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These wise words from Tolstoy seem even more relevant 100 years on.
Matt Ridley has published a great essay in WIRED SCIENCE today. Ridley nails an issue that has plagued humanity since time immemorial. Some supposedly intelligent human beings become so convinced that Doomsday is upon them that nothing will persuade them to the contrary. Ridley’s essay is a must read for everyone interested in Doomsday predictions that have failed to materialise and why we should dump the Climate Scare in the same basket.
When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives. And the prophets of apocalypse always draw a following—from the 100,000 Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the Christian radio broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both 1994 and 2011.
Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable. Best-selling economist Robert Heilbroner in 1974: “The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seem to be very slim indeed.” Or best-selling ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s ["and 1980s" was added in a later edition] the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now … nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Or Jimmy Carter in a televised speech in 1977: “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”
Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”
APOCOHOLISM IS GROWING
Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions—we are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes.
So far all of these specters have turned out to be exaggerated. True, we have encountered obstacles, public-health emergencies, and even mass tragedies. But the promised Armageddons—the thresholds that cannot be uncrossed, the tipping points that cannot be untipped, the existential threats to Life as We Know It—have consistently failed to materialize. To see the full depth of our apocaholism, and to understand why we keep getting it so wrong, we need to consult the past 50 years of history.
Ridley takes the reader through a modern day analogy of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
The classic apocalypse has four horsemen, and our modern version follows that pattern, with the four riders being chemicals (DDT, CFCs, acid rain), diseases (bird flu, swine flu, SARS, AIDS, Ebola, mad cow disease), people (population, famine), and resources (oil, metals). Let’s visit them each in turn.Read it all here | <urn:uuid:39cd3ba2-0f3d-47b0-b89f-dee9760eeaa2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://austeaparty.com.au/web/the-end-is-not-nigh-but-many-of-us-just-dont-get-it/ | 2013-05-18T08:08:49Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93762 | 909 |
Seattle Seahawks: Did Russell Wilson and Bobby Wagner Deserve ROY Awards?
Over the weekend, Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III and Carolina Panthers linebacker Luke Kuechly won the NFL's Offensive and Defensive Rookie of the Year awards, while Seattle Seahawks Bobby Wagner and Russell Wilson finished in second and third place respectively in the voting done by the Associated Press.
As the Seattle Times' Danny O'Neil reported:
Seattle’s draft class was panned in April. In January, though, Seattle had two of the top six rookies according to Associated Press ballots.
Linebacker Bobby Wagner was runner-up in Defensive Rookie of the Year to Luke Kuechly of Carolina, the No. 9 overall pick. Kuechly received 28 first-place votes, Wagner 11. Green Bay cornerback Casey Hayward finished third with six first-place votes.
Quarterback Russell Wilson was third in votes for Offensive Rookie of the Year. Robert Griffin III of Washington won the award, receiving 29 of 50 votes. Andrew Luck of Indianapolis received 11 votes, Wilson received 10.
The balloting by 50 designated voters concluded before the start of the postseason. Voters selected one winner. There were no second and third-place votes in balloting.
While I'm not shocked that RG3 won the offensive award, I was a little surprised Kuechly beat out Wagner. In both votes what really has me scratching my head is the margin by which RG3 and Kuechly won.
On the offensive side of the coin the competition was fierce between not only the No. 1 and No. 2 selections in the April draft, but the man chosen 70-plus spots following them.
If you're a fan of the underdog, you will be hard-pressed to find a better story than Russell Wilson this season or most others. The undersized third-round draft choice took the city of Seattle and the NFL by storm in a story that now reads like a cheesy Hollywood script.
The fact of the matter is that it was really a fairly lengthy process that began last spring and took shape over the better part of the season. Wilson painstakingly won over his coaches, teammates, fans and eventually the entire league by taking on all comers and proving the critics wrong every step of the way.
Yet choosing among RG3, Andrew Luck, and Russell Wilson isn't as easy as you might imagine.
Who deserved the Offensive ROY Award?
As much as I love Wilson, I can understand the appeal of RG3 and how voters were amazed by him from the very beginning to the very end.
Who could forget RG3's Week 1 performance when he went to New Orleans and won with a dazzling display of dominance by attacking through the air and on the ground. Fast-forward to the regular-season finale at home against the Cowboys with the division title up for grabs when Griffin once again got the job done with the help of fellow rookie Alfred Morris at running back.
By the way, where were the ROY votes for Morris? A sixth-round pick from Florida Atlantic rushes for 1,613 yards with 13 touchdowns while helping his team to the playoffs and his teammate wins in a landslide while he doesn't get a single vote from the 50 writers?
It all leads me to believe that Griffin's knack for drama is what has the media and fans spellbound. It also leads me to believe it's part of why he stayed in the wild-card game against the Seahawks well past the point he should have.
Patrick McDermott/Getty Images
Wilson, on the other hand, perhaps because he has been reminded throughout his life about his limitations, seems to have a solid grasp of what he should and shouldn't do on the field of play.
That maturity came through against the Redskins as he rallied the 'Hawks back on the road and leads me to wonder how many voters would have changed their vote if they had the chance now?
On the defensive side, Wagner was a second-round pick joining an already solid defense, but asked to help shore up what was arguably the team's weakest point at linebacker.
Following the departure of veteran David Hawthorne via free agency, Wagner was drafted with the hopes of taking over the middle linebacker spot after the top middle linebacker in the draft was selected just a few spots ahead of the Seahawks' first-round pick.
Whether the 'Hawks would have drafted Luke Kuechly is something we will probably never know, but with the Carolina Panthers grabbing him at No. 9, the brain trust of head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider adjusted accordingly and eventually found their man in the middle in Round 2.
A position that going in to the season looked like a potential liability soon became a strength, with Wagner always at the center of the action while leading the team in tackles playing alongside second-year man K.J. Wright and veteran Leroy Hill.
With that said, did Wagner deserve to win given his contributions to the Seahawks this season?
Who Deserved the Defensive ROY Award?
In Carolina this season Kuechly posted 165 tackles and took over the middle linebacker spot after veteran Jon Beason went down for the season with an injury early in the season.
At the same time I don't see how Kuechly got 28 first-place votes versus only 11 for Wagner.
At times like these I can imagine some fans crying about an East Coast bias within the media, but I'm not sure how much I buy that here given the fact that the Seahawks had four first-team All-Pro selections this year.
Perhaps in both cases Wilson and Wagner's success was seen as a byproduct of an already solid roster built by Pete Carroll and John Schneider?
Once again, we will probably never know, but by now Wilson and Wagner are likely accustomed to the critics looking past them. Either way I like to think both slights will be stowed away and some day used as motivation for Wilson and Wagner, who seem the kind of players who may forgive but will never forget.
Winning rookie of the year may be nice, but I hope that both men have their sights set on something far more grandiose over the course of time, while helping lift the Seahawks to a level that no one will be able to deny them with a popular vote...a Super Bowl championship.
What is the duplicate article?
Why is this article offensive?
Where is this article plagiarized from?
Why is this article poorly edited? | <urn:uuid:ba9ed54e-b45e-4214-8bd7-ff5123fcd5fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1516181-seattle-seahawks-did-russell-wilson-and-bobby-wagner-deserve-roy-awards | 2013-05-18T06:02:45Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977403 | 1,328 |
- Year Published: 1866
- Language: English
- Country of Origin: Russia
- Source: Dostoyevsky, F. (1866). Crime and Punishment. Moscow, Russia: The Russian Messenger.
- Flesch–Kincaid Level: 7.2
- Word Count: 7,803
Dostoyevsky, F. (1866). Part 3, Chapter 5. Crime and Punishment (Lit2Go Edition). Retrieved May 18, 2013, from
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. "Part 3, Chapter 5." Crime and Punishment. Lit2Go Edition. 1866. Web. <>. May 18, 2013.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "Part 3, Chapter 5," Crime and Punishment, Lit2Go Edition, (1866), accessed May 18, 2013,.
Raskolnikov was already entering the room. He came in looking as though he had the utmost difficulty not to burst out laughing again. Behind him Razumihin strode in gawky and awkward, shamefaced and red as a peony, with an utterly crestfallen and ferocious expression. His face and whole figure really were ridiculous at that moment and amply justified Raskolnikov’s laughter. Raskolnikov, not waiting for an introduction, bowed to Porfiry Petrovitch, who stood in the middle of the room looking inquiringly at them. He held out his hand and shook hands, still apparently making desperate efforts to subdue his mirth and utter a few words to introduce himself. But he had no sooner succeeded in assuming a serious air and muttering something when he suddenly glanced again as though accidentally at Razumihin, and could no longer control himself: his stifled laughter broke out the more irresistibly the more he tried to restrain it. The extraordinary ferocity with which Razumihin received this “spontaneous” mirth gave the whole scene the appearance of most genuine fun and naturalness. Razumihin strengthened this impression as though on purpose.
“Fool! You fiend,” he roared, waving his arm which at once struck a little round table with an empty tea-glass on it. Everything was sent flying and crashing.
“But why break chairs, gentlemen? You know it’s a loss to the Crown,” Porfiry Petrovitch quoted gaily.
Raskolnikov was still laughing, with his hand in Porfiry Petrovitch’s, but anxious not to overdo it, awaited the right moment to put a natural end to it. Razumihin, completely put to confusion by upsetting the table and smashing the glass, gazed gloomily at the fragments, cursed and turned sharply to the window where he stood looking out with his back to the company with a fiercely scowling countenance, seeing nothing. Porfiry Petrovitch laughed and was ready to go on laughing, but obviously looked for explanations. Zametov had been sitting in the corner, but he rose at the visitors’ entrance and was standing in expectation with a smile on his lips, though he looked with surprise and even it seemed incredulity at the whole scene and at Raskolnikov with a certain embarrassment. Zametov’s unexpected presence struck Raskolnikov unpleasantly.
“I’ve got to think of that,” he thought. “Excuse me, please,” he began, affecting extreme embarrassment. “Raskolnikov.”
“Not at all, very pleasant to see you… and how pleasantly you’ve come in…. Why, won’t he even say good-morning?” Porfiry Petrovitch nodded at Razumihin.
“Upon my honour I don’t know why he is in such a rage with me. I only told him as we came along that he was like Romeo… and proved it. And that was all, I think!”
“Pig!” ejaculated Razumihin, without turning round.
“There must have been very grave grounds for it, if he is so furious at the word,” Porfiry laughed.
“Oh, you sharp lawyer!... Damn you all!” snapped Razumihin, and suddenly bursting out laughing himself, he went up to Porfiry with a more cheerful face as though nothing had happened. “That’ll do! We are all fools. To come to business. This is my friend Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov; in the first place he has heard of you and wants to make your acquaintance, and secondly, he has a little matter of business with you. Bah! Zametov, what brought you here? Have you met before? Have you known each other long?”
“What does this mean?” thought Raskolnikov uneasily.
Zametov seemed taken aback, but not very much so.
“Why, it was at your rooms we met yesterday,” he said easily.
“Then I have been spared the trouble. All last week he was begging me to introduce him to you. Porfiry and you have sniffed each other out without me. Where is your tobacco?”
Porfiry Petrovitch was wearing a dressing-gown, very clean linen, and trodden-down slippers. He was a man of about five and thirty, short, stout even to corpulence, and clean shaven. He wore his hair cut short and had a large round head, particularly prominent at the back. His soft, round, rather snub-nosed face was of a sickly yellowish colour, but had a vigorous and rather ironical expression. It would have been good-natured except for a look in the eyes, which shone with a watery, mawkish light under almost white, blinking eyelashes. The expression of those eyes was strangely out of keeping with his somewhat womanish figure, and gave it something far more serious than could be guessed at first sight.
As soon as Porfiry Petrovitch heard that his visitor had a little matter of business with him, he begged him to sit down on the sofa and sat down himself on the other end, waiting for him to explain his business, with that careful and over-serious attention which is at once oppressive and embarrassing, especially to a stranger, and especially if what you are discussing is in your opinion of far too little importance for such exceptional solemnity. But in brief and coherent phrases Raskolnikov explained his business clearly and exactly, and was so well satisfied with himself that he even succeeded in taking a good look at Porfiry. Porfiry Petrovitch did not once take his eyes off him. Razumihin, sitting opposite at the same table, listened warmly and impatiently, looking from one to the other every moment with rather excessive interest.
“Fool,” Raskolnikov swore to himself.
“You have to give information to the police,” Porfiry replied, with a most businesslike air, “that having learnt of this incident, that is of the murder, you beg to inform the lawyer in charge of the case that such and such things belong to you, and that you desire to redeem them… or… but they will write to you.”
“That’s just the point, that at the present moment,” Raskolnikov tried his utmost to feign embarrassment, “I am not quite in funds… and even this trifling sum is beyond me… I only wanted, you see, for the present to declare that the things are mine, and that when I have money….”
“That’s no matter,” answered Porfiry Petrovitch, receiving his explanation of his pecuniary position coldly, “but you can, if you prefer, write straight to me, to say, that having been informed of the matter, and claiming such and such as your property, you beg…”
“On an ordinary sheet of paper?” Raskolnikov interrupted eagerly, again interested in the financial side of the question.
“Oh, the most ordinary,” and suddenly Porfiry Petrovitch looked with obvious irony at him, screwing up his eyes and, as it were, winking at him. But perhaps it was Raskolnikov’s fancy, for it all lasted but a moment. There was certainly something of the sort, Raskolnikov could have sworn he winked at him, goodness knows why.
“He knows,” flashed through his mind like lightning.
“Forgive my troubling you about such trifles,” he went on, a little disconcerted, “the things are only worth five roubles, but I prize them particularly for the sake of those from whom they came to me, and I must confess that I was alarmed when I heard…”
“That’s why you were so much struck when I mentioned to Zossimov that Porfiry was inquiring for everyone who had pledges!” Razumihin put in with obvious intention.
This was really unbearable. Raskolnikov could not help glancing at him with a flash of vindictive anger in his black eyes, but immediately recollected himself.
“You seem to be jeering at me, brother?” he said to him, with a well-feigned irritability. “I dare say I do seem to you absurdly anxious about such trash; but you mustn’t think me selfish or grasping for that, and these two things may be anything but trash in my eyes. I told you just now that the silver watch, though it’s not worth a cent, is the only thing left us of my father’s. You may laugh at me, but my mother is here,” he turned suddenly to Porfiry, “and if she knew,” he turned again hurriedly to Razumihin, carefully making his voice tremble, “that the watch was lost, she would be in despair! You know what women are!”
“Not a bit of it! I didn’t mean that at all! Quite the contrary!” shouted Razumihin distressed.
“Was it right? Was it natural? Did I overdo it?” Raskolnikov asked himself in a tremor. “Why did I say that about women?”
“Oh, your mother is with you?” Porfiry Petrovitch inquired.
“When did she come?”
Porfiry paused as though reflecting.
“Your things would not in any case be lost,” he went on calmly and coldly. “I have been expecting you here for some time.”
And as though that was a matter of no importance, he carefully offered the ash-tray to Razumihin, who was ruthlessly scattering cigarette ash over the carpet. Raskolnikov shuddered, but Porfiry did not seem to be looking at him, and was still concerned with Razumihin’s cigarette.
“What? Expecting him? Why, did you know that he had pledges there?” cried Razumihin.
Porfiry Petrovitch addressed himself to Raskolnikov.
“Your things, the ring and the watch, were wrapped up together, and on the paper your name was legibly written in pencil, together with the date on which you left them with her…”
“How observant you are!” Raskolnikov smiled awkwardly, doing his very utmost to look him straight in the face, but he failed, and suddenly added:
“I say that because I suppose there were a great many pledges… that it must be difficult to remember them all…. But you remember them all so clearly, and… and…”
“Stupid! Feeble!” he thought. “Why did I add that?”
