in execution ( the biggest drawback to the kit was the rubber mallet. It was easily the smelliest tool I have ever encountered).
Going clockwise starting from the upper left we have Rebecca's very traditional one tooth pumpkin. It's such a happy looking face. I love how the eyes are just a little bit cockeyed, it adds to the overall charm.
Next we have Max's flower, bat and moon. He always makes tiny detailed drawings and this pumpkin was no exception. He did a beautiful job drawing and craving his creation.
On the lower right is Jake's grumpy old man. Like Rebecca's it is a bit more traditional. Jake's observation about it, after he was done carving, was that the pumpkin kind of looked like an old guy that would yell out Hey kids! Get off my Lawn!" So of course this was the pumpkin we put at the end of the driveway to bring in trick or treaters.
Last up we have Nate's zombies. I apologize for the poor quality of the picture. I had a hard time setting up to take this pumpkin's picture. The carving, like Max's, is a tableau of zombies under a cresent moon and stars. He had a hard time carving the stars and ended up with a sort of triangular shape. I think he did a great job and the pumpkin looked great once it was lit up.
All four had a great time drawing their designs on the pumpkins and then cutting them out. The best part for me, however, was that nobody sliced themselves with the knives. It was a sucess and I forsee more carving in the future.
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
This year it's a bit washed out from the bright sunlight in my backyard. However, rain or bright sunshine I vote. It's my civic duty and I take it very seriously.
Monday, November 01, 2010
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
My plan is to hollow them out tomorrow after we are all done with soccer. I think I'll be willing to carve a few as well. We'll see how it goes. My main concern is the weather, as long as it doesn't rain I'll be happy. So far it like it will be cool and clear.
Now I just have to find my jumbo bag of tea lights...
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Theoretically the top cushion should be against the back of the dog couch, but John prefers to have it stacked top of the bottom cushion. He usually pulls it back down within an hour of my straightening it up into it's "official" position. So at this point I don't bother unless we have company.
Nate noticed Dell in the dog couch the other day and took this picture. We both found to rather funny that Dell's head was the only thing you could see. Normally he and John will be on top of the cushions, each dog curled up in his respective spot. But not this time, Dell apparently wanted to be inside the cushions.
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An effort to launch the impeachment of Virginia's top Black elected official was set aside on Monday and Gov. Ralph Northam declared a new "race and equity" agenda for the rest of his tenure, saying he really believes "that things happen for a reason."
Revelations of racist behavior and allegations of sexual assault that happened years ago have engulfed Northam, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and Attorney General Mark Herring. It increasingly appears that all three will survive the immediate firestorm, but with deep wounds that threaten their political clout.
Northam and Herring are still struggling to recover after acknowledging that they each once wore blackface as young men in the 1980s. When it appeared Fairfax might take over as governor, two women came forward accusing him of sexual assault in the 2000s. Fairfax vehemently denied it, calling on the FBI to investigate.
Northam, for his part, said in an interview broadcast Monday on "CBS This Morning" that he now understands that he "was born into white privilege," which is why he will dedicate his remaining tenure to policies aimed at helping his Black constituents.
"I really believe that things happen for a reason," Northam said. "I will focus on race and equity. That's something that, for the next three years, is going to be my commitment to Virginia. And I really think we can make impactful changes."
All three men are facing a reckoning over events that happened long before they took office, but it's a full-blown crisis for the Democratic Party, which counts on the support of Black voters and has taken an almost zero-tolerance approach to sexual misconduct in the #MeToo era.
A housecleaning could be costly: The GOP already controls Virginia's legislature, and if all three resign, Republican state House Speaker Kirk Cox would become Virginia's governor. Democrats are still hoping to flip the General Assembly in legislative elections this year.
Democratic Del. Patrick Hope tweeted early Monday that he got "an enormous amount of sincere and thoughtful feedback" from colleagues after circulating a draft of his impeachment bill, and that he sees that "additional conversations ... need to take place before anything is filed."
Lawmakers still might launch some sort of investigation of Fairfax, even if impeachment isn't immediately in the cards. Meredith Watson and Vanessa Tyson have accused him of sexual assault and offered to testify.
The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they are victims of sexual assault, but both women have come forward voluntarily.
Watson alleges Fairfax raped her while they were students at Duke University in 2000. Tyson, a California college professor, accused Fairfax of forcing her to perform oral sex on him at a Boston hotel in 2004.
Fairfax denies ever sexually assaulting anyone.
"Frankly, we really want any entity with comprehensive investigative power to thoroughly look into these accusations," Fairfax spokeswoman Lauren Burke said. "There needs to be verification of basic facts about these allegations. It feels like something bigger is going on here."
Meanwhile, Fairfax has made it clear he won't resign.
"Before Donald Trump, I would say with this kind of stuff, it's impossible for a person to just hang on, put their head down and ignore it," said Quentin Kidd, a political science professor at Christopher Newport University. "Post-Donald Trump, I think what elected officials are willing to do has changed in some ways. So can he hang on? Certainly he can hang on."
If Fairfax were to leave, it's unclear who could replace him. Northam may try to appoint a Democrat, while Republicans could mount a legal challenge with the goal of getting Senate Pro Tem Steve Newman to serve as both a voting senator and temporary lieutenant governor.
Herring would be next in line if both Northam and Fairfax were to leave office, and he initially made a forceful call for Northam to step down, but then he too acknowledged wearing blackface at a party in 1980, opening himself to simultaneous charges of racism, opportunism and hypocrisy.
In this latest interview, Northam provided a more complete explanation of his statements that set off this whole crisis, when he reacted to the discovery of a photo on his 1984 medical school yearbook page showing one man wearing blackface next to another person in a Ku Klux Klan hood and robe. Northam initially said he was in the photo; then he denied it, while saying he did wear blackface to a dance party that same year.
Northam told "CBS This Morning" he mistakenly took responsibility for the picture because had never seen the image before.
"When you're in a state of shock like I was, we don't always think as clearly as we should," said Northam, who worked for years as a pediatric neurologist before entering politics.
But "when I stepped back and looked at it, I just said I know it's not me in the Klan outfit. And I started looking in the picture of the individual with blackface. I said that's not me either," he said.
Northam told CBS it's up to his fellow leaders to decide whether they want to remain on the job. He said he supports Fairfax's call for an investigation, and as for Herring, "just like me, he has grown." | {
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Can youth in Tanzania challenge the established regime?In October 2015 Tanzania underwent historical and highly-competitive elections. Can the young generation challenge a system of power that has been in place since the 1960s?
Good governance training at Hawassa UniversityILPI's senior advisors Dr. Dereje Feyissa and Aklilu Tetemke gave good governance training to members of the academic community of Hawassa University on January 3, 2016.
ILPI conducts the second round training for Ethiopia MFAILPI successfully conducted the second round training on capacity building in foreign policy analysis to thirty staffs of the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Ambassador Hotel in Addis Ababa from December 14-15, 2015.
ILPI conducts the first MFA training in AddisILPI successfully conducted a training on capacity building in foreign/policy analysis to twenty eight staffs of the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Ambassador Hotel in Addis Ababa from November 17-19, 2015. | {
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Ahead of World No Tobacco Day on 31st May, Queensland Health has launched a campaign appealing to the vanity of female smokers. The Future is Not Pretty if you Smoke campaign shows the impact of smoking on your physical appearance – which accelerates the physical signs of aging by 10-20 years.
Tobacco smoke contains more than 4,000 chemicals, restricting blood flow through the capillaries and depriving your skin of oxygen and nutrients. The chemicals in tobacco smoke damage the fibres in the skin which leads to wrinkles, sagging of the eye-lids, bags under the eyes and premature aging on the face and other parts of the body including breast sagging.
QLD Health says a smoker’s face ages by 14 years for every 10 years of smoking. The appearance of deeply wrinkled skin around the eyes (crow’s feet) and mouth occur by puckering when drawing on a cigarette and squinting in reaction to the cigarette smoke. Smoking reduces the body’s store of vitamin A which provides protection from skin damage and causes the dull yellow-grey complexion clearly evident on the faces of all long-term smokers.
It is commonly known that prolonged smoking causes bad breath, stained teeth and discolouration of fingers and fingernails on the hand used to hold cigarettes. But what isn’t commonly known is that the chemicals in cigarette smoke break-down hair cells leading to hair damage and can also result in the swollen gums that can cause teeth to fall out.
Women also need to be aware that smoking has been linked to the early onset of menopause.
In an effort to appeal to younger women who smoke, QLD Health has signed former Miss Universe Australia Rachael Finch as a campaign ambassador. Rachael agreed to be photographed without make-up and the image photo-shopped to give her the appearance of a young woman who smokes.
“It’s no secret that leading a healthy and active life is something that I live by both for myself and my family. This campaign for Queensland Health is focused on encouraging young women to think twice about smoking, and as a young woman, I am only too happy to be a part of something which encourages positive change,” said Rachael.
“If considering the effects on one’s physical appearance caused by smoking is another motivating factor for young women to give up smoking, then I’m all for encouraging women to think about the overall affects to their entire health and wellbeing.”
For more information visit www.qld.gov.au/quit | {
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Host your own eco-arts workshop in your classroom using our Teachers Workshop Pack - including learning objectives, equipment lists, curriculum links and discussion topics
Download our Recycling Rangers leaflet to find out how you can inspire young children to become "green" ambassadors
See how our eco-arts plastic workshops link to the National Curriculum and find additional classroom activities here
Learn how to make an angelfish from a milk bottle with our easy step-by-step instructions
Want to know how to incorporate other marine issues into your lesson plans? Check out the Marine Conservation Society Cool Seas website for more brilliant ideas!
Ideas of your own
Download and print one of our posters to educate on the issue of plastic pollution:
Help spread our message by downloading and using our fantastic wallpapers. Click on the images below to download your own!
Download our education resource pack by clicking on the images below and be inspired to join the fight against plastic pollution!
Included is key information on plastic pollution in the oceans, fun activities to try out in the classroom or at home, easy-to-follow ideas for reducing your plastic footprint and curriculum links for lesson planning.
If you want to learn how to deliver our bespoke marine conservation workshop across your informal or formal learning networks, click on the button below to be directed to our training page.
