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|European Case Law Identifier:||ECLI:EP:BA:2004:T031503.20040706|
|Date of decision:||06 July 2004|
|Case number:||T 0315/03|
|IPC class:||C12N 15/85|
|Language of proceedings:||EN|
|Download and more information:||
|Title of application:||Method for producing transgenic animals|
|Applicant name:||THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE|
|Opponent name:||British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection
Bundesverband der Tierversuchsgegner et al
Ökologisch - Demokratische Partei
Meinel A. et al; Fraktion Bündnis 90
Fuchs U. et al
Fraktion Bündnis 90/ DIE GRÜNEN im Bayer. Landtag
Evangelischer Stadtkirchenverband Köln
Koechlin F., Schenkelaars P. et al. "No Patents on Life"
Voggenhuber J. et al
Keine Patente auf leben
Hamberger Sylvia et al
Bundeszentrale der Tierversuchsgegner Österreichs
Wiener Tierschutzverein und Zentralverband der
Deutsche Tierhilfswerk e.V.
|Headnote:||1. Rules 23b to 23e EPC apply to a case such as the present which was pending on the date when, as provided for by the legislator, those Rules took effect. (See Reasons, section 5)
2.1 A case falling within one of the four categories listed in Rule 23d(a) to (d) EPC must ipso facto be denied a patent under Article 53(a) EPC and there is no need to consider that Article further; but a case not falling within one of those categories must be considered further under Article 53(a) EPC. (See Reasons, section 6)
2.2 Thus, in cases falling within it, Rule 23d(d) EPC inserts an objection under Article 53(a) EPC (a "Rule 23(d) type" Article 53(a) EPC objection) which, depending on the facts and thus on the outcome of the test, may be either additional or alternative to an objection under Article 53(a) EPC itself (a "real" Article 53(a) EPC objection) as developed by the case law. (See Reasons, section 6 and paragraph 10.1)
3. Rule 23d(d) EPC is neither ultra vires nor inconsistent with the principle of narrow construction of exclusions or with the previous law. (See Reasons, section 7)
4. Assessment of a "Rule 23(d) type" Article 53(a) EPC objection is to be made as of the filing or priority date of the patent or application in suit. Evidence arising thereafter may be taken into account provided it is directed to the position at that date. (See Reasons, paragraphs 8.2, 9.5 and 9.6)
5.1 The Rule 23d(d) EPC test requires only three matters to be considered: animal suffering, medical benefit and the necessary correspondence between the two in terms of the animals in question. (See Reasons, paragraph 9.1)
5.2 The level of proof is the same for both animal suffering and substantial medical benefit, namely a likelihood. (See Reasons, paragraphs 9.2 and 9.3)
6.1 In the assessment of a "real" Article 53(a) EPC objection, no single definition of morality based on e.g. economic or religious principles represents an accepted standard in European culture. Opinion poll evidence is of very limited value for the reasons given in T 356/93. (See Reasons, paragraphs 10.1 to 10.4)
6.2 In animal manipulation cases, the test in T 19/90 is appropriate. This differs in several respects from the test in Rule 23d(d) EPC, most importantly by allowing matters other than animal suffering and medical benefit to be taken into account. (See Reasons, paragraphs 10.5 and 10.6)
6.3 Since the T 19/90 test is "mainly" the basis of assessment, other arguments as to the appropriate standard of morality or "ordre public" can additionally be considered but all arguments must be supported by evidence. (See Reasons, paragraphs 10.7 and 10.8)
6.4 Assessment of a "real" Article 53(a) EPC objection is made as of the filing or priority date; evidence arising after that date may be taken into account provided it is directed to the position at such date. (See Reasons, section 10.9)
7.1 In an assessment under Article 53(b) EPC, the principle enunciated in G 1/98 (OJ EPO 2000, 111) concerning plants and "plant varieties" should be followed in the case of animals: a patent should not be granted for a single animal variety (or species or race, depending on which language text of the EPC is used) but can be granted if varieties may fall within the scope of its claims. (See Reasons, paragraph 11.4)
7.2 The definition of animal variety (or species or race) by reference to taxonomical rank would be consistent with the position in relation to plant varieties and in the interest of legal certainty, allowing assessment under Article 53(b) EPC as interpreted by Rule 23c(b) EPC to be made by considering whether the technical feasibility of the invention is not confined to a particular animal variety (or species or race). (See Reasons, paragraphs 11.5 to 11.6)
7.3 The different terms used in each official language are inconsistent and denote different taxonomic categories. Thus strict compliance with Article 177(1) EPC would lead to the absurd result that the outcome of an Article 53(b) EPC objection would depend on the language of a case, with German having the highest taxonomic order "species" ("Tierarten") and thereby offering the widest objection. (See Reasons, paragraphs 11.1, 11.2 and 11.7)
|Relevant legal provisions:||
|Keywords:||Method for producing transgenic rodents - whether contrary to Rule 23d(d) EPC (yes)
Method for producing transgenic mice - whether contrary to Rule 23d(d) EPC (no) or Article 53(a) EPC (no) or Article 53(b) EPC (no)
Summary of Facts and Submissions
History of the Previous Proceedings
I. These appeals are from the decision of the Opposition Division of 16 January 2003 to maintain European patent No. 0169672 ("the patent") in amended form. The patent is based on European patent application No. 85304490.7, entitled "Method for producing transgenic animals", which was filed on 24 June 1985 claiming a priority date of 22 June 1984. Although the title and early versions of the claims refer to animals, the only embodiments disclosed relate to mice and the subject-matter of the patent has come to be referred to as the "oncomouse". In this decision that word is used, as it was by the parties during the proceedings, as a convenient means of denoting the subject-matter.
II. The application as filed contained inter alia independent claims directed to:
"1. A method for producing a transgenic eucaryotic animal having an increased probability of developing neoplasms, said method comprising introducing into an animal embyro [sic] an activated oncogene sequence.
17. A transgenic non-human eucaryotic animal whose germ cells and somatic cells contain an activated oncogene sequence introduced into said animal, or an ancestor of said animal, at an embryonic stage, said oncogene optionally being further defined according to any one of claims 3 to 10, said animal preferably being a rodent."
III. The application was refused by the Examining Division on the grounds of Article 53(b) EPC, which prevents patenting of animal varieties, and of Article 83 EPC, since it could not be assumed that the only examples in the application, namely mice, could be extended to all other animals. The Examining Division also considered the application of Article 53(a) EPC, which excludes patents for inventions the publication or exploitation of which would be contrary to "ordre public" or morality, but concluded that patent law was not appropriate for resolving the potential problems thereby raised. The claims in the application as refused corresponding to those quoted above read as follows:
"1. A method for producing a transgenic non-human mammalian animal having an increased probability of developing neoplasms, said method comprising introducing an activated oncogene sequence into a non-human mammalian animal at a stage no later than the 8-cell stage.
17. A transgenic non-human mammalian animal whose germ cells and somatic cells contain an activated oncogene sequence introduced into said animal, or an ancestor of said animal, at a stage no later than the 8-cell stage, said oncogene optionally being further defined according to any one of claims 3 to 10.
18. An animal as claimed in claim 17 which is a rodent."
IV. The applicant appealed against that decision. In its decision of 3 October 1990 in those previous appeal proceedings (T 19/90 OJ EPO 1990, 476), the Board of Appeal held that Article 53(b) EPC applies to certain categories of animals but not to animals as such; and that, in the absence of serious doubts substantiated by verifiable facts, there was no reason to refuse the application under Article 83 EPC on the ground that it involved an extrapolation from mice in particular to mammals in general. As regards Article 53(a) EPC, the Board expressed the view that, particularly in cases such as the present of genetic manipulation of animals by the insertion of an activated oncogene, there were compelling reasons to consider this Article. The Board remitted the case to the Examining Division for further prosecution.
V. Following further proceedings before the Examining Division, the patent was granted on 13 May 1992 with independent claims as follows:
"1. A method for producing a transgenic non-human mammalian animal having an increased probability of developing neoplasms, said method comprising chromosomally incorporating an activated oncogene sequence into the genome of a non-human mammalian animal.
19. A transgenic non-human mammalian animal whose germ cells and somatic cells contain an activated oncogene sequence as a result of chromosomal incorporation into the animal genome, or into the genome of an ancestor of said animal, said oncogene optionally being further defined according to any one of claims 3 to 10.
23. A chromosome of an animal as claimed in claim 19, which comprises an oncogene as defined in any one of claims 3 to 10.
25. A cell derived from a somatic cell obtained from a transgenic non-human mammalian animal as defined in any one of claims 19 to 22."
VI. Between 18 December 1992 and 13 February 1993 seventeen oppositions were filed against the patent alleging variously several grounds under Articles 100(a) and 52 to 57 EPC including lack of industrial application, lack of novelty and inventive step, the absence of an invention, a non-patentable method for treatment of the animal body, that exploitation of the invention would be contrary to morality or "ordre public", and that the patent was for animal varieties. There were also objections of insufficient disclosure under Articles 100(b) and 83 EPC (in the case of opponents 4, 6 and 8 to 15).
VII. (1) The representative of Opponent 4 - a group consisting of an individual (Mr R. Büchner), a registered association (the "Tierschutzverein Göppingen" - the Göppingen Animal Protection Society), and an unregistered association of fourteen individuals (the Initiative "Kein Patent auf Leben" - No Patent on Life) - informed the EPO in a letter of 12 May 1995 that the unregistered association no longer existed, that his professional fees were largely unpaid, and that he wished his clients' opposition to be considered withdrawn. Although subsequent notifications were sent to this opponent, it played no further part in the proceedings.
(2) Opponent 5, a "Fraktion" (parliamentary party) in the Parliament of the German "Land" (province) of Sachsen (Saxony) ceased to exist, although this fact was only disclosed in a letter of 5 February 2003 sent on receipt of the Opposition Division's written decision. That letter explained that the "Fraktion" ceased activity after the provincial elections in 1994 and the subsequent liquidation was thereafter finalised at an unspecified date.
(3) Opponent 9, the "Bundesland Hessen" (the German province of Hesse), withdrew its opposition in a letter received on 19 April 2000.
VIII. The opposition proceedings continued until 16 January 2003. Oral proceedings were held by the Opposition Division from 21 to 24 November 1995 and again from 6. to 7 November 2001. In its decision the Opposition Division rejected the patent proprietor's objections to the admissibility of the oppositions and rejected all the opponents' objections to the patent except those under Article 53(a) EPC. It found that the claims directed to non-human mammalian animals were not allowable under that Article and accordingly maintained the patent in an amended form with independent claims directed to rodents in accordance with the proprietor's fourth auxiliary request filed on 24 April 1997. In the course of its decision, the Opposition Division also decided that Rules 23b to 23e EPC applied to the present case and rejected arguments to the contrary based on the principle of legitimate expectations; rejected as an abuse of procedure a request made at the first oral proceedings that all its members should be disqualified for partiality; and rejected requests from the patent proprietor and opponents 1, 8 and 10 to 15 for an award of costs against the EPO in respect of the second oral proceedings.
IX. The independent claims of the patent as maintained by the decision of the Opposition Division read as follows:
"1. A method for producing a transgenic rodent having an increased probability of developing neoplasms, said method comprising chromosomally incorporating an activated oncogene sequence into the genome of a rodent.
19. A transgenic rodent whose germ cells and somatic cells contain an activated oncogene sequence as a result of chromosomal incorporation into the animal genome, or into the genome of an ancestor of said animal, said oncogene optionally being further defined according to any one of claims 3 to 10.
22. A chromosome of an animal as claimed in claim 19, which comprises an oncogene as defined in any one of claims 3 to 10.
24. A cell derived from a somatic cell obtained from a transgenic animal as defined in any one of claims 19 to 21."
The Appeal Proceedings
X. Appeals against the decision of 16 January 2003 were filed by one of the two legal persons forming opponent 1 which filed a notice of appeal on 25 March 2003, paid the appeal fee on 26 March 2003 and filed a statement of grounds of appeal on 23 May 2003; by opponent 2 which paid the appeal fee on 11 March 2003 and filed a combined notice and statement of grounds of appeal on 13 March 2003; and by opponents 8, 12, 13 and 15 which all filed notices of appeal and paid appeal fees on 26 March 2003 and filed statements of grounds of appeal on 26 May 2003. These opponents which filed appeals are referred to below as appellants 1 to 6 respectively. Opponents who did not file appeals were parties to the appeal proceedings as of right pursuant to Article 107 EPC but, with the exception of opponent 3 which attended the oral proceedings, none of those non-appealing parties played any part in the appeal proceedings.
XI. A communication of the Board dated 24 November 2003 dealt with the following matters.
(1) The Board expressed the provisional opinion that all the appeals were prima facie admissible but, if any appeal should be held inadmissible, the party in question would none the less be a party as of right and its grounds of appeal would stand as written submissions made by such a party.
(2) The Board directed the parties to file copies of any published material, including national laws and case-law, referred to in their written submissions and on which they intended to rely. As regards the appellants, this was to be done within one month. None of the appellants complied with this direction although appellants 3 to 6, who - unlike appellants 1 and 2 - had filed with their grounds of appeal copies of new documents referred to therein, replied to the communication by filing (under cover of a letter of 29 December 2003) several new documents not referred to in their written submissions.
(3) The Board stated its intention to avoid unnecessary delay in the appeal proceedings and gave various directions, inter alia that replies (including requests) be filed by the respondent (patent proprietor) and the parties as of right (non-appealing opponents) within four months with no extensions of time to be permitted. The communication also indicated that oral proceedings would be held in the week of 5 to 9 July 2004. The respondent filed its reply to the statements of grounds of appeal, and a main and five auxiliary requests, by a fax of 2 April 2004. No other parties filed replies.
XII. In a second communication sent with the summons to oral proceedings dated 23 April 2004, the Board indicated the order in which it proposed matters be discussed at the oral proceedings, namely admissibility issues, objections to the patent other than under Article 53 EPC, Article 53(a) EPC objections, and Article 53(b) EPC objections. On 13. May 2004 the respondent filed by fax a request, made on what was described as a precautionary basis, to refer ten questions to the Enlarged Board of Appeal.
XIII. In a third communication of 17 May 2004, the Board drew the parties' attention to the claims directed to a chromosome and a cell and stated that discussion of those claims would take place at the oral proceedings.
XIV. (1) In faxes dated 4 June 2004 and transmitted on 8. June 2004, appellants 3 to 6 asked (in reply to the communication of 23 April 2004) that Article 53 EPC issues be discussed first in the oral proceedings because their case was based on that Article, they were not commercial organisations and did not have the resources to be represented at a hearing lasting up to five days. The same faxes indicated that one or more persons, some identified by name and some not, would wish to speak at the oral proceedings on the subject of patenting animals.
(2) In a fourth communication of 15 June 2004, the Board replied that, first, it could not alter the order of the discussion at such a late stage but that in fact it expected the oral proceedings to last less than the five days which had been reserved; and second, by drawing attention to decision G 4/95 of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (OJ EPO 1996, 412) and related decisions mentioned in "Case Law of the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office", 4th edition 2001, section VI.K.7.1 at pages 371 to 373.
(3) Appellants 3 to 6 wrote again by fax of 24 June 2004 complaining of the Board's refusal to change the order of discussion and announcing that the same persons would speak on behalf of those appellants at the oral proceedings before the Board as had spoken at the oral proceedings before the Opposition Division.
XV. Oral proceedings took place on 5 and 6 July 2004 attended throughout by appellants 3 to 6, the respondent and opponent 3. Contrary to its previously expressed intention, appellant 1 did not attend the oral proceedings for reasons of cost but, in its fax of 2 July 2004 announcing its non-attendance, sent a further written submission in response to the respondent's reply which it asked to be admitted. The Board supplied copies of that submission to the parties attending the oral proceedings. Appellant 2 attended the oral proceedings on 5 July 2004 but, without any notice or explanation, absented itself during the afternoon of that day and did not appear again thereafter. Despite being duly summoned no other party gave any notice of or explanation for its non-attendance.
XVI. (1) At the opening of the oral proceedings on 5 July 2004, the respondent filed new main and first and third auxiliary requests, the new third auxiliary request being the previous fifth auxiliary request filed with its reply of 2 April 2004, and withdrew all its previous requests except for the second auxiliary request. The respondent's new main request contained the same claims as those of the request allowed by the Opposition Division (see paragraph IX above) but without the claims to a chromosome and a cell. The new first auxiliary request was the same as the previous third auxiliary request filed with its reply except for the deletion of claims directed to a chromosome and a cell, such claims having been removed in response to the Board's communication of 17 May 2004 (see paragraph XIII above).
(2) In the course of the oral proceedings on 6 July 2004, the respondent filed a slightly amended version of the first auxiliary request in which references to "animal" were replaced by "transgenic mouse" and certain dependent claims were renumbered to allow for the fact that an independent claim to a plasmid appeared in the middle of the dependent method claims depending on claim 1; and it also filed an amended description.
(3) Independent claims 1 and 19 of the respondent's first auxiliary request as filed on 6 July 2004 read as follows:
"1. A method for producing a transgenic mouse having an increased probability of developing neoplasms, said method comprising chromosomally incorporating an activated oncogene sequence into the genome of a mouse.
19. A transgenic mouse whose germ cells and somatic cells contain an activated oncogene sequence as a result of chromosomal incorporation into the animal genome, or into the genome of an ancestor of said animal, said oncogene optionally being further defined according to any one of claims 3 to 10."
(4) The respondent's second and third auxiliary requests were restricted to claims directed to the use of a transgenic rodent (second auxiliary request) or transgenic mouse (third auxiliary request) for test purposes and methods of testing materials by exposing (respectively) a transgenic rodent or mouse to them.
XVII. The following documents are mentioned in the decision:
(1) Jaenisch, R. and Mintz, B., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol.71, No.4, 1974, pages 1250 to 1254;
(28) Proposed Resolution of the European Parliament, 8. February 1993 (in German);
(29) Proposed Resolution of the European Parliament, 10. February 1993 (in nine languages) and Resolution, 11 February 1993 (in German);
(47) Ekins, S. et al., Br. J. Clin. Pharmacol, Vol.36, 1993, pages 165 to 166;
(48) Long, B. et al., Br. J. Cancer, Vol.65, 1992, pages 865 to 869;
(49) Ming Liang Li et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol.84, 1987, pages 136 to 140;
(81) Declaration of Dr L. Hennighausen dated 6. September 2001;
(82) Declaration of Dr P. Leder dated 6 September 2001;
(83) Declaration of Dr. R. Pitman dated 6 September 2001;
and the following annexes to document (82):
(A1) Pupa, S.M. et al., Gene Ther., Vol.8, 2001, pages 75 to 79;
(A2) Gyorffy, S. et al., J. Immunol., Vol.166, 2001, pages 6212 to 6217;
(A3) Crane, P.D. et al., J. Nucl. Med., Vol.36, No.10, 1995, pages 1862 to 1868;
(A4) Chen G. et al., Int. J. Immunopharmacol., Vol.18, 1996, pages 251 to 258.
XVIII. Arguments of the Parties: General
(1) In the paragraphs XIX to XXXV below, the arguments of the various parties who took part in the appeal proceedings are summarised. In the case of those who both filed written submissions and attended the oral proceedings (appellants 2 to 6 and the respondent), the summary reflects both their written and oral submissions. In the case of appellant 1, which did not attend the oral proceedings, the summary is of the arguments in its statement of grounds of appeal and the written submissions filed by fax on 2 July 2004. In the case of opponent 3 (a party as of right) which took no part in the written proceedings but attended the oral proceedings, the summary is of arguments presented at the oral proceedings. Save where otherwise indicated, all of a party's arguments applied to all the respondent's main and auxiliary requests. Appellants 3 to 6 were jointly represented and filed virtually identical grounds of appeal. However, although still jointly represented at the oral proceedings, appellants 3, 5. and 6 then made both joint and separate submissions. Accordingly, the arguments of these appellants are in part summarised together and in part set out separately.
(2) Appellants 1 and 2 limited their submissions to Article 53(a) EPC. No objections were raised by any appellants under Article 123(2)(3) EPC. Appellants 3 to 6 referred in their statements of grounds of appeal, by reference back to arguments filed with their grounds of opposition, to all the other Articles mentioned in paragraphs XX to XXIII below. Articles 53(a), 53(b), 56 and 83 EPC were also the subject of argument at the oral proceedings before the Board, but no comments were made in respect of the other Articles. The respondent made no submissions with regard to Articles 123(2)(3) EPC and Article 54 EPC.
XIX. Arguments of the Parties: Admissibility of Oppositions
(1) As regards the admissibility of the oppositions, the respondent disagreed with the Board's view in its communication of 24 November 2003 (see paragraph XI(1) above) and argued that, if an opposition were to be found inadmissible (which was still possible in appeal proceedings), the opponent in question could be neither appellant nor party as of right. The respondent then quoted from headnote III of Decision G 3/99 (OJ EPO 2002, 347) the words "...it has to be clear throughout the procedure who belongs to the group of common opponents or common appellants" and submitted that the oppositions of appellants 2 to 6 did not fulfil that condition.
(2) In particular, the respondent argued that appellant 2 (opponent 2) originally included an organisation not shown to be a legal person; that it was unclear whether appellant 3 (opponent 8) was a legal person or not - the respondent had seen no documentation establishing its status; that appellant 4 (opponent 12) was an organisation described by its representative as "formed or supported by" a large number of listed organisations of uncertain legal status; that appellant 5 (opponent 13) was three named natural persons said to be supported by a "co-ordination" made up of another long list of entities - at the least this contrasted with the position of appellant 4; and that, as regards appellant 6 (opponent 15), it had again not been established that its two member organisations were legal persons, the situation being further confused by the long list of entities said to "belong" to those two organisations, and the respondent put the issue to proof.
(3) As regards non-appealing opponents, the respondent referred to the letter of 12 May 1995 from the representative of opponent 4 and submitted this amounted to a withdrawal of the opposition. The Opposition Division had held it did not, but the letter of 14 February 1995 from Mr Büchner, one of the persons comprising opponent 4, to the opponent's representative suggested otherwise. Opponent 6 was simply a long list of over 1,200 persons and it was inconceivable that, in the eleven and a half years since the opposition was filed, each and every one of those persons remained alive and retained both an interest in and a willingness to take part in the proceedings.
(4) None of the other parties made any submissions on the issues of admissibility. However, appellants 3 to 6 each commented in their grounds of appeal, under the heading "Admissibility", that they welcomed the rejection (presumably by the Opposition Division) of the respondent's "attempts to exclude the participation of the public in the present proceedings", which had been made not just because of the present case but because of the precedent it could set for the business behind the patentee and for other businesses active in the field of gene technology. The respondent denied it had made any such attempts.
XX. Arguments of the Parties: Article 52 EPC (Invention)
(1) Appellants 3 to 6 argued in their grounds of appeal that, whereas an invention was made in a technical context by reference to a technical problem and its technical solution, an animal and its natural progeny or offspring could not be defined as a technical solution to any technical problem. Even if the introduction of a foreign gene into the genome of an animal could be seen as a technical method and thus as an invention, this was not the case for the resulting animals.
(2) The respondent referred to the established jurisprudence of the Boards of Appeal, wherein critical intervention steps of a technical nature in an otherwise biological process were acknowledged to change the overall nature of that process so that it was no longer regarded as essentially biological. The claimed transgenic rodents and their natural progeny could not be provided without the intervention of the hand of man in a technical manner to provide for the chromosomal incorporation in somatic and germ cells of oncogenic sequences.
XXI. Arguments of the Parties: Article 56 EPC (Inventive Step)
(1) Appellants 3 to 6 stated that, from a statistical point of view, it would have been unexpected - using a known method for introducing a known oncogene into the mouse genome - not to find at least a few animals with the oncogene integrated into their genomes. Similarly, the presence of only healthy transgenic animals would also have been surprising. Indeed, the skilled person would expect that, under certain conditions, the introduction of an oncogene into an embryo would result in its integration into the genome of at least some animals, especially if the method was repeated thousands of times with different genes and animals. The teachings of the opposed patent were based on a known method with a very low success rate - less than 1% of animals surviving - and which only produced expected results. No inventive merit could be seen therein.
(2) The respondent referred to the declaration of Dr Philip Leder filed during the examination proceedings under cover of a letter dated 22. December 1988 (not document (82), a later declaration of Dr Leder). In particular, it was outlined that at the priority date the available bacterial test systems for studying suspected carcinogens were inappropriate. Similarly, studies with laboratory animals were expensive, requiring long monitoring time and administration of large doses of suspected carcinogens. Furthermore, continuous cell lines were not available for many tissues and studies on cell lines could not be compared to studies using a complete organism with all possible metabolic interrelations. At the priority date of the opposed patent, experimentation in mice was not so advanced that, given the possible reactions of the animal immune system to a human protein, physiological incompatibility, etc, it could be foreseen whether the introduction of an activated oncogene into the genome of an embryo would result in the animal's death, in the absence of expression of that oncogene, or in any effect at all. The claimed method was not obvious to try and, even if it had been obvious, then there would have been no reasonable expectation of success.
XXII. Arguments of the Parties: Article 57 EPC (Industrial application)
(1) The appellants submitted no arguments under Articles 54 and 57 EPC in their grounds of appeal. However, in the context of Article 83 EPC, it was stated that whereas an oncomouse could be a suitable system for studying cancer, this was not the case for other rodents, such as beavers, squirrels, etc. which were not known as animal models for studying any human diseases. Thus, no industrial application could be seen for such rodents.
(2) The respondent argued that industrial application as a test had to be pitched very broadly, certainly broad enough to encompass industry devoted to medical treatments and the furtherance of such treatments.
XXIII. Arguments of the Parties: Article 83 EPC (Sufficiency of Disclosure)
(1) Appellants 3 to 6 asserted that, on the basis of the only examples in the patent which all related to mice, it was unacceptable to grant protection for an animal group (rodents) that included more than 2000 species. In the light of the low success rate achieved in mice, it was not credible that the same result could be obtained for each and every species of rodent including for example squirrels and beavers. Whereas on the one hand the patentee argued that the opposed patent made an inventive contribution since, in the light of the technical difficulties referred to in the prior art, the production of transgenic mice was surprising, on the other hand it was said that no technical problems were to be expected when carrying out the teachings of the invention in other rodents. A gene had multiple functions depending a number of factors such as the animal in which it was expressed and its age and living conditions. The exemplified oncogene (myc) was a regulation gene, which only induced cancer under certain conditions. It could not be expected that the same gene would have the same effect in different rodents and that all onco-rodents would be useful models for studying human diseases. Indeed, whereas rats were used as a model for diseases of blood circulation, mice were not appropriate models for those diseases. Rodents were not a uniform group. At the oral proceedings before the Board, opponent 3 stated that in the opposed patent the only examples related to the production of transgenic mice and that there was no indication how to produce other rodents and to achieve the claimed effect in those rodents.
(2) The respondent argued that rodents were a reasonable extrapolation from the specific work described in the opposed patent and encompassed most laboratory animals in use over the years. The claimed rodents were a model for studying cancer, which was known to occur in both rats and mice - contrary to blood circulation diseases. As a group of animals, rodents showed no important differences in their metabolic and immunologic systems. The oncogene used (myc) was involved in the regulation (interference) of cell division and this function was essentially the same in all rodents. A patent might be objected to for lack of sufficient disclosure only if there were serious doubts, substantiated by verifiable facts (T 19/90, OJ EPO 1990, 476, Reasons, paragraph 3.3). Indeed, there was no evidence on file to contradict the teachings of the opposed patent and to show that the invention could not be performed in rodents other than the exemplified mice.
Arguments of the Parties: Article 53(a) EPC ("ordre public" and morality)
XXIV. Appellant 1
(1) Appellant 1, after noting the test propounded in T 19/90 and the comment in that case on Article 53(a) EPC (OJ EPO 1990, 476, Reasons, paragraph 5), argued that the Board in T 19/90 had accepted that the present invention fell within the scope of the Article. Once so accepted, it was irrelevant whether the exclusion was interpreted narrowly or broadly and the Opposition Division must simply establish the European public's moral approach to the invention. The Opposition Division apparently approved the definition of "morality" in T 356/93 (OJ EPO 1995, 545, Reasons, paragraph 6) and its task was therefore to ascertain what were the beliefs as to right and wrong behaviour and the accepted norms of European culture in relation to the invention.
(2) Animal patents aroused public unease such as that in the United States noted in T 19/90 (OJ EPO 1990, 476, Facts, paragraph II) and also reflected by the refusal to grant the invention a patent in Canada (Harvard College v Canada (Commissioner of Patents) 2002 SCC 76). The EU Treaty of Amsterdam and the proposed European Constitution recognised animals are sentient beings. Therefore the EPO must scrutinise animal biotechnological inventions more than others under Article 53(a) EPC, the more so since patentees might make broader claims than their research justified in order to overcome problems posed by Article 53(b) EPC.
(3) As with other patentability tests, morality was to be viewed as at the filing or priority date. (Hereafter in this decision those two dates as alternatives are referred to for convenience as "the effective date".) However, since the European public knew little or nothing of the invention at the effective date, it had neither opportunity nor reason to form a moral view then. The Opposition Division began by considering whether animal experiments were permitted in EPC Contracting States. This was too general - some might accept such experiments but oppose genetic manipulation of animals, or oppose manipulation which caused pain to animals. The public was sophisticated in its approach to moral issues. For these reasons laws, which lag behind scientific invention, were a poor guide to morality and there must be an element of hindsight in the assessment of morality. The correct test was: in the light of what was now known about the public's moral approach to the invention, what could be deduced about what its approach would have been at the effective date, had it been in possession of the relevant facts?
(4) Article 53(a) EPC was concerned with the morality of patenting as well as of exploiting the invention. In its faxed submissions of 2 July 2004, appellant 1 argued that the application of Article 53(a) EPC in the present case was not, as the patentee asserted, a matter of ascertaining the public view at the effective date of the morality of animal experiments but of the morality of this particular invention. Similarly, arguments relating to animal testing of drugs and activities such as bullfighting were irrelevant.
(5) The Opposition Division suggested a two-stage approach to Article 53(a) EPC, first to consider what was right or wrong in European society and then to apply a cost-benefit test. Appellant 1 agreed a two-stage approach was needed but the first step should be to make a Rule 23d(d) EPC assessment and then consider more general matters if necessary. A two-stage approach did not, as the respondent argued, represent "double jeopardy" - it was two stages of one test, not two tests.
(6) As regards Rule 23d(d) EPC, the Opposition Division was right to apply the Rule but did so incorrectly. After accepting, as had been common ground throughout, that the invention caused suffering to animals, it failed to balance that suffering against the alleged benefit but simply asserted that, because there was (as it found) a substantial medical benefit, there was no objection under Article 53(a) EPC. This approach was flawed for several reasons:
(a) Rule 23d(d) EPC provided an absolute bar to a patent if animal suffering was established and there was no medical benefit. If there was a benefit, it must then be considered whether morality dictated against a patent. Rule 23d(d) EPC could be decisive against an applicant but not against an opponent.
(b) The Opposition Division took no account of the degree of suffering involved. It did not in fact make a cost-benefit analysis but simply used suffering as a trigger to consider whether there was substantial medical benefit. Appellant 1 and other opponents had produced extensive evidence, not seriously disputed, that the technique of the invention caused substantial suffering. Moral acceptability by the public would be influenced by the level of suffering so to omit consideration of it made a nonsense of Article 53(a) EPC.
(c) The Opposition Division's approach made the question of the availability of non-animal alternatives irrelevant but this was also a factor in public acceptability (cf. EC Directive 86/609, Articles 7.2 and 7.3). which provided, respectively, that an animal experiment must not be carried out if there was an adequate non-animal replacement and, where the use of an animal was scientifically justified, the suffering must be kept to the minimum). Appellant 1 had also provided evidence that cell lines would be equally suited to study cellular metabolism (e.g. documents (47) to (49)).
(d) Whether substantial medical benefit existed should be assessed objectively but the Opposition Division allowed a subjective test - whether at the effective date the inventor had bona fide reasons to believe his invention would lead to such a benefit. An inventor was only likely to assert his invention had a value. In fact in the present case after nearly two decades the benefits had been only modest.
(e) Although the test had to be made as at the effective date, it would be artificial to exclude evidence which became available between then and the date of decision. The respondent's own arguments supported this.
(7) Since no substantial medical benefit could have been foreseen at the effective date, that should have lead to revocation. However, even if the appellant was wrong in that respect, it was not, as the Opposition Division thought, the end of the matter. It should have proceeded to consider whether other considerations of morality or "ordre public" dictated against a patent. It should have completed the cost-benefit assessment and considered alternative techniques but it did neither.
(8) The Opposition Division should also have considered all available evidence about the European public's view of the morality of the invention, something which it attempted but, again, its approach was flawed for several reasons. It considered laws and regulations and not other evidence such as opinion polls. Although legislation was an important indicator of public morality, it was not the only indicator (cf. T 356/93 OJ EPO 1995, 545, Reasons, paragraph 7). The Opposition Division did not identify any legislation dealing with exploitation of genetically modified animals. The EC Directive 86/609 neither prohibited nor allowed any particular animal experiments. In for example the United Kingdom, a licensing system required researchers to obtain permission to use animals for a particular purpose and a number of tests must be satisfied. There was no blanket authority to engage in genetic manipulation such as that of the patent. The EC Directive 98/44 addressed the patenting of biotechnological animal inventions by excluding patentability in certain circumstances, specifically leaving this to considerations of morality on a case-by-case basis. European legislation was therefore a poor guide to morality and the Opposition Division admitted that, apart from the EC Directive 86/609, it did not know what legislation there was. As for other evidence, opinion polls however imprecise were used in the formulation of legislative policy by the EU so must be legitimate tools in assessing public morality.
(9) Two such polls were referred to by appellant 1. In 1998 a poll it commissioned in the United Kingdom found 82% of those questioned were opposed to animal patenting and therefore must have been opposed to the present invention. An EU poll on biotechnology in 1996 of 16,000 persons across Europe included the question "Do you think it is morally acceptable for society to develop genetically modified animals for laboratory research studies, such as a mouse that has genes which cause it to develop cancer?". 47.8% thought it unacceptable, 41.2% thought it acceptable. (Despite the Board's direction to file copies, no further details of these polls were supplied.)
XXV. Appellant 2
(1) Appellant 2 argued that, just because the four members of the Opposition Division were of the opinion that the medical advantages outweighed the suffering to animals, it was not established that the use of the invention was not contrary to morality. The Opposition Division had not shown why its own opinions were representative. There was nothing in Article 53(a) EPC to suggest it was limited to major infringements of morality or "ordre public".
(2) The EPO had tried to prevent the implementation of Article 53(a) EPC in a number of ways. First, by a too narrow interpretation. The same expression (in German "die guten Sitten") appeared in many German national laws and the correct approach to its interpretation was that found in German jurisprudence; the appellant quoted from two decisions of the "Bundesverwaltungsgericht" (Federal Administrative Court) and also cited seven decisions of the "Bundesverfassungsgericht" (Federal Constitutional Court). (Despite the Board's direction to file copies, no further details of these decisions were supplied.)
(3) Second, the expression had been given the wrong definition in T 356/93 (OJ EPO 1995, 545, Reasons, paragraph 6): "The concept of morality is related to the belief that some behaviour is right and acceptable whereas other behaviour is wrong, this belief being founded on the totality of the accepted norms which are deeply rooted in a particular culture". This definition suggested a dangerous path. At the 1995 oral proceedings the patentee's representative referred to activities which were accepted as part of a "non-culture" such as bullfighting and hunting and perhaps this was meant to suggest that a "cancer mouse" was not so bad.
(4) The simple question which had to be answered was: was there an infringement of morality or not? In this context "morality" meant the dominant moral feeling of society at large. This could not be ascertained within a bureaucracy, nor could the members of the Board adopt their own views. Equally one could not ask the whole population of Europe for their views.
(5) There were a number of indications that the majority view precluded patenting the production of "cancer animals" under Article 53(a) EPC, including the multi-national opposition in the present case. One also had to consider opinion polls which were used by the European Union. The Boards of Appeal had said opinion polls did not necessarily represent what was deeply rooted in European culture. However, whether something was deeply rooted had nothing to do with culture. Something deeply rooted could be a "non-culture" such as slavery, torture or some medical experiments.
(6) Opinion polls about animal experiments generally and genetic manipulation of animals in particular showed that a majority considered the development of "cancer animals", for the sole purpose of giving them cancer, was contrary to morality. This further suggested that a majority considered the suffering of such animals to outweigh the marginal benefits to cancer research. For example, a poll in Germany in 1993 in which 70% of 500 persons questioned considered the patenting of genetically manipulated animals for cancer research was morally reprehensible. Reference was also made to polls and resolutions of national parliaments mentioned by other opponents.
(7) The volume of animal testing and the number of transgenic animals was increasing. Patenting such animals was an incentive to produce them and to cause animal suffering. It was contrary to the views of citizens generally. Animal protection was enshrined in the German and Swiss constitutions and included in the new European constitution.
(8) The claimed "cancer animals" were not free from associated risks for mankind and the environment, such as possible epidemics, contagion, or the accidental release of modified animals into natural ecosystems.
XXVI. Appellants 3 to 6 (Joint Arguments)
(1) Appellants 3 to 6 made clear that, in their view, the main issue in the present case was not the actual subject-matter of the patent in suit but the patenting of animals in general. This case would set a precedent; patenting of animals per se should be excluded. The patenting of animals was part of the systematic destruction of social values and the patent in suit took that process one step further. Patenting of animals threatened natural animals, denaturised mankind and was contrary to evolution. This case was therefore seen by the general public as a chance to deal with the problem of declining standards in general and patenting of animals in particular.
(2) These appellants considered the implementation of Rules 23b to 23e EPC to be unacceptable. In complete agreement with the Examining Division which originally dealt with this case, these appellants were of the view that, before the introduction of those Rules, the EPC excluded the patenting of animals. Who wanted and who did not want the patenting of animals? It was only wanted by those interest groups for whom it had economic advantages - the international genetic engineering industry, patent attorneys and the EPO. Against a background of widespread revulsion at the patenting of animals and the extraordinarily high number of oppositions in this case, the introduction of Rules 23b to 23e EPC was not a mere clarification of a text but a fundamental amendment or addition with retrospective and prospective effect on the patenting of animals. Such changes should be made in the Convention itself not the Implementing Regulations. The EPC should be applied in this case as at the date of the patent application or, at the latest, the date of filing of the oppositions.
(3) As regards possible alternatives to the invention, appellants 3 to 6 said the oncomouse could not be compared with cancer in a human being. There was a range of non-animal models available for cancer research and cancer testing, for example cell cultures.
XXVII. Appellant 3
(1) Appellant 3 argued that the EPO was expressly required by Article 53(a) EPC to consider the ethical issue of patenting living animals. The appellant was convinced that the oncomouse was contrary to morality and "ordre public". The Opposition Division based its decision on a concept of morality "related to the belief that some behaviour is right whereas other behaviour is wrong, this belief being founded on the totality of the accepted norms which are deeply rooted in a particular culture which, in the case of the EPC, is the culture inherent in European society and civilisation" (see paragraph 9.2 of the decision under appeal). It was deeply rooted in European culture that a difference existed between animals and inanimate material and the removal of this distinction could lead to great barbarity. To treat a genetically manipulated mouse like a piece of technical equipment offended mankind's basic morality and could lead to a distortion of sensitivity in the earthly life of man. This was the reason for the Catholic Church's "Misereor" campaign of 2002-3 which, under the slogan "No patents on life", demanded that patents be ruled out for seeds, plants and animals and parts or genes thereof. The Evangelical Church had taken similar steps.
(2) Both the wording and the spirit of Article 53(a) EPC meant that patenting a genetically manipulated mouse was contrary to "ordre public" and morality. The Implementing Regulations had been changed to make this case different. Whether Article 53(a) EPC should be interpreted differently for living beings was a matter which should be referred to the Enlarged Board of Appeal. There should be different rules for animals than those for bottles and air pumps. The acts of the EPO in this case departed from the European Judaeo-Christian tradition and the humanism of the Enlightenment and could lead to the barbarisation of society.
XXVIII. Appellant 5
(1) Appellant 5 argued that it was the wrong approach to consider a balance between animal suffering and medical use because no such balance was possible. Animals were sentient beings. They could not be equated with humans but lay between humans and things. It was typical of European culture that animals could be owned and used but patents on living matter were not so typical. One could not say he/she had invented animals. The Opposition Division decision did not reflect this distinction. This case was not about the medical use of mice but about the patenting of animals. Patents encouraged trade in animals and downgraded them to the status of things. It was accepted that patents on animals led to greater production of such animals. The German constitution and the new EU constitution both enshrined animal protection. The Board should acknowledge that animal protection had gained increasing acceptance in recent years. Many bodies, including a committee of the Bundestag (the lower house of the German parliament), the Council of Europe and the principal churches, had expressed views contrary to the patenting of animals.
(2) Although against a balancing test, appellant 5 had two points to make regarding Rule 23d(d) EPC. First, as regards the time at which the balancing test must be made, it could not be when the application was filed. This would mean that under Rule 23d(d) EPC, only a theoretical assessment of substantial medical benefit would be possible whereas it was the actual medical use which ought to be taken into account. Thus, the balancing test should be made in the present case as of 2003.
(3) Second, as regards the actual medical use, the patent presently covered rodents and there were some 2,000 types of rodents. The Opposition Division had not considered each to see if a medical benefit existed - was there a medical benefit to be had from a genetically manipulated squirrel? It was necessary to go step by step through all rodents and see if inclusion of every one in the patent was justified.
(4) In its 1991 Annual Report, the EPO said of this case:
"The granting of patents no longer depends on purely technical considerations: from now on, applications will have to bear scrutiny in respect of their wider social implications".
This had not been fully considered in this case.
XXIX. Appellant 6
Appellant 6 argued that patenting was a feature of capitalism, an economic and social system which was organised in the sole interest of the owners of capital. This system had no moral basis and only had one principle - the maximisation of profit. What was allowed was what was profitable. Patents for genetic manipulation, while they undermined nature, supplied profits to their owners. While such patents were ecologically unthinkable, they were economically beneficial only to a few. The patent in suit, which caused animal suffering, must be revoked.
XXX. Opponent 3 (Party as of Right)
(1) Opponent 3 argued that if Rule 23d(d) EPC applied in the present case, two questions must be considered. First, the Rule must be looked at in the light of the text of Article 53(a) EPC and particularly the proviso that exploitation was not deemed contrary to morality just because it was prohibited in one or more Contracting States. The words "in particular" in Rule 23d EPC must also be noted. If Rule 23d(d) EPC applied, then if there was suffering on the part of the patented animals and there was a medical benefit, did this lead automatically to the patentability of animals? The proviso in Article 53(a) EPC referring to "prohibited by...regulation" suggested that, when more than half the population of a democratic state were in favour of prohibiting it, there was no support in that state for patenting of animals. What happened then to "ordre public" or morality? Suppose that position applied in several Contracting States? Was some doubt sufficient?
(2) Second, did the fact that Rule 23d EPC said one could not go beyond the line (i.e. not have a patent when there was insufficient benefit) mean one could patent all the way up to the line (i.e. have a patent whenever there was a benefit)? These were fundamental questions which, if Rule 23d EPC applied, must be answered and, given the importance for other cases, they must be referred to the Enlarged Board of Appeal.
(3) Whereas the English text of Rule 23d(d) EPC used the word "likely", the German text used the word "geeignet" ("suitable"). Thus the test might not be whether processes for modifying the genetic identity of animals were likely to cause them suffering without medical benefit but whether such processes were suitable for causing suffering without medical benefit.
(4) The question of whether an alternative to the invention was available should be assessed at the date of the decision in these proceedings since there were forms of diagnosis available today which would avoid the need for the oncomouse.
(5) The date of assessment was also important as regards animal suffering and the extent of such suffering - was it enough if only one animal suffered or must all the animals falling within the claim suffer?
(1) The Board must operate within a certain pre-set legal framework which resulted from the democratic process. Unfamiliar as the opponents might find that framework, the Board could not accede to arguments which would require it to go outside that framework. The appellants were using the proceedings as a vehicle for a general objection to the patenting of life forms. They wanted to change the law - it was not appropriate to use one case to secure a basic change in the law. The correct way to change the law was the democratic legislative system. The patent system should not be used to achieve something not so far achieved through democracy.
(2) Article 52(1) EPC, which says "European patents shall be granted...", carried a presumption of grant and therefore a reason for not granting a patent must be established. Exclusions, such as in Article 53(a) EPC, must be interpreted narrowly and objectively. No one set of beliefs must dominate a balanced and reasonable finding. The existing case law gave balanced guidance. As with other patentability criteria, assessment should, in the interest of legal certainty, be made as of the effective date (in the present case, the European priority date), and not subject to review over time. Evidence not focused on the effective date was irrelevant. The appellants' evidence encompassed legitimately held beliefs but gave no evidence of current attitudes to animal testing at the effective date. In the absence of relevant evidence, the Board must have regard to the principles of legal fairness and not decide on mere surmise or the expression of beliefs.
(3) T 19/90 (OJ EPO 1990, 476, Reasons, paragraph 5) provided the only test for judgments under Article 53(a) EPC and, if the Board should differ from T 19/90, a reference to the Enlarged Board was necessary. T 19/90 was decided with full knowledge of the travaux préparatoires and was the only authoritative pronouncement on Article 53(a) EPC prior to the introduction of Rule 23d(d) EPC. If the new Rules were more restrictive than T 19/90, either a referral to the Enlarged Board was necessary or the new Rules may, to the extent they were more restrictive, be ultra vires. Otherwise the exclusion in Article 53(a) EPC would have been broadened contrary to the principle of narrow construction of exclusions, and inventions which might have satisfied the test in T 19/90 might now fail the test in Rule 23d(d) EPC. The application of Rules 23b to 23d EPC to Article 53(a) EPC was considered in T 272/95 (of 23. October 2002, unpublished in OJ EPO, Reasons, paragraphs 4 and 5) but in that case the Board merely adopted the approach of the Enlarged Board in G 1/98 (OJ EPO 2000, 111) to the application of the new Rules to Article 53(b) EPC, namely that those Rules were only interpretative. There was thus no authoritative statement that Rule 23d(d) EPC was consistent with Article 53(a) EPC.
(4) The respondent agreed with appellants 3 to 6 that the introduction of the new Rules into the proceedings after a six year delay from the first oral proceedings in 1995 was wrong and the EPO did not behave properly in that respect. The case was ostensibly to be continued in writing after the first oral proceedings in 1995 but in effect there was no such written phase. The delay was truly immense and was a cause for complaint. Circumstances had changed in the time since 1995, so it was wrong that Rule 23d EPC should apply retrospectively.
(5) The respondent considered Rule 23d EPC should not apply in the present case subject to a caveat. The caveat was that, if application of Rule 23d EPC did no more than explain Article 53(a) EPC, it seemed reasonable that the Administrative Council should explain how they wanted things done. Whether the Rule was simply interpretation or not was not easy to decide. In reality, it was an exclusion from patentability which went to the very nature of the subject-matter to which Article 53(a) EPC applied. "Substantial medical benefit" defined an area of requirement for patentability which could not have been predicted from previous interpretation of Article 53(a) EPC. The expression "likely to cause suffering" itself required interpretation; if Rule 23d EPC not only overlapped with T 19/90 but also went further, it was ultra vires.
(6) Following a question from the Board during oral proceedings, the respondent agreed that its use of the term ultra vires was imprecise. The respondent's argument was that, if Rule 23d EPC led to a different interpretation of Article 53(a) EPC than that given in T 19/90 and the Board proposed to depart from the T 19/90 interpretation, a referral must be made to the Enlarged Board of Appeal.
(7) The appellants' evidence ignored scientific attitudes and motives at the effective date, when in fact the invention was seen as a useful tool in the fight against cancer. Animal experiments for disease research and drug testing purposes had been performed and required for many years and using more categories of and more advanced animals than just rodents. The invention, by providing animals which could be used for more "sensitive" tests, could be seen as reducing both the extent and duration of animal experimentation.
(8) It could not be necessary for the respondent to produce evidence of actual medical benefit let alone substantial medical benefit at the effective date since this would require the invention to be reduced to practice and shown to have utility by that date. Reduction to practice at the filing date was not an absolute requirement, it was enough that there should be a perception or expectation of a benefit at that date. Rule 23d(d) EPC said "likely to cause suffering without substantial medical benefit"; the word "likely" indicated that it was a matter of perception and not actuality. What was required was the perception of the skilled person at the filing date of the likely suffering of animals compared with the advantages seen by the skilled person at the same date. If the test applied under Rule 23d(d) EPC were to include assessment of facts not known at the filing date, this would create an impossible situation for patentees who would have to test every possible cancer compound, in other words engage in a gross reduction to practice. If that was required, then there must be a referral to the Enlarged Board of Appeal.
(9) The respondent did not deny that it was at the filing date predictable that some animals would get cancer and would suffer. But it was also predictable that some animals would be useful laboratory tools in future cancer research. The benefit was thus that cancer research could be done which could not have been done before. Evidence in support of this could be found in documents (82) and (83).
(10) The appellants' evidence ignored many widespread negative attitudes to animals in many Contracting States, such as the mass-organised killing of animals for food, hunting and bullfighting for entertainment, and the economic and social factors associated with such activities. The present invention must be judged against all such real cultural attitudes and not just a "wish list" of some. Many experiments were made in the 1980s to find cancer cures and mice were often used. This was and still is the case - acceptable experimentation is part of the culture. It was plain from the specification as filed that the claimed subject-matter had the highest of motives in relation to human care and protection of humans from cancer. To want to cure cancer was thoroughly moral.
(11) Despite having had many years in which to do so, none of the appellants, on whom the onus lies, had produced any evidence of moral attitudes at the effective date which were detrimental to the invention. The respondent accepted that specific evidence at that date about the oncomouse was not possible, but there was not even any evidence as to the general attitude to animals and the use of animals in inter alia tests and experimental research for the treatment and cure of cancer in humans.
(12) The invention satisfied Article 53(a) EPC as regards publication because as a matter of fact publication did not result in a breach of "ordre public". It also met the requirement of exploitation since this was regulated by national laws and EU regulation in Contracting States. If only legitimate exploitation governed by democratically delegated authority could occur, that exploitation was consistent with accepted standards of European culture. It was also consistent with the Article 53(a) EPC proviso. The Board was not concerned with illegal or immoral exploitation of an invention regardless of its nature. A new form of chisel should not be refused a patent because it might be used for killing or housebreaking; both those activities would be contrary to "ordre public" and morality but were regulated by other areas of the law. A patentee should not be required to limit his use to the purely legal. The oncomouse was directed to a particular area of research and still was.
(13) The claims of the main request covering rodents represented a narrow and appropriate extrapolation from mice which had historically been most commonly employed in animal testing for bona fide medical purposes. The auxiliary requests were limited to mouse subject matter which involved no such extrapolation. The requests with claims limited to uses made no attempt to protect a product per se so the only exploitation to consider under Article 53(a) EPC was such uses as were permitted by law in the Contracting States. Such uses must by definition be consistent with European culture.
(14) The case law of the Boards of Appeal showed clear acceptance of the principle that patents may be granted for inventions concerning animals or plants (see T 356/93, OJ EPO 1995, 545, Reasons, paragraph 10; T 19/90, OJ EPO 1990, 476, Reasons, paragraph 4.6). The appellants' argument that animal subject matter was non-technical and non-patentable was therefore incorrect. In this respect the Board must either follow the case law or refer an appropriate question to the Enlarged Board of Appeal.
(15) The respondent referred to the travaux préparatoires (document IV/2071/61 of March 1961 on a "First working draft of a Convention on a European Patent"). Regarding Article 12 of that draft, the forerunner of Article 53(a) EPC, the document said:
"(b) Even if protection of new plant varieties and processes for producing new plants are excluded under European patent law, European patents will still have to be granted for processes which, whilst being applicable to plants, are of a technical nature, for example processes for producing new plants by irradiation of the plants themselves or the seeds with isotopes. It remains to be examined whether that possibility of patent protection must be expressly incorporated in European law or whether it is obvious from general principles.
(c) The comments in (b) also apply mutatis mutandis to the patentability of new animal species."
Thus it appeared the legislators considered that the possibility of irradiating animals to obtain new species was something technical which they could not necessarily exclude.
(16) The respondent answered specific arguments of appellant 1 as follows.
- Appellant 1's argument - that it was accepted in T 19/90 that the present invention fell within the scope of Article 53(a) EPC and, once so accepted, the breadth or narrowness of that Article became irrelevant - took the relevant passage in paragraph 5 of T 19/90 out of context. In this passage, the Board had indeed over-ruled the Examining Division by saying that Article 53(a) EPC had to be considered in cases such as this and provided a balancing-act test for doing so. Yet, it had also provided a further reminder that the narrowness of exceptions to patentability was a repeated finding by the Boards of Appeal which flowed from the permissive rule established by Article 52(1) EPC.
- While the respondent agreed that the test must be applied as of the effective date, appellant 1's suggestion that subsequently produced evidence could be considered would mark a departure from normal practice with other patentability tests and should not be allowed in order to be consistent with those other tests and because attitudes to morality changed with time. To allow that evidence of later experience could be used to inform an assessment at the effective date would be to allow the use of hindsight. The test must be a "looking backwards" not a "looking forwards" test.
- Appellant 1 had asserted the public was sophisticated in its approach to moral issues but, in fact, care had to be exercised in relying on media views since the media could create controversy to gain circulation. Any judgment as to moral standards must be made with an understanding of the technology. The respondent accepted there may be unease over animal patent inventions and it was true that the corresponding Canadian case was decided for different reasons, but neither of these matters could be even persuasive in the present case.
- Appellant 1's proposed application of the test in Rule 23d EPC was not correct; whereas it was accepted that the categories listed in Rule 23d(a) to (d) EPC were excluded, other categories not expressly mentioned in Rule 23d EPC could not also be excluded under Article 53(a) EPC.
(17) With regard to appellant 2's arguments, the respondent answered as follows:
- The views of German courts were only of one Contracting State and could only be even persuasive if the circumstances were equivalent - there was an absence of evidence in this respect.
- As to the criticism that the Opposition Division failed to show their view was representative, there was no such burden on the first instance. Opposition Divisions, and the Boards of Appeal, must work within established procedures which depended upon evidence being supplied by parties. This was also the answer to appellant 2's claim that the EPO had tried to inhibit democracy by a narrow interpretation of Article 53(a) EPC, by introducing a test when the question was simply "is it moral or not?". A narrow interpretation was always intended (cf. the travaux préparatoires). The Boards of Appeal had to work within a given framework and could not "make it up as they went along"; they had thus produced an essentially narrow interpretation (e.g. T 19/90, OJ EPO 1990, 476; T 356/93, OJ EPO 1995, 545) about which appellant 2 complained.
- The Opposition Division had also been criticised by appellant 2 for not establishing that the majority of citizens of Contracting States considered the invention immoral. However, the Opposition Division could only have done that if evidence to that effect had been provided by the opponents. Appellant 2 alleged that the simple question "is it moral or not?" was answered by finding the dominant popular opinion and that this was done by opinion polls. The opinion polls referred to by appellant 2 suffered from the same disadvantages as those discussed in T 356/93. The problem with opinion polls was that they could not take account of enough knowledge - in this case, of genetic engineering, ethics and patent law - to be sure the answers were meaningful. Appellant 2 also argued that, in the case of new technology, it was not enough to establish what was deeply-rooted in European culture; to this the respondent observed that, if that was the case, it was still relevant to establish what the moral attitudes were to related issues such as animals in general and the use of animals in testing.
- Appellant 2 had argued animal testing was increasing and animal protection was enshrined in the new European constitution. However, national governments still permitted animal testing. That was one of the tasks governments were assigned in a democracy.
(18) As regards appellant 3's arguments, a decision as to what was right and normal should not be based on one set of religious beliefs. It was not the current European way to allow one religion to dictate. As to appellant 3's distinction between living material and other inventions and the argument that patenting living material could lead to barbarity, there was very little evidence that patenting of life forms had contributed to barbarity. Article 53(a) EPC was not about the morality of patenting.
(19) As regards appellant 5's arguments, the Respondent replied as follows:
- The answer to the argument that suffering could not be balanced by benefit to mankind, as reflected in T 19/90, because it took no account of the fact animals were sentient and life could not be invented, was simply that the Boards had upheld life-form patents and there was nothing in the established case-law to suggest any limit beyond what was in the EPC. An early example was T 320/87 (OJ EPO 1990, 71) concerning hybrid plants obtained by non-essentially biological breeding process. It was not the case that patents encouraged trade in animals - a patent discouraged the activities of others. Some activities resulted in situations which may be found unacceptable under Article 53(a) EPC. Thus, keeping, growing and distributing animals for food often had undesirable results such as mass commodity use and battery farming of animals. The respondent agreed with appellant 5 that the statements of ethical bodies must be taken into account, but it was for the Board to weigh such statements as evidence and not for the parties to demand that such statements governed this case.
- As regards Rule 23d(d) EPC, appellant 5 was incorrect to say this was about actual medical benefit - the Rule only referred to a likelihood of causing suffering without substantial medical benefit. As for such benefit in the present case, this was shown by the declarations of Pittman and Leder (documents (83) and (82) respectively). Some of the abstracts annexed to the Pittman declaration specifically talked about the advantages of the approach taken. This showed the scientific community at least worked with this invention for research purposes so, even on a retrospective test, there was some medical benefit.
(20) As regards the argument of appellant 5 and opponent 3 concerning the extension of the balancing act to all animals embraced by the claimed subject matter (for example, a genetically manipulated squirrel), rodents were accepted as laboratory animals for use in experimental research and they provided different model systems for studying cancer.
(21) As regards appellant 6's arguments largely based on the allegation that genetic engineering was dictated by a profit motive and the EPO needs to promote economic growth, the present invention was remarkably unprofitable. Everyone was aware that some extraordinarily profitable cases had come before the EPO. In this case, the issue for the scientists was: could they do something about cancer? The answer to appellant 6's statement that human beings lost their humanity by distorting nature was that it was simply human to fiddle with nature - to use a car or produce mass-produced food was to fiddle with nature. Comparing this invention with the practices of farmers and animals breeders showed that, apart from any profit motive, genetic engineering provided a quicker route to the desired end since it avoided the delays of traditional breeding.
(22) As regards the argument, made on behalf of all of appellants 3 to 6, that values were being systematically destroyed if animals could be patented, the issue whether animals in general may be patented was considered in T 19/90 and the Board came to the conclusion there was no general exclusion of the patentability of animals (OJ EPO 1990, 476, Reasons, paragraphs 4.4 to 4.8). If the present Board disagreed, it must refer the matter to the Enlarged Board of Appeal. The respondent agreed with these appellants that the first instance procedures were unsatisfactory. As for the alternatives to the invention mentioned by appellants 3 to 6 (cell cultures), they were dealt with in document (82) which showed these tests were of doubtful relevance. On the contrary, by using the present invention one could adjust the promoter in accordance with knowledge of the tissues to achieve varying effects between tissues. More importantly, the entire organism (including, for example, the immune system) was being considered.
(23) As regards opponent 3's argument that some doubt in the public mind was sufficient to prevent patenting, this was too vague and nebulous a test and would involve a task too political to be consistent with the role of the Board. Furthermore, if as argued by opponent 3, there were inconsistencies between the English and German texts of Rule 23d EPC, this may be another reason why that Rule was ultra vires. Finally, opponent 3's suggestion that alternatives to the invention be considered at the date of the decision was clearly wrong. Like it or not, the system was that, once granted, a patent lasted to the end of its term provided renewal fees were paid. Subsequent developments did not affect its validity.
Arguments of the parties: Article 53(b) EPC
XXXII. Appellants 3 to 6
(1) Appellants 3 to 6 referred back to the arguments in their grounds of opposition and emphasized the following arguments at the oral proceedings before the Board.
(2) Plant or animal species were not products as such but only abstract concepts. An animal species existed in a material sense when a number of animals had a specific common feature. The exclusion from patentability of plant or animal species as immaterial concepts would be absurd if the very animals themselves falling within these abstract concepts were not excluded from patentability. If the legislator had wanted the plants or animals of a new species - in contrast to "species" as such - to be patentable, it would have said so explicitly and with an appropriate form of words. The absence of such a form of words showed that plants or animals as material manifestations of abstract species were not patentable. Decision T 1054/96 (OJ EPO 1998, 511, paragraph 97 of the Reasons) referred to Article 4(2) of the EU Directive 98/44 as being satisfied by permitting process claims for these products.
(3) According to the decision G 1/98 (OJ EPO 2000, 111, Reasons, paragraph 3.3.3), a copying machine for use exclusively in forging banknotes was not patentable, whereas the same machine to be used for other purposes could be patentable. By analogy, the claims of the first auxiliary request, which were exclusively directed to mouse species, could not be allowed. If this argument should not be accepted by the Board, the question filed by appellants 3 to 6 should be referred to the Enlarged Board of Appeal.
(4) The claimed method for producing transgenic mice was a biological process in view of the many and essential steps required to produce these mice once the oncogene had been injected in a fertilized egg cell. This became even more evident for their natural progeny obtained only by essential biological processes.
XXXIII. Opponent 3 (Party as of Right)
At the oral proceedings before the Board, the party as of right referred to the fact that the claimed transgenic mouse inherited a specific technical characteristic and thus for that reason alone it represented a new animal species.
(1) Article 53(b) EPC intentionally made a distinction between animals and animal species and it did not exclude the patenting of animals as such. The decision of the Enlarged Board of Appeal G 1/98 (OJ EPO 2000, 111) allowed generic claims to plants even though such claims might embrace plant varieties as such - a "generic approach" as opposed to a "specific approach". Equal linguistic treatment was found in the EPC for plants and animals. Thus, there was no reason for taking anything other than a parallel view in relation to animals and therefore a generic approach had to be applied to the claimed transgenic mice. According to T 19/90 (OJ EPO 1990, 476, Reasons, paragraph 4.8), it should first be ascertained whether the claimed subject matter constituted one of the expressly stated categories in the three language versions of Article 53(b) EPC. If not, then this Article was no bar to patentability. The broadest of the terms used in Article 53(b) EPC in any of the three languages was "species" (Tierarten) in the German and the transgenic mice of the patent were at least two taxonomic orders above that. Thus, they represented a generically applicable invention patentable under Article 53(b) EPC.
(2) This interpretation was in agreement with Rule 23c(b) EPC, which stated that if an invention was not restricted to any particular species, i.e. it was a generic invention, then it was patentable. This Rule 23c(b) EPC applied to the opposed patent too.
(3) Paragraph 3.3.3 of decision G 1/98 (cited by appellants 3 to 6, see paragraph XXXII(3) above) concerned morality issues (Article 53(a) EPC) and not issues related to Article 53(b) EPC. For Article 53(b) EPC, the conclusions summarised in Headnote I of G 1/98 were the relevant ones.
(4) Chromosomal incorporation into mice of an oncogene did not without more create a species as such. One feature alone could not define a new race. The boundaries of a species were determined by other criteria, such as the ability of the animals to breed among themselves. A red rose was not a plant variety per se just because it was red, although red colour was an inheritable characteristic. There were in fact many specific varieties of red roses. The same was true of the oncogene in mice.
XXXV. Arguments of the parties: Costs
Appellants 3 to 6 and the respondent all repeated the requests they and appellant 1 made at first instance, namely that the European Patent Office be ordered to pay their costs of the oral proceedings of 6 to 7. November 2001 before the Opposition Division on the grounds that the costs of those second oral proceedings were unnecessarily incurred. They argued that the Opposition Division should have taken a decision after the first oral proceedings. Appellants 3. to 6 observed that the reason given by the Opposition Division for refusing the same request in its decision, namely that there was no basis in the EPC to make such an order, amounted to an assertion by the European Patent Office that it never made a mistake. The respondent observed that the delays in the first instance proceedings were exceptional (see paragraph XXXI(4) above). Appellant 1 also commented on the delays but did not renew its costs request.
XXXVI. All the appellants (in the case of appellants 1 and 2 in writing) requested that the decision under appeal be set aside and that the patent be revoked. Appellants 3 to 6 further requested that the following question be referred to the Enlarged Board of Appeal:
"With reference to G1/98: Is a claim allowable if it is directed exclusively to transgenic animal races?" (Translation made by the Board; the question as filed was in German and read "Unter Bezug auf G1/98: Ist ein Anspruch gewährbar, wenn er ausschliessend auf transgene Tierrassen gerichtet ist?").
Appellants 3 to 6 also requested that their costs of the oral proceedings of 6 to 7 November 2001 before the Opposition Division be paid by the European Patent Office.
XXXVII. The respondent requested that the decision under appeal be set aside and that the patent be maintained on the basis of its main request or alternatively one of its auxiliary requests 1 to 3 all filed during the oral proceedings.
The respondent also requested that the Board refer to the Enlarged Board of Appeal the questions in its letter of 13 May 2004, namely:
"1. Does Article 53(a) or (b) exclude the patenting of animals in general?
2. At what date is the morality or "ordre public" test of Article 53(a) to be assessed?
3. If the answer to question (2) is other than at the European filing date or priority date, is it possible for the legal validity of claimed subject-matter under Article 53(a) to change with time?
4. If the answer to question (2) is at the European filing date or priority date, is it permissible for an invention to be excluded from patentability under Article 53(a) as a consequence of evidence or facts which is or were not current at the European filing date or priority date, as the case may be?
5. Does Rule 23d(d), when referring to "substantial medical benefit", set a test which goes beyond the meaning of Article 53(a) as interpreted without knowledge of this Rule?
6. If the answer to question (5) is "no", are the requirements of Rule 23d(d) satisfied by a reasonable expectation or hope of "substantial medical benefit" at the date of assessment for Article 53(a) purposes?
7. Is it relevant to a consideration of whether claimed product subject-matter meets the requirements of Article 53(a) that such product subject-matter may have been generated outside the EPC jurisdiction by use of a process or method which would itself be unpatentable under Article 53(a)?
8. If the answer to question (1) is "no", what is the proper extent of the exclusion from patentability under Article 53(b)?
9. If the answer to question (8) is any one or more of "animal varieties", "races animales" or "Tierarten", how is/are such term or terms to be interpreted in actual practice?
10. If the answer to question (8) is anything other than one or more of the terms listed in question (9), how is the nature of such exclusion from patentability to be interpreted in actual practice?"
The respondent also requested that its costs of the oral proceedings of 6 to 7 November 2001 before the Opposition Division be paid by the European Patent Office.
Reasons for the Decision
1.1. The focus of this case is a very small animal, namely a mouse - to use a poet's description, a "Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie" (R. Burns, "To a Mouse", 1785). In all other respects however, this case is not small. It has been conducted by a large number of parties who have deployed a multiplicity of arguments. Therefore, it may assist to begin the reasons for the decision with a short outline of the structure the Board has adopted. After dealing first with matters of admissibility of the oppositions and appeals (sections 2 and 3), the Board will then consider a number of matters concerning Articles 53(a) and 53(b) EPC generally (sections 4 to 11). As is evident from the summary of the parties' arguments (see paragraphs XXIV to XXXIV above), the bulk of this case relates to those Articles. Thereafter the Board will consider the application of the law - both Articles 53(a) and 53(b) EPC and others - to the patent proprietor's requests (sections 12 and 13). Lastly, the Board will consider the various requests for referral of questions to the Enlarged Board of Appeal and for costs to be paid by the European Patent Office (sections 14 and 15).
1.2. The issues arising under Articles 53(a) and (b) EPC generally will be dealt with in the following order. First, it is important to establish what this case is not concerned with since this will allow the large volume of arguments purportedly directed to Article 53(a) EPC (see paragraphs XXIV to XXXI above) to be reduced to that which is actually relevant (see section 4 below).
1.3. Second, it is then necessary to consider several questions relating to Rules 23b to 23e EPC as follows.
(a) First, whether or not those Rules, and in particular Rule 23d EPC, apply to this case at all (see section 5 below). If those Rules do apply to this case, then the further matters in (b) to (e) below arise.
(b) The relationship between Rule 23d(d) and Article 53(a) EPC (see section 6).
(c) Whether, as the respondent has argued, Rule 23d is inconsistent with the previous case-law relating to Article 53(a) EPC (see section 7).
(d) The point in time at which the conditions imposed by Rule 23d EPC are to be assessed (see section 8).
(e) The evidence which can be taken into account in making that assessment (see section 9).
1.4. Third, it is necessary to consider the application of Article 53(a) EPC other than in conjunction with Rule 23d(d) EPC. As is evident from its wording and as explained in more detail below, that Rule creates a "special case" application of Article 53(a) EPC which requires a quite distinct factual and legal analysis from that required by the application of Article 53(a) EPC simpliciter (see section 10 below).
1.5. The fourth and last area of general consideration is Article 53(b) EPC and, again, this will also be influenced by the decision whether or not Rules 23b to 23e EPC apply (see section 11).
2. Admissibility of the Oppositions
2.1. Admissibility of oppositions can be questioned at any point in proceedings, including appeal proceedings (G 4/97 OJ EPO 1999, 270, Order, paragraphs 1 and 2; and see generally "Case Law of the Boards of Appeal of the EPO", 4th edition 2001, pages 462 to 463). A case such as the present with "multiple opponents" appears to be a pre-eminent example of a situation in which admissibility should be kept under review, although parties cannot expect the Opposition Division or Board to do this alone. It is clear that the Board has neither the resources nor the knowledge of the relevant laws of all the Contracting States necessary to police the composition of, and the legal status of all the members of, multiple opponents. As the Enlarged Board observed, such opponents must inform the EPO of changes in their composition or representation. Equally, once prima facie admissibility is acknowledged, it must be up to the party or parties seeking to challenge admissibility to make a case of inadmissibility.
2.2. The respondent objected at first instance to the admissibility of a number of the oppositions commenced by "multiple opponents". The Opposition Division dismissed those objections by observing that the Enlarged Board had said in G 3/99 (OJ EPO 2002, 347, Order, paragraph 1):
"An opposition filed in common by two or more persons, which otherwise meets the requirements of Article 99 EPC and Rules 1 and 55 EPC, is admissible on payment of only one opposition fee."
As regards a similar objection of the patentee to that made in the appeal proceedings, namely that the identity of all the multiple opponents was in doubt, the Opposition Division said of all opponents it was "satisfied that sufficient proof was available as to the status of legal person of Opponents" (see paragraph 1.3 of the decision under appeal). The Board sees no reason to question those findings, the respondent not having pointed to any evidence which suggests that the legal status of the various persons in question is other than the Opposition Division held. For example, the respondent said it had seen no documentation establishing whether opponent 8 (appellant 3) or the two members of opponent 15 (appellant 6) were legal persons or not. The Opposition Division said of opponent 8 that it is "a corporation under public law having the status of a legal person" and, of opponent 15, that it "consists of two associations having the status of legal person under Austrian law" (see paragraph 1.3 of the decision under appeal - clearly, "person" was intended to read "persons"). If the respondent wished to challenge those conclusions, it was incumbent on it to produce or point to some evidence to question such conclusions - for example evidence from official registers or the results of inquiries showing that a legal person never existed or no longer exists, or evidence that under the relevant national law a legal person does not have the status found by the Opposition Division.
2.3. However, a distinction can be drawn between, on the one hand, the legal status of each member of a multiple opponent and, on the other hand, changes over time in the composition of a multiple opponent. As regards the latter, the Board agrees with the respondent (see paragraph XIX(1) above). As the Enlarged Board also said in G 3/99 (see Order, paragraph 3):
"In order to safeguard the rights of the patent proprietor and in the interests of procedural efficiency, it has to be clear throughout who belongs to the group of common opponents or common appellants. If either a common opponent or common appellant (including the common representative) intends to withdraw from the proceedings, the EPO shall be notified accordingly by the common representative or by the new common representative determined under Rule 100(1) EPC in order for the withdrawal to take effect." (Emphasis added)
2.4. In the case of some "multiple opponents" the position will remain clear throughout as the Enlarged Board required. For example, opponent 1 was comprised of two English law legal persons, both having general animal welfare activities, of which only one elected to appeal and the Board was informed of the change of both composition and representation. This can be contrasted to opponent 6, a group of over 1,200 natural persons whose only common interest was that they had all signed what was in effect a petition against the patent in suit. The respondent observed with some force that it was inconceivable that, in the eleven and a half years since the opposition was filed, each and every one of those persons remained alive and interested in and willing to take part in the proceedings. The Board agrees and, if opponent 6 had appealed or sought to take any part in the appeal proceedings, it would have been appropriate to consider further whether the conditions stipulated by the Enlarged Board could have been met. Unlike opponent 1 and several other multiple opponents, opponent 6 was purely and simply an "opposition club" which existed only for the purpose of these proceedings. In the case of such an opponent of more than 1,200 members, the absence over eleven and a half years of any notification as envisaged by the Enlarged Board could in itself be considered an indication that the "clear throughout" condition had not been complied with.
2.5. A further objection to the admissibility of certain other multiple opponents was that they were said to be "formed and supported" by persons of uncertain legal status. As regards "formation", the fact that certain opponents only came into being for the purpose of filing opposition to one patent cannot in itself be an objection to admissibility whether, as already observed in the case of opponent 6, this was all the members of the multiple opponent had in common or whether, as in the case of appellant 6 (opponent 15), the two members already shared a more general common interest (in that case, as animal welfare organisations). It is apparent from the opinion of the Enlarged Board in G 3/97 (OJ EPO 1999, 245, Order, paragraph 1(a)) that an opponent's motive or lack of motive is irrelevant: a "straw man", such as a company formed for the sole purpose of opposing a patent, could be acceptable. Since multiple opponents are permissible, it would be illogical to impose a stricter requirement on them.
2.6. As regards "support", it appears to the Board to be wholly irrelevant that an opponent, whether individual or multiple, may be supported by others. Such supporters clearly cannot take any part in the proceedings and cannot affect its outcome. In relation to any proceedings there are likely to be non-parties who want to see a particular party succeed (for example, employees or shareholders of a company which is a party). The only difference is that in the present case some opponents have made varying reference to their supporters - in the case of appellant 5 (opponent 13), three natural persons with a long list of supporters, by suggesting their opposition is on behalf of their supporters. If such references were made in the belief that this might influence the result, then that was of course incorrect. However, support for a party cannot per se be a reason to challenge admissibility. In fairness to the respondent, it did largely acknowledge the distinction between "support" and "formation" and it was the legal status of individual members of multiple opponents on which its attack was concentrated.
2.7. Lastly, the respondent presented specific arguments about the admissibility of the oppositions of opponents 4 and 6. As regards opponent 6, the Board has already observed (see paragraph 2.4 above) it considers the respondent's comments to have force. As regards opponent 4, this was another "opposition club" consisting of three members - an individual, a registered association and an unregistered association itself consisting of fourteen individuals (see paragraph VII(1) above). It was clearly formed for the purpose of this opposition. The EPO was informed by a letter of 12 May 1995 from the opponent's professional representative that the unregistered association no longer existed and, although not expressed in so many words, that the representative would no longer act as such. No new representative was determined and indeed it would have been unlikely that any such determination would have had any effect since the retiring representative made clear he had received no instructions. It appears to the Board that the only conclusion which could and should have been drawn was to treat the opposition of opponent 4 as withdrawn since the requirements indicated by the Enlarged Board as to clarity of composition and ongoing representation of multiple opponents ceased as of the receipt of that letter. However, as in the case of opponent 6, little purpose would be served in pursuing this matter further in the absence of any appeal by or participation in the appeal proceedings by opponent 4 or any of its members.
2.8. The comments of appellants 3 to 6, under the heading in their grounds of appeal of "Admissibility", that they welcomed the rejection of the respondent's "attempts to exclude the participation of the public in the present proceedings" (see paragraph XIX(4) above) are rejected by the Board as meaningless. The respondent denied it had made any such attempt and the Board can find no evidence on the file of any such activity. All that appellants 3 to 6 can have meant was that (unsurprisingly) they agreed with the Opposition Division's rejection of the patentee's various objections to admissibility of oppositions. However, if that is what they meant, they should have said so and should not have mis-described quite legitimate objections to the admissibility of oppositions as attempted exclusion of "the public".
2.9. In summary, in a case with "multiple opponents" such as the present admissibility should be kept under review to ensure it remains clear throughout who belongs to the group of common opponents or common appellants as noted by the Enlarged Board of Appeal in G 3/99 (OJ EPO 2002, 347, Order, paragraph 3). The Board accepts there are serious grounds for questioning the admissibility of the oppositions of opponents 4 and 6 since it may not have been clear throughout the proceedings who belongs to each of those multiple opponents. However, in the absence of any appeal by either of those parties or of any participation by them in the appeal proceedings, no purpose would have been served by pursuing those matters. As regards the other oppositions, the respondent did not produce or refer to any evidence sufficient to disturb the findings of the Opposition Division.
3. Admissibility of the Appeals
3.1. Since the appeals of the parties who have appealed are from decisions in oppositions which were themselves admissible, and since the appeals all comply with Articles 107 and 108 EPC, the admissibility of the appeals is not in question.
3.2. In its communication of 24 November 2003 the Board stated the opinion that if any appeal in this case should be held inadmissible, the party in question would none the less be a party of right and its grounds of appeal would stand as the written submissions of such a party. The respondent subsequently expressed disagreement with this, observing that if a party's opposition should be found inadmissible, that party could not appeal. That is of course strictly-speaking correct. The Board's communication was intended, as it stated, to reflect the Board's intention to avoid delay in the appeal proceedings. Further, the Board's opinion was only provisional and said to be such. In the event, nothing turns on this since the oppositions of all the appellants are considered by the Board to be admissible.
4. Irrelevant Issues
4.1. A large number of the appellants' arguments made in relation to Article 53(a) EPC were directed to issues with which the present case is quite simply not concerned. First, there is a straightforward question of interpretation, or rather misinterpretation, of the EPC on the part of certain appellants. Appellant 1 argued in terms (see paragraph XXIV(4) above) that Article 53(a) EPC was concerned with the morality of patenting as well as of exploiting the invention. Appellant 2 argued (see paragraph XXV(4) above) that there is a simple question to be answered namely, "is there an infringement of morality or not?". This could only mean "is the patent in suit an infringement of morality or not?" and it was abundantly clear appellant 2 considered the answer to that question to be "yes". And, as already indicated, appellants 3 to 6 argued (see paragraphs XXVI to XXIX above) that the patenting of animals should not be allowed and thus they too clearly considered that Article 53(a) EPC was concerned with the morality of patenting. The Board disagrees. The wording of Article 53(a) EPC is clear:
"European patents shall not be granted in respect of: (a) inventions the publication or exploitation of which would be contrary to "ordre public" or morality...".
4.2. It is, in the Board's opinion, only possible to read the words "contrary to "ordre public" or morality" as qualifying "publication or exploitation". The same is true of the text in the other official languages. Accordingly, the Article raises no question of the morality of patenting a particular invention or of the morality of that invention per se. This conclusion, of course, applies to the particular animal invention claimed in the patent in suit: this case is concerned neither with the morality of genetically manipulating a mouse nor with the morality of the oncomouse thereby produced nor with the morality of patenting either the oncomouse or the genetic manipulation method but only with the morality of publication or exploitation of the oncomouse or that method. The same is of course true of "ordre public": it must be the publication or exploitation of the invention (in this case, the oncomouse or the method of producing it) which is contrary to "ordre public". Indeed, that Article 53(a) EPC is only concerned with the morality of publication or exploitation is confirmed by considering "ordre public". Neither the making of an invention (which by definition must occur in private if there is to be any chance of a patent) nor the process of patenting an invention (conducted within a patent office) can be seen as contrary to "ordre public". Since in Article 53(a) EPC the words "morality" and "ordre public" both stand in the same relationship to the rest of the Article, both must be treated in the same way; and both quite clearly qualify only "publication or exploitation".
4.3. Second, this case is not - contrary to the assertion of appellants 3 to 6 - concerned with "the patenting of animals" or "whether or not animals are patentable under the EPC" (see paragraphs XXVI(1)(2), XXVII(1) and XXVIII(1) above). Such a decision quite simply cannot, as the EPC is currently formulated, ever fall to any of its first instance departments or to the Boards of Appeal. The EPC has a clear set of basic rules as to patentability. First, the fundamental principle is that inventions shall be patentable if they fulfil three criteria - novelty, inventive step and industrial application (Articles 52(1), 54 to 57 EPC). As use of the word "shall" clearly indicates, there is a prima facie presumption in favour of patentability. Second, certain categories of subject-matter (for example, aesthetic creations) are not regarded as inventions at all - these are sometimes called the exclusions (Article 52 (2)(3) EPC). Third, certain other categories of subject-matter, while being acknowledged as capable of being inventions, are denied the protection of patents - these are sometimes called the exceptions (Article 53 EPC).
4.4. The categories of exclusions and exceptions may, depending on one's moral, social or other point of view, appear acceptable or unacceptable, quixotic or outdated, liberal or conservative. There may certainly be scope within the express wording of certain of those categories for interpretation in order to establish the exact boundaries of the categories but, subject to such interpretative scope, the law is clear: there is no excluded or excepted category of "animals in general". The only provisions which relate to patents for or concerning animals are in Article 53 EPC. The second limb of this Article (Article 53(b) EPC) denies patents to "animal varieties" (a term which certainly requires interpretation and to which the Board returns below - see section 11) but which, on even the most rudimentary analysis, cannot mean animals in general. The first limb of the same Article (Article 53(a) EPC) denies patents to inventions the publication or exploitation of which would be contrary to "ordre public" or morality and, subject to interpretation which has largely been supplied already by existing case-law and supplementary legislation, this can be invoked to stop a patent being granted for an invention which causes suffering to animals without some counterbalancing benefit. Those two provisions apart, animal patent cases are treated in the same way as other cases. This case is therefore not, as appellants 3 to 6 asserted, concerned with the patentability of animals. This case is concerned with whether or not the EPC allows the patentability of the particular animal invention in question and, if so, how broadly that invention may be claimed.
4.5. A third and related matter to make clear is that, again contrary to the assertion of appellants 3 to 6, the position as described in the two preceding paragraphs has prevailed since the EPC entered into force. The respondent cited as an example of a life form case T 320/87 (OJ EPO 1990, 71) and referred to the travaux préparatoires to show life form patents had been considered a possibility from the outset of the framing of the EPC. The assertion of appellants 3 to 6 that, until the introduction of Rules 23b to 23e EPC, patenting of animals was not possible is quite simply erroneous. The introduction of those Rules may have been upsetting and/or unhelpful to certain parties (and the Board notes parties on both sides of this dispute argued those Rules should not apply to this case - see section 5 below), but to suggest those Rules changed the EPC from a régime under which animals could not be patented to a régime under which animals might or could be patented is quite simply wrong and those who advance such an argument have misunderstood the relevant legal history.
4.6. A fourth and final point to be made in this section concerns appellant 2's argument that it was not established that the opinion of the four members of the Opposition Division was representative (of, the Board assumes, European society - see paragraph 10.2 below). The Board agrees with the respondent that the Opposition Division was under no obligation to establish any such thing. The Opposition Division was not required to form its own opinion and then somehow establish that such opinion was representative of a wider group. Quite the contrary, the task of the Opposition Division was to assess whether or not the exploitation of the invention conformed with conventionally-accepted standards of conduct in European society (see T 356/93 OJ EPO 1995, 545, Reasons, paragraph 6). The Opposition Division had to make that decision, as with all decisions between opposing parties, only on the basis of the evidence placed before it by the parties in support of their arguments and with no consideration for personal opinions. Similarly it is the task of the Board to decide, in the light of the evidence before the first instance and any further evidence permitted on appeal, whether the first instance decision made that assessment correctly. The actual opinion or opinions of the members of the Opposition Division (or the Board) are irrelevant.
4.7. In view of the observations in this section the following arguments of the appellants need not be considered further: the argument that Article 53(a) EPC is concerned with the morality of patenting (see paragraph XXIV(4) above); that the Opposition Division decision was not shown to be representative and that Article 53a EPC poses the question, "is there an infringement of morality or not?" (see paragraph XXV(1)(4) above); the whole case made jointly by appellants 3 to 6 as recorded in paragraph XXVI(1) and (2) above, save as it related to the applicability of Rules 23b to 23e EPC in this case; and the whole case presented individually by appellants 3 and 6 (see paragraphs XXVII and XXIX above). The Board has no doubt that the parties in question genuinely hold the views they expressed; however, as arguments they fall outside the issues in these proceedings.
5. Applicability of Rules 23b to 23e EPC
5.1. It is necessary to decide whether Rules 23b to 23e EPC (the "new Rules") apply in this case since if, as the Opposition Division decided, they do apply, they must have an effect on the interpretation of Articles 53(a) and 53(b) EPC. All the submissions on this issue were confined to Rule 23c and 23d EPC, but all of Rules 23b to 23e EPC must be regarded as a "package" since they were promulgated together (by decision of the Administrative Council of 16 June 1999), since they entered into force together (on 1 September 1999, see OJ EPO 1999, 437 et seq), since they have a common derivation in EU Directive 98/44, since they form a chapter within the Rules of the EPC, and since they have a common purpose expressed in Rule 23b(1) EPC:
"For European patent applications and patents concerning biotechnological inventions, the relevant provisions of the Convention shall be applied and interpreted in accordance with the provisions of this chapter."
The Board notes that it is clear from that sentence that the only function of the new Rules is to supply provisions for the application and interpretation of pre-existing provisions of the EPC. This reinforces views of the Board expressed both above (that the new Rules did not mark an entire change of régime as regards animal patents - see paragraph 4.5) and below (that the new Rules did not create retrospective bars to patentability - see paragraphs 5.9 and 5.10).
5.2. The content of the new Rules would appear to leave no doubt that they should apply to the present case. Rule 23b(1) EPC states the new Rules apply to "patent applications and patents concerning biotechnological inventions". Rule 23b(2) EPC defines "biotechnological inventions" as "inventions which concern a product consisting of or containing biological material or a process by means of which biological material is produced, processed or used". "Biological material" is in turn defined in Rule 23b(3) EPC as "any material containing genetic information and capable of reproducing itself or being reproduced in a biological system". There can be no doubt that any animal consists of a material containing genetic information and is capable of reproduction. An animal is therefore a product consisting of biological material in accordance with Rule 23b(2) EPC. The present case thus concerns a biotechnological invention, a conclusion none of the parties challenged. Accordingly, the new Rules must prima facie apply to this case unless one of the arguments to the contrary can succeed.
5.3. Of the parties who took part in the appeal proceedings, only appellant 1 agreed that the Opposition Division was correct to apply Rule 23d(d) EPC (the only one of the new Rules to which that appellant referred), although it disagreed with the way it was applied. Appellant 2 made no mention of the issue. Opponent 3 did not in terms dispute the applicability of the new Rules, however at the oral proceedings it several times used the expression "if Rule 23d applies..." and devoted much of its subsequent argument concerning Article 53(a) EPC to questioning the effect of that Rule. The Board concludes that, if anything, opponent 3. would prefer that the new Rules did not apply in this case.
5.4. Appellants 3 to 6 and the respondent formed an unholy alliance against applicability of the new Rules to this case, albeit their reasons were vastly different. Appellants 3 to 6 saw the new Rules as a fundamental amendment to the EPC to provide, with both retrospective and prospective effect, for the patenting of animals. Those appellants argued that changes of such significance should be made in the EPC itself and not in the Implementing Regulations. Like the respondent they also complained of the delays in the opposition proceedings and, since these appellants considered patenting of animals only became possible as a result of the new Rules and that patenting of animals was only wanted by a very few interest groups including the EPO, they at least inferred that the proceedings were deliberately delayed in order that the new Rules could apply to the present case.
5.5. The respondent's position was more complex, involving two arguments - one in three stages and a simpler alternative (which it called a "caveat"). The principal argument proceeded thus - first, the respondent said Rule 23d EPC, by introducing the concept of "substantial medical benefit", made a previously unpredictable change to the interpretation of Article 53(a) EPC. Second, this change in the law was introduced during a six year delay in the opposition proceedings and thus at a point in time when the proceedings should have been finished. Third, the outcome of the opposition proceedings was as a result unfairly affected by the change - it was thus at least implicitly argued that the new Rules had a retrospective effect. However, the respondent's simpler alternative argument (the so-called caveat) was, if Rule 23d EPC merely explained Article 53(a) EPC, that seemed reasonable (from which the Board infers the respondent would accept the application of that Rule, and therefore of all the new Rules, to this case if treated as "explanatory", see point 5.7 below).
5.6. The question of the applicability of the new Rules must be distinguished from, and must be decided before, questions of their interpretation. Moreover, the question of the fairness of applying the new Rules cannot be assessed with regard to their effect, since judging applicability in the light of effect would mean putting interpretation before applicability. Above all, applicability cannot be decided by reference to the effect on a particular party's case: it must be decided objectively and not subjectively. It follows that arguments based on the effect the new Rules (or any one of them such as Rule 23d EPC) have on the case of any one party must be discounted.
5.7. The argument of appellants 3 to 6 that the new Rules changed the law so as to make patenting of animals possible for the first time (a claim which is both startling and startlingly inaccurate) has already been rejected by the Board (see paragraph 4.5 above). Not only is the argument manifestly wrong as a matter of legal history but accepting it would mean disapplying the new Rules for the subjective reason that they are not in favour of certain parties. Similarly, the respondent's alternative argument (the so-called caveat), that Rule 23d EPC may be applicable if merely "explanatory" of Article 53(a) EPC, can only be seen as special pleading. Since the respondent argued strenuously that Rule 23d(d) EPC should be interpreted no more narrowly than the test in T 19/90 (OJ EPO 1990, 476; see paragraph 7.1 below), its alternative argument can only have been intended to mean that it accepted the applicability of Rule 23d if this Rule "explained" Article 53(a) EPC as meaning the same as the T 19/90 test. Put at its simplest, the respondent's alternative argument amounted to saying "I accept the change made by Rule 23d if it makes no change to the law as previously interpreted". Thus, here again, accepting that argument would mean accepting a subjective reason for the applicability of the new Rules based on the effect on a particular party. While the Board may, as regards the issue of applicability of the new Rules, consider pleas of "unfair", it must ignore pleas of "unfair if against me".
5.8. As regards the argument of appellants 3 to 6 that changes of such significance as those made by the new Rules should be made in the EPC itself and not in the Implementing Regulations, the Board can see no legal basis for the proposition, nor did the appellants cite any principle or legal provision to support it. Article 164(2) EPC provides that, in the case of conflict between the EPC and the Implementing Regulations, the EPC shall prevail. Thus, Article 164(2) EPC might, in the event of such a conflict, affect the application of the new Rules but it does not and cannot affect how changes in the law may be made, namely by amending Articles of the EPC and/or by amending the Implementing Regulations. Further, in the absence of any such provision, the Boards of Appeal have no power within their existing jurisdiction to pronounce upon such matters. The Boards do have jurisdiction inter alia to interpret the EPC - whether Articles enacted by the Contracting States in conference or Rules enacted by the Administrative Council - and must have jurisdiction to refuse enforcement of, and to declare invalid, legislation which has been defectively enacted (for example, if passed by an insufficient number of States or Administrative Council delegations), since otherwise parties could be prejudiced by "laws" which in fact do not exist. The Boards also have jurisdiction to give effect to Article 164(2) EPC - to refuse enforcement of a Rule of the Convention which conflicts with an Article. But none of these powers mean that the Boards have any power, express or necessarily implied, to prevent the operation of correctly enacted legislation and, as regards the passage of legislation, the choice between Articles and Implementing Regulations is one exclusively for the legislator.
5.9. This leaves, as possible reasons not to apply the new Rules in this case, only the arguments based on delay. It is beyond doubt that there were quite appalling delays in the opposition proceedings and that all parties were thereby severely inconvenienced. The Board returns to this below (see section 15). A delayed case is of course more vulnerable to the effects of new legislation, or new case law developments, which arise while it is pending and, since legal certainty is desirable and parties should be able to commence proceedings with the best possible estimation of the outcome, such changes in the law are understandably unwelcome to parties. However, legislators and courts cannot suspend their activities for the duration of even the shortest case, since necessary legislation would thereby be delayed and cases could only be prosecuted one at a time. Thus new legislation normally does apply to pending cases unless its non-application is expressly provided for. That principle has a corollary, namely that new legislation normally does not apply retrospectively and, in order to safeguard interests based on the former state of the law, an express provision for retrospective effect is necessary before it will be judicially acknowledged. Neither form of express provision was made in the case of the new Rules - there was no saving for pending cases and no provision for retrospective effect.
5.10. Accordingly, appellants 3 to 6 and the respondent were incorrect to describe the effect of the new Rules as retrospective - the new Rules had no effect whatsoever on any concluded proceedings. That they entered into force while this case was pending is beyond doubt true, but it would have been equally true if the opposition proceedings had only been commenced the year before, or even the week before, the new Rules took effect. Since one could not in such cases make an exception by not applying the new Rules on the grounds of delay, at what point would delay become so great as to allow such an exception? From this it becomes clear, and the Board concludes relatively easily, that the true cause of the parties' complaint should not be the new Rules, which had to be applied without exception to each and every case which might happen to be pending at the time of their introduction, but the delay itself about which the parties were quite right to complain.
5.11. The Board also agrees with the Opposition Division that the principle of legitimate expectations does not apply. When, to safeguard such expectations, a number of cases are to be exempted from a change in the law, that is expressly provided for. For example, on three occasions the Enlarged Board of Appeal, having reversed the previous law or practice has, to avoid unfairness to parties with pending cases commenced in reliance on the old law or practice, made a saving for such cases (G 5/88 OJ EPO 1991, 137; G 5/93 OJ EPO 1994, 447; G 9/93 OJ EPO 1994, 891). The very fact such a step was taken on that limited number of occasions shows, first, that the norm is not to exempt pending cases and, second, that such rare exemptions should apply to all pending cases.
5.12. To summarise this section, the Board has no hesitation in finding that the new Rules apply to the present case since, as with all changes in the law, the application of the new Rules took effect on the date provided for by the legislator and the opposition proceedings were pending on that date. That they were then still pending after many years is in itself a legitimate source of complaint but not a reason for exempting this case from the new Rules.
6. Article 53(a) and Rule 23d(d) EPC
6.1. Application of the new Rules to the present case means that, as regards Article 53(a)EPC, Rule 23d(d) EPC must be taken into account. The relevant text of that Rule reads:
"Under Article 53(a) European patents shall not be granted in respect of biotechnological inventions which, in particular, concern the following:...
(d) processes for modifying the genetic identity of animals which are likely to cause them suffering without any substantial medical benefit to man or animal, and also animals resulting from such processes". (Emphasis added)
It follows from the preamble, i.e. from the use of the words "in particular", that the Rule is not intended to provide an exhaustive list of inventions excluded from patentability but that, on the contrary, it is limited to four categories - its effect is simply to ensure that inventions which fall within sub-paragraphs (a), (b), (c) or (d) of Rule 23d EPC must not be granted patents under Article 53(a) EPC. A case not falling within the Rule does not thereby "escape" Article 53(a) EPC: there might well be biotechnological inventions not falling within sub-paragraphs (a) to (d) which, nonetheless, must not be granted patents under Article 53(a) EPC. In short, a case falling within one of the four categories must ipso facto be denied a patent under Article 53(a) EPC and there is no need to consider that Article further; but, on the contrary, a case not falling within one of those categories must be considered further under Article 53(a) EPC (see section 10 below).
6.2. It is immediately apparent that Rule 23d(d) EPC imposes a test for assessing whether or not processes for genetically modifying animals, or animals produced by such processes, are allowable. The nature of that test is also immediately clear - it is a "balancing test" in which the suffering to animals must be weighed against the medical benefit to man or animal. Moreover it is abundantly clear that this test can only apply in cases where suffering to animals is likely. In other words, a likelihood - but no more than a likelihood - of such suffering is necessary to "trigger" the operation of Rule 23d(d) EPC - it is a conditio sine qua non.
6.3. To the extent that there may be some biotechnological inventions which "fail" the Rule 23d(d) EPC test and are thus denied a patent at that point while other such inventions may "pass" that test and therefore have to proceed to an Article 53(a) EPC assessment, appellant 1's argument that there is a "two-stage test" (see paragraph XXIV(5) above) is correct. Whether it is seen as two stages of one test or two tests is relatively unimportant, although the Board tends to the latter view as shown by the distinction in section 10 below between "Rule 23d(d) type" Article 53(a) objections and "real" Article 53(a) objections.
7. Rule 23d(d) EPC and the Case Law
7.1. In the decision T 19/90 (OJ EPO 1990, 476, Reasons, paragraph 5), which concerned the present invention during the examination stage of the patent application, it was said:
"The decision as to whether or not Article 53(a) EPC is a bar to patenting the present invention would seem to depend mainly on a careful weighing up of the suffering of animals and possible risks to the environment on the one hand, and the invention's usefulness to mankind on the other."
The Board in that appeal was making the important observation that, contrary to the opinion of the Examining Division whose decision was under appeal, Article 53(a) EPC had to be considered in cases such as the present. And, as is immediately apparent, the balancing test in that earlier decision is very similar to that now found in Rule 23d(d) EPC. There is little doubt that the T 19/90 test was adopted, although adapted, by those who framed the Rule 23d(d) test. However, despite the similarity of the two tests, that in T 19/90 balances suffering of animals not against substantial medical benefit to man or animal, but against usefulness to mankind. It is manifestly clear that "usefulness to mankind" may embrace a wider range of benefits than the "substantial medical benefit" found in the Rule 23d(d) EPC test and accordingly the T 19/90 test is broader; and it is also manifestly clear that the reverse is true, namely that if "substantial medical benefit" is established so as to satisfy Rule 23d(d) EPC, then "usefulness to mankind" is necessarily established.
7.2. The respondent saw this difference between the test in Rule 23d(d) EPC and that put forward in T 19/90 as so inconsistent that it considered the Enlarged Board of Appeal should decide whether, in spite of this difference, the Rule could be considered as a bona fide interpretation of Article 53(a) EPC. In the words of the fifth question the respondent sought to refer to the Enlarged Board:
"Does Rule 23d(d), when referring to "substantial medical benefit", set a test which goes beyond the meaning of Article 53(a) as interpreted without knowledge of this Rule?".
7.3. The respondent's arguments as to this difference (see paragraphs XXXI(3), (5) and (6) above) appear to the Board to be unnecessarily complicated. First, the respondent argued that, unless the matter is clarified by the Enlarged Board, Rule 23d(d) EPC may be ultra vires. As the Board observed during the oral proceedings, such use of the term ultra vires appears incorrect. An administrative action or rule of subsidiary legislation is ultra vires if it falls outside the scope of a law which precludes or limits the legal power of the person or body doing the act or making the rule which is consequently invalid - the term ultra vires denotes an "excès de pouvoir". That is quite clearly not the case here. The law in question, Article 53(a) EPC, contains nothing which precludes or limits its own subsequent interpretation whether by case-law (as in T 19/90) or by legislation (as in Rule 23d EPC). The respondent appears to have argued that the law in question is not simply Article 53(a) EPC but that Article as interpreted in T 19/90. Not only is this a legal impossibility - one cannot combine a legislative provision with case-law interpretation to construct an artificial vires by which to judge an action or rule as ultra vires - but even if possible it would make no difference since that notional "law" would still contain nothing to preclude or limit subsequent interpretation. Ultra vires requires an inconsistency but there is none - Article 53(a) EPC as previously interpreted by T 19/90 remains unaffected by Rule 23d(d) EPC save that, as already indicated (see paragraph 6.1 above), the Rule deems four limited categories of inventions to fall within Article 53(a) EPC. That has been achieved in a perfectly valid - i.e. intra vires - manner.
7.4. Second, the respondent said Rule 23d(d) EPC broadens the exclusion in Article 53(a) EPC contrary to the principle of narrow construction of exclusions and thus inventions which might have satisfied the T 19/90 test may now fail the Rule 23d(d) test. In the Board's opinion, it is only correct to say the Rule broadens the Article 53(a) EPC exclusion in as much as the Rule now specifies four limited categories of inventions which are deemed to fall within that Article. However, since it is unimaginable that cases within those four categories would not always have been considered under Article 53(a) EPC, it would be incorrect to say that the new Rule broadens the law as regards the exclusion of such cases. If a case falls within one of the four specific categories, then it must without more be refused a patent; if it does not fall within one of those categories, it must be considered under the law as it stood prior to the new Rules. That position is no more contrary to any principle than it is ultra vires. While the Board agrees that exclusions are generally interpreted narrowly, that does not mean the legislator is prevented from increasing or reducing the number of exclusions or, as in this case, from amending existing exclusions by specifying a certain result if certain conditions are met. As with the manner of legislation (see paragraph 5.8 above), so the scope of legislation is entirely a matter for the legislator.
7.5. Third, and last, the respondent presented a four step argument which can be summarised as follows. First, T 19/90 was the only authoritative pronouncement on Article 53(a) EPC prior to the introduction of Rule 23d(d) EPC - which, if meaning T 19/90 provided the only test or manner of assessment for an Article 53(a) EPC objection, is correct. Second, in G 1/98 (OJ EPO 2000, 111) the new Rules were considered, as regards Article 53(b) EPC, only to offer interpretation - which is also correct. Third, in T 272/95 of 23 October 2002 Board 3.3.4 followed G 1/98 in applying the new Rules to Article 53(a) EPC but in doing so quite simply followed the Enlarged Board decision and, it is at least inferred, made no independent assessment for itself. Fourth, the argument thus concluded, there was no authoritative statement that Rule 23d(d) EPC was consistent with Article 53(a) EPC.
7.6. The Board disagrees both with the argument and the conclusion. While the respondent's first and second submissions are, as indicated above, correct, the third is not. While it is correct that T 272/95 followed G 1/98 in finding that the new Rules only interpret Article 53 EPC, it is only to be expected that Board 3.3.4 should have followed the approach of the Enlarged Board of Appeal - the function and purpose of Enlarged Board decisions is to give guidance to the Boards and others in matters of law ("to ensure uniform application of the law" - see Article 112(1) EPC). Further, the inference that Board 3.3.4. made no independent assessment is incorrect - paragraph 5 of the Reasons in T 272/95 begins:
"Having regard to Article 164(2) EPC, the Board has to examine whether or not the new rules insofar as they relate to Article 53(a) EPC are in conformity with this article."
As mentioned above (see paragraph 5.8), Article 164(2) EPC provides that, in the case of conflict between the EPC and the Implementing Regulations, the EPC shall prevail. Thus it is clear that, in T 272/95, Board 3.3.4. posed the question whether the new Rules were consistent with Article 53(a) EPC and, relying as one would only expect on available guidance from the Enlarged Board, found that the new Rules were so consistent. The respondent was therefore quite simply wrong to conclude that there is no authoritative statement in that respect.
7.7. The relationship between Rule 23d(d) EPC and the earlier case law can be summarised as follows. The introductory provision of the new Rules - Rule 23b(1) EPC - states those Rules are interpretative (see paragraph 5.1 above). The established and authoritative statement of the case law is to the same effect (see the previous paragraph). None of the arguments presented to the contrary are accepted by the Board for the reasons in this section. As regards cases such as the present which fall within Rule 23d(d) EPC, the effect of this interpretation is to insert a test which, depending on the facts and thus on the outcome of the test, may be either additional or alternative to that previously established by the case law.
8. The point in time for applying the Rule 23d(d) EPC test
8.1. Both appellant 1 and the respondent agreed that the Rule 23d(d) test should, as with all criteria for the assessment of patentability, be applied as of the effective date (the filing or priority date, as the case may be) of the patent or patent application in question. However, while the respondent also wanted the evidence which could be taken into account to be limited to that available at the effective date, appellant 1 wanted evidence arising after that date to be admissible. Appellant 5 and opponent 3 both considered the appropriate date for such assessment should be the date of decision in these proceedings and made clear their reason was specifically because this would allow evidence arising after, but not directed to, the effective date to be taken into account.
8.2. The Board has no hesitation in concluding that the date of assessment should, as with all criteria for the assessment of patentability, be the effective date (the filing or priority date, as the case may be) of the patent or patent application. Any later date, as argued for by appellant 5 and opponent 3, would be inconsistent with other areas of patent law and would lead to unjustified differences between otherwise similar cases. Indeed, all the reasons for assessment at the effective date can be summarised as the need for legal certainty - assessment at the filing or priority date means all cases are treated alike whereas assessment at the date of final decision in any proceedings would encourage parties to delay opposition or appeal proceedings in the hope of evidence for or against arising, would encourage late filing of evidence, and could make the outcome of cases dependent on the length of proceedings.
9. Rule 23d(d) EPC and Evidence
9.1. The Board makes the following further observations on questions of evidence in an assessment using the Rule 23d(d) EPC test. First, this test requires three matters to be evaluated namely, whether animal suffering is likely; whether likely substantial medical benefit has been established; and whether the suffering and the medical benefit both exist in relation to the use of the same animals. The first two matters follow axiomatically from the wording of Rule 23d(d) EPC and, in the view of the Board, the third matter must also follow since otherwise that Rule could be circumvented. Thus to take a hypothetical example, if likely suffering to both cats and lions was established it would none the less be contrary to Rule 23d(d) EPC to allow claims which encompassed both cats and lions when the only established likely medical benefit arose in relation to the use of cats. In short, Rule 23d(d) EPC should be applied to ensure that any patent should only extend to those animals whose suffering is balanced by a medical benefit. For convenience, this is referred to below as the necessary correspondence between suffering and benefit.
9.2. Second, in applying the Rule 23d(d) EPC test it is important to resist seeing the two integers of the test as requiring different degrees of proof. The expression "likely to cause suffering without any substantial medical benefit" may appear at first sight to contrast the words "likely" and "substantial" with the result that one seeks to balance mere likelihood of suffering by a medical benefit which, since it must be "substantial", is therefore actual or real - with the result that one looks for proof of the existence of such a benefit at the relevant date. The Board considers this is not in fact the case.
9.3. Opponent 3 observed at the oral proceedings (see paragraph XXX(3) above) that the German text of Rule 23d(d) EPC uses the word "geeignet" which is not the exact equivalent of "likely", being more usually translated as "suitable" or "suited". The Board notes that the French text uses the expression "de nature à", which would usually be translated as "of such a kind as to". Thus the three texts have marginally different words but all three use such words to qualify "processes for modifying the genetic identity of animals" and, as is highlighted by the German text in which the word "cause" ("verursachen") appears after the words "substantial medical benefit to man or animal" ("wesentlichen medizinischen Nutzen für den Menschen oder das Tier"), it is the entire suffering- without-benefit dialectic which is the object of "likely". Thus there is no difference in the level of proof required between animal suffering and substantial medical benefit - the difference is quite simply between, on the one hand, any likely suffering by animals however minor and, on the other hand, the likely medical benefit to man or animal which must be substantial.
9.4. Third, it follows from the conclusion that only a likelihood of animal suffering need be proved that, in a Rule 23d(d) EPC assessment, the degree of suffering experienced by animals (which appellant 1 and opponent 3 argued should be taken into account) and the availability of non-animal alternatives (which all the appellants, except appellant 2, and opponent 3 argued should be taken into account) do not need to be considered. (This does not mean such matters should be ignored when considering the case under Article 53(a) EPC generally.) As regards animal suffering, the likelihood of any suffering and nothing else is all that must be established to bring Rule 23d(d) EPC into play.
9.5. Fourth, as to the nature of the evidence which may be relied on, this must be confined to evidence as to the relevant matters - namely the likelihood of suffering, the likelihood of substantial medical benefit and the necessary correspondence between the two; and such evidence must be directed to those matters as at the effective date. The appellants, understandably from their point of view, argued that the evidence should not be confined to that in the patent application since this would inevitably lead to patentees claiming benefits for their invention, appellant 1 observing (see paragraph XXIV(6)(d) above) that an inventor will quite naturally assert that his invention has a value. The respondent, equally understandably, argued that any greater requirement than relying on the evidence in the patent application would allow the use of hindsight and require patent applicants to reduce their inventions to practice before filing which would be a complete departure from previous practice. The Board agrees with the respondent that it cannot be necessary to set a standard which requires reduction to practice before filing, but also agrees with the appellants that evidence cannot be confined to that in existence at the effective date: additional evidence, both for and against the patentee, may be considered subsequently but this must be evidence which demonstrates the state of affairs at the effective date. Such evidence may be open to the objection of hindsight (which, if established, may tell against the party relying in it) but the alternative - to allow only evidence in existence at the effective date - is subject to the greater criticism that only a patentee is likely to have admissible evidence. It must be acknowledged that some information about certain inventions will only emerge after, and on occasions some considerable time after, patent applications have been filed; a good example of how this may happen is given in T 356/93 (OJ EPO 1995, 545, Reasons, paragraph 18.4).
9.6. The Board considers the position in this respect to be analogous to that regarding evidence of sufficiency of disclosure under Article 83 EPC. Just as it is considered necessary for an initial disclosure in a patent application (or priority document) to establish plausibly that the invention disclosed can be performed, so the Board considers a patent application must plausibly establish the likelihood of medical benefit to balance any animal suffering evident from the application. In practice, in Rule 23d(d) EPC cases it will of course be clear beyond doubt from a patent application that, in a case of genetic manipulation of animals, suffering is at least likely even if not expressly mentioned. Further, just as later, post- published evidence may, in relation to sufficiency, be taken into account as confirmation or support for evidence initially produced in the patent application, so the Board considers further evidence may be filed to confirm or support the likelihood of medical benefit. Equally, just as opponents may file evidence in which they attempt to demonstrate insufficiency (for example, by trying and failing to work examples in a patent), so opponents may file evidence seeking to demonstrate that such medical benefit was not likely. However, just as in the case of a sufficiency debate the later, post-published evidence must be focused on the question whether the skilled person would have been able to perform the invention without undue burden at the effective date, so in Rule 23d cases the later, post-published evidence must be directed to the question of the likelihood of medical benefit at the effective date.
9.7. To summarise, the Rule 23d(d) EPC test requires three matters to be established: likely animal suffering, likely substantial medical benefit, and the necessary correspondence between the two in terms of the animals in question. The level of proof is the same for both animal suffering and substantial medical benefit, namely a likelihood. Since only a likelihood of suffering need be shown, other matters such as the degree of suffering or the availability of non-animal alternatives need not be considered. Evidence need not be limited to that available at the filing or priority date but evidence becoming available thereafter must be directed to the position at that date.
10. Article 53(a) EPC - morality and "ordre public"
10.1. As stated above (see paragraph 6.1), if a case falls within one of the four categories of exceptions set out in Rule 23d EPC (i.e. if a case concerning the modification of the genetic identity of animals falls within Rule 23d(d) EPC), then it must ipso facto be denied a patent under Article 53(a) EPC. However, cases not falling within the limited exclusions of Rule 23d EPC (including cases such as the present if they "pass" the Rule 23d(d) test) must then be considered under Article 53(a) EPC. There are thus in effect two quite different Article 53(a) EPC objections - on the one hand, a "Rule 23d - type" Article 53(a) objection which requires only that the invention is assessed as to whether or not it falls in one of the four limited categories set out in the Rule and, on the other hand, a "real" Article 53(a) objection which requires an assessment as to whether or not exploitation of the invention in question would be contrary to morality or "ordre public". When making the latter assessment, the case law offers some guidance.
10.2. T 356/93 (OJ EPO 1995, 545, Reasons, paragraphs 5 and 6) supplies working definitions of the concepts of morality and "ordre public" for the purposes of Article 53(a) EPC:
"5. It is generally accepted that the concept of "ordre public" covers the protection of public security and the physical integrity of individuals as part of society. This concept encompasses also the protection of the environment. Accordingly, under Article 53(a) EPC, inventions the exploitation of which is likely to breach public peace or social order (for example, through acts of terrorism) or to seriously prejudice the environment are to be excluded from patentability as being contrary to "ordre public".
6. The concept of morality is related to the belief that some behaviour is right and acceptable whereas other behaviour is wrong, this belief being founded on the totality of the accepted norms which are deeply rooted in a particular culture. For the purposes of the EPC, the culture in question is the culture inherent in European society and civilisation. Accordingly, under Article 53(a) EPC, inventions the exploitation of which is not in conformity with the conventionally-accepted standards of conduct pertaining to this culture are to be excluded from patentability as being contrary to morality."
Those definitions confirm the view, which appears from the words of Article 53(a) EPC itself, that "ordre public" and morality may form the basis of two separate objections either or both of which can be raised in a particular case (and are both raised in the present case).
10.3. In the course of the present proceedings, objections based on the concept of morality were numerous, varied and also sometimes contrary. Some defined the morality of "animal patenting" (in itself an irrelevant issue - see section 4) on the basis of economic criteria (see paragraph XXIX above), others defined it on the basis of religious creeds (see paragraph XXVII above). It was argued that legislation was a poor guide to morality (see paragraph XXIV(8) above) but also that the Board should take into account that animal protection was enshrined in the constitutions of some European states (see paragraphs XXV(7) and XXVIII(1) above). In the same manner, one should refrain from taking into consideration norms deeply rooted in a particular culture (see paragraph XXV(5) above), yet the Board must not forget the deeply-rooted norm that animals were not akin to inanimate objects (see paragraphs XXVII(1)(2) and XXVIII(1) above).
10.4. If anything, these divergences in points of view pay tribute to the wealth and diversity of human minds. However, they give the Board no help whatsoever in deciding what is the prevailing moral attitude. In fact, it would seem that certain of the appellants themselves appreciated that the beliefs they hold may not enjoy general acceptance since they put forward the suggestion that morality is what the majority thinks and therefore they relied heavily on opinion polls. The validity of opinion polls as "barometers" of the public perception of morality was discussed in great detail in T 356/93 (OJ EPO 1995, 545, Reasons, paragraph 15), a decision which identified many drawbacks ranging from the type and the number of questions posed within one poll, through the size and representative nature of the cross-section of the population polled, to the manner of interpretation of the results obtained. The Board is in full agreement with the views on opinion poll evidence expressed in that earlier decision.
10.5. The Board considers the only starting point for a "real" Article 53(a) EPC assessment is the test suggested in T 19/90 for the assessment of cases concerning the genetic manipulation of animals (OJ EPO 1990, 476, Reasons, paragraph 5):
"The decision as to whether or not Article 53(a) EPC is a bar to patenting the present invention would seem to depend mainly on a careful weighing up of the suffering of animals and possible risks to the environment on the one hand, and the invention's usefulness to mankind on the other."
This test may be employed in different cases using evidence relating to particular times and conditions and thus appears sufficiently flexible to allow for the current (i.e. current at the effective date - see paragraph 10.9 below) views as to social order, environmental risk and accepted standards of behaviour in European culture. In contrast to the test in Rule 23d(d) EPC, it balances suffering of animals not against likely substantial medical benefit to man or animal, but against usefulness to mankind. It also suggests balancing possible risks to the environment against usefulness to mankind. Thus, it offers a test for use in "ordre public" cases, morality cases and both.
10.6. Most significantly, whereas the Rule 23d(d) EPC test only requires a likelihood of animal suffering (that is, any suffering, however minor) and a likelihood of substantial medical benefit, the T 19/90 test requires a "careful weighing up" of the matters to be balanced. That clearly allows the scope or extent of, on the one hand, the animal suffering and/or environmental risk and, on the other hand, the usefulness to mankind to be considered. Accordingly factors such as the degree of suffering and the possible use of non-animal alternatives can be taken into account.
10.7. Lastly, it is said in T 19/90 that a decision under Article 53(a) EPC would depend "mainly" on the test. This allows for other considerations to be taken into account, either by way of adapting the test - if, for example, other issues than animal suffering or environmental risk were advanced as contrary to "ordre public" or morality - or by way of considering other matters outside the framework of the test. For example, in the present case the arguments under Article 53(a) EPC included an alleged threat to evolution, alleged increased trade in genetically manipulated animals and alleged moral unacceptability of such manipulation (see paragraphs 13.2.10 et seq below).
10.8. There is no apparent reason why other such arguments could not be deployed as part of the T 19/90 test. (In passing, the Board observes that in cases other than those concerning genetic manipulation of animals, in which neither the Rule 23d(d) EPC test nor the T 19/90 test would apply, such arguments would form the core of any Article 53(a) EPC objection). Yet, as already established in T 356/93, these arguments like all arguments must be substantiated.
10.9. For the same reasons of certainty as given in relation to Rule 23d objections, the time as of which a "real" Article 53(a) EPC assessment is to be made must be the effective date (filing or priority date) of the patent or application in suit although later evidence may also be taken into account provided it is directed to the position as at the effective date (see paragraphs 8.2. and 9.5 to 9.6 above). However, the Board adds for completeness that the nature and extent of the evidence required for a Rule 23d(d) EPC objection will probably be quite different from that required for a "real" Article 53(a) EPC objection. Whereas Rule 23d(d) EPC only requires evidence of the likelihood of animal suffering and the likelihood of substantial medical benefit, other factors may be taken into account under Article 53(a) EPC (see paragraphs 10.6 to 10.8 above), i.e. the relevant evidence may be both greater in volume and more varied in nature.
10.10. To summarise the assessment of a "real" Article 53(a) EPC objection, decision T 356/93 supplies working definitions of morality and "ordre public". The many bases (economic, religious, etc) for definitions of morality suggested by the appellants are of no assistance since no single such basis represents an accepted standard in European culture. Opinion poll evidence is of very limited value for the reasons given in T 356/93. In animal manipulation cases, the test in T 19/90 is appropriate. This differs in several respects from the test in Rule 23d(d) EPC, most importantly by allowing for matters other than animal suffering and medical benefit to be taken into account. Since the T 19/90 test is "mainly" the basis of assessment, other arguments as to the appropriate standard of morality or "ordre public" can additionally be considered but, like any other argument, must be supported by evidence. Assessment of a "real" Article 53(a) EPC objection is made as of the filing or priority date; evidence arising after that date may be taken into account provided it is directed to the position at the effective date.
11. Article 53(b) EPC
11.1. Article 53(b) EPC explicitly excludes from patentability "plant or animal varieties or essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals" with the proviso that "this provision does not apply to microbiological processes or the products thereof" - a proviso which is not relevant here (see Rule 23b(6) EPC and T 356/93 OJ EPO 1995, 545, Reasons paragraphs 33 to 39). Unlike Article 53(a) EPC, the exclusion is simply a denial of patents to the specified subject-matter per se, and not to inventions covering such subject-matter whose publication or exploitation must be measured by a moral or other standard. Thus an Article 53(b) EPC objection appears initially straightforward - it requires only a decision as to the meaning of the exclusion and an assessment whether or not the patent or application objected to contains plant or animal subject-matter within that meaning. However, in a case concerning animals, ascertaining the exact meaning of Article 53(b) EPC is not straightforward due in particular to differences of language.
11.2. In the German and French texts of Article 53(b) EPC, the words used in place of "plant or animal varieties" are respectively "Pflanzensorten oder Tierarten" (i.e. plant varieties or animal species) and "les variétés végétales et les races animales" (i.e. plant varieties and animal races). Thus, as regards animals, three different terms are used in the three official languages: "varieties", "species" and "races". Rule 23c EPC, which specifies that certain biotechnological inventions shall be patentable, includes in Rule 23c(b) EPC (in the English language text) "plants or animals if the technical feasibility of the invention is not confined to a particular plant or animal variety". While this narrows the application of Article 53(b) EPC to inventions confined to one particular plant or animal variety, the language problem is perpetuated because, in the German and French texts of the Rule, the words used in place of "plant or animal variety" are respectively "Pflanzensorte oder Tierrasse" and "une variété végétale ou une race animale" (i.e. in both languages, plant variety and animal race). Thus there is not only an inconsistency between the terms used in the three languages in Article 53(b) EPC and a similar inconsistency in Rule 23c(b) EPC, but also the further complication that, by use of "Tierarten" (species) and "Tierrasse" (race), the two inconsistencies are themselves inconsistent!
11.3. All the parties who pursued Article 53(b) EPC objections in the appeal proceedings (appellants 3 to 6. and opponent 3) took a robust approach to the question whether Article 53(b) EPC is limited to an animal "variety" or "species" or "race". They simply used the term "species", no doubt because of the three alternatives that is the term with the widest meaning (see paragraph 11.6 below), thus giving Article 53(b) EPC the widest possible exclusionary effect. The respondent argued that, just as the decision of the Enlarged Board of Appeal in relation to plants in G 1/98 (OJ EPO 2000, 111) would allow claims which encompass several plant varieties but not a claim to a specific variety, so the same "generic approach" should be allowed in the case of animals. However, the respondent made no attempt to select "variety" or "species" or "race" but simply observed that the oncomouse was at least two taxonomic categories above the broadest of those three terms, namely "species".
11.4. The Board agrees with the respondent that the principle enunciated in the decision of the Enlarged Board of Appeal G 1/98 concerning plants and "plant varieties" should be followed in the case of animals. In that decision, the Enlarged Board of Appeal stated, in paragraph 3.10 of the Reasons, that:
"In the absence of the identification of a specific plant variety in a product claim, the subject-matter of the claimed invention is not directed to a plant variety or varieties within the meaning of Article 53(b) EPC. This is why it is, contrary to the conclusions of the referring Board, in agreement with the rules of logic that a patent shall not be granted for a single plant variety but can be granted if varieties may fall within the scope of its claims".
However as indicated above, the difficulty which exists in the case of animals, but which the Enlarged Board did not encounter in the case of plants, is that there is no single term relating to animals in the EPC such as the term "plant variety". Not only is the exactly equivalent term for "plant varieties" used in all three language texts of the EPC, but in G 1/98 the Enlarged Board also had the benefit of earlier case- law of the Boards of Appeal, Article 2(2) of the UPOV Convention 1961 and Rule 23b(4) EPC to provide a clear definition of that term (namely, "any plant grouping within a single botanical taxon of the lowest known rank" which fulfils certain conditions specified in Rule 23b(4)(a) to (c) EPC).
11.5. While neither the jurisprudence of the Boards nor Rule 23b EPC (which is concerned with interpretation of the EPC as regards biotechnological inventions) provides a corresponding definition for "animal varieties" (or "species" or "races"), the Board considers that a definition by reference to taxonomical rank would be both consistent with the position in relation to plant varieties and in the interest of legal certainty. With such a definition, an assessment could be made as to whether the claimed subject-matter is excluded from patentability under Article 53(b) EPC as interpreted by Rule 23c(b) EPC - i.e. whether, in a case concerning animals, the technical feasibility of the invention is not confined to a particular animal variety (however "variety" or its alternative French and German terms might be defined).
11.6. Although as already indicated the parties offered no evidence in this respect, taxonomic definitions exist for all three terms. Thus a dictionary definition of "animal variety" is:
"any of various groups of animals ranking below a species (subspecies)";
and "animal race" is defined as:
"an actually or potentially interbreeding group within a species; also a taxonomic category (as a subspecies) representing such a group".
Therefore, in the taxonomic hierarchy, both "variety" and "race" clearly appear below the category of "species". That category is in turn defined as:
"a category of biological classification ranking immediately below the genus or subgenus, comprising related organisms or populations potentially capable of interbreeding, and being designated by a binomial that consists of the name of a genus followed by a Latin or latinized uncapitalized noun or adjective agreeing grammatically with the genus name".
Thus, examples of species include Mus musculus (M. musculus), M. abbottii, and M. caroli; and M. musculus, for instance, is further subdivided into sub-species such as M. musculus domesticus and M. musculus bractianus. "Genus" itself is defined as:
"a category of biological classification ranking between the family and the species, comprising structurally or phylogenetically related species or an isolated species exhibiting unusual differentiation, and being designated by a Latin or latinized capitalized singular noun"
An example of a genus would thus be Mus (Mice). (All the definitions in this paragraph are from the "Merriam-Webster OnLine Dictionary" with italics in those definitions added by the Board.)
11.7. According to Article 177(1) EPC, the three texts of the Convention, i.e. in the English, French and German languages, are equally authentic. However, as just demonstrated, the three different terms used in each of the three official languages denote different taxonomic categories. Thus strict compliance with Article 177(1) EPC would lead to the absurd result that the outcome of an Article 53(b) EPC objection would depend on the language of a case - with German, having the term "species" ("Tierarten"), being of the highest taxonomic order and thereby offering the widest objection. While this uncertainty is clearly undesirable, it is unnecessary for the reasons appearing below (see paragraphs 13.3.1 to 13.3.5) to pursue this matter further in the present case. As the respondent argued (in relation to the first auxiliary request - the first request to bring Article 53(b) EPC into play - although the same would have been true of the main request if it had not been disposed of for other reasons), and as the Board agrees, the patent clearly concerns a taxonomic category of animals higher than "species" which represents the widest definition which could be given to the animal exclusion in Article 53(b) EPC.
11.8. To summarise the Board's views regarding Article 53(b) EPC, the principle adopted in G 1/98 concerning plants and "plant varieties" should be followed in the case of animals: a patent should not be granted for a single animal variety (or species or race, depending on which language text of the EPC is used) but can be granted even if varieties may fall within the scope of its claims. The definition of animal variety (or species or race) by reference to taxonomical rank would be consistent with the position in relation to plant varieties and in the interest of legal certainty, allowing assessment under Article 53(b) EPC as interpreted by Rule 23c(b) EPC to be made by considering whether, in a case concerning animals, the technical feasibility of the invention is not confined to a particular animal variety (or species or race). However, the different terms used in each official language denote different taxonomic categories. Thus strict compliance with Article 177(1) EPC would lead to the absurd result that the outcome of an Article 53(b) EPC objection would depend on the language of a case - with German having the highest taxonomic order "species" ("Tierarten") and thereby offering the widest objection.
12. Main Request
The respondent's main request, filed during the oral proceedings, contained the same claims as those upheld by the Opposition Division but without the claims to chromosomes and cells. Thus the independent claims of this request read as follows:
"1. A method for producing a transgenic rodent having an increased probability of developing neoplasms, said method comprising chromosomally incorporating an activated oncogene sequence into the genome of a rodent.
19. A transgenic rodent whose germ cells and somatic cells contain an activated oncogene sequence as a result of chromosomal incorporation into the animal genome, or into the genome of an ancestor of said animal, said oncogene optionally being further defined according to any one of claims 3 to 10."
12.1. Article 52 EPC
12.1.1. Article 52(1) EPC states that European patents shall be granted for any inventions which are susceptible of industrial application, which are new and which involve an inventive step. The technical character of an invention is emphasized in Rule 27(1)(a) and (c) EPC. In accordance with the case law, a subject-matter is to be regarded as an invention if it has a technical character i.e. if it provides a technical contribution to the art (see "Case law of the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office", 4th Edition 2001, page 1).
12.1.2. The claimed method pertains to the field of genetic engineering and the transgenic animals produced by that method may be used as appropriate models for studying different aspects of cancer, such as the development of tissue-specific tumours and the effect of suspected carcinogens (see paragraph 13.2.2 below). They represent technical tools just as other means - such as bacterial tests and culture cell lines - are also technical tools. Thus, both the claimed method and the transgenic animals directly derived therefrom have a technical character. Similarly, the technical feature characterising these transgenic animals - the presence of an activated oncogene which confers an increased probability of developing neoplasm - is also found in their offspring. Therefore, this progeny would also be used as an appropriate technical tool. Thus, the subject-matter of claims 1 and 19 is an invention within the meaning of Article 52 EPC.
12.2. Article 53(a) EPC
The Rule 23d(d) EPC test
12.2.1. It is beyond doubt that the subject-matter of the patent in suit concerns a process for modifying the genetic identity of animals and thus Rule 23d(d) EPC must be considered. Further, it was not in dispute - indeed it was agreed by the parties - that the process is likely to cause those animals suffering. As the request embraces all animals within the taxonomic order Rodentia, suffering will - and must - be present in the case of every such animal - not just mice but also squirrels, beavers, porcupines and every other rodent. In any event, no other conclusion would be possible in respect of a request in which claim 1 causes the rodents of claim 19 to have "an increased probability of developing neoplasms": in other words causes an abnormal - benign or cancerous - tissue growth which results in the animals suffering and eventually in their death. Animal suffering is not just a likelihood but an inevitable consequence of the very purpose of the patent.
12.2.2. The two questions which thus arise are first, whether there is also a likelihood of a substantial medical benefit to man or animal and second, whether that benefit is obtained in the case of all the animals which are likely to suffer i.e. whether there is the necessary correspondence between likely suffering and likely benefit (see paragraph 9.1 above).
12.2.3. There is no evidence on file, either in the patent itself or elsewhere, that any such benefit, let alone a substantial medical benefit, is likely to be derived from applying the claimed process to all rodents, or indeed to any animals of the order Rodentia apart from mice. The necessary correspondence, in terms of the animals in question, between the likely suffering and the likely benefit is absent. The respondent has referred to the advantageous provision of several model systems for studying cancer without being restricted to the limited physiology, metabolism, etc. of mice. However, there is quite simply no evidence to show that all the various animals in the category of rodents are so different that each of them would provide a contribution to cancer studies, such as being specifically suited as a model for studying a specific type of cancer. Thus the respondent's argument appears to be no more than argument - it is purely hypothetical and unsubstantiated by any evidence. Therefore, the Board concludes that the likelihood of substantial medical benefit required by Rule 23d(d) EPC has not been satisfied for rodents.
12.2.4. Accordingly, the main request discloses a likelihood of animal suffering but not a likelihood of medical benefit in the case of all animals embraced by the claims. Consequently, the main request fails the balancing test of Rule 23d(d) EPC and must therefore be refused under Article 53(a) EPC. The main request is accordingly not allowable.
The T 19/90 test
12.2.5. Before proceeding to the first auxiliary request, the Board would add a further observation. As announced during the oral proceedings, the Board considers the same conclusion as regards the main request would have been reached in the framework of a "real" Article 53(a) EPC assessment (see section 10 above). In that event, the test in T 19/90 (OJ EPO 1990, 476, Reasons, paragraph 5) would apply to the main request. As observed above (see paragraph 7.1), "usefulness to mankind" can include medical benefit so the matters to be weighed against each other would essentially be the same in both tests. That more than a likelihood of suffering or usefulness may be considered in applying the T 19/90 test would make no difference since the parties agreed animals would suffer. Taking into account other matters, such as the degree of animal suffering and the availability of alternative non- animal methods, would (assuming such other matters were established on the evidence) merely tilt the balance further against acceptance of the request.
13. First auxiliary request
The respondent's first auxiliary request contained independent claims corresponding to those of the main request but in which references to "rodent" had been replaced by references to "mouse". The independent claims of this request thus read as follows:
"1. A method for producing a transgenic mouse having an increased probability of developing neoplasms, said method comprising chromosomally incorporating an activated oncogene sequence into the genome of a mouse.
19. A transgenic mouse whose germ cells and somatic cells contain an activated oncogene sequence as a result of chromosomal incorporation into the animal genome, or into the genome of an ancestor of said animal, said oncogene optionally being further defined according to any one of claims 3 to 10."
13.1. Article 52 EPC
None of the appellants raised an objection against the specific subject-matter of this request under Article 52 EPC. In the Board's judgment, the conclusion reached for the subject-matter of the main request that it is an invention within the meaning in Article 52 EPC also applies to this request for the same reasons as given in paragraph 12.1.2.
13.2. Article 53(a) EPC.
The Rule 23d(d) test
13.2.1. Under Article 53(a) EPC the first auxiliary request must first be assessed according to the "balancing test" in Rule 23d(d) EPC. As regards the likelihood of animal suffering, there is evidence in the patent itself showing that the specific oncomice produced by the method of the opposed patent develop specific neoplasms and that they have been used for testing compounds suspected of being carcinogens or else suspected of conferring protection against the development of these neoplasms (see page 10, lines 15 to 31). There is thus not just a likelihood but a certainty of animal suffering. Moreover, as already observed in respect of the main request, the parties agreed that any animals resulting from the method of the patent would suffer and this must include mice.
13.2.2. As regards the likelihood of substantial medical benefit, this can at the very least be inferred from the patent itself: the purpose of both the claimed method and the oncomice thereby produced and used for test purposes is to further cancer research. Additionally there is evidence on file, in the form of declarations and post-published documents, demonstrating actual medical benefits achieved using mice such as those obtained by the claimed process. For example, it is stated in document (81) that "the oncomouse may be the closest we can get to a human situation" and that "key genetic pathways controlling mammary gland development (and as an extension cancer) are conserved between mouse and man, and thus the mouse serves as the best approximation." Document (82), a declaration commenting on how oncogenic non-human mammals are of utility and of benefit in scientific and medical research, cites a number of scientific papers (attached as exhibits) reporting such benefits obtained with oncomice. In 1995, the oncomouse was reported as a useful model for in vivo imaging and preclinical screening of breast tumour imaging agents (document (A3)). In 1996, oncomice were used to show how ethanol and cocaine have tumorigenic effect and implicate a specific oncogene product in the deregulation of the immune system (document (A4)). A short-term combination therapy of IL2 and Type 5 adenovirus vectors expressing murin angiostatin was evaluated in an oncomouse model in 2001 demonstrating for the first time a delay and regression in tumour growth (document (A2)). The successful vaccination of oncogenic mice against mammary tumour development by using a DNA vaccine was also described (document (A1)).
13.2.3. As regards the need for correspondence between suffering and benefit (see paragraph 9.1 above), all the animals within the genus "Mus" are closely related to each other in most relevant biological aspects and this makes it credible that any member of the genus could be used as a model system for cancer studies in a manner similar to that taught in the patent using particular mouse examples. There can be no doubt that the consequence of using the claimed method - incorporation of an activated oncogene into the animal chromosome - or the use made of any such mice, would result in suffering while at the same time offering the prospect of a contribution to medical research.
13.2.4. Accordingly, the Board considers that the subject-matter of claims 1 and 19 of the first auxiliary request "passes" the test in Rule 23d(d) EPC and thus does not fall within the category of inventions for which patents shall not be granted under that Rule. The request must therefore be assessed under Article 53(a) EPC without reference to that Rule: in other words, a "real" Article 53(a) EPC objection arises (see paragraph 10.1 above).
The T 19/90 test
13.2.5. The limitation of the auxiliary request to "mouse" also produces a different result in the application of the test in T 19/90 test (OJ EPO 1990, 476, Reasons, paragraph 5). Applying this test, on one side of the balance it is again agreed between the parties that the patented method causes actual suffering to the mice used. On the other side of the balance, actual medical benefit has been demonstrated (see paragraph 13.2.2. above) and this benefit is clearly of use to mankind. Unlike the main request, no suffering is envisaged to any animals without a corresponding prospect of benefit. Thus far, assessment under the T 19/90 test leads to the same result as under the Rule 23d(d) EPC test. However, the T 19/90 test permits other considerations to be taken into account as mentioned above (see paragraphs 10.6 to 10.8). In the present case two such other considerations were raised in argument by the appellants and opponent 3 - the degree of animal suffering and the possibility of using non-animal alternatives to achieve the same aims as the patent in suit.
13.2.6. No evidence of the degree (as opposed to the existence) of animal suffering, an argument advanced by appellant 1. and opponent 3, was produced, which the Board finds wholly unsurprising. To suggest that the degree of suffering could be material is to suggest the possibility of a distinction between "acceptable suffering" and "unacceptable suffering". In the Board's opinion this is not a distinction which the parties in question really wished to evoke and it is certainly not a distinction which would assist in deciding this or similar cases. Those observations are sufficient to show how it would be not only distasteful but effectively impossible for the Board (or any other decision-making instance) to make findings as to degrees of suffering. Both Rule 23d(d) EPC and T 19/90 refer to "suffering" and not "degree of suffering"; in the view of the Board, this reflects the only possible approach - any animal suffering is sufficient to bring Article 53(a) EPC into play and requires a balancing benefit. Accordingly, the degree of animal suffering argument is of no assistance in making the T 19/90 test and, if anything, the unhappy distinction it suggests detracts from the case of those making the argument.
13.2.7. As regards non-animal alternatives, appellants 1 and 3 to 6 and opponent 3 all argued that these should be taken into account. The most pertinent of the alternatives mentioned was cell cultures but no evidence was filed showing any advantage over, or even equality of benefit with, the method of the patent. The respondent rebutted these arguments by observing that only an animal offers the opportunity to use an entire organism including for example the immune system. The respondent also filed a declaration explaining why oncomice provided advantages over cell cultures (document (81), paragraphs 3 and 4). Thus, if this alternative is added to the matters to be weighed up in the T 19/90 test, the result will be, on the available evidence, to tilt the balance away from the appellants and in favour of the respondent.
13.2.8. The same result is reached when applying the T 19/90 test to balance environmental risks against usefulness to mankind. In this case, the same factors are considered except that the agreed suffering to animals is replaced by possible threats to the environment if oncomice were to escape (or to be released, deliberately or accidentally) into the wild. As is only to be expected of a danger yet to materialise, there was no evidence to support such environmental arguments which played very little part in the appeal proceedings. The environmental arguments are thus if anything weaker in this case than in T 356/93 (OJ EPO 1995, 545, Reasons, paragraphs 18 to 19) in which, as regards similar arguments relating to the alleged risks of "escape" of genetically modified plants, Board 3.3.4 considered a threat to the environment could be grounds for an Article 53(a) EPC objection but that, on the evidence before it, such a threat had not been established. In paragraph 18.6 of the Reasons that Board said:
"In the present case, no conclusive evidence has been presented by the appellants showing that the exploitation of the claimed subject-matter is likely to seriously prejudice the environment. In fact, most of the appellants' arguments are based on the possibility that some undesired, destructive events (e.g. the transformation of crops into weeds, spreading of the herbicide- resistance gene to other plants, damage to the ecosystem) might occur. Of course, such events may occur to some extent. This fact has even been admitted by the respondents. However, in the board's judgment, the documentary evidence submitted on this subject is not sufficient to substantiate the existence of a threat to the environment such as to represent a bar to patentability under Article 53(a) EPC."
By comparison, the environmental case of those opposed to the patent in suit is considerably weaker.
13.2.9. The Board considers the environmental issues are at the utmost of neutral effect on the case. While a risk of release or escape exists, just as there is such a risk with zoo or circus animals, the risk can only be regarded as minimally more than hypothetical when one considers the secure conditions under which laboratory mice are kept and the level of regulation of the use and keeping of animals for experimental purposes in most countries. Further, in the event of release or escape, it must be questionable whether oncomice would cause any damage, let alone any lasting damage, to the environment. The only perceivable threat is that, by mating with mice already in the wild, the oncogene would be spread. Against that, there must be the possibility that, because of their manipulated state, oncomice would not survive as long in the wild as non- manipulated mice.
Article 53(a) EPC - Other considerations
13.2.10. Accordingly, for the reasons in the previous five paragraphs, the first auxiliary request "passes" the T 19/90 test. It remains to be considered, under Article 53(a) EPC, whether any other arguments advanced by the appellants or opponent 3 are sufficient to establish that publication or exploitation of the invention as claimed in that request would be contrary to "ordre public" or morality. Those remaining arguments are in summary:
(a) that oncomice pose a threat to evolution;
(b) that the patent will promote an increase in the number of transgenic mice used in cancer research and, more generally, encourage trade in animals;
(c) that the use of genetically manipulated animals (in this case, mice) in medical research is morally unacceptable to the public.
These arguments will be considered in the following paragraphs. The Board observes these all appear to be morality objections, as none of them suggest anything contrary to "ordre public".
13.2.11. As regards the alleged threat to evolution, there was again - and unsurprisingly - no evidence. It is therefore purely a question of argument. There are some developments in the course of evolution which are generally regarded by mankind as regrettable, such as the extinction of certain animals; and others, such as the eradication of the causative agent of smallpox, which are considered as having been indisputably beneficial to mankind. The furtherance of medical research with a view to curing or reducing or eliminating illness and disease can, in general terms, only be regarded as morally correct. As the respondent rightly observed at the oral proceedings, to want to cure cancer is thoroughly moral. The only real question therefore within this evolution argument is whether it is moral to use mice to this end and that is addressed in paragraphs 13.2.13 to 13.2.21 below.
13.2.12. As mentioned above, other arguments ranged from a fear of increased use of transgenic mice in cancer research to increased trade in animals generally. Such arguments come close to if not in fact within the area of irrelevant issues (see section 4 above). It must be remembered that it is the morality of exploitation of the oncomouse invention, and not the morality of animal patents, which is in issue. Thus it appears to the Board that these arguments amount to no more than the suggestion that allowing a patent will increase the use of modified mice. The Board cannot agree with that proposition (a proposition being, in the absence of evidence, all that the argument amounts to). Since a patent grants a temporary monopoly, only a patentee and its licensees can work the patent during its life - in the case of a European and most other patents twenty years. Since unfettered competition is usually considered to lead to increased economic activity, such a monopoly period may actually mean that the use of modified mice is for an initial period lower than it would otherwise be. For what it is worth, the respondent's statement in argument at the oral proceedings (almost amounting to an admission against interest) that the present invention had been "remarkably unprofitable" (see paragraph XXXI(21) above) must be considered as substantially negating the wholly unsupported arguments of the appellants: if the patent really had increased trade in transgenic animals, one would have expected the holder of a monopoly for certain such animals to have done better than the respondent says.
13.2.13. Finally, the Board will now consider the further material regarding public attitudes at the priority date. Strictly speaking only the evidence relating to the present invention should be reviewed yet, as the respondent correctly observed (paragraph XXXI(11) above), no such evidence was produced. Thus the best the Board can do is to consider the arguments presented as to the public's perception of the genetic manipulation of animals in general. In this connection the material either filed as evidence or brought to the Board's attention as part of various parties' arguments included, in the case of the appellants: public unease; the outcome of the corresponding Canadian proceedings; references to animals in European treaties, EU and national legislation on the experimental use of animals, and statements and resolutions of various bodies including churches and national and EU parliaments; and opinion polls; and, in the case of the respondent, the accepted use of animals in medical research.
13.2.14. However, before considering this material, the Board wants to emphasize once more (see paragraph 10.8) that, as with all arguments, public perception arguments under Article 53(a) EPC must be substantiated by evidence. While the Board does not for one moment consider that any party sought by not producing evidence to be misleading, it is not sufficient proof of a fact simply to allege that fact in written or oral argument. To take but one example, that the proposed European Constitution provides for animal protection may easily be proved by filing a copy of the proposed constitution. Similarly, it is the generally accepted procedure, in most European countries (cf. Article 125 EPC) and beyond, that laws of other jurisdictions than the one before which proceedings are pending must be proved as a matter of evidence, for example by filing as documents copies (in translation if necessary) of such laws and/or as appropriate by filing as expert evidence the opinions of lawyers in the relevant jurisdictions. While the Board could have ignored all unsupported allegations (not least because it expressly invited the parties to produce evidence - see paragraph XI(2) above), it has where possible given them such weight as it can - in part because, even in the absence of evidence, the matters alleged may be well-known and/or easily checked, and in part because the respondent, while commenting on the overall shortage of direct evidence from the appellants, answered all their arguments including those based on unsupported allegations.
13.2.15. Appellant 1 argued that animal patents arouse "public unease" such as that in the United States noted in T 19/90 (OJ EPO 1990, 476, Facts, paragraph II) and reflected in the corresponding Canadian decision. The relevant passage in T 19/90 which the appellant refers to reads:
"... (c) The Division also felt that it should consider Article 53(a) EPC, which excluded patents for inventions whose publication or exploitation would be contrary to "ordre public" or morality; in the United States, for example, the patenting of higher organisms had encountered severe criticism for ethical reasons." (Emphasis added)
It is in fact no more than a mention by the earlier Board of an observation made by the Examining Division in the decision then under appeal. As a statement, it appears to the Board to be nothing more than an extremely general truism with which even the respondent would agree (see its reply of 2 April 2004, paragraph 13) and which would have no more impact on the case even if it could be demonstrated as referring to European, and not United States, opinion as at the effective date of 22 June 1984, and not late 1990.
13.2.16. The Board has obtained and considered the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the corresponding case in that jurisdiction. As appellant 1 mentioned, and as the respondent observed, the decision turned on the meaning of terms present in the Canadian patent legislation but not in the EPC. After three previous appeals following the examiner's decision, the Supreme Court finally decided that the terms "manufacture" and "composition of matter" excluded higher life forms. In summary, not only did this decision arise in a non- European country, not only did it concern legislative terms which do not exist in the patent law of the EPC, not only were the views of the Supreme Court expressed in 2002, but the decision quite clearly does not establish that animal patents arouse public unease.
13.2.17. Very little evidence was provided in support of the arguments based on treaties, legislation, political and religious beliefs, to the effect that animals should be protected and animal patenting should be forbidden. However, even in the absence of all but a small volume of evidence (most notably documents (28) and (29), proposed resolutions of the European Parliament of 8 and 10 February 1993), the Board can readily accept that care and concern for the well- being of animals is an accepted tenet of European culture and was also such a tenet at the priority date of the patent in suit.
13.2.18. Against this it must also be noted that appellant 1 also referred to EC Directives 86/609 and 98/44 and to the licensing system in the United Kingdom for the use of animals in research. In doing so appellant 1 was apparently seeking to show that, in keeping with the concern for animal well-being referred to in the previous paragraph, the use of animals for experimental medical research is strictly controlled. However, the existence of these Directives and national legislation also supports the respondent's observation that the use of animals in medical and scientific research, albeit under strict controls in the measures referred to by appellant 1, is also an established feature of European culture. The Board agrees and thus finds that not just animal welfare but also the use of animals for research and testing is established in European culture and was so established at the priority date of the patent.
13.2.19. The remaining category of evidence put forward by the appellants (principally appellants 1 and 2) was opinion polls. In paragraph 10.4 above, the Board has already expressed the opinion that, like Board 3.3.4 in T 356/93 (OJ EPO 1995, 545), it does not consider opinion pol9ls as reliable tools for assessing public perception. The respondent's objection that in order to answer poll questions meaningfully those questioned would need a certain level of education in several fields (see paragraph XXXI(17) above) is to much the same effect. Appellant 1 refers to a UK poll, which it commissioned itself, conducted in 1998, and to a Europe-wide poll on biotechnology of 16,000 persons in 1996. Appellant 2 refers to one poll of 500 persons in Germany in 1993. No information was put forward about the methodology of such polls - for example, whether they were conducted by trained professional pollsters or by casual staff recruited for the particular poll in question; whether the respondents were stopped on street corners and answered questions in a hurry or were invited into comfortable premises and given time to think; whether they were volunteers or were paid for participating; what other questions they were asked as well as those specifically relied on in these proceedings - if a previous question might provoke moral outrage, that could carry over to the question relied on; whether the questions they were asked were "open" - such as, "What is your opinion about genetic manipulation of animals?", a question which allows a variety of responses - or "closed" - such as "Do you consider genetic manipulation of animals acceptable?", a question which allows only one of two responses; and how the results were analysed, for example how "don't know" responses were treated.
13.2.20. With those reservations, the Board has considered what can be extracted from the information it has been given about the three polls relied on.
(a) Appellant 1's own poll conducted in the United Kingdom in 1998 (sample size and composition unknown, number of questions asked unspecified) found 82% of those questioned were opposed to animal patenting and concludes those persons "must, by definition, have been opposed to patenting the oncomouse" (see appellant 1' grounds of appeal, paragraph 36(f)). However, it is exploitation of the oncomouse invention, and not the patenting of animals in general which is the issue in the present case (see paragraphs 4.3 and 4.4. above). Thus, Appellant 1's conclusion cannot be correct inasmuch as those who were asked could not have known of the use envisaged for the oncomouse. At most, this poll shows there might at that date have been some public reluctance in one large European country to endorse the exploitation of the present invention.
(b) Appellant 1 also relied on a Europe-wide poll of 16,000 persons conducted by the European Union in 1996. This was apparently restricted to matters of biotechnology. In answer to the question "Do you think it is morally acceptable for society to develop genetically modified animals for laboratory research studies, such as a mouse that has genes which cause it to develop cancer?", appellant 1 says 47.8% (i.e. 7,648 persons) thought it was unacceptable and 41.2% (i.e. 6,592 persons) thought it was acceptable. This question is manifestly directed to the present invention, so the answer must be carefully evaluated. The first observation is that the number of persons whose views are not known (11% or 1,760 persons) is greater than the difference between those who are reported as expressing a view for or against (6.6% or 1,056 persons). The second observation is that, apart from any other questions in the poll not mentioned by appellant 1, the value of the question was undermined by its nature: it is a "double question", incorporating both the general and the particular. If the poll had first asked "Do you think it is morally acceptable for society to develop genetically modified animals for laboratory research studies?" and then, as the next question, to have asked "Do you think it is morally acceptable for society to develop a mouse that has genes which cause it to develop cancer?", the value of the second question would have been extremely limited. However, to have combined the two questions in one makes the response of those polled to the specific issue of a genetically modified mouse so loaded as to be virtually meaningless.
(c) Appellant 2 refers to a poll of 500 persons conducted in Germany in 1993 in which 70% said they considered the patenting of genetically manipulated animals for cancer research to be morally reprehensible. Thus, all that his poll establishes is that 350 persons in the largest European country disapproved of genetic manipulation of animals for cancer research in 1993 - that is sufficient to show it has no evidential value in the present case.
13.2.21. Having thus considered all the "public perception" arguments, with or without evidence to support them, the only conclusion the Board can make is that in current European culture, and thus (in the absence of evidence to the contrary) in such culture at the priority date of the patent in suit, animals are on the one hand respected as sentient beings which are not to be gratuitously abused or misused (see paragraph 13.2.17 above); and, on the other hand, animals are accepted as being important in the testing of medicaments and curative methods prior to human application (see paragraph 13.2.18 above). One result of this dichotomy is, to use appellant 1's expression, the "unease" which may arise in relation to patents involving animals as to which both appellant 1 and the respondent agreed (see paragraphs XXIV(2) and XXXI(16) above). However, there is nothing before the Board to suggest that such unease could be elevated to the status of moral disapproval in European culture of the use of animals for medical research, let alone moral disapproval of the use of mice in cancer research - i.e. moral disapproval of the exploitation of the present invention. Accordingly, Article 53(a) EPC does not constitute a bar to patentability of the subject- matter of the first auxiliary request.
13.3. Article 53(b) EPC
13.3.1. It follows from the Board's observations (see section 11. above) that an Article 53(b) EPC objection will only succeed in excluding the present auxiliary request from patentability if one or more claims of the request are to a taxonomic category at least as narrow as an "animal species" - the broadest of the three taxonomic categories excluded in the three language texts of the Article 53(b) EPC. Appellants 3 to 6 and opponent 3 all asserted that the transgenic mice of the patent were a new species. In the case of opponent 3, this was because the mice inherited one particular characteristic, namely an increased probability of developing tumours. In the Board's opinion, this cannot be enough to create a new species when the possible "starting material" in accordance with the claims may originate from a whole genus of animals, namely from all mice. If opponent 3 was correct, one could perform the claimed method of the patent upon, for example, three different species of mice which would as a result all become members of one new species. However opponent 3 produced no evidence that the alleged new species would be seen or accepted as such by anyone, let alone by any expert in fields which require classification of animals such as biology or zoology.
13.3.2. Appellants 3 to 6 also produced no evidence to support their use of the term "species". They argued that species were mere abstract concepts and the intention of the law was to exclude all animals falling within any species. The Board rejects this argument - however Article 53(b) EPC may be defined, it is clear it only excludes a limited category of animals and not all animals (as already observed - see paragraph 4.4). The Board's view is supported by the decision of the Enlarged Board in G 1/98 (OJ EPO 2000, 111) in relation to plants with which Article 53(b) EPC is also concerned. The same appellants also argued that, if the legislator had wished to allow patents for new species of plants or animals it would have said so explicitly. Again, the Board disagrees. The legislator may frame the exclusions from patentability in such words or form as it wishes (again, as already observed - see paragraphs 5.8 and 7.4). While it is true that, as observed in section 11, the differences in the words used in the three official language texts of Article 53(b) EPC is unfortunate, it is at least clear beyond any doubt that the Article does not represent a general exclusion of all animal patents.
13.3.3. The case-law cited by appellants 3 to 6 in support of their arguments does not, in the Board's judgment, assist them. They argued first that paragraph 97 of the Reasons in T 1054/96 (OJ EPO 1998, 511) referred to Article 4(2) of EU Directive 98/44 as being satisfied by permitting process claims. Article 4(2) of EU Directive 98/44 is effectively identical to Rule 23c(b) EPC. In T 1054/96 Board 3.3.4 referred a number of questions concerning Article 53(b) EPC to the Enlarged Board of Appeal whose opinion on those questions forms G 1/98. Thus the Reasons in the referring decision put forward alternative views and, by definition, do not express a final view. Paragraph 97, on which the appellants rely, begins with the following sentence:
"On the other hand, it could be considered that Article 4(2) of the directive is satisfied by permitting process claims."
The words "On the other hand" serve to demonstrate this is merely one of alternative views; and indeed the previous paragraph 96 not only contains a different view but, following several quotations from the Directive made in paragraph 95, states in its first sentence:
"From these quotations the most natural deduction is that the drafters of the Directive intended and the EC Parliament approved that in all cases where the technical situation is such that a concept of genetic engineering is the invention which can be applied to more than one variety the resulting products shall be patentable, even if they are plant varieties."
It is thus apparent that paragraphs 96 and 97 of T 1054/96 put forward, respectively, the possibility of patenting plant products and patenting plant processes and, if anything, the referring Board thought patenting of plant products the "most natural" interpretation. This simply cannot assist parties seeking to exclude animal product claims under Article 53(b) EPC.
13.3.4. Appellants 3 to 6 also relied on paragraph 3.3.3 of the Reasons in G 1/98. They maintained that in that paragraph the Enlarged Board had said that a copying machine for use exclusively in forging banknotes was not patentable, whereas the same machine, if to be used for other purposes, could be patentable. The appellants argued that, by analogy, the claims of the first auxiliary request exclusively directed to mouse species could not be allowed. The relevant passage in G 1/98 (Reasons, paragraph 3.3.3) reads as follows:
"It may be helpful to look at the neighbouring exclusion in Article 53(a) EPC and ask what the situation would be if a claim were to cover something immoral or contrary to "ordre public". Suppose that a claimed invention defined a copying machine with features resulting in an improved precision of reproduction and suppose further that an embodiment of this apparatus could comprise further features (not claimed but apparent to the skilled person) the only purpose of which would be that it should also allow reproduction of security strips in banknotes strikingly similar to those in genuine banknotes. In such a case, the claimed apparatus would cover an embodiment for producing counterfeit money which could be considered to fall under Article 53(a) EPC. There is, however, no reason to consider the copying machine as claimed to be excluded since its improved properties could be used for many acceptable purposes."
It is manifestly apparent not only that this passage refers to Article 53(a) EPC and not to Article 53(b) EPC but also that it does not say what the appellants argued that it said - it says that one possible unlawful embodiment does not render an invention unpatentable. This quite simply does not support the analogy claimed by the appellants. Furthermore, even if the purported analogy was viable, to substitute "mouse species claims" for "money forging claims" assumes it has already been accepted that the claims in issue are directed to mouse species, which is manifestly not the case. As already observed, these appellants simply called the mice of the first auxiliary request a species without any evidential basis for doing so.
13.3.5. The remaining argument of appellants 3 to 6 regarding Article 53(b) EPC was that the claimed method for producing transgenic mice was an "essentially biological process for the production of animals" and thus excluded by the Article. However, Rule 23b(5) EPC states:
"A process for the production of plants or animals is essentially biological if it consists entirely of natural phenomena such as crossing or selection."
It is self-evident that a process which includes genetic manipulation does not consist entirely of natural phenomena.
13.3.6. Accordingly, Article 53(b) EPC does not exclude the patentability of the first auxiliary request.
13.4. Articles 123(2)(3) EPC and 84 EPC
No objections to the first auxiliary request have been raised by any party under these Articles. A formal basis for all the claims of the request is found in the application as originally filed. The claimed subject matter concerns mice, whereas the claims as granted were concerned with non-human mammalian animals. There is no extension of the conferred protection. The claimed subject-matter is clear. Thus, the requirements of Articles 123(2)(3) EPC and 84 EPC are fulfilled.
13.5. Article 54 EPC
None of the parties submitted further arguments nor provided further evidence with regard to novelty in relation to the claimed transgenic mice or to the process for producing them. In the Board's judgment, there are no documents on file which would destroy the novelty of the claimed subject-matter.
13.6. Article 56 EPC
13.6.1. At the priority date of the opposed patent, methods for introducing genes into the germ line of an animal at an early (one-cell) development stage already existed and transgenic animals had already been produced by such methods (see page 3, lines 5 to 15 of the patent). However, the effect of introducing into the chromosome of an animal, at such an early stage of development, an activated oncogene known to interfere with the regulation of cell division was still under investigation.
13.6.2. The closest prior art is, as identified by the opposition division, document (1). This document refers to previous studies wherein the development of mouse two-cell embryos (but not that of morulae) to the blastocyst stage was blocked by the introduction of tumorigenic SV40 viral DNA (cf. page 1250, right- hand column, first paragraph). It shows that the introduction by microinjection of tumorigenic SV40 viral DNA into pre-implantation mouse blastocysts results in the normal development of such embryos into mature and apparently healthy animals that are tumour- free at the age of one year (see page 1251, right-hand column, Results).
13.6.3. The expectations of the skilled person when incorporating an activated oncogene into the chromosome of an animal (a method which is performed at the embryonal stage) would have been either the death of the embryo due to the interference of the activated oncogene with the normal cell division at a very early stage of development, or the normal development of healthy mature animals due to the absence of any effect of the activated oncogene at later stages of development. There is no other prior art suggesting a different result, namely no interference with cell division in the early stages of development but interference at a later stage (maturity) resulting in increased probability of developing tumours. Therefore, there was no objective reason to expect that at least a few embryos would inevitably survive which would develop into adults having an increased probability to develop neoplasms. Thus, contrary to the opinion of appellants 3 to 6 (see paragraph XXI(1) above), there was no reason to expect success of any degree whatsoever. The claimed method (claim 1) and its observed result (claim 19) are non-obvious.
13.6.4. In the light of the above considerations, the Board concludes that the requirements of Article 56 EPC are fulfilled.
13.7. Article 83 EPC
Appellants 3 to 6 provided neither technical evidence nor experimental data nor any reference to any documents to support their argument of lack of sufficient disclosure. Instead, they simply pointed out that the respondent had emphasised the difficulties of obtaining oncomice when arguing in favour of inventive step. The Board agrees that, according to the established case law (see "Case law of the Boards of Appeal", 4th Edition 2001, page 114), the same level of skill has to be applied when considering inventive step and sufficiency of disclosure in the same invention. However, the case law also establishes (for example, T 19/90 OJ EPO 1990, 476, Reasons, paragraph 3.3) a patent may only be objected to for lack of sufficient disclosure if there are serious doubts, substantiated by verifiable facts, that the claimed subject-matter could be reproduced. Taking into account the complete absence of any such facts and that, moreover, the patent in suit describes a method which is successful (albeit at a modest level), the Board concludes that the requirements of Article 83 EPC are fulfilled.
13.8. Article 57 EPC
The industrial applicability of oncomice resides, in particular, in their use as animal models for testing materials suspected of being carcinogenic as well as for testing materials for the ability to confer protection against the development of neoplasms.
13.9. Allowability of the First Auxiliary Request
For the reasons set out in paragraphs 13.1 to 13.8 above, the Board considers the First Auxiliary Request, with claims limited to "mice", to fulfil the requirements of the EPC and the request is accordingly allowable.
14. Requests to refer questions to the Enlarged Board of Appeal
14.1. Article 112 EPC sets out the circumstances in which a Board of Appeal shall refer a question to the Enlarged Board of Appeal as such:
"(1) In order to ensure uniform application of the law, or if an important point of law arises:
(a) the Board of Appeal shall, during proceedings on a case and either of its own motion or following a request from a party to the appeal, refer any question to the Enlarged Board of Appeal if it considers that a decision is required for the above purposes."
A consistent interpretation of this provision in the case law (inter alia J 7/90, OJ EPO 1993,133; J 16/90, OJ EPO 1992, 260) is that, although a question may involve an important point of law, it will only be referred to the Enlarged Board of Appeal if the answer to it is necessary to decide the case under consideration. Accordingly, the Board is only required to refer questions to the Enlarged Board when no other course is open to it in order to arrive at a decision. The parties should therefore appreciate that, if the questions they asked to be referred to the Enlarged Board are not so referred, it does not necessarily mean that the Board considers those questions to be unimportant but just that referral is unnecessary to dispose of the present case. Subject to that general comment, the Board considers in turn each of the proposed questions to be referred. Where a proposed question has already been disposed of earlier in this decision, reference will be made back to the relevant earlier passage herein.
14.2. Appellants 3 to 6 requested that the following question be referred to the Enlarged Board of Appeal:
"With reference to G1/98: Is a claim allowable if it is directed exclusively to transgenic animal races?"
As the Board has observed (see paragraph 13.3.1 above), the transgenic mice embraced by the claims of the first auxiliary request do not, as appellants 3 to 6. asserted, form a category as limited as an animal species. Such mice could not therefore form a yet narrower category such as an animal race; thus, while slightly confusing, the difference in terms used by those appellants, in their Article 53(b) EPC arguments and in their proposed question to be referred to the Enlarged Board, is of no effect. The reference in the question to G 1/98 is to those appellants' argument (using the term "species") based on paragraph 3.3.3 in that Enlarged Board decision but that argument has been dealt with in paragraph 13.3.4 above from which it is apparent that the argument was based on false premises. Accordingly, not only has the issue been disposed of above but also the question is not one of importance and, for both those reasons, it is unnecessary to refer this question to the Enlarged Board of Appeal.
14.3. The respondent also requested that the Board refer to the Enlarged Board of Appeal the questions in its letter of 13 May 2004. Those questions were presented on what was termed "a precautionary basis" and, in the light of earlier findings in this decision, it may be unsurprising that none of these questions have been referred to the Enlarged Board of Appeal. However, to deal with those questions in order:
"1. Does Article 53(a) or (b) exclude the patenting of animals in general?"
The answer is clearly "No" for the reasons in paragraphs 4.3 to 4.4 above.
"2. At what date is the morality or "ordre public" test of Article 53(a) to be assessed?"
The answer is the filing or priority date of the patent, as the case may be - see section 8 and paragraph 10.9 above.
"3. If the answer to question (2) is other than at the European filing date or priority date, is it possible for the legal validity of claimed subject-matter under Article 53(a) to change with time?"
In view of the answer to the question (2), this question does not arise.
"4. If the answer to question (2) is at the European filing date or priority date, is it permissible for an invention to be excluded from patentability under Article 53(a) as a consequence of evidence or facts which is or were not current at the European filing date or priority date, as the case may be?"
As the Board has held (see paragraphs 9.5 and 10.9 above), evidence arising after the filing date or priority date may be permitted in the assessment of patentability under Article 53(a) EPC but such evidence must be directed to the position at the filing date or priority date.
"5. Does Rule 23d(d), when referring to "substantial medical benefit", set a test which goes beyond the meaning of Article 53(a) as interpreted without knowledge of this Rule?"
This question has already been considered in extenso in section 7 above and, for the reasons in that section, the Board sees no need to refer this question to the Enlarged Board of Appeal.
"6. If the answer to question (5) is "no", are the requirements of Rule 23d(d) satisfied by a reasonable expectation or hope of "substantial medical benefit" at the date of assessment for Article 53(a) purposes?"
This question was answered in paragraphs 9.3 and 9.6 above.
"7. Is it relevant to a consideration of whether claimed product subject-matter meets the requirements of Article 53(a) that such product subject-matter may have been generated outside the EPC jurisdiction by use of a process or method which would itself be unpatentable under Article 53(a)?"
This question raises issues which were not the subject of argument in the appeal proceedings. This appears in particular to be a question raised by the respondent on a precautionary basis. It is in any event evident from this decision that it was unnecessary to answer this question.
"8. If the answer to question (1) is "no", what is the proper extent of the exclusion from patentability under Article 53(b)?
This has been considered in section 11 above from which it is clear that the proper extent of the exclusion from patentability under Article 53(b) EPC is one of the terms "animal varieties", "races animales" or "Tierarten".
"9. If the answer to question (8) is any one or more of "animal varieties", "races animales" or "Tierarten", how is/are such term or terms to be interpreted in actual practice?"
As is apparent from paragraph 11.7, to dispose of the present case no more need be decided as to the interpretation of those terms than is contained in section 11 above.
"10. If the answer to question (8) is anything other than one or more of the terms listed in question (9), how is the nature of such exclusion from patentability to be interpreted in actual practice?"
Since the answer to question (8) is not anything other than one of those terms, this question does not arise.
Accordingly the Board sees no reason to refer any of the questions filed by the respondent to the Enlarged Board of Appeal.
15. Costs Requests
15.1. The requests of both the respondent and appellants 3 to 6 for payment of costs to be met by the EPO are in respect of the second oral proceedings before the Opposition Division. Such requests are, to the best of the Board's knowledge, unprecedented; and, since they do not relate to any power possessed by the Board, there can be no question of such requests being allowed. However, since the only response to these requests which the Board could announce at the conclusion of the oral proceedings was that these requests must be refused only for the reason that the Board has no power to allow them, some explanation of the Board's views is appropriate.
15.2. The first oral proceedings before the Opposition Division were held on 21 to 24 November 1995 and the second on 6 to 7 November 2001. The Opposition Division's communication of 20 September 2000 mentioned, first, that there had been a change in the composition of the Opposition Division since the oral proceedings in November 1995 in that the legally qualified member had been replaced. It is not clear exactly when this happened but it is clear that it had occurred by the date of the communication. This was not given as a reason for offering new oral proceedings but in such circumstances such an offer was clearly correct at the time it was made (see T 862/98 of 17 August 1999, Reasons, paragraph 2.3). Second, the communication observed that the Administrative Council had enacted Rules 23b to 23e EPC with effect from 1 September 1999 and reference was also made to decision G 1/98 (OJ EPO 2000, 111) which had become available. The Opposition Division therefore considered the legal position was not the same as at the time of the previous oral proceedings and offered the opportunity for further oral proceedings. Again, that was a correct offer to make at the time it was made (see Article 116(1) EPC and T 194/96 of 10 October 1996, Reasons, paragraphs 2 to 3). Thus the question the costs requests raise is: could and/or should the opposition proceedings have been disposed of before either of these events (the change of composition or change in the law) arose? The date of the change of composition is not clear so, the change in the law having taken effect on 1 September 1999 (OJ EPO 1999, 437 et seq), that is the key date for this purpose.
15.3. The Board's review of the file leads to the following observations. First, the parties are in part responsible for the delays in the first instance proceedings - to take only one, and possibly the worst, example: after the proceedings were continued in writing after the first oral proceedings for the parties to comment on the requests filed during the oral proceedings, the patent proprietor made four requests for two month extensions of time such that it obtained a total of twelve months to respond to comments of other parties. As for the arguments of several opponents, these almost invited delay in that, from the beginning (i.e. from the grounds of opposition), they drew attention to, and in some cases relied solely on, the then pending debates in the European Parliament on transgenic animals and the proposals for legislation on biotechnological inventions. Second, although the file does not reveal this as such, the Opposition Division was without doubt aware in the period from late 1995 onwards that the European Parliament was contemplating legislation which might impinge on cases such as the present and which eventually led to European Directive 98/44/EC and to the new Rules. It was also no doubt aware of the referral of 28 July 1995 by the President of the EPO of a question regarding the interpretation of Article 53(b) EPC to the Enlarged Board of Appeal, a referral which led to decision G 3/95 (OJ EPO 1996, 169) rejecting the referral as inadmissible. And it is clear from the Opposition Division's communication that it was aware of the further referral by Board 3.3.4's decision of 13 October 1997 (T 1054/96 OJ EPO 1998, 511) of further such questions to the Enlarged Board which gave rise to G 1/98 (OJ EPO 2000, 111).
15.4. All the matters referred to in the previous paragraph may, in answer to the question why the first instance proceedings took so long, be viewed as mitigating circumstances. However, nothing appears from the file to suggest why those proceedings needed to take as long as nearly ten years. If the delay may have been in part attributable to the demands of some parties, the Opposition Division should not have acceded so liberally to such demands. If the Opposition Division expected developments in the law, whether by way of amendments to the EPC or Enlarged Board decisions, to affect the present case, it should (as is often the practice when referrals to the Enlarged Board are pending) have announced to the parties that it intended to adjourn the present case until such developments occurred, not least because the parties would then have had the chance to be heard about the proposed delay. In the absence of any such announcement, the allegation that the case had been delayed so as to allow the introduction of the new Rules to affect its outcome (see paragraphs XXVII(2) and XXXI(4) above) was, even if not in fact the case, bound to gain some credence as the apparent reason for the extreme delay. From there it is only a short step to the further allegation that the Opposition Division may have delayed the proceedings at the instigation of or under pressure from others within the EPO (see paragraphs XXVI(2) and 5.4 above). However well- intentioned the motives for delay may have been and however much the delay may be attributable to the parties as well as the Opposition Division, all these matters only explain the delay, they do not justify it.
15.5. That there was unjustified delay, as alleged by the parties, is clear - on any view, ten years to dispose of first instance proceedings is far too long. Measured by reference even to bad examples of delay to be found in the case law of the Boards of Appeal, the delays in the present case were extreme (see for example T 900/02 of 28 April 2004, Reasons, paragraph 3 and the other decisions referred to there). The parties and the public should have known far sooner whether the patent in suit was to be maintained and if so in what form. The priority date being 22. June 1984, the opposition proceedings only ended when the life of the patent had virtually expired. Ten years to dispose of proceedings at one instance is much longer than some periods which have been found not to be "within a reasonable time" contrary to Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Accordingly, while it was correct to offer the parties further oral proceedings at the time that offer was made, the proceedings should never have been allowed to continue until the reasons for that offer arose. The question now facing the Board is, what can it do about this sorry state of affairs? Its powers in such circumstances are limited to two remedies.
15.6. First, if it allows an appeal and if it considers it equitable by reason of a substantial procedural violation to do so, it may reimburse the appeal fee (Rule 67 EPC). In the present case, the appeals have been allowed (in as much as the patent has been narrowed in scope from "rodents" to "mice"), so Rule 67 EPC could apply. The delay in the opposition proceedings amounted beyond question to a procedural violation. Whether that violation was "substantial" depends on whether or not it had a substantive effect on the outcome of the proceedings (see "Case Law of the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office", 4th edition 2001, pages 555 to 556). If, as alleged, the delay was deliberately imposed in order to ensure the new Rules applied to this case, then a substantive effect on the outcome was at the very least intended. However, this point need not be examined further since, in the Board's opinion, it would not be equitable to reimburse the appeal fees of the appellants making the costs requests for several reasons - first, appellants 1. and 2 made no such request but have the same equitable claim to some relief for the delay all the parties suffered; second, the same consideration also applies to those parties who did not appeal; third, the appeal fee is a trivial sum compared with the gravity of the delay and the likely additional costs thereby incurred; fourth, the respondent is as deserving as the appellants but, having paid no appeal fee, cannot obtain any relief under Rule 67 EPC; and fifth and last, an order for reimbursement of the appeal fee is no more than an order to repay to a party money necessarily spent to appeal - in the present case the requests are for compensation for expenditure which should never have been incurred.
15.7. Second, if the Board finds the first instance proceedings contained fundamental deficiencies, it must remit the case to the first instance unless there are special reasons for doing otherwise (Article 10, Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal). For similar reasons to those mentioned in the previous paragraph, the Board's powers under Article 10 RPBA are inappropriate. There is no doubt whatsoever that a fundamental deficiency in the first instance proceedings occurred but, equally, there is no doubt that remittal would achieve nothing for any of the parties in the current circumstances. The special, indeed overwhelming, reason for not remitting the case under Article 10 RPBA is that the deficiency (i.e. the delay) was so extreme that the additional delay which remittal would cause would just add insult to injury (see T 346/92 of 29 July 1993, Reasons, paragraph 7; T 900/02 of 28 April 2004, Reasons, paragraph 18).
15.8. In the circumstances the only satisfactory step which could be taken would be to pay all the parties their costs incurred by the delay and the only appropriate party to make such payment would be the EPO, the authority responsible for the Opposition Division. However, as already indicated, the Board has no power to make an order against the EPO to pay any costs. For that and only that reason, the Board must find the requests of appellants 3 to 6 and the respondent inadmissible.
For these reasons it is decided that:
1. The decision under appeal is set aside.
2. The case is remitted to the first instance with the order to maintain the patent on the basis of:
the first auxiliary request filed during the oral proceedings,
the description pages 3, 6 and 10 as amended during the oral proceedings,
pages 4, 5, 7 to 9 as granted, and Figures 1 to 8 as in the patent as granted.
3. The requests to refer questions to the Enlarged Board of Appeal are refused.
4. The requests for payment of costs by the European Patent Office are dismissed as inadmissible. | <urn:uuid:4885ed48-e142-465b-ba97-0d2c55395008> | CC-MAIN-2017-34 | http://www.epo.org/law-practice/case-law-appeals/recent/t030315ex1.html | 2017-08-20T09:54:56Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886106367.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20170820092918-20170820112918-00460.warc.gz | en | 0.960234 | 47,906 |
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Just like April 15th when adults learn about taxation and come to realize how much of their income has been taken away to pay the tax man, October 31st has it's own tax based significance.
Halloween is the day many parents use to teach their children about paying taxes with the well known candy tax. For those that are unfamiliar with the candy tax, it is the day at least in my household, where my children learn what it means to pay taxes. After a long evening of going door to door collecting goodies they are required to empty their take on the kitchen table and pay their tax to the head of the sdmoderate household.
Unlike the IRS, I am usually quite easy to deal with as my tax only consists of any Butterfinger bars that might have been collected and since my kids don't like them anyway it is usually quite painless for them.
So if anyone from Canistota is getting ready to hand out candy, please consider supporting the tax man by dropping a Butterfinger in the bag of the sdmoderate twins when they come to your door.
UPDATE: Looks like I am going to have to increase my tax rate to include Snickers bars as the tax collection on the Butterfingers was pretty slim...
From the Email bag.
Planned Parenthood has just launched a text messaging campaign that will allow you to keep up on the results on Referred Law 6 next Tuesday.
You gotta love the technology these days...
On November 7, South Dakota voters have the chance to overturn their state’s abortion ban. You can be one of the first to know the results! Join our Action Network and we will send an alert to your cell phone when the results of the South Dakota ballot initiative are announced. Just fill out the form at the link below or text “PP” to #75528.
Standard text messaging rates apply. Look for your confirmation message shortly! If you don’t get it text “PP” to #75528
Monday, October 30, 2006
It is based on Wordpress and includes all the same functionality of that popular blogging platform without the hassles of setting it up on your own. It is still in beta but if you always wanted your own blog but were afraid to start why don't you give it a try. Oh and did I mention that it is totally free?
The incumbent Republican would win 57-35 with 8 percent undecided if the results of the Nov. 7 election mirror the outcome of a recent Mason-Dixon Polling and Research survey of 800 likely South Dakota voters.Rounds has big leads in just about every demographic other than with registered Democrats.
The Argus Leader sponsored the poll.
The statewide results of the telephone survey, done Tuesday through Thursday, match almost exactly a late-October poll by the same firm in 2002 when Rounds ran against Democrat Jim Abbott. That poll showed Rounds up 55-36. Rounds won that election by about 15 points.
The Democrats finally had a viable candidate to challenge the Republican stranglehold in Pierre but for whatever reason his campaign never really got off the ground and now Billion sits 22 points behind with only 8 days remaining. I guess we can stick a fork in it...
The quarter that was engraved by John Mercanti, which depicts our state bird the Chinese ring-necked pheasant flying over Mt. Rushmore, will be initially available at Great Western Bank locations throughout South Dakota which was chosen as the official launch bank for the coin.
The quarter is the 40th in the series of 50 to be released to correspond to South Dakota’s admittance into the United States.
A husband wakes up with a huge hangover the night after a business function.
He forces himself to open his eyes and the first thing he sees is a couple of aspirins next to a glass of water on the side table. And, next to them, a single red rose!
The husband sits up in bed and sees his clothing in front of him, all clean and pressed.
He looks around the room and sees that it is in perfect order, spotlessly clean. So is the rest of the house. He takes the aspirins, cringes when he sees a huge black eye staring back at him in the bathroom mirror and notices a note on the table: Honey, breakfast is on the stove, I left early to go shopping. Love you!
He stumbles to the kitchen and sure enough, there is hot breakfast and the morning newspaper. His son is also at the table, eating. The husband asks, Son, what happened last night?
Well, you came home after 3 am, drunk and out of your mind. You broke the coffee table, puked in the hallway and got that black eye when you ran into the door.
The husband asks, So, why is everything in such perfect order, so clean, I have a rose and breakfast is on the table waiting for me?
His son replies, Oh, THAT! . . . Mom dragged you to the bedroom and when she tried to take your pants off, you screamed: Leave me alone, woman, I’m married!!
Red rose bud--$3
Saying the right thing, at the right time . . . PRICELESS!
Sunday, October 29, 2006
According to the statewide poll conducted for the Argus Leader, 52 percent of voters polled would vote to reject the ban; 42 percent would vote to keep it.What is really telling and what even many pro-life supporters have been saying all along is the fact that if the authors of this bill weren't so set on trying to have it all at once by not including exceptions for rape and incest, just adding those exceptions would have all but guaranteed that the ban would have passed.
Another 6 percent were undecided.
56 percent of those who said they would vote against the ban or were undecided said they would vote for the ban if it had a clear exception for rape and incest, while 32 percent said no and 12 percent were undecided.Compromise might not have been the best option for ban supporters but their unwillingness to find a middle ground looks like it will be the reason if the ban does indeed fail as this poll suggests.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
In response to O'Reilly's suggesting that Letterman believes "Bush is an evil liar" and that "America is a bad country".
"You're trying to put words in my mouth just the way you put artificial facts in your head."
And finally Letterman closes with the following wise-crack to close the interview.
"I have no idea what I'm talking about but I don't think you do either"
Even throughout the Letterman digs, O'Reilly still found a way to plug his books, priceless...
On a somewhat politically related note regarding South Dakota's economy, If South Dakota in general and Sioux Falls in particular ever wants to become even remotely more attractive to business, something will have to be done about airfare prices for those wanting to travel in and out of the area. I was involved in training with several other individuals from as far away as San Jose California and in every case, the airfare I paid (company reimbursed, thank goodness) was at least twice as much as others paid. Any business that requires extensive air travel would turn and run away as fast as possible when confronted with those kinds of travel costs and good luck getting back to the area if your scheduled flight is canceled for some reason.
So what else has been happening while I was away?
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Adelstein is going through the same withdrawls many in the South Dakota "big tent" party have been experiencing over the current one dimensional focus in the party and some of the SDWC readers are giving him a hard time about it.
Stan is currently the most visible opponent of the Republican agenda in Pierre, and the reaction to his outspoken opinions just proves how small the Republican tent actually is. It is quite obvious that the Republicans will continue their dominance in state politics through this election cycle but if things don't change pretty soon, his voice is sure to be joined by many others.
Saturday, October 21, 2006
In other news, posting here will more than likely be quite sparse beginning tomorrow through the end of next week as I am heading off to Boston for a week of training for my day job in the land of "This Old House" and the Kennedy’s. I will try to post on the goings on in South Dakota politics when possible but feel free to discuss the news of the day in our forum.
Friday, October 20, 2006
"Real leadership starts at the top, and I find it unconscionable for the governor of a state with the nation's lowest teacher pay to be paid 37th or 36th among state governors," said Billion. "I will cut my pay to dead last among governors until our state's teachers move up from dead last in teacher pay. And when South Dakota's teacher salaries rank 48th or 42nd, I will consider adjusting my pay to 48th or 42nd among governors."
* Amendment C (Marriage Amendment) - Yes
* Amendment D (Property Assessment) - No
* Amendment E (Judicial Accountability) - No
* Amendment F (State Legislature) - Yes
* Initiated Measure 2 (Cigarette Tax) - Yes
* Initiated Measure 3 (School Start Date) - Undecided
* Initiated Measure 4 (Medical Marijuana) - No
* Initiated Measure 5 (State Aircraft) - No
* Initiated Measure 7 (Video Lottery) - No
* Initiated Measure 8 (Cell Phone Tax) - No
* Referred Law 6 (Abortion Ban) - Yes
No real surprises I guess...
Exceptions or no exceptions you be the judge, the Argus has an article about complaints lodged about the recent ads being run by the pro-life crowd that touts that the abortion ban does indeed contain exceptions for rape and incest. So with this in mind I thought I would post some information on a couple of prominent pro-lifer's and their take on the exception debate.
Roger Hunt, the primary sponsor of the abortion ban earlier this year from the Washington Post 2/23/2006:
"The momentum for a change in the national policy on abortion is going to come in the not-too-distant future," said Rep. Roger W. Hunt, a Republican who sponsored the bill. To his delight, abortion opponents succeeded in defeating all amendments designed to mitigate the ban, including exceptions in the case of rape or incest or the health of the woman. Hunt said that such "special circumstances" would have diluted the bill and its impact on the national scene
WASHINGTON — At a news conference Monday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan suggested that President Bush does not support a South Dakota bill that would ban nearly all abortions in the state.McClellan did not say that Bush opposes the state bill but reiterated the president’s long-standing position on abortion. Bush is “pro-life with three exceptions,” McClellan said.
Those exceptions are rape, incest or when a woman’s life is endangered. The South Dakota bill allows abortion only in the last case.
Thune acknowledged his own view differs from the new state law, which makes no provisions for abortions following rape or incest or to protect the health of the mother.Thune says he supports an abortion ban but with those exceptions.
So the author of the bill, the President of the United States, and South Dakota's own Republican Senator have stated that this legislation carries no rape or incest exceptions.
Is this ad deceptive? If you listen to the 3 individuals above it sure looks like it and now it seems that issue has been brought to the attention of South Dakota Attorney General Larry Long. Mt Blogmore has a copy of the letter sent by the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families.
Dear Attorney General Long:In an effort to allow the voters to hear honest debate over Referred Law 6, I would like to bring your attention to a very serious legal concern.
The Vote Yes for Life ballot committee has run television and radio advertising in which Dr. Mark Rector states Referred Law Six “does provide exception for the life and the health of the mother.” As you know, you describe HB1215/Referred Law 6 in the official ballot question guide as containing only an exception for those abortions performed “to prevent the death of the pregnant woman. ” Dr. Rector erroneously asserts that a health exception exists in the ban.
In a mass mailing paid for and authorized by the Vote Yes for Life ballot committee, the following statement is presented as fact: “under this law women have the option of terminating pregnancies that are the result of rape and incest.” In the official ballot question, however, you state, “1215 would prohibit any person, at any time, from providing any medicine or other substance to a pregnant woman for the specific purpose of terminating her pregnancy.”
Apart from simply misleading the voters, Campaign Manager Leslee Unruh, Campaign Treasurer Jim Miles and ad spokesman Dr. Mark Rector have broken the law. According to South Dakota law: “Any person knowingly printing, publishing, or delivering to any voter of this state a document containing any purported constitutional amendment, question, law, or measure to be submitted to the voters at any election, in which such constitutional amendment, question, law, or measure is misstated, erroneously printed, or by which false or misleading information is given to the voters, is guilty of a Class 2 misdemeanor.” [SDCL 12-13-16]
The people of South Dakota gathered the required number of signatures to refer this law to the ballot and allow the voters to decide whether HB 1215 should remain in effect. The voters expected – and deserve – an honest debate. The Vote Yes for Life ballot committee has failed to do so. They’ve purposefully distorted the truth for political benefit and in the process of lying to the public they have broken the law.
We ask that you take this criminal offense seriously, address it immediately and set the record straight with the voters.
Anyone want to give odds on what will become of this?
Vote you conscious on November 7th, but if the main reason you would vote to pass this is because of the supposed rape and incest exceptions that are touted in the campaign ads, you might want to think twice and you should also read Tim over at Progressive on the Prairie's post on the possible heath implications of the one real exception that covers only cases in which the life of the mother is in danger.
UPDATE: KELO TV breaks down the claims made in this ad and finds several mis-statements and outright falsehoods.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Ever since they wrestled control of Congress during the Newt Gingrich led "Contract with America" days the GOP has pretty much had free reign on controlling the agenda of this country through the last part of the Clinton Administration and all through the Bush years. With all that history, why all these years later has the GOP suddenly lost it’s charm with the American people?
Of course there is no one reason for the recent loss of popularity but one thing is for sure, the turnaround cannot be blamed on anyone other than the GOP itself. The last few years a number of issues have come to light that have caused great concern among all but the die hard GOP kool-aid drinkers including the steadily worsening situation in Iraq, appearances of deception coming from Congress and the White House, almost daily scandals involving elected officials many of which are members of the Republican party, and an almost total disregard for Constitutional freedoms by many in Washington.
Getting to this point was a slow and gradual process that can probably be traced back to the beginning of the war in Iraq. At the time the Bush administration was at it’s highest popularity and could have gotten just about anything they wanted. Instead of using that popularity to further the war on terror that begun after 9/11, they instead decided to go after a country that had been a thorn in our side since Bush’s fathers days, Iraq. To accomplish this they used very suspect intelligence and what could be argued, outright lies regarding Iraq’s WMD program and ties to terrorism, to sell Congress and the American people on the need to invade.
Once they went forward with the invasion, it became quite apparent that the planning for the war and the subsequent occupation was totally inept and instead of admitting their mistakes and altering their focus they came up with the totally ridiculous "stay the course" agenda. To this day they have yet to figure out that a bad plan isn’t going to get any better the longer you try to carry it out and all we have to show for this agenda is a growing civil war, increasing numbers of terrorists, and over 3000 US casualties with no end in sight.
All throughout his tenure President Bush has taken every opportunity to increase his power by using secret programs to spy on US citizens often bypassing Constitutional controls. Once these programs come to light he attempts to justify his actions by playing the fighting terror card and if worse comes to worse, he uses his allies in Congress to write legislation after the fact to legalize his actions as evidenced by the Spectre bill to legalize the wiretapping program and the recent legislation authorizing the use of torture on terror suspects. Even when Congress tries to reign in his attempts at grabbing more power, he uses the now infamous signing statements to override their attempts.
Of course the GOP led Congress hasn’t been immune in this either. Recent scandals involving numerous members of the House and Senate have many wondering what will happen next plus the fact that Congress has no apparent focus on the issues facing the country and has had a difficult time passing any meaningful legislation. A few hundred national guard troops and a fence as a solution to our porous Mexican border problem? Is that the best you can do?
As the November mid-terms draw closer and the polling continues to worsen you would think that the GOP would focus on addressing these problems. But unlike the agenda they had when the regained Congress that focused on what they planned to do, this time around they instead have tried to scare the public into believing what would happen if they lose. Considering their scare tactics are what got us into the sorry state of affairs in the first place, that argument isn’t passing the smell test anymore and if they do in fact lose control, they only need to look in the mirror to figure out why.
“Violent gun crime is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, but not at the expense of a community like Yankton, and not using federal dollars to disparage such a thriving, historic community,” Johnson said.
Being someone that has been to East St. Louis, telling people that if they commit a gun crime they will be sent to Yankton wouldn't seem to be much of a deterrent to me...
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
It looks like the Argus has stolen PP over at the South Dakota War College's thunder as they have come out with details of a scandal involving sexual misconduct between Sen. Dan Sutton of Flandreau and an 18 year old legislative page.
The father of the former page, believed to be a male, has accused Sen. Dan Sutton, D-Flandreau, of misconduct during the last legislative session, said Senate Democratic Leader Garry Moore of Yankton.
The article says that the allegation has sparked both a criminal and requests for a Senate investigation.
South Dakota Senate President Pro Tem Lee Schoenbeck, R-Watertown, confirmed Wednesday that Sutton is the target of both a criminal and state Senate investigation involving an 18-year-old legislative page."As the presiding officer of the Senate, I got a complaint from parents of a page about a senator's conduct towards that page of a sexual nature during the session, and we take those things serious," Schoenbeck said.
"When a formal complaint like that's made, two things are going to happen. The person accused is going to be entitled to a hearing, if they want one, and we're going to take the complaint seriously. We're going to investigate it. It's going to run its course, whatever in the end that is.
"The senators feel very strongly about the page program, and any allegation of any improper conduct towards a page is going to be investigated and dealt with."
Schoenbeck said the allegations against Sutton have been the subject of a criminal investigation for months.
"I believe that what in the end motivated the father to call me was when that national thing broke. He'd been getting people in the community that knew about the investigation calling him and saying, 'Why aren't you doing something?' He's been involved in politics himself, and he understands the process and so he knew that if he called the presiding officer, that would start a process going and he made the decision to do that."
Schoenbeck said he has sent a letter to Senate colleagues about the allegations.
"Under Senate rules, it's my job to be the first one to deal with that," he said.
"I would not express an opinion about the truthfulness of the allegation," Schoenbeck added. "That's why we have a hearing process in the Senate."
The issue is now in the hands of South Dakota Attorney General Larry Long and I am sure much more is on the horizon regarding this matter. Either way, kudos to Pat for breaking the story on his blog.
UPDATE: The usual partisanship rhetoric is already starting in the comments section over at the War College with accusations of coverup by the liberal Argus and questions on why Stephanie Herseth hasn't come out calling for Dan Sutton's resignation as she did with Rep. Mark Foley who resigned under a similar scandal.
Come on folks this story (at least the public knowledge of it) is still in the very early stages and there is some serious questions that still need to be resolved including who knew what and when (sound familiar?) and for those that think the Argus withheld announcing this for political reasons, please ask yourself why they would have waited until 3 weeks before the elections when any option by the Democrats to either get past this issue or at least replace Sutton on the ballot have long since passed? It will quite probably sell more newspapers this way but it definitely won't help Democrats...
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Bruce Whalen is out with his latest campaign ad and as usual he continues his assault on Stephanie Herseth. Of course this assault continues to be only about the fact that she is pro-choice and then he goes on to twist the comment she made about South Dakota being a red state. The fact that she never said she was sorry about being from the red state of South Dakota doesn't seem to matter with the Whalen campaign and seems to be their second favorite topic.
Come on Bruce, Herseth has several years worth of voting records in the House, how about talking about that. Give it up! We already know she is pro-choice and wishes there were more Democrats in South Dakota. Time to put another record on the turntable as this one is pretty worn out, if that's all you got you'll be lucky to break the political version of the Mendoza line on November 7th.
Monday, October 16, 2006
He seems to think that it could result in a Democratic Senator dropping out of the race or even a special session of the legislature being called to sort things out. His information has an October 18th deadline for the Senator in question to respond so something might be made public by as early as the 19th. Stay tuned...
That trial adjourned July 27 to allow its five-judge panel to consider a verdict. The court was to have reconvened Monday to hear a verdict."The Dujail trial will resume Nov. 5 when the presiding judge will announce the verdict and the sentencing," Juhi said.
So the face of the Bush policies in Iraq will conveniently be convicted 2 days before the election that has many in the GOP led House and Senate fighting for their political lives. Wow, who would have thought something like that would happen?
Following a tradition that is both uniquely American and often misunderstood, the editorial board of this newspaper each election season interviews candidates for public office and, after deliberate consideration, publishes its endorsements.
For the six members of the Argus Leader's editorial board, the process is important, enlightening and, at times, frustrating. The concept of determining which of two or three otherwise honest and sincere individuals might better serve the public interest is, at best, imperfect science.
And to bring home their "point"
Reflections of any certain political affiliation or philosophy. When we're finished endorsing in all races this year, our ballot will be roughly half Republican and half Democrat. That's not unusual in any election year.
The article by Randall Beck comes on the heels of their upcoming endorsements for the various legislative seats and after the have already come out endorsing Jack Billion, Stephanie Herseth, and Larry Long.
So the question should be asked, does anyone actually believe that the Argus has no political agenda? Their soon to be announced endorsements should answer that question though for some that question has long since been answered...
Discuss this in our forum
Sunday, October 15, 2006
The American Community Survey, released this month by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples — with and without children — just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent five years earlier.
Of course some of those non-traditional households (776,000) consist of same sex partners, the majority are opposite-sex couples (5.2 million). Even in the face of these figures, many on the far right would like you to believe that allowing gays to marry would cause the sanctity of marriage to somehow be diminished. But according to these numbers, even though few states currently allow gay marriage, the number of "traditional" couples deciding to get married is trending towards becoming the minority among American households.
Maybe instead of trying to blame gays for the declining popularity of marriage even though the vast majority are not even allowed to enter into that institution they should instead look into on the reasons why that for a growing number of heterosexuals, it just isn’t as important to them as the right-winger’s would like you to believe.
I would be willing to bet that if you asked couples that have chosen not to get married they would have a lot of different reasons and very few if any of those reasons would have anything to do with gays being allowed to marry. On the other hand if you ask those same couples if they believe they should be penalized for choosing not to enter into the historically religious institution of marriage, as Amendment C seeks to do, they would say no and I would have to agree...
Discuss this in our forum
Currently our taxes are based on 3 different factors, assessed value of your property, city budgets, and the mil levy in your city that funds the budget. Amendment D proposes to change that formula by trying to control the assessed value of your property by initially rolling back property values to 2003 levels and then allowing it to rise a maximum of 3 percent per year.
The confusion comes into play at least in my mind because of the specific factors that are based on where you live and what if anything could cause your taxes to rise. First off the annual rise will be dictated by the legislature and won’t necessarily be based on actual property value increases or decreases and could in theory cause you to pay less taxes based on current property values or in many cases especially for those of us in rural areas, could actually increase our taxes to more than the assessed value of our homes.
An example of this is cited in the RCJ article.
For instance, you and your neighbor each have homes valued at $200,000 for tax purposes. Over 10 years, the market value of your homes could rise by 6 percent per year, but under Amendment D, your assessments could rise only 3 percent a year.
After 10 years, both houses would be worth $358,000. But the assessed value, limited to 3 percent annual increases, would be $269,000. Assuming that the mill levy is the same as it is today in Rapid City - about 17.7 mills - and then you’d both be paying $4,757 in property taxes.
So far, so good. But what if you sell your house after 10 years and move to a new neighborhood? The person who buys your old house will pay about $1,500 a year more in property taxes than his neighbor does.
Meanwhile, in your new neighborhood, you will be paying more than any of your neighbors.
To put a rural twist on the above example, assume just the opposite is the case. Say you live in an area where property values are stagnate like they are here in Canistota. If the legislature raises the tax rate 3 percent a year but your property values increase only 1 percent or not at all which has often been the case, you end up paying more taxes even though your home hasn’t increased in value.
Another consequence of this amendment relates to the already strapped funding of our schools.
For example, Tim Creal, superintendent of the Custer School District, said state law limits the school district’s mill levy. Custer is at the maximum. If Amendment D passes, assessments will roll back to 2003 levels. Unless the Legislature raised the allowable mill levy, his district will lose $350,000 in annual revenue.
“We are maxed out. No matter what happens, we can’t raise more money. The only way is if the Legislature would change the mill levy,” Creal said. “Without legislation, this is not revenue neutral.”
Mr Creal’s statement really gets to the crux of my problem with this amendment. If passed even supporters admit that more legislation will need to be passed to support it.
Amendment D supporter Bill Napoli even addresses these concerns.
Napoli dismisses those arguments as scare tactics. He said all constitutional amendments require legislative changes. He said he has a package of bills already in mind.
This seems to be a common tune among the supporters of the various bills that seek to change revenue sources for state government like this amendment and the initiated measure that seeks to repeal video lottery. Go ahead and pass the legislation and then rely on those in Pierre to tweak it down the road so that it can be revenue neutral. Based on the recent history of our legislature, do we really want to remove state revenue and then leave it up to Pierre to come up with alternate sources later?
If you live in an area where property values consistently rise more than 3 percent and you plan on never remodeling or moving then you would likely benefit from Amendment D’s passage, but for just about anyone else this measure will end up costing you in the long run.
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Saturday, October 14, 2006
Ney’s plea makes 5 members of Congress that have been involved in one scandal or another and other than Democrat William Jefferson whom so far is still under investigation for bribery, all have been a member of the Denny Hastert led GOP majority House of Representatives.
Ney now joins an "exclusive club" that includes former Majority Leader Tom DeLay who is under indictment for campaign irregularities, Mark Foley and his improper IM’s with underage House Page’s, and Randy Cunningham whom earlier this year plead guilty to accepting bribes from defense contractors.
So with all these examples of GOP leadership, what is on the horizon? Other than the ongoing Jack Abramoff issue that Ney was involved in and another possible scandal brewing with Republican House member Curt Weldon, recent polling shows that it could result in more than just a Democratic takeover in the House as some Senate races originally considered "safe" for the GOP are starting to look as if they aren’t as safe as first thought.
If the GOP does in fact lose their majority in one or both houses of Congress, they can lay the blame not so much with their losing popularity among their base but with their increasing popularity with law enforcement officials. Unfortunately for them, that is one group they didn’t want on their side.
Friday, October 13, 2006
The latest denial coming from the Administration deals with the book written by one of his former aides that I posted about a few days ago in which Karl Rove supposedly called some prominent church leaders "nuts," "ridiculous" and "goofy".
Along those lines here are a few examples from the mail bag of what supporters of similar bans in other states said when trying to pass the bans and what they did once the bans did indeed pass.
Organization Backing Amendment Said Purpose Was Only to "Define Marriage" Gary Glenn, head of the American Family Association in Michigan, dismissed fears that the amendment would impact domestic partnerships. According to The Ann Arbor News, "Glenn called that claim a scare tactic and insists public and private employers would continue to offer domestic-partner benefits if they wanted to." When asked about the threat to domestic partner policies, he said, "Under that policy, every single person currently receiving any kind of benefit would continue to do so." (Jackson Citizen Patriot, 10/23/04, Metro Times, 10/20/04)
Amendment Backer Said It Had “Nothing To Do With Taking Benefits
Away”: In 2005, Marlene Elwell of Citizens for the Protection of Marriage,
which supported the Michigan amendment, said, “This has nothing to do with
taking benefits away. This is about marriage between a man and a woman.”
CFPM campaign literature also claimed “This is not about rights or
benefits…It merely settles the question once and for all what marriage is….”
And CFPM’s attorney, Eric Doster, told both the media and in testimony to
the Michigan Board of State Canvassers that the amendment would not impact
domestic partner contracts. (USA Today, 10/15/04; CFPM campaign literature, Associated Press, 8/24/04)
Amendment Backers Sued To Stop University Benefits: In July 2006,
the American Family Association of Michigan filed a lawsuit to stop
Michigan State University from offering health insurance benefits for
domestic partners. The lawsuit argued that the benefits violated the state’s
constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
(Detroit Free Press, 6/6/06)
Local Governments In Michigan Prohibited From Granting Domestic
Partner Benefits: In March 2005, the Michigan state Attorney General
Mike Cox issued an opinion stating that local jurisdictions and
governmental entities, such as school boards, were prohibited from offering
domestic partner benefits to their employees due to the constitutional
amendment passed in 2004. The issue is now before the Michigan Supreme
Court. The American Family Association of Michigan has filed a brief in
support of the attorney general’s position. (Associated Press, 3/16/04)
State Workers In Michigan Denied Domestic Partner Benefits: In
December 2004, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm stripped domestic
partner benefits for same-sex couples for state workers under new union
contracts, citing the “legal cloud” created by the constitutional marriage
amendment. (Detroit Free Press, 12/2/04)
Remember before voting, this Amendment has nothing to do with "protecting the sanctity of marriage" as gay marriage has already been outlawed in South Dakota and what quite possibly could result might have a far greater impact than what the supporters would like you to think.
Discuss this in our forum
There is always something going on in the political arena and this is the place to talk about everything and anything in world and local events. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think or if you would like other categories added.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.”
“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.
More seriously, Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly “nonpartisan” events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races.
I am sure President Bush isn't going to be too happy about another "tell all" book that pisses off one of the few remaining groups left in his ever dwindling Conservative base.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
I certainly wouldn't send any of these jokers even to pick up some apples at the store for me. If I told them to pick the best, most ripe apples, they'd likely come back with a bunch of rotted mush, if this is the best "moral choice" they can come up with.
Becoming pregnant as a result of a rape would be a terrible thing. Encouraging the woman to kill her own child--a child that is half "her"--simply because the child was conceived in a violent act, is one of the most morally irresponsible recommendations I believe I've ever heard from someone who enjoys the misplaced honor of being a member of the clergy. These people will have a lot to answer for someday when they face their Creator, the Creator of those whom these "pastors" are giving hearty approval to the destruction of.
Is this fire and brimstone rant directed towards leaders from some small unknown splinter religious group? No, actually it is in response to a group of 30 leaders from 5 major denominations including the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church that believe that the totally restrictive abortion ban goes too far.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Mr. Bush clearly faces constraints as he seeks to address the public concerns about Iraq that have shrouded this midterm election: 83 percent of respondents thought that Mr. Bush was either hiding something or mostly lying when he discussed how the war in Iraq was going. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said Mr. Bush was personally aware of pre-9/11 intelligence reports that warned of possible domestic terrorist attacks using airplanes. When the same question was asked in May 2002, 41 percent said they believed Mr. Bush was aware.
Oh and by the way in a time of the year that most in Congress from the party in power are looking for support from the President in their re-election campaigns, the same poll has Bush's popularity at a dismal 34 percent.
Monday, October 9, 2006
WTF, I watch Battlestar Galactic, it’s a great show or at least I used to think it was. Last night was the season premeire and they seem to have decided to turn it into a bash America show.
The new GOP platform, everyone is out to get us...
Sunday, October 8, 2006
Their take on Governor Rounds:
Gov. Mike Rounds' engaging smile and personal warmth hide arrogance and secrecy and a lack of understanding, or lack of willingness to accept, that South Dakotans have an inherent right to open government. There's simply a basic disregard for public accountability.
And on Jack Billion:
Billion gets it. A physician and veteran. Former state legislator. Dakota Wesleyan University board member. Deep roots. Outspoken. Open. Willing to try new things. Willing to admit he doesn't have all the answers. Willing to admit when he's wrong.
They closed their endorsement with a real nice dig on Rounds' popularity, "Yes, Rounds is incredibly popular in South Dakota. His popularity, though, is based on his smile - not on his leadership or successes."
They certainly left no doubt on where they stand did they?
Not that George Sr. was a bad president but how does a one term president who pretty much got elected on his former boss, Ronald Reagan’s coattails, and whose legacy includes doing only half the job in Iraq in 1991 and not much else rate getting one of the US’s most feared warships, a Nimitz class carrier, named after him?
What’s next the USS Jimmy Carter?
Here’s something you won’t see much of in the big city...
This is a photo of the annual buffalo roundup in Custer State Park where the nearly 1300 free roaming buffalo in the park are rounded up each year for vaccinations and disease testing.
Saturday, October 7, 2006
Not one to usually gloat but considering I am a fan of what could be considered a small market team, the Cleveland Indians, it sure is nice for those of us outside of the New York area to see the free-spending Yankees go down again. I would sure like to be a fly on the wall in Steinbrenner's office during the offseason...
Speaking of senseless, welcome to South Dakota, where supporters of Amendment E hope a new day will soon dawn where citizens will be able to turn the table upon judges and punish jurists over unpopular decisions. Amendment E would create a "grand jury" of citizens, rotating regularly, that would meet to determine whether a complaint against a judge warranted taking away from that judge long-held "immunity" from lawsuits (right now, and for obvious reasons, you can't sue a judge for failing to rule your way). Amendment E, as in Error, means that a group of citizens who don't like a judge's decision -- remember, judges when interpreting the Bill of Rights are the only checks against the tyranny of the majority -- can take their revenge.
Under Amendment E, judges could lose part of their salary or retirement pay depending upon how much trouble they get into with that runaway grand jury the initiative would create. There is nothing subtle about it Amendment E: vehemently anti-judiciary forces want to diminish the authority of the courts and to destroy the independence of the judiciary. And the worst part? They seem to be winning, if recent polls in South Dakota are accurate. Just imagine what the passage of Amendment E would mean to the practice of law, and the legal system itself, in South Dakota. Just imagine what will happen when the inmates are allowed to run the asylum.
(h/t and more coming out against Amendment E over at Progressive on the prairie)
For the first time since 2001, the NEWSWEEK poll shows that more Americans trust the Democrats than the GOP on moral values and the war on terror. Fully 53 percent of Americans want the Democrats to win control of Congress next month, including 10 percent of Republicans, compared to just 35 percent who want the GOP to retain power. If the election were held today, 51 percent of likely voters would vote for the Democrat in their district versus 39 percent who would vote for the Republican. And while the race is closer among male voters (46 percent for the Democrats vs. 42 percent for the Republicans), the Democrats lead among women voters 56 to 34 percent.
It's not just the House and Senate Republicans that are out of favor as the same poll shows President Bush is now at an historic low in the Newsweek poll.
Meanwhile, the president’s approval rating has fallen to a new all-time low for the Newsweek poll: 33 percent, down from an already anemic 36 percent in August. Only 25 percent of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country, while 67 percent say they are not.
Ouch! Mission accomplished? For the Democrats maybe...
Friday, October 6, 2006
Congress pick up on that fact and wrote legislation into the homeland-security bill that would have established new minimum qualifications that any future FEMA director nominee would have to meet.
The law says the president must nominate a candidate who has ``a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management" and ``not less than five years of executive leadership."
You would think that the above qualifications would be a no-brainer for someone tasked with running the department responsible for our country's emergency responses. But of course, that would be true only if someone other than King George was in the Oval Office.
Using one of his infamous "signing statements", President Bush said that he could ignore these qualifications because he said that it went against his interpretation of the Constitutional powers of the President to make personnel decisions.
The law, Bush wrote, ``purports to limit the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the president may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office."
Bush's signing statement also challenged much more than the FEMA director appointment.
But Bush's signing statement challenged at least three-dozen laws specified in the bill. Among those he targeted is a provision that empowers the FEMA director to tell Congress about the nation's emergency management needs without White House permission. This law, Bush said, ``purports . . . to limit supervision of an executive branch official in the provision of advice to the Congress." Despite the law, he said, the FEMA director would be required to get clearance from the White House before telling lawmakers anything.
Again Bush shows his true colors when it comes to signing statements and gaining power because as we all know in his case, no amount of power is enough. Why even bother signing the legislation if you are going to not follow it anyway?
Highlights include a drop in the unemployment rate from 3.9 percent to 3 percent while the state added 9,600 new jobs which translates into a growth rate over 1 percent higher than the national average. If the report stopped there, the governor's claims would have been dead on when he says his policies have help our employment picture.
Unfortunately the report doesn't end there and here is where the real employment news comes into play. Average salaries were up 2.1 percent, far below the 5.8 percent that was the national average while high wage sectors actually saw lower wages during the last 12 months.
"For South Dakota, the problem isn't so much unemployment, but the problem continues to be low wages," said Reynold Nesiba, an economist at Augustana College. "It is surprising to me how little growth there has been in South Dakota."
The article then wonders if companies are having a hard time finding employees during this current period of low unemployment and the answer they discovered is that even with the low number people in the available job pool, companies outside of the retail sector are not having a difficult time finding people because of the large number of underemployed whom are more than happy to move on to new jobs.
So the next time Governor Rounds starts crowing about the states employment picture, ask him how many of those jobs are actually making a living wage?
As an aside to this story, the author Jonathan Ellis, talked to an HR representative from Premier Bankcard who currently employs over 2800 people in South Dakota. The rep. from the company said they have had no problem filling the 1000 positions yearly that they need, 1000 positions? Does anyone think that the company might have some issues if they need to replace 1/3 of their workforce every year?
Being that it was the far-right publication asking the questions, issues that really affect South Dakotans like the war in Iraq, farm subsidies, and education were not addressed but if you want to know what Whalen's positions are on stem cells, gay marriage, and the secularization of America, this interview will give you his thoughts on those "pressing" questions.
Thursday, October 5, 2006
How bad are things going when even good news doesn't help?
The Republican National Committee agreed to stop making recorded-voice calls to the homes of North Dakota GOP supporters after the Republican attorney general said the calls were illegal.
North Dakota do-not-call laws ban all pre-recorded calls unless they are prefaced with a live operator. Sounds like a law that would be nice to have here in South Dakota especially with all the pre-recorded calls coming our way this election season...
During the current 2005-2006 election cycle, the Republican Party has received $1,361,300, significantly less than the $7,253,819 it received during the 2003-2004 election cycle. And the Democrats are also dealing with a smaller budget this year.Why the big difference? According to the article, the large number of ballot initiatives and proposed amendments have contributors sending their money to fight for or against the various causes instead of contributing to party candidates.
During the 2003-2004 election cycle the Democrats had $1,881,024 to work with, significantly more than the $489,965 it has received this election cycle. But the important number is the difference between what the Democrats have to work with and what the Republicans have.
I don’t know what’s worse, wall to wall ads with candidates ripping each other as in previous years or wall to wall issue ads in which one side rips the other. I guess we will find out soon enough...
The following op-ed piece by Sam Kephart, the CEO of Spearfish based Virtual Acumen Corp., was originally printed in the Rapid City Weekly and is being reprinted with his permission.
The 2006 fall election cycle is on. Press conferences are being held, signs are getting planted, political ads have begun to run and words are beginning to fly. Serious faces acting out the same partisan war dance of years past.
Next time you watch your favorite candidate or listen to their message, ask yourself, am I touched, moved and inspired by this person? It’s a pretty simple and effective litmus test for real leadership ... and I’ll bet your answer is no.
South Dakota has big dreams. It wants to assume its rightful place in the global economy, it wants a living wage and affordable health care access for its residents, and it wants to stop exporting its best future — its young people. What’s slowing down or holding up this process? Quite simply stated, it’s the current power structure.
There’s a significant disconnect between our leadership’s stated agenda and what behaviors they, as a group and as individuals, are willing to change to get there. The GOB (good old boys) are alive, well, and in control. And while right-wing conservative Christian Republicans are running things in our state, my comments are not just directed at them — the Democrats appear to have similar issues within their hierarchy.
First, there is a deep fear, bordering on resentment, of newcomers to our state. Instead of being embraced for what they can intellectually and energetically contribute to advance projects important to our future, they are politely greeted and then mostly ignored, because they are “outsiders” and what they have to say is suspect.
I know several individuals with world-class educations and business credentials who have moved to the Black Hills over the last few years. They have all found it virtually impossible to get integrated into the de facto power structure-politically or business-wise.
This past July, I was quoted in a newspaper article debating the size of the Republican Party “tent.” Over the next few days, I heard from several prominent Republican officials. One told me, point blank, that “you haven’t been here long enough to offer a public opinion.” Another advised “Tsk, tsk, Sam, you just don’t understand how things work here yet.” Yet another said, “You have to start at the bottom and work your way up.”
Help me out here. Is there some time clock I neglected to punch when I relocated my family to Spearfish in January 2004? Is there some secret committee that’s the arbiter of who’s worthy and who isn’t?
Another issue with our leaders, both in politics and in business, is their lack of willingness to try genuinely new approaches to solving problems ... and to be coachable.
If you’ve got a new idea, you can usually get a meeting with them and some polite listening, but forget about quick decisions, risk taking, and pursuing out of the box possibilities. Everything is “handled” and “under control” — read “the spoils are already divvied up, why share?” and “that’s how we’ve always done this, why change now?”
The sad thing is South Dakota’s past is dictating its future.
Any farmer or rancher worth his salt knows about the dangers inherent in in-breeding. In general, hybrid crops are more productive and more resistant to disease and drought. An F1 steer (an offspring between a pure-bred Angus and a pure-bred Hereford) is generally reputed to have greater weight gain and better health.
Why can’t we apply the same openness to experiment with ideas regarding our social, political, and economic future?
We are at a crossroads in South Dakota. Great leaps forward can’t and won’t be generated by the GOB and Depression-era hangover, zero-sum thinking. Suspicion of “outsiders,” fear of unorthodox approaches to dealing with issues, resentment of those who are candid in public, and, in general, fixed ways of being, are not character traits compatible with a world class future, regardless of rhetoric or party affiliation.
In life, context is decisive. As Albert Einstein once said, “Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.” What’s our leadership pretending not to know ... and why?
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
I have been discussing Initiated Measure 2, the proposed $1 a pack increase on cigarettes that is being voted on in November on a post on the SDWC and via email with a supporter of the increase. The emailer was trying to point out to me the fact that many supporters of the legislation are touting as the reason this bill is a good idea (emphasis added).
We have language in code which sets a tobacco tax and which puts all the money from the tobacco taxes in that chapter of code, into the general fund. That current tobacco tax generates about $30m and puts it all in the general fund.
This initiated measure, this new language increases those same taxes in that chapter. It leaves the general fund revenue neutral, in that the $30m generated currently and which will be generated even if this measure fails still goes to the general fund.
But the increase, the lift if you will in tobacco taxes generated, will be dedicated as the proponents describe. Essentially, the first $5m goes to cessation programs as they’re called, and the rest distributed among the funds.
If you just go by what the emailer discusses, the tax would be a great source of revenue for cessation programs that could be used to stop young people from starting smoking and for getting smokers to quit. What isn’t mentioned is something that I commented on over at PP’s and in response to the email I quoted above.
Under the current tobacco tax, South Dakota received around $30 million last year that goes into the general fund and proponents of this bill say that the next 5 million would go towards prevention programs. The new tax if passed would first and foremost guarantee that the $30 million that the state receives remains in place and any additional revenue would be divided first to the cessation programs and then to other state programs. What isn’t mentioned is how much the revenue from the tobacco tax has been decreasing year after year due to the ever decreasing number of smokers and how that number will continue to decline.
What happens when cigarette sales decrease? For one, the state collects less in tobacco taxes. With less coming in the state loses revenue, that $30 million cut mentioned above, and what this tax actually will do is make sure that even though fewer packs are being sold the state still gets it money.
The proponents like to tout the $5 million for cessation programs but how long will that money be generated if ever? My problem with this legislation has nothing to do with the increase in the tax itself, I am more concerned with the fact that it is being touted as some kind of noble effort to get people to either not start smoking or to quit altogether, that isn’t the purpose. The main reason for this measure is to ensure that South Dakota keeps getting it’s money from smokers and to make it sound more palatable, they threw in the $5 million dollar bone that may or may not ever exist.
One thing you notice is that many would like you to believe that their motive for this is to prevent kids from smoking, but you rarely if ever hear anyone trying to increase the tax on alcohol to prevent underage drinking. Last time I checked, underage drinking results in many more deaths among our youth than smoking does so where is the call for increased taxes on that? Of course there are none because drinking is currently more sociably acceptable and many more people partake of that vice.
So when the state needs to increase or maintain revenue they target a vice that most people wouldn’t have a problem increasing taxes on, hence the real purpose of Initiated Measure 2.
I personally could care less if this measure passes but call it what it is, an increase whose sole purpose is to insure the state gets its money and not some grand gesture to get people to quit smoking. If that were it’s purpose, the $5 million would be guaranteed upfront before any talk of the $30 million for the state’s coffers.
(h/t - Crooks and Liars)
How does a Conservative media outlet spin a GOP scandal on a subconscious level? They "accidentally" list him as a Democrat, oops!
On the same note, how does the House Leader whom has been accused of covering up the scandal try to distance himself? He goes on the Rush Limbaugh show to get his endorsement on how it is all just a democratic ploy to discredit him.
UPDATE - Crooks and Liars has more on this including how finally after 24 hrs. someone is calling out Faux News for this "oversight" and how the network has yet to comment on the little "mistake".
Former Governor Bill Janklow's buddy at the Argus, Dave Kranz is reporting in today's Argus that Janklow is no longer involved in the Mayo Clinic's fight against DM&E.
But a Mayo official told me Tuesday that the official relationship between Janklow and the clinic is over.
Janklow, like former Senator Tom Daschle, has been catching a lot of heat from many in South Dakota for working with the Mayo Clinic in their fight against the railroad expansion project but actually left the fight 3 months ago with no fanfare.
Even though Janklow's departure took place three months ago, his exit in that official role seemed to be a well-kept secret.
No one from the Mayo Clinic is saying why he left and Janklow seems to be avoiding the media like the plague lately first telling KELO TV that "I don't talk to the news" and more recently responding to inquiries by Kranz for this story by saying "I don't talk to you. I don't know how much clearer I can make it."
Governor Bill seems quite testy with the media lately, if he is so set on avoiding media attention, maybe he should stop doing things that the media feels the need to cover...
Tuesday, October 3, 2006
CBS sure wasn't wrong when they named their guest segment "Free Speech". Think Progress has the video from Brian Rohrbough's appearance last night. Rohrbough tragically lost his son during the Columbine shootings and he used his air time to blame all the school shootings recently on the teaching of evolution and abortion.
Transcript from Think Progress:
I’m saddened and shaken by the shooting at an Amish school today, and last week’s school murders.When my son Dan was murdered on the sidewalk at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, I hoped that would be the last school shooting. Since that day, I’ve tried to answer the question, “Why did this happen?”
This country is in a moral free-fall. For over two generations, the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak, without moral consequences and life has no inherent value.
We teach there are no absolutes, no right or wrong. And I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.
Suicide has become an acceptable action and has further emboldened these criminals. And we are seeing an epidemic increase in murder-suicide attacks on our children.
Sadly, our schools are not safe. In fact, we now witness that within our schools. Our children have become a target of terrorists from within the United States.
On a side note, how long before the Yes on 6 folks change their campaign literature to reflect this new "revelation" brought to you by that "liberal media" outlet known as CBS?
1. There are exceptions for rape and incest.
2. Passage will prevent school shootings.
If they did, I would be willing to bet they wouldn't put a huge red arrow over it.
Tony Perkins of Dobson's Family Research Counsel was on CNN earlier and I think we are hearing the contours of the Christian Right's argument. They are going with Newt Gingrich's formulation: Poor Denny was afraid of being called a gay basher so he didn't say anything.
The idea that anyone from the Christian right would refrain from coming out with the Foley emails and IM's was because they were afraid of being called gay bashers is so full of hypocrisy that it would be funny if it wasn't so ridiculous. The party that loves to legislate against gays at every turn with such bills as the Gay Marriage Amendment was worried about being thought of as anti-gay? I'm sorry guys, I think that ship has long since sailed.
Monday, October 2, 2006
“It was just an oversight,” Schmidt said. “As soon as I discovered it, I ran down and got it taken care of. This is like the last century, and they’re trying to make hay on this thing. And it’s just an oversight.”
Schmidt, who coincidently is now saying he is a lifelong Republican whom has always voted Republican, happens to be running in a district that is 2-1 Republican but for some reason he didn’t feel that it was important enough to be affiliated with the party he says he was supposedly so loyal to until after he decided to run for office.
“This was all before the (June primary) election and all that,” he said. “At the time they voted, I was an absolute Republican. I’ve been a Republican all my life, and I’ve never voted anything other than Republican.”
PP over at SDWC has his perspective on this issue and thinks that even with all the latest on this, Schmidt should still win in November and that it amounts to nothing more than an embarrassing lesson though some of his commentators think that Schmidt should be prosecuted.
On the prosecuting note, the RCJ does touch on the fact that he appears to have actually broken the law by making a false sworn statement.
Schmidt’s sworn statement on the nominating petition appears to violate provisions in South Dakota statute that state, under 12-6-3.2, that “No person may sign a declaration of candidacy or be nominated as a political candidate for a party unless that person is a registered voter with that party affiliation.”
But even though some think he should be prosecuted, the law that Schmidt would
have broken by making the false statement has no penalty listed in the statute so
this issue will likely never see a courthouse
Putting this all into perspective, forgetting to pick up a loaf of bread at the grocery store is an "oversight" but Schmidt would like the District 33 voters to believe that somehow forgetting to change his registration before filing his paperwork is just an honest mistake? I really wonder what else his constituents will discover about him once he does end up in Pierre, like maybe he isn’t as Republican as they might believe? Democrats in our state would know the feeling on that note after what happened during the last legislative session...
This is the final poll for the Governors race. The previous polls here and over at the now defunct South Dakota Politics and Elections site have ended with Jack Billion in the lead. The September very unscientific poll just concluded was no exception and had Jack Billion beating Governor Rounds 62 percent to 32 percent.
Sunday, October 1, 2006
If you failed to complete your own National Guard service and your Vice President received five deferments to avoid service in Vietnam, but accuse political opponents who challenge your failed foreign policy in Iraq of being cowards, you might be a Republican.
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News Article | May 11, 2017
How do T cells, the beat cops of the immune system, detect signs of disease without the benefit of eyes? Like most cells, they explore their surroundings through direct physical contact, but how T cells feel out intruders rapidly and reliably enough to nip infections and other threats in the bud has remained a mystery to researchers. In a new study, published online May 11, 2017 in Science, UC San Francisco researchers began to address this question by using cutting-edge techniques to capture videos of the surface of living T cells in more detail than ever before. Researchers had previously observed tentacle-like protrusions called microvilli covering the surface of T cells, but the new research revealed that these tentacles are in constant motion: they crawl across the cell surface, each independently searching for signs of danger or infection in a fractal-like pattern that allows T cells to spend the minimum time necessary feeling for a potential threat before moving on. "Previous techniques had allowed us to take snapshots of the surface of T cells, but that's like trying to understand a basketball game by studying a black-and-white photo," said Matthew Krummel, PhD, associate professor of pathology at UCSF and senior author of the new study. "Now we can watch these amazing little fingers of membrane move around in real-time - and it turns out they're incredibly efficient." Among other potential benefits, Krummel says, understanding how T cells efficiently sample their environment to search for invasive pathogens opens up new questions about what countermeasures infectious organisms or even cancer cells may have evolved as a way of avoiding detection, and could suggest new ways for researchers to help T cells see through such a ruse. Efficient search by T cells is key to an effective immune response As they make their rounds through the body, T cells make contact with a network of informants -- other immune cells that scour the body for potential signs of danger and display the protein fragments they find (called "antigens") on their surface for inspection by the T cells. If a T cell meets one of these so-called antigen-presenting cells and recognizes a protein fragment it carries as evidence of danger, the T cell sounds the alarm and triggers a more global immune response to fight off the invaders. Scientists estimate that you have only about 100 T cells in your body at any given moment that can recognize and responding to a specific antigen, such a protein from this year's flu virus, and these few cells each take days to patrol your entire body, Krummel said. "This means the immune system really needs to get ahead of whatever is attacking the body at the very first evidence that there's an intruder on board. If one T cell misses the signs of a virus, the next time a cell that can recognize the threat might come through that tissue, the virus has had hours to make tens of thousands of copies of itself." New imaging techniques reveal how immune cells "talk" using touch In the Science study, Krummel's team was able to study how T cells efficiently interrogate antigen-presenting cells in real time, thanks to a high-resolution cellular imaging technique called lattice light-sheet microscopy, which the team set up at UCSF in collaboration with its inventor, 2014 Nobel prize winner and study co-author Eric Betzig, PhD, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in Virginia. Using this technology, the team studied mouse T cells exploring simulated patches of antigen-presenting cell membrane in laboratory dishes, and found that the T cell microvilli move independently of one another in a fractal-like geometry, such as is often seen in nature as a way of optimizing efficient use of space, such as by plant roots or foraging animals. The researchers calculated that, thanks to this efficient search pattern, in an average minute-long encounter win an antigen-presenting cell, T cell microvilli can thoroughly explore 98 percent of the contact surface between the two cells -- called an "immunological synapse" after the neuronal synapses of the nervous system. This suggests that T cells are tuned to spend the minimum time necessary to get a clear read on the information available at each antigen-presenting cell before moving on, the authors say. To study the details of threat detection by microvilli, the authors devised a new approach that allowed them to simultaneously track microvilli as well as the T cell receptor (TCR) proteins T cells use to detect their target antigens. To do this, the team covered simulated patches of antigen-presenting cell membrane with tiny fluorescent particles called quantum dots, which questing T cell microvilli had to push out of the way to reach the membrane surface. This technique, dubbed synaptic contact mapping, allowed the researchers to visualize the microvilli as holes of negative space in the quantum dot fluorescence, while at the same time visualizing TCRs with a different-colored fluorescent marker. They found that normally, individual microvilli poke and prod at the antigen-presenting cell membrane for an average of about four seconds at a time. But when the microvilli found the antigen they were searching for, they stayed in contact with the antigen-presenting cell membrane for 20 seconds or more and accumulated large rafts of TCRs, suggesting that they were likely signaling the T cell to trigger its immune response. "These videos give me a much more visceral understanding of what's happening when T cells and antigen-presenting cells come into contact," Krummel said. "T cells have these anemone-like sensory organs, and when they want to get information from another cell, their only chance appears to be during this short period of intimate contact. If they don't detect a strong signal during that contact, they move on." Real-time imaging technology opens new opportunities to study immunity and disease Krummel's team also briefly studied the surfaces of other types of immune cells, such as dendritic cells and B cells, which play different roles in pathogen detection and immune response. They found that each cell type appears to use distinct patterns of surface protrusions -- such as tentacles, waves, or curtain-like ripples -- to probe and communicate with their environments, though more research is needed to understand these diverse patterns and how they interact with one another. (See video.) "Understanding how the immune system reliably detects and responds to the huge range of potential threats it has to deal with is one of the key questions we still face as immunologists," Krummel said. "Of course, the immune system also makes mistakes -- like when it attacks the body's own cells in autoimmune disease or fails to recognize cancerous cells as a threat. Understanding the mechanics and constraints of how the immune system recognizes threats in the first place could potentially help us correct those errors." En Cai, PhD, Kyle Marchuk, PhD, Peter Beemiller, PhD, and Casey Beppler, BS, of UCSF, were co-first authors of the new study. Other authors were Matthew G. Rubashkin, PhD, Valerie M. Weaver, PhD, and Audrey Gérard, PhD, of UCSF; Tsung-Li Liu, PhD, and Bi-Chang Chen, PhD, of Janelia; and Frederic Bartumeus, PhD, of the Center for Advanced Studies of Blanes in Girona, Spain and Institut Català de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) in Barcelona. Funding for this research was provided by the National Institutes of Health (AI052116), National Cancer Institute (U01CA202241), a US Department of Defense National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (1650113). Betzig is an inventor on patent application US 20130286181 A1, submitted by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which covers LLS imaging. The authors declare no competing financial interests. About UCSF: UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational and population sciences; and a preeminent biomedical research enterprise. It also includes UCSF Health, which comprises top-ranked hospitals, UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland - and other partner and affiliated hospitals and healthcare providers throughout the Bay Area. Please visit http://www. .
News Article | May 9, 2017
Thin air can reverse brain damage due to mitochondrial defects in mice. After a month of breathing air that contains about half the usual amount of oxygen, telltale lesions in the brains of these mice had disappeared, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator Vamsi Mootha and colleagues report online May 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We found, much to our surprise and delight, that we could actually reverse advanced disease," Mootha said. "I don't think anybody thought that these types of neurological diseases could be reversible." It's a remarkable turnaround -- though the result was seen in mice, not humans. More research is needed before a similar approach could be used to treat people, cautions Mootha, a mitochondrial biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Still, the findings hint at the promise of low oxygen therapy to prevent, or even reverse, mitochondrial disorders in people. One such disorder is Leigh syndrome, a rare disease that often appears in the first few years of life. The disorder is marked by progressive brain lesions, a loss of motor skills, developmental delays and a failure to grow. Most forms of the disease have no proven treatments. Yet Mootha and his team had what seems like a counterintuitive idea. In 2016, the researchers reported that hypoxia, or oxygen deficiency, actually improves the health of mice genetically engineered to have dysfunctional mitochondria, tiny power-producing organelles. Those results, published in Science, were tantalizing, and also raised a number of questions, such as how long these treated mice actually live, and whether hypoxia treatment needs to be continuous. The new findings answer some of these questions. "At a high level, this is exploring the remarkable potential and also the limitations of hypoxia," Mootha said. The mice in the study were genetically engineered to lack a gene called Ndufs4, which encodes a protein essential for a part of mitochondria called complex I. That same gene is mutated in some people with Leigh syndrome. When these mice were housed in chambers that contained normal air containing 21 percent oxygen, the equivalent of what a person would breathe at sea level, they developed brain lesions and had a median survival length of 58 days. But when these mice were kept in chambers that contained 11 percent oxygen, their median survival time stretched to 270 days, Mootha and colleagues found. What's more, MRI images revealed these mice had no signs of abnormally bright brain tissue, lesions that often signal degeneration. Eleven percent oxygen is close to what a person would encounter at high altitudes such as the base camp at Mount Everest. "Is it super comfortable? Certainly not," Mootha said, but a healthy person would be able to tolerate it. Based on his team's earlier work, Mootha wasn't surprised that the mice treated with hypoxia lived longer. But a different result was unexpected: A switch to hypoxic conditions seemed to actually reverse existing brain damage. After a month of breathing low oxygen air, lesions in the mices' brains disappeared, MRI images revealed. While the results in the mice are "profound and striking," Mootha emphasized that the research is still at an early stage. Much more work needs to be done before hypoxia can be used to treat people with mitochondria disorders. "We are not ready yet to go into the clinic," he said. Other results help illustrate remaining hurdles to developing a hypoxia therapy. Mootha and his team had hoped to find benefits for more moderate low-oxygen conditions, such as intermittent periods of hypoxia or slightly higher levels of oxygen. But so far, the results suggest that only continuous 11 percent oxygen does the trick. "The disappointing part was that we didn't come up with a more practical regimen, at least in this paper," Mootha said. Still, he and his team plan to keep looking for other ways to get the hypoxia benefits without the intense hypoxia conditions, perhaps with a small molecule. The researchers also plan to study how exactly the hypoxia response works -- how low-oxygen conditions kindle molecular efforts to protect and repair the brain. The results have implications that stretch beyond mitochondrial diseases. Neurodegenerative disorders that have been associated with aging, and even normal aging, have been linked to a diminished mitochondrial power. "As all of us age, our mitochondrial activity declines," Mootha said. Hypoxia, or a drug that mimics a key aspect of it, might one day be able to rejuvenate flagging mitochondria, and perhaps the aging body, too.
News Article | May 9, 2017
Forty-one scientists from 16 countries have been chosen as International Research Scholars, exceptional early-career scientists poised to advance biomedical research across the globe. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has teamed up with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to develop scientific talent around the world, and will award a total of nearly $26.7 million to this group of scholars. Each researcher will receive a total of $650,000 over five years. The award is a big boon for scientists early in their careers, and offers the freedom to pursue new research directions and creative projects that could develop into top-notch scientific programs. "This is an outstanding group of scientists who will push biomedical research forward worldwide, and we are thrilled to support them alongside our philanthropic partners," said David Clapham, HHMI's Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer. The scientists selected as International Research Scholars represent a diverse array of scientific disciplines and geographic locations. Scholars hail from research organizations and institutions from across the world, from Tanzania to Cambodia to Chile to Austria. Their research covers a broad variety of biological and medical research areas too, including neuroscience, genetics, biophysics, computational biology, and parasitology. "We are excited to join with our partners in supporting these superb scientists. We look to them to bring transformative innovation to priority global health problems," said Chris Karp, Director of Global Health Discovery & Translational Sciences at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. These researchers' goals are innovative, wide-ranging, and forward-thinking. They seek to understand diverse topics, from how immune cells function to how pathogenic bacteria jump from the environment to humans, and are even investigating ways to watch genes switch on and off in living brains. "We are delighted to be a partner in supporting this outstanding community of international researchers. Their expertise and thirst for knowledge will enhance our understanding of how life works and the causes and consequences of disease, said Anne-Marie Coriat, Head of Research Careers at Wellcome Trust. A panel of distinguished scientists reviewed more than 1,400 applications, and evaluated both the impact of past work, including doctoral and postdoctoral achievements, and the promise of work to come. It's a researcher-focused approach that emphasizes the skills and talents of the individual, rather than solely the projects proposed. "We are proud to partner with HHMI, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to support this truly exceptional group of young biomedical scientists. Biomedical research is increasingly at the core of the work of our research institute, the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência," said Gulbenkian Institute Director Jonathan Howard. HHMI, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation announced the 2017 International Research Scholar competition March 29, 2016. The competition was open to early-career scientists who held a full-time position at a research-oriented university, medical school, or nonprofit institution, and had been running their own labs for less than seven years. Candidates also had to work in an eligible country, and have received training in the United States or the United Kingdom for at least one year. Ido Amit wants to reveal how immune cells work, and what role they play in health and disease. His lab develops new single cell genomic technologies to study these cells in unprecedented resolution. Figuring out immune cells' actions will help advance the next generation of immunotherapy to fight cancer and other disorders. Melanie Blokesch studies Vibrio cholerae, a water-dwelling bacterium that wreaks havoc in the gut and causes the diarrheal disease cholera. Her team wants to map the molecular tools V. cholerae uses to jump from the environment to humans, which will help explain what triggers cholera outbreaks in endemic areas of the world. Carlos Blondel investigates the emergence of human pathogens by studying their molecular weaponry. He has worked with foodborne pathogens that cause gastrointestinal disease, such as Salmonella and Vibrio parahaemolyticus. Blondel recently used CRISPR/Cas 9 genome editing technology to uncover key interactions between V. parahaemolyticus and human cells. Yossi Buganim's goal is to bring therapeutic cells from the lab to the clinic. His team has invented and improved ways to reprogram adult cells into other cell types, including those able to generate nearly any kind of cell in the body. One day, such cells could be tapped for regenerative medicine replacing damaged tissues with those grown in the lab. Tineke Cantaert seeks to understand how the immune system responds to infection by flaviviruses such as Dengue and Zika. Currently, no treatment exists for infection by either virus. Identifying biomarkers for protective immunity might help scientists speed up the development of therapies and vaccines. Ling-Ling Chen is discovering new and unusual classes of RNA molecules called long noncoding RNAs. She's figuring out how these molecules form, what role they play in gene regulation, and how they may influence disease. She has found that some of these RNAs are conspicuously absent in people with the neurodevelopmental genetic disorder Prader-Willi syndrome. Mark Dawson is searching for ways to wipe out malignant stem cells without harming normal stem cells. He studies cancers such as acute myeloid leukemia, which are difficult to eradicate using traditional chemotherapies. Understanding how normal and malignant stem cells differ from each other could let researchers devise more effective, targeted treatments. Ana Domingos is investigating new molecular strategies to fight obesity. She has discovered a direct link between fat tissue and neurons of the sympathetic nervous system, which plays a role in burning fat. Stimulating these neurons could one day lead to a new treatment to cause fat loss. Idan Efroni is unraveling the mystery of plants' impressive regenerative abilities. He uses tomatoes to study how plants generate new stem cells and meristems to replace damaged or missing roots. Insight into this process might reveal clues about tissue regeneration in other organisms, and help scientists boost plant production for agriculture. Eran Elinav is fascinated by microbes that live around and in our body our microbiome. He has discovered important links between nutrition, gut microbes and the risk of developing common diseases, such as obesity and diabetes. Now, he wants to figure out how gut microbes impact human relapsing (or "yo-yo") obesity and its many complications. Qiaomei Fu is exploring the genetic roots of humankind. Her work has helped untangle the early history of modern humans and Neanderthals, and reveal how early agriculture affected European farmers. She wants to illuminate the human prehistory of Asia by investigating the ancient genomes of both humans and pathogens. Lena Ho is on the hunt for new peptides linked to human disease. She's looking for hidden gems among previously overlooked regions of our genome, and seeks to understand how the peptides work and how they can be used to combat common diseases of the cardiovascular and metabolic systems. Kathryn Holt uses genomic tools to study infectious disease-causing microbes important in global health, including Salmonella typhi, which causes typhoid fever, and Shigella sonnei, a bacterium responsible for dysentery. She wants to understand what makes pathogens emerge, and why some become resistant to antimicrobial drugs. In developing animal embryos, stem cell growth is tightly regulated so that the right kinds of cells emerge at the proper place and time. Catarina Homem is investigating how metabolism and nutrition influence this process, and how mistakes can lead to developmental defects and diseases such as cancer. Michael Hothorn is piecing together how plants sense essential nutrients in the soil and send signals from cell to cell. A molecular understanding of how plants detect and respond to changes in phosphorus levels, for example, could help researchers engineer crops that can survive when nutrients are scarce. Shalev Itzkovitz studies the design principles of mammalian tissues. He's taking a close-up look at individual cells to figure out how they work together in organs such as the intestine, liver, and pancreas. Advanced imaging techniques combined with single cell sequencing will help researchers determine the job description of cells in different organs. Martin Jinek is investigating how protein and RNA molecules team up to control gene expression and protect the genome. He has pioneered work on the powerful genome-editing system known as CRISPR-Cas9, and revealed key details of this system at the atomic level. His work could spur the development of new, cutting-edge technologies for editing genomes and genetic therapies. Luis Larrondo is unwinding the secrets of biological clocks, which help living organisms, including humans, plants and fungi, stay in sync with the Earth's daily rhythms. His research draws upon synthetic biology as well as optogenetics to probe the molecular components that keep biological clocks ticking. Human genomic DNA is packaged with histone proteins into tightly-wound bundles of fiber called chromatin. Guohong Li has used an imaging technique called cryo-electron microscopy to visualize these twisted fibers in 3D at a detail previously unseen. Now, he wants to view the fibers at atomic resolution, and figure out the role of the histones wrapped inside. A suite of chemical tags decorates the genomes of humans, plants, and other multicellular organisms. Ryan Lister is inventing new tools to edit these tags, a type of epigenetic modification, which can regulate gene expression, cell differentiation, and more. He also wants to explore their role in brain development, which could offer new insights into neurological disorders. Mitochondria, which generate energy for cells and regulate programmed cell death, are vulnerable to damage. Ying Liu is using worm genetics and biochemistry to investigate the cellular pathways that sense mitochondrial dysfunction and activate stress responses. Defects in these pathways may contribute to metabolic disorders, neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. Laura Mackay is working to identify pathways that guide the development of tissue-resident memory T cells, immune cells that reside in the body's peripheral tissues and protect against local infections. She wants to harness these cells to create new therapies for infectious disease, cancer, and autoimmune diseases. Judit Makara is investigating how neurons in the brain's hippocampus support creation of memories. She is interested in the synaptic and dendritic processing mechanisms that promote the recruitment of individual neurons into ensembles with coordinated activity to store information about places or events. Tomas Marques-Bonet is assessing genomic diversity among great apes. His work will help us understand the biological processes and features that make us human and has implications for conservation biology. He is also using comparative genomics to study changes in gene regulation and the genomic consequences of domestication. Seth Masters uses personalized medicine to identify genetic changes that cause severe inflammatory diseases early in life. These studies teach us about how the innate immune system works, and may also provide targets for the development of drugs to treat more common inflammatory conditions such as heart disease, inflammatory bowel disease, type 2 diabetes and neurological disorders. Ruben Moreno-Bote is interested in the idea that although the human brain can solve complex problems, it sometimes falls short on simple tasks. He is combining theoretical and experimental approaches to identify the factors that limit the amount of information stored in the brain. As stem cells develop into specialized cells, their cell fates are influenced by the biochemical pathways that process nutrients to synthesize cellular materials and convert food to energy. Shyh-Chang Ng is studying how these metabolic processes regulate muscle regeneration during aging. His work could deepen our understanding of the effects of nutrition and exercise, and suggest strategies for treating the aging-induced metabolic syndrome. Zaza Ndhlovu is investigating how the immune system is affected when patients with HIV begin combination antiretroviral therapy very early in the course of disease. His goal is to learn whether brief exposure to the virus is sufficient to prime a protective immune response that might one day be boosted by a vaccine. Fredros Okumu is developing species-specific methods of eliminating the malaria-transmitting mosquito Anopheles funestus, with the goal of stopping the disease's transmission in two districts in southeastern Tanzania. Although A. funestus is not the most populous mosquito species in the region, it is responsible for 82-95 percent of local malaria infections. Cellular perturbations, such as changes in nutrient or oxygen levels or accumulation of misfolded proteins, can be indicative of pathogen presence or disruption in normal physiology. Fabiola Osorio studies how the immune system recognizes and responds to signs of cellular stress for regulation of immunity. Biophysicist Hye Yoon Park is developing imaging technologies to visualize the cellular and molecular processes the brain uses to form, consolidate, and retrieve memories. She will use the new techniques to study how neuronal activity alters gene expression to rewire neural circuits during learning. Joseph Paton has discovered key signals in the brain involved in timing and decision-making. He is investigating the circuit mechanisms that generate these signals and transform them into actions. His work will help explain how animals free themselves from the immediacy of the current moment to learn and plan. Nicolas Plachta is using single-cell imaging technologies devised in his lab to study how developing embryos take shape. He wants to understand the molecular mechanisms that govern changes in cell fate, shape, and position and how these changes are coordinated across an entire embryo. Thomas Pucadyil is studying how biological membranes -- protective barriers that are highly resilient to rupture -- split apart to allow for the packaging and transport of cellular materials. He is searching for membrane fission catalysts that cells use to manage this energetically demanding process. Hai Qi is exploring how the immune system generates and maintains memory cells that remember past infections and stay poised to produce antibodies against returning pathogens. His research may open new avenues for vaccine development and suggest better ways to control autoimmune diseases. Asya Rolls wants to understand the connections between the brain and the immune system. She is particularly interested in how brain activity influences the immune system's ability to find and destroy tumors. Her research could reveal new ways to harness the body's inherent disease-fighting potential. Marvin Tanenbaum is developing an imaging approach that will allow researchers to observe individual messenger RNA molecules as they are translated into proteins in living cells. He will use the method to investigate how translation is regulated to control the fate and function of cells. Wai-Hong Tham is studying how malaria parasites interact with their human hosts. Specifically, she wants to understand how Plasmodium vivax, the dominant malaria parasite in countries outside of sub-Saharan Africa, recognizes and invades red blood cells inside the human body. Yanli Wang is studying mechanisms of two bacterial anti-virus defense systems. She is using structural biology to learn how the CRISPR-Cas and Argonaute systems use small molecules of RNA or DNA to find and cleave foreign genetic material. She is also looking for ways to modify their RNA/DNA-cleaving components to increase their efficiency as genome editing tools. Immediately after an egg is fertilized, DNA and its packaging proteins (histones) undergo drastic reorganization so that cells can acquire new identities in early embryos. However, how this is achieved remains poorly understood due to the extremely scarce experimental samples. By developing ultrasensitive tools for chromatin analysis, Wei Xie is working to decipher how such reprogramming occurs and whether chromatin associated "epigenetic" information can be passed on to the next generation. Manuel Zimmer is using the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans to study the dynamics of neural networks. Using a whole-brain imaging approach developed in his lab, he aims to uncover the fundamental computations and their underlying mechanisms neural circuits use to interpret sensory information and generate appropriate behaviors. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute plays a powerful role in advancing scientific research and education. Its scientists, located across the country and around the world, have made important discoveries that advance both human health and our fundamental understanding of biology. The Institute also aims to transform science education into a creative, interdisciplinary endeavor that reflects the excitement of real research. HHMI is headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland. http://www. Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people's health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people - especially those with the fewest resources - have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life. Based in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by CEO Sue Desmond-Hellmann and Co-chair William H. Gates Sr., under the direction of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. http://www. The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to improving health. We support bright minds in science, the humanities and the social sciences, as well as education, public engagement and the application of research to medicine. Our investment portfolio gives us the independence to support such transformative work as the sequencing and understanding of the human genome, research that established front-line drugs for malaria, and Wellcome Collection, our free venue for the incurably curious that explores medicine, life and art. http://www. The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation is an international foundation that bears the name of businessman, art collector and philanthropist of Armenian origin, Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (1869-1955). For almost 60 years, the Foundation has been carrying out extensive activities both in Portugal and abroad through the development of in-house projects -- or in partnership with other institutions -- and by awarding scholarships and grants. Headquartered in Lisbon, where Calouste Gulbenkian spent his last years, the Foundation is also home to a scientific investigation centre in Oeiras, and runs delegations in Paris and London -- cities where Calouste Gulbenkian lived. http://www.
News Article | May 15, 2017
Lung cancer tumors were prevented in mice by a novel small molecule that directly activates a tumor suppressor protein. Goutham Narla, MD, PhD, Pardee-Gerstacker Professor in Cancer Research, Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and member of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Cells are constantly turning proteins on and off via molecular switches--phosphate molecules--that have become common drug targets. Said Dr. Narla, "All the drugs we currently have to treat our cancer patients target what we call kinases, which attach phosphate molecules to proteins. But equally important to this are the enzymes that take the phosphate off." One enzyme--PP2A--can "turn off" tumor proteins by removing phosphate molecules attached to them. But according to Dr. Narla, "This tumor suppressor is turned off in pretty much every major cancer. Its inactivation is essential for a normal cell to become a cancer cell." Narla and his team decided to take an unconventional approach to cancer drug development by seeking molecules that directly target PP2A, in an effort to reactivate its tumor suppressor properties. Forty-five researchers, including eight students from the Young Scientist Foundation and Mark R. Chance, PhD, Vice Dean for Research at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, collaborated to screen a series of drug-like molecules for their ability to reactivate PP2A in lung cancer cells and prevent lung cancer tumors in mice. The prototype drug molecules were created from FDA-approved medications by Michael Ohlmeyer, PhD, Associate Professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The team found one particular prototype drug can attach to a subunit of the PP2A protein, effectively activating the enzyme. As Narla explained, the study is the first to use a small molecule to directly activate an enzyme that removes phosphate molecules. "There are indirect ways that have been shown to get at these kinds of enzymes, but this is the first example of a direct activation of one. Our drug actually binds to and turns on PP2A." The prototype drug also prevented lung cancer cells from proliferating in laboratory models, including mouse models. Mice injected with the drug had fewer lung cancer tumors and did not experience weight loss or behavioral abnormalities associated with other cancer medications. In the mouse models, the drug was comparably effective to currently available combination therapies used to slow lung cancer progression. To confirm exactly where the drug attaches to PP2A, the researchers also developed lung cancer cells with specific mutations at the putative drug binding site. Mice with tumors created from the mutated cancer cells did not benefit from the prototype drug, as the drug could not attach to and reactivate PP2A. The results confirmed that the prototype drug attaches to PP2A at two specific amino acids within a subunit of the enzyme, information that could help inform other drug developers. "This is the first example ever of a cancer drug that directly binds to and activates an enzyme that removes phosphate molecules. Therefore our findings could have broad applicability to the treatment of a large number of human cancers, including lung cancer as we demonstrated in this paper," Narla said. "There are some 2,000 plus papers on the role of PP2A in cancer. Breast cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, brain cancer, childhood cancers, ovarian cancer, endometrial cancer, every major cancer involves the inactivation of this protein," Narla noted. "Molecules that allow us to turn it back on, like the one in our study, have the potential to work in a broad range of cancer patients." "We are continuing to test our drug in a large series of animal models. If things continue to go well, we hope to start clinical trials next year with this drug. Our initial clinical trials would be quite broad, and would include a number of diverse cancer patients, including patients with lung cancer." Narla said. "The Young Scientists supported by the Young Scientist Foundation, http://www. , were integral to these discoveries," Narla added. "I think their contributions highlight, in an increasingly competitive funding environment, the importance of STEM and the benefit of engaging youth early on in biomedical research." The study included pre-clinical cell and animal models that may not necessarily translate to human lung cancer. Mice were implanted with lung cancer tumors, rather than developing them on their own, and treated with the drug for only four weeks. Long-term effects of the prototype drug remain unknown. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), University Hospitals through the Harrington Discovery Institute, and Dual Therapeutics. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai on behalf of the authors GN, MO, NSD, DBK have filed patents covering composition of matter on the small molecules used in the study for the treatment of human cancer and other diseases. Dual Therapeutics LLC has licensed this intellectual property for the clinical and commercial development of this series of small molecule PP2A activators. The authors GN, MO, YI, NSD, DBK have an ownership interest in Dual Therapeutics LLC. GN and MO are consultants for Dual Therapeutics LLC. For more information about Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, please visit: http://case. .
News Article | May 22, 2017
-- An international team of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA, USA) and the Braunschweig University of Technology (Germany) has developed an approach to enhance the sensitivity of smartphone based fluorescence microscopes by ten-fold compared to previously reported mobile phone based handheld microscopes. This is an important development toward the use of mobile phones for advanced microscopic investigation of samples, sensing of disease biomarkers, tracking of chronic conditions, and molecular diagnostics and testing in general.Fluorescence is one of the predominant detection modalities for molecular diagnostic tools and medical tests due to the sensitivity and specificity that it enables. An important need in smartphone-based microscopy and sensing techniques is to improve the detection sensitivity to enable quantification of extremely low concentrations of target molecules, for example cancer biomarkers, pathogen proteins or even DNA. Therefore, these recent results on enhanced fluorescence microscopy using mobile phones are especially important to provide highly sensitive, mobile and cost-effective readers for molecular diagnostic tests, potentially impacting global health and point of care applications.The sensitivity enhancement was accomplished by using a thin silver film on which the fluorescent samples were placed. Although the thickness of the silver film is approximately two thousand fold thinner than the human hair, it is sufficient to enhance the strength of the excitation light, especially in the vicinity of the fluorescent samples. This is achieved by coupling the energy of an optical beam into plasmonic waves (known as surface plasmon polaritons) that are formed by electron oscillations in the silver film. This plasmonics based optical enhancement resulted in a cost-effective mobile phone fluorescence microscope that weighs approximately 370 grams including the smartphone, and achieved repeatable detection of single quantum-dots and as few as ~50-80 fluorophores per sample spot. Compared to standard benchtop fluorescence microscopes, this mobile device is more than twenty fold cheaper and lighter."We are now capable of detecting a few tens of fluorophores for each sample spot using a low-cost pocket microscope, enabled by plasmonics and mobile phones. This will create numerous new opportunities for bringing advanced molecular testing and diagnostics for tackling global health problems, especially in developing countries," said Aydogan Ozcan, who led the research team at UCLA and is a Chancellor's Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering and an associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI).The first author of the research is Dr. Qingshan Wei, a former postdoctoral scholar at Ozcan Lab, who has recently moved to North Carolina State University (USA) as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.This collaboration between UCLA (Ozcan Lab) and Braunschweig University of Technology (Tinnefeld Lab) was published in Scientific Reports. Earlier this year, Ozcan Lab also reported targeted DNA sequencing and mutation analysis using a mobile phone based multimodal microscope, which was published in Nature Communications.Ozcan Lab was supported by the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Army Research Office, National Institutes of Health, Vodafone Americas Foundation and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).Scientific Reports publication:Qingshan Wei, Guillermo Acuna, Seungkyeum Kim, Carolin Vietz, Derek Tseng, Jongjae Chae, Daniel Shir, Wei Luo, Philip Tinnefeld and Aydogan Ozcan, "Plasmonics Enhanced Smartphone Fluorescence Microscope,"Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 2124 (2017), doi:10.1038/s41598-017-02395-Ozcan Lab: http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu/
News Article | May 22, 2017
Many things go wrong in cells during the development of cancer. At the heart of the chaos are often genetic switches that control the production of new cells. In a particularly aggressive form of leukemia, called acute myeloid leukemia, a genetic switch that regulates the maturation of blood stem cells into red and white blood cells goes awry. Normally, this switch leads to appropriate numbers of white and red blood cells. But patients with acute myeloid leukemia end up with a dangerous accumulation of blood stem cells and a lack of red and white blood cells -- cells that are needed to supply the body with oxygen and fight infections. Now, researchers at Caltech and the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami are narrowing in on a protein that helps control this genetic switch. In healthy individuals, the protein, called DPF2, stops the production of red and white blood cells when they do not need to be replaced. That is, it turns the switch off. But the protein can be overproduced in acute myeloid leukemia patients. The protein basically sits on the switch, preventing it from turning back on to make the blood cells as needed. Patients who overproduce DPF2 have a particularly poor prognosis. In a new study, to be published the week of May 22, 2017, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers demonstrate new ways to impede DPF2, potentially rendering acute myeloid leukemia more treatable. They report new structural and functional details about a fragment of DPF2. This new information reveals targets for the development of drugs that would block the protein's function. "Many human diseases, including cancers, arise because of malfunctioning genetic switches," says André Hoelz, the corresponding author of the study. Hoelz is a professor of chemistry at Caltech, a Heritage Medical Research Institute (HMRI) Investigator, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Faculty Scholar. "Elucidating how they work at atomic detail allows us to begin the process of custom tailoring drugs to inactivate them and in many cases that is a significant step towards a cure." Red and white blood cells are constantly regenerated from blood stem cells, which reside in our bone marrow. Like other stem cells, blood stem cells can live forever. It is only when they become differentiated into specific cell types, such as red and white blood cells, that they then become mortal, or acquire the ability to die after a certain period of time. "Our bodies use a complex series of genetic switches to differentiate a blood stem cell into many different cell types. These differentiated cells then circulate in the blood and serve a variety of different functions. When these cells reach the end of their lifespan they need to be replaced," says Hoelz. "This is somewhat like replacing used tires on a car." To investigate the role of DPF2 and learn more about how it controls the genetic switch for making blood cells, the Hoelz group partnered with Stephen D. Nimer, co-corresponding author of the paper and director of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, and his team. First, Ferdinand Huber and Andrew Davenport -- both graduate students at Caltech in the Hoelz group and co-first-authors of the new study--obtained crystals of a portion of the DPF2 protein containing a domain known as a PHD finger, which stands for planet homeodomain. They then used X-ray crystallography, a process that involves exposing protein crystals to high-energy X-rays, to solve the structure of the PHD finger domain. The technique was performed at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, using a dedicated beamline of Caltech's Molecular Observatory. The results revealed how DPF2 binds to a DNA-protein complex, called the nucleosome, to block the production of red and white blood cells. The protein "reads" various signals displayed on the nucleosome surface by adopting a shape that fits various modifications on the nucleosome complex, like the different shaped pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Once the protein binds to this DNA locus, DPF2 turns off the switch that regulates blood cell differentiation. The next step was to see if DPF2 could be blocked in human blood stem cells in the lab. Sarah Greenblatt, a postdoctoral associate in Nimer's group and co-first author of the study, used the structural information from Hoelz's group to create a mutated version of the protein. The Nimer group then introduced the mutated protein in blood stem cells, and found that the mutated DPF2 could no longer bind to the nucleosome. In other words, DPF2 could no longer inactivate the switch for making blood cells. "The mutated DPF2 was unable to bind to specific regions in the genome and could not halt blood stem cell differentiation," says Huber. "Whether DPF2 can also be blocked in the cancer patients themselves remains to be seen." The researchers say a structural socket in DPF2, one of the puzzle-piece-like regions identified in the new study, is a good target for candidate drugs. The study, titled "Histone-Binding of DPF2 Mediates Its Repressive Role in Myeloid Differentiation," was funded by a PhD fellowship of the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, a National Institutes of Health Research Service Award, the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, a Faculty Scholar Award of the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute, the Heritage Medical Research Institute, Caltech startup funds, the Albert Wyrick V Scholar Award of the V Foundation for Cancer Research, a Kimmel Scholar Award of the Sidney Kimmel Foundation for Cancer Research, and a Teacher-Scholar Award of the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation. Other authors are Concepcion Martinez and Ye Xu of the University of Miami and Ly P. Vu of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
News Article | May 22, 2017
A crystal structure of a portion of human DPF2, a protein that controls a genetic switch that tells blood stem cells when to become red and white blood cells. Orange and yellow regions illustrate the DPF2 'reader' domain, which is stabilized by zinc ions, represented as red and grey spheres. Credit: Hoelz Lab/Caltech Many things go wrong in cells during the development of cancer. At the heart of the chaos are often genetic switches that control the production of new cells. In a particularly aggressive form of leukemia, called acute myeloid leukemia, a genetic switch that regulates the maturation of blood stem cells into red and white blood cells goes awry. Normally, this switch leads to appropriate numbers of white and red blood cells. But patients with acute myeloid leukemia end up with a dangerous accumulation of blood stem cells and a lack of red and white blood cells—cells that are needed to supply the body with oxygen and fight infections. Now, researchers at Caltech and the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami are narrowing in on a protein that helps control this genetic switch. In healthy individuals, the protein, called DPF2, stops the production of red and white blood cells when they do not need to be replaced. That is, it turns the switch off. But the protein can be overproduced in acute myeloid leukemia patients. The protein basically sits on the switch, preventing it from turning back on to make the blood cells as needed. Patients who overproduce DPF2 have a particularly poor prognosis. In a new study, to be published the week of May 22, 2017, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers demonstrate new ways to impede DPF2, potentially rendering acute myeloid leukemia more treatable. They report new structural and functional details about a fragment of DPF2. This new information reveals targets for the development of drugs that would block the protein's function. "Many human diseases, including cancers, arise because of malfunctioning genetic switches," says André Hoelz, the corresponding author of the study. Hoelz is a professor of chemistry at Caltech, a Heritage Medical Research Institute (HMRI) Investigator, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Faculty Scholar. "Elucidating how they work at atomic detail allows us to begin the process of custom tailoring drugs to inactivate them and in many cases that is a significant step towards a cure." Red and white blood cells are constantly regenerated from blood stem cells, which reside in our bone marrow. Like other stem cells, blood stem cells can live forever. It is only when they become differentiated into specific cell types, such as red and white blood cells, that they then become mortal, or acquire the ability to die after a certain period of time. "Our bodies use a complex series of genetic switches to differentiate a blood stem cell into many different cell types. These differentiated cells then circulate in the blood and serve a variety of different functions. When these cells reach the end of their lifespan they need to be replaced," says Hoelz. "This is somewhat like replacing used tires on a car." To investigate the role of DPF2 and learn more about how it controls the genetic switch for making blood cells, the Hoelz group partnered with Stephen D. Nimer, co-corresponding author of the paper and director of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, and his team. First, Ferdinand Huber and Andrew Davenport—both graduate students at Caltech in the Hoelz group and co-first-authors of the new study—obtained crystals of a portion of the DPF2 protein containing a domain known as a PHD finger, which stands for planet homeodomain. They then used X-ray crystallography, a process that involves exposing protein crystals to high-energy X-rays, to solve the structure of the PHD finger domain. The technique was performed at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, using a dedicated beamline of Caltech's Molecular Observatory. The results revealed how DPF2 binds to a DNA-protein complex, called the nucleosome, to block the production of red and white blood cells. The protein "reads" various signals displayed on the nucleosome surface by adopting a shape that fits various modifications on the nucleosome complex, like the different shaped pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Once the protein binds to this DNA locus, DPF2 turns off the switch that regulates blood cell differentiation. The next step was to see if DPF2 could be blocked in human blood stem cells in the lab. Sarah Greenblatt, a postdoctoral associate in Nimer's group and co-first author of the study, used the structural information from Hoelz's group to create a mutated version of the protein. The Nimer group then introduced the mutated protein in blood stem cells, and found that the mutated DPF2 could no longer bind to the nucleosome. In other words, DPF2 could no longer inactivate the switch for making blood cells. "The mutated DPF2 was unable to bind to specific regions in the genome and could not halt blood stem cell differentiation," says Huber. "Whether DPF2 can also be blocked in the cancer patients themselves remains to be seen." The researchers say a structural socket in DPF2, one of the puzzle-piece-like regions identified in the new study, is a good target for candidate drugs. Explore further: Researchers show p300 protein may suppress leukemia in MDS patients More information: Ferdinand M. Huber el al., "Histone-binding of DPF2 mediates its repressive role in myeloid differentiation," PNAS (2017). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1700328114
News Article | May 25, 2017
In a paper published today in Nature, the team lays out its methodology for using Betzig's lattice light sheet microscope in combination with image-tracking technology developed in Drexel's Computational Image Sequence Analysis Lab, led by Andrew Cohen, PhD, to produce 3-D time lapse videos of organelle movement and generate quantitative data on their interactions. "The cell biology community has recognized for many years that the cytoplasm is full of many different types of organelles, and the field is recognizing more and more how significant cross-talk between these organelles is in the form of close contacts between these organelles," said Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, PhD, of HHMI's Janelia Research Campus, and senior author of the study. "When two organelles come close to each other they can transfer small molecules like lipids and calcium and communicate with each other through that transfer. But no one has been able to look at the whole set of these interactions at any particular time. This technology is providing a way to do that. But this paper is about a whole new technology, being able to tag six different objects with six different fluorophores, and unmixing the fluorophores so that you can observe the six different objects discretely." Betzig's microscopy technique uses layers of light grids that interact with fluorescent protein-tagged cells to build a 3D microscopic image. At Janelia Research Campus, Betzig and Lippincott-Schwartz have refined that technology to produce a detailed look inside the cell by tagging each organelle type with its own color. "The challenge is analyzing this data," Lippincott-Schwartz said. "It requires being able to simultaneously track these six different objects in 3D. What Andy Cohen and his group have done with the software system they have developed is enable us to really look at this in more quantitative ways than would be possible with conventional tools." Cohen's lab developed a tool called LEVER 3-D in 2015 to help researchers study 3-D images of neural stem cells. It applies an advanced image segmentation algorithm they developed that can identify boundaries of cells and track their movements. Prior to this technology being available to microbiologists, the processing of microscopic images and time-lapse footage would take massive amounts of time because they would have to create lineage trees by hand and attempt to follow cell changes by making their own observations when comparing images. This process is even more involved when multiple objects are being tracked in three dimensions. Lippincott-Schwartz's group used a battery of computer programs to filter out all the different pieces of light spectra emitted by the organelles, to begin to bring the 3-D images and video into focus. The process, called "linear unmixing," required more than 32 cores of a computer work station to sift through 7 billion sets of six-color images, pixel by pixel. Typically they would use expensive commercial software programs to stitch them into a 3-D volume to go about studying them. But these programs are expensive and time-consuming to use, and were not capable of the sophisticated analysis for tracking moving objects in order to make quantitative measurements of their behaviors and particularly how they interact. Cohen's algorithm automates the entire process, which saves researchers a lot of time and it also lets them ask – and answer – more questions about what the cells are doing. He further verified the data by working with Drexel colleague Uri Herschberg, PhD, an associate professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems and College of Medicine, to check it against 2-D images of the cells. "It's some really impressive footage that gives biologists this ability to look deeper and deeper into live cells and see things they've never seen before—like six different organelles in a living cell in true 3-D," said Cohen, a professor in Drexel's College of Engineering. "But it's also a lot of work to begin quantifying what they're seeing—and that's where we can help, by using our program to automate big portions of that process and glean valuable data from it." Using the new technology to simultaneously look at six sets of organelles, Lippincott-Schwartz's teams at Janelia and at the National Institutes of Health are making exciting new observations. They are looking at how the organelles distribute themselves inside the cell, how often they interact with each other and where, when and how fast they move during various times in the cell's lifecycle. "One very interesting outcome is that we found the largest organelle in the cell, which is the ER [endoplasmic reticulum], at any particular time point will be occupying about 25 percent of the volume of the cytoplasm, excluding the nucleus. But if you track the way it disperses through the cytoplasm over a short period of time, like 15 minutes, you see that it explores 95 percent of the whole cytoplasm during that time period," Lippincott-Schwartz said. "We can do this for all of the other organelles at the same time to see how the cytoplasm is being sensed through the dynamic motions of dispersive activities of these organelles." Observing sub-cellular behavior is just the first application of this technology. Now that it has proven to generate usable data, the team will forge ahead to study what happens inside a cell when it is exposed to drug treatments and other common stresses on the system. The researchers suggest that it could be used to study many more than six types of microscopic objects. And it could help dig even deeper into the building blocks of life—into interactions of RNA particles and other proteins that play a role in a cell's function and the behavior of diseased cells. "As these tools continue to improve they will give researchers both a better look at cell behavior and many options for gathering and analyzing that data," Cohen said. "They will be able to ask and answer increasingly complicated questions and that's going to lead to some very exciting and important discoveries." Explore further: How plant cell compartments change with cell growth More information: Alex M. Valm et al. Applying systems-level spectral imaging and analysis to reveal the organelle interactome, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature22369
News Article | February 15, 2017
Life scientists keen to share their findings online before peer review are spoilt for choice. Whereas physicists gravitate to one repository — the ‘preprint’ server arXiv — life sciences has a fast-growing roster of venues for preprints. There’s the biology-focused bioRxiv, and a biology section on arXiv too. But other sites have sprouted up in the past year, or soon will do, and these too provide opportunities for life sciences: ChemRxiv for chemistry, psyArXiv for psychology; even AgriXiv for agricultural sciences and paleorXiv for palaeontology. Now, a coalition of biomedical funders and scientists is throwing its weight behind a ‘one-stop shop’ for all life-sciences preprints — a move that its backers argue should clarify any confusion and make it easier to mine the preprint literature for insights. On 13 February, ASAPbio, a grassroots group of biologists that advocates for preprints, issued a funding call to build a central preprint site; the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Wellcome Trust and several other leading funders announced their support for the concept. “The landscape could become fragmented very quickly,” says Robert Kiley, head of digital services at the London-based Wellcome Trust. “We want to find a way of ensuring that, although this content is distributed far and wide, there’s a central place that brings it all together”. The details of the service are inchoate: its scope will depend on specific scientific fields and their funders, says Jessica Polka, the director of ASAPbio. But as well as aggregating content from other biology-focused preprint sites, ASAPbio wants the site to mesh with arXiv and with ChemRxiv, which the American Chemical Society in Washington DC plans to launch soon. Proponents hope that a central site will lure biologists to embrace the practice as wholeheartedly as physical scientists have. Physics manuscripts routinely appear at arXiv.org months before publication in peer-reviewed journals, as researchers race to release their findings online before their rivals. And preprints are now accepted currency in determining priority for a discovery, as well as in winning grants and jobs. ArXiv handles more than 100,000 manuscripts each year in physics, mathematics and computer science. (The largest life-sciences preprint server, bioRxiv, posted around 5,000 manuscripts in 2016.) “One of the lessons of arXiv is that users prefer ‘one-stop shopping’,” says Paul Ginsparg, a theoretical physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who founded the site in 1991. He could see a preprint aggregation site for life sciences working just as well, so long as disparate sites can agree on uniform technical standards. A central preprint service could also help scientists to use automated software to mine the literature for insights, says Ron Vale, a cell biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a founder of ASAPbio. At the moment, researchers who want to mine peer-reviewed papers face myriad hurdles, from publisher copyrights to disparate websites that make bulk-downloading difficult. “We’re trying to think of preprints as data,” says Vale. It would be both technically and legally straightforward for computers to crawl the collection of preprints on the central site, where they would appear under an open-access licence. Polka would not say how much ASAPbio expects the site to cost, but arXiv funding totals about US$925,000 a year, paid for by a global collective of more than 200 research institutions and funders; a large donation has come from the Simons Foundation, a private organization based in New York City. Ginsparg says expenses for the life-sciences site should be around $5 a manuscript, once it is publishing tens of thousands of manuscripts each year. Funders who support the site have not yet committed to paying for it, but Kiley expects that funders will do so once details are hashed out. Other funders that have come out in support of the central service include the UK Medical Research Council, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the European Research Council. “That’s going to send a strong message to the science community that this kind of communication is encouraged,” says Vale. Last month, the HHMI announced that it would consider preprints in deciding whether or not to renew the prestigious five-year grants it gives to investigators. Jason Hoyt, chief executive of the journal PeerJ (which also operates a preprint service), says he supports a central preprint site and that his company might bid to help create it. But such a site will succeed only if it can induce a large proportion of life scientists to view preprints as the dominant currency for career progression, he says. “The challenge is to overturn the thinking in biology.” ASAPbio and the funders supporting a central preprint service emphasize that it’s no replacement for peer-reviewed journals. They note that the vast majority (over 80% in some fields) of arXiv posts wind up in journals. “We really see this as a complement to the journal system, rather than anything that could be threatening,” says Polka, who adds that a central service will not attempt to organize peer review. That would be a missed opportunity, says Rebecca Lawrence, managing director of London-based F1000Research, which posts papers before they are peer reviewed at the journal (but does not consider these preprints). She would like to see peer review occur through a central preprint service, thereby reducing the influence that traditional journals have on scientists’ careers. “It’s a great shift in the right direction,” Lawrence says, “but I think we need to go a lot further.” Ginsparg ultimately envisions a "federated repository" that spans scientific disciplines and aggregates preprints from arXiv and other fields, including the life sciences. “Twenty-five years ago, I thought we’d be much closer to that point by now, but I still think it’s inevitable,” he says.
News Article | February 15, 2017
FILE - This Tuesday, April 26, 2016 file photo shows The Associated Press logo in New York. The Associated Press is teaming with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education to expand its coverage of science, medicine and health journalism. (AP Photo/Hiro Komae) NEW YORK (AP) -- The Associated Press is teaming up with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education to expand its coverage of science, medicine and health journalism. The initial collaboration includes two pilot projects. With the first project, AP will create and distribute a series of stories, profiles, videos and graphics focusing on genetic medicine. The second project will look at a variety of science topics in the news that will help readers stay current on the latest science research and make informed decisions on topics ranging from the environment, to public health. "This collaboration brings wider attention and new storytelling tools to evidence-based, factual science," AP Executive Editor Sally Buzbee said. HHMI, based in Chevy Chase, Maryland, supports the advancement of biomedical research and science education. The organization's origin dates back to the late 1940s when a small group of physicians and scientists advised Hughes. The medical institute was created in 1953. The primary purpose of the organization is to promote human knowledge in the field of the basic sciences and its effective application for the benefit of mankind, according to its charter. In fiscal 2016, it provided $663 million in U.S. biomedical research and $86 million in grants and other support for science education. HHMI's Department of Science Education, the largest private, nonprofit supporter of science education in the country, will provide funding for the AP projects. The funding will allow AP to increase the amount of science-related stories it provides to news organizations and add more journalists to support its current science reporting team. HHMI will also offer expert background information and educational material. While the AP will receive funding and utilize HHMI's expertise when crafting its content, it maintains full editorial control of published material. "We're proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with the world's most respected news organization to ensure that the best evidence around important scientific topics is presented clearly and distributed widely," said Sean B. Carroll, vice president of HHMI's Department of Science Education. | <urn:uuid:c7096ecb-6f3c-4f19-9411-fa2d19bf1c5f> | CC-MAIN-2017-34 | https://www.linknovate.com/affiliation/hhmi-719172/all/ | 2017-08-18T04:53:26Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886104565.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20170818043915-20170818063915-00620.warc.gz | en | 0.943583 | 13,839 |
On Sunday night, The New York Times brought you live coverage of the Tony Awards with photos from the red carpet and the show, commentary from Charles Isherwood and Dave Itzkoff and behind-the-scenes reports.
11:12 P.M. A Few Last Thoughts on a Not-So-Predictable Show
DAVE ITZKOFF: I can hardly remember what happened! But that was a less predictable show than I expected going in – at least in terms of award-winners, if not the musical numbers. Highlights for me might have to be James Corden’s sweetly moving acceptance speech, and Patti and Mandy riffing off each other as only they can.
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: As Tony telecasts go these days I think that was not bad, even with the cruise-ship moment. I loved Patti and Mandy, Steve Kazee’s and Nina Arianda’s speeches. And actually the leading actor/acrtess awards all went the way I’d hoped. Not that it’s all about me. Or even remotely about me. It will be interesting to see if the Tony sweep helps “Once” win audiences.
DI: So I guess we won’t have adjacent cabins on the next Royal Caribbean cruise, is what you’re saying?
CI: Well, maybe if they’re doing “Memphis.”
DI: See you on the high seas!
11:08 P.M. A Parable-by-Way-of-Commercial as Acceptance Speech
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: I guess “Once” winning the big one isn’t a surprise at this point, but still it’s heartening that this small show has done so well. Often the Tonys go to the more commercial show.
DAVE ITZKOFF: Well, that was an interesting parable-by-way-of-commercial as acceptance speech by Frederick Zollo. Onto NPH’s musical recap of the show we just saw. But don’t spoil Mad Men for me!
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: What’s “Mad Men” Dave? I only pay attention to the theatah. This closing number is terrific. I must watch on YouTube, with all the credits running over it, alas.
DI: Adorable. I loved NPH’s hip-hop routine from last year a bit more, but he should have a permanent hosting slot on this show.
CI: I suspect it’s his as long as he’s willing.
11:02 P.M. A Word From the ‘Broadway Establishment’
DAVE ITZKOFF: I can’t believe this is about to end on time. And no one spoiled “Mad Men” on Twitter!
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: But Dave it’s not ending on time! We’ll be at least two minutes over. Still…
DI: Well, then, I’ll just turn it off. You’ll let me know how it ends? Two of the three Book of Mormon creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are celebrating their transformations from “artists” to “artistes” as Mr. Parker eats a cookie onstage.
CI: I love the poncy accent the cookie-eater is doing. But which one is he?
10:54 P.M. The Audra Award
DAVE ITZKOFF: Time to rename this award the Audra?
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Well this is her first leading actress Tony; the other FOUR were in supporting categories.
DI: “I was a little girl with a pot belly and afro puffs, hyperactive and overdramatic, and I found the theater and I found my home,” says a tearful Ms. McDonald.
CI: “To think that the theater would be so good to me” she also said; Audra McDonald has been good to the theater!
10:54 P.M. A Scream and an Acceptance Speech From Nina Arianda
CHARLES ISHERWOOD Nina Arianda wins the actress award. “You were my first crush” she says to Christopher Plummer. She’s delightful. I love that she’s got a neon-yellow Post-It with her list on it.
DAVE ITZKOFF: I might not do this again,” Ms. Arianda says, pushing back against the orchestra that’s trying to play her off.
10:50 P.M. From the Press Room: Hugh Jackman
STEVEN MCELROY: Hugh Jackman, in the press room, talked about his wife presenting his special Tony award. He was truly surprised, he said. “I thought she was going to miss it because she’d gone to the bathroom,” he said. “She hates public speaking and she can’t keep a secret. It’s a minor miracle that this happened.”
10:40 P.M. An Upset and Tears From James Corden
DAVE ITZKOFF: That’s an upset. Incredible.
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Not really, Dave, I predicted it. But I know what you mean: Hoffman was the favorite. But Corden’s was such a winning performance. And Corden just gave some nice props to Hoffman. A tearful James Corden thanks his fellow nominees including his “favorite actor in the world,” Philip Seymour Hoffman.
I’ll never doubt you again, Charles. Corden rounds out his speech by dedicating his victory to his “baby mama,” who gave birth just before rehearsals started. “I can’t wait to marry her. … She makes me say ‘us’ instead of ‘I’ and ‘we’ instead of ‘me.’”
CI: OK am I crazy or is it weird to have the “Leap of Faith” number at this point in the show when things are moving to a climax? The show is closed and got few nominations.
DI: I feel we’re almost due for the third annual performance from Memphis.
CI: Ha! It’s not an impossibility. Actually this COULD be a number from “Memphis.” More or less.Is there a musical that doesn’t have a gospel number these days? I hear they put one into the “Les Miz” movie.
DI: “I Dreamed a Dream, Y’All”
10:38 P.M. A Big Night for Steve Kazee and ‘Once’
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Steve Kazee wins the leading actor in musical Tony. My prediction rate is going up. It’s well deserved; he’s wonderful in the show. It’s a big night for “Once.” AND he gave a gorgeous, moving speech.
10:31 P.M. A Special Tony For Hugh Jackman From His Wife
DAVE ITZKOFF: Hugh Jackman’s getting a special Tony from his wife? This is total nepotism!
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: That’s called star power I guess. Although he looked genuinely surprised, I can hardly imagine he was. What did his wife say she was doing? Going to the loo? Just before his award.
DI: He should have taken the stage by zipline.”She’s never kept a secret her entire life,” Hugh says of Deb’s remarks about the loo.
CI: I guess she DID say she was off to the loo! I got it in one. Not crazy about that maribou fringe on her dress. That will be my sole comment on fashions this evening. And really I don’t even know if it was maribou.
DI: I can’t top that.
10:23 P.M. ‘Hairspray’ On the High Seas
DAVE ITZKOFF: Enter Harvey Fierstein to introduce a segment from “Royal Caribbean” — I mean “Hairspray.” I believe there’s a reason why David Foster Wallace did not call his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Do Over and Over Again.”
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: And it has surely not been lost on anyone that Royal Caribbean has bought at least two ads on the telecast. Looks a WEE BIT tacky.
10:21 P.M. Jeffrey Richards Accepts for ‘Porgy’
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: The revival award goes to “Porgy and Bess.” I had a feeling that it would beat the closed “Follies.” I’d have voted “Follies.”
DAVE ITZKOFF: I hope they have a few extra pages in tomorrow’s edition to devote to a new letter from Sondheim.
10:16 P.M. A Song From Patti and Mandy
DAVE ITZKOFF: When are Patti [Lupone] and Mandy [Patinkin] just going to adopt me already?
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: This medley is adorable. A highlight of the show.
DI: And Mandy has his “Homeland” beard back. All is right with the world.
10:09 P.M. From the Press Room: Bob Crowley
STEVEN MCELORY: Bob Crowley, the scenic designer for “Once,” set in a pub, knows a thing or two about such places. “I grew up in Ireland,” he said in the press room. “I probably spent more time in the pub than I did at home. It’s that natural environment for people to fall in love and fall out of love. Births, marriages and funerals are sort of arranged in these places and sometimes conducted in these places as well. So it seemed a natural place to do a show that’s about falling in love, and the fact that they don’t come together makes it even more real I think.”
10:06 P.M. Arm Pumps and Ricky Martin for ‘Evita’
DAVE ITZKOFF: Here are Elena Roger and the vigorously pumping arms of Ricky Martin to perform “And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out)” from “Evita.”
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Ricky Martin has to be the most chipper and cheery Che the world has known. Alliteration accidental.
DI: That was beautiful.
CI: Funny thing: this choreography could have come straight from the mock-opening number. Do you agree? I agree, but it seems a bit hard on poor Elena Roger that she just stands there looking imperious. I mean, it is called “Evita” … And she didn’t get a nomination either.
DI: LES MIZ
CI: Against all odds could it actually be good? I sort of got chills hearing “I Dreamed a Dream.”
10:03 P.M. ‘Clybourne Park’ Gives Thanks
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: “Clybourne Park” wins; I think that was pretty likely, although “Starcatcher” is cleaning up in other categories.
DAVE ITZKOFF: Was its Pulitzer win essentially a guarantee of this award as well (its bumpy road to Broadway notwithstanding)?
CI: Probably. Are those the 100 producers and cast of show sort of posing at the side of the theater? That’s new. At least they’re not all clambering onstage, I guess.Is clambering a verb?
9:59 P.M. Jim Parsons Introduces Best Plays
DAVID ITZKOFF: Did you all see the ad for “Rebecca”?
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Yes I did: what’s that about the most lavish show in 20 years?
DI: I know – is that a selling point? “Lavish”? Though I do enjoy that Linda Lavish.
CI: She’s brilliant.
DI: Jim Parsons is introducing the first of the nominated plays, “Clybourne Park.” And onto “Other Desert Cities.”
CI: These shadow-mime things in the background are a bit weird, no?
DI: And didn’t we already see a scene from “Peter and the Starcatchers”?
CI:Yes, which is a bit odd.
DI: Well, they did their best to keep folks from switching to “Mad Men” by flashing some skin.
9:51 P.M. From the Press Room: Alan Menken
STEVEN MCELROY: Alan Menken, the “Newsies” composer is here (funny that “Once” is doing a musical number on the telecast at the moment.) Mr. Menken has a whole lotta Oscars, but this is his first Tony. It’s not better, he says, but certainly different. “I’m a New Yorker, born in Manhattan and grew up on theater,” he said. “It doesn’t get better than this.”
9:48 P.M. A Taste of ‘Once’
DAVE ITZKOFF: This isn’t the part of “Once” where people are invited up on stage to join in, I take it.
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Unless they brought their own instruments, no. But I thought they said they were going to do “Falling Slowly.” Or did I mishear?
DI:I didn’t hear, but I can live without that number for an awards show or two.
CI: Yes maybe I just imagined it. In any case I think that number came off better than any of the others so far. Although Cristin Milioti didn’t have much to do other than wander about looking waifish.
9:44 P.M. Tyler Perry Presents to Scott Rudin
DAVE ITZKOFF: Tyler Perry is giving the revival of a play award. And announcing he’s sold out the Beacon with his shows 120 times. Nice self-plug!
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: And he worked for Kermit Bloomgarden, the original producer of “Salesman.” That I didn’t know.
9:35 P.M. It’s ‘Summertime’
DAVE ITZKOFF: I would not mind a three-hour show of Audra singing “Summertime.”
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Agreed. But I think I would rather have seen a real scene from this show rather than this hodgepodge of moments.
DI: Well, all the Tony nominees in the show have to get their due, I suppose.
CI: That’s the idea I guess but all the nominees from “Follies” didn’t get their due. And that worked better.
9:33 P.M. The First Musical to Win a Razzie and a Tony?
DAVE ITZKOFF: It’s a win for “Newsies.” It would have been quite a snub if it hadn’t won, what with two plays nominated and one quick-flop musical, “Bonnie & Clyde.” This must be the first musical to win the Razzie and the Tony.
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: That’s an achievement of a kind.
9:29 P.M. It’s 9:30, Time for a Neil Patrick Harris Medley
DAVE ITZKOFF: We’re back with NPH singing a tribute to – what? Every score that’s ever Won a Tony?
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Seems like it. I’m getting dizzy. And all that to introduce .. Sheryl Crow. Really! She’s giving away the best-score Tony? Well she is doing the score for “Diner” I now learn.
9:19 P.M. Scenes From the Tonys Red Carpet
9:17 P.M. Ellen Barkin With the Year in Plays
DAVE ITZKOFF: Ellen Barkin introduces the year in plays, which begins with the mermaid musical number from “Peter and the Starcatcher.” That itself was a feint to set up a very abbreviated scene from the show. Whew! James Corden – definitely James Corden – gives us a little of the physical comedy from “One Man, Two Guvnors.”
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: He’s brilliant. Now in honor of Judy’s 90th…. fake Judy! This is a very oddly arranged sequence. I mean, a bit of “The Trolley Song” after James Corden doing the mad shtick, spliced in between bits of all the plays. Peculiar.
9:16 P.M. From the Press Room: Paloma Young
STEVEN MCELROY: Paloma Young, who won best costume design of a play for “Peter and the Starcatcher,” stopped by and talked about the challenge of designing for such a fantastical show. “It’s an ensemble piece and the actors play so many characters and it’s so fast-paced and the actors also play scenery, she said. “So I needed to make costumes that could be pirates, and sailors, and orphans, and officers in the navy and a wall, and a ship and a jungle. It was, you know, no biggie.”
9:12 P.M. James Marsden Presents Best Featured Actress in a Musical
DAVE ITZKOFF: Get ready for a lot of vamping. (and I’m not talking about the “True Blood” season premiere).
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Judy Kaye I predicted. “Chandeliers have been very good to me,” she says — having last won for “Phantom of the Opera.” Good line, Judy.
DI: Oh, I totally get it now! She was a highlight of “Nice Work,” I will say. But are you ever so slightly surprised by the love going this show’s way?
CI: As I said I thought she’d win but McGrath was a surprise. And Kaye’s role was pretty meaty, compared to some others in the category.
9:04 P.M. Kelli O’Hara Leads a Sampler From ‘Nice Work’
DAVE ITZKOFF: “Glee” star Matthew Morrison set up a performance from “Nice Work If You Can Get It.” Probably the only time “Someone to Watch Over Me” has been done by a lady gangster toting a shotgun.
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Lady bootlegger, technically. But what a heavenly voice. I could listen to Kelli O’Hara all night and be happy.
DI: I like this fun and boozy fellow at the center of the number. Where was he the night I saw the show?
9:02 P.M. Another Upset Win With Christian Borle
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: One presumes, meantime Christian Borle — another upset. I thought Andrew Garfield would win. There seems to be a bit of a “Salesman” backlash if you ask me.
DAVE ITZKOFF: Certainly all the “Spider-Man” promos, stage and screen, leading up to this award, seemed to indicate it was going to go Andrew Garfield’s way. But he did co-found Facebook, so don’t feel too bad for him.
CI: Yes you can’t have everthing, even in showbiz. Particularly in showbiz. But I say he was robbed. That was one of the outstanding performances of the season.
8:59 P.M. A Spider is on the Loose
DAVE ITZKOFF: Uh-oh, I’m hearing the theme from “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: I can’t believe you recognized it. That’s an impressive feat of recall.
DI: Let’s just say it’s burned into my memory. Ted Chapin and Angela Lansbury are giving their spiel for the American Theater Wing – “We won’t leave you hanging,” says Ms. Lansbury – as NPH dangles precariously from a Spider-Man rigging.
CI: That was a cute bit. Now Jessica Chastain is giving an award wearing a dress that says, “I’m not really plain like the heroine of ‘The Heiress.’”
8:54 P.M. Michael McGrath From the Press Room
STEVEN MCELROY: Michael McGrath gave a shout out to Tommy Brent in his acceptance speech; in the press room he elaborated; “I started at Theater by the Sea in 1977, it was my first season of summer stock,” he said. (Brent, a longtime summer stock producer, died a year ago.). And as for that “Baby, you’re the greatest line,” well yes, he is indeed attached to a musical version of the 1950s sitcom “The Honeymooners,” as Ralph Kramden.
8:50 P.M. Don’t You Get Me Wrong ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’
DAVE ITZKOFF: Ah, finally, that “Jesus Christ Superstar” performance we were promised. “Israel, 4BC, had no mass communication.” The immortal lyrics of Tim Rice.
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: I’m sure you could quote endless gems from this score. I’m wondering how Josh Young gets into that shiny blue suit. Could it be any more snug?
DI: We’ll discuss that when we’re not on company time.
8:48 P.M. Mike Nichols: ‘A Salesman Has Got to Dream’
DAVE ITZKOFF: Did Laroquette even look in that envelope before announcing Mike Nichols’ name?
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Oddly he seemed not to. Well we’re on track here, this one at least was fairly easy to call. 18 nominations he’s had!
DI: “You see before you a happy man,” says Nichols, who recalls the Beacon Theater as his old neighborhood movie theater and the site of his victory at a pie-eating contest.
CI: Yes another talent!
DI: “There’s not a person in this theater that doesn’t know what it is be a salesman, to be way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.”
well said Mr. Nichols (by way of Mr. Miller).
CI: Indeed. Too bad the orchestra started to play him off. That was a moving speech. (With thanks to Mr. Miller).
8:43 P.M. Four Wins So Far For ‘Once’
DAVE ITZKOFF: Is “Once” now the favorite for best musical?
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Yes I think we have a trend here. How many times are we going to hear the strains of … what’s the name of that one song? Of course there’s the odd irony that this musical was disqualified from the score category so you have a musical potentially winning the big one — but not even nominated for best score.
8:39 P.M. ‘Ghost’ Makes an Appearance
DAVE ITZKOFF: Hey Charles, you were a big fan of Ghost: the Musical, right?
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Oy. I like the phrasing: a number “from another new show on Broadway this season.” Rousing endorsement there, but then they were snubbed by the Tonys, for the most part. That was mercifully short at least. They seem to have been given less time than the shows with the major noms.
8:31 P.M. A Little Song and Dance From ‘Follies’
DAVE ITZKOFF: Danny Burstein’s giving us “Buddy’s Blues” from “Follies.” Will they do the whole “Loveland” sequence?
CHARLES ISHRERWOOD: I fear not. I just keep thinking how tired the man must be after flying in on the red-eye. God bless him. But of course the show is closed so you wonder why they’re spending all the money to do the number?
DI: Two words: Sond. Heim.
8:28 P.M. A Win for ‘Nice Work’
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: This is turning into a very odd night. I didn’t think Michael McGrath — pronounced McGRAW I gather — was even in contention. Go figure.
DAVE ITZKOFF: That shocked me. Seemed like the house was very much rooting for Josh Young of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” if such things matter.
CI: We may be in for a night chock full o’ upsets. At least it keeps things lively. I was pulling for MIchael Cerveris, but he’s got one already.
8:25 P.M. Amanda Seyfried Presents
DAVE ITZKOFF: You DO NOT play the score to “Jesus Christ Superstar” and then not perform “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Now I know how to pronounce Amanda Seyfried’s name. I’m learning something tonight. But did I spell it right?
DI: I’m assuming Amanda Seyfried is here to plug Les Miz. Or is her Linda Lovelace biopic a musical too?
8:17 P.M. A Number From ‘Newsies’
DAVE ITZKOFF: This peppy number is “Seize the Day” from “Newsies.”
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: One of many peppy numbers from the show. It sort of looks like a Thom Browne fashion show to me. But with gymnastics.
DI: If it doesn’t get people buying newspapers again, it might sell some culottes.
CI: Too bad we don’t have 3-D televisions yet. This number would be perfect.
8:14 P.M. Wow Judith Light
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Wow. Judith Light! That was a longshot, or so I would have thought.
DAVE ITZKOFF: You were thinking Linda Emond for the early Death of a Salesman sweep?
CI: That was my prediction. Of course I’m often wrong. And I have to say Judith Light was terrific in the show. She made the role her own, following an impressive LInda Lavin. And since I missed her all those years on “Who’s the Boss?” I was particularly impressed.
It was “Who’s the Boss?” right?
DI: Yes, exactly. Though the cast members of “The Facts of Life” will all have their day.
CI: One can only hope.
8:12 P.M. From the Press Room: Emanuel Azenberg
STEVEN MCELROY: Emanuel Azenberg is the first winner to arrive in the press room, but doesn’t want to share details about anything else he might have coming up. He does, however, mention a few of his favorite shows he’s worked on in his long career: “The Real Thing” is one, “The Lion in Winter” is another and “Brighton Beach,” is another, he said. “Then there are some you’ve committed to that fail, like ‘Sideshow,’ I loved it,” he said. The failures are on “the resume of your soul,” he said.
8:09 P.M. First Impressions of the Host
DAVE ITZKOFF: Neil Patrick Harris refers obliquely to the cast of “Newsies” as “hyper-acrobatic 35-year-old-15-year-olds.” That’s his setup for an original musical number that wonders what life would be like if it were more like theater. I’m a fan of NPH’s previous hosting efforts but some energy seems to be lacking so far.
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: It seems a wee bit under-rehearsed. But the odd thing is of course that this opening number is basically mocking the absurdities of theater in the guise of celebrating them. But that’s our post-post-modern world I guess.
DI: I don’t have the time to type out that Jesse Tyler Ferguson just crashed a Neil Patrick Harris musical number. Get shorter names, fellas.
CI: And we’ve got Annie…
DI: Did Broadway’s newest Annie just say “the sun will be back tomorrow?”
8:01 P.M. The Show Opens With a Hello From ‘The Book of Mormon’
DI: The 2012 Tony Awards appear to be opening with “Hello,” the opening number of 2011 Tony Award winner “Book of Mormon.” Or did we enter a time warp?
CI: No it’s really happening. But then a few years ago they opened with “The Lion King.” So there is precedent, I suppose. Still if I were the producers of, say “Newsies” or “Once” I might be miffed.
DI: As long as we’re doing the year over again, I’m going to remind myself not to invest in Facebook or get too caught up in “The Killing.”
CI: Wise. And don’t get too excited about the Triple Crown thing either.
DI: And here’s host Neil Patrick Harris, joining the “Book of Mormon” kids in LDS attire.