“But we know all who had pledges, and you are the only one who hasn’t come forward,” Porfiry answered with hardly perceptible irony.
“I haven’t been quite well.”
“I heard that too. I heard, indeed, that you were in great distress about something. You look pale still.”
“I am not pale at all…. No, I am quite well,” Raskolnikov snapped out rudely and angrily, completely changing his tone. His anger was mounting, he could not repress it. “And in my anger I shall betray myself,” flashed through his mind again. “Why are they torturing me?”
“Not quite well!” Razumihin caught him up. “What next! He was unconscious and delirious all yesterday. Would you believe, Porfiry, as soon as our backs were turned, he dressed, though he could hardly stand, and gave us the slip and went off on a spree somewhere till midnight, delirious all the time! Would you believe it! Extraordinary!”
“Really delirious? You don’t say so!” Porfiry shook his head in a womanish way.
“Nonsense! Don’t you believe it! But you don’t believe it anyway,” Raskolnikov let slip in his anger. But Porfiry Petrovitch did not seem to catch those strange words.
“But how could you have gone out if you hadn’t been delirious?” Razumihin got hot suddenly. “What did you go out for? What was the object of it? And why on the sly? Were you in your senses when you did it? Now that all danger is over I can speak plainly.”
“I was awfully sick of them yesterday.” Raskolnikov addressed Porfiry suddenly with a smile of insolent defiance, “I ran away from them to take lodgings where they wouldn’t find me, and took a lot of money with me. Mr. Zametov there saw it. I say, Mr. Zametov, was I sensible or delirious yesterday; settle our dispute.”
He could have strangled Zametov at that moment, so hateful were his expression and his silence to him.
“In my opinion you talked sensibly and even artfully, but you were extremely irritable,” Zametov pronounced dryly.
“And Nikodim Fomitch was telling me to-day,” put in Porfiry Petrovitch, “that he met you very late last night in the lodging of a man who had been run over.”
“And there,” said Razumihin, “weren’t you mad then? You gave your last penny to the widow for the funeral. If you wanted to help, give fifteen or twenty even, but keep three roubles for yourself at least, but he flung away all the twenty-five at once!”
“Maybe I found a treasure somewhere and you know nothing of it? So that’s why I was liberal yesterday…. Mr. Zametov knows I’ve found a treasure! Excuse us, please, for disturbing you for half an hour with such trivialities,” he said, turning to Porfiry Petrovitch, with trembling lips. “We are boring you, aren’t we?”
“Oh no, quite the contrary, quite the contrary! If only you knew how you interest me! It’s interesting to look on and listen… and I am really glad you have come forward at last.”
“But you might give us some tea! My throat’s dry,” cried Razumihin.
“Capital idea! Perhaps we will all keep you company. Wouldn’t you like… something more essential before tea?”
“Get along with you!”
Porfiry Petrovitch went out to order tea.
Raskolnikov’s thoughts were in a whirl. He was in terrible exasperation.
“The worst of it is they don’t disguise it; they don’t care to stand on ceremony! And how if you didn’t know me at all, did you come to talk to Nikodim Fomitch about me? So they don’t care to hide that they are tracking me like a pack of dogs. They simply spit in my face.” He was shaking with rage. “Come, strike me openly, don’t play with me like a cat with a mouse. It’s hardly civil, Porfiry Petrovitch, but perhaps I won’t allow it! I shall get up and throw the whole truth in your ugly faces, and you’ll see how I despise you.” He could hardly breathe. “And what if it’s only my fancy? What if I am mistaken, and through inexperience I get angry and don’t keep up my nasty part? Perhaps it’s all unintentional. All their phrases are the usual ones, but there is something about them…. It all might be said, but there is something. Why did he say bluntly, ‘With her’? Why did Zametov add that I spoke artfully? Why do they speak in that tone? Yes, the tone…. Razumihin is sitting here, why does he see nothing? That innocent blockhead never does see anything! Feverish again! Did Porfiry wink at me just now? Of course it’s nonsense! What could he wink for? Are they trying to upset my nerves or are they teasing me? Either it’s ill fancy or they know! Even Zametov is rude…. Is Zametov rude? Zametov has changed his mind. I foresaw he would change his mind! He is at home here, while it’s my first visit. Porfiry does not consider him a visitor; sits with his back to him. They’re as thick as thieves, no doubt, over me! Not a doubt they were talking about me before we came. Do they know about the flat? If only they’d make haste! When I said that I ran away to take a flat he let it pass…. I put that in cleverly about a flat, it may be of use afterwards…. Delirious, indeed… ha-ha-ha! He knows all about last night! He didn’t know of my mother’s arrival! The hag had written the date on in pencil! You are wrong, you won’t catch me! There are no facts… it’s all supposition! You produce facts! The flat even isn’t a fact but delirium. I know what to say to them…. Do they know about the flat? I won’t go without finding out. What did I come for? But my being angry now, maybe is a fact! Fool, how irritable I am! Perhaps that’s right; to play the invalid…. He is feeling me. He will try to catch me. Why did I come?”
All this flashed like lightning through his mind.
Porfiry Petrovitch returned quickly. He became suddenly more jovial.
“Your party yesterday, brother, has left my head rather…. And I am out of sorts altogether,” he began in quite a different tone, laughing to Razumihin.
“Was it interesting? I left you yesterday at the most interesting point. Who got the best of it?”
“Oh, no one, of course. They got on to everlasting questions, floated off into space.”
“Only fancy, Rodya, what we got on to yesterday. Whether there is such a thing as crime. I told you that we talked our heads off.”
“What is there strange? It’s an everyday social question,” Raskolnikov answered casually.
“The question wasn’t put quite like that,” observed Porfiry.
“Not quite, that’s true,” Razumihin agreed at once, getting warm and hurried as usual. “Listen, Rodion, and tell us your opinion, I want to hear it. I was fighting tooth and nail with them and wanted you to help me. I told them you were coming…. It began with the socialist doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social organisation and nothing more, and nothing more; no other causes admitted!...”
“You are wrong there,” cried Porfiry Petrovitch; he was noticeably animated and kept laughing as he looked at Razumihin, which made him more excited than ever.
“Nothing is admitted,” Razumihin interrupted with heat.
“I am not wrong. I’ll show you their pamphlets. Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it’s not supposed to exist! They don’t recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That’s why they instinctively dislike history, ‘nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,’ and they explain it all as stupidity! That’s why they so dislike the living process of life; they don’t want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won’t obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won’t revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery—it wants life, it hasn’t completed its vital process, it’s too soon for the graveyard! You can’t skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That’s the easiest solution of the problem! It’s seductively clear and you musn’t think about it. That’s the great thing, you mustn’t think! The whole secret of life in two pages of print!”
“Now he is off, beating the drum! Catch hold of him, do!” laughed Porfiry. “Can you imagine,” he turned to Raskolnikov, “six people holding forth like that last night, in one room, with punch as a preliminary! No, brother, you are wrong, environment accounts for a great deal in crime; I can assure you of that.”
“Oh, I know it does, but just tell me: a man of forty violates a child of ten; was it environment drove him to it?”
“Well, strictly speaking, it did,” Porfiry observed with noteworthy gravity; “a crime of that nature may be very well ascribed to the influence of environment.”
Razumihin was almost in a frenzy. “Oh, if you like,” he roared. “I’ll prove to you that your white eyelashes may very well be ascribed to the Church of Ivan the Great’s being two hundred and fifty feet high, and I will prove it clearly, exactly, progressively, and even with a Liberal tendency! I undertake to! Will you bet on it?”
“Done! Let’s hear, please, how he will prove it!”
“He is always humbugging, confound him,” cried Razumihin, jumping up and gesticulating. “What’s the use of talking to you? He does all that on purpose; you don’t know him, Rodion! He took their side yesterday, simply to make fools of them. And the things he said yesterday! And they were delighted! He can keep it up for a fortnight together. Last year he persuaded us that he was going into a monastery: he stuck to it for two months. Not long ago he took it into his head to declare he was going to get married, that he had everything ready for the wedding. He ordered new clothes indeed. We all began to congratulate him. There was no bride, nothing, all pure fantasy!”
“Ah, you are wrong! I got the clothes before. It was the new clothes in fact that made me think of taking you in.”
“Are you such a good dissembler?” Raskolnikov asked carelessly.
“You wouldn’t have supposed it, eh? Wait a bit, I shall take you in, too. Ha-ha-ha! No, I’ll tell you the truth. All these questions about crime, environment, children, recall to my mind an article of yours which interested me at the time. ‘On Crime’... or something of the sort, I forget the title, I read it with pleasure two months ago in the Periodical Review.”
“My article? In the Periodical Review?” Raskolnikov asked in astonishment. “I certainly did write an article upon a book six months ago when I left the university, but I sent it to the Weekly Review.”
“But it came out in the Periodical.”
“And the Weekly Review ceased to exist, so that’s why it wasn’t printed at the time.”
“That’s true; but when it ceased to exist, the Weekly Review was amalgamated with the Periodical, and so your article appeared two months ago in the latter. Didn’t you know?”
Raskolnikov had not known.
“Why, you might get some money out of them for the article! What a strange person you are! You lead such a solitary life that you know nothing of matters that concern you directly. It’s a fact, I assure you.”
“Bravo, Rodya! I knew nothing about it either!” cried Razumihin. “I’ll run to-day to the reading-room and ask for the number. Two months ago? What was the date? It doesn’t matter though, I will find it. Think of not telling us!”
“How did you find out that the article was mine? It’s only signed with an initial.”
“I only learnt it by chance, the other day. Through the editor; I know him…. I was very much interested.”
“I analysed, if I remember, the psychology of a criminal before and after the crime.”
“Yes, and you maintained that the perpetration of a crime is always accompanied by illness. Very, very original, but… it was not that part of your article that interested me so much, but an idea at the end of the article which I regret to say you merely suggested without working it out clearly. There is, if you recollect, a suggestion that there are certain persons who can… that is, not precisely are able to, but have a perfect right to commit breaches of morality and crimes, and that the law is not for them.”
Raskolnikov smiled at the exaggerated and intentional distortion of his idea.
“What? What do you mean? A right to crime? But not because of the influence of environment?” Razumihin inquired with some alarm even.
“No, not exactly because of it,” answered Porfiry. “In his article all men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary. That was your idea, if I am not mistaken?”
“What do you mean? That can’t be right?” Razumihin muttered in bewilderment.
Raskolnikov smiled again. He saw the point at once, and knew where they wanted to drive him. He decided to take up the challenge.
“That wasn’t quite my contention,” he began simply and modestly. “Yet I admit that you have stated it almost correctly; perhaps, if you like, perfectly so.” (It almost gave him pleasure to admit this.) “The only difference is that I don’t contend that extraordinary people are always bound to commit breaches of morals, as you call it. In fact, I doubt whether such an argument could be published. I simply hinted that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right… that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep… certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity). You say that my article isn’t definite; I am ready to make it as clear as I can. Perhaps I am right in thinking you want me to; very well. I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound… to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity. But it does not follow from that that Newton had a right to murder people right and left and to steal every day in the market. Then, I remember, I maintain in my article that all… well, legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed either, if that bloodshed—often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defence of ancient law—were of use to their cause. It’s remarkable, in fact, that the majority, indeed, of these benefactors and leaders of humanity were guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals—more or less, of course. Otherwise it’s hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to remain in the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it. You see that there is nothing particularly new in all that. The same thing has been printed and read a thousand times before. As for my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that it’s somewhat arbitrary, but I don’t insist upon exact numbers. I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. There are, of course, innumerable sub-divisions, but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood—that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that. It’s only in that sense I speak of their right to crime in my article (you remember it began with the legal question). There’s no need for such anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfil quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal right to exist. In fact, all have equal rights with me—and _vive la guerre éternelle_—till the New Jerusalem, of course!”
“Then you believe in the New Jerusalem, do you?”
“I do,” Raskolnikov answered firmly; as he said these words and during the whole preceding tirade he kept his eyes on one spot on the carpet.
“And… and do you believe in God? Excuse my curiosity.”
“I do,” repeated Raskolnikov, raising his eyes to Porfiry.
“And… do you believe in Lazarus’ rising from the dead?”
“I… I do. Why do you ask all this?”
“You believe it literally?”
“You don’t say so…. I asked from curiosity. Excuse me. But let us go back to the question; they are not always executed. Some, on the contrary…”
“Triumph in their lifetime? Oh, yes, some attain their ends in this life, and then…”
“They begin executing other people?”
“If it’s necessary; indeed, for the most part they do. Your remark is very witty.”
“Thank you. But tell me this: how do you distinguish those extraordinary people from the ordinary ones? Are there signs at their birth? I feel there ought to be more exactitude, more external definition. Excuse the natural anxiety of a practical law-abiding citizen, but couldn’t they adopt a special uniform, for instance, couldn’t they wear something, be branded in some way? For you know if confusion arises and a member of one category imagines that he belongs to the other, begins to ‘eliminate obstacles’ as you so happily expressed it, then…”
“Oh, that very often happens! That remark is wittier than the other.”
“No reason to; but take note that the mistake can only arise in the first category, that is among the ordinary people (as I perhaps unfortunately called them). In spite of their predisposition to obedience very many of them, through a playfulness of nature, sometimes vouchsafed even to the cow, like to imagine themselves advanced people, ‘destroyers,’ and to push themselves into the ‘new movement,’ and this quite sincerely. Meanwhile the really new people are very often unobserved by them, or even despised as reactionaries of grovelling tendencies. But I don’t think there is any considerable danger here, and you really need not be uneasy for they never go very far. Of course, they might have a thrashing sometimes for letting their fancy run away with them and to teach them their place, but no more; in fact, even this isn’t necessary as they castigate themselves, for they are very conscientious: some perform this service for one another and others chastise themselves with their own hands…. They will impose various public acts of penitence upon themselves with a beautiful and edifying effect; in fact you’ve nothing to be uneasy about…. It’s a law of nature.”
“Well, you have certainly set my mind more at rest on that score; but there’s another thing worries me. Tell me, please, are there many people who have the right to kill others, these extraordinary people? I am ready to bow down to them, of course, but you must admit it’s alarming if there are a great many of them, eh?”
“Oh, you needn’t worry about that either,” Raskolnikov went on in the same tone. “People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so in fact. One thing only is clear, that the appearance of all these grades and sub-divisions of men must follow with unfailing regularity some law of nature. That law, of course, is unknown at present, but I am convinced that it exists, and one day may become known. The vast mass of mankind is mere material, and only exists in order by some great effort, by some mysterious process, by means of some crossing of races and stocks, to bring into the world at last perhaps one man out of a thousand with a spark of independence. One in ten thousand perhaps—I speak roughly, approximately—is born with some independence, and with still greater independence one in a hundred thousand. The man of genius is one of millions, and the great geniuses, the crown of humanity, appear on earth perhaps one in many thousand millions. In fact I have not peeped into the retort in which all this takes place. But there certainly is and must be a definite law, it cannot be a matter of chance.”
“Why, are you both joking?” Razumihin cried at last. “There you sit, making fun of one another. Are you serious, Rodya?”
Raskolnikov raised his pale and almost mournful face and made no reply. And the unconcealed, persistent, nervous, and discourteous sarcasm of Porfiry seemed strange to Razumihin beside that quiet and mournful face.
“Well, brother, if you are really serious… You are right, of course, in saying that it’s not new, that it’s like what we’ve read and heard a thousand times already; but what is really original in all this, and is exclusively your own, to my horror, is that you sanction bloodshed in the name of conscience, and, excuse my saying so, with such fanaticism…. That, I take it, is the point of your article. But that sanction of bloodshed by conscience is to my mind… more terrible than the official, legal sanction of bloodshed….”
“You are quite right, it is more terrible,” Porfiry agreed.