Click the buttons for our India and UAE branch education resources
Teacher's Resource Pack Reference List - Useful to lookup plastic pollution related facts and sources of further information | {
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Dream a Little Dream by Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Publisher: Harper Collins
Publication Date: October 13th 2009
Add It: Goodreads
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A Desperate Young Mother
Rachel Stone's bad luck has taken a turn for the worse. With an empty wallet, a car's that's spilling smoke, and a five-year-old son to support, she's come home to a town that hates her. But this determined young widow with a scandalous past has learned how to be a fighter. And she'll do anything to keep her child safe—even take on. . .
A man With No Heart
Gabe Bonner wants to be left alone, especially by the beautiful outcast who's invaded his property. She has a ton of attitude, a talent for trouble, and a child who brings back bad memories. Yet Rachel's feisty spirit might just be heaven-sent to save a tough, stubborn man.
Dare To Dream
Welcome to Salvation, North Carolina—where a man who's forgotten what tenderness means meets a woman with nothing to lose. here two endearing lovers will set off on a funny, touching journey of the heart. . .to a place where dreams just might come true.
*****As part of our 10 year anniversary celebration, we’ll be re-posting old reviews that make us cringe, laugh or sigh all over again.
I meant to have this written as part of our Susan Elizabeth Phillips Author Spotlight last month, but I didn’t get around to writing it. Dream a Little Dream is one of my favorite SEP novels. It’s hands down my favorite of the Chicago Stars/Bonner Brothers series.
Gabe Bonner lost his wife and son in a tragic car accident and for the past two years he’s been in a state of deep mourning. He’s been coasting through life, numb and emotionless, waiting for the day when it all will end. But Rachel Stone changes all that the day she shows up at his drive-in; dirty, hungry and desperate to save herself and her son Edward. He should be repulsed by her, but he isn’t. He’s drawn to her in a way he hates. She cracks the icy ball that’s surrounding his heart.
Rachel Stone has returned to the last place on Earth she ever wanted to see again, Salvation, North Carolina. 5 years ago she and her husband G. Dwayne Snopes were the hope and pride of Salvation, a televangelist couple to rival even the most sincere and promising of them. But all that ended the night G. Dwayne disappeared with the life savings of the people of Salvation, bringing shame and scandal to the once prosperous town. Now she’s back, determined to find the stash Dwayne left behind, desperate to save the future of her much beloved son.
At times this novel is hard to read, especially in the beginning when Rachel and Gabe meet. They’re both desperate and broken, though for different reasons and with different ways of dealing with their pain. One of the most emotional things I’ve ever read is when Rachel begs Gabe for a job. The first few chapters of this book are hard to get through, but they showcase perfectly just how far both characters have fallen.
Eventually Rachel and Gabe form a tight bond, though both are reluctant to acknowledge it. The town shuns Rachel, and her house and car are vandalized. Gabe takes on the role of protector, though even he can’t understand why. Despite their change in feelings for one another, they both know they have no future together. Especially since Gabe can’t stand Edward, Rachel’s son.
I loved the strength Rachel showed. It wasn’t easy for her to continue on each day, especially in the beginning, but she did what needed to be done. I would have to say she’s probably one of my favorite SEP heroines. She’s practical and tough, with a smart mouth and a strong will to survive. What’s not to love?
My heart ached for Gabe. I wanted to wrap him in cotton and protect him from the world. I loved that Rachel was the only one who saw him for what he was, and was willing to push him in the direction he needed to go.
Even though this is a darker novel, there are moments of unexpected tenderness and humor. I loved that even though the town hated Rachel, none of them took it out on her son. Everyone, from the townsfolk to the Bonner brothers, was kind to Edward. Well, except for Gabe.
The secondary romance between Ethan Bonner and Kristy Brown, his church secretary, was sweet. It provided relief from the darker tone of the rest of the novel.
Dream a Little Dream is heartwrenching and emotionally compelling. I couldn’t put it down, even when I could barely see the pages through my tears.
5 out of 5 | {
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Mrs Kay (Jean Haywood) runs a remedial class for illiterate children. Along with the long-suffering Mr Briggs (Alun Armstrong) and two younger teachers – Susan (Elizabeth Estensen) and Colin (Lennox Greaves) – she escorts her unruly mob on a day trip from Liverpool to Conwy Castle in North Wales. For Mr Briggs, it’s a day of considerable stress ….
Drawing on his own experiences of school trips (both as a teacher and a child) Our Day Out is a typically perceptive slice of drama from Willy Russell. Originally broadcast in December 1977 as part of the Play of the Week strand, it obviously struck an immediate chord with the audience as it was swiftly repeated just a few months later (this time as a Play For Today).
Although he wrote the play in just four days, it was a subject he’d been mulling over for some considerable time. Later turned into a musical, the original BBC play is one which Russell still regards with fondness today. “The performances are exquisite. Shot on 16mm in just three weeks by a first time director working with a largely untrained cast it just seemed to be one of those charmed ventures in which everything just fell into place”.
Mrs Kay and Mr Briggs are two very different types of teacher – she’s the free and easy type whilst he’s stern and controlling. Which method works best? Mr Briggs maintains that you need discipline in order to make any headway in teaching these types of children but Mrs Kay – in a late set-piece monologue – is totally dismissive of this attitude. Society at large, she maintains, doesn’t want them schooled – after all, if they were then where would the next generation of factory fodder come from?
This is the most overtly political point in a play where the thorny topic of inner-city deprivation is never far from the surface. The difference between the streets of Liverpool (shown here in all their grimy 1970’s glory) and the countryside of Wales is marked, especially since it’s made plain than most of the children have never gone further than Birkenhead before. There’s a yearning melancholy on display from some of them which is heartbreaking – they want a better life, but there’s a sense that the system just won’t allow it.
The gulf in acting experience between the adult cast and the children is one of the most intriguing things about Our Day Out. None of the children had acted before (and most wouldn’t again) which gives their performances a very natural and unaffected air. To balance this, you have experienced actors such as Jean Haywood and Alun Armstrong in the central roles as well as decent cameos from the likes of George Malpas, Robert Gillespie and Peter Tilbury.
En route to the castle, they stop off twice – first at a motorway cafe and then at a zoo. It does beggar belief that both times Mr Briggs would let them roam unsupervised – with the result that they pilfer all the sweets from the cafe and later attempt to steal half the zoo! This latter moment is high on comic value but low on credibility. However it allows Armstrong (who is excellent throughout) a moment of high intensity as he roundly berates the children.
As you might expect, he eventually begins to relent and it’s his clifftop encounter with young Carol (Julie Jones) which is key. Jones tackles the substantial role of Carol with such gusto that it’s a real shame she didn’t continue acting. Desperate to stay in Wales rather than return to her miserable existence in Liverpool, there follows a tense scene where Mr Briggs attempts to talk her back from the cliff edge. This he does and the emotional connection he makes with her helps him to finally unbend.
A late visit to the funfair – his idea – ends the day on a happier note, but as the coach returns to Liverpool it’s easy to see Mr Briggs’ relaxed spirit slowly dissipating. Will he modify his approach in future or simply revert to his stern ways once they’re back at school? This is left unresolved, but there’s one key moment which suggests that the latter course is the most likely.
Deftly juggling comedy with more serious themes, Our Day Out is a gem of a play which at 67 minutes doesn’t outstay its welcome. Alun Armstrong is outstanding, but none of the cast disappoint and it’s the sort of play which should have considerable replay value.
Our Day Out is released by Simply Media on the 1st of October 2018, RRP £9.99. It can be ordered directly from Simply here (quoting ARCHIVE10 will apply a 10% discount). | {
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Akse P19’s Photo Realistic Street Art
Akse P19 (pronounced axe) has become one of Manchester’s most prominent street artists in recent years. The popularity of his work has come about for two main reasons. First, it’s his style: instead of illegible lettering, or simplistic stencils, Akse produces photorealistic murals on a large scale that can’t help but catch your eye.
The second thing that has boosted his popularity is his subject matter: characters from popular culture that perfectly capture the zeitgeist. He has painted memorial pieces dedicated to musicians such as David Bowie and Amy Winehouse. Recently Akse captured headlines for his portrait of Arya Stark. He has also done a series on movie psychopaths that included James Gandolfini from The Sopranos, Kevin Spacey from House of Cards, and Christian Bale from American Psycho. He paints from the TV shows and films he loves. When he did a series of portraits from Breaking Bad, just as season five was released, he had no idea how popular the show was until photos of his work went viral.
Who is this enigmatic artist painting the streets of Manchester and beyond? Akse was born in Paris to parents of Vietnamese origin (Vietnam was colonised by the French in the late 1880s). In the early ’90s, he studied chemistry and eventually achieved a PhD in the subject, which perhaps explains his love of Breaking Bad. While studying he took part in the Erasmus project, which brought him to Britain. He was attracted to Manchester because of “the vibe, the energy, the people, the community” according to an interview he did in 2017. He began painting in 1992 and the following year joined the P19 crew. He moved to Manchester permanently in 1997.
Now in his late 30s, Akse is continuing to create stunning works of art in between the demands of a full-time science career and having two young children. Fatherhood has given him a new passion beyond chemistry and film. One of his ongoing art projects is to paint a mural every year of his eldest son. Akse hopes to paint all over the world, including in Vietnam. | {
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Admissions and Referral Process
The Children’s Hospital School provides education to children and young people who are either hospital in-patients, pupils unable to return to a mainstream or special school within 15 school days of a hospital admission or pupils who are not able to attend their school because of their medical needs. A placement at The Children’s Hospital School is normally temporary, time limited, and with an anticipated return to mainstream, special or post-16 provision.
Due to the mixed and complex needs of the pupils at this school, referrals for pupils excluded or in danger of exclusion for presenting aggressive behaviours should be made to agencies other than The Children’s Hospital.
This policy applies to all those pupils who are so medically unfit that they are unable to attend school, those who are physically ill or injured, and those with mental health problems. Particular care is needed to ensure that there is adequate provision for pupils suffering from medically diagnosed mental illness which prevents them from attending school. This includes pupils with mental illness, anxieties, depression, and/or school phobia, including separation anxiety and school refusal associated with clinical depression.