CI: And looking weirdly appropriate in that getup.
DI: He introduces the Tony Awards as “50 Shades of Gay.” So that’s how we’re starting.
CI: Well it’s been four minutes already, Dave. It’s nice that the Tonys can be out and proud at last.
7:49 P.M. The Showdown Between Once and Newsies Begins
DI: Before the telecast has started, the showdown between ‘Once’ and ‘Newsies’ is already underway. “Once” nabbed an early award for best orchestrations (going to Martin Lowe) and “Newsies” got a trophy for choreography (Christopher Gattelli).
CI: Yes it looks like it could shape up to be a showdown. I think the orchestration award for “Once” is well deserved, and heaven knows “Newsies” had a LOT of choreography. All them boys jumping around ceaselessly. But I think I would have voted for Steven Hoggett for “Once.” His work is so distinctive. I think he deserved to win for “American Idiot,” but anyway…
DI: And in that time, “Once” has picked up a second award, for book of a musical, going to Enda Walsh, who wins out over “Newsies” writer Harvey Fierstein. The battle continues!
CI: It’s kind of a bummer not being able to watch these awards being given out. You feel like you’re entering the party late. But that battle is lost, I fear.
7:39 P.M. John Lithgow and Bernadette Peters on the Red Carpet
7:34 P.M. A Happy Judy Garland’s Birthday to You
CHARLES ISHERWOOD: Hi Dave. Here we are again. Not on the red carpet.
DAVE ITZKOFF: A happy Judy Garland’s birthday to you, Charles. Should we do something to celebrate? Maybe an awards show?
CI: Well that seems a little extravagant, but why not? Judy deserves nothing less.
DI: This year’s Tonys have a few categories that most observers believe are all but settled. And then we’ve got a few – pardon the word choice – horse races.
Any competitive (or non-competitive) categories that you’ve got your eye on tonight?
CI: It is kind of nice that the Big Prize — best musical — is one of the tighter races. Last year, I seem to recall, this was not the case. Something to do with Mormons?
DI: Yes, I wish I could remember. But it had a very popular Book, I’m told.
CI: Are there any categories you’re particularly invested in, Dave?
DI: Well I have small sums of money on all of them. That’s how I make things “interesting.” But I’m especially curious about best musical revival. That seems like a very tough call to make.
CI: Agreed. “Follies” probably is the sentimental favorite, but it closed in Los Angeles today. The poor cast had to fly out on the red-eye! Arrived in New York 7:30 a.m., they were saying. Ouch. But “Porgy and Bess” is obviously a major contender here. If the voters dare to thumb their noses at Stephen Sondheim.
DI: I wonder how Sondheim feels about that “Porgy and Bess” revival. Oh, wait, never mind.
6:35 P.M. Neil Patrick Harris on the Red Carpet
5:39 P.M. A Few Notes and Tips From the Dress Rehearsal
SCOTT HELLER: I spent a few hours at the Tonys dress rehearsal this morning, as once the show starts and our great team of writers, editors, bloggers, and photographers gets going it becomes pretty hard to pay close attention to the show itself. A few impressions, questions and things to watch for:
—It will be hard for Neil Patrick Harris to top his own performance as host last year, and he doesn’t have Lin-Manuel Miranda writing the end-of-show rap this time. But David Javerbaum, the former “Daily Show” producer who co-wrote the hilarious “Not Just For Gays Anymore” opener in 2011, is involved again. And if something unusual happens, expect NPH to run with it.
—Plays will get more attention than usual, in part because James Corden of “One Man, Two Guvnors” can’t help but be funny. Also: “Peter and the Starcatcher” and “End of the Rainbow” are plays with music.
—Today would be Judy Garland’s 90th birthday. Expect to hear about it if Tracie Bennett wins best actress in a play for portraying her in “Rainbow.”
—Even if “Death of a Salesman” wins, you won’t see much of the just-closed revival. It’s the only nominated show that, at the rehearsal at least, didn’t provide video footage to play during the montage segments.
—“Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark” will not go unmocked.
—Speaking Of: If set designer George Tsypin wins, how will he handle thanks for the show’s deposed director, Julie Taymor?
—“Unchained Melody”? Check. “Falling Slowly”? Listen to the album.
—Could there be a surprise presenter for Hugh Jackman’s special award?
—When the “Godspell” cast encourages audience participation, will Philip Seymour Hoffman play along?
3:50 P.M. A Tonys Curtain Raiser
PATRICK HEALY: For all the choreography at Sunday night’s Tony Awards ceremony — the producers promise more Broadway performance numbers than ever — the CBS telecast will include plenty of unpredictability as well. Broadway audiences have been loving the new shows “Newsies” and “Once” for three months now, and they are locked in a tight race for the best musical Tony. The best play Tony is up for grabs too, with the acclaimed productions of “Clybourne Park” and “Other Desert Cities” among the contenders. And could this be the year when “Follies,” which has had a cult following for 40 years, finally wins a top Tony (for best musical revival this time around)? The acting categories will quicken the pulse of some theater lovers; for best actress in a play, nominees Nina Arianda, Tracie Bennett, Stockard Channing, Linda Lavin, and Cynthia Nixon ALL can’t win. Even if they should, cruel world, even if they should.
ArtsBeat and NYTimes.com will have coverage throughout the night, including live blogging by theater critic Charles Isherwood and reporter Dave Itzkoff right off the mark at 8 p.m. with the first of at least 14 musical production numbers on the show. And check out Monday’s newspaper too for a complete wrap-up and photos. | <urn:uuid:2d422c07-67a2-4966-b783-e44f93728e91> | CC-MAIN-2017-34 | https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/tony-awards-2012-live-blog/?_r=0 | 2017-08-24T09:05:43Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886133447.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20170824082227-20170824102227-00460.warc.gz | en | 0.943412 | 8,236 |
[2017/11/24 11:17] The Trader Smiles as she sees Evie "Good Morning Dear
[2017/11/24 11:17] Evie smiles brightly. "Good morning, Trader."
[2017/11/24 11:18] The Trader: I missed you in class yesterday, But hopefully we can cover what i meant to cover today..
[2017/11/24 11:19] Evie nods, looking happily relieved. "I had a rough day yesterday."
[2017/11/24 11:20] The Trader: Ow? Well If you need to talk about it we have a little bit of time before class?
[2017/11/24 11:21] Evie: "I'd rather just forget it if its all the same."
[2017/11/24 11:21] The Trader Nods "Very well"
[2017/11/24 11:21] The Trader: I should get ready
[2017/11/24 11:23] Claire just walks past the two and heads into the classroom
[2017/11/24 11:24] Mark Blake: yo evie
[2017/11/24 11:24] Evie: "Heya, Mark. Ready for class?" Evie enters the classroom and finds a seat.
[2017/11/24 11:24] "Colleen" comes racing around the corner, pausing as she sees the other students. She walks shyly toward the classroom.
[2017/11/24 11:24] The Trader smiles at Claire as she enters "Take a set, do be careful"
[2017/11/24 11:25] Mark Blake: no im not..
[2017/11/24 11:25] Claire sits down with a slight squish as last time
[2017/11/24 11:25] The Trader Frowns, "Hmm.. if anymore arrives we will move classes"
[2017/11/24 11:27] The Trader: Hmm.. It might be better to move into the other class. More room
[2017/11/24 11:28] "Colleen" looks for a seat in the back away from the others.
[2017/11/24 11:28] The Trader smiles "Much better.. Judging from the fact i Only had two students yesterday i thought that room would do. I see i misjudged."
[2017/11/24 11:29] Claire: i wonder where everyone was
[2017/11/24 11:29] Claire: and uh... wheres the dead girl?
[2017/11/24 11:29] The Trader: Things happen, It is fine
[2017/11/24 11:30] Mark Blake grunts and leans back in his chair pulling his bandanna lower over his eyes "not here and dats a good thing..i ain't met more then 2 undead i would say shouldn't be immideatly corrected
[2017/11/24 11:34] The Trader shakes her head "Well this is fine atleast." rings the bell on the desk starting the class "Morning Students, hope you have a good day. This class will be about the Basics of Magic. How mages can work on the various energies to make effects happen, and the symbology involved."
[2017/11/24 11:36] Mark Blake Pulls out a piece of paper and labels it how best to punch magic usesers in the head
[2017/11/24 11:37] Evie sits up attentively.
[2017/11/24 11:37] "Colleen" shifts awkwardly in her seat, poking at her tablet.
[2017/11/24 11:40] Claire just sighs a bit, this being the class she didnt like after all
[2017/11/24 11:41] Alecta Papadopoulos steps into the class, a little behind schedule. curtseying to trader
[2017/11/24 11:44] The Trader Watches Alecta enter "Welcome too class, a little late i see, no matter." she looks down at the registrar and smiles "I see someone new in the Class, I'll ask for you name, but not you Name..." she chuckles "The difference will be known soon. Right Today i shall be doing the Class i wished to do yesterday. Most mages are capable of only working in some specific fields of power, throwing a Fireball is Conjury for example"
[2017/11/24 11:46] Mark Blake Yawns again taking notes and shooting a side long look at alecta
[2017/11/24 11:46] Evie nods, looking over to the freak next to her at the mention of fireballs.
[2017/11/24 11:47] "Colleen" blushes, looking down. She pokes at the tablet randomly.
[2017/11/24 11:48] Claire hmm, right...
[2017/11/24 11:52] The Trader: All Mages can manipulate the basic Elements of Earth and Air, Fire and Water. Most people know these, but not the symbols they represent. There is also 'Centre' , Void or Metal depending on where in the worlds they learned from.
[2017/11/24 11:52] Alecta Papadopoulos turns to give Evie an unemotive glance
[2017/11/24 11:55] Mark Blake Grunts and jots a few things down his foot tapping on the floor unconcuously
[2017/11/24 11:55] Evie nods, already knowing she had an affinity for Air, though not really able to do much with it... yet.
[2017/11/24 11:55] "Colleen" looks up through heavy lashes, but avoiding any eye contact.
[2017/11/24 11:56] Alecta Papadopoulos starts writing. She knew hers. and it would seem to be fire.
[2017/11/24 11:57] Claire takes a couple of notes
[2017/11/24 12:00] The Trader: Well, I pose a question to you all, Each of you give me what an Element could represent. Mark, i give you Earth, Alecta, Fire, Evie, Air. Claire Water. Colleen.... Metal.
[2017/11/24 12:00] The Trader Smiles looking at Colleen
[2017/11/24 12:01] Mark Blake grunts "what makes you so sure of dat.. pluse i can't do magic"
[2017/11/24 12:01] Evie just nods.
[2017/11/24 12:03] "Colleen" turns bright red as the instructor looks at her. "Uhm... toughness?"
[2017/11/24 12:08] Evie says, "Air could represent music? Or maybe light?"
[2017/11/24 12:09] Claire: uh guess water is something like change and stuff? thought i read that somewhere, or saw it in a movie
[2017/11/24 12:10] Alecta Papadopoulos: fire represents passion, ambition. Whether its openly expressed ot tempered. It is an element that needs balanced, because if you do not control the flame, you can be burned. It is the element of life and renewal, but can also bring destruction for it is a hungry element, and at times these things require a closure to what came before. I have read on this 'Hawaii', where volcanos- symbolizing fire reshaping earth and molding it, to create and make a fertile home where life can grow. But these volcanic islands were simultaneously still capable of great destruction. ~she speaks, probbly more than others have heard her, that cold emotionless tone accented by the greek. ~
[2017/11/24 12:20] The Trader nods to Mark first "I think you misunderstood what i meant, I wanted to know what it meant too you. Earth endures, it stand when everything else falls, it survives. But it is also Dangerous, once it starts moving it cannot be stopped." Nodding to Colleen "Yes, it is strong, Tempered from the heat of Fire, Passion. Battered and cleaned by Water, cooled by air, and coming from the earth. As an emotion it is the most balanced of places" Looking to Claire "Good, it is more then that, but it is also that. I expected something about Purity, but you went beyond what i thought" turning the Alecta "Good, you know it well i see." Smiling at Evie "And yours?"
[2017/11/24 12:23] Mark Blake mark jots down "make earth mage hurt him self" adding more notes for each of the descriptions of the elements
[2017/11/24 12:24] Evie considers. "Air could be maybe changeability? Or mutability?"
[2017/11/24 12:25] "Colleen" tilts her head. "Metal... balanced?" She can't help but smile a bit.
[2017/11/24 12:28] Claire: so water is pure eh? depends on where you find it id say
[2017/11/24 12:29] Alecta Papadopoulos: Water is also patience and eventuality. Marks stone may be strong, but even the roughest stone is eventually smoothed by water.
[2017/11/24 12:30] Claire: right, just needs enough pressure really
[2017/11/24 12:35] The Trader nods to each of them. "Classically they represent things, such as Passion, Purity, Motion, Endurance, Balance... But as Humanity evolved they came to represent much more. Water has Depths, it holds secrets, lost to those who seek them. Fire Is that of home and hearth, welcoming and warming. Earth is the place we live, and weathers everything it needs to be. Air.. is Flightly and fussy, seeking to move into gaps and push others into things. Metal it Progress, it comes from the earth and is cleaned by water, smelted by fire. What other Elements do you think there are?" she says smiling impassively
[2017/11/24 12:38] Claire: uh, i have no idea...
[2017/11/24 12:40] Mark Blake Grunts " light and dark. good and evil"
[2017/11/24 12:40] Evie seems not to hear the Trader at all. She contines on, "Air can shape stone too, given enough time, though probably not as easy as water. But fire couldn't exists without air, and yet air could smother air if it wanted to if there were enough of it... though again, probaly not as easily as water. Can I change me element to Water?"
[2017/11/24 12:42] "Colleen" frowns as she concentrates on the question. "Electricity?" she offers quietly.
[2017/11/24 12:42] Claire: isnt that usually air in the movies tho?
[2017/11/24 12:42] Alecta Papadopoulos: spoke only one word. " death"
[2017/11/24 12:46] The Trader nods to both Colleen and Alecta "Yes, those are Elements, Specifically they are combinations of the Classic elements. Electricity is Fire and Air working together, Air once heated takes on the passion and sparks with Violence. Death is the End of any of the Elements, once they have ran their course, they become inert.. Dead." Turning towards Mark "Light and Dark are, but Good and Evil are not. Divinity and Infernal are however. No Element is Good or Evil. Those are concepts that Magic stands apart from.. or it should"
[2017/11/24 12:49] Mark Blake shakes his head " no.. your wrong.. i've seen evil i've felt it evil exists"
[2017/11/24 12:50] Evie clamps her mouth shut, realizing she was starting to babble.
[2017/11/24 12:51] Claire: isnt that more of a concept tho? or at least thats what the crazy alien told me...
[2017/11/24 12:52] Alecta Papadopoulos nodded taking notes and thena fireball shot from her hand to the floor between herself and claire. She tried to stamp it out
[2017/11/24 12:54] Claire looks over and throws water to put it out, same as yesterday
[2017/11/24 12:55] "Colleen""Colleen" seemed lost in thought, broken by the outbreak of a small fire.
[2017/11/24 12:56] The Trader smiles at Mark "I never said it didn't. Good and Evil are not what Magic Should be about. Humanity Perverted and made it about it in the past. And other creatures act on their nature.. Predators and Prey, They Might be evil, they might not be." she shakes her head "Their are Divine beings that represent Murder and Death, but they are Divine.. 'Good' If you seek to put them in that way. There are Demonic entities that focus on dealing with order and limiting Chaos. 'Evil' but they are not seeking anything that would cause harm."
[2017/11/24 12:56] Claire: really gotta get you a place to practice somewhere
[2017/11/24 12:58] Mark Blake scoffs " i agree dat definitions can be misleading but dats just an excuse.. good and evil are real not just titles or misunderstandings something is good o evil based on how it behaves.. but dis aint an ethics class either.. i've seen magic dat was evil in and of its self" he squints stubbornly staring at the teacher
[2017/11/24 13:01] Evie: "If Good and Evil can be considered elements, then maybe Stupidity and Knowledge would have to be too."
[2017/11/24 13:03] "Colleen": me chuckles at Evie's comment. "So magic doesn't have a particular source, good or evil?" she asks.
[2017/11/24 13:05] Alecta Papadopoulos: does mark represent stupidity? ~look- the dead girl cracked a joke!~ Thank you Claire. I do
[2017/11/24 13:05] The Trader Nods at mark Again. "They are not Elements. Magic itself isn't about them. Yes.. Magic is a Tool and can be USED for Good and Evil. but it is not inherently Good or Evil." she looks down and sighs "And although i would love to argue that Demons aren't Evil, they are Predatory, they do seek harm in some way most of the time. Atleast the ones you will see in the field will be. Angels can sometimes be just as bad aswell though. If you have Any Sin within you.. they will purge it.. and You."
[2017/11/24 13:06] Mark Blake Scoffs and says nothing this time just jotting down notes , shooting a glare at alecta
[2017/11/24 13:06] Claire: well, that alien told me that good and evil was kinda made up by culture and stuff
[2017/11/24 13:08] Alecta Papadopoulos turned giving a calm cold look to Mark, a glint of green in her eye..nothing connecting but as if to say ' watch your tongue or I'll have it cut from your head'
[2017/11/24 13:08] "Colleen" snickers at the crack at Mark. She tries to pay attention to the instructor but squirms in her seat.
[2017/11/24 13:08] Evie furrows her brow in concentration, considering something, whether it is something mentioned in class or not is anyone's guess.
[2017/11/24 13:14] The Trader watches the Class and taps her Foot "Is there something that needs to be brought up?" She glances at each of the Students "I oathed to do you no Harm.. but i will not hesitate to send you ALL to Mrs Harlowe if need be" She sighs "Ok.. Detach the Ethics from Magic. It as i said Can be used for good and Evil. It is a Tool.. like anything in Nature it can be twisted to be something it shouldn't be. Mark, Can you Tell me What Elents Would be used to bring about Divinity?"
[2017/11/24 13:16] Mark Blake grunts "nope.. ain't much for magic and it probably varies or something"
[2017/11/24 13:17] Evie thinks. "How about Air?" She thinks some more. "Well... actually, I don't know why any of them wouldn't be able to bring about some form of divinity."
[2017/11/24 13:18] "Colleen""Colleen" looks down nervously as the instructor glares, shaking her head. She only peeks back up when the focus put on Mark. "F-fire?" she meekly offers for the question.
[2017/11/24 13:19] Claire: weeell... id say water air and fire or something, probably
[2017/11/24 13:20] Alecta Papadopoulos look to evie then forward. " ther eis no element that would lead to divinity. Divinity and fel exist as adjustments on other magic. Like adjectives in grammar. "
[2017/11/24 13:24] The Trader smiles and glances between both Alecta and Claire "Both of you are correct. If one just wants to 'Call upon the Divine' One would combine the Elements unattached to Earth, those that can be considered Ephemeral. If one is casting a Divine Spell, Well.. it would be cast as a Divine spell, and use the other elements for effect."
[2017/11/24 13:27] Evie crosses her arms, remaining silent.
[2017/11/24 13:29] Mark Blake Grips his desk and stares back at alecta unafraid he continues writing but mouths the words " when ever ya ready" though he dosn't say them
[2017/11/24 13:31] "Colleen" purses her lips, and taps the desk.
[2017/11/24 13:37] Alecta Papadopoulos didnt react to his mouthed words. Perhaps.. unimpressed.
[2017/11/24 13:44] The Trader coughs heavily "Hmm. Well... Moving on. The basics of these elements can be used with the Symbols they represent to bring about effects. Fire could be used to heal, as could water depending on what it was being used to heal. Wind would be used to Tear done a Building, by wearing away at it, Earth could be used to strengthen your own body, making it capable of enduring more." she coughs again "Any Mage worth their salt would be able to conjure any of the Elements, but they will find their own Aura Element better to channel and sustain."
[2017/11/24 13:45] Mark Blake nods taking more notes
[2017/11/24 13:46] Evie tilts her head. "So, like how?"
[2017/11/24 13:47] "Colleen" nods in interest to Evie's question. "And can anyone use magic that way?"
[2017/11/24 13:50] Claire: so how exactly would one heal with water anyway?
[2017/11/24 13:50] Alecta Papadopoulos deemd this may be a good time " Miss. I learned a trick this morning, that may refer to what you are talking of. May I give an example? I will need a clear space"
[2017/11/24 13:54] The Trader: Anyone can be taught about Magic and taught Magic... but not all can Cast it. Some do not have the Talent. However certain things can be used with just the knowledge. This is what the Lessons will be about for this Class. I will also be Teaching Negotiation. Perhaps we can relocate to a new location that is Safer.. The Gym? Hmm. A Little Practical Example might be fine. And If you want private Lessons on Casting i will gladly schedule them...
[2017/11/24 13:54] Claire: hmm, guess i should get some water ready too, just in case eh?
[2017/11/24 13:54] Mark Blake grunts and kicks his chair back heading towards the door " bath room.." is all he says as he heads out
[2017/11/24 13:56] Evie: "Really? We gotta move to the gym so the freak can throw a fireball? Well, nevermind. I guess better there than here." Evie stands up.
[2017/11/24 13:57] Alecta Papadopoulos nodded and stood to go, shooting evie a glare
[2017/11/24 13:57] "Colleen""Colleen" stood nervously, worried as the others looked to the door behind her.
[2017/11/24 13:58] The Trader Nods "It would be safer There then here."
----Relocation to the Gym-------
[2017/11/24 14:00] Evie stands near the fire alarm lever, ready to pull it.
[2017/11/24 14:02] "Colleen""Colleen" walks stiffly in the area, finding a space out of the way.
[2017/11/24 14:02] The Trader looks towards Claire, "Do be ready to put out anything if it gets too bad, I hope she can keep it from burning the Place down..."
[2017/11/24 14:04] Claire does seem somewhat ready "ill get some water ready beforehand" she says before she holds a hand out, water pouring out of her sleeve and hovering into a sphere, building it up to beachball size "there"
[2017/11/24 14:05] Evie grumbles. "Yeah, this couldn't possibly be a bad idea. Where'd Mark go. Can I go look for him?"
[2017/11/24 14:06] Alecta Papadopoulos held a hand forth palm up. At first it stayed there- then the fire flowed up her hand to encase her body like an aura. They even hid the fact her clothes were..not fireproof. The flames flickered over her" if I control, I can shape the fire. and this might help someone not hit me" the flames wickedly blazing
[2017/11/24 14:08] "Colleen""Colleen" looks on, wide-eyed.
[2017/11/24 14:11] The Trader nods recognizing the ability "Be careful to maintain control or it will burn you up.. even if your flesh restores itself.. you can burn from your own Passions." she grins "Were your Clothes.. Fireproofed.. because that could be an issue if not...."
[2017/11/24 14:12] Claire sends a bit of the water over to coat the floor under Alecta to try and keep it from getting scorch marks
[2017/11/24 14:13] Evie frowns a little. "Or it could help someone hit you by giving them a better target... you know, if it were night time or somethin'."
[2017/11/24 14:14] Alecta Papadopoulos was expecting that comment " I cannot be burned. My clothes. Well persians save me" the voice was calm, but some fire and sparks did shoot off from it . The flames shot a few more arcs out mossibly hitting a student, and when they died down, she was nude. Still holding that cold demanour
[2017/11/24 14:15] "Colleen" takes a couple steps back as the sparks fly. She looks up to see the naked form. She hides a smile.
[2017/11/24 14:16] Claire: i could cover you in ice or something if you want
[2017/11/24 14:17] The Trader: I have seen many say the Same. "I Am Flame, i cannot be Burned" It is easy to forget that it is still possible to burn something Faster.. And Starving Flames of Fuel is something that could work against it. Forcing you to use the only Fuel left too you.. your Body.
[2017/11/24 14:19] Alecta Papadopoulos: I have never been burned in my experience. Perhaps I can be. Thank you claire. Miss, May I be excused from class to return to a dressed state in my dorm? I believe I may have given a useful example
[2017/11/24 14:21] EvieEvie flinches a bit as a fire arc shoots above her and just a little to the left. As the flames die down, she inspects the fire freak from head to toe, remaining expressionless.
[2017/11/24 14:21] The Trader shakes her head "You can wait. You can consider it part of the Lesson." She turns and Looks to Evie "Do you think this would be useful for anything beyond combat?"
[2017/11/24 14:24] Claire sends the ball of water over, shaping it a bit around the undead one before freezing it in place as a kind of ice bodysuit "there, better than nothing eh? you dont get cold right?"
[2017/11/24 14:26] "Colleen""Colleen" tries not to stare at Alecta's naked body. 'Good example' she whispers under her breath. She looks a bit disappointed by the coverage of Claire's icesuit.
[2017/11/24 14:26] Evie: "I suppose yeah, fire is useful for lots of things. Warmth, light in the dark, burning away something poisonous, a flare for either signaling or attention grabbing, could probably cook with it. If you're under attack or something it could scare the attacker away. Also, I guess it could be considered a flashy way of getting undressed if the situation calls for it. It'd probably go over big on stage at the Ex-ex-excelsior."
[2017/11/24 14:34] Claire: guess it would work nicely with a fireproof hero suit or something *shrugs*
[2017/11/24 14:34] The Trader nods at Evie "Very good, And how would you deal with someone who came at you like that.. if they were trying to do you harm? Knowing them as they are now.. a Naked Burning person who's running at you screaming bloody Murder."
[2017/11/24 14:35] Alecta Papadopoulos: I would let others handle it. Heroes should."
[2017/11/24 14:35] Alecta Papadopoulos: thank you Claire
[2017/11/24 14:37] Claire: sure, no problem
[2017/11/24 14:40] Evie: "You could either turn alight, and then bluff them, make them think you weren't gonna set them aflame. Or you could set youselfalight as you run screaming and trying to get attention. From what I've seen, most of the villains around here, don't seem to scare away so easily, so a bluff wouldn't be that likely to succeed, but the flame would definitely help grab attention when you needed help. Of course, it might set off some fire alarms too... which would help even more I suppose."
[2017/11/24 14:42] "Colleen""Colleen" "Naked and on fire? Find something to put them out..." Colleen say softly.
[2017/11/24 14:42] The Trader nods "Ok.. i think the time is getting to lunch. Perhaps class should be ended." she takes a deep breath "Ok, Homework.. Claire and Alecta have it already. For the Next Occult Lesson, I want everyone to Research into a Form of the undead. Any of them is fine."
[2017/11/24 14:44] Alecta Papadopoulos: I am researching shadows. They know things.
[2017/11/24 14:44] Claire:Claire: uh, got liches here
[2017/11/24 14:45] EvieEvie blinks. "The undead? I heard someone call Alecta undead. What kind of undead is she?"
[2017/11/24 14:47] The Trader: Alecta Appears to be a Wraith, Thinking on it overnight.. it is also possible that she is a Wight...
[2017/11/24 14:47] Claire:Claire: whats the difference?
[2017/11/24 14:48] The Trader: One is Created by someone or something. The other is a Natural occurrence.
[2017/11/24 14:48] "Colleen": me nods at the instructor's assignment. "So, like zombies?"
[2017/11/24 14:49] The Trader: Yes. Zombies.. or Xombies. If you wish to know the difference.. then the research is to help with that.
[2017/11/24 14:50] Alecta Papadopoulos: I am not sure what type I am. I am bodily, and do retain from decay
[2017/11/24 14:50] Evie smacks her lips, looking Alecta over again. "Very bodily, I would say."
[2017/11/24 14:51] The Trader: Wights tend to stay as they are when they are 'Born' anew.
[2017/11/24 14:52] "Colleen": "Yes, Miss... uh..." she frowns. "What is your name, Miss?" She looks down avoiding looking at the instructor directly. She peeks back up at Evie, then Alecta at the bodily remarks.
[2017/11/24 14:53] The Trader Smiles at Colleen "I am the Trader, But Trader is fine."
[2017/11/24 14:53] The Trader: Or Miss.
[2017/11/24 14:54] "Colleen""Colleen" nods slowly in recognition. "Y-yes, Tra... M-miss Trader." She turns a little red recalling the comment about names at the start of class.
[2017/11/24 14:58] The Trader nods "Class Dismissed, If you have any questions, please stay and ask. Evie, See me for Lessons on Spells if you Wish..."
[2017/11/24 14:59] Evie nods and remains where she is.
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Batman's Love Interests | DC Database | FANDOM powered by Wikia
Who does Bruce Wayne/Batman has more love, for Catwoman or
most recently in bruce wayne: the road home, vicki finally learned the truth of batman's identity, but she was developed into a confidant of the batman family rather than a love interest of bruce [email protected]
this has ruined my day and it's not even noon. but before ivy and selina can discuss the matter any further, boneblaster returns and tries to once more make a name for himself by attacking ivy, harley and selina. when she used the identity audrey marguerite in brazil, bruce, as batman, sent her a note, telling her to confess all her crimes.: to pull off her many capers, catwoman resorts to disguises and [email protected]
happy thanksgiving to you from my extremely hormonal sons ferted, hemergob and largeonesque. catwoman and batman have angry costumed sexbruce wayne/batman is one of those superheroes who doesn't really have one stand-out long term love interest, largely because he's a brooding loner who hangs out in a cave full of bats all day. up by october 31st for an extended 3-month trial of youtube red. this is due to the nature of the batman character, who cannot mantain a serious relationship with a woman as a result of his obsession with his crusade against crime. holly robinson takes over as the new catwoman while selina, living under the alias irena dubrovna, turns her attention to caring for her daughter (selina's alias was inspired by the name of the main character in the 1942 film cat people). she attacks and subdues kitrina, who tells selina that she had unknowingly stolen a map that details the location of the new black mask's underground bunker. you think batman ever went over to catwoman's apartment to hook up but saw a huge turd in her litter box & fucked her twice as hard? not having the joker in 'batman v superman: dawn of justice' is a good thing. she appears alongside various other batman villains, and has a tendency to say "meow meow" after every sentence. batman: arkham city, although their love is not explored, catwoman constantly flirts with the dark knight whenever they meet.'ve always loved women dark and dangerous-- yet if they do something dark and dangerous-- you can't love them-- and therefore, you've never really loved any woman at all. cassie comes to investigate the noise and is horrified to discover what robin has been up to. realizing that she could use the map to capture black mask and claim the 50 million dollar bounty on his head, selina leaves kitrina bound in a locked room so that she can keep the map for herself. while contemplating her loss, and her unexplained physical weakness despite being fully recovered from her physical heart trauma, she rescues two bystanders from a new supervillain-wannabe who calls himself boneblaster. eventually cottons on to what's going on, so supergirl admits to her big cousin her plan to get him super-laid. her true feelings for bruce wayne were not developed in the time she was introduced and her stories often involved the same plot. catwoman even gives up her sure escape from arkham city to go back and help the injured batman. in an attempt to cover up the illegal activities, the administrator put selina in a bag and dropped her in a river to drown (like a cat). catwoman is #51 on wizard magazine's "100 greatest villains of all time" list, #11 on ign's "top 100 comic book villains of all time" list, and #20 on ign's "top 100 comic book heroes". 1993, following the success of batman returns and selina kyle’s prominent role in that film, catwoman was given her first ongoing comic book series.
Batman & Catwoman Hookup Pushes Two-Face Over the Edge
a former socialite, she dedicated her time as a nurse for the elderly, instead of falling into the stereotype that rich women were spoiled and lazy. lane: when the new batman adventures crossed over with superman: the animated series, bruce developed a relationship with lois lane, much to superman's annoyance. 1, issue 3, was penned by wonder woman's co-creator william moulton marston, who often included themes of bondage and submissiveness in his stories. the early golden age comics, batman often flirted with catwoman, as he was charmed by her beauty although not so much by her methods. perhaps the two most prolific relationships of the comics are talia al ghul — who was the mother of his child, damian wayne/robin — and selina kyle, better known as catwoman. there's never really been any romantic inclinations between aquaman and wonder woman — apart from in the alternate "flashpoint" timeline where the two were betrothed to be married — arthur curry has admitted to having a bit of a thing for wonder woman in the past. the batman and robin film, poison ivy, portrayed by uma thurman, she acts exactly as her comic book counterpart, often relying on chemicals to hypnotize men, forcing them to lust and fight for her." a change in editorial team at that point, however, brought a swift end to that story line and, apparently, all that transpired during the arc. believing she can no longer function as a criminal, selina has since decided to become one of batman's outsiders. their first encounters, talia has shown a devotion to the dark knight as strong as her love for her father, often saving batman, but always choosing to remain by her father's side. the fight was tough and almost a draw, but eventually huntress was able to defeat lion-mane. earth-16, bruce broke off all ties with talia because of her conflicted morals; her love for batman on one side, her devotion to her father on the other, but mostly, because she considered the two equal. if one of the amazons is able to catch the moon goddess, they get to wear the mask and take over her duties. as previously mentioned, there are elements of lust and desire between them, but there is not a real love or romantic interest between them. the earth-two continuity, julie and bruce broke up as she expected him to become something more than a mere playboy, but when he refused, she left.. senator from the eurasian assassin cheshire; during the mission, she saves lady shiva, who was bound and gagged in the trunk of a car wired with explosives by chesire. this impresses selina, who mentions that she had tied up the child using an "inescapable" knot that bruce had shown her years earlier. two new lovebirds plan to return to earth together, but as soon as they enter earth's solar system luma becomes incredibly weak and agonized. she worked for the black glove, and gained his love as part of a plot to destroy him during "batman r. she broke off the engagement when she and her father had to flee the country to escape the mob. then appears in a series of backup stories in detective comics #759 - #762. her feats have been so amazing, one could argue that her athletic ability is somewhat superhuman. selina kyle is reintroduced as a cat-loving prostitute/dominatrix who is inspired to become a costumed cat burglar when she sees batman in action. when silver returned to gotham, she and bruce tried to work a serious relationship in what could possibly be the best attempt by batman to have a normal relationship, but as usual, things fell apart. appears to be completely reformed, and her love for batman true (although brash and unpredictable).
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22 Best Batman and Catwoman Moments
her criminal activities are often tempered by a reluctant altruism, making her an inconstant villain and occasional ally to batman. their relationship becomes intensely dramatic toward the end of the movie, to the point where bruce actually implores her to abandon her vendetta against max shreck and come and live with him in wayne manor, to no avail. selina was taken in by "mama fortuna", the elderly leader of a gang of young thieves, and was taught how to steal. julie madison was an actress and she eventually adopted the artistic name of "portia storme". back in reality, talia reveals to the sirens that just a few hours prior, an unknown benefactor had offered up a massive reward to whoever could kidnap and deliver catwoman to him, with the hopes that he could penetrate her mind and learn batman's secret identity. she dated bruce for a few issues, but later fell between the cracks and disappeared. and catwoman have had several romantic encounters in the new earth continuity. however, by the time of the events of batman: arkham knight, selina is aware of batman's identity as bruce wayne, addressing him as such after he rescues her from the riddler. cyber cat); and a stint as a reluctant government operative. stories in the 1970s featured catwoman committing murder, something that neither the earth-one nor earth-two versions of her would ever do; this version of catwoman was assigned to the alternate world of earth-b, an alternate earth that included stories that couldn't be considered canonical on earth-one or earth-two. their history on the earth-two continuity developed to the point were catwoman reformed and batman admitted his love for her, formally marrying shortly after and having a daughter, helena wayne, who later became the huntress.. wonder girl makes out with robin in the remains of her dead boyfriendanother charming tale from dc comics concerns the death of conner kent/superboy and his best friend tim drake/red robin's efforts to bring him back to life. talia tries to kill selina before vanishing, but she survives and ultimately reunites with bruce, who had recently returned to the present. discovery of her father's evils drove rachel to pay her father's penance on his behalf by enrolling in a nunnery and breaking off her engagement with bruce wayne, who had prepared himself to end his crimefighting career to marry her.'the flash' showrunner explains why the show abandoned speedster villains for season 4. • batman reborn • battle for the cowl • the black mirror • blind justice • cataclysm • contagion • the dark knight returns • a death in the family • death of the family • endgame • face the face • fugitive • gotham's most wanted • hush • the killing joke • knightfall • last rites • legacy • a lonely place of dying • the long halloween • night of the owls • no man's land • officer down • prodigal • the resurrection of ra's al ghul • the return of bruce wayne • batman: where were you on the night batman was killed? if she could win, lion-mane would release the hostages, or if lion-mane won, she would have to reveal the location of the treasure catwoman buried in the forest. almost every other alternate universe and continuity, catwoman is depicted either as strongly interested in batman/bruce wayne, or vice-versa. the follow-up to the return of bruce wayne, the sirens help zatanna put out a massive fire at a local park near their home, only for them to be ambushed by a creature made of mud. bruce is gone, selina continues to keep close ties to his family, spending christmas eve with dick grayson and alfred pennyworth (and to a lesser extent damian). however, after his encounter with the joker and realizing that there would be more enemies like him, he broke off their relationship to protect lorna. what made her remarkable was that she suffered from a rare "light sensitivity" disease and her skin was bleached white. batwoman's love for batman was never reciprocated and was only seen as a good friend. but luckily for wonder woman, a handsome prince by the name of aquaman just happens to be in the vicinity. it was revealed that selina kyle had been the wife of an abusive man, and eventually decided to leave her husband.
Batman And Catwoman? 5 Crazy DC Comic Book Sex Scenes
Batman/Catwoman - What is the appeal? - Batman - Comic Vine
this is a dark and tragic period which culminates with selina's former pimp stan abducting and violently abusing her sister maggie. before the knowledge can be ripped from her mind, selina's captors (revealed to be shrike and a new villain named senpai), are eventually defeated by the other sirens. and harley accept this answer for the moment, and ivy tries to make amends by growing all manner of exotic fruits for selina. the excuse some writers come up with is that "catwoman loves batman, but she loves outsmarting him even more! however, in later storylines, like batman: heart of hush, it has been strongly hinted that they still love each other deeply. the queen of fables saga of 2000's jla comic book, manhattan is turned into a dark fairytale land by the villainous queen of fables and the justice league are trapped there. selina discovered that ivy had apparently seduced and drugged the riddler with her plant pheromones, keeping him in a vegetative state. stealing the contents of a safe belonging to the falcone crime family, selina returns home to find kitrina falcone, a teenaged escape artist and carmine falcone's long lost daughter, breaking into her room. this played a huge part in the development of wonder woman, as marston wrote "give [men] an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they'll be proud to become her willing slaves!'s a lot of weird stuff in comic books, and relationships are perhaps the weirdest of all. remove the custom ad blocker rule(s) and the page will load as expected. rather than talk it out, selina kisses batman and pushes him to the floor, and we learn that this isn't the first time the two have hooked up. batman was no exception and the two of them started a relationship as they were both equally fascinated by the other. she started a relationship with bruce, but when she learned that bruce was batman and that her father was killed as a result of batman's actions, she left gotham and her relationship with bruce, choosing to become a missionary in africa. she later returned in batman beyond, but bruce was horrified to learn she had given up her body for her father.: dark victory, the sequel to the long halloween, implies that catwoman suspects she is the long-lost illegitimate daughter of carmine falcone, although she finds no definitive proof of this. asks catwoman to infiltrate the violent tribe of bana amazons during the amazons attack! this is echoed in the justice league animated series, where producers decided to pair diana with bruce instead of clark because the show's creators disliked pairing wonder woman with superman. they eventually break up though, because batman is unsure if he can trust her after the events of hush.. superman wants to marry his cousinseriously comic books, what is it with you and incest? things went awry when batman learned of a massive conspiracy organized by hush and he decided he couldn't trust in her anymore, ending their relationship. following the procedure, angle man turns himself in to the authorities; film freak, however, embarks upon a murderous rampage. in the silver age and in response to various allegations which caused the comics code authority to be created, batman was given a female counterpart. it has been implied that her sister's keeper was rendered non-canonical by the events of zero hour, and subsequent writers have rejected miller's choice to make the post-crisis catwoman a prostitute. ivy and harley move in, but before ivy makes a final acceptance of selina's offer, she surprises selina and drugs her with truth serum-like spores.
Cartoon Hook-Ups: Batman and Catwoman - YouTube
Dating Catwoman - TV Tropes
the golden age, batman had a couple of relationships as bruce wayne, but he would often flirt as batman with occasional villains, among which was catwoman. of her sister's keeper and the year one origin conceived by frank miller remain canonical to catwoman’s origin, while other portions have been dropped over the years. they have a brief but intense argument about the morality of tim's actions, which of course ends with the two of them crying and making out. actresses julie newmar, lee meriwether, and eartha kitt introduced her to a large audience on the 1960s batman television series. michelle pfeiffer portrayed the character in 1992's popular film batman returns. • batgirl • batman • batman and robin • batman beyond • batman confidential • batman incorporated • batman: dark knight • batman: streets of gotham • birds of prey • justice league of america • outsiders • red robin • superman/batman. acrobat: selina is a gifted and accomplished athlete, with heightened acrobatic prowess. it wasn't until the mid-70s that some writers started taking batman's love life more seriously. this story kara zor-el/supergirl decides that it's high time superman got serious about his relationships, instead of messing around trying to decide between lois and lana lang. marston was a psychologist in addition to being a writer, and used early wonder woman tales to explore themes around bondage — both physical/sexual and social/political. vale was portrayed in the tim burton batman film by kim basinger. writer doug moench was mainly responsible of slowly removing vale from batman's love life in after he took the writing chores from conway, but she was later used as a recurrent love interest for bruce wayne by many other writers. later, she posed as a night club goer in order to get acquainted with it's owners and return later to rob them. it turns out, superman isn't all that against getting married, he's just got his standards set to the height of his 16-year old cousin. quinn: best known as "the joker's girlfriend", harley has had occasional romantic encounters with batman, most notable her big smooch with him on the episode harley's holiday from batman: the animated series and most recently, in the the new 52, there have been a couple of harley quinn stories in which she becomes infatuated either with bruce wayne or batman. after being dragged underneath the soil by the creature, catwoman awakens tied up and gagged on the floor of a dark room, and is quickly forced into an illusion by her unseen captors. soon afterwards she disappears and is believed to have been killed by the assassin deathstroke the terminator, ending her series at #94. rescuing her daughter, selina convinces zatanna to mind-wipe film freak and angle man (whom she had bound and gagged with duct tape after beating them brutally) in order to preserve her secret identity. in an attempt to harmonize the various versions, some writers have posited that catwoman, early in her career, pretended to be a prostitute in order to scam lonely men and rob them. knight:batman and nocturna the most remarkable of his love interests at the time was nocturna, aka natalia knight, created by doug moench in the early 1980s. in an early 80's story line selina and bruce had developed a relationship.: the first occasion in which zatanna was portrayed as a strong romantic interest of bruce wayne was in batman: the animated series, where the two of them met in their youth and were interested in each other, but bruce gave priority to the pursue of his training to become batman. the catwoman: year one story (catwoman annual #2, 1988), selina (now an adult) achieved some success as a thief. list includes all those women who have sporadically appeared as romantic partners of batman:Linda page: a character adapted from the batman serial (1943), linda page was adapted into the comics during the golden age as a romantic partner for bruce wayne. after years of building sexual tension between the two, batman and catwoman embarked on a somewhat tenuous relationship in hush, with batman even revealing his secret identity to her.
Riddler's Revenge - Batman Arkham Knight Wiki Guide - IGN
black mask attacks the institution, and somehow awakens maggie from her coma. the bat-hound • alfred pennyworth • azrael • barbara gordon • batgirl • batman incorporated • batman of zur en arrh • batwoman • bat-mite • batwing • bruce wayne • cassandra cain • catwoman • commissioner gordon • crispus allen • damian wayne • dark ranger • dick grayson • helena bertinelli • flamebird • el gaucho • gcpd • harold allnut • harriet cooper • harvey bullock • huntress • jason bard • jason todd • julie madison • knight • legionary • leslie thompkins • lucius fox • man-of-bats • martha wayne • matches malone • mr. hardly one to knock over a bank, catwoman would rather break into the chairman's office and take his personal documents. once selina is freed, talia orders zatanna to wipe bruce's identity from her memory, reasoning that her kidnapping has proved that the knowledge is too dangerous for her to handle. on the other hand, bruce wayne, batman's alter-ego, has managed to have a few relationships with ladies of his interest, but they always come to a rather abrupt end, because of the lack of trust and constant absence shown by wayne, which has earned him the reputation as a notorious playboy. martial artist: she was trained by the armless master in martial arts and by wildcat in boxing and street-fighting. beaumont: in batman: mask of the phantasm andrea is a woman that bruce wayne was briefly engaged to prior to becoming batman. she was the first version of the character to learn the identity of batman without seeking it. a hidden radio reel reveals that catwoman has a slight grudge for batman, though, since he knows her secret identity but she doesn't know his. huntress infiltrated the prison and challenged lion-mane into 1-on-1 fight. selina appears again as a criminal in batman #84 and detective comics #211, her final appearance for many years (until 1966). cloud, natalia knight and julia pennyworth; while others were re-introduced, like vicki vale and catwoman. after a tense and violent confrontation with a traumatic figure from her past — which ends with her attempting to claw his eyes out — selina returns to her hideaway, and batman shows up shortly after to check in on her. she then asks selina to reveal the identity of the original batman. she left gotham after the "no man's land" crisis and was later desecrated as a plot device by greg rucka when he had vesper killed by david cain on orders from lex luthor in order to start the bruce wayne: fugitive storyline. afterwards, she is seen covering her bed with past versions of her catwoman costume. maggie is then shown in the depths of the gotham city sewers clad in the bloodied nun robes, muttering about her plan to kill catwoman in order to free selina's soul. to new york, selina becomes corporate vice president then ceo of randolf industries, a mafia-influenced company, through blackmail. batman has made it clear that after these incidents, he no longer trusts zatanna. however, alfred's suspicion of her led him to checking her background, discovering a criminal record of a woman, whose description matches jillian's, who used the aliases of kathryn cole, christine gherard, diana lopez, pamela weisman, and many other identities to seduce young wealthy men for their fortunes, then later arrange events that led to their deaths so she can claim their wealth. she winds up reforming and stays on the straight and narrow for several years, helping out batman in batman #65 and #69, until selina decides to return to a life of crime in detective comics #203. however, a normal life with batman is out of the question as long as he is fighting crime. vs superman: batfleck to star as batman in his fifties! in this quest, she became involved with bruce wayne, as she suspected him of being batman and she was determined to find the evidence. canary: although black canary has a relationship with green arrow, she has shown an attraction to the dark knight and she and batman have shared kisses from time to time.
rob delaney on Twitter: "Do you think Batman ever went over to
New 52 - Catwoman #1 review - Batman News
however, when ed brubaker re-introduced her into the comic, he implied that maggie may have directly entered an orphanage and promptly been adopted. the green goop is even shown splashing around in a few panels as cassie and tim kneel on the floor in the remnants of superboy's dna. while selina falls into a stupor, ivy says that she wants total honesty between all of them if they are to trust one another. when catwoman appeared again, no mention whatsoever was ever made of the notion that she had apparently figured out who batman actually is. questions whether she should be raising a daughter when her life as catwoman has already proven to be such a danger to the child. the two drifted apart afterwards, with sylvia blaming selina for her negative experiences; she hated selina for not inquiring about what had happened to her at the hands of her abusive first client. catwoman has mastered the following martial arts styles; boxing, capoeira, hapkido, jujutsu, dragon style kung fu and karate. each diana's day, one member of the amazons puts on a silver mask representing the moon goddess diana, and goes around giving out gifts. kinsolving: shondra was a psychic and the half-sister of benedict asp. holly, from batman: year one, and her sister maggie (from her sister's keeper) have appeared regularly in the catwoman series. she is last seen going over her options, now realizing that she cannot murder her own sister, and therefore must personally exorcise the "cat demon" from within selina's body. however, she couldn't handle being involved with someone in such a dangerous line of work. the character has been one of batman's most enduring love interests. if they fail to defeat her, however, they get captured and are tied up. tim burton's batman returns, selina (played by michelle pfeiffer) seems to be the true love of bruce's life, as not only their costumed identities but also their disturbed psyches are described as similar. following a massive battle with black mask and his henchmen (which ends with neither woman being able to claim the bounty), selina agrees to take on kitrina as her new sidekick, catgirl. this series, written by an assortment of writers but primarily penciled by jim balent, generally depicted the character as an international thief (and occasional bounty hunter) with an ambiguous moral code. she is part of a group sent to rescue a u. in the comics, they had a major falling out after bruce found out zatanna lobotomized doctor light, erased his mind of the event and brainwashed catwoman to be more heroic. he was initially a henchman of that world's catwoman who betrayed him and buried the loot in the forest. as catwoman, she assists batman against lex luthor in the reconstruction of the city. in the course of the story, the origin of catwoman was also re-envisioned. maria kyle was a distant parent who preferred to spend her time with cats, and committed suicide when selina was very young. daughter of the supervillain, ra's al ghul, talia's father has encouraged the relationship in hopes of recruiting batman as his successor.'s first silver age appearance was in superman's girlfriend lois lane #70 (november 1966); afterwards, she continued to make appearances across the various batman comics.
Catwoman and Batman hookup in New 52 Catwoman | Comic Book
Batman Returns (1992) - IMDb
-mane - lion-mane was a human with feline features and heightened strength. original and most widely known catwoman, selina kyle, first appeared in batman #1 (spring 1940) in which she was known as the cat. as an adversary of batman, she was a whip-carrying burglar with a taste for high stake thefts. just as black mask is about to gouge maggie's eyes out and shove them down selina's throat, harley and ivy arrive and defeat the black lantern by trapping him in the stomach of a man-eating plant. brian kyle, a drunken layabout angry at his wife for killing herself, disliked selina for resembling her mother and eventually drank himself to death. 1989 catwoman limited series (collected in trade paperback form as catwoman: her sister's keeper) by writer mindy newell and artist j. superman pops off to staryl faster than you can say "restraining order," and he and luma fall instantly in love. after enlisting batman's help in faking the death of both herself and her daughter, selina puts helena up for adoption. kane; batwoman: first introduced as a female counterpart for batman, batwoman developed into a romantic partner in the silver age, where many imaginary stories featuring kathy and bruce getting married were often published. concerned at how weak catwoman had become, ivy takes selina to where she'd been staying, the home of the riddler. lorna later left the city, feeling that gotham wasn't safe anymore because of batman and the joker. and dean will raise jack in 'supernatural' season 13, which co-showrunner calls 'my two dads: hell edition'. but determined to do it in style, she learned martial arts and trained extensively to perfect her skills in cat burglary. however, the two had difficulty surviving on their own, and in desperation tried to support themselves by working as child prostitutes. is a list of those romantic partners that have been prominently portrayed in comics books and other media:Julie madison - first appearance: detective comics #31. despite this developments, catwoman realized batman and bruce could not totally trust her and she would always leave gotham, to keep away from both men who were one and the same. timeline is where you’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you. the most prominent one is probably from the storyline batman: hush, in which bruce finally revealed his identity to selina and invited her to become part of her life. she was thirteen, selina discovered that the hall's administrator was embezzling funds and confronted her. girls are then untied and dressed in deer costumes for the diana's day hunt, when the other amazons chase them across the island firing sucker-tipped arrows at them. in the brave and the bold #197, the golden age origin of catwoman given in batman #62 is elaborated on, after selina revealed that she never actually had amnesia. catwoman's response to this revelation is unequivocal: she pitched zatanna out a window (zatanna survives the fall). "one year later" selina kyle is no longer catwoman, has left the east end, and has given birth to a daughter named helena (whose father is initially unknown). in this version, julie had auburn hair instead of black and she was the daughter of norman madison, a wealthy entrepreneur. knowing that the real bruce is dead, and that the man with harley is really thomas elliot (hush), selina takes ivy to the restaurant where the picture was taken.
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Batman Proposes to Catwoman in DC Comics Rebirth
modern writers have attributed her activities and costumed identity as a response to a history of abuse. revision in catwoman's origin, and the introduction of the modern version of the character, came in 1986 when writer frank miller and artist david mazzucchelli published batman: year one, a revision of batman’s origin. the strong influence of superman's success, forced the creators of batman to introduce a serious female figure who can eventually become batman's partner. appears in gail simone's "sensei and student" story-arc in birds of prey. up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold. the comics of the new batman adventures, bruce briefly dated julie, but batman broke up with her after he discovered she was after his fortune. earth-one, catwoman and batman were often at odds since they were on different sides of the law, but eventually, catwoman reformed and batman accepted her as part of the vigilante team in gotham city. this 1999 side-scroller by kemco, catwoman is hired by talia al ghul to steal an ancient crystal skull from the gotham city museum. when each girl is captured they're brought back to camp and strung up like literal deer, before being "skinned" (removed from their costumes) and "served" on platters for the diana's day feast. this issue, catwoman has just escaped having her apartment fire-bombed to bits, and is hiding out in an empty hotel penthouse. she is a dangerous, clever and resourceful fighter, known for precise, agile attacks and speedy getaways. she had a brief love affair with batman, having been brought in to help him when bane broke his back. in batman beyond, bruce hints at a relationship with selina in his past, as well as comparing that relationship with terry's and the current 10 of the royal flush gang. the 1990s, catwoman has been featured in an eponymous series that cast her as an anti-heroine rather than a supervillainess. somewhere along the line it gets going again, as issue 1 of the new 52 catwoman series treated us to seeing the two going at it — in vivid detail. familyjustice league of americaoutsidersbirds of preysecret society of super villainsinjustice league. selina accompanies him on a mission to break into doctor sivana's armory, and later travels with him to tokyo in order to recruit a japanese representative for batman incorporated. eventually, batman realized his love for nocturna was an obsession caused by the drug she carried in her skin and he struggled to stop thinking about her. batman eventually defeated benedict, but the damage to shondra's mind was too great. pennyworth: the daughter of alfred and french resistance fighter mlle marie, julia was brought in by doug moench in the early 1980s, but their efforts to make her a romantic partner of bruce wayne were impossible because of the presence of vicki vale and nocturna. superboy kicked it during infinite crisis back in 2006, dying in the arms of cassie sandsmark/wonder girl — his girlfriend. the concluding story featured a closing panel in which she refers to batman as "bruce. athleteexpert burglarsteel spring-loaded climbing pitonsrazor-sharp retractable clawswields an assortment of bullwhips and cat o' nine tails as gymnastic equipment. while ivy and harley distract him, selina ends boneblaster's threat by shorting out his gauntlets with a live electrical conduit, deducing that the villain had yet to get used to the technology, and had failed to properly insulate his gloves. catwoman began life as a villain, she later progressed to anti-hero and sometime hero status as her character developed. | <urn:uuid:5ec30ce8-6755-424c-a125-6e95463295c0> | CC-MAIN-2018-34 | http://dinhmenh.org/data/index.php?id=/does-batman-and-catwoman-hook-up | 2018-08-20T16:57:06Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221216718.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20180820160510-20180820180510-00620.warc.gz | en | 0.97529 | 7,833 |
300-101 exam Dumps Source : Implementing Cisco IP Routing (ROUTE v2.0)
Test Code : 300-101
Test denomination : Implementing Cisco IP Routing (ROUTE v2.0)
Vendor denomination : Cisco
free pdf : 420 actual Questions
IPSec VPN tunnel is one artery of developing inner most web page-to-website connection through employing public community (the cyber web). since it's applying public network, there would subsist no should hold dedicated actual circuit to interconnect the websites, hence requiring low cost to setup whereas hold private and comfy connection.
With website-to-website IPSec VPN, there is a IP routing in region to interconnect dissimilar subnet. This IP routing could subsist static routing or dynamic routing. In a minuscule network where there is just one direction connecting two sites, then static routing should soundless subsist adequate. When there are dissimilar paths connecting two sites, then dynamic routing (i.e. EIGRP, OSPF) and/or load balancing (both per-packet or per-destination) should soundless subsist used to hold foremost connection.
be sensible that IPSec tunneling expertise is only capable of assist static routes and simple IP interconnection. When there are extra better IP interconnections necessary; comparable to operating Novell IPX, dynamic routing, and cargo balancing between the websites; then IPSec tunneling itself is unable to aid. For such strengthen IP interconnections, GRE tunneling is the option. The downside of GRE tunneling is that GRE tunnel is much less-cozy tunnel in comparison to IPSec tunnel.
when you achieve to a decision to hold promote IP interconnection aid while hold cozy connection over public network, the workaround is to rush GRE over IPSec. IPSec will then subsist encrypting the GRE tunnel securely and GRE tunnel should subsist presenting the promote IP interconnection support.
referred to by using gramzster:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------I attain hold a quick query, When i used to subsist searching throughout the illustration configurations on the Cisco web page, it seemed that GRE turned into what i wished to try to configure, in view that it supported routing protocols. Does this classification of IPSEC tunnel too assist routing protocols? (really, what's the incompatibility between a GRE tunnel, and this class of tunnel?)--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a nutshell, the VPN tunnel by no means forwards the routing pronounces throughout the tunnels. Neither attain they ship the routing updates. To ship the routing updates (in order that the far flung district can learn the community on the local facet) you ought to consume GRE over IPSec. With this feature, the routing updates are first encapsulated over a newfangled GRE packet and then forwarded in the course of the VPN (IPSec) tunnel. here's efficient and required if you are the consume of OSPF, RIP, EIGRP for your internal network and want to construct a routing tunnel.
right here's some more component and hyperlinks/ameliorations between a simple IPSec VPN tunnel and a GRE over IPSec tunnel:
Pure IPSec vpn tunnel=====================
In a simple IPSec vpn tunnel, most efficient ip site visitors is encrypted/decrypted.
you probably hold non ip site visitors, illustration, ipx, then it is not in a position to recede into the vpn tunnel.
OSPF, EIGRP, don't appear to subsist transferred within the tunnel.
The url beneath might possibly subsist useful for you about IPSec,
An Introduction to IP safety (IPSec) Encryption
GRE over IPSec vpn tunnel=========================
In a GRE over IPSec vpn tunnel, the original packet even if ip, ipx, and so on... is first going to subsist GRE encapsulated after which this packet is then subjected to IPSec encapsulation.
for this reason, in a GRE over IPSec tunnel, aboriginal routing traffic (ip and non ip) will too subsist routed via as a result of when the fashioned packet (ip/non ip) is GRE encapsulated, then it will hold an ip header (as described through the GRE tunnel (normally the tunnel interface ip addresses)) then the IPSec protocol can subsist mindful the ip packet and and may for this intuition subsist able to encapsulate the GRE packet to fabricate it GRE over IPSec.
please visit the urls under for more information.,
Which VPN confess is arrogate for You?How digital private Networks Work
1. network instruments that advocate GRE tunnel terminations
seeing that GRE tunnel includes routing and routing protocols, by using nature GRE tunnel is supported through routers and not firewall or IPSec VPN Concentrator. IPSec VPN tunnel nevertheless contains encryption, hence by using nature IPSec VPN tunnel is supported by artery of IPSec VPN Concentrator. In seller implementation, some firewall and router too assist IPSec VPN tunnel advent.
On Cisco implementation, Cisco routers consume Tunnel interfaces as the GRE tunnel. The procotol used is business-commonplace GRE (Protocol forty seven). you could buy a stare at extra information about GRE protocol on RFC 2784
As to IPSec VPN tunnel implementation on Cisco instruments, there are crypto ipsec and crypto isakmp statements on any commands that relate to IPSec VPN tunnel configuration on both Cisco router, graphics, or ASA. The protocol used is combination of trade-normal ESP (Protocol 50), AH (Protocol 51), UDP port 500 (general ISAKMP), and UDP port 4500 (non-standard ISAKMP). that you would subsist able to try greater info about these protocols on RFC 2460: ESP, RFC 4302: AH, and RFC 2408: ISAKMP.
2. MTU dimension
even with IPSec VPN tunnel presence, there's usually a exigency to adjust MTU measurement when you believe to implement GRE tunnel inside your community for the intuition that GRE tunnel takes up about 24 bytes. In Ethernet community the spot MTU dimension is 1500 bytes, you should configure the router Ethernet interfaces to hold MTU optimum size of 1476 bytes (1500 - 24). try the following link for details.
Why cannot I Browse the information superhighway when the usage of a GRE Tunnel?
Following is a listing of pattern configurations as illustrations on Cisco implementation of both simply IPSec VPN tunnel or GRE over IPSec VPN tunnel.
»Cisco discussion board FAQ »a number of web site-to-web page IPSec VPN: Cisco, Juniper, Checkpoint, Sonicwall, Zywall»Cisco forum FAQ »deepest Routing over VPN: NAT/PAT, GRE, IPSec pattern Configurations
Hope that helps.
This FAQ become delivered to you with the aid of this allot up http://www.dslreports.com/discussion board/remark,8108888~root=equip,cis~mode=flat#8176897 by artery of Covenant .
BEIJING, April 17, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- recently, China United network Communications community Co., Ltd. (China Unicom) formally introduced seven newfangled products: Cloud community Connection, Cloud Networking, Cloud VPV, Cloud Broadband, Unicom Cloud safeguard, smart Boutique Video community, and Boutique economic community. China Unicom has done a mammoth milestone in pursuing network transformation according to Industrial cyber web and has spin into probably the most main provider suppliers in pile "cloud + community" synergy.
Cisco has been participating with China Unicom for the past two years, to seriously change the present common nationwide MPLS VPN network into Industrial web with the "cloud + network" synergy in accordance with section Routing. This project marks a sequence of firsts:
Industrial internet is an design derived from buyer cyber web. It refers to the apply of traditional industries leveraging the competencies of large facts, cloud computing, sensible gadgets and networks to boost internal effectivity and the potential to provide service for external purchasers. It is without doubt one of the most crucial approaches for typical industries to realize transformation and better via "internet+".
China Unicom sharply create the huge possibility of commercial internet and worked on it as a company approach to build China`s first on-demand network that offers community routes with minimal latency for clients, assisting minute-stage carrier launch. despite the fact, China Unicom`s nationwide MPLS VPN spine network covers 300 cities with greater than 1200 contraptions, and as soon as it's linked with the IP RAN/SPDC metro community sooner or later, there may subsist tens of lots of devices worried. in addition, "cloud + network" integration requires the skill to supply site visitors engineering carrier for each tenant and every application. This items an remarkable problem to community scalability. no allotment of these issues may too subsist solved via natural RSVP-TE.
section Routing inherent merits of community simplification, huge scalability and go-domain operations advocate completely fitting with China Unicom`s wants. Interoperability between providers` contraptions and controllers was a mandatory requirement.
Cisco used the ASR 9000 router string as the issuer allotment router (PE router), and went past ordinary third-party machine (the consume of the static section Routing answer) to recognize the connection of SRTE. As allotment of the traditional answer, Cisco offered its network services Orchestrator (NSO) and WAN Automation Engine (WAE), participated in activities comparable to company modeling, gadget configuration, topology guidance assortment and route calculation for Cisco and third-birthday celebration machine, and effectively delivered a multi-vendor segment Routing answer.
Cisco additionally worked with China Unicom to force and obtain lofty availability (HA) with diverse carriers` SDN controllers. The rig can panoply screen the condition of the grasp controller. When the grasp controller fails, the backup controller from a unique dealer can smoothly buy over the entire business models, company examples, as well as configuration and route counsel, in order to comprehensive the switching. This innovation is of utmost weight for upcoming 5G/colossal-scale SDN deployment.
Cisco`s superior features teams performed an incredible office within the implementation allotment of the task. To align with China Unicom`s company approach, Cisco did some "joint construction" and customised construction via a "three-step" mode - consulting, implementation, and optimization. Cisco`s confess assist team acted because the unique component of Contact (PoC) coordinating with linked suppliers to supervene up and divulge complications, and the time vital to resolve issues was decreased by 43%.
Ma Jichun, chief engineer from the digital department of China Unicom`s design institute CITC, spoke of: "within the context of the brand newfangled period, China Unicom strives to travail with its partners to construct a `cloud + community` ecosystem by artery of actively adopting SDN, NFV, cloud computing, ultra-broadband network and different applied sciences. there is a vast house for China Unicom and Cisco to hold interaction in shut collaboration and travail collectively to strengthen leading applied sciences reminiscent of side Routing and SDN. China Unicom will construct future networks with an open perspective, to stronger meet the newfangled needs of customers."
Jonathan Davidson, Senior vice chairman and intimate supervisor of carrier company Networking at Cisco referred to: "Cisco and China Unicom hold labored to seriously change its networking model and rebuild an intent-based subsequent-era community. Their collaboration is Cisco`s first section Routing deployment case in China involving know-how from assorted carriers. They appear to subsist forward to carrying on with their joint inventive practices, working collectively to power the strategic layout and coordinated construction of commercial internet." Cisco is main the disruption within the trade with its technology innovations in techniques; silicon; application and safety; and its unrivalled potential in mass-scale networking, automation, optical, optics, cable access, video, and mobility. Combining these capabilities with Cisco`s portfolio of go-to-market security, collaboration, IoT, and expert functions, they enable provider suppliers, media and net companies to reduce cost and complexity, advocate cozy their networks, and develop revenue.
About China UnicomChina Unicom has department agencies in 31 chinese language provinces (autonomous areas and municipalities) as well as numerous international locations and regions outdoor of China. it is China`s only telecom service provider listed on mammoth apple metropolis, Hong Kong and Shanghai at the equal time. China Unicom ranked No.241 on the 2017 Fortune Global500 listing.
About CiscoCisco (CSCO) is the worldwide know-how chief that has been making the information superhighway travail seeing that 1984. Their individuals, products, and partners assist society securely link and trap the following day`s digital probability nowadays. discover more at thenetwork.cisco.com and supervene us on Twitter at @Cisco.
RSS Feed for Cisco: http://newsroom.cisco.com/rss-feeds
Sara CiceroSr. Public family members manager Cisco carrier issuer Business770-236-2181 direct770-331-0269 mobile
This announcement is allotted by artery of Nasdaq corporate solutions on behalf of Nasdaq company solutions customers.
The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are entirely responsible for the content material, accuracy and originality of the guidance contained therein.source: Cisco via GlobeNewswireHUG#2184690
in the past, handiest rig admins and network directors essential to subsist sensible load balancers. but in the age of excessive extent site visitors managed through DevOps practices, or not it's indispensable for every person to hold a basic knowing of load balancers and their position in the modern software infrastructure.
Load balancers, too called software start controllers (ADCs), are hardware or software tools used for distribution of community traffic across servers. they're used to better the efficiency of websites and applications.
When clients contend with your website, the net server services the request. however every internet server has processing and reminiscence boundaries. So if there are too many requests, the internet server can develop into overwhelmed. The confess is to raise the number of internet servers and fabricate positive the site visitors receives equally allotted among these servers with the intent to find rid of efficiency bottlenecks.
Load balancers are liable for the site visitors distribution. When clients ship requests to your web site, the requests recede to the load balancer and the weight balancer then decides which server to consume in line with various load balancing algorithms. In mission-critical applications where extravagant availability is a requirement, load balancers can route traffic to failover servers. also, load balancers themselves can spin into a vulnerability. commonly, network architects implement some kind of replication of the weight balancers to subsist positive there is redundancy.brief history of Load Balancers
in the 1990s, within the early days of the internet, the startup entrepreneurs of the time discovered an issue. Their budgets didn't permit them to purchase the strongest mainframe computer systems of the day. They may simplest hold the funds for ordinary servers that had been being bought by using the laptop manufacturers of the time. but these servers weren't efficient ample to serve the kind of site visitors these startups had been getting. So some of those pioneers came up with the artful design of using extra off-the-shelf servers. They allot a load balancer between the users and the servers and just saved sending site visitors to several servers in a circular-robin fashion. It solved their scalability issues. So the design of load balancing is an immediate upshot of hardware limitations that changed into a detriment to enterprise boom for the early internet entrepreneurs.kinds of traffic Load Balancers Can tackle
depending on the design and goal, load balancers can address a considerable number of kinds of traffic:
the burden balancing algorithm makes the election about which backend server to dispatch a specific request. network administrators installation the algorithm in response to the enjoyable want of a specific website or software. listed below are some commonplace methods used:
The brand or dressmaker decides the available algorithms on a load balancer, so your load balancer might not hold particular algorithms available or it might even hold custom algorithms created for specific applications.particular concerns for Load Balancers
besides the site visitors kinds and algorithms, community architects additionally exigency to accept as telling with here things when imposing load balancers:fitness tests
For numerous motives, the backend servers can develop into unresponsive. It doesn't fabricate experience for load balancers to ship requests to an unresponsive server. So load balancers often hold fitness assess mechanisms in region to panoply screen the fitness of the backend servers in use. The health checks will continuously computer screen the servers the usage of particular protocols and predefined ports. The tests are sometimes described in response to the wants of the purposes they serve.Redundancy and lofty Availability
To remain away from a load balancer as a unique point of failure, networks hold redundancy. there is often a failover server to buy over the load balancing tasks in case of a catastrophic failure of the fundamental load balancer. This ensures extravagant availability (HA) for the network. because DNS propagation can buy time, gadget administrations consume floating IPs to without problems aspect to the failover server instantly.Sticky Session masses
When a request from a user needs to recede to the equal backend server anytime as a result of utility session necessities, then the weight balancer has to hold a artery to value clients and route the site visitors to the right servers. In the sort of case, load balancers consume cookies to respect users. Then, the cookie or session guidance is used to direct traffic to the arrogate servers.various categories of Load Balancers
There are each hardware and application load balancers. notwithstanding cloud-primarily based load balancers are in reality software options, nevertheless they can subsist regarded a different class as a result of they're developed and maintained by the cloud provider suppliers. here is a more in-depth appear to subsist into numerous classes of load balancers:Hardware Load Balancers
organizations consume hardware load balancers for the speed. they are designed with special processors to optimize efficiency. also, these category is superior for protection as they're actual servers and simplest purchasable with the aid of personnel from the firm. but they require a better degree of skills to function. or not it's additionally more durable to scale your operations aboriginal through high-growth periods due to the physical boundaries. listed below are one of the excellent providers of hardware load balancers:
Cisco is among the biggest producers of network hardware. The Cisco router hardware products can travail as a load balancer. Cisco used to provide committed load balancers. however they stopped manufacturing them due to the fact 2012.application Load Balancers
application load balancing provides flexibility and scalability. at the present time most organizations select application load balancers because they are more cost-effective to operate. also, groups can set up these options within the cloud. as an instance, an organization can achieve to a decision to create an EC2 load balancer on AWS the consume of Nginx. although, corresponding to hardware options, application load balancers too require excessive-stage potential and journey to office efficiently. listed here are one of the crucial favorite software load balancing options:
listed here are few different application load balancers to buy a stare at: Seesaw, Neutrino, stability, Pen, and site visitors.Cloud-based mostly Load Balancers
despite the fact that purposes are relocating to the cloud, the exigency for load balancers hasn't diminished. There is soundless the exigency for smart distribution of workloads. The early movers of the cloud used application load balancers to tackle their needs. but given that then, the cloud suppliers hold achieve up with their personal cloud-based load balancing solutions. any person developing functions within the cloud should soundless subsist privy to the attainable functions. listed here are one of the most sought after ones:AWS Elastic Load Balancer
Amazon net carrier (AWS) is the dominant player within the cloud computing field. AWS has designed Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) to travail neatly with their Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. The Elastic Load Balancer is in a position to route traffic to a number of Availability Zones. So or not it's a first-rate solution to scale extravagant volume purposes with lofty availability wants. AWS present offers three styles of load balancers:
Elastic Load Balancer takes care of aboriginal the resource requirements for you. in case you deploy the ELB along with your utility that has Auto Scaling turned on, the load balancer will preserve track of car-scaled servers to fabricate unavoidable it might probably route the traffic to the hale servers. ELB may too subsist too utilized in hybrid clouds to route traffic to your on-premise servers.Azure Load Balancer
Azure is Microsoft's Cloud answer. It already has fully-managed load balancing features in their average suites. application Gateway offers Transport Layer security (TLS) protocol termination or HTTP/HTTPS request and application-layer processing. traffic manager offers DNS load balancing options.
Azure has two sorts of load balancers: basic SKU and average SKU. The generic SKU can address the entire tasks of the primary SKU. traditional SKU has an improved rate component and higher efficiency. listed below are one of the crucial key adjustments:
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers lofty efficiency and scalable load balancing options. Its load balancers can steadiness HTTP/HTTPS and TCP/SSL. also, it has the SSL offload solution so that you can centrally manipulate your SSL certificates. It additionally has added UDP load balancing. the burden balancers seamlessly combine with Google content material start community (CDN). It means more desirable efficiency for clients who down load content from GCP.
international external load balancing will too subsist handled via HTTP(S) load balancing, SSL Proxy load balancing or TCP Proxy load balancing. Regional external load balancing is handled through network load balancing and regional load balancing is dealt with through inner load balancing. The expenditures are based on the forwarding guidelines (protocol forwarding) and ingress and egress information processing.DigitalOcean Load Balancer
DigitalOcean is a cloud provider provider that has received popularity among the open source neighborhood and minuscule businesses. It provides wholly-managed, highly available load balancers. each of the servers within the DigitalOcean is known as a Droplet. the weight balancers are designed to route traffic immediately to failover servers or Droplets.
DigitalOcean provides the load balancer service at a hard and lickety-split rate. the weight balancers can advocate HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2, and TCP. in the HTTPS situation, they can deal with both SSL passthrough and SSL termination. they can stability using round robin and least connections algorithms. besides the fact that load balancers can subsist create in several areas, a specific load balancer can handiest route traffic to the backend server create in its region.Cloudflare Load Balancer
Cloudflare is a content beginning community (CDN). It gives DNS load balancing for its carrier. It runs commonplace health checks and may provide brief movement to failover servers to remain away from consumer dissatisfaction. Cloudflare load balancers can route traffic according to geographic proximity, so European requests might subsist served from European facts facilities and US requests could subsist served from US statistics centers. It improves latency.
clients can subscribe to distinctive tiers of load balancers to fullfil their particular necessities. Pricing tiers are conditional on the variety of origins, fitness examine frequency, geo-routing, and so on. every tier too contains a unavoidable variety of month-to-month DNS queries.Incapsula Load Balancer
is one other CDN issuer. It gives Load Balancer-as-a-provider (LBaaS). It offers each aboriginal and international load balancing for content material start. it's a simple rule-based load balancing device that works with mammoth agencies fancy HITACHI, SIEMENS, and XOOM. It makes consume of a month-to-month subscription for per web site using seasoned, enterprise, and business tiers.
observe: even if each cloud provider offers its personal load poise options, you could consume a application load balancer on a cloud example to create your own load balancer.issues for picking out Load Balancers
most likely, there is lots of selections purchasable for anybody trying to find load balancers. in case you are deciding upon a solution, buy here into consideration:
300-101 exam Dumps Source : Implementing Cisco IP Routing (ROUTE v2.0)
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After three years on the school of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Director of overseas education and date Fred Pierce has been proven the door.
Madeline Holzem, UW-L director of Human materials, confirmed Thursday that Pierce had been given ninety-day notice, together with his remaining day of employment scheduled for Aug. 18. Pierce become no longer within the workplace on Thursday, and Holzem pointed out administrators are allowed to buy earned time off throughout the 90-day epoch with the intent to stare for other work.
UW-L employed Pierce in August 2013 as an affiliate vice chancellor for tutorial affairs within the provost’s workplace with oversight of the alien schooling workplace. That office has been embroiled in controversy after the former director of the office, Jay Lokken, and certainly one of his subordinates, Sandra Sieber, sued UW-L, alleging actions taken by means of Pierce and former provost Heidi Macpherson had been discriminatory.
Emails between Macpherson and Pierce confirmed he changed into involved within the hiring of his wife, Kim Pierce, to an administrative position within the overseas schooling workplace. The office’s enterprise supervisor resigned aboriginal through Pierce’s tenure, and Sieber and Lokken were moved to distinctive positions in the school whereas the workplace handled a number of years of funds shortfalls and declining international pupil enrollment.
UW-L settled with Lokken and Sieber on August 18, apologizing to them and paying them returned wages and barrister charges. In October, the tuition restructured the provost’s workplace, eliminating Pierce’s position and naming him the newfangled director of the international training office.
The swagger become no longer devoid of controversy, as members of the school senate requested concerning the abruptness of the election when institution leaders together with Chancellor Joe Gow and intervening time Provost Betsy Morgan counseled them of the adjustments right through a college senate meeting that month.
Morgan declined to remark Thursday, announcing it was a personnel challenge. In previous interviews, UW-L Chancellor Joe Gow praised Pierce’s ardour for overseas education and observed he can subsist an outstanding fitting for the office as it works to ramp up recruitment and grow enrollment.
Pierce’s profits at the college is $one hundred fifteen,217, the identical he earned aboriginal through his time as an associate vice chancellor.
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Mohammad Reza Shalgouni is a founder-member of the Organisation of Revolutionary Workers of Iran (Rahe Kargar) and has been elected as a member of its central committee on a number of occasions. He spent nine years as a political prisoner in Iran under the shah and today is an active supporter of Hands Off the People of Iran. Yassamine Mather interviewed him for the Weekly Worker
Could you explain the origins of your organisation and the space it occupies on the Iranian left?
Before answering your questions, I see it as my duty to thank your party, and especially the comrades involved with the Weekly Worker, for your coverage of issues concerning the movement of the Iranian people and working class. I hope your efforts can help eradicate the obvious misunderstandings of large sections of the western left.
Rahe Kargar started its activities in the early summer of 1979 and those who founded the organisation were mostly ex-activists of the guerrilla movement, who during their incarceration in the shah’s prisons had come to the conclusion that armed struggle had not only failed to weaken the dictatorship, but that it harmed the relationship between the left and the working class.
Rahe Kargar was one of the first organisations of the left that pointed out the reactionary nature of the Islamic Republic and more importantly deduced from this that the Iranian revolution was defeated once the clergy took power. The clergy was a force that would undoubtedly suppress the movement and independent workers’ organisations, as well as all aspects of modern culture (without which socialism would have no significance). It was with this analysis that, in the midst of widespread general optimism stemming from those who considered the ‘massive popular presence on the streets’ as a definite sign of the victory of the revolution, we drew attention to the threat of fascism and the need to confront its formation.
From our point of view, it was important to pay attention to the characteristics of the new dictatorship and to confront the forthcoming threat. Unlike a substantial section of the left, we considered the clergy and their influence and government as the main threat and, inspired by Marx’s analysis of the ruling classes in England and France in the 1850s, we said that, although the clergy in power is defending the interests of the bourgeoisie against workers and toilers, it has its own interests when it acts as a governing caste. And that this is a result of a Bonapartist equilibrium resulting from the simultaneous weakness of both the bourgeoisie and the working class, the two main classes in society, at a time when neither can take political power.
Rahe Kargar started its existence in opposition to the Islamic Republic and has continued to struggle against this regime. But we have always had clear and firm anti-imperialist positions and we categorically oppose any imperialist intervention in Iran or anywhere in the Middle East. We have always been against the dependence of opposition forces on foreign powers.
From the beginning we opposed the dominant traditional position of the Iranian left, concerning the ‘stage of the revolution’ or defence of the bourgeois democratic revolution, and we have always insisted that a durable democracy in the specific conditions of Iran is impossible without the working class coming to power. That requires independent mass organisation of the class in the political, economic and social arena and this cannot be achieved solely through party organisations. That is why non-party, mass organisations of the workers and toilers can also play an important role. In addition, party organisation might take the form of a number of socialist and workers’ parties, which can form a united workers’ front.
Two other issues that distinguish Rahe Kargar from other leftwing organisations in Iran are:
1. the attention we pay to the issue of nationalities in Iran (a multinational country); we defend the right of the country’s nationalities to self-determination, while emphasising the need for voluntary, democratic unity;
2. the destructive confrontation between tradition and modernity (a form of schizophrenia in our country) and putting an emphasis on the importance of keeping in touch with leftwing religious forces, which maintain a democratic and class understanding of religion and strive for a class alliance of workers and toilers.
In our opinion these are essential conditions for the class unity of the proletariat.
Can you give us an overview of the current situation, including the role of the reformists, the process by which sections of the movement became radicalised and the role of the working class?
In order to understand the dynamics of the current anti-dictatorship movement we must pay attention to a number of issues:
First, although this movement expressed itself in protests against rigged elections, its origins predate June 2009. In other words, in order to understand the situation we must remember that the gatherings in June in support of the reformists had nothing to do with people’s illusions about the elections or the reformists’ programme, but were mainly due to opposition to the institution of the vali faghih (Shia supreme religious leader). In fact these elections were similar to 1997, when people voted for Khatami mainly to confront that institution (the supreme leader wanted Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri to be elected at that time) and it should be said that at least during the last 10-12 years, the majority of Iranians have either participated in or boycotted elections as means of expressing opposition to the ruling dictatorship.
Second, the Islamic Republic has major differences with other dictatorships in the third world. We are dealing with a regime that came out of a mass revolution and for a while it did have considerable influence amongst the masses. The Iran-Iraq war (one of the longest of the 20th century) and political pressure by the United States and its allies throughout most of the last three decades have added to the regime’s need to mobilise its mass base.
However, the Islamic regime is also a rare entity amongst world governments in that the clergy has imposed religion as the dominant force in the state apparatus, denying people’s sovereignty even on a theoretical level and in its constitution. In addition, the Islamic Republic is a plural or multi-centred dictatorship, which so far has not succeeded in destroying its own factions and has not become a dictatorship run by a single individual.
Given the above, elections play a different and a more important role in this system compared to most third world dictatorships. Here the principal organs of power are not electable and elections are limited to the lower echelons within the power structure, which are controlled by the structures nominated by the supreme leader. Elections are above all a means to hide the absolute dictatorship foreseen in the constitution and to mobilise the masses, convincing them of a defining role in state policies. Elections are also a means by which the state organises relations between its own factions (its inner circles) and as a result of this the regime has no alternative but to take its elections seriously. So, once candidates have been screened by the Council of Guardians, there is less vote-rigging, compared with other dictatorships. That is why open electoral fraud disturbs the balance of forces in the regime, not only exposing its absolute despotism, but creating difficulties for regulating relationships between its factions.
Third, the Islamic Republic is a religious dictatorship. In this regime civil repression complements political repression. The regime considers daily and constant control over people’s lives as its raison d’être and this repression creates widespread popular resistance. Throughout the last three decades we have seen a weary, direct and indirect mass resistance to the regime’s efforts to impose sharia law and this has played an important role in the erosion of the regime’s support base. In this confrontation, middle layers of society have played an active role, especially in the major cities. That is why some foreign observers (erroneously) refer to the current protests as the revolt of the middle classes.
Fourth, although at the time of the revolution the religious leadership benefited from considerable influence and this was reflected in the support for the governments stemming from the revolution, the imposition of velayat faghih (guardianship by the supreme leader) created many contradictions, which not only forced the government into constant confrontation with society’s daily life and therefore confrontation with large sections of the population, but also created problems within the clerical hierarchy and the religious establishment.
These factors led to a situation where the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic was seriously challenged (in both the political and religious spheres) especially after Khomeini’s death and this precipitated the loss of it support base. In fact the appearance of the reformists (who mainly came from the ‘left’ faction of the regime, or the ‘imam’s line’ group in the first decade of the existence of the Islamic regime) and their victory in the 1987 presidential elections, has no other significance but a sharpening of this crisis of legitimacy. Efforts over the last 12 years by the office of the supreme leader to control the influence of government reformists were mainly attempted through the strengthening of organs under the direct control of the leader and rendering meaningless elected bodies. All this broke down the equilibrium that had previously existed, and it is no coincidence that the crises of the political and religious legitimacy of the regime have coincided.
The office of Iran’s supreme leader is not only in total confrontation with the people, but at the same time most of the Shia ayatollahs who are accepted as sources of religious guidance are trying to distance themselves from him. The truth is that the traditional Shia religious governance is a form of republic (in the way Engels refers to the Protestant church as the ‘republican church’ and the Catholic church as the ‘Royalist church’), but now vali faghih is trying to change it into a royalist system, making the independence of centres of guidance impossible.
Fifth, the vali faghih system is keeping all the real levers of power directly under the control of the supreme leader. In fact under the current constitution his absolute authority is unprecedented even in comparison to absolute kings. As far as religious matters were concerned, even the kings had to accept religious authority, whilst in Iran all the power of both religious and state authorities is concentrated in the hands of one leader. Given the needs of the revolutionary period and later the requirements of war, the first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, tried to present himself as the embodiment of popular will, but during the last two decades, as the crisis surrounding the legitimacy of the regime increased, Ali Khamenei has been forced to use levers of power under his control to neutralise the general and inevitable inclinations of the people and work actively to destroy them.
As a result of this absolute ‘royalist’ power embedded in the constitution, the regime has been recognised as a naked dictatorship by ordinary Iranians. Nowadays all its armed forces are under the direct control of the supreme leader and the president cannot even send a policeman to someone’s door without his permission. The Revolutionary Guards are not only in charge of national security: they also control many of the country’s major economic activities. Today, Iran’s economy is not just divided between the private and the public sector: there is a third, very powerful sector controlled by foundations under the direct influence of the supreme leader – even the parliamentary accounts committee has no control over it. According to some estimates, the resources under the control of these ‘foundations’ account for a quarter of the country’s internal gross production. The broadcasting authority is a state monopoly under the direct control of the vali faghih. The supreme leader is in charge of one fifth of the country’s oil income.
The coincidence of the economic crisis with the anti-dictatorship movement is a sign of the explosive potential of the current situation in Iran. During Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, despite all the talk of ‘protecting the disinherited’, Iran’s economy has reached a more critical stage.
Unemployment is increasing at a frightening rate and, according to some estimates, amongst youth it has reached 70%. It should be noted that the 15-30 age group constitutes about 35% of the population. Before the elections, inflation was above 25%, according to figure released by Iran’s Central Bank (even after the manipulation of statistics), and despite the government’s denials it has gone up in recent months. In the first three months of Ahmadinejad’s presidency the cost of housing in most major Iranian cities rose by 1,500% and the cost of housing took up around 75% of the income of an average working class family.
Contrary to the illusions of some left groups outside Iran, Ahmadinejad’s so-called ‘pro-disinherited’ policies played an important role in worsening the structural crisis of Iran’s economy. The first term of the Ahmadinejad presidency coincided with an unprecedented rise in the price of oil and he spent a substantial part of the country’s oil income, as well as the country’s foreign exchange reserves, strengthening the social position of vali faghih. By injecting most of these resources into projects that had no economic value and only benefited the regime’s inner circles, the government created unprecedented inflation, the main burden of which fell on the shoulders of workers and toilers. It is enough to remember that, according to Ahmad Tavakoli (head of the research centre of the Islamic Majles, and one of the most hard-line Principlist-conservative factions of MPs), 46% of all the the ‘quick turnaround’ policies claimed by Ahmadinejad to confront unemployment never existed. In other words, all these claims were a cover for giving credit and low-interest loans (at times no-interest loans) to close associates of the vali faghih. Of course, had it been any different, it would have been surprising, because corruption is endemic in Iran’s Islamic Republic. In fact this regime has all the preconditions for relentless, institutional corruption. It is a rentier oil state and a brutal religious dictatorship, depriving non-believers of any rights.
Right now, according to figures released by the Central Bank, the country’s banking system is facing total bankruptcy, because the banks have provided 50,000 billion tomans (around $50 billion) in non-returnable credit, lost in handouts to the regime’s inner circles. Now, the banking system cannot even provide loans to small production units desperate for credit.
According to some evaluations, around 35% of the population live below the absolute poverty line. This means they face hunger and constant malnutrition. In addition to all this, as a result of the shortage of resources and considerable drop in oil income, the government has been forced to implement sudden measures to abolish subsides for all essential commodities, starting with the energy sector. The implementation of this policy will lead to a jump in the rate of inflation and increase poverty and destitution, making the lives of workers and toilers unbearable.
In view of all this, in my opinion the conditions are not suitable for reform. In general, reforms can only be achieved when the state is reasonably stable and the population is relatively calm and accepts the existing conditions. However, not only do people consider their situation unbearable, not only is there a lively protest movement, but the state is also at breaking point. In such conditions any retreat by the government will only encourage the people. That is why the reformists have little chance of gaining from the situation.
In reality, the electoral fraud, the removal of many reformists from power and the arrest of many of their leading figures was no more than a manifestation of the open bankruptcy of the reformist discourse in our country. It was not the reformists who rebelled against the vali faghih: it was the supreme leader who practically threw them out of the inner circles of the religious state.
In the midst of all this, the emergence of a self-instigated movement against electoral fraud propelled the reformists to the leadership of mass protests. That is the contradictory situation created by the rigged elections – reformists managed to lead the protest at the very time when the bankruptcy of the reform programme had become obvious. Clearly this situation cannot last long. We are now in the post-reformist era and the best proof of this is the growing gap between the slogans of the protest movement and the reformist discourse. The demonstrations that started with slogans like ‘Where is my vote?’ have now moved on to slogans such as ‘Death to the dictator’, ‘Death to Khamenei’, and even ‘Death to the principle of velayat faghih’.
The people’s protest movement started under reformist leadership for two obvious reasons:
1. the first protests were against election fraud and it was inevitable that candidates who lost should take pole position within them;
2. in periods of severe repression, protesters usually rely on some sort of cover to protect them – a cover that can reduce a little bit the cost of protest.
In any case, although the reformist programme was clearly bankrupt, the fact that reformists flocked to the ranks of the protest demonstrates the crisis within the regime. A phenomenon which is a necessary precondition for a revolutionary situation. Today, the presence of reformists on the side of the popular movement is a sign that the ruling order’s position is untenable. At a time when the regime cannot even tolerate reformists who abide by the velayat faghih constitution, we can see a sign of absolute dictatorship and despotism, reducing the regime’s chances of survival. Clearly this situation cannot last for a long time. However the reformists themselves have reached the end of the road – caught between the velayat faghih system and the anti-dictatorship movement of the masses, they are so hemmed in, they have lost the ability to take any initiative.
The brutal, repressive reaction of the regime in confronting the protests was one of the most important factors in the radicalisation of the protest movement over the last eight months. As I mentioned before, the protests against rigged elections (which was indirectly a protest against velayat faghih) disrupted the calculations of the regime. They had not expected mass popular interest in the elections and had even organised TV debates between candidates (a rare event in the Islamic Republic) to try and inject some enthusiasm and show the elections to be a real contest.
In the three weeks before the elections support for reformists candidates became so widespread that Ahmadinejad’s defeat was obvious to everyone. It was in this atmosphere that the vali faghih system, seeing a repetition of the 1997 elections, declared two days before the elections, via the Revolutionary Guards, that a ‘velvet revolution’ was being planned by western powers. On the day of the election itself the Revolutionary Guards staged a military manoeuvre in Tehran to stop this alleged attempt. The election headquarters of reformist presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Moussavi was ransacked by plain-clothed security forces.
When the authorities saw the angry reaction of the masses after the announcement of the unbelievable results, they attacked Tehran University on the night of the election, killing a number of people and injuring more than a hundred. And again on June 15, when three million people were marching peacefully against the rigged results, they opened fire on defenceless protesters, killing more people and arresting hundreds. After that came the torture and rape of young boys and girls in prisons, and the death of more than a hundred political prisoners in detention. Illusions in reformism rapidly evaporated and slogans now clearly proclaimed opposition to all the main organs of the current order.
Throughout the last eight months, the shameless Goebbels-like lies of the regime has aggravated the situation. For example, they shamelessly claimed that Neda Agha Soltan, the young girl killed by the security forces, had died through a plot by a BBC reporter, even though witnesses to the attack arrested her killer and confiscated his security ID. When Massoud Ali Agha, a physics professor and supporter of Moussavi, was killed, they claimed he was a nuclear scientist and so Mossad had targeted him. All this, plus the escalating repression, has played a crucial role in reducing the reformists to a forgotten phenomenon and radicalising the youth (the main force behind the anti-dictatorship movement).
Contrary to the opinion of those who consider the movement ‘middle class’, there can be no doubt that workers and toilers have played a very important role in the current protests. For example, how can one say that the June 15 demonstration was only middle class, when Tehran’s mayor admits three million people joined the protest (in a city with a maximum of 12 million inhabitants). Of course, the workers were not raising their own slogans in this demonstration, but the same is true of other sections, such as women and the youth, whose participation in the protests is not in doubt.
We should not forget that we are currently dealing with an anti-despotic movement which is facing brutal repression. In such movements, political protests take the form of sporadic demonstrations, fighting here, fleeing there, and under such conditions workers cannot get involved in independent political struggle at their workplace or in the districts where they live. This is a point made by Rosa Luxembourg in her summation of the Russian uprising of 1905. The experience of the February revolution in Iran against the shah confirms this. In that uprising there was no sign of independent workers’ protests until the massacre of September 1978. It was only after that event (the police opened fire on demonstrators, killing large numbers), when street actions became more difficult and dangerous, that protests moved from the street to workplaces and gradually we witnessed important workers’ strikes. And, of course, at that time, until very close to February 1979, most of the workers’ strikes only raised economic and trade union demands.
At present too, despite all the arrests and repression of labour activists, workers’ protests in support of their demands has manifestly increased. A review of workers’ protests over the last eight months and a comparison of these with the same period last year leaves no doubt that the workers’ movement is on the rise. The least one can say is that without a movement based on workers, toilers and the poor (who constitute the overwhelming majority of the population of the country) the current anti-dictatorship movement will get nowhere and in fact it is even difficult to envisage its continuation. Of course, the elimination of subsidies on essential goods (which is due to start in the first weeks of the new Iranian year, beginning on March 21) will no doubt lead to major workers’ protests and this can create suitable conditions for the development of class-consciousness.
We must also remember that under dictatorships people do not believe any of the government’s propaganda and in general do not consider the enemy of the government as their enemy (they are more likely to consider them as friends). In other words, that famous saying, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’, gains legitimacy. In today’s Iran, where the regime’s entire propaganda is geared towards opposition to the United States, public opinion against the US is weaker than in most Islamic countries. A couple of months ago when Obama was discussing the nuclear issue with the regime, in one of the demonstrations people were shouting, “Obama, Obama, you are either with them or with us!”
However, this does not mean people are oblivious to the dangers of military action or economic sanctions. One can say with certainty that the majority of Iranians are opposed to economic sanctions and any military action against their country. In particular, the US military invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the general massacre and destruction it has created in our two neighbouring countries has had a profound effect on public opinion in Iran. There are even signs (unfortunately) that Iranians support the regime’s nuclear programme and would not even mind if their country possessed nuclear weapons. In fact the painful experience of the bombing of cities during the Iran-Iraq war and especially the indifference of western states towards the use of chemical weapons by Saddam’s regime during that war created a sense of nationalist impotence which the regime tries to use. It is no coincidence that at present the state raises the nuclear issue in order to divide the masses.
How optimistic are you regarding the future of this movement? What are the prospects of the working class putting its stamp on any regime that follows the defeat of the theocracy?
There are many reasons to be optimistic about the prospects for this movement. In fact, even if this movement dies down today and its continuation becomes impossible, what it has achieved so far will have historic consequences.
The events of the last eight to nine months have left the Islamic regime with no future. Even if it survives for a while, it will never recover from the fatal blows it has suffered at the hands of this mass uprising. The young generation, the main motor of these protests, did not witness the 1979 revolution or the bloody repression of the first decade of this regime and until recently it was preoccupied with minor changes and certainly not thinking about social revolution. This generation is now irreversibly against the very existence of the Islamic regime.
There is no doubt that during the last three decades Iran’s economy has fared worse than other countries in the region. For example, in 1977 (a year before the revolution), Iran’s gross national product per capita was 60% more than Turkey and five times more than Egypt’s. Now Iran’s GNP, despite its oil income, is only 14% ahead of Turkey, and just twice that of Egypt.
The civil repression imposed by the regime will have consequences that will be with us for a long time. It is enough to remember that Iranian girls have been deprived of participation in sport for three decades and have not taken part in any major international sporting competition. The damage resulting from this is a tragedy that is occasionally referred to even within the pages of the regime’s own educational journals. The reason is that, according to the clerics, girls’ sporting activity must not be seen from people in neighbouring buildings, for example, and this makes any form of sport in girls’ schools impossible. The absence of any rights for women has turned half of the society into second-class citizens, as far as law is concerned.
Around 15% of the country’s population – the Sunnis, who are mainly Kurds, Baluchis and Turkmens – face double deprivation because of their religious beliefs and this endangers the country’s territorial unity. It is a weapon in the hands of the US and its allies.
For all its claims of supporting the ‘disinherited’, Iran’s Islamic regime is thoroughly corrupt, it is a parasitic state, pursuing brutal, anti-worker policies. According to many estimates, the current line of poverty in Iran stands at 800,000 tomans ($800), while the official minimum wage (which is often ignored and workers are paid less) is 300,000 tomans ($300). More than 80% of workers have temporary jobs and those in workplaces of less than 10 employees (ie, the majority of Iranian workers) are officially exempt from any labour legislation. For them it is the law of the jungle. Even those activists who demand the establishment of independent workers’ organisations or workers who fight for payment of unpaid wages are arrested and tortured.
It is revealing to compare the government’s attitude towards capitalists and managers compared to its attitude to workers. Last year when the government announced a two percent rise in tax for bazaar merchants, it faced a strike by shop owners in the Tehran bazaar and the state retreated immediately.
All this shows that the current anti-dictatorship movement is the only hope for improving the plight of the working class and ordinary people in Iran. The continuation of this movement and expansion of its scope has created a suitable atmosphere for raising class-consciousness and the formation of independent workers’ organisations and no doubt will improve political conditions in favour of workers to such an extent that it will, in the words of the Persian proverb, learn in one night what usually takes a century. Of course, if the regime creates such an atmosphere of fear where workers’ participation in political and economic protests becomes more difficult and costly, there is a danger that the struggle will take a violent form, when the role of organisations associated with foreign powers would increase, initiatives from below by the working class would fade away and reactionary, anti-democratic forces would gain the upper hand.
Let us not forget that, unlike the shah’s regime, Iran’s Islamic Republic has many powerful enemies throughout the world who seek to find allies amongst the forces opposed to the regime. No doubt such a scenario will harm democratic and socialist forces within the movement and it will give the regime an excuse to link the people’s legitimate struggles with foreign powers. In my opinion the worst scenario in the current situation would arise if groups associated with foreign powers gained more influence within the opposition, because even if they do not manage to stifle the protests they will divert it from its democratic direction.
However, given the current awareness amongst social movements inside Iran, especially amongst the youth over the last 10-12 years, one can be hopeful that the anti-dictatorship movement will not be diverted from such a path. Of course, liberal discourse still dominates Iran’s political scene and the left has a steep hill to climb to overcome this problem. But if the protest continues and takes a revolutionary path, as the role of the working class increases, the conditions for the dominance of socialist thought will develop.
How do you see radical change in Iran linking in with political developments in the region as a whole?
The coming to power of the clergy in the February 1979 uprising in Iran undoubtedly played a significant role in the development of Islamic movements in the region. In my opinion, the overthrow of the Islamic Republic in Iran can play an important part in weakening the influence of Islamic movements.
The reality is that Iran’s Islamic experience is about 10 years older than other countries and so disillusionment with Islamism came much earlier than in other Muslim countries. The overthrow of the Iranian regime could increase that process in other countries, even though it might not necessarily lead to the coming to power of defenders of socialism in our country. Given the current situation in Iran and the region, such a perspective is possible.
It should be pointed out that, although liberal discourse is still powerful in Iran, the economic crisis engulfing world capitalism, the destructive effects of US military intervention, the bankruptcy of corrupt, pro-western regimes in the region and the fact that they are not tolerated – all this has created suitable conditions where, with the demise of Islamism, toilers in the region might turn towards more enlightened horizons. We are now witnessing the Islamic movements subsiding and if US military interventions stopped this decline would be faster. In none of these countries would liberalism be capable of responding to the stacked up problems of poverty, dictatorship and obscurantism, nor can it benefit from mass support amongst workers and toilers.
Right now in two key countries of the region, Egypt and Turkey, a powerful working class movement is rising and if in Iran the anti-dictatorship movement succeeds in strengthening the working class left (and in my opinion there is a strong possibility of that happening) it may be that a ‘strategic bloc’ would be created in these three key countries. A strong left in Iran, Egypt and Turkey would be in a good position to oppose not only the swagger about the ‘free market’ and neoliberalism, but also the obscurantist slogans of Islamism. In reality both currents are not as attractive as they used to be in the Middle East and if the left can learn from past mistakes and take up a democratic, radical, mass-orientated discourse, our region can move in a direction similar to Latin America.
The principal danger for the formation of such a perspective in our region is the destructive policies of the US. For example, Nato’s plans in Afghanistan and Pakistan might lead to the disintegration of both countries – a phenomenon that will be as destructive as an earthquake for the whole region, and especially Iran. Countries in the region have strong religious, tribal and cultural links and Iran has more than 2,500 kilometres of common borders with these Afghanistan and Pakistan. Tribal strife in Kirkuk could heat up dangerous nationalist strife in Iraq, strengthening such arguments in the region and producing disastrous consequences.
What are the role and tasks of the international solidarity movement with those fighting the Iranian regime?
Undoubtedly the solidarity of western organisations and parties with the Iranian people has an important subjective effect on political and social activists inside the country.
Of course, we must have a realistic understanding of this influence. The truth is that the Islamic regime has a monopoly when it come to the radio and television that is available to all and especially the lower classes. These media present everything in a distorted manner, with Goebbels-like lies, and constantly make use of the support of some western left groups who praise the regime’s anti-imperialism! This creates a certain hatred of the ‘international’ left amongst the population. Let there be no doubt: any support for the regime is met with nothing but animosity from the people it suppresses. Satellite radio and television, available to around 20% of the population, is mainly controlled by the US, UK or sections of the opposition directly or indirectly connected to foreign powers and most of them are anti-left and combine opposition to the regime with propaganda for the stance of the US and its allies.
Expressions of support for the working class movement in Iran from international progressive, leftwing organisations is mainly possible through the internet. However, although it is the most important means of communication for the majority of anti-dictatorship activists, inevitably it has a limited number of users – an optimistic estimate would be that 10% of the population has access to the internet.
Despite these limitations, though, support for the anti-despotic movement and, of course, for worker struggles plays an important role in strengthening the left and attracting the country’s youth towards socialist ideas. Let us not forget that there are already favourable conditions for the re-establishment of a strong worker-socialist movement and clear positions taken by socialist forces in the west help bring neoliberalism as well as Islamist ideas into disrepute. In my opinion the anti-war, anti-sanctions movement abroad undoubtedly has a positive influence on the Iranian people, because, as I said before, the overwhelming majority of Iranians do not want to see a repetition of the Iraqi or Afghan experience in their own country, and they have seen how it is ordinary people who suffer the burden of sanctions (Iran has already had three decades of sanctions).
But the important issue is that opposition to the imperialist policies of the US and its allies must not lead to support for the Iranian government. Unfortunately the position of certain ‘anti-imperialist’ forces in the west is as damaging as the stance of those who support military intervention and sanctions. It is vital to oppose war and sanctions, but it must never take the form of supporting the dictatorial, bloodthirsty and obscurantist Islamic Republic. We must not forget that any support for the Islamic regime discredits leftwing and socialist ideas and in practice strengthens the hand of the US and its allies. Whether they like it or not, leftwing apologists for the regime actually help strengthen the imperialist, pro-capitalist camp in our country.
Our readers have followed Rahe Kargar’s stance on many issues for over two decades. Could you explain the reasons for last year’s split in your organisation?
The reason for the split was that for quite a while a group of people had tended towards a kind of reformist anarchism and latterly they wanted to impose their anti-organisation model on the rest of us.
Of course, they were only a minority, but others who did not necessarily agree with them politically ended up supporting them organisationally, creating conditions which would have meant nothing but dissolution. This made coexistence in the same organisation impossible. Amongst the comrades who had more formulated ideas were those who followed an interpretation of John Holloway’s ‘change the world without taking power’. But they propagate a caricature version of this, portraying any organisation as stifling and they are opposed not only to the notions of a working class party and state, but even to trade unions and other workers’ organisations.
The conflict started around an article written by one of the comrades regarding the establishment of independent trade unions in Iran. This comrade warned workers that such an organisation would lead to hierarchical structures and claimed that unions, which limit their politics to economic issues, would benefit the liberals and pave the way for conciliation with capitalists. Those responsible for the website and the organisation’s paper, followed our internal rules and put this article in the ‘point of view’ section of the website and some comrades considered this discriminatory. The reality is that the Iranian working class is actually fighting to establish independent organisations and it is not our policy to leave the working class defenceless.
Another difference arose around Palestine, starting with Israel’s attack on Gaza. They thought the condemnation of Israel’s crimes must be expressed in such a way that it would not strengthen Hamas and, although this was not clearly expressed, they wanted us to condemn both sides (Israel and Hamas) equally. Our position was that Israel’s crimes must be condemned unconditionally and firmly. | <urn:uuid:56f202b4-ef3b-4779-bfda-eb4b5f8e3e96> | CC-MAIN-2018-34 | http://hopoi.org/tag/left/ | 2018-08-21T19:54:45Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221218899.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20180821191026-20180821211026-00540.warc.gz | en | 0.966043 | 7,818 |
Room Decor Uplighting
Room Decor Uplighting is a set of lighting fixtures inconspicuously placed throughout the ballroom that project decorative beams of light from the floor on to the walls. Please contact a Sounds Abound Entertainment Consultant for more information or to create a custom uplighting package other than those listed below.
Full Room Uplighting
- Up to 18 Color fixtures placed around entire room
- Available to DJ clients only (price reflects discount)
Head Table Uplighting
- Up to 6 Color fixtures placed along one wall of room
- Available to DJ clients only (price reflects discount)
What Clients Say About Sounds Abound Uplighting
People Are Still Raving About the Entertainment!
We had Rufus and Greg (Assistant) for our November 11, 2017 wedding. We knew from the very first meeting that Rufus would be a perfect fit for our Irish-Italian wedding! Within minutes of meeting with Rufus, he had us laughing and at that time, we knew we were in good company!
We had multiple requests throughout our time planning the wedding such as: special father-daughter dance, special mother-son dance, a surprise for the guests, and incorporating music into the speeches/toasts. Rufus helped tremendously in making our crazy ideas a possibility and provided excellent suggestions to make it all happen. In addition, Rufus catered to our individual style as a couple. He was extremely professional, but still managed to make us feel comfortable. He never treated our appointments or meetings as business transactions, but instead, treated us like part of the Sounds Abound family.
Rufus and Greg did an outstanding job keeping the night running smoothly and on track. He incorporated many of our "must play" songs, but he also was able to "read the crowd" to keep the dance floor packed.
We are a few weeks past our beautiful wedding, and the most common compliment from our guests is how amazing the music and dj were...we are so grateful to have found Sounds Abound and Rufus!
P.S. If you are questioning using uplighting--do it! Sounds Abound supplies it and are in control of the lighting throughout the night---it was an excellent addition to create our perfect Autumn ambiance!
November 11, 2017
Reliable, personable, and fun to work with!
Sounds Abound was an amazing company to work with and was attentive to all of our questions. Tony Ho listened to our music vision and made it come alive. He was a lot of fun at the reception and we got several compliments from family/friends regarding Tony. We also had our uplighting and photo booth though them-- both were great! We really appreciate Tony helping us celebrate our special day!
We are SO happy and relieved that we went with Sounds Abound for our wedding DJ and uplighting. Kyle Overbey was our DJ and did a FANTASTIC job, and so did his assistant. All of our guests loved the music and they kept the party going until the end (seriously, no one was leaving). The uplighting was perfect and illuminated our reception beautifully 🙂
September 2, 2017
Awesome Experience all around!
We were recommended Sounds Abound and Tony Ho from some friend and we were not disappointed! They took the time to walk us through everything they offered and how it would all work out! We had additional speakers for our outdoor reception and some awesome uplighting that really made our venue pop! Tony was awesome to work with. The enthusiasm he had for us and our day was perfect! Not only was he able to work in all of our special requests he was able to keep the dance floor packed the entire night! We couldn't have asked for a better DJ! He also took the photo we uploaded here too!
August 12, 2017
Thank you, Rufus and Sounds Abound, for being exactly what we were looking for to DJ our wedding! Rufus was amazingly professional, and we truly felt like he understood our musical tastes and preferences. He checked with us throughout the evening when a request was made that he wasn't sure we would approve of, and he made sure we were okay with the timing of certain special songs. He kept the party rockin', and we had several of our guests comment how great the music was, from start to finish! The uplighting definitely helped add to our reception venue, and we appreciate the consideration taken to match our colors. Thanks again to Rufus and Sounds Abound for making our wedding such a great party!
May 28, 2017
Laura said... Our wedding was back in October of 2016 and we were so happy with the services we received from Sounds Abound. We chose a package that included DJ, uplighting, and a photo booth and it was money well spent. Our DJ, Kevin Vance, and his assistant did such a great job with song choice throughout the evening. Our guests clearly had a great time and they did a great job of keeping people on the dance floor. We knew that a photo booth would be popular but we had no idea that it would be THAT popular, especially with the older guests. There were people going in and out of there all night long, most even going multiple times so it was definitely a huge hit. And the beautiful uplighting made the ambiance so much more wonderful. We recommend Sounds Abound 100%. Thanks for everything!
October 1, 2016
Stellar Experience all around! A+ for Gary!
Our DJ, Gary was incredible and we cannot speak highly enough of him. He was a joy to work with and the wedding party and guests absolutely adored him. The two of us, and our wedding party felt like he was a friend we had known for years. He jumped into our "unorthodox" wedding without reserve and met our requests head on every step of the way. We were a wedding party filled with Musical Theatre performers and actors, and we had very specific song requests for the ceremony and the reception. On top of that we had two grooms combining traditional Irish culture with traditional Greek culture, and Gary made sure to please everyone from "the old country", in both music and presentation. The uplighting that came with the package enhanced our space and added that last minute touch of color we needed. We also went with the PhotoBooth package from SoundsAbound as well and couldn't have asked for a better finished product! All in all Sounds Abound was our top vendor for the night! No complaints! If you are having an event and need a DJ, snatch up Gary before he is booked! You won't regret it!
September 16, 2016
We loved working with Sounds Abound from the very start with planning for our wedding in November 2016. The online client planner was a great tool to help organize which songs we wanted at our wedding. We worked with Keith Talaga as our DJ and he was fantastic! He was extremely personable, professional, provided insight with not only music choices but also with our Sounds Abound up lighting package. The lights were amazing in our reception room and the music was great! Keith made us feel at ease leading up to our reception and played the best music - we were dancing all night! We are so glad we chose Sounds Abound and highly recommend Sounds Abound and Keith for any occasion!
November 12, 2016
We worked with Sounds Abound for our wedding and could not have had a more positive experience!!
Prior to the wedding, we has a Skype session with our DJ Kyle to go over the entire nights events, our wants and expectations, and of course music selections. Kyle gave us a play by play for what we could expect and when. It was so nice to be prepared and know when exactly we would need to be around for the cake cutting, bouquet toss, etc. This way it was very organized and everything just ran smoothly. We never felt rushed and could just enjoy every moment.
Kyle and his assistant showed up early the day of the wedding and knew precisely where to set up at the venue. It was such a relief not to have to worry about a thing! The uplighting we chose was so beautiful in our reception room. Kyle also kept everyone out on the dance floor and having a great time! From start to finish the floor constantly had our guests up and dancing. I really could not have asked for a better experience for our special day!
I would HIGHLY recommend DJ Kyle for anyone's event!
October 15, 2016
Sounds Abound did an excellent job!
I definitely recommend Sounds Abound. We used their services for our reception on 9/24/16, and everything turned out just wonderful! Tony Coix was our D.J. and he was excellent. We were able to choose the music from the Sounds Abound website and had options for ‘Must Play’, ‘Additional songs’, and Do Not Play. He played all of the music that we picked out / suggested, and was a great MC for the night. He also speaks Spanish and that was very helpful as he could pronounce my husband's last name correctly (my husband is Cuban). We also had a photo booth and the attendant was friendly and helpful. He even let me add some of my own props. We also had the up lighting and our 'name in lights' ... We were happy with everything, and having an entire Banquet room in purple really made the night extra special !!!
September 24, 2016
Sounds Abound was a perfect company to work with for all of our wedding entertainment. Not only was every member of their team easy to work with and always available to answer questions, the services they provided were outstanding!
Kyle was our DJ and there aren't enough words to describe how incredible he was! Our dance floor was packed from start to finish, and every request we had, he fulfilled. The online planning system was a great way for us to give Kyle the vibe we wanted for our party, and he absolutely nailed it come wedding day! We have gotten endless compliments about how we had the best DJ our guests have ever experienced!
We also utilized the uplighting and photobooth services, and both were just as perfect as everything else! Highly recommend this company!
September 24, 2016
David from Sounds Abound was absolutely the BEST DJ and also provided uplighting for our wedding. He thought of every detail, read the crowd well on song choices and just let us sit back and enjoy the day! He even helped guide some "sensitive" family matters and everyone raved about how cool/great he was! It's one thing to have great vendors, but by the end of the night David felt like family and I can't imagine having anyone else to be our DJ/MC/Jack of All Trades on our wedding day! Thank you David for not only being a great DJ but a great person, we only hope to be as cool as you someday! 🙂
August 13, 2016
Rufus was a great DJ and really made our wedding complete. He worked with us before the reception to figure out all of the necessary details and followed through by helping us stay on track the day of. His flexibility with music selection was perfect for our event. Rufus allowed us to give him an extensive selection of particular music we wanted to hear, and he took the time to create a playlist that kept the party going all night. He also allowed us to provide a separate list of songs for our cocktail hour that set the perfect tone. The up lighting changed colors throughout the night and made the space even more beautiful and complete. We can't thank Rufus and Sounds Abound enough for their part of our perfect wedding!
August 29, 2015
Sounds Abound were amazing to work with! From the initial contact to the DJ Open House, everyone was very informative and welcoming. We selected our DJ, Jeff Wells, who we personally selected from the DJ Bio section on their website. Based on Jeff's music history, he was a perfect choice. We met with Jeff about a week before the wedding and he was so helpful and literally ran our entire evening! From the introductions to the speeches to dancing all night, everything was perfect. The online planner to personally selected your wedding playlist was so easy to use and SO great to customize your special night. It was very convenient you could listen to any song on the planner to preview! Finally, we selected the package with the additional up lighting that was worth it since we had an outdoor tented wedding on a farm. I would definitely recommend Sounds Abound and Jeff Wells to any bride to be!
October 24, 2015
I just wanted to let you know what an absolutely ridiculously fantastic job your entire crew did at our wedding! Matt and his assistant did an amazing job and I have received a large amount of compliments about them. I have to say he was so easy to work with and he played all the right songs in all the right places. After our meeting I knew we were on the same page, but I had no idea he would be able to match the moods as perfectly as he did. Several members of the country club that were present at the wedding could not believe the quality of his work and they said that they never attended an event there that was so perfect. I wanted to let you know that everyone was just blown away and I know our event coordinator was also impressed and will be recommending your company to other members for future events. People were also very impressed with the uplighting and I will have to say Kyle gave us the suggestion for purple uplighting for the room and then scrolling colors during dancing and it absolutely changed the room, which is beautiful on its own, but it transformed it into something out of a fairy tale. The photo booth was also a phenomenal hit! I am so glad we went with the keepsake book as well. It was so nice to be able to see all the hilarious pictures of our guests having a blast the attendants were also so kind and easy to work with. I am beyond impressed and I can assure you that all the guest were as well. I feel I could write a novel about how amazing everything was. I'm blown away and I know that I will be recommending all of your services to all my friends who will be planning their weddings and other events, and I believe our venue (La Grange Country Club) will be recommending you as well. I also have to say again what a pleasure it was to work with Matt, he was fantastic and rolled with all the changes I threw at him the day of. He's fantastic! I am so glad we went with your company you helped make our big day a beautiful celebration!
October 17, 2015
We had Kevin Vance (and His assistant Stephanie) as our DJ for our wedding on 8/1 at Boulder Ridge Country Club. My initial meeting with Kevin was great. He was very helpful and guided me through my music choices for both the ceremony and reception. It was a huge relief. I gave Kevin a lot of freedom in regards to reception music because I wanted him to play what he knew would keep people on the dance floor. It worked! He checked up with us numerous times during the night to make sure things were going well and made every announcement I randomly asked of him. We would definitely recommend him and Sounds Abound to anyone looking for a DJ! Also, we definitely recommend up lighting. It will add so much to the look of your venue!
August 1, 2015
I cannot say enough good things about Sounds Abound!!! A DJ is HUGE at a wedding to keep everyone entertained and the dance floor full! Kyle did an AMAZING job at this! I would highly recommend him and sounds abound to anyone planning a wedding!!!! Keeping in contact with Kyle was a breeze! Any questions I had were answered super fast! I also got up lighting through Sounds Abound and it was beautiful! They met me at my reception hall to choose the perfect color for our reception! I had multiple guests come up to me saying how great our DJ was! I've never seen a dance floor that full for the last song of the night! If you need a DJ choose Sounds Abound!!!!
August 1, 2015
Tony Ho was awesome! He really listened to our wants and needs during our one on one sit down and executed flawlessly at the reception. The dance floor was always packed. If he saw the floor starting to empty out, he would change the music quickly to a crowd favorite and people would turn around and come right back on the dance floor. Also, instead of just playing random songs for the cocktail hour, he asked what bands/songs we would like for that as well. Sounds Abound also provided up-lighting for the reception that looked wonderful. Overall, great job! I highly recommend him and Sounds Abound!
July 18, 2015
I cannot express how overly satisfied we were with Sounds Abound (specifically, our DJ, Kyle Overbey). We exchanged many emails before the wedding and he was sure to answer all of my questions. We used Sounds Abound as our DJ for the outside wedding ceremony and also for the DJ for the reception. The sound equipment was absolutely perfect outside and everyone could hear. The inside equipment and lights (we added uplights to our package to help make the room look nicer) were absolutely great. We also did the photo booth and the staff from Sounds Abound really got people in there, having a good time. Our music was unbelievable and Kyle had everyone on the dance floor, the entire night. Our pictures absolutely show people out of their seats and dancing. It was such a great mix of oldies and new music. I would never use another company, after my fabulous experience with Sounds Abound! Thank you to the staff and especially to Kyle, for an unbelievable party!
July 3, 2015
Katherine said... We hired Sounds Abound to do our music, uplighting, and photobooth. Our venue was Bocaditos at The Brookfield Zoo. The reception space layout is kind of odd but Sounds Abound found the perfect spot for our Photo Booth and dance floor in there. They really transformed the room. The uplighting matched our color theme perfectly. I highly recommend getting lights. It will revolutionize your space. I've seen weddings at the zoo without the up-lights and it just didn't look as nice. We also had DJ lighting on the dance floor. Gotta add lights for your wedding, trust me! For photos we went with the big fun booth. Chris was our attendant. He did a great job helping guests with props, explained how the booth works once inside, and handed out lots of pictures to everyone. At the end of the night he handed me a usb thumb drive from all the pictures taken in the booth that night. He also said if we lose the drive they have back ups. Chris was friendly to everyone and did a great job with the booth. Now the music. Honestly I've never seen a better DJ feel the dance floor so well like Kyle does. If the floor was getting tired he brought it down with some chill songs. If the floor wanted to rock he kicked it up. He even came out and danced with us during some line songs. He played everything I requested. I've been to a lot of clubs and his mixes/mashups were better! He announced everything on time, got the crowd cheering, and gave a great pep talk to our wedding party when we walked out for our grand entrance. I think Sounds Abound has a lot of DJs to choose from. I'm sure they're all good but I'd recommend Kyle Overbey. Sounds Abound was our favorite wedding vendor as they were easy to work with and friendly, answered emails promptly, and did a great job! They made the night fun!
June 6, 2015
We used Kyle O for DJ services as well and we rented their Photo Booth and uplighting for our wedding reception. We had a great experience with the company as a whole. Everyone that attended our wedding raved about how wonderful our DJ was. He definitely kept the dance floor full the entire evening. He was extremely professional and it is obvious how much he cares about his job!
We would definitely recommend Sounds Abound to anyone!
November 23, 2012
Matt and I were so pleased with our DJ experience, and wanted to say thank you to Matt Ammons and his assistant for making our wedding day so wonderful. We picked Matt Ammons from the meet and greet nearly a year before our wedding. His personality seemed to match ours and we felt pretty confident we would have a great party because of him. He did not disappoint. We met with him about 10 days before the wedding and went through our vision and thoughts on music as well as giving him some lists of music we were excited about for our wedding day. We went outside the box with cocktail hour music and dinner music and he was super receptive to all of our requests and suggestions. On our wedding day everything went off without a hitch and there wasn’t even enough room on the dancefloor at some parts of the night because so many people were dancing. From the moment the dance floor opened up until the very last song the dance floor was full, which is what we wanted. He picked such a good variety of music from our ‘Must Play’ list to song requests from our guests (pre-approved). He did a great job working with our other vendors and making the night one that not just us, but our guests, will remember for a long time. An added bonus, just before the wedding Matt found us on social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat and after the reception was over he shared videos and pictures with us from our special day! It was great! Thank you so much for helping us throw a great party! We also rented uplighting and a photobooth which were great!
February 7, 2015
Kyle and Sounds Abound were incredible at our wedding.
The music. the uplighting. the whole package.
Kyle from Sounds Abound was incredible at our wedding. He worked with us for months before the wedding ensuring everything would be perfect.... and it was.
The music was incredible. Ive never been to a wedding were people literally stayed on the dance floor ALL NIGHT LONG. Usually you have a lull somewhere at other weddings I have been to, but Kyle and Sounds Abound kept people there all night. Everyone raved about our dj service and our beautiful uplighting that Sounds Abound provided.
Exceeded our expectations. we couldn't be happier with the services provided. Thank you!!!
January 3, 2015
AMAZING -- Even with crazy requests
We just got married on 12/13/14. When we chose the date, our venue suggested we book vendors ASAP. I did a lot of research to find my dj and wanted to make sure they were local to Naperville. I met with about five companies and the first four did not leave a good impression. When we met with Kyle Overbey at Sounds Abound (about a year out from the wedding), we knew we had to lock him in. He was laid-back but knew so much about music. We seemed to understand each other well. I told him we'd likely not put many limitations on what could be played/could not be played. Fast forward to three weeks before the wedding and we met with Kyle again. He had amazing recommendations for bridal party songs, and our last song. They weren't run of the mill songs and I appreciated that he took the time to get to know us to decide what songs would work. We felt more than confident he would do a great job.
On the day of the wedding, my dad had a few surprises that he worked with Kyle on including a Frank Sinatra cover singer and a little video presentation. Kyle was ready to pump music into the cocktail hour just in case the sinatra singer bombed (thankfully all went well). Kyle had a difficult job at our wedding because he was getting requests all over the board, including a few that I put on the "do not play" list. He was kind to the guests and when my dad insisted on a song from the do not play list, Kyle came to talk to me about it and always used his best judgment. Overall, there is no way I would choose another company. Our 24x24 dance floor was PACKED from open to close. Kyle was simply the best.
We also booked Sounds Abound for the photo booth. It's a must have! They do a great job putting together the scrapbook, which is a forever keepsake. Lastly we used Sounds Abound for uplighting. I found out after the fact that the original color we selected didn't look right with our colors, but Sounds Abound worked with my wedding team to come to a quick decision and it was gorgeous.
Thanks Kyle and Sounds Abound!!!!!
December 13, 2014
Sounds Abound was absolutely amazing!
We had such a great experience with sounds abound. We loved working with Larry. He was so nice and gave great advice. We loved being able to go online and watch videos of the DJ's. Larry was funny and worked great with all the weird requests people made. He was also great at keeping us on track.
We also went with up lighting and the photo booth. Everyone had a blast using the photo booth. The uplighting transformed to room completely. It was so beautiful, I'm so glad we went with it.
I highly recommend Sounds Abound for any party!
We chose Sounds Abound after attending a friend's wedding who used the company for their wedding. It was one of the best weddings we had ever been to and it was mostly due to the fact that the music was really good. We chose Ernesto because he is one of the DJ's that can mix/spin music. We are so happy we chose Ernesto because he did an amazing job!! We were beyond happy with the results of the music and we received so many compliments from guests about the music. He kept the dance floor full all night and delivered the exact vibe we wanted. We will definitely recommend him to people in the future!! Also, Sounds Abound did a great job with our uplighting and photo booth. Everything exceeded our expectations and turned out great!
September 20, 2014
This place was great to work with! The services they offer and the time they give was just what I was looking for.... also their pricing was great! I was able to do DJ, uplighting and photobooth all at one place... so much easier on a bride planning! We had Rufus and he was THE BEST! He really took charge on the day of the wedding and led the night off to the right start. We loved working with him and people commented about him all night how wonderful he was!! I wish we could do the night all over again!
October 4, 2014
Sounds Abound did an outstanding job of providing music for our wedding ceremony and reception, along with a photo booth and uplighting during the reception. We chose David Wilner to be our MC and we could not have been happier with the way that he worked with us, our families, and our friends to make our evening perfect. David communicated with us several times leading up to our wedding to make us feel completely comfortable and confident. He listened to our ideas and provided music and leadership throughout the evening that everyone at our wedding enjoyed. We highly recommend David and Sounds Abound!
June 13, 2014
My husband and I could not have been happier with David Wilner and his team from Sounds Abound. We live out of town, so David arranged a meeting over Skype so that we could discuss all of the music and MC details prior to our big day. After our meeting, leading up to our reception, we had no doubt that our night was going to be perfect, thanks to David (& it was!). The dance floor was full all night, just like we were hoping and our guests raved about how impressed they were with David. We also used the Photo booth & up lighting services from Sounds Abound and we have had a great time looking back at pictures of our goofy guests. Also, our room at Bolingbrook Golf Club looked great with the purple up lighting! Thanks so much, Sounds Abound!
May 25, 2014
We had our wedding reception on April 5, 2014. Sounds Abound provided us with our dj, photobooth, projection screen, slideshow, and uplighting. Our DJ was Kyle, he was absolutely amazing. He went above and beyond. When first meeting with Kyle our goal was to have everyone on the dance floor having a great time and Kyle did just that. We let Kyle do his thing and feel out the crowd and he did an incredible job. Our friends/family members are still talking about Kyle and how fun the wedding was. Kyle was extremely organized and worked with our wedding coordinator at the hotel and provided us with the most amazing music. Everyone loved the photobooth and uplighting. I cannot thank Kyle and Sounds Abound enough for making our wedding so special. I recommend them to everyone. We had the most incredible experience and had so much fun with Kyle and Sounds Abound.
April 5, 2014
February 15, 2014
We used Sounds Abounds as the DJ company for our wedding. Tony Ho was the DJ we selected. He was great! We had them provide the ceremony and reception music. They provide helpful advise and the website is easy to use. People were on the dance floor all night and that was what we wanted!
They have an easy to use website to put in the music you want and don't want. We added the uplighting into the package, and if it is in your budget I would suggest adding it. It makes the space elegant and cozy.
December 31, 2013
We used Sounds Abound for our MC/DJ, Photo booth and Up-lighting- and they did a fantastic job with all three. The venue looked amazing with the very professional and elegant looking up-lighting. The photo booth was so much fun, and the attendant made sure everyone had a good time taking the silly photos. But the best service provided by Sounds Abound was the DJ. We chose Rufus for our MC and he was amazing. My husband and I have very different tastes in music, and had an extremely mixed crowd at the wedding. Somehow, Rufus kept the dance floor full all night, and managed to make everyone happy. Our guests mentioned that they have never seen so many people dancing and having fun at a wedding before, and we have Rufus to thank. He made sure the night went smoothly, and choreographed the whole event to perfection!
November 30, 2013
Jason Yach was the dj for our wedding at Arrowhead Golf Club. Jason did a great job, and was extremely easy to work with. He followed our playlist selections, but also included songs that we did not think to include. The dance floor was never empty!
Several of our guests said the following:"Your dj was great!", "My feet are killing me, because I danced so much.", and "You had a great variety of music." Several people also commented on how neat the "dancing with the stars effect" looked. We could not have asked for a better response from our guests.
Sounds Abound also provided several other services for our wedding, which included uplighting, dancing with the stars, and the photo booth. Everything turned out great. There was always a line for the photo booth. We would highly recommend the company Sounds Abound, and Jason Yach as a dj. You will not be disappointed!
November 9, 2013
I will be saying the same thing that everyone else has...Sounds Abound is incredible! We were able to hand pick our DJ and see some of his work before booking. We chose to go with Kyle and I couldn't be happier. He was very friendly and genuinely loves his job. We met with him twice and I felt at ease that our party would be fantastic. He kept us on track throughout the night. They provided the music for our ceremony, cocktail hour, and reception and uplighting for the reception. The dance floor was full the whole night. He got out on the dance floor to teach our guests the Cupid Shuffle. Even the assistant (Tony) was dancing behind the table! He used our must-play list to create a perfect dance party. I would highly recommend Sounds Abound for any bride!
August 3, 2013
An amazing night!
Our wedding was on Saturday September 21st. We used sounds Abound for our uplighting, photobooth and Dj. I could not have been more happy with how everything turned out. We received so many compliments on everything!! For the DJ, we had the privilege of working with Matt Ammons. Words cannot describe how professional and knowledgable he was. I had an extremely large wedding party. He was able to get everyone in line and tell them what to do, where to be, etc. It helped me tremendously because it was one less thing I had to worry about. Not to mention the music itself set the party mood perfectly. I would definitely recommend Matt and Sounds Abound services to anyone and already have!
September 21, 2013
Amazing, organized Event Company
We had Matt Ammons as our DJ for or wedding on August 24th, 2013. He was great to work with from the moment we met him. He met with us and talked about exactly what we wanted for our wedding and music preferences, etc. He was very detail oriented. When it came to the big day, he had everything under control. He did the music for it ceremony and reception. Everything was perfect. The dance floor was filled the entire night! We received so many compliments on the music and Matt! We can't thank him enough for making our wedding so memorable! His assistant was great too. The two of them organized our rowdy wedding party and made sure everything ran smooth all night so we didn't have to worry. We also had uplighting and a photobooth from Sounds Abound. The lighting completed the room and looked fantastic! I would definitely recommend it to everyone! The photobooth guys were a blast to work with and or guests loved them! Brandon made everyone want to use the photobooth over and over and because of that our album turned out awesome! I can't thank everyone at Sounds Abound enough including Jeff for answering all my questions! You guys are great!
August 24, 2013
I cannot speak highly enough about Sounds Abound or Matt in particular. We had met with several other companies, but after talking with Sounds Abound and hearing rave reviews from friends, we felt confident booking them for our wedding. Now that our wedding has come and gone, I realize just how great Sounds Abound is! Matt was the consummate professional while still being a lot of fun to work with before and during the event. He emceed our event starting with a cocktail hour and managed to keep the dance floor packed until the very last song! He blended his knowledge of our families (given during a pre-wedding meeting) and our taste in music with tried-and-true wedding favorites and more top 100 songs. It was just perfect! In addition to being incredibly knowledgeable about music, Matt is everything you'd want in a master of ceremonies. Right before we were supposed to do the bouquet toss, I discovered that the servers had literally tossed my toss bouquet in the garbage! Matt was able to stall and keep me calm while everything got sorted out - and no one knew! That's just one example of how wonderful he is.
Additionally, Sounds Abound did our color-change uplighting. I can't recommend that enough. I wasn't sure it was worth the additional cost (over stand uplighting) but it really made our event extra special. Not only was it a blast to be out on the dance floor with the lights changing to the music, but they made for gorgeous and fun photos! We also had Sounds Abound hook up a portable speaker to our outdoor patio so guests could hear the music and know if any special events were taking place. That was a great idea, too!
Given the length of this testimonial, I obviously cannot say enough good things about this company! I guarantee you will not regret working with them. From the assistants who fields calls and helped with the initial planning stages all the way to the DJs involved in our actual event, everyone was so attentive, making us feel like we were their only customers.
June 22, 2013
Our wedding was a PAAAARRRRTTTTAAAYYYY!!! Every guest had an amazing time and the dance floor was packed the entire night. No one wanted the event to end thanks to Kyle's excellent entertainment and music selections! Sounds Abound was incredible to work with! The online music planner allowed us to choose songs with our friends and family and request them online. Then meeting with our DJ, Kyle, made everything cohesive. He helped us make final decisions on song choices for things like cake cutting and garter toss. We were able to walk through the night's timeline with Kyle so everyone was on the same page. After the event, the wedding planner said she'd never had a smoother flowing event and it was all thanks to the DJ keeping everything on track! Kyle was a delight! Our rowdy bridal party was a challenge to organize but he did it; our first dance was not 1 but FOUR songs that Kyle was able to mix for us; and Kyle even warned us when the videographer was about to wrap up just so we could make sure our bouquet toss and garter throw were recorded. By the end of the night the groomsmen had split their pants and sweat through their vests from dancing so much! Even the flower girls lasted all night they were having so much fun there was no time to even think they were tired! On top of all the music, Sounds Abound provided the perfect touch to the room with uplighting. They were even able to accommodate our colors, teal and purple. The room was gorgeous, the music was bumping, and the guests won't forget a minute of the night! Thank you Sounds Abound and especially Kyle for making our night PERFECT... if only we could repeat it every weekend :o)
June 29th 2013
Throughout the night, we consistently received comments that Ken was "wonderful". He catered to people of every age, was very attentive to timing and our schedules and he was very professional. We loved the specialty dances and everyone at the wedding said they had a blast out on the dance floor! In addition, the uplighting that was provided through Sounds Abound brought an untimely elegance to the room that would not have been achieved without their help. The photobooth was a HUGE success and people are still talking about it! It was so much fun! Everything was wonderful!
October 30, 2010
Theresa & John – October 30, 2010
“The uplighting that was provided through Sounds Abound brought an untimely elegance to the room that would not have been achieved without their help.”
John & Milena – May 22, 2010
“We were extremely pleased with Sounds Abound. Every wedding requires lots of choices and picking Sounds Abound was one of our best and easiest decisions we made. Ken made everything in the sales process a breeze. He even came out and met us at our reception location to go over lighting several months before the wedding. You can tell that Sounds Abound is dedicated to making sure their customers are happy (contrary to other companies we’ve seen). We will be loyal customers for a very long time. Recommendations are on their way.”
Anjela & Reggy – September 6, 2009
“I ordered uplighting from Sounds Abound and the setup they provided was excellent. The room looked great and I never had to worry about them as a vendor, which is vital considering everything else a bride and groom have to worry about.” | <urn:uuid:2978417e-49f8-4f14-a61c-e6d1bfbbe1c5> | CC-MAIN-2018-34 | https://www.soundsabound.com/uplighting/ | 2018-08-17T10:56:57Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221212040.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20180817104238-20180817124238-00420.warc.gz | en | 0.987771 | 8,234 |
(F/M, spanking, crop, humiliation, CBT, paddle, nipple torture, hairbrush, clothespins, school memories, voyeurism)
Note: This story involves non-consensual activity, something I do not condone in real life. However, the story is pure fantasy and one that was a great release for me to write as I dealt with some political frustrations of late.
As I walked up to the door at the big white house, the butler’s eyebrows raised at my appearance. I thought I looked great, but perhaps I hadn’t toned it down quite enough for the vanillas. I was a vision in royal blue. My skirt was a tight and lacy yet lined A-line which hit a few inches above my knees. I had on a blue leather bra, but I had put on a sheer blue blouse over it for a little bit of modesty. My blue fishnet stockings and blue stilettos somewhat covered my legs and feet. I wore a lace blue choker necklace, and my hair was upswept into a loose bun. It would have been a marginally professional outfit appropriate for business wear had it been a little less revealing. I also carried a large duffel bag which carried the tools of my trade.
“I’m here to see Donnie,” I informed the butler as he looked me up and down.
“And whom may I say is requesting the honor of his presence?” the butler inquired.
“Tell him Lacey is here to play. His Uncle Steve sent me to change his attitude a bit,” I replied as covertly as I could. I didn’t think the butler really wanted to know I was there to beat his boss’ ass, but I wanted Donnie to start quaking in anticipation of what he had coming. I had played with Donnie once before, and he was a very whiny, very needy type of boy-man who deserved to be put in his place, a job I was happy to do. Getting paid for it was nothing but a bonus.
The butler showed me into a parlor off the main hallway where I knew I was to wait until I had been cleared for entering Donnie’s private quarters. The room was nicely decorated, and on the coffee table were magazines which had Donnie’s portrait on the cover. Not all of them were recent, but I knew Donnie’s ego dictated that nothing but magazines with flattering articles about him should fill his home. He had an image he wanted to convey to his guests, one of power and success as a corporate CEO. I didn’t buy it for a minute. I’d seen the true man, and I knew the real story of whom he was.
After a few minutes, the butler returned. “You may follow me upstairs,” he let me know. I remembered the way, but I knew protocol dictated that I follow him. We climbed a regal staircase and walked down a red carpet hallway lined with giant portraits of the previous occupants hanging on the walls. As I looked on the faces of honorable men from the past, I shook my head in bemusement. How had Donnie managed to descend from this lot?
As we approached Donnie’s private quarters, the butler gestured toward the two security guards standing at attention. I recognized one from my previous visit and knew he was the senior of the two. The other man was a stranger, but that didn’t surprise me. Donnie was the kind of man who had a frequent turnover in his staff because he was so difficult to please, or so rumor said.
I approached the senior guard and gave him my bag to inspect. It had been quite a process getting in with my toys the previous time I was here, but this visit I knew would go much smoother since the guard knew what to expect. As he opened my bag, he found paddles, a strap, a crop, a butt plug, nipple clamps, and a few other delightful toys. The guard smiled and nodded with approval as he dug through the bag. The only compromise we’d had to make last time was that I was not allowed to take my handcuffs or rope into the room. This time, I didn’t even bring them.
“Would either of you gentlemen like earplugs?” I asked.
“No, ma’am. We plan to enjoy this, if you don’t mind,” the senior security guard replied. His junior was looking very confused by this point since he hadn’t seen what was inside the bag, but I knew he would soon be enlightened. I laughed in response. Working for Donnie probably wasn’t a fun job, so I could imagine how hearing him suffering at my sadistic hand might be truly delightful for his guards.
“But of course,” I responded with a smile. “I’m always happy to have an audience listening in. Would either of you want to be an actual witness at some point?”
“Oh, ma’am,” the senior guard said, almost breath-taken, “You don’t know what an honor that would be. We’d be happy to witness.”
“What did you just sign me up for?” the junior guard asked.
“Just wait,” his superior said. “It will be well worth it.”
With that, I smiled at the senior guard, reclaimed my bag, and knocked on the door to enter Donnie’s room.
“Come in,” Donnie called in a hesitant voice. Good. He was already nervous. He should be. It took a lot to break him last time. I was hoping he had remembered some of his lessons, but I suspected that his ego was going to try to fight me again.
“Hello, Donnie,” I greeted him as I entered the room.
“Hello, Lacey,” he replied as he walked toward me.
“STOP!” I commanded. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m coming over to greet you,” Donnie casually replied.
“I don’t think so, Donnie,” I retorted. “We ‘discussed’ this last time, and that discussion involved a harsh beating of your ass if you remember correctly.”
“Oh,” Donnie meekly said. He began whining at me, “But I didn’t think that meant I had to do it every time I saw you.”
“Oh, little boy,” I replied. “You are very mistaken on that one. When I am in your rooms, I am in charge. You will submit to me, and you will do it willingly…”
“But I’m in charge!” Donnie whined again.
“Like hell you are!” I replied. “The sooner you accept that I am in charge of you in the bedroom and that your Uncle Steve is in charge of you in the corporate realm, the easier your life will be. Now, would you like to try that entrance again or will we have to repeat the very intense beating you got last time for disrespecting me?”
Donnie looked rather miserable at this point. His ego was still struggling. I could see him debating whether he should fight me on this or not. He might weigh twice as much as me, but that wouldn’t stop me from being able to physically dominate him, and he knew it. His ass had been a very lovely shade of purple when I said goodbye to him the last time, and I knew he felt that beating for many days afterward. I suspected he was debating in his head whether or not I would really repeat that performance again. To make my point, I pulled a hairbrush out of my bag and smacked it against my hand. His eyes got quite wide in response to my gesture.
“No, Lacey,” he replied. “I’d rather not have a purple backside again.”
“Let’s get one thing straight, Donnie,” I sharply retorted. “You WILL address me as Mistress Lacey, Mistress, or Ma’am. If you don’t, you will pay for your disobedience. Now, please try that again.”
“No, Mistress Lacey,” he corrected himself, “I don’t want a purple backside again.”
“Excellent choice, Donnie,” I replied, “Because you are still going to have a very red backside for all the ways you’ve been disobedient since I last saw you.”
“But…” Donnie began whining. I slapped the hairbrush on my hand again and shot Donnie my best “if looks could kill” glare. He stepped backward, instinctively covered his bottom with his hands, looked down at the floor, and meekly replied, “Yes, Ma’am.”
“Good boy, Donnie,” I responded. “Now, I am going to walk out into the hallway and have a little chat with your guards for a few minutes. When I come back in, I expect you to be dressed and positioned as we discussed last time.”
“Yes, Mistress,” Donnie sighed submissively. I decided to let that bit of attitude go for the moment. I’d be correcting him for it soon enough.
I stepped out in the hallway with my hairbrush still in my hand and shut the door to Donnie’s room. The senior guard had a huge smile on his face.
“How is it going, ma’am?” he asked.
“Fine, thank you. Donnie just needs a moment or two to prepare,” I said.
“Are you doing his hair?” the junior guard inquired while staring at the hairbrush in my hand. “I had heard he didn’t let anyone touch his hair besides his barber.”
I laughed. Donnie’s hair really could use a woman’s touch, but I was not up to that task. “No, that’s not what I plan to do with this hairbrush,” I replied. The guard looked confused.
“Are you telling me that when you were a little boy your mother never put a hairbrush to good use on another part of you besides your hair?” I asked him.
“Oh!” he said, his face reddening. I could see the lights going off in his head. “So, you’re a…”
“Professional dominatrix,” I finished the sentence for him so that he didn’t accidentally say something inappropriate. “Yes, I am, and I’m quite a good one. Donnie’s Uncle Steve has hired me to come on a weekly basis to keep Donnie in line. I’ve been here once before, and Uncle Steve found Donnie much easier to control after I’d given him a good dose of discipline.”
“Oh,” the guard said again. “So when Joe said we’d be happy to witness, he meant…”
“That you would be happy to watch me give your boss a bare bottom ass licking,” I finished his sentence. A smile unlike any I’d seen from any of the staff at the big white house broke across his face.
“Wow!” he said. “Yes, I would definitely be happy to witness that. I’ve only been on the job for a few days, but still, I wouldn’t mind seeing him in a submissive position.”
“Well, wait a little bit, and I’ll call you in. Naughty schoolboys often need a witness when the principal paddles them at school, so I don’t see why it should be any different for a big boy,” I responded with humor in my voice. “Now, time for me to see if that naughty boy has followed my orders,” I stated as I opened the door and walked back into Donnie’s room. I closed the door, but not quite all the way. I wanted to make sure the guards got to hear as much as possible.
When I walked back in the room, I was greeted by the back view of Donnie wearing his tighty-whities and nothing else. “Donnie” was even embroidered into the waistband of the briefs. Donnie was standing in the corner of the room with his hands on his head. This was a vast improvement to the way I had been greeted the first time I entered the room when he was still in his suit and tie.
“Good boy, Donnie,” I replied. “I am glad to see you remember how I expect to find you. And what exactly have you been thinking about while you were in the corner waiting for me to come in?” I asked him. By this time, I had walked up behind him, so I took advantage of the hairbrush in my hand, dragging it firmly across his bottom so that he knew I was prepared to punish an unacceptable answer.
“I’ve been thinking about how you are going to spank my bottom, Lacey,” he replied.
CRACK! Donnie let out a loud howl as my hairbrush very sharply and fiercely came down on his bottom. His briefs really weren’t much protection against my muscular swing, though I was sure he was grateful to still be wearing them.
“What did you do wrong, Donnie?” I asked sternly.
“I forgot to call you Mistress,” Donnie quickly responded, worried that his bottom was going to be spanked again. He was right on that account. He just didn’t know when the next swat would come.
“I’m glad you recognized part of what you did wrong,” I replied, “but that wasn’t your only error.” With that pronouncement, I gave Donnie’s covered bottom a series of five very quick, very hard spanks in one place which led Donnie to let out another howl. He was such a baby when it came to taking his spankings unlike most men who tried to stoically hide their pain for as long as possible. I continued to lecture him while randomly swatting his bottom at a slower pace, “You were supposed to be thinking about what a naughty boy you’ve been since I was last here and why your Uncle Steve had to call me to come discipline you again. You must be acting like quite the naughty boy from how disgruntled he was on my voicemail. He said that you have been using social media too much and working too little. He also said you haven’t been following his orders well at all. He wanted me to spank your negative attitude and your stubbornness out of you, and that’s a task I’m more than happy to do for the good of your entire staff.”
I could tell that Donnie was as displeased about my lecture as he was about the continued bites from my hairbrush. He so desperately wanted to be in charge at work, but he just wasn’t ready yet. His immaturity came through in his behavior. Despite his inherited title as CEO, he wasn’t the one who really ran the company. His Uncle Steve ran the show, and he was definitely right in thinking that the best way to handle a spoiled brat like Donnie was to spank some obedience into him. Donnie might not physically be a little boy anymore, but he sure acted like one.
I decided that it was time to increase Donnie’s humiliation. “Turn around,” I commanded, “But don’t take your hands off of your head. As Donnie did so, I could see the frustration and struggle in his eyes. When I was done spanking him, those emotions would be replaced with submission and acceptance. But for now, it was time to start with a bit of humiliation. I set my brush on the bureau next to me and turned backed to Donnie. I quickly pulled on both side of Donnie’s briefs, and they fell to the floor. As I expected, Donnie began to protest this treatment.
“You can’t do that to me,” he said, removing his hands from his head to cover his cock and balls. “I won’t stand for it.”
“Oh, yes I can, Donnie,” I reprimanded him. “And you just earned yourself quite a bit more punishment for both talking back to me and taking your hands off your head. Now, get back into position and shut your mouth unless you want to make this any worse for yourself.”
Donnie looked at me. He knew I wasn’t kidding. He sighed and put his hands back on his head. That sighing nonsense was going to have to stop, but one step at a time. I walked over to my bag and pulled out a handful of clothespins along with nipple clamps.
“What are those?” Donnie asked with trepidation as I approached him.
“’What are those, Mistress?’” I responded.
“Oh. Yeah. What are those, Mistress?” Donnie corrected himself.
“’Those’ are some devices for me to help adjust your attitude. I dropped the clothespins on the bureau but brought the nipple clamps with me to Donnie’s bare chest. His eyes got a bit wider as he saw me open them and approach his own delicate nipples.
“I don’t think I want you to use those on me,” he whined at me.
“Too bad,” I replied without a bit of remorse. “You made your decisions to accept whatever punishment I dealt out when you chose not to follow my orders to keep your hands on your head and address me properly. I am going to teach you to follow instructions no matter how much pain it causes you.” With that, I let the one clamp bite into his nipple. He winced at the pain. “Oh, little boy,” I reacted, “Just you wait for what’s coming next.” I latched the other clamp onto his free nipple and then sadistically turned the clamp as hard as I could. Donnie nearly jumped out of his skin as he screamed in pain. His hands started to come off of his head, but he quickly put them back. He was figuring out he couldn’t afford to disobey anymore. His punishment was already going to be harsh enough.
I grabbed the clothespins off of the bureau next. Donnie grimaced and asked hesitantly, “Please, Mistress, Ma’am, what are you going to do with those?”
“I am going to put them on your ballsack,” I replied. “And you should be aware that they twist just as well as the nipple clamps do so you better be on your best behavior. Now, spread your legs for me.”
I could tell that Donnie really wanted to refuse, but for once, common sense kicked in. His legs spread apart and his flaccid cock and balls dangled meekly between his legs. I cupped his balls and began carefully lining his scrotum with as many as I could, some facing to the right and some to the left. This was going to make it very uncomfortable to walk over to the bed without hurting himself or popping them off accidentally. Either way, he was going to be hurting.
I put the last of the clothespins on his scrotum, and I smiled at my artwork. I could make such creative designs, not that my clients ever seemed to appreciate that part of my talents. I stood up, and I gave Donnie a sharp whack with my hand on his bottom just because I could. He winced a bit, but I could tell that I needed to switch back to my hairbrush to make him yell. That was already my plan.
“Ok, Donnie,” I said. “It’s time for us to really get down to business. I’m going to sit on the bed, and you are going to bend yourself over my lap with your body draped on the bed so that I can give you the good, hard, bare bottom spanking that you deserve. I expect complete compliance. No kicking and no wiggling off my lap. Any infractions will be harshly punished. Remember, those clothespins twist just as easily as the nipple clamps.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Donnie replied. Finally. I was getting somewhere in changing his attitude towards me.
I gracefully walked over to the bed and sat down, pulling my skirt toward my knees. I set the hairbrush on the bed next to me so that I could assist Donnie in positioning himself over my lap.
“Alright, Donnie,” I instructed, “You may walk over to the bed now.” Donnie began what was an uncomfortable for him but amusing for me waddle over to the bed. I could tell he was also not wanting to walk any faster than he had to because he was trying to stall his punishment. That was fine. He could really only extend the wait by a few seconds. When he finally got over to me, though, he quickly bent over my lap like a good boy. He spread his legs apart to keep the clothes pins from prodding his legs and balls too much. He delicately put his chest onto the bed, concerned about what the nipple clamps might do. I decided to show him. I pushed down strongly on the center of his back, and he let out a scream of pain as the clamps dug in.
“That was just a warning, Donnie,” I said. “I wanted to let you know how any lack of cooperation will be dealt with during this spanking.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Donnie replied.
With that, I was ready to begin his spanking. I picked up my hairbrush, rubbed it across his backside so that he knew I was about to begin, and then I let the brush come crashing down onto his bottom. As expected, he screamed out, but he did try to hold still as he didn’t want any of the torture devices on his body to create any more misery.
Not feeling overly merciful, I set forth in giving Donnie the kind of harsh spanking that any naughty boy could expect from me even if he spent his daytime hours as a CEO. Over my lap, I could revert him to a sobbing little boy in minutes. My wooden hairbrush and I were experts at the job. I began moving the brush up and down his bottom and legs, switching sides periodically but randomly. I settled into a steady rhythm, spanking fairly rapidly. Donnie was howling within only a few seconds, though most men would only have been grunting at that point. To his credit, Donnie was a good boy about staying over my lap and not reaching back. I’d had to smack his hands thoroughly last time for trying to stop the brush, and this time he knew not to do it.
As Donnie’s bottom and thighs went from pale pink to dark pink to red, he continued to howl and wriggle. I had my left arm around his waist to steady him from rocking off of me. Eventually, I felt the release in his body that I was waiting for: The one that told me he was no longer fighting his punishment and had accepted his place of submission. When he reached that point, I slowed my spanking strokes, working on randomly smacking the spots on his backside that weren’t as red as the others. His howling also slowed, but he still winced and shrieked with each new smack. Once I was satisfied with my artistry on his canvas, I placed the hairbrush next to me on the bed and began slowly running my hands over Donnie’s bottom. I could tell he found the gesture soothing though his whimpering and sniffing continued as he recovered from the harsh spanking he just endured.
“I’m very proud of you for taking this part of your punishment well, Donnie,” I began speaking again when I felt he was ready to pay attention. “You didn’t try to block the hairbrush or get off my lap. That shows you can be a good boy who follows directions when you want to. Hopefully learning to submit to me in the bedroom will help you learn how to submit to your Uncle Steve in the office. If not, he’ll report back to me, and I will punish you for it.”
Silence ensued this little lecture of mine, so I gave Donnie another sharp smack on his very sore bottom. Donnie yelped and replied quickly, “Yes, ma’am! I’ll be good! I promise.”
“I’m glad to hear that Donnie,” I replied. “Now, it’s time for you to get onto the bed on your back with your legs spread so I can remove the clothespins.”
Donnie scooted off of my lap as carefully as he could, not wanting the clothespins to cause any more damage than they already were. He gingerly sat on the edge of the bed and leaned back, spreading his legs as wide as he could. While he was arranging himself, I had stood up and reached into my bag of goodies. I pulled out a crop and returned to stand between Donnie’s legs. When he looked up and saw the crop in my hand, his eyes nearly bugged out of his head.
“What are you going to do with that, Mistress?” he asked with great trepidation.
“I’m going to remove the clothespins from your ballsack,” I confidently replied. “Don’t worry. This is not a trick amateurs should try, and I am not an amateur. I spent years practicing to learn how to do this correctly, and I’ve done it to many other naughty boys aside from yourself, Donnie. However, if you don’t want to receive a hard cropping in some very delicate places, I suggest you hold as still as possible while I do this. It’s probably best if you pull your legs up onto the bed and use your hands to hold your knees open.”
Donnie quickly followed my directions, though I could tell by the look on his face that he was still scared out of his wits about what I was going to do. I smiled my most wicked smile, and then I quickly began slapping off the clothespins with my incredibly accurate aim and my trusty crop. It actually took me less than a few seconds to remove them all, so fast that Donnie didn’t have time to react. However, once they were off and the blood began rushing back to his scrotum, Donnie let out another howl of pain. His hands flew off his knees and onto his sack, grasping and rubbing and attempting to stop the sting. I knew that this intense pain would only last briefly, and he would calm down quickly. However, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy watching his desperate attempts to stop it.
Once Donnie’s sack quit hurting so intensely, he simply lay on the bed. I could tell that he was in a submissive state. The hard hairbrush spanking had gotten through to him fairly quickly this time. I went and sat on the bed and gently rubbed his hair.
“You’re being a good boy, Donnie. You’re learning to listen and follow directions without questioning them. That’s a good thing. You need to be able to work well with others rather than insisting on doing things your way all the time. I know this isn’t a pleasant way to learn those lessons, but it’s well past time you learned them.”
Donnie looked at me meekly and whispered, “Yes, ma’am.” I had him in the submissive state I wanted him in. As an act of kindness, I then leaned over and quickly tugged off the nipple clamps he was still sporting. Of course, this resulted in another howl as Donnie’s nipples regained feeling. I could only smile as he desperately tried to rub the pain away.
I stood up and replaced my crop in my bag, but I also pulled out my heavy wooden school paddle. Donnie’s Uncle Steve and I had worked out a daily incentive system that I was now going to put into action. Each day at the end of the work day, Uncle Steve was going to evaluate Donnie’s behavior for the day. He and Donnie would discuss it before Donnie went home. If Donnie had failed to be cooperative and compliant that day, then he would earn a demerit. Each demerit he earned from Uncle Steve would result in a hard swat with the paddle from me. Since there were five days in the work week, Donnie could earn up to five swats from me. This was on top of whatever type of spanking I felt was necessary to shape his general submission and cooperation with me.
Having grabbed my next weapon of choice, I went and stood in front of Donnie again. He was still curled up in the fetal position on the bed trying to recover from the stinging pain in his nipples, his sack, his ass, and his thighs. When he saw me with the paddle, he began to beg.
“Please, Mistress Lacey, no more. I can’t take any more today,” he whined.
“I’m afraid that’s not true, Donnie. You have to take what is coming to you. You earned the swats you are going to receive with the paddle through your behavior at work last week, and so now it’s time to pay the piper. Now, how many demerits did Uncle Steve give you last week?” I asked.
I could tell Donnie wanted to refuse to answer. Then I could tell he was thinking about lying. However, he knew that his Uncle Steve and I texted each other daily, so if he lied, I would know. Finally deciding to accept his fate, Donnie whispered out to me, “Five. Five demerits. Five swats.”
“I’m glad you know how the demerits translate to swats. I am disappointed, though, Donnie, that you were such a bad boy at work last week. However, I’m happy to give you the punishment you deserve. Please stand up for me now and walk over to your desk,” I ordered.
Donnie delicately rolled off the bed, being careful to put as little pressure as possible on his sorest parts, some of which were about to get even sorer. He limped over to the desk with his ballsack obviously still sore and his ass smarting as well. Once Donnie got next to the desk, he put his hands over his crotch out of modesty, not that I hadn’t just seen everything he had to display.
Ignoring his hands over his genitals, I began a new line of inquiry with him. “Donnie, when you were still in school, was corporal punishment allowed?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, obviously wondering why I was asking.
“And were you ever in the principal’s office for a licking?” I pried further.
“Um, yes, ma’am. Twice when I was in high school. I probably should have been there more often, but I escaped with only two paddlings from the principal. There were some other incidents with teachers, though,” he fully confessed.
“So what was the routine in your principal’s office?” I requested.
“Well, we’d go in and sit down. He’d ask us why we thought we were sent there. We’d confess our sins, and then he’d issue a ruling on our punishment. If he decided we were getting a paddling, he’d call our parents to let them know even though they’d already signed a form giving their consent. My mom was the one who got the call both times, and both times she insisted on talking to me. She let me know that I could expect a hard belt licking from my dad that night, too, for acting out at school,” he reminisced.
“Hmmm…” I thought out loud, “Perhaps next week we’ll start with your paddling and then move on to a belt spanking afterward. That seems like it might jar some memories of how to behave from your subconscious.” Donnie did not look pleased with this idea of mine, but he knew that talking back to me when I was holding a big wooden paddle was a very bad idea.
“So tell me what happened next,” I prompted Donnie.
“After I hung up the phone, I would have to go stand at the back of the principal’s desk and lean over toward the front. The principal would get the secretary or a volunteer from the office to come in to witness the paddling. The rules said he had to paddle us in whatever we were wearing, and luckily both times I was wearing jeans though they didn’t offer much protection from his hard swing. Then, once he was ready, he would give us the paddling. He’d make us count off the strokes and thank him when he was done. Once we stopped crying, we were sent back to class,” Donnie finished.
“Well,” I said, “You’re not wearing anything right now, so it appears you’ll be getting your paddling exactly as you are, unfortunately for you. We’re also lucky enough to have not one but two willing witness for your paddling, though.”
Donnie’s jaw dropped as he realized that I was about to bring in his security guards to see him get a bare bottom paddling. His ass was already bright red, so he had to have known that the paddling was going to hurt a great deal, and he had to have known that he was going to scream loudly with each swat. The color began to drain from his face. I could tell he was debating protesting my verdict, but as I held up the paddle in both my hands for his viewing pleasure, I could see that urge back down within him. Donnie knew that the five swats he was about to get were going to be extremely painful, and he didn’t want to earn any more.
“Yes, ma’am,” Donnie squeaked out. And with that, he compliantly bent over the desk without me even asking him to do it. That was a very good sign. I walked over to the door and poked my head out.
“Ok, gentlemen, we’re ready for you to witness Donnie’s paddling,” I said with a smile. Both men smiled back and followed me into Donnie’s room. I motioned for them to stay at a distance of about five feet from the desk, far enough back that they could see Donnie’s face when he looked up but also close enough that they could see the details of the damage I was inflicting on his bottom.
I walked around to the back side of the desk and ran a hand over Donnie’s waiting bottom. It was still quite red and obviously sore. However, I wasn’t done with the job I had been hired to do. I lifted up my paddle with both hands, took aim, pulled back, and swung hard.
“ONE!” Donnie screamed as the impact of the paddle reverberated through his bottom. I gave him a few seconds to calm himself, and then I took aim again. Once again, Donnie screamed out “TWO” after the paddle hit is ass. I could tell he wanted to stand up and rub his bottom, but instead, he just rocked back and forth as his hands gripped the front of the desk with all his might. Once his rocking subsided, I gave the third stroke which Donnie counted off with a scream.
I paused to look up at the guards who were both still smiling at me. The joy on their faces was amazing. I was so glad I’d let them partake in this event. I decided it was time to get this over with, though. I let the paddle hit Donnie’s ass hard and rapidly twice in a row. Donnie screamed “FOUR” and “FIVE!” After the fifth swat, his body seemed to crumple on the desk. He let go of his firm grip, and his tears began to flow. I motioned to the guards that they should leave, and I began to rub Donnie’s back.
“I’m sorry I had to punish you so harshly, Donnie boy, but you earned this paddling and you know it. Next week, you might be able to avoid the entire paddling by cooperating with your Uncle Steve. If not, I’ll be paddling you again. And despite the rules in your principal’s office, I’m instituting a new rule here. You will always get the paddle on your bare bottom from me. Do I make myself clear, young man?” I asked.
Through his tears, Donnie replied, “Yes ma’am.” Then he asked very submissively, “May I get up, Mistress Lacey?”
“Yes, Donnie. Your punishment is over. You can get up and get dressed if you would like or you can get in bed and cry for a while. Whatever you would like to do is fine with me,” I responded. “However, I recommend that you spend some time reflecting on how you are going to avoid this happening next week when I come to visit you.”
“Yes, ma’am” was Donnie’s only response as he stood up and painfully walked over to his bed where he curled up in a ball on top of the covers. I put my paddle back in my bag, zipped it up, and headed out the bedroom door which I shut quietly behind me.
The guards both smiled at me as I said my goodbyes. Then, with a bit of hesitation, the junior guard asked me, “Um, ma’am? Do you have a business card? For a friend, of course,” he quickly added. I smiled and pulled one out of the side pocket of my bag.
“I look forward to hearing from your friend,” I answered, and then I headed down the long hall once again. | <urn:uuid:23f71e5c-cbc9-4675-9d87-639d61771f09> | CC-MAIN-2018-34 | https://woodleatherlace.com/2017/02/26/im-in-charge/ | 2018-08-14T21:13:39Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221209585.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20180814205439-20180814225439-00460.warc.gz | en | 0.989686 | 8,477 |
BahrainCountry Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2007Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and LaborMarch 11, 2008
Bahrain is a monarchy with a population of approximately 725,000, approximately 430,000 of whom are citizens, according to official figures. King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa is the head of state and all branches of government. The king appoints a cabinet of ministers, half of whom are members of the Al‑Khalifa royal family. The 2002 constitution reinstated a legislative body with one elected chamber, the Council of Deputies, and one appointed chamber, the Shura Council. All political societies participated in the November and December 2006 parliamentary and municipal elections. Trained local observers did not report significant problems during the elections, although there were allegations that the government manipulated general poll center vote counts in some cases and gerrymandered political districts. Civilian authorities generally maintained effective control of the security forces.
Citizens did not have the right to change their government. The government restricted civil liberties, including freedoms of press, speech, assembly, association, and some religious practices. Although citizens were not able to form political parties, the law authorized registered political societies to run candidates and participate in other political activities. The judiciary lacked independence, and corruption was a problem. Domestic violence against women and children was common, as was discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, sect, and ethnicity. Trafficking in persons and restrictions on the rights of expatriate workers remained problems. The Shi'a majority population was routinely discriminated against.
RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
Section 1 Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom From:
a. Arbitrary or Unlawful Deprivation of Life
There were no reports that the government or its agents committed politically motivated killings.
However, on December 17, a 31-year-old man, Ali Jasem, died after participating in a protest where Shi'a activists clashed with security forces. Although the official autopsy reported he died of “acute cardiovascular and respiratory collapse,” local human rights observers alleged his death was linked to inhaling tear gas used to disperse demonstrators.
There were no reports of politically motivated disappearances.
c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
The constitution prohibits such practices; however, there were reports during the year that security forces employed them.
According to a June 1 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, security forces severely beat Ali Saeed Al-Khabbaz and Hassan Yousif Hameed after arresting them on May 21 while breaking up a gathering near the house of political activist Hassan Mushaima. According to HRW, on May 29, Ministry of Interior (MOI) officials informed the two men's families that they were in a military hospital. The hospital declined to give the families any information about their injuries. On May 29, the Arabic daily Al-Wasat published photos of the men depicting swelling and bruising on their faces and heads. According to HRW, Hameed sustained a broken jaw. On June 7, both men were released following a meeting between the minister of the interior and Secretary General of Al-Wifaq Islamic Society Shaikh Ali Salman. There was no investigation into the alleged abuses.
Following protests that occurred on December 18 and 20, security forces arrested dozens of protestors and detained them in the Adliyeh detention center. According to HRW, some detainees were reportedly tortured and abused in prison by judicial interrogators that beat and electrocuted them. One detainee, Maytham Badr al-Shaykh, reported that interrogators sexually assuaulted and electrocuted him. Officials denied the allegations of abuse.
Human rights activists, including the dissolved Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), continued to demand government accountability for alleged acts of torture committed prior to 2001.
Prison and Detention Center Conditions
Prison and detention center conditions generally met international standards. Unlike in previous years, the government did not permit any visits by international human rights observers.
In August 2006 the quasi-governmental Supreme Council for Women (SCW) conducted a visit of the country's women's prison in Isa Town. There was no publicly released SCW report on the visit.
In 2005 a Bahrain Human Rights Society (BHRS) team made two visits to Jaw Prison, the country's men's prison. BHRS conducted interviews with staff and 56 inmates. There were reports from some inmates of mistreatment in the detention section where new inmates are first held before being assigned a permanent cell.
Although International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) officials visited the country during the year, they did not request prison visits. Bahrain Red Crescent Society officials reported that ICRC officials had not visited prisons since the release of all political prisoners in 2000.
d. Arbitrary Arrest or Detention
The constitution prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention, and the government generally observed these prohibitions.
Role of the Police and Security Apparatus
The MOI is responsible for public security. It controls the Public Security Force and the extensive security service, which are responsible for maintaining internal order. The Bahrain Defense Force is responsible for defending against external threats and also monitors internal security. The security forces were generally effective in maintaining internal order.
A widespread lack of transparency made corruption difficult to assess. The press reported that authorities jailed and/or fined law enforcement officials for misconduct, most often for accepting bribes.
During the year there were no known instances of police officers punished for committing human rights abuses. There is no mechanism in place for investigating security force abuses. In practice the MOI responded to allegations of abuse and public complaints by establishing ad hoc investigation committees. There is no evidence that these committees have ever issued public reports of their findings.
Arrest and Detention
In order to apprehend felony suspects, the police must convince the judge based on evidence to issue an arrest warrant. Police and security forces must transfer suspects to the public prosecutor's office immediately, and generally respect that requirement in practice. Within seven days of arrest, a detainee must appear before a judge in the public prosecutor's office. If the judge decides the suspect is a flight risk or a danger to society, a maximum additional 45 days detention is permitted while the investigation is carried out. This process may continue through subsequent reviews by different judges, but pretrial detention may not exceed six months. Judges may grant bail to a suspect and do so regularly.
The 2006 counterterrorism legislation allows the public prosecution to detain a terrorism suspect for a five-day period. Upon request, the public prosecutor may extend this period based on the needs of the investigation for up to an additional 10 days. At the end of this period, the detainee must be transferred to the public prosecution and questioned within three days. The public prosecutor must then decide to issue a detention order or to release the detainee. The detention order may not exceed 60 days.
Detainees were generally allowed prompt access to visiting family members. Detainee access to attorneys was often restricted in the early stages of detention; attorneys must seek a court order to confer with clients. The state provided counsel to indigent detainees. After conviction attorneys required the prison director's permission to visit a client in jail.
On May 18, the king ordered the public prosecution to drop all charges against Hassan Mushaima, head of the Haq Movement; Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, Director of the dissolved BCHR; and Shaker Abdulhussain, a Shi'a activist. Police arrested the men on February 2, and prosecutors charged them with inciting hatred, encouraging law-breaking, and publishing false news. The arrest sparked riots in several Shi'a villages.
On September 30, according to the BHRS, police arrested Khalid Nour and Hussain al-Ali for taking an illegal commission and held them for 48 hours before granting access to an attorney. At year's end, the authorities had not announced charges against either Nour or al-Ali, and they remained in detention.
On December 24, according to the Associated Press, Hafez Hafez, a lawyer for some of the detainees who were arrested by police following the December 20 clashes between Shi'a protestors and security forces, reported that the government refused to allow the detainees access to legal counsel or family members.
On February 25, a royal pardon released and dropped all charges against Mohamed al-Sahlawi and Hussein al-Habash. Authorities had charged them with promoting change of the system of the state through illegal means and possessing publications containing false information that "would cause disruption to public security and damage the public interest" in connection with plans to distribute leaflets calling for a boycott of the 2006 elections.
On August 1, the government initiated an amnesty for illegal workers. On December 31, the amnesty was extended until Jan 31, 2008. Under the terms of the amnesty, any expatriate living or working illegally in the country may legalize his or her status without penalty or return to his or her home country without paying fines.
e. Denial of Fair Public Trial
The constitution provides for an independent judiciary, but the government did not respect judicial independence in practice. Courts were subject to government pressure regarding verdicts, sentencing, and appeals. There were allegations of corruption in the judicial system. The constitution provides that the king appoint all judges by royal decree. The king also serves as chairman of the Supreme Judicial Council, the body responsible for supervising the work of the courts and the public prosecution.
The legal system is based on a mix of British civil law, common law, Shari'a (Islamic law), and traditional laws. The judiciary is organized into two separate branches: the civil law courts and the Shari'a courts.
The civil law courts, through their criminal and civil branches, adjudicate all civil and commercial cases, criminal cases, and personal status cases involving non-Muslims. The courts of minor cases (the lower courts and the Court of Execution) have one judge with jurisdiction over minor civil, commercial, and misdemeanor cases. The high civil courts have three judges with jurisdiction over larger civil and commercial cases, felonies, and personal status cases involving non-Muslims. The Civil High Court of Appeal has a panel of three judges and hears appeals. Both the civil and criminal court systems have a supreme court of appeal, and a court of cassation, the final appellate court.
The Shari'a courts have jurisdiction over personal status cases involving citizen and noncitizen Muslims. There are two levels: the Senior Shari'a Court and the High Shari'a Court of Appeal. At each level is a Sunni Maliki Shari'a court with jurisdiction over all personal status cases brought by Sunni Muslims and a Ja'afari Shari'a court with jurisdiction over cases brought by Shi'a Muslims. The High Shari'a Court of Appeal is composed of a minimum of two judges. In the event of a disagreement, the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) provides a third judge, and the decision is based on a majority vote. There are 11 judges in the Sunni Maliki Shari'a courts and 12 judges in the Shi'a Ja'afari Shari'a courts.
The Constitutional Court rules on the constitutionality of laws and statutes. The court's membership consists of a president and six members, all appointed by the king. These seven judges serve nine‑year terms and cannot be removed before their terms expire. The court's determination is final and binding, according to the constitution.
The Bahrain Defense Force maintains a separate court system that only tries military personnel accused of offenses under the Military Code of Justice. The MOI has a similar system for trying police officials. There were no reports of either court considering cases involving civilian, common criminal, or security cases during the year.
According to the constitution, defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Civil and criminal trial procedures provided for an open trial. Juries are not used. By law, defendants have the right to prompt consultation with an attorney of their choice. The state provided counsel to defendants who could not afford to hire an attorney. Defendants are present during trial proceedings, and they have the right to present witnesses and evidence on their behalf and question witnesses against them. No law governs defendants' access to government-held evidence, and the government often reviewed evidence prior to defendants' access to it. Women's legal rights vary according to Shi'a or Sunni interpretations of Islamic law.
Political Prisoners and Detainees
There were no reports of political prisoners or detainees.
Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies
Citizens may bring civil suits before the court seeking cessation of or damages for human rights violations; however, there was impunity for alleged torturers that the government maintained was granted by the 2001 general amnesty.
f. Arbitrary Interference with Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence
The constitution provides for personal freedom and freedom from arbitrary interference with privacy, home, and correspondence except under the provisions of the law and under judicial supervision; however, the government continued to infringe on citizens' right to privacy. Telephone calls, e-mail, and personal correspondence remained subject to monitoring. Police informer networks were extensive and sophisticated.
Section 2 Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:
a. Freedom of Speech and Press
The constitution provides for restricted freedom of speech and of the press, but the government limited the exercise of these rights in practice. Both censorship and self-censorship took place.
The 2006 association law forbids any speech or discussion infringing on public order or morals. In private settings, individuals openly expressed critical opinions regarding domestic political and social issues. There was considerable freedom of expression on the Internet, in letters to the editor, and occasionally on state‑run television call‑in shows.
The government enforced at its discretion the 2002 suspended press law, which provides for restricted freedom of speech and press. The law provides for prison sentences of at least six months for criticizing Islam or the king or inciting actions that undermine state security. The law allows fines up to $5,300 (2,000 dinars) for 14 other offenses, including publicizing statements issued by a foreign state or organization before obtaining the consent of the minister of information; publishing any news reports that may adversely affect the value of the national currency; reporting any offense against the head of a state that maintains diplomatic relations with the country; or publishing offensive remarks towards an accredited representative of a foreign country because of acts connected with the person's position.
There was no government-owned print media, but the Ministry of Information exercised considerable control over local privately-owned print media. The government generally did not restrict press coverage of international issues and local issues focusing on opposition politics and economic and commercial issues. However, government censorship took place. Representatives from the Ministry of Information actively monitored and blocked local stories on sensitive matters, especially those related to sectarianism, national security, or criticism of the royal family, the Saudi royal family, and judges.
Journalists also practiced widespread self-censorship. According to some members of the press, government officials contacted editors directly and asked them to stop writing about certain subjects or asked them to not publish a press release or a story. In the runup to the November 2006 parliamentary elections, there were reports that the government paid journalists to represent it favorably. In addition, the Press and Publications Directorate at the Ministry of Information was responsible for reviewing all books and publications that were ready to go to print and issuing printing licenses allowing the authors of these books to publish them.
In October Ghada Jamsheer, a women's rights activist and president of the Bahrain Women's Petition, reported that government officials effectively banned her from appearing in the media, due to her calls for the dissolution of the Supreme Council of Women in April. Media officials and editors-in-chief claim there is no ban on her in the media.
On March 18, the chairman of the Bahrain Journalists' Association and editor-in-chief of Al-Ayam newspaper, Isa al-Shaiji, filed a complaint at the public prosecutor's office against Member of Parliament (MP) Mohammed Khalid, alleging that Khalid insulted him and his family during a debate in the Council of Deputies on February 20. In May the Legislative Committee refused to withdraw Khalid's parliamentary immunity, effectively preventing the case from proceeding.
On April 19, authorities convicted in absentia Dr. Salah al-Bandar and sentenced him to four years in prison and a $265 (100 dinars) fine. In September 2006 authorities deported al-Bandar and accused him of seizing official government documents and stealing private checks, after he distributed a report claiming a group of high-level government officials attempted to manipulate the 2006 election process. At the time, al-Bandar, a British citizen, was an advisor to the president of the Central Informatics Organization, which originally had responsibility for conducting elections. In October 2006 the High Criminal Court issued an injunction against the publishing of any news, commentary, or other information related to the report or the legal case against al-Bandar, including on the Internet. The gag order remained in effect at year's end.
On August 29, a prosecutor summoned Isa al-Shaiji for questioning regarding a May 10 complaint filed by Egyptian Islamic Brotherhood preacher Wagdy Ghunaim, who alleged that al-Shaiji published articles critical of Ghunaim's views. The prosecutor released al-Shaiji on bond the same day. On November 14, the government withdrew Ghunaim's residency permit. Ghunaim then hired a proxy to continue pursuit of the case in his absence. At year's end, the case was still pending.
The government owned and operated all local radio and television stations and maintained control over the selection of the locally-based Al—Jazeera correspondent. Some public demonstrations were not covered on government-owned television.
Radio and television broadcasts in Arabic and Farsi from countries in the region, including by satellite, were received without interference. Satellite television systems provided unimpeded access to international broadcasts.
The government restricted use of the Internet. The government is a major shareholder in the Bahrain Telecommunications Company (Batelco), the country's principal telecommunications company. Batelco prohibited user access to Internet sites considered to be antigovernment or anti‑Islamic. E-mail use was reportedly monitored. The government has invoked the press code to justify the questioning of some journalists and bloggers.
The government attempted to block local access to numerous Web sites, including local Web logs and chat sites; human rights Web sites; sites containing information about Arab Christians; and the Wa'ad political society's Web site. Public discussion of blocked Web sites is widespread. Most residents have access to the Internet in the home, workplace, or Internet cafés. The number of Internet users increased by 32.7 per cent in 2006, and at year's end, there were approximately 61,000 Internet subscribers. Most low-wage laborers use Internet cafés. Many users were able to access blocked sites through alternate servers. The government regularly monitored Web sites and blogs maintained by local activists.
In late 2006 the government blocked some Web logs until their authors removed any references to the case of Dr. Salah al-Bandar.
After the November and December 2006 elections, a number of local bloggers were blocked on the Internet for commenting upon election irregularities.
Under the law, Web site administrators face the same libel laws that apply to print journalists, and Web masters are held jointly responsible for all of the content posted on their Web sites or chat rooms.
Academic Freedom and Cultural Events
The constitution provides for academic freedom, although the government limited this freedom in practice. Academics avoided contentious political issues. There was a disproportionately high number of Sunni professors in universities. The university's hiring and admissions policies favored Sunnis and others who were assumed to support the government. The proportion of Shi'a students was estimated to be close to the approximately 70 percent of Shi'a in the general population, although there are proportionately fewer Shi'a professors.
On November 26, press reports indicated that the government began granting licenses for publication of several books pertaining to Islamic history, modern Bahraini history, and democracy for which licenses were previously denied.
b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association
Freedom of Assembly
The constitution provides for the right of free assembly, but the law restricts the exercise of this right.
The July 2006 amendments to the association law codified restrictions on where and when public gatherings or demonstrations can be held. According to the law, organizers must submit requests for public gatherings or demonstrations to the MOI with at least 72 hours' advance notice. The request must be signed by three law-abiding citizens from the area in which the gathering is to take place. If there is no response to the request, the gathering may proceed. According to the law, the head of public security is required to notify the organizers of any public gathering about any changes to the request (such as location, time, or route) at least 48 hours prior to the event. Organizers of an unauthorized gathering may be held responsible for any damage to public or private property, in addition to prison sentences ranging from three to six months.
The law prohibits any public gatherings or demonstrations near hospitals, airports, commercial centers, or facilities designated to be security-related by the MOI. Public gatherings and demonstrations are not permitted after 11:00 p.m. or before 7:00 a.m. without written permission from the head of public security or his deputy. The law states that funeral processions may not be turned into political rallies and security officials may be present at any public gathering.
Government security forces intervened in some demonstrations during the year.
On May 19, police used tear gas and rubber bullets to break up a seminar in support of political activists Hassan Mushaima and Abdulhadi al-Khawaja. A number of MPs and Sunni and Shi'a clerics were in attendance. Chairman of the Wa'ad Society Ebrahim Sharif reportedly suffered minor injuries.
On May 21, police broke up a gathering near the house of political activist Hassan Mushaima and arrested Ali Saeed al-Khabbaz and Hassan Yousif Hameed. According to a June 1 HRW report, police beat Al-Khabbaz and Hameed while in custody. On June 7, both men were released.
On December 17, security forces used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse Shi'a activists protesting alleged abuses by security forces during the 1980s and 1990s. Demonstrators threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at the security forces. Ali Jassem, 31-year-old Shi'a activist, died directly after the protests. While the official autopsy reported that the man died of “acute cardiovascular and respiratory collapse,” local human rights observers alleged that he died as a result of inhaling the tear gas police used to disperse demonstrators.
On December 18 and 20, street clashes between Shi'a protestors and security forces also occurred. On December 20, according to press reports, approximately 500 protestors rallied over the December 17 death of Ali Jassem. The police reported that some attacked and severely beat a policeman and stole his service weapon. Protestors set a police vehicle on fire. Security forces responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. According to Reuters, during and following the clashes security forces arrested dozens of protestors, including opposition political activists. At year's end, fifteen individuals faced charges of arson, attempted murder of a police officer, and theft of a weapon.
The MOI reportedly told the owners of some venues to close their premises to prevent meetings from occurring, primarily at mosques and "ma'tams," or Shi'a community centers. The number of times this happened was unknown.
The government limited and controlled political gatherings. The law regulates election campaigns and prohibits "election meetings" at worship centers, universities, schools, government buildings, and public institutions. July 2006 amendments to this law lowered the voting age to 20 years of age and provided for a 10 year loss of the right to vote or stand as a candidate for any person sentenced to more than six months in prison for any crime. The electoral restriction was not enforced in the November and December 2006 elections, as the names of citizens sentenced for more than six months appeared on the voter registration lists.
Freedom of Association
The constitution provides for the right of freedom of association; however, the government limited this right in practice. Although the government does not allow the formation of political parties, it authorized registered political societies to run candidates and participate in other political activities.
Organized groups in the country are either civil society groups registered by the Ministry of Social Development, political societies registered by the MOJ, or labor unions registered with the Ministry of Labor (MOL). Each of these is subject to registration requirements. Based on the proposed by-laws a new group submits, the government decides whether its proposed activities are social or political in nature. The law prohibits any activity by an unlicensed society and any political activity by a licensed civil society. The law provides the Ministry of Social Development the right to reject the registration of any society if its services are deemed unnecessary, are already provided by another society, are contrary to state security, or are aimed at reviving a previously dissolved society.
The law requires all political societies to have bylaws signed by the founders in order to register or maintain registration. The society's principles, goals, and programs must not run counter to either the principles of Shari'a law or the national interest as interpreted by the judiciary. The law requires that societies must not be based on sectarian, geographic, or class identity and have no military or paramilitary wing. When submitting an application for registration, the political society must submit three copies of the bylaws signed by all members, a list of all members and copies of their residency cards, a financial statement identifying the society's sources of funding and bank information, and the name of who will act as the society's proxy. Upon receipt of an application, the MOJ has 45 days to request in writing any necessary clarifications and/or statements and a total of 60 days to approve or deny a political society's registration request. Approvals must be published in the official gazette; denials must be accompanied by written statements that detail reasons for the denial.
The law requires that any civil society organization submit two copies of the bylaw of the association signed by all founding members; two copies of the minutes of meetings of the founding committee stating names of founding members, their professions, their place of residence, and containing their signatures; and a registration fee. The law also requires that all members be 18 years of age or older. The applications are required to be examined by the Ministry of Social Development within 30 days. If after 60 days the ministry has not announced the registration of a society, the application is considered rejected. The society may file a complaint, which the ministry has 60 days to review. If after 30 days the ministry has not responded, the association may refer the application to the High Civil Court, which may annul the decision or refuse the complaint.
The Ministry of Social Development has not allowed the National Committee for the Unemployed to register as a civil society group because of the political nature of its activities.
The Bahrain Youth Human Rights Society (BYHRS) also remained unsuccessful in legally registering as a civil society organization. The society first applied for registration in 2005. According to supporters of the group, authorities told them that the society failed to meet one of the requirements of the 1989 associations act because some of its members were under 18 years of age. Members of the society also speculate that government officials are enforcing the 1989 law to the letter because of ties between BYHRS and the now-dissolved BCHR.
On November 27, the president of the BYHRS, Mohammed Al-Moskati, appeared before a lower criminal court judge to answer charges of "operating an unregistered association" under the terms of the 1989 associations act. Al-Moskati asserted that the act was inconsistent with Bahrain's international commitments as a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The judge adjourned the trial until January 2008, and Al-Moskati was not taken into custody. The BYHRS remained active at year's end.
c. Freedom of Religion
The Constitution states that Islam is the official religion and that Shari'a (Islamic law) is a principal source for legislation. The constitution provides for freedom of conscience, the inviolability of worship, and the freedom to perform religious rites and hold religious parades and meetings, in accordance with the customs observed in the country; however, the government placed some limitations on the exercise of this right. Members of other religious groups who practice their faith privately do so without interference from the government.
All other religious groups must obtain a permit from the Ministry of Justice and Islamic Affairs (MOJIA) to operate and hold religious meetings. Depending on a group's activities, it may also need approvals from the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry of Information, and/or the Ministry of Education.
The government continued to exert a level of control and to monitor both Sunni and Shi'a Muslims, and there continued to be government discrimination against Shi'a Muslims in certain fields. Historically there is evidence of discrimination against Shi'a Muslims in recruitment for the country's military and domestic security services. During the year the Ministry of Defense did not recruit Shi'a for military service. During the year the MOI made increasing efforts to recruit additional Shi'a into nonmilitary security agencies.
The Muslim population is approximately 70 percent Shi'a and 30 percent Sunni. Non-Muslims account for approximately 1 percent of the population. There are numerous Christian churches of different denominations, four Sikh temples, and several official and unofficial Hindu temples located in Manama and its suburbs. The only Jewish synagogue has been voluntarily closed since 1948.
The government funds, monitors, and closely controls all official religious institutions, including Shi'a and Sunni mosques, Shi'a ma'tams (religious community centers), Shi'a and Sunni waqfs (religious endowments), and the religious courts.
During the year there were reports of clashes between the government and elements of the Shi'a majority population, who were often critical of the Sunni-dominated government. Problems continued to exist during the year, stemming primarily from the government's perceived unequal treatment of Shi'a in the country. Many of these incidents involved Shi'a protestors burning tires or throwing Molotov cocktails at security forces. There were reports that the security forces used rubber bullets and tear gas to break up some of these demonstrations, which Shi'a protestors and other local human rights observers alleged lead to the death of a 31-year-old man after a December 17 protest.
The government may appropriate or withhold funding to reward or punish particular individuals or places of worship, although reports of this were not common. There were no reported closures of mosques or ma'tams during the year; however, in newer towns such as Hamad Town and Isa Town, which often have mixed Sunni and Shi'a populations, there tended to be a higher number of Sunni mosques. The Ministry of Islamic Affairs has not approved applications for the Shi'a community to establish ma'tams in Hamad Town. As an alternative, individuals in the Shi'a community have converted parts of their homes into ma'tams.
Sunni and Shi'a waqfs made funding decisions for new mosque construction. Although both Sunni and Shi'a waqfs were reportedly well-endowed and able to fund mosque construction, new mosques were dependent upon government approval of land allocation. The government's approval of land allocation for mosques was not transparent and reportedly not proportionate to the Shi'a community's relative population in the country.
There were reports that at year's end the government had not made a decision on a 2005 request by one Christian church to form a second parish and obtain a resident visa for the proposed permanent priest.
The government rarely interfered with what it considered to be legitimate religious observances. During the year the government permitted public religious events, most notably the large annual Shi'a holiday of Ashura, but police closely monitored and limited these gatherings. The MOI's policy of providing full media coverage of Ashura events continued this year. There were no restrictions on the number of citizens permitted to make pilgrimages to Shi'a shrines and to holy sites in Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The government monitored travel to Iran and scrutinized carefully those who chose to pursue religious study there.
Christian congregations and churches were registered with the government and operated freely. The majority of those who attended Christian churches were expatriates. Events at churches occurred frequently and were advertised regularly in the English press, including the hosting of guest speakers from many countries.
The law forbids election speeches in worship centers, but sermons often touched upon political themes. Proselytizing by non‑Muslims is illegal and the government prohibited anti‑Islamic writings; however, Bibles and other Christian publications are displayed and sold openly in local bookstores that also sold Islamic and other religious literature. Churches also sold Christian materials, including books, music, and messages from Christian leaders, openly and without restriction. Religious tracts of all branches of Islam, cassettes of sermons delivered by Muslim preachers from other countries, and publications of other religions were readily available. Christian pastors were permitted to provide literature to Christian inmates and to prison libraries.
The MOJIA has repeatedly denied a Baha'i congregation a license to function, although the group has not sought official recognition in many years. The Baha'i community continued to gather and worship freely without government interference. While the MOJIA views Baha'ism as blasphemous and an inauthentic offshoot of Islam, some other government ministries included Baha'i as a religion choice in "drop-down" computer menus for citizens applying for certain government documents.
Societal Abuses and Discrimination
Discrimination against the majority Shi'a population remained a problem. Sunnis received preference for employment in sensitive government positions and in the managerial ranks of the civil service. The royal family is Sunni, and the defense and internal security forces were predominantly Sunni. Although Shi'a citizens held posts in these forces, with few exceptions, positions were not high-ranking. In the private sector, Shi'a tended to be employed in lower paid, less skilled jobs. Educational, social, and municipal services in most Shi'a neighborhoods were inferior to those found in Sunni communities.
In private conversations and in Internet forums, Shi'a consistently complained of discrimination, especially in public sector jobs, positions at the university, and security-related positions. Although the percentage of Shi'a students was close to the approximately 70 percent of Shi'a population in the country, only about 40 percent of university faculty was Shi'a. Shi'a composed a high percentage of the country's unemployed.
The Jewish community had approximately 36 members. Travel to Israel is officially prohibited for all Bahraini citizens, although some are able to travel there. One Jewish citizen served in the Shura Council. Some anti-Semitic political commentary and editorial cartoons appeared, usually linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These articles and depictions occurred without government response. Although the one synagogue is not open due to the small size of the Jewish community in the country, Jews practiced their faith privately without interference from the government.
The government has not enacted specific laws to combat discrimination.
For a more detailed discussion, see the 2007 International Religious Freedom Report.
d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons
The constitution provides for freedom of movement, except as modified by law and judicial decisions. Citizens were free to move within the country and change their place of residence or work.
The law provides that the government may reject applications to obtain or renew passports for reasonable cause, but the applicant has the right to appeal such decisions before the High Civil Court. There is no definition in the statute of the phrase "reasonable cause." In practice authorities rely on determinations of national security when adjudicating passport applications.
The constitution permits the government to revoke citizenship only in the cases of treason and other such cases "according to the law." The government has not revoked the citizenship of any person under the 2002 constitution.
Opposition groups claimed that the naturalization process was politically driven to manipulate demographics for voting purposes and to keep Shi'a out of the police and defense forces, which are allegedly dominated by naturalized Sunnis. Although naturalization requirements are clearly defined in law, adjudication of naturalization applications was neither transparent nor impartial. The government reportedly was more lenient with naturalization requests from expatriates in the security forces. Shi'a and non-Arab applicants reportedly experienced longer delays in the processing of their cases. The government occasionally granted citizenship to Sunni residents from neighboring countries. The government stated that some of the Saudis who had received citizenship were the grandchildren of Bahraini citizens who had immigrated to Saudi Arabia. According to the country's nationality law, these persons have a legal right to citizenship. No official statistics regarding naturalization cases were available.
The constitution prohibits forced exile, and there were no reports of forced exile or return from exile during the year.
There is no official requirement for women and children to have their husband's/father's permission to travel abroad, and there were no reports of women or children facing restrictions on travel.
Protection of Refugees
The law does not provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status to persons who meet the definition in the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 protocol, and the government has not established a system for providing protection or status to refugees. In practice the government provided protection against refoulement, the return of persons to a country where there is reason to believe that they feared persecution. The government cooperated with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and other humanitarian organizations in assisting refugees and asylum seekers.
Section 3 Respect for Political Rights: The Right of Citizens to Change Their Government
Citizens do not have the right to change their government or their political system; however, the constitution provides for a democratically elected Council of Deputies, the lower house of parliament. The king appoints the prime minister, who then proposes cabinet ministers who are appointed by the king. Members of the royal family held all strategic cabinet ministry positions and approximately half of all ministerial slots.
The bicameral National Assembly consists of the 40-member popularly elected Council of Deputies and the 40-member appointed Shura (Consultative) Council. The Office of Legal Affairs drafts the text of laws, not the Council of Deputies or the Shura Council. This office had been part of the prime minister's cabinet until July 2006, when it was made a quasi-independent body linked to the MOJIA. The king may veto laws passed by the National Assembly, which in turn may override a veto by a two‑thirds majority vote. If the legislature overrides a veto, the king must promulgate the law within one month. No veto has been exercised, and no law has been enacted that was proposed by a member of the legislature since the constitution was adopted.
The king may dissolve the Council of Deputies at his discretion, and he retains the power to amend the constitution and to propose, ratify, and promulgate laws. Either council may question government ministers, and the Council of Deputies may pass a two‑thirds majority vote of no confidence requiring a minister's resignation. The Council of Deputies may also introduce a resolution indicating it cannot cooperate with the prime minister. Both the elected and the appointed chambers of the National Assembly would then have the option to pass the resolution by a two‑thirds majority that would require the king to either dismiss the prime minister or dissolve the Council of Deputies. The situation of a no-confidence vote has never arisen.
Elections and Political Participation
Bahrain held parliamentary and municipal council elections in two rounds in November and December 2006. Voter participation in the first round was 73 percent of all registered voters. In second round runoff races, 69 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. Although a small group of eligible voters boycotted the elections, all political societies, including the four that boycotted the 2002 elections, participated in the elections.
Although no international observers participated, the government permitted nine local civil society groups, including the BHRWS and the Bahrain Society for Public Freedoms, access to poll stations to observe voting. Bahrain Transparency Society and the BHRS joined efforts to form the Election Monitoring Joint Committee (EMJC) and trained over 200 local observers. The government asked a foreign political party training and election observation organization to leave the country during the campaign process and elections.
In its final report issued on February 10, EMJC reported that there were no reports of widespread attempts to influence the outcome of the elections. Official polling station observers did not report significant problems during the voting process, although there were allegations that general poll center vote counts were manipulated in some cases against opposition candidates in close races.
In the first round of elections, officials in the 40 district polling stations announced results to observers and candidate representatives immediately following ballot counting. However, votes from the 10 general polling stations were taken to central facilities and folded in with those of other general stations before vote counts were made public. After the first round, EMJC presented this lapse in transparency to the High Commission for Elections. Election administrators corrected this problem in the runoff elections and announced all vote counts prior to moving ballot boxes.
EMJC reported other violations, the most serious being that candidates did not cease campaign activities 24 hours prior to the polls as required by law. Campaign volunteers continued to pass out fliers and lobby voters in the vicinity of polling stations on election day. In addition observers reported many campaign posters and billboards moved closer to polling stations than allowed by law just prior to the election. Most other violations were minor and procedural.
The government drew the unified electoral districts for both the municipal council and the legislative elections to protect Sunni interests by creating several districts with small populations likely to elect a Sunni candidate. In contrast districts where a Shi'a candidate was likely to win were drawn to include large numbers of voters, a formula that diluted the voting strength of the Shi'a community. According to voter lists for the elections, divergence in the electoral population per district is significant—the number of eligible voters per elected representative can vary by as much as a factor of 13.
The election law prohibited speeches at most public locations and limited the areas where campaign material could be placed.
The government did not allow the formation of political parties, but 15 political societies, which received some government funding and operated somewhat like political parties, chose candidates for parliamentary and municipal elections, campaigned for political office, developed political platforms, held internal elections, and hosted political gatherings.
The 2005 Political Societies Law provides political societies legal authority to exist and defines guidelines within which they can operate. Political societies were highly critical of provisions in the law requiring them to notify the MOJIA before contacting political groups abroad. The law also prohibits foreign funding or training, raised the minimum membership age from 18 to 21; and gives the MOJIA the authority to reject an application for registration. Since the government began recognizing political societies in 2002, it has not refused or deferred an application.
Although the law prohibits civil society groups from engaging in political matters, the government permitted such activity at its discretion.
Women have the right to vote and run for public office. On April 24, the government appointed the first female member, Dr. Dhuha al-Zayani, to the Constitutional Court. In the legislative elections 18 women ran, and five ran in the municipal elections. One woman, Latifa al-Qa'oud, was unopposed in her district and became the first female MP. None of the other women candidates were elected. The government did not release percentages of voting by gender.
While Shi'a amounted to approximately 70 percent of resident citizens, and both Shi'a and Sunni citizens have equal rights before the law, Sunnis dominated political life.
In December 2006 the king appointed one Christian and one Jewish member to the new Shura Council. Eighteen Shura Council members were Shi'a Muslims and 17 were Sunni. Six of the 23 cabinet ministers were Shi'a, including a deputy prime minister.
Government Corruption and Transparency
According to the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators, government corruption was a problem. The Penal Code provides specific penalties for various forms of official corruption. Significant areas of government activity continued to lack transparency. However, new legislation increased transparency in central bank transactions and activities and increased disclosure responsibilities for the 39 companies listed on the local stock exchange. The annual National Audit Bureau report released on August 26 analyzed the accounts of state-owned entities and was made available to the public. The Council of Deputies called ministers to appear at public sessions to respond to questions from MPs.
On June 27, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce filed a complaint with the public prosecution accusing nine employees of embezzlement. A few days later authorities arrested the individuals. The case remained pending at year's end.
There was no law providing citizens with access to information held by the government. There was no law requiring financial disclosure on the part of government officials.
Section 4 Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights
Restrictions on freedom of association and expression hindered investigation or public criticism of the government's human rights policies. There were approximately 400 NGOs registered in the country, most of which were sports clubs and charitable organizations. NGOs must report to the Ministry of Social Development when their members participate in international NGO events. There were three major human rights NGOs that reported on issues of concern: Bahrain Human Rights Society (BHRS), Bahrain Human Rights Watch Society (BHRWS), and former members of the dissolved Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR). BHRS was independent from the government. BHRWS considered itself independent, although members of its leadership were also members of the royally appointed Shura Council.
In recent years the government has allowed increased interaction between local civil society groups and international human rights organizations. During the year citizen members of Amnesty International (AI), who have not registered as an NGO with the Ministry of Social Development, carried out several activities without interference by the government. AI members coordinated with the Bahrain Society for Public Freedoms to observe the elections and monitor media coverage during the 2006 election campaign.
On June 26, the High Court issued an order enjoining the National Democratic Gathering Society from holding meetings or conducting any other activities for three months. The order resulted from an internal conflict over the administration of the society involving the former secretary general, Abdullah Hashim, and the newly-elected secretary general, Fadhel Abbas. On August 27, the MOJIA approved the results of the society's general assembly meeting held on July 24, in which Fadhel Abbas was elected as the new secretary general. The society resumed its operations at that time.
In 2004 the Ministry of Social Development dissolved the BCHR, an umbrella human rights organization that had been active since 2002. Beginning in 2003 government ministries warned the center against conducting activities that were outside its bylaws such as criticizing the government or specific government officials. The government locked the center's rented office space and froze its bank accounts. The BCHR challenged its closure in court but lost the case and its subsequent appeals. Individual members continued to conduct activities and write reports about issues of concern in the name of the center.
The BHRWS, established in December 2004 and led by a member of the Shura Council, conducted a number of human rights activities.
Although foreign NGOs were prohibited from registering with the government, the government generally did not interfere with their activities, so long as these activities were not perceived as interference in the political system. In previous years, the government has provided written warning to foreign NGOs it believed to be interfering with internal political matters. In at least one previous case, the government declined to renew the residence permit of an NGO chief who had become the focus of controversy, with the result that the NGO's local operation had to close down.
On October 30, a foreign organization previously asked by immigration authorities in 2006 to leave the country returned to conduct activities. On July 12, the organization signed a memorandum of understanding with the Bahrain Institute of Political Development (BIPD), in which the two organizations agreed to work together.
Section 5 Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons
The constitution provides for equality; equal opportunity; and the right to medical care, welfare, education, property, capital, and work for all citizens. However, these rights were protected unevenly, depending on the individual's social status, sect, or gender.
No government policies or laws explicitly addressed violence against women. Spousal abuse of women was widespread, particularly in poorer communities. Since 2005 the Batelco Care Center for Family Violence has offered free medical, psychological, legal, and social assistance to victims of violence, primarily women and children. The center runs a hotline that abused persons can call for assistance. The center recorded 669 cases involving domestic abuse during the year: 407 from women, 178 from children, and the remainder from men.
Violence against women, especially by family members and spouses, is believed to be pervasive. Women rarely sought legal redress for violence, and there was little public attention towards or discussion of the problem. Incidents usually were not brought to the attention of authorities. Rape is illegal, and the press reported cases of men arrested for the crime. The law does not address spousal rape. There was no information on the number of rape and sexual assault cases brought to the public prosecutor or any resulting convictions.
Reports of foreign women working in domestic positions being beaten or sexually abused by their employers and recruiting agents were common. Numerous cases were reported to local embassies, the press, and the police; however, most victims were too intimidated to sue their employers, although they had the right to do so. Courts reportedly allowed victims who registered complaints to sue for damages or return home. If the victim brings a suit against the employer, the plaintiff cannot leave the country for the duration of the case. Since its inception in 2002, the Migrant Worker Protection Society (MWPS) has supported several victims who have taken their cases to court, but compensation to victims was reportedly very low. During the year MWPS withdrew its court cases, including three rape cases, citing a complete lack of success in the courts.
There is no specific law that prohibits female genital mutilation (FGM). According to the Batelco Care Center for Family Violence Cases, there have never been any cases of FGM.
Prostitution is illegal; however, the press reported arrests of prostitutes and their managers. During the year cases of prostitution were referred to the public prosecution for investigation. Sentences for individuals who "encouraged the practice of prostitution" varied between 10 days and two years in prison. Sentences for those who "managed an establishment for the practice of prostitution" ranged from prison sentences of three months to three years.
Sexual harassment is prohibited but was a widespread problem for women, especially foreigners working as domestics and in other low‑level service jobs. The press reported a number of cases of men arrested for sexually harassing women.
Women's legal rights vary according to Shi'a or Sunni interpretations of Islamic law. Shi'a and Sunni women have the right to initiate a divorce; however, religious courts may refuse the request. Women of either sect may own and inherit property and represent themselves in all public and legal matters. In the absence of a direct male heir, Shi'a women may inherit all property. Sunni women without a direct male heir inherit only a portion as governed by Shari'a; the balance is divided among the brothers or male relatives of the deceased. In practice, better‑educated families used wills and other legal maneuvers to ameliorate the negative effects of these rules.
In divorce cases, the courts routinely grant mothers custody of daughters under age nine and sons under age seven. Custody usually reverts to the father once the children reach those ages. Regardless of custody decisions, the father retains guardianship, or the right to make all legal decisions for the child, until the child reaches the legal age of 21. A noncitizen woman automatically loses custody of her children if she divorces their citizen father. A Muslim woman legally can marry a non‑Muslim man if the man converts to Islam.
By law foreign women who marry citizens are eligible for citizenship after five years of marriage. Foreign men who marry citizens, however, are not entitled to citizenship, and neither are their children. During the year the Bahrain Women's Society (BWS) registered more than 800 families where children (infant to age 21) were born to citizen mothers but do not have citizenship. In September 2006 King Hamad issued a royal decree granting citizenship to at least 372 children of citizen mothers and noncitizen fathers. However, this action did not change the legislation, so any children born in the future under such circumstances would face citizenship difficulties.
Labor laws prohibit discrimination against women; however, discrimination against women is systemic in the country, especially in the workplace. The influence of religious traditionalists sometimes hampered women's rights. According to the Central Bank, women constituted 13 percent of the private sector workforce and 42 percent of the government workforce. The government was a leading employer of women. A 2005 law granted women working in the public sector 42 days maternity leave, not including weekends. Women in the private sector are entitled to 45 days maternity leave, including weekends.
The government generally honored its commitment to children's welfare through enforcement of related civil and criminal laws and an extensive social welfare network. However, children born to citizen mothers and noncitizen fathers are not entitled to citizenship and are not eligible for certain social services.
According to the 2005 Education Act, education is free and compulsory for all children, including noncitizens, ages six to 15. In recent years, authorities did not enforce compulsory education rules. However, the act imposed fines on parents whose children failed to attend school and outlined other measures to encourage school attendance.
The state provided limited medical services for infant and preadolescent citizens. Noncitizen adults and children paid a fee for each visit for care at public health centers. Boys and girls enjoyed equal access to medical care.
According to the BWS, child abuse was common. There has been an increase in public discussion and in press reporting that covers child abuse. The BWS "Be Free" Campaign, which has posted a Web site for victims of child abuse since 2002, reported that during the year it received on average between 300 and 400 emails per month mostly from youth and adults, from inside and outside the country, reporting to have been victims of child abuse. Many calls have originated from older adults, reporting abuse they endured as children.
Child prostitution is illegal and there were no reported cases during the year.
Trafficking in Persons
The law does not specifically prohibit trafficking in persons. Workers from Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Horn of Africa, and the former Soviet Union reported conditions that amounted to trafficking, such as withholding of passports, restrictions on movement, and physical or psychological intimidation to work. Some victims reported being forced into commercial sexual exploitation; however, the most common forms of trafficking in persons involved unskilled construction laborers and domestic workers. There were approximately 70,000 foreign housemaids working in the country, and labor laws did not fully cover domestic workers. According to government statistics, foreigners make up 59 percent of the workforce.
Up to half of low and unskilled expatriate workers were subjected to illegal contract substitution, whereby workers agreed to a contract in their home country but were required to agree to and sign a different contract upon arrival, nearly always for less pay and often for different work. Victims of trafficking experienced nonpayment of salaries; inadequate meals; physical, sexual, and psychological abuse; absence of rest days; and/or extremely long working hours.
The primary traffickers were employment agencies operating in the source countries. These agencies approached workers in their home countries and offered visas at prices in the range of $3,975 (1,500 dinars), payable after arrival. Upon arrival at the airport, the workers' passports were taken from them, ostensibly to facilitate customs; however, the passports frequently were not returned. Frequently, traffickers, including some from influential families, tricked new workers into paying for fraudulent visas and nonexistent jobs, leaving stranded workers vulnerable to trafficking due to their illegal immigration status in the country and high debt in their home country.
The MOL nearly doubled its number of labor inspectors to approximately 65 to investigate reports of visa abuse.
Prostitution is illegal, but during the year there was evidence that a number of foreign women, particularly Thai women, were forced into commercial sexual exploitation through deception or intimidation. Although many Thai women traveled to the country voluntarily, traffickers reportedly used false job offers and physical force to traffic some of them into commercial sexual exploitation.
In cases of forced prostitution, the government reportedly prosecuted the victim and often the victim's sponsor or employer but did not provide any specific information on cases of forced prostitution it pursued during the year.
The fear of deportation or employer retaliation prevented many foreign workers from making complaints to the authorities. Many foreign workers were unaware of their rights under the law, such as the right to change employers without the consent of the original employer after working two years in a position.
The government can fine employers guilty of forced labor up to $2,650 (1,000 dinars) and/or sentence them for prison terms not to exceed two years. The rules require sponsors to put up a deposit of $265 (100 dinars) for each runaway worker. The government published pamphlets on expatriate workers' rights in several languages, provided manuals on these rights to local diplomatic missions, and operated a telephone hotline for victims. The government did not provide direct assistance to victims. During the year there were approximately 500 labor cases involving a total of over 650 expatriate workers sent from the MOL to the Public Prosecution for investigation and prosecution.
Under the sponsorship system, an expatriate worker could not seek employment while a case was in court. Because in past years MWPS has been unsuccessful at resolving cases against sponsors in the courts, MWPS recommended that individuals instead attempt to resolve cases through mediation between their foreign embassies and the sponsors. Most of these mediations resulted in the payment of back payments followed by repatriation.
Workers also sought assistance from their embassies. The Pakistani embassy reported that it successfully resolved 200 cases through mediation between the sponsor and the worker, referred 135 to the MOL, and 40 to lawyers. The Pakistani embassy repatriated over 750 workers.
On June 13, a Sri Lankan housemaid sought assistance from the MWPS after running away from her Bahraini sponsor's allegedly abusive family. The housemaid claimed her sponsor's wife and two elder children abused her on daily basis. She was allegedly made to work seven days a week and paid a salary of approximately $132 (50 dinars) a month. The maid's sponsor denied the allegations but after police questioning agreed to end his legal sponsorship, and the housemaid was repatriated with the assistance of MWPS.
In July the Ministry of Labor began investigating a complaint lodged by the MWPS on behalf of a number of housemaids based on reports that a leading labor recruitment agency was complicit in the abuse of individuals it had recruited. The investigation was ongoing at year's end.
Between July 16 and July 21, working in concert with an international NGO, a government shelter focused on female victims of domestic abuse and trafficking assisted the return of two trafficking victims to their home countries.
In September the MWPS assisted an Indian housemaid who was severely beaten with a cricket bat by her sponsor and suffered a broken leg. She was in the hospital and out of work for more than two months. The Indian embassy filed a complaint against her sponsor for the beating. At year's end the investigation was ongoing, and the housemaid was out of work.
Between January 7 and 18, the government partnered with a foreign organization to train a special, multidisciplinary antitrafficking unit.
Several NGOs provided assistance in the form of housing, basic health care, education, and transportation to trafficking victims with the government's approval, including the MWPS, the Art of Living Foundation, the Indian Community Relief Fund, and the BHRWS.
Persons with Disabilities
The law protects the rights of persons with disabilities and a variety of governmental, quasi‑governmental, and religious institutions are mandated to support and protect persons with disabilities.
On June 4, the cabinet approved the formation of the High Committee for Disabled Affairs. The committee, chaired by the social development minister, consisted of representatives from the government and civil sectors.
On May 8, an official at the Ministry of Social Development announced that 4,055 disabled persons each received financial support of $132.50 (50 dinars) from the ministry's disability funding.
There were no reports of discrimination against persons with disabilities in employment, education, or access to health care. Children with learning disabilities, physical handicaps, speech impediments, and Down syndrome were enrolled in specialized education programs in public schools.
Since 2005 new public buildings in the central municipality must include facilities for persons with disabilities. The law does not mandate access to nonresidential buildings for persons with disabilities.
The government is required by law to provide vocational training for persons with disabilities who wish to work. The law requires any employer of more than 100 persons to hire at least 2 percent of its employees from the government's list of workers with disabilities. However, the government does not monitor compliance. The government placed persons with disabilities in some public sector jobs.
The law grants citizenship to Arab applicants who have resided in the country for 15 years and non-Arab applicants who have resided in the country for 25 years. However, there was a lack of transparency in the naturalization process, and there were reports that the citizenship law was not applied uniformly. For example, there were allegations that the government allowed expatriate Sunni Arabs who had served less than 15 years in the security services to apply for citizenship. There were also reports of Arab Shi'a who had resided in-country for more than 15 years and non-Arab expatriates who had resided more than 25 years who had not been granted citizenship. The MOI has acknowledged the naturalization of 5,000 people between 2003 and 2006. Some Shi'a activists have claimed that considerably more have been naturalized, but there is no evidence to support these claims.
In past years the government offered citizenship to several thousand minority stateless "Bidoon" persons, mostly Shi'a of Persian origin. However, according to Freedom House, Bidoon and citizens who speak Farsi as their first language continued to encounter discrimination in the society and work force.
Other Societal Abuses and Discrimination
The law does not criminalize homosexual relationships between consenting adults of at least 21 years of age. Reports of crimes in the media did not regularly specify if a victim of a crime was an alleged homosexual or had HIV/AIDS. While discrimination was not common or apparent, both attributes are socially taboo and not widely covered in the media.
Section 6 Worker Rights
a. The Right of Association
The law grants workers, including non citizens, a limited right to form and join unions. Public sector workers may join private trade unions and professional societies, but public sector unions are illegal. Five public sector trade unions were recognized by the General Federation of Bahrain Trade Unions (GFBTU) but declared illegitimate organizations by the government's Civil Service Bureau. Union membership was 26 percent in the private-sector labor force. The law provides for the right to organize and bargain collectively. Unions can be formed at establishments of any size.
The 2002 trade union law established a union federation, the GFBTU, which all unions were required to join. New legislation in 2006 allowed for the establishment of additional federations. The law also provides protection to workers terminated for their union activities and requires extra compensation for workers who are not paid their salaries on time.
Members of the military are prohibited from joining unions. The law allows union membership for private sector, civil service, and maritime workers. Seven public sector unions have been formed and have registered with the federation, but they are still not recognized by the government. The law prohibits unions from engaging in political activities.
b. The Right to Organize and Bargain Collectively
The law provides for the right to organize and bargain collectively. Employers and the government are required to treat unions as independent judicial entities.
The law holds the right to strike is a legitimate means for workers to defend their rights and interests; however, this right was restricted. The law requires arbitration before a vote to strike and a two-week notification that a union intends to strike. The law stipulates a simple majority vote of a union's members.
Although government sources report that the arbitration provision will not preempt the right to strike, the text of the law does not clearly specify that a union may proceed to a strike vote if it disagrees with the arbitrator's decision.
In November 2006 the prime minister issued an executive order with language expanding the 2002 Labor Union Law vital sector definition. Under the order, additional sectors in which strikes are not allowed include the oil, gas, and education sectors. Health centers, pharmacies, and bakeries are also specified under the new order.
On July 22, Batelco fired two trade union organizers, including the union's vice-president, for engaging in what it deemed to be a work stoppage that violated the Trade Union Law, which bans industrial action in the telecommunications sector, even though the union did not call for nor attempt a strike. Approximately 500 Batelco employees engaged in a work slowdown to protest the firings and reiterate demands for a pay raise. On July 24, the minister of labor stated that the firings were unjustified and called on Batelco to reinstate the two workers. Batelco had not reinstated the two individuals at year's end.
There are no special laws or exemptions from regular labor laws in export processing zones.
c. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor
The law prohibits forced or compulsory labor, but there were reports that such practices occurred, particularly in cases of domestic workers and those working illegally. There were no reports of forced or compulsory child labor.
Foreign workers, who made up 59 percent of the workforce (78 percent of the private sector workforce), in some cases arrived in the country under the sponsorship of an employer and then switched jobs while continuing to pay a fee to their original sponsor. This practice made it difficult to monitor and control the employment conditions of domestic and other workers.
In numerous instances employers withheld salaries from their foreign workers for months and even for years, and refused to grant them the necessary permission to leave the country. The government and the courts generally worked to rectify abuses if they were brought to their attention, but they otherwise focused little attention on the problem. The fear of deportation or employer retaliation prevented many foreign workers from making complaints to the authorities.
Labor laws do not fully cover domestic workers. There were numerous credible reports that domestic workers, especially women, were forced to work 12 to 16 hour days, given little time off, were malnourished, and were subjected to verbal and physical abuse, including sexual molestation and rape. Between 30 to 40 percent of the attempted suicide cases handled by the government's psychiatric hospitals were foreign domestic workers.
According to foreign embassies and NGOs, it was estimated that there were 70,000 foreign domestic workers in the country of predominantly Sri Lankan, Indonesian, Indian, and Filipino origins. During the year, there were several incidents of seriously abused domestic workers reported in the press.
Domestic workers who have no embassy representation in the country were often subjected to the worst types of physical and sexual abuse. With no diplomatic mission to represent them, runaway domestic workers had few places to turn for support.
d. Prohibition of Child Labor and Minimum Age for Employment
The law protects children from exploitation in the workplace and prohibits forced and compulsory child labor. The government enforced this prohibition effectively.
The minimum age for employment is 16 years of age. Rare exceptions can be made for juveniles between the ages of 14 and 16 who have an urgent need to assist in providing financial support for their families. These exceptions are made on a case-by-case basis, and the minors must obtain official authorization from the MOL to work. Minors may not work in industries deemed hazardous or unhealthy by the Ministry of Health. When employed, minors may work no more than six hours a day and may be present on the employment premises no more than seven hours a day. These regulations do not apply to family-operated businesses in which the only other employees are family members. MOL inspectors enforced child labor laws effectively in the industrial sector; child labor outside that sector was monitored less effectively, but it was not believed to be significant outside family‑operated businesses. Even in such businesses, it was not widespread.
e. Acceptable Conditions of Work
There is no national minimum wage. Unskilled foreign laborers in particular did not earn as much as the guidelines suggested. The law allows employers to consider benefits for foreign workers such as annual trips home, housing, and education bonuses as part of the salary.
The labor law is enforced by the MOL and mandates acceptable conditions of work for all adult workers, except domestic workers, including a maximum of 48 hours per week. Except for Muslims during Ramadan when work should not exceed six hours per day and 36 hours per week, workers are entitled to one day of rest after six consecutive days of work and to annual paid vacations of 21 days after one year of service. The labor law for the private sector permits 12 hours of overtime per week that is to be paid at a rate of 25 percent above the normal wage if conducted during the day and 50 percent if completed at night. Special MOL permission is required for anyone working more than 60 hours per week. The Labor Inspectorate conducts periodic, comprehensive inspections of private sector enterprises, including verification of employee hours and wages.
Work place safety standards are very low. The MOL set occupational safety and health standards and sporadically enforced them by performing workplace inspections. A team of 25 inspectors, in conjunction with ministry officials, had the authority to levy fines and close work sites if employers did not improve conditions by specified deadlines. During the year the press reported several workplace deaths owing to a combination of inadequate safety procedures, worker ignorance of those procedures, and inadequate safety standards for equipment but exact figures were not available. According to a press release, there were 30 workplace deaths at Aluminum Bahrain, the largest manufacturing facility in the country.
The MOL enforced the labor law through both planned and unannounced periodic inspections and routine fines for violators. In 2005, 10 safety and health inspectors covered approximately 34,000 active work places. During the year the ministry increased the number of safety and health inspectors to 25 and the number of active work places increased to approximately 35,000. Trained inspectors visited labor camps to verify if workers' accommodations met required safety and hygiene standards. During the year, inspectors visited 1,307 labor camps, of which 78 failed the inspection because of safety issues such as gas and electricity problems, overcrowding, poor hygiene, and the general state of disrepair. Inspectors cited poor hygiene in warnings issued to 100 camps, as well as part of their rationale for the closure of 21 camps. The inspectors were only authorized to inspect premises that had a commercial registration. Inspectors were not authorized to inspect private homes where most domestic workers reside and work.
When a worker lodges a complaint, the MOL opens an investigation and often takes remedial action. The MOL reportedly received 3,426 complaints during the year, including those from domestic workers. On average there were nine complaints from domestic workers per month. Ministry officials said that they were able to resolve more than half of these cases through mediation in the ministry. The remaining cases were taken up by the Public Prosecution for investigation. The Fourth High Civil Court consists of three labor courts and has jurisdiction over cases involving alleged violations of the labor law. Complaints brought before the MOL that cannot be settled through arbitration must be referred to the court within 15 days.
The law provides for fines and jail sentences for private sector employers who failed to pay wages as required by the law. The law applies equally to employers of citizens and of foreign workers.
Although the practice is illegal, many companies transported expatriate workers in open trucks on benches, and accidents, sometime fatal, resulted. In December 2006 MOL officials announced that a ban on the transport of workers in open trucks would be enforced. Enforcement of the ban has been erratic and many companies continue to transport expatriate laborers in open trucks. Press reports have called for stricter enforcement amidst continued fatalities.
The press reported the deaths of several workers at construction sites during the year. Numerous workers reportedly suffered injuries on the job. On June 24, the cabinet approved an MOL recommendation to ban outdoor work between the hours of noon and 4:00 pm during the months of July and August. According to the MOL, 283 companies employing approximately 8,000 registered workers faced fines of approximately $132 to 785 (50 to 300 dinars) per worker for allegedly violating the ban during the year. Despite the ban, health officials reported an increase in the number of heatstroke cases from 948 cases in 2006 to 1,087 because of the increase in construction and the above average temperatures during the summer. | <urn:uuid:40d1ce4f-0fd1-441e-8348-9ef19d9eb8eb> | CC-MAIN-2018-34 | http://bahrain-eve.blogspot.com/2008/03/bahrain-reports-on-human.html | 2018-08-18T12:58:28Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221213666.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20180818114957-20180818134957-00060.warc.gz | en | 0.967205 | 15,126 |
Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are somewhat complex topics. However, they each can have an effect on the way you run your WordPress site, which makes understanding their basics important.The good news is you don’t need to hit the law books to figure out how each of these elements impacts you. In this article, we’re going to discuss the difference between copyrights, trademarks, and patents, and how WordPress is licensed. Then, we’ll talk about what elements of your site you need to protect and how to do it. Let’s get to work!
What’s the Difference Between Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents?
Before we dive into how these elements affect your WordPress site, it’s important to know what their differences are. For now, let’s keep things simple and talk about them one by one:
- Copyright. Think of this as proof of ownership over the content you create. For example, if you’re running a WordPress website you can copyright your graphics and content (and we’ll talk more about this later on). On top of proving you’re the owner of your content, copyrights also govern how others can reproduce, imitate, and distribute it.
- Trademark. Unlike copyrights, trademarking isn’t about protecting your content, it’s all about your brand. Using this method enables you to claim your website’s name, domain, logo, and any other symbols representing your brand. That way, other people can’t use them to deceive your visitors and customers without breaking the law.
- Patents. This type of protection is reserved for unique business processes and technologies. However, you can’t patent a website as a whole (in the vast majority of cases).
Before moving on, let’s talk a bit more about patents. There’s a common misconception that almost any idea can be patented, but it’s not quite true. In fact, it’s likely you won’t be able to obtain a patent for your product unless you can prove it’s unique (and non-obvious).
To put it simply, if you run a simple WordPress website, you probably don’t need to think about patents. That is unless you’re offering a service you can prove is unique and innovative. If you just want to protect your intellectual property, copyrights and patents are the way to go.
How is WordPress Licensed (And How Does It Affect You)?
Most of you probably know that WordPress is open-source software. What you might not know is that it’s available to the public under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Let’s break down what this means:
- You’re free to run the platform for any purpose you want.
- You can have access to the platform’s code and modify it to suit your own needs.
- It can be freely redistributed. This means you can share the platform with other users if you want, instead of having them download it directly from the developers.
- You can also redistribute the platform including any modifications you’ve made to it.
This last point is particularly important for you as a WordPress user because it also covers ‘derivative’ works. In WordPress’ case, both plugins and themes fall into this category. It means you can create either of those two options for any purpose, and distribute them without having to pay the original developers.
Plus, if you’re a developer, you can also charge any price you want for your plugins and themes. The only caveat is that they must be made available under the GPL license as well without any additional restrictions. This is where things get a bit confusing if you’re a WordPress user or developer, so let’s discuss what this means for you:
- You only need to adopt the GPL license if you plan to distribute your plugins or themes. If they’re meant for private use or a particular client, that doesn’t apply to you.
- If you want to, you’re free to charge extra for technical support and other similar tasks. That’s why you often see plugins and themes available for purchase under limited-time licenses. In that case, you’re not just selling your work, but also your expertise.
- You can sell your work. However, according to the GPL, once someone purchases it they can also distribute and charge for it.
If you’re a developer, you might be worried about that last point we covered, so let’s elaborate using an example. If you create and distribute a WordPress theme under the GPL (which it must be), anyone who purchases it can legally access its ‘source code’, modify it, and redistribute it. In WordPress’ case, that refers to its core PHP files.
What they can’t do is copy any other part of your work, including bundled graphics, and CSS customizations. That means they can’t just take your theme and resell it under the same name to pocket the profits. In that case, they would be breaching its license and be open to legal action.
Do You Need to Copyright Your WordPress Website?
echnically, you don’t need to copyright your WordPress website – at least not under US law. That’s because websites are considered ‘original work’, and they’re copyrighted from the moment they go live. The same law applies to other types of creative work as long as you document them in a way you can prove, such as writing them down or recording them.
The question is, if you don’t need to copyright your site, why do so many pages on the web bother to include notices to that effect? A lot of them do so as a deterrent to would-be copycats, while others may include them because they actually went to the trouble of registering their copyright.
While a copyright isn’t strictly necessary for every site, it can come in handy. At least in the US, registering this proof of ownership makes it much easier to prosecute anyone copying it. For other countries, the situation could get muddier – so we recommend doing some research with an expert in your particular nation’s law.
What Elements of Your WordPress Website Should You Protect?
We’ve already talked about copyrighting your site, but that isn’t the only thing you can do to keep it safe from a legal standpoint. Let’s check out some of the other elements you can protect and how to do it.
Your Logo, Site Name, and Slogan
These three elements are a big part of what makes up your overall brand, which makes them perfect candidates for trademarking.
To register a trademark in the US, you’ll have to go through the United States Patent and Trademark Office(USPTO). To apply for one, you’ll need to submit a representation of your mark that includes its name and any designs associated with it (such as logos and other related icons).
However, keep in mind that the USPTO enables you to register each of these components separately if you want to do it. This means you can have a trademark for your logo, another for your site name (and URL), and one for your slogan. Doing this provides you with more protection if you decide to mix those site elements.
Keep in mind, registering a trademark with the USPTO isn’t free so you should only do it once your site gains a little traction and you’re sure the investment is worth it.
Many digital marketers believe that their brand provides a positive user experience. However, in many cases, the consumer feels differently. This disconnect can damage brand reputations and hinder the success of marketing efforts.
We now live in a customer-first world. Consumers today have their choice of countless companies within nearly every conceivable niche, and it’s up to the organizations to demonstrate why they should gain more business over their competitors. Staying ahead of digital marketing trends and adapting strategies accordingly are essential to success.
The brands that succeed are the ones that build an online experience tailored to the consumer, meeting their needs every step of the way. Sixty-one percent of customers report that they would not return to a brand’s mobile site after a negative experience, and 40 percent say they would go to a competitor’s site, according to Google.
The need to have an intimate familiarity with customers, what they like and the platforms they live on, is critical. As technology and customer expectations mature, brands need to be alert to the rising trends so that they can provide the optimal user experience for consumers. These top five trends below comprise a critical component of the modern digital marketing strategy. Here is what you should know to make it a part of your organization.
Trend 1: Data and personalization
In the increasingly competitive digital ecosystem, brands need to stand out for their customers. These consumers want to know that you care about their individual needs, and thus you need to create a highly personalized experience. Personalized calls to action, for example, convert 42 percent more than ordinary CTAs. Data and personalization will be the cornerstone of marketing moving forward.
Data can help you uncover topics that matter the most to your target audiences. It also allows you to better track how different personas interact with your content, move through your buyer’s journey, and learn what material will be most helpful for them next. Thus, data informs personalization efforts.
Tips for succeeding with data and personalization
- Secure data on a broad scale by uncovering trends within your industry and important topics that matter the most to your customers. Rising topics can help you get material published before competitors, building a strong presence in those areas as well.
Look at personal data to see how particular personas use your website.
- Look at the content they enter your site on, how they move about the site after reading it, and how they go from visitor to lead to customer. This will help you create personalized experiences, because you will know which content to display next to visitors.
- Gather statistics about how data and personalization impact the traffic and revenue of your site.
- Examine your site statistics before beginning these campaigns, including bounce rates, traffic rates and revenue rates, and then compare them to the statistics once the efforts have been enacted. Successes will help you build a case to budget more for data and personalization, driving your site strategy forward.
Trend 2: AI and intelligent agents
The demands of technology and customers are quickly outpacing the capabilities of human marketers. Although the amount of data is expected to reach 40,000 exabytes by 2020 (up from just 130 in 2005), the human brain is only capable of holding about 1 million gigabytes, according to Northwestern University professor Paul Reber. The technology available today can collect information about user behavior and help marketers better understand personas, points in the buyer’s journey and what that particular customer likely wants to read next.
The key to using that information, however, will be artificial intelligence. AI could double the rate of economic growth by 2035, according the Accenture.
AI will never replace quality marketers, because it cannot replace human creativity. What it can do, however, is help optimize content throughout the creation process, make it easier for brands to select topics and assist with the creation of digital strategies. It will allow for the automation of all the steps that can be completed simply by analyzing data and spitting back answers, freeing marketers to focus on how to best utilize this information.
What’s interesting is how digital marketers view and implement AI. There is a clear disconnect between importance and adoption, and brands must come to grips with implementation of AI in 2018.
Tips for using AI for your brand
- Find areas in your marketing strategy where AI can help, such as the optimization of content or triggering email campaigns. This means taking a closer look at steps that can be automated.
- Avoid excessively using AI to the point where customers are turned off or feel uneasy interacting with the brand.
- Incorporate AI into the broader strategy. The same way marketers in different departments, such as PPC and SEO, need to learn to work together, brands need to make sure their AI technology seamlessly integrates with the rest of the team.
- Have a defined role in the workflow, such as uncovering popular topics and guiding them through the optimization process, to ensure that everything runs smoothly.
Trend 3: Mobile and connected devices — the Internet of Things
We already know that mobile has begun to dominate search: The number of searches performed on mobile devices in the US, and several other countries, outpaced desktop back in 2015. Google has also announced an imminent mobile-first algorithm that we should see by 2018. Optimizing content for users should be second nature for website owners now.
Moving forward, we also need to consider the rise of alternate mobile devices, such as fitness trackers and smart watches, as well as the growing importance of voice search, both with personal assistant devices and on these mobile devices.
Customers use this technology to gain rapid answers to their questions, often while on the go. Brands that want to thrive need to make sure that they have prepared their content and digital strategies for these trends as well.
Tips for succeeding with mobile and connected devices
- Optimize for more verticals than before. Technologies such as personal assistant devices, often use alternate search verticals to find the information for their users. As an example, Kayak.com is used by some devices to pull flight and hotel information, or Yelp supplies information on local businesses.
- Use schema and high-quality content to move into top spaces whenever possible. With the smaller screens on mobile devices, and even fewer search results given on many non-smartphone devices, brands need to prioritize gaining access to the top spots on the SERP and earning Quick Answers whenever possible.
- Monitor how customers interact with your content. When you do earn top slots, see how it impacts your mobile traffic and conversion rates. This will offer key insights into how customers interact with your content and help you improve your strategy.
Trend 4: Content and SEO convergence
SEO and content cannot be regarded separately. All content developed needs to be optimized to boost its rankings on the SERP and to ensure its relevance, which means that content and SEO teams need to work together from the beginning.
Fortunately, most companies seem understand this need. A survey completed by my company, BrightEdge, found that that 97 percent of companies view these two functions as more integrated or converging into a single function. There are still ways that companies can improve their integration.
Tips for succeeding with SEO and content convergence
- Remember that customers recall experiences more than text. Use SEO insights, such as trending topics and keywords, to find topics. Then create outstanding content for digital experiences that align well with customer needs.
- Do customer analysis. Look at how customers interact with your material, including what devices they use to read your material, customer impressions of your brand and what customers want to see from you.
- Set realistic goals for your content, and regularly measure how well your efforts align with these benchmarks. Goals might describe traffic rates, rankings, conversions or revenue.
Trend 5: Native advertising growth
Native advertising will increase exponentially over the next few years. An estimated $7.9 billion was spent on this style of advertising in 2015, but that number is projected to reach an incredible $21 billion by just 2018. Mobile native ads are also expected to reach 63 percent of the mobile display ad revenue by 2020.
Native advertising has taken off because of its ability to fit more smoothly into the user experience. Customers have turned away from disruptive advertising practices. They do not respond to pop-ups or other ads that hinder their user experience. They want to see promotions that relate to them and their needs and experiences.
Native ads, which focus on creating ad copy that is relevant and natural for customers reading a particular web page, create positive outcomes both for the host websites and the company formulating the promotion. This form of advertising focuses on creating ads that align with the content that already appears on the website, thus making it more appealing to customers who had arrived on the page organically.
Tips for succeeding with native advertising
Research the audience and the target site’s content. The more familiar you are with these criteria, the easier it will be to select advertising platforms that align best with your target audience while also making it easier to create content that fits well with those visiting the host website.
Create content that will add something for the reader. To attract readers and make a strong impression, you want to focus on creating content that creates a positive experience for them. Just like your search optimization strategy, your native ad strategy should include providing value for those interacting with the material.
Test what advertising content works best where. Unlike using PPC advertising on Google, for native advertising, you have a better ability to target particular audiences that fit particular personas. Track not only what customers respond best to your content, but also the platforms where you find them and how well the traffic on your advertising content ends up becoming leads and then customers on your main site.
Digital marketing continues to change rapidly as technology and customer expectations evolve and mature. Brands that want to not only keep up with the curve, but thrive in this environment, need to capitalize on these emerging trends. These five that I have identified I believe will be the most significant moving forward through the rest of 2017 and into 2018.
Have you ever needed to record your screen to show a demo of your software, give someone a walkthrough as a tutorial, or create a video of your screen for an online course? Screen capture software is perfect for this. Screen capture software includes tools to capture all or portions of your screen in high definition, and allows you to easily edit, add information such as text or audio, add interactive buttons, and lots more. Some even include features such as live-streaming.
9 Best Screen Capture Software for WordPress Video Tutorials and Client Walkthroughs
Most of the apps on this list were made specifically for creating training videos. Some are for Mac only, some are for Windows only, and others work on both systems as well as Linux. Prices range from free to several hundred dollars. I’m showing the prices for commercial use. The software might be cheaper than I’ve shown, but the cheaper prices will either show watermarks, limit the features such as time of recording or number of recordings, reduce the editing features, or specify they are for home use only. The apps are in no particular order.
QuickTime 7 Pro for Mac from Apple unlocks editing functionality within the QuickTime 7 Player. Editing features include creating slideshows with music, cropping, resizing, compression, and adding special effects. You can also convert images to different formats. The Pro features are purchased through the free app. QuickTime X (10) Ships with Mac OS X. It includes video editing, screen recording, capture of video and audio streams, visual chapters, file conversion, sharing to YouTube, live streaming, and GPU acceleration. Its screen capture features keep users from copying DVD’s. It removes support for a few of the popular formats, so some have preferred version 7.
Price: $29.99 | More Information
ScreenFlow from Telestream provides video editing, screen recording, and screen-casting for Mac. Anything or any part of the screen can be recorded with high quality. It evens records iOS, meaning you can record your iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV. It includes tools meant for software tutorials such as mouse click effects, pointer size, and displaying any keys that are pressed. Editing tools include callouts, highlights, annotations, transitions, text, audio and video filters, and even multi-channel audio. Animations include graphics, titles, and logos. It also includes closed-caption support. The intuitive interface is easy to learn for anyone without video editing experience. It has lots of publishing options.
Price: $99 | More Information
Screenium from Synium Software provides screen recording for both Mac and iOS. It provides recording at 60 frames per second to create a smooth video recording. It will record full screen, windows, or a selected area. Editing features include cutting, text, audio, effects, transitions, and animation. You can embed picture-in-picture clips from a webcam so you can appear within the video or show additional slides or images. It has smart zooming to highlight areas on the screen. Videos export to multiple platforms including YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Flickr, and messages and mail apps.
Price: $49.99 | More Information
4. Screen Recorder
Screen Recorder from Icecream Apps works on Mac OS X and Windows 10 to capture any area of the screen as either a screenshot or a video in HD. You can draw, add text, and add arrows while you’re performing the screen capture. It even includes project history so you can see previous versions of the images and videos. Zoom while recording and select a mouse size and area so you can record a specific region around the mouse. Trim, convert, display hot-keys within the video, set screen captures on a timer, and perform audio adjustments.
Price: $29.95 | More Information
Camtasia from TechSmith uses an intuitive drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor for both Mac and PC. You can record any portion of the screen all the way down to an individual pixel. Add callouts, shapes, and arrows. Insert video using your webcam. Build videos with multiple tracks for video, audio, images, and text. Import media with 4k resolution. Add transitions such as intro or outro to the beginning or end of a clip. Add voice narration, audio effects, video effects, and even green-screen. You can even add quizzes so you can know how much of the video was viewed and by whom. It includes animated backgrounds, graphics, icons, and royalty-free music tracks that are safe to play on YouTube and Vimeo.
Price: $199 | More Information
Snagit, also from TechSmith, is a simple screen capture and recording app for Windows and Mac. Capture screenshots, record video, edit images, and share your files. It includes markup tools that make it easy to edit and customize every screenshot. Click and drag to capture any portion of the screen. Record, narrate, and trim video. A magnify tool lets you focus on one portion of the screen. It can be expanded to capture Android and iOS and send photos and videos to the Snagit editor from your mobile device. It will even capture multiple types of scrolls. Panoramic capture is used for wide horizontal scrolls and infinitely scrolling webpages. Scrolling capture helps to capture something that’s not showing on the screen vertically, horizontally, or a scrolling area. It will also create animated GIF’s.
Price: $49.95 | More Information
7. Snap 10
Ashampoo’s Snap 10 for Windows allows you to capture and edit anything on your screen including the entire screen, multiple windows at once, a web page, or individual sections, and turn them into images or videos. You can add arrows, graphics, automatic numbering, etc., to create self-explanatory steps. Live editing lets you add text, drawings, and voice narration rather than having to add them in post-production. Visually show mouse and button clicks within the video. Add watermarks, include information on the source page, and include other graphical metadata and links. Videos can also be converted to animated GIF’s.
Price: $49 | More Information
8. Open Broadcaster
Open Broadcast Software is a free open source software studio for Mac, Windows, and Linux that’s made specifically for video recording and live streaming. Designed with gamers in mind, it records directly from your graphics card in HD in full-screen at 60 frames per second. It includes real-time video and audio capturing and mixing to record unlimited scenes. You can switch between scenes using custom transitions. Video editing includes filters such as chroma, color correction, color keying, masking, etc. Audio filters include gain, noise gate, suppression, and VST plugin support adds even more features. It’s easy to configure and you can set up different configurations based on profiles. The studio mode lets you preview the video before publishing.
Price: $Free | More Information
Flashback, from BlueBerry Software, is a screen recording app for Windows. It will record any part of your screen from multiple monitors to create a video file. It will also record from your webcam and will record audio. It includes pro editing tools so you can draw on the screen, add notes, callouts, text, images, cut, crop, add blur effects, synchronize audio with video, etc. The files will export to any major video format. Schedule your recordings and add watermarks, interactive buttons, create start and end titles, etc. Zoom in to any part of the recording and use auto-tracking for the mouse so the action stays in view.
Price: $99 | More Information
Screen capture software provides you with the tools to create videos of your screen, allowing you to easily create your own software tutorials and walkthroughs. There are a lot of screen recorders out there to choose from, but this quick look at 9 screen capture programs will help you narrow it down so you can select the best software for your needs and budget.
For some time now, Pinterest has allowed companies and bloggers to pay to promote their pins, after which the platform shows pins to Pinterest users who might have an interest in the product.
But now, some Pinterest users can purchase products without leaving the platform.
That’s possible because of the company’s newly released feature called “buyable pins”.
The feature was rolled out by Pinterest back in June. It stands for pins featuring a ‘buy’ button, and it enables users to buy what they see in those pins.
Pinterest says when users spot a pin with a blue price, they’ll know they can buy the featured item from within the application. Here’s how it looks:
Pinterest appears to be the perfect platform for this type of impulse spending, as one-third of all Pinterest users didn’t contemplate making a purchase before seeing the item on Pinterest.
And aside from making shopping convenient, buyable pins allow consumers to confidently and safely make a purchase. Purchases are handled with a credit card through Apple Pay, although Pinterest is working with Braintree to devise a method of purchase for users outside iOS. This handling method means that credit card and personal information is secure for consumers.
For the moment, buyable pins are only available on Apple mobile devices (iPad or iPhone), so pinners who surf on a desktop or Android device can’t make a purchase from Pinterest.
While a few major retailers (e.g., Macy’s, Nordstrom) have jumped on the buyable pin bandwagon, smaller retailers may find it difficult to enable the feature. Pinterest has partnered with Shopify, so sellers who use the Shopify platform will find buyable pin integration easy.
Pinterest will not take any fees or surcharges from sales made through buyable pins, but they have been monetizing very successfully with promoted pins. It’s expected that buyable pins will lead to more companies promoting their pins and drive Pinterest revenue in that way.
Fees and surcharges from sales will be limited to what retailers will pay through Apple Pay (and later, through Braintree) or Shopify Payments with no additional cost from Pinterest. Pinterest also has a waiting list for businesses that don’t use Shopify to power their store.
The advantages of Pinterest buyable pins are clear. Retailers now have a way to encourage and facilitate impulse purchasing while marketing to their most lucrative demographics. Pinners can re-pin the things they like, allowing products to go viral and spread through peer groups.
Almost half of all online shoppers in the United States have purchased something as a direct result of a recommendation from Pinterest. More than 80% of all Pinterest pins are re-pins – that is, about four out of every five pins is something that has been passed along from another Pinterest user, so the potential virality on Pinterest is staggering.
For Shopify users, adding a buyable feature to their pins is an easy way to increase revenue. While the data on buyable pins isn’t available due to the novelty of the concept, we do know that before buyable pins existed, the average sale from a Pinterest referral was $58.95. Clearly, there is tremendous potential to use buyable pins to increase this revenue. By eliminating the need to visit the website, chances are that a greater portion of pin viewers will be converted to customers.
Unfortunately, buyable pins aren’t yet perfect. The greatest disadvantage in these early days is the limited reach of the pins to consumers and retailers. For many retailers and many Pinterest users, buyable pins simply aren’t available. Pinterest has always maintained a conservative stance toward new developments, so it’s likely that these early forays into buyable pins will be expanded as the new program takes off, but for the moment, a seller’s ability to use buyable pins (and a buyer’s ability to purchase with them) is still quite limited.
One other major disadvantage to buyable pins is that while it facilitates impulse purchasing, it doesn’t allow sellers to cross-promote other items or to establish a relationship with the buyer. Some brands use Pinterest quite effectively to communicate with and build brand loyalty with their consumers. Almost 3/10 of all Pinterest users follow a brand on Pinterest, and 83% would rather follow a brand than a celebrity. However, Pinterest buyable pins allow consumers to make a purchase without first getting acquainted with the company and the brand.
Buyable pins do not allow cross-promotion, which may be a problem for many retailers. Items are listed and purchased individually without encouraging consumers to check out other items from the same seller.
In a way, the buyable pins feature brings an eBay feel to Pinterest. eBay is filled with hundreds of sellers and many of them sell nearly identical products and the buyer chooses a product based on the individual product rather than the seller. For example, with two identical products in original packaging, an eBay user is more likely to buy from the seller who has 1,000 positive reviews and is selling the product at $25 than the seller with 10,000 positive reviews who’s selling for $30. There is fear that buyable pins on Pinterest will create the same price competition that currently exists on eBay.
Are Pinterest Buyable Pins the Next Big Thing?
Judging from the buzz around these buyable pins, some marketers are claiming that buyable pins are the next step in commercializing (and profiting from) social media. But only time will tell whether buyable pins are the wave of the future or a well-intentioned but ultimately unprofitable experiment.
For large retailers like Macy’s and Nordstrom, buyable pins are beneficial. But for small retailers, the picture is less rosy. Small retailers who lack the name recognition and reputation of more established brands require a strong brand reputation and a more personal relationship with their buyers. Buyers take a risk when purchasing from a less established company, so their initial purchases are often small and conservative. Once they see great customer service, fast delivery, and amazing quality, they often return to that same buyer for additional or future purchases. For smaller businesses, that repeat business is critically important.
Small businesses with less recognizable brands cannot generally negotiate the same wholesale pricing as larger companies, leaving them to pay higher prices for their inventory than the multi-national corporations. Because of this, they will often struggle to compete based on price, even when the products are identical. Smaller companies differentiate themselves from larger ones through customer service and building relationships with their customers. When small companies are competing with large companies on a marketplace which rewards low prices and makes it easy to comparison shop, small companies traditionally suffer.
Even when the small business has a unique product (one that they’re not competing with larger companies to sell), buyable pins reward appearance over function. Pins that share well have beautiful photography and are aesthetically pleasing. This means that companies that sell a mixture of beautiful and functional products are likely to see a marked imbalance in their sales figures as their buyable pin sales skew toward the beautiful rather than the more functional.
In most cases, this will be a simple matter of adjusting inventory according to the change in sales trends. But in some cases, this problem can be damaging to the business’s reputation. For example, a beautiful hat might require specialized hairpins to keep it in place, or a cute and colorful cloth diaper cover might require dull and boring liners to function correctly. Customers who purchase the beautiful part without choosing to purchase the functional are likely to be disappointed.
Should You Use Pinterest Buyable Pins?
That depends on who you are. If you’re a large retailer with established name recognition and a strong reputation of trust, Pinterest buyable pins can be a source of additional revenue. If you’re a small retailer who only sells products that photograph well and look good on Pinterest, the buyable pins can help to drive sales, especially if your products themselves are well-branded.
But not everyone may benefit from buyable pins, and Pinterest already has a strong eCommerce advantage even without the impulse purchasing. Without buyable pins, Pinterest users can surf to your website and make a purchase, especially when compared to other social media channels.
Maximizing Your Pins
Whether you’re using buyable pins or simply looking to maximize your conversions from your traditional Pinterest pins, there are several ways to make sure that your pins are re-pinnable and attractive.
The most sharable Pinterest images include great photography and a light-colored (or white) background. Lighter images are almost 20 times more likely to be shared than darker ones. Bright or bold colors can make the image “pop” on the Pinterest platform, and Pinterest users prefer to share images without faces than those with faces. Using portrait (vertical) orientation on your images makes them look better when they’re displayed on the Pinterest dashboard.
On Your Website
To encourage people to share your images from your website (and to re-pin those images), it’s important that your images have a descriptive name, because the image name will be the title of the Pinterest pin. For example, a picture of blueberries labelled “Blueberries from Hawthorn Berry Farm 2015” is more professional than “DSC0072(2)”.
There are plugins available that can help Pinterest pinners get a customized description when pinning from your pages. If you’re on WordPress, Share This and Social Media Feather will allow you to customize Pinterest descriptions. This enables you (for example) to use a pre-programmed description that will accompany your pins when a guest to your website shares them on his or her pinboard.
When You Pin
When you’re pinning, you’ll want to use a great description, because most re-pinners will retain your original description. Whether you’re writing for buyable pins or just for your ordinary Pinterest social media marketing, the descriptions will allow other pinners to understand why they should share your content.
For Buyable Pins
For the average Pinterest-using company, buyable pins will be available only if you have a store through Shopify. Once you’re logged in to Pinterest and Shopify, you can go to http://www.shopify.com/pinterest and click on the “Add the Pinterest sales channel” button in the center of the page. This will add Pinterest buyable pins to your Shopify store. It is important to note that you must have a paid Shopify account to use this feature. If you do have a paid Shopify store, adding Pinterest buyable pins is a matter of following a few simple instructions in Shopify.
When you use Shopify, your buyers will pay by credit card using Apple Pay and Shopify Payments. While Pinterest will not charge additional fees for buyable pins, Shopify Payments and Apple Pay will charge a transaction fee. Shopify Payments currently charges 2.9% $0.30 for Basic users, 2.6% $0.30 for Professional users, and 2.4% $0.30 for Unlimited users. Apple Pay does not currently charge a transaction fee, but users of the buyable pins feature may want to keep in mind that if Apple Pay chooses to change their policy, Pinterest buyable pin merchants may be affected.
For those monitoring the eCommerce industry, the biggest winner in this buyable pin idea is Shopify. Pinterest has been tight-lipped about rolling out the buyable pin feature to other eCommerce platforms, so for the foreseeable future, Shopify store owners have a marked advantage over sellers using a different platform or an individual website.
If your company is flexible, and is interested in early adoption of this new program, a Shopify store is the only way to try it out for now. While the idea certainly sounds promising, it remains to be seen whether this is a major advance in social media marketing or another good idea that won’t quite work out.
Facebook needs no introduction. Today it boasts over 1.6 billion monthly active users, and if you haven’t extended your marketing efforts onto the platform yet, it begs the question – what on earth are you waiting for?
Well, the good news is that getting started with marketing on Facebook is honestly not that hard – anyone can create a page and start accumulating a following right away. Doing it right, however, will require you to get acquainted with a multitude of tools in order to maximize the efficacy of your efforts. You’ll need to engage with your followers, track your analytics, manage your ad campaigns, and know exactly which content to publish and when.
Thankfully, given Facebook’s popularity, there are hundreds of such tools available to help you kickstart your marketing efforts. Let’s take a look at our favorite 12 of them.
Agora Pulse is a social media management platform that offers solutions for multiple platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google , Youtube, and, of course, Facebook. The platform provides users with their own social media inboxes to keep track of their incoming interactions, analytics reports, and comprehensive data regarding their followers, among other tools.
- Enables you to handle publishing (including scheduling options) to multiple social media platforms from a single dashboard.
- Automatically filters incoming interactions to platform-specific inboxes.
- Collects new content from all your feeds into a single daily report.
- A notification system enables you to keep track of new interactions as they occur.
- An automatic moderation system provides you with the option of creating custom rules, to keep your social media pages clean.
- Provides you with a tracking system for your Facebook shares and mentions.
- Comprehensive analytics system with reports that can be easily exported to PowerPoint.
- Includes multiple Facebook-only tools such as a quiz application, photo contests, sweepstakes, personality tests, fan voting, and even a coupon app.
Price: Starts at $15 per month | More information
Hootsuite is another multi-platform social media management tool that offers support for pretty much every platform available at the moment. As far as Facebook is concerned, Hootsuite offers solutions for engaging with followers, publishing new content, analytics reports, follower insights, and advertising.
- Quickly respond to social media interactions from a single dashboard, which also enables you to create automated responses.
- Use filters to narrow down interactions from followers located in a specific area, or using a particular language.
- Manage your publishing duties with scheduling tools, targeted content, and the ability to designate specific team leaders who have final approval over everything that gets published onto your social media pages.
- Track engagement thanks to thorough analytics reports, which can be automatically shared among your team.
- Provides you with information regarding the best times to publish new content based on past activity trends.
- Includes support for Facebook ads.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $8.99 per month | More information
Buffer is an easy-to-use platform that enables you to manage all of your pages and accounts from the same place. While it may not feature the functionality of the previous two entries in this round-up, Buffer is an overall much simpler to use platform. It’s a solid tool for small enterprises that would benefit from a comprehensive Facebook marketing tool.
- Enables you to create and schedule your Facebook posts (as well as multiple other media platforms) from its dashboard.
- Includes its own powerful graphics editor which provides you with the necessary tools to make your images stand out.
- Using either its browser extension, iOS, or Android apps, you can automatically add content from across the web to a sharing queue for your social media accounts.
Price: Free, with premium plans starting at $10 per month | More information
Oktopost is yet another social media management platform, albeit one designed explicitly as a business-to-business (B2B) solution. This distinction comes, of course, with a higher price tag, albeit one well worth the price for those businesses looking for an upscale solution.
- Enables you to manage your social media publishing strategy through Oktopost campaigns, featuring categories and extensive analytics.
- Provides you with a detailed editorial calendar.
- Using queues, you can add posts to your existing calendar, and let Oktopost automatically assign them to previously customized time slots for maximized efficiency.
- Includes social acquisition statistics, which track conversions driven by your social media activities.
- The analytics platform tracks which kinds of content perform better for different audiences.
- Comes with a built-in content curation engine, which helps you discover relevant content for your social media accounts.
Price: From $400 per month | More information
Socialbakers Analytics is a company dedicated to providing a thorough analytics solution focused on social media platforms, including Facebook. Using their platform, users can access information regarding the performance of competing brands and pages, and track general industry trends.
- Enables you to compare the performance of your content to your competition, custom groups, or simply measure it against overall industry trends.
- Track how your organic content is faring against its promoted counterparts.
- Provides you with detailed reports, which can be set to be automatically delivered at specified intervals.
- Includes thorough analytics regarding your Facebook advertising campaigns.
Price: From $75 per month | More information
While on the surface DrumUp looks like another social media management platform, in truth this service is mostly focused on automating your content strategy and marketing efforts. Using DrumUp, you can sharply cut down on the time spent managing your Facebook pages, thanks to its curated list of content recommendations, scheduling tools, and mobile apps for updates on the go.
- DrumUp automatically looks through the web in order to find high-quality content relevant to your followers, which is crucial to increasing your following.
- Aside from Facebook, it also offers support for Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.
- Provides you with hashtag recommendations for your content, to maximize the number of viewers for your content.
- Includes smart scheduling tools.
- Chrome extension, iOS, and Android apps are available to manage your account from anywhere.
Price: From $19 per month | More information
Post Planner is a service that helps users find the most engaging content for their particular fields, and helps them schedule it for the perfect time – maximizing the number of people that will be exposed to it on Facebook. Its focus on maximizing engagement through simple curation, and its low price point, make it a great choice for small businesses looking for a boost to their Facebook marketing strategy.
- Provides you with curated content tailored to your followers, to maximize viewer engagement on your Facebook page.
- A simple scheduling tool enables you to plan your content strategy months in advance to boost your productivity.
- Includes a recycling feature which, when enabled, will reuse your popular content after a decent period of time.
Price: Starts at $7 per month | More information
Pagemodo is a platform meant to help users create a Facebook social media presence from scratch, and provide them with the necessary tools for growth in the long term. In order to achieve this, they provide you with a simple cover photo and welcome tab design tools, as well as post designers – and that’s without going into their management functions.
- Provides you with the right tools to design a professional-looking Facebook page from scratch, and simultaneously launch your social media marketing efforts.
- Start selling your products right away, thanks to custom tabs and contest creation tools.
- Enables you to provide coupons on your Facebook page.
- Suggested posts feature will help you find engaging content and then schedule it in advance.
Price: From $4.50 per month | More information
LikeAlyzer is a no-frills tool that provides you with an analysis of any Facebook page you want, including analytics information and Facebook statistics. While the main page itself doesn’t look like much, the tool it provides is pretty darn useful for anyone looking to gain a quick insight into their Facebook performance at no cost and in a matter of minutes.
- Generates a report for your Facebook page with a single click.
- Provides you with an overall performance score, as well as the median scores of the competition regarding content publishing rates, and the average number of likes.
- Tells you exactly how many likes your publications have accrued, as well as the rate at which your likes are growing.
- Tracks your engagement statistics.
Price: Free | More information
Qwaya is a Facebook ads manager tool for marketing professionals, which provides them with multiple key functions to manage their work from a single platform. For example, using Qwaya, you can conduct powerful A/B tests by using Facebook’s data to target only the audience you want.
- Powerful A/B testing tool for your ad campaigns.
- Enables you to automate the structure of your ads, so you can handle larger campaigns more easily.
- Provides you with timing information to maximize the return on your ads by running them during the most effective windows.
- Integration with Google Analytics right from your dashboard.
- Add tracking URLs to your ads, such as those provided by Google Analytics, so you can link them to third party tools.
Price: From $149 per month | More information
Driftrock is an ad campaign manager for Facebook, tailored as a B2B solution that has served prestigious customers such as BMW and Coca-Cola. This tool provides you with a customer relationship management platform to increase your Facebook leads, and make sure that your ads are displayed during the best time windows, among other functions.
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Business owners are doing more on the Internet and in the cloud than ever before. Nowadays, small business owners consider higher broadband speed a must-have. In fact, 85% of all businesses need to increase their Internet speed and plan to do so this year.
What’s driving this growth? It’s a wireless world out there. Cloud-based applications. File sharing. Heavy web browsing. And the increase in number and use of wireless devices are all contributing to it… while faster wireless speeds and smart phones are driving employee and customer expectations.
And then there are the bandwidth hogs… Users… maybe your employees or your customers… they’re folks who are using a lot more bandwidth on your network than anyone else. Normal web surfing doesn’t take up a lot of bandwidth. Streaming music, movies, and downloading large files do.
Businesses do so much online nowadays. Even legit activities like voice, email, productivity, accounting and customer service could be deemed bandwidth hogs because they present constant demands on your network.
So here’s a basic rule of thumb for determining the best Internet speed for your business. The higher the number of users, the number of devices in use, and the applications running, the more speed you’ll need.
Once you’ve figured out the best Internet speed for your business, don’t forget to look into setting up a wireless network for your employees and your customers. The right Internet and WiFi solution will make all the difference for your business. | <urn:uuid:88a67241-4605-47a7-8805-474b2bc8d9d9> | CC-MAIN-2018-34 | https://vmccom.com/category/resources/ | 2018-08-17T17:29:23Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221212639.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20180817163057-20180817183057-00260.warc.gz | en | 0.926688 | 10,356 |
This post presents events that shaped the evolution of High Frequency Trading, the massive penny-ante arbitrage programs used by the high-speed traders.
Like most technologists, I approach history with some disdain–this despite an occasional “aha moment” when I am surprised by the fundamental impact of a historical event on today’s technology. But, when it comes to explaining the complex and supremely silly structure of the current financial markets, history is the key. Today’s market rules may seem utterly illogical, yet they were made for seemingly good reasons at some point in time, many years ago. In fact, at the high level, our market technology works the way it does mostly “for historical reasons”.
I started this post by making a set of notes for my own use and it grew to the point where I decided to share it. I hope that it will prove helpful to readers that need a quick perspective of the HFT history. I intend to update the post periodically, as my time permits. Please suggest changes by email or by leaving a blog reply/comment.
My focus is on the US stock market and the global Forex spot market, two very important but different markets that had to cope with the “issue” of HFT for two decades. I also cover the European stock market because of its leading role in HFT regulation.
Here is a quick and rough side-by side comparison of the two markets that shows parameters important for HFTs. You can see some stunning differences and similarities. (Concerning the differences: even this simple table required a non-trivial effort to establish meaningful dollar trading volumes because equities volumes are usually specified only as a number of “shares”. For additional comparisons, see MarketFactory’s post Complexities of FX and Equities are Inverted by James Sinclair.)
|Parameter||US Stock Market||Forex Spot Market|
|Approximate average total daily volume (2013)||$200B||$2,000B|
|Number of actively traded symbols||6,000||60|
|Busiest symbol (max avg daily dollar volume)||AAPL||EUR/USD|
|Average daily dollar volume of the busiest symbol||$5B||$500B|
|Typical unit price (order of magnitude)||$100.00||$1.00000|
|Typical price tick size on major venues||$0.01 (1 bp)||$0.0001 (1 bp)|
|Value of a "round lot" on major venues||$10K||$1M|
|Round lots per day for the busiest symbol||500,000||500,000|
|Typical bid-ask spread for the busiest symbol||$0.01 (1 bp)||$0.0001 (1 bp)|
This post provides only a chronological sequence of important HFT-related events, rather than an annotated framework of causalities (because this would require a long book). Events include regulations, influential books, papers, blog posts, technology developments and glitches.
Events are listed in reverse chronological order. To keep the number of entries manageable, a singly-dated headline may include a “More…” section with some history leading to the event, as well as mentions of future developments. There is some dichotomy in dating of the key events: For regulations, I often use the date when a law was adopted or implemented, even though it might have been in the works for many years. For ideas (papers, posts, etc.), I try to find the initial publication that is deemed seminal or influential.
Acknowledgments: For helpful discussions and suggestions I am grateful to numerous industry practitioners: James Sinclair (MarketFactory, Inc.), Chris Sparrow (Sparrow Consulting), Prof. Donald MacKenzie (Univ. of Edinburgh), Prof. Eric Budish (Univ. of Chicago), Dr. Anatoly Schmidt (Kensho Technologies, Inc.).
Apologies: I tried for a compromise between a dry wiki article and a blog piece. Unavoidably, I exercise a subject bias by selecting only specific events. I may also be biased in my views or in the smart-alecky conclusions (made with twenty-twenty hindsight); these are preceded with the heading “Opinion:” and are hidden in the “More…” sections below — you have been warned.
Click here toor to all “More…” sections on this page. (Use “show” if you are searching for a particular term or if you wish to print the whole thing.)
Feb 11, 2015: Physicist Mark Buchanan suggests in a Nature’s article that – because of speed of light limitations – within a few years it may become profitable to station a ship or other trading platform near halfway points between pairs of financial centers worldwide. More…
The commentary article Physics in finance: Trading at the speed of light (Mark Buchanan, Nature, Feb 11, 2015) asserts:
“To explain: special relativity says that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, c. Hence, a trader standing a distance D away from an exchange can find out what happened there, in the best circumstance, at a time T = D/c after it happened. Between major trading centres around the globe, such delays can be from a few to tens of milliseconds. If a trader stands halfway between the two exchanges, he or she will receive information from both after the same interval, T = D/c. Anywhere else, the distance to at least one of the exchanges would be greater and information would take longer to get there.
In other words, within a few years it may become profitable to station a ship or other trading platform near halfway points between pairs of financial centres worldwide (see Fast-trading hotspots).”
The news regarding the optimal placement of HFT computers on mid-ocean barges traveled fast, see stories in MarketWatch, International Business Times, and WatersTechnology. Some pundits accepted the “fact” as self-evident, some expressed doubts. Bill Harts, CEO of Modern Markets Initiative, a group that supports high-frequency trading, dismissing the idea, told MarketWatch: “Even if a trader could receive data from a market faster at such a location, in order to profit from it she would have to transmit orders to a market from the same location and would always be slower than traders stationed at the actual markets.” In a follow-up IBT article, he adds: “If this were possible, data center space in Youngstown, Ohio, (roughly half way between the New York and Chicago exchanges) would be at a premium because all the HFTs would locate there. But guess what? There is no HFT in Youngstown, Ohio.”
Opinion: In fact, Nature’s article is completely wrong about trading from a midpoint between financial centers. The article is important only as another illustration of the literati’s ignorance of high-speed trading basics (see also the Opinion section under the Mar 31, 2014, Flash Boys entry).
The Nature’s article is trivially correct in stating that the midpoint between the two exchanges is the point where an arbitrage opportunity can be first discovered. What is less obvious — given that Mark Buchanan, a respected physicist and author got it wrong — is that the midpoint is a particularly bad place where to make trading decisions.
My Feb 25, 2015 post “Colocation beats the speed of light” provides an easy to digest formal proof that the optimal configuration for a trading strategy that communicates with a number of distant exchange servers is fully distributed — that is, all of the strategy’s computers are colocated with the servers. (Remarkably, the same logic applies to a financial exchange that provides services to several distant data centers.)
Jan 1, 2015: Daniel Fricke and Austin Gerig publish an estimate for the optimal frequent batch auction interval for the US equities market. More…
The concept of synchronized markets (aka frequent auctions) has been championed in recent years by Chris Sparrow, Eric Budish at al., and others. This paper (Too Fast or Too Slow? Determining the Optimal Speed of Financial Markets, Daniel Fricke and Austin Gerig, Jan 1, 2015) is the first attempt to establish the optimal length of the auction interval in the US stock market.
The model uses three factors to determine the optimal clearing frequency: the volatility of the security, the intensity of trading in the security, and the correlation of the security’s value with other securities. All else being equal, a security should be traded faster if its volatility is higher, slower if its intensity of trade is lower, and faster if its correlation with the market is higher. Using rough estimates of these values, the authors determine that the optimal time interval of trade for a typical US stock is currently 0.2 to 0.9 seconds. The analysis suggests that speed is important in financial markets and that time delays of even a fraction of a second can harm market quality. On the other hand, the results also suggest that for many securities, milli- and microsecond speeds are unnecessary.
For a helpful summary, see Why we need a speed limit for financial markets (Mark Buchanan, Bull Market, Jan 25, 2015).
Opinion: The paper takes the bold initial step to establish the optimal length of the auction interval in the US stock market. But the real issue is that that US equities market — like most other markets — operates in continuous, not discrete, time. In the end, if we ever agree on trading using frequent auctions, the auction interval will very likely be chosen by regulators to be uniform across all securities, just as the price granularity is determined today. The most likely scenario is that the less liquid securities will trade at a multiple of some standard minimum interval (say 10 or 50 milliseconds).
First, we must prove beyond any doubt that discrete time trading is fundamentally preferable to continous time trading. Then, the actual length of the of the auction interval will be about as important as agreeing to trade in price increments of a penny rather than a nickel or an eighth of a dollar. Given that we halt all trading on weekends (or at night – in equities markets), why is it so controversial to match orders only every 10 or 500 milliseconds when preponderance of research indicates that this is the most efficient way to trade?
Aug 26, 2014: SEC announces a 12-month pilot program that will widen tick size from $0.01 to $0.05 per share for certain small cap stocks and study the effects. More…
Earlier this year, on Jan 31, 2014, SEC’s own Investor Advisory Committee recommended against the pilot. On Feb 11, 2014, the pilot was overwhelmingly mandated by the U.S. House “Tick Size Bill” (although the Senate never proposed a companion bill). The scope of the SEC pilot is narrower than what was proposed by the House bill; it aims only to assess whether wider ticks would enhance small cap market quality for the benefit of investors.
Opinion: Everyone agrees that the larger tick size would be a boon to the traditional market makers by guaranteeing a minimum spread and preventing the HFT market makers from cheaply jumping in front of the queue. Besides this, there is a lot of iffy logic making for a fascinating debate. Advocates say that wider tick sizes would compel market makers to provide more liquidity in small stocks, increase number of IPOs, and ultimately create jobs. Critics say that spreads in small stocks are already considerable, yet market makers are not interested; wider tick sizes would only make trades more expensive for retail investors. The thoughtful Recommendation of the SEC Investor Advisory Committee is definitely worth a read.
It is instructive to compare this anti-decimalization movement in the stock market with the anti-decimalization of the Forex spot market. Where, in the stock market, the large ticks are intended to incentivize market makers to provide liquidity in illiquid small cap stocks, the Sep 17, 2012 change to half pips on the EBS/ICAP venue was done to satisfy manual traders trading larger-than-normal amounts in the most liquid currency pairs, such as EUR/USD.
Jun 30, 2014: Following in the footsteps of EBS/ICAP, Thomson Reuters Matching prepares to test randomization of order processing. More…
Thomson Reuters will pilot the order message delay randomization with a single currency pair, likely to be USD/MXN, in early 2015 — a year and a half after EBS started to deploy its “latency floor” on Aug 19, 2013. Similar to EBS, Thomson Reuters plans to randomize order processing for at least three milliseconds during the pilot phase. But, unlike EBS, the company will apply randomization only to taker (aggressive) order submissions, not to maker (passive) orders or order cancellations.
Opinion: Thomson Reuters’ tip-off that only the taker order submissions will be delayed seems to indicate that the order matching industry finally came to the realization that delaying maker orders and cancellations harms liquidity (see also May 30, 2014 and May 8, 2014).
Somewhat incongruously, Phil Weisberg, global head of FX at Thomson Reuters, said at a recent (2013) conference that he has always thought of randomization of orders “as a bug, not a feature” (see James Sinclair, Aug 1, 2013).
“If you’re worried about the liquidity impact, you don’t randomize the cancellation orders, but only the taking of orders and possibly the making of them as well.” But, he goes on to say that, nevertheless, “Randomising cancellation orders has the biggest impact on HFTs, as the success of one of their favored strategies – quote matching – depends on a trader’s ability to cancel orders faster than others can.”
Opinion: Larry Harris is right on both counts. But the most important points remain unsaid. Firstly, delaying cancellations hurts all market makers equally, whether HFT or not, by making them vulnerable to quote sniping. Secondly, randomizing taker orders enables everybody, not just HFTs, to be a successful quote sniper–it levels the sniping field. Thus, random order delay scheme (when applied to all order messages) is a double whammy to liquidity.
May 8, 2014: Thomas Peterffy presents to SEC the Interactive Brokers Group Proposal to Address High Frequency Trading. The proposal would impose random delays of up to 200 ms on taker transactions only on all equity and options trading venues. More…
Peterffy recommends “that all U.S. equity and option trading venues be mandated to hold any order that would remove liquidity for a random period of time lasting between 10 and 200 milliseconds before releasing it to the matching engine.”
Opinion: This recommendation goes further than any implementation of Larry Harris’ random order delay scheme (ParFX, EBS, or Thompson Reuters). The magnitude of the delay (200 milliseconds) is truly enormous, easily noticeable even to a human trader. Although the proposal seems self-serving (coming from a traditional market making firm), it actually follows a reasonable modification of the original Harris proposal that mitigates its anti-liquidity effects by applying delays to taker order submissions only (not to maker order submissions or cancellations).
May 6, 2014: The European Financial Transaction Tax proposal refuses to die. Ten member states issue a Joint Statement on FTT. More…
The statement is unspecific and says that “It is evident that complex issues have arisen” but pledges that “the first step should be implemented at the latest on 1st January 2016”. Slovenia did not sign the statement, leaving the group of ten PMS with only one vote above the required minimum of nine EU member states.
For a balanced summary, see Latest Developments Regarding the Proposed European Union Financial Transaction Tax, May 9, 2014. The United Kingdom’s attempt to derail the proposal at an early stage, via a legal challenge, was dismissed on Apr 30, 2014. The current plan of the Participating Member States is to work on a “progressive” implementation of the FTT. Fixed-income products, for example, would not be taxed initially. There has also been a suggestion that the minimum rate of tax might be ten times lower than originally proposed – namely 0.01% instead of 0.1%.
Apr 15, 2014: European Parliament adopts Markets in Financial Instruments Directive and Regulation (MiFID II/MiFIR). The legislation proposes strict rules on HFT trading, including requirements that automated traders be authorized and regulated, that they reveal and test their algorithms, and that market makers provide liquidity on a consistent basis. It also sets standards meant to prevent small tick sizes and to limit HFT order-to-trade ratios. More…
The HFT provisions of MiFID II are based on ESMA’s Automated Trading Guidelines that went into effect in May 2012. ESMA Discussion Paper is published on May 22, 2014. On the basis of the responses received, a consultation paper will be published in Q1 2015. EU member states are required to implement MiFID II in their national legislations by June 2016. The legislation will be applied across EU by January 2017.
At the same time, European Parliament adopts Market Abuse Directive and Regulation (CSMAD/MAR) which strengthens the existing 2003 Market Abuse Directive by addressing specific HFT strategies (for example, “quote stuffing”) and explicitly banning manipulation of benchmarks (such as LIBOR). The legislation will go into effect by July 2016.
Opinion: The MiFID II legislation is wide-ranging and quite revolutionary as far as market regulations go. Of course, ESMA (European Securities and Markets Authority) had the benefit of having been able to observe the effects of inadequate regulation of the U.S. equities markets and Congress’ and SEC’s inability/unwillingness to fix it.
Some initial proposals were rejected by ESMA, such as a minimum half-second order “resting time” or a ban on customers using their brokers’ exchange membership to trade directly on the market (“sponsored naked access”).
Individual EU member states are free to impose tougher HFT regulations, such as Germany’s High Frequency Trading Act (effective May 15, 2013) that makes HFT a licensed activity, or Italian Financial Transactions Tax (effective Sep 2, 2013) that imposes an HFT tax of 0.02% on modifications and cancellations of HFT orders.
Mar 31, 2014: Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt is published. The book describes the stock market plagued by conflicts of interest that benefit high-frequency traders and harms ordinary investors. It gains enormous notoriety by implying that the U.S. stock market has been “rigged” and triggers several congressional hearings on high-speed trading. More…
You probably read “Flash Boys”, otherwise you would not be reading this post. But, if you did not, read at least the thoughtful review by John Lanchester in London Review of Books — you will save a lot of time. Here is a quote from that review that introduces the main problem, eventually solved by the hero, Brad Katsuyama: “Flash Boys is a number of things, one of the most important being an exposition of exactly what is going on in the stock market; it’s a one-stop shop for an explanation of high-frequency trading (…). The book reads like a thriller, and indeed is organized as one, featuring a hero whose mission is to solve a mystery. The hero is a Canadian banker called Brad Katsuyama, and the mystery is, on the surface of it, a simple one. Katsuyama’s job involved buying and selling stocks. The problem was that when he sat at his computer and tried to buy a stock, its price would change at the very moment he clicked to execute the trade. The apparent market price was not actually available. He raised the issue with the computer people at his bank, who first tried to blame him, and then when he demonstrated the problem – they watched while he clicked ‘Enter’ and the price changed – went quiet.”
There are many positive reviews of the book, along with some harsh criticisms (see, for example, Matthew Philips in Bloomberg Businessweek, Charles Gasparino in New York Post, Larry Tabb in TabbFORUM, or this Amazon review). The Modern Markets Initiative (an HFT advocacy group) site maintains a long list of video clips upholding virtues of HFT, many of them critical of the Lewis’ book.
Opinion: My main (additional) criticism is that Michael Lewis, in his attempt to deepen the thrill and mystery, makes his heroes appear dull-witted. To illustrate this, here is just one passage (selected out of many similar ones) which describes the moment of Brad Katsuyama’s key insight: “The increments of time involved were absurdly small: In theory, the shortest travel time, from Brad’s desk to the BATS exchange in Weehawken, was about 2 milliseconds, and the slowest, from Brad’s desk to Carteret, was around 4 milliseconds.” This meant that exchanges in Weehawken and Carteret would receive Brad’s orders 2 milliseconds apart and (as discovered later by the heroes) allow the HFTs to react in Carteret on the information that they gained when the initial order was received 2 milliseconds earlier in Weehawken.
Well, the “absurdly small” two milliseconds worth of human time is actually a whole lot of computer time: two million nanoseconds. Starting in 1986 (when Brad Katsuyama was in primary school), retired Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, US national icon, toured the country educating young people and businessmen on the value of nanosecond. At her lectures, she would distribute 30 cm (about one foot) pieces of wire that represented the furthest distance that information could travel in one nanosecond. She would also suggest that programmers hang a one-microsecond-worth loop (984 feet) of cable around their necks so that “they know what they throw away when they throw away a microsecond”. Thus, one would expect that, three decades later, every child knows that two milliseconds is a very, very long time in computer terms. Moreover, every teenager knows that her smartphone processor runs at 1 GHz or better, which means that it executes about one processor instruction–a “blink of computer’s eye”–per nanosecond. Using the blink metaphor, 2 milliseconds of computer time equal about 55.5 hours of human time (2 million blinks at 0.1 sec per human blink). That’s enough of human time to ponder a trading decision, have ten long conferences, and then send a messenger by foot from Weehawken to Carteret. My point is that people like Brad Katsuyama (the Global Head of Electronic Sales and Trading at RBC Capital Markets) should live by this metaphor and should be able not only to quickly solve the problem he discovered, but to predict that the latency arbitrage problem must exist in the first place, while using only basic logic and the faith that human greed will explore every opportunity to make a buck.
In general, any rational person–for example, an SEC regulator–should know that a market regulation that allows multiple exchanges (Regulation ATS), continuous time trading, and that mandates order execution at the “universal” National Best Bid and Offer price (NBBO, which is at the heart of the Regulation NMS) is self-contradictory; see Einstein’s relativity of simultaneity established in 1905. In 2014, the fastest trading algorithms, implemented on FPGAs, take only 650 nanoseconds (less than a microsecond) to make a trading decision. But it takes at least 100,000 nanoseconds for the information to travel at the speed of light the 20 miles between Weehawken and Carteret (and much longer in practice). So any concept of the “best price” available to all traders at the same time is utterly silly. It is straightforward to brainstorm and enumerate all the basic ways that a trader could take advantage of this regulatory contradiction, something that the Flash Boys’ heroes eventually do when designing the new IEX venue. (Advice to US SEC: hire a physicist to review your regulations!)
At the core, the story of Brad Katsuyama is similar to Haim Bodek’s and covers events that ocurred roughly at the same time (culminating around 2009). In each case, a very competent, professional equities trader is greatly surprised by certain fundamental rules of the game that are well known and widely used by the HFTs. But Katsuyama’s solution is much more radical and intrepid: he changes the fundamental rules of the game by creating the IEX exchange. There, he uses the same laws of physics that bit him to protect his customers from effects of latency arbitrage.
Katsuyama’s solution doesn’t eliminate all the perceived ills of HFT and does not scale up well from it’s use at a single exchange. In my view, the only rational way to achieve the noble goal of having one National Price that’s available to all at the same time, while preventing multi-venue latency arbitrage and assuring fair distribution of spoils is the concept of synchronized markets (aka frequent auctions). The concept has been championed enthusiastically in recent years by Chris Sparrow and Eric Budish et al.
For an interesting early reaction, see The Economist’s article The end of the street (which reads a bit like a NYSE obituary).
Opinion: ICE is an unbelievably successful and entrepreneurial company, see Intercontinental Exchange – Mergers and Acquisitions.
Sep 18, 2013: In a well-publicized and hotly debated incident, information about the Federal Reserve’s decision to maintain bond buying program (the “no-taper announcement”) travels from Fed’s safe “lockup room” in Washington to New York and Chicago in zero milliseconds, thus contradicting Einstein’s special relativity theory. More…
The incident was analyzed in a Dec 4, 2013 paper by Quincy Data researchers who looked at microsecond-granularity timestamps to confirm the irregularities.
Opinion: For the first time ever, U.S. regulators had to seriously consider the speed of light limitations. Although the incident was never adequately explained by the Fed, it seems that the news leaked from the Fed’s media lockup room a few minutes before the scheduled release time; this allowed a news distributor to program its servers in NJ and Illinois to distribute the news within the first millisecond after the announcement’s official release time. On October 25, 2013, the Fed announced it would add an internet kill switch and other measures to prevent future leaks of FOMC news announcements.
Sep 16, 2013: A runaway algo at Black Phoenix Research, one of Rabobank‘s FX Prime Broker customers, accumulates a very large position that “breaks the house” by exhausting some of the global bank’s daily interbank credit limits. More…
Rabobank is a Dutch bank with a global presence and an excellent reputation, rated in Feb 2013 Global Finance as the 10-th safest bank in the world. Until 2014, the bank offered FX prime broking services (that allow its customers to trade in the global FX spot markets in the bank’s name).
Black Phoenix Research is a relatively small Chicago prop firm, an offshoot of Last Atlantis Capital Management (a firm that was discredited by being kicked out of National Futures Association in 2009 and an unsavory lawsuit in 2012). Black Phoenix uses Rabobank as its FX prime broker and Integral Development as its FX aggregator.
On Sep 16, 2013, the Black Phoenix’ runaway algo unintentionally exploits a weakness in Rabobank’s risk control procedures. The glitch exhausts some of the banks credit limits and causes up to $15M in loses for the bank. (This could not come at a worse time. A month later, in an unrelated development, Rabobank gets slapped with $643M in fines for false reporting and manipulation of LIBOR over a period of 6 years; Rabobank’s CEO resigns shortly thereafter.) In 2014, Rabobank severs its relationship with Integral Development aggregator and exits the FXPB business for good.
Opinion: The way prime broking works is that the customer (a hedge fund or a prop shop) posts a collateral with his prime broker, who sets customer’s trading net position limits based on margin ratios for the instruments traded by the customer. There are, however, big differences between equities and FX prime broking. First, the margin ratios in the unregulated forex market are huge by comparison to equities (typically 1:50 or 1:100).
Second, where an equities broker handles and routes orders directly on behalf of the customer, and thus is able to control customer’s total net exposure on a pre-trade basis, things work differently in the FX markets. The FX prime broker is usually a global bank that simply allows the customer to access the FX spot market in its name through a multitude of independent and competing venues — EBS, Thomson Reuters, Hotspot, Currenex, FXall, bank portals, etc. Depending on the venue, the bank may be able to set some pre-trade limits for the customer on each venue, but — because it does not actually handle or route customer’s orders — it cannot set a pre-trade limit on customer’s total net exposure.
As a compromise, the FX prime broker bank often assigns each customer huge pre-trade limits on each venue and then monitors the customer’s total net exposure using post-trade reports. Unfortunately, post-trade notifications are always slightly delayed and may take as much as 15 minutes in the worst case. To make matters even worse, many FX prime broker banks still use manual control procedures that take additional time before customer’s trading is finally halted. These half-measures were designed (and sufficient) at the time when most of the prime customers were smaller banks trading on manual workstations. But this mechanism is completely inadequate in today’s HFT scenarios, especially when faced with runaway strategies.
Rabobank (like most other FXPB banks) did not pay enough attention to the hypothetical risks of a customer’s buggy code accumulating a huge position in a few seconds. And this is exactly what happened on Sep 16, 2013. Although Black Phoenix was not a real HFT player, its runaway trading strategy turned it into one. The details are unclear; my best guess is that the strategy traded furiously until it exhausted Rabobank’s daily credit limits with its market-making counterparties. This would indicate that Black Phoenix ended with a position of around $10B (for a firm with assets of a few million dollars). The runaway activity moved the market, so unwinding the position was costly, aggravated by Rabobank’s exhausted interbank credit limits. The saving grace was that it is much more difficult to move the $2T/day FX market rates than it is to move individual stock rates. (Compared to Knight Group’s $440M loss, Rabobank’s $15M seems almost insignificant, in spite of the fact that the total accumulated positions were comparable.)
Solution: One solution to the FX Prime Broker rogue algo risk problem is to use the equities broker model where the prime bank controls submission and execution of all orders submitted by its customer. Unfortunately, this can be very expensive in terms of keeping up with the quickly evolving, varied, and unregulated FX trading venue technology and quickly leads to requirements for best price order routing, etc. An alternative is to use a third-party FX market access point that implements a real-time pre-trade exposure monitoring and requires each customer to use it. This works especially well for so-called prime-of-prime second-tier broker banks that specialize in FX, offer larger margins, and provide direct market access (DMA).
The pioneer in this space is Saxo Bank which launched its Saxo Prime business in partnership with MarketFactory only in Jan 2013. In Apr 2014, the bank hired Rabobank’s Peter Plester, the FXPB veteran who learned a lot from the Black Phoenix glitch. Saxo is the first FX prime bank that requires its customers to use a single FX market access point with real-time pre-trade exposure limit monitoring. MarketFactory provides the technology (disclaimer: I am a cofounder of the company) through its FX Limit Monitor.
Sep 2, 2013: Italy becomes the first country in the world to levy financial transaction “Tobin tax” that specifically targets HFT. More…
History: On Feb 14, 2013, the European Commission proposed a financial transaction tax limited to a group of eleven member states, including Italy, that is working its way to a possible implementation in 2016. But, on Dec 24, 2012, Italy jumped the gun and approved a wide-ranging FTT legislation as part of its Stability Law. In the first phase, on Mar 1, 2013, a general FTT 0.22% tax was applied to all equity trades in large-cap stocks causing a significant drop in Italian stock market volumes. The HFT tax constitutes the second phase of the legislation.
According to the HFT tax, order modifications and cancellations are taxed at 0.02% when they occur within a timeframe shorter than 0.5 second, once above a daily threshold of 60% of transmitted orders. Unlike the general FTT tax, the HFT tax applies regardless of where the transaction is executed, or the country of residence of the counterparty.
Opinion: Italy has no real “HFT problem”, and no HFT industry that’s worth taxing. This tax appears to be a “sin tax” that is easily imposed and will bring some (meager) revenues to a cash-strapped country. The tax is silly because it penalizes HFT at a time when its harms and benefits are not yet fully understood.
Aug 19, 2013: EBS/ICAP Forex matching platform begins deploying a random order delay scheme (the “latency floor”) designed to mitigate the HFT advantage. More…
The EBS pilot begins with Australian dollar (AUD/USD). In Sep 2013, the pilot is extended to Swiss Frank (USD/CHF). After a period of analysis and testing, in Feb 2014, the latency floor is applied to all active EBS currency pairs ending (on Mar 3, 2014) with the EBS crown jewel EUR/USD pair.
The EBS latency floor scheme delays all order messages (including submissions and cancellations) by a random delay of up to 3 milliseconds. The scheme uses batching intervals and works as follows: At the start of each batching interval, its length is selected at random between 1 and 3 milliseconds. All order messages received by EBS (from a specific city/region) during the interval are captured (on their way to the matching engine) and grouped in rows by the sender id (with message order preserved within each row). The rows are randomly shuffled. Finally, messages from all rows are submitted to the matching engine in a round robin fashion in a single burst.
Opinion: This ingenious scheme does not require the complex record keeping required by ParFX’s “green room”. The consequences for an EBS customer are that it does not pay to reduce her order latency unless she can improve it by at least 3 milliseconds. The takeaway is “stay/get colocated; beyond that, the latency race is unproductive”. The average delay applied to an order message by this scheme is only 1 millisecond. Thus, although EBS applies delays to order cancellations (as does ParFX), the resulting liquidity reduction is fairly insignificant.
Jul 7, 2013: Eric Budish, Peter Cramton, and John Shim publish an influential study of a novel market type where (very) frequent auctions are used instead of the current continuous matching mechanism. They prove that the continuous market forces a latency arms race whose cost is ultimately borne by investors (via wider spreads and thinner markets) and is largerly eliminated in the proposed frequent auctions market model. More…
In the first part of their lengthy article The High-Frequency Trading Arms Race: Frequent Batch Auctions as a Market Design Response (first version published Jul 7, 2013, see here for the latest) the researchers use historical market data to show that, in continuous markets, correlation betweeen similar instruments breaks down completely at small timescales. This creates latency arbitrage opportunities forcing a latency arms race among HFTs. Significantly, the arb opportunities remain constant in the face of constantly improving IT speeds.
Next, a simple abstract model of continuous limit order book (CLOB) market is defined and several remarkable propositions are formally proved about the Nash equilibrium of the model: (P1) All other things being equal (volatility, etc.), the market bid-ask spread is proportional to the cost of implementing the high-speed trading. (P4) The bid-ask spread and the prize associated with the latency arms race are invariant to both the cost of high speed trading and the magnitude of speed differences between the fast and the slow traders. (P5) HFT market makers are faced with the Prisoner’s Dilemma; they would be equally well-off if they would all commit not to invest in speed technology–but, as each individual market maker has an incentive to invest in speed, this arrangement does not form equilibrium; this total “unproductive” expenditure on speed is ultimately borne by the investors.
In the last and most significant part, authors define and analyze the frequent batch auctions as a possible “market design response to HFT”. Frequent batch auctions are uniform-price (each auction clears at a single optimal match price) blind (order activity is not visible during the batch interval) double auctions (multiple buyers and sellers) conducted at frequent but discrete time intervals, for example, every second (although intervals as small as a millisecond would be possible). Orders, aggregated by price, as well as the clearing price, are announced publicly at the conclusion of each batch interval. The authors prove a number of things regarding this market model–in general, market makers compete here on price rather that on speed. In particular, quote sniping is largerly eliminated, bid-offer spreads are reduced, depth (liquidity) is increased, and social costs of the speed race are minimized. One material handicap is an increased delay suffered by the liquidity takers.
The key study deals with an abstract simple centralized market. But in May 2014, the same group of researchers publishes a sequel article Implementation Details for Frequent Batch Auctions: Slowing Down Markets to the Blink of an Eye, where they propose an implementation of frequent auction venues that agree with the SEC Reg NMS and could coexist with CLOB venues in the US stock market.
The key study is featured in many articles. See, for example, Frequent but inefficient (Economist, Nov 29, 2014).
For an opposing view, see the Nov 18, 2014 post Synchronized Frequent Batch Auctions: A Rebuttal by D. Keith Ross. (Note: It seems that the author did not fully understand the Budish et al. proposal — the paragraph ending with “Same race; different finish line” indicates that he missed the key features of the Budish frequent auctions: they are “blind” and “pro-rata” — not based on time priority.)
Opinion: The key study is ground-breaking in its formal comparison of continuous and discrete time trading. It demonstrates a number of laws that are fundamental enough to invoke esteem not unlike the one felt for Einstein’s thought experiments (exaggeration intended): if it’s so damn simple, how come no one thought about it before? Still, human behavior is much more complex than physics. One should be cautious of models with simplified assumptions, which–although necessary to allow a theoretical treatment–may omit some fundamental considerations (see, for example, the concept of taker-as-maker which caused EBS to reverse its price granularity decision on Sep 17, 2012). The simplifications adopted in this study are quite severe. Most ominously, the Nash equilibrium–used to formally prove the main results–does not generally apply in real-life markets, where participants do not usually know equilibrium strategies of the other players.
Ideally, one would like to see a realistic Monte Carlo type simulation of the CLOB market with (at least some of) its complexity, defined by tweakable parameters, where the correctness could be empirically confirmed based on historical data, followed by similar simulation of the frequent auctions market. (In my view, every regulation should be first optimized in this fashion, and only then tried in limited pilot evaluations.) Shameless admission: I am very interested in a keen sponsor of this approach.
Regarding the possible introduction/implementation of frequent auction venues, I think that one should first define the “ideal” discrete high frequency auction market, before attempting to force the concept into the obsolete world of Reg NMS which does not befit even the current CLOB market that it was created for.
May 15, 2013: German High Frequency Trading Act (Hochfrequenzhandelsgesetz) goes into effect, paving the way to similar MiFID II requirements. More…
The German government started working on the HFT Act in July 2012. The law enters into force on 15th May 2013, with an implementation period of six to nine months; it will be fully implemented by Feb 14, 2014.
The HFT Act mandates licensing and supervision of all automated trading (including prop shops), electronic identification of trading algos, risk controls, and management of order-to-trade ratios and tick sizes. Most of these items appear in similar form in drafts of MiFID II/MiFIR or other European legislations. However, those are not expected to be implemented before late 2016.
May 1, 2013: Wall Street Journal unveils a CME “loophole,” where high-speed traders are notified about their own order execution before the rest of the market sees that data. More…
In the page one Wall Street Journal article “High-Speed Traders Exploit Loophole“, the authors state with a straight face: “High-speed traders are using a hidden facet of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s computer system to trade on the direction of the futures market before other investors get the same information. Using powerful computers, high-speed traders are trying to profit from their ability to detect when their own orders for certain commodities are executed a fraction of a second before the rest of the market sees that data, traders say. The advantage often is just one to 10 milliseconds (…). All firms that connect directly to CME’s trading computers are able to get information ahead of the market when their trades are executed, firm officials say. But many companies are unaware of the advantage or choose not to use it, traders say, either because they don’t have the technology to take advantage of such tiny edges or employ different investing strategies.”
In a prompt and equally straight-faced response CME Group vows to shrink to “as close to zero as possible” the time advantage some investors gain from seeing trading data before the rest of the market.
Opinion: The WSJ article beats all banality records. The CME “loophole” described in the article is normal, logical, expected, and well established in the trading world — going back to the open outcry, voice-broker, and OTC practices. In simple terms, a trade is first done (which includes direct and private communication between trader submitting the order and the broker or execution venue), and only then the market data about the trade is distributed to other market participants. In all normal cases there is a slight delay between the first and the latter, which may be exploited by the trader to his advantage.
The post “Well known trading secrets become public” by Meanderful, explains all of this well and with only a minimum number of expletives.
The bottom line is that trader’s communications with the exchange are private until they are publicly announced by the exchange as market data. Going beyond the basic methods described in the WSJ article, consider the moment when a market order is sent by a trading algo (well before it is received by the exchange). The algo can use this information to predict the impact of the order on the future state of the market book — here, the trader’s algo actually beats the speed of light limitations. When a group of traders/algos share this private information with each other, they may gain considerable predictive capabilities, especially where the target venue is sufficiently remote (for example, when hedging on CME by NY/NJ firms, or when trading GBP on London’s Thomson Reuters exchange out of NY). The methods to do this right are non-trivial; see MarketFactory‘s 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,296,217, “Method and apparatus for enhancing market data feed using proprietary order flow“.
Apr 18, 2013: Tradition launches ParFX wholesale currency trading platform designed to curb the advantage of high-frequency traders. More…
ParFX is founded by ten global banks as a counterweight to EBS/ICAP and Thompson Reuters Forex matching platforms that banks consider overly HFT-permissive. The platform was renamed several times: from Pure FX (2010) to traFXpure (2012) to ParFX (2013). ParFX implements the random order delay scheme proposed by Larry Harris. A randomized pause of between 20 and 80 milliseconds is applied to all order messages, including cancellations. On Jan 23, 2014, ParFX opens its doors to hedge fund participation.
Opinion: The magnitude of the delay applied by ParFX is relatively huge. Where Harris’ 0-10 millisecond scheme aims only to eliminate the winner-take-all race among the HFTs, ParFX attempts to nearly eliminate any advantage of HFTs over banks. Incidentally, the large delay also eliminates any advantage of colocation. Most importantly, delaying cancellations makes ParFX market makers defenseless against quote sniping (even by slow players) and thus decreases liquidity. The random delay generation, handled by a “Green Room” module, is fairly complex because, although each order message is randomly delayed, the relative order of messages from an order source must be preserved (which means that the delays are not independently random).