“Yes, you must have exaggerated! There is some mistake, I shall read it. You can’t think that! I shall read it.”
“All that is not in the article, there’s only a hint of it,” said Raskolnikov.
“Yes, yes.” Porfiry couldn’t sit still. “Your attitude to crime is pretty clear to me now, but… excuse me for my impertinence (I am really ashamed to be worrying you like this), you see, you’ve removed my anxiety as to the two grades getting mixed, but… there are various practical possibilities that make me uneasy! What if some man or youth imagines that he is a Lycurgus or Mahomet—a future one of course—and suppose he begins to remove all obstacles…. He has some great enterprise before him and needs money for it… and tries to get it… do you see?”
Zametov gave a sudden guffaw in his corner. Raskolnikov did not even raise his eyes to him.
“I must admit,” he went on calmly, “that such cases certainly must arise. The vain and foolish are particularly apt to fall into that snare; young people especially.”
“Yes, you see. Well then?”
“What then?” Raskolnikov smiled in reply; “that’s not my fault. So it is and so it always will be. He said just now (he nodded at Razumihin) that I sanction bloodshed. Society is too well protected by prisons, banishment, criminal investigators, penal servitude. There’s no need to be uneasy. You have but to catch the thief.”
“And what if we do catch him?”
“Then he gets what he deserves.”
“You are certainly logical. But what of his conscience?”
“Why do you care about that?”
“Simply from humanity.”
“If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment—as well as the prison.”
“But the real geniuses,” asked Razumihin frowning, “those who have the right to murder? Oughtn’t they to suffer at all even for the blood they’ve shed?”
“Why the word ought? It’s not a matter of permission or prohibition. He will suffer if he is sorry for his victim. Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth,” he added dreamily, not in the tone of the conversation.
He raised his eyes, looked earnestly at them all, smiled, and took his cap. He was too quiet by comparison with his manner at his entrance, and he felt this. Everyone got up.
“Well, you may abuse me, be angry with me if you like,” Porfiry Petrovitch began again, “but I can’t resist. Allow me one little question (I know I am troubling you). There is just one little notion I want to express, simply that I may not forget it.”
“Very good, tell me your little notion,” Raskolnikov stood waiting, pale and grave before him.
“Well, you see… I really don’t know how to express it properly…. It’s a playful, psychological idea…. When you were writing your article, surely you couldn’t have helped, he-he! fancying yourself… just a little, an ‘extraordinary’ man, uttering a new word in your sense…. That’s so, isn’t it?”
“Quite possibly,” Raskolnikov answered contemptuously.
Razumihin made a movement.
“And, if so, could you bring yourself in case of worldly difficulties and hardship or for some service to humanity—to overstep obstacles?... For instance, to rob and murder?”
And again he winked with his left eye, and laughed noiselessly just as before.
“If I did I certainly should not tell you,” Raskolnikov answered with defiant and haughty contempt.
“No, I was only interested on account of your article, from a literary point of view…”
“Foo! how obvious and insolent that is!” Raskolnikov thought with repulsion.
“Allow me to observe,” he answered dryly, “that I don’t consider myself a Mahomet or a Napoleon, nor any personage of that kind, and not being one of them I cannot tell you how I should act.”
“Oh, come, don’t we all think ourselves Napoleons now in Russia?” Porfiry Petrovitch said with alarming familiarity.
Something peculiar betrayed itself in the very intonation of his voice.
“Perhaps it was one of these future Napoleons who did for Alyona Ivanovna last week?” Zametov blurted out from the corner.
Raskolnikov did not speak, but looked firmly and intently at Porfiry. Razumihin was scowling gloomily. He seemed before this to be noticing something. He looked angrily around. There was a minute of gloomy silence. Raskolnikov turned to go.
“Are you going already?” Porfiry said amiably, holding out his hand with excessive politeness. “Very, very glad of your acquaintance. As for your request, have no uneasiness, write just as I told you, or, better still, come to me there yourself in a day or two… to-morrow, indeed. I shall be there at eleven o’clock for certain. We’ll arrange it all; we’ll have a talk. As one of the last to be there, you might perhaps be able to tell us something,” he added with a most good-natured expression.
“You want to cross-examine me officially in due form?” Raskolnikov asked sharply.
“Oh, why? That’s not necessary for the present. You misunderstand me. I lose no opportunity, you see, and… I’ve talked with all who had pledges…. I obtained evidence from some of them, and you are the last…. Yes, by the way,” he cried, seemingly suddenly delighted, “I just remember, what was I thinking of?” he turned to Razumihin, “you were talking my ears off about that Nikolay… of course, I know, I know very well,” he turned to Raskolnikov, “that the fellow is innocent, but what is one to do? We had to trouble Dmitri too…. This is the point, this is all: when you went up the stairs it was past seven, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” answered Raskolnikov, with an unpleasant sensation at the very moment he spoke that he need not have said it.
“Then when you went upstairs between seven and eight, didn’t you see in a flat that stood open on a second storey, do you remember? two workmen or at least one of them? They were painting there, didn’t you notice them? It’s very, very important for them.”
“Painters? No, I didn’t see them,” Raskolnikov answered slowly, as though ransacking his memory, while at the same instant he was racking every nerve, almost swooning with anxiety to conjecture as quickly as possible where the trap lay and not to overlook anything. “No, I didn’t see them, and I don’t think I noticed a flat like that open…. But on the fourth storey” (he had mastered the trap now and was triumphant) “I remember now that someone was moving out of the flat opposite Alyona Ivanovna’s…. I remember… I remember it clearly. Some porters were carrying out a sofa and they squeezed me against the wall. But painters… no, I don’t remember that there were any painters, and I don’t think that there was a flat open anywhere, no, there wasn’t.”
“What do you mean?” Razumihin shouted suddenly, as though he had reflected and realised. “Why, it was on the day of the murder the painters were at work, and he was there three days before? What are you asking?”
“Foo! I have muddled it!” Porfiry slapped himself on the forehead. “Deuce take it! This business is turning my brain!” he addressed Raskolnikov somewhat apologetically. “It would be such a great thing for us to find out whether anyone had seen them between seven and eight at the flat, so I fancied you could perhaps have told us something…. I quite muddled it.”
“Then you should be more careful,” Razumihin observed grimly.
The last words were uttered in the passage. Porfiry Petrovitch saw them to the door with excessive politeness.
They went out into the street gloomy and sullen, and for some steps they did not say a word. Raskolnikov drew a deep breath. | <urn:uuid:842792ff-9ed5-4959-9a6a-526b7eed61ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/182/crime-and-punishment/3410/part-3-chapter-5/ | 2013-05-18T06:34:48Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975755 | 10,724 |
Front Page Titles (by Subject) OF GIVING THE LIE - Essays of Montaigne, vol. 6
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OF GIVING THE LIE - Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, vol. 6
Essays of Montaigne, vol. 6, trans. Charles Cotton, revised by William Carew Hazlett (New York: Edwin C. Hill, 1910).
Part of: Essays of Montaigne, in 10 vols.
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OF GIVING THE LIE
WELL, BUT some one will say to me, this design of making a man’s self the subject of his writing, were indeed excusable in rare and famous men, who by their reputation had given others a curiosity to be fully informed of them. It is most true, I confess and know very well, that a mechanic will scarce lift his eyes from his work to look at an ordinary man, whereas a man will forsake his business and his shop to stare at an eminent person when he comes into a town. It misbecomes any other to give his own character, but him who has qualities worthy of imitation, and whose life and opinions may serve for example: Caesar and Xenophon had a just and solid foundation whereon to found their narrations, in the greatness of their own performances; and it were to be wished that we had the journals of Alexander the Great, the commentaries that Augustus, Cato, Sylla, Brutus, and others left of their actions; of such persons men love and contemplate the very statues even in copper and marble.
This remonstrance is very true; but it very little concerns me:—
“I repeat my poems only to my friends, and when bound to do so; not before every one and everywhere; there are plenty of reciters in the open market-place and at the baths.”
I do not here form a statue to erect in the great square of a city, in a church, or any public place:—
“I study not to make my pages swell with empty trifles; you and I are talking in private:”
’tis for some corner of a library, or to entertain a neighbor, a kinsman, a friend, who has a mind to renew his acquaintance and familiarity with me in this image of myself. Others have been encouraged to speak of themselves, because they found the subject worthy and rich; I, on the contrary, am the bolder, by reason the subject is so poor and sterile that I cannot be suspected of ostentation. I judge freely of the actions of others; I give little of my own to judge of, because they are nothing: I do not find so much good in myself, that I cannot tell it without blushing.
What contentment would it not be to me to hear any one thus relate to me the manners, faces, countenances, the ordinary words and fortunes of my ancestors? how attentively should I listen to it! In earnest, it would be evil nature to despise so much as the pictures of our friends and predecessors, the fashion of their clothes and arms. I preserve their writing, seal, and a particular sword they wore, and have not thrown the long staves my father used to carry in his hand, out of my closet:—
“A father’s garment and ring is by so much dearer to his posterity, as there is the greater affection towards parents.”
If my posterity, nevertheless, shall be of another mind, I shall be avenged on them; for they cannot care less for me than I shall then do for them. All the traffic that I have in this with the public is, that I borrow their utensils of writing, which are more easy and most at hand; and in recompense shall, peradventure, keep a pound of butter in the market from melting in the sun:—
“Let not wrappers be wanting to tunnyfish, nor olives; . . . and I shall supply loose coverings to mackerel.”
And though nobody should read me, have I wasted time in entertaining myself so many idle hours in so pleasing and useful thoughts? In moulding this figure upon myself, I have been so often constrained to temper and compose myself in a right posture, that the copy is truly taken, and has in some sort formed itself; painting myself for others, I represent myself in a better coloring than my own natural complexion. I have no more made my book than my book has made me: ’tis a book consubstantial with the author, of a peculiar design, a parcel of my life, and whose business is not designed for others, as that of all other books is. In giving myself so continual and so exact an account of myself, have I lost my time? For they who sometimes cursorily survey themselves only, do not so strictly examine themselves, nor penetrate so deep, as he who makes it his business, his study, and his employment, who intends a lasting record, with all his fidelity, and with all his force. The most delicious pleasures digested within, avoid leaving any trace of themselves, and avoid the sight not only of the people, but of any other person. How often has this work diverted me from troublesome thoughts? and all that are frivolous should be reputed so. Nature has presented us with a large faculty of entertaining ourselves alone; and often calls us to it, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but chiefly and mostly to ourselves. That I may habituate my fancy even to meditate in some method and to some end, and to keep it from losing itself and roving at random, ’tis but to give to body and to record all the little thoughts that present themselves to it. I give ear to my whimsies, because I am to record them. It often falls out, that being displeased at some action that civility and reason will not permit me openly to reprove, I here disgorge myself, not without design of public instruction: and also these poetical lashes:—
“A slap on his eye, a slap on his snout, a slap on Sagoin’s back,”
imprint themselves better upon paper than upon the flesh. What if I listen to books a little more attentively than ordinary, since I watch if I can purloin anything that may adorn or support my own? I have not at all studied to make a book, but I have in some sort studied because I had made it; if it be studying to scratch and pinch now one author, and then another, either by the head or foot, not with any design to form opinions from them, but to assist, second, and fortify those I already have embraced.
But whom shall we believe in the report he makes of himself in so corrupt an age? considering there are so few, if any at all, whom we can believe when speaking of others, where there is less interest to lie. The first thing done in the corruption of manners is banishing truth; for, as Pindar says, to be true is the beginning of a great virtue, and the first article that Plato requires in the governor of his Republic. The truth of these days is not that which really is, but what every man persuades another man to believe; as we generally give the name of money not only to pieces of the just alloy, but even to the false also, if they will pass. Our nation has long been reproached with this vice; for Salvianus of Marseilles, who lived in the time of the Emperor Valentinian, says that lying and forswearing themselves is with the French not a vice, but a way of speaking. He who would enhance this testimony, might say that it is now a virtue in them; men form and fashion themselves to it as to an exercise of honor; for dissimulation is one of the most notable qualities of this age.
I have often considered whence this custom that we so religiously observe should spring, of being more highly offended with the reproach of a vice so familiar to us than with any other, and that it should be the highest insult that can in words be done us to reproach us with a lie. Upon examination, I find that it is natural most to defend the defects with which we are most tainted. It seems as if by resenting and being moved at the accusation, we in some sort acquit ourselves of the fault; though we have it in effect, we condemn it in outward appearance. May it not also be that this reproach seems to imply cowardice and feebleness of heart? of which can there be a more manifest sign than to eat a man’s own words—nay, to lie against a man’s own knowledge? Lying is a base vice; a vice that one of the ancients portrays in the most odious colors when he says, “that it is to manifest a contempt of God, and withal a fear of men.” It is not possible more fully to represent the horror, baseness, and irregularity of it; for what can a man imagine more hateful and contemptible than to be a coward towards men, and valiant against his Maker? Our intelligence being by no other way communicable to one another but by a particular word, he who falsifies that betrays public society. ’Tis the only way by which we communicate our thoughts and wills; ’tis the interpreter of the soul, and if it deceive us, we no longer know nor have further tie upon one another; if that deceive us, it breaks all our correspondence, and dissolves all the ties of government. Certain nations of the newly discovered Indies (I need not give them names, seeing they are no more; for, by wonderful and unheard-of example, the desolation of that conquest has extended to the utter abolition of names and the ancient knowledge of places) offered to their gods human blood, but only such as was drawn from the tongue and ears, to expiate for the sin of lying, as well heard as pronounced. That good fellow of Greece said that children are amused with toys and men with words.
As to our diverse usages of giving the lie, and the laws of honor in that case, and the alteration they have received, I defer saying what I know of them to another time, and shall learn, if I can, in the meanwhile, at what time the custom took beginning of so exactly weighing and measuring words, and of making our honor interested in them; for it is easy to judge that it was not anciently amongst the Romans and Greeks. And it has often seemed to me strange to see them rail at and give one another the lie without any quarrel. Their laws of duty steered some other course than ours. Caesar is sometimes called thief, and sometimes drunkard, to his teeth. We see the liberty of invective they practised upon one another, I mean the greatest chiefs of war of both nations, where words are only revenged with words, and do not proceed any farther. | <urn:uuid:c49a59d2-e707-47d7-9c0e-006cae733e6c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1747&chapter=91264&layout=html&Itemid=27 | 2013-05-18T06:34:27Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97343 | 2,423 |
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The Silverton Standard & the Miner
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White Hall, Eastern Kentucky University
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Hubbard Broadcasting and KSTP-TV
Denver, Co., Denver Press Club
Milwaukee , WI., Milwaukee Press Club, oldest continuously operating press club in the Americas.
Los Angeles, Calif., KTLA, leading radio news in the Los Angels community since becoming the first commercially licensed station in LA.
Washington, D.C., American News Womens Club
Chicago, Chicago Bee Building
Tombstone, Ariz., The Tombstone Epitaph
Indianapolis, the Indianapolis Recorder.
Montpelier - Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Washington, D.C., The Senate Press Gallery in honor of Anne N. Royall(1769-1854), the first Capitol Hill news woman
New York City, the Algonquin Hotel, initial site of the Overseas Press Club, a meeting place for foreign correspondents.
San Francisco, awarded to the San Francisco Chronicle in honor of the founders Michel H. de Young and Charles de Young. The brothers founded the Daily Dramatic Chronicle which appeared as the Chronicle in 1868.
Memphis, Tenn., at the Beale Street Baptist Church, in honor of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, editor of the Memphis Free Speech, a Black newspaper.
New York City, to The Amsterdam News, the oldest Black newspaper in New York City. Edited by James L. Hicks, first Black journalist accredited to cover the Korean War and the United Nations.
Montpelier, VA., the Virginia estate of James Madison.