It is essential that a referral to The Children’s Hospital School is part of an integrated support plan for a pupil which is underpinned by the work of all involved professionals, and which has clear goals or outcomes for a return to school or other provision.
Where referrals to The Children’s Hospital School are made other than by the pupil's own school, the Referrals Team will seek to gain a consensus of all involved agencies, including the school, regarding the planned programme and expected outcome. Acceptance of referrals is dependent upon the pupil's needs meeting the school's referral criteria. If the placement is not utilised, or is deemed inappropriate, the place will be closed. In this event, the referrers and home school will be notified.
Pupils with physical medical problems which prevent school attendance:
Teaching will normally be provided where the pupil's anticipated absence will be of 15 days duration or longer. The type and extent of provision made is at the discretion of the Referral Team.
Pupils with mental health difficulties which prevent school attendance:
Such pupils may include those presenting with eating disorders, anxiety and depression - possibly with actual, or threat of, self-harm, school refusal and obsessive behaviours.
It is expected that referrals of pupils whose main presenting difficulty is psychiatric or mental health difficulty would be supported by:
- Clear evidence of any difficulty experienced.
- Any information regarding work already carried out by the school, family, and other agencies to remedy the problem.
- An indication of consensus amongst involved professionals, including a consultant psychiatrist or psychologist, that a referral to the Children's Hospital School is likely to be the most effective way forward.
- An agreement to continuing support for the pupil and family by the referring agency, and planned outcomes for the placement.
Assessment placements (part-time or full-time) will be reviewed after 4 or 10 weeks. It must be noted that such placements are time limited, with an expected date for a return to the referring school agreed at the outset, and a risk assessment must be completed.
A child or young person who is unable to attend school because of medical needs should have their educational needs identified and receive educational support quickly and effectively.
Pupils with degenerative medical conditions may require special consideration
- Some conditions are rapidly progressive – progress runs counter to peer group, and appropriate and accessible activities are needed
- It is important to maintain educational input
- Regular and frequent reviews are called for
- Closer liaison is required owing to greater medical need
- Are covered by the Disability and Discrimination Act
Return to school:
- Most pupils who have been in hospital or have a serious illness which requires a period of convalescence return to school without any problem
- Some children do find it difficult to return to their own school, particularly those children who have had mental health problems. The receiving school should expect to make additional appropriate arrangements to support the transition
- Forward planning and effective collaboration can facilitate a successful reintegration to school
- Effective and flexible collaboration between Local Authorities, the child's school, medical personnel, allied health professionals, parents/carers, and other agencies e.g. the Connexions Service, is crucial to the continuity of high educational provision for children and young people with medical needs and successful re-entry into school or college.
Click here for the service level agreement for Leicester City children (Willow Bank and Outreach)
Click here for the service level agreement for Leicestershire County children (Willow Bank)
Click here for the service level agreement for Rutland children (Willow Bank) | {
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If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve probably realized I’ve been home for a bit. Home for me is Colorado, USA. Colorado’s one of the hottest states in the U.S. at the moment; one of the top places young people want to move. The migration is major, bringing both skilled and unskilled workers in large numbers to my home.
I can’t blame them; as I tell my friends and family when they ask about my travels, I’ve now seen a lot of places around the world. And the more places I see, the more convinced I am that Colorado is one of the better ones.
Here’s why I believe that: | {
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At a basic level, pilgrimage is about following a path. It provides a break from the routine, an opportunity to expand horizons, – and a chance to reassess priorities. Pilgrimage is about about noticing things, taking in the language of a place, its history, its dynamics, its culture; tuning in to the essence of things, a way of connecting.
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, probably most famous for his short poem “God’s Grandeur”, used two terms in his writing, “inscape” and “instress”. By “inscape” he means a complex of characteristics that gives a thing its uniqueness and that differentiates it from other things; and “instress” the force of being, which holds the inscape, and carries it whole into the mind of the beholder.
Wordsworth experienced a similar inscape which had spiritual or mystical significance for him. These poets from the Romantic era saw nature in its individuality, as opposed to the scientific approach of the eighteenth century, which had been to classify and generalise.
In his book I and Thou, the philosopher Martin Buber says that when considering a tree, one cannot avoid degrading it to the status of a mere object, by naming its species and counting its number, but then he says,
“It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is no longer It.”[ Buber, Martin, I and Thou, trans., Ronald Gregor Smith, pp. 7-8]
The whole of nature is a ‘thou’, a mirror of the human existence, silently reflecting our experience of being alive, forcing us to rethink our ideas about the physical world. By walking through a meadow, or beside a river, or through a woodland we can not only appreciate the science of the landscape, and but also its poetics.
Attentiveness deepens our sense of the order, balance, harmony and grace of creation. In turn this develops our human capacities for intimacy, trust and relationship. Just as a great painting may hold us in conversation, or a piece of music touch our soul, so a journey of any kind in the outdoors can give us a glimpse, an insight, into the silent and invisible life that points to something more significant.
Annie Dillard’s spiritual autobiography, Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek is a theological and natural science study of a year in a Virginia valley. She is riveted by profligate, extravagant nature, and the law of kill or be killed, that we tend to ignore when we are walking in the countryside. But at the same time nature invites her to make connections in personal ways and she concludes her book by saying,
“The giant water bug ate the world. And like Billy Bray I go on my way, and my left foot says ‘Glory,’ and my right foot says ‘Amen’: in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise.”[ Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, (Pan Books, London, 1976) p.237]
Science comes from the Latin ‘scientia’, which refers to any systematic body of organised knowledge. But science, as we know it today, is generally taken to mean just the natural sciences. Theology, another systematic body of organised knowledge was once termed ‘the queen of sciences’. It contributed to the emergence of modern science. Scientia is a pilgrimage of discovery and scientists are pilgrims in much the same way that people of faith are. The realms that some scientists are operating in today is getting closer to metaphysics than physics.
The father of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, became something of a guru with his quasi-mystical understand of his field.The science writer Philip Ball has called his recent book Beyond Weird: Why everything you thought you knew about quantum physics is different. It’s recommended for lay readers. I’m thinking of getting a copy. Scientists are beginning to take seriously what philosophers have been debating for centuries. What is real? What is a living being? What is beauty?
Professor Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia [ TED talk, June 2016, https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other%5D, has discovered that beneath the soil of the forest, a world of infinite fungal networks grows in association with the roots of a plant in a symbiotic or mildly pathogenic relationship. These networks connect trees and allow them to communicate. So the forest behaves as though it’s a single organism. A single species will look after their kith and kin and send messages of wisdom and support to the next generation. By their roots, trees speak in a language of electrons with crystalline bonds of affection. Trees through their leaves can taste, smell and in a sense see, warning others of harmful invaders. We can learn from the wisdom of trees.
The earth behaving as one organism is an idea put forward by the inventor James Lovelock. To his annoyance, his ideas about Gaia have been taken up by eco-theologians and earth-diviners. But secular or not, the point we should remember about Gaia is that she is not a benevolent Mother Earth, who calls for a cult of worshippers to gather round her. To pay attention to nature is not to pray to Gaia, to worship her, to ask her what she wants from us and to do it. Rather, it is to be provoked toward new modes of thinking and acting.
In his book The Biology of Wonder, the biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber questions the pure scientific viewpoint of a mechanistic universe, of an abstract genetic code controlling the bodies of all created organisms, like pre-programmed machines, with algorithms shaping lives. He says it does not explain freedom of choice, the sense of what is good or bad shared by all organisms; the human feelings of doubt, love, guilt or compassion.[ Andreas Weber, The Biology of Wonder, (New Society Publishers, Canada, 2016) pp.97 – 100]
As a birdwatcher, I have heard, all too rarely, the nightingale’s song. What becomes apparent, and scientists have confirmed this, is that its song is not just about genetic inheritance, or indeed mapping territories by warning off the opposition. Deep in the hedgerow its song is an expression of the sheer joy of its existence; and it orients me into its world.
In recent years, I have been taking part in developing links between faith, science and nature in the context of pilgrimage.
St Ternan’s Banchory had a science and faith project, which involved woodland walks led by an Aberdeenshire countryside ranger along parts of the Deeside way. The ranger expertly drew our attention to what was happening in nature. But to give the walks a spiritual dimension, we were invited the walkers to share a poem, piece of scripture or spiritual writing. Science and faith fell into conversation following the same path. And it had an extraordinary effect on the participants. Many started to notice the detail of nature, a small flower, birdsong, a caterpillar crossing our path. Contemplative silence fell on the group; even the young people ceased their ‘Game of Thrones’ battles and joined the ‘oldies’ in the walk.
I led an 8 mile reflective walk through the Fetternear Estate in Kemnay for the Epiphany group. We tried to maintain a vow of silence and participants were aided by extracts from various writings and questions for reflection. It was clear by the time of our lunchtime picnic that the vow of silence had to be lifted as everyone seemed bursting to say something about what they had experienced.
I am a trustee of Eco-Congregation Scotland and in the run-up to the Paris Climate Change Conference, ECS commissioned a baton made from a recycled pew from a church in Edinburgh. It was carried from church to church across the length and breadth of Scotland before arriving at the conference floor. A spiritual symbol present at a secular conference.
ECS has set up a pilot with registered congregations and the RSPB. The aim is to provide opportunities for churches to import the scientific expertise of RSPB staff into their wildlife projects, such as, how to develop wildlife sanctuaries in their churchyards and communities. The reciprocal is the opportunity to enjoy the biodiversity of the paths through the RSPB reserves, providing places of prayerful contemplation and worship.
“God is an active creator, an artist and a musician. By an outpouring of divine love, a great order, a grand symphony, God arranges the staff, notes, pitch and accidentals, dots and ties of creation; and, surreptitiously, unfolds a work of harmony and beauty, while the beat and rhythm drives the pace of life.”[ Murray Richard, ‘Preaching Eco-Theology’ https://www.collegeofpreachers.co.uk/media/1023/issue_166_production.pdf p.10] As pilgrims exploring nature, we can experience this musicianship if we apply our intelligence and are receptive to wisdom.