Mar 5, 2013: Anatoly B. Schmidt, Taming HFT in the Multi-Dealer FX Market, FX Week (also here), proposes modifying trading rules so that certain HFT behaviors are allowed only as privileges that entail defined responsibilities. More…
Opinion: Schmidt’s proposal is made in the context of the Forex market, and, specifically, the EBS/ICAP trading system. Schmidt’s HFT characteristics do not apply in equities markets. But his general idea of dynamic tit-for-tat trading rules deserves consideration: An HFT earns the right to engage in certain “disruptive” behavior only if she provides certain “beneficial” services at (nearly) the same time. (One thing that comes to mind: allow quote sniping in return for providing liquidity–one can imagine several ways of achieving this.)
Feb 14, 2013: European Commission proposes an eleven-country €30 billion “Tobin tax” More…
History: On Sep 28, 2011, the European Commission issued a proposal for a pan-European system of financial transaction tax (the FTT Proposal). By July 2012 it became clear that the proposal would not gain unanimous support within EU. In Oct 2012 eleven member states (covering two-thirds of EU economic output) formally requested a common system of FTT within this group of states on the basis of enhanced cooperation procedure (where a group of at least nine EU member states is allowed to establish general rules without the other members being involved). On Jan 22, 2013, the European Council adopted decision authorizing the group to proceed with the introduction of FTT.
The new proposal levies 0.1 per cent on stock and bond trades and 0.01 per cent on derivatives transactions involving a trader in the tax area, or trading on behalf of a client based in the tax area. In a revision that strengthens the original pan-EU FTT Proposal, the tax will now also be applied to a transaction based on where the financial instrument was issued, regardless of where it takes place. This wide net of taxation causes US as well as European countries which rejected the FTT, such as UK and Luxembourg, to strongly oppose the proposal.
Jan 2013: SEC rolls out the Market Information Data Analytics System (MIDAS). More…
For a recent semi-official view on the project see SEC’s MIDAS program highlights how to do big data. The system was created by SEC when it became clear that the organization had no capabilities to analyze market anomalies such as the Flash Crash of May 6, 2010. MIDAS was built in record time on a small budget by Tradeworx, an HFT company, that initially hosted the system in the Amazon Web Services cloud. MIDAS collects billions of records per day from all national equity exchanges, each time-stamped to the microsecond. For the first time in history, the SEC has access to data about every displayed order posted on the national exchanges in near real-time.
Dec 27, 2012: Larry Harris publishes an influential Financial Times article Stop the high-frequency trader arms race where he proposes to add a random delay of up to 10 milliseconds to all order messages. More…
Prof. Harris states: “A small and easy to implement change in exchange trading rules can substantially reduce the incentives to acquire the expensive trading technologies now required to compete successfully as an HFT. Regulatory authorities could require that all exchanges delay the processing of every posting, cancelling and taking instruction they receive by a random period of between 0 and 10 milliseconds.”
An expanded version of the article appears as Mar 2013 paper What to Do about High-Frequency Trading in the Financial Analysts Journal.
Opinion: The random order delay idea breaks the sacred price-time priority that was the basis of fair markets for millennia. In my opinion, it is acceptable to remove the time priority (see, for example, Frequent Auctions), but not to randomly reverse it, even by nanoseconds. But, besides, the idea is not as “easy to implement” as it may seem: adding a random delay to each order message must still preserve the order of messages, so cancellation of an order is not processed before its submission, for example. Finally — and worst of all — delaying order cancellation makes quote sniping easier than ever; this makes the HFT’s cardinal sin cheap and available to all, thus obviously hurting liquidity. Harris eventually recognizes this on May 30, 2014
In Jan 2013 the collected writings are published in a book form as The Problem of HFT. Among some new material, “Chapter 6. Reforming the National Market System” deserves particular attention. It proposes a 10-step plan for strengthening the operation of the US equities marketplace. He says: “I assert that there is a straightforward path to correcting the system. The industry took a wrong turn when Regualation NMS was implemented market-wide in 2007. To address the market structure head on, we need to reassess Regulation NMS in the context of its original purpose and intent — to bind a fragmented marketplace into an effective national market system that serves long term investors.”
Opinion: As I mention later, Haim Bodek’s story is somewhat similar to that of Brad Katsuyama’s in “Flash Boys”. In each case, a brilliant, professional trader is greatly surprised by the rules of the game that are well known to the more-inner-circle-than-thou traders.
In Haim’s case it’s all about complex and obscure order types devised by the stock exchanges to cater to their most profitable customers, the HFTs. The special order types are not “secret”–they are simply not publicized and not even well documented by the exchanges. (Allegorically, this made me think of high-stakes blackjack tables in casinos, where faster shuffles are used, where joining a game in progress is disallowed, and where concealed restrooms are placed suitably close, so that one can be back in the game before the shuffle is done. You learn these elite rules only by playing high stakes, by observing carefully what is going on, and by asking the pit boss for the password to the private restroom!)
Bodek’s posts and disclosures induce exchanges to become more transparent. Nasdaq elaborates its order types on Nov 30, 2012.
In my wiew, Bodek’s 10-step plan for reforming the National Market System is very practical, but fairly limited. It represents the best that can be done without radically rearchitecting the NMS.
Sep 17, 2012: EBS/ICAP Forex matching platform reverses its recent price decimalization in all currency pairs. More…
Only 18 months after decimalizing Forex spot prices on Mar 7, 2011, EBS reverts to trading in full and half-pips. All EBS liquid currency pairs–including EUR/USD, USD/JPY, USD/CHF, and nine others–trade now in half-pips; other pairs go back to full pip pricing.
EBS decimalization in 2011 created a confusing scenario where the major banks first unanimously approved the decimalization (vital for bank Forex taker-only portals that competed to quote in tenths of a pip), and then demanded a reversion to larger ticks (vital for big time bank manual traders) presaging top-level management changes at EBS.
Opinion: For the first time in history, a major Forex exchange increases price ticks in world’s most liquid instruments.
The change is billed as anti-HFT and is done under pressure from large banks for the benefit of EBS’ most important customers: the manual bank traders, still responsible for roughly half of EBS dealt volumes.
Now, it is known that increasing tick size in a liquid instrument widens the bid-ask spread and thus benefits the market makers and disadvantages the takers. It is also known that there are no professional manual market makers in ultra-liquid markets. Manual bank Forex spot traders are driven by “natural need”, and never place two-sided passive limit orders; they are natural takers, not makers. So, why would they want larger tick sizes?
To answer this question, it is important to understand the large manual transaction scenario in an ultra-liquid market. What’s special about an ultra-liquid symbol (such as EUR/USD or AAPL), that trades many times per second, is that an aggressive market order (a take) may often be replaced with a quickly executed passive limit order (a make). That is, rather than paying the ask (say) price, the would-be-taker joins the current bid and gets done within seconds as a maker, saving money that’s proportional to the bid-ask spread and the amount traded. Let’s call this the taker-as-maker technique. It works wonders for manual Forex spot bank traders trading amounts larger than the nominal 1M of base currency. As natural takers, they are attracted to lowest spread venues: FxAll is great, zero spread would be even better. But on high-volume Forex exchange platforms like EBS and Thomson Reuters that allow customers to make prices, the taker-as-maker technique offers the effect of a negative spread–taker heaven!
So, let’s see how decimalization affects a big time Forex spot manual bank trader using the taker-as-maker technique. To begin with, note that large ticks force larger bid-ask spread, concentrate liquidity at the best bid-ask price edge, and make prices more stable in a second-by-second timescale. Now imagine that you are a manual trader out to buy (say) a largish amount of an ultra-liquid symbol, and that you decide to trade time for a better price according to the taker-as-maker technique. With large ticks (no decimalization), you join the solidly populated best bid, wait a short time, and (usually) get done at the maker’s price, saving money equal to the (large) spread times the (large) amount. With decimalization, the best that can happen is that you get done equally quickly but you save less money because of the smaller spread. Regrettably, in a typical case, your presence is noted right away in the thinly populated best bid, small guys and HFTs jump the bid queue for a tenth of a pip and block you from being on the best price. You may never get done at your original bid; you will likely give up and move your bid up slightly, reducing your already slim (“decimated”) maker advantage. You will eventually get done at the worst possible time, when the market moves down and catches you–the slow manual guy–before you cancel.
Finally, let’s see what makes the taker-as-maker technique work. It requires a matching venue with sufficiently large dealing volumes to produce attractively short maker waiting times. This, in turn, requires a large number of bona fide aggressive takers (willing to cross the spread in return for instant execution). This requires attractive narrow spreads. Which require fine price granularity. Which causes all the small tick “decimalization” problems described above. You see the vicious circle.
All things being equal (tick size, volatility), there is a delicate balance between the taker-as-maker waiting time and the trader’ willingness to cross the spread as a taker. The longer the waiting queue, the more compelled the trader is to pay the spread thereby reducing the queue length (see The Difficulty of Trading Ultra-Liquid Stocks, Pragma Securities). The problem unique to Forex is that the tick size is not regulated: decimalized taker-only portals compete with EBS which offers the taker-as-maker mechanism. Impatient taker-as-makers will cross the spread, but may do it on a competing, lower (decimalized) spread venue.
Manual traders’ frustration with Mar 7, 2011 decimalization forced EBS to revert to larger ticks. But to remain attractive to aggressive takers, EBS made the Solomonic decision to restore price granularity to half pips (not full pips which was the norm before decimalization). In my view, even half pip ticks may be too large to compete on spread with decimalized taker-only portals in times of record low Forex volatility. (When volatility increases, portals increase their spreads to avoid being sniped by HFTs, allowing the natural interest “reference venues”–such as EBS and Thomson Reuters–to become competitive again.) Perhaps stock market-style taker-maker rebates would help…?
According to SEC investigation findings, Knight’s smart order router software that was modified to work with NYSE’s Retail Liquidity Program was incompletely deployed causing a “repurposed” flag to execute code that was unused for 9 years. The code went into an uncontrolled loop buying and selling securities when responding to routine requests. A mere 212 Knight-originated orders resulted in 4 million executions in 154 stocks for more than 397M shares resulting in positions worth $6.65 billion. The glitch was one of the costliest computer bugs ever.
The incident reveals a number of weaknesses in the software development and computer center operations of one of the largest market maker firms (17% of NYSE and Nasdaq orders, 10% of total US stock market’s dollar volume). The company receives emergency funding that averts a bankrupcy, but ends up being acquired by Getco LLC in Dec 2012.
The incident illustrates vividly the possibility that a single component (here, a smart order router) may cause a loss that ruins a major financial company.
Opinion: Almost all early media reports regarding the cause of the glitch are wrong. To see a deeper picture, read the SEC report that took over a year to prepare, or see the more digestible comments here or there.
From a dev-ops professional point of view, the scenario looks very scary; a true tragicomedy of errors. First, the Knight’s software is changed to accommodate new requirements (RPL). A global (“Power Peg”) configuration flag bit, not used for years, is “repurposed” to control the new behavior (this is common when modifying legacy software because it saves the coding effort needed to set and control a new flag). On Aug 1, 2012, the new software is deployed to only seven out of eight Knight’s SMARS servers. The one with the old Power Peg code responds dutifully by buying (or selling) shares until the accumulated result reaches the requested amount – except that the accumulated result is no longer being updated in the code that was dormant for 9 years. This means that a single order triggers a virtually unlimited number of “child” orders.
The story reveals a number of cardinal Knight’s dev-ops deficiencies:
- There are no controls to guarantee that any new software is consistently deployed.
- There are no real-time monitoring mechanisms that could trace back the unusual trading activity to a particular server.
- There is no global kill switch.
- The rollback procedures are deficient (the software is rolled-back, but the system configuration is not restored — so now all eight SMARS servers go bonkers).
May 18, 2012: The social networking company Facebook (FB) holds its initial public offering, the largest in US history, with initial market capitalization set at $104B. The FB IPO is marred by serious NASDAQ technical glitches. More…
Start of FB trading is delayed from 11:00 until 11:30am due to technical problems with the NASDAQ exchange. Once trading starts, Nasdaq fails to acknowledge trades for another three hours.
Investors, including the Wall Street banks involved in the FB IPO, claim losses over $500M but settle eventually for a mere $62M. In addition, SEC imposes on Nasdaq a $10M fine, the largest ever paid by an exchange. The SEC faults Nasdaq’s poor systems and decision-making that led to costly trading delays.
Opinion: The Facebook IPO problems are generally similar to the BATS IPO glich, affecting the transition from the initial IPO auction to continuous trading. According to this WSJ article: “The day of Facebook’s IPO, Nasdaq’s computer systems got caught in a loop while lining up orders before the company’s shares started trading. The opening of trading in Facebook shares was stalled by half an hour. For almost three hours after that, Nasdaq failed to send order confirmations to brokers, causing uncertainty about who held what positions.”
Embarassingly, unlike the BATS IPO fiasco that was caused by a one-time careless software deployment, FB IPO glitch is due to a material design flaw in the in the NASDAQ IPO Cross software that debuted in 2006. The bug causes deadly race conditions preventing the start of continuous trading. After the botched Facebook IPO Nasdaq modifies the IPO Cross process so it no longer accepts orders after the auction’s final calculation has been made (duh!).
Mar 23, 2012: BATS IPO fails because of a BATS exchange software glitch. More…
BATS (Better Alternative Trading System) was founded in 2005 by Tradebot‘s founder David Cummings to counter the emerging NYSE and Nasdaq duopoly. The new exchange offered lower fees and openly catered to HFT clients. It earned good reputation for efficient low-latency executions and excellent reliability (99.94% uptime as of 2012).
BATS decided to handle its own IPO and list its own shares (at that time, all US public companies were listed on venues owned by either NYSE Euronext or Nasdaq OMX). Unfortunately, the BATS’ matching engine handling the IPO became crippled by a software bug. The BATS share market price, unsupported by the disabled BATS server, quickly plummeted from $15.25 to $0.0002 before the trading in BATS symbol was halted. The company’s IPO was cancelled and postponed indefinitely.
Opinion: The software bug was never adequately explained by BATS. The best that we can tell is that it affected the code that controlled transition between the initial IPO auction and the subsequent continuous trading of the BATS symbol. The bug was caused by “a unique scenario of different option/order types”. Embarassingly from design/dev/ops point of view, the bug incapacitated an entire BATS matching engine (one of 12), responsible for matching all symbols in the range A – BF, including AAPL. This happenned despite the IPO code being “something we’ve tested more thoroughly than anything else in our history,” according to Joe Ratterman, the company’ CEO. (In my view, the worst mistake was to run the BATS IPO as the very first public company listing on BATS — why would you not try to run an IPO for another company first — just to make sure you can handle it?)
Some additional details about the BATS IPO price sliding down to near zero may be gleaned from Nanex Research’s report and the Zero Hedge article insinuating a conspiracy. (In my view, once the BATS’ matching engine failed, anything that subsequently affected BATS’ share price on other venues should be completely disregarded.)
Dec 5, 2011: Chris Sparrow begins a series of seminal TabbFORUM articles pointing out that all HFT issues are caused by fragmented markets operating in a continuous rather than discrete and synchronized fashion. More…
In The Failure of Continuous Markets (see also Journal of Trading), Sparrow, an authority on market structure, postulates that markets should move from the continuous to a quantized time regime. “Moving to a market in which executions only take place at prescribed, predetermined times is not necessarily simple but is simply necessary to restore fairness and confidence to equity trading.” To summarize his detailed description of the process, the synchronous market would function as a series of frequent auctions taking place once per second (or more frequently). Each auction would include all visible orders from all the venues. The results of each auction would be announced only after the matching was complete, giving every computer system sufficient time to leisurely digest the new market information and to react to it before the next auction. In the proposed scheme, the order submission time would not be considered in matching, but intra-venue matching would be given priority.
Sparrow follows his proposal with further posts: How to Control High Frequency Trading on Sep 12, 2012, and Eliminating ‘Unfairness’: Creating a Protocol for Synchronized Periodic Trading on Apr 21, 2014, which courageously details a possible synchronous matching protocol in a multi-venue setting.
On Jul 7, 2013, Eric Budish, Peter Cramton, and John Shim present a thorough analysis of this idea with a somewhat different proposal.
Opinion: I wholeheartedly embrace the general idea of synchronized high-frequency auctions. Regardless of the devilish details that still need to be worked out, synchronized trading would eliminate virtually all of the HFT behaviors that are generally detested by ordinary traders, market makers, and investors: inter-venue latency arbitrage, order front running, quote sniping, quote stuffing, crossed/locked markets, etc., etc. Instead of investing in the mindless speed race, the competition would focus on price and would involve traders that have the same information about the market price (but perhaps different — and asynchronous — information and views on the real world). An implementation of this idea would also simplify market data distribution, market auditing processes, and provide a true NBBO price.
Mar 7, 2011: EBS/ICAP Forex matching platform implements granular “decimalized” pricing in all currency pairs. More…
After a pilot that started in Aug 2010, decimalization is now implemented for all EBS currency pairs, including EUR/USD, USD/JPY, EUR/JPY, USD/CHF and EUR/CHF. (In Forex spot, “decimalization” refers to prices using an extra digit specifying tenths of a pip, for example, 1.23456 in EUR/USD. In the stock market this would correspond to a $100.00 stock trading with a price increment of one tenth of a cent.)
For a rare view of the difficult EBS market at the time, see Ecology of the Modern Institutional Spot FX: the EBS Market in 2011 by Anatoly Schmidt.
Opinion: According to EBS, the main reason for decimalization is that “it’s inevitable” as most Forex platforms have already implemented it, and because the new breed of customers (aggregators, HFTs, and smaller banks) desire it. EBS advisory board consisting of executives from major banks unanimously approved the change at a meeting in 2010. And yet, only 18 months after the change, on Sep 17, 2012, EBS will reverse itself under pressure from the same major banks. Thompson Reuters, EBS’ main competitor, will not decimalize its Forex spot prices.
Late 2010: Dark pools account for over 14% of U.S. equities market. More…
The total dark market (including dark pools, broker internalization, and dark orders on visible marketplaces) accounts for 40-50% of U.S. equities market. This share will increase very little in the next few years.
Jul 21, 2010: The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is signed into law. More…
Passed as a response to the Great Recession of 2008, it brought the most significant changes to financial regulation in the United States since the regulatory reform that followed the Great Depression in 1930’s. It made changes in the American financial regulatory environment that affect all federal financial regulatory agencies and almost every part of the nation’s financial services industry.
The Dodd-Frank Act has two provisions that affect high-frequency trading:
- The Volcker Rule which prohibits banks from proprietary trading.
- Prohibition of spoofing in commodities and futures markets (spoofing in equities is already prohibited under the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 and other regulation).
CFTC takes three years to issue specific guidelines regarding spoofing (May 20, 2013), defining spoofing as submitting limit orders with malevolent intent (scienter) to cancel the bid or offer before execution. Remarkably, “reckless trading, practices, or conduct” do not violate the rules.
The first case under the new powers is brought by CFTC against Panther Energy Trading and its owner, Michael Coscia on Jul 22, 2013.
Opinion: Ironically, both provisions above benefit the mainstream high-frequency traders:
- The effect of the Volcker Rule is to remove banks from competition against the specialized HFT companies such as Getco and others.
- Spoofing is a strategy used by some HFTs to exploit the common front-running logic used by other HFTs. See Spoofers Keep Markets Honest (John D. Arnold, Jan 23, 2015).
May 6, 2010 Flash Crash. Dow Jones Industrial Average falls over 1,000 points (9%) and then rebounds in about 15 minutes. More…
According to the Sep 30, 2010 CFTC and SEC report, many of the almost 8,000 individual equity securities and exchange traded funds traded that day suffer similar price declines and reversals. Some equities experience much more severe price moves. Thousands of trades in major stocks execute at insane prices of a penny or less or as high as $100,000. By the end of the day, major futures and equities indices recover to close down about 3% from the prior day.
CFTC and SEC spends nearly 5 months investigating what happened before it issues a a voluminous report on Sep30, 2010. (Most of this time is spent organizing and reconciling data from multiple sources exposing a glaring defficiency in SEC’s ability to act as a watchdog. This eventually leads to Project MIDAS deployed in Jan 2013.)
The CFTC and SEC report blames a single firm (identified by other sources as Waddell & Reed Financial) as a direct cause for the crash — a fact that is later disproved; otherwise, the report is deemed accurate. Here is a (much abbreviated) summary:
“May 6 started as an unusually turbulent day for the markets. By 2:30 p.m., the S&P 500 volatility index was up 22.5 percent from the opening level and selling pressure had pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average (“DJIA”) down about 2.5%.
At 2:32 p.m., against this backdrop of unusually high volatility and thinning liquidity, a large fundamental trader (a mutual fund complex) initiated a sell program to sell a total of 75,000 E-Mini contracts (valued at approximately $4.1 billion) as a hedge to an existing equity position. The “Sell Algorithm” used by the large trader was programmed to feed orders into the June 2010 E-Mini market with the target execution rate set to 9% of the trading volume calculated over the previous minute, but without regard to price or time. The Sell Algorithm executed the sell program extremely rapidly in just 20 minutes.
HFTs were the likely buyers of the initial batch of orders submitted by the Sell Algorithm, and, as a result, these buyers built up temporary long positions of a few thousands contracts. Then, between 2:41 p.m. and 2:44 p.m., HFTs aggressively sold about 2,000 E-Mini contracts in order to reduce their temporary long positions. At the same time, HFTs traded nearly 140,000 E-Mini contracts or over 33% of the total trading volume. This is consistent with the HFTs’ typical practice of trading a very large number of contracts, but not accumulating an aggregate inventory beyond a few thousand contracts in either direction.
The Sell Algorithm used by the large trader responded to the increased volume by increasing the rate at which it was feeding the orders into the market. (…) The combined selling pressure from the Sell Algorithm, HFTs and other traders drove the price of the E-Mini down approximately 3% in just four minutes from the beginning of 2:41 p.m. through the end of 2:44 p.m. During this same time cross-market arbitrageurs who did buy the E-Mini, simultaneously sold equivalent amounts in the equities markets, driving the price of SPY also down approximately 3%.
Still lacking sufficient demand from fundamental buyers or cross-market arbitrageurs, HFTs began to quickly buy and then resell contracts to each other – generating a “hot-potato” volume effect as the same positions were rapidly passed back and forth.
(…) At 2:45:28 p.m., trading on the E-Mini was paused for five seconds when the CME Stop Logic Functionality was triggered. In that short period of time, sell-side pressure in the E-Mini was partly alleviated and buy-side interest increased. When trading resumed at 2:45:33 p.m., prices stabilized and shortly thereafter, the E-Mini began to recover, followed by the SPY.”
The E-Mini crash caused a liquidity crisis in the equities markets for individual stocks. Many automated market-making algos paused as they were programmed to do in face of an unknown cataclysmic event.
“(…) As liquidity completely evaporated in a number of individual securities and ETFs, participants instructed to sell (or buy) at the market found no immediately available buy interest (or sell interest) resulting in trades being executed at irrational prices as low as one penny or as high as $100,000. These trades occurred as a result of so-called stub quotes, which are quotes generated by market makers (or the exchanges on their behalf) at levels far away from the current market in order to fulfill continuous two-sided quoting obligations even when a market maker has withdrawn from active trading.
(…) After the market closed, the exchanges and FINRA met and jointly agreed to cancel (or break) all such trades under their respective ‘clearly erroneous’ trade rules.”
Opinion: The report is criticized for several inaccuracies and for whitewashing the HFT’s role in the crash. In fact, on Oct 1, 2010, a day after the CFTC and SEC report, CME Group issues a statement that absolves Waddell & Reed Financial of aggressively pushing the E-Mini market down.
This fact is later confirmed by Eric Hunsader’s (Nanex Research) analysis: “Based on interviews and our own independent matching of the 6,438 W&R executions to the 147,577 CME executions during that time, we know for certain that the algorithm used by W&R never took nor required liquidity. It always posted sell orders above the market and waited for a buyer; it never crossed the bid/ask spread. That means that none of the 6,438 trades were executed by hitting a bid.”
In the Mar 26, 2013 post “Flash Crash Mystery Solved“, Nanex states their final conclusions: “(Based on this extremely thorough analysis) we were able to zero in on the ignition point, or starting time of the crash: 14:42:44. That is the moment when one or more large HFT “market makers” hit their limit of long positions in the eMini Futures (ES.M10), and reversed out – “readjusted their position”. Immediately. That aggressive act sucked out a significant amount of liquidity and caused thousands of trading instruments (stocks, options, indexes, futures) to reprice, which severely overloaded all trading systems processing market data (peak message traffic set a record at that time, which was not exceeded for the balance of the day). Overloaded systems caused bad, delayed, and unexpected pricing to appear, which caused other algos and traders to stop trading, removing any remaining liquidity. We know the Waddell & Reed algo practically ceased trading shortly before the 600 point slide in the Dow Jones Industrial Average; selling a mere 1000 contracts in small lots (averaging 6 contract per trade), all on the offer side. No Virginia, the Barclay’s algo used by Waddell & Reed did not sell indiscriminately without regard to time or price: it didn’t take liquidity either. That was the work of HFT. In short: High Frequency Trading caused the Flash Crash. Of this, we are sure.”
As for CFTC and SEC report whitewashing the HFT role in the Flash Crash, read the Jun 12, 2014 Nanex’ post “Reexamining HFT’s Role in The Flash Crash“.
Nanex findings are confirmed and analyzed further by many researchers. See the extensive HFT bibliography compiled by Themis Trading. I found the article “The Flash Crash: The Impact of High Frequency Trading on an Electronic Market” by A. Kirilenko et al. illuminating (especially the section “What Do High Frequency Traders Do?”); it explains well the “hot-potato” behavior of the HFT algos.
At the high level, the story is really quite simple. The 2010 market is run by very fast half-intelligent black boxes. Their strategies work reasonably and predictably under normal market conditions. Things turn ugly when market goes out of kilter. Market making algos have some risk-avoidance logic that says “if observed conditions are unusual, stand back”. Trend-following algos follow their logic unconditionally — sell a stock if its price shows a clear downward trend. No HFT boxes have enough intelligence to use longer-term logic and conclude that Apple or P&G stock trading below certain price represent a buying opportunity. Instead, they are focused exclusively on their very short time horizon (seconds-minutes). That’s similar to a day trader who does not pay any attention to what may happen to the stock in a few weeks.
At a detail level, one learns (five years after the event) that the Flash Crash was triggered by a single London-based day trader using relatively primitive tools to spoof the market. The trader (Navinder Singh Sarao) placed some “spoofing” limit orders to sell well before the HFT avalanche begun. This brings to mind the butterfly effect in the chaos theory, where a butterfly flapping its wings causes a tornado. Extending the analogy, passing anti-flapping (or anti-spoofing) laws will not prevent hurricanes (or flash-crash events).
In biological terms, the market run by the machines lacks a reliable homeostasis mechanism. However, being an incorrigible optimist (and a firm believer in human greed), I am sure that strategies ready to take advantage of a major flash crash will be developed; such algos would have prevented the extreme price gyrations during the Flash Crash.
Lessons learned: On Feb 18, 2011, the Joint CFTC-SEC Advisory Committee publishes Recommendations Regarding Regulatory Responses To The Market Events Of May 6, 2010.
Feb 26, 2010: SEC enacts Amendments to Regulation SHO that reintroduce a modified short sale uptick rule as a circuit breaker for distressed securities. More…
Regulation SHO Rule 201 is passed in the wake of financial crisis (and, specifically, Lehman Brothers failure) in 2008. The rule forbids the execution or display of a short sale order of a security at a price that is less than or equal to the current national best bid if the price of that security decreases by 10% or more from the previous day’s closing price.
Opinion: The 1938 uptick rule ceased to make any sense in the fragmented U.S. stock market where thousand of deals per second on fifty different venues may take place in a single security. Consequently, Rule 201 gives up on the idea of price change (since back-and-forth asynchronous price changes occur with high frequency in the decimalized market) and refers instead only to the price value itself (without referring to the “previous” price). The fact that it refers to the “current national best bid” makes it more conservative, as the NBBO is notoriously delayed and shows the best bid that is many milliseconds old (and, therefore, higher than the true current best bid in a downward market). The SHO Rule 201 uptick definition is styled after the 1994 NASD Rule 3350.
Jan 14, 2010: SEC Concept Release on Equity Market Structure.
Nov 23, 2009: SEC Regulation of Non-Public Trading Interest proposed. More…
Dark Pool Reg, Not adopted as of 2014
Nov 18, 2009: Ciamac C. Moallemi, Mehmet Saglam, The Cost of Latency in High-Frequency Trading is published. More…
The paper discusses and quantifies the cost of stale information in trading. It presents a closed-form expression for the cost of market information latency in terms of parameters of the underlying asset.
2008: Dark order types evolve on visible exchanges (full iceberg, pegged, flash orders).
Oct 1, 2008: NYSE Euronext acquires the American Stock Exchange (Amex). More…
On Jan 17, 2008, NYSE Euronext announced it would acquire the AMEX for $260 million in stock; the acquisition is completed on Oct 1. Before the closing, NYSE Euronext announces that the AMEX would be integrated with the Alternext European small-cap exchange and renamed the NYSE Alternext US. In Mar 2009, NYSE Alternext US will be renamed to NYSE Amex Equities. On May 10, 2012, it will be renamed again to NYSE MKT LLC.
The transaction extends NYSE Euronext’s leadership in U.S. option, cash equities, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), making it the third largest U.S. equity options marketplace based on number of contracts traded. After the merger, Amex listings trade directly on NYSE.
Apr 1, 2008: The Value Of A Millisecond.
Early 2008: Dark pools account for about 5% of U.S. equities market. More…
The total dark market (including dark pools, broker internalization, and dark orders on visible marketplaces) accounts for about 10% of U.S. equities market. This percentage will nearly triple in the next three years.
Oct 8, 2007: SEC Regulation NMS implementation complete. More…
Industry compliance with Rules 610 and 611 of NMS.
Jul 9, 2007: SEC Regulation NMS implementation begins. More…
Start of NMS Rules 610 and 611 implementation (Pilot Stocks phase).
Jun 13, 2007: SEC Regulation SHO and Rule 10a-1 enacted. The regulation completely eliminates and outlaws the short sale price test (Securities Exchange Act, Rule 10a-1).
2007: NYSE Group merges with Euronext, creating NYSE Euronext, the first trans-Atlantic stock exchange group.
2006: NYSE and Archipelago merge, creating NYSE Arca and forming the publicly owned, for-profit NYSE Group.
2005: SEC Regulation NMS adopted.
Late 2004: Block crossing networks account for 2% of US market.
Late 2004: Smart Order Router technology introduced.
Late 2004: Broker dealer internalization engine technology introduced.
Jul 28, 2004: SEC Regulation SHO enacted. The regulation introduces rules to restrict naked short selling. More…
The regulation is followed by numerous amendments enacted over the following years. The regulation adopted only a subset of Regulation SHO (proposed on Oct 28, 2003) and deferred the rest. In particular, Rule 202T sets up a pilot to investigate need for a short sale price test (such as the “uptick rule”).
2002: First continuous match Dark Pool, Posit Now, created.
Apr 9, 2001: Nasdaq decimalization. More…
Completes decimalization of US equities market.
Jan 29, 2001: NYSE decimalization.
2000: Intercontinental Exchange is formed to develop a transparent marketplace for OTC energy markets.
2000: Euronext is formed from Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Portugal stock exchanges.
Dec 8, 1998: SEC Regulation ATS adopted.
Fall 1986: First dark pools appear as daily auctions.
Late 1971: James Tobin proposes a transaction tax designed to dampen short-term speculation in the currency markets. This is later considered as means to eliminate HFT activity in financial markets. More…
James Tobin, the 1981 Nobel Prize in Economics laureate, suggested what later became known as the “Tobin tax” in his 1971 Janeway Lectures at Princeton, after the Bretton Woods system collapse. He elaborated the idea in the paper “A Proposal for International Monetary Reform” (Eastern Economic Journal, July-October 1978) and later clarified it in the FT article An Idea that Gained Currency but Lost Clarity (Financial Times, Sep 11, 2001).
Tobin tax was originally defined as a tax on all Forex spot transactions. The tax was intended to discourage short-term currency speculation. A similar general financial transaction tax was later proposed as means to reduce HFT activity in financial markets. The first HFT-specific Tobin tax is implemented by Italy on Sep 2, 2013.
Jan 24, 1938: “Exchange Act Release No. 1548, Rule 10a–1” restricts short selling in a declining market.
Jun 6, 1934: “Securities Exchange Act of 1934” is enacted by U.S. Congress. More…
The act and related statutes form the basis of regulation of the financial markets in the U.S. The act also established the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Sep 1871: NYSE starts continuous trading. More…
NYSE adopts a system of continuous trading, replacing the twice-daily call auctions used since 1817. As part of the new system, brokers dealing in a particular stock remain at one location on the trading floor, giving rise to the specialist.
Continuous trading is a fundamental prerequisite for high frequency trading.
May 17, 1792: The Buttonwood Agreement, a precursor of the New York Stock Exchange, is signed. More…
The agreement to trade securities is signed by twenty-four brokers outside of 68 Wall Street under a buttonwood tree. It has two provisions: 1) the brokers are to deal only with each other, thereby eliminating the auctioneers, and 2) the commissions are set to 0.25%. In 1817 the organization drafts its constitution, rents rooms at 40 Wall Street, and names itself the “New York Stock & Exchange Board”. In 1863 this name is shortened to “New York Stock Exchange”. | <urn:uuid:ba364e8f-fa41-4e9d-8070-406eb159288b> | CC-MAIN-2018-34 | http://edhoworka.com/a-brief-history-of-hft/ | 2018-08-19T11:46:16Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221215077.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20180819110157-20180819130157-00420.warc.gz | en | 0.940728 | 18,944 |
The Dingo Crusades
Episode Blog #283
INDONESIA – VIETNAM – CHINA – SOUTH AFRICA – THE NETHERLANDS – CZECH REPUBLIC – POLAND – ISRAEL – SRI LANKA – SINGAPORE – AUSTRALIA
Previously on TAR Australia: Teams raced from Poland to the Middle East. An odyssey through the desert left Dave & Kelly exhausted and didn’t even make it to the pit stop.
Tonight, the finish line is in sight but the strain is starting to show as teams struggle through the Holy City. Will one crucial mistake be the end for surfers Tyler & Nathan?
Just four teams remain; who will be eliminated next?
THE BIG QUESTION: Will TAR Australia producers copy TAR US and have their final NEL before the Final Three, or will somebody go home tonight?
I really hope Mike Bickerton from TAR Canada is following this season.
Grant re-introduces us to the desert fortress of Masada.
It looks like the surface of Mars.
King Herod built this on a cliff top overlooking the Dead Sea. It was the site of a brutal siege during the Jewish-Roman war and became a symbol of the Jewish struggle for freedom.
“Now watch me fall backwards and plummet hundreds of feet to the desert below. On the way down, several doves shall swoop down from the Heavens above and carry me to safety.”
During the pit stop, teams record video messages for their loved ones.
Mr. McKay loved forcing this task in TAR Asia 4 so much that he is making everybody do it again in
Hopefully nobody cries worse than Richard Hardin did.
“We’re the last women standing! We can quit now!”
“We don’t have camcorders on our ranch.”
How is Wilbur doing? Did we have to put him down yet?
Ah, this is all an ad for Canon. Not the Sony Cybershot.
Hopefully Matt isn’t recorded while he accidentally cuts his tongue on the adhesive.
Wouldn’t production know which address to send it to? Teams have enough to do during their mandatory rest period as is.
That cowboy charm.
I shall transcribe these video messages for you.
MATT: Hello Mum. As you can see, I am on The Amazing Race Australia.
TOM: Over here, at the, uh, Dead Sea in Israel.
JEFF: Just want to let you know Luke and I are having the most amazing time.
“And just in case I am boring you, you can check your ticket for last week’s lotto numbers on the bottom of this video.”
LUKE: I’ll be home really soon.
“And I am going to buy a GPS right when I get home.”
TYLER: Hopefully I come home with some cash in my pocket.
“Although I would trade that in for some cash right now so I can stop whoring myself out to the local women just to survive the next leg. I haven’t eaten in three days.”
NATHAN: I miss you so much. I love you so much.
“But I miss having cash in my pocket even more.”
SAM: We have been doing the most amazing things. Life-changing things and it made me realize how much I love you so much.
“And my vocabulary is dwindling by a lot of much because we have been racing too much.”
RENAE: I just want you to know I am thinking of you every second. I love you, okay?
“I love you too, Renae.”
Man, Renae misses Captain Caveman more than I do. I can’t wait for that family visit on Australian Survivor 5.
JEFF: It’s really been amazing. Love you.
“Turn it off, Luke. It’s game over, man. Game over.”
Well, that was a gigantic waste of fucking time.
Matt & Tom, who were the first to arrive at an unspecified time will depart first at 6:31am. They read they must search King Herod’s Winter Palace Ruins in Masada for their next clue.
I can’t wait to see how much Matt & Tom won the last leg by.
Teams must now ride a huge cable car to the very top of Masada Plateau and search for the ruins of King Herod’s Winter Palace where they will find their next clue.
I am just glad to hear they aren’t leaving Israel after one leg for like France or something.
Tom says they have a good shot at making the Final Three and continue to pretend that they are racing to avoid last place in this leg.
You’ll be last very quickly if you observe the pottery.
The random teenager in baggy pants shall lead the way.
MATT: Take the bull by the horns and give it to her.
I don’t think that could air on TAR Australia. They’ll air you saying shit, but not that, Matt.
Matt & Tom enter the cable car. They say they will be walking down if the clue isn’t up there.
That’s gonna be a long walk.
A forty-four minute lead on Jeff & Luke? That’s it? They didn’t dominate the Know Your Partner task as much as the previous episode made it out to be.
LUKE: King Herod’s Winter Palace? There’s nothing wintery about this place.
King Herod would have frozen to death in Canada.
Luke says the room for error is getting smaller and smaller now that they are in the “business end” of the race. Ugh. Didn’t Luke have a confessional just like this for the past couple episodes?
Jeff says the $250, 000 grand prize would make a big difference in their lives.
Matt & Tom comment on how old the castle is and the great views it provides.
Where is Tom?
That camera was really far away.
Almost like an Earl Cole helicopter shot from Survivor: Fiji.
Matt & Tom think the Winter Palace is down below.
Tom leans over the railing like a child.
I have a feeling a Winter Palace will stick out in the middle of the desert.
Jeff once again tells us about his Bible knowledge and how cool it is to be amongst all of King Herod’s shit.
Luke finds Bible study as intriguing as the rest of us.
Matt & Tom run down several flights of stairs.
The stairs lead into a chasm.
Matt & Tom find the Winter Palace.
It wasn’t as hidden as they thought it would be.
Matt & Tom they must drive over one hundred kilometres north to Qumran–it is the site where the ancient Dead Sea scrolls were found only sixty years ago. This is where they’ll find their next clue.
The area above the cave looks like a webbed foot.
MATT: Stairs aren’t my forte.
Thank god for the cable car back up to the top.
Tyler & Nathan depart third at 7:56am. Only one hour and 25 minutes Matt & Tom despite wasting 45 minutes on the way to the pit stop. They talk about racing quite well.
Jeff & Luke struggle with a sense of direction. Jeff wants them to leave their backpack at the top. Luke offers to carry it for him.
JEFF: I am coming up with different logic for saving time.
No kidding. It’s called “risk all of your possessions getting taken” but whatever.
Something tells me the path to the Winter Palace was a lot more treacherous than this two thousand years ago.
Jeff & Luke have the clue. Back up the steps you go, boys.
It would be funny if now was the time when Jeff dumped his bag onto Luke.
Matt & Tom read that there is a border crossing.
TOM: Border crossing? Does that mean between two countries? What’s a border crossing? What’s West Bank? You don’t know?
MATT: Do I look like I know?
MATT: I’ve never been overseas before this race. I don’t know where we were. We’re in Israel. I don’t know how many countries we’ve been to.
TOM: We come from a large country on a ranch in Australia.
Ummmm. . . .I know EU countries don’t have a border crossing, but they definitely crossed over into other countries while on the trains in central Europe.
“West Bank? Isn’t that the place near Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada on the other side of the bridge?”
How little do Matt & Tom know about Israel? Well their unaired confessional is really awkward.
“There are Jews here????? I thought it was just one of those religions they made up in Lord of the Rings or Schindler’s List.”
Tyler & Nathan spot Jeff & Luke.
TYLER: Do you have the clue?
LUKE: We have a map! Do you want it?
JEFF: The map helps.
Well, Jeff & Luke have proven they are useless with maps so you may as well give it to a team that knows how to use one.
The only alliance left in the race stays strong.
JEFF: Nathan and Tyler are really top racers.
LUKE: We are really happy to help out a little bit.
Isn’t that a reason to make sure a team doesn’t make it to the Final Three and kick your ass?
Tyler & Nathan have wanted to work with Jeff & Luke for a while despite knowing how bad they are with directions and understanding some of the tasks. I haven’t researched exit interviews yet, but my assumption is that part of Tyler & Nathan’s endgame strategy for the past two or three rounds has been to make sure Jeff & Luke are in the Final Three with them.
Tyler & Nathan study the map and continue their way on the path.
I know Tyler & Nathan say they aren’t religious, but I must add that those beanies are the closest in shape to a yarmulke that they’ll ever wear on their head.
Matt & Tom are in the town of Kumquat–er, I mean Qumran.
Qumran also happens to be Kevin & Ryan’s favourite “film”.
Roadblock Hint: Who is not lost in translation?
In this Roadblock, one team member must use a translation guide to decipher a Hebrew scroll. The message is written in the Hebrew style–right to left. Therefore they’ll have to transcribe it left to right in order to receive their next clue.
GRANT: Teams who have a nact for codes will be able to decipher this next challenge.
Well that pun was lazy.
The contestants from Hamerotz LaMillion would kill this challenge.
Good ol’ Jerusalen.
Did you know the Hebrew alphabet is based upon taking strokes away from the Star of David? Future TAR applicants, you never know what might prove to be useful on the race!
Good ol’ rainbow pockets.
Matt has a theory about the Roadblock.
TOM: I’d say so.
MATT: You can have it.
It’s all you, Tom.
Tom doubts every team will remember to go from right to left.
Sam & Renae depart last at 8:28am. Their ninety minute mistake and Sam misreading a question led to them being only one hour and fifty-seven minutes behind Matt & Tom.
Working with Mo & Mos is more detrimental to your race than thinking Anne Marie & Tracy could lend you a helping hand.
Sam & Renae talk about being the last all-female team standing blah blah blah. Nat & Kat and Kisha & Jen already beat you to what you’re trying to do.
Tom says he enjoys Sudoku and crossword puzzles. He loves doing one on the race.
I didn’t even know Sudoku made it to rural ranches in Australia.
We put in the ‘k’ and. . .it says “Go Fuck Yourself”? That can’t be right. . .
Wait a second. Does that one word say “raper”? It says e-raper! Like an online rapist! Man, so that’s what part of the word ‘prepare’ looks like backwards. Not good.
Tyler & Nathan are third to find the Winter Palace clue. Tyler hasn’t heard of the Dead Sea scrolls. They get directions and off they go.
Matt hates it when people are yelling at him when doing puzzles. So he decides to lend his mental support.
MATT: I decided to have a bit of a kip.
Or as well call it here, a nap.
Matt’s mental support.
He uses ESPN to communicate.
Sam & Renae run into the crowd of tourists and want to catch “The Boys”.
Considering there are six boys, Sam & Renae will need to be more specific.
Sam is the one wearing pink in the crowd. Gates for Masada must open by nine.
Tom reveals his puzzle to the judge.
. . .Just kidding.
Does he get penalized for adding in the smiley face?
Tom receives the clue. They must travel by taxi to the MAIN post office in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem–The Holy City. The Mother of All Meccas.
Oh my word. The Dome of the Rock.
Know Your Role and Shut Your Torah.
Grant describes it as the city that was first settled over five thousand years ago and is the holy site for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. And CNN in the 90s.
What are they going to do in Jerusalem first? They are going to mail their SD card at the post office where they will receive their next clue.
A post office? What is this?
TAR 2 in Namibia?
Matt & Tom pound fists in cab in celebration of going to Jerusalem. Sam & Renae keep looking for the Winter Palace. Renae says they have been lost for a -long- time.
The other side of the mountain? Not again!
Commercial break. We resume. Sam & Renae find the stairs. Last to the clue box. No equalizer today, ladies. You’ve gotta hustle.
Sam & Renae find a local who tells them the Dead Sea scrolls are in Qumran.
Sam starts cheering and turns into an airplane.
Jeff & Luke are second to the Roadblock. It is Jeff’s to even out their Roadblock count.
LUKE: We’re racing in this one!
JEFF: We are!
Clearly Jeff thinks it is a NEL because he couldn’t give less of a shit.
Now Jeff just has to touch his right ear three times, his forehead twice, and needs to find a Scientologist who can lightly scratch his back. Then he’s all good to go!
Jeff is the Nomar Garciapara of TAR Australia.
JEFF: Fifteen seconds to put my glasses on.
“Fifteen? JUST fifteen?”
LUKE: The little things Dad was doing was really really irritating.
“Telling the girls it opens at six rather than eight was one thing, but taking fifteen seconds to put on your glasses is too much!
LUKE: I’ll take your pack here.
JEFF: No, that’s alright.
LUKE: Just give me your pack, please.
Luke won that game of Tug o’ War pretty quickly.
Luke is somehow outwalking Jeff.
JEFF: It was quite complex as I found out while deciphering the clue.
I can help you out with the Roadblock, Jeff.
Matt & Tom are on their way to Jerusalem in the taxi.
By the way, that’s Jerusalem in case you have forgotten that is the next destination in the past two minutes.
They are at the main post office according to their cab driver.
Which is a small building next to a dumpster.
MATT: We need to go to a big one.
TOM: Is there more than one?
DRIVER: This is a post.
TOM: This is the main post office? Number one?
DRIVER: I don’t know.
“I wouldn’t be so stressed if that camera wasn’t staring me in the face.”
Matt & Tom go inside.
TOM: Do you speak English?
Eighty percent of Israelis do.
TOM: Is there a main post office in the city?
Everything is Jaffa in Israel.
The man and the driver speak in Hebrew.
Ohhhh. The main -mail- office! They were just talking about the main -post- office or the number one one!
“Thumbs up, mate!”
TOM: So number one post office?
TOM: The big one?
Tyler & Nathan are third to the Roadblock.
NATHAN: I’m going to struggle with it but I’ll do it.
Tyler cheers on his Nate Dogg. Nathan is breezing through it.
NATHAN: Jeff was still doing it. Once I sat down and got the first couple letters easily. I picked it up straight away faster than I thought.
JEFF: It was quite complex. It’s very subtle as a language. One tiny brush stroke can mean the difference between a letter being an ‘e’ or a ‘y’.
The biggest challenge for Nathan is swatting away the flies.
JEFF: You wanna collaborate?
NATHAN: He’s like “you wanna work together on cracking this code”? I was thinking ‘what code are you trying to crack? You’re just spelling out the words’.
NATHAN: What letters you go–
JEFF: Let’s have a look.
Nathan doesn’t have a choice. Jeff is essentially the new Andre & Damon to Nathan’s Ken & Gerard.
NATHAN: Dude, you’ve got it all wrong. You’ve got some letters wrong in there.
NATHAN: I’m like ‘what is he doing’?
Nathan explains the whole task to Jeff.
JEFF: It was clear it was a message from right to left rather than left to right.
Because Nate Dogg just explained it to you.
Study Hebrew Every Day!
JEFF: That’s. . .that’s ‘M’.
NATHAN: No, that’s an ‘A’.
JEFF: That doesn’t make sense.
NATHAN: Once he sat there I couldn’t tell him to go away.
Nathan has to explain each individual letter to Jeff. Hilarious.
It’s like playing co-op fighting video games against your grandpa. You’re just going to have to do everything for him.
Sam & Renae say there is no point stressing out and refuse to give up as they drive.
JEFF: I’ve got a ‘Y’ in there. No, that’s a ‘W’. That doesn’t make sense.
NATHAN: That’s a ‘P’.
JEFF: It’s a ‘T’.
NATHAN: First letter is a ‘F’. You’re getting your P’s and F’s wrong, dude.
JEFF: Trust me on it. I’ve got a ‘F’.
NATHAN: No, it’s not. That’s a ‘S’. Spell.
JEFF: Whoa. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on.
JEFF: We work incredibly well with Nathan and Tyler so we decided to work together.
NATHAN: It was like two heads clashing. He wasn’t checking it out enough. Like oh my god. Like you’re kidding. He was a bit all over the place.
I think Jeff is -this- close to being smited right now.
Or Nathan is ready to take on the role of Abraham and Jeff is his Isaac.
Meanwhile, Matt & Tom notice a guy eating a bagel.
Yeah, it’s just a bagel. What’s the big deal?
Matt looks so serious. This is killing me. He is ready to kill for that bagel. I guess he just likes staring at round things with a hole in the middle.
Matt couldn’t be more perplexed by this.
What does it do? What does it do? What does a bagel do?
It roundhouse kicks you in the face.
It makes out with your Armenian cousins.
It rigs the ending to the third season of The Amazing Race in the most iconic way possible.
It tears down that wall.
It’s a fucking bagel, Matt.
MATT: . . .
Matt still doesn’t get it.
Even Smalls from The Sandlot understood what a s’more was after Porter explained it to him. Some more of what? Classic.
Matt & Tom enter the main post office. There was a complimentary bagel on the way out. Nah, just kidding.
Be funny if it wasn’t the main post office. The guy just took the letter and did his job properly.
It’s a Detour.
MATT: Pilgrim Trail or Holy Grail.
Grant leaves out the bad puns this time.
Which is for the best.
In Pilgrim’s Trail, teams must make their way to the old city of Jerusalem. Then collect an eighty kilogram wooden cross and carry it along the Via Dolorosa. Christian pilgrims follow this path daily to retrace the final journey of Christ. The street passes the nine stations of the Cross to the Church of the Holy Sebokah on the site built where Jesus was crucified then buried.
Forcing two people to carry a huge cross across a far distance?
Kimo Leopoldo and Joe Son would have loved this task.
Jesus passed through a Hard Rock Cafe on his way to his death?
You’re telling me he stopped for nachos and looked at posters of James Dean before the Roman Emperor left him for dead?
That’s tough to believe.
The nine stations are marked with Roman numerals.
Once they find the final resting spot, they will receive their next clue.
The next clue is gonna be another Roadblock.
ROADBLOCK: Who wants to be crucified? Note: Whoever performed the last Roadblock cannot perform this one.
Easter came a little early this year!
Meanwhile, locals gather to stare at a wall.
In Holy Grail, teams must make their way to the Western Wall in the old city then walk through the coal tunnels to an active archaeology dig and unearth a clay pot. Take the clay pot to the nearby ruins of the City of David, wade through an ancient underground aqueduct, and deliver the pot to an archaeologist to receive their next clue.
GRANT: Teams will need patience to tunnel through this task.
Next time just leave it alone, sir.
TAR Australia producers sure love underground locations over the past few rounds.
Be funny if they unearth Jesus’ bones rather than a clay pot.
Apparently ‘City of’ is ‘Tit’ in Hebrew. It doesn’t matter whether they’re reading it right to left or left to right. It’s still ‘Tit’.
I know those are candles in the middle, but are those other things? They look like octopus arms. Or Zoidberg arms.
The aqueduct is so cool.
His hat is more Aussie than Jewish.
Matt & Tom choose crucifixion.
Nathan keeps correcting Jeff on the Roadblock. They are about to hand in their answer.
JEFF: With Temple Mount.
NATHAN: I don’t think so.
JEFF: Trust me on it.
JEFF: We burned through it quickly.
How do I know Nathan knows it’s wrong?
Because Nathan walks away even before the judge says anything.
Jeff should change that smiley face to a frowny face and draw angry eyebrows on it.
Jeff exhales deeply. Commercial break. We resume. We watch Jeff exhale.
Jeff knows they are ninety-nine percent there.
NATHAN: With ‘a’ temple mount.
JEFF: Let’s put an ‘a’ in there.
NATHAN (confessional): I had to just look over the thing and it was just an ‘a’ we were missing and he was like ‘oh yeah, alright, I see where you are going’.
Jeff presents his guess. It’s correct then summons Nathan.
“C’mon dude. I’ve got it. You’re slowing me down a bit, mate.”
Nathan tells Tyler about how much of the work he did as they run to the taxi. He nearly says it within earshot. Both teams are in their cabs.
JEFF: Working with Nathan and Tyler is like a dream. It’s like working with two more sons.
NATHAN: He had the wrong letters all over the joint.
JEFF: They’re just easy to work with. They collaborate. They’re intelligent.
NATHAN: He wouldn’t have got that. There is no way. He was reading it the wrong way.
JEFF: They’re got ethics.
TYLER: Go around this guy in the car ahead. Just go.
JEFF: We do it and we help each other.
“It’s like we’re Batman and they’re Robin.”
“Jeff’s a fucking moron who can eat my dung street.”
“Nicest boys you’ll ever meet.”
“My niece in pre-school could have finished that challenge before Jeff.”
Renae is slightly ahead of Sam as they run to the clue box.
The camera couldn’t capture Sam’s fall as it was happening, sadly.
I hate the lotto.
“We don’t roll around on the sand Sam, man.”
Renae lifts Sam back up.
Sam goes back to being an eagle again. She says she has some bruises on her leg, but everything is all good.
RENAE: Shes got so many bruises she doesn’t care anymore.
Sam wants to do the Roadblock because she is good with “looking things” cause it’s like a puzzle in her head. Renae agrees that this is an ideal task for Sam.
Matt & Tom comment on what they are about to do.
TOM: We’re following the road of Jesus Christ, mate. How about it?
MATT: Pound it.
“We’re following the route of a guy who got crucified two thousand years ago.”
I wasn’t expecting that response.
TOM: Surely they can’t do that to us.
Nah, there’ll just be locusts.
Matt & Tom bid farewell to their crappy taxi driver.
I think she just finished watching TAR 24 for the first time.
And now they’re retaliating on her behalf.
“Excuse me, are these two hundred pound crosses for us?”
It’s like carrying either Debra or Steve through Jerusalem for a task.
Jeff & Luke are inside of the post office. Luke has to direct Jeff to the flags right in front of his face because his dad is so disoriented. They choose to do Pilgrim Trail.
It’s surprising Jeff chose Pilgrim Trail because the clue says it requires commitment, and Luke may or may not disagree that Jeff has always possessed that trait.
Jeff & Luke ask their driver to open the boot. Huh. Aussies talk like the British. Tyler & Nathan are fourth into the post office. Nathan leaps over a barrier and onto the road to catch a cab.
The barrier is sponsoured by TAR considering it’s red and yellow.
That bus certainly helped stall traffic enough for Nathan to catch the cab behind it.
Sam is finding the Hebrew task easy.
Where are the bruises?
How is Renae lending her mental support?
She’s your Venus, she’s your fire, your desire.
That’s right. Renae has no choice but to shave her legs during a Roadblock because producers forced her to make an hour long video for her family at the pit stop while sleep-deprived.
Maybe at the next Roadblock Jeff can hire somebody to shave his back and then at the final one Nathan will finally shave his head.
Too bad Sam’s legs were partially shaved when she took that tumble a few minutes ago.
Needless to say this task is easier when Jeff isn’t shouting out random letters to distract you.
RENAE: She pretty much sat down for five minutes and said “I’ve got it!”
“Well, that was after Anne Marie & Tracy secretly lent her a helping hand.”
Sam receives the clue and asks if Renae really did shave her legs. She did and they have a nice giggle about it before getting into their cab. Sam & Renae ask their taxi driver to go as fast as possible because they are the only girls left in the race.
Unfortunately for them Bono from U2 is their taxi driver.
Matt & Tom casually walk by a group of tourists with a gigantic cross.
TOM: The path we’re walking in is the same trail as the big man did with his cross back in the day.
The big man? You mean Jesus?
Now Shaq is a big man. You don’t see Jesus as the centre for the Bethlehem Lakers. “That’s another slam dunk for the big man! Hey-Zeus! Hey-Zeus! Hey-Zeus!”
Matt & Tom keep walking through the stations.
Matt doesn’t want to damage his good hat.
Would JESUS casually put down his cross and take a breather guys? Weak sauce!
Jeff & Luke and Tyler & Nathan get to the crosses at roughly the same time.
Aren’t they T’s?
LUKE: Fancy seeing you blokes here!
Man, with that technique Nate is going to be wearing that cross for a crotch.
Jeff says Luke took the front because Luke is a Hercules when it comes to that sort of stuff.
“He can carry it from left to right.”
JEFF: I’m only eighty-three kilos. I am carrying my own body weight. It was challenging, but I was up for it.
You were probably up for the challenge because it was half of your body weight that you were carrying. Also, you weigh more than me.
Matt & Tom have to pause for a second.
Because a freakin’ tractor is going to block Jesus’ path.
They have no choice but to hug the side of the tunnel.
That can’t be comfortable.
WE THE BEST SHOES!
Matt & Tom set it down again. Matt thinks they may have to redo it because he didn’t see any of the stations.
Especially when Matt’s head is tilted like Ralph Wiggum when he doesn’t know how to use an earring.
“My ear hurts and I am being crucified. I have two owwies.”
Tom approaches the two soldiers.
Meanwhile, Matt starts humping Jesus’ cross. That’s a sentence I never thought I would say in this blog. I think it was the bagel’s round hole that did it for him.
Matt & Tom are told to go straight and right. Matt thinks it is cool to walk the same path as Jesus in real life.
Sam & Renae are last to the clue. They hire a cab. They decide to not do a task that is more than their combined body weight and go with Holy Grail.
For some reason somebody is carrying a random scale through the market.
Matt & Tom find the finishing point (not to be confused from the finishing point in the middle of TAR 4’s second India leg).
Matt & Tom try to carefully put Jesus’ cross on its side. It would be hilarious if they screw it up and the cross falls flat while making a roaring thud sound that echoes throughout Old Jerusalem.
Matt & Tom read that they must walk the Ramparts Wall to find their next clue.
Ah. How cool.
Nathan wants to switch to carrying it like a surfboard. After a few seconds Tyler disagrees.
Probably because there are no waves to catch here, bro.
Jeff is considering to collaborate with Tyler & Nathan on this task.
“You’re doing a fine job, guys. . .Please don’t ask me to help.”
Tyler admits they didn’t really bring their clue so they have no idea where they’re going.
TYLER: Nathan and I have struggled the last two legs with directions.
Because you’ve been hanging around Jeff & Luke too much.
NATHAN: What’s VI?
TYLER: Four. That’s four.
Somebody needed to watch more Rocky movies.
Tyler asks a local the way to the ninth station.
He gestures them to the right.
Follow the yellow Jesuses.
Jeff & Luke continue to “collaborate”.
Sam & Renae run past a bunch of rabbis.
“Don’t you need a degree for this?”
Yeah, c’mon guys. Don’t break a two thousand year old ancient artifact.
Sam says there a lot of rocks in the digging site. It provided a lot of false hope because every time you hit a rock you think you hit the vase.
This is very similar to the Detour task they chose last week.
Just replace bottle caps with rocks for this round’s Detour. It’s also better than all of the used condoms they found on Jerusalem Beach last round too.
Jeff frequently switches shoulders to use “the fleshy part of his shoulder and there’s not flesh up there”.
JEFF: I felt the crush that Jesus must have felt by the cross that was significantly bigger and heavier on his own.
I dunno. I’m pretty sure he had a buddy named Simon help him out on that one.
If only Jesus had some followers telling him to “focus, believe, achieve” to move a bit faster through the streets.
Tyler & Nathan grin and bare it while carrying the cross. Jeff & Luke lose their collaboration partners.
Matt & Tom see the wall where locals and tourists write notes and shove them into the wall. Tom talks about Dung Gate.
TOM: It’s near the Dung Gate. It’s in somewhere not out of somewhere.
Sam & Renae find the long pot.
Renae cleans it off.
Tyler & Nathan get lost again with their cross.
They are making this a lot harder for themselves than it needs to be.
NATHAN: Do you want to read the clue again dude so we’re not walking around like chickens with our heads cut off?
TYLER: I don’t have the clue.
Commercial break. We resume.
NATHAN: Do you want to read the clue again dude so we’re not walking around like chickens with our heads cut off?
TYLER: I don’t have the clue. I only have the additional info.
Well that was a misleading cliffhanger.
Tyler insists there were no signs as they read the part about the nine stations. Nathan says there were.
NATHAN: What do you mean year?
TYLER: There were.
NATHAN: Dude, we’ve got to follow that stuff.
Tyler’s position flipped quickly.
Maybe Tyler was accidentally reading the clue from left to right.
Luke comments on the old stone in the withered streets.
The woman reaches out to touch Jeff like he is a member of The Beatles in the 1960s.
JEFF: We walked past people saying “I love you,” “bless you”.
“I touched his wood!”
A little overdramatic.
JEFF: The little holes in the wall that were shops–at one point I could imagine smelling the spices and things that must have been present two thousand years ago. To put the cross down and know we were within metres of where Jesus was crucified was an amazing experience.
All hail the Downes!
I’d pay Jeff ten shekels to go up to the clue giver, sniff him, and exclaim “I can smell the spices on you! You smell like you are two thousand years old!”
Luke shields the clue from the onlookers.
Sam & Renae carry the pot.
RENAE: I feel like I could qualify us for the Olympic Power Walkers Team.
And should they fall any further behind, Renae can take out her frustration on the pot by using it to qualify herself for the Olympic Javelin Team.
Sam & Renae get help to find the City of David.
SAM: I wonder why we got so much help.
Even more dudes.
RENAE: There’s not a lot of blondes in this area.
SAM: Now that I think about it, the only people who helped us were men.
Sam has to explain what adjacent means to one of the locals helping her. It might not be the best help that they’re getting.
Tyler & Nathan have to retrace some of their steps.
Not Nathan’s most ideal position.
NATHAN: What’s this phone, Tyler? What’s this phone?
TYLER: Nothing. It’s a flag. Go.
I think it’s just a phone.
Screw sending a letter to your loved ones–just grab this phone and give ’em a shout right now!
I hope the women in the Pikachu hats are cast for the next Hamerotz LaMillion.
Tyler & Nathan arrive at the final station. The clue is theirs.
There’s a lot of tourist groups hovering around in the area.
Sam & Renae find the City of Tit.
I mean David.
Sam tells Renae to not drop the pot as if they are experimental high school students once they are inside.
How was this a city?
Unless it was like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
Current Population: 2
Sam says the water was up to her knees.
On Renae? Not so much.
By the way, in some unaired footage there is somebody right behind Renae who is directly walking on top of the water. I don’t know who it is, but he seems to have a gift.
SAM: The water is up to my knees.
RENAE: It was only up to my ankles.
Renae is awarded the most smug expression of the season.
Renae admits to being claustrophobic.
It’s The Blair Renae Project.
RENAE: I’m good! I’m good! I’ll tell you when I’m not!
Like right about now.
“This is so fun, Renae! Renae?”
Renae hits her head a couple of times. Too damn tall.
In other news, Renae got a concussion.
Alas, Renae is rescued and they complete their trek through the aqueduct.
The ancient bong belongs to the archaeologist. Use it well, my friend. Use it well.
Matt & Tom are completely lost and absolutely no one has heard of the Rampart Wall.
TOM: We were bushed for quite a while.
Ah, more Aussie-isms.
Just keep going up, I guess.
They nearly get run over by a bus.
Matt & Tom really have no idea where to go.
Jeff & Luke are near the Western Wall.
JEFF: Take your time. On your left, that’s the Wailing Wall. Take your time. Just suck it in.
Suck it in like a cultural Kirby.
JEFF: We’re in the sharp end of the race now but we’ll still take time to experience the significance of historical places.
JEFF: Alright. Let’s stop for a minute.
LUKE: What are you–
This picture is priceless.
JEFF: I just want you to look at that.
LUKE: I’m looking. That’s why I turned this way.
Suck it in. Suck it in.
Culture successfully sucked in. Let’s go.
Luke says they always try to take in the environment while racing.
The guy in the green is awesome.
Jeff & Luke don’t even stop for a second. Clearly they are full on culture for the day.
Every single team is looking for Dung Gate. Nathan gets directions from a local. Tyler doesn’t follow and asks the guy to repeat it in perfect English twice. After they start walking, Tyler is doubting if they even walked through that area as Nathan confirms they did.
I love the guy rocking the Scatman John moustache.
Matt & Tom finally find somebody who knows the Rampart Wall.
“Up there, my friends.”
Matt & Tom run to the clue box. They read to head to the Aish HaTorah World Centre on the Western Wall for their next pit stop.
There sure are a lot of letters in that limestone.
In 20 BCE in the Holy City of Jerusalem, the Western Wall was built by King Herod. It’s one of the holiest sites in the world for Jews.
I’d advise against a pun on this one, Bowler.
And that guy possesses one of the holiest beards I have ever seen.
It is also known as the Wailing Wall and attracts thousands of worshipers every day who leave written prayers in the stonework. The Aish HaTorah World Centre overlooks the stone wall. Last team to check in may be eliminated.
Matt & Tom scramble to find the pit stop. Jeff & Luke get directions to the clue box from a local.
Jeff’s ascot returns.
After receiving directions, Jeff wants a high five.
Boooom! Brothers from another mother!
I don’t know how this was advantageous to Jeff.
Jeff & Luke are second to the clue box. Matt & Tom are asking for directions to the race flags that they see.
I’m surprised nobody decided to go there rather than Rampart’s Walk.
They spotted the race flags from quite a distance.
There is a lot of running around throughout Old Jerusalem. Many steps. Who shall be first to the pit stop?
Grant chillin’ with a rabbi. Just another day on the job.
Matt & Tom are there first.
Matt side-steps onto the mat.
MATT: You like your stairs here.
FIRST PLACE: MATT & TOM
Another calm handshake.
They have won ten thousand dollars courtesy of NAB.
That asterisk is free and happy running around.
What the hell happened to the asterisk? It’s on a cross!
He crucified the asterisk! My god!
TOM: We followed the path of Jesus and it ended up leading us to the right direction and getting us there first. Maybe he was looking down on us favourably today.
MATT: He gave us that guiding touch.
They’re the only Muslim team that had a chance to be racing around in Israel, and Mo & Mos really could have spoiled the Christian theme of this leg (and the last one) by winning one of these two rounds. Especially this one. It only would have been more hilarious if two raging atheists had won it.
Missed opportunity for the folks at Active.
“We’re the two very best friends!”
SECOND PLACE: JEFF & LUKE
They sure are sweaty.
By the way, absolutely no mat chat for them again. We immediately cut to Tyler & Nathan running around to find Dung Gate. They’re told to backtrack. The locals are offering contradictory directions. Frustration is setting in. Sam & Renae are also running around.
Sam & Renae appear to be close to the wall. They are stumped by a turnstile.
It turns out to be an ‘Exit Only’ turnstile.
It sure is fun to play with, though.
It’s a long search for Dung Gate. Tyler & Nathan are getting increasingly frustrated. Nathan tries to calm Tyler down but it doesn’t go over well.
TYLER: We’re trying to find a clue, dude. That’s where we’re going. What do you mean where we go?
NATHAN: Chill out, mate.
TYLER: I’m just saying, dude.
NATHAN: You’re so stressed.
TYLER: I’m not stressed.
NATHAN: Yes you are. Chill out, mate.
TYLER: I’m trying to find a clue, dude.
NATHAN: Yeah, but look at how stressed you are!
TYLER: Shut up, mate! I’m in a fucking race!
NATHAN: Chill out.
TYLER: You fucking idiot.
NATHAN: Chill out mate. Don’t call me a fucking idiot.
Yeah, don’t call him a fucking idiot.
Not when he has the smallest manbun known to man.
Commercial break. We resume. Tyler & Nathan’s fight is replayed. Nathan breaks out some sass.
NATHAN: Let’s walk the wall where the wall is like the clue says. You wanna do that?
TYLER: I don’t know.
Tyler & Nathan find the clue.
The Jewish cousin of Aisha Tyler.
Sam & Renae are last to the clue box. Editors aren’t going to fool us. It isn’t that close. As Sam & Renae cross the street, Renae asks to hold her hand.
“Hold my fin, baby girl.”
It’s a race to Aish Hatorah.
Wait. Canada? The Dan Family of Canada? I was not expecting Canada being mentioned on the Jerusalem leg of TAR Australia.
And as somebody who has now been working in a pharmacy for nearly four years, I finally learned who was behind Novo and Teva brand pharmaceuticals. What a random connection to find in this episode for me.
They have no choice but to wait.
Sam & Renae have been running by tourists all day.
THIRD PLACE: TYLER & NATHAN
Not the happiest pair.
GRANT: You look a bit frustrated.
Tyler & Nathan answer that not reading clues properly and getting stressed out is why they are annoyed and stressed.
“It’s more than what’s happening to Matt & Tom or Jeff & Luke at the moment.”
Tyler says they should have finished in second place today, and that their struggle over the past couple rounds has been a major kick in the ass.
Or a slap in the face.
That’s a team who highly suspects a NEL.
No tears yet.
It’s tough to be angry around a happy rabbi.
LAST PLACE: SAM & RENAE
The breakdown is coming.
GRANT: I have to tell you. . .this is a pre-determined non-elimination leg. Therefore you have not been eliminated from the race.
If only they received this news via scratch card.
SAM: We were pretty lucky to have dodged this bullet.
TAR 1, TAR 2, TAR 4, TAR 5, TAR 6, TAR 7, TAR 8 (x2), TAR 9, TAR 10, TAR 11 (x2), TAR 12, TAR 13, TAR 14, TAR 15, TAR 16, TAR 17, TAR Asia 1, and TAR Asia 3 have all had a NEL at Final Four up to this point.
If anything, it would be extremely unlucky if they didn’t hit the final NEL on this leg.
Sam & Renae are Marked for Elimination. If they don’t arrive in first place on the next leg, they will incur a thirty minute penalty.
SAM: We realize how far we’ve actually come in the competition, and to be the last two girls standing here we’ve won. To us we’ve won.
Actually, you haven’t won. The only way you win is if you’re the first team to cross the finish line on the final leg of the race.
Renae wants females in the top three, and girls can do it half their size, half their age, and half their strength.
Aren’t they older than Tyler & Nathan?
SAM: Hopefully we can do it.
Sam & Renae didn’t exactly present the most compelling case that they would overcome this penalty in the next leg. Let’s see how it plays out.
Next Time on TAR: The Final Four teams run a tight race in a sprint towards the finale, but in the battle for a quarter of a million dollars which team won’t make it into the final leg?
Rank the Legs
1) Krakow, Poland -> Masada, Israel
TAR goes to Israel. Well, other than Hamerotz LaMillion which is the Israeli version of The Amazing Race (you smartass), but the American version hasn’t even gone to Israel after 29 seasons.
There is a sense of satisfaction to watch a version of TAR that visits a country that the US version has not dared to visit yet. TAR Australia and TAR Canada will later repeat this with Cuba.
Cuba being dismissed by TAR US is obvious. But Israel? How did Australians go there but not the Americans or Canadians?
Yes, Israel is still a very controversial country to this day, but their extremely close ties to the States makes you think that an Israel visit for TAR US would be very easy for them to do.
Like, I know TAR Asia could never go there since some of its teams would not be allowed to visit, but TAR US? How come they can’t go?
As somebody who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, news stations filled up endless material with things happening in Israel. The Gaza Strip, the West Bank, various attacks, etc.
I know things aren’t kosher and hunky-dory with its surrounding countries there now, but it fills up a lot less of the daily news cycle than it did about ten years ago.
It was really neat to see its debut as a casual TAR location. The Australian teams expressing genuine shock they were going there, and how Tel Aviv looked like any western metropolis, and then Jerusalem Beach looking like any other ordinary beach.
It’s like “here is a regular ol’ country that just happens to be home to stuff you read in the Bible”.
Oh, that thing over there? King Herod built it.
And it gives me the chance to make a bunch of jokes that hover around the line of what is considered offensive. We all win.
The storyline of Tyler & Nathan clawing their way to survival with minimal funds since the robbery continued. They ended up with a pile of phone numbers (and rubbers) by the end of this leg.
Dave & Kelly became public enemy number one and were considered the worst thing since Hitl–er, Kevin & Ryan in TAR Canada 5 as everyone labeled them as the team that absolutely had to go home. I have no idea where that sentiment came from.
A self-drive leg to the pit stop resulted in four out of five teams getting lost on the way to the pit stop. Hell, Dave & Kelly didn’t even get to the pit stop. The only team who didn’t get lost was also the team who were already in first after the Detour. Matt & Tom ran a flawless leg as they completed every single task in the fastest time this round. Even Grant commented that they did this leg in about two seconds. Hopefully we get departure times at the start of next round.
Seeing two teams be absolutely certain they were being eliminated only to discover they were safe was fun to watch. That’s why I like self-drive legs.
Matkot was alright for a task.
Seeing the return of How Well You Know Your Partner task was refreshing. Particularly because Sam misread a question and nearly royally screwed Renae. Thank god Renae knew all of the other answers with certainty.
Jeff acting like a maniac for half of the episode was also a surprise.
Israel being a location automatically shot it high up in these standings regardless of the production design or editing this leg–everything else was just icing on the cake.
2) Masada, Israel -> Jerusalem, Israel
All of my religious jokes in the blog aside, it is still really really cool that TAR Australia visited Jerusalem.
I understand why they focused more on the biblical part of the city rather than the current political climate, but it was still awesome to see the city be added to the TAR catalog. I am very curious to see how TAR US or TAR Canada will treat Israel when they eventually visit the country.
It was a bit anti-climatic as this was the shortest episode of the season in terms of airtime, and since NELs on the penultimate leg aren’t allowed anymore it had to be the final NEL of the season. It didn’t help that there were no equalizers and the tasks were easy enough for everyone to stay in the exact same position as they did in the last leg.
The Holy Grail task was a bit too similar to what we saw in the metal detector search task from the previous round. However, instead of a beach we get an awesome trek through the mysterious city of David.
Seeing teams go to the site of the Dead Sea Scrolls as Renae shaves her legs, Matt takes a nap, and Jeff couldn’t understand this task at all made it an entertaining Roadblock for everyone.
Watching Tyler & Nathan deal with mounting pressure, stress, and attrition was interesting to watch play out. They have surprisingly unique ways of coping with this in the race.
The letters to be sent home ultimately amounted to nothing. What was the point? There was no payoff with it.
Sam falling was funny. Jeff being the Slow Grandpa was funny. The Kimo Leopoldo crosses were funny. Matt being seduced by a bagel was funny.
There was a mixture of self-driving, taxis, and racing on-foot to make this an integrated round of play.
It was a quick round, but we really needed two rounds in Israel and producers did a pretty good damn job with it. I approve.
3) Macau, China -> Port Elizabeth, South Africa
It took four episodes, but we finally get some original material. After copying tasks from prior seasons of TAR Asia, nothing is repeated as the cast exits Asia for the rest of the season.
What is even better is we visit a part of South Africa that has yet to be seen on The Amazing Race. In other words, not Cape Town.
This round earns a lot of points for being an extreme self-drive leg. After flying for a full day, teams were forced to drive six hundred kilometres only to be equalized until the morning.
Richard & Joey’s storyline was set up perfectly for this round. After pissing off everyone else this season, it did not come as a surprise that they would be the only team to be U-Turned. Add to this that they were stuck in the mud more than any other team, Richard wasting time wanting a better goat, and both of them going insane during the Detour was great entertainment.
This round had the perfect balance of tasks. A couple of scenic locations, a difficult driving challenge through mud, a Detour where you pick between either coordination or skill, a record-breaking bungee jump task, and lastly a fun goat-herding challenge.
This is when TAR is at its best.
There was lots of fun moments this leg. Most of them came from Alana & Mel nearly dying as they learn how to drive a stick shift. Matt & Tom were pulled over by the friendliest police officer ever, and Mo & Mos barely surviving elimination yet again despite not even being able to stand up on a ferry just a day earlier.
An episode like this is why I love The Amazing Race, and why it makes me sad when I watch a season like TAR 24 or the majority of TAR 28 where the soul of the series continues to fade away. Or the season premiere of TAR Asia 5. What the hell was that?
4) Cape Town, South Africa -> The ‘Dam, Netherlands -> Prague, Czech Republic
I will award this round fifty points for traveling to two separate non-bordering countries properly in a single episode (as a reader pointed out, TAR Asia 1 and TAR Asia 2 had done this before). We saw teams fatigued before they were even at the second challenge.
The twist of providing the leading teams with comfortable accommodations while providing the trailing teams with a punishment is something I don’t recall seeing before. Unless you’re Danny & Oswald and take it from your own pocket.
Furthermore, the $50 Roadblock race bonus at the bow and arrow task was also a creative twist. None of the other versions had ever done that before either.
However, this leg blatantly copied three of the TAR Asia 2 challenges that they also did in Prague. Back in 2011 I doubt too many people had watched the TAR Asia seasons prior to TAR Australia, but I can’t help but penalize production for a lack of creativity for the majority of the episode.
Dave & Kelly accidentally making fun of a blind man, Tyler & Nathan describing themselves as underdogs, Matt as Robocop, Jeff & Luke unintentionally misdirecting Sam & Renae, the princesses being called fat, and Mel’s twinging elbow strain all contributed to an entertaining round of play.
And just think of Jeff & Luke did not give away their arrows, Matt & Tom would have been eliminated! So close, guys. So close.
5) Port Elizabeth, South Africa – > Cape Town, South Africa
This round is hilarious. I thought this season would suffer after Richard & Joey’s exit, but that is not the case.
I have two complaints with this round. One of them is that the Intersection is as weak as the American version. Why doesn’t any of the franchises want to do something more with the Intersection? Just one lousy task and that’s it?
Although it was funny to see Intersected teams lose each other while driving on the road to the same place.
The other complaint is that they copied a luck-based task from TAR Asia 2 in the exact same location. I love how Anastasia thought it was necessary to one-up Collin’s accident. The air she got was ridiculous.
Speaking of Anastasia, the reason why this episode ranks so high is because of how volatile Chris & Anastasia were from start to finish. The wine Detour blowup is memorable for any hardcore TAR fan. They were even fighting in confessionals from start to finish this episode. Not to mention they lost their keys in the desert, needed Renae to release their key, and Anastasia nearly died. I imagine more absurd fights are on the horizon.
Mo & Mos’ adventure this leg started out with a series of bathroom breaks prior to jumping out of a plane. Or their pointless search of a random beach that didn’t have their next clue. I can picture their friends and family cringing at home as they make their jihad jokes when firing at clay targets on the shooting range.
The Detour featured a classic pun–Guns or Rose. I guess that is a thing. Neither Detour seemed difficult unless you are a couple preparing to break up. It wasn’t a terrible Detour, but not brilliant either.
The skydiving task may be a tired formula in TAR by this point. Thankfully Alana, Dave, and Mo provided a bit of entertainment within it.
Dave & Kelly donating an extra map to the orphanage led to one of the more amusing moments of the round.
The Matt & Tom vs. Tyler & Nathan rivalry continues to build without it being too boring. Luckily all four racers are somewhat entertaining.
Mo & Mos were -this- close to surviving the leg. It would have made a better ending as Chris & Anastasia being eliminated would have been the best way to cap their shitty day.
Lastly, Luke overplays how old his dad is on screen. It never gets old. . .unlike his dad.
6) Melbourne, Australia -> Lombok, Indonesia
A Starting Line task where nobody is penalized? Wonderful.
A NEL that doesn’t involve a stupid Speed Bump? Wonderful.
A round where the prize up for grabs is an Express Pass? Meh, but I’ll forgive this since the twist was still relatively new.
This round loses points for being the closest thing to a copycat of another prior TAR leg that I have ever seen. When half of the tasks are identical, nearly every single location is identical, and the host’s own puns are plagiarized, I think that is a bit extreme.
I know it is tempting because this Lombok leg was well-constructed in TAR Asia 4. It had the freakin’ Ethan & Khairie vs. The Richards fight to set the tone for a very competitive leg.
But c’mon, replacing a tomb with bakso soup is not enough to make this its own leg. We still had a clue covered by a net in an outrigger, the rice cake massacre, diving into the water, counting money, and riding a cidomo to a pit stop.
The only interesting part about seeing a group of people repeat a leg from a different season is if it plays out any differently. Knowing how exhausted teams were by the time they needed to count the money demonstrated that this was a true test for everyone involved. My initial assumption that Tyler & Nathan would stroll through this round easily was erased halfway through the episode.
Sam & Renae obliterate eighteen seasons of TAR US’ history with young blonde all-female teams by slaughtering everyone on their way to the pit stop. They were also responsible for slaughtering that poor asterisk. It gave you ten thousand dollars and THAT is how you repay it?
One of the weirdest trends was seeing Mo & Mos repeat fellow Muslim team Bilal & Sa’eed by having a horrendous opening leg. Luckily, they were saved by a NEL unlike their Cleveland counterparts.
The lopsided rivalry of the intense Richard & Joey versus the goofy and giggly Anne-Marie & Tracy begins here. I hope this lasts for a while because it is a hilarious storyline. Anne-Marie & Tracy must be oblivious to the target on their backs. By the way, I love Anne-Marie & Tracy win round one of this war.
After Alana & Mel were awful with self-driving in Melbourne, I cannot wait to see how they handle driving in foreign countries.
Chris’s roided up reactions to everything during this leg amused me. So was Dave & Kelly’s commentary.
Lastly, Liberty vomiting after kissing a dozen Lombok men. Did their cheeks nauseate you that much?
Overall, this round was anything but its own original piece, however the cast and the fact this was a strong leg in TAR Asia 4 makes up for it. A seventy-minute episode did not drag whatsoever.
7) Zimni, Czech Republic -> Niedzica, Poland
Despite it being a To Be Continued round, there wasn’t an equalizer that resulted in all six teams being forced together at the start of the day. Yes, the gap narrowed at the salt mine, but it wasn’t enough to make Dave & Kelly and Matt & Tom be on an equal playing field with the other teams.
Tyler & Nathan being robbed on the train is one of the most shocking moments in TAR history. James & Abba will suffer a worse fate just over a year after this season airs, but James & Abba weren’t the extreme frontrunners like Tyler & Nathan had been all season long. It would be like if Colin & Christie lost their passports at the end of the tenth leg of TAR 5–the strongest team being taken out in the unluckiest way possible.
Thanks to it being a self-drive leg and having many allies, Tyler & Nathan mounted a comeback and nearly won this round. If you had any doubts they were going to win this season, they were certainly removed after this round of play.
Surprisingly, none of the tasks in Poland referenced World War II like they did during TAR 11: Real All Stars’ visit. It’s just castles, salt mines, and views of the lakes and mountains.
The salt mine task was a bit too much of a needle in the haystack for me. The crypt was cool, though. And Nathan nearly damaging the equipment was amusing as well as Matt being forced to damage his own equipment thanks to the tight overalls.
Dave & Kelly continuing to pile on fatigue and physical injury was amusing. Every time they beat Matt & Tom on navigation and how pissed Matt & Tom were also added a dash of hilarity to the episode.
The Detour, where it was so lopsided that everyone chose the sheep anyway, was full of funny moments. Renae lifting up fat sheep, sheep escaping through every pole or hole possible, and the cute little way they all run away from the contestants had me laughing. It was also a fun task to watch.
It was painful to see the Intersection be the last task before the pit stop. I know it wasn’t the shortest drive in the world, but nearly everyone checked into the pit stop in pairs.
Now for the Intersection task itself–the TAR Asia 4 woodcutting challenge on steroids. The log was three times as high, and the tools used required A LOT of physical strength. Was it too unfair to the group that had three women and only one man? That’s up for debate. Can you imagine if Charla & Mirna had to do this task?
There was hope for Chris, Anastasia, Sam, and Renae when Sam & Renae made it through their first cut, but Anastasia’s lack of strength made it clear that the lead they had since the previous round was going to be sacrificed. At least there was suspense if Kelly had enough in her to complete this challenge. The editors had me wondering because of what happened with Anne-Marie & Tracey and Mo & Mos at the zodiac challenge earlier in the season.
But Anastasia was the only one who couldn’t do it. The four hour penalty was assessed, and Sam & Renae were caught in friendly fire as they had a two hour penalty dumped on them. I think Sam & Renae should not have received a penalty at all because they weren’t allowed the chance to prove they could make the second cut.
Jeff & Luke finally nab their first victory of the season. It was well-earned as this was Jeff & Luke’s most entertaining episode to date. What time is it, old man?
It would be interesting to see how social media would have reacted to Chris & Anastasia if social media platforms were as big in 2011 as they were now. Something tells me Chris would have had a much tougher time dealing with the public reaction.
Overall, this was a solid round but too much TAR Asia copying, an oddly placed Intersection, a Detour where one option was extremely unappealing, and a luck-based challenge drops it in the rankings.
8) Prague, Czech Republic -> Zimni, Czech Republic
If I recall correctly, this is by far the shortest episode out of the first seven episodes (while other episodes were up to seventy minutes of running time, this one is only 43 minutes).
Matt & Tom set a new record by being stopped by police TWICE in the same round. Somehow they were not detained or fined by law enforcement in either situation.
The ice hockey challenge proved to be difficult as we saw some extremely painful falls by our dear Aussies. Dave’s incidents were cringeworthy to watch.
Production trolled teams by setting up a Detour task that they knew would be borderline impossible for everyone involved. Seeing three teams fall for this trap was funny.
Sam & Renae receive bad advice from a fellow team for the second round in a row as Matt & Tom were unaware of how to properly succeed at the Russian spy challenge. The comrade was always good for a laugh as he repeatedly insulted Tyler.
You could see this season being taken to the next level as the showdown at the beer stacking between the three trailing teams became more physical than what I was expecting. With five rounds left in the season, we could very well shift to it being a cutthroat battle.
This round does have a lousy ending, though. No prize given to Chris & Anastasia for finishing first, and whoever finishes last on this leg will not be penalized despite it being a Non-Elimination Leg. Sigh.
A mid-season NEL leg can be dull most of the time, but here it holds up reasonably well. A self-drive leg, a unique penalty for failing at a task, and a physical active route info all contributed to a decent round of play.
Oh, and there was abseiling. I almost forgot about it since it was only shown for two minutes.
9) Lombok, Indonesia -> Hue, Vietnam
Although this leg ends in Hue, we cannot glance over the fact that we were in Ho Chi Minh City for one task before equalizing all of the teams.
For the second round in a row, we get an excessive amount of overlap with a TAR Asia leg. Well, two TAR Asia legs if you include the carabao task from TAR Asia 2.
I like how teams were given even less instruction with the dynasty coins task compared to when it was run during TAR Asia 3 (it was also twenty degrees Celsius warmer back then to balance things out).
The Detour was extremely physical. Either you relied on the carabao to drag you through the mud to find a clue, or you caught a bunch of chickens and had to carry the heavy weight over a long course. Considering multiple teams switched tasks, nobody had any energy left.
However, forcing half of the players to run up and down stairs during what would normally be billed as a mental challenge led to them scrounging what little energy they could to finish off the leg.
Perhaps my biggest beef with this leg is underediting the broken deal between Alana & Mel and Richard & Joey right before the pit stop. Both teams were minutes away from being eliminated, and Richard & Joey gave into temptation to guarantee they stayed alive. Since both teams entered the pit stop seconds apart, we should have seen Grant Bowler host a mat chat on the spot.
In fact, Ryot & Liberty could have been told they were eliminated and start crying while Mel and Joey engage in a shouting match. That would have been great TV.
Rich & Joey was not the only team to piss off everyone this episode. Chris did his part as he infamously berated Anastasia at the airport in Lombok. Furthermore, the name-calling continued until Anastasia was the first to complete the Roadblock over ten other teams. Then things changed.
We saw alliances begin to form and enemies made. I don’t understand why we needed a double equalizer before the true round could start, but whatever.
I do find it funny that this cast got to travel by plane rather than bus or train to Hue. Special treatment for Aussies!
Mo & Mos and Anne-Marie & Tracy staying alive through the first elimination was the ideal start to the season. Ryot & Liberty were not the best choice for first boots, but it is not the worst option out there. Besides, we saw how physically fit Liberty was in the first episode–I am surprised she held up through this round without vomiting again.
While wonderful storylines developed and amusing moments were present, the lack of originality and a missed opportunity for the editors drops this episode down a bit in the rankings.
10) Hue, Vietnam -> Macau, China
Let’s get this out of the way: For the third leg in a row, many of the challenges and locations are unapologetically ripped off from TAR Asia. The fortune cookie search, placing Zodiac lanterns in the correct order, dancing in a lion costume, playing a simple card game in a casino to win points, and A-Ma Cultural Village being used as the pit stop were all apart of TAR Asia 3.
This episode used too many luck-based challenges. That is always disappointing.
The only Fast Forward of the season appears, and features the famous traditional head shaving challenge. Whether you are annoyed this task is unoriginal or like the nostalgic factor is completely up to you.
Seeing Richard & Joey go from the team viewed as underperforming and pissing off everyone else in the race go to “lucky bastards” who jump to the front and take the Fast Forward and skip three-quarters of the leg sets up the team everyone wants to knock out of the race.
This round contains one of the most frustrating moments in TAR history. The bottom two teams, beloved Mo & Mos and Anne-Marie & Tracy are at the final Roadblock. Mo & Mos decide to take a four hour penalty, thus setting up Anne-Marie & Tracy to beat them by default. However, Anne-Marie & Tracy quit -after- them despite knowing it would guarantee their elimination, and end up going home in what could have been a case of having all-time great characters.
We had name-calling in the form of Chris referring to Dave as a fat oaf, a kung fu task where Renae accidentally punched concrete to make her hand bleed, and Anne-Marie & Tracy successfully performing an aerobic lion dance.
Oh, and Mel being angry with Alana’s hesitation to step up for a Roadblock was funny. We’ll have to work on that, Alana.
This round featured a TAR franchise first which has yet to be repeated: An Express Pass which saved a team who had a 50/50 shot at being eliminated. Sam & Renae used their Express Pass in an episode where editors buried them. This round in Singapore was absolutely brutal for them.
P.S. How dapper were Matt & Tom? They were as dressed up as the Texan guy from The Simpsons. | <urn:uuid:a552fad2-9990-408d-92b8-da521f6973bd> | CC-MAIN-2019-35 | https://thesupacoowackiestblogintheuniverse.wordpress.com/2017/10/18/the-amazing-race-australia-1-episode-10-rankings/ | 2019-08-17T22:34:06Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027313501.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20190817222907-20190818004907-00220.warc.gz | en | 0.960658 | 16,333 |
Ten years ago, Jen’s cousin Meg killed herself after failing to escape an abusive relationship.
Now, Meg’s ex is back and Jen’s domestic abuse helpline has started getting frightening calls from a girl who knows things about Meg – details that only the dead girl or the man who hurt her could have known…
As Jen starts to uncover the past, someone is determined to stop her. Can she save this young woman from Meg’s fate? Or is history about to repeat itself?
| MY THOUGHTS |
Good grief! What an emotional rollercoaster ride this was. It took me several moments to recover from the devastating storyline Don’t Turn Around focused on.
Ten years ago, Meg killed herself. Her mother Ruth and cousin Jen have always believed Meg saw no other way to escape the abusive relationship she was in with her boyfriend Lewis. But lack of proof meant Lewis was never brought to justice. Now, Lewis is back in town and the helpline where Ruth and Jen work starts receiving frightening calls from a girl who knows things about Meg and is finding herself in the same situation. Can Ruth and Jen help this girl to safety before it’s too late?
This story is told through the perspectives of Ruth and Jen. Both of these characters struggle immensely with the guilt of not having seen what Meg was going through, of having been unable to see the signs and get her the help she needed. Throughout the story, you’re left to wonder if Ruth and Jen knew Meg at all as they delve into their memories of her short life. That in turn made me, as the reader, wonder about Meg as well. Was she someone who liked playing games, pulling people to her and then pushing them away again? Or was there something far more sinister going on that damaged her?
The search for the truth is not an easy one. Dealing with this new girl via the helpline has major consequences. Ruth and Jen have always vowed that the best way to deal with Meg’s loss is to make sure no other girl ever has to deal with what she dealt with. But does this determination blind them to the truth? And will they finally find out why Meg took her own life?
Amanda Brooke does an amazing job in delving into the aftermath of a loss like Meg’s for those around her. The immense struggle to pick up the pieces of their lives and move on without her is utterly realistic and believable. Time does not heal all wounds and that’s something that’s very noticeable here. This isn’t the most comfortable storyline to read as it deals with the rather dark and disturbing topics of abuse and suicide but I feel the author tackled it brilliantly.
Don’t Turn Around is a gripping, suspenseful and emotive psychological thriller with plenty of twists and red herrings. It made me angry, it made me sad and had me completely engrossed right up until the incredibly shocking ending.
Breaking: Nuclear weapon detonates over Washington
Breaking: London hit, thousands feared dead
Breaking: Munich and Scotland hit. World leaders call for calm
Historian Jon Keller is on a trip to Switzerland when the world ends. As the lights go out on civilization, he wishes he had a way of knowing whether his wife, Nadia and their two daughters are still alive. More than anything, Jon wishes he hadn’t ignored Nadia’s last message.
Twenty people remain in Jon’s hotel. Far from the nearest city and walled in by towering trees, they wait, they survive.
Then one day, the body of a young girl is found. It’s clear she has been murdered. Which means that someone in the hotel is a killer.
As paranoia descends, Jon decides to investigate. But how far is he willing to go in pursuit of justice? And what kind of justice can he hope for, when society as he knows it no longer exists?
| THE BOOK I’M CURRENTLY READING |
2019: Julianne is preparing a family dinner when her son comes to her and says he’s found something on his iPad. Something so terrible, it will turn Julianne’s world into a nightmare and make her question everything about her marriage and what type of man her husband is or is pretending to be.
1990: Holly is a fresher student at Oxford University. Out of her depth and nervous about her surroundings, she falls into an uneasy friendship with a group of older students from the upper echelons of society and begins to develop feelings for one in particular. He’s confident, quiet, attractive and seems to like her too. But as the year progresses, her friends’ behaviour grows steadily more disconcerting and Holly begins to realise she might just be a disposable pawn in a very sinister game.
| WHAT I’M (PROBABLY) READING NEXT |
Bryony Masters has been looking for her long-lost sister, Hannah, for years, but when their father has a stroke her search takes on new urgency. So when primetime game show, What Happens in France, puts a call-out for new contestants, Bryony spots the ultimate public platform to find her reality TV-obsessed sister, and finally reunite their family.
With the help of handsome teammate Lewis, it’s not long before she’s on a private jet heading for the stunning beauty of rural France. With a social media star dog, a high maintenance quiz host and a cast of truly unique characters, Bryony and Lewis have their work cut out for them to stay on the show and in the public eye.
Yet as the audience grows and the grand prize beckons they find that the search that brought them together may just fulfil more than one heart’s wish…
From dystopian to rom-com. This will be interesting. 😂
What are you reading this week? Let me know! Happy reading! xx
Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for Out of the Silence by Owen Mullen! My thanks to Emma Welton for the invitation to join. Owen joins us today to play a around of Dessert Island Must-Haves but first, let’s see what the book is all about.
| ABOUT THE BOOK |
Star investigative reporter Ralph Buchanan’s glory days are behind him. His newspaper has banished him to Pakistan, not knowing the greatest moment of his long career is waiting for him there.
When Simone Jasnin asks him to help expose a grave injustice, he finds himself embroiled in a harrowing tale that began in a dusty settlement in rural Punjab, setting in motion a chain of events that will change the lives of everyone involved.
Seven years later in the city of Lahore, members of a prominent family are being brutally murdered, one by one. The only clue is a hand-carved wooden bangle left at the scene of each crime.
As the list of suspects grows and the tension mounts, Ralph realises the answers might be closer to home than he ever thought possible.
Solving the mystery will put him back on top but at what cost?
Only when the smoke clears will the killing stop and honour be satisfied…
My wife Christine set me this fun challenge… so I thought I’d share it with you.
Dessert Island Must Haves
You have been washed up on a desert island with no hope of rescue in the foreseeable future but before leaving the ship you have just enough time to grab 1 item from each of the following… Tell us what/who you would choose and why.
A Book – I suspect that being on a dessert island may not be all its cracked up to be, sure to be a few down days. And, as you’ve probably discovered, sand gets everywhere. With all of that going on I’m liable to need some spiritual uplifting. The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho has helped me before and probably would again: a simple tale, simply told with a host of powerful messages on how to navigate the journey through life – and desert islands. Fantastic!
An Album – So many to choose from, but I’d go with something from a time when music was very important to me. I was still at school when The Beatles double album – sometimes called The White Album came out. And what an impression it made on me; great songs, too many to mention. Think I’ll put it on while I’m writing this. I remember teaching myself to play Blackbird in my lunchtime breaks and being over the moon when I got it.
A Film – Often comedy films don’t make me laugh. Having said that, probably my favourite film of all time is…As Good As It Gets. Jack Nicholson is always great but in this movie Helen Hunt, Cuba Gooding Junior and Greg Kinnear all give him a run for his money. The film manages to be cringe-worthy cruel, sad and laugh-out-loud funny. No wonder it won 2 Oscars. I’ve seen it a dozen times and if I see it another dozen that will be fine with me.
A fictional character – As a crime fiction writer I’m often asked who my favourite fictional character is and I always say Sherlock Holmes. However, old Sherlock would be heavy going on a desert island – out of his face on dope most of the time, because there would be no crimes to solve and he’s depressed. Then, when he gets started on his violin… couldn’t handle it. So who would I like to be there with me? No contest, Patrick Logue from the Charlie Cameron series. He would always make me laugh and if it turned out there were natives he’d soon be on first name terms. Might even keep us off the menu! Though I would have to keep my eye on him or he’d have the coconut milk out of my tea.
A luxury item – There would be plenty of time to kill so I’d take a guitar, I was always able to lose myself in music and I would maybe even discover that elusive 4th chord.
A photograph – I’d take the photograph I took of Christine a few days ago in Chania. She was looking wonderful, and I captured it.
A weapon – I’d take a machete because it could double as a tool. And if it turned out that there were natives and they weren’t friendly, they just might think twice before attacking a mad Scotsman wielding one of these – in my head I’m seeing Braveheart🤣
One useful item – I could imagine mosquito repellent just might come in handy, but I’d go for matches to keep that signal fire burning.
One food item – A big jar of curry powder for obvious reasons. Too long without a curry and I’d get withdrawal symptoms.
One drink item – Coffee, I’d definitely struggle without the bean! How could I possibly get into the day? I’d need to get used to no Stevia though; not looking forward to that.
One fun item – A football; nothing like a kick about on the beach!
I already got stuck on the first question 😂. Great answers, Owen! Thanks so much for stopping by and sharing this wish us!
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
Owen Mullen is a McIlvanney Crime Book Of The Year long-listed novelist.
Owen graduated from Strathclyde University, moved to London and worked as a rock musician, session singer and songwriter, and had a hit record in Japan with a band he refuses to name; he still loves to perform on occasion. His passion for travel has taken him on many adventures from the Amazon and Africa to the colourful continent of India and Nepal. A gregarious recluse, he and his wife, Christine, split their time between Glasgow, and their home in the Greek Islands where In Harm’s Way and the Charlie Cameron and Delaney series’ were created and written. His latest novel Out Of The Silence is a truly compelling thriller set in Pakistan.
Absolutely thrilled to bits to host a stop on the blog tour for The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup today! My thanks to Jenny Platt at Michael Joseph for the invitation to join and for the fab review copy!
| ABOUT THE BOOK |
Rosa Hartung is returning to her job as Minister for Social Affairs, a year since the disappearance of her twelve year-old daughter. Linus Berger, a mentally ill young man, confessed to her killing, but can’t remember where he buried her dismembered corpse.
That day a young single mother is found murdered at her home in the suburbs of Copenhagen – she’s been tortured, and one hand has been cut off. Thulin and Hess, sent to investigate the crime, arrive to find a chestnut figure hanging from a playhouse nearby.
When yet another woman is murdered, and another chestnut figure is found, Thulin and Hess begin to suspect that there’s a connection between the Hartung case and the murdered women.
Thulin and Hess are drawn into a race against time, as the murderer is on a mission that is far from over
| MY THOUGHTS |
One year after the disappearance of her daughter, Rosa Hartung returns to work as Minister for Social Affairs. Linus Berger confessed to the daughter’s killing but can apparently not remember what he did with her body, which was never found. On that same day, a young mother is found murdered at her home. The only clue is a chestnut man figure hanging nearby. It becomes clear quite early on that the killer is on a mission but is there a connection to Rosa Hartung and if so, what is it?
Enter Thulin and Hess. Thulin, a single mum, would quite like to leave the murder division behind to focus on cyber crimes. Meanwhile Hess would just rather be somewhere else entirely. He used to work at Europol in The Hague but has been forced to return to Copenhagen under a cloud. What he wants more than anything is to return to his old job, which doesn’t exactly make this investigation a priority on his list.
If you’re one of those readers who is slightly put off by high page counts, try and put that aside. Yes, this novel is more than 500 pages long but it never felt that way to me. Apart from the cramps in my hands from holding it so tightly. This is one of the best crime thrillers I’ve read. The prologue alone sent chills down my spine and had me sitting upright and paying attention from the word “go”.
Incredibly dark and disturbing, extremely chilling, it’s one of those stories where you’re annoyed when you have to put the book down because your eyes stop cooperating. I couldn’t at all figure out who the killer was and the ultimate reveal left me spinning. But that was nothing compared to the emotions I went through when I discovered why the killer is such a damaged individual. The Chestnut Man has everything. From a fantastic setting, to intriguing characters; from gruesome murders to a rather heartbreaking backstory, it is just intensely engrossing and compelling.
Soren Sveistrup is an acclaimed scriptwriter and I felt that really showed in The Chestnut Man. There’s something about the way he sets a scene that makes it incredibly easy to see it play out right in front of your eyes, as if you were watching a film. The Chestnut Man is his debut novel and, goodness gracious me, what an absolute belter it is. If you like your crime thrillers, this needs to go onto your list right now! I have no doubt you’ll be seeing it again in my “best of” at the end of the year and I’ll be recommending it until I’m blue in the face!
Søren Sveistrup is an internationally acclaimed scriptwriter of the Danish television phenomenon The Killing which won various international awards and sold in more than a hundred countries. More recently, Sveistrup wrote the screenplay for Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman.
Sveistrup obtained a Master in Literature and in History from the University of Copenhagen and studied at the Danish Film School. He has won countless prizes, including an Emmy for Nikolaj and Julie and a BAFTA for The Killing.
I’m kicking off the week with a stop on the blog tour for I’ll Find You by Liz Lawler. My thanks to Ellen at Bonnier Zaffre for the invitation to join. I have an extract to share with you all today but first, here is what this psychological thriller is all about.
| ABOUT THE BOOK |
Emily Jacobs, a nurse, is in hospital for a minor operation. When she wakes in the night, woozy with anaesthetic, she sees the doctor frantically trying to resuscitate the woman in the bed next to her. In the morning, she is told that she must have had a nightmare. The bed has been empty all along . . .
When Emily returns to work she discovers a bracelet that she believes belonged to the missing woman. Soon, she becomes convinced that her colleagues at the hospital are hiding a terrible secret. What if she’s wrong? What if her own troubled past has affected her more than she knows?
But what if she’s right?
What else could they be capable of?
| EXTRACT |
Courage abandoned her as she stared into the darkness. Her legs turned to rubber, as if she’d run long and hard, and her heart thudded as she dragged in air. Her mind froze with indecision. She needed to get a grip. To just get on with it and start searching, before the porter returned and caught her there. Her week of spying on him and following and noting down times of his every movement could change. His nightly routine of hanging up his porter’s jacket in the staffroom, with keys still in the pocket, before getting into his car and driving off-site to one of three neighbouring takeaways was no guarantee he would not return any moment and catch her in the act. She needed to be quick.
She pressed her trembling hands together, attempting to squeeze away the tremors, and stiffened her legs to give them strength. It was not the fear of looking that stopped her taking this step, it was the fear of what she would find.
She reached out and patted the wall, feeling for the light switch, hearing the pings and buzz of electricity as each Perspex square on the ceiling above illuminated brightly. The noise filled her ears and in her heightened state she imagined it being heard outside the building. She listened intently, but the momentary sounds had already ceased, and she could find no more rea son to abandon her mission. The place was silent except for the sound of her own breathing.
The room – rectangular, windowless and very private – looked like a bank vault with safe deposit boxes, where clients were taken and left in privacy to open a box and store their most valuable items. The difference here was in the size of the boxes. Each was big enough to take a body. The first and last were even bigger and were used to take the largest of the cadavers. On one wall she counted twelve doors – enough fridges for twelve bodies. That meant there were twelve spaces to check, not counting those on the facing wall. If she hurried she could be out of there in minutes, have the keys back in the porter’s pocket with him none the wiser to her being there. It may only take the opening of one door to find who she was looking for…
The small terracotta floor tiles were worn and the black scuff marks told of the back-and-forth journeys of rubber-wheeled trolleys. Parked trolleys and a hydraulic lift sat at the far end of the room, the lift plugged in for battery charging. A single chair was set against a drab grey wall.
She would open doors from left to right, bottom to top so that she didn’t miss any out.
She made her way to the nearest fridge and gripped the handle. The heavy door opened with barely a sound and cold air cooled her heated face. The cadaver was zipped inside a white body bag. She held her breath, not wanting to breathe in the air of the dead, the lingering scent of hundreds of bodies that had lain here before. The temperature was set to keep bodies cool, but could not prevent rot. When she finally took a breath, she was relieved to find that all she could smell were the harsh chemicals that the fridges had been sterilised with. Her fingers trembled as she eased open the zip, relief flooding her as she saw grey, wispy hair. Inside was a featureless old man or woman with hollowed-out cheeks. She closed the bag, shut the door and moved to open the fridge above. Her eyes fixed on a bald head, noticing wrinkles and liver spots. There were simi lar bodies in the next few chambers, with more grey hair on some, whispery white patches on others, a peach-coloured afro on another, then a shock of white-blonde hair tied back with a scrap of bandage. Someone young.
Resting for a moment, she tried not to imagine a face to fit that body. She unzipped the next bag, gagged and had to cover her mouth. The head was charred black with red congealed blood that had settled like jellied lava pushing through burst skin. She banged the door shut and gulped the air, trying not to imagine the particles of dead flesh that she could be inhaling. The dead can’t hurt you, she whispered into her cupped hand. Only to discover a moment later that they could. Inside the next fridge was a tiny, cocooned shape wrapped in a white sheet. She felt an unbearable ache inside her throat. There was a pink teddy lying atop the shrouded baby. It may have been a gift from the parents, and she felt unforgivably intrusive for seeing something so private and precious.
She slumped to the floor and leaned back against the cold steel. She was torturing herself in this place. She should have requested this search in the presence of someone else; demanded that they show her the inside of every fridge, but she couldn’t run the risk of being refused or seeing the pity in their eyes as they reluctantly agreed. They would think she had lost her mind to request such a search. As far as they were concerned the patient had simply absconded and was not one of the dead lying in this mortuary.
She crawled to the last two doors and reached up to open the top one first. Hardened by what she had already seen, she unzipped the bag fast and was surprised to see the soles of feet. The underside of the toes was pure white, the arches and heels dark purple. They were young feet, smooth and unworn by time. They could be male or female, though they were small. Using the door to steady herself she stood up and felt her insides buck as she saw the painted toenails. Blue’s so much prettier, don’t you think? It shows off your tan better. With fingertips, she reached in and touched the feet. They were cold. She cried out, unable to stop herself. It could be her. A white identity band circled the left ankle, the name hidden from view. She twisted the band slowly until she saw a printed name: Jane Doe. It was the name used for an unknown, the unidentified. Her breath felt ragged. Until she saw the face, she couldn’t be sure.
The body was in the fridge but the wrong way round. She would have to pull out the tray to see the face. She gripped its rim and pulled, but it didn’t slide out. She tugged harder, but it stayed put. She stared at the sides of the tray to try and see why it was stuck but could see nothing obvious. Maybe it just needed a stronger pull. She placed a foot against the door below, leaned back and pushed hard with her foot to put her weight behind the tug, but it was hopeless. The tray refused to move. Frustrated, she stared in at the body bag, staring at the space above it. Calculating. Thinking. Maybe there was enough room for her to climb in over it. The compartment was bigger than the others, and there was a further tray slot midway up the wall, room for a second body. She would have to unzip the bag as she went along so that when she got to the end the bag would be completely open. But fear filled her. The space looked so small, a narrow icy tunnel with only darkness at the end. She would have no room to turn around. She would have to get out of the fridge feet first, slide over the uncovered body and pray she held her nerve.
Placing her knee gingerly on the tray, she positioned her self; left foot on the left side, right foot on the right side. Keeping her head low and her weight off the body, she crab crawled her way in. The air she breathed was dense and cold and it chilled her skin as it clung to her. Her thighs were already beginning to tremble as she held herself awkwardly on toes and hands, in a spread-eagled press-up. Arching her back to relieve the stress, she was startled as she felt the ceiling pressing down on her, reminding her how tiny the crawl space was. She gulped at the air, trying to quell her rising panic. She needed to use her knees to take her weight, so that she could rest on her elbows. She shook from the strain of her position and needed to get comfortable. Clumsily she moved one knee forward as the edge of the metal tray dug into the bone, before bringing the other forward to lessen the pressure. She brought her shoulders back and straightened her arms so that she was on all fours, and immediately realised her error. She was now higher, her back a solid plane fixed in position, a feeling of weight on top of her as she pressed against the roof. She had taken up all the space with her change of position and now she was stuck.
She struggled, instinctively, shaking her head like a rabid dog stuck in a hole, banging it against the steel, grunting with the effort to get free, but her hands and knees were locked and her inability to go backwards or forwards petrified her. She wheezed, a whistling sound as her airway closed, and then, spent, weak with effort, she flopped down, resting on the body beneath her. She touched the plastic bag, feeling its smoothness, its coolness, and slowly her limbs stretched out and she realised how foolish she was to have panicked. There was enough room for both her and this body.
Moving her hand beneath her, she reached down as far as her fingers could stretch, searching for the zipper. Her fingers fumbled as they touched the bag, and she felt a solid mass beneath, but no goddamn zip. Her face mashed against the plastic as she half twisted, pushing her shoulder down and straining her muscles to reach it. Please, please just give it to me, she chanted inside her head, and then let out a cry of victory as the metal piece slid between her fingers. Wasting no more energy she pulled the zipper towards her. The scratch ing of metal against plastic echoed loudly in the confined space. She stopped as she reached the neck, seeing the sud den strands of dark hair, her fingers becoming like boneless appendages as they touched its softness. Tears blurred her vision and she was thankful for the watery screen. She could view the face through a teary waterfall and climb back out of here and still not know if it was her. She could hold on to the hope that she wasn’t dead.
She blinked away the tears and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. Slowly she brought the zip all the way up to see the top of the head, and somewhere in the region of where her heart lay, she felt a stillness. An absence of a heartbeat to match the one against her. The eyes were closed, lips pulled together and skin a washed-out milky grey. She gazed at the face. Then it came. A crushing, a squeezing, a pressing feeling right inside her heart. She had found her.
‘Wake up,’ she whimpered. Then, shoving the body hard, she yelled: ‘Wake up, damn you. Stop fucking playing about!
She wrapped her arms and legs around the unyielding form, trying to make it move. ‘You’re not dead,’ she cried. ‘You’re just cold. People can be brought back to life when they’re cold. You simply have to get warm. Come on. Wake up. Please!
Shuddering with grief she huddled into the still figure, pla cing her warm face against the cold face, her tears and mucus dripping down the neck of the body she held. Her cries changed from howls to sobs to whimpers as her mind slowly absorbed reality. Her search had finally ended. She could now lie there. She would stay for ever. She would not leave her in the dark. Stay there till —
The fridge began to hum, a healthy sound to indicate it was on. The air had suddenly become colder. Solid blackness filled the space where she lay. The square of light, from where she had crawled into the space, was now gone. While she lay there someone had entered the morgue. Someone had seen the fridge open. Someone had closed the door.
I’ll Find You is available to buy in ebook format!
Liz Lawler had a 20-year career as a nurse before becoming a general manager of a five star hotel. She found it an easy transition as she used the same greeting to both patient and hotel guest ‘Good morning. did you sleep well?’
Oh, January, you’re killing me. First of all, if you could stop with the white fluffy shit or rain falling from the skies, that’d be brilliant. A girl needs some sunshine. Desperately. (Like seriously, I don’t have enough light to take pictures for Instagram. This is just not on!)
If I thought last week was making me grumpy, this week things went to a completely different level altogether. I’m not the most diplomatic of people so I kept my mouth shut and bit my tongue so much I was worried I’d lose a piece of it. It all resulted in a bit of an existential blogger crisis and words of wisdom from someone who “talked me off the ledge”, so to speak. This blogging community, for all its talk of being loving and supportive, is often anything but. And when it shows its true colours, I feel like running a mile. It’s quite sad. As if there isn’t enough drama in the world, and yet some people feel the need to create extra when there is no call for it at all.
So, time to make some changes. I don’t like most people at the best of times. It’s why I spend so much time surrounded by books. That is where my focus will be. Ignore everything and pretty much everyone else. Sounds like a good plan.
Now if WordPress could get its act together and stop deleting stuff from my posts after I’ve saved the drafts, that would be great and maybe I can finally find some Zen again!
| BOOKS I READ THIS WEEK |
Sadly, I’ll Find You was a DNF at 46% so I don’t feel that counts. But I’ll gladly consider the other five a major accomplishment, especially since The Chestnut Man was over 500 pages long. I’m on the blog tour for that one on Tuesday but let me tell you right, it’s an absolute corker!! And Janel and I flew through Dirty Little Secrets yesterday because it’s awesome!
| BOOKS I BOUGHT THIS WEEK |
Nothing. Not due to lack of trying, mind you. It seems all the books that are calling my name aren’t published yet. What you see here is my haul from last week’s virtual shopping with Janel. Fun times!
| ARC’s RECEIVED VIA NETGALLEY |
One for a blog tour, two I was invited to read. My shelf is slowly getting out of control, although I’m still hanging on to the 90-91% approval rating. Still, when they send you books, what’s girl to do? 😂
| BOOK POST THAT LANDED ON MY DOORSTEP THIS WEEK |
The Glass Woman courtesy of Michael Joseph for the blog tour in February. Breakers and Call Me Star Girl were sent to me by Orenda. Totally excited!
Monday : Blog tour | Extract | I’ll Find You by Liz Lawler
Tuesday : Blog tour | Review | The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup
Wednesday : Blog tour | Guest Post | Out of the Silence by Owen Mullens Wednesday : This Week in Books
Thursday : Review | Don’t Turn Around by Amanda Brooke
Friday : Blog tour | Guest Post | The Boy at the Door by Alex Dahl
Saturday : Blog tour | Review | The Last by Hannah Jameson Saturday : Blog tour | Extract | Beton Rouge by Simone Buchholz
Sunday : Weekly Wrap-Up
Let the insanity of February commence! 🙄
Question of the week : Book jackets. This is a serious and obviously very deep question. When you read a book, do you take off the jacket or not? I’ve seen people mention they don’t because they want to protect the book. Now, I do take it off because I want to protect the jacket, which is ultimately what you see when you peruse my bookshelves. Thoughts? If any? 😂
That’s it for another week! Time to get my head down and fly through an enormous stack of February books to read. I may not survive this month!
Wishing you all a wonderful week and lots of happy reading! xx
It’s a real pleasure to welcome you all to my stop on the blog tour for In Safe Hands by J.P. Carter. I have an extract to share with you all but first, here is what the book is about.
| ABOUT THE BOOK |
When nine children are snatched from a nursery school in South London, their distressed parents have no idea if they will ever see them again. The community in the surrounding area in shock. How could this happen right under their noses? No one in the quiet suburban street saw anything – or at least that’s what they’re saying.
But DCI Anna Tate knows that nothing is impossible, and she also knows that time is quickly running out. It’s unclear if the kidnappers are desperate for money or set on revenge, but the ransom is going up by £1million daily. And they know that one little boy in particular is fighting for his life.
It’s one of the most disturbing cases DCI Anna Tate has ever worked on – not only because nine children are being held hostage, but because she’s pretty sure that someone close to them is lying…
| EXTRACT |
Anna was still staring at the photo half a minute later when her office door was thrust open and Detective Inspector Max Walker came rushing in. His face was pinched and tense and his bald head was shiny with perspiration.
He held up a sheet of paper and said, ‘We’ve got a live one, guv. Call just came in and it sounds pretty serious.’
Anna was at once alert. Even though he was still in his early thirties, Walker was one of the most experienced members of her team, and he was not prone to exaggeration.
‘There’s an ongoing incident at a nursery school in Peabody Street, Rotherhithe,’ he said. ‘Three men with guns entered the place and locked the all-female staff in a storeroom. There are four of them and one has been badly beaten.’
Anna jumped to her feet.
‘Who called it in?’
‘One of the women from inside the room. She used a phone the men didn’t know they had.’
‘Jesus. If it’s a nursery then there must be children.’
Walker nodded. ‘There are nine kids apparently, but the staff have no idea what’s happening to them because they were put into another room.’
Anna felt her chest contract as the adrenalin fizzed through her veins.
‘Have shots been fired?’ she asked.
Walker shook his head. ‘Not so far.’
‘Thank God for that.’ She grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair. ‘We’d better get over there fast.’
Minutes later they were in an unmarked pool car that was among dozens of police vehicles from all over South London converging on the Peabody Nursery School in Rotherhithe. Walker was driving while Anna concentrated on the constant stream of updates over the radio.
Yikes! If this extract has left you wanting more, In Safe Hands is now available to buy!
J. P. Carter is the pseudonym of a bestselling author who has also written sixteen books under the names Jaime and James Raven.
Before becoming a full-time writer he spent a career in journalism as a newspaper reporter and television producer. He was, for a number of years, director of a major UK news division and co-owned a TV production company. He now splits his time between homes in Hampshire and Spain with his wife. (
Absolutely thrilled to join the blog tour A Promise To The Dead by Victoria Jenkins today! My thanks to Team Bookouture for the opportunity to join and for the review copy, which I received via Netgalley.
| ABOUT THE BOOK |
On a dark night, on a mountain road, a young couple, Matthew and Stacey, are on their way home from a night out. Their car breaks down and Matthew leaves to look for help. By the next morning, Stacey is found murdered in the car and Matthew is missing, presumed guilty of her murder.
Called to the scene, Detective Alex King and her team soon see some terrifying links – to another local young man who is missing, and to the discovery of a body from 30 years ago.
Alex knows that the missing and the dead have a story to tell her. But will she hear it in time to uncover the killer before they strike again?
| MY THOUGHTS |
Matthew and his girlfriend Stacey are driving along a dark and quiet mountain road when their car breaks down. Matthew goes to find help, leaving Stacey alone in the car. But by the next morning, Stacey is dead and Matthew is nowhere to be found.
But that is not all and the team is overwhelmed with various cases landing on their desks all at once. Because on top of Stacey’s murder and Matthew’s disappearance, there is another missing person and the discovery of a body under a patio. There are few clues, a bit of frustration and lots of dead-ends. I too couldn’t see the forest for the trees and Victoria Jenkins managed to keep me guessing until the end, as always. As I’ve come to expect, there is some seriously heartbreaking stuff in this storyline, which left me with a massive lump in my throat. True to form, Victoria Jenkins manages to to make the reader sympathise with just about every character you meet, and that includes the ones who are committing a crime.
A Promise to the Dead had me hooked from the first page. It had me flipping the pages faster and faster, sitting on the edge of my seat with my heartbeat racing from the nail-biting tension. This is yet another insanely addictive page-turner with various layers and threads that have no problem whatsoever holding your attention throughout.
Back when I picked up the first book in the Detectives King & Lane series, The Girls in the Water, I just knew I was in for something special. There was something about Victoria Jenkins’ writing, the incredible plotting and the absolutely fantastic main female characters that got my pulse racing. Every book since then just got better and better and now here we are, at what looks like it might be the last one. For now, at least.
If this is to be the end, what a way to go. I’ll miss Alex and Chloë but this entire series has been the most incredible ride and I’m thrilled to have been a part of it from the very beginning. I absolutely love this series and no matter what Victoria Jenkins tackles next, I’ll be first in line!
Victoria Jenkins is a Welsh author who has made a name for herself writing the highly popular Detective King and Lane series of novels. The first novel in the series was “The Girls In The Water” that Jenkins first published in 2017, to much critical acclaim and popularity among crime fiction fans. The series of novels features Detective Constable Chloe Lane and Detective Inspector Alex King, who are the lead investigative characters that solve some mysterious murders in their hometown.
Jenkins lives with her husband and daughter in South Wales, where her series of crime novels featuring Detectives King and Lane is based.
Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for The Woman Inside by E.G. Scott. My thanks to Tracy Fenton for the opportunity and to the publisher for my review copy!
| ABOUT THE BOOK |
Rebecca didn’t know love was possible until she met Paul, a successful, charismatic, married man with a past as dark as her own. Their pain drew them together with an irresistible magnetism; they sensed that they were each other’s ideal (and perhaps only) match.
But twenty years later, Paul and Rebecca are drowning as the damage and secrets that ignited their love begin to consume their marriage. Paul is cheating on Rebecca, and his affair gets messy fast. His mistress is stalking them with growing audacity when Rebecca discovers Paul’s elaborate plan to build a new life without her. And though Rebecca is spiraling into an opiate addiction, it doesn’t stop her from coming up with a devious plot of her own, and this one could end absolutely everything.
| MY THOUGHTS |
If you suffer from major trust issues, step away now! Good grief! It is impossible to know who to believe or trust in this story, and quite frankly you may never believe or trust anyone ever again!
Things kick off with a most intriguing prologue. And then we have the pleasure, or displeasure, of meeting Rebecca and Paul. These two have been married for two decades but the cracks are starting to show. Paul is cheating and Rebecca has an addiction to pretty much anything that comes in pill-sized shapes. For years, they’ve been putting away money in order to build their dream home. But when Rebecca finds out all their savings have disappeared, well, let’s just say Paul had better watch out.
It took me a while to figure out what on earth was going on but the chapters were so intensely gripping that I just had to keep reading. Told mostly from the perspective of both Paul and Rebecca, the reader gets a really good insight into their marriage. These are not exactly your likeable characters. They are both incredibly flawed and there’s a lot going on with both of them. From infidelity, lies and deceit to addiction, it’s quite frankly a miracle this marriage made it to the twenty-year mark.
Because of Rebecca’s addiction to pills, it’s impossible to determine if she’s a reliable narrator. Is she suffering from hallucinations or paranoia? Or are the things she believes that are happening actually happening? This is where most of the tension comes from. Added to that is Paul’s latest mistress who can’t seem to take “no” for an answer and entertainment provided by two detectives investigating the disappearance of a woman. These two may just need a spin-off.
I was never quite sure how things would pan out but I thoroughly enjoyed the satisfying conclusion of Paul and Rebecca’s storyline. The Woman Inside takes dysfunctional to a whole other level and with plenty of twists and turns, this will leave you guessing until the end.
E. G. Scott is a pseudonym for two writers, who have been friends for over twenty-years, and have been writing plays, screenplays, and short stories separately since they were kids. They’ve collaborated on multiple projects from the beginning of their friendship, but “The Woman Inside” is their first published work together. This book came out of their shared love of thrillers and noir and wanting to collaborate on a novel for a long time. They are currently working on their next thriller.
They left four children safe upstairs. They came back to three.
On the fifth floor of the White Caps Hotel, four young boys are left alone while their parents dine downstairs.
But when one of the parents checks on the children at midnight, they discover one of them is missing.
The boys swear they stayed in their room. CCTV confirms that none of them left the building. No trace of the child is found.
Now the hunt is on to find him, before it’s too late – and before the search for a boy becomes a search for a body…
| MY THOUGHTS |
Gone By Midnight is the third instalment in the Crimson Lake series, a fact I was unaware of when I picked this one up to read. Now, luckily, this reads perfectly well as a stand-alone but I already know I’ll be making time to read the previous two as well because I can’t for the life of me figure out how these evaded my radar.
The premise of the story reminded me somewhat of the McCann investigation. Four eight year old boys are left alone in a hotel room while their parents go out to dinner. But when one of the parents returns to check on them, one of the boys has gone missing. The remaining three boys swear to high heaven that they never left the room and CCTV confirms none of them left the building. So surely the missing boy must be in the hotel somewhere but there is no trace of him.
This is the start of an amazingly intricate and complex investigation. Eight year old boys don’t exactly make great and reliable witnesses. For the longest time, I thought I knew exactly what had happened but I was proven wrong. I do so love it when an author manages to lead me in the wrong direction. Gone by Midnight is super tense, insanely addictive and has an incredibly delicious sting in its tail. Let’s not forget the amazing Australian setting.
I must say that while the search for the missing boy is intensely gripping, it’s the characters that really drew me into this story. Especially, Ted and Amanda. These two work together as a sort of private detective team but their backgrounds are utterly fascinating. I won’t be telling you what those are because I feel you need to find that out for yourself and to get a better picture of them, I recommend you start with the first book in the series. Now, I know I said at the start this can be perfectly well read as a stand-alone and that is still the case. You get plenty of background information so you don’t feel like you’ve missed out on anything. Yet, it’s also so immensely intriguing that the urge to go back and read the previous books to get the full picture is pretty hard to resist.
I honestly can’t believe this is the first time I’ve read a book by Candice Fox. Gone By Midnight had me hooked from start to finish and was just a fabulous treat. | <urn:uuid:8c7dc492-3d3f-45bf-a133-08410d726983> | CC-MAIN-2019-35 | https://noveldeelights.com/2019/01/ | 2019-08-19T03:56:50Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027314641.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20190819032136-20190819054136-00380.warc.gz | en | 0.976021 | 10,159 |
Adrian Kavanagh, 26th January 2018
As the Electoral (Amendment) (Dáil Constituencies) Bill 2017 was officially passed into law just before Christmas 2017, this will be the first polls analyses to use the new Constituency Commission electoral boundaries as the basis for the analysis. The translation of 2016 support figures onto these new constituency units is not a perfect one, alas, given the lack of tally figures in some cases (e.g. the Laois, Offaly and Kildare constituencies) or the lack of time to carry out the necessary background analyses in other cases (e.g. the constituencies in the West and North West). Where it has been possible to take account of tally figures, the constituency support estimates are based on the votes cast in the new constituency units in those cases.
The first two opinion polls of 2018 – the Sunday Times-Behaviour and Attitudes poll (21st January) and the Irish Times-Ipsos MRBI poll (25th January) – offer relatively good news for Fine Gael, although the party’s support level has dipped slightly relative to the level of support registered by the party in the December 2017 polls. Furthermore, the combined vote Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil vote share in these two polls stands at just under 60%. This, admittedly, is lower than the combined vote levels commanded by these parties before the onset of the Economic Crisis in 2008, but these poll figures seem to mark another stage in the recovery of the “Civil War” parties, given that the two parties won less than half of the votes cast nationally at the 2016 General Election. Is “Civil War” politics back? Maybe, maybe not…although it must be noted that when the other “Civil War” party, Sinn Fein, is factored in here, the combined support levels for the “Civil War parties” comes in between 75% and 80% in these two polls – up by over 15% on the combined support levels won by these parties at the 2016 election. As the larger parties advance, the smaller parties and Independents all fall back, while the Labour Party support levels remain significantly lower (especially in the Irish Times-Ipsos MRBI poll) than the already very low levels of support won by that party at the 2016 contest.
The 25th January 2018 Irish Times-Ipsos MRBI opinion poll estimates party support levels as follows: Fianna Fáil 25% (No Change relative to the previous Ipsos MRBI opinion poll), Fine Gael 34% (down 2%), Sinn Fein 19% (NC), Independents and Others 18% (up 2%) – including Solidarity-People Before Profit 2%, Social Democrats 1%, Green Party 3%, Independents 12% – Labour Party 4% (NC). My constituency-level analysis of these poll figures estimates that party seat levels, should such national support trends be replicated in an actual general election, would be as follows: Fianna Fail 47, Fine Gael 70, Sinn Fein 30, Green Party 1, Independents 12. (Fianna Fail 47, Fine Gael 69, Sinn Fein 29, Green Party 1, Independents 12 for the old 158-Dáil seats constituency arrangement.)
The 28th January 2018 Sunday Business Post-Red C opinion poll estimates party support levels as follows: Fianna Fáil 26% (No Change relative to the previous Red C opinion poll), Fine Gael 32% (up 5%), Sinn Fein 15% (down 1%), Independents and Others 21% (down 4%) – including Solidarity-People Before Profit 3%, Social Democrats 2%, Green Party 4%, Independents 12% – Labour Party 6% (NC). My constituency-level analysis of these poll figures estimates that party seat levels, should such national support trends be replicated in an actual general election, would be as follows: Fianna Fail 46, Fine Gael 70, Sinn Fein 22, Labour Party 4, Solidarity-People Before Profit 3, Green Party 2, Social Democrats 2, Independents 11. (Fianna Fail 45, Fine Gael 69, Sinn Fein 22, Labour Party 4, Solidarity-People Before Profit 3, Green Party 2, Social Democrats 2, Independents 11 for the old 158-Dáil seats constituency arrangement.)
The 21st January 2018 Sunday Times-Behaviour & Attitudes opinion poll estimates party support levels as follows: Fianna Fáil 26% (No Change relative to the previous Behaviour & Attitudes opinion poll), Fine Gael 32% (down 2%), Sinn Fein 18% (up 1%), Independents and Others 18% (NC) – including Solidarity-People Before Profit 2%, Social Democrats 1%, Green Party 2%, Independents 13% – Labour Party 6% (up 1%). My constituency-level analysis of these poll figures estimates that party seat levels, should such national support trends be replicated in an actual general election, would be as follows: Fianna Fail 49, Fine Gael 65, Sinn Fein 29, Labour Party 3, Independents 14. (Fianna Fail 47, Fine Gael 66, Sinn Fein 28, Labour Party 3, Independents 14 for the old 158-Dáil seats constituency arrangement.)
Independents and Others: Support levels for independents (whether as part of the Independent Alliance or other alliances such as the Independents4Change grouping, or for “non-aligned” independents) are down significantly on the support levels enjoyed by these groupings at February 2016 election. If these figures were to be replicated in a general election contest, a significant number of Independent Dail deputies would lose their seats, or would at least face a major struggle to hold these. Improved support levels for Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein, relative to their February 2016 General Election performances, also place greater pressure on the independents and smaller parties in terms of translating votes into seat levels, as seats that may otherwise gone to Independents/smaller party candidates may now be won instead by a candidate from the larger parties, arising from their overall increase in support levels.
In the lead up to the February 2016 election, seat levels for the Independents and Others grouping were notably harder to glean than was the case for the larger political parties, given that this is a very large and diverse grouping. The general election showed that, in some cases, increased support levels for a smaller party were simply absorbed by the increased number of candidates within that party/grouping, meaning that increased support levels did not translate into increased seat numbers – as evidenced in the support/seat level figures for the Social Democrats in that election. These trends could also be evidenced when the 2002 and 2007 Sinn Fein vote and seats levels were compared. It was impossible to apply the model in the case of the smaller parties/groupings ahead of the 2016 General Election, as many of these smaller parties and groupings did not exist in 2011 or had contested only a relatively small number of constituencies. But, with a good number of these parties having contested a number of constituencies in the 2016 election, it is now possible to treat them as separate entities in this model (although figures can not be gleaned for constituencies that these parties did not contest on February 26th, as in the case of the Social Democrats in more than twenty of the current Dail constituencies).
The nature of the Independents and Others grouping means that support levels do not usually translate as neatly into seat gains as would be the case with parties such as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Vote transfer levels across this grouping will generally not prove to be as strong as the extent of intra-party vote transfer levels enjoyed by the larger political parties, who in turn often enjoy a “seat bonus” at most general election contests. Against that, candidates from the Independents and Others grouping may be more likely to attract transfers from political parties than would be the case with candidates from other political parties, as indeed proved the case in certain circumstances (most notably Maureen O’Sullivan in Dublin Central) at the 2016 election. And, of course, the better that candidates from this grouping fare in different constituencies, the more likely they are to attract vote transfers given that they will be placed higher up in the order of first preference vote levels and hence well placed to last longer/until the end of the election count.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael surge: When compared with the February 2016 election results and particularly the trend evidenced in polls carried out in the months leading up to that election, the opinion polls published across the first few weeks of 2017 amounted to another set of very good opinion polls for Fianna Fáil. (Although party support levels were not as high as they stood at in the Ipsos-MRBI opinion poll of 7th July 2016, which has represented the best poll figures for that party since the Spring of 2008; a point in time when Fianna Fáil were still the strongest party in the state by some considerable distance.) Fianna Fáil’s strength in the opinion polls in the earlier part of 2017 has been eclipsed somewhat by the rise of Fine Gael in the latter part of 2017, however, and this trend continues also into the first opinion polls of 2018.
An increase in Fianna Fáil support levels of around seven percentage points between the 2011 and 2016 elections translated into an even more increase in seat levels for that party, although the reasons for this have been discussed in earlier poll analyses (including the impact of the 2012 Constituency Commission report). (A similar trend was noted in 2011 in respect to the support/seat gains made by Fine Gael.) It has to be expected that an even larger increase in Fianna Fáil support levels than that evidenced at the February 2016 election, or an even larger increase in Fine Gael support levels, than those evidenced at the 2011 election, would translate into very significant seat gains for either of, or both of, those parties at a future general election, especially if they could avail of the seat bonus that the largest party, or parties, usually gets at Irish general elections; the proportional element of the Irish electoral system notwithstanding. The final seat estimates for Fine Gael and Fianna Fail here may well veer on the conservative side of the scale (although both of these parties are still seen to be enjoying a significant seat bonus in all of these poll analyses), mainly due to the need to assume that vote management patterns would remain roughly the same as at 2016 to ensure that there is a consistency in approach across the post-General Election poll analyses. (I have now relaxed the assumption that parties would run the same number of candidates as in February 2016, mainly due to the realisation that a party such as Fianna Fail is likely to be running extra candidates in a number of constituencies (e.g. Limerick, Limerick City, Cork North-Central, Meath East) arising from their observations of party support trends at that election.) With the vote management assumption being further relaxed somewhat, Fianna Fail are well placed to win a seat-level in the mid-to-high 50s range on the support patterns evident in this poll.
The impact of the new constituency boundaries may be evidenced in the figures listed above. In the Irish Times poll, which shows Fine Gael nine percentage points ahead of Fianna Fáil, it is Fine Gael who seems to be the party who is benefiting the most from the new constituency boundary arrangements (with potential gains in Cavan-Monaghan and Kildare South offsetting a potential loss in Dublin North-West). However, when the gap between the two larger parties narrows, as in the case of the Sunday Times-Behaviour & Attitudes poll (six percentage point gap), the new constituency arrangement does seem to weight heavily in favour of Fianna Fáil. In this scenario the party does forfeit the potential of a second seat in the old Offaly three-seater (although prospects of three seats in Laois-Offaly cannot be ruled out), but – on the basis of the figures in the Sunday Times-Behaviour & Attitudes analysis – the party would seem to be well placed to make further seat gains in Kildare South (almost mirroring Fine Gael’s success in Dún Laoghaire in 2016), Dublin Central and Dublin North-West. The addition of the West Cavan area (the impact of which has not been factored in here) is also likely to copperfasten the party’s hold on their second seat in that constituency; something that this analysis has not been able to take account of.
The problem for Labour: Like the canary in the coal mine, the constituency level poll analyses consistently warned in the years leading up to the 2016 General Election that low levels of Labour support nationally would translate into very low seat levels for that party. Given the Labour Party’s geography of support, but also given the increased level of opposition the party faces on the left of the political spectrum from Sinn Fein, Solidarity-People Before Profit, the Social Democrats and other left-wing groupings/independent candidates, it was argued that Labour would struggle to convert votes into seats if their national support levels fall below the 10% level, as indeed proved to be the case with the February 26th election. If the party’s support levels nationally were to even lower than the 6.6% level won in the general election, then the party would be losing even more seats – especially given the narrow margins that Labour candidates (such as Willie Penrose) won seats by in that election. On the 4% support level evident in the Irish Time-Ipsos MRBI poll, Labour would face a struggle to win seats in every constituency in the state, even in their strongest areas. On these national support figures and assuming they would be contesting at least thirty constituencies, the Labour Party would need a lot of luck to win more than one or two seats in terms of their total number of seats at a general election contest. There would be a relatively strong possibility that Labour could end up winning no seats.
The low support level in this poll is a problem, but some Labour marginals and some potential Labour seat gains would be also swallowed up by the stronger showings for other parties, such as Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. On the figures in this analysis the party would really only be competitive in only a handful of constituencies and – if vote transfers patterns did not favour them – there could be a not-entirely impossible scenario emerging in which that party, based on these poll numbers (a 4% support level nationally), could end up winning no seats in a general election. On the other hand, the party seat estimates do improve on the basis of the 6% support level figure in the Sunday Times poll and Labour could edge out another seat or two in constituencies, such as Dublin Fingal, if problems were to exist with the vote management approaches of other political parties or groupings, as indeed happened in a number of constituencies at the February 2016 contest, or if the party vote was to hold up especially well in a small number of constituencies.
How this model works: Constituency support estimates for different parties and groupings form the basis of the general approach taken with this analysis. This seeks to ask the following question in relation to different opinion poll results – what do these poll figures mean in terms of the likely number of Dail seats that could be won by the different parties and groupings on those national support levels? Although the Irish electoral system is classified as a proportional electoral system, the proportion of seats won by parties will not measure up exactly to their actual share of the first preference votes, mainly because geography has a very significant impact here. First preference votes need to be filtered through the system of Irish electoral constituencies (and the different numbers of seats that are apportioned to these). In order to address this question, I estimate what the party first preference votes would be in the different constituencies, assuming similar (proportional) changes in party vote shares in all constituencies to those that are being suggested by a particular opinion poll. This of course is a very rough model and it cannot take appropriate account of the fact that changing support levels between elections tend to vary geographically, while it also fails to take account of the local particularities of the different regions in cases where no regional figures are produced in association with different national opinion polls meaning that there is no scope to carry out separate regional analyses based on these poll figures.
Thus constituency support estimates for different parties/groupings will be over-estimated in some constituencies and under-estimated in others, but the expectation would be that the overall national seat figures figures estimated will be relatively close to the true level, given that over-estimates in certain constituencies will be offset by under-estimates in others. Based on these estimated constituency support figures, I proceed to estimate the destination of seats in the different constituencies. The constituency level analysis involves the assigning seat levels to different parties and political groupings on the basis of constituency support estimates and simply using a d’Hondt method to determine which party wins the seats, while also taking account of the factors of vote transfers and vote splitting/management (based on vote transfer/management patterns observed in the February 2016 election). Due to unusually high/low support levels for some parties or political groupings in certain constituencies in the previous election, the model may throw up occasional constituency predictions that are unlikely to pan out in a “real election”, but of course the estimates here cannot be seen as highly accurate estimates of support levels at the constituency level as in a “real election” party support changes will vary significantly across constituency given uneven geographical shifts in support levels.
The model has been amended to take account of instances where general election candidates have changed their political party/political grouping, as with the case of Stephen Donnelly’s (Wicklow) defection from Social Democrats, return to the Independent ranks and his later joining of the Fianna Fail party. In this instance, part (i.e. 50%) of that candidate’s February 2016 support level is transferred from the old party’s tally to the new party/political grouping when carrying out analyses with this model, with the remainder being allocated to/remaining with that candidate’s old political party/political grouping.
The point to remember here is that the ultimate aim of this model is to get an overall, national-level, estimate of seat numbers and these are based, as noted earlier, on the proviso that an over-prediction in one constituency may be offset by an under-prediction in another constituency. This model does not aim, or expect, to produce 100% accurate party support and seat level predictions for each of the 39 constituencies. (Just taking a moment to mourn the loss of the three-seat Laois constituency…)
These analyses simply estimate what party seat levels would be, should such national support trends be replicated in an actual general election. For a variety of reasons (including the impact of high levels of undecided voters in a specific poll), the actual result of an election contest may vary from the figures suggested by an opinion poll, even if the poll is carried out relatively close to election day, or on election day itself as in the case of exit polls, but the likelihood of such variation is not something that can be factored into this model. Vote transfer patterns of course cannot be accounted for in the constituency support estimate figures, but I do try to control for these somewhat in my set of amended seat allocations.
Constituency Support Estimates (Irish Times-Ipsos MRBI poll): The constituency support estimates based on the Irish Times-Ipsos MRBI opinion poll (25th January 2018) are as follows:
|Cork North Central||29%||24%||4%||27%||4%||12%|
|Cork North West||34%||41%||0%||9%||13%||3%|
|Cork South Central||39%||32%||2%||16%||5%||5%|
|Cork South West||20%||42%||4%||11%||21%||2%|
|Dublin Mid West||16%||34%||3%||30%||8%||9%|
|Dublin Bay North||17%||32%||5%||18%||19%||9%|
|Dublin North West||14%||15%||4%||46%||5%||16%|
|Dublin South Central||14%||20%||5%||34%||15%||12%|
|Dublin Bay South||13%||43%||7%||14%||4%||19%|
|Dublin South West||16%||32%||4%||22%||14%||13%|
Please Note: “OTH” here refers to the total support/seat levels estimated for the smaller parties (including the Greens, Social Democrats, Solidarity-People Before Profit and Renua – as the published version of an earlier post showed, it gets “messy” if there are too many columns in the tables here!
Seat Estimates: Based on these constituency estimates and using a d’Hondt method to determine which party wins the seats in a constituency, the party seat levels are estimated as follows:
|Cork North Central||2||1||0||1||0||0|
|Cork North West||1||2||0||0||0||0|
|Cork South Central||2||1||0||1||0||0|
|Cork South West||0||2||0||0||1||0|
|Dublin Mid West||1||2||0||1||0||0|
|Dublin Bay North||1||2||0||1||1||0|
|Dublin North West||0||1||0||2||0||0|
|Dublin South Central||0||1||0||2||1||0|
|Dublin Bay South||1||2||0||0||0||1|
|Dublin South West||1||2||0||1||1||0|
Amended Seat Estimates: The seat estimates also need to take account of the candidate and competition trends unique to the different constituency. Amending the model to account for seats that may be won or lost on the basis of estimates here being based on support levels derived due to a large/small number of candidates contesting the election. The vote transfer/management patterns evidenced in the February 26th contest are also being factored in to a certain degree. The assumption that political party vote management patterns will remain consistent/similar to those of February 26th does result in some conservative seat estimates in the case of parties that experience notable increase in support levels, , but it is important to maintain a consistency in approach across all of these post-General Election 2016 poll analyses. I have now relaxed the assumption that candidate selection approaches (i.e. the number of candidates selected) would remain the same for the February 26th contest. It would be more than fair to assume, for instance, that Fianna Fail will run more than one candidate in constituencies such as Laois, Limerick City, Cork North-Central and Meath East and Sinn Fein will run more than one candidate in Dublin Mid-West, on the basis of the support trends/patterns that were evident in such constituencies at the February 2016 election, but also on the basis of the party’s stronger support levels in recent opinion polls. However, the model, of course, cannot take account of constituencies that were not contested by certain political parties/groupings.) Taking these concerns into account, the amended seat allocations across the constituencies would look more like this:
|Cork North Central||2||1||0||1||0|
|Cork North West||1||2||0||0||0|
|Cork South Central||2||1||0||1||0|
|Cork South West||1||2||0||0||0|
|Dublin Mid West||1||2||0||1||0|
|Dublin Bay North||1||2||0||1||1|
|Dublin North West||0||1||0||2||0|
|Dublin South Central||0||1||0||2||1|
|Dublin Bay South||1||2||0||0||0|
|Dublin South West||1||2||0||1||1|
Fine Gael (and also Fianna Fáil) are obviously gaining from a larger party seat bonus in this most recent series of polls analysis, as illustrated in the Ipsos-MRBI poll analysis figures above. As noted earlier, some of the seats estimates here may veer on the conservative side. If either of the two larger parties were to manage the party vote more effectively in some constituencies than they did in February 2016, then the likelihood is that the support patterns evident in this opinion poll would translate into a higher number of seats for either of these parties. It is worth noting also that these figures show the three larger parties accounting for over eighty percent of the seats being allocated by this model. This almost parallels the dominance of the Irish political landscape (in terms of seat levels, especially) by the old two-and-a-half party system of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour. Given that current Sinn Fein support levels are notably closer to those of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail that was the case with Labour for most of the State’s history, if these support trends were to pan out in future elections it could well be the case that a new “three party system” could well be replacing the old “two-and-a-half party system”. This is not, of course, to downplay the significant level of support that is still commanded by the Independents and Others grouping, even given the declining support levels for independents across most recent polls, but this grouping – as discussed in detail above – does face greater challenges in terms of translating support levels into seat gains than would be the case for the larger political parties.
Potential Governments?: As the image above shows, on the basis of the seat-estimate numbers in this poll analysis, two-party coalitions involving Fine Gael and either Sinn Féin or Fianna Fáil would both be viable options. On the basis of the precedent set after the February 2016 General Election, it would also be possible to conceived of a minority government, led either by Fine Gael (and maybe also Fianna Fáil, although this would seem a less likely prospect based on these numbers), involving a number of deputies from the independents and smaller parties groupings, but such an arrangement would need the support from one (or both) of the other two larger parties in order for this to be viable.
Why are Labour likely to win less seats than they did in 1987 on a similarly low national support level?: The seat level estimates for the Labour Party in most of the poll analyses more or less from 2013 onwards have been stark; also highlighting the fact that the PR-STV system is proportional, but only to a limited extent. Previous analyses have, moreover, suggested that, especially given the increased competition on the Left from Sinn Fein, other smaller left of centre parties and left-leaning independents, that it will be a struggle for Labour to win seats in most, if not all, constituencies if the party’s national support levels fall below the ten percent level, as has been shown in similar analyses of most recent polls. The further the party falls below this ten percent level, the more problems Labour faces in terms of winning seats. Labour would be in serious trouble if their national support levels fall below ten percent as the party is also facing a “perfect storm” from electoral geography and changed competition levels. These factors include the reduction in Dail seat numbers (from 166 to 158) and other changes made to general election boundaries by the 2012 Constituency Commission (which militated against Labour while seeming to advantage other parties, but notably Fianna Fail) as well as the increased competition the party now faces on the Left from Sinn Fein, other smaller left-wing parties and left-of-centre independents, as well as from Fianna Fail. When Labour support levels fell to similarly low levels in the late 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s, the party was in a position to be helped (as in the 1997, 2002 and 2007 General Elections) by transfers from lower placed candidates from the smaller left-wing parties. But on these constituency-estimate figures outlined in these analyses Labour Party candidates would find themselves polling below candidates from Sinn Fein, the Socialist Party, the Workers and Unemployed Action Group or the People Before Profit Alliance, or left-leaning independents, in a number of constituencies. Instead of being in a position to possibly benefit from vote transfers (which themselves would be likely to dry up in any case), the Labour candidates would now in a number of cases be eliminated before the final count and would be providing the transfers to see candidates from other left-of-centre political groupings over the line. (If we look at the 1987 case study – we see Labour won 6.5% of the vote in the 1987 General Election and won 12 seats, but it is also worth noting that they did not contest nine constituencies in that election, whereas their 7% national vote is being distributed across all forty constituencies in this analysis, as with the most recent general elections in which Labour has contested all constituencies. In two of the twelve constituencies in 1987 where Labour won seats – Dublin South-Central, Dublin South-West, Galway West and Wexford – vote transfers were crucial in ensuring Labour won these these seats – i.e. Labour candidates were outside the seat positions on the first count but overtook candidates with higher first preference votes as counts progressed due to transfers from other candidates.
|Constituency||FPV||Total Poll||Quota||% FPV||Lab/quota|
Voting statistics for constituencies in which Labour won seats at the 1987 General Election. The table above shows that there was no constituency in 1987 in which a Labour candidate exceeded the quota and indeed successful Labour candidates, Ruairi Quinn and Michael D. Higgins won seats in their constituencies despite winning less than half of the quota in their first preference votes. In addition, Dick Spring came within a handful of votes of losing his seat in Kerry North.)
The Labour Party has tended to fall below the ten percent level in most opinion polls over the past few years, as is especially evident in this Ispsos-MRBI opinion poll. Labour seat level estimates in most of the poll analyses I have carried out in the years leading up to the recent general election were quite stark, highlighting the fact that our PR-STV electoral system is proportional but only to a limited extent. The party’s seat levels in the actual election generally tended to support the analysis offered by this model. The further Labour Party support nationally falls below the ten percent level, the more difficulties it will face in terms of winning seats. This proved to be the case in February 2016 as Labour was left to face a “perfect storm” from the combined effects of boundary changes, electoral geography and changing political competition patterns. These factors explain why Labour faces greater challenges in translating lower levels of national support into seat numbers than it did back in 1987 when the party won 12 seats with just over six percent of the national vote.
- The size of the Dáil was reduced from 166 seats to 158 at the recent general election, but my analysis of the effects of these boundary changes suggested that Labour would be more adversely effected by these than other parties, such as Fianna Fáil in particular, would be. Had the new boundaries been in place in 2011, it was estimated that the Labour Party would probably have won three or four fewer seats, while Fianna Fáil may have won two or three more seats.
- While there is a distinct geography to Labour Party support levels over and above the more “catch-all” trends traditionally associated with Fianna Fáil and (to a lesser degree) Fine Gael, there is not the same concentration of support into a small number of constituencies that one has observed in past contests with smaller parties such as the Green Party (especially in the 2002 and 2007 contests, as well as the 2016 contest) and parties such as the Social Democrats and Anti Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit in the 2016 election. In the latter cases, lower support levels nationally often translate into much larger support levels in a small number of stronger constituencies, allowing these to pick up a number of Dáil seats. In the case of Labour, the same spiking of support in a small number of stronger constituencies is not evident. As evidenced at the 2016 contest, a small share of the vote nationally (especially if Labour contests all, or most of, the Dáil constituencies) would translate into a sufficient level of support to allow them to challenge for seats in only a very small number of their stronger constituencies. (Labour were also not be helped by the level of defections and retirements amongst its cohort of TDs, especially given that these involve many of the party’s stronger constituencies at the 2011 contest. This was perhaps most evident in the party’s failure to win seats in some of its strongest constituencies in 2011, namely Dublin South-West, Dublin South-Central and Dublin North-West.)
- In 1987, Labour won 12 seats even though the party never exceeded the quota in any of the constituencies being contested by the party in that election (and it is worth remembering that Labour did not contest every constituency in 1987). Indeed, Labour won nearly half of their seats in constituencies where they had won little more than half a quota in terms of first preference votes – or even less than half a quota in the case of the Galway West and Dublin South-East constituencies. Labour were helped in this instance as their candidates were in a position to pick up vote transfers from lower-placed left-wing candidates, as well as lower-placed Fine Gael candidates (arising from that party’s drop in support in 1987 and also some instances of poor vote management). In 2002 and 2007 Labour were also able to translate their national support levels into a higher proportion of Dáil seat levels due to Labour candidates being ahead of candidates from other left-wing groupings and hence in a position to win transfers from these. In the context of low Labour support levels nationally in the 2016 election, however, the trend in a number of constituencies was instead for Labour Party candidates to be polling below candidates from Sinn Fein, the Social Democrats, Solidarity-People Before Profit, or left-leaning independents. Instead of being in a position to possibly benefit from left-wing vote transfers (which themselves were weaker in any case, as was predicted earlier in data provided in a Sunday Independent-Millward Brown poll in the summer of 2015), in this context Labour candidates were eliminated before the final count in many constituencies and potentially providing the transfers to ensure the election of candidates from other left-of-centre political groupings (or Fine Gael candidates). In previous elections, Labour might still have been able to translate lower support levels into seats in constituencies such as Dublin Bay-South, Dublin Bay-North, Clare and Dublin Rathdown, but this proved not to be the case in the 2016 contest. Ironically, with the party now out of government, they may find that their ability to win vote transfers improves again over time, along the lines of the trends that were observed for the Green Party at the 2016 General Election. | <urn:uuid:261d2a32-f92d-4d2e-b7e6-73abc84b8c20> | CC-MAIN-2019-35 | https://adriankavanaghelections.org/2018/01/26/the-january-polls-and-the-impact-of-the-constituency-commission-2017-report-changes-constituency-level-analysis-of-the-irish-times-ipsos-mrbi-24th-january-2018-and-sunday-times-behaviour-att/ | 2019-08-20T23:51:10Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027315681.63/warc/CC-MAIN-20190820221802-20190821003802-00180.warc.gz | en | 0.939418 | 7,435 |
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Atención e Investigación en Socioadicciones (AIS), is a mental health organization in Spain that provides information, advice and therapeutic activity on cults and behavioral adicctions. AIS at present, is recognized as a public health service at Catalonia. One of our main therapeutic priorities has been oriented towards providing assistance in cases related to cult groups, although we also treat cases related to unethical situations of intense interpersonal influences in "groups of two" (situations of one-way personal manipulation without the existence of a group). Facebook Twitter Youtube
Atención e Investigación en Socioadicciones (AIS), es una organización de salud mental en España que proporciona información, consejo y actividad terapéutica a personas afectadas por grupos de manipulación o sectas y por adicciones comportamentales. Actualmente, AIS está reconocida y presta servicio público en Cataluña, España. Nuestras principales prioridades terapéuticas son: proporcionar asistencia en casos relacionados con grupos de manipulación o sectas, tratar casos de situaciones no éticas de influencia interpersonal en “grupos de dos” (situaciones de manipulación unipersonal sin las existencia de un grupo) y tratar a personas afectadas por otras adicciones conductuales.
Thomas Plante, PhD, ABPP, Department of Psychology, Santa Clara University. I have edited several books on this topic (e.g., Bless Me Father For I Have Sinned: Perspectives on Sexual Abuse Committed by Roman Catholic Priests as well as Sin Against the Innocents: Sexual Abuse by Priests and the Role of the Catholic Church), have published several professional research studies about priest sex offenders in academic journals, have evaluated about 60 priests or brothers accused of sexually abusing minors, and have consulted with a variety of religious orders and dioceses about this and related problems. I have also evaluated and treated many of the victims. It troubles me that misinformation about this problem still exists. The purpose of this brief article is to try to set the record straight given the best available data and update an article I published on this web site in 2002.
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La Asociación Iberoamericana para la Investigación del Abuso Psicológico (AIIAP) es una asociación profesional especializada en relaciones sectarias, sectas destructivas y otras dinámicas de abuso psicológico.
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The mission of the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law is to protect and advance the rights of adults and children who have mental disabilities. The Bazelon Center envisions an America where people who have mental illnesses or developmental disabilities exercise their own life choices and have access to the resources that enable them to participate fully in their communities.[legal]
Becoming Free provides professionally facilitated support/recovery groups that offer psycho-social education in the context of safe relational support. These groups are for adults who have suffered previous involvement in abusive/harmful religious or spiritual environments. Additionally, a friends and family one day educational seminar will now be offered November 5, 2016. This seminar is for friends and family that have loved ones involved in religiously abusive environments or who have just recently exited.
The Berkman Center at Harvard University was founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. The Center investigates the real and possible boundaries in cyberspace between open and closed systems of code, of commerce, of governance, and of education, and the relationship of law to each. Its faculty, fellows, students, and affiliates engage with a wide spectrum of Net issues, including governance, privacy, intellectual property, antitrust, content control, and electronic commerce. As part of Its active research mission, the Center builds, uses, and freely shares open software platforms for free online lectures and discussions and sponsors gatherings, ranging from informal lunches to international conferences. [legal]
Carol Giambalvo’s Cult Information and Recovery
The mission of Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty is to end child abuse or neglect related to religion, cultural practices, or quackery through public education, research, legal action, and a limited amount of lobbying.
CTA is a not-for-profit organization based in Houston, Texas working to improve the lives of high-risk children through direct service, research and education. We recognize the crucial importance of childhood experience in shaping the health of the individual, and ultimately, society. By creating biologically-informed child and family respectful practice, programs and policy, CTA seeks to help maltreated and traumatized children. [research]
Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. The site is a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics. [legal, topic human rights]
This website explores the issues of people who have experienced spiritual abuse in their local churches and how they have, over time, recovered. Every year dedicated Christian people leave churches because of spiritual abuse. What factors contribute to dedicated and active believers in Christ leaving their churches and becoming exiting statistics? The spiritual abuse stories of people who have left their home church because of a negative and hurtful experience paint a picture of a widespread occurrence, which beckons consideration by church leaders and church congregants alike. This site also explores Biblical gender equality.
A member-driven advocacy organization, led and driven by those with direct experience in residential care and our allies. We promote and secure the human rights of youth in or at risk of residential placement.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is an independent think tank whose work aims to challenge threats to international and communal peace, from polarisation and radicalisation through to defence and security challenges. It does this through a range of policy, research, educational and cultural programmes which include the facilitation of inter-governmental and expert task forces, cross-border action networks, major applied research projects, high-level briefings, and a scholarship and leadership scheme run with the University of Oxford to nurture the next generation of leaders across Europe’s wider neighbourhood. ISD is also involved in incubating a range of initiatives that are seeded as independent organisations helping to deliver its mission in practice. The Institute works extensively across Europe, North America, the Middle East and China.
CAIC is concerned about people who are ensnared in totalitarian groups. CAIC warns the public about cults, their deceitful recruiting techniques, the imprisoning of member's minds though fear and phobia indoctrination and the isolation of members from those outside the group either physically or psychologically. CAIC works together with others who are as concerned as we are. Founder, the late Jan Groenveld, had been involved in liberating people from cults since 1980. This web site is from her work.
Colleen Russell, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Certified Group Psychotherapist, has over 20 years of experience in a general private practice working with individuals, couples, families, and groups in Marin County, San Francisco Bay Area. She specializes in high-demand group or cult education and recovery and was also a former member as a young adult. Her other specialties include trauma, loss and grief, and motherless daughters. She has presented at conferences and written articles for the International Cultic Studies Association, Northern California Group Psychotherapy Society, among other organizations. She has facilitated workshops for former members, family members of someone involved, and Second Generation Adults (SGAs), those raised in cults. Since 2003 she has developed and facilitated a Group for Former Members in which participants address and explore issues relevant to their lives, gain acknowledgement, express differences and commonalities, and learn how others have navigated through challenging situations. The group offers opportunities for healing from loss and trauma while moving forward in one’s life. Group For Former Members of High Demand Groups or Cults, Including SGAs
The Cult Education Institute (CEI) is an educational nonprofit, which offers the general public an online library about controversial groups and movements, some that have been called "cults." The CEI archives, which was first launched in 1996, has recently been redeveloped into a more modern information database. CEI is a member of both the American and New Jersey Library Associations. Together with Cult News.com and the Cult News Network the related CEI websites offer the public an interactive educational resource. The Cult News Network Cult News
CIFS is an Australian support and information network. CIFS was initially formed by parents and family members of loved ones caught up in abusive groups. The network has grown to include families, friends, former members and concerned individuals working together towards a common goal, to provide support and develop awareness for those affected by high demand groups or cultic relationships.
CIC is a charity providing advice and information for victims of cults, their families and friends, researchers and the media. CIC was founded in 1987 and became a registered charity (No. 1012914) in 1992. It was the first charitable organisation, established in the United Kingdom, focusing critical concern on the harmful methods of the cults.
Cult Information Service, Inc. is a tax-exempt, non-profit, educational, self-help organization. It is made up entirely of volunteers and dedicated to: (1) educating the public about the danger and harmful effects of mind control used by destructive cults; (2) providing support and referral to victims and those affected by destructive cults; and (3) providing information for professionals and people interested in researching destructive cults and cultic behavior. It is important to note that the Cult Information Service limits its concerns about destructive groups to unethical or illegal practices. It does not pass judgment on doctrine or beliefs.
Offers resources designed to help thoughtful families and friends understand and respond to the complexity of a loved one’s cult involvement.However, because each case should be assessed individually, we can more effectively advise you on what resources to concentrate on, if we know a bit about your situation. Site of Joseph Kelly/Patrick Ryan.
News, links and resources about cults, cultic groups, abusive relationships, movements, religions, political organizations, medical and related topics. We provide information from many points of view - our intent is to encourage understanding of the complexity of group involvement. We encourage readers to consider a variety of opinions, so that inquirers can make independent and informed judgments pertinent to their particular concerns. Provided by Joseph Kelly/Patrick Ryan. CultNews101 is available: Facebook Twitter Via email: to subscribe, send an email to [email protected]
Bibliography, with emphasis on sociology, compiled by Rob Naninga. Mainly material from before 2000. However, this is quite an extensive listing.116 Online Texts About Cults and NRMs [research]
Hope for those who have lost their way because of spiritual or cultic abuse. Doug and Wendy Duncan, who run a support group in the Dallas area.
The DialogCentre UK offers information, understanding and help about high-demand religious or political groups and the effects of involvement with them. Whether you want information about your own or someone else's group, feel you need expert help, or just want to tell someone your story, contact us. Our contact details are on the bottom of this page.
How do you recognize you’re in an abusive relationship and reach out to others for help? Almost 30% of couples report that they are struggling with some sort of abuse or domestic violence, but the issue is often denied, excused, or overlooked by the victim. This is particularly true if the abuse is psychological rather than physical. The first step towards getting help is to notice and acknowledge it, rather than avoid it. You should not have to live in fear of the person you love. Look for the following red flags and, if they’re present in your relationship, reach out to somebody. Remember – there is always help available for you.
ESAMA is dedicated to providing information, education and awareness about cultic, high demand groups and to supporting ex-members and their families through recovery. Our vision is to be a leading resource in Alberta for anyone who wants information or has been affected by mind control through cultic/high demand groups and to develop strong relationships with professionals across Canada and on an international scale.
Miguel Perlado. Bienvenido al espacio de EducaSectas, donde se recogen noticias de actualidad acerca de diversos movimientos. Los grupos que aparecen en este espacio han sido incluidos en la medida en que han sido calificados de “sectas” o bien por mostrar “comportamientos sectarios”. No obstante, no todos los grupos que se califican como “sectas” son necesariamente dañinos; de hecho, alguno de estos grupos podría ser considerado más o menos benigno y no ser más que grupos muy centrados en una persona, idea u objeto. Le recomendamos que consulte diversos artículos a su disposición en la página de la Asociación para la Investigación del Abuso Psicológico (AIIAP). HemeroSectasEducaSectas YouTube EducaSectas Facebook EducaSectas Twitter
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. We work to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as our use of technology grows. [legal]
Are you or a loved one struggling with this group? Do you need Biblical answers about the World Mission Society Church of God (WMSCoG or CoGWMS), their founder Ahnsahnghong (Ahn Sahng/Sang-Hong) or their current leader "Mother Jerusalem" (a.k.a. "Heavenly Mother God," Zang/Zahng Gil-Jah, or Chung Gil Cha)? Thank you for coming here. I hope my blog helps you. Questions and comments are always welcome.
EnCourage was set up in order to offer support to those who have left a cult, abusive group, one on one cult or been spiritually abused (called former members). This includes first generation (joined or recruited) and second/third generation (born and or raised). Whilst EnCourage has a wide range of aims (set out on this page) we are only able to offer one service at this time (when funds allow) which is to subsidise counselling for those who cannot afford to pay. Counselling can be subsidised if the former member is seeing an already approved Service Provider (ASP). This ASP will have been approved by EnCourage and thoroughly checked (counselling accreditation a requirement).
Information and help on cults and the occult. Unlike contemporary magazines that promote new-ageism, neo-advaita or non-dualism, this magazine sets out to shine a light on the negative impact of teachers and teachings within those movements.
Exit is a project within the non-profit organization Fryshuset. Our aim is to help and provide support to those who wish to leave a nationalistic/racist/nazi oriented groups and movements. We provide hands-on support for persons wanting to leave a neo nazi or racist environment by cooperating with various housing corporations, the police, social services, legal system and also with the client’s own family and friends.
Help and Hope for Survivors of Worldwide Church of God, Philadelphia Church of God, Restored Church of God, and All Offshoots
First Amendment Project is a nonprofit organization providing free and low-cost legal services on public interest free speech and free press matters. FAP provides these services to its core constituency of activists, journalists and artists who seek to vindicate important First Amendment rights, but do not have the financial resources to hire private counsel. FAP represents these clients by defending them when they are sued for what they say or write, by contesting governmental non-compliance with open records and meetings laws and in challenging laws, practices and policies that infringe on First Amendment rights. FAP is the only nonprofit organization in the country dedicated to providing free legal representation exclusively on free speech and free press issues. [legal]
An education and support group for people who are, or were, involved in cults or high demand groups. Free Minds UK is based in London, UK. It also provides individual education and support for cult recovery.
The Freedom of Mind Resource Center, Inc. offers counseling, consulting, and coaching services along with information for those seeking help for themselves or a loved one concerning controlling people, cults, beliefs, and estrangement. We do a wide range of undue influence situations: estrangements, parental alienation, second generation, cults, and use the Strategic Interaction Approach created and developed by veteran Steven Hassan and explicated in Combatting Cult Mind Control and Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults and Beliefs. It is important to stay strong, involved, and to know that "love is stronger than mind control.”
Futuristguy is a blog exploring a broad range of topics including spiritual abuse, deconstruction of unhealthy/destructive ministries, reconstruction of church ministries, healthy versus toxic paradigms, and culture and social systems among other topics.
Hartford Seminary's Hartford Institute for Religion Research has a thirty-four year record of rigorous, policy-relevant research, anticipation of emerging issues and commitment to the creative dissemination of learning. This record has earned the Institute an international reputation as an important bridge between the scholarly community and the practice of faith. Resources include an online Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. [research]
The goal of this site is to bring awareness and solutions for spiritual abuse and bad church experiences.
Gillie Jenkinson specialises in offering Post Cult Counselling to former members of abusive groups, high demand groups, cults, one-on-one cults or relationships and spiritual abuse. The company is named after the area in which it operates - the Hope Valley - which is a beautiful part of England called the Derbyshire Peak District, and is a National Park and an area of outstanding natural beauty. Post Cult Counselling is a flexible approach to counselling former cult members and survivors of spiritual abuse which may include clients coming and staying locally and spending time with Gillie Jenkinson in psycho-educational/relational counselling. Email: [email protected]
ICSA Today (IT) serves members of the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) by providing information that enhances understanding of all aspects of the cult phenomenon, including how groups function, how they affect members, techniques of influence, dealing with harmful effects, educational and legal implications, and other subjects.
Info-Cult is a non-profit charitable organization founded in 1980 based in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) that offers help and information about cults, new religious movements and related groups and subjects. Legal and Government Reports
Info-Secte est un organisme sans but lucratif de bienfaisance fondé en 1980 situé à Montréal (Québec, Canada) qui offre de l'aide et de l'information sur les sectes, les nouveaux mouvements religieux et les groupes ou sujets connexes. [legal; research]
Inform (Information Network on Religious Movements) is an independent charity, based at the London School of Economics and supported by the British government and mainstream churches. Its objective is to provide information that is as reliable and up-to-date as possible about minority religions, including new religious movements (‘NRMs’), spiritual, esoteric and/or other ‘sectarian’ or ‘cultic’ movements.
In Shaykh's Clothing is a resource website for spiritual abuse in the Muslim community. The site includes an introduction to spiritual abuse, accounts of spiritual abuse, a section on narcissism, and a blog.
This website includes a Code of Conduct of Islamic Leadership, "the most comprehensive ethical guide for Muslim institutions."
Published in cooperation with The International Society for the Study of New Religions (ISSNR), the journal was founded in 2010. International Journal for the Study of New Religions considers submissions from both established scholars and research students from all over the world. Articles should be written for a general scholarly audience. All articles are refereed. [research]
The International Journal of Cultic Studies (IJCS) is published by the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA). IJCS is a refereed annual journal that publishes scholarly research on cultic phenomena across a range of disciplines and professions with a view of making research results available to researchers, practitioners, and policy makers across the world. IJCSseeks to advance the understanding of cultic phenomena in their relationship to individuals, families, and society, notably in their psychological, social, legal, educational, religious, and cultural dimensions.
Offers resources designed to help thoughtful families and friends understand and respond to the complexity of a loved one’s cult involvement.However, because each case should be assessed individually, we can more effectively advise you on what resources to concentrate on, if we know a bit about your situation. Site of Joseph Kelly/Patrick Ryan.
Award winning filmmaker, Ondi Timoner, follows four families as they leave an abusive church in South Carolina and realize they have been in a cult. The film documents them as they enter Wellspring, the only accredited, live-in cult treatment facility in the world, where they learn the true extent of the brainwashing they have all experienced. Eventually they return home to bring the Pastor and his wife to justice, and to try to begin to rebuild their damaged lives.
An international peer reviewed journal. Its purpose is to both document and evaluate the anthropological, sociological, psychological, and philosophical aspects of emerging manifestations of religiosity in any part of the world—whether within innovative movements or mainstream institutions. [research]
MeadowHaven exists to provide a refuge for former members of high control, destructive groups to rest, heal, and grow. By understanding their experience in an abusive environment and acquiring the skills necessary for life outside the group, MeadowHaven helps former members recover their ability to be thriving contributors to society. Healing is fostered in the context of healthy community, relationships with other former members with similar experiences, and a supportive staff who understand the processes of thought reform, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), identity confusion, chronic emotional disturbance, etc The New England Institute of Religious Research was founded in 1991 as a mission outreach to provide churches, secular organizations and concerned individuals with up-to-date research on cultic structures. The Institute also provides training for people who work with those caught up by such destructive groups. We personally meet with the members of various groups to discuss Behavioral/Biblical/Theological issues with them. Another important dimension of Institute ministry is to provide an emotionally and spiritually healing environment for ex-members. We offer information, resources, support groups and counseling to those who have a loved one involved in any type of spiritually abusive group. New England Institute of Religious Research
With over 15,000 articles, news items, blog postings and videos, and over 5 million annual visitor sessions, Mediate.com is the world’s leading mediation web site. Mediate.com serves as a bridge between professionals offering mediation services and people needing mediation services.
The National Association for Christian Recovery is a not-for-profit religious organization whose passion is the cultivation and growth of recovery communities within or in partnership with Christian churches. We believe that part of the Good News that Christ brought to us was the realization that we can all bring our “problems of self” into the community of Christ and that his grace extends to our hidden wounds as well as our faith.
No matter what problems you are dealing with, we want to help you find a reason to keep living. By calling 1-800-273-TALK (8255) you’ll be connected to a skilled, trained counselor at a crisis center in your area, anytime 24/7.
NJ Safe & Sound is a volunteer organization whose mission is to educate the public about predatory alienation and to promote laws to protect families from such destructive manipulation. Visitors to the site can review a draft bill to provide a civil cause of action for the malicious disruption of the parent-child relationship, sign a petition for its passing, and fill out a questionnaire about their own experience with a ruptured relationship. They also will find answers to FAQs, expert interviews, and sample letters they can use to encourage legislators to address malicious undue influence. More information is available at facebook.com/njsafeandsound.
Nova Religio presents scholarly interpretations and examinations of emergent and alternative religious movements. [research]
Division of Religion and Philosophy, University of Cumbria [research]
Disseminate accurate religious information. Expose religious fraud, hatred, and misinformation. Disseminate information. Promote religious tolerance. [research]
Explores spiritual abuse and toxic faith
Esther Harris, a young woman praised for her virtue and devotion, believes she has landed the opportunity of a lifetime. When her fundamentalist Christian sect falls on hard times, Esther finds a job at a local health food store to supplement the group’s faltering income. At the store, Esther shares her devotion to the group with her new manager, Gabriel, a devout skeptic and preacher’s kid. The friendship with Gabriel helps Esther re-examine her human worth and reframe her faith in a whole new light.
Pokrov.org is a resource for survivors of abuse in the Eastern Rite churches, both Orthodox and Catholic. We are NOT affiliated with any church, nor is this site “blessed” by any hierarch. Pokrov.org is proud to be under the umbrella of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
Maintained by Michael Nielsen, Department of Psychology, Georgia Southern University. [research]
Leona Furnari, LCSW, is a psychotherapist specializing in assisting individuals and families in recovery from highly controlling, manipulative and/or abusive groups, cults, or 1:1 relationships. I work with those who entered destructive groups as adults, as well as those who were born or raised into these groups or relationships. I provide a supportive, safe, therapeutic environment to help former members understand what happened to them, explore the short-term and longer-term impacts, and learn to develop strengths and skills to move forward in life in a self-affirming manner. I also am a certified EMDR (eye movement desensitization & reprocessing) therapist and consultant.
Comprehensive help for anyone affected by destructive cults: Survivors, loved ones and professionals; easily accessible information on psychological manipulation and cultic abuse; up to date announcements on meetings, conferences and workshops; solid advice on where to find safe support and reliable resources in the cult recovery field; detailed explanation of Rosanne Henry’s background, experience, and approach to cult recovery.
Quackwatch is now an international network of people who are concerned about health-related frauds, myths, fads, fallacies, and misconduct. Its primary focus is on quackery-related information that is difficult or impossible to get elsewhere. To help visitors with special areas of interest, Dr. Barrett maintains 24 additional sites for autism, chiropractic, dentistry, multilevel marketing, and many other hot topics. Our Internet Health Pilot site provides links to hundreds of reliable health sites. Our Casewatch site contains a large library of legal cases, licensing board actions, government sanctions, and regulatory actions against questionable medical products. We are also affiliated with Bioethics Watch, which highlights issues of questionable research on humans. [research]
Quiet Horizon is a blog about the damaging impact of ideological thinking and an exploration of its alternative: the pursuit of self-knowledge in non-dogmatic ways. Among the questions explored are: How can a person live a meaningful and spiritual life unencumbered by ideology? How best can a person learn to trust his own inner compass for ultimate guidance rather than the prescriptions put forward by ideological organizations, both religious and secular?Greg Jemsek (author of "Quiet Horizon") works as a narrative therapist, a leadership consultant, and an educator in both Australia and the United States.
Recovering Grace is an online organization devoted to helping people whose lives have been impacted by the teachings of Bill Gothard, the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), and the Advanced Training Institute (ATI). Recovering Grace provides a unique perspective in that it was founded and is operated by adults (and their spouses) who were raised as children in Bill Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute. We all have attended Bill Gothard’s seminars, and most of us served within the IBLP organization in some form or fashion. Among the members of our team are pastors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, businessmen, and stay-at-home moms. We have all taken different journeys, but we all have one thing in common: We survived ATI. (For more about who and what Bill Gothard, IBLP, and ATI is, visit our FAQ section).
This website explores the issues of people who have experienced spiritual abuse in their local churches and how they have, over time, recovered.
Esta página ha sido creada con el propósito de ofrecer una herramienta de ayuda alterna a víctimas intimidadas, perseguidas y/o amenazadas por grupos sectarios. Pretendemos ayudar a satisfacer las necesidades emocionales y a fortalecer emocionalmente con nuestro apoyo a víctimas de sectas o cultos destructivos.
reFOCUS is a secular, non-profit tax-exempt organization which provides a network of support and referrals for individuals recovering from the effects of a destructive cult, or other closed, high-demand group or relationship. reFOCUS list of support groups.
Blog written by John Huddle exploring World of Faith Fellowship, harmful groups, and resources for those who have been involved in such groups.
For more than 40 years, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has provided free legal advice, resources, support and advocacy to protect the First Amendment and Freedom of Information rights of journalists working in areas where U.S. law applies, regardless of the medium in which their work appears. In particular, see the First Amendment Handbook. Also, see libel articles in The News Media and the Law, Summer 2011 [legal, topic human rights]
“An essay by a psychotherapist on cultic and fundamentalist groups, orthodox vs. heterodox beliefs, and religious abuse with links to other articles and resources for those affected by restrictive religious groups.”
RETIRN is a private practice of psychologists and clinical social workers which specializes in providing services to individuals and families harmed by coercive social/religious movements ("cults") and other abusive relationships. It has offices in the USA (Delaware and Lansdowne) and the UK (Pontypridd, Wales and Buxton, England). Counseling/psychotherapy, forensic (legal) consultation and expert testimony, and information and referral services are among the services offered by RETIRN. Please feel free to email Dr Steve Eichel at [email protected], Dr Linda Dubrow-Marshall at [email protected], Professor Rod Dubrow-Marshall at [email protected]), and/or Roberta Eisenberg at [email protected].
REVEAL is an organization of former members of the International Churches of Christ and its predecessor religious movements, the "Boston Movement", or Boston Church of Christ, and the "Crossroads Movement", or Crossroads Church of Christ. We also work with family members and friends of ICC members, although (at least at present) we are all former members ourselves. Our purpose is to bring the ICC into the light of day -- to provide accurate, detailed and complete information about its beliefs and practices. By providing this information, we hope to give people the tools they need to assess the ICC and their involvement in it.
This Australian commission's website has links to many useful research reports, including: Analysis of claims of child sexual abuse made with respect to Catholic Church institutions; Safe and sound: Exploring the safety of young people in residential care; Principles of trauma-informed approaches to child sexual abuse: A discussion paper.
The Safe Passage Foundation provides resources, support and advocacy for people raised in restrictive, isolated or high-demand communities, colloquially referred to as "cults."
A stage drama for family audiences. Suitable for youth theatre. Two guys. One rusted out Honda. Twenty-four hours to separate a girl from her guru. The road to Hell was never more fun. When his hip older sister Denise disappears with members of a fundamentalist church, 17-year-old Cliff Kozak struggles to hold it all together, pretending that he isn’t hurt by her decision to cut him out of her life. But a year later, a chance sighting of Denise at a New Jersey strip mall leads Cliff and his best buddy Duffy on a road trip into the heart of a deepening mystery. Why would a smart and talented girl like Denise fall for the hollow promises of a sleazy preacher? Could it be that blind faith is just another term for a desperate need to belong?
We provide faithful Catholics with guided, customized programs designed to remove psychological obstacles to giving and receiving love from God and neighbor.
We cover spiritual abuse in Bible based churches and have a secondary focus on the United Pentecostal Church.
Well, if you have experienced spiritual abuse, you know result. We hope the resources at this web site will be helpful to you. The damage that has been done is not irreversible. It is possible to feel safe again. It is possible to learn to rest again. It is possible to regain that sense of blessing you once had when you first realized that God's stance towards you, God's 'yes', was not based on your performance, but rather on God's very own performance, that of Jesus, signed, sealed, finished, available in gift-form only. -Jeff VanVonderen
Blog: The name “sounding board” resonated with me for many reasons. Although I do share some of my personal experiences on this blog, I didn’t want this blog to be about me, but to be a place where others can join in and learn from our shared experiences. We can use each other as sounding boards here. Read the definition. “Sounding board” is especially meaningful to me because I am a musician.
Part of the Royal College of Psychiatrists he Spirituality and Psychiatry Special Interest Group (SPSIG) was founded to provide a forum for psychiatrists to explore the spiritual challenges presented by psychiatric illness, and how best to respond to patients’ spiritual concerns. More than half of service users hold spiritual or religious beliefs they see as important in helping them cope with mental illness, but often feel unable to discuss such concerns with their psychiatrists. Publishes an online newsletter.
The Nitty Gritty on Cults - books, links, and resources on the Hare Krishna movement and general information about cults. What makes a cult dangerous? * Do you need a guru? * 14 Common Characterstics of Cults by Marcia Rudin * Ten Points to Develop Healthy Boundaries * Born or raised in a cult * Friend or loved one in a cult * Recovery books by Nori Muster, and more.
A blog for those wishing to explore the issue of abuse in the Church. Why does it happen? How can we move on from it? In the blog you will find 100+ articles that have been written on various aspects of Church life, its leadership and some of the problems it faces. Some of the articles are topical and connect with current events. Others are attempts to throw light on having a better understanding of why things can go wrong in the Church. Most of the articles have been written by Stephen Parsons, an Anglican priest and writer. He has made a study of abuse in the Church over the past 15 years.
SNAP is an independent, confidential network of survivors of institutional sexual abuse and their supporters who work to protect the vulnerable, expose predators and those who shield them, heal the wounded, share stories, empower others to confront the truth, find healthy ways to recover.
This website is the largest internet collection of historical documents for the: Church without a Name, Two by Twos, 2x2s, workers, friends, friends and workers fellowship, Christian Conventions, Cooneyites, Assemblies of Christians, Testimony of Jesus, No Name Church home church, the truth, the way, the fold, the fellowship, meetings, conventions, undenominational, nondenominational, testimony, gospel, Hymns Old & New, Go Preachers, Tramp Preachers, Dippers, Black Stockings, Jesus Way. This website is devoted to preserving and publishing material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find and is not widely known.
Resources for people who have been emotionally or sexually exploited in psychotherapy or other healthcare setting;
The Cult Next Door by Elizabeth Burchard and Judith Carlone. Synopsis: At 17, Elizabeth attended a therapy session where the practitioner regaled her with prophetic visions of a glorious future, hers to claim beside him. Over the next decades, this master at manipulating metaphysical concepts organized a small dedicated band. Among brainwashed minds fused with New Age doctrine, Elizabeth sank into despair. From the gullibility that led her astray, to the enlightenment that freed her, you will travel an incredible journey. For anyone who has ever been trapped by a person who would not let them go, within this book lies a message of hope.
The Forgiveness Project is an award-winning, secular organisation that collects and shares real stories of forgiveness to build understanding, encourage reflection and enable people to reconcile with the pain and move forward from the trauma in their own lives. Our exhibitions, events, and programmes use narrative learning techniques to present alternatives to cycles of conflict, violence, crime and injustice.
This website is a repository for Documents written by former followers of a worldwide, non-denominational Christian church/fellowship which claims to take no name. Common nicknames for this church are: The Truth, The Meetings, The Way, Friends and Workers Fellowship, Two-by-Twos, 2x2s, Cooneyites, The Fold and others. To read the compelling story a woman born and raised in this group see: Exit Letters
Over the past five decades, immigration has dramatically changed the religious landscape of the United States. Today, the encounter of people of different religious traditions takes place in our own cities and neighborhoods. In 1991, the Pluralism Project at Harvard University began a pioneering study of America's changing religious landscape. Through an expanding network of affiliates, we document the contours of our multi-religious society, explore new forms of interfaith engagement, study the impact of religious diversity in civic life, and contextualize these findings within a global framework. [research]
We look at all of the trends within evangelical Christianity, along with other stories and trends that impact the faith. We have become quite interested in church conflict, spiritual abuse, and hyper-authoritarian polity. We are equal opportunity offenders and do not emphasize one denomination over another.
Spiritual abuse with a special interest in the Christian fundamentalist patriarchy movement.
Voices for Dignity, Inc.™ is a non-profit organization founded to speak out against the abuse, exploitation, oppression and humiliation of human beings, to help the victims heal, to empower the survivors, and to restore their sense of dignity. To accomplish our goals, we put a strong emphasis on the power of proper storytelling. Specifically, we empower survivors of patriarchal polygamy, cults, ecclesiastical abuse, human trafficking, prostitution, rape, cyberbullying, media humiliation and other forms of trauma, including psychological violence.
Watchman Fellowship is an independent Christian research and apologetics ministry focusing on new religious movements, cults, the occult and the New Age. David Henke founded Watchman Fellowship in Columbus, Georgia in 1979. Today, Watchman Fellowship has grown to several offices in the United States. Watchman Fellowship serves the Christian and secular community as a resource for education, counseling, and non-coercive intervention and evangelism training. We accomplish these tasks through our church presentations, personal counseling, this website, and other activities. We have served almost every denomination including Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, Assemblies of God, Church of God, Lutheran, Nazarene, non-denominational, etc., as well as schools, law enforcement agencies, and civic groups.
For over 25 years, Wellspring Retreat and Resource Center has provided outpatient counseling services for victims of spiritual abuse, psychological abuse, and toxic relationships in Southern Ohio. Since 1986, survivors have come from all over the globe to find respite and care through our specialized, research-based program. We offer hope and help through a program of counseling and education. We also offer phone consultations for therapeutic professionals and families, seminars, weekend educational workshops, conference presentations, and reference materials. Our treatment plan is a multifaceted approach. Clients receive daily counseling and educational workshops from gentle, licensed professionals who understand the manipulative dynamics behind exploitative groups and relationships.
Wind of Changes, this public service website, is offered by former "instrument keepers" of the Gentle Wind Project (ex-members) to former and present followers and current "instrument keepers," as an alternative viewpoint to the GWP leaders' self-promotion, claims, and publicity. These detailed accounts of manipulation by GWP leaders -- who claim(ed) to have exclusive connections with the "spirit world" -- in the day-to-day lives of followers, and the subtleties of how commitment to the group happened, should also be helpful to families and friends of present members who are looking for answers, and to anyone searching for more information about the group.
"The World Religions & Spirituality Project (WRSP) was established in 2010 at Virginia Commonwealth University. The mission of the WRSP is to provide objective, reliable and comprehensive information about the world's diverse array of religious and spiritual groups. The central feature of the WRSP website is, therefore, profiles of contemporary religious and spiritual movements, established world religions, and historical religious and spiritual movements. Wherever possible, profiles are prepared by scholars of record for the groups that they profile. Each profile includes a presentation of the group's history, distinctive beliefs, rituals, organization and leadership, and issues/challenges. Particularly with respect to newer groups, reliable information often is less accessible, and this website offers comprehensive, balanced information for religion scholars, students, media representatives and those with a personal interest in understanding the diversity of religious and spiritual alternatives in the contemporary world." [research]
World-Wide Religious News was established as a non-profit service in 2002 committed to providing the international academic and legal community ease of access to up-to-date news on religion from around the world. Throughout history, religion has proved to be a central component of society and human experience, shaping how individuals think and interact with their society and culture, both in an immediate as well as global context. WWRN’s service provides a nexus to information that highlights the unique interplay of religion and society and how this impacts the world of today. [research] | <urn:uuid:5f5a3daa-20b2-490d-ace0-1fbb4169adf6> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | https://www.spiritualabuseresources.com/links | 2020-10-22T06:03:35Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107878921.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20201022053410-20201022083410-00180.warc.gz | en | 0.925669 | 9,804 |
We couldn’t believe one CD could be filled up so quickly.
— Aaron Conners
Bountiful, Utah, is the second city of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Legend has it that its patriarch, a herdsman named Perrigrine Sessions, exclaimed, “Here at last is paradise on earth!” on the day in 1847 when he first looked down upon the lush valley where the city stands today.
Like so many Mormon communities, Bountiful seems frozen in time, or rather out of time, a vision of a bucolic 1950s small-town America that barely ever existed in reality. The city’s newsletters have a weirdly anachronistic tone, regardless of their cover date. An issue from 1993 notes with alarm that a gang (!) has been formed, whilst going on to add a little reluctantly that it doesn’t appear to have committed any actual crimes yet. (“We hope that gang activity can be stopped before it takes a foothold.”) The same issue looks forward to “patriotic Americana” in the city park with “Utah Voices and the 23rd Army Band.” Somewhere in Bountiful, one senses, a middle-aged matron is still shaking her head disapprovingly over Elvis Presley and those gyrating hips of his — “and yet he seems such a nice, well-spoken young man otherwise…”
She was doubtless doing the same in the late 1960s, when a handful of Bountiful kids started to shoot their own movies on the new Kodak film format of Super 8. Chris Jones, Doug Vandegrift, and a collection of assorted siblings, cousins, and friends spoofed the things they were watching at the local cinema and on television: Batman, Tarzan, Mission: Impossible. Judging from the few fragments of their movies that have survived, they were hopelessly square — it’s hard to believe that they’re contemporaneous with the likes of Woodstock and Easy Rider — but also clever and endearingly cheeky. Typical Bountiful art, in other words.
Inspired by these experiments, Vandegrift went off to university to study acting, while Jones, being of a more practical bent, went out for finance. After university, Vandegrift switched from acting for a camera to drawing for one, landing a job with Hanna-Barbera illustrating Saturday-morning cartoons. He parlayed that gig into an impressive career; he won an Emmy Award in 1988 for his work on Muppet Babies. Meanwhile Jones wound up an accountant at an engineering firm in Salt Lake City.
Jones had a friend named Bruce Carver, who in 1982 bought one of the first Commodore 64s ever sold in Utah. He discovered a latent genius in himself as soon as he began to program it, and founded Access Software to publish his work. Jones initially joined the venture, whose offices would move back and forth between Salt Lake City and Bountiful as it grew, as its part-time sales representative and accountant, but he quickly grew fascinated with the creative potential of the new medium his friend was exploring. Thus he sketched out the scenario for a multi-part action game called Beach-Head, which Carver then proceeded to implement in code. Like virtually everything else Jones would ever do on a computer, this first game was inspired by his love of movies — in this case, by rah-rah World War II movies starring John Wayne and similarly lantern-jawed leading men. Thanks to Carver’s programming chops and Jones’s instinct for cinematic drama, Beach-Head became the breakout hit that put Access on the map upon its release in October of 1983. Raid Over Moscow and Beach-Head II, more games in the same style, did almost as well in 1984 and 1985.
After that, however, Bruce Carver stumbled upon the subject matter that would sustain Access for almost two decades. He and his brother Roger Carver made a golf game called Leader Board in 1986, which begot World Class Leader Board the following year, which in turn begot the long-running Links series in 1990. These games were very, very good for Access in general, but something of a mixed blessing for Chris Jones, who was now working full-time for the company, keeping track of all the money they were bringing in. The reality was that he just didn’t have much to contribute creatively to a golf simulation.
So, he decided to get the old gang back together and make another movie instead. Vandegrift had recently returned to Bountiful to take a job as Access’s art director, and was more than up for Jones’s plan. The two had dreams of showing at Sundance as they wrote a script that combined The Maltese Falcon with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Jones took the starring role of a private detective born in the wrong time, who channeled not only Humphrey Bogart but also Roy Rogers, what with his penchant for yodeling cowboy tunes. The detective-cum-cowboy’s name was Tex Murphy.
But the film went disastrously wrong. All Sundance ambitions went out the window when someone stole the gang’s brand-new 16-millimeter camera, forcing them to switch back to Super 8, then to videotape because, hey, film gets expensive. Most of the soundtrack got lost, forcing everyone to re-dub their lines. The project devolved into Plan Ten from Outer Space, a ludicrous farce whose only obvious advantage over the awful Ed Wood film it purports to spoof is the fact that it knows how terrible it is. And yet it’s also really, genuinely funny, even when it’s abundantly clear that its creators have no idea what they’re doing. It’s smart in its amateurishness, bursting with a joie de vivre that just can’t be faked. In this, it has much in common with what came later from many of the same creators.
Disappointed to have made a film that could only be shown to family and friends, however much fun he’d had with it, Jones proposed adapting it into a computer game built out of spare parts that happened to be lying around the Access offices. Bruce Carver had been blending real-world photography with computer graphics since making the first Leader Board a couple of years before; for that game and its sequel, he had captured Roger Carver swinging a golf club on videotape and imported selected frames using primitive digitization technology, all in order to give a smooth, realistic depiction of the subject. And Access also had a vaguely Starglider-like outer-space shoot-em-up called Echelon on the shelf, which Bruce Carver had worked very hard on but which had given a poor return on his investment; the game had never sold very well. Now, he agreed to let Jones make an adventure game relying heavily on digitized images, its puzzle-solving scenes glued together by a flight-simulator game that re-purposed some of the old Echelon code. It would move Tex Murphy into the dystopian world of the year 2033, largely dropping his Roy Rogers persona but doubling down on Humphrey Bogart. Cheerfully appropriating the name of a classic Martin Scorsese film without giving it a second thought, Jones dubbed the game Mean Streets.
Today Jones regards Mean Streets, like Plan Ten from Outer Space, as non-canonical, a piece of Tex Murphy juvenilia, and that’s probably a fair assessment. But, as with the movie, auguries of what came later are all over this work. Mean Streets mixes wildly disparate interfaces and modes of play with giddy abandon: the flight simulator you use to fly Tex’s speeder from place to place, the side-scrolling shoot-em-up you get dumped into when negotiations go south, the adventure game of searching locations for clues, the menu-driven conversations with some two dozen witnesses and suspects in the crime you’re trying to solve. It stitches this crazy quilt together using cutting-edge technical tricks from its time: all of the characters you meet are presented as 256-color digitized photographs — Jones once again plays Tex — and snippets of digitized speech pop up here and there, thanks to another of Bruce Carver’s brilliant innovations, a technology called Real Sound that let a game play back just what the name would imply on an MS-DOS computer without an add-on sound card.
Such an overweening focus on trendy gimmicks seldom yields a classic game; no surprise, then, that Mean Streets doesn’t quite earn that label. And yet Jones, working with Doug Vandegrift as art director, managed to bring it closer to that status than one might expect, thanks to yet another quality that would show up again in the future: a thoroughgoing willingness among the developers to put themselves in the player’s shoes, to try to play with her rather than against her. In Mean Streets, you can fly your speeder manually everywhere if that’s what you enjoy, or you can turn on the autopilot and zip to your destination; you can screw around in the desert outside of town shooting bounty hunters all day, or you can diligently pursue the resolution of the mystery with the help of the notepad thoughtfully included in the box. Even when it comes to the gimmicks, one never gets the impression the developers were thinking, “Including real pictures in our game will surely make us market leaders and sell a million copies!” No, it’s rather, “Gee, real pictures… in a game! How cool is that? Let’s do it!”
Released in late 1989, Mean Streets sold well enough to justify continuing with adventure games as a sideline to Access’s main business of golf simulations. In fact, Jones, Vandegrift and their colleagues made no fewer than three more games in the same general style as Mean Streets, minus only the flight simulator and shoot-em-up sequences, which most players of the first game had agreed were a bridge too far. The games in question were called Countdown, Martian Memorandum, and Amazon: Guardians of Eden, of which trio only the middle entry starred Tex Murphy. Then, the era of juvenilia ended as Jones and company took things to another level entirely.
Access was flying higher than ever at the time, but the reasons for their success still had much more to do with their golf games than their adventure games. In 1992, the year that Chris Jones made Amazon, Bruce Carver made Links 386 Pro, the first major game of any stripe to require a high-resolution “Super VGA” graphics card. It became a smashing hit, selling to many gamers who couldn’t care less about the sport of golf but just wanted to take in the mouth-watering details of the game’s meticulously recreated real-world courses. With Access thus flusher than ever with cash, Jones sought and won permission to, as he put it, “make the Links 386 of adventure games,” employing not only the new technology of SVGA but also CD-ROM. It was a tremendous gamble — the industry had been waiting in vain for CD-ROM to break through for literally years already — but the money flowing in from Links put Access in a position where they could afford to take such risks.
Although Doug Vandegrift had provided welcome assistance, all of Access’s adventure games to date had been Chris Jones’s babies at bottom, a fact that was perhaps not completely to their benefit. Jones was many things, but he wasn’t a terribly accomplished writer, and it often showed. Luckily, Access had recently hired as a technical writer a fellow named Aaron Conners, holder of a degree in English literature from the University of Utah. He’d become chummy with Jones when he was assigned to write hints for Amazon. Now, Jones asked him to write a full-length script for a third Tex Murphy game that would pull out all the stops.
It was the best move he ever made; Conners brought a whole new dimension to the character, adding not just more layers of humor but a degree of pathos as well. Conners:
He’s a man out of time, which works well because we can put him in an environment that none of us are familiar with, and he doesn’t seem to be familiar with it either. So, we can relate to him.
At the same time, he’s got the sensibilities of the 1940s, which is nostalgic to us. I think it ties in really well together, but it’s inherently humorous because he’s constantly out of place, no matter where he goes. He’s a [private detective], and he doesn’t really have any peers [in the future]. When he goes to the people who hire him, they’re generally higher class and think he’s scum. And yet he thinks that everyone at his level or lower is scum.
Tex’s basic attitude reminds me of the George Carlin line: “When you’re out driving, anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac.” That’s kind of the way Tex is. He doesn’t seem to fit in with anyone. Tex has an inherent dislike of people who are born privileged. So he just has to poke them all the time. That’s how I see Tex’s character, fueled by this natural irreverence.
In November of 1992, three months after being given the assignment, Conners handed Jones the story for Under a Killing Moon, then stepped up to join him as co-designer. The two have been professionally inseparable ever since.
The story takes place in the San Francisco of 2042, ten years after Mean Streets. The people of the city, who live out their lives in a Blade Runner-esque nocturnal setting, have been segregated into “norms” who don’t evince radiation-induced mutations and “mutes” who do. Tex himself is a norm, but he feels more comfortable among the mutes who inhabit the ghettos of the city. In the course of the game, his investigation of a petty robbery at a local pawnshop puts him on the trail of a worldwide eugenicist conspiracy to cleanse the earth of mutants and re-constitute the human race from pure stock.
Doug Vandegrift crafted the look of the setting, blending film noir with science fiction in a way whose only obvious antecedents were his and Jones’s own earlier works and the aforementioned Blade Runner. Jones:
The model was old-style, rundown, down and out, seedy, making it feel like the [Great] Depression. In Tex’s neighborhood it could be 1938. Dirty, dark alleys and streets, wrecked buildings, that post-apocalypse feel. Then in the new city, Tex moves through beautiful condominiums and high-tech office complexes and facilities.
Like the Access adventure games that had come before it, Under a Killing Moon would knit together all of the trendiest new techniques in game development. But, in a telling sign of the changing times, the nature of those techniques was now such that this game would necessarily be ambitious — and expensive — on an almost unprecedented scale. At its core, it would be built around two seemingly wildly disparate approaches: a 3D-rendered virtual reality and full-motion video starring real actors.
At the time that Under a Killing Moon was first being conceived, the potential for 3D rendering outside the context of vehicular simulations was best demonstrated by two games with polar-opposite personalities: Blue Sky Productions’s CRPG Ultima Underworld and id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D. The former was by far the more complete implementation of a 3D environment, but paid the price for it by running rather slowly even on machines that met its steep system requirements. Wolfenstein 3D, on the other hand, was much more limited — it was more of an illusion of a 3D environment than the real thing — but it ran like blazes on almost any computer made during the last five years. Ultima Underworld let you do all sorts of things in its world, from swimming to flying to casting spells; Wolfenstein 3D let you run through suspiciously uniform corridors and shoot Nazis. As the decade progressed, all games that employed 3D rendering would sort themselves on a continuum between these two archetypes.
Jones and Conners, for their part, were interested in using 3D not as a test of reflexes but to bring their world to life in a way that third-person graphic adventures, including Access’s own earlier ones, did not. Although Tex Murphy must sometimes use stealth to hide from enemies in the 3D sequences, he never shoots anyone at all within them. Even all these years later, Under a Killing Moon and its eventual sequels still stand out as unusual, noble efforts to use the potential of 3D in the service of something other than what the politicians would soon be labeling “murder simulators.” Jones:
When we sat down to create this experience, we asked ourselves, “If I’m a private investigator, what do I want to do?” Hey, I want to look in drawers! I want to crawl around, look at footprints on the floor, pull things out and examine them! And I want to do that stuff myself. I want to control the action. I don’t want some mouse click to take me on a path over there. Give me all the freedom that you can, then let me interact with that environment.
In talking about “some mouse click to take me on a path over there,” Jones is implicitly comparing his game to The 7th Guest, the industry’s first big CD-ROM-exclusive hit, which appeared in March of 1993 and paved the way for Under a Killing Moon by unleashing at last the long-anticipated wave of CD-ROM uptake among consumers. And indeed, at a casual glance The 7th Guest seems like a very similar game to Access’s effort: it too blends 3D environments with full-motion-video clips of real actors, and it too is among the earliest games to require an SVGA graphics card.
Look closer, however, and the differences become stark. The 7th Guest uses a node-based movement system; thus Jones’s disparaging reference above. Your movements from node to node inside the haunted mansion where it takes place are presented via pre-rendered 3D animations. Under a Killing Moon, on the other hand, does its rendering on the fly, giving you a glorious free-scrolling environment to roam as you will — crouching, bending, looking on top of things and under things and inside things. It’s an extraordinary achievement, especially given that it’s almost entirely the work of a single programmer, a longtime Access stalwart named Bruce Johnson. In order to get the speed he needed from the hardware available at the time, he had to write it in pure assembly language — an approach which even as storied a programmer as id’s John Carmack had abandoned by that point as just too much trouble. Access Software is seldom mentioned as a 3D pioneer on the level of Looking Glass Technologies (née Blue Sky Productions) and id Software, but perhaps that’s unjust. Their reputation in this field may have been ironically undermined by their other ambitions — for, instead of being content merely to redefine the state of the art in 3D environments, Jones and Conners used 3D as just one component in their game.
The other side of the equation is, as mentioned, full-motion video, which is used for cut scenes that advance the story along and for your menu-driven conversations with others. Like virtually all such productions from the 1990s, Under a Killing Moon leaves much to be desired by the cineastes among us. Even the most experienced professional actors would surely have struggled to deliver good, natural-feeling performances when forced to ply their trade in front of a plain blue screen, waving around clumsy props that would later be painted over by Access’s artists, being directed by Jones and Conners themselves, who, clever and creative though they were, had never been to film school. But then, much of the cast of Under a Killing Moon are not professional actors, and, believe me, it shows.
Whether that quality of rank amateurishness is ultimately to the game’s detriment, however, is a different question. Under a Killing Moon‘s secret sauce, which makes it work even where it really ought not to, is its sheer likability. Chris Jones deadpans his way through the role of Tex in a fashion that will never win him any acting awards, but it does win the viewer’s sympathy. The same applies to virtually every other amateur who appears onscreen, often in ludicrous homemade prosthesis and makeup appropriate for their mutant personae. Whether childhood friends of Jones and Vandegrift or people who just happened to work at Access, they’re clearly having a great deal of fun with their roles, and they clearly want us to have fun watching too.
Deep into production, Jones learned during a chance conversation with his brother that the latter knew a Hollywood talent agent who was in Salt Lake City casting for a movie. Doug Vandegrift:
She said, “If you guys want to hire Hollywood actors, I can arrange that.” But we really didn’t take it seriously until she called up one day and said, “I’ve got Margot Kidder. She’s got to go to the airport in three hours, but right now she’s sitting in Salt Lake City doing nothing. If you’d like for her to come, you can have her for three hours.” Aaron quickly wrote something, she showed up, and had great fun doing it.
We thought, well, if we can get her, maybe we can get somebody else. Before we knew it, Brian Keith came in for a day.
In an amusing reminder of Access’s essential Mormon-ness, Brian Keith, whose gruff persona in television shows like Hardcastle and McCormick apparently wasn’t affected, became in Aaron Conners’s recollection the first person ever to “drop an F-bomb” in the office. This must mark some sort of record; normally the F-bombs flow like soda inside a games studio…
Russell Means, a supporting player in the recent movie The Last of the Mohicans, also joined the cast. These “stars” who came on such short notice and left just as quickly stand out from the amateur thespians considerably less than one might expect. Like so many Hollywood actors who slummed it in CD-ROM during the heyday of the full-motion-video craze, they used Under a Killing Moon as an opportunity to chew up some scenery and have a little fun playing out-sized versions of the roles for which they were best known. “I don’t think she was really quite sure of what we were doing,” says Chris Jones about Margot Kidder. “Her reference point was Nintendo and Sega.”
Undoubtedly Access’s biggest coup was the casting of James Earl Jones, the iconic voice of Darth Vader himself, as narrator. It was really on a lark that they even rang up his agent — and sure enough, the initial response was, to say the least, not positive: “No way, no way will we do this, no way.” In the end, though, James Earl Jones did agree to do the job, and for a fraction of his normal rate at that, because his son had played and loved Access’s earlier adventure games and had been following the progress on this one closely: “Dad, you’ve got to do this!” Consider: LucasArts had just started making Star Wars games at the time, and yet with all their connections were forced to settle for a soundalike in the role of their Darth Vader. But here he was, performing for Access. Under a Killing Moon truly was a charmed project.
But if its makers were lucky, they earned their luck by doing everything they could to make sure that everyone who played it got more fun than frustration out of the experience. For example, it’s impossible to lock yourself out of victory without knowing it. Another telling sign that this game is on its player’s side is its interactive hint system, which you’re free to use as much or as little as you want. There’s even an “easy play” mode that lets you skip the puzzles completely and just explore the story. The designers plainly aren’t entirely comfortable with the idea — “you’ll enjoy a new level of entertainment” if you only use easy mode to “become familiar with the controls” and then move on to the real thing, says the manual — but, hey, if you really want to play that way, that too ought to be your right.
Yet another innovation for the player’s sake — perhaps the most enduring of all — is found in the conversation system. Menu-based conversations had been a staple of graphic adventures for quite some time, but Jones and Conners noted how awkward it felt to click on a line of dialog for Tex and then hear him parrot the very same line back. Aaron Conners:
Almost every game at the time would show the full line of dialog. We said, “This is so tedious.” A lot of the wordy games, including some of the best ones, like Monkey Island — fantastic, wonderful humor… but even with that I got tired of reading it and then hearing it. I had to come up with some other way to do it.
So, they implemented a mood-based conversation menu: instead of seeing exactly what Tex will say, you see options like (in the case of a potential love interest) “subtle innuendo,” “lovesick puppy,” and “charmingly curious.” This way, you still feel like you’re directing the course of the conversation, but some element of surprise is preserved. This system went on to influence no less a gaming blockbuster than the Mass Effect franchise, whose development teams included some avowed fans of the Tex Murphy games.
There’s an honesty about Under a Killing Moon, a commitment to its plot and premise that is lacking from most contemporary interactive movies. Again, a comparison to The 7th Guest is unavoidable. The earlier game is the poster child for puzzles that exist purely to give the player something to do, that have no connection whatsoever to a game’s fiction. But, in the words of Chris Jones, “there are no 7th Guest-type things” in Under a Killing Moon: “You know, ‘Here’s a puzzle to solve so you can move to the next room. Move these little marbles around here or whatever. None of that. In Under a Killing Moon, everything is interrelated.” The things you do in the game are mostly the things that a real private detective might be expected to do in order to solve a crime: interviewing people, searching premises for clues, piecing together the evidence to come another step toward the solution. Even those that are thoroughly goofy and would certainly never appear in a detective movie still bear directly on the case you’re trying to solve. And even those puzzles that might initially seem like roadblocks for the sake of roadblocks — like Tex’s urgent need for a new fax machine to replace his broken one — turn out to be useful as background, in this case by establishing just how down and out our hero actually is. At the time of its release, Under a Killing Moon was simply the best, most honest interactive implementation of a mystery — arguably the fictional genre most naturally amenable to becoming an adventure game — to appear since The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.
By the time it was released just in time for the Christmas of 1994, Under a Killing Moon had taken two years and some $2 million to create, making it one of the two most expensive computer games ever made to that point. It was also one of the two biggest games yet made in terms of sheer number of bits: it grew from one CD to two to three to four over the course of its development. In both departments, it was equaled only by the near-simultaneously released Wing Commander III from Origin Systems, another, very different take on the full-motion-video interactive movie. How strange to think that just a year or two earlier developers had been fretting over how they would ever manage to fill up a single CD! Not content with blowing past the one-gigabyte barrier in 1994, these two games had already exceeded two gigabytes in size. It was as frenzied a period of technological change as gaming has ever known.
Under a Killing Moon was greeted with a brutal review in Computer Gaming World, courtesy of Charles Ardai, that magazine’s resident curmudgeon as well as my favorite gaming scribe of the 1990s. His take-down is odd not least because he had previously given Countdown and Martian Memorandum fairly glowing reviews. Nevertheless, his review of Under a Killing Moon makes some very valid points, so much so that I want to quote from it here as the flip-side to my positive take on the game.
With the plot about the cult and the crusade for genetic purity, [the developers] appear to be trying to tell a serious story, with serious threats and grim implications. Yet every time the story threatens to go in an interesting direction, they cut it off at the knees by throwing in lame, inappropriate jokes and cheap slapstick, such as scenes that involve Tex falling over in his chair or walking into walls or getting captured by villains who do Three Stooges-style eye-poking shtick.
This undisciplined willingness to sacrifice the story in order to stick gags in where they don’t belong is typical of amateur writers, and it is deeply unsatisfying. Jones and Conners seem to be hoping that they can make a single game be both a serious thriller and a goofy comedy, both Chinatown and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and it just doesn’t work.
Ardai isn’t precisely wrong about any of this; the game’s tone really is all over the map, in that way all too typical of adventure-game writers — and, yes, amateur writers of all stripes — who lack the courage of their convictions, and seek to head off criticism of their productions’ manifest weaknesses by suddenly playing them for laughs. Normally, this sort of thing irritates me as badly as it does Ardai.
In this case, however, it doesn’t; I recognize the game’s disjointedness, not only in terms of its fiction but in the disparate gallery of techniques and interfaces it uses to present its story, but I’m just not that bothered by it. For me, Under a Killing Moon is a shaggy beast for sure, but also a thoroughly lovable one. When I ask myself why this should be, I find myself tempted to fall back on those vague platitudes that are the hallmark of the amateur critic: that the game has “soul”; that it is, God help us, “greater than the sum of its parts.”
Since that will obviously never do, let me note that it has at least three saving graces. One is a certain cultural sophistication which peeks through the game’s pastiche, telling us that its creators were a bit older than the norm and had a taste for things beyond Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars: the street where Tex Murphy lives is called Chandler Avenue after the beloved crime novelist; the central Mcguffin of the game is a bird statuette, a nod to The Maltese Falcon. Another is its bold spirit of innovation, its willingness to try not just one new thing but a whole pile of them, despite working in the terminally conservative ludic genre of the adventure game, which usually departs from the tried and true only with the utmost reluctance. And a third — probably the most important of all — is one that I’ve already mentioned: its exuberant likability. Just being nice — being the kind of person that other people enjoy being around — will get you a surprisingly long way in life. If Under a Killing Moon is any evidence, the same is true in games.
Here, then, is the ultimate difference maker between Under a Killing Moon and a game like The 7th Guest: the former is generous to its player while the latter is stingy. Although Under a Killing Moon gleefully employs every piece of trendy technology its developers can get their hands on, it’s all done for the purpose of making a fun game of the sort that said developers themselves would like to play; it’s not done merely to make a statement about the alleged multimedia zeitgeist, much less to rake in beaucoups of cash. The money, one senses, was always secondary when it came to Tex Murphy. (Why else invest millions into risky interactive movies at all instead of wallowing contently in the ocean of guaranteed profit from the Links franchise?)
There’s an open-hearted joy about Under a Killing Moon that makes up for a multitude of acting and even writing sins. It’s still bursting with that excitement which Jones and Vandegrift felt as kids — “We’re making a movie!” It’s just that now it’s an interactive movie. Under a Killing Moon is a wonderful tonic in a cynical world. If that sounds odd, given that the game takes place in such a dystopian setting, it serves only to point out how special its personality really is. The game tells us that the best parts of us, the things we sometimes call our basic humanity, will always survive. Chris Jones:
Okay, this world’s worn-out and ugly and partially destroyed, but people are people. People still have their sense of humor. People still have an outlook they can hang onto. Even if the world’s going to hell, it’s the only world they’ve got. To be dragged down in the mud attitude-wise or [imagine] things never improving… well, maybe they will never improve, but there’s got to be some hope that they will.
It strikes me that the most under-discussed aspect of Under a Killing Moon, as well as quite possibly our key to understanding all this, is the Mormon community from which it sprang. There are all sorts of reasons for the silence on the subject, starting with many would-be game historians’ apparent belief that individual games can be understood without taking account of the real-world beliefs and biases that went into them, passing through the way that the people who made this particular game studiously avoid the subject, ending with how loaded any discussion at all of religion has become in our societies. Not everyone who worked on Under a Killing Moon was Mormon — even a community like Bountiful is “only” 75 percent Mormon, with a substantial Catholic minority among its other believers and non-believers — and the game never, ever proselytizes; it wants to entertain you, not convert you. Nevertheless, it has a distinct Mormon sensibility, and is all the better for it.
There is, I think, a tendency among many non-believers who lack experience with religious communities to imagine them as unduly grim milieus, where everyone marches in lockstep as Soldiers of God, where there is no room for warmth or humor or whimsy, no space for secular culture of any stripe. But, as Under a Killing Moon amply demonstrates, that’s not always or even usually the case at all.
Of course, like any dogmatic religion, Mormonism comes complete with a set of Lines That Shall Not Be Crossed, whose nature I won’t belabor here. Yet it’s more forward-looking than many religions, with surprisingly little aversion to modernity within its strict lines of demarcation. Based on my own limited experience, this orientation translates into a genuine desire to see the faithful live up to their individual talents here in the world. You can see this quality manifested in Under a Killing Moon, along with much else that will strike a chord of recognition with anyone who has ever lived among or around Mormons. I recently discussed the subject with Jeff Roberts of RAD Game Tools, a longtime friend of this site who did some contract work on the game’s video-compression system:
Yeah, I joke about how LDS the humor seems to me. It’s super chaste, awkward humor. Very dad-joke humor. I grew up in Utah as a non-Mormon, so I sense that feeling immediately (Book of Mormon nails that perfectly). But yeah, any clips of Access games immediately trigger a “whoa…” in me to this day. They did a “comical” golf game a few years later that really pegs the Mormon meter for me: “Extreme” something… yikes, so bad.
I remember a funny story about Bruce [Johnson] being a henchman that has to grab a girl that was being abducted, but Bruce was embarrassed and it kept filming badly, which led to the actor playing the girl finally just saying, “Look, can you just grab me, so I can go home?”
Under a Killing Moon is the videogame equivalent of Mitt Romney, the whitest man in the world, marching gawkily along with a Black Lives Matter protest, just because, gosh darn it — and Mitt Romney would actually say, “Gosh, darn it,” in 2020 — it’s the right thing to do. As far as the game is concerned, the Right Thing is to try its own earnest, gawky best to give its players the best time ever.
Fortunately for Access, most gamers hewed more to my verdict on Under a Killing Moon than to Charles Ardai’s. In spite of a coveted segment on the television show Entertainment Tonight, the game didn’t become a breakaway mainstream icon of the early CD-ROM era like The 7th Guest or Myst. But it did do well among the slowly expanding audience of core gamers, enough to earn back its development budget and justify another Tex Murphy game. So, one of the most likable series in the history of adventure gaming got to continue on its goofy way, and thus will be making another appearance as part of these histories before all is said and done. In the meantime, give the game a shot if you haven’t already. You might be surprised at how much wholesome fun a post-apocalyptic dystopia can be.
(Sources: the book Under a Killing Moon: The Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba; Computer Gaming World of January 1990, January 1991, January 1992, August 1994, and January 1995; Electronic Entertainment of November 1994 and January 1995; Commodore Magazine of July 1987 and August 1987; Provo Daily Herald of January 25 1989, August 1 1990, August 21 1990, June 23 1992, September 19 1993, and October 8 1994; various Bountiful city newsletters. Video sources include the original film of Plan Ten from Outer Space, with commentary from the makers; the documentary The Making of Tex Murphy; and Chris Jones, Aaron Conners, and Mat Van Rhoon on the Back Seat Designers podcast. And I owe a huge thank you to Jeff Roberts for sharing his impressions of working with Access Software.
Under a Killing Moon is available for digital purchase on GOG.com.) | <urn:uuid:52543687-dc44-49c3-a7e0-05efaa8f2af5> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | https://www.filfre.net/tag/chris-jones/ | 2020-10-23T22:21:22Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107865665.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20201023204939-20201023234939-00300.warc.gz | en | 0.970981 | 8,380 |
Exceptional. What an experience! This was a wonderful, paradise-like, authentic, relaxing but also exciting time. We stayed for two nights, enjoyed a day long hike and the sunrise with the hosts (they offer some tours you can choose from) and we absolutely loved it. The hosts are wonderful people, chatting with you by the fire in the evening (so much to tell about the area, the tribes, the life in Thailand), they cook the food themselves (best Thai food we've ever had and we have been to Thailand 5 times for many weeks - definitely choose this option instead of going to some other place! )...the place is made with so much love, full of plants and cozy lights, the interior is traditional and beautiful, the garden is huge right above the river, the famous Lod cave is easy and quick to reach. Massages and scooter were arranged on request. This place is absolutely remarkable, perfect to relax and calm down, non touristic and so much to see in the surroundings. It's personal and far away from the typical tours you'd get somewhere else. It is 4 hrs by van from Chiang Mai, 1 hr from Pai and definitely worth the extra drive from Pai. Our favorite place so far.
Thank you so much for an amazing stay! Beautiful surroundings, friendly and peaceful place and the food is more than delicious.
We loved everything here and we will be back for sure, for more chocolate cakes and more chats with Khan Gail around the fire.
A unique place to make wonderful memories!
Lots of love
Elodie & Franck
We were spoiled. Six stars. Need to come back and stay longer to fully enjoy this beautiful region
Brilliant location, great service and food. Top level attention to guests. With many options to fully enjoy the area, activities everywhere. This is the area to hang out around Pai, less mass tourism, more nature and luxury. Will definitely come back for longer stay.
Dès l’arrivée, nous avons été accueillis comme des amis. Un bungalow sublime, décoré avec beaucoup de raffinements au sein d’un jardin de toute beauté. Un spa sous la terrasse couverte attenante et une vue sur la vallée et la rivière Paï exceptionnelle. Pour le dîner thaï, une table nous a été dressée entourée de bougies sous le ciel étoilé : Nous avons passé 2 jours de rêve.
Merci à nos 2 hôtes adorables.
Looking for Paradise - found heaven
Aussicht, Haus, Ruhe, Freundlichkeit der Gastgeber - einfach perfekte Ferien
Kulturell sehr interessant, super essen und einfach der wohlfühlfaktor wie zuhause zu sein.
Nur mit mehr Luxus als gewohnt ;-)
Mae Hong Son ist Thailand immer noch so wie es früher überall war - authentisch und real
Ps. Thum Lod Oyster - last Euch von Philip erklären was das ist - yummy yummy
Romantic 5 star home stay.
Very nice room, outdoor Jacuzzi with beautiful views !
Owners, Gail and Philip are fantastic people with a good sense of humour.
Excellent breakfast in the morning.
L’ospitalità di Philip e Gail è stata insuperabile. Il Resort è una perla nella foresta del nord. Camera stupenda, arredata con ottimo gusto. Terrazzo con jacuzzi per vedere Il tramonto. Prima colazione completa. Abbiamo sempre cenato nel resort. Cucina di grande livello, leggera e mai ripetitiva. Poi chiacchiera con i nostri ospiti davanti alle braci avvolti dalla natura. Prezzi più che buoni considerando il livello del resort. Belle escursioni da fare. Lasciatevi guidare da Philip , gentiluomo di Cambridge e grande appassionato della natura. Che dire ancora ? Tutto Fantastico!
A true once in a lifetime experience! De kamer met fantastisch uitzicht en jacuzzi, ook Philip als de ultieme tourguide verdient extra waardering. Het leek soms net alsof we in een live uitzending van National Geographic zaten!
Paradise in Paradise
This property, which is probably the best choice in the northwest Hill Tribe area of Thailand, offers two rooms including a romantic luxury suite with a private hot tub. the owners, phillip and gail, were great hosts and very helpful in making local travel arrangements, including car service from Chiang Mai, a jungle hike to a waterfall, visit to a remote Karen village and a local cave.
since this property is fairly remote, which was a good thing for us, renters may want to choose the added breakfast and dinner option..however there are also several inexpensive local restaurants nearby. given its small size, with only two rooms to let and no formal bar, Kanlaya is clearly not a hotel. however its intimate and remote setting along a river, with hundreds of swift birds flying overhead every evening at sunset is hard to beat and worth every penny.
Would love to come back to this little piece of heaven!
- Luxurious room set amidst breathtaking scenery.
- Plenty of viewing points within the resort where you can enjoy amazing views.
- Rooms were very well styled, clean with attention to details
- Private jacuzzi overlooking a beautiful valley.
- Food! We had breakfasts and dinner. Both with many options and very tasty food, it's well worth the price.
- Overall service is fast and they were very flexible to our needs.
- The hosts are wonderful!
Nothing negative...Everything was perfect
Wir können uns nur den sehr positiven Bewertungen anschließen. Im Kanlaya´s passt alles.
Sehr aufmerksame und freundliche Gastgeber. Jeder Wunsch wird einem erfüllt. Es ist etwas teurer, aber man bekommt auch hervorragendes geboten. Gerne wieder.
Un havre de paix dans la jungle
L'accueil sympathique avec cooktail de bienvenue
La chambre magnifique typique thai
Terrasse avec vue sur la jungle et jacuzzi
Le petit déjeuner sont très bon.. très bien composé
Le dîner sont préparer avec de bon produit frais. Cuisine thaïlandaise excellent
Hôte super sympathique, merci!
To my surprise, the pictures on the website turned out to be real, the inn really looks like this……old Philip's dream is real
In the inn, we need to devote ourselves to the Manor Lord's romance , but if a two-year-old child with us, we will find it’s hard to get into the state
The Emotions experienced during 3 days at Kanlaya can’t be described by words.
But, if you are reading this, you probably understand Philip is a great host, a fantastic guide but most important he is a really extraordinary person.
Gail smile at breakfast is a good boost for starting the day, her green curry is delicious.
Kanlaya is a secret corner of paradise.
Thank you so much Philip and Gail.
Almost forgot to mention Cho, a sweet dog who has kept us company constantly!
Thank you Gail and Philip for your hospitality. This place is great. The room is very lovely. Breakfast and meals are really delicious. We love watching stars at night at the patio. Everything is great.
We enjoyed the time staying here. We love to come back again!
Miranda Con Kate H
Dear Gail and Philip, as well as the entire family!
We had a wonderful stay with you. 6 nights and days of pure immersion in a Karen family. It is exactly what we were looking for.
Avoir en l’opportunite de nous promenes avec des populations locale, de vois tous ces enfant clauser de Mariere traditionnelle, avoli le chance de fasser Noel entoure de la familie de Gail, le petit dejeuner cue lener du soleil, le rafting et le visite des eaves, les chutes (pesque) kintes mais tellement authentiques avec le refas cuit daies du bamboo. Que de meureilleux Sourenizs. Et quelle belle propriete. Nous vous le souhaitons…as sustainable as possible!
Anne, Phillipe, Laure, Edgar & Agathe
Dear Gail, dear Philip
We would like to thank you very much for your hospitality. We loved to stay at your wonderful home, we enjoyed the amazing food, the interesting excursions.
Min Soen villmals Merci fri olie flott Zait be rich.
Maacht weisler esou.
Addi an Merci
Chantal & Marc,
Great company, amazing food, lush surroundings…
Thank you so much for taking me under your wing when I was in need of accommodation during the weekend of the Thailand Ultramarathon 50/100 km,
My first Ultra will live long in the memory and the hospitality show by Philip, Gail and Sinwan (who saved me from a giant spider!) has been first class.
Dear Philip & Gail, Happy New Year!
What a wonderful time we have spent in your warm and welcoming home. You truly have an amazing place here, something to be very proud of J
Philip, the day tour was just so much fun! What a special place your hut – we enjoyed every minute of it. From the wise lessons about the surroundings, the big knob, the lights of the village, the orchids and let’s not forget about Philip’s pets to the bonfire, the fantastic breakfast, the magical sunrise etc. etc.
Then a little stay at the house of the welcoming local villagers, including the very pink cookies that our boys ,Thomas & Pieter loved so much J
I can go on and on but let’s just say it was unforgettable. New Year’s Eve was just one big splendid party (and we have the videos to prove it!) – one we will never forget.
We thank you for your openness, all your knowledge, your warmth towards our children, your authenticity and for taking care of us the way you did. Please let us know when you ever come to Hong Kong – our door is open!
Warmest, Bram, Matres, Thomas & Pieter Eijsbass
Ps Gail – great dancing!
Dear Philip and Gail, Thank you so much for a wonderful time. It is a beautiful place. Thank you for your very warm hospitality. The Sunrise was amazing, The Karen Village and the Coffee village very nice, Thank you for everything, Love Robert and Wenche, Amsterdam
Dear Philip and Gail, Thank you so much for the lovely welcome. We have been so happy here and Jim loves it. One day we will bring our family back here. It feels like a second home for us and we are sorry to be going back to England, but we will be back. Thank you, Areeya and Jim
Dear Gail and Philip, Thank you for extending your warm hospitality in your lovely Jungle Paradise. All the best, Robert and Trine
Philip and Gail, we love your homestay, its just what we needed to relax, Glen and Michelle
Dear Philip and Gail, What a lovely lush and welcoming piece of paradise in the middle of the stunning Northern Thai countryside. Although we are not on Honeymoon but “just on holiday” we still had the lazy romantic honeymoon vibe. Thank you both and your lovely staff, for making our stay truly amazing! Love from Amsterdam, Myrhe and Reynier
Dear Philip and Gail, Thank you for a gorgeous stay in this amazing spot. The room (and hot tub) is truly beautiful. We really, really enjoyed the walks, the wander up the river was particularly enjoyable, and your local knowledge about Susa Waterfall gave us such a fun day out! The dinners were delicious and we’ll need some tennis sessions to get ourselves back into shape. The best thing of all has been your exceptional hospitality – you have been so amazingly welcoming and looked after us so beautifully, and we can’t thank you enough. We can’t wait to see you back in UK , and look forward to catching up with you in less exceptional environment. Very best wishes to you both, Athene and John.
Postscript from John: Many thanks for your wonderful hospitality, we have thoroughly enjoyed our time here, your splendid company around the fire-pit taught us so much about Nature and life around here.. What you have achieved here is truly remarkable and a wonderful testament to your spirit and relationship. We very much look forward to seeing you again in England, Jon and Athene
Philip and Gail!! Thank you so much for your hospitality. The stay here was exactly what we needed to show us the pure beauty of Thailand. Your family was absolutely wonderful and helpful with everything. The cooking was delicious and I don’t think I’ll be able to find Thai food like your sister’s anywhere in Thailand. When we found our trip to Bali wasn’t going to work we knew needed to find a comparable visit somewhere in the world and your home and welcome hearts more than exceeded our plans!! Northern Thailand is one of a kind, filled with smiles, loving people, great food and true hospitality. We love you all and will be back as soon as we can. Come to Colorado and visit us!!! We’d love to share our life and home with you both as you have done for us. Love, Brooke and Luke XXX
Dear Philip and Gail, Thank you so much for the fabulous stay. Your hospitality exceeded our expectations and we are sorry we can’t stay longer. We are already looking forward to our next visit to Thailand and possibly Cambridge. Everyone at the Lodge was so friendly and food was sizzling! You have the perfect combination of charm and local information whichmafe our whole stay very special. We came as strangers and left as friends. Please come visit us anytime in Arizona and we look forward to seeing you again soon! Thanks so much. Cheers Kelsey and Joe
Dear Philip, Dear Kanlaya,
Thank you for the wonderful stay, we talk about t as our second honeymoon. Your place is amazing,, the views are so wonderful, the food is gorgeous…. We really enjoyed the sunrise on the mountain, the visit of the Golden Buddha and Mae Lanna, the visit of the Long Neck Village, the hike after visiting Kanlaya’s village and of course the Full Moon BBQ with the Lahu people, what a unique experience! Thanks, Giselle and Geert
Dear Gail and Philip, Thank you so very much for making our dream Honeymoon a reality!
Your home and family are so friendly and welcoming and everyone has looked after us so kindly. We have had the most amazing experiences from 2 days rafting on the Pai River to two days with the elephants and visiting the wonderful temple on the mountain with the Golden Buddha. These are things we will never ever forget, the Honeymoon of a lifetime. We will be very sad to leave such a beautiful, affable place in these mountains. We have many stories to tell, one of the best will be about our first night’s dinner by candlelight due to no electricity. The joys of the rainy season! Thank you Gail for letting us take part in Mother’s Day here, it was truly wonderful to see your family and friends so happy in your home village. We really loved seeing the real Thailand and finding out about your culture and enjoying the delicious food here.
We do hope many more will come to your wonderful home during rainy season, as although there have been some fun challenges, Thailand, especially the North, is so very beautiful at this time of year!
We have learnt so much here and we have been looked after every step of the way, we cannot thank you enough for making our time here so unforgettable. We could not have ever hoped for a more magical or romantic honeymoon, we feel so, so lucky to have had it here at Kanlaya’s and in the North of Thailand. Thank you so very much, Amber and Ash
Words can’t describe the incredible experience of living for an extended time at such a lovely resort as Kanlaya’s Eyrie. The scenery is beautiful and has a very peaceful atmosphere – you really get the feel of what life in Thailand is really like. The combination of European and Karen influences is blended together to make a wonderful vacation. It doesn’t get any better than this!
Thank you Gail and Philip for a superb holiday and for sharing your home and family life with us. Your friends,
Bob and Lisa
(Whilst here Lisa studied the local bird life and wrote the authoritative report “Kanlaya’s Birds,” identifying and recording over 57 species. John, who is a master of concrete and construction, was the brains and much of the brawn behind the flight of 58 steps and terraces we built together down from the house at a 45 degree gradient, which stood up to the 2015 monsoon without a flicker!)
Thank you for having us stay at your beautiful home – you have provided us with a very unique experience and given us an insight into the way of life here in the northern Thailand mountains. You have been great hosts, service, service and attention to detail have been brilliant and without fault. We have really enjoyed your company and getting to know you both.
We enjoyed the wide variety of trips available, from the day out in Pai through the fishing with Gail’s family and celebrating Lahu New Year! We feel that we have learned a lot about the area. Thanks again, Lauren and Dean
Cher Philippe, Cher Gail, It will be hard to forget such a nice stay in Kanlaya’s. Everything was just “Formidable.” The charm of the place, the atmosphere, the people we met. The place is unique and will remain in our heart. A bientot we hope, Dominique and Francois
Another lovely visit with Philip and Gail, outside of happy we so enjoy this beautiful area, the hikes, the Karen village, lovely food and garden. Thank you once again – our second visit to Mae Hong Son Province in two years. Until we meet again we wish you the very best, John and Jan
(for the second year running this generous and altruistic couple spent many weeks at a remote Tribal School by the Burmese border in the toughest conditions, lending their support and leadership to the local people.)
We feel sad to leave Kanlaya after three wonderful days where we experienced all new and exciting things such as the most beautiful Sunrise we ever saw,, meeting the people from the Karen Village, walking through lush and wild valleys of Northern Thailand. We enjoyed every minute on your beautiful premises and in our peaceful Honeymoon Suite. We felt like true honeymooners! All the best to you and your family!
Thank you so much for everything, Love, Fons and Ulrike
Dear Philip and Gail,
Thank you so much for making us feel so welcome at Kanlaya’s. We have thoroughly enjoyed our visit and have lots of lovely memories from the first half of our Honeymoon. Your knowledge of the area and your expeditions are something no guide book could ever cover. We have enjoyed learning about local life here and its rich traditions, so different from home.
Kanlaya’s is beautiful so we both felt very lucky to have visited and enjoyed its beauty.
Thank you both for all your time for showing us everything and looking after us so well.
We wish you every success with future Honeymoons. We also wish we could take home the view from the Hot Tub (and maybe an Elephant too!)
Many thanks, Evie and Cei
Gail and Philip,
Thank you both for your great hosting in your house. We appreciate your open arms and honest company. You are both such lovely people. We think choosing your Homestay was the very best place we have seen in Thailand. Such a beautiful and relaxing place connected with lovely people, a great combination.
Thanks too for taking us up to the Sunrise. It was the best what we have seen, honestly, the landscape and the mist, wow!! We wish you Happy New Year, lots of love and good health to you and all your family.
We will stay in touch, Eva and Tomas
Unforgettable Stay !" Aurelien,Paris Score 10/10
We spent 2 days in paradise! Gail and Philip are 2 amazing persons who did everything for our Comfort! This place is just wonderful, so authentic and made with so much taste. We highly recommend their one day trek (to Gail's native village) and the sunrise breakfast!! Our warmest and best souvenir from Thailand!
"Amazing place", Eva, Czeck Republic Score 10/10
Location among mountains is just spectacular.Peaceful and relaxing place with great hosts Philip and Gail which gave us a lot of care.Night sky, full moon and one of the best sunrise watching what we have ever seen make this place special.There is also lot of things to do - hikking, discovering nature beauties as a biggest cave in asia, watterfalls and meet local tribe people. The accomodation is nicely build, clean, comfortable and quiet.I would absolutely recommend to everyone, becouse you have to FEEL that place :)
“Awesome Experience.” Yu, China Score 9.6/10
The environment was clean, the landscape was fascinating and peaceful, an awesome place where to relax and have a good time. The best resort I've ever been in my life. Nice and delicious food serving. Polite attitude. We spent the last day of 2014 there, which is unforgettable.
Exceptional, Marc, Switzerland Score 10/10 6 January 2015
Kanlaya's Eyrie est un lieu magique. Les propriétaires sont des personnes très attachantes et toujours à votre service. Cet endroit calme et reposant possède un jardin extraordinaire avec des plantes et des arbres magnifiques où chaque chose est à sa bonne place. Bien situé entre Pai et Mae Hong Son, il permet de découvrir la région très facilement
Paradise im Norden Thailands" Score 10/10. 7 January
Wunderschöne, stilvolle Anlage. Sehr zuvorkommende, freundliche Gastgeber. Ein idealer Ort um ein paar Tage auszuspannen.
Auriel et Aurielen, Paris, 28/31.12.2014
Merci a Kanlaya et Philip pour leur accueil si chaleureux et si generieux! Nous avons 3 jours immoubliables dans cette endroit magnifique! La douceur, la gentillerie, la qualite des biens et des personnes sont pour nous de tres beaux presents! Longue vie a cet endroit de Paradis! Merci aussi a Pat et a tous ceux qui font ivre cet endroit magnifique!
Au Plaisir de revenier tis bientot
Auriel et Aurelien, Paris
Dear Philip and Gail,
Thank you for providing us with a really unique and special start at Kanlaya’s to our Honeymoon. You have built a beautiful place which really does have the wow factor. The Honeymoon Suite was superb and all the small details from intricate hand-shaped door handles, hand-made, emerald green crackled glazed tiles in the bathroom, copper taps and washbasin not to mention beautiful teak wall panelling and Thai silk bedspread, all give a wonderful feeling of pure luxury.
The food was delicious throughout and we have both developed a real taste for Thai cuisine as a result!
We enjoyed our trips and excursions immensely and feel we have had a rare opportunity to see a more traditional, authentic side of Thailand without having to rough it in the jungle with a backpack to do so!
Your hospitality has been warm and genial throughout and we thank you for making us feel so welcome.
Kindest regards, Kerry and Andy
Dad and Gail,
Thanks so much for looking after me so well. Fantastic to come at last to see what you have been working away on for so long. You really have created something quite exceptional and unique. I take my hat off to you for your vision and endeavour!
The expedition to the “Secret Waterfall” was an adventure to remember, but the whole area is charming and fascinating. Nice landscape, lovely people and perfect climate.
I really hope to return with the whole family next time. Good luck with the future here. Thanks so much,
Thank you so much for a fantastic stay! We have had a wonderful time, the staff have been amazing and the food simply delicious.
Gail, you have been a perfect hostess, we have enjoyed all our conversations, getting a very personal insight into local life here. The expeditions have been once in a lifetime experiences, so very memorable.
We feel blessed to have been able to have spent time in such a beautiful place for our Honeymoon, it’s been perfect.
We really hope to come back one day for another visit! Thanks again for everything, we will never forget Kanlaya’s!
Clarissa and Sean
Dear Philip and Gail
Thank you so much for welcoming us to your exquisite home. We have had such a luxurious relaxing and peaceful stay here after the hectic challenge of the Ultramarathon. Every morning we have woken up from a peaceful slumber to see the beautiful view of the mist drifting through the valley until the rising sun burns it away for the day. By day, whichever way we look, we feast our eyes on the beautiful gardens, forests, mountains, the river far below and the house itself. What a stunning place you have created! Every evening we have enjoyed relaxing in the water-garden, dining and warming ourselves by the fire besides the waterfall. And each night we have soaked in the tub! We will never forget your great hospitality.
Marcus and Julie.
Dear Philip and Gail,
We have had the most amazing stay in your beautiful home! From meeting us at Chiang Mai Airport, all through our stay you have been the most wonderful hosts.
We have been completely blown away by the stunning surroundings, the attention to detail and the first class service. It was a privilege to see in the New Year with the Lahu Tribespeople, what an experience!
The Sunrise seen from your charming mountain top hut was totally captivating. We feel our experiences have been so authentic and we would never have got to see such amazing things without your knowledge of the area and all Kanlaya’s Tribal connections. Her wonderful family and friends made us feel so welcome, especially Penn.
We wish we could wake up every day to that wonderful view!
Thank you, Jamie and Nicky
Thanks for everything Gail. We had a fantastic time. The sunrise was quite possibly the best thing I have seen in my life and having breakfast cooked over charcoal as the sun rose made it perfect. I loved meeting your family in their Tribal village, so warm and welcoming, rice farming, and hiking through the river. But most of all I loved you. Thanks for sharing your life with me.
Love Crawford (Sean) and Scott.
I want to thank you for the amazing stay last week. Sue, Todd and I enjoyed it very much. From the perspective of people who stay in luxury hotels around the world, this was a very pleasant change of pace, and an interesting and exciting experience.
There is no doubt that the crucial selling point here is to brand the experience as a luxury homestay in a Thai village. Quite different from a resort experience and this is the key point to communicate to potential guests we would have. It is not possible anywhere else in Thailand to have a classy standard of luxury like this while being so intimate with a small Thai town at your doorstep. That is what compensates for lack of other amenities you’d find at a luxury hotel, and makes it a very unique experience in Thailand.
Regarding the experience, it was excellent. The food and treatment was very good. Staff very pleasant – and I understand probably quite early in their training – yet still quite satisfactory considering that.
Clearly the design, gardens and grounds are truly lovely. You feel as if you are part of the village, not in a hotel or even remotely near the tourist trail. This is the greatest feature which we will emphasize very clearly with potential guests. A stay in the late rainy season or Oct/Nov must be absolutely spectacular indeed.
Best in Adventure, Dan Fraser
What a fantastic surprise. I couldn’t imagine a more amazing Kanlaya’s. And I understand now what a beautiful is all about – it’s taken us 38 years but we’ve finally done it, had our Honeymoon! I could go on forever singing your praises, and have stayed in this exquisite room all day and night, lazing in the Jacuzzi, and gazing out over the most enchanting garden. In a million years I couldn’t have imagined, with fountains and fish, waterfall and the glorious fire pit at night and dinner beneath the stars, delicious and perfect as we watched the local Karen Village children perform their ageless Tribal Dances on the Balcony.
Your staff, so efficient and so charming in an unspoilt and natural way, thank you all. It was paradise, the Sunrise from your mountain top hut, while Sinouan conjured “The Full English” over a charcoal burner, Forest Monastery so spiritual, and Gail’s extended village family, so welcoming, all in hand-weaved Tribal Dress.
With all our love,
Jessica and Tim
The most extraordinary guest house in Thailand!
We feel so privileged to have spent our Honeymoon at Kanlaya’s. It is the best possible Honeymoon we could have hoped for, all of te staff at Kanlaya’s have made every memory close to our hearts. It was very enjoyable to have the guidance of Philip and Gail to show us the culture of Thailand and to give us the opportunities to experience the local way of life and to participate in all the exciting activities.
We have thoroughly enjoyed our visit to Kanlaya’s and would recommend it to everyone, whether they are coming for their Honeymoon or just to visist the beauty of the North of Thailand. We have felt so welcome and have been looked after by all of the staff. We just can’t wait to plan our next trip to Kanlaya’s.
Thank you so much to all of the staff for making this such a spectacular Honeymoon for us both. Love, Arran and Ruth
Dear Philip and Gail, thank you so much for your extraordinary welcome to Kanlaya’s- what an amazing place you have created.
I wish everyone success and hope that you gain enormous pleasure from living here and opening it up for everyone to share – How kind of you! Your staff are charming and the food simply delicious – a real Jewel in the Jungle,,,,,
Best wishes, Becky
Kanlaya’s is Beautiful! Thank you so much for making our Honeymoon so special and for all the attention to detail that made our stay so perfect. You’re right – it’s the best sunrise and we were lucky to have had the full moon too.
Everyone has been amazing and made us feel so very welcome. We loved the Jacuzzi and our evening chats by the fire and all the day trips have been a once in a lifetime experience. We have learnt so much from your wealth of knowledge and please thank Pat for her fantastic trekking and for looking after me when I felt ill.
It has been lovely to get to know you all, the girls have been charming, specially Penn. All in all it has been the best holiday ever and a truly special and romantic time we will never forget. Thank you so very much, Love Sally and Jamie
Dank dem Guidebook Alleman “Hoose.” Haben vir Thum Lod gefunden und vurden sehr m-lich begrissl und bevirtet. Im weiteren ist lat aine super interessante. Wanderbegleiterin, thanks! In bester erinnering blebl uns der anfenthalt hier! Thanks a lot, Lydia and Hans
Merci pour l’accueil chaleureuxet extraordinaire, merci a Philippe pour les descussions profonds, merci a Gail pour les saurires, et les randonnees. Merci a Penn et les autres.
Thanks for welcome “chaleureuxet extraordinaire.” Merci to you Philip for the very profound discussions, thanks to Gail for the laughs and the trekking. Thanks also to Penn and your other staff. Vincent and Won-Chee.
Merci a Gael et Philippe de leur marveilleur accueil dans ce cadre somptueux. Le reveil avec le lever du soleil est pour le moins “Magique.” Dommage que notre sejour ici soit trop rapide car il y a trop de chose a decouvrier ici.
Quelle surprise de decouvrier ce superbe site au milieu de la montagne. IL faudrait qu’on y revienne. Merci encore pour l’accueil.
Thanks to Gael and Philippe for your wonderful greeting in this sumptuous location. The dawn with the sun rising was at the very least “Magique.” How sad our stay passed so quickly because there is so much to do and to discover here.
What a surprise to discover this superb place in the very middle of the mountains. It’s imperative we come back. Thanks again for your welcome,
Sincere apologies for such a tardy email – my feet have hardly touched the ground since returning from such an amazing trip to stay with you in Kanlaya’s Eyrie! Thank you both, Philip and Gail, for your wonderful and generous hospitality. Your home is magnificent and the tranquillity of your beautiful gardens is intoxicating. The enthusiasm of our guided tour around the local area was “catching” and the vivid memory of sunrise breakfast will be with me for a very long time.
I wish you well with your enterprise and hope to be able to bring my own guests to stay and enjoy your fantastic home.
Many thanks, Micaela Hobbs
Dear Philip and Gail:
Sincere apologies for such a tardy email – my feet have hardly touched the ground since returning from such an amazing trip to stay with you in Kanlaya’s Eyrie!!
What a heavenly spot--and what a surprise to discover it in such rural surroundings. Having massages on our terrace with its valley and mountain views, as we watched the swallows fly over and the stars come out, was one of the highlights of our holiday in Thailand.
You've built something unique that manages to combine modern style with the traditional comfort of an elegant Thai home.
Angela Murrills and Peter Matthews
Thanks for 2 days in Paradise! You have spoiled us in many ways. We will never forget and hope to come back some day. Also thanks to Penn, helpful, sweet and a very good cook.
Love, Hans and Minnaf
Thank you Gail and Philip for your great hospitality. We did greatly appreciate the beauty and comfort of the place. Penn was the cherry on the sundae; she is a good worker. We did enjoy a lot our visit to the cave. It’s an extraordinary place to see. Good luck with your great project you two. Sincerely Martial and Monique
Good luck with your great project you two. Sincerely Martial and Monik from Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Lovely spot, idyllic patch of paradise. Thanks for your gracious hosting. We enjoyed ourselves very much and appreciated our different experiences, the hot tub, full moon rising above Kanlaya’s, the roaring courtyard fire and a great dinner amongst good company. Thanks again, Robin and Ray
Gail and Philip, what a stunning place, house and gardens are absolutely amazing. Great hospitality from all staff, thoroughly recommend to friends and family. Thank you for an amazing few days. Louise and Stuart
What a beautiful view from our bedroom. Very friendly and kind owners and delicious local food plus a perfect breakfast. If we have the chance we will certainly return to Kanlaya’s
Gail and Philip, We had a truly wonderful stay at your lovely resort. Thank you so much for the hospitality. We will definitely spread the word to our friends and family about how great this place is. We feel lucky to have the honour of being your first guests in the Honeymoon Suite. May our paths cross again in the future. Thank you, love Kate and Parker | <urn:uuid:8bc3c673-3f4a-4cfa-b361-b696d45c3681> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | https://kanlaya-thailand.com/refrences | 2020-10-24T02:31:24Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107881640.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20201024022853-20201024052853-00540.warc.gz | en | 0.901239 | 8,092 |
People can work in two-week cycles, on the job for four days then, by the time they might become infectious, 10 days at home in lockdown.
If we cannot resume economic activity without causing a resurgence of Covid-19 infections, we face a grim, unpredictable future of opening and closing schools and businesses.
We can find a way out of this dilemma by exploiting a key property of the virus: its latent period — the three-day delay on average between the time a person is infected and the time he or she can infect others.
People can work in two-week cycles, on the job for four days then, by the time they might become infectious, 10 days at home in lockdown. The strategy works even better when the population is split into two groups of households working alternating weeks.
Austrian school officials will adopt a simple version — with two groups of students attending school for five days every two weeks — starting May 18.
Models we created at the Weizmann Institute in Israel predict that this two-week cycle can reduce the virus’s reproduction number — the average number of people infected by each infected person — below one. So a 10-4 cycle could suppress the epidemic while allowing sustainable economic activity.
Even if someone is infected, and without symptoms, he or she would be in contact with people outside their household for only four days every two weeks, not 10 days, as with a normal schedule. This strategy packs another punch: It reduces the density of people at work and school, thus curtailing the transmission of the virus.
Schools could have students attend for four consecutive days every two weeks, in two alternating groups, and use distance-learning methods on the other school days. Children would go to school on the same days as their parents go to work.
Businesses would work almost continuously, alternating between two groups of workers, for regular and predictable production. This would increase consumer confidence, shoring up supply and demand simultaneously.
During lockdown days, this approach requires adherence only to the level of distancing already being demonstrated in European countries and New York City. It prevents the economic and psychological costs of opening the economy and then having to reinstate complete lockdown when cases inevitably resurge. Giving hope and then taking it away can cause despair and resistance.
A 10-4 routine provides at least part-time employment for millions who have been fired or sent on leave without pay. These jobs prevent the devastating, and often long-lasting, mental and physical impacts of unemployment. For those living on cash, there would be four days to make a living, reducing the economic necessity to disregard lockdown altogether. Business bankruptcies would also be reduced, speeding up eventual economic recovery.
The cyclic strategy is easy to explain and to enforce. It is equitable in terms of who gets to go back to work. It applies at any scale: a school, a firm, a town, a state. A region that uses the cyclic strategy is protected: Infections coming from the outside cannot spread widely if the reproduction number is less than one. It is also compatible with all other countermeasures being developed.
Workers can, and should still, use masks and distancing while at work. This proposal is not predicated, however, on large-scale testing, which is not yet available everywhere in the United States and may never be available in large parts of the world. It can be started as soon as a steady decline of cases indicates that lockdown has been effective.
The cyclic strategy should be part of a comprehensive exit strategy, including self-quarantine by those with symptoms, contact tracing and isolation, and protection of risk groups. The cyclic strategy can be tested in limited regions for specific trial periods, even a month. If infections rates grow, it can be adjusted to fewer work days. Conversely, if things are going well, additional work days can be added. In certain scenarios, only four or five lockdown days in each two-week cycle could still prevent resurgence.
The coronavirus epidemic is a formidable foe, but it is not unbeatable. By scheduling our activities intelligently, in a way that accounts for the virus’s intrinsic dynamics, we can defeat it more rapidly, and accelerate a full return to work, school and other activities.
Why the bulls are wrong
Equity markets have bounced well over 20% since the lows just over a month ago, so technically we are already back in a new bull market. With peak new cases now behind us in Australia, business is agitating to reopen and governments are starting to ease restrictions. With the biggest fiscal programs since WW2 and huge monetary stimulus in the pipes, are the bulls about to be proven spectacularly right? No. Not even close, according to Jerome Lander who manages the Lucerne Alternative Investments Fund.
In this 25-minute outdoor video interview, Jerome first set the stage by giving three reasons the bulls are wrong before then saying the bottom for the market could be more than 40% below where it is now:
“… it’s very easy to come up with figures around, 1600 or 1800 on the S&P 500. Obviously we’re up at 2800 on the S&P at the moment”.
Citing the risks of ongoing virus infestations, credit defaults, geopolitical risks, poor consumption and investment spending going forward, he paints a picture of a future that is vastly different from the past.
In this new paradigm, he argues, investors face the very real prospect of long-term asset price deflation as fundamentals reassert themselves, and that in this environment investors will require a completely different approach to the one that has worked for the last 40 years.
Discussion points through the interview
– Three reasons the bulls are wrong
– What could drive the bear market and how low it could go
– What the most imminent risks are, including conflict
– What ‘the new normal’ might look like
– The biggest mistakes most investors are making
– The lens investors should now view the market through
– Investment styles that reduce market risk
– A message for all anxious investors out there
You can access the full transcript here: https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/why-the-bulls-are-wrong
I think firstly the Bulls are pretending
this virus itself the problems gone away
and the problem hasn’t been solved so
although we’ve reached a peak in daily
new cases we we still haven’t got an
effective treatment or an effective
vaccine for the virus firstly secondly
we have valuations at all-time record
for earnings levels not with saying the
economic settings we have had we have
and thirdly I think the Bulls really
ignore the overall picture which is that
we have unsustainable and unsustainable
amounts of debt driving our economic
growth for many years now and that we
may well be becoming to the end of a
long term debt cycle which makes it
really very difficult to be optimistic
about the returns that you’re going to
get from traditional asset classes
there’s a lot of people out there who
just seem overly optimistic to me given
the the the settings we have at the
moment for investment markets so we
think about where we’re at we have
economies which are really operating
unsustainably still we keep on putting
on more and more debt we have
unsustainable situation whereby we we
keep trying to pretend that we can just
layer and layer upon layer of extra
extra debt and create some sort of
nominal growth the low amount of growth
given the amount of debt we’re putting
on and that somehow we’re going to we’re
going to be able to continue doing that
forever and I think the balls really
ignore those things so the Bulls often
focus on very short term short term sort
of settings and they’re overly
optimistic by Nature
I suspect so I think when you’re
investing it’s ideal to be flexible so
you want to be bullish sometimes very
sometimes neutral at other times and be
able to adjust yourself to the settings
and the opportunities that you have if
you think about where we’re at now we’re
in a position where valuations are
expensive you know we actually when you
price what markets are going to deliver
just normally based on historical
context given how they’re being priced
you come up with very low returns from
traditional asset markets
if you then layer on top of that you
know we’re at economically we’re really
we really look to be coming towards the
end of the long term debt cycle whereby
it’s becoming increasingly obvious and
increasingly challenging to actually
keep economic growth going given the
type of economic settings we have we
have a very imbalanced economy so we
have a lot of wealth in the hands of
relatively few parties and we have a lot
of people living unsustainably on the
basis of the fact they can keep on
borrowing money to to buy what they need
and that doesn’t really create a
virtuous circle in the long run or a
situation which can really resolve
itself favorably I think sure so if you
look at a traditional bear market you
know it sort of takes place over many
months so you don’t suddenly you don’t
see the bear market over in a one-month
period of time so if we are in a bear
market there would be strong reason to
suspect that it will take many months
for it to play out we might for example
see a significant default cycle over
time we might see further waves of virus
infestations should we not be in a
fortunate position to come across you
know better treatments or were
unfortunate with mutations or whatever
we might see all sorts of ramifications
further shocks to the system from
geopolitical risks there’s lots of X
factors that can still occur to mean
that shocks the system that mean that
people really re reassess whether their
prices they’re paying at the moment in
this rally actually are supported by the
fundamentals at the moment the the rally
the bear market rally you know is
supported by by the fact that that we
have got you know daily new cases piki
have piqued by optimism around that but
mainly really by massive central bank
liquidity and that central bank
liquidity there is a fight between bulls
based which the bull case is really
based upon central bank liquidity and
bears based on fundamentals and the
strong possibility of a high default
cycle and poor consumption and poor
investment spending etc going forward
and so you know that’s gonna be the
tussle back and forth now this this bear
market doesn’t have to be like any other
bear market we’ve seen before it can
definitely be different so I think while
history can inform
what we might expect going forward it
could equally be very very different the
thing that’s of concern to me I guess is
that many investors are assuming that
we’re going to go back to normal or that
although the asset prices are justified
and I think that I think that they’re
not there’s been lots of work done on
this to say well what is this support
what is a supported evaluation for these
markets and if we think about what what
earnings are doing this year and where
bear markets historically sort of get to
you know historically we’ve seen
valuations you know bottom at much lower
multiples and what we see now we’ve
obviously got earnings coming off a long
way this year so it’s very easy to come
up with figures around you know 1600 or
1800 on the SP obviously we’re up at you
know 2800 on the SP at the moment so
that would be a fall around circa 50%
plus to get to what you might argue is a
fair valuation level for the market now
clearly we’re not in a situation where
central banks have any interest or
wanting to allow valuations to fall to a
normal valuation level or experience
that sort of situation so they’re
fighting very hard to keep the bubbles
alive and they’re providing massive
amounts of liquidity and stimulus to to
to keep that secured basic prices afloat
now at the end of the day will that be
successful we don’t know you know how
long will they be able to do that for we
don’t know but there’s clearly a lot of
risk to the downside should for any
reason central bank’s not be successful
at continuing to stimulate stimulate
asset prices and support our set prices
one of the things I raised concerns
about was the valuations of commercial
property unlisted property and and where
that would go to going forward so you
think about the situation now with
everybody having you know a lot of
people being at home working from home
and a lot of people actually saying we
can actually work at home effectively
and employers saying well actually we
can have our employees and working from
home and they’re more productive you
simply aren’t going to have the same
sort of demand or need for office space
coming out of this coming out of this
crisis they needed before not to mention
the fact that you know unemployment
levels will be higher probably a
substantially higher so the demand for
property won’t be what it was and that
means that a lot of those you know those
evaluations probably are not sustainable
and you’re likely to see a lot of
pressures on on property property
evaluations moving forward also with
respect to you know residential property
we have to ask ourselves you know
depending upon what the unemployment
picture does and and how ugly this gets
are those valuations justified you know
can we can we really support valuations
purely on the basis of cheap money or do
we have to have people in employment
with good employment prospects being
able to grow their incomes over time and
people with the confidence to be able to
take out big loans banks with the
willingness to lend people in those
situations lots of money so they can
continue to pay the the high prices that
we have on on property more generally I
think one other issues I raised was the
valuations that are that you know that
are being used of unlisted assets within
super funds and so forth and there’s now
been more published on that whereby
people have raised the fact that you
know that valuations arguably weren’t
being priced fairly such that if you
think take the bottom of the market the
the short-term bottom in the market back
in March and the recovery since that
time a lot of super funds haven’t
actually recovered with the markets over
that period of time so if you had
actually invested at that time thinking
you were getting the bottom one of the
markets all had a been fortuitous enough
just to just to be in that situation and
you had of invested in one of these
super funds you were actually buying
into unlisted property prices unlisted
infrastructure price unlisted private
equity prices at at prices which were
inflated which didn’t really reflect
reality your fair valuation and those
valuations will need to now gradually
come back to what they really worth and
and that means is that there’s an
inequity in the way those those
investors are actually being treated
there is actually a much higher risk of
conflict post post two pandemic
interestingly enough and certainly when
you start doing funny things with your
money then also there’s a high risk of
conflict when you look at political
cycles and you think about people trying
to retain power there’s also an
incentive incentive there for them to
you know try and remove trying to move
the the attention of the populace onto
some external focus because they know
that if you’re at war with someone
you’re much more likely to vote in ink
to be conservative in that regard so you
can certainly come up with situations
whereby the likelihood of conflict you
know you can certainly assess the like
little conflict as being higher now than
what we’ve seen before now of course we
already have a lot of conflict in the
world we have we have we have trade war
you know that’s been going on for some
time between China and us you know fight
for supremacy there we have cyber war
going on this is not something that
people necessarily focus on I talk about
but we have lots of that going on at the
moment already so the war doesn’t have
to necessarily be in the in terms of
physical confrontation we have economic
war going on at the moment and and that
can certainly be you know exaggerated
there’s a lot of focus in the media
recently on you know what was the real
cause of this forest did China you know
did China handle this appropriately when
they did certain things and certainly
you can point to those things very
easily and and be quite upset about the
fact that that maybe this problem should
have been contained a lot of earlier
than it was and it shouldn’t have been
the problem shouldn’t become the problem
that it did if certain state actors had
it behaved very differently than what
they had ever had that then they’d have
done so you know there might be a focus
of attention turned towards that and and
that might create you know D
globalization terms of people looking to
there’s a need that in fact for people’s
supply chains become much more resilient
out of this to move to move certain
industries which are strategic and
necessary or at least diversify them but
move some of them back to to kind of
more familiar territory and more home
territory in order to ensure they have
supplies of essential goods and services
for their economy so there’s a lot of
things that can happen out of this and
there is certainly a much higher risk of
conflict and I think he’s being
appreciated it’s one of those X factors
that’s out there in terms it’s not just
China there’s obviously the possibility
of conflict in the Middle East again all
prices have dropped very significantly
that’s going to be putting a lot of
pressure on those budgets and a lot of
those a lot of those those those
countries there’s obviously the the
tensions with Iran
there’s tensions with Venezuela there’s
lots of Powder Keg some places around
the world where
this can go wrong I think it’s some
things are definitely going to change as
a result of of this shock to the system
I think certainly we’re not going to go
back in a hurry to the levels of
unemployment that we had previous to
this shock very easily so we now have in
the US unemployment fast approaching
about 20% of the population and although
we may on the other side of this once we
do and if we do get to a solution to the
coronavirus have a rapid sort of
comeback in unemployment
it won’t quickly come back at all to
where it was before so we’re going to
come out of this with a lot more
unemployment and certainly a much more
challenged consumer than what we had
before and that will mean that will come
back with a lot of people much more
hesitant in the way they go about their
daily business and the way they choose
to interact with the world is it safe to
go and do the things you did before do I
you are you are you willing to sort of
travel overseas and go to exotic places
like you were before are you in a
situation financially where you can even
afford to do that will you be confident
in your ability to take on long term
debt and your ability to pay pay off
that debt given the fragility that
you’ve just learned with respect to your
employment prospects there’s a lot of
there’s a lot of reason to think things
will some things will change permanently
as a result of this crisis one of the
concerns I have is that when you look at
the big picture we have an economy
that’s operating it
you know that’s this size say you know
we’ve got an economy sort of this size
and we have asset prices which are this
size so there’s a massive misalignment
between the size of our asset prices and
the size of our markets and the size of
our real economy and furthermore we’re
not really growing this real economy you
know we don’t have and and this crisis
is really going to accentuate that even
further we’ve got a kind of low
productivity economy we haven’t actually
got the right settings to grow the
economy strongly and it’s laden with
debt you know basically and with the
debts been used to boost asset prices to
these levels and that’s just not a
sustainable picture long-term so
investors really should be conscious of
that in the back of their heads they
should be thinking and
really safe if I just go and buy you
know a broad basket of equities so I
just invest in a traditional way
am I really safer I’m really taking the
risk that one day this big these asset
prices that are all the way out here
this massive on the back of this massive
financialization and massive easy money
on that central banks have provided gets
collapse towards the size of the real
economy alternately do I really believe
with the way we’re operating the
economies today are we going to grow
those economies rapidly so they ask they
grow you know they grow the asset
they’re going to be asset prices so to
speak I think if you look at either
those situations there’s strong reason
to think that there’s going to be at
some stage you know you know there’s a
there’s a gravity that’s pulling asset
prices down there’s a force there that
asset prices actually naturally want to
collapse and the settings were right now
we have massive deflationary forces
operating on our set prices they want to
collapse the only thing that’s keeping
them up is really central bank easy
money and and that’s that’s becoming
harder and harder to do the real
question mark out of this is whether we
gonna get one more bubble you know
whether they manage to float those I set
prices higher again into one more even
bigger bubble how long will that last if
they manage to do that or whether this
is it this is the end of the long term
debt cycle and we have to change the way
we everything will change basically all
the things will change to mean that you
know the the returns you get from being
invested in a traditional way
long equities long property all along
all these long debt basically lot read
through an assets gets collapsed down
and so you know for me I can’t go to I
can’t I can’t sleep at night if I was
operating under that paradigm with that
with what I know now I wouldn’t I
couldn’t sit there and look at that
setting and say I should put all my
investors into that sort of risk in a
very concentrated fashion and just hope
it’s all okay because I think there’s no
reason when you look at it I think that
it will be okay in the long run so you
have to operate on the assumption that
that can collapse and therefore you have
to do things very differently from the
way most people are actually doing it
most investors are really operating
under a traditional or historic paradigm
so they’re really they’re really you
know they’ve got their equity dominant
portfolios and they really operate under
the assumption that this is a strategic
asset allocation type framework which is
based on historical returns and they’re
basically assuming that
the portfolio’s ahead for the last 40
years are the right portfolios are run
with going forward now I don’t believe
that is the case I think they’re quite
clearly we can mount a very very strong
case for why real returns will be very
low from here looking forward on the
basis of valuations or pond on the basis
of the unsustainable economic settings
we have and on the basis of all the
risks that are out there that were that
the world’s facing that investors are
facing that just aren’t being priced
into markets and and on the basis of
that I think you really need to you know
if you’re really assessing the world or
thinking about how risk it really is and
also thinking about what investors
really want for their money
you know this is don’t want a roller
coaster ride they don’t want to go up
and down like a yo-yo and end up going
nowhere at the end of that they want to
actually have absolute returns with low
risk of large you know substantial
losses and have their money protected
and genuinely diversified and if you’re
just running a portfolio which depends
purely upon you know interest rates
moving from very high to very low and
upon debt levels continuing to expand at
extraordinary and unsustainable rates
you’re not really running running a
portfolio that’s suited for what we’re
facing the next five or ten years I
think one of the things investors often
underappreciated as well is that you
know it’s geometric returns that matter
to most investors over time it’s not
arithmetic ones so if you return ten
percent this year ten percent next year
and ten percent the year after that but
then you do you do minus 30% you know
you’ve actually you’ve actually lost
investors a lot of money overall and
achieve nothing so the whole the whole
name of the game investing for the long
term is to make sure you avoid large
losses because if you have if you
experience large losses and you exposing
vistas to large losses and you’re not
you’re not giving them what they need or
want and you’re not really doing a good
job for them and I think our industry
really at the moment under the
traditional paradigm it’s it’s operating
under is really giving investors that
experience and it’s it’s really
necessary for a lot of people to sit
back and think you know given what given
what you know from operate from first
principles is this the way it would
design a portfolio for today or is this
the way the portfolio has been designed
a long time ago on a very with very very
different investment settings you’ve got
to assume that that asset prices are
going to be very low in the long run
you’ve got to assume that you know
crises are a normal part of the way
you know you manage money you have to be
your portfolio has to be resilient to
crises basically because this isn’t
gonna be the last crisis we face we
can’t just sit here and say this is a
one in a hundred year event and it’s
gonna go away even if we do somehow
manage to go over the coronavirus very
soon which as we’ve talked about there’s
no strong reason to think that will be
the case but let’s let’s say that we do
they’ll still be further crisis because
of the way we’ve set everything out and
because of the risks that there are in
the real world so we have to build a
portfolio that’s resilient to Christ as
it can still make us money and still
meet the objectives that we have now to
do that unfortunately we can’t all do
we can all do that by just investing in
a traditional way so we can’t say let’s
go and invest in a risky way let’s go
and chase equity risk and property risk
it inflated valuations and which is what
by the way think just about the entire
industry does so what I’m saying is that
the way the entire industry operates is
is flawed that’s what I’m basically
saying and in terms of what the
individual investor actually needs it’s
based on historical paradigm that
probably isn’t going to work very well
so we have to think how do we get away
from those risks you know if the stove’s
gonna be really hot and really dangerous
to touch how do i how do i trying to
avoid touch that i have to think very
differently you have to do something
very differently to what to what they’re
doing have to expose myself I have to
minimize that risk basically so you need
to have a lot less risk exposed to the
traditional long-only type of investing
and you have to move much more into a
more conservative more active more more
sort of long-short way of looking at the
so more skill-based
strategies basically so a lot of so a
lot of what I focus on is you know
finding skilled strategies that I can
use combined combined in a portfolio to
mean that I can get a return which is
along with what investors actually won
which isn’t as dependent upon
traditional asset process and
traditional asset Marcus remaining
inflated because that’s a very binary
risk so if you really want to build a
diversified or balanced portfolio you
need to think about how do i how do I
minimize the exposure to interest rate
risk you know how do I minimize the
exposure this asset price inflation risk
how do I make sure the portfolio can
survive the cry
SIB again face going forward so with
life basically what we do is we look at
we look for skills underlying
investments managers and strategies that
really bring something different to the
portfolio there’s not heavily dependent
upon you know markets so you want to
find sources of return that don’t depend
upon the markets basically going up to
achieve a good result for investors and
that’s why we’ve had such resilient
returns assess resilient results put
part whose have managed to find those
returns and we’ve managed to combine
them in a way such that we manage a lot
of the risks that are that are out there
and ensure that you know investors have
a have a have a true to label type
experience now investors in life you
know are basically looking for absolute
returns we have low risk of large
capital losses I mean one of the things
are published on as an example of
something we have used in the portfolio
which is a more traditional sort of type
of exposure in a sense but which you
know even other investors could could be
using a lot more of is precious metals
precious metals have been in a bull
market for some time now there’s still
strong reason to expect that bull market
might continue it’s amazing when you
look at you know your every Superfund or
average large institutional investor out
there how little if anything for having
precious metals it’s incredible giving
the settings we actually have at the
moment and it’s just an example of what
I was talking about before that most
investors really aren’t thinking outside
the square and aren’t really trying to
adjust their portfolios from a
historical paradigm to one which is
better suited to the sort of situation
we face today if you actually looked
under the hood of the way a lot of these
these investors operate you would
realize that bringing in an idea that’s
kind of considered you know
non-consensus is getting it into the
portfolio is actually quite difficult so
there might be in individual investors
within large institutions who actually
believe and who are themselves investing
in gold but they won’t be able to get it
in past Syria their investment
communities or their investment boards
and get it into the portfolio in any
meaningful degree I mean I saw a study
recently suggesting that even though
historically institutions had a couple
of percent of their portfolio in gold
more recently was only half a percent
which is incredible in this massive bull
market that were actually been on for
some time now
it’s amazing so some of the long short
exposures we have for example there’s
that one of the strategies that’s that’s
worked for a long period of time is in a
long short land it’s basically being
long you know higher quality companies
and low you know lower quality companies
there’s a generic sort of buckets so we
think about that there are a lot of
companies on the stock exchange which
really aren’t good companies you know
you shouldn’t be investing in them so
when you buy an index fund you’ve got an
exposure automatically to all these
crappy companies you’ve got exposure to
you know actually differentiating
between the good companies and the bad
companies people are actually adding
economic value of creating value over
time and people who aren’t so the
benefit of being long short is that you
can you can you can actually say look
these are these are good companies these
are actually adding you know creating
value for their shareholders over time
and on the other hand here we have a
whole bunch of let’s call them bad
companies in and sometimes these bad
companies are really are really bad
companies they’re fraudulent for example
there’s a lot of frauds fraudulent
companies that are on stock exchanges
around the world and in the long run
they’re going to burn their investors so
if you’re able to create a basket of of
shorts to sort of fraudulent companies
or mismanage companies or highly
indebted companies at a time when the
economy’s turning south all sorts of
different strategies you can use as a
longshore manager to to have that bucket
of low quality companies and over time
the strong reason to expect you get a
you get a relative return out of that
that the good companies will actually
outperform the poor quality companies
and you’ll be able to extract a return
that’s not depend upon whether the
markets go up or down but it’s dependent
upon whether those good companies
outperform those bad companies over time
and and that sort of strategy is one of
the strategies we use if you think about
traditional asset assets if you like the
original asset classes are things like
you know equities bonds cash property
you know these are all considered sort
of traditional asset classes the ones
that make people feel most comfortable
most familiar with the ones that are
most mainstream and most you know used
in a traditional sort of paradigm you
think about alternate eternities they’re
really everything else so alternatives
can can be alternative asset classes so
things like precious metals often
considered alternatives some people even
unlisted versions of of listed asset
classes as being alternative I don’t
really see them as alternatives I see
them as unlisted
unlisted versions of the listed version
but they still expose the underlying
similar economic risks for me but when I
think about alternatives I’m thinking
more about liquid alternatives so ways
of taking traditional asset classes but
operating with them very differently so
for example you know market neutral so
your long one company your short another
company against it you’re taking out the
market that you you you you taking it
down to another level and saying you
know within that within that asset class
what is there that I want to own what is
there that I don’t want to own what can
i what is going to outperform something
else so you totally getting a different
return stream out of it and that’s
that’s an alternative strategy in my
book it’s understandable that investors
are confused because lots of things are
changing and it’s important that your
investment approach also changes will be
if investment markets if you don’t
believe investment markets are going to
offer strong returns going forward if
you don’t believe like I do that
economies are well set up to encourage
high productivity growth that the
valuations are attractive that settings
are sustainable that we don’t have a
debt bubble that’s a big problem in this
sort of thing like if you if you believe
everything is okay and you can continue
to invest in a traditional way and have
your portfolio or your your wealth and
your future dependent upon that but if
you think things that you know if you
think things aren’t like that and think
the world’s different place from that
now I think you really need to think
have I got the right investment approach
at all haven’t got the right investment
partners do I need to do something very
differently than what the industry at
large offers me and I think you do I
think people absolutely need to think
differently about how they manage money
and what’s a line with what they’re you
know not knowing that the way the world
is but what they are trying to achieve
for their portfolios the truth is most
of us don’t want a rollercoaster ride we
don’t want to be on this you know seesaw
and end up going nowhere we want to
actually have you know steady more
reliable more skill-based returns for
investment managers that aren’t depend
upon everything being okay and I don’t
expose us to so much crisis risks that’s
out there so my message to investors
will be just that you know really think
about whether you’ve got the right
alignment for what you’re trying to
achieve and is there a better way is
there a different way and do I need to
do I need to make sure I’ve got the
right investment partners for that
@RaoulGMI identified the following factors contributing to a crisis, before Coronavirus:
- Stocks: Largest Equity Bubble of All Time: (Pension Crisis & Buyback Bubble)
- Largest Retiree Wave, all wanting to sell stocks and bonds at the same time
- Millennials are too poor and indebted (make 20% less than parents)
- Corporate Credit: Largest Credit Bubble of All Time
- ($10 Trillion + Off balance Sheet = 75% of GDP)
- Student Loan Bubble:
- $1.6 Trillion
- Auto Loan Bubble
- ($1.2 Trillion)
- Indexation Bubble
- ETF/Market Structure Bubble
- Foreign Borrowings (Dollar Standard Bubble)
- Monetary Policy Bubble (The Central Bank Bubble)
- EU Banking Crisis
- why they hired Christine Lagarde, for her political negotiating skills to deal with the nationalization of the European banks (which are facing insolvency) not for her economic or financial skills
- A Trade War:
- The Trade Wars “shattered” supply chains
- Largest Supply & Demand Shocks of all Time
Central Banks have been fighting for the last 20 years:
- Full Scale Debt Deflation and a Solvency Crisis
- A loss of confidence in the Dollar Standard and the Entire Financial Architecture
Submitted by Michael Every of Rabobank
- The Eurodollar system is a critical but often misunderstood driver of global financial markets: its importance cannot be understated.
- Its origins are shrouded in mystery and intrigue; its operations are invisible to most; and yet it controls us in many ways. We will attempt to enlighten readers on what it is and what it means.
- However, it is also a system under huge structural pressures – and as such we may be about to experience a profound paradigm shift with key implications for markets, economies, and geopolitics.
- Recent Fed actions on swap lines and repo facilities only underline this fact rather than reducing its likelihood
What is The Matrix?
A new world-class golf course in an Asian country financed with a USD bank loan. A Mexican property developer buying a hotel in USD. A European pension company wanting to hold USD assets and swapping borrowed EUR to do so. An African retailer importing Chinese-made toys for sale, paying its invoice in USD.
All of these are small examples of the multi-faceted global Eurodollar market. Like The Matrix, it is all around us, and connects us. Also just like The Matrix, most are unaware of its existence even as it defines the parameters we operate within. As we shall explore in this special report, it is additionally a Matrix that encompasses an implicit power struggle that only those who grasp its true nature are cognizant of.
Moreover, at present this Matrix and its Architect face a huge, perhaps existential, challenge.
Yes, it has overcome similar crises before…but it might be that the Novel (or should we say ‘Neo’?) Coronavirus is The One.
So, here is the key question to start with: What is the Eurodollar system?
The Eurodollar system is a critical but often misunderstood driver of global financial markets: its importance cannot be understated. While most market participants are aware of its presence to some degree, not many grasp the extent to which it impacts on markets, economies,…and geopolitics – indeed, the latter is particularly underestimated.
Yet before we go down that particular rabbit hole, let’s start with the basics. In its simplest form, a Eurodollar is an unsecured USD deposit held outside of the US. They are not under the US’ legal jurisdiction, nor are they subject to US rules and regulations.
To avoid any potential confusion, the term Eurodollar came into being long before the Euro currency, and the “euro” has nothing to do with Europe. In this context it is used in the same vein as Eurobonds, which are also not EUR denominated bonds, but rather debt issued in a different currency to the company of that issuing. For example, a Samurai bond–that is to say a bond issued in JPY by a nonJapanese issuer–is also a type of Eurobond.
As with Eurobonds, eurocurrencies can reflect many different underlying real currencies. In fact, one could talk about a Euroyen, for JPY, or even a Euroeuro, for EUR. Yet the Eurodollar dwarfs them: we shall show the scale shortly.
So how did the Eurodollar system come to be, and how has it grown into the behemoth it is today? Like all global systems, there are many conspiracy theories and fantastical claims that surround the birth of the Eurodollar market. While some of these stories may have a grain of truth, we will try and stick to the known facts.
A number of parallel events occurred in the late 1950s that led to the Eurodollar’s creation – and the likely suspects sound like the cast of a spy novel. The Eurodollar market began to emerge after WW2, when US Dollars held outside of the US began to increase as the US consumed more and more goods from overseas. Some also cite the role of the Marshall Plan, where the US transferred over USD12bn (USD132bn equivalent now) to Western Europe to help them rebuild and fight the appeal of Soviet communism.
Of course, these were just USD outside of the US and not Eurodollars. Where the plot thickens is that, increasingly, the foreign recipients of USD became concerned that the US might use its own currency as a power play. As the Cold War bit, Communist countries became particularly concerned about the safety of their USD held with US banks. After all, the US had used its financial power for geopolitical gains when in 1956, in response to the British invading Egypt during the Suez Crisis, it had threatened to intensify the pressure on GBP’s peg to USD under Bretton Woods: this had forced the British into a humiliating withdrawal and an acceptance that their status of Great Power was not compatible with their reduced economic and financial circumstances.
With rising fears that the US might freeze the Soviet Union’s USD holdings, action was taken: in 1957, the USSR moved their USD holdings to a bank in London, creating the first Eurodollar deposit and seeding our current UScentric global financial system – by a country opposed to the US in particular and capitalism in general.
There are also alternative origin stories. Some claim the first Eurodollar deposit was made during the Korean War with China moving USD to a Parisian bank.
Meanwhile, the Eurodollar market spawned a widely-known financial instrument, the London Inter Bank Offer Rate, or LIBOR. Indeed, LIBOR is an offshore USD interest rate which emerged in the 1960s as those that borrowed Eurodollars needed a reference rate for larger loans that might need to be syndicated. Unlike today, however, LIBOR was an average of offered lending rates, hence the name, and was not based on actual transactions as the first tier of the LIBOR submission waterfall is today.
Dozer and Tank
So how large is the Eurodollar market today? Like the Matrix – vast. As with the origins of the Eurodollar system, itself nothing is transparent. However, we have tried to estimate an indicative total using Bank for International Settlements (BIS) data for:
- On-balance sheet USD liabilities held by non-US banks;
- USD Credit commitments, guarantees extended, and derivatives contracts of non-US banks (C, G, D);
- USD debt liabilities of non-US non-financial corporations;
- Over-the-Counter (OTC) USD derivative claims of non-US non-financial corporations; and
- Global goods imports in USD excluding those of the US and intra-Eurozone trade.
The results are as shown below as of end-2018: USD57 trillion, nearly three times the size of the US economy before it was hit by the COVID-19 virus. Even if this measure is not complete, it underlines the scale of the market.
It also shows its vast power in that this is an equally large structural global demand for USD. Every import, bond, loan, credit guarantee, or derivate needs to be settled in USD.
Indeed, fractional reserve banking means that an initial Eurodollar can be multiplied up (e.g., Eurodollar 100m can be used as the base for a larger Eurodollar loan, and leverage increased further). Yet non-US entities are NOT able to conjure up USD on demand when needed because they don’t have a central bank behind them which can produce USD by fiat, which only the Federal Reserve can.
This power to create the USD that everyone else transacts and trades in is an essential point to grasp on the Eurodollar – which is ironically also why it was created in the first place!
Given the colourful history, ubiquitous nature, and critical importance of the Eurodollar market, a second question then arises: Why don’t people know about The Matrix?
The answer is easy: because once one is aware of it, one immediately wishes to have taken the Blue Pill instead.
Consider what the logic of the Eurodollar system implies. Global financial markets and the global economy rely on the common standard of the USD for pricing, accounting, trading, and deal making. Imagine a world with a hundred different currencies – or even a dozen: it would be hugely problematic to manage, and would not allow anywhere near the level of integration we currently enjoy.
However, at root the Eurodollar system is based on using the national currency of just one country, the US, as the global reserve currency. This means the world is beholden to a currency that it cannot create as needed.
When a crisis hits, as at present, everyone in the Eurodollar system suddenly realizes they have no ability to create fiat USD and must rely on national USD FX reserves and/or Fed swap lines that allow them to swap local currency for USD for a period. This obviously grants the US enormous power and privilege.
The world is also beholden to US monetary policy cycles rather than local ones: higher US rates and/or a stronger USD are ruinous for countries that have few direct economic or financial links with the US. Yet the US Federal Reserve generally shows very little interest in global economic conditions – though that is starting to change, as we will show shortly.
A second problem is that the flow of USD from the US to the rest of the world needs to be sufficient to meet the inbuilt demand for trade and other transactions. Yet the US is a relatively smaller slice of the global economy with each passing year. Even so, it must keep USD flowing out or else a global Eurodollar liquidity crisis will inevitably occur.
That means that either the US must run large capital account deficits, lending to the rest of the world; or large current account deficits, spending instead.
Obviously, the US has been running the latter for many decades, and in many ways benefits from it. It pays for goods and services from the rest of the world in USD debt that it can just create. As such it can also run huge publicor private-sector deficits – arguably even with the multitrillion USD fiscal deficits we are about to see.
However, there is a cost involved for the US. Running a persistent current-account deficit implies a net outflow of industry, manufacturing and related jobs. The US has obviously experienced this for a generation, and it has led to both structural inequality and, more recently, a backlash of political populism wanting to Make America Great Again.
Indeed, if one understands the structure of the Eurodollar system one can see that it faces the Triffin Paradox. This was an argument first made by Robert Triffin in 1959 when he correctly predicted that any country forced to adopt the role of global reserve currency would also be forced to run ever-larger currency outflows to fuel foreign appetite – eventually leading to the breakdown of the system as the cost became too much to bear.
Moreover, there is another systemic weakness at play: realpolitik. Atrophying of industry undermines the supply chains needed for the defence sector, with critical national security implications. The US is already close to losing the ability to manufacture the wide range of products its powerful armed forces require on scale and at speed: yet without military supremacy the US cannot long maintain its multi-dimensional global power, which also stands behind the USD and the Eurodollar system.
This implies the US needs to adopt (military-) industrial policy and a more protectionist stance to maintain its physical power – but that could limit the flow of USD into the global economy via trade. Again, the Eurodollar system, like the early utopian version of the Matrix, seems to contain the seeds of its own destruction.
Indeed, look at the Eurodollar logically over the long term and there are only three ways such a system can ultimately resolve itself:
- The US walks away from the USD reserve currency burden, as Triffin said, or others lose faith in it to stand behind the deficits it needs to run to keep USD flowing appropriately;
- The US Federal Reserve takes over the global financial system little by little and/or in bursts; or
- The global financial system fragments as the US asserts primacy over parts of it, leaving the rest to make their own arrangements.
See the Eurodollar system like this, and it was always when and not if a systemic crisis occurs – which is why people prefer not focus on it all even when it matters so much. Yet arguably this underlying geopolitical dynamic is playing out during our present virus-prompted global financial instability.
Down the rabbit hole
But back to the rabbit hole that is our present situation. While the Eurodollar market is enormous one also needs to look at how many USD are circulating around the world outside the US that can service it if needed. In this regard we will look specifically at global USD FX reserves.
It’s true we could also include US cash holdings in the offshore private sector. Given that US banknotes cannot be tracked no firm data are available, but estimates range from 40% – 72% of total USD cash actually circulates outside the country. This potentially totals hundreds of billions of USD that de facto operate as Eurodollars. However, given it is an unknown total, and also largely sequestered in questionable cash-based activities, and hence are hopefully outside the banking system, we prefer to stick with centralbank FX reserves.
Looking at the ratio of Eurodollar liabilities to global USD FX reserve assets, the picture today is actually healthier than it was a few years ago.
Indeed, while the Eurodollar market size has remained relatively constant in recent years, largely as banks have been slow to expand their balance sheets, the level of global USD FX reserves has risen from USD1.9 trillion to over USD6.5 trillion. As such, the ratio of structural global USD demand to that of USD supply has actually declined from near 22 during the global financial crisis to around 9.
Yet the current market is clearly seeing major Eurodollar stresses – verging on panic.
Fundamentally, the Eurodollar system is always short USD, and any loss of confidence sees everyone scramble to access them at once – in effect causing an invisible international bank run. Indeed, the Eurodollar market only works when it is a constant case of “You-Roll-Over Dollar”.
Unfortunately, COVID-19 and its huge economic damage and uncertainty mean that global confidence has been smashed, and our Eurodollar Matrix risks buckling as a result.
The wild gyrations recently experienced in even major global FX crosses speak to that point, to say nothing of the swings seen in more volatile currencies such as AUD, and in EM bellwethers such as MXN and ZAR. FX basis swaps and LIBOR vs. Fed Funds (so offshore vs. onshore USD borrowing rates) say the same thing. Unsurprisingly, the IMF are seeing a wide range of countries turning to them for emergency USD loans.
The Fed has, of course, stepped up. It has reduced the cost of accessing existing USD swap lines–where USD are exchanged for other currencies for a period of time–for the Bank of Canada, Bank of England, European Central Bank, and Swiss National Bank; and another nine countries were given access to Fed swap lines with Australia, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Singapore, and Sweden all able to tap up to USD60bn, and USD30bn available to Denmark, Norway, and New Zealand. This alleviates some pressure for some markets – but is a drop in the ocean compared to the level of Eurodollar liabilities.
The Fed has also introduced a new FIMA repo facility. Essentially this allows any central bank, including emerging markets, to swap their US Treasury holdings for USD, which can then be made available to local financial institutions. To put it bluntly, this repo facility is like a swap line but with a country whose currency you don’t trust.
Allowing a country to swap its Treasuries for USD can alleviate some of the immediate stress on Eurodollars, but when the swap needs to be reversed the drain on reserves will still be there. Moreover, Eurodollar market participants will now not be able to see if FX reserves are declining in a potential crisis country. Ironically, that is likely to see less, not more, willingness to extend Eurodollar credit as a result.
You have two choices, Neo
Yet despite all the Fed’s actions so far, USD keeps going up vs. EM FX. Again, this is as clear an example as one could ask for of structural underlying Eurodollar demand.
Indeed, we arguably need to see even more steps taken by the Fed – and soon. To underline the scale of the crisis we currently face in the Eurodollar system, the BIS concluded at the end of a recent publication on the matter:
“…today’s crisis differs from the 2008 GFC, and requires policies that reach beyond the banking sector to final users. These businesses, particularly those enmeshed in global supply chains, are in constant need of working capital, much of it in dollars. Preserving the flow of payments along these chains is essential if we are to avoid further economic meltdown.
Channeling dollars to non-banks is not straightforward. Allowing non-banks to transact with the central bank is one option, but there are attendant difficulties, both in principle and in practice. Other options include policies that encourage banks to fill the void left by market based finance, for example funding for lending schemes that extend dollars to non-banks indirectly via banks.”
In other words, the BIS is making clear that somebody (i.e., the Fed) must ensure that Eurodollars are made available on massive scale, not just to foreign central banks, but right down global USD supply chains. As they note, there are many practical issues associated with doing that – and huge downsides if we do not do so. Yet they overlook that there are huge geopolitical problems linked to this step too.
Notably, if the Fed does so then we move rapidly towards logical end-game #2 of the three possible Eurodollar outcomes we have listed previously, where the Fed de facto takes over the global financial system. Yet if the Fed does not do so then we move towards end-game #3, a partial Eurodollar collapse.
Of course, the easy thing to assume is that the Fed will step up as it has always shown a belated willingness before, and a more proactive stance of late. Indeed, as the BIS shows in other research, the Fed stepped up not just during the Global Financial Crisis, but all the way back to the Eurodollar market of the 1960s, where swap lines were readily made available on large scale in order to try to reduce periodic volatility.
However, the scale of what we are talking about here is an entirely new dimension: potentially tens of trillions of USD, and not just to other central banks, or to banks, but to a panoply of real economy firms all around the Eurodollar universe.
As importantly, this assumes that the Fed, which is based in the US, wants to save all these foreign firms. Yet does the Fed want to help Chinese firms, for example? It may traditionally be focused narrowly on smoothly-functioning financial markets, but is that true of a White House that openly sees China as a “strategic rival”, which wishes to onshore industry from it, and which has more interest in having a politically-compliant, not independent Fed? Please think back to the origins of Eurodollars – or look at how the US squeezed its WW2 ally UK during the 1956 Suez Crisis, or how it is using the USD financial system vs. Iran today.
Equally, this assumes that all foreign governments and central banks will want to see the US and USD/Eurodollar cement their global financial primacy further. Yes, Fed support will help alleviate this current economic and brewing financial crisis – but the shift of real power afterwards would be a Rubicon that we have crossed.
Specifically, would China really be happy to see its hopes of CNY gaining a larger global role washed away in a flood of fresh, addictive Eurodollar liquidity, meaning that it is more deeply beholden to the US central bank? Again, please think back to the origins of Eurodollars, to Suez, and to how Iran is being treated – because Beijing will. China would be fully aware that a Fed bailout could easily come with political strings attached, if not immediately and directly, then eventually and indirectly. But they would be there all the same.
One cannot ignore or underplay this power struggle that lies within the heart of the Eurodollar Matrix.
I know you’re out thereSo, considering those systemic pressures, let’s look at where Eurodollar pressures are building most now. We will use World Bank projections for short-term USD financing plus concomitant USD current-account deficit requirements vs. specifically USD FX reserves, not general FX reserves accounted in USD, as calculated by looking at national USD reserves and adjusting for the USD’s share of the total global FX reserves basket (57% in 2018, for example). In some cases this will bias national results up or down, but these are in any case only indicative.
How to read these data about where the Eurodollar stresses lie in Table 1? Firstly, in terms of scale, Eurodollar problems lie with China, the UK, Japan, Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands, Singapore, Canada, and South Korea, Germany and France. Total short-term USD demand in the economies listed is USD28 trillion – around 130% of USD GDP. The size of liabilities the Fed would potentially have to cover in China is enormous at over USD3.4 trillion – should that prove politically acceptable to either side.
Outside of China, and most so in the Cayman Islands and the UK, Eurodollar claims are largely in the financial sector and fall on banks and shadow banks such as insurance companies and pension funds. This is obviously a clearer line of attack/defence for the Fed. Yet it still makes these economies vulnerable to swings in Eurodollar confidence – and reliant on the Fed.
Second, most developed countries apart from Switzerland have opted to hold almost no USD reserves at all. Their approach is that they are also reserve currencies, long-standing US allies, and so assume the Fed will always be willing to treat them as such with swap lines when needed. That assumption may be correct – but it comes with a geopolitical power-hierarchy price tag. (Think yet again of how Eurodollars started and the 1956 Suez Crisis ended.)
Third, most developing countries still do not hold enough USD for periods of Eurodollar liquidity stress, despite the painful lessons learned in 1997-98 and 2008-09. The only exception is Saudi Arabia, whose currency is pegged to the USD, although Taiwan, and Russia hold USD close to what would be required in an emergency. Despite years of FX reserve accumulation, at the cost of domestic consumption and a huge US trade deficit, Indonesia, Mexico, Malaysia, and Turkey are all still vulnerable to Eurodollar funding pressures. In short, there is an argument to save yet more USD – which will increase Eurodollar demand further.
We all become Agent Smith?
In short, the extent of demand for USD outside of the US is clear – and so far the Fed is responding. It has continued to expand its balance sheet to provide liquidity to the markets, and it has never done so at this pace before (Figure 5). In fact, in just a month the Fed has expanded its balance sheet by nearly 50% of the previous expansion observed during all three rounds of QE implemented after the Global Financial Crisis. Essentially we have seen nearly five years of QE1-3 in five weeks! And yet it isn’t enough.
Moreover, things are getting worse, not better. The global economic impact of COVID-19 is only beginning but one thing is abundantly clear – global trade in goods and services is going to be hit very, very hard, and that US imports are going to tumble. This threatens one of the main USD liquidity channels into the Eurodollar system.
Table 2 above also underlines looming EM Eurodollar stress-points in terms of import cover, which will fall sharply as USD earnings collapse, and external debt service. The further to the left we see the latest point for import cover, and the further to the right we see it for external debt, the greater the potential problems ahead.
As such, the Fed is likely to find it needs to cover trillions more in Eurodollar liabilities (of what underlying quality?) coming due in the real global, not financial economy – which is exactly what the BIS are warning about. Yes, we are seeing such radical steps being taken by central banks in some Western countries, including in the US – but internationally too? Are we all to become ‘Agent Smith’?
If the Fed is to step up to this challenge and expand its balance sheet even further/faster, then the US economy will massively expand its external deficit to mirror it.
That is already happening. What was a USD1 trillion fiscal deficit before COVID-19, to the dismay of some, has expanded to USD3.2 trillion via a virus-fighting package: and when tax revenues collapse, it will be far larger. Add a further USD600bn phase three stimulus, and talk of a USD2 trillion phase four infrastructure program to try to jumpstart growth rather than just fight virus fires, and potentially we are talking about a fiscal deficit in the range of 20-25% of GDP. As we argued recently, that is a peak-WW2 level as this is also a world war of sorts.
On one hand, the Eurodollar market will happily snap up those trillions US Treasuries/USD – at least those they can access, because the Fed will be buying them too via QE. Indeed, for now bond yields are not rising and USD still is.
However, such fiscal action will prompt questions on how much the USD can be ‘debased’ before, like Agent Smith, it over-reaches and then implodes or explodes – the first of the logical endpoints for the Eurodollar system, if you recall. (Of course, other currencies are doing it too.)