Baltimore, The Sun, in honor of one of the newspapers founders, A. S. Abell.
Greenville, Ohio, birthplace of Lowell Thomas, radio and television broadcaster
Mississippi State University, Starkville, Miss., marks the site of the personal and professional papers of William Turner Catledge, late editor of The New York Times.
New York City, accepted by the Magazine Publishers Association and the American Society of Magazine Editors in honor of Ida Tarbell, muckraking journalist of the turn of the century.
Washington, D.C., National Press Club, site of many world news events.
Red Wing, Minn., upon occasion of 100th anniversary of founding of National Newspaper Association.
Annapolis, Md., at site of Revolutionary War newspaper, Maryland Gazette, published by Jonas Green and his wife, Catherine Hoof Green.
New York City, Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), one of Americas best-known photojournalists.
Kansas City, Mo., the Roy Wilkins site at the Kansas City Call, marked by the Kansas City Professional Chapter in recognition of Roy Wilkins editorship there between 1923 and 1931. The Kansas City Association of Black Journalists was a co-sponsor of the dedication.
Washington, D.C., United Press International, upon its 75th.anniversary.
New York City, Freedoms Journal, the first Black newspaper published in America.
Akron, Ohio, Akron Beacon Journal, in honor of John S. Knight, builder of the Knight-Ridder Newspapers Company.
Philadelphia, Richard Harding Davis, one of the most adventurous war correspondents of his time who was known for his colorful reportage during six wars.
Boston, The Christian Science Monitor, founder Mary Baker Eddy and long-time editor Erwin D. Canham.
Newburyport, Mass., William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the Liberator, anti-slavery journal.
Atlanta, W. A. Scott II, founder of the Atlanta Daily World, oldest continuing Black owned and controlled daily newspaper in the United States.
Charleston, S.C., Elizabeth Timothy, first woman publisher of an American newspaper.
Milwaukee, Christopher Latham Sholes, chief inventor of the first practical typewriter.
Memphis, Tenn., the Christian Index, the second oldest Black religious newspaper in the nation.
Philadelphia, Cyrus H. K. Curtis, who played a major role in consolidating Philadelphia newspapers and founded the Ladies Home Journal.
Toledo, Ohio, David Ross Locke (Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby), who created the Nasby Letters and was a forerunner of the muckrakers.
Milwaukee, H. V. Kaltenborn, pioneer radio news analyst who was known for his analysis of World War II.
New York City, The Wall Street Journal.
Richmond, Va., John Mitchell, one of the Souths leading Black reform journalists and editor of the Richmond Planet.
Philadelphia, The Pennsylvania Packet or the General Advertiser, the first successful daily newspaper in the United States and first to publish the Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution.
Rochester, N.Y., Frederick Douglass, founder in 1847
of the North Star, which with its successor newspapers under Douglasss direction was the leading Black journal in the United States in the antebellum period.
Canton, Ohio, Donald Ring Mellett, publisher of the Canton Daily News, who was gunned down in front of his home after editorializing against Cantons lawless elements and city officials ineptness.
Worcester, Mass., Isaiah Thomas, American revolutionary editor, printer, pioneer press historian and co-founder and first president of American Antiquarian Society.
New York City, The Nation, oldest opinion magazine in the United States.
Pittsburgh, John Scull, first editor to transport type and a press across the Alleghenies to establish journalism west of the peaks; founder of Pittsburgh Gazette in 1786.
University of Alabama, Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, eloquent and effective for the principle of a free and untrammeled press.
Chicago, the Chicago Defender, for pioneering and continuous leadership and strength in the Black press.
Gathland State Park, Md., Townsends War Correspondents Arch, a memorial to Civil War correspondents of the North and the South.
Augusta, Ga., the Augusta Chronicle, the Souths oldest newspaper presently publishing.
Chicago, the Chicago Tribune.
Oologah, Okla., the Will Rogers Home, birthplace of Will Rogers.
Philadelphia, Sarah Josepha Hale and Godeys Ladys Book, first major womans magazine of mass circulation published from 1830-1882.
Baraboo, Wis., Ansel N. Kellogg and the first newspaper syndicate developed in 1861.
Chillicothe, Ohio, the Chillicothe Gazette, oldest newspaper in continuous publication west of the Allegheny Mountains, published since 1800.
Chicago, the Chicago Daily News and the nations oldest foreign news service operated by a newspaper.
San Francisco, William Randolph Hearst and the San Francisco Examiner.
Calhoun, Ga., the Cherokee Phoenix, the Indian-language newspaper of the Cherokee Nation.
Sacramento, Calif., the Sacramento Union, oldest daily in the West, founded in 1851.
Madison, Wis., the Wisconsin Press Association, oldest continuing state press association in the nation, existing since the 1830s.
Des Moines, Iowa, J. N. (Ding) Darling and the Des Moines Register and Tribune. Darlings cartoons catapulted him into national prominence and were a factor in enhancing the great prestige of his newspaper in the first half of the 20th century.
Hannibal, Mo., 206 Hill Street, boyhood home of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and site of the Hannibal Journal, which started Twain on the way to fame as one of Americas great writers.
Lexington, Va., Reid Hall, the journalism building on the campus of Washington and Lee University. Here the first formal instruction in journalism in the history of education was initiated by General Robert E. Lee in 1869.
Atlanta, Henry Woodfin Grady (1850-1889), and the Atlanta Constitution, leaders in creating a more comprehensive, interpretative journalism in the South.
Gunston Hall, Va., home of George Mason, author of Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), which gave the first expression of a free press its binding, legal form.
Boston, James Franklins New England Courant, first newspaper published in the United States without license or authority. Washington, D.C., the Washington Globe (1831-1845), published by Francis Preston Blair and John C. Rives.
Cincinnati, The Centinel of the North-Western Territory, marking the 175th. anniversary of the first newspaper in the Northwest Territory, published in 1793.
Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Richard Hoe and Ottmar Mergenthaler, for invention of the rotary press in 1847 and the linotype machine in 1886, respectively.
New York City and Washington, D.C., the Associated Press. Establishment of the worlds first private, leased wire for news transmission (1875).
Carmel, Calif., Lincoln Steffans (1866-1936), foremost exponent of journalistic crusaders known as muckrakers, whose exposes of corruption and injustice aroused the public conscience.
Greencastle, Ind., DePauw University, where Sigma Delta Chi was founded, April 17, 1909.
Little Rock, Ark., John N. Heiskell and the Arkansas Gazette, oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi.
New York City, News department, Columbia Broadcasting System. Leadership in founding independent radio news system; distinguished reporting and interpretation exemplified by H. V. Kaltenborn and Edward R. Murrow.
Washington, D.C., National Intelligencer (1800-1865). Vital force in nations political force and set high standards of journalistic responsibility.
New York City, Adolph S. Ochs, largely responsible for the revival of The New York Times.
Louisville, Ky., Henry Watterson, outstanding editorialist.
Kansas City, Mo., William Rockhill Nelson, founder, Kansas City Star.
Hartford, Conn., the Hartford Courant, oldest newspaper of continuous publication in the United States.
New York City, James Gordon Bennett.
New York City, Horace Greeley, one of the most influential newspaper editors in American history.
Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, statesman and newspaperman.
Charlottesville, Va., Thomas Jefferson.
Cleveland, Edward Wyllis Scripps and the Cleveland Press. Publisher, founder of the Cleveland Press and chain of newspapers, plus United Press and Newspaper Enterprise Association.
New York City, the trial of John Peter Zenger.
Baltimore, H. L. Mencken, author and newspaperman.
Columbia, Mo., Walter Williams and the University of Missouri School of Journalism. First school of journalism in the nation.
Pittsburgh, Radio Station KDKA. Reported Hardings election in 1920. First radio coverage of a national event.
New York City, Henry J. Raymond, co-founder and the first editor, The New York Times.
Bloomington, Ind., Ernie Pyle, editor, columnist, war correspondent for Scripps-Howard newspapers.
Alton, Ill., Elijah Parish Lovejoy, editor, The Observer, and a militant abolitionist assassinated by his enemies.
New Orleans, George Wilkins Kendall, co-founder of the New Orleans Picayune, first war correspondent to achieve fame as a regular reporter of military actions.
Boston, Mass., The Boston Gazette, second regularly-published paper in the nation.
Emporia, Kan., William Allen White, editor and publisher, the Emporia Gazette.
Montgomery, Ala., Grover Cleveland Hall, editor, the Montgomery Advertiser. He fought the Ku Klux Klan.
St. Louis, Mo., Joseph Pulitzer, founder, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
San Francisco, Calif., James King of William, founder, editor and publisher, the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. He fought corruption in municipal government and was assassinated by a politician after many threats on his life.
A contribution was made to Peter Zenger Memorial Fund.
Bennington, Vt., Anthony Haswell, editor and publisher, the Vermont Gazette. He was jailed for fighting the Sedition Act.
The Societys Historic Sites in Journalism program honors the people and places that have played important roles in American journalistic history. The program dates back to 1942.
The sites were originally marked with a bronze marker, and some honorees include: World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle; Benjamin Franklin; William Randolph Hearst; The Associated Press offices in Washington and New York City; Freedoms Journal, the first Black newspaper published in the United States; and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.
Nominations are open. Self-nominations are permitted.
Nomination form should be accompanied by a letter(s) of recommendation that reflects the nominees national historic significance in journalism and why the nominee is deserving of this national recognition.
Submit all nomination materials unbound on 8 1/2 x 11 paper. Additional supporting materials are welcomed and should be limited to 10 pages.
Nominations should also include an indication of the specific location (i.e. building, street address, inside or outside installation) where a bronze plaque would be placed and the name of a person to be contacted to supply additional information if necessary.
Nominators should contact the rightful authorities (such as owner of the building) to ensure that they are amenable to placement of a plaque.
Only one historic site may be chosen each year. However, if one of the nominated sites is not selected, it may be resubmitted for future consideration.
Winner Announcement and Presentation
Honorees will be announced and honored at a special celebration event. A bronze plaque is displayed at the location marking it as a Historic Site in Journalism.
Nominations must be postmarked on or before March 20. Nominations should be mailed, faxed or e-mailed to:
Historic Sites in Journalism
Society of Professional Journalists
3909 N. Meridian St.
Indianapolis, IN 46208
For More Information
Contact the Director of Awards at 317/927-8000 or [email protected] | <urn:uuid:88630209-54c2-41f0-b587-e9fc3af452c5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://spj.org/a-historicsites.asp | 2013-05-18T06:55:45Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.885783 | 2,963 |
Jim Jennings, (703) 295-6406, (540) 272-1452, jjennings@asceorg
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
New data released today by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and TRIP show the deteriorating conditions of the surface transportation infrastructure system in Ohio is worsening, and drivers and businesses continue to feel the impact. Closing the investment gap in the state’s surface transportation infrastructure will grow Ohio’s economy, save jobs and protect personal income.
“Failing to invest in Ohio’s roads, bridges and transit systems has a dramatic negative impact on the state and national economy,” said Andrew W. Herrmann, P.E., president of ASCE. “This data underscores the need for state and national policymakers to make smart, long-term investments in infrastructure.”
By 2020, ASCE projects the consequences of these conditions will cost the U.S. economy $897 billion in lost Gross Domestic Product and $28 billion in exports as transportation costs rise. The recent surface transportation bill adopted by Congress addresses spending in only the next two years, and it doesn’t fill the current funding gap.
“While addressing Ohio’s need for a safe, efficient and well-maintained transportation system will require a significant boost in investment, failing to act will result in even greater costs,” said Will Wilkins, executive director of TRIP. “Smart investments in transportation policies relieve traffic congestion, improve road and bridge conditions and enhance economic productivity.”
Due to the underinvestment in transportation in the Great Lakes region, data from ASCE shows that by 2020 productivity losses will cause the region to underperform by $104 billion and 102,000 jobs will be lost resulting in a drop in personal income of almost $108 billion if no action is taken.
“Ohio’s roads, bridges and transit systems keep our economy moving,” said Chris Runyan, President, Ohio Contractors Association. “Investing in key projects not only improves highway conditions in our state, but also creates good paying jobs.”
The latest information from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) shows pavement has severe deterioration in Ohio, and the effects of the conditions are acute:
- Vehicle travel on Ohio’s highways increased by 29 percent from 1990 to 2010. Ohio’s population grew by seven percent between 1990 and 2010.
- Forty-five percent of Ohio’s major urban highways are congested, and
- 42 percent of Ohio’s major urban roads are in poor or mediocre condition.
- Driving on roads in need of repair costs Ohio motorists $2.5 billion a year in extra vehicle repairs and operating costs – an average of $315 per motorist.
- Twenty-four percent of Ohio’s bridges (6,381) are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.
“Our highways, roads and bridges are real economic drivers for the state,” said Kevin Carpenter, director at WD Transportation, an inter-disciplinary engineering firm that provides services for Ohio government agencies, municipalities and counties. “Having worked on over 100 infrastructure projects in Ohio, I’ve seen first-hand the benefits of investing in our transportation system.”
Bad roads mean big problems for businesses in Ohio considering 78 percent of the $563 billion worth of commodities delivered annually from sites in Ohio is transported by trucks on the state’s highways, and an additional 12 percent is delivered by parcel, U.S. Postal Service or courier, which use multiple modes, including highways.
“Investing in high quality roads and bridges is important to our state’s quality of life,” said David Pritchard, civil engineer and consultant. “Our roads and bridges connect businesses to commerce and people to their loved ones as they move across our state and throughout the country.”
Founded in 1852, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) represents more than 140,000 members of the civil engineering profession worldwide and is America's oldest national engineering society. For more information go to
Founded in 1971, TRIP is a nonprofit organization that researches, evaluates and distributes economic and technical data on surface transportation issues. TRIP promotes transportation policies that relieve traffic congestion, improve road and bridge conditions, improve air quality, make surface travel safer and enhance economic productivity. | <urn:uuid:46eb3a09-c4a8-4065-970b-292ad11fe78f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.asce.org/Press-Releases/2012/New-Data-Finds-Closing-the-Surface-Transportation-Infrastructure-Investment-Gap-Will-Keep-Ohio-s-Economoy-Growing,-Save-Jobs-and-Protect-Personal-Income/ | 2013-05-18T07:20:34Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928801 | 918 |
C.F. Martin & Co. Announces the Promotion of Amani Duncan to Vice President of Brand Marketing
NAZARETH, PA Recognized by her peers as one of the most dynamic marketing executives in the music business, Amani Duncan was today named Vice President of Brand Marketing for C.F. Martin & Co. Duncan was originally hired in January 2011 as Director of Promotional Marketing, making this the first time that a Martin executive has been promoted to the company's internal Senior Core Team after only one year with the company. Amani is responsible for establishing the company's Global Marketing direction and plays a major role in the achievement of the company's domestic and international sales objectives.
"Amani was chosen to round out the Core Team at Martin for her creative thinking and great enthusiasm," said Keith Lombardi, President and COO. "In her short tenure at Martin Guitar she has completely overhauled our marketing efforts, providing a vibrant, youth-oriented approach while still staying true to our heritage and culture. We are very lucky to have her on the team."
A 17-year music industry veteran, Duncan was chosen for her dynamic contributions to the music industry, with experience that runs the gamut from artist relations to visual marketing, campaign creation and partnership negotiations. Her illustrious career has included positions at some of the most iconic companies in the music industry. Past achievements include serving as Chief Marketing Officer of Sean Combs Enterprises.