Intelligence comes from the Latin meaning ‘choose between’. But its not about choosing between science and faith. We need to use more than our brains; we need to experience nature with our whole bodies; we need to be mindful, inwardly appreciative, moment by moment.
Making the connection between science, faith and nature provides an experience of belonging that makes our lives profoundly meaningful. Pilgrimage makes every place holy ground. | {
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Two soap stars have been speaking about how difficult their current storylines have been to film.
Jack P Shepherd, who plays David Platt on Coronation Street, says he’s had to “shake off” his character after filming scenes for his male rape storyline.
And Emmerdale star Emma Atkins said filming scenes which look at Charity Dingle’s past were the hardest thing she’s done on the soap.
“It was incredibly challenging,” the actress said.
An hour-long flashback episode is being screened on 29 May, focusing on abuse that Charity suffered when she was 14. It comes after the character was seen speaking to her partner Vanessa Woodfield, played by Michelle Hardwick, about her traumatic childhood.
Speaking about the scenes, however, she added that she had “loved every second of it”.
“I know that sounds weird, but I think, as an actor, it’s great to be given something where there’s a whole host of things going on, with her past, with the sadness that’s attached,” said Atkins.
“It was extremely difficult, but it was great teamwork. Michelle made it so easy as well, and we bounce off one another really well.”
She explained how it felt to film the storyline, adding: “You have to go to difficult places when it comes to the moment you’re filming such dramatic scenes, you have to pull on personal emotions that you’ve experienced in the past.
“That isn’t particularly pleasant, but it’s part of the journey when you’re an actor and you need something to give you that impetus.”
Charity is played by a young actress for some of the scenes in the flashback. Emmerdale has been working with a team at North Yorkshire’s Rape Unit while it was researching the storyline.
Atkins added that there were upsetting scenes to come, saying: “There’s only so much you can show when it’s going out to that many people at that time of day… it’s tough watching. A lot of it’s implied as well, which makes it more powerful.”
Meanwhile, Jack P Shepherd has been talking about his storyline, which has seen David Platt struggling to cope after he was raped by Josh Tucker, played by Ryan Clayton.
Asked about how he relaxes following such scenes, he said: “I take myself off for a short while to shake off David.
“I have to take myself into quite a dark place to get that emotion so it is important to get yourself back in reality quickly.”
The 30-year-old said it was “such an important story to tell”, adding: “The storyline has got people talking which is exactly what we set out to do.
“When you are playing a part, you get on with telling the story but to see the effect it has had is very rewarding, so it has been great.” | {
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Auxiliary Verbs and the Verb To Be in Questions
There are 10 questions for this simple auxiliary verb learning exercise. Each question has three multiple choice answers provided, and learners must choose the word that correctly fits in the blank provided.
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Firstly, Happy Thanksgiving to the Blue Devil Nation! Here are several Duke Football player videos going into this weekends matchup with Miami in Wallace Wade Stadium. A reminder, there is a Black Friday Sale at GoDuke.com where you can purchase tickets for ten bucks each. Support the Blue Devils on Senior Day.
If you think football season is close, consider this: there is only one more Football Friday before Duke opens training camp. If that doesn’t get you excited, hopefully the rest of this column will. Early analysis suggests that this may be the longest Football Friday ever, so pace yourself!
No sales pitch this week. If you’re reading this, you already know how good BDN is. One other note: Duke football season tickets are still available, so if you haven’t got yours yet, time is running out. Away game tickets are also available, and we can say from experience that it’s a lot of fun to be part of the Duke faithful in watching a big Blue Devil road victory. Starting on August 1st, Duke will make single game home tickets available at GoDuke.
I don’t know what else to say. Last weekend, all seemed well at the ACC Football Kickoff in Pinehurst. Though still somewhat hard to believe, Butch Davis continued to weather the storm and appeared poised to lead the Tar Heels in 2011. Then, Wednesday happened. For reasons that still remain unclear, Chancellor Holden Thorp fired Davis after a closed-door meeting with the Board of Trustees. Thursday, Athletic Director Dick Baddour announced that he will be stepping down as well, and the Tar Heels later tagged Defensive Coordinator Everett Withers as interim Head Coach. The timing of all this is puzzling, to say the least, and leaves the Tar Heel players, fans, and administration in a difficult position. In addition to the financial costs associated with Coach Davis’ termination, the Tar Heels will now have to pay off their stadium improvements. With many players, fans and boosters upset with the handling of the football scandal for one reason or another, UNC is certainly in an unenviable position. We could spend all Football Friday talking about the scandal and these recent developments, but we’ll just highlight two points:
First, in the current climate of NCAA athletics, let’s be thankful for those who do things the right way. Duke is fortunate to be led by good people who want to win, and want to do it honestly. Thank you to Coach Krzyzewski, Coach Cutcliffe, Dr. Kevin White and Dr. Richard Brodhead for their outstanding character and dedication to Duke University. Every program has problems, but the Blue Devils’ leadership has handled these situations appropriately, consistently, and with class. And thank you to all of the coaches and administrators throughout the NCAA who continue to improve the lives of thousands of student-athletes and uphold the integrity of college athletics.
Those responsible should be held accountable for the egregious transgressions within the North Carolina football program, athletic department, and academic administration. It appears that this is finally being done, and one could argue that there is no wrong time to do the right thing. That being said, this puts the football program in a difficult position, and while it may be difficult for any Duke fan to say something nice about a Tar Heel, we all want what’s best for the ACC and the student-athletes. We want to see the ACC become a more competitive football conference, and we want to see programs win the right way. Hopefully, the Tar Heels will eventually arise from this scandal as a better program and a more respectable member of the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Congratulations to Duke’s Brandon Harper
With the NFL lockout finally over, Duke’s Brandon Harper was the first former Blue Devil to earn an opportunity as a professional, signing a free agent contract with the Jacksonville Jaguars. BDN wishes the best of luck to Brandon and all of the Blue Devil alumni pursuing their NFL dreams!
Dondo Files, episode 4
Duke senior receiver Donovan Varner has started a video blog, the Dondo Files, and released episode 4 this week. He has great messages for young players and fans about hard work and achieving your goals. This week, he discusses being able to take constructive criticism. With that in mind, how about more than 1 touchdown this year, Donovan? In all seriousness, though, we’re looking forward to a big year from the senior receiver and are proud to have him as a role model for young Blue Devils and players everywhere.
BDN previews continue
We hope you’re enjoying our week-by-week preview of Duke’s 2011 opponents. This week, we wrapped up Duke’s first half of the season with Tulane and Florida International, two important, but tough, games for the Blue Devils to win. After the off week, Duke will face yet another top 10 opponent in Wallace Wade Stadium as the ACC-favorite Florida State Seminoles invade Durham. Check back next week for a look at FSU along with Duke’s week 8 opponent, Wake Forest.
Last week, we took a look around the Atlantic Coast Conference, and our predictions weren’t too terribly out of line with the rest of the ACC media. The Blue Devils landed two players on the preseason All-ACC team in WR Conner Vernon and K Will Synderwine. Now that we got the ACC predictions out of the way, let’s take an in-depth look at the team that really matters - the Blue Devils. There are high hopes for a bowl game in 2011, and a lot of that may depend on how good the Duke defense can be, but the reality is that the Duke offense will have to carry this team for much of the season. For that reason, we kickoff our 2011 Duke Football Team Preview with a look at the high-flying Blue Devils’ offense. If this unit lives up to expectations, there should be plenty of excitement in Wallace Wade Stadium this fall.
BDN Duke Football 2011 Team Preview: Offense
With considerable youth and inexperience on defense, the 2011 Duke Football team will rely on a veteran offense that finished 2nd in the ACC in passing offense and 7th in total offense a year ago. While the Duke offense showed flashes of dominance in 2010, there will need to be dramatic improvements across the board if the Blue Devils hope to make a bowl in 2011.
Key returners: Sean Renfree (R-Jr.), Brandon Connette (So.)
Newcomers: Anthony Boone (R-Fr.)
2010 Review: In his first year as a starter, Sean Renfree showed glimpses of his potential, but overall was inconsistent in leading the Duke offense. In particular, Renfree struggled with turnovers, finishing the season with an ACC-high 17 interceptions. Coming off of season-ending knee surgery in 2009, Renfree’s mobility appeared to be limited at times, particularly early in the season. More importantly, and not unexpectedly, the redshirt-sophomore struggled with his confidence throughout the season, especially on the heels of Duke’s embarrassing loss to Alabama. Despite the struggles, it wasn’t all bad for Renfree. He led the Blue Devils to three wins, finished third in the ACC with 3,131 total yards and completed 61.4% of his passes, including a midseason stretch of 16 consecutive completions and 28/30 completions against Navy, both school records. The 3,131 yards were the 3rd highest total in Duke history and helped to earn him the Carmen Falcone Award as Duke’s Most Valuable Player. The biggest area for Renfree to improve is certainly turnovers, and he demonstrated tremendous growth throughout the 2010 season. After throwing 15 interceptions in the first 7 games of the season, Renfree finished the season with just 2 interceptions in the Blue Devils’ final 5 contests.
In 2010, dual-threat QB Brandon Connette served as Renfree’s primary back-up and earned significant playing time with his legs. Connette set a Duke freshman record with 8 rushing touchdowns and finished the year with 321 yards on 78 carries. He struggled to move the ball through the air when called upon, finishing just 10/22 with 2 interceptions.
2011 Outlook: Simply put, the Duke offense will rely heavily on the play of Sean Renfree. If Renfree is unable to significantly reduce his turnovers, the Blue Devils will not be bowling in 2011. Now nearly two years removed from knee surgery and with a year of starting experience under his belt, Renfree’s mobility and confidence should be drastically improved from this time last year. With three of his top four receivers returning, along with 4 of 5 offensive line starters, Renfree will be surrounded by familiar faces and will be counted on to lead the Blue Devil offense. While there is no doubt within the Duke program that Renfree is the clear starter, he will continue to be pushed by a sophomore Connette and redshirt-freshman Anthony Boone, which should only help the Duke offense. Reports from spring practice were overwhelmingly positive for all three quarterbacks and for Renfree in particular. Coach Cutcliffe has anointed Renfree as the best returning quarterback in the ACC in 2011, and believe he is poised to have a “special” season. If the Blue Devils plan on playing in December or January, he will have to play like the best quarterback in the conference.