Is Neo The One?
In conclusion, the origins of the Eurodollar Matrix are shrouded in mystery and intrigue – and yet are worth knowing. Its operations are invisible to most but control us in many ways – so are worth understanding. Moreover, it is a system under huge structural pressure – which we must now recognise.
It’s easy to ignore all these issues and just hope the Eurodollar Matrix remains the “You-Roll-Dollar” market – but can that be true indefinitely based just on one’s belief?
Is the Neo Coronavirus ‘The One’ that breaks it?
ORACLE: “Well now, ain’t this a surprise?”
ARCHITECT: “You’ve played a very dangerous game.”
ORACLE: “Change always is.”
ARCHITECT: “And how long do you think this peace is going to last?”
ORACLE: “As long as it can….What about the others?”
ARCHITECT: “What others?”
ORACLE: “The ones that want out.”
ARCHITECT: “Obviously they will be freed.”
It isn’t really about hoarding. And there isn’t an easy fix.
Around the world, in countries afflicted with the coronavirus, stores are sold out of toilet paper. There have been shortages in Hong Kong, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. And we all know who to blame: hoarders and panic-buyers.
Well, not so fast.
Story after story explains the toilet paper outages as a sort of fluke of consumer irrationality. Unlike hand sanitizer, N95 masks, or hospital ventilators, they note, toilet paper serves no special function in a pandemic. Toilet paper manufacturers are cranking out the same supply as always. And it’s not like people are using the bathroom more often, right?
U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar summed up the paradox in a March 13 New York Times story: “Toilet paper is not an effective way to prevent getting the coronavirus, but they’re selling out.” The president of a paper manufacturer offered the consensus explanation: “You are not using more of it. You are just filling up your closet with it.”
Faced with this mystifying phenomenon, media outlets have turned to psychologists to explain why people are cramming their shelves with a household good that has nothing to do with the pandemic. Read the coverage and you’ll encounter all sorts of fascinating concepts, from “zero risk bias” to “anticipatory anxiety.” It’s “driven by fear” and a “herd mentality,” the BBC scolded. The libertarian Mises Institute took the opportunity to blame anti-gouging laws. The Atlantic published a short documentary harking back to the great toilet paper scare of 1973, which was driven by misinformation.
No doubt there’s been some panic-buying, particularly once photos of empty store shelves began circulating on social media. There have also been a handful of documented cases of true hoarding. But you don’t need to assume that most consumers are greedy or irrational to understand how coronavirus would spur a surge in demand. And you can stop wondering where in the world people are storing all that Quilted Northern.
There’s another, entirely logical explanation for why stores have run out of toilet paper — one that has gone oddly overlooked in the vast majority of media coverage. It has nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with supply chains. It helps to explain why stores are still having trouble keeping it in stock, weeks after they started limiting how many a customer could purchase.
In short, the toilet paper industry is split into two, largely separate markets: commercial and consumer. The pandemic has shifted the lion’s share of demand to the latter. People actually do need to buy significantly more toilet paper during the pandemic — not because they’re making more trips to the bathroom, but because they’re making more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. population under stay-at-home orders, Americans are no longer using the restrooms at their workplace, in schools, at restaurants, at hotels, or in airports.
Georgia-Pacific, a leading toilet paper manufacturer based in Atlanta, estimates that the average household will use 40% more toilet paper than usual if all of its members are staying home around the clock. That’s a huge leap in demand for a product whose supply chain is predicated on the assumption that demand is essentially constant. It’s one that won’t fully subside even when people stop hoarding or panic-buying.
If you’re looking for where all the toilet paper went, forget about people’s attics or hall closets. Think instead of all the toilet paper that normally goes to the commercial market — those office buildings, college campuses, Starbucks, and airports that are now either mostly empty or closed. That’s the toilet paper that’s suddenly going unused.
So why can’t we just send that toilet paper to Safeway or CVS? That’s where supply chains and distribution channels come in.
Not only is it not the same product, but it often doesn’t come from the same mills.
Talk to anyone in the industry, and they’ll tell you the toilet paper made for the commercial market is a fundamentally different product from the toilet paper you buy in the store. It comes in huge rolls, too big to fit on most home dispensers. The paper itself is thinner and more utilitarian. It comes individually wrapped and is shipped on huge pallets, rather than in brightly branded packs of six or 12.
“Not only is it not the same product, but it often doesn’t come from the same mills,” added Jim Luke, a professor of economics at Lansing Community College, who once worked as head of planning for a wholesale paper distributor. “So for instance, Procter & Gamble [which owns Charmin] is huge in the retail consumer market. But it doesn’t play in the institutional market at all.”
Georgia-Pacific, which sells to both markets, told me its commercial products also use more recycled fiber, while the retail sheets for its consumer brands Angel Soft and Quilted Northern are typically 100% virgin fiber. Eric Abercrombie, a spokesman for the company, said it has seen demand rise on the retail side, while it expects a decline in the “away-from-home activity” that drives its business-to-business sales.
In theory, some of the mills that make commercial toilet paper could try to redirect some of that supply to the consumer market. People desperate for toilet paper probably wouldn’t turn up their noses at it. But the industry can’t just flip a switch. Shifting to retail channels would require new relationships and contracts between suppliers, distributors, and stores; different formats for packaging and shipping; new trucking routes — all for a bulky product with lean profit margins.
Because toilet paper is high volume but low value, the industry runs on extreme efficiency, with mills built to work at full capacity around the clock even in normal times. That works only because demand is typically so steady. If toilet paper manufacturers spend a bunch of money now to refocus on the retail channel, they’ll face the same problem in reverse once people head back to work again.
“The normal distribution system is like a well-orchestrated ballet,” said Willy Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School. “If you make a delivery to a Walmart distribution center, they give you a half-hour window, and your truck has to show up then.” The changes wrought by the coronavirus, he said, “have thrown the whole thing out of balance, and everything has to readjust.”
While toilet paper is an extreme case, similar dynamics are likely to temporarily disrupt supplies of other goods, too — even if no one’s hoarding or panic-buying. The CEO of a fruit and vegetable supplier told NPR’s Weekend Edition that schools and restaurants are canceling their banana orders, while grocery stores are selling out and want more. The problem is that the bananas he sells to schools and restaurants are “petite” and sold loose in boxes of 150, whereas grocery store bananas are larger and sold in bunches. Beer companies face a similar challenge converting commercial keg sales to retail cans and bottles.
I’m absolutely convinced that very little was triggered by hoarding.
It’s all happening, of course, against the backdrop of a pandemic that makes it hard enough for these producers to keep up business as usual, let alone remold their operations to keep up with radical shifts in demand.
If there’s any good news, it’s that we can stop blaming these shortages on the alleged idiocy of our fellow consumers. “I’m absolutely convinced that very little was triggered by hoarding,” Luke said. Even a modest, reasonable amount of stocking up by millions of people in preparation for stay-at-home orders would have been enough to deplete many store shelves. From there, the ripple effects of availability concerns, coupled with a genuine increase in demand due to people staying in, are sufficient to explain the ongoing supply problems.
In the long run, the industry is still optimistic that it can adapt. “We’ve got fiber supply, we’ve got trees,” said Georgia-Pacific’s Abercrombie. “It’s just a matter of making the product and getting it out.”
In the meantime, some enterprising restaurateurs have begun selling their excess supplies of toilet paper, alcohol, and other basics. Last week I picked up takeout at a local restaurant with a side of toilet paper and bananas. The toilet paper was thin and individually wrapped. The bananas were puny. They’ll do just fine.
For now, social distancing is the best America can do to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. But if the U.S. truly mobilizes, it can soon deploy better weapons—advanced tests—that will allow the country to shift gradually to a protocol less disruptive and more effective than a lockdown.
Instead of ricocheting between an unsustainable shutdown and a dangerous, uncertain return to normalcy, the U.S. could mount a sustainable strategy with better tests and maintain a stable course for as long as it takes to develop a vaccine or cure. The country will once more be able to plan for the future, get back to work safely and avoid an economic depression. This will require massive investment to ramp up production and coordinate the construction of test centers. But the alternatives are even more costly.
Two types of testing will be essential. The first test, which relies on a technology known as the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, can detect the virus even before a person has symptoms. It is the best way to identify who is infected. The second test looks not for the virus but for the antibodies that the immune system produces to fight it. This test isn’t so effective during the early stages of an infection, but since antibodies remain even after the virus is gone, it reveals who has been infected in the past.
Together, these two tests will give policy makers the data to make smarter decisions about who needs to be isolated and where resources need to be deployed. Instead of firing blindly, this data will let the country target its efforts.
Here’s a simple illustration of how test data can save lives. Every day millions of health-care professionals go to work without knowing whether they are infectious and might spread the virus to their colleagues. We both have close relatives on the front lines. As soon as one of them developed a cough, she pulled herself out of service. But at that point she may have been infectious for several critical days. If she and her colleagues had all been tested every day, her infection would have been caught earlier and she would have isolated herself sooner.
To be used as a screening mechanism at the beginning of a shift, the test would need to be able to give a result within minutes. Developers are making progress on speeding up these PCR tests—so much so that the aforementioned physician received the results from her second test, conducted five days after the first, before those from the first test. Abbott and Roche, two pharmaceutical companies, are moving forward with tests that can decrease reporting times from days or hours to minutes. Now that the doctor has recovered, an antibody test could help determine when she can return to the frontlines of patient care.
As testing capacity expands, the same tests could be offered to all essential workers, such as police officers and emergency technicians, and then to other overlooked but critical workers—pharmacists, grocery clerks, sanitation staff. The next step would be to test people throughout the country at random to get up-to-date information about who is infected now and who has ever been infected.
For those who are currently infected, governments can provide immediate assistance to make sure they don’t infect anyone else, especially family members. Those infected before who now have antibodies may be less susceptible to reinfection. If that is proved in the weeks to come, they could also return to work.
Putting this system in place will take resources, creativity and hard work. Test developers will have to increase the production rate of kits by an order of magnitude. In his work fighting Ebola in West Africa, Dr. Shah saw how a virus can cause a 30% reduction in economic output. Mr. Romer’s back-of-the-envelope calculation is that the recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic has already caused a 20% reduction in U.S. output, which means the country is losing about $350 billion in production each month. If a $100 billion investment in a crash program to make antibody and PCR tests ubiquitous brought a recovery one month sooner, it would more than pay for itself.
Building this testing system would be complicated and require the best of American science, business and philanthropy working together. But it is the type of challenge that the U.S. has overcome before. It isn’t viable to wait a year or two for a vaccine before getting people back to work safely. To save lives and prevent a depression, testing on a massive scale is essential.
The bills are now coming due for big companies and millions of laid-off workers. Decisions made in the next few days will shape how coronavirus impacts the economy
Congress has passed a $2 trillion rescue plan but before those funds start to flow, American companies from the owner of a single liquor store in Boston to corporate giants like Macy’s Inc., must decide what to do about April’s bills: Which obligations do they pay and which can they put off? How many employees can they afford to keep on the payroll? Can they get a break on rent?
“Rent is due. Utilities are due. Credit card bills are due April 1,” said Hadley Douglas, who has laid off two workers from her liquor business, The Urban Grape. “The deadline is looming large and it is petrifying.” She said her landlord turned down a request to temporarily pay half the rent but said to keep in touch as it was focusing first on smaller, harder hit businesses.
Millions of Americans are suddenly out of work and many businesses have already closed under orders from state and local governments to close to prevent the spread of the virus. A record 3.28 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the week ended March 21.
The U.S. restaurant industry has lost $25 billion in sales since March 1, according to a survey of 5,000 owners by the National Restaurant Association. Nearly 50,000 stores of major U.S. retail chains have closed, according to the companies.
An estimated $20 billion in monthly retail real estate loans are due as early as this week, according to Marcus & Millichap, a commercial real-estate services and consulting firm. Many retailers and restaurants have said they are not going to pay their April rents, which in turn poses a threat to the $3 trillion commercial mortgage market.
Economic activity in the U.S. and other developed countries could be lowered by a quarter, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Friday.
Companies of all sizes are feeling the squeeze, especially retailers and restaurants that have closed their doors during the outbreak. Nike Inc. is asking to pay half its rents. TJ Maxx is delaying payments to its suppliers. Victoria’s Secret and Men’s Wearhouse have furloughed thousands of workers. Cheesecake Factory Inc. closed 27 of the company’s locations and furloughed 41,000 hourly workers, nearly 90% of its total staff.
Tyson Evans, a 23-year-old line cook for Cheesecake Factory in Indianapolis, Indiana, said he and fellow workers were stunned to learn about the furloughs. He said they believed the company would continue to employ them despite a drop in business. He is now filing for unemployment.
“We keep this company going,” said Mr. Evans, who is currently living with his parents and worried about paying bills including his phone, grocery and prescriptions. He has started an online petition to urge the chain to keep paying furloughed workers.
Denise Burger, a 64-year-old Cheesecake Factory server in Escondido, Calif., said she was counting on the 36 hours of work the company had scheduled for her before the furloughs came down. Ms. Burger said she’s been contacting her mortgage and credit card companies to try and postpone payments.
“This pandemic has put much stress and strain on me,” said Ms. Burger, who is single and has worked for the company for six years in a job she loved.
California-based Cheesecake Factory said it would continue to provide health insurance for employees until June 1, and provide them a daily meal from their restaurants that remain open for take-out orders.
Cheesecake Factory has notified landlords that it won’t pay April rent. “Due to these extraordinary events, I am asking for your patience and, frankly, your help,” wrote Chief Executive David Overton.
Owners of independent and small restaurant chains have also asked their landlords for rent relief, with mixed responses. Some say landlords are offering them deferments of several months, whereas others haven’t gotten much help yet.
“Landlords, if they are overly greedy, they could be losing us,” said Andy Howard, chief executive of Huey Magoo’s Restaurants, who is pleading for a break on rents for his Orlando, Fla., chicken tenders chain.
Residential and commercial landlords say they have been flooded with requests from individuals and businesses saying they will struggle to pay their rent for April and beyond.
“I feel like I’m running triage in a retail hospital out of my apartment,” said Ami Ziff, director of national retail for Time Equities Inc., which owns 122 retail centers, including shopping centers, malls and street-front retail locations in 25 states.
Mortgage firms are bracing for a wave of missed payments starting April 1 as borrowers lose their jobs. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac say they will offer deferrals on home mortgages and postpone foreclosures. Auto dealers say consumers are calling to put off their April lease or loan payments.
Guy Hillel, 47 years old, got laid off from his job as a food and beverage manager at a Times Square hotel earlier this month after the property closed due to the outbreak. He is eligible for $504 a week in unemployment benefits, a fraction of what he was earning.
Mr. Hillel, who has a wife and two children, says it isn’t enough to cover the family’s expenses. He has called credit-card companies to negotiate payment extensions, and tried unsuccessfully to delay his monthly car loan for his family’s Volkswagen Tiguan sport-utility vehicle.
“It’s extremely stressful,” Mr. Hillel said. “It’s crazy: I’m more exhausted now than I was before when I had a job.”
Mr. Hillel estimates his family will receive some stimulus money, but not the full amount awarded to couples.
The federal economic stimulus program passed last week will provide direct payments to Americans as well as loans to large and small companies. The bill includes $350 billion to help small businesses keep people on their payrolls.
For employees, it increases current unemployment benefits by $600 a week for four months. It also provides one-time checks of $1,200 to Americans with adjusted gross income up to $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 for married couples; individuals and couples are eligible for an additional $500 per child.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the Trump administration aims to send out direct payments to individuals in three weeks and that banks should be able to originate same-day loans for small businesses in as little as a week.
Many business owners and individuals said they have little in the way of cash reserves or savings for bills that come due in the next few days. Some wonder whether the aid will be enough.
The Small Business Administration said the stimulus bill provides “small businesses with the resources they need to get them through this unprecedented time.”
America’s large, marquee retailers are also struggling.
Macy’s Chief Executive Jeff Gennette told suppliers last week that while he had hoped to reopen stores by April 1, that was highly unlikely. “While our digital business and call centers remain open, we have lost the majority of our sales,” Mr. Gennette wrote in a letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Macy’s has suspended its dividend and drawn down its credit line to bolster its cash. It has reduced pay for executives. It’s also canceling some orders and has doubled the amount of time it gives itself to pay suppliers, to 120 days. Nevertheless, Mr. Gennette wrote in the letter, the retailer may need to begin furloughing some of its 130,000 employees.
Nike has offered to pay 50% rent on its 384 closed U.S. stores, landlords say, and when the stores reopen, a percentage of sales in lieu of any rent for 12 months. Nike executives said they will continue to pay workers while the stores are shut.
“We are currently honoring all existing contracts with our landlords. In collaboration with our real estate partners, we provided a proposal looking at near and long term approaches that we believe will help ensure both parties remain viable business partners through this unprecedented time,” a Nike spokeswoman said.
Tapestry Inc., the parent of Coach and Kate Spade, extended U.S. and European store closures through April 10, but is continuing to pay store workers. “What will be important as we come out the other end is to have a committed team of people,” said Chief Executive Jide Zeitlin.
Mr. Zeitlin said the company is in negotiations with landlords about rent forgiveness and is looking at other expenses to cut aside from labor.
T.J. Maxx and Ross Stores Inc. have canceled orders through mid-June and are delaying payments to suppliers, according to people familiar with the situation. A T.J. Maxx spokeswoman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Ross Stores didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Financial pressures are particularly intense for small business owners; In a typical community, about half of small businesses had less than two weeks of cash liquidity, according to a 2019 report by the JPMorgan Chase Institute.
Pennsylvania deemed auto repair an essential business, which allowed Tom Bemiller, the chief executive of The Aureus Group, to keep open his three repair shops in the Philadelphia area. Revenue is down 35% this month, he said.
“Customer after customer is telling us I am not going to get my car fixed until this blows over,” said Mr. Bemiller.
Mr. Bemiller said his priority is to pay his 25 employees and his suppliers. His bank is working to determine whether it can retool the terms of his company’s $450,000 loan to allow for interest-only payments and has increased its credit line by $50,000, enough to cover two weeks of payroll. Pennsylvania is letting him delay certain sales tax payments; American Express Co. has agreed to waive fees and interest if he delays his $270,000 corporate credit card bill for one month.
“Right now everything is on the table because we are in survival mode,” Mr. Bemiller said. “We are reaching out to all vendors and creditors and asking for help and trying to delay payments as much as possible.”
Mr. Bemiller has reduced his own salary. He hopes to defer payments on his mortgage, student loans, credit card bills and other expenses, but hasn’t had time to work on that yet because he’s been singularly focused on the business, which provides all of his family’s income.
At Envision Travel Holdings Inc., a travel agency with 11 offices, revenue has fallen by two-thirds in the past month and is expected to drop to near zero in the next month or so. The Las Vegas company, which normally has 40 employees and 25 independent contractors, has laid off four workers and cut hours by 20%.
All but one of Envision’s landlords has agreed to reduce rents, cutting payments to about $15,000 from $38,000, with missed payments tacked on to the end of the lease. The travel company put a hold on its 401(k) retirement savings plan and, for now, dropped its 50% contribution to the employee dental plan. “We are analyzing every expense, line by line,” owner Thomas Carlsen said.
“The universal advice we are giving tenants is don’t pay your rent and see what happens,” said Derek Wolman, partner at law firm Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP, which often represents bars, restaurants and hotels in lease negotiations. He said this is especially true in New York state, where there is pending legislation that would give 90 days of rent forgiveness to residential and commercial tenants who suffered financially as a result of Covid-19.
In Detroit, Bedrock, a developer and property owner created by billionaire Dan Gilbert, is offering free rent to more than 100 small businesses and restaurants from April to June. “Hopefully, they sense we’re in it to help them,” said Matt Cullen, chief executive of Bedrock. On Monday, Michigan ordered all non-essential businesses to close.
Smaller landlords who don’t have enough reserves to tide them through a prolonged pause in rent collection say they are in a precarious state.
“Why is the landlord the first line in bailing them out?,” said Corey Bialow, a small property owner. He owns a stake in 12 properties in different states including New Jersey and Massachusetts. He said he will be on the hook for additional costs beyond mortgages such as real estate taxes, maintenance and insurance and will have to dip into his savings to pay for these. “I’m personally on the hook.”
Coyote Hole Ciderworks, a three-year-old cider producer in Lake Anna, Va., saw an 80% drop in revenue after it was forced to shutter most of its operations.
Coyote typically employs seven workers most of the year and fifteen or more in the summer. Now, just co-owner Laura Denkers and one employee remain on the payroll; Her husband, Chris, has stopped taking a salary so the company can continue paying health insurance premiums. The Denkers’ 10-year-old twin sons have cystic fibrosis, which makes keeping health coverage crucial.
The couple began applying for a $60,000 disaster loan from the SBA on March 20. They said all the information they put into the system was lost when the SBA revamped the disaster loan application process because of technical difficulties.
The small company has secured a 90-day reprieve on mortgage payments from its bank; Mr. Denkers plans to pay the minimum allowed on his corporate credit card and is trying to defer payments on equipment loans and other bills. “The next three weeks is the real crunch time when we need an influx of money,” he said.
Jodi Rodriguez, until recently director of retail and sales for Ovenly, a New York City-based wholesale and retail bakery that laid off all of its 72 employees, filed for unemployment March 18.
She wrote a letter to the landlord of the building she’s lived in for eleven years, asking for a temporary discount on the rent on her New York apartment. Ms. Rodriguez owns a rental property in Florida, but the tenant is a make-up artist who isn’t currently working. “I’m unsure whether she is going to pay or not,” Ms. Rodriquez.
“The hardest part right now is health insurance,” said Ms. Rodriguez, noting that coverage through Ovenly ends March 31.
Even businesses that have had gains are facing uncertainty. Ms. Douglas, the Boston liquor store owner, said in-store sales are up 130% over what she had budgeted, more than offsetting the collapse of her catering and event business. She’s keeping a close eye on cash flow and expenses, worried that she, her husband or one of their employees might get sick, that worker illnesses could disrupt her supply chain or that the state could order liquor stores to close.
Ms. Douglas is a member of a local business group in Boston’s South End neighborhood that recently surveyed more than 100 small firms. Most of the owners reported revenue is down by 90% or more in March, with monthly losses totaling about $8.5 million for the 72 businesses that provided specific figures.
“Every order we put in is nerve-wracking because we are so worried about getting stuck with product we can’t sell,” she added. “We are open today but that doesn’t mean we will be open next week.” | <urn:uuid:1539e954-1967-459c-959a-071b8177fb4d> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | https://www.openpolitics.com/tag/coronavirus-economy/ | 2020-10-30T23:06:57Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107911792.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20201030212708-20201031002708-00220.warc.gz | en | 0.950998 | 20,538 |
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Although the role70 of colloid in resuscitation of brain-injured patients remains unclear 120mg starlix for sale, it is appropriate to avoid large volumes of hypo-oncotic fluids such as lactated Ringer solution purchase 120mg starlix amex. Hypertonic purchase starlix with amex, hypernatremic solutions, with or without added colloid, appear to fulfill some of these criteria (Table 16-12). Hypertonic solutions exert favorable effects on cerebral hemodynamics, in part because of the reciprocal relationship between plasma osmolality and brain water. Central78 pontine myelinolysis, which follows rapid correction of severe, chronic hyponatremia, has not been observed in clinical trials of hypertonic resuscitation. Despite theoretical considerations favoring the use of hypertonic saline in resuscitation of patients with traumatic brain injury, a subsequent randomized trial failed to demonstrate an improvement in outcome. Pending further preclinical work, the theoretical advantages of such fluids appear most attractive in the acute resuscitation of hypovolemic patients who have decreased intracranial compliance. Although this goal is conventionally accomplished with mannitol, some clinicians prefer hypertonic 1027 saline solutions. However, infusion of hypertonic saline increases intravascular volume, while diuresis secondary to mannitol decreases intravascular volume. Table 16-12 Hypertonic Resuscitation Fluids: Advantages and Disadvantages Fluid Status: Assessment and Monitoring For most surgical patients, conventional clinical assessment of the adequacy of intravascular volume is appropriate. Assessment of hypovolemia is mainly based in physical signs that include oliguria, supine hypotension, and a positive tilt test. In general, oliguria implies hypovolemia, keeping in mind that hypovolemic patients can have adequate urinary output and that urinary output can be misleadingly high. Supine hypotension suggests a blood volume deficit greater than 30%, although in elderly or chronic hypertensive patients, an arterial blood pressure within the normal range could represent relative hypotension. A positive tilt test, defined as an increase in heart rate of at least 20 beats per minute and a decrease in systolic blood pressure of 20 mmHg or more when the subject assumes the upright position, can be falsely negative. In contrast, orthostasis may occur in 20% to 30% of elderly patients despite normal blood volume. In volunteers, withdrawal of 500 mL of blood was84 associated with a greater increase in heart rate on standing than before blood withdrawal, but with no significant difference in the response of blood pressure or cardiac index. In acute hemorrhage, hematocrit decreases slowly as fluid shifts from the interstitial to the intravascular space and more rapidly during administration of fluids. The sensitivities and specificities of measurements of blood and urinary variables to hypovolemia are poor. In prerenal oliguria, enhanced sodium reabsorption should reduce urinary [Na ] to 20 mEq/L or+ less and enhanced water reabsorption should increase urinary concentration (i. Intraoperative Clinical Assessment Both surgeons and anesthesiologists tend to underestimate blood loss, based on assessment of blood on surgical gauze pads, pooled on the floor, and accumulated in the surgical field and suction containers. Assessment of the adequacy of intraoperative fluid resuscitation integrates multiple clinical variables, including heart rate, blood pressure, urinary output, arterial oxygenation, and pH. In patients receiving potent inhalational agents, maintenance of blood pressure within the normal range implies adequate intravascular volume. When measured, a central venous pressure of 6 to 12 mmHg suggests adequate blood volume. Tachycardia is an insensitive and 1029 nonspecific indicator of hypovolemia that is also altered by anesthetic drugs. In severe hypovolemia, the accuracy of indirect measurements of blood pressure diminishes. Under those circumstances, direct arterial pressure measurements are more accurate than indirect techniques. Therefore, in the absence of glycosuria or diuretic administration, a urinary output of 0. Mixed venous hemoglobin desaturation, a specific indicator of poor systemic perfusion, reflects average perfusion in multiple organs and cannot supplant regional monitors such as urinary output. Assessing physiologic responses to fluid87 administration can indicate the adequacy of cardiac preload and facilitate management of hemodynamics. Assessment increasingly depends on dynamic physiologic variables rather than static variables such as central venous pressure. Esophageal Doppler assessment of blood flow in the descending aorta is another promising technique in measuring adequacy of cardiac preload during high-risk surgical procedures. Using the esophageal Doppler to guide administration of colloid boluses, Venn et al. Of note, Horowitz and Kumar speculated that the infusion of95 colloid rather than the monitor-driven algorithm was responsible for the improved results. Large multicenter trials are needed in order to ascertain the benefits of the described novel techniques in perioperative outcomes of patients undergoing high-risk surgery. However, there is96 no apparent benefit for patients other than surgical patients and patients undergoing initial resuscitation from septic shock in the emergency department. Postoperative cardiovascular complications occurred significantly more frequently in the group receiving fluids alone (13/25, 52%, vs. Another specific risk associated with use of fluids to achieve goal-oriented resuscitation is an increased incidence of abdominal compartment syndrome in trauma patients. Disorders of sodium concentration, that is, hyponatremia and hypernatremia, usually result from relative excesses or deficits, respectively, of water. Regulation of total body sodium and [Na ] is accomplished primarily by the+ endocrine and renal systems (Table 16-13). Therefore,+ primary hyperaldosteronism is associated with hypervolemia and with hypertension, but not with abnormal [Na ]. The most common clinical scenarios associated with hyponatremia include the postoperative state, acute intracranial disease, malignant disease, medications, and acute pulmonary disease. Recently, hyponatremia, as well as hypokalemia and hypophosphatemia, have been recognized as complications of immunologic treatment of cancers such as hepatocellular carcinoma and melanoma. Symptoms that can accompany+ severe hyponatremia ([Na ] < 120 mEq/L) include loss of appetite, nausea,+ vomiting, cramps, weakness, altered level of consciousness, coma, and seizures. Because the blood–brain barrier is poorly permeable to sodium but freely permeable to water, a rapid decrease in plasma [Na ]+ promptly increases both extracellular and intracellular brain water. Because the brain does not rapidly compensate for changes in osmolality,106 acute hyponatremia produces more severe symptoms than chronic hyponatremia. The symptoms of chronic hyponatremia probably relate to depletion of brain electrolytes. Once brain volume has compensated for hyponatremia, rapid increases in [Na ] may lead to abrupt brain dehydration. Hyponatremia with a normal or high serum osmolality results from the presence of a nonsodium solute, such as glucose or mannitol, which holds water within the extracellular space and results in dilutional hyponatremia. The presence of a nonsodium solute may be inferred if measured osmolality exceeds calculated osmolality by over 10 mOsm/kg. Hyposmolality is more important in generating symptoms than is hyponatremia per se. In contrast, as glycine or sorbitol is metabolized, hyposmolality will gradually develop, and cerebral edema may appear as a late complication.
Low fow status with a slow decrease for pump exchange or for thrombectomy 120 mg starlix with mastercard, in case of of fow is typical of post-pump thrombosis where unsuccessful washout maneuver starlix 120mg discount. Te log fle of a successful backwash maneuver Te last step of the washout maneuver is is shown in order starlix visa. No neurologic complication has been the fow and power consumption of the pump can recorded with this strategy, as far as reported in be clearly identifed. In a small percentage of patients, the rial blood pressure will show: frst, low blood fow thrombus cannot be found afer the procedure and full lef ventricular ejection at the time of pre- (neither in the Sentinel device nor in the periph- pump obstruction, then retrograde fow indicated eral arteries). Pump Exchange A “lateral implantation” to the descending Pump exchange is the defnitive treatment for aorta can be also performed and represents a suit- intra-pump thrombosis. However, it represents a able solution for patients with a history of com- major cardiac operation, which is performed in plex cardiac operations, where a redo-sternotomy an acute setting on a compromised and hemo- would bear a signifcant risk of damage to the dynamically instable patient. Some clinical signs, for exam- brane oxygenation can be considered for mechan- ple, hemoglobinuria with dark urine, may suggest ical circulatory support during pump exchange, as that severe hemolysis has occurred as a conse- it is a closed circuit, not exposed to air, and allows quence of intra-pump thrombosis and should a lower degree of heparinization compared to the trigger the decision for pump exchange instead traditional heart-lung machine. Indeed, several surgical approaches to pump exchange have been described, each presenting unique advantages and disadvantages . Intensifcation alternative strategy is tirofban (Aggrastat, Merck of anticoagulation is recommended in the & Co. Use of direct thrombin inhibi- tor is described in this context, but is theoreti- 48. Conservative therapy has thrombosis which lowered the percentage of suc- high recurrence rate of thrombosis, because by cess to 21% . However, serious adverse events measuring only indirect parameters it is hard were observed in the treated cases : stroke from to determine whether the thrombus was fully 10% to 15%, bleeding complications at 65%, and resolved or just reduced. No standardized protocol exists; therefore, dosage and time of administration may greatly 48. Furthermore, high option because the rate of bleeding is low, it is dosages of drug are commonly infused (up to safer than thrombolysis, and does not preclude 100 mg) , as it is administered systemically. Te key for No consensus exists however, concerning the success is the timing of treatment compared to the administration route of thrombolytic agents and onset of pump thrombosis. Small tricle through a pigtail catheter (rate of 1 mg/min case series reported successful use of eptifbatide for a total dose ranging from 30 to 50 mg) , via (Merck & Co. Cardiac transplantation may be a strategy for some patients, but this therapy is limited by donor availability. Awareness of the efect of pump throm- Tere are three main reasons for blood fow bosis on patient outcomes prompted the United obstruction in the outfow graf: kinking of the graf, Network of Organ Sharing in 2013 to allow emer- stenosis of the aortic anastomosis by ingrowth of an gency priority listing for patients with impending intimal fap, or graf thrombosis. No bailout strategy Regular follow-up with transthoracic echocar- is available for destination therapy patients. Fluoroscopy, with intubation of the malfunction due to pump thrombosis, from outfow graf and contrast medium, should be recognition and diagnosis to treatment. Many regarded as the gold standard in assessing stenosis centers worldwide faced pump thrombosis and of the aortic anastomosis. Te ments of the pressure gradient along the outfow device industry focused on this type of adverse graf further support the diagnosis and may be the event in developing new devices. Kinking of the outfow tract time, efort by clinicians should be placed on can be treated by stenting alone and thrombosis novel management strategies since outpatient of the outfow tract by stenting with a covered care is crucial in this topic and every opportu- stent while using cerebral endovascular protec- nity of telemonitoring is welcomed to start the tion [32, 33]. Hubbert L, Sundbom P, Loebe M, Peterzen B, Granfeldt scheduled for pump explantation. However, they H, Ahn H (2014) Acoustic analysis of a mechanical cir- represent a minority of cases. J Am Coll Cardiol 67(23):2758– M, Latif F et al (2012) Development of a novel echocar- 2768. Krabatsch T, Drews T, Potapov E, Weng Y, Pasic M, Hetzer nosis of device thrombosis in continuous-fow left R (2014) Diferent surgical strategies for implantation ventricular assist devices: the Columbia ramp study. Kaufmann F, Hormandinger C, Stepanenko A, and management of pump thrombus in the Kretzschmar A, Soltani S, Krabatsch T et al (2014) HeartWare left ventricular assist device system. A Acoustic spectral analysis for determining pump throm- novel approach using log-fle analysis. J Heart Lung Transplant 34:1535–1541 Registry for Mechanically Assisted Circulatory Support 24. J Heart Lung tinuous-fow right ventricular assist device--repeated Transplant 33:12–22 thrombolysis with two diferent protocols. J Heart Lung Transplant with ventricular assist device thrombosis: an attempt 33:23–34 to avoid reoperation. Soltani S, Kaufmann F et al (2015) Design changes in 192–196 continuous-fow left ventricular assist devices and life 26. Artif novel echocardiograph ramp test for speed optimiza- Organs 39:526–529 tion and diagnosis of device thrombosis in continuous- 27. Analysis of 9 events and pression during speed optimization ramps in patients results after endoventricular thrombolysis. Int J Cardiol supported by continuous-fow left ventricular assist 178:159–161 device: device-specifc performance characteristics 28. J Card Fail tricular assist device outfow cannula obstruction 21(10):785–791 treated with percutaneous endovascular stenting. Grinstein J, Kruse E et al (2016) Screening for outfow Heart Fail 8(1):229–230 cannula malfunction of left ventricular assist devices 29. EuroIntervention 8:43–50 patient with left ventricular assist device outfow graft 33. Eur Heart J 36:2070–2207 48 513 49 Infectious Complications Ezin Deniz, Christina Feldmann, Jan D. Te term “outfow cannula” refers to that sively and difficult to treat due to the presence part of the device connecting the pump device to of biofilms on prosthetic surfaces that markedly the patient’s cardiovascular system. Suture lines reduce the likelihood of successful treatment refer to the surgical anastomoses between pump with anti-infectives alone. Te retrieval of a pathogen teams may be able to aspirate diagnostic fuid sur- or an indistinguishable organism from more than rounding devices by imaging guidance. Objectively Te term “pocket” in these defnitions is used they lie between existing standards for tunneled to describe infections that occur in the body space central lines and implantable intraports [5, 9, or pocket that holds the pump inside the body of 11]. Classically the pocket may be newly fully comprehensive defnitions and defni- created within the abdominal wall or within prox- tions that are practical and useful for clinicians. All percutaneous drivelines may refect the presence of a deeper infection of should be surgically examined at time of removal the pocket space or pump and/or cannula. Patients ofen present with non-specifc aneurysms may be visceral or intracerebral (usu- symptoms such as lethargy, fatigue, fever, or ally presenting as an intracranial hemorrhage). Routine surveillance cultures of exit b sites may be considered as colonization ofen pre- Clostridium difcile infection cedes infection and can serve as valuable infor- Urinary tract infectiona mation for subsequent infection. Cardiothoracic surgeons, diagnosis and ultrasound have become the frst- cardiologists, and, in specialized centers, interven- line study for infections such as cholecystitis . Finally with specifc protocols may have a role in charac- at least two samples of tissue from the pocket area terization of infection but in the surgically “dam- and insertion site of the cannulas into the heart aged” sternum may have limited value . Photograph: Thoratec corporation 1 2 3 49 Possible Probable Proven Defnition No surgical/histology or No surgical/histology Surgical/histology criteria ± purulent discharge ± other criteria with purulent other criteria criteria discharge ± other criteria Surgical or Surgical debridement not Surgical debridement not Involvement of tissues histopathological performed performed superfcial to fascia or No histopathology No histopathology muscle layer = superfcial infection Involvement of tissues deep to fascia or muscle layer = deep infection. All patients should be screened in a similar and coccidioidal infection, respectively.
It is also necessary to perform preparatory work the day before perfusion buy discount starlix 120 mg, and a little more on the day of perfusion buy generic starlix on line, prior to placenta collec- tion order starlix 120mg overnight delivery, inspection, cannulation, and establishment of homeostasis before experimentation. There are key quality control measures, which must be adhered to in the maintenance of tissue structural integrity and in preventing leakage artifact from the fetal to the maternal circulation. Fetomaternal leakage takes two forms: post- partum breakages in the villous tree structure, which provides a route of least resistance for fetal perfusate escape, along a hydro- static pressure gradient and into the intervillous space, and the bulk fow of perfusate through existing paracellular routes when this fetomaternal hydrostatic pressure differential exceeds approxi- mately 30 mmHg [12, 39, 40]. The latter phenomenon is associ- ated with elevated fetal-side infow hydrostatic pressure, which is evoked by prolonged postpartum ischemia, whereby hemostasis leads to platelet activation and irreversible vasoconstriction within the placental microcirculation. Establishing fetal-side perfusion within 30 min, or at least ensuring a fetal-side fush with heparin- ized perfusate in this time period, would normally ensure a basally relaxed fetoplacental microcirculation, preventing fetomaternal leakage to an acceptable level. Fetal-side (and sometimes maternal-side) infow hydrostatic pressure is monitored in real time, to visualize the ease of postisch- emic blood elution within the frst phase of fetal-side perfusion. A steady-state low fetomaternal hydrostatic pressure differential (below 30 mmHg) is preventative of a perfusate fetomaternal “bulk fow” effect and the loss of barrier architectural integrity, whereas a sustained excessive fetal vascular resistance will compro- mise the tissue structural integrity, by vacuolating the vasculosyn- cytial membrane, leading to an increased diffusional pathway length. According to Fick’s law of diffusion, this would otherwise interfere with nutrient transfer effcacy and the accuracy of inter- pretation and in vivo of pharmacokinetics. Fetal-side infow hydro- static pressure is also directly used in experiments designed to assess the regulation of fetoplacental vascular tone, important in the adequacy of provision of fetal blood fow to and from the pla- centa, in the supply of nutrients and oxygen, and in the elimination of waste products of metabolism. Herein, we discuss the methods for ex vivo dual placental perfusion system and uses of this technique to evaluate (1) vascular function, (2) transplacental clearance, (3) hemodynamic and oxy- genation changes associated with pregnancy complications on 176 Paul Brownbill et al. Circulating water bath, set to deliver heated water to the benchtop perfusion chamber, equilibrating to 37 °C, if using. Fetal and maternal peristaltic pumps with appropriate mani- fold tubing ftted to ensure pumps work within their midrange at 6 mL/min and 14 mL/min, respectively, with scope for fetal-side pumps to operate up to 12 mL/min, if investigating fow-mediated vasodilation (see Note 4). Hydrostatic pressure transducers, coupled to a pressure logger and computer with software installed for recording, with real- time screen readout. Gas cylinders and regulators to supply required levels of oxy- gen and carbon dioxide to perfusates. In-line oxygenator system for exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide to required levels. In-line heat exchanger supplying heated water from a circulat- ing water bath for effective closed circuit perfusion if perform- ing closed-circuit perfusion. A bubble trap for each circuit to prevent non-soluble gases reaching the perfused tissue. A chamber ftted with an oxygen electrode or optode for each circuit to measure oxygen supply to the fetal villous microcir- culation and the maternal intervillous space, plus an additional Ex vivo Human Placental Perfusion 177 Fig. Depicting fetal-side (a) and maternal-side (b) perfusion, the capacity to measure real-time infow hydrostatic pressure as a measure of resistance to fow; pH, which is particularly important in closed-circuit perfusion, ppO2 in the fetal and maternal infow perfusate and the fetal venous perfusate, permitting a measure of tissue oxygen consumption and transfer. An alternative to an oxygenator is through-gassing a perfusate reservoir within a water bath using a sintered gassing tube (for open-circuit perfusion only). Options are available to recirculate perfusate in closed-circuit perfusion with reservoir sampling or send to waste in the open-circuit method with direct sampling. If using the benchtop perfusion system, two perfusate heat exchangers, or equivalent arrangement, one in each circuit, would need to be employed prior to the oxygenator; alternatively, all equipment may be housed within a heated cabinet arrangement to measure the partial pressure of oxygen in the fetal venous perfusate and gauge aerobic metabolism and transplacental oxygen transfer if relevant to the study. A further needle-type oxygen electrode/optode to assess intervillous space oxygen gradient mapping, sampled using a micromanipulator, if relevant to the study. A chamber ftted with a pH electrode for each circuit to enable pH adjustment if employing closed-circuit perfusion. Watch-makers’ forceps and Vannas scissors for chorionic plate arterial cannulation, forceps and fne pointed scissors for cho- rionic plate venous cannulation, straight fne Spencer-Well for- ceps for holding sutures, and standard scissors for trimming the placenta when mounted in the ring. Beakers to collect venous waste for disposal (open-circuit per- fusion) or reservoirs to collect and recirculate closed-circuit perfusate. Prepare perfusates according to individual requirements (see of Experimentation Subheading 2. Flow settings vary by center, but the range is 4–6 mL/min for the fetal circulation and 12–14 mL/min for the maternal cir- culation. Fetal-side circuit may increase by integers of 2 mL/ min if “fow-ramping” in vascular studies. Check that the hydrostatic pressure transducers are holding their calibration, using a column of water equivalent to 25 mmHg (circa 33. If necessary, recalibrate or perform spreadsheet correction factor on experimental results. In the absence of a placenta, perfuse the tubing in each circula- tory system with water, hold the experimental cannula at the experimental height position for the placenta, and record infow hydrostatic pressures for at least one revolution of the pumps. These data can be later used to correct for total resis- tance of the tubing with placenta following experimentation, to derive a representation of placental resistance alone. Prepare all dissection equipment, sutures, gauze, lab flm, and placenta clamping apparatus, so that time can be saved during cannulation and placental assembly on the day of perfusion. Liaise with research midwives/obstetric nurses for the recruit- ment of patients, as research volunteers, for the donation of their placentas. Switch on perfusate pumps, perfusion cabinet or circulating on Day water bath, reservoir water bath, hydrostatic pressure and O2 of Experimentation recording equipment, and aspirator pumps. Turn on gas regulators and employ gas to exchangers or through-gas reservoirs within water bath, according to design. Record time of birth, and once the placenta has been checked Collection, Inspection, for clinical purposes, transport to the laboratory within Cannulation, 15–20 min. Inspect the decidual surface to identify a lobule devoid of of Homeostasis breakages to the villous structure. Placing a gloved hand underneath the placenta, in contact with the chorionic plate, and rotating the placenta during inspection usually reveal fssured breaks in the decidua, which helps in the elucidation of septa damage and also decidual separation at the placenta margins. In all cases of damage, the villous tissue will appear as a rough texture and would incur a leakage from the fetopla- cental microcirculation into the intervillous space upon estab- 180 Paul Brownbill et al. If a suitable area is identifed, prime all perfusion tubing with perfusate, displacing the water with perfusate. For closed- circuit systems that will initially operate in an open-circuit manner, be sure to also prime current closed-circuit dead space. Turn the placenta over, to reveal the chorionic plate, and remembering lobule arrangements and tissue zones to be avoided where there are tears, select a pair of chorionic plate artery and veins, corresponding to the intact lobule and clear the plate of any blood using gauze swabs, in preparation for cannulation. Decide on where the suture point will be for the arterial can- nula to capture the zone of perfusion interest. Again, vascular anatomy exploration is key in determining the likelihood of perfusion into the desired and undesired zones. Make a small incision in the artery wall 1–2 cm afferent to the desired suture point. Using a 20 mL syringe, with fetal arterial cannula attached and primed with perfusate, insert the beveled end of the cannula into the lumen, being careful not to include air, and negotiate necessary branches, passing the desired suture point by at least 5 mm. The progression of the cannula through the artery can be aided by fushing the artery a little with the perfusate, which has the effect of expanding the vessel diameter. Suture around the vessel wall, being careful not to encounter villous tissue, or pierce the vessel wall, employing a double knot.
Panels of biomarkers may be better than individual biomarkers to aid diagnosis generic 120mg starlix, but which combina- tions of biomarkers are likely to be of greatest use remains a matter of ongoing research buy starlix 120 mg without a prescription. Whichever biomarker(s) is used buy starlix 120mg line, levels must be interpreted in the con- text of the full clinical picture and never in isolation. The third international consensus defnitions for sepsis and septic shock (Sepsis-3). Surviving sepsis campaign: International Guidelines for Management of Sepsis and Septic Shock: 2016. Serological reactions in pneumonia with a non-protein somatic fraction of pneumococcus. The physiological structure of human C-reactive protein and its complex with phosphocholine. Rheumatoid arthritis: national clinical guideline for management and treatment in adults. Acute phase reactants in infections: evidence-based review and a guide for clinicians. Ubiquitous expression of the calcitonin-i gene in multiple tissues in response to sepsis. The value of procalcitonin at predicting the severity of acute pancreatitis and development of infected pancreatic necrosis: systematic review. Correlation of procalcitonin and C-reactive protein to infam- mation, complications, and outcome during the intensive care unit course of multiple-trauma patients. Early increase of procalcitonin after car- diovascular surgery in patients with postoperative complications. Use of procalcitonin in patients with various degrees of chronic kidney disease including renal replacement therapy. Plasma adrenomedullin is associated with short-term mortality and vasopressor requirement in patients admitted with sepsis. Plasma adrenomedullin in critically ill patients with sepsis after major surgery: a pilot study. Evaluating the value of dynamic procalcitonin and presepsin mea- surements for patients with severe sepsis. Comparison of diagnostic accuracy in sepsis between pre- sepsin, procalcitonin, and C-reactive protein: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The duration of hypotension before the initiation of antibiotic treatment is a critical determinant of survival in a murine model of Escherichia coli septic shock: association with serum lactate and infammatory cytokine levels. Early identifcation of intensive care unit-acquired infec- tions with daily monitoring of C-reactive protein: a prospective observational study. Procalcitonin as a diagnostic test for sepsis in critically ill adults and after surgery or trauma: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Procalcitonin as a prognostic and diagnostic tool for septic complications after major trauma. Procalcitonin, lipopolysaccharide-binding protein, interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein in community-acquired infections and sepsis: a prospec- tive study. Diagnostic accuracy of procalcitonin, neutrophil-lymphocyte count ratio, C-reactive protein, and lactate in patients with suspected bacterial sepsis. Host biomarkers for distinguishing bacterial from non-bacterial causes of acute febrile illness: a comprehensive review. C-reactive protein levels correlate with mortality and organ failure in critically ill patients. C-reactive protein as a predictor of outcome after discharge from the intensive care: a prospective observational study. Procalcitonin as an early indicator of outcome in sepsis: a prospective observational study. Serum procalcitonin: an independent predictor of clinical outcome in health care-associated pneumonia. Prognostic value of procalcitonin in adult patients with sepsis: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Predictive value of procalcitonin decrease in patients with severe sepsis: a prospective observational study. Failure to reduce C-reactive protein levels more than 25% in the last 24 hours before intensive care unit discharge predicts higher in-hospital mortality: a cohort study. Early changes of procalcitonin may advise about prognosis and appropriateness of antimicrobial therapy in sepsis. Changes in circulating procalcitonin versus C-reactive pro- tein in predicting evolution of infectious disease in febrile, critically ill patients. The time course of blood C-reactive protein concentrations in relation to the response to initial antimicrobial therapy in patients with sepsis. C-reactive protein correlates with bacterial load and appropriate antibiotic therapy in suspected ventilator-associated pneumonia. Usefulness of consecutive C-reactive protein mea- surements in follow-up of severe community-acquired pneumonia. Procalcitonin versus C-reactive protein for guiding antibiotic therapy in sepsis: a randomized trial. Procalcitonin guidance of antibiotic ther- apy in community-acquired pneumonia: a randomized trial. Effect of procalcitonin-guided treatment on antibiotic use and outcome in lower respiratory tract infections: cluster-randomised, single- blinded intervention trial. Effcacy and safety of procalcitonin guidance in reducing the duration of antibiotic treatment in critically ill patients: a randomised, controlled, open-label trial. Use of procalcitonin to shorten antibiotic treatment dura- tion in septic patients: a randomized trial. Procalcitonin algorithm in critically ill adults with undifferentiated infection or suspected sepsis: a randomized controlled trial. Effect of sodium selenite administration and procalcitonin- guided therapy on mortality in patients with severe sepsis or septic shock: a randomized clini- cal trial. Clinical and economic impact of procalcitonin to shorten antimicrobial therapy in septic patients with proven bacterial infection in an intensive care setting. Practice patterns and outcomes associated with procalcitonin use in critically ill patients with sepsis. Procalcitonin-guided interventions against infections to increase early appropriate antibiotics and improve survival in the intensive care unit: a random- ized trial. Effectiveness and safety of procalcitonin evalu- ation for reducing mortality in adults with sepsis, severe sepsis or septic shock. Use of plasma C-reactive protein, procalcitonin, neutrophils, macrophage migration inhibitory factor, soluble urokinase-type plasminogen acti- vator receptor, and soluble triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells-1 in combination to diagnose infections: a prospective study. Effect of procalcitonin testing on health-care utilization and costs in critically ill patients in the United States. | <urn:uuid:e4a1157e-5a96-4edc-ab39-aa7c5a4ce6f8> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | http://glassconnection.co.za/wp-content/large/buy-online-starlix-cheap/ | 2020-10-28T07:40:38Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107897022.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20201028073614-20201028103614-00340.warc.gz | en | 0.878609 | 7,270 |
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Reverse query guest name and address points of interest of any USA/Canada landline and cell phone number.
(201) 108-2### arrangement enquiries:
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2011082452 Christine Stevens: My phone
2011082859 Tracie Gasca: DDDDDDDDDDDDD
2011082079 RAJVIR: No way
2011082689 Bruce Hill: I don't understand who is this person ? All they said some numbers and if they don't hear from my attorney ? I am some kind of legal matters . It was a robot sounding voice .
2011082751 elmer p fudd: Keeps calling and hanging up
2011082269 Chris. Farrell: thx for report
2011082698 Buddhu dab mondal: Need to identify caller on phone bill
2011082518 lola: Forceful sales scam artist
2011082083 Mildred Clark: On the run
2011082004 Amarjeet singh: Forceful sales scam artist
2011082537 Joe snead: fdsfs sdf sdf sdf
2011082630 Rick hale: owner name
2011082641 Tawonda Adams: I want to know details about this number.
2011082606 Eruy: call but never leaves message
2011082683 Victoria Chisolm: Drug dealer
2011082461 Rose Perez: very fantastic number
2011082148 Jamie Mcnew: No lost
2011082146 chandra jyoti: plz find out adress with name loction of 2011082146
2011082126 manesh kumar: i want to block this number because it is gone
2011082720 Hxhxh: Verizon said phone blaxklisted
2011082263 Elavarasan: What
2011082883 Julie snith: I like it
2011082648 Ruth Bell: Received a call from a company called MRP in Virginia saying that i have a criminal case against for a payday loan that i have never received
2011082354 Sarah smith: Need I return a missed call?
2011082089 Manoj: Fghxcgg
2011082109 Casey Brown: Name and picture
2011082013 Phillip Comeaux: gsgsdgs
2011082917 Jason Smazz: Need to know number
2011082814 Debbie Briggs: recurrent caller
2011082003 amir khan: enquiry. this no
2011082016 Lynn Waters: ya. mera sunil beta ka mobile hau wapas nahi kar payaga
2011082075 Jacqueline Boyd: Who is this? They call late at night
2011082790 Malkhan Singh Gurjar: I need a list of recent calls
2011082659 Lori Henderson: Full details this num
2011082929 Charlotte Payne: multan
2011082905 Lori gerst: Gjkft
2011082584 Santosh: Location request
2011082939 malati das: to know
2011082338 don burt: Didn't
2011082062 steven bates: Complaint against this number, a person keeps calling from this number and says he received call from me ! What rubbish !?
2011082856 Wendy Paul: Locating
2011082278 Ashley Warren: WhatsApp code
2011082336 jeff p: Called, beeped once, silence, then hung up.
2011082946 Harvy little: i don't know
2011082391 Nani peterson: Called 3x back to back
2011082952 David Miller: friend searching
2011082542 Hansom Ringer: Who is this!
2011082136 Samiksha: Whose calling
2011082129 Tulsi trendz: ghir gya h khi par
2011082369 Chcha: Need to know number
2011082247 Mc smith: Scam
2011082988 Blake Mason: Lost my phone
2011082223 shubham: Calls
2011082678 Rachel McCormick: Text from this number who are you?
2011082709 Sarah renee: Is number activated
2011082135 Loni Hall: Who is owner of thus number
2011082334 Jane Doe: haha
2011082137 Birendra singh: Phone was spoofed
2011082871 Kalin kalav: Trying to submit payment
2011082049 Miles Mayoral: ebbfyh hhhhh hhhhuu
2011082628 Neha tyagi: Don't know who
2011082827 brenda orea quoo: Different number 2011082827 and law office
2011082052 Hilde Robles: When I answer the phone the person on the other line is always breathing into the phone so hard you can barely listen because it screeches. They ask for my boyfriend and never give me any kind of information and hang up quickly. Try to call the number back and it says the number you are dialing is incorrect.
2011082205 Ganesh shing: Found this in my husband's car.
2011082771 Paul Lando igbomoji: Hung up
2011082482 Birendra singh: This number calls my cell phone repeatedly, morning after morning. I received 11 calls in 40 minutes on 8/30/2017. Today (8/31/2017), I have already received 16 calls. If I answer and say anything, I hear an odd clicking-like pattern (every time). I do not answer these and they are blocked, but I see each incoming call.
2011082727 Surya: Llamar
2011082358 Ian Manning: Harassing constantly sending messages
2011082477 Bart Laube: This no.tolerate me
2011082015 Jacqueline Boyd: last five call
2011082784 Jamie ross: Hang up call
2011082769 reporting fraud: Mising
2011082780 Toi Galindo: Got a call from this number, just trying to find out who it is.
2011082225 Anne Cooper: Want details
2011082112 Ann Lovell: Fraud Alert
2011082436 Aariana: Always angry and crazy
2011082378 Juan Young: i want to know how to trace mobile no. and location for 2011082378
2011082203 pradeep kumar: Location request
2011082957 Ann Lovell: Fat & dirty home-wrecking crank whore
2011082777 Tina Howard: Owner of this
2011082513 David Fairbanks: Stapker
2011082588 Prashant: Found his/her iphone 5c. Need to communicate. send me an email to this email address. [email protected]
2011082765 Matthew Brooks: I lost my phone my number is 2011082765
2011082608 Meghan Barnes: social
2011082006 josh middleton: Complaint fraud
2011082082 jen linet: Have few miss calls
2011082180 Shonda: Wife missing
2011082565 Jenice Demarco: Hang ups
2011082357 Sabana: Claims to be 'Steven Wilson' of BT Technical.. has repeatedly called our businees and is aggressive when challenged. states that we have computer file problems...
2011082807 amy blevens: noone
2011082027 jenni: Ring no
2011082696 Vicky: I don't understand who is this person ? All they said some numbers and if they don't hear from my attorney ? I am some kind of legal matters . It was a robot sounding voice .
2011082238 Yup yup: Business
2011082293 Joella Witherspoon: pintu kumar
2011082638 Carlos: Many phone calls from this number
2011082819 H hhhhh: Which sim numbers
2011082443 Sarah renee: Leo's calling
2011082176 Patrick carter: Finding to missing my husband
2011082884 Patty Coss: stolen
2011082024 tari: Not sure who is it
2011082803 Mathew Mendez: Curious to know who this is
2011082896 Jere Ross: I want know about this sim
2011082706 Daniel: The caller has called my wifes phone repeatedly from two different phone numbers. He was warned not to call my wife from any number . His mother was told. We sent her screenshots of the phone calls from both numbers. She claimed the calls weren't in her history log on her phone. We have voicemails and screenshots of his harassment and emotionally damaging trespass. He was told today. By me, not to call my wife again or have charges pressed.
2011082767 Doug Benson: person calling at night reason not known
2011082539 h iujjk: Whose this number
2011082467 sunitha kumari: hang up x3
2011082466 terry: Calls but leaves no message
2011082506 Sabana: Senha
2011082066 D Tom: whos number is this really.,., it is associated with multiple names and when I call it has a voice mail set up in someone elses name., why ?
2011082346 Peter Bivins: I want to block 2011082346 mobile number, how to do that?
2011082609 ajajajawhhw: I just need to know who is calling my (do not call) number
2011082339 krishna gogoi: no coment
2011082423 Romeo: incoming
2011082691 Jeremy Hughes: keeps sending text messages
2011082362 Danica Valentine: Enjuiry
2011082294 Jeremy Louis: Please any one help me trace the caller details for 2011082294?
2011082733 Susan Campbell: Called regarding a pending lawsuit with the IRS
2011082808 Sabana: Cody Villarreal in Phoenix Glendale Arizona owns this number since 2015
2011082431 Joan beckerdite: Sending fake messages taht I have taken loan from some company
2011082402 Bob Byer: this number is hacked
2011082349 Melaine Bittner: Where is the number from and is this number from a legitimate organization?
2011082507 Anna Baker: Sending fake messages taht I have taken loan from some company
2011082804 Diane Williams: only call
2011082669 Mzswol: I am sorry
2011082854 Brandon: Whete is location of phone
2011082668 Jill Jenkins: Phone number used by scam to get vulnerable people to send money. Associated with individual providing fake name of Deborah Patrick James
2011082272 G Ramirez: may no to Uninor to rich
2011082483 Janet P Holsclaw: scammer on craigs list
2011082115 P harris: Phishing scams
2011082183 Delbert Wolfe: Block this no.
2011082562 Linda Braden: need name
2011082846 Sachin Kadam: My cable not start all channels not show all blur all
2011082317 Julio Ortega: Worried
2011082147 Joseph May: Jeannette Elizond
2011082479 Marion Garner: Find friend
2011082360 Rahim: i don't know
2011082030 Beverly Hall: Late night call ....again and again...... Today...
2011082723 Rio blake: gps enabled
2011082755 Diana Brown: I miss you 2011082755
2011082549 Pamela Williams: Would like to know owner's name
2011082222 Ranjith Kumar: Received 6 clld today from this number
2011082410 amir md: Efron nbjg bfhcuf fj
2011082038 Lacey grappin: Location
2011082581 Marco tello: harassing calls
2011082073 Sierra Lynn: Got a call from 2011082073 and it's sounded like from a foreign country, beware
2011082590 Pablo Gibbs: Want to know who called
2011082598 Terrie michelle: Enquri
2011082521 Reyes: Call recoding
2011082661 Sharon Murphy: This person is wasting my time calling and hanging up without bothering to leave a message I don't like my time being wasted or left to think there is a family emergency somewhere
2011082690 Rebecca Lee: Is this a tella-market caller?
2011082123 Bill crocker: nice nombar
2011082172 Clyde Miles: The person who issued this sim is not active please give us another contact no. Of his
2011082631 benn dover: Mobile lost
2011082863 Khameswaramma: Keep getting missed calls from this number
2011082076 Bubbah: false
2011082585 Ace duble: Wanting to know owner name of phone
2011082328 Boo Boddyy: Different number 2011082328 and law office
2011082217 Beverly Hall: this caller keeps calling but never leaves a message.
2011082520 Denise Morgan: Who is calling from this #
2011082894 ajay: wrong number?
2011082157 Martin Hunt: name of person who has this phone
2011082579 Sharon Faye brown: Hey some one from Escondido is looking for you in Poway
2011082875 Tasha mooe: Missed
2011082103 Santosh: brand new phone , just activated today, bout 3 hrs ago, dont know who this is
2011082090 Karen Smith: This person keeps calling my wife
2011082347 Deborah Harris: Curiosity
2011082996 Jeff heras: Id proof
2011082284 Ruth Bell: ????????
2011082470 Warren Ingram: Possible scammer
2011082934 dannie Miller: My friend
2011082877 Rose Robinson: from where this call came
2011082564 Penny Fletcher: This person keeps calling my wife
2011082832 amaro rodriguez maria dolores: Calls all the time every day at the same times.
2011082821 Todd Gains: Got a call from this number
2011082847 anilkumar: Said they were from a bio med company Medix
2011082893 Delbert Wolfe: Just looking
2011082544 bob smith: Mobile phone carrier
2011082042 jorge: This number called my phone
2011082311 Ajay Pooja: Who's the owner of this number.
2011082057 Maiya Isadore: Who is this? They call late at night
2011082210 Takia S. Washington: Is a drug dealer. .game menber caring a pistol
2011082359 thanesh: Dt5wd
2011082730 Danese stalls: Missed call and don't know the caller
2011082528 jon green: Send me the caller details for 2011082528
2011082595 Louise Goodwin: Trying to find my sister
2011082559 Xanadu vigil: Sst co
2011082775 Allen Ray Harris: Sending marketing text
2011082086 frank lovejoy: Who is this belong to
2011082456 Ed lowe: hamari mobaile kahan hai
2011082787 Daniel Drifer: recurrent caller
2011082012 Sachin: constantly calls
2011082169 Suhana devi: Id like to tack tgis #
2011082593 Shae Tschebykin: Called from
2011082351 raj kumar saini: NEED TO CONFIRM THE IDENTITY
2011082782 Robert Malkvist: I want name of the numbers owner
2011082143 Robert Meyer: i know
2011082502 Jacquelyn Mcdonald: Called withouttaking
2011082792 Laurie Michael: Stolen phone being used for soliciting purposes.
2011082442 sazid khan: Someone keeps contact grandmother saying family has gotten into an accident
2011082134 Janet Clark: A old friend
2011082035 Sheryl Peters: Checking number
2011082941 Charlene Jordan: Unknown caller has reached me and seems to know who I am. I've never met this person.
2011082663 Julie Griffith: aaaaa
2011082228 Joe blpe: call from this no. but no one speak and cut
2011082874 jane doe: constant calls annoying!
2011082356 Anonymous: name of caller
2011082986 Jeff atkins: Calls hangs up
2011082667 Kristy: Has this number been changed or disconnected?
2011082139 Lynn Castro: hi.....
2011082788 Melissa smithsom: Name and picture
2011082615 Arpit goyal: asdf
2011082179 Tracy Hughes: Can you tell me the owner of this number : 2011082179
2011082724 Tina Turner: called and said i called them and i never did so i feel like it's a scam
2011082118 Ha Sma: 2011082118, mobile number address and owner photo
2011082643 Zana Barrow: Fake
2011082995 karl fronda: Sim off
2011082460 karen: Harrasing
2011082937 Marc Santos: No massage
2011082959 Estella Luna: Forget password
2011082017 Joe Swanson: Messages are sent by itself to this phone no. 2011082017 from my mobile every time I switch on my mobile
2011082031 omkar pandey: 2011082031.....whose number is this please tell me very worried
2011082815 Ben shits: This number keeps calling me it is only an automated message telling me to call back the same number! I absolutely will not without a proper message and the details of what they want as I do not know who it is I will not call them please please help me find out who this is because they call 9-10 times a day
2011082971 Roberto: H j f
2011082178 cheese carter: Lost Cell Phone
2011082053 shar: Con artist
2011082372 Bugs Bunny: Cab driver do not contact after 8 pm
2011082119 Jill Ruebush: deepak kumar
2011082998 Rita Montoya: no coments
2011082167 Searching Bey: xxxxx
2011082241 janet: I'm on no call list
2011082312 K hice: 26uuy
2011082314 steve: This 2011082314 is a very strange number called it back it was in mass
2011082684 Shopping69 shshs: Name of phone number owner
2011082023 pablo arnedo: Necesito saber su direccion
2011082768 darlene: Find my phone
2011082458 Tommy mullis: This number calls pretending to be from the IRS claiming you owe money. Remember, the IRS never contacts you via phone for any money owed, they send certified letters.
2011082531 rahul sahu: Stolen2
2011082262 Dora Robinson: Received 6 clld today from this number
2011082117 Ishika konar: Can't get my Facebook password
2011082177 Theo Dowdy: Drug dealer
2011082756 Mary jones: Info
2011082514 Luke Rhodes: Text wring
2011082111 Raymond Gray: Met online
2011082714 Jennifer Wilson: crimal history
2011082702 Archie Adkins: whose this no.
2011082688 Ramona terance: recurrent caller
2011082945 Val Liu: Someone by the name of Joey Davis is using this number to sign up for things, but it does not belong to him.
2011082981 taufeek Ahmad: Quisiera saber quoen llamo ubicacion la ultima llamada fue en las horas de la noche
2011082840 Darla Mooneyham: Call us and use Miss langua
2011082441 ratan veeren singh: Partner
2011082954 James Junior: No ne
2011082400 David Colburn: Guy at bar
2011082417 Bonnie Mitchell: Just curious
2011082868 Ygggvjbf: Getting calls from this number that I don't reconixe
2011082182 Summer: missed call
2011082187 Alexandra Phelps: want to see who this is
2011082319 mel schwartz: i would like to find out who's number this is
2011082779 Linda: weird similar number to mine calling me?
2011082154 brenda orea quoo: Stolen2
2011082292 Victoria Chisolm: Aaadfhhkk
2011082969 Richard: this person called somewhere looking for me and said it was urgent. I want to know who they are.
2011082425 Krishna kumar: my phone distroyed
2011082666 Samiksha: who called?
2011082797 Grace Jonrs: MISSED CALLS
2011082829 Kristeen Koerber: I want call details of 2011082829
2011082058 Steve Torres: my friend
2011082596 Paul Thompson: true agent or not
2011082695 Josh barber: More about this man
2011082693 Micheal C Craig: Been trying to reach Margaret Robinson for over two months now and dont have access to her email anymore,can somebody please help
2011082429 Morgan: I want owner of this number full details
2011082745 Rick Olson: I want to know this no all call detial
2011082968 mike jackson: Got a call from 2011082968 and I think some kid was playing with phone??
2011082571 darren: Found his/her iphone 5c. Need to communicate. send me an email to this email address. [email protected]
2011082554 Om Prakash Mali: stolen moto g verizon
2011082393 Apryl Brockman: Who's the owner?
2011082682 Speedie: Want name of contact
2011082011 Sheldon Jones: show me info of 2011082011
2011082303 Judy Perry: personal imformation needed
2011082763 Charlotte Payne: see if somebody use my number too
2011082297 Marley mcglashan: I'm on no call list
2011082652 Max Harper: comentarios molestos quiero saber quien es
2011082490 Linda Coulter: #keeps calling me all hours. I need to know
2011082753 Jack Gild: Thaks so much
2011082008 Tona richardson: Want to know who this is
2011082924 gloria jaskolski: Received several missed calls from this number. Trying to find out who it is.
2011082302 Bill mill: this person called somewhere looking for me and said it was urgent. I want to know who they are.
2011082540 Mzswol: nice borther
2011082705 sumit gautam: My husband is cheating
2011082324 Josh Yoder: No way
2011082121 Hshssh: Possible scammer
2011082551 Austin: Got a call from 2011082551 and it's sounded like from a foreign country, beware
2011082475 Takia S. Washington: All call details number for 30 July to 2 august
2011082320 Magan Dehart: phone was stolen last night
2011082916 Matthew Andrae: Wanted to know the location
2011082781 Cody Villarreal: called and hung up want to know what she wants from me.
2011082430 Samatha Boss: imran khan
2011082234 Kristy: dyuifhj
2011082175 Jonathan Cook: friend
2011082377 mel schwartz: Pishing
2011082380 Robyn Gibson: hello
2011082211 Rupesh kr mandal: I need help on this number 2011082211. I was using this number but is deactived. How to active same number please tell me the process.
2011082454 Clarence Clark: Continuous robos
2011082438 Leea petersen: Nice app for mobile tracker
2011082071 Dave E: good
2011082376 Rakesh kumar: Want to find out if he is a legitimate business owner
2011082020 MZ HOLLYWOOD HAT & ACCESSORIES: looking
2011082500 Tina Peterson: Called at 1 in the morning
2011082515 Liz Lindsey: I want to know this no all call detial
2011082700 Ismael Francis: Work info
2011082373 Chris dude: This man scared my wife, he called her by name and hen hung up. She became scared and contacted me. I'm looking for him.
2011082878 Vijay: No thanks
2011082879 Lateef: My girl friend number
2011082852 sanjeev yadav: Group
2011082880 K Reyes: Plzzz any one help me find this person 2011082880
2011082151 J reed: Random weird call
2011082435 Maliyka upson: social
2011082421 Belinda Mclaughlin: Who number is this
2011082168 Mary Kelly: ye number kispa h
2011082650 Joseph Jimenez: Why they calling me
2011082623 Debra K: Need to identify caller on phone bill
2011082289 Phil Morrison: Obscene calls
2011082472 Mac young: checking out if i got it rite
2011082685 Enola Kruger: Who is Bradley Quinn
2011082189 Tanisha Williams: Miss behave
2011082534 anshit raj: ????? ????? ??? ??????
2011082399 Irfan khan: fax machine
2011082820 tari: 2011082820, pls track the mobile number pls reply me
2011082185 James King: Please add name and address for this mobile number 2011082185
2011082657 Sandra Jones: who number is this
2011082063 Johnny Cortez: Scammer appliance repair trying to locate to provide more info on my police report
2011082271 Soni singh: Crime
2011082201 Crystal: Connect
2011082265 samir: aaaaa
2011082962 Tyrone Cortez: Fack
2011082729 Bob Courand: Searching phone
2011082837 Juan Adrián Vivas Olivares: WhatsApp code
2011082731 Patrick Swanson: Arjent ha
2011082589 Mejoa: Won't stop calling me
2011082226 rohit: Not really good
2011082742 Ashli Melancon: Find out
2011082218 Jeremy Hughes: Sends random text
2011082105 George: Unknown caller
2011082614 steve luckesen: bother
2011082951 Kamilah Miranda: What is the location of this number? Who does this number belong to?
2011082081 S Green: Cheaters
2011082220 Pamela Williams: only call
2011082834 Jean Carter: jdhdghd
2011082517 James Moreno: Calls, curses and hangs up
2011082270 Karen Smith: Calls and never leaves a message, when I return the call this number claims it's disconnected. I tire of all spam/scam bs calls
2011082034 Yolanda Lloyd: This guy is a psychopath... He's a stalker and beyond weird.
2011082355 K Reyes: random text
2011082197 Ralph Harrison: I want to register complain
2011082701 Bubba Johnson: is it lost
2011082853 illiejo salvas: Trying to find out why this number keeps calling me
2011082165 Sarah smith: called for my husband. wouldnt tell me how she got my number or any info. i told her to stick it where sun dont shine
2011082100 Kimberly Montano: THIS NUMBER'S USERS NAME
2011082014 Kelli Bishop: I got missed calls 2011082014 number
2011082149 pradeep kimar: Checking on son
2011082019 Ja co shaq: who?
2011082828 Sophie: number
2011082345 Melissa Homers: Claims to be well know musician. Wants i tunes cards.
2011082268 lola rodriguez: Cool
2011082098 Richard Hicks: Search it
2011082985 Lewis Maldonado: My phone number
2011082166 Robert Davis: I dint know who this is
2011082404 George jones: soacha cundinamarca colombia
2011082577 Ja co shaq: I'm needing the service provider for this number? Please
2011082246 Vicious: personal imformation needed
2011082799 Khang: This unknown no. sends me strange message.
2011082672 Magen osborn: who is..?
2011082245 Naina: it is lucky number
2011082043 Clifton Price: Adds
2011082045 Laverne Andrews: Amount issue
2011082732 Wanda Moore: Who's thi?
2011082950 vijay mishra: Looking for name of this person
2011082655 Laura: Call recoding
2011082796 Anel Gupta: I get call from this number
2011082919 Nana Yaa Akosah: Curious who this is
2011082432 Chiku: im a good soul
2011082300 Donald Griffin: Please give information about this no 2011082300, my relative are getting blank calls. Please email me caller name, address details ASAP.
2011082882 Rose Perez: please this number full details 2011082882
2011082060 Jorge Logan: Got a call from 2011082060, who is this?
2011082051 Mark Green: Help
2011082107 Tanisha Covington: Someone calles
2011082361 Emily F.: You are shitty to me
2011082316 Ajay Pooja: Enwari
2011082923 Found this whore: This guy is a perv.
2011082133 Carla Chambers: Ex that keeps calling - even after DV
2011082048 Catherine Martin: this caller keeps calling but never leaves a message.
2011082754 Carla: Who phone number is this
2011082602 Patrice Hammond: looking for owner
2011082281 Geoff loo: grrr
2011082519 Garry Roberts: Got 2nd missed call/phony call from this number
2011082196 Dirty Randy: This number keeps calling me it is only an automated message telling me to call back the same number! I absolutely will not without a proper message and the details of what they want as I do not know who it is I will not call them please please help me find out who this is because they call 9-10 times a day
2011082561 Annette Castillo: Bhut phone karta hai
2011082927 Dean Shields: ya. mera sunil beta ka mobile hau wapas nahi kar payaga
2011082388 Lacy: Pedro moreno
2011082938 pallabi pal: need to know
2011082493 Shonda: How location
2011082873 mari: I dont now this number but I am disturbed by this number
2011082566 Johnny apples: Just got a call from this number at 2a.m. and curious who it belongs to is all.
2011082122 Pfred Pfred: Received a call
2011082044 sadasdasdasd: called and hung up want to know what she wants from me.
2011082368 Brandi Pierce: I have forgotten the name or location of 2011082368
2011082887 Cecilia Porter: Oo4mr
2011082552 Karen Garcia: I want this mobile number 2011082552 complete address and name. Can you help me please?
2011082942 anthony costa: Trying to find my sister
2011082307 Buddhudab mondol: My name
2011082676 raj shekhar mishra: Mising
2011082633 Nick Nichols: keeps calling and does not leave message..do not recognize number
2011082973 giobanni mendoza: Who is this Ann person?
2011082337 Nunzio: search mobile number
2011082374 raja G: very fantastic number
2011082568 Lisa byrd: calling and not saying anything
2011082881 King dasan: Sonu singh
2011082036 ramchandra: Find detail
2011082597 perugu Shashi: Incbari
2011082424 Arun: Want name of contact
2011082778 Ed lowe: I like it
2011082860 rajendra bansal: multiple calls
2011082440 Anthony Telly: Trying to find Darren
2011082632 Flora Blair: Tracke online
2011082070 LOVLESH KUMAR CHANDRAVANSHI: Unknown
2011082983 Sophie: I do not know who this is
2011082586 rajendra bansal: Who is mobile's operator of 2011082586 phone?
2011082844 Dkimeon: Uses my name
2011082642 Jim Moran: Damage of sim
2011082721 pirl: i wamt to konw.
2011082032 nitin: Command
2011082786 Diana: NINGUNO
2011082088 Tyler Lawson: Businesses
2011082616 venkat: Want details
2011082716 charlie: mmopiknik
2011082426 Melissa Racay: the Only one
2011082457 Anita Gimes: grrr
2011082040 Ronnie Suire: Very
2011082680 Cheryl Morgan: Multiple calls from this number, unable to hear any response
2011082822 su gu: Emails me
2011082212 QUANEESHA OBANNER: This no.tolerate me
2011082553 Rosemary Norman: Has been lost
2011082224 Howard Watson: Need to know number
2011082419 akhil: Unknown caller
2011082949 Billy Mitch: Nice caller
2011082776 Starla hill: called, not leave me a msg
2011082512 Patrick Rodriguez: Need my phone
2011082379 Arlinda Pike: Consistent calling
2011082536 Sommer Leary: Airtel
2011082397 Joe Maples: I am trying to reach you, please call back
2011082054 Mary thomas: Strange call from phone number
2011082427 anil mehar: This no.tolerate me
2011082499 Fred dirks: No message? STOP
2011082722 Christopher Evans: Keeps calling my house
2011082059 XDRMAJ: person calling at night reason not known
2011082583 Carol Weber: Do you provide criminal background checks
2011082740 Alexis Lopez: Indian bank caller fake calling this number ATM Pin Request this people
2011082736 John Zenaida: This caller call 1 time but I don't know whose this
2011082486 Steve Dobie: Unknown caller
2011082920 joll: On the run
2011082591 Brad Alden: Curious
2011082901 Mary Stagen: Wanted to know who is calling me
2011082570 VED PRAKASH gupta: Beware steal
2011082047 Will smith: For family safety
2011082072 Ajendra: Cell
2011082907 raj kumar: know Sim owner
2011082748 Owen Keller: Unrecognized
2011082476 giobanni mendoza: Lost Cell Phone
2011082022 Michelle themas: Wanted to know who is calling me
2011082321 Karen: sir my mobile has been lost this time pls give locatin urgent
2011082498 Dawn miller: wondering who this is?
2011082582 Grace Cedano: Call
2011082087 Guillermo Carlson: bznxt
2011082718 Sharron Avalos: none
2011082065 Lori burrows: I get call from this number
2011082216 Loni Hall: Juan
2011082892 Tammy thomas: I get texts from this number. I asked/texted for the person's name and got no response
2011082717 sidney womack: Want 15 july call details
2011082305 malati das: Where abouts is the Cell
2011082651 José Fonseca: Por nombre
2011082999 Shopping69 shshs: call /no message
2011082505 Kamil saifi: who is calling me?
2011082407 Bret Shu: Possible scammer
2011082817 Manoj: deepak kumar
2011082749 Chris Peterson: Forget password
2011082857 Mars: I want trace 2011082857 number owner
2011082990 Andrew Bell: Call saying they are the FBI and they have our house surrounded. To come out with our hands up someone is trying to kill us.
2011082772 Rochelle Rogers: from icici bank
2011082523 Glen Hall: Surat
2011082367 john alva: Enquirer
2011082150 Cari Dietrich: Claims to be 'Steven Wilson' of BT Technical.. has repeatedly called our businees and is aggressive when challenged. states that we have computer file problems...
2011082414 Pablo Pittman: Keeps calling and sending texts. Do not know this person
2011082155 THE OWNER: This number keeps calling. I only buy want to know the name of the person who is calling me
2011082288 Michael Martin: comment
2011082964 Hector Pearson: showed up on bill
2011082529 Charlie Boyd: i would like to find out who's number this is
2011082978 Laura: I am trying to reach you, please call back
2011082406 Vishwas Kumar: I miss my sister
2011082785 Thilde: missacall
2011082921 Sarah: Who's calling
2011082640 Harry Bennett: Trying to I D this caller
2011082327 Carla Green: noone
2011082850 sazid khan: prank caller
2011082930 mine ya: This number won't stop calling me its a recording that says " This is the student loan forgiveness hotline" and it never gives an option to speak to a person to remove my number I tried calling it back but CANNOT get ahold of a person it just hangs up on me. I have no student loans and have had the same phone number for 11 years its really starting to piss me off. I want my number removed from their list and them to stop calling me but I don't know how to stop it.
2011082626 doug smith: scam number
2011082738 Bob brown: This information is incorrect. The owner is Ronald Nelson of Red Wood Lane in Berlin, CT. I would like my money back
2011082232 crystal: uhhh
2011082450 Alfredo Harris: I kno ths number
2011082487 fuck his: creepy
2011082557 Yolonda Swartz: Keeps call8ng
2011082543 andrew vienna: Nsndndnd
2011082735 Elizabeth Dancer: calls then hangs up
2011082056 Adelita msrtinez: oh a omma la
2011082594 Calculus budlap: Need contacts
2011082215 Roxanne Herrera: Locating
2011082055 Candi sipes: tset
2011082816 Douglas Ross: Crime
2011082960 Flora Gibson: 3 calls in 25 mins - no message left.
2011082712 Warren Ingram: prank call
2011082530 Charles Captain: This number was stolen from my phone. I woke up to my phone being disabled
2011082677 Jay J Castro: Call enquiry
2011082451 Jamey Portillo: it is lucky number
2011082556 Jane Turner: extortion by the caller
2011082463 Emily Torres: haha
2011082204 Dick Tracy: *missing
2011082660 Beverly Price: This is an African Scammer.6/13/2017
2011082102 Laurine Nieves: calls constantly
2011082108 Erich Walter: Name associated with number
2011082485 Kristie: Who it this
2011082489 Shawn taxis: Mq1a4
2011082674 José Fonseca: Who is this number? no message, hang-up
2011082200 Leigh Gomez: Harassing calls
2011082235 Jennifer Rudolph: social
2011082277 Matt black: Call deatil
2011082800 Stephanie wille: opt no
2011082524 Jim Catcha: Los phon
2011082221 Laura Turner: Want to know name and address of phone no: 2011082221 pl.
2011082956 zauwad: ....
2011082646 Matilda Montano: 5wtxz
2011082251 Sudhansu: Keeps calling, won't leave a message.
2011082448 Phone User: 26uuy
2011082810 Jenna Holmes: This is a scam
2011082106 Tatiyana Taylor: In Ft. Worth, TX
2011082958 Raymond Briggs: Looking for a Fernando
2011082364 Elizabeth Bohling: Who is calling?
2011082416 raj shekhar mishra: comment
2011082578 Christopher Lewis: I wanna know if the person. Is real
2011082468 steve: Please find name and address
2011082382 Carolyn Rivera: Message history
2011082662 Doug: This number has called my home numerous times at all hours and never leaves a message. If it's so important to call so often leave a message
2011082152 Kelly Davidson: Just wanted to know
2011082762 Dct rxr: The owner and location of the telephone number
2011082181 Steve: Info
2011082760 Anne Mcgee: Can you please locate this number 2011082760, from philippines.
2011082497 Alexandra Phelps: Mobile chori
2011082412 Elizabeth Bohling: Sounds like a butt dial but a rooster can be heard crowing in the background. One call a day for the last several days
2011082322 Ali Atilgan: curious
2011082621 Spam: Frequent calls
2011082365 Tohnya Shuffield: enquieries
2011082492 Jane Baker: Location request
2011082703 anuj: I want address call details for 2011082703
2011082812 Boogie: WHO IS THIS
2011082900 user: I'm on no call list
2011082649 Mark Smith: Someone calles
2011082094 Dob &: harassing calls
2011082538 Prashant Bukanam: Kitt
2011082193 Rita Montoya: Crime
2011082252 Bubbah: Who's this
2011082174 mine ya: Enquirer
2011082236 Tatiyana Taylor: This was my old number
2011082961 Antonio Warren: Late calls
2011082550 Bethany garcia: Need name associated with number
2011082791 Antonio Warren: Who's number is this?
2011082627 Mary ward: Cheated money
2011082533 Jessica garA: HIGHLY aggressive car insurance comparison sales, though the man specifically stated "we are not sales". Talked over anything I said when stating I was not interested. Totally ignored repeated requests to remove my number from call list. Talked over those too. Only after stating "please verbally confirm you will remove this number from your call list or I will reverse look up this number and file a complaint with government and the better business bureau" did I get him to stop talking over me and say he would remove the number. Wish I remembered the name of the company.
2011082386 Karen Garcia: Jjhhh
2011082254 Selena Thigpen: She is a dangerous escort in Houston Texas named Shyann Shimmerthighs from a web site called ECCIE Worldwide. Her real name is Alexis Rodgers, who is a very dangerous person, she drugs her dates with methamphetamines and GHB. She lives in the Galleria area hotels, after you have been drugged she will steal your credit card numbers and cash. Because of her my son is now sitting in rehab. We are contacting the Houston police, this is a person you need to avoid.
2011082323 jay bivens: wrong number?
2011082164 Dana Schriver Brearey: My sim is missing. I get new one sim. That who Id proof
2011082635 Shiv vijay: called me
2011082478 Micha Sisco: who number is this
2011082120 Lauran Slusher: caller states can reduce loan payments! I have NO loan.
2011082870 Robyn Gibson: Called and no voicemail left
2011082415 HealthTech: bother
2011082104 Eddie hood: Caller said I won a large sum of money. He had a heavy accent. I asked to be added to the do not call list. He said he couldn't do that and hung up.
2011082140 Himmat dayaram Pawar: Trying to find out why this number keeps calling me
2011082510 Rex Graham: name owner
2011082195 Got message from this number: Who's nu mber is this
2011082469 Searching Bey: Elizabeth called to let me know that I've been selected to receive a paid cruise to the Bahamas, that would depart from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. They will try to sell me a timeshare. I told her that i wasn't interested and added the number to my blocked list
2011082849 Angela sands: Keep missing calls from this number
2011082647 Sayantan: harassing text
2011082989 Anne Hopkins: Gjkft
2011082077 Marie lopez: Called my phone
2011082428 Terrell Hanson: I want this mobile number 2011082428 address and full details of present location
2011082413 Rebecca Mccarthy: Keep calling n don't say shit
2011082257 Robert N. Lunder: I want call history for 2011082257
2011082912 Jacob anderson: because
2011082313 Carl Banks: receiving calls from a man who id'd himself as "mike " but sounded Indian about payday loan
2011082096 ramkarn: Employment by Jeremy Mikle?
2011082188 Joe mammy: which company number.
2011082634 Mindy Bennett: Low class trashy female talking shit
2011082560 Jazmin: This number is sending texts to my friend trying to tell his girlfriend it's me and I'm messing with him n starting a lot of problems. I need to know who this is.
2011082018 MOutusi: Calls my cell phone nonstop..Credit card Services to lower my interest rate on my credit cards
2011082516 Kimberly Bullard: This number is sending texts to my friend trying to tell his girlfriend it's me and I'm messing with him n starting a lot of problems. I need to know who this is.
2011082895 Ha Woojin: MISSED CALLS
2011082025 hbghfv: Called r really late
2011082944 Purav: Got a robot xall from this nunber stating there is an arrest warrent out for me it is a a scam number
2011082256 Phillip Comeaux: Stop calling me
2011082867 Nisha: Lost mobile
2011082547 Lisa shipley: Full details this num
2011082842 Elena Smith: asdf
2011082984 Veronica Freres: skdfasdf
2011082250 Marta danis: I want details of this number
2011082067 Maria Gonzalez: They keep calling but don't say anything but when my daughter answers they curse at her.
2011082315 Madison A: Who number
2011082936 Elaine Vasquez: Looking for name of caller
2011082909 Etsuko Pogue: I want his name
2011082805 Mathew Mendez: Good
2011082747 Ronald Griffin: This number was stolen from my phone. I woke up to my phone being disabled
2011082370 harmish kakadiya: Kept calling no message
2011082603 Ron Andeson: Text wring
2011082653 Jim trambo: I don't know
2011082398 Jelly birk: Endless stream of scam robocalls.
2011082462 John: whose this no.
2011082021 Jose Henderson: What's up babe
2011082366 Aresh hansda: Would like to know who this is continually calling my phone but won't say anything and just hang up on me.
2011082928 Manish Chakrabarty: Need to know number
2011082420 Michelle themas: Unknown caller has reached me and seems to know who I am. I've never met this person.
2011082617 Traci Lindsey: Where am I
2011082558 Regina Brammer: Sst co
2011082445 Katy: Caller name
2011082110 Jordyn Riley: Abusive on phone
2011082526 Lisa shipley: Rrcieved a missed call on yesterday from mobile number 2011082526.
2011082993 Katherina Joe: Attend call for interview purpose
2011082037 Emilio Wilkins: noone
2011082622 Shera Newell: company name
2011082260 Melda Coker: Can this 2011082260 number be tracked for me please?
2011082798 Anthony: I need address.
2011082474 asha kirker: I think hee been cheatiing5w
2011082409 Tawnia Casey: who is the person that this number is registerd to
2011082341 alen: Keep getting private calls
2011082363 Lee Waters: how is this
2011082831 Ishika konar: ????
2011082535 Hattie Cobb: I want details of this number
2011082383 Boo Boddyy: prank call
2011082309 Lois Hill: Please give me details about this sim card user
2011082774 Richard Abraham: Call log
2011082261 kris shoe: I got a call from this number now unavalible
2011082654 Phillip Morris: NINGUNO
2011082240 A Lewis: Who keeps calling me
2011082764 Shonda brown: Different number 2011082764 and law office
2011082619 David cook: They call and say nothing
2011082259 Toni Pomasl: Adhar
2011082664 Gretchen Long: Keep calling and dont say anything
2011082991 vikash: missed call
2011082173 rick burrell: 2011082173 address / owner name details
2011082592 Hector Pearson: Hahshs
2011082237 Colin Arnold: Obscene caller
2011082948 Frankie Hopkins: She is a dangerous escort in Houston Texas named Shyann Shimmerthighs from a web site called ECCIE Worldwide. Her real name is Alexis Rodgers, who is a very dangerous person, she drugs her dates with methamphetamines and GHB. She lives in the Galleria area hotels, after you have been drugged she will steal your credit card numbers and cash. Because of her my son is now sitting in rehab. We are contacting the Houston police, this is a person you need to avoid.
2011082029 deepika srivastava: call but never leaves message
2011082987 Krystal Lovett: Need to know who calling me
2011082074 Zachery Mcmurray: Met online
2011082199 Joe Momma: Not receiving phone
2011082332 Katie Hines: Cheatedmoney
2011082869 jigs: This was a foreigner who called me and said "You ARE the one who hit my car!" I told him to get list and then blocked his number. I was home all week with my 5 small grandchildren.....it was a SCAM to get money from me....please BE CAREFUL with this one!
2011082207 John: Wife number
2011082976 Phil Morrison: Have few miss calls
2011082219 MRS.ROSALYNBRYANT: Blah
2011082333 Delia Pratt: Informazioni
2011082977 Robyn smith: call and hangs up
2011082494 nitin: Stranger will not leave me alone!!!
2011082904 Moe Azi: Fack
2011082449 Jennifer Nguyen: Please give information about this no 2011082449, my relative are getting blank calls. Please email me caller name, address details ASAP.
2011082741 Ty Herrington: id addrass full name
2011082145 jyoti: I got random msgs from this number
2011082773 Paige: Want details
2011082352 Rebecca Mccarthy: cal trace
2011082131 Marley mcglashan: thx for report
2011082532 Eric Medina: I don't know
2011082658 Annie: EMAIL 530-17
2011082708 Karen King: Call details
2011082728 Cindy gatz: commn
2011082679 Antone Lundberg: please this number full details 2011082679
2011082890 rohit: MISSED CALLS
2011082601 Miss Karen Lynn Torres: only call
2011082046 josh archer: Keep missing calls from this number
2011082876 traci grimmell: Who is calling
2011082283 Agad: Unknown texting
2011082836 Youre' Getdivorce: keeps callng
2011082084 Diana Brown: Can you please Trace mobile number with caller name & address details: 2011082084. Thank You!
2011082405 Timothy Taylor: this is awesome help thankyou
2011082202 Jason Milles: Like to know who owned this number before they changed it
2011082242 Tapan das: checking out if i got it rite
2011082726 Ryan mckenzie: Wife missing
2011082091 Brashad Mathis: Need name for this number
2011082127 R. G.: For whom the number
2011082910 timm locke: Pls. Tell me details of this number.
2011082342 Bobbie Thrasher: I want to know who called
2011082264 Rejaul Karim Khan: called me and hung up 2x
2011082114 Gregory Taylor: Track now
2011082276 Constance Maldonado: Gjtgjhd
2011082620 sharvan: handy man's number
2011082113 Stefanie Whitehurst: Phone kaha pe hai
2011082639 shahil verma: Whose number is this?
2011082826 Edward Crouse: May I know whose no is this?
2011082371 Paul Patterson: unsafe
2011082569 arun shukla: Your maps
2011082481 Beverly Price: Called me swearing and being rude
2011082527 ayesha jasmin: Where
2011082101 Sherry: calling phone every 30 minutes
2011082304 sydney: Calls all hours never leaves a message.
2011082982 S.Lee: Stop calling me!
2011082007 Anthony Hamm: Is a drug dealer. .game menber caring a pistol
2011082625 Dayan: caal deteail
2011082396 Sybil Casillas: Talk
2011082255 Pat young: scam
2011082935 Ron Krenta: Dove sei
2011082239 Jacquelyn Mcdonald: Someone calles
2011082580 Pfred Pfred: hello
2011082282 Angela Wilkes: my phone loss in my room
2011082194 vvu ruth: keep receiving call and text
2011082963 Sally sue: Annoying
2011082085 Walter Hart: Keeps calling me sometimes two-three times a day and the recording says, "for insurance, press 9" then hangs up.
2011082567 Austin Malone: I have lost this no. Now I want to know about this no,s id
2011082408 J jay: Attend this call suddenly for iterviev purpose
2011082825 Priya Mishra: testing
2011082298 Yakia williams: back ground
2011082885 Kimberly Montano: Missed calls received at night from 2011082885
2011082231 Hansom Ringer: I want to check the current location of 2011082231 caller on google map
2011082068 Bob bub: enquiry
2011082340 Peter Martinez: this person called somewhere looking for me and said it was urgent. I want to know who they are.
2011082464 Ashley brooks: Phone call harassment. Must stop these. If not, authorities wI'll be notified. So I need to know whose number this is, so I can ask them to stop.
2011082605 Amber: need name
2011082980 Linda dean: Wife missing
2011082835 Rachel Torres: H j f
2011082979 Janel Lofton: Enquire of reports made
2011082770 Jerry Carter: Porn
2011082522 Jake Lukas comer: Stolen phone being used for soliciting purposes.
2011082818 Warner Crump: Is this site any goiod
2011082411 Walter Morgan: Won't answer
2011082095 Sonu sahu: Strange call from phone number
2011082918 James kin: 2011082918 is this a company HR phone no?
2011082710 Laura Cooper: Sim card loss
2011082845 Shae Tschebykin: Who is calling me from this number?
2011082161 Dave sanchez: Caller id
2011082839 Dennis Bennett: I need the confirmation code for Snapchat, I had it for this number and I forgot to change it to my new one.
2011082433 Roger Collins: Number called and hung up after i said hello twice.
2011082811 evbert: 2011082811.....whose number is this please tell me very worried
2011082744 Amanda Barnes: Phone
2011082604 Kendra Morgan: Now he is where
2011082473 Santana Herndon: Numerous missed calls
2011082576 Berta Hauser: Enquiries
2011082965 luisa line: Full details this num
2011082587 Genna Wasson: Looking for name and address
2011082955 Belinda Reeves: Teasing case need this number details.
2011082092 Rocky P Wilkerville: I get texts from this number. I asked/texted for the person's name and got no response
2011082344 Roxy Marvin: Jhoot sms ki thi
2011082864 Bobby Smith: Called late at night but when I said hello the did not speak
2011082285 Anne Hopkins: Plzzz any one help me find this person 2011082285
2011082848 Bertha Soto: friend searching
2011082002 Billy Gonzalez: Who keeps calling me
2011082447 mohd javed: Need work info
2011082675 chandan singh: Black mile
2011082707 Grace heaphy: brand new phone , just activated today, bout 3 hrs ago, dont know who this is
2011082274 Jack mehoff: My sim is missing. I get new one sim. That who Id proof
2011082459 ???????? ???????: Please search my friend for me.
2011082296 Bob bub: Costumer address full information
2011082783 Shelly Smith: Call saying they are the FBI and they have our house surrounded. To come out with our hands up someone is trying to kill us.
2011082766 John brown: Call us and use Miss language
2011082192 pc jat: Heavy breathing masterbating
2011082159 nathuram: Elizabeth called to let me know that I've been selected to receive a paid cruise to the Bahamas, that would depart from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. They will try to sell me a timeshare. I told her that i wasn't interested and added the number to my blocked list
2011082162 P abot: Who's the person behind this number
2011082838 Casey Brown: is number se call aata hai mujhe ye janna hai ki number kis company ka hai.
2011082888 vinod: spam caller
2011082061 Nicolas Harrison: Prank call / silent call
2011082504 Sara Wilson: Called at 1 in the morning
2011082841 amir khan: i dont know him...but he continously send me message...and tease me
2011082381 Sangeeta: Can't find it
2011082214 Gregory Taylor: Bother me
2011082548 Rita Montoya: Checking number
2011082335 Xanadu vigil: No comment
2011082943 K Stramat: Kevin Saadmanti is switching numbers to Ron/Micheal hubbard!
2011082384 arvind: looking up my phone
2011082872 Janelle Shannon: Why are you wanting to nw, and how did you get his number, any info you give me would be greatly appreciated.
2011082966 Scooby-Doo: Used in credit card scams with businesses. Guy calling himself David Olson currently
2011082279 Alexis: What
2011082898 John Hernandez: Find my mobile location
2011082809 Tee tee: Whose phone is this?
2011082387 Loan Hyatt: Need
2011082273 Amy Rogers: Fffv ya
2011082503 Yash m.: Have few miss calls
2011082418 Yup yup: Dating - scammer or real
2011082629 Joe shmo: Drug dealer
2011082326 Teresa Malone: Keep calling
2011082190 Corina: Trying to I D this caller
2011082266 Len ovo: just i want to know who he is he
2011082318 Blake Ramirez: This number won't stop calling me its a recording that says " This is the student loan forgiveness hotline" and it never gives an option to speak to a person to remove my number I tried calling it back but CANNOT get ahold of a person it just hangs up on me. I have no student loans and have had the same phone number for 11 years its really starting to piss me off. I want my number removed from their list and them to stop calling me but I don't know how to stop it.
2011082306 Donald Fredrick: late text
2011082801 Md Rafhi: This man scared my wife, he called her by name and hen hung up. She became scared and contacted me. I'm looking for him.
2011082005 mohit: What do they want
2011082743 Meredith Simmons: Please any one help me trace the caller details for 2011082743?
2011082248 Angelica Moore: It is the phone number of Lyudvig Khachatryan.
2011082855 Patty Hughes: Showed up as me in my google acct they are wiretapping my cell im reporting them
2011082290 TOm Jones h: fraudulent caller
2011082746 Teri ross: Want to know texts
2011082171 dipak: None need address
2011082704 Ryan Johnson: enquiry
2011082806 Chase Laven: I'm just wanted to find out who keeps calling my phone
2011082932 Angela Wilkes: spam
2011082267 Ramiro Allison: Comments/Enquiries/Complaints who is using this number
2011082128 Jamie Jamison: my sim was lost plz find hr
2011082833 Michael greenwell: I want this mobile number 2011082833 address and full details of present location
2011082243 S smith: Plzzz any one help me find this person 2011082243
2011082439 Beth wood: Harassing and fake calls
2011082752 Kelli Bishop: Stop calling me!
2011082230 Brandy Nunez: Text from this number who are you?
2011082080 Whitney Summers: Whose this
2011082813 chris: enquiries
2011082613 Tanisha Williams: Inf9rmacion
2011082028 Jessica garA: Telemarketer?
2011082455 Jaukiia: Keep missing calls from this number
2011082758 Joan Smith: Enquires
2011082725 Allie: this caller keeps calling but never leaves a message.
2011082495 robert moore: deepak kumar
2011082508 Eruy: Called and hung up 9am
2011082555 Merle Leung: Keep hanging up
2011082258 Travis Vasquez: Cheaters
2011082375 P.srinivas: Please lookup
2011082291 Chris Achterhof: Hang up call
2011082866 Jessica James: aderssss
2011082686 Mitch Champagne: Want details
2011082138 Mohd sakir: plz find out adress with name loction of 2011082138
2011082078 Kimberly Montano: This is calling my husband often but not in his contacts
2011082644 Grace heaphy: Called me swearing and being rude
2011082325 Man man: Who is calling
2011082392 David cook: Idk u
2011082925 ltana: Abusive, threatening ,cursing unidentified female.
2011082911 Bruce Washington: Who called no message
2011082064 Clarence Wood: Begok
2011082824 kushi: is this the perfect tree bizniz still
2011082953 Victorina Mejia: I just need to know who is calling my (do not call) number
2011082611 George Lopez: I want to know whose number this is
2011082275 Pauline Spencer: Call log
2011082227 Ranjith Kumar: caller name and location
2011082687 swati jain: who?
2011082858 Robert N. Lunder: Need location
2011082233 Andrew Phillips: ssss
2011082563 Elizabeth Smith: Called 3 times in a row while I was in a meeting
2011082511 Emily rose heil: I dint know who this is
2011082572 Jim Spank: Ndskjdnd
2011082719 Jonathan Wilson: I would like to know owner name
2011082600 A. Lewis: They keep calling but don't say anything but when my daughter answers they curse at her.
2011082198 Sarah lynn: This number keeps calling and hangi g up
2011082692 Eliza Currier: Scam?
2011082715 David Miller: Ok u to do with the food
2011082865 Loren jensen: Would like to know owner's name
2011082525 Johnelle Barley: know Sim owner
2011082186 Jennifer De los Santos: This number is not working I think. I sent message "Loan" to it as directed in message received from Capital pvt ltd on behalf of on of my close. But message delivery failed each time I tried.
2011082000 Tammy hunter: Slept with my ex
2011082280 Rebecca Lee: Spam?
2011082394 cathy green: Wife missing
2011082541 Douglas Perry: Djdjd
2011082737 Eunice Cunningham: On my bf receipt
2011082343 Nishant agrawal: got two calls I did not answer from this number. No message left by caller either time.
2011082933 Lawrence: hamari mobaile kahan hai
2011082501 Barb Valentine: Looking for name of this person
2011082673 Khameswaramma: Atm verification
2011082209 adrien shalhoub: Dt5wd
2011082843 David Carneal: enquires
2011082170 mel schwartz: Calls all the time every day at the same times.
2011082050 Asshole: Trying to help pay bill
2011082734 Stella Cross: sir i have many called from this no. can you tell me about this no. it is true or wrong. regard
2011082295 sandy: stolen moto g verizon
2011082926 Terrell Hanson: Asshole
2011082546 Latoya Coleman: This number is sending texts to my friend trying to tell his girlfriend it's me and I'm messing with him n starting a lot of problems. I need to know who this is.
2011082471 Josh barber: bujjji
2011082116 dyivt: Got a call from this number
2011082713 Lisa Lopez: Texted me but won't say who it is
2011082636 askjflkas laksdflaksdf: Only confirm
2011082902 Scott Dill: person is calling me
2011082401 Tom smith: Prank call / silent call
2011082039 Antonio Warren: who sis this
2011082465 Rogelio Gonzalez: help
2011082851 Jackie Kennedy: Sucks mean cock
2011082453 Heather jackson: I hv a voice missed call frm this no..
2011082142 perugu Shashi: Ful. Name of caller
2011082286 Joshua Butler: Comments calls
2011082789 Robert Amare: I just need to know who is calling my (do not call) number
2011082331 Andrea: No atttend my phone
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The recent literature on panentheism often starts with two claims. First, one is reminded of the recent popularity of the term ›panentheism‹ across philosophy of religion, systematic theology, the comparative study of world religions, science and religion, and naturalistic spirituality.1 Through numbers, if not through arguments, »the panentheistic turn« is presented as »a doctrinal revolution«, which cannot be ignored by either critics or sympathisers.2 Second, one is presented with a problem; namely, that no one knows exactly what panentheism means or how it can be demarcated from similar views—even demarcated from the very view panentheism is commonly pitted against, namely classical theism.
The central claims of panentheism, which are often used to define the position, are that ›the world is the body of God‹ and ›the world is in God‹. In order to avoid predetermining whether these phrases should be taken literally or metaphorically, I refer to these claims throughout this paper as ›the panentheistic slogans‹. These slogans are evocative but cannot illuminate panentheism’s distinctive claims regarding God’s relationship to the world without further analysis. As a result, there is a growing collection of secondary literature seeking to interpret these slogans in a way that clearly demarcates panentheism from neighbouring theological positions.3 This paper contributes to this secondary literature.
However, there are also scholars who criticise the search for a clear demarcation for missing the point of panentheism entirely.4 As Thomas C. Owen notes, some panentheists seem to view the fluidity or vagueness of their position as part of its attraction.5 The implication is that the gathering together of various warring parties in religious discourse under the panentheist’s banner of relationality, naturalness, scientific credibility, and embodied spirituality, is a good to which clear definitions should be willingly sacrificed.6 For such a purpose, emphasising »family resemblances« between even the most disparate positions is enough.7 However, this paper rejects this all-inclusive framing of either the content or purpose of panentheism. In the marketplace of academia, a clear demarcation between one’s own theory or the family in which a theory is found and one’s competitors is an essential part of any sales pitch, elst the various members of the family might be adopted into other dynasties.
For all its celebration of unity, panentheism remains a polemical position and is presented as either »the other God of the philosophers«, the reasonable »middle path between two extremes« (dualistic classical theism and atheistic pantheism), or the »higher synthesis« between supernaturalism and atheistic naturalism.8 If we cannot demarcate panentheism from these neighbouring positions, then not only does panentheism lose its competitive edge and much of its explanatory power, but the gathering of ambiguously related theories under the umbrella of panentheism becomes superfluous; panentheism would amount to »a somewhat suspect ›fudge‹ word.«9 Process panentheist David Ray Griffin warns that »increased popularity brings a danger that ›panentheism‹ will be appropriated for doctrines devoid of [its] promise.«10 If panentheism amounts to the popularity of an ambiguous slogan, rather than a genuinely shared understanding of the relationship between God and the world, then the panentheist umbrella seems unlikely to weather any future storms.
Yet there might be a way to avoid this dreary forecast. As Thomas writes, one »major exception to this vagueness in the concept of panentheism« is found in the work of Process philosophy.11 Whilst few can deny the historical importance of Process theology within the panentheist family (particularly in the West where the name, but perhaps not the original idea, was coined), Process panentheism is often treated as the grandparent whose leadership of the family has been surpassed by younger generations. Thankfully, this paper has no interest in defending Process theology, nor holding Process panentheism up as the exemplary for panentheists more widely. Instead, this paper investigates if a particular theory of mind, one that Process philosophy shares with many other historical figures, can provide the resources to demarcate panentheism from neighbouring theological positions. The theory of mind in question is panpsychism.
This raises an immediate methodological question; quite simply, what’s mind got to do with it? Although often taken for granted, it is not immediately transparent what a position in philosophy of mind has to do with the God-world relationship, nor how strong the relationship between mentality and divinity should be. On the one hand, it has been asserted that »on any possible reading of the panpsychic system« the world must be »internal parts of God and not external creations«.12 On the other hand, the historical preference for panpsychism by panentheists may be little more than coincidence, since there seems no good reason why the God of classical theism could not have chosen to create a panpsychist universe quite apart from Godself.13 It seems safest to conclude that adopting a panpsychist theory of mind cannot determine one’s theology. Moreover, if God is the source of all being, then perhaps philosophy of mind should play second fiddle to philosophy of religion. If this is correct then panpsychism cannot and should not, determine one’s theology.14
This brief methodological excursus allows me to be clear about the scope and ambition of this paper’s analysis. It is precisely because panentheists have certain primary theological commitments regarding the God-world relationship that this paper explores whether panpsychism can facilitate and clarify those commitments. Within this paper, philosophy of mind is serving as handmaiden to philosophy of religion. Panpsychism neither gives rise to, nor determines the beliefs of panentheism, and there is no argument here that panentheists are panpsychists by default (nor vice versa). Indeed, I do not think panpsychists should adopt panentheism as the theological expansion of their commitments.15 Instead, the central question of this paper is only whether panpsychism provides a useful framework for interpreting the two panentheistic slogans, such that panentheists may use panpsychism to demarcate themselves from their neighbours and rivals.
To achieve this, the section below will define panpsychism by providing four core theses that demarcate panpsychism from neighbouring theories of mind and provide the boundaries for identifying one’s theory as panpsychist. I then provide seven auxiliary theses that specify versions of panpsychism currently offered within this boundary. Not only is this necessary, since two ambiguities do not equal a clarity, but may serve as something of a model for the kind of demarcation we are hoping for with regard to panentheism. Whilst there may be a general correspondence between the aims of panentheism and panpsychism, vague gestures towards a correspondence between these theories is a relatively unhelpful exercise, particularly if the goal is to clarify panentheism’s distinct claims. As such, the specific variants (seven auxiliary theses) within the panpsychist theory of consciousness are essential for the second task of this paper; to test whether particular versions of panpsychism can illuminate the two panentheistic slogans. The demarcation is in the details.
The word ›panpsychism‹ can be translated to the general claim that all (pan) is mental (psyche), yet this should not be confused with animism, vitalism, or idealism. Popular definitions amongst contemporary panpsychists are that »mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world«, »the view that the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties«, »physical nature is composed of individuals, each of which is to some degree sentient … [has] experience, or in a broad sense, consciousness«, or more colloquially that »everything has a soul … or a rudiment of a soul.«16 While these definitions provide a general idea of what panpsychism is about, a more precise list of Panpsychism’s Core Theses (PCT) are required to show that panpsychism is a coherent and demarcated position within philosophy of mind.
Panpsychism’s Core Theses
The first core thesis is:
PCT1: At least some physical organisms are phenomenally conscious. (Mental Realism)
Phenomenal consciousness refers to the qualitative, subjective, experience or feeling of ›what it is to be like‹ an organism.17 The felt quality of an experience is said to be the phenomenal character of that experience; for example, the reddish quality of seeing the colour red. According to panpsychists, phenomenality is a real and irreducible feature of this world. The first core thesis demarcates panpsychism from reductive physicalism in its various forms (e.g. eliminativism, behaviourism, functionalism).
The second core thesis is:
PCT2: Phenomenal consciousness is fundamental, and thus can neither arise out of, nor be reduced to anything wholly lacking in phenomenal consciousness. (Non-Emergence and Irreducibility)
A panpsychist does not merely believe that phenomenal consciousness exists but argues that phenomenality is a really hard fact to account for in a fundamentally physical world.18 If organic consciousness (phenomenal consciousness of material organisms) is real and neither reducible nor strongly emergent, then »there must be some secret properties of matter with a direct connection to consciousness«.19 Weak and Strong Emergentists, however, will disagree with these claims and so PCT2 demarcates panpsychism from emergence theory.
Since a traditional substance dualist or hylomorphist can hold to PCT1 and PCT2, a further core thesis is required to demarcate panpsychism from these two alternative positions. I propose that a third core thesis of panpsychism should be,
PCT3: Whatever is fundamental for materiality is also fundamental for mentality, since there is only one fundamental level of reality. (Fundamental Monism)
For panpsychists then, unlike traditional substance dualists or hylomorphists, the individual phenomenal consciousness experienced by human beings is not itself fundamental, but it can be accounted for by positing a single, fundamental, psychophysical ground to reality.
This fundamental monism underpins a large portion of the general correspondences between panpsychism and panentheism. First, just as panentheism seeks the path between monistic pantheism and theological dualism, panpsychism proposes a route between reductive physicalism and substance dualism. Second, just as panentheism wishes to talk of God and the world as a ›qualified non-dualism‹ (Vishishtadvaita) where two realities form a single unity, so do many panpsychists speak of mind and matter as the two properties of a shared neutral substance or as the intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of any one entity.20 Third, for panentheists, infinity is a monistic category that includes all finite realities, and for the panpsychist fundamentality is a monistic category that grounds all beings and includes both material and mental properties. Fourth, just as a panpsychist seeks to naturalise the mind, so too do many panentheists seek a naturalistic version of theism.
Finally, one should state a fourth core thesis for panpsychism:
PCT4: Fundamental consciousness is necessary for explaining organic consciousness.
Panpsychism posits consciousness at the fundamental level of reality because it provides an explanation for organic consciousness. If fundamental consciousness does not and will never aid (in any way) in explaining organic consciousness, then panpsychists should abandon their position.21 As such, how best to specify PCT4 is a major conundrum for panpsychists, better known as ›the combination problem‹.22 Phrased as a question, the combination problem asks: what is the relationship between fundamental consciousness and human subjects, just that the former aids in explaining the existence of the latter? The hard-nut of this question is, more specifically, how does the adding together of many single perspectives result in a composite but unified conscious whole? Whilst the combination problem has yet to be expressed as a defeater against panpsychism, it remains an open question that requires (and is currently receiving) further research.23 As panpsychists debate between themselves how to specify PCT4, this conundrum holds the competing mind-body ontologies in a stalemate; the combination problem is comparable to the interaction problem for substance dualists, or the question of how mind emerges from mindless matter for the emergentist. It may simply be a matter of which mystery one is happy to live with.
With these core theses we have successfully defined panpsychism and demarcated it from the other major positions in philosophy of mind. A specific version of panpsychism will require auxiliary theses, upon which panpsychists may disagree whilst still identifying their position with the panpsychist camp. As mentioned above, these auxiliary theses will be important for interpreting the panentheistic slogans of divine embodiment and interiority.
Panpsychism’s Auxiliary Theses
The seven auxiliary theses stated below are organised into three semi-independent categories. First, whilst panpsychists all agree that mentality is found at the fundamental level they differ on how to specify the nature of this primitive mentality (Aux1-3). No living panpsychists I know of posit rational, volitional, self-conscious, emotional, imaginative, etc. minds as fundamental—but prefer to use phrases such as »thin subjects« or »raw feels«.24 The kind of mental life enjoyed by human beings is taken to be the result of the complexity and evolutionary development of these basic subjects. On panpsychism, you can’t get something from nothing (pace strong emergence) and there really is something there (pace reductive physicalism), but we may be able to get more mental life from less—the question is ›how much less?‹. Currently a panpsychist has a choice between three auxiliary theses on this matter:
Aux1: Basic subjects, which have simple momentary experiences, exist at the fundamental level. (Subject Panpsychism)
The panpsychists who reject Aux1 do so either because it is too counterintuitive or because it bares the full force of the combination problem; it demands an account of how subjects combine to form larger subjects. To avoid these issues some panpsychists prefer:
Aux2: Proto-phenomenal properties, but not phenomenal experience or subjects, are found at the fundamental level. (Panprotopsychism)
Whilst panprotopsychism does not demand an account of subject combination, it does still require an account of how phenomenal experiences arise from proto-phenomenal properties without violating PTC2. Moreover, whilst some panprotopsychists name specific properties, such as qualities or intentions, we cannot really know what proto-phenomenal properties are. Panprotopsychism, therefore, seems threaten by noumenalism.25 If Aux1 is too counterintuitive, and Aux2 appears too mysterious, then the third option is:
Aux3: There are experiences, but no subjects to experience them, at the fundamental level. (Panexperientialism)
This is the option preferred, almost exclusively, by Process theologians since it requires an event-based, and not substance-based, ontology to make sense of experiences floating free of subjects.
The second disagreement between panpsychists is in how to specify what is fundamental, or perhaps more clearly, where the fundamental level of reality is (Aux4-5). As argued above, the panpsychist needs to hold to fundamental monism (PTC3) and this leaves panpsychists with only two choices. The first option is,
Aux4: The cosmos is made up from a plurality of fundamental psychophysical micro-entities. (Micropsychism).
Simply put, the fundamental level of reality is where the building-blocks for all that exists are found (e.g. quarks and photons, or whatever is described by a completed physics). It is largely due to the success of reductionistic explanations in the natural sciences that the majority of Western panpsychists retain the spirit of reductionism by holding to micropsychism alongside microphysicalism (that physical things are explained in virtue of their physical parts). In order to satisfy PTC4, micropsychists typically seek models of mental combination. However, Eastern forms of panpsychism, Absolute idealism, and the rise of environmental holism has also meant that some panpsychists, instead, favour:
Aux5: The cosmos as a single psychophysical whole is fundamental. (Cosmopsychism).
More recently, some analytic philosophers of mind have come to prefer Aux5 over Aux4, due to the perception that PCT4 will be easier to maintain.26 That is, it is hoped that a theory of subject individuation will be easier than a theory of subject combination. This view is influenced by Jonathan Schaffer’s account of priority monism, where the one and only fundamental entity is the cosmos.27
The third set of auxiliary theses outline two types of relation between fundamental subjects and human or organic subjects; namely, constitutive and non-constitutive relations. The literature on the combination problem is too large to survey fully here but I will give four example solutions from: constitutive combination, non-constitutive combination, constitutive individuation, and non-constitutive individuation. It is these examples that are most relevant for the present discussion since they specify how different panpsychists understand the mind-body relation and what it means for a mind to be ›in‹ another mind.
The first type of relation is a constitutive relation, where all the true statements about human consciousness are (wholly or partially) grounded in true statements about fundamental consciousness.28 To use a (controversial) metaphor from ecclesiology, if individual members of a church are seen to be prior to the church itself, then the existence of the church might be said to be grounded in the existence of its members. In this case, the church just is the sum of its members. However, if the church (perhaps as a spiritual reality) is logically prior to it having any members, then being a member of the church is a state of affairs about an individual that is grounded in the existence of church (itself, probably grounded in something else, like the will of God). In both cases, the grounding entities are prior to and more fundamental than the grounded entities. That is, truths about human consciousness are true in virtue of the fact that they are also, perhaps primarily, true about fundamental consciousness.
Aux6: All true facts about organic consciousness are true in virtue of facts about fundamental mentality. (Constitutive Panpsychism)
On this view, the organic subject is the sum of its fundamental parts (if combined with Aux4) or a part of a larger subject (with Aux5). All the organic subject’s properties and causal powers are metaphysically necessitated by the properties and powers found at the fundamental level. This is sometimes phrased as an ›ontological free lunch‹, since the organic subject is nothing ›over-and-above‹ fundamental mentality.29
For many panpsychists, the advantage of Aux6 is that it retains a bottom-up, scientific (even quasi-reductionist) account of consciousness, parallel to material sciences. The materialist will hold to a constitutive relation like this between fundamental physical facts and organic material/mental facts, whereas a constitutive panpsychist will hold to a constitutive relation between fundamental mental facts and organic mental facts (facts about the mental life of organisms). The main advantage is that constitutive relations seem best suited for accounting for mental causation in a bottom-up fashion alongside physical causation.30
A proposed constitutive combinatorial solution (Aux4 + Aux6) to the combination problem is Philip Goff’s idea of Phenomenal Bonding. Goff has proposed that, just as fundamental entities have intrinsic phenomenal properties (subjectivity, experience) and extrinsic material properties (mass, spin, location), so too might relations between such entities have intrinsic phenomenal relational properties which facilitate subject combination.31 Similarly, Gregg Rosenberg’s ›carrier hypothesis‹ has proposed that causation is a fundamental relation that has a phenomenal interiority to it, as part of his argument for panpsychism from causation.32 The biggest challenge for Phenomenal Bonding is to give a more positive account of what these ›bonds‹ are, where they are, and how they structure the mental aspect of the world such that some things, like organisms, are conscious as single collective wholes, and other things (like tables and slippers) are not.
Philip Goff has more recently argued that constitutive panpsychists should, instead, adopt Cosmopsychism (Aux5). Whilst this provides some relief from providing a positive account of combinatorial relations, it still requires an account of constitutive individuation. Goff refers to this as Grounding by Subsumption; all true facts about organic subjects are true in virtue of being true of the cosmic subject. In this way, Goff argues, organic subjects are subsumed within the cosmic subject as a partial aspect of a given unity.33 On this view, the fundamental entity (the cosmos) is not a »homogenous blob« but is »structured« by its different aspects.34 These aspects may be considered (epistemologically) in isolation, but (ontologically) depend upon the existence of the whole.
If one has never been enamoured by materialism and reductive explanations, then constitutive solutions to the combination problem may seem unnecessarily strange or sterile. Instead, a panpsychist, perhaps who has previously been associated with dualism or emergence theory, may prefer to search for a non-constitutive solution to the combination problem.
Aux7: There are true facts about organic consciousness that are not true in virtue of facts about fundamental mentality. (Non-Constitutive Panpsychism)
A non-constitutive relation allows for new properties to arise within the combined organic subject that are not present in the fundamental subject. The organic subject can be said to be caused by the fundamental subject(s), but to exist over-and-above the fundamental subject(s).
The most important micropsychist version of the non-constitutive relation (Aux4 + Aux7) is Emergent Panpsychism.35 As with emergence theory more widely, an emergent panpsychist can say that the body is the emergent base of the mind, and that the body gives rise to the mind due to some contingent laws of nature. But, importantly, as a panpsychist body this emergent base is a society of micropsychist subjects who merge or infuse to create a single collective mind. The main advantage of this position is that no further theory of combination is required, instead the emergent mind is fundamental in the same way that a substance dualist affirms.36
As long as Aux7 is not combined with Aux2 (panprotopsychism), then emergent panpsychism is not in danger of retreating into a (super)strong emergence theory, as is ruled out by PCT2. As a realist position regarding mentality (PCT1) and often realist concerning downward causation, emergent panpsychism cannot be confused with Weak Emergence either.37 That said, given that the rejection of emergence is a core thesis for panpsychism, many panpsychists are not willing to sail so close to the wind of emergence theory.
Finally, one might propose a non-constitutive model of individuation (Aux5 + Aux7). Such solutions are popular amongst cosmopsychists, but highly speculative and often phrased metaphorically. For example, Itay Shani employs aquatic metaphors where the universe is a »vast ocean of consciousness« or »oceanic plenum« and human subjects are »local disturbances coursing the ocean as currents, waves, streams, eddies, bubbles, ripples, and the like«.38 Freya Mathews and Joseph Bracken, who both endorse panentheism, employ the language of systems theory; a self is a »system with a very special kind of goal, namely its own maintenance and self-perpetuation.«39 For Bracken, Ultimate Reality is a comprehensive system, in this technical sense, and is identified as the divine-life system, which includes the world and all creatures »as a sub-system within the higher-order system of the divine life«.40
This brings us to the theological implications of these variants of panpsychism and so to the main investigative question of this paper: can panpsychism aid panentheists in interpreting their two core metaphors in a way that demarcates their position from neighbouring theories of the God-world relationship? Although the two panentheistic slogans should ideally be held together they are treated somewhat separately in the two remaining sections of this paper. First, I focus on how micropsychist theories of combination (Aux4 + Aux6/Aux7) illuminate how the world might be God’s body, and second I examine how cosmopsychist theories of individuation (Aux5 + Aux6/Aux7) may elucidate how one subject may be said to be ›in‹ another subject, perhaps as the world is ›in‹ God.
3. The World as God’s Panpsychist Body
The first panentheistic slogan draws explicitly on philosophy of mind in claiming that ›the world is the body of God‹. There are as many ways to interpret this metaphor as there are positions in philosophy of mind. If God is an immaterial mind, and the world is a ›mindless‹ mechanical body over which God has direct and total control, then a classical theist could easily employ this metaphor to depict the ontological separation between God and the world, as well as God’s total determination of all events.41 Yet, panentheists typically critique exactly this depiction of the mind-body, God-world relationships.42 The success for this metaphor hinges almost entirely upon whether the panentheist can specify a mind-body relationship capable of performing the interpretative heavy-lifting necessary to demarcate panentheism from neighbouring theological positions.43
Western versions of panentheism have more recently turned to emergence theory to elucidate the metaphor of divine embodiment.44 Emergence theory states that consciousness emerges from the complex arrangements of the physical body, such that consciousness supervenes upon (is determined by, or is at least ontologically dependent upon) the body. Probably the most well-known statement of »emergentist panentheism« is Philip Clayton’s »panentheistic analogy«, which suggests that God acts in the world in a way analogous to how the emergent mind (whole) acts through the body (parts) as its physical substrate.45
There have been, however, a number of critiques against employing emergence theory to interpret the panentheist’s use of this metaphor. Niels Henrik Gregersen argues that, whilst the world as God’s body may have been an attractive metaphor in antiquity, the rise of emergence theory in philosophy of mind makes this metaphor unsuitable since, »God would appear as an emergent reality arising out of natural processes rather than the other way around.«46 Emily Thomas compares the emergentist panentheism of Clayton, Peacocke and Morowtiz, unfavourably, with Samuel Alexander’s emergentist theology by arguing that emergence theory is quite simply incompatible with the claim that the universe is ›in‹ God. If God is the emergent whole or resultant then it can only be true to say that »deity is strictly contained ›in‹ the universe« and not the other way around.47 In summary, as I have argued elsewhere, the use of emergence theory entails the prioritization of the material and the subordination of the immaterial, which is in tension with much philosophy of religion and forms of theism, including panentheism.48 The unsuitability of emergence theory, in addition to a longstanding historical precedent, gives us good reason to turn to panpsychism instead.
Subject Panpsychism and Micropsychism (Aux1 + Aux4) give an account of the body as a society of subjects. If the world is a body in this sense, then the universe is a cosmic community, united by a shared relation to the whole/God. This seems congruent with panentheistic motivations towards a sacramental, ecological, and value-laden picture of the physical universe, and the rejection of inert, mechanistic views of materiality. An example of this approach is Hartshorne’s statement that »The world consists of individuals, but the totality of individuals as a physical or spatial whole is God’s body, the Soul of which is God.«49 Yet, what relation the bodily community of subjects will bear to God on this panpsychist interpretation of panentheism will depend upon the type of combinatorial relation that is adopted, Aux6 or Aux7.
3.1 Constitutive Micropsychism and God’s Body
If the micropsychist, subject panpsychist also adopts a constitutive relation (Aux1+ Aux4 + Aux6), then God will be the sum of the universe; all facts about God will be true in virtue of being true of some feature of the world. As such, God is constantly affected by the experiences and events in the world between creatures as a metaphysical necessity. Indeed, whilst ›God‹ would properly refer to the joint experience of the whole cosmic community, it would not be incorrect to refer to each subject as God in a derivative sense of participating in, even constituting, the divine body. This resonates with Lataster’s celebration of panentheism for lacking »an authoritarian deity dictating commands from on high. Only the divine can tell us what to do, but we are the divine!«50 The problem for panentheism here is that a constitutive relation may be too strong, and so fail to demarcate panentheism from pantheism.51 Not only do God and the world share a single substance, but there are no facts about God that are not also true of the world as a whole.52
3.2 Non-constitutive Micropsychism and God’s Body
If the panentheist adopts Micropsychism, Subject Panpsychism, and Non- constitutive Panpsychism (Aux1 + Aux4 + Aux7), then the picture changes substantially. The world is still the body of God as a combined plurality of subjects or cosmic community, but God is not reducible to the sum of this plurality of subjects. As such, God may have properties, intentionality, experiences, or actions that are not true of individual organic subjects, nor true of the cosmic community as a whole. As such, the panentheists could now demarcate their position from pantheism and classical theism by claiming that, whilst God depends upon the world (contra classical theism), God also transcends the world (contra pantheism); there are true facts about God that are not true of the world, but all true facts about the world affect, and perhaps even effect, the very essence of God.
However, if the non-constitutive relation employed is the causal relation of emergence then on this model God again appears secondary and dependent upon the universe, but the universe does not appear dependent upon God. Panentheism would then become a version of emergent theism. This conclusion may not be exclusive to emergent panpsychism but may be a tendency within all varieties of micropyschism and (as argued above) traditional emergence, where the parts are taken as more fundamental than the whole. Therefore, a panentheist committed to divine creation/creativity of the world, to God’s logical priority over the world, or even God’s logically equality with the world, is more likely to find aid from cosmopsychism (Aux5) than micropsychism (Aux4).
4. Panpsychism ›in‹ God
The second panentheist slogan, »that the world exists within the Divine, although God is also more than the world«, is captured in the very name ›pan-en-theism‹.53 Whilst a panentheist could abandon all notion of divine embodiment, she cannot abandon the claim that ›all is in God‹ and still claim to be a pan-en-theist. Yet, as Gregersen writes, »the concept of panentheism is not stable in itself. The little word ›in‹ is the hinge of it all.«54 It is widely recognised that this small word ›in‹, »must bear the brunt of the interpretative burden« since it alone »holds the position together and distinguishes it from its rivals.«55 To achieve this, what is meant by ›the world being in God‹ must exclude, first, whatever it means for the world to be ›outside of God‹ (Classical Theism) and, second, ›identical to God‹ (pantheism).56 Third, to say that ›the world is in God‹ should not be identical to the claim that ›God is in the world‹; the traditional doctrine of divine omnipresence or indwelling.57 Whilst more controversial, this third constraint is nothing more than the logical consequence of the first two. For if what it means for the world to be in God is identical to traditional notions of omnipresence then the defining statement of panentheism is no different from a statement adhered to by most classical theists. Similarly, if ›God‹ and ›world‹ can dance around the word ›in‹ interchangeably then there is a risk of implying that these are synonymous concepts, as in many versions of pantheism.
In his constructive proposal to demarcate panentheism from neighbouring positions, R.T. Mullins suggests that panentheists should interpret the ›in‹ literally and not metaphorically. To do this, Mullins recommends that panentheists make metaphysical space and metaphysical time attributes of God—in Gregersen’s words, God has »roominess«.58 When this roomy God creates the universe, physical space and time are created within the divine metaphysical space and time. In this way, the universe and all its objects are literally ›in‹ God. This proposal, as Mullins intends, says something unique about God and so might be the beginnings of a successfully demarcated panentheism.59 However, it says nothing about God’s relationship to the world and very little about the ontology of the world. As a result, Mullins’ proposal abandons most of panentheism’s motivators to be a more credibly scientific, relational, dynamic, view of God that can account for both the problem of evil and the reality of religious experience.60 A clear demarcation that fails to motivate the position is only marginally helpful to the panentheist. The question is, can panpsychism provide an equally clear demarcation of panentheism as Mullins’ proposal without sacrificing the motivating reasons to adopt panentheism in the first place?
Since, cosmopsychism (Aux5) starts with a single whole, which all finite organic subjects are contained within, it seems that the second panentheistic metaphor is a theological parallel to cosmopsychism. This retains both the literal reading of ›in‹ that Mullins argues for, but in both a mentalistic and spatial sense, since on panpsychism subjectivity and extension are fundamentally united (PCT3). As Uwe Meixner comments,
It seems natural to identify the transcendental subject with God. The immediate consequence of this idea is that everything is in God (qua being in His total experience, which, at the same time, is the totality of all experiences), whether as an experience, as a subject of experience, or as an object of experience.61
Meixner identifies this version of cosmopsychism (Husserlian idealism) with a panentheism that provides »a real sense of the inner, the utterly intimate omnipresence of God.«62 As such, this cosmopsychist notion of how the world is ›in‹ God, such that the minds of the world exist by virtue of being part of God’s experience, also retains at least some of the main motivators of panentheism. It seems a promising start for the panentheist, therefore, to adopt PTC1-4 with Aux5. However, the panentheist will still need to adopt a theory of individuation and apply either a constitutive or non-constitutive relation to her understanding of the God-world relationship.
4.1 Constitutive Cosmopsychism
If applied to panentheism, Philip Goff’s grounding by subsumption would mean that organic subjects are constitutive aspects of the divine. This already invokes the mereological language that literal interpretations of panentheism prefer. It also captures the idea that discrete, individual subjects and objects are both dependent upon God and manifestations of the divine being, not as symbolic representations as a classical theism may hold, but in a more direct and ontological fashion.63 In a way similar to how Goff says that aspects of the cosmic consciousness can be distinguished epistemologically without ontological separation, Göcke describes panentheism as holding to a distinction between reality and ultimate reality »that is epistemologically needed for ultimate explanation, [but] cannot be a substantial ontological distinction between them for a variety of reasons.«64
Goff argues that his grounding by subsumption model only applies to subject cosmopsychism (Aux1+Aux5), since aspects of unities (unlike parts of composites) cannot have any properties, which are not had by the whole within which they are subsumed; if aspects of the cosmos are subjects, then the cosmos must also be a subject. This may suit the personal view of God adopted by many (but not all) panentheists, demarcating it from, at least, impersonal versions of pantheism. He also suggests, however, that fundamental reality will not be a pure subject, but an impure subject with both experiential and non-experiential aspects (consciousness+).65 Although Goff cannot tell us what exactly consciousness+ consists in, grounding by subsumption may yet tell us some things about the cosmic-subject/God. For example, the cosmic subject must be aware of all the experiences and first-person perspectives that are contained within it as partial aspects, otherwise these partial aspects would have properties not had by the cosmic subject. To be clear, the cosmic subject does not know about the experiences of finite subjects in a third- or second-person kind of knowledge, as is the case in some definitions of omniscience and omnipresence in classical theism, but the cosmic subject experiences them as its own, in an unmediated first-person way. Indeed, my experiences just are the experiences of God in the partial aspect of God that is ›me‹. Since my experiences are grounded in God’s experiences, there can be no separation between how I feel and how God feels.
We might compare this constitutive cosmopsychism to Linda Zagzebski’s proposal to add ›omnisubjectivity‹ as a divine attribute within classical theism. She argues that perfect knowledge of subjects and their first-person experiences, such that God is present with creatures in their experiences, is a direct implication of the classical theists’ commitment to omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence.66 Zagzebski proposes that an omnisubjective God maximally empathizes with all the conscious first-person states of creaturely subjects. She contrasts her proposal with a constitutive relation between the divine consciousness and human subjects for three reasons. Her first reason is that if the »One conscious self (God) has another conscious self (you) as a part.« Then, »[t]he self you thought you were is not a distinct self.«67 This alone may not concern panentheists or panpsychists, who could argue that we must deflate our notions of selfhood away from autonomous or fundamental unities. Second, Zagzebski points out the repercussions for relationality, since »if I am simply a part of God, I lose much of the point of addressing God as a distinct person«.68 There can be no second-personal I-Thou relationship in a whole-part constitutive relation; this seems to me a serious problem for panentheists who claim to have a highly relational view of God. Third, Zagzebski defends her own view from The Moral Objection, which worries that if God empathizes with humanity then immoral dispositions and intentions are included into the life of God. Although Zagzebski applauds Charles Hartshorne sensitivity to the importance of divine empathy, she cites his understanding of the world as the body of God as incurring the full force of The Moral Objection, and thus departing from the tradition on the issue of absolute divine goodness and holiness.69 This is a clear example of how the type of relation between God and the world has concrete implications for religious practice and ideas of who God is.
As an asymmetrical relation, grounding by subsumption may appear to demarcate this version of cosmopsychist panentheism from pantheism; since the world would be grounded in God (by subsumption), but God would not be grounded in the world and thus it seems that God and the world cannot be strictly identical. However, this demarcation fails. For whilst it is true that God bears an asymmetrical relation to organic or finite subjects (such as human beings), God does not bear such an asymmetrical relation to the world (universe or multiverse) as a whole. Indeed, a constitutive relation means that the cosmic subject is not more than the world, but is just the sum of its parts; the total consciousness+ in the world when it is not individuated.70 The world as a whole is not a partial aspect of God, but simply is God. Goff considers this a problem for theological appropriations of his theory of mind. He comments,
Cosmopsychism does not entail pantheism. We need not think of the universe as a supremely intelligent rational agent…. It is more plausible to think that the consciousness of the universe is simply a mess.71
Many pantheists will, justly, complain that Goff’s depiction of their deity as »a supremely intelligent rational agent« is a mischaracterisation. However, Goff’s assumption that his position is closest to some form of pantheism and his warning that any cosmic deity resulting from his philosophy of mind will lack mental (rational, emotional, experiential, violation) coherence or clarity should be of concern to panentheists.
4.2 Panentheism and Non-constitutive Cosmopsychism
The problem of a ›messy‹ God is avoided by a cosmopsychist panentheism that adopts the non-constitutive model of individuation (Aux7). The most common example of a non-constitutive relation is the contingent and causal relation described in emergence theory. When combined with cosmopsychism this becomes something like a reverse emergence theory, where the whole system (›the ocean‹) logically precedes and causes the parts (sub-systems or ›eddies‹) to endure semi-independently for a time. Unlike emergent panentheism or emergent panpsychism, the adoption of cosmopsychism buttresses this version of panpsychism from the previous criticisms. If the panentheist were to adopt a non-constitutive cosmopsychism (Aux5 + Aux7) they would still be able to claim that God is logically prior to and the causal ground of all other subjects, whilst also being of one substance with all finite beings. The world is a contingent, rather than a necessary, aspect of God.
The non-constitutive relation means that the cosmic consciousness is more than the sum of its partial aspects. Therefore, the cosmic substrate, the divine ocean of consciousness, need not experience all (morally problematic) finite intentions, thoughts, emotions as its own. Indeed, the fundamental level of mentality need not be personal or a subject at all. That is, a non-constitutive relation (Aux7) is compatible with subject panpsychism (Aux1), panexperientialism (Aux2) or panprotopsychism (Aux 3), in a way grounding by subsumption was not. Therefore, a non-constitutive cosmopsychism allows the panentheist to adopt either a personal, impersonal or more-than-personal view of God. The demarcation between pantheism and panentheism is upheld by the contingent causal relation between God and the subjects/objects we call ›the world‹. In terms of holding together agency at both the cosmic-divine level and the organic level, this position gives no immediate relief to the problems of epiphenomenalism and overdetermination that challenge ontologies with fundamental agents existing on multiple levels, but this is not a unique or defeating problem for non-constitutive cosmopsychism/panentheism.72
This non-constitutive relation between God and the world means that there is a logically possible state of affairs where God, as the cosmic consciousness, was the only consciousness in existence and none of the finite objects and subjects of the world were yet to individuate themselves from the divine substance or consciousness. What we may have in a non-constitutive cosmopsychist interpretation of panentheism is an origin of finite subjects/objects through emanation from the divine substance; creation ex deo, not creation ex nihilo. Contrary to classical theism, this emanation not only takes place within the substance of God, rather than from absolute nothingness, but individuation results from a kind of contingent law or principle of the divine being itself, rather than an act of the divine will. This corresponds with a number of statements from panentheists that emanation implies that God is »bodying [the world] forth, generating all life from her being« and that creation is »a self-transformation of the divine being«.73
This paper has explored whether panpsychism can illuminate the two panentheistic slogans in such a way that panentheism can be clearly demarcated from neighbouring positions. Whilst panpsychism may be combined with any model of God, panpsychism’s account of the mind-body relation and fundamental-organic consciousness relation do seem to provide a framework for interpreting the panentheists metaphors in a distinctive manner. This is a promising start, but further work will be needed to develop this into a more thorough demarcation and version of panentheism. Since evocatively powerful ambiguities have plagued panentheism in the past, I have employed panpsychism’s auxiliary theses in addition to the core panpsychist theses to try and make this discussion as specific and concrete as possible. It is clear from the resulting analysis that these auxiliaries make a great deal of difference to the interpretation of panentheism’s core metaphors. Future scholars should keep these particularities in mind when exploring or asserting any correspondence between panpsychism and panentheism. In the end, a cosmopsychism that posits a non-constitutive relation between the cosmic consciousness and organic subjects seems to mirror the kind of relationship between God and the world posited by panentheists most faithfully. However, there is much more to be done on this and panpsychists themselves are at no agreement concerning the possibility of such individuation; panentheists will need to pay attention to this ongoing debate. For now, it seems that there may be a way of employing panpsychism for the demarcation of panentheism, but as to whether panentheism is a plausible or desirable theology is a separate question and one I will leave panentheists to argue for.
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( Brierley, M.W. ) » 2004 Naming the Quiet Revolution: The Panentheistic Turn in Modern Theology.« In: (eds.) In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. and Philip Clayton Arthur Peacocke Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1- 15.
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( Clayton, P. ) » 2004 Panentheism Today: A Constructive Systematic Evaluation.« In: (eds.) In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. and P. Clayton A. Peacocke Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 249- 264.
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( Thomas, E. ) » 2016 Samuel Alexander’s Space-Time God: A Naturalistic Rival to Current Emergentist Theologies.« In: (eds.) Alternative Concepts of God: Essay on the Metaphysics of the Divine. and A. Buckareff Y. Nagasawa Oxford: Oxford University Press, 255- 273.
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See, Clayton and Peacocke 2004; Biernacki and Clayton 2014.
Clayton 1999; Brierley 2004: 4.
Mullins 2016; Göcke 2013; Gasser 2019 Brierly 2008: 636-41; Peterson 2001; Stenmark 2019; Gregerson 2004; Towne 2005; Hutchings 2010.
Lataster 2014; Lataster & Bilimoria 2018.
Thomas C. Owen justly critiques Philip Clayton for glossing such ambiguity as ›richness‹. Owen 2008: 653-53; cf. Clayton 2004: 254, 256.
One might point to the value-based and political arguments for panentheism in Jantzen 1984 and McFague 1993.
Clayton 2004: 249. Indeed, Philip Clayton describes both the classical theism of John Cooper and the atheistic pantheism of Robert Corrington as versions of panentheism, such that one is forced to asked what the term ›panentheism‹ excludes? See, Clayton 2017.
Cooper 2007; Brierley 2004: 3; Hartshorne & Reese 1953: 5.
Roe 198: 94. Patrick Hutching simply states that, to commit myself to panentheism is disingenuous since »I am—as I see it—committing myself to nothing.« Hutching 2010: 299.
Griffin 2005: 35.
Brierly 2004: 3.
James, 1947: 318; cf. Cooper 2007: 141.
Taliaferro 2017. This preference is noted in Cooper 2007: 193. However, classical theist Gottfried von Leibniz and pantheist Bauarch Spinoza, provide clear counter examples of how panpsychism can support various theological positions. Skrbina 2005: 87-91, 95-99.
R.T. Mullins raises something like this objection against demarcations where, »[a]ll the demarcating work is being done on the side of creation«, since »panentheism is supposed to be making a unique claim about the nature of God.« Mullins 2016: 342. But this seems to mischaracterize panentheism. Panentheism is primarily a statement about God’s relationship with the world, not about God’s nature in abstraction or considered apart from the world. Indeed, to many panentheists the idea of making a unique claim about the nature of God apart from the world would be to miss the point entirely (see, Henrikson, 2017: 1083; Gregersen 2004: 20; Meister 2017: 8; Peters 2007: 285). A God-world relationship may, of course, have strong implications for the attributes of God etc., such as seen in the panentheists tendency to accept divine passibility, mutability and deny creatio ex nihilo, but as Mullins shows these ideas alone fail to demarcate panentheism. On the insufficiency of these demarcations see, Stenmark 2019; Mullins 2016: 344-336; Göcke, 2013: 71-72; Lataster & Bilimoria 2018: 59-60.
I should acknowledge that I do not subscribe to panentheism or Process theology, but do consider panpsychism the most plausible position in philosophy of mind.
Goff, Seager & Allen-Hermanson 2017; Nagel 1979: 181; Sprigge 1998; Popper & Eccles 1977: 15.
Sprigge 1971: 166-68; Nagel 1974; Chalmers 1995.
Galen Strawson 2008: 60-67; Brogaard, 2017: 131-137.
Coleman 2018a: 185.
Meister 2017: 3. See, Stubenberg 2017; Chalmers 2015.
There are versions of panpsychism that are not so reliant on providing an explanation of organic consciousness, and instead seek to provide explanations to one of the other perineal mysteries of philosophy; such as causation. However, within philosophy of mind, I take it that all theories raison d’etre is to provide an explanation of organic consciousness.
This is a very old problem discussed by Lucretius, Leibniz, and William James, but the conundrum was given its modern name in Seager 1995. For a thorough discussion see, Chalmers 2017b: 179-214.
Sam Coleman describes the combination problem »represents a major theoretical ›I owe you‹ of the panexperientialist/panpsychist. But that there is work to be done does not imply the falsity of a view, and there are avenues to be explored.« Coleman 2006: 51.
›Thin subjects‹ or »SESMETs« are what Galen Strawson uses to refer to subjects that persist only for the briefest period of time, Strawson 2009. ›Raw feels‹ is a phrase taken from Toleman 1932 to refer to features of our mental life that science cannot capture.
See, panqualityism in Coleman 2018b and panintentionalism in Pfeifer 2016.
Goff 2017b; Nagasawa & Weger 2017; Jaskolla & Buck 2012.
Schaffer 2010. Schaffer’s account is different to cosmopsychism primarily because Schaffer identifies as a materialist.
Chalmers, 2017b, 181; Cf. Fine 2012; Scheaffer 2009.
Goff 2017b: 226-27.
Chalmers 2017b: 193.
Philip Goff abandons his own idea in favour of a constitutive cosmopsychism. Others are more hopeful that ›phenomenal bonds‹ might yet provide the best way forward; Miller 2017; Chalmers 2017b.
Goff 2009, Goff 2017a. As such, Rosenberg argues that panpsychism not only offers a solution to the mind-body problem, but also to what intrinsic or categorical natures carry the structures of causality in our world. Rosenberg 2004. See also, Mørch 2014; Mørch forthcoming.
Goff 2017b: 221-233. The terms ›aspect‹ and ›unity‹ are treated as primitive concepts that do not admit fundamental analysis. Goff uses examples to clarify these terms: one’s unified experience is often made up of different auditory, visual, and emotional aspects; a specific colour is a unity of different aspects of hue, saturation and lightness; states of affairs (electrons-having-negative-charge) are fundamental unities of which the object (electron) and the property (negative charge) are aspects.
Goff 2017b: 225-26.
Seager 2012; Seager 2010; Brüntrup 2017; Mørch 2014.
And thus, David J. Chalmers argues that emergent panpsychism suffers from the same difficultly as substances dualists in accounting for mental causation; Chalmers, 2017b, 193-94.
Shani 2015: 389-437, 411-412.
Mathews 2003:48. Mathews 2010.
Bracken 2015: 219. Bracken is clear that the aim of its systems-orientated approach is to »eliminate any kind of dualism, even dualism between God and the world of creation« p. 224.
T.J. Mawson even argues that »Classical Theism is committed to seeing the universe as God’s body.« Mawson 2006: 171.
McFague 1993: 144-145, 154-155.
Ward 2004, 62-68; Barua 2010.
Leidenhag 2013, 978.
Clayton 1997: 258-59.
Gregersen 2004: 20.
Hartshorne 1984: 94.
Lataster & Bilimoria 2018: 52. Similarly, Gregersen ties Christian panentheism to degree Christology, where Christological revelation is not unique to the person Jesus of Nazareth. Freya Mathews goes so far as to suggest that on panentheism/panpsychism, »God with angels and burning bushes, the gods and goddess of Olympus and small hearth gods of Asia to Daoist immortals, fox faries, vision lakes, tertons, dragons, and rainbow serpants« are all »different emanations of the same material substratum«, that is »imbued with possibilities of inspiritment.« Mathews 2010: 234-35.
Lataster stresses that many versions of panentheism hold that God and the world are the same substance, and in doing so classifies panentheism as a version of pantheism. Lataster 2014: 390-91, 392.
For more on pantheism and constitutive panpsychism, see Leidenhag 2018.
Clayton 2017: 1045
Gregersen 2004: 19.
Clayton 2004: 252; Peterson 2001: 396.
Göcke 2013: 63.
For example, Krishna’s teaching in the Bhagavad Gita is often labelled as panentheistic and not pantheistic because he teaches that whilst »everyone abides in him, he does not abide in them.« Lataster & Bilimoria 2018: 52. This is contrary to Clayton 2010: 184.
Mullins 2016: 342-344; Gregersen 2004: 20.
Mullins 2016: 243.
Panentheists need not be concerned with all these motivators, nor does their proposal need to be successful in achieving all these claims. But, I take it that a panentheists should be concerned with at least one of these in order to motivate her metaphysical claims in competition to competing models of God.
Meixner 2017: 399.
Clayton 2010: 187-190.
Göcke 2017: 6.
Goff 2017b: 230.
Zagzebski 2013: 10-25.
Zagzebski 2013: 24.
Ward 2004: 70.
Goff 2017b: 246.
Chalmers 2017b: 194.
McFague 1993: 152; Göcke 2017: 7. | <urn:uuid:d82d2e1f-2ede-43ce-a036-f955a76b3c2c> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | https://www.mentis.de/view/book/edcoll/9783957437303/BP000010.xml?rskey=06fkNp&result=3 | 2020-10-20T08:57:03Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107871231.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20201020080044-20201020110044-00700.warc.gz | en | 0.881087 | 15,168 |
Creative Distanciation: Etude for Naro [i] is about music, musicians [ii] and working across cultures. Using multimedia [iii], there are photographs from my fieldwork in Mongolia, and links to wonderful performances by mostly Mongolian (in Mongolia) musicians there. The unfolding narrative and these performances are both contextualised with introductions and detailed footnotes.[iv]
This presentation is intended to facilitate cross-cultural interpretation and learning for those of you for whom this Mongolian stream of culture and musicianship is of interest, but unfamiliar. My intention is to present aspects of cosmopolitan [v] post-Soviet socialist Mongolian cultural life in the nation’s capital Ulaanbator (“UB”) through its music, as well as to give you a glimpse of other ritual music-performance practices I have had the privilege to observe in my study of Mongol culture in Mongolia over the years.
The urban settlement of Uliastai (Mong. Улиастай) is more than 1,000 kms to the north-west of UB, in Zavkhan (Mong. Завхан) Aimag (Province). In 2008 I was a guest of Damdin Gerlee and her mother at their summer camp when I did fieldwork in the region for a month in September of that year. In reference to the above photograph, and in terms of traditional Mongol instrumentation, the shudraga (or shanz) has 3 strings and is plucked. This style of instrument is well known across Asia. In China it is referred to as ‘sanzian’ and in Japan as ‘samisen.’ The Yatug-a is a zither, that generally-speaking come in two sizes: the smaller one has 11-15 strings (pictured) and the ‘master yatug-a’ a professional concert instrument has 21-23 strings.
Modern globalization processes have significantly influenced the development of musical revivals and the situation of post-revival structures (Sweers 2014, p466) From a contemporary and global perspective, acts of music revival, restoration and renewal are reshaping musical landscapes in post-industrial, post-colonial, post-war [vi] (and post-Soviet socialist) contexts. Musical elements are being identified as old, historical and traditional; a practice that implicates scholars, performers and promoters in the reinterpretation of ‘big histories’ and revisions of previously historicized narratives and their norms (Bithell and Hill 2014, pp3-4).
As Owe Ronstrom (2014, p43) points out, one key to understanding music revival, ‘is the notion of a past from which something is brought to a second life. And yes, much revival is about representing the past—but the representation itself takes place in the present. To be “about” also implies interpretation and staging, as in theatre. Even if what is staged refers to a past, it always takes place in the present. And, like theatre, much of revival is about creating and shaping the sublime. What makes such productions meaningful is not so much what they point at or refer to, but the “affecting presence” that is their result.’
Trajectories, Exemplars and Sources
What unfolds from here, is a series of links to live musical performances with brief introductory notes. Footnotes provide additional details. In selecting examples, I want to provide those of you who are new to Mongolian music with not just an overview but also to attune you to some of the cultural and other nuances at play. However, many of you are also Mongolians-in-Mongolia so I have sprinkled this post with Mongolian Cyrillic so that you too feel at home! The sub-headings below are self-explanatory, so let’s get on with the show.
Contemporary (Mongol) Music in Mongolia Performance: Master Yatug-a
- Товуухорол Дэлгэрмөрөн (Tovuuhorol Delgermeren, or “Deegii”) – Уянга цагаан хуруу. Melodic “White” Fingers’ like the White Moon, first moon of the Mongol lunar calendar, not a reference to the colour white. See below. Ятга: Мөнх-Эрдэнэ (Menh Erdenii). The Mongolian Live Sessions.
This is a wonderful example of the contemporary UB music scene, where elite classical training on a traditional instrument is blended with Mongolian voice and song— with an ever-so-delicate yet incredibly precise touch. The song is built around the metaphor of women’s fingers, seen as they would be when sewing sheep leather. How wonderful the fingers look as they work: everything is like a melody when fingers move with pristine (white, scared) intention. Its all in the fingers: playing the meaning of life with a wholesome mind. Also, Mongol people in Mongolia really like dressing up. The vestments chosen and worn by the musician-performers here are no exception.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIZWmGdqwrg Published: 21 May 2013. Retrieved 21 December 2016.
A transformational perspective
Scholars such as Tamara Livingston (2014, p60) argue that, ‘the participatory aspect of music revivals deserves special consideration given its importance as a critical site for the intersection of musical practice and social signification.’ She cites the grounded research of ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino as a case in point. For a discussion of revivals of the musical arts, and an outline of a methodology for research into musical revivals after major catastrophes, bans or neglect, see Margaret Kartomi (2014). Within growing disenchantment with ‘globalisation’ and its economic reductionist processes, Britta Sweers has articulated (for musicians?) a more optimist view that she describes as, ‘the transformational perspective’ (2014, p466) that argues that:
‘The contemporary patterns of globalization are unprecedented, as are modern development directions, the musical results, and post-revival structures. ‘Transformationalists’ thus perceive the increasingly dense global networks as the basis for developing new musical structures, in this case through revival, which needs to be approached with an open perspective. This particularly applies to the analysis of the actual relationship between traditional performance practices and increasingly prevalent revival forms, and also addresses the actual space and deep impact of Western popular music in this process. A revivalist might participate in a complex network of musical cultures, of which the seemingly dominant Western popular music might be simply one element among many and not necessarily a destructive one. Revival forms could, thus, also include or lead to fusion and electric forms. From this perspective, modern technology—often a central part of this revival process—could lead to a rediscovery and reconstruction of traditional elements.
Ritual Landscapes in Mongolia
Ovoo (Mong. овоо) are sacred stone heaps usually located in high places such as mountains and crests of ravines. They are one of the most widely recognised visual elements and are important sites in Mongolians’ ritual landscapes, an aspect with which many readers will be familiar. Here, Ulziikhishig Temuulen is paying homage to local nagas and other ‘earth-spirits’ at one particular ritual site (of many) that are long associated with his own kinship elders and their home-country, their birthplace in geomantic terms. The vehicle for this offering of respect is a particular kind of mindfulness: an (inner) visualised ‘performance’ in partnership with the generation of externalised (hopefully mellifluent) sonorities (‘playing with air’) expressed through his own body in concert with morin khuur.[vii]
In the English language research literature, one of the more powerful ideas I have come across that is associated with the Mongols’ horse-headed lute and that has been forwarded by Mongolian-in-Mongolia scholars and intellectuals is the idealised Mongolian philosophical concept of “Arga-Bileg”. This concept is similar to the Chinese concept of yin-yang and is related to the Buddhist ideas of Prajna (wisdom) and Upaya [skillful means]’ (Marsh 2009a, p130).
Here, it is important to point out, that ‘Mongolian Buddhism, the official state religion [in Mongolia] until the communist revolution of 1921, was not homogenous, but incorporated a range of influences, such as religious, monastic, repertory and performance traditions … Drawing on these overlapping pluralistic beliefs and practices in Old Mongolia, individuals constructed conceptually fluid ideoscapes, toposcapes and soundscapes, as they mixed the reformist Gelugpa traditions of Mahayana Buddhism with those unreformed Buddhist schools and with already present folk-religious and shamanic complexes’ (Carole Pegg 2001, p143). Such rituals performed at ovoos and other locations in Mongolia (see below) embody a wide variety of practices: notionally traditional, authorised, spontaneous and at times simply improvised.
Contemporary (Mongol) Music in Mongolian Performance: Morin khuur (Mong. морин хуур; or ‘matouqin’) ) [viii]
The following staged and live performance-recordings reflect a reemergence in socio-cultural status of the Mongolian horse-headed bowed lute away, ‘from a minor symbol of the national musical culture in the Socialist period, to an explicit symbol, if not icon, of national identity in the post-Socialist period’ in parallel with an apparent rise in interest that Mongol peoples in Mongolia are having for their nation’s cultural past (Marsh 2009a, p121).
- In terms of classical Mongolian orchestral ensembles with a morin khuur soloist at its musical heart-centre, Batsaihan and The Academy Theatre of National Song and Dance Orchestra of Mongolia are in some ways the elite of the elite. In the following clip Batsaihan wears the medals he has been awarded for his contribution to Mongolian music and culture and is considered a living cultural treasure in these terms. We first met in September 2009 when Damdin Gerlee, a mutual friend, invited him over to our apartment the evening before I was due to fly out of Chingghis Khan airport after quite some time working in Mongolia. To this day, virtuosic technique aside, the sound Batsaihan generates through his morin khuur, still sends shivers up and down my spine. Along with so many others in Mongolia, I have travelled thousands of kilometres across the steppe listening to ‘his sound.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPyS4kxDpcc Published 24 April 2014. Retrieved: 21 December 2016.
- For a soloist display of extraordinary technique on the morin khuur, one that foregrounds melodic ornamentation against the tonal background of a Bb or F drone (or lower pitch open tuning for some older songs), see B. Battulga‘s following performance of ‘Jonon kharlin yavdal’ on an original-styled instrument. The face of his morin khuur is covered with animal skin (rather than a soundboard of timber) and the two strings, rather than synthetic, are made of hundreds of individual horses’ hairs—some from mares and others from stallions. This can been interpreted as another example of the Mongol “arga-bileg” conception: in this iteration, in terms of an idealised balance — between culturally-specific female and male energies? qualities? attributes? or yet another permutation of ‘modality’? —as referred to above. It’s all in the mind’s-eye of the beholder, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRmVXjOOXio Published 15 June 2011. Retrieved: 21 December 2016.
Contemporary Mongol Cosmopolitan Historical Classic (hard?) Rock
Khatanbaatar Lhagvasuren (Mong. Лxагвасүрэн), or ‘Lkhagvaa’) and Uugii (the lead guitarist) have been performing together with their rock band Kharanga (Mong. Харанга) for years. [ix] In the next You Tube video you will notice Lkhagvaa replete with adornments (just as you see in the above image here). He wears mainly Mongolian silver jewellry, hand-tooled locally by silver smith-artisan-friends who he knows. For pop stars like Lkhagvaa in Mongolia (and elsewhere) such vestment-adornments are an integral component to ‘impression management’ (see Kebede 2010). Such adornments are chosen to communicate a message to a public audience, amongst other things. They can reflect one’s status in society, or visually inscribe other ‘locations’ at play.
One of the symbolic elements, in this case, is the large silver pendant worn by Lkhagvaa (in the You Tube video) with a Svastika (Skt.) at the heart as his centrepiece. I thought it wise to point this out to you before you view the video in order to reduce the likelyhood for a cross-cultural misunderstanding. Please refer to the footnote below [x] if you would like to find out more about the Svastika and what it may reflect in this contemporary post-soviet socialist Mongolian cultural context.
- The Mongolian Live Sessions. Lhagvaa’s incredible vocal range aside, our euro-centric cultural norms are up for discussion (forthcoming post). As for Uujgii’s guitar playing? Just the usual: eloquent, understated, complimentary and precise. The title of the song is ‘Waiting.’ This song is very popular and there are many versions with most Mongolians in Mongolia knowing one or more verses. The translation of the song into English goes something like this: As the evening stars appear in the sky, beautiful one, please come. I sit with a yearning heart-mind and await you with a peaceful disposition. I wish for you to come. The moon appears in the sky and shines down to the earth. The stars too are shining. These all reminds me of you. The morning light is dawning. Please come to me. The wonder of nature has awoken in me. I feel and sense all this since I met you. I wish for you to come to me here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKDq3NiYdHM Published: 2013. Retrieved: 21 December 2016
- Mongolian Morin khuur (Muukhai Ganbold) and Dombra (Myrat Abai)
The dombor (with two strings, a long neck and round belly) is the instrument traditionally played by Khazakh [xi] musicians.[xii] In terms of balance, I thought it important to present an example of this stream of musical creativity in Mongolia too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hRKQiL4hU8 Published 2014. Retrieved: 21 December 201
Contemporary (Mongol) Music in Performance: geospatially, to the North
- Фольклорный ансамбль Тува в Красноярске. Tuva Folkloric Ensemble.
Tuva (Tuvan: Тыва; Russian: Тува́) is a Republic of the Russian Federation and is located in Southern Siberia with a geo-political border with Mongolia to the South. This demarcation is very important in terms of the flow, or otherwise, of a whole raft of things. Whilst the majority of people in Tuva, are of Turkic descent and speak Tuvan (unlike the Russian minority) the two dominant (revived) religions are Gelugpa Buddhism-Tengrism and Shamanism, with Russian Orthodoxy and Protestant Christianity being generally-speaking under-represented.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrliffCygjA Published 2012. Retrieved: 21 December 2016.
Visual interlude: Contemporary Music in Trans-global Performance: the cosmopolitan multi-cultural elite— to the South
I decided to include the above photograph to make a point regarding the apparent omnipotence of euro-centric classical music and its presence in elite socio-cultural settings wherever geographically elite performers of this genre may happen to be. [xiii] Regardless of this meta-observation, the musicians in the Zurich-based Stradivari Quartett and their beautiful instruments were absolutely amazing! Anthropological fieldwork has had its privileges. Without doubt, the opportunity to see this quartet perform live in Beijing, not five metres from where I was seated is an experience I will never forget! To continue …
Contemporary (Mongol) Music in Globalising Networks for Performance: from home to the East and South
In post-socialist Mongolia, the re-institution of elite music and musicians (away from Soviet socialist auspicing and affiliation) is now happening at a politico-structural level. I’ve noticed recently that English language Mongolia-related lists to which I subscribe are increasingly offering descriptions of keystone organizational ‘developments’ that are (appropriately) rendered in the English language (and Mongolian Cyrillic sometimes.
- After a hiatus of many years, we are starting to see new ‘loose tie’ organisational affiliations foregrounded, as senior Mongolian government officials and representatives forge new links with high-profile political and cultural entities in the West. The present Government of Mongolia’s ‘cultural partnership’ with The Philadelphia Orchestra (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-philadelphia-orchestra-and-the-government-of-mongolia-announce-new-cultural-partnership-300230723.html) [Retrieved: 9 October 2016] is an illustrative example of this.
- The Mongol composer Zulan and her modernization of traditional musical forms. See: ‘Sound Magician’ which premiered at the Beethovenfest in Germany. Published: 23 September 2015. Retrieved: 21 December 2016;
- Mongolian Music Dance: From the Grasslands of China auspiced by the University of Albany Confucius Institute, in collaboration with The Arts College of Inner Mongolia (Hohhot, China). Retrieved: 21 December 2016; and
- The Smithsonian Institute’s ‘Reimagining Mongolian Music in China’ Published 7 April 2014. Retrieved: 21 December 2016.
To be clear, these are but a few threads in a much more complicated local-to-Mongolia matrix of societal realignments and in-the-public-domain conversations. What of the bigger picture, the ‘thicker description’ (cf. Clifford Geertz, 1973) of events? What news of other Mongol cultural reimaginings rendered in Beijing Mandarin or Russian Cyrillic? What do we English-reading audiences hear (through interpreters) from these alternative modes of communication? Maybe one of you could help me out here?
Contemporary Mongol ‘borderland’ music in performance: western ‘world music’ conceptions
There are a few (but not so many) professional ‘western’ musician-performers who have embraced late 20th century Mongolian (in Mongolia) musical forms, instrumentation, sonorities and playing techniques, and then merged them with their own. One could say that such a musician, someone who wanted to work ‘inter-culturally’ in another country of origin to that of their own, would adopt a synthetic if not syncretic approach[xiv] in their creativity. They are attempting to merge initially unfamiliar musical idioms, motifs, instrumentation and ideation of ‘other’ into developing their own innovative syncretic forms. In so doing, they re-forge the porous boundaries of personal curiosities, abilities and tastes.
So why make the effort to do this in person, to travel all the way to Mongolia[xv] [xvi] rather than just Google along? Moreover, what are some of the artistic and embodied results arising from such a considerable inter-cultural and personal investment?
In response to the first question, a serious musician can avail themselves, through immersion in the aesthetics and other facets of a (new) proximal culture (cf. Mongolian culture in Mongolia) to stimulate their own artistic renewal and dynamic revitalization. As for my response to the second question? I have selected the musical creativity of Paris-based multi-instrumentalist arranger-composer Mathias Duplessy (1972- ) for his broad palette of multimodal-multimedia options and what can materialise (artistically) from taking the risk to wade into the pond of ‘culturally new. .[xvii] Duplessy’s compositions and performances (and their flamboyant at times outrageous multiple self-projections) appeal to me if not for their theatre, then out of curiosity. The following selection of links to his creations will give you a sense of what I am talking about.
- An original compostion for morin khuur, voice and drum by Mathias Duplessy. It’s a multi-track. He plays all three. From the album Public tunes/Private Songs).
Sad Morin Khuur Published: 2012. Retrieved: 21 December 2016.
- From the album ‘Violins of the World.’ Composed by Enkhjargal Dandarvaanchig (Morin khuur) and Mathias Duplessy (guitar and Khoomei) with Guo Gan (on erhu) and Aliocha Regnard (on nyckelharpa).
Crazy Horse Published in 2015. Retrieved: 21 December 2016.
- A largely improvised (live performance) in a less staged setting, different instrumentation and blending of multi-cultural vocal techniques.
Duplessy and The Three Violins of the World Published: 2013. Retrieved: 21 December 2016.
- Mathias Duplessy playing one of his compositions (live): a rhythmic blues with Mongol styles of singing (Kargyraa and Khoomei) whilst playing a two-string Gnawa Bass (Gombri) traditionally used for certain African spiritual rhythms and songs.
Blues in Mongolian Style Published: 2011 Retrieved: 21 December 2016.
- Finally, if your taste for ‘other’ music is not yet satiated, then, take a look at the following version of a (western) rock classic by contemporary Korean gayageum-instrumentalist-electronic composer Luna Lee. The gayaeum is, like the Mongolian traditional instruments described in this post, a zither but with 12-21 strings. Luna is not Mongolian but I think her syncretic approach to cross-cultural creativity is worth further exploration.
Voodoo Child (Jimmy Hendrix) on Korean Gayageum by Luna Published: February 2013. Retrieved: 21 December 2016.
Creative Distanciation: Etude for Naro (video on You Tube by CP)
“Without an imagined audience there is no message, there is no art.” [xviii]
The identity and attachments formed by a participant-observer (CP) who has been ‘situated’ in another non-English speaking culture for many years is turning out to be far more layered than I ever imagined: more than any rendering in written summaries or acknowledgement sections could ever hope to give account. This year I have begun searching out other ways to document and communicate to others my observations and experiences in Mongolia these past years. I aspire to communicate my deep sense of connection with the Mongol people about whom I write more creatively (or something to that effect).
And so, the short video on You Tube titled, Etude for Naro is my next attempt to reach this goal. It is the final component of this Creative Distanciation presentation (which is both distributed (across 2 channels) and multimodal [xix] (see Arola, Sheppard, and Ball 2014).
I would like to think that—this is a bit of a mouthful—my choice of instrumentation for performance, the composite of visual elements and the range of local-to-Mongolia narratives they are intended to invoke, together with the semantics, phonologies and associated meanings (cf. Leonard Bernstein) conveyed through this amalgam of source materials, may in some way reflect important facets of my in-Mongolia identity and my attachments to particular others there. On You Tube, I have re-created for (Mongolian) others a work to (metaphorically) bridge the distance from my home in Melbourne to them in Mongolia using mutually recognizable instrumentation, cultural symbols and other motifs.
Resource: Etude for Naro video on You Tube (Length: 3:48 min)
Resource : Etude for Naro: Sheetmusic (lead sheet, see below)
Creative Distanciation: Etude for Naro (a technical study by CP)
“Since in music we deal with notes, not words, with chords, with transitions, with color and expression, the musical meaning always based on those notes as written and nothing else, has to be divined.” (Claudio Arrau) [xxv]
This creative work is not an origin story of (Mongolian) cultural exceptional-ism. That is, I am not composing or performing ‘traditional’ Mongolian music that I have learnt. Rather, I have drawn from the strong influences of the Nineteenth Century Euro-centric classical tradition in our music-s; an aspect of contemporary musicianship that most (post) (soviet) Mongolian classically-trained musicians share. The intention is to communicate a shard of cultural understanding and empathy, as well as a kind of wholesome attachment to these same others there. Have I succeeded? I will only know when I am told. The Mongolian people with whom I keep company take their music seriously, especially when a work is expressly and overtly related to them. (Here, she breaks into a broad smile that tapers off into nervous laugher as she continues to write).
Etude for Naro[xx] is an original composition (I think) arranged for piano akkordeon in the key of C minor. It builds on a simple motif cascading downward from the minor third, and pays homage to the technical studies for pianoforte by Carl Czerny (1791-1857) and his enormous body of other works.[xxi] My original copy of Czerny’s Schule der Gelaufigkeit (The School of Velocity) Opus 299, purchased in 1965 for 7/- (Australian Shillings) sits front and centre within the video’s visual frame. Etude for Naro is intended as a heart-gift for a young musician friend of mine in Mongolia. Like others in this post, she too is flourishing in the vibrant inter-cultural social worlds we call home.
So that’s it! My sincerest gratitude to Zava Damdin Bagsh (1976 – ) for the ongoing invitation to sustain ‘Mongolia’ as an animated point of cultural reference and study for the past decade and more. Some musicians referred to in this post are acquaintances if not friends. I thank you all. In particular, I would like to thank Dugarjav Bilguun who since 2004 has been opening my eyes and ears to the rich and changing palette of local music in Mongolia today. To his nephew Ulziikhishig Temuulen, a very big thank you also. A busy young man about town in UB, he was kind enough to give me, my first lessons on the morin khuur, a precious gift from a Mongol elder. Also, a big thank you to Amarbat Temuulen and Damdin Gerlee (people in women’s bodies) for being there for me— at the last minute when I need your help most! And to Christopher Blackall who continues to support my interrogation of western academic literature as a counterpoint to ‘doing anthropology’ out in the field—thank you so much! Irrespective of age, there are few people with whom I keep company in Mongolia for whom making music is not implicated in some meaningful way in what they do. I thank you for your time and for what you have chosen over the years to so generously share with me. Finally, I wish to thank some of my musician-friends in Melbourne, especially Amy Lynch[xxii], Peter Anderson[xxiii], and Kirsty Pittman,[xxiv] with whom I share the love of inter-cultural and community-based music-making as performance art.
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Sweers, Britta. 2014. “Toward an Application of Globalisation Paradigms to Modern Folk Music Revivals.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival, edited by Caroline Bithell and Juniper Hill. New York: Oxford University Press.
[i] ‘Distanciation’ is an important concept when writing from an imagined ‘reader-oriented’ perspective i.e. ‘you’. Although grounded in text, writing is not ‘objective’ and is therefore open to interpretation, right? So, as a work of ‘discourse’ this post, this ‘composition’, follows an arc (like others on my website) to tell a particular story, with footnotes designed to not only support the unfolding narrative and its ‘style’, but to work with a form of distanciation; the one that takes into account a narrative text’s separation from the frame of reference where the orator (me) and her live audience (you) were proximally located and our dialogic exchange was real-time.
To be sure, in terms of narrative modalities, writing and speaking are two different modes and ‘distanciation’ highlights an important difference between the two. Attributed to French Philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005). The other form of ‘distanciation’ of relevance here, is related to ‘meaning’ where written text has the potential to acquire a longer life than that of a speech event (see Czarniawska 2004, pp69-71). I draw on the powerful dynamics of meta-narrative and ‘self-explaining’ (Fiorella and Mayer 2015, pp123-129) with metaphor, allegory, repetition and detail to tell my story in parts.
[ii] In terms of western academic studies associated with a psychology of music, how can we make sense of music-s’ diversity? … ‘the functions of which range from the individual—music can affect the way we feel and the way we manage our lives—to the social (it can facilitate the co-ordination of large numbers of people and help to forge a sense of group identity… musical behavior (including all kinds of listening and performance) also covers a vast middle ground in which relationships between self and other or between the individual and the collective are played out’ (Martin Clayton 2016, p47). In terms of the ‘aesthetics’ of music and ‘the idea of concurrent parallel mental processes transforms our understanding of the phenomenon of pleasure’ (Huron 2016, p239) and music’s integration into our everyday life. As for the creative processes associated with musical composition? Whilst there is little agreement (even within Western culture) on a cultural definition of ‘composition’ (Impett 2016, p651) for this post I’ll leave it at, ‘humanly organized sound’ (Blacking 1973). As for the question of, ‘musical identity’ Hargreaves, MacDonald and Miell (2016, p759) continue to argue, quite rightly, that notions of musical identity, overlap with other psycho-socially constructed concepts such as personhood, self-concept and musical preference.
[iii] At the level of presentation formats, ‘multimedia’ refers, ‘to the use of different forms of representation such as texts and pictures. At the level of sensory modalities, it means the use of multiple sensory organs such as the eye and the ear’ (Schnotz 2014, pp72-73). In terms of developing multimedia compositions, the actual information and communication technologies (ICTs) used become less interesting than other perspectives even though they shape their form.
‘Creative Distanciation’ is based on the Integrated Text and Picture Model of Comprehension (ITPC) that, ‘provides a framework for analysis of learning from multiple representations including spoken or written text, visual pictures, and sound pictures’ (p97). In terms of a ‘modality principle,’ presenting some information in visual mode and other information in auditory mode can produce ‘the modality effect’ where learning occurs through a mixed-mode presentation of information. There is research evidence that supports the assumption that this is more effective than a single-mode presentation of the same information (Low and Sweller 2014, p227).
I have also adopted the ‘personalization principle’ long advocated by Richard E Mayer (2014, p345), in that, ‘people learn more deeply when the words in a multimedia presentation are in conversational style’ and from my perspective, that’s you.
[iv] The detailed nature of postings (incl. footnotes) to my web-blog are designed to have ‘long tail distributions’ (Benkler 2006). This effect is made possible through online access. It is quantified (in terms of value to unknown others) and monitored and measured (website backend analytics and visiting patterns) through reducing yet sustained visits to both older and more recent posts to CPinMongolia.com over time. In terms of Internet-based modelling, I choose to align myself with other individuals who are contributing to rich commons-like and non-fiscal networks of knowledge sharing and cultural production.
[v] Based on my participant-observations and social relations in Mongolia since 2004, the following conception of ‘cosmopolitan’ from Peter Marsh (Marsh 2009a, p7) rings most true: ‘[The] musical and conceptual continuities that connect the Socialist and post-Socialist periods in Mongolia are rooted in a fundamental social transformation of the twentieth century [called ‘cosmopolitanism’.] By this I am referring to the imagined connection that people sense they have with a broader trans-local or international community, but which is manifest in distinctly local ways. Mongolian cosmopolitans are those who, often by virtue of their training, education, or experience, identify with a broader international culture or way of life, and who seek to bring a uniquely Mongolian version of this to their homeland.’
[vii] See Peter Marsh (2009b, pp16-46) for a developmental history of the two-stringed bowed lute from the era of the Mongol Empire until the Peoples Revolution in 1921. Marsh’s narrative, based on data available to scholars of the western tradition, builds a picture of the cultural life of the Gobi Khalkha and Western Oriat people.
[viii] ‘Residing at the heart of a complex of symbolic meanings surrounding the key symbol of Chinggis Khan (cf. Ortner 1973), the Mongolian horse-headed lute (Mong: морин хуур) has come to play an important role in the narratives surrounding and supporting the new national myths’ (Marsh 2009a, pp122-123) as well as playing an important role in defining modern Mongolians in Mongolia self-identity.
[ix] The singer-performer Lhagvaa is (through my eyes) the Mongolian (in Mongolia) equivalent of Australia’s John Farnham. Australians reading this post may be able to connect to Lhagvaa through this lens. In 2015, at their 25th Year Anniversary Concert at the Mongolian State Opera House in UB it was standing room only. At the State Opera House performance, I saw how children and adults from four and five generations of the one Mongol kinship group had come together as a family outing to the concert. They were seated in clusters, sang along with each song (they knew all the words!) and often had their arms raised and swinging in time with the music—something everyone else in the auditorium was also doing. Such is Lhagvaa’s deep heart-connection with his local Mongolian-in-Mongolia audience.
[x] The musician-performer Khatanbaatar Lhagvasuren is wearing a pendant with a Svastika at his heart as an element in his public presentation of self to others. Robert Beer (1999: 343) refers to the Svastika (Eng. Swastika) as, ‘a common symbol found in many cultures and civilisations. It occurs in Egyptian, Trojan, Roman, Teutoni and Celtic stone carvings; as a symbolic motif of the American Indians, throughout North Central and South America; and in Persian, Central Asian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese and South East Asian art … in Buddhist art [ ] the Swastika represents the stability of the element Earth … The Indian symbol of the swastika first appears amongst artifacts from the ancient Harappan city of Mohehjo-Daro in the Indus Valley (circa 2500 B.C.). [It] was first identified with Vishnu, as a solar or fire symbol of his chakra or as the auspicious mark which adorns Vishnu’s breast—known as the shrivatsa— meaning ‘beloved of good fortune’ …
[Furthermore] the Sanskrit word ‘svastika’ derives from the root sv-asti, meaning well-being, good fortune, success or prosperity… In the Tibetan Bon tradition the swastika (Tib. g.yung drung) meaning eternal and unchanging, essentially corresponds to the Buddhist vajra … The Bon swastika rotates in an anticlockwise direction, unlike the Hindu, Jain and Buddhist swastika, whose sacred motion is clockwise… In Indian symbolism the right (Skt. dakshina) or clockwise-rotating swastika is identified with the male principle of the god, and the left (Skt. vama) or anticlockwise swastika (Skt. sauvastika) with the feminine principle of the goddess. In China the swastika (Ch. wan) was originally a Taoist symbol of eternity and divinity … Whatever its origin, the swastika was essentially an ancient and widespread auspicious symbol of good fortune, though its adoption by the German Nazi Party as the symbol of the Third Reich has recently bestowed the most sinister impression of nationalism upon it.’ Lkhagvaa has for the many years I’ve known him has kept company with a high profile Mongolian Gelugpa prelate (ZDR, 1976 – ) in Mongolia. Suffice to say, his incorporation of a Svastika into a public persona, is likely to have Indic and Buddhist (rather than Third Reich) overtones.
[xi] Also Kazak, Turkic: Qazaq; Russian: Қазаx (Qazaqs “of the steppes” as differentiated from Казак (Cossacks of the Russian Imperial military). With Turkic ancestry, their presence is concentrated on an area that extends from Eastern Europe and eastwards across the Ural Mountains and ‘Central Asia’ into Russia and the ‘Inner Asia’ nation states of China, and Mongolia. According to the 2010 National Mongolian Census preliminary results, in 2010, 96% of people living in Mongolia (Mong. Монгол Улс) were ethnic Mongols. The remaining 4% (~201,000 people) were Khazakh.
[xii] I am unaware of any current projects related to researching Khazakh-centric musicianship in Mongolia although there may well be some local initiatives in this regard. However, from an inter-cultural educational perspective the Fourth Aga Khan’s Humanities Project may have much to offer musician-educators in this field. As John M. O’Connell (2015) explains, the Humanities Project is focused on curriculum development, academic instruction, and scholarly research. Conceived as an educational project that serves to promote pluralism and tolerance in Central Asia, the program draws upon an international range of pedagogical sources. These encompass the cultural artifacts of world traditions that foster a new understanding of difference in the region. Critical here is the development of a civil society that is both democratic and humane in the wake of Soviet disintegration.
As a way of building bridges across the region, the curriculum is now taught in more than fifty institutions. Since the syllabus involves “core texts” from around the world and the pedagogy emphasizes critical reasoning in a cross-cultural perspective, the curriculum aims to promote leadership through a humanist approach to education. The project acknowledges music in the curriculum. As part of a wider study of expressive culture, the program views music as a human activity that serves both to embed cultural identity and to foster intercultural dialogue. In the first instance, the curriculum honors the musical traditions of Central Asia, be they of Turkic origin (such as the epic cycle called Manas in Kyrgyzstan) or Persian derivation (such as the elegiac form called madah in Tajikistan). The curriculum also looks at the materials of music (such as song texts) and the artifacts of music (such as instrument design).
The curriculum examines the lives of musicians, tracing how each learned his or her art and how each practiced his or her tradition. This part of the curriculum draws on the work of the Music Initiative, especially the master-apprentice program now established in Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan (among other countries). Significantly, musical anthologies of representative performances are available in the form of CDs and DVDs. The musical content of the curriculum benefits from these resources. Music theory is not described as technical abstraction. Principles are related to practice, the curriculum emphasizing the relationship between the audible and visible to demonstrate the sophistication of creativity both as an expression of human cognition and as a celebration of human sensibility. Music repertoire is related to musical concepts, showing how musical performances are structured and realized. Here, music categories are viewed as cultural commodities that are shared and exchanged between distinctive traditions.
[xiii] A nod from me to the French Sociologist-Philosopher Pierre Bourdieu (1984) and the topic of ‘distinction.’
[xiv] Here, I would like to draw on Ronald M. Davidson’s observation (2002: p116) of how ‘regional institutional cultures’ (cf. monasteries in Early Esoteric Indian Buddhism, circa. 7th century) can be seen as analogous to educational institutions and large corporations of our modern age. Participating individuals are socialized to reflect the values and behaviors of (more senior) others associated with the organisation to which they aspire, for whatever reasons, to belong. If you have completed musical training at a University or monastic training in another kind of Institute of Higher Education you will know to what I am refer here. Notionally, such communities of trainee-practitioners in socially-constructed terms (see Fisher 2006), negotiate and are buffeted by cross currents of expectations. To be sure, the environment is competitive, hierarchical and individual-focused. As Davidson points out, this ensures the development of a consensus around the big picture history of an institution, and what it’s opinion leaders think it should, for whatever reasons, be about.
[xv] The entire population for the country of Mongolia is ~3,035,000, with a current net migration loss of ~3,000 people leaving the country this year. To be sure, there are more Mongol people living beyond Mongolia’s nation state borders than there are living therein. It is estimated that ~100,00 Kalmyk Mongols live in Elista (Russian Federation); 500,000 Buryat Mongols live in Ulan-Ude and Irkutsk (Russian Federation); ~140,00 Oirat Mongols who live in Xinjiang (People’s Republic of China); and ~263,000 Tuvan- Mongolia who live in Kyzyl (Russian Federation) (Source: Quora at https://www.quora.com/Where-are-the-most-sizable-populations-of-Mongolians-outside-of-Mongolia-and-Inner-Mongolia).
In relation to descendants of Khalkha Mongols, ~5,800,000 live in China and ~30,500 in South Korea (Source: 2010 Mongolian Census). In 2010 there were only ~18,300 Mongolian Americans whose communities are concentrated in California, Illinois, Virginia and Colorado. (Source: “Profile of General Population and Housing Characteristics: 2010 Census Summary File 2, Mongolian alone or in any combination (465) & (100-299) or (300, A01-Z99) or (400-999)”. American FactFinder. United States Census Bureau).
Smaller communities of Khalkha Mongols live in the Czech Republic (~7500) (Mongolia Web Accessed: 21 December 2016), the United Kingdom (~7,000) (Mongolia: Mapping exercise. London: International Organization for Migration. May 2009), Canada (~5,300) (Canadian 2011 Household Survey of mother tongues spoken at home) and Japan (~4,700) (Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tokyo 2005). According to the 2011 Australian Bureau of Statistics National Census, there are ~1200 people with Mongolian ancestry living in Australia with the largest concentration in and around Sydney, New South Wales.
[xvi] My study of contemporary (post-soviet socialist) Mongol culture continues to be focused on Mongolians-in-Mongolia and not on the broader Mongol diaspora that, since the cessation of soviet socialist rule in Mongolia ~ 1990, has since moved much further afield.
[xviii] See: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/14/why-i-took-slow-train-to-become-fan-of-bob-dylan-simon-armitage Retrieved: 4 November 2016.
[xix] Here, ‘multimodal’ describes the combination and use of original music, images, video and text in an integrated exposition The work is also ‘multi-disciplinary’ in that it draws from Anthropology, Musicology, Ethnomusicology, Asian Studies, Communication Studies, Buddhist Studies, Mongolian Gelugpa Studies, Cultural Studies, Narrative Studies and Educational Research. The creative opportunities available in this modality, at the intersection of disciplines, are considerable: something that working strictly within intra-disciplinary frameworks and their stylistic conventions would most likely disallow.
[xx] ‘Naro’ is also a direct reference to the Indian (Bengali) Brahmin Mahasiddha Nāro-pā (Prakrit; Sanskrit: Nāropadā) (see Loden 2005, Mullin 1996, Courtin and Cameron 1998) who studied at Nalanda University in the ancient kingdom of Magadha (modern-day Bihar in India). Located south-east of Patna, I first visited the ruins of this once acclaimed centre of Buddhist learning (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) in 1987. My journey into studying Buddhist logic and philosophy and experiencing its community-based socio-cultural constructions has unfolded from there.
The journey of writing on this topic, however, from the outset has been inspired by Yanjin (Mong.) and her associated and at times appointed temporal embodiments. The name ‘Yanjin’ is derived from ‘Yangjan Lhamo’ (Mong. Egesigtü eke; Tib. dbYans-can-ma) and in Sanskrit. Sarasvati. ‘ Sarasvati’s presence is not usually sought in the home’ (although the ubiquity for the Internet and working from home is now changing all that) … her presence (particularly in India) is sought in libraries and schools by those who create and bear culture in the ongoing task of transforming the natural world into a refined and civilized habitation for human beings.’ (Kingsley 1986, p63) quoted in Miranda Shaw (2006c, p236) who goes on to describe how, ‘Sarasvati has been associated with intellectual and artistic pursuits and [is] invoked by those who seek knowledge or strive through education or sacred arts to transmit the cultural values than ennoble and embellish life.’ (Pleteshner 2011, p126 fn.76).
As Andrew McGarrity (2015, p313) points out, ‘the dichotomy between philosophical reasoning or analysis and spiritual practice or religious experience has been a common motif in shaping Western perceptions of Indian and Buddhist thought’ and by implication the wide range of cross-cultural perceptions related to those who self-identify as ‘Buddhist.’ If then, ‘the syncretic nature of the Buddha’s teaching[s] and [their] ability to pull apparently disparate philosophical strands together into a harmonious whole, especially through the incorporation of ethical cultivation’ is valid, then in broader sociological terms, I am deeply sympathetic to Guiseppe Tucci’s apparent ‘big picture’ perspective in how the Mahayana tradition can bring together disparate philosophical, ethical, religious and cultural expressions with a sense of internal unity and coherence (pp343-44). In other words, put more simply, and to quote Sandra Bullock, “— and world peace!”
[xxi] Born in Vienna (of Czech ancestry) this industrious Austrian composer produced more than a thousand works (up to Opus 861) many of which were études (“studies”) specifically composed to facilitate the progressive development of piano technique. In terms of ‘modern’ classical piano technique, legacy and lineage, the Russian-Royal Prussian Court pianist Anna Yesipova (1851-1914), the deeply patriotic Polish-American-Jewish pianist Arthur Rubenstein (1887-1982), the Chilean (Spanish-Scottish-Catholic) pianist Claudio Arrau (1903-1991) and Argentinian Jewish-born pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim (1942- ) are descendants. See Bomberger, D E (2004) An Index to Music Published in The Etude magazine 1883-1957 (Lanham: Scarecrow Press).
As a far less accomplished student of classical piano technique, I also studied Czerny’s etudes and based my interpretations of Beethoven’s piano sonatas (for examinations) on Arrau’s ‘romantic’ [Schonberg, Harold C (1987) The Great Pianists from Mozart to the Present (Simon & Schuster. 2nd Edition] ‘thick and disembodied’ [Randles, Roma (2013) A Life in Music: Ruth Nye and the Arrau Heritage (Grosvenor House Publishing) p1937] sound.
[xxii] The pianist-composer Amy Lynch is my akkordeon tutor. Born in Tasmania, Amy first studied advanced classical piano with the English-born, French-educated piano soloist Beryl Sedivka (b1928) at the Tasmanian Conservatorium where she completed her undergraduate degree. Sedivka, also an outstanding classical chamber musician, had studied piano with the Croatian pianist Dino Ciami (1941- 1974), the British pianist (Cutner) Solomon (1902-1988) and the German-born British composer and concert pianist Theodor Reizenstein (1911-1968) before moving to Tasmania to teach and perform for The Tasmanian Conservatorium in 1966.
Amy is currently enrolled in a tailored program, ‘a specialized year of study for students who have achieved academic excellence in their undergraduate degree’ at The Melbourne (University) Conservatorium of Music. She cites the classical pianist-composer Michael Horsphol, previously her neighbor, and the akkordeon-improviser Anthony Schultz as informing and influencing her emergent performance and compositional works. After three years of living abroad in South America and studying music in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Amy Lynch is currently the pianist/akkordeonist and founding member of La Busca. This particular ensemble specializes in interpreting and improvising traditional tangos from early 20th Century Argentina in innovative ways. The group performs original arrangements for which Amy, the talented jazz acoustic double bass player Elise Winterflood and Jessica McLaughlan (flute) have been the primary source.
[xxiii] The instrument I play on You Tube is a Hohner Concerto 26/48 vintage piano akkordeon manufactured in Germany during the late 1960s early 1970s. It was British-born Oliver (‘Olie’) Hinton (Community Music Victoria’s Coordinator) who first introduced me to this model (similar to the one he plays) and so began the search for a similar instrument of my own. After six months reconnaissance, the akkordeon on which I perform Etude for Naro has travelled from Germany to Bulgarian akkordeonist Slav Petrov in Dobrich then on to me here in Melbourne. It is lightweight and responsive with a punchy sound. I would like to thank Melbourne’s piano akkordeon aficionado Peter Anderson for facilitating this above average musician-to-instrument match. In terms of akkordeon repairs and construction, he is our go-to-artisan in this particular field.
[xxiv] Kirsty Pittman is an English born, Melbourne-based composer and guitarist-performer who is currently studying composition at The Melbourne (University) Conservatorium of Music with Professor Stuart Greenbaum for her Honours Degree. Here, she is also exploring modern classical guitar and Tango guitar with her other mentors, Ken Murray and Doug de Vries. Recently she has completed compositions for orchestra, big bands, electronics, guitar ensemble, extended chamber works as well as solos and duets. In previous years, she majored in guitar at The Melbourne Polytechnic and cites guitarist Tom Fryer and multi instrumentalist Adrian Sherriff as influential teachers in this regard. She speaks of how they stimulated and encouraged focus on using Turkish and Arabic drum rhythms and additive cycles for her original compositions. At The Melbourne Polytechnic she also studied Konnokol with Adrian Sherriff, and Karnatic Vocals with Shobhar Sekhur. She continues to develop her own skills under the tutelage of both of them. In 2015 Kirsty Pittman was invited to perform in a collaboration of Western and South Indian musicians in an ensemble led by Guru Karaikudi Mani and Adrian Sherriff.
Improvisation and composing original works is Kirsty’s main focus. Her compositions always have a large improvisatory element. Recently she has been exploring the Oud and fretless guitar in order to explore microtones and thereby add to her existing palette of improvised sounds and techniques. Since 2015, her primary outlet for performance and original compositions has been her chamber-jazz fusion ensemble Samassin with whom in 2016 she toured Europe and Turkey. Kirsty Pittman in mentioned here because I think her original compositions—their earthy, vibrant, original eastern-tinged jazz compositions, exotic rhythms drawn from traditional rhythmic ideas of the Middle East and Balkans— are outstanding, in terms of complexity and in terms of the visual imagery/emotional journey listening to her music supports. The rich textures and sounds of ‘Golden Muse’, the Samassin Quartet’s album, appeals deeply to my own musical conscience and its eclectic taste.
[xxv] Source: Claudio Arrau Biography Retrieved: 3 October 2016. At The Dame Nellie Melbourne Conservatorium of Music in Melbourne during the early 1970s, I studied a number of Beethoven’s later piano sonatas according to Arrau’s interpretive style under the supervision of my classical piano teacher, the wonderful Margriet Pendavingh.
The multimodal presentation Creative Distanciation: Etude for Naro (Soundscape 04) was created by Catherine Pleteshner.
See the INDEX to my blog for other articles that may be of interest.
In keeping with ethical scholarly research and publishing practices and the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, I anticipate that anyone replicating the photographs or translating into another language all or part of this article and submitting it for accreditation or other purpose under their own name, to acknowledge this URL and its author as the source. Not to do so, is contrary to the ethical principles of the Creative Commons license as it applies to the public domain.
end of transcript.
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Calculate the gender of your baby, boy or girl, with the Chinese calendar conception chart 100% accurate baby gender predictor for 2021 and 2022, in accordance with the precepts of Chinese astrology, for mothers who wish to determine the sex of their child at the time of conception. At the same row, if you want to conceive a boy check the boy's box; for girl, look the and girl's boxes. Enter your actual date of birth. The month of conception can be calculated by removing two weeks at the date of the last menstruation. Keenly aware of the global issues we all face, Japan is proactively engaging in research and taking action for their resolution. Some claim that using a Chinese gender calendar can be up to 93 percent accurate in predicting your baby’s sex. Some mother-to-be carry high, some carry low, and some bellies look different every day. Then, look along the top row for the month your baby was conceived. Below you can find dates and hours of all Moon Phases in 2022. You can find both simple black & white and cute pastel designs. 200+ Coolest Baby Girl Names Baby Names Gone Wild! Celebrities can be a great source of unique baby names. She is a Japanese actress and singer. NAMES MEANING GENDER; Aoi (あおい) Holly flower: Unisex: Japanese: 2022 Incnut Digital. The Chinese Baby Gender Prediction Calendar Chart was revealed by a Taiwanese newspaper in 1972. Ox people born during the Tiger month of February or during Tiger hours (3 a. The Accuracy of the Maya Calendar Gender Prediction Method. When deciding to use the 2021 Chinese Predictor for Baby Gender service online, you will be offered an available form to enter necessary information. Gina comes from a Greek word and means Well Born. Step 2: Find the baby gender using month of conception against the magic number. If the fetal heart rate (FHR) is less than 140 bpm, it means you are having a baby boy; if the FHR is 140 bpm or above, it means you are having a baby girl. Latest available data is from 2017 - OECD. Department of Advanced Pathobiology, Graduate School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Osaka Prefecture University, Izumisano, Osaka, Japan; . Enter your age 18 years 19 years 20 years 21 years 22 years 23 years 24 years 25 years 26 years 27 years 28 years 29 years 30 years 31 years 32 years 33 years 34 years 35 years 36 years 37 years 38 years 39 years 40 years 41 years 42 years. Top 200+ Coolest Baby Girl Names. 16 rows in 2022, chinese new year begins on february 1st and ends february. They have a crush on you (gender neutral reader), but think they are not enough for you. Chinese Gender Predictor, Baby Gender Calendar for Pregnancy. Many celebrities have chosen baby names that could be considered cool, weird, or interesting, depending on your perception. January 1 to 3, 2022 (three days in total; 2022 public holidays in china. Chinese Baby Gender Prediction Calendar. the Philippine Consulate General in Nagoya conducted various Gender and . You will find information about the growth of your baby, changes in your body and the preparations for your birth. That's literally what the joker guy said. Enter your Actual Birth date, place and time. Our 10-question gender prediction quiz takes only a couple of. Daily, weekly, and monthly calendars showing all months of the year 2022. how to predict or conceive a baby boy, 100 percent accurate baby gender predictor and planner chart, find how to conceive a baby girl. You can easily calculate your due date here and find useful links for your pregnancy. Holidays are not yet supported for this country. , Manila time (GMT +8) March 2022. March 5, 2022 to march 31, 2022. espn fantasy football trade value chart; valencia scholarship bulletin board; simplicity wide leg pants pattern; old las palmas, palm springs homes for sale Donate Now. With 400+ sessions and hundreds of inspiring speakers, MAX 2021 was an amazing. Here are all the year at a glance SaturdayGift calendars for years 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2024. JetPens carries planners from brands like Hobonichi, Kokuyo, and Midori. Chinese gender calendar boy or girl chart is based on lunar calendar which shows dates according to the phases of the moon. “I Still Have Faith In You,” ABBA. The tool will automatically calculate your lunar age as per the chinese gender calendar and will let you know if you're having a baby girl or a baby boy. Tiger month is the first month of the spring. The best baby names of 2022 hit all the hottest trend notes right now, blending a fashionable sound and style with influence from pop culture, current affairs and societal trends. To use the chart correctly (see below), first locate the mother's age at conception in the Y axis (the column on the left) and then look across on the X axis (the column which goes horizontally across. Hikari Mitsushima was born 30 November 1985. 3rd-9th National Public Health Week. You should use the following lunar months for the chinese baby gender prediction chart. Dates of Moon Phases in 2022 Year. This information is developed to primarily serve as a reference. Among numerous gender prediction tools, the Mayan gender predictor is claimed to be around 85% accurate in determining the baby’s sex despite no. The month in which the mother conceived. Ginjiro is a Japanese name and means Good Silver. The square where the two meet will show if you’re having a boy or a girl according to the Chinese birth chart. Pass your NCLEX-RN in 75 questions. Red -Public Holidays and Sundays. Determining the gender of the child by Japanese calendar online. Chinese Calendar 2022 is year of the tiger from February 01, 2022. 34 (10%) Japanese baby gender prediction and planner chart (calendar). According to Chinese calendar, from February 01, 2022 to January 21, 2023 is Year of the Ox. Father's month of birth : July. I was just curious as to if anyone has checked this out. Enlightened Son, Goro is especially enthusiastic and amiable, outgoing and to a great degree informative. The Bump Chinese Gender Chart, also referred to as a Chinese Gender Calendar or a Chinese Birth Chart, is a fun way to predict the sex of baby. 4National Thank You Month Black Lives Matter At School Week of Action JAN. Share the Ramazan calendar 2022 or Ramadhan Timing of Sehar Time (Sahur, Sehr or Sehri) and Iftar Time with your friends and family and know all about Ramzan. Chinese Gender Calendar 2018-2020. From the row, find out the date range where your birthday falls in. All you need to know to predict the gender of baby is:. Friday 1:00pm – 6:00pm Saturday 11:00am – 6:00pm Sunday 11:00am – 6:00pm. This formula is designed to help you plan the gender of your baby. There's no scientific evidence that the (alleged) Mayan gender prediction. HOW TO KNOW BABY'S SEX BY USING CHINESE GENDER PREDICTICTION CHART IN 4 EASY STEPS|CHINESE CALENDERSTEP 1 CALCULTAE CHINESE AGE OF MOTHERhttps://www. Fun Fact: Besides love, Ai can be associated with the kanji for indigo. Male zodiac signs: Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius, Aquarius. To use the Baby Gender Predictor, you simply enter the two required values into the Gender Calculator: the expecting mother’s current age and the date in which the baby was conceived. Chinese birth chart From traditional family names to unique baby names, the options are endless (and can feel overwhelming) when you are searching for a unisex name that will perfectly capture your little one. Here we have made the chart into an easy one to read. It is based on two elements: the mother-to-be’s lunar conception month and …. The bump chinese gender chart, also referred to as a chinese gender calendar or a chinese birth chart, is a fun way to predict the sex of baby. In Order To Help You Check The Chart Easily, We Create The Following Chinese Gender Calendar In Western Date. Use our pregnancy calendar to track your pregnancy stages and follow your baby's development week by week. Month of conception - July Result: BOY. Doing official paperwork in Japan – know your Japanese birth year! While the Gregorian calendar is also used in Japan, the traditional Japanese . What the Chinese Gender Predictor Chart does is convert what you have input into the calendar to your lunar age when you got pregnant and the lunar date of. Female zodiac signs: Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn, Pisces. Check out SneakPeek Gender Test to find out your baby's gender as early as 6 weeks at 99. com February 3, 2022 to march 1, 2022. 0 – digital transformation of manufacturing in the fourth industrial Jan 03, 2022 · Baby movement at 29 to 31 weeks. The chinese calendar predictor method use two values: the "Lunar age" of the mother when she got pregnant and the Chinese Lunar Month of conception. Chinese Gender Calendar 2022 For Baby. Here are a few unique celebrity baby girl names: Blue Ivy: Beyonce & Jay-Z; Chicago Noel: Kim Kardashian & Kanye West. However, some suggest it also may have originated in the Slavic root milu, meaning “merciful. Origin: British | Gender: Boy | Style: Vintage | Pronunciation: Ned. dragonvale cheats 2022; what national day is september 29; sims 4 can't adopt stray; tatsumi prince fanfiction; 2022 planners near sofia. The 2021 edition of the Global Gender Gap Index studied and ranked 156 countries and territories around the world. Feb 8, 2022 - Japanese baby gender prediction calendar. Hetalia Worldâ Stars 2022 Desktop Calendar (Japan Version) Expected Release Date: 2021-12-25 Related promotions: Our Price: US$20. 16 patients had stage two and 44 stage three AKI. JordynnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnJay , 04/30/2022 . com Review to Amazon properties including, but. Bryan Adams is the author of 2022 Pirelli Calendar. japanese calendar baby gender 2022. It is not a scientifically proven method to predict the gender of your baby. Chinese Baby Gender Chart 2022 The Chinese Gender Chart is not easy to read because it's complicated to calculate Chinese lunar age and convert conception month from western calendar to Chinese lunar calendar. Python was created by Guido van Rossum in the late eighties and early nineties. Use our popular and famous baby gender predictor and sex planner tool. This online Chinese baby gender calendar will convert the age and dates into Chinese year format and perform the calculations as per the chinese birth chart. In ancient China, the royal family used the Chinese gender calendar to predict the gender of their babies in order to give birth to more boys, . Japanese baby gender prediction calendar This amazing Japanese baby sex calendar is also used widely all over the world especially in Japan to plan the baby . Enter your month of conception. Boy or girl? Calculate the gender of your baby according to your date of birth and the Lunar month at the start of your pregnancy. Title: Mayan Gender Predictor Boy Or Girl Baby Gender Pros; Type: jpg; Dimension: 675 x 690; Source: babygenderpros. Just find out the date range where the mother's birthday falls in, you will get suggested conceiving time ranges in 2022 for preferred baby gender quickly. Meaning: Cute baby names are often shortened versions of more classic names. For example if you are born on March 1st 1990, you will be looking at the line saying January 27 1990 to Feb 14 1991. Momentum to Revise Japan's Legal Gender Recognition Process the age of majority (currently age 20 and beginning April 1, 2022, age 18), . February 3, 2022 to march 1, 2022. The chart isn’t based on science, so it’s no more accurate than other low-tech, non-medical gender tests (as far as experts know, anyway!). The year 2022 is a common year, with 365 days in total. Or, for a less common royal name, Walter means "powerful warrior. Alternative Spellings & Variations: 愛 (kanji), あい (hiragana), アイ (katana) Famous Namesakes: Singer Ai Carina Uemura, poet Ai Ogawa. Always check official sites before heading to an event. They’re similar to popular baby girl names like Grace and Hazel yet aren’t found in nearly every school. Jan 03, 2022 · Fire department officials have told pet owners in South Korea to stay on guard as cats caused a total of 107 house fires between January 2019 and November 2021. OECD Labour Force StatisticsPublication (2022) Chart; Map; Table. There are calendars that come with holidays and with week numbers. 100% accurate baby gender predictor for 2021 and 2022, in accordance with the precepts of . Chinese Baby Gender Chart 2022 The Chinese Gender Chart is not easy to read because it’s complicated to calculate Chinese lunar age and convert conception month from western calendar to Chinese lunar calendar. Chinese lunar calendar 2022 baby gender. Then, find the lunar month you conceived across the top of the calendar. It will provide you with the one-year prediction calendar, which will give you the correct timing of the conception depending on the gender of your preference. Chinese Gender Predictor 2021 & 2022. See Mabel, Rosemary, and Vera for more unique vintage options. Chinese Calendar 2022 Gender Calculator 2022. We have replaced the lunar age and lunar conception months with their western date range in the following charts. Chinese baby gender prediction chart. Daily Countdown: Count down your days left until your due date. Your due date or child's birthday. You Can Plan/Predict your desired baby gender by following the simple steps : Enter Your LMP Date in LMP Box & click the Go Button. University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire 105 Garfield Avenue P. 👲 Find a Feng Shui master near you. , Day of Service 24-28 GLSEN Freedom Seeds 31–Feb. Add own events to PDF Calendar. Gender Predictor Quiz: Boy or Girl. Only common local holidays are listed. This baby gender prediction is based on the belief that women of the same age are more likely to. Brazilian folklore says that if an expecting mother cooks up a chicken's heart then she can be certain to know if she's having a boy or a girl based on how the heart reacts to heat. Find out the changes you can expect to your body, your emotions and your life as your pregnancy progresses. Brazilian folklore says that if an expecting mother cooks up a chicken’s heart then she can be certain to know if she’s having a boy or a girl based on how the heart reacts to heat. An old wives' tale says that if Baby's heart rate is above 140 beats per minute, you're carrying a girl — and if the rate is below, a boy is on the way. To prevent the spread of COVID-19, many events have been canceled. Find out the sex of your baby with the Baby Gender Predictor which uses the Chinese Pregnancy Calendar. The use of the chinese pregnancy calendar is quite simple. In the same year she made her acting debut in Rebirth of Mothra II. If your pupils are dilating, it means you’re having a boy. She came to note as a pop singer but went on to star in films. February 2022 March 2022 April 2022 May 2022 June 2022 July 2022 August 2022 September 2022 October 2022. Mayan Calendar Gender Prediction. Using the tool can be an enjoyable experience shared between family and friends, but the results are not scientifically proven. To create a Week-By-Week calendar choose from the following options: Weekly Count: Follow new developments in weeks and days. 1 April 2022 Call for Research Proposals: Trade Facilitation in CAREC - A 10-year CPMM Perspective Online via Zoom, 5:00 p. Japanese Calendar for Baby Gender Prediction 2019-2020-2021. Rediscover the Garden again and again with each visit. This vast database of Japanese names has been compiled from various references and suggestions provided by our web site users and resources partners. However, it still shows a 50% accuracy rate. Does Chinese baby gender chart work? Mums seem to think so, but given it's based on astrology alone its really only as good as a guess. 65 years average female life expectancy in the US at birth ( CIA - 2022 ) Overall the average life expectancy in US male vs female is up considering the OECD estimated Male life expectancy to be 76. To know the gender of the baby, you will need to know the father’s month of birth, the mother’s month of birth and the month of conception. Before the Zhou dynasty, solar calendars were used. Browse 2022 Calendars at Calendars. In 1997, she began her music career as an idol singer. They are skillful with money and handle finances well. Gray -Typical Non-working Days. If you are less than 18 lunar years old or older than 45 lunar years old, you couldn't get best conceiving time for preferred baby gender by using the chart. More than half of the people want to know the gender of the baby before the baby gets born. Published on September 2nd, 2020 and Updated on March 30th, 2022. To tell the truth, not many people heard about determining the sex of a baby with the Mayan baby gender prediction calendar. 2021 Chinese Horoscope Golden Cow, Metal Ox Baby Gender Calendar, Love. 9% accuracy! When you find out that you're pregnant, your mind becomes a whirl of emotions, excitement, and, of course, questions. An old wives’ tale says that if Baby's heart rate is above 140 beats per minute, you’re carrying a girl — and if the rate is below, a boy is on the way. Using Japanese boy name generator to find full list of perfect Japanese baby boy names and their meanings. The Japanese baby gender predictor chart is different from the Chinese gender predictor calendar 2021 and based on two charts. Originated from Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1911 AD), the Chinese Gender Chart or Birth Chart is widely used to predict baby's sex. Check the date range of the chosen boxes at the top of the chart to get best conceiving time ranges. Step 2 ~ At table 2, find out the baby gender by crossing the month of conception with the secret number. Daily Countup: Count up how many days you are into your pregnancy. In the Chinese gender prediction chart, two important details are needed: the mum-to-be’s birth date and date of conception (or the baby’s estimated due date in some versions). 👲 Find a Feng Shui master near you Boy or girl?. 32 Rows Chinese Baby Gender Chart 2022. Printable Calendar (PDF) for easy printing. trumansburg bed and breakfast; all star weekend 2022 game time; safety briefing for visitors. In the pregnancy calendar you can closely follow your pregnancy. People born in the year of the Horse are skillful in paying compliments and talk too much. Based on this information the scientist drew a Chinese. If you are less than 18 lunar years old. Let’s take a closer look at one of the most intriguing. I have not gotten that BFP yet, but according to this chart if i conceive during March/April I will get a girl (thats what I want--I already have two boys). What's the Chinese Zodiac-Lunar Month?. Predict the gender of your future baby. The babyMed Chinese sex predictor brings ancient information into the modern age. Simply type your date of birth and the conception date; in case you’re not sure about the date of conception, you can choose the expected due date option. Extending beyond the nation’s borders, these efforts share Japan's expertise with other countries to aim for solutions with global perspective. According to folklore, a Chinese scientist supposedly discovered some data buried in a Royal tomb near Peking, China about 700 years ago which led to the creation of the Chinese Calendar for baby sex. Animal Cruelty Prevention Month. It will show you the predicted sex of the baby for each possible month of conception for an entire year. Week by week pregnancy calendar; Chinese gender chart; GENDERmaker feedback rate; When to take GENDERmaker test; Pregnancy Progress; Best time for 4D ultrasound; Best time to have a baby shower; GENDERmaker mobile; Contractions Counter; List of old wives tales; When is my 20 week ultrasound; Trimester Calculator; Popular baby names; GENDERmaker. This ancient birth predictor considers your age and the month you conceived to work out which gender your baby might be with astrology. If you want to have some fun with the process, go ahead and try our Chinese Gender Predictor tool. ) will have an easier time adapting to the ups and downs of a Tiger year. All dates and times are given both in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and America/Los Angeles time. According to pregnancy lore, carrying high means you’re having a girl, while carrying low means it’s a boy. All you have to do is: Enter your actual date of birth. Check the date highlighted in the calendar. There is, after all, a 50 percent chance the answer you'll receive will be correct (making it as accurate as a coin toss). At the moment of lunar conception, it is necessary to find out the zodiac sign in which the moon aligned to on that date. Chinese calendar: Based on your age at conception and the month in which you conceived, this ancient chart supposedly can predict baby's gender. Chinese Calendar for Baby Boy or Girl — When to Conceive. This 2022 edition of the Mayan Calendar includes the symbols representing the day name in the Mayan Sacred and Solar calendars for every day of the year, the Long Count for the first day of every month, and factoids about important dates in Maya history. 9% accuracy! When you find out that you’re pregnant, your mind becomes a whirl of emotions, excitement, and, of course, questions. 0-year difference between average US female and male lifespan expectancy. 22 Get Organized Month National. Jonas Theory Fertility and Moon Phase Calendar A woman's peak fertility corresponds to the angles of the sun and moon that occurred at the time of her birth. Temperatures, rain and wind have a strong effect on the process of the season, for example, they can accelerate, delay or shorten it considerably. With your information, our calculator will convert your dates into your lunar dates for you with a final. It said that the Chinese Baby Gender Prediction Chart has a very high accuracy rate according to the survey in the hospital's delivery room. Promotional Events Calendar 2022. Gender-neutral names are set to remain as popular as ever in 2022 with many unisex names appearing on the boy and girl names lists below. Latest Chinese gender predictor calendar 2022 to 2023 & 2021. But since there are only two choices - boy or girl - it has at least a 50-50 chance of making an accurate prediction!. However, the Chinese pregnancy calendar predicts the baby's sex from the moment of conception with a reliability rate of approximately 90%. If the heart doesn’t open or split or expand, she’s. Such as Nate, which was often a nickname for boys called Nathan or Nathaniel, but is now a name in its own right. com is a one-stop resource for everything you want to know about Pregnancy and Pregnancy Kits. PAGE 3 | NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL AND HEALTH AWARENESS DATES • 2021-2022 CALENDAR 1 Emancipation Proclamation Anniversary 1 Global Family Day 16 World Religion Day 17 Martin Luther King, Jr. Note: The Chinese Gender Chart is used for mother from age 18 to 45 in Chinese lunar calendar. January February March April May June July August September October November December. Japanese baby gender prediction calendar This amazing Japanese baby sex calendar is also used widely all over the world especially in. It is based on two elements: the mother-to-be's lunar conception month and …. The 2022 chinese new year day is on tuesday, february 1, 2022 in china's time zone. Tickets to Thailand, Vietnam, Japan-I could go on and on-are quite affordable and only a quick hop away. Milo is also linked to related name Miles that evolved when the name immigrated to the British Isles in the Middle Ages. 2027 is the year of fire red ram (sheep, goat). Other unusual girl names are considered modern baby girl names because of their contemporary flair. Tickets to Thailand, Vietnam, Japan–I could go on and on–are quite affordable and only a quick hop away. Sep 12, 2020 - The most accurate, updated and latest Chinese gender predictor chart 2022-2023. As for the question who can apply this method, the range includes women between 18 and around 40 years old. This chart will tell you if your having a boy or girl based on month conceived and your age when baby is born. Once you have clicked the calculate button, the Gender Calculator will provide you with a prediction of your baby’s gender. Chinese Gender Calendar 2021 for Baby Boy Chinese Gender Calendar 2021 for Baby Girl. If male chromosomes are present, the baby is a boy. Chinese Gender Predictor, Baby Gender Chart 2022. Chinese Gender Predictor Table Method; Gender myths about “Gender Prediction Test”; Chinese Gender Calendar Predictor; Chinese Birth Chart | Predict Baby; 15 . The analyses of each country are intended to serve as a basis for designing effective measures for reducing gender gaps. At the same row, if you want to conceive a boy check the boy’s box; for girl, look the and girl’s boxes. Jubilee Photos; Schedule of Services; Events. They are quick thinkers, wise and talented. 2022 Plan for Baby Boy or Baby Girl? India Sex Ratio Statistic Data v. Just find out the date range where the mother’s birthday falls in, you will get suggested conceiving time ranges in 2022 for preferred baby gender quickly. Chinese lunar calendar baby predictor uses mother's chinese age at the time of conception and the month of conception. 9% accurate at 7 weeks into a woman's pregnancy. Paper and noodles are terrific, but if you're pregnant and dying to know whether a boy or girl is in your future, consult the Chinese gender predictor! Discovered 700 years ago, the Chinese birth. It was found out by ancient Chinese 700 years ago by calculating yin, yang, the Five Elements, the Eight Diagrams, and time. There's no scientific evidence that the Chinese Gender Predictor works. Go during set-up days and watch the lords and ladies of big time retail buy right o… Nov 01, 2021 · 2021-11-01. Ryan, a cute Irish name meaning "little king," is listed at No. The result is a prediction about whether you'll be having a baby boy or a baby girl. Post author By ; Post date bright and early texas cinnamon coffee; ftc identity theft statistics on japanese calendar baby gender 2022. "Monthly Survey on Service Industries" (Feb. Chinese Lunar Calendar 2021-2022 Baby Gender PredictionMost Updated Full Image. 2021 (final)) April 27 News Bulletin (The Fiscal 2022 Budget for the Statistics Bureau and the Director-General for Policy Planning (Statistical Policy) of Japan Approved) April 26 "Report on Internal Migration in Japan" (March 2022). The tiger is the chinese new year 2022 animal. Free Chinese Zodiac Calendar Calculator for mothers who wish to predict their baby's gender, boy or girl. This Scottish name means “field, meadow. The name Leroy has French roots and means "the king. Scroll down and click on Add or remove exclusions. Calendars - online and print friendly - for any year and month Gender Predictor Quiz: Boy or Girl -Chinese Gender Prediction This ranked 11th in the world and made up 1. To use the calendar, find your lunar age at the time of conception using the column to the left. Our Chinese Gender Predictor calculator forecasts your baby's sex based on an ancient Chinese gender chart and the Chinese lunar calendar. If none are found, it's a baby girl. Planning to get pregnant in 2021 or 2022??. 2 years longer than men in 2020 at birth. 6 April 2022 Asian Development Outlook 2022 Launch Online via Zoom, 1:00-2:00 p. The baby gender prediction chart that's blowing everyone's minds. Horse people anger easily and are very impatient. Sexual Assault Awareness Month. The Chinese Gender Calendar or Birth Chart is widely used to predict baby's sex. Japanese Boy Name Meanings / Orgin / Gender. 87%) of registered births occurring in 2020. Statistics Bureau Home Page. japanese calendar baby gender 2020endymion 2022 grand marshal japanese calendar baby gender 2020. The name Milo is a boy's name of German origin meaning "soldier or merciful". This includes word name options like Breezy and Bliss. We are open Wednesday - Monday from 10am - 5:30pm (closed Tuesday). Free online tool for calculating the gender of the child by . Calendar type: Julian calendar. If you’re always thinking of doughnuts, candy, or cake, you’re having a girl according to the craving gender prediction method. 1 years - Average life expectancy of a US male (at birth). Japanese baby gender calendar 2022. Nate is of Hebrew origin and means gift of God. SneakPeek is a DNA-based test that looks for male chromosomes in the fetal DNA found in mom's blood. Calculate the gender of your baby, boy or girl, with the Chinese calendar conception chart. These are perfect when making long-term plans. The calcultation to know if the the baby is a boy or a girl are said to be based on traditionnal Chinese beliefs like Yin-Yang, Five Elements, Eight Diagrams and time. If the heart doesn't open or split or expand, she's. The gender predictor test is 99. Back in ancient China, people believed that you could use a legendary Gender Chart to predict if you were going to have a baby boy or baby girl. Later, the Baby Gender Prediction Chart is posted in Chinese Farmer's Almanac every year. 1 years only a couple of years ago. BabyCenter’s baby name rankings are updated in real-time, which is why you might see one name top this list today, but something completely different next week. The sex of the baby depends on the position of the moon at the time of conception. Passenger's Name in English, Date of Birth, Gender; Nationality, . Steps to Use the Chart to Select Your Baby’s Gender. The cherry blossom front has reached Hokkaido where the season will last into May. " With your information, our calculator will convert your dates into your lunar dates for you with a final gender prediction. " However, there are many other royal-inspired names to use in 2022. For baby boy signsThis amazing Japanese baby sex calendar is used widely all over the world especially in Japan to. We're working hard to make the best pregnancy app! more. Enjoy! Download all twelve months, or one month at a time. They just have to wait for the moment that the gender is actually visible on the echo, after about 17 weeks. Enter your pregnancy due date or child's birthday below for a personalized weekly calendar that offers a daily dose of helpful, development-related information about your growing child. Apr 15, 2019 - Baby gender predictor 2021 to 2022. Simply type your date of birth and the conception date; in case you're not sure about the date of conception, you can choose the expected due date option. Expecting a baby girl this year? Here are the top girl names for 2022, according to Nameberry: Maeve. As for the freebies, if you want row Apr 20, 2017 · Woodland Crochet Round-Up - Free Crochet Patterns April 20, 2017 by Maria Weaber 2 Comments While creating my Woodland Afghan, I searched through Pinterest to make sure it was "original" enough to design and share. It is based on two elements: the mother-to-be's lunar conception month and Chinese lunar age when the baby is conceived. Choose different conception dates and check the . Proceeds support Maya Exploration Center, a non-profit research. Find calendars by desired features or topic and get ready for a productive year!. Just look at the Chinese birth chart below and find the number for how old you were when you conceived on the left. Enter Mother's date of birth and the year of conception (if already conceived) or expected year of conception (if trying for a baby) in the form given below. 100% accurate baby gender predictor for 2021 and 2022, in accordance with the precepts of Chinese astrology, for mothers who wish to determine the sex of their child at the time of conception. Check out our calendar selection for the very best in unique or custom, handmade pieces from our calendars & planners shops. For more calendars, see all our updated options here. Some say that a woman’s sweet tooth or salty snack hankerings might be an early indicator of their baby’s gender. (Enter approximate date if your don't know the actual date) Click on "Predict Baby Gender" to submit details. Than you go to the approximate date of conception and see if it says girl or boy. You need to Plan/Conceive your desired baby gender as per colours in the calendar. Home; Our Pastor; Give Online; Thanks for Your Contribution! Media. The owner of this website, PregnantEve. For baby boy signsThis amazing Japanese baby sex calendar is used widely all over the world . If it opens or splits or expands during cooking, she’s having a girl. The meaning of th name Gin is Silver. The Chinese Birth Chart relies on two important principles: The age of the mother when she conceived. Born 2002, 1990, 1978, 1966, 1954, 1942, 1930, 1918, 1906. Chinese calendar: Based on your age at conception and the month in which you conceived, this ancient chart supposedly can predict baby’s gender. Unlike the Nub, Ramzi Theory or Skull Theory used. 1 years - Average life expectancy of a US female (at birth). Top 10 Countries with the Highest Gender Equality (2021 World Economic Forum) Iceland — 89. If it opens or splits or expands during cooking, she's having a girl. Chinese u0026 Mayan Gender Predictor; japanese birth calendar Boy or Girl? 'Predict' Your Baby's; japanese birth calendar The curse of the Fire-Horse: How . But… with this test you can already get an idea of whether you’re going to buy blue or pink clothes. It starts from February 12, 2021 to January 31, 2022. Lunar Calendar 9Th Month Chinese gender calendar, Gender from www. If you don’t know your lunar dates, not to worry! We’ve made this Chinese Gender Calendar Chart easy for you. Please use this up to date list of Japanese name as a reference to name your kid/child. Despite this name meaning “crooked”, this name is a very popular choice for unisex names. In order to help you check the chart easily, we create the following Chinese Gender Calendar in Western Date. Fetal Weight: Available in ounces or grams. | <urn:uuid:ee65a67f-660f-4948-adbc-fda6e67b7f2f> | CC-MAIN-2022-21 | https://thorstenharte.de/japanese-baby-gender-calendar-2022.html | 2022-05-21T21:45:36Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662541747.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20220521205757-20220521235757-00420.warc.gz | en | 0.903645 | 9,032 |
The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 57,000 members.
Founded by Justin Winsor, Charles Ammi Cutter, Samuel S. Green, James L. Whitney, Melvil Dewey (Melvil Dui), Fred B. Perkins, Charles Evans, and Thomas W. Bicknell on October 6, 1876, during the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and chartered in 1879 in Massachusetts. Its head office is now in Chicago.
During the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, 103 librarians, 90 men and 13 women, responded to a call for a "Convention of Librarians" to be held October 4–6 at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. At the end of the meeting, according to Ed Holley in his essay "ALA at 100", "the register was passed around for all to sign who wished to become charter members," making October 6, 1876, to be ALA's birthday. Among the 103 librarians in attendance were Justin Winsor (Boston Public, Harvard), William Frederick Poole (Chicago Public, Newberry), Charles Ammi Cutter (Boston Athenaeum), Melvil Dewey, and Richard Rogers Bowker. Attendees came from as far west as Chicago and from England. The aim of the association, in that resolution, was "to enable librarians to do their present work more easily and at less expense." The association has worked throughout its history to define, extend, protect and advocate for equity of access to information.
Library activists in the 1930s pressured the American Library Association to be more responsive to issues put forth by young members involved with issues such as peace, segregation, library unions and intellectual freedom. In 1931, the Junior Members Round Table (JMRT) was formed to provide a voice for the younger members of the ALA, but much of what they had to say resurfaced in the social responsibility movement to come years later. During this period, the first Library Bill of Rights (LBR) was drafted by Forrest Spaulding to set a standard against censorship and was adopted by the ALA in 1939. This has been recognized as the moment defining modern librarianship as a profession committed to intellectual freedom and the right to read over government dictates. The ALA formed the Staff Organization's Round Table in 1936 and the Library Unions Round Table in 1940.
The ALA appointed a committee to study censorship and recommend policy after the banning of The Grapes of Wrath and the implementation of the LBR. The committee reported in 1940 that intellectual freedom and professionalism were linked and recommended a permanent committee – Committee on Intellectual Freedom. The ALA made revisions to strengthen the LBR in June 1948, approved the Statement on Labeling in 1951 to discourage labeling material as subversive, and adopted the Freedom to Read Statement and the Overseas Library Statement in 1953.
In 1961, the ALA took a stand regarding service to African Americans and others, advocating for equal library service for all. An amendment was passed to the LBR in 1961 that made clear that an individual's library use should not be denied or abridged because of race, religion, national origin, or political views. Some communities decided to close their doors rather than desegregate. In 1963, the ALA commissioned a study, Access to Public Libraries, which found direct and indirect discrimination in American libraries.
In 1967, some librarians protested against a pro-Vietnam War speech given by General Maxwell D. Taylor at the annual ALA conference in San Francisco; the former president of Sarah Lawrence College, Harold Taylor, spoke to the Middle-Atlantic Regional Library Conference about socially responsible professionalism; and less than one year later a group of librarians proposed that the ALA schedule a new round table program discussion on the social responsibilities of librarians at its next annual conference in Kansas City. This group called themselves the Organizing Committee for the ALA Round Table on Social Responsibilities of Libraries. This group drew in many other under-represented groups in the ALA who lacked power, including the Congress for Change in 1969. This formation of the committee was approved in 1969 and would change its name to the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT) in 1971. After its inception, the Round Table of Social Responsibilities began to press ALA leadership to address issues such as library unions, working conditions, wages, and intellectual freedom. The Freedom to Read Foundation was created by ALA's Executive Board in 1969. The Black Caucus of the ALA and the Office for Literacy and Outreach were set up in 1970.
At a national convention of the ALA in Dallas in 1971, Barbara Gittings staffed a kissing booth underneath the banner "Hug a Homosexual", with a "women only" side and a "men only" side. When no one took advantage of it, she and Alma Routsong kissed in front of rolling television cameras. In describing its success, despite most of the reaction being negative, Gittings said, "We needed to get an audience. So we decided, let's show gay love live. We were offering free—mind you, free—same-sex kisses and hugs. Let me tell you, the aisles were mobbed, but no one came into the booth to get a free hug. So we hugged and kissed each other. It was shown twice on the evening news, once again in the morning. It put us on the map."
In June 1990, the ALA approved "Policy on Library Services to the Poor" and in 1996 the Task Force on Hunger Homelessness, and Poverty was formed to resurrect and promote the ALA guidelines on library services to the poor.
In 2014, Courtney Young, the president of the association, commented on the background and implications of a racist joke author Daniel Handler made as African American writer Jacqueline Woodson received a National Book Award for Brown Girl Dreaming. "His comments were inappropriate and fell far short of the association's commitment to diversity," said Young. "Handler's remarks come at a time when the publishing world has little diversity. Works from authors and illustrators of color make up less than 8 percent of children's titles produced in 2013. The ALA hopes this regrettable incident will be used to open a dialogue on the need for diversity in the publishing industry, particularly in regards to books for young people."
ALA membership is open to any person or organization, though most of its members are libraries or librarians. Most members live and work in the United States, with international members comprising 3.5% of total membership.
The ALA is governed by an elected council and an executive board. Tracie D. Hall became the executive director in February 2020. Policies and programs are administered by committees and round tables. One of the organization's most visible tasks is overseen by the Office for Accreditation, which formally reviews and authorizes American and Canadian academic institutions that offer degree programs in library and information science. The ALA's current President is Julius C. Jefferson Jr. (2020–2021).
Past presidents of the ALA include Theresa Elmendorf, its first female president (1911–1912), Clara Stanton Jones, its first African American president (she served as acting president from April 11 to July 22 in 1976 and then president from July 22, 1976, to 1977), Loriene Roy, its first Native American president (2007–2008), Michael Gorman (2005–2007), Roberta A. Stevens, and Carla Hayden (2003–2004), the current Librarian of Congress (See List of presidents of the American Library Association.)
The official purpose of the association is "to promote library service and librarianship." Members may join one or more of eleven membership divisions that deal with specialized topics such as academic, school, or public libraries, technical or reference services, and library administration. Members may also join any of seventeen round tables that are grouped around more specific interests and issues than the broader set of ALA divisions.
- American Association of School Librarians (AASL)
- Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS)
- Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC)
- Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)
- Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies (ASCLA)
- Core: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures
- Library Information Technology Association (LITA)
- Library Leadership and Management Association (LLAMA)
- Public Library Association (PLA)
- Reference and User Services Association (RUSA)
- United for Libraries (United)
- Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA)
- Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF)
- Office for Accreditation (OA)
- Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services
- Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP)
- ALA Editions (book publishing)
Established in 1969, the Social Responsibilities Round Table currently oversees task forces such as the 'Feminist Task Force'; the 'Hunger, Homelessness, and Poverty Task Force (HHPTF)'; the 'International Responsibilities Task Force'; the 'Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Task Force (MLKTF)'; 'The Rainbow Project Task Force'; and the 'Task Force on the Environment'. According to their website, the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT) have worked to make the American Library Association (ALA) more democratic and progressive. Their primary focus is to promote social responsibility as a core value in librarianship and to ensure that libraries and librarians work to recognize and solve social problems in their community.
In 1970, the ALA founded the first lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender professional organization, called the "Task Force on Gay Liberation", later known as the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table (GLBTRT), and now as the Rainbow Round Table. The first leader was Israel David Fishman. Barbara Gittings became its coordinator in 1971. In the early 1970s, the Task Force on Gay Liberation campaigned to have books about the gay liberation movement at the Library of Congress reclassified from HQ 71–471 ("Abnormal Sexual Relations, Including Sexual Crimes"). In 1972, after receiving a letter requesting the reclassification, the Library of Congress agreed to make the shift, reclassifying those books into a newly created category, HQ 76.5 ("Homosexuality, Lesbianism—Gay Liberation Movement, Homophile Movement"). In 1971, the GLBTRT created the first award for GLBT books, the Stonewall Book Award, which celebrates books of exceptional merit that relate to LGBT issues. Patience and Sarah by Alma Routsong (pen name Isabel Miller) was the first winner. In 1992, American Libraries published a photo of the GLBTRT (then called the Gay and Lesbian Task Force) on the cover of its July/August issue, drawing both criticism and praise from the library world. Some commenters called the cover "in poor taste" and accused American Libraries of "glorifying homosexuality", while others were supportive of the move. Christine Williams, who wrote an essay about the controversy surrounding the cover, concluded that in the mid-90s, the library world was "not an especially welcoming place to gays and lesbians." In 2010, the GLBTRT announced a new committee, the Over the Rainbow Committee. This committee annually compiles a bibliography of books that show the GLBT community in a favorable light and reflects the interests of adults. The bibliographies provide guidance to libraries in the selection of positive GLBT materials.
On July 23, 1976, the committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship was established as a Council Committee of the ALA on recommendation of the Ad Hoc Committee with the same name (which had been appointed by the President of the ALA in December 1975) and of the Committee on Organization. The committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship works to "officially represent the diversity of women's interest within ALA and to ensure that the Association considers the rights of the majority (women) in the library field; to promote and initiate the collection, analysis, dissemination, and coordination of information on the status of women in librarianship; to coordinate the activities of ALA units which consider questions of special relevance for women; to identify lags, gaps, and possible discrimination in resources and programs relating to women; in cooperation with other ALA units, to help develop and evaluate tools, guidelines, and programs designed to enhance the opportunities and the image of women in the library profession, thus raising the level of consciousness concerning women; to establish contacts with committees on women within other professional groups and to officially represent ALA concerns at interdisciplinary meetings on women's equality; and to provide Council and Membership with reports needed for establishment of policies and actions related to the status of women in librarianship; and to monitor ALA units to ensure consideration of the rights of women." In 1979, the committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship received the Bailey K. Howard – World Book Encyclopedia – ALA Goal Award to develop a profile of ALA personal members, known as the COSWL Study. In 1980, the committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship was awarded the J. Morris Jones – World Book Encyclopedia – ALA Goals Award with the OLPR Advisory Committee to undertake a special project on equal pay for work of equal value.
- Ethnic & Multicultural Information Exchange RT (EMIERT)
- Exhibits Round Table (ERT)
- Film and Media Round (FMRT)
- Games and Gaming (GAMERT)
- Government Documents (GODORT)
- Graphic Novel and Comics Round Table (GNCRT)
- Intellectual Freedom Round Table (IFRT)
- International Relations (IRRT)
- Learning RT (LearnRT)
- Library History (LHRT)
- Library Instruction Round Table (LIRT)
- Library Research (LRRT)
- Library Support Staff Interests Round Table (LSSIRT)
- Map and Geospatial Information (MAGIRT)
- New Members Round Table (NMRT)
- Rainbow Round Table (RRT)
- Retired Members Round Table (RMRT)
- Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT)
- Staff Organization (SORT)
- Round Table Coordinating Assembly (RTCA)
- American Association of Law Libraries
- American Indian Library Association
- Association for Information Science and Technology
- American Theological Library Association
- Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA)
- Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association
- Association for Library and Information Science Education
- Association for Rural and Small Libraries
- Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Services
- Association of Jewish Libraries
- Association of Research Libraries
- Beta Phi Mu
- The Black Caucus of the American Library Association was formed in 1970. "The Black Caucus of the American Library Association serves as an advocate for the development, promotion, and improvement of library services and resources to the nation's African American community; and provides leadership for the recruitment and professional development of African American librarians." The current president of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association is Richard E. Ashby, Jr.
- Catholic Library Association
- Chinese American Librarians Association
- The Joint Council of Librarians of Color
- Latino Literacy Now
- Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa
- Medical Library Association
- Music Library Association
- National Storytelling Network
- Online Audiovisual Catalogers
- Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association
- Polish American Librarians Association
- ProLiteracy Worldwide
- REFORMA is the National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-speaking.
- Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials
- Theatre Library Association
The ALA is affiliated with regional, state, and student chapters (SCALA) across the country. It organizes conferences, participates in library standards development, and publishes a number of books and periodicals. The ALA publishes the magazines American Libraries and Booklist. The Graphics Program creates and distributes products that promote libraries, literacy and reading. Along with other organizations, it sponsors the annual Banned Books Week the last week of September. Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) also sponsors Teen Read Week, the third week of each October, and Teen Tech Week, the second week of each March. In addition, the ALA helps to promote diversity in the library profession with various outreach activities, including the Spectrum Scholarship program, which awards academic scholarships to minority library students each year. Additionally, the ALA's Office for Library Advocacy has an initiative called I Love Libraries, also known as ilovelibraries, which attempts to "spread the world about the value of today's libraries," promotes value of librarians and libraries, explains key library issues, and "urges readers to support and take action for their libraries."
The ALA helps to provide a total of 29 scholarships (over $300,000 annually), a list of which can be found on their website. National Library Week, the second week of each April, is a national observance sponsored by the ALA since 1958. Libraries across the country celebrate library resources, library champions and promote public outreach.
The ALA annually confers numerous book and media awards, primarily through its children's and young adult divisions (others are the Dartmouth Medal, Coretta Scott King Awards, Schneider Book Awards, and Stonewall Book Award).
The children's division ALSC administers the Caldecott Medal, Newbery Medal, Batchelder Award, Belpré Awards, Geisel Award, and Sibert Medal, all annual book awards; the Odyssey Award for best audiobook (joint with YALSA), and the (U.S.) Carnegie Medal and for best video. There are also two ALSC lifetime recognitions, the Children's Literature Legacy Award and the Arbuthnot Lecture.
The young-adult division YALSA administers the Margaret Edwards Award for significant and lasting contribution to YA literature, a lifetime recognition of one author annually, and some annual awards that recognize particular works: the Michael L. Printz Award for a YA book judged on literary merit alone, the William C. Morris Award for an author's first YA book, the new "YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults", and the "Alex Award" list of ten adult books having special appeal for teens. Jointly with the children's division ALSC there is the Odyssey Award for excellence in audiobook production.
The award for YA nonfiction was inaugurated in 2012, defined by ages 12 to 18 and publication year November 2010 to October 2011. The first winner was The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism & Treachery by Steve Sheinkin (Roaring Brook Press, November 2010) and four other finalists were named.
Beside the Alex Awards, ALA disseminates some annual lists of "Notable" and "Best" books and other media.
The annual awards roster includes the John Cotton Dana Award for excellence in library public relations, and the ''I Love My Librarian'' award in concert with the philanthropic foundation Carnegie Corporation of New York and the New York Public Library.
In 2000, the Office for Literacy and Outreach Services (OLOS) launched the Jean E. Coleman Library Outreach Lecture in tribute to the work of the first OLOS director, Dr. Jean E. Coleman. Barbara J. Ford gave the inaugural lecture, "Libraries, Literacy, Outreach and the Digital Divide".
Since 2006, the ALA has selected a class of Emerging Leaders, typically comprising about 100 librarians and library school students. This minor distinction is a form of organizational outreach to new librarians. The Emerging Leaders are allocated to project groups tasked with developing solutions to specified problems within ALA divisions. The class meets at the ALA Midwinter and Annual Meetings, commonly January and June. Project teams may present posters of their completed projects at the Annual.
The ALA and its divisions hold numerous conferences throughout the year. The two largest conferences are the annual conference and the midwinter meeting. The latter is typically held in January and focused on internal business, while the annual conference is typically held in June and focused on exhibits and presentations. The ALA annual conference is notable for being one of the largest professional conferences in existence, typically drawing over 25,000 attendees.
In 2020, Wanda Kay Brown was the first president in 75 years under whom the Annual Conference, scheduled for Chicago in June 2020, was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a press release about cancellation of the conference, Brown stated: "ALA's priority is the health and safety of the library community, including our members, staff, supporters, vendors and volunteers."
- Virginia Cleaver Bacon, Member
- Inez Mabel Crawford, member
- Essae Martha Culver, first State Librarian of Louisiana
- M. Winnifred Feighner, Assistant librarian at University of Montana
- Helen E. Haines, member of the Council of American Library Association and editor of its proceedings for ten years
- Wilhelmina Harper, Supervisor of children's work for the Kern County Free Library, since 1921
- Abigail Scofield Kellogg, San Luis Obispo City Librarian
- Jacqueline Noel, vice-president of the Pacific Northwest Library Association and a member of the American Library Association
- Edith Allen Phelps, twice president of the Oklahoma Library Association, the first professional in the Library Science field in the Oklahoma City system
- Ida M. Reagan, first vice-president of the California Librarians Association
- E. Ruth Rockwood, charter member of the Subscription Books Committee, a group to provide evaluations and advice on encyclopedias, subscription sets, and allied compends, newly founded by the ALA
- Faith Edith Smith, on the Education Committee of the American Library Association and was a member of the California Library Association
- Carla Hayden, the 14th Librarian of Congress. Appointed in September 2016, Hayden is the first woman and the first African American to hold the post. She is the first professional librarian appointed to the post in over 60 years.
- Lindsay Cronk, first President of Core and co-author of ALA's Resolution to Condemn White Supremacy and Fascism as Antithetical to Library Work.
- Emily Drabinski, ALA President 2023-2024.
The ALA advocates positions on United States political issues that it believes are related to libraries and librarianship. For court cases that touch on issues about which the organization holds positions, the ALA often files amici curiae briefs, voluntarily offering information on some aspect of the case to assist the court in deciding a matter before it. The ALA has an office in Washington, D.C., that lobbies Congress on issues relating to libraries, information and communication. It also provides materials to libraries that may include information on how to apply for grants, how to comply with the law, and how to oppose a law.
The primary documented expressions of the ALA's intellectual freedom principles are the Freedom to Read Statement and the Library Bill of Rights; the Library Bill of Rights urges libraries to "challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment." The ALA Code of Ethics also calls on librarians to "uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources."
The ALA maintains an Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), which is charged with "implementing ALA policies concerning the concept of intellectual freedom," defined as "the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access to all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored." Its goal is "to educate librarians and the general public about the nature and importance of intellectual freedom in libraries." The OIF compiles lists of challenged books as reported in the media and submitted to them by librarians across the country.
Since January 2016, the OIF has been headed by James Larue. Larue is the third director of the office, having succeeded Barbara M. Jones, former University Librarian for Wesleyan University and an intellectual freedom advocate and author. Jones had assumed the position in December 2009; prior to that, the first director, Judith Krug, had headed the office for four decades, until her death in April 2009.
In 1950, the Intellectual Freedom Committee, the forerunner of the OIF, investigated the termination of Ruth W. Brown as librarian of the Bartlesville Public Library, a position she held in the Oklahoma town for 30 years. Brown's termination was based on the false allegation that she was a communist and that she had as part of the library's serials collection two left wing publications, The New Republic and The Nation. The ALA support for her and the subsequent legal case was the first such investigation undertaken by the ALA or one of its state chapters.
In 1999, radio personality Laura Schlessinger campaigned publicly against the ALA's intellectual freedom policy, specifically in regard to the ALA's refusal to remove a link on its web site to a specific sex-education site for teens. Sharon Priestly said, however, that Schlessinger "distorted and misrepresented the ALA stand to make it sound like the ALA was saying porno for 'children' is O.K."
In 2002, the ALA filed suit with library users and the ACLU against the United States Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which required libraries receiving federal E-rate discounts for Internet access to install a "technology protection measure" to prevent children from accessing "visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors." At trial, the federal district court struck down the law as unconstitutional. The government appealed this decision, and on June 23, 2003, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the law as constitutional as a condition imposed on institutions in exchange for government funding. In upholding the law, the Supreme Court, adopting the interpretation urged by the U.S. Solicitor General at oral argument, made it clear that the constitutionality of CIPA would be upheld only "if, as the Government represents, a librarian will unblock filtered material or disable the Internet software filter without significant delay on an adult user's request."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) attempted to use librarians as possible informants in the conspiracy case of the Harrisburg Seven in 1971. The Harrisburg Seven, a group of religious anti-war activists, were primarily accused of conspiring to kidnap National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. The supposed leader of the group, Philip Berrigan, was serving time at the Lewisburg penitentiary. The FBI sought "to use library surveillance and librarian informants" at Bucknell University as evidence of the Harrisburg Seven's "characters and intentions." Boyd Douglas became one such informant for the FBI: he was a prisoner at the same penitentiary with a work-release position at the library. Boyd presented himself as an anti-war activist and offered to smuggle letters he collected while at work to Philip Berrigan at the prison.
The FBI also attempted to use Zoia Horn, a librarian at the Bucknell library, and interviewed other library workers. The FBI met with Horn in her home to debrief her, but Horn refused to answer their questions. She refused to testify, even after she was given immunity from self-incrimination. Horn stated, "To me it stands on: Freedom of thought" and for the government to practice "spying in homes, in libraries and universities inhibits and destroys this freedom." Zoia Horn was charged with contempt of the court and served 20 days in jail. She was "the first librarian who spent time in jail for a value of our profession" according to Judith Krug of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. Horn continued to fight for intellectual freedom in libraries and beyond. The Intellectual Freedom Committee of the California Library Association now awards the Zoia Horn Intellectual Freedom Award in honor of those who make contributions to intellectual freedom.
In the 1970s, United States Department of the Treasury agents also pressured public libraries across the country to "release circulation records recording the names and identifying information of people who checked out books on bomb making." The ALA believed this to be an "unconscionable and unconstitutional invasion of library patrons' privacy."
As a result of these two situations and many others, the ALA affirmed the confidential status of all records which held patron names in a Policy on the Confidentiality of Library Records. The ALA also released the ALA Statement on Professional Ethics in 1975 which advocated for the protection of the "confidential relationship" between a library user and a library.
The FBI tried to use surveillance in library settings as part of its Library Awareness Program of the 1980s; it aimed to use librarians "as partners in surveillance." The program was known to the FBI as "The Development of Counterintelligence Among Librarians", indicating that the FBI believed that librarians might be supportive in its counterintelligence investigations. The FBI attempted to profile "Russian or Slavic-sounding last names" of library patrons to look for possible "national security threats". The FBI wanted libraries to help it trace "the reading habits of patrons with those names."
The ALA responded by writing to the FBI director. The Intellectual Freedom Committee also created "an advisory statement to warn libraries" of the Library Awareness Program, including ways to help librarians "avoid breaking their ethical obligations if faced with FBI surveillance."
USA PATRIOT Act
In 2003, the ALA passed a resolution opposing the USA PATRIOT Act, which called sections of the law "a present danger to the constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users". Since then, the ALA and its members have sought to change the law by working with members of Congress and educating their communities and the press about the law's potential to violate the privacy rights of library users. ALA has also participated as an amicus curiae in lawsuits filed by individuals challenging the constitutionality of the USA PATRIOT Act, including a lawsuit filed by four Connecticut librarians after the library consortium they managed was served with a national security letter seeking information about library users. After several months of litigation, the lawsuit was dismissed when the FBI decided to withdraw the National Security Letter. In 2007, the "Connecticut Four" were honored by the ALA with the Paul Howard Award for Courage for their challenge to the National Security Letter and gag order provision of the USA PATRIOT Act.
In 2006, the ALA sold humorous "radical militant librarian" buttons for librarians to wear in support of the ALA's stances on intellectual freedom, privacy, and civil liberties. Inspiration for the button's design came from documents obtained from the FBI by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The request revealed a series of e-mails in which FBI agents complained about the "radical, militant librarians" while criticizing the reluctance of FBI management to use the secret warrants authorized under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Renaming of Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal
In 2018, the organization changed the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal to the Children's Literature Legacy Award. According to The New York Times, the name change was made "in order to distance the honor" from what the ALA described as "culturally insensitive portrayals" in Wilder's books.
The ALA "supports efforts to amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and urges the courts to restore the balance in copyright law, ensure fair use and protect and extend the public domain". It supports changing copyright law to eliminate damages when using orphan works without permission; is wary of digital rights management; and, in ALA v. FCC, successfully sued the Federal Communications Commission to prevent regulation that would enforce next-generation digital televisions to contain rights-management hardware. It has joined the Information Access Alliance to promote open access to research. The Copyright Advisory Network of the association's Office for Information Technology Policy provides copyright resources to libraries and the communities they serve. The ALA is a member of the Library Copyright Alliance, along with the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of College and Research Libraries, which provides a unified voice for over 300,000 information professionals in the United States. Currently, the ALA supports bill H.R. 905, also known as the You Own Devices Act, stating "to foster the social and commercial evolution of the "Internet of Things" by codifying the right of the owner of a device containing 'essential software' intrinsic to its function to transfer both the and the device."
ALA-Accredited Programs in Library and Information Studies
ALA-Accredited programs can be found at schools in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Canada. Theses programs offer degrees with names such as Master of Library Science (MLS), Master of Arts, Master of Librarianship, Master of Library and Information Studies (MLIS), and Master of Science. To be accredited, the program must undergo an external review and meet the Standards for Accreditation of Master's Programs in Library and Information Studies. There are currently 62 accredited programs, and two that are candidates seeking accreditation.
- American Indian Library Association and American Indian Youth Literature Awards
- ANSEL American National Standard for Extended Latin Alphabet Coded Character Set for Bibliographic Use
- Book Links, an ALA magazine that helps teachers, librarians, school library media specialists, and parents connect children with high-quality books
- Booklist, an ALA publication that provides critical reviews of books and audiovisual materials, geared toward libraries and booksellers
- Challenge (literature), an attempt to have books removed from a library
- History of public library advocacy
- International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA)
- Library Bill of Rights
- Library Hall of Fame
- Librarianship and human rights in the United States
- List of American Library Association accredited library schools
- List of presidents of the American Library Association
- Neal-Schuman Publishers, an imprint of the ALA
- Public library advocacy
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When you're trying to get more views for your videos, it can often feel like you're at the mercy of YouTube's algorithm. That's why it's important to think about distribution at every stage, from creation to promotion.
In this episode of Shopify Masters, you’ll learn from two entrepreneurs who regularly produce YouTube videos that drive millions of views.
Patrick Adair Designs creates rings made of materials like carbon fiber, titanium, and other rare materials.
We made a ring that subscribes you to PewDiePie and this was a very thought-out video. We had a really intense strategy for it. We posted that a month ago and it’s already at 4.6 million views.
Tune in to learn
- How to get your first sales by running Instagram auctions
- Why content needs to change when you’re building an audience versus creating customers
- Their exact strategy to creating and promoting a YouTube video to a million views
- Store: Patrick Adair Designs
- Social Profiles: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube
- Recommendations: Klaviyo (Shopify app), Justuno (Shopify app), G Suite, Pablo Cimadevila (YouTube Channel)
Felix: Today I’m joined by Patrick and Lewis from Patrick Adair Designs. Patrick Adair Designs creates rings made of things like carbon fiber, titanium, and other rare materials. It was started in 2015 and based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Welcome guys.
Patrick: Thank you
Lewis: Hey. Welcome.
Felix: I think you told us that you guys or, I think, Patrick you mentioned that you’ve always been a creative and business-minded person and you’ve been doing projects like this you’re whole life, but this was the first legitimate, scalable project you started. First, tell us about the other projects you started. What was that like?
Patrick: So just growing up, I started this company when I was a senior in high school. I was really young for all those other previous projects, so they’re more just like, less serious. Like in fifth grade I got banned from selling gum out of my backpack at a certain point. I’ve just always trying to peddle crap to just anyone around me. I’d sell stuff on eBay. There was a while, I think one of the coolest things I was doing, is there’s an EDM music artist named Deadmau5, and he has a really iconic mouse head that he puts on while he’s performing. I started making those at my house, I think I was in probably Freshman year of high school. I would make them by hand. I’d spend a lot of time, using similar techniques to what I do with my rings now. I was just making these heads. I’d throw them up on eBay and they’d sell for like 500 or so bucks.
Patrick: For the time, I’d put probably like 20 hours of work into each of them, but that was fantastic money and I loved doing it. That’s just kind of been my entire childhood, growing up, is just selling stuff, figuring out what I can do to try to just be an entrepreneur.
Felix: So what was different about this particular business with the rings with Patrick Adair Designs, that was different than the other businesses?
Patrick: I guess a lot of them, whether it’s like selling stuff to classmates in school, like that not scalable. I can’t use a website builder to make a website and sell gum for more expensive than you can get it at the grocery store. That just fundamentally was not a legitimate, good business, I guess. Then the Deadmau5 stuff, that’s obviously infringing on some trademark stuff. It was more of just a handmade, cool, I wasn’t trying to sell 100,000 of these. I was just a fan of Deadmau5. I didn’t want to step on his toes and I am also not capable of producing more than, you know in high school, I could produce one a month or something like that. It was the first thing that I thought, okay what’s a product that I could make personally, that’s fairly cheap, that appeals to everyone and something that I could sell online without limits. Like I said, the Deadmau5 head had a lot of limits. And just something that I could scale and that was how I got into this.
Patrick: First I started, I wanted to sell a product made out of carbon fiber. So that was kind of my brainstorm. I’ve done all these things in my past. I wanna do something bigger, something I can put on the internet. So I bought some carbon fiber. I was messing around with it and it was a fairly simple and straightforward to make a ring out of it. So that’s how I got started in the rings, and I just saw the tip of the iceberg of the potential that it had and just kind of ran with it.
Felix: Right. I’m sure entrepreneurs approach you all the time with their ideas and wanna get feedback from you. What do you look at when you have an entrepreneur approach you and you want to determine if their business is scalable. Because it sounds like a really important aspect of your current business has led to your success is the scalability factor. What do you recommend entrepreneur look at, or what did you look at yourself, or what do you look at yourself, when you look at other businesses to determine if it’s scalable or not?
Patrick: That’s a great question. There’s kind of, probably a lot of different things that I look for. So in terms of, like I’m a huge proponent of making sure your business is really profitable and rings are really great for that. Because they’re a very symbolic thing. They mean a lot to people, and they’re willing to spend a lot of money on it, because for a wedding ring or just for any other important reason to wear a ring. People are willing to spend money on something that means a lot to them.
Patrick: I think picking something that is the right, right for profitability that you’re gonna always be, you know you never wanna get your business off on the wrong foot. You’re never going to be able to be profitable if you can’t be profitable from the get-go, is kind of my philosophy. Of course, there are different things you can do, but for the most part, I’d say, be as profitable as you can. One thing that I would recommend, you know you don’t have to do but it’s based on my experience, is I started with no money, no budget, no loans, no tools even. I just bought like $30 of carbon fiber because that’s all I could afford.
Patrick: I would start with something that you don’t need a business loan for. I think a lot of people are like, well if I could just get $20,000 from this loan, I’m sure I could be successful. I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. I think you need to start with a strategy that allows you to just hit the ground running. Start from zero dollars, scale your way up to $100 a month, and then go from there. Don’t try to get yourself $20,000 in debt and crawl your way out of it.
Felix: Got it. So you mentioned that for first big success were the Deadmau5 heads and it took you 20 hours to make each one of them. How long do the rings take to make? I’m sure your process may be different today, but at the very beginning, give us an idea of how long each product took you to make.
Patrick: That’s a great question. In the beginning, it took me a lot longer, and that was one of the things I was able to figure out to make myself even more profitable and just, in general, be able to sell more product because of increased production capacity. I would spend a lot of time on every ring from the beginning. I’d spend, well the carbon fiber rings is where I got started, and then I moved on to more custom stuff. So the carbon fiber rings those were kind of quick and easy, and I figured out a quick process. I probably averaged about 30 minutes per ring. The other rings that I started getting into, I’d spend 10 to 12 hours on one of them. And I was just kind of experimenting with what I could do.
Patrick: I should probably explain the backstory to how I was selling them. After I did my Kickstarter, I did a Kickstarter for those carbon fiber rings. I never explained that. Sorry for not making that clear. Essentially for that Kickstarter, I posted a, it was just a really quick Kickstarter I did. I spent probably 24 hours from start to finish, working on the project page as well as the video. I edited the video and shot it on my iPhone, so it was just very simple, very straight forward and it brought in about $5,000. And that was great. It wasn’t a very big Kickstarter but was one that I was able to do quickly. So people shouldn’t shoot for like $100,000 from the get-go, I’d say go for the $5,000 and then work your way up from there. So that was really helpful to me.
Patrick: After I did that Kickstarter, I started an Instagram page where I would post the work that I did. I had all this ring making equipment. I would just kind of document what I was doing. I was just having fun, messing around making rings. And I would try to sell them, and I essentially would just sell to the highest bidder. Whoever was willing to pay the most for a custom ring that week, is who I’d make it for. So they’d pay me like, at the beginning, it was like 50 to 70, 80 bucks, and I would spend 10 hours, 12 hours on the making of it. Probably five hours researching it and going back and forth with them on ideas. So making less than minimum wage, but it was a lot of fun and I was learning a lot.
Patrick: Then I was able to tweak everything that I did, my design, my production process, all of that, to get it down to where some of the rings could be really customized. They’d look cool, really unique, all of that, and they could take me an hour and a half or less. That was kind of a really good thing for me as a business. I started out with something that wasn’t really that scalable. If I was spending 12 hours on a ring, it would be really hard to make it profitable and really hard to scale because we’d have to charge so much for them. So just trying to see what’s successful and then how can I adapt that to make it scalable was that experience.
Felix: So you were creating these custom rings and then were you taking notes of what you could do, what kind of rings you could create more scalably and you didn’t have to actually do these one-off? How were you using the custom rings to, I guess, inform and guide your business around the more scalable products, the more scalable product lines that you were creating, that weren’t custom?
Patrick: That’s an interesting question. There wasn’t too much strategy other than I literally just didn’t have time to offer. The thing is with rings too is, a ring can take 20 hours to make or it can take two hours to make and you can’t really tell the difference for some them. Obviously, for a really ornate ring with hand engravings and all that, that’s priceless and you can never reproduce that in a matter of hours. For the most part, the customer doesn’t know how long it takes so being able to make something quickly and efficiently, but still making it high quality and not underselling yourself. Just because that ring took a shorter amount of time doesn’t mean it’s any less special, any less beautiful, anything like that. I tried to push my audience towards liking those, which they did. I’d do sales on those a lot more heavily than I would on my other designs. I think just naturally I tried to steer people towards it and they obviously responded well to it.
Felix: Right. You have this approach where you want to make sure that the products you sell are profitable from the beginning. Meaning that each unit that you sell is going to be profitable and you don’t believe in the kind of thinking where you become profitable with volume. You want to start making money on that first product and not be losing out. So your approach was to launch a Kickstarter of course, which is essentially pre-selling your product. So obviously no cost other than the time that you put into creating the page it sounds like. Then you went on Instagram to start selling these custom rings. So you’re selling custom products that you’re, it’s kind of made to order. What are you putting up on Instagram to attract people to start bidding on the custom rings?
Patrick: Back then it was, I’m pulling up my Instagram here, it was pretty, it’s kind of a weird concept when I explain it to people. Especially people who aren’t as familiar with Instagram. But it is weird for Instagram too. I would just post what I was doing. I post a cool picture of a ring. And I’d get people interested, like, hey that was an interesting ring, could I buy one from you? And nine times out of 10 they don’t end up actually going through with the transaction. So that’s kind of frustrating when you’re getting started, but something you kind of have to accept.
Patrick: But with an auction, that is almost a guaranteed way to sell something and you’re probably not going to make enough money for it to be worth your time. Especially for a really long time until you can build up some popularity. But you can guarantee to sell customers a product. I would just post what I was doing and then probably once a week, I would post a picture of maybe two or three example rings that I had made in the past that I thought were cool and then maybe just a picture of some interesting materials that they could have as an option for the ring. So I’d just post like, hey this is an auction post, comment down below what you’re willing to pay and whoever is willing to pay the most in 24 hours they will win the auction and I will work with them to make them a custom ring.
Felix: What about this auction model makes you more likely to get a sale than just pushing people to buy at a set price?
Patrick: It makes it really exclusive, so people like this is my one chance to get this thing so now is the time to put my money where my mouth is. The biggest thing is I start the auction at $1, whereas I’d really like to sell the ring for 100 or more. So it’s probably going to sell for like $40 to $60 and you're not really making your money back in terms of it being worth your time, but it’s a way for you to get some momentum. You can get a customer base. You can get some popularity, and next week you’re almost guaranteed to get more for that auction. It’s a starting point where-
Felix: -Just because the auction generating some kind of buzz and more people are coming to your page?
Patrick: -Yeah. Exactly. And you make something custom for one person and you post the results of it. You post how happy they are. They post a picture once they get it. So it’s just a really, really solid just buzz like you said. Just gets people really excited for it.
Felix: Okay. You run these auctions for like one day or how long does it run for?
Patrick: It depends. I do one that’s like a flash auction. It’ll end in 24 hours or I’d let it run for two or three days. It just depends. If someone else is gonna wanna try this, I’d say experiment. You probably want it to be at least 24 hours to give people a chance to see your post, but maybe do up to three days or so.
Felix: Got it. So people are just commenting on the price they would pay. What was the conversion rate there, like I’m sure that there are still some tire kickers that would win, but not really wanna go through with it? What was the conversion rate with this model?
Patrick: Yeah. It’s interesting. I think I don’t know if I ever had, I think I had one out of probably… And I stopped doing the auction thing after a while. I probably did 20 of them, and I think I only had 1 person not actually come through. It kind of depends on your community, who your follower base is. I would try to have like a really, I don’t know, I’d put like a disclaimer in there like, I don’t think I have it word for word on this post, but just like, don’t post if you’re not willing to bid and then, or actually pay through PayPal at the end. Then you’d wanna make sure people have a reputation, not necessarily a reputation, but if they’ve got one follower, no posts, they’re probably not a legit account. They could be just trolling even, that can happen. Just make sure that they’re a legitimate account.
Patrick: When it comes to Instagram, it’s usually people’s personal page, where they have followers from their personal friends. They aren’t willing to, you know somewhere like YouTube where you don’t have your personal main page where your friends follow you. People are a lot more willing to be obnoxious or troll there. But Instagram, I think it is a nice community where people usually are fairly legit.
Felix: Right. So when you first this, how big was your following?
Patrick: Really small. I’m trying to get a sense for it. You know I got like 40 posts, so I kind of go through my, this one has 40. So my older posts, it looks like I was getting about like 40 likes per post. And this could be different where people go back in time and like the photo. But essentially I think I had one to two hundred followers that came through from Kickstarter, where I said, hey guys I started this Instagram page. You can follow my future projects here. I got a little bit of a response from that. But from where I needed to do stuff like I do giveaways and try to get followers from that.
Patrick: There’s kind of a community of makers on Instagram. There’s ring makers, knife makers, all of that. There’s kind of a cool community there, so you do a giveaway it kind of gets spread throughout the community and they’re not super effective. But you’d get the followers rolling through and I think I started doing the auctions once I had, I think I had about 500 followers by the time I started doing auctions and I’d actually get a few bids. I think this one sold for like 50 bucks or something. Yeah. Once I had like 500 followers or so, I was able to sell a ring for like 50 bucks. That’s kind of-
Felix: -Okay. So it's definitely a manageable level to get to for anyone who is serious about starting a business like this. A few hundred to 500 followers is certainly an achievable starting point. You mentioned that you eventually did stop the auctions after 20 or so. What made you make that decision?
Patrick: -Mostly just the orders were flowing through naturally and I didn’t really have time for it at this point. I don’t even take customer requests on rings. It’s just not something that is really applicable to us anymore. But it is something that I would love to get back into. I think it could be a really special and interesting thing for us to do. It’s just kind of too low on our priorities list right now to be worth doing. But I’d love to get back into it.
Felix: Right. Makes sense. What’s the strategy today? If Instagram maybe is custom rings through these auctions is no longer being done, what do you guys focus on today to drive traffic and sales to the store?
Patrick: Today our main strategy is the YouTube channel that we have behind it. That’s kind of a unique thing too. Most e-commerce companies aren’t fueled by a YouTube channel. That’s something that we think is really special for our company. What I ended up doing was filming my process while I would make the ring, turn it into a video, post it to YouTube, and try to get people to watch that. It was within a year that, I probably started doing it a year after I started my Instagram, and it was about a year later where my YouTube actually overtook my Instagram, in terms of followers and views. It was able to overlap our success on Instagram pretty quickly.
Patrick: That’s been a great thing. That’s where like our top of the funnel, that’s what Lewis will get into a lot later. But that’s just where we gather our interest for people being aware of our product and from there we have a lot of other strategies, such as Facebook ads, retargeting ads, our email newsletter, all of that. Kind of the main source of where we try to procure our customers is by posting YouTube videos that are genuinely entertaining so that they will get organic success, not paid views or anything like that.
Felix: Right. Instagram has the technology for you to put out these videos as well. What made you decide to try to expand to a different platform?
Patrick: Oh that’s a great question. I think YouTube’s a much better fit for the content that I post there. On Instagram, I had to really fight for all of my followers. It wasn’t super scalable. There’s even, you know, you’d do giveaways, you can even follow and unfollow people. I’m sure people on this podcast are probably kind of familiar with that. That’s kind of that just classic grind when you’re starting an Instagram page. And you can do that, but you have to fight so hard to get every single one of your followers. So its kind of like a there’s only so many hours in the day you can try to get Instagram followers, but it really wasn’t scaling on its own. There was no exponential growth to it or anything like that. So once I got to like 10,000 followers, it’s still just, it was just like a straight line of growth that was really slow. It was nice and steady, but I was not getting any love from the Instagram algorithm, I think is what it comes down to. And that’s okay. Instagram is not for rings. I’m not mad at Instagram for that, but YouTube is much more fit for this content.
Patrick: So I’d post videos showing how I make it. That’s what people are really into on YouTube. That’s not the only thing, but that’s something that’s really popular on YouTube. They want to see makers doing stuff. They want to see how they make things. Then they like seeing the transformation from, you’re starting with, and I think one of my big things when I was starting, was starting with unconventional materials. I’d start with a block of carbon fiber, a piece of marble, some copper and I’d turn it into a beautiful ring. People love seeing that transformation. That gave it a success on the YouTube algorithm, where I don’t think it was a great fit for Instagram. But what I do think was important was it was really to get started on Instagram. It was easy to get those first 500 followers. Where it’s almost impossible. You’ll post a video and you’ll get zero views. Like legitimately zero views, or 50 or less. So it’s so hard to get started there. So once I’d built up my Instagram, I could push them to my YouTube and that gave it the kickstart it needed to get some actual success outside of that and then there really was some fantastic exponential growth to that where we just naturally have that be kind of our main hub of Patrick Adair Designs now.
Felix: Did you already see people creating similar content? Because obviously like you mentioned, that’s way less friction to growing on YouTube today. It’s eclipsed your following on Instagram, but you still had to put in some initial grunt work, where you might not have seen any results early on at least, results were not as good as if you posted it on Instagram early on. What did you see that made you decide to start in the first place?
Patrick: On YouTube?
Felix: On YouTube.
Patrick: Yeah. Jimmy DiResta is a perfect example of this. I love YouTube. I’ve probably watched an average of two hours of YouTube a day for the past decade. I know it like from A to Z kind of. So, I’m a huge fan of YouTube, I know a lot of the makers on there. And Jimmy DiResta is someone that I’ve been a fan of forever. What he does, if you’re not familiar with his channel, he’s literally just a guy in Upstate New York, and he makes whatever he wants. So in one of his videos, he makes a canoe, in another one he makes a sign for a local business, in one he makes a ginormous padlock. And so he’s just making interesting stuff, and he had a great following there. There’s a lot of other channels similar to that, but he’s my favorite and one of the original maker YouTubers. I knew that market was there, I think he’s had over a million subscribers for quite a while now. I’ve always liked that. I’ve always wanted to do that but had no real way of trying to get it started. And as soon as I saw that opportunity through my Instagram, I really tried to run with it. And there was that proof of concept, where there are other people on there and people are genuinely interested in watching other people make interesting things.
Felix: Yeah. I guess YouTube does make more sense because there’s a little bit longer attention span on there to see someone making something. If I’m on Instagram I wanna most I wanna see like all the cuts like of just give me the highlights of you making something within the next 10 seconds. But YouTube definitely has more I guess in more the context of the video is in on YouTube people have more patience to watch it play out. How large is the following that you have on YouTube today?
Patrick: Our sub … I think we’re at like 570,000 subscribers give or take.
Felix: That’s amazing. How long did it take to get to that point?
Patrick: It’s been-
Lewis: -Three years.
Patrick: -Three years. Yep. Almost [crosstalk] exactly three years since I started the channel.
Felix: Were there specific inflection points, where things just took off to another level each time? Like was there a specific video, was there anything you could point and say that was the reason why our growth has grown so quickly?
Patrick: I think the biggest thing … And I hear so many YouTubers hit this exact same point, when they talk about their growth and all that. Is hitting your first subscriber milestones, it’s kind of in that 100 to 10,000 range. That’s kind of the hardest thing. Being able to actually break through the YouTube barrier, and have YouTube show your stuff to people and kind of have it see the light of day. That’s kind of the trickiest part. That’s where probably somewhere in the 99 percentile of channels get stuck because it’s so hard to actually get your stuff noticed and appreciated. Once you can get there, everything from there, we, of course, have had some amazing successes, we’ve had some fantastic collaborations. We’ve had videos that go, one of our videos has over 10 million views.
Patrick: And it comes down to the YouTube algorithm liking the video and promoting it for you, in our case for that video. Nothing that was just like this is the magic thing that we did. It was really just doing whatever you can to make sure that you get those first, you know, it’s hard to put a number, but as I said earlier, 100 to 10,000 subscribers. That’s kind of the window, where if you can get to that point, that’s where YouTube will actually take you seriously. And kind of let your stuff see a broader audience and they’ll advertise it to more people and you’ll bring in more fans, all that.
Felix: So you mentioned that one of your videos has 10 million views, that’s an example of a video’s gone viral. And obviously you can’t force a video to go viral, but I’m sure there are certain boxes that you now know to tick off, to give yourself the best chances of going viral or at least getting recommended by YouTube and getting more views that you would typically get. What is that to you? What are certain things that you try to do today to make sure that you set up a video for success?
Patrick: I guess, we have a lot of different strategies. Some of the videos we just wanna make a ring that customers we already have, the subscribers that we already have, are going to really like and it’s going to be effective at converting their view into an order. Then there are others where we’re trying to get a ton of views on the video and we try to make it appealing to a mass audience. So you can see some of our successes and failures with that, I just pulled up my YouTube page now and our third most recent video, the video title is, Using My YouTube Play Button To Make a Ring. I took my play button, I ground some pieces of the back of it and I turned it into a ring. That’s kind of a strategy to get a video that, that’s a really wide appeal. Everyone on YouTube, it’s really popular to do a video with your silver play button on them. So that can be a really good chance for success. And that hasn’t been super successful. It’s done a little bit better than average and over the next six months or so, maybe it will continue to do really well and we’ll look back and it’ll be a great success.
Patrick: That was just an attempt we did. It worked out okay, but just not fantastic. Before that, we made a ring that subscribes you to PewDiePie and this was a very thought out video. We had a really intense strategy for it. We posted that a month ago and it’s already to 4.6 million so that one was a huge success. PewDiePie right now is the, he might actually have just been passed, but he essentially the largest YouTuber on YouTube-
Felix: -Sorry. This is a ring that subscribes you to PewDiePie’s channel? I don’t get it. How does this work?
Patrick: -Yes. Oh, I should probably explain that. That’s weird. We put an NFC chip in the ring. So if you touch it to your phone, it’ll open up a link and prompt you to subscribe to PewDiePie. And it’ll actually prompt you to unsubscribe from T-Series, so that was kind of the whole joke. It’s just kind of playing off that YouTube culture. You know that’s a really hot topic right now. Even hotter topic a month ago when we posted it. So that got a lot of attention. People really liked it. People showed it to PewDiePie. He ended up showing it one of his videos. After he showed it in his video, we got a ton of people coming to watch that, and we probably had like 100,000 views from that within 48 hours. After that, that got YouTube to notice that it was a special video just because so many people were watching it. Then YouTube started recommending it to everyone like crazy, so PewDiePie brought in 100,000 views for us and then YouTube took over the reins and they brought over, it was over a million view in 24 hours at one point. So [crosstalk 00:29:04]-
Felix: -Wow. Amazing. You sound like you obviously planned this out, or you mentioned that there was an intense deliberate strategy around this. Can you talk more about that? What was the strategy that you went into this with?
Patrick: I’ll have Lewis explain it because he helped me orchestrate it and he literally, we came up with like a flow chart of what we wanted to do so he’d be great to talk about it.
Lewis: Alright. So our whole idea was, we noticed that Patrick’s audiences demographic overlaps with PewDiePies. They’re both males aged 18 to 25 and Patrick’s also a big fan of PewDiePie, so it gave us insight. We knew what those people liked and what they didn’t. So of course, the first goal was to make a video that would be good, that would appeal to Patrick’s core demographic, as well as this other demographic, because we wanted to hit the overlap, but we also wanted PewDiePie subscribers to be able to watch the video and just enjoy the video even though it might not be what they’d normally watch. So of course, the first step was to create good content, but then at that point, we wanted to take advantage of the fact that there was a demographic overlap, and we also knew that PewDiePie regularly hosts content from his subreddit on his YouTube channel. Like he does a review of the top posts on his subreddit.
Lewis: So our goal was to run a guerrilla marketing strategy to get the video to the top of the subreddit, and it was fairly organic. We made the video then we posted on the subreddit about the video and had some people who were active there post about it as well. But that natural overlap also made, I think it was about seven to 10 people that were our subscribers that we had talked to, also posted the video in the subreddit. So it quickly became a trending, buzzing topic on the subreddit. Then people started talking about it, looking at the memes people were making about it, and it got upvoted, and it ended up being one of the highest upvoted posts of that week.
Lewis: Which then meant when PewDiePie went to do his weekly subreddit review, it was now at the top, so the only way he couldn’t see it and talk about it, was if he chose not to. And because it was a fun thing, no harm no foul, we didn’t sell it. We weren’t trying to monetize off of it or anything, and we actually took a large portion of the traffic routing to it and we ran a charity raffle and donated money to a charity PewDiePie had donated to in the past. So we weren’t trying to capitalize and be like, oh look talk about us because we want to make a whole bunch of money off you. It was just like, hey look we did this because we thought it would, kind of like, you know like it is a PR stunt but it was also like we want to use the traffic and the attention to give back to a community, we’ll give back to the community you like. So we donated to a charity he donated in the past, because we’re like feeding off of your attention so let’s make sure we’re giving back.
Felix: Right. That makes sense. I love this approach where you’re not going directly at PewDiePie, you're not trying to send him like a direct message or email. You are trying to get a smaller win that you know will lead to the bigger win. So that smaller win of getting onto Reddit was much, much more achievable than trying to get into PewDiePie’s inbox. I’m sure he has tons of people hitting him up all the time. I like that you kind of back out of this and tried to find, how can you kind of set off this domino effect and then go for something that’s much more achievable early on and then lead up to eventually having one of the larger YouTubers talk about the product that you made.
Felix: You guys talked about the two types of content that you’re creating and I like this, the way that you talked about this because I’ve never thought about this way. Which is that you have to have content that is focused on getting a new audience and then content to get at the existing audience to buy. What about the approach of getting the existing audience to buy? What is the content that you create in that case?
Patrick: I’ll go through some of my videos and give like good examples and bad examples. So I’d made a ring out of fire hose. I took a fire hose. I cut it into sheets, stacked it up, and fused it with resin, and turned it into a ring. That was really cool and interesting, and people liked watching it. But that’s not a valuable material. People don’t really want a ring made out of the hose. That not like, no one’s gonna buy that. And there could be. There were quite a few firemen interested in that and we did a sale where we sold them. But essentially people aren’t going to be willing a lot of money for anything like that. So that was just kind of the, let’s get people viewing our videos and get them interested in stuff.
Patrick: But then there’s stuff where I go to make a video. I’m like we want to sell a ring, so I need to make it out of a scalable design. So the design needs to be straightforward to make, it needs to be a durable ring, one that we’re not going to run into issues with it cracking or breaking or anything like that. I think one of our best examples of this is called our Stardust ring. I made it with a cobalt chrome base, and that’s a metal that is fantastic for jewelry. It’s hypoallergenic, it’s super strong, and it holds a really nice polish. It’s great for a ring. It’s great for a wedding ring. It’s something that you could put on your finger forever, so that is really important if you’re trying to sell a ring. Something that people actually like and want to have, not just as a fun thing. Because then they’re not willing to spend a lot of money.
Patrick: We then did an inlay that we thought would be cool. We used meteorite shavings for that. So that’s a really interesting, fun material. We have all the meteorite shavings in the world in our shop because it’s a by-product of our other meteorite rings that we make. So it just has from start to finish it’s made of cool materials, and it’s made out of durable materials, and it’s made out of scalable materials for us, and there’s nothing in it that is super expensive for us so that it can be a profitable product.
Felix: Got it. So you are basically creating videos that essentially feature products that people actually want to buy, not just like videos that entertaining to watch or videos that are I guess more gimmicky in that case.
Patrick: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Exactly. I just noticed I made a ring out of cake sprinkles. It’s cool, fun to watch, no one wants to put that on their finger and wear it forever.
Felix: Right. You mentioned that you can’t just create videos of you making stuff. That not good enough, you also have to be entertaining. Are you doomed if you’re just not an entertaining person or you’re not like a funny person? Are there ways that, can it be learned or that there are things that you can learn to kind of set yourself up for success here?
Patrick: It can be learned. I’m not the most charismatic person. And I’m aware of that, but you can put on a face and make a quick video. But even that aside, I think somewhere where you can take inspiration is—think of someone who doesn’t even speak English. So you can find YouTube channels like this. There are YouTube channels that are huge and they have an audience of people in America. America is kind of, don’t quote me on this but, America has a huge YouTube audience, so there’s definitely people trying to get videos popular here and if you don’t speak English that’s really hard. But you can style your videos in a completely different way than I do.
Patrick: I think a fantastic example of this is a guy, another jeweler. His name is Pablo Cimadevvila and he’s from Spain and he might speak English, I don’t know, but he doesn’t talk in any of his videos. If you’re listening to the podcast, I recommend you look up my channel and you look up his channel. They’re two very different styles, but both can be completely successful. He doesn’t do any talking in his videos, but he has a style where he just tries to make it really cinematic. He tries to make beautiful rings. He does really cool up close shots with a good camera, good lighting, all of that. It’s just a fantastic video to watch. He has inspirational music that he puts behind it. People just really like watching his stuff, not because he’s an entertaining person, but because he made an entertaining video.
Felix: Makes sense. So now that you are getting the attention, there are people coming to watch the video, how do you actually direct them to your store or to buy the product that you’re talking about in the video?
Patrick: In the videos we obviously we want to make sure people are very well aware that we sell the rings, but we don’t wanna be too overbearing with our sales pitch. First of all, people aren’t going to like that, and if people don’t like that then they’re not going to watch our videos as much. And if they don’t watch our videos as much, YouTube can tell and they won’t recommend our videos as much. You wanna make sure at the end of the day our YouTube videos are getting watched by our viewers and you just wanna be subtle with it like, hey if you enjoyed this video and you though this ring was cool, you can check out my website, I’ve got a link to it down in the description below. Then from there, that’s where we really go hard on the sales tactics after that.
Felix: Got it. Can you give us an idea of how quickly the business has grown since you started this about four years ago?
Patrick: I started it was 2016 … 2015 is when I did my Kickstarter. So it did that and that was kind of like a part-time thing while I was in high school. It brought in like $5,000, but from there I didn’t have any major income after that. I’d have the occasional ring order, but I was in school, I wasn’t devoting a ton of attention to it. There that initial 5,000 that I brought in that was great and got me started. Then I just kind of coasted. The following summer, in 2016, is when I actually, I was done with school for the year, and so I devoted a lot more attention. At that point I was able to go, we’ll say I was probably bringing in less than $500 a month from before then. And then I was able to slowly grow, and it was slow at this point. When you look at an exponential curve on the graph, the growth at the beginning almost looks like nothing. It’s very slow going. But that’s important.
Patrick: I started, like I said under 500 a month and it probably took me about a year until probably June of 2017, is when I was really on another level. So January 2017, I was still, you know January’s a much slower month, I probably did like 1000 the December of 2016, but then January was maybe more like 300 or something. I was really just kind of just crawling, baby steps still in January 2017. So that’s almost two years later. But that was really only kind of six months of focus at that point. From there, that’s when YouTube started growing and we were up to five figures a month by the middle of that year. That’s where the exponential growth of it took off like a rocket. I don’t know [crosstalk] it was kind of crazy-
Felix: -That was mid–2017 or mid–2018?
Felix: 2017. Got it.
Patrick: So that was when we really hit a stride with YouTube and we had some stuff get some like it’s not too hard to get like 1,000 views on YouTube if … And you know that’s great and fantastic if you’re getting 1,000 views, that’s so much better than zero, in so many ways. But it’s not too difficult to have a video, you know because videos on YouTube will get up to 50 million views. 10,000 views is fantastic for me, but it’s not even a drop in the bucket of what’s possible on YouTube. There’s a lot of volatility, so if you can just have one or two videos hit a little bit of success, that kind of what it took. That’s what kind of took things, helped take things to the next level so quickly within that six month period.
Felix: Is it putting out a lot of content or is it better to have quantity or do you try to be more focused on the type of content you put out. Not at the stage that you’re at today, but like if someone were to start out. What is the recommended approach?
Patrick: I think the most important thing is to make sure that you’re putting out the good stuff and to make sure you have a strategy. If you’re making a really great video every single week and you go post it and it’s still not getting any views. It’s not seeing the light of day, you can do that for three years and still not have any success [inaudible] that. So all that time you’ve just been wasting your time. I would suggest if you are struggling to hit that initial success, even though you’re putting in all this great effort is maybe take half of that effort that you’re putting into your videos and focus it on allowing those videos to see the light of day.
Patrick: So maybe go post it on a Reddit page, maybe you could go to r/jewelry and show people like, hey check this ring out that I made, this video along with it. And that can be really tricky. People on Reddit, the last thing they want you to do is try to spam them with stuff that’s going to benefit you personally. They absolutely hate that. So you have to have a really good strategy with that. You have to have genuine content, that’s genuinely good, and you have to post a real caption for it, like, hey what do you guys think of this ring I made. Don’t say, hey guys check out my ring channel I’m doing 50% of for any orders from Reddit. People aren’t gonna like that. They’d know that you just want to use them for their money.
Patrick: Then there are a thousand different things you can do. You can go into Facebook groups for people who are jewelers and talk to them about jewelry and kind of go back and forth. Make connections, make friends in the industry and you don’t have to spam your content to them. If they know that you’re the guy that makes those YouTube videos, they’re gonna go back and watch it. If it’s good content then they’re gonna keep watching it, and they’ll share it with their friends, all of that. I think absolutely the number one thing is to make sure you’re posting content. But don’t get stuck in that repetitive mindset of just make videos [crosstalk] hoping one day the YouTube algorithm will do the rest.
Felix: Just churning. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I think another big lesson that I hear from you is that you have to be aware of what the results are. You have to be attuned to that feedback and change direction at some point where you can’t just keep on banging your head against the wall and hoping things will change. You sound like you did this with the move from Instagram to YouTube. You noticed that you weren’t getting the results that you wanted, let’s try something new. Can you think of any other examples that you have seen in your own business, or that feel like you see in other entrepreneurs where they are kind of banging their head against the wall, where you might wanna just shake them and say, "Hey, try something new?"
Patrick: Yeah. Let’s try to think. Nothing too specific. I struggling to think of anything outside of the jewelry realm because I’m not as experienced obviously. You just see a lot of people who, they’ve built up a fan base, they’ve got people who are ordering rings, and they think that the best thing for them to do is to just keep making that next good ring design that everyone’s going to love, and one day, you’ll just have this fantastically large audience. That’s kind of a logical fallacy that I see within the industry that [crosstalk 00:45:02]-
Felix: -Looking for like a home run or something? Is that what?
Patrick: -Yeah. Well, not even that. Just, maybe if I keep making good rings one day I’ll have 100 times the number of followers that I have. And that’s gonna take, if you’ve been doing it for one year, it’s gonna take 100 years to do that. That’s linear growth. That’s not what can allow you to really blow up your business in the way that you want to. I think one of the best things to do is to hire someone for your help. If you’re to the point where you’re making enough money that you can scrape by, as well as pay someone $10 an hour to help you out. I think that’s a fantastic thing to do. You can get buried in 40 hours of ring making a week. You’re trying to fulfill orders that you have no time to innovate, no time to change things up. So you just get stuck there. You’re just flatlining. And maybe you charge a little bit more per ring once you have a better reputation. Other than that, that’s just kind of like a [crosstalk 00:45:57]-
Felix: -I see. You’re saying, don’t get hooked on that what got you that level of success.
Felix: It’s gonna require something different if you want to grow exponentially. I think you’re also basically saying, you can’t just focus on the product. Yes you obviously have a great product, but if no one’s going to see your products then it doesn’t matter. So if you’re focus and just stuck in your kind of lab and working on the product, working the product, but then not really getting out there and focusing on ways to get the world to see if, then you’re gonna have a great product but you’re not gonna have a great business. I think that that’s important thing is that a business is much, much more than just the product that you’re putting out there. So you mentioned building up that support by hiring someone. Do you have a team at this point? Like what is the kind of, who’s working behind the scenes over at the business?
Patrick: So, I’ve got Lewis who is my CMO and just kind of, he’s a business partner, and just my right-hand guy. We spend 50, 60 hours a week working on the company and neither of us do the order fulfillment or anything like that. It’s all just trying to grow the business in all the different strategies we have. So we’re kind of the two leaders of the company I’d say. Then we’ve got multiple other, I maybe should let Lewis explain this, but we’ve got other people in the office, we have people dedicated to helping us grow on social media. We actually started an LLC, specifically for growing just us and any other companies on social media, using our, we call it guerrilla strategies of just brute forcing your way into the market.
Patrick: You don’t need an ad budget, you don’t need a huge following. There’s a lot of stuff you can do that’s worth your time that if you just sit down and do all this work, you can have a lot of great success on social media. We spend, we probably have 40 to 80 man hours a week devoted to just direct social media stuff. We do a lot of stuff on Pinterest now for example. Then we got five to eight ring makers at any given moment and then another couple office hands. So there’s probably, between all of our employees and contractors, there’s at least 20 people at any given moment working on Patrick Adair Design stuff, I’d say.
Felix: Awesome. Now, what about running the online store itself. Are there any apps or services that you depend on?
Patrick: I let Lewis go into this.
Lewis: Yeah. So I primarily oversee that. Services, we’re really big on email marketing. We do huge portions because we’re selling in luxury jewelry so there’s a really long customer acquisition window. Sometimes we’re seeing 45 days from the first touch to conversion. So we want to make sure we’re following up, so we use email and Facebook retargeting heavily for that. My favorite email marketing service that integrates with Shopify if Klaviyo. I just think it has the strongest like it integrates the easiest and has the most power there. Because we’re doing so much with email, of course, lead capture for email is really important, so we use Justuno for our pop-up captures and our banners on our site. The other big thing, all of our products are made to order, so we use Product Options by Bold, so they can be highly customizable. We have products that have I mean literally probably over 100,000 variants depending on how you customize it. And all of those have different price points. Say you want a ring that has diamonds, and glows this color, and also incorporates this other material, we have to price that out. So we use Product Options by Bold for that.
Lewis: We’re really heavy on G-Suite, the entire Google atmosphere, like Google Drive, Google Sheets. We use G-Suite for our emails. All the other tools we use, all the other apps are kind of like, they get changed out on probably almost like every two months we will because we’re just always trying to optimize and see which is the best one. We’re always switching between which Facebook Messenger Bot do we like the best, which customer review acquisition apps are the best. So I don’t really have solid recommendations of favorites there. Because we’re doing it, but we’re always grabbing the next app and then comparing to see what we like from one, what we like from the other, deciding which one to keep, and then we see another one come out and we test that. Just always trying to optimize for that little extra few percentage points of conversion rate.
Felix: Right. That’s certainly the name of the game. Just testing out little different things to move the needle a little bit. So that you so much for your time Patrick and Lewis of PatrickAdairDesigns.com is their website. What’s something new that you guys are focusing on in 2019? Where do you have your attention these days?
Patrick: Pinterest has been a huge thing for us. We have made some connections with a lot of really successful Pinterest users and they’ve shown us a lot of stuff that we’re missing out on. Pinterest is kind of this fantastic place that people I think underrate it. Especially if you don’t have a following. In my opinion, I think it’s one of the most straightforward ways for you to grow as a small business, just online. It’s the best place to get a lot of impressions through social media without any sort of following.
Lewis: I think with that one we’re just trying to really like we said we focus 40 to 80 hours a week on social media, and particularity growing our top of the funnel so we can grow as a company. So Pinterest is one we’re super passionate about. It’s just right now, who knows if, because social media platforms are constantly changing what they’re doing. But right now it’s the easiest way to basically get free, it’s not free because you’re always devoting time, so you have a time cost. But as far as organic traffic, it’s one of the easiest platforms to grow really fast organically. Yeah, we’re just all in on Pinterest and increasing our sales channel diversity throughout 2019.
Felix: Awesome. Again, thank you so much for your time guys.
Patrick: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Great to talk to you. Thanks for having us on. | <urn:uuid:b01eb6b9-6926-41c5-9ab4-d5b6ecd3b1bc> | CC-MAIN-2022-21 | https://www.shopify.co.za/blog/patrick-adair-million-views | 2022-05-28T10:45:35Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652663016373.86/warc/CC-MAIN-20220528093113-20220528123113-00420.warc.gz | en | 0.97442 | 12,740 |
Scots pine transfer effect models for growth and survival in Sweden and Finland
Berlin M.E., Persson T., Jansson G., Haapanen M., Ruotsalainen S., Bärring L., Andersson Gull B. (2016). Scots pine transfer effect models for growth and survival in Sweden and Finland. Silva Fennica vol. 50 no. 3 article id 1562. https://doi.org/10.14214/sf.1562
In this study, we developed models of transfer effects for growth and survival of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) in Sweden and Finland using a general linear mixed-model approach. For model development, we used 378 provenance and progeny trials with a total of 276 unimproved genetic entries (provenances and stand seed check-lots) distributed over a wide variety of climatic conditions in both countries. In addition, we used 119 progeny trials with 3921 selected genetic entries (open- and control pollinated plus-tree families) for testing model performance. As explanatory variables, both climatic indices derived from high-resolution gridded climate datasets and geographical variables were used. For transfer, latitude (photoperiod) and, for describing the site, temperature sum were found to be main drivers for both survival and growth. In addition, interaction terms (between transfer in latitude and site altitude for survival, and transfer in latitude and temperature sum for growth) entail changed reaction patterns of the models depending on climatic conditions of the growing site. The new models behave in a way that corresponds well to previous studies and recommendations for both countries. The model performance was tested using selected plus-trees from open and control pollinated progeny tests. Results imply that the models are valid for both countries and perform well also for genetically improved material. These models are the first step in developing common deployment recommendations for genetically improved forest regeneration material in both Sweden and Finland.
Received 4 February 2016 Accepted 2 June 2016 Published 10 June 2016
In the latest assessment report from IPCC (IPCC 2014), future climate change (predicted as the difference between the recent period 1986–2005 and the future period 2081–2100) is expected to manifest itself as a global increase in the annual mean temperature between 0.3 C° at the low end of the most stringent scenario with directed mitigation and 4.8 C° at the high end with the highest greenhouse gas emissions. For Sweden and Finland, the general trend is similar and the effects of warming will be greater in the northern parts, especially during winter (Kjellström et al. 2014). A recent study has shown that global warming alters climatic conditions known to affect survival and productivity of forest trees in the boreal region (Bärring et al. 2016). For example, the vegetative growth period is expected to be extended by around one month by 2050 compared to the current climate, based on the medium–high emission scenario (Bärring et al. 2016).
Studies of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) under boreal conditions have shown that global warming could potentially have a large positive effect on productivity (Bergh et al. 2003; Bergh et al. 2010), although this potential is only achievable in practice if the reaction of different forest regeneration materials (FRM) to climate change is known and if well-adapted genetic materials are used (Beuker 1994; Persson and Beuker 1997; Persson 1998; Rehfeldt et al. 2002). Forest tree provenance experiments have been established to evaluate adaptive properties and performance of FRM by testing provenances in common garden trials, where both provenances and trial locations ideally should cover a wide range of environments and climatic conditions.
Variation in spatial climatic conditions can be interpreted in terms of temporal trends, which facilitates the development of models predicting reaction to climate change. This has been done for several coniferous species worldwide (Rehfeldt et al. 2002; Thomson and Parker 2008; Thomson et al. 2009; Wang et al. 2010; Kapeller et al. 2012; Leites et al. 2012a; Farjat et al. 2015). Modeling approaches used in these earlier studies vary somewhat. In general, “response functions” describe the reaction pattern of a specific provenance/population, when tested at several sites (Rehfeldt et al. 2002; Kapeller et al. 2012). In contrast, “transfer functions” describe the reaction patterns of a set of provenances/populations tested at a specific site (Rehfeldt et al. 1999).
The transfer-function approach has sometimes been generalized by pooling data from several sites to provide a single, static transfer function (Schmidtling 1994; Carter 1996; Andalo et al. 2005). For most situations, this is a simplification as there is evidence that reaction patterns of provenances/populations are different depending on climatic and geographic conditions at both the planting site and the provenance/population origin (Persson and Ståhl 1993; O’Neill et al. 2008; Leites et al. 2012a,b; Farjat et al. 2015). Thus, models have been developed that include both planting site conditions (X) and population/provenance origin conditions (Y) (or where one is replaced with a transfer distance, Δ = Y–X), as well as interaction terms between the two (X*Y) to allow for “dynamic” reaction patterns. For example, Wang et al. (2010) developed “Universal Response Functions” for lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Dougl. var. latifolia Engelm.) using provenance trials and simultaneously modeling variable classes X, Y and X*Y. This approach was later used by Farjat et al. (2015) for loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.). Furthermore, Leites et al. (2012a,b) developed height-growth response models for Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) and western larch (Larix occidentalis Nutt.) using provenance trials and simultaneously modeling variable classes Y, Δ and Y*Δ. For Scots pine, effects of transfer have been described, modeling local site performance and effects of transfer separately using variable classes X, Δ and X*Δ (Persson and Ståhl 1993; Persson 1994). The abovementioned approaches differ depending on the aim of the study, field data used and statistical considerations, but they are all characterized by providing estimates of performance for an arbitrary provenance/population at an arbitrarily selected site, where the reaction patterns vary over the sites and provenances/populations (i.e., they are “dynamic” or “universal”).