As Senior Vice President of Marketing, Video Production & Content for the Capitol Music Group, Duncan empowered consumers and entrepreneurial Artists by leveraging brands in an increasingly contracting music industry. Her marketing stewardship during a delicate consolidation of Virgin and Capitol Records helped to re-brand two of the industry's most formidable labels. Armed with her own proprietary "success mission", Duncan helped deliver substantial new revenue streams through third party alliances that included Myspace, Champion apparel, Chase, and Southwest Airlines among others. Under her tutelage, superstar Lenny Kravitz garnered his highest Billboard entry in two decades, with "It Is Time For a Love Revolution" debuting at #4 on the "Billboard Top Albums Chart". She also reallocated assets to strengthen the label's digital presence, partnering with Myspace for Kravitz' "Get On The Bus With The Love Revolution Tour", utilizing her considerable visual expertise to generate other digital and mobile content from the CMG roster to garner new platforms of exposure for their artists.
Prior to the 2007 consolidation of Virgin and Capitol into a single unit, the Capitol Music Group, Duncan was Vice President of Video Promotions for Virgin America from 2002 to 2006. In this position she was tasked with forging partnerships with franchise brands such as MTV and the NFL to promote Janet Jackson's 9th studio album, "Damita Jo". Duncan also worked behind the scenes to create the first-ever MTV2 $2 Bill Tour called "Welcome to the Universe", also dubbed "The Environmen-tour" due to its forward-thinking eco messaging. Duncan also oversaw the video promotional campaign for the UK band Gorillaz and their album "Demon Days", helping the band attain their highest U.S. chart debut ever, achieving the #6 spot on the "Billboard Top Albums" chart in 2005.
The most formative period of Duncan's career was gleaned during her tenure with the Island Def Jam Music Group from 1995 to 2002 where she started out as West Coast Office Manager before convincing Def Jam executive Kevin Liles that she deserved a shot at the Big Apple. Once there, Duncan made it a point to "drop in" regularly at the BET offices to cultivate relationships that would ultimately prove beneficial to Def Jam artists, proving that she was right to ask for the transfer to New York, which subsequently led to her being named Promotions Manager, then National Director of Visual Promotions. Most importantly for Def Jam, it also led to BET sponsorships of one of the most successful tours in the history of hip hop - Jay-Z's "The Hard Knock Life" Tour. Duncan was also instrumental in securing a 2001 "MTV Unplugged" showcase for Jay-Z, only the second hip hop artist of the entire previous decade to garner the coveted MTV platform; and a partnership with Jay-Z and BET executive Stephen Hill on BET's flagship Marquee program "Blueprint" named after Jay-Z's award-winning album. All of these elements led to Def Jam regaining its dominant position in the hip-hop sector, and spawning the hugely successful Roc-A-Fella Empire.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Duncan spends her spare time donating her services to support mentoring Sports and Arts in Schools Foundation, a non-profit provider of after-school programs in New York City.
About Martin Guitar & Strings
C.F Martin & Co. (www.martinguitar.com) has been creating the finest instruments in the world for over 175 years. It continues to innovate, introducing techniques and features that have become industry standards including X-bracing, the 14-fret guitar and the “Dreadnought” size.
One of the world’s leading acoustic instrument makers, Martin guitars are hand-made by skilled craftsmen and women, who use a combination of new design and techniques along with those introduced by the company founder.
The company is also known for producing high-quality, popular acoustic guitar strings. These include the Martin SP® LIFESPAN™ line - the fastest-growing treated string in the industry, and the Martin SP line - which uses an industry leading core wire to hold tunings better.
Martin guitars and Martin Strings are the instruments and strings of choice for musicians around the world, from the icons of rock, country, folk and bluegrass to those just beginning their careers. They can be seen across all segments of pop culture, from television (Glee, Psych, Raising Hope and American Idol) to the movies; on Broadway and in books, online, and gracing the covers of popular magazines on newsstands everywhere. Connect with Martin and Martin Strings on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and via www.martinguitar.com and www.martinstrings.com.
DKC for Martin Guitar | <urn:uuid:5143f355-8554-4085-b616-29405452acfc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.martinguitar.com/news/37-main-site/press-release-archive-2012/720-cf-martin-a-co-announces-the-promotion-of-amani-duncan-to-vice-president-of-brand-marketing.html | 2013-05-18T07:13:38Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956548 | 1,281 |
The publication and republication of (offensive) caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed provided, to many, an opportunity to revisit the contours of the right to freedom of speech and expression. Without consciously taking sides in the debate as it unfolded in On Line Opinion and elsewhere, let me introduce to the discussion some more dimensions based on another controversy. The controversy is about Internet censorship in China which was reignited by Google’s recent decision to censor search results.
Apart from the censor, the Chinese Government, there are four main corporate players in the censorship saga. Beginning in 2003, Yahoo provided electronic details of cyber-dissidents to the Chinese authorities which lead to their incarceration. Learning from Yahoo, Microsoft adopted a soft approach and shut down an Internet blog of a Chinese journalist hosted at its MSN Spaces for discussing politically sensitive issues. Microsoft has now opened up this censored blog, but only outside China.
Most recently, Google agreed to self-censor search results of its new Chinese site: www.google.com.cn. The popular search engine will block results that include terms such as “free Tibet”, “democracy”, “human rights”, “Tiananmen massacre”, and “Falun Gong”. Finally, Cisco Systems is accused of facilitating such censorship by selling routing devices to China.
Some may ask what the big deal is. Censorship, with or without the Internet, is common in China (pdf file 2.02GB) and rights are severely restricted. Chinese citizens - irrespective of whether they have access to the Internet or not - do not enjoy any meaningful freedom of speech in any case. Such a contention, however, misses an important point regarding the efficacy of the Internet. Among others, because of its trans-border base and reach, the Internet was believed to nullify, to a large extent, the power of repressive states to control and censor the free flow of ideas within their municipal boundaries. However, the current controversy indicates that powerful states could prevail over the might of even the Internet, at least for now.
This is, however, not to suggest that Internet service providers are not (or should not be) subject to certain restrictions. Like many other rights, the right to freedom of speech, which includes the right to seek, receive and impart information, is not absolute. It could be reasonably restricted, say, on the ground of public order, health, morality, or the rights of others. For this reason, even corporations that are providing Internet services have to facilitate the freedom of speech, or of press, within such applicable limitations. For example, a corporation should not turn a blind eye to its website being used for inciting terrorism, promoting genocide, spreading social hatred, selling slaves, or facilitating music piracy for that matter.
The China factor
One natural question to ask is whether these giant corporations would have behaved elsewhere in the same way as they behaved in China. For example, would they have bowed to the censorship pressure of the governments of Myanmar or Zimbabwe? I very much doubt it. The reason is not difficult to identify; it is about commercial opportunism. One has to merely look at the speed at which the Internet market is growing in China. According to a survey report released by the Internet Society of China at the end of year 2005, China had 110 million Internet users (second only to the US), up from 103 million in 2004. In 2005, the total revenue from Internet users was about 186 billion Yuan, which is expected to rise at the rate of 52.5 per cent.
This perhaps explains why Yahoo, Microsoft and Google chose to follow the path of, as they put it, lesser evil. Apart from anything else, it also makes business sense not to annoy or pull out of China.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR)
CSR is the new mantra attracting the attention of almost everyone, from corporations to investors, consumers, media, NGOs, researchers, governments and international institutions. In addition to special corporations that have been constituted to do only CSR consultancy, there are specialised websites, journals and research centres devoted to exploring CSR issues. Despite all this, there is still a lack of consensus on what these “social” responsibilities of corporations are, how they could be balanced, if at all, with the primary objective of profit maximisation and how best they might be enforced.
It may, therefore, be interesting to examine the CSR commitment of the four corporations that allegedly helped China in censoring people’s freedom of speech. The four US corporations - Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google - are market leaders in their own fields and are generally seen as good corporate citizens. Cisco “strives to be a good citizen worldwide” and pursues a strong “triple bottom line”: profits, people and presence.
Yahoo takes prides in its “Yahoo! For Good” campaign and is “committed to making a difference in the world by empowering [its] users … with products and services that inspire them to make a positive impact”. Similarly, Microsoft “is committed … to help advance social and economic well-being and to enable people around the world to realise their full potential”. Additionally, the commendable initiatives taken by the Gates Foundation should not be forgotten.
Google, on the other hand, claims to make money “without doing evil”. It was, however, surprising not to find the names of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google in the list of Global Compact participants.
How do corporations explain the gap, as in this case, between their declared policies and practices? To begin with, it is safe to pass on the responsibility to states. The Joint Statement of Microsoft and Yahoo to the US Congress Human Rights Caucus illustrates this: “we think there is a vital role for government-to-government discussion of the larger issues involved” because in acting alone their “leverage and ability to influence government policies in various countries is severely limited”. Admittedly, states have the primary responsibility to ensure the protection and promotion of human rights, but this does not derogate whatever responsibility corporations have. If corporations have human rights obligations only subject to their profits, such obligations hardly serve any useful purpose.
Surya Deva is Lecturer at School of Law, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. He recently completed his PhD at the Sydney Law School. Surya has published widely in law journals also blogs at Glocal Canvas. | <urn:uuid:8e6c29bb-3219-4587-ae5a-eaf95bdd248a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4178 | 2013-05-18T05:18:37Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950497 | 1,337 |
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11 DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES
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NEW YORK COUNTY | <urn:uuid:b32dad8b-96a4-4020-a2b4-c23801f6c282> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.registry.jockeyclub.com/registry.cfm?page=dotIRTermsOfUseAgreement&CFID=113486625&CFTOKEN=99193161 | 2013-05-18T06:49:43Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.818582 | 6,515 |
ROBERT DEWITT: ‘Bear’ can rest a little bit more peacefully now
Published: Wednesday, February 6, 2013 at 3:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 7:14 p.m.
TUSCALOOSA | When I think back on that winter and spring 30 years ago, the image that always comes to mind is bleakness.
I was living in a basement level apartment with gun-slit windows that seemed perpetually cold. Very little light got in, anyway, and what did seemed to get absorbed into the dark, sheet-paneled walls and ugly green carpet.
Campus always goes through a transformation from fall to winter. What was once lively and colorful suddenly seems drab and lifeless. Bare branches frame everything. Instead of lingering in sunny spots between classes wearing colorful clothing like songbirds looking for a mate, students take direct lines between buildings, tightly clad in drab, heavy winter coats.
It seemed particularly bleak on that late January day when I stood on the curb in front of Bryant-Denny Stadium and watched the hearse roll past. I don’t know why every Alabama fan in America didn’t want to stand exactly where I was on that day. But there was plenty of room.
Of course, the news cameras wanted to shoot pictures of the hearse rolling past the stadium where Coach Paul W. “Bear” Bryant had spent so many successful Saturday afternoons. So you can see me in a good many of the video and photo images, standing there in my L.L. Bean overcoat with the fur collar, my hand over my heart.
I didn’t know what else to do with my hands, and I didn’t have a hat to take off and hold over my heart. So I’m standing there looking like I’m saying the pledge of allegiance with no flag anywhere to be seen.
I’m not crying like a lot of the people you see in the videos. I’d done that the night that I found out he died, embarrassingly in front of my roommate. I’d been fine when he handed me a straight shot of whiskey and told me the news. But when I called my parents to tell them the news, the tears came.
It’s not like I knew him personally. The two up-close encounters I’d had with him certainly left no impression on him. The first was as a freshman during the annual melee that was called “registration.” Students swarmed what was then called “Memorial Coliseum” trying to secure their classes for the coming semester. They jostled and pushed and gave ground to no one.
And yet suddenly they parted as miraculously as the Red Sea before the Israelites. I heard a hushed muttering, saw the people stepping back so that he could pass and then he strode past me, giant-like, taller than everyone else with a big smile that a 35-6 licking of Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl had put on his face.
The other was when I interviewed him in his office. Everything about the experience made me feel inadequate. I felt like the baby-blue Izod sweater I wore made me look like a sissy. I couldn’t get my hand around his enormous, hard, calloused farmer’s paw to properly grip it for our handshake. I overstayed my welcome and he got annoyed. Listening to the tape of the interview years later and comparing notes with other reporters, I found out my experience was par for the course — not nearly as bad as I thought.
No matter how distant he was, he seemed close to us who loved Alabama football at that time. I felt vaguely responsible for what had happened, almost as if I had abandoned my post at a critical moment. I moved to Louisiana in 1982 for my first real job, and while I was gone, the entire Alabama football empire came unraveled. And within a month of my return to graduate school, the emperor was dead.
People who don’t belong to our particular football fraternity don’t really understand how we felt about him and why losing him affected us the way that it did. Some think we’re like the South American Indians who carried the mummified remains of their fiercest king into battle before them. Pat Dye once exhorted his Auburn team not to be in awe of Alabama, that the team wasn’t magic. Then he added that there had been magic but it had died with “Coach Bryant.”
It did seem that way — that he was more than a great football coach; that he could actually conjure victories. And when he adopted the wishbone offense it was like that was his incantation.
But there was something else, too, maybe connected to that magic, maybe not. I recently watched a DVD of an old “Bear Bryant Show” from the 1970s. And it was as if a piece of what I’m talking about was trapped in that DVD. It came though from that hokey show with the glass bottles of Coca Cola, and Dub Taylor cackling on the commercials about Golden Flake having “Southern fried crunch” and, of course, in Bryant’s mumbled digressions.
There was something in it that was comforting to those of us who love Alabama football. It was like going to your grandparent’s house and everything that was there, the furnishings, the food and especially the people, made it the best place to be in the world. Then, after he died, it was like going back to that house after the people were dead and gone and everything is still in the same place, but the life essence of it is gone.
That was what we missed from Alabama football after he was gone. It took us a long time to figure out that it was never going to be the same. We had to get used to the idea that it was going to be different. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t be good.
And now, 30 years later, we realize that it can be different and still be really good — great, in fact. Those of us who remember him will always miss him. But I think we’ve reached a point where we can let him rest a little bit more peacefully.
Robert DeWitt is senior writer for The Tuscaloosa News. Readers can email him at robert.
All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged. | <urn:uuid:2d6b0b85-7f01-4c9c-b639-7f506218cd6f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20130206/NEWS/130209880/0/TOPIC0379 | 2013-05-18T06:59:40Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983691 | 1,385 |
April 6th, 2011
Four thousand people attended the largest annual conference of left and progressive intellectuals in the world over the weekend of March 18-20, 2011. It was the 7th annual Left Forum, at Pace University in lower Manhattan. A thousand speakers, 300 workshops, panels and dialogues on international politics, class war, social justice issues, corporate abuse of power and the ravages of financial deregulation attracted academics, anti-capitalists, socialists, artists, journalists, activists and anarchists to forge bonds of solidarity for social change. They had their choice of up to 45 panel discussions per seven program periods, plus two stellar plenary presentations covering the conference theme “Towards a Politics of Solidarity”.
Internationally known presenters such as Richard Wolff, Stanley Aronowitz, Cornel West, Laura Flanders, Barbara Ehrenreich, Francis Fox Piven, Benjamin Barber, John Nichols and The Yes Men, keen-sighted and eloquent in their analyses and reportage of problems, activists working for change, graced the conference mainstage.
So why were only a few presentations really strong on inspiration and insight for how to foster growing unity among progressives, how to build consensus on outlook and method to bring unity of action to fruition?
For the most part, I heard the need for solidarity answered with a call for solidarity, a need for a new paradigm with a call for a new paradigm. In the face of mounting world catastrophes and collapses, this is just a little like singing, “100 bottles of beer on the wall” together.
I suspect even right-wing spies who no doubt sat among us were underwhelmed by such tautologies. What could they report back that the leftists were planning to do? Top secret: They say they’re going to get together and take down power systems, make demands for multiracial, multicultural harmonious living, end top-down ersatz democracy, rid societies of oppression and exploitation, create equal opportunity and abundance for all . . . .
But there we all were, “together” at the conference, and if there were any coherent plans for how this vast harmonious concert of united humanity is to subsume current power structures and create a better world, I didn’t catch wind of them. Maybe I just went to the wrong rooms.