Newcomers: Jamison Crowder (Fr.), Blair Holliday (Fr.), Nick Hill (Fr.)
2010 Review: As you might expect, the performance of Duke’s wide receivers mirrored the ups and downs of QB Sean Renfree. Overall, Donovan Varner and Conner Vernon make up one of, if not the, top receiving tandem in college football. After his All-ACC campaign in 2009, Varner became just the 2nd Duke receiver to post back-to-back 60-reception seasons, finishing 2010 with 60 catches for 736 yards and 1 touchdown. After a breakout freshman season that earned him freshman All-American honors, Vernon topped his 2009 campaign with 73 catches for 946 yards and 4 touchdowns. The duo of Varner and Vernon partnered with senior Austin Kelly to form the top receiving trio in Duke history in 2010. Kelly battled injuries throughout his senior year, but still finished tied for the team lead with 4 touchdown catches. Outside of the top three, Duke’s younger receivers had an inconsistent 2010. After a good spring, freshman Brandon Braxton had an up and down season in his first year of college football, playing in 11 games and starting 5. Braxton finished 2010 with 14 catches and 1 touchdown; however, of those 14 receptions, 8 went for a Duke first down. Overall, fans should be excited with his potential and can pencil him in as the third starter alongside Varner and Vernon in 2011 after a strong offseason. Redshirt-freshmen Corey Gattis and Tyree Watkins saw the field sparingly in their first year of college eligibility.
2011 Outlook: Despite the loss of Kelly, Duke’s third-leading receiver in 2010, expectations are extremely high for the 2011 Duke receiving corps. Led by upperclassmen Varner and Vernon, this should be one of the top receiving units in the country. As good as Duke’s receivers were in 2010, they will need to be better in 2011, particularly in finding their way to the end zone and securing passes (not all of Dukes 2010 turnover troubles can be blamed on the QB). Expected improvements in the Duke running game should open up big play possibilities for Duke’s receivers, allowing them to eclipse their previous career highs. With Varner and Vernon likely to draw significant attention from opposing defenses, the opportunities will be there for Duke’s young receivers to step up and make plays. Braxton will get the first shot as the third starter at receiver, and is beginning to develop good chemistry with Renfree. Expect Braxton, Watkins, and Gattis to show dramatic improvement over 2010, and they should be pushed by true freshmen Blair Holliday and Nick Hill for playing time. The athletic ability of freshman Jamison Crowder will be hard to keep off the field, and he may find some time at slot receiver in certain offensive sets. Led by two determined, dynamic upperclassmen, this group has the potential to be the best in the ACC.
Losses: Brett Huffman, Brandon King
Key returners: Danny Parker (R-Sr.), Cooper Helfet (Sr.), Jack Farrell (R-So.)
Newcomers: Braxton Deaver (R-Fr.), David Reeves (Fr.)
2010 Review: For the past several years, the Duke tight end position has been led by two warriors in Brett Huffman and Brandon King. Seemingly always injured, it took a lot to keep them off the field. With some struggles along the offensive line, Huffman and King were called upon to aid the Blue Devils’ blockers for much of their careers, and did so admirably. The Duke staff likes to move the tight end around in their offense, and the versatility of Huffman and King allowed them to thrive in multiple roles. While Huffman and King assumed roles as the unheralded warriors of the Duke offense, junior college transfer Cooper Helfet emerged as another potent weapon in Sean Renfree’s arsenal. After struggling with an ankle injury early in the season, Helfet finished the year with at least 4 catches in Duke’s final 5 games, leading the team in receiving in two contests and earning two ACC Player of the Week honors.
2011 Outlook: Huffman and King will not be easily replaced in the Duke offense, but with two seniors and a talented group of young players, the tight end should remain a strength for the 2011 Blue Devils. Helfet appears poised for a breakout senior campaign and will be joined by redshirt-senior Danny Parker, who redshirted in 2010 after seeing 232 snaps as a junior in 2009. Redshirt-freshman Braxton Deaver should be ready to contribute in his first season of college eligibility and true freshman David Reeves may be too good to keep off the field in his first year in Durham. The concern for this group will be replacing the blocking of Huffman and King, but their receiving numbers should improve over 2010.
Key returners: Jay Hollingworth (Sr.), Patrick Kurunuwe (R-Jr.), Desmond Scott (Jr.), Josh Snead (So.), Juwan Thompson (So.)
2010 Review: The 2010 Duke running game had nowhere to go but up, finishing last in the FBS in rushing in 2009. As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the Blue Devils took significant steps forward in 2010, increasing their rushing averages by 46.5 yards per game and adding 13 more touchdowns on the ground from 2009. Still, Duke finished last in the ACC in rushing and 104th in the country in 2011. Desmond Scott led the Blue Devils in rushing for the second straight season, finishing with 549 yards and a 4.4 yards per carry average. Scott established himself as Duke’s best all-around back and endeared himself to the Duke faithful with his game-winning touchdown dive against Virginia. Freshman Josh Snead showed flashes of his ability before injuries interrupted his season, but still finished with a team-best 4.9 yards per carry. Fellow freshman Juwan Thompson saw his offensive role increase as he adjusted to the college game, but was primarily limited to kick return duty. Junior Jay Hollingsworth came on strong late in the season, igniting the Duke offense with impressive 2nd half runs against Miami. Redshirt-sophomore Patrick Kurunuwe saw limited action on offense and special teams.
2011 Outlook: Duke returns all of their running backs in 2011, along with four of five starters along the offensive line. While blocking may be partly to blame for Duke’s struggles in the running game, Duke’s rushers must continue to improve their vision, burst, and strength. Improved confidence could go a long way to improving Duke’s running, as some of Duke’s best runs in 2010 appeared to come when the Blue Devil backs were “running with a purpose.” Scott has emerged as the face of Duke’s running game, and must become a consistent threat both on the ground and through the air for the Duke offense. While Scott is likely to again see the majority of carries, Duke’s depth at running back means that there will be significant competition for snaps in training camp and throughout the season, which should force this group to continue to improve. Snead and Thompson should take a big step forward in their second year of college football, and the overall depth at running back should allow Duke to do a better job wearing down opposing defenses. Thompson, in particular, appears poised to be a breakout candidate for the Duke offense. While no one should expect Duke to become a great running team overnight, the pieces are there for the Blue Devils to continue to improve on the ground, open things up in the passing game, and keep opposing offenses off the field.
Key returners: Kyle Hill (R-Sr.), Jon Needham (R-Sr.), Brian Moore (R-Jr.), Conor Irwin (R-Jr.), Dave Harding (R-So.), John Coleman (R-So.), Perry Simmons (R-So.)
Newcomers: Takoby Cofield (R-Fr.), Laken Tomlinson (R-Fr.), Marcus Aprahamian (Fr.), Lucas Patrick (Fr.), Cody Robinson (Fr.), Matt Skura (Fr.)
2010 Review: After watching Thaddeus Lewis play under seemingly constant pressure for four years, the Duke offensive line appeared to take a step forward in 2010. The group struggled again in run-blocking, but finished near the top of the ACC in sacks allowed per pass attempt. Morgan, though undersized, was the anchor up front, starting at center for 36 consecutive games. With little depth, the offensive line was asked to play through injury in 2010. For many weeks, Duke’s starters sat out practice but suited up on Saturday. That warrior mentality showed through on the field, as Duke improved their rushing by 46.5 yards per game, and the line successfully protected their first-year QB coming off knee surgery (25 sacks allowed, only 5.1% of dropbacks).
2011 Outlook: Of all the position groups on the Duke offense, the offensive line appears the most ready to take a big step forward in 2011. That being said, this group loses seniors Morgan and Harper and will need to continue to work hard and produce results on the field. Duke’s starting offensive line is expected to average close to 290 pounds in 2011, and that increased size and strength should help in both pass and run blocking. For the first time since Coach Cutcliffe’s arrival in Durham, the Blue Devils will be able to go two-deep across the offensive line without significant drop-off. In fact, there should be interesting position battles in training camp at right tackle and right guard, where redshirt-freshmen Takoby Cofield and Laken Tomlinson will push Perry Simmons and John Coleman for snaps. A talented group of freshmen offensive linemen should help solidify the position for the next several years and could see the field in the event of a significant injury. For the first time in several years, Duke has multiple NFL prospects among their offensive linemen, led by Brian Moore, Kyle Hill, Laken Tomlinson, Takoby Cofield, and Cody Robinson. Overall, the size, skill, and depth has improved, but this group will need to produce results on the field for the Duke offense to realize its full potential.
There’s more? Sure, why not? To reward our loyal members, let’s take a quick look at where Duke stands with a few uncommitted 2012 prospects:
Running back: Jela Duncan is the guy here, and Duke would love to try and secure a commitment from him soon, though he seems content to wait out other offers. Earlier this week, we took a look at possible destinations for the Mallard Creek star, and the smart money is still on the Blue Devils here, whether it’s sooner or later. There’s no telling what will happen with North Carolina, but they remain in play for a few other backs, and with scholarship restrictions on the horizon, new offers will be few and far between. Scholarships are also scarce at South Carolina, another potential competitor for Duncan’s services. As for his current offers, Duncan hasn’t shown a lot of interest in Pittsburgh, Purdue, or Wake Forest up to this point. Some other prospects to keep an eye on include Dondre Brown, Jamie Gilmore, and Chris Mangus, but Duncan is the clear priority.
Best available: Outside of running back, the Duke coaching staff feels very good about the class of 2012 and will be in a position to take the best available players with their last 2 or 3 scholarships. In the past week, Duke has hosted OL Robert Conyers and ATH Ryan Janvion, and it looks like a good bet that the Blue Devils will find themselves among the finalists for both of those Florida prospects.
In addition, we’ve long reported Duke’s interest in Korren Kirven, but they face a huge uphill battle against his in-state ACC schools and several top SEC programs. Kirven is expected to narrow his list soon, and it would be nice for the Blue Devils to make the cut, but there are no guarantees. Elsewhere along the defensive line, Duke is still very much in it for Alabama standout Torey Agee, and will likely be a finalist along with Vanderbilt. BDN’s thinking is that Auburn or Georgia Tech would jump to the lead for Agee, if they were to offer. Duke is a longer shot for Greensboro’s D.J. Reader, who plans to play both football and baseball in college. With the academic requirements at Duke, it takes a very dedicated student-athlete to balance classes along with two sports.