In Sweden and Finland, the utilization of FRM for one of the main commercial species, Scots pine, relies on transfer recommendations developed as a result of many decades of provenance research (Eiche 1966; Eriksson et al. 1980; Persson and Ståhl 1993; Persson 1994). For Scots pine in Sweden, deployment recommendations are based on transfer functions for growth and survival together with genetic gain estimates for the seed sources, which are combined into estimated per-hectare production over a rotation (Berlin et al. 2014). In southern Finland, the current recommendation is to reforest with material of “local origin”, whereas in northern Finland there is a preference to use limited transfers to the south. In the Finnish recommendations, locality is defined by temperature sum (Tapio 2006). Although recommendations for both countries refer to climatic variables that can be projected to future conditions, there are some obvious draw-backs to the models currently used. First, climatic variables were derived from earlier time periods (1961–1976 for Sweden and 1961–1990 for Finland) and are not good representations of the current climate (Bärring et al. 2016). Second, the climate data variables (Odin et al. 1983; Morén and Perttu 1994) were based on information from sparse networks of meteorological stations. The variables are thus not fully compatible with state-of-the-art climate models (Bärring et al. 2016), which makes it difficult to extend the models that are currently in use to include projected climate changes. Finally, transfer models and deployment recommendations are derived in different ways in Sweden and Finland, and are thus not directly comparable if we envision using FRM in both countries.
In Sweden and Finland, extensive field data from provenance trials and progeny trials containing suitable stand seed check-lots from various latitudes, are available for analysis. In addition, state-of-the-art climate models have recently been used to identify climate variables considered important for Scots pine performance that are common to both countries (Bärring et al. 2016).
The main aim of this study was to develop models of Scots pine transfer effects for growth and survival in Sweden and Finland. The models are universal (cf. Wang et al. 2010) in the sense that transfer effects will vary depending on both planting site and provenance characteristics. The models were developed using a general linear mixed-model approach involving both geographic and climatic variables, derived from state-of-the-art high-resolution gridded climate data, which are consistent with regional climate model data. For developing the models, records of growth and survival from provenance trials and stand seed check-lot data (i.e., bulked seed lots collected from several individual trees within a stand used as references) from progeny trials were used. The development of new models is the necessary first step in developing common deployment recommendations for genetically improved FRM in both Sweden and Finland. Therefore, another aim of the study was to investigate the model performance when applied to plus-tree progeny data, where one or both parents are known, serving as a proxy for contemporary seed orchards in Sweden and Finland. While the models are capable of accounting for the effects of climate change, we do not consider these effects as they will be analyzed in a forthcoming study including operational FRM in Sweden and Finland.
In both Sweden and Finland, a large number of Scots pine provenance and progeny trial series have been established and analyzed during the 20th century. In addition, a majority of the progeny trial series established during the same time period in both countries included check-lots from various photoperiodic and/or climatic conditions that served as references of un-improved stand seed. There are thus different categories of trial series containing valuable information for developing models of transfer effects in both countries. Although the data are heterogeneous, with different trial designs, lack of overlap of genetic entries tested among trial series, large span in establishment years and ages of assessment, thus complicating an aggregate analysis, we believe that the trade-off between complexity and information in this case favors including as many trials as possible (cf. Persson 1994). The field trial data used in this study were therefore divided into two large groups. The first group consists of provenance and progeny trials where provenances and check-lots are used for developing the transfer effect models for growth and survival. The second group consists of progeny trials where the plus-tree progenies are used for testing the model performance.
To develop robust and reliable transfer effect models, it is essential that both trial sites and genetic entry origins have a large geographic and climatic distribution in order to reveal reaction patterns and to separate those from site conditions. For development of the models, we selected genetic entries of autochthonous origin from both provenance trials (provenances) and progeny trials (stand seed check-lots) that fulfilled these criteria.
To test the model performance when applied to genetically improved material, we used progeny data from plus-trees, phenotypically selected in natural stands, serving as a proxy for contemporary productive seed orchards in Sweden and Finland. Some, but not all, of the progeny trials overlapped with trials used for developing the models. The plus-trees were represented by half-sibs produced from seed collected in natural stands or by full-sibs produced by controlled crosses in clonal archives or seed orchards. The half-sibs’ origins were considered to be the stand location of the plus-trees and the full-sib origins were calculated as the mid-parent values (cf. Andersson et al. 2007; O’Neill et al. 2014; Farjat et al. 2015). As progeny trials in both Finland and Sweden are designed to test well-adapted candidate trees within a restricted target area they are not well suited for developing transfer functions. They generally have a very narrow variation in tested plus-tree origins and are often transferred only in one direction (usually southwards), making it very hard to find reaction patterns and distinguish those from trial site effects. Therefore, in this study progeny data were only used to test the model performance to predict recorded progeny outcomes. This makes it possible to find potential differences in reaction patterns between unimproved and improved trees. Provenances, check-lots and progeny are henceforth referred to as “genetic entries”.
In total, 378 field trials and 276 genetic entries distributed over a large climatic and geographic gradient in both countries were used for developing the models, and 119 field trials and 3921 genetic entries were used for testing the model performance (Table 1, Fig. 1, Fig. 2). To avoid extremely maladapted entries strongly influencing the modeling, genetic entries transferred more than 5° northwards or 5° southwards were excluded from the analysis. Only field trials north of latitude 60°N were selected for this study. This limit corresponds to the southernmost part of Finland so that, photoperiodically, the data cover the same areas in both countries. This also means that the study and model validity is limited to the region north of latitude 60°N in Sweden.
|Table 1. The number of trials and genetic entries (N) used in both the model development (provenance and check-lot data) and for testing model performance (progeny data) parts of the study and their mean (minimum and maximum in parentheses) latitude (LAT), longitude (LONG), altitude (ALT) and temperature sum (TS).|
|N||LAT (°N)||LONG (°E)||ALT (m a.s.l)||TS1|
| Provenance and |
|Finnish trials||289||63.9 (60.2–69.4)||27.0 (22.0–31.6)||178 (5–300)||1042 (577–1396)|
|Swedish trials||89||64.0 (60.1–67.8)||17.7 (12.4–23.2)||346 (5–775)||863 (618–1133)|
|Finnish entries||163||65.3 (60.0–69.8)||26.3 (17.8–31.3)||170 (5–415)||941 (539–1390)|
|Swedish entries||113||64.2 (57.6–69.8)||18.5 (12.8–28.6)||291 (5–850)||888 (528–1530)|
|Finnish trials||19||62.4 (60.7–66.5)||26.3 (24.1–29.4)||128 (71–282)||1186 (756–1346)|
|Swedish trials||100||64.5 (61.0–67.6)||18.5 (12.4–23.3)||313 (25–724)||856 (618–1066)|
|Finnish entries||690||62.0 (60.0–66.8)||27.0 (21.6–30.9)||122 (82–283)||1220 (838–1341)|
|Swedish entries||3231||65.2 (61.7–68.5)||18.9 (13.0–23.8)||314 (0–754)||829 (452–1077)|
|1 Long term average heat sum (degree days), threshold 5 °C.|
For each selected trial, records used for height and survival were from the most recent assessment, but before effects of competition and/or pre-commercial thinning may have biased the results. As trial designs and assessment regimes have varied over the more than 50-year span between the first established and last assessed trial used in the study, the resulting data were heterogeneous (Table 2).
|Table 2. The average number of genetic entries per trial, trials per genetic entry, trees analyzed and mean survival, height, establishment year, age of height assessment, and age of survival assessment used in both the model development (provenance and check-lot data) and for testing model performance (progeny data) parts of the study (maximum and minimum values in parentheses where applicable). View in new window/tab.|
Field trial data were analyzed in two steps: (i) a pre-adjustment and standardization resulting in least-square means of survival and tree height per site and genetic entry (described in this section); and subsequently used in (ii) the model development (section 2.4).
Due to the heterogeneity of the data (e.g., different trial designs) and the wide variety of (micro)environmental conditions at the trial sites, a pre-adjustment was performed for each field trial with respect to both height and survival, to provide environmentally adjusted genetic-entry means for the subsequent analysis. For trial designs with single-tree plots, the pre-adjustment model was:
and for trial designs with multiple-tree plots:
where yklm is the dependent variable (individual tree height or survival), μ is the site mean, bk is the fixed effect of block, gl is the fixed effect of genetic entry, pkl is the random effect of plot for multiple-tree plots, eklm is the residual deviation, k is the number of blocks, l is the number of genetic entries, m is the number of individual trees and and . For some older trials (designed as multiple-tree plots), individual tree data were no longer available so plot-mean values were used instead, and the pre-adjustment was performed according to the model structure in Eq. 1.
The models were used to estimate environmentally adjusted least-square (LS) means for a given site i and genetic entry j of tree height and survival (%) using procedures GLM and MIXED from the SAS STAT package (SAS Institute Inc. 2011). The pre-adjusted LS means were subsequently used in the development and testing of the transfer effect models. The pre-adjustment resulted in 2850 (2162 Finnish and 688 Swedish) LS means available for the model development and 12 499 (867 Finnish and 11 657 Swedish) LS means available for testing the model performance.
Studies have shown that mortality of Scots pine in northern Sweden mainly occurs before trees reach 2.5 m in height and that this developmental phase is reached at rather different tree ages depending on various growth site conditions (Persson and Ståhl 1993). In our study, survival assessment ages varied between 7–35 years and climatic conditions between 577–1396 in temperature sum (day degrees). We therefore standardized the survival rates to an equivalent stage of plant development (cf. Persson 1994). Consequently, the genetic-entry LS means for survival were transformed to the level of survival at 2.5 m height in our study by using the formula developed by Persson and Ståhl (1993):
where s25ij is the genetic-entry LS mean survival transformed to 2.5 m height, is the genetic-entry LS mean survival, and is the genetic-entry LS mean height for a given site i and genetic entry j. Furthermore, from Persson and Ståhl (1993), where TSi is the temperature sum (Morén and Perttu 1994) at site i.
Transformations were applied to normalize the data and improve statistical properties in the subsequent analysis for both height and survival. For height modeling, the dependent variable was transformed with a natural logarithm so that and, for survival modeling, the logit transformation was used so that , where and s25ij are as described above.
The climate data used in this study were derived from meteorological observations interpolated into high-resolution gridded data combined from the two national data sets for Sweden and Finland. The PTHBV dataset had a spatial resolution of 4 × 4 km and the FINADAPT dataset a spatial resolution of 10 × 10 km (Bärring et al. 2016). Climate indices considered important for Scots pine performance in boreal conditions were calculated for each grid from daily mean temperature and precipitation observations, converting them to averages spanning the period 1961–2007, which was considered to represent the current climate (Bärring et al. 2016). This period also corresponds to and encompasses the climate encountered by the genetic entries in the selected field trials. Each trial site and genetic entry origin was assigned the climatic indices from the corresponding grid. The climate indices and geographical data used for modeling are shown in Table 3.
|Table 3. A summary of the variables describing geographical location, site and climatic conditions for trial sites and genetic entry origins.|
|LAT||-||Latitude (degrees, WGS84)|
|LONG||-||Longitude (degrees, WGS84)|
|ALT||-||Altitude (m a.s.l.)|
|TS||ANN||Long term average temperature sum during the growing season (degree days), threshold 5 °C.|
|Tmean||ANN, DJF, MAM, JJA, SON||Mean temperature (°C)|
|ContInd||ANN||Continentality index calculated as the difference between the average July mean temperature and January mean temperature. A lower value represents a maritime climate whereas a higher value represents a continental climate.|
|VegPer||ANN||Vegetation period length. The number of days between the start and end of the vegetation period.|
|VegStart||ANN||Vegetation period start. The first day of the year in the first continuous period where the mean temperature has been at least 5 °C for four consecutive days.|
|VegEnd||ANN||Vegetation period end. The last day of the year in the last continuous period where the mean temperature has been at least 5 °C for four consecutive days.|
|MaxDrySpell2||ANN, AMJJ, ASO||Dry spell (days). The longest continuous period in which the precipitation is <1mm/day.|
|precipSum2|| ANN, |
| 1 Different time spans for the variable. ANN = Annual. DJF = December–February. MAM = March–May. JJA = June–August. SON = September–November. AMJJ = April–July. ASO = August–October. AMJJASO = April–October. |
2 The drought and precipitation indices exhibited systematic differences between the countries (Bärring et al. 2016) and could therefore only be used for within country analyses.
We modeled the effects of environment (site) and genetics (transfer) simultaneously, an approach found to be advantageous in comparison to methods where these effects are analyzed separately and combined afterwards (Wang et al. 2010; Leites et al. 2012a). Three main categories were used as independent variables: (i) those describing the trial site; (ii) transfer; and (iii) the interaction between the two.
The general structure of the mixed model (Proc MIXED, SAS Institute Inc. 2011) used in the model development was then:
where Yij is the dependent variable (tree height or survival), μ is the intercept, δ is a dummy variable with the value 0for sites located in Sweden and 1 for sites located in Finland, Xi are the n independent variables describing the site, Zij are the m independent variables describing transfer, Vij are the q terms representing the interaction between independent variables describing the site and transfer, ui and eij represent the random variation between and within sites respectively, α1,...,n, β1,...,m and γ1,...,q are coefficients, i represents sites and j represents genetic entry means within a site. For each genetic entry, a weight, , was applied by using the WEIGHT statement in Proc MIXED (SAS Institute Inc. 2011), where nij is the number of tree records behind every genetic entry. This was done to account for the varying amount of information behind the genetic-entry means. Furthermore, and .
Due to the large number of independent variables, the model development was done in two stages, where the first stage was an exploratory analysis with the aim of selecting a reduced sample of variables and variable combinations to be used in the subsequent modeling stage. The modeling approach combined: (i) the use of statistical measures for model selection, Akaike’s Corrected Information Criterion (AICC) (Akaike 1973; Hurvich and Tsai 1989); (ii) residual analysis; (iii) parsimony; (iv) a priori knowledge of modeling structures from earlier studies of transfer effects of Scots pine (Persson and Ståhl 1993; Persson 1994; Andersson et al. 2003; Andersson et al. 2007); and (v) biological soundness. Variables describing the site were the geographic and climatic data shown in Table 3, along with information related to the particular trial data used, i.e., age of assessment and trial establishment year (Table 2). Variables describing transfer were calculated for every geographic and climatic variable described above as Zij = Xj – Xi, where Zij and Xi are as described above and Xj is the independent variable describing the genetic-entry origin.
In the first stage of the modeling approach, preliminary regression and correlation analysis were used to screen independent variables. Most variables with predictive power for site or for transfer were highly correlated, and therefore we did not use more than one at the time (site and transfer effects considered separately in this respect) in the subsequent analyses (cf. Leites et al. 2012a). In the subsequent modeling stage, not all but several different combinations of first-order interaction between site and transfer variables were tested. In particular, transfers in latitude or temperature sum were combined with several different site variables comprising altitude, temperature sum, annual mean temperature and a binary dummy variable representing country ( δ ). In particular, δ was used to discern possible differences in the transfer effects between the two countries. This is a crucial test to make if the aim is to develop models that are generally valid for both countries. Furthermore, the independent variables describing site were both left untransformed and transformed with natural logarithms, square roots, squares, and inverses. In particular, care was taken (e.g., by transformations of certain variables) to ensure biologically reasonable effects in the real (i.e., back-transformed) scale. All models were compared using AICC and the best-performing model was selected.
To illustrate the model performance, back-transformation of the independent variables was also undertaken. When back-transforming height, an adjustment term for logarithmic bias (φ) was introduced (Baskerville 1972; Lee 1982) and calculated as .
The model performance was tested using the progeny data to predict height and survival as:
where is the predicted value of height or survival when the models are calculated with the actual values of the independent variables describing site i (), transfer of genetic entry j () and the interaction terms () from the progeny data. All other terms are as described above.
The predicted height or survival values calculated from the models were then compared with the recorded outcomes from the progeny trials as , where dij is the deviation between the recorded genetic entry mean value from the progeny data and .
For tree height, the best model included the natural logarithms of age at the time of assessment, year of establishment (scaled using the establishment year minus 1945) and temperature sum as factors describing the site. The effect of country was not significant for height. Transfer effects were best modeled by latitudinal transfer and its square, both alone and as interaction terms with temperature sum. The back-transformed height (expressed in meters for simplicity and descriptive purposes) was then:
Coefficients and p-values are given in Table 4.
|Table 4. Coefficients and variance estimates with the natural logarithm of height as the dependent variable. Independent variables are the age of height assessment (ah), establishment year minus 1945 (EY-1945), temperature sum (TS) and transfer in latitude (ΔLAT).|
|Variance between trials||0.06237|
|Variance within trials||0.03336|
|Total variance in dependent variable||2.1907|
For tree survival, the best model included the temperature sum, its natural logarithm and a dummy variable indicating country as factors describing the site. Transfer effects were best modeled by latitudinal transfer and its square, both by themselves and as interaction terms with altitude. The back-transformed survival in percent was then:
Coefficients and p-values are given in Table 5.
|Table 5. Coefficients and variance estimates with the logit transformed survival projected to 2.5 m height as the dependent variable. Independent variables are temperature sum (TS), transfer in latitude (ΔLAT), altitude (ALT) and a dummy variable ( δ ) where 0 represents Sweden and 1 Finland.|
|Variance between trials||0.8134|
|Variance within trials||4.0489|
|Total variance in dependent variable||27.5474|
To illustrate the model performance, four sites were selected to represent harsh and mild conditions covering the geographic area being studied, and were assigned appropriate values for the modeled site variables (Table 6).
|Table 6. The four representative sites chosen to illustrate the model performance.|
|62M||62||1200||100||Milder coastal areas in central Sweden and milder areas in southern Finland.|
|62H||62||750||450||Harsher high-altitude sites in central Sweden.|
|66M||66||1000||100||Milder low-land and coastal areas in northern Sweden and Finland.|
|66H||66||650||350||Harsher areas with higher altitudes in northern Sweden and Finland.|
| 1 Approximate latitude corresponding to the general site description and combination of TS and ALT. |
2 Long term average heat sum (day degrees), threshold 5 °C.
3 Altitude (m a.s.l.)
To illustrate the performance of the height transfer effect model, the establishment year was set to 1980 and the age of assessment to 30 years. The transfer span was chosen to be between 4° of latitude to the south and 2° of latitude to the north, to cover the most important dynamics and to facilitate comparison with previous studies.
At the harsher sites (62H and 66H), the optimal transfer for height growth is around 0.5° of latitude to the north and zero transfer seems to be near optimal (Fig. 3). Transfer to the south and too far to the north reduces height growth.
At the northern, mild site (66M), optimal transfer is around 2° of latitude to the north, whereas the southern mild site (62M) trees exhibit a continued increase of height growth with even greater northward transfer. For all sites, transfer to the south reduces height growth.
The increase in height growth at optimal transfer is negligible at the harsh sites and around 2% and 6% at the northern (66M) and southern (62M) mild site, respectively. For all sites, a southward transfer of 3°, and for the two harsh sites a northward transfer of 4°, results in a decreased height growth of around 10%.
The first obvious thing with respect to the model performance for survival (Fig. 4) is that it is lower in Finland (Fig. 4b) than in Sweden (Fig. 4a), i.e., around 15% at zero transfer. Nevertheless, the transfer effects are similar in both countries, where optimal transfer for increased survival is around 2° of latitude to the south for the two milder sites (62M and 66M). For the harsher sites (62H and 66H), optimal transfer is even further to the south, around 3° of latitude.
The increase in survival by transferring to the south can be substantial at harsh sites (62H and 66H), around 10–20% at optimal transfer, with an equally large decrease in survival when transferring a similar distance to the north. The increase in survival by transferring south is smaller at milder sites (62M and 66M), whereas the decrease in survival by northward transfer can be almost as large as at harsher sites.
The deviation between the recorded and predicted genetic-entry mean value from the progeny data for the logit-transformed survival and ln-transformed height (d) is shown in Fig. 5. Furthermore, the data is divided into latitude classes and the mean and standard deviation for each class is given (Fig. 5).
The model performance was tested by comparing assessed heights and survival levels for progenies with predicted values from the model using the deviation (d). Using linear and quadratic regression to model d as functions of latitudinal transfer, we investigated if there were systematic structures showing differences in reaction patterns between modeling data and progeny data. No regression model explained more than 1.9% of the variation for either height or survival (data not shown) and no clear trends could be seen, indicating negligible differences in reaction patterns between modeling data and progeny data. For survival, no clear difference in the total level of survival could be found, whilst the recorded heights were in general somewhat greater than the predicted ones.
The models developed in this study share the same general features as previous models of transfer effects for Scots pine in Sweden (Persson and Ståhl 1993; Persson 1994; Andersson et al. 2007). All models show an increase in height growth with transfer to the north but the models differ slightly in optimum transfer distance and the size of the increased height growth. Furthermore, survival increases with transfer to the south and decreases with transfer to the north in all models. All show that the increase in survival with transfer to the south is greater at harsher sites than at milder ones. A slight difference can be seen in the optimum of transfer to the south. In our model, the optimum southward transfer was approximately 2° at milder sites and 3° at harsher sites. In the model developed by Andersson et al. (2007), there is no optimum within the 4° transfer, but survival keeps increasing as the material is transferred further south. The model by Persson (1994) behaves in a similar way to that of Andersson et al. (2007), except for the mildest sites (temperature sum 1250 DD) where the optimum transfer to the south is similar to our model, around 2°. These differences in optima are probably due to the different datasets used in the respective studies, but compared to those with the most overlapping and comprehensive data the differences are small.
A direct comparison with earlier Finnish results is difficult due to a lack of explicit transfer models. Earlier experiences concerning provenance transfers in southern Finland can be summarized either as favoring the use of local seed sources or favoring material transferred a maximum of 200 km from the south (Heikinheimo 1949; Sarvas 1960; Koski 1989). In northern Finland, a transfer of 2.5° from the north resulted in maximum survival, and 1.5° transfer produced maximum height sum (not very different to the local value) (Mononen 1987). These results are roughly compatible with the results of our models. The practical seed transfer rules in Finland have, to date, been on the conservative side and favored the use of local seed sources (Tapio 2006).
The key factor describing the site (i.e., performance of local, unimproved material) in our models for both height and survival was temperature sum. For Scots pine in Sweden and Finland, temperature sum is well correlated with forest yield (Beuker 1994; Morén and Perttu 1994; Persson and Beuker 1997) and has been used as a key site descriptor in previous transfer-effect models (Persson and Ståhl 1993; Persson 1994; Andersson et al. 2007). Due to the large heterogeneity in both time and space of the field data used, age of assessment (cf. Andersson et al. 2007) and year of establishment were included in the height model to describe site performance. Assessment ages in the field trials varied from 8 to 35 years, under a wide variety of climatic conditions and, hence, this factor is used to account for the different growth phases of the trees. For survival, the effects of different developmental stages were instead captured by predicting the survival rate when a height of 2.5 m was reached. In a study using data from the Swedish National Forestry Inventory, Elfving and Tegnhammar (1996) found an increase in growth in both Scots pine and Norway spruce (Picea abies L. Karst.) during the time period 1953–1992 and attributed this to changes in silvicultural regimes, land use and improved regeneration methods, rather than the effects of climate change. Our main provenance data largely overlap the time period considered by Elfving and Tegnhammar (1996), but also span a later period, and we used climate data for 1961–2007 to represent current climate. Thus, establishment year may, besides the factors described by Elfving and Tegnhammar (1996), contain effects of climate change. For temperature sum, the average increase between 1961–1990 and 1988–2007 was only between 36 and 40 DD, and very small compared to the projected changes by 2050 (290–322 DD) (Bärring et al. 2016).
The significant interaction terms for both survival and growth models indicate that the reaction patterns of the provenances differ depending on a combination of climatic and photoperiodic conditions at the site as well as the transfer distance in terms of latitude (i.e. also, indirectly, the conditions at the origin of the provenance). Having an interaction term that simultaneously includes both site and provenance origin confers dynamic properties on the transfer functions and is considered crucial when developing a model structure for predicting performance of an arbitrary seed source at an arbitrary site (population and site specific reaction patterns) (cf. Wang et al. 2010; Leites et al. 2012a). The combination of the model terms (along with the non-linear properties of the functions in the re-transformed scale) entails climate adaptive properties of the transfer effect models. Thus, by changing temperature sum to correspond to future climatic conditions, the models can predict new reaction patterns and performance of height and survival.
One alternative model we investigated in detail used transfer in temperature sum instead of transfer in latitude. Previous studies and recommendations for Sweden advocated transfer in latitude (Persson and Ståhl 1993; Persson 1994), whereas temperature sum has been used in Finland (Tapio 2006). Temperature sum and latitude are closely correlated in Finland (Mikola 1982) and recommendations made with respect to one variable could therefore be transformed to the other, whereas the relationship between the two variables is more complex in Sweden (Bärring et al. 2016). We tested a set of models for both height and survival, including different site and interaction terms, using temperature sum as the main transfer effect both for the entire data set and separately for the individual countries, but none of those models was as good as the models presented here, based on their AICC-values.
The interaction between country (δ) and the transfer effects (ΔLAT, ΔLAT2) revealed significant effects for both height and survival, indicating a difference between the countries, although replacing country with other interaction terms we found that altitude for the survival model and temperature sum for the height model gave better AICC-values. The combined results from the model-development analyses lead us to consider that the transfer effect models for height and survival are, indeed, valid for both countries.
For the survival transfer effect model, we did not succeed in finding biological variables that would replace the strong effect of country for estimating non-transferred (local) survival. In the modeling data, Finnish trees exhibited, on average, 11% lower survival than those in Swedish (Table 2) and, with no transfer, there was 15% lower survival in Finland than in Sweden for the three common representative sites according to our model (Fig. 4). We considered three possible reasons for this difference: (i) there is a difference in performance and adaptation between the Swedish and Finnish populations of Scots pine; (ii) we are lacking one or several crucial site and/or climatic variables to model this difference; and (iii) there is a technical difference between Finnish and Swedish trials (e.g., soil preparation, scarification, plant material, trial design, establishment quality, planting spots, weed control, etc.) not described in our set of variables.
We find the first suggestion unlikely for a number of reasons. First, Savolainen et al. (2011) showed in a recent study that there was no evidence for adaptive differences between Scots pine populations in Sweden and Finland, and they are therefore expected to react similarly to a given set of climatic and photoperiodic conditions. Second, freezing tests including both Swedish and Finnish material show that Finnish material is equally or even more hardy than Swedish material from the same latitudinal origin (e.g., Andersson (1990) and unpublished studies). Third, genetic entries from one country present in field trials in the other country (49 entries spread over 19 trials) did not show any differences in performance compared to domestic entries. Fourth, at Finnish sites with similar geographic and climatic conditions compared to Swedish sites, where there is lower survival but no discernible difference in growth, the surviving trees could, hypothetically, also be selected for superior growth; that is, a possible population difference in height between Swedish and Finnish material could be concealed by selection effects. We tested this hypothesis by including survival and its interaction with country in the height model, but found no evidence suggesting any selection effects.
Regarding the second possible reason, one variable missing from our model is a measure of soil fertility, since we found it very difficult to standardize information from both countries and different time periods to provide something generally quantifiable to be used in a model. If soil fertility is indeed a main contributor to the difference in survival, we should also have seen an effect of country for the height model, but we did not. Freezing tests of Swedish, Finnish and Russian seedlings in nurseries have shown that seeds from a more continental climate are generally hardier than those from the same latitude with a more maritime climate (Andersson 1990; Andersson and Fedorkov 2004). In this study, however, the variable describing continentality (ContInd) did not improve model behavior and, thus, did not explain the difference in survival.
We believe that technical and organizational differences are the most likely reasons for the different levels of survival. In Sweden, the same research organization was responsible for designing, establishing and managing the field trials, whereas in Finland the trial design was undertaken by one research organization, but the provision of plants, establishment and early management of the trials was handled by and outsourced to another organization (State Forest Service). The Finnish trials were probably not monitored and managed in the same intensive way as those in Sweden, but rather more like ordinary forest plantations. To investigate this idea, we compared survival data from practical plantations of 216 fixed plots spanning latitudes 63.4–67°N in northern Sweden (Ackzell et al. 1994) with local (with origin ± 0.5° of latitude from the planting site) check-lots from the field trials spanning the same latitudinal range in our study. Although this comparison is not straightforward and is somewhat crude, it indicated that the survival levels in the Swedish field trials are higher than in operational plantations, with a magnitude similar to the country differences. This supports the idea of technical differences as a main factor affecting survival.
In this study, we opted to use as many sources of information about reaction patterns as possible. This implied an analysis of a multitude of trial series with different design features and genetic entries. Most studies on transfer effects or reaction patterns have focused on a single trial series or a set of trial series with very similar design (Wang et al 2010; Kapeller et al. 2012; Farjat et al. 2015). Such an approach allows for including trial design features directly in the modeling step and more advanced statistical modeling (cf. Leites et al. 2012a,b). As the aim of our study was to develop transfer effect model valid for both Sweden and Finland, we decided to use trial series with diverse designs for a number of reasons. First, there were several different provenance trial series established in Sweden and Finland, with varying geographic (and thus climatic) coverage. Second, many progeny trial series in Sweden and Finland contained stand-seed check-lots with transfer effect information. Third, as no trial series (provenance or progeny) had parallel trials in both countries, inclusion of genetic entries tested across the border were important and these were found in both provenance and progeny trials. Finally, most provenance trials were established earlier than the progeny trials used here, so including progeny trials means accessing new performance data from a more recent time period.
Using the progeny data to test model performance, we found only minor deviations between predicted and recorded values with regard to transfer effects. This implies that the models developed here (using unimproved seed sources) are also valid for phenotypically selected plus trees. This agrees with studies comparing improved and unimproved Scots pine in northern Sweden, where transfer effects for the two categories only differed marginally (Andersson et al. 2003; Andersson et al. 2007). Similar observations were also made by O’Neill et al. (2014), who suggested that the seed transfer guidelines developed for unimproved material of Douglas-fir and interior spruce (Picea glauca (Moench) Voss P. engelmannii Parry ex Englem. complex) in British Columbia could also be used for improved material.
The survival level at zero transfer for the progeny was predicted well by the model, suggesting only marginal differences in survival between phenotypically selected plus-trees and unselected local material and corresponding well to previous results (Andersson et al. 2007). The level of difference between recorded and predicted value for height at zero transfer was around 8%, which is reasonable considering the structure of the progeny data (Rosvall et al. 2001). There was a mix of both open-pollinated and control-pollinated progeny from phenotypically selected plus-trees, which means that the level of genetic gain is not homogenous. In addition, only a subset of the trials used in the testing of model performance overlapped with the modeling data.
The transfer effect models developed here are the first step in an endeavor to develop joint Scots pine deployment recommendations and seed-zone delineations in Sweden and Finland. For this to be achievable, the models need to be valid for both countries, include climate adaptive properties and be able to predict performance of contemporary seed orchards. This study suggests that the models developed, indeed have these desired properties.
In the current Swedish deployment recommendations of FRM (both provenances and seed orchard crops), a production index is calculated from the product of estimated survival projected to 2.5 m height (in current climatic conditions) and height projected to age 30 (in mid-century climatic conditions) adjusted with a function taking patchiness of mortality into account (Berlin et al. 2009a,b) to estimate per hectare volume production over a rotation (Berlin et al. 2014). The production index includes a trade-off between survival during the establishment phase and utilization of the increased growth potential in a future warmer climate (Berlin et al. 2014).
We suggest that the new transfer effect models should be implemented for both countries in the model structure described above. In this case, climate-adapted transfer rules can be calculated by using estimates of survival in the current climate and growth in a future climate. Such deployment recommendations would be a major accomplishment and could increase the exchange of FRM between the two countries. In addition, the performance of a given seed lot can be predicted for any scenario of changed future climate. We intend to analyze the effects of climate change on the performance and deployment recommendations of practical FRM in a forthcoming study.
The Skogforsk part of this study was funded by the Swedish Association of Forest Tree Breeding, Future Forests and the EU FP7 Noveltree project. The SMHI part of this project was funded by the Swedish Mistra-SWECIA program funded by Mistra (the Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research). All funding agencies are gratefully acknowledged. The Finnish Meteorological Institute kindly provided the climate data for the 10 × 10 km grids. The authors would also like to thank Sara Abrahamsson for assisting in the data compilation, Dag Lindgren, Bengt Persson, Björn Elfving, Urban Nilsson, Egbert Beuker, Jari Hynynen and Risto Ojansuu for helpful comments and suggestions during the model development and Tim Mullin for assisting in the final stages of the manuscript completion.
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Total of 49 references. | <urn:uuid:b655b09c-e89b-4d23-93e7-c98317249a73> | CC-MAIN-2022-21 | https://www.silvafennica.fi/article/1562/ref/20 | 2022-05-28T09:40:05Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652663016373.86/warc/CC-MAIN-20220528093113-20220528123113-00420.warc.gz | en | 0.900844 | 13,049 |
|“||Reality is the lifeblood that makes a work pulse with energy. Reality itself is entertainment!||”|
A successful professional mangakaW, Rohan is often roped into paranormal events while conducting research for his latest manga. He is a Stand User who uses his Stand, Heaven's Door, to transform others into books and read them for inspiration.
He is notable for being featured as the protagonist in a variety of spinoffs to the main JoJo story, including the series Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan; Rohan at the Louvre, and Rohan Kishibe Goes to Gucci.
Diamond is Unbreakable
Rohan is a slim young man of average height. He has green hair that is styled in a slicked-sideways undercut. He has a well-sculpted face with sharp cheekbones and delicate eyebrows. While his eyes are green in the anime and animated OVAs, they notably are heterochromatic in the colorized manga OVAs, with the right being blue and the left gold. In these OVAs, he also wears lipstick. While his outfits regularly change, Rohan keeps his trademark headband that is jagged on both sides and sits on his crown. He also always wears dangly earrings that have manga pen tips at the ends. Manga pens are apparent in almost all his outfits, either as jewelry or the pattern of his clothes itself. His overall style is somewhat feminine and notably revealing. They are form-fitting and of unique designs, accompanied by some baggy article of clothing.
His first outfit sees him adorning a baggy suit and pants, over which he wears a semi-unbuttoned vest. This section requires expansion.
Rohan has appeared in multiple one-shots, including:
- Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan, consisting of
- Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan - Episode 16: At a Confessional
- Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan - Episode 2: Mutsu-kabe Hill
- Rohan Kishibe Goes to Gucci
- Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan - Episode 5: Millionaire Village
- Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan - Episode 6: Poaching Seashore
- Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan - Episode 4: The Harvest Moon
- Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan - Episode 7: A Rainy Monday
- Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan - Episode 8: Deoxyribonucleic Acid
- Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan - Episode 9: The Run
- Rohan at the Louvre
|“||Did you think the great Kishibe Rohan draws comics because he wants money?! I draw comics because I "WANT TO BE READ"! That's the one and only reason. I couldn't care less about anything else!||”|
Rohan Kishibe is a passionate mangaka dedicated to his work, with a particularly abrasive personality but a good heart.
Rohan Kishibe is above all defined by his dedication to his work. With great draftmanship talents, Rohan has constantly sought to make the best manga possible in order to keep being read. His wish to be read is so great it trumps any other motivation, disdaining money or glory and feeling no need for kinship either. When drawing, Rohan falls into an artistic trance, drawing with abandon and being distracted with great difficulty. Because of his tremendous drawing skill, the one thing Rohan seeks the most is inspiration to fuel his work as everything else is an effortless formality.
To gain inspiration, Rohan is constantly seeking new experiences or facts, investigating anything he might find interesting with blatant disregard for common sense, politeness or the law, for instance buying a whole mountain range to preserve the living area of a supposed yokai and constantly prying into people's lives by turning them into books with his Heaven's Door. Moreover, Rohan is overly curious, willingly throwing himself into strange adventures such as an unusual house sale or a poaching session. His inquisitiveness can turn obsessive and downright morbid as he had to be reigned in to stop harassing Koichi and killed a spider just to taste its innards. Nonetheless, Rohan considers "reality" to be the greatest inspiration, and looks for genuine material, disdaining fakes such as when Hazamada fakes throwing up.
In addition to his own work, Rohan is an amateur of art in all its forms. He possesses movie goodies artbooks and manga figures alike, and considers that a visit to the museum to be a solemn occasion necessitating a proper outfit.
Parallel to his artistic passion exists Rohan's general unpleasantness. First of all, Rohan is arrogant, being aware of his nearly superhuman skill as an artist. Thus he generally looks down on everyone else and may only see people as possible material for his stories. However, he greatly respects Koichi for his courage and niceness. He also respects Tonio as a chef, later acknowledging him as a friend. Naturally, Rohan also hates being made a fool of, reacting with extreme dissatisfaction when Josuke cheated against him without him knowing how and cutting off his own finger as self-inflicted punishment. Likewise, he didn't like that his editor Kyoka Izumi dismissed his idea for a one-shot.
His arrogance is paired with his constant coarseness. While he may act with professional courtesy, Rohan is generally brash and impolite. Maintaining a thin veneer of civility, Rohan will usually make no secret of what he thinks of people which, combined with his arrogance, often earns him a mutual disdain with his interlocutors. Likewise, he also likes aggravating people he doesn't like, playing a game with Josuke with the declared intention to ruin him, has also stated to liking put down people "in their place" by refusing their requests or orders and is willing to tease or taunt an opponent. Rohan blatantly disregards courtesy for the sake of his goals, turning people into books on a whim and having at one point entered a confessional just to see the interior. But if he is disinterested, Rohan may also blatantly not remember an interlocutor's name such as Yukako Yamagichi at one point and distract himself while they talk. He has also occasionally adopted a visible passive-aggressive behavior and had no qualm punching an annoying Ken Oyanagi.
Nonetheless, behind his eccentric and discourteous demeanour, Rohan is still a decent person. When he learned about how Reimi Sugimoto saved him, he took an active part in seeking her murderer in part to give Reimi closure. He would also admit, with some persuasion, that he did like her and would miss her. Although he looks down on people and clashes with them, he always defends their lives, ultimately saving Ken Oyanagi when the boy tried to commit suicide and also saving the abrasive Kyoka Izumi from the gods of the mountains. Moreover, Rohan's stubborn personality means that he also has an iron-clad moral standard, for instance refusing to let Josuke be attacked by Highway Star despite the Stand promising to free him and Josuke being the person Rohan hates the most. Finally, Rohan steadfastly grants his fans autographs whenever they ask him, no matter the circumstances.
Despite his arrogance, Rohan is mature enough to know that surpassing others is easier than surpassing oneself.
Portrayed as impressively narcissistic in his in-universe interviews prior to Part 4, Rohan believed that there was no greater person than he, lying in response to questions to make himself appear likeable to fans. However, he began to humble himself after the events of Part 4, seen admitting his possible defeat to Hermes, begging for an innocent woman's life and acknowledging people as friends he cares about. None the less, he himself knows that his egotistical personality gets him in trouble, and after defeating Hermes, he seems to be more wary of his arrogance.
Recent stories feature Rohan doing regular physical exercise to keep in shape.
- Main article: Heaven's Door
Heaven's Door enables Rohan to transmute people into "human books", with written pages unfurling from their bodies. These pages relate detailed information about that person, including biological characteristics, history, personality, or even details of their Stand and its abilities.
Rohan's Stand Heaven's Door was acquired when he was shot with the Arrow and its nature likely originated from his zeal for drawing manga. Rohan states that compelling manga requires a quality that may only be drawn from reality, both for its sensory variety and the depth of experience that humans accumulate.
Heaven's Door simple yet exceptionally versatile power to transform people into books makes Rohan a formidable Stand User. There has been a noticeable shift in Rohan's mastery of his Stand as he initially required someone to look at a manga page to be transformed into a book, but then could draw his art in the air to trigger the effect and has recently been shown to only need a touch to turn targets into books. This shift has been stated as his own progress as a Stand User.
Rohan liberally uses his power to write commands in people, but usually shows restraint and subtlety in writing said commands. He prefers using very specific orders to compel people into not doing one thing or performing a single task for him, but never more. As a manga artist, he frequently uses his power to pry into people's lives for inspiration, regardless of courtesy.
He can also use his power in unexpected ways as people are literally transformed into paper and take on paper's property. Thus, he can easily immobilize someone by turning articulations into paper and has transformed an obese man into paper that could unfold and fit between two speeding trains.
Rohan is an exceptionally talented draftsman, capable if he chooses of finishing manga pages of quality at superhuman speed. He can draw competently without construction lines and shade precisely simply by throwing ink drops with his pen. Such is his speed that he is able to do 19 pages in four days, a feat he can easily surpass, as is noted when he still can meet the deadline for his manga during Made In Heaven's accelerated time, where time has hastened to the point that ink can dry before it gets to the paper. Incidentally, his skill also gives him the necessary arm speed to draw a paper sheet off his desk even before Crazy Diamond can complete a punch. He was also able to throw pen nibs with such speed that they pierced Josuke's skin during their initial encounter.
Chapters / Episodes
Chapters in order of appearance
Episodes in order of appearance
Part 4: Diamond is Unbreakable
Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan
When he was young, he was often left at his babysitter's house, Reimi Sugimoto. During the night of August 13, 1983, his parents had an important thing to attend to and so Rohan was left with Reimi. He was saved by Reimi at the cost of her own life from the serial killer Yoshikage Kira, but was in shock and couldn't serve as a witness. He intentionally chose to not remember much of this life in his adult years.
At some point during his childhood, Rohan, while playing on the beach, fell onto some rocks and broke ribs on the left side of his body. Because of that injury, he experiences pain in that area if he finds himself wherever there is extremely low atmospheric pressure.
Years later, Rohan met a woman named Nanase Fujikura at the inn of his grandmother. Rohan, at the age of seventeen at the time, becomes intrigued by her and attempts to use her as a model for his drawing. Nanase shows interest in his drawings and asks to read his work once he finishes it.
Days later, Nanase tells him the story of Nizaemon Yamamura, who created the "Under the Moon", which Nanase describes as "the darkest painting in the world." She leaves the room to answer her phone briefly, but when Rohan goes to check on her, she appeared to be crying about her divorce and goes running out of the house.
A week later, she returned and Rohan knocked on her door. She opened the door and embraced him while crying. Rohan attempts to show her his drawings of her, but she suddenly becomes enraged and begins stabbing the drawings. She runs away crying again, only this time she doesn't come back.
Rohan first appears as an antagonist to Koichi and Toshikazu Hazamada when they go to his house for an autograph. After they try to sneak a peek of the new issue of his manga, he activates his Stand and prevents either of them from attacking him. He then reads their memories, and in doing so, finds out about Josuke Higashikata, Okuyasu Nijimura and others affiliated with the two. He decides to use Koichi and Hazamada as materials for his manga. After using Koichi as his personal "inspiration", Okuyasu and Josuke find out about where Koichi has been going by following him. Rohan attempts to take advantage of Josuke's sensitivity about his hair and force him to open his eyes and be subject to Heaven's Door, but this backfires when Josuke's anger prevents him from recognizing Heaven's Door in the manga, enabling him to pummel Rohan without restraint. Rohan's manga, Pink Dark Boy, is suspended for a month as a result of his defeat (though interestingly, Rohan was never shown to have been deformed from being punched by Crazy Diamond).
Upon leaving the hospital, Kishibe finds a lot of respect for Koichi, in whom he confides, and at the same time holds an extremely deep hatred towards Josuke. When Josuke finds an alien named Mikitaka Hazekura, he decides to play a dice game with Rohan, who soon finds out that Josuke is cheating and threatens to take off his little finger if he doesn't stop. However, Rohan is ultimately unable to prove Josuke's dishonesty when his house catches on fire in the middle of the game.
Rohan later encounters Stand user Ken Oyanagi and proceeds to play five matches of Rock, Paper, Scissors, almost losing his Stand in the process. After defeating him, he's attacked by Highway Star, who lures him into a room with a vision of Kira in a room cutting off a woman's hand. Later, he also encounters Masazo Kinoto, who harbors Cheap Trick on his back. After seeing Masazo's back, the Stand transmits himself to Rohan's back. Rohan eventually tricks Cheap Trick by taking him to the Ghost Alley and forces him to look backward. As several hundred disembodied hands grab Cheap Trick, Rohan inscribes on Cheap Trick that he will be dragged to Hell, even though Rohan himself does not know if it even exists.
During the final investigation of Yoshikage Kira's new identity, Rohan narrows it down to Kosaku Kawajiri after finding a suspicious photograph of Kosaku being tailed by his son, Hayato Kawajiri, holding a video recorder. Rohan manages to meet with Hayato and uses Heaven's Door to find out more about his father. As Rohan opens contents of Hayato's body book, he discovers a warning on Hayato's pages to not read further. Rohan eventually discovers that Kosaku is actually Yoshikage Kira in disguise. His excitement of this revelation is cut short when a miniature Killer Queen appears, revealing that Kira has unlocked a new Stand Ability, Bites the Dust. By discovering Kira's identity through Hayato, Bites the Dust marks Rohan. Wounded, Rohan feebly attempts to call out to Koichi and Jotaro who were just a few blocks away from him and is promptly killed by an explosion, which, coincidentally, reminded him of his first time with Josuke. Bites the Dust loops time back an hour and in the second version of the hour, Rohan is killed again as he was already marked by Bites the Dust in the previous time loop, despite not meeting Hayato in the current time loop. In the third and final time loop, Kira eventually is forced to deactivate Bites the Dust in order to protect himself when Josuke discovers his identity, sparing Rohan just seconds before his fate.
He is seen preparing to draw manga. He is later mentioned by Okuyasu, who states he heard a rumor about him being caught shoplifting at Kameyu store.
(The information below derives from a Light Novel not written by Araki. As such, it may or may not be considered canonW.)
Rohan appears drugging 34 cats to find out the one who invaded his house earlier, but forgets about the cat after finding Trinita covered in blood. Searching for his master with Koichi they find the corpse of Hanae Orikasa. Rohan uses his stand on Trinita and discovers that the killer has red marks on his arms, and so tags along with Koichi to find him.
In order to research a YokaiW legend for his manga, Rohan buys six mountains to prevent a corporation from building a resort road in that area.
After meeting Naoko Osato on the mountains, Rohan uses Heaven's Door on her and discovers the story of her accidental murder of Gunpei Kamafusa, a gardener whose body never stopped bleeding and whom Naoko has been obliged to take care of since then. Suspecting him to be a yokai, Rohan investigates the region around Naoko's house until he comes across a young girl. The girl tells Rohan she's not allowed to talk to strangers and runs away, and when Rohan tries to catch her, the girl falls and hits her head on a rock, bleeding just like Gunpei. Rohan realizes this girl is actually Naoko's daughter with Gunpei. Surprised the man who became a corpse was able to impregnate Naoko despite being dead, Rohan soon realizes the girl is a yokai trying to possess him. He uses Heaven's Door and notices the girl's memories is starting to fade away because she is dying, so he quickly writes one last memory: "I don't know Rohan Kishibe. Even if I meet him, I won't see him". When the girl comes back she briefly shows her true form to Rohan but leaves after not seeing him. Saved, Rohan names the yokai Mutsukabezaka, and declares his research complete.
Rohan then meets with his editor Minoru Kaigamori and asks for an advance on his manuscript fees due to being bankrupt. The value of the land he bought became worthless since the plans for construction stopped. He has to live at Koichi's house and even had to sell all of his Sailor MoonW merchandise, Led ZeppelinW record sleeves and his Rurouni KenshinW volumes. His only remaining asset is a Nicolas de StaëlW artbook. His editor thinks he's crazy until Rohan explains what he discovered on his adventure.
Rohan tells Josuke, Okuyasu, and Koichi about Nanase. He then decides to investigate the painting she told him and travels to Paris. There he discovers the painting is located at an abandoned section at the Louvre and asks to see it. Thinking it's strange there's a painting at an abandoned section and its archives being top secret, the interpreter Noguchi accompanies Rohan in there with Gaucher and two firefighters. When the group finds the painting they are attacked by a ghost mob of their relatives and everyone save Rohan is killed the same way the ghosts died. Rohan is almost killed by his grandmother, but the ghost of Nanase, who reveals that she was actually his ancestress, reveals to him the painting uses the memories of its victims. Thus, Rohan erases his memories with Heaven's Door, but not before writing a clue to recover it once he's outside of the Louvre. At the end, his four unfortunate companions are considered missing and Rohan discovers the painting was burned after being examined by scientists, even though he doubts it.
Rohan, accompanied by a beautiful interpreter, goes to a Gucci factory to investigate about his grandmother's treasured bag, that has the strange ability to vanish valuable things. He is informed by the leather goods artisan in charge that it is one of three bags created by a genius artisan from Gucci. Rohan asks for the bag to be fixed, even though the artisan tells him he doesn't understand the bag's true purpose. The interpreter gets Rohan drunk and steals all his valuable things, except for the bag, leaving him wandering alone. Fortunately, he finds an umbrella and a firelighter to shield himself from the rain. Rohan finds a hotel but is unable to pay for any room. It is then that a man shows interest in Rohan's recently found umbrella, offering the exact value of the bills Rohan made the bag vanish for it. Rohan then comes to the conclusion that the bag had a Stand bound to it, with the ability to take away valuable items but giving back their equivalent during misfortune, but laments that he had the bag fixed and now can't make use of the Stand anymore.
Rohan and a manga editor by the name of Kyoka Izumi go to investigate a hidden village located in the mountains for his new one-shot at her suggestion. Initially believing it to be related to the mountains he previously bought, Rohan agrees after Izumi tells him how every resident in there became rich at the age of 25. Izumi plans to buy a house in there, as she now is 25 too. They are greeted by the butler Ikkyu, who tests them about good manners. After Izumi fails the test, Rohan discovers that a bird he found earlier had died, while Izumi's mother and fiancee died in a car crash. Rohan becomes suspicious and uses Heaven's Door on Ikkyu to discover the mystery behind the village and trick Ikkyu to break a rule by writing on him. The village was under a curse that gave things to anyone who showed good manners, while those who didn't lose things. Ikkyu claims that this time Rohan broke a rule, as he hadn't given permission to be turned into a book, and Izumi starts to have a heart attack. Rohan begs for another test to save Izumi and is successful in it, all the while making Ikkyu break a rule (as he wrote earlier). Ikkyu says Rohan cheated and asks for another test, but Rohan denies it and carries Izumi away from the village. He notices the bird also returned to good health.
Rohan, after playing a optical illusion with a chicken leg, tells a story about a event he personally experienced at a train station. Rohan is on the phone discussing with a unknown person (presumably his editor) to meet at S-city to discuss his manuscript when someone on their phone bumps into him and trips. Rohan helps them up and then continues his phone call only to get bumped by another person on their phone, who happened to be a fan of his work. After they leave, a old woman who is also on their phone nearly bumps into Rohan, but he moves out of the way in time and she trips and falls on her own. After this more and more people accidently ram themselves into Rohan, all of whom are distracted on their phone, and as Rohan looks around the station he notices that just about everyone is distracted on their phone, paying little attention to their surroundings. The mangaka is nearly bumped into a large obese man, but Rohan manages to draw their attention from their phone and stops them from walking into him, and he begins to lecture the man before a woman knocks him over into the train tracks using her baby carriage, who was also distracted by her phone. With trains coming from both directions the obese man attempts to pull Rohan up from the train tracks, but Rohan doesn't trust him and thinks that he is under attack. The obese man then also gets knocked onto the train tracks thanks to distracted people knocking him off. Rohan quickly uses Heavens Door on the man, but doesn't find anything that shows him as a enemy, but does tell Rohan that the man has chronic heart disease. The man tells Rohan about how he also has had many people bumped into him that day, and that it has gotten much worse at the train station. As more people try to lift them up from the train station, more and more people got knocked off and fell on the train station. A ridiculous amount of people fell onto the train tracks, and Rohan realized the problem: he realizes that all of these people have been gathering around the obese man, and then Rohan sees some sort of creature emerge from many of the cell phones. It is explained that it is a bug that lives inside electronics and feed off of electromagnetic waves, as well as animals with weak hearts, like the obese man. The man is the sole death of the incident, which is stopped by Rohan commanding on of the men nearby to drive a truck onto the railroad crossing, stopping the train. As Rohan leaves he is forced to cancel the meeting but notes that on the bright side he has a idea for what to write for his manuscript.
Rohan, bearing a cast and a broken hand, shows deep regret for foolish actions he did to break his hand, and begins to tell the story of how it came to be. We are told the story of Yoma Hashimoto, who was scouted by a model production company. As he worked out more and more at the gym and in his girlfriends apartment to attain perfect physical condition for modeling, his personal life degraded, especially with his girlfriend, and his temper became very short, such as becoming angered at a deliveryman ringing the doorbell three times. While at the gym, his personal trainer didn't spend much time with him since he was preoccupied with training someone else. He secretly took large sums of money out of his girlfriends debt card, and even installed small artificial rocks all over not only the apartment but the entire apartment building for bouldering. That incident caused her to break up with him and kick him out. Rohan, who also worked out at the same gym, challenged Yoma to a contest. In the gym, there are two treadmills, that gradually speed up to 25 KM/H, their maximum speed. The remote stops one of the treadmills. The challenge part is getting the remote first and stopping your treadmill once they reach 25 KM/H. It is revealed that Rohan and Yoma have done this once before, with the mangaka securing a victory. As they begin again, Yoma takes off his jacket, revealing his perfect physique which has Rohan floored. As they ran, parts of Yomas muscles formed the shape of wings, which resemble those of the Greek God Hermes. At the 20 KM/H mark, Yoma turns around and starts running backwards, grabs a dumbbell, and throws it forward, destroying the window of glass that was behind them as they ran, revealing that the gym is very high up and that whoever falls down would surely die. Rohan attempts to grab the remote, but due to the treadmills only moving at 23 KM/H, Yoma quickly grabs his hand and crushes it, breaking his hand except for two fingers Yoma left intact so Rohan could still press the button on the remote. Rohan uses Heavens Door on Yoma, but it only gets his hand so the challenge continues. It is revealed that Yoma has killed his girlfriend, the delivery man, and the person who Yomas trainer was occupied training, causing him to neglect training him. Both of the treadmills reach 25 KM/H, and both make a dive for the remote, with Yoma winning, but Rohan wrote a command onto Yoma with Heavens Door, forcing him to use the remote on Rohans treadmill, causing Yoma to fall off his and go flying out the broken window and off the building. Rohan, speechless, knows not to look out the window, for he knows that Yoma would see that as him looking down on him, and he would surely kill him. Rohan concludes that he needs to leave the area right now, and notes that Yoma has become avatar of the God Hermes, which is what his muscles turning into wing symbols symbolizes. Rohan ends with that thought, and starts the run away from that place.
The mangaka heard a horror story from a mysterious sinner confession. As he is visiting Italy, Rohan decides to research the churches, especially for their architecture and spiritual background. He walks into a confession booth to research the interior, but mistakenly walks into the side reserved for the priest. Shortly after, a man walks into the other side of the booth and confesses his sin to Rohan, believing him to be the priest. Rohan hears his confession anyway, interested in getting information out of the man's horror story. The man tells he has been cursed by the spirit of a beggar he had been responsible for the death of, who swore that they would come to take him at his happiest moment. After telling the story, where the man continues to explain his sins and why he was still alive after apparently killed by the spirit, it is revealed that he had found a servant who was willing to do anything for him, and used plastic surgery to alter both his and the servant's appearances, thereby fooling the beggar into dogging the servant instead. The spirits of the beggar and the beheaded servant then dog the man, and both vow to watch him around the clock to make sure that he does not do anything suspicious again. Rohan watches on with curiosity, deciding to interview him later if given the chance, as he didn't know what happened to the man after that.
He is mentioned by Koichi, who revealed that Rohan used Heaven's Door to make it so Koichi could understand Italian for his trip.
When Made in Heaven sped up time to the point where one work day lasted for less than 5 minutes, Rohan was mentioned as the only mangaka to continue to meet his weekly deadlines, easily publishing over 20 pages in less than an hours time without food or sleep. Rohan himself does not appear however, as it is mentioned over the radio.
Despite loving his manga more than anything else, even over friends and family, Rohan still maintains relationships with the protagonists. Most if not all of those are strained.
- Koichi Hirose: Koichi was one of the first people Rohan met upon his return to Morioh. Despite trapping Koichi and using him for new manga ideas, Rohan shows more trust and friendship towards Koichi than the rest of Morioh's inhabitants. While Koichi is often perturbed by Rohan's near-obsessive behavior over him, he also has attempted to help Rohan in return. Koichi tolerated less and less the worst sides of Rohan's arrogance as he gained confidence and he was overall a positive influence on Rohan's attitude. At the end of Diamond is Unbreakable, one reproachful look from Koichi was enough for Rohan to yield and confess an attachment to Reimi Sugimoto.
- Reimi Sugimoto: Reimi was a babysitter for Rohan when he was four years old. As a ghost, Reimi still treats Rohan as though he were a child. While he often acts resentful towards her treatment of him, he also shows unceasing determination to find her killer, as Reimi had sacrificed herself to save Rohan's life as a child.
- Josuke Higashikata: Josuke and Rohan loathe each other, with their relationship being strained at best. This first started when Rohan kidnapped Koichi to use as material and nearly had Okuyasu commit suicide. Rohan also insulted Josuke's hair, causing Josuke to beat him until he was in the hospital for a month. Rohan views Josuke as simple-minded, and Josuke is often annoyed by Rohan's arrogance. As a result, Josuke was not above scamming Rohan for money. However, Josuke has tried on at least two occasions to patch up the relationship between the two. During the RPS Kid arc, he asked Rohan if he wanted to sit with him, Okuyasu, and Yukako. He also hoped to patch up their relationship after their battle against Highway Star, though Rohan's stubbornness and grudge prevented this. Despite their sharply contrasting personalities and rough history together, Rohan shows trust in Josuke, proven when risking his own life to allow Josuke to escape from Highway Star, and the fact he restrains some hostility on the knowledge that he's Joseph Joestar's son, a person he values deeply. In the OVAs, while Rohan is still portrayed as being somewhat aggressive, he appears to be more comfortable with Josuke, willing to eat lunch and chat with him. However, the details of their relationship are yet to be revealed.
- Jotaro Kujo: Rohan seems to regard Jotaro as knowledgeable, and Jotaro trusts Rohan despite being a former enemy.
- Okuyasu Nijimura: They only truly interact once, when Okuyasu goes to save Koichi from Rohan. Rohan used Heaven's Door to manipulate Okuyasu, nearly causing him to commit suicide by burning himself. While the two aren't seen together afterwards, it is safe to say they don't have a good relationship since Okuyasu holds a grudge against Rohan for what he did while Rohan is mostly indifferent to Okuyasu. In the OVAs, he is shown spending his free time with him and the others.
- Joseph Joestar: Unlike with most people, he is polite to Joseph, possibly since Joseph is his elder (and often refers to him as Joestar-san or Mr. Joestar). Joseph has been shown to be a fan of Rohan's works, something Rohan appreciates. He usually speaks calmly to Joseph, such as when he explains his investigation in uncovering Kira's whereabouts. He even states one of the main reasons he tolerates Josuke is out of respect for Mr. Joestar, further demonstrating his respect for him.
- Nanase Kishibe: Rohan first meets her Nanase as "Nanase Fujikura" during his teenage years. Attracted to her, Rohan mentions that his relationship was in effect a first love to him. Indeed, he was noticeably less abrasive in her presence and even showed some protective instincts. However, Nanase fled away before things could evolve in a meaningful way. It is only later that Rohan learns that Nanase is his ancestor.
- Tonio Trussardi: Although both characters do not interact in the manga, they are featured in Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan - Episode 6: Poaching Seashore as allies. In the one-shot, Tonio and Rohan are friends, even though Rohan disapproved of Tonio coming to Morioh in order to cook. Rohan changed his mind after eating Tonio's abalone risotto, and the two cooperated to go poaching for a rare type of abalones. During their escapade, Rohan risked his own safety to save Tonio's life. Throughout, they refer to each other with respectable titles, Tonio calling Rohan "sensei" and being referred to as "san". Rohan also appears to care for Tonio's happiness, choosing to bite his question upon seeing him with his lover, Virginia, and smiling to himself.
- Yukako Yamagishi: While the two have no interaction, Rohan learned about her after reading Koichi's memories using Heaven's Door. When Josuke asks if Rohan wants to sit with him, Okuyasu and Yukako, he declines while referring to Yukako as a crazy bitch (or the moody Yukako depending on translations). In Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan - Episode 8: Deoxyribonucleic Acid, Yukako requests Rohan to fix the abnormalities the daughter of Mai, one of her mothers friends, possessed who was a young child named Mao. Rohan declines to fix her and is incredibly rude during the meeting, straining his relationship to Yukako. In the end, however, they made up due to events that occurred relating to Mai and Mao after their meeting.
- Shizuka Joestar: The two have little interaction though Rohan once scared her by using the flash on his camera. On another occasion, Rohan used her invisibility powers to force Ken's hand into a rock in Janken, causing Ken to lose against Rohan. He seems to care for her, as he became worried when he lost her and helped Joseph and Josuke look for her.
- Hayato Kawajiri: Rohan noticed that Hayato was in the background of many of the pictures he took of people who were possibly Kira in disguise and tailed him. He tried to get information out of him, though Hayato refused, knowing that telling him anything would activate Bites the Dust and kill Rohan. Rohan did eventually get killed by Bites the Dust since he used Heaven's Door to read Hayato's memories, much to Hayato's horror. Luckily, his fate is avoided thanks to Josuke.
- Toshikazu Hazamada: Toshikazu was a huge fan of Rohan who accidentally learned about his address and decided to visit the mangaka himself. He was impressed by Rohan and stated he truly admired him from the bottom of his heart even after Rohan used Heaven's Door on him. In contrast, Rohan read through Toshikazu's memories and learned of his sordid personality and actions and frankly dismissed him, much to Toshikazu's sadness.
- Tamami Kobayashi: The two worked together in the I Am an Alien arc to expose Josuke's cheating during a game of Cee-lo between Josuke and Rohan where it was obvious the dice they used were somehow rigged to let Josuke win (it was Mikitaka disguised as dice and constantly throwing winning tosses for Josuke). Although they were not able to find out how Josuke cheated, Tamami still charged Rohan for his services. However, in Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan - Episode 2: Mutsu-kabe Hill, he is shown to be a fan of Rohan and asks for his autograph, which is a stark contrast to their more professional relationship during their first on-screen meeting.
- Akira Otoishi: Otoishi meets Rohan with Tamami after he is released from prison and excitedly asks for Rohan's autograph, claiming to be a big fan of his. Rohan's editor Minoru Kagamari harshly denies, saying that Rohan is busy, but Rohan scolds his editor and gives the two of them an autograph.
- Yoshikage Kira: While initially only interested in chasing down the serial killer in order to improve the quality of his manga, Rohan takes Kira much more seriously after learning that the man had killed his childhood babysitter. Evidently, all of Rohan's attempts at tracking Kira down have been done alone, with limited help from his allies.
- Ken Oyanagi: Ken initially annoyed Rohan greatly when they first met by challenging him multiple times to Janken (Rock, Paper, Scissors). Because of this, Rohan felt little remorse for making him upset, eventually reaching the point of spontaneously punching him in the face out of irritation. When Rohan learned that Ken was actually attempting to steal Heaven's Door's ability in order to gain power, he acted diligently to beat him, and happily gloated in his victory. Rohan had a change of attitude after seeing Ken attempt suicide over the thought of losing his own Stand, claiming that he is moved whenever he sees people whom are dramatic like him.
- Yuya Fungami/Highway Star: Though Rohan did not meet Yuya personally, he ended up a victim of his Stand. Rohan was shown to have enjoyed defying Highway Star, despite being completely at its mercy.
- Masazo Kinoto: The architect was hired to inspect Rohan's house after it was burned in order to agree on a rebuilding plan. Upon their meeting, Rohan immediately used Heaven's Door in order to check if he was an enemy Stand user. Learning of Masazo's abnormal fear of having his back seen piqued his curiosity. During the inspection, Rohan tried time and time again to look at Masazo's back, and was eventually successful. This was the cause of Masazo's death, as his own Stand drained his life force and latched onto Rohan.
- Cheap Trick: The Stand was an immediate threat to Rohan once it attached to him, making constant attempts to get other people to see his back in order to kill him. When he was able to remove the Stand via Reimi's Alley, he uses Heaven's Door to write in it "I'm going to Hell" before it gets dragged off into the unknown.
Relationships in Eyes of Heaven
(The information below derives from a Video Game not written by Araki. As such, it may not be considered canon.)
- Yukako Yamagishi: In Story Mode, Rohan is unnerved by Yukako's violent tendencies and will state that there is no difference when she is brainwashed by Heaven Ascension DIO. In Free Battle Mode, Yukako is annoyed by Rohan's teasing of Koichi and threatens him.
In Video Games
Rohan appears as a 1-Koma character (which provides immunity from the Battle and Support Seal status effects) and as a menu explanatory character, representing the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure franchise. This is also his first appearance in any game media.
Rohan makes his first playable appearance in the PS3 title. As one of the mass majority of playable characters in the game with the "Stand" Style, Rohan can turn Heaven's Door on/off, changing movesets, as well as having access to the Stand Rush ability returning from the Capcom game, being able to attack in conjunction with his Stand.
As Heaven's Door has never been shown engaging in physical combat, most of Rohan's fighting ability makes use of Heaven's Door's power or his own art equipment. Exclusive to Rohan is the ability to use "Seals", which lock off certain types of attacks and skills from the opponent for five counts of the battle timer, making them flinch every time they attempt to use a locked off skill and giving Rohan an opening to attack. However, if Rohan is hit at all, every lock will be instantly nullified.
- Throw - Rock, I win!: Rohan pushes the opponent off-balance and delivers a swift punch that knocks them down as he points at them.
While Heaven's Door is off:
- Safety Lock: In place of normal attacks, Rohan draws Heaven's Door's silhouette in the air with his finger. If the opponent touches it, one of their normal attacks is sealed. The normal attack sealed corresponds directly to the attack button inputted to produce this move. This move can also be used on a downed opponent. (Comboable through Puttsun Cancel)
- What would I do if I were a manga hero?: Rohan throws a number of pen tips as projectiles. (Comboable through Puttsun Cancel)
- I must keep drawing!: Rohan, paintbrush in hand, swings upward, knocking the opponent off their feet and onto the ground. This move can only be interrupted by Throws or HHA/GHA, and doubles as an anti-air. (Comboable through Puttsun Cancel)
- Your abilities are spent!: A Throw. Rohan extends his hand to grab the opponent. If it connects, he will pick the opponent up by their collar and swiftly write on their face with a paintbrush, before pushing them away and onto the floor. This seals abilities pertaining to the opponent's Style and the Style Button;
- Ripple Users cannot use "Ripple Breath", nor enhance their skills.
- Dio Brando cannot use "I'll suck you dry!"; While he technically cannot use "You weakling!" and "MUDA, MUDA, MUDA!" as well, these require preceding attacks to land in order to unleash. At the point where Dio would be able to use those skills, his seal would have already been nullified by the other moves in question.
- The Pillar Men cannot activate their respective Modes.
- Stand Users cannot summon their Stands.
- Mounted Style Users cannot call for their horses.
- You dare insult ME, cretin?!: A special taunt. If the opponent has successfully taunted Rohan while he's down, he can input his own taunt immediately afterward to regain not only his lost HHG, but gain bonus HHG at the cost of potentially leaving himself vulnerable on recovery.
While Heaven's Door is on:
- I'll be the first to strike!: A Throw. After a short delay, Rohan sends Heaven's Door to attack the opponent. If Heaven's Door touches them, the opponent will be stunned and left vulnerable to attack. (Comboable)
- I'm on the rise!: Heaven's Door rushes forward in a flurry of punches. This move has two follow-up attacks. (Comboable through Puttsun Cancel)
- Knocked back at 70 km/h!: Heaven's Door writes into the opponent "I will fly backwards at 70km/h", sending them into the stage wall.
- Time for you to be retired!: Heaven's Door takes material out of the opponent, stealing some of their HHG and knocking them to the ground.
Rohan's HHA, "Your reality is mine!", has him send Heaven's Door fly at the opponent. If it hits, Heaven's Door turns a section of their face into 'material'. Rohan then quickly walks up to them, rips a piece out, and guffaws. The HHA seals all of the opponent's skills, leaving them with just their normal attacks.
Rohan's GHA, simply named "Heaven's Door", sends Heaven's Door to fly a short distance. If it hits the opponent, they are knocked onto the ground sitting, before their entire face is turned into material. Rohan walks up to the vulnerable opponent and writes on the material to generate a safety lock. When he finishes, it shows that Rohan wrote "I cannot attack Rohan Kishibe" on the margin, and he proceeds to palm the opponent's face closed, sending them flying. This GHA, despite doing the second least amount of damage of all the GHAs (behind the GHA of "Kosaku Kawajiri"), completely seals all of the opponent's normal attacks, skills, moves, and abilities pertaining to their Style. This means that the opponent is able to only defend themselves for five counts of the battle timer with no possible way to attack or directly damage Rohan.
Rohan is a low-damage fighter, relying on his seals and ability to rapidly build the Heart Heat Gauge in order to effectively battle. Having attacks at all ranges and many opportunities to use HHG-consuming actions (HHA, GHA, Stand Rush, and Puttsun Cancels) more frequently makes up for Rohan's sub-par damage output. Rohan can force his opponent into a defensive playstyle with a combination of the right type of seals and attacks, but can be properly countered with characters that are not as hindered by certain seals than others.
Amongst many other notable costumes in the game, one of Rohan's unlockable costumes is his outfit from Under Execution Under Jailbreak.
His knocked down animation has him move his pen on the floor which is a reference to him writing notes after being pummeled by Josuke after hearing about his hairstyle's backstory when introduced as an antagonist.
Rohan was confirmed for the game alongside Okuyasu and "Kosaku".
Like in All Star Battle, Rohan compensates his mediocre damage output and combo ability with the powerful ability to lock off attacks.
As a Stand User, Rohan is one of many characters with wildly varied abilities that grant him uniqueness in battle. Opponents hit by Rohan's skills will be Sealed, and will have their abilities locked off accordingly until either enough time has passed or Rohan is hard knocked down.
- Style Action - Safety Lock: Rohan draws Heaven's Door's silhouette in the air with his finger as a trap. If an opponent touches it, their Normal Attacks, Powerful Attacks, and Homing Dashes will be Sealed. Holding down the input will charge the skill, eventually allowing it to seal an opponent's Style Action, then ability to interact with stage objects. When used in midair, Rohan is unable to charge and enhance it. This ability can be canceled out of with a Normal Attack, Powerful Attack, and Homing Dash. Despite Rohan creating air drawings, the Safety Locks are tangible, and can cancel out and be canceled out by projectiles. Though not specified by the game, Rohan can trap stage objects with Safety Locks when interacting with them.
- I'll be the first to strike!: Rohan sends Heaven's Door forward to attack, and if it connects, the target is knocked off their feet. This skill Seals off all skills, Flash Cancels, and Flash Bursts.
- Knocked back at 70 km/h!: Heaven's Door rushes forward in a flurry of punches, following the attack up by writing into opponents "I will fly backwards at 70km/h", and sending them flying a great distance away.
- I think I'll put you out of commission.: Heaven's Door rushes forward in a flurry of punches, following the attack up with an unblockable grab that steals material from opponents and leaves them crumpling and open to further attack. This skill seals off the ability to use Dual Combos and DHAs as well as Flash Bursts, and freezes the Dual Heat Gauge.
- You dare insult ME, cretin?!: Rohan stops to taunt, and if he is not interrupted, he temporarily increases the duration of inflicted Sealed effects for a period of time afterward. The effect does not apply to Seals already active when he executes the skill.
- EX - I'll be the first to strike!: The skill executes quicker, gains a boost to range and damage, and the duration of the inflicted Seal is increased.
- EX - I think I'll put you out of commission.: Rohan is invincible until the attack begins, and the duration of the inflicted Seal is increased.
- Time to open the door of your heart.: Rohan must use a fully charged Style Action. (200 Points)
- You dare insult ME, cretin?!: Rohan must use "You dare insult ME, cretin?!" (200 Points)
- If I were the hero of a manga story, what would I do here?: Rohan must land the basic Powerful Attack 3 times. (300 Points)
- A bit quick, huh?: Rohan must land a Takedown 3 times. (500 Points)
- Shut up! Just try me!: Rohan must survive the first 30 counts of the battle timer without taking damage. (800 Points)
Dual Heat Attacks
- Solo - Heaven's Door: Rohan uses Heaven's Door to knock the opponent onto the ground sitting, opening their entire face into material. Rohan, reading the pages, is left awestruck by the contents. Claiming the pages for himself, he swiftly and violently rips a handful of them out, sending the opponent flying. Like his GHA from All Star Battle, it does below-average damage but has the immensely powerful effect of Sealing all of the opponent's abilities short of basic movement and platforming for a period of time, leaving them completely unable to fend for themselves.
- With Josuke - I really hate this guy...: Rohan uses Heaven's Door to write within the opponent "My body will fly forwards at 70 km/hr." as he begins to tell Josuke something; revealing soon after that he hates him. The opponent is sent flying at Josuke in an attempt to cause a collision, forcing him to use Crazy Diamond to pummel them away.
- With Koichi - We're best friends!: Koichi uses 3 Freeze to make the opponent heavier, before Rohan uses Heaven's Door to write in the opponent "My weight will increase 10-fold.", combining the effects and multiplying their weight to such a degree that it causes them to slam face-first and sink into the ground with enough force to generate a crater.
Rohan appears in Diamond Records as both a playable character and the player's guide, explaining the game's mechanics and modes.
Rohan was one of the characters first confirmed during the game's announcement.
- Rohan's valued possessions include Sailor MoonW figures, Led Zeppelin paper sleeves, and the Rurouni KenshinW series.
- Despite Rohan being modeled after him, Araki has stated that the two of them are not the same personality-wise. He does admit however, after being asked if he would lick a spider like Rohan, that he would eat really strange things if asked to, and that he really enjoys drawing skin peeling, which is the premise behind Heaven's Door.
- In an "Tameike Now" interview with Shoko Nakagawa, Araki mentions that if he were to have any Stand ability from his series, it would be Heaven's Door.
- Rohan's Latin Spanish voice actor both in the OVA and the Anime, also voices Jotaro Kujo.
|Characters in one-shots|
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of the TOM WILDER
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © David Stuart Black 2017
All rights reserved. Except as provided by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
A note from Jack Brandon
Occasionally I have books available for FREE
or at greatly reduced prices.
For more information, see the end of this book,
where there is also information on joining
the JB Readers Club for free and enjoying its benefits.
Eaton Terrace, London’s West End
It was the most devastating text message that Wilder had ever received. All the more so, as just before it arrived to upend his world, he had been thinking that he’d fixed everything. Finally, just before lunchtime, he’d felt sure he’d brought an end to weeks of turmoil. How could he have been so wrong?
That morning had started with Tatiana Macrae being kidnapped by helicopter from a Scottish island. Wilder had given chase of course – though, before he could do so, he’d had to wait for charter helicopter to get up to the island from Glasgow. Even as he waited for the chopper to arrive, he had started his fight-back. He’d made a frantic telephone call to Jessie Marker in London – the obvious destination of the kidnapper. Could she track the kidnapper’s helicopter to its place of arrival for him? There couldn’t be many London helicopter charter companies who had lent-out a machine to Russian clients. In a panic, this had not been an easy task for her, but, with the help of MI6, she had managed it.
But after that small success, she had ignored Wilder’s instructions. Having traced the kidnapper – the Russian FSB agent Izolda Volkova – to a small hotel in London’s West End, she had gone against everything he’d told her. Wilder had warned her just how dangerous Volkova was. A supreme exponent of hand-to-hand combat. But Jessie, in the heat of pursuit, had followed Volkova and her prisoner up to the hotel room and waited for Wilder to arrive. But when she had heard shouting coming from the room, it was too much for her.
Ignoring the dangers, she burst into the room. But she was no match for Volkova. It was thanks only to Wilder’s timely arrival in his pursuit helicopter that he reached the hotel room in time to prevent Jessie being killed.
But it had ended all right. After Wilder had dealt with Volkova, she’d been carted off to hospital. And Tatiana had been taken back to her husband waiting anxiously nearby. Everything was supposedly restored to normal and the Russian threat was back under control at last.
Afterwards, Wilder and Jessie had met up with Mina Falcone from MI6. They thanked her for her invaluable part in helping with the helicopter tracking. The three of them had enjoyed a pub lunch – discussing not just that morning but also the extraordinary events of the days that had preceded it. As far as they were aware, they had put the whole nightmare behind them, bringing closure at last.
Falcone had gone back to the headquarters of SIS, the British Secret Intelligence Service at Thames House. After dealing with the arrest of Volkova, Wilder had gone back to his place and tidied up. He then drove down to meet Marker for lunch at the Antelope. After a quick sandwich and a beer each, they were walking back to their cars. At six-foot-three, Wilder’s brisk strides forced Jessie Marker to break into a trot every few paces to keep up with him. Typical of him, she thought, to have already put the dramas of the morning behind him, while she was still trying to come to terms with the fact that she could have been killed.
Then that devastating text arrived.
Wilder’s phone buzzed in his pocket. Still striding along, he pulled it out and glanced at the screen; it was from his daughter Lucy. Her fight from New York wasn’t due to land till now. So why text him as soon as she landed? He opened the message. In that instant, he stopped abruptly and his mouth fell slightly open.
Jessie, slow to react, had walked on a few paces. When she noticed he was no longer beside her, she stopped too and looked back at him. She had never before seen what she saw now. The colour had drained from his face and the muscles around his jaw were standing out, clamped and strained.
‘What’s happened?’ she asked.
He didn’t answer, as he was busy trying to type a response to Lucy’s text. But his fingers were clumsy and he cursed under his breath. It looked to Jessie as though he’d pressed the wrong key and deleted his half-finished reply. He tried again, frantic by now.
‘For God’s sake, what’s wrong?’ asked Jessie, putting a hand on his arm.
He was concentrating so intently on his mobile phone that he didn’t appear to have heard her. She watched him with a growing sense of dread
He put the mobile away and turned towards their cars again, but Jessie held him back by the arm. ‘What is it?’ she asked a second time, more insistent. The look in his eyes as he stared back at her made her catch her breath.
‘We’ve got to go,’ was all he said. She knew that Wilder didn’t do fear, but there was a wild look in his eyes – a look she’d never seen before – if not fear, then what?
‘What’s happened? What’s wrong? For goodness sake, Tom, tell me.’
‘It’s Lucy. She’s been abducted – I mean, kidnapped.’
‘What? Your daughter Lucy?’ Jessie shouted it out, involuntarily as though being engulfed by the same panic. ‘From New York?’ she stuttered as her mind got into gear.
‘I… yes… she’s at college there. But she was coming over to here today to spend the rest of her holidays with me – here in London to start with, then maybe Paris next week.’
‘Oh my God.’ Jessie just stared back at him, not knowing what to say.
Looking back at her with a kind of pleading expression on his face, he said, ‘I don’t understand this. She says she’s been taken, but she’s still able to send me a long text. Her language threw me for a second. She said the car pulled into a cul-de-sac as soon as they left the airport and she was taken out of the back seat and thrown into the trunk. She’s spent most of her life in the US, though – she would call it the trunk. So, she’s been able to send this long text because she’s in the boot of the car. Her kidnappers must be in too much of a hurry to have checked her for a phone. Dammit, I’ve got to concentrate.’
Jessie needed to know more. ‘What does she say after that?’
‘Let me think this through,’ said Wilder. ‘If it hadn’t been for Tatiana being kidnapped in Scotland this morning and brought down here… and me chasing after her and Volkova… I’d still be in Scotland. I hadn’t planned to come down to London until this afternoon. Lucy was going to make her own way to my place. At the airport, there must have been one of those drivers – in a chauffeur’s uniform perhaps – you know, peaked cap, probably holding up one of those boards with her name on it.’
‘But would she just go with a driver if she hadn’t been told she was being met by one?’
‘If she thought I’d arranged it,’ replied Wilder. ‘I’ve done that for her before when I’ve not been able to meet her myself – to make it easier for her to get into London with all her holiday baggage. But in her text she talks about two of them. After that, something must have happened – the message stops mid-sentence.’
He turned and began to hurry on towards their cars again. Jessie, now taking two quick steps to every one of Wilder’s strides, hurried along beside him. Her heart was pounding in her chest. She was still trying to work out why Lucy should be involved in a kidnapping. Was this the Russians again?
‘But why kidnap Lucy?’ she shouted, trying to catch up with him.
‘This is pure revenge.’ Wilder spat the words out. ‘A swift but well-planned retaliation for our rescuing Tatiana this morning. I should have seen this coming.’ Wilder bent into the stiff breeze and walked even faster.
‘So, what do we do now?’
‘Lucy always has a tracker hidden on her if she’s travelling alone. I’ve trained her that if she’s taken, she’s only to activate it once she’s gets to a destination – wait till she’s settled somewhere from where she might be rescued. She won’t switch it on while she’s still on the move. These people are unlikely to have detected the tracker yet. It also implies they’re still on their way into London. As with Tatiana, this being the Russians, this time they’ll be taking her to the Russian Embassy.’
As they hurried along the last stretch, with their cars now in sight, he ran his fingers through his dark hair and raised his face to the weak afternoon sun, almost as though in prayer.
‘Oh shit,’ he said, suddenly stopping and looking directly down at Jessie. ‘What if they’re going to put her on some private flight and take out of here? What if they take her back to Moscow along with Volkova and that IT specialist of hers, Sasha Gulina? Volkova’s supposed to be under guard in hospital, but what if they manage to get her out of there? They’ll probably want to take both of them back home so they can’t be questioned by the police.’
‘You mean so that they can’t be asked about rigging the bank or the kidnapping of Tatiana?
‘Both. But we haven’t time to worry about that now; my focus has to be on Lucy. God knows how we’ll find her if they get her back to Moscow with the other two.
‘What exactly are we going to do about this?’ asked Jessie. Wilder was now just fifty yards from the cars.
‘We’ve got to focus on stopping them getting Lucy to Moscow,’ he shouted back over his shoulder.
As they got to his car and he fumbled, rushing to get the keys from his pocket, he looked back at Jessie, now with a look of anger on his face, his muscles taught, his deep blue eyes unblinking.
‘I know it’s only a hunch,’ he said, ‘but we know that Rodchenko’s flying into London from Moscow this afternoon. I’ll bet they opt for Northolt Airfield. Private flights. I’m going to assume they’ll send a car to collect Rodchenko from Northolt. I’ll also bet anything that they’ll then take Lucy and their two out to Northolt – put them on the same plane and whisk them off to Moscow that way. My guess is they’ll be stuck at the Russian Embassy at the top of Kensington Palace Gardens until the plane’s ready for the return flight. I’ll head for the Embassy and see if I can spot them there.’
He looked down into Jessie’s upturned face. ‘While I’m on my way there, can you contact Mina Falcone? Then, between the two of you, could you do some things for me?’
‘I don’t know in which of her two offices you’ll find Mina, but give her a ring on her mobile,’ he said. ‘She’ll either have gone back to MI6 at Thames House, or she may be in the diplomatic section of the Home Office. But get a hold of her. See if you two can pull off any images from cameras near the Russian Embassy – both at the top and bottom ends of Kensington Palace Gardens. I’ll go to the top end, up on the Bayswater road – easier to find somewhere to park while I have a look around. I’ll keep an eye out for anything coming out of the Embassy that might be headed west towards one of the three airports they could use. As I said, I reckon Northolt or Luton but it could be Luton or even Heathrow. See if there’s a flight-plan been lodged for an incoming private jet from Moscow. Outgoing flights too, of course. But I don’t need to teach you your job, do I? Just keep in regular contact with me. You’ll both need to be my eyes and ears till we get this sorted.’
‘Sure, we’ll manage that and we’ll keep you posted.’
‘Lucy’s the most important thing in my life,’ he said as he climbed into his car. ‘But I don’t want anyone knowing I’m going to the Russian Embassy,’ he said as he eased the car out of its parking space. ‘And I certainly don’t want the cavalry coming to my rescue.’
The Zorin Residence, London.
Victor Zorin smiled. The kind of self-satisfied smile that has no mirth in it. He was humming an old Russian war song under his breath. Even if there had been anyone else in the room, they would barely have heard it. He tapped in time to the tune with a gold Cross pen on the hand-tooled pale green leather top of his huge desk. As he sat there, he indulged himself with a few minutes relaxation, basking in a glow of quiet excitement; it was beginning to look as though a whole new life was about to unfold for him. One of Russia’s richest men, he had more money than he could spend in several lifetimes; now, a move back into the world of politics had its attractions. And with great timing, a hand-written letter from President Balakin himself had seemed to open that door for him this morning. Nor was it just that the letter was hand-written; it had come in the diplomatic bag and had been delivered to him direct from the Kremlin.
During these idle moments, he reflected on the past. Having lived in London for a few years, just a few doors down from the Russian Embassy, he felt that this letter was proof at last that he’d risen to the top. Living here in arguably London’s most desirable road – maybe the most expensive road anywhere in the world – he’d come a long way from the slums of St Petersburg where he’d been born fifty-five years earlier.
But enough of this. He stopped humming, leant forward and stretched across the desk. He had been busy earlier finishing some notes. Notes were rare for him, as he usually avoided putting things in writing – things that could come back to bite one later. He considered these particular notes, however, to be necessary, as the President’s letter demanded a series of very specific actions. From today, everything would need to be carried out with meticulous care. Each action needing to be precise, with little leeway for variations and none for errors. The notes were also needed as many of the steps would have to be carried out by Alexis Mitkin. Originally Zorin’s bodyguard, Mitkin had matured thanks to solicitous nurturing from Zorin; he had become an indispensable righthand man – though he still needed occasional guidance and supervision. He had become like an additional limb as well as a sounding-board for Zorin – almost an extension of himself.
He glanced at the exquisite eighteenth-century marble and ormolu clock on the dresser nearby – time to call Mitkin in for his briefing. He took off his gold-rimmed glasses and ran a hand over his face and his bald head; his pate was so shiny it might have been hand-polished by some minion. He took in a couple of deep breaths and let them out slowly again. Although the president’s letter opened up the prospect of a great new life, it also carried risks.
For a moment, he thought about his predecessor in the project, Igor Rodchenko. He’d taken chances with the risks inherent in the project. And though Rodchenko didn’t know it yet, those chances were going to cost him – not only his exalted position, but his life as well. Unlike Rodchenko, however, Zorin would keep a close watch on everything and impress the same on Mitkin – keep an eye on the risks, take no chances. And now the time to set the ball rolling had arrived.
Zorin picked up the President’s letter and hid it away under some other papers in the top righthand drawer of the desk. Reaching out again, he pressed one of the intercom buttons and asked his secretary to find Mitkin and get him to the office right away.
A couple of minutes later, Mitkin entered the room. He closed the door noiselessly behind him and walked briskly to one of the two comfortable Chippendale armchairs across the desk from Zorin. He said not a word as he watched Zorin finishing a telephone call.
‘… No, do not take Mr Rodchenko to the Embassy, bring him here to my house… That’s right… See you in around three quarters of an hour.’ Zorin hung up, looked across to Mitkin and smiled at him.
‘As you may have just overheard, Igor Rodchenko will be here shortly.’
‘Is he the man they call the President’s fixer?’ asked Mitkin.
‘One of the most powerful men in Russia, isn’t he?’
‘Until recently, yes.’
‘What do you mean, until recently?’ Mitkin looked puzzled.
‘Over the past few months he’s made an unbelievable mess of a project to find and steal a thing called Gemini. He also made the mistake of telling President Balakin how it could transform his negotiating powers with the West. So, when his people let him down no less than three times getting this Gemini for the President, he lost the one thing he should have guarded with his life.’
‘And what was that?’ asked Mitkin, leaning forward. As always, eager for the boss’s insights.
‘He lost the President’s trust,’ said Zorin. ‘The final nail for Rodchenko’s coffin is being driven in by a man called Wilder.’
‘Of late he’s been guarding the Gemini thing Rodchenko was trying to steal. But he’s always been a jump ahead of Rodchenko. On a couple of occasions this man Wilder had the audacity to use Gemini to take copies of a month’s-worth of all the top-secret communications between the President and his innermost circle…’
‘He what?’ interrupted Mitkin.
‘Wilder took electronic copies of all the inner circle’s secret files and threatened to publish them on the internet – like WikiLeaks did with those American files.’
‘Good God,’ said Mitkin, grinning. ‘I can see how that might dent Rodchenko’s popularity with the President.’
‘Denting one’s popularity might be survivable,’ said Zorin. ‘But Wilder’s still threatening to publish – holding the files over the President’s head like a Sword of Damocles. Rodchenko’s got to go.’
Mitkin stopped smiling and just nodded his head.
‘The upshot is that, though he doesn’t know it yet, I’m to take over from Rodchenko. The project of finding and stealing Gemini for the President is now our responsibility. So, just as soon as we have got out of Rodchenko everything he knows about the Gemini Project, we’ve been ordered to… er… facilitate disposing of him. It’s one of the reasons the President sent him over here. The pretext is that he’s here to clean up his mess, though we’ll do that for him. The real reason of course is for us to deal with him while he’s here out of the sight of the President’s enemies in Moscow.’
‘You mean we’ve got to do the President’s dirty work for him?’ said Mitkin, frowning.
‘Yes, but we’ll discuss how we’re going to do that later. Right now, before Rodchenko gets here, we’ve other matters to clear up.’ Zorin leant forward and pushed the pad and pen across the desk towards Mitkin.
‘You’ll see on the pad that I’ve listed a number of things that need to be done as we take over the Gemini Project. Have a look at it and put a question mark against anything you don’t understand.’
Mitkin took the list and, looking down it, occasionally let out a low whistle. At other points, he just nodded his head. Twice he put question marks against items.
‘Unlike Rodchenko,’ said Zorin, as Mitkin finished reading, ‘we’re going to approach this huge opportunity in a step-by-step manner,’ said Zorin. ‘Rodchenko charged at the project; we’re going to do it by stealth. We’re going to be subtle in our approach and, above all, we’re not going to make any mistakes. So, let’s deal with the list now, in chronological order.’
‘Rodchenko’s last major mistake was this morning. His chosen agent, Volkova, ultimately failed in her kidnapping of Tatiana Macrae. She’s the wife of the head of the Gemini programme. She was to have been held in ransom in exchange for Gemini. Unfortunately, that meddler Wilder managed to rescue her and put Volkova in hospital in the process. Incidentally, that was quick thinking on your part and a good job of yours getting Volkova and her IT expert out of the hospital and police custody. What gave you the idea of diplomatic immunity?’
‘I needed to act fast, didn’t I? You told me you needed to get them both here so they couldn’t be questioned by the police,’ replied Mitkin. ‘So I just ran up the road to the Embassy and I got Anatoly Borkin to take over from there.’
‘And he thought up the ploy of saying they were Embassy staff?’ queried Zorin.
‘Yes. I thought he did well, even got the Ambassador along to the hospital. Now that’s what I call pulling out the big guns.’ Mitkin grinned, clearly pleased with his part in the successful rescue of the two women.
‘Well done,’ said Zorin. ‘As it happens, it turned out even better than anyone could have anticipated. That IT girl Gulina gave me a mass of vital information about Gemini. Stuff even Rodchenko didn’t know. Most important of all, she told me that she’s worked out exactly what this Gemini thing is. She even told me where to get a critical missing element that’s part of its makeup.’
‘You mean that Rodchenko’s been trying all this time to get Gemini for the President and yet he didn’t know exactly what it consisted of?’
‘That’s right,’ scoffed Zorin. ‘He knew from the stolen files how unbelievably powerful it is, but he never knew what machines or software run it.’
‘So, as we take the project over from Rodchenko, we get the Gemini and, unlike Rodchenko, you already know what it is and where to get it?’
‘I do,’ said Zorin, that self-satisfied smile returning for a second. ‘But, once again, that’s still not our first priority timewise. First, we need to finish off going through the list in front of you. If you look, you’ll see that the next item on it is that we’ve got to deal with the rest of Rodchenko’s kidnapping of Wilder’s daughter – Lucy, I believe is her name. I don’t approve of this kidnapping nonsense but we need to make the best of it now that Rodchenko’s started it. I need to get her here into my office before we ship her out to Moscow. Now that she’s been taken we can at least use her as a bargaining chip. So, how’s that progressing?’
‘I spoke to Anatoly about that too when I was up at the Embassy. He told me that there were a couple of SVR agents up there who are trained up for this sort of thing,’ replied Mitkin. ‘They went out and met this Lucy Wilder at Heathrow. She fell for the trick that they were there on her father’s orders. She’s now on her way back here. As you suggested, the Embassy have accepted that you’ve now taken Rodchenko’s matters over and she’s to be brought here to join Volkova and Gulina. When you’ve finished with all three of them, they can be taken back to Moscow on the private jet that’s bringing Rodchenko into Northolt Airport.’
‘Good. And where exactly is this Lucy Wilder right now? The timings are getting tight.’
‘Somewhere on the Cromwell Road – she should get here any minute now.’
‘Good,’ said Zorin. ‘And, as I said earlier, this is an important point – before we send her off to Moscow, I want to see her here in my office. Got that?’
‘Right. Now, and still keeping it chronological, Rodchenko will arrive just after Lucy Wilder gets here,’ said Zorin. ‘I want Rodchenko to be treated like royalty until we have everything we need out of him. I’ll deal with him personally. I’ll be pretending that we’re here to help get him get out of the mess he’s got himself into. He’ll jump at that. I’ve an outline plan of how to dispose of him tonight. I have in mind a way that will get Wilder blamed for his death – but I’ll tell you the details later.’
‘So, all of this is really about this Gemini thing, isn’t it?’
‘Can I be allowed to know what the hell Gemini is and why it’s so important?’ Mitkin looked sternly at Zorin, almost as though challenging him for keeping Gemini from him.
‘Okay, but we haven’t much time, so I’ll try and put it as briefly as I can. The young IT genius Sasha Gulina has just confirmed to me that it’s called Gemini because it’s a combination of two technologies – digital, which currently runs just about everything on the planet, but added together in some unique way with the new quantum computing technology. A small team in the UK, together with a huge US conglomerate’s research team, have come up with a way of synergising the two. All you need to know is that, in just seconds, it can penetrate virtually any known computer defence system anywhere in world’
‘It can?’ interrupted Mitkin.
‘Not only can it get through even the most sophisticated computer defences yet devised, it can then take control of whatever it is that it’s penetrated. It can do this over the internet or by someone inserting a tiny specialised dongle into virtually anything connected to the target computer’s system. I’ll give you just one example. Suppose President Balakin had a Gemini and took over the air traffic control hub near Islip on Long Island. He’d be in complete control of all the air traffic in and out of the five airports around New York City – including Philadelphia. Using its control as a bargaining chip, suppose he then rings the new US president and demands, for example, that the US remove all their strategic missile placements in Eastern Europe. With all those aircraft up in the air over New York, what’s the US President going to say?’
‘Jesus Christ,’ whispered Mitkin.
‘Well, he might say that,’ grinned Zorin, ‘but in practical terms, the American President would have no option but to bow to Balakin’s demands. That should give you an idea of what’s at stake here.’
‘Yes, quite astonishing. I had no idea it was that important.’
‘And now, thanks to President Balakin’s letter to me this morning, we’ve been given this chance of a lifetime. As I said earlier, we’re to take over delivering Gemini to the President. Once we’ve achieved that, with Rodchenko gone, I could well be taking over his position – one of the most powerful in all of Mother Russia.’
‘Aha! Returning to Moscow as heroes?’ beamed Mitkin.
‘Okay, but don’t let’s get carried away. Now at least you now know what’s at stake here. Fortunately, Sasha Gulina has pointed the way ahead for us. You’re to get us one of the main components of Gemini – a quantum computer. They’re as rare as unicorns, but my people have found one. It’s soon to be on its way to a customer and I’ve already set that up for you in Canada. We’ll go into that just as soon as we’ve got these three women off to Moscow and disposed of Rodchenko.’
Mitkin smiled. He liked it when the boss was on a roll.
Bayswater, London’s West End
As soon as Wilder had driven through Hyde Park and out onto the Bayswater Road, he turned left and, about level with Kensington Palace Gardens, turned into a small mews and parked there. He walked quickly back towards the top of the Palace Gardens road itself. Here he waited for a call from either Mina or Jessie – surely one of them would have something to report back to him soon. He also hoped there would be a clue as to where the Russians taken his Lucy.
As he waited, he felt physically sick; he dug the nails of both hands into their palms, trying to generate enough pain to take his mind off what terror she might be going through, or whether she was trying to reach him. Finally, after a quarter of an hour, he’d managed to remind himself that she was his daughter and that, as such, she’d been better trained than most on what to do in a situation like this.
At last his mobile phone buzzed. This time it was a text message from Mina. He read it twice: ‘Lucy seen at Heathrow climbing into black SUV. Poor visibility so no vehicle registration number. But probably the same SUV which recently entered Ken. Palace Gdns south entrance. Lost sight but not out again north or south. Still there now.’
At least that was a good sign, even if not definitive. He’d wait for Lucy to activate her tracker. But he would need to stay up at the top end of the road, near to his car so he could give chase if they left to take her away and fly her to Moscow. At the same time, he wanted to know where she was right now – to give him better warning of when they might make that move. His crushing sense of helplessness was suddenly relieved by another text from Mina: ‘Another SUV collected large man from Russian registered private jet at Northolt Airfield. Headed for London.’ That would be the car that Sasha Gulina referred to when she’d been questioned by police in the hospital – the car bringing Rodchenko into London. The next question: would they wait for Rodchenko to get here or would they take Lucy out with the others in another car?
He tagged himself onto a group of what looked like Embassy staff; they seemed to be known to security and as he passed through the wide gates into the road, he held up his own office pass with most of it obscured by his hand. Once through he considered what to do next. Switching to the tracker map on his mobile, he immediately saw that Lucy’s tracker had been switched on and had now appeared on the map – a small red button blinking in Kensington Palace Gardens. But there was a surprise; it was near the bottom of the hill, the far end from where he was standing.
Then came the call.
‘Hi Dad.’ It was Lucy, and it tore into Wilder’s soul. Her voice was trembling. ‘I’m so sorry for falling for the…’ Her voice was interrupted as Wilder heard a harsh voice cut across her. Then she continued. ‘The gentleman who had me collected at the airport says that if you don’t go to the…’ There was a break again while Wilder heard the other voice in the background, followed by Lucy, continuing, ‘If you don’t go to the Newby Centre at eight o’clock tonight, you’ll never see me…’ Her voice faded away in sobs and became fainter, and he guessed that the phone had been taken from her.
The next voice was deep and only slightly accented, but with an unmistakable Russian guttural sound to it. ‘You will get instructions to your mobile phone later today. As your daughter just said, if you are not at the Newby Centre tonight, you will never see her again. Is that clear?’
Wilder felt like giving vent to his pain, anguish and rage. He wanted to yell out and give this man a taste of his fury; but he knew it would be pointless and the outcome was more important that his rage.
‘I’ll await your instructions,’ he said, as calmly as he could manage under the circumstances, his voice firm and slow. The telephone then clicked off and his only remaining connection with her, the tracker on the screen of his mobile, began to move as he watched. He looked up from it and scanned the houses to his left and then his right. Then he spotted it. A good number of houses further down the hill, he saw some people getting into a large SUV outside its front door. Though it was difficult to recognise anyone at this distance, he was sure that the stooped figure of Lucy was among them. Another thought occurred to him and he punched the number he knew well into his mobile. He was soon through to Mina Falcone.
‘It’s Tom. I’m standing opposite the Russian Embassy and… one, two… eight houses south of it, there’s an SUV leaving a house. Can you find out who lives there?’
‘Eight houses south of the Russian Embassy… Give us minute and I’ll see what I can come up with,’ said Mina.
He waited, his heart pounding, as Mina did what they do at spooks HQ. He watched as the SUV came slowly out of the semi-circular driveway and began coming up the hill towards him. He turned and began to run back towards the gates at the top of the road and to his car parked beyond. His mobile phone was still clutched tightly to his ear as he ran.
‘The house you indicated is owned by a Russian by the name of Victor Zorin,’ said Mina. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’
‘It does now,’ said Wilder. The SUV was now moving faster. He sprinted back up the hill towards his car, keeping ahead of the SUV’s sedate progress. But just as it reached the large wrought-iron gates it passed him and he made a mental note of the registration number. As he got to the gates himself, he saw the SUV swing left out of the end of the road heading towards Northolt. He crossed the Bayswater Road, dodging between the traffic, and ran on towards the mews where his car was parked.
‘If they’re going to try and use diplomatic immunity to get Lucy and anyone else out of the country,’ he shouted into his phone as he ran for his car, ‘I need someone there with me at Northolt who can bluff their way past any diplomatic waffling they might use. I know that Northolt is a British Airforce base as well as being used for a lot of private aircraft flights, but see if someone can come up with a way to ground the Russian plane. Though I haven’t got absolute proof, tell them that the Russians have abducted my daughter and are about to fly her out of here to Moscow.’
‘Leave it with me,’ replied Mina. ‘I’ll see you at Northolt too and I’ll bring some diplomatic weight with me. In the meantime, do not – I repeat – do not get up to any heroics.’
‘This is my Lucy we’re talking about,’ he shouted back, now entering the mews. ‘I’m promising you nothing.’
He ran across the cobbles, but just as he jumped into the car, a man of medium build ran over towards him. From his body-language and the scowl on his face, he was clearly angry about something. He arrived at Wilder’s car just as he started it. The man smashed his clenched fists down onto the roof of the car and was shouting something. Wilder wound the window down to hear him properly.
‘You can’t park here,’ he was screaming. ‘Can’t you see this is a private mews? Do you think that just ’cos you’ve got a fancy fast car you can park the bloody thing anywhere you like, you selfish…’ His voice trailed off as he ran around to the front of the car to stop Wilder from driving off.
His heart thumping, Wilder looked for a way of avoiding this confrontation and the time that it might take. He looked in the rear-view mirror but saw that there was no way of backing out of the situation. So, as calmly as he could, he opened the door to get out and pacify the man. But as he was getting out, the man had come back around the car and, before Wilder was even properly upright, swung a wild wheeling punch at Wilder’s head. Wilder deflected it and quickly pulled himself fully upright.
‘Oh shit,’ he muttered, as he got himself round the car door, letting it fall shut behind him. He blocked two more of the enraged man’s blows and tried to calm him at the same time by shouting out that he was sorry to have caused offence with his parking.
The man’s next punch caught Wilder on the cheek. It was a glancing blow, but it indicated that the man was not going to listen to reason or accept an apology.
‘Sorry about this,’ said Wilder, and with two short, sharp and very precisely aimed blows, he knocked the man out cold. Wilder stepped swiftly forward and caught him before he hit the ground, and then gently laid him down. Wilder looked around to see if there was anyone about who could help but there was no one in sight. He took off his Parka coat, emptied the pockets, rolled it up and put it under the head of the prostrate figure; he then straightened out the man’s legs and placed his hands across his chest.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said quietly.
He climbed quickly back into the car again, cursing at the amount of time this incident had cost him. He just hoped it hadn’t given the Russians the time to get the girls onto the jet bound for Moscow. He accelerated at speed out of the mews and onto the Bayswater Road, and headed for Northolt. He slotted his mobile phone into the holder in front of the dashboard and contacted Jessie Marker to update her on the situation.
When he got to Northolt, he approached the security check-point at the entrance to the Airforce Base with some trepidation, but the guard at the gate bent down to talk to Wilder as he drew up and pressed for his window to go down.
‘The Base Commandant is expecting you. If you drive over to the building with the flagpole outside it,’ he said, pointing as he spoke, ‘you can park in front of it and go right in.’
With his pulse thumping in his throat, Wilder drove over, parked and ran into the building. Beyond the small hallway, there was a heated argument coming from a room with its door wide open. Wilder’s pulse-rate rose sharply as soon as he could make out what they were saying.
‘Have you any idea of the diplomatic implications of what your man has done?’ came angry shouting. ‘Your people can’t just turn up here, run over to an aircraft, pile into it, taxi out onto the runway and take off. It’s, it’s…’
‘What the hell’s going on here?’ shouted Wilder as he burst into the room. The last speaker was clearly the Base Commandant and he had been shouting at a group of three. The one nearest to the commandant was a small man, completely bald, wearing the thick pebble glasses of the very short-sighted. He had been taking the brunt of the commandant’s fury. The other two were both very large and very Slavic-looking, and Wilder expected no prizes for guessing them to be Russians from the Embassy – probably SVR people. A young man standing next to the commandant looked on, clearly bewildered – no training course he’d ever been on had covered this situation. Wilder guessed that he might be the base’s second in command?
They all turned as Wilder crossed the large room towards them.
‘You must be Wilder,’ said the commandant.
‘I’m really sorry to have to tell you that, outrageously, though instructions had come over the telephone from a senior aide to the Home Secretary that their flight had been grounded pending further investigations, a small party of four sneaked out to the Russian jet and, without air traffic clearance, just fired up, taxied out and took…’
‘What?’ yelled Wilder. He felt his eyes glaze over and the thumping in his throat now completely enveloped him. He felt as though his body was shutting down. The room seemed to go dark. He clenched his fists as hard as he could. In that instant, knowing that his little Lucy was now bound for Moscow, the only thing he could do for her was what he did best, what he was trained for – he needed to take command of the situation. He also needed a couple of seconds to work out the best way to do that.
‘No way of intercepting the Russians, I suppose?’ he asked the commandant.
‘No way,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘I’m also sorry to have to tell you that after the jet’s take-off and after less than a minute’s arguments over the airwaves, it became obvious that if we didn’t patch them into a hastily made-up flight-plan for Moscow and treat them as a legitimate flight, they could endanger the whole of our airspace. As a result, I’m afraid they’re now bound for Moscow and there’s nothing we can do but let them go. Of course, we’ll make strong representations but…’
Wilder thought about this for a moment. No point in worrying about the Russians here in the room – they could be dealt with later and, it would certainly not help get Lucy back if he went over and pummelled the life out of them. He took the commandant to one side and said quietly to him, ‘Have you an office where I could make some quick calls to try and respond to this?’
‘Yes, follow me,’ he said, and turning to the young man beside him, said ‘Keep an eye on them and if we have any trouble, use your side-arm, call out the guard, and we’ll slap the lot of them in the lockup.’
‘Yes sir,’ replied the young man, seeming to mature years in a matter of seconds.
As soon as the commandant had settled Wilder into a cold, sparsely-furnished office, he departed to organise some coffee for his guest and, seeing how pale Wilder was, offered him some brandy as well. Wilder grinned for the first time in a while – that was just about the last thing he needed.
He found an old A4-sized pad and a couple of tired looking pens in one of the drawers of the desk and quickly scribbled out some notes before making his first call. These notes were more than just a list of people to call, they were also his first thoughts on the huge task of getting Lucy back – and doing so as fast as possible. She would have endured terrible trauma over this and getting her back was his number one priority. Task number two – revenge. But that could wait a bit longer too.
If the Russians wanted to do some bargaining involving Lucy and Gemini – a likely eventuality – he’d need to get from Gemini’s boss, Angus Macrae, his final red line in any negotiations. He also wondered if the Russians might take him in exchange for Lucy. That would be the quickest and easiest solution, of course, and one he could make without even thinking twice. But he doubted whether Macrae would allow him to do that. Gemini’s protection would be seriously jeopardised if Wilder was locked away in Lubyanka prison. It was beginning to look as though an appalling set of conflicting interests were going to come into play here, and a shiver ran down the back of his neck.
But before they got anywhere near negotiating, he needed to get to Moscow to physically rescue Lucy – the kind of thing he’d turned into an art-form in Afghanistan. To get into Moscow without being immediately seized, he’d need to be smuggled in – no point in becoming a target himself. That might be best be achieved if Angus Macrae’s father-in-law Mikhail Rostov sent his Hawker jet over from Moscow to collect him. It shouldn’t be too difficult to sneak in that way. Boris Boreyev with his huge Moscow-based security company could supply the Russian know-how and manpower if physically seizing Lucy seemed feasible.
Right now, call number one needed to be to Mina. Between her own MI6 spooks’ resources and those of GCHQ, they might even be able to track Lucy’s flight into Moscow and Boreyev’s people might be able to shadow Lucy to where the kidnappers were going to hold her. The flight would take some three hours, so if they all got onto that now, there was some hope.
After he’d scribbled down these ideas, he put the pen down, picked up the phone, dialled nine for an outside line and got through to Mina. As fast as possible, she would galvanise the huge resources of the country’s renowned spy network, tracking Lucy’s flight, the people behind the flight, and later Lucy’s imprisonment location. Though this would have been a horrendous if not impossible task even for his own employer’s formidable resources and expertise, for MI6 it should be simple enough. The fight-back had begun. More than any battle he’d fought in Afghanistan or the back streets of cities around the world, this was a fight with only one outcome – the rescue of Lucy. Nothing would stop him until he’d achieved that.
Albert Mews, London’s West End
Wilder needed to keep his mind off Lucy. Every time his thoughts veered towards her loneliness, her cries for him to rescue her, he had to play a couple of tricks on himself; the first of these was to remind himself of what a strong, independent young woman she’d grown into, how wise beyond her eighteen years. He consoled himself that he had trained her extensively for situations like the one she was now in. He hoped she’d remember that his military and civilian careers had been built on dealing with crises of this kind and that at some point he would appear.
The second trick, if it could even be called that, was to immerse himself in every detail of what he was doing at present; those details were naturally all driven by his desire to get over to Moscow and rescue her. All he needed to do was to think and to see every detail of his preparations as being small stepping stones to getting her back.
His preparations included a meeting with Angus Macrae in his offices at the Towneley Bank in the City of London. There was no doubt that Lucy had been kidnapped with a view to her release being in exchange for information on Gemini. Wilder needed to check with Macrae, who was head of the entire Gemini project. He needed to know how far Macrae would allow him to go in negotiations – not far at all, he suspected.
This had proved difficult for both of them. How the hell does one strike balance between a young woman’s life and a weapon so powerful that it could affect the balance of power between Russia and the West? For Macrae, the choice was especially difficult; he’d known Lucy all her life and was her godfather. His wife Tatiana was also devoted to Lucy, who had always been like an older sister to their son Jerry Towneley-Macrae.
For Wilder, trying to strike a balance between Lucy’s life and the importance of Gemini was near impossible. But he tried to steer his mind away from a situation where, in trying to rescue her, he came to a choice between her and giving Gemini to the Russians – to somehow find a way to take the fight to the Russians, to make Lucy the least of their worries. Though nothing occurred to him immediately, he felt sure that by the time he got to Moscow, a solution would come to him – some way perhaps of appearing to give the Russians Gemini until Lucy was safe and then reneging on the deal as soon as she was.
He also had a meeting with Mike Rogers, his friend and boss at IPI – International Private Investigators. He was relieved to discover that he and Macrae had already made a deal. Wilder was to remain an employee of IPI but was to be lent on long term secondment to the Gemini Project. There was better news even than this: he would have first call on Jessie Marker to assist him anywhere in the world. She had been his partner many times when he was just an investigator, and even after being made director, she had been his backup on a couple of major cases.
Tatiana Macrae’s father also contributed. As much in gratitude for Wilder rescuing his daughter from being kidnapped by Izolda Volkova as from his long-standing anger at the Kremlin’s high-handed ways in government, he sent his Hawker jet over from Moscow to the City of London Airport. It took less than half an hour to refuel and was ready to take Wilder to Moscow as soon as he was ready to go.
Unfortunately, Zorin had already prevented Wilder from leaving immediately. Wilder had to stay in London till he had been to the Newby Training Centre this evening. Whether it was a bluff or not, he could not risk ignoring Zorin’s threat – that he would never see Lucy alive again if he was not there at seven.
Though this threat was probably just a ploy to delay Wilder chasing after Lucy, Zorin correctly guessed that Wilder would not risk treating it as such. Though it was difficult to see what Zorin could do to Wilder here on British soil and get away with it, he took some precautions. He got Detective Chief Inspector Jock Imrie to go to the Newby Centre at about six-thirty. He agreed to sneak into the place shortly after it closed to the public and to hide there until Wilder himself arrived and gave him further instructions.
As the Newby computer training centre was not far from the City, Wilder took his travelling bag with him and got there at around twenty to seven. He let himself in by the back door and, creeping through the building, found DCI Imrie in the kitchens. Both were intrigued as to what Zorin’s threat would turn out to be. Wilder had known Imrie for some years and they’d become good friends, working together on a couple of IPI cases. Imrie had also been the officer called in on the murder of John Freeman, which had started the Russians on the hunt for Gemini. They chatted quietly about Zorin as the watched the hands of the large wall clock creep towards seven.
Their wait was suddenly over. There was shouting coming from the back of the building. This noise was quickly followed by a couple of shots being fired. Wilder left Imrie crouching in the kitchens and rushed through the building to the back door and the source of the noises. As is was near dusk, Imrie decided it was safe to follow Wilder, but kept some ten feet behind him and out of sight. Just as Wilder rounded a corner in the corridor to the back door, another a couple of shots were fired, followed by the noise of receding running steps and voices.
Wilder ran on towards the back door but nearly fell over a body lying in the passageway just before he reached it. He groped on the wall for the light switch and found it just as Imrie arrived on the scene. There at their feet lay the body of a large, well-dressed man, He had clearly been killed in a professional manner – a couple of shots to his chest, already oozing blood through his clothes, and a neat hole in his forehead from a third shot. Imrie quickly pulled on a pair of fine rubber gloves and searched the pockets of the body. Eventually, in one of the pockets, he found the man’s wallet; though the driver’s licence and other identifications were all in Russian, it seemed almost certain that this was Igor Rodchenko.
To double-check, Wilder got through on his mobile to Angus Macrae, who spoke fluent Russian, and described the writing to him. Macrae confirmed their guess.
More police arrived along with forensics. What surprised Wilder and the others was what a poor attempt this was to frame Wilder for the killing. Even if the perpetrators had not known that a senior Scotland Yard detective was with Wilder and had witnessed the whole event, the gun used for the murder had just been cast casually away near the back door. Without Wilder’s finger prints on it, it was almost useless for putting the blame onto him.
It had achieved its main purpose, however – it had delayed Wilder’s pursuit of Lucy. As soon as DCI Imrie squared it with his bosses at Scotland Yard, Wilder rang Mina to tell her he needed to get to the City of London Airport and could she meet him there. But she had other ideas.
‘You won’t need to be smuggled into Moscow,’ said Mina. ‘While you’ve been packing and having your meetings, I’ve been quite busy too – on your behalf.’
‘You’ve what? What the hell have you been up to? My plans needed to be dead secret if I was to have any chance of Boreyev finding out where they’d taken Lucy and…’
‘Calm down,’ said Mina. ‘I’m on my way to the Newby Centre right now. I’m going to pick you up and take you to the City of London Airport myself. I’ll tell you all about it on the way.’
As soon as Mina and the limousine arrived, Wilder jumped in.
‘You may find some of what I’m going to tell you incredible,’ she said. ‘But it’s all true, and it’s going to transform the way you’re going to get Lucy back – so you’d better listen carefully.’ She smiled and put a hand on his arm as he turned in the seat of the limousine and looked back at her/
‘Okay. I’m the epitome of concentration. On you go,’ he said.
‘To start with, you’ll maybe find it hard to believe this,’ she began, ‘but despite the false dual role I played with my cousin, the Moscow Mafia boss, he still doesn’t know that I’m also with MI6.’
‘You’re joking,’ replied Wilder. ‘You mean to tell me that Novikov hasn’t cottoned on that you’re a spook?’
‘Apparently not,’ replied Mina. ‘Mind you, I did try to sound quite different depending on who I was trying to be. Anyway, the good news is that Anton took my call today eagerly…’
‘Yes, really. He’s genuinely glad of anything that can get him back in with the Kremlin. This is particularly so now that Rodchenko has been assassinated.’
‘Hey! Wait a minute, how the hell did he know about Rodchenko? We’ve only just left the scene of the…’
‘No, no,’ interrupted Mina. ‘As forensics will show Rodchenko was killed soon after getting to Zorin’s place. What they then did was dump the body with you and just fired some shots to implicate you. I must say, it was a pretty half-hearted attempt to put the blame on you – but we think that Zorin hoped you’d be tied up with questioning for many more hours yet.’
‘We? Who’s we ?’
‘I’m coming to that. Anton Novikov told me that he and Rodchenko’s right hand man, Pavel Polichev, suspected that Rodchenko was being sent to London by the President, not to clean up his mess but to hand over getting Gemini to Zorin. They realised that this might mean that Rodchenko would be eliminated and warned him.’
‘Didn’t stop him being killed, so what went wrong?’
‘Rodchenko obviously didn’t believe he was at risk. He and President Balakin go way back so I suppose he thought that the President would never sanction such a thing as his assassination. Anyway, to cut a long story short, with Rodchenko being disposed of like this, Pavel Polichev has lost what he thought was his right to succeed his boss and become the President’s new fixer. And here’s where it gets interesting.’ Mina moved closer to Wilder as though someone might be listening in on them.
‘My cousin Anton tells me that Pavel Polichev will do just about anything to see Zorin taken down. If he doesn’t stop him, Zorin will get the influential position and the implications of that are apparently horrendous for others within the President’s circle. According to Anton, Zorin’s a pathological maniac and Gemini in his hands will mean World War Three.’
‘That’s a bit over the top, surely?’ said Wilder.
‘Don’t know, don’t care,’ replied Mina. ‘The important thing is that you have Pavel Polichev as an ally in getting Lucy back from Zorin’s clutches. Could be a great help, don’t you think?’
‘I do,’ muttered Wilder. ‘But what does this mean in practical terms?’
‘When you get to Moscow, you’ll be met by your old friend Boris Boreyev.’
‘He’ll take you to meet Polichev. You can all then decide between you how to pull Zorin down. My cousin guesses that Polichev will want to do a deal with you on Gemini. That will help him get back into favour with the President.’
‘Okay. But presumably that discussion could wait while I get Lucy back…’ he mused. ‘Does this Polichev speak English?’
‘Passably,’ said Mina, ‘But you’ll have Boreyev with you, so that won’t be a problem.’
‘And your cousin Anton Novikov, how does he fit into this strange new alliance?’ asked Wilder.
‘The Kremlin used to use him a lot to do sometimes shady things they didn’t care to do for themselves – but those days are gone. He too needs Polichev to succeed his old boss. So, as you say, there you have a strange mix – Polichev and Novikov helping you to get Lucy back in exchange for your help when you get back to the UK in bringing Zorin down.’
‘Seems to be a workable proposition. Getting Lucy back’s obviously my top priority. After we’ve achieved that, if the next steps suit us, let’s see how it goes. As you say, it’s an unexpected alliance, but if it works, why not?’
The Zorin Residence, Kensington Palace Gardens
Victor Zorin watched Alexis Mitkin as he poured the coffee and brought it over. A hell of an investment, he thought to himself as he admired the tall, bristlingly fit figure. On his way up the treacherous paths to become one of what used to be called the Russian Oligarchs, Zorin had needed a strong-armed right-hand man who was also street-wise, even genuinely clever – a Mitkin in fact. Looking for him in the first place was a tall order; then he’d chanced upon the Mitkin case.
Mitkin had clearly been framed and was on his way to death row. At that time it was a place in which the convicted stayed but a few days before they were dispatched. Zorin had not only provided the lawyers who got Mitkin off death row and his false conviction quashed, but had also invested heavily in his education. There were two strands to this education. One was in the ways of the world, the other in two different disciplines in unarmed combat. Looking at him now he was well-pleased with his investment in both time and money.
‘I’m sorry the plan to get Rodchenko’s murder blamed on Wilder didn’t work,’ said Mitkin, as he sat down across the desk from Zorin.
‘Yes, but you weren’t to know that he’d have a senior policeman there with him right in the centre itself. Still, it served its purpose. We delayed him till tonight.’
‘Yes, but that’s now the third or fourth time this man Wilder has got in the way of our plans.’ Mitkin spat out the name.
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Zorin. ‘And you’ll get your chance to take him down some day. But right now we need to move fast, we’ve more important things to do than you getting even with Wilder.’
‘As I think I told you, the real breakthrough with Gemini came from the IT girl, Sasha Gulina. She studied all the photographs of the laboratory where Wilder and Macrae have hidden Gemini.’
‘Is that Craithe Castle, on the island?’
‘It is. On those photos she spotted a computer control console which was unlike anything she’d seen before. With some difficulty, she was able to research the logo on it and was able to trace it to a manufacturer of quantum computers in Canada.’
‘Quantum computers? I’ve heard a bit about them but…’
‘Don’t worry about them just now; I’ll tell you in more detail some other time. Meanwhile, being a genius with computers, she’s worked out that this quantum element is why Gemini is so unbelievably powerful.’
‘Because of the quantum machine?’
‘Yes. But the trouble is they are as rare as hens’ teeth. That’s why I’m sending you off to Canada – to pick a brand-new one which is about to be on its way to a customer over there.’
‘We’re going to steal it?’
‘I prefer the word borrow,’ said Zorin, smiling. ‘The one we’ll take is about to be delivered to McGill University in Montreal. My facilities outsourcing company has found this all out for us and it’s by far the fastest way of getting hold of one. I’ve also made arrangements with a New York organisation who are setting up the necessary route to get it out of Montreal, into the States and then to us here in the UK.’
‘Why bother with that? Taking it out via the States, I mean?’
‘It would be tracked down in a matter of hours, even minutes, if we tried taking out of Canada. Once it’s over the border and into Vermont, they’ll have one hell of a job tracking it – too many alternative airports and shipping container ports to find which one we’re using.’
‘I see. So this Gemini thing has been what all this is about?’
‘It is. President Balakin has set his mind on one of them and that’s that. All we have to do now is take over from the mess Rodchenko left behind him. This time we’ll actually get him one – or, rather, put one together for him.’
‘I don’t understand. What do you mean, put one together?’
‘Sasha Gulina has told me that the team up on the island of Craithe, the one your friend Wilder’s protecting so assiduously, must have found a way of getting the new quantum computing technology to work in synch with a top-end digital computer. She says that’s the only thing that explains the extraordinary results of all the test files that Rodchenko got from the murdered Freeman’s files. Thanks to Gulina’s deductions, we now have a clear goal – to build our own Gemini for the President, but do it by stealth. I also have a plan for how to put it together. The computer research centre in Moscow is producing the means which will allow us to build one for ourselves. In no time at all we’ll have the ability to bring the West to its knees.’
‘Good. And my first step on that job is to go to Montreal?’
‘It is. But be careful, there are two organisations capable of stealing the quantum machine and getting it out of Canada. Both have experience running contraband goods across the US-Canadian border. In fact, both of them have been involved in cross-border operations going back to the days of running liquor across during prohibition in the thirties. They like to play down their mafia roots these days, pretend to be legitimate businesses, but I don’t believe that leopards change their spots. So, although I chose to go with Giuseppe Massimo, that’s only because a friend of mine in New York warned me off the other one, the organisation run by Rocco Balboni. I’m afraid that what we’ve finished up with is only the better of a dicey duo.’
‘Thanks for that,’ sneered Mitkin.
‘Still, as soon as they’ve got you and the quantum machine over the border, they’ll have served their purpose and you can split. You’ll see from the from the plan I’ll send you to your mobile phone. You’ll then take the van with the quantum computer with you while they chase their own tails going to the original air freight export point. Will you be okay with that?’
‘You always do.’
The Rostov Residence, Moscow
Borislav Boreyev met Wilder at Vnukovo Airport and, on the drive into Moscow, told him of the arrangements for the next couple of days. Wilder was of course desperate to get on with rescuing Lucy – after all, she’d been kidnapped early lunchtime and it was now ten at night. But Boreyev reminded him that with the new alliance with Pavel Polichev, their chances of success had increased considerably and it was therefore worth waiting till the morning. At Wilder’s suggestion, however, no sooner had they arrived at the Rostov residence than he got Boreyev to pretend that he was Alexis Mitkin checking up on the prisoner. He got him to ring and to speak to Lucy. Though worried that the person answering might know Mitkin’s voice well, Boreyev rang through to Zorin’s house.
‘Hello, it’s Alexis Mitkin here,’ he said. ‘I’m checking up on our valuable prisoner. Just get her on the line for me, will you?’
Reluctantly, and muttering about security, but obviously too terrified of Mitkin to object overmuch, whoever it was who had answered the phone went off to collect Lucy.
Wilder spoke to her the moment she was put on the line. ‘As quickly as you can, say the words “Yes, Mr Mitkin”…’
Despite the shock of hearing her father’s voice, she immediately understood.
‘Yes, Mr Mitkin, they’ve been good to me here,’ she said. ‘And one of the women who was on the flight with me, Sasha Gulina, has been very kind.’
‘This is just to say that I’ve arrived in Moscow,’ said Wilder. ‘I’ve come to get you out of there tomorrow. Right now do not show any relief; remember that you’re supposed to be talking to the man who organised your kidnap. When I finish speaking pretend that’s who you’ve been speaking to and tell me, using Mr Mitkin’s name again, that you’ll do whatever you’re asked to do. Okay?’ He resisted the urge to finish off by using the words my darling, as she might have broken down and given the game away.
‘Of course, Mr Mitkin. I promise I’ll do whatever you say.’
The call ended and Wilder let out a loud sigh of relief.
‘At least she’ll now be able to spend a night knowing I’m on my way. So, what’s our plan with this Polichev?’
‘First you need to understand that with the death of Rodchenko, there’s huge uncertainty here in Moscow, said Boreyev. ‘As the President’s chief fixer, most people had to defer to him. But, with him gone, the air’s thick with whispered rumours; no one dares to say openly what they think is going on. While in this vacuum, it is assumed that Pavel Polichev will just step into Rodchenko’s shoes. This gives him huge power in the short term.’
‘Short term?’ asked Wilder.
‘Until he’s replaced by Victor Zorin – though that might not happen right away. Much would seem to revolve around your Gemini.’
‘I see,’ said Wilder. ‘And is there anything I should know about Polichev before we meet him in the morning?’
‘I can answer that,’ said a voice from the doorway, as Mikhail Rostov, Tatiana’s father, entered the room. ‘Firstly, Tom, I want to thank you personally for saving Tatty from her dreadful second kidnapping. I don’t know how the hell you managed it but the two of us will be forever in your debt.’
‘Just doing what I’ve been trained to do, Mikhail – and happy it turned out okay. It did have its dicey moments.’
‘You’re too modest, Tom. But getting back to Polichev… As you know, I’ve known President Balakin as long as anyone, excepting perhaps the departed Igor Rodchenko. I can say without fear of contradiction that for the President to have ordered his death is quite extraordinary.’
‘Yes, Boreyev told me that.’
‘There’s much more going on here than meets the eye. In my view, two things are certain. One is that Zorin aims to get his hands on a Gemini, both for himself and for the President, and hopes to get Rodchenko’s position as a result. The other thing of which I’m certain is that Polichev knows no other life than working for Rodchenko. He has no family, and the nearest he ever got to it is Rodchenko’s daughter Katya. Polichev used to be almost a surrogate father to her when her real father was too busy doing the President’s dirty work. Until Polichev loses what he sees as his birth-right to Rodchenko’s job, he’ll be a good ally for you.’
‘Well, thank you for that Mikhail,’ said Wilder, ‘and roll on tomorrow when I meet the guy.’
The following morning, Boreyev took Wilder over to Nikol’skaya Street to Rodchenko’s old offices. Boreyev stayed on to act as interpreter even though, from the outset, it was clear that Polichev’s English was perfectly good enough to discuss the straightforward problem of a kidnap rescue.
‘I see your problem as very simple,’ said Polichev. ‘You want your daughter back. Today, I think. Yes?’
‘My problems however are many, and none of them simple. The first is that these are uncertain times. With my boss, a good man, suddenly gone, a greedy man who deserted Russia many years ago now wants his place. No one to trust anymore. How I trust you? I help get your daughter away from pig Zorin but you both get home and forget me and my problems. Yes?’
‘No,’ replied Wilder. ‘I have been in a war. In war you must trust the men around you or you die. If you lead them, they must trust you or they die. If I trust you to help my daughter live, you can trust me to help you do what you wish with Zorin.’
‘Yes, okay,’ said Polichev, drawing out his words. ‘I look you up; I know about you fighting in Afghanistan. I too fought there. Maybe we both know that it was without any point? We both were always going to lose.’
‘I agree,’ said Wilder. ‘But sometimes we do things because we said we would?’ Wilder wondered if this might strike home. It did. Polichev smiled, leant forward over his small desk and offered Wilder his hand. They shook hands, and each gave an almost imperceptible nod, as though to confirm a bond.
‘Okay Mr Wilder. I make no threat, but I must tell you that if you forget me when you get home with your daughter, our reach is anywhere in the world.’ Then, as though that had just been the small print in an agreement, he went straight on. ‘Your daughter is being held at Zorin’s residence at Serebryanny Bor – in fact, not far from Mr Macrae’s father-in-law’s residence where you are staying, are you not?’
Wilder was momentarily shocked at Polichev’s bluntness. But he remembered that Polichev’s boss and long-time mentor Rodchenko would have had all the powers of both Russia’s internal and its foreign intelligence agencies at his disposal.
‘Sorry for hesitating. I’m not sure of the area Mr Rostov’s house is in.’ He glanced at Boreyev who gave him a quick nod.
‘Is fine,’ said Polichev. ‘I hope you not mind but I have suggestion how you might get your daughter out. Mr Boreyev I have known for years, so I know he can tell you if plan is good or not.’
Wilder was taken aback – not only by the suggestion, but also by the way Polichev immediately followed up his remark by pulling a map out of a folder on the desk. To both his and Boreyev’s amazement, it was a detailed plan of all three floors of Zorin’s house and grounds. Even more astonishing was that, without waiting for any sign from him or Boreyev, Polichev went straight on into a detailed narrative about the most likely place for Lucy to be held. He also outlined a good-sounding plan for getting her out.
‘I hope you will understand why I’m not able supply men to help you with this idea, but Boreyev here has no problem for men, eh?’
Boreyev nodded and Wilder could think of nothing to add. In Afghanistan Wilder had broken into many well-guarded houses, both large and small. He’d been tasked in those days with capturing and returning high-value enemy officers and politicians. He was therefore familiar with the best ways of carrying out such dangerous operations. He was impressed with Polichev’s suggestions. They discussed both details for Lucy’s rescue and some ideas of how Wilder could help bring down Zorin when he got back with Lucy to the UK.
Polichev insisted that it was Russian etiquette to toast a successful agreement with shots of vodka. Wilder looked quickly across to Boreyev as Polichev got a bottle and glasses out of an ornate cabinet. Though it was only ten-thirty in the morning, Boreyev nodded forcibly that this needed to be endured, even with an air of enthusiasm.
Wilder reckoned it must have been at least three quarters of an hour later when he and Boreyev emerged into Nikol’skaya Street. It had been a surprising morning.
The Rostov Residence, Moscow
That evening Polichev came around to Rostov’s house with the items he had agreed to supply. There were several men with him because it took four of them to lift one of the items into Boreyev’s van. This was a four-foot-long two-wheeled barrow. It looked as though it contained a large pile of fir-tree branches, thrown into it at random. In fact they were tied together so that if it was wheeled over rough ground they would not fall off. Under these branches was a mixture of high explosives and incendiary devices which, on detonation, would produce a huge fireball.
He had also supplied the requisite number of FSB uniforms which, initially at least, would make it look as though the attempt to free Lucy was being carried out by the FSB themselves. There were also small arms, some stun grenades, and other materials Wilder had asked for.
As dusk was falling and Wilder, Boreyev and four of his men were all dressed and ready to go, Polichev bade them good luck and said that though he’d love to come along to see ‘the show’ it would be better for Wilder if he didn’t. He and his men refreshed themselves with toasts in vodka and then left. Shortly after that, the van full of supplies and Boreyev’s four men followed Wilder and Boreyev’s small red car. As Mikhail Rostov and Victor Zorin had both become oligarchs around the same time but were unlike most – not of the bling-loving kind – both lived near to each other in this area, rather than in the new extravaganza houses occupied by some of the newer mega-rich.
The first job was to blow open the huge wrought-iron gates in a way that would allow the van and car through but not alert the surveillance people in the house. Photographs of the view were pinned up in front of all the surveillance cameras and the gates were then blown. As soon as the van and the car were through, the gates were closed again so that if anyone were sent down the long drive to have a look, all would appear to be in order.
The van followed the car, and almost as soon as they had set off up the dive, they took a right and went off into the woods and bushes surrounding the house. They eventually arrived at their first target. This was an ornate wooden summer house. It was in full view of the house but had a back door giving access to storage for groundsmen’s tools and brushes. With some difficulty and much grunting, they managed to get the barrow full of explosives into the storage area and primed it. They also checked the mobile telephone triggering device.
Just before they crept forward in the dark towards the bright lights of the imposing house, Wilder took Boreyev by the arm and looked him in the eye.
‘Remember, the overriding objective of all of this is Lucy’s rescue. Whatever happens from here on, she must be got out of here and then flown back to the UK in Mikhail’s plane. Is that understood?’
‘I’ll put my life on it,’ replied Boreyev. They began to skirt through the bushes of the formal gardens as they made their way noiselessly forward in single file.
They reached one of the side doors which the map had told them led to the servants’ quarters – a likely place to keep Lucy, they reckoned. It was away from the main living quarters used by Zorin when he was here and could be easily guarded from the servants’ hall.
The door was unlocked and the small hallway and corridor beyond it were dark and silent. But then a noise caught them unawares as a servant came out of one of the rooms off the corridor. In his soft-soled shoes, Wilder ran up behind him. With one well-aimed blow, he knocked him unconscious and laid him gently down where he would otherwise have fallen.
It was time for the distraction. Wilder looked across at Boreyev and they nodded to each other. Wilder tapped out the number Polichev had given him on the small mobile phone. Around half a second later there was a huge explosion from behind them. The floor beneath them shook as they crouched down. The reinforced glass panel on the side door into the house shook and was lit up by a flash of light, accompanied by an almost deafening noise. In the distance, nearer the explosion itself, they could hear breaking windows and the din of other damage to buildings.
Pandemonium broke out.
A few figures came running out from the door the member of staff had used earlier. These people ran away from the crouching figures behind them, not seeing them in the dark. As soon as they had all gone, Wilder and the group rose silently and followed on towards the noise of voices in the hall beyond. When they reached the door the staff had poured out of, they turned in through it. They found themselves in a large open kitchen. It contained an eating area and a large sitting area beyond, furnished with a motley collection of old but comfortable sofas and deep armchairs. The group filed silently through this large open space and Wilder tentatively called out Lucy’s name. He tried to strike a balance – not making too much noise, but loud enough for her to hear him if she was near.
There was an immediate response – a high-pitched shriek of ‘Dad?’ – from behind a door at the far end of the sitting area. Wilder called out her name again and shouted out that he was coming for her.
The door was locked but Wilder stood back, quickly raised his foot, and smashed it with all his strength against the lock. With a grinding of twisting metal and splintering wood the door burst open, and Wilder ran into the room beyond it. Lucy leapt, sobbing, into his arms. The others let them stand for a moment locked, immobilised in silent embrace. But Boreyev then tapped Wilder on the arm and silently they all retreated the way they had come. Wilder led the way with Boreyev near the back of the file holding Lucy’s hand. They crept out through the side door they had come in by and began to move silently through the bushes and flowerbeds, back towards the van and the small car in the woods.
Suddenly floodlights came on and a megaphone blared out in Russian. Wilder and the man directly behind him were lit up like ducks in a shooting gallery. Those behind were still in darkness and Boreyev whispered for the others to retreat towards him. These four plus Lucy then quickly ran round the building, keeping to the darkness of the deep shadows cast by the bright floodlights. They crossed a small half-lit gap and ran into the woods. As they passed the summer house, they could see even in the dark that there was nothing left there at all – just a deep crater left by the explosion.
They ran on, reaching the car and the van. Boreyev told Lucy to get into the van – they would leave the small car with the keys still in it on the off-chance that Wilder and the other Boreyev man might get away from the spotlights. As they climbed into the van, Boreyev looked back at the house and saw that Wilder and his man had been surrounded by a group of angry gesticulating figures.
Boreyev turned to Lucy, looking back at the house, her tear-stained face a picture of utter dejection. ‘Your father had planned to exchange himself for you, so he knows what he’s doing. He ordered me to get you away from here at all costs and if we don’t move right now we might be too late.’
Lucy nodded, gave one more look back at her father and, turning away with a sob, climbed into the van, followed by Boreyev. He powered out of the woods onto a small track and back towards the main gates and the road. As they approached the gates, they could see that they were in luck – they were open. But it turned out not to be luck at all.
As they were almost through, a large truck full of men came round a corner in the outer drive – the gates had obviously been opened for them.
Boreyev had little option but to play the age-old game of chicken. He told Lucy to scramble over into the back and, just as the two vehicles were about to meet head-on, the driver of the truck lost his nerve. He swerved off the road and into a great bank of shrubs. Hitting the soft verge, the truck, as though in slow motion, tipped over onto its side, spilling its human cargo into the bushes. Boreyev shouted out with relief and delight. Then he put on a scowl and drove as fast as he dared for the sanctuary of Mikhail Rostov’s residence.
Back outside Zorin’s house, matters had got nasty. Wilder and Boreyev’s man were encircled by some dozen men. All of them were armed. Most were pointing their guns at the two of them trapped in the middle. Retaliation or even resistance was pointless from the outset. To start with, the taunts from the men surrounding them were merely jibes in Russian. But as soon as news of came in from the gates of the overturned truck and the escape of an unknown number of assailants, several of the men surrounding the two of them left to check on whether the important captive girl had escaped. The moment it was discovered that she’d gone, all hell broke loose.
The men, now conscious of how vulnerable their own positions had become with Zorin, vented their fear and their fury at the two trapped with their circle. Men took turns to move in close and strike one or other of two as hard as they felt inclined and wherever they wished. Suddenly there was a shout from a huge man who came through the side door and strode across the lawns to the circle.
Wilder stepped forward towards him and they finished up almost nose-to-nose, out-staring each other, unblinking – two very large, very fit men sizing each other up.
‘So you’re the one who’s been giving my boss such a difficult time these past few days,’ he said in English, with hardly a trace of an accent. Wilder was intrigued and thought he’d test him out.
‘It would appear so. But all of that might have been avoided if your boss hadn’t been stupid enough to kidnap my daughter – I found that decidedly irksome.’
‘Irksome indeed,’ replied the other. ‘Is that all? Irksome?’ He stood there close to Wilder, and then threw up his arm as though to hit Wilder across the face. Wilder had been waiting for something like this to happen. He blocked, and smashed the side of his other hand into the outside of the big man’s arm, just about level with his biceps. It struck home inch-perfect. The man let out an involuntary yelp of pain as his arm fell limp by his side, partially paralysed. Then, as an ultimate insult, Wilder slapped the man’s face hard, twice, once across each side of his face – the kind of strikes more usually associated with chastising an errant teenager.
This humiliation of his boss was too much to bear for one of the staff, who swiftly stepped up behind Wilder and smashed his gun into the back of Wilder’s skull. Wilder dropped first to his knees, then out cold to the ground.
The big man, Zorin’s steward, helped two others pick Wilder up and carry him into the room where his daughter had been imprisoned. Here they began to tie Wilder and Boreyev’s man in kitchen chairs. They started with Boreyev’s man. While they were doing that, Wilder’s consciousness returned and, though aching and nauseous, he quickly realised what was happening.
He forced himself to pretend to be still unconscious, but when the time came to tie him to the chair he strained with all his strength to keep each hand and then each ankle as far as possible from the parts of the chair they were being tied to. As soon as Zorin’s men had completed this task they left the room, locking the door as they went.
Wilder immediately straightened up, looked across to Boreyev’s man and, through the bruising and blood covering his face, gave him a broad smile. Though he was not sure if his companion spoke English, he said, ‘Time to get us out of this mess.’
Whether the other understood or not, he grinned back at Wilder, who had already begun working his bindings loose. His efforts at keeping his limbs clear of the chair had worked and it didn’t take him long to get one hand free. After that it took but minutes to get all of his and then his companion’s bindings off. He indicated by sign-language that the other should stay in his chair and pretend to have fallen asleep, with his head lolling onto his chest. He next acted out what was to follow, his companion grinning both at the mime acting and in anticipation.
What was going to happen next was likely to happen fast, so, still in complete silence, Wilder practised by playing through each move, exactly what he was going to do for real in a minute’s time. When he had run through the entire sequence, he stopped, took a deep breath, and loosened his neck muscles, working his head around and stretching.
He picked up the chair, raised it above his head and, after a brief pause, smashed it down onto the floor. After several efforts along the same lines, he finished up with just a chair-leg in each hand. The breaking up of the chair had made a considerable noise but the over-confident guards had presumably gone off some way because, by the time Wilder and Boreyev’s man heard the door being unlocked, Wilder was standing by the doorway and would initially be hidden by the door as it opened.
The first of Zorin’s men to come through the door received a near-fatal blow from one of the chair-legs, smashing into his throat below his voice box, followed by another to his head from the other leg, which cracked into the back of his head as he went down.
Swiftly, Wilder stepped round from beside the door, and slammed the point of one of the chair-legs into the bridge of the second guard’s nose, following this up with a blow to the throat. Wilder then delivered powerful kicks to the heads of both men, who now lay twisted and unconscious on the floor.
Boreyev’s man and Wilder picked up the men’s weapons and crept out through the door and into the kitchens. Rather than risk going out into the corridor beyond, they opened a window and climbed down into the flowerbeds below.
Here they stopped and surveyed the scene. There was no sign of anyone, so they ran down through the ornamental flowerbeds by the side of the sweeping lawns and into the woods. Zorin’s men had not bothered to check over the small red car and, under the driver’s floor-mat, Wilder soon found the keys. He started up the car and, as quietly as he could manage, drove it along the rough track through the woods and out onto a stretch of driveway they’d not seen before. Although he only remembered from the map where this second arm of the driveway would take them, he turned away from the house and drove as fast as the bends would allow.
Soon they came to a second set of gates. They were clearly seldom used, for they were secured by a chain and an old padlock, rusted from lack of use. Wilder and Boreyev’s man got out of the car and went over to examine it. Wilder smiled. At least this meant that the gates were not electrically operated. Using sign language again, Wilder told his companion to get back into the car and be ready to drive through the gates as soon as he had them open.
When the other was ready, Wilder picked one of Zorin’s men’s guns which he hoped would have the lowest muzzle velocity. Though he knew there were risks involved, he aimed the gun from quite close into the main hinge at the rear of the lock. There was a loud crack and metal splinters shot off in various directions – though luckily none near Wilder.
The lock fell to the ground.
Wilder quickly unravelled the chain and Boreyev’s man came rushing over, and between them they managed to push both gates open. Once out onto the main road, Boreyev’s man seemed to recognise where he was, and drove as fast as he could back to Mikhail Rostov’s house. The moment they arrived, the front door of the mansion was thrown open and Lucy came running down the steps and into her father’s arms, knocking him back against the car.
Back in London, the news of Lucy’s escape from his house in Moscow put Zorin into a state of fury. Though the event was a setback, his plans to build himself a working imitation of Gemini were making good progress elsewhere, so he soon calmed down again. He decided that retribution on his staff could wait. Looking for the positives, he smiled at the thought of the effect his next move was going to have on the unsuspecting Wilder.
The Ritz Carlton Hotel, Montreal
The telephone rang. Alexis Mitkin glanced at the bedside clock – there was only be one person likely to call him at this ungodly hour. It would be a leisurely nine-fifteen and broad daylight in London – not four-fifteen in the morning and dark, as it was here in Montreal. He stopped packing and answered it.
‘I’m ringing just to warn you to watch your back,’ said Zorin.
‘Watch my back?’ repeated Alexis.
‘I know you can look after yourself, even with the people you’ll be up against today. But what I learned last night just made this project a little bit trickier. Giuseppe Massimo has found out what’s in the consignment. This may mean that he’ll want to keep it for himself. But you know how critical the consignment is to all our plans so, as I say, watch your back and don’t let him get away with anything.’
‘Okay. Anything else?’ asked Mitkin.
‘No, just ring me when it’s over.’
Mitkin sat for a minute after putting down the phone. He ran his fingers through his long, unkempt blond hair, sighed, then rose to go back and finish checking his equipment and packing. As he passed the table where even at this hour they had brought him breakfast, he poured some more coffee. He stood there sipping it for a moment and, especially after the warning, gave some more thought to those he was going to be ‘up against’ today – the Massimo organisation.
So, Giuseppe Massimo now knew what was in the consignment, did he? At more than eleven million bucks in value, it was hardly surprising that he might now want to keep it for himself.
He finished packing, checked his two guns and slid the smaller of the two into its holster, strapped above his left ankle. Down in the deserted lobby, he was told the bill had been paid and that the limousine was here to pick him up – it was already outside the hotel. It was precisely 4.30 am.
From Sherbrooke Street West, the trip north out of the city to Meribel Airport was uneventful; this was just as well, for he needed to rehearse in his mind the critical part of this morning’s job.
After what he guessed had been a twenty-five-mile trip, the car pulled off the airport approach road and made its way over the uneven, dilapidated roads within the airport complex itself. Even in the half-light he could see tufts of grass growing in some of the joints of the roadway’s concrete blocks. This confirmed for him what he had been told. The whole Meribel Airport development had become a great white elephant; the out-of-the-way location and the fact that it was now used only for cargo flights had made it the ideal arrival point for the consignment. It had come in from the west coast yesterday evening and was now sitting in a forwarding agent’s warehouse not far from here.
As Alexis’s limousine crossed the parking lot, he could see, even though dawn was still an hour away, that the four of them were there, waiting for him. They were standing, as though on parade, in front of a compact Chevrolet and a police car, stolen for this job. He did a quick appraisal of the group; they ranged from one at six-foot two – similar in size to himself – to a short, tubby one, maybe five-foot eight, who was dressed in a cop’s uniform.
When his limousine came to a halt, the driver got out, came round to open the door for him and handed him his small overnight bag. Alexis thanked him, turned and walked across to meet the group. His confident stride – that of a fitness freak – belied his quaking stomach, for these were tough mafia men he’d be working with until he dumped them. On reaching the group, the tallest of them stepped forward holding out his hand.
‘You’ll be Alexis, I presume,’ he said. ‘I’m Carlo.’ After shaking hands, he was introduced to each of the others in turn. Alexis barely bothered to commit their names to memory as he hoped never to see any of them again beyond midday today. He remembered only Carlo and Emilio, the one dressed as a policeman, for it was he who would partner him for the first part of the mission. After the introductions, Emilio fetched a police uniform which he handed to Mitkin.
It was a simple enough plan. Posing as police, they would find the quantum computer destined for McGill University. They were to hijack it and get it over the border and into the USA, then to be shipped out to the UK as quickly as possible.
Mitkin changed into the cop’s uniform – it fitted well – and joined Emilio in the police car. Emilio drove and, soon after leaving Meribel, Emilio cut off the highway and, after some turns to the right and then the left, they arrived at a tall wire-mesh fence. Behind this they could be see the buildings of Lachapelle Transport & Security. Emilio flashed the car’s headlights and switched on and then off again the police lights on the roof of the car. The gates ground their way open and Emilio drove through and up to the reception entrance.
Inside the wide reception area, one security guard was seated at a console, watching screens; but they were greeted by his tall angular partner who was standing in the middle of the open area in front of the desk. He was tapping his thigh with his truncheon in what Alexis guessed was irritation at this unwanted intrusion.
‘What can I do for you officers?’ he asked.
‘We’ve had a tip-off,’ replied Emilio, ‘a threat to steal a consignment that came in on a flight yesterday evening. The tip-off said there was going to be an attempt to steal it before it’s shipped out to McGill University later today. We need to take a look, so can you show us where it is?’
‘Better follow me then,’ shrugged the guard.
The guard behind the reception desk got up from his chair, flicked a couple of switches and picked out a set of keys from a board behind his chair; then, with one hand resting on the butt of his holstered pistol, he said, ‘I’d better come too.’
Alexis and Emilio followed the two guards through some empty offices and then swung right into the first of the sheds. After turning a corner and unlocking a connecting door, they came into a second shed and to a van parked in one of its loading bays.
‘This is it,’ said the leading guard.
‘I’d like to check what it’s like outside the shed; I mean, beyond those roller doors,’ said Alexis.
Without answering, the second guard went over to the wall next to the doors and Alexis watched carefully how he switched on the power and then raised the doors. As soon as the bottom bar of the doors was high enough off the ground, Alexis went over to it, bent low and went outside to have a look. On re-entering the shed, he saw that Emilio had positioned himself near the two guards who were chatting away together near the van. He walked over to join Emilio, exchanged looks with him and they both nodded – time to take over the van. Both quickly stepped forward and delivered swinging blows to the backs of the heads of the two guards. Both crumpled to the ground. Emilio didn’t bother to bind or gag them; instead he delved into one of the pockets in the uniform and produced a neat box which, when opened, turned out to contain some syringes and small bottles. He deftly filled one syringe after the other and injected each of the guards in their necks; he looked at his watch and nodded as he looked up to Alexis.
‘Those injections should keep them quiet for a good two hours at least, plenty of time to get where I’m headed. Because this is where we part company. My real boss, Rocco Balboni will be waiting for me in New York,’ he said, rising to his feet and levelling his gun at Alexis, ‘In case you’re wondering, you can tell Carlo, if you ever see him again, that Rocco got me into the Massimo organization a few months back to find out more about their European connections. And then I find myself in the middle of a really valuable heist – great, right? Anyway, enough of this. I need you to get down on your knees so I can put you to sleep like the other two.’
Alexis did as he was told and got down onto his knees with his back to Emilio. In the chrome of the van’s wheel-hubs he could see Emilio’s reflection; just as he was about to be injected, he twisted his body violently and threw out a leg to his right with all the force he could muster. It caught Emilio on one of his ankles and he dropped his gun as he doubled up in pain. Alexis pulled a spare gun from its ankle holster on his other leg, spun around, allowing himself to fall sideways as he fired two shots into Emilio.
The shots struck home before Emilio had recovered enough to reach for his own fallen gun. They hit him with dull thuds in the chest and stomach. Alexis’s third shot hit Emilio smack in the middle of his forehead and knocked him backwards, stone dead.
‘Shit,’ cursed Alexis as he got to his feet. ‘Idiot,’ he thought. ‘How the hell did he think he’d get away with that?’
He collected up the keys to the van which one of the unconscious guards had brought along in case they wanted to look inside it, and also took the police car keys from Emilio’s pocket. Squeezing out under the roller door, he ran around to the front of the building and into reception; after some searching he managed to switch off all the lights. Next, leaving by the front doors, he locked them, ran over to the police car and drove it back to the loading bay’s roller doors. Back under these, he wound them fully up. With some quick manoeuvring, he swapped the vehicles around, putting the police car in where the van had been and leaving the van outside. He lowered the roller-door as low as he could – still allowing for his last exit under it. Once outside again, he got into the van and drove out of the yard, through the wire gates, and headed south.
With these unplanned complications, Mitkin realised that there was an added time-pressure to get the van over the US border before any of this was discovered.
Back up on the highway, he drove as fast as he dared without attracting the attention of an overnight police-car shift – it would be tricky explaining what he was doing dressed as a policeman driving a delivery van. As he drove, he stripped down to just shirt and trousers.
Down in the Montreal suburb of Lachine, Massimo had hired a small garage on an industrial estate just north of the Saint Lawrence river. Here a small team had been assembled to help his people spray the Lachapelle van a dark green. Oval panels had also been prepared declaring that the van belonged to Cockerel Transport – it even boasted a small rooster as its logo. In the unlikely event of the police discovering the theft and the bodies, even if they closed the bridges over the river to set up vehicle-checking, the green van would get through.
When Mitkin got to the garage Carlo accepted the story that Emilio had been shot dead by an overzealous warehouse guard.
With his own plans at risk, Mitkin decided to leave out the complication of Emilio being a part of the Balboni organisation. They needed to get on with the plan to get the van across the border some fifty miles south of here. So it was decided to leave Massimo to deal with Emilio’s body and family.
Mitkin changed back into his old clothes and added the cop’s uniform to all the other pieces of evidence that were already burning away in a brazier just outside the garage building. He then got the US licence plates from the Chevy and changed them for the Canadian plates still on the van. By now the quick-setting paint was touch-dry and Carlo called together those taking the van over the border.
‘When we get down to the border,’ he said, ‘here’s what’s going to happen. The van, the licence plates and Cockerel Transport have all been fast tracked through customs – that means going through the sign-posted fast-track lane. We don’t want anyone having the time to give it a long inspection, do we? Once we’re in Vermont, we’ll meet up at the services restaurant and go on down to Albany, get the consignment on its flight to Europe. Okay?’
They all nodded agreement. Wilder was accompanied by Guido in the now green van and they set off following the Chevy. From Lachine they crossed the Saint Lawrence by the Honoré Mercier Bridge and turned south when they got to Highway 15. This would take them down to the border crossing; there it became US Highway 87 and would take them the whole way to Latham and Albany Airport.
Alexis glanced at his watch. If the Lachapelle guards recovered unusually quickly from the drug, they might regain consciousness just about the time the van and the Chevy reached the border. This would be the nightmare scenario – the authorities would be alerted, and with Montreal being only three quarters of an hour or so from the border, it was entirely possible that they would ask police there to have all vans stopped and searched – fast-track or otherwise.
As Carlo had said, as the lines of border-crossing booths came into view, Alexis spotted the fast-track lane, and as the van passed the slowing Chevy on the inside, Carlo, unsuspecting, gave him a wave.
As planned, the van got through both Canadian and US formalities in little time. When one customs officer asked Alexis about the contents of the van, he used the prepared excuse he had been briefed on – that a factory in Albany could not operate till the spares in the van got there. This worked well and the van came through clear into the wide stretch of road before it narrowed back into highway. They were well ahead of the Chevy – in fact, so far ahead that it was out of sight. Alexis immediately drove the van over to the right and as he reached the side of the road he slowed to a stop. Producing his gun from his pocket he raised it to Guido’s neck.
‘Sorry about this Guido, but this is where you get out of the van.’
Guido looked sideways at the gun, and then across into the van’s rear-view mirror. There was still no sign of the Chevy. He realised that there was nothing he could do about his situation, said nothing, and did as he was told. As soon as he was out of the van, Alexis pulled the door closed, checked to the rear and accelerated away as fast as the van would go. He turned down the next slip-road to the right. This took him onto the west highway service road, and a couple of hundred yards further on he turned left under the highway itself and into the small town of Champlain.
Once through the small town, he pulled up onto the wide verge, got out his phone and began tapping out a text message. ‘Alone in van heading as planned Boston this evening no pursuit yet so confident container ship departure tonite.’ He sent it.
He slammed the clam phone shut and thrust it into his pocket. Starting up the truck again he waited for a short while, watching for the Chevy. After a few minutes, there was still no sign of Carlo or the Chevy and Mitkin took the van over the two tranches of the top of Lake Champlain and pressed on across-country for Boston.
As Alexis drove down to Boston, he had plenty of time to plan ahead. He started with the assumption that the Massimo threesome would discover soon enough that he was not putting the consignment onto a flight out of Albany. He smiled at the thought of the hell that Massimo would rain down on Carlo when he realised that they had been outsmarted.
The Massimo shipping people would not take long, however, to sift through all the container-ship sailings from the US east coast to Europe; they would quickly rule out both New York and Philadelphia – he reckoned that he had perhaps a three- to four-hour head-start on them, but probably no more than that. He would need to move fast.
On arriving in Boston, he drove to Independence Square and parked the van in a side street. It didn’t take him long to find a restaurant that met all his requirements. It was called Dean’s Diner. It had both a front and a back entrance, but more importantly, an internal stairway up to a flat roof. The fact that none of the steps creaked was a nice bonus.
The proprietor quickly became amenable when given suitable financial inducement and was happy to give him a number of his restaurant’s business cards and some of its handy advertising flyers. Mitkin booked a table which would be visible from East Broadway, the main street. He said that three friends of his might come looking for him and they were to be told that he would meet them at the booked table at nine-thirty.
Mitkin returned to the van and drove down to the Conley Marine Terminal where the container ship Calgaria was berthed. She would be sailing tonight, and would take the consignment to Rotterdam.
As he arrived, a gang of six longshoremen were already there and waiting for him. He manoeuvred the van to near the small container. Before he left, he told them he would be back shortly to see that the consignment had been put into the container and was ready to be loaded onto the ship.
He went up meet the ship’s Master and they discussed the itinerary. The Captain confirmed the container’s expected date of arrival in Rotterdam and gave him an estimate of when it would arrive in London after trans-shipment. Before leaving to get back to the container, Alexis warned that there just might be two or three gentlemen coming around looking for him. Could the crew be told to say that they knew nothing of the small container or of himself? He also said that he’d be grateful if it could be loaded aboard as soon as it was ready. Just before leaving to get back and see how the longshoremen were progressing, he excused himself, went to the Captain’s adjoining shower room and double-checked his gun, fitted the silencer and made sure he had plenty of spare rounds. Sticking it in his belt in the small of his back and pulling his canvas jacket over it, he then returned to the Captain, bade his farewells and left.
The longshoremen had finished the job and were waiting for him. He gave each of them a bonus and they started the loading procedures right away, and Alexis waited and watched as the container was hoisted and stowed on board.
He next drove the van slowly back towards East Broadway. He took it round the block of the Marine Park and in a loop back again towards the terminal. There were not many parking spaces available but eventually he picked what looked to be an ideal spot. Whether the Massimo three came down the William Day Boulevard, East Broadway, or any of the smaller east–west streets, this was the ideal spot. They could not miss spotting the van with its Cockerel Transport Logo and sign. He parked it there, leaving the cards and flyers for the restaurant on both the dashboard and front seat of the van.
He walked slowly back up towards Independence Square. This time, however, he took a side street, just in case the threesome arrived earlier than expected. He glanced at his watch – seven-thirty. He had not yet seen the Massimo Chevy but he went to a small restaurant across the road from Dean’s Diner. He ordered a steak, and just as it arrived he saw Carlo and the other two arrive at Dean’s. Carlo went in while the other two waited outside. Carlo reappeared and the three of them held a furtive conference outside the restaurant before setting off in the direction of the centre of South Boston.
Alexis finished his meal at his leisure, paid for it and went across to Dean’s. On entering, the proprietor hurried up to him and told him his friends had called in looking for him. He thanked him, but before going to his table he went through the back of the restaurant, and checked that the back door was locked and the curtain was drawn, hiding the stairway to the roof. Returning to his table, the took his seat and ordered a glass of red wine. Sipping it, he read a newspaper in such a way that he could see any approaches to the restaurant over the top of it.
He did not have long to wait. Carlo and the other two arrived and came cautiously towards the restaurant. As soon as Carlo spotted Alexis, he momentarily froze, and then all three of them backtracked out of sight again. Alexis gave them a moment to regroup, rose, and quickly went out towards the back. As he passed the proprietor, he whispered in his ear and then went on and hid behind the curtain leading up the stairs, leaving a chink in the curtain open so that he could see back into the restaurant.
After what seemed an age, Carlo entered the restaurant. He held his gun out in front of him and immediately the few customers in the restaurant panicked. Dean ushered them quickly out of the front of the restaurant and, turning to Carlo, whispered that the man he was after had gone to freshen up before his dinner and that the restroom was through the back on the left.
Carlo crept forward, his gun held out in front of him, his attention focused on the door into the men’s washroom. As soon as he was level with the curtain, Alexis shot him in the knee. With a cry of acute pain and shock, he began to crumple. As he went down, Alexis stepped swiftly over him and smashed the butt of his gun into the base of his skull. The rest of his fall was silent.
Turning, Alexis silently ran up the stairs, through the small door at the top and out onto the flat roof. Creeping forward, with extreme care, he eventually got near enough to the edge to peer down into the small garden below. As he had anticipated, both Guido and the other were well hidden, positioned to shoot Alexis if he tried to escape out the back. From his vantage point on the roof, they presented Alexis with quite easy shots. He got down into a prone sniper’s position and, steadying his gun by resting it on his left arm, firmly braced on the felt roof, he shot both of them in their knees, one after the other, just a second or so apart. He then got up quickly, tucked his gun into his belt again and left the two screaming men lying on the ground clutching their knees. Back down in the restaurant, he stopped beside the bewildered proprietor.
‘Give us a couple of minutes, will you, and then ring for an ambulance and the cops?’
‘Sure,’ stammered the proprietor as he accepted another wad of notes.
‘And which is the quickest way out of South Boston?’
‘Where are you parked?’
‘Just across the street,’ said Alexis,
‘Go directly to Dorchester Bay,’ said the proprietor, taking him to the front of the restaurant and pointing the way. ‘When you reach the bay, take a right. That takes you up and onto the 93 Highway. Go west, and you’ll be outta Boston itself in no time.’
‘Thanks, I owe you,’ said Alexis, almost as though he might repay it one day.
He then left by the back door, and knocked the Massimo men out of their pain with quick blows from the butt of his gun. He went back, collected the Chevy keys from the still unconscious Carlo’s pocket and hurried away through the back streets. He found the Chevy parked a block away, got into it and drove it down towards the terminal, but as he got close to it, he abandoned the car in a side street, keeping the keys. In this way, he would set a false trail – with Carlo’s Chevy gone and his asking the restaurant owner the way out of Boston. As he walked the rest of the way to the terminal, he tapped out a text to Zorin.
‘Pursued as expected, dealt with them, consignment sails tonight, see you tomorrow. Alexis.’
When he got to the van, he collected his overnight bag, walked back to a taxi rank he’d seen earlier and got one to take him to Boston Logan International. Less than an hour later he climbed aboard a flight to London Heathrow. As the plane soared out over the Atlantic he gave a brief thought to his exploits in Canada and the US.
Though all he’d done was what Zorin had paid him to do, he was happy enough with the outcome. When he got to London he would tell Zorin the details, and around ten days after that he would need to get to Felixstowe Container Port to meet the consignment as it came in from Rotterdam. There was still an outside chance that the Massimo organisation would trace the shipment and cook up some crazy plan with their European associates to disrupt the quantum machine’s progress. He thought this unlikely but with so much of Zorin’s future now relying on this machine, it was going to be worth taking precautions. Besides, if they did try anything, he’d enjoy kicking ass again.
Vnukovo Airport, Moscow
The unusual circumstances surrounding Rodchenko’s death and the dumping of his body at the Newby Centre initially caused the police to refuse the release of his body. But quickly the Russian Ambassador intervened and the funeral was allowed to go ahead. Most of the arrangements had been made by Pavel Polichev and Rodchenko’s only next of kin, his daughter Katya, was hugely grateful to him.
But she was used to Polichev’s kindnesses over the years. He had tended to her needs since she was quite small – admittedly on her father’s orders. Though it would have been nicer if her father hadn’t been so busy doing the President’s dirty work for him. Though this trip was to London to bury her father, she was not in any great state of sorrow, but more one of interest in how her father had died.
The press had enjoyed a riot of speculation over his death and no amount of story-spinning could cover the fact that he had been assassinated. In a macabre kind of way, she knew she would manage to get some more out of Polichev and, unknown to her, with an agenda of his own, he’d be happy to give it. He was not surprised when she started on this while in the VIP lounge before the flight.
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that these stories of my father’s assassination are lies,’ she said, thrusting her chin out at him.
‘Not at all,’ he replied, ‘and if you promise not to do anything stupid in revenge, I’ll tell you who was responsible and what I propose to do about it.’
For a moment Katya just sat there, open-mouthed, then rushed on excitedly. ‘I promise not to do anything if you tell me who it was – go on, you owe it to me.’
‘On one condition.’
‘Yes, yes,’ she replied, hardly caring what the condition might be.
‘I haven’t proof enough yet to put him behind bars, but I’m working on that. It was Victor Zorin, the London-based oligarch. You remember the guy, you stayed with him for a bit when you were studying for your art degree in London?’
‘Of course I remember him – short, fat, with the shiny head. But why would he do that?’ She seemed genuinely intrigued.
‘Politics, basically,’ replied Polichev. ‘He’s taken over your father’s project – a thing called Gemini – and he hopes to use that to take your father’s position as the President’s righthand man.’
‘Really? So my father was killed trying to get something for the President?’
‘Exactly,’ replied Polichev. ‘But your father had some bad luck actually getting Gemini. The President, desperate for what Gemini could do for him against the West, lost patience and has given the job to Zorin…’
‘But that’s outrageous,’ exploded Katya. ‘Anyway, what’s so special about Gemini? I mean, for starters, what is it?’
‘Without going into technical details, it’s a mix of old and new computer technologies. The people who invented it refuse to allow it to be used against civilian populations but that won’t bother President Balakin. He wants to use it to bring the West to its knees.’
‘It can do that?’
‘We believe so, and test results show it to be true.’
‘But what does it actually do? Is it a new missile system, or what?
‘No, it’s not a missile system; it’s potentially far more powerful than a missile system,’ replied Polichev.
‘Come on. What’s more powerful that a missile system – especially one delivering nuclear warheads?’ Katya jutted her chin out a second time.
‘Let me try and explain without getting into technical stuff which even I don’t understand.’
‘I’ll just give you an example of what it could mean to President Balakin, why he’s so keen to get his hands on it and why Zorin believes he’ll get your father’s old position if he can deliver it. It can get through any digital computer defence system there is. Once in, it can then take control of whatever it is it’s just got into. Let’s suppose it targeted the main electrical supply systems of the US Eastern Seaboard; it could shut down as much or as little of it as it wished. Black out New York just as everyone’s trying to commute home. Think about it – the subway, traffic control systems, lights and so on. And in people’s homes – light, heat and cooking off just as the breadwinner gets home after a long day.’
‘Ah, yes, I see how that could be worse than just one missile. No loss of life, but I suppose you’re going to tell me it could affect all the other main domestic services…’
‘Not to mention locking the military out of using their missile silos,’ added Polichev.
‘So why haven’t the West used it against us?’
‘The man whose team invented it is a prominent London banker. Gemini started as a retaliatory weapon for use against bank hackers. Its development just ran on out of control, you might say. It’s since become the super-weapon it now is. But the banker said he’d never allow politicians to wage war with it, the way I just described to you – innocent civilians being targeted.’
‘But our dear President Balakin would?’
‘You bet he would,’ said Polichev, ‘which is why so much is at stake here.’
‘So, if you’re about to be cheated out of taking over from my father when he taught you so much, what are you going to do about it?’
‘Frankly, I’m going to need all the help I can get,’ replied Polichev.
‘If there’s any way I can help,’ said Katya, laying a hand on his arm, ‘I’d be happy to – though as you know my father always kept me away from the world of spooks. He said it was for my safety.’
‘That still applies, of course…’ said Polichev, throwing a quick glance at her. She was looking out of the VIP lounge but she appeared to be staring blankly, her eyes bright with… was it excitement? It was a possibility too good to miss.
‘We might find quite a safe way in which you could help me,’ he mused.
‘Really, you think so?’
Not wanting to appear too eager, Polichev just smiled and nodded his head as though deep in thought. ‘Leave it with me,’ he said. And although he had already worked out exactly how she could help, he let her excitement incubate for a while.
‘Perhaps during the flight I’ll come up with some way in which you could help,’ was his final encouragement.
The flight from Moscow to London was to be just on the four hours so Polichev waited until after they’d been served a meal. He then moved back into the subject obliquely.
‘What if you said to Zorin that you wanted to get away from Moscow and do some of those murals you’re so good at…’
‘What, you mean stay with him again now?’
‘Look at it this way,’ said Polichev, leaning over towards her. ‘If he was responsible for your father’s death, what better way of showing he could never have been involved by having his daughter to stay. I could put it to him at the funeral. I think I could do it in a way he couldn’t refuse.’
‘You think you could?’
‘I do. And you could help both me and the people guarding the Gemini project.’
‘Really? How would you manage that?’ Katya’s large dark eyes had grown even larger and were shining; her mind was clearly racing over Polichev’s words.
‘Don’t worry about how I’m going to arrange it,’ he said. ‘If you’re up for the challenge and would really like to nail him for your father’s death, you can safely leave setting it up to me – after all, it’s the kind of thing your father and I used to get up to all the time.’
Including her father’s work in this way was the clincher for her.
‘Done!’ she cried. ‘Let’s get it fixed up. And though my English isn’t as good as it was a few years back when I was at uni, it will be great to get back into it. ‘And I’ll need a contact at Gemini. Who will that be?’
‘His name’s Tom Wilder,’ said Polichev. ‘Have you ever seen any of the Bourne films, or Jack Reacher?’
‘Oh, yeah, all of those kinds of films. I love ’em.’
‘Well, Wilder’s a bit like a taller version of one of them – you’ll like him, and he’ll be really glad to have a spook helping him from inside Zorin’s house.’
‘Wow! I can’t wait to get started,’ said Katya, shifting about in her seat and grinning back at Polichev.
On arriving in London, Polichev took Katya to the Russian Embassy. Although Rodchenko was now gone, vestiges of the power of his small department still hung on. Everyone in the Embassy knew that Polichev might take over his old boss’s mantle and so accorded him due deference.
As Polichev’s whole being was infected with his desire for revenge on Zorin, one of the first things he did was to contact Wilder; he was keen to use his new British ally to the full and one step that would get that moving would be to introduce Katya to him.
As soon as he mentioned this to her, she bounced with enthusiasm.
‘If you don’t want him coming to this dreary place,’ she said, ‘I remember now there used to be a really nice London pub right across the main road from the top of Kensington Palace Gardens.’
‘How far is that from here?’
‘Fifty yards; he couldn’t miss it.’
She got out her phone, looked up Google Maps, and gave Polichev its name, The Champions.
Half an hour later, Wilder met the two of them and they went out into the gardens there with their drinks. They were lucky there were no other customers out there at the time and Katya could hardly take her eyes off Wilder – especially after Polichev having earlier likened him to her film heroes. But she particularly noticed how he quietly listened to her intently and softly answered her slowly in his deep voice as she questioned him about her father’s death. She wanted to know what had happened that night at the Newby Centre.
‘I think you need to realise that whoever killed your father just wanted to pass the blame over onto me. I’d taken precautions, so it didn’t work,’ he said. ‘But you can be assured of one thing. We’ll find out who did this. The British police may have been stopped in their investigations by the Russian Ambassador – like the Litvinenko case, which is still ongoing to this day, the Kremlin tried to shut it down.’
‘What was that case?’
‘It was very complex, but the point I’m making is that this country hasn’t given up hope yet of getting to the truth, and that was ten years ago. So, as we say in this country, chin up and we’ll get to the truth one day.’
‘What does this mean, ‘chin up’?’
‘It means that even though you feel like sitting down and crying with sorrow, disappointment or frustration, take your courage into your hands, put a defiant look onto your face, stick your chin up and go forward even if you don’t feel like it at the time.’
‘And does it work?’ Katya looked back at him with a sudden unwelcome welling up of emotion coming over her as the realisation of her father’s death hit her again.
‘It does,’ said Wilder. ‘You’ll see. It’s a scientifically proven fact that sometimes if you act the way you wish to be, it will come to pass. You’ll begin to behave as though the way you want to be is real, and soon it will be.’
‘Really. Whenever you feel down, smile to yourself; stick your chin out at what’s worrying you. Soon enough you’ll find the scientists were right; you’ll feel better able to look your troubles in the eye. Troubles are often like bullies; they don’t like to be challenged, so when they are, they fade away. But don’t take my word for it. Give it a go.’
She smiled through her tears and, sure enough, she began to feel better. She’d find the proof of who killed her father. And suddenly that seemed not just a vague possibility but, with this film-star’s help, a very real one.
Kensington Palace Gardens, London
Igor Rodchenko’s funeral service was quite well attended – considering it was taking place on foreign soil. Katya had been looked after by Polichev both at the memorial service and the cremation. Back at the Russian Embassy there was a small wake attended by a couple of dozen people. There was plenty of vodka and champagne available and Polichev ensured that Katya met Zorin again. After so many years since she’d stayed with him briefly, Polichev even hung around during the conversation in which Katya invited herself to stay.
As Polichev had anticipated, Zorin saw it as an excellent opportunity to confirm to the world that he was unlikely to have killed Rodchenko Senior and then had his daughter for an extended stay so soon afterwards. Indeed, as Zorin sat in a corner of the reception talking to Katya he had about him the peaceful air of a consoler and friend.
‘I have no doubt that I can get you commissions if that is what you wish for,’ said Zorin. ‘So if you’d like to move from the Embassy down the road to my place I would be delighted.’
The following day Zorin’s and the Embassy staff helped Katya to move. She bade farewell to Polichev and as they parted, Katya stood, a rather forlorn little figure in the hall of the Embassy.
‘I’m sure I’m doing the right thing; it’s just that I feel really nervous about trying to follow in my father’s world,’ she whispered.
Polichev gave her a hug, stood back and replied, ‘You’ve no need to worry about a thing. Follow your instincts. Just listen, look and learn, and when you need encouragement or have something to tell me, just use the special mobile phone I’ve given you. Give me a ring any time, day or night. And remember that Tom Wilder’s mobile number is on there too.
Katya smiled weakly, gave Polichev another hug and, turning away quickly to hide her welling eyes, followed one of Zorin’s waiting staff down the road.
Zorin greeted her warmly and showed her to her suite of rooms – a bedroom, bathroom, and a walk-in wardrobe large enough to serve as a dressing room. There was also a small study with a large tilting table where she could work on drawings for murals for the clients she would find through Zorin. After a good look round, she followed Zorin back downstairs and into his private study. They sat down in comfortable leather chairs as coffee was brought in; looking across the room, on the wall opposite where he was sitting, there was one of her early floor-to-ceiling murals.
It portrayed a beautiful if somewhat idealised English countryside with gently rolling hills covered with a patchwork of fields of different crops; there were sweeps of green meadow harbouring sheep and cattle and lush ancient woodlands. The painting had a delicate feel to it and might easily have fooled an amateur into thinking it was an unknown Fragonard.
‘Look at it,’ said Zorin, following Katya’s gaze, admiring the wide sweep of the canvas that covered the wall. ‘I thought it was a brilliant idea of yours to paint it onto canvas and then stick it to the wall. Not that I shall be selling this place, but it does mean I could take it with me if I wanted to. And I’m not just saying that because I’m talking to its painter. I love that mural of yours more and more every time I see it. So, I’d be very happy to sound out some possible clients for you.’
‘Before you do that,’ said Katya, ‘as I would propose to do most of my murals in the same manner, I need to look for a studio – preferably near here. Then if it also has sleeping accommodation I could move in there and get out of your way here. As soon as that’s set up I would be most grateful for some introductions.’
‘If that’s the way you want to go, that’s fine by me,’ said Zorin. ‘In the meantime, just treat this place as home till you’re fixed up. And if it would be helpful, I could get my property development people to find a place such as you describe – though I’ve no idea how long such a search might take,’ he added.
‘That would be a great help; my English is not as good as it was – I need to do quite a bit of practising to get it back to where it was when I was at university here.’
‘That’s settled then,’ said Zorin. ‘As soon as we’ve found you a studio I can get you going with some introductions and, of course, if you want to show your work to anyone, you can bring them back here to show them this mural – save you relying on photographs.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Zorin…’
‘Victor. You must call me Victor. I was an old friend of your father, after all.’
This remark touched Katya like a hand pressing on a wound, but she let it pass.
It was maybe a couple of days later that her first real opportunity arose to snoop around the place, to see what she could learn of the rather sinister Zorin. He and Mitkin had gone out for the morning and from the window of her room she saw them both get into a limousine and drive away.
She waited till the car was out of sight and ran downstairs. There was neither sight nor sound of any of the staff so she crept into Zorin’s study. Though there was nobody about, she was as quiet as she could be as she started to look through the drawers of the desk. She had no idea what she was looking for, but spurred on by Wilder’s kind remarks a few days earlier, she put a bold look on her face and rifled through the drawers with careful efficiency. She had started on the left-hand side of the desk, working her way down through the five drawers. They all contained files of various kinds, accounts, projects, reports from some of the companies in his huge business empire.
She then started on the right-hand set of drawers. She mostly just glanced at the files, but beneath one of them she found a letter with a very grand embossed letterheading – it was from President Balakin, and it was handwritten.
With a sharp intake of breath, she took the letter out from under the file, sat down in Zorin’s huge chair and began to read. Its contents were horrifying. It appeared to be a series of step-by-step instructions from the President himself for Zorin to take over the Gemini project. Unlike her father, Zorin was to make no mistakes and had just one month to find and steal – or clone, or do whatever else was necessary – Gemini and deliver it to him. Though words such as assassination and murder did not appear in the letter, this was, in effect, her father’s execution warrant.
By now her hands were trembling with both fear and excitement. She was actually holding in her hands the proof others were looking for. She fumbled in her pockets but suddenly realised that she’d left her mobile phone up in her room. She nearly screamed out with frustration. The one time she really needed her phone…
She looked around the room for a photocopier. There was none that she could see. She was wondering whether to run up to her room and get her phone – obviously she would need to put the letter back where she’d found it. She was just working her way through these options when she heard a car arriving at the front door. In a sudden panic, she rushed over to the window to have a look. It was Zorin and Mitkin returning. They were already getting out of the car.
Her heartbeat now pounding in her throat, she rushed back to the desk and began carefully putting President Balakin’s letter back where she had found it. By now she could hear Zorin’s and Mitkin’s voices outside the office in the hall. She quickly closed the drawer, checked she hadn’t left any sign she’d been there and, panic now threatening to paralyse her, dashed around Zorin’s chair and hid behind the great heavy curtains that hung on either side of the tall window behind his chair. She had barely settled herself behind the great folds of heavy materials when she heard the two of them coming into the room. Once more she cursed not having her mobile phone with her; she would otherwise have been able to record what they were saying.
‘So, while you were in Canada, my people checked back through Rodchenko’s notes on the Gemini project,’ Zorin was saying. Katya let out her breath noiselessly; there was no need to go on holding it just so long as she made no sound.
‘What they did manage to find,’ continued Zorin’s deep voice, ‘was a real breakthrough. I won’t bore you with all the details, but just listen to this for a stroke of luck. The head of the Gemini team is certain Professor Henry Hapsley. All you need to know is that he’s one of the world’s leaders in computer sciences and especially in the new technology of quantum computers. He was working in Cambridge University where he held a top professorship of some kind. He was in collaboration with a large unnamed American conglomerate which was apparently also researching quantum computing.’
‘Is that the breakthrough?’ asked Mitkin’s voice.
‘No, the breakthrough was the person working most closely with Professor Hapsley – a young Russian computer genius by the name of Yulian Agaron. This young man’s father was none other than the famous Moscow mathematician and dissident, Evgeny Agaron…’
‘The one who so publicly defected to the UK?’
‘That’s the one. Young Yulian Agaron was no more than a boy at the time he fled with his father; his mother couldn’t go with them as her own mother was dying in Moscow. It was Professor Hapsley who took the two Agarons under his care, gave the father a job, and became a virtual saviour to the two of them. With me so far?’
‘Yes, but I still don’t see the breakthrough,’ said Mitkin.
‘I’m just coming to that,’ said Zorin, and though she couldn’t see him, Katya could hear the irritation in his voice. ‘The professor left Cambridge for the Newby Centre in London. There he concentrated on the beginnings of the Gemini Project. Meanwhile, the young Agaron was apparently too young to carry on working alone on the Cambridge University quantum computer. Since his father had died a couple of years back, he left the UK and went back to his old mother in Moscow. But here’s the breakthrough. The FSB found him for us and good old Anna Kuznetsova from my human resources recruitment company went and saw him.’
‘As soon as she offered him the opportunity to come back to the UK and work again with Professor Hapsley, his father’s saviour and his own mentor, he jumped at it. So there’s the breakthrough. Young Yulian Agaron, a great friend of the professor’s, who’s already worked with him on quantum computers, is now going to work for us. He was probably involved in the beginnings of Gemini and we’ve now installed him in Cambridge. He’s ready and eager to take control of the quantum machine you brought back from Montreal.’
Shortly after, Katya heard Zorin telling Mitkin to get up to Cambridge and ensure that young Agaron was content with his accommodation and had the quantum machine set up. Mitkin left, and before long Katya heard Zorin leave the room as well. It was just a moment later that, to her horror, she heard him out in the hall shout out her name. She crept out from behind the curtain and ran across to the door. Zorin was just going into the drawing room and she swiftly ran across the hall. Opening the door through to the kitchens, she then slammed it shut again and walked back across the hall towards the drawing room.
‘Were you calling me?’ she said as she breezed into the room, almost bumping into Zorin as he was coming out.
‘I wasn’t really calling for you, I was just wondering if you…’
‘Oh, I was down in the kitchens stealing some biscuits.’
He smiled, took her by the arm and led her into the room. Though she played the bright young woman without a care in the world, rich beyond imagination from her inheritance from her father, she was in turmoil inside. In her heart she wanted to confront Zorin with what she knew. Fortunately, she had also inherited some of her father’s guile, and decided she would savour it all the more once she had a copy of President Balakin’s letter safely in her hand.
The Russian Embassy, Kensington Palace Gardens
As soon as Katya was able, she made an excuse – going shopping up on Portobello Road – and skipped off out of Zorin’s house. As soon as she was out of sight of the house, she broke into a trot and ran the rest of the way up the hill to the Russian Embassy. As she’d being staying there earlier and her father’s wake had been there she was allowed straight in. Once past the simple security checks, she ran on to the temporary offices that had been assigned to Polichev.
She felt she was about to burst with all the information she had for him, and she was lucky that he was on his own. He got her to calm down, gave her a glass of water and settled down to listen to her outpourings. Soon, however, he pulled a lined pad across the desk and began to jot some notes.
He took in a sharp breath as she told him of President Balakin’s letter. Though even reading it would be regarded as treason, he vowed to get a copy of it – though didn’t say so that minute. He also nodded his head approvingly as she told him about the recruitment of Yulian Agaron.
From her descriptions of Zorin ‘finding’ Yulian Agaron, Polichev sensed he would need to tread warily. The word ‘finding’ suggested that the job had been done by the FSB’s internal intelligence people. If this were the case he might be about to run into a trap. Though Rodchenko dealt mostly directly with the President himself, in theory he reported to General Zharkov, head of the FSB. More than that, it was currently rumoured that the President was about to reunite the FSB’s internal operations with those of the SVR’s external intelligence and thereby reconstitute the KGB. This would make the General even more powerful than before. And here was the danger. If Zorin had found out about Yulian Agaron through the FSB, Zharkov would know all about Zorin and his plans.
He would ring Zharkov but he would need to tread carefully, like someone creeping out onto an ice-covered lake, ever fearful of it giving way and plunging him into deep water.
Katya felt much better after unburdening herself of all her secrets. She then added, ‘And I suppose as Tom Wilder’s helping us to put Zorin away, I should let him know about all of this as well?’
‘No need for that,’ cut in Polichev quickly. ‘He’s taken his daughter off to Paris and Rome for a few days to take her mind off the kidnapping business. No need to worry him while he’s busy patching up family affairs; I’ll tell him all about it when he gets back. Okay?’
‘Whatever you suggest,’ replied Katya. ‘But we’ve made good progress, don’t you think?’
‘We have, and it’s down to you. Well done. But how did you get away from Zorin to tell me all this?’
‘I just said I was off up to Portobello Road to look at the market, do a spot of shopping.’
‘If I were you,’ said Polichev, ‘I’d carry on and do that so that you have some shopping with you when you get back. We don’t want him to get suspicious – especially as he knows I’m still staying here.’
You’re right, and you’ll tell Tom Wilder?’
‘I will, don’t worry about that. And again, well done.’
As soon as Katya had gone, Polichev glanced at his watch. The General would have indulged himself in a lengthy lunch in Moscow. With a bit of luck, he would be in somnambulant mode, drowsy after his usual glass or two of brandy, not quite as sharp. He rang and got the telephone operator to put him through to the General – leave it to them to fiddle about trying to find him at FSB headquarters at Lubyanka Square or his Kremlin office, near the President’s private quarters.
As soon as he was through he heard that he was in luck – the General sounded as though he was in a good mood.
‘So, Igor’s funeral went off all right?’ asked the General.
‘Yes, so it should stop all the media chat and the investigations into his death.’
‘Good. That means that Victor can now get on with putting a Gemini together for the President,’
‘Yes,’ said Polichev slowly, drawing out the word as though he had reservations. ‘But if you’ll excuse my ignorance, I thought that this Gemini thing needed a quantum computer in its make-up and that implied that it also needed a special operator?’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ replied the General. ‘We found one for the project. A genius young man who has a personal connection to the head of Gemini’s technical side.’
So, there it was. It was the General’s FSB people who had tracked down Yulian Agaron for Victor Zorin. Did this mean that the General was on Zorin’s side? Would that include going as far as promoting him to Rodchenko’s old position? This was of such burning interest to Polichev that he just had to creep a little further out across the ice.
‘Assuming Zorin’s successful in putting a Gemini together and getting it operating on behalf of the President, how are you going to take the Gemini system back under the Kremlin’s control?’
‘I don’t follow you,’ slurred the General.
‘Get the Gemini under the Kremlin’s control so that it goes for the President’s targets and that Zorin doesn’t get to pick the tragets?’
‘Good question,’ replied the General. And to Polichev’s relief, he continued, ‘Don’t worry about Zorin; here in the Kremlin we still hold all the strings for all of our puppets.’
Though this didn’t spell out Zorin’s eventual fate, Polichev liked the thought of puppets on strings. If Zorin, for all his wealth and scheming, was still a puppet, there was still hope for himself. Hopefully this might include a way by which, working with Wilder, Polichev could thwart Zorin’s plans. Maybe, even, the Polichev-Wilder alliance might find a way to deliver Gemini to the President. Emboldened by these thoughts, he told the General he’d be back in Moscow shortly, and they ended the call.
With Katya’s news this morning, and the General’s remarks, Polichev felt he might still get his old boss’s job. But he needed to know more of Zorin’s plans so that they could be frustrated. It was time to get Wilder back from his family holiday in Paris and Rome and working on Zorin’s UK operations.
Craithe Castle, Scotland’s Western Isles
When the news got back to them that Tatiana had been rescued, Professor Hapsley and the Gemini team relaxed security from high alert down to just watchfulness. As she could not be used as a bargaining chip to gain access to Gemini, it seemed that the Russian attempts to steal Gemini might now fade.
No sooner had this been decided than they learned that Wilder’s daughter had been taken in revenge for that rescue. When that was swiftly followed by the news that she’d been shipped out to Moscow, the team became edgy again. There was now the complication that the tourist season had begun. Hundreds of them swarmed all over the castle and grounds every day – especially in the fine weather. There was a constant fear that one of them might present themselves at the lab, prove that they were connected to Lucy’s kidnapping, and demand access to Gemini.
These worries, and the renewed vigilance required – at least till Lucy was rescued – were all but forgotten when Professor Hapsley got a call from the son of a late good friend, his former pupil Yulian Agaron. Memories of happy days spent with Yulian in joint quantum computer research in Cambridge flooded in on him.
‘My dear boy, how are you?’ asked the professor. ‘When I got involved with the Gemini programme and had to leave Cambridge, I’m afraid I rather left you in the lurch…’
‘Not at all,’ replied Yulian. ‘The exciting news I have, and why I’m ringing you, is that I’ve been offered and have taken a new job back in Cambridge.’
‘That’s great, Yulian. With the same people?’
‘No, a new project, but I’ll be in charge of my own quantum computer,’ Yulian bubbled on.
‘I’m in charge of one of the latest ones – same as the one we worked on but a newer model.’
‘That’s wonderful. And you’re enjoying it?’ asked the professor.
‘Generally speaking, yes.’ Yulian was now more subdued. ‘I have to confess to you that I’ve run into a slight problem and I’d appreciate your advice.’
‘Sure, what’s the problem?’
‘You know the special suite of software we devised to connect the quantum machine and sync it to the digital mainframe?’
‘I seem to have lost my way round it. I’d got most of it sewn up – or so I thought – but the synching is not as consistent as we achieved. I was wondering if I could just copy the file we finished together all that time ago?’
There was quite a pause and then the professor answered. ‘I do remember you contributed greatly to that, so, just for that piece of software…’
‘It would really put me in my new employer’s good books if I could just copy across that snippet,’ interrupted Yulian. If you let me log into your digital controller, you could monitor me all the way to make sure I don’t steal anything you aren’t happy for me to take.’
‘Okay. I don’t see why not – just this once,’ replied the professor.
What he could not know was that this very telephone call had been rehearsed over and over between Mitkin and Agaron. They had also practised how to respond to every conceivable response the professor might come up with. What had just occurred was the best they could have hoped for. But there was more to come.
Just as Yulian was given the login details and was about to make the connection to the Gemini machines, Mitkin put a telephone call in to the professor’s mobile. All that Yulian needed was around a minute during which the professor would be distracted from his monitoring of the link-up.
Mitkin did a good job of putting a handkerchief over the mouthpiece of the telephone and producing some static interference from an old radio switched on next to him. Every now and then, he’d tone down the static, turning away from the radio and muttering in a high-pitched voice the distinct word ‘Hapsley’, interspersed with gibberish.
It had the desired effect. On his landline, Yulian could hear the professor shouting back down the mobile connection, ‘Yes, this is Professor Hapsley, where are you calling from…? I’m afraid we’ve got a very poor connection… Would you like to ring again?’
Eventually, Yulian gave Mitkin a thumbs-up. He had managed to copy all of the vital software that he needed and Mitkin ended his call to the professor.
‘Get what you wanted?’ asked Mitkin.
‘I did,’ said Yulian, grinning like a boy clutching an apple stolen from an orchard. ‘It won’t be anything like as developed as the real Gemini, but I could have blown the whole thing if I’d been greedy and tried to steal more. Still, what I did get will give us most of the basic Gemini functions.’
Though what Yulian had just told him wasn’t exactly what he had expected to hear, ‘most of the basic Gemini functions’ sounded good enough to Mitkin. As always, the proof that this was the case would be critical, and Mitkin was glad that the next phase was to provide just that – by trying out Yulian’s new quasi-Gemini on a real target.
Kings Lynn, North Norfolk
The taller of the two men held up his hand for quiet. Both, their heads and faces hidden by black balaclavas, were crouched, listening. They could hear the voices of their pursuers in the distance, shouting instructions to each other – mostly about where to look next. The voices faded, and the noise of running footsteps receded away into silence.
The taller man turned and found his face but inches from his companion’s, whose eyes were wide, unblinking through the slit in the helmet, his panic seeming to freeze them.
‘No one said nuffing about armed security,’ he whispered, still not blinking.
‘Maybe we’ve been set up,’ said the other. ‘One thing’s for certain, mate. The money for the job ain’t worth being shot at – we need to get the hell out of here. Follow me, I think I know a different way out.’
He peered around the corner of the corridor; seeing no one, he ran across it, and immediately turned down a short cul de sac towards an emergency fire exit at the end. The other followed him, also running quietly. The first, now sure he’d come the right way, gave his mate a thumbs-up. Both then pushed hard on the jammed exit door. Finally, it gave, and opened with a jarring noise. With some difficulty, the leader got out onto the lawn and paused, looking left and right along the building. He could see no one, so he ran, half-crouching, towards some low bushes some twenty-five feet from the door. Peering ahead from his new vantage point, he checked again.
Still no one in sight.
He beckoned to his mate. As soon as they were together again, huddled behind the scant cover, he put his hand up to his mouth.
‘I know where we are,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘The holes I cut in the mesh fence are just to the right of the large post over there. It looks all clear to me. We don’t need to run now; I think we’ve lost them.’ His companion looked past him. Sure enough, there was just a short bit of open ground between them and the holes.
‘Once we’re through, we’ll be into the woods in no time and back to the car. Are you ready?’
The shorter man pulled off his balaclava; he looked younger than his twenty-four years. He nodded and wiped his hand across his dry mouth. ‘Ready,’ he whispered.
‘Okay. On the count of three, run over there behind me.’ The leader paused for a moment and then said, much louder, ‘One, two, three,’ and stepped out. Still stooping slightly, they hurried towards the fence.
They had covered less than half the distance when two shots rang out in quick succession. Both of the young men crumpled mid-stride, dead before they hit the ground. They had never stood a chance.
It took Detective Inspector Jack Howard more than an hour to get the first lot of statements from everyone at the power grid sub-station; the more information they gathered from each successive interviewee, the less sense it made.
The two young terrorists – as they were immediately branded – had clearly been here to cause the power failure. They had on them a map and detailed plans of the sub-station. They had cut their way into the station and gained access to the computer room where the ultimate controls for the electrical supply were situated. It had not taken long to find a small but specialised USB memory stick – inserted into one of the computer mainframes. This small device was immediately blamed for the hour-long cut in electricity supplies. Yet one of the power company’s own computer people checked it out further and said that it still didn’t explain what was preventing the computers from restarting; even later extensive diagnostics checks failed to explain why the computers were dead.
Yet more tests and further detective work showed that the two young men had been shot from the direction in which they were heading, both hit smack in the middle of their foreheads by a marksman outside the grounds.
‘Who the hell would kill them as they were leaving?’ said DI Howard, as much to himself as to the sergeant standing next to him. ‘It’s almost as though the people that sent them in to do the job didn’t want them to make it out again. Damn it, the shots came from right by their own car.’
Their discussion was cut short by the sub-station’s manager, Jim Forbes. ‘We had a call earlier from some people who said they could fix the mainframe computer, the one which our own chap can’t get restarted. And now there’s a couple of blokes arrived; they say they’re from the company that telephoned. Can I bring them in? I need to fix the bloody computer as quickly as possible; it’s getting dark and already we’ve had hundreds of irate calls about the power cut. And people have their evening meals and their bloody telly to watch and…’
‘Yes, let them in,’ said Howard. ‘Forensics have finished, and anyway I think we’ve got everything we can from here. We can do background checks on these two repair people later. Who cares as long as they can get the job done, and the lights, TVs and cookers can go back on?’
Forbes went back out to where the two men were standing by their van.
‘What company did you say you were from?’ Forbes asked one of the repairmen.
‘PowerPlus,’ said one. ‘As my boss said when he rang, we had a similar power failure in the next county. When he heard of your blackout, he thought he’d give a ring and offer some help.’
‘Okay. Thanks. Can you just get on with it as quickly as possible?’ said Forbes. ‘Just get the bloody thing up and running again.’
King’s Lynn, North Norfolk
The two repairmen from PowerPlus got to work immediately. From what appeared to be a brand-new van, they took just two laptops. They explained that these contained their company’s sophisticated computer diagnostics and software repair programmes. Forbes was suspicious but intrigued. His own IT people had spent a considerable amount of time without being able to find out what was wrong and, try as they might, had been unable to restart the computers.
He now watched as one of PowerPlus men plugged a laptop into the dead mainframe whilst the other, with his back turned to Forbes – and his laptop therefore hidden from view – tapped rapidly on his keyboard.
To Forbes’s astonishment, the mainframe sprang back into life in less than five minutes. Not only was this embarrassing for his own people, it seemed to him to be almost like a sting. How could these two have fixed it so quickly when his own people – who were no slouches with technology – had been baffled for several hours?
Though the population around King’s Lynn would soon forget all the inconveniences of the black-out, Forbes felt that he could not let matters rest. His company’s reputation was at stake. He noted the PowerPlus details and was told that an account would be sent to him from their head office in due course. Apart from Forbes’s continuing puzzlement and desire to find out more, matters might have rested there had it not been for the following day’s newspaper. Whilst Forbes was flipping through the main news pages on his way to the sports section, the word “PowerPlus” caught his eye in the business section.
There it was, the heading to an article: “PowerPlus bid approved”. He read on with growing conviction that his sub-station had been involved in some kind of plot, for it told of PowerPlus’s successful bid to get a foothold in the UK power marketplace. Forbes knew well that the UK power market was virtually closed to newcomers. So the more he read of PowerPlus’s successful entry into it, the more suspicious he became.
He read on further. The article went on to explain that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Freddy Briston, had launched a new initiative to encourage more supply companies into the country’s supply provision. The article explained that, having been driven into the measures by months of campaigning about rigged markets, power company near-monopolies and price fixing, the Chancellor had declared that this initiative would increase fair competition and soon reduce power charges to consumers.
Another article, tucked away in different section of the paper, remarked on the how fortuitous it was that PowerPlus had been able to come to the assistance of the national grid in King’s Lynn at the very moment that they had made an application to the Business Secretary for a licence to operate in the UK. The way both articles dealt with this angle finally convinced Forbes that he was right – there was a conspiracy somewhere here. He decided to telephone someone and say his piece. Though he thought this might prove embarrassing to the National Grid, he rang his superiors at head office.
He was encouraged. His story, and his conclusions that there might be a link between the King’s Lynn computer malfunction, the instant repair at the sub-station, and PowerPlus’s bid for a foothold in the UK power marketplace quickly gained traction. This was soon followed up at the National Grid’s senior management level and, although this kind of wild west business approach was unheard of in the world of UK power generation and distribution, both the Fraud Squad and the office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer were briefed on Forbes’s conspiracy theory.
Freddy Briston, anxious that his power initiative should not be tainted by scandal, asked the Fraud Squad to hold off their investigations for a couple of days, as he had a way of getting to the truth even quicker than they were likely to. Some opponents of Briston complained that this was gross interference by the Executive into the process of law, and the Fraud Squad agreed. Briston, furious at being thwarted, telephoned his old friend Angus Macrae.
‘I need someone to check this conspiracy theory out for me,’ said Briston. ‘And as your people are in the forefront of the latest technologies, and your man Wilder is with the leading industrial espionage company, could they get down there and check this out?’
‘Okay, I’ll get Wilder and our people onto it right away,’ said Macrae, and took down the particulars. These included the location, the manager’s name, the timings of the incident and so on. He was just thankful that Wilder was back from Rome and had sent his daughter back to her uncle and aunt in the States, and so could take over from here.
Macrae first contacted the professor at Craithe. He told him the whole story, and said that his going down to King’s Lynn would be a politically astute gesture; the professor agreed to go and to take his genius hacker Perry with him.
‘So long as Tom Wilder’s there as well,’ he added. ‘He can deal with any tricky political aspects, while Perry and I look into these conspiracy theories.’
‘That would be great, Prof,’ replied Macrae. ‘See if you can get to the root of it as fast as possible. I don’t want the government breathing down my neck – even if it’s in the form of an old friend of mine. Oh, and I’ve ordered the helicopter over from Glasgow. It will take the two of you direct from Craithe to King’s Lynn, and I’ll get Tom Wilder to meet you there.’
‘Fine, we’ll have it sorted in no time.’
Macrae telephoned Wilder at IPI and explained the situation.
‘Haven’t the police got a unit that would deal with a suspicious stoppage like this?’ asked Wilder.
‘There’s a potentially embarrassing political angle to this,’ explained Macrae. ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer knows all about Gemini and is terrified that this might be a complex attack, as none of the people down there could fix it. These mysterious PowerPlus people just turned up. The Chancellor didn’t say why he was worried about this PowerPlus company, but before you go down to King’s Lynn, see if your people at IPI can find out a bit more about them, will you?’
‘I will, and if the budget will stretch, I’d like to take my old IPI colleague Jessie Marker on this assignment.’
‘As far as a Gemini-related investigation is concerned there’s no such thing as a budget,’ replied Macrae. ‘We need to do whatever it takes to establish that there’s no connection between this King’s Lynn incident and Gemini.’
‘Just so long as you understand that the two of us may have to stay on up there if there’s a hint of a Gemini-like attack – you know, nose around a bit,’ said Wilder.
‘Yes, It’s fishy. Who goes to King’s Lynn unless they have to – or are passing through on their way to the coast? So, do whatever you need to do and get back to me the moment you have anything – I’d like to get Freddy Briston’s interest in this incident and in Gemini shut down as quickly as possible. The last thing we need government calls to take over Gemini in the name of National Security.’ He spat out the phrase as though it were some kind of conspiracy itself.
Wilder and Jessie Marker met up at King’s Cross. They took a train north to King’s Lynn, a trip of an hour and a half or so. On the way, Wilder checked and found that the professor and Perry were there already.
The four of them met up at the sub-station and were greeted by Forbes. He now seemed embarrassed that his conspiracy theory had evoked such a wide response. While Perry and the professor got to work on the sub-station’s computers, Jessie Marker rang IPI to check on investigations into PowerPlus’s background and ownership.
The professor explained to Forbes what he and Perry were doing as they ran diagnostics on the mainframe. It did not take them long to establish that a quantum computer had been used and, to his horror, he found a Gemini-like footprint hidden away inside some of the computer’s activity logs.
It was at this point that the truth bore in on the professor. He got up from where he’d been kneeling to pick up a USB stick which had fallen out of the mainframe. He went back over to a desk near the mainframe and sat down at it. He put his head into his hands and the others looked on in astonishment as he sat here for a few moments before letting out a loud moan.
‘Are you all right, Prof?’ asked Wilder. ‘Had a funny turn?’
‘Oh Tom, what have I done?’ He ran his hands through his thinning white hair. Perry, Jessie and Forbes looked on anxiously, Forbes worried in case the professor was having a heart attack or a stroke.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Wider.
The professor let it all pour out. His long telephone conversation with his former protégé, Yulian, his allowing Yulian to copy some files across from Gemini to his machine in Cambridge.
‘And were you distracted at any point while you were supposed to be monitoring what Yulian was doing?’ asked Wilder. ‘At any time during which his computer was linked up to the Craithe machines?’
The professor let out a long sigh.
‘Oh God, yes,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘Now that you mention it, there was another call. It seemed it was a wrong number or a mobile on a bad connection.’ He stopped for a moment as he gave this more thought. ‘Christ, what a fool I’ve been. Now Gemini is out in the open. We must track and destroy it. In the wrong hands, it could be…’
‘Did your young friend Yulian happen to mention who he was being employed by?’ interrupted Wilder.
‘No, when he said he was back in Cambridge again, I never really thought about it; I assumed he meant the University itself. How stupid of me, I never even asked. God, how careless can you get?’
‘Don’t make yourself ill with this, Prof,’ said Wilder, laying a hand on his shoulder. ‘We’ll get it sorted. What’s done is done; don’t beat yourself up about it.’ The professor looked back up at him, a look of despair on his pale, drawn face. ‘Look. With the best will in the world, we were never going to keep Gemini entirely to ourselves for ever, were we?’ said Wilder, smiling down at the Prof. ‘I’ll bet that they’ll only have a shell of the real thing in the little time they had while they were distracting you.’
‘Well, that’s certainly true,’ said the Prof, brightening a bit. ‘Though they’ve managed to use whatever they’ve got to shut this sub-station down. We must find them or…’
‘That’s enough, Prof,’ said Wilder, in a mock-stern tone. ‘Now you’re distracting me. Give me a minute to think about this.’
Shortly afterwards, he got out his mobile and rang Katya at Zorin’s place.
‘Hi Katya,’ he said. ‘How are you?’
The others could hear her excitedly talking at the other end.
‘Did Polichev ever pass on my message to him about what I overheard while I was hiding behind the curtain in Zorin’s office?’
‘No,’ said Wilder. ‘What was that about?’
Katya breathlessly told him all about the Russian President’s letter to Zorin, and the plans he had then discussed with Mitkin. The others watched as Wilder’s face lost some of its colour and he began to frown and shake his head. Eventually he thanked Katya for her help and told her that he’d be back in touch shortly.
‘They’re not wasting any time,’ said Wilder as he put his mobile down. ‘They’re on the move.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked the Prof.
‘Katya’s just told me a whole lot of stuff that was supposed to have been passed on to me by Rodchenko’s number two Pavel Polichev. I can see why he didn’t. Zorin and his righthand man Alexis Mitkin have moved.’
The others clearly didn’t get the full significance of this news.
‘They’ve gone, packed, taken big bags with them,’ said Wilder. ‘Unfortunately, Katya doesn’t know where they’ve gone to. She got back from lunch and shopping and the housekeeper told her she was welcome to stay as long as she wished but that Zorin and Mitkin had been called away on urgent business.’
‘Does that mean what I think it does?’ said the Prof.
At that moment Wilder’s mobile rang. As he answered it, he mouthed the name ‘Mike Rogers’. Rogers spoke for some time and, again, the others watched for any reactions from Wilder, who listened to Rogers, intently nodding his head and muttering the occasional ‘Uh-ha’.
‘I see. So PowerPlus is owned by Zorin, but through a series of companies in the Bahamas?’ said Wilder at last. ‘So that was only a part of his plan, is that what you’re saying?’ Shortly after that, the call ended and Wilder turned to the professor.
‘I’m afraid there’s not really time to tell you all that Mike Rogers just told me. But here’s the gist of it. PowerPlus had just applied for entry into the UK power supply industry. It’s already a large setup, but is linked to other companies straddling Russia, Europe and the Eastern Seaboard in the States. It looks as though Zorin was just testing his new proto-Gemini. He picked King’s Lynn to try it out because it’s near where Yulian Agaron was based in Cambridge. What’s clear from all these bits of information is that Zorin believes he has enough of Gemini’s power to start on his plans, whatever they might be.’
‘And the two young men? The ones they killed?’ asked Jessie.
‘They must have known who was employing them and needed to be sent to their graves, taking that secret with them. Remember, if there hadn’t been the complication that brought the Chancellor in on this incident, it would have hardly got beyond the local news. We’d never have heard about it. We wouldn’t have been called in. No one would have ever discovered that it wasn’t just a minor local breakdown. And discovering that it’s been a trial of a proto-Gemini has been a series of unlucky events for Zorin – he came really close to getting away with his trial being unnoticed.’
‘But how about this, then?’ said the professor. ‘Zorin may have hoped to test his new setup at his leisure and then move on at his own pace with his plans.’
‘You’re right,’ said Wilder, taking up the point. ‘But we’ve exposed all of this. Even though we haven’t broadcast it, he’ll now need to bring his plans forward as fast as he can.’
‘Just my thoughts,’ said the professor.
‘Right. We need to move fast,’ said Wilder. ‘Prof, can you and Perry get back up to Craithe as fast as possible and contact GCHQ. We need to look for any activity that could give us a clue to their next move. I’ll get in touch with my contact in MI6 and before long we can come up with a way of finding Zorin and Mitkin. We also need to track down Yulian Agaron and his machines. It’s possible Katya may remember some other things about the conversation she overheard between Zorin and Mitkin. We need to get a lead on where they’ve gone and what they’re up to.’
King Street, Norwich, Norfolk
It was after three in the morning by the time the vans had transferred the computers and all the other pieces of equipment to the old warehouse by the river. Getting Yulian’s machines out of Cambridge in the pitch dark had not been easy. But now, safely installed around forty-five miles from King’s Lynn, Zorin was confident the move would give him time enough for more trials before moving on to his main plan. Taking Yulian and the machines here had the additional advantage that Norwich had its own airport on the outskirts of town – ideal for what was to come later.
With all of the equipment now hidden away in the old warehouse off King Street, the removal people handed the keys to Alexis Mitkin and departed. For Mitkin it had been a long day. Just as soon as the King’s Lynn electricity sub-station trial attack and shutdown had succeeded, the next phase of the plan had swung seamlessly into action. He and Zorin had come up from London, and had booked into a nice small hotel in the centre of Norwich under assumed names and false passports.
Yulian had been dropped off at his new accommodation – a magnificent if small apartment near to the warehouse. The operation had gone smoothly. They had needed to be sure that the first trial of the new mini-Gemini setup would work, after which they would need to move it. But Zorin had never expected the turmoil that was to follow the trial, and just thanked Lady Luck that he’d had the foresight to make his move earlier.
Early in the morning, after a full breakfast, Mitkin and Zorin checked out of their hotel and took a taxi over to Yulian’s apartment. He was still sleeping, so they let themselves in and brewed some fresh coffee. It was nearly ten in the morning by the time Yulian joined them, rested but still bewildered by the speed at which things had developed in the last twenty-four hours.
‘Professor Hapsley’s going to be so proud of you,’ were Zorin’s first words to Yulian as he joined them in the apartment’s large living room. He was standing, sipping his coffee and looking out over the apartment block’s neatly trimmed lawns.
‘Going to be proud of me?’ repeated Yulian, joining him at the window. ‘How do you mean?’
‘The people who now employ Professor Hapsley have consistently told the UK Government that they will never allow Gemini to be used aggressively, as innocent civilians always suffer. This means that the professor will never be able to develop the full power of his and his team’s wonderful invention. You, however, have just shown how powerful Gemini really is – and that’s without having the full capabilities of his more developed programmes.’
‘Oh, I see, and you think he’ll be proud of that?’
‘Of course he will – even if only secretly,’ said Zorin. ‘But till we’ve got our proto-Gemini set up again here in Norwich, just keep our little success a secret, will you? We’ll contact the professor again when we’ve got our next success under our belts.’
‘What’s that going to be – our next success? I thought we were just going to develop our own Gemini – the proto-Gemini, as you call it – and that we’d still be doing it alongside the professor,’ said Yulian, his eyes darting a glance at Zorin.
‘We will, we will,’ said Zorin, slapping Yulian on the back. ‘But, as I was saying, he’s not allowed to use his original version aggressively, so we’re going to break this whole exciting area of computer research to him gently by showing him how it’s done. That way we will dominate Gemini’s full capabilities. I think it’s a very exciting prospect and one which has been denied to the professor because of his boss’s scruples.’
‘Ah yes, I see,’ said Yulian. ‘So we’re just keeping ahead of the bad guys who might come along later and usurp Gemini?’
‘Exactly,’ said Zorin. ‘We managed to get our hands on enough of Gemini’s software for you to build us our proto- system. Who’s to say that someone else with less worthy motives than our own might not be able to do the same?’
Zorin took Yulian gently by the arm, winked at Mitkin as he passed him, and sat Yulian down on the sofa.
‘Alexis and I now have to go off for a couple of days, maybe more. But around lunchtime tomorrow a real nice guy called Andrei Boykov will be arriving here. He’s from St Petersburg, and though he’s not quite up to your genius level with computers, he’s pretty damned good with them. We think you two will get on well together. He’s the one who wrote the software that allowed you to take the Gemini software you’d worked on with the professor without being detected. I want you to show him how to set up and run your new proto-Gemini here in Norwich. Okay?’
‘What, he’s to be my assistant?’
‘Exactly. You’ll be the boss. It’s your proto-Gemini, it’s not even mine. But his extra pair of hands and another head to bounce more development ideas off will even things up,’ said Zorin.
‘I don’t understand. Even what up?’
‘You and the professor. He has a whole team and a young genius called Perry. Now you and Andrei will become a real match for them. Who knows… the two of you may even devise developments that the professor will really thank you for.’
‘Ah, that sounds great.’ Yulian gave a Zorin a smile and seemed to go off into a daydream.
‘Alexis and I will be off now,’ said Zorin. ‘You can start setting up the proto-Gemini down in the warehouse and Andrei will join you tomorrow. Here’s some spare cash to tide you over. It might be better if you use this cash rather than your bank account for the next few days, all right?’
‘If we’re to be in hiding from other bad guys looking for us,’ said Yulian, ‘that makes sense.’
Zorin fumbled in his pocket, took out an envelope and handed it to Yulian. It felt both thick and heavy, so Yulian half-opened it and took a look inside. After leafing through the notes, he gave a low whistle.
‘There must be thousands here,’ he said, looking up in surprise at Zorin.
‘Two thousand, to be precise,’ replied Zorin. ‘Treat it as a bonus for your great work. Giving you cash also keeps the taxman’s hands off it. Treat yourself. There are some nice shops just up the hill and over into the city centre.’
The taxi that Mitkin had ordered arrived, and he and Zorin got their suitcases into it and bade farewell to Yulian. As they drove off, Mitkin watched the young man standing by the apartment block’s main entrance. He looked forlorn and alone, and Mitkin turned to Zorin.
‘Do you think he’ll be okay setting up the machines and being on his own till Andrei gets here tomorrow?’ he asked.
‘Yes. He’s a computer geek through and through,’ replied Zorin. ‘He’ll become completely absorbed in setting the machines up and he assured me he’ll really enjoy teaching Andrei about Gemini. Soon after that, he and Andrei will be joined by Goran Anokhin. In no time at all, the three of them will be up to speed and we can then crack on with the next phase.’
‘I didn’t have anything to do with the detail of the next moves,’ said Mitkin. ‘So what are they?’
‘As soon as we’d established that out Gemini worked, we needed as clean a break with the past as possible, both for security reasons and for what I’ve planned for Yulian. I’ll bet that the Craithe lot – or at least that thorn in our sides Wilder – will have put a search on our names. They may even be looking at the possibility of us leaving the UK. Hence false passports and names. Right now we’re flying from Norwich Airport to Amsterdam. That should confuse anyone trying to track us flying west towards the States. By tonight we’ll be incognito and ready for our next phase.’
King Street, Norwich, Norfolk
True to Zorin’s prediction, no sooner had the two of them left in their taxi than Yulian went down to the warehouse and let himself in. Utterly absorbed with his passion for his machines, he started setting them up. This was the third time he had done this. The first time had been with the professor when the very first quantum computer had arrived at Cambridge University. On that occasion the two of them had been assisted by the manufacturer’s technicians. The second time he’d done this had been only days ago. Again, one of the manufacturer’s people had flown in from Canada for the day and had helped Yulian set up the machines.
He was now so familiar with the procedures that he hardly had to refer to his or the manufacturer’s notes at all. He worked through the lunch period and, oblivious of time, continued until it was mid-afternoon. When he eventually glanced at his watch, he suddenly felt tired, hungry and thirsty all at once. He shut the machines down, locked up the warehouse and walked up the hill to the apartment block.
It was only now that he remembered that he’d done no shopping at all. The company who were renting the apartment to Zorin had thoughtfully stocked the fridge with milk, butter, some cheeses, and some bottles of soft drinks and sparkling water, but nothing else other than breakfast cereals and biscuits. In the cupboards he found coffee, a box of teabags, sugar and other essentials, but nothing to satisfy his now gnawing hunger. He slurped down some sparkling water and then, on a whim, picked a few notes out of the envelope Zorin had given him. He stuffed them into his pocket and put the envelope in the back of one of the kitchen drawers.
Checking that he had the apartment keys, he left. Walking briskly up the hill he went straight to the pub Mitkin had told him about. He found it to be more of a restaurant than an old English pub, but that was fine. He quickly ran an eye down the menu and ordered himself a sirloin steak with chips and peas. Then, unusual for him, he ordered a large vodka and tonic. The barman said he’d bring the food over shortly and Yulian walked across to a small table with a couple of comfortable chairs and, on his way, picked up a couple of magazines from a rack full of them.
He quickly drank his first vodka and tonic while skimming through the first of the magazines; he found that it contained little of interest to him. Before his food had arrived, most uncharacteristically, he called a waitress over and followed his first drink with another of the same size. His meal then arrived and, as it was the first thing he’d eaten that day, he soon had the plate clean. He now felt better about life but lonely. The pub had filled by now – a large number of people all enjoying themselves.
He ambled up to the bar, paid for his late lunch and for a third vodka and tonic. He got into an idle chat with another young man who seemed to be on his own. His new companion told him about a couple of nice places to eat, and he and Yulian had a few more drinks together before the young man said he had to go. By now, Yulian had drunk considerably more than he had in a long while.
Now unsteady on his feet, he decided that perhaps it was time to get back home to the apartment while he still remembered where it was. On the way he cut a corner, walking across a small stretch of open hillside; it was fortunate that it was covered in grass, as he fell. Tripping over his own feet and falling forward onto his face, he winded himself and lay there on the grass, gasping for breath. Being drunk, as soon as he’d got his breath back, he thought he had done more damage to himself than he actually had, and he rolled around for a moment groaning.
Getting back up onto his feet proved too challenging at the first attempt, so he just sat there quietly laughing to himself. He suddenly had the urge to disobey Zorin’s instructions – he would ring the professor. Then he remembered – he’d left his phone back at the apartment. Spurred on by this new goal, he managed to get onto his knees. Finally, he rose unsteadily to his feet. Tottering off again down the hill, he was lucky not to fall a second time but, as the grass sloped downhill sharply, he broke unintentionally into the semblance of a trot. The ground levelled out as he reached the apartment block, and he managed to get into the apartment without further mishap.
Once back into the bedroom, he flopped down onto the bed, still fully clothed and with his overcoat and heavy outdoor shoes still on. By now, having lost his normal, well-developed sense of propriety, he stretched across to the far bedside table and managed, with some difficulty, to pull his old mobile phone out of the bedside drawer. Pulling himself up into a sitting position, he squirmed his way to the bedhead and propped himself up against the wall. Zorin had told him to dump this old phone as it had notes and other potentially incriminating details on it. He now opened up the clam to get to the keys and giggled with satisfaction that he had gone against his occasionally frightening new boss’s orders. He rang the professor.
As soon as he got through, he found that he had forgotten momentarily why he had rung – loneliness was hardly the kind of reason one could confess to, especially not to the professor, and for a few moments he just mumbled. The real reason for his call was immediately clear to the professor, and after some more rambling from Yulian, he cut in.
‘Where are you, Yulian? It’s most unlike you to drink at all, let alone get smashed.’
‘I… I’m in Norwich,’ mumbled Yulian. ‘I’m supposed to be in hiding. Mr Zor… Mr Zorin has a very important mission ahead of us and I’m not supposed to tell anyone…’
‘Where’s Zorin?’ asked the professor.
‘He’s sugared off to the States or Bermuda.’ He stopped and gave this some more thought. ‘Yes… Bermuda. And he’s going to ring me back later to tell me more about his important mission. But meanwhile… meanwhile… I’m just here on my own.’
The Professor manged to get little more sense out of Yulian, who agreed to drink large quantities of water and get into bed to sleep it off. But the professor did glean some information which a sober Yulian Agaron would never have divulged
The information confirmed what they had suspected. The King’s Lynn incident had indeed only been a trial for other targets. It appeared that as soon as he had set the machines up again in Norwich, Yulian’s next task was to write a series of attack modules for different but very specific targets. Unfortunately, Yulian fell asleep mid-sentence before he had divulged any details of these.
The professor immediately rang Wilder.
He told Wilder every detail he could remember of Yulian’s drunken call and, as soon as he’d finished, Wilder ran back across the bar of the King’s Lynn hotel and told Jessie Marker all of it.
‘There’s nothing we can do tonight,’ said Wilder. ‘We’ll get over to Norwich early in the morning. With a bit of luck the professor’s mobile phone will have captured the number of the phone Yulian rang him on. But I’ve no idea how we set about finding him.’
‘You forget I’m Norfolk born and bred,’ said Jessie. Norwich is quite a big place – at least a couple of hundred thousand people, I’d guess – but we can worry about that in the morning.’
They paid their account that night and Wilder went out and hired a car for an early start in the morning.
Yulian’s apartment, Norwich
Yulian was not quite sure what was happening. As he woke, he became aware of the ringing of the doorbell and a loud insistent hammering on the door. It was dark outside as he rolled over and managed to rise up onto one elbow and then, in one slow-motion manoeuvre after another, got off the bed and onto his feet. He noticed his mobile phone lying there and quickly stuffed it into his pocket – too many secrets on it for comfort.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ he shouted, as he clutched at his head and stumbled towards the door. The banging and the ringing had stopped and, as his head throbbed less, relief flooded over him like a soothing balm. When he opened the door, he was confronted by an exceptionally tall young man who Yulian guessed to be in his mid-thirties. He had a haunted look to him, with dark rings under his eyes, and his sallow skin made him look as though he might be ill, though his smile was warm enough.
‘Hello, I’m Andrei Boykov. Mr Zorin told me you’d be expecting me,’ he said.
Yulian immediately brightened. Apart from occasional chats with Zorin, Yulian had spoken little Russian; it reminded him of his father. He immediately took to Andrei.
‘Come in. You’re a welcome sight,’ said Yulian, ushering him into the room with an exaggerated sweep of his arm, a gesture he would never have used had he been completely sober. ‘I’m afraid I went on a bit of a bender at lunchtime and must have dozed off. Sorry not to have answered a bit quicker.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ grinned Andrei, dropping his large canvas bag in the narrow hallway and walking on into the apartment. ‘If I were all alone in a small city like Norwich I’d go on a bender too. Anyway, as I said, Mr Zorin sent me here not just to assist you and keep you company but to work with you on developing the fullest possible potential of the quantum machine.’
‘That’s wonderful news,’ said Yulian, immediately forgetting his anger at having to pass on years of acquiring knowledge of quantum machines to a stranger. ‘Can I get you a drink or something?’
‘Well, it’s already past my usual time for my evening meal and I have to say I’m starving, so…’
‘Oh, I’m afraid I have nothing here in the apartment,’ said Yulian, looking crestfallen. ‘I’ve been having all my meals at a nice pub just up the hill,’ he added, forgetting that he’d only been there the one time. ‘It’s only about half a mile from here at most. We could go up there if you’re desperate for something to eat.’
‘We could kill two birds with one stone, as I think they say here in England,’ smiled Andrei. ‘Let’s go up to your pub and we can get a meal and have a celebratory drink all at the same time.’
‘I’m sorry. I have no idea what time it is. I had a meal in the afternoon and then I… I… er…’
‘It’s after seven o’clock, and I feel like I’ve been travelling for hours,’ said Andrei. ‘If you’re not hungry you could just have a drink to keep me company.’
‘Great. I can show you to your room when we get back,’ said Yulian.
The two strolled up the hill to the pub in the balmy evening of late spring. They got themselves their celebratory drink and something to eat – very little for Yulian but a huge T-bone steak with chips, mushrooms and peas for Andrei; he plunged into it as soon as the waitress had put it down in front of him and devoured it as though he hadn’t fed for a week.
Yulian nursed a couple of pints of lemonade while Andrei enthusiastically downed two pints of strong lager as he ate. During the meal he brought Yulian up to date with his knowledge of quantum computers which, to Yulian’s surprise was well advanced. Yulian assured him that in no time at all he would fill him in on how he had mastered the synergy between the quantum computer and the digital machines. He also told him about the professor and, in his new delight at such a personable new companion, he unloaded days of pent-up loneliness by rambling on about on Gemini, his theft of Perry’s track-hiding software and other matters of a similar kind.
Had he not still been suffering from his lunchtime bender, he would never have dreamed of such an outpouring but, as Andrei was confident would happen, even if he touched no alcohol, he would soon be suffering again from the quite pleasant effects of the lunchtime session and would weaken. He was right. After the lemonade, Yulian swapped back to vodkas and tonic.
It did not take long for Yulian to get drunk again and, with talking to someone his own age for the first time in maybe months, he suddenly confessed to his call to the professor.
Andrei knew this was strictly against Zorin’s orders, and with good reason. His own instructions were to have no contact whatsoever with outsiders. As soon as they’d eaten and finished their drinks, Andrei helped Yulian back down the hill and into the apartment. He then guided the stumbling Yulian to his bed, allowed him to collapse onto it and, pulling off his shoes, covered him with a blanket. Yulian was snoring even before Andrei was out of the room.
As soon as he got back into the living room, he glanced at his watch: ten-fifteen; it would be six-fifteen in Bermuda. He rang Zorin.
He was afforded complete silence as he told Zorin everything that had happened since his arrival including all the details of Yulian’s call that late afternoon to the professor. When he had finished, Zorin simply said, ‘Put the phone down, go and find a pad and something to write with, and then pick up again.’
Andrei did as he was told, returned to sofa, and pulled the low coffee table closer.
‘Ready,’ he said.
‘First, find and destroy the mobile phone that Yulian used. Let’s just hope he didn’t use the landline for the call to the professor. We may be in luck. Since Yulian was drunk when he made the call and the professor’s number would be on his own mobile, find it, destroy it, and we’re still in the clear. Next thing to do: first thing tomorrow you need to get up to speed with the new proto-Gemini. You need to get from Yulian exactly how it syncs with the digital machines, what to do with breakdowns and all of that. Though we have unlimited support from the manufacturers, I want as little contact with outsiders as possible. Check all the attack modules Yulian is supposed to have written. They should be virtually complete by now. Hopefully you’ll only need to add in the specifics for each of the targets. By tomorrow afternoon, you need to be as near as possible to one hundred percent competent on Gemini, okay? You know that this was always likely to happen to Yulian, and you know what we now need to do about it.’
‘I do,’ said Andrei, ‘and I can get a hold of Goran Anokhin; he came up to Norwich with me and is staying less than ten minutes away from here.’
‘Good,’ said Zorin. ‘We’ll have to do the next attack after the move – after we’ve got you and all the machines over to New York. All the arrangements have already been made and all I need to do is to tell them to come in and get you late tomorrow rather than the middle of next week as originally planned. There’s little doubt that Yulian’s call to the professor will have got that pain in the arse Wilder coming after you and the machines. Do you think you can get one hundred percent up on the machines by, say, lunchtime tomorrow?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Andrei. ‘Why don’t I ring you from the warehouse by midday tomorrow. That’ll be eight in the morning in Bermuda. That should be enough time to fix everything and get us out of here in the afternoon.’
‘That sounds good,’ said Zorin. ‘The only one I need to check on is the flight. We may need to charter another freighter, but that’s my people’s problem, not yours. We’ll leave it like this, then. Ring me by midday tomorrow. All you need say is ‘go’ or ‘hold’ and I’ll have the rest in hand by then. In the meantime, cover all the bases, and for God’s sake destroy anything that Wilder could use to track you down.’
Warehouse, King Street, Norwich
The following morning, a Sunday, Yulian had recovered from the previous day’s excesses and, chivvied by Andrei, the two of them went down to the warehouse as soon as they’d had a meagre breakfast. They made themselves more coffee from supplies found in the small office, but had to drink it black. They started work with enthusiasm and swift dedication. Yulian was impressed by the speed with which Andrei picked up everything that was thrown at him. He also excelled on a test that Yulian set him – replicating the attack on the electricity supply, at an electrical sub-station like that at King’s Lynn. This they did over the internet on an out-of-the-way village in the Camargue region of France, where there was a good chance few would be using electricity at the time anyway.
It was late on Sunday that Andrei finally sat down in one of the two chairs in the warehouse and beckoned for Yulian to take the other one. Yulian left off tinkering with one of the laptops and came over.
‘You’ve taught me well,’ said Andrei. ‘So well, in fact, that I think that between the two of us, we’re now ready to implement the next phase of Mr Zorin’s plans.’
‘Come over here,’ said Andrei, rising and going over to the trestle table on which his briefcase stood open. He pointed to map of the next target lying open there. Yulian went closer, bending forward to concentrate on the map. Andrei silently picked up a small iron bar used for opening crates, which was lying nearby, and swung it down hard onto the back of Yulian’s head. Yulian crumpled forward, just missing the briefcase on his way down to the concrete floor. He was dead before he knew what had hit him.
Andrei knelt by the fallen Yulian and checked for any sign of life. There was none. He quickly searched through Yulian’s pockets, emptying them out on to the concrete. A substantial sum in twenty-pound notes he stuffed into his own pockets. But he was really concentrating of finding Yulian’s own personal mobile phone, the one he had used to contact the professor. That needed to be destroyed; even if it was switched off, the surveillance people at GCHQ could probably track its location. He wasn’t entirely sure of the state-of-the-art technology in that specialised field, but it worried him. He couldn’t find it, and made a mental note to search for it when they cleared out the apartment. He then wrote a quick suicide note and stuffed it into one of Yulian’s pockets.
Next, he grabbed a large sheet of thin tarpaulin lying nearby and, with some difficulty, rolling the body first one way and then the other, wound Yulian’s body up in it.
This done, he sat for a moment as he gathered his breath and his thoughts. Leaving Yulian bundled up in the tarpaulin, Andrei sat on a pile of pallets and rang Goran.
‘It’s me,’ he said as soon as Goran answered. ‘The time’s come. Did you do as I asked you?’
‘I did,’ replied Goran. ‘And am I glad you’ve called. I was beginning to despair of ever getting out of this place.’
‘Well, the deed’s done so it’s all “go” from now. Get yourself over to the warehouse. We’ll settle your B&B account and collect your things later. Right now I need you here as fast as you can make it.’
‘I’ll be there in a few minutes.’
Andrei shoved his mobile into his pocket, hurried out of the barn and, collecting his car from a large car park just up the road, he drove down and parked it outside the warehouse doors.
Goran arrived in less than ten minutes and the two of them immediately set about getting Yulian’s body into the boot of Andrei’s car. From the warehouse to the bridge that Goran had found was just a ten-minute drive and, once there, it took them no time at all to unwrap Yulian’s body, heave it up onto the bridge’s parapet and roll it over to fall to the railway line below. They then drove back to the warehouse, stopping half way for Andrei to ring the police from a phone box and tip them off anonymously about a body they’d seen on the line.
As train commuter services would start early on Monday morning, the police had no choice but to get the body off the line right away, destroying much of the potential forensic evidence. But, even though it was a Sunday night, there was some effort made to identify the victim of what was assumed to be a suicide.
There was no identification on the body. And battered by its fall from the bridge above, there was no significance given to the severe blow to the back of the head. In one of the pockets was a tightly scrunched receipt for a late afternoon meal and many vodkas and tonic. In a different pocket was a note written in Russian. Forensics called in an interpreter from the University of East Anglia decipher it for them. It was sad tale of loneliness in a foreign land. The signature was indecipherable, even to the interpreter.
The tragic incident was mentioned briefly on television in the local Look East news. It was also some time until the police got around to interviewing those that responded to the television plea for anyone who knew anything to contact them. In responding to one such call, what puzzled police most was that whereas the piece of paper had cited loneliness as the reason for the suicide, two members of staff at a city centre pub came forward to say that the victim had moved into the city recently and that they had seen him with a stranger the previous evening and eating a meal alone earlier in the day.
By Monday evening these witness stories, and other circumstances surrounding the death of the young Russian, made the suicide theory untenable. This immediately put new life into the story and two national newspapers sent reporters up to Norwich to delve in in greater depth.
Two top investigative journalists from one of these nationals were sure they would soon crack the truth to this intriguing story but, however persistent they might be, it was going to be too late to have any effect on Zorin’s plans – far too late.
Norwich City Centre
Wilder and Jeesie Marker had spent a fruitless Sunday hunting around Norwich but both saw the Monday morning news on television and had no doubt that the body referred to was Yulian’s. But even with the young man now dead, it was still possible that Perry or GCHQ might be able to track his mobile phone. And after a call from Wilder, Perry contacted GCHQ and attempted to do this.
Wilder and Marker left immediately after that and drove over to Norwich. On the way they discussed what to do when they got there. They decided to discover what the police knew and, fortunately, Marker’s connections gave her an entry through a senior officer she knew in the local force.
On arriving in Norwich, Jessie directed Wilder to the police HQ where they met up with her contact. In exchange for much valuable background on Yulian from Wilder, he told them all that the police had gathered to date. It was clear from this that Wilder and Marker’s first visit should be to the pub where Yulian had eaten the meal for which the receipt had been found.
‘Let’s try and get an idea of the atmosphere of the place,’ said Wilder as they walked from their hotel up the hill to the pub; though it was only mid-morning, as it was a prominent city-centre pub it was sure to be open for coffee.
‘See if we can work out which of the waitresses fits the descriptions in the news – the one who was interviewed by the police,’ said Wilder as they got there and parked the car.
‘With a bit of luck,’ added Jessie, ‘Yulian may have been here for a few days, may have had several of his meals here, so I suppose that it’s possible that some of the other staff would also have known him – give us more than one impression of him?’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ agreed Wilder. ‘We can pretend to be mourning relatives. From what the professor has told me of Yulian, he was a nice quiet young man, so maybe the staff will commiserate with us and help with some more information. It’s possible he may have come here with his killer.’
‘Yes, and if we’re playing the grieving relations,’ said Marker, ‘we might coax more out of the staff than the police did.’
They found that the pub was quiet, as expected so early, and they ordered themselves coffees. They picked a small table tucked away on its own. After a while, an attentive waitress came round checking that the tables were freshly polished and that the menus were sitting up neatly in their little stands. Marker began sniffing and mopping at her eyes, pretending to be crying into her handkerchief. As she had hoped, this attracted the waitress’s attention and she came over. Wilder, playing the part of a male lost at what to do when a woman cries, looked pleadingly at the waitress.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ she said, bending down near Marker.
‘I’m afraid I perhaps shouldn’t have brought Jessie here,’ said Wilder. ‘It’s my fault. But the newspapers said that this was the really friendly pub where her cousin came for all his meals – that is, before he took his own life yesterday.’
Marker blew her nose heavily into her handkerchief.
‘Oh, do you the lonely young foreign man?’ said the waitress. ‘Such a lovely, quiet customer.’
With Marker still quietly crying, Wilder took advantage of the waitress’s friendly approach.
‘As you don’t seem to be too busy at the moment,’ he said, ‘could you tell us how he seemed when you saw him last? I mean, we were mortified when the news said that he took his own life. Was he sad and…?’
Before he had even finished his sentence, the waitress cut in on him. ‘Heavens no, not sad at all,’ she said. ‘On the contrary, he had a friend with him the second time he came in. They spoke in a foreign language all the time.’
By now she had checked that her conversation was not causing the young manager at the bar any problems and, seeing that all was well on that account, she squatted down on a chair next to them and leant forward.
‘He came in on his own earlier, and he seemed really happy to have some company now. It was the first time he cracked a smile all day – laughing with his friend and enjoying long conversations. That’s why we were so mystified when the very next day the police came to question us about his suicide. They were really surprised when I told them about his new companion.’
‘And this man who was with him,’ said Wilder, leaning forward like the waitress, ‘this new companion of his, what was he like?’
‘To be honest I didn’t like the look of him at all,’ she replied. ‘Maybe it’s because he was a foreigner, but then so was Yulian. But he was really rude to us staff – very abrupt and demanding, and he had a spooky kind of look about him.’
‘Still, you said that Yulian seemed to get on well with him?’ said Wilder. This friend – was he tall, short, slim, fat?
‘Oh, very tall,’ answered the waitress instantly. ‘I watched as he left, had to bend right down to get through the door there.’ She nodded her head towards the double-door entrance to the pub.
‘Don’t suppose you’ve seen him since then, have you?’
‘Only the once, thank God,’ horror at the thought flitting across her face. ’It was just after the police had been here…’
‘Sorry to interrupt, but how did the police know to come here?’ cut in Wilder.
‘I asked the same thing,’ she smiled – great minds thinking alike. ‘They told me he had nothing on him but a crumpled five pound note and inside that a receipt from this place.’
‘Okay. You were saying that Yulian’s companion came back after the police had gone?’
‘Yeah. He asked first, real nice like, if we’d told the police anything. Well, of course we said, “Tell them what?” I mean, what did we know? They didn’t seem to be bothered, to be honest – said it was just a routine suicide enquiry, and they just wanted to find out what the victim had been doing, who he’d been with. Things like that.’ She seemed disappointed not to be able to tell Wilder more, and she shrugged her shoulders.
‘The very tall man,’ said Wilder. ‘After he’d asked you nicely if you’d told the police anything, what did he do then?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said the waitress, ‘that’s right. He turned real sinister like – real nasty, you know, and all aggressive like – and says we’re not to breathe a word to anyone that we saw him with his friend, or…’
‘He didn’t say. Didn’t have to, if you know what I mean – like on those TV thrillers. Gave the impression he’d come back an’ do us all in, finish us off, know what I mean?’
‘I do,’ said Wilder. ‘Well, thank you very much; you’ve been more helpful than you can know. Here’s my card, and if this very tall man comes here again, can you give me a call right away? I’ll be around for the next few days anyway, so we’ll see you again.’
The waitress peered down at the card, which had on it just Wilder’s name and his mobile number.
‘Yeah, I’ll certainly ring if I see him again.’
At that moment a call came through for Wilder. He excused himself from the other two and took the mobile outside. The call was from Craithe.
‘Yes, Prof. Got something for me?’
‘I most certainly have,’ replied the professor. ‘On my large monitor here, I can see that you’re standing outside a pub near the city centre…’
‘Okay. First, face the front entrance. If you now walk away from the pub, to your right…’
‘What’s this about, Prof? I’d better go and get Jessie Marker from in the pub if you’re sending me off somewhere.’
‘GCHQ have picked up a weak signal from the mobile that Yulian Agaron used to call me…’
‘Good God,’ shouted Wilder. ‘I’ll get Jessie right away and we can go together.’
He rushed back inside the pub and waved frantically to Jessie, who quickly rose from her chair, bade farewell to the waitress and came running out of the pub to join him.
Norwich City Centre
As soon as Jessie Marker joined him, Wilder got back to the professor on his mobile.
‘Sorry about that. You were about to give me instructions as to where Yulian’s mobile is?’
‘Yes, I’ll repeat from the beginning again. Facing the pub entrance, go a hundred yards to your right.’
As Wilder and Jessie set off, Wilder put his mobile onto speaker so that Jessie could hear as well. They followed the professor’s directions down a steep hill towards the river maybe a quarter of a mile below them. At the first road they came to, he told them to go left along a row of houses. This they did, but as they approached a four-storey block of luxury apartments, two men ran out of the building. At that moment the professor knew that this very building must be the site of Yulian’s phone. One of the men was exceptionally tall, maybe six-foot-six or even seven, the other short and swarthy. Both ran, carrying a couple of suitcases and some other bits and pieces. They threw these into a four-wheel-drive SUV, climbed in, and with wheels spinning accelerated off up the slight incline towards the city centre.
On impulse, Wilder shouted out for them to stop and sprinted forward, trying to get a better view of the men as the SUV drove away.
‘Damn,’ he said, giving up the chase. Jessie had already taken out her mobile and noted down the registration number of the vehicle. This Wilder passed on to the professor.
‘I don’t suppose it will do any more than confirm my suspicions, but can you check on the owner?’
The professor said he would, and as Wilder and Jessie ran into the building, he promised to get back to them as quickly as possible.
In the large hall, he saw that a door into the ground level apartment had been left wide open, and remembered that the professor had been directing him to Yulian’s mobile. He rang him back, and apologised for the hiccup.
‘The signal from Yulian’s phone: is it near mine, as we speak?’
‘Absolutely side by side. So that means you’re in Yulian’s apartment. You say that a couple of people just fled as you arrived? Well, you’re in luck because Yulian’s phone is still in the apartment rather than with them. They would certainly have looked for it, knowing that if they didn’t destroy it we would do exactly what we’re doing now. If they were living there with Yulian you might have a job finding it, as Yulian might have hidden it from them. Anyway, I’ll let you get on with your search and I’ll be in touch if we get news on the owners of that SUV.’
Inside the apartment, it looked as though a bomb had hit it. Every room in the place had been torn apart, perhaps with looking for Yulian’s mobile, perhaps for other things Yulian had left behind – things that might give a clue as to where the people who turned out to be his assassins might be headed.
‘My guess is,’ said Wilder to Jessie, ‘that one of those two we saw fleeing this place may have been keeping a look-out for us and seen us coming down the hill. Let’s just take our time and do a proper search, room by room. We’re in no hurry till we get a lead on the SUV.’ They worked their way through the sitting room, the bedrooms and the bathroom, and were starting on the kitchen when Wilder suddenly said, ‘Hang on a minute. If Yulian wanted to keep his old connection to the professor as his link to the past and didn’t want the other two to know about it, the only place he could take it in and out of its hiding place if others were in the apartment would be in the bathroom.’
He ran back in there and slowly and systematically looked about him. Suddenly his eyes lighted on some glass shelves holding unusual ornamental objects – decorations serving no main bathroom function. On the top shelf, at around his head height, there was large glass bowl holding inside it a huge candle – probably scented when lit. Beside it was a box of matches, and further along the shelf some old apothecary jars with ancient names of medicines they’d once contained. Wilder gently picked up and shook each of these in turn. The left-hand one contained something. The jar rattled with it. His heart pounding, he pulled it down and looked inside. There was Yulian’s mobile phone.
‘They must have been in a real hurry to have missed this,’ he said as he retrieved it from the jar.
He and Jessie went back into the living room and Jessie found a pad and some paper in one of the drawers of a tall dresser. As they went through the contents of the phone, it gave them a wealth of information about Yulian’s orders for the development of his new proto-Gemini, and an hour later Jessie had jotted down three pages of notes. They took a break and she went to make them some coffee.
They were just about to go through their list when the professor rang back and told them that the SUV had been rented by a Mr Andrei Boykov, who gave his UK address as Zorin’s house in London. Clearly he had never expected to be caught driving it, though, in emergencies, the Zorin empire would swiftly have dealt with accident claims and the like.
Unfortunately, there was no mention of the location of the machines, though there were numerous other cryptic, almost shorthand notes, and Wilder decided to look into these later. Yulian’s mobile was of a well-known brand and Wilder was later able to put it on to charge in his hire car. Though it was highly unlikely, he wondered if Zorin might ring it, if only to see if the telephone had been found by Wilder and, if so, if any of his secrets had been found on it. He also got Mina at her MI6 intelligence office to check through the surveillance cameras in the area around Yulian’s apartment. Yulian’s flatmates might have used the car when going to the machines, but as Yulian had been on foot here, Wilder hoped that the machines might not be far away. Perry, the most inventive of the Gemini team, spent considerable time trying to find a way to track them. He was looking for what he called ‘markers’ in the software – they might respond to a search by GCHQ.
For the rest of the day, Wilder sat and waited. Like a cat near a mouse-hole, he sat, hoping perhaps that Andrei might need some cash from an ATM to fund his travels. Unfortunately, though Wilder was not to know it, Andrei had taken over Yulian’s large wad of cash. He was not going to use a cash machine till he got to New York.
Off South Shore Road, Bermuda
Victor Zorin paced up and down the teak decking. Alexis Mitkin sat in his wicker chair nearby occasionally casting a furtive look towards his boss. But he was wary of being caught doing so, for Zorin was in one of the fieriest moods he could remember. He hoped the fury might die down as matters now seemed resolved and the large single-storey house they had rented near the beach was tranquil and largely isolated from its neighbours. Tall hedges, covered in bougainvillea and low dense trees, bent over permanently by the sea breezes, gave the place a much-needed air of seclusion. Mitkin had already run down off the end of the couch-grass lawns, across the beach of caster sugar-white fine sand and plunged into the warm crystal-clear sea. He urged Zorin to do the same, but he was still too busy nursing his rage.
Zorin stopped pacing and came and sat down in a wicker chair next to Mitkin and in the shade of an enormous pink umbrella.
‘As soon as we’ve got the machines,’ said Zorin, ‘and we’ve got Andrei and Goran over to New York, we’re going to have to do something about this menace Wilder. I’ve lost count of how many times he’s got in our way.’
Mitkin sought to divert the conversation.
‘Has Andrei confirmed the cargo flight the machines are on?’
‘Well, those are separate matters now,’ replied Zorin, ‘and with so much happening, perhaps I should bring you up to date.’
‘Yes please; leaving the UK in a rush has kept me pretty busy,’ said Mitkin.
‘We always reckoned that the King’s Lynn trial might alert the authorities. With hindsight, I should have specified that when I said I wanted the two young men kept silent about their raid, I didn’t mean for them to be publicly killed and left lying on the lawn there.’
‘Not very bright,’ agreed Mitkin.
‘But when the Gemini team was called in, I have to confess that was a bit of a shock. Still, we’d always planned to move to Norwich because of its airport, so moving earlier than planned was no great hassle. Pity about Yulian going off the rails. That was a real pain. And this man Wilder coming looking for him…’ He gave a grunt of exasperation. ‘God damn it, that’s about as much as I can take from this man.’
‘But it’s sorted now, isn’t it?
‘Well, thank God that Andrei’s a quick learner and got himself up to speed on Gemini. So, yes, in a sense it’s sorted. Though I won’t relax till I get confirmation of all the arrangements. Just now, for over an hour, I’ve been waiting for a call from John Straker.’
‘The director of the travel group?’
‘That’s the man. After the Yulian Agaron business and, as I said, Wilder following it up, we’ve had to bring all our plans forward. I had wanted to do the next trials from the UK. But we’re here now, and I must say it’s a pleasant change from the cold.’
To his relief, the call came around midday.
‘John here,’ said Straker. ‘Just calling to give you an update on what’s been happening since you left the UK. Andrei has been in touch with me and spent a good hour giving me a full account of everything. He said that Yulian Agaron taught him all he needed to know on the machines and the two of them did some trial runs on the next planned operations. He’s shut them all down and they’re ready for shipment.’
‘And the press and police aftermath with Yulian?’ asked Zorin. ‘No chance of a follow-up or repercussions?’
‘No, all clear. Everyone’s accepted it was suicide so all of that is now finished with.’
‘So, shipment and the men’s flights are when?’ asked Zorin.
‘We’re getting Andrei and Goran out this afternoon. We’re using the well-tried transatlantic ploy that will get them into the States through what I might call the back door. It will take us a bit longer – a whole day longer, to be precise, but better that than having them stopped at a border attracting attention.’
‘Oh, absolutely. And there’s no concern about their false identities and their backup paperwork?’ asked Zorin. ‘I understand that the authorities have new machines that can detect the age of the paper of forged documents. I know my heart nearly stopped as my papers were scrutinised when Alexis and I came into Bermuda – and that was off a private jet, for goodness sake.’
‘Yes, I know. But there’s no need to worry; we have a tame ex-senior customs and immigration man who looks over all our forged documents trying to detect even the most minute flaws.’
‘Okay, but you know how much is riding on this?’
‘As I said, don’t worry. I know only too well you’d pursue me into a hole in the ground if I let you down.’
‘Oh, I’m not sure I’d…’
‘Yes you would, and you know it.’
Since driving away at speed from Yulian’s apartment, with a shouting Wilder chasing them on foot, Andrei and Goran had counted themselves lucky they had left when they did. Had they left Yulian’s apartment a minute or two later they would all have met up somewhere in the building.
After driving few hundred yards up the hill towards the city centre, Andrei had to pull over to the side of the road so that Goran could open the door and throw up into the gutter. Like Andrei, he was not only a highly competent computer hacker, but had also been in dangerous situations. The difference this time was that he was in a foreign land, under a false name, and was an accessory to murder. This combination of circumstances was proving rather more testing than he’d been used to before.
But he recovered, and as soon as they reached the city centre, Andrei drove the SUV right up to the top of the city’s largest multi-storey car park. He drove over to the side of the roof directly above the entrance. Here he and Goran got out of the car and went over to the side of the building. Andrei sat precariously where he could get a good view of cars coming into the car park. If there was any sign of police arriving to block the building, they would take the lifts down to the floor that gave access to the shopping mall, where they could lose themselves amongst the shoppers.
Here they waited, Goran pale and pacing back and forth like a caged zoo animal. Andrei waiting for the call. At last, an hour since they’d been sitting there killing time, the call came through.
‘John Straker here; how are you doing?’
‘How do you think?’ answered Andrei – close to shouting at the man for keeping them waiting so long. In that time Andrei had even been wondering if they’d been abandoned. It was only Andrei’s knowledge of all Zorin’s plans that reassured him that being left to their own defences was not an option. ‘I already told you, a tall Englishman chased us as we drove away from the apartment. Goran’s been sick with worry and we’re here just…’
‘Okay, I’m sorry about that,’ cut in Straker. ‘It was difficult rearranging the cargo flight for the machines – but that’s all been done now. So, here’s what’s going to happen from now. Incidentally, where have you been lying low?’
‘The main multi-storey car park.’
‘Okay. By the time you get back down to the warehouse the van collecting the machines going to the States will be nearly finished loading up. We need you to double check that the right machines have been loaded up and that there’s nothing missing from the van. Once it leaves the warehouse, there’ll be no going back. Have you got that?’
‘I’ll make sure and Goran will make second check.’
‘Good. The two of you can just dump the SUV, hide it away somewhere – just not so ridiculously difficult that we can’t recover it later. Okay?’
‘Yeah, I know a place.’
‘Once you’ve double checked the machines again, you’re to leave the two men we’ve sent to clear up all the evidence you were ever there. They’ll take away the machines that aren’t going to the States. The two of you are to go to Norwich Airport in the van just in case they’re putting a block on roads out of the city. When you get to the airport, just check in with your bags for the six-fifteen flight to Amsterdam. When you get to the Schiphol, you’ll be met off the flight and given new instructions. These will include which transatlantic flight you’re on and at that time you’ll also be given new names, identities and papers. All right?’
‘Is this really necessary? How are we to remember who the hell we are supposed to be?’
‘If you just sit down at some point and give it some serious thought, you’ll realise that if you can’t be bothered to remember your new identities, you can of course spend the rest of your days behind bars. If you get your act together, when you get out to New York, it’ll be into the arms of Zorin’s men. With these two choices, you may think it worth the effort to…’
‘Okay, okay, I understand,’ said Andrei. ‘We get new IDs and we’re put on a flight to where?’
‘You’ll get all your instructions at Amsterdam,’ replied Straker, a sharp edge to his voice. ‘For now, until you get to Amsterdam, just concentrate on seeing the machines safely into the van and accompanying it to Norwich Airport, okay?’
Straker was gone, and the two of them climbed back into the SUV and Andrei drove it back down to the warehouse. The two men who were to clean the place up had arrived. They must have been there a while as the machines that were bound for the States had already been stowed away in the large van.
Andrei and Goran carefully checked the machines and some peripheral equipment off their list and then checked again. Everything seemed in order, but they also gave a good look around the warehouse.
Satisfied, Andrei parked the SUV up a narrow alley opposite the warehouse and they all climbed into the van and left. Both sighed with relief as they set off on their way out of trouble and away from trials for murder.
The Warehouse, King Street, Norwich
On leaving Yulian’s apartment, Wilder and Marker’s most immediate and pressing problem was where the hell to look next. All they knew was that the suspects had fled from outside the apartment block. Yulian’s mobile had in its notes section just one helpful comment -like instructions to himself when he and the machines had first arrived in Norwich. Out of apartment block, down to King Street, warehouse right then up on the left, the note read,
‘Why don’t we take a walk down a hypothetical route he might have taken and maybe we’ll strike lucky?’
‘You think so? asked Jessie, looking decidedly quizzical.
‘Think positive,’ replied Wilder.
They set off down the hill from the apartment block and soon reached King Street. If Yulian’s warehouse was going to be on the left, as his note suggested, they now needed to turn right up the slight incline of King Street. Sure enough, on their right were some more apartment blocks, some of them quite new but others on their left were old warehouse conversions. After a couple of hundred yards, Wilder happened to glance up to his left. There was the white SUV, half-hidden by a large builder’s skip full of building renovation junk. He immediately put out an arm and pulled Jessie back towards him, putting a finger up to his lips. Both then crept forward, on the lefthand side of the road, close to the buildings. Just twenty-five yards further on there was a large warehouse and Wilder pointed to it and gave a thumbs-up.
With their hearts thumping within their ribcages, they moved forward on tiptoe. As they got nearer they could hear talking inside. It was in a foreign language and it was an easy guess that it was Russian.
The front door was ajar and they got themselves right up to it. Wilder peered through the gap between the door and the lintel. All he could see was a small hallway beyond which was another doorway into what looked like the warehouse itself. The voices came from this second space. It was now obvious that they had been able to hear the men inside earlier because their voices were raised in heated argument. Whilst these two voices continued with their dispute, Wilder signalled to Jessie and they both moved quickly through the first doorway and took cover behind the door into the larger room beyond.
Hearts still pounding and senses heightened, they could smell a strong aroma of something like linseed. Wilder shifted his view a bit and could then see that the warehouse was largely filled with packing cases and oil drums. Some of these appeared to have been pushed back to make space for two long trestle tables.
Without doubt, this was where the quantum machine had been and, nearest to the door they were hiding behind, there were a couple of laptops and some other small pieces of equipment on one of the trestle tables.
Two large men, looking like fitness-keen gymnasts or sportsmen, were standing on opposite sides of the trestle tables. They seemed to be arguing about the amount of equipment that had been left here – one of them gesticulating at the machines and then shrugging his shoulders. The other was insisting that it all had to be cleared. Quite near them, draped over a pair of chairs, there were jackets and on the floor, amidst some personal items, there was a gun, still in its shoulder holster.
Wilder made signs to Jessie that she was to stay hidden until he had the gun and was in command of the situation. He ran forward, and was very near to the gun when one of the men reached forward and pulled another gun from behind what looked like a printer sitting on one of the trestle tables.
‘What have we here?’ he said, as he levelled the gun at Wilder. Then, gesturing with the weapon, he ordered Wilder forward and indicated that he wanted him to sit down in a chair further on. Wilder walked past them both. They were just too far for him to lunge for the other gun so he kept going till he reached the chair. The one holding the gun now had his back to Jessie as the other went to get a length of rope.
She dashed silently over to the gun on the floor, pulled it from its holster and, hoping it was loaded, threw off the safety catch and fired, just as the man holding his gun on Wilder spun round at the click of the catch. Her first shot hit him in the knee and, with a howl of pain, he lowered his gun, both hands going down in an automatic response to his injury. Wilder leapt to his feet and smashed the side of his hand into the back of the man’s skull. By instinct, he also swung round just as the other man was bringing down a shaft of wood onto him. He managed to deflect the blow, though it still hit him hard on the shoulder – enough to get a sharp grunt of pain and anger out of him.
He then swung his other hand sharply in a wide arc and caught this second man inch-perfect in his solar plexus. The man let out a gurgling gasp as he crumpled forward, and as his head came level with Wilder coming up after the blow to his shoulder, the bridge of his nose was met with a vicious blow from Wilder’s other hand. He went down onto his knees and then fell forward onto the concrete floor, unconscious.
The man with the gun was about to recover himself when he received another strike from Wilder, who had spun round again before the other man had even hit the ground. He dropped his gun, and Wilder grabbed it and held it to the man’s head as he lay writhing on the ground holding his shattered knee.
Wilder gave Marker a quick look and suddenly noticed for the first time that she was lying on the ground, wounded. One of the shots must have come from the man on the ground. She struggled to a chair and he ran over to her to help, still keeping half an eye on the two men on the ground.
She gave Wilder a weak grin and nodded her head.
‘You all right, or at least not too bad?’
‘I’m okay,’ she whispered back.
Wilder, reassured, stepped forward towards the two groaning men, the second one now coming back to consciousness. Wilder gestured that both should back up along the floor and prop themselves up against a stack of wooden pallets just behind them. This they both did, though with difficulty.
Taking out his mobile he rang Craithe. As soon as Angus answered he quickly ran through what had happened and summed up the current situation. He asked him to phone for an ambulance to be sent to collect the three wounded, and gave him the address. This done, he asked Angus what the Russian was for “where is Andrei?”
Angus gave him the phrase and Wilder used it on the two men. The younger of the two now looked terrified, and cast his eyes down to the floor. The elder just looked back up at Wilder and smirked as though he did not understand. Wilder stepped forward quickly and put his foot firmly down on the man’s shattered knee. He then applied a bit of pressure which got screams of agony in response. As soon as the man had recovered and was sitting there whimpering, he looked back up at Wilder and grinned again.
This time Wilder stepped forward and nonchalantly fired a shot near the man’s other undamaged knee. The shot was close enough to pass through the cloth right next to the man’s flesh. It might even have nicked him, and it instantly got the message through to him – with two shattered knees he would probably never walk again.
In passably good English, he said, ‘He left long time ago, maybe two hours.’
‘Where to?’ asked Wilder.
‘New York,’ replied the man.
Wilder rang Angus again.
‘Ambulance is on the way,’ said Angus, ‘How are things your end?’
‘Andrei left for New York an hour or two ago. Even if he’s on a feeder flight from Norwich into Heathrow or Amsterdam, he’ll be long gone by now. Even though it’s a long a shot, I’m going to get myself out to Norwich airport, see what I can find out.’
Just as he was about to leave, the ambulance arrived and the two Russians were loaded into it. Wilder agreed to take Jessie Marker in his car.
He ran back to where he’d parked it before coming to the warehouse and drove back down as fast as he could. By the time he got back, Jessie had recovered somewhat and the ambulance people had confirmed that it was only a flesh wound. To make the journey to the hospital a bit more bearable, they gave her a painkiller injection. Before leaving the warehouse, Wilder collected up the two laptops and put them on the back seat of his car. He would later need to get these sent up by courier to Craithe Castle so that Perry could go through them. Perhaps they’d be lucky and find some clues as to where the other machines had been taken.
He drove Jessie out of town to the City’s main hospital; luckily this was in the same direction as the airport. He saw her settled in the Accident and Emergency area and said he’d be back for her within the hour. Leaving the hospital, he took a cross-country route, using an enlarged map on his phone. On reaching the airport he parked and ran into the main concourse. Being a small local airport this was a low-ceilinged room, and it didn’t take him long to find out that there had only been two flights out recently. One of these had gone to Edinburgh, the other to Amsterdam. He managed to find one of the check-in hostesses who would have knowledge of the passengers on that flight.
‘I wonder if you could help me. I am anxious to know where a couple of Russian passengers were booked through to. They left here on the Amsterdam flight but they will have been booked on from there.’
‘I’m sorry; we can’t divulge passenger information.’
‘I’d rather not get the police or the Home Office involved, though I will do that if you can’t give me just that one piece of information I’m after.’
The hostess seemed willing to help, but said it would be more than her job was worth to do so.
‘I quite understand,’ said Wilder, smiling kindly at her. ‘So, to keep your job safe let’s get your most senior manager available in here, then whatever we do will not impact on you personally.’
A senior supervisor was duly called for, but when he arrived he appeared to be one of those thankfully rare people who, as soon as they don a uniform, believe they have been elevated to a position of power. Even after Wilder told him that the two Russians might be evading a murder charge if they managed to get out of Europe on a flight to the States or to Russia, he still refused to give him the information he needed.
‘We’d better get you some assistance, then,’ said Wilder, still smiling, and hoping this might work before the two Russians did indeed fly out again from Amsterdam.
‘I’m ringing Deputy Commissioner Tremayne in Norwich and I’ll put the call on speaker so that you can hear that I’m being completely fair to you.’
The supervisor had now gone pale, and as Wilder got through to the police HQ and asked for Jessie’s contact, Tremayne, he touched Wilder’s arm and whispered, ‘I’ll give you the information you need.’
At that moment Tremayne came on the line.
‘Commissioner, it’s Jessie Marker’s friend, Tom Wilder. We met yesterday on the…’
‘Yes, yes, of course. How can I help?’
‘I’m here at Norwich airport. The two Russians that Jessie and I were trying to find and who may have been responsible for Yulian Agaron’s death flew out of here this afternoon bound for Amsterdam. I’ll pass you over to the two airline officials in a minute and they can give you the passenger names and their final destination.’
The supervisor had leant close to Wilder and whispered, ‘New York.’
‘I believe they’re bound for New York, and you may want to invoke the European arrest warrant to stop them getting out of Europe. I also just wanted to say how very co-operative and helpful the two airline people here have been in passing on this vital information. Indeed, I hope you manage to stop them as result of their help.’
‘As Wilder passed his mobile to the supervisor he gave Wilder a mimed ‘thank you’, and gave Tremayne the details of the two Russians.
As soon as he got his mobile back from the supervisor he made another call to Bob Brady, head of IPI in New York. He gave him an abbreviated version of the story. If the Russians had already flown to New York, Zorin would be that much closer to whatever dreadful plan he might have for Gemini.
‘I’ll need to discuss this with my colleagues here in the UK,’ he said to Brady, ‘but my guess is that they’ll be happy for me to come out to New York. I’ll let you know for sure in less than an hour.’
Norwich Airport, Norfolk
Andrei and Goran’s flight arrived spot on its scheduled time. As they walked along the seemingly endless corridors towards passport control, Andrei wondered what their next instructions were. His last instructions had included having his mobile phone on at all times except when forbidden to do so on the aircraft.
As they were getting near to passport control, Andrei got a call on his mobile phone. It was from Alexis Mitkin. As Mitkin was speaking to him in Russian, Andrei pulled Goran aside and they stood while their fellow passengers passed on by.
‘Listen to me very carefully and say nothing until I have finished. Understood?’ said Mitkin.
‘Yes,’ replied Andrei, a sudden dread filling his head and causing his stomach muscles to contract. Was there some hitch to their getting out of Europe. Were they about to be apprehended at passport control. Had they been traced in time to be extradited back to the UK? These thoughts rushed through his mind in fractions of a second.
‘When you get through passport control and customs at Amsterdam, this is what you are to do. Although you and your luggage are booked straight through to New York, you will not, I repeat, you will not go through the channels marked for transit passengers. Instead you will follow the passengers who are terminating their journey at Amsterdam. Is that clear?’
‘But what about our luggage?’ asked Andrei.
‘Your luggage will go straight on to New York and you will never see it again. In a minute, I will tell you what to do about that. When you’ve been through customs and have only your hand baggage with you, you will be met by a very large Dutchman by the name of Jan. He will recognise you from photographs he has been sent. You therefore do not need to worry, look anxious or feel any sense for being on your own. Jan speaks good Russian, but while you are in public will speak to you in English. You will do exactly as he tells you, and you have Victor Zorin’s personal assurance that you are in safe hands. Do you understand all of that?’
‘Yes, absolutely,’ replied Andrei, his spirits visibly lifting and affecting Goran too.
‘Good, then repeat it all back to me,’ said Mitkin.
This Andrei did without making a mistake.
‘As soon as you are able, you and Goran are to write down everything from your suitcases that was of any importance to you. Try to give an indication of sizes of collars and shoes but don’t worry if you do not know them. Just remember you do not have to worry about anything at all, other than going out of the right channel at Amsterdam and surrendering yourselves to Jan. Do you have any questions?’
Familiar with Zorin’s huge organisations, Andrei knew better than to question these instructions – and he was well aware of how important both he and Goran were to Zorin’s plans.
‘No questions, no,’ he said. ‘And I’ll convey all of this to Goran. You can take it from me, he will do exactly as I tell him.’
‘Okay, but first, before we end this call can you hand your mobile phone to him?’
Andrei turned to Goran.
‘It’s Mitkin,’ said Andrei as he handed over the phone. Andrei watched as Goran listened to Mitkin and smiled as Goran handed the mobile back to him. Goran had perked up considerably.
As they got out into the busy arrivals area, they walked slowly through those meeting people off flights. Suddenly, from their right, a tall and somewhat overweight man put a heavy hand on Andrei’s shoulder, causing his heart to miss a beat.
‘Hi, I’m Jan,’ he said in faultless Russian, beaming with what seemed to be a genuinely welcoming smile. ‘I’ll be taking care of you from now on. Just follow me.’
He strode off at a brisk pace, Andrei and Goran hastening after him. As they got out of the concourse and into the chilly air, a large SUV with darkened windows drove right up to Jan. The driver leapt out of the vehicle and snatched their hand baggage from them, and Jan asked both for the lists of the things in their suitcases which they had been asked to provide. After a bit of fumbling around to find their lists, they handed them over to a man they had not seen earlier and who had suddenly appeared from nowhere and, on getting the lists, vanished again into the crowds.
Jan then ushered the two of them into the SUV, telling them to sit on the wide back bench-seat while he climbed into the front. The moment he had slammed the door shut, the SUV powered away through the heavy traffic as though it possessed some magical pass; traffic seemed to part in front of it as it sped out of the airport complex. Jan gave the driver a couple of instructions in what Andrei assumed was Dutch, and then shared a joke with him. He turned in his seat to talk to them.
‘Probably a bit disconcerting,’ he said in fluent Russian, ‘to have no control over what’s happening to you. And though this may have appeared to be a panicky operation to get you safely out of the UK, there was always a possibility that Yulian Agaron might leave us suddenly and a quick exit like this might become necessary. So, as I just said, though all of this may seem rushed it’s been well-planned for some time.’ Once again, thinking about the time he’d been with Zorin, Andrei was impressed with the way all of his different organisations seemed to tick over with Swiss watch efficiency and reliability – most reassuring.
‘Just before we get to the French border, I’ll tell you more of the full plan, taking you to Paris and giving you new names, passports and papers. I’ll also give you cheat-sheets written in Russian to help you learn more of our further plans for you. It must have been a worrying time getting away from Norwich and, if you wish, you will find some glasses and Victor Zorin’s own favourite vodka in the cabinet in front of you. You will also find, next to it, small pull-down tables. Help yourselves. I’ll leave you in peace for a bit now as the driver and I must use an unusual route out of Amsterdam. This is just in case the UK has already issued a European Arrest Warrant for the two of you.’ After this rather alarming message, Jan turned away from them and started up a conversation in Dutch with the driver.
Andrei opened the cabinet, pulled down one of the tables and poured three glasses of vodka. He handed one to Goran and Jan, hearing the clinking of glasses, turned around and joined them in a toast to a successful escape from British justice.
The two Russians enjoyed a couple more vodkas, and the combination of these and Jan’s air that he was in complete control of events soon had them relaxed. Just before the French border Jan handed them their new passports and they looked through them – both finding it strange looking at their own photographs next to names they’d never seen before. Going through the French border took no time at all and a while later, as they began to drive through the suburbs of Paris, Jan turned to speak to them again.
‘As you will have appreciated by now, your parts in Zorin’s plans are too important to risk you flying into New York. There is a Mr Wilder taking a keen interest in you two. Mr Zorin has long had good contacts running contraband across the Canadian-American border. So, from Paris you’ll be flying to Montreal. From there you’ll be taken down to New York City by whichever route is being least heavily patrolled. The authorities have purges on one route one week and then nothing on it for weeks. But we know their patterns so you’ll be fine. You may also find it reassuring if I tell you that Mr Zorin’s contacts have been playing this game for over a hundred years – they’ve got pretty good at it by now – so you’ll be safe.’
‘And the machines?’ asked Andrei.
‘Flown into New York already. They’re hidden in Queens, a major district of New York City. Your hideaway is close to New York’s JFK International Airport – just in case we need to evacuate you in an emergency.’
Andrei didn’t like the sound of this but said nothing.
‘As always these days,’ continued Jan, ‘travel is a tedious business, even if well looked after in business or first class. But on some sections of your journey things may get a touch rough. Don’t worry. Above everything else, getting you safely to your hideaway in Queens is the top priority.’
Jan left them alone again, suggesting they read their briefing papers and learn who they were now supposed to be.
As he bade them farewell at Paris’s Orly Airport, he wished them bon voyage and, almost before they could reply, he was gone.
For their cover getting into Canada, Andrei and Goran were a pair of important Ukrainian dissidents who were being granted asylum in Canada. They were accompanied on the flight by a genuine Canadian diplomat whose financial problems were such that he was willing to escort them in return for a substantial sum from Zorin. He looked after every aspect of their travel and entry into Canada, and was there of course to back up their story. The accompanying documents and background stories were impressive, and as they walked out to the waiting car at Montreal’s Dorval Airport, they both felt important and almost invincible.
As they went out to where the buses and arriving passengers’ cars congregated, the Canadian diplomat handed them over to an Italian-American New Yorker who told them only that his name was Carlo. He was affable enough but gave them no more information. They were driven south-west up the Saint Lawrence river, and after around an hour and a half they pulled off the highway and were soon in a delightful small riverside township. As they got near to the wide St Lawrence, the car pulled into the driveway of an extensive riverside house. It was well-kept but seemed deserted.
‘This evening we’ll take you on a little pleasure cruise,’ said Carlo, ‘and we’ll finish up at one of our regular spots in upper New York State.’
‘Surely they patrol the river?’ said Andrei.
‘Oh sure they do, but we’re well known and we have a business taking tourists up and down the river so they don’t give us any problems.’
But it didn’t work out that way. The plan was that they would keep Andrei and Goran down below-decks in the tourist cruiser. In addition to Carlo, and his assistant whose name they could not remember, there were three other men, complete strangers. The ploy was that five of them would be in the cabin below, playing cards and drinking, with the two Russians furthermost from the cabin door. They were nearing their arrival point on the American shore when a patrol boat came powering over to them. They were ordered to heave to. Andrei and Goran had gone pale but had been told to try and appear to be slightly drunk and enjoying themselves. They were given US passports which were placed on a shelf behind their heads.
As the US customs and immigration officer jumped across from the patrol boat to the tourer, down in the cabin the scene was one of laughter, cards and drink – too much drink. There was much clinking of glasses in toasts and a cacophony of discussion on who had just won or lost the last hand of poker. As the officer came down the steps into the cabin, the laughter in the smoke-filled cabin died down only as his foot came to rest on the floor of the cabin. He was tall, unsmiling, and had to take off his peaked cap to see down into the cabin. He looked at the bunch and Andrei, who had been told what to do, raised his glass and said, ‘Hi.’
The officer looked him over and then the others, all of them grinning drunkenly. One of the strangers suggested that the customs officer’s shift must be nearly over and offered him a place at the table.
‘Passports,’ said the officer.
Everyone fumbled about and Andrei reached round behind him, pulled the two US passports off the shelf, handed one to Goran and, like everyone else, held his up in the air, proof of temporary possession maybe, certainly not of authenticity. The officer took the passport of the man nearest him, leafed through it, but didn’t seem that interested.
‘Where are you from?’ he shouted out to Andrei.
‘Potsdam,’ replied Andrei, genuinely slight slurred with drink, the bottle of bourbon on the table drained down to within a centimetre or two of the bottom.
‘Potsdam down the road?’
The officer challenged another and then, turning, went back up the steps to the top deck.
‘Whose deal is it?’ shouted out one of the strangers, and the general din of the card game started again. Moments later they heard the engines of the patrol boat increase again; the idling rumble became a full-throated roar and then faded as it left them to hunt down other smugglers.
Carlo came down from on deck and, not that reassuringly, said, ‘They’re not usually that bothered.’ He gave a thumbs-up in Andrei’s direction and went back up the steps. It was only just enough to stop Andrei from throwing up from tension and fear.
Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital
After Wilder had got all the information he could from the airline staff at Norwich airport, he checked on Jessie Marker at the huge hospital where she’d been taken with her gun-shot wounds. She was fine, but they were going to keep her in for a couple of days to ensure there were no complications from her ordeal. He spoke briefly to her and told her he’d be in touch as soon as he’d decided what to do next.
It took him around an hour of telephone calls to gather enough information to make his next decision. It did not surprise anyone that Andrei and Goran had vanished the moment the flight had landed at the Schiphol. And though their luggage had been routed right through to New York, the authorities were able to check that they did not themselves transfer onto any flight to the US.
Matters were made no easier when a quick check showed that there were no cargo flights out of Norwich. Later careful investigation showed a van that had come out of King Street in Norwich was later seen on surveillance cameras travelling down the M11 motorway, headed south towards London. Too late, it was spotted parked at Heathrow Airport, not far from where cargo flights were loaded. Its being there meant that it was likely that Zorin’s quantum computer and other digital machines had been flown out of the country. This was near-useless information, as they could have been equally sent to Moscow as New York.
Wilder caught a train to London and, from some more calls made on the way, just one tiny glimmer of hope came to him from the professor up at Craithe Castle.
‘We won’t know if this is going to work but I’ll try and explain to you something hypothetical which may help you later.’
‘Anything at all, Prof; even the smallest amount of help would be great,’ said Wilder. ‘What’s this hypothetical thing, then?’
‘Firstly, have you ever come across propriety software, which will track your laptop when it’s stolen?’ asked the Prof.
‘Yes, I’ve got one on my mobile to track my laptop and vice-versa.’
‘Good, at least you understand the principle. We may be able to use the same kind of software to track Zorin’s quantum computer.’
‘That would be great. How and when are you going to do that?’
‘Can’t do anything till their machine’s switched on. We can then begin our searches. There are a number of techniques we can use and we can send GCHQ a link which will give them a snippet of our identifier software. Using the global reach of their surveillance capabilities, all their satellite links and their links to search capabilities in, say, New York, Moscow, Manila and so on, as soon as Zorin’s people switch on their quantum computer some identifiers within it should become visible.’
‘That’s incredible. So you’ll be able to give us the location of the machine?’
‘Haven’t tried it before,’ said the professor, ‘So I won’t go that far. An analogy might be that it will be like a metal detector telling which of two haystacks a needle is in. But I doubt we could triangulate accurately enough to take you closer than to tell you which part of a city it’s in. We’re unlikely to be able to take you to the street or the building.’
‘Pity,’ said Wilder.
‘But look on the bright side,’ continued the professor. ‘We’re still working on some other ideas which might enable us to get more focused and give you a smaller area and, who knows, maybe the building.’
‘Well, keep at it, Prof, and let me know if you get even a clue as to where they’ve gone with this machine. I don’t have to tell you, but as soon as the American authorities learn that there’s a weapon out there with the massive capabilities of Gemini, all hell’s going to break loose. The last thing we want is for politicians to get involved.’
‘Why do you say that so vehemently?’ asked the Professor.
‘Because they’ll mobilise as though for a third Wold War and that’ll prompt Zorin to hide his machine away even more by delaying using it. Then, at some point of his choosing, when our guard is relaxed, he’ll strike. Better allow him to proceed now with whatever plans he has while he thinks no one’s expecting anything.’
‘Well, that’s true,’ said the Professor. ‘If his operator puts his main quantum machine inside something like a Faraday Cage, not even GCHQ would be able to find it.’
‘A Faraday Cage?’ repeated Wilder. ‘That jogs an old memory or two. I seem to remember that from school physics – remind me, what is it?’
‘In simplest terms it’s a wire-mesh cage. They could surround the machine with something as simple as chicken wire mesh, run a small electrical charge through it and anything inside the cage can’t be scanned – becomes invisible, if you like.’
‘I see,’ said Wilder slowly. ‘And do you think that they’ll consider doing that with their quantum machine?’
‘Well, if I were in their shoes, that’s exactly what I’d do. But don’t worry, if they want to do any damage with their machine, they’ll have to come outside the cage to do it.’
‘Oh God. Don’t things ever get easier than this? Still, I have great faith in you, Prof, and in that genius team of yours. As soon as they settle their machines and switch it on to see it’s survived its travels, I expect a call from you telling me you know where it is.’
‘You can mock me and the team,’ laughed the professor, ‘but get yourself ready for the call.’
The following day, Wilder got the call.
‘You’ll be pleased to hear,’ the professor told Wilder, with undisguised pleasure in his voice, ‘that Zorin’s quantum computer has arrived in Queens, somewhere not far from JFK. I know that’s still a pretty big haystack, but as I said before, we’re continuing to work with GCHQ on a way to narrow that down for you. But at least you can get yourself out there, can’t you?’
‘That’s wonderful news, Prof. Many thanks, and tell the rest of the team how much everyone appreciates the work they’re doing.’
‘They know that already,’ said the professor, ‘but I’ll pass on the compliment nevertheless.’
Wilder flew out to New York on the next available flight. The hunt for the proto-Gemini had begun in earnest.
Ballikinrane, South Shore, Bermuda
Victor Zorin sat out on the decking at the back of the house. It had been a long day, much of it taken up by putting the final touches to the next phase of his plans. Both he and Mitkin sipped long cool Tom Collinses – heavy on the vodka, light on the soda water.
‘So you’re not that pissed off about that man Wilder being largely responsible for the changes of plan?’
‘Oh, I’m still pissed off with him, but the new arrangements have worked out okay. I’m relieved that we’re back on track,’ replied Zorin.
‘I know I haven’t been involved in what you’ve been arranging this morning, but I’d be interested in how all these different strands come together – I mean, some of your calls have seemed to be unconnected with others…’
‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you now,’ mused Zorin as he took another sip of his drink. ‘Let me see… the best way to explain this…’
For a minute or two he gazed off across the crab-grass lawns, over the sugar-white beaches and at the crystal waters of the sea beyond.
‘You know about the next two attacks, the ones that Yulian wrote the basic software for?’
‘Yes, but about those,’ replied Mitkin. ‘How did you explain those attacks to such a meek and mild guy as Yulian? I’d have thought he’d be the kind of guy who’d rebel at inconveniencing tens of thousands of people, which his attack software most certainly will.’
‘Simple, my dear Alexis,’ replied Zorin with one of his self-satisfied smiles. ‘I told him that the computer engineers at both sites would be made fully aware that the attacks were coming and would take action the moment they hit. In that way there wouldn’t actually be any power cuts that the general population would notice. There might be a flickering of the lights or, at worst, a cut for a second, and people would just have to reset their oven clocks – hardly disastrous, eh?’
‘I see,’ said Mitkin slowly. ‘But actually, we are going to cause blackouts near Moscow and then in Queens?’
‘Of course we are. How else am I going to make a few million, even a billion or two, at the same time as we’re testing our proto-Gemini?’
‘And the long call and the exchanging of pages of emails with the press and publicity people, I didn’t get that – am I being stupid?’
‘Now that you surely should have understood,’ said Zorin. ‘The press bit is the most important part of the whole phase.’
‘I’m sorry, I really have been stupid.’
‘Oh, don’t knock yourself out about it,’ said Zorin. ‘That’s why my bank account’s healthier than yours.’
‘Well… are you going to spell it out for me or not?’
Zorin laughed, and looked across at Mitkin for a moment. Without his strong-arm man, for all his devious brilliance, some of his shadier successes would never have been possible.
‘Okay, what’s going to happen is this. Andrei is going to use the proto-Gemini to cause disruption, first in Russia, and then in Queens in suburban New York,’ said Zorin.
‘And I presume that these disruptions will be of the same kind that we tested in King’s Lynn?’ asked Mitkin.
‘They will. Yulian has set up the attacks for the several different electrical sub-station defence systems; and to make sure that Andrei had mastered all that he’d been taught, he set him a test on the Moscow one, which he passed with distinction. But the most important part of these attacks comes in through the press releases. Hence all my discussions of them. As I said a moment ago, the two attacks are near meaningless without the press back-ups.’
‘So what role do they play?’
‘The key role. Tip off the major publications throughout Russia, Europe and the US that there are rumours of attacks about to take place – you know the kind of thing: Sources high up in the Kremlin are preparing for a major cyber-attack on their financial trading systems… Then come the attacks from Andrei’s machines. The press come into play again immediately after the attacks. In the Moscow press they’ll naturally blame the US and, after the attack on Queens, they’ll say that those were caused by Russia retaliating. The press will also hint at this being the start of a major cyber war between the Russia and the US. And it’s at that point that I stand to make a small fortune on the foreign exchange markets.’
‘And how exactly does that work?’ asked Mitkin.
‘I won’t go into that technically but, in essence, all those calls to the brokers were setting up what you might call my bets.’
‘Yes, forward positions for very large sums of money,’ said Zorin, ‘which, in non-technical language, means I’ve placed bets that both the rouble and the dollar will drop in value as the markets react to the consequences of a cyber war.’
‘Technically, it’s called selling the two currencies short. I borrow vast sums to cover my bets that the currencies will drop in value on the international markets and, when they do, I take the profit – hopefully a billion or two. Very neat when all we’re doing otherwise is testing our proto-Gemini ready for President Balakin’s really big one.’
‘President Balakin’s big one, what’s that?’
Before Zorin could answer, the telephone rang. Mitkin rose, went over and picked up the handheld for the landline. After a moment, he came back, holding it out towards Zorin.
‘It’s Andrei for you.’
Mitkin listened intently to what followed, as it was likely to signal the start of the fun.
‘The fara-what…?’ said Zorin, a frown on his face. It cleared a moment later. ‘Ah, a Faraday Cage. Yes, I understand. So you’re ready to go with the Moscow attack this evening and the Queens attack eight hours later? Good. I’ll notify the Kremlin. Good luck, and keep me posted, especially if you detect any reaction to what you’re doing from the real Gemini people on Craithe. Don’t worry about the time differences or whether I’ll be awake or not, just keep me informed. Oh, and good work, Andrei. Your very special reward will be in your bank account just as soon as the job’s done.
JFK International Airport, New York City
Sitting in a plane for some seven hours had been deeply frustrating for Wilder. The relief that they at least knew where the proto-Gemini had been taken was tempered by the fact they still didn’t know what its targets would be. This was not helped by the fact that there was no one to share his worries with.
On his own side – Macrae, Jessie and the Craithe team. But the last thing he wanted to do was worry any of them further by constantly reminding them of the danger Zorin posed. The only certainty about Zorin was that he would use his new toy with discretion to start with – no flamboyant trials that would help Wilder or Bob Brady track the location of the machines or tell them what his targets were going to be.
Though this kind of investigation was quite usual for him, Wilder’s great difficulty right now was the knowledge he had of the devastation that even a poor version of Gemini could wreak on the US. About the only person with whom he could be frank about the potential horrors of the current situation was Bob Brady. During the flight, he’d written Brady a long email and had sent it the moment the aircraft allowed mobiles and laptops to come out of flight mode.
As he was waiting for his luggage, he rang through to IPI in Manhattan. Brady was out so he just he waited for his baggage along with the several hundred others off the flight. But, as he had his phone out anyway, he re-read the email he’d sent.
It finished up with this:
‘My guess is that when Zorin decided to steal the quantum computer in Canada, it was for a couple of reasons. He knew he’d never manage to steal what was needed from Craithe – too many machines, too large. Impossible. I guess the other reason was that it would be easier to build a Gemini piece by piece in the UK and run tests there on small out-of-the-way locations. His bringing it back to the US strikes me that this is where he proposes to deliver his coup de grace. Have your group of five detected anything which could give us an idea as to what he’s up to or what his main target is going to be? Could this be the subject of our first meeting when I land?’ Bob Brady’s Group of five, consisting of himself and four of the brightest young rising stars from the four biggest US intelligence agencies, would be sure to contribute greatly to his search capabilities and would portably already have files on Zorin – so clues might result.
As he waited he also resolved to get away for a couple of hours and go and see Lucy. Another thought struck him on this resolve. After Zorin had kidnapped her once, he’d need to arrange that meeting carefully. Oh God, why did life sometimes seem to get so complicated?
Brady had been out of the office as he had done Wilder the favour of meeting him at JFK – a pleasant surprise. Wilder walked out into the main concourse and they got all the personal catching-up out of the way on the drive back to Wilder’s hotel – the St Regis on Fifth Avenue.
Up in his suite Wilder quickly freshened up, splashed welcome cold water over his face and brought his mind back into sharp focus. With Brady, who’d once been his boss, he’d need to be sharp as a tack and there was not a moment to lose in hunting down Andrei and his machines.
Brady had ordered some coffee and bagels and got straight down to business.
‘There’s only one intriguing thing that my group of five have come up with that we thought might be connected to Zorin’s Gemini machine,’ said Brady as they tucked into the bagels.
‘Good, what’s that?’
‘The Canadian manufacturers sent an email to Zorin. Of course it doesn’t tell us where he is but it intrigued us because we didn’t fully understand whether it had significance or not. I’m only mentioning it to you now because we wondered why there would be email exchanges unless it was significant.’
‘Now you’ve got me interested,’ said Wilder.
‘In brief, it talked about a specialised dongle for the quantum computer. Does that make any sense to you? A dongle usually being for communications purposes.’
‘It does indeed make sense to me,’ said Wilder. ‘And I’m afraid it means it’s not good news for us or for the US.’
‘The professor told me a while back,’ said Wilder, ‘that in most cases installations can be attacked by Gemini through the internet, right?
‘But in a few cases, for maximum security, some institutions isolate their critical mainframes from danger of attack via the internet by isolating key machines from any direct link between them and the internet. In these cases Gemini could still get at them by getting a highly specialised internet dongle secretly inserted into such an institution’s mainframe – this giving them access to it for an attack.’
‘The implication of that being what?’
‘That Zorin’s making sure that if his main target – or targets, plural – is sensitive enough to be isolated from the internet, he’d still be able to attack it.’
‘But if such institutions were that paranoid about security to isolate their machines, how the hell would they to get a dongle into the machine they want to attack?’
‘Not as difficult as you might think,’ replied Wilder. ‘Don’t you remember in the case of that Japanese company I got access to where they’d hidden stolen intellectual property on one of their mainframes. I got fake computer engineers to go in to do an unnecessary software upgrade…’
‘Ah yes, I remember that. Anyway, on you go. The internet dongle – you were saying…’
‘I believe that for a dongle attack the attacking machine and the target need to be fairly close geographically.’ That may give us a clue to the machine’s location if we can think up a list of the most vulnerable and devastating targets in New York City.’
‘Christ, that list could be a mile long.’ Brady took a gulp of his coffee and then quickly put his cup down again. ‘Another thought has just occurred to me… Yes, it makes sense now you’ve told me about dongles.’
‘There’s been just one other internet telecoms chatter with Zorin’s name included in it. That chatter has been between two of the largest brokers on the foreign exchange markets – the Forex markets. They’ve been confirming between them huge credit facilities for a company that belongs to Zorin. Though they were obviously trying to make it look as though they just need forward funds for legitimate business purposes, the credit lines they were talking about were so vast that Zorin can only be preparing to do one thing…’
‘Play the foreign exchange markets,’ said Wilder finishing his sentence for him.
‘That’s it,’ said Brady. ‘But with huge sums at stake, he’d only do that if he’s certain he’s onto a winner. And to be onto a winner he either has to use his proto-Gemini to fix the markets – almost impossible, I’d guess – or he’s going to do something that will affect the markets so that he can bet on them in the certainty of winning.’
‘Ah, so nice and easy,’ joked Wilder. ‘All we need to do is to guess what he’s going to do to get the foreign markets to move.’
‘Yes, and equally importantly,’ added Brady, ‘we need to warn the authorities that this is likely to happen.’
‘I think I know how we can get that to happen almost instantly,’ said Wilder.
‘For me to ring an old friend of Angus Macrae’s,’ said Wilder. ‘Turn what Zorin thinks is going to be a nice little earner into a financial disaster instead.’
‘And you can arrange that?’ asked Brady, smiling at such a delightful prospect.
‘Let’s see, shall we?’ said Wilder.
The St. Regis Hotel, New York City
Wilder checked his watch. It would be mid-afternoon in London. Still time to put a cat among the pigeons. As managing director of the City of London’s second oldest bank, Angus Macrae would know just how to thwart Zorin’s plans and Wilder knew that in addition to overseeing one of London’s most prestigious banks, he was also a long-standing friend of the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was lucky too. Macrae was in his office – not bogged down in some interminable meeting.
‘Angus, good afternoon. It’s Tom Wilder here. I’m calling you from New York.’
‘Yes, Tom, how goes it?’
‘Hectic as usual, but not as bad as I need to make your day right now.’ Wilder then went on to give Macrae the evidence collected by GCHQ and the big agencies in the US and he finished up with his and Brady’s conclusions.
‘It seems to us that Zorin’s setting himself up to do some big gambling on the foreign exchange markets. We don’t know how his version of Gemini is going to come into this, but more importantly, what the two of us are asking for is for you to see if you can get the Bank of England and probably the Federal Reserve Bank in the US to go into the markets to counter any bets he might make. We’ve got the names of the two brokers that have been discussing Zorin’s lines of credit.’
‘Good tip-off, Tom, and thank Bob Brady for his part in this too.’ Wilder had purposely put the phone on speaker for this call and, on hearing the remark, Brady smiled and nodded his head.
‘I can certainly get things moving this end,’ Macrae added, ‘and no doubt the Bank of England will make whatever arrangements it deems necessary as far as support elsewhere around the world goes. It’ll be good to give one of these speculators a good kick up the arse. You say you don’t know yet how this man Zorin is planning to use his Gemini to get the markets moving.’
‘Not yet, so we’ll need to look out for unusual events which might spook the markets and cause them to fall.’
‘Doesn’t matter that much; we can act in seconds once big brokers like those two begin to play games. But if you do hear any more, let me know. In the meantime, relax and let me get to work.’
‘Thanks Angus,’ said Wilder, and rang off.
Angus Macrae first called his old university friend Freddy Briston. He was in luck as Briston was in his office at the Chancellor’s official London residence, Number 11 Downing Street. He was thankful, as Briston might have been in the House of Commons, The Treasury, or any one of half a dozen other places.
He got personal greetings and polite exchanges about each other’s families out of the way in less than half a minute. These were followed by a near-verbatim summary of what Wilder had told him.
‘That’s good work by your man and his American colleague,’ said Briston. ‘Be sure to pass on our thanks to them. As you know, my political position vis-à-vis the Bank of England has to be seen as being completely independent of them – you know, all that rubbish about political threats and all that. But I can get around that, especially in an emergency such as this. So, take it easy and leave it with me.’
The Chancellor went downstairs in person to see one of his most trusted aides, Bill Mason. He was so busy running over the most diplomatic way of saying what he needed Mason to do that he just walked straight through his outer office, smiled and nodded to Mason’s secretary, and went straight on into the room. Mason leapt to his feet; this was probably the first time he had been visited by the Chancellor in person.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ said the Chancellor as he sat across the desk from Mason. In turn, he repeated almost word for word what Wilder had told Macrae.
‘So, you need to get on to the Governor of the Bank of England, give him all the information, the names of the big foreign exchange brokers. The fact that they’ll be acting for Victor Zorin may not be immediately obvious but that’s not the important point. He’ll know what arrangements to make with the Fed and others to get them to smash Zorin. Okay?’
Briston left Mason’s office, nodding to Mason’s secretary again on his way. As soon as he was past, she quickly rose from her desk and scuttled into Mason’s room.
‘I’m so sorry, but as I’m kinda trying to give up cigarettes, I didn’t have one at lunchtime. I’m afraid I’m not completely winning yet. May I go out the back of the building to have one now? – if you don’t need me for anything, of course.’
‘No, I don’t need you for anything, I’ve an important couple of things to occupy me for half an hour. On you go, Francesca. See you later’
She ran downstairs and out of Number 11 into the gardens at the rear of the building. She carefully checked around her and looked at the windows directly above. She got out her cigarettes, lit one, and then got out her mobile phone. Her hands trembling slightly, she looked up a number and rang it.
‘Frobisher and Smiley,’ came the answer.
‘Mr Frobisher, please. You can tell him it’s important and that it’s Francesca from 11 Downing Street.’
The mention of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s official London residence opened the way through to Frobisher as though by magic.
‘Hello, Francesca,’ said Frobisher. ‘Very unusual for you to risk ringing me like this. Some kind of emergency?’
‘Just thought you’d like to know that if Mr Zorin goes ahead with his playing the markets later today or tomorrow, the Bank of England are preparing to move against him and it could cost him a bit. I’ve been here in Number 11 long enough to know the sound of the trumpets of war when I hear them.’
For a few seconds there was complete silence, then Frobisher spoke again.
‘You’ve done well calling me,’ he said. ‘Though the news is not good, I’m sure that Mr Zorin will be very grateful. Very grateful indeed. Thank you for that, and I’m sure we’ll be in touch with you shortly. You haven’t changed your bank details, have you? Same sort code and account number?’