Because, in fact, I witnessed several quite bristly moments of disharmony, one among panelists on stage and one among audience members, the latter threatened physical aggression, with me shouting “stop!”
And throughout the weekend, there was more accord on explicating societal ills and defining authoritarian power structures than on fresh orientations or practical strategies for building a just and fair society.
Also, to my chagrin, I did not hear discussed what is actually the most significant divide among progressives, the rift between secular atheists and spiritually-oriented progressives. The latter were tellingly under-represented in the Left Forum programming. It appears the two groups do not break bread together, nor smoke the peace pipe around the same campfires.
And, of course, there are those progressives who wouldn't be caught dead or alive at either the Left Forum or at a gathering of, say, the Institute of Noetic Scientists, whose conference attracts the “conscious evolutionary” progressives.
And so the palpable spiritual desertification of our culture, if we could even be said to have a culture at all here in the US, was not considered a key part of the discussion of political, economic or social problems at either of the two Left Forums I’ve attended (2010 and 2011).
But I wonder if spiritual poverty and spiritual heartbreak is of central and essential relevance to our movement and to the urgent global problems so eloquently elucidated and enumerated at the Left Forum.
There were only a couple of classroom panels focusing on spiritual topics. One featured three Christian ministers speaking to a relatively small audience about the radical nature of their congregational work. Another panel, which I did not attend, featured Gary Null, et. al., who may have approached some of the issues I am pointing to here.
The very fact that the spiritual left and the academic left do not, for the most part, speak to each other in public (and that this fact was not deliberately brought forth in the widely attended plenary talks at this year’s Left Forum) speaks volumes about just how intractable a problem achieving solidarity really is among progressives.
How can we speak about solidarity or lack thereof without coming to grips with this glaring dissonance? Not only was this, our biggest rift, left unaddressed as a central topic in any panels I attended, I heard no direct conversation about any of the perennial divisions among progressives—all the little fractures and slices of worldview from Marxists to progressive democrats, to Green Anarchists—and so, where could be the insightful analyses of what human needs give rise to strong ideological identifications and encampments or how such divisions might be transcended? And without such understanding, how are we to begin to approach a more global vision for connecting with those who are not the least bit progressive at this time?
Instead, the need for solidarity was addressed through kudos for Egyptian and Wisconsin demonstrators, through applauding these truly heroic examples and models of solidarity for social justice and regime change, but at a time when neither of these groups have lasting victory to show for their efforts, the kind of social progress that can deal with human greed, aggression, power, supremacy . . . .
There were accolades and strong applause for the solidarity represented by pizza orders called in to feed Madison, WI demonstrators, from unknown ideological comrades watching Madison protests via internet and TV around the US and the world.
Yes! hot pizza pies are significant and meaningful gestures of solidarity, and yet eerily disappointed was I that radicals at the Left Forum did not dig up and chew on the roots of what lasting solidarity really is, the metaphysical elements of brotherhood and sisterhood and what gives rise to them beyond the common enemy, those intangibles that provide persistent courage and energy to power through and prevail in the face of destructive forces that oppose the best in us.
In my experience of the conference only Cornel West went there and so it thrilled me when he said, in speaking of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan: “We actually love those brothers and sisters. And isn’t it something that to believe that is to be radical.” That’s it; that’s right! He actually used the L-word, the seemingly forbidden word that represents a force that knows no bounds or divisions and no obstacles, a force more powerful than all the evils in our way. Bravo, Cornel West! The audience exploded with applause for him.
Why not speak of this in depth and more often? Why the separation of intellect and soul? Can't we get over this?
Is it because this is what gets you good and killed if you start talking about it as an unmediated birthright (Lennon, MLK, Jesus . . .) and start speaking of its lack as the root cause of social injustice?
Other than West’s statements, the general disengagement from the L-word and its meaning as the clarifying, fundamental aspect of life that we must exercise, strengthen and engage in ourselves and each other to full capacity, is the daunting fact that left me bereft, because only by addressing the lack of love amongst progressives and others will we be set to balance and transform our stagnation and galvanize a metaphysics of solidarity. This is how to arrive at a resolute set of actions, with strong and flexible bonds of brotherhood, with loving care and tenderness as our foundation; this is what's necessary for us to overcome rampant toxicity at every level—all of this was crystalized for me by what was lacking at the conference, an understanding of just why progressives are in their perennial underdog position in the struggle for justice.
Are we embarrassed or afraid to love big, bold and colorful? Are we ashamed to speak of abiding love as the energy of our bonds? Are we all just too depressed, anxious and desiccated inside? Can we wholeheartedly live up to taking care of ourselves and each other? Are we too heartbroken by life experience to let love flow and overspill, to beam love in the direction of the future where we will pioneer into 21st Century and excite all those around us to do the same? Are we paralyzed by the evil we have witnessed and continue to witness every day around us? All I can say is that if love is flowing in our hearts and nervous systems, let it not be confined, disguised, or kept too private now; we need it now more than ever.
I am listening for it, looking for it (the L), and yet I hear rampant cynicism, depression and despair. Love is lively, confident and bright. I appreciated the moment when Joel Kovel said in his presentation that “you need faith if you’re going to transform the world.” This is correct. But what is faith?
Faith is not religion, emotion or belief. Faith is a basic trust in life and the forces of existence, a trust in one’s organic sense of what is real and correct, and a trust in the underlying forces and processes of a universe of implicate law and intelligence, exceeding our feeble comprehension. We have to reawaken our capacities to listen, intuit and trust in life's true essentials.
Investigative journalism, accurate assessments and indictments, as well as multiple forms of resistance are surely needed, but we also need more time to be quiet, to be outdoors in wild places, to welcome our own changes, to be creative and make mistakes, to refresh ourselves and to get over our pasts, so that we’re not projecting personal rage from offenses of long ago onto current outrageous situations. Because all that makes for is conflagration, not skillful, creative and radical means that can show the way to the unwise.
The super-communicators of this year’s Forum were Cornel West and John Nichols. The old adage that “it’s not what you say, it’s the way you say it,” reasserted itself fully in the delivery of these orators. They activated bonding forces of solidarity, speaking emphatically with grace, rousing emotion, tempered to below the boiling point.
And yetl, did we not still long for gifts of real imagination at this conference? The cutting-edge is dull, getting perennially stuck at a horizon all too familiar, with too many conflicting views and goals, too much in-fighting. What will cut through to a higher order, to overcome dysfunction in our world.
Lip service is often given to the role of artists and creatives, but were there any artists on the Left Forum plenary panels? No!
At the scale of global society, with nearly seven billion people on the planet now, and with enormous challenges and forces in play, why are all these brilliant thinkers not entirely engaged with just how human beings will function, seven billion strong, as the current imperialist and plutocratic structures are disabled and dismantled, as we would like them to be?
The most clearly desirable practical ideas mentioned were worker cooperatives and relocalization, breaking up of multinational conglomerate financial systems, such as the IMF and the World Bank, reregulating investment banks, decentralizing governments into smaller regional entities and a global redistribution of wealth and power.
These are all ideas in common currency on the left. For those of us not invited to the table at progressive think tanks, it would be galvanizing to us to get feasible pictures of how the society we ideologically want would actually work, how things would be different in our daily lives and how those differences would make dangers we now face shrink back and resolve, how the redistribution of wealth and power would actually be achieved.
And if the answer is that nobody really has such things worked out, even in in their own minds, then how smart is it, really, to convene at this time, to have all these people burning all this fossil fuel to come together just to criticize the yellow brick road and the men behind the curtain? Shouldn’t we all be working locally and personally to open up our visionary capacities so we can see the way forward and then get together to share views and arrive at plans?
The word revolution was certainly in the air at the Forum, but it takes a whole lot more than a word to convince significant numbers of people to revolt. Combat revolutions require sacrifices of lives and materials; and history has shown that even successful people's revolutions can be followed on by regression to old ways.
This is exactly why “the spiritual left” calls for inner revolution, for psychological change, for freedom from addiction, for personal authority and integrity, so that social progress springs from authentic habits of holistic thinking and living, from the resolution of inner conflicts, and freedom from the irritation, discontent and wanting of the immature human spirit.
Everywhere on the Left we are inundated with daunting facts rather than energizing tactics. Facts about the toxicity of what we breathe, drink and eat, stats on the alarming rate of wealth being sucked up the ladder, rallying calls for the redistribution of wealth – So where is the unified, coordinated redistribution-of-wealth strategy? "Tax the rich"? Is this it?
Did anyone at the Left Forum say international general strike? I didn’t hear it. How much personal and moral authority would it take for, say, 25% of people around the world to shut down the global economy and governments and take charge of every aspect of their own lives, as a group, in solidarity? We could do this, just as soon as we are actually ready to handle it.
But how do unemployed people living on government checks strike? Are they going to refuse to pick up their government checks? Are they really interested in bringing down the government that is the teat they’re attached to for food and drink?
And what about employed people or entrepreneurs, up to their eyeballs in debt, kids, cars . . . what would get them to step out of line to bring down the system and build a new world? What do you think? That going to happen if we have no solidarity or plan that encourages these people to drop out of this way of life and stand together?
In which rooms at the conference were they talking about all this?
There were many details given about corporate abuses of power and how Citizens United will effect elections and bring even more corporate power to lawmaking and military authority, more evidence that we are being strangled and poisoned notch by notch, that while we hem, haw, dilly and dally, Fascism is taking hold and tightening its grip.
We were also privy to many specifics and particulars of the escalating environmental devastation of our biosphere and the denial of corporate/governmental power to recognize the urgency and respond. To be environmentally responsible means abandoning a legacy of exploitation and greed with biblical underpinnings, as well as high-stakes investments in growth and expansion of businesses based on extraction, domination and exploitation of natural ecosystems. To be truly environmentally responsible would mean that predatory capitalist system would be finished and the elite standards of living that everyone in the Left Forum audience is used to would be cut way, way back. Ready to rally for that? Just how many people would be put out of work in that scenario? Even if workers were to take over those businesses as coops, how would they run such businesses if they weren’t going to exploit land or other people?
We want to end the wars, close nuclear power plants, stop hydrofracking and tar sands operations, stop offshore drilling. Are you ready to live without fossil fuels? Ever gone hiking and camping? Ever live like a monk or a nun? No? Do these things now and then let's have a radical conversation.
We were told that Fox News is the most watched television news program and that the Wall Street Journal is the most read newspaper; that the messengers on the Right are ever-so-disciplined, consistent and pervasive in their backward messaging.
But isn’t it also true that Republicans are divided on many issues? We were told that half of Republicans identify as Tea Party supporters and the other half poll more like Democrats on the subject of social programs. So, the truth is that they don’t know what to do either and they don’t agree with each other or stand together on a lot of issues. There are pro-choice, pro gay marriage, fiscal Republicans, for example.
So why were there not concentrated analyses of just what our central messages are and why we are so unclear, undisciplined, inconsistent and ineffectual? Why were we not looking judiciously at ways to create lasting solidarity across platforms, across aisles, across all the blurred and shifting lines of the masses of suffering humanity? Why can’t we think bigger and more holistically than we do?
Artists, spiritual elders, and futurists are the visionary systems thinkers with big-picture capacity, long-range vision, and inner resources of satisfaction, but there were no artists or futurists on the plenary stage. Why not?!
Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, prodigious minds of erudition and passion, where was the much-needed attention to remedying ideological territorialism, which so afflicts the movement for justice and for sanity? Are we to remain defined primarily by what we are not, by what we oppose, by our anti-corporate and anti-capitalist rage, slogans and declarations?
Must it be our destiny to be in the role of yelping underdogs, fighting with our softie-hearted kid gloves in a class war that is totally rigged, where nothing can be done without capital and where we are perennially undercapitalized and forced to fight a losing battle, when in fact we are lovers not fighters? Why was there not more talk along these lines?
I say we've got to change the game in our own lives and who wants to hear that?! Let us no longer recognize the value of paper currency! Let us be defined by our creative vision and leadership, making obsolete, in both word and deed, the shackles of unwholesome societal projects! Disengage! Pull out! Disobey! Divest yourself of everything you've got sunk into the toxic, unreal world. Occupy the land. Leave the cities and get with the land to learn from and work with those who know how to live in harmony with the land.
Laura Flanders said something very important at the conference. She said, “Reality is what we need to grapple with.” This is truly of the essence. And it’s the same reality for progressives, as it is for those on the right. Dissociation from reality is the most pervasive human problem we are called to overcome now, in every social class, at every age, and in every culture and country on Earth.
Our true unity is actually found in our ignorance and weaknesses, in the pain of our confusion, ineptitude, psychological immaturity and disengagement from the Earth, in our not knowing what to do. The energetic network for mass solidarity is actually the shared experience of modernity and industrial civilization and its discontents, its craziness, its falsities, and our shared struggles of being neither here nor there.
Meanwhile everyone is pretending to know more than they do know and to be stubbornly right in that! We are together in our hidden existential pain. We will be strong when we can present a viable structuring of society that gives everyone the time and resources to address their dissociation from reality, to deal with hurt and the possibility of deep healing for future generations, to approach reality afresh, as ones who have learned a great deal since the start of the industrial era, with only perhaps a few elements of it worth keeping. Let us be eclectic about what we have learned; let's keep gems of wisdom and abolish all our many errors of ways and means.
No one can do this while they are on a rat-wheel “workin’ for the man,” when they are caught up in competition, envy and fear. And “the man” can’t do it either, not when he’s in domination mode, waging war, exploiting underlings, setting policies that don’t serve the universal needs of people, scarring the land and pillaging seas for profit. These are people sadly out of touch.
All too few of us can approach and stay engaged with reality if we are living within today’s world structures, which are so very damaging to the spirit. This is why monks and nuns are given protection to be reclusive; they are doing the work of inner alignment with reality. More and more of us could disengage from academia and all forms of institutional and establish work and turn inward to contact reality, living very simply and without fanfare. As we do, we need less and less of what the techno-monopoly world has to offer, seeing it as a sorrowful waste of the gift of life. All people might be touched by reality and therein find rest, peace.
Are we willing to lay down our careers, positions and possessions if that’s what needs to be done to reach our most cherished goals?
Imagine if 85% of the world’s population were highly educated and psychospiritually mature. Anarchy might work. It would not be such a chaotic situation. But if 85% of the world’s population is ignorant, dependent and immature, anarchy is completely untenable, because people cannot self-manage and they will not be trustworthy to look after each other and other forms of life.
A favorite slogan of the Situationists during the European social upheavals in 1968 was "Be Realistic. Demand the impossible.”
Reality itself is demanding that we transcend, create, surpass former limits and that is the natural way of the universe anyway, with or without us. What seems “impossible,” out of reach, is so because our psychospiritual development and its conditions are too undeveloped to live up the moral sense or the creative potential that is ours, but which is very intimate. This demand for alignment with intimate reality is knocking inside all of us but the most severely crippled souls, those very people who so often find their way into positions of power. When are we going to answer to the intimate truth instead of to the magnetic psychopaths who dominate and manipulate through ignorance and lies?
The growth humanity needs now has nothing to do with the growth of an economy or the provision of “creature comforts,” nor with rallies and the fall of governments. It is about deepening and strengthening of our capacity to meet reality and be wholeheartedly aligned with it, to be realized people, working with natural law as our law.
Can we imagine that the basis of our entire global culture is to achieve what is generally considered “the state of enlightenment,” but which is simply alignment with reality?
Will the academic left get with this? If so, you might just be out of a job, professors. How would you like to build a cob house with a bunch of us and put in some gardens and greenhouses?
And, will “the spiritual left” please leave off with the UFOs and aliens, crystals and runes, drug trips, crop circles, reptilian humans, astrology, mystery cults, power of attraction workbooks, drum circles, fortune tellers, pagan rites . . . and meet with intellectuals and just folks around the campfire for some practical architecture?