Duke has been the leader for top in-state linebacker Keilin Rayner, but something has kept him from pulling the trigger for the Blue Devils so far. He’s been busy on the camp circuit this summer, and we’ll see where things stand with him soon. It appears that other schools have closed the gap, but Duke is still in the running for his services and a good start in September could help the Blue Devils’ chances. Florida athlete Marcus Allen is another intriguing prospect who looks like a good fit in Durham with his success in the classroom and on the field, but with a Florida State offer in hand, it may be tough to pull him out of the sunshine state. California LB Jeremiah Allison is another star student-athlete who seems to fit the Duke mold, and if the Blue Devils can maybe get him on campus for an official visit, they could become a serious contender in his recruitment.
As always, BDN will keep you posted with new developments. By securing a solid 2012 recruiting class early in the summer, the Duke coaching staff has been able to get a head start on evaluating the class of 2013, and we’ll slowly start to introduce members to some of the early targets as we head into the fall.
Ok, seriously, I can’t write any more, and I bet your eyes hurt if you’ve made it this far. So next week, Duke defense preview time. Until then, WE ARE DUKE.
Football Friday comes to you fashionably late this week, and in abbreviated form so that you can get in line for Harry Potter early. Has anyone camped out for three months for seats to Harry Potter? I didn’t think so. That takes real dedication. Here’s to you, Cameron Crazies – and here’s hoping to see all of you in Wallace Wade Stadium this fall.
Clarkston Hines HOF 2011
Congratulations to Duke alumnus Clarkston Hines, who will be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana. The ceremonies will kick off at 9:30 AM and conclude with a dinner and ceremony at 7:30 PM. The “Frequent Flyer” holds Duke records in receptions, receiving yards, receiving touchdowns, and 100-yard receiving games. He also holds ACC records in touchdown receptions and 100-yard receiving games. The 1989 ACC Player of the Year, Hines led the Blue Devils to a share of the ACC Championship and was named a first team All-American.
To put some of Hines’ accomplishments in perspective, consider how his career compares to current Duke stars Donovan Varner and Conner Vernon.
Conner Vernon (2009-2010): 128 receptions, 1719 yards, 7 touchdowns, 7 100-yard receiving games
While Varner and Vernon may have a chance to approach Hines’ reception total, they would have to put up some impressive seasons to approach his yardage, touchdown, or 100-yard game records. It’s clear that Hines is more than deserving of his enshrinement. Congratulations!
More preseason accolades
It wasn’t that long ago when Duke was being shut out of most national preseason Award Watch Lists. Well, the times, they are a’changin. This year, it might be hard for you to keep track, so let us recap for you:
SAF Matt Daniels: Athlon Sports 3rd Team All-ACC
TE Cooper Helfet: Mackey Award Watch List, CFPA TE Watch List, Athlon Sports 3rd Team All-ACC, Lindy’s Sports 2nd Team All-ACC
OT Kyle Hill: Athlon Sports 3rd Team All-ACC
C Brian Moore: Rimington Trophy Watch List
QB Sean Renfree: Davey O'Brien Award Watch List, CFPA QB Watch List, Athlon Sports 3rd Team All-ACC, Lindy’s Sports ACC “Strongest Arm”
K Will Snyderwine: Groza Award Watch List, CFPA K Watch List, Athlon Sports 1st Team All-ACC, Lindy’s Sports 1st Team All-ACC, Sporting News 2nd Team All-American, Sporting News 1st Team All-ACC
WR Donovan Varner: Biletnikoff Award Watch List, Athlon Sports 3rd Team All-ACC
WR Conner Vernon: Biletnikoff Award Watch List, CFPA WR Watch List, Athlon Sports 1st Team All-ACC, Lindy’s Sports 1st Team All-ACC, Sporting News 1st Team All-ACC, Sporting News ACC “Best Hands”
Got it now? There’s going to be a quiz at the end. Congratulations to the Blue Devils for their well-deserved recognition, but we know that it’s the post-season awards that they’re working to earn.
The Dondo Files
Speaking of Donovan Varner, don’t miss episode three of The Dondo Files. “Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records.” – William Arthur Ward
2011 Opponent Previews
In case you missed them, be sure to check out our previews of Richmond and Stanford. They’re great reads and we are fortunate to have had the help of David Weissman and Hank Waddles to give us an inside look at Duke’s first two opponents. As you might expect, we’ll have a preview of Boston College, as well as Florida International, up this week, so be sure to check them out and spread the word that BDN has the best Duke Football coverage year-round.
2011 Bowl Games
Make no mistake, the goal for the Duke program is to play in Charlotte in December and the Orange Bowl in January. However, a lot will have to go right for that to happen, with maybe even some help from Harry Potter and friends. Coming off a 3-win 2010 in which the Duke defense struggled mightily and the offense was inconsistent, it might be more realistic to look at some other potential bowl destinations for the Blue Devils. If Duke is able to put together 6 wins or better in 2011, where might they end up playing in December or January?
The three best fits for Duke, at least geographically and a potential high-profile opponent, would be the Belk Bowl, the Music City Bowl, or the Military Bowl. The 2011 Belk Bowl will be held down I-85 in Charlotte on December 27th, and feature the #5 ACC team against a Big East opponent. The 2011 Music City Bowl will be held down I-40 in Nashville on December 7th, pitting the #6 ACC bowl team against an SEC opponent (with a sweet $3.675MM payout). If the Blue Devils were to be selected for the Military Bowl, they would likely face a familiar opponent in Navy on December 28th in Washington, DC.
The ACC also has a conditional agreement with the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, which will be played on New Year’s Eve in San Francisco, but let’s hope we won’t have to travel that far. Another option would be the Independence Bowl on December 26th against a MWC team in Shreveport, Louisiana. Of course, Duke fans would welcome the opportunity to travel to any of these games to support the Blue Devils, so you may want to start saving up those frequent flyer miles and hotel points for December!
Class of 2012 holds steady
Wow, we made it through an entire week without a Duke football commitment. It’s been awhile since we could say that. Duke has 13 solid verbal commitments in the class of 2012 and will hold their final few scholarships for potential impact players at RB, DL, LB, and WR. We’ve discussed the targets at length in previous weeks and on our Premium Message Board, but just to recap:
RB: Todd Gurley confirmed to BDN this week that he has dropped Duke from the schools he is considering. I gave my reaction to this news earlier this week on the message boards, but to summarize, Gurley is a tremendous talent, but may not have been the best fit at Duke University. Mallard Creek’s Jela Duncan, who posted a sub-4.3 40 time in Durham earlier this summer and boasts a 3.5 GPA, would certainly look good in Duke blue.
LB: We heard from Marcus Allen earlier this week, another great athlete out of the state of Florida. His recruitment will be competitive, but he’s exactly the type of student-athlete that could thrive in Durham. Keilin Rayner is a player who has been high on the Blue Devils throughout the process and with his interest in Sports Medicine, would be another great fit at Duke.
DL: The targets at this position have changed significantly in the past week, as the Virginia schools have locked up several verbal commitments. Woody Baron and Nigel Williams committed to Virginia Tech, giving the Hokies five defensive linemen in the class of 2012. Virginia added Courtnye Wynn, their third defensive line commitment in this class (they brought in seven DLs in the class of 2010). With a logjam on the defensive lines at UVA and VPI, could that help the Blue Devils with their recruitment of DT Korren Kirven? It certainly can’t hurt, but Duke will have to battle things out with over a dozen other top programs for the elite Lynchburg lineman. Outside of Kirven, Duke is still recruiting Torey Agee out of Alabama and in-state standout David Reader. Agee is on a visit to Vanderbilt this weekend, and Reader has recently decided to pursue both football and baseball at the collegiate level. At 6’3” and 300+ pounds with a 95 MPH fastball, Reader could certainly help the Blue Devils on the gridiron and the diamond.
WR: The Blue Devils are hoping to add a new element to their receiving corps with one more commitment in the class of 2012, and that could come in the form of elite Tennessee prospect Drae Bowles, or the lengthy Anthony Nash out of Pennsylvania.
ACC following in the SEC’s footsteps?
Except without the national championships. With the NCAA having investigated North Carolina and Georgia Tech for violations in their football programs, the ACC appears to be trending down a slippery slope. Fortunately, the majority of ACC programs continue to do things the right way, and Duke remains one of them. The Duke coaching staff, along with a top-notch compliance department, are sure to keep the program on track. With regards to Georgia Tech, though the NCAA noted a lack of cooperation with their investigation, the penalties ultimately should not have a great affect on the program. A fine, vacating wins, and probation hardly hurt the program where it counts going forward. In my opinion, the only NCAA penalties that have any noticeable effect involve the loss of scholarships or post-season participation. With many more violations having occurred in Chapel Hill, we’ll have to see if the NCAA chooses to enforce more significant penalties.
They say this internet is going to be a big deal. You can keep up with all things Duke Football through us here at BDN, of course, or you can follow Duke Football on Twitter. We’re also on Facebook, as is Duke Football. Of course, the best way to stay informed about all things Duke athletics is to join BDN Premium. And if you need an invite to this new Google+ thing, shoot me an email.
We’re gaining steam now
We’ve been saying that football season is fast approaching for awhile now, and some of that might just be wishful thinking. Come next week, however, and it can no longer be denied. The ACC will host its Football Kickoff in Pinehurst on July 24-25, and the Blue Devils will be represented by Head Coach David Cutcliffe, along with QB Sean Renfree and SAF Matt Daniels. Just two weeks after the ACC Football Kickoff, the Blue Devils will take the field for fall training camp. As always, you can rely on BDN to have the best coverage of all things Duke Football. After all, WE ARE DUKE.