While in the business of making herself some extra money, Francesca had one more call to make. But she paused before making it. Her late father’s cousin Alfredo Lupo had recently died and his huge crime organisation in New York had been taken over by Rocco Balboni – an apparently ruthless operator. She’d never done business with this Rocco, but anyone as ambitious as he was reported to be was sure to know what to do with her information on Zorin.
Had she known that Balboni was aiming to take over his biggest rival in New York – Giuseppe Massimo’s outfit – she might have been more ambitious when making this call. Had she also known that it was the Massimo organisation which was currently helping Zorin with his plans in New York, she would have realised that the potential for earnings was huge. But she was not aware of any of this.
She rang anyway.
‘Rocco Balboni,’ came the answer.
‘This is Francesca Lupo, Giorgio’s daughter. I live in London and I work in the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer’s offices.’
‘Yes, yes, of course, Francesca. So the two of us will be related by marriage. I was sorry to hear of your father’s passing. You may not know this, but the Lupo family has given me everything I have,’ said Balboni.
‘…everything you’ve taken,’ thought Francesca. She went on to explain how she knew what she did. It was greeted with stunned silence at Balboni’s end. She gave the story that neat touch of credibility when she added that she’d telephoned Zorin’s accountants with this same information. She finished by saying, ‘But Frobisher and Smiley are crooked and devious enough to pay me as a mole in Downing Street. They like to be tipped off in advance of tax laws coming down the line. It occurred to me that, for their own reasons, they might not pass on this important information I’ve given them. I considered that they might even use it to their own advantage without even telling Mr Zorin’s brokers.’
‘Well, well, well,’ said Balboni. ‘So, you thought that for old time’s sake I might be able to turn a buck or two by using the information and passing an introductory fee back to you for giving it to me?’
‘And of course, if I didn’t do right by you, you’d get your own back by ringing Mr Zorin to question my trustworthiness?’
‘This is a dangerous world, Francesca,’ said Balboni, with distinct menace in his voice. ‘This has been a bold call of yours. But I must say it shows guts and good business sense – I like that. I’ll check this out and if it’s all on the level, I’ll see you well rewarded. Thanks for the call. I’ll speak to you again soon – one way or the other, of course.’
Balboni’s remarks, in his harsh Bronx Italian-American accent and the underlying threat of his words were strangely reassuring to her. It seemed to her to confirm that he’d pay well. She clicked the clam phone shut and smiled. She wondered what the going rate was for saving someone from making a billion-dollar Forex-trading mistake.
Quickly she stubbed out her third cigarette, pushed the fag-ends under a bush by the doorway with her foot and went back up to her office. She amused herself by trying to picture the events that would follow these two calls.
Queens, New York City
The customs men checking on the boat on the St. Lawrence had been a shock to both Andrei and Goran. Both had suffered similar visions of being locked up in a Canadian or US jail and the key being thrown away. Both also felt emotionally drained as they got ashore half an hour later. They were met by Carlo, the most experienced of Giuseppe Massimo’s people at running things or people over the US-Canadian border. His breezy confidence soon had Andrei and Goran relaxing as they drove south through New York State down towards New York City.
Carlo drove them to the Massimo headquarters in Newark, New Jersey. He made a couple of calls and then explained to them that one of Mr Zorin’s people would arrive shortly and take them to their new home in the US. About half an hour later an SUV arrived. A large man who introduced himself as Kimber took them and their luggage out to the car and they were relieved when they climbed into it with its darkened windows all around. It was reassuring too when Kimber greeted them in fluent Russian.
‘That was the most terrifying journey either of us has ever made,’ said Andrei. ‘From leaving Norwich in the UK, being chased by a man called Wilder, it was dreadful.’ He rambled on, regaling Kimber with his story till Kimber stopped him.
‘Yeah, but you two are valuable parts of Mr Zorin’s plans. He needed to be sure you got down to New York safely, and those mafia Italian-Americans are the best there are at smuggling over the border.’
‘So why didn’t they take us to our new place?’
‘Oh come on,’ laughed Kimber. ‘You wouldn’t expect Mr Zorin to let a bunch of squabbling ex-mafia know where he was hiding you two and his machines, would you?’
‘I suppose not,’ conceded Andrei.
‘The machines have arrived and been installed in suitable premises in Queens. As required, this is not that far from your main target. They are also just round the block from a nice apartment we’ve got for you. From here on, I’ll be looking after everything you need, your comfort, provisions, all that kind of thing. And when the job’s done, I’ll take you back to Massimo’s people, who’ll get you safely out of the US again. Okay?’
‘And who are you, if you don’t mind my asking – I mean, a name like Kimber but accent-less Russian-speaking?’
‘I don’t mind you asking, but you don’t need to know.’ He said this in a light and kind enough manner, but it ended that particular conversation.
Once they had gone over the Hudson, through Manhattan, over the East River, they eventually arrived in Queens. As always for first-timers, the sight of downtown Manhattan took the breath out of them. Having originally come from St. Petersburg, got used to Moscow and been to London, they might have felt they’d seen it all. But nothing had quite prepared them for this first view of New York City. And both felt a similar tingle of excitement, whispering to each other that this was the world they were about to turn upside down.
When they got into the apartment they found it large with a good-sized sitting room, and a kitchen with a comfortable-looking eating area containing a table and chairs to seat six. It also had a spacious bathroom with a bath and shower, and two decent-sized bedrooms. Cheerfully airy and decorated throughout in bland pastel shades, its décor could not have been described as very imaginative, but it was far from the prison Andrei had been expecting.
The quantum computer, with its refrigeration units, the digital computers and all the other paraphernalia had also arrived, and was housed at ground-floor level in an old warehouse nearby and within the same block.
As soon as they were settled into their new accommodation, they got a welcome telephone call from Zorin. Following warm words, they got their instructions. The absolute imperative of complete security and secrecy was the first of these. Though it should hardly have needed mentioning, Zorin reminded them that their lives depended on no one knowing where they were. The instructions also included, therefore, the absolute banning of outbound telephone calls – either by landline or mobile.
Kimber then took them over to the machines, and after he left them, they began right away working on setting them up. It took just short of twenty-four hours to complete this and, when finished, Andrei texted the number he’d been given: ‘ready for the first assignment.’
The first assignment was to be a couple of attacks on suburban electrical supply sub-stations – the first one on the outskirts of Moscow and the second in Queens. With this latter target, they had taken care looking at detailed electrical supply maps of the whole of the Queens area to ensure that they didn’t cut off their own supply. Whilst carrying out this search, it alerted Andrei to the possibility of Wilder finding their general location and arranging for their own supply to be cut. He contacted Kimber and had a small electricity generator installed. They also installed the quantum machine and its controller laptop on a false floor on wheels. This allowed them to be wheeled in and out of a Faraday Cage within which Andrei could work on the machines, confident that they could not be found by any electronic means. Andrei realised that when he brought the machines out to connect to the internet or to their ‘big’ and ultimate target later on, they would need to come out of the cage.
They were acutely aware that not only would Wilder and the Craithe team be looking for them, but also GCHQ, the formidable surveillance capabilities of the NSA, Homeland Security and the CIA at Langley. But they were not cowed by these thoughts – they had a job to do and knew that, despite the risks, when it came to the final target, it would change the whole balance of power between Zorin and the rest of the world.
His first target was a minor sub-station on the outskirts of Moscow near Pavshino. At 5.30 p.m. local time in Moscow – 10.30 in the morning in Queens – he ran through his final procedures and pressed ‘Enter’ on the controlling laptop. Almost instantly, the combined power of the quantum computer’s algorithms and the assembled high-speed digital machines here in the warehouse did what they had practised on the plant in King’s Lynn – they shut down the sub-station at Pavshino.
As intended, it quickly brought mounting chaos. Traffic lights failed in Pavshino, and as the black-out fed back to the huge spaghetti junction of roads nearby, it soon brought the E22 and the M9 coming out of Moscow to a standstill. In turn, the MKAD motorway which encircles Moscow slowed and then came down to crawler speed.
In situations of this kind the world over, drivers’ initial resignation quite quickly turns to anger. Soon increasing numbers of drivers began to react. Ill-tempered phone conversations sprang up between those stuck in the traffic snarl-ups and their wives and partners waiting for them at home.
Andrei was to hold the power-grid incapacitated for two hours. This would stop its electrical distribution for long enough to mystify engineers sent to fix it and cause maximum disruption to customers, but not long enough to escalate into a major issue for either.
These same two hours would also enrage those in their homes – those dependent on electricity to prepare meals. Zorin had mused on this subject several times. Each time he did so he wondered why it had taken so long for a Gemini-type weapon to arrive into fields of propaganda and war. The potential for either real or imagined damage for so little effort had mind-numbing potential.
Having achieved its purpose, exactly two hours after shutting down the sub-station, Andrei switched off the lock-down. The engineers trying to work out the mysterious fault had no idea what was causing it. Even advanced diagnostic tests could not determine the cause of the stoppage. They were equally amazed when it suddenly righted itself. Their relief was such that, as anticipated by Zorin, they probed no further into its causes and departed – just happy that the power was back on again.
By design, it was too late in the day for the incident to get into the evening press. This gave Zorin’s well-briefed publicity organisations around the world the time to stoke the story up into a major incident. Contrived quotes from ‘leading experts’ and those ‘close to’ the seats of power laid the blame squarely at the door of the US. As intended, these resulted in a frenzy of speculation both in governments and the general public.
Zorin’s plan gave President Balakin the perfect excuse to try out a new weapon that had been acquired for him and use it in retaliation on the US, but from the safety of foreign soil – Queens.
At exactly 5.30pm Eastern Standard Time, Andrei completed the last steps of a similar attack on an electrical sub-station in Forest Hills, just next to Queens. As with the Moscow attack, this hit commuters just as millions were either about to make their weary way home or were already en route. As in Moscow, those about to prepare evening meals would also have to contend with calls from their partners’ mobiles complaining about the horrendous traffic snarl-ups.
In Queens, as traffic lights went out, the number of major roads which converge and meet in many places ground to a halt within minutes. The parkways, turnpikes and expressways all seized up. The Jackie Robinson, the Union, Queens Boulevard – all were turning into inescapable nightmares. With tempers fraying, Zorin’s media people were quickly provided with very real personal stories and quotes and reports, many of them on video, which poured into New York and social media.
As with the Moscow attack, it had been planned to happen too late to get into the evening papers, but the following day all New York’s press and the nationals were full of it. Cleverly, the press had been fed the rumour that escalating East-West cyber-warfare would soon lead to much more serious incidents, and this was soon seen by millions on their television screens.
Ballikinrane, South Shore, Bermuda
Zorin had enjoyed his swim and had not even bothered with a towel when he came out of the sea. He had simply flopped down on the sand and dried in minutes lying in the hot sun. He’d often read of the beautiful Bermuda beaches when browsing holiday brochures, and experiencing them for the first time soothed any worries he might have had about his project. After lying there for several minutes, he rose and sauntered over onto the wide decking of the patio. He was soon glad of the shade from the striped canvas awning that ran round over it, as the full sun was now too hot for comfort.
By now the full blast of his press releases would be having its desired effects, not just on the public, but also on the financial markets. He’d leave it for another half-hour and would then ring to see how things were going with his plans to exploit market movements. He was about to pour himself a cool drink when the telephone rang.
It was Rocco Balboni on the line. He too was relaxing, in the late Giuseppe Lupo’s apartment overlooking Central Park. He too was sipping a drink, but with the time-zone putting him an hour earlier than Bermuda, his was just a cup of morning coffee. Balboni had the advantage over Zorin as he was initiating the call, and he had every intention of using that advantage to the full. It included a delicious opportunity over the next few minutes of listening while he turned Zorin’s world upside down.
‘Rocco, long time no see,’ said Zorin. ‘In fact, if I recall correctly, last time we met was at a fundraiser in New York when you were general dog’s-body to old man Lupo.’
‘Yeah, that’s probably right, but with Lupo’s sad passing a month or so ago, I’ve now taken over the Lupo organisation. Sadly, his son Roberto didn’t really have the stomach for the business, if you get my meaning. But, since then, a lot of water has passed under the bridge, as they say, and much of that in the past few hours.’
There was something in Rocco Balboni’s tone that sent a chill down Zorin’s neck and made the hairs on it stand up.
‘So what’s happened in the past few hours that’s got you calling me?’ ventured Zorin.
‘I’ve done you a great service, my friend,’ came the unexpected reply.
‘You have?’ Zorin’s attention now focused, pin-sharp. The menace in Balboni’s voice had not just been in his imagination.
‘Yeah, saved you being taken to the cleaners, as we say in New York. From impeccable sources in Number 11 Downing Street, the seat of the real power in London, as you will know, I learned that the Bank of England and the Fed here in New York were preparing to come in against your positions in the Forex markets. They had every intention of wiping you out. Not knowing when your options were going to go live, I tipped off your brokers and your positions were quickly covered. I’m surprised they haven’t rung you yet to tell you about this.’
‘They don’t know how to reach me direct here, that’s why,’ snapped Zorin. ‘Anyway, how the hell did you get this number, or anything else for that matter?’
‘Through the Massimo organisation, of course,’ said Balboni.
Zorin’s stomach did a cartwheel. Not only did it appear that his highly lucrative dealings in the markets had been destroyed, but he was now being informed, in this manner, of something disastrous about them. One of the most difficult aspects of his plans had concerned which of the two big mafia organisations to pick as his partners. He had chosen the Massimo organisation, but here he was, apparently being saved by their arch-rival, Rocco Balboni’s Lupo organisation.
This was a nightmare.
As his mind tried to absorb all the implications of this catastrophe, he quickly crossed the decking, and with his hand slightly unsteady, he put aside his cool lemonade drink and poured himself a large brandy from one of the bottles on the drinks table. Immediately taking a large gulp from it he realised he’d missed something Rocco had said and concentrated harder.
‘I don’t know how much money you were aiming to play about with on the markets,’ continued Rocco, ‘but having saved you what I guess might have been some pretty hefty losses, I have a proposition for you.’
For a second or two there was complete silence on the line. Zorin had taken yet another gulp of brandy and waved furiously for Mitkin to get up out of his sun-lounger and come over to him. He hastily scribbled a note on a pad and pushed it across the bar table to him.
‘Sorry about that. Someone ringing me on another line,’ said Zorin in an effort to cover the silence.
‘That’s okay,’ replied Balboni. ‘Probably your brokers telling you how many millions they’ve just saved you. But as I was saying, I have a proposition for you.’
‘You won’t mind if I just check with them, will you?’ said Zorin as he watched Mitkin’s reactions to the note. Mitkin had understood the message from the barely readable scribble on the pad and had got out his mobile phone to ring Zorin’s brokers. In less than a minute he was scribbling a note back for Zorin. Meanwhile, Balboni was explaining.
‘… So I know you patched things up with Massimo and gave him the job of moving your package back from the UK to here in New York. But, in view of the favour I’ve just done you, and trying to keep all of this just between you and I, I’d like to take the rest of that job over from his organisation. Nothing would need to change, just that I would supervise the premises where you have your machines and where your two operators are hidden. I would also provide them with escape routes if anything were to go wrong with your little operation there in Queens.’
‘How the hell do you know about all of this? I…’ exploded Zorin.
‘It’s my job to know about these things,’ cut in Balboni. ‘I admit I was lucky hearing from Downing Street this morning, but I’ve been keeping an eye on the Massimo organisation for some time now. Poor old Massimo doesn’t even know yet that he recruited one of my people into his organisation. He’s lost his touch, that’s his problem. Too fond of his food and wine for his own good.’
As he had been speaking, Mitkin had come across and put a second note on the table next to Zorin. It read, ‘Brokers confirm threat to trading exposed, pulled out of all positions. Millions, maybe more saved.’
‘I’m really grateful for your prompt actions on my behalf regarding my trading,’ said Zorin, accepting defeat and trying his best to put a good face on it. ‘And as your man now appears to know all the details of what’s going on in Queens, it seems to make sense if you now take over the project. I have no intention of getting involved in a turf war between you and Giuseppe Massimo. With this change-over, I want to hear back from you within the hour that the two of you have come to an understanding over this and that there will be no war between you. Is that clear?’ He switched on the speaker-phone and waved for Mitkin to come over and witness this last vital bit of the conversation. ‘Naturally, I’ll also tell Giuseppe Massimo that that his services are no longer required. And I’ll tell him that the change-over is thanks to some quite extraordinary service you have provided for me elsewhere. But I want you to assure me this will all be done peaceably.’
‘Of course, Victor.’
Balboni’s use of his Christian name riled Zorin, but then so did this whole nightmare situation. His only consolation was that it appeared he had been saved huge sums of money. Yet, despite the financial savings, Rocco Balboni taking over had been an outsider’s coup – he would need to find a way of getting back control as soon as possible.
‘So, in conclusion,’ said Zorin, ‘I’d like you to call me back within the hour to tell me that the transition to your people looking after my interests has taken place peacefully. I also want you to give Giuseppe Massimo this number and ask him to ring me and confirm that he’s happy with these new arrangements.’
‘Of course I’ll be happy to do that, and I look forward to mutually beneficial business between the two of us continuing into the future.’
‘Indeed,’ said Zorin, now gritting his teeth. ‘Look forward to hearing from you again just as soon as all of this has been smoothed over, but within the hour at the outside.’
He put the phone down gently and then screamed out in a volley of the vilest Russian swearing. His pent-up rage blasted out of him, he poured himself some more brandy, went back to his chair and slumped into it. It had been years since he had been this close to a major financial setback and even longer since he had been so comprehensively outsmarted. He was not enjoying the experience. But as the soporific qualities of the brandy began to take the edge off his seething anger, he started to give the new situation some colder, more measured thought.
How the hell had the central banks known about his plans and moved against him? Had that constant thorn in his side Wilder been involved? How would the change from Massimo to Balboni affect his plans – especially now that he’d suddenly been driven by these events into bringing forward the timing of the ‘big’ one?
The peace and quiet of Bermuda, from which to watch his carefully-laid plans unfold, had suddenly become a prison. He needed to take command of the situation or all might unravel. The failure of this project would also end his chances of returning to Moscow in triumph. Time to get a grip.
IPI Offices, New York
The morning after he’d prompted Macrae over Zorin’s trading ambitions, Wilder went downtown to IPI’s offices on lower Madison Avenue. He sat in Brady’s spacious office, much of the time watching Brady as he studied a relayed Bloomberg screen, concentrating on the main foreign exchange markets. Both were relieved to see that although both the dollar and rouble had dipped as the markets responded to Zorin’s press release stories, there was nothing worrying about the movements, which recovered after the intervention of the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Messages were posted on most trading screens that the newspaper rumours of imminent cyber-warfare between Russia and the West were what was now being dubbed ‘False News’ – news which had no truth to it and had been put about on the internet to move markets or public opinion in the direction wished by a rogue trader.
Both knew, however, just how close Zorin had come to making billions following his closing down of the electrical sub-stations outside Moscow and in Queens. And, in an attempt to expose Zorin’s operations, IPI had put large numbers of staff onto chasing every clue and lead.
The first of these was trying to work out how Zorin had got to know that his plans to play the markets had been found out. It had been Wilder’s guess that had prompted the call to Number 11 Downing Street – could there be a leak there? It did not take long to trace it to Francesca Lupo.
Under the threat of the hugely powerful anti-terrorism laws that were mentioned during her interrogation, she crumbled and confessed to everything. This included being a tax information mole for Frobisher, but most importantly she told of her tenuous relationship with Rocco Balboni and her call to him. This was just the kind of breakthrough that Wilder and Brady had prayed for, and they quickly discussed the best way of using the new information.
‘The latest update from the Five is that Rocco Balboni has been aiming to take over from his arch rival Giuseppe Massimo in helping Zorin with a major project in the US,’ said Brady. ‘I wouldn’t mind betting that refers to the proto-Gemini project.’
‘That’s pretty impressive private knowledge about New York ex-mafia,’ said Wilder. ‘Of course I know of your group of five, but remind me who they all are.’
‘I’ll need to explain that to you later, but believe me, they’re probably the best-informed group of people this side of the Atlantic. Hold me to giving you that explanation again once we’ve got this problem out of the way.’
‘Okay,’ said Wilder, raising his eyebrows in surprise. ‘You were saying…’
‘Hardly surprisingly, Massimo is well aware of Balboni’s ambitions and we understand is in a permanent state of siege, fighting off Balboni’s efforts to take him down. My guess is that Massimo would probably blindly grab at anything plausible that might damage Balboni. So, why don’t we say in this introductory welcoming email that you’ve been sent over from IPI Europe. Tell him that IPI Europe have been taken on to help an Italian special prosecutor who’s looking into some serious crimes in Europe. The crimes he’s looking at involve the old Lupo organisation, which Balboni has recently taken over from the Lupo family.’
Wilder nodded slowly.
You can say,’ continued Brady, ‘that you’ve been sent over here to gather evidence on Balboni’s Lupo group. A little dicky-bird has told you that Massimo’s an expert on the subject of Balboni. All you’ll need to do is ask for a meeting with Massimo, drop a hint that you need whatever he’s got on Balboni and I have no doubt he’ll grab at the opportunity to meet you.’
‘And what if he suspects that I’m a fake, or that my excuse is phoney?’ asked Wilder.
‘I don’t think that’ll happen. Just repeat that you’re at your wits’ end as to how to bring Balboni and the Lupo organisation down. You might hint – just hint, mind you – that you’ve been told by the US authorities that the Massimo organisation would be seen in a very favourable light if it could help. With me so far?’
‘Wise too to pop in the sentiment that you fully appreciate the fraternity amongst his brotherhood and that you wouldn’t be asking him to become a snitch; his name would be kept out of it.’
‘It sounds plausible to me.’
‘You could try and shut down any further questions on this by using Europe as the background – it will make it too difficult for him to check it out. One last thing, drop the name Frattini in at some point.’
‘Who the hell’s Frattini?’
‘Massimo will know the name, all right – he’s the most successful Mafia-prosecutor in Italy’s history.’
‘And will this work? It sounds pretty high-risk stuff to me? It’s not that I’m over-anxious for my own safety, but I’d rather not find a dead horse’s head next to me on my pillow tomorrow morning – I’ve only just got here,’ said Wilder.
‘No risk whatever,’ said Brady.
‘Absolutely none,’ replied Brady. ‘That’s the beauty of this approach. I’ll bet every last cent I have that when Giuseppe Massimo wakes each morning, the first thing he thinks is ‘Is this going to be the day I get rid of Rocco Balboni and the Lupo organisation?’ So much so that I reckon he’d give his right arm to open up to you and help you out.’
‘Okay, I’ll give it a go. Anything else you can suggest?’
‘I can give you some top-class surveillance help from IPI. You’ll probably need a firearm too. I can get all that kind of stuff for you and I’ll arrange for you to meet a good buddy of mine who’s the top man on mafia matters in the NYPD. He’s in charge of taking down not just Balboni’s outfit, but Massimo’s as well.’
They made the call. What Brady’s Five thought was rumour had actually happened – Giuseppe Massimo was already seething with fury that Rocco Balboni had manoeuvred him out of a lucrative, indeed prestigious, deal with Zorin. In short, Wilder was about to walk into an open-arms welcome.
As soon as he was through to Massimo he gave his brief presentation, reading from some notes he’d made before the call.
‘So let me get this straight, Mr Wilder,’ said Massimo. ‘You want me to snitch on my good friend Rocco Balboni? Do I have that right?’
Wilder took a deep breath.
‘I hate both the word and the concept of a snitch as much as anyone, Mr Massimo. But I’m over here from the UK following a lead from the UK government that, if I can prove it, implicates Rocco Balboni and his Lupo organisation in some potentially horrendous crimes. I need all the help I can get to nail him. If I succeed, I’m confident that what we’re pursuing will take down Balboni and his group for ever. Now, you’re right in a way, you might be justified in calling anyone involved in helping me of being a snitch, but what I’m trying to do, Mr Massimo, is to prevent a simply horrendous loss of American lives.’
‘Well, Mr Wilder, you deserve at least a bit more of a hearing. Would you care to join me for lunch at a restaurant down in the Village? It’s called Mario’s.’
With the phone on speaker, Brady had heard this, and mouthed the words ‘I know it’ to Wilder.
‘I’d be honoured, Mr Massimo,’ replied Wilder. ‘What time do you suggest?’
‘One o’clock? Just ask for me when you get there.’
‘I look forward to it,’ said Wilder, and hung up.
‘That was good,’ said Brady. ‘But watch yourself with Massimo. For all his outward bonhomie and apparent charm, he’s a rattlesnake with a deadly bite.’
The St. Regis Hotel, New York
Wilder found Mario’s easily. A typical Italian restaurant, with red chequered gingham table cloths and a bright, busy and friendly air about it promised a good meal even if the atmosphere was chilled. Clearly, he was expected, for the moment he entered, he was greeted by someone he presumed was Mario, and was ushered to a table at the back of the restaurant set apart from the other tables by a wide gap. It was a large table, could have seated at least half a dozen people, though only Massimo was seated at it.
As Wilder approached, Massimo rose from the table – a hugely overweight man, whose long face was wreathed in a broad smile. But Wilder could not help but be drawn to his eyes – they looked pitch black and were underlined by dark rings as though the man never slept. Wilder took Massimo’s outstretched hand, and as he sat down on the chair being held for him, he shook it firmly, noting the other’s vice-like grip – too strong for good manners, this was the handshake of a power-player. Massimo seated himself again and gave a waiter hovering nearby an imperious click of his fingers. At that moment Wilder had the uncanny feeling he had just sat down at the centre of a large spider’s web.
‘You’re most welcome here, Mr Wilder,’ said Massimo. ‘Despite its humble appearance, this one of the best restaurants in New York. Would you care for something to drink? Some wine, perhaps?’
Knowing it to be proper etiquette to accept such a specific offer of hospitality, Wilder accepted – though the days of long, well-lubricated lunches were regarded now as being a thing of the past. The lurking waiter had scurried off when Massimo had clicked his fingers and, though he had not actually been given any instructions, he now returned and poured Wilder a glass of red wine.
Massimo turned to size Wilder.
‘I hope the St Regis is looking after you well and that you’re already enjoying whatever time you have with us here in New York.’ He beamed, though his black eyes remained expressionless. ‘I didn’t know it was a requirement of IPI to insist on men as fit as you appear to be, Mr Wilder. Somehow, as you told me you had a whole lot of information on Mr Balboni and some plot he’s involved in, I expected that you would turn out to be a smaller man, perhaps a devious little backroom worker.’
‘Well, despite being tall and fit I could still be a devious little backroom worker, could I not? And as to IPI, it’s quite a large organisation, room for all sizes. But chit-chat aside, we’re both here to talk about Mr Balboni’s and your own involvement with Victor Zorin, are we not?’
Massimo blinked twice, involuntarily, but recovered himself in an instant.
‘Mine?’ he said in exaggerated surprise. ‘But I’ve never met this Zorin.’ He added a chuckle as though he found the thought amusing.
Wilder had made his point and was sure that Massimo had got his message. He decided on a return to the pretence of a light, enjoyable lunch.
‘As I said over the telephone,’ he said, watching Massimo closely, ‘I am at my wits’ end as to where Mr Balboni has hidden the machine that Mr Zorin proposes to use to the endangerment of so many New Yorkers. Is there a possibility that, for the sake of the lives of all the innocent flying public, you could put the usual loyalty to the mafia fraternity aside just this once and help me out?’
‘You’re very blunt, Mr Wilder,’ said Massimo, who had stopped smiling and now looked as though a heavy mantle of righteous responsibility had fallen over him. ‘As I said in reply to you over the phone, I wanted to meet for lunch to make sure you were genuine – genuine enough to give you our organisation’s support. For example, how would you expect me to help you?’
Wilder gave him his view of Zorin’s plan, but only in sketchy outline so as to give Massimo a chance to add something if he wanted to.
Massimo didn’t add anything.
Wilder finished by saying, ‘And as I believe it was your organisation that helped Zorin to steal the quantum machine in the first place, I assumed that you had pulled out of his latest plan because American lives might be lost. Is that right?’
Massimo grabbed at this let-out being offered him.
‘You’re right there, Mr Wilder…’
‘Tom… As you say, I was appalled at what he was proposing and I said no amount of money was worth the appalling risk he was taking. Imagine it. What if the authorities didn’t come up with a ransom demand? There would be God knows how many aircraft up there, running out of fuel, and five airports in the area all closed and… No, I couldn’t go along with it.’
‘So, I imagine that as soon as you pulled out, Zorin froze you out of all the details of where he was going to hide the machine, things like that?’
‘That’s exactly right, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t have any idea of where the machines are or how Balboni will help Zorin carry it out,’ he said, leaning forward slightly towards Wilder.
‘Naturally I have spoken to many people since I got to New York,’ said Wilder, mimicking Massimo in leaning forward, ‘and I have the firm impression from all of them that were you to make a positive contribution to putting Balboni away for this and other matters, that their view of you and some of your past activities would be dramatically changed for the better.’
‘My past activities?’ repeated Massimo. He picked up the menu and handed it to Wilder as he weighed up the implied offer. ‘I can highly recommend the Bistecca di Manzo here,’ he added.
‘I’m in your hands, I’m happy to go along with whatever you suggest.’
Massimo clicked his fingers again and nodded, and once again the waiter merely nodded in return and hurried away.
‘My people have eyes and ears all over this great city of ours,’ said Massimo. ‘Virtually nothing happens that we don’t get to hear about. It would just be a question of time till we found where Balboni and Zorin have their machines hidden.’
‘Unfortunately time is not on our side,’ said Wilder, ‘and we need to take Balboni and Zorin down before they can activate their plan, not after the event. So, for example, if after lunch today you could put your people to work helping the NYPD and my colleagues from IPI look for Zorin’s machines, I have little doubt that you’d be regarded in a new light by the authorities.’
‘Well, my organisation hasn’t always been on the same side as the NYPD…’ They both laughed. ‘But, yes, we could support everyone else in a covert way and maybe I personally could act as liaison between what we might call the good and the bad sides in this Zorin project?’
‘That would be great,’ said Wilder, ‘and as you’ll know far better than anyone else how Balboni thinks – you may even know of some of his hideaways, that kind of thing.’
‘I do,’ agreed Massimo, and the two clinked glasses as their food miraculously arrived at that moment. ‘And for our part in this joint effort for the good of the city and preventing the possible loss of so many lives, I presume that the authorities will forget our differences from the past and that we will be allowed to start again with a clean slate?’
‘Well, provided there aren’t half a dozen unsolved murders included in that,’ replied Wilder, and again they both laughed.
They finished lunch, but only the first bottle of Barolo, as Massimo boasted about some of his past escapades, most of them poking fun at Balboni and his gang. During this, at a specifically agreed time, Bob Brady got one of his people to ring Massimo’s mobile. When he answered there was an apology for a wrong number, and Massimo switched his mobile off again – though not before Wilder had captured all its data using Perry’s pairing software.
As Wilder was about to leave, he again impressed on Massimo the need for extreme urgency.
‘You’re only going to be able to start with a clean slate and a new first day in the rest of your life if we find where Balboni’s hidden the machines before they can use them,’ he said as they parted.
‘I do understand, Tom, and I’ll ring you within the hour with something, I promise.’
As soon as Wilder had left the restaurant, two men came over to Massimo from another table. Three glasses of brandy were ordered and after the waiter had delivered these and left the three of them alone, Massimo leant forward towards the middle of the table, as did the other two.
‘We have an excellent opportunity here,’ said Massimo. ‘We can keep feeding Wilder and his colleagues whatever information we choose to give them. Even with the NYPD and IPI resources they’re never going to find the machines in time to stop Zorin.’
‘So what do you have in mind?’ asked the smaller of the two, his large eyes made even more grotesquely big by thick pebble glasses.
‘You’re the brains of the organisation, Alfredo, you tell me,’ said Massimo.
Completely un-phased by this mockery, pebble-eyes paused for a moment and then said, ‘I would have thought that Mr Zorin would pay a king’s ransom to be kept constantly updated with everything that his pursuers were doing, wouldn’t you?’
‘That’s exactly what I think Zorin would do, pay very handsomely indeed,’ agreed Massimo.
‘You mean we just pretend to be on Wilder’s side?’ said the large thick-set man, who looked more suited to the role of club bouncer than conspirator.
‘Well done, got it in one,’ said Massimo, giving him a hearty slap on the shoulder. ‘I’ve only met this Zorin a couple of times and I could see immediately how he got to be a Russian oligarch. It’ll be interesting to see how much he’ll pay to know what Wilder and his people are up to and how far they’re getting on hunting down the machines.’
He took a long sip of his brandy.
‘He’s going to ask me, of course, how much I trust Wilder to come up with truthful information, isn’t he?
Though this was a rhetorical remark, Alfredo answered it.
‘This guy Wilder, his buddies in IPI, the cops – the lot of them – their lives are on the line, they gotta find the machines, they gotta keep telling the truth. Though on our side we can say whatever suits us. Good game, eh?’
‘I think you’re right,’ said Massimo. ‘Genuine info on how much the other side know has got to be worth a bundle – besides, I have another idea on how I can screw that bastard Balboni. I’ll give Zorin a ring. This should be good; let’s liven things up a bit in sunny Bermuda.’
Craithe Castle, Western Isles, Scotland
It had taken some time to get the two laptops from the warehouse in Norwich and up to Craithe Castle. As they might contain all manner of Zorin’s or Andrei’s secrets on them, Perry and other members of the team set about looking through them as fast as they could. As one might expect, there was a mass of rubbish to go through, but they were in luck. An early find was scanned images of a couple of maps.
The first showed Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens; the second, a strip of Long Island beyond Queens and including the township of Islip. Both maps had annotations on them though all of them were in Russian and one particular symbol was repeated here and there.
The Craithe team contacted Macrae who, fortunately, was in his office. As he had spent nearly two years seconded from the Towneley Bank to his father-in-law’s bank – the Rostov Kapital Bank of Moscow – Macrae spoke fluent Russian and could read it too. The symbol repeated a number of times was clearly to denote ‘Target’. And the most chilling of these came together with a note alongside it just near Islip itself – the greater New York City and Philadelphia air traffic control hub sited there. This confirmed earlier suspicions. This was Zorin’s ‘big’ one.
Macrae telephoned Wilder at the St. Regis Hotel to make sure he was in and then emailed the maps to him. As soon as they arrived, he and Brady got down to studying them. Not only was there a mass of targets of different types but also what looked at a glance to be computer centres for food distribution, the New York subway and many more tasks. As they looked around the maps it became clear that the first plan to avert disaster was the right one – to find the proto-Gemini and its operators in their hideaway and to somehow disable them. The secondary plan – of somehow disabling the machines over the internet, though considered very difficult to achieve, was still being worked on.
‘I just need to contact the professor at Craithe,’ said Wilder. ‘A short while ago the team were working on a possible way of tracking Zorin’s version of Gemini to its location.’
‘What else are we doing? Just so I can see what else the Five can do.’
‘Ah yes – the Five,’ said Wilder. ‘A while back you said you’d explain to me who they are, what they do.’
‘I did. It came about on a big case. IPI and me got involved with two of the big agencies. I don’t remember if it was the CIA or the Homeland Security guy who complained first. But whoever it was complained about the constant inter-agency turf wars and the manoeuvring to get more for their budgets. Anyway, to cut a long story short, he and the other guy from the other agency came to a truce.
‘Yeah. Both decided to stop holding up the investigation and just get on with it. In time, I’ve recruited one from each of the five big agencies. Each has come into the group on the understanding that their first loyalty was to the case they were working on, and their agency was only their second consideration.’
‘That’s unusual, surely?’ said Wilder. ‘I mean, isn’t it against an oath of each agency, something like that?’
‘Don’t know, don’t care,’ grinned Brady. ‘Each has been given a new Five name. No one but me knows their real names or identities. They’re all in their thirties. As I’m in my fifties, they call me Dad.’
‘Dad? How cute,’ said Wilder, grinning back.
‘Yeah, but it works. Really collaborating, they crack cases unbelievably quickly. They’ve become stars in their own agencies, which don’t even know of the extra brain-power their young stars are pulling in on each of their cases.’
‘So you have five young bright guys…’
‘Hand-picked, the very best of their agencies.’
‘So you virtually have each agency at your disposal?’
‘So how can the Five help with finding Andrei and his machines?’
‘I’ve given Charlie of the CIA most of the details and told him what could happen if Zorin picks one of his big targets. He passed it on to the others and they have a meeting later today to assess how much each of them has managed to find out. Of course I’ll let you know the outcome.’
‘For example, all five agencies are likely to have something on the Massimo and Balboni organisations. They guess that these two have not really been let in on Zorin’s plans, so there’s no point in bringing them into any of the agencies for questioning. But Massimo in particular may come in handy, with his organisation’s eyes and ears out looking for Andrei or picking up any street-talk about his machines.’
‘Good. There’s only one other avenue that’s occurred to me,’ said Wilder, ‘and that’s finding the head of the snake – Zorin himself – and chopping it off.’
‘And what are you doing about that?’ smiled Brady.
‘I’m working on it, may have an answer for us in the morning.’
‘In the morning, eh?’ said Brady. ‘Knowing you, if you manage it by then it will only be by barely legal means – the width of a human hair. Is that right?’
‘You don’t want to know,’ replied Wilder.
Zorin’s Residence, London
Katya Rodchenkova got back to Zorin’s house at around six in the evening. She had been surprised when, just two days earlier, Zorin and Mitkin had suddenly packed and left. They told her they might be away a couple of weeks. But she was happy enough. Zorin had arranged for one of his rich friends to give her a commission and each day she went out and did what she enjoyed most, painting murals.
She freshened up and was delighted when a call came through for her from Wilder. Their long chats about finding who’d killed her father always cheered her up.
‘You remember the chat we had in the pub about it maybe becoming necessary for you to help me out by doing a search of Zorin’s house?’ asked Wilder.
‘Yes, I wrote all your instructions down. Very exciting.’
‘It will be easier now that Zorin’s left you alone in the house. But you’ll still have to do the bit with the two security guys. Do you feel up to that?’
‘Oh, yes I do,’ said Katya, ‘The day after our chat I went to your house and I found the little blue bottle in the bathroom cupboard. I’ve hidden it in my room. Does this mean we’re going through with the plan?’
‘Yes, it does,’ said Wilder. ‘My young colleague from IPI will come to the house this evening, after you’ve dealt with the guards. But before we commit to this, are you absolutely sure you can manage it?
‘Come on. Though my father always kept me away from his world, it’s in the blood. Don’t worry, I’m up for it.’
‘Good,’ said Wilder. ‘The young man from IPI will come this evening. Just give him the signal when you’re ready and he’ll be with you. Good luck, and ring me in the morning to tell me how it went. Okay?’
‘Will do,’ she said, and put down the phone, her body trembling with excitement.
As Wilder had suggested, that evening she left Zorin’s house, walked down the hill and out of Kensington Palace Gardens. She turned right and, soon after that, up a side street to the Mason’s Arms pub. She was wearing a bright red scarf around her neck and had been told that Wilder’s young colleague from IPI, Peter Smythe, would be wearing a plain red tie.
As soon as she entered the pub she spotted him sitting in a bay window seat by himself, nursing a pint of best bitter.
‘Hey, Katya. Tom Wilder sent me.’
Somehow his appearance reassured her. His thick-rimmed glasses gave him a serious air and she instantly felt that Wilder’s description of him as being very thorough and dependable looked to be true in the flesh. He rose quickly from his seat and went off to the bar to buy her a glass of white wine.
‘I don’t know if Mr Wilder told you,’ he said as he sat down beside her, ‘but I’m trained in house searches and I thought that after you’ve drugged the guards, the two of us working together would increase the chances of finding something useful for him.’
Katya grinned back at him. ‘That’s good, ’cos I’m not.’
‘Don’t worry. When we get to the house, you go on in and I’ll hang back,’ said Smythe. ‘You can let me in as soon as the two security guards have been drugged and are asleep. Then we can get going and share the workload – we’ve got less than an hour till the drug wears off so, to be on the safe side, I’ll set an alarm on my phone. After our searches, I’ll leave a trail such as an incompetent burglar would leave, remember?’
As they got towards the house, Katya let herself in. She went straight down to the kitchens just as the two security guards came in for their usual pre-shift mugs of tea.
Luckily Katya was already boiling the kettle and setting out the mugs and it seemed natural for her to continue doing that. She had already ground some of Wilder’s pills from the blue bottle. These were now a fine powder so that they would quickly dissolve. The two guards had their backs to her, busy discussing some play in a football match and she slipped some powder into each of the mugs.
‘There you go,’ she said, as she put the mugs down on the large refectory table where they had settled themselves. She joined them and watched, fascinated to see how soon they would begin to fall asleep. In due course, they both did begin to nod off, and Katya helped them as they gently slumped to the floor.
She looked at her watch. It was eleven-thirty.
She ran upstairs and into the main entrance hall where she switched off the alarm and opened the front door. Peering out, she looked left and then right, and Smythe appeared from shadows.
‘So what do we do now?’ she asked as he came in and quietly shut the front door.
‘You take Zorin’s bedroom and bathroom and I’ll do the drawing room and his study’ he said. ‘Let’s meet back here in the hall about twelve-thirty to see how we’ve got on.’
They duly split up and Katya made her way upstairs and into Zorin’s bedroom. She carefully searched each drawer in each chest of drawers, the small ornamental desk in the corner, and both of the bedside tables. In the drawer of the bedside table with the telephone on it, she found a small jotter pad. It had just one telephone number on it. She immediately took a note of it on her mobile phone but left the note and pad where she’d found them. She was quite excited by the find as she recognised that it was a Moscow telephone code and number.
She found nothing in the bathroom but was amazed when she got into the dressing room. It was almost the same size as the bedroom itself. It consisted of a large walk-in cupboard with open-topped tray-drawers filled with what must have been more than fifty shirts. She noticed that almost all were hand-tailored by Turnbull and Asser of Jermyn Street. On the other side of the corridor running down the middle of the room there hung countless suits. These were hung in what was clearly an order – heavier winter suits at one end of the cupboard and lighter suits at the other. Beyond these summer suits were jackets, from tweeds through to cotton. Beyond them was a large number of slacks, casual trousers and Bermuda shorts.
It was a tedious task going through each of them, feeling the pockets from the outside in the hope of finding that one or two might contain forgotten notes, wallets, or other items of interest.
Suddenly, she was rewarded for having been so thorough; in one of the suits, halfway along the row, she felt something in one of the inside breast pockets.
Her heart thumping, she felt inside the pocket itself and pulled out a small notebook. It had only a few notes in it and she feared that they might be old, forgotten, having sat there for months, maybe years. She took it over to a chair at the foot of the bed and examined it a bit more closely. She was particularly intrigued and suddenly excited by a note dated only the previous week. Why had the note been dated, she wondered, and what did it mean? It simply read ‘Bermuda contact DBx DAG trippt556’. As there were a few more scribblings, she kept the notebook and glanced at her watch. It was 12.33 a.m.
Putting the notebook in her pocket, she got up and hurried downstairs. The two of them discussed what they had found and agreed that Katya would ring Wilder with their findings at around seven or eight in the morning New York time.
Smythe then looked around the drawing room for something worthy of a burglary here in London’s most expensive road. He soon spotted a late Russian Tsar’s Fabergé Easter egg. Carefully he lifted it off its stand. Looking around the room he spotted a smallish waste paper basket and, using some old newspapers which had not yet been cleared away and were still lying on the coffee table, he gently wrapped both the egg and the stand and stowed them away in the basket.
‘You’d probably best get back down into the kitchen now,’ he said. ‘Take about a quarter of the amount of powder you gave the Guards and then join them on the kitchen floor.’
‘I will, but out of interest, how is this break-in going to look plausible?’
‘Ah, what you don’t know is that before Wilder suggested this particular incident, he checked and found that the security alarm system was upgraded only two weeks ago. This incident will be blamed on the security people who installed the upgrade. Whoever looks into this in due course will be sure to come to that conclusion. So don’t worry about it anymore, okay?’
Katya went downstairs, took her powder and lay down near the two guards. Smythe left the Zorin house, leaving the front door only just open, and made for a small car parked nearby. A few minutes later he managed to get into the car, hot-wired it and drove out of the north end of Kensington Palace Gardens, giving a cheery wave to the security people there at the top of the gardens.
Within half an hour the first of the guards slowly woke and, soon guessing at what must have happened, got up and roused the other two. There was a heated discussion for a few minutes about how this could have happened. But that was until they realised the futility of their arguing and went upstairs and looked around. It didn’t take them long to find the front door slightly open, the alarm switched off and the Tsar’s Easter egg missing.
As predicted by Smythe, they blamed the people who had upgraded the security system and rang the police. It being the early hours of the morning, the police took some time to arrive, and when they did, they took hours testing for finger prints, looking around for anything else that might help them find who had done this – though they too quickly bought into the story that the upgraders of the alarm system were to blame. ‘Must have had a member of the gang who’d installed it,’ said one. With many of the houses in the road being either embassies or owned by the likes of Zorin, they were keen to be seen to do a thorough job, and it was broad daylight by the time they were finished.
Katya answered their questions and, as it was still far too early to ring Wilder, she decided to go back to Wilder’s mews house where she now knew the location of the key and the alarm code. There she lay down for a few hours so as to be more alert for her call to Wilder.
She woke around ten and did her calculations again – she could safely ring at about eleven-thirty; it would be six-thirty in New York. She made some coffee and breakfast, went out and got a newspaper, and it soon got to the time she had decided to ring Wilder.
‘How did you get on, then?’ asked Wilder as soon as he answered the call.
‘I’d say pretty well,’ replied Katya, and went on to give him a full report, discussing their finds and giving details of those notes that had particularly caught Katya and Smythe’s attention.
‘I’ll certainly try out the Moscow telephone number when we’ve finished this call and I’ll let you know what I think of the other finds when I’ve had a good look at them,’ said Wilder.
Wilder rang room service for some coffee and, after this had arrived, he settled himself comfortably and rang the Moscow number.
‘Zharkov,’ came the strong, deep voice he knew so well. He immediately replaced the receiver and, in case Zharkov rang back, Wilder rang Brady – that way Zharkov would get his caller busy and assume that it was just a simple wrong number.
Wilder was intrigued by the note Katya had found in the suit pocket. He decided he would discuss it with Brady as, try as he might, he could make no headway in understanding it.
When Wilder got through to Brady he relayed Katya’s findings, and Zharkov answering the telephone number from the bedside pad. Brady had an immediate explanation – at least for the Zharkov call.
‘Overnight we’ve had a lot more in from your people at GCHQ and the NSA. With what we have now put together, it seems clear that Zorin just may be doing all of this on behalf of the Russian President.’
‘You surprise me,’ said Wilder. ‘Though it might explain a number of things, I still didn’t see Zorin as a President’s man.’
‘We can look into that later,’ said Brady. ‘But your Bermuda note also begins to make more sense. It looks as though that’s where Zorin has moved to. We’ve already been on to the office of the Governor of Bermuda, but haven’t heard anything back from them yet.’
‘It seems today’s going to be the day Zorin makes his move and attacks what has been referred to as the ‘big’ one… Craithe will think it’s still too early for them to ring me, so I’ll make it easy and ring them – see what news they have,’ said Wilder.
Before ringing Craithe, he took a large swig of coffee and a deep breath. He could feel it in his bones – it was a similar feeling to the one he often used to get before a mission in Afghanistan. This was indeed going to be a big day.
Fifth Avenue, New York City
It was just a few blocks up Fifth Avenue from the St. Regis Hotel to Bob Brady’s apartment. Though it was unseasonably cold, Wilder looked forward to a brisk walk. The snow had gone from the sidewalks, but when he reached Central Park it looked beautiful in the morning sun, with sprinklings of still un-melted snow lying around like icing on a cake.
When he tried to recall it later, he was unable to remember what had made him look further up along Fifth Avenue at the particular moment that he did. But his attention was suddenly, inexplicably drawn to an exceptionally tall, thin man fifty yards up ahead. He had just come out of an apartment block and seemed anxious, looking this way and that and, even at a distance of some fifty yards, it was easy to see that he had a furtive air about him.
Gauging him against his fellow pedestrians, he seemed substantially taller than Wilder’s six-foot three – maybe two inches taller, towering over those about him. From what Wilder could see of him, he was dressed in a dull grey British-style waterproof, the drab kind which is not even actually waterproof. It hung from him as though he were a coat-hanger – he was clearly very thin. Inexplicably, a chill ran through Wilder. The man seemed uncertain which way to turn. As he stood there looking both left and right, it occurred to Wilder that he was looking for a cab.
It was while doing this that the man’s eyes suddenly met Wilder’s. For no apparent reason, both of them stood locked in each other’s gaze. Wilder now noticed his pale sallow complexion, deep shadows under his eyes – a haunted look in them; he remembered all of this, and later put his next reaction down to a flash of his heightened senses, on edge lately with his hunt for Zorin’s copy of Gemini.
Wilder was hardly even consciously aware of what he was doing, but a mirror image of the man sprang into his mind. This was the same man he’d seen rushing out of Yulian’s apartment in Norwich and driving off at speed in an SUV. In that instant he remembered all the information that had been gathered, The name of Zorin’s man suddenly sprang into his mind and, on a sudden impulse he shouted it out.
‘Andrei!’ he yelled. The man’s mouth fell open, but at that instant a yellow cab pulled up and, though he seemed half-frozen in shock, he eventually fumbled with the cab door and climbed into it. The cab come down the one-way system and passed by Wilder. The man looked up at Wilder as the cab went by. There could be little doubt – this was indeed Andrei, the man sought by the police for the murder of Yulian, but more importantly right now, Zorin’s operative of the machines.
There was no time to analyse all the thoughts that raced through Wilder’s mind, but his response was immediate. He was lucky. There was a cab-for-hire immediately there for the taking. He jumped in and told him to follow the cab in front.
It was the shortest taxi ride he had ever had. At the next available turn, Andrei’s cab took the left just after the lights had changed, and before Wilder could urge his driver to follow on, he’d stopped at the lights. Wilder memorised Andrei’s cab’s number, paid his own driver and disconsolately climbed out to see Andrei’s cab vanishing into heavy traffic.
Wilder turned back the way he’d been going and ran further up Fifth Avenue towards Brady’s building. On his way, he rang ahead on his mobile. As soon as he got through to Brady he told him what he’d seen and gave him the cab’s number.
‘Any chance that your friends in the NYPD could find out where the cab was taking the tall man?’ asked Wilder.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Brady; Wilder rang off and continued running towards Brady’s place.
When he got up to Brady’s apartment floor, he ran straight in through the open front door to find Brady waiting for him.
‘NYPD have done a great job. They got through to the cab company and tracked the cab. Your man dumped it only two blocks further on.’
‘Had he given an address before that?’ asked Wilder, hoping wildly that it might give them the area where the quantum computer was – even if not the actual address.
‘No, must have been frightened off by you because he only said ‘Queens’ to the cab driver.’
Then another thought occurred to Wilder.
‘Where’s Balboni’s apartment?’ he asked.
‘One block back down from here… Oh my God, that seems to finally confirm that it was in deed Andrei. Wonder what the hell he was doing calling on Balboni? I would have thought the very last place he’d risk going would be coming down here to visit him.’
‘Christ,’ cursed Wilder. ‘There was just something about the man. How extraordinary I should see him like that. We’ll need to redouble our efforts to find him. I guess it would need to be something damned important to bring him out of the safety of his hiding place in Queens. Why wouldn’t he just ring Balboni? Perhaps he needed to come and physically collect something. What would Balboni have for him that meant a visit? A gun? No, surely not just a gun – one of Balboni’s men could have dropped that into him in Queens without risking him being seen out in the open.’
‘Could some friction have come up amongst them, some kind of falling out?’ suggested Brady. ‘It would sure be interesting to know the answer to this. Still, all we can do is speculate at present. We’ll know the truth soon enough.’
‘Yes,’ said Brady, ‘I reckon they’ll have to do whatever they’ve got planned tomorrow at the latest. Almost every hour that passes makes it more likely that one of our lot will come up with a break that will expose them and put an end to their plans.’
‘Or our people on Craithe will make electronic contact with their machine,’ said Wilder. ‘As you say, one way or another, if they’re going to manage to do this thing at all, they’re now under pressure to do it soon.’
Zorin had just got back up onto the long lawn that lay between the house and the beach; he had enjoyed the exhilaration of another swim in the crystal-clear seas. It had cleared his mind and reinvigorated him. But as he walked up towards the veranda he saw Mitkin standing there urgently waving a telephone.
As he stepped up onto the decking Mitkin handed him the phone and half-whispered as he mouthed the name, ‘Rocco Balboni’. Zorin raised his eyes skyward in mock-supplication but took the phone.
‘Rocco, what’s up?’
‘As you told me it would look less suspicious if I got Andrei’s escape air tickets out of Montreal rather than your Matt Kimber, I went ahead and got open tickets. Then, damn me if your man Andrei doesn’t come bursting in here to get the tickets.’
‘He what?’ shouted out Zorin.
‘Yeah, comes the whole way here. Explained he no longer trusted not actually having his escape tickets in his own hands. I don’t know what’s going on in your organisation but he forced my address out of Kimber and next thing…’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Zorin. ‘I’ll sort Kimber out and give Andrei a call.’
‘Well, I’d do that right away. The man’s really on edge, if you ask me he looks as though he wants to jump ship – quit the project.’
‘Calm down,’ said Zorin. ‘For a start, they’ll surely never remember his face from a glimpse of it in Norwich. Secondly, though he’s worried that the people on Craithe are looking for him and getting closer, there’s no need to panic. They’ve an almost impossible task in finding him or his machines. Anyway, there’s no harm done, is there? I’ll give him a call.’
‘I’m not so sure that no harm’s done,’ said Balboni. ‘He rang me after he’d got back to his machines. He told me that someone he’d seen only for a matter of seconds in Norwich seemed to have remembered him and had shouted out his name as he climbed into a taxi outside my place on Fifth Avenue. He wondered if by any chance some of the authorities had made up an identikit picture of him or retrieved his passport photo or somehow got hold of a photograph of him. In short, he was worried there might be leaflets out there with mug-shots of him.
‘Oh shit,’ said Zorin.
‘Well, of course I told him that was just crazy, not true. But he’s on the brink; you need have a word with him, yourself.’
‘Okay, I’ll deal with it. Just keep him in Queens till the job’s done. Talk to you later,’ said Zorin, and slammed the phone down.
A few minutes passed while Zorin raged that such pettiness had come close to jeopardising the operation. The telephone rang again. Zorin looked across to Mitkin, who frowned – only about three people in the world were supposed to know the number. Perhaps it would be someone for the owners, not knowing that they were away and had rented it out.
‘Yes?’ said Zorin, giving nothing away.
‘Mr Zorin? It’s Giuseppe Massimo here.’
‘How the hell did you get the number here?’ asked Zorin, rattled by the surprise.
‘If you remember, you gave it to me before you decided to give your project to Rocco Balboni,’ replied Massimo, an icy tone in his voice.
Zorin’s mind raced. He had entirely forgotten about Massimo, though it was only days before that he had dumped him. ‘How many days? Who cares? Better care now – he knows too much about the project, doesn’t he?’ As these thoughts rushed through his mind he also thought about conciliation; at this delicate stage of the game, this needed conciliation.
‘Yes, of course. What can I do for you, Mr Massimo?’
‘It’s more what I can do for you,’ said Massimo. Zorin caught the hint of menace.
‘Really? How so?’ he said, as breezily as he could manage.
‘I’ve been approached by a Mr Wilder. I believe you know him?’
For a second time in just minutes Zorin felt a sense of panic well up in him. Wilder indeed? What was the new sales director of Gemini doing in New York? But, more importantly, what the hell was he doing talking to Massimo? Need to find out more – play for time.
‘Wilder, Wilder,’ Zorin mused as though trying to place the name. ‘The name kinda rings a bell,’ he said at last.
‘Well, anyway, he knows you,’ continued Massimo. ‘He’s after the man who has a clone or copy of their Gemini software and he’s also looking for your Andrei.’
‘And?’ said Zorin, desperately trying to get a grip on this unwelcome development.
‘As I said, this Mr Wilder came to me,’ said Massimo. He went on to tell Zorin how he had been recruited to help put Balboni away for what he was planning to do; to do the same to everyone involved in it. Zorin sighed as Massimo reeled off the list of people working with Wilder on finding and stopping Andrei.
‘To cut a long story short,’ said Massimo, after rambling on for some time, ‘Wilder himself is going to coordinate all the US agencies and his own people’s progress in finding your Andrei. He’s going to keep me informed of any progress in return for me telling whatever I know. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Everyone in the pack knowing each time one of the others get closer to the prey – your Andrei and his machines.’
‘All right, all right. Where are you going with this – as though I couldn’t guess?’ said Zorin, the sting of bile rising in his throat.
‘I thought that it might be worth a modest investment on your part to be regularly updated on how close the hounds of State and Mr Wilder are getting to your project.’
‘What size of investment would we be talking about for a regular updating service?’ asked Zorin, prepared for the worst.
‘A hundred grand?’
‘Done,’ said Zorin. ‘I’ll pay you half now, half when all of this is finished. And for that I want to know every single move this Wilder makes as well as all the moves of all the rabble of the State authorities?’
‘Agreed. And so to the first piece of news for you under our new agreement,’ said Massimo. ‘The NYPD have had an identikit drawing done of your Andrei as seen by Wilder on Fifth Avenue this afternoon. It’s being circulated as we speak. Soon enough a cast of hundreds will be out looking for him. I strongly suggest you contact your Andrei and tell him to keep inside with the curtains drawn, if you see what I mean.’ There was a seriously misplaced chuckle from Massimo, who then added, ‘Sorry, I was only joking about the curtains.’
After the call from Massimo, Zorin was happy to make the necessary financial arrangements. It was almost worth it to keep Massimo on side, even if he got no more bulletins from him. If some did come in, however, they’d be welcome. Less welcome would be the telephone calls, but he supposed that was just part of the price of doing business again with the man.
As soon as he had organised Massimo’s money, he rang Andrei.
‘I’m sorry you felt you had to go to Balboni to collect your escape money and tickets. I’ve reprimanded him for not following my instructions to get those to you the moment he’d arranged your flights,’ he lied.
‘Thanks Victor. I knew it wouldn’t be your fault – we’ve been through too much together for you not to take care of me properly.’
‘That’s right,’ said Zorin. ‘But what prompted you to risk leaving the warehouse? You must have known I’d ensure you got your escape package in due course.’
‘That’s just one of the things that was bothering me,’ said Andrei. ‘I got the impression that your Mr Kimber had vanished as soon as he left me here. I felt alone. And I also felt that this guy Balboni might be holding out on me. And, finally, the other thing nagging at me is the Craithe lot. They are deploying just about everything at me. I can sense it on the laptop that’s twinned with the quantum machine. It keeps making a pinking sound from time to time. I daren’t shut it down as it’s an integral part of the whole operation. Yet there must be some kind of tracking software hidden on it – very eerie, though I’ve had no luck finding it.’
‘But apart from that how’s it going?’ asked Zorin, keen after all the mounting distractions of the day to learn how near they were the culmination of the project.
‘I’ve been doing my last calculations yet again,’ replied Andrei. ‘It’s now safe to say that I can just about guarantee breaking into the air traffic control system by mid-morning tomorrow at the very latest. You can now prepare your recorded announcement and demands for the US President if you haven’t done those already.’
‘No, they’re not done yet, but that’s for a reason you don’t need to worry about,’ said Zorin. ‘We’ll just stick to the original plan. I’ll give my demands out at eleven tomorrow morning and you give them a quick demonstration of a control centre shut-down to show we mean business; they will then have till midday to comply.’
‘Yes, it’ll be good to get to that point,’ said Andrei. ‘I seem to have been waiting forever for it, can hardly wait for it to be here.’ There was a pent-up excitement in his voice and Zorin was glad that, from the sound of him, he didn’t have to worry anymore about Andrei’s motivation or staying power.
‘Keep in touch with developments,’ said Zorin, ‘but whatever happens, keep indoors, maybe even keep the curtains drawn.’
As he put the phone down he turned and looked at Mitkin.
‘Do you think Andrei really appreciates how difficult his position is?’ he asked.
‘How do you mean, his position?’ Mitkin looked back at him, puzzled.
‘Just as soon as the Americans have agreed to our demands,’ explained Zorin, ‘the two of us have to leave Bermuda. Andrei knows that if the US President doesn’t agree to our demands, our plan says that Andrei has to abandon the system right there and then and get himself up to Canada. He’s to leave his machines running on their own, holding control of New York’s air traffic, with the US authorities unable to do anything about it. That’ll give them plenty to do while Andrei makes his escape.’
‘Yeah, he knows that’s the plan, so what are we worrying about?’ Zorin kept looking at him. Mitkin still did not get it.
‘Let me explain, then.’ A note of anger had crept into Zorin’s voice because Mitkin was forcing him to say what he didn’t even want to admit to. ‘I give our demands. The other side have an hour to comply. But we can’t sit around here waiting to see if they do or don’t. The moment the President hears what all this is really about – our demands – everybody up at the White House is going to go berserk. They’ll start by tearing their hair out in rage for misjudging this thing and then they’ll calm down and, probably with cold fury, they’ll throw everything they’ve got at us.’
‘Yes, I accept that’s probably what’ll happen,’ said Mitkin, ‘but I still don’t see…’
‘So, I have to spell it out for you, eh?’
Mitkin said nothing.
‘While the two of us are getting the hell out of here, there will be nothing we can do for Andrei. He was right to worry. With these images of him now out on leaflets, how far do think he’ll get when he comes out into the open to try making his escape?’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Mitkin, reality dawning on him.
‘Exactly. Trouble is we can’t spell that out for him or everything we’ve been working for will count for nothing. If he panics, we’re lost; he just needs to do the job.’
The two of them sat on the veranda and rather disconsolately looked out to sea. Tough trying to change the world, especially when you’re up against the most powerful nation on Earth and, of course, that bloody man Wilder from Craithe.
Zorin glanced at his watch. It would be coming up to 3 p.m. in Moscow. It would not be long now till the big event. But he was nervous and he cursed his weakness as he saw that his hands were shaking. So much depended on this final attack working that he’d lost his usual cool. He’d even put out two pens next to a pad – in case one of them failed during the telephone call. He cursed again under his breath and reminded himself that he had known the President for years.
A strange, faint spasm shot through his throat and neck as the telephone rang, and he forced himself to calm down. Damn it, he wasn’t even going to be speaking to the President, he was only calling General Zharkov.
‘General Zharkov,’ he said. ‘How are you this afternoon?’
‘I’m well, thank you, Victor. Everything all right your end?’
Zorin could not possibly answer the General’s question with the unvarnished truth – that they were not yet ready to carry out the attack. He’d need to prevaricate.
‘Like all operations of this kind, there are some minor tweaks to be done, then we’ll be a hundred per cent,’ he said.
‘What does that mean, minor tweaks?’ asked General Zharkov. His job was simply to stand between the President and the world, to shield him from any possible scandal. ‘Minor tweaks’ sounded well away from normal – was everything really all right?
‘Minor tweaks,’ replied Zorin, ‘simply means that Andrei’s machine needs to remain hidden inside what one might call an electronic safe-house until the very last moment before it can then do the final hacking into the target computers. The job’s ninety-nine percent completed; these minor tweaks are like doing the fine tuning when listening to a radio programme and getting it spot-on to the right channel or programme.’
‘Okay, but when we get to the agreed hour,’ said the General, ‘and when Andrei switches on his machines and takes over the place, will all the air traffic controllers sitting in front of their computer screens acknowledge that they have lost control of their system to him – yes or no?’
‘Yes they will,’ confirmed Zorin – hoping that this would be the case, though he hadn’t had this confirmed by Andrei yet.
‘Just so that we’re all completely clear on this, when the White House gets our message, will they instantly panic, get through to the air traffic control headquarters to check that’s true, and will they be told that it is indeed true?
‘Yes, exactly that,’ confirmed Zorin.
At that moment, Mitkin put his head and shoulders around the door. He had a wide grin on his face and he gave Zorin a thumbs-up, which Zorin acknowledged with one in return.
‘Oh, and I’ve just had a message from your namesake, Andrei. The link from his computer into the heart of the air traffic control computers has just become one hundred percent – the tweaks have been successfully tweaked.’ He could hardly believe his luck at the timing.
‘That’s excellent news indeed,’ said Zharkov. ‘The President will be delighted. And may I say that your handling of this whole project has been an object lesson to us all in perseverance and masterly organisation.’
‘Well, thank you, Andrei,’ replied Zorin. ‘But we should perhaps wait till the show is over and the US President has acquiesced to all our demands.’
‘You’re right, Victor,’ replied Zharkov. ‘When we embarked on this cyber-warfare idea I had my doubts. Yet here we are, without a shot or a single ICBM being fired; we’re on the brink of getting the greatest power in the world to back down on so many of its cherished policies.’
Silence fell as the two contemplated the implications.
‘Just one thing – apart from the rumour that the people who invented the software, what’s their name…?’
‘Gemini,’ replied Zorin. ‘A team of geeks on the Scottish island of Craithe…’
‘That’s the people,’ said Zharkov. ‘Apart from the vague possibility of that Craithe lot being able to block what your Andrei is about to do, could the US President back down on all these policies as soon as we lift the threat to his aircraft?’
‘The short answer is “No”,’ said Zorin. ‘The machine is effectively hidden in a vast city and we can just sit there with it on stand-by for months if necessary. Just sitting there until the President fulfils the promises he makes today. He will get that message too. This is no quick here-today-gone-tomorrow problem for him. Today he has to bow to our threat, and then implement the changes afterwards for all the world to see, or else…’
‘Excellent,’ cried Zharkov. ‘A bloody one-man army!’
‘Well, there is Andrei at the machine, and Mitkin my invaluable right-hand man, and…’
‘Yes, yes, of course, your team,’ conceded Zharkov. ‘They too will be recognised and honoured. Anyway, I’ll now send you the two recordings. I am only sending them because we’re still doing this pretence thing that the President is powerless to stop these fanatics – that’s you and Andrei – from holding both the US and Russian presidents hostage to the idea of returning Russia to its former international standing.’
‘Yes, I am aware of the narrative behind all of this,’ said Zorin. ‘But I forget why you’re sending me the recordings.’
‘Just in case anything goes seriously wrong and you get caught, you need to be in possession of what are supposedly your demands,’ replied the General, irritation creeping into his voice. ‘I’m sending them now.’
‘Ah yes, I remember now,’ said Zorin.
As they both waited for the files to come through, Zharkov asked ‘So what are you going to do when we’ve pulled this off?’ There was no way in which Zorin could tell the General the complete truth, so he gave him a version of it that he had agreed personally with the President.
‘I’ve had enough of playing the playboy in London,’ said Zorin. ‘Idling away in Monte Carlo, Aspen and all that. I want to go home. I’ve already got people working on my houses in St Petersburg and Moscow and my dacha in the Crimea. But I don’t want to sit doing nothing when I get back to Mother Russia, and I’m attracted by the President’s idea of my fulfilling the kind of role Igor Rodchenko held – “Fixer to the President” – though I wouldn’t want it to lead to the same end as Rodchenko’s, of course.’
They both laughed.
‘Ah, the files are coming through,’ said Zorin. ‘Why don’t I play them through and then ring you back?’
‘Do that,’ said Zharkov, and, ignoring Zorin’s suggestion that perhaps they should not celebrate till after the show was over later today, he added, ‘And my personal congratulations on an excellent job well done.’
Zorin, also ignoring his own caveat that this whole thing was not yet in the bag, replied with, ‘Thank you, Andrei. That means a lot to me, especially coming from you.’
Queens, New York City
The game of cat-and-mouse that Perry and Andrei were engaged in was conducted in fractions of fractions of a second. Though waged across the three and a half thousand miles of the intervening Atlantic Ocean, every move that either made could spell success or failure for either of them.
Andrei needed to pull the machines out of the wire Faraday Cage so that the quantum machine was able to communicate with the outside world through its synchronised laptop. But in doing so he exposed it to an attack from Perry – like two aircraft engaged in a dogfight, but in the old-fashioned way, all of it fought on visuals, each manoeuvring round the other in and out of banks of cloud, in sight of each other one millisecond, gone again the next.
This put a huge strain on the hunted Andrei, for he could see nothing of Gemini, but was just aware that it was constantly there waiting for him. He had to just try one more time that he had a good link onto the air control centre’s machines. This last, hopefully quick attempt would establish for certain all he needed to do the real shut-down of the hub at precisely 11 a.m. As soon as he’d set the cage aside, he was out in the open. His fingers rattled over the keyboard of the controlling laptop, and then pressed ‘enter’. He should go instantly onto the internet, get connected to the air traffic hub at Islip and be able to initiate the attack.
Exactly thirty-two seconds after 11am, all the air traffic controllers found themselves sitting in front of blank screens. All the small icons depicting individual aircraft were gone. All the little tags denoting the flight number, each representing hundreds of souls, suddenly gone.
Over a light meal a week or more earlier, Wilder and Lucy had laughed a lot. Though he was at the height of his problems with Gemini and Zorin, he’d hidden it well. He’d even given his blessing to her latest holiday treat. She was going off to Italy. Her explanation of it was muddled. Her uncle’s brother – no relation really, was marrying for the second time and she’d been invited to attend. This wedding was to an Italian lady and was taking place in Rome. She’d be travelling with her uncle and aunt who’d shared bringing her up with Wilder. The romance of Rome, the fun, friends, what more could you ask for?
Wilder hadn’t even troubled himself to ask her how long this wedding trip was to be. It was not till the day of the culminating battle between Craithe and Andrei that he received a text from her. She’d be flying back into New York with her uncle and aunt at the very time Andrei was attempting to shut down the air traffic hub. A feeling of nausea suddenly swept over him. But there was nothing he could do; the flight was due to land around 11 a.m.
Lucy had enjoyed the flight. They would soon be approaching New York. It was one minute and forty-eight seconds after 11 a.m. – just one minute and sixteen seconds after Andrei had blanked out the controllers’ screens. Though Lucy was a frequent flyer – going to Europe every holiday to spend some time with her father, she still loved the wonderful sight of downtown Manhattan whenever her aircraft’s flight plan took her into JFK that way.
The captain had announced that they were beginning their descent. Lucy peered out of her window, excitement widening her eyes. It was just past eleven.
Suddenly she recoiled when the noise of the aircraft engine suddenly increased in volume to a roar; the aircraft lurched violently upward and to the right, physically pressing all the passengers down sharply into their seats. She could feel the G-force of the manoeuvre. Within milliseconds another aircraft shot past below them, going in the opposite direction. The speed of the near-miss was enough to cause some passengers to shout out. Lucy herself sucked in a breath sharply and instinctively as she reached for her uncle’s hand nearby.
She did the maths. Travelling in opposite directions, the aircraft had passed each other at substantially more than a thousand miles an hour.
‘God, that was close,’ she almost whispered, her voice harsh, her mouth suddenly dry. She reached out for the flute of champagne sitting in a small holder by the seat. Though none of the three of them had drunk much of the endless first-class supply through the flight, she was never more grateful for it in that instant of sharp shock.
She now looked back at her uncle. He, like her, was pale and sweating profusely. Once the terror had subsided a bit, Lucy looked out of the window again. She could now see more aircraft very close. They were both above and below them, though none at the same height. In all of her trips she could not remember ever seeing so many other aircraft at the same time.
On the flight deck the Captain was desperately trying to contact ground control; this was the first time he had ever experienced being suddenly shut off from a flight instruction in mid-sentence. Shocked and apprehensive he tried again and again, the sweat now trickling down into his eyes. It was now nearly two minutes since Andrei had cut the computer feeds to the air traffic controllers’ screens.
Peering ahead, the captain brushed this sweat from his eyes. The near miss had told him that normal height separation and directional safeguards had somehow been breached. Then it came to him in an instant; he had just been instructed before the silence to bank left on a new heading and to drop height to five thousand feet.
He now realised that he was still completing that manoeuvre. But what should he do now? Should he continue with that manoeuvre or should he straighten up? He felt he was going to be sick. He decided to straighten up.
Then he saw it dead ahead. At first it was but a tiny speck, like a fly on the glass in front of him. But it grew at an alarming speed. Within just seconds there it was again, suddenly far larger. As it came clear of an intervening cloud, the huge oncoming mass of metal seemed to be hurtling directly at him like something in a video game.
Guesswork told him the two aircraft would meet head-on in seconds. He pushed on full power and slammed the aircraft into a steep dive. It seemed like nothing had happened. Then, at blast, the nose dipped. He froze in his seat, squirming down into it as though to stop being hit by something physical. It was like a repeat of the other child’s tennis racket that had smashed into his head all those years ago. He winced at the memory and screwed his eyes tight shut. He even gave out a child-like whimper.
The backdraft of the other aircraft as it shot over the top of them caused his aircraft to react violently. It was as though he was in the midst of unimaginably dangerous turbulence, being thrown about as though the plane was just a tiny single-seater. Over the noise of his own aircraft’s engines, now at full throttle, the crescendo of noise as the other passed over the top of them with no more than a few feet of clear space between them was absolutely deafening.
But they missed each other.
Coming back to his senses with the shock of realisation that they had not actually hit each other, he glanced to his right at the young co-pilot next to him. He was still rigid with fear and had clearly wet his uniform, for he was beginning to squirm about in his seat. He was also wiping tears away from his face.
The captain got back control of the aircraft and, just as he managed it, ground control came on again in his earphones.
Perry, sitting with his face close up to the computer screen had been monitoring Andrei’s machine. Once locked onto it, it appeared as a small red dot amidst the lines of code. It came and went as Andrei took his machine in and out of its cage, on and off the internet.
Suddenly, he saw a flash of red again. It was just three minutes and six seconds after 11 a.m. Then, for no apparent reason, the red light stayed on. Perry’s fingers rattled across the keyboard confidently, pouring out the code that could kill Andrei’s machine. Row upon row of code flowed down the screen. He was aware there was a possibility that Andrei might try and lock the Craithe Gemini machine out. Perry’s first two attempts had failed to eradicate the red dot. It was like some mad video game without pictures, just seemingly senseless letters, numbers and symbols. But this was no game. As Perry could well guess, this situation was likely to lead to aborted landings, near misses and, in this now uncontrolled airspace, fatal collisions.
He typed feverishly. He then pressed a couple of keys on the quantum computer control panel. More code cascaded down the laptop screen. Then, as suddenly as it had all begun, it stopped. The red dot began to fade, through orange and then to nothing. In just three seconds, all that remained of was a little cursor caret. It sat there blinking away on the screen as though asking what it should do next.
But Andrei’s machines were dead. In that instant, Zorin’s great plans had died too.
Lucy’s uncle put his arm around her shoulder. The aircraft was now in level flight once more and the engine noise behind them had subsided to a mere murmur.
‘Sorry about that; brief technical glitch,’ said a voice from the air traffic control centre. ‘All’s well and we have you under our control again. Maintain heading two-two-eight and current height.’
The young co-pilot burst into tears but quickly got a hold of himself as the captain put a reassuring hand over onto his arm.
In first class, the cabin crew came around to see that everyone was all right, and Lucy’s uncle asked for a couple of large brandies.
Lucy looked out of the window, her thoughts in turmoil. She wondered if these events had anything to do with her father’s worries over the past few weeks. Suddenly the plane came out of a bank of clouds and, reassuringly, the magnificent sight of downtown Manhattan appeared below them. All right after all.
Craithe Castle, Scotland
In the lab on Craithe the team had been watching Perry’s every move. Now they breathed a collective sigh of relief and the professor went over to Perry.
‘I’m proud of you,’ he said. ‘You’ve proved decisively that even sophisticated clones of Gemini can be beaten by our original programme.’
‘Still,’ said Angus, ‘though others may have guessed that the threat is over, we’d better tell them officially.’
He glanced at his watch – it would be just five past eleven in New York. This confirmed, as they had guessed, that Zorin had chosen 11 a.m. as his moment of greatness. Angus looked down at a slip of paper and rang Wilder at Brady’s apartment.
There would be plenty of time later for congratulations and to go back over the struggle between Perry and Andrei, but right now it was time to tell the US President that it was officially all over. The President would already have been informed through his own communications channels that the air traffic control system had come back online. He would need Craithe’s technical confirmation that the threat was past and that he could prepare to tell the American people – especially New Yorkers – that a hoax threat had been dealt with and that stories of a new super cyber weapon were just myth.
Wilder and the others in Brady’s apartment opened a bottle of Brady’s prized thirty-year-old Talisker single malt scotch and drank a toast to the disaster averted.
But though that might have appeared to be an end to it, Brady and Wilder still had urgent work to do. Wilder rang the Governor of Bermuda again to make sure that nothing had flown out of Bermuda and, as far as it was possible to tell, that no powerboats had left the islands either. Wilder confirmed that they were leaving New York shortly and hoped to be arriving in Bermuda as fast as possible, in around three hours from now.
The news spread fast throughout the ring of expectant conspirators. Andrei rang Zorin with the bad news. Having failed, he was naturally on the defensive and spent some time telling him what had gone wrong and that he had really needed more time to perfect his clone. During Andrei’s call, Zorin had the time to make urgent signs to Mitkin. The first was made with a movement across his throat to indicate that the plan had failed, the second asked for a notepad and pen. With Andrei still trying to say how close he’d come to success, Mitkin gave the pad and pen. Zorin quickly scribbled a note and turned around on the table so that Mitkin could read it. ‘Destroy all evidence – get ready to leave’, it said.
Finally, Andrei asked Zorin what he should do about making his escape.
‘You took a trip down to Balboni’s place on Fifth Avenue, didn’t you? And you got your money and tickets all right?’
‘Okay then. Rocco Balboni has all the plans to get you back out of the US via Canada – the way you came in. Give him a ring immediately after this call. But bear in mind that though the US authorities will be out in force looking for both you and the machines, they have absolutely no idea where you are. I know this is going to be difficult, but try to relax as much as you can. You did a fantastic job and this project is not over just because the first attempt didn’t work out. You’re going to get another shot at this, only the next time with that bloody Gemini machine out of the way.’
‘So all’s not lost?’ said Andrei with a lift in his voice.
‘Certainly not,’ replied Zorin, ‘though we need to get you into Canada at least in the short term. So, chin up, as they say in the West, and ring Balboni as soon as I’m off the line.’
Andrei rang Balboni right away. He had been cheered by his conversation with Zorin. Nevertheless, he was still on the defensive as he told Balboni the details of the attack and how he had been stopped by the superior technology of the people who had invented the attack software.
‘They’ve spent years for all I know perfecting their software, I’ve only had weeks.’ Though this was an exaggeration, he went rambling on, speaking fast in his poor English. And after Zorin’s encouraging comments on the future, telling Balboni what he would do the next time – this had become so convincing that even Balboni began to believe it.
But in Andrei’s disappointment at his failure, his mind had lost its usual sharp edge. He had indeed already begun to talk about the future and failed to give any thought to Balboni’s organisation’s position. In talking to Balboni about what he now thought would be an escape, he had not reflected on the immediate problem that Balboni still had fifty-thousand to collect from Zorin.
‘Sure, I understand that the other guys had more powerful machines,’ Balboni manged to say at last. ‘But, hey, you can’t win ’em all, can you? Don’t you worry about it, Andrei. Right now the most important thing is for me to get you safely out of here. But, with that safety in mind, don’t make a move just yet. In fact, don’t even leave the building without us to escort you – there will be lots of people out there looking for you. And consider this, though there will be another shot at this sometime, out there are people looking for a scapegoat. If you don’t want that fall-guy to be you, just stay where you are till we come for you.’
Andrei promised not to make a move and settled himself down to some TV in the small area that had been set aside for him in the warehouse so that he could stay with the machines till the project was over.
Balboni then rang Zorin.
Sorry to hear the plan didn’t work out,’ he said. ‘I’ve told Andrei to stay put, but what are we actually going to do about him and the machines?’
‘I’ve had a re-think about getting him or the machines out of Queens straight away,’ replied Zorin. For now, leave Andrei and the machines where they are. If he keeps his head down, they’ll never find him. So, for the rest of your money, I need you to make sure he stays put and that we all keep our mouths shut and just lie low.’
‘But I think that Andrei’s hoping to be whisked away on a magic carpet to Canada right now – even if it’s only for a short time till this next attempt everyone seems to be talking about now.’
‘Okay, Rocco, I can understand all that,’ said Zorin, in what he hoped was a calming voice. ‘But the fact remains, you just need to keep him pacified and staying put for a while, at least till the heat subsides. As I said earlier, just calm him down and tell him we’ll deal with his situation shortly.’
‘Okay, will do. And the money?’
‘Don’t worry about the money,’ said Zorin. ‘As soon as we’ve let the dust settle, the US President has calmed the nation and the police realise that there’s no point in their rushing around like headless chickens looking for either Andrei or us, we can sort everything out in a calm and rational manner. But I do suggest you don’t do anything rash for the rest of today at the least.’
‘Okay, I’ll tell Andrei it’s in his best interest to leave it for a day or two.’
But Balboni thought about this for a moment as he put the phone down. He had a niggling worry that Zorin might cut his losses and make a run for it. At least the machines and Andrei were still an asset. As an insurance against Zorin’s possible departure, he decided to move the machines and Andrei to near his main headquarters in Newark. This would at least give him some assets with which to bargain with later on.
With a renewed sense of purpose, he rang his three men who were keeping watch over Andrei and his machines. Up till this point their job had been to deter, and if necessary dispose of anyone getting too close to him. Now he told them they would have a different job to do – one of great urgency.
‘Paulo, that you? Sorry, Pietro. Didn’t recognise which one of the two you it was. There’s been a major change of plan. The Russian, Andrei, flunked the job. So maybe his people will come after him. We’re the only people who know exactly where he is, but I don’t trust the Russians and so we need to move him and the machines nearer to our headquarters. The warehouse below us on the Hudson should do the job. Everyone out looking for the machines and for Andrei will expect them to lie low, so we’ll do the opposite. We’ll just pretend it’s a normal delivery we’re doing. Get a van over as quick as you can, load everything into it and tell Andrei that you’re starting the process of escorting him back to Montreal. He won’t know where he’s being taken but it will keep him quiet. As far as the general public is concerned, this is just an ordinary delivery, so we don’t want an armed escort. I’ve told the Russians that we’re all going to sit tight, so they won’t bother to check on us while you’re doing the move. Is all that perfectly clear?’ he asked as he came to the end of his instructions.
‘Yeah, no sweat,’ replied Pietro. ‘We’ll get that all done and I’ll only ring you back if we hit a problem. Should get all that done within a couple of hours and I’ll ring you then.’
Not fully understanding the rage amongst all the national and New York authorities over this whole episode, Pietro got on with this as though it was a normal job – an attitude of gross over-confidence that would not serve him well.
Giuseppe Massimo, having heard nothing from Wilder or Zorin, realised that something had gone wrong. Aircraft were still flying in and out of JFK well after the target time of 11 a.m. As Wilder had told him that their best guess for Andrei’s attack would be at exactly that time, he decided to ring Wilder for news. He got through to Brady’s apartment.
‘Brady,’ came the reply.
‘Ah, Mr Brady. It’s Giuseppe Massimo. You may recall I was to keep you informed if we got any idea of where Balboni had hidden Andrei and his machines?’
‘Yes, Mr Massimo. I’m pleased to be able to tell you that the Russian did indeed try to attack the air traffic control centre at 11 a.m., but failed, and his machines have now been disabled. So the threat is over. But you’re right, we still need to find the machines and Andrei. You say you have an idea where they might be?’
Fearing that everyone would vanish now that the game was over, Massimo was still keen to make sure he got some benefit from all his efforts. He was also determined to get the better of his old rival Balboni.
‘No luck yet,’ he said, ‘but I’m still hoping to earn the amnesty you promised me, so my people will continue looking. What do you think Mr Zorin’s plans will be now?’
‘We’ve discovered that he’s holed up in Bermuda, though we don’t know exactly where yet. Mr Wilder and myself are off down there right now to make sure he can’t make a getaway.’
‘So this is the new game,’ thought Massimo. ‘Better get myself down to Bermuda too. I’d like my one hundred-thousand-dollar payment from Zorin before he vanishes, and I’ve an idea how my people can find Andrei and the machines while I do that…’
He finished his call to Brady and rang Zorin.
‘Don’t worry about your hundred grand,’ was the very first thing that Zorin said. ‘I know you didn’t get a chance to do much investigating for me, but I’ve another way you can earn it. That is, if you’re still interested.’
‘I am,’ said Massimo.
‘As you know, Rocco Balboni has Andrei and the machines hidden away somewhere in Queens,’ said Zorin. ‘I’ve suggested that no one should make a move for a day at least until the dust settles. My first guess, however, is that, Balboni being Balboni, he’ll try and keep both Andrei and the machines to himself as insurance. My second guess is that he’ll try and move them to nearer his own place – across the river to Newark.’
‘Knowing Balboni much longer than you, Victor, those were exactly my own thoughts as well. I can practically guarantee that’s what he’ll try and do,’ said Massimo.
‘Okay, Giuseppe, to confirm: a hundred grand,’ said Zorin. ‘I’ll add another fifty if you can find a way to catch Balboni taking Andrei and the machines to Newark. I need you to take them from Balboni and up into Connecticut or Massachusetts or wherever it is you have another of your hideaways?’
Ignoring the shock of learning that Zorin even knew of these secret locations, he laughed. ‘I’d be delighted to do that for you.’
‘But there’s also more,’ said Zorin. ‘Whilst your men are doing that, I need you to get yourself down here to Bermuda as fast as you can. There’s the future to discuss.’
‘Sure, I could do that.’ There was a clear hesitation in this reply, as he was quite shocked that Zorin seemed to have read his mind and had just suggested he do exactly what he had planned himself. Zorin, sensing this, quickly came back to him.
‘Naturally I’ll pay all your expenses,’ he added. ‘So charter a private jet if you can. I’ll text you later as to where I am when you’ve actually landed here on the island.’
‘I’ll see you in Bermuda just as soon as I can arrange it,’ said Massimo, though between now and then he would need to give this new development more thought – stupid to walk into the centre of a spider’s web unprepared.
Massimo rang Carlo, his head man, and explained the new plan. He stressed that finding where Balboni had hidden the Russian and the machines was now top priority. He also knew that the moves they were now planning would meet with resistance from Balboni.
‘Don’t worry, Giuseppe,’ said Carlo. ‘The easiest way of dealing with this will be to put a tail on any trucks leaving the Lupo organisation’s premises. Then we simply overpower Balboni’s men after they’ve led us to where the machines are. I’ve already got men tracking his people’s moves ’cos we’ve been trying to find the hiding place these past couple of days. But now that he’s likely to move them, the job of finding them will be easy. But don’t worry – all of that’s our problem now.’
Three telephone calls later, Massimo felt confident that he had covered any eventuality. If anything went wrong on Bermuda he also now looked forward to hearing later this evening that Andrei and the machines had become his property. He had just finished the last call when his secretary came on the line.
‘It’s not been easy, seeing how it’s a Sunday, but I’ve got your flight organised by private jet to Bermuda, and I’ve also got some Bermuda dollars ready for you too – would you like me to bring them in to you?
‘No thanks, Maria, I’m on my way.’ ‘Indeed, I’m on my way,’ he repeated to himself under his breath – this was going to be an interesting end to an already most unusual day.
The White House, Pennsylvania Avenue
Henry Steiner’s time at the White House as Chief of Staff had never been more frightening than today. Around an hour after what might have been a series of disasters to rival 9/11, a degree of calm had returned to the corridors of power. In retrospect, the air traffic control system for New York’s five-airport area had been disrupted for only three minutes or so.
Though not all the reports were in yet, one said that there had been six near misses. One instance had been of an appallingly close one between an Alitalia Airways flight and one of United Airlines’s; the White House were told that the two aircraft had passed each other with only a few feet to spare.
At one point, Steiner had wondered what the President would have had to say if there had been a mid-air collision; but he was a positive kind of guy and he didn’t dwell long on what ifs. But now it was he and not the President who had the comparatively simple task of flannelling his way through a White House press conference. This was something at which he had grown adept. He was relaxed as he went to the press room to meet the phalanxes of reporters and commentators.
‘In this great country of ours, we have one of the best track records in aviation safety,’ he said, standing behind the podium with row upon row of faces staring up eagerly at him. ‘But it would be a rash man who dared to say that even these great and safe systems are perfect. So yes, for no more than a few seconds there was a computer glitch in our air traffic control systems. During that infinitesimal time, New York was slightly affected before our backup systems kicked in. So no harm resulted.’ This was, of course, rubbish. Andrei’s attack had earlier disconnected the back-up system, though that had not even been noticed.
‘I’m speaking to you all here right now to say how sorry we are if any passengers suffered from aircraft being delayed by the glitch. I’m also here to tell you that rumours of something more sinister than a computer glitch are entirely unfounded.’
He beamed down over the gathering as would a teacher surveying a bunch of wayward children.
‘We are not aware of any conspiracies and what I’ve just told you is our best information at this time. Are there any questions?’
Naturally, there were questions. In separate but uncoordinated ways, a few members of the press and a couple of lobby groups could not resist the opportunity to stir up trouble for the authorities. They had an enjoyable time asking awkward questions and were encouraged by others who were just there, as usual, in the hopes of a digging up a more meaty story that would sell better.
Compared to what might have been, Steiner got off lightly. Had Andrei succeeded, he might have been here answering questions on a massive change to the US relationship with Russia. He might have been having to explain the reversal of many cornerstones of foreign policy. As it was, he would get away with no more than a few column inches of print – and none of them on the front pages.
As Steiner left the room, the conference was over and many left gloomily, packing up their belongings. Later, one seasoned hack described the whole business as a non-event.
Steiner, on the other hand, would have sold a member of his family for cash – maybe the youngest one who was going through teething at present and was keeping them from sleeping at nights; it would have been worth almost any sum, however large, to have been in Moscow as the full horror of the project failed.
But there was another matter that would need to be addressed after Steiner left the press room. Though he had lied and got away with it, the air traffic control system had been attacked, the screens had been blank for long enough to have caused more than one fatal air disaster, and though they had Craithe – the ultimate experts in this field – now confirming that those responsible had nothing left but junk, the perpetrators needed to be found.
Trouble was, they had absolutely no idea how to start looking for them – an area the size of Queens could take months to search when looking for the one small area holding the machines.
The Kremlin, Moscow
Steiner might have paid handsomely to be a fly on the wall in the Kremlin – to hear the reaction there. But he would have been disappointed if he was expecting a hugely disappointed President upbraiding everyone around him for the failure of a project so close to his heart.
‘Well, Victor, as you haven’t opened your call with a triumphal whoop,’ said the President, as soon as he was told it was Zorin calling, ‘I imagine everything did not go exactly as planned,’
‘Would you like the good news or the bad news first?’ asked Zorin.
‘Don’t play games with me. What do you mean by good news?’ replied the President. But, intrigued, he relented. ‘Oh all right then, the bad news first.’ He knew well anyway that both the good and the bad would be Zorin’s own gilded versions of the truth.
‘The whole team did a remarkable job,’ said Zorin. ‘We actually had the air traffic of the greater New York area under our control for all of five minutes. Unfortunately, the inventors’ software which we used – the original Gemini – managed to track down our machine. They’ve had years in which to perfect their version of the software, so they were able to shut down our man’s machine. Sadly, of course, that means that your ability to reverse many of the US foreign policies has had to be put off temporarily.’
‘Yes, temporarily, which brings me on to the good news.’
Even the President had to admit to a touch of admiration for the way in which Zorin had moved at such speed over the disappointment of the project’s failure and on to what he had the brass neck to call ‘good news’.
‘I have made arrangements for the machine and its operator to be moved out of New York as soon as the dust settles,’ said Zorin, ‘and, almost before you can draw your next breath, it will be ready for use in whatever manner you choose.’
‘What do you mean by “whatever manner”?’ asked the President.
‘I’ve spoken to you before about the brilliant young Yulian Agaron?’
There was a muffled grunt of acknowledgement.
‘Well, before his unfortunate accident, he wrote a whole mass of software for the machines. That, combined with the excellent operator we still have, means that the next time around we shall definitely succeed. Would you like to know what I have in mind?’
‘Go on then.’
‘I myself have plans to vanish shortly, until things have calmed down a bit,’ continued Zorin. ‘But I’ll ring you again within the next few days once I’m safe again and away from here. I can tell you then of my plans. They include a detailed method of destroying the Gemini installation on its Scottish island – that was the only thing that stopped us this time. Eliminating them will give us a clear run at our chosen target next time.’
‘Well this project has always been your baby from the start, Victor,’ said the President. ‘So if you’ve had contingency plans in place against this latest set-back, I naturally take your word for that.’
‘Well, thank you for that vote of confidence. You won’t be disappointed and, as I say, I’ll tell you more of what I have in mind as soon as the dust has settled. Now, I should make a move, as I believe that my present location may be compromised.’
‘Before you go,’ said the President, ‘there’s another side related to all of this which I should tell you. The world, but especially the US president, will have seen this as a disaster for us; they will expect us to make heads roll. If no heads were to roll, they might think that we were not that disappointed and that we therefore still had something up our sleeves. Well, of course we do, as soon as you’ve sorted out the hiding of the quantum machine and its operator, but in the meantime, heads are still going to have to roll.’
‘What exactly are you saying?’ asked Zorin, a sudden catch in his voice.
‘You’ll not be surprised to hear that since Rodchenko’s death, there have been attempts to shift the blame for that onto you.’ said the President.
‘I suspected as much,’ said Zorin. ‘I even think that they tried to get Rodchenko’s young daughter Katya involved in trying to implicate me.’
‘That’s right,’ said the President. ‘Pity about that, but it will all be forgotten as soon as those responsible for Rodchenko’s death are brought to justice.’
‘I don’t suppose you mean General Zharkov and Rodchenko’s understudy Polichev, by any chance?’ ventured Zorin.
‘You’ll have to wait till it’s official, and in case anything goes wrong with your plans for vanishing when you leave Bermuda, best you know no more – what you don’t know you can’t lie about, eh?’
‘All right. I look forward to reading about it, when you see fit to announce it. Do you have that announcement planned yet?’
‘Yes, but I’m holding off until I hear back from on the three following matters. Firstly, that you’ve got yourself clear of Bermuda; secondly, that you’ve got the machines and their operator hidden away and secured for further use; and thirdly that you have a plan for dealing with the people on the Scottish island. As soon as you can reassure me of each of those three with greater detail than you have to date, I’ll make my move. Those to be used as scapegoats have no idea what’s coming their way, so it should be perfectly straightforward. But you mustn’t know what’s coming. Do you understand that?’
‘I do. I’ll get myself out of here today. And, as I said earlier, my plans for this were in place even before our attack in New York. What’s more, they were designed irrespective of which way the attack went.’
‘Good, I’m pleased to hear that,’ said the President. Just one more thing before you make your escape. Some of the manoeuvrings around this whole Gemini business have shaken up my confidence in one or two people close to me. Now that Rodchenko’s gone and some other changes are on the way, would you be interested in taking on Rodchenko’s role when you get back here to Moscow?
Zorin’s spirits soared. He’d been unsure how badly the President would take the New York failure. But now he was being offered the one thing he had only expected had he pulled off a stunning success. It was almost too good to be true.
‘I most certainly would – just so long as I don’t finish up the way Rodchenko did.’
They both laughed and the President added, ‘I wouldn’t expect you to work out of his dreadful little office in Nikol’skaya Street; you could do all I would need of you from your pretty little palace here in the city.’
‘It would make a wonderful homecoming present for me,’ said Zorin. ‘I’ve been away from the seat of power in Moscow too long and this project has given me an appetite to get back into the swim of things.’
‘That’s what I wanted to hear,’ said the President. ‘In the meantime, good luck with your escape from Bermuda and I look forward to your early confirmation on those three outstanding matters we’ve just spoken about.’
‘You’ll hear as soon as I’m clear of Bermuda’.
The call ended with Zorin in high spirits.
The President’s next call was to General Zharkov, asking him to come to his personal quarters. The General knew that after the failure of the New York project, some scapegoats would have to be found, and was sure this meeting would be about that. He hurried along the winding corridors in the hopes that he might be called to help implement that process rather than be one of those scapegoats himself.
‘You’ll relieved to hear, my dear General Zharkov,’ said the President, after he’d told the General to seat himself comfortably, ‘that, though I say it myself, I think I said enough to Victor Zorin over the phone to get him rushing back here to Moscow – and faster than he’d planned. I’m telling you this because I’ll bet that you were just about to get your bloodthirsty people to go over to Bermuda to fetch him back here. Now be honest with me – was I right?’
‘Well, I had thought you might need him here to answer in person for the failure of something that had been so close to your heart. I had been dreading having to go all the way over there and embarrass him by dragging him back here unwillingly. So the fact that you got him rushing back here of his own accord is good news.’
The President grinned.
‘Quite,’ he said.
‘So, are we now ready to put this sorry business out of its misery?’ asked the General.
‘I think we are,’ said the President. ‘Though, as you will have guessed, I’m not giving up on the idea of still getting one of those Gemini programmes. Just need to think who we can entrust that project to next.’
The Quantum Installation, Queens
The failure of Victor Zorin’s project had naturally left all the others involved in it in a state of uncertainty bordering on fear. In Rocco Balboni’s case, he reckoned he had now dealt with that uncertainty to his satisfaction – at least he was taking over the machines, hiding them somewhere else and keeping the operator. These were all powerful insurances for his survival.
Being a cynic, he had quickly translated in his own mind Zorin’s advice to lie low into the opposite. It meant to him, ‘Don’t make a move yourself. I am coming for my man and my machines myself.’
Carlo, one of his senior people, had initially suggested that moving the machines was crazy – no one knew where they were at present and moving them would be like waving a red flag in front of the proverbial bull. Calling everyone’s bluff, however, the plan was already underway and a van had left the organisation’s headquarters in Newark for Queens.
As though this decision was not stupid enough, he’d made another miscalculation. He had been in such a rush to grab the machines; he thought that by acting so fast, no one would be watching. This made it easy for Massimo’s people to find and follow the Balboni van as it set off from their headquarters in Newark. The two Massimo organisation cars assigned to this task did their job well. Following Balboni’s van, they anticipated slowdowns during the pursuit as well as points where traffic flow allowed for faster progress – a perfect tailing operation, with no suspicions raised amongst Balboni’s people.
When the van reached Queens, the Massimo party were particularly cautious – talking to each other over radios and swapping tailing cars as seemed necessary. When they arrived at the warehouse where the quantum machine was hidden, the two trailing cars came to a halt before turning into the same road as the hideaway. Massimo’s people then went forward on foot to watch the van’s arrival at the warehouse.
This Massimo team consisted of five strongmen; they watched from a safe distance as Balboni’s people began loading the quantum machines and all the other equipment from the warehouse into the van. With no Balboni look-outs or guards posted, it was easy for Massimo’s men to bring the larger of the two cars up closer. This would be used to block the dead-end road when they were ready.
They watched as Balboni’s men seemed to be getting the van full. But they also needed to know when the van’s departure was imminent and when Andrei would be brought out. To check on how close this was getting, one of them walked down the road towards the warehouse and the van. He was carrying a clipboard and a small package so that he looked like someone trying to make a delivery. As he got near the van, he shouted over to one of them, ‘Hey, buddy, can you help me out here? I’m looking for Brace Brothers’ place to make this delivery.’
‘Sorry, but we’re just doing a collection here,’ replied the nearest of Balboni’s men. He looked irritated being stopped from the job in hand, but as clipboard man hadn’t moved, he added, ‘I dunno the area so I can’t help you.’ With that, he turned back to loading the van as though that was the end of the matter. It was not.
The Massimo man had looked past him into the warehouse. He had seen that there were only one or two more small items still to be loaded. Judging it to be the moment for the rest of his team to make their move, he dropped his clipboard and the package onto the ground and pulled a gun from where it had been tucked into his belt in the small of his back. At the same moment, one of Massimo’s cars drove into the cul de sac and as soon, as it had lurched to a halt, two others jumped out. They all raised their guns to shoulder level and the larger of the two cars they had hidden around the corner drove across the top of the cul de sac, blocking the exit.
‘Down on the ground, all of you,’ shouted the leading Massimo man as he walked slowly into the warehouse. Balboni’s people, taken completely unawares, meekly obeyed, and soon all were prone on the ground.
At the back of the warehouse, in the area which had been made vaguely habitable for him, Andrei and Goran both crouched, trembling. Andrei even more than Goran, was confused and terrified. His command of the English language had been challenged by all this shouting in Italian-American accents. It left him confused about what was going on.
Only an hour earlier Balboni’s men had arrived to take himself and Goran and all the equipment ‘to safety’ and then on to Canada. They had not mentioned anything about the flight to Montreal for which he had their tickets, nor had they told him who they were. And now, here was another bunch of people he had never seen before. Who were they? Why were they here? Why were they brandishing guns? Were they here on Zorin’s orders or were they a new gang intent on stealing the machines? Many questions but no answers.
After a few minutes of the extreme discomfort, his very tall frame doubled-up behind the office partition windows, Andrei’s mind was turning over at ever-increasing speed and into near-panic. He felt the urge to stay out of these two sets of people’s quarrel. Leaving Goran still crouching, he stood up in the half-light at the back of the room with his hands above his head. The sudden appearance of this gaunt giant behind the dirty glass, dressed in his dark drab overcoat, was too much of a shock for one of Massimo’s men. Already on edge, he fired off a couple of shots before his leader could shout out ‘Hold your fire’.
Andrei went down.
The leader of the Massimo group rushed forward but stopped in the doorway and gasped. Andrei had fallen to the floor next to the whimpering Goran, near the bedding laid out there and was groaning and rolling around, clutching at his arm. The space around them both was an unbelievable mess. There were two low camp-beds and a jumble of loose bedding on it – set up there so that the two of them could work here and take breaks without having to go back to the apartment. And there on the floor next to it was these priceless assets, Andrei and Goran.
‘Hey, Marco, get in here,’ the leader shouted back over his shoulder. He put his gun away, as he knew that the Balboni men would already be tied up. He bent down over the two. He then helped Andrei to get up onto the camp-bed and looked into his eyes with what appeared to be genuine concern. Andrei got the impression from him that he was genuinely trying to help and managed a weak smile and a thank-you.
The leader of the Massimo group stood up and turned to the others.
‘Right, listen up. I want the rest of the equipment out here and into the van. Giorgio, you drive the van. I’ll take Andrei and Goran in my car. I know where we can get Andrei seen to by a proper doctor. The rest of you take the route we planned and I’ll meet up with you in Vermont.’
As soon as the remaining equipment was in the van and all Balboni’s men’s bonds had been checked, the Massimo group dispersed to their various vehicles and the leader went back into the office to collect the pale and still groaning Andrei. He helped him to his feet and out to his car as Goran followed meekly behind.
‘We’re used to getting gunshot wounds treated in our line of work,’ he said in a kindly way to Andrei, ‘so you’re in good hands.’ How much Andrei actually understood was irrelevant; he had no alternative but to do as he was told.
Balboni’s men looked and felt ridiculous. It took them a considerable time to squirm their way around until one of them found a sharp object with which to cut his cuffs off. Eventually all were freed and they wandered out into the road. They had no money or mobile phones. One of them remembered that there was a landline back in the apartment which Andrei had used from time to time. They hastened there and the leader of the group rang Balboni.
‘What do you mean you don’t know who they were?’ shouted Balboni. ‘For Christ’s sake, were they Italian-American mafia or what? You mean you don’t know whether they were acting on behalf of Zorin or Massimo or even, God forbid, some entirely new group? Next you’ll be telling me that they were in the pay of that Englishman Wilder.’
Whilst Balboni raged at this unforeseen disaster, Massimo’s people and the convoy slipped away on minor roads out of Queens and then headed north into Connecticut. From there they continued on to yet another place known only to a handful of people in Vermont. The leader texted Massimo, who would shortly land in Bermuda. It was welcome news. And when his private jet did get him to Bermuda, Massimo was delighted – it would greatly strengthen his hand when striking a deal with Zorin.
Wade International Airport, Bermuda
The flight from New York to Bermuda had been comfortable but frustrating for Wilder and Brady. They’d been assured that flight departures had been rigorously checked and checked again to prevent Zorin and Mitkin leaving. As far as possible, considering Bermuda’s miles of coast-line and generations of smuggling, in theory at least, boats had also been stopped from leaving the island.
They were keen, naturally, to bring this long saga to an end by apprehending Zorin. And they were hopeful they might be on the last stretch as their jet was on approach into Wade International. The Governor was sending a car to meet them. This would also cut arrival formalities to a minimum.
Moscow’s attempts to get instant diplomatic status for Zorin and therefore a safe, no-questions-asked passage off Bermuda were emphatically blocked by London. This made the Governor of Bermuda’s job that much easier than if he had had to make the decision by himself.
On purpose, this refusal had not yet been passed on to Moscow – or naturally to Zorin himself – and he and Mitkin now sat in the villa, sipping cool drinks, still under the misapprehension that they would soon be able to get off the island without further questioning or hindrance.
As soon as Wilder and Brady’s plane landed, a car with the Governor’s flag drove over the tarmac to the aircraft and even before they had collected up their papers and mobiles and put them into their briefcases, a sprightly young gentleman entered the aircraft and introduced himself.
‘I’m Blacker, John Blacker,’ he said, extending his hand and grinning broadly.
‘Mr Blacker, thanks for coming out to meet us. I’m Tom Wilder and this is my colleague, Bob Brady.’
They rather formally shook hands and, half-turning, Blacker added, ‘The Governor’s looking forward to meeting you and I’m to take you straight to Government House. Shall I lead the way?’
With that, he ducked under the low aircraft door and led them down the steps and into the waiting car. The drive from the airport to Government House did not take long. They travelled at the island’s strict speed limit of around twenty miles an hour with the large car almost filling the narrow winding roads. These were lined on both sides for the most part with white, pink, and palest green and blue bungalow houses. Their white roofs were all stepped to collect the island’s scant rainfall.
They reached the large imposing Victorian building of Government House and here Blacker ushered them straight to meet the Governor, James Fremantle. After introductions and some brief polite exchanges about the comfort of the flight and then the awkwardness of the Zorin situation, they were served some cool drinks and got down to the serious business of what to do about the Russian himself.
‘With the help of my colleagues in the UK I have managed to get a firm view of this mess from a legal standpoint,’ said Fremantle. ‘For a start, I was surprised to find that Mr Zorin applied for and was granted dual British-Russian nationality…’
‘You’re joking,’ said Wilder.
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Fremantle. ‘It appears that he was thinking of asking for asylum on the grounds that most of his life was now based in London. I understand that if this had been granted it would have been embarrassing for the Russian President and so the dual-nationality was granted as a kind of compromise.’
‘|How does that fit in with his situation here?’ asked Wilder.
‘As you will know we’re under British law here and so I also got our legal people to draw up a list of offences with which he could be charged under both UK and Bermuda laws. And here it is.’
He handed a single page of to each of them.
‘I don’t suppose for a moment that he will dispute any of these so this sheet will come in handy when we catch up with him, won’t it?’ said Wilder, looking across to Brady who nodded agreement.
‘The only slight problem is, we don’t know exactly where he is on the island,’ said Fremantle.
‘Damn, I hadn’t even thought about that,’ said Brady. ‘How are we going to set about apprehending him?’
‘Hang on a minute. It may not be much to go on but this was found in his house in London.’ Wilder delved into his pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper on which he had copied out several of the notes from the book Katya had found. ‘The note at the top of the page in particular, just under the word Bermuda, does that mean anything to you?’ said Wilder handing the piece of paper over to Fremantle.
Fremantle studied the note that Wilder was referring to – ‘Bermuda contact DBx DAG trippt556’.
‘Unless it’s a coincidence, which I doubt, the “DAG” is sure to be the retired old rascal Douglas Alexander Garnier. He lives just across the water from Hamilton at a place called Salt Kettle – he’s also an old friend of mine. We can either ring him or just go and see him,’ said Fremantle. ‘And as to the “DBx” – under the circumstances it’s probably “Dropbox”, the internet document transfer facility. The last bit, “trippt5565”, would therefore seem to be his password for Dropbox. Do you want me to try that on a laptop here? Doug won’t mind me doing that at all.’
‘That would be great,’ said both Wilder and Brady, almost in unison. Fremantle rang a bell on a small table nearby and when a uniformed servant appeared, asked him to bring him his laptop from the office. As soon as it arrived, Fremantle started it up and soon brought up Dropbox.
‘I know Doug’s email address almost as well as my own,’ he said. ‘He spends a lot of his time in a summer house at the bottom of his garden where he refuses to have a telephone so we often exchange emails – you know, jokes, help requests with the crossword of the day, drink invitations, that sort of thing.’
The other two got up from their chairs, and came round behind Fremantle. They stood behind him to see what was in Garnier’s Dropbox. Fremantle had put in Garnier’s email address and added the password from Wilder’s piece of paper. Dropbox opened and inside was a whole mass of documents, some of them in Russian Cyrillic. They opened one or two of those that were in English, and there on one of them was the lease agreement for the rental of a house down on South Shore.
‘Ah, there we are,’ said Fremantle. ‘That explains everything. It appears that Zorin’s renting a house from the Balantynes, a retired Scottish couple who come out here about twice a year for a month or so at a time; I happen to know that Doug Garnier acts as a kind of host to anyone who rents that particular place, as he’s a good friend of the Balantynes.’
‘What do you suggest we do now?’ asked Wilder. ‘I mean, you’re the boss here and know everyone involved.’
‘Shall we go down to the place where Zorin’s staying but call in on Doug Garnier first? It’s on the way.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ said Wilder. Brady nodded too.
‘If we’re going to arrest him, should we take police or whatever it is you have here?’ asked Brady.
‘I can take my firearm,’ said Fremantle, ‘but I doubt very much if anything else will be needed. The ban I’ve put on flights out of the island still holds and, anyway, why don’t I ring him? Zorin, I mean. He’s expecting a call from me anyway – waiting to hear if he’s been granted diplomatic status. He’ll think I’m coming to discuss that. I can try and judge his mood over the telephone. What do you think?’
‘That sounds good to me,’ replied Wilder. ‘But, not that it should be necessary, Bob and I are also armed and I’ve some experience using them.’
‘Yes, I was told quite a lot about you when I was being briefed on this whole business,’ said Fremantle. The two of them smiled at each other and Fremantle added, ‘Saying you have some experience with them is short-changing yourself a bit, isn’t it? From what I’ve been told, you’re the nearest thing to a James Bond to come to Bermuda in years.’
They all left together and one of Fremantle’s cars, flag on the bonnet, took them from the Governor’s house through the narrow roads as before, hemmed in much of the way by the pretty little pastel-coloured houses.
‘We could take the Salt Kettle Ferry but I think we’ll just drive the longer way round as it’s often quicker,’ said Fremantle, ‘and after we’ve had a word with Doug it’s not far across the island and down onto South Road to the Balantynes’ place.’
They found a convenient place for the car to pull off the road and Fremantle led the way into Garnier’s house, shouting out his name as they went through the house and out the other side onto the lawns. Halfway down the tight, clipped crab-grass towards the waters of Hamilton Harbour, Doug Garnier came out of his summer house and walked up to meet them.
Wilder and Brady were introduced and they went into the cool of the house and settled into comfortable chairs. They refused the offer of some tea and Fremantle quickly briefed Garnier on why Wilder and Brady were here. As Fremantle’s tale unfolded, Garnier’s eyes grew wider and his mouth fell open involuntarily. At the end of the tale he just shook his head slowly, appearing to be running the story over in his head a second time.
‘I’ve never heard of such a tale. You absolutely amaze me,’ he said at last. ‘I just offer my email and Dropbox facilities for people who rent the Balantynes’ place. I’m not their agent or anything like that, but I keep an eye on the house for them and help their guests in any way I can. But to have a Russian oligarch staying there… Well, words fail me, I…’ At that point words did fail him and Fremantle leant over towards him.
‘Don’t worry about it, but is there anything you can add?’ asked Fremantle. ‘Or haven’t you had anything to do with Zorin?
‘Almost nothing, except when the bloody great boat arrived for him,’ replied Garnier.
‘Bloody great boat?’ repeated Wilder.
‘Yes. He asked me if it would be okay for him to keep it here in one of my Salt Kettle berths in case he wanted to use it,’ said Garnier.
‘Could we have a look at it?’
‘Sure, I’ll lead the way. They followed Garnier out of a small side-gate and onto a pathway raised above the beach of Salt Kettle bay.
There were a number of boats anchored in the bay itself but at the end of a small pier a large, powerful-looking forty-footer was tied up. As they got closer it looked as though there was someone aboard. In case it was Zorin, they increased their pace and Wilder, clearly the fittest of the four of them, ran on ahead.
He already had his gun out, and he sprinted the last bit and jumped on board. Fremantle and Brady watched as, to their horror, the engines started up and, seconds later, with a great roar, the boat lurched away from the pier and rapidly gathered speed, tearing a mooring bollard off the top of the planking of the pier and taking a couple of boards off it as well.
Brady and Fremantle watched helplessly as, with a wide wake, the boat powered off west down Hamilton Harbour, heading for the open sea where the harbour curved to the north. If it got out onto the open seas it might go anywhere – a bit over six-hundred miles from the US mainland, only a bit over seven hundred to Canada, but, more importantly, to something else out there that might help make good their escape.
Hamilton Harbour, Bermuda
The Bermuda Triangle has its particular reputation for good reason. A craft as big as that could make it to any of those places with ease, and it would be like trying to find a very small needle in an enormous haystack – even tracking it down from the air. Fremantle made an urgent call on his mobile.
‘Not much we can do but buzz them with the helicopter. But with a boat as powerful as that, and a head-start, I don’t know if we can catch them before they get to the open sea. Out there, they might have a rendezvous. Who knows with someone as rich as Zorin? Let’s just hope Wilder isn’t too heavily outnumbered and can do something about it on board.’
As neither of them had binoculars with them, they continued to watch as the boat began to disappear out of sight.
On board, Mitkin was at the wheel. The moment the boat had taken off in such a violent, unscheduled departure, Zorin came up from down below only to be met by Wilder coming the other way. Though he prided himself on his fitness regime and was a judo black belt, Zorin never knew what hit him. Feinting with his left hand, as though to hit Zorin with it, Wilder’s right hand came round as from nowhere and caught Zorin smack on the temple, just at its most vulnerable spot. Zorin went out like an extinguished candle and crumpled to the deck.
Mitkin, on the other hand, was going to be a much harder proposition. He had taken the boat out as fast as he could the moment he recognised the sprinting man as Wilder. It took him but seconds to piece together the entire puzzle. If Fremantle had been on his way over to meet them to talk about the diplomatic application, he would have come alone. Accompanied by Wilder and another stranger meant only one thing – trouble. Worse, it might even be in the form of an arrest. This had given him no choice but to go for the second of their escape plans. Further along to the sheltered water at the western end of the harbour was a small flying boat at anchor, ready if needed.
As Mitkin tried to watch Zorin and Wilder whilst also keeping an eye on where the boat was headed, he saw Zorin go down; he quickly secured the boat’s wheel by locking it in place with his belt, the other end of which he tied to the swivel seat in front of it. He now turned with a quick twist of his body and, balancing himself on the swivel seat, threw out his right foot as he straightened his leg. It met Wilder coming up from the cabin area where he had left Zorin lying on the deck. He caught Wilder full in the face with his sand-shoed foot. Wilder fell back and smacked his head on the deck with a loud crack. He felt he was beginning to pass out. His vision blurring, he saw Mitkin raising a gun and pointing it down at him.
Was this the end? After all he had been through in his life, was this it? Without even a proper fight with Mitkin? It just didn’t seem fair. Sheer anger sent adrenalin coursing through his body.
At that very second, he heard the sound of a distant rifle shot. Was he dreaming? Was this part of the hallucination that comes with the end?
At the same second, Mitkin was spun around as the force of a high velocity bullet struck his right shoulder; he came tumbling down like a tree, felled by an unseen hand. He crashed onto the deck next to Wilder. Coming more to his senses as the adrenalin poured through him, Wilder rolled over from where he had been lying on his back. With all the strength he could muster, he swung his straightened arm over in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc and smashed it down onto Mitkin’s throat. Had he not been close to passing out a moment earlier, this blow could have killed Mitkin. As it was, it knocked him unconscious. Wilder, still dazed, slowly got himself to his feet by pulling on the boat’s side-railings.
He looked about, saw some coils of mooring-rope nearby and, as fast as he could, tied up first Mitkin and then Zorin. He then suddenly realised that the boat sounded as though it was on full power. He pulled himself up the steps and onto the bridge. Here he could see that the wheel had been locked by Mitkin at a slight angle to straight ahead and that the boat was heading for the rocks near what he later learned was called Spanish Point.
He quickly untied the belt and cut the power; his headache and the swimming sensation was coming back almost to normal. Looking back to Spanish Point, he saw the rifleman who had shot Mitkin. He was uniformed and Wilder surmised that he must have been one of Fremantle’s people – probably armed police. He was just putting his rifle into a travelling sleeve and was heading back to a small van.
In full control of the boat, he turned on full power again and swung it full circle back to Salt Kettle. As he approached the pier, he could see Fremantle and Brady standing there. Fremantle had been busy and as soon as the boat was tied up Zorin and Mitkin, now both conscious but weak, were brought ashore and transferred into the hands of the police.
‘We were lucky,’ said Fremantle. ‘My top rifle-shot was at the practice ranges. He and his companion had only a mile and a half to travel to get to Spanish Point. Sheer luck your boat had gone off course and headed that way as opposed to the other. That would have been out of shot for our man. As soon as you had jumped aboard Doug Garnier confirmed that Mitkin, driving the boat, was one of the two who had taken the Ballantynes’ house. Interesting, too, they had both used different names to the ones you now talk about.
‘With Doug’s help, I relayed a description of the boat and its owners to my sharp-shooter. He’s told me since that you were bloody lucky as, through his telescopic sights, he could clearly see Mitkin get out his gun and point it downwards. It was only when you must have got up onto your elbows to meet your death that he understood what was happening. At that point it wouldn’t have mattered who he was. Seeing as Mitkin was aiming to kill someone meant that he needed to be disabled. The rest was easy.’
Zorin and Mitkin were taken back in a police van to Government House for questioning. On the drive back to Government House, Wilder reflected on how lucky they had been to find Mitkin and Zorin before they had got away and how fortunate he was personally that Fremantle’s sharp-shooter had been able to stop Mitkin bringing his life to an end.
If any of them had thought this was at last the end of the past few weeks’ nightmare, they’d have been gravely mistaken. Unknown to them, Giuseppe Massimo’s private jet was on its final approach to land at Wade International.
Government House, Bermuda
Although Rocco Balboni always thought and said that Giuseppe Massimo was an idiot, any impartial assessment would have turned that view around. Whereas Massimo was now stepping out of the private flight to Bermuda, Rocco Balboni was discovering that there was no reply to his frantic calls to any of his men’s mobile phones.
Massimo’s men were now speeding beyond Massimo’s main residence in northern Connecticut to an even more secret spot in Vermont. They had with them both the quantum machine and its all-important operators Andrei and Goran. Rocco Balboni had paid handsomely for transport, escape documents and cash, had only been paid fifty grand, with no prospect of any more to come.
Massimo smiled to himself at these thoughts as he walked into the terminal building. Having no luggage to collect, he walked straight through and out the far side to the taxi rank.
‘Government House, please,’ he said.
He ran over in his mind what he would say whilst he was there, but more importantly, he also thought about what he was not going to say. He enjoyed the short ride from the airport to Government House, especially as he was feeling quite pleased with himself. For here was a drama which had started for him towards the end of March when he was putting together the plan to steal McGill University’s quantum computer, and finally here he again was about to tie up most of the loose ends – and very profitably.
When he got to Government House he paid for the taxi in American dollars – always welcome – and walked with a bounce in his step into reception.
He was greeted by a pretty girl behind the desk with the customary ‘Can I help you?’
‘I hope so,’ he replied. ‘My name’s Giuseppe Massimo and I’m here to see Mr. Zorin who I believe you will find is a guest of the Governor’s right now.’
For a couple of seconds, the girl hesitated, thrown by such an unexpected answer. She then looked back up at Massimo. ‘I’m sorry; what did you say your name was?’ she asked, blushing slightly.
Massimo, passed her a business card. She rang through to the Governor’s office, and whilst alternately looking down at Massimo’s card and then back up to the man’s pale, gaunt face, she eventually told the Governor’s secretary that there was someone to see a Mr Zorin. A couple of minutes later Tom Wilder appeared in the reception hall; he was smiling broadly, came straight over and shook Massimo warmly by the hand. In that instant all the pieces of the jigsaw fell into place for Massimo, so he didn’t show any surprise at Wilder’s appearance.
‘Nice to see you, Mr Massimo. Come with me.’ He nodded to the girl in reception and took Massimo back through to meet the Governor.
‘I expect you’re here to see Victor Zorin?’ said Wilder as he led the way back to the Governor’s office.
‘Yes, I’d like to speak to him if that’s okay.’ replied Massimo.
‘That’s fine,’ replied Wilder. ‘We’ve already made arrangements for you to do that, though they’ll frisk you before you see him – after all, we wouldn’t want you to shoot or cut him.’
‘Of course, Mr Wilder. I’d expect no less.’
Massimo was frisked for a gun or knife and then led into the only interview room in Government House. Zorin was brought in and the trio of Fremantle, Wilder and Brady were surprised to see Zorin smile at Massimo as the two of them sat down opposite each other across a wide trestle table.
Fremantle led the way out of the room and Wilder and Brady followed him next door so that they could observe Zorin and Massimo through the two-way mirror. Fremantle also fiddled for a moment to set up the sound system so they could hear the Zorin-Massimo conversation.
Just as these two were about to talk, however, there was a crackling sound, like static interference, and the trio watching their prisoners could hear nothing else.
‘Christ, Massimo must have had a jamming device in his pocket,’ said Fremantle, as he got up from his seat to go and get it put right. But Wilder restrained him with a hand on his arm.
‘No need,’ he said.
‘What do you mean, no need?’ said Fremantle, looking back at him, irritation on his face. ‘We have to hear what passes between them.’
‘It’s okay,’ said Wilder. ‘One of the young men in the outer office must have thought me very strange when I gave him ten bucks for the gum he was chewing.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ asked Brady.
‘I went into the interview room as you were frisking Massimo and bringing Zorin along from his cell,’ went on Wilder, ‘and I stuck my mobile under the table in there with the chewing gum – just hope it holds till the end of their chat.’
‘Better leave them the way it is now,’ continued Wilder. ‘No doubt Massimo will tell Zorin about the jamming device so they’ll talk freely. By the end I hope we’ll get what we want.’
‘The truth?’ suggested Brady hopefully.
The three of them sat for the best part of half an hour while Zorin and Massimo talked. At one point Massimo took a piece of paper out of his inside pocket together with a pen and passed them to Zorin, who wrote a long scribble and handed them back to Massimo.
‘We’ll need that note off Massimo when he comes out,’ said Brady.
‘When their allotted time was up, Wilder, Brady and Fremantle went back into the interview room. Massimo and Zorin, both smiling happily, got up out of their chairs and Massimo yawned and stretched. Wilder held out an open hand towards him and, after looking down at it with disdain, he took the jamming device out of his pocket and handed it over.
Wilder took it, dropped it on the floor and smashed it into a small pile of wires with the heel of his shoe. He then looked up again at Massimo, still holding out his hand. Once again, after a wait of a few seconds, Massimo went into his inside pocket and, taking out the note Zorin had written, handed that over too.
Wilder then bent down and from under the table took out his mobile. Peeling the stickiness off it, he went to put it in his pocket. Massimo had watched this with growing horror on his face and, after a second’s delay, shouted out in fury and lunged at the mobile. Wilder’s free hand swung into Massimo’s ribs just below his heart and Massimo crumpled, letting out a gasp of air as he collapsed back into the chair he’d been sitting in. Zorin was taken away to the cell he had come from.
Once Massimo had recovered, he looked utterly crestfallen; begrudgingly he thanked the three of them for the opportunity to talk to Zorin and then said he was off back to New York. As, at this time, they were not aware that Massimo had taken possession of Andrei and his machines, they saw no objection to this and let him go.
Just before letting him go, they checked on New York-bound flights and discovered that Massimo was booked to return on a United Airways flight.
‘I’ll make arrangements for Massimo to be met off that United Airways flight as it gets into New York,’ said Wilder. ‘So apart from us listening to the recording of the chat between Zorin and Massimo, it looks to me as though we’ve just about got this sewn up, doesn’t it?’
But Massimo had arrived by private jet and would be returning that way; they could watch all the commercial flights they liked, Massimo would not be on any of them.
As the three of them left the interview room to go back to Fremantle’s office, Wilder sensed that all was not right but couldn’t put his finger on it – perhaps matters would become clearer when they played back the recording of the conversation between Massimo and Zorin?
Government House, Bermuda
Content that they were near the end of this roller-coaster drama, Wilder and Brady followed Fremantle to his office. They settled themselves comfortably and, pouring some welcome fresh coffee, Wilder got out his mobile and went to put it on for them to listen to.
‘Damn,’ he said as he looked down at it. ‘Isn’t that just our luck? Very unprofessional of me; the bloody thing’s out of power.’ He immediately got out his wallet and took out a slim spare battery and swapped it into the mobile. The three of them then bent towards the machine lying on the table and Wilder prepared to take some notes as, with volume high, it replayed the Zorin-Massimo conversation.
‘When your man Mitkin took the quantum machine from my men on the way down to Albany, I must confess that I was a bit pissed off…’ said Massimo’s voice.
‘Well I couldn’t tell you all of the detail of my plans, could I?’ replied Zorin’s voice with its slight Russian burr, distinctive enough to be immediately recognisable. ‘It would have meant a whole lot of play-acting, so it was easier just to keep most of my plans from you.’
‘And I suppose that shooting and wounding two of my men in Boston comes under the same heading?’
‘Afraid so,’ said Zorin.
‘Christ, you’re a hard man.’
‘I’ve had to be,’ came Zorin’s voice again, adding, ‘But at least Mitkin didn’t kill them. May I suggest that you don’t dwell on small incidents like that; think of the prize, think of the bloody prize, man.’
‘Yeah, guess you’re right.’ Massimo’s voice. ‘And I thought that a neat trick diverting the machine in Amsterdam from Moscow to London. Good re-organisation, that.’
‘Yeah, but, hell, I’ve got companies and people all over the place. What do you think I’ve been doing these past ten years, wasting my time in Monte Carlo?’
‘Well, I know you go sometimes,’ said Massimo’s voice.
‘After that I understood just about everything,’ said Massimo’s voice again. ‘Setting the machine up in Cambridge, getting the Craithe lot to educate Agaron on how to set up the quantum machine to hack into just about everything – brilliant.’
‘We’d learned our lessons. I was given the project because earlier attempts to steal the Gemini software had proved hopeless. Bloody fiascos, all of them,’ said Zorin’s voice. ‘After Rodchenko’s attempts, which included embarrassing the President with his secret files being stolen, he’d had enough. Realistically, we were never going to get the quantum machine past the West’s sanctions and get it out of the EU and into Russia, but doing all our trials from Cambridge was fine.’
‘And the bit about cutting the power supplies in King’s Somewhere. That trial went well?’
‘King’s Lynn.’ Zorin’s voice. ‘Yes, that proved we’d got our work-in-progress Gemini right.’
‘Confirmed that Yulian Agaron’s software was fit for the bigger jobs?’ Massimo’s voice again.
‘Exactly – ready to go.’
‘And the move to Norwich and Agaron’s death?’
‘Yes, that bloody interfering Wilder,’ came Zorin’s reply. ‘Though I wouldn’t have minded having the man in my organisation. He was a right pain, caused me to bring my plans forward.’
Sitting round the table, Brady gave Wilder a light prod on the arm and Wilder said, ‘We were lucky in Norwich, must have put real pressure on Andrei.’
The mobile had been silent for a moment and Wilder looked worried that this was where it had run out of power.
But then it continued.
‘That brings us to the war games and playing the money markets.’ Massimo’s voice again.
‘Yes. All of that still just good practice for our main event, the one the Russian President had been asking for.’ Zorin. ‘It might have been fun to make a bit of money off the markets. Arrogant little sods, some of those traders. Anyway, as I was saying, all very good practice for what we’ve really been planning for.’
‘Yeah.’ Massimo’s voice. ‘Again you didn’t let me in on the air traffic control attack and all that stuff, scared the living daylights out of me. There were all of us, I mean half my damn New York organisation, running around trying to catch up with what the hell you were doing.’
‘I know, sorry about that.’ Zorin. ‘But yet again, I couldn’t afford any slip-ups simply because someone was trying to act out a part.’
‘I understand that now.’ Massimo. ‘So it’s all looking good. The machine’s on its way up to my new place in Vermont along with Andrei, who incidentally seems much happier now that we got him patched up and into his new home. So, where from here?’
‘I presume you have your plan for how you’re going to extricate yourself from this little island in the middle of nowhere?’ Zorin.
‘Yes, it’s all organised; I’ll be fine.’
‘I myself will have to work out how I get Mitkin out of jail later – but I can do that from anywhere, even from Moscow.’ Zorin’s voice now sounded melancholy and he cleared his throat after this observation.
‘So that just leaves the people on that island of Craithe to deal with before we have another go at a similar target?’ Massimo’s voice.
‘Yes, maybe the same target, anything that gives the US President no room for manoeuvre.’
‘So do you have a date in mind for this next go at the same target?’ Massimo’s voice.
‘Just a bit more time, that’s all I’ll need. I need to consolidate my position in Moscow. Next time I’ll need the full might of the state under my control so that I can use those powers to finally deal with Craithe and the team there.’
‘And you don’t worry that Andrei might get to feel forgotten, stuck up in Vermont? I have set him up beautifully there.’ Massimo’s voice, edgy. ‘After all, he’s still the key to the next time.’
‘No, I’m not worried about him.’ Zorin’s voice. ‘He’s fiercely loyal to me and he has no one else in the world. He’ll be fine. Hey, on that subject, hadn’t you noticed that all my key people have no one else in their lives but me?’
‘Yes, I had.’ Massimo’s voice. ‘Anyway, we’re to make contact in a few days’ time, right? Once we’re both free again and you can give me the details of what you want me to do about Craithe. And after that’s fixed, I can get back to the States and…’
At this point there was just silence; it must have been the point at which Wilder’s mobile ran out of power.
Wilder muttered again under his breath.
‘Sorry about that, gentlemen. It would have been interesting to hear what they said next.’
‘Especially the plans for your boss’s island, Craithe,’ commented Brady
‘No doubt you’ll be ready for anything they might throw at the island?’ said Fremantle rhetorically.
‘Yes, taken care of. But Zorin,’ said Wilder. ‘Got to be sure he doesn’t get away from us between here and a UK prison.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Fremantle. ‘Everyone along the route will be made aware of who he is and what he tried to do. If anything, his personal safety might be our biggest concern.’
‘Pity you can’t hold Massimo here as well,’ said Wilder. ‘Still, once he gets back to the States no doubt you and your lot, Bob, can help the authorities to find where exactly in Vermont he’s taken Andrei and the machines.’
‘Certainly will, and once we’ve found them we can throw the book at him.’
‘Bob, can you get the authorities in New York to meet Massimo?’ said Wilder. ‘With luck, they may already have enough to hold him in custody the moment he lands.’
‘That’s right,’ repeated Fremantle. ‘Just because we haven’t anything to hold him on here doesn’t mean the same for the US. After all, that’s where the crimes were committed.’
‘And what of Zorin? What’s the plane for him?’ asked Wilder.
‘I’ll have to double-check that,’ said Fremantle. ‘As all of this landed on my plate only this morning, I wouldn’t want to mislead you by telling you something which I can’t follow up on. But all the legal paperwork will be completed by the end of tomorrow, and he’ll be escorted back to the UK under armed guard Monday or Tuesday and handed over to the Home Office people or someone like MI6.’
‘Could anything go wrong with that?’ asked Wilder
‘Apart from a miracle escape he’s already planned? No,’ said Fremantle, ‘You can bet that the Russians and the US will try and bully us into letting him go to them, but I’m quite clear on that – initially at least he’s here on British territory and his arrest will stay British until people far more senior than myself decide otherwise.’
‘Good,’ said Wilder. ‘So I have till late Tuesday to be in London to see the arrival of Zorin and Mitkin there.’
‘I’d say that’s about right,’ said Fremantle.
After discussing a few more matters, Wilder and Brady bade their farewells to Fremantle and were driven out to their plane to return to the States.
‘We get Massimo as he lands in New York,’ said Brady as they took off, ‘and you confirm Zorin and Mitkin put away in London and I’d say job well done.’
‘I didn’t like the Governor’s mentioning some Zorin miracle escape plan,’ said Wilder. ‘If you’ve a bank balance of several billion and your people focus entirely on springing you from an escorted trip to jail, I’d think twice before calling it “job done” – not yet anyway.’
Wade International Airport, Bermuda
At JFK International, a heavy police presence was on hand for all flights coming in from Bermuda from Sunday afternoon well into Monday. They were under orders to detain Massimo for questioning, though there was not yet sufficient evidence to arrest him.
The trouble with these orders was that Massimo wasn’t on any of the scheduled flights that came in from the island. He’d gone there and returned by private jet. Understandably, anger spread as they realised that they’d missed their man. By the time the police were asked to check on flights arriving from Bermuda into European cities such as London, Amsterdam and Paris, Massimo could have got to anywhere.
As for Zorin and Mitkin, their situation was straightforward. Mitkin was to remain under armed guard in his hospital room and Zorin was to be taken on a commercial flight to London – also under armed guard. He and his guards were allowed an upgrade to first class – provided he paid for it – and on arrival, the three of them disembarked from the plane quickly. They went through the special customs area reserved for VIPs.
It was in this suite of rooms that Zorin’s people had planned for his escape. Following his escape organiser’s instructions to the letter, he asked to go to the toilets on his way through to customs. One of his armed guards remained outside the toilets, while the other accompanied Zorin. They were hardly through the door when a complete stranger struck out and incapacitated the guard inside the toilets. This was not witnessed by anyone and it was later discovered that of the numerous surveillance cameras posted on this route, the ones in these toilets had all been disabled. After Zorin and his guard had been in there an inordinate length of time, the guard outside went in to investigate. He met with the same fate as his fellow guard and, a minute later, three disguised men came out of the toilets and proceeded to customs.
From there, the three disguised men – one of them being Zorin, of course – cut through a connecting door and joined the economy passengers who by now were going through passport control and customs in large numbers. By the time the VIP area airport security people searched the toilet areas where Zorin had escaped, he had vanished without trace.
Later, a hastily summoned enquiry came to the sorry conclusion that, without much difficulty, the ‘get Zorin out’ team must have given him a fake passport for a UK national, a change of clothes and perhaps a notable distinguishing feature such as a moustache. Such a feature would be likely to fool a passport control officer into assuming he was looking at the right passenger. Later, more detailed checking proved that this guess was exactly how they had done it.
The following day, when Brady and Wilder heard of this disappearance, Brady reminded Wilder that, during their recorded chat, Massimo had asked Zorin if ‘all his arrangements were made’. It was now clear that when Zorin replied that they were ‘all covered’, this was what he was referring to.
Thus, to the fury of the US authorities, with Zorin and Massimo gone and Andrei also hidden away, they were left with only Balboni on whom to vent the nation’s fury for the air traffic control disruption.
Wilder and Brady returned to New York from Bermuda on their private flight. It was therefore late morning before Wilder could ring Katya – even though he had an urgent message for her. It was that either Zorin or Massimo – or even both of them – might return to Zorin’s house in London and that she should therefore move out of it.
‘Aha, that would explain it,’ said Katya on being told this.
‘Explain what?’ asked Wilder, one of his bad feelings coming on.
‘There was a call from, I think, an American. I’m not so good at telling other accents in English.’
‘What did he have to say?’ asked Wilder.
‘When I said Mr Zorin was abroad, he asked if there was anyone else staying here, and that suddenly sounded a bit creepy to me – I mean who rings and asks a stranger if anyone else is staying in a house they’re ringing? So I pretended to be a member of staff and asked who was calling.’
‘And what did he say to that?’ asked Wilder.
‘He said it didn’t matter; he would call round in person to see Mr Zorin in a few days’ time, as he’d been invited to stay here.’
‘And still no name?’
‘No, just this strange accent,’
‘Okay, here’s what you do,’ said Wilder. ‘As I said a minute ago, you need to get out of the house right away. Go and stay at my mews house till I get to London tomorrow. Ring the telephone number I’m going to give you in a minute, tell the person who answers that I’ve told you to stay there. She’ll come to Kensington Palace Gardens, collect you and take over and settle you into my place – all right?’
‘That seems a bit extreme; are you sure I need go that far?’
‘Yes, I am,’ replied Wilder. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow. I’m afraid you won’t find much to eat in the house, but I’m sure you can eat out for just the one or two meals. I’ll ring you when I know which flight I’m on and when it gets in. In the meantime, leave Zorin’s house as soon as you’ve put the phone down and don’t go back there again for any reason till I get back and meet you at my place. Got that?’ He gave her Jessie Marker’s telephone number.
The St. Regis Hotel, New York City
After dealing with the urgent business of getting Katya out of Zorin’s house, Wilder rang Jessie and asked her to help Katya move. After that, he relaxed for the first time in days. Not that Zorin would risk going back there just yet, but Massimo might. He next had a pleasure he’d been putting off for too long – he rang Lucy. As always, she was relieved to hear that he was still in one piece and they arranged that she’d come to the St. Regis for dinner at eight. He promised to have got rid of business by then.
After freshening up he went down to the King Cole Bar where Brady was already waiting for him.
‘Back at the apartment there were a number of messages waiting for me,’ said Brady as they sipped at their first celebratory drinks. ‘There were congratulations from the President in person for our efforts. They were for both of us, so at least he was well briefed. Apparently, the various agencies involved had all said that, without us, the disaster would have been unstoppable.’
‘Well, let’s face it, that’s true,’ said Wilder.
‘They also want to talk with us about the threat of similar attacks using really advanced quantum technology as was used in this case; apparently its use by Andrei caught them completely unawares,’ said Brady. ‘They were aware of the Craithe team’s invention because of all the trials and tests carried out by Freeman. But now they’d be grateful if you could meet with someone from the White House staff at some point to discuss how Gemini could be used by them to a much greater extent.’
‘Yes, but you know about Angus’s wariness of politicians getting their hands anywhere near Gemini,’ said Wilder. Brady smiled.
‘To change the subject a bit,’ said Brady, ‘pity about Rocco Balboni.’
‘Why the commiserations for him?’ asked Wilder.
‘Because of his disjointed involvement in all of this. He only ever played a supporting role, but now he’s been taken into custody on terrorism charges. That means he’ll be incarcerated for God knows how long, maybe forever.’
‘Well at least he won’t be worrying that they didn’t find Andrei and the machine,’ said Wilder.
‘It’s worse than that,’ said Brady, and went on to tell Wilder that he’d rung the Homeland Security man who had been in his apartment earlier and got the whole story.
‘In trying to save his own skin, Balboni told the authorities about Massimo’s attack on his men, the abduction of Andrei and all the machines, and of the Massimo organisation’s secret hiding place in northern Connecticut. Naturally, a small army rushed up to that part of the world but found nothing.’
‘But in the recording of the conversation between Zorin and Massimo on Bermuda,’ said Wilder leaning forward, ‘Massimo said he had sent them to northern Vermont, not Connecticut. We can check that. Hang on a minute.’
He got out his mobile and went through the recording and, sure enough, there was Massimo’s voice – he played it for Brady to hear: ‘The machine’s on its way up to my new place in Vermont along with Andrei’.
‘I can pass this on to the authorities and we’ll see if they can find some place in Vermont that has a connection to him,’ said Brady. ‘I’ll get on with that right away because you’re meeting Lucy for dinner, aren’t you?’
‘I am. I’ll catch up with you later about tracking down Andrei and his machines. But in case I don’t get a chance again for a while, many thanks for everything. We’d never have managed to stop Andrei without IPI over here and your personal help,’ said Wilder. They finished their drinks just as Lucy arrived for the dinner date. Wilder introduced her to Brady, as it was a year or two since they’d last met – part of Wilder’s policy of keeping her well separated from business. Though, come to think of it, he hadn’t done so well on that score of late.
Brady then left to chase up on the search for Andrei and Wilder gave Lucy the big hug he’d wanted to give her when she’d first arrived.
‘I understood from Uncle Jim that this last bit of business you’ve been involved with was to do with what the White House said was a computer glitch,’ said Lucy as they sipped their drinks.
Wilder put an arm around her as they sat on the bench seat in their little cubicle. ‘We don’t need to talk about my business, do we?’
‘This time we do,’ she said firmly, and went on to describe what had happened on the flight she’d been on with her uncle and aunt.
‘Oh God, I’m so sorry,’ said Wilder, suddenly putting his hands on both her shoulders, turning her round and looking into her eyes. He felt a great surge of emotion begin to well up within him. ‘My business really has put you through hell just lately, hasn’t it?’
She saw that he was appalled by this news of her flight and she threw herself forward onto him. Whispering into his ear, she said, ‘If it wasn’t for you saving the world every second day, from what I heard when I rang Jessie in London, there might have been mayhem over the skies of New York and maybe lots of mid-air crashes.’
Wilder separated himself from her and pushed her out to arm’s length.
‘Jessie’s not supposed to tell you anything about what we do,’ he said, trying to hide a smile form her.
‘Oh, come on, Dad,’ she said, smiling back at him. ‘I got the measure of Jessie years ago. I know all about the two of you and I’ve been blackmailing her for years to find out about every job you go out on.’
They both laughed – as they did during the rest of their happy evening together. But she knew that, joking apart, he did often play a role in significant matters and that he needed to leave her again to get on with those.
That night he caught the late flight back to London. Zorin and Massimo had both disappeared – time to get back to work.
Albert Place Mews, London
Katya Rodchenkova had set her alarm early. Even though this gave her plenty of time before Wilder arrived in from the States, she still hurried. As he had promised, he texted her from the airport.
As she heard him unlocking his front door downstairs, she rushed down them and leapt into his arms, almost knocking him over. She buried her head in his chest for a short while. After a few seconds, she unwound her arms and, looking back up into his handsome face she relaxed, lowered herself onto her feet and stepped back from him.
‘Sorry about that.’ she said. ‘But I’m suddenly happy with good news I got, and it’s also great to have you back again. I’ve been quite frightened when you were away and I can now share the news with someone else.’
‘Good news?’ repeated Wilder, standing back and looking down at her.
‘Yes. I had a call from Mr Zorin just before I left his place yesterday.’
Wilder frowned, bent down, picked up his suitcase and, with Katya following him, began going upstairs. Even before she told him the rest, he was trying to work out how this was possible.
‘Tell me about it,’ he said as they reached the top of the stairs. He put down the case and went with her into the bright sunny sitting room, and they sat down together on the sofa.
‘He went back to Moscow,’ she said, ‘and he told me that they had found and arrested my father’s murderers – or rather the two who had organised it.’
‘Yeah, but then something odd,’ she went on. ‘He was just about to tell me the names of the people responsible when he excused himself for a moment – he said there was someone at the door.’
‘And then?’ said Wilder.
‘He never came back on the line – almost as though he’d gone to meet someone at the door and then forgotten that he’d left me on the line.’
‘And that was all?’ asked Wilder, now frowning.
‘That was all, yes. Though I thought I heard some shouting after Zorin had gone.’
‘There is another explanation,’ said Wilder, but Katya seemed in a daydream of her own, thinking about Zorin – so he let the conversation end.
‘These things are sometimes complicated,’ said Wilder as she buried her head on his shoulder. Being careful in what he now said, he went on, ‘Politics around the Russian President is particularly complex. But we don’t need to speculate. I have a couple of good friends in Moscow. I’ll ring one of them who’ll be sure to know more about all of this.’
‘Oh, and another thing,’ she said, quickly sitting up straight and looking back at him excitedly. Just before I left Zorin’s house, there was a telephone call. It wasn’t answered by the staff so eventually I thought I should answer it. On the other end of the line there was someone with a really creepy voice.’
‘Someone with a creepy voice?’ Wilder nearly laughed but saw that Katya was still serious.
‘He told me he was called Rossi, Mr Rossi. He said he was a friend of Zorin’s and that he’ll be calling round to Zorin’s house sometime today. I’m to let him in and he’s been told by Mr Zorin to go the safe in the office where there’s a large envelope inside it. He knows where the safe’s hidden and the combination to open it. He said that would prove that he was bona fide. He said he would take the envelope and that was all.’
‘And do we have a time for this Mr Rossi’s visit?’ asked Wilder, now fully alert.
‘Some time near midday today. He said it was important for me to be there so that he could follow Mr Zorin’s instructions.’
Wilder glanced at his watch – a couple of hours to spare.
‘I need to change after the flight. After that we need to get over there before Mr Rossi arrives,’ he said. ‘Could you make me some toast and coffee while I have a shower and change? Though they gave us some breakfast on the flight, that was ages ago. After that we can get over to Zorin’s place.’
‘Of course,’ she said, jumping up from the sofa.
It was just after eleven as Katya let herself and Wilder into Zorin’s house. They were met in the hall by the housekeeper.
‘I’ve been speaking to Mr Zorin,’ she explained to the housekeeper, ‘and I’ve agreed with him that when a Mr Rossi comes here I can deal with him. Okay?’ The housekeeper nodded and left.
As soon as she’d gone, Wilder took Katya into the study and, turning and facing her, took hold of her by the shoulders. Looking intently into her eyes, he said, ‘I want you to pay very careful attention to what I’m going to tell you. I need your complete concentration and for you to remember what I want you to do. Okay?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘When Mr Rossi gets here and after you’ve met him at the front door, bring him directly in here and take him over to the safe. Don’t make any offers of coffee or anything like that. Just stick strictly to what he’s come for – the package in the safe. So far so good?’
She repeated back to him exactly what he had just told her.
‘Good. As soon as he has opened the safe and got the package out of it, I am going to come in and get up behind him. It’s very important that you don’t look up at me as it will send a signal to him that I’m there. Do you understand that?’
‘I do. I tell you what, I won’t even look at you at all. I’ll keep gazing at him. I’ll even pick on something to concentrate on – his cuff links or his watch or something.’ She looked so earnest that Wilder had no doubt that that was exactly what she would do.
Wilder retired to the drawing room and placed himself behind the door there. He made sure that from this spot he could see both the front door and the whole of the route from there to the study the opposite side of the hall from where he was standing. Katya went into the study and nervously leafed through magazines till the front door bell rang.
Wilder watched and, as she opened the door to Mr Rossi, as Wilder had expected, Giuseppe Massimo stepped into the hall.
‘Nice to see you, Mr Rossi,’ said Katya, welcoming him in with a sweep of her arm. ‘Mr Zorin said you’d be calling and that you needed to get a package from the safe.’
Wilder watched as Massimo looked around the place, seeming to satisfy himself that he was alone with Katya.
‘If you’ll come this way I’ll show you where the safe is.’
Massimo had said not a word, but now muttered a ‘Thank you’ and followed her into the study.
Wilder waited a few seconds, got out his gun, ensured for a third time that it was fully loaded and the safety catch was off. He crept out of his hiding place and crossed the hall.
In his usual state of heightened awareness, the ticking of a large carriage clock on one of the hall tables suddenly seemed loud, and he had a fleeting urge to tell the damned thing to shut up. Creeping forward to the study door, he peered through the chink between the door and the doorframe.
By moving his head to see as far as he could to the right, he could now see Massimo. He was on one knee in front of a safe built into the floor under a small Indian rug which he had rolled back to expose it. Behind him, and at the far side of him, stood Katya, concentrating, looking down at him.
He could feel his heart pounding in his ribcage as though trying to get out. The clock behind him ticked even louder.
Suddenly he almost jumped as the clock struck midday, so loud he felt sure it would disturb Massimo. But it didn’t. As he continued to watch, Massimo took out of the safe a large buff-coloured manila envelope. It had a red ribbon tied around it. From where he was standing, Wilder could see no writing on it.
Massimo now seemed about to close the safe and quickly Wilder reviewed his options again. He could wait for Massimo to come out into the hall and take him then, or move quickly right now and risk Massimo turning round before he could reach him. He decided to risk the second choice and moved swiftly into the study and across the room until he was standing over Massimo and just behind him.
Massimo had locked the safe, and was just about to roll the carpet back over it when Wilder gently put the gun muzzle next to Massimo’s ear.
‘Good morning, Mr Massimo. I was wondering when we’d meet again.’
Almost in slow-motion, Massimo put the package down and raised his hands above his head. He got to his feet, turned slowly and faced Wilder.
‘I might have expected that you’d manage to get in the way yet again, Mr Wilder.’
‘Shall we sit?’ said Wilder, as he indicated with the gun that Massimo should go over to some chairs by the fireside. Wilder, who had not taken his eyes off Massimo, except to indicate that Katya should pick up the manila folder, could now see that it was a very substantial package – three or four inches thick and twice the size of a glossy magazine.
‘Katya, could you please bring me over a couple of the curtain tie-back cords from the windows?’ asked Wilder, still looking directly at Massimo.
She did as he asked, and Wilder then asked her to tie Massimo’s hands behind his back, being sure to wind the cord round his wrists a number of times and make sure the knot was secure. As soon as she had done this, Wilder put the gun down on a small table nearby and led Massimo over to a large armchair. Here he ordered him to sit down, and then quickly bound his ankles to one of the chair’s legs.
Leaving him sitting there with not another word yet spoken, he took the manila envelope and, keeping his eyes on Massimo, took it over to a large ornate table. With his elbows he pushed a lamp and some ornaments out of the way to make space, laid the envelope on the table and carefully opened it.
‘Well, well, well, what have we got here?’ he said. He smiled as he pulled the contents slowly out of the envelope and onto the table.
‘I see that you and Mr Zorin have taken a keen interest in the island of Craithe,’ he said as he spread the papers out on the table.
As he leafed through the contents, he could see large-scale maps of the island, the castle’s tourist brochure, press cuttings, print-outs from the internet, and notes on varying sizes of paper.
‘As Mr Zorin may have told you, Mr Massimo,’ said Wilder, looking back up at him, ‘this file is probably the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle of your ambitions to hold the US and therefore the West to ransom. It looks from this file as though you are planning to destroy the Gemini programme before you have another attempt.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Massimo, attempting an absurd ploy of ignorance. ‘I was here at the request of the owner of the property to get a file for him from his safe and send it to him. In fact, you taped the conversation between the two of us so you’ll know that’s the truth.’
‘Well, Mr Massimo,’ said Wilder, ‘I’m very grateful to you – so will Angus Macrae be. This file will help us to perfect our defences on Craithe.’
Massimo’s face was now pale, and at one moment his eyes went across to Katya – they seemed to plead with her to do something, though quite why she should or what he might expect of her just added to the pathos of the moment.
‘So, all that really remains now is for you to tell me where you have hidden away Andrei and all his machines in Vermont.
‘And what makes you think that Zorin or I will…’
‘Don’t let’s waste time with all that ridiculous defiance,’ said Wilder. ‘In a minute, I shall ring my colleagues in IPI and ask their opinion on who of all the people out looking for you I should ring to tell that you’re here, ready for collection.’
A look of fear suddenly crossed Massimo’s face.
‘If all we want from you right now is where you’ve hidden the machines, who should we hand you over to so that you can tell them? First, I could hand you over to Balboni’s people. They would probably use informal, probably illegal methods to get the information out of you, wouldn’t they? But they’d probably be quite persistent. You put their boss into the hands of the US authorities, who are probably sending him to Guantanamo Bay right now.’
‘Or maybe my IPI friends might suggest we ring Homeland Security. With you still hiding the machine which threw the airspace over New York into chaos, I’m sure they’d love to talk to you. What’s more, you’re still harbouring the man who did that, Andrei. Of course they well might treat you as a terrorist, and I presume you know what that would mean for you?’
Massimo now sat there, his mouth dropped slightly open, just staring blankly in front of him.
‘Note I said terrorist, not suspected terrorist,’ added Wilder just to rub the point in. ‘What about Guantanamo? Despite all the promises, it’s still open for business. No defence lawyers, no visitors, no nothing, ever again.’
‘All right, all right,’ shouted Massimo. ‘What exactly do you want of me?’
‘The address in Vermont where you’ve hidden the machines and Andrei. That would do for a start.’
‘But that would mean the end of…’
‘Precisely,’ cut in Wilder. ‘Though, if you stop to think about that for a moment…’ He paused to let Massimo do just that. ‘If you cooperate and give me the address of your Vermont hideaway, willingly pass over the files on your plans to destroy Craithe and Gemini, and point out that it was actually Rocco Balboni who was harbouring the machines and Andrei when the crime was being committed…’
Massimo seized on this last point as though it was the very straw that would save him from drowning.
‘Okay, okay, I’ll tell you.’
Wilder rang Brady in New York. It took him a while to tell even an abbreviated version of the events since he had last seen him. He then gave Bob the address in Vermont where Massimo’s people were hiding Andrei and the machines. Shortly afterwards, after another couple of calls, a special police detail came to collect Massimo and take him somewhere secure for questioning. Wilder would need to keep a check that Massimo hadn’t given them a false address for the place in Vermont and wouldn’t be truly relaxed till that had been checked out.
The Towneley Bank, London
Wilder joined Angus Macrae in his office at the Towneley Bank. He brought him up to date with everything that had happened of late.
‘It seems that we’re near the end of an epic struggle, then,’ said Macrae. ‘Although Mike Rogers has told me that this has been one of IPI’s biggest cases, that’s hardly the point, is it? He might be keen as hell for you to stay on with Gemini for the kudos it’s brought, and the profit. But there have been times when we’ve wondered if it was ever going to end – let alone end well.’
‘You can say that again,’ agreed Wilder.
‘Nor had I expected it would be so dangerous. Not just for you but also for Tatiana, Lucy, Jesse Marker, and probably dozens more. Still, as soon as we’ve got Bob Brady and the US authorities to find Andrei and the machines, we’ll be back to square one, but much wiser as to how to keep Gemini safe.’
‘But what about the Russian President and Victor Zorin?’ asked Wilder.
‘Good God, how crass of me,’ said Macrae. ‘I’d entirely forgotten to tell you. Mikhail Rostov, my father-in-law, rang me last night. Initially it was just a rumour, but he’s spoken to President Balakin since then.’
‘He’s spoken to the Russian President?’ Wilder almost shouted it out. ‘But I thought that after the President had turned a blind eye to the kidnapping of his daughter and had indirectly sanctioned the blockading of his dacha in the Crimea, he was on the brink of declaring a personal war on his old friend.’
‘You’re absolutely right, that was the case,’ replied Macrae. ‘But since then the President’s been desperate for cash. Apparently, he went to Mikhail, practically on bended knee. They agreed to bury their differences and have since got back on friendly terms. As though to say that he was giving up the chase after getting a Gemini for himself, he told Mikhail about Zorin. The diplomatic crisis over Zorin’s holding the New York air traffic control system to ransom was near-catastrophic. As a sop to the US President, he’s dealt with Zorin and made a public apology for him.’
‘Wow, that’s quite a turnaround,’ said Wilder.
‘Yes, and since the recent G20 heads of state meeting, apparently the US and Russian Presidents are almost buddies.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ said Wilder. ‘So some good has come out of all the shenanigans of the past month or so.’
‘That’s the way it appears,’ said Macrae. ‘So, formally I now release you back from your secondment to IPI. Again, I can’t thank you enough for everything that you and your friends and contacts did for us. I know that you and your people take in your stride the kinds of ups and downs of the past few months. Even I was shocked at the violence these people were prepared to indulge in to follow through their plans. I understand the effectiveness of kidnapping from their point of view, but if it hadn’t been for you lot, God knows what the outcome might have been.’
‘We were just doing our jobs,’ said Wilder. ‘And, anyway, once you’d explained what the consequences would be if we didn’t fix this business for you, we didn’t have much choice, did we? Fix it or let the likes of Zorin take over the world? No thanks. But what now?’
‘It’s clear that we need to follow up on the address Massimo gave for where his people have hidden the machines and Andrei – this thing’s not over till their version of Gemini has been destroyed and Andrei’s been locked away,’ said Macrae. ‘Still, that need not bother you anymore. No doubt the US authorities have the know-how to take this over now and finish it.’
‘I hope so,’ said Wilder. ‘I’d rather you didn’t ring me again in a couple of months’ time to tell me that they haven’t sewn up all the loose ends.’
Wilder left Macrae and made his way back to IPI in the Haymarket. Ever the optimist, he did not expect another call from Macrae about Gemini. How wrong he was.
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Copyright © David Stuart Black 2017
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There’s a new high-tech weapon which could bring any country to its knees. The UK and the US won’t use it – too many innocent civilians would suffer. But the Russian President has tasked ruthless London-based Russian Oligarch, Victor Zorin to steal it for him. He has no scruples about civilian deaths – he aims to use it to bring the US and the UK down But they have called in Tom Wilder, ex Special Ops Afghanistan War hero to stop Zorin. But can Wilder is used to dealing with people who don’t play by the rules; But this time will he and his small team succeed against this State-backed megalomaniac and his and their resources? The fate of the West is in Wilders hands and only one of the two of them can win. | <urn:uuid:01f42605-a5ff-4708-ad21-b9e7f960d1aa> | CC-MAIN-2022-21 | https://shakespir.com/ebook/stealth-225259 | 2022-05-25T23:19:23Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662594414.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20220525213545-20220526003545-00620.warc.gz | en | 0.983943 | 116,732 |
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A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by the combatants, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, the conscription of children in the military, committing genocide or ethnic cleansing, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.
The formal concept of war crimes emerged from the codification of the customary international law that applied to warfare between sovereign states, such as the Lieber Code (1863) of the Union Army in the American Civil War and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 for international war. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the war-crime trials of the leaders of the Axis powers established the Nuremberg principles of law, such as the fact that international criminal law defines what is a war crime. In 1949, the Geneva Conventions legally defined new war crimes and established that states could exercise universal jurisdiction over war criminals. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, international courts extrapolated and defined additional categories of war crimes applicable to a civil war.
In 1474, the first trial for a war crime was that of Peter von Hagenbach, realised by an ad hoc tribunal of the Holy Roman Empire, for his command responsibility for the actions of his soldiers, because "he, as a knight, was deemed to have a duty to prevent" criminal behaviour by a military force. Despite having argued that he had obeyed superior orders, von Hagenbach was convicted, condemned to death, and beheaded.
The Hague Conventions were international treaties negotiated at the First and Second Peace Conferences at The Hague, Netherlands, in 1899 and 1907, respectively, and were, along with the Geneva Conventions, among the first formal statements of the laws of war and war crimes in the nascent body of secular international law.
The Geneva Conventions are four related treaties adopted and continuously expanded from 1864 to 1949 that represent a legal basis and framework for the conduct of war under international law. Every single member state of the United Nations has currently ratified the conventions, which are universally accepted as customary international law, applicable to every situation of armed conflict in the world. However, the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions adopted in 1977 containing the most pertinent, detailed and comprehensive protections of international humanitarian law for persons and objects in modern warfare are still not ratified by several states continuously engaged in armed conflicts, namely the United States, Israel, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, and others. Accordingly, states retain different codes and values about wartime conduct. Some signatories have routinely violated the Geneva Conventions in a way that either uses the ambiguities of law or political maneuvering to sidestep the laws' formalities and principles.
The first three conventions have been revised and expanded, with the fourth one added in 1949:
- The First Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field was adopted in 1864 and then significantly revised and replaced by the 1906 version, the 1929 version, and later the First Geneva Convention of 1949.
- The Second Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea was adopted in 1906 and then significantly revised and replaced by the Second Geneva Convention of 1949.
- The Third Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War was adopted in 1929 and then significantly revised and replaced by the Third Geneva Convention of 1949.
- The Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War was first adopted in 1949, based on parts of the 1907 Hague Convention IV.
Two Additional Protocols were adopted in 1977 with the third one added in 2005, completing and updating the Geneva Conventions:
- Protocol I (1977) relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts.
- Protocol II (1977) relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts.
- Protocol III (2005) relating to the Adoption of an Additional Distinctive Emblem.
Just after WWI the world governments started to try and systematically create a code for how War Crimes would be defined. Their first outline of a law was "Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field"—also known as the “Lieber Code.” A small number of German military personnel of the First World War were tried in 1921 by the German Supreme Court for alleged war crimes.
London Charter / Nuremberg Trials 1945
The modern concept of war crime was further developed under the auspices of the Nuremberg Trials based on the definition in the London Charter that was published on August 8, 1945. (Also see Nuremberg Principles.) Along with war crimes the charter also defined crimes against peace and crimes against humanity, which are often committed during wars and in concert with war crimes.
International Military Tribunal for the Far East 1946
Also known as the Tokyo Trial, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal or simply as the Tribunal, it was convened on May 3, 1946, to try the leaders of the Empire of Japan for three types of crimes: "Class A" (crimes against peace), "Class B" (war crimes), and "Class C" (crimes against humanity), committed during World War II.
International Criminal Court 2002
On July 1, 2002, the International Criminal Court, a treaty-based court located in The Hague, came into being for the prosecution of war crimes committed on or after that date. Several nations, most notably the United States, China, Russia, and Israel, have criticized the court. The United States still participates as an observer. Article 12 of the Rome Statute provides jurisdiction over the citizens of non-contracting states if they are accused of committing crimes in the territory of one of the state parties.
War crimes are defined in the statute that established the International Criminal Court, which includes:
- Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, such as:
- Willful killing, or causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health
- Torture or inhumane treatment
- Unlawful wanton destruction or appropriation of property
- Forcing a prisoner of war to serve in the forces of a hostile power
- Depriving a prisoner of war of a fair trial
- Unlawful deportation, confinement or transfer
- Taking hostages
- Directing attacks against civilians
- Directing attacks against humanitarian workers or UN peacekeepers
- Killing a surrendered combatant
- Misusing a flag of truce
- Settlement of occupied territory
- Deportation of inhabitants of occupied territory
- Using poison weapons
- Using civilians as shields
- Using child soldiers
- Firing upon a Combat Medic with clear insignia.
- The following acts as part of a non-international conflict:
- Murder, cruel or degrading treatment and torture
- Directing attacks against civilians, humanitarian workers or UN peacekeepers
- The following acts as part of an international conflict:
However the court only has jurisdiction over these crimes where they are "part of a plan or policy or as part of a large-scale commission of such crimes".
Heads of state and government
- German Großadmiral and President Karl Dönitz and Japanese Prime Ministers and Generals Hideki Tōjō and Kuniaki Koiso in the aftermath of World War II.
- Former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević was brought to trial charges with, genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in three republics. This pertained to superior responsibility for the Bosnia and Croatia indictments, and individual responsibility for the Kosovo indictment. He was acquitted, however, as he died in custody in 2006, before the trial could be concluded.
- Former Liberian President Charles G. Taylor was also brought to The Hague charged with war crimes; his trial stretched from 2007 to March 2011. He was convicted in April 2012 of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity.
- Former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadžić was arrested in Belgrade on July 18, 2008, and brought before Belgrade's War Crimes Court a few days after. He was extradited to the Netherlands, and is currently in The Hague, in the custody of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The trial began in 2010. On March 24, 2016, he was found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica, war crimes and crimes against humanity, 10 of the 11 charges in total, and sentenced to 40 years' imprisonment. He was sentenced to life on appeal.
- Omar al-Bashir, former head of state of Sudan, is charged with three counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and other war crimes regarding the war in the Darfur region of Sudan.
- Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was indicted for allegedly ordering the killings of protesters and civilians and Crimes against Humanity, during the 2011 Libyan civil war, however, he was killed in October 2011 before he could stand trial.
- Yoshijirō Umezu, a general in the Imperial Japanese Army
- Seishirō Itagaki, War minister of the Empire of Japan
- Hermann Göring, Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe.
- Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Adolf Eichmann, high-ranking members of the SS.
- Wilhelm Keitel, Generalfeldmarschall, head of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.
- Erich Raeder, Großadmiral, Commander in Chief of the Kriegsmarine.
- Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany 1942–45.
- William Calley, former U.S. Army officer found guilty of murder for his role in the Mỹ Lai massacre.
- General Tikka Khan, aka "Butcher of Bengal" was a notorious Pakistan Army General known for his war crimes in Bangladesh during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971.
- Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti, more commonly known by his nickname "Chemical Ali", executed by post-Ba'athist Iraq for his leadership of the gassing of Kurdish villages during the Iran-Iraq War; also governor of illegally occupied Kuwait during the First Gulf War
- Ratko Mladić, indicted for genocide amongst other violations of humanitarian law during the Bosnian War; he was captured in Serbia in May 2011 and was extradited to face trial in The Hague, wherein he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
- Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, guerrilla group which used to operate in Uganda.
War crimes are serious violations of the rules of customary and treaty law concerning international humanitarian law that have become accepted as criminal offenses for which there is individual responsibility. Colloquial definitions of war crime include violations of established protections of the laws of war, but also include failures to adhere to norms of procedure and rules of battle, such as attacking those displaying a peaceful flag of truce, or using that same flag as a ruse to mount an attack on enemy troops. The use of chemical and biological weapons in warfare are also prohibited by numerous chemical arms control agreements and the Biological Weapons Convention. Wearing enemy uniforms or civilian clothes to infiltrate enemy lines for espionage or sabotage missions is a legitimate ruse of war, though fighting in combat or assassinating individuals behind enemy lines while so disguised is not, as it constitutes unlawful perfidy. Attacking enemy troops while they are being deployed by way of a parachute is not a war crime. However, Protocol I, Article 42 of the Geneva Conventions explicitly forbids attacking parachutists who eject from disabled aircraft and surrendering parachutists once landed. Article 30 of the 1907 Hague Convention IV – The Laws and Customs of War on Land explicitly forbids belligerents to punish enemy spies without previous trial.
War crimes also include such acts as mistreatment of prisoners of war or civilians. War crimes are sometimes part of instances of mass murder and genocide though these crimes are more broadly covered under international humanitarian law described as crimes against humanity. In 2008, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 1820, which noted that "rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide"; see also wartime sexual violence. In 2016, the International Criminal Court convicted someone of sexual violence for the first time; specifically, they added rape to a war crimes conviction of Congo Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo.
War crimes also included deliberate attacks on citizens and property of neutral states, such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As the attack on Pearl Harbor happened while the U.S. and Japan were at peace and without a just cause for self-defense, the attack was declared by the Tokyo Trials to go beyond justification of military necessity and therefore constituted a war crime.
War crimes are significant in international humanitarian law because it is an area where international tribunals such as the Nuremberg Trials and Tokyo Trials have been convened. Recent examples are the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which were established by the UN Security Council acting under Chapter VIII of the UN Charter.
Under the Nuremberg Principles, war crimes are different from crimes against peace. Crimes against peace include planning, preparing, initiating, or waging a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances. Because the definition of a state of "war" may be debated, the term "war crime" itself has seen different usage under different systems of international and military law. It has some degree of application outside of what some may consider being a state of "war", but in areas where conflicts persist enough to constitute social instability.
The legalities of war have sometimes been accused of containing favoritism toward the winners ("Victor's justice"), as some controversies have not been ruled as war crimes. Some examples include the Allies' destruction of Axis cities during World War II, such as the firebombing of Dresden, the Operation Meetinghouse raid on Tokyo (the most destructive single bombing raid in history), and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In regard to the strategic bombing during World War II, there was no international treaty or instrument protecting a civilian population specifically from attack by aircraft, therefore the aerial attacks on civilians were not officially war crimes. The Allies at the trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo never prosecuted the Germans, including Luftwaffe commander-in-chief Hermann Göring, for the bombing raids on Warsaw, Rotterdam, and British cities during the Blitz as well as the indiscriminate attacks on Allied cities with V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets, nor the Japanese for the aerial attacks on crowded Chinese cities. Although there are no treaties specific to aerial warfare, Protocol 1, Article 51 of the Geneva Conventions explicitly prohibits the bombardment of cities where the civilian population might be concentrated regardless of any method. (see Aerial bombardment and international law).
Controversy arose when the Allies re-designated German POWs (under the protection of the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War) as Disarmed Enemy Forces (allegedly unprotected by the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War), many of which were then used for forced labor such as clearing minefields. By December 1945, six months after the war had ended, it was estimated by French authorities that 2,000 German prisoners were still being killed or maimed each month in mine-clearing accidents. The wording of the 1949 Third Geneva Convention was intentionally altered from that of the 1929 convention so that soldiers who "fall into the power" following surrender or mass capitulation of an enemy are now protected as well as those taken prisoner in the course of fighting.
- Intentional murder of innocent people;
- Torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments;
- Willfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health;
- Compelling a prisoner of war or other protected person to serve in the forces of hostile power;
- Use by children under the age of sixteen years into armed forces or groups or using them to participate actively in hostilities;
- Intentionally directing attack against the civilian population as not taking direct part in hostilities;
- Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly;
- Destroying or seizing the property of an adversary unless demanded by necessities of the conflict;
- Using poison or poisoned weapons;
- Intentionally directing attack against building dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals as long as it's not used as military infrastructure;
- Wilfully depriving a prisoner of war or other protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial;
- Attacking or bombarding towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which are not military infrastructure;
- Unlawful deportation, transfer, or unlawful confinement;
- Taking of hostages.
- Intentional assault with the knowledge that such an assault would result in loss of life or casualty to civilians or damage to civilian objects or extensive, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment that would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct.
Legality of civilian casualties
Under the law of armed conflict (LOAC), the death of non-combatants is not necessarily a violation; there are many things to take into account. Civilians cannot be made the object of an attack, but the death/injury of civilians while conducting an attack on a military objective are governed under principles such as of proportionality and military necessity and can be permissible. Military necessity "permits the destruction of life of ... persons whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable by the armed conflicts of the war; ... it does not permit the killing of innocent inhabitants for purposes of revenge or the satisfaction of a lust to kill. The destruction of property to be lawful must be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war."
For example, conducting an operation on an ammunition depot or a terrorist training camp would not be prohibited because a farmer is plowing a field in the area; the farmer is not the object of attack and the operations would adhere to proportionality and military necessity. On the other hand, an extraordinary military advantage would be necessary to justify an operation posing risks of collateral death or injury to thousands of civilians. In "grayer" cases the legal question of whether the expected incidental harm is excessive may be very subjective. For this reason, States have chosen to apply a "clearly excessive" standard for determining whether a criminal violation has occurred.
When there is no justification for military action, such as civilians being made the object of attack, a proportionality analysis is unnecessary to conclude that the attack is unlawful.
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
For aerial strikes, pilots generally have to rely on information supplied by external sources (headquarters, ground troops) that a specific position is in fact a military target. In the case of former Yugoslavia, NATO pilots hit a civilian object (the Chinese embassy in Belgrade) that was of no military significance, but the pilots had no idea of determining it aside from their orders. The committee ruled that "the aircrew involved in the attack should not be assigned any responsibility for the fact they were given the wrong target and that it is inappropriate to attempt to assign criminal responsibility for the incident to senior leaders because they were provided with wrong information by officials of another agency". The report also notes that "Much of the material submitted to the OTP consisted of reports that civilians had been killed, often inviting the conclusion to be drawn that crimes had therefore been committed. Collateral casualties to civilians and collateral damage to civilian objects can occur for a variety of reasons."
The Rendulic Rule is a standard by which commanders are judged.
German General Lothar Rendulic was charged for ordering extensive destruction of civilian buildings and lands while retreating from a suspected enemy attack in what is called scorched earth policy for the military purpose of denying the use of ground for the enemy. The German troops retreating from Finnish Lapland believed Finland would be occupied by Soviet troops and destroyed many settlements while retreating to Norway under the command of Rendulic. He overestimated the perceived risk but argued that Hague IV authorized the destruction because it was necessary to war. He was acquitted of that charge.
Under the "Rendulic Rule" persons must assess the military necessity of an action based on the information available to them at that time; they cannot be judged based on information that subsequently comes to light.
- List of war crimes
- 1971 Bangladesh atrocities
- Allied war crimes during World War II
- British war crimes
- German war crimes
- International Military Tribunal for the Far East
- Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant war crimes findings
- Italian war crimes
- Japanese war crimes
- Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen
- Korean War crimes
- Soviet war crimes
- United States Senate Committee on the Philippines
- United States war crimes
- East Timor Genocide
- American Service-Members' Protection Act
- Command responsibility
- Law of war
- Rule of law
- Rule of Law in Armed Conflicts Project (RULAC)
- Russell Tribunal
- Special Court for Sierra Leone
- The International Criminal Court and the 2003 invasion of Iraq
- War Crimes Law (Belgium)
- War Crimes Act of 1996
- Universal jurisdiction
- Chronicles of Terror
- Civilian internee
- Commando order
- Commissar order
- Crime of aggression
- Doctors' Trial
- Forensic archaeology
- Human shield
- International Criminal Court investigations
- Katyn massacre
- Henry Kissinger
- List of denaturalized former citizens of the United States, including those denaturalized for concealing involvement in war crimes to obtain that country's citizenship
- Mass atrocity crimes
- Mass killing
- Military use of children
- Nazi human experimentation
- NKVD prisoner massacres
- No quarter
- Nuremberg Principles
- Razakars (Pakistan)
- Satellite Sentinel Project
- Srebrenica massacre
- State terrorism
- Terror bombing
- Transitional justice
- Unlawful combatant
- Winter Soldier Investigation
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Int J Med Sci 2020; 17(11):1474-1481. doi:10.7150/ijms.45831 This issue
Division of Longevity and Biofunctional Medicine, Pusan National University School of Korean Medicine, Yangsan 50612, Republic of Korea.
The anti-cancer mechanisms of Radix Sophorae Flavescentis were investigated in 5637 bladder cancer cells. Radix Sophorae Flavescentis extract (RSF) (50‑400 µg/ml) inhibited the proliferation of 5637 cells and increased sub‑G1 phase ratios. RSF‑induced cell death was associated with the down-regulation of B‑cell lymphoma 2 (Bcl‑2) and the up-regulation of Bcl‑2 X‑associated protein (Bax). RSF also activated caspase‑3 and -9 and regulated the activations of mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs). In addition, RSF increased intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels and depolarized the mitochondrial membrane potential. These findings suggest RSF induces apoptosis in 5637 bladder cancer cells and that it has potential use as a novel anti-cancer drug for bladder cancer.
Keywords: Radix Sophorae Flavescentis, Apoptosis, Proliferation, Bladder cancer, 5637
Bladder cancer is one of the most common cancers in the world in the top 10 and is diagnosed with approximately 550,000 new cancers each year . Also, it is difficult to treat because it easily metastasizes and reoccurs . Until now, chemotherapy has been viewed as the most effective way of treating bladder cancer . However, chemotherapy damages normal tissues and has serious side-effects in bladder cancer patients. Therefore, novel anti-cancer drugs with limited effects on normal cells are required [4,5].
Traditional medicine is widely used to treat cancer because it has fewer complications and side effects and is higher quality of life [6,7]. Radix Sophorae Flavescentis is an herb that is used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat and prevent various diseases . In particular, this shrub has anti-cancer effects, for example, it has been reported to induce the apoptosis of laryngeal cancer Hep2 cells , esophageal cancer TE‑8 cells , PC‑3 prostate cancer cells , and gastric cancer cells .
Apoptosis provides an important key to cancer treatment strategies, and the signaling pathway associated with cancer cell growth is viewed as a major target for cancer treatment [13,14]. However, relatively little is known about the anti-cancer efficacy of Radix Sophorae Flavescentis and even less is known of the mechanisms responsible for its effects. In the present study, we investigated the anti-cancer mechanisms of an ethanolic extract of Radix Sophorae Flavescentis in 5637 bladder cancer cells.
Three human urinary bladder cancer cell lines (5637, RT4 and T24) were used. Among them, we used mainly 5637 cell line. Cells were propagated in RPMI-1640 medium (Gibco-BRL, St. Louis, MO, USA) supplemented with 10% heat-inactivated fetal bovine serum (Invitrogen, Grand Island, NY, USA) containing 1% penicillin/streptomycin (Invitrogen, Grand Island, NY, USA) at 37°C.
RSF extract (RSF) was obtained using ethyl alcohol as described previously . Matrine and oxymatrine have long been regarded as major components of the pharmacological efficacy of RSF [15,16]. Matrine and oxymatrine were detected by high‑performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) at retention times of 11.6 and 25.7 min, respectively . The concentrations of matrine and oxymatrine in RSF were 70.47 ± 1.27 and 299.87 ± 3.746 mg/g, respectively.
5637 cells were seeded onto 12‐well plates at a density of 3 × 104 cells/well. Cell viabilities were determined using an MTT assay (Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis, MO, USA). 5637 cells were treated with MTT solution and incubated for 2 h at 37°C, following which, absorbance was measured at 570 nm.
5637 cells were treated with ethyl alcohol and vortexed prior to overnight incubation at 4°C. Samples were centrifuged for 5 min and the supernatant was discarded. Cell pellets were resuspended in propidium iodine (PI) staining solution (PI [5 mg/ml; 2 μl) containing RNase (2 μl), spun at 20000 g for 10 s, and incubated for 40 min in the dark at room temperature. Samples were analyzed using a fluorescence-activated cell sorter (FACScan; Becton-Dickinson, Mountain View, CA, USA) at λ=488 nm using Cell-Quest software (Becton-Dickinson, Franklin Lakes, NJ, USA).
For mitochondrial depolarization assay, the cells were treated with 50 nM tetramethylrhodamine methyl ester (TMRM; Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis, MO, USA) for 30 min. Fluorescence intensities of these samples were measured using a BD FACSCANTO II (BD Biosciences, Sunnyvale, CA, USA) at the excitation and emission wavelengths of 510 and 580 nm, respectively.
Lysates were prepared by incubating cells in RIPA buffer containing protease and phosphatase inhibitor cocktail (Calbiochem, La Jolla, CA, USA). The total protein extracted from the cells was quantified using the Bradford method (Bio‑Rad Laboratories, Hercules, CA). An equal amount of protein (20 μg per lane) from the samples was separated by 8% or 10% SDS-PAGE and probed with indicated antibodies. Antibodies against survivin (#2808), ERK (#9102), pERK (#9106), JNK (#9252), pJNK (#9251), p38 (#9212), and pp38 (#9216) were purchased from Cell Signaling Technology (Danvers, MA, USA), and antibodies against BCl (#sc-783), Bax (#sc-493), caspase-3 (#sc-7148), caspase-9 (#sc-7885), PARP (#sc-7150), β-actin (#sc-47778) and GAPDH (#sc-32233) were from Santa Cruz Biotechnology (Santa Cruz, CA, USA). The secondary horseradish peroxidase‑conjugated antibodies used were goat anti‑rabbit IgG and goat anti‑mouse IgG (cat. nos. SC‑2004 and SC-2005, respectively; Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Dallas, TX, USA). Relative intensities of protein bands were analyzed with a GS‑710 Image Densitometer (Bio‑Rad Laboratories, Hercules, CA, USA). Results are representative of at least five independent experiments.
Assays were performed using caspase-3 and -9 assay kits (Cellular Activity Assay Kit Plus; BioMol, Plymouth, PA, USA). After resuspending the cells in ice‑cold cell lysis buffer, the supernatant was removed. Supernatant samples were incubated with caspase substrate (400‑lM Ac‑DEVD‑pNA; 50 μl) at 37°C. Each sample was read at 405 nm at several time‑points.
ROS generation was measured using DCF-DA (2',7'-dichlorodihydrofluorescein diacetate; Molecular Probes, Eugene, OR, USA). The cells were treated with 20 μl DCF‑DA at 37˚C for 30 min and washed with PBS. Fluorescence was measured using FACS (Becton-Dickinson, Mountain View, CA, USA), at excitation/emission wavelengths of 488/525 nm, respectively.
One-way ANOVA with Tukey's post hoc comparison was used for multiple comparisons. The analysis was performed using Prism 6.0 (GraphPad Software Inc., La Jolla, CA, USA) and Origin 8.0 (OriginLab Corporation, Northampton, MA, USA) software. Results are expressed as means ± SEMs, and P values of < 0.05 were considered statistically significant.
To determine whether RSF suppresses bladder cancer cell (5637, RT4 and T24) growth, MTT assays were performed after treating cells with RSF for 24 h, 47 h and 72 h. RSF (50, 100, 200, 300, or 400 µg/ml) reduced the survival of 5637, RT4 and T24 cells by concentration and time dependence (Fig. 1A-1C). Among them, various experiments were conducted mainly with 5637 cells. 5637 cells are in the advanced stage of human bladder cancer, with high capacity of proliferation and metastasis . In addition, cell cycle analysis was performed using flow cytometry to determine whether RSF induced apoptosis. Sub-G1 phase ratios were increased by RSF by 4.7 ± 1.0 % at 50 µg/ml, 5.2 ± 0.9 % at 100 µg/ml, 5.8 ± 1.4 % at 200 µg/ml, 12.6 ± 2.3 % at 300 µg/ml, and 18.9 ± 4.0 % at 400 µg/ml as compared with non-treated treated cells by (Fig. 2A and 2B). Also, the mitochondrial depolarization was examined by TMRM staining and the results showed that the mitochondrial membrane of the cells was significantly depolarized on RSF treatment (Fig. 2C and 2D). These results indicate RSF inhibits the proliferation of 5637 cells and that these effects are associated with the induction of apoptotic cell death.
Western blotting was used to determine whether RSF-induced apoptosis is regulated by BCl-2 (anti-apoptotic) and Bax (pro-apoptotic). BCl-2 was reduced by RSF, whereas Bax was increased (Fig. 3A). Also, survivin, a member of the family of inhibitor of apoptosis proteins, was reduced by RSF (Fig. 3B). These results indicate RSF-induced apoptosis was dependent on mitochondrial activation in 5637 cells.
RSF reduced bladder cancer cell viability. Cell viabilities were determined using an MTT assay. (A) RSF reduced cell viabilities dose-dependently in 5637 cells. (B) RSF reduced cell viabilities dose-dependently in RT4 cells. (C) RSF reduced cell viabilities dose-dependently in T24 cells. Results are presented as means ± SEMs. *p<0.05. **p<0.01. RSF, ethanolic extract of Radix Sophorae Flavescentis; CTRL, control.
RSF induced sub‑G1 phase ratio increase and mitochondrial damage. (A) Cell cycle analysis was conducted by flow cytometry. (B) Sub-G1 fractions are expressed as percentages. (C) The fluorescence for mitochondrial depolarization assay was measured by FACS analysis. (D) The relative mitochondrial TMRM fluorescence levels were calculated to determine the fold difference in comparison to control. Results are presented as means ± SEMs. *p<0.05. **p<0.01. RSF, ethanolic extract of Radix Sophorae Flavescentis; CTRL, control.
Effects of RSF on BCl-2, Bax and survivin in 5637 cells. (Aa) Western blot was performed on 5637 cells treated with different concentrations of RSF. BCl-2 expression was down-regulated by RSF, whereas Bax expression was up-regulated. (Ab) BCl‑2 and (Ac) Bax protein expressions were normalized versus β‑actin. (Ba) Western blot was performed on 5637 cells treated with different concentrations of RSF and survivin expression was down-regulated by RSF. (Bb) Survivin protein expressions were normalized versus GAPDH. Results are presented as means ± SEMs. *p<0.05. β-Actin was used as the loading control. RSF, ethanolic extract of Radix Sophorae Flavescentis; CTRL, control.
Caspases are important mediators of apoptosis via the intrinsic and extrinsic apoptotic pathways. These induce the activation of cytoplasmic endonucleases, which cleaves various substrates, such as poly (ADP‑ribose) polymerase (PARP). Furthermore, the cleavage product of PARP functions as a sign of apoptosis . RSF dose-dependently increased the activities of caspase -3 and -9, and zVAD-fmk (a broad-spectrum caspase inhibitor) suppressed these activities (Fig. 4A). Also, western blot showed RSF gradually down-regulated the expressions pro-caspase-3 and -9, gradually up-regulated the active forms of caspase-3 and -9, and up-regulated PARP protein levels (Fig. 4B). When 5637 cells were co-treated with z-VAD-fmk and RSF for 24 h, z-VAD-fmk suppressed RSF-induced apoptosis (Fig. 4C). These results indicate that RSF-induced apoptosis was dependent on caspase activation in 5637 cells.
To investigate the effects of RSF on MAPK pathways, cell viabilities were determined after co-treating cells with RSF with or without SP600125 (c-jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK) II inhibitor) or PD98059 (p42/44 MAPK inhibitor) using the MTT assay. Co-treatment with RSF (50, 100, 200, 300, or 400 µg/ml) and SP600125 inhibited 5637 cell death by 95.9 ± 0.9 %, 91.8 ± 2.0 %, 65.8 ± 0.7 %, 33.4 ± 0.9, and 15.3 ± 0.2 %, respectively (Fig. 5A), and co-treatment with RSF and PD98059 inhibited 5637 cell death by 89.3 ± 7.9 %, 73.0 ± 5.1 %, 56.7 ± 3.9 %, 28.7 ± 1.6 %, and 16.8 ± 1.1 %, respectively (Fig. 5B). To further examine the regulations of these signaling pathways, we investigated RSF-induced phosphorylations of MAPK proteins by Western blot. The phosphorylations of MAPKs, including extracellular signal regulated kinase (ERK), JNK, and p38, increased after treating cells with RSF (400 μg/ml) from 30 min to 4 h (Fig. 6). These results indicate that RSF inhibited the proliferation and induced apoptosis of 5637 cells by modulating MAPK signaling pathways.
Since ROS play a key role in apoptosis, we investigated whether RSF generates ROS in 5637 cells. DCF-DA (a fluorescent dye) was used to check the involvement of ROS in RSF-induced apoptosis. Flow cytometry showed RSF significantly increased ROS levels in 5637 cells (Fig. 7).
Caspase activations by RSF in 5637 cells. (A) RSF dose-dependently increased the activities of caspase -3 and -9. (B) 5637 cells were treated with RSF. Membranes were probed with the indicated antibodies, and GAPDH was used as the internal control. (C) In addition, zVAD-fmk (a pan-caspase inhibitor) pretreatment suppressed RSF-induced reductions in cell viability. Results are presented as means ± SEMs. *p<0.05. **p<0.01. GAPDH was used as the loading control. RSF, ethanolic extract of Radix Sophorae Flavescentis; CTRL, control.
Effect MAPK pathway inhibitors on the effects of RSF in 5637 cells. Cell viabilities were determined using the MTT assay after co-treating cells with RSF plus (A) SP600125 or (B) PD98059. Results are presented as means ± SEMs. *p<0.05. **p<0.01. #p<0.05 between treatments. RSF, ethanolic extract of Radix Sophorae Flavescentis; CTRL, control.
The activations of ERK, JNK, and p38 MAPK pathways in 5637 cells by RSF. 5637 cells were incubated with RSF. (A) Phosphorylations of ERK, JNK, and p38 were confirmed by the Western blot method. (B) Phosphorylated ERK, JNK, and p38 levels are indicated as band densities relative to GAPDH. Results are presented as means ± SEMs. **p<0.01. RSF, ethanolic extract of Radix Sophorae Flavescentis; CTRL, control; ERK, extracellular signal regulated kinase; JNK, c‑Jun N‑terminal kinase.
RSF increased ROS levels in 5637 cells. (A) Cells were stained with DCF-DA and then, intracellular ROS levels were measured. (B) Intracellular ROS levels were assessed after treating cells with RSF. ROS levels are expressed as percentages of untreated controls. Results are presented as means ± SEMs. **p<0.001. RSF, ethanolic extract of Radix Sophorae Flavescentis; CTRL, control.
Traditional medicines have recently been accepted as useful complementary and alternative treatments for cancer-related diseases . Radix Sophorae Flavescentis has received much attention because of positive research findings on its anti-cancer efficacy and has also been widely used in traditional medicine for cancer [9-12]. Furthermore, the present study demonstrates that an ethanol extract of this herb (RSF) induces the apoptosis of 5637 bladder cancer cells.
Apoptosis plays a crucial role in normal cell development . Somewhat surprisingly, although apoptosis is known to play a major role in anticancer therapy, its clinical relevance remains unclear . There are two major apoptotic mechanisms: an internal mitochondrial mechanism and an external death receptor mechanism . The internal signaling pathway causes apoptosis and mitochondrial signals that react directly with intracellular organelles [23,24]. On the other hand, the external signaling pathway initiates apoptosis via receptor-mediated interactions . In the present study, BCl-2 and survivin proteins significant decreased when RSF was treated with 5637 cells, while Bax was increased significantly. BCl-2 is an antiapoptotic protein that exhibits oncogenic potential by controlling the intrinsic apoptotic pathway. Our study indicates the decrease in BCl-2 expression in the use of RSF, suggesting that RSF might have the ability to promote apoptosis in 5637 cells. The change in the survivin levels further proves this result. Inhibitor of apoptosis protein (IAP) acts as a control of programmed cell death and apoptosis . Survivin is another member of the IAP family of antiapoptotic protein . Survivin protein functions to inhibit apoptotic pathway and negatively regulates apoptosis of the cells [27-29]. Survivin interacts with caspase-3 and 7, an effector caspases of apoptotic pathway [27-29]. In our study, RSF reduces the degree of Survivin and, therefore, RSF may be a powerful inducer of apoptosis in 5637 cells. The proteolytic system, which involves caspases, is a central component of apoptosis [30,31]. In the present study, RSF gradually up-regulated the active forms of caspase-3 and -9 and gradually down-regulated the expressions of pro-caspase-3 and -9. In addition, RSF gradually up-regulated the activities of caspase-3 and -9, and these increases were suppressed by zVAD-fmk, which also suppressed RSF-induced cell death. In Fig. 3, the non-treated cells showed PARP cleavage and caspase activation. It is thought that AGS cells themselves are weak and may be caused by cell stress. Also, we think the band may look strong due to the relative difference in density. However, in this experiment, the RSF treatment effect is more obvious than non-treatment, so we think the RSF effect is clearly present. These observations indicate that RSF-induced 5637 cell apoptosis via caspase-dependent death receptor signaling and mitochondria pathways in 5637 cells.
Several ion channels are expressed in a variety of bladder cancer cell lines and have been linked with bladder cell proliferation [32-34]. However, the roles played by ion channels in the development and increase of bladder cancer have not been well established. A few reports have shown BKCa and TREK2 channels regulate 253J cell growth [34,35] and that TRPM8 and TRPV2 are involved in the apoptosis of T24 cells [32,33]. However, few have reported that a traditional medicine can cause bladder cancer cell apoptosis by controlling ion channels. Therefore, we suggest additional mechanistic studies be performed to determine whether ion channels are involved in the apoptosis of bladder cancer cells by RSF.
MAPKs are involved in intracellular action mechanisms during proliferation, differentiation, stress responses, and apoptosis . Furthermore, MAPK pathways, such as those of ERK1/2, p38 MAPK, and JNK, have been implicated in chemotherapy and particularly in drug toxicity [36,37]. In the present study, we found that RSF activated the ERK, p38, and JNK pathways and reduced 5637 cell survival. In addition, the inhibition of MAPK signaling by PD98059 or SP600125 protected 5637 cells from RSF induced cell death, which suggests the activation of MAPK cascades acts to prevent the proliferation of 5637 cells.
In conclusion, the present study shows RSF inhibits 5637 cell growth and increases the proportion of cells in the sub‑G1 phase. In addition, RSF‑induced apoptosis was found to be associated with the down-regulation of BCl‑2 or survivin and the up-regulation of Bax. Furthermore, RSF activated caspase‑3 and -9 and MAPK cascades and increased intracellular ROS levels. We hope that this research provides an opportunity to develop a cure for bladder cancer.
The present study was supported by a Korean National Research Foundation (NRF) Grant funded by the Korean Government (MSIP) (Grant no. 2014R1A5A2009936).
The authors have declared that no competing interest exists.
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Corresponding author: Byung Joo Kim, 50612 Division of Longevity and Biofunctional Medicine, Pusan National University School of Korean Medicine, 49 Busandaehakro, Mulgeum-eup, Yangsan 50612, Republic of Korea. Telephone: +82-51-510-8469; Fax: +82-51-510-8420; E-mail: visionac.kr. | <urn:uuid:59634545-dcf1-4c86-9645-462aeb77d7f4> | CC-MAIN-2022-21 | https://www.medsci.org/v17p1474.htm | 2022-05-18T16:59:44Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662522284.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20220518151003-20220518181003-00620.warc.gz | en | 0.902112 | 6,867 |
I have a little balm for the Minister. Since the last day in respect of one of the cases in which I had a most unfortunate experience, the private firm in question rang me up and told me the delay was entirely theirs and not that of CIE. Therefore, ventilation in the House provides at least that slight solace for the Minister. However, we adjourned on the last occasion with the Minister still going to see his colleague, the Minister for Finance, to discuss the question of the tabling of specific contracts. I notice in the Order Paper to-day there is no reference to such tabling. Therefore, before we proceed further on the section, it might be advantageous to the House if we heard what the Minister's present view on the subject is.
State Guarantees (Transport) Bill, 1962 —Committee Stage (Resumed)
I have given careful consideration to the suggestion by Deputy Sweetman that the contract between CIE and General Motors should be appended to this Bill or alternatively laid on the Table of the House. I can find no grounds for the assertion by the Deputy that this would be in accordance with normal practice. The precedents he quoted did not refer to commercial contracts —one was an agreement between the Minister for Agriculture and the owners of Johnstown Castle for the taking over of the Castle as a gift to the State; the other related to an agreement about rents between the Dublin Artisans Dwellings Company Ltd. and their Tenants Association which was being given legal effect by the Rents Restriction Act, 1960. I am aware of no precedent for scheduling to a Bill or tabling in the House a commercial contract between a State body and a private company. Moreover, similar contracts made between Government departments and private companies are always treated as confidential and successive Governments have refused for obvious reasons of public policy to publish such documents or disclose details of them.
The House is not being asked to ratify a specific contract between CIE and General Motors Corporation. If Deputies will look at Section 2 of the Bill, they will find that in the first place they are being asked to empower the Minister for Finance to guarantee contracts entered into by CIE and in the second place, to empower the Minister for Finance to guarantee this particular contract. As I explained on the Second Stage, the reason for including this special provision was that the Government, in order to enable CIE to avail themselves of the attractive terms offered, undertook to provide the necessary guarantee, subject to the enactment of legislation. Having anticipated the general authority of the Oireachtas to give such guarantees, the Government considered it only courtesy to the House to seek their special retrospective sanction for the authorisation by the Minister for Finance in respect of this particular contract.
It is not strictly necessary to do so at all and I am advised that the Bill would be entirely effective, even if subsection (2) of Section 2 were deleted. If the Dáil preferred, I would be willing to delete subsection (2) of Section 2 and to move an amendment to that effect on Report Stage. There is no question of scheduling future contracts which may be guaranteed under this provision or of laying them on the Table of the House. Particulars of the guarantees will be reported annually to the Oireachtas as provided for in Section 6 and this is the normal provision of the kind.
As I said, the object of the Bill is to give certain powers to the Minister for Finance to be exercised in his discretion and to give him, so to speak, covering sanction in the case in which he has already made a commitment in principle. It is no object of the Bill to obtain Dáil approval for the contract. The reason why CIE, with the encouragement and approval of the Government, decided to acquire these locomotives on the instalment terms offered was not, as insinuated by Deputy Browne, that they could not otherwise get the money. It was because the terms were so advantageous, being better than those on which CIE can raise money at home. These terms are so advantageous because I understand the transaction qualifies in the United States for special export credit financing and this is also the reason why the Government guarantee is required.
The merits of the contract do not arise. The contract was entered into by the Board of CIE on their sole responsibility under the powers conferred on them by the Transport Act, 1950.
On a point of order, is the Minister entitled to read a statement to the House?
On what ground?
It is a practice, when the Minister is making an important statement, that he is entitled to read the manuscript. When a Minister has to make a statement of importance, it is the usual practice that he is entitled to read it.
Is it not also understood and accepted by the Committee on Procedure and Privileges that when Ministers read such a statement, they will go through the normal courtesy of furnishing a copy of it for Deputies who are interested——
It is not in the report——
The Parliamentary Secretary, I may say, gave that undertaking on the Minister's behalf.
But not in relation to this specific statement.
The Minister for Transport and Power is transgressing the undertaking that was given.
I did not mean to transgress any custom——
We shall acquit the Minister of deliberate intent to transgress the undertaking. However, sometimes it is impossible to follow a statement which is read, at the speed at which a statement can be read, compared with a speech. Therefore, the other arrangement was come to, within the past year. The channel of communication between the Parliamentary Secretary and his Government seems to have fallen down.
CIE did not seek or receive any official approval of this contract. I have not myself seen the contract nor the seven other tenders received by the Board and I do not propose to see them. What CIE sought and were given was an assurance that the necessary guarantee would be forthcoming to enable them to secure the very advantageous financial terms offered. It is the giving of that assurance to CIE that the House is being asked to endorse, not the terms of the contract nor the technical design of the locomotives, nor the arrangements for maintaining them, all of which are the sole responsibility of the Board of CIE, entrusted to them by enactment of this House.
Neither I, nor my Department, see or approve contracts entered into by CIE, though they are, of course, open to inspection by the auditors of CIE in due course. Indeed, if affairs were ever to reach a stage where I considered it necessary or desirable that contracts entered into by the Board should be submitted for official inspection or approval, I would obviously have lost confidence in the Board and should seek their replacement. I have not lost confidence in the Board or their Chairman. They are, despite much unfair and misinformed criticism from both inside and outside this House, carrying out a very difficult and thankless job. They stand to make no private gain from pursuing the policy they have determined on and in which they are guided by a sense of public duty and the specific directives laid down by this House in the relevant statutes. I can only describe as mean and unworthy many of the attacks which have been made on them and their Chairman.
As regards Deputy Dr. Browne's innuendoes about the technical specifications of the diesel locomotives, I must again point out that these matters are the sole responsibility of CIE. Under the legislation, I have no function unless it were established that CIE are operating these locomotives in a manner which contravenes safety regulations. This is not the case and the matter does not, in any case, arise on this Bill.
I am not interested in the sermon the Minister chooses to read. However, apart from that, he made one concrete suggestion. He thinks it might be preferable to drop subsection (2) altogether. Personally, my view is that when a contract is named in a Bill, it must be made available to the people concerned with the enactment of that Bill.
I remember other occasions, in addition to the two I mentioned the other day, when the principle was negotiated and accepted after some discussion on both sides of the House. My reaction, frankly, is that it would be better to drop subsection (2) altogether than to have the subsection without the contract being tabled. I propose to consider that between now and Report Stage and to deal with the matter either by way of amendment to the section on Report, leaving the contract in, or by the method the Minister has suggested, deleting subsection (2).
The Minister was asked questions on Section 2 the last day. As reported at Column 2928 of the Official Report of Thursday, 19th July, 1962, I asked the Minister to clarify to the House whether he had power under the Transport Acts to disclose certain information that was asked for in this House, and, if he had that power, to disclose that information or, if he had not the power, to let us know. The Minister comes in here today and reads out a statement that was prepared for him no doubt by some of the gentlemen in CIE who have been under criticism here.
On a point of order, I should like to ask whether it is permissible to suggest that the officers of the Board prepared a speech for me. In fact, it is not the case. This is part of the continuous propaganda against the Board of CIE, which I reject. Nothing of the kind was done at all. What I have said today is entirely my responsibility. It was done in consultation with the Department of Finance, preserving the position in future in relation to State companies.
If the Minister had furnished us with a copy of the speech which he read, we might more easily have been able to determine the author.
Does the Deputy insinuate that it was given to me by CIE?
I am saying the Minister did not carry out the undertaking given in relation to the circulation of copies of speeches. If any misunderstandings arise because he did not do so, he has only himself to blame.
I gather the Deputy is not insinuating——
The Deputy is insinuating anything he likes.
The Minister made it quite clear that he will use this important speech, which he has just read and of which none of us has a copy, as a means of attacking Deputies for daring to suggest that information should be made available to the public. The sum involved in this measure is six million dollars. When Deputies ask questions as to the expenditure of that money on locomotives, surely it is not the Minister's function to come in here and to criticise the Deputies for asking for information on matters which every man in the street is anxious to know about? Have we reached the stage in this democratic institution that it is an offence now for public representatives to query the expenditure of public money?
Not alone are Deputies criticised by the Minister for their interest in the expenditure of money but they are criticised for even suggesting that the present set up as regards State companies in general is unsatisfactory. They are criticised for daring to suggest that the Minister and his appointees, the directors on the Board of CIE, are not doing their job in the public interest.
This has reference to guarantees in respect of certain moneys and whether the Minister should guarantee them. Surely we cannot drag officials into such things?
The Minister dragged them in. He spent from five to seven minutes reading a statement in which he sought to suggest that there was a halo around the head of every director in CIE and that Deputies who criticised them in regard to this request——
That is not what the Minister said.
On a point of order, I made no reference——
That is not a point of order, either.
That is a point of explanation.
I made a statement in relation to what the practice should be in the scheduling of contracts in relation to Government Bills which provide for State guarantees and nothing more. If we start discussing the relations of all State companies and their directors, we could be here for days on end. It would be better if we discussed these things on the Estimate for the Department of Transport and Power.
I am trying to point out to the Deputy that the only thing that falls for discussion is guarantees in respect of certain moneys payable by the Board. The activities of officials and whether they are competent or incompetent do not fall for discussion on this at all.
Are you suggesting——
Do not ask the Chair what it is suggesting. I am giving you my direction that the only matter that falls for discussion on this section is what I have set out. I am not suggesting anything beyond giving my ruling on what falls for discussion.
I do not dispute your ruling, Sir. It is on the point of disorder raised by this excuse for a Minister——
I am endeavouring to put Deputy McQuillan on the right track. I hope he will continue on it.
It is appropriate at this stage because we are dealing with locomotives. I maintain I have been on the right track all along.
The only matters that fall for discussion are guarantees of moneys to be expended by the Board——
This House is being asked by the Minister to guarantee a State body in connection with the expenditure of six million dollars on the purchase of locomotives. I maintain it is my duty and my right in this House to question the expenditure of the guarantee that the Minister requests for this semi-State body. It is a fundamental right of a Deputy to be in a position to question the right to guarantee it or the wisdom of guaranteeing it and to discuss, in the long run, whether or not the case put forward by the Minister in requesting the guarantee is strong enough to sway the House. That is all I want to get clear on. Arising out of the sum which the House is asked to guarantee, it would be no harm for us to consider that the Minister's action and his attitude in this House since this section came under discussion has done more to harm and discredit first-class State bodies or semi-State bodies than anything I have heard in a long time.
He has failed to disclose what, in my opinion, is information that should be made available to the House. He has sought to suggest that he is not in a position to disclose it. As on other occasions, he has hidden behind sections and provisions of the Transport Act. I have here to-day a letter from you, Sir, in which you tell me that it is with great regret—as usual—that you find you cannot allow a question to the Minister for Transport and Power regarding the agent who placed the contract and the firms who were asked to tender for the supply of the diesel electric locomotives for CIE. "The Ceann Comhairle states that the Minister has no official responsibility for these matters"—that is what the Ceann Comhairle says. The Minister comes in to-day and proceeds to give certain information in the form of a written statement to the House, information that would not have been made available, were it not for the fact that last week a number of Deputies, including Deputy Dr. Browne in particular, taught the Minister a lesson in Parliamentary democracy and forced him, as a result of their criticisms, to come forward and give information which is of interest to the public.
Is the Deputy speaking to the section?
I kept a close watch on the Minister during the debate the other day and at one stage when he was being cross-examined on a number of points arising out of expenditure under this section, he was, in my opinion, about to give the information, only he was advised officially to do otherwise.
The Deputy is certainly not dealing with the section. He is endeavouring to ramble over the whole field of the administration of CIE. I cannot allow him to do that. He must stick to the section and deal with the section.
This is the only section of importance in the Bill. The whole discussion arises on this section. I do not intend to speak again. This is the kernel of the whole matter. If we have a situation arising that the House can be asked to guarantee the expenditure of £2,000,000 and put no questions, the questions of contracts, the question of the agents who placed the contracts, the question of other firms who were asked to tender, do not arise at all and the public have no right to information about money which they are asked to raise or guarantee. That would appear to me to be the position that has arisen here. All I can say to the Minister is that I hope he will have another look at this situation which obtains regarding the liaison or the understanding that exists between himself and CIE.
The Minister the other day spent quite a considerable amount of time referring me to the Taoiseach's speech when I asked him, on this particular section, to explain the situation as to why he could not give more detailed figures and information about the way this money raised under this guarantee was going to be expended. He said: "I would refer the Deputy to the statement made by the Taoiseach to the Institute of Public Administration on the powers and liberties of State bodies." That is no answer to the public or to me when the Minister is asked to give a straight answer. When a Deputy asks a question of that nature, there is no use referring him to a speech made six or eight months ago, or two years ago, as the case happens to be, by a Taoiseach or any other member of the Government. For the Minister's information, in that particular speech the Taoiseach made it quite clear that if there was a demand in this House for closer co-operation and collaboration between members of this House and a State body, he was prepared to examine such a suggestion carefully. If such a suggestion had been adopted, I do not think we would have today the trouble which the Minister has brought on himself, as far as CIE is concerned. There is, in my opinion, a feeling of contempt amongst the Government-appointed directors for this House. When the Minister in this House——
The Deputy is endeavouring to discuss general CIE administration on this section. It does not fall for discussion on this section.
The only thing about it is——
I have allowed the Deputy a great deal of latitude but he has not begun to discuss the section.
I appreciate your latitude, Sir. I just felt that when the sum of money is of such magnitude it was not inappropriate to point out to the Minister that if certain suggestions made from time to time over the years in this House had been adopted this long discussion on the guaranteeing of £2,000,000 would not have taken place. All I can say at this stage is that I will wait for a further opportunity to deal with the wider aspects of the policy of the Government and of CIE as far as railways are concerned.
I should like the Minister now, before this section is put to the House, to let us know whether it is a fact that he has no authority as Minister to ask CIE for the name of the agent who placed the contract. Has he the power to find out also what the position was in regard to the other companies who might be interested in tendering? Has the Minister power to request CIE to give that information? I know he has told a number of Deputies, including myself and Deputy Dr. Browne, to apply direct to CIE, to Dr Andrews and the directors, for information which he will not give in this House. What are Deputies to do if they apply to the Chairman of CIE——
The Deputy should get back to the section or sit down.
I did not know that you had given up your position as Ceann Comhairle, Sir.
Sometimes I feel like doing it.
I can sympathise with you, Sir. I did not think we had reached the stage where someone with a Fascist mentality like Deputy Booth would be allowed to take the Chair. The position at the moment is that neither the Minister nor the Chairman of CIE will give what is, in our opinion, information that should be disclosed to the public with regard to the expenditure of the money for which the guarantee is being made available.
I have ruled that the section should be discussed.
Precisely. I understand that. I understood that I was discussing the section, and I do not think it is fair that the Chair should be criticised in that fashion by Deputy Booth who spends so little time in the House.
Do not talk drivel; do not talk tripe. The Deputy is playing for time. When will Deputy Dr. Browne be in? What time is he due?
I am beginning to wonder whether the questions which Deputy Booth has put down on the Order Paper to the Minister for Defence are going to his head. He has nothing to say when serious matters in this connection are under discussion, and he comes in to interrupt a debate in which he evidently has no intention of taking part. Will the Minister give the information which was asked for a half a dozen times last Thursday? Will he state who the agents are, and what is the situation in regard to the other firms who would be interested in the contract? Is he or is he not going to make that information available to the House?
I think everyone in the country except the Deputy knows who the agents for General Motors are. Under the 1950 and the 1958 Acts, I have not got the power to ask CIE who the agents are for any particular company. I would consider this matter in a different way, and I hope my successor would. If a position were reached where I felt it was desirable to make a serious inquiry in regard to the giving of any particular contract, I would unfortunately have lost confidence in the Board and in the chairman of the company and I would have begun to make serious inquiries into the management of the company. I am glad to say that that situation has not arisen as far as I can recall in the whole history of the State.
So far as asking questions and receiving information are concerned, I would ask Deputies to read statements I made at the conclusion of the debate on the Estimate for my Department last year and at the commencement and conclusion of the special debate on the report of CIE. They will get there a very fair indication of what I feel is the kind of information which is useful to the House, which it is essential that they should have for discussion in relation to the general operations of State companies.
My successor may perhaps go a little further or he may not go as far, but there is no law which prescribes precisely the personal attitude of the Minister towards Deputies in relation to State companies. A tradition has been built up that State companies should be able to operate without day-to-day interference from the Minister and without political interference. In relation to this transaction and in relation to State companies, I have given a great deal of information to the House at all times. But there comes a point where serious interference with the day-to-day operations of particular State companies begins. We would then start creating precedents which would inevitably involve political interference or interference on behalf of the interests of one group or the interests of another. If we start interfering, we may be quite sure that we will not get satisfactory directors for the board; we will not get a satisfactory chairman and we will not even get satisfactory higher executives. The directors of State companies want to feel that they are working on a commercial basis and free from interference of a political kind.
Is this subsection (2)?
I take it we will be entitled to take the same line?
Volumes have been written on this. That is my answer to the question of whether or not sufficient information has been given.
The door is fairly wide open now.
As I say, if Deputies read back over the debates, they will find sufficient information on which to judge the performance of the various State companies, and particularly they will find that ample information was given in the last debate on CIE on which they can judge the wisdom or otherwise of seeing that the 1958 Act continues to remain on the Statute Book. They will see that quite sufficient information was given in that regard during that debate.
The Minister amazes me by his statement. You, Sir, very properly ruled that Deputy McQuillan was completely out of order. The Minister then gets up and replies to the statements which Deputy McQuillan should not have made and which he should not have taken cognisance of, according to your ruling. The Minister starts off with not a word about the section but tells us what he said in the debate on his Estimate.
I took it that the Minister was answering questions as to his attitude towards State companies or bodies, of which CIE is a very important one.
You are very generous, Sir, or else you are hard of hearing on one side. What the Minister really dealt with in reply to Deputy McQuillan was his Estimate, and that Deputy McQuillan should not have been so ungentlemanly as to ask the questions he did. You had already ruled that they were not in order and that they were not debatable. The Minister opened up the whole thing again. What I want to get at is the section itself.
Clearly, the section is one in which we do two things. We give the Minister power to go security for various sums and in subsection (2):
Without prejudice to the generality of subsection (1) of this section, the Minister may guarantee, in such form and manner and on such terms and conditions as he thinks fit, the due payment by the Board to the General Motors Corporation.
I submit he had already the power he wants to do that in subsection (1) and that he does not need this subsection at all.
Having got this power, he now brings to the House details of a specific transaction, plus the name of a firm, and then he will not tell us what the contract is with that firm. Neither will he put it on the Table of the House, but he wants to make the House a party to this contract of CIE so that at a future date no one of us will be able to say he was wrong because the Minister will be able to reply: "You gave me this power and you did not even push it to a division." That is what would happen if we gave the Minister this power without his giving us all the information we require. All we want is that a copy of the contract be placed in the Library together with information as to who the agents are as well as the company itself.
The Minister very blandly tells us that everybody knows who the agents of General Motors are. I suppose certain people in this town do but I knock about quite a bit and I regret to say I do not. That may be my fault, but surely when we ask the Minister who the agents are, confessing that we do not know, the least the Minister should say is: "Everybody knows the agents are so and so". Accordingly, the Minister would be well advised to take out the subsection or, alternatively, give us the information we have asked for. Only in those circumstances would we consider what we should do.
The Minister has raised the very much wider question of State companies in general and not merely in relation to the particular section we are discussing. Nobody will for a moment suggest it is not a vexed and difficult problem, but when we are considering State companies here we nearly always start out on the wrong foot. The classic examples of State companies are to be found in Scandinavia—Norway, Sweden and, I think, Finland. They have set a pattern of their own in this respect. In Sweden and Norway the capital investment programme of the State company and the funds for that are not formulated by the State company itself but by Parliament. The money is paid to the company out of Parliamentary funds and it is on that Vote that the capital investments of the State companies concerned are debated in Parliament.
We must also know that in relation to the whole Scandinavian concept of the control of State companies it is against a background of an economic form of public administration, particularly in Sweden, where every journalist has the right to go into any civil service office at any time and demand to see any file for the purpose of finding out what is taking place. It is for the civil servant to rebut the journalist's claim that there are grounds why the file should be shown to the Press. It is, of course, the complete reverse of what has been built up here and we must, therefore, when discussing State companies—here I disagree completely with the Taoiseach's published address in Studies— have regard to the position in Scandinavia where the journalist has the absolute right to look at the files. In Scandinavia it is the journalist's right that must be challenged. When the Minister endeavours to put on record that the facts and views in this respect are far from being the unilateral ones he has expressed, when he agrees that, in fact, there are very wide differences of opinion——
I agree with the Deputy.
——between people generally holding different views——
I said I agreed with the Deputy.
I do not want the Minister, having put his views on record, to say, when somebody gets up afterwards, that the thing can be seen in the records of the House—that we did not challenge the approach to this matter. In Scandinavia this type of capital investment would be discussed by Parliament because the funds would be made available by Parliament itself. In relation to this section I feel very strongly that once you put a contract into a Bill, once it is named in the Bill, if we permit the Bill to go through in that shape, hereafter we will be told, if anything goes wrong with the company, that we had accepted the contract in the Bill. It is the responsibility and the discretion of the Minister in accordance with the appropriate procedure in the State Guarantees Act.
I do not agree with the Minister that it is not his responsibility to make certain investigations into the activities of a State-sponsored body before he gives his imprimature to a guarantee. He must be satisfied there is need for such a contract before he guarantees it and the fact that the Minister said here he did not make any such inquiries about a contract means he has not done his duty as a Minister. Although I feel strongly that this is a rotten Government, still when the Government are there they are the people to exercise the administrative powers under subsection (1) and as long as they ask the Dáil for the authority to exercise those powers they are asking for what is a proper and executive power for the Government. Under this section they are trying to part with their responsibility elsewhere.
I am quite willing to have subsection (1) of the section withdrawn.
It must have been put in for a reason.
I want to make it clear that the Deputy seems to have misinterpreted what I said. I did not say I had made no inquiries in respect to the circumstances under which this contract arose.
The Minister has himself to blame for not having sent us a copy of the speech he read.
In relation to capital demands, we naturally examined in the Department the whole of the dieselisation programme of CIE and their general programme for the improvement of their stock, stations and so on. What we did examine was whether, from the standpoints of the Capital Budget and the commitments of the State now and in future, this particular method of financing this contract was one which was favourable to CIE and favourable to the Minister for Finance at the same time. We decided it was and we then decided that this kind of contract was a good one, but we left to CIE the discretion of entering into the contract and the terms of the contract because, as I have said already, no Minister before me and, I should think, no Minister after me unless the rules have changed, discusses or debates with State companies the circumstances of individual contracts with individual firms.
The Minister has said that what he submitted to the House was a peculiar statement. When he so describes it, there is little point in any of us contradicting him. If the Minister had come here and said: "I want security from this House to the tune of £2,000,000 to enable CIE to purchase locomotives" there might have been some justification for the failure to disclose the type of information for which he has been asked in various questions here for weeks past concerning the type of locomotives involved, the number of firms asked to tender, the reasons why a particular firm received the contract and further questions of that nature arising out of the decision to buy locomotives from General Motors.
The Minister changed the whole concept of the relationship between CIE as a State body and its work with this House and the Minister by that very sentence, namely: "I want the House to endorse a particular transaction with General Motors." When the House is being asked to endorse one specific deal on behalf of the community I do not think it is for me to suggest that the members of the House should be furnished with full information——
Around we go again. We have had this ten times.
It has been answered already.
——on the firms, whether French, British or German, interested in the sale of locomotives to us. The Minister has sought to suggest that that type of information could not be made available because it would then be a question of entering into the day-to-day administration of CIE but who sought to enter into it? Was it not the Minister himself who came to the House and asked the House to intervene by suggesting we give the signature of this House as a guarantee to enable CIE to purchase so many locomotives from General Motors? Was not that asking the House to move into the arena of the day-to-day affairs of CIE?
The Deputy has repeated himself three times.
I have not spoken on this issue before.
The Deputy has— endless repetition.
Am I entitled to speak, or is this fascist Deputy to be allowed to prevent other Deputies from speaking——
I am communist, not fascist.
The Deputy will not be accepted in that camp, either.
The Minister threw this door right open and repeated the one thing four times. He left it open to Deputy McQuillan or anybody else to reply to what he said.
The Minister is not at a chamber of commerce dinner now where he has a number of people listening to him who may be dependent on him for State grants. He is here to listen to the public representatives——
On the Bill.
And whether he likes it or not, until such time as this House is satisfied, we shall insist on the right to speak and extract from a dictatorial little Government the information the public are entitled to have. The Minister himself, because of his approach, is responsible for any interference with CIE on a day-to-day basis that may have taken place in the House into the affairs of CIE. It was his own attitude that is responsible; his impertinence and the impertinence of the Board of CIE in sending in an ill-thought out measure of this nature and saying to the Deputies: "We want your endorsement so that CIE can purchase from General Motors."
Up to this, whenever a question of expenditure was involved in CIE or any other State company, the House was asked, perhaps, as follows: "We want the sum of £2,000,000, or backing for the expenditure of £2,000,000, to enable CIE to buy equipment." Deputies had always been precluded from inquiring into the number of tenders, whether it was the highest or lowest tender that was accepted and precluded generally from interfering simply because we had no responsibility for the placing of a particular contract. Instead we came here and were dependent on what the Minister described as a feeling of confidence which this House had in the directors of the different boards but in this case the Minister has come here at the behest of CIE and suggests that "CIE want backing to the tune of £2,000,000 to buy locomotives from General Motors and we want Dáil Éireann to give an undertaking that they will back this business deal." At the same time the Minister says: "I am not going to give you any information as to whether there were German, French or British firms interested in this contract——
Or Russian ones.
We were given no information as to the agent who placed this contract. What does the Minister think this House is? I let him know the position in Britain where we have State bodies and State railways. It is the members of the British House of Commons who are in a position to send for the members of the Board of the British Transport Company and interview them and the officials of that Board must obey the instructions of their MPs and come to a meeting and discuss whatever is requested of them.
In this country the position is that Deputies who are now decorating the back bench of Fianna Fáil are small boys in the eyes of officials whom this House appoints. Deputies have been refused admission to the presence of the Chairman of CIE——
On a point of order, is the Deputy in order in discussing all these other matters that are not in the Bill?
The Deputy must relate his remarks to the section, as amended.
I am sure the Chair is grateful for the lead it is getting from Deputy Booth.
The Deputy said that before. I dare the Deputy to talk about the Bill without repeating himself.
The only thing I have to say to the Deputy is that if he were to go out and reorganise his little empire outside this House to face the Common Market, he would be better employed.
A very big empire.
I shall discuss it outside the House with the Deputy, if he wishes. I shall discuss his activities here, if he wants me to. If he wants to draw me at this stage, I am quite prepared to answer.
The Deputy should shut up or talk sense; that is all.
I am making the Deputy a fair offer. The Minister, in his last intervention here, said: "I shall judge the type of information which I think should be disclosed to the House in connection with CIE." The Minister is going to decide that while he is in that position, he will give to the House certain types of information about CIE but it is quite possible that another Minister who might replace him—and that is not outside the bounds of possibility— might have a different outlook and say: "Deputies are entitled to this information which Deputy Childers would not give". Is that not a very unsatisfactory state of affairs? Surely it must be laid down clearly in the various Acts passed here what information a Minister is bound to give to Deputies? It does not matter in those circumstances whether it is Deputy Childers, Deputy Booth or any other Deputy in the Fianna Fáil Party who happens to be Minister——
On a point of order, Sir, the Deputy has already referred to the ruling——
The Deputy is not Minister yet.
——of the Chair that the questions he is repeatedly putting here are out of order as they are not the responsibility of the Minister.
I shall ignore Deputy Booth. We must get a decision from the Minister as to exactly what powers he has to enable him to disclose to the House the fullest possible information on the points raised.
The Chair has told the Deputy already.
For the information of the Deputy, I want to be reasonable. I have not adverted to this particular point previously. I did mention the position in relation to State bodies in general, and I was ruled out of order. I accept the ruling of the Chair on that. I have not got a satisfactory answer from the Minister on this point. The House is being asked to stand security for CIE so that a sum of six million dollars can be expended on the purchase of locomotives from General Motors. Is that action on the part of the Minister not asking the House to move into the day-to-day administration of CIE and to assume responsibility for the expenditure of money? If this House is to assume responsibility for the expenditure of six million dollars on the purchase of locomotives from General Motors, surely the House is entitled to know, first, whether the locomotives already purchased were safe and, if they were not, what changes have taken place in them? Surely we are entitled to ask if it is a fact that first-class terms were available from other suppliers of locomotives in different countries? Why could that information not be given when we are asked to affix the seal of this House to this purchase? Is the Minister, even at this late stage, going to act the little dictator and say: "I refuse to make this information available. I do not think Deputies are entitled to it. I think that I, as Minister, and CIE are entitled to ride roughshod over the public in the matter of giving information in this House on the expenditure of public money". The Minister would help to shorten the discussion by now giving us the name of the agent who placed the contract and the names of the firms who were asked to tender. Will he answer those two questions at this stage? We know we cannot get them through the normal procedure of Parliamentary Question.
I was not going to intervene but I feel I must. When the Minister was introducing the Bill, he said—I can quote from memory—that diesel engines were profitable on the long haul. I asked him where were these long hauls on the CIE system. I also asked him if diesel engines were profitable on long hauls, did that mean they were unprofitable on short hauls. The Minister did not answer me when I asked him was it better for us to make good steam engines at Inchicore or import engines from the United States, Great Britain or Germany.
I also asked the Minister if he were sure that on the short hauls diesel engines were more economic than steam engines. I asked him how the diesel engines measured up to the steam engines in the matter of maintenance. I asked him was it true that the diesel engines required a great deal of expensive maintenance. I understand that a horde of very costly technicans must be employed to keep them running, and they are not able to run them successfully. I also asked the Minister what was the record of these wonderful diesel engines so far as time keeping was concerned.
I answered the Deputy all these questions on the Second Stage.
The Minister did not answer the question about time keeping. They are not running to time.
It is a miracle when trains come in on time.
The Deputy must not have read the debate.
I want to tell the Minister something about the experience of people who live in an area served by a short haul railway line, the Waterford-Tramore line. This was before the Minister's time and, perhaps, before Dr. Andrews's time. On this short haul the steam locomotive was able to haul 2,000 people at a time and get them out in 20 minutes. Then we got an up-to-date diesel train. As a matter of fact, we got two. We could shift only 600 passengers with these wonderful trains and it took 15 minutes to get them out. Even with the 600 in 15 minutes, we were able to take more than 500,000 people the last time that line was allowed to operate.
None of the Minister's minions at Kingsbridge would listen to the local people. A deputation was received and I had to listen to a young buck asking me what experience I had of transport. What experience had he? I had 40 years' experience of being a fare-paying passenger on public transport. This fellow never had been on public transport in his life except as a free passenger.
What has this got to do with Section 2 of the Bill?
This has to do with diesel engines on which we are expending six million dollars. I want to support what Deputy McQuillan has said.
The Deputy must relate his remarks to the section, as amended, which deals with the purchase of diesel engines.
I am dealing with that.
The Deputy is explaining about other types of locomotives.
They put the diesel engines on the Tramore line in place of the steam engines. I am telling you what happened. Instead of being able to take 2,000 people in 20 minutes, they were able to take 600 in 15 minutes. If the Minister thinks that is progress, I should like him to say so.
Now they have done away with the steam engines and they have put buses on the roads. These are not able to keep up the services. Yesterday I was looking at people who had to wait up to 40 minutes for a bus and all that has been caused by putting diesel engines on lines that were paying, on short-haul lines. I cannot say whether it would pay to have diesels on the long-haul lines between Dublin and Cork but there are short-haul lines all over the country and it looks now as if they are being threatened and that they are going to cut away more of the railway. The whole cause of this is the introduction of the diesel engine. It is supposed to be a short haul from Waterford to Dungarvan and then on to Mallow but the Minister is going to cut that lifeline.
We will not let him do it.
We will not let him do it, if we can help it, but this Minister can be fast off the mark and it might be done in a vindictive and spiteful way. If they made the decision to do it next Saturday, they might be smashing down the bridges and tearing up the lines on Monday morning. We have had experience of that already in Waterford. There was to be a children's outing to Tramore today, sponsored by the Mayor of Waterford, and they could not bring any more than 500 children there on this wonderful system. The Minister and these great experts of his had no use for the railway we had there. These experts were hauled off the bogs and dragged up to Kingsbridge and they became experts overnight. They could tell us then that diesel trains would run better than steam engines. They were so happy about getting a job that they became experts in it overnight.
As provided by Section 2 of the Bill.
I am speaking on Section 2 and I do not know if it is an advantage to the House to have Deputy Booth endeavouring to usurp your function as Leas-Cheann Comhairle, Sir.
Deputy Booth is entitled to his opinion.
I am entitled to my opinion also but when I interrupt anybody, I am called to order, and rightly so.
On Section 2.
Let us hear Deputy Lynch on Section 2.
If he can remember what is in Section 2.
Deputy Lynch can remember that there used to be a fireman on these steam engines and that they were built in Inchicore.
There is nothing in the section about steam engines or firemen.
I am pointing out that there were firemen on the steam engines——
The Deputy may not discuss the whole day-to-day administration of CIE on this section.
When you say that you break our hearts because this is the only chance we will have to deal with these day-to-day matters.
There is always the Estimate.
The Estimate that never came.
It will come.
It will come in October. That is the Kathleen Mavourneen system.
You have wasted so much time in which it might have been dealt with.
Where was Deputy Booth when the Bill for the fluoridation of water supplies was going through?
Surely that does not arise?
Deputy Booth interrupted me and I replied to him.
Are you playing for time, too?
I would never have to play for time on a matter such as this. I feel so strongly on it that I do not have to play for time. This is now late in the month of July and if that restriction were not on me, I could keep on talking to the Minister about the evils he has brought on transport and power in this country. I am glad to see that this is only Section 2 of the Bill and I will be heard on it again. I should like the Minister to point out to us how these diesel engines are going to pay on the short hauls.
Perhaps the Minister would care to intervene to answer my questions?
I have already answered all the questions that appeared to me to be reasonable and I made quite clear the mind of the Minister with regard to this section of the Bill. In my introductory statement, I gave some general information with regard to the Bill. I said that I was duly satisfied that the contract was entered into according to the established practice of CIE; that tenders were sought; and that they made their decision on the proper basis. I also told Deputy Lynch that I was satisfied that diesel engines were more economic for long and short-haul runs than steam engines. I would make a rough estimate that if there had been no diesel engines and no intensified sales campaign by CIE, the loss for 1961-1962 would not be £1,600,000 but something over £3,000,000.
The Minister has stated that he is going to be the judge of the type of information that should be given to Deputies in connection with the purchase of these locomotives from General Motors. The Minister has admitted that there are at least two different viewpoints about the functions and the powers of State and semi-State bodies and that there are at least two different views as to the amount of control which should be exercised by this House over such bodies.
That has nothing to do with Section 2 of the Bill.
Is it unfair to ask the Minister to take into consideration the fact that there may be two different viewpoints about the amount of information which should be disclosed in this House? It is on that basis that I am asking the Minister not to act here as the great know-all but to act in a much more humble way and give information to Deputies who are not as well armed with information as he is, information on a subject on which he has been queried so many times in Questions.
He has stated that a Bill of this nature asking for £2,000,000 for CIE is a common occurrence in this House and that similar Bills in connection with other State bodies have come into this House in the past. I refer the Minister to his remarks here the last day at column 2909 of the Official Report of 19th July, 1962, when he said:
I reject the attitude of Deputy Dr. Browne towards this whole transaction. Enormous purchases have been undertaken by State companies, the ultimate responsibility being left on the State company for the choice of material or equipment. If one were to have this kind of discussion in regard to one hundred million pounds' worth of equipment purchased by a great board such as the ESB since they started, we could have an interminable debate.
Why should we not?
That is the Minister for Transport and Power explaining what he thinks is the foundation of the case he makes for CIE. This House was not told where the equipment purchased by the ESB was being purchased. We were not told whether it was X, Y or Z companies who would act as agents. We were not asked to approve of one or the other. We were not asked to decide the type of equipment, the expenditure of the moneys involved, or the countries which would supply the equipment. We were simply asked to give the financial accommodation, to act as a backer, to give a guarantee so that the ESB could purchase the equipment wherever it wanted. The measure we are discussing here now is a measure to give specific authority to CIE to purchase $6,000,000 worth of locomotives through General Motors. Is there not a distinct difference in the type of approach here?
I have suggested we withdraw that subsection so that the Deputy will be satisfied that there will, therefore, be no mention of General Motors.
Surely the Minister does not think we are all so innocent in this House as to believe that, because a subsection is withdrawn, the implication is not there in the actual section itself.
If it was all right in the case of the ESB, why worry about CIE?
Because that was not the position with the ESB. Under no circumstances did the Minister come in here and say: "I want a guarantee from this House to back the ESB in the purchase of electrical equipment from such and such a firm in Sweden or such and such a firm in America". That was never done.
There is no difference in the world.
Read subsection (2).
Is it a fact that Deputy Booth is the agent involved?
Read subsection (2).
Indeed I am not the agent involved.
Am I to be allowed to speak? The trouble is that a great many people have long memories. A great many people remember the smell that attached to railway shares. A great many people know there was a good deal of trickery.
The Deputy should not go back too far.
Deputies know there was a great deal of trickery in relation to railway shares and we know close friends of the present Government who made hay while the sun shone. We want the public now to be satisfied that there is no longer a smell attaching to the shares of CIE. That is one of the reasons why we want to know who the agent is in this particular section.
Is there an agent at all?
The Minister should tell us that. If Deputy Booth does not know, surely, as a Dublin Deputy, he has some sense, and would like to know.
I do not know.
Does the Deputy know whether or not there is an agent?
The Deputy does not mind the expenditure of six million dollars of public money. He does not mind how it is spent—he does not give two hoots.
Is it in the amount or the principle the Deputy is interested?
In which is the Deputy interested?
I am interested in the principle.
I am glad to hear that. I know Deputy Colley is a young Deputy and he has not so far had some of the integrity rubbed off him that other Deputies have had rubbed off them.
Talk sense, or sit down.
Deputy Booth is usurping the function of the Chair. As I have said here before, it is often a wise move to count ten in this House when there is a Deputy like Deputy Booth in it because one might otherwise say things that one might possibly feel sorry for later. At times, I feel sorry for Deputy Booth. I want to know why all the secrecy? Deputy Booth is not worried as to whether or not there is an agent. He says he does not know if there is. Evidently, he is not any more interested than a great many other members of his Party as to whether or not other firms were asked to tender. He is not interested in finding out, even on behalf of his constituents, the names of the other firms who may have been asked to tender for the supply of locomotives to CIE.
Yet he is quite prepared to give the Minister the backing of this House for a guarantee for the purchase of the locomotives through General Motors, and he wants no more information about the transaction. He is quite satisfied everything is above board. I do not know; everything may be above board. I assume that, with the responsible element in Fianna Fáil, that is the case. But that does not take away from the fact that there is imposed on members of this House a duty to extract the last ounce of essential information to which the public are entitled. I do not know of any other way in which the community, the taxpayer and the ratepayer have an opportunity of getting the information they need and for which they now ask in relation to this expenditure.
They have never asked for it.
The only way they can ask for it is through their public representatives.
They have not asked for it.
There is no good in an ordinary member of the public writing to Dr. Andrews: "Dear Dr. Andrews, Would you ever let me know on what you are spending the £2,000,000?" Is it not a fact that if such a letter went in to CIE, it is doubtful if the person who wrote would get even the courtesy of an acknowledgment? Is it not a fact that when Deputies, who are alleged to represent the public and who are presumed to carry some weight, write to CIE for information on the very matter we are discussing, the purchase of these locomotives, the Chairman writes back and says: "I am afraid I cannot give you that information"? Further, is it not a fact that when Deputies come in here and ask the Minister, the alleged boss of the Chairman of CIE to give the information, the Minister says: "I have no power to do so"? Where is the general public to get the information then? Are they not entitled to know how their money will be spent?
The Deputy has said that about ten times.
He has repeated.
There is no harm to repeat it. It is a strong point. We know the type of answer the Minister gives when he replies to questions here in relation to State-sponsored bodies. This is the only opportunity we have. It is no harm to repeat it.
It may be no harm, but it is not in accordance with the rules of this House.
It is a strong point. We know the manner in which this House is treated when members seek information in relation to State-sponsored bodies, and particularly this State-sponsored body.
Deputy McQuillan is in possession, not Deputy Murphy.
Under no circumstances do I wish to repeat and, I would ask you, sir, to extend your patience a little further, should I happen to repeat myself in order to bring out one or two particular points. The first is that, if there is a demand by Deputies for information as to who the agent is in connection with this sale, and the names of the other firms or companies asked to tender for the supply of the locomotives, and that information is not forthcoming, surely the public will take the view that this House is discredited and no longer represents public opinion. Are we not as Deputies doing a disservice to ourselves as public representatives?
Is it not a fact that the Deputies who are not giving full thought to the implications of this are leaving themselves open to the possibility that the public can say: "What is the use of electing these people to the Dáil at all? Is it not a fact that they are only messenger boys to Departments? Is it not a fact that the officials who are appointed to a company like CIE can tell the Deputies, `You have no authority whatever, even though you represent the people, to get this information'."? The public will say that this House has discredited itself.
The Deputy has said that at least four times. He should cease repeating himself. The Chair has been very lenient.
I hope the Chair is not siding with the Minister in trying to put an end to the debate.
The Chair is not siding with the Minister or with the Deputy. The Chair is trying to keep the Deputy from repeating himself, as he has been doing.
I want information from the Minister and, even though it may be very painful to members of this House to sit here, I can, if I wish, go through the Minister's speech and keep well within the rules of procedure, as you happen to know, if I want to do that. But I have no intention of delaying the House. I want the Minister to answer two specific questions: Who is the agent involved where this sum of 6,000,000 dollars is concerned and, second, what are the names of the other firms asked to tender for the supply of locomotives? The Minister is not getting this measure in so far as I am personally concerned until he gives that information. Otherwise, the public, who are not used to the technical ramifications of debates in this House and that "under subsection (d) of Section 5 the Minister cannot disclose the information," will ask, "What is all the secrecy about?"
If the Minister had come in here and, on the basis as I first suggested, asked for a backing for CIE of 6,000,000 dollars as a blanket purchase, without giving any information, there would have been some sense in his approach. He did not do that. I object, and I am sure even in Fianna Fáil there are Deputies who will object, to allowing our names to be used as having sanctioned a transaction with a particular firm without knowing the names of the other firms also asked to tender. Is it an unreasonable proposition that the people who are responsible on behalf of the public who are asked to guarantee this expenditure should know the names of the other firms? Why should we merely be told that it is General Motors that got the contract and be prevented from knowing the names of the firms who were unsuccessful?
Round and round and round and round we go.
The Deputy should go back and try his luck in the Common Market. He would be much better occupied than engaging here in irresponsible interruptions. We know the expenditure of £2,000,000 of public money means little to a Deputy and a company which has been protected for years here by public money and who has been subsidised up to his two eyes up to the present to keep his inefficient company going.
The House is not discussing Deputy Booth or his activities. Section 2, as amended, is under discussion.
It is a pity we are not.
Sit down, for pity's sake.
I should like the Minister to take the opportunity provided for him in this House to answer questions. Otherwise, he will sit here for quite a while.
I do not wish to hold up the House longer than it is being held up but there are a few things which should be said. We have heard a good deal of talk about the principles involved here, as, for instance, the obligations on a Deputy to question the expenditure of public money. Deputy MacEoin mentioned that in his view the Minister was endeavouring to implicate the members of the House in a transaction which might turn out to be doubtful, so that nobody could complain about it. Nobody seems to have adverted to what the Minister, in fact, said, that was, that subsection (1) would permit him to do exactly what he is asking to do in subsection (2), that he introduced subsection (2) merely as a courtesy to the House because these commitments had been entered into subject to the enactment of legislation. The Minister went further and said——
You do not believe it was out of courtesy to the House?
The Minister went further and said that if Deputies would feel happier about it he would withdraw subsection (2).
I have offered to do so.
All this talk has taken place and I will tell you why, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle. It does not suit certain Deputies to listen to that offer because they want to go on and on and on about things which they know cannot within the rules of order be discussed here and they know also that any State body, if it is to be operated in any normal way, cannot be subjected to scrutiny in this House in its day-to-day workings. If Deputies paid any attention to what the Minister said and paid attention to his offer and were logical in their arguments they would say: "Right. Withdraw subsection (2) and that means we do not have to complain about these various things" but nobody said: "We will accept your offer" because it did not suit Deputies to do so. It is time that it was pointed out to the House that that is what is going on.
The Deputy has deliberately misinformed himself. If the Minister is taking this out he should have said so specifically. He should have said that he withdrew the section. He did not. He said: "If it would suit Deputies" but he did not say he was doing it.
I was waiting for Deputy Sweetman to come back because he had not made up his mind whether he wanted the Report Stage tomorrow or today to discuss this matter.
The Report Stage was always going to be tomorrow. I have already an amendment in on Report. I am sure the Minister has been told about it.
If the Minister says he is withdrawing it and if the Deputy can speak for the Minister——
I said the Minister offered to withdraw it.
I am in possession.
I am circulating the amendment immediately for discussion on Report Stage tomorrow, if that will satisfy the Deputy.
And I am still in possession. If the Minister wishes to reply when I have finished, he may do so. The Minister says he will withdraw this. Of course, if that is so, the plain truth is that it never should have been put in. Why was it put in? Why has the time of the House been taken up with it? Why was this printed? Why was so much time lost if the provision was not of some value? The Minister, when he now withdraws it, should tell us why he put it in, in the first instance.
He put it in for the specific reasons I have told the House here, that he wanted to commit Deputy Booth as well as Deputy MacEoin to this contract that he has entered into, or that CIE has entered into.
That is my opinion. Deputy Booth can get up and express a different opinion, if he wishes.
It is not what the Minister said.
Is the Minister infallible?
If the Minister is withdrawing it, he should do so formally without saying that if somebody desires or if it pleases Deputies, he will withdraw it.
I agree with Deputy McQuillan that we should have detailed information in relation to this purchase. The Minister has no authority whatsoever to guarantee State money without the approval of this House. If he had such authority, I am very sure, being the type of Minister he is, he would not bother to ask us. Does he expect this House to approve of the expenditure of more than £2,000,000 without detailed particulars as to how that money is expended? We have not got these detailed particulars here. I may say en passant, that it is, indeed, peculiar that this Bill has been brought before the House at all having regard to the action of the Minister and of the State-sponsored CIE in removing the main bulk of branch lines.
It is quite evident that the Minister and CIE have made mistakes in the past, have made serious blunders. We as members of this House must be cautious that they are not making a mistake in this deal. What did the Minister say in the House last year? On one occasion he told us he was assured by Dr. Andrews and the CIE Board that we were quite safe until 1964, that if the Tramore line, the West Cork line and the Clare line were wiped out, CIE would be solvent until 1964 and there was no danger of any move being made to close further lines. Did the Minister not make that quite clear here in the House? Did Dr. Andrews and the Board of CIE not make it quite clear?
The closing of branch lines is not relevant.
It is relevant in this way. I am asking the Minister for detailed information and I am pointing out that both the Minister and CIE have made mistakes in the past. I am recalling some of these mistakes, big blunders, to my mind, for instance, that persons such as the Minister and Dr. Andrews should make statements that there would be no further closures of branch lines until 1964. That statement was made in 1961.
The Deputy may not discuss the closing of branch lines on this Bill.
I did not intend to do so but at the same time, I think it was relevant. This House is being asked to guarantee 6,145,330 United States dollars and that guarantee may have to be honoured. How do we know CIE will not make further blunders, thus being unable from their own resources to pay this money? They have been subsidised by this House over a number of years and, despite what is in the Transport Act of 1958, there is a likelihood that they will have to be subsidised again. Is that the reason we have this further closure of lines?
What any business executive would be entitled to know how CIE or the Minister went about the purchase of these engines. Did they insert advertisements in the newspapers in America, Germany or any other country selling this type of equipment, and ask for tenders, or did they, as is alleged here, get some of their agents to go to America to buy these engines and cut others out of it? Did that happen? We do not know whether it did or not. The Minister is the person to give us the information.
I gave it. The Deputy was out of the House.
I was present.
The Deputy was not present when I gave the information.
I was present during portion of the debate.
The Deputy was not present when I gave the information.
In any case, I have read the reports. We want to know here how many persons or companies tendered for these engines.
I gave that information.
What was the nature of the competition? Who carried out the work on behalf of CIE? Was it Dr. Andrews himself, or was it some agent, or was it some friend of the Minister or of the Government?
Is the Deputy alleging that I had any part in this transaction, directly or indirectly? Is he accusing me of corruption?
I am not making an allegation beyond this, that, in the absence of information, we cannot say what has happened.
The Minister has given up importing tar, I suppose?
The Minister is the only person who can clear the air in this matter. He must take this House into his confidence. Neither he nor the Government have any power or entitlement to guarantee money without the approval of this House. The Minister has to bear in mind that he is Minister in a Party who have not a majority in this House. It was quite all right for the Minister when he was discussing CIE matters a few years ago in this House. He had a majority then and he was quite safe in the knowledge that if a vote were taken, he would win. However, that majority is not in existence at the present time and he will have to change the dictatorial manner in which he has treated this House in the past.
I do not want to delay the House but I want detailed particulars from the Minister as to how CIE came about purchasing these engines. Did the Board consult the Minister? Did they ask him about this guarantee or did he, as Minister for Transport and Power, make any suggestions to CIE as to the best course to adopt to ensure that the equipment was purchased at the lowest possible price? It has often been announced by the Chair that the Minister for Transport and Power has no function in the day-to-day affairs of CIE. Numerous questions which I addressed to the Minister for Transport and Power have been disallowed by the Chair, on the ground that the Minister was not responsible for the day-to-day activities of CIE, the day-to-day activities of the ESB, or the day-to-day activities of other State bodies. In fact, at one time I addressed a question to the Taoiseach asking if the Minister for Transport and Power had any functions at all because whenever a question was addressed to him, he told us it was a matter for the Board. It is evident that he has functions, so far as Section 2 is concerned. He cannot deny that and he should give us the information we seek in order to ensure that there will be no behind-the-scenes talk about this matter and that everything is above board.
Notice taken that 20 Members were not present; House counted, and 20 Members being present,
That bell should ring until the Deputies are inside the Chamber. The Clerk is not entitled to stop ringing it.
When 20 Deputies are inside the enclosure, then there is a House.
I accept that, but before 20 Deputies were inside, the Clerk stopped ringing the bell.
The Deputy should not make charges against officials of the House.
As this is the Committee Stage, the Minister might like to give us the information we have sought before we proceed further with the discussion.
I have nothing more to say on this matter, except that I propose on Report Stage to withdraw the subsection which gives the name of the firm from whom the equipment is being purchased. I have already at great length answered the questions of Deputy Murphy in so far as I am able or think it proper to do so.
What are the Minister's reasons for withdrawing the subsection? Is it because he thought he was giving the House too much information?
The Deputy was not in the House unfortunately——
I am in the House more often than the Minister.
He was not in the House for this debate.
I was in the House for portion of the debate.
He was not in the House when this matter arose and when I stated that the subsection mentioning the name of the contractor was put in more or less as a courtesy to the House. If it troubles Deputy Sweetman, Deputy MacEoin and other members of the Fine Gael Party that we should put in a subsection which clearly indicates the name of a specific firm without actually scheduling the section as part of the Bill, I am prepared to believe that might create a very awkward precedent in relation to future contracts of this kind and that it would be best therefore to delete that subsection and simply to enable the Minister for Finance to guarantee a sum of money for purchases made under these special conditions.
That will mean that the Bill, if enacted, would be of no different character from many others where money is guaranteed to State companies and where there is no question of the Minister of the day giving details in regard to contracts entered into, giving the names of the firms that were not successful in regard to any contract, or giving the names of the agents for the firms in this country. The Bill will, then, be one of many measures of a similar kind where no one in the House ever thought of asking for such information. On that basis, I am accepting the suggestion of Deputy Sweetman, so we need have no further controversy on this matter.
I have complete and absolute confidence in the Chairman and the whole board of CIE. I am confident that there is absolutely nothing whatever underhand in the arduous work they are undertaking in this country. The Chairman and the Board are jointly responsible for contracts, as in the case of other State companies.
The conduct of their operations is entirely satisfactory, as far as I am concerned. I deprecate the suggestions and the criticisms impugning the character, particularly of the Chairman of CIE who is not able to answer for himself in this House. The Board of CIE are acting under legislation passed by this House at various times. I believe they are acting with a full sense of responsibility.
Any charges made against any individual member of the board or against the Chairman should, in fact, be made against me who am responsible and against the Government who are responsible for the general appointment of the Board. It will be quite impossible to get good men to act as directors on boards if they are to be attacked individually or by name in this House. I am quite sure, however, responsible Deputies will agree with me in regard to that matter.
I have no objection to Deputies criticising me and my conduct as Minister for Transport and Power, or to their criticising the Government for their overall responsibility for State companies. Let us, however, not criticise men who are not able to answer. Deputies would be setting a very serious precedent. I have answered all the questions that have been asked which seemed to me to be relevant to this debate. I am proposing, as I have said, on the Report Stage, to eliminate the subsection referred to and so to get us out of a difficulty which, I agree with Deputy Sweetman, might cause us some problems in the future.
Has the Minister concluded his lecture?
He will give us another one in a few minutes' time.
The Minister is feeling he should not give us this information at all. He feels that we should have got no details such as the few details set out in subsection (2). He told us as well that the former Minister for Finance, Deputy Sweetman, agrees with him. I do not know whether or not that is the case, but I think it is the view from these benches, and it is my personal view, that we do not agree with that type of procedure.
One would think, by the Minister, that he was taking us all very closely into his confidence and giving us some deep secrets so far as CIE are concerned. He is doing nothing of the kind. Is every member of this House, who is a member of a local authority, not aware that these questions arise from time to time at local authority meetings when, say, the local authority would require money to purchase equipment such as we propose here? In scarcely no instance would it amount to the sum of money involved here.
Would the members of the local authority not get, as of right, particulars as to the number of contracts, as to the other prices, as to the steps taken to secure the best value for money, as to the steps taken to ensure that the project was publicly advertised and that all people or all firms selling the type of equipment were quite well aware of the requirements of the council?
Are we to assume from the attitude of the Minister for Transport and Power, in relation to this Bill, that we should be satisfied to give him a blank cheque to guarantee a State-sponsored body such as CIE more than £2,000,000 without getting the information which we require? Is that not the reason why we come from Cork, Donegal, Mayo Meath, and from every other county in the country, to inquire into the workings of this House, to inquire as to how our public money is expended, and to ensure that public money will usefully and gainfully be employed to the best advantage? Is that not the reason why this Parliament makes laws and regulations?
There is a law and a regulation by this Parliament which provides that a Minister has no right to guarantee money, such as is being guaranteed under this Bill, without the approval of this House. It is by virtue of that fact that we are here today seeking this information.
I should like to refer to the remarks made by the Minister so far as the Board of CIE are concerned. I think I have never abused the privileges of this House since I became a member by commenting on any person who had not the right of audience within the House. Surely, however, a man such as the Chairman of CIE, or a board such as the Board of CIE, must be coming to that point here? There were occasions in the past when reference was made to the dictatorial attitude of CIE.
Surely the Deputy covered that in his previous speech?
I think, with your indulgence, I am entitled to reply to the Minister's statement, which I think was uncalled for. There was no need at all for it. He assumed we were contributing to this discussion——
The Deputy is not entitled to repeat his speech.
Notice taken that 20 Members were not present; House counted, and 20 Members being present,
I was refuting the Minister's assertion that members are abusing the privileges of this House in making unwarranted attacks on men who are not members of the House. I am sure he was referring to the Chairman of CIE and to the members of the Board. I maintain that no unwarranted attacks were made on any of these people, and no attacks at all. The statements made were completely relevant to this discussion.
It is well known that the majority of the members of this House are very dissatisfied with the courtesy extended to them by the Board of CIE. It would be no harm if the Minister, instead of lecturing us, were to turn his attention to them and give a lecture to the Board of CIE. A State-sponsored body should be courteous and helpful so far as the legitimate requirements of Deputies are concerned in the line of seeking information. It is very unfair for the Minister to sidetrack the issue involved by commenting unnecessarily on alleged abuses of privilege in this House.
It is said that there is never smoke without fire. I think there has been smoke in this House for the past two days and that smoke leaves a question mark in my mind. The Minister must take a lot of responsibility for that. He fanned the fire himself by refusing to answer questions that were asked of him. If there has been trouble about this Bill, the Minister must be practical and realise that the House has a duty. The result of the discussion during the past two days has made me uneasy about the Minister. His conduct in this debate has not filled me with any confidence. Supercilious sermons are not quite good enough. Whatever about the general judgment of CIE in the wider sphere, the position has not been helped by the fact that the Minister has sought to erect this screen more closely around this transaction.
The Minister suggested that Deputy Murphy was not present when he read what has been described as "a peculiar statement". That was no excuse for trying to suggest that Deputy Murphy was not aware of the Minister's attitude all along the line. Four times within the last hour within my hearing, the Minister has delivered a lecture to Deputies to the effect that they were irresponsible for daring to criticise the Chairman or the directors of CIE. The Minister stated that any charges that are to be made should be made against him as Minister and at that stage he stuck out that mighty chest of his and that was the first time I heard the Minister assuming responsibility for the office which he holds. I have been listening to him for a number of years stating that he has no responsibility for this, no responsibility for that and that he would refer the Deputy to CIE for this, or he would refer the Deputy to the ESB for that. While he was doing that, the Ceann Comhairle was preventing Questions from being tabled on the ground that the Minister had no responsibility. I am not criticising——
The Deputy, I take it, is not making a charge against the Chair?
No, I am not.
A statement of fact.
I am emphasising the wonderful courage which the Minister has shown suddenly when he says that "If charges are to be made, let them be made against me", and that he is responsible. I do not think he has the slightest responsibility for running this Department. It has been shown before he is merely a rubber-stamp. Therefore we must criticise somebody. There is no use criticising a rubber-stamp—it is an inanimate object. As far as I can see the Minister is up a siding. He has been shunted up one of these forgotten places where the grass is growing between the tracks, and perhaps derailed, from what we hear.
The Deputy is not keeping on the rails.
The Minister, after a debate which has lasted a few days, comes in and quite casually says: "I am going to drop subsection (2) of Section 2. I am quite satisfied it will meet with Deputy Sweetman's approval." I do not know why suddenly, after the House has been discussing all this secrecy and the lack of co-operation on the part of the Minister and has failed to extract information that should be made available, the Minister should think he can solve his problem by withdrawing a subsection, one young and well-meaning Deputy of his Party having said that the Minister brought in that subsection as a matter of courtesy to Deputies. Is that all that is thought of the standard of intelligence of Deputies, that we can be hoodwinked on this measure? Is it not a question of "a rose by any other name"? The House is debating the matter and we are still being asked to endorse a cheque to CIE for the purchase of locomotives from General Motors. There has been no change in that but the Minister is going to drop the subsection at this stage in order to meet the worries expressed by certain members of the Opposition.
I make the charge that the Minister is irresponsible at this stage and there is no question of the Minister suggesting that it is Dr. Andrews or the directors of CIE that I am attacking. I am criticising the Minister and saying that his attitude towards this House has been one of complete contempt.
The Deputy has made that point on many occasions already.
Yes, but not in relation to the particular point I am discussing, the homily delivered to Deputies on four different occasions. He sought to suggest that what we were doing was attacking individuals of CIE. I want it recorded on this matter that my first interest here is to extract information from the Minister in regard to the sum of six million dollars. If in the course of trying to extract that information, some people's ears or noses are pulled or twigged and some of them get a little rough treatment, then the only person to be blamed is the Minister. If his officials or his appointees feel hurt by the way they have been knocked about in this House, let them place responsibility on the Minister who failed to give the information he was asked for in the House, information which, in the public interest, he should have given.
The question is that Section 2, as amended, stand part of the Bill.
We are going to discuss it on Report Stage. The Minister is putting down an amendment to delete subsection (2)—is that not the position?
I take it the Minister's amendment will be available to-morrow?
The amendment is available now.
I want to be reasonable. I do not want to speak again if the Minister is amending the section and we can have the matter re-examined on Report Stage.
The amendment referred to is ready for distribution.
It is ready for circulation.
It has already been circulated here.
Is Section 4 in the same form as in the normal State Guarantees Bill?
It is, yes.
Is the Minister positive?
Well, Section 4 is self-explanatory.
I know, but is it in the same form as the other sections?
I understood that the position in relation to general guarantees which had to be made good by the Minister for Finance was that those guarantees had to be made good out of voted moneys and they had to come before the House for the purpose of being voted. That is the general pattern in relation to most items of guarantees, the Trade Loans (Guarantee) Act, for example. The Minister will recall that on many occasions Ministers have had to come to the House for the purpose of paying the amount due under the Trade Loans (Guarantee) Acts, where the companies concerned went into liquidation and were not able to meet their commitments.
I think Section 4 and Section 5 taken together follow the exact lines——
They do not follow the line of the Trade Loans (Guarantee) Act and that——
I think they follow the same line as the State Guarantees Act, 1954. It will be seen that the moneys will have to be voted by the Oireachtas.
Will the effect of these sections be that the Central Fund makes good the guarantee and these voted moneys have to be made good to the Central Fund? Is that what the Minister means?
I do not think it is in exactly the same form. What I am worried about is that I think it is all wrong for the House to pass a Bill providing for a guarantee, unless, at the same time, the Government of the day must come back to the House in one form or another, if that guarantee has to be met out of public funds. I do not mind how it is done. It does not matter to me whether it is done by the Central Fund paying the debtor and the Minister for Finance reimbursing the Central Fund. I am satisfied that there must be, without question, a categorical arrangement in respect of any guarantee by the State, not merely in this Bill, that the control of this House over the fiscal arrangements is such that there must be a vote to make good what has to be repaid under the guarantee.
Section 6 (2) of the State Guarantees Act, 1954, is, in actual fact, identical with subsection (2) of this Bill. They are, in fact, identical, so the Deputy can be reassured on that matter.
What guarantee has the Minister that this money will be repaid within the specified period of two years? Has he had consultations with the Board, and were the Board able to give evidence to the effect that they will be in a position to repay the money within the two years provided for in the section?
That might arise on the following section.
It arises on Section 5 which provides that any advances out of the Central Fund shall be repaid to the Minister, with, if the Minister so requires, interest thereon at such rates as the Minister appoints, by the Board within two years from the date of the advance. Has the Minister any evidence that the Board will be in a position to repay the money? As it was pointed out earlier, there is a change in the outlook of the people so far as CIE are concerned.
Notice taken that 20 Members were not present; House counted, and 20 Members being present,
CIE have had to make changes in their plans. They have indicated the closure of a number of branch lines as outlined in this map.
Section 5 deals with the question of repayments.
I am speaking of the capacity of CIE to repay the money.
The Deputy may not discuss the whole administration of CIE on this section which deals with the repayment of loans.
Surely on this section we can discuss the possibility of CIE not being able to repay the loans?
The Deputy may not discuss the closure of branch lines.
I am not discussing the closure of branch lines; I am only referring to them. At present it does not seem that CIE are in good standing. They have had to change their plans and they will make orders, I am sure, in the not too distant future for the closure of branch lines. There has been a change of outlook about CIE and many people feel that the Government should review the entire transport system of the country.
The Deputy may not proceed along those lines. The section deals with the question of repayment of loans.
With all due respect to you, Sir, if you made a loan to a person, would you not consider the possibility——
The Chair does not make loans to anyone.
To put it bluntly, if this House guarantees a loan for two years to somebody such as CIE, is it not entitled to inquire into the circumstances of the borrower and into what the borrower's financial circumstances may be two years hence when the loan is due for repayment?
The Deputy is discussing security for repayment of loans, which would have arisen on Section 3.
With all due respect, I accept your advice, but I do not like to see other people meddling in a matter that does not call for their attention.
I have already pointed out to the Deputy that the section does not deal with the matter to which he is referring.
What are we discussing on this section?
I take it the Deputy is discussing security for loans which might have arisen on Section 3.
It is set out in Section 5 (1) that the loan must be repaid within two years from the date of the advance. Is it not relevant to discuss what may be the financial circumstance of CIE two years hence on that section?
What is relevant then?
It is not for the Chair to advise the Deputy.
I would not like to say that I think the Chair is out of Order.
The Chair is never out of Order.
In the Chair's opinion.
This is the same as the section in the State Guarantees Act, 1954? | <urn:uuid:0847dd24-37eb-43e1-8752-e41667dcef43> | CC-MAIN-2022-21 | https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1962-07-24/31/ | 2022-05-26T14:43:31Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662606992.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20220526131456-20220526161456-00620.warc.gz | en | 0.985015 | 19,077 |
In this episode, I am joined by writer Julia Abel Smith who has enjoyed a long career with The Landmark Trust during which time she discovered the forbidden love story between Prince Augustus and Lady Augusta Murray who shared a name, birthday and destiny…
Holly: Hello my darlings and welcome back to Past Loves – the weekly history podcast that explores affection, infatuation and attachment across time to bring you a touch of romance to daily life. Ah well I hope this episode finds you very well indeed. I’m so pleased to be in September – not only to welcome the return to the podcast obviously – but also because I think it is just my favourite month of year. Autumn dressing is back and I can don my jumpers and thick black tights again and then with the start of term either at school or university or even at work really, it always feels like new beginnings. Plus it’s my birthday month so I think I might be slightly biased but I just love that autumn has started.
And of course it is time for the second episode of the season to be coming your way and it’s the first secret marriage episode of the season! I told you in the preview for the second season – the little teaser I send out – that in a weird way there are quite a few secret marriages in the line up this time around. Today, we will be discussing the relationship between Lady Augusta Murray and Prince Augustus who was the son of King George III. I am joined by Julia Abel Smith who has enjoyed a long career with The Landmark Trust and more recently with Art UK. She has also written for Country Life and House & Garden magazines. Whilst researching the history of one of the Trust’s follies that she discovered Lady Augusta and she was simply captivated. This year her book Forbidden Wife was published by The History Press.
Forbidden Wife: The Life And Trials of Lady Augusta Murray uses material from the Royal Archives and the Dunmore family papers to create a dramatic biography of Lady Augusta set in the reigns of Kings George III and IV against the backdrop of the American and French Revolutions. Augusta’s life changes when she meets Prince Augustus Frederick. He was Augustus, she was Augusta, and moreover they shared a birthday. It seems like destiny but their love story was consumed by scandal.
The History Press kindly gifted me a copy of the book and I have to say I absolutely devoured it. The story is so enthralling that I really did just love it and it was a piece of history that I had no idea about. The book reveals this royal marriage that has been almost completely hidden in history until now in an entertaining and articulate way. And I hope from this episode you will also understand why Lady Augusta Murray and Prince Augustus’ love story is both passionate and heart-breaking. Also we also talk a little about techniques that were used to win yourself a proposal – essentially its the eighteenth-century version of tinder.
Now, whilst Julia and I were having the conversation, Storm Francis was raging and well we had 2 or 3 power cuts during our discussion. So, the conversation does shift from a zoom call which is how I normally record interviews to a phone call. If you were wondering, when that change does happen, that is why. Storm Francis was causing quite a few problems. You will notice when we had to switch to plan B but I think you’ll feel so enthralled to learn how it turned out for Augustus and Augusta that it will be but a fleeting transition – you get pretty used to it pretty quickly, the change, and it really is such an important story and such a fascinating story from beginning to end. So we will start with a little introduction into the remarkable Lady Augusta Murray herself…
Lady Augusta Murray was born on the 27th January 1761. How would you describe her as a person?
Judith: Lady Augusta was intelligent, well read, very attractive. She was vivacious, generous and kind. She could be flirty. She was determined. And I would say that she was a very passionate person. And she was also proud of her family lineage.
Holly: Yes because her family is very interesting. What was her childhood like? Who were her parents?
Judith: Her father was the 4th Earl of Dunmore and he was descended from the Marquess of Atholl, and the Marquess of Atholl included in his forebears: members of the Royal Houses of Plantagenet, Orange and Bourbon. And her mother was Lady Charlotte Stewart. She was the daughter of the 6th Earl of Galloway and again, her family included the Royal House of Stewart.
Holly: And so John Murray was very interesting, because he ended up moving the whole family to Virginia. Why, and what was life like that for them?
Judith: John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, was short of money and he needed a job that would pay him well. And one of the well paying jobs was to be a governor in the colonies. And so in 1770, he took the role of the governor of New York and after a year there, he was assigned as governor of Virginia and he was the last royal governor – and that’s to say, the last governor that was appointed by George III in Virginia. And so he went to Williamsburg, and he missed his family so much that he persuaded his wife to bring six of their children out to live in Williamsburg with him. And at that stage, it was very, very unusual for a governor to have his wife and his children out there. And so when they arrived, all the people in the colony of Virginia were so excited, and so welcoming, and gave them the most wonderful reception. And so she had, I would say, quite a lonely life out in Virginia, because they were grander than everybody else and she lived in the royal palace in Williamsburg. But she had her siblings, and her mother would have made sure that she continued with her education, dancing, music, languages reading. And so she had a year and a half out there.
Holly: Yes, and then they had to flee soon after her 14th birthday.
Judith: That’s right. Yeah, she and her siblings and her mother arrived just after the Boston Tea Party. They arrived in New York in 1774 and the Boston Tea Party, when some of the traders in Boston Harbor had thrown all the tea into the harbour because we’re being forced to pay taxes on it, and it was just the beginning of the American War of Independence when the American peoples were saying,’ we don’t want to pay taxes if we’re not represented in the Westminster parliament.’ So this was all the beginning of all the rumblings of the beginning of the American War of Independence and in 1775, Augusta’s father, Lord Dunmore, after there was various upsets throughout the colonies, he thought it would be a sensible thing to do to remove the gunpowder from the magazine, or the arsenal in Williamsburg. And next morning, when it was discovered that the gunpowder had been removed, and that the people of Virginia couldn’t arm themselves. They went to the palace and said ‘where’s our powder?’ And things got very, very dangerous. The governor decided that he would guard the palace and so he got British guards to surround the palace because he was really worried about the palace being broken into. And then it got so dangerous that in the middle of the night, in the summer of 1775, his wife and his six children, crept out through the back door, creeping down the pathway of the garden where there was a carriage waiting for them. And they were taken to the harbour and taken off to a British naval ship for their safety and then they eventually came home. But it was a it was dramatic, dramatic departure from Williamsburg.
Holly: It really was it must have been such an experience for Augusta. And it really seems that that time in Virginia was quite formative for her in general doesn’t it?
Judith: Yes, I think I think you’re absolutely right, Holly. And not only was she crossing the the ocean to New York, which in itself was a big adventure, she then went down from New York to Williamsburg, visiting lots of the capitals of the colonies on her way. And I think her time in America gave her an enormous confidence and gave her an experience that girls her age simply wouldn’t have had in England. People travelled of that background, but to travel to the colonies was really something very, very, very extraordinary and to be treated in the way that she was treated as the daughter of the governor gave her a sense of importance, gave her a sense of herself. And she would have also had time to do a lot of studying a lot of reading and her father’s library, mixing with the highest circles, she would have met George Washington – there’s no doubt about it, he knew the governor, he dined at the Royal Palace. So she would have met all the people that were instrumental, ironically, in the War of Independence.
Holly: Yeah, it’s remarkable. So they they came back to England, and it’s eighteenth-century England so we’re going to have to talk about her marriage prospects. What was it looking like for her? I particularly love the story about the painting by Romney, so if you could tell it to that would be great.
Judith: Yes. Her aunt, Lady Susanna Stewart, she was a very wealthy lady and she was a great patron of Romney, George Romney. And she married the Marquess of Stafford, she had a huge income and she was very, very fond of Augusta, her niece, and unlike her sister, Lady Charlotte Stewart, who was not at all wealthy, Susanna Stewart was wealthy, and she thought it would be a nice thing to do, to commission a portrait of Augusta, from George Romney for her 21st birthday. However, there was a tradition in those days that people of that background, went to visit artists and to look at all the pictures that they were doing and they would often have music played, and they would drink wine, and they would spend time in the studios of current artists. And so if you were having your portrait painted, and you were hoping that you’d make a good match, very often the invoice would be delayed, so that the picture was hanging around literally hanging around in the studio so young men could say, ‘Oh, what a beautiful girl, you know, who is that?’ And it was a way of putting yourself about, if you like, in, in a subtle sort of way. So I can’t quite remember how long it took Lady Susanna to pay the bill, but it was quite a long time.
Holly: Yeah, it was. It was a years.
Judith: Yeah. And there was and there was a reason for that!
Holly: Because it seems that Augusta had plenty of interest, but she was quite unwilling to compromise in who she took for a husband.
Judith: She was very intelligent. And she knew that once she was married, her husband would be able to tell her what to do where they went. She wouldn’t be mistress of her own destiny anymore. So she was very, very keen to marry somebody who she could not only love, but feel was her equal. And as you say, she had lots of interest. But she didn’t find anybody that she was particularly keen on or that she wanted to marry until she fell in love with her first cousin, Lord Archibald Hamilton.
Holly: Yes, what’s the story there?
Judith: He was the son of another of her aunts (she had lots of aunts). This was Lady Harriet Stewart. And he was, I think it was eight years younger than her, quite a lot longer than her. And they got on very well. They were very happy together. Mothers are great friends. And it’s certain that he had made some sort of arrangement with her that when they came back from their trip to Italy – Augusta was going to go to Italy with her mother – she understood that they would probably be married. So when she left, she was if you like, unofficially engaged. They’d swapped rings. They’d swapped pictures. There was nothing public, but she believed she had an understanding with her cousin Archibald.
Holly: Yeah, but it was in the summer of 1792 when they did go to Italy with Augusta’s sister Virginia, that she fell in love with someone entirely different. And honestly, the story of their first meeting is like a fairy tale. It’s like a Cinderella moment.
Judith: It’s charming isn’t it?
Holly: So so lovely. So how did Augusta meet Prince Augustus?
Judith: Augusta had been in Naples with her mother and her sister, Virginia, and they came up to Rome for Christmas in December. And Prince Augustus, the sixth son of King George III, had been in Rome for a matter of days. And he was walking up the Via del Corso, one of the main roads in Rome. He went into a church, San Giacomo and as he came out on the steps, he met a mother and her two daughters. He realized immediately that they were British and he thought maybe he knew them, but he wasn’t sure. And he noticed that the very pretty daughter’s shoe, the ribbon was loose. And so he knelt down without knowing who she was. He knelt down and tied up the ribbon of her shoe. And she hadn’t noticed that the ribbon was was loose, and she was a little bit surprised.
Holly: I mean, you’d be a little…it’s romantic, but you’d also be a little bit worried.
Judith: ‘Thank you very much.’…and smiled at him and went inside the church. And he left the church went on his way – maybe to do some more sightseeing – and they were very much thrown together in society in Rome. It was a small society. And he fell in love very, very quickly, very passionately with her, and by Christmas was sending her passionate letters, prayers saying, you know, ‘you will only love’ and things went from there.
Holly: Yeah, he really laid it on thick very early on. But it took her a little bit more time didn’t it?
Judith: Yes, she knew he was. She was much older than him. And at the beginning, she absolutely wasn’t in love with him. She was in love with her cousin Archibald. She was expecting to marry him when she got home. And she was flattered by the prince’s attentions, but she didn’t really think any more of it. But he was so persistent and they saw each other every day, and the relationship got more and more intense. And then the crunch really came when she had a letter from Archibald saying that he was going to marry somebody else. And she was utterly, utterly devastated because by this time, she was in her early 30s and she was really hoping that when she got back, she could marry somebody she loved, that was her equal and should be happy ever after. So that was a terrible, terrible shock to her. And Prince Augustus really took his chance and say,’ well, Archibald told you this, but you know, I’m here and I’d like to marry you.’ And she thought,’ well, this is this is impossible. You’re the son of the King. I can’t possibly marry you.’ But he carried on and carried on and carried on.
Holly: Maybe we can talk a little bit about who Prince Augustus was. So he was born in January 1773 so yes he was quite a bit younger than Augusta and he was the son of George III. Can you describe his character a little?
Judith: Yes. Um, I think it’s quite important to say that not only was he 12 years younger than Augusta, but actually they shared a birthday.
Holly: Yes. It’s so romantic.
Judith: They were both born on January 27th. And he was Augustus and she was Augusta. And there they were born on the same day, it looks as if they were meant to be together. Augustus was very sweet natured. He was very popular with all his siblings. He was much loved by his mother, Queen Charlotte. He was very resilient because he was sent to the University of Göttingen for his education, age 13. He got terrible asthma, and he underwent horrific treatments and he underwent them uncomplainingly. Yeah, they had that horrible thing called blistering where you had horrible hot glasses put on top of your head to they believed it was to draw out the evil vapours and things. I mean really painful and all his brothers always commented that he never made any fuss so he was very very brave.
Holly: Yeah, I felt a real because I asthmatic so I felt a real connection him knowing what it must have been like for him to deal with it, without any medication, without just a doctor giving you some steroids when things flare up massively and I just felt so…he did incredibly well just to be out there and you know, pursuing love with such vigor when he was so poorly.
Judith: Yes and no, no puffers for him! No his brothers, his two brothers that he was with, would stay in Göttingen and he was sent off to to warmer climates. He was sent to the south of France and he was sent to Italy for his asthma. So I think he was also quite lonely. And he used to write how happy he was to get to go back to Göttingen to see his brothers. So when he met Augusta, he missed his mother. There are charming letters to his mother, Queen Charlotte charming letters to his sisters. I think he was very, very homesick. And he was very, very lonely. And so when he met a sweet, lively girl, and within a very warm hearted mother, a very another very sweet sister, I think he was so happy to be in the bosom of a family again, having not seen his own family for for six years.
Holly: No, because their family dynamic was very interesting, and particularly his relationship with his father.
Judith: Yes, yes, his father, who was the very dutiful, conscientious King, and expected that sort of behaviour from his children. And I think all Augustus wanted to do was please his father, and work hard at his studies. But he knew that he was at a disadvantage in that because his other brothers, Prince William was in the Navy and the Prince of Wales himself couldn’t actually be actually in the services, but he had an honorary title in the services. Augustus was the only one that couldn’t actually be in the army, and help fight for his country, which his other brothers did. So he always felt at a great disadvantage for that, and felt that he was not being as helpful as he could be to his father. So he would write to his father and tell him everything that he thought might be useful. He tell him about the naval ships that he saw, maybe the armies that he came across on his travels. But he always felt I’m not really much used to my father, which I think was a great sadness.
Holly: Yeah, no, it really did seem and it seemed he was like, very desperate to find something because at one point, he thought, ‘well, maybe I’ll become part of the clergy.’ And then he’s like, ‘Well, no, I like I like girls a bit too much and I’d quite like wife.’
Judith: Yes and the sad thing about that is very sensible idea about going into the church was that it would have been actually perfect, but he never got a reply from his father. And I think that was terribly sad. He kept he kept writing, devising, ‘I could go to university and go to church. What do you think? Do you think this is a good idea? Because I can’t go into services’ and never had any replies which I think must have been absolutely heart-breaking.
Holly: Yeah, it really did seem. But I mean, the first three months of their relationship, that sounds like the best summer romance you could possibly ever want. What was it like for them those first three months exploring Italy?
Judith: Prince Augustus took Augusta, Virginia and Lady Dunmore, all around Rome showed them all the things that he loved. He was instrumental in many of the archaeological digs, and he helped fund those. He would have taken them off to see the archaeological digs of which there was a huge amount going on in Rome at that time. He would have taken off to the picture galleries, the palaces, the churches, St. Peter’s obviously, and he was also very interested in music, church music, and he loves singing. So he took them off to church concerts. And quite interestingly, they were there during Lent. And you couldn’t have opera during Lent. He would take them off to oratorios, which is why so many oratorios are very like opera, and the church music, which you hear in church that has all the sort of all the charm of an opera. So they used to go off to concerts, and then in the evenings, they would go out for dinner with people and they would play cards, and they would dance and eat ice cream ice cream is very popular at that time which I think is rather charming. And of course, it was such a it was such a cosmopolitan society. There were so many different people from royal families, expats from Britain, who found a room much cheaper to live in. There was a rich mix, so there was the culture in the daytime and then there was the inspiring and enjoyable society in the evening. So there was never a dull moment. And I mean the intensity of her diaries. Gosh, they were busy.
Holly: Yes. There’s something every single day, they were exploring something new. And I find it interesting that you talked about the fact that he really savoured being back in a bosom of the family because it was on the 4th March 1793 that Augusta wrote in her journal about the fact that her mother loved him as much as she loved him. He’d been quite sick with his asthma again, and they’d both been crying over him and it really did seem that they became very intense very quickly.
Judith: Yes, Yes. And I think I think that Lady Dunmore was separated from her other children and I think he really became a son to her. And with that motherly affection for a child that’s not very well, I think she got more and more more and more fond of him and felt more and more sympathetic towards him with his asthma.
Holly: Archibald’s letter, as you mentioned, was the catalyst to Augustus’ proposal. But Augusta didn’t agree straight away, did she?
Judith: No she didn’t, because she just felt that it was inappropriate for him to a) ask her to marry him and and b) to start that it was it would be impossible. She wasn’t a protestant princess and she was 12 years older than him, which in those days would have been very, very extraordinary. I mean, people who married women even up to a few months older, that was looked down on. Extraordinarily. She just felt that this was impossible and really, he should change his behaviour.
Holly: Yeah and can you explain the significance of the Royal marriages Act of 1772? Because that was very influential.
Judith: That was crucial to their story. The Royal Marriages Act originated from King George III’s horror, at the marriage of his brother, Henry, Duke of Cumberland, to Mrs. Horton. Mrs Horton was a coquette, a flirt, she came from a family with very contentious political affiliations, she really was not suitable to be the wife of a royal Duke. And the king felt very upset that his brother the Duke had married Mrs Horton because he hadn’t asked him and he felt that as the paterfamilias, as the head of the family, it behoved his young brothers to ask him for they got married, but of course, the Duke hadn’t asked him because he knew that King George wouldn’t allow him to get married Mrs Horton. So the King decided that he would actually try and get some legislation passed to make sure that, in the future, his descendants would ask the King or the Queen before they got married to make sure that the people they married were in his eyes suitable. In 1772, the law was passed and the Royal Marriages Act came into being which said that any children had to ask the monarch before they got married. And Lady Augusta didn’t really know that the details of the Royal Marriages Act but she knew that there was such a thing and she knew that she obviously wasn’t a possible Princess. When the King set up the conditions of the Royal Marriages Act, he was very keen that his children and his siblings should not marry what he called a country man or a country woman. They shouldn’t marry somebody from Britain because he felt that they could get very involved with politics, and they could happen to have separate factions and he didn’t want that. And when he made Queen Charlotte, he was said to her, and you mustn’t get involved with politics, you just keep to domestic, domestic affairs. So that was absolutely crucial to the story of Augustus and Augusta.
Holly: I mean, remarkably, not remarkably, there were desperately in love, but he did wear her down. He was really very passionate. And so they decided they would have a wedding ceremony, and it happened on the 4th April 1793. Can you explain the story of their first wedding ceremony?
Judith: Yeah. The stress of trying to persuade Augusta to marry him had made Augustus really very unwell and he’d had to keep to his room for a few weeks with bad asthma and everything that was decided between them, they pass in letters, his doctor passed the letters and her servant passed the letters so we know exactly what what went on. All the letters are in existence. And they had lots of difficulty in trying to find a cleric to marry them because the cleric often wanted to know why when it should be kept secret. Lots of them, ‘why I don’t actually want to be involved with it.’ And then eventually, they tricked the Reverend William Gunn into marrying them because they asked him to come to Augusta’s lodgings in Rome, and he went there expecting to meet her, and then the prince popped out thrust a prayer book into his hand and said ‘you have to marry us’ and got so upset and so agitated, that the Reverend William Gunn was persuaded to do so, much against his will and so much so that he left that a little bit of the service. So it was all very, very dramatic. He did marry them in the end.
Holly: He did and then he separated them as quickly as quickly as possible.
Judith: As quickly as possible and what was more important than anything, he kept the certificate. He didn’t give them the wedding certificate. He kept it because he knew that by being party to the marriage, by just being a part of it, he was committing a crime because he was going against the provisions of the Royal Marriages Act.
Holly: But Augusta and Augustus seemed like, when they went back to their rooms and they wrote in their diaries, you have them talking about what it was like, and they seem just so swept up in all I mean, Augusta wrote: ‘Oh my prince, my lover, and now indeed, my husband,’ which is so very touching.
Judith: They were so so pleased. I think it has all been so traumatic and so intense. And then it was also desperate, and then at last they were married. I think the relief was phenomenal.
Holly: And as was the trend with their relationship, things moved very quickly, because when they did consummate the marriage, that’s when Augusta fell pregnant with their son, straight away!
Judith: And of course, she got very sick very quickly. And she hadn’t told her mother, she hadn’t told anybody. They promised each other that they wouldn’t tell people. The Reverend William Gunn made them promises that they wouldn’t tell people. It was all secret. And she was so unwell. Her mother and sister carried on going out to parties in Rome, but she had to stay home on the other hand, that did give her an opportunity to see Augustus in private.
Holly: But then it was the end of the feast of Corpus Christi. And that meant that Lady Dunmore wanted to return back to England with her daughters so Augusta made the trip back to England, returning home visibly pregnant, and apparently single, and that must have just been very daunting for her.
Judith: Yeah, yeah. Because she didn’t know what she was going to get back to. She didn’t know how the King would take the news that his son was married. She didn’t know if Augustus had told the King. Her future was very, very, very uncertain. And I think that must have been a terrible thing to come back to England in November, having had a dreadful sea journey during the war with France, feeling very unwell, and simply not knowing what was going to happen. She couldn’t go out in public because everybody was said, ‘Oh, my goodness, you’re pregnant.’ She had no obvious husband and she couldn’t tell anybody. But what she did have…it was a dreadful position for her.
Holly: I deliberately said their first wedding ceremony in Italy because they then had another ceremony on the 5th December in the same year. Why did they have a second ceremony and what was it like?
Judith: They had a second equally secret ceremony at St George’s, Hanover Square at the beginning of December because Lady Dunmore wanted to secure the reputation of her daughter and the legitimacy of her unborn grandchild, because she was concerned that the wedding in Rome, without witnesses, and without a certificate that they could produce would be recognized. In Augusta’s mind, she was my definitely married, she had no qualms about the service that they’d undergone in Rome, but it was her mother who felt that the Roman ceremony wouldn’t be recognised in England, and also Prince Augustus was keen to have a ceremony undertaken in England. So they have the bands read, but they had to read without their titles: Mr. Augustus and Miss Augusta Murray. They went dressed very simply, afterwards, the prince was described as looking like a common shopkeeper in a brown great coat, and Augusta was wearing just a very simple, long cotton gown. None of the glorious apparel that they would have been wearing if the wedding had been approved or they got married as a first wedding. It was very early in the morning when it was dark in December and they got married in what’s called a double wedding. In those days when churches have something like nine weddings a day, people could opt to get married with another couple – you get two for one. So quite extraordinary, the idea of getting married with another couple in the same ceremony. The wedding went off and it was all fine or apparently all fine. And then she went home afterwards and they were much much relieved that it was done.
Holly: So how did the secret get revealed then?
Judith: The secret was revealed because, very interestingly, one of the later of weddings that day was Dido Belle and she married John Davinier. And she was the ward of Lord Mansfield, and there’s a beautiful portrait of her with her cousin at Scone Palace. And I, I have no idea how Lord Radnor was looking at the wedding register. But I just wondered if he wasn’t one of the attendees of the wedding of Dido Belle because John Davinier was a Huguenot and Lord Radnor looked after one of the houses were lots of Huguenots lived in North London and I’m just wondering if that wasn’t a possibility. Otherwise, I don’t know how long Radnor was there. For whatever reason, he was in church, he saw the wedding register, and he clocked that Augusta and Augustus were who they were, and he told The Times and not only did he tell The Times, he informed Privy Council.
Holly: Wow, that must have been so tumultuous for the couple What was it like for Augusta?
Judith: She then had her baby on the 13th January. And she was very, very, very ill after she had postpartum fever, which could kill you. It was a great scare of new mothers. And she was summoned to appear before Privy Council at an inquiry, and she was much too ill to go. So her mother went in her stead. And her mother asked questions in front of the Privy Council, I think there was 14 Privy counsellors, the great and the good of the government: the Prime Minister, the war minister, the Archbishop, the Bishop of London. She was absolutely magnificent. She answered all the questions. She retained her daughter’s reputation and her sense of dignity and she was utterly superb. But the enquiry having taken place, it was decided that king’s case against Augustus should then go to one of the church councils in June. And then it was decided that both marriages in Rome and London were null and void and that their little boy was illegitimate.
Holly: What did the Prince make of it?
Judith: Oh, he was desperately unhappy. He has gone back to Italy the morning after his little boy was born.
Holly: It’s such a heart-breaking story that he leaves at four o’clock in the morning.
Judith: He had to leave at four in the morning because he had to get to Portsmouth because his ship was sailing and he was leaving, again, health reasons. But he did just manage to see Augusta, although he didn’t say goodbye to her because she was so well. He knew that that would be a terrible thing for her but he just saw his little baby boy. And he was absolutely horrified. I think he was so horrified that their position had been made a legal case. And that to him, you know, he thought that it could be agreed in amongst the family. But no, because of the Royal Marriages Act, it became a legal case. And he was horrified. He was appalled at what happened. Initially, he was desperately unhappy. But he determined, he resolutely set out to try and make his marriage to Lady Augusta accepted, accepted by his father, accepted by everybody. And it was something a an uphill battle.
Holly: Didn’t he even just try to work out a country where they would be acknowledged?
Judith: Yes. He wrote the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time that ‘if we went to somewhere that would accept her, would this not be suitable?’ And the Archbishop replied, ‘You will always be the son of the King, wherever you go. You will be the son of the king, don’t be under any illusion.’ Eventually, he did realise that he would never get his marriage to Augusta accepted.
Holly: So in 1799, Augusta actually went to see Augustus in Berlin in a kind of non…it was a non-sanctioned visit, because they’d put head to her travelling. But she went because she thought that Augustus was very, very ill. And they had five weeks there and it was very, very happy for them. But you wrote in your book that the Prince of Wales was really regarding Augustus is both idealistic and foolish are trying to keep up this pretence of their legal marriage and how did he try to undermine their relationship?
Judith: I think what should be remembered is that so often there are personal reasons why people behave the way they do. And of course, the Prince of Wales himself had undergone an illegal marriage, so that he knew really that to marry somebody that was not sanctioned by the King, was absolutely hopeless. The King had asked him to help extricate him brother Augustus from Lady Augusta and this is a task that he accepted a very, very unwillingly. He didn’t really want to spend time on it. He just thought that it was a nonsense that he was trying to something that he would never ever succeed in, and he just got rather bored of it. When Augusta went out to Berlin, she left her son with her mother Lady Dunmore. And it was decided that if they prevented the child from going to Berlin to be with his parents then that would be a way of getting Augusta back, but Augustus should stay in Berlin. The child became something of a bargaining chip. However, they weren’t reckoning on Lady Dunmore, because Prince Augustus sent his valet to go and pick up the child and Lady Dunmore had no hesitation in giving the child to the valet, and off he went, and was whisked away from London to Berlin where he spent one day before he and his mother had to come back.
Holly: I know it was so sad because obviously that was the first time they were meeting, Augustus and his son Augustus.
Judith: That the three of them were together
Holly: Yes and so it’s so sad that they did come back. But by the end of March in the next year, Augustus did decide that he did want to come to be with his family so he came home without the permission of his father and what did he decide was the best strategy to achieve a reasonable pension for them both?
Judith: He decided that he wouldn’t press to have Lady Augusta recognised as his wife for financial reasons. But he thought, ‘well I’ll just live with her quietly’ and like many of his brothers did – you know Prince William and his mistress lived quietly and so he thought ‘well we’ll just live quietly, we won’t make a song and dance about this and I’ll say that I’m not going to try to get her recognised as my wide and we’ll just live quietly with her.’ Which is what they did for 7 months at a house on Grosvenor Square and they lived there before he had to go back again for health reasons.
Holly: Yeah so in 1801, they decided to separate. Can you explain what happened?
Judith: Yes, yes. Augusta was not going to take that for definite. So she thought ‘I’m going to have one more try. I’ll go and have one more try and I’ll try to get my debts paid’ because when they’d had 7 months in London, they’d spent a lot of money and there were many debts that couldn’t be paid. She was being harassed by her creditors. In the Spring of 1802, she went to Lisbon with her sister where Augustus was living at that stage – had a disastrous few days there trying to make him see her. She didn’t succeed and it was a very humiliating visit because he wouldn’t see her and he said ‘I’m going to go to Gibraltar unless you go away.’ So she eventually left Lisbon and came back and put in a case against him for the money because she genuinely thought that she would be thrown into the debtor’s prison. She even got to the point where she was looking at rooms in the Marshalsea prison because she was so worried about being thrown into prison for debt. Then her brother very kindly helped her out and paid some of the debts so that she wouldn’t have to go to prison. At last, in 1806, they came to an agreement and the Prince agreed to pay her debts. He debts would be paid off of £26,000 on the understanding that a) she dropped her case b) his coat of arms would not be shown on her carriage and c) her servants would not wear his livery. A line was draw. Her debts were paid. He agreed that he would pay her a pension of £4,000 a year. They had to be completely separate and I think by that time she was quite pleased not to see him and he was quite happy not to see her. She split her time between her house in Ramsgate and her house in London.
Holly: Ramsgate sounds like a very picturesque place.
Judith: I think it was, I think it was a period of contentment. I don’t think it was idyllic because I think when you think what she had before, before she met the Prince, she was at the top of her social tree, she went to court all the time, she was the Queen of society. When she was in Ramsgate, nobody of any quality would see her. I think it was only sort of rackety rakish crowds who would see her. However she used her time to make a beautiful estate, gardens, grounds. She gathered a library, the whole bottom floor of her house was her library with a very big dining room in a wing at the back. She saw her children and she had a life, I think it was of contentment. She made the best of what she had and I think what runs through her story again, again and again is how supportive her own family was. She loved her parents, they did a lot to look after her. She loved all of her siblings, they supported her. To them, she was always the Duchess, they always regarded her marriage as valid and they stuck by her. Her mother, who had been at the pinnacle of society in America, in all of the colonies – she was the most important woman in America – she then got to the stage where there was no money, she couldn’t even have a carriage. That must have been terrible for Lady Dunmore. It was a period of quiet content I would say.
Holly: And when she did die and then later Prince Augustus died as well, what was their legacy for their children?
Judith: Their son Augustus, he was always uncomfortable about his situation. He was royal but he wasn’t royal. His mother acknowledged him as royal but his father absolutely didn’t acknowledge him as royal. He had a very tricky time. Augustus had a very sad life and he eventually died of Multiple Sclerosis. He never married. He made all kinds of clumsy attempts to marry princesses. He tried to court Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Prince of Wales, which ended in disaster. He tried to woo the half sister of Princess Victoria, who would become Queen Victoria, which was also a disaster. He died very unhappy and very unwell. Her daughter Emma, she coped with it slightly better, I think it was slightly easier for her. She got married very late. She married one of the executors of Queen Caroline, Thomas Wilde, Lord Truro. She had met him when she had been involved in the journey taking Queen Caroline’s coffin back to her home in Brunswick. Emma, she did go to stay at Windsor as a guest of Queen Victoria, her first cousin. She had I think I relatively quiet life I think she was quite happy.
Holly: Well I hope so! Now if we look a little more at the longer term between Augusta and Augustus, how do you think that they should be remembered?
Judith: I think that their misfortune was that their love affair took place after the Royal Marriages Act because law because I think in another age, her descent from the royal families of the Stewarts, Plantagenets, Oranges and Bourbons might well have made her a suitable consort for what was, after all, the sixth son of the monarch.
Holly: Well I think that their story is remarkable and you’ve done such an amazing job of pulling together all of the sources that they left for you to find so thank you so much and thank you for talking to me today
Judith: Oh thank you so much Holly, it’s been delightful talking to you
Holly: And thank you for listening – especially with the minor technical issues that we had but we powered on even without power and I’m sure you’ll agree that Lady Augusta and Prince Augustus’ story is such a rollercoaster from those intoxicating few months in Italy to the sad demise of their marriage against such opposition and financial issues. I have to say talking to Julia and reading her book I did just fall in love myself with them both. Lady Augusta because I think she knew her own mind and Prince Augustus mainly because with his asthma, knowing what it’s like even now when you’re asthma isn’t under control that he must have suffered a great deal and yet, he still pursued her after falling in love on the steps of a church. I really do think the story of their first meeting – their meet-cute in romcom terms – really is just so very romantic. And I love the fact that for so many years they did act so boldly in order to be together. It is just a shame that against it all it couldn’t last forever.
I would therefore highly recommend reading Julia’s book Forbidden Wife: The Life And Trials of Lady Augusta Murray which was published by The History Press and is available on Amazon, at Waterstones and of course at your favourite independent book shop.
If you have enjoyed this episode please rate, review and subscribe to the podcast wherever you are listening to it now. Perhaps you could tell me your favourite love story that has been lost to history. And then, I would love it if you were to follow me over on Instagram @pastlovespodcast where the conversation continues and then, with all of that, you really won’t miss a single thing – which is very important if Past Loves has become your current love. Until soon! | <urn:uuid:f37e4e19-058b-4188-89ef-6ad4ef63419f> | CC-MAIN-2022-21 | https://pastlovespodcast.co.uk/2021/11/03/lady-augusta-murray/ | 2022-05-27T22:35:46Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652663006341.98/warc/CC-MAIN-20220527205437-20220527235437-00620.warc.gz | en | 0.993866 | 9,838 |
28 pictures of Adam at iHeart radio concert yesterday in NY:https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150793292876567&set=a.10150793288326567.389803.352406061566&type=3&permPage=1
I find it interesting that so many of our group kept talking against power ballads and wanting dance, dance, dance and yet the poll shows the most emotional heartache song was the favorite.