Now, will the evangelists and the rednecks, addicts, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, gangsters, secret agents and casino owners turn away from false doctrines, false flags, guns and poisons? What? No? Will you be ransacking our brand new mud and straw villages? Really?
Don’t you want to admit that the native peoples were the advanced minds, the wisdom figures, and that the Europeans were the neurotic, puerile savages?
Can we get a wee bit smarter and more radical now?
Making our demand Life’s demand, taking this upon ourselves as a species, across all borders, boundaries and divisions, is deeply political in nature and also deeply spiritual: these go together. Once you’re fully involved in reality, you won’t have time anymore for consumer business or celebrities, nor will you harbor a shred of interest in the circus of electoral politics.
Bio-psycho-social-spiritual integration and development, dynamic growth, holistic health and clear mind-sight into and through the old and the present has the potential to bring not only the fractured left together, but humanity as a whole.
The imperative for reality changes the human project entirely. We simply cannot go back to sing Jack and Jill, play musical chairs and Ring around the Rosy now. We simply cannot sing anthems, run marathon rat races or have the fruits of our love and work go to war and waste.
The whole stage-set will be dismantled when we are over the silly stories of this theater! All of us, together, over it, over it now! Dull, ditzy, dusty old stories!
Victor Hugo famously said "Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come." And the time as come, fellow human beings, to acknowledge that when enough of the human race grows up and perceives reality, the seemingly endless cycles of invasion, exploitation and domination of peoples and planet will be obsolete.
There are not enough jails, money or uniformed men to contain, hold back and push down an idea whose time has come.
It is the whole construct of reality that is crumbling and dying around us. Goodbye. Good night. Good luck. Awaken.
©2011 Jari Chevalier
March 11th, 2008
The question, where is your money invested? is experienced by many as a violation, a pointed finger jabbing at them. Well, this gets our backs up precisely because this is where we have compromised our hearts, where we really don’t want to look and listen, where the worm of hypocrisy squirms. It’s what we really don’t want to feel, talk about, and possibly be moved to address. Why?
Because it is still, generally speaking, more financially profitable (higher returns, less risk) in the short term to put money into the coffers of established companies and profiteers, engaged as they may be in disregard of land, people, health and wisdom, and every creature of the Earth.
And so we think we have our money working for us?! We give over our money, which, along with our work, is our most powerful instrument, voice and vote, to this portfolio of doom and Armageddon. And, the game is set up so that the players rationalize and justify detrimental business practices on the basis of having to satisfy their stockholders with high returns. This is a game where profit is the highest value in consideration. So, there you have it.
I was at the Whitney Biennial contemporary art show on preview day and it was a spiritual wasteland, very disappointing. The show mirrors a society that is imbalanced, disgusting, disordered, epically ugly, mad, stupid, broken, mean-spirited and sick. On the audio tour, Ellen Harvey, one of the artists whose work stood out to me, said: “You can’t win, so let’s just start off by failing as extravagantly as possible,” in speaking of her art process. A fitting line for our times. There was hardly a hint of transcendence or visionary attitude in that entire show; instead, despair and hurt and self-indulgence. Is this the best we can do? One wonders about the selection of this uninspired psychic display and what the mindset is there, the agenda.
The proverb “money is the root of all evil” in these materialistically driven times might just as well be “money is the root of all good”. Our money is what we get for the life energy we have expended and both our energy and our money can be put to good, evil or neutral work in the world.
Our money actually does invest us in that which we have invested, even though we are not always willing to look at it that way or to do the real math from a holistic perspective. So then, are we living behind our own backs? Are we content to be strangers to ourselves and each other? Are we actually saying: yes, here, do more of this with our world, kill it, destroy and decimate it, kill it all, just give me another cushion, don’t take away my addictions, and throw in the health insurance.
We have the power, if we have the will, to reform our civilization very quickly, and we can do it with our energy and our money, much more effectively than with our political votes.
If you haven't seen the movie Zeitgeist yet, you can get to it through these links. It's screening at non-mainstream theaters across the country this Saturday. The second link displays those theaters. Part three of this movie gives a historical view of the financial world that you might want to have a look at. I invite your comments on this.
Streaming Zeitgeist movie
Big Screenings on March 15th
Article by Javier Sierra, Sierra Club, "How to Tell Greenwashing from Real Corporate Responsibility"
©Jari Chevalier, 2008 | <urn:uuid:44647ad1-9013-423c-927a-b63150aa908d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jari.podbean.com/category/economy/ | 2013-05-21T10:13:56Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956277 | 6,154 |
The Roosevelt, located at 623 N. 25th Street in Richmond, VA, and nestled in one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, is definitely a new Richmond restaurant you should check out, people. Now, we went for Sunday Brunch, and good gravy! This Southern Charm is sure to impress. Go whole hog, y'all!
The Roosevelt is co-owned by Kendra Feather and Chef, Lee Gregory (no relation to me). When you walk in, you immediately feel like you have walked into a southern, quaint room. Yes, I said room. You can definitely throw a rock in this place. I think there are about 12-14 tables in this plantation-like establishment. My husband loved the old-time photography that adorns the walls. He instantly became very ecstatic about giving me a "Virginia history lesson" as we sat there that Sunday afternoon. I, being from Texas and quite frankly never being interested in history, actually did listen. With full ears, too. For me, the black chandelier, over the bar area, kept catching my eye as it solidified the whole ambiance of this fabulous restaurant. The walls are lined with wooden booths with throw pillows for table seating. The other side of the tables have simple wooden chairs. There is also seating nestled in the middle of the wall-lined tables. The bar probably had about 10 seats, as well.
So, we ordered our drinks. Me, a Bacon Vodka Bloody Mary and my husband, coffee. Yes, that is right. B-A-C-O-N Vodka. House-made Bacon Vodka, at that! Now, I am NO fan of bloody marys that make you feel as if you are sipping soup through a straw. This cocktail was perfect! It was blameless, actually. So blameless that my husband pushed the coffee aside to order one himself.
So, we looked over the menu and I ordered the fried chicken thigh (I am a thigh girl in more ways than one) with cast iron potatoes, a slow cooked egg and sausage gravy. I also had to order the side of cornbread with the vanilla butter. Of course! Misplaced Texan is the name here! ;) My husband ordered the fried oyster omelet with a bacon hollandaise.
As we waited for our food, that is where the history lesson was professed and after the quick teaching from my husband, I began to people watch. The couple next to us were talking about how they were getting married and moving in with each other in May. I think. It was odd. They mostly talked about the fact they both knew they needed a washer and dryer. And this was where I shook my head. You ready for it? She spoke of her laundry skills, or something of the sort, and then he actually proceeded to say, "Yeah, it'll be nice to have you around." Oh my. That was all I could eavesdrop in on that one! I was there for the food, not to hear some man say some crap like that to some young girl. Ha!
Additionally, one of the tables that lined the middle of the room was a four-top, and it was sat with 2 young couples. I swear one of the young men at that table was having a 20 minute food-gasm over the bacon. Wow! He was in total ecstasy. Eyes closed, head leaned back and all. Damn, Chef Gregory! I hadn't even indulged in any of the food yet, and I was seeing eyes roll in the back of some blonde, yuppie dude's head in the middle of your restaurant as he professed his love for your bacon...to another dude. OK, maybe we should just go back to the history lesson? But in all reality, that is Richmond. There are all walks of life, and whether it is washers & dryers or bacon...to each his own.
Now, back to the food. Unfortunately, my husband had to change his order because they ran out of oysters that day. That kind of broke my heart, too. I was excited to steal one off his plate and then still be able to eat my fried chicken thigh on my own plate! Best of both my favorite worlds! Reluctantly, my husband changed his order to the Brunch special for that day; potato, mushroom, sausage hash with two slow cooked eggs and topped with a salsa verde. Soon after, our food arrived and yes, I had to stare for a bit. Stunning! My egg was staring at me with pure allurement. I couldn't wait.
We dined and damn, that was some scrumptious stuff, I tell ya! As my Oklahoman Grandpa would say, "That's some good grazin'!" My fried chicken thigh was like "O.M.G." Moist and the crispiness and lightness of the fried crust was phenomenal! The potatoes were seasoned well and I was happy for that. The gravy was a little more runny for this Texan (wasn't made for a fork by any means at all), so in the back of my mind, I knew I had that cornbread to try and sop up what was left at the end.
Now, for the cornbread. Sorry. It was dry. Maybe if it was warmed up it would have been a little more moist, but I couldn't even sop up the gravy due to the dryness/crumbling. The vanilla butter tasted like frosting. It was an interesting combination. I might have enjoyed it a little more had it not been so dry, but I just might be a picky Texan.
Since my husband was left with a hankerin' for a tad bit more, we ordered the coffee cake at the end of our meal. Wonderful! No dryness there. Super moist and a perfect wrap up to an almost flawless experience. I was only going to have a bite, but a bite turned into just a few more.
I encourage you to go! For real. If it is for dinner, you better make reservations. They take them by phone only (804.658.1935), and it's best to do so after 4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.
We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and cannot wait to head there for dinner soon! Love me some southern food! I felt the food was greatly priced and they even had humor while ringing it up... | <urn:uuid:03a83046-4817-49fa-bf93-0fecd84fab94> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://misplacedtexaninva.blogspot.com/2012/01/roosevelt-restaurant-review.html | 2013-05-21T10:21:25Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987177 | 1,339 |
It is that time again summoners. Yea, I am a day late, but I've been busy and didn't get a chance to post this last night when the list came out, was too busy sleeping at the time. But, I digress, it is that time of the week where champions join the rotation of free-to-play, allowing those not skilled in using them to try them out for free, to both their amusement and their teams pain. This is also the week where Darius makes his appearance for the first time in the rotation, making those who don't know how to counter him yet, yell at the heavens saying he is too OP, when really, they just didn't shut him down.
As always, I pick which champions out of the week are my favorites, and say a little why on a couple of them, I then ask you what your favorites are, and why. Why do I ask? I'm a curious person, and it sates part of that curiosity. Out of this weeks champs I like: Darius, Kassadin, Vayne, Gangplank, Galio, Wukong, and Urgot (Despite him being fugly). The ones I will explain why on are: Darius, Kassadin, and Galio.
Darius, I actually bought during the double IP weekend, where my goal was to get him and Shyvana, I only got him since I wasn't home long enough to play any more than that. (I already saved up most for him anyhow). Even after getting him, I still stand by him not being OP. Yes, he can seem that way, but when a team knows what they're doing, or if the guy playing Darius doesn't know what he is doing, he is rather easy to shut down. I know some people like to build him rather tanky, I actually prefer a bit more in the AD than tank, usually going for Trinity force first, then building towards items like ghost blade, zeke's harald, and depending on if the team is ad or ap heavy Maw or Cleaver. Why those? Well, his cooldowns are a bit of a pain, especially for his pull which starts at over 20s for the initial cooldown, and items like Zekes and Ghostblade help ease that a bit. I also like to worth with his already passive armor pen to compliment that a bit more, which really helps take out the heavy hitters on their team. It does leave me a bit less tanky, than others I have seen play with him do, but he is a fighter/melee, not a tank. After playing him for the past few days, he is fairly fun, but I do agree with the nerf they're giving his ult. I didn't realize before using it, that it does give you a second or two grace period to kill an enemy if the ult didn't do it to refresh it, which can be a bit much, considering that it should require a bit more paying attention/skill on the players part to really get that down.
Kassadin, I don't really see that many people playing him, despite how well he can actually do. He is a bit gimped in the melee/mage department, since he has a low scale with HP and AD, making him fairly useless on that front, but when it comes down to silencing the right people, slowing other, and just picking off runners, he is a fairly good anti-mage, or just plain mage. He does take a bit to get used to and master, as I have seen more fail Kassadins than those who actually know what to do with him.
Galio, I originally got him when he was released on another of my accounts (when I was flaky/wanted a name change per month), and he is quite fun. Though I love to play mostly the DPS sort of champions, I don't mind playing him once in awhile, and I am almost always to have on on my side. I say almost because I had a few that ult too late, or ult and just miss half the targets, doing it at the wrong time. But when he does it right, he can give you the time to really screw over the enemy team, giving you enough time to do heavy damage, and keep them in check enough for those low on your team to get away. I don't think he should ever really solo lane, as he is best suited with a good AD/heavy AP partner to take advantage of his support skillset.
Okay, those are my favorites for the week, with some on the why for a few of them. I did ramble on a bit on Darius, but that is since he is new and I have a bit more to say on him in that regard. So as I said earlier, I also want to know what champions you guys like for this week? Or hey, which don't you like, and just say why. | <urn:uuid:2803d869-9d53-4255-9f91-5d91b4a837c2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://my.mmosite.com/1495693/blog/item/new_free_champion_rotation_season_two_week_28.html | 2013-05-21T09:59:57Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.990826 | 1,018 |
NetWellness is a global, community service providing quality, unbiased health information from our partner university faculty. NetWellness is commercial-free and does not accept advertising.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
If you are seriously thinking about quitting smoking, you will want to keep this important tip in mind. Research shows that those who are the most successful at giving up tobacco are people who didn't try to do it all on their own. You will greatly improve your chances of winning the battle if you take advantage of one of the support programs available. And it is easier than ever now to do that with the free mobile apps that have been created.
So don't hesitate to turn for help. The resources below will get you started. Quitting smoking is one of the hardest things you will ever do. You deserve to give yourself the best chance at a healthier you!
Quit Smoking: 5 Steps to START (MedlinePlus Magazine)
Quitters Can Win! (American Heart Association)
Smoking and How to Quit (Dept. of Health and Human Services, Office on Women's Health)
Smoking: Tips on How to Quit (ADAM)
For Young People
For Teens: How Can I Quit Smoking? (Nemours Foundation)
For Teens: Smoking and How to Quit (womenshealth.gov)
Quit Smoking: 3 Tools to Help You Quit (MedlinePlus Magazine)
Quiz: Do You Need Help to Quit? Take the Stop Smoking Quiz (American Cancer Society)
Withdrawal Quiz (National Cancer Institute, Tobacco Control Research Branch)
SmokefreeTXT is a free mobile service designed for young adults across the United States. Receive 24/7 encouragement, advice, and tips to help you stop smoking for good.
QuitGuide is a free mobile app to help you prepare to quit smoking and support you through the hard times in the days and weeks after you quit.
FDA 101: Smoking Cessation Products (Food and Drug Administration)
Medication Guide (National Cancer Institute, Tobacco Control Research Branch)
Quit-Smoking Products: Boost Your Chance of Quitting for Good (Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research)
Smoking Cessation: Treatment Options (MedlinePlus)
Smoking - Medicines to Help You (Food and Drug Administration)
Varenicline (Marketed as Chantix) Information (Food and Drug Administration)
Where to Get Help
For support in quitting, including free quit coaching, a free quit plan, free educational materials, and referrals to local resources, call 1-800-QUIT-NOW (1-800-784-8669); TTY 1-800-332-8615.
Lung HelpLine (American Lung Association)
Talk to an Expert (National Cancer Institute, Tobacco Control Research Branch)
Where to Get Help When You Decide to Quit Smoking (National Cancer Institute)
Know a pregnant smoker? Reach Out and Offer Her a Helping Hand (smokefree.gov)
Overcoming Addiction (National Institute on Aging)
Quitting Smoking (National Institute on Aging)
Stop Smoking Before Surgery (American Society of Anesthesiologists)
Success Stories: You Can Do It!