Even in the middle of March Madness, Football Friday is back to satisfy your weekly craving for Duke football. So far, we’ve covered Duke’s incoming freshman class, football recruiting 101, and a look at the fall schedule. While we love us some good recruiting scoop here at BDN, we think it’s also just as important to talk about the players we already have. With that in mind, this week’s Football Friday takes a look at the early reviews from Duke’s 2011 spring practice. [private]
Duke travels to Chapel Hill
This weekend is all about Duke vs. North Carolina. The Tar Heels have dominated the Blue Devils on the gridiron of late, and that’s a trend that we’d all like to see come to an end this fall. More importantly, however, is to come away with a victory and the #1 seed on the hardwood Saturday, and I think the Blue Devils have a great chance to do it. The two teams match up with each other poorly, and that should make for another very interesting game. In the first game, UNC had no answer for Duke’s guards, while Duke struggled to contain UNC’s bigs. Kyle Singler and Harrison Barnes essentially neutralized each other. I expect to see much of the same on Saturday, and if either team can get a boost from their bench, that could end up being the difference. It’s Duke and Carolina, with the ACC regular season championship on the line, which means we’re in for another thriller.
The Blue Devils hosted 26 prospects on February 19th for the second of their junior days. The prospects took in Duke’s practice, toured the facilities, and met with the coaches.
Current Duke commit Erich Schneider made the trip from Florida and got to spend a lot of time with Coach Middleton and the tight ends. The long distance award goes to QB Bart Houston, who flew in from California for the weekend. Houston’s recruiting has recently picked up and offers are starting to come in for the talented signal-caller. A few other prospects were in town this past weekend to take in Duke’s spring practice, including offensive lineman Andrew Jelks. Jelks told BDN he really liked Duke and had high praise for Coach Cutcliffe and Coach Luke. The top Tennessee prospect intends to make visits to Knoxville, Tuscaloosa, and Oxford, Mississippi this spring.
Congratulations are due for Duke TE commit David Reeves, who helped Greensboro High School capture a Regional Championship on the hardwood. Best of luck to David and Greensboro as they continue their quest for an Alabama State Title.
With only 12 seniors scheduled to graduate this season, the Blue Devils will be particularly selective this year with their recruiting. No new offers were extended this week, and the top targets remain the same as we discussed in our earlier Football Friday. Invitations have been sent out to prospects for the spring game on March 26, and it will be important for the Blue Devils to have a good showing, both on the field and in the stands.
Duke wrapped up the first half of spring practice on Wednesday, and will take a much-needed two-week break for spring break. No coach or fan wants to hear that Duke is banged up this spring, but it’s the truth. Duke has been practicing with about 55 players this spring, which can make it difficult to assess individual performances. In particular, the Blue Devils are thin on the defensive side of the ball, where Kenny Anunike, Kelby Brown, Lee Butler, and Quan Stevenson are out for the entire spring, and other key players have missed time. At this point, everyone is expected to be healthy for the fall, which obviously is most important, but with a young team, you’d like to see players play as many snaps as possible this spring.
Right now, the strengths of this team should be no surprise to most fans, and it starts with the play at quarterback and receiver. Sean Renfree has had a very good start to spring practice, and Brandon Connette and Anthony Boone have also made strides since the fall. Renfree told BDN last week that he feels as comfortable as he ever has playing football, and it’s shown on the field. For the most part, he’s been on the same page with his receivers and his offensive line, which has made things difficult for the Duke defense. As we mentioned last week, the Duke offense must take a big step forward in taking care of the football if the Blue Devils are to have any success this fall. So far, Renfree and co. look poised to do just that.
For those who have followed Duke’s spring scrimmage statistics, you’ll note that the running backs have put up some impressive numbers. Josh Snead has been out with a MCL sprain, but Desmond Scott. Patrick Kurunuwe, and Juwan Thompson have played well and shown the ability to break out big runs. The real credit here goes to Duke’s offensive line, where they lose only one starter in center Bryan Morgan. Brian Moore shifts over from right guard to take the starting center spot, and Duke has been working in Conor Irwin, Joey Finison, and Dave Harding as well. Overall, the line looks much improved, and projects to start Moore at center, Kyle Hill at left tackle, Harding at left guard, John Coleman at right guard, and Perry Simmons at right tackle. Redshirt-freshmen Laken Tomlinson and Tacoby Cofield have both played well this spring and will likely back-up Coleman and Simmons this fall.
As you can expect with several starters out, defensively, Duke has had mixed results this spring. The theme on defense seems to be athleticism and inconsistency; Duke is clearly stronger and faster than they have been in past years, but they are extremely inexperienced with only 5 seniors on the entire defensive unit. The key for the Blue Devils will be the play up front, and newcomers Jamal Bruce and Jordan Dewalt-Ondijo have shown some play-making ability and will compete for playing time this fall. New DL Coach Rick Petri is working hard with his young linemen, which include 10 underclassmen. Over the course of the spring and fall, the expectation is that this group, led by returnees Charlie Hatcher, Sydney Sarmiento, and Justin Foxx, will develop under Coach Petri into a solid ACC defensive front, but there will continue to be growing pains along the way. Among the defensive backs, the Blue Devils’ athleticism has been evident, as players such as Austin Gamble, C.J. France, and Jordon Byas appear ready to contribute this fall. Duke has the athletes on defense to improve from last season’s ACC-worst unit, and consistency will be the key to the group’s success this fall.
In summary, at this point in the spring, the offense is clearly ahead of the defense, which is what you would expect to see with a more veteran group. I think Coach Cutcliffe said it best with his assessment of the first half of spring practice: “I’m not disappointed at all. What you see is that we don’t have a lot of people who are ready to play 50 or 60 snaps of ACC football, so there’s a learning process to that.” Overall, the effort and energy from the Blue Devils has been excellent. The team continues to work hard this spring and improves each day, which is exactly what you want to see from a young team.
We’ve got lots more football prospect interviews coming your way, so be sure to check back during your March Madness downtime. Until next week, GTHC.
Durham, N.C. - One of the things Coach Cutcliffe and the staff will concentrate on in the off season is running the football better. As always, that begins with the offensive line and BDN talked with Brian Moore about what might be done - | {
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The next generation of homebuyers are in for a shock, as many expect to snap up their first property for just £50,000.
Research has highlighted a raft of misconceptions among young people, with one in five 11 to 14 year olds assuming they will be able to borrow unlimited amounts to buy a home.
A survey of over 1,000 people aged between 11 and 21 revealed they had little idea of how much a house cost, or how long it would take them to save for a deposit. Many expected their parents or the Government to help them on to the property ladder.
What do they expect?
A third of children aged 11 to 14 are banking on their parents giving them the cash they need to buy their first home, while an optimistic 21% of 18 to 21 year olds think the Government will help them on to the housing ladder.
One fifth of young people also vastly underestimate the cost of becoming a homeowner, as they expect to be able to purchase a home in London for just £50,000 to £200,000. But, in reality the typical first-time buyer property in the capital costs £422,580.
A quarter of men in the 18 to 21 age bracket also think they will only need to save between £5,000 and £10,000 for a deposit – significantly short of the average £32,321 needed by first-time buyers.
Despite underestimating the size of the deposit they would need, a quarter of those aged 15-17 expected it to take them 20 years to save for one.
Any other confusion?
Stamp duty was a mystery, with 10% of 18 to 21 year olds thinking the tax related to posting letters.
Unsurprisingly, members of Generation Z were most likely to turn to the internet to buy a property at 36%, while 33% would visit an estate agent, but 27% thought a bank would help them find a home.
There was considerable confusion about the home buying process itself, with one in six older teens expecting it to take a year to complete a purchase.
What about when they've bought a property?
Looking to the future, surprisingly, once they have their new home, 32% of young people rated meeting their neighbours as a higher priority than getting Wi-Fi installed.
They were also more likely to focus on buying a sofa than having a housewarming party.
But many were not anticipating the long haul of repaying their mortgage, with a fifth of 18 to 20 year olds counting on receiving an inheritance to clear their loan.
Despite their lack of knowledge, nearly six out of ten, 18 to 21 year olds said they thought it was very important to own a home.
A cash free, paper free future….. How often do we actually have the call... Read more
The next generation of homebuyers are in for a shock, as many expect to snap up their first... Read more
According to the DailyMail, nearly 770,000 households over... Read more | {
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FEARLESS of FAILURE
This video contains: Praise and Worship (00:00); Skit (10:40); Missionary video (12:37
Lesson & Activity Introduction
This video contains: Lesson (00:00); Activity intro (19:46)
How do we define failure ?
Webster’s dictionary defines failure as , “Failing to perform a duty or an expected action.” Our lesson today reminds us that because of Who we believe, there is no need to fear even when we fail or fall in our faith.
We are focusing on a young man, named, John Mark, in today’s lesson on “Fearless of Failure.”
In Acts 12:12 & 25, we read that when Peter was in prison, the church had gathered in John Mark’s house for prayer. This reflects his godly heritage and a home which was acknowledged as a “house of prayer” for the local body of believers.
Now turn to Acts 13:1-5
Young John Mark was to join Paul and Barnabas on a missionary trip as a helper. Who would not be excited and even proud to be part of a team accompanying the apostle Paul himself? But strangely, halfway through the trip John Mark changed his mind. Leaving Paul and Barnabas in the middle of their missionary trip John Mark returned home, back to Jerusalem (Acts 13:13). Later we understand that this behaviour of John Mark had upset Paul and Barnabas. It perhaps reflected John Mark’s lack of commitment to God.
In Acts 15:36-41 we are told that Paul wanted to visit the churches again along with Barnabas. Barnabas wanted to take John Mark with them. But Paul disagreed because John Mark had deserted them in Pamphylia. There was a sharp disagreement between them as Paul did not want John Mark in his team again. As a result, Paul and Barnabas parted ways. Barnabas took John Mark and went to Cyprus. Paul took Silas and went to Syria and Cilicia.
John Mark was wrong to commit to a missionary trip and then desert his mentors. It was a spiritual failure on John Mark’s part. But God did not write him off. In Fact God being the gracious God he is, helped John Mark through the encouragement of Barnabas to bounce back from this failure.
In Colossians 4: 10 and 11 - Paul’s letter to the Colossians church, Paul mentions John Mark as a co-worker and a comfort to him in his work . Isn’t that encouraging? God helped John Mark to overcome his “failure” and become a faithful helper to the Apostle Paul in his work for the kingdom of God.