OT But I DONT CARE - got a ticket for Adams concert on July 19 in Costa Mesa, Cal. Soooooooooo excited!!!!!!!! Saw his GNT 2 nites in a row at this outdoor venue - seats over 8,000 peeps. Last time the tickets sold out so fast they added a second show. Cant do that this time since there's already a show scheduled the nite before. Great venue for a summer show. Beside myself with joy!!!!! . . . Adamluv
From AdamLambertFans.com:UPDATE: There will be an eight (8) ticket limit per member!BREAKING NEWS: We are happy to announce that Adam has just been confirmed to play the OC Fair in Costa Mesa, CA on July 19th! More importantly, presale tickets will be available to fan club members ONLY at 10am PST TOMORROW morning right here on AdamLambertFans.com!! What you need to know: You will NOT need a password to take part in the presale. Simply log into AdamLambertFans.com and click on the 'Buy' button (which will appear at 10am) next to the OC Fair event on the EVENTS page (or simply go HERE). You'll automatically have access to the presale as long as you are logged in with a current Glitter or Glam membership. Thu, Jul 19, 2012 Time TBAFan Club Pre-sale: Wednesday, May 16th @ 10am PSTNo password needed as long as you are a member and you are logged into the site! ORANGE COUNTY FAIR & EXHIBITION CENTER88 Fair DriveCosta Mesa , CA 92626DIRECTIONSGoogle MapFor more info. go to this link:http://adamlambertfans.com/events/107011
How did you get a ticket already?
Check out dates of upcoming events and concerts:http://adamlambertfans.com/events/
@12:56PM you can get your tickets for OC Fair event on Wed. July 19 here:http://adamlambertfans.com/events/107011
these polls are alot of fun. Thanks for posting them 24/7.
Check out bunch of iHeart Radio conert youtube fan videos:http://goo.gl/MZ4Az
YAY!!! I got a ticket!!!
If Trespassing (Deluxe) stays at no. 1 for more than a week on iTunes, Adam will be the first out musician holding the no. 1 position on chart and hence a big sale. So, if you haven't bought Trespassing album on iTunes please do so. PLEASE!http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/trespassing-deluxe-version/id518854512
I was just at my local Target and deluxe TP all gone and about 6 regulars left.Now I have to report nicely to the right people to please restock. I am going to be the self appointed restock shelf reminder Queen.
@Magiclady - had an email from Adams fan club sent last nite saying you could get tickets today if you were an updated member of the club. There were still tickets available a few hours ago.
have you guys read the predictions for #1...at race btwn Adam, Adele and Carrie. Bad news is that as of today they are predicting that Adam will sell 70-80k for the first week. Compared to his FYE which sold 198000 copies it seems low but I believe this is a very strong album and can hold steady numbers for weeks to come.They are releasing another prediction on Friday which will be after idols so lets see if the no.s will change. As for Trespassing being sold out in some stores please keep in mind RCA shipped less copies of albums as compared to that of Carrie as she sells way more than Adam so don't take it to mean she is outselling him because his albums have run out.Good news is that Bieber fans have been pimping out Trespassing. Two sent tweets with the link for itunes and they one had almost 500,000 followers while the other had over 800,000 which is AMAZING!!! Hope more young people buy the album.RCA must be happy since Adam is doing well right now considering he hasn't done much promo and doesn't have a hit single on radio. If only the stations would start playing his music!! Its still too early to write off NCOE since it hasn't been impacted on radio and the video ain't out yet. Excited for his idols performance tomorrow!!!!!!
1:33,1:34 and @AdamluvThanks so much for the info. I appreciate it. Unfortunately, I am at work and can't order right now. I am a member of the fanclub but did not review my emails last night at home, GEEZ...Hopefully there will be tickets available when I get home. Thanks again!
@AdamLuv Do you have to pick up your tickets at the box office for the OC Fair concert?
This is the email I got from ALF site:BREAKING NEWS:We are happy to announce that Adam has just been confirmed to play the OC Fair in Costa Mesa, CA on July 19th! More importantly, presale tickets will be available to fan club members at 10am PST TOMORROW, May 16th, on AdamLambertFans.com!!In order to snag tickets before the public, you must have an active Glitter or Glam membership to participate. Simply login and go to the EVENT page on AdamLambertFans.com to purchase your tickets. No password necessary as long as you are logged in with an ACTIVE membership. There is an eight (8) ticket limit per member.We apologize for the short notice, but we were just given this awesome opportunity to offer this to you before the public onsale and of course we said 'YES!' As we are still confirming details, we'll post the most up-to-date information in this news post on the site.
Out to dinner in town with friends last night and then directly to Target to get TP. A mid forties lady and her husband were ahead of me trying to decide which album to buy. She turned to talk to him and I quickly grabbed the last two deluxe albums turned on my heel and walked away. Since I am the mother of three in their forties, I figured "he who hesitates is lost and age before beauty." As I was walking away, I heard her say "What happened to those other albums?" Quickly "You snooze, you loose" came to mind. Now I'm just hoping it wasn't you Anon @2:04. I opened one album in my car and loaded it into my 6 cd player. I listened to TP Deluxe all the way home to my very rural abode beating on my steering wheel and bouncing in my seat. Love the album so much, but gotta say Underneath just grabs my heart and won't let go.Adam's mom, true!
My deluxe cd arrived yesterday and now I am off to drive around and blast it - it's 88 degrees so the window will just have to be down.:)
@2:33 - will pick them up at "will call". @magiclady - hope you can get a ticket. Actually I read the email wrong this morning and thought it was sent today meaning to get tickets tomorrow (Th) so thought I had a day to plan. Luckily a friend got 2 tickets - 1 being for me! They're not together but who cares. Hopefully all fans get a ticket before they go on sale to the general public. . . . Adamluv
I wonder why RCA doesn't send enough physical albums to stores. Casual fans go to store and find shelves empty of Adam's TP albums and they walk out. They might forget about it and won't look for it else where. Lost sales. Same thing happened with FYE album.
@AdamLuv Does "Will call" equates to tickets to be picked up at the box office? I got three tickets.
@AdamLuv found it. Will Call means tickets will be released only to the person who purchased the tickets at the box office. ID is required.
Tickets will also be available this Saturday via TicketMaster.com for the OC Fair concert on July 19.
Streets are predicting Adam's TP sales between 60K to 80K in third place after Adele and Carrie Underwood. NOT ACCEPTABLE BY HIS FANS. We want him to make history in US music industry with his album. FOLKS AS MANY ALBUM AS YOU CAN BUY BUY BUY BUY. We want Adam a Sure Fire Winner. WINNER!!!
3:43, I agree. Even though coming in third after Adele and Carrie is nothing to be ashamed of, I really want to see Adam lead the pack. I've bought and bought and bought. If anyone out there can squeeze out another purchase, do it! I assume the Billboard chart only counts U.S. sales, right? DRG
@adamluvThanks so much, whatever I have to do I will be there, but would much rather pay $30.00!Last year, I had tickets in the 3rd row, but my girlfriend was in a wheelchair with a pulled muscle and we couldn't sit there because we couldn't get the wheelchair down there. Many bucks paid for those seats. Had to move to 2nd level :(
@DRG Yes, it's only US charts. Adam as an out musician if he makes it to no. 1 on Billboard chart, he'll make history. With it comes a lot of news coverage. FREE PR FOLKS! BUY BUY BUY! This puts Adam into next level of acceptance and radios can't avoid him, IMO. People will dig into him further to know more about him and hopefully know him the way his fans know him. Respect his individuality as a human being. We always are willing to contribute to charity organizations that Adam promotes. This will be our charity to give back to him to put him where he belongs as a talented human being. A WINNER ON BILLBOARD CHART!
Carina @_ninniAdam's "LA Weekly" cover in HQ (click "View full size")!http://twitpic.com/9ltel7/full
I don't understand what's going on with Billboard! All my friends at work asked me today about Tresspassing debut on Billboard.They said that album has to appear on Billboard same day as it was released. Same as FYE was debuted at #3 pn 2009. So, does anybody hear about the Billboard rules and charts?So far, Itunes put back on Pop Charts "What Do You Want From Me"!By the way, Tresspassing & Runnin are doing very good as singles!
I never will understand the Adam's management idea about releasing 2 albums! Both of them are doing very good on Amazon, and Itunes. However, if it would be only one albume, Tresspassing would stay as #1 best seller on amazong forever. And tresspassing would stay for while on Itunes charts. Adam deff has lack of manegement.Aslo, this is fantastic tiem to release Tresspassing or Runnin (or bothe of them) as single!
Sorry for bad spelling:)5:07PM
This is some news from Billboard.http://www.billboard.com/news/adam-lambert-aiming-for-no-1-on-billboard-1007074952.story#/news/adam-lambert-aiming-for-no-1-on-billboard-1007074952.storyHAL
I kind of agree why are there two albums? Do other artist do that? I'm not sure how things work or what is the reasoning behind it. Maybe some can explain this to us mear motals???? mosie
OMG when I opened iTunes the first I saw on its home page was Adam's banner. Before with each opening of iTunes first I saw garbage (it's name of a band) the the promotions for Billboard and T.V. shows then John Mayer and then Adam. NOW I SEE ADAM FIRST on iTunes main page. Yay!!!
OMG It's the same thing on my iPad too. I see Adam's banner first when I open iTunes.
medium size town --I went to Target Tuesday morning for a couple extras, but was shocked to see only 4 deluxe and 5 regular. I decided to let someone else have the chance to purchase them and check back later in the week to buy them if they were still there. At our big box grocery store there were only 5 regular and NO deluxe. I know the cd department is shrinking, but there were twice as many Carrie cd's there. The lack of adequate stock may hurt the first week's count. I'm sure there is nothing Adam can do. The amount sold to stores is up to RCA. I think they were not sure how popular Adam would still be. On the two version question, though, surely BOTH count? I wish someone truly knowledgeable would educate us on these things!SS
@5:24PM Yes, all main artists do the same thing. They have Deluxe and regular. Some regular folks don't care for bonus tracks or they don't have enough money cause regular is cheaper than Deluxe.
@SS Could also be labels marketing strategy as well for sales! I know most artists have both Deluxe and Regular.
Can anyone tell me whay they do 2 versions? It just seems silly to me especialy when the both seem to be vying off one another??? Why not just ONE!
@SS I think they count both sales.But to get and stay on top charts would be much easier just releasing on album. JB is releasing two albums also. But I don't think he will have any problems to sell 200,000-300,000 of both of them in first week.By the way,this kid likes to follow Adam's steps. First,it was Charity Water for two years on the roll,released Acoustic album same time as Adam released his.No it is the copy of Tresspassing cover on JB'new album. And finally, I saw some advertisement with JB. He has same hair style like Adam. Poor little think. He doesn't relise that he can buy a lot of stuff on his millions. But he can't buy Adam's magnificent voice, golden heart, and Adam's HAIR!!!!LOL
@5:44PM Then by all means he should tweet to his fans about Adam's album. Why copy an artist and not show him respect? Come on JB tweet to your followers to buy Adam's album.
Just checked Amazon sales. Tresspassing original was #90 on top 100 music at noon. Now it is #66 on top 100 music! Sometime I want to know name of the person who got this crazy idea to release two version of one alubm in the same time!
@SS I agree with lack of albums stocked on stores' shelves Adam and label will lose sales. Most people now a days buy album on iTunes or Amazon. I bought Trespassing only from iTunes, AdamOfficial, and Amazon and I bought and gifted plenty of TP Deluxe. For regular casual fans that walk into the store and see lack of promotions and empty shelves might be a disappointment and loss of sales count for the first week.
In our little town they even don't change display in most of the stores. I saw top 20 bestseller rack with Susan B as #1. I think they didn't change this display over two years! I think people don't buy a lot of CD's at stores anymore.I prefere to order everything from amazon and get some credits. This way I don't pay for shipment usually!
Yeah, and didn't someone say the ones in stores are already counted as "bought" (by the stores themselves). Maybe for the first week, we should concentrate on Amazon and i-tunes. We have to learn these things so next time we know the tricks.SS
So Adam gonna sell Between 70,000-80,000 WHAT? I can't believe this!
@3;22 - yes, thank you for the heads up. I will be meeting with my friend and driving down together and she will get the tickets since they're under her name. @magiclady - my advice to anyone wanting to go is to just get the best tickets available bc. closer to the event more tickets come up. The first show there in 2010 was given a pit ticket at the last moment and then gave my ticket to someone who wanted to upgrade theirs. No money changed hands since we all just wanted to help each other! The second nite I had paid scalper prices for a pit ticket but best.spent.money.evar! Let us know if you get a ticket - bet you do!!!! . . . Adamluv
@AdamluvJust got 2 tickets! YAY! $56.00 range. Not too bad in Section 1.Thanks so much for the support!
@6:33PM That's what the music analyst on the streets are predicting. They are saying if Carrie and Adele sell less than these numbers then Adam will be No. 1 on the Billboard chart. If so, then it will be the lowest album sales since August of last year. If not then, he'll be in 3rd place. With the amount of TV appearances and promotions Carrie is getting I doubt she'll sell less than 100K and Adele have been selling over 80K for the past 12 months straight. Adam's physical album going out of stock on stores' shelves ain't a good thing for TP's first week sales. We should make some of these artists who Adam were tweeting about their stuff to tweet about his album. Where is Paula Abdul? Rhianna, JB, Ellen, Katy Perry, Gaga, Queen, etc.? Come on tweet about Adam's album. We should all post this iTunes link http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/trespassing-deluxe-version/id518854512 on their facebook pages. Adam's album should make it to the no. 1 on US charts. It'll be historical!
@Magiclady - soooooo happy for you. Isnt that the best feeling ever to know you have tickets and will be seeing Adam live! I'm in section 3 for the same price range. Not bad! . . . Adamluv
OK my twitter and facebook friends, let's get the word out! Send this to all your friends who support equal rights. (I bought the one cd I can afford, but there are other ways to help.)From Chris Molanphy at Village Voice:UPDATE: One-day sales numbers for this week's crop of albums/next week's album chart are out. HITS says: "...a three-way battle is shaping up for #1 between Adele and Carrie Underwood, both of which will have substantial post-Mother's Day drops, and Adam Lambert, who appears to be trending to the high end of expectations."It's within your grasp, Lambert fans! Y'all can help him make history! #shamelessadvocacyhttp://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2012/05/adam_lambert_gay_pop_star.php
They announced Adam Lambert as guest on AI tomorrow. yay can't wait.
I have seen where some Gaga fans and Beiber fans are supporting Adam and they have 500,000 to 800,00 followers and also some Glee fans. I have tweet Paula, Ellen , Katy, Rihanna, Bieber and Gaga and asked them to tweet about Adam. So far notheing.
RCA wants to sell more albums--SO they released 2 versions.They know that many fans( that bought the reg album) will be hearing the bonus tracks & MUST have them for a certain extra track,like maybe "Nirvana",for example, which is #(15) on the deluxe album.This time it was funny that some places were selling the bonus track cheaper than the reg album( like from Barnes & Noble) not sure about the price now,but the DELUXE album was $9.95.Best Buy had it advertised Sun. for $12.99,so I bought another Deluxe version yesterday..so three for me,so far!Love it!can't wait to watch Idol tomorrow to see BB( and Lisa Marie Presley..interesting to have her on the same night as Adam..that could help him)Her voice isn't great,but she has that famous name,& I believe her voice is pretty deep for a woman.We bought her last album about 7 yrs ago..Come on,tomorrow!!
REQUEST Never Close Our Eyes!http://sites.google.com/site/urbrhypopradiostations/
@7:19PM Yes, this is a movement. We want to help Adam make history in US music industry. Trespassing people! Let's gift TP album to each other or if we have other email addresses we can gift it to different emails. LET'S DO IT! Let's make a history! I don't understand that Lady Gaga is a huge supporter of gay rights why she doesn't tweet about Adam's album to her followers. Come on Gaga just don't be full of talk. Put your words into action. What you've got to lose?
Rolling Stone gave Trespassing 4 stars. Carrie Underwood's new album, they gave 2 i/2 stars.Tee Hee Hee!!
12:32pm - I voted for emo song as my favorite but that was just from the stunning, first reaction - had to pull the car over and get my breath the first time I "felt" it and you don't just hear a song like that, you feel it and then add that phenomenal voice and it has immeasurable effect. Now today - I am in love with "Kickin' In" - it was like that with the first album too.
why don't some of you people calm down.Tweeting other celebrities and their fans sounds pretty bizarre and desperate and embarrassing to me. So Adam gets number 1 the first week on Billboard and what about the next week? He drops down to 30? Let things fall where they may.
OMG!Tresspassing Deluxe is #3 on music and rock on amazon.Also, Tresspassing original is #44 on music % on rock.I think it's going to be very interestig to see how fast original will take top 10 on amazon.Out of subject. PLease, vote for Joshua Ledet. This kid is crazy! He has to win!
This is pretty darn cool!!! This Justin Beiber fan site has over 800,000 followers on Twitter, and they sent out this tweet supporting Adam and Trespassing! Fabulous and amazing!! Justin Bieber Fans@JustinBieberFanIf you haven't already, check out @AdamLambert's killer new album #TRESPASSING which is #1 at iTunes! http://t.co/NFn19ied
@8:44PM If TP makes it to no. 1 on US Billboard chart, Adam will be the first out singer making it to no. 1 on Billboard chart. He will make a mark a history in US Music Industry. There will be news about it. FREE PROMO. This translates to more album sales count for the following weeks. Plus Adam has line up of events, concerts, and overseas promos that will bring more album sales. Radios will notice and they can't avoid it but to play his singles. Hence more album sales!
I love kickin in, what a fun song! cuckoo is another favorite, I think shady would make a great 3rd single for radio play, but I like the others just as much.underneath is beautifully written,and broken english is awesome. I just love all of them, its fun, upbeat and just what Adam said it would be. love,love,love :)
Please, check this chart!!!!!http://www.downloadcharts.net/us/charts/albums/2012/05/15?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitterHAL
Just saw tweet from JustinBieber Fans on twitter! This is deff time for miracles!
I think this is gonna be real fun if Tresspassing Deluxe will be #1 top 100 music and original will be #2 on top 100 music on amazon.com
Wow, so much angst over twitter.2 of JB's fansites have tweeted support for Adam, one with 500,000 followers, one with 800,000. A Brittany spears and Gleek fansites have also tweeted, as have Michael Orland, Pharell fans, Nina Garcia, Sutan, Claude Kelly, Terrance, Taylor Green, Anoop, Michael Sarver and Kriss Allen from Idol, Eden Espinosa, Nile Rogers, Brandon Hilton (30k followers), Kayvon Zand (80k followers). These are just the ones I found in a quick check. Hopefully there'll be more in the next few days.I really hope he makes number 1, whatever the sales numbers.
Check out these videos from ADAM's MLB Fan Cave gig on Ytube ... sounds not that great but the vids are ... just change the titles of the songs to view all of them or click on the uploader's alias (virg1877) to get their channel & then view them ... seven songs I think ... Cuckoo .. Shady .. WWFM .. Broken English .. NCOE .. Trespassing .. Hope I did this right ... computer NERD Adam Lambert Performs Kickin In MLB Fan Cave 5-14-12tess4ADAM(LAMBERT Outlaw)
@ HKfan,it's great to hear about all those tweets :) I believe the interest will raise day by day! I really hope he reaches #1 at the end of the week. LN
I love almost every song on the cd but I am getting worried about how we are in massive debate about which should be the next single. If we don't embrace NCOE there may not be any more singles (or at least any more singles with music videos, which are expensive and, sadly, necessary.)All of the songs are so good that we are split. My favourite is Trespassing but I will take whatever song RCA releases next. And yes, I like Runnin' very much but it doesn't fit the radio format that Adam's aiming for.We have to start seeing radio as a means to an end - not a medium for commending or rewarding the best song or our favourite sonf. It's a marketing tool.The cd is doing well and I am so happy for him but this is my concern - Adam is leaving the US at a crucial time promotionally for the cd - we have to push NCOE for him while he is away.Some people are waiting for the May 28th ADD date - we need to request now so that he starts out high.
We have to listen to 3:57. We cann't forget to keep requesting and supporting NCOE ont he radio!!!! I hope we're not neglecting this because so excited about the album and about the NEW songs that we want to be the NEXT single. Well, in order for there to be a third single, we have to support NCOE!! The video is coming out next week, right? I think that's what I read. We must keep supporting NCOE consistently to keep the ball rolling. BTW, I want the next single to be Shady, but I love all the songs.DRG
@8:44 I see nothing wrong with them sending positive tweets to theses celebs. That may have been how some of their fans (who have alot of followers) noticed Adam. They look at their favorites feed every day and see what is going on and possibly saw that one tweet. I see no difference in telling a friend, but this one just happens to have millions of followers. As long as they are just saying have you seen Adam's new album and not being hateful or negative to that celeb it is fine. IMO You go girl, I would if I had a twitter account.
I don't like Runnin as much as the other fans. It's among the bottom 3on my list. I like the darker songs most and the other 2 my least favourite tracks are Pop That Lock (too Gaga) and Naked Love (too Katy Perry).
like all adam music- my favorite one is shady-never close our eyes- cucko--tesspassing and etc. adam voice nice to hear it. sounds like an angel.
I'm sorry, but Adam's managenent and fans are wrong. BTIKM and NCOE were horrible choices for singles. And I know everybody likes Underneath, but that's along the same vein as the other two. If radio play is what you want, Naked Love is the only choice.
Trespassing, Cuckoo, Shady and Broken English are all hits. I also think chokehold is. The next single should be one of the first 3 cuts from the album
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- Ocean Fishing
- Laws & Regulations
- Marine Protected Areas
- Fish Identification
- Permits & Licenses
- FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions
- Marine Life Management & Research
- What We Do
Main Office: 20 Lower Ragsdale Drive, Suite 100
Monterey, CA 93940
Information: (831) 649-2870, [email protected]
Acting Regional Manager:
Marine Management News: April 2005
This page gives you a fast, convenient way to view all articles within the April 2005 issue of Marine Management News.
- California Recreational Fisheries Survey Completes First Year
- Season Changes for Groundfish Will Give Recreational Anglers More Fishing Opportunites
- Abalone Permit Report Card Data Provide Valuable Insights
- Invasion of the Jumbo Squid!
- Birth of a Fishery: A grooved Tanner crab fishery emerges off northern California
- Abalone Recovery and Management Plan Slated for Adoption in May 2005
- Marine Life Protection Act Initiative Making Progress
- Market Squid FMP Regulations Now In Effect
- Get Hooked on the Marine Region website!
- DFG Marine Region Scientist Wins Prestigious Award
- DFG Marine Region Returns to Shows After One Year Absence
- Where Did The Map Go?
- DFG Marine Region Staff Honored in Sacramento
- Fishery Management Meetings
by DFG Staff
If you're an avid saltwater fisherman, you've probably heard about it. You've probably even talked to the folks who are the backbone of it, when you return to your home port after a fishing trip. What is "it"? The California Recreational Fisheries Survey, or CRFS for short.
How did the CRFS, a new and improved method for gathering saltwater fishing information, come into being? Before the CRFS was created and implemented, Marine Recreational Fisheries Statistics Survey (MRFSS) data were used for making crucial management decisions. In recent years, constituents and fishery managers expressed concern over the use of MRFSS data, particularly for making in-season decisions for groundfish. To address concerns, California and other West Coast policymakers recommended the development of a new program to replace the MRFSS. Staff from the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) and the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission (PSMFC) designed CRFS to more comprehensively sample California's recreational fisheries, incorporating selected elements of the MRFSS program and the high frequency on-site sampling of private vessels from the DFG's Ocean Salmon Project.
CRFS samplers began hitting the docks, jetties, beaches, and other prime fishing spots in January 2004. The new sampling program provides estimates of catch and effort every month, rather than every two months as with the MRFSS. Field samplers interview fishermen within six distinct geographic regions, as compared to two regions for MRFSS. Samplers record a greater diversity of information for each fisherman surveyed, including trip target, fishing mode, area fished, and the fisherman's catch. To support the increased complexity of the survey, twice as many samplers were hired in 2004. With double the samplers working more hours, the number of surveys completed in 2004 more than tripled. The focus on smaller geographic areas, monthly reports, and greater diversity of gathered information has given fishery managers more vital and timely information than ever before.
CRFS also incorporates a telephone survey that uses a limited licensed angler database. One in every 20 licensed fishermen is asked to provide their name and telephone number for the database when they buy their licenses. Anglers are then randomly contacted and asked to complete a survey over the phone. Interviewers especially want to talk to anglers who fish at night, fish from beach/bank areas, and who begin their fishing trips from private launch points inaccessible to samplers. Because only licensed fishermen are contacted, the improved telephone survey gathers more pertinent information for the same amount of interviewer effort.
Results To Date
Data for 2004 were thoroughly analyzed in early 2005 to ensure accuracy. Both founding agencies spent considerable time creating and implementing new comparison methods that allow direct comparison of CRFS data to previous survey and logbook data. New estimation methods were also formulated, as the previous estimation methods would not work for the more complex CRFS data.
Preliminary estimates for 2004 were posted to the RecFIN website (www.recfin.org/crfs.htm) on March 1, 2005. The preliminary data indicate that catches were generally lower than estimated using MRFSS data, primarily because of the extensive use of exit counts by the CRFS program to generate effort estimates instead of the "random digit dialing" telephone survey used in the MRFSS program.
The Future of CRFS
The DFG and the PSMFC are encouraged by the successful implementation of this monumental program, as well as the more accurate estimates of catch and effort. As with any program, there is always room for improvement and DFG will be striving to strengthen and expand CRFS. In 2005, twice as many telephone surveys are slated to take place to provide a more accurate estimate of fishing effort for night-time, beach/bank and private access fishing modes. DFG will also continue to improve the sampling program, the data review, and the estimation process.
For more information about CRFS, visit the following websites:
- DFG's California Recreational Fisheries Survey Site
- Recreational Fisheries Information Network
- Pacific Fishery Management Council
by Mary Patyten, Research Writer
Anglers fishing in state waters will soon have more opportunities to fish for groundfish, the Department of Fish and Game (DFG) has announced. At the request of the Fish and Game Commission, DFG Director Ryan Broddrick approved modifying the recreational groundfish fishing season for 2005.
The in-season adjustments follow the receipt of new data from the California Recreational Fisheries Survey (CRFS), which was implemented in 2004 to provide more timely and accurate estimates of recreational catch and effort in ocean waters (see "California Recreational Fisheries Survey Completes First Year," above). CRFS data are available on a monthly basis to help manage California's recreational fisheries.
"The California Recreational Fisheries Survey is the best scientific method available for evaluating all forms of recreational ocean fishing," said Broddrick. "To the extent that these data support additional fishing opportunities, the Department will make those opportunities available."
Broddrick cautioned, however, that fishing opportunities could be restricted in the future if new CRFS data show that recreational fishermen are exceeding catch levels specified by law. The changes to the recreational groundfish seasons and depths by area are as follows:
Northern Management Area
(California/Oregon border to near Cape Mendocino):
Open May 1 through December from 0-180 feet (0-30 fathoms).
North-Central Management Area
(Near Cape Mendocino to Pigeon Point):
Open July 1 through December from 0-120 feet (0-20 fathoms).
Monterey South-Central Management Area
(Pigeon Point to near Lopez Point):
Open July 1 through December from 0-120 feet (0-20 fathoms).
Morro Bay South-Central Management Area
(near Lopez Point to Point Conception):
Open May 1 through September from 0-240 fms (0-40 fathoms).
DFG reminds abalone fishermen that returning punch cards helps to maintain a healthy fishery
by Jerry Kashiwada, Marine Biologist
Abalone permit report cards, commonly known as "punch cards," are filled out by fishermen whenever abalone is taken. The cards were implemented in 2000 to provide information about the number, time, date, and location of abalone taken by fishermen. The California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) uses data from abalone punch cards to estimate of the number of abalone caught each year. A subset of the cards is entered into a database for analysis after the cards are returned at the end of the season. Although the returned cards provide a valuable estimate of the number of abalone caught, the relatively low rate of returns, which has varied from 18 to 43 percent annually, could cause inaccuracies in catch estimates.
The main difficulty is determining whether different catch rates exist for fishermen who return cards and fishermen who do not. To study the fishing patterns of people who do not return their cards, DFG altered its telephone surveys to only use names drawn from the database of abalone card purchasers. This systematic draw insures the sub-sample is representative of the whole database. Analysis of data from survey questions can determine whether the card-return group has different catch rates from the non-return group, and allows biologists to adjust estimates to account for the differences.
The average catch per season for fishermen who tried to catch abalone was around nine abalone. People who returned cards averaged about eleven abalone, while people who did not return their cards averaged between seven and eight abalone.
As expected, few people actually reached the annual limit of 24 abalone per year. Although the estimates for abalone catch are relatively small compared to the annual limit, these estimates are in the range biologists were expecting with the reductions in bag and annual limits in 2002.
For both 2002 and 2003, the estimated annual catch was 264,000 abalone. This estimate is much lower than in previous years, primarily as a result of recent changes in bag limits and annual limits. Data from the abalone permit report cards and targeted surveys have also improved both the amount and the accuracy of data available to DFG biologists, which translates into more accurate annual estimates.
According to telephone survey data, the six sites with the highest abalone catch were Fort Ross State Marine Conservation Area/Reef Campground (these two sites were combined due to close proximity), Van Damme State Marine Conservation Area, Sea Ranch, Salt Point State Marine Conservation Area, Albion Head, and the Mendocino Headlands. Data indicate that the Fort Ross State Marine Conservation Area/Reef Campground site consistently produced the most abalone.
The use of fins distinguishes whether the person is a diver or a shore picker. Shore pickers generally catch abalone in water depths that are accessible by wading, while divers can access deeper water. The average size of abalone caught by divers is usually larger than that caught by shore pickers. Over time, an increase in the percentage of divers could indicate lower availability of abalone in the shallow waters accessible to shore pickers. Currently between 70 and 75 percent of those surveyed used fins.
Similarly, the use of boats allows fishermen access to areas less impacted by fishing pressure.
An unusual creature from the south invades California waters
by Travis Tanaka, Marine Biologist
This winter, many California anglers have been catching something that resembles a sea monster but is actually great table fare: the jumbo squid, often incorrectly referred to as the "giant" squid. Anglers from San Diego to Eureka have been catching these large brown "squirts" for the last two months. Harvest of these unique animals off California is uncommon, but in some years they can be present throughout state ocean waters.
The natural range of jumbo squid, also known as the Humboldt squid, stretches from Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America, to Southern California, primarily in the mid-to-eastern portion of the Pacific Ocean. The bulk of the population appears to reside off Central America. During extreme warm water years they have been sighted as far north as the Gulf of Alaska. Their estimated depth range is from the surface to over 1,600 feet.
This is a large, fast growing, predatory species. Its maximum reported total length is 13 feet (including the tentacles) with an estimated lifespan of 1 to 2 years. With such a rapid growth rate, its metabolism is extremely fast. Jumbo squid are constantly in search of food. They will eat crustaceans, sardines, mackerel, other fishes, and even each other. Due to their large size, other animals such as toothed whales and large tunas readily feed upon jumbo squid. The stomachs of large dolphins and some whales have been found to contain jumbo squid beaks. The San Diego long-range sport fishing fleet often uses whole jumbo squid to entice yellowfin tuna, which can weigh over 200 pounds.
The big question that everyone asks is "Why are they here?" There are no definitive answers; however, the squid's appearance may be connected to an influx of warm ocean waters. Currently off the Monterey coast, the sea surface temperature is 2 to 2½ degrees above normal for this time of year.
Jumbo squid are being caught with regularity by sport anglers up and down the coast this year. Anglers fishing the local banks and high spots near San Diego and the Cordell Bank near Bodega Bay are hooking jumbo squid on every trip. Boats from Monterey are targeting the Monterey and Carmel submarine canyons, where warm water meets cool, nutrient-laden upwelled water. Jumbo squid seek out food sources trapped between these two water masses, as do many other predators.
With many of California's recreational fisheries currently closed, the appearance of jumbo squid is a welcome surprise. Sport landings from San Diego to Bodega Bay have been scheduling numerous trips every week, and most meet with great fishing success. Anglers have been averaging five to 15 squid per person. Many private boaters are getting their share as well. Keep in mind that it takes a tremendous amount of work to capture one of these squid: most are caught at depths of 500 to 600 feet or more. Sometimes dropping a jig down to 1,000 feet may be required.
According to Title 14 of the California Code of Regulations, Section 29.70, there is no season or bag limit on these squid. However, the Department of Fish and Game encourages wise and conservative harvest. It is a violation to waste any fish, invertebrate or mollusk taken from the waters of the State. Take what you can use, and leave some for your next outing.
For more information on jumbo squid, check out:
A grooved Tanner crab fishery emerges off northern California
by Peter Kalvass, Associate Marine Biologist and Mary Patyten, Research Writer
Over the past few years, a leggy crab living off the California coast known as the grooved Tanner crab (Chionoecetes tanneri) has been receiving a bit more attention than usual. Under the authority of an experimental permit, fishermen have been landing the crab while Department of Fish and Game (DFG) biologists evaluate the fishery. After analyzing two years' worth of landings and other scientific data, the DFG and the California Fish and Game Commission (Commission) are on the brink of permitting a new fishery for grooved Tanner crab off the California coast.
These spidery-looking, deep-sea crabs are cousin to our southern California sheep crab, and relatives of the more gastronomically desirable Alaskan snow crab and true Tanner crab. The grooved Tanner crab, or "tanneri", is the only member of the genus whose range extends south to California. Tanneri can be found from the Pribilof Islands in Alaska to the California-Mexico border, on soft sea floor at depths of up to 5,400 feet.
Although the life span for tanneri is not currently known, other species of Tanner crab live for an estimated 15 to 19 years, with an accompanying low natural mortality rate as adults. By comparison, Dungeness crab live for a maximum of six to eight years. Most female tanneri reach maturity in their fifth year, at about 3 1/3 inches in carapace (shell) width; males are thought to mature in their sixth year at about 4½ inches carapace width.
Local interest in tanneri emerged in 1997 when a crabber based in Seattle began exploring the potential for a fishery off Eureka and Crescent City, with assistance from a DFG biologist. The first experimental permit to trap tanneri off California was issued in 2001. Although the permit was renewed each year for four consecutive years (the limit prescribed by Fish and Game Code), it was only fished in 2003 and 2004.
The permit limited fishing activities such as the number of traps fished, the depth at which traps could be fished, and the size and sex of crabs that could be taken. Fishermen were also required to take an observer on fishing trips. Although other individuals and companies approached the Commission to obtain permits to fish for tanneri, these were denied pending the outcome of the fishery's experimental phase.
Fishermen landed approximately 212,000 pounds of tanneri in 2003 and nearly 461,000 pounds in 2004, all from northern California waters. Landings fetched from $1.05 to $1.50 per pound in 2004, with most of the crab ending up in the export market or on casino buffet tables.
Biomass, Harvest Limits, and Fishery Concerns
The DFG analyzed information from a number of state and federal fishery management agencies to determine the status of tanneri populations. The tanneri population off California averaged an estimated 48 million pounds between 1998 and 2003, including about 18 million pounds of harvestable male crabs. Analyses indicate that tanneri could sustain only a low harvest rate; therefore, the DFG has recommended an annual catch limited to about 15 percent, or 2.8 million pounds, of male crabs measuring 5 inches or greater in carapace width.
Tanner crabs are not as robust as king crabs or crabs of the genus Cancer (such as Dungeness crabs), and succumb to handling mortality more frequently than those hardier species. Studies show that from 4 to 20 percent of snow crabs die as a result of handling and discard (known as ‘deadloss'). In 2003, deadloss accounted for a little over 10 percent of the catch in the experimental tanneri fishery. Deadloss dropped to about 6 percent in 2004.
Proposed Management Elements
for a Grooved Tanner Crab Fishery
- Annual harvest limit
- Observer requirement
- Trap logbook
- Vessel-based permit requirement
- Minimum fishing depth
- Trap limit
- Male crabs only, with 5-inch minimum size limit
California trawlers take tanneri incidentally in the slope bottomfish fishery. Bycatch has been estimated at about three-quarters of a million pounds annually. This is a significant catch, and indicates that about 1½ percent of the population is already being fished and discarded, with a very low survival rate.
Proposed Management Elements
After analyzing fishery data, reviewing other emerging tanneri fisheries in Alaska and British Columbia, and determining that the experimental tanneri fishery met the definition of an emerging fishery under the terms of California's Marine Life Management Act, the DFG presented tanneri fishery management recommendations to the Commission in February, 2005. The next step will be for the DFG to refine the tanneri regulatory package and bring it before the Commission again at the May 2005 meeting, thus beginning the process of adopting regulations for the new fishery.
by DFG Staff
The Abalone Recovery and Management Plan (ARMP) is nearing completion. The Department of Fish and Game (DFG) is now finalizing the plan for adoption at the May 2005 Fish and Game Commission meeting.
In preparing the ARMP for adoption, DFG has revised the document based on public comment received during 2004. Currently the document is undergoing final editing to make sure the Commission is given a clean, concise and error-free version of the plan. The final document will be available for viewing once it is sent to the Commission. The ARMP will be posted on the Marine Region website (www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/armp), and hard copies will be available at all Marine Region offices and regional headquarters.
by MLPA Initiative Staff
The California Resources Agency and Department of Fish and Game have partnered with the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation and others in a new initiative to implement the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA). The MLPA directs the state to re-examine and redesign California's system of marine protected areas to increase its cohesiveness and effectiveness to, among other things, protect marine life, habitats, and natural heritage, as well as improve recreational, educational and marine research opportunities. Marine protected areas include state marine reserves, state marine parks and state marine conservation areas.
A public-private partnership, the MLPA Initiative is developing recommendations for implementing the MLPA through a Blue Ribbon Task Force chaired by the Honorable Phil Isenberg, a former assemblymember and mayor of Sacramento. The task force is guided by the advice of scientists, resource managers, experts, stakeholders and members of the public through a variety of methods, including a Master Plan Science Advisory Team, a Statewide Interests Group, stakeholder and expert panels during meetings of the task force, and public comments on documents as they are being drafted.
The initiative includes a high degree of involvement and input from a wide range of stakeholders, from ports, harbors and conservation organizations to divers and commercial fishermen. These interests and others are part of an open, transparent process that began last fall and will conclude at the end of 2006. Please visit www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/mpa for more information.
by Dale Sweetnam, Senior Marine Biologist
Last year, the Fish and Game Commission (Commission) adopted the Department of Fish and Game's (DFG) Market Squid Fishery Management Plan (MSFMP), along with a regulations package and the supporting environmental documentation. The new fishery regulations went into effect on March 28, 2005. The MSFMP creates a management program for California's market squid resource, which will:
- Establish fishery control rules, including a seasonal catch limit to prevent the fishery from overexpanding; continue weekend closures, which provide for periods of uninterrupted spawning; continue gear regulations regarding light shields and wattage used to attract squid; and maintain monitoring programs designed to evaluate the impact of the fishery on the resource
- Create a restricted access program, including provisions for initial entry into the fleet, types of permits, permit fees, and permit transferability to produce a moderately productive and specialized fleet
- Establish a seabird closure that restricts the use of attracting lights for commercial purposes in the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary
The regulations pertaining to the new program are available for review in the 2005 Digest of Commercial Fish Laws available at all DFG offices, and online at www.dfg.ca.gov/licensing/commercial/CommercialDigest.htm.
Current squid permit holders will be notified of eligibility by the DFG. Applicants qualifying for non-transferable permits must submit an application along with the appropriate documentation to the DFG's License and Revenue Branch. For questions concerning the initial permit requirements, please contact Ms. Vandella Campbell of the DFG License and Revenue Branch, at (916) 227-2281, or e-mail [email protected].
For more information on market squid, check out the Marine Region Web page at www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/cpshms/marketsquid.asp.
by Aaron Del Monte,, Assistant Information Systems Analyst and Marine Region Webmaster
For the latest information on fishing regulations, marine resources, and news affecting natural resources on our California coastline, your first stop should be the Department of Fish and Game Marine Region website, located at www.dfg.ca.gov/marine. This comprehensive information source currently contains over 1,800 Web pages readily available to the public. If you are new to the Marine Region Web site, we invite you to see what a truly valuable resource we have created. For those of you who have already visited our website, be sure to check back regularly, since new features, updates, and press releases are added every week. Here are a few recent, noteworthy additions to our website:
2005 Ocean Sport Fishing Regulations - www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/sportfishing_regs2005.html: The complete online version of the annual ocean sport fishing regulations booklet is available on our website, in bookmarked PDF format. Additional resources on the page include links to in-season regulation changes, maps of Channel Islands Marine Protected Areas, images of selected fish, and measurement methods for finfish and invertebrates. You can even learn about the state record-holding fishermen featured on the booklet cover.
Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative - www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/mpa: This partnership between government agencies and private entities is striving to achieve the original MLPA goals. The 1999 MLPA directed the State to design and manage a network of marine protected areas in order to, among other things, protect marine life and habitats, marine ecosystems, and marine natural heritage, as well as improve recreational, educational and study opportunities provided by marine ecosystems. This website, which has been updated substantially within the past few weeks, contains up-to-date information about this endeavor.
2005 Ocean Salmon Seasons - www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/oceansalmon.asp: Going salmon fishing? As of April 2, the recreational salmon season is open all along the California coast. Be sure to check our Ocean Salmon Seasons page for the latest information on season dates and regulations throughout the state. At the bottom of the page, you will find some recent additions, including the 2004 Salmon Fishery Review and 2005 pre-season reports.
California Grunion Facts and Runs for 2005 - www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/grunion.asp: Grunion are the object of a unique recreational fishery. These fish are famous for their spawning behavior, which is so remarkable that it evokes an "I don't believe it!" from most first-time observers. The grunion's phenomenal behavior can be observed from March through August. Check out this page for more information, including an updated 2005 schedule.
Here are some of our most popular pages:
California Ocean Sport Fishing Regulations Map - www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/fishing_map.asp: Going ocean fishing? This should be your first stop. Simply click the marine location where you plan to fish and you will access a compact list of sport fishing regulations for that area. The pages are printerfriendly, so you can print the regulations and take them with you on your next fishing trip. These pages are updated frequently, so you can be assured that they contain the most up-to-date information.
Record Ocean Sportfish - www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/records.asp: Would you like to learn about some of the largest California saltwater fish that have ever been caught? Go no further! This page contains links to lists of record ocean sport fish, as well as some impressive photos. If you're a potential record holder, learn how you may apply to join the ranks of state record holders.
Laws and Regulations Page - www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/regulations.asp: This page is your main source for information concerning commercial and sport fishing regulations. Over 30 links connect you to a variety of information concerning current regulations.
A-to-Z Directory - www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/index_directory.html: We receive frequent comments letting us know how easy it is to find information on our website. Can't seem to find what you're looking for? Don't worry! Just visit our A-to-Z Directory to find an alphabetized list of resources available to you on our website.
Marine Region Press Room - www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/media: This portion of our website contains up-todate information specifically for members of the media interested in publicizing information about the DFG Marine Region or California's marine resources. Current features include news releases, a press kit, media FAQs and story ideas.
Enjoy our website, and be sure to check back often for the latest news and updates.
by DFG Staff
For the second time in ten years, Department of Fish and Game (DFG) Senior Biologist Tom Barnes was a member of a research team receiving the Best Publication of the Year Award from the Fishery Bulletin of the United States. The Fishery Bulletin is an internationally-respected scientific journal published quarterly by NOAA Fisheries, a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. For 2003, the winning paper was entitled "Biology and Population Dynamics of Cowcod (Sebastes levis) in the Southern California Bight," by John Butler, Larry Jacobson, Tom Barnes and Geoff Moser. Back in 1994, Tom was a member of another research team that received the same award from NOAA Fisheries for a paper entitled "A Biomass-based Assessment Model for Northern Anchovy, Engraulis mordax."
In both of these cases, a key ingredient was underlying research based on collaborative work between the DFG and NOAA Fisheries. It is this kind of partnership that can take advantage of different but complimentary skills and resources to achieve outstanding results. Encouraged by this and other successes, the Marine Region has made it a point to actively seek out partnerships with academic institutions, local and federal agencies, and the public to maximize our effectiveness.
When Department scientists like Tom Barnes gain recognition outside DFG, it underscores what we here in the Marine Region have known all along— that our dedicated, professional scientists contribute significantly to our understanding of California's precious ocean resources, which gives our managers the information they need to provide for sustainable use by the public while maintaining a healthy marine ecosystem.
by Ed Roberts, Marine Biologist and Carrie Wilson, Associate Marine Biologist
After a brief absence, the Department of Fish and Game (DFG) returned this year to staff booths at six of the largest sportsmens shows throughout California. License counter agents sold fishing and hunting licenses at each event, while biologists and game wardens staffed adjacent informational booths to answered questions, clarify regulations, and to provide information about California's fish and wildlife resources. DFG personnel interacted with thousands of hunters, anglers, divers and other outdoor enthusiasts at the following shows this year:
- January 12-16: Fred Hall Fishing, Tackle, and Boat Show - San Francisco
- January 20-23: International Sportsmen's Expo - Sacramento
- February 3-6: International Sportsmen's Expo - San Mateo
- February 25-27: International Sportsmen's Expo - Pleasanton
- March 2-6: Fred Hall Fishing, Tackle, and Boat Show - Long Beach
- March 16-20: Fred Hall Fishing, Tackle, and Boat Show - Del Mar
Sportsmens shows such as these provide great opportunities for anyone interested in fishing, hunting, diving or enjoying the outdoors to meet with DFG game wardens and biologists. In this relaxed, informal setting, people can ask questions about regulations, or about what DFG is doing to manage California's fish and wildlife resources. With our full-service license sales staff also on hand selling everything from hunting and fishing licenses to pig tags, DFG was well represented.
Getting DFG back to the shows was a priority for DFG's Director Ryan Broddrick, who said, "These shows give us a unique opportunity to meet thousands of hunters and anglers over the course of a few days - to answer their questions, hear their concerns, and give them a convenient place to buy their annual fishing licenses."
Anglers took advantage of the opportunity to purchase their fishing licenses, and hundreds more expressed their gratitude and support for DFG's return to the shows.
In Long Beach and Del Mar, the booming fishery for jumbo squid was a hot topic. Just as frequently, saltwater sport anglers expressed their confusion regarding the recreational depth restrictions that were in effect for the southern California groundfish fishery opener in March.
At the northern California shows participants seemed most interested in what the new groundfish regulations were, and why they have changed. Interest was also very high regarding the opening of salmon season (determined in early April by the federal Pacific Fisheries Management Council) and whether there would be any changes to abalone season.
The DFG would like to thank all the people that took the time to come by our booths to purchase a license, ask a question, or just to talk. The DFG would also like to thank the promoters of the Fred Hall and ISE shows for their generous support.
by DFG Staff
In 2004, the DFG printed a map of the Channel Islands MPAs on the back cover of the Ocean Sport Fishing Regulations booklet. For the 2005 booklet, however, the back cover was dedicated to advertisements, a necessary step to insure that the DFG had sufficient funds to print this year's regulations booklets.
Even though this year's booklet does not feature the Channel Islands MPAs map on the back cover, fishermen may still view and/or print the map from the Marine Region website at www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/channel_islands. The Channel Islands section of the Marine Region website includes not only the map that appeared on the back of the 2004 regulation booklet, but also maps of individual Channel Islands MPAs, regulations for the MPAs, information about the continuing process of MPA designation within the Channel Islands, and other useful information.
by Mary Patyten, Research Writer
On February 8, 2005 the hard work and dedication of 18 Marine Region employees was recognized at the Department of Fish and Game (DFG) Superior Accomplishment Awards ceremony held in Sacramento. These awards recognized Marine Region staff who helped to bring the Nearshore Fishery Management Plan (NFMP) to completion. The plan was adopted by the Fish and Game Commission in October, 2002.
"This team demonstrated unusual creativity, inventiveness, and innovation in producing the first State fishery management plan," said DFG Marine Region Manager Patricia Wolf. "The methodology and product was a substantial improvement over traditional methods, organization, and procedures used previously to manage marine species."
The NFMP was the first State fishery management plan developed by a team of Department staff. The NFMP team produced the plan, presented it for adoption by the Fish and Game Commission, and implemented the subsequent program under the goals and priorities of the Marine Life Management Act. At the core of the NFMP is a management strategy of sustainability, which is an important contribution to the conservation of California's nearshore marine resources.
For more information about the Nearshore Fishery Management Plan, go to the Marine Region website at www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/nfmp.
Superior Accomplishment Award Recipients
- Debbie Aseltine-Neilson, Research Analyst II
- Tom Barnes, Senior Biologist Specialist
- Traci Bishop, Associate Marine Biologist
- Cyndi Dawson, Marine Biologist
- Deborah Johnston, Staff Environmental Scientist
- Maura Leos, Office Technician
- Robert Leos, Research Analyst II
- Dave Osorio, Marine Biologist
- Sandra Owen, Research Manager I
- Mi Ra Park, Research Analyst I
- Mary Patyten, Research Writer
- Connie Ryan, Research Manager I
- Don Schultze, Senior Biologist Specialist
- Terry Tillman, Senior Biologist Specialist
- Lisa Wertz, Marine Biologist
- Deb Wilson-Vandenberg, Research Manager I
- David VenTresca, Associate Marine Biologist
- Marci Yaremko, Associate Marine Biologist
2005 Fish and Game Commission
San Luis Obispo
2005 Pacific Fishery Management Council
October 30 - November 4
Foster City, California
San Diego, California
For the latest information on upcoming Marine Region meetings, please check out our Calendar of Events at www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/index_calendar.asp or contact our DFG office in Monterey at (831) 649-2870. | <urn:uuid:f023b02b-a7e8-4027-bd33-0c329e7dd875> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dfg.ca.gov/marine/newsletter/0405.asp | 2013-05-21T10:34:47Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930655 | 7,502 |
Volume 18, Number 3—March 2012
Seroprevalence of Antibodies against Taenia solium Cysticerci among Refugees Resettled in United States
Neurocysticercosis (NCC) is a disease caused by central nervous system infection by the larval stage of the pork tapeworm, Taenia solium. In developing countries, NCC is a leading cause of adult-onset epilepsy. Case reports of NCC are increasing among refugees resettled to the United States and other nations, but the underlying prevalence among refugee groups is unknown. We tested stored serum samples from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Migrant Serum Bank for antibodies against T. solium cysts by using the enzyme-linked immunoelectrotransfer blot. Seroprevalence was high among all 4 populations tested: refugees from Burma (23.2%), Lao People’s Democratic Republic (18.3%), Bhutan (22.8%), and Burundi (25.8%). Clinicians caring for refugee populations should suspect NCC in patients with seizure, chronic headache, or unexplained neurologic manifestations. Improved understanding of the prevalence of epilepsy and other associated diseases among refugees could guide recommendations for their evaluation and treatment before, during, and after resettlement.
Cysticercosis is a disease caused by infection with the larval stage of the pork tapeworm, Taenia solium. Humans and pigs acquire cysticercosis by ingesting T. solium eggs shed in the feces of humans with taeniasis (i.e., infected with an adult intestinal tapeworm). Upon ingestion, tapeworm eggs release oncospheres, which invade the intestinal wall and disseminate through the bloodstream to form cysts throughout the body. The natural lifecycle of T. solium tapeworms completes when a human eats pork contaminated by T. solium larval cysts because these can then develop into adult egg-producing intestinal tapeworms. This endemic lifecycle occurs primarily in regions where sanitation is poor and where pigs are allowed to roam and access raw human sewage.
Neurocysticercosis (NCC) occurs when cysts develop within the central nervous system (CNS); NCC is the primary cause of illness in T. solium infection. The clinical features of NCC cover a diverse range of neurologic manifestations, including seizures, headache, intracranial hypertension, hydrocephalus, encephalitis, stroke, cognitive impairment, and psychiatric disturbances (1,2). In areas in which T. solium infection is endemic, it is a major cause of epilepsy, with 30% of seizure disorder attributable to NCC (3–5).
Numerous reports document that cysticercosis in the United States occurs primarily among migrants and travelers who are presumed to have acquired their infection in another country (6–9). Refugees represent a large group of migrants in which the frequency of T. solium infection has not been described. Approximately 690,000 refugees resettled in the United States during 2000–2010 (10). Resettlement from regions with known pockets of T. solium tapeworm endemicity, including Southeast Asia, central Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, is common. Cysticercosis among resettled refugees has been reported, but the underlying prevalence in refugee populations is unknown (11–15). Understanding the prevalence of T. solium infection could guide recommendations on evaluating and treating refugees before, during, and after resettlement.
During 2010, we used the classic enzyme-linked immunoelectrotransfer blot for lentil-lectin purified glycoprotein (EITB LLGP) to measure the seroprevalence of antibodies against T. solium cysts among several refugee populations resettled to the United States in previous years. We present the results, discuss clinical and public health implications, and suggest topics for further research.
Refugees who apply for resettlement to the United States are required to undergo a predeparture medical screening examination that includes collection of a peripheral blood sample from persons >15 years of age. The Migrant Serum Bank, established by the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, Atlanta, GA, USA) in 2002, retains a convenience sample of de-identified serum samples from these examinations. Each sample has associated demographic information, including refugee group, age, birth country, refugee camp, and site and date of specimen collection. At the time of this study, ≈31,000 serum samples were available that represented resettled refugee populations from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. We identified refugee populations represented in the Migrant Serum Bank in which cases of human cysticercosis or NCC have been reported in the countries of origin (16). We then randomly selected serum samples from each of these identified populations to test by EITB LLGP for antibodies against T. solium cysts. Populations with limited numbers of samples were excluded because lack of statistical power could impede prevalence estimations. Our final sample comprised 2,001 serum samples from resettled refugees from Laos, Burma (renamed Myanmar in 1989), Bhutan, and Burundi (Figure 1). The institutional review boards at CDC and at Oregon Health & Science University reviewed and approved this study.
Individual 100-μL aliquots of each sample were separated at the CDC Central Repository, stored in microtubes, and shipped on dry ice to the CNS Parasitic Diseases Research Unit, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (Lima, Peru), for processing. Serum samples were analyzed by EITB for the presence of antibodies against T. solium cysts (EITB LLGP) as described (17). The EITB LLGP uses a semipurified fraction of homogenized T. solium cysts containing 7 T. solium glycoprotein antigens named after the Kda molecular weights of the corresponding reactive bands (GP50, GP42, GP24, GP21, GP18, GP14, GP13). Reaction to any of these 7 glycoprotein antigens is considered positive. When applied in community settings, the EITB LLGP provides an estimate of population exposure to T. solium cyst antigens. A positive EITB LLGP result alone does not definitely establish active infection because antibodies can persist even after parasite clearance. The clinical significance of specific glycoprotein bands or combinations of bands in community studies has not been described. Although a highly sensitive and specific EITB is available to detect serum antibodies against adult T. solium intestinal infection, the unknown duration of antibody persistence after parasite clearance and the large sample size required for reasonable confidence intervals precluded our use of this assay in this study (18).
Data were analyzed by using Stata version 10 (StataCorp LP, College Station, TX, USA). Direct standardization was used to facilitate comparison across refugee groups, with age–sex standardized seroprevalence calculated as the weighted average of stratum-specific seroprevalence. Continuous variables were assessed by using Kruskal-Wallis for differences among groups of interest. Pearson χ2 and Fisher exact tests were used to compare distributions of proportions or to examine association between pairs of categoric measures. Logistic regression models were constructed for each refugee population to calculate odds ratios for seropositivity among strata (refugee camp or birth country) while controlling for age and sex. All tests are 2-sided, and significance was set at 0.05.
A total of 2,001 samples were distributed approximately equally among refugees from Burma (499 [24.9%] refugees), Laos (502 [25.1%]), Bhutan (500 [25.0%]), and Burundi (500 [25.0%]). The median age of refugees sampled was 26 years (interquartile range 20–40 years, range 15–99 years). No significant difference existed between the proportions of samples from male (984 [49.2%]) and female (1,017 [50.8%]) refugees (p = 0.30). Of the 2,001 samples, 22.5% (95% CI 20.7%–24.4%) were EITB LLGP–positive for antibodies against T. solium cysts.
The aggregate seroprevalence was statistically homogenous across categories of age and sex. However, within individual refugee groups, seroprevalence differed across strata of age (Figure 2) and sex (Table 1). Male refugees from Burma were 2× more likely than female refugees from Burma to be seropositive (odds ratio [OR] 2.0, 95% CI 1.3–3.1). This association between male sex and positive serologic test results was not present in the other refugee groups. The proportion of seropositive results also varied by age category in refugees from Laos (p = 0.04) and Bhutan (p = 0.12).
Refugees from Burundi were significantly younger than those from the other countries (p<0.01), but Burma had a higher proportion of male refugees (p = 0.04) (Table 2). The crude seroprevalence (25.8%, 95% CI 22.0–29.6) and age–sex standardized seroprevalence (27.4%, 95% CI 22.8–32.0) were highest among refugees from Burundi. Samples from Burundian refugees were collected during 2006–2007 from persons in a single camp (Kibondo, Tanzania).
Of the 499 samples from refugees from Burma, 459 (92.0%) were collected during 2006–2007, a period of increased resettlement; the remaining 40 were collected during 2004–2005. The refugees came from 5 refugee camps and 2 urban populations, with most samples from Mae La Camp (326 [65.3%]) and Tham Hin Camp (130 [26.1%]). The proportion of seropositive refugees was not equal between camps (p<0.01). The crude seroprevalence was significantly higher in Mae La (28.5%, 95% CI 23.6%–33.4%) than in Tham Hin (12.3%, 95% CI 6.6%–18.0%). After controlling for age and sex, we found that refugees from Mae La were >3× more likely than refugees from Tham Hin to be seropositive (OR 3.5, 95% CI 1.7–7.5) (Figure 3, panel A). The remaining 40 samples from Burmese refugees were distributed among 5 refugee sites (Nupo, Umpiem, Ban Don Yang, urban Bangkok, and urban Kuala Lumpur), but sample sizes were insufficient to calculate reliable seroprevalence estimates.
All 500 refugees from Bhutan sampled resettled during 2007–2008. The crude seroprevalence was highest in Beldangi-1 Camp (26.6%, 95% CI 18.8%–34.4%) and lowest in Timai Camp (6.3%, 95% CI 0.0–14.5) (Figure 3, panel B). After adjusting for age and sex, we found that refugees from Beldangi-1 were >5× more likely than refugees from Timai to be seropositive (OR = 5.4, 95% CI 1.2–23.9).
The 502 samples from the Hmong refugees were collected during 2004–2005, and all were from 1 refugee camp (Wat Tham Krabok) in central Thailand. This group was the only one in which refugees who provided samples were born in different countries; 260 (51.8%) were born in Thailand and 242 (48.2%) were born in Laos. The crude seroprevalence was higher for Hmong refugees born in Laos (22.7%, 95% CI 17.4%–28.0%) than for those born in Thailand (14.2%, 95% CI 10.0%–18.5%). After adjusting for age and sex, we found that Hmong refugees born in Laos were 2× more likely than those born in Thailand to be seropositive (OR 2.0, 95% CI 1.0–4.2).
Of the 451 positive samples, 247 (54.8%) were reactive to a single glycoprotein antigen band only. In all 247 instances, the single-band–positive samples reacted to GP50. The remaining 204 (45.2%) positive samples reacted to multiple bands: 51 (11.3% of the 451 positive samples) with 2 bands, 119 (26.4%) with 3 bands, and 34 (7.5%) with >4 positive bands. On 24 (5.3%) of the positive samples, an atypical band pattern was noted, in which reactivity with the lower molecular weight proteins (GP13, GP14, and GP18) were present in the absence of reactivity to higher molecular weight proteins (GP50, GP42, GP24, and GP 21). This pattern was more frequent among positive samples from Burundi (16 [12.4%], p<0.01) than from Burma (6 [5.2%]), Laos (2 [2.2%]), or Bhutan (0). The odds of an atypical reaction occurring in a sample from Burundi were 6× greater than for all of the other groups combined (OR 6.2, 95% CI 2.6–14.6). The proportional distribution of atypical reactions did not differ with respect to age (p = 0.94) or sex (p = 0.54).
We demonstrated that exposure to T. solium parasitic infection is common among refugees from Burma, Laos, Burundi, and Bhutan who resettled to the United States. All 4 populations had seroprevalence of antibodies against T. solium cysts comparable to or higher than the seroprevalence in well-characterized T. solium–endemic communities in Latin America where illness attributable to NCC is common (4,5,19,20). The widespread exposure among these groups has clinical and public health implications because these populations are resettling to the United States, where the infection is not endemic and where many clinical providers are not familiar with the disease manifestations, diagnosis, or treatment.
Epilepsy and other neurologic diseases associated with T. solium infection may be prevalent among certain populations of resettled refugees. We were unable to characterize the prevalence of T. solium–related disease because of the retrospective nature of this study and the lack of clinical data accompanying the anonymous samples. However, case reports of symptomatic NCC among resettled refugees are now being reported in the literature (11–15). Clinicians who care for migrants from countries where T. solium infection is endemic should have a high index of suspicion for NCC when encountering seizure disorder, chronic headache, or other neurologic deficits of unknown cause. Up-to-date information on diagnosis and treatment of NCC is available in recent reviews (21–23).
Although human cysticercosis is considered a dead end in the T. solium life cycle, a person with taeniasis can transmit infection to others by shedding infective eggs in feces. An adult-stage tapeworm can live for several years within the human intestine and intermittently releasing proglottids containing tens of thousands of potentially infective eggs. The infrequent reports of Taenia spp. infections in fecal samples of resettled refugees may not reliably indicate the true prevalence of taeniasis (24). Routine screening of fecal samples is done by light microscopy, which has low sensitivity (<40%) for Taenia spp (25,26). The number of imported T. solium taeniasis infections can be estimated among the populations we tested by extrapolation from other communities with similar seroprevalence in areas in which it is endemic. Multiple studies using the highly sensitive (99%) coproantigen ELISA in Latin America have shown the prevalence of Taenia spp. taeniasis in T. solium–endemic communities to be 2.0%–3.5% (19,27–30). These estimates include both T. solium and T. saginata tapeworms because the coproantigen ELISA used in those studies does not differentiate between these species (26). Approximately 87,000 refugees resettled to the United States from the 4 refugee populations we sampled during 2004–2009 (10). By using a conservative estimate of 1% prevalence, ≈870 refugees with T. solium taeniasis may have entered the United States from these populations alone.
Identifying and treating taeniasis among resettling refugees could prevent further transmission of cysticercosis in destination countries. The current approach for controlling intestinal helminthes among resettling refugees involves presumptive treatment before resettlement rather than routine fecal screening (www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/guidelines/overseas/intestinal-parasites-overseas.html). Taenia spp. tapeworms are not specifically targeted, although refugees from Schistosoma spp.–endemic areas in Africa may receive presumptive treatment with praziquantel, which is an effective treatment for T. solium taeniasis. Household screening for taeniasis when cysticercosis is diagnosed in an area to which it is not endemic is an alternate approach that can identify persons with T. solium intestinal tapeworm infection (6,31–35). Clinicians who diagnose cysticercosis should consider screening the index case-patient for taeniasis and household members for taeniasis and NCC. A combination of clinical history, laboratory analysis of feces and serum, and neuroimaging may be required.
The demonstration of widespread exposure to T. solium tapeworms among certain refugee populations is of concern because of the potential for severe adverse events related to presumptive treatment for intestinal helminthes. Refugees resettling to the United States from Africa and Asia receive presumptive treatment for intestinal roundworms. All refugees without contraindication receive a single dose of albendazole, and refugees originating in sub-Saharan Africa receive additional treatment for schistosomiasis with praziquantel before departure. These guidelines are consistent with program strategies of presumptive treatment in parasite-endemic areas used by the World Health Organization for soil helminth infections (www.who.int/intestinal_worms/strategy/en/) and schistosomiasis (www.who.int/schistosomiasis/strategy/en/). Both medications are used in the treatment of NCC because of their ability to penetrate the CNS and to damage T. solium cysts. Corticosteroids are typically administered simultaneously in treatment of NCC to control resulting inflammation and to prevent neurologic complications (22). The long latency between CNS infection and development of symptoms means that some persons with NCC will have occult viable brain cysts. Inadvertent damage to these occult brain cysts during presumptive treatment for intestinal helminthes could precipitate an inflammatory CNS reaction in patients for whom presumptive treatment would otherwise have been contraindicated had their infection been known. Multiple case reports describe new-onset seizures in persons with underlying NCC who receive treatment with these agents (12,35–39). The Food and Drug Administration recently updated label precautions for albendazole and praziquantel to inform clinicians about this potential adverse event (www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/appletter/2009/020666s005,s006ltr.pdf and www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/appletter/2010/018714s012ltr.pdf).
The current CDC refugee predeparture health guidelines advise avoiding presumptive treatment for intestinal helminthes in patients with known history of cysticercosis or previous seizure (www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/guidelines/refugee-guidelines.html). However, refugees from T. solium tapeworm–endemic regions may harbor occult viable CNS cysts that could increase their risk for severe adverse events. Refugees are observed for 1–3 days after drug administration before departure; however, enhanced surveillance with systematic data collection would help inform risk-benefit analyses of these programs. Prospective studies that monitor adverse neurologic reactions after mass treatment with albendazole and/or praziquantel in T. solium tapeworm–endemic areas are needed to quantify the actual risk. Clinicians should be aware of potential adverse treatment events when evaluating refugees who develop neurologic symptoms after presumptive therapy and should report suspected cases by email to CDC ([email protected]) or telephone (1-404-498-1600) and to the Food and Drug Administration though the Adverse Events Reporting System (www.fda.gov/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/Surveillance/AdverseDrugEffects/ucm115894.htm).
Although we cannot confirm that active transmission is occurring within the refugee camps and/or within surrounding communities on the basis of seroprevalence alone, we do suspect that active transmission is occurring for 2 reasons: 1) the populations we sampled lived in the refugee camps for years to decades before resettlement, and 2) the antibody response to T. solium cysts detected on EITB LLGP has been demonstrated to be transient, with ≈40% reversion from seropositive to seronegative after 1 year in serial community studies (40). Although we were unable to adequately explore risk factors for positive serologic findings in this study, we did detect significant differences in the odds of exposure between refugee camps. Further investigation within the camps and surrounding communities may clarify reasons for the variation observed. Areas for further study include characterizing 1) the prevalence of epilepsy and other neurologic disease associated with NCC, 2) the prevalence of and risk factors for taeniasis, 3) the prevalence of and risk factors for porcine cysticercosis, and 4) animal husbandry practices and market structure for sale of pork. Interventions, such as screening for and treatment of taeniasis, use of corrals for raising pigs, and improved sanitation infrastructure and education, may reduce transmission among refugees and ultimately prevent disease.
This study has limitations. The EITB LLGP is known to have low sensitivity for detecting single parenchymal cysts and calcified cysts alone. On the other hand, the 100% specificity to the larval stage of T. solium means that false-positive reactions are unlikely. Seroprevalence estimates based on the EITB LLGP are therefore likely to underestimate the overall prevalence of exposure to T. solium eggs in a community. Although T. asiatica tapeworms are co-endemic in Southeast Asia, there is no evidence for or against potential cross-reactivity of this related species on the EITB LLGP. However, T. asiatica cysticercosis has not been reported among humans. We preselected our sample to include refugee populations in which we expected to find evidence of endemic T. solium transmission. Our seroprevalence estimates should not be generalized to all resettling refugee populations, particularly those from Middle Eastern or northern African countries, to which T. solium tapeworms are not thought to be endemic. Our seroprevalence estimates also may not be generalizable to the broader population in the refugees’ countries of origin. Refugee populations often include ethnic minority groups whose compilation of risk factors may not represent those of the majority population in their countries of origin. Nevertheless, our study does provide seroprevalence estimates for regions in which little to no data were previously available.
Exposure to T. solium parasitic infection is widespread among specific refugee groups resettled to the United States. Clinicians should suspect NCC in patients from these regions who have seizure, headache, or other unexplained neurologic manifestations and should consider screening household members for additional cases. Systematic screening and treatment for taeniasis among refugees may prevent additional cases of NCC. Further investigation is needed to characterize illness and risk factors associated with T. solium infection in refugee populations. Additional serologic testing of stored samples from different regions of the world with the EITB LLGP can improve understanding of the global distribution of T. solium infection and may highlight regions that could benefit from control or elimination interventions.
Dr O’Neal is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon. His primary research interest is the epidemiology and control of T. solium infection in endemic and nonendemic settings.
We thank the CDC Migrant Serum Bank for provision of samples, John Painter for his epidemiologic assistance, and Kevin Liske for map creation. We also thank Suzette Bartley and Andres Lescano for logistical assistance and Eileen Emori for administrative support.
This work was financially supported by the CDC Emerging Infections Program through the State of Oregon Acute and Communicable Disease Prevention program and by the International Society for Travel Medicine. S.E.O. is supported by the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center Clinical Research Scholars and Fellows Training Program through Vanderbilt University (R24 TW007988) and by the Research Institute for Health Sciences at Chiang Mai University. H.H.G. is now a Wellcome Trust Senior International Research Fellow.
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Suggested citation for this article: O’Neal SE, Townes JM, Wilkins PP, Noh JC, Lee D, Rodriguez S, et al. Seroprevalence of antibodies against Taenia solium cysticerci among refugees resettled in United States. Emerg Infect Dis [serial on the Internet] 2012 Mar [date cited]. http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1803.111367
Comments to the Authors
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1In the context of a linguistic conference, a paper on a literary text may appear as something of an oddity. However, the text I wish to discuss here is closely linked to the issue of connections/rupture between form and meaning, and raises some vital questions about the way in which the two are interrelated, albeit in a rather unorthodox manner. Before presenting and analysing the work in question, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue (1984), I wish first to say a few words about the long tradition which has seen literary works present imaginary languages that are claimed to be superior, ideal or perfect. I will then look at the ways in which Elgin’s novel addresses this question, the rather unique solutions it proposes, and the reasons for its predictable failure to accomplish the author’s clearly stated aims.
2Imaginary voyages and Utopias use a fiction – that the lands and peoples they describe actually exist somewhere – in order to encourage readers to explore reality, re-examine the here and now, acknowledge its failings and consider potential solutions. The otherness of the imaginary worlds is not an end in itself, but a means of gaining new perspectives on the familiar and the known. Behind the smokescreen of the fictional travel tale, many authors of imaginary voyages, particularly during the 17th and 18th centuries, explore in their works new philosophical and scientific ideas, which it would be risky to express in more direct modes. To succeed, this ploy relies upon the deceptive nature of language and writing, and on the readers’ ability to recognise and accept that deceptiveness, so that they will read between the lines and consider the sub-text beneath the imaginary travel tale.
3Even imaginary voyages and Utopias that appear to promote rational models of society are thus dependent upon the figurative nature of language in order to function. Traveller-narrators repeatedly insist upon the veracity of their personal account, alluding to travellers’ age-old reputation as inherently unreliable, citing renowned travel liars and claiming that their report is different from all the others because they, and they alone, are honest. Insofar as it reminds readers, at regular intervals throughout the text, of the untrustworthy nature of travel narratives, this technique is unlikely to reassure them as to the narrator’s truthfulness, rather inciting them to view him with mistrust and suspicion. Swift’s Gulliver, for instance, claims to be notorious for his veracity, but refers in his text to his “cousin Sympson” and his “cousin Dampier”, two notorious plagiarists and fabricators of travel accounts. Through this play on truth and lies, and this use of language to express the opposite of what is actually stated, readers can and must recognise that they are being encouraged to view the narrator and his words as intrinsically untrustworthy and therefore to seek out the underlying ideas beneath the travel tale.
4As imaginary voyages depend upon the deceptive, ambiguous nature of language in order to function, it should perhaps come as no surprise that when the authors of such texts attempt to create their own imaginary languages, and to present them as ideal, they are usually anything but successful. Francis Godwin, Thomas More, Denis Veiras and Simon Tyssot de Patot all invent more or less detailed imaginary languages but one of the best examples is to be found in La Terre Australe connue (1676), Gabriel de Foigny’s fictitious account of a journey to the still unknown Great Southern Land, a text which not only describes an apparently model, rational society, but also provides a detailed grammar of a supposedly ideal language. The Austral language is said to be perfect because there is total connection between form and meaning: “ils forment si parfaitement leurs noms qu’en les entendant, on conçoit aussitôt l’explication et la définition de ce qu’ils nomment.” (162) The narrator adds that to name something is to explain its nature: “on ne peut nommer aucune chose en ce pays, qu’on n’explique sa nature en même temps.” (163)
- 1 U. Eco, Serendipities. Language and Lunacy, (1998), transl. William Weaver, London: Phoenix Press, (...)
- 2 R. Menzies “L’échec des utopies linguistiques chez Foigny et Swift : écueil ou éloge de l’imperfec (...)
5However, as has been eloquently demonstrated by Umberto Eco,1 Foigny’s fictional language is in fact even less perfect than real ones, as the system of monosyllables upon which it is based contains letters endowed with both semantic and grammatical values (a fact which increases, rather than decreases, the possibility of confusion and misunderstanding). Furthermore, it relies entirely upon a series of paraphrases and metaphors to function, thus belying any claims to clarity or certainty. The presence of this attempted perfect grammar is also rather incongruous within a text that uses the travel conceit as a means of exploring primarily religious ideas that might otherwise have met with the censors’ disapproval. The disjunction between form and meaning that Foigny’s ideal language aims to eliminate is a vital aspect of the very text within which it is found. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere,2 imaginary grammars such as these, while seeming to promote the ideal of a perfect language, in fact highlight the drawbacks of such projects. The texts in which they are presented are vital spaces of liberty, both literary and intellectual, within which authors explore and present often daringly new and critical ideas - and it is precisely the ambiguous and polysemous nature of language that makes such ventures possible.
6Eco and various other critics have already analysed these attempts to create perfect languages, which were particularly numerous during the 17th and 18th centuries. The text I would like to consider here is one that has aroused little critical attention, but that nonetheless perpetuates themes and problems inherent in the presentation of ideal languages in fictional texts, while addressing issues very different to those that preoccupied earlier writers and proposing a new and even more improbable solution to the question of relations between form and meaning.
7As Marina Yaguello has pointed out, early inventors of such imaginary languages have one thing in common:
Qui sont les inventeurs de langues, qu’elles soient philosophiques ou à finalité utilitaire ? Qui sont les auteurs de théories sur l’origine et le développement du langage ? Qui sont les auteurs de voyages imaginaires ou de science-fiction ?
Des hommes, toujours des hommes. (53)
8Yaguello emphasises that, with the possible exception of Hildegard de Bingen, women do not produce this type of project whereas, she maintains, glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and xenoglossy (speaking an existing language that one has never actually encountered) are generally ascribed to women rather than men. While there are undoubtedly practical historical reasons for this – after all, in statistical terms women traditionally produced comparatively few projects of any type – Yaguello suggests that it also reflects stereotypical gender roles: “Aux hommes les activités intellectuelles, les spéculations abstraites, les théories à composante philosophique, les créations conscientes et réfléchies; aux femmes les produits de l’émotivité, de l’imagination non révisée par l’intellect.” (54) Furthermore, she suggests that projects for improving language or creating an ideal language also reveal deep-seated distinctions between male and female relationships to language, since existing languages, our mother tongues, are typically described by male commentators as capricious, illogical, irregular, unreliable, ambiguous and therefore mendacious, changing and unstable, rebellious and in need of mastering. And these are exactly the shortcomings that classical imaginary languages attempt to remedy: “Il s’agissait, certes, de mettre fin à la confusion des langues, mais pendant qu’on y était, on a cherché la rationalité, la régularité et la logique avant tout.” (60)
9Given the paucity of such texts, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue, published in 1984, is an interesting case. Elgin differs from most inventors of imaginary languages not only because she is a woman, but also because she actually is a linguist, with a PhD in linguistics and an academic career, possibilities that were obviously denied to women in earlier times. Prior to retirement in 1980, Elgin was Professor of Linguistics at San Diego State University.
10Set in the year 2205, Native Tongue is the first volume in a science-fiction trilogy, and describes a context in which women in the US have lost their rights as citizens following constitutional reform. Banned from voting, owning property and working outside the home without permission from a male relative, they are the property of their menfolk. In Elgin’s fictional future, interplanetary exchanges are a central part of business, and as a result linguists have a vital social function: in their role as interpreters (both linguistic and cultural) they alone can guarantee the successful outcome of commercial negotiations and transactions between humankind and extra-terrestrials. As alien languages are extremely complex and difficult, Linguist dynasties have evolved, each one training its children in one alien language and several human ones, as well as teaching them linguistic theory. A group of Linguist women, relegated to a Barren House where women are sent to live out their lives once they can no longer bear children, secretly develops a women’s language, in order to challenge patriarchal oppression. The result, Láadan, allows for the expression of women’s feelings, emotions and experiences; these, Elgin suggests, cannot be accounted for in English, which is an androcentric language, reflecting male conceptions and perceptions of the world and structuring that world accordingly.
- 3 S. Haden Elgin, interview with Kim Wells, 1999, http://www.womenwriters.net/editorials/hadenelgin. (...)
11Elgin’s science-fiction text reflects and explores contemporary concerns and issues: the work was published one year before Margaret Atwood’s more famous The Handmaid’s Tale, which also depicts a world where women suffer from institutionalised oppression and domination.Elgin herself has clearly stated that science-fiction as a genre offers unique potential for examining new ideas and testing hypotheses: “SF, she has said, “ is the only genre of literature in which it’s possible for a writer to explore the question of what this world would be like if you could get rid of [X].”3 This speculative premise (that in order to improve the world one needs to eliminate that which is deemed negative) is the classic mode of creation used in Utopian literature. Rather than establishing definite, positive criteria for improvement, authors of such texts tend to take as their starting point the failings of the real, imperfect world, which they propose to eliminate. Standard targets include private property, money, political organisations, the education of children within their families or according to gender, social inequality, and corruption, but often no clear indication is given as to how these ills are actually to be eradicated. Elgin’s text functions in a slightly different way: it is simultaneously dystopian (in that it depicts a cataclysmically bleak scenario, one that certain readers had trouble taking seriously) and yet purports to be practical in scope, as it posits clear ways in which the author thinks women could and should take steps to modify their position and status within society.
12In fact, whereas traditionally imaginary voyages and Utopias maintain a certain distance from reality, offering an examination and exploration of the existing world without necessarily stating that any specific action should or must be taken to modify it, Elgin’s text is intended as a call to arms, encouraging women to take urgent steps in order to reassert their rights before reality comes to resemble the fictional world portrayed in the novel. Similarly, while earlier texts like the moon voyages of Francis Godwin and Cyrano de Bergerac, for instance, present scientific experimentation and validation in a purely abstract, literary context and offer an obviously fictional illustration of theories such as the diurnal rotation of the Earth or the power of gravity, Native Tongue blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality in a slightly different way. Instead of using fiction as a smokescreen for exploring daring, potentially risky ideas put forth in speculative mode, Elgin presents a model which she very explicitly hopes to see implemented in reality. Moreover, while few earlier authors appear to think it likely their fictional work will have any major impact upon the world around them, Elgin explicitly tries to use literature as a means of testing certain hypotheses in reality. Native Tongue, she explains, is
a thought experiment with the express goal of testing four interrelated hypotheses:
(1) that the weak form of the linguistic relativity hypothesis is true [that is, that human languages structure human perceptions in significant ways.];
(2) that Goedel’s Theorem applies to language, so that there are changes you could not introduce into a language without destroying it and languages you could not introduce into a culture without destroying it;
(3) that change in language brings about social change, rather than the contrary;
- 4 http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Laadan.html (...)
(4) that if women were offered a women’s language one of two things would happen – they would welcome and nurture it, or it would at minimum motivate them to replace it with a better women’s language of their own construction.4
13I would like to focus first on the first hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which “human languages structure human perceptions in significant ways.” Although this hypothesis has been much criticised, Native Tongue nonetheless sets out to verify it by suggesting that male perceptions dominate English and are encoded in the language to the extent that they influence our understanding of gender. Elgin’s allegation is that English does not allow women to express their feelings and experiences and that this failing is a key factor in sexual inequality. This hypothesis is illustrated in Native Tongue by the experiences of Nazareth Chornyak, a particularly brilliant Linguist woman. Forced into an arranged marriage with a brutal, ignorant man, she falls in love with Jordan Shannontry, a more sensitive character, who shows some concern for and interest in her as a thinking, feeling, individual and even gives her a rose, a gesture of exceptional kindness in Nazareth’s bleak life. She blurts out her love to Shannontry, who promptly informs her husband, and she is reprimanded and scolded. However, the humiliation she feels is above all due to the men’s refusal to acknowledge her feelings, and to her own inability to describe them in the words available to her: “If she had had the skill and leisure to write it all down, and to somehow bring it to pass that men would read it, it would only bore them. What a fuss a woman makes, they would say, and they would forget it at once. And there were no words, not in any language, that she could use to explain to them what it was that had been done to her, that would make them stop and say that it was an awful thing that had been done to her.” (201-2)
- 5 http://www.womenwriters.net/editorials/hadenelgin.htm (...)
14The reform endorsed by Elgin in her text is thus linguistic in nature. If we return to her definition of science-fiction as a genre addressing the question of “what this world would be like if you could get rid of [X]”, it is notable that she goes on to specify “where [X] is filled in with any of the multitude of real world facts that constrain and oppress women.”5 The [X] that Elgin recommends for elimination in Native Tongue is no less a target than the English language, and that is what her characters attempt to do – to replace English with a language, Láadan, that is capable of rendering their perceptions and experience. They secretly devote their time to encoding Láadan:
When we women say “Encoding”, with a capital “E”, […] we mean the making of a name for a chunk of the world that so far as we know has never been chosen for naming before in any human language, […] We mean naming a chunk that has been around a long time but has never before impressed anyone as sufficiently important to deserve its own name. […]
But there is no way at all to search systematically for capital-E Encodings. They come to you out of nowhere and you realize that you have always needed them […] (22)
15Whereas many previous imaginary languages strived in vain to improve communication by simplifying language, reducing it to monosyllables or categorising terms according to their composition, Láadan reflects a desire to expand existing language in order to accommodate women’s experiences and feelings. In Elgin’s account, the women Linguists do succeed in forging, or encoding, a new, more adequate language, and when they have done so and the language has begun to be used by the women and children in the Barren House, it effects perceptible change amongst them, thus, Elgin suggests, confirming the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis under test. However, it is notable that the change in women is described in the text primarily from the point of view not of those directly benefiting from the liberating effects of Láadan, but from the perspective of the male Linguists. Emotionally insensitive and dismissive of women’s concerns and abilities, the men are utterly unaware of the secret, subversive Encoding project. They only gradually become aware of the transformation that is taking place, without realising the causes: “Women, they tell me, do not nag any more. Do not whine. Do not complain. Do not demand things. Do not argue. Do not get sick – can you believe that …? No more headaches, no more monthlies, no more hysterics… or if there still are such things at least they are never mentioned.” “How long has it been,” they ask one another, “since you sat and listened to a woman nag? Or watched one sit and blather endlessly about something that no one in his right mind could possibly have any interest in? Or blubber for hours over nothing at all?”(275)
16Thus the women in Elgin’s imaginary world achieve their goal and in doing so they validate (entirely fictionally, of course) the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Their triumph is complete when the Linguist men concur that their women are no longer pleasant company, since their minds always seem to be elsewhere, and that they should therefore be given agreeable but separate accommodation. The women consequently find themselves liberated from a great deal of the material and psychological oppression they previously experienced. But, as Elgin puts it, they are above all freed
- 6 http://www.womenwriters.net/editorials/hadenelgin.htm (...)
from the constant tension and frustration that comes of not having words for the things you want to say, and of not being listened to when you try to talk about those things anyway; they were spared the suffering that comes of deciding that talking about those things is utterly impossible and giving up trying. Think of foot-binding. It’s easy to list the restrictions foot-binding places on a woman and to understand what removing those restrictions would mean. An inadequate language (one of the hypotheses in Native Tongue) imposes less obvious but equally repressive constraints; it could be called tongue-binding.6
17Although Elgin’s underlying ideas and aims differ radically from those of creators of early imaginary voyages, it is striking that, like them, she strives to create a language that provides an exact means of expressing one’s experience and perceptions, thereby correcting the perceived deficiencies and ambiguities of existing languages. It is also notable, although unsurprising, that, as we shall see a little later, she fails as dismally as her predecessors.
18Elgin has said that the women she consulted complained of two major problems with English and its close linguistic relatives:
- 7 http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Laadan.html (...)
(1) Those languages lacked vocabulary for many things that are extremely important to women, making it cumbersome and inconvenient to talk about them. (2) They lacked ways to express emotional information conveniently, so that – especially in English – much of that information had to be carried by body language and was almost entirely missing from written language. This characteristic (which makes English so well suited for business) left women vulnerable to hostile language followed by the ancient "But all I said was...." excuse; and it restricted women to the largely useless "It wasn’t what you said, it was the way you said it!" defense against such hostility.7
19The lexicon at the back of the 2000 reprint of Native Tongue gives some indication of the kind of perceptions that Elgin apparently sees as being both specifically female and inexpressible in English, and for which she coined terms in Láadan. These include entries such as:
Lowitheláad:“to feel, as if directly, another’s pain/grief/surprise/joy/anger”
Radíidin: “non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help”
rathoo: “non-guest, someone who comes to visit knowing perfectly well that they are intruding and causing difficulty”
wonewith: “to be socially dyslexic; uncomprehending of the social signals of others”
Doroledim: “This word has no English equivalent whatsoever. Say you have an average woman. She has no control over her life. She has little or nothing in the way of a resource for being good to herself, even when it is necessary. She has family and animals and friends and associates that depend on her for sustenance of all kinds. She rarely has adequate sleep or rest; she has no time for herself, no space of her own, little or no money to buy things for herself, no opportunity to consider her own emotional needs. She is at the beck and call of others, because she has these responsibilities and obligations and does not choose to (or cannot) abandon them. For such a woman, the one and only thing she is likely to have a little control over for indulging her own self is FOOD. When such a woman overeats, the verb for that is “doroledim.” (And then she feels guilty, because there are women whose children are starving and who do not have even THAT option for self-indulgence... )”
20While not every term in the above list will resonate with every woman, and some women may feel that none of them is remotely useful, it would probably be reasonable to suggest that many of the entries in the lexicon do indeed describe situations or feelings recognisable to many female – and indeed male – readers of Native Tongue. The final example quoted illustrates how it would indeed be “cumbersome and inconvenient” to try and express the complex emotions and reactions at work in this situation, though one might well argue that coining an entirely new language to express such feelings is not indispensable and would not necessarily improve gender relations in society. Furthermore, the sheer number of terms in the lexicon to describe this type of very specific feeling and circumstance hints at a language that only a very few people might ever come to master.
21One of the conspicuous things about the terms featured in the lexicon is that many of them are negative terms, as indicated by the prefix “ra.” It is striking that while Utopian societies are often structured along negative lines, their perfection being defined by the absence of certain ills and deficiencies present in reality, Láadan seems to contain many words which are attempts to improve language by revealing what things are not, highlighting the extent to which the reality perceived by Elgin and the women whom she consulted does not conform to the meaning of the words generally used to convey it. “Holiday” thus means one thing in standard English and in the mouths of speakers but has quite the opposite sense in the experience of these women, and a similar problem is observed in the case of the word “guest”. Láadan can clearly be seen as an attempt to reduce the deceptive nature of language observed in English, and it functions in a rather paradoxical way by coining words to describe what things are not, to refer to all the things that are not what they are said to be, or that do not correspond to the definition of the term used to describe them.
- 8 http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Laadan.html (...)
- 9 The examples of Láadan, as well as the lessons featured below in this paper, are taken from the we (...)
22In writing Native Tongue, Elgin extended her linguistic experiment beyond the bounds of fiction, in an attempt to validate the fourth hypothesis outlines above: “that if women were offered a women’s language one of two things would happen – they would welcome and nurture it, or it would at minimum motivate them to replace it with a better women’s language of their own construction.”8 Rather than merely providing a sketchy outline of her invented language, Elgin actually constructed Láadan, writing a full grammar for the language and providing a textbook for anyone interested, to be purchased from an address provided at the end of Native Tongue. Láadan has since acquired a small cult following, and there is a substantial website with lessons and discussion of the subtleties of the language, and the option for Láadan aficionados to add their own terms to the dictionary. For the purposes of this paper, I will present just a few of the specific characteristics of Láadan, before turning to an examination of the outcome of Elgin’s attempt to test her hypothesis.9
23In Láadan, the female form is considered the norm, so for certain professions, for instance, the basic word is feminine, and in order to specify that a man is fulfilling that particular role, a masculine suffix needs to be added, rather in the same way as English has “author” and “authoress”, “steward” and “stewardess”, etc. This is perhaps one of the simplest ways in which Elgin tries to alter what she perceives as the imperfect and oppressive nature of English, although what she does is merely to create not neutral but female universal forms, as if the only means of redressing the gender balance were to go to the opposite extreme. She also invents a range of words allowing nuances of expression that are unavailable in English, to describe specifically female experiences (menstruation, pregnancy, etc.). Láadan also comprises an astonishing number of words to describe varying forms of feelings such as love, as if Elgin thought that were the key domain in which women’s experiences and perceptions differed most radically from men’s and were least well-represented by English. “A” is the Láadan term for love, but it refers to inanimates only, while various other derived and more complex terms apply to the different feelings of love for individuals:
azh = love for one sexually desired now
áazh = love for one sexually desired at one time, but not now
ab = love for one liked but not respected
ad = love for one respected but not liked
am = love for one related by blood
ashon = love for one not related by blood, but heart-kin
aye = love which is an unwelcome burden
24Types of anger are also defined, in terms that refer to the relative futility of the varying forms of anger and are not, I would argue, either very clear or comprehensible:
bama = anger with reason, but with no one to blame, which is not futile
bana = anger with reason, with no one to blame, which is futile
bara = anger with reason, with someone to blame, which is futile
25There are also various degrees of cleanliness:
éthe = clean, to be clean, to make clean
háawithéthe = child-clean, the level of cleanliness at which a child considers her room "clean" [háawith=child + éthe=clean]
huhéthe = boss-clean, probably the highest level of cleaning you would need [hu=boss + (h)éthe]
mudahéthe = pig-clean, the state of your teenager’s room, to be used when teenager says "it’s clean, mom!", and mom responds "well, yeah, pig-clean!" […] [muda=pig + (h)éthe=clean]
* entry not by Elgin
onidahéthe = family-clean, the usual state of affairs [onida=family + (h)éthe=clean]
* entry not by Elgin
thóohéthe = guest-clean, the level of cleaning you need to do for guests [thóo=guest + (h)éthe=clean]).
26Láadan also reflects Elgin’s desire to eliminate discord and misunderstanding in human communication by introducing what she terms Speech Act words. These are obligatory and always occupy the first position in any Láadan sentence.
Bíi= I say to you as a statement
Báa" = I say to you as a question
Bíid = in anger, I say…
Bíida = in jest, I say…
Bíidi = in teaching, I say…
Bíidu = as a poem, I say…
Bilan = in celebration, I say…
Bíili = in love, I say...
Bíith = in pain, I say…
Bíiya = in fear, I say...
27The Speech Act words bear witness to Elgin’s attempt to make speech clearer and more explicit, by creating a language in which the speaker must not only state whether he/she is stating or asking, etc., but also define the type of statement according to the perceived context in which it is formulated and meant to be received. Meaning and form, it is suggested, are thus connected more tightly in Láadan than in English, reducing, one can only surmise, the potentially deceptive nature of the language. The extremely cumbersome nature of this particular linguistic device appears to have escaped its creator.
28One final detail also needs to be mentioned: Láadan possesses evidentials, to reveal why the speaker feels justified in claiming that the words spoken are true.
Wa = the reason I claim that what I’m saying is true is that I have perceived it myself
Wi = the reason I claim that what I’m saying is true is because it’s self-evident; everybody can perceive that it’s true, or everybody is in agreement that it’s true.
29Evidentials are placed at the end of sentences and, like Speech Act Words, are obligatory. How one is actually supposed to recall, in conversation, the source of one’s information, is not explained by the author.
- 10 http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Laadan.html (...)
30Elgin’s language goes far beyond any of the older attempts to create ideal languages, and she has said that she set herself a 10-year time limit (i.e. until 1994) within which she hoped to verify her fourth hypothesis. However, her test clearly failed, as women have neither adopted Láadan nor created an alternative ideal women’s language. Since this hypothesis has not been validated, the other three are, by Elgin’s admission, not successful either, “since they only begin to be tested if the fourth one succeeds.”10
- 11 http://podcast.conlang.org/2009/04/interview-with-suzette-haden-elgin/ (...)
31Elgin refuses to ascribe the failure of Láadan to the inaccurate nature of the basic hypotheses. Several theories have been put forward by the author and others to explain why women did not seize upon Láadan and use it, or create their own, ideal language. In an interview from 2009,11 Elgin does admit that she was “naïve” to think that Láadan might be used as a language. Based upon feedback she obtained from women, she has come to the conclusion that there are two main reasons why they did not adopt Láadan: women are too busy and they found that her language, with its speech act suffixes and evidence morphemes, would make them feel vulnerable and exposed. Elgin makes no comment in the interview upon the first explanation, other than agreeing that of course women are inevitably too busy to learn a new language (the implication being that this is men’s fault). She gives more credence to the second explanation, demonstrating surprise that women should feel thus, but accepting that perhaps women are not keen to justify their statements and state how they are expressing themselves. In fact, the suggestion is that the vague, ambiguous and potentially deceptive nature of English corresponds rather well to how women wish to express themselves, because they exploit the perceived imperfections of the language to their own ends.
- 12 http://www.womenwriters.net/editorials/hadenelgin.htm (...)
32Elgin refers repeatedly, in her interview and elsewhere, to the attention given to the Klingon language from the Star Trek films, which she compares to the lack of interest aroused by Láadan, concluding that the male establishment and film industry are happy to back a male language, constructed to express the perceptions of warriors, but that “a language of harmony designed to express the perceptions of women, has been largely ignored. This, she says, “is a CLUE.”12 The suggestion appears to be that Láadan is yet another victim of male domination.
33There are, I would suggest, various other reasons why Láadan has failed. Firstly, while language clearly has a role to play in expressing and therefore also in redressing inequality between the sexes, eliminating English and replacing it with an invented tongue is perhaps not the most obvious choice of method for promoting sexual equality. Another plausible explanation is that an entirely artificial language has little or no chance of surviving in the real world. There would surely have to be an overwhelmingly persuasive reason why people should go to the effort of learning a constructed language, when they contrive to get by using existing modes of expression. Furthermore, even if one were to consider literature as a means of instigating women’s liberation, it does seem likely – although Elgin herself has expressed astonishment and some indignation at the idea – that a science-fiction novel is not the ideal vehicle for such a project, since the genre is not one generally favoured by a female readership. Moreover, the very aspects of Láadan that Elgin clearly intends as advantages compared with English and related languages, that is to say the high degree of semantic precision and the obligatory use of evidence morphemes and speech act words, make it a vastly complex language, which even the most determined of pupils would find daunting.
- 13 The choice of themes and characters in the online lessons may, of course, not be Elgin’s own. Ther (...)
34Finally, I would venture to suggest that if one were to consult the lessons available on the Láadan website, hoping to find inspiring examples of ways in which it offers a more adequate medium for expressing women’s perceptions, one might well be disappointed.13Lesson One gives an overview of the main characteristics of Láadan, and Lesson Two provides the first examples and exercises for learners. The title of Lesson Two is rather puzzling: “Athid, Sha, Thad And The Dragon Are Going To The Con.” Not only does it seem improbable that many people will know what a con (conference) is, but it is surely equally unlikely that they will deduce the meaning from the contextual information, i.e. that a con is a location habitually frequented by dragons and individuals with peculiar first names. How many modern learners, one might wonder, be they male or female, would find such examples relevant, let alone consider that the language presented offers greater scope for expressing women’s experiences and perceptions? The exercises that follow, for the budding Láadan learner, consist in completing sentences to say that the dragon is going to the cave, to the forest, to the town and to the spaceship. They thus confirm this general impression, as do the subsequent lessons, where amongst the exotic Athid, Sha and Thad, the dragon remains omnipresent:
Is the dragon going to the con?
Does the dragon have a suitcase?
The dragon carried three suitcases.
The dragon is in the bar.
35This culminates in Lesson Ten, entitled The Dragon Has A Sales Table At The Con:
1. Bíi ril thi óowamid dalahebewaneth buzheha wa.
The dragon has a sales table at the con.
2. Bíi aril eb óowamid áabeth menedebe wa.
The dragon will sell many books.
3. Bíi aril eb be dínídineth menedebe wa.
It will sell many toys.
4. Bíi id aril thi óowamid losheth menedebe wa!
And then the dragon will have a lot of money!
36While the recurrent references to the dragon are clearly intended to be light-hearted and humoristic, the overall impression created is a rather childish one, and these exercises, I would argue, underline another key reason why Elgin’s language failed. The constant presence of the dragon and its companions with their alien-sounding names creates an unfortunate effect, not unlike the recurrent allusions to the traveller-narrator’s veracity in imaginary voyages: it anchors Láadan firmly in a universe of imagination and science-fiction and thereby constantly reminds us that it has little or no practical potential in the real world.
37If, as Elgin does, we were to accept the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, then we might raise the question of how this presentation of the language will shape and influence the perceptions of the reader: insofar as the Láadan lessons establish a constant correlation between Láadan and an overtly fictional, unbelievable context, surely they affect the learner’s perceptions of the language, undermining its already very slender chances of ever being taken seriously? Despite the very detailed grammar, the attention paid to remedying the perceived failures of English to link form with meaning and Elgin’s stated desire to see her fictional language transcend the text in which it was first described, Láadan consequently appears just as abstract and ephemeral as the hastily sketched imaginary languages of preceding centuries, firmly and irrevocably rooted in the literary world within which it is presented to us.
38Even without consulting the website and encountering the bizarrely ubiquitous dragon, the reader of Elgin’s novel is nonetheless constantly aware that Láadan is introduced as just one element amongst the many that make up a complex fictional tale about clearly invented groups and people. The futuristic setting of the text, as well as its extreme presentation of future events, seem further to confirm its clear detachment from reality.Elgin’s comparison between Láadan and Klingon may perhaps come to seem more relevant when considered from this point of view: Star Trek fans who adopt Klingon do so not in an attempt to replace their native language, but as a means of joining a smaller, parallel linguistic community, one based upon the shared appreciation of the acknowledgedly fictional Star Trek series. Klingon clubs may well be a means of attempting to escape from reality, and there are undoubtedly a handful of aficionados who wish that their fiction could become fact. However, there is never any real suggestion that Klingon is in any way superior to existing languages or that it will supplant them. Elgin’s aims are far less realistic, being simultaneously more ambitious and yet more simplistic, but while the fictional tale narrated in Native Tongue, like the imaginary voyages of the 17th and 18th centuries, provides quite a powerful critique of one aspect of contemporary society, the ideal language it posits is clearly fated to remain as utterly fictional as its context. | <urn:uuid:a42ef01c-474a-47f4-82a3-65009a948dcc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://erea.revues.org/2410 | 2013-05-26T09:34:28Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955607 | 8,756 |
|My Fair Nanny
Author: RevSue PM
CROSSOVER: Eloise & a My Fair Lady character .... What happened when one of Nanny's cousins came to the Plaza on Christmas Eve?Rated: Fiction T - English - Romance - Chapters: 3 - Words: 20,908 - Reviews: 5 - Favs: 3 - Published: 03-03-09 - Status: Complete - id: 4899688
|A+ A- Full 3/4 1/2 Expand Tighten|
The next morning, Alfred announced that he simply HAD to get back to England. With a roguish wink, he said to Wilkes, "You must know 'ow it is, gov'ner. I was just re-thinking last night with Eleanor and all. I ask you! When the ladies start to get ideas in their 'eads that you never put there and don't WANT to 'ave there, and won't allow to GROW from there, SOMETHING 'as to be done!"
Wilkes once more awakened from a restless, not very refreshing sleep, rubbed his eyes and tried to follow Alfred's train of thought. "I... er..."
"I 'aven't told Nan yet, o' course," Alfred continued. "Me only 'aving seen her briefly last night, and not making the decision until the wee hours of the morning... 'earing you in the bloody shower... makes a bloke wonder, gov'ner. I ask you! Showers in the middle of the night? I'm thinking they were cold showers, and I'm wondering what they 'ave to do with my favourite cousin... and just what your attentions are in that matter..."
Struggling to sit up, Wilkes firmed his lips. "Whatever my intentions are with regard to your cousin, Alfred, are between Nanny and myself. I assure you they are honourable."
"Thank you for that, anyway, gov'ner," Alfred said. Leaning forward, he said in a hoarse whisper although the two were alone in the suite, "She was badly 'urt by another fancy bloke long ago, and I won't allow it to 'appen again to 'er. She don't deserve it. I ask you, a sweet woman like my Nan being told she wasn't worthy of 'im? She don't deserve it, I tell you! Is that unreasonable? I put it to you, gov'ner, and I leave it to you!"
Despite knowing he shouldn't, Wilkes couldn't help but murmur, "Badly hurt?"
"'e built 'er up and led her on until she gave in to 'im and gave 'im what 'e wanted," Alfred said confidentially. "Naturally then 'e told 'er she was beneath him, and not to expect a bloody thing, especially marriage. Broke 'er 'eart, 'e did, and no mistake, but not 'er spirit! It was close, though. I never 'eard of Nan even LOOKING at another man since. Made me 'appy to see you kissing 'er on Christmas and 'er not shoving you away!"
"Oh yes... quite. Quite."
"You'll do right by 'er, won't you, gov'ner?"
Wilkes got out of bed, feeling at a great disadvantage, and repeated, "Whatever happens between Nanny and myself is private and personal, Alfred. However, I do assure you that I will do my utmost to not hurt her."
"That's all I ask, gov'ner, all I ask. And by the by, we've been invited over to the other suite for a bite o' breakfast in twenty minutes. I said as 'ow I was sure we could make it, me being ready and you 'aving already 'ad your shower in the middle of the night." Alfred winked again at Wilkes who stifled his groan and went to dress.
O o O o O o
Nanny stared at Alfred in disbelief when he announced he had booked his return ticket for that evening. "You're leaving tonight?" she asked incredulously.
"I am, Nan, my love. I'm 'omesick, you might say. Liza, 'enry and the kids'll be back tomorrow. And now that I've seen for meself that you are fine, it's time to go."
"I'm so glad you came over, Alfred," Kay said graciously. "And that we got to meet you. Nanny, you must stay here tonight instead of coming with Eloise and I to the country." She turned to the men. "We were invited to a house party today until tomorrow, but they'll understand that Nanny had to stay in the city."
"You're sure, Kay?" Nanny asked. "I WOULD like to spend as much time as possible with Alfie while 'e's 'ere."
"I'm sure, Nanny," Kay's hand covered Nanny's for a moment and she smiled warmly at the older woman.
"'ow about you, gov'ner? Can you spend the day with us?" Alfred asked Wilkes.
Kay felt the tremor go through Nanny's body and tightened her grip briefly before releasing the hand she was holding.
"I'm afraid I'm busy until five o'clock," Wilkes said regretfully, "but I would be delighted to join you for supper and the trip to the airport!"
"Do you REALLY have to go, Mr. Doolittle?" Eloise asked. "It has been absolutely divine having Nanny's cousin here!"
"It's time, Eloise, my dear," he said, grinning at her. "You and your mother and Nan need to get back into your routine for the New Year, and you don't need an old drunk like me around all the time."
Eloise jumped up and put her arms around the surprised man's neck. "You're not an old drunk, Mr. Doolittle! You're Nanny's cousin!" Then, as if not to leave Wilkes out, she turned and put her arms around Wilkes as well. "And YOU are the bestest neighbour we have, Sir Wilkes!"
"Thank you, Eloise," Wilkes managed to say, returning her hug briefly. His eyes met Nanny's blue ones as he stood up. "I'd best be going in order to get my business completed in time. Shall I come by here for you and Alfred at five?"
"That... that would be wonderful, Sir Wilkes," Nanny said feebly. "We... we could eat here..."
"No, no, no," Alfred shook his head. "I want to treat you to a meal out... you, Nan, because I love you, and the gov'ner 'ere because I owe it to 'im."
"You don't owe me a thing," Wilkes protested, and inwardly he was thinking that had it not been for Alfred's arrival, he would not have been able to spend so much time in the last few days with Nanny, and he most CERTAINLY would not have had the opportunities to kiss her that he had taken to his advantage in that time! "But there are a number of fine restaurants in the city on the way to the airport..."
"And we'll take advantage of a few of them!" Alfred beamed. He winked exaggeratedly. "And I wouldn't say no to stopping at a pub or two on the way!"
"I'll keep that in mind."
"Ta ta, Sir Wilkes!" Eloise cried shrilly, and he turned to her once more, smiling.
"Ta ta, Eloise."
O o O o O o
The day spent with Alfred following Kay's departure with Eloise mid-morning was one Nanny would long remember. All of their childhood memories were brought out and laughed or cried over, and they talked until they were hoarse. Room service kept their beer cold and topped up from mid afternoon on, and they continued talking. The only topics they did not touch on was Nanny's experience long ago with the lover who had scorned her, nor her relationship with Sir Wilkes now.
Then Wilkes was at their door and it was time to go for supper. Nanny was amazed at how Wilkes managed to fit into the closeness between herself and Alfie. It was as though he was one of them, himself, for Lord's sake! And yet it was obvious he was a gentleman from the top of his bowler to the tips of his toes! He wasn't boisterous or raucous but his quiet humour kept them smiling or laughing in the moments when Alfie was busy bolstering his courage to face the airplane flight ahead. Alfred had confided to Nanny earlier that flying was really for the birds, and had he not wanted to check up on her so badly, he would never have trusted his life to a metal machine. "If the Lord above 'ad wanted us to fly, we'd a been born with wings!" he had declared emphatically. "Just you wait, Nan! Just you wait until YOU are asked to do it more and more...!"
"Aoww, Alfie, I fly with Kay and Eloise all the time," Nanny had chuckled. "I feel safe... You know, some things CAN be done without your ordering and manipulating! Without your pulling it, the tide comes in... without your twirling it, the earth can spin..."
"Well, bein' an ordinary man, who desires nothing more than an ordinary chance, I just KNOW the air-ee-oh-plane won't get off the ground tonight without my fervent prayers and spirit-filled body!" Alfred had retorted.
Although Alfred did not appear to show the amount of liquor he consumed over supper, both Nanny and Wilkes were feeling a little wavery when they finally got up and went out to find a cab to take them to the airport.
"You drink too much," Nanny grumbled to Alfred, her hand clutching Wilkes' arm to steady herself.
"Me? 'ow could you SAY such a thing? I'm an ordinary man, with dreams of derring-do..."
"You?" Nanny chuckled, her good humour restored suddenly.
"Me! I'm just an ordinary man 'oo wants to live exactly as I like, and do precisely what I want..."
"I think you're dreaming, Alfie, love," Nanny informed him, amused at his words. "Dreaming of sitting abso-bloomin'-lutely still, never budging 'till spring creeps over the windowsill..."
"Do you still dream, Nan?" Alfred asked seriously.
"Aoww, for sure, sure, sure, Alfie, I do!" Nanny's eyes seemed unfocussed to Wilkes as he watched her closely. She spoke softly, in almost a singsong voice, recalling words she had known since she had been very, very, very young. "Someone's 'ead restin' on my knee, warm and tender as 'e can be, 'oo takes good care of me... Aoww, wouldn't it be loverly?"
"And you, gov'ner? This isn't like you to be sittin' in a place like this with the likes of US! Do you 'ave dreams?" Alfred turned to Wilkes.
"Doesn't everyone, Alfred?" Wilkes looked around and noticed people staring at the three of them curiously, and he smiled faintly, knowing he had never before been uncaring of strangers' curiosity the way he was tonight. "People stop and stare, but they don't bother me for there's no where else on earth that I would rather be. Let the time go by, I won't care..."
"You did it, gov'ner, you did it! I doubted you'd do it, but now I must admit it that succeed you did!"
"What ARE you babbling about, Alfie?" Nanny asked almost impatiently. "And where is the bloody cab? We'd best be going or you'll miss your plane!"
Wilkes almost fell over in his surprise at Nanny's words, and laughter welled up inside him. He was MUCH more inhibited most of the time, but the amount of drink he had consumed tonight had mellowed him to the point that he was finding almost everything amusing. The cab arrived, and he handed Nanny in to the back seat where she sat between the two men.
When they were saying goodbye to him at the airport, Alfred said, "Jolly spot, this, Willy! I should visit 'ere more often!"
"Please don't, and say you did," Nanny said under her breath.
Wilkes muffled his snort of amusement, and his brown eyes twinkled into hers before he shook Alfred's hand heartily. "I must admit, I never thought I'd say this, but I'll miss you, Alfred. I've grown rather accustomed to your face, to having you bounce into my room at all hours of the day or night to ask where my liquor is kept...."
Alfred roared with laughter. "Well, gov'ner, you'll be 'appy to know I don't feel a need to keep tabs on my cousin any more... I'm sure she's in fine 'ands with you!" and he winked. "But I've gotta ask, gov'ner, why can't a woman be more like a man? Men are so decent, such regular chaps, ready to help you through any mishaps, ready to buck you up whenever you are glum. Why can't a woman be a chum, I ask you?"
Nanny shoved at him, then hugged him tightly. "Bye, Alfie, love, and be good... give my love to Liza and 'enry and the children... and take care of yourself!"
"Bye, Nan. I love you." Alfred's eyes were suspiciously shiny. He glared at Wilkes and said, "Be good to 'er," and then he was gone, swinging jauntily down the hallway.
O o O o O o
Noticing that Nanny was fighting to keep her own tears inside as Alfred disappeared, Wilkes offered her his arm in silence, and they made their way out of the airport, getting into a cab at the door. As the cab approached the Plaza, Wilkes suggested that they go for a short walk in the park since no one was expecting them upstairs, and they already had their coats and boots on.
"I'm a little..." Nanny tried to consider how best to describe the feelings that were flooding her. "I've 'ad more to drink than..."
"So have I. Perhaps we should walk it off..."
"Yes, perhaps we should..." Her laugh was contagious.
"Or," Wilkes continued daringly, "Perhaps we could pop into that little pub just over there, and have another drink to celebrate your cousin's visit..."
Nanny chuckled again. "Or perhaps you mean his leaving? I'd like that, Sir Wilkes."
"And I would like it if you would call me Wilkes, and leave off the title," Wilkes said, leaning forward and speaking to the cab driver.
The cab obligingly stopped for them to get out, and after being paid, the driver grinned at Wilkes. "I hope you and your wife have a happy New Year. You know, when I see a couple as much in love as the two of you, it always makes me wish I had married so I could be like you." Then he was gone, leaving the two staring after him somewhat foolishly.
After a moment, Wilkes held out his arm for Nanny to take and they made their way in to the crowded pub where they drank a warm, alcoholic apple cider that made them both feel as if they were wrapped securely in a fuzzy blanket. When they had finished their drinks, Nanny clutched Wilkes' arm as they walked across the street and down the path into the park. It was a beautiful night, with the Christmas lights from the surrounding buildings dancing over the snow. Nanny leaned on him as they walked, thinking he was so solid to hang on to and so sure of himself. Her body tightened in anticipation of what she hoped might come about later. Finding themselves in a secluded area, Wilkes stopped walking suddenly and, freeing his arm from her grasp, cupped her face with his warm hands.
"Do you feel what I am feeling?" he asked abruptly, his eyes on her lips.
"I... I suppose I do..." she said faintly, and she slowly swayed closer to him. There was a nice little kick of heat simmering between them, but Nanny wanted to start a fire.
"I grew accustomed to Alfred's presence, but even more to yours in my suite... and in my arms..." he murmured, his hands sliding down to her shoulders.
Their lips met in a chaste kiss, then another, then another. Then she was in his arms and his hands were slipping under her unbuttoned coat to draw her still closer. Her hands burrowed beneath his coat, too, and their bodies met and shared the warmth generated by their proximity. His kisses were intoxicating. It was the best night of her life, she decided, her head spinning.
"Nanny, I want..." He broke off, realizing what he was about to say and thinking she was too much of a lady to embarrass her so. Besides, the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to remind her of the other man who had used her and so cruelly tossed her aside.
"So do I, Willy, so do I..." she said huskily.
They kissed again, his hands pressing her against him until neither could stand the ache. She felt his leaping response against her, an incredible sign that his blood had surged quickly in reaction to her closeness. It gave her a sense of feminine power that her body was exciting to him, for all the extra pounds age had added. The skin of his jaw rasped her face as he deepened the kiss with an urgency that thrilled her. She felt her lips swelling beneath the demanding pressure of his and her whole body quivered with longing to feel more and more of his touch. The sound of his deep groan rumbling in his throat signalled that she was having much the same effect on him as he was on her. She whimpered softly as her body exploded with desire.
"Are you hungry?" he asked hoarsely.
"Not for food," Nanny said boldly, and undulated her hips against him once more.
He kissed her again, branding her with a swift, hard kiss before releasing her. Nanny swayed a little on her feet, feeling disoriented and unfocussed.
"Come, Nanny," Wilkes said, his voice sounding deep and gravelly. He wasn't too clear on what was happening, not being used to doing much drinking. The drinks had gone down way too easily that evening. All he knew for sure now was that he wanted to get Nanny someplace where he could kiss her with no one around, so no one could see them. His head was spinning, and he kept hearing the cab driver's voice in his head, repeating, 'you and your wife'. Wilkes pondered that, and it fit so well with his desires that suddenly it seemed quite clear to him that he HAD married Nanny, just as he had wanted for a while now. He didn't remember ever seeing her so happy as she was now, patting his arm lovingly and her face glowing as she rubbed it against his shoulder. She blinked at him curiously as if she might be seeing three of him, or perhaps she was just trying to figure out why he was taking so long to get them somewhere private. His steps quickened.
Nanny racked her brain for something to say, but for the life of her couldn't think of a single thing. She dazedly hurried with him back through the park, across to the street and into the Plaza. Thankful that Max was off duty, they went up alone in the elevator, taking the opportunity to kiss and touch some more. On the sixteenth floor, they almost fell out of the elevator and hurried right past Nanny's door to Wilkes' suite, their bodies humming with desire and certainty.
Once inside, Wilkes locked the door and dropped his coat on the floor, toeing off his boots at the same time. Nanny did the same, somewhat more awkwardly, as they never let the other go.
"I can't think straight when you kiss me," Wilkes tried to shake his head to clear it, but it was no use.
"Why are you thinking at a time like this?" she replied, her lips on his again.
"Nanny, Nanny, oh, Nan, I WANT you..." Wilkes panted as he covered her face with kisses, and held her close. "I've been imagining what it would be like to..."
"Willy, I..." Her voice failed her.
"Tell me you don't want to make love with me," he added, pressing a kiss to the side of her neck. "Tell me, and I'll let you go right now."
How could she even think straight, let alone speak intelligently with his tongue rasping along the sensitive skin around her ear? She wasn't thinking straight, she realized in a warm, fuzzy, thoroughly distracted way. Part of her knew she was behaving in a highly improper manner, but the other part recognized that she was where she belonged, here in his arms. She should be nervous, she should not allow him to continue, she should not have enticed him... yet she had never felt so sure of anything nor so at peace in her entire life. "Willy, please, please, please..."
"Do you want me to stop?" he asked, hoping she would say no.... suspecting she would say no... SURE she would say no! After all, what wife would NOT say 'no, don't stop' to a loving, beloved husband such as himself? The cab driver had SAID they were a couple... the man had SAID that Nanny was Wilkes' wife... hadn't he? So even if Wilkes couldn't exactly remember the wedding, it must have happened. Nanny moved against him enticingly again, and Wilkes forgot everything but how much he loved the woman in his arms.
Entwined together, they stumbled into the bedroom and fell on the bed. He fumbled with the buttons on her blouse and his hand slipped beneath her camisole to caress and stroke the heated skin. She gasped and arched closer to him and, at the resultant shaft of pleasure coursing through her, she began to pulse with a sweet agony that only Wilkes could relieve.
"Please, Willy, please..." she heard herself almost chanting. Her eyes were having a hard time focussing. It was better than any dreams she had ever had... yet all too soon, it seemed, reality intruded even as they continued to kiss. Lying in Wilkes' arms, knowing she must soon return to her own suite before she utterly disgraced herself, Nanny finally whispered against his lips, holding his hands captive against her chest, "I shouldn't be here. It's not RIGHT..."
"You feel right to me..." Wilkes murmured, hugging her a little tighter, his heart thumping madly against her.
"But... but it can't work," she said hesitantly, courageously voicing her doubts. "You have different needs, for Lord's sake! We are from different stations in life..."
"I don't care about stations in life," Wilkes nuzzled her neck, and she lifted her chin to grant him access to her throat. "There's nowhere else on earth that I would rather be than here in your arms. It's a towering feeling just to know somehow you are near. An overpowering feeling, you might say, to have you here... in these rooms where I live."
Still, she had to try to make him see sense! "But..."
Suddenly Wilkes was overpowered by a wave of tiredness that swept everything before it, including his desire to continue this delightful lovemaking. It had to be the drinking. He just wasn't used to having so much alcohol... If Alfred hadn't influenced him so much the last few days, he would be happily loving his beautiful wife, but as it was... Wilkes just couldn't keep his eyes open or his mind focussed any more. "Let's just go to sleep, Nanny," he murmured drowsily, his body heavy beside her. "We'll worry about everything in the morning."
"SLEEP? You think I can sleep now? I couldn't sleep tonight! Not for all the jewels in the crown!" Nanny smiled crookedly at him, her fingers moving languidly over his chest which she had bared in her frenzied arousal earlier.
"Hmmm." He kissed her once more, tucking her close to his side, and surprisingly they both fell asleep almost immediately.
O o O o O o
As the faint beginnings dawn began to creep into the room, Nanny stirred. "Aoww!" she cried in surprise when she realized the warm bulk she was snuggled against moved and grunted. "Aoww, Sir Wilkes... I..." She was horrified that she had actually spent the entire night in his bed. She had obviously had much too much to drink last night! Struggling to free herself from his embrace, she tried to sort through her fuzzy memories. They hadn't really done anything but, well, kiss... and cuddle... had they? "Oh my LORD..."
"Where are you going, Nanny?" Wilkes sounded puzzled, and his hands tightened on her, preventing her from escaping his bed. For all he had heard about 'the morning after', he was suddenly surprisingly wide awake and coherent... and he knew that if he allowed Nanny to leave without insisting she marry him, he would be even WORSE than the blackguard who had hurt her long ago.
"I shouldn't be here..." she moaned, holding her blouse together where it gaped open and struggling to pull her skirt down. At least she wasn't BARE beside him, for Lord's sake!
Wilkes sighed. "Are we back to that again? There are other things I would love to hear repeated. For example, the sighs and loving murmurs you whispered in my ear last night when I nibbled on your neck and earlobe..." He pressed light kisses on her cheeks and jawline and once more nibbled on her ear.
"Ohhh, Willy..." Nanny melted instantly once again, unable to resist his caresses. She struggled to say, "But it's not right. You're above my station... I'm only a nanny and you're a KNIGHT..."
"Nanny, I love you." His words hung in the air and he stopped teasing her with his lips and raised his head, gazing down at her. "I love YOU, not your job, not your station in life... even though they are a part of you that I wouldn't ever wish away. It's... it's what Kay said. You are the other part of me that I've been missing all my life until now. My soulmate... my love. Please, marry me, Nan. Marry me soon. Make me a complete, beloved person, and allow me to do the same for you. We weren't made to live alone, and now that I've found you and experienced this incredible link, I don't want to ever let you go... not even for another night. I... I don't remember much about last night, so if I hurt you, I'm dreadfully sorry. The last thing I wanted was to take advantage of you. But Nanny, please, I need you here, in my bed, in my arms, in my heart, now and always. Please, Nanny... Marry me."
Nanny could hardly believe her ears, or the evidence of his very real desire for her burgeoning once more against her hip. "Oh my Lord, are you sure, sure, sure, Willy? Absolutely?" Her eyes searched his for the slightest hint of indecision, but couldn't find any. All she could see in his dear brown eyes was an overwhelming love that she knew was hers alone... a gift she only needed to accept. And she DID love him, she knew that, however wrong it was. From the moment she had first seen him, he had made her feel things no other man before him had ever made her feel. Yes, in general she was content with her life, and while she didn't really NEED a man to make her feel complete, she most certainly WANTED him... and LOVED him. "W-Willy, I LOVE you! I absolutely do, do, do!"
"Is that a yes? You'll marry me? Today, if possible?"
"Yes, yes, yes!"
"It's just like what Kay said," Wilkes said a short while later.
"What's that, Willy?" Nanny asked dreamily, her head resting on his shoulder.
"If we give our innermost soul to each other, if we SAY what we are thinking instead of keeping it inside, we CAN be whole."
"Hmmm," Nanny agreed. "That is what love is ... a gift of ourselves to the other."
"Tell me you don't want to wait until your cousin can come back before we are married..." Wilkes grinned, his hands beginning to fan the flames of desire burning over her once again. "You WILL marry me today if it can be arranged? I want to love you completely and fully... as my wife."
"Yesssss..." Nanny's breath caught as his lips pressed light kisses over her face and throat. "As... as long as... Eloise and... Kay... ooh, Wilkes... are here... and... ohhhh... agree..." she panted.
He stopped his delightful torture and sat up suddenly, staring down at her. "You won't marry me today unless they agree to it? Nan, I love Eloise dearly, but what if she decides she wants to keep you as her mostly companion, and says she doesn't agree to our marriage?"
"She will agree, Willy, for sure, sure, sure," Nanny soothed him, drawing him back into her arms. "She will agree. Oh my Lord, she absolutely HAS to!"
O o O o O o
When Kay and Eloise returned later that morning, Nanny was nervously pacing the living room of her suite, looking at her watch and twisting the gleaming sapphire and diamond ring on her left hand – Wilkes' mother's engagement ring. Wilkes had gone to get the special licence for their wedding that evening, and Miss Thompson had spent an hour with Nanny making arrangements for the room the marriage would take place in and the subsequent reception. Prunella Stickler had not returned to the Plaza since Christmas Eve and the loss of face she had sustained when Brooks Oliver had turned out to be an imposter and a wanted man. All the other staff of the Plaza had been wild with excitement when the news had leaked out that Nanny and Sir Wilkes were to be married that very evening, and everyone was planning to be on hand. Mr. Peabody had offered to walk the bride down the aisle, but Nanny had refused gently, saying that it really should be Eloise doing the honours.
Kay took one look at Nanny, the gaze encompassing Nanny's left hand and her blue eyes shining with a mixture of fear and happiness, and she sprang at the older woman and clasped her in a tight embrace which Nanny returned wholeheartedly, tears falling from both sets of eyes. Eloise stood stock still in amazed wonder to see her mother and Nanny hugging each other and crying.
"When?" Kay choked out, taking Nanny's hand and examining the ring, then hugging her again.
"'e asked me this morning... and the wedding is to be... tonight..." Nanny said hesitantly.
"Tonight?" Kay stared. "TONIGHT?"
"What wedding? Whose wedding? Bill and Rachel's? STOP IGNORING ME!" Eloise cried. "I absolutely HATE that!"
"'e doesn't want to wait any longer... nor do I, for Lord's sake!" Nanny confessed. "But Kay, I won't if you..."
"Nonsense! And Nanny, I've been keeping a secret from you, too... I told Eloise this morning..."
"We're getting married, Nanny!" Eloise announced loudly, pushing in to stare up at Nanny. "Me and Maman and YOU. And we're moving to Paris!"
"Eloise," both women began, then Nanny stared at Kay. "YOU are getting married?" she asked. "THAT is the news you were keeping from me?"
A small smile trembled around Kay's lips, and she nodded. "It seems love is in the air this Christmas," she said. "I should have known I wasn't fooling you by keeping quiet. I wasn't sure how to tell you... and now I find that all my worry is for nothing."
"So we'll all be happy in Paris together!" Eloise added brightly.
"Errr..." Nanny hated to hurt the child, but...
"Actually, Eloise, I was wrong this morning about one thing," Kay shot Nanny a look as if to say, 'I'll handle it' and she knelt down beside her daughter. "You see, I forgot to think about Nanny's feelings. That's why we have to think of others, and talk to them about our feelings. That's one way we show our love for each other, by telling each other our thoughts. And because I didn't tell Nanny earlier, well, we might have a problem."
"But you won't mind moving, will you, Nanny?" Eloise looked up at Nanny imploringly. "You're my mostly companion! You absolutely HAVE to come to Paris and marry with us!"
"Actually, love," Nanny began.
Again Kay interrupted her, speaking softly to Eloise. "Eloise, you know Nanny has liked Sir Wilkes for a long time, right?"
"Oh YES! It was a secret, but I could see it."
"Well, Sir Wilkes obviously saw it, too, and since he likes her as well...."
"I could see that, too. His breathing doesn't go funny like Nanny's, but he gets red the way she does."
"So," Kay continued, "This morning he TOLD Nanny that he likes her, too, and they are going to get married... tonight."
"TONIGHT? MARRIED? TONIGHT?" Eloise was staggered. "NANNY AND SIR WILKES?"
Just then, a tap came at the door, then Wilkes appeared in the doorway shyly, hesitating when he saw the three huddled together. "I, er..."
Kay got to her feet and came up to Wilkes, holding out both hands. "Sir Wilkes. I'm so happy for you and Nanny..." She took his hands and leaned forward to kiss his cheek. "Thank you for seeing her and loving her..." she whispered in his ear. "She's very dear to me."
"And to me," he whispered back, beaming at the woman he knew Nanny loved as the daughter she had never had.
"Sir Wilkes!" Eloise announced, pulling out of Nanny's arms even as the older woman was trying to hold her back, and marching up to Wilkes. "Do you LOVE Nanny?"
"I do indeed, Eloise. Very much," he replied solemnly.
Looking like she was still trying to catch her breath after the surprise, Eloise finally said, "Then I guess you can marry her... and come to France with us. WE are getting married, too, you know! Maman told me this morning!"
"Err, you are? France??" Wilkes looked from Eloise to Kay and finally his eyes rested on Nanny.
"Eloise, love," Nanny said softly, coming up to Wilkes and taking his arm before reaching for Eloise with her free hand, "We are not moving to France with you. Sir Wilkes and I will live here and in England. But," She stopped Eloise's protests with a finger to the child's lips and smiled, "but when we are in England, we will be close, close, close to France, so we will come to visit you and you will come to visit us, and we will have an absolutely divine time!"
"We will?" Eloise looked interested but still somewhat hesitant.
"We ALL will," Kay said firmly. "And we will ALL be happy!"
"And Eloise," Nanny said, coaxing a reluctant smile out of the little girl, "I want YOU to walk me down the aisle and give me to Sir Wilkes at our wedding."
"ME?" Eloise's eyes grew round.
"For sure, sure, sure. And you can wear your pretty pink dress..."
"Oh, Nanny, I absolutely love you!" and Eloise flung herself into Nanny's arms again. Then she peered around Nanny at Wilkes and asked, "and can I call you Sir Grandpa when you've married Nanny?"
"You may call me anything you like, Eloise," he beamed, patting her head even as he put his arm around Nanny and nodded at Kay. "When my fair Nanny is my wife, I'll be the happiest man alive. Actually, I do believe I am right now!"
O o O o O o
Later that night, after publicly promising to love each other forevermore and their covenant of marriage being duly recognized by the community of their friends and the state of New York, Nanny and Wilkes found themselves alone in Wilkes' suite once more. Slowly, lovingly, they undressed each other, delighting in uncovering the mysteries of the other's body and the exact places that needed special attention. She held him tightly as spasms of pleasure convulsed her body. Oh my Lord, she loved this man and had wanted to be with him like this from the first moment she had seen him. As his hands continued to move over her, she knew that nothing else existed, save this moment. Time had stopped for them to love. Her unhappy past forgotten, she clung to her beloved present...
Staring up at his features afterwards, Nanny knew she had just found the part of her that had always been missing. They had gifted each other with their innermost souls and now at last they were wholly one. "I love you, Willy... my soulmate," she murmured.
"You are my soulmate, too, Nanny..." Wilkes whispered in her ear as he lay half on top of her, breathing heavily from their exertions. "My love... my fair Nanny..." | <urn:uuid:3933d925-c61f-4f32-9e63-c6b78e48adc1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4899688/3/My_Fair_Nanny | 2013-05-24T08:37:31Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.989896 | 8,316 |
by Gus Elvin
Last season the ACC only received 4 bids to the NCAA Tournament and this year don’t expect a dramatic increase as once again there is a huge drop-off after North Carolina and Duke. In the offseason the ACC expanded adding Syracuse and Pittsburgh for the future but for now the ACC will continue to struggle in basketball as there are no tournament locks after Carolina and Duke. This season the ACC welcomes 4 new head coaches as Jim Larranga (Miami), Mark Gottfried (NC State), Brian Gregory(Georgia Tech) and Mark Turgeon(Maryland) all make their ACC coaching debuts. The conference is clearly in a transition phase but that does not mean the ACC is void of talent as teams like Miami, Virginia Tech and Florida State all should contend for NCAA berths behind the aforementioned top 2. While the ACC loses players like Nolan Smith, Kyle Singler, Chris Singelton and Malcolm Delaney it does bring in some of the elite incoming freshmen as players like Austin Rivers, Quinn Cook, James McAdoo and Dorian Finney-Smith should all become household names by midseason. The ACC has two legitimate Final Four contenders in North Carolina and Duke but a lot of question marks exist after that as teams like Virginia Tech, Miami and Florida State appear to be tournament contenders but all 3 also have notable weaknesses. To tipoff our ACC Preview we’ll examine preseason #1 North Carolina.
ACC Conference Projected Standings
1.North Carolina Tar Heels
2.Duke Blue Devils
3.Florida State Seminoles
4.Virginia Tech Hokies
7 Clemson Tigers
8. North Carolina State Wolfpack
10. Boston College Eagles
11.Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets
12. Wake Forest Demon Deacons
1.) North Carolina-The Tar Heels rebounded surprisingly well last season as their young players after a slow start really took off as the Tar Heels went from a fringe Top 25 team to one of the favorites come tournament time. The Tar Heels this year will be counted on from day 1 to succeed as they appear to be the clear favorite in college basketball largely thanks to a talented trio that all chose to return to school. That trio, Tyler Zeller, Harrison Barnes and John Henson combined for an amazing 44 points and 23 rebounds last season and all could have moved on for the NBA but chose to return to school to pursue a championship. Last season after a 4-3 start Roy Williams turned the point guard duties over to freshman Kendall Marshall who averaged 6 points and 6 assists and led Carolina to a 29-8 record and a regular season ACC title. That switch was the turning point for Carolina as Marshall seemed to settle down a young Tar Heel team on his way to becoming one of the best “true point guards” in the nation. Offensively North Carolina will be led by senior Tyler Zeller who really took his game to that next level last season averaging 16 points and 7 rebounds. Zeller took his game one step farther in the NCAA Tournament emerging as a dominant post scorer averaging 26 points and 9 rebounds in 4 NCAA Tournament games while becoming the go to player for the ‘Heels. The other key offensive player will be Harrison Barnes who struggled to meet almost impossible expectations last season but finished strong with averages of 16 points and 6 boards. Barnes more than anyone appears ready for a breakout season as the sophomore and former top overall recruit has a year of experience and confidence under his belt now to go along with his unparalleled ability. Down low look for John Henson to keep improving offensively as the freakishly long forward averaged 12 points last season in addition to his amazing rebounding and block totals. Henson is an athletic specimen who originally was very raw offensively but seems to be really improving on that end as his offensive game is slowly catching up with his already NBA ready defensive play. Also expected to contribute this season are 2 McDonald’s All Americans James McAdoo and P.J. Hairston. McAdoo gives North Carolina more frontline scoring and depth while Hairston could be an explosive scorer off the bench who should help North Carolina improve their poor 3-point shooting numbers(33%). In terms of role players UNC also returns defensive stalwart Dexter Strickland and former McDonald’s All-American Reggie Bullock but received bad news when backup guard Leslie McDonald tore his ACL this offseason and is likely lost for the year. UNC will have to get used to being the hunted once again as their young players are now going to be expected to reach the Final Four and win an ACC title. I expect Harrison Barnes to have a breakout season as he should really settle in and become the player Carolina expected him to be last season as a freshman. Barnes and Zeller are legitimate All-America selections and if freshmen McAdoo and Hairston contribute there is no reason the Tar Heels won’t reach the Final Four in New Orleans. Kendall Marshall is the key as his leadership and court vision will determine jus how good Roy Williams’ Tar Heels can be this year.
2. )Duke- The bad news for Duke is that their best 3 players from last year are gone as #1 overall pick Kyrie Irving, and fellow draft picks Nolan Smith(21st Portland) and Kyle Singler(33rd Detroit) have all moved on to play professionally. Smith and Singler, 2 staples from Dukes National Championship team 2 seasons ago were both All-ACC performers and will be missed not only for their scoring and rebounding but for their tremendous leadership and heart. Duke will especially miss Smith the reigning ACC-Player of the Year who averaged 21 points, 5 rebounds and 5 assists during a banner senior season. Irving on the other hand missed most of last season with a foot injury but was a times the best player in college basketball but left Duke after just one injury plagued year. The good news for Duke is that they have reloaded and amazingly remain a top 10 preseason pick largely due to their incoming freshman class. Coach Krzyzewski’s recruiting class features 5 players ranked in the top 50 according to ESPN led by top 5 recruit Austin Rivers. Austin Rivers who in some publications is the top ranked recruit is the son of Celtics head coach Doc Rivers and is expected to be one of Duke’s leading scorers this season. Rivers a 6-4 guard is a prolific scorer who can both shoot from 25 feet or aggressively drive the rack and finish with contact. Rivers might be the most advanced offensive player in this year’s class and his tremendous shooting range and ability to score in a variety of ways make him unstoppable at times. Duke also brings in highly touted point guard Quinn Cook from prestigious Oak Hill Academy, fundamentally sound forward Michael Gbinije and forwards Alex Murphy and Marshall Plumlee. The key returnees for Duke will be led by Seth Curry who last season had some big games but was mostly relegated to being a role player (9.0ppg). Curry this season along with fellow 3-point marksmen Andre Dawkins will be expected to scorer more and expect both to be up to the task. Curry is more than capable of being a go to scorer as during his freshman season at Liberty he led the Flames in scoring at over 20 points per game. Look for Curry and Dawkins, specifically Curry to increase their scoring totals on this young team as Duke must replace the scoring vacated by Smith, Irving and Singler. Besides youth and lack of experience the other key question mark with Duke is post play. Duke will really need contributions from the Plumlee trio and well as Ryan Kelly as the Blue Devils need rebounding and some occasional scoring from their interior players. Mason Plumlee I think is most likely to step up as the junior is the most athletic of the Plumlee clan and had very solid averages of 7 points and 9 rebounds as a sophomore. Duke does not return many of their go to scorers but their role players from last season and their highly touted freshmen should step up this season and have Duke right behind North Carolina in the ACC. Austin Rivers will make an immediate splash in Durham, and with Rivers, Curry and point guard Quinn Cook the Blue Devil have a dangerous trio of scorers in the backcourt. If Duke can get some solid play inside from the Plumlees and company the Blue Devils could have a very good year and could threaten to return to the Final Four even without Smith, Irving and Singler.
3.Florida State- While Duke and North Carolina received most of the attention last season in the ACC, the Seminoles of Florida State quietly had a very good season finishing 11-5 in conference and reaching the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament. This year FSU is once again the pick to finish behind Duke and Carolina but that has more to do with the weakness of the conference than who the Seminoles return. FSU loses their 2 leading scorers in Chris Singleton and Derwin Kitchen which is scary considering who offensively challenged the ‘Noles were with those 2 players last year. Singleton is the biggest loss as he was FSU’s best player on both ends of the floor leading the team in scoring at 13 points a game in addition to being named ACC-Defensive Player of the Year each of the last 2 seasons. Even with the early departure of Singleton, FSU returns a solid nucleus of players led by Bernard James, guards Deividas Dulkys and Luke Loucks and former McDonald’s All-American Michael Snaer. The issue this season for FSU like it has been in years past will be scoring. The Seminoles will once again be stout on the defensive end under Leonard Hamilton but career role players like James, Snaer, Loucks and Dulkys will have to take on more of a scoring load with someone emerging as a go to offensive option. Two players likely to breakout this season are 26 year old defensive stopper Bernard James and the former standout high school player Michael Snaer. James, an Iraq War veteran flourished late last season as the 6-10 senior played his best ball during FSU’s tournament run averaging 11 points, 10 rebounds and almost 4 blocks over the 3 games. Snaer on the other hand is FSU’s leading returning scorer at just under 9 points a game but has not had the offensive impact expected of him during his first 2 seasons. Now that Singleton is gone, expect Snaer to pick up some of the scoring slack and become that go to scorer FSU envisioned when they recruited him. FSU has a very strong frontline with Bernard James, Xavier Gibson, Terrence Shannon and Okaro White so expect FSU to rank among the nation’s leaders in blocked shots and rebounding margin, 2 statistics that will be key to their success this season. FSU will look for sound guard play from Dulkys, Loucks and sophomore speedster Ian Miller but most of FSU’s damage this season will be done down on the block and on the offensive glass. FSU will also welcome offensive contributions from highly touted freshman Antwan Space and former Arkansas transfer Jeff Peterson who is eligible to play immediately because he has already graduated. Leonard Hamilton’s squad will have to make up for the loss of All-ACC performer Chris Singleton but with tremendous front court depth and a pair of senior guards expect the Seminoles to reach the Big Dance for the 4th consecutive season.
4.) Virginia Tech-The Hokies once again left their fate up to the NCAA Selection Committee last season and once again they were left out of the NCAA field for the 4th time in 5 years. This year Seth Greenberg will have to fill the void left by the graduation of 2 tremendous seniors Jeff Allen and Malcolm Delaney. Delaney, was the Hokies’ leading scorer the past 3 seasons and finished his career as #3 scorer in school history. Allen on the other hand had a solid 4 year career, climaxing in a senior year where he took his game to the next level averaging a double-double with 13 points and 10 boards. This year Virginia Tech will count on a pair of returning guards as the Hokies’ aspirations will hinge largely on the shoulders of Erick Green and Dorenzo Hudson. Hudson who missed all but 9 games last year with a foot injury is back healthy and Seth Greenberg hopes he can duplicate his junior season of 2009 in which he averaged 15 points a game. Hudson will be paired with Erick Green a 6-4 guard who emerged last season in the absence of Hudson and averaged 11 points and 3 assists last year alongside Malcolm Delaney. This year the 2 should combine to form one of the better backcourts in the ACC and if the Hokies can get some consistent post play, Virginia Tech could finally crack the NCAA field even without the star power of players like Malcolm Delaney and Jeff Allen. The other key player this season will be highly touted freshman Dorian Finney-Smith a forward who ESPN ranks as the 18th best prospect in the 2011 freshmen class. Dorian Finney Smith is a smooth wing who can attack the rim, rebound on the offensive glass and shoot from beyond the 3-point arc and instantly will be counted on for scoring as a freshman. Other expected contributors this year will Victor Davila(7.4ppg, 5rpg) and forward J.T Thompson who missed last season but averaged 7 points and 5 boards as a junior in 2009-10. Seth Greenberg will also look to a trio of incoming freshmen from the Hargrave Military Academy for contributions. The trio of C.J. Barksdale, Robert Brown and Marquis Rankin will all be counted on for minutes off the bench as Virginia lacks much returning depth and could use some production from their freshmen. Even after losing their best 2 players expect Virginia Tech to compete during a down year for the ACC. The Hokies are not as good as last year but with a veteran backcourt and some promising young freshmen, the Hokies should finally be primed for an NCAA Tournament berth under Seth Greenberg something they have not been able to achieve since 2007.
5.) Miami- After only 1 NCAA tournament appearance in 7 seasons under Frank Haith, Miami decided to bring in a proven head coach with tournament experience. That coach Jim Larranaga formerly of George Mason has “plenty” of experience, 27 years of head coaching experience to be exact. Larranaga left a good situation at George Mason but walks into another good one as the Miami Hurricanes return their top 3 scorers led by guards Malcolm Grant and Durand Scott. Scott and Grant both originally from New York are tough minded guards who can both score and pass effectively. This season Larranaga will try to up the defensive tempo which should feed into the games of Grant and Scott who both like to get out and run in transition. The other key returnee for the ‘Canes is Reggie Johnson an immovable force on the offensive end who was only slowed down last season by foul trouble. Miami and Johnson though suffered a tough break this summer as Johnson who averaged 12 points and 10 rebounds last year tore his meniscus in his knee and will be out until ACC play starts in January. Losing Johnson for half the season is a tough blow to the new look ‘Canes but don’t write off Miami just yet as the Hurricanes still have one of the best backcourts in the ACC and shoot the 3-pointer as well as anyone in the conference at 38 percent. Outside of Grant and Scott, Miami returns 3 point gunners Rion Brown and Garrius Adams, defensive center Julian Gamble and 6-7 wing DeQuan Jones. This season it will be up to Malcolm Grant and Durand Scott to take the Hurricanes to the next level especially without Reggie Johnson, as the two New York City guards will be counted on to provide the bulk of the scoring for the ‘Canes. Jim larranaga inherits a pretty decent situation as he walks into a program with 2 veteran guards, an established post player and some capabale outside shooters so expect the ‘Canes to contend for an NCAA berth. If Miami can weather the storm in non-conference play without Reggie Johnson the Hurricanes could be in position to earn an NCAA berth in an Atlantic Coast Conference that is way down this season. Larranaga should do well during year 1 in Coral Gables but his longterm success will hinge on how he is able to recruit, specifically in the talent rich state of Florida.
6.) Virginia- This is not a misprint. I’m picking the Cavaliers to finish in the top half of the ACC this season because of strong core of returning players and not to harp on it but a very weak conference. Tony Bennett has made strides in his first 2 years in Charlottesville but this season Bennett and UVA fans will be looking for a lot more than a .500 season. The Cavaliers will be led by forward Mike Scott who was averaging 15 points and 10 rebounds last season before going down with an ankle injury after 10 games. Scott is back for a 5th season and I expect the physical forward to have a huge season and make a name for himself nationally on an underrated UVA team. Scott who averaged 12 and 7 as a junior is one of the best rebounders in the country at his height and will be a strong contender for ALL-ACC honors this season. The Cavaliers in all return 6 of their top 7 scorers from last year and should be in the conversation for post season play with players like Mike Scott and Sammy Zeglinski. Zeglinski headlines a trio of formidable outside shooters as Zeglinski (8ppg), Joe Harris (10.4ppg) and K.T. Harrell (8ppg) all shot better than 39 percent from 3- point range last season. This statistic will be key to Virginia’s success as the Cavaliers were one of the better 3 –point shooting teams in the ACC and that will need to continue if the Cavs want to improve on last years’ 17 win campaign. Leading assist man Jontel Evans(3.5apg) also returns and pairs with Zeglinski to form a solid veteran backcourt for Tony Bennett. Although UVA relies on the 3-point shot they will need to improve as a rebounding team as they ranked 11th last year in the ACC but should improve with a healthy Scott and the return of 7 foot center Assane Sene. Virginia will also receive a boost from 2 incoming freshmen Malcolm Brogdon and Paul Jesperson. Brogdon is expected to be an immediate contributor as he is a sharp shooter from the 2 guard spot but also has recently improved his game as a penetrator Jesperson is also a good outside shooter but at 6-7 he can also play the wing effectively and draw larger defenders away from the basket. The Cavaliers should be better this season and expect them to finish in the top half of the ACC behind strong play from one of the most underrated players in the country Mike Scott and a group of sharp shooters led by Sammy Zeglinski, K.T. Harrell and the freshman Malcolm Brogdon. UVA will contend in the ACC and could be in the ballpark for an NCAA berth this year but I don’t think they have enough just yet to reach the NCAA’S but the NIT is definitely attainable for Bennett and the Wahoos.
7.) Clemson- Last season Clemson surprised many prognosticators by reaching the NCAA Tournament under 1st year coach Brad Brownell. If Clemson is able to repeat that feat this season it will be just as surprising as the Tigers lose their top 2 scorers to graduation as point guard DeMontez Stitt (14.5ppg, 3.3apg) and center Jerai Grant (12.4ppg, 6.7rpg) both have expended their eligibility. These 2 players put up great numbers last season but their leadership and experience will be missed just as much as their scoring and rebounding. Clemson’s leading returning scorer this season is Andre Young a 5-9 guard, who shot just under 40% last season from 3-point range. Also returning for Clemson are returning starters Tanner Smith (8ppg), Devin Booker (8ppg, 5.5rpg) and former McDonald’s All-American Milton Jennings. Young will be counted on to lead the way in terms of scoring this year but the Tigers’ will also need key contributions from post players Booker and Jennings. Jennings and Booker are both very talented and physically gifted but so far the 2 have been inconsistent and disappointing during the college careers. This season the 2 will see major minutes and both will have an opportunity to erase the bust labels that have been associated with their names during their first 2 seasons of college ball. I would look for both to make major strides this year as the 2 will be counted on for scoring in support of Andre Young. Although Clemson loses Stitt and Grant they do return 3 starters and have a solid nucleus for 2nd year coach Brad Brownell to build on down in Tiger country. Also at Brownell’s disposal will be senior reserve Bryan Narcisse and incoming freshman Bernard Sullivan. Sullivan an effective post scorer adds to the depth of Clemson’s frontline which should be among the best in the ACC as long as Booker and Jennings progress like expected. Backcourt depth will be a major question mark as Young is not a true point guard and Clemson’s only other point guards are true freshmen. Young will be the Tigers’ primary ballhandler but in order to get him open 3-point shots look for either Daniel Sapp or Rod Hall to emerge as point guard option for the Tigers. The Tigers return a solid core of players and if they can get the most out of players like Milton Jennings, Devin Booker and Bryan Narcisse, Clemson could be in contention for a NCAA bubble berth with teams like Miami and Virginia Tech. Brad Brownell already has inked some highly touted recruits for 2012 and with a solid young core Brownell could be building something special for years to come in Clemson.
8.) North Carolina State- After failing to reach the NCAA Tournament in 5 seasons under Sidney Lowe, North Carolina State brass looked to hire a coach with a tournament pedigree to get them back to the Big Dance. N.C. State gets that in new coach Mark Gottfried formerly of Alabama and Murray State. Gottfried has led his teams to the postseason in 10 of his 12 full seasons as a head coach including 7 NCAA Tournament appearances. Gottfried inherits a team that won 15 games last season but has a lot more talent than their win total would indicate. That talent starts with C.J. Leslie the teams’ leading returning scorer and rebounder who averaged 11 points and 7 rebounds last year as a freshman. Leslie a former McDonald’s All-American has unlimited potential but his attitude and selfishness at times got in the way last season and hurt not only his own game but his team. This year Leslie will have to adjust to a new coaching staff but he should remain the top offensive option for the Wolfpack and could have a big year if he focuses on basketball. N.C. State will also look to guards Scott Wood and Lorenzo Brown for contributions as Wood is the teams’ best outside shooter at 42 percent, while Brown a sophomore should take over as the fulltime starting point guard now that Javier Gonzalez has graduated and Ryan Harrow has transferred to Kentucky. Wood who averaged 10 points a game last season will be counted on for more scoring this year as N.C. State tries to make up for the scoring vacated by Tracy Smith and Ryan Harrow. Also expected to see major minutes this season for North Carolina State are junior frontline players Richard Howell and Jordan Vandenberg. One impact freshman to keep an eye on is Tyler Harris the brother of Milwaukee Buck 1st round pick and former Tennessee forward Tobias Harris. Harris a 6-8 lefty wing is a threat both in the lane and from the perimeter and is a product of basketball factory St. Benedicts Prep in New Jersey. The Wolfpack will be in a rebuilding phase this season but with C.J. Leslie and sharpshooter Scott Wood, North Carolina State will be in many of their games this season. Mark Gottfried is a safe selection as head coach as he is a proven winner but this year I see N.C. State sitting around the .500 plateau for most of this season. C.J. Leslie could have a big season individually but North Carolina State lacks a multitude of talent around him and will miss the NCAA’s for the 6th consecutive season.
9.) Maryland- A new era begins in College Park as legendary coach Gary Williams retired after 22 seasons at Maryland in which he led the Terps to 461 wins, 14 NCAA Appearances, 2 Final Fours and the National Championship in 2001-2002. In steps Mark Turgeon who at the relatively young age of 46 has already tallied 250 head coaching wins in stops at Jacksonville State, Wichita State and Texas A&M. Unfortunately for Turgeon he steps into a traditional powerhouse that has its weakest team on paper in recent memory. The Terps return very little from last years’ team that underperformed to the tune of 19 wins and a 7-9 conference record. Gone are Jordan Williams (16.9ppg, 11.8rpg), Dino Gregory (9.1ppg 5.8rpg), Cliff Tucker (9.6ppg) and Adrian Bowie(8.8ppg, 3.5apg) leaving Terrell Stoglin and Sean Mosley as the only key returning contributors. Stoglin, the Terrapins 2nd leading scorer and assist man last season with averages of 11 points and 3 assists is the key returnee for new head coach Turgeon. Mosley on the other hand is a very sound defender and role player (8ppg) but will be counted on to be a secondary scorer this year on a team that returns very little in terms of scoring or experience. Stoglin just a sophomore will be one of the better guards In the ACC this season but Maryland has very little around him which will make it tough for the Terps to compete for a berth in postseason play. Another returning player expected to step up this year will be sophomore Pe’Shon Howard who showed flashes as both a scorer and a playmaker during his first season in College Park. Another player to watch will be incoming freshman Nick Faust. Faust who is ranked in the top 50 incoming freshmen by almost every recruiting service is a 6-6 guard who brings a polished offensive game to Maryland. Faust is a very athletic wing type player who can go the rim, pull up from mid- range or knock down the 3-point shot over his defender due to his length. Look for the freshman to be one of the Terrapins top scorers this year as Faust should be a strong candidate for the All-ACC Freshman team and could be a very good player down the road if he hangs around in College Park. In the paint Maryland will rely on players like James Padgett and Mychal Parker to make major strides this year to make up for the loss of a double-double machine Jordan Williams. Those 2 players averaged only a combined 5 points and 3 rebounds last season numbers Maryland will need to rise considerably if they want to be competitive in games in the ACC. Maryland will not be the most talented team in the ACC with only 8 or 9 scholarship players but they will take on the tough defensive mindset of their head coach, which will keep them competitive and moving in the right direction for the future. Also in the mix this season will be Haukur Palsson a 6-6 forward originally from Iceland who last season saw increased minutes down the stretch and should build on that experience early this season and compete for a starting job. Although this year no one will “Fear the Turtle”, Maryland should install a tough defensive system in an attempt to claw out victories against more talented opponents. The ACC should get their shots in now at Maryland because I don’t expect the Terrapins to be down for long as Turgeon has already signed 3 high profile recruits for the class of 2012 and his 97-40 record at Texas A&M clearly exhibit the man can flat out coach.
10.) Boston College- After inheriting a veteran laden team last season replacing Al Skinner, Steve Donahue is forced to start from scratch this year in his 2nd season at Boston College. The Eagles lose their top 5 scorers from last year and their leading returning scorer Danny Rubin, averaged just 4 points a game last season. With very little returning this year Donahue will earn his pay check as he will look for role players and a series of freshmen to rise up with the departures of players like Reggie Jackson and Joe Trapani. Two players that will be expected to slide into larger roles will be leading returning scorer Danny Rubin and expected starting point guard Gabirel Moton. Moton should replace Biko Paris at point guard while Rubin should become the Eagles best shooter and starting 2 guard in his sophomore season. Although the Eagles will rely heavily on their sophomore backcourt, freshman Ryan Anderson may be the most important player for Boston College this year. The 6-8 Anderson is the highest rated recruit Boston College has brought in since Reggie Jackson and should get an immediate opportunity to impress on a team with 11 newcomers and 9 freshmen. Anderson the 2011 California Gatorade High School Player of the Year, is a solid face up forward who has very good shooting touch even extending out to 3-point range and also is a capable rebounder and a good passer. Anderson will be expected to play major minutes and provide big production and will most likely be a starter from day 1 in Chestnut Hill. Another newcomer who is expected to step right in and start is Matt Humphrey a transfer from the University of Oregon who in 2 seasons averaged 5 points a game for the Ducks. Humphrey when he was recruited was expected to be a big time scorer both in transition and behind the 3-point line and a fresh start at Boston College could be just what Humphrey needs to jump start his career. BC will definitely look for major contributions from Humphrey and Anderson but they are not the only newcomers who will be counted on. Steve Donahue also brings in 6 other freshmen in addition to Anderson, many of them not elite level recruits but solid players who should fit nicely into Donahue’s system. BC brings in 2 bigmen in Dennis Clifford and K.C. Caudill. Clifford is a very skilled shooter at 7-0 who fits Donahue’s fast pace system while Caudill is more of a banger who can clean up on the offensive glass and finish around the rim. In terms of guards BC very quietly brings in a very good duo of freshmen from California in Jordan Daniels and Lonnie Jackson. Jordan Daniels is a 5-8 speedster, who was not highly recruited because of height but has all the point guard skills to be a good 4 year player and should gain valuable experience this year as a freshman. Jackson on the other hand is a Steve Donahue player as he is a prolific outside shooter who will help keep BC among the best outside shooting teams in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Another freshman to watch will be Eddie Odio who at 6-6 has a solid shooting touch and should continue to improve his range with more experience. Boston College will go through a tough rebuilding year but their underrated recruiting class and coach Steve Donahue’s system will help the Eagles build toward a brighter future. The Eagles lose 95 percent of their scoring and rebounding and 88 percent of the teams assists but a plethora of exciting newcomers and a few young retuning guards will help BC avoid the basement of the ACC. Steve Donahue formerly of Cornell has never been able to grab the top recruits but he does know how to recruit the right players for his system and I think this class quietly will go down as one of the better ones in recent years at Boston College. BC on paper doesn’t jump out at you but the players in place fit Donahue’s 3-point offense well and the Eagles will once again live and die with the 3 this season.
11.) Georgia Tech- As I mentioned earlier the ACC at the bottom is very weak as Wake Forest, Boston College and Georgia Tech all have a number of glaring weaknesesses and I personally would be shocked if any of these schools won more than 5 conference games this season. Georgia Tech gets the nod at #11 in the ACC because of they return the best player of the bottom 2 schools in Glen Rice Jr. Tech also brings in a new coach in Brian Gregory and brings in the most highly touted freshman of the 3 schools. Rice Jr. will be the key for the Yellow Jackets this season as they will rely heavily on the junior guard for scoring now that Iman Shumpert has moved onto the NBA. Rice Jr. had an a solid sophomore season with averages of 12 points, almost 6 rebounds and 2.5 assists but his shooting was inconsistent as he shot only 42 percent from the floor and 30 percent from 3 signs he forced things and sometimes had poor shot selection. Rice Jr. will evolve into the primary option this year for Brian Gregory but outside of him little returns for the Jackets. Also expected to have an impact this season will be guards Mfon Udofia and Jason Morris who combined for 13 points last season. This year Udofia and Morris will be expected to score more often as without Shumpert and Brian Oliver the Jackets will try to piece together 28 points they lost from last season. Georgia Tech will also look for early contributions from their lone freshman Julian Royal, an ESPNU Top 100 recruit out of the state of Georgia. Royal is a 6-8 power forward who is very skilled inside and also possesses a decent mid-range offensive game but must work on his conditioning and defensive effort to fulfill his potential. With very little returning in the frontcourt expect Royal to compete for a starting position with sophomore Kammeon Holsey who averaged 14 minutes a game last season. Brian Gregory finally has his “primetime coaching gig” at Georgia Tech but he walks into a far from desirable situation in year 1. Gregory can coach and his ability to recruit which he showed at Dayton should help him to continue to grab the top players in the state of Georgia like his predecessor Paul Hewitt was able to do. The Yellow Jackets will not be playing in the postseason this season but it’s only fair to give Brian Gregory some time before we start pointing fingers and dishing out coaching grades.
12.) Wake Forest- Jeff Bzdelik is back for his 2nd season in the ACC and the former Air Force and Colorado coach hopes his young team will continue to progress from last seasons’ 8 win campaign. Wake Forest was the youngest team in the conference last season and this year their players are a year older and a year wiser which Bzdelik hopes translates into more victories. The bad news for Wake is that 3 players who were expect to make major contributions this season have left the team for conduct and off the court issues as Ty Walker, Melvin Tabb and the teams 2nd leading scorer J.T. Terrell have all been suspended or have left the team. The key returnee for the Demon Deacons is sophomore Travis McKie who had a banner freshman season leading Wake Forest in scoring at 13 points per game and rebounding at 8 boards per game. McKie is a bully down low in terms of rebounding and when he gets the ball in good positions he finishes with the best of them in the ACC, shooting 50 percent from the field during his freshman season. Also returning for Wake Forest is junior guard C.J. Harris who averaged 10 points and 3.5 assists last year but needs to improve his turnover to assist ratio which was just 1-1. The key loss is Terrell, who although sometimes selfish and erratic, was a capable scorer who would have helped this team greatly as a sophomore. With Harris and Terrell the Deacons would have had a very productive backcourt but without him Wake Forest will have to once again find a shooting guard. One option at guard will be freshman Chase Fischer who is a knock down outside shooter but is very one dimensional at this point. Fischer may help this team some offensively this year but his all-around game needs a lot of work before he can be counted on to be anything but a catch and shoot guy. Another freshman to watch is Anthony Fields a tough point guard who made very good decisions as a high school point guard and could move to the point and allow Harris to be more of a scorer off the ball. In terms of post players Wake will look to Carson Derosiers and Nikita Mescheriakov, Mescheriakov is a skilled bigman who played sparingly during first 2 seasons at Georgetown. Wake Forest will be hurt this season by their 3 unexpected departures but Travis McKie is a really good player poised for a big season individually. Wake Forest is a program that is still way off at this point but Bzdelik has a big recruiting class on tap for 2012 and if the Demon Deacons can continue to progress next year they could once again become relevant.
ACC Preseason Accolades
G-Malcolm Grant, Miami
G-Austin Rivers, Duke
F-Harrison Barnes, North Carolina
F-Mike Scott, Virginia
C-Tyler Zeller, North Carolina
G- Terrell Stoglin, Maryland
G-Seth Curry, Duke
F-Michael Snaer, Florida State
F- C.J. Leslie, North Carolina State
C- John Henson, North Carolina
Player of the Year-Harrison Barnes, North Carolina
Last year Harrison Barnes became the first freshman to be selected as an AP Preseason All-American and Barnes frankly struggled to live up to the gaudy and in reality unfair hype. No he wasn’t an All-American but Barnes had a very good freshman season averaging 15.7 ppg and 5.8 rpg, helping his team to an Elite 8 appearance. Barnes who could have gone to the NBA is back this year and expect him to have a breakout season now that he has a year of experience under his belt to go along with his all-world ability. Barnes is a special talent and in his 2nd year in Chapel Hill look for the 6-8 forward to build off a strong finish last year and emerge as a legitimate National Player of the Year candidate. North Carolina is once again the team to beat and with Harrison Barnes on their side, there is no guarantee they will be beat this season. Harrison Barnes may not have lived up to the unprecedented hype he garnered as a freshman but this year Barnes will prove he is every bit as good as advertised and help lead North Carolina deep into March.
Also Considered: Tyler Zeller-North Carolina, Austin Rivers-Duke, Malcolm Grant-Miami, Bernard James-Florida State
Freshman of the Year-Austin Rivers, Duke
This year the ACC is a young conference with a lot of impact freshmen but 1 freshman will stand above the rest and that is Austin Rivers. Rivers, may just be the best freshman in all of the land and his all-around offensive game and ability will be put to use from day 1 in Durham. The Blue Devils will be a very young team and on that team expect Rivers to emerge as the offensive star as he possesses tremendous shooting range, dribbling ability and great finishing ability inside. Don’t expect Rivers to blend in this season as this freshman will become a household name very early in his first season of college basketball. Duke will need someone to step up without Nolan Smith, Kyle Singler and Kyrie Irving and the freshman Rivers has the skills and the confidence to lead the Blue Devils at the tender age of 19. Duke will rely on young Rivers to put up huge numbers if they want to contend with Carolina in the ACC and the Naismith Prep Player of the Year should be more than up to the task. Coach K doesn’t get this excited about freshmen often so you know Rivers is the real deal.
Also Considered: Dorian Finney-Smith-Virginia Tech, James McAdoo-North Carolina, Malcolm Brogdon-Virginia, Antwan Space-Florida State.
Coach of the Year-Tony Bennett, Virginia
This was a tough one as there are a number of coaches who will have tough jobs this year in the ACC but Tony Bennett of Virginia sticks out when you look at how his program has gradually improved since the 10 win team he inherited 3 seasons ago. Bennett finally has a competitive roster and his team looks like they can contend for at least the NIT if not the NCAA’s which would be something when you consider where this program was just 3 years ago. UVA will sneak up on some people this year and a top 5 finish from the Cavs would merit some recognition for Bennett who has done a great job with this team. Bennett gets the most out of his players and that will be rewarded this season as the Cavs should qualify for some form of postseason play. Lookout for Miek Scott and the Cavs as Virginia will no longer be the whipping boy of the ACC.
Also Considered: Mark Turgeon-Maryland, Seth Greenberg-Virginia Tech, Jim Larranaga-Miami, Leonard Hamilton-Florida State.
Most Improved Player-Michael Snaer, Florida State
Most times when you think of Most Improved Players you don’t think of top recruits or heralded high school players but with Michael Snaer both labels fit. Snaer was a McDonald’s All-American 3 years ago and after 2 so-so offensive seasons will be called upon to lead FSU on the offensive end as a junior. FSU’s leading scorer and best player Chris Singleton is gone and that leaves Snaer(8.8ppg) as the teams’ leading returning scorer. Snaer who has struggled offensively in his first 2 seasons has the ability to score as he was the 2009 California Gatorade Player of the Year and led Rancho Verde High in scoring at over 28 points per contest. This season is the breakout for Snaer as he will finally be the primary option and if can find that scoring touch he exhibited in high school the sky is limit for him and the rest of the ‘Noles. Look for Snaer to dwarf his numbers of 9 points and 3 rebounds and also to shoot a better percentage as he elevates from role player to star during his junior season.
Also Considered: Bernard James-Florida State, Milton Jennings-Clemson, Seth Curry-Duke, Sean Mosley-Marland
Best Game: February 8th Duke at North Carolina/ March 3rd North Carolina at Duke
Duke vs. North Carolina need I say more. Seriously a no brainer as the biggest rivalry in college basketball enters another year with both teams ranked in the top 10. North Carolina and Duke is always worth the price of admission and when the teams are this good which they have been a lot recently it even adds to the rivalry and the spectacle that is the battle for Tobacco Road. This game will have more than enough star power as Tyler Zeller, Harrison Barnes and Kendall Marshall take on a young Duke team with Seth Curry and freshmen phenoms Austin Rivers and Quinn Cook. With both teams stacked with future NBA Lottery picks grab some popcorn and enjoy the show. The Zeller vs. Plumlee family rivalry is also an interesting side story not that this rivalry needed any more of those.
Also Considered: None. | <urn:uuid:a3a46b62-f209-46a0-8782-38b55372a70e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tshq.co/2011/10/the-gap-widens-duke-and-north-carolina-continue-to-separate-themselves-from-the-rest-of-the-acc/ | 2013-05-22T07:35:36Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970102 | 8,952 |
Every year Hauntworld.com releases the premier list of haunted houses, haunted hayrides, scream parks, Halloween attractions, corn mazes, real haunted houses and even home haunted houses. By doing so, Hauntworld.com has helped even the smallest home haunts become nationally recognized, allowing some to even progress into major, professional attractions. Hauntworld.com has also helped many local haunted houses receive national recognition as one of America’s best haunted houses in the nation. Many of the best haunted houses in the World were discovered and promoted on this very list, our annual list of the best haunted houses in America.
The haunted house industry started back in the early 1970's predominantly as charity attractions. Then later into the 1980's, they transformed into huge local screams! With the invention of the internet and more specifically high speed internet access, haunted houses could cost-effectively showcase videos, photos, logos and more towards the worldwide promotion of their events as high end attractions, gaining the kind of national awareness that only places like Disney World or Universal Studios were able to garner prior.
Haunted houses flourished, finding new audiences and creating worldwide identities as tourist hotspots. Today, there are people from all over the WORLD planning Fall vacations in search of attending the best haunted house attractions in the world. Many load up their vehicles, take off work for a week, and travel from city to city finding haunted houses throughout the nation that make their heart pound and the hair on the back of their neck rise. They’re in search of finding that ultimate high and extreme sensation that ONLY a haunted house can create. Hollywood can NO LONGER compete with the live experience of fear. The debut of horror movies have moved out of October, because haunted houses get all the press and hype. Today, haunted houses are better attracting their attention, and haunted houses are getting millions of people from around the WORLD lined up for miles to enter their favorite haunted houses.
Today’s horror fans flock to haunted houses to experience live, in-your-face thrills, suspense, screams and terror. They seek that fear, REAL FEAR, only found in live experiences. Haunted houses today are sophisticated with high tech special effects. These are the same high end effects you'd find in major motion movies and multimillion dollar theme parks. The haunted house industry is much like the movie industry, in that it creates very emotional experiences, but the difference is motion pictures are creating movie experiences; haunted houses are creating unforgettable memories that last a lifetime. Many times the movie industry over hypes or over sells a film. Well, haunted houses do the same. Like the movies, haunted houses have very little time to make the public aware of the product and sell the tickets.
Today, you can find the best deals on hotels from a single website. You can find the best prices on airfare. From vacations to cars to shoes, you can read and write reviews about places and products you’ve experienced. Thanks to www.Hauntworld.com, people who love to SCREAM now have a place to call HOME, a place to share their haunting experiences, their passions, and their love of haunted houses and all things haunted.
John Carpenter's Halloween might have started the whole craze of fearing “the boogie man” on film, but haunted houses have taken the love of fear to the next level. This Halloween, remember what you love about Halloween and about horror movies. Indulge in that overwhelming desire to feel real fear, and visit YOUR favorite haunted house(s) in your community, in your state, across America and around the World.
Hauntworld.com will help you find the best haunted houses in America. With your help, we will share through social media, blogs, message boards and word-of-mouth our favorite haunted houses and pronounce them as THE BEST haunted houses in America and around the World. This year we present our 2011 list of the best haunted houses in America, best scream parks, best hayrides and best real haunted houses too.
Something new this year…You can VOTE for which haunted house YOU feel is the best in each state. Watch their videos, view their photos, and ultimately visit the haunts. Then, come back HERE to Hauntworld.com to VOTE for the best haunted houses in the World. Share this page on your Facebook page or Twitter account and ask America to come to Hauntworld.com to VOTE for their favorite haunted house too. We want to know which haunted house YOU believe to be the best haunted house in America 2011. Visit this page all October, and come November return to Hauntworld.com to view the results. We want YOU, our fans of FEAR, to tell America who has the best haunted house, the scariest haunted house in America!
1. Bates Motel & Haunted Hayride and Pennhurst Asylum Haunted Attraction in Philadelphia, PA Pennsylvania: The Bates Motel Haunted House & Hayride is a unique haunted attraction for several reasons: The Haunted Hayride is located deep in a 200-year-old forest full of overgrown trees creating the ultimate dark trail even during a full moon. This puts customers on edge even before ever entering the first hayride scene. Combined with a digital custom soundtrack, pyrotechnics and continuous scares throughout the ride, this hayride attraction is sure to create the ultimate haunting experience of your life! To read a more detailed article about this attraction, CLICK HERE or visit their website at www.TheBatesMotel.com. Additionally, The Pennhurst Asylum is one of the scariest haunted attraction sites in the world, mostly due to the setting of this haunt. It’s located in a 100-year-old, abandoned mental institute. The building itself will instill real fear and true horror in anyone. The Asylum has been investigated by professional ghost hunters and featured on Ghost Adventures and Ghost Hunters several times. This attraction is truly haunted. To read a more detailed article about this real haunted house CLICK HERE or visit their website at www.PennhurstAsylum.com. Bates Motel and Pennhurst Asylum are owned and operated by the same company and are within a short drive of each other. These have to be number one on our list for locations to get scared this Halloween.
2. The Darkness Haunted House in St. Louis, MO Missouri: The Darkness Haunted House is beyond belief with haunting atmosphere and terror. The Darkness is very much like a high end, Hollywood movie set. From room to room, the fear intensifies with never ending detail, special effects, animations, live actors, and more. It's simply the best. The Darkness rests inside a 100-year-old, two story warehouse and includes three attractions in one location for one price. If you can survive both stories of The Darkness, you will then enter the World’s best 3D haunted house, Terror Visions 3D. As you exit Terror Visions, you’ll find yourself inside The Monster Museum filled with real horror movie collectibles, full-sized horror images, and life-like monsters. The Darkness is a multimillion dollar attraction filled with terrifying experiences. With the ultimate creative team behind it, The Darkness truly stands out from year to year as one of America’s best haunted houses. Each year, they look for new ways to create the ultimate haunting experience for producing the best haunted house in America. To read a more detailed review, CLICK HERE or visit their website at www.Scarefest.com
3. 13th Gate Haunted House in Baton Rouge, LA Louisiana: 13th Gate Haunted House has it all. Their level of detail, set design, and effects combined with their impressive actors and incredible makeup effects can only be compared to the likes of Hollywood. As soon as you enter The 13th Gate Haunted House, you immediately realize you are inside no ordinary haunted house. Over 13 different indoor & outdoor fright zones make this huge scream factory a top haunt on our list. Haunted asylums, claustrophobic cellars, a real snake-infested Louisiana swamp, nightly voodoo shows, hidden subterranean passages and even a prehistoric ice cave all seamlessly woven together is nothing short of masterful. You never know what to expect around the next terrifying corner at 13th Gate. Plus, the company behind 13th Gate Haunted House, Midnight Production, will unveil their latest addition, Necropolis 13, new for 2011! Necropolis 13 is a 40,000 sq. ft. New Orleans style cemetery complete with over 400 zombie-infested crypts and mausoleums. Upon entering the attraction, visitors are sent 13 steps down an open grave into dark underground catacombs where they must find an alternate escape up and out into the cemetery where the terror continues! 13th Gate Haunted House is one of the best, most detailed haunted houses in the WORLD. To read a more detailed review CLICK HERE or visit their website www.13thgate.com
4. Headless Horseman Hayrides & Haunted Houses in Ulster Park, NY: Located in the Historic New York Haunted Hudson Valley, Headless Horseman offers a second-to-none haunted scream park featuring a massive corn maze, 6 haunted houses, a haunted hayride, side shows, 5 gift shops, 4 places to eat, and to top it off, you’ll even find professional actors riding around as THE Headless Horseman himself…Or are they actors? The property offers over forty-five acres of natural landscape that as night falls provides the perfect setting for the ultimate haunting. It’s one of the only haunted houses in America where they presell every ticket before ever opening… a true testament to how incredible this attraction has become! To read a more detailed review of this attraction CLICK HERE or visit their website www.headlesshorseman.com
5. Netherworld Haunted House in Atlanta, GA Georgia: The legendary NETHERWORLD Haunted House is a walk-through dark attraction filled with THE MOST terrifying live actors, special effects and monsters. They too always seek to produce an even scarier, over-the-top haunt for each coming year. Netherworld’s creators spare no expense in constantly improving and expanding. They play to every nightmare imaginable inside Netherworld Haunted House. Known for their originality of unique monsters and innovative scares, Netherworld Haunted House offers an over-the-top production that many in the industry consider to be the top horror attraction in the country. Created by film and television professionals, NETHERWORLD is also noted for its unique themes, stunts, costumes and sets. Netherworld has been featured on everything from Travel Channel to The Today Show and was even used as a filming location for the movie Zombieland. To read a full review of this attraction CLICK HERE or visit their website www.fearworld.com
6. Cutting Edge Haunted House in Dallas Fort Worth, TX Texas: Cutting Edge Haunted House was recognized by Guinness Book of World Records as the longest haunted house in the WORLD! Cutting Edge is located inside an old meat packing plant, the perfect setting for a gruesome haunting. Cutting Edge Haunted House features live sets, animations, and hundreds of live actors inside and outside the building. One of the best features of the attraction is all the real meat packing plant equipment left behind from when the planet closed years ago. Much of the meat packing theme has been incorporated into the setting of this attraction making this haunted house in Dallas Fort Worth Texas one of the most authentic haunted houses ever created. Cutting Edge Haunted House is waiting for you…Will you make it out alive? CLICK HERE to read a complete review of this attraction or visit them online at www.cuttingedgehauntedhouse.com
7. 13th Floor Haunted House in Phoenix, AZ Arizona: 13th Floor Phoenix isn’t just a 60,000 square foot onslaught of terror and insanity. It’s a mega haunted house offering one of the most detailed and terrifying haunted houses in America. Featuring 2 attractions that thematically span classical horror to modern day zombie apocalyptic carnage, this haunted house is a must see. You’ll first experience the essence of Halloween in a highly detailed series of haunted mansions, gothic graveyards, and tormented asylums that play out in fantastic wonder in what many have referred to as “one of the most impressive haunted houses in the country.” Inside the second attraction, Zombieland, patrons experience a one of a kind trip through the apocalypse as they navigate their way through a city infected with undead turmoil. The 13th Floor Phoenix features over 100 performers, amazing costumes, and horrifying thematic experiences that rival television and film in the scope and scale of its production. To read a detailed article about this attraction, CLICK HERE or visit their website www.13thflooraz.com
8. House of Torment Haunted Houses in Austin, TX Texas: House of Torment is widely considered to be one of the most innovative haunted houses in the country. Take a journey through its dynamic and ultra-creative attraction, The Reckoning, and when you think you’ve seen it all, you’ll find yourself in more terrifying danger as you enter their next attraction, Cursed. The Reckoning is an apocalyptic saga that takes customers through a devastated city that has suffered through virulent out breaks, alien invasions and ample amounts of destruction. The Reckoning features aerial stunts, giant animatronic monsters, massive movie quality sets, a crashed space ship, thrilling special effects, and nonstop action as war unfolds between hoards of the undead and the intergalactic Soul Reaper army. Cursed is an immersive experience taking customers on a journey through a haunted island where blood thirst savages attack and zombie pirates stalk the living. Dark terrors lurk in the shadows of ancient temples along with murky caves, thick jungles, and a massive shipwreck. The Reckoning and Cursed are both new for 2011! The highly revered House of Torment production team prides itself on creating new and vivid experiences each year for its avid fan base. To read a detailed review of this haunt, CLICK HERE or visit their website www.thehouseoftorment.com
9. Erebus 4 Story Haunted Attraction in Pontiac, MI Michigan: Erebus Haunted House is surrounded by tons of competing haunts, but that’s what keeps them on their toes, always staying ahead of the pack by making and developing their own unique scares that you can't see anywhere else but Erebus Haunted House. With over 30 years in the haunted house business, they are masters at creating things that will grab you, bite you, and even land on top of you. Imagine being placed in a room, doors slam, and 10,000 balls fall on your head to bury you alive! How long can YOU hold YOUR breath? New for the 2011 season, is Erubus’ WAR OF THE WORLDS section where the war between humans and aliens is raging. Watch in terror as you see an alien explode right before your eyes. To read a detailed review of Erebus, CLICK HERE or visit their website www.hauntedpontiac.com
10. Asylum Haunted House / 13th Floor in Denver, CO Colorado: If there is less oxygen, can you scream as loud? Visit The Asylum Haunted House, 13th Floor Haunted House, and Blood Shed Haunted House in Denver, Colorado and you’ll find out! There’s terror in the heart of the Mile High City. These haunted houses offer intense graphic experiences, where attention is paid to every detail ensuring those who visit have a frightening good time. It all begins with The Asylum, set in Gordon Cottingham’s Hospital for the criminally insane. It’s a damp and musty place infested with unimaginable nightmares and coupled with the endless screams of tortured souls. This year guests will be scared out of their minds with an insanely redesigned layout featuring new sets and effects that create a truly mind blowing experience. Then it’s onward to the 13th Floor, where the age-old question is answered…Where is the 13th Floor, and why is it absent in so many buildings? Find out as you board a haunted elevator for a heart-pounding ride to a thrilling adventure on the legendary 13th Floor. Superstition? Conspiracy? Supernatural? Or something far, far worse? Either way, be prepared, because there’s a plethora of updates added for 2011, including a mirror maze never before seen in Denver. It appears to provide you an endless supply of horrifying reflections. Visit the 13th Floor Haunted House and you are guaranteed an amazing journey through the most sought after haunted experience in Colorado. To read a detailed article about this attraction, CLICK HERE or visit their website www.getscared.com
11. The Dent Haunted Schoolhouse in Cincinnati, OH Ohio: Evil lurks within the walls of the school, and the basement is truly hell on earth at The Dent Schoolhouse haunted attraction in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s one of the most detailed haunted houses you will find in the nation. The schoolhouse uses Hollywood style animatronics, sets, actors and make-up making it one of America’s best haunted attractions. Classified as haunted, The Dent Schoolhouse was actually a school that opened in 1894 and has a grizzly past. Guests of The Dent Schoolhouse learn the true story of its murderous janitor, Charlie, and why locals have coined the term “hell’s basement” for the school’s basement. Charlie was never caught and brought to justice. Is it he who haunts the halls of the school to this day? For 2011, haunt seekers get to enter never before seen rooms of the school’s basement. Among the new rooms are Charlie’s workshop, bedroom, boiler room and even the janitor’s student holding cell. Plus, The Dent Haunted Schoolhouse will feature a brand new attraction for 2011, Detention Hall, a militarized zone with a zombie outbreak theme, included with every Dent ticket! Read a detailed review of Dent Schoolhouse by CLICKING HERE or visit their website www.frightsite.com
12. The 13th Floor Haunted House in San Antonio, TX Texas: The 13th Floor Haunted House is the flagship haunted attraction of America’s most haunted city, San Antonio, Texas. This is truly a testament to its high action, in-your-face premium production value among Texas haunted houses. Spanning 40,000 square feet across 3 stories in a 105 year old historic building, the 13th Floor San Antonio takes patrons through several levels of horror from the depths of its decrepit, underground basement. Through the wickedness of its massive gothic cemetery and into its horrifically fantastic haunted hotel, 13th Floor San Antonio customers get to experience a barrage of special effects, animatronic monsters and impeccably detailed sets. Add to that some of the most talented group of performers in the industry, and you’ve got a top notch, first rate haunted house that’s 2nd to none. Taking nothing for granted the 13th Floor San Antonio delivers 2 haunted experiences that continually raise the bar and push the limits of what a haunted house is and what a haunted house can become. To read a detailed review of this attraction, CLICK HERE or visit their website www.13thfloorsanantonio.com
13. Nightmare on the Bayou Haunted House in Houston, TX Texas: Located in the shadow of downtown Houston, TX next to Houston’s oldest graveyard, Nightmare on the Bayou is the name people think of when searching “HAUNTED TEXAS”. Nightmare on the Bayou is entering its 12th year in operation and has grown bigger and better with every year featuring newly designed scenes, Hollywood quality props, professional animatronics and dozens upon dozens of the most well-trained and highly supervised actors…CRAZED actors whose sole purpose is to scare you TO DEATH. Nightmare on the Bayou boasts, “The only haunted house in Houston with REAL ghosts,” and with being right next to the graveyard…I believe them! Ghost sightings are frequent from both customers and employees alike. Additionally, Nightmare On The Bayou is one of the only haunted house in America with a WORLD CLASS Halloween retail store for your ease and convenience. Learn more about Nightmare On The Bayou Haunted House in Houston, TX by visiting their website www.nightmareonthebayou.com
The list doesn't end there.
Who is brave enough to take on our list of 31 HAUNTS IN 31 NIGHTS, traveling across the country to visit the 31 best haunted houses in America? If you take on this journey, you need to contact us! If you don't find your favorite, scary haunted houses on this list, check our haunted house directory, CLICK HERE, to find the scariest haunted house in YOUR area. You can search the Hauntworld database for haunted houses, hayrides and more by city, by state, or by zip code. Now, the list continues with rankings 14-31 of the BEST haunted houses in America:
14. Haunted Hoochie & Dead Acres in Columbus, OH Ohio www.DeadAcres.com
15. Atrox Factory Haunted House in Birmingham, AL Alabama www.AtroxFactory.com
16. Bayville Scream Park in Long Island, NY New York www.BayvilleScreamPark.com
17. Blood Manor Haunted House in New York City, NY New York www.BloodManor.com
18. Haunted Overload, A New England Haunt in Lee, NH New Hampshire www.HauntedOverload.com
19. Disturbia Haunted Attraction in Huntsville, AL Alabama www.DisturbiaHauntedHouse.com
20. Field of Screams Haunted Houses in Lancaster, PA Pennsylvania www.FieldOfScreams.com
21. Terror Town Haunted Houses in Toledo, OH Ohio www.Terrortown.net
22. Terror Behind The Walls at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA Pennsylvania www.EasternState.org/halloween
23. Bennett’s Curse Haunted Houses in Baltimore, MD Maryland www.BennettsCurse.com
24. Creepyworld Haunted Scream Park in St. Louis, MO Missouri www.Scarefest.com
25. The Mortuary Haunted House in New Orleans, LA Louisiana www.TheMortuary.net
26. Jason’s Woods Haunted Attractions in Lancaster, PA Pennsylvania www.JasonsWoods.com
27. Pure Terror Scream Park in Orange County, NY New York www.PureTerror.com
28. Haunted Schoolhouse and Lab in Akron, OH Ohio www.hshlab.com
29. The Beast and Edge of Hell in Kansas City, MO Missouri www.EdgeOfHell.com
30. ScreamPark Haunted Houses in Lexington, KY Kentucky www.ScaryLexington.com
31. Haunted Hills Estate in Pittsburgh, PA Pennsylvania www.HauntedHillsEstate.com
THE SCREAMING DOESN'T END THERE…
What is a haunted hayride? For a haunted hayride, you board a wagon filled with people pulled by a tractor through haunted scenes where special FX are triggered causing folks to scream in horror. Additionally, live skits and well-timed scares are played out to give the ultimate haunted hayride experience. Generally, haunted hayrides are found on farms, at scream parks, in woods or other outside venue.
Haunted woods and haunted trails are paths thru forest, trees and/or brush designed to scare. These schematic trails through deep woods provide the best backdrop for a heart pounding thrill. Sets are installed with scary themes while live actors try to make you scream TO DEATH! Here is our list of the best outdoor haunted hayrides, haunted woods and haunted trails. Or for more haunted hayrides, visit www.HauntedHayrides.com
1. Headless Horseman Haunted Hayride in Ulster Park, New York www.HeadlessHorseman.com
2. Bates Motel & Hayride in Philadelphia, PA Pennsylvania www.TheBatesMotel.com
3. Field of Screams in Lancaster, PA Pennsylvania www.FieldOfScreams.com
4. Spookywoods in High Point, NC North Carolina - www.SpookyWoods.com
5. Creepyworld: Tombstone Haunted Hayride in St. Louis, MO Missouri www.Scarefest.com
6. Jason's Woods in Lancaster, PA Pennsylvania www.JasonsWoods.com
7. Haunted Overload in Lee, NH New Hampshire www.HauntedOverload.com
8. Creepywoods in Baltimore, MD Maryland www.Creepywoods.com
9. Fear Fest in Columbia, MO Missouri www.FearFestHauntedHouse.com
10. The Haunted Trail in San Diego, CA California www.HauntedHotel.com
To find a haunted hayride near you, visit www.HauntedHayrides.com
What do we mean by the top MOST OUTRAGEOUS haunted houses in America? Let us explain… The haunted houses on this list might be a full contact haunted house where the actors could grab you, or the animations might ram into you, or perhaps they just have very gruesome or disgusting themes and scenes. Some of these haunts are simply over the top including ones with devil worship style themes…Yikes! Do you have the stomach or the courage to step foot into one of these places? We dare you! And if so, be sure to comment your experience on our Facebook page.
1. Haunted Hoochie / Dead Acres in Columbus, OH Ohio: Dead Acres is a self-proclaimed “bad ass” haunted house attraction, set out to stand out. When you enter Dead Acres, you begin a full sensory assault through a heart pounding, in-your-face horror show. Dead Acres has the craziest actors doing the most outrageous things of any haunt in America. This attraction is NOT for the faint of heart and especially NOT for kids. www.DeadAcres.com
2. House of Shock Haunted House in New Orleans, LA Louisiana: This haunted house has a devil worship theme, and with a cast of over a hundred volunteer actors, you’re guaranteed an outrageous show with possible grabbing, mangling, preaching or worse. Proclaimed as “the most infamous haunted attraction in the world”, you never know what to expect as you enter House of Shock Haunted House in New Orleans. This event also features major pyrotechnics, too. www.HouseofShock.com
3. Erebus Haunted House in Pontiac, MI Michigan: This is one of the craziest haunted houses in America. Erebus is a full contact haunted house where every gag or animation is designed to get you, touch you, hit you or simply swallow you whole! This haunt is a no holds barred attraction and easily makes our list of most outrageous haunts! www.HauntedPontiac.com
4. Netherworld Haunted House in Atlanta, GA Georgia: This haunted house attraction makes the list for most outrageous haunted houses, and all the credit goes to their crazed, over-the-top parking lot actors and queue line actors. At most haunted houses, you wait in line simply standing around, but not at Netherworld Haunted House. They’ve trained the craziest people they know to literally torment the crowds of people waiting in line. Imagine 30 monsters sparking concrete, sliding, jumping off hearses and more! www.Netherworld.com
5. House of Torment Haunted Houses in Austin, TX Texas: This haunt makes the list because the attraction allows their actors to torment and literally haunt you all the way through the attraction. They have the green light to do whatever it takes. They WILL touch you, and they WILL get into your mind! If you make it out alive, your sanity will never be the same at House of Torment Haunted House in Austin. www.HouseofTorment.com
3D haunted houses are unlike any other haunted house you've ever seen, and typically they are a secondary haunted house attraction, usually inside a larger haunted event or scream park. What is a 3D Haunted House? The build out to these attractions are similar to regular haunted houses, but they’re painted and themed using blacklight paint. When blacklight paint is properly layered, the creation is a 3D environment unlike any other. Of course, a special pair of chromodepth 3D glasses are necessary for the entire environment to become three dimensional. Inside these haunted attractions, you’ll find floating floors, death defying holes, walls that are coming out at you and more. 3D haunted houses are very popular especially at amusement parks. Here is our list to find the best 3D haunted houses in America, so put on your favorite 3D glasses and take a wild psychedelic adventure into horror as we list America's best 3D haunted houses:
1. Terror Visions 3D in St Louis, MO Missouri: The entire haunted house industry agrees, this is hands down the best 3D haunted house attraction in America. The 3D effects are simply amazing. The theme centers around a wild, crazed clown infested circus where the clowns are horrifically dangerous. The attraction is filled with animations, extreme actors and a spinning tunnel sure to leave you mental unstable. If you weren’t afraid of clowns before, you will be after visiting Terror Visions 3D Haunted House in St. Louis, MO. www.Scarefest.com
2. Uncle Needles Funhouse of Fear 3D Haunted House in Long Island, NY: The name says it all! One visit and you’ll agree this 3D haunt is a BEST 3D haunted house in America, featuring hundreds of thousands of dollars in incredible artwork, fully built-out sets, animations, spinning tunnels, moving floors, and a pre show where you are tormented by a multi-motion clown. Plus, the facade on this attraction is second to none! www.BayvilleScreampark.com
3. Circus Bezerkus at Six Flags Dallas, TX Texas: This clown themed 3D haunted house is filled with some of the most amazing 3D special effects in the industry, and the black hole spinning tunnel will leave you completely unstable. Do you dare enter Circus Bezerkus? www.SixFlags.com
4. The Ice Scream Factory at Talon Falls in Paducah, KY Kentucky: The ice cream man might lure you with promise of sugary treats, but don’t be fooled. This evil ice cream man is no childs play. He might take you back to his factory and make a flavor out of YOU! The Ice Scream Factory 3D Haunted Attraction at Talon Falls Haunted House features some of the best eye popping 3D sets and scenes found anywhere, and with all the crazed actors around every corner, this 3d attraction is a MUST SEE! www.TalonFalls.com
5. Saw 3D Haunted House at Creepyworld Haunted Screampark in St. Louis, MO Missouri: From the same creators who made Terror Visions 3D Haunted House, comes another BEST 3D haunted house…Saw 3D! Saw 3D Haunted House is based on the SAW movie franchise and features the most disturbing animations ever found in a 3D haunt. The video FX in this attraction create the ultimate, heart-pounding environment where you will truly fear for your life! There’s no other attraction in America quite like Saw 3D. It’s darker, more twisted and scarier than ever. http://www.scarefest.com/haunted_house_in_stlouis_missouri_creepyworld/index.cfm?id=cms/saw_3d
As a side note, the number one designer of 3D Haunted Houses and Blacklight Attractions in America and around the World can be found at www.HalloweenProductions.com or www.BlacklightAttractions.com.
Often people ask: What is a SCREAMPARK, and what is the difference between a SCREAMPARK and a haunted house? Aren't they one in the same? No, there are many differences between a SCREAMPARK and a haunted house. A typical haunted house is usually located inside an old warehouse, a closed-down box store, or some other indoor structure, and they usually offer one attraction or one major attraction with one or two possible side attractions. A SCREAMPARK is usually built on a large, open property such as a farm, a field or an amusement park, and they consist of multiple haunted houses all at that one location. Many SCREAMPARKS offer a Haunted Hayride as their main attraction, where guests (or victims) board a tractor pulled hayride through scenes where actors scare and torment causing heart pounding meters to rise. But additionally, they’ll include other attractions like different style haunted houses, corn mazes, stage shows, haunted games, haunted trails or walks through the woods, or even a carnival. SCREAMPARKS typically have 5 or more different haunted attractions. When visiting one of America's best SCREAMPARKS you should keep in mind these events take a long time to complete and guests may NEVER make it out alive!
Are SCREAMPARKS better than a typical haunted house? No, it’s really just a personal preference. Because they’re outdoors, SCREAMPARKS offer that authentically genuine, scary feel. But since SCREAMPARKS are mostly outdoors, they sometimes have less access to electric and are more susceptible to weather elements. However, amazing pyrotechnics are sometimes found at outside SCREAMPARKS, more so than typical haunted houses. Because of the outdoor element of SCREAMPARKS, most of the attractions are taken down in the off season and stored. Whereas a permanent haunted house building might actually stays up year round for the owners to work on and improve on year round. The level of detail, design, and special FX inside a typical haunted house is difficult to achieve at an outdoor SCREAMPARK event. Of course, there are some SCREAMPARK exceptions such as those on our list of the 13 best, biggest, and scariest HAUNTED SCREAMPARKS in America. Do you want to be scared UNDER THE STARS, under the LIGHT OF THE MOON? Then you need to visit one of America's BEST Haunted SCREAMPARKS.
1. Headless Horseman Hayride & Haunted Houses in Ulster Park, New York: Headless Horseman is known for having one of the best, most theatrical haunted hayrides in the World! Headless Horseman features EIGHT different attractions including their infamous haunted hayride, a haunted corn maze, a haunted slaughterhouse, a haunted motel, a haunted cellar, a haunted nursery & greenhouse, plus 2 more haunted houses. WOW! Visit their website at www.headlesshorseman.com or CLICK HERE to read a full review.
2. Creepyworld Haunted Screampark in St Louis, MO Missouri: Creepyworld is one of America's best and biggest haunted screamparks with SEVEN haunted attractions in one location for one price. The extreme Saw 3D Haunted House is based on the popular SAW movie franchise. Tombstone Haunted Hayride takes you on a journey through Tombstone Haunted Ghost Town where zombie outlaws endlessly haunt and terrify. Ravens Haunted Mansion is a highly detailed haunted house that will keep you guessing what’s real and what’s not. Hornbuckle’s Pig Farm & Corn Maze offers the ultimate in a good old fashioned backwoods haunting. Drive Inn 666 is an outdoor movie theater where the horror characters come to life looking for their next kill. Choppers Gore & Grill is a chainsaw scream zone looking for fresh meat. And, a secret government experiment has gone awry inside Creepyworld’s longest haunted attraction, Silo-X! To read a detailed review, CLICK HERE or visit their website: http://scarefest.com/haunted_house_in_stlouis_missouri_creepyworld/home.cfm
3. The Bates Motel and Haunted Hayride in Philadelphia, PA Pennsylvania: The Bates Motel offers three MASSIVE haunted attractions at Arasapha Farm in Philadelphia, PA including Haunted Corn Maze, The Bates Motel Haunted House, and their main attraction The Haunted Hayride. The Haunted Hayride at Bates Motel is by far one of the best in the country with more creatively designed pyrotechnics than any other haunted hayride ever. They even have high end special FX created by real Hollywood artists designed to provide you with the ultimate haunting experience. Read more CLICK HERE, or visit their website www.thebatesmotel.com.
4. Field of Screams in Lancaster, PA Pennsylvania: The Field of Screams Haunted Hayride is a MASSIVE hayride attraction offering heart-stopping thrills around every turn. Field of Screams Haunted Hayride has been featured on the Travel Channel as one of the best in America. But the excitement doesn’t stop there. Field of Screams also offers 2 more MASSIVE haunted house attractions, Den of Darkness and Frightmare Asylum. Visit their website at www.fieldofscreams.com or to read a full review, CLICK HERE.
5. Bayville Scream Park in Long Island, NY: Before you ever even enter Bayville Haunted Scream Park, fear will overcome you as you look upon one of the coolest haunted facades in America. Inside, you’ll find FIVE haunted houses including Evil Woods, Zombie Pirates, Temple of Terror, Bloodworth Haunted Mansion, and Funhouse of Fear in 3D. Bayville Haunted Scream Park also offers a live Parade of the Dead. Bayville Scream Park is the biggest haunted adventure in New York. To learn more, visit their website www.bayvillescreampark.com
6. Corner of Chaos Scream Acres in East Windsor, NJ New Jersey: Corner of Chaos sits on 75 acres of farmland in Central New Jersey. Their attractions include Trail of Treachery, Wooded Wasteland, Barbaric Barnyard, The Wicked Wagon Ride and Halloween Town. Other features include food, refreshments, bonfires, live music, undead dance shows, carnival acts and more. This is no ordinary haunted house; it’s an entire Halloween event NOT to be missed! Learn more by visiting their website at www.cornerofchaos.com
7. HorrorFest at Shady Brook Farm in Yardley, PA Pennsylvania: There’s nothing ordinary about this haunted SCREAMPARK. Guests are introduced to a haunting history dating the farm back to the late 1800’s and setting the stage for one horrific night of terror as they tour Barn of Horror, Deadtime Stories Haunted Corn Maze, Hayride of Horror and Alien Encounter 3D Haunted House. Additionally, HorrorFest offers live entertainment with scheduled DJ's, bands, celebrity appearances and even Scareeoke. To learn more, visit their website at www.shadybrookfarm.com/hrrfst
8. Burial Chamber Haunted Complex in Appleton, WI Wisconsin: Burial Chamber Haunted Complex features Adrenaline Haunted House, Insanity Haunted House, Phobia Haunted Woods, plus The Last Ride Burial Simulators. This haunted house SCREAMPARK is only for the BRAVEST of heart, because at Burial Chamber you can and will be buried alive! Have you ever been closed inside a real coffin before? Are you prepared? This haunt season, you MUST visit Wisconsin's best haunted house and biggest Screampark…BURIAL CHAMBER! For details visit www.burialchamber.com.
9. Jason’s Woods in Lancaster, PA Pennsylvania: The Legendary Jason’s Woods #1 Attraction offers NINE haunted house attractions: Horrifying Hayride, Barn of Terror, Pirates Revenge 3D, Mystery Maze, Macabre Museum, Pitch Black, Psycho Circus, Escape From Oz, and Lost In Jasons Woods. Additionally, Jasons Woods offers nightly special events and activities like movies, live bands, inflatables fun, food specials, fireworks and more! To learn all about Jasons Woods Haunted Attractions, visit their website www.jasonswoods.com.
10. The Field of Terror at K & S Farms in East Windsor, NJ New Jersey: With over 120 acres of preserved farmland, The Field of Terror is New Jersey's LARGEST Haunted Attraction Farm. They offer Haunted Hayride, Field of Terror Corn Maze, Flashlight Maze, plus 2 walk-through haunted houses: The Unknown and Dementia 3D Haunted House. In their 8th season of bringing chills and thrills to guests, Field of Terror KNOWS how to haunt! Learn more at www.fieldofterror.com.
11. Haunted Mill Screampark in Spring Grove, PA Pennsylvania: What awaits you in the dark and damp basement of Haunted Mill? At Haunted Mill ScreamPark, FIVE terrifying attractions test your bravery and fortitude: The Haunted Mill, The House of Eyes. Maw’s Crazy Maze, Terror Trail and Creepy Cornwalk. To learn all the details about Haunted Mill ScreamPark, visit their website www.hauntedmillscreampark.com.
12. Talon Falls Haunted Screamfest in Paducah, KY Kentucky: Talon Falls features Blood Creek Haunted Hayride, Dead End Haunted House, and The Talon Falls Cell Block D, plus an incredible 3D haunted house, Ice Scream Factory 3D. To read a more detailed review CLICK HERE or visit their website at www.talonfalls.com.
13. Pirates of Emerson in San Jose, CA California: Pirates of Emerson Haunted Theme Park features SIX different haunted houses, plus Dead Entertainment nightly. One low price and you’ll tour Habitat of Hags, Lockdown Haunted House, Doll Hostel, Mental Maze, Wicked Wild West and of course Pirates of Emerson. Pirates of Emerson has been offering amazing haunted houses along with an incredible cast of costumed characters for 20 years of fear! Visit www.piratesofemerson.com.
What is a corn maze? Generally located on a farm or in a field, a corn maze is trail built into a mass of corn stalks. How are they made? As the corn starts to grow in, farmers use GPS tracking to create patterns in the corn, and from there the farmers remove the corn stalks where the customers will walk thereby creating a unique and creative design in the corn. A corn maze is usually confusing making it hard for guests to find their way out. Corn mazes can be daytime events for family-friendly Halloween or Fall Festival fun. Or in our case, they can be HAUNTED CORN MAZES, providing nightly hauntings where actors might stalk and torment those who dare enter. Many corn maze operators will even offer both, a fun Fall event by day and then turn the corn maze into a night time scream fest at nightfall. Some might use special effects, animatronics, lighting, props, actors, chainsaws and more. Which are the best, scariest corn mazes in America? The best website to find corn mazes is www.HalloweenAttractions.com, but keep reading as Hauntworld.com reveals the best CORN MAZES in America:
1. Spookywoods Corn Maze in High Point, NC North Carolina: Spookywoods runs the most MASSIVE corn maze attraction in America. Learn more at www.Spookywoods.com
2. Evil Reaping, Dark Harvest Corn Maze at Headless Horseman in Ulster Park, NY New York: Headless Horseman features a labyrinth style haunted corn maze. One visit here and you’ll quickly remember why you NEVER walk thru the cornfield alone. www.HeadlessHorseman.com
3. Field of Terror Haunted Corn Maze at K & S Farms in East Windsor, NJ New Jersey: This haunted corn maze is the ultimate haunted trail experience. It will have you running for your life and screaming bloody murder. Stay close, because lost in the corn is NOT recommended. You SHOULD fear for your soul in Field of Terror Haunted Corn Maze. Learn more at www.FieldofTerror.com
4. Seward Farms Corn Maze in Lucedale, MS Mississippi: This corn maze is designed for family fun with an amazing design from the sky and fun for kids young and old. Learn more at www.SewardsFarm.com
5. South Texas Maize in Hondo, TX Texas: Another Amazing corn maze with a massive corn maze design, hayrides, pumpkin patches and more. www.SouthTexasMaize.com
Are you searching to find the creepiest, scariest, REAL haunted houses in America? Look no further than our list of the Top 10 Scariest REAL Haunted Houses in America 2011. Hauntworld.com is your home for all things haunted houses: finding best haunted houses, real haunted houses, paranormal ghost hunting, ghost tours and much more. Each year Hauntworld.com creates a list of the best haunted houses in America. However, this year we are focused on the best REAL haunted houses in America. Have you ever explored a haunted place and wondered if you’ll make it out alive? Hauntworld.com has come up with the ultimate list of the best REAL haunted houses in America which reside in REAL haunted locations whereby the owners of these properties have turned them into commercial haunted houses.
The Haunted House industry is now a ONE BILLION dollar industry and everyone is getting in on the act: major amusement parks, companies who own relevant tourist attractions (such as Winchester Mystery House), and of course haunted house owners. Other notable tourist attractions such as the haunted Queen Mary and The Eastern State Penitentiary with all of its haunted history become elaborate haunted house attractions in October. Do you want to “ghost hunt” while at the same time having the scariest actors in America jump out and make you SCREAM? Inside a haunt like that, who knows if the stalking presence behind you is REAL or something from the OTHER SIDE! When visiting America's best REAL haunted houses, you’ll never know who is real, what is real, and whether your life is in true danger of being pulled into the underworld …with no hope of return.
Hauntworld.com has compiled a list of the TOP 13 haunted attractions which reside in documented REAL haunted buildings, ships, mansions, prisons, asylums, and even real mortuaries. Grab your courage if you dare and take a road trip to visit America's best REAL haunted houses. A trip like this guarantees yourself the ultimate case of the willies, goosebumps and possibly a real life ghost encounter. So now Hauntworld.com presents the top, best, scariest, ultimate, REAL haunted houses in America for 2011…No, make that…in the WORLD.
1. Pennhurst Asylum Haunted Attraction: Prior to opening as a haunted attraction, the old Pennhurst Asylum building sat vacant, falling on decay, for decades. Parts were even vandalized until haunted house owner, Randy Bates (famous for The Bates Motel Haunted House & Hayride in Philadelphia), took over the property and turned this real haunted site into the most controversial haunted house project ever produced. Now, you can walk the grounds and the haunted halls in probably the most terrifying REAL haunted house in America. Located in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area in Spring City, PA, this haunted experience offers multiple haunted house attractions, each more impressive than the next. Prepare for one of the most shocking haunt trips of your life. Read the Featured Article, we did on this amazing attraction CLICK HERE or simply visit their website at www.PennhurstAsylum.com
2. Lemp Brewery Haunted House: The Lemp Dynasty once owned one of the biggest brewery companies in the World until prohibition. It was believed, the Lemp family went a little mad. With mysterious deaths and multiple Lemp family suicides, the Lemp family and their legacy slowly faded away. The Lemp's built one of the biggest breweries in the World over a natural cave system known as the 'Cherokee Caves' found underneath St. Louis city, and believed to be cursed. Was it the loss of their empire or the ghosts in the caves that drove them to their edge? The brewery complex spans over 17 acres of old turn-of-the-century buildings, and the haunted house is located under the complex, five stories down, inside a real gothic style cave and cavern system where light is scant and no one can hear you scream. Learn more at www.Scarefest.com or CLICK HERE to read a complete review of this attraction.
3. The Mortuary: The Mortuary Haunted House sits inside a REAL turn-of-the-century funeral home mortuary, right next door to one of the biggest, oldest and creepiest cemeteries in Louisiana. Can you image the backdrop for a haunted house inside one of the biggest and oldest cemeteries in America? So YES, The Mortuary Haunted House in New Orleans, LA readily makes our list as one of America's BEST locations to get a fright in 2011. Learn more by visiting their website www.TheMortuary.net or CLICK HERE to read our complete featured article online.
4. Terror Behind The Walls: The Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA is one of the oldest prisons left standing in America. It once housed notorious gangster Al Capone and many other hardened criminals. Documented as a truly haunted building, the old Eastern State Penn allows touring of the facility year around, but when Halloween season arrives, it becomes even darker than ever as one of America's best haunted houses, Terror Behind The Walls. Eastern State is located in Philadelphia, PA, and is now also home to Terror Behind the Walls. Terror Behind the Walls isn't your average haunted house it's a real haunted prison. To learn more visit their website www.easternstate.org/halloween or CLICK HERE to read a full article on Terror Behind the Walls.
5. The Haunted Prison Experience at the Ohio State Reformatory: Staying with the entire haunted prison theme, you should prepare to walk the halls of another historic prison and home to real ghosts and spirits. This location is additionally the site of several famous movies such as Shawshank Redemption. This old haunted prison located in Mansfield, Ohio will certainly put the chills into anyone who enters its gates. Visit their website www.hauntedx.com for more haunting information about this amazing haunted house attraction. It truly is a haunting “experience” you won’t want to miss.
6. USS Nightmare Haunted House: Come aboard if you dare! The USS Nightmare, America’s Premier Haunted Steamboat, is located on the Ohio River in Newport, KY in the Greater Cincinnati, OH area. We’ve all heard of ships being haunted, but this one takes the cake, as you step foot on a real historic steamboat. This is not your ordinary haunted house experience. The USS Nightmare haunted house is floating on the Ohio River bank and filled with ghosts, ghouls, and long lost passengers still trying to find passage to the other side. To learn more visit their website www.ussnightmare.com or CLICK HERE to read our full article on The USS Nightmare in Newport, Kentucky.
7. The Haunted Cave at Lewisburg: Who knows what terror awaits you in a real cave system, deep underground where no one can find you, dead or alive. Near Dayton, Ohio beneath the peaceful village of Lewisburg, OH, The Haunted Cave is the longest running, most highly-rated underground Halloween attraction in and around Ohio. Located 80 feet below ground in an abandoned mine, the Haunted Cave is home to over 30,000 bats, and possibly just as many ghosts and spirits. If you were to get lost, you might NEVER return! To learn more about The Haunted Cave at Lewisburg, visit their website here: www.hauntedcaveatlewisburg.com.
8. Cutting Edge Haunted House: This haunted attraction is located in Fort Worth, TX inside a building built over 100 years ago. It’s one of the only haunted houses in America built inside a REAL meat packing plant, the perfect place to properly dispose of a body. When you go through this haunted house, you’ll see all the meat packing plant equipment still there and still intact, and this Halloween season, it’ll be put to good use making YOU America's next meal! Cutting Edge Haunted House won the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest haunt in America. To learn more, visit their website www.CuttingEdgeHauntedHouse.com or CLICK HERE to read our full article all about Cutting Edge Haunted House in Fort Worth, Texas.
9. House of Torment Haunted Houses: This is the only haunted house we’ve known to be located inside an old movie theater. Once running classic movies of horror like The Shinning & The Exorcist, this location now makes American scream with real life horror where the characters are REAL. The theater is supposedly haunted and now that the owners have been running House of Torment Haunted House, we must to agree! Your trip to the movies will never be the same again. Visit their website here: www.TheHouseofTorment.com or CLICK HERE to read our full article on House of Torment in Austin, Texas.
10. The Dent Schoolhouse: Who wants to go back to school? Most everyone would love to relive their younger years, but what if that meant entering a 100-year-old school that was closed and condemned, filled with ghosts who want to teach you the meaning of HELL. The Dent Schoolhouse is one of the only haunted houses in America built inside a real, condemned turn-of-the-century schoolhouse. The entire attraction is themed around going back to school, to a haunted school, utilizing everything that was left behind, and we mean EVERYTHING! There are reports from real ghost investigations that the place is filled with the supernatural. Learn more by visiting their website www.frightsite.com or CLICK HERE to read our full article all about this haunted attraction.
11. Winchester Mystery House: This is one of the most famous houses in America located in San Jose, California. In 1884, Mrs. Sarah Winchester, Winchester Rifle heiress, left New Haven, Connecticut, leaving behind the graves of her husband and child. She landed in the Santa Clara Valley and began building a new house that became an obsession that was to last her lifetime. Why did Sarah Winchester build the world’s oddest home? We don’t know, but inside that home today is a haunted house attraction not soon to be forgotten. If you dare, you can learn more at www.WinchesterMysteryHouse.com.
12. Ruby Falls Haunted Cavern: Ruby Falls is one of America's natural wonders featuring an unreal natural cave system in Chattanooga, TN Tennessee. A major haunted house has been created inside this cave system taking you down 26 stories underground. No other haunted house has such an amazing natural environment quite like the Ruby Falls Haunted Cavern. To learn more, visit their website www.hauntedcavern.com.
13. Necropolis 13 Haunted House: The owners of one of America's best haunted houses (13th Gate Haunted House) have created one of the WORLD’s biggest catacomb haunted houses. Walk through the city of the dead experiencing real catacombs and tombs, amongst the spirits of the undead. These top notch hauntings are sure to give you the true creeps. To learn more about this attraction visit their website here: www.necropolis13.com
So there you have it, Hauntworld.com offers you a list of the best and scariest REAL haunted adventures for 2011.
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AMERICA'S TOP 13 SCARIEST DESTINATIONS 2010:
13. Nightmare on the Bayou, Houston, Texas - www.NightmareOnTheBayou.com
12. House of Torment, Austin, Texas - www.TheHouseOfTorment.com
11. The Dent Haunted Schoolhouse, Cincinnati, Ohio - www.FrightSite.com
10. Asylum/13th Floor Haunted House, Denver, Colorado - www.GetScared.com
9. Kersey Valley Spookywoods, Greensboro, North Carolina - www.Spookywoods.com
8. The Cutting Edge Haunted House, Dallas, Texas - www.CuttingEdgeHauntedHouse.com
7. Netherworld Haunted House, Atlanta, Georgia - www.FearWorld.com
6. Headless Horseman, Poughkeepsie, New York - www.HeadlessHorseman.com
5. The Beast & Edge of Hell, Kansas City, Missouri - www.FullMoodProd.com
4. The Darkness, Creepyworld, & Lemp Brewery, St. Louis, Missouri - www.Scarefest.com
3. 13th Gate Haunted House, Baton Rouge, Louisiana - www.MidnightProduction.com
2. Erebus Haunted House, Pontiac, Michigan - www.HauntedPontiac.com
1. The Bates Motel & Pennhurst Asylum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - www.TheBatesMotel.com and www.PennhurstAsylum.com
America's Scariest Haunted House Destinations 2010
Haunt-goers travel high and low visiting cities across America in search of the best, scariest, and most outrageous haunted houses. The internet has made it possible for those haunt-seekers to find, shop and compare haunted houses in their quest for that ultimate haunted house rush or that over-the-top scare they’ve been dying to experience. Through websites like Hauntworld.com, people from all over the world can readily find haunts to visit to experience that pinnacle of fright. This year alone, American's will spend over 500 million dollars to feed their fear, buying tickets to haunted houses, experiencing ghost tours, visiting amusement parks with haunted venues, or attending other Halloween related attractions.
Hauntworld.com is a website that houses an online haunt directory. It’s a shopping guide for haunted houses. This directory can guide you on a journey across America to locate some of the best haunted houses available. Together with HauntedHouseMagazine.com, Hauntworld.com is publishing AMERICA’S BEST HAUNTED HOUSES. The 2010 edition of the best haunted houses will direct you to some of the scariest cities in America where you can get your SCREAM on!
1) Philadelphia, PA: The city of brotherly love is also the city of fear! Philadelphia has a collection of some of the best haunted houses in the nation. If you visit the Philadelphia area, you could visit about 15 to 20 top notch haunted houses. Additionally, you could find dozens more just outside the Philadelphia area. However, the two BEST haunted houses in the Philadelphia area are The Bates Motel with Haunted Hayride and the all new Pennhurst Asylum.
The Bates Motel is a high action, adrenaline pumping haunted attraction featuring a 25 minute, heart pounding haunted hayride through the dark forests of Arasapha Farm. This horrific hayride is just the beginning. The dark corridors of the Cornfield Trail will surely send shivers up your spine, but nothing compares to the main attraction of this trilogy of terror, The Bates Motel, a huge Victorian mansion filled with computer controlled animatronics, digital sound , lighting and fog, detailed rooms, custom soundtracks, and a host of professional actors. Consistently ranked best in the country, The Bates Motel is one show you won't want to miss! To learn more about The Bates Motel visit TheBatesMotel.com.
Pennhurst Asylum is the other MUST SEE attraction in Philadelphia. It boasts a 16,500 square foot attraction inside a 100 year old building where a museum begins your journey and details the birth, growth and death of the Pennhurst State School. This haunted house is guaranteed to keep you on edge the whole way through. Imagine a highly detailed surgical suite, complete with operating room, lights, gurney and other cabinetry that have been moved from the original hospital located on the property. Another great set is the morgue, detailed with real morgue drawers used in the facility years ago. To cap off this tremendous haunted house, you will travel through a series of underground tunnels over 800 feet long. To learn more about this truly haunting experience, visit PennhurstAsylum.com.
2) Detroit/Pontiac, MI: Detroit boasts more haunted houses in one 50 mile radius than any other city in America. Years ago, a multitude of vacant buildings became a breeding ground for haunted houses, but only one stands alone as a long-running Detroit favorite…Erebus. Erebus 4 Story Haunted Attraction boasts THE LONGEST haunt with four amazing stories of fear.
Located in the haunt capital of the world, Erebus opened its doors in 2000 and has consistently gained recognition as one of America’s top haunts. It remains #1 in the Detroit market for a reason. Erebus is known for the way it engages its victims in an all out scare assault. Because Erebus personally manufactures nearly all of their major effects, guests are guaranteed a unique experience as they advance through the terrifying, four story labyrinth of dark, dank, dingy passages where your fate is unknown. This haunt creates a fear factor so intense, some call it PAIN. For more information, go to HauntedPontiac.com.
3) New Orleans/Baton Rouge, LA: The New Orleans/Baton Rouge area is historically filled with voodoo and haunting stories, but this area is also known for the intensity of their haunted houses. One haunt is set up inside a real funeral home and another is known as the most controversial haunted house in America, but the 2010 overall BEST haunted house is The 13th Gate.
The 13th Gate has consistently been recognized as one of the top haunted attractions in the country, rated best by Hauntworld.com. This 40,000 square foot haunted house will take you on a journey through 13 frightening themed indoor/outdoor sets where your worst nightmares come true and anything can happen. Award-winning scenic artists, set carpenters, lighting and sound technicians, and special effects artists are just a few of the many crewmembers that make The 13th Gate THE ULTIMATE haunted experience. It’s an experience you won’t soon forget, IF you survive The 13th Gate! For more information, visit MidnightProduction.com.
4) St. Louis, MO: St. Louis is widely known for Cardinals baseball, The Arch, the St. Louis Zoo and more, but it has a sinister past starting with one of America's biggest ghost stories, the historically haunted Lemp Mansion. As well, St. Louis is known for its professional haunted house attractions…The Darkness Haunted House, Creepyworld Haunted Screampark and the NEW Lemp Brewery Haunted House, three of the most unique haunted attractions you will find anywhere in America.
The Darkness has been featured in USA Today, Modern Marvels, the Travel Channel, and National Geographic Channel. It features some of the most realistic set designs and special effects ever seen inside a haunted house. With two floors of fright, The Darkness also features a monster museum and the world’s best 3D haunted house, Terror Visions. The Darkness is often hailed as simply the best, most detailed haunted house in America. Visit Scarefest.com for more details.
Creepyworld is one of the largest haunted scream parks in America, now featuring seven haunted houses in one location for one low price including Tombstone Haunted Hayride with mind-blowing pyrotechnics. Creepyworld has incredible set designs, creative back plots, and 100's of live and animatronic monsters known for the most crazy, outrageous actors in the industry. Hardcore haunt fans who desire an entire evening of frightful fun rank Creepyworld their most favorite haunted scream park for a reason! Visit Scarefest.com for more details.
There is another haunted house located in St. Louis called The Lemp Brewery Haunted House. Lemp Brewery was one of the nation’s biggest brewing companies prior to prohibition. The Lemp history is one that’s truly haunted. The building still stands on old Lemp Avenue. The haunt is actually built under the old brewery inside real caves and caverns, making it one of America's only real haunted houses. To learn more about visiting all of the St. Louis haunted houses go to Scarefest.com.
5) Kansas City, MO: Once labeled as the ‘haunted house capitol of the world' by Time Magazine, Kansas City features amazing haunted attractions such as The Chambers of Poe Haunted House, Macabre Cinema Haunted House and Kansas City Ghosts and Gangsters Tour, but two of the best Kansas City haunts are The Beast and Edge of Hell.
Established in 1975, Edge of Hell is Kansas City’s oldest and best haunted house and has molded into a national model for celebrating the Halloween season. The converted five story warehouse in which it stands is the granddaddy of them all, offering a 30-minute, quarter mile walk-thru. Its many scenes are elaborate and detailed and house a cast of over 45 live actors, including two of the largest anacondas in North American captivity. This is one haunt you won’t want to miss. Can you make it through hell and back? Find out more at EdgeOfHell.com.
The other KC featured haunt is The Beast. Established in 1991, The Beast is known throughout the industry for having pioneered the “open format” of haunting. With this style, guests wander through scenes, never knowing when an actor or activated device will rock into action. It’s a truly intense experience like no other. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour to walk through IF you don’t get lost along the way. To exit this haunt, there’s a blazing fast, 4-story slide straight down. To learn more, visit FullMoonProd.com.
6) New York/Poughkeepsie, NY: New York is known for its theatrical productions, and their haunted houses are no exception. With the most wicked character actors, New York haunted houses rock! Ranked best this year is one of the biggest and best haunted hayrides in America, The Headless Horseman.
Headless Horseman includes 8 separate attractions including a hayride, a corn maze, 5 haunted houses, 4 eateries, a haunted walk, and a haunted show. Their 2010 hayride theme, Escape of Prisoner X, incorporates high tech special effects, pyrotechnics and illusions. The newly constructed Crow Hollow Harbor is an expansive set design that includes three 40-foot haunted fishing boats. Also, new for 2010 is the antique Night Shade Nursery & Greenhouse, purchased from a historic estate and restored at the Horseman. In addition to amazing actors, the cast includes stilt walkers, line actors, side show illusionists and a stunt team. Guests are entertained at the Headless Horseman for 2 ½ to 3 hours straight! Visit HeadlessHorseman.com for all the details.
7) Atlanta, GA: Atlanta doesn't boast as many haunted attractions as some of the other cities on our list, but the best haunted house in Atlanta might be the best haunted house in the country. Prepare to experience Netherworld!
Netherworld Haunted House brings you a monster fest of epic proportions. Inside Netherworld, nightmarish creatures fly, swing and crawl as they hunt for flesh, so real you’ll feel trapped in a horror movie. You might even see a 17-foot tall gargoyle king feasting on his prey. Walk lightly…You won’t want to be his next victim. You must escape The Mangler, The Acid Room, The Drowning Tank, The Flesh Compactor, and other horrific death traps as the haunt grows even bigger this year. You might escape with your life, but not your sanity! Visit Fearworld.com for all the details.
8) Dallas/Fort Worth, TX: The state of Texas is experiencing a booming and growing haunted house industry like no other, especially the Dallas area which now features more haunted houses than any other city in Texas. Cutting Edge Haunted House is currently celebrating its Guinness World Record as the longest haunted attraction in the World, so it’s no surprise this haunt is on the BEST list.
Located in a 100-year old abandoned meat packing plant in a section of Fort Worth historically known as 'Hell's Half Acre', Cutting Edge is built on a foundation of fear. The old meat packing plant is back in use, but this time it's being used for human flesh! Cutting Edge features 32 animations, 26 sets, massive creatures on the roof, monster hearses outside, and a pre-show performance comparable to ‘Stomp’. This is one haunted production you won’t want to miss! To learn more about Cutting Edge visit CuttingEdgeHauntedHouse.com.
9) Greensboro/Raleigh, NC: If you visit this area, you’ll certainly find plenty of screams. This area is known for its many outdoor haunted adventures. Creating an outdoor haunted experience allows for a more authentic scare, and one such attraction that stands out above all others is the Kersey Valley Spookywoods, North Carolina’s LARGEST haunted attraction.
Spookywoods isn't just a haunted house. By day, it’s also a Halloween attraction for the whole family featuring a huge corn maze, a 2-mile long zip line, pumpkin patches, fossil & gem digs and much more. Once dusks sets in, Spookywoods Haunted Scream Park opens featuring America's only haunted tram ride, Dark Terror. Spookywoods also includes a haunted cornfield, Wrong Way haunted house, The Fun House, and the main attraction, Spookywoods Maze. Using some of the best scare techniques combined with top quality sets, special effects and detailed creatures around every corner, Spookywoods offers a unique haunted attraction and probably America's best overall Halloween experience. Visit Spookywoods.com or MaizeAdventure.com to learn more.
10) Denver, CO: Denver is a city with a historic past and all sorts of things to scream about, but most importantly are three of the best haunted houses, The Asylum Haunted House, 13th Floor Haunted House and Blood Shed.
Horror in the heart of the Mile High City, The 13th Floor is located on the edge of downtown Denver and the Lower Downtown (Lodo) entertainment district. Where is the 13th Floor and why is it absent in so many buildings? Denver’s legendary haunted house takes you on a gut wrenching elevator ride to the mysterious 13th Floor. Visit the current occupants who call it their home. Witness the oddities and strange occurrences that have created the legend of the 13th floor, and discover why it continues to be one of the world’s greatest, ghostly mysteries. Visit GetScared.com for more details. (The 13th Floor San Antonio is a new, 2nd location getting ready to open in San Antonio, TX. Find out more at 13thFloorSanAntonio.com.)
The Asylum is Denver's longest running haunted house featuring two levels into Gordon Cottingham's Hospital for the Mentally Insane. The Asylum is a damp and musty place infested with spiders, rats, snakes and endless screams of tortured souls. Together with Blood Shed Haunted House, Denver’s newest and goriest Halloween attraction, this haunt location offers a truly terrifying experience. As you travel through a dilapidated family farmhouse, a backyard of bloodshed and finally the family home, you’ll see why Blood Shed is hillbilly horror at its most extreme. A truly graphic haunting experience bursts onto the Denver haunt scene in a way never before. To learn more about the best haunted houses in Denver visit GetScared.com.
11) Cincinnati, OH: Ohio is a great state for finding haunted houses. Ohio natives expect excellence in their haunted houses and they find it year after year at The Dent Schoolhouse, rated best by Fangoria, and we agree!
Imagine reliving a horror movie or your worst nightmare… You can at The Dent Schoolhouse! Movie quality sets, intense detailing, and first-rate animatronics combine inside an actual haunted schoolhouse from 1894. You’ll experience the story of the murderous janitor and how the school came to its grizzly demise. The Dent Haunted Schoolhouse will shatter your fond memories of school and replace them with horrific, haunted nightmares of school-age days.
There are several haunts to visit in Ohio but make sure you put Dent Haunted Schoolhouse on the top of your list. With a cast of 50+ monsters and award winning make-up artists, the crew of Dent will be happy to “school you” in FEAR! Visit Frightsite.com for more details.
12) Austin, TX: Austin would surely be higher on our haunting cities list IF there were more haunted houses to visit. However, the one to see has dominated the competition so fiercely that it leaves other haunts gasping for air. That haunt is House of Torment (otherwise known as HOT).
House of Torment is one of the most cutting edge haunted houses in America offering a horrific experience like no other and featuring three unique attractions offering patrons a variety of dynamic experiences. The first attraction guests must brave is Nightmare Mansion, a theatrically driven horror escapade that takes customers through the macabre and demented experiments of an early 20th century physician, Dr. Incubus.
Second is House of Torment’s main event, Revenge of the Immortals. This nightmare takes customers deeper into the post apocalyptic wreckage of a war torn city where infected mutants, an abomination army, and predatory immortals prey on the living. The 3rd and final attraction is a festival filled with entertaining atmosphere, large animations, and highly detailed monsters rounding out the average nightly staff at just under 100 people! To learn more, visit TheHouseOfTorment.com.
13) Houston, TX: Currently, Texas has the 3rd most haunted houses of any state in America according to the Hauntworld.com database, and it continues to grow rapidly. Houston is no exception with several top rated haunted houses, but one specific haunted house stands above all others, Nightmare on the Bayou.
Nightmare on the Bayou features several animations, sets, special effects, and acclaim REAL ghost haunting. It’s built right next to one of Houston's biggest and oldest haunted graveyards, so to have supernatural visitors drop by from time isn’t unusual. Nightmare on the Bayou features one of America's biggest Halloween costume shops, Party Boy, located directly next door. Party Boy is known as THE Houston place to buy Halloween costumes, decorations, and supplies. When you visit this haunted house make sure you bring your credit card or you’ll be kicking yourself once you see all the goodies at the Halloween store. But no matter what, prepare for the haunting of your life at Nightmare on the Bayou! To learn more, visit NightmareOnTheBayou.com.
Those are the top 13. Now, head out to see some of the best haunted attractions in America. If you visit any or all of these cities and you want to find more haunts while there, log onto HauntWorld.com‘s online haunt directory where you’ll find more great haunted houses to visit throughout the US and worldwide, and make your 2010 Halloween season the best and scariest ever! | <urn:uuid:8c6470a5-28d6-4937-a3b5-31757539efa5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hauntedhousemagazine.com/articles/top_13_haunted_houses.html | 2013-05-22T07:33:10Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922819 | 15,831 |
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MASH- Farewell to a Friend
This is set in Abysinnia Henry, Henry Blake's final episode.
Hawkeye looked at Trapper, waiting for him to say something, anything. This couldn't be real. A minute ago they had been informed that their good friend and colleague Henry Blake had been killed. He'd been on his way to Bloomington, Illinois, only to have his plane shot down over the Sea of Japan. He never stood a chance. And now they were left to deal with the aftermath of a tragedy that should never have happened.
Radar was in shock, he couldn't believe the loss of his friend. The words came out of his mouth but he couldn't believe what he had to say. Nothing he'd been through prepared him for this moment. Looking around at his comrades was impossible, for he could barely handle his own grief. All he wanted to do was run out of the O.R. as fast as his feet could take him. The man who he loved like a father had perished and there was nothing he could do. His friend was gone, and Radar just wanted to go home. Henry was a man whom Radar loved like a father and was also a good friend. This man had taught him many things about life and could never be replaced. In a million years Radar would never be able to make sense of this tragedy.
"Retractor." Hawkeye called out to the nurse, who repeated his request.
"Scalpel." The nurse obediently repeated.
This routine went on for another hour. Everyone went about their business while processing the news. Trapper would look over at Hawkeye, who avoided everyone's gazes. Margaret kept close to Frank , who kept quiet. Frank repeatedly looked to his girlfriend for advice on how to handle this tragic situation. She was at a loss for words. All she knew to do was dry her tears and carry on to the best of her ability. Determined not to let this interfere with her job, she was nonetheless devastated by the loss of her commander. They were not close but he was part of her daily life and she was not so callous that she would wish this kind of tragedy on anyone. If she could do things over again, she would still carry on business on usual but perhaps she would have taken a little more time to get to know him better. She might have had a drink or two with him. Now all she would have would be the memories of going over his head over his inept leadership skills with the camp. Inept, but he did have a way with the men that she may have underestimated. Margaret couldn't help but think of his children. She knew that Henry had little ones who were waiting patiently for their father, and they would be devastated when they would learn of the news. She herself hadn't lost her parents and couldn't imagine the pain of losing a loved one, especially at such a young age. It wasn't fair. A child shouldn't have to learn of the harsh reality of war. They were so innocent and knew nothing of wars and the lessons of good and evil. And Lorraine, poor Lorraine. To be a widow at such a young age, well, Margaret couldn't imagine being put in such a position. Lorraine was so young and deserved a lifetime of happiness with her family and to have that taken from her, well that was just cruel. And on the day her husband was coming home of all days! It was a shame, a crying shame, and she felt sick to her stomach. Henry was many things, not all of them good, but mostly he was a good man and he had deserved a long life with his family and now he would never get to see his family again. War was hell.
Father Mulcahy grew quiet and weary. It was going to take all of his strength to get through the next week. He wasn't prepared for this death, and it had hit him hard. All eyes had turned to him, and he knew they would be on him for some time to come. He could only pray for the strength and wisdom and courage to find the right words to say to the members of the 4077. His own pain would have to wait. This was a most difficult task being asked of him and he had to be ready to answer the call. There were no easy answers for the questions that were surely going to be asked of him. Why did this have to happen to Henry Blake? That was a question he himself wanted to know, but it was no time for personal self-seeking revelations. The good of the many came first. Such is the life for the man of the cloth. He must be ready immediately to help those in pain, and there was no doubt that there would be many in need of his services. This was a dark day indeed. His own anger at God would just have to wait.
Klinger watched Trapper and Hawkeye continue to work and he didn't say anything. This just made him resolve to try harder to get out. There was no way he would wind up like Colonel Blake, rest his soul. He had too much to lose. His family needed him too much. He could only imagine what his family would be feeling if they were to get the letter that Colonel Blake's family would be getting. His poor mother's heart wouldn't be able to take it. And then there was Toledo. Toledo really seemed a million miles away. They say home is where the heart is, and he'd never heard a truer expression in his life. Suddenly it seemed as if he'd forgotten what baklava smelled like, what Packo's tasted like. Would he ever go home? Would he make it there in one piece? His section 8 schemes didn't seem so crazy after all.
Frank looked over at the teary-eyed Margaret and it nearly broke his heart. He knew that he couldn't afford to wax poetic about the late Colonel but he couldn't help but think about what his death meant. He was in charge! Oh, sure, he should feel bad for thinking of that so quickly but he couldn't help himself. A commander had so many responsibilities. This was his chance to prove himself. Where Colonel Blake had failed in many areas, he would succeed. He would bring order to the camp. The men and women would respect him. No more mumbo jumbo, especially from those two nimrods. Now he could really show who's in charge. He would have to put his foot down about a lot of things. The first thing he would do will be to get rid of that awful distillery in his tent. Colonel Blake may have tolerated that tomfoolery but he wasn't about to. Colonel Blake- the camp wasn't going to be the same without him. May he rest in peace.
Trapper just wanted to finish up the patient he was working on and get back to the tent. His buddy was gone and there was nothing he could do about it. He felt sick, as if he'd been sucker-punched. He'd spent so many days and nights with Henry, sharing drinks and laughs. There were very few people around these parts that he considered friends, and Henry was one of them. Henry, crazy Henry.. Whether it was getting plastered and slurring his words or attatching his finger to a lure in his hat, Henry always could be counted on for a wasn't always a man of words. There was the time the latrine blew up with him in it. He simply said " Boom." It wasn't so much what he said but the way he said it. They shared many good times. He'd been so happy for his friend when he'd gotten his points. It was hard to believe he was gone.
No one was more devastated than Hawkeye at the loss of Henry Blake. He was like an older brother to him, one which he'd never had. He was comical, true, but he also knew how to be supportive and serious when he needed to. Henry was there for him when he suffered the loss of his friend Tommy Gills, and offered him some sound advice. Hawkeye couldn't imagine what this war would have been like without his commander. Under any other colonel, it might have been completely unbearable. With Henry, he knew how far to push and what he could get away with (a lot). They had some good times and good laughs, which he couldn't imagine sharing with any other commander, especially not Frank Burns. At one point he would have gone to any length to keep Henry, including faking Radar's illness. There was no one he'd rather have lead the 4077. Now Hawkeye was without his comrade, and he didn't know what he would do. His friend was gone and he couldn't do a thing to save him. He was lost forever, banished in a watery grave. The thought of his friend dying like that would forever torture him.
Henry didn't want to die. There was so much he wanted to do. He wanted to kiss his wife like there was no tomorrow. She was the greatest cook in the world, not to mention lover. He longed to play baseball with his son and watch his girls play dress-up. There were barbeques to be had. All he could think about on the plane home was how happy he finally was. He had perspective. He wouldn't mind the chores, and he wouldn't mind the nagging if he forgot to do his share around the house. He liked to think he wouldn't forget anything but he knew himself. He would like to think that he'd be the perfect husband but Lorraine would probably have a few things to say about that. How he got so lucky he'd never know. All he knew is he just wanted to get back and have a normal life. Say hello to the neighbors. Pay the bills. Go out to eat now and then. Maybe have another kid. And now he would never get the chance. All because of a blasted police action.
"I love you, that's all I got." - Rick to Lori
Awesome, I'll post some Glee .
Great stuff guys!
Damn that made my eyes water but I wasn't crying.
Wow great one shot Melinda, I loved the show M.A.S.H. Awesome writing, hope to see more from you.. Great idea to do this thread.
Take my Hand (Law and Order Special Victims Unit)
Olivia and Elliott both were angry, and lost. They both were blaming themselves for the death of Amy Miller. She was 4 years old, they got her away from her abusive Father, but the Courts handed her back 2 weeks later. They knew the child would be hurt again, they remembered the day they saw her. She was hiding in a closet with a teddy bear clutched in her hands. She was rocking back, and forth. She had been beaten they were grateful she wasn't sexually abused at least.
Olivia carried her out to the Police car , and drove her over to the Hospital herself. She held her hand during the whole exam. She remembered her Mother coming into the hospital, because she was also beaten. Olivia had no sympathy for her, how could she stay in a that house while that man beat her , and her little girl? Meg saw her Daughter, and ran over touching her face. Olivia almost pulled her away, but Amy cried out for her Ma Ma. The Mother was taken into custody, Amy went into Child Protective Custody. Olivia called everyday, they said Amy was doing much better.
Olivia and Elliott had no idea that Amy's father Frank was released from prison. Her Mother Meg was not charged, she was given custody again, only under one exception, she couldn't allow Frank back into her life. He had to be at least 300 yards from her and Amy at all times. She agreed but Olivia knew from past experiences, Mother's always take the abuser back. She brought Frank back in, and 2 days later Meg and Amy both were dead. Olivia and Elliott were there seeing Amy made them both ill. It was like all the hard work to save children was for nothing. They handed her back trusting the Mother, when they knew she was so mixed up herself.
Olivia and Elliott went to their car, they both were silent. Elliott turned, "I'm going to get a drink, do you want one"?
"Yes, I need one but this isn't going to help us Elliott"
"It will help me why do we do this Olivia"?
"We saved her, it isn't our fault, we didn't send her back"
"Does that make you feel better Olivia, it doesn't make me feel better"?
"I feel horrible but blaming ourselves will destroy us Elliott". They got to the bar, and he sat at a booth. He ordered a beer, she said she wanted the same. He was looking around , "Olivia how many people in here, lead abusive lives, how many beat their spouses, or children"?
'A few probably, Elliott go home to Kathy, and the kids".
"Yeah that will make me feel better, she isn't happy with me. I'm miserable she says, she will never understand what we do. I hate seeing children suffer, she was so young, she trusted us Olivia".
"I know Elliott, stop this please".
"I don't know if I can do this anymore Olivia"
"Elliott maybe you need a holiday, a few weeks off".
"Like that will make it better, Olivia I thought I was going to make a difference, but nothing will. You catch one, there is two more behind every tree in New York City. We will never stop them, it gets worse, and worse every year".
The waitress brought the beers, Olivia paid her. She moved them aside, she stood up, "Come on Elliott go home see your kids, tomorrow you will feel better". Elliott looked at Olivia, she whispered "Take my hand, lets get out of here". He grabbed her hand, and hugged her, she was a good friend. He knew he would be back on the job tomorrow, but today he wanted to throw this career out the window. He knew he will never get the image of Amy out of his mind, but he knew as time went on it would get easier. He knew he didn't save Amy but he has saved so many children like her. He walked out of the Bar with Olivia, and they went home, knowing today changed them forever, but they knew their friendship was the only thing keeping them sane, because they both knew they always could depend on each other.
wow this was powerful, it was just like an episode. you especially captured the Elliot/Olivia dynamic nicely. sometimes the show is hard to watch but its very compelling. very good job, you should write more SVU stories in the future
"I love you, that's all I got." - Rick to Lori
Thanks Melinda, I love SVU, I will try writing more about that show..
Originally Posted by daphne crane
Fred You Sexy Thing. I Love Lucy (One Shot)
Ethel came over to Lucy's place, she was so down.
"Ethel what is the matter, you seem so upset"?
"Lucy I don't want you to laugh, but I think Fred has eyes for someone else"
"Fred are you kidding, come on he isn't exactly a sex symbol"
"Lucy Fred is something, so don't you say that to me"
"Why would you think he has eyes for someone else"?
"Well for 2 nights he didn't come home for dinner. He called but he said he had to help a friend. I asked him who, and he said I didn't know her".
"Well this isn't going to keep happening, how dare Fred treat you this way"?
"I love him Lucy he is my life, I know I complain sometimes, but if I lost him, I would die". Lucy sat down holding her hand, "You won't, and you wouldn't die you have me and Desi".
"I know but it wouldn't be the same, I think I will go home, I'm really tired".
"Ethel lets go find Fred , and see where he goes when he should be home. You deserve to know who this woman is".
"Oh if he thought I was spying he would be so angry, forget it Lucy". Ethel left, and Lucy was so upset seeing her best friend so sad. She grabbed her coat, and purse, and left to go find Fred, she knew he would be at the diner he loved. She stood outside, and saw him come out, he normally walked home . She followed him, and saw him walk into a building, only 10 minutes from home. She couldn't believe Ethel was right, he was seeing someone. Lucy went inside, and she saw what apartment he went into. She was so angry, she walked down knocking on the door yelling Fred's name. He opened the door, Lucy wanted to shake him. "Fred what are you doing, Ethel is at home, so upset? She loves you, and your hurting her like this. I never expected this from you, I thought you and Ethel would be together forever. You go home right this moment, and tell her to her face, have the courage to be a man".
"Lucy you have no idea what you are talking about"
"Really why are you here, and not at home with Ethel"?
A lady came to the door, she was blind, she whispered, "Fred is something the matter"?
"Oh Susan I'm sorry, go sit down, Lucy is leaving, I will be there in a minute".
Susan smiled, "Ok Fred you are a dear helping me, you surely are the sweetest man, Ethel is so lucky to have you". Fred took her to the couch, and sat her down. He walked over to the door, "She is a friend I use to work with, she had a accident, and went blind. She can't work, so we all chip in to help her around the house. Her family can only visit on weekends, she was amazing at work it is the least we can do. You go home Lucy, I will explain to Ethel when I get there. I'm really disappointed in both of you expecting me of cheating". Fred shut the door, Lucy felt horrible she walked home, and went to Ethel's.
"Lucy what is the matter you look like your in trouble"?
"I followed Fred, and you were right he went to a ladies home. You are so wrong about him Ethel, he wouldn't hurt you that way. He is helping a woman that he worked with, she went blind. Fred is amazing Ethel, I'm so sorry he is so angry".
"Lucy you never keep your nose out of other Peoples business. You go home, I will handle my husband, thanks for making him angry at me". Ethel shut the door, Lucy was so upset she went home. She saw Desi, and she walked over sitting beside him.
"Lucy it looks like you lost your best friend".
"I just might have, Desi I made a horrible mistake. Ethel was worried about Fred, she thought he was cheating"
"Fred are you both crazy"?
"No I followed him, I laid into him, but he was just being a friend".
"Lucy why did you do that, you made thing's worse"? Lucy started to cry, Desi hugged her, and she laid her head on his shoulder feeling just horrible.
Fred came home, he hung up his coat, and Ethel walked over to him.
'Fred I'm so sorry, I never told Lucy to follow you"
"You told her I was cheating, how could you think that"?
"You are so sexy, I just thought".
Fred smiled, "Sexy oh Ethel, I love you". She hugged him, he held her tight, and whispered, "Ethel you are the only girl for me, I love you". She whispered, "I love you to Fred, I would die if I lost you". They both kissed, and they went into the living room, and talked. It was 1 hour later, Ethel and Fred showed up at Lucy's place. Desi opened the door, "Oh I didn't think we would see you both for a while"
Fred smiled, "We came to tell Lucy we are not mad at her. Ethel got Lucy worked up, she realized, she was just being a friend". Lucy walked out of the kitchen, "Oh Ethel , Fred"
"Lucy I'm sorry for yelling at you, will you forgive me"?
"Forgive you, I'm the one that made the big mess, will you forgive me"?
"No it was my fault, not yours".
"No it was my fault Ethel".
Fred laughed, "It was both of your faults, just hug, and make up."
Lucy and Ethel hugged, while Fred and Desi shook hands. That day was stressful for all of them, but they also became closer. They would be friends forever, and they knew they would always be there for each other. Ethel knew she had the most wonderful husband, that she would treasure forever.
Response to the Characters you hate challenge. This is a MASH story, I picked Frank Burns, who's more of a character you love to hate but still...
Today was Margaret's wedding day and Frank Burns was excited. It was going to be the day she left ol' Donald for him. He'd left a note in her tent asking her to meet her out in the fields where they used to take their picnics and he would pick her flowers and then he would have the answer to his question. He wasn't going to leave his wife for her, well, maybe not. All he knew was that he couldn't make it through the rest of the war without his Margaret by his side. He'd blown it, he knew that, but all he needed was one last chance. One chance to make things right for the two of them. After all, she still loved him, didn't she? It was a quarter till one, and the wedding was supposed to start at one, so Frank knew it was just a matter of minutes until his love came back.
Frank didn't know why he was the way he was. He knew he wasn't the most popular person in camp, not the way that that sneaky Hawkeye Pierce or that clever B.J. Hunnicutt were. He never saw what was so special about those two. So they made people laugh, so what? Frank's father always taught him to never trust a person who couldn't look you straight in the eye without laughing. It meant they were up to something, and in these two's cases, his father was absolutely correct. They were always trying to pull a fast one on someone, usually him, and chaos was the result. Not what you needed in the Army and not what you needed durning war. Order, control, and leadership were what this place needed, and it was hard pressed to find much of it here. If only he hadn't been passed over for promotion after Henry Blake died, things might be a little different around here.
Frank didn't let on, not to Margaret or not to anyone but that devestated him when they gave control of the camp to Colonal Potter instead of himself. Why not him? He was regulation, he could give them order, he could get this place in line if only he'd had the chance. But just like was the story of his life, he was passed over for someone else, someone braver, someone stronger, someone with more experience. In his life it was always someone else.
Especially with the girls. Every time he'd get the nerve to ask one out they'd make up some phoney excuse and hang out with the guy they really like. There was Shirley Maroni. Boy she was the cutest thing in a skirt he'd ever seen. And she was so kind to him. She would walk with him home from school, he would really open up about how things were at home, he trusted always teased him about being one of her younger brothers but he didn't care. Frank was going to ask her out if that was the last thing he did. Finally he got the nerve to ask her out on for this Friday night when she apologized and said she had to stay home and wash her hair. He sighed, but there was always another chance. He knew he could get another chance to win her over. Well Friday night came and he decided to go to the movies and who did he see there? Shirley Maroni and some other guy. He couldn't believe it. Lied to… the thought never crossed his mind that she didn't want to hurt his feelings. The message he got were women, like other people, were not to be trusted.
And then there was Margaret. She was nothing like his wife. Fiery and intellegent (he normally hated that in a woman) and headstrong she always got what she wanted. Frank couldn't even concieve of why she'd picked him if he were honest with himself. But he usually wasn't, so it didn't even occur to him that she might leave him someday. And that day had happened without any warning. She'd found another man who was now expecting to be Margaret's husband.
But that wasn't going to happen. Frank checked his watch-it was one-thrirty. The wedding must already be half over by now. She wasn't coming. There wasn't much left for him to do. Might as well stay out here for a while, he thought. No sense in going back to a celebration that I won't feel much like celebrating. He lay down in the green grass, realizing he could only hide out for so long. As long as he didn't have to face the others, he could keep on fooling himself. As long as he still sat out here away from everyone, Maragret was still his, and for now, that was good enough for him.
"I love you, that's all I got." - Rick to Lori
Awesome one shot Melinda, I wasn't a big Frank fan. I loved this story, I hope you post more one shots, you write them so well. I actually felt bad for Frank in this story.
I Love Lucy and the one shot was great. The title makes me laugh. Fred? Sexy?
The M*A*S*H was good too, even though I can't stand Frank's butt.
Worth the Wait (Golden Girls)
[I]This takes place immediately at the end of the episode Mrs. George Deveraux, the one where Blanche dreams her husband is alive. This asks what if it weren't a dream, that George really had come back from the dead. I]
Blanche Deveraux couldn't help herself. She just needed to feel the warmth of her George against her skin. She'd held many, many men but none had compared to her own husband. For the first time in nine years, she believed she was truly happy. She'd found what she was looking for. Could this be happening to her? Could it be that George had come back to her? She had so many questions for him. But for right now she just wanted to savor this moment for as long as she could. He was hers again, and that was all she needed to know.
Finally the moment came when she had to let him go. Silently she vowed that she would never let him out of her room for as long as she lived. Blanche just couldn't take the chance of him disappearing from her life again. These past nine years had been the most awful years of her life. There were no words to explain the heartache she' d experienced when the call came that George had perished in a car accident. And she felt so angry with herself because her last thoughts of him were that she hated him for leaving his shoes in the middle of the living room. She would have given anything to be able to replace that thought with a more proper and loving one. One that a good wife would have thought. She'd lost a lot of sleep over those feelings of guilt. When George told her he forgave her for thinking that, she'd felt a lot of relief and happiness that she'd never thought she'd feel. George was nothing if not a loving man, and he was all hers again.
She couldn't take her eyes off of him. Time had been good to him. He was more handsome than ever, if that was possible. His hair was grayer, and he'd grown a moustache, but his eyes were just as expressive and his smile was just as kind as they ever were. All she wanted to do was stay in his arms forever. She never thought she could love one man, but she loved George Deveraux. How she loved him, and how she grieved for him. She'd been doing a great deal of thinking and at times she didn't think she could forgive him for what he'd done to her. But Rose was right; how many women would give their right arms to be in her position. She herself had many sleepless nights wishing she could hold him one last time and now that dream had come true.
It was hard to believe that the man that Blanche loved had betrayed her so. Her mind simply could not process that bit of information. It would take her some time to get over it, but in her heart she knew that she would. He was the great love of her life and he was back. Her life as she knew it was about to change and for the better. She was once again a married woman. She could forget about all those nights of meaningless sex. The men that she thought she couldn't live without were now just a distant memory. She was a one-man woman now, and she would always be faithful to her husband. She would make up for lost time, and she hoped that he would do the same. She was a lucky, lucky woman.
"Darlin, a penny for your thoughts." George smiled at her as he sat across from her.
"I'm just thinking about what a gift we have. Things can be different this time. We have a second chance to make things right. There are so many things that I want to say to you. You don't know how much I've missed you. You are the great love of my life, you know."
"As you are mine. Blanche, I will find a way to make this up to you. I swear I never meant to hurt you. I hope that you can find a way in your heart to forgive me. Let's start over again. It can be better than before. I'll build my business up again and give you the kind of life you deserve. We can do this. I don't deserve you and I know it. I never did and I certainly don't now. But I will do my best to make you a happy woman."
Blanche took a deep breath. "You already have. When I saw you in that restaurant I couldn't believe my eyes. I thought that God was playing a cruel joke on me. Maybe it was your brother Jamie. But I knew it was you. I just knew. But I didn't know why I was given this second chance. I was so angry. And I still am. It's something I'm going to have to work through. It's going to take time. I was mad that you left me the first time and now that I know that you did it on purpose I feel even more devastated. I don't know that I can trust you. Every time you walk out the door I know that I will be wondering if it's the last time that I will see you. So don't make any promises George. Because I don't think that you can keep them."
And Blanche meant that. She may have given George her heart but it didn't mean that she would open herself to him completely.
"Darlin, I know that you will have a hard time believing a word I say. And when I get back, I will work on earning your trust again. I will do what ever it takes to get you to believe in me."
Blanche couldn't believe what she had just heard. "When you get back? And just where do you think you're going?"
"I have to go back to Atlanta to finish up some business. I wasn't sure that you would take me back. I promise I'll be back within a month. I'll…"
The fiery southerner stood up. "How dare you! You walk back into my life only to leave again! You tell me you've changed your ways but I don't believe you for a minute. You come in here asking me to be your wife again and then you tell me that you want to leave me. I don't believe you! You have some nerve waltzing in here like you've done nothing wrong. You destroyed my life and I'm not going to let you do it again. Get out of my life George Deveraux. Go on. I don't care to ever see you again."
George was stunned. He knew that this was a possibility but he thought that Blanche had accepted him. All he wanted was a chance to be her husband again but now she was throwing him out. If this was what she wanted then he had no choice but to respect her wishes. He was a broken man; there was no reason for him to go on. He didn't look at her as he turned around and walked out the door.
Once Dorothy, Rose, and Sophia saw that George had left, they knew that they needed to be with her. She was their friend; if one of them was in pain they all were.
"Are you alright? George just left without saying a word." Dorothy commented as she knocked on Blanche's open bedroom door.
"Sweetheart, you don't mean that. What happened?"
"I really don't care to discuss it."
Rose spoke up. "Whenever I have a problem I find that talking about it always helps."
"Good for you. But I don't have a problem."
"Now I know that something happened between you and George. I'm not going to stick my nose in where it doesn't belong." Dorothy started.
"That's a first."
Dorothy ignored her roommate. She was used to Blanche's sarcastic remarks, especially when she was hurting. "I think that whatever happened is tearing you up. It's been a long time since I've seen you in this much pain. I know that you still love him. You wouldn't have welcomed him back into your house if you didn't. I know you heard him out and you had the right to throw him out. He hurt you really badly. But you also loved him really deeply. He was the love of your life and that kind of love only comes around once in a lifetime. What did he do? What did he say?"
Blanche ran her fingers through her hair. "It's not what he said. It's what he's going to do. He said he was going to leave town to take care of business. He said he'd be back in a month but how in the world am I supposed to believe him?"
"You know what this calls for? There's a chocolate cheesecake in the refrigerator and I'll start a pot of coffee." Rose suggested.
Soon they were they were sitting over their dessert, wondering what to say to Blanche.
"How do you know that he won't be back? I'm sure it takes a lot of work coming back from the dead." Rose finally spoke up.
"Because, you bubblehead, he left me once. How do I know he won't do it again? He obviously doesn't care about my feelings. And he was in Atlanta the whole time. Atlanta! He was so close and didn't even bother to come back to me. He let me waste all of these years of my life. George only came back because he has a guilty conscience. He only wants me because he thinks he can't have me. He doesn't love me. If he did he never would have done this to me in the first place."
"I can't speak for him but it sure seems like he loves you. He came back for you. He had his reasons for leaving and they had nothing to do with you," Dorothy said. "He made a mistake, a terrible, tragic mistake. I spoke to him and I heard what he had to say. He loves you. If you believe in your marriage maybe you should believe in him now. What you two share most people would kill for. I never experienced that with Stan. I would give anything to know that kind of love. Love requires faith. I know he made it impossible for you to give it to him but couldn't you try? What have you got to lose?"
Blanche sighed." I could lose my heart all over again."
The girls looked at each other, feeling bad at Blanche's honesty.
The next day, Blanche was preparing to go out with Mel Bushman. He'd forgiven her for standing her up the night before. They'd had a history together, and he was the most understanding of her dates. She needed a pick-me up to help her forget the events of the past 24 hours. Losing George was hard enough, but forgetting him would be impossible.
She was putting on her earrings when the doorbell rang. Of course, no one answered it. She set her earring down and went to the living room. She was stunned to see her husband at the door.
"George, what are you doing here?"
"Sophia called. She said that you wanted to see me."
"Obviously she was mistaken." She started to shut the door on him when he placed his hand on it and opened it.
"Please, darlin'. Won't you hear me out?"
"George Deveraux I have nothing to say to you." She said, opening the door.
"Then let me speak. I'm sorry I told you that I had to leave. I was in such a hurry to see you that I didn't take care of my business. I should have had more faith in us and done that first. I can see that I've been wrong about many things and that was one of them. But I was not wrong about you. You were the best thing I've ever done in my life. I was hoping with all of my heart that I could pick up where we left off. I should have known that you would have difficulties trusting in me. I know that I hurt you and nothing I can say or do can make up for it. I love you, and thoughts of you have sustained me throughout the worst years of my life. We belong together. Now if you can look me in the eyes and tell me you don't love me anymore I will walk out this door and you will never see me again. But if not I promise you that I will never leave your side. You can come with me, and we can be together. I will do anything it takes to prove to you that my love is for real." George said passionately.
Blanche was torn. Dare she open her heart to this man who had torn it all apart? She did what she always did when she had a problem that seemed insurmountable- she ran into those strong arms of his.
"Oh George. Don't you ever leave me again. Of course I'll go with you. I need you by my side. I've known from day one that you're the only man for me. I can[t take the chance of losing you again, but that's not why I'm with you. You're the most charming, intelligent, witty, handsome man I've ever known. You complete me. You've brought so much joy into my life. The happiest days of my life I've spent with you. And I intend to hold you for the rest of my days. Don't you ever leave me again."
And for the first time in nine years, they shared their first kiss. It was worth the wait.
"I love you, that's all I got." - Rick to Lori
Great one shot Melinda, I loved it, Golden Girls is one of my favourite shows. Awesome writing, hope you do more Golden Girls stories, this was wonderful.
Wow that Golden Girls one shot is amazing. I loved it. Two thumbs up.
Stranded at the Drive In (Grease)
Rizzo never felt so alone in all her life. She knew she made a mistake, and she had to live with it. She got in her car, and was about to drive out of the drive in. She brought some of her friends, but they would find rides home. She just wanted to go home, and sleep and forget all her problems. She didn't have a Mother or Father to go to. She had Parents, but they were to busy ruining their own lives to worry about her. She has always been smart, but how could she get herself in this situation? She was driving out, when she spotted Sandy running out of the drive in. She couldn't see Danny, she stopped her car.
"Sandy do you need a ride"?
"No I will walk home Rizzo".
"Get in I will drive you". Sandy walked over getting in, putting her seat belt on.
"What happened you, and Danny have a fight"?
"He is a horrid man, all they think about is sex"
"Yeah Sandy that is pretty much the truth, but don't you"?
"Well I'm not pure like you, well I guess you heard I might be pregnant"
"Yeah I'm sorry about that"
"We will be fine, I don't need anyone, and I don't run away from my mistakes".
" Kenickie should help you, it is his baby".
"Lets not talk about Kenickie, or Danny"
"Sounds great to me"
Rizzo was driving Sandy home, they were pretty quiet. Sandy smiled, "Rizzo did you ever date Danny"?
"Yeah for a short time why"?
"He totally confuses me, he has so many different sides to him"
"Yeah most men do, Danny likes you Sandy"
"I thought he did but how he acted tonight was not very nice"
"Sandy he is a guy they all make their move eventually".
Sandy smiled, "Rizzo you are acting pretty sweet, what is up with that"?
"You tell anyone you will regret it Sandy, I'm having a bad day"
"Well I would like you to have more of them, you have treated me pretty awful recently"
"I treat everyone that way, I'm sorry Sandy"
"I live right down this street, the last house on the left". Rizzo stopped the car, Sandy smiled, 'Thanks for the ride Rizzo, would you like to come in"?
"No I have to get home, I'm pretty tired"
"You sure my Parents are probably in bed already"?
"No I wouldn't want people to see me go into your house my reputation Sandy"
"Ok Rizzo see you at school tomorrow"
"Yeah" Sandy got out, and Rizzo waved, and drove off. Sandy smiled she actually saw a side to Rizzo she liked. She could see herself being friends with her, but she could see Rizzo was someone with a lot of secrets. She walked into her house, and went to bed.
Rizzo drove home, and went into the house, and saw her Mom and Dad in the living room. They were drunk, she was happy they were not awake. She walked upstairs, and went to her room, and shut the door. She walked over to the bed, and sat down touching her stomach.
"I promise you if I'm pregnant, I will be a better person. God I hope I'm not pregnant, I'm not ready to be a Mother. If I am God, I promise I will be the best Mother I can be.". She laid back shutting her eyes, and fell asleep. The next morning she went to the clinic for the results. She went into the Doctor's office, and he smiled, 'Rizzo you are not pregnant".
Rizzo was shocked she really thought she was even part of her was a little disappointed. She smiled, 'Thank you Doctor".
"Rizzo you are young, please be more careful"
"I will Doctor that is a promise". She got up, and walked out of the clinic, and she decided from this point in her life, she was going to change. She was going to start to live her life for her, she didn't need a man in her life to make her happy. She sure hoped Kenickie would be in her future, but if he wasn't she would survive. She got in her car, and went to school, she was going to focus on her education, but she laughed, she wasn't going to give up being a Pink Lady, and she sure wasn't going to give up on her friends, she needed them in her life. She knew she was going to Graduate real soon, but she knew she would never forget what almost happened to her. She would have child in her future she hoped, but for now it wasn't the right time, and she was ok with that. She got to school, Frenchie and Jan ran over to her.
"Rizzo why did you leave the Drive In last night"?
"Oh I had to get out of there, but guess what"?
"I'm not pregnant, it was a false alarm"
"Oh Rizzo thank God"
"Yeah I wasn't ready, lets go today is our last day". Frenchie smiled, "Yeah now we have something else to celebrate"
"Yeah I guess but I'm a little sad, I was thinking maybe it would have been good for me to have someone else to think about beside myself"
"Oh Frenchie lets go". They all walked into the school, and they all were happy they were about to Graduate, but a little sad their time at school together was going to end. They didn't know what the future held for them, but they did hope they all would be friends forever.
Great Grease one shot. Loved the songs from this show which was good because none of the actors were that memorable for me. | <urn:uuid:3fe58981-e112-42b5-9058-fd3f4da9079f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.soapchat.net/showthread.php?203616-Odds-and-Ends-One-Shots | 2013-05-22T07:49:21Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.995591 | 9,787 |
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1.a state in northwestern United States on the Canadian border
Montana (n.) [MeSH]
région administrative (fr)[Classe...]
Montana (pr. n.)
|State of Montana|
|Nickname(s): Big Sky Country, The Treasure State|
|Motto(s): Oro y Plata
(Spanish: Gold and Silver)
|Largest metro area||Billings Metropolitan Area|
|Area||Ranked 4th in the U.S.|
|- Total||147,042 sq mi
|- Width||630 miles (1,015 km)|
|- Length||255 miles (410 km)|
|- % water||1|
|- Latitude||44° 21′ N to 49° N|
|- Longitude||104° 2′ W to 116° 3′ W|
|Population||Ranked 44th in the U.S.|
|- Density||6.86/sq mi (2.65/km2)
Ranked 48th in the U.S.
|- Highest point||Granite Peak
12,807 ft (3903.5 m)
|- Mean||3,400 ft (1040 m)|
|- Lowest point||Kootenai River at Idaho border
1,804 ft (550 m)
|Before statehood||Montana Territory|
|Admission to Union||November 8, 1889 (41st)|
|Governor||Brian Schweitzer (D)|
|Lieutenant Governor||John Bohlinger (R)|
|- Upper house||Senate|
|- Lower house||House of Representatives|
|U.S. Senators||Max Baucus (D)
Jon Tester (D)
|U.S. House delegation||Denny Rehberg (R) (list)|
|Time zone||Mountain: UTC -7/-6|
|Abbreviations||MT Mont. US-MT|
Montana (i//) is a state in the Western United States. The western third of Montana contains numerous mountain ranges. Smaller "island ranges" are found in the central third of the state, for a total of 77 named ranges that are part of the Rocky Mountains. This geographical fact is reflected in the state's name, derived from the Spanish word montaña (mountain). Montana has several nicknames, none official, including: "Big Sky Country" and "The Treasure State", and slogans that include "Land of the Shining Mountains" and more recently, "The Last Best Place". Montana is the 4th-most extensive, but the 7th-least populous and the 3rd-least densely populated of the 50 United States. The economy is primarily based on services, with ranching, wheat farming, oil and coal mining in the east, and lumber, tourism, and hard rock mining in the west. Millions of tourists annually visit Glacier National Park, the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and three of the five entrances to Yellowstone National Park.
The name Montana comes from the Spanish word Montaña meaning "mountain" or more broadly, "mountainous country". Montaña del Norte was the name given by early Spanish explorers to describe the entire mountainous region of the west. Historians believe General and former Kansas Territory Governor James W. Denver was aware of this when asked by Senate chairman of the Committee on Territories Stephen A. Douglas for a name of one of the several territories he was planning on proposing. Though Douglas never did introduce a bill with the name Montana, he is credited with at least introducing the name. The name was eventually added to a bill by the United States House Committee on Territories, which was chaired at the time by Rep. James Ashley of Ohio, for the territory that would become Idaho Territory. The name was successfully changed by Representatives Henry Wilson (Massachusetts) and Benjamin F. Harding (Oregon) both complained that Montana had "no meaning". When Ashley presented a bill to establish a temporary government in 1864, for a new territory to be carved out of Idaho, he again chose Montana Territory. This time Rep. Samuel Cox, also of Ohio, objected to the name. He complained that the name was a misnomer given that most of the territory was not at all mountainous and that an Indian name would be more appropriate than a Spanish one. To this Rep. Elihu Washburne of Illinois jokingly suggested Abyssinia. Cox suggested Shoshone, but its translated meaning of "snake" elicited laughter and a remark that the bill had progressed too far to have the territory's name changed without unanimous consent. Cox then suggested that the new territory be called 'Jefferson', to which Ashley responded, "Oh, well, we are opposed to that." This astounded Cox, "Opposed to Jefferson! I propose that we name the new territory, by unanimous consent, 'Douglas Territory.' I think the gentleman opposite will agree to that," to which Ashley replied, "Oh, no, we cannot do that." Rep. John Pruyn then commented that the Governor Lyon of Idaho Territory said he thought the names for the two territories should be reversed given Idaho was more mountainous than Montana. Finally, Rep. Edwin Webster of Maryland stepped in and suggested that every father has the right to name his own child, and since the bill was the progeny of the Committee on Territories, the committee could name it whatever they wanted. After more laughter the name was settled.
With a land area of 147,046 square miles (380,850 km2), Montana is slightly larger than Japan and slightly smaller than Paraguay. It is the fourth largest state in the United States (after Alaska, Texas, and California), the largest landlocked U.S. state, and the 56th largest national state/province subdivision in the world. To the north, Montana shares a 545-mile (877 km) border with three Canadian provinces: British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. To the east, the state borders North Dakota and South Dakota. To the south lies Wyoming and to the west and southwest is Idaho.
The topography of the state is diverse and roughly defined by the Continental Divide, which runs on an approximate diagonal line through the state from northwest to south-central, splitting it into two distinct eastern and western regions. Montana is well known for its mountainous western region, most of which is geologically and geographically part of the Northern Rocky Mountains. The Absaroka and Beartooth ranges in the south are technically part of the Central Rocky Mountains. About 60% of the state is prairie, part of the northern Great Plains. Nonetheless, even east of the Continental Divide and the Rocky Mountain Front, there are a number of isolated "island ranges" that dot the prairie landscape. This island range region covers most of the central third of the state.
The Bitterroot Mountains—one of the longest continuous ranges in the entire Rocky Mountain chain from Alaska to Mexico—divide the state from Idaho to the west, with the southern third of the range blending into the Continental Divide. Mountain ranges between the Bitterroots and the top of the Continental Divide include the Cabinet Mountains, the Anaconda Range (informally called the "Pintlars"), the Missions, the Garnet Range, Sapphire Mountains, and Flint Creek Range.
The northern section of the Divide, where the mountains give way rapidly to prairie, is known collectively as the Rocky Mountain Front. The front is most pronounced in the Lewis Range, located primarily in Glacier National Park. Due to the configuration of mountain ranges in Glacier National Park, the Northern Divide (which begins in Alaska's Seward Peninsula) crosses this region and turns east in Montana at Triple Divide Peak. It causes the Waterton River, Belly, and Saint Mary rivers to flow north into Alberta, Canada. There they join the Saskatchewan River, which ultimately empties into Hudson Bay.
East of the divide, several parallel ranges march across the southern half of the state, including the Gravelly Range, the Tobacco Roots, the Madison Range, Gallatin Range, Big Belt Mountains, Bridger Mountains, Absaroka Mountains, and the Beartooth Mountains. The Beartooth Plateau is the largest continuous land mass over 10,000 feet (3,000 m) high in the continental United States. It contains the highest point in the state, Granite Peak, 12,799 feet (3,901 m) high.
Between the mountain ranges are many scenic valleys, rich in agricultural resources and rivers, and possessing multiple opportunities for tourism and recreation. Among the best-known areas are the Big Hole Valley, Bitterroot Valley, Gallatin Valley, Flathead Valley, and Paradise Valley.
East and north of this transition zone are expansive, sparsely populated Northern Plains, with rolling tableland prairies, "island" mountain ranges, and scenic badlands extending into the Dakotas and Wyoming, as well as Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada. The isolated island ranges east of the Divide include the Bear Paw Mountains, Castle Mountains, Crazy Mountains, Highwood Mountains, Judith Mountains, Little Belt Mountains, Little Rocky Mountains, Snowy Mountains, Sweet Grass Hills, Bull Mountains, the Pryor Mountains south of Billings, and—in the southeastern corner of the state near Ekalaka—the Long Pines.
The area east of the divide in the north-central portion of the state is known for the Missouri Breaks and other significant rock formations. Three stately buttes south of Great Falls are familiar landmarks. The three: Square, Shaw, and Crown buttes, are made of igneous rock, which is dense and has withstood weathering for many years. The underlying surface consists of shale. Many areas around these buttes are covered with clay surface soils, which have been derived from the weathering of the Colorado Formation. Farther east, areas such as Makoshika State Park near Glendive and Medicine Rocks State Park near Ekalaka also highlight some of the most scenic badlands regions in the state.
The Hell Creek Formation is a major source of dinosaur fossils. Paleontologist Jack Horner, of the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, brought this formation to the world's attention with several major finds.
Montana also contains numerous rivers, many of which are known for "blue-ribbon" trout fishing, while also providing most of the water needed by residents of the state, and hydropower. Montana is one of few geographic areas in the world whose rivers form parts of three major watersheds (i.e. where two continental divides intersect). Its rivers feed the Pacific Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and Hudson Bay, and the watershed areas are divided atop Triple Divide Peak in Glacier National Park.
West of the divide, the Clark Fork of the Columbia (not to be confused with the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River) rises in the Rocky Mountains near Butte and flows northwest to Missoula, where it is joined by the Blackfoot River and Bitterroot River, and further downstream by the Flathead River, before entering Idaho near Lake Pend Oreille, exiting it by the Pend Oreille River which flows west, then north through Washington into Canada. Just over the border, it meets the Columbia River, which flows to the Pacific Ocean. The Clark Fork discharges the greatest volume of water of any river exiting the state. The Flathead and Kootenai rivers also drain major portions of the western half of the state.
East of the divide, the Missouri River—formed by the confluence of the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rivers—crosses the central part of the state, flows through the Missouri breaks and enters North Dakota. The Yellowstone River rises in Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, flows north to Livingston, Montana, where it then turns east and flows through Billings, continuing across the state until it joins the Missouri River a few miles east of the North Dakota boundary. The Yellowstone River is the longest undammed, free-flowing river in the contiguous United States. Other major Montana tributaries of the Missouri include the Milk, Marias, Tongue, and Musselshell rivers. Montana claims the disputed title of possessing the "world's shortest river," the Roe River, just outside Great Falls, Montana. Through the Missouri, these rivers ultimately join the Mississippi River and flow into the Gulf of Mexico.
The Northern Divide turns east in Montana at Triple Divide Peak. It causes the Waterton River, Belly, and Saint Mary rivers to flow north into Alberta, Canada. There they join the Saskatchewan River, which ultimately empties into Hudson Bay.
In addition to its rivers, the state is home to Flathead Lake, the largest natural fresh-water lake in the western United States. Man-made reservoirs dot Montana's rivers, the largest of which is Fort Peck Reservoir, on the Missouri river, contained by the largest earthen dam in the world.
Vegetation of the state includes lodgepole pine, ponderosa pine; douglas fir, larch, spruce; aspen, birch, red cedar, hemlock, ash, alder; rocky mountain maple and cottonwood trees. Forests cover approximately 25 percent of the state. Flowers native to Montana include asters, bitterroots, daisies, lupins, poppies, primroses, columbine, lilies, orchids, and dryads. Several species of sagebrush and cactus and many species of grasses are common. Many species of mushrooms and lichens are also found in the state.
Montana is home to a diverse array of fauna that includes 15 amphibian, 85 fish, 110 mammal, 17 reptile and 420 bird species. Additionally, there are over 10,000 invertebrate species, including 180 mollusks and 30 crustaceans. Montana has the largest grizzly bear population in the lower 48 states.
Montana contains Glacier National Park, "The Crown of the Continent"; and portions of Yellowstone National Park, including three of the Park's five entrances. Other federally recognized sites include the Little Bighorn National Monument, Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, Big Hole National Battlefield, Lewis and Clark Caverns, and the National Bison Range. Montana has ten National Forests and more than 20 National Wildlife Refuges. The Federal government administers 36,000,000 acres (150,000 km2). 275,000 acres (1,110 km2) are administered as state parks and forests.
Montana is a large state with considerable variation in geography, and the climate is, therefore, equally varied. The state spans from 'below' the 45th parallel (the halfway line between the equator and the north pole) to the 49th parallel, and elevations range from under 2,000 feet (610 m) to nearly 13,000 feet (4,000 m) above sea level. The western half is mountainous, interrupted by numerous large valleys. Eastern Montana comprises plains and badlands, broken by hills and isolated mountain ranges, and has a semi-arid, continental climate (Köppen climate classification BSk). The Continental Divide runs north-south through the western mountainous half, and has a great effect on the climate. It restricts the flow of warmer air from the Pacific from moving east, and cooler, drier continental moving west. West of the divide, the climate is described as modified northern Pacific coast climate, with milder winters, cooler summers, less wind, and a longer growing season. In the winter, valley fog and low clouds often form in the valleys west of the divide, but this is rarely seen in the east.
Average daytime temperatures vary from 28 °F (−2 °C) in January to 84.5 °F (29.2 °C) in July. The variation in geography leads to great variation in temperature. Hot weather occurs in the eastern plains on occasion, the highest observed being 117 °F (47 °C) at Glendive on July 20, 1893, and Medicine Lake on July 5, 1937. Throughout the state, summer nights are generally cool and pleasant. Temperatures decrease as altitude increases, and extremely hot weather is relatively unknown above 4,000 ft (1,200 m). Snowfall is not unknown in any month of the year in parts of Montana, namely in the more mountainous areas of central & western Montana, but is rare in July and August.
The coldest temperature on record for Montana is also the coldest temperature for the entire contiguous U.S. On January 20, 1954, −70 °F (−57 °C) was recorded at a gold mining camp near Rogers Pass. Temperatures vary greatly on such cold nights, and Helena, 40 miles (64 km) to the southeast had a low of only −36 °F (−38 °C). Winter cold spells last a week or so, and are usually the result of cold continental air coming south from Canada. The front is often well defined, causing a large temperature drop in a 24-hour period. Conversely, air flow from the southwest results in "Chinooks". These steady 25–50 mph (or more) winds can suddenly warm parts of Montana, especially areas just to the east of the mountains, where temperatures sometimes rise up to 50 °F (10 °C) – 60 °F (15 °C).
Loma, Montana is the location of the most extreme recorded temperature change in a 24-hour period in the United States. On January 15, 1972, the temperature rose from −54 °F (−48 °C) to 49 °F (9 °C).
Average annual precipitation is 15 inches (380 mm), but great variations are seen. The mountain ranges block the moist Pacific air, holding moisture in the western valleys, and creating rain shadows to the east. Heron, in the west, receives the most precipitation, 34.70 inches (881 mm). On the eastern (leeward) side of a mountain range, the valleys are much drier; Lonepine averages 11.45 inches (291 mm), and Deer Lodge 11.00 inches (279 mm) of precipitation. The mountains themselves can receive over 100 inches (2,500 mm), for example the Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park gets 105 inches (2,700 mm). Perhaps the driest is an area southwest of Belfry that averaged only 6.59 inches (167 mm) over a sixteen-year period. Most of the larger cities get 30 to 50 inches (760 to 1,300 mm) of snow each year. Mountain ranges themselves can accumulate 300 inches (7,600 mm) of snow during a winter. Heavy snowstorms may occur as early as September or as late as May, though most snow falls from November to March.
The climate has become warmer in Montana and continues to do so. The glaciers in Glacier National Park have receded and are predicted to melt away completely in a few decades. Many Montana cities set heat records during July 2007, the hottest month ever recorded in Montana. Winters are warmer, too, and have fewer cold spells. Previously these cold spells had killed off bark beetles which are now attacking the forests of western Montana. The combination of warmer weather, attack by beetles, and mismanagement during past years has led to a substantial increase in the severity of forest fires in Montana. According to a study done for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science, portions of Montana will experience a 200% increase in area burned by wildland fires, and an 80% increase in air pollution from those fires.
Various indigenous peoples lived in the territory of the present-day state of Montana for thousands of years. Historic tribes encountered by Europeans and settlers from the United States included the Crow in the south-central area; the Cheyenne in the southeast; the Blackfeet, Assiniboine and Gros Ventres in the central and north-central area; and the Kootenai and Salish in the west. The smaller Pend d'Oreille and Kalispel tribes lived near Flathead Lake and the western mountains, respectively.
The land in Montana east of the continental divide was part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Subsequent to the Lewis and Clark Expedition and after the finding of gold and copper (see the Copper Kings) in the area in the late 1850s, Montana became a United States territory (Montana Territory) on May 26, 1864. Prior to the creation of Montana Territory (1864–1889), various parts of what is now Montana were parts of Oregon Territory (1848–1859), Washington Territory (1853–1863), Idaho Territory (1863–1864), and Dakota Territory (1861–1864).
Montana was the scene of warfare as the Native Americans struggled to maintain control of their land. The Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought near the present-day town of Hardin. Montana was also the location of the final battles of the Nez Perce Wars.
A series of major mining discoveries in the western third of the state starting in 1862 found gold, silver, copper lead, coal (and later oil) that attracted tens of thousands of miners to the area. The richest of all gold placer diggings was discovered at Alder Gulch, where the town of Virginia City was established. Other rich placer deposits were found at Last Chance Gulch, where the city of Helena now stands, Confederate Gulch, Silver Bow, Emigrant Gulch, and Cooke City. Gold output from 1862 through 1876 reached $144 million; silver then became even more important. The largest mining operations were in the city of Butte, which had important silver deposits and gigantic copper deposits.
Cattle ranching has been central to Montana's history and economy since the late-19th century. The Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site in Deer Lodge Valley is maintained as a link to the ranching style of the late 19th century. Operated by the National Park Service, it is a 1,900 acres (7.7 km2) working ranch.
The railroads arrived in the 1880s, including the Great Northern Railroad (1889) and its rival, the Northern Pacific Railroad (1883) from Minneapolis, and the Union Pacific Railroad (1881) from Denver. Montana railroading, with two transcontinentals to the Pacific coast and extensive operations to the mines, became a major industry, with centers in Billings and Havre. Montana became a state in 1889 in an omnibus package together with North Dakota, South Dakota and Washington. In 1888, Helena (the current state capital) had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the world.
The revised Homestead Act of 1909 greatly affected the settlement of Montana. This act expanded the amount of free land from 160 acres (0.6 km2) to 320 acres (1.3 km2) per family. Tens of thousands of inexperienced homesteaders arrived, lured by free land and high wheat prices, but they were unprepared for the climate, which usually had little rainfall and required special dry farming techniques. The droughts of 1917–1919 proved devastating, as many left, and half the banks in the state went bankrupt after providing mortgages that could not be repaid. The Great Depression caused further hardship for farmers and ranchers and miners, but the economy bounced back in the 1940s. The wheat farms in eastern Montana make the state a major producer; the wheat has a relatively high protein content and thus commands premium prices. After 1940 tourism became the state's third largest industry with Yellowstone and Glacier national parks as the largest tourist attractions.
The planned battleship USS Montana was named in honor of the state. However, the battleship was never completed, making Montana the only one of the 48 states during World War II not to have a battleship named after it. Additionally, Alaska and Hawaii have both had nuclear submarines named after them. As such Montana is the only state in the union without a modern naval ship named in its honor. However, in August 2007 Senator Jon Tester made a request to the Navy that a submarine be christened USS Montana.
Politics in the state has been competitive, with the Democrats usually holding an edge, thanks to the support among unionized miners and railroad workers. Large scale battles revolved around the giant Anaconda Copper company, based in Butte and controlled by Rockefeller interests, until it closed in the 1970s. Until 1959, the company owned five of the state's six largest newspapers.
Seven American Indian reservations are located in Montana: Fort Peck Indian Reservation, Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, Crow Indian Reservation, Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation, Blackfeet Indian Reservation, and the Flathead Indian Reservation.
Montana has 56 counties with the United States Census Bureau stating Montana's contains 364 "places", broken down into 129 incorporated places and 235 census-designated places. Incorporated places consist of 52 cities, 75 towns, and two consolidated city-counties. Montana has one city, Billings, with a population over 100,000; and two cities with populations over 50,000, Missoula and Great Falls. These three communities are considered the centers of Montana's three Metropolitan Statistical Areas. The state also has five Micropolitan Statistical Areas centered on Bozeman, Butte, Helena, Kalispell and Havre*. These communities, excluding Havre, are colloquially known as the "big 7" Montana cities, as they are consistently the seven largest communities in Montana, with a significant population difference when these communities are compared to those that are 8th and lower on the list, and the only communities to host major airports. Based on 2000 census numbers, they collectively contain 34 percent of Montana's population. and the counties containing these communities hold more than 60 percent of the state's population.
The United States Census Bureau estimates that the population of Montana was 998,199 on July 1, 2011, a 0.89% increase since the 2010 United States Census. On January 3, 2012, Governor Schweitzer announced that the Census and Economic Information Center (CEIC) at the Montana Department of Commerce estimated Montana had hit the one million mark sometime between November and December, 2011.
The 2010 census put Montana's population at 989,415 which is an increase of 87,220 people, or 9.7 percent, since the year 2000. Growth is mainly concentrated in Montana's seven largest counties, with the heaviest percentile growth in Gallatin County, which saw a 32% increase in its population since 2000. The city seeing the largest percentile growth was Kalispell with 40.1%. The city with the largest actual growth was Billings with an increase in population of 14,323 since 2000.
According to the 2010 Census, 89.4% of the population was White (87.8% Non-Hispanic White Alone), 0.4% Black or African American, 6.3% American Indian and Alaska Native, 0.6% Asian, 0.1% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, 0.6% from Some Other Race, and 2.5% from Two or More Races. Hispanics and Latinos of any race made up 2.9% of the population.
The largest European ancestry groups in Montana are: German (29.3%), Irish (16.4%), English (13.1%), and Norwegian (10%). In addition, 5.9% of the people identified their ancestry as "American".
Apart from the sizable American Indian population, nearly 90% of its residents are of European descent, with a large numbers of German, Irish, British, Slavic, Italian, and Scandinavian immigrants arriving between 1890–1910. About 2000–3000 Chinese miners were in Montana by 1870, and 2500 in 1890. They were strongly opposed by labor unions, and public opinion grew increasingly negative in the 1890s and nearly half left the state by 1900.
While German ancestry is the largest reported European-American ancestry in Montana as a whole, residents of Scandinavian ancestry are prevalent in some of the farming-dominated northern and eastern prairie regions, parallel to nearby regions of North Dakota and Minnesota. Irish and English are the second and third largest European ancestral groups in the state. There are also several predominantly Native American counties, mainly around each of the seven Indian reservations. The state has a larger Native American population (and percentage) than most US states. The seven reservations are actually made of more than twelve distinct Native American ethnolinguistic groups. The historically mining-oriented communities of western Montana such as Butte have a wider range of ethnic groups, and are particularly rich in European-American ethnicity; Finns, Eastern Europeans and especially Irish settlers left an indelible mark on the city, as well as people originally from British mining regions such as Cornwall, Devon and Wales. The nearby city of Helena, also founded as a mining camp, had a similar mix in addition to a small Chinatown, and the Chinese in Montana, while a low percentage today, have historically been an important presence. Montanans who claim Filipino ancestry amount to almost 3,000, making them the largest Asian American group in the state. Throughout the nineteenth century, many farmers of German, Scandinavian, Irish, Scots, and English roots settled in Montana. In addition, the Hutterites, originally from Central Europe, settled here, and today Montana is second only to South Dakota in U.S. Hutterite population with several colonies spread across the state. Many of Montana's historic logging communities originally attracted people of Scottish, Scandinavian, Slavic, English and Scots-Irish descent. Montana's Hispanic population is concentrated around the Billings area in south-central Montana, where many of Montana's Mexican-Americans have been in the state for generations. The highest density of African-Americans is located in Great Falls.
|2000 (total population)||92.79%||0.50%||7.36%||0.79%||0.12%|
|2000 (Hispanic only)||1.74%||0.05%||0.28%||0.04%||0.01%|
|2005 (total population)||92.52%||0.62%||7.47%||0.82%||0.11%|
|2005 (Hispanic only)||2.22%||0.07%||0.23%||0.03%||0.01%|
|Growth 2000–05 (total population)||3.42%||28.09%||5.19%||7.11%||-4.46%|
|Growth 2000–05 (non-Hispanic only)||2.87%||25.58%||5.91%||8.07%||-0.82%|
|Growth 2000–05 (Hispanic only)||31.85%||52.36%||-13.46%||-13.52%||-39.22%|
|* AIAN is American Indian or Alaskan Native; NHPI is Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander|
The religious affiliations of the people of Montana include:
Large denominations (measured by numbers of adherents) include the Roman Catholic Church with 169,250 as of 2000[update]; the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America with 50,287 as of 2000[update]; and (as of 31 December 2008[update]) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with 45,517.
A November 2011 Public Policy Polling survey found that 37% of Montana voters supported the legalization of same-sex marriage, while 51% opposed it and 12% were not sure. A separate question on the same survey found that 62% of respondents supported legal recognition for same-sex couples, with 32% supporting same-sex marriage, 30% supporting civil unions, 35% opposing all legal recognition and 3% not sure.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that Montana's total state product in 2003 was $26 billion. Per capita personal income in 2003 was $25,406, 47th in the nation. However, this number is rapidly increasing.
Montana is a relative hub of beer microbrewing, ranking second in the nation in number of craft breweries per capita. There are significant industries for lumber and mineral extraction; the state's resources include gold, coal, silver, talc, and vermiculite. Ecotaxes on resource extraction are numerous. A 1974 state severance tax on coal (which varied from 20 to 30 percent) was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Commonwealth Edison Co. v. Montana, 453 U.S. 609 (1981).
Tourism is also important to the economy with millions of visitors a year to Glacier National Park, Flathead Lake, the Missouri River headwaters, the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn and three of the five entrances to Yellowstone National Park.
Montana's personal income tax contains 7 brackets, with rates ranging from 1% to 6.9%. Montana has no sales tax. In Montana, household goods are exempt from property taxes. However, property taxes are assessed on livestock, farm machinery, heavy equipment, automobiles, trucks, and business equipment. The amount of property tax owed is not determined solely by the property's value. The property's value is multiplied by a tax rate, set by the Montana Legislature, to determine its taxable value. The taxable value is then multiplied by the mill levy established by various taxing jurisdictions—city and county government, school districts and others.
As of January 2010, the state's unemployment rate is 6.8%.
Montana has variety of arts and culture as well as festivals and events.
There are no major league sports franchises in Montana due to the state's relatively small and dispersed population, but a number of minor league teams play in the state. Baseball is the minor-league sport with the longest heritage in the state, and Montana is currently home to four Minor League baseball teams, all members of the Pioneer Baseball League:
All of Montana's four-year colleges and universities field a variety of intercollegiate sports teams. The two largest schools, the University of Montana and Montana State University, are members of the Big Sky Conference and have enjoyed a strong athletic rivalry since the early twentieth century. Most of the smaller four-year schools in the state belong to the Frontier Conference.
Numerous other sports are played at the club and amateur level, including softball, rugby, and soccer. In 2011, Big Sky Little League won the Northwest Region, advancing to the Little League World Series in South Williamsport, PA for the first time in state history.
From 1988–2010, the Montana High School All Class Wrestling Tournament was held in Billings at MetraPark. This event remains one of the most popular high school events each year in Montana. The 2011 event was relocated to three different cities due to a freak tornado that tore the roof of the MetraPark building on June 20, 2011. The MetraPark has been repaired and expects to host the all class tournament again.
In 1904 a group of young Native American women, after playing undefeated during their last season, went to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition held in St. Louis and defeated all challenging teams and were declared to be world champions. For this they received a large silver trophy with the inscription "World's Fair – St. Louis, 1904 – Basket Ball – Won by Fort Shaw Team".
Montana has several ski areas including:
The current Governor is Brian Schweitzer (Democrat) who was sworn in on January 3, 2005. Montana's two U.S. senators are Max Baucus (Democrat) and Jon Tester (Democrat). The state's congressional representative is Denny Rehberg (Republican).
Historically, Montana is a swing state of cross-ticket voters who tend to fill elected offices with individuals from both parties. Through the mid-20th century, the state had a tradition of "sending the liberals to Washington and the conservatives to Helena." However, beginning in the 1980s, the pattern flipped, with voters more likely to elect conservatives to federal offices. There have also been long-term shifts of party control. During the 1970s, the state was dominated by the Democratic Party, with Democratic governors for a 20-year period, and a Democratic majority of both the national congressional delegation and during many sessions of the state legislature. This pattern shifted, beginning with the 1988 election, when Montana elected a Republican governor and sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate for the first time since the 1940s. This shift continued with the reapportionment of the state's legislative districts that took effect in 1994, when the Republican Party took control of both chambers of the state legislature, consolidating a Republican party dominance that lasted until 2004.
In presidential elections, Montana was long classified as a swing state, though in recent years, Montana has been classified as a Republican-leaning state, as the state supported Republican presidential candidates in every election from 1996 to the present. The state last supported a Democrat for president in 1992, when Bill Clinton won a plurality victory. Overall, since 1889 the state has voted for Democratic governors 60 percent of the time and Democratic presidents 40 percent of the time, with these numbers being 40/60 for Republican candidates. In the 2008 presidential election, Montana was considered a swing state and was ultimately won by Republican John McCain, albeit by a narrow margin of two percent.
However, at the state level, the pattern of split ticket voting and divided government holds. Democrats currently hold both U.S. Senate seats, as well as four of the five statewide offices (Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State and State Auditor). The Legislative branch had split party control between the house and senate most years between 2004 and 2010, when the mid-term elections returned both branches to Republican control. The state Senate is, as of 2010, controlled by the Republicans 28 to 22, and the State House of Representatives at 68 to 32.
Montana is an Alcoholic beverage control state.
The state-funded Montana University System consists of:
Major Tribal Colleges in Montana include:
There are three small private colleges based in Montana, in addition to branch campuses of out-of-state schools:
Montana does not have a Trauma I hospital, but does have Trauma II hospitals in Billings, Missoula, and Great Falls.
Railroads have been an important method of transportation in Montana since the 1880s. Historically, the state was traversed by the main lines of three east-west transcontinental routes: the Milwaukee Road, the Great Northern, and the Northern Pacific. Today, the BNSF Railway is the state's largest railroad, its main transcontinental route incorporating the former Great Northern main line across the state. Montana RailLink, a privately-held Class II railroad, operates former Northern Pacific trackage in western Montana.
In addition, Amtrak's Empire Builder train runs through the north of the state, stopping in the following towns: Libby, Whitefish, West Glacier, Essex, East Glacier Park, Browning, Cut Bank, Shelby, Havre, Malta, Glasgow, and Wolf Point.
Billings Logan International Airport is the busiest airport within a four state region (Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota) both in passenger boardings and air cargo. Montana's other major Airports include Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport (formerly Gallatin Field) Missoula International Airport, Great Falls International Airport, Glacier Park International Airport, Helena Regional Airport, Bert Mooney Airport and Yellowstone Airport. Eight smaller communities have airports designated for commercial service under the Essential Air Service program.
Historically, the primary east-west highway route across Montana was U.S. Route 10, which connected the major cities in the southern half of the state. Still the state's most important east-west travel corridor, the route is today served by Interstate 90 and Interstate 94. U.S. Routes 2 and 12 and Montana Highway 200 also traverse the entire state from east to west.
Montana's only north-south Interstate Highway is Interstate 15. Other major north-south highways include U.S. Routes 87, 89, 93 and 191. Interstate 25 terminates into I-90 just south of the Montana border in Wyoming.
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Admitted on November 8, 1889 (41st) | <urn:uuid:324b7f82-6f6c-4c77-adaa-1e573df200d8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dictionary.sensagent.com/Montana/en-en/ | 2013-05-22T14:39:56Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941417 | 8,760 |
US 4682367 A
Cooperation between two repeater transceivers of a radio trunking system causes a mobile radio transceiver to join or rejoin ongoing communications. To join ongoing communications, a radio transceiver attempts to acquire a free repeater communications channel by transmitting call signalling identifying a group of transceivers to be contacted. If the group to be contacted is already communicating on another repeater communications channel, the calling radio transceiver is forced to leave the communications channel it is trying to acquire and to begin scanning communications channels in search of call signalling identifying it. Meanwhile, the repeater permitting the ongoing communication interrupts the ongoing communications briefly and transmits the call signalling identifying the group of transceivers to be joined (including the radio transceiver which is to join the ongoing communications). The radio transceiver to be joined detects the call signalling transmitted by the repeater, locks onto the repeater channel over which the call signalling is being transmitted, and joins the ongoing communications. Land line callers are also permitted to join ongoing communications.
1. In a trunking radio transceiver of the type which operates on a plurality of channels, the improvement comprising:
means for controlling said transceiver to (1) transmit, on a non-used channel X, a request to join ongoing transceiver communications being conducted over a further channel Y, (2) thereafter leave said channel X and scan said plural channels, and (3) thereafter tune to said channel Y in response to signalling transmitted to said transceiver so as to permit transceiver participation in said ongoing transceiver communications thereon.
2. A method for establishing communication between a first radio transceiver and a further radio transceiver comprising the steps of:
(1) transmitting a first calling signal from said first radio transceiver to said further radio transceiver over a communication channel Y;
(2) in response to said calling signal transmitted by said transmitting step (1), transmitting, with said further radio transceiver, a further calling signal identifying said first radio transceiver over a communication channel X different from said channel Y;
(3) receiving said further calling signal with said first radio transciever; and
(4) in response to said received further calling signal, operating said first radio transceiver on said channel X.
3. A method of operating a trunking radio transceiver of the type having a plurality of communication channels, comprising the steps of:
(1) transmitting on a non-used channel X a request to join ongoing transceiver communications being conducted over a further channel Y;
(2) thereafter leaving said channel X and scanning said plural channels;
(3) thereafter operating on said further channel Y in response to signalling received by said radio transceiver; and
(4) thereafter staying tuned to said channel Y so as to permit transceiver participation in said ongoing transceiver
4. A method for establishing communication between radio transceivers via a fixed radio repeating station comprising the steps of:
(1) dedicating a radio communications channel Y to a group of radio transceivers;
(2) conducting transceiver communications over said channel Y between transceivers of said group via said fixed repeating station;
(3) transmitting, from a radio transceiver to said repeating station, a request over a further radio communications channel X that a further radio transceiver be permitted to join the communications conducted by said conducting step (2) over said channel Y;
(4) transmitting, with said repeating station over said channel Y, in response to said request, a pre-assigned calling sequence directed to said further radio transceiver; and
(5) operating said further radio transceiver on said channel Y in response to said calling sequence transmitted by said transmitting step (4).