You Can Quit Smoking: Here's How (MedlinePlus Magazine)
Quit Smoking: Keep Trying! (MedlinePlus Magazine)
Share Your Story (womenshealth.gov)
Our Experts Respond
Quit Smoking (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion)
Smoking and Tobacco Use (CDC)
Smoking Cessation (MedlinePlus)
Surgeon General Reports on Tobacco and Smoking (Office of the Surgeon General)
Secondhand Smoke (womenshealth.gov)
Secondhand Smoke/"Light" Tobacco/ Smokeless Tobacco (MedlinePlus Magazine)
ClinicalTrials.gov: Smoking Cessation (National Institutes of Health)
This article is a NetWellness exclusive.
Last Reviewed: Jun 08, 2012
Mary Ellen Wewers, PhD, MPH
Professor of Health Behaviors & Health Promotion
College of Public Health
The Ohio State University | <urn:uuid:d592fb4a-f0bf-4f36-9345-71384ece50d8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://netwellness.org/healthtopics/smoking/quitresources.cfm | 2013-05-21T10:27:26Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.868258 | 868 |
A week ago, talk about Nebraska's running game centered on its stable of talented running backs. Now, you have to throw the quarterback into the mix as well. After redshirt freshman Taylor Martinez gashed Western Kentucky for 127 yards and three touchdowns on just seven carries last Saturday, the Huskers' ground attack became even more dangerous that it already was to begin with.
Considering NU faces an Idaho defense that gave up 148 rushing yards to I-AA North Dakota last week, Martinez and backs Roy Helu, Rex Burkhead and Dontrayevous Robinson should once again put up some big numbers on the ground this week.
NU Pass Offense vs UI Pass Defense
With Martinez getting the start once again today, it will be interesting to see if he's able to do a little more through the air against a Vandal defense that ranked 116th nationally in pass defense last season. Last week, Martinez completed some nice passes, but he also got away with some risky throws that arguably should have been picked off.
Idaho held North Dakota to just 122 passing yards and picked off two passes last week, but then again, it was against North Dakota. Nebraska's wide receivers will be some of the biggest the Vandals' secondary will face all season, and there's really no reason why the Huskers can't be a little more aggressive against such a physically inferior defensive backfield.
UI Rush Offense vs NU Rush Defense
The 155 yards and a touchdown Western Kentucky's Bobby Rainey put up against Nebraska last week were definitely reasons for concern, especially considering NU didn't give up that many yards against any of the talented backs it faced all last season. However, the players and coaches have insisted Rainey's big day was more a result of communication and alignment issues on their part and not because they were physically beaten up front.
The good news for the Husker defense is that Idaho doesn't present nearly the challenge WKU was in the run game. Sure, they rushed for nearly 150 yards and three touchdowns against UND, but the Vandals still lost four starting offensive linemen from last season, and their pass-first mentality doesn't necessarily do much for the running game either. Also, word is that sophomore Eric Martin will get the start at linebacker over Alonzo Whaley, so NU should be even more physical against the run.
UI Pass Offense vs NU Pass Defense
If there's one area where Nebraska should genuinely be concerned about going into today's game, it's how they're going to handle Idaho's explosive passing attack led by quarterback Nathan Enderle. The Huskers' secondary is considered one of the biggest strengths of the defense, but it certainly wasn't tested much at all last week.
That definitely won't be the case today, as there's no doubt that the Vandals will come out slinging the ball all over the place. Enderle and Co. passed for 399 yards and three touchdowns last week, but the passing game definitely wasn't perfect. North Dakota racked up four sacks in the first half alone and also added an interception.
Special Teams, What If's and The X-Factor
As usual, Nebraska gets the edge on special teams primarily because of senior kicker/punter Alex Henery and punt returner Niles Paul. Henery didn't really have to do much last week, and Paul came oh-so-close to breaking a couple of punt returns. In addition, kickoff specialist Adi Kunalic and kickoff returner Tim Marlowe did excellent jobs. Kunalic put two kickoffs into the end zone for touchbacks, and Marlowe averaged 34.5 yards per return. Idaho return man Justin Veltung is a threat on kick returns, but Kunalic should be able to make him a non-factor.
Nebraska Will Win If:
It continues to dominate in the run game and finds a way to put pressure on Enderle all game. Though Idaho's offensive line weighs in at an average of roughly 340 pounds, Nebraska's defensive line is much faster and more athletic, and it should be able to put some serious heat on Enderle and at least throw him off his rhythm. And if Martinez pulls off another performance like he did last week, then it's pretty much game over right there.
Idaho Will Win If:
It can force Nebraska to pass the ball and create some turnovers while also putting up some points through the air. Enderle is one of the better quarterbacks in the country right now, and if he can get enough time in the pocket to go through his reads he should be able to find some holes in NU's coverage, especially considering the inexperience at linebacker and safety.
There's no question that the one element Nebraska has that Idaho doesn't is a natural playmaker like Martinez. What he lacks in experience and his sometimes questionable decision making he more than makes up for with the ability to score every time he takes a snap. Add in Idaho's recent defensive struggles, and Martinez could be in for another highlight reel performance, which will only further separate himself from the rest of the pack as clear cut starter at quarterback. | <urn:uuid:04e33fa0-23c2-4de1-a4d2-8ecba512086d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nfldraft.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1124611 | 2013-05-21T10:05:45Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97206 | 1,048 |
Amazon.com (AMZN) will have a difficult time meeting analyst expectations this quarter given its several significant headwinds. The two most prominent headwinds relate to revenue, namely the imposition of state sales taxes on Amazon e-commerce revenue and the large increase in federal taxes impacting consumer demand. There is another additional key headwind that is rarely discussed in relation to Amazon, but has and will continue to have a significant impact on operating income - the price of gasoline. While it should be no surprise that gasoline impacts shipping costs, this article enables the reader to accurately predict the impact of gasoline price changes on gross margin, operating income and earnings per share.
While Amazon is quite stingy in the investment information it releases to investors (missing are tablet units, impact of sales tax, streaming users, 3P total merchandise value, AWS COGS, etc…), they do let us know their gross and net shipping expenses. Figure 1 charts gross shipping expense as a percentage of e-commerce revenue against average US gasoline prices in the quarter (regular unleaded, average of all formulations and areas). The chart illustrates that shipping expense had increased steadily from about 7.5% of revenue to 8.6% - 8.9% during 2012. This occurred while Amazon was spending billions of capital on tens of new fulfillment centers closer to the customer to reduce shipping expenses. In order to understand this divergence, I dug a little deeper to determine what is driving the much faster than revenue increases in shipping expense even as shipping distances are being reduced.
Figure 1: Amazon Gross Shipping Cost as a % of E-Commerce Revenue and Average US Gasoline Prices
Through regression analysis of Amazon and government data, I built a shipping expense growth model that demonstrates high correlation to two obvious independent variables: The price of gasoline and what Amazon refers to as "Paid Units Sold" (Amazon defines "Paid Units Sold" as "physical and digital units sold" that "are paid units and do not include units associated with certain acquisitions, rental businesses, web services or advertising businesses, or Amazon gift certificates"). The Coefficient of Determination (R2) of this regression was a convincing 0.98, displaying that these two variables alone account for the variation in shipping expense growth. As a note, I thought paid unit growth of 1P units only would be a better predictor as not all 3P units are shipped by Amazon, but the total paid units had a better R2, so I stuck with that.
What does the Statistical Analysis Tell Us?
Here is the key takeaway: Every 2% increase in gasoline price reduces Amazon's overall gross margin by 10 basis points (BPS). At $16 billion in revenue, every 10 bps of margin reduction results in a $16 million reduction in operating income, or about 2.5¢ in earnings per share reduction. While 10 bps may not sound like a lot, 2.5¢ represents 28% of the analysts $0.09 consensus estimate for Q1. So a minor 2% shift up in gasoline costs can shift earnings lower by 28% in Q1.
Let's look at this in the wider context of future earnings potential. Amazon bulls like to point to 2009 Q4 as a shining example of Amazon profit potential as they achieved 4.0% net margin and $0.85 per share of earnings. They claim that once all of the current investments subside, Amazon will either return to or exceed those peak margin levels on much higher revenue. Here is a dose of reality for the bulls: If gasoline prices per gallon in 2009 Q4 were what it is today, Amazon would have earned a measly $0.02 per share instead of $0.85! That means given today's energy environment Amazon faces nearly 4.0% net margin headwinds from its prior peak performance.
Has The Fulfillment Center Build Out Strategy Had Any Positive Impact At All?
There is one other interesting result of the analysis to note: the model generated an additive constant term of negative 8.8%. That means that with zero unit growth and no gasoline price change, Amazon shipping expense would shrink by 8.8% Y/Y. This is the positive impact of the distributed fulfillment center strategy and is already baked into the current numbers - you just can't see it in Amazon's financial results due to higher gasoline prices and much higher unit shipments than revenue growth over the past four years. The end result is that although Amazon management recognized they need to do something to stem these two major headwinds, they have only lost ground. While they have increased fulfillment expense as a percentage of revenue by 270 bps, shipping expense has increased 120 bps as a percentage of revenue, thus reducing net margin by 400 bps over the past four years. Based on these trends it seems Amazon will need to continue to invest heavily in fulfillment expenses over the next several years just to return to 2009 shipping expense percentage levels of e-commerce revenue.
Is There Hope For Gasoline Prices to Return to 2009 Levels?
This is highly unlikely as the global financial crisis scared the energy markets into a severe dip (60% drop) at the end of 2008/early 2009. Gasoline prices have begun an exponential run up over the past few weeks and have well surpassed both the prior quarter and year ago quarter's level seven weeks into the quarter (Figure 2). Oil prices tend to lead gasoline prices by 4 to 6 weeks, so look for gasoline prices to continue to rise significantly into the end of Q1 to near all-time high levels ($4.11/gal) as oil continues to print new 9-month highs. That could mean all time high shipping expense as a percentage of e-commerce revenue for Amazon in Q2. The current White House Administration's tough policy approach on fossil fuels coupled with the Fed's QE infinity program should continue to pressure oil prices higher through at least 2015, leading me to wonder why Amazon is considered a "risk-on" trade with its strong inverse earnings sensitivity to oil prices. Not only does an increase in gasoline cost increase Amazon's shipping expense, it also lowers consumer's discretionary income, thus providing an additional headwind to revenue - a true double whammy.
Figure 2: Weekly US Gasoline Prices for Q/Q and Y/Y Comparisons
Core to Amazon's value proposition is the convenience of shipping product directly to your door. That service currently reduces operating margin by 870 bps (up from 750 bps three years ago) and is directly correlated to the cost of gasoline. For every 2% increase in gasoline cost, Amazon gross margin declines by 10 bps. This relation has reduced Amazon net margin by 400 bps to zero over the last four years. While spending billions on new distributed fulfillment centers has attempted to reduce the impact of soaring gasoline prices, shipping expenses as a percentage of e-commerce revenue continues to climb as Amazon paid units shipped far outpace revenue growth and gasoline price increases continue to override any Amazon efficiency gains. In the current money printing and political environment, energy costs are skyrocketing, thus having a direct and meaningful impact on Amazon profit potential for 2013 and beyond.
Note: Additional information on the model, data and analysis can be made available through my consulting practice.
Disclosure: I am short AMZN. | <urn:uuid:c6c03e75-ef3c-4e66-80ce-d937222af5e1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://seekingalpha.com/article/1220891-amazon-is-getting-gassed | 2013-05-21T10:30:21Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947175 | 1,484 |
By Jack Rikess
Toke of the Town
Northern California Correspondent
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he will “work with states” to clarify the Department of Justice’s position on medical marijuana. This is what I’d like him to say…
11. Marijuana is no longer a Schedule I drug.
The Good News: Marijuana will finally be reclassified as having medical value.
Bad News: Big Pharma doesn’t like to share…
10. Everyone can grow!
For states that have Medical Marijuana, patients will be allowed to grow six plants each. Why not?
Most everyone is doing it already. That way, the Man (and Woman) can’t control our stash.
9. Arizona, you have medical marijuana, get over it!
It would be great if the highest attorney in the land, Eric Holder reaffirmed that if the highest voters passed medical marijuana, they have spoken. This goes for any state that doesn’t like democracy and the right of voters.
I’m also looking at you, Big Sky.
8. We’re only busting deals over 50 pounds.
Until legalization happens, commerce shall continue. Fifty elbows can be divvied up pretty quick, especially if it’s the amazing Purps or some of that Solar Diesel making the rounds.
I think 50 pounds and under is a fair amount that one should be able to travel with for commercial purposes, within state lines of course.
7. There won’t be any lists of medical marijuana patients or growers recorded anywhere.
Doctors don’t give the State or the Feds lists of their patients who are on Viagra or Ritalin, (and who wouldn’t want to know who gets a little sketchy if they’re not on their meds?)
Why should they give the medi-jane patients up? In the Time of Grey Markets, we’ll come out, but don’t make us tell you where we live.
6. States need to get their acts together.
There are 58 counties and a whole lot of unincorporated towns (think Deadwood) in California. Unless two adjoining counties have the same laws, ordinances and restrictions, you’re going to have graft, corruption and more of the same.
We need consistent and common-sense regulations within the states, left up to each state what that would be, but for the love of all that is sane, let’s have cultivation, commerce and transportation laws that make sense and work.
5. Amsterdam is over.
The Dutch no longer want the sounds of the Grateful Dead gracing their canals. For some crazy reason (actually, the Flemish blew it for everyone) foreigners will not be allowed entry into the hash bars without a visitor’s permit.
This is the United States’ chance for a big toe into the lucrative world of the ganja-turistas. For Las Vegas whose fountains suck the blood of a vanishing economy everyday and then spit it out in a multicolor symmetry five times a day to a couple of tourists dressed in cut-offs, and other destination cities that are having hard times. Here’s your chance!
It’s time for these sinkholes to reinvest in the American Dream and open our own hash bars. Once Las Vegas discovers marijuana, munchies, and cotton-mouth, food and beverage directors everywhere will have a new lease on life. This model could be replicated everywhere.
4. If you’re in jail because of cannabis, pack your bags…
It is just time to stop. As correctional officials nationally figure out ways to release the least violent and aggressive inmates into our society. Why are non-violent, first-time marijuana offenders going to prison at all?
Because somebody says it is illegal.
3. Users are immune from federal prosecution.
From this point on, it will be left up to the state you’re in for the rules and regulations governing marijuana. One of the reasons it is easy to get a job in Oklahoma City is because people are leaving there because of draconian weed laws. You took a chance on gambling and casinos, alcohol and guns.
Trust me, after all of that, you’re going to love marijuana. We’re a lot less hard to handle.
2. Movies are better when you’re stoned.
I don’t know, I just think it would be cool if the Attorney General of the United States came out and said, “You know, I saw Ghostbusters straight the first time, then I saw it high.
“Man, it’s a lot funnier when you’re baked. I’ll take your questions now if you have any.”
1. I am sorry.
These last few weeks have been very tense for many of us in the medical marijuana movement. Dispensaries have been threatened with closures. Banks that do business with the cannabis industry have been told to open their drawers. Proposition 19 in 2010 had a pretty good chance of passing until Eric Holder came out the week before the vote and said, “no matter what happens with the vote, the Feds will still bust pot smokers.”
In fact, Eric Holder and then candidate Obama pledged to back off medical marijuana patients and make marijuana a low priority in terms of prosecution. At a time when Big Pharma seems to be making strides and advancements, patients and medical marijuana doctors are being deterred, harassed and even jailed.
Some days it is like a bad game of ganja musical chairs. We’re never sure where to sit.
It would be nice to hear someone say, “Sorry for the inconvenience. We hear you. We won’t smile nor smirk when asked if marijuana has medicinal value. We will take medical marijuana patients and their input seriously, realizing that they’ve been the only true governing body that has driven the medical marijuana movement since it started.
“I am sorry.” | <urn:uuid:d0808d99-4eea-4a71-9582-39d70d467075> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://valetudocafe.wordpress.com/tag/arizona-medical-marijuana-news/ | 2013-05-21T10:27:22Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93773 | 1,274 |
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