Have you ever felt that you’ve failed God? You made a commitment but you did not keep it? Did you accept Jesus Christ as your Saviour and then continue to sin because of which you don’t feel worthy to go back to God? Will you stop and consider how gracious God is? He has not given up on you. God will help you overcome your failure if you let him. Will you let him? Will you go to him and ask for help?
Watch this video: Olympics Inspiration: Finish the Race, Not Just Start It!!
The 1968 Olympics was held in Mexico City – John Stephen Akhwari of Tanzania came last in the 26 miles Marathon because of injury. It was 7 pm and the stadium was nearly empty as the winners had finished the race nearly one hour earlier. Do you know what he said after he crossed the finish line as the lone runner?
“My country didn’t send me 5000 miles to start the race, but sent me 5000 miles to finish the race.”
Assess and Apply
Where are you today? If you think you have failed,or you see yourself as a failure..what should you do?
1. It’s time to change your track.
Run, fixing your eyes upon Jesus, the author and perfecter of your faith. Hebrews 12:2
2. Remember- Quitters don’t win, and winners don’t quit
Do what He says – Hebrews 12:1- throw away the negative thoughts and emotions that pull you down, whether discouragements , grumblings, ingratitude or the fear of failure.
3. When the going gets tough, the tough get going
Pray, read your Bible, be part of a godly and praying community of God’s people. Use your talents for God’s glory.
Use the download button in the activity if available or take a screenshot of the finished activity and send it to your teachers via WhatsApp or email to
Activity 1: Inductive study of the Bible
The Inductive Study Method is an investigative approach to the Bible using three basic components: Observation, Interpretation and Application. These are general questions to help you investigate the passage. You have to find out how these general questions apply to this specific passage Now, it is time for you to learn about failures in one's spiritual life and how to handle them.
Do an inductive Bible study on the Bible portion given below.
Activity 2: Crossword
Activity 3: Disappear to remember?!
Have a pen and paper with you before you start this activity. Watch the video. Look at all the words carefully once. You may pause the video for few seconds.
Now play !
A word will disappear. Write down that word on the piece of paper.
Now give a second word disappears. Write down the second word.
Now repeat the process.
When all the words disappear, you would have written the memory verse on you paper. Now learn it. | {
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Grand-theft Auto Collection Full Pc Game + Crack Cpy CODEX Torrent Free 2021
Grand-theft Auto Collection Full Pc Game Crack When a young streetwalker, a retired bank robber, and a horrible psychopath are among the most frightening and confusing aspects of the criminal world, the U.S. government, and the entertainment industry, they must remove a series of dangerous emissions in a ruthless city. when they can’t trust anyone, at least. Grand Theft Auto for PC gives gamers the chance to explore the world of award-winning Los Santos and Blaine counties with resolutions up to 4k or above, as well as the chance to experience the game at 60 frames per year. seconds. The game offers players a huge range of Grand-theft Auto Collection FREE DOWNLOAD of PC-specific customization options, including over 25 individually configurable settings for texture quality, shadows, tessellation, aliasing, and much more, as well as extensive support and customization for mouse and keyboard control. Additional features include a Grand-theft Auto Collection IGG population density slider to control car and pedestrian traffic, as well as dual and triple display support, 3D compatibility, and plug and controller support.
Grand-theft Auto Collection CPY:
Grand-theft Auto Collection CODEX open-world action-adventure. The plot of the game is very interesting, the action takes place in Los Lantos, where the main character meets a certain Franklin, who hires him to steal client cars. So begins the friendship of a new thief and a professional hijacker. Then they rob a jewelry shop. This is where the fun begins. Michael sounds his catchphrase on TV and is immediately recognized by his ex-partner Trevor, who thought Michael was dead. Additional events develop even more interesting, what happens when they come together. All citizens are actively responding to the Grand-theft Auto Collection RELOADED tricks of the player, in case of violations they report to the police. open-world action-adventure. The plot of the game is very interesting, the action takes place in Los Lantos, where the main character meets a certain Franklin, who hires him to steal client cars. So begins the friendship of a new thief and a professional hijacker. Then they rob a jewelry shop. This is where the fun begins. Michael sounds his catchphrase on TV and is immediately recognized by his ex-partner Trevor, who thought Michael was dead.
Grand-theft Auto Collection CODEX:
Grand-theft Auto Collection CPY Additional events develop even more interesting, what happens when they come together. All citizens are actively responding to the tricks of the player, in case of violations they report to the police. What defines the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas downloads more than anything is its size. It is very ambitious, located in a large country, which includes three large cities and many rural areas. This campaign is very big and there is still a lot to do. The story, a story in many rags, Grand-theft Auto Collection SKIDROW may not be overwhelmingly original, but it is well told with excellent acting and many fun and memorable characters. The radio station is very good, with an excellent combination of 90s music and fun commercials. There is a time when Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas will be frustrating for some people. Country race cars can be very smart, for example, and they can make Carl’s lungs Grand Theft Auto San Andreas swim underwater for too long. Some missions are also a bit boring, but they are defeated by the best moments of the game and the amount of fun that you can explore the country, enjoy the site, and create mayhem.
- An open-world 3D action game that has been very successful on PC, PlayStation, and mobile platforms.
- Play the role of Carl Johnson and interact with him and his gang to dominate the streets where you
- will meet other characters such as Helena, Katie, Brian, Catalina, Barbara, or Denise.
- Help him find out who killed his mother and protect the other members of the family.
- The trips to Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas mimic the gang wars that took place on the west coast of the United States.
- A sandbox game in which you can explore endless scenarios where anything goes.
- The same game engine as GTA III: Renderware.
- Impressive soundtrack with hip-hop, rock, and electronic music from the 90s.
- Possibility of expanding the game options, which is already a lot, by installing all kinds of MODs, such as the famous Hot Coffee
- Windows XP or Windows 2000 operating system.
- 1 GHz Pentium 3 processor or AMD Athlon processor.
- 256 MB RAM minimum.
- \64MB or better Geforce 3 video graphics card.
- At least 3.6 GB of free hard disk space is required.
- Install software like SecuROM or Direct X.
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- Intel Pentium IV or Athlon AMD XP processor.
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- Geforce 6 is the best 128MB graphics memory card or even better for the best-recommended card.
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- A Direct X9 compatible sound card is also required. The recommended card is Sound Blaster Audigy
How to Crack?
- Download Grand Theft Auto Game
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- Copy crack to game’s folder
- Play and Enjoy:) | {
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Want to earn distinctive goods from Park Bo Younger and Seo In Guk’s future drama Doom At Your Company? Hold reading through to discover out how to enter!
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Your remark has been submitted to the moderation queue | {
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The scorpion that my maid found under my kitchen sink in Brasilia on May 1, 2014.
(Photo by Rasheed Abualsamh, all rights reserved. May not be copied without written permission.)
By Rasheed Abou-Alsamh
My maid Silvania found a live scorpion lurking under my kitchen sink this week when she was cleaning. I had gone out to run an errand and when I returned she proudly pointed to an old peanut butter jar that she had placed the scorpion in, killing it with rubbing alcohol and bleach. There it floated gracefully and menacingly, its stinger in its tail pointing towards the surface, around 8cms long, colored a yellowish-red.
“The yellow scorpions are some of the most poisonous,” my mother tells me, only adding to my anxiety about whether there are more lurking in my house.
I look up scorpions on the internet and find that the females of the yellow-variety do not need a male to reproduce. They reproduce through parthenogenesis, in which unfertilized eggs develop into embryos. They can fast for up to 6-12 months without eating anything and survive because their metabolism rate is so slow. Scorpions are present on all continents except for the poles, and originally were not present in Great Britain or New Zealand. International trade put an end to that, with scorpions being introduced into the UK in the 1860s, most probably from Africa. Of the more than 1,700 species of scorpions, only around 25 are venomous enough to kill a human being. That is scant comfort for me, as my dead scorpion seems to be of the very venomous type.
Further research finds that scorpions usually come into houses to escape from the cold outside. This makes sense as its been around 13 degrees centigrade here in Brasilia at night, and my house tends to be extra warm because of the heat that my roof retains from the sunshine during the day. My mother is worried that there may be a whole nest of baby scorpions hiding in my house. To make sure I don’t get surprised by one of these nasty creatures, I spray insecticide under my kitchen sink, in the living room, bedrooms and my bathrooms before going to sleep. A Brazilian friend tells me on the phone: “Don’t walk around barefoot, and check under your bedcovers and shake out your pillows before climbing into bed!” All of which I do.
The next day I decide to call Jacques, a trained agronomist and an exterminator that sprayed all of our land two years ago to get rid of termites. “What most people do after they’ve found a scorpion in their home is to have their residence fumigated. Scorpions usually eat cockroaches and other insects, but you could go for years after finding a scorpion and not see another one,” he tells me reassuringly. The fact that I haven’t seen any cockroaches in my house for a while both reassures and scares me, for it could mean the scorpion had eaten them all or it could just be that there haven’t been that many cockroaches to begin with.
My revulsion of certain types of insects began at a young age. I vividly remember visiting my grandmother in Riyadh in the early 1970s when we lived in Geneva and I was around 7 years of age. Walking up the stairs to the second floor of the house where she lived scared me immensely because of the horrible and scary insects that were lurking there on the landing between the floors. I remember seeing scorpions and other insects, and refused to walk up or down those stairs without the protection afforded to me by an adult uncle or aunt, whom I was sure would shield me from them.
Scorpions like to live in dark crevices, so I have decided that I need to have the hole in the wall below my sink patched up. The previous tenants left the hole when they moved out and I never got around to having it fixed up since it was out of sight.
I’m not surprised to find out that scorpions are part of the Arachnid family of insects, of which spiders are the most common. And indeed there are too many spiders in Brasilia, spinning their webs quickly on anything that is standing still, and at an amazing speed. Knowing that, I opened a kitchen cupboard before going to bed on the day Silvania caught the scorpion and was faced with a spider’s web between containers of sugar and an army of tiny black ants trying to get into the containers. I gasped in horror and quickly sprayed the insects with insecticide. Here was one arachnid that had gotten away from my maid. | {
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