5. A method for establishing communication between radio transceivers comprising the steps of:
(1) scanning plural repeater channels with a first radio transceiver to detect a non-used channel Y;
(2) transmitting a pre-assigned calling sequence from said first transceiver over said channel Y;
(3) re-transmitting said pre-assigned calling sequence with a repeater over said channel Y;
(4) detecting said re-transmitted calling sequence with at least a second radio transceiver and, in response thereto, operating said second radio transceiver on said channel Y so as to permit communications between said first and second transceivers;
(5) scanning said plural repeater channels with a third radio transceiver to locate a non-used channel X;
(6) transmitting said pre-assigned calling sequence from said third radio transceiver over said channel X; and
(7) in response to said sequence transmitted by said transmitting step (6), re-transmitting with said repeater said pre-assigned call signalling sequence over said channel Y.
6. A method as in claim 5 further including the steps, performed after said transmitting step (6), of:
(a) scanning said plural channels with said third transceiver and detecting said pre-assigned calling sequence transmitted by said re-transmitting step (7);
(b) operating said third radio transceiver on said channel Y in response to said calling sequence detected by said scanning and detecting step (a), thereby permitting communications between said third radio transceiver and said first and second transceivers over said channel Y.
7. In a radio communications system including (a) a radio repeater having plural communications channels C1-CN and (b) plural radio transceiver each capable of communications via any of said communications channels, a method for permitting communications between radio transceivers over one of said communications channels comprising the steps of:
(1) scanning said communications channels C1-CN with each of a plurality of radio transceivers;
(2) transmitting call signalling over a selected channel CK of said communications channels C1-CN with said radio repeater;
(3) receiving said call signalling transmitted by said transmitting step (2) with said plurality of radio transceivers;
(4) permitting communications over said repeater channel CK between said plurality of transceivers;
(5) transmitting call signalling from a further radio transceiver over another selected channel CL different from said channel CK;
(6) deciding in response to said signalling transmitted by said transmitting step (5) whether said further radio transceiver should join the communications permitted over said repeater channel CK by said permitting step (4); and
(7) if said further radio transceiver should join said communications over said channel CK, performing the following steps:
(a) scanning said communications channels C1-CN with said further radio transceiver,
(b) transmitting call signalling with said radio repeater over said communications channel CK while said further radio transceiver is scanning said communications channels,
(c) operating said further radio transceiver on said communications channel CK in response to said call signalling transmitting by such transmitting step (b), and
(d) thereafter permitting communications over said repeater channel CK between said plurality of transceivers and said further transceiver.
8. A method of operating an improved trunking radio transceiver of the type which operates on a plurality of channels C comprising the steps of:
(1) detecting a non-used channel C1 of said channels C;
(2) transmitting signals on said channel C1 identifying at least one transceiver originally operating on a further channel C2 of said channels C;
(3) leaving said acquired channel C1 and scanning said plural channels;
(4) tuning to said further channel C2 and detecting signals thereon; and
(5) staying tuned to said further channel C2 in response to said signals detected by said step (4) and communication thereover.
9. The method of claim 8 in which said trunking radio transceiver was originally operating on channel C2, lost communication thereon, and reaquires said lost communication.
10. The method of claim 9 in which said trunking radio transceiver was originally communicating with a telephone interconnect network over channel C2.
11. The method of claim 8 in which said trunking radio transceiver acquires communication over channel C2 with a further transceiver originally operating on channel C2.
12. A method as in claim 8 further including the step of transmitting signals on said further channel C2 with a further radio transceiver in response to said signals transmitted by said transmitting step (2).
This application is related to copending commonly-assigned U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 645,710 filed Sept. 17, 1984, now abandoned; 721,815 filed Apr. 10, 1985 and 725,682 filed Apr. 22, 1985, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,649,567. The disclosures of these related applications are hereby incorporated into this application by reference.
This invention relates generally to trunking radio repeater systems, and more specifically, to radio communications systems wherein a plurality of mobile or portable radio transceivers communicate with one another over communications channels through radio repeaters operating on such channels. Even more specifically, this invention relates to a technique by which additional radio transceivers may be brought onto a communications channel already acquired by other radio transceivers and dedicated to ongoing communications between those other radio transceivers. The invention may be used advantageously with different signalling arrangements including tone signalling and digital signalling protocols.
In many localities, a plurality of radio frequency channels are allocated for use by mobile radio transceivers. Each of these radio channels usually includes at least two separate and distinct frequencies, one for transmitting and the other for receiving. Generally, there may be, and usually are many more mobile radio transceivers than there are available radio channels in a given locality.
Consequently, some arrangement is needed for sharing available spectrum space among users. One such arrangement enables a mobile radio transceiver user to obtain access to a radio channel that is not in use (without disturbing the privacy of channels already in use) and to thereafter establish communication with one or more other specifically designated mobile transceivers over that acquired radio frequency channel. When the user is finished using the channel, he or she relinquishes it for use by other mobile transceivers. One such system for establishing communication between mobile radio transceivers through a repeater over a radio frequency channel selected from a plurality of such channels is disclosed in commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 4,360,927 to Bowen et al issued Nov. 23, 1982. The disclosure of this U.S. patent is expressly incorporated herein by reference.
Bowen et al discloses a positive handshake between a mobile radio transceiver originating a call and a repeater operating on a vacant channel. A mobile transceiver desirous of originating a transmission searches a plurality of channels for an idle channel (indicated by the absence of a busy signal or tone which repeaters transmit on channels in use). When the mobile transceiver locates an idle channel, it transmits a busy signal burst which is received by the repeater operating on the idle channel. The repeater, upon detecting the busy signal burst transmitted by the mobile transceiver, transmits an acquisition signal burst which preferably has characteristics which are different from those of the busy signal. The acquisition signal burst is transmitted only if the channel is in fact vacant.
The Bowen et al type mobile transceiver originating the transmission listens for the acquisition signal, and completes a predetermined channel acquisition signalling sequence only after detecting the acquisition signal burst returned from the repeater. If the acquisition signal burst is detected, the mobile station then transmits a call signalling sequence including a first tone followed by a second tone (i.e. a "group signal" or "collect" tone followed by a "sub-group signal") which collectively identify a particular mobile transceiver (or a group of mobile transceivers) with which the user would like to communicate.
The repeater in the Bowen et al system receives and re-transmits the calling sequence to alert other designated mobile transceivers (which if in an "idle" mode are continuously scanning the repeater channels to detect call signalling sequences pre-assigned to them) identified by the transmitted signalling sequence that communication is to be established. The repeater simultaneously transmits a busy signal throughout the channel acquisition call signalling sequence (beginning at the time that a busy signal transmitted by the mobile station is received by the repeater) to ensure that other mobile transceivers searching for an idle channel detect that the channel is in use and therefore do not try to acquire the channel themselves.
When the Bowen et al mobile transceiver has completed transmitting the desired call signalling sequence, it switches back to a receive mode to listen for a busy signal still being transmitted by the repeater. If such a busy signal is still present, the mobile transceiver assumes that the communication channel has been successfully acquired and dedicated to its use, and begins operating in a "ready" mode. The radio transceiver is available for use by a user to communicate voice information over the acquired communication channel via the repeater to another mobile transceiver(s) alerted by the call signalling sequence and "collected" onto the channel. On the other hand, if the mobile transceiver does not detect a busy signal at the conclusion of its call signalling transmission, it resumes scanning the communication channels until another idle channel is found, and attempts to acquire this idle channel in the same manner.
An improved arrangement is disclosed in U.S. application Ser. No. 721,815 filed Apr. 10, 1985. Briefly, this improved arrangement includes additional signalling tones and suppresses transmission of the busy signal during portions of the call signalling sequence to permit a larger number of different groups of mobile transceivers to be served by a single group of repeaters while reducing the possibility of a mobile transceiver "falsing" on voice information present on a scanned communication channel.
Other radio communications systems are disclosed in the following commonly-assigned patents: U.S. Pat. No. 4,347,625 to Williams issued on Aug. 31, 1982 entitled "Arrangement For Cellular Operation Of A Repeater Trunking System"; U.S. Pat. No. 4,409,687 to Berti et al issued on Oct. 11, 1983 entitled "Arrangement And Method For Establishing Radio Communication In A System"; U.S. Pat. No. 4,281,413 to Forrest issued July 28, 1981 entitled "Multichannel Radio Telephone System"; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,376,310 to Stackhouse et al entitled "Mobile Data Terminal Channel Busy Arrangement" issued Mar. 8, 1983.
The following U.S. patents disclose techniques for routing and/or transferring a call from one repeater in a cellular mobile radiotelephone communications system to another depending upon the physical location of a mobile transceiver participating in the call:
______________________________________U.S. Pat. No. 4,187,398 to Stark (1980);U.S. Pat. No. 4,228,319 to De Jager et al (1980);U.S. Pat. No. 4,398,063 to Hass et al (1983);U.S. Pat. No. 4,475,010 to Huensch et al (1984);U.S. Pat. No. 4,144,496 to Cunningham et al (1979);U.S. Pat. No. 4,435,840 to Kojima et al (1984);U.S. Pat. No. 4,127,744 to Yoshikawa et al (1978);U.S. Pat. No. 4,144,412 to Ito et al (1979);U.S. Pat. No. 4,242,538 to Ito et al (1980);U.S. Pat. No. 4,308,429 to Kai et al (1981);U.S. Pat. No. 3,764,915 to Cox et al (1973);U.S. Pat. No. 3,663,762 to Joel, Jr. (1972);U.S. Pat. No. 4,144,411 to Frenkiel (1979);U.S. Pat. No. 4,384,362 to Leland (1983); andU.S. Pat. No. 3,898,390 to Wells et al (1975).______________________________________
Although the exemplary arrangements disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,360,927 to Bowen et al and in U.S. application Ser. No. 721,815 are quite successful, further improvements are possible (it should be noted that the discussion herein of these systems refers only to the exemplary embodiments thereof and does not relate to the scope of any of the patent claims in the Bowen et al patent or in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 721,815). In both of these systems, it is assumed that all mobile transceivers which are to participate in communications are in the "idle" mode and are scanning the repeater channels at the time a call signalling sequence directed to them is transmitted over a vacant repeater channel, and that all such mobile transceivers enter the "ready" mode and successfully "lock on" to the newly-dedicated repeater channel in response to the call signalling and remain on this dedicated channel until communications has terminated. A mobile transceiver which "drops off" a dedicated channel or which accidentally or intentionally misses the call signalling sequence which dedicates the channel has no way of later joining the ongoing communications on the now-dedicated channel.
Suppose, for example, that a repeater channel has been acquired by a group of several mobile transceivers (in the manner described previously), and that one of the mobile transceivers in the group temporarily cannot receive the repeater transmissions (e.g., the vehicle that it is on board is driven through a tunnel or behind a hill). The mobile transceiver "drops off" the dedicated channel because, not detecting the transmission of a busy signal (or a carrier) for a prefixed time-out period, it determines that communication on the channel has terminated. The mobile transceiver will thus return to the "idle" mode of operation in which it continuously scans repeater channels listening for call signalling.
Typically, the operator of the mobile transceiver which has "dropped off" the channel will try to rejoin the continuing communications by initiating a call signalling sequence (i.e., he or she keys the microphone to cause the transceiver to enter the "wait" mode and attempt to acquire a repeater channel). If no repeater channels are free, the attempt at acquiring a new channel will be unsuccessful. Even if the mobile transceiver successfully acquires a new repeater channel, communications with the other mobile transceivers in the group will not be established--these other transceivers are still engaged in communications on the original channel, and the calling mobile transceiver has now acquired a different channel. Two repeater channels have been dedicated to the same group of mobile transceivers, and all of the transceivers in the group are nevertheless unable to communicate with one another.
If one of the operators of a mobile transceiver in the same group as the transceiver which "dropped off" the channel realizes that the operator to whom he or she was conversing is no longer present on the channel, the operators of the transceivers still present on the channel may decide to intentionally terminate communications on the dedicated channel and to attempt to acquire a new repeater channel (so that the transceiver which "dropped off" the channel can be "collected" onto a new channel). If, however, the mobile transceiver which had originally "dropped off" the channel has already acquired a new channel, that transceiver will no longer be in the "idle" mode scanning repeater channels waiting for a call and will not detect the new call signalling sequence. These events can occur several times before all of the mobile transceivers in the group are finally collected onto the same repeater channel, causing inefficient use of repeater channels, waste of time, and frustration of mobile transceiver operators.
In many systems, it is desirable to permit mobile transceivers to be included in more than one group of transceivers. For example, the transceiver of a supervisor or a dispatcher may be programmed to enable him or her to call the transceivers of all employees (employee transceivers may be divided into several groups of transceivers), while an employee transceiver may be programmed to permit the employee to contact only a single group of transceivers operated by a subset of fellow employees. Sometimes, therefore, a mobile transceiver included in multiple groups may be busy communicating with transceivers of a first group while a call for a second group (of which the mobile transceiver is also a member) is transmitted by the repeater. Once the communications of the first group have terminated, the mobile transceiver which is also included in the second group may wish to establish communications with the second group of transceivers. Unfortunately, a call signalling sequence directed to the second group of transceivers will not be received by any of them because they are busy participating in communications on a channel already dedicated to the second group.
A similar situation occurs if a mobile transceiver is powered off or is otherwise disabled from receiving repeater transmissions during the time a call signalling sequence directed to a group of which it is a member is transmitted by the repeater. It would be highly desirable to provide some way for a mobile transceiver not participating in communications on a repeater channel dedicated to its own group of mobile transceivers to selectively join the ongoing communications at will.
Systems which use data streams to direct mobile transceivers to channels (see, e.g., the systems disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,352,955 to Kai et al and U.S. Pat. No. 4,127,744 to Yoshikawa et al) have an acceptable solution to this problem despite the limitations imposed by the solution. Any time a mobile transceiver in such systems is not involved in voice communications on a repeater channel, the mobile transceiver monitors a data stream transmitted continuously by the repeater over a dedicated control channel. If a mobile station "drops off" a channel prematurely, the data stream transmitted on the control channel redirects the mobile station back onto the correct repeater channel.
There are serious disadvantages to this data stream approach, however. A mobile transceiver can never intentionally exit a conversation to make or receive another call on a different channel, since the data stream always forces the mobile transceiver to rejoin the conversation. Moreover, in systems in which the data stream is transmitted over a dedicated control channel, the number of channels available for voice communications is decreased by one. One of the many advantages of the systems disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,360,927 to Bowen et al and in application Ser. No. 721,815 is that no dedicated control channel is needed and all available channels can be used for voice communications. It is wasteful to permanently allocate a channel for transmission of the data stream unless there are so great an abundance of voice channels that a channel is always free. Unfortunately, systems installed in busy metropolitan areas can experience overload during times of peak usage. Moreover, it is often not worth the expense of providing a dedicated control channel and associated equipment (e.g. a transmitter) merely to resolve a problem which arises only occasionally when a mobile transceiver "drops off" a channel prematurely.
The present invention permits a mobile transceiver to join, at will, communications occurring on a repeater channel after the repeater channel has been dedicated without requiring a control channel. A group of mobile transceivers scans plural communications channels waiting for a call signalling sequence directed to the group. When such a call signalling sequence is transmitted over one of the channels, the group of transceivers are collected onto the channel and communications are permitted between the transceivers.
When a further transceiver of the group not participating in communications over the channel dedicated to the group is to join (or rejoin) the ongoing communications, the transceiver transmits call signalling over a channel different from the dedicated channel. A repeater operating on this different channel decides, in response to the call signalling transmitted by the further transceiver, whether the further transceiver should join the ongoing communications permitted over the first channel. If the further radio transceiver is to join the ongoing communications, the repeater causes the further transceiver to begin scanning the communications channels and simultaneously, interrupts the ongoing communication and transmits a call signalling sequence over the already-dedicated channel. The scanning mobile transceiver receives the call signalling sequence transmitted over the already-dedicated channel and joins the communications being conducted thereon.
In an exemplary system in accordance with the present invention, an operator of a mobile or portable radio transceiver is free to decide whether or not the transceiver is to remain tuned to a channel dedicated to a group of transceivers of which his or her transceiver is a member. The operator may choose to simply drop off the channel and not participate further in communications thereon, or drop off the channel in order to communicate with a different group of radio transceivers. The operator is free to rejoin the ongoing communications on the channel later by simply initiating a call on an unused channel. Cooperation between repeaters automatically causes the operator's radio transceiver to drop off the channel upon which the call is being initiated, to begin scanning the communications channels, and to be collected onto the repeater channel already dedicated to the group of which the transceiver is a member.
Thus, an operator can intentionally "drop off" a channel without being forced back on. If a mobile transceiver accidentally "drops off" a channel, the operator of the transceiver has the option of deciding whether or not to rejoin the conversation. Although a free repeater channel is necessary for a join to occur, a channel does not have to be permanently allocated for, and dedicated to, implementing the join feature. Since the need for a join does not arise frequently enough to justify allocating a control channel especially for this feature, available resources (i.e., equipment and radio channels) are used more efficiently. Moreover, the call signalling used to cause a mobile transceiver to join an existing conversation serves as an alert to the operators of mobile transceivers already operating on the dedicated channel that one or more transceivers have just been joined and are now also operating on the channel.
The present invention is fully compatible with both the earlier Bowen et al system described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,360,927 and with the improved system described in application Ser. No. 721,815 (although, of course, the invention can be used with advantageous results in other trunking communications systems as well). All changes to existing systems are made in the preferred embodiment by simply reprogramming the repeater, and do not require modification of the many mobile transceivers that may already be out in the field.
Many of the additional advantages and features of the present invention will be more readily apparent and better understood by reference to the following detailed description of exemplary embodiments considered in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, of which:
FIG. 1 is a general block diagram of an exemplary trunking radio communications system according to the present invention;
FIG. 2 is a graphical illustration of the various operating modes of the mobile transceivers shown in FIG. 1;
FIGS. 3A and 3B are together a graphical illustration of exemplary signalling events occurring in accordance with the present invention when a mobile transceiver joins ongoing communications on an already-dedicated repeater channel;
FIG. 4 is a block diagram of an exemplary repeater station in accordance with the present invention;
FIG. 5 is a schematic block diagram of the site controller shown in FIG. 4;
FIG. 6 is a schematic block diagram of an exemplary mobile transceiver in accordance with the present invention;
FIG. 7 is an exemplary program control flow chart of a main routine executed by the repeater station shown in FIG. 4 to provide the join feature in accordance with the present invention;
FIG. 8 is a detailed flow chart of an exemplary "mobile call processing routine" called by the main routine shown in FIG. 7;
FIG. 9 is a flow chart of another exemplary routine continuously performed by the repeater shown in FIG, 4;
FIG. 10 is an exemplary program control flow chart of a main routine performed by the transceiver shown in FIG. 6;
FIG. 11 is an exemplary program control flow chart of a routine performed by the mobile transceiver shown in FIG. 6 during the time it is operating in the "wait" mode;
FIG. 12 is an exemplary program control flow chart of a routine performed by the mobile transceiver shown in FIG. 6 when it is operating in the "ready" mode; and
FIG. 13 is a detailed flow chart of an exemplary "land line call processing routine" called by the main routine shown in FIG. 7.
FIG. 1 is a schematic block diagram of a presently preferred exemplary embodiment of a trunking radio communications system 50 in accordance with the present invention. System 50 includes a repeater base station 52 and plural groups 54a-54n of mobile radio transceivers (only two groups 54a and 54b of transceivers are shown, but any number of groups of transceivers can be provided). Repeater base station 52 is connected via a telephone interconnect network 56 to one or more conventional standard telephone lines 58a-58n ("land lines") which are used to establish communications between standard telephones and mobile transceivers.
Repeater base station 52 includes a plurality of individual repeater transceivers R1-RN, a site controller 60, a data communications bus 62 (connecting the site controller to the repeater transceivers), and in some implementations may also have a further data communications bus 64 (connecting the repeater transceivers to one another). Each repeater transceiver R1-RN is capable of communicating with site controller 60 via data bus 62, and is also capable of communicating directly with any other repeater transceiver via data bus 64.
Repeater transceivers R1-RN are each connected to telephone interconnect network 56 via an analog signal path (66-1 through 66-N, respectively). Each repeater R1-RN is also connected to a transmit antenna (68-1 through 68-N, respectively) and to a receive antenna (70-1 through 70-N, respectively).
Repeaters R1 through RN each permit radio transceivers within a group 54 of transceivers to communicate with one another over a communications channel. Groups 54a-54n of mobile transceivers each include at least one mobile radio transceiver, and may each include two or more transceivers (the transceivers need not be mobile, of course, but might be portable or fixed in position). Repeaters R1-RN operate independently on different communications channels, so that as many groups of mobile radio transceivers can communicate simultaneously (without interference from the communications of other groups and without intrusion by transceivers in other groups) as there are repeater transceivers.
Repeaters R1-RN are full duplex transceivers in the preferred embodiment (meaning that they each can transmit and receive simultaneously). Conventional techniques for sufficiently separating the input and output frequencies of repeater transceivers R1 through RN and the use of filtering and other techniques permit the repeater transceivers to operate simultaneously on different frequencies on a non-interfering basis.
Typically, each group 54a through 54n of mobile radio transceivers has a common basis. For example, mobile radio transceivers installed on all vehicles owned by a given business may be included in the same group. Communications are generally restricted within each group (i.e. any member of a group of radio transceivers may communicate with any other member of the same group, but communications between members of different groups is not possible). A given mobile transceiver may be a member of more than one group if desired. Each group is pre-assigned a predetermined call signalling sequence, which in the preferred embodiment is a sequence of two tones or four tones uniquely identifying the group. The call signalling sequence is used to call ("collect") every member of a group onto a communications channel corresponding to one of repeater transceivers R1 through RN.
Briefly, the mobile transceivers supported by repeater base station 52 continuously scan through the communication channels on which repeater transceivers R1 through RN operate whenever the mobile transceivers are not engaged in communications in order that they may detect calls directed to them. If the operator of a mobile transceiver wishes to contact another mobile transceiver in his or her group, the operator controls his or her mobile transceiver to locate an unused communication channel and to transmit to the repeater transceiver operating on that unused channel the call signalling sequence associated with the group of transceivers to be contacted. The repeater transceiver operating on the unused channel receives the call signalling sequence (transmitted on its input frequency) and requests site controller 60 to verify that the received call signalling sequence is valid.
If the call signalling sequence is valid, the repeater regenerates (or repeats) and transmits on its output frequency a version of the call signalling sequence it has just received. The other mobile radio transceivers in the group are normally scanning the communications channel of system 50, and therefore detect and decode the call signalling sequence being transmitted by the repeater. Each mobile radio transceiver in the group "decides" that the call signalling sequence transmitted by the repeater is directed to it, "locks on" to the communications channel over which the call signalling sequence is being transmitted, and begins communicating over the communications channel. In this way, a free communications channel (and thus a free repeater transceiver as well) is "acquired" by (and is temporarily dedicated to) a group of mobile radio transceivers and all of the transceivers in the group are "collected" onto the acquired channel. Further description of the handshaking and call signalling sequence protocol used in the preferred embodiment may be found in application Ser. No. 721,815.
In an alternate mode of operation, system 50 can be used to establish communications between a land line and a group of mobile radio transceivers. Someone who wishes to contact a group of mobile transceivers simply calls a standard pre-assigned telephone number corresponding to telephone interconnect network 56. Telephone interconnect network 56 automatically "answers" the call by taking the telephone line "off hook" and requests the telephone caller to dial (using, e.g., a touchtone keypad) additional digits specifying a code representing a group of mobile radio transceivers to be contacted, and also determines whether there is a free repeater and associated communications channel.
If there are no free channels, the telephone interconnect network doesn't answer the telephone. If a free channel is or becomes available, telephone interconnect network 56 connects the telephone line to the repeater transceiver operating on that free channel. The repeater operating on the free channel transmits the call signalling sequence described above corresponding to the group of mobile radio transceivers to be contacted (as specified by the landline caller's request). The mobile radio transceivers to be contacted normally will be scanning the repeater channels listening for a call signalling sequence directed to them. All of the mobile radio transceivers in the desired group are collected onto the vacant communications channel in response to the transmitted call signalling sequence, and the repeater transceiver permits communications to take place between the landline caller and the radio transceiver operators.
FIG. 2 is a pictorial diagram indicating the various modes of operation of an exemplary mobile radio transceiver of the preferred embodiment. A mobile radio transceiver in the preferred embodiment operates at any given time in one of three functional modes (states); "idle"; "wait"; and "ready." When power is initially applied to a mobile radio transceiver, the transceiver is placed in the "idle" mode. In the idle mode, the transceiver continuously scans the repeater communications channels (the channels upon which repeater transceivers R1 through RN operate) listening for a call signalling sequence identifying the group of transceivers with which the transceiver is associated. All audio circuits of the mobile transceiver are inhibited in the "idle" mode so that the operator is undisturbed and so that ongoing conversations between transceivers of other groups remain private.
A call signalling sequence in the preferred embodiment is a sequence of tone bursts identifying a group of transceivers being called. If a call signalling sequence received and decoded by a mobile transceiver is a sequence assigned to a group of transceivers of which the receiving transceiver is a member (i.e., if the transceiver has been preprogrammed to recognize the call signalling sequence as a call directed to it), the radio transceiver begins operating in the "ready" mode. In the "ready" mode, the radio transceiver locks onto the channel over which the received call signalling sequence is transmitted and is ready to participate in voice communications on that channel. The audio circuits of the radio transceiver are enabled and an indicator lamp (not shown) is illuminated. An audible alarm (such as four alert beeps) is sounded by the radio transceiver upon entry into the "ready" mode so as to alert an operator that a call has been received.
If the repeater which caused the mobile transceiver to lock onto the channel ceases transmitting or communication is otherwise interrupted, the radio transceiver returns to the "idle" mode from the "ready" mode and resumes searching for calls identifying groups with which it is associated.
From the "idle" mode, if a user desires to originate a call (such as by depressing a push-to-talk button located on, for example, a hand-held microphone), the radio transceiver begins operating in the "wait" mode. In the "wait" mode, the transceiver stops scanning on the "first" vacant (unused) repeater communications channel (in the sequence of channels scanned by the transceiver) and attempts to acquire the corresponding repeater. Channel acquisition signalling protocol may be that described in commonly assigned application Ser. No. 721,815 filed Apr. 10, 1985 or that described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,360,927 to Bowen et al. After all repeater communications channels have been tried without acquiring a repeater after a time-out period has elapsed, the radio transceiver informs the user that no vacant communications channels are available (for example, by sounding an audible tone). If all channels are busy or if the mobile radio transceiver has failed to establish communications with a repeater after a time-out period has elapsed, the radio transceiver returns to the idle mode.
Suppose that a communications channel Y (and, for example, repeater R1 operating on channel Y) has been dedicated to group 54a of mobile radio transceivers, and that group 54a includes mobile transceivers 72, 74 and 76. Suppose further that mobile transceiver 76, for some reason, is not participating in communications on channel Y (e.g., it missed the call signalling sequence originally transmitted on the channel, or it thereafter accidentally or intentionally "dropped off" the channel). Suppose further that the operator of mobile radio transceiver 76 wishes to now join (or rejoin) the communications taking place over repeater channel Y. A graphical illustration of exemplary signalling and handshaking events occurring during a join in accordance with the present invention is shown in FIGS. 3A and 3B.
Prior to attempting to join the communications occurring on repeater channel Y, mobile radio transceiver 76 is in the "idle" mode and is scanning through the repeater channels listening for a call signalling sequence directed to it. The operator of mobile radio transceiver 76 need not join the communications taking place over channel Y, but may instead simply wait for a call. However, as can be seen in FIG. 2, if the operator depresses the microphone button of transceiver 76 (or takes the microphone "off hook"), the transceiver enters the "wait" mode and tries to acquire a free repeater channel.
When transceiver 76 enters the "wait" mode, the receiver section of the mobile radio transceiver is enabled onto a likely channel (e.g., channel X) and "listens" for the presence of a busy signal. If a busy signal is present on the channel (indicating that the channel is presently in use), the mobile transceiver leaves the communications channel and selects another channel. However, if no busy signal is present (interval τ.sub.a shown in FIG. 3A), the mobile transceiver transmits a busy signal on the channel (during time period τ.sub.b)
The repeater operating on the channel X selected by the mobile radio transceiver (e.g., repeater transceiver R2) receives the busy signal transmitted by the mobile transceiver and verifies that the received signal is in fact a busy signal. The repeater R2 responds to the busy signal by transmitting its own busy signal and simultaneously transmitting an acquisition signal (during time periods τ.sub.b and τ.sub.c). The acquisition signal transmitted by the repeater continues after the busy signal transmitted by the mobile radio transceiver ceases (i.e. during a time period τ.sub.c) so that when the mobile transceiver is finished transmitting the busy signal, it can switch to the receive mode and determine if the repeater has responded to its busy signal by transmitting an acquisition signal.
If the mobile transceiver does not detect an acquisition signal in response to its transmission of a busy signal, it assumes that the communications channel X which it has selected is unavailable and switches to the next free channel. However, if the mobile transceiver detects an acquisition signal (during time period τ.sub.c) at this time, the mobile transceiver transmits a call signalling sequence which contains information identifying the group of mobile radio transceivers which the mobile transceiver desires to call and communicate with (τ.sub.d).
The call signalling sequence transmitted by mobile radio transceiver in the preferred embodiment may be either a two-tone signalling sequence (as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,360,927 to Bowen et al but not shown in FIGS. 3A and 3B) or a four-tone signalling sequence (as shown in FIGS. 3A and 3B and as described in application Ser. No. 721,815 of Childress et al). The repeater receives the call signalling sequence transmitted by mobile radio transceiver 76 and begins regenerating the sequence and transmitting it over communications channel X (during time periods τ.sub.d -τ.sub.h). Normally, this call signalling sequence being transmitted by the repeater would collect mobile radio transceivers 72 and 74 (and any other transceivers of the group 54a to be contacted) onto communications channel X. However, mobile transceivers 72 and 74 are engaged in voice communications over repeater channel Y (since well before time period τ.sub.a) and are therefore not scanning through the repeater communications channels and do not detect the call signalling sequence. Other mobile radio transceivers and other groups receive and decode the call signalling sequence, but ignore it once they determine that the signalling sequence is not directed to them.
The call signalling sequence transmitted by the repeater will collect any other transceivers of group 54a which are not engaged in communications on channel Y (or on some other channel). Normally, however, all transceivers of the group except the one initiating the call will be "locked onto" channel Y and the call signalling sequence transmitted by the repeater "collects" no mobile transceivers at all (except the one initiating the call).
The call signalling sequence is transmitted by the repeater for a sufficiently long period of time so that mobile radio transceiver 76 can complete transmission of the call signalling sequence and then switch to the receive mode in time to receive ("catch") at least a final portion of the first tone burst and all of the subsequent regenerated tone bursts comprising the call signalling sequence. Mobile radio transceiver 76 may verify that the regenerated call signalling sequence transmitted by the repeater matches the call signalling sequence which it initially transmitted to the repeater. If such a match exists, the mobile radio transceiver simply waits a time period τ.sub.i during which it does nothing. τ.sub.i is preferably of a predetermined duration (e.g. 180 milliseconds in the preferred embodiment). During time period τ.sub.i, the repeater transmits neither a busy signal, an acquisition signal nor a tone burst; rather, it transmits only a "dead" (unmodulated) carrier. Time period τ.sub.i is used to help prevent mobile radio transceivers of the two-tone Bowen et al type from falsing on four-tone type signalling sequences.
Upon conclusion of time period τ.sub.i, the repeater begins transmitting the busy signal once again. The mobile radio transmitter receives the busy signal transmitted by the repeater (during time period τ.sub.j) and recognizes that the signalling sequence is completed and that the communication channel X has been dedicated to it. The mobile transceiver begins operating in the "ready" mode, receives audio transmitted by the repeater, and converts this audio into sound (via a loudspeaker) to be heard by the operator.
Sometime between the end of time period τ.sub.d and the beginning of time period τ.sub.j, the repeater R2 recognizes that the call signalling transmitted by mobile transceiver 76 is directed to transceivers which are already communicating over channel Y via repeater R1. During a time period τ.sub.k, the repeater R2 transmits an alert tone (at 2614.9 Hz in the preferred embodiment) over channel X which is received by mobile radio transceiver 76 and converted into sound to be heard by the operator of the transceiver. This alert tone is a distinctive audible tone which informs the operator of mobile radio transceiver 76 that the transceiver will not be granted channel X, but that something else (i.e. a join) is about to occur. Simultaneously, a similar alert tone may be transmitted by repeater R1 over repeater channel Y to alert the other transceivers in group 54a that a join is about to occur. In the preferred embodiment, the alert tone transmitted over channel Y has a duration of 18 msec. The alert tone need not be transmitted on channel Y at the same time an alert tone is transmitted on channel X; the channel Y alert tone could, for example, be transmitted during the time period τ.sub.delay to be discussed shortly.
The alert tone is transmitted over channel X by repeater R2 for a predetermined period of time (e.g. 2.16 seconds), and is subsequently discontinued. During the time period (τ.sub.k) for which the alert tone is transmitted, repeater R2 also transmits the busy signal over channel X (since the mobile radio transceiver 76 will drop the channel upon detecting that the busy signal is no longer present). Mobile radio transceiver 76 detects that the busy signal is no longer present, drops channel X and returns to the "idle" mode, and begins scanning the communications channels listening for a call signalling sequence directed to it (during time period τ.sub.m).
Repeater base station 52 waits a predetermined period of time τ.sub.delay, during which time it may mute the audio of repeater R1 (so that nothing but a busy signal is being transmitted over communications channel Y) and/or transmit an alert tone. τ.sub.delay is long enough to ensure that mobile radio transceiver 76 has detected the absence of the busy signal on channel X, and has entered the "idle" mode and begun scanning the repeater communications channels. τ.sub.delay in the preferred embodiment is 1.59 seconds in duration if the mobile transceiver initiating the join is of the Bowen et al two-tone type and 1.49 seconds if the mobile transceiver initiating the join is of the four-tone type as disclosed in application Ser. No. 721,815.
When the period τ.sub.delay has elapsed, repeater R1 begins regenerating the same call signalling sequence previously regenerated by repeater R2 during time periods τ.sub.d through τ.sub.h (which is also the same call signalling sequence which was initially transmitted over repeater channel Y prior to time period τ.sub.a in order to originally collect the other radio transceivers 72 and 74 of group 54a). Hence, repeater R1 transmits a four-tone signalling sequence over communications channel Y (during time periods τ.sub.d', τ.sub.f', τ.sub.g' and τ.sub.h') if mobile transceiver 76 is a four-tone type transceiver, or transmits a two-tone call signalling sequence if mobile transceiver 76 is of the two-tone type. Time period τ.sub.d' is long enough so that mobile radio transceiver 76 can scan through the entire sequence of repeater communications channels to reach channel Y, and to subsequently detect (during a time period τ.sub.e') at least the tail end of the first-transmitted tone in the sequence. Mobile transceiver 76 does not treat the call signalling sequence being transmitted by the repeater any differently from any other call, even though the sequence is actually being transmitted in response to the call transmitted by the mobile transceiver shortly before.
When mobile radio transceiver 76 detects the first tone and recognizes it as corresponding to the first tone of call signalling sequence preassigned to it, it pauses on channel Y to listen for the next tone to be transmitted. As repeater R1 continues (and finally finishes) transmitting the call signalling sequence, mobile radio transceiver 76 decodes this sequence and compares the sequence with the sequence assigned to it.
Since the transmitted call signalling sequence matches the call signalling sequence assigned to transceiver 76, the mobile transceiver waits a predetermined period of time τ.sub.i', and then determines if a busy signal is transmitted during time period τ.sub.j'. Repeater R1 begins transmitting the busy signal during time period τ.sub.j' (transmission of the busy signal having been interrupted during a portion of time period τ.sub.f' and during time periods τ.sub.g', τ.sub.h' and τ.sub.i' to prevent falsing as is discussed in application Ser. No. 721,815), and mobile radio transceiver 76 detects that transmission of the busy signal has been resumed. Mobile radio transceiver 76 then begins operating in the "ready" mode, alerts the operator that an incoming call has arrived, and is ready to be used for voice communications with the other members of group 54A.
Through cooperation of two repeater transceivers R1 and R2, repeater base station 52 converts a call initiated by mobile radio transceiver 76 that would ordinarily be interpreted as a request for acquisition of a free channel into a request to join ongoing communications on another channel, and causes mobile radio transceiver 76 to join the ongoing communications. This join occurs in the preferred embodiment without requiring mobile radio transceiver 76 to transmit any signals other than those it uses to initiate a normal call and without requiring any additional intelligence on the part of the mobile transceiver.
Although the preferred embodiment uses a call signalling sequence including two or four tones identifying a group of mobile radio transceivers, the invention is certainly not limited in application to systems using tone signalling protocols. In some applications, it may be highly advantageous to replace tone signalling with digital signalling--and the present invention is equally useful in and adaptable to either type of system.
In a system using digital signalling, "frames" of digital information are transmitted by the repeater instead of (or along with) signalling tones, each "frame" including digital information identifying a group of transceivers being called. A "frame" of digital information comprises a series of pulses encoding a value representing the group of transceivers being called (and may also include timing pulses to permit receivers to synchronously decode the information contained in the frame). Using conventional, presently-available digital data transceiver and encoder/decoder components (see, for example, Tugal, Data Transmission Analysis, Design, Applications (McGraw-Hill 1982)), a frame of digital information can be transmitted by a repeater at an extremely rapid rate and received and decoded by mobile transceivers at the same rapid rate.
To ensure that all mobile transceivers in the "idle" mode (and thus scanning the communication channels awaiting a call) receive and decode the digital call signalling sequence transmitted by the repeater, the repeater preferably transmits the same frame of digital signalling information repetitively (e.g., 20 times). Each mobile transceiver can determine whether or not the call is directed to it by decoding a single frame. Thus, a transceiver not being called can determine from a single frame that the call is not directed to it and can thereafter leave the channel being dedicated and resume scanning the channels listening for other calls. A transceiver which is identified by the information contained in the digital frame "locks onto" the channel after decoding the first full frame of digital information it receives, and then preferably remains muted until after the last frame is transmitted (the last frame transmitted may include a flag or other special character which indicates to transceivers being called that signalling is completed and communications can begin), in response to which it may enable its audio circuits.
The higher data transmission rate offered by a digital system gives such systems some advantages over tone-based systems at the expense of requiring each mobile transceiver to be provided with relatively sophisticated (although conventional) digital signal processing components. Because it is often somewhat expensive to retro-fit existing, older tone signalling-type mobile transceivers with digital signal processing components, entirely new installations not requiring compatability with older mobile transceivers already in the field are the best candidates for the digital call signalling sequence arrangements described.
A mobile transceiver which is to join an ongoing conversation on a communications channel of a digital system transmits a digital call signalling sequence (identifying the group of mobile transceivers to be joined) on an unused repeater channel. The repeater transceiver operating on the unused channel forces the calling mobile transceiver to enter the "idle" mode and begin scanning channels in the manner described above in connection with tone signalling systems. Meanwhile, the repeater transceiver operating on the communications channel over which the conversation to be joined is being conducted transmits a digital call signalling sequence which identifies the group (including the calling mobile radio transceiver) of transceivers participating in the ongoing conversation. The calling mobile transceiver pauses on the occupied repeater channel, receives and decodes a frame of digital information identifying it, and in response to the frame, locks onto the occupied channel and joins the ongoing conversation. The join feature is thus essentially independent of the call signalling protocol and mode being used.
FIG. 4 is a block diagram of an exemplary repeater transceiver (e.g., repeater transceiver R1) in accordance with the presently preferred exemplary embodiment of the present invention. In the preferred embodiment, the repeater is capable of operating in the full duplex mode (i.e., it can receive and transmit signals simultaneously).
Receiving antenna 68-1 is coupled to the input of a repeater receiver 106, conventional in design, which receives and demodulates signals received by the receiving antenna. The output of repeater receiver 106 is coupled to an A/D converter 108 which digitizes the output in a conventional fashion. The digitized output produced by A/D converter 108 is applied to an input of a signal processor 110. The output of signal processor 110 is connected to the input of a D/A converter 112 which converts the digital output of the signal processor to an analog signal and applies the analog signal to the input of a repeater transmitter 114. Repeater transmitter 114 produces a radio frequency (rf) carrier signal modulated by the audio information applied to its input, and couples the modulated rf carrier to transmitting antenna 70-1. Transmitting antenna 70-1 radiates this modulated carrier signal in a conventional manner.
Signal processor 110 is connected to a controller processor 116 and a memory 118 via a bidirectional data bus 120. Processor 116, memory 118, and signal processor 110 communicate via data bus 120.
Signal processor 110 selectively generates call signalling information and also digitally filters (and otherwise processes) the output of repeater receiver 106 (as digitized by A/D converter 108). Signal processor 110 can produce a tone and process an audio signal simultaneously in the preferred embodiment.
The output of repeater receiver 106 is also connected to the input of a busy signal filter and detector 122. Busy signal filter and detector 122 is preferably a bandpass filter which produces an output when a busy signal is received by repeater receiver 106. The output of busy signal filter and detector 122 is applied to the input of a sequential controller 124 the function of which is to control the other portions of repeater R1. Busy signal generator 126 is activated by controller processor 116 and sequential controller 124 via gate 128 to apply a busy signal to repeater transmitter 114.
Memory 118 is capable of storing the identification tones of mobile radio transceivers which communicate via the repeater. Thus, memory 118 stores the identification tone signals which are used to acquire the communications channel on which the repeater operates. Memory 118 also stores program control information used to control the operation of controller processor 116.
Controller processor 116 is connected to data buses 62 and 64 (if used), and employs these buses to communicate either directly with another repeater transceiver or with site controller 60 as needed. Information communicated via data buses 62 and/or 64 is used to accomplish the cooperation between repeater transceivers which brings about a join (as described).
Repeater R1 is also connected via an analog signal path 66-1 to telephone interconnect network 56. Audio in analog form produced at the output of repeater receiver 106 can be selectively applied to telephone interconnect network 56 for application to the telephone line of a telephone caller. Similarly, audio received from the telephone line of a caller by telephone interconnect network 56 may be applied directly to the input of repeater transmitter 114 for transmission to a group of mobile radio transceivers. An "interconnect" between repeater R1 and telephone interconnect network 56 is established by closing a double pole single throw (DPST) switch (130a and 130b) under the control of controller processor 116 (and/or interconnect network 56).
A more detailed explanation of the circuitry of the repeater transceiver R1 may be found in the copending application Ser. No. 721,815 filed Apr. 10, 1985.
FIG. 5 is a schematic block diagram of an exemplary site controller 60 shown in FIG. 1. Site controller 60 includes a microprocessor 150, a read only memory (ROM) 152, an input/output (I/O) port 154, a data bus 156, and a random access memory (RAM) 158. I/O port 154 is connected to data bus 62, and thus provides a means by which information can be communicated between selected repeater transceivers R1-RN and site controller 60. ROM 152 contains stored program control information and other data necessary to control microprocessor 150 to perform a sequence of predetermined steps. RAM 158 contains information used by site controller 60 and by repeater transceivers R1 through RN to control the operation of system 50. Microprocessor 150, ROM 152, I/O port 154 and RAM 158 communicate with one another via data bus 156. The internal structures and operating features of each of these components is conventional and well known to those skilled in the art, and further details need not be provided herein.
RAM 158 stores a table 160 containing a plurality of blocks 162 of data relating to the status of repeaters R1 through RN. Thus, block 162(1) stores information relating to the status of repeater R1, block 162(2) stores information relating to the status of repeater R2, and block 162(N) stores information relating to the status of repeater RN. The contents of blocks 162 are updated periodically as the status of the repeaters to which they relate changes.
Blocks 162 each include the following storage locations: a busy flag; a group field; and an interconnect flag. An index field specifying the repeater and/or communications channel to which the block relates may also be provided and/or other conventional techniques for indexing these blocks may be used. The busy flag of a block 162 is set whenever the repeater it relates to has dedicated the communications channel it operates upon to a group of mobile radio transceivers, and is otherwise unset. When a repeater dedicates a communications channel to a particular group of mobile radio transceivers, a code designating that group (the same code preferably also specifying the call signalling sequence associated with the group) is written into the group field of the block 162 associated with that repeater. The interconnect flag of a block 162 is set whenever the repeater associated therewith is interconnected with a land line via telephone interconnect network 56, and is otherwise unset.
RAM 158 also stores a "validity" table 164 which includes a listing of all of the groups of mobile radio transceivers supported by system 50, and a valid flag associated with the listing of each group. Validity table 164 permits site controller 60 to restrict the use of system 50 to groups of mobile radio transceivers which have been declared to be "valid" on the system. Typically, only a limited number of all possible call signalling sequences are assigned to groups of mobile radio transceivers supported by system 50, and only the assigned groups are listed in validity table 164. Moreover, it is sometimes desirable to deny a group of mobile radio transceivers listed in validity table 164 the use of system 50. For example, a group of users which have contracted to pay for the use of system 50 but which has been delinquent in paying for radio services may be prevented from accessing the system by simply changing the value of the valid flag associated with the listing for this group from "valid" to "invalid."
The manner in which the information stored in tables 160 and 164 is manipulated and changed will be discussed shortly in connection with FIGS. 7 through 13.
FIG. 6 is a block diagram of an exemplary mobile radio transceiver (e.g. transceiver 76) in accordance with the present invention. Mobile transceiver 76 includes a transmitter 200, a receiver 202, an antenna 204, a processor 206 and a signal processor 208. Receiver 202 and transmitter 200 are capable of operating on any of the communications channels operated upon by repeaters R1 through RN shown in FIG. 1. Antenna 204 may be switched by a T-R switch 210 (or some other suitable switching device) between transmitter 200 and receiver 202 depending upon whether the radio transceiver is transmitting or receiving (in some systems, it may be desirable to permit the mobile transceiver to operate full duplex rather than half duplex as described).
In the preferred embodiment, receiver 202 and transmitter 200 are frequency modulation devices (although they may be modulated using other conventional methods such as amplitude modulation if desired). Transmitter 200 includes a conventional oscillator circuit (not shown) which operates at any selected one of the input frequencies of repeaters R1 through RN depending upon the signal applied to it by a decoder logic block 212. Receiver 202 is preferably of the superheterodyne type and includes a local oscillator which operates at a selected frequency corresponding to any one of the output frequencies of repeaters R1 through RN depending upon a signal applied to it by decoder logic 212.
Decoder logic 212 is connected to an output of processor 206, which monitors and controls the state of radio transceiver 76 and also controls the operation of signal processor 208. Processor 206 applies control signals to decoder logic 212 which cause the decoder logic to sequentially produce frequency scanning signals. These scanning signals are applied to the oscillators of transmitter 200 and receiver 202 to cause the receiver and transmitter to sequentially operate on the preassigned communications channels provided by repeater base station 52. Decoder logic 212 can comprise a sequential machine which is simply enabled or disabled by processor 206, or the processor can directly control the oscillator frequencies of receiver 202 and transmitter 200 by writing information to digital data input ports of the receiver and the transmitter.
Transceiver 76 includes operator controls and indicators 214 which enable a user to operate the mobile station and to receive indications of the status of the station. The user controls permit the operator to place his or her station in one of the modes depicted in FIG. 2.
The heart of mobile radio transceiver 76 is processor 206 and signal processor 208 and the interaction between these two blocks. Processor 206, signal processor 208 and a memory 216 (e.g., a "personality"-defining PROM storing one or more call signalling sequences pre-assigned to the transceiver) communicate with one another over a conventional bi-directional data bus 218. Processor 206 writes information to signal processor 208 and reads information from the signal processor via data bus 218. Processor 206 may read (and write) information from (to) memory 216 via data bus 218. If desired, an additional address bus (not shown) may be used by processor 206 to address specific locations in memory 216 and specific control registers of signal processor 208.
Transceiver 76 also includes CODECs 219 and 220 and a duplex side tone cancellation circuit 222. The operation of CODECs 219 and 220 and duplex side tone cancellation circuit 222 is believed to be known to those skilled in the art, and need not be presented in detail here. In the conventional architecture shown, each of CODECs 219 and 220 may at times function as A/D and D/A converters in a well known manner.
Signal processor 208 in the preferred embodiment is a conventional large-scale integration (LSI) general-purpose programmable signal-processing device capable of performing a wide variety of tone generation and filtering functions. Signal processor 208 performs all necessary filtering of signals being transmitted and received. Signal processor 208 also detects and/or generates one of 38 possible tones at frequencies, times and durations specified by processor 206. Signal processor 208 is also used to detect and/or generate tones for signalling applications other than those associated with the call signalling between the mobile radio transceiver 76 and a repeater transceiver (such as for touch-tone dialing onto one of standard land lines 58A-58N, for billing purposes, and for other information transmittal to increase security of transmissions and the like).
A more detailed explanation of the operation of the mobile radio transceiver is presented in copending application Ser. No. 721,815 filed Apr. 10, 1985.
FIG. 7 is a flow chart of a main routine 250 performed by the repeater base station 52 shown in FIG. 4. Main routine 250 is interrupt driven, and is executed whenever the repeater base station is called upon to handle a call (initiated either by a calling mobile radio transceiver or by a land line caller). The processing of main routine 250 is distributed between one or more of repeater transceivers R1-RN and site controller 60 in the preferred embodiment, with most steps being performed by the repeater transceivers. Several versions of main routine 250 may be performed concurrently by different ones of repeater transceivers R1-RN in the preferred embodiment.
When main routine 250 begins executing, the first step to be performed is that the hardware and software of the repeater transceiver is initialized (block 252). Next, the repeater transceiver determines whether a new mobile call has been received (e.g. by determining whether a busy signal is being received) (block 254). If a new mobile call has been received, the mobile call processing routine shown in FIG. 8 is executed (block 256). If a new mobile call has not been received, the repeater determines whether a new land line call has been received (block 258). If a new land line call has been received, the "land line call processing routine" shown in FIG. 13 is called and executed (block 260). Otherwise, execution of main routine 250 continues to loop until an event occurs due to a new call being originated.
FIG. 8 is a flow chart of the "mobile call processing routine" 300 called by block 256 shown in FIG. 7. Mobile call processing routine 300 controls one of repeater transceivers R1-RN to dedicate a channel to a calling mobile transceiver, and also performs the join feature if necessary. For purposes of the discussion herein, assume that a mobile call originated by mobile transceiver 76 has been received on channel X including the four-tone call signalling sequence t.sub.a t.sub.b t.sub.c t.sub.d.
The repeater decodes the call signalling sequence transmitted by the calling mobile radio transceiver, and begins retransmitting the signalling sequence on channel X (as is shown in FIG. 3A) (block 302). Meanwhile, the repeater determines whether the call signalling tone sequence t.sub.a t.sub.b t.sub.c t.sub.d was used to initiate communications on another channel which are still ongoing (decision block 304). Decision block 304 is performed in the preferred embodiment by sending a packet of information representing the received and decoded call signalling sequence to site controller 60 via data bus 62 with a request for validation (the form of such a validation request message might be "Ot.sub.a t.sub.b t.sub.c t.sub.d " where "O" is a "request for validation" character and "t.sub.a t.sub.b t.sub.c t.sub.d " specifies the tones in the call signalling sequence to be validated).
Regardless of the result of the test performed by decision block 304, the repeater finishes transmitting the call signalling sequence on channel X. Site controller 60 meanwhile indexes the entry in validation table 164 corresponding to the call signalling sequence t.sub.a t.sub.b t.sub.c t.sub.d and also checks the group fields of each of blocks 162 to determine if this information has been stored in the group field of the block corresponding to any other repeater of system 50. Site controller 60 returns information to the repeater which indicates whether: (1) the call signalling sequence is valid; and (2) the group identified by call signalling sequence is communicating on any other repeater communications channel. In the preferred embodiment, an invalid user message ("5") is sent by site controller 60 to the repeater R1-RN which requested the validation whenever the sequence is invalid or the group identified by the sequence is communicating on another channel; otherwise, a valid user message "2" is sent by the site controller to the relevant repeater to give the repeater permission to dedicate the free channel X to the calling mobile transceiver. Thus, in the preferred embodiment, decision blocks 304 and 310 are actually performed as one step by site controller 60, and the repeater requesting validation is notified only whether a call signalling sequence is "valid" or "invalid" based upon the combined results of the two tests.
If the call signalling sequence t.sub.a t.sub.b t.sub.c t.sub.d is in use on another channel (e.g. channel Y), the repeater transceiver causes the calling mobile radio transceiver to join the ongoing conversation on that other channel by transmitting an alert tone and dropping the channel (as is shown in FIG. 3B) (block 306). Block 308 (which is performed by a different repeater transceiver, e.g. repeater R1, than the one performing block 306 and may be performed concurrently with block 306) transmits the join tone sequence shown in FIG. 3B on channel Y (the channel already in use by members of the group identified by the call signalling sequence received on channel X). Block 308 is initiated by transmitting a message from site controller 60 to the repeater operating on the already-dedicated channel Y (in the preferred embodiment, this message has the form "Ct.sub.a t.sub.b t.sub.c t.sub.d " where the character "C" indicates a join) which causes the repeater to transmit a specified signalling sequence on channel Y.
If the call signalling sequence is not already in use on another channel, the calling mobile transceiver is requesting not a join but rather the acquisition of a free channel for use by its group. If the call signalling sequence is invalid (as tested for by block 310 based upon information obtained by site controller 60 from validity table 164), the repeater completes the transmission of the call signalling sequence, sends an alert tone to indicate to the operator of the calling radio transceiver that something is wrong and that he or she has been denied access to system 50, and then drops the channel (block 312).
Even mobile transceivers which are denied acquisition of a channel are temporarily granted access to the channel in the preferred embodiment and are shortly thereafter dropped off the channel when the repeater stops transmitting the busy signal. In the preferred embodiment, if the call signalling sequence transmitted by the repeater was simply terminated as soon as a determination is made that the call signalling sequence is invalid or that a join should be performed, the calling mobile radio transceiver would not necessarily return to the "idle" mode to begin scanning additional channels, but might remain in the "wait" mode and try to acquire another free channel. Because the repeater finishes transmitting the call signalling sequence before it drops the mobile radio transceiver off the channel, the mobile transceiver is guaranteed to return to the "idle" mode, thereby ensuring more efficient use of repeater channels (in the case of an invalid call signalling sequence) and also ensuring that the mobile radio transceiver will receive the join call signalling sequence (in the case of a join).
If decision block 310 determines that the call signalling sequence is valid, site controller 60 updates the block 162 associated with the repeater to reflect that the repeater is busy (by setting the busy flag in the preferred embodiment) and stores a code specifying the call signalling sequence in the group field of the block associated with the repeater (block 314). Meanwhile, the repeater continues regenerating the call signalling sequence it has decoded in order to collect all of the mobile radio transceivers of the corresponding group onto the channel X, and after the signalling sequence has finished, permits voice communications between the collected mobile radio transceivers to occur.
FIG. 9 is a flow chart of a monitor routine continuously performed by each of the repeater transceivers R1 through RN of system 50. Decision block 325 continuously monitors the communications occurring on the repeater communications channel to determine when the communication is completed (by determining when mobile transceiver transmissions are no longer being received). If a predetermined period of time has passed since a mobile radio transceiver transmission was last received, the repeater drops the channel (e.g., by terminating transmission of its carrier), and requests site controller 60 (by sending the message "NBY" to the site controller in the preferred embodiment) to update the status of the communications channel to "not busy" and to clear all information from the block 162 corresponding to the channel (block 327).
FIGS. 10 through 12 are flow charts of the steps performed by each of the mobile radio transceivers of system 50. A detailed discussion of these flow charts is presented in application Ser. No. 725,682 filed Apr. 22, 1985, which discussion is expressly incorporated herein by reference. FIG. 10 is a flow chart of the main routine performed by each mobile radio transceiver of system 50 and will now be described in a manner which will illustrate the behavior of a mobile radio transceiver in the preferred embodiment during a join.
Assume that a mobile radio transceiver is in the "idle" mode and the group of which the transceiver is a member is communicating on a repeater channel Y. The mobile radio transceiver, being in the idle mode, continuously scans channels searching for a call signalling sequence identifying the group(s) to which it is assigned (block 402, 403). No such signalling tones will be detected because the mobile radio transceiver's group is busy communicating on a communications channel already dedicated to it (unless, of course, the transceiver is a member of more than one group and a call directed to another group of which it is a member is transmitted). The operator can choose to permit his or her transceiver to remain in the idle mode, and is under no compulsion to join communications with the group.
Suppose, however, that the operator decides he wishes to join the ongoing conversation. The operator simply keys his or her transceiver (e.g. by depressing the microphone push-to-talk button) (block 404), thereby causing the mobile transceiver to enter the "wait" mode and to transmit the call signalling sequence associated with the group on a free repeater channel if one exists (block 406, see FIG. 11).
If the free channel is not granted (block 408), the mobile transceiver remains in the "wait" mode and tries to acquire another free channel (this is the reason why a repeater grants a channel temporarily in response to an invalid call signalling sequence or a call to be joined). Once a channel is granted to the transceiver, the mobile transceiver locks onto the channel and enables its audio circuitry in preparation for communication (block 410). The repeater transmits a join alert tone over the granted channel (as discussed previously) which the operator of the mobile radio transceiver hears through the mobile transceiver speaker. The repeater then discontinues transmission of the busy signal (block 412), causing the mobile transceiver to drop off the channel (block 414) and return to the "idle" mode (block 402, see FIG. 12).
The repeater waits a predetermined period of time τ.sub.delay (as described previously in connection with FIG. 3B) to give the mobile transceiver time to drop off the channel and to begin scanning communications channels once again (block 402). After the period τ.sub.delay has elapsed, the repeater operating on the channel already dedicated to the group the calling mobile radio transceiver wishes to join transmits the group call signalling sequence. Since the mobile radio transceiver is in the "idle" mode, it detects and decodes these tones (block 403), and determines that they correspond to the call signalling sequence assigned to the mobile transceiver (block 416). The mobile transceiver locks onto channel Y (block 410), and joins the ongoing communications occurring thereon.
In the preferred embodiment, a calling mobile transceiver locates the channel which it is to join by returning to the "idle" mode and scanning the communications channels listening for a call signalling sequence directed to it. Hence, relatively unsophisticated transceivers with minimal "intelligence" can join an existing conversation in the preferred embodiment. In systems in which all mobile transceivers are relatively sophisticated, however, it may be desirable to avoid interrupting the ongoing conversation to be joined with the transmission of a call signalling sequence.
In an alternate embodiment of the present invention, the repeater transceiver receiving a call from a mobile transceiver which is to join an ongoing conversation responds to the call by transmitting, over the channel occupied by the calling mobile transceiver, information identifying the communications channel on which the ongoing conversation is occurring. The calling mobile transceiver receives and decodes this channel-identifying information, stores it in an internal memory, and sets its transmitter and receiver oscillator frequencies in accordance with it (thereby locking onto the channel on which the ongoing communications is occuring). In this way, a join is accomplished by transmitting information to the mobile transceiver to be joined over the unused channel on which the mobile transceiver initiates a call, rather than on the communications channel it is to join. This alternate arrangement can be implemented using tone signalling, digital signalling or other signalling protocols (as can the arrangement already described) and avoids the inconvenience of interrupting ongoing communications temporarily to accomplish a join, but does requires some additional intelligence in each mobile transceiver.
FIG. 13 is a flow chart of the "land line call processing routine" called by block 260 shown in FIG. 7. As mentioned briefly previously, calls to mobile radio transceivers of system 50 can be initiated either by a call from other mobile radio transceivers (as has been described) or by a call received from a land line. Telephone interconnect network 56 is a conventional telephone switching network that automatically "answers" (i.e. takes off hook) a "ringing" telephone line (i.e. a line carrying a ring signal thereon) and assigns the telephone line to a free communications channel X and its associated repeater transceiver (block 350). Telephone interconnect network 56 does not "scan" repeater communications channels to locate a vacant channel in the same manner as does a mobile radio transceiver in the "idle" mode, but instead attempts to connect an active land line to each repeater R1 through RN in sequence until an inactive repeater is found. Consequently, the connection does not take place until a repeater becomes available.
If telephone interconnect network 56 is successful in assigning a land line call to a free channel, the interconnect network completes the analog signal path 66 between the repeater transceiver operating on that channel (e.g. R2) and the telephone interconnect network. The land line caller is then expected to transmit a sequence of tones to repeater base station 52 which identifies the group 54 of mobile radio transceivers to be called. These tones are decoded by the repeater transceiver in a conventional manner (block 352).
The repeater sends a message to site controller 60 which requests validation of the decoded tones. Site controller 60 indexes the decoded tone information in tables 160 and 164, and decides: (1) whether the group the land line caller has requested contact with is a valid group (by reading the value of the "valid flag" associated with the appropriate group field of validity table 164); and (2) whether the group, if "valid," is already communicating on any other repeater communications channel (by reading the group fields of each of the blocks 162 of status information associated with the various repeaters R1 through RN).
If the group of mobile transceivers the land line caller wishes to contact is not already communicating on another channel and is a "valid" group, site controller 60 in the preferred embodiment sends a message to the repeater transceiver interconnected with the land line directing it to transmit the call signalling sequence identifying the group of mobile radio transceivers which the land line caller desires to contact (blocks 354, 356) (in the preferred embodiment, the site controller sends a validation response "2" to the repeater transceiver). Meanwhile, site controller 60 updates the contents of the block of status information (e.g. block 162(2)) to reflect that the communications channel is busy handling a call for the group, and that the repeater is in the interconnect mode. The mobile radio transceivers in the group being called are collected onto channel X by the transmitted call signalling sequence, and the repeater permits voice communications to occur on channel X between the land line caller and the mobile radio transceivers (simply by closing switches 130a and 130b shown in FIG. 4).
If the group identified by the signal transmitted by the land line caller is already busy communicating on another repeater communications channel Y, site controller 60 reads the value of the interconnect flag of the status block 162 associated with the repeater operating on channel Y to determine whether that repeater is in the interconnect mode (block 358). If the repeater is in the interconnect mode, it is not possible to connect the land line to the repeater in the preferred embodiment (since only one land line at a time may be connected to a repeater transceiver). A busy tone is applied to the land line to request the land line caller to try again later, and the land line is disconnected (block 360) (these events are brought about by transmitting the message "D" from site controller 60 to the proper repeater transceiver). If desired, an alert tone may be transmitted over channel Y at this time to notify the group of mobile radio transceivers the land line caller desires to contact that a land line call was received but could not be handled (block 362).
As has been explained, the preferred embodiment could permit a land line to join ongoing communications between the mobile radio transceivers of a group if no other land line is already participating in the ongoing communications. To do this, telephone interconnect network 58 transfers the land line from channel X to channel Y (by simply disconnecting the analog signal path 66 between the interconnect network and the repeater operating on channel X and completing the analog signal path between the interconnect network and the repeater operating on channel Y) (block 364).
The repeater operating on channel Y then transmits the join alert tone over channel Y in the manner discussed previously (block 366) to warn the operators of the mobile radio transceivers in the group being joined that a join is about to occur (in the preferred embodiment, site controller 60 directs the repeater operating on channel Y to transmit an alert tone and then interconnect with the landline by sending to it the message "C0000" where "C" specifies a join and "0000" indicates that no call signalling sequence is to be transmitted). The land line audio is enabled onto channel Y (by closing the switches 1 30a and 130b of the repeater operating on channel Y), and site controller 60 updates the contents of the block 162 of status information associated with this repeater to reflect that the repeater is in the interconnect mode (block 368). The repeater operating on channel Y permits voice communications between the mobile radio transceivers of the identified group and the land line caller to proceed.
The present invention permits a mobile transceiver to rejoin communication with a group of mobile transceivers and/or a land line. Sometimes, the "group" of mobile transceivers engaged in communication with a land line over a communications channel may comprise a single transceiver. For example, it may be desirable to provide private communication between a single mobile transceiver and a land line caller. Such communcation can be initiated by either the single transceiver or by the land line caller using the call signalling sequence already described. When in the interconnect mode, repeater transceivers R1-RN in the preferred embodiment do not drop channel until 30 seconds have elapsed since the last mobile transceiver transmission is received. This rather long time-out period is provided to permit land line callers to speak uninterruptedly for a relatively long period of time. A mobile transceiver has sufficient time to drop off channel accidentally and rejoin communications on the channel during this time-out period. The manner in which the join occurs is precisely the same as that described in connection with FIGS. 3A and 3B, except that no mobile transceivers are operating on repeater channel Y from the time the single transceiver accidentally drops off channel until time t.sub.e ', when the single mobile transceiver is reacquired onto the channel.
A join feature has been described which allows mobile radio transceivers to enter (join or rejoin) a conversation in progress on a busy repeater communications channel. When a mobile radio transceiver initiates a call using a call signalling sequence which was used to initiate ongoing communications on another communications channel, the mobile radio transceiver is permitted to acquire a free channel but is then dropped from the channel it acquired as if it were an invalid user. Once dropped, the mobile radio transceiver returns to the "idle" (scanning) mode and resumes scanning channels. After the mobile transceiver returns to the scanning mode, the mobile transceiver is immediately collected onto the busy channel, which generates the call signalling sequence upon command from the site controller. The users on the busy channel are notified that a join is about to commence by receipt of a join alert tone just prior to the generation of the tone signalling used to bring up a joining mobile transceiver.
In accordance with the present invention, users can join or rejoin an existing conversation so long as a communications channel is free to initiate a join. No dedicated control channel is necessary to implement the join feature. A mobile radio transceiver can drop a channel and not be forced back into the conversation (as occurs in data stream systems using dedicated control channels). Thus, a user can drop a channel, call another group of mobile radio transceivers or make a landline call, and then rejoin the original conversation. Moreover, users already on channel are notified that land line calls to their group are being attempted. Existing mobile radio transceivers need not be modified to implement the present invention, since they need not ever distinguish between a call initiating acquisition of a new channel and a call initiating a join (thus, even relatively "dumb" transceivers can be used to implement the join function). The repeater base station 52 in the preferred embodiment provides all of the intelligence necessary, and accomplishes the join feature through cooperation between two repeater transceivers. Of course, if relatively intelligent mobile transceivers are available, more advanced features (such as join without interruption of the ongoing conversation and join using digital signalling) may be provided, as have been described.
Although the preferred embodiment has been described in connection with a repeater base station 52 including a site controller, a site controller is not necessary to implement the present invention. Some manner in which repeater transceivers can communicate with one another must, however, be provided in order to facilitate cooperation between repeaters. In many systems in which a site controller is provided to calculate billing data and to perform other oversight functions, it will be most convenient to implement the join feature by providing the site controller with additional intelligence. However, in an alternate embodiment, each repeater transceiver is provided with sufficient intelligence to permit it (e.g. via data bus 64) to poll all other repeater transceivers of the system in order to determine whether a particular group of mobile radio transceivers has already acquired another communications channel, and to permit it to prompt the repeater operating on that other channel to transmit the call signalling sequence over that other channel to accomplish the join.
The present invention has been described in connection with a trunking radiotelephone communications system which does not use a dedicated control channel. It may, however, be desirable to implement the join feature in a system with a dedicated control channel. As described previously, systems using a dedicated control channel constantly transmit a stream of digital data over the control channel, this control channel being monitored by all mobile transceivers not engaged in communications on a voice channel. The control channel forces all mobile transceivers of a group to lock onto a voice communications channel over which group communication is occurring or is to occur. To implement a join feature in such a system, it is necessary to permit the operator of a mobile radio transceiver to selectively inhibit his/her transceiver from responding to signals transmitted over the control channel directing the transceiver to join particular conversations.
Thus, each mobile transceiver can be provided with a control (e.g., a button) which, when operated, causes the transceiver to leave the voice channel it is operating upon and to inhibit response to signalling information transmitted on the control channel directing the transceiver back onto that voice channel. To rejoin the conversation, the transceiver can simply be re-enabled to respond to the control channel information.
Since it is desirable that the transceiver responds to the next group call, the mobile transceiver should be notified when the ongoing conversation it intentionally left has ended so that it can be re-enabled automatically at that time to respond to new group call signalling sequences transmitted on the control channel. One way of automatically re-enabling the mobile transceiver at the conclusion of the ongoing communication not to be joined is to associate a unique call identification code with each conversation, transmit the conversation identification code on the control channel along with other call signalling information directing mobile transceivers onto the channel on which the conversation is occurring, and selectively disable mobile transceivers from responding to call signalling information including particular conversation identifying codes. Alternatively, a predetermine message could be transmitted over the control channel periodically for a time (longer than the expected maximum duration of a conversation which may be limited to pre-fixed time-out period) after a conversation has ended to override the programming an operator may have given his or her mobile transceiver to ignore call signalling sequences identifying a particular group. In this way, the transceiver will not ignore later call signalling sequences identifying the group it previously left a conversation with.
The join feature as has been described is initiated voluntarily, i.e., by the operator of a mobile transceiver desiring to join an ongoing conversation. It may be desirable in some circumstances, however, to force all mobile transceivers in a particular group to rejoin priority group communications. A "forced" join can be accomplished by transmitting the join call signalling sequence on the communications channel dedicated to the group of transceivers in response to an event other than a call from a mobile transceiver on an unused channel. For example, a dispatcher might initiate transmission of the join call signalling sequence shown in FIG. 3B on a communications channel in use in order to make sure all transceivers of a group receive an important message (regardless of the intentions of the operators of the transceivers).
Moreover, there is no requirement that a call signalling sequence transmitted by a mobile transceiver to initiate a join be responded to by causing the calling transceiver to join the communications with the group of transceivers identified by the transmitted call signalling sequence. In some circumstances, it might be desirable to cause a mobile transceiver to join a different group of transceivers than the one identified by the call signalling sequence it transmits, or to join a conversation with a land line caller. Although the call signalling sequence transmitted by the repeater base station in response to the call transmitted by the mobile transceiver to be joined should identify a group of which the calling mobile transceiver is a member (otherwise, the calling mobile transceiver will not respond), the repeater-transmitted call signalling sequence need not identify the group the mobile transceiver requested to join. Selection by the repeater base station of the conversation to be joined may take into account the number of factors, such as the relative importance (priority) of two or more conversations the mobile transceiver is elligible to join.
Although in some applications it might be desireable to join the landline caller to ongoing communications, in the preferred embodiment a busy signal is sent to a land line caller and the landline call is disconnected. Such a system transmits an alert tone over the busy channel to the group of transceivers the landline caller attempted to contact to inform them a landline call had been received.
It will thus be seen that there has been provided a new and improved system and method for enabling the user of a mobile radio transceiver to readily and quickly join or rejoin communications already established and continuing on a communications channel. The invention is relatively simple and is simultaneously compatible with various different signalling formats. While the invention has been described with reference to particular presently preferred exemplary embodiments utilizing specific signalling formats, it is to be understood that many modifications may be made while retaining many of the novel advantages and features of the invention (for example, the present invention may be used advantageously with a variety of different call signalling protocols). The invention is not to be limited to the disclosed embodiments, but on the contrary, it is intended to cover various modifications and equivalent arrangements included within the spirit and scope of the appended claims, which scope is to be accorded the broadest interpretations so as to encompass all such modifications and equivalent structures.
Citations de brevets
Citations hors brevets | <urn:uuid:56ef3346-0864-4361-a27e-200e89262b01> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.google.fr/patents/US4682367?hl=fr | 2013-05-22T14:26:40Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930855 | 20,003 |
About Tanya Lokshina
Tanya Lokshina is Senior Russia Researcher, Human Rights Watch
Articles by Tanya Lokshina
A heavy, stifling heat envelops the Caucasus in midsummer. During the day the sun fries your brain, your throat itches from the hot dust, and the night brings no relief, only hordes of maddened mosquitoes.
It happened on a Friday. Armed men in camouflage uniforms drove up to Nazir's house in a small village in Chechnya's mountainous Vedeno district. They turned Nazir's home upside down. Nazir had some wooden boards he was going to use to repair the floor, and when the armed men started setting up the boards for a bonfire, he understood what was about to happen. Nazir was scared - not for himself, but for his neighbors. He singled out the person in charge of the large group, approached him, and tried to explain: "I know that you want to burn my house. I don't understand why I am being punished. Why do I have to pay for the crimes of my relatives over whom I have no influence? But if this has been decided, I can't do anything about it. However, please listen to me. My roof touches my neighbor's roof. If you start burning my house, the fire will spread over to my neighbor's house."
Nazir's nephews have been allegedly involved in Chechnya's still smoldering insurgency for almost a decade, and Nazir knew that he was now going to pay the price for failing to convince them to surrender.
To be fair, the serviceman Nazir thought to be in charge understood the situation, but said that the decision had been made at the top, that he had orders from higher up. The house was to be burned. But Nazir proposed a compromise. He said to the commander, "An excavator operator lives nearby. He could separate the roofs. And then perhaps nothing bad would happen... Could you please send your soldiers to fetch him?" Twenty minutes later the excavator operator and his machine were brought to the house, and the excavator driver, following the elderly man's directions, separated the roofs and broke a part of the wall that was less than one meter from his neighbor's house. Then Nazir's house was set on fire. Everyone, including Nazir, stood by and watched the flames rise.
Nazir and his family are now homeless. At least two dozen other families in different districts of Chechnya have had their houses torched in 2008 and 2009 by local Chechen law enforcement personnel to punish them because their relatives are allegedly insurgents, and to coerce the insurgents to surrender. This report documents these episodes of collective punishment.
Today, the armed conflict in Chechnya has subsided and the capital, Grozny, has been largely rebuilt. However, abuses such as torture, illegal detention, and extrajudicial executions persist (albeit on a smaller scale), and impunity for past and ongoing abuses is rampant. The perpetrators of ongoing violations are mainly law enforcement and security personnel under the de facto control of the republic's president, Ramzan Kadyrov.
Although insurgent attacks in Chechnya are now distinctly less frequent than in the neighboring North Caucasus republics of Ingushetia or Dagestan, they continue to occur sporadically. The insurgency has a loose agenda to overthrow the government and create an Islamic state in the Caucasus. Working toward those objectives, insurgents have been using a variety of violent tactics, including killings and house-burnings, against members and supporters of the pro-Moscow Chechen authorities: policemen, security personnel, administration officials, and their family members.
The perpetrators of these and other crimes must be held accountable under the law and in accordance with international fair trial standards. However, unlawful tactics used by insurgents can in no way justify the use of similar tactics by government forces fighting against the insurgency, particularly burning of houses and other types of persecution against families of alleged rebel fighters.
Human Rights Watch is aware of 25 cases of punitive house burning that can be attributed to Chechen law enforcement personnel between June 2008 and March 2009 in seven districts of Chechnya: ten in Kurchaloi, six in Shali, four in Vedeno, two in Naur, and one each in Shatoi, Achkhoi-Martan, and Grozny districts. Also, just several days prior to the release of this report Human Rights Watch learned of yet another, most recent case of house-burning. On June 18, around 5 a.m., unidentified law enforcement servicemen reportedly burned two homes belonging to elderly parents of an alleged insurgent in the village of Engel-Yurt, in the Gudermes district.
All the affected families, whose homes were burned, have among their close relatives alleged insurgents, usually sons or nephews. In most cases, prior to the house-burning, law enforcement and local administration officials strongly pressured the families to bring their relatives home "from the woods" and threatened them with severe repercussions for failure to do so. Some burnings occurred very soon after a rebel attack in the vicinity and therefore appeared to have been motivated by retribution.
Notably, in 2008 high-level Chechen officials, including President Kadyrov, made public statements explicitly stating that the insurgents' families should expect to be punished unless they convince their relatives to surrender. While such statements may not constitute direct instructions for law enforcement agents to destroy houses of insurgents' families, they encourage such actions by police and security personnel by sending a strong message that lawless, punitive actions will be tolerated or condoned.
Thirteen episodes of punitive house-burning are documented in detail in this report. These cases follow a strikingly similar pattern. They were generally perpetrated at night, with law enforcement personnel-often masked-arriving in several cars, breaking into the yard, and forcing the residents out of their house. The perpetrators would prevent residents from approaching their home, treating them roughly and in some cases holding them at gunpoint.
The assailants torched the houses methodically and unhurriedly. They looked around the inside of the house, piled furniture together, put easily flammable objects on top, doused gasoline around the house, and set it on fire. They would stay for up to an hour watching the fire spread, to make sure the residents or their neighbors did not attempt to put it out before the house was well ablaze.
The victims were generally told in clear terms that complaining about the house-burning would lead to further repercussions. Consequently, only in three cases known to Human Rights Watch did victims file complaints with the authorities. In another three cases the victims agreed to have Memorial, a leading Russian human rights NGO working in the North Caucasus, raise their cases with competent authorities. At least two of the families were then threatened by the district law enforcement authorities and forced to sign a statement that the fire had been caused by their own carelessness. At this writing not a single criminal case into the allegations of house-burning in Chechnya has been opened by the law enforcement authorities.
The Russian government has overwhelmingly failed to investigate and hold accountable perpetrators of human rights violations during a decade of war and counterinsurgency in Chechnya. Indeed, in more than 100 judgments to date, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has found Russia responsible for serious violations in Chechnya. One Chechen government official told Human Rights Watch that this failure has helped to create in Chechnya an acceptance of impunity as the norm. This situation cannot be tolerated, and calls for prompt and effective measures.
Russian federal and Chechen authorities should immediately put a stop to collective punishment practices, including house-burnings, against families of alleged insurgents, and ensure meaningful accountability for perpetrators of these and other human rights violations. Accountability includes ensuring effective implementation of ECtHR rulings on Chechnya cases. Other governments, in particular European Union states and the United States, should use multilateral forums and bilateral dialogues to call on Russia to stop collective punishment practices, and put an end to impunity for human rights abuses in Chechnya.
This report is based primarily on field research conducted in close cooperation with Memorial Human Rights Center, a leading Russian human rights organization, in March and April 2009 during two Human Rights Watch missions to Chechnya. In the course of these missions, a Human Rights Watch researcher visited and photographed house-burning sites and interviewed 37 individuals, including owners and former residents of homes destroyed by house-burning, and witnesses of the house-burnings. We also interviewed 14 human rights activists, lawyers, government officials, and law enforcement personnel. Field research was conducted in the Achkhoi-Martan, Kurchaloi, Naur, Shatoi, Shali, and Vedeno districts of Chechnya, where the burnings had taken place, as well as in Grozny, where some victims, witnesses, activists, and officials were interviewed. Several interviews were done in Moscow or by phone from Moscow. Sites of house-burnings were identified based on information received from Chechnya-based human rights activists as well as from some victims of house-burnings who happened to be aware of other similar cases. All interviews were conducted in Russian by a Human Rights Watch researcher who is a native speaker of Russian.
Also, Human Rights Watch examined official documents, prosecutor's office decrees, public statements by Chechen officials, analytical reports published by Russian human rights groups, and media accounts. Transcripts of televised statements by President Kadyrov and several other high-level Chechen officials were translated by a native speaker of Chechen.
The present report documents only those house-burning cases for which we were able to interview victims and witnesses to the burnings and make our own site visits.
The vast majority of those interviewed for this report were deeply concerned about possible repercussions for their families and asked Human Rights Watch researchers not to use their real names. Consequently, we chose to assign pseudonyms to victims and witnesses quoted in the report who gave us their names (the pseudonyms were chosen randomly from a comprehensive list of Chechen names at a specialized website http://www.n-a-m-e-s.info/dat_imya/chechenu.htm).
Few people really understand what is happening there. It is hard to get an objective picture of events in such a complex place, home to more than 30 different ethnic groups speaking many different languages. In fact, it is all but impossible, even more so when the media propagate myths that are often completely absurd.
Gudben - the myth
Gudben, a village in the Karabudakhkent District, has something of a reputation. People outside and inside Dagestan say that it is a ‘wahhabi' village. They'll tell you all sorts of stories about what goes on there. You get the idea that the village has been completely taken over by Islamic radicals, that they've more or less imposed sharia law there, as they did in the villages of Karamakhi and Chabanmakhi before the outbreak of the second Chechen war. They say that the women are all hidden behind veils and girls do not go to school, while the boys study in the Koranic school, where they are turned into future martyrs for Islam. At any rate, they're supposedly ready to take to the forests. Indeed, they say that Islamic fundamentalism has got such a foothold in Gudben that the doors of people's houses have two handles - one for men and one for women. It's not for nothing that a counterterrorist operation has been underway there since March.
Islam does indeed play an important part in the life of Gudben. It is as an old village with deep-rooted religious traditions. Even during the Soviet years, local people stubbornly defended their right to believe and pray openly. The Dagestani authorities complained to Moscow that, "in the village of Gudben, in 1956, a group of religious fanatics, acting without permission, opened a mosque", and that "it is very hard to stamp out the relics of the past in people's minds and lives: the religious authorities forbid the young people from joining the komsomol and constantly undermine the communist ideology". (http://www.chernovik.net/news/245/MONOTHEOS/2007/10/12/3444)
People from Gudben were among the first Russian Muslims to make the hajj in the early 1990s. Salafist preachers were active in the village, and it certainly had its share of aggressive fundamentalists, though there can't have been too many of them, because when Shamil Basayev invaded Dagestan, they were swiftly dealt with by their own fellow villagers. The villagers gave them a beating, kicked them out of the madresa and made them promise that they would not under any circumstances help Basayev and his friends. In other words, the radicals were not the dominant force in the village.
So how is it that 10 years later there is no secular education and even door handles are segregated according to sex? Or is this just hearsay?
Gudben - the reality
It's hard to say who thought up the story about the door handles. The doors in Gudben are extremely ordinary, with just one handle. As for the women, they are not hidden behind burqas, but wear long dresses and cover their hair with a scarf thrown over the shoulder. You don't see anyone smoking in the streets, and you certainly don't see anyone drunk. People here are serious about their religion, they stick to the rules, and pray five times a day.
There are over 12,000 people living in the village, and the locals say that four villagers have gone to join the insurgents in the forest. Just four, not hundreds or even dozens. When the ‘counterterrorist' operation began in March, the security forces, worried by the news that Gudben had been taken over by wahhabi fundamentalists, began picking out families who were not sending their children to school. They came up with a total of around 30 children who were not receiving any secular education. This is not a good thing of course. But to put it in perspective, Gudben is a big village, the families all have many children, and 30 children is a drop in the ocean.
As for the question of education, the real problem is not that there are children who don't go to school, but that even those who do go to school have no chance of getting a decent education. The teachers are recent graduates of the very same local school with precious little experience. They speak to the children in Dargin, but the textbooks are in Russian. The children learn to read out the syllables, but they don't actually understand what they're reading. They learn basic arithmetic, and that is about as far it goes.
The better-off families try and send their boys, especially their older sons, to boarding school or to relatives in the towns of Makhachkala, Buinak and Kaspiisk. If the boys have certificates proving that they've had nine years of schooling, schools in the towns usually reluctantly accept them into the sixth year and try to help them catch up, though they are probably more like third year students. Village families don't send their daughters away to study. There is not enough money to go around, and they need helping hands at home. While this is certainly sad, the same is true of many villages in the North Caucasus.
Gudben is an ordinary village, old, with narrow winding streets that not every car can manage. But the streets here were not designed for cars. It has picturesque stone houses and a huge cemetery on the hill, from where you get an excellent view of the mosque, the same mosque that Gudben's fearless rebels built against Soviet atheism in the late 1950s. The village women and girls look exotic to urban-dwelling outsiders with their colourful headscarves and traditional clothes. It is a picturesque Dargin village high up in the mountains, a place with its own customs. The local life is full of interest. It would be good to make a documentary about it, to be able to show the daily lives of these people who want only to be left in peace to follow their traditions without the upset caused by endless ‘special operations'.
Beard = wahhabi
"Young men with beards can't show their faces here", said a strongly-built man of around 40, shaking his head. "The security people, if they see a beard, that's it - they're taken into custody straight away. They don't touch the old people, but the young ones... best not to go out. People here prayed during the Soviet years. They prayed in secret, but they kept the religion alive. After the old regime collapsed, we started travelling all around Dagestan, preaching Islam, teaching Muslims who'd lost their knowledge. We had up to 400 people during the holy Ramadan month. We found mosques that had been turned into storehouses, cleaned them, and people began coming to them again...
"Later, at the end of the 1990s, this talk of ‘wahhabis' began, some sort of enemy. People became afraid of receiving us. Now life's become impossible. I get called a wahhabi, but I've not held a gun since I was in the Soviet army. I simply want to follow my beliefs. Yes, I practise pure Islam. Muslims need nothing except what the Prophet God sent and what's written in the books. But here we have fundamentalists like me, and traditionalists who follow the sheikhs. We all pray together, all go to the same mosque. It's shameful to say, but I don't wear a beard, though I should. I should be setting an example. But the security people would only cause me grief. Look what happened to Saihadji Saihadjiev. He's the same age as me, not even a young man, and now he's left seven children behind. Who is going to bring them up? Two others were killed along with him. And me, I want to raise my children..."
On October 21, 2008, just 10 kilometres away from Gudben, there was a clash between the insurgents and security forces. Five police officers, including a local policeman from Gudben, were wounded. The security forces surrounded the village and over the next four days detained about 40 local people. They were then sent to police stations in Kaspiisk and Makhachkala. There, they were questioned about the insurgents. Many were beaten, threatened, but they were released fairly quickly.
The villagers thought the incident was over. But on October 27, three Gudben residents, Saihadji Saihadjiev, Nustap Aburakhmanov, and Akhmed Hadjimagomedov, ‘disappeared'. Forty-four year-old Saihadjiev went that evening to pray at the mosque and never came home. Hadjimagomedov collected his daughter from school, then went to the mosque, and disappeared too. Abdurakhmanov was in Dagestan's capital, Makhachkala, at the time. He was abducted there. In all three cases relatives soon found eyewitnesses to confirm that the three men were taken away by law enforcement officials. On October 28, the families were told that the three men were killed during a ‘special operation' in Dagestan's Sergokalinsk district, while putting up resistance to law enforcement officers. The families' requests for the bodies to be handed back to them were rejected at first. Under Russian law, terrorists' bodies are not handed over to relatives. But Saihadjiev's father turned out to have connections in high places and after two difficult days, he and the other two families were able to get back their sons' bodies. They could see that they had been subjected to torture.
Magomed Saihadjiev is 76. Taking his guests up to the second storey of his house he sits down, upright, his silver-white beard neatly combed. His wife Kistoman sits on the stairs, watching attentively, not saying a word, only shedding silent tears from time to time, shyly covering her eyes with the edge of her white headscarf.
"My son left the house and drove to the mosque", Magomed says. "He entered the mosque. There was a white car waiting beside the mosque. When he came out again, the law enforcement people took him away. There were witnesses. We didn't have a clue about what was going on. There was just this report on the news, this special operation, three insurgents killed, and Saihadji among them. If it hadn't been for my connections we'd never have got his body back. He would've been buried somewhere and we'd never have known what happened. But they ended up having to hand over his body. When I saw what they'd done to my son... One of my relatives, Abdula Rasudlov, is a doctor. We called him, got him to examine the body and explain what he saw, and we filmed it all on video. I'll put it on for you to watch now..."
Magomed put on the recording. The screen showed a horribly tortured body accompanied by the doctor's calm and even voice. Broken bones, burns, bruising...
"We went to the prosecutors. We have a lawyer too... But there's no hope here. Our lawyer says that if we take the case to the European Court of Human Rights we would definitely win, because we have all the proof. But I heard this would take a long time... Do you know how long we'd have to wait, a year, two years? What, five whole years? Isn't there any way to speed things up? Please try to do something. You saw yourselves what they did to him? And for what? Saihadji spent his whole life doing nothing but good for others. He never caused anyone any harm. And then there was this shootout with the police, our local policeman got caught in it too. Then they came and took him and the two others away by way of punishment... Innocent people! He's left four sons behind. How are they going to manage now?"
Saihadji's youngest son is two years and eight months old. His relatives say that the boy spends whole days sitting on the windowsill, waiting for his father, asking when papa will come home.
On the village outskirts, the big cemetery on the hill offers a wonderful view of the mosque, that same mosque which the villagers opened without permission more than fifty years ago. Saihadji is buried near the cemetery fence. His mother often visits the grave with her little grandson. While his grandmother prays, the little boy runs around, hiding behind the white stone gravestones.
He doesn't yet understand the meaning of death.
There are terrible traffic jams in the center of the Dagestani capital, Makhachkala. The main form of transport is shuttle taxis. Drivers competing for clients cut each other off, overtake in the opposing lane and pretty much ignore all traffic rules. There are way too many shuttle taxis here, but the driver pays a kickback to the city authorities for each "trip," so the powers that be have little interest in reducing the number of shuttle taxis to a relatively sensible figure. Everyone here knows this, with the possible exception of newborn babies.
Corruption in Dagestan long ago reached astounding proportions. The power structures seem to have merged fully with the criminal world. The sandy beaches remain wild and abandoned because starting any large-scale project is simply pointless: they'll ask for money from you before you start making any kind of profit. This seemingly heavenly spot -- the warm sea washes the shore and the beauty of the mountains takes your breath away -- is shivering in poverty and dust.
The traffic is as chaotic and aggressive as the city itself. When they hear the complaints -- "No one drives this appallingly badly anywhere in the Caucasus!"-- Makhachkala residents sniff, though not without pride. They need, after all, to have at least one thing to be proud of.
The locals don't like their city - it is sprawling, clamorous and disfigured by clumsy, ugly buildings. They constantly curse it and their plight in general. There are no jobs to be had. Women make do by selling things. Men work as drivers. They can also go into law enforcement. The pay there is good, but this is a job one might want to think twice about - police officers are being shot by the dozen.
A young dark-haired taxi-driver shakes his head: "I served on the police force for four years and then gave it up. Nine of my friends were killed. They have families and small children... It's better to be a driver. It's enough to live on, and that's OK: I don't want my children to be orphans."
"Who killed them, Akhmed?"
He takes a drag on his a cigarette and sighs: "Supposedly Wahhabis.... Although who knows. They blame everything on Wahhabis here, even ordinary crimes. If you're an officer they ask you to catch Wahhabis and make them confess.... That means you have to beat them. And you look at this guy and think, he also has a family."
Akhmed's mobile phone rings. He picks it up, listens and answers something in Avar - something unprintable, judging his tone- and smiles guiltily: "You know, you'll get to your destination more quickly on foot. They've found another bomb around here and the neighboring streets have been cordoned off. We'll be stuck for another hour at least. So, today there's a bomb. Yesterday an officer was shot literally on that corner. And that's how it is every day."
The war between the "Wahhabis" and "authorities" has become an essential part of everyday life. It's obvious who the "authorities" are: officers of the Interior Ministry and FSB. But the "Wahhabis," or "Wahs" or "Vovchiks," as the slang goes, are a much more complicated matter.
In Dagestan Wahhabism is effectively regarded as terrorism, and even, uniquely for Russia, prohibited by law. This law was passed by the local parliament back in 1999, after the incursion by Shamil Basaev and his followers, which marked the beginning of the "Second Chechen War". In other words, Wahhabis are perceived as armed Islamic radicals who want to destroy secular government and create a Shariah state in the Caucasus. To the government, they are the chief natural enemy of the state.
On the other hand, there are actually a large number of people who are followers of "pure Islam" (researchers on the issue call them Salafis) in Dagestan. These are Muslims who preach a return to the five pillars of Islam and do not accept worship of Sufi sheikhs as intermediaries between Muslims and Allah. They are generally not hard to spot, as they have beards and pray at their special mosques. The vast majority of these people do not, of course, roam the mountains with automatic weapons. They lead ordinary lives. But they are also branded as enemies and harshly persecuted.
The situation is aggravated by a preexisting conflict between the Salafis and the "traditional" Sufi Muslims ("Tariqahs"). In Dagestan acting Sufi sheikhs have many "murids" in government and in law-enforcement enforcement agencies, including in high positions. A murid is a follower obliged to obey his sheikh, and, as experts have noted, the sheikhs do not hesitate to use high-ranking murids to suppress their religious opponents. Being a salafi in Dagestan is dangerous. Men who make themselves visible as Salafis by wearing Muslim clothes and long beards create such a threat for themselves and their families that few of the followers of "pure Islam" dare to take the risk.
A dark yard on the dirty outskirts of Makhachkala. It's around 10 in the evening. It's so dark you could easily break your leg in a pothole, and finding the right door is almost impossible. But one of the doors opens, a boy looks out and gestures me to come in. You can't see anything in the entrance, but the lift is unexpectedly working. At the entrance to the apartment there are two girls, ages 7 or 8, with long dresses to the ground. Their pale, serious faces are framed by hijabs - one white, the other blue. They politely whisper hello, and look at me intensely, not responding to my smile. From the other end of the corridor, their mother emerges with a tiny child in her arms. Her clothes reveal only her hands and her face - from her chin to her eyebrows. She invites me into the room.
It is almost completely empty. There is a rug on the floor and a lonely plastic stool in the corner. A tall, thin man with a short beard sits on the rug, leaning against the wall. His eyes are sunken and he has a tubercular cough. His swarthy, yellowish face is thin and, despite his exhaustion, he looks quite young. Eldar is 25. An hour ago there was an attempt to abduct him. This was evidently the "sixth department" -- employees of the Extremism and Criminal Terrorism Directorate of the Dagestan Interior Ministry. They won't leave Eldar alone because he is a "Wahhabi." Eldar looks at the guests through half-closed eyes, mumbles a greeting and turns to his wife: "Bring us some tea."
Eldar Navruzov had in fact already been abducted, just over a year ago. On the morning of March 13, 2008, armed men in camouflage attacked him on the street, dragged him into their car, put a sack over his head, planted a hand grenade in his pocket and drove him to the "sixth department." There Eldar was beaten and tortured for over a day, until he admitted that he was part of a gang of one Vadim Butdaev - Eldar said he found out only later who this Vadim was - and had been attacking policemen. Three days later, a lawyer was finally able to get to Eldar, and he retracted the testimony he had given under torture. But he spent around 11 months in prison on remand, until the charges of attacking employees of the law-enforcement bodies and organizing a criminal society were dropped for complete lack of evidence.
Eldar was released in February this year, and found a job at a building site. He thought he was being followed - he noticed cars driving around outside his home and suspicious people following him. But the charge against him of illegally possessing and carrying a weapon had not been dropped, so he was only freed from custody after he gave a written undertaking not to leave the city. When he will be released from this order, God only knows.
On the evening of April 22 at around 9 p.m. Eldar was returning home from work. He was on the mobile to his wife, Aisha, telling her he would be home soon, when a silver 99 Lada with Dagestan number plates drove up to him. Two people jumped out of the car and shouted at him to stop. Eldar ran toward his home, which was very close, shouting to his wife that he was being kidnapped again. The car overtook him, hitting his left leg, but he kept running, because he knew what would happen if he fell down. Another car was waiting for him in the yard, right in front of the entrance. It was also silver and had tinted windows. Some men tried to drag him into the car. He fought them off, screaming at the top of his voice: "I'm being kidnapped!" The neighbours looked out of their windows. Aisha, along with another family who was visiting her at the time, flung open the door and grabbed hold of Eldar. They also started shouting. This was too much noise and too many witnesses for the "officers," so they abandoned their victim, got into their cars and drove away.
"Until the next time..." Eldar coughs, sipping some dark infusion from a cup. He is curing his tuberculosis with "sunna", i.e. prayers and herbs. He doesn't trust secular medicine. "Inshallah..." Eldar continues, "It was probably the sixth department again. They are the only ones who can kidnap people like me, apart from the FSB and they don't bungle things like that. In any case, there's no letup. They've branded me a Wahhabi. I won't swear oaths to the Sheikhs, I pray directly to Allah, I have a beard, as Allah's messenger said to do.... When I got out of prison in February, my cellmates told me: "Drink, smoke and go to brothels, then no one will touch you. That's the only solution." But I would rather reject my family, although I am prepared to give my life for them, than reject my faith. Others advised me not to leave the house. There were another three men who were in the remand prison on the same charge as me and were released at the same time - we were supposed to be part of a gang. Two of them haven't left the house all these months. The third only goes outside with his relatives, and not very often. But I have to work to feed my children. That's no solution either. I have one weapon against them, the doa - prayer - and Allah has heard my doa. But he won't hear theirs. They don't have a protector, like I do. His will is everything. Allah does not ask of people things they cannot do."
Aisha nods in agreement. Eldar takes the little boy from her, lightly throws him into the air, kisses his forehead and whispers something tender. The girl in the fluffy pink jumpsuit stretches out her arms to her father and laughs.
Nariman Mamedyarov doesn't look anything like the others who are branded "Wahhabis". He has no beard and is dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. He's an ordinary Caucasian guy, who doesn't look his 33 years. Nariman lays tiles for a living. There is enough work for him to feed his wife and children and to rent an apartment in an outlying district of town. But it's hard for him to work now - he can't bend his left arm at the elbow properly as the ligament is torn. The doctors say it's too late for an operation. They could try of course. But it's probably pointless - it will just be torture for him. Nariman's arm was injured at the "sixth department." He didn't notice how it happened because that night he was not only beaten, but subjected to electric shock torture. The pain was so great he couldn't feel anything else.
Nariman was taken last year, in the early evening September 25. It happened not far from School No. 57. A car stopped by him, and four "officers" in masks and camouflage jumped out, dragged him into the back seat, and put a black bag over his head. They drove for about half an hour, then threw him to the ground and started beating him. They asked him about Vadim Butdaev, but Nariman had no idea who he was. They gave him electric shocks by connecting up wires to his thumbs.
Then he was pushed into the car again and taken to the division. Nariman realized where he was going, because the sixth department is next to the central mosque, and during the namaz prayers he heard the voice of the muezzin. If he had not heard this, he would not have known where he was as no one took the bag off his head. The electric shock torture went on all night and his nails were pulled out with pliers. He screamed: "Kill me, I don't know anything! I've never seen this Butdaev! I can't take it anymore." The officers laughed: "After what we do to you, you'll envy the dead! You'll admit to everything!" By morning, he had said he had taken weapons to this mysterious Butdaev, just so they would leave him alone. And he really was left alone. For a few days he lay on the floor with the bag on his head. He was given water twice and taken to the toilet once. He was not given any food at all, but to be quite honest he didn't want any.
Nariman says that on September 28 he was taken to the police station in Buinaksk. A police chief finally took the bag of his head-- and put an automatic weapon in his hands, so as to put his fingerprints on it. Then he told Nariman to sign a statement that the police officers had found him in the forest, in dirty clothes, with a broken arm and that he had sworn at them. Nariman signed everything because they told him that if he didn't sign it, he would simply be taken into the forest and killed. And the gun would be placed on top of his corpse. It would be a great special operation.
In total, Nariman was given 10 days of administrative arrest for using obscene language. It was cold in the police cell. And he was hardly given any food. But on the first day his arm was put in a cast. And he wasn't beaten. What else could he ask for? Nariman wanted something else - he wanted to go home. He was taken back to Makhachkala after 10 days, and taken to the Leninsky district prosecutor's office. The investigator said: "Sign here and you'll go straight home. This is a report that you were interrogated as a witness." Nariman said he signed without reading it. He was just very tired, and wanted to go back to his family.
But instead of going home he was taken to the Makhachkala police cells, where a lawyer came to see him. She told Nariman that he had confessed to supplying weapons to "Butdaev's gang" and, as part of this group, had planned to kill law-enforcement officers. Nariman rejected this testimony. During the night officers from the "sixth department" came to his cell. They told him that it was not a good idea to go back on his words and beat him up a little to drive the message home. Nariman really didn't want electric shock torture again, so he promised to repeat his testimony. But when the investigator came to see him in the morning, he decided not to do this. There were three more night visits from officers of the sixth department. Then some other officers came along, who said they were from the general investigation department. They threatened to take him to the Russian military base in Chechnya at Khankala: "you've been giving us all this trouble for nothing, and there you'll either tell us everything quickly, or you'll disappear." But in the end they didn't take him.
These talks had all taken so long that Nariman had been held in the police cells for 26 days, instead of the 10 days stipulated by law. He was moved to a remand prison, where he met Eldar Navruzov, who was also being held under the "Vadim Butdaev case" and who also had no idea who this person was. Itwas only later, once they were released, that Mamedyarov and Navruzov got to meet the Butdaev family.
Like Eldar Navruzov, Nariman Mamedyarov was released in February because all the charges fell through - apart from one, involving the automatic weapon with his fingerprints on it. The Buinaksk police knew what they were doing when they put the weapon in his hands.
Nariman has given a written undertaking not to leave town. He tries not to leave his home without a relative. He has noticed someone following him several times. But he cannot sit at home all day. He has to work. There is no one else to feed his family. He shrugs: "They kept asking me at the prosecutor's office whether I was a Wahhabi. In fact I go to an ordinary, traditional mosque. But I pray regularly and before Ramadan I and a few other guys spent 10 days in prayer in the mosque. For a Muslim this is a good thing to do. Three of those guys were arrested with me. Two of them were soon released. But the third was held for several months, like me... I think the police can't catch the real "forest brothers," but they have to have some statistics to report. They take guys in when they notice that they go to the mosque a lot. "
I was taken to see Nariman Mamedyarov by Vadim Butdaev's brother in an old, shaky truck. Butdaev was killed by officers when they stormed a house in Makhachkala on last November 17. In Dagestan he is portrayed as an important figure in the "Wahhabi underground." The press implied that he was receiving money from Al-Qaeda. If he did get money, it was clearly not enough to support his family.
Butdaev did take off for the forest the previous summer. His family-members believe that he would not have joined the insurgents if he could have lived and prayed without persecutions, beatings and humiliation.
His brother Ismail shakes his mane of gray hair, and looks into my eyes: "I'm not going to talk about Vadim any more. You didn't know him, you didn't see him. Why should you believe me? But you've just talked to this guy Nariman. Is he an enemy? A terrorist? What can a person do if he is not allowed to believe in God? What can he and his friends do if they cannot protect themselves? You know, if you drive a rat into a corner, it will bite you in the face... These guys are forced to do the same thing."
This article first appeared on http:// www.polit.ru and http://www.islamnews.ru
On January 23, Human Rights Watch published a 200-page report, Up in Flames: Humanitarian Law Violations in the Conflict Over South Ossetia, summing up its extensive findings regarding the violations of human rights and international humanitarian law that occurred during the conflict in South Ossetia and uncontested Georgian territories. The armed conflict as such lasted only one week in August 2008, but the consequences will indubitably endure for much longer. The conflict and its aftermath have seen lives, livelihoods, homes, and communities devastated in South Ossetia and bordering districts of Georgia. As the conflict broke out, Human Rights Watch researchers immediately began documenting the violations that were committed by all sides. All this data, including more than 460 interviews over several months of field research, formed the basis for the legal analysis presented in the final report.
Human Rights Watch's research documented a number of indiscriminate and disproportionate artillery attacks by Georgian forces on South Ossetia and other attacks, which were part of the ground assault. These attacks caused excessive harm to civilians with respect to the military advantage that was to be gained. In particular, Georgian forces made extensive use in civilian areas of multiple-rocket launching systems, known as Grad (Russian for hail), which cannot be targeted with sufficient precision to distinguish between civilian and military objects - thereby causing indiscriminate harm to civilians. The very use of Grad rockets in areas populated by civilians is just one way in which Georgian forces conducted attacks in South Ossetia disregarding the safety of civilians.
Human Rights Watch found that, in a number of instances in South Ossetia and in undisputed Georgian territory, Russian forces used indiscriminate aerial, artillery, and tank fire strikes, killing and wounding many civilians. Human Rights Watch documented a number of cases in which Russian forces occupying the Gori district in Georgia opened fire on civilian vehicles, killing or wounding civilians.
Russian and Georgian forces both used cluster munitions, causing civilian deaths and putting more civilians at risk by leaving behind unstable "minefields" of unexploded bomblets. The impact of cluster munitions on civilians in the conflict demonstrates why, in December 2008, 94 governments signed up to a comprehensive treaty to ban cluster munitions. This was negotiated just months before the conflict commenced: Russia and Georgia notably failed to sign.
South Ossetian violations
Georgian forces withdrew from South Ossetia on August 10. Over the following weeks South Ossetian forces deliberately and systematically destroyed ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia that had been administered by the Georgian government. The South Ossetians looted, beat, threatened, and unlawfully detained numerous ethnic Georgian civilians. They killed several, on the basis of their ethnic and imputed political affiliations, with the express purpose of forcing those who remained to leave and ensuring that no former residents would return. South Ossetian forces also arbitrarily detained no fewer than 159 ethnic Georgians. They killed at least one detainee and subjected nearly all of them to inhuman and degrading treatment and detention conditions. They also tortured no fewer than four Georgian prisoners of war and executed at least three.
The role of the Russian forces
As an occupying power in these areas, Russia failed in its duty under international humanitarian law to ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety. Instead of protecting civilians in the territories under its effective control, Russian forces allowed South Ossetian forces who followed in their path to engage in wanton and widescale pillage, the burning of Georgian homes and attacks on ethnic Georgian civilians. Such deliberate attacks are war crimes and, when committed as part of a widespread or systematic pattern, may also be prosecuted as crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch concluded that the actions of the Ossetian forces against ethnic Georgians in several villages in South Ossetia, coupled with their intent to ensure none returned, amounted to attempted ethnic cleansing.
In Georgian territory adjacent to the South Ossetian administrative border, which at the time was occupied by Russia, South Ossetian militias looted, destroyed, and burned homes on a wide scale. They deliberately killed at least nine civilians, and raped at least two. Russian forces were at times involved in the looting and destruction, as passive bystanders or active participants, or by providing militias with transport into villages.
More than 20,000 ethnic Georgians who fled the conflict in South Ossetia remain displaced. Ethnic Georgians in the Akhalgori district - a remote area in the east of South Ossetia, currently occupied by Russian forces - face threats and harassment by militias and anxiety about a possible closure of the district's administrative border with the rest of Georgia. Both factors have caused great numbers of people to leave their homes for undisputed Georgian territory. The permanent forced displacement of thousands of people cannot be countenanced, and as long as Russia remains in effective control it should publicly promote the right of all persons displaced by the conflict to return and live in their homes in safety and dignity. It also has an obligation to ensure that this right can be effectively implemented and provide security to all persons living there, regardless of ethnicity.
The Way Forward
Human Rights Watch stresses the need for both Russia and Georgia to undertake an impartial and thorough investigation into abuses committed by their forces. Russia should also investigate the crimes committed by South Ossetian forces, since it exercises effective control over South Ossetia. Russia and Georgia should not only hold the perpetrators accountable for their crimes, but also provide appropriate redress to the numerous victims of the conflict.
The report Up in Flames measures each party's compliance with their obligations under international humanitarian law, not against the conduct of the other party. Exposing violations committed by one party does not excuse or mitigate those committed by another party. Nor under international humanitarian law does a violation by one party justify or mitigate violations by another party. Which party started the conflict has no bearing on their obligations to adhere to international humanitarian law and to hold violators accountable. Those seeking answers to questions about who committed worse, or more violations, or who bears responsibility for starting the conflict, will not find answers in this report. Human Rights Watch is also concerned that focusing on who started the war or who committed worse atrocities, as some observers are, misses the point: the urgent need to hold all who are responsible accountable and to allow displaced people to return home safely.
See the whole Human Rights Watch report:
Among those few Russian journalists who dared write the truth about the second Chechen war, Anna Politkovskaya is number one. That is, she was number one. It's still almost impossible to fully understand and accept that Anna is no more. She was travelling to the armed conflict-zone for so many years, wrote about such burning issues, took such tremendous risks that at some point many of us thought that she had already transcended the danger.
Certainly, back in 2001, when she published a series of articles on how Russian policeman Sergei Lapin tortured to death a Chechen young man, Zelimkhan Murdalov, the perpetrator started threatening her, and the threats were so serious that she even had to leave the country. At that time, some people thought that Politkovskaya would never return to Russia, and that even if she did, she'd never go to Chechnya again. But she did return several months later, continued her work on that case - and returned to the region again and again, published more striking stories about lawless violence and human suffering. In September 2004, she was allegedly poisoned on the plane to prevent her from going to Beslan, North Ossetia, to investigate the school siege which had ended in the deaths of hundreds of people.
Anna was ill for a long time after this incident, but she survived and kept working. Her hard-edged publications made such a name for her that she became an icon of a sort to her readers in Chechnya, Russia and the west. In recent years it seemed inconceivable that she could be simply, cynically killed. After all, President Putin and his team could not possibly afford such a terrible ugly scandal. Apparently, they can. Anna is dead - four gunshots were certainly more than enough.
Whenever I traveled to Chechnya, some local residents, having found out I came from Moscow, would always ask: "Have you met Politkovskaya? Are you personally acquainted? Really? Could you then pass these documents to her. Please ask her to write a piece on this case. And on this one, too. If it had not been for her, no one would've known of our pain, we would've been all killed in silence, all of us. Please thank her for us."
Tanya Lokshina is head of the Russian human-rights think-tank Demos
Also by Tanya Lokshina in open Democracy:
"Russian civil society: the G8 and after"
(19 July 2006)
Also in openDemocracy:
Anna Politkovskaya, "Chechnya: Russia's shame"
(9 October 2006)
Shaun Walker, "Anna Politkovskaya: death of a professional"
(9 October 2006)
A fighter for truth
For the Chechens she was, first and foremost, the woman who cared, who tried to change something. She was respected by friends and enemies. Even Chechen officials, including those from the security agencies who knew that Politkovskaya was working against them and condemned her for it, sometimes praised Anna for her tenacity and courage ("she's brave, that woman, you can't frighten her").
Anna was a fighter for truth, more than anything else. And she was certainly no saint. Strong-willed, unyielding and forceful, she would attack even her colleagues and supporters. She always felt no one was doing enough to help those in need and to save the world. She was convinced that no compromises were possible and seemed to believe that if all the honest people fearlessly upheld truth and together beat their heads against the wall, the wall would crumble from their pressure.
Anna doggedly uncovered the crimes of the military and the security services. In the past three years, she wrote a lot about Ramzan Kadyrov and his men, and about the abductions, executions and torture perpetrated by them. She openly declared that she dreamed of seeing the Chechen leader behind bars and was systematically working to achieve that objective.
Anna frequently walked on the very edge, risking not only her own life and safety but also the life and safety of those who helped her get the information. There were people living in Chechnya in permanent danger, who shared facts and leads with her, drove her around, hid her in their homes for the night. When one tried to reason with Anna, her reaction was always dramatic. She screamed that someone had to do this, someone had to speak despite all danger and not be a chicken. She stressed that if some people hadn't been too careful - "yes, people like you!" - the overall situation would not be so desperate.
Today, several scenarios of Politkovskaya's murder are proposed: it was organised by Ramzan Kadyrov himself; planned by someone who wanted to paint Kadyrov black and ruin his chance to acquire the presidency of Chechnya; perpetrated by a figure from the military or the security services whose crimes Anna had exposed; or, more personally, was an act of revenge by a mate of that policeman Lapin who, thanks to Anna and a few others, ended up in prison for eleven years. Politkovskaya's enemies were numerous and came in different guises.
The most disturbing and absurd aspect of the situation is that each of those narratives seems quite plausible. This would be conceivable in a normal democratic society, but in our country there are too many people, forces and agencies likely to seek to get rid of an uncompromising, relentless journalist. No one doubts that the motive for Anna's murder was political.
Voices and silence
Several hours after the killing, the secretary-general of the Council of Europe, Terry Davis, issued a brief statement. The American president and the French president paid their tributes, as too did various Russian politicians. Diplomats, ambassadors, heads of international organisations all spoke to condemn the crime and express their hopes for a speedy and effective investigation. It seemed that not only Russia but the entire world awaited President Putin's response. But the Russian leader remained dead silent.
Finally, three days later, he grew tired of the media debates on the meaning of his silence and told a German newspaper: "murder is a very grave crime before the society and before God. The criminals should be found." Putin could have left it there but chose to add: "Politkovskaya's political influence inside the country was of little significance. She was more known in human-rights circles and to the western media. And I think that Politkovskaya's murder caused more harm to the Russian and Chechen authorities than her publications."
So, according to the president, Anna's efforts had next to no impact. In other words, she wasted her life. At the same time, there is a certain paradox in his utterance: if the president says her publications were somewhat harmful to the state, then she must have had some influence... One way or another, Putin's line of thinking implies that Anna was a problem when alive and remains an even worse problem for Russia once dead. The Russian president is probably a very honest person - he cannot help but speak his mind. However, speaking ill of the deceased is inappropriate for any layperson, not to mention a state leader.
Today, western reporters and politicians are all asking the same question: will Russian journalists and human-rights defenders stop speaking of Chechnya and exposing human-rights violations altogether? Certainly, they have very good reasons to quit.
Anna Politkovskaya was a household name, but her fame did not protect her from a horrible, brutal death. This clearly shows how absolutely, frighteningly vulnerable everyone involved in this area of work is. At the same time, to keep silent now, after Anna's murder, amounts to becoming complicit with her killers. This would be to bury her for the second time, and wipe out the results and the very meaning of her work - the work for which she paid with her very life. People who understand this will not remain mute.
Anna Politkovskaya was born in New York in 1958 to a family of Soviet diplomats. She studied at Moscow State University, and earned a diploma in journalism before working for several Russian newspapers and broadcasters.
She visited Chechnya for the first time in 1998 (on assignment with Obshchaya Gazeta ) to conduct an interview with the president, Aslan Maskhadov. By the time of the second Chechen war in 1999, she was working for the independent democratic newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. She reported the war extensively and visited Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia dozens of times.
In 2001, she received the Golden Quill Award for a series of reportages from Chechnya. Many of these were collected into her books, among them A Small Corner of Hell (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy (Metropolitan Books, 2006)
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12/07/2012 -- When the world can produce more than enough food to adequately feed the global population, it shames us all that hunger and malnutrition exist.
- Nelly's Story
12/07/2012 -- In a village in Zambia, Nelly and her family once depended exclusively on chemical fertilizers to produce the crops on their farm. As years went by, the quality of their soil degraded to a point that hunger and poverty took over the family’s already preca...
- Introducing Food Justice
11/14/2012 -- Hunger and poverty have a cyclical relationship.
- The Impact of Food Prices on Peace and Security
11/14/2012 -- The poorest households in the developing world spend up to 60 to 80% of their incomes on food.
- Batis Center for Women
11/13/2012 -- United Methodist Women‘s International Ministries with Women, Children & Youth supports the Batis Center for Women in the Philippines.
- Hershey's Fair Trade
11/01/2012 -- United Methodist voices help persuade chocolate company to address child labor.
- Building Peace: United Methodist Women and Democratic Republic of Congo
10/16/2012 -- United Methodist Women leaders encourage the empowerment of women as a pathway to peace - in DRC and around the world.
- United Methodist Women Unveils D.C. Anti-Hate Ad
10/16/2012 -- On Monday October 15, standing shoulder to shoulder with members from Jewish, Muslim and other Protestant faith communities, representatives of United Methodist Women responded to anti-Islamic ads now appearing in metro stations in Washington, D.C.
- HIV's Unexpected Legacies
10/01/2012 -- Activists fighting the AIDS epidemic for 30 years share lessons about social justice, gender equality, human rights and solidarity.
- United Methodist Women Hosts Public Forum on Peace in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
09/24/2012 -- “Raging War, Waging Peace—Achieving Justice in the Democratic Republic of the Congo” was co-sponsored by the General Board of Church and Society’s U.N. and International Affairs Office, Global Policy Forum, Mennonite Central Committee–U.N. Office, Presbyt...
- New York Interfaith Coalition Will Gather to Denounce Hate Ads on Subways
09/24/2012 -- On Tuesday, September 25 at 9:00 am, a coalition of New York community and faith based organizations will gather on the steps of City Hall to denounce anti-Muslim hate advertisements posted on New York City subway platforms. The ads are harmfully provocat...
- Climate Justice
09/20/2012 -- United Methodist Women is seeking applications from women ages 18-30 to be participants in a seminar on climate justice. The seminar will take place at the Wesley Center in Tokyo, Japan, February 14-24, 2013. Download the brochure and application for more...
- Divide and Conquer
09/01/2012 -- Employers stoke racial rifts for economic gain.
- Speaking Up for Women
07/01/2012 -- "I will never be tired of speaking up for women’s causes." Kapend Christine Musumb served as a delegate to the 2012 General Conference. She coordinates the Central Congo Conference’s United Methodist Women.
- United Methodist Women Joins World Day Against Child Labor
06/01/2012 -- During the week of June 11, 2012, United Methodist Women will join children’s advocates around the world, lifting up concerns about the exploitation of children on the World Day Against Child Labor.
- Responsively Yours: A Peek Into the Gender Gap
06/01/2012 -- Women in general operate with a sort of enlightened self-interest, not selflessly, but in ways that take seriously our own needs, the needs of our families, our businesses and our communities, the people and places we know best.
- United Methodist Women Blog About the Rights of Indigenous People
05/11/2012 -- In an address to the United Nations Jalisa Ross stated, “My brothers and sisters, though I am speaking on behalf of the church, I am also a victim of this violent crime against humanity, called the Doctrine of Discovery." Ms. Ross is a United Methodist c...
- General Conference Approves New Resolution on Peace in Afghanistan
05/02/2012 -- United Methodist Women proposed the resolution, “Seeking Peace in Afghanistan,” which passed at General Conference with amendments, and calls for The United Methodist Church to support an end to war and seek a process of peace in Afghanistan.
- Responsively Yours: Resources and Activism Needed
05/01/2012 -- As Leymah Gbowee traveled in the United States, she came to know that there is plenty of poverty in this country. Ms. Gbowee’s observation was: “It seems to me that in Africa we have activism, but we lack resources, while in the United States, you have re...
- The Global Land Grab
05/01/2012 -- Around the world impoverished peoples are fighting a foreign rush for wealth and control that threatens to strip them of land, food and water.
- Directors Visit Southeast Dallas Cooperative Parish, Learn About Immigration Issues
03/19/2012 -- Directors heard from pastors leading the three member churches and learned about how Justice for Our Neighbors was helping immigrants retain legal rights in Dallas.
- Opening Our Eyes and Hearts to the Needs and Gifts of Women, Children and Youth
03/18/2012 -- At the spring 2012 board of directors meeting, Inelda González, president of the Women’s Division, celebrated the past four years of work and service of the board of directors on behalf of United Methodist Women.
- That We May All Live Together
03/08/2012 -- Three of the ten United Methodist Women supported-delegates to the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations (CSW) attended the international meeting through the United Methodist Church partner, the Asian Rural Institute (ARI) in Japan.
- United Methodist Women Explores Needs of Rural Women
03/07/2012 -- United Methodist Women sponsored international participants who attended the first week of this year’s commission meeting, which began Feb. 27 and continues through March 9.
- Why Women Must Leave Home
03/06/2012 -- On Thursday, March 1, 2012, United Methodist Women hosted an interactive workshop called “Why Women Must Leave Home” as part of the 56th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).
- Ana Chã: Brazilian Landless Worker Emphasizes Health and Happiness for Rural Women
03/02/2012 -- Ana Chã spoke to more than 100 people on Tuesday as part of the panel, “Voices of Rural Women,” co-sponsored by United Methodist Women and World Vision International, a side event of the Commission on the Status of Women.
- Can a Rainbow Come in the Clouds Without an Ark First?
02/26/2012 -- The last time I saw a bow in the clouds, colorful like a rainbow, was this past January. I was in São Paulo, Brazil, and a summer shower came over us in the streets. Then came the sun. Behind the buildings, there it was: a rainbow.
- Community Leaders and Rural Women Bear Fruit at UN Meeting
02/24/2012 -- The fruits of next week’s UN gathering will be the empowerment and participation of community leaders like Ms. Robinson who brings the realities, concerns and voices of rural women to the international table.
- Women's Division Statement to the Fifty-sixth Session of the Commission on the Status of Women
01/24/2012 -- Statement submitted by The United Methodist Church General Board of Global Ministries, Women’s Division, a nongovernmental organization in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council to the Fifty-sixth session of the Commission on the Stat...
- Crisis in the Horn of Africa
01/03/2012 -- Women confront hunger and violence in a drought-plagued region.
- Responsively Yours Audio: Something There Is That Doesn't Love A Wall
01/01/2012 -- For me, these words of Robert Frost call to mind the cold stone walls separating fields and properties through the forests and hills of New England.
- Women, War and Peace: Three Women Win the Nobel Prize for Peace
12/21/2011 -- Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is the first woman to be elected head of state in Africa and she ushered in peace after a 14-year civil war. Leymah Gbowee founded Women, Peace and Security Network Africa, and is known for organizing a women’s peace protest that inc...
- Ubuntu Sisters in India
12/19/2011 -- As an Ubuntu sister I was privileged to be a part of the 125th year celebration of Isabella Thoburn College, meeting young ladies soon to enter into adulthood.
- Transcending Boundaries and Transforming Lives
12/19/2011 -- Speech by Harriett Olson at 125th Anniversary of Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow, India.
- In Recognition of Sonia Pierre
12/12/2011 -- United Methodist Women recognizes the life of Sonia Pierre, who was dedicated to fighting against injustice toward Haitians in the Dominican Republic.
- Eyes to the Vista
12/07/2011 -- Every day, there are those that set out in migration in every corner of our world. They seek a vista of justice, security and sustainability.
- Mary, Joseph, Baby Jesus and Other Immigrants
12/01/2011 -- The Christmas story is a lesson on God’s greatest commandments of all.
- Women Key in Making Peace
12/01/2011 -- With three women winners of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, no longer can women's critical role in peacemaking be denied.
- Cordialmente Suya: El Chocolate y la Justicia
12/01/2011 -- Para muchas de nosotras, el chocolate, las galletas y otros dulces son golosinas básicas durante la temporada de Navidad.
- The Price of Motherhood
11/27/2011 -- As we think about the anticipation of motherhood for Mary during Advent, we also think of migrant women who face motherhood under very, very difficult circumstances.
- Celebrate International Migrants Day, December 18
11/17/2011 -- In this time of Advent, the United Methodist Task Force on Immigration invites United Methodists to lift up the global and local realities of migrants on December 18 in worship and prayer.
- United Methodist Delegation to Attend Migrant Rights Convention in Geneva, Switzerland
11/17/2011 -- A General Board of Global Ministries delegation will attend the People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland, November 28–December 2, 2011.
- Rooted in Justice
11/04/2011 -- United Methodist Women’s work for peace and justice has 140-year-old roots.
- The Things That Make for Peace
11/04/2011 -- United Methodist Women Host Panel Discussion on Enabling Reconciliation of Communities and Individuals
- Rural Women Panels Raise Issues on Food Security, Violence Against Women
11/01/2011 -- In observance of International Day of Rural Women and World Food Day, United Methodist Women co-organized two panel discussions highlighting issues important to rural women around the world at the Church Center for the United Nations, Oct. 14, 2011.
- United Methodist Women Joins Tar Sands Action at White House
10/28/2011 -- United Methodist Women will join with other organizations November 6th in Washington, D.C., at 2 p.m. for one hour in an action against the proposed transcontinental Keystone XL tar sands pipeline projects intended to ship oil from Canada to the United St...
- Women's Division Board Meeting Wrapup
10/11/2011 -- The Women’s Division board of directors approved the 2012 budget, received the criteria and application form for incoming national mission institutions that will be used to approve new partnerships, and approved a plan for a consultation with Native Ameri...
- Race and Migration: Ten Years After Durban
09/28/2011 -- Over 15,000 people gathered in Durban, South Africa, 10 years ago to attend the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, known as WCAR, or “Durban.”
- Give Us This Day Our Daily Will to Build Peace:
A Reflection for September 21, International Day of Peace
09/21/2011 -- Mentored in peace by God can be an awesome task. I was fascinated by a rabbinic interpretation of this verse. Playing on the original Hebrew word for children, banayik, the Babylonian Talmud says, “Read not banayik (your children) but bonayik (your builde...
- Reflections of My Travels With Women's Division to Japan for the Ceremony of the 66th Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima
09/21/2011 -- My 11-day trip to the other side of the world was an amazing time, from staying with my incredibly loving and hospitable host family, to having a giant sleepover at Jogakuin University with 40 of the nicest girls I’ve ever met, to attending the incredible...
- Listen to Marian Solomon: United Methodist Women member and longtime peace activist.
09/21/2011 -- Marian Solomon is a United Methodist Women member from Ames, Iowa. She has been a longtime peace activist. She has served UMW as the President of her local unit and as the conference social action coordinator.
- Remarks by President Obama in Address to the United Nations General Assembly
09/21/2011 -- "Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General, fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen: It is a great honor for me to be here today. I would like to talk to you about a subject that is at the heart of the United Nations -- the pursuit of peace in an imperfect worl...
- International Day of Rural Women and World Food Day Event
09/20/2011 -- On October 14, 2011, United Methodist Women and partners will host panel discussions on the role of rural women in food security and ending violence against women at the Church Center for the United Nations.
- Seeking Peace in Afghanistan
09/02/2011 -- For Afghans, the current war involving more than 100,000 foreign military troops is simply the latest in a long history of foreigners trying to impose by military might their own agenda in Afghanistan.
- The 56th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women
08/04/2011 -- CSW-56 will take place at United Nations Headquarters in New York City from February 27 to March 9, 2012. The theme is “the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenge.” This session will ...
- Voices: A Transformative Leadership Event
06/23/2011 -- Las participantes en el evento—coordinadores de idiomas y presidentas conferénciales—vinieron de 34 conferencias a través de los Estados Unidos. Entre las presentes se identificaron 10 idiomas, incluyendo inglés.
- My Understanding of Mission
06/23/2011 -- Keynote Address at Voices: A Transformative Leadership Event for United Methodist Women Language Coordinators and Presidents.
- Gum Moon Women’s Residence: 100 Years of Turning Faith, Hope and Love Into Action
06/23/2011 -- A message from Hortense Tyrell, Executive Secretary for National Ministries, at the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Gum Moon Women’s Residence, a United Methodist Women National Mission Institution.
- United Methodist Women UNiTE to End Global Violence Against Women
06/22/2011 -- The UNiTE campaign was launched in 2008 by United Nations (U.N.) Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to influence laws and policies, mobilize the public and partner with governments and organizations to end violence against women.
- Grace Children's Hospital Providing Health and Hope in Haiti
06/10/2011 -- How one hospital in Haiti survived and thrived since last year's earthquake destroyed other hospitals in the area.
- Farming Uphill in Haiti
06/10/2011 -- For the better part of two centuries, since Haiti gained independence from France in 1804, the indescribably resilient people of rural Haiti have been forced to farm uphill, both literally and figuratively.
- The Paradoxes of the Haitian Diaspora
06/02/2011 -- This article examines these three paradoxes, often caused by government immigration policies for Haitians who live scattered.
- Environmental Justice: Just Words, or Haiti's Key to Capacity?
05/27/2011 -- The 2010 earthquake in Haiti presented humanitarian workers with one of their most complex and difficult emergencies. The response to immediate needs must be accomplished with an eye toward fair and just long-term development. Capacity building must outwe...
- Reframing Recovery to Achieve Environmental Justice in Haiti
05/27/2011 -- During its 21-year occupation of Haiti, the United States concentrated nearly all economic resources and investments in the capital city, Port-au-Prince. Haiti's other population centers and rural areas received few benefits, spurring a severe decline in ...
- Wage Peace for Mother’s Day
05/06/2011 -- President Barack Obama’s announcement on Sunday that a U.S. Navy Seal team had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan begs the question: Could this be a time for all persons of goodwill to undertake the hard work of waging peace?
- Just for Girls
05/03/2011 -- Girls find a haven from abuse and a safe place to laugh at the YWCA in Petionville, Haiti.
- Nation Under Rubble
05/03/2011 -- Women struggle to survive in post-quake Haiti.
- UPDATE: The Nation’s Budget: A Reflection of What We Value
04/28/2011 -- Next month the U.S. Congress votes on whether to raise the debt ceiling. Let your representative know that you want the debt ceiling raised to protect important programs.
- It’s Not Too Late to Save Creation
04/13/2011 -- Jeremiah teaches us that if we do what God calls us to do, through our modern-day environmental prophets, that we can trust God to do all that God can.
- A Parable of ‘Talents’ for Mission in Sudan
04/01/2011 -- Creative ventures across Iowa raised awareness and funds for Sudan.
- Building Peace in Africa’s Newest Nation
04/01/2011 -- In January the people of Southern Sudan voted to become an independent nation. Now begins the hard but joyful work of building a nation in peace.
- God's Faithful Provision in Our Journey
03/25/2011 -- Whether we are in the wilderness like the Israelites or in the Killing Fields of Cambodia during the Khmer Rogue, whether we are in the slums or plush subdivisions and mansions, God listens to our murmurings.
- A New Heart and a New Spirit
03/23/2011 -- In this time of Lent, we prepare ourselves for the deepest transformation we can go through as human being or institutions: getting a new heart and new spirit that we may have the fruits of the tree in abundance so nobody will go hungry anymore in our glo...
- God's New Creation
03/22/2011 -- As God created heavens and earth very good in the beginning (Genesis 1:31), so God is renewing the heavens and earth for the people to rejoice. God will not destroy the earth to make another universe.
- United Methodist Women Reach out to Japan
03/20/2011 -- United Methodist Women are praying for the Japanese people and for all of the missionaries and mission institutions in the country that was hit by earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown on March 11.
- Women Share Their Stories at UN event
02/24/2011 -- 26-year-old Taurai Sandra Chinyerere is among the women sharing stories, advice and solidarity during the Feb. 22–March 4 meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations. The United Methodist Women’s 20-member ecumenical delegation ...
- A Happy Valentine's Day for All
02/13/2011 -- This Valentine's Day, consider the real price of your flowers and chocolate and buy fair trade.
- Mary Scranton's Legacy of Leadership
02/01/2011 -- The Scranton Center for Leadership Development in Seoul, Korea, is preparing women across Asia to effect change in church and society.
- Human Trafficking Fact Sheet
01/10/2011 -- Answers to your frequently asked questions about human trafficking.
- Not in My Neighborhood!
01/10/2011 -- This text is designed to be used for a group retreat, accompanied by the “Not in My Neighborhood” PowerPoint presentation.
- Let There Be Peace on Earth
12/15/2010 -- Much more work remains to ensure that women have a voice in times of conflict and in implementing UNSCR 1325 worldwide. We must all join the efforts of women throughout the world who are saying, “Let there be peace on earth.”
- Take Action for Migrant Rights on December 18, International Migrants Day
12/13/2010 -- In this season of Advent, we commemorate International Migrants Day on December 18, recognizing the efforts, contributions and rights of migrants worldwide. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the United Nations (U.N.) migrant rights convention.
- Who Is My Neighbor?
12/13/2010 -- This is the question that Baltimore-Washington Conference United Methodist Women will be exploring over the next three days during their seminar with the United Methodist Seminar Program.
- International Climate Talks On In Mexico
12/03/2010 -- This year’s high-level United Nations climate meeting, the Conference of Parties, has begun in Cancun, Mexico, with an estimated 200 nations sending representatives. United Methodist Women partners are currently there.
- Treating HIV, AIDS and Stigma
11/30/2010 -- Around the world, HIV and AIDS still ravage lives and communities, and the discrimination that comes with the disease can be worse than the illness.
- Ons Plek
11/30/2010 -- Ons Plek means a place for us in Afrikaans and is the only intake shelter for runaway girls in Cape Town, South Africa. Its focus on education and strengthening families enables 90 percent of the girls to return to homes better prepared to support them.
- This Thanksgiving, Help End Violence Against Women
11/23/2010 -- Be thankful for your blessings this Thanksgiving: Take action to end violence against women.
- United Methodist Women Register for Independence Vote in Southern Sudan
11/23/2010 -- United Methodist women in Southern Sudan are joining their neighbors in enthusiastically registering to vote in a January referendum on whether their war-torn land will split off from the north of the country.
- Women, Health and Safety
11/17/2010 -- Urge your congressional representative to support and co-sponsor H.R. 5268, the Global Maternal and Newborn Health Outcomes while Maximizing Successes (MOMS) Act.
- Responsively Yours: Called to Service and Advocacy
11/09/2010 -- What energizes women organized for mission?
- Citizens of the World Advocate for Women, Peace, and Security at the CCUN
11/01/2010 -- This week, to celebrate ten years since UNSCR 1325's passage, hundreds of global citizens gathered with United Methodist Women at the Church Center for the United Nations (CCUN) to strategize on new and creative ways to hold governments accountable for th...
- Global Migration Focus of Global Gathering in Mexico
11/01/2010 -- United Methodist Women heads to Mexico City this week for the People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA).
- Interviews with Women from "Voices from the Frontlines"
10/28/2010 -- United Methodist Women spoke to about what would make implementation of UNSCR 1325 effective and how women of faith can implement peace around the world.
- Women Call for Peace Resolution Implementation
10/28/2010 -- In “Voices from the Frontlines,” women from conflict areas around the world shared their experiences on why women need to be involved in decisions that define just and reconciliatory processes on every level.
- Harriett Olson Speaks on Women, Peace and Security
10/26/2010 -- Women’s Division head Harriett Olson spoke on the importance of women’s involvement in peace and security issues for an event on implementing United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace and Security.
- Apply for the College Women's Seminar on Women and Migration
10/14/2010 -- The United Methodist Seminar Program is seeking applications from college and university women for a week long seminar Jan. 3-9, 2011 to be held in New York City.
- Become a JFON Advocate!
10/12/2010 -- Join us during 10-Fold to learn about a vital United Methodist Ministry to immigrants, Justice For Our Neighbors.
- Women as Peacemakers, Women as Decision Makers
10/12/2010 -- From Oct. 18-29, the United Nations and women’s and civil society organizations will celebrate 10 years of UNSCR 1325.
- 10 Facts: Do you really know the suburbs?
10/01/2010 -- This month's issue features a story about the suburbs. These ten facts provide insight into what it really means to live in the suburbs.
- Family Roots
10/01/2010 -- Author Thomas DeWolf shares lessons from a life-changing journey into the history of his family, his country and the transatlantic slave trade in Inheriting the Trade, a 2011 United Methodist Women Reading Program book.
- Sunlit Sisters
10/01/2010 -- The Korean War led many young women to “camptowns” where there were soldiers with money and a chance for survival. Today, Sunlit Sisters Center offers light and love to the now aging women.
- The Power of Words: Curses, Blessings and Interfaith Dialogue
09/30/2010 -- Engaging in interfaith dialogue is a way to follow Paul’s guidance and to bless those who are different from us, those who threaten us and even those who we feel persecute us (and be blessed by them in return).
- UMC Bishop Thomas Bickerton Speaks on Ending Malaria Deaths at U.N. Panel
09/22/2010 -- United Methodist Women had a presence at the U.N. Week’s Digital Media Lounge Tuesday during which a panel discussion was held about malaria that included United Methodist Bishop Thomas Bickerton, who spearheads the Nothing But Nets campaign.
- My Work With Imam Feisal Rauf and Daisy Khan
09/15/2010 -- As I listen to the debate about the proposed Cordoba House community center at 51 Park Place in Manhattan, I find it painful to see two highly regarded interfaith leaders dragged through the mud by news commentators and politicians who don’t really know t...
- For the Living of These Days
09/09/2010 -- This September is the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy. We still have not gotten over the raw woundedness of the painful tragedy inflicted on our nation.
- From Iowa to Washington, D.C.
08/30/2010 -- Judy Kading shares how she puts “love in action” as Iowa United Methodist Women’s social action mission coordinator.
- Voices of Human Trafficking Team Members
08/30/2010 -- United Methodist Women members who participated in the Human Trafficking training session in Atlanta, Ga. in 2009 reflect on what they've accomplished and how they've changed a year later.
- Haiti Update: Communities of Shalom
08/26/2010 -- Deaconess candidate Valerie Mossman-Celestin shares her work with Communities of Shalom as the U.S. director of Haitian Artisans for Peace International (HAPI).
- Battling Sexual Exploitation
06/18/2010 -- The fight against human trafficking in Cambodia is a struggle to protect vulnerable young girls.
- A Separate Peace
06/18/2010 -- Lisa Shannon shares about her journey to the worst place on earth to be a woman in A Thousand Sisters. She shares a chapter of her book with Response.
- The Experience Hall of Assembly
05/02/2010 -- Assembly’s Experience Hall offers participants an opportunity to learn about justice issues – and be entertained.
- Women Veterans Working for Peace
05/02/2010 -- United Methodist Women's 2010 Assembly features workshops with women veterans working for peace.
- On International Women’s Day, United Methodist Women Assesses Setbacks for Women’s Rights, Affirms Commitments
03/15/2010 -- On International Women’s Day, March 8, United Methodist Women joins thousands of women around the world to affirm our commitment to gender equality for women.
- Gender, Race, Class Focus of Event on Global Status of Women
03/12/2010 -- The workshop is part of a series of events convened parallel to the United Nations 54th Commission on the Status of Women, in New York City, March 1-12.
- United Methodist Women Forum Promotes Migrant Women’s Rights
03/08/2010 -- Migrant women’s vulnerability to exploitation and need for international protections dominated a forum convened as a parallel event to the 54th Commission on the Status of Women.
- UMW and PICUM Launch Report on Women Migrant Workers
03/04/2010 -- On March 1, United Methodist Women and the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM) issued the report “The Exploitation of Undocumented Migrant Women in the Workplace.”
- Ecumenical Women Worship, Prepare for 54th U.N. Commission on Status of Women
03/02/2010 -- Ecumenical Women at the United Nations gathered in the Church Center for the United Nations Feb. 27 to worship and prepare for the 54th Commission on the Status of Women.
- Of HAPI-ness, Gratitude Journals, and Haiti
02/19/2010 -- Artisans have been expressing gratitude in spite of their horrific experiences. They are grateful to be alive. They are grateful to God for giving them strength. They are grateful for the gift of hope. We can follow their example by keeping a gratitude jo...
- West Africa Women Meet to Explore Being Better Together in Christ
06/03/2009 -- This impromptu composition by missionary Catherine Akale became the unofficial theme song of this first gathering of leaders from United Methodist women's organizations within the West Africa Central Conference. The participants gathered in Monrovia, Libe...
- Love the One Next to Us, Peace Flourishes
03/25/2006 -- * Kelly Martini is communications director/information officer of the Women’s Division. This meditation is written to help United Methodist Women begin to prayerfully prepare themselves for the United Methodist Women’s Assembly, May 4-7 in Anaheim, Calif...
- Mary’s Song: My Song
03/25/2006 -- United Methodist Women and United Methodist Women's Division staff joined tens of thousands in New York City and Washington on April 10 to voice concerns over the potential criminalization of undocumented immigrants and to call for comprehensive immigrati...
- United Methodist Women & Farmworker Justice
06/13/2005 -- The United Methodist Church, in the 2004 General Conference, adopted the resolution to boycott Taco Bell for fair wages and working condition of tomato pickers. United Methodist Women participated in action to bring about a peaceful settlement to the boy...
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1) vancem ----- Wilt Chamberlain. Wilt Should always be the first pick in this draft. Getting the right players to go with Wilt is a bit tricky. Kobe Bryant. The "never used him before" bug bit me here along with my huge ego thinking that I could make it work. I've never seen a Kobe team win this league but none of them had Wilt. Great usage, great defense, good assists and good rebounds for Kobe. Weak EFG% for Kobe and he's no Dwyane Wade. Deron Wiliams. Wanted assists, defense, and just enough usage at a solid EFG% to compliment Kobe and hopely balance him out when he is shooting 8 for 25 from the field. Having a bit of buyers remorse right now with the Kobe pick. A.C. Green. Very good defense and rebounding at SF along with clean play. Very low turnovers and fouls. Most likely going to use the 98% effectiveness version at SF for the extra 20 defense and the 30% CREB. Zelmo Beaty. Adds inside scoring at 55.5 EFG%, good rebounding at 34.5 CREB%, over 500 FTA's at 79% made, and 20.8 usage. I did a lot of play testing and he worked the best out of all of the remaining PFs. Could have waited to take Zelmo but the last 2 picks of this draft are a total crap shoot to predict. The starting 5 is set and no worries about the last 2 picks. Roy Tarpley and Rodrique Beaubois. Tarpley backs up Zelmo for just 7 MPG but good rebounding, 78 defense, 24 usage and 54 EFG% plus lower fouls than his other seasons. Rodrique backs up Kobe for 9 MPG. He has over 24 usage, 59 RFG%, 40% from 3 with 45 made and 70 defense. I really like this squad. More 3s are needed though to keep the defenses from sagging in. l'll do the uvasooner here and not forecast the teams success but it should be a playoff team. Probably my last Wilt team in this league or even a team with a top 5 pick so hopefully it will be a fun season.
2) ncih (1) ----- Lebron James. Dominating if used at the PG position. Somewhat weak pick if used at SF. Robert Parish. Very nice inside player to go with Lebron. Very efficient and rebounds well along with low negative numbers. Parish's defense is a bit of a weakness but I'm sure that ncih will get another great player in round 3. So far so good. Bill Walton. A great pick and Walton does the defense for the front court even if it is for less that 30 MPG. This team should be a contender. Good work here ncih. Wesley Person. A great pick that compliments Lebron very well. Kills it from three, plays very good defense and have extremely low negative #s per 48 MPG. I like one player slighty better here for the higher usage, and more rebounds and more assists. Still this is a grade A pick. Lamar Odom. Decent rebounding, good threes, good EFG% and excellent assists which the team needed. 49 defense is a bit low but not terrible here. Potentially a strong contender. Rebounding help is still needed for Parish for this to be a dominant team. Great job so far ncih. Chris Dudley and Greg Anthony. Two ex Trail Blazers that should always be drafted LOL! Dudley fits well here. His rebounding is great, defense is pretty good considering who was left and isn't the worst foulish big out there at 23 - 24 MPG. Greg Anthony looks to be the backup for Lebron and that appears to be a good choice. Anthony will get some dimes, add some high percentage 3s and plays alright defense. There seems to be a big hole in regard to scoring off of the bench though at this point. There is one player that may have been a better back up to Lebron with 4 usage points. I think this squad will be a playoff team but may have to fight to get there.
3) xxevilivexx---- Michael Jordan. Excellent pick especially at PG. It could be argued in this league that Rodman is a better choice. Just add one more scorer and you don't need many more points to build a winner. # 18 Larry Bird. It's too early for me to wrap my head around the 3 owner trade that was completed between dh555, natenoy, and evil and come up with a great evaluation but I will do my best. I really like MJ + Bird for evil's team. But this leaves 2 huge holes at PF and C right now for this squad. Most of the great low usage bigs are normally gone by the middle of round 3 so let's see what is left when evil picks next. I like dh555 getting more picks in rounds 2 and 3. dh555 gets # 37 and # 60 for # 18 and a 5th rounder. This works out if dh555 gets a really good player at # 37 and he should. As far as natenoy goes I really don't have a clue what that dude is doing . . . does he??? Going from # 37 to # 46 is a big drop in this draft and getting # 51 instead of # 60 is not that much of an improvement IMO. Nate could have kept # 18 and gotten a great high EFG% guard to go with D Wade or a pretty dominant big man at this spot. After top 40 picks or so that talent pool drops of significantly. In short, the trade grades are: evil--- B + --- weak bigs left will hurt the team somewhat, dh555--- A --- 2 really good 2nd and 3rd round picks in this league means great balance and quality, natenoy--- C- --- picks # 46 and # 51 won't provide the help that D Wade needs to make this squad a winner. Serge Ibaka. A great role player here at about 27 MPG. Awesome defense, low usage at a good EFG%, and is a good fit. At this point in the draft an A pick. Some inside help is still available which the team does need. If the right bigs drop down look out league! James Donaldson. Love the player in RL. I completely understand it here but hate it all the same. Let's begin with the good stuff---Donaldson is terribly efficient. His EFG% is 58, FT% is 81%, turnovers and fouls per 48 MPG are about the lowest in the SIM and he can play 37 MPG. The bad and the ugly. The bad the defensive rating is 50. The ugly CREB% is about 32 and much better partial season players with 1 and 2 usage points were available that all rebound much, much better. It can also be argued that Amare Stoudamire would have been a better fit in round 5 as a low usage banger or 2 probably would have been there in round 6. But none of those bigs plays a sqeaky clean game like Donaldson so the grade is a D- and not an F. Troy Murphy. Helps out a lot on the defensive boards but not so much on the offensive ones. Great 3 point shooting and he makes a ton of them. Fantastic EFG% at 58. Very low turnovers and okay fouls per 48 MPG. However, the poor defense at 33 will hurt against many opponents. The offensive rebounding for this entire unit is a little weak IMO. This team's giving me a headache kind of like when I was 16 years old and I saw Motor Head open for Ozzy Osbourne at the Paramount Theater in PDX. Terry Tyler and Chris Anderson. Tyler in an all time favorite of mine and is a perfect back up for Ibaka. Great defense, one stellar 1900 minute season, nice rebounding and tremendous shot blocking. Good EFG% as well. Anderson provides the defense that both Murphy and Donaldson lack up front. Plus, the birdman adds rebounds, nice EFG% and more good low usage minutes. A very intriguing team. Can 1 great pick in round 3 and 2 great picks in round 6 save this squad and propel it to the top of the league??? I kind of doubt it but it will be a great team to watch and may make a playoff run. However, both Jordan and Bird will need to play out of their minds to win the title.
4) tricky24 ----- Dennis Rodman. Easy to build around in this league. I don't like him at SF in this league but most other owners do. Pretty much a no brainer to take him at # 4. Paul Pierce. I really like this pick. A lot of usage is always needed when you draft Rodman. A good PG can be added later. Rodman will get many of the rebounds form Pierce's missed shots. Great defense, a ton of three's, lots of freethrows and assists too. Very good pick. Mel Daniels. I like this pick. The rebounding was actually still needed and most owners don't draft enough support for Rodman in that area. Daniels can also score a bit and adds some usage that was also needed. Plus, he can play 38 MPG. Great job here. Dana Barros. A good pick. Not the best pure PG available but a good complimentary player next to Pierce. Great EFG% for Barros and the team needed that from a scorer. I'll give it a B+. Amare Stoudamire. As the great, and hated by me in PDX, Larry Bird once said after barely beating the Pistons in a playoff game years ago, "We was lucky, we was very lucky." Basically, this ranks as possibly the best pick in the entire draft so far. Amare has great scoring efficiency, tremendous EFG%, makes his FTs, and rebounds well enough based on the rest of the roster. When Pierce is jacking up shots with only a 50 EFG% you need a player that will take shots away from him. Great trick tricky24.This is right up there with the best picks in the draft so far. A+ grade.Spencer Haywood and Archie Clark. It was already a somber day in the PDX and now this??? Haywoods nasty EFG% pretty much negates the advantage that Amare gave the team. How do you fit Haywood's best year, Rodman's best year, Amare's best year and Daniel's best year on the same roster? The answer is you don't. I get it that Rodman is th starting SF but I still don't like the team. Way too many low percentage shots being taken between Pierce and Haywood for this to be a contender. As for Clark he's a decent back up combo guard with okay numbers. Rebounding alone could make it a top 10 team though.
5) mikee1 ----- Kareem Abdul Jabbar. I like another player better at # 5 because of Kareem's somewhat poor rebounding. But a very efficient scorer and can play over 40 mpg which means a lot in this league. Tyson Chandler. The best big left that makes sense here. Rebounding has been addressed to help Kareem. Lots of efficiency. I liked an SF here a bit better.But this is a good pick. Not getting a premier guard here may be a problem in the end. Horace Grant. A great pick here if Chandler wasn't already on the team. At SF he's very good and the best low usage player other than Rodman at this position. I have to rate this a B to a B+ unless some excellent scoring and high usage is added later. If that happens the grade is an A. James Harden. Great EFG%, good assists, pretty good rebounding, makes lots of 3's and makes a ton of FT's, but with weak defense and only 29 MPG per game. Harden also is a 2 usage point player and a lot more points are needed. Overall great EFG% team wise. Kareem needs more scoring help for this team to challenge for the title. Fat Lever. Does a lot of things to help the team--Great rebounding, decent to very good defense, pretty good assists and very low T/Os and fouls per 48 MPG. But without enough offense to take this team to top level in this league. B- for this pick. Mark Landsberger and Jon Barry. Landsberger will do very well baking up Chandler except of his god awful defense. Barry will do everything well offensively that Lever won't do albeight at about 6 usage% less. Great team EFG%. But let's face it with just one very efficient high usage player and no 4 usage point player as a true second scoring option how far can this team go . . . maybe win a first round playoff series is what I think. Even with Jabbar and Harden this team won't get fouled enough, or make enough free throws to win on the road often enough to contend for the league title.
6) bluenote75----- Shaq. Great offense, okay defense, and a bit poor rebounding wise based on what was still on the board. It never hurts though to start this draft with dominant inside player with very high EFG%. Steve Nash. Not the best choice. High turnovers and terrible defensively. Shad needs big time help on the boards now more than ever. Again mildly shocked that an SF wasn't the pick. This grade is a C- to maybe a C if all of the other picks are super good.Shawn Kemp. I don't like this pick much at all. Kemp isn't a super good rebounder and he fouls a lot. Either an efficient mid usage SF with great rebounding, or an SG with great defense would have been better with this pick.Shane Battier. A nice defensive SG that can make some 3's and get some boards. I like one player better that makes a lot more 3's and has better usage. Not a bad pick about a B grade here. Steve Novak. Probably better as a 6th rounder. Novak can only play 16 MPG max and that means that he's a backup. Sure he can back up Battier but this pick leaves a huge hole at starting SF for this squad. Novak is an awful rebounder for an SF even as a backup in this league. Much better strarting or even back up SFs were available, better combo guards were available and so on. The 6th round picks will need to be stellar for this team to make the playoffs. DeAndre Jordan and Charles Oakley. I suppose that Jordan and back up Shaq but with such a huge drop in usage when that happens i don't see it working very well. Oakley's 21 MPG season will go well with Kemp's 9192 season. Perhaps the plan is for Kemp to back up Shaq for 10 or 12 MPG, then have Oakley back up Kemp for 21 MPG, and have Jordan finish of the minutes at the PF position. I like that plan a lot better. I don't see a stong enough scoring option at Guard to run with Nash to make this work well. But all of the basic parts are there ie EFG%'s, rebounding and three's made and 3PT% to look very good during the regular season. Even if Oakley is used at SF I still don't like it. There aren't enough assists, and FT's, and way too many fouls for this team to win the league.
7) ncih (2) ----- Charles Barkley. How high should he go and which season should an owner use? Ask a true draft expert which I am not. My heart tells me that this was a decent pick and to trust ncih's experience to get the most out of this pick and out of the rest of the team. On the other hand there's only 2 to 3 truly great big men left so one of them probably should have been picked here over Sir Charles. Ray Allen. Don't like this pick because I've never seen this pairing work in this league. On paper the offensive potential is great and the defense is shaky at best right now. This looks like a team that will win around 30 home games and lose 25 or more on the road. Early prediction is 47 wins max. This grade is a C- because ncih should know better LOL! Tom Boerwinkle. A nice pick that will help the team with the exceptional rebounding and assists for about 30 MPG. Probably the best big available that fits the teams composition so far. I'll rate this a B to B+ pick. Bob Lanier. The best big man left with fairly high usage and excellent defense. A great fit for this team. Inside scoring that Boerwinkle doesn't do. Okay rebounding since Barkley and Boerwinkle kill on the boards. Makes his FTA's and is very good with assists. I see improvement but the team really needs a great PG. Lanier is only 96% effective at PF so I'll give this pick an A-. Well done. Rajon Rondo. Great pick again. Rondo does everything that the team needed. Killer defense, great assists, and 2 good seasons to use. Great pick.
8) jakotay ------ Dwight Howard. I love this pick. Great rebounding and high EFG% combined with a 6 usage point season and very good defense. Only one other player that I would consider at this point based on remaining players. Buck Williams. Builds on strengths which is good. Great rebounding and EFG% between these 2 players at pretty high usage levels. I like the idea behind this pick but wonder if there will be good enough guards left in rounds 3 and 4 to make the most of the great front court. Good enough guards should be there. Alonzo Mourning. Really good guards were available and this was the pick? Mourning only has one or maybe 2 good seasons to use as a backup for both Howard and Buck. I would say that this is the worst pick in the draft so far but I don't want to encourage jakotay. So the grade for this pick is an F+. Kevin Johnson. A nice pick here. A great PG was needed and KJ is a very good player. This adds assists which were needed big time, 3's, and points from the backcourt. If the plan is to still use Buck Williams at SF then I am truly missing something. There are only one or 2 seasons that I can find where Buck is either 98% of 99% effective at SF and the numbers show that a player like that would have been available in round 5. Trade Mourning and get better team balance and a better chance to avoid drafting Wilt next season LOL. Vince Carter. Very good fit here. Will make a nice backcourt wth KJ. Lots of scoring, plenty of 3's, pretty good defense. Good job! Amir Johnson. Good rebounder and defender for about half a game or so at SF. He fouls a ton but also has an outstanding EFG%. It appears that Amir will be backing up Buck Williams at SF. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder now isn't it?
9) coachcroft------- Moses Malone. The right choice here without a doubt. Arguably better than Dwight Howard in this league. Great offensive rebounding, solid defense, solid offense and good FT% shooter. Can be pushed up to 42 or 43 MPG in this league. Usage is lower than you would like in a draft pick this high other than Rodman. Coach knows how to get the right usage. Great pick. Gary Payton. Great defense and shoots a ton of 3's. Fairly low EFG% and another player may have worked better with Moses. However, Moses offensive rebounding will make up for some of Payton's missed shots. Good pick. Somewhat surprised that a SF wasn't the pick. Bobby Jones. Great defense, excellent EFG%, okay rebounding at SF, good assists. 1 usage point most likely so won't help too much with scoring. More scoring is needed most likely from the SG spot but its is still outh there. This is a B+ to an A pick. Don't forget to also add some help up front for Moses.Yao Ming. I like the idea of the inside usage and a scorer to help Moses inside. However, Ming's rebounding is a bit weak and so is Jones. I liked 2 players better if high usage inside scoring was the idea for this pick. Plus. Ming would have surely still been on the board for coach in round 5 and probably been there in round 6. And some really good complimentary DGs were here to compliment Payton. The playoff hopes are starting to fade. Grant Hill. Doesn't work IMO here. Who is PF on this team with the terrible rebounding? OH yeah that would be both Hill and Jones. Hill's high usage and poor EGF% combined with Payton's high usage and poor EFG% have doomed poor Moses. Don't tell me that Hill is the SG, at 98% effectiveness, with awesome rebounding that will dominate the league. The overall very poor OREB% has already condemned this unit. Dan Majerle and Paul Westphal. I really like both of these guys but don't have a clue who will back up who at the guard spots on this team or what years coach has in mind to use each one. Wesphal is the type of player that natenoy should have been looking at to go with D Wade. Nice EFG% for both players and Majerle in particlua has very low negative numbers per 48 minutes. I like most of the pieces but can't get the vision for this team. Please up date us with what years and seasons for each ot the players so that I can do my job better. Thank you very much.
10) 98average(1)--- Ben Wallace. A little bit too high for me but I love the player. Great defender and defensive rebounding. Goes away from 98's normal big man picks that he likes to draft. I think that I like another big man better at this spot that 98 has used before in round # 1. But on 98's team this is a scary pick because this man knows how to draft consistently winning teams in this league. Mookie Blaylock. Reigns down 3's, plays great D, gets decent assists and has very low negative numbers. A very good pick because I see the high usage players that 98 loves coming to the team soon. Another PG may have been a better fit. Marques Johnson. A really great pick. A great rebounding SF with good defense and the abilty to score some points. Sets up the rest of his selections very well by taking this player at this spot. Tracy McGrady. Normally, I hate this player in this league but on this team with the really good rebounding at SF and PF or C this works okay. I am shocked that another player wasn't taken to give the team some inside scoring punch however. The marginal overall EFG%s of the unit so far does hurt the team so far. Kris Humphries. A wise choice. A pretty clean player with excellent rebounding, 2 usage points, okay EFG% and decent defense. The low turnovers from this team will add up to extra wins. Possible 50+ game winner right now. Antonio McDyess and Kosta Koufos. I like McDyess backing up Johnson, but don't like him as much backing up Humphries or Wallace due to not being such a strong rebounder at PF. McDyess also fouls a lot but that won't really affect the team because the rest of the roster plays pretty clean ball. I really like Koufos as a 12 MPG back up player. Has 59 RFG%, over 35% CREB and 60 defense at 14.1% usage which is a perfect back up for Wallace. The thing that is lacking a scoring big with 4 usage points. This a very effective looking unit for the most part but because of the lack of any really high EFG% players at 55% or better. This is a playoff bubble team.
11) scudmissle ------ Karl Malone. Tremendous pick at this point. Huge usage and great EFG%. Superior defense and makes his FTA's. IMO a much better choice than Barkley was. Dikembe Mutombo. A great owner makes a great pick. Very good defense, great rebounding, perfect usage to go with the Mailman. Has to be at least an A grade so far. Terry Porter. Terrific pick. Porter should have gone higher instead one or two PGs taken earlier. This team's EFG% and efficiency is off the charts so far. This is a contender. Sidney Moncrief. Great defense, excellent rebounding for an SG, solid EFG%, low negative numbers per 48 MPG, nice assits, some suprisingly good seasons with 4 usage points, but not many 3's. The right SF really wasn't available. This team will be a pain to match up against. Detlef Schrempf. If used as the starting SF I hate this pick. If used as the back up to Moncrief, with Moncrief backing up Porter at PG and I absolutely love it! Schrempf at is 99% efffective at SG and has 21 usage, over 56 RFG%,and over 51% from 3 with over 180 attempts in about 35 MPG. Great rebounding and assists for an SG. Get the right SF in round 6 and this team should challenge for the conference title. Clarence Weatherspoon and Peja Stojakovic. I like another player better to split time with Peja at the SF spot here but that's splitting hairs. This team's biggest flaw is the rebounding and picking Peja from that standpoint was a mistake. I completely understand why this pick was made though more points and more 3 point shooting was needed because Moncrief isn't a pure scoring guard and Schrempf isn't a 4 usage point player. Peja's defense will hurt the team. Malone's rebounding already hurts the team a bit so I would have taken a great defending SF with great rebounding at about 24 MPG and then hoped that the very high 3 point percentages of Porter and Schrempf would have been good enough for that area. Weatherspoon will do a great job defensively and on the boards. If this team can keep from getting beaten on the boards by more that 5 per game it could contend for the division title.
12) natenoy ------ Dwyane Wade. Too high for this player. 5 to 6 much better choices at the 12th spot. But surrounded with the proper team D Wade dominates games by himself. A bit suspicious though as nate appears to be intentionally drafting players that were on the prior seasons championship teams in both this draft and the ODL. GL trying to match those owners winning formulas! Donyell Marshall. Yes, a great pick and yes it was a bit lucky for a wonderful complimentary SF fall to # 46. So far fantastic defense, great low negative numbers for 48 MPG for Marshall along with very good rebounding at SF, etc. If Nate pulls another one off this good at # 51 then look out league! That pick was an A grade. Swen Nater. Yes, rebounding was needed and Nater will do that in spades. He is very efficient offensively and has good negative numbers. However, the defense here will kill the team when going up against the likes of Wilt, Moses, Kareem, Howard and Gilmore etc. I liked another player or 2 a lot better here. Anthony Mason. A complimetary guard was needed do D Wade or a defensive big man to help Nater up front and neither happened. This is a bit sad. Mason is a poor rebounder at PF and the team already had Marshall at SF. Some very good SG's were there and so were some PG's and some great partial season big men. The grade is an F. Nick Anderson. One of my favorite players. Nice usage and EFG%, great 3's, very good defense and rebounds and assists well. Perfect fit for Nate's plan. A nice complimetary player to go with D Wade and has very low turnovers and fouls per 48 minutes. Nate thinks this is a 7 course meal. . . I think that its more like Hamburger Helper made with Ground Sirloin. Both taste good but one wins the championship and one barely makes the playoffs. Ich Habe Hunger Katernberg! Paul Milsap and Gilbert Arenas. Milsap provides rebounding, some points and some fouls at back up SF and PF. IMO the team would have been better off with a back up PF anc C to spell Nater and Mason with more rebounding. Arenas and D Wade are a toxic backcourt. Gilbert does everything like D wade but on much worse level. Another high usage SG with better defense, rebounding, 3PT% and a ton of 3's made would have been a better pick. Nate you are missing the forest for the trees.Your focus is on all of the small stuff like perfectly balanced usage levels, and usage points, total number of 3's taken and made, etc, etc. After the last 2 picks this team has little hope. The offensive rebounding is horrible, the usage percentage is over 65 combined the 2 worst shooters on the team. I see this unit being out rebounded by 6 or 7 per game and out scored by about 7 to 8 points per game.
13) katernberg ------ David Robinson. Can't argue with this pick at all. This player has it all except for excellent rebounding and that can be added later. Robinson has been underrated IMO in this draft in the past. Definitely should have been picked ahead of D Wade and I like him better than Barkley in this league. Willis Reed. Good to very good defense depending on the season used. I don't like this pick because of one thing: Average to below average rebounding. And also over 20% usage wasn't needed here at this position and the less than 53% EFG # doesn't help the Admiral out. I'm stunned that a top notch guard or a small forward wasn't the pick. Did dh555 pay you to do this? dh555 really doesn't need anymore help and now he will get another great player. Sorry kat but IMO this is the 2nd worst pick so far and a D grade. Gerald Wallace. Great defense and defensive rebounding as an SG. If the team had a great PG already in RD 2 instead of taking Willis Reed I would have loved this pick. IMO Drexler should have been the pick for a lot better offense and assists and FTAs. Plus, Wallace doesn't shoot the three ball very often or very well. The PG for this team will have to be great to make this work . . is that player even out there? A grade of a C at best. Cedric Maxwell. Probably the best SF available but not the best player for this team. A huge need for assists and for a decent PG which was there. Excellent EFG%, very good rebounding at SF, excellent FTAs which were needed, but mediocre defense, and fairly high turnovers and fouls. This is about a C- or a D+ grade pick. A serious lack of assists and 3's will doom this squad and they won't make the playoffs. Charlie Ward. Great assists, great defense and makes some 3's. But very little offensive pop. More points were needed and so was more usage. I like the way the numbers look in some ways because of the percetages and the some of the totals.But there isn't much synergy here and the parts don't really add up to being a great team as a whole IMO. Brent Price and David Lee. More low usage picks and on this team that isn't a good thing. Price can back up Ward and then play spot minutes behind Wallace. Price has awesome EFG%, very good assists, and poor defense. Lee in his best season has about 59% EFG, 39% CREB and very poor defense at 21 MPG. Some nice ideas working but not in concert in my mind. No 4 point usage players in the backcourt hurts this team on the road. They just won't score enough points. Some excellent EFG players though. Robinson will be close to leading the league in scoring and could well be the league MVP. I see 47 wins max and most likely the 6th seed in the playoffs at best.
14) 98average(2)---- Chris Paul. A mild surprise that 98 took Paul here. That being said I really like this pick. I see Paul as arguably the 2nd best PG in this draft. Very efficient and low negative numbers. I've seen Paul on numerous final four teams and championship teams in this league. Nice pick 98. Larry Nance. Interesting pick. Nance's awesome defense and extremely low negative numbers keep pushing him up the draft boards. I like another player better here that probably plays the same position that 98 will use Nance for. But, this looks like a team with very good potential. Clyde Drexler. A great pick. Very efficient player. Adds more defense, lots of points, really good assists and rebounds for an SG. But rebounding and inside scoring are both lacking at this point. This is a grade A pick. Emeka Okafur. A very nice pick here. Very good rebounding, 2 usage points and good EFG%, and 71 defense. A sneaky good team that may surprise in the playoffs. Dan Gadzuric. Perfect backup for Okafur. Great offensive rebounding and very good CREB% of over 41, okay defense, and nice EFG%. One more big or combination of bigs needed to finish this off. Starting to smell a playoff run here. Joel Pryzbilla & Javale McGee. So Joel starts and Gadzurich is the backup it works. McGee backs up Okafur and that works. These last three picks are what separates the men from the boys in this league. Perfect execution to take the higher in demand Gadzuric in round 5 and gambling on Prybilla being there still in round 6. McGee's 17 MPG season is a perfect fit behind Okafur. I love this team at this point. It may prove difficult to find a really good back for Drexler for 14 MPG but I'm confident that 98 will find a way. A final four favorite now.
15) banditone(1)----- Artis Gilmore. A great pick here. Love the EFG%, rebounding and defense. I wish that his usage number for his best seasons were higher but who doesn't? He's the horse inside here but more points are needed for this team to the champions. Good start. Kevin Love. A good pick here. Love's poor defense will hurt but his excellent rebounding, ability to make three's and low neagtive numbers are all big pluses. More points are still needed and I am surpised the a guard wasn't the pick. This pick also removes the need to go for a good rebounder at SF later on. Jerry West. I like this pick for the offense, defense and FTAs. More assists were needed if this is a PG pick. I like another player better because West's EFG% isn't that great, his assist to turnover ratio is a bit high, and he doesn't make a lot of 3's. This is about a B or a B+ pick. Be thankful that Gerald Wallace wasn't availble for you here. Maurice Cheeks. A really good pick here but I liked a simlar player better that makes some 3's. Great defense, very good assists, low turnovers and fouls. A scorer is still needed that can knock down some three's for a playoff run. Toni Kukoc. As an SF Kujoc lacks rebounding and defense. As a backup to West with West backing up Cheeks this is a great pick. Even though Gilmore and Love are great on the boards you would still like more rebounding from your starting SF in this league. A good pick if used at SG. Rick Berry and Jason Richardson. Barry as a 17 MPG backup for Kukoc is pretty clever. I like Barry's EFG% and ungodly usage to use for drawing fouls and then converting FTAs at around a 90% clip. J Rich has one good season to back up West with 10 MPG. I like the 25 usage and amount of 3's here backing up West. With a stronger starting SF this team could make the final 4. The rebounding which started out as spectacular is now just about average.
16) chris_snid ------- Magic Johnson. This is one of my favorite picks so far. Position dominance is crucial in this league. The rebounding edge that Magic has over CP3 pretty much makes up for the lower D rating and higher turnovers. I've always wanted to be able to draft Magic but have never been able to do it. Nice work chris. John Stockton. This is the worst pick that I have seen in long time. Magic isn't a great scorer and Stockton isn't much of one at all. This team will lead the league in assists and in turnovers. Plus, one of Magics greatest strengths rebounding is now negated by Stockton's terrible rebounding. But this does keep Stockton out of another owner's hands which is a good thing. I'll give this pick a D-. Patrick Ewing. Thanks for breaking 98's little heart! A very good pick for the most part based on what was left. I liked Bynum better here becuase of the better rebounding, higher EFG% and much lower fouls per 48 MPG. Joakim Noah. Assuming this is an SF pick I like it. Very good rebounding for an SF. Good defense low negative numbers and can score a few points too. More points and boards are needed to make the playoff picture but there is hope. Michael Redd. A great fit for this team. Adds scoring and 3's which were sorely needed. Nice three guard rotation going now. Plus, Redd is a great rebounding SG with very low negative #s per 48 MPG. Very nice work here chris. Kermit Washington and Ersan Illyasova. There was a much cleaner big with better offensive rebounding available that would have worked better with Ewing IMO. Ersan is a great pick. I mean 45% from 3, about 33 CREB%, 53 EFG% and low negative numbers per 48 MPG. This team is unique and could make a playoff push.
17) ginandjuice ---- Kevin Durant. A great choice if used at SG. Some might say that less than 54% EFG is a bit low for such a high usage player in this league because Durant is only 99% at SG. Scores a ton and is excellent on the defensive glass. Defensive isn't great but it isn't poor. Not a bad choice here and perhaps a better player than D Wade. Tim Duncan. The only good pick here. TD has the high usage inside game and Durant has the high usage mid range and outside game. Great Job! Ryan Anderson. A good pick here. Solves the SF issue which is big in this league. Great 3's, good rebounding, very low neagtive numbers and above 20% usage. Jose Calderon. The most efficient PG left on the board. Great assist to turnover ratio. High EFG% and a great pick here. The guards have fairly low defense for this league which will hurt some but the offense is super good right now. One more great pick and this is a playoff team and possibly a top 6 or better team. But, having 2 starters in this league with less than 50 defense is a a bit of a buzz kill. Samuel Dalembert. A fantastic pick here. Addresses a need with offensive rebounding, plays decent defense, shoots well and doesn't foul terribly. The 6th round will determine this team's fate as Anderson, Calderon, and Dalembert are all at 30 MPG or less. Oliver Miller and Carmelo Anthony. Miller has the great defense but doesn't rebound that well, except for one season, and fouls too much. I like another foulish big much better to back up Dalembert. Carmelo solves the backup issue for Durant. But the team really needed a great back up for Anderson that could rebound and defend and at least 2 were out there for this pick. I see the Carmelo pick as being a wasted pick in some ways.
dh555 --- No First Round Pick -------- # 31 Scottie Pippen. Tremendous pick. Defense, rebounding, assists, and scoring. One of the best SGs in this draft. Plus, Pippen makes 3's at a decent rate. & # 37 Chauncey Billips. What is this the Romney plan where the top 1% just keep getting richer and richer? Awesome 3PT% and almost 200 made. 80 defense, over 31% assists, 4 usage points and extremely low turnovers and fouls per 48 MPG. Plus, 520 FTA at over 89% made. I'm getting sick. The grade is an A to A + so far. Wes Unseld. A good pick based on what was left. 98average may have altered the plan for this pick. Rebounding was needed and usage not so much. Unseld doesn't have the best defense though. Looks like this team is still in the playoff picture. Andrew Bynum. Nice pick. Great EFG%, solid rebounding, very good usage, and low fouls. This one's becoming a contender or perhaps even a top 4 team. The front court defense is little bit weak at this point. Pau Gasol. Adds a lot of positives to the front line. Good EFG%, okay rebounding, good defense, about 12% assists and decent usage. Low negative numbers too. Another top notch pick. Reggie Miller and Kenneth Faried. Normally at this point Miller would be a great pick. I dislike it because another SG was available with some of the same qualities but with much better defense, rebounding and usage. Playing Pippen at 32 MPG at SF and thinking that the rebounding will be okay because Faried is the back up is dicey when Unseld is the only big on the team with a season of over 35 CREB%. Faried was a awesome pick though.But this team is stlll playoff bound and might even contend for the title.
19) jethroeg ------- Hakeem Olajuwon. Not the best possible pick but not the worse pick either. So-So offensively, great defensively, doesn't make a lot of FT's and fouls more than I like in this spot. Right now this pick is grade of B based on a curve. There was a chance to do better. The # 30 pick must be great jethro or you will be headed back to the top of draft next season. But you will have a chance to make a great pick at # 30. . . Just Do It Man! Elton Brand. At least give jethro credit for knowing who the good defensive players are. Great defense, good offense, good rebounding and low negative #s. Brand also has nice usage and makes his FT's. Keep going on this path jetho. However, keep in mind that you are one high usage low EFG% player away from a complete melt down. Good job so far. Penny Hardaway! One of the best picks in the draft so far and probably your best pick ever in this draft jethro. Good assists, great EFG%, good rebounding for a PG, really good usage for what you needed and one of the best players available. Well done A+ pick. You still need some more assists and some 3's but you will be able to get those later. Kirk Hinrich. A solid pick. Adds 140 3's, lots of assists, 80 defense, and low turnovers. Fouls more than you would like per 48 MPG as a starter in this league. One of the best choices for a backcourt players for this team that fits into jethro's defensive vibe. A solid B for this pick. Playoffs are still in the picture for what is becoming a defensive beast. Maurice Lucas. With both K Humphries and S Dalembert gone this pick isn't so bad. Offensive rebounding was really needed and Lucas provides some of that. 70 defense, EFG% over 50 ( a minor miracle jethro didn't go for a higher usage bigger name player at some EFG% between 42 and 49), and makes his FT's at a decent rate. CREB% of 38 for 33 MPG isn't that bad here. But fouls will be a problem area. Hakeem, Hinrich, and Lucas all foul at pretty high rate for this league. The overall usage is getting too high at about 120% right now. Pretty good though jethro. Now start thinking about players with less than 20% usage in round six as back ups please! Paul Pressey and Caldwell Jones. At least jethro was on the ball pretty good for 4 rounds this time. If the 21 MPG version of Pressey is used, which is the only on the fits behind Penny and Hinrich, than this a a horric pick. I mean 4.4 turnovers and 6.7 fouls per 48 MPG. If anyother version of Pressey is used than the rebounding behind Brand is way to weak. Jones has no good seasons to use to back up Lucas or Hakeem. Defense alone should get this team 25 to 30 wins. . .only if poppapomp's team is in the same division LOL!
20) tarheel1991 ---- Jerry Lucas. A great support player. Maybe too high for him at # 20 but tarheel1991 will get a great complimentary player at # 29 to go with Lucas. Really good rebounding, very good EFG%, low negative numbers and just enough usage on a winning team. Good solid pick. Kevin McHale. Intriguing pick here. McHale adds even more offensive efficiency plus some great defense to the front line which was needed. I really like what tarheel is cooking up here. Some special sauce is still needed ie. the right backcourt players with some scoring punch. Chris Mullin. He should work well with this team. Really good EFG%, good usage and scoring, and pretty good defense. This is a team that I would have loved to have see play together in RL. Great job so far. My interest is peaked as to who the PG will be for this team. Walt Frazier. The best player available at PG remaining. A very good pick. Defense, some assists, nice EFG%, good rebounding. But low on 3's and a bit low on assists. Manu Ginobli should have been selected over Mullin in round 3. This still feels like a playoff team though. Rasheed Wallace. A good player but not my favorite pick at this spot with this team. Very good defense, makes some 3's, good not great EFG%, At SF he really helps the front line on defense as Lucas is only about 50. Wallace has about 25 CREB% at best which combined with McHale's 26 CREB% in his best season, and it may not be enough to make this a final 4 team. Mark Price and Anderson Varejao. Price has one good season that fits behind Frazier and Mullin. If you use the 35MPG version of Mullin with the 57 EFG%. Price has good usage, very good assists and 3's, is the best of the lot that filled the need. Varejao has a 12 MPG season that I really like. His most expensive season has about 29 CREB% and that doesn't help this team much. I liked a couple of much better rebounders with less defense for this pick.
21) brick_man ----- Kevin Garnett. A very good SF in this league. The EFG% is a bit lower than I like. To win this league an owner must have rebounding at SF and defense which KG has. Good pick here. Marcus Camby. Another top role player is taken! A solid pick. High usage players will be available later on. I would have taken a different front court player to give KG some help here. But Camby's defense, rebounding, and very low negative numbers still make him a great complimentary player for KG.
Bob McAdoo. A very good pick in terms of usage, EFG% and defense. Inside points were needed. Rebounding is a bit low and that is why he goes this low. Derek Harper. Another very good pick. Pretty efficient player that has 80 defense, nice assist numbers, hits some 3's and plays a clean game. This team may contend if the SG pick is excellent and the backup for Camby is also excellent. Raja Bell. A good pick in many ways. Very good defense, makes ton of 3's at a very high percentage, EFG% at 56 and has extremely low turnovers per 48 MPG and doesn't foul ton. Plus, he can play 36 MPG. Slight weakness are low assist numbers, fairly low rebounding numbers and just 1 usage point. But, I get a weirdly positive vibe about this unit. This could be one of the best KG teams that we have seen in a while. Joe Dumars and Clifford Ray. Joe Dumars adds a lot of 3's, plays a clean game, can back up both guard spots and has 70 D rating! One of the best combo guards for this team by far and a fantastic pick. Clifford Ray. Nice back up for Camby. Ray provides excellent rebounding, a good dose of assists, okay defense and isn't afraid to put somebody on their back when the drive the lane LOL! A grade picks in the 6th here. A lack of scoring from the guard spots may hinder the team from getting as far as the conference finals.
22) poppapomp ---- Julius Erving. Fantastic pick if used at SG and with the highest EFG%. Fairly low negative numbers. Really good usage, and excellent rebounding and defense. Great pick. Oscar Robertson. Must some have evil disease. High octane but not as strong as evil's backcourt. I would have gone big here in round 2. But, I hope that this team and evil's are in the same division. Fun team to watch that's for sure. Nate Thurmond. I understand this pick but I don't like it. Thurmond's usage is too high relative to his EFG% and his rebounding isn't so great except for one season which I would recommend be used here. Low negative numbers per 48 MPG and pretty good defense. But better low usage bigs with much higher EFG% and higher CREB% were available. This pick is a C. Mark Eaton. This has gone from bad to worse in 2 picks. Eaton is a fairly poor rebounder for this league and his offense is horrific. Better bigs were available that would have helped more. Eaton's defense is tremendous but more rebounds and efficient points in the paint were and are still sorely needed. No playoffs for this squad. Jamaal Crawford. I don't like this pick much at all. Crawford has one decent season, with horrible defense, that an owner might even be tempted to look at using in this league. If this pick means the Crawford is backing up DR J and Oscar at the guard positions then I hate this pick. If this pick means that Crawford is a starter, anything other than the 09-10 season is used, and DR J becomes the SF for the team . . . well then pay attention to my picks poppapomp because you are getting WIlt next season! Garfield Heard and Joe Johnson. Heard has one season of over 45 EFG% and has over 31 CREB% in that same season so I suppose he's the back up PF. Johnson is considered too weak overall to take in this league many times. He will score some points here and does shoot over 47% from three which is very impressive. 19% usage which seems to be a good fit. Extremely low negative numbers per 48 MPG. But Johnson rarely shoots FTs so in this league he will shoot even less than normal. Sorry poppapomp but this is just a bad team. There's enough scoring and rebounding to possibly get up to 20 wins.
23) eleibowitz ------- Shawn Marion. Has 2 wonderful seasons for this league. EFG%, rebounding and defensive are all really good. Low tunovers and fouls too. Nice work. Jason Kidd. Pure genius here only if there are some good high usage players available in rounds 3 through 5 and there should be. Two of the A + rated role players are now on the same team. Carlos Boozer. A very good pick. Great usage, 41 CREB%, over 56 EFG% and about 10% assists. Can only play a little bit more than 31 MPG and is a poor defender. I like another underrated PF/C better. Kidd's and Marion's help on the boards for over 35 MPG each really helps. Mix in the right SG along with a big man that can defend and here's another contender. Manu Ginobli. The best possible pick here without a doubt. A+ grade. Great scoring, very EFG%, makes 3's, plays defense, and adds more assists. This team is very close to becoming the favorite to win the title. But 2 more outstanding picks are needed becuase Ginobli and Boozer both play less than 32 MPG. Arvydas Sabonis. This may be a great pick if eleibowitz is thinking what I am thinking. I only like one season for this player. If the plan is to use that season and then to get some complimentary players; one up front and one for Manu than i am all for this plan. Sabonis has very high EFG%, solid rebounding, good assists, okay defense, makes some 3's all at over 25% usage. The all important 6th round will seal this teams fate. But I'm liking it so far. Gheorghe Muresan and Stephen Curry. I didn't see these picks coming but like them both. Muresan is underrated. He rebounds well enough, shoots around 58% from the field, plays over 60 defense and is perfectly paired with Sabonis. Curry is an excellent choice to back up Manu and then fill in for Kidd. The inside game is very strong scoring wise. The outside game and mid range game are outstanding. What are there like 700 3's made here? Inside defense is a bit weak and the really good Cs and PFs will do some damage. This is a strong contender to win the title. The combined EFG% are almost unheard of in this league and with so much positional balance and balanced usage.
24) sixernuggets --- Bill Russell @ 24 Dirk Nowitzki @ 25. I sort of like this combo and sort of hate it. These two make a fairly strong front court but my gut feeling is that they would be crushing the opponents in the ODL but not in this league. Very low negative numbers and very good defensive rebounding. I liked other players better that were available. Another big man instead of Russell and then taking Jason Kidd intstead of Dirk would have made this an A+ grade. I'll give it a C+. Brent Barry. I like the pick but a bit more usage would have helped. Fantastic EFG% with a ton of 3's, good assists, and good rebounding at the SG position with this pick.This is a very low fouling and low turnover team so far. Connie Hawkins. A good pick at SF. Decent rebounding. Tons of FTA's for Hawkins which will be a big help. But the EFG% of the top two usage players is probably going to be 52% or less which isn't good. I liked another SF alot better because of Hawkins fairly mediocre EFG% and very low 3's. These 2 combined are a B grade. It may have been better to take a PG with the Hawkins pick, and then go for a better rebounder at that position later. Offensive rebounding is becoming a big priority. But the very low fouls and low turnovers will win some extra games. Tim Hardaway, Adrian Dantley. Jamaal Tinsley. Hardaway an Tinsley take care of the PG spot. Good picks there. Lots of assists and some good 3's. The EFG% between these 2 isn't the best. Dantley adds offense does he back up both Hawkins and Barry? Dantley won't help on the boards or with defense or with 3's. Overall poor EFG% + Poor OREB%= about 35 wins at best. | <urn:uuid:06ac659a-ac1e-4b47-a94a-b60125274e3f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?topicID=462099&page=1&TopicsTimeframe=30 | 2013-05-20T22:31:29Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968877 | 11,819 |
Individual differences |
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The Buteyko Method, or Buteyko Breathing Technique is a holistic health philosophy, primarily for the treatment of asthma, that includes a set of breathing exercises developed by the late Russian doctor, Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko (Russian: Бутейко). The method is taught as a complementary therapy and several small clinical trials have shown that it can safely reduce asthma symptoms and the need for reliever medication in some people, as well as increasing quality of life scores. However, improvement takes time and commitment, requiring daily exercises over a period of weeks or months and tuition can be expensive.
At the core of the Buteyko method is a series of breathing exercises that focus on nasal-breathing, breath-holding and relaxation. At present it is used to treat asthma, sleep apnea, snoring, anxiety attacks and panic attacks. These conditions are associated with disrupted or irregular breathing patterns and the Buteyko exercises aim to 'retrain' breathing to restore a natural pattern, akin to certain forms of Yoga.
Despite evidence that Buteyko can be an effective treatment for asthma, it is still subject to skepticism from the medical community. This is mainly due to the lack of a controlled large-scale trial of the method and no explanation for why the Buteyko exercises work. Professor Buteyko's own proposed physiological mechanism, the "CO2 theory", is popular amongst teachers of the technique, but has more opposing than supporting scientific evidence. The general view of the medical community is that the Buteyko method is at least unlikely to do any harm.
Professor Buteyko was born on 27th January 1923 in Ivanitsa, near Kiev. After a brief stint in the Russian armed forces he decided to follow a career in medicine and enrolled as a medical student in Moscow in 1946. During his medical studies he was given a project of making observations on patients’ breathing rates in relation to the severity and prognosis of their illness. He soon came to the conclusion that there was a correlation between these two factors, such that as a patient’s condition became more severe so their breathing rate increased.
After qualifying as a doctor he continued his studies on the relationship between breathing and ill-health. He reasoned that if there really was a connection between hyperventilation and illness it should be possible to reverse this by deliberate breath control. Having already made a study of several texts on yoga he was aware of exercises in breath restriction and so began to experiment both on himself and with his patients.
By the early 1980s the Russian authorities were sufficiently impressed to allow him to conduct a formal trial, or ‘approbation’, with asthmatic children in a Moscow hospital. Although very different in design from the standard controlled trial now predominant in the west, the results were sufficiently impressive to persuade the State Medical System to approve the method for widespread use. To date, it is estimated that over a hundred thousand asthmatics in Russia have been helped by Dr Buteyko’s work, and probably as many in the rest of the world as well.
In the late 1980s an Australian business man was admitted to hospital in Russia for treatment of an attack of angina. He was introduced to the Buteyko method (known in Russia as ‘Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing’ or VEDB) and found it extremely helpful. The Australian sponsored two Russian practitioners to teach the techniques in Australia. Within a short time, one of these people, Alexander Stalmatski was also training new teachers. The first blinded, controlled trial of Buteyko was carried out in 1994. Since then the Buteyko method has spread across the world and the number of people teaching this method grows every year. Professional bodies have been formed to promote safe, accurate and standardised teaching of the method.
Professor Buteyko died on May 2nd, 2003, aged 80.
It is not known exactly why Buteyko works, but there are many theories and ideas. Chronic hyperventilation may have a role, and this condition has been discussed in detail in medical literature for a long time. Central to the method is the theory that respiratory illnesses are a subset of illnesses caused by habitually breathing excessive volumes of air - what Professor Buteyko called "hidden hyperventilation". In particular, Professor Buteyko claimed that the blood of asthmatics contained too little carbon dioxide, but evidence for the role of carbon dioxide as a clinically significant bronchodilator is mixed and its role in asthma disputed.
Also proposed by Professor Buteyko, mineral deficiency and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle are elements that may be involved. Up-to-date theories, such as the balancing of nitric oxide and the production of ANP, have been proposed and studies continue.
Dysfunctional breathing was noted in up to 42% of people in a British study of people with asthma. In these instances, the breathing becomes excessive for metabolic needs and it causes a wide array of symptoms that include the typical asthma symptoms of chest tightness and increased mucus production. This type of thing is noted in most Buteyko workshops, where participants report that their short-acting bronchodilator, such as Ventolin, is not always effective. This is not because of an escalation in the condition due to a chest infection for example, but usually in a one-off situation when Ventolin normally removes the asthma symptoms. On this occasion it does not. It seems likely then that there is either a mis-diagnosis of asthma in some cases, or that the person with asthma mistakes the symptoms of hyperventilation for asthma. By using the Buteyko Method, the person with asthma and/or dysfunctional breathing is usually able to replicate the trial results that all show a huge reduction in asthma symptoms and medication.
The three core principles of Buteyko are reduced breathing, nasal breathing and relaxation.
Reduced Breathing Edit
Almost all of the Buteyko exercises involve slowing breathing rate or reducing breathing volume. The exercises are initially practiced on a regular basis, but are gradually phased out as the condition improves.
Instead of relying solely on peak-flow measurements, Buteyko uses an exercise called the 'Control Pause' (CP) to monitor the status of asthma. The Control Pause can be defined as 'The amount of time that an individual can comfortably hold their breath after a normal exhalation.' As with many physical exercises, performing the CP properly requires practice, and the measurement varies widely from person to person. With regular Buteyko reduced-breathing practice, asthmatics tend to find that their CP gradually increases, and in parallel their asthma symptoms decrease.
Nasal Breathing Edit
The Buteyko method stresses the importance of breathing through the nose, rather than the mouth. Apart from protecting the airways by humidifying, warming, cleaning and sterilizing air entering the lungs, breathing through the nose also reduces the tendency to hyperventilate.
The majority of asthmatics and those who suffer with other breathing disorders have problems sleeping at night. This is known to be linked[How to reference and link to summary or text] with poor posture or unconscious mouth-breathing at night, and there are many devices available designed to encourage nocturnal nasal breathing. By keeping the nose clear and encouraging nasal breathing during the day, night-time symptoms can also improve.
Dealing with asthma attacks is an important factor of Buteyko practice. The first feeling of an asthma attack is scary and often results in a short period of rapid breathing. By controlling this initial ‘over-breathing’ phase, asthmatics can prevent a ‘vicious circle of over-breathing’ developing and spiraling into an asthma attack. This means that asthma attacks may be averted, simply by breathing less.
Note that the method is not a substitute for medical treatment for an asthma attack and reliever medication should be kept handy at all times and used as required. Reduction of medication should be done under supervision of the doctor prescribing the medication, as some steroids and other drugs should not be ceased too quickly. This aspect of Buteyko is merely a change in lifestyle that can minimize the chance of an attack occurring and reduce the severity by remaining calm and in control of breathing.
Clinical Studies Edit
There have been several small clinical studies on Buteyko, and a common thread amongst them is to see a reduction in asthma symptoms and therefore the need for reliever medication after around 1-2 months. A reduction in steroid medication has been observed, but often takes longer. The Buteyko method has not been shown to improve lung function (or peak-flow), which is the conventional measurement of asthma - measuring the current level of constriction in the airways. However, the fact that lung function does not decrease in these trials, despite the reduction in reliever medication, is an important observation.
Some of the earlier Buteyko trials were marred by outside interference from Buteyko groups. This involved telephone 'follow-ups', which Buteyko teachers claimed were standard procedure, but such measures were not taken into account by the control group. However, subsequent trials have taken into account these issues and replicated similar results under strictly controlled conditions.
Slader et al, Thorax, 2006Edit
This is the most recent trial on something that is similar to Buteyko and confirms the findings of previous trials. This was the first trial to use an active control group, by comparing the Buteyko group with a similar, but not identical, set of breathing exercises. The results of the trial were surprising as both groups showed a significant reduction in asthma symptoms. The conclusion states: "Breathing techniques may be useful in the management of patients with mild asthma symptoms who use a reliever frequently, but there is no evidence to favour shallow breathing over non-specific upper body exercises."
The details are as follows: 57 asthmatic volunteers were randomised to one or two breathing techniques learned from instructional videos. The subjects practiced their exercises for 13 minutes, twice daily, for 12 weeks; and as needed for relief of symptoms. Group A exercises were ‘Buteyko-like’. Group B were exercises designed to avoid impact on upper body muscle strength. In both groups reliever use decreased by 86%. Quality of life measurements, lung function and airway responsiveness were unchanged after 14 weeks. The group constructed an in-house device to assess route of breathing and end-tidal CO2 levels, neither of which changed significantly over the course of the trial.
Bowler et al, Medical Journal of Australia, 1998Edit
In 1995 a randomized double blind placebo controlled study on the technique was run in Brisbane, Australia. People in the test were taught either the Buteyko method or a placebo breathing method involving standard physiotherapy relaxation and breathing, and changes in behavior noted. The results of the test showed no improvement in lung function, such as forced expiratory volume in one second or peak flow, in either the Buteyko method group or the placebo group. There was no significant difference between normal breathers and either group at any time, however there was a significant reduction in mean minute volume in the Buteyko group (relative to the placebo group). There was no significant increase in actual CO2.
However, the study detected significant changes in drug use, with the Buteyko group showing a decrease in steroid inhaler use of 49%. To quote the summary of the trial: "Those practising [the Buteyko technique] reduced hyperventilation and their use of beta2-agonists. A trend toward reduced inhaled steroid use and better quality of life was observed in these patients without objective changes in measures of airway calibre." "Quality of life" was measured by a self-administered questionnaire that asked patients about breathing, mood, social interaction and concerns for the future. As the questonnaire relied on subjective information and was not carried out by an independent source, it is possible that it was merely people's perceptions of their own health that was changed.
From the data given the reduction in beta2-agonists (e.g. Ventolin) was 96% and the reduction in steroid inhalers was 49%.
The results were also clouded because it was later learned that the Buteyko group was being telephoned by the Buteyko teacher during the trial. This was unknown to the people carrying out the trial and though it was claimed to be a normal part of the Buteyko process it was not disclosed as such. This leaves open the possibility that people were talked into having their perceptions of their illness changed, which would explain why the Buteyko group showed a change in their drug usage and in their own descriptions of their quality of life, but no changes in physically measurable areas such as airway or lung function. There has been no repeat of the trial to measure the possible influence from outside sources.
Other interesting findings from the Brisbane trial were:
- Neither the Buteyko nor the placebo group experienced a change in carbon dioxide levels after the treatment, but average minute volume for the Buteyko group was significantly lower than for the placebo group, and reduced beta2-agonist use was related to reduction in minute volume.
- Neither group experienced a difference in airway function.
- There was no significant change in the quality of life at any stage of the treatment, though there was a slight trend towards the Buteyko group measuring theirs as better in the long term. The changes in life quality were evenly spread across all areas that were measured.
- There was no significant difference in tidal volume at the end of the trial
- Those who used the Buteyko method used beta2-agonist inhalers less often.
The trial shows that the Buteyko method reduces drug usage without exacerbating the disease, however there are no physical changes to lung function beyond reducing minute volume (which may not be relevant as it is not significantly different to that of normal subjects).
The report states "BBT might also have altered subjects' perceptions of asthma severity without affecting the underlying disease. This could account for the reduction in medication use and trends toward improvements in quality of life and is consistent with the absence of any change in objective measures of airway calibre. On the other hand, the reduction in medication use in the BBT group did not lead to a decline in lung function, and rates of oral steroid use and hospital admission were similar in each group."
In 2000 another trial took place in New Zealand, the aim of which was to measure safety and effectiveness, rather than why Buteyko works. It recorded no change in forced expiratory volume. However, there was an 85% reduction in beta2-agonists and a 50% reduction in steroid use amongst people who had used the Buteyko method for six months. Participants were paired on the basis of severity of asthma. They were then randomised to either Buteyko or control group using a computer-generated list. All participants received a telephone call from their tutor one week after the final teaching session and were instructed to contact their tutor if necessary from this point on. Three contacts were made, two from Buteyko participants and one from the control group. The matched participant was contacted in each case. The term "Buteyko" was allowed in the trial, because it was considered that use of the term would not unduly bias results, and was preferable to unrealistic efforts to maintain complete blinding. The trial recorded no adverse effects from the use of Buteyko. Even though no study has indicated exactly why Buteyko is so effective at controlling asthma, if a drug could show these results, then it is likely that it would be used widely in asthma control.
Bibliography of Russian texts Edit
from the paper by Kazarinov VA
- Buteyko K.P. Oscillogtaphs and Hypertonia. Is "Enhanced" Breathing Beneficial? Izobretatell I Ratsionalizator. 1962. No.5.
- Buteyko K.P. Shurgaya Sh. I.Functional Diagnosis of Coronary Disease. Thesis from Symposium on Surgical Treatment of Coronary Disease, Moscow, 1962.
- Buteyko K.P., Demin D.V. Cross-correlational Analysis of Physiological Functions. Izv. Sib.Otd. AN SSSR. 1963, No.6. Ser.biol.med.nauk.Vypusk Issue) 2.
- Buteyko K.P., Odintsova M.P., Demin D.V. The Influence of Hyper and Hypoxaemia on the Tonus of Peripheral Vessels. Proceeding of the Second Siberia Scientific Conference of Therapists, Irkutsk, 1964.
- Buteyko K.P., Demin D.V., Odintsova M.P. The Application of Regressive Analysis for Differentiation of the Influence of Gaseous Components of the Arterial Blood on the Functional State of Fine Peripheral Arteries. Materialy Vtoroy sib. Nauchnoy Konf. Terapevtov. Irkutsk, 1964.
- Buteyko K.P., Demin D.V.,, Odintsova M.P. The Mathematical Analysis of Interreaction of Physiological tigation Factors. Physics-Mathematical Methods for Inves in Biology and Medicine. Materialy Pervoy Novosib- Conf., Novosibirsk/, 1965.
- Buteyko K.P., Demin Dove,, Odintsova M.P. The Relationship between the Ventilation of the Lungs and the Tone of Arterial Vessels in Patients with Hypertonic Disease and Stenocardia. Fiziologichni Zhurnal, 1965. Vol. II, No.5 (in Ukrrainian).
- Buteyko K.P., Demin D.V., Odintsova M.P. The Relationship between the Carbon Dioxide in Alveoles, Arterial Pressure and Cholesterol in Blood in Patients with Hypertonic Disease and Stenocardia. Materialy Tretley Sib. Nauchn. Conf. Terapevtov. irkutsk, 1965. (Proceedings of the Third Siberian Sci. Conference of Therapists).
- Buteyko K.P. The Cross-Correlational Technique of Analysis of Physiological Regulations. Materialy VII Vsesoyuzn. Conf. po Avtomat. Kontrolyu i Metodam Elektr. Izmereniy. Novosibirsk, 1965, (Proc. of the VII-Union Conference on Automatic Control and Methods for Electrical Measurements).
- Buteyko K.P. The Complex Investigations into Functional Systems in Biology and Medicine. (Reports of the Medical Electronics Section of the 9th Regional Sci.-Tech. Conference Dedicated to the Day of. Radio). Dokl. Sektsii Med. Elektroniki 9-oy Obl. Nauchn.-Tekhn. Conf. Posvyashchennoy Dnyu Radio, Novosibirsk, 1966.
- Buteyko K.P., Demin D.V., Odintsova M.P. The Relationship between the Partial Pressure in Alveolar Air and the Tone of Peripheral Arteries in Patients with Hypertonic Disease and Stenocardia. Zdravookhranenie Turkmenistana. 1966. No.2 (Public Health of Turkmenistan. 1966, No.2).
- Buteyko K.P., Demin D.V., Odintsova M.P. The Effect of Carbon Dioxide on the Coronary Efferent Arteries in Patients with Hypertonic Disease and Atherocardiosclerosis. Zdravookhranenie Kazakhranenie Kazakhstana. 1966. No. 6 (The Kazakhstan Public Health, 1966, No.6).
- Buteyko K.P., Demin D.V., Odintsova M.P. A Linear Model for Regulation of Vascular Tone by Gaseous Components of Arterial Blood. Dokl. 9-oy Obl. Nauchn.-Tekhn. Conf., Posvyashchennoy Dnyu Radio. Novosibirsk, 1966.
- Buteyko K.P. et al. The Influence of Intentional Regulation of Respiration on Some Physiological Functions at Altitude. Voprosy Aviatsionnoy Meditsiny (Problems of Aviation Medicine). Moscow, 1966.
- Buteyko K.P., Chasovskikh S.F.,, Demin D.V. An Indirect Determination of the Degree of Hypertension of Pulmonary Circulation According to the Data of Calibrated Phonocardiography. Materialy 4-oy Povolzhskoy Conf. Fiziologov, Biokhimikov i Farmakologov- Saratov, 1966. T.l. (Proceedings of the 4th Volga River Conference of Physiologists, Biochemists and Pharmacologists. Saratov, 1966, Vol.1).
- Buteyko K.P., Odintsova M.P., Demin D.V. The Influence of Hyper- and Hypoxaemia on the Tone of Arterial Vessels. Sovetskaya Meditsina. 1967. No.3 (Soviet Medicine, 1967. No3) -
- Murakhtanova Z.M., Buteyko K.P. et al. Concerning Characteristic of External Respiration in Patients with Scoliosis. Sbornik Rabot Novosib. Instituta Travmatologii i Ortopedii. Novosibirsk, 1967. (Collection of Reports of the Novosibirsk Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics. Novosibirsk, 1967).
- Buteyko K.P. et al. The Use of Correlation Methods for Investigation of Cardiovascular System. Mat. Metody v Aviatsionnoy i Kosmicheskoy Meditsine. - Moscow, 1967 (Mathematical Methods in Aviation and Cosmic Medicine).
- Buteyko K.P., Demin D.V., Odintsova M.P. The Mutual Information of Heartrhythm and Other Physiological Human Functions according to the Data of Cross-Correlative Analysis. Mat. Metody Analiza Sergechnogo Ritma. Moscow, 1968 (Mathematical Methods for Analysis of Heart Rhythm. M., 1968).
- Buteyko K.P., Odintsova M.P., Nasonkina P.S. The Ventilation Test for Patients -with Bronchial Asthma. Vrachebnoe Delo, 1968, No.4 (Medical Treatment. 1968, No.4).
- Buteyko K.P., Odintsova M.P. Hyperventilation as One of the Reasons for the Spasm of Nonstriated Musculature of the Bronchi and Arterial Vessels. Materialy 4-oy Nauchn.-Praktich. Conf. po Vrachebn- Kontrolyu i Lechebnoy Fizkulture. Sverdlovsk, 1968 (Proceedings of the 4th Scientific-Practical Conference on Medical Control and Medical Physical Culture. Sverdlovsk, 1968).
- Buteyko K.P. Complex Methods for Investigation of Cardiovascular System and Respiration. Voprosy Funktsionallnoy Diagnostiki. Novosibirsk,, 1969 (Problems of Functional Diagnostics. Novosibirsk, 1969).
- Buteyko K.P. The Theory of CO2-Deficient Diseases of Civilisation as an Adaptation to the Evolution of Atmosphere. Kiberneticheskie Aspekty Adaptatsii Sistemy "Chelovek-Sredall. Tez. Seminars. Moscow, 1975 (Cybernetic Aspects of Adaptation of the System "Man-Environment". Seminar Thesis, M., 1975).
- Buteyko K.P. Therapy of Hemohypocarbia. Patent No.1067640. Registered in the State Record of Inventions of the U.S.S.R., 15.9.1983.
- Buteyko K.P., Genina V.A. Concerning Pathogenesis of Asthma Attack during Physical Exercise. Non-medical Methods for Treatment of Patients with Bronchial Asthma. Tez. Dokl. Vsesoyuzn. Conf. Moscow, 1986 (Report Thesis from the All-Union Conference. M., 1986).
- Buteyko K.P., Genina V.A. The Comparison of Justification and Effectiveness of the Complex, Symptomatic and Monoetiological Principles of Treatment of Bronchial Asthma and Other Allergies. Ibid.
- Buteyko K.P., Genina V.A. The Theory of Discovery of Deep Respiration (Hypervention) as a Main Cause of Allergic,, Bronchial-vascular-spasmodic and Other Diseases of Civilisation. Ibid.
- Buteyko K.P., Genina V.A., Nasonkina N.S The Reactions of Sanogenesis in Medical Treatment Using the ISDR Method. Ibid.
- Putintsev E.V., Varlamova Z.A., Meshcheryakova L.R. Concerning Medical Physical Culture for-Bronchial Asthma. Sb. Materialov k Godichnoy Nauchnoy Sessii Instituta. Novokuznetsk, 1967 (Collection of Reports for Annual Sci. Session of the Institute. Novokuznetsk, 1967).
- Shelomova K.V. Intentional Normalisation of Respiration in the Complex of Medical Physical Culture for Bronchial Asthma. Proceedings of the 4th Sci. -Practical Conf. on Medical Control and Medical Physical Culture. Sverdlovsk, 1968 (as in 22).
- Panova L.A. Bronchial Asthma - a Model of Adaptation to the Changed Environmental Conditions. (As in 24.).
- Gavalov S.M., Genina V.A., Gavalova R.F. Intentional Regulation of Respiration in Complex Medical Treatment of Bronchial Asthma in Children. Saratov, 1976.
- Genina V.A., Glur-,henko I.R. The Construction of a Generalised Indicator of the Bronchial Asthma Condition. Methods for Physical Measurements of Parameters of the Ecological Systems and the Mathematical Processing of the Obtained Data. Novosibirsk, 1982.
- Genina V.A. The Role of Hyperventilation in the Pathogenesis of Bronchial Asthma and Its Medical Treatment by means of Reduction in Ventilation of the Lungs. Epidemiological Characteristics of Non-r.,pecific Diseases of the Lungs in Various Professional Groups. Novosibirsk, 1982.
- Genina V.A. et al. The Medical Treatment of Bronchial Asthma in Children Using the Method of Intentional Normalisation of Respiration (INR) according to the Data of the 1st MMI Children's Clinic. Pediatriya, 1982, No.2 (Pediatrics, 1982, No.2).
- Genina V.A. The Technique for Elimination of Chronic Hyperventilation in the Treatment of Patients with Obstructive Syndrome. Medical Treatment of Non-specific Diseases of the Lungs.
Clinical trials Edit
- Cooper S, Oborne J, Newton S, Harrison V, Thompson-Coon J, Lewis S, Tattersfield A, "Effect of two breathing exercises (Buteyko and Pranayama) in asthma: a randomized controlled trial.", Thorax, VOL 58, 2003, 674-679
- McGowan J, "Health Education: Does the Buteyko Institute Method make a difference?", Thorax, VOL 58/Sup3, December 2003, p28
- Opat AJ, Cohen MM, Bailey MJ, Abramson MJ, "A Clinical Trial of the Buteyko Breathing Technique in Asthma as Taught by Video", J. of Asthma, VOL 37(7), 2000, 557-564
- McHugh P, Aitcheson F, Duncan B, Houghton F, "Buteyko Breathing Technique for asthma: an effective intervention", The New Zealand Medical Journal, VOL 116 No 1187, Dec 2003
- McHugh P, Duncan B, Houghton F, "Buteyko breathing technique and asthma in children: a case series.", The New Zealand Medical Journal, VOL 119 No1234, May 2006
- R.L. Cowie, D.P. Conley, M.F. Underwood, P.G. Reader, "A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Buteyko Technique for Asthma Management", American Thoracic Society Abstracts online. http://www.abstracts2view.com/ats06/view.php?nu=ATS06L_1512
- Brashear R (1983). Hyperventilation syndrome.. Lung 161 (5): 257-73. PMID 6138480.
- DaCosta JM (1871). On irritable heart: a clinical study of a form of functional cardiac disorder and its consequences.. Am J Med Sci 61: 17-53.
for disussion on DaCosta's contribution, see: Jacob Mendez Da Costa Who Named It doctor/2452 and Da Costa's syndrome Who Named It synd/2882 as well as Wooley C (1982). Jacob Mendez DaCosta: medical teacher, clinician, and clinical investigator.. Am J Cardiol 50 (5): 1145-8. PMID 6753556.
- Donnelly P (Jan 19 1991). Exercise induced asthma: the protective role of CO2 during swimming.. Lancet 337 (8734): 179-80. PMID 1670821.
- Gayrard P, Orehek J, Grimaud C, CHarpin J (Apr 1975). Bronchoconstrictor effects of a deep inspiration in patients with asthma.. Am Rev Respir Dis 111 (4): 433-9. PMID 123713.
- Guyton AC, Hall JE (1996). "Chemical control of respiration" Textbook of medical physiology, 9th edition, 527-8, WB Saunders. ISBN 0-7216-5944-6.
- Hibbert G, Pilsbury D (Nov 1988). Demonstration and treatment of hyperventilation causing asthma.. Br J Psychiatry 153: 687-9. PMID 3151279.
- Jefferies M (1996). Safe uses of Cortisol, 2nd Edition, Springfield: Charles C.Thomas. ISBN 0-398-06621-3.
- Morgan W (1983). Hyperventilation syndrome: a review.. Am Ind Hyg Assoc J 44 (9): 685-9. PMID 6356858.
- Neill W, Hattenhauer M (1975). Impairment of myocardial O2 supply due to hyperventilation.. Circulation 52 (5): 854-8. PMID 1175266.
- Pfeffer J (1984). Hyperventilation and the hyperventilation syndrome.. Postgrad Med J 60 Suppl 2: 12-5. PMID 6431401.
- Pfeffer J (1978). The aetiology of the hyperventilation syndrome. A review of the literature.. Psychother Psychosom 30 (1): 47-55. PMID 358247.
- Wheatley C (1975). Hyperventilation syndrome: a frequent cause of chest pain.. Chest 68 (2): 195-9. PMID 1149547.
- ↑ McHugh P, Aitcheson F, Duncan B, Houghton F. Buteyko Breathing Technique for asthma: an effective intervention. NZ Med J. 2003;116:1187 PMID 14752538. Free full text
- ↑ Bowler SD, Green A, Mitchell CA. Buteyko breathing techniques in asthma: a blinded randomised controlled trial. Med J Aust. 1998;169(11-12):575-8. PMID 9887897. Free full text
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Bowler S, Green A, Mitchell C (Dec 7-21 1998). Buteyko breathing techniques in asthma: a blinded randomised controlled trial.. Med J Aust 169 (11-12): 575-8. PMID 9887897.
- ↑ Slader C, Redde H, Spencer L, Belousova E, Armour C, Bosnic-Anticevich S, Thien F, Jenkins C. Double blind randomised controlled trial of two different breathing techniques in the management of asthma. Thorax 2006;61:651 PMID 16517572. Free full text
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 McHugh P, Aitcheson F, Duncan B, Houghton F (2003). Buteyko Breathing Technique for asthma: an effective intervention.. N Z Med J 116 (1187): U710. PMID 14752538.
- ↑ Kazarinov VA (1990). "[The biochemical basis of KP Buteyko's theory of the diseases of deep respiration]" Ed. Buteyko KP [Buteyko Method: The experience of implementation in medical practice] (Translation from Russian), 198-218, Moscow: Patriot Press.
- http://www.buteykointernational.com Buteyko practitioner training in USA, Canada and Europe.
- http://www.buteyko.ie Buteyko Clinic of Ireland
- http://www.buteyko.co.nz Buteyko Resources New Zealand and teach yourself worldwide
- http://www.buteykobreathing.org Buteyko Breathing Association, UK
- http://www.buteyko.info Buteyko Institute of Breathing & Health (List of registered practitioners worldwide)
- http://www.buteyko-usa.com Buteyko information USA | <urn:uuid:f5890180-73fb-4415-a8e1-accaf4508327> | CC-MAIN-2015-14 | http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Buteyko_method?oldid=63523 | 2015-03-28T18:56:46Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131297689.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172137-00146-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.8956 | 7,230 |
so…back in the states for a couple of months now after my trip to europe. figured i’d wait a bit to finish my travel blog to get a genuine perspective on the “transition” back to “reality.” just hit the 32 mark of my life yesterday, and it feels pretty damn good. it wasn’t my typical trip with the bests to las vegas’ hard rock hotel, but i had a fantastic day. i’m getting settled back in with the necessities (i.e. job, apartment), not without a couple of hiccups, but nevertheless, i’m on my feet. some pretty awesome things have been happening lately. if you were with me a few months back, i talked about how i was wanting to write a cartoon. and a lot of that stems from the characters/voices that are constantly throwing parties in my head. well, i’ve made a commitment to follow that dream. i’m gaining proper training in the animation voiceover field as we speak, and a demo will soon follow, and hopefully some experience soon thereafter. once i get it all mapped out, i’m gonna be putting that cartoon together. it’s gonna take a little time, so don’t hold your breath, but keep your eyes peeled. it’s gonna be a reeeeeaaal barnburner, i tell ya.
as far as the music that brings you to my site/blog, i’m working with a couple of guitar players here in austin, trying to see who’s the best fit for now. i’ve got some really cool songs that i can’t wait for you to hear. i know i’ve said it before that the music would be ready by now, but hey, recording this stuff ain’t cheap. i’ll have it dancing in your ears as soon as i can. there’s been some recent interest by the higher-ups, but until one bites, gotta keep pluggin’ away independently.
since i’ve been back, i’ve looked at things a little differently. first of all, traveling the world is fighting for the number one spot of priorities. hopefully, music will take me to all the places i’d like to see, but i’ll get there regardless. secondly, i was planning on a move to nashville before/during my trip. something i learned on the trip is how much i’m supported and loved by the friends i have in austin, and how uprooting from that right now isn’t what i want to do. this is a great city full of great people. i’ve come to realize that most places all kinda have the same things to do, with a few things that tip the scale in either direction. but the people that surround you are really what make a place special. and i’m feeling good about staying here. for now.
32 is gonna be a great year. come along and ride on a fantastic voyage…slide, slide, slippity slide, you better be ready when the 5 rolls by.
i hit liverpool running last week. some friends from the states have come out and added some new twists to the mix, as being with other people will do after spending so much time traveling alone. first thing i do when i land is head to the hotel. immediately we’re welcomed to the liverpool life. there’s an interesting wedding reception going on, full of all the 80s wedding songs you could want. i think “never gonna give you up,” by rick astley was blaring on our way out after checking in, and the oldest guy (probably a grandpa of one of the wedding party) is standing alone catching a night smoke. he’s got a metal cigarette holder and my friend comments how cool it was as we passed. well this old guy let us know how hammered he was when he turned aggressively wanting a fight. he yelled, “what are ya, some kinda psychiatrist?” not sure what he meant by that exactly, so we kinda laughed and told him that we were just being kind. that only enraged him more. yelling obscenities at us as we walked to the car, we just knew it wouldn’t be the last of this guy. well we get the car and have to drive right past him to the exit, he’s got a cane-type thing wrapped around his arm and he’s using it assist his walking out to meet us as we pass. he jabs it in the air in our direction, still yelling at us. we get to the gate, of which we don’t have the code to exit. great. so we back up, and watch this guy as he’s literally rubbing his hands together, warming them up for us. i’m pretty sure he wanted to punch a hole right thru the car and thru our heads. we again drive past him and use the back entrance to avoid having to deal with this guy. we get the code and head back towards the gate. he’s still out there yelling and taunting, letting us know what would happen to us if we were to come at him. his family, obviously having seen this before, escorts him inside and we finally get out of the complex. we get out to a pub in a small town outside the city. again with the 80′s wedding songs. they love this stuff. not far from what i had expected of the culture here. hello, liverpool!!!
the intent of staying in liverpool was to see their football (soccer) game the next day vs tottenham. it was a huge game as the season-end neared, so getting tickets was impossible…a very cool environment in the city though. anyway, we chose a less popular game to go to…wigan vs. west ham. my friend and i knew a little, at most, about these teams, but seeing an english premiere league game was on both of our bucket lists, so we headed towards the wigan stadium. stood in the rain for about 20 minutes trying to scalp some tickets out in front of the stadium. finally a really cool guy hooked us up with seats next to him on the west ham (visitor) side. which actually turned out to be the best side to sit. west ham fans are nuts. they came four to five hours north from london to stand in the rain and watch their team who is the worst in the english premiere league. and not only did they come, they came in full force and gave the other fans hell. apparently that’s what all the singing and chanting is all about you hear at the games. especially from west ham. chants like, “we pay your benefits”…or…”we forgot that you were here”…or my favorite…”your support is f*ing sh@t!” they chanted all the way to the end, even though their team lost, and was eventually relegated out of the premiere league. on the way out of the stadium, as the wigan fans rushed the field, and the bobbies stood protecting the fans from altercation, we saw a wigan fan in the adjacent stands taunting the west ham fans. we picked him out of the crowd somehow and it was just so ridiculous. i mean the whole thing brings the most childish of acts out of grown men, but this guy took the cake. he was doing things like wiping his cheeks with his fists in a crying motion, making “na na na na-na naaaah” sounds, then bending over, pointing at his arse, then pointing over to the west ham fans…and his final move was to point at them and then spit on his hand. this was the cheekiest 50-something-yr old man i’d ever seen. what an experience.
rain, rain, and some more rain fell. we hung out in small town, northern england for a couple of days, then headed to scotland…glasgow to be exact. glasgow is a cool town, but we were really just there to have a nice scottish meal and head to the highlands the next day. if you ever get a chance to get to scotland, do it, it’s a beautiful country and the people are extremely friendly. we really experienced that when we got to edinburgh. couldn’t have met nicer people while we were there…whether it was when we were trying to golf in 80mph winds or checking out the haunted side of the city, everyone was very cool. edinburgh is up there on the “i could live there” list. extremely windy, and some spotty rain, but a great place.
just got to london. i’m excited to be here, rain or shine. 16 days left.
so with prague being as wonderful as it is…krakow, poland had the challenge of maintaining pace for me as i enter the last month of my trip. and it has done so, swimmingly. with funds running low, i decided to go the couch surfing route. much to my surprise and against my safe thinking, it has gone great. my couch host is the perfect first go at this. with the exception that she’s extremely busy with school, she has done everything to make me feel perfectly welcome and she is very proud of her city. she’s a polish-american over here studying and creating art, so we have similar ideas on life. hers a little more liberal than mine, but i’m not here to discuss politics…even when she has tried. anyway, i have my own room to sleep in and she is always coming back from her long days of schooling/finals with traditional polish fare. so i’m getting the culture even when i’m not out getting it on my own. can’t thank her enough for the place to stay. guess i’ll have to consider being a host sometime to “pay it forward.”
so…krakow. first day i went to some crazy salt mines, as recommended by some fellow travelers along the way. honestly, a bit underwhelming. maybe if the tour had been a little bit shorter…or maybe if i hadn’t been a cheap ass and taken the english tour instead of the polish tour. i was one of two people in a group of 30 that didn’t understand what was going on. i tried to just stay out of the way of the tour guide as we winded down towards middle-earth, in hopes of not being spoken to. the only other person that didn’t get it was a 3 yr old girl. one time when the guide made a joke and the group softly laughed, the little girl gave a big pee-wee herman “ha ha,” and i thought it was hilarious. she and i saw eye-to-eye…and we laughed together at the ridiculousness of this tour the rest of the time. her mom didn’t like that. a couple of highlights shone through. seeing as though i didn’t understand what the guide was saying, all i could do was see what was to be seen, which was a lot of sculptures made completely of salt. some not so great, some amazing…like an entire cathedral built of salt. designs of all of the jesus’es. “away in a manger” jesus, “praying” jesus, and “on the cross” jesus. a design of pope john paul the second. the altar and even the huge chandeliers were made of salt. pretty cool. on the way out of the cathedral, a polish guy looks over to me and mutters some things and i waited for some sort of out for me…and there it was, he started laughing without me saying anything…so i obliged and laughed back, followed quickly by one of those faces that looks surprised and kinda pointed with my eyes that i wanted to walk past him. i tiptoed by without him knowing. he probably saw my cowboy hat though…there’s no escaping that.
second day…a bit more difficult to take in. i made the trip over to auschwitz-birkenau. it’s kind of an emotional day for everyone that decides to make that trip. a very gripping, detailed tour of how the nazis occupied the small town of oswiecim, poland and did what they did. i really don’t need to go into detail and it’s very difficult to wrap your head around the inhumanity, especially when you’re standing on the grounds. and the effort to make what they were doing to innocents more efficient and systematic is nauseating. i recommend going if you make it over to poland, but be prepared.
now that i got all that out of the way, i have been able to see krakow for all its beauty. like prague, it has castles and a river and beautiful churches. but the one thing it has is probably the greatest market town center in the world. this square is HUGE! people everywhere! i love. gonna spend the rest of my time enjoying the wonderful weather and the scenery. eastern europe…amazing. can’t wait to come back.
can’t say enough great things about this gem in the czech republic. it was the first time on this trip i had taken a walking tour, and i’m glad i did. there’s a ton of history in this medieval, gothic, and post war-themed wonderland. a river divides the city in half, and the charles bridge that connects both sides has been around since 1357. and the fact it’s still there and i got to cross it was pretty damn sweet. anyway, i won’t get too history-involved here, but the czechs have a lot to be proud of…they’re good people.
starting with the bartender at the first bar regan and i went to. not far from our americanized hostel, we strolled down the street, thru a scary alleyway and found this seedy little basement bar where everyone was smoking, a lot. and the bartender, well this big guy was awesome. we sorta got his name as it fell out of his mouth. just as we sorta understood anything he said. he was pretty sloshed and we were looking to get a taste of the local flavor, so that’s what he offered us. we had several bohemian beers (which rival german beer for sure) and then between one of the several high-fives and handshakes (i think he was enjoying our american company), he reached up to the top shelf and pulled down a beautiful bottle of absinthe. it didn’t look like the typical, over-commercialized bottle, and come to find out it wasn’t. it was from a distillery of a good friend of his who had been making the poison for about 10 years now. it was a little known premium brand and it was actually a bit better than most, not that absinthe is ever good. anyhow, we pretended to understand anything the guy said til it was time to go. smiled, high-fived, and headed out. every night was a great drinking experience…and we capped it off with a stop off back here at our favorite prague bar. we just had to. received applause from the locals as we drunkenly sang michael jackson’s “man in the mirror” with some ohioans alongside some absinthe and gambrinus beer…god bless.
ate some local czech foods…like broiled beef in some sort of sweet brown gravy, served with bread and carlsberg dumplings, then topped off with whipped cream and cranberries. what!? it was pretty damn good too. for as unhealthy as the food is over here in europe, they don’t seem to have the overweight issue that we have in the states. but i think i’m gonna look like chet at the end of “weird science” when i get back. it’ll be worth it. every damn bite.
regan’s gone now…it was good seeing this part of europe with ya man. see ya back in the states.
i’m off to poland.
after leaving amsterdam, my friend regan and i headed to berlin. we stayed in a really cool apartment just north of the city center. with only a couple of days there, we weren’t able to really grasp all that berlin has to offer. which is kind of a shame, cause berlin is a pretty happenin’ city. it’s THE big city in germany that has all the things characteristic of big cities. and a little more. for the sightseeing stuff, we saw everything from the place where hitler was inaugurated into power to the place where the berlin wall used to stand. unfortunately there was a small war a few years back that pretty much destroyed all things historical in this city, so it’s a lot of “this is where such-and-such” used to be. but there are some wonderful parks and monuments throughout the metroplex. one of the most interesting points-of-interest is the holocaust memorial. check it out if you ever make it to berlin.
aside from the sightseeing, the nightlife was quite interesting. not being the clubbing types, regan and i elected to see more of the eclectic underbelly of berlin’s social scene. we made it to a dive bar called ‘white trash,’ a seedy, smoke-tank called ’8mm’ where they were playing “a clockwork orange” with english subtitles, and the most ridiculous of places being ‘mr.pong.’ ‘mr.pong’ didn’t have a sign out front. ‘mr.pong’ had clear-ish trash bags covering all of the windows. ‘mr.pong’ had a dj and a bar inside that i’m pretty sure is run by the residents that live in or above ‘mr.pong.’ ‘mr.pong’ most importantly had a ping pong table. it’s THE reason anybody was there and everyone was playing. about fifteen people, ranging from maybe 18 yrs old to maybe 50. that one dude was def at least 50. the dude who was sort of standing, leaning against the wall, swaying back and forth, in all black. the german dude in the corner. black stocking cap, black jacket, black shirt, black das boots. only thing of color was his blond hair and his red, bloodshot eyes. he’d stumble over to the game ever so often. the game started when all the people got a paddle in their hand and ran in circles around the table…each person getting one chance to keep the ball alive across the net. once you miss the table or put it in the net, you’re out. the german dude never made it past the first shot. regan and i barely ever made it past the second shot. there were a lot of professional pongers in the room. wasn’t fair really. germany, you win this time. combine this and throwing down some authentic german sausage, sauerkraut, potatoes, schnitzel, pork knuckle, and a lot of filling dark beer, i think we did the best we could with the time we had in berlin.
off to prague.
i spent all of last week in palermo, sicily. what a relaxing relief from the chaos that is rome. if you get a chance to make it to southern italy/sicily region, disregard the talks of it being dirty and unwelcoming. yes, there is a lot of trash in the street for some reason, but i found it to be a lot better than rome. especially at the beach. it’s a semi-mountainous area, so you can imagine how the calm bay gave way to the soft, tan sand with rock cliffs in your panoramic view. it really is a beautiful place.
i was taken in by another family on this trip. friends i had made while i was in venice. with a pretty strong language barrier, communication was limited…but true warmth and affection doesn’t require words. they prepared home-cooked pasta, insisted i drink their wine, and made me feel very welcome in their home. they even cleaned my laundry. what an amazing family. i hope to return the favor some day.
i pretty much saw the entire city by foot, even another catacombes. i think i’m done with seeing the dead. interesting, but this one was even more than just bones. it was their whole bodies preserved in their clothing. yeah, i’m def done with that. i also witnessed a store robbery. three teenagers were standing around conspicuously late at night in front of a store. i rounded the corner to grab some food and quickly came back around the corner. two of the kids were yelling under the throw-up, store-front door at their friend inside. lots of banging around going on, and then the kid inside comes running out with the entire cash register in his arms. leaving only a long trail of receipt paper behind them, they tore off down the street. i figured this battle was one better left to the police, as i’m not a superhero and there probably wasn’t much money left in the register anyway…not enough for me to get “dealt with” over. i mean, maybe they were just kids having fun, but, in my fantasy mind, they were probably in the low ranks of the italian mafia earning their merits. i will not be sleeping with the fishes in sicily.
on my last night, i enjoyed some incredible seafood near the bay. oysters, sea urchin (they are cut in half while still alive, and these spiky creatures are still wiggling their spikes as you soak up their insides with bread), and my favorite, zuppa di cozze (mussels). a little white wine to boot, and i was feeling real nice as i prepared mentally for the next stop…amsterdam.
queen’s day: the most amazing party i have ever experienced. about 1.5 million people flood the streets of amsterdam. every street corner or river canal bridge has a dj or a live band. “coffee” shops everywhere. some people just chilling and doing their thing, but mostly everyone was up and about, laughing, dancing, and moving from one incredible party to the next. the girls in the red light district, surprisingly quite attractive, seemed to be in good spirits as i’m sure they bring in a ton of money during this event. ugh. i guess ya do what ya best at.
met some cool people there. argentinians, new zealanders, canadians, australians, netherlanders, brits…it was a melting pot for sure. and nothing seemed out of place, including the one guy on his bicycle yelling out random dutch phrases and yodeling a fierce tune, leaving an ‘s’-shaped gap in the group of people he rode through. i will miss this place. everyone is exactly who they are and when the city isn’t in full-on party mode, it’s a place to be marveled. can’t wait to go back.
what day is it?
it’s been a bit since my last post. it’s been quite hectic since i left florence. the fellow texan, jake, i met in venice and florence went with me to rome. we were gonna stay a couple of nights and part ways. it didn’t really turn out that way. rome is a different kind of animal.
what to say about rome? well i didn’t expect to be there as long as i was. 5 nights. it was the most confusing leg of the trip so far. jake and i started out in different hostels and we hit the first night pretty hard, meeting a group of austrian gals, some german gals, and a ton of american folk (started at the abbey theatre irish pub, then hit the streets and other bars in the campo dei fiori area). we ended the night at around 6am with plans of meeting at 11am for a walking tour of rome. well, since we were at diff hostels, this idea was ludicrous and surely enough we showed up at diff times to the meeting point and left with no way to contact each other. so i head to the colloseum. wow. this place is pretty amazing. and to imagine what it must have been like to gather and see people die here. i snap some shots and move on. now been wandering aimlessly thru the ridiculous crowds of people (for those wanting to see rome during easter week, be aware of this) for about 4 hours now. not sure how i’m gonna meet up with my texas pal at this point in this huge city, i drag my tired, hungover feet to the metro and head back to the main station. as i climb the last stairs from the metro, i hear a loud aussie gal chatting with an english speaking kid, and i turn to look. and, wouldn’t ya know, jake. what are the chances? ah right…pretty good. i guess texans think alike. with all of the stops and turns and ups and downs and hours in between, ridiculous we ran into each other again. the aussie (tara), jake and i are now together to experience the next four nights.
since everyone we met along the way likes to stay up late, the day times became less touristy you could say…so i’ll just summarize what i can remember:
moved to a campsite close to the beach (not close to the city, difficult to get to at night)
moved to another campsite and slept in a tent
slept in a boat on land
met kevin and his wonderful canadian family
never made it to bed earlier than 5 in the morning because i was lost every night
saw a lot of rome with no camera (charger is in germany)
asked for directions from two very sketchy dudes…thought i was gonna die…ugh, especially the one guy
spent too much money
laid out on the beach
walked 5 miles in the wrong direction, following the wrong signs
met a really chill chick from washington state
saw the vatican on easter sunday
stayed in a different place every night (don’t recommend this, makes the whole lost thing happen)
got bit by a bed bug. bit the bed bug back.
danced. sang karaoke. danced.
played beer pong and lost
went to a seedy after hours bar
missed my flight. slept in airport.
and now i’m in palermo, sicily. resting. it’s beautiful, even in the misty haze thats blanketing the city as i type. a wonderful sicilian i met in venice is taking good care of me here til friday. then it’s off to amsterdam for queen’s day to meet the good ol’ regan kline, a friend of mine from texas. i’m tired just thinking about how next week is gonna be.
so i’ve been in italy for about a week now. internet has kinda been spotty so i’ll just kinda recap what i can remember:
getting here was interesting. it was my first experience with a night train. from munich, i sat by myself in a four-person closed cabin with a see-thru glass door. you know in demon-based horror films, when the main character starts to realize everything’s gone awry…and everyone he/she sees just has an off look to them. like their head’ll be upside-down or their legs are twisted backwards as they scurry by. well that’s kinda what it was like. the shrill scream of the wheels and the lights punching in and out as another possessed traveler passed by my door were tell signs i was the main character in this movie. i also had the italian police startle me awake a couple of times to check my passport and search my bags. def like being in a movie. but i like horror films, so i was at home. i also had another great book to distract my mind: “let the great world spin,” by colum mccan. i highly recommend this one as it only needed my attention for three days to be complete. 3 books down in a little over a month. i may have found a new addiction.
i woke up as we rolled into venice in the very early morning. from the train, you could see snow-capped mountains off in the distance and sprawling villages in the nearby. stunning.
i had written down about a thousand rights and lefts with street names to get me to my hostel. however, only about every third street was marked, so to hell with the notes. venice is a neat little spot with it’s exceptionally tasty pastas and pizzas and its winding roads that often lead you to a dead end. in some places the streets are only a little more than shoulder-width and it seems as if though the opposing walls get even closer, trying to hug towards the top. cool and all, but not at night when you have no idea where you are and only speak english. the best i could do was ask very slowly in my chinese english accent how to get back. all but slept in the street one night. met a girl who got so frustrated with the dead ends that she swam across one of the canals, which i’m sure was a wonderful treat. the water in the canals looks like it’s filled with absynthe and cigarettes. in my hostel, i saw a texas rangers hat on a bed across the room. another texan, sweet. what are the chances? oh right, pretty good. we drank a bit, met some locals, took some shots of makers mark and the cowboy hats were on. a good last night in venice. in short, it’s a great place for a romantic getaway, on which i am not. note taken.
a couple days in venice and then i set off for the cinque terre. it’s a lesser known tourist spot in the northwest corner of italy, along the coast. colorful houses built in the side of cliffs and the ocean here is clean, crisp and magnificent. another place for lovers. after i did what sight-seeing there is to do, i just made my way to the beach. spent about 3 hours there my last day without a cloud in the sky. in my new skin, i jumped on a train to pisa. snapped a few photos of the leaning thing. hopped back on a train, and now i’m in florence. florence seems pretty cool. a lot of americans here. including the texan from venice. what are the chances we’d be in the same hostel? oh right, pretty good. we went drinking again last night. it seemed a bit weird to be in italy watching the NHL playoffs and listening to a bunch of early 20-something american girls screaming “don’t stop believin’.” standing outside chatting in a circle with some girls from new england, we met this guy, “steven.” a portly english kid who was flat hammered. he was from “lundgren” or london, and as he swayed back and forth, he insisted on attempting to speak in italian, regardless of how many times we told him we spoke english. wasn’t much this guy claims he hasn’t done. and his excitement literally spewed from this mouth. every new idea he had started with a fresh spray of spit flying in our direction. i’m pretty sure the last idea i could stand was in slow motion. everyone seemed to be watching in amazement as this spitwad tumbled end over end in my direction. voices and noise slowed to a hum and like i was in a dream, i just couldn’t move fast enough to dodge it. it took final resting place in my beard just below my bottom lip with such force that it knocked me back. all i could say was, “wow man, that was a lot.” and it was. but i couldn’t be mad at the fella. he was too happy.
but it got me wondering about if you could see your body as a tiny dot from above. if you could see from your original birth day a red line that connected the dot for your every move. there’d be way more little short lines, as you go about your day-to-day back-and-forths, and then the occasional long line for when you go on a trip. and if you could hit fast forward and watch yourself like speedy gonzalez bouncing around your little world. then take “steven,” and you can see his little blue line connecting the dots in his life. he’s gotta lot of long lines considering he’s “done almost everything.” who knows how many times our lines have crossed over each other without a dot. but not this time. this time there’s a dot. this time the dot got covered in spit.
my last night in munster was great…but in a different way. there was still partying going down, but it was more like a party you would go to if you were german and you lived there. it was a birthday party…again, but this time for a woman that is friends with my munster host family. she turned 50 and there were about 150 ppl from the town there celebrating. from old to young, everyone was having a jolly time. the party was catered with a potluck of food and beverages from the guests, so i really got a taste of all kinds of german delicacies.
not many overly exciting stories to tell about this night, however, it was a really great opportunity to see how the german community operates. and i love it. i feel at home here. and that’s because everyone is so damn nice and give forth their best effort to speak english when they obviously don’t have to. they actually enjoy it because as one said, “we don’t get the opportunity to use english very often, so it’s nice.” the only people i met that didn’t really speak english were the people that gave me a ride back to my host house. we didn’t ever exchange names, but when they found out i was from texas, they coined me “whiskey.” what! BTW, i wasn’t even drinking whiskey and whiskey is a kentucky thing, not texas. maybe i just look like i love whiskey. which i do. =) they were in their 50s, jammin’ “blue (da ba dee)” by eiffel 65. thanks for the ride.
so free food, free booze, free place to stay with a wonderful family with my own guest room. added to my autobahn blog, this was a weekend i’ll never forget. and i can’t wait to come back…i now have a soft place in my heart for germany.
danica patrick (julia from autobahn blog) beat her first time from the trip up…and now i’m back in ramstein…planning my next move. italy…see you in 48hrs.
…it’s not just one stretch of road like i previously thought. it’s the system of freeways here in germany. and i got a full taste of what it’s actually like yesterday.
i had plans to go to munster this weekend. and not like the cheese. they actually haven’t ever heard of it here. maybe they just call it “cheese” or “käse”, like the chinese call their infamous interrogation method, just “water torture” or “水刑.” i made some german friends while staying in barcelona that live in munster, so i figured i’d take a break from taking a break and go see their hometown.
well, the train ride is extremely expensive for some reason, so i was looking for other options. one of my german friends suggested a website where people offer rides from wherever they are to wherever they’re going…like a carpool situation, where all i have to pay is a bit for fuel. i’m a bit skeptical of this, but whatever, when in rome. so i let anja set the whole ride up cause i don’t speak german.
11am: sarah (house host) drives me up to mannheim (about an hour away) to meet “niklas.” we pull into town just in time to meet this guy at the main train station. so yeah, here we are on the freeway, and there’s the train station, and we have no clue where to exit or how to get over to it. i call “niklas,” we are both extremely frustrated at the communication barrier, and he decides that this american is not worth his time. he leaves.
1230pm: sarah and i finally make it over to the elusive, yet extremely large, visible, and stationary train station. we have now driven for an hour and a half, to be left in the cold by some impatient german weirdo (to be nice). it’s not cold though…actually the weather here is quite perfect. i recommend this time of year for anyone wanting to see germany.
1245pm: anja rings and says it will be a long shot but she will try the website again. i contemplate the expensive train ride since we have driven here already, when anja calls excitedly to tell me there’s another person leaving from the exact same spot in like 30 minutes. (22 euro). score.
130pm: the white golf i’m supposed to meet out in front of the station pulls up. a seemingly nice girl hops out and opens the hatch for my bag. we shake hands and set off. julia and i make small talk in broken english. i feel like an ass by now for not at least trying to learn some german before spending an extensive amount of time here. but she speaks well enough english to make it work. and when she can’t come up with the right word, she just throws her hands up and says, “whatever, who cares?” winding thru the populated city of mannheim, i learn she does this trip all the time with strangers. she goes up on the weekends to meet her boyfriend (which she makes clear a few times, i got the hint), and she said this is the first weekend since september that she wasn’t going to have someone riding with her. until anja called 30 minutes before she was gonna leave. amazing timing…at least i didn’t have to make this trip with some stuffy weirdo (to be nice). i also find out that we both have the exact same degree from college, a bachelors in corporate communication. i didn’t think anybody else even knew what that meant, i sure as hell don’t. anyway, the small talk slowly diminishes, and now it’s driving time…we’re approaching the freeway. she flips her designer sunglasses from the top of her blonde head down over her eyes, kinda smiles in my direction (the kinda smile foreigners give each other because they don’t know what else to do), and there’s a small, sparkling stone (kinda diamond-ish) adorning her right lateral incisor (just looked that up). i swear the prism from the sun hitting the stone illuminated the car for the split second that she downshifted, floored the pedal, and cranked up the volume to kesha’s “take it off.” i’m def in germany.
(this trip is supposed to be a little under 4 hours, barring any traffic. not for julia)
2pm: we hit the autobahn full speed. this little golf has some get-ups. we’re going like 190km/hour, or like 120mph. i’m nervously laughing on the inside as we take this winding freeway up to munster. i bury my nose into my latest book (“bicycle diaries,” by david byrne…the lead singer of the talking heads chronicles his journey thru several major cities across the globe from the cyclist’s POV).
230pm: julia hits the brakes, 120mph to 0mph in like 2 seconds. i guess this is just how it’s gonna go. so i nervously continue to pretend to read at a pace of about one page every 5 minutes.
515pm: we pull into munster. a little over 3 hours it took to get here. and about an hour of that was snail-paced traffic. unreal. i peel my skin off of the seat, pat my hair down forward with my hand, snap a photo with danica patrick, and i’ve made it to munster in one piece. she’s taking me back on sunday, when there will be no traffic. sweet.
we end up going to a birthday party by way of bicycles. everyone does that here in munster. it’s pretty awesome, as this quaint, well-manicured town is beautiful and the weather is perfect. a little cautious going in, as i just knew i’d be the only american there at what is usually kind of a private event. i couldn’t have felt more welcome though. vodka and “magic man” (like red bull) was my drink of choice. german techno coursing thru my alcohol-infused veins and everyone being friendly…i’m feeling real nice. the birthday girl steals me from a circle of girls interested in my travels to take me to the living room where i’m introduced to “gluff-gluff.” a german drinking game that all of the guys at this party are determined i take with me to teach everyone “across the world.” or i think they would be happy if i just got some fellow texans interested. drink, drank, drunk and we leave this party at about 2am. i think we’re going home, but nope, it’s clubbin’ time. jesus europe, calm down. bike home and sleep.
and now i feel as if though i had a day just like that. | <urn:uuid:2c873533-a2c4-4f6d-b944-7ebe74f5bd63> | CC-MAIN-2015-14 | http://ewilsonmusic.com/blog/ | 2015-03-28T23:47:01Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131298015.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172138-00270-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975477 | 9,231 |
General Disclaimer: The characters in this story may bear some resemblance to characters owned by MCA/Universal and Renaissance Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit gained by this.
This story contains references to women loving each other in an intimate way. If this offends, or legally you shouldnt be reading it, please move on.
Comments welcome: Id love to know what you think.....
The noise was deafening; the clanking and grinding of the brakes and carriages, the muffled echoing tannoy, the laughter, shouting and chatter of all the people who jostled around - her head swam with it as it assaulted her ears and crashed into her skull, but she didnt care. She liked the hustle and bustle around her - it felt real, made her feel real. Caught up even momentarily in other peoples lives - watching as people said goodbye, bought their newspapers, giggled and gossiped over cups of foul station coffee - she felt like she was finally living instead of putting life on hold the way she had for the past three months. Unconsciously - and she couldnt have helped herself even if shed tried - she grinned hugely as the excitement that had been growing inside her all day ripened and threatened to burst out.
Standing on the station platform, Charlie watched the lovers kiss, the husbands wave and the girlfriends cry. Still grinning, she sponged up all the emotion that pulsed around her, and stored it away for when her moment came. Which - she checked her watch - should be any minute now. Ten past four. She ran her fingers through coal black hair impatiently and peered up the platform, praying all the while.
"Cmon....cmon......its ten past....where are you honey?"
There was a shrieking whistle, and the express train slowly chugged alongside the platform and ground to a clanking halt a few yards away. Doors shot open and the narrow platform was immediately filled with bodies jumping off the train, throwing suitcases to the ground and waving to their loved ones who waited, like Charlie, anxiously on the platform. Using her considerable height advantage, she strained over the crowd of people milling around, trying to spot a familiar golden head in the crowd. Her heart thumped with excitement as she checked the platform. Still no sign of her though, and as the crowd started to dissipate she walked quickly to the train, her way clearing as the crowds of people moved into the station concourse and spilled out onto the street.
"Where are you, Emily? You shouldve been on this train.....dont tell me you missed it!" Excitement quickly turned to disappointment, and then uncertainty. "Maybe shes decided to stay on longer.....maybe shes having too a good time with them....she doesnt want to come back yet. Maybe Im not..." She dampened down the thought before it could take form in her mind, not wanting to let the black insidious whispering fill her thoughts. "Where are you honey?"
There was a "thunk" at the far end of the platform, and a slim figure stumbled out of the carriage and half fell onto the platform. Charlie immediately bolted towards the disturbance as the whistle blew and the train slowly began to pull away. The figure staggered to its feet, turned and spotted the tall woman bearing down on her; she hurled herself into outstretched arms. "Charlie!" She held onto Charlies neck like a drowning man seizes a lifebelt. "Oh ..... thank god youre here!"
"Emily! I missed you too, honey!" Charlie whirled the smaller woman around and then tried to hold her at arms length, but she wriggled loose, buried her face in Charlies chest and let out a ragged, slightly weepy sound. "Are you alright? Has anything happened?"
"No." Two thin arms shifted their grip and wrapped themselves tighter round Charlies waist. "I just missed you so much." Came the wavering reply.
"Well I missed you too, but Im not crying my eyes out!" chuckled the taller woman, and dropped a small kiss on the top of the blonde head; she was rewarded with a brief, watery smile.
"You never cry." She sniffled into a grubby handkerchief that was pulled out of her jeans pocket. "The day I see you cry, well......" Her face crumpled as she fought to hold back the tears that threatened to spill out.
"Hey, whats wrong?"
"Nothing, really. Im just so happy to be here with you. I missed you so much."
"That bastard Davies hasnt been upsetting you again has he? I dont know why you just dont tell him to stick his bloody job - its just not worth it! The pays crap, your boss is a major loser with an attitude problem and ......and it takes you away too many times. Three months is a long time to be apart."
"Hey, were together now and thats all that matters. Lets put your bag in the car and get you home." She swung the heavy holdall onto her shoulder, and steered the younger woman through the station and out into the car park. Once the bag was stashed and Emily settled and belted in, Charlie started the engine then spared a quick glance at the blonde sitting next to her; she was absently twisting the handkerchief round her fingers whilst staring fixedly at Charlie. Turning awkwardly in her seat, Charlie ran her hand through soft golden hair and twisted the thick strands round her fingers, savouring the silky feel as it brushed across her skin.
"Im glad youre home, Emily." Emily smiled back at her, and Charlie could feel her heart swelling as she stared into her partners eyes. Laying her hand against a smooth cheek, she leant in and lightly kissed her, closing her eyes to savour the warm, moist lips under hers and letting the touch and scent of her lover fill her senses and soak into her being, filling the gaping emptiness that had returned so emphatically over the last three months. She pulled back reluctantly when she felt the lips underneath hers part slightly, and sighed deeply. "Welcome back, beautiful. God, I missed you. We have got to see about getting you a new job!"
Emily just smiled, leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. She was silent for the journey home, and uncharacteristically still. Usually she would be chattering about anything that took her fancy - trading bits of gossip about the people she worked with, criticising Charlies driving - anything, all accompanied by restless movements, twisting and turning in her seat until Charlie would sometimes have to yell at her to be still and stop putting her off. Today - nothing. Charlie stole anxious sideways glances at her all through the short journey home.
"Hey!" She noticed a cut on Emilys head which appeared to be trickling a little blood. "How did you get that?"
"Get what?" Emilys vibrant green eyes opened slowly and focussed on Charlie.
"That cut on your head."
"Oh. I hit my head when I fell over trying to get out of the train."
"You hit your head? I dont remember you hitting your head."
"I think I knocked it on the door as I was getting out - thats why I fell."
"Its bleeding a little - Ill take a look at it when we get home. Is your head aching too?" The womans normally rosy cheeks were deathly pale and her lips were drawn. Emily dabbed at the cut at her temple with the handkerchief; dots of red bloomed on the white cloth and spread on the fabric, making it look like it was patterned with little poppies.
"Yeah, a little."
Charlie sighed deeply as she watched her slide down the seat and rub eyes which were already red from unshed tears. She brushed back blonde bangs and felt her forehead. No temperature - if anything, she was a little too cool. Better keep an eye on her tonight. Shes definitely not herself. "Nearly there, love." She stroked the womans brow and noticed how it seemed to calm her down - her breathing slowed and her eyes fluttered shut again. Her hand was captured, joined with Emilys and brought to rest on the younger womans lap where it was squeezed tightly for the remainder of the ride home.
"So howd it go?" Trying to break the uncomfortable silence that blanketed them, Charlie relied on Emilys customary love of her job to break her out of her seeming preoccupation.
"How did what go?" The uncharacteristically short reply worried Charlie further.
"Whatever youve been doing for the past three months." Nervously, she turned a brittle smile in Emilys direction.
"You know how its gone. Weve spoken almost every day. Please watch the road!"
"Sorry. Just trying to make conversation."
Seeing the hurt in her normally untalkative partners eyes, and knowing how much Charlie hated to chatter when driving, Emily immediately felt guilty and stroked the hand clasped tightly in hers. "Im sorry, baby. I shouldnt have snapped at you - Im a little tired after the journey. And my head really does hurt."
"You dont look well at all, and you dont seem yourself. Sure theres nothing you want to tell me?" She rubbed the toned thigh underneath her imprisoned hand vigorously, trying to will some life into her normally vivacious partner.
"No, really. Please dont worry so much. Davies has been as much of a pig as ever. The hotel we stayed in really was as bad as I told you it was - I still have the bites to prove it - and Davies tried it on again with me, like I told you but he wont be doing that in a hurry; I threatened to tell his wife. And then the proposal we put to the board, the whole campaign Id been working on for the past three months, was trashed because some bloody idiot in Davies department couldnt be bothered to do the research properly. So I looked like a complete fool."
"Aw, honey Im so sorry....."
"Dont be. Ive learned that there are more important things in life than that. Like you. Youre the most important thing in my life, and dont you ever forget that, Charlotte Fisher. I cant believe I wasted so much time - all the times weve been apart over the last year. I wish we couldve spent more time together."
"We have our whole future together. All we need to do is get you a job closer to home where you dont have to travel round half the known world, and definitely one where you wont be working for slimy bastards with a very short life expectancy. If I ever get my hands on him......."
"Youd give him one of your best filthy looks, probably growl at him or something and generally intimidate him as only you can." Emily chuckled to herself and Charlies face lit up at the sound. It was the first laughter shed heard from the usually boisterous and giggling blonde since shed fallen out of the train. Lets see if I can get a proper laugh.....
"What are you saying?" She turned one of her best mock filthy looks onto Emily, who chuckled again.
"Dont even try it with me. Im impervious to your glaring. I have the best protection against it."
"And whats that?"
Charlie laughed loudly, a rich deep sound which filled the car and wrapped itself warmly around the small woman in the seat next to her. "Youll always have my love, Emily. But you cant blame me for at least trying out my new glares on you!"
"Oh, was that a new one? Which one was that then? Squirrel caught in car headlamps glare?"
"So you dont like my new glare? Mmm. Wonder if youll like my new kisses any better? Ive been practising........I was hoping to try them out for real tonight......"
"Id like that." Came the soft, shy response.
"Good," was the whispered comeback, and the words sent promising shivers racing up both their spines. "I was hoping you would."
Another five minutes, and Charlie pulled the car into the drive, climbed out and dug out Emilys holdall from out of the back. Emily hadnt moved; she still sat, strapped into her seat with her hands clenched into fists and staring at the house through the windscreen. Charlie dragged the passenger door open and peered in. "You coming? Or would you like me to carry you in?" she teased.
"Of course Im coming. This is our home."
"Yes...." Charlies brow wrinkled again, as the woman made no attempt to get out of the car. Has she lost her memory or something? Maybe that bang on the heads hit her worse than I thought?
"And you dont have to carry me in - you did that before, remember? Tuesday 13th April, last year. You said I nearly gave you back strain because I weighed so much, and then you made me give you a back rub. And then we...." Her voice husked, thick with tears again.
"We did." Charlie took Emilys hand, tugged her out of the car and led her into their home. She settled her onto the settee, put the kettle on and headed upstairs to dump the bag and to rummage through the bathroom cabinet. Moments later, she was back with antiseptic, elastoplast and a cloth. Two aspirins and a glass of water were pressed into Emilys hand.
"Here, take these for your head and let me have a look at that cut. Its still bleeding a little."
"No, its okay. I wont need these." The aspirins were tossed onto the table, and the water placed carefully on the floor. They were immediately picked up and handed back.
"I dont need any damned tablets!" Charlie was pushed roughly away; she rocked back on her heels with shock. Emily again burst into tears, and threw her arms round Charlies neck. "God, Im so sorry! I didnt mean to do that!"
Cradling the wildly sobbing woman, Charlie rocked her gently and murmured soothing words to her until the sobs finally quietened down into broken hiccups. "Okay, Ive had enough of this. You better tell me whats going on now, Emily. Youre scaring me." Cupping the teary face between her two tanned hands, she gently brushed away the tears with her thumbs and kissed the trembling bottom lip softly.
"Make love to me." Two pleading green eyes stabbed right through Charlies chest and pierced her lungs, forcing all her breath out. It took all of her control to shake her head.
"No, I want you to tell me whats going on Emily."
"Please. Please make love to me Charlie."
"Emily........" Her voice a warning, as Emilys lips moved closer and she felt a hand run through her shortish black hair. One arm snaked round her back, pressing her tightly against the firm, slim body of the young woman.
"Please, I need you. Please do this for me Charlie."
Soft lips claimed hers, sucking gently, teasing and taunting as they had so many times before and with much the same effect - Charlie crumbled whenever Emily kissed her, especially when it was soft and loving, like this.....a kiss that reached down inside her, snatched the heart out of her chest and stole all reason out of her head. She groaned; a small little noise that signalled her almost surrender. Her head was swimming, and all she could feel, taste and hear was right in front of her. Hands sunk into thick blonde hair as she tried to deepen the kiss and take the initiative back, and she was rewarded by a whimper and a tightening of the arms that bound them closely together. Soon they were a tangle of tongues and limbs; she slid her hands to Emilys face and rubbed the downy hair at her temples - dimly, she became aware of a sticky sensation at her fingertips, and she pulled back reluctantly to see what it was. Blood, still oozing from the cut and staining her fingers crimson.
"God, your head - here, let me fix it up." Emily barely flinched as her head was swabbed, cleansed and fixed - she just kept staring at Charlie and running her hands over her face, as if trying to cast it into her mind, ready to be replayed later. "There, youre done."
"Thanks. Im...listen, Im sorry about earlier. I feel kinda silly - I dont know what came over me. Im just so glad to be home, with you and I guess I got a little emotional. I didnt mean to scare you Charlie. Im really fine. Honest."
"Youre sure? You know you can tell me anything. I only want to help you."
"I know. And you do, you always do. I do love you."
"I love you too. Listen, I booked us a table at Remellis for tonight, but Im not really up for it now. What do you say we stay in?"
Emily chortled quietly, her eyes glowing a little. "What you really mean is, you dont think Im up to it. But staying in sounds good - Id much rather spend the time I ...... Id much rather spend my time with you." A sweet smile lit up her face, and Charlie couldnt resist pressing a kiss onto the curved lips.
"Great! Then Ill go knock us up something stupendous for dinner, using only my imagination and the leftovers in the fridge."
"Can we order take out?" The familiar mischievous grin appeared on the womans face, and Charlie ruffled the blonde hair before sauntering out to the kitchen, leaving a suddenly pensive Emily behind.
Bits of wilted lettuce scattered all over the pure white worktop and tomatoes spilt their juices as Charlie sliced and diced with wild abandon and not much skill; her speciality salad - to be honest, the only thing she could make without burning, curdling or generally finding an inventive way to ruin. Even so, it usually ended up looking like a small bomb had exploded in the salad bowl, and the kitchen looked ten times worse. And to add insult to injury, all this frenetic activity was usually accompanied by loud and off key singing - today, Emily was treated to the strains of a ruined "Nessun Dorma", punctuated by many "Cmere you, ya little...." and "Ow! My finger! Goddam knives...."
Cautiously, she poked her head round the door and surveyed the battleground with a raised eyebrow. "Dont tell me. Salad a la Charlotte?"
"What else?" the opera murderer paused temporarily in the act of bleeding a tomato to death, and smiled lovingly at the tousle headed woman craning round the door. "You coming in or you gonna hover in the doorway all night?"
"Yeah, Im coming in. If its safe...."
"Of course its safe - what are you suggesting?" The stained knife blade waggled dangerously.
"I dont trust you with those things - just be careful this time. Im not taking you up to hospital again. Honestly, youre hopeless with knives."
"And I need to be good with knives - why exactly? Im a copy editor, not a chef. Or a soldier. My weapon of choice is my acerbic pen and my rapier like wit......" Said whilst chopping and crushing various defenceless vegetables, to be sacrificed for the greater salad good.
"Oh, I dont know. I find your armoury to be pretty devastating....." The sudden purr behind her ear turned her spine to mush, a feeling which was intensified a thousandfold when Emilys arms draped themselves around her waist. Charlie could feel her lovers body heat through her thin cotton shirt, and she leaned back into the warmth; a small moan slipped out as she felt soft lips nuzzling at her neck. She groaned louder as they slowly travelled up to fasten on a sensitive earlobe, the movement mirrored by hands that wandered over her stomach and slid slowly up her sides to brush gently against her breasts. The knife was dropped, the decimated vegetables forgotten and Emily was quickly enfolded and kissed soundly.
"You....." muttered between passionate kisses, "...are a tease."
"Mmm. Whats your point?" Emily returned her attention to the inviting earlobe again, nibbling and licking until Charlies breathing quickened still further.
"Im not sure."
"Hows that salad coming?" Blonde eyelashes batted innocently as Emily pushed herself away and headed over to the fridge. Pulling out a bottle of mineral water, she gave a cheeky grin and quirked a teasing eyebrow.
"You....." said with a waggling finger, "...are a tease."
"Maybe, but Im your tease." The tease poured two glasses and hopped back over to Charlie.
"That you are. And dont you forget it."
The cheeky smile was gone; abruptly, Emilys mood slipped. "Ill never forget you Charlie. Ill always love you - you know that, dont you?"
Charlie matched the beautiful, solemn face. "Of course I do, honey. And you know I love you too. I always have, right from that day you crashed your trolley into me in the supermarket. Sure, you near broke my leg, but it was the best day of my life." She was back at the chopping board, lacerating a sweet pepper. "...I dont know what Id have done if you hadnt found me that day. Dont know where Id be without you."
"Do you really think that Charlie?"
"Sure, honey!" She paused, staring deeply into murky green eyes. "I was going nowhere fast when you found me - you know I was. I mean, the day you crashed into me, Id just beat up my boss and trashed his office. Not to mention drowning my sorrows until I couldnt tell what day of the week it was anymore - Maria screwed me up and you know she did, just the latest in long line of failed relationships and wasted chances. I was this close to losing my job and Brian was gonna call the cops in ......and then there was the court case..."
Emily snorted. "I remember hearing clinking coming from your trolley, from all the scotch bottles. And all that frozen lasagna - I dont know..."
"The diet of choice for screwed up, alcoholic failed script writers cum copy editors whos girlfriends just run off with their brother, and whos just been kicked out of work for beating up on their boss." Her tone turned pensive. "And who are up in court on charges of drunk driving. I still feel so guilty about that. I was such a stupid bitch in those days.....a pathetic bitch too weak to even get through a day without a drink."
"But youre not like that anymore, are you? I mean - youre stronger now." A slightly pleading tone crept into Emilys voice.
"Only with you around I am."
"Dont say that! Youre strong enough on your own, without me."
Charlie lay the knife carefully down and turned to examine the woman; very pale cheeks and unnaturally bright eyes stared up at her. "I guess, but Im just so grateful that I dont have to be. You give me strength, Emily - I can do anything, as long as I have you to come home to every night." Narrowing her eyes as she watched the blonde head slowly shake, Charlie folded the woman into a hug again. " Honey, are you okay? Is your head hurting again? You didnt take those tablets, I know you didnt......"
"Tell me youre strong enough, Charlie - you could go on without me if you needed to...."
"I guess, but I wouldnt want to. Whats all this about? Youre not planning to leave me, are you?" Said in jest, but fear clutched her heart in its icy fingers as doubt seeped into her mind. Emilys response was muffled, as she buried her head in Charlies shoulder and burrowed deeper into the embrace.
"I wouldnt ever want to leave you, love. Ill always be here."
"Good." Charlie let out a small, very relieved breath. "Cmon, lets get this salad dressed and presentable - Im sure you must be hungry. You usually are....."
"Im not hungry, but you go ahead. Ill just sit with you, if you dont mind." The head stayed fixed on its new resting place, pillowed on a soft, firm chest.
"Youre not hungry? Since when? If youre tired, why dont you go to bed or have a bath or something. That might make you feel better - go on, Ill be up in a little while."
"No, its okay. I just want to stay here with you. I missed you while I was away, and I want to spend as much time with you now as I can. I dont want to let you out of my sight."
"Well okay, but given where your face is buried right now, I wouldnt say there was a great deal of sight being used!"
The head was finally lifted and to Charlies relief, a naughty smirk glowed on the bright face. "Oh I dont know about that. I had quite an eyeful from where I was. But hurry up with that salad - lookings good, but touchings much better." Charlie mock sighed deeply, tickled the ribs underneath her hands and chased the giggling Emily out of the kitchen.
"You are a tease!" The salad was left untouched.
Charlie crashed back onto sweat soaked pillows, panting and trembling, unable to do more than just lie there and try to suck breath into her body and attempt to wrap arms as feeble as boiled spaghetti around Emily as she collapsed on her chest. Slowly, she felt her wits and her strength returning, and cradled Emilys body close to her own, wanting to prolonge the satin feel of flushed slick skin against skin.
"God," she gasped, eventually when she could trust herself to speak coherently. "Youre ..........that was......" She felt Emily stir against her as she buried her face deeply between her breasts; gradually, she became aware of a slight hot wetness against her skin, and caught a muffled sob. She raised Emilys head, and saw the round cheeks glistening with tear tracks as the woman wept silently. "Hey... crying?"
She half smiled, and dragged a hand over her face. "You know I sometimes cry when we make love."
"Yeah, but you usually scream with it, and I end up with a headache. You dont cry like this, love.....and you didnt even..."
"I know - I wanted to make you happy."
"You do. And now you can make me happier by telling me whats upsetting you so much today. You know Im not gonna drop it."
Emily raised herself up and straddled the long body underneath her; she rubbed her eyes and nodded, ducking her head to avoid the silent demand that was coming from the eyes of her lover. She remained silent for a long while, absently caressing the side of the woman beneath her, then spoke quietly. "When I was away, there was an accident; a woman was killed on the road, and it was horrible. She was about....." The voice wavered, then broke hoarsely. "....she was my age and....I guess Im just being silly, but it made me think."
"Aw, honey.......no wonder youre so upset....."
"We could be gone, just like that - and no way of even saying goodbye or anything."
"But were not gone - were both here, love. Fine and healthy and here." Charlie pulled the woman down and cradled her head on her chest again, and hugged her tightly.
"Yes, here - were both here, arent we?"
"Yeah..." The face lifted, and Charlie leaned in for a long, sweet and reassuring kiss. "Theres proof....were definitely both here." Why are you talking like this? Please stop.
"I cant leave you Charlie. I cant stand to think of spending whatever comes next without you. Im so afraid."
"Of dying?" Why are you saying these things - youre not leaving me?
"No, of leaving you behind. Weve all got to die - I accept that. But Im so scared of what might happen to you when I have to go. You always said you needed me more than I needed you." Emilys damp cheek pressed against Charlies as she wrapped her arms around her neck and held her tightly - so tightly, that Charlie could barely breathe.
"I do need you honey. But I dont want to be having this conversation - I dont even want to think about this."
"No! I want to talk about this - its important to me Charlie. I need to know....."
She grabbed a sheet and wrapped it round herself as she slid out from underneath Emily and almost ran for the bathroom; she slammed the door behind her and stared at her reflection in the mirror. The face that stared back at her was as familiar and as detested as ever - dark hair framing a tanned face, with blue eyes sent into relief by high cheekbones and finely sculpted brows. "Shes gonna leave you. Shes talking about leaving..." the dark image in the glass spoke to her, taunting her with views of what her life would become. "And can you blame her? Why should she stay with you?"
She touched her face, tracing the fine lines that radiated from her eyes, the tiny scar on the lip where a lucky punch had sidestepped her defences, the line in her brow carved by too much scowling. Shards of memory, shattered pieces of picture rained down on her - her fist flying into Brians face, splitting his lip; the contempt in Marias eyes as another empty bottle was hurled against the wall; the terror on Andy Thompsons face as her car mounted the pavement and the sickening sound of his body hitting her windscreen - each razor sharp sliver was for ever embedded into her mind, twisting and turning viciously until the infection streamed out of her wounds and gushed through her body.
No, it was no wonder Emily wanted out. She was poison, pure and simple. She poisoned everything good in her life.
And Emily was the best thing in her life.
"Shes gonna leave you. And I dont blame her. Its no more than you deserve. She always was too good for you." She told the woman in the mirror.
"Im not too good for you. Dont ever believe those things about yourself."
Charlie gasped, and almost stumbled as she turned towards the sweet, low voice that always lulled the vicious murmuring in her mind.
"I wish you wouldnt think those things about yourself. Youre so self destructive, Charlie. Just one little press of a button, and you crumple back into it, dont you?"
"I dont know what you mean....." she growled her response, eyes skittering around the room, baited like an animal sensing the trap.
"Its so much easier, isnt it? To hate yourself, to blame yourself - you dont have to face up to it then. You always run right back to the past - bad things have happened before, theyll happen again. Right? So much easier to believe that, because then you dont have to try to do anything about it. So you run away, or hide at the bottom of a bottle."
A gruff snort was the immediate response, quickly followed by the cynical words that shot over her shoulder as she pushed her way past the smaller woman standing in the doorway and headed back into the bedroom. "If you always expect the worst, then youre never disappointed."
"And so youre expecting the worst now; that Im leaving you. Well what if I was? What would you do then?" A sullen glare was the only answer. "Would you fall to pieces, Charlie? Would I find you coughing up your own guts like I used to? Would I have to look for you in the bottom of a Jack Daniels glass?"
"You seem to know so much about it - you tell me!" Clutching the wooden post at the foot of the bed, Charlie turned her back. Emily could see the drooping shoulders and bent head straining under the weight of guilt.
"I do know you, Charlie - better than you know yourself. I know youre better than that, and I know youre stronger than that. You can take whatever life throws at you, Charlie, and youd wrestle it to the ground but you stop yourself because youve got this bloody stupid idea in that bloody thick skull of yours that youre a weak, useless loser! And I dont know how to help you see that its not who you are!" Sullen silence hung over the room, the atmosphere as thickly tangible as smoke. Emily took another deep breath, to steady herself for the expected onslaught. "I thought we were past all this. Do you know how it makes me feel, to see you give up on yourself so quickly?"
"It hurts me, Charlie. Youd give up on us that quickly."
"I would never give up on us! Youre the one whos talking about leaving!" Two vivid blue eyes pinned her in place and Emily could feel the air in the room tighten oppressively. "How the hell is this about me, anyway? Youre the one who started all this!"
"I would never give up on us, Charlie, and I would never give up on you. I thought Id already proved that?"
The sweetly hopeful smile broke Charlies heart - it crept through her ribcage and blanketed her weeping heart, and Charlies fingers tingled from the light brush of warm downy skin as she swept her hand across a cheek and rubbed the small nose with its tiny bump to the side - the only visible sign remaining of a nose broken nine months before, after her final bout of heavy drinking. Then, shed sworn that if Emily would stay with her, shed get off the booze and get herself back together - make her a person worthy of someone like Emily. And she had. It had been bloody tough; impossible at times, when the thirst would crash through her system and have her screaming, or the dark midnight doubts would crowd her, giggling and whispering into her mind. But Emily had believed in her and had stuck by her, and so shed done it.
She smiled back, relief streaming out of her eyes. "I know. Im sorry. I love you Emily."
"Believe in me, Charlie - remember, Ill always be here when you need me. But believe in yourself too. I cant do it for you."
Charlie reached out and gathered the blonde into her arms; she pressed her lips to Emilys and kissed her lightly. "What would I do without you?" She murmured, then flicked the tip of her tongue against Emilys lips and sighed as she felt them move. They kissed deeply, slowly - hands freely roaming as the kiss lengthened and the sensations intensified; touch, scent and sound were all there was as their world shrunk to fingertips, lips and tongue. Roughly, Emily shoved Charlie back towards the still warm bed.
She felt stirring at her side and the warm bundle that had nestled there got up, and padded down the stairs. Charlie moaned a little in protest as the sudden chill hit her side, and she snagged the wayward sheet and covered herself with it. A few moments later, the warm bundle was back again, lying alongside her; she purred and crept closer to the source of the heat - then yelped and shot back as her butt came into contact with an icy cold......substance. Wicked giggling accompanied Charlies graceless flight.
"What the hell....?" Charlie glowered at the little blonde as she blissfully sucked a spoon of ice cream, a wicked gleam in her eye and a positively evil smile on her face. Ruefully, she wiped off the ice cream.
"Aw! I was saving that bit for later...." was slurred around another dollop of ice cream. "Want some?"
"No thanks. What are you doing eating ice cream at....what? One oclock in the morning?"
"I was hungry. Sure you dont want some - its cookie dough.....cmon, baby...open wide now....." The laden spoon was shoved into Charlies mouth, lost its contents and was quickly dumped back into the container, where it scraped out another lump and headed towards Emilys eager mouth.
"Ack!..." mumbled Charlie around the freezing mouthful, "...too early......"
"Nah!" was mumbled back, "No time like the present. Being able to eat ice cream is one of the joys of being alive."
"Having it dribbled all over your body at one oclock in the morning sure isnt...."
There was a small choking sound. "......Actually, thats a great idea. I cant believe we never thought of that before! Lets....."
"No! No way, Emily! Just go to sleep.....youve worn me out and I need to get my sleep. And dont think I dont realise that I havent made love to you all night....Im just catching up my strength, and then its your turn!"
"Aw, cmon Charlie! Im not tired and I want to stay up and talk. This is such a beautiful time of night - so quiet and peaceful, with the world bathed in moonlight. Its that magical time when the world is suspended between sleeping and waking, between day and night - just on the edge of dying, and about to be reborn. Its magical, Charlie."
A wistful look bloomed on her face; absently, she stroked Charlies moon washed body, tracing patterns along its contours as the faint silvery-blue moonlight turned her hair blue black and painted mercury shadows around her breasts and belly. Charlie shivered, and arched slightly into the feathery touch; Emily smiled, knowingly, and in that smile, Charlie saw her life laid bare - the promises, the past, the hurts, the joys, the future - all rolled into one small, blonde with the sweetest, most heartbreaking smile and the biggest, most forgiving heart she had ever met. Charlie fell in love with her all over again. She caught the meandering hand, and pressed a kiss onto the palm.
"Let me make love to you." she whispered against the fingers resting against her mouth.
"Do you remember the first time we made love?" The fingers stroked her lips softly, the warm tips tracing delicate patterns on the pink flesh.
"February 3rd, about 8 oclock in the evening."
"You remember the time??" The fingers stilled.
"I remember how I felt. My heart stopped beating, and the whole universe shrank into twin points of vivid green light." Idly, she traced the eyebrows above the twin points. "I thought Id died, for a while, until you brought me back. Id never felt like that before. I know it sounds cliched, but I swear its true."
"Why didnt you ever tell me that before?" Emilys beautiful green eyes glistened; two bashful blue ones blinked, and skittered away as a wry smile tugged at the corners of Charlies mouth.
"You know Im not much of a one for talking all fancy, Emily. I just say what I feel, plain and simple. Im not very good at the hearts and flowers stuff - I hoped I showed you that in other ways. Let me show you now...." Pink lips drew one of the still digits inside; Emilys eyes grew wide as Charlies tongue strayed up and down, and her breathing hitched and grew shallow as her finger was sensuously suckled. With an effort, she drew her damp digit out and tucked her hands behind her back, smiling at the obvious disappointment on Charlies face.
"You remember the good times, Charlie?"
"Oh yeah - so many of them. More than I thought Id ever get in my life. I was so lucky that day, in the supermarket...."
"Whats been the best time, Charlie? For you?"
"How do I choose? Every day with you is the best time, honey.....what, you really want me to choose? Okay...ummm...then, I guess Id say....yeah, the day we met. You looked so cute, standing there trying to stuff all those bottles...."
"..and frozen lasagnas........"
"...yeah, with me lying there all mangled up underneath the trolley, with frozen lasagna all over me. And I remember thinking Wow! Shes hot! even then.....ouch! And I was so mad, and felt so embarrassed, and winding myself up ready for a big fight - cos I really wanted one that day - and then you pulled me out and stood me up and looked at me with those eyes, and when you smiled.....I was just.....gone."
Emily gave her another of those smiles. "And you - you were so funny, when you asked me if Id like to have coffee. All bashful....." Emily dissolved into giggles on Charlies chest as she remembered the tall, dark haired woman with the lasagna in one hand and the scotch in another, twisting her foot as she ummed and ahhed her way through the request. "Umm...." Her voice went theatrically deeper, as she did a very bad impression of Charlie, "...ahhh ....uhhh....would you....I mean.....coffee....maybe.....? I thought it was the funniest thing Id ever seen, and then when you just grabbed my hand and dragged me to the coffee shop, I really thought I was in trouble. I thought Id knocked you silly with that bump, and youd just come to your senses!"
"I guess in a way, I did. But I just wasnt used to people breaking down in hysterics whenever I asked them out. And I tell you what - wasnt that coffee goddam awful?" The pair cackled with laughter; Emily composed herself first and lay on Charlie, enjoying the feel of her lovers laughter shaking both their bodies.
"What was the worst time, Charlie?"
"What? Why would you want to remember those?"
"Because theyre part of the life weve shared too. Theyre bricks in this building, just the same as the good times. So - whats your worst time?"
"You shouldnt have to ask. The day I hit you." Charlie turned over and made to bolt to her favourite hiding place, but a firm hand on her shoulder and a dead weight sitting on her stomach stayed her.
"Talk to me about it." A shake of the head was her only answer. "I know why you did it, and Ive forgiven you - you know I have. I know it was the drink more than you."
"Maybe, but the drink just brings out whats there....underneath. And thats what scares me - Im so afraid that I might do it again one day."
"I know." As Charlie felt her cheek being caressed, and heard the acceptance in her partners voice, her eyes blurred. God, what did I ever do to deserve a friend like you? You know who I am, and what Ive done, and what Im capable of yet you love me anyway.
"How did you get through that Charlie?"
"You got us through it, not me......."
"Thats not true. How did you get through it? Tell me."
"I dont know....."
"Youre the one who gave up drinking. How did you do that?" Emilys voice was urging, serious.
"I didnt want to hurt you again. I wanted to be someone you could be proud of. Not some old drunk who cant control her temper - just a loser with no control over her own life." Slow, huge tears were slipping between tightly closed eyes now, and her voice was hitching. "I felt ashamed and I didnt want you to feel like that about me."
"There was a time for a while there that you were just going to walk away from it all. What stopped you?"
"How many times had I already run away? I ran from Maria - she wasnt strong enough to help me, and I was running from the job. I finally realised that the drinking was just another form of running away, and I got tired of running. I wanted to, but I realised that Id always end up back here, at the same place. Alone, lonely; hating myself and the world for what Id become. Guess I still want to run - but at least its only as far as the bathroom these days...." She gave a rueful smile and sniffled. The path from the bed tods and stuff?
Shit. I bet he's filming us right now.
EXT. BURNHAM HOUSE - CONTINUOUS
On VIDEO: We're across from Jane's window, looking in. Jane tries to shut the drapes, but Angela won't let her. Irritated, Jane retreats into the room. We ZOOM toward her, even as Angela [²ðxelh
We see Angela standing at the window in her underwear, looking down at us. Jane joins her and is immediately unnerved by:
Their POV: In the Burnham's DRIVEWAY, the word "JANE" is spelled out in FIRE.
INT. BURNHAM HOUSE - JANE'S BEDROOM - CONTINUOUS
It's that psycho next door. Jane, what if he worships you? What if he's got a shrine with pictures of you surroundewas being buried alive ........Some of the things I said, back then....you know I didnt mean them."
Charlie pulled the other woman down to lie alongside her, and pillowed her head against a comfortable shoulder. Emilys arms wrapped around her, and she stroked the tanned back of the older woman in long, slow strokes, soothing and comforting her normally stoic lover as tortuous tears ripped through her. "It wasnt me - it was the poison in my mind coming out. I really dont think Id have got through all that crap if you hadnt been there to give me strength."
"You dont need my strength, Charlie. You have strength of your own - I just wish you could see that. You couldve started drinking anytime and I wouldnt have been able to stop you. It was you who was strong enough not to."
"Yeah, but only because of you....." Emily barely picked up the mumbled words as they were kissed onto her neck.
"But you still did it, dont you see? You did it. Not me - I mightve given you the incentive, but you had the inner strength needed to get you through all that. And look where you are today - a good job, your careers looking up again, and you havent touched a drop in now. No more fights and no more trips to the hospital to get you stitched up. Its down to you, Charlie. Please believe in yourself."
"Why do I need to when I have you to do that for me?"
Abruptly, Emily sat up and buried her face in her hands. "Because I might not always be here to do that for you! And I dont want you falling to pieces - I couldnt bear to think of you like that again." The small shoulders shook, and Charlie folded her arms around her and pulled her back onto her chest, where she rocked the small woman and whispered nonsense until Emily had calmed down a little.
"Love, I know seeing that girl killed has shaken you up - thats obvious - but you really mustnt get so caught up in this. Do you think that I dont worry about losing you, or wonder whatd happen if something happens to me? We cant spend our lives worrying about things like that - theyd drive us crazy."
"But what if it does happen? What if that girld been me? What would you be doing, right now?" Emily turned and gazed up at Charlie beseechingly; Charlie sighed uncomfortably and tightened ger grip. What the hell is with her tonight? Im never gonna get any sleep at this rate, and I really dont want to be thinking of this. But it was Emily asking, the woman she loved more than anything, so she took a ragged breath and took the plunge.
"Crying. A lot. And feeling like - well, I dont know that Id be feeling anything. And wanting it not to be true. And getting angry at you, for leaving me. And still not wanting to believe it. And feeling useless, because I wasnt there when you needed me most, and wishing I could see you one last time. Just one last time."
"And if you could see me that one last time, Charlie - knowing youd never see me again in this lifetime - what would you say?"
"I would tell you how much I loved you, and how grateful Id always be to you because you gave me hope and made me realise that I could be the kind of person Id always wanted to be. That you brought light, and love and laughter into my life, and that Ill always remember you. And that Ill miss you - every day, and Ill be waiting until the day I die so I can see you again, and touch you, and hear your voice say my name, and feel your arms warm and tight around me. So I can kiss you, and feel you arch against me, and hear you moan as I make love to you. Id say thank you, and I love you, now and forever."
"And I would tell you how much I loved you, and how you were worth it. And how I believe in you, and that Id want you to be happy and to carry on your life, and to remember me and all the things we were to each other." Tear stained cheeks met tear stained cheeks; they both cried in each others arms and Charlie clung tightly to the warm, living body of the woman who owned her heart. "And to tell you that, whenever you needed me, Id be there. Just reach down inside yourself, Charlie and Ill be there. Always - you remember that! I love you - God, I cant tell you how much! Make love to me Charlie - please. I need you now......"
Tears and soft touches gave way to moans, caresses and kisses as the two moved together slowly at first; lingering kisses turning to passionate explorations, writhing and shuddering bodies entangled and bathed in the milk white moonlight as they both tortuously climbed towards release, for the first and the thousandth time.
The harsh ringing of the telephone dragged Charlie unwillingly out of a deep sleep; "Em....Em, phone....." Absently she felt the empty space next to her as she crawled over the bed and lurched out of the room, down the stairs and into the hall. God, what bloody time is it? Jesus, its only 6.30am. Em must be in the bathroom. What the hells she doing in there at this time? Thankfully, the shrill tones of the bell stopped as she cradled the receiver between chin and shoulder, rubbing her eyes vigorously as she drawled a sleepy "Hello?"
"Ah....good morning, am I speaking to Charlotte Fisher?" The polite tones of authority stirred her brain, forcing her further into reluctant wakefulness.
"Miss Fisher, Im calling from the county hospital at Kingston. My name is Dr. Hawes. Im sorry to disturb you at such a time, but Im afraid I have to speak to you urgently. Its about a miss Emily Gardner."
"Emily? What...what about her? Hang on, Ill just fetch her......" She turned and shouted up the stairs - silence greeted her.
"Miss Fisher, Im afraid I have some bad news about Miss Gardner. I understand she had you listed as her next of kin....is this true?"
"Next of....I guess. Shes my partner. We live together." Sleepy eyes were rapidly growing wider awake.
"Ah, umm - I see. Im very sorry to have to tell you this, but Im afraid theres been an accident......involving Miss Gardner. It happened the day before yesterday, but its taken us a while to identify her. She was carrying no formal identification on her."
"What are you talking about? Im sorry, but I think youve got the wrong person....."
"Theres no mistake, Miss Fisher. Miss Gardner was involved in a car accident - she was hit by a drunk driver. She suffered a major head injury, and has been in a coma for the past two days. Weve only just traced her hotel room and found your details - Im so sorry we couldnt tell you sooner."
"Look, is this some kind of sick joke, because if it is, Im not laughing. Now get the hell off this line and go find someone else to......"
"This is no joke, Miss Fisher. Im afraid Miss Gardner never regained consciousness and she died a little over two hours ago. Im so sorry."
"Just get off this fucking phone now...Im not listening to this! You sick...."
"Miss Fisher, please I assure you this is no joke. Im so very sorry to be the one to tell you like this, but I wanted you to hear before the police arrive - they will be following up on this case. Im so sorry for your loss. Please, if you need any more information or would like to discuss arrangements....please call. Once again, please accept my condolences on your loss."
There was a slight click, and the voice on the other end was gone. Charlie started at it in dumbstruck confusion for a long while, trying to pull her head together, before replacing the receiver on its cradle.
What the hell was that all about? There are some sick bastards out there! "Hey Emily! Youll never guess what some sick bastards just told me........"
She bounded up the stairs and into their bedroom. The sheets were still rumpled and the tang of their lovemaking still hung in the air, a heady perfume which Charlie knew she could never get enough of. No sign of Emily there, or in the bathroom. She hunted around the little house, but there was no sign of the smaller woman. Back in the bedroom, completely lost and confused, she sat on the bed and felt the mattress still warm from where Emilys body had lain. "Honey? Where are you?"
Still no answer.
"Emily! Youre scaring me!"
No answer. Jumbled images flashed into her mind - the cut on Emilys head, the whimpers and moans she had made last night when they were making love, the feel of small hands sliding down her back and across her breasts; and over it all, the words of the doctor running through her head like a record with the needle stuck. "...she died a little over two hours ago....."
Just when theyd made love for the last time. Emily had cried like a baby, clung onto her as if her life depended on it, and as the huge wracking shudders that coursed through her body had spent themselves, she had whispered words into Charlies ear; "Remember me, Charlie. I love you. Ill always be here when you need me." A choked sob forced its way through Charlies tight throat, as those final words buried themselves in her memory and the agony of loss began to eat into her heart.
There was a loud banging on the front door. She ignored it, gazing dumbly at the indent made by Emilys head on the pillow; slowly, she reached out a finger and touched the blonde strand that lay across it. The knocking at the door came again, louder.
"Miss Fisher? Its the police. Please come to the door - we need to speak with you."
"Honey? I need you now. Please come back to me." The strand of hair stirred slightly on its pillow, as Charlies words echoed round the empty room. There was more knocking on the door, harder and more insistent.
She rose, made her way down the stairs and to the door. As she opened it, she felt the early morning breeze ruffle her hair like a hand brushing through her locks and kiss her cheek. Emilys words shot through her mind, again. "Just reach down inside yourself, and Ill be there. Youre strong enough to deal with this. I love you, baby."
She stepped aside, and motioned the two officers in, and as she shut the door behind them, she felt the wind brush against her lips. She turned, squared her shoulders, and prepared to face the next, most difficult, phase of her life.
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Economy of Kenya
|This article is outdated. (May 2013)|
|Economy of Kenya|
|Currency||Kenyan shilling (KES)|
|CEN-SAD, COMESA, EAC, WTO and others|
|GDP||Nominal: $54.2 billion (2014 est.)
PPP: $86 billion (2014 est.)
|GDP rank||72nd (nominal)
GDP per capita
|Nominal: $1,137 (2014 est.)
PPP: $1,903 (2014 est.)
GDP by sector
|agriculture (24.2%), industry (14.8%), services (61.0%) (2012 est.)|
|10.1% (2012 est.)|
Population below poverty line
|45% (2012 est.)|
|42.5% (2008 est.)|
|18.89 million (2012 est.)|
Labour force by occupation
|agriculture 75%, industry and services 25% (2007 est.)|
|Unemployment||40% (2008 est.)|
|small-scale consumer goods (plastic, furniture, batteries, textiles, clothing, soap, cigarettes, flour), agricultural products, horticulture, oil refining; aluminium, steel, lead; cement, commercial ship repair, tourism|
|Exports||$5.942 billion (2012 est.)|
|tea, horticultural products, coffee, petroleum products, fish, cement|
Main export partners
| Uganda 10.5%
United Kingdom 6.7%
United States 5.8%
DR Congo 4.5% (2012 est.)
|Imports||$14.39 billion (2012 est.)|
|machinery and transportation equipment, petroleum products, motor vehicles, iron and steel, resins and plastics|
Main import partners
| India 20.7%
United Arab Emirates 9.5%
Saudi Arabia 6.7% (2012 est.)
|$11,960,000,000 (31 December 2013 est.).|
|-4.6% of GDP (2012 est.)|
|Revenues||$7.375 billion (2012 est.)|
|Expenses||$9.3 billion (2012 est.)|
Kenya's economy is market-based, with a few state-owned infrastructure enterprises, and maintains a liberalised external trade system. The country is generally perceived as Eastern and central Africa's hub for Financial, Communication and Transportation services. As of March 2014, economic prospects are positive with above 5% GDP growth expected, largely because of expansions in tourism, telecommunications, transport, construction and a recovery in agriculture. These improvements are supported by a large pool of English-speaking professional workers. There is a high level of computer literacy, especially among the youth.
The government, generally perceived as investment friendly, has enacted several regulatory reforms to simplify both foreign and local investment, with the most important of these being the creation of an export processing zone. According to Healy Consultants, the export processing zone is expected to grow rapidly through input of foreign direct investment over the next decade. An increasingly significant portion of Kenya's foreign inflows is from remittances by non-resident Kenyans who work in the US, Middle East, Europe and Asia. Compared to its neighbours, Kenya has a well-developed social and physical infrastructure. It is considered the main alternative location to South Africa for major corporations seeking entry into the African continent.
- 1 Economic history
- 2 Gross domestic product
- 3 Industries
- 4 Labour
- 5 Currency, exchange rate, and inflation
- 6 Government finances
- 7 Foreign economic relations
- 8 Current economic standing
- 9 Economic planning: Vision 2030
- 10 Criticism and challenges
- 11 See also
- 12 Notes
- 13 References
- 14 Further reading
- 15 External links
After independence, Kenya promoted rapid economic growth through public investment, encouragement of smallholder agricultural production, and incentives for private often foreign industrial investment. Gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an annual average of 6.6% from 1963 to 1973. Agricultural production grew by 4.7% annually during the same period, stimulated by redistributing estates, diffusing new crop strains, and opening new areas to cultivation. Between 1974 and 1990, however, Kenya's economic performance declined. Kenya's inward-looking policy of import substitution and rising oil prices made Kenya's manufacturing sector uncompetitive. The government began a massive intrusion in the private sector. Lack of export incentives, tight import controls, and foreign exchange controls made the domestic environment for investment even less attractive.
From 1991 to 1993, Kenya had its worst economic performance since independence. Growth in GDP stagnated, and agricultural production shrank at an annual rate of 3.9%. Inflation reached a record 100% in August 1993, and the government's budget deficit was over 10% of GDP. As a result of these combined problems, bilateral and multilateral donors suspended program aid to Kenya in 1991.
Throughout these first three decades of independence, Kenya's parastatals, partly from a lack of expertise and endemic corruption, largely inhibited economic development. In 1979, a presidential commission went as far as saying that they constituted "a serious threat to the economy"; a decade later, they had still not furthered industrialisation or fostered the development of a Black-Kenyan business class.The backbone of the country's private-sector success was provided by Asian Kenyans; during the colonial period, it was they who had created their country's internal market, and then dominated internal trade. British colonizers instituted segregation based on skin colour: Whites were first-class citizens, Indians (who came to Kenya to work on the East African Railway as labourers, were second-class citizens, and native Kenyans were third-class citizens. As a result various laws were set in place to limit African Kenyans in their own land, for example, they had to walk around with 'Passes' at all times, and free movement, schooling and entrepreneurial endeavours for Africans in Kenya was strictly enforced by colonial police between the late 1800s and Kenya's Independence in 1963. Post-independence, and particularly after being pushed out of its retail stronghold after its "Africanisation", those who stayed in Kenya transferred their dominance to the more advanced sectors of its commerce and industry, easily out-competing Western multinationals in notable instances. Prominent Asian-Kenyan businesspeople include Manu Chandaria and Madatally Manji.
In 1993, the Government of Kenya began a major program of economic reform and liberalisation. A new minister of finance and a new governor of the central bank undertook a series of economic measures with the assistance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As part of this program, the government eliminated price controls and import licensing, removed foreign exchange controls, privatised a range of publicly owned companies, reduced the number of civil servants, and introduced conservative fiscal and monetary policies. From 1994 to 1996, Kenya's real GDP growth rate averaged just over 4% a year.
In 1997, however, the economy entered a period of slowing or stagnant growth, due in part to adverse weather conditions and reduced economic activity prior to general elections in December 1997. In July 1997, the Government of Kenya refused to meet commitments made earlier to the IMF on governance reforms.As a result, the IMF suspended lending for three years, and the World Bank also put a $90 million structural adjustment credit on hold.
The Government of Kenya took positive steps on reform, including the 1997 establishment of the Kenya Anti-Corruption Authority, and measures to improve the transparency of government procurements and reduce the government payroll. In July 2000, the IMF signed a $150 million Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility, and the World Bank followed suit shortly after with a $157 million Economic and Public Sector Reform credit.
This is a chart of trend of gross domestic product of Kenya at market prices estimated by the International Monetary Fund with figures in millions of Kenyan Shillings.
|Year||Gross Domestic Product||US Dollar Exchange|
|2008||–||78.90 Shillings|
|2011||–||96.85 Shillings|
|2011||–||106.21 Shillings|
|2012||–||84.00 Shillings|
|This article needs additional citations for verification. (November 2012)|
Small scale businesses are providing a more and more jobs in Kenya. With increased but simplified regulations, they are able to blossom into large, legitimate businesses that can eventually create more jobs and government revenue.
Gross domestic product
In 2006 Kenya's gross domestic product (GDP) was about US$17.39 billion. Per capita GDP averages somewhat more than US$450 annually. Adjusted in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, per capita GDP in 2006 was about US$1,200. The country's real GDP growth picked up to 2.3 percent in early 2004 and to nearly 6 percent in 2005 and 2006, compared with a sluggish 1.4 percent in 2003 and throughout President Daniel arap Moi's last term (1997–2002). Real GDP is expected to continue to improve, largely because of expansions in tourism, telecommunications, transport, and construction and a recovery in agriculture. The Kenya Central Bank forecast for 2007 is between 5 and 6 percent GDP growth. GDP composition by sector, according to 2004 estimates, was as follows: agriculture, 25.7 percent; manufacturing, 14.0 percent; trade, restaurants, and hotels, 13.8 percent; transport and communications, 6.9 percent; government services, 15.6 percent; and other, 24.0 percent.
Agriculture, industry and manufacturing, and services GDP growth
Agriculture: In 1980, agriculture accounted for 33% of Kenya’s overall GDP. In 1990, the value agriculture added to GDP was 30 percent, in 2000, it increased to 32 percent, and in 2011, and the value agriculture added to overall GDP fell to 23 percent.
Industry and manufacturing: In the last 31 years, this component of Kenya's GDP has been greatly fluctuating. In 1980, industry and manufacturing accounted for 21 percent of Kenya's overall GDP. In 1990, it decreased to 19 percent, and in 2000, the value added to GDP decreased again to 17 percent. In 2011, there was a slight rise to 19 percent of Kenya's overall GDP.
Services: The World Bank defines Services as jobs that are included in "wholesale and retail trade, transport, government, financial, professional, and personal services." In 1980, services accounted for 47 percent of Kenya's overall GPD. In 1990, it accounted for 51 percent, in 2000 it stayed constant at 51 percent, and in 2011, the services sector accounted for 58 percent of Kenya's overall GDP.
The agricultural sector continues to dominate Kenya's economy, although only 15 percent of Kenya's total land area has sufficient fertility and rainfall to be farmed, and only 7 or 8 percent can be classified as first-class land. In 2006 almost 75 percent of working Kenyans made their living on the land, compared with 80 percent in 1980. About one-half of total agricultural output is non-marketed subsistence production. Agriculture is the second largest contributor to Kenya's gross domestic product (GDP), after the service sector. In 2005 agriculture, including forestry and fishing, accounted for about 24 percent of GDP, as well as for 18 percent of wage employment and 50 percent of revenue from exports. The principal cash crops are tea, horticultural produce, and coffee; horticultural produce and tea are the main growth sectors and the two most valuable of all of Kenya's exports. In 2005 horticulture accounted for 23 percent and tea for 22 percent of total export earnings. Coffee has declined in importance with depressed world prices, accounting for just 5 percent of export receipts in 2005. The production of major food staples such as corn is subject to sharp weather-related fluctuations. Production the downturns periodically necessitate food aid—for example, in 2004 aid for 1.8 million people⎯because of one of Kenya's intermittent droughts. However, the expansion of credit to the agricultural sector has enabled farmers to better deal with the large risk of agriculture based on rainfall and the dramatic fluctuations of the prices of agricultural products.
Tea, coffee, sisal, pyrethrum, corn, and wheat are grown in the fertile highlands, one of the most successful agricultural production regions in Africa. Livestock predominates in the semi-arid savanna to the north and east. Coconuts, pineapples, cashew nuts, cotton, sugarcane, sisal, and corn are grown in the lower-lying areas.
Forestry and fishing
Resource degradation has reduced output from forestry. In 2004 roundwood removals came to 22,162,000 cubic meters. Fisheries are of local importance around Lake Victoria and have potential on Lake Turkana. Kenya's total catch reported in 2004 was 128,000 metric tons. However, output from fishing has been declining because of ecological disruption. Pollution, overfishing, and the use of unauthorised fishing equipment have led to falling catches and have endangered local fish species.
Mining and minerals
Kenya has no significant mineral endowment. The mining and quarrying sector makes a negligible contribution to the economy, accounting for less than 1 percent of gross domestic product, the majority contributed by the soda ash operation at Lake Magadi in south-central Kenya. Thanks largely to rising soda ash output, Kenya's mineral production in 2005 reached more than 1 million tons. One of Kenya's largest foreign-investment projects in recent years is the planned expansion of Magadi Soda. Apart from soda ash, the chief minerals produced are limestone, gold, salt, large quantities of niobium, fluorspar,and fossil fuel.
All unextracted minerals are government property, according to the Mining Act. The Department of Mines and Geology, under the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, controls exploration and exploitation of such minerals.
Industry and manufacturing
Although Kenya is the most industrially developed country in East Africa, manufacturing still accounts for only 14 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). This level of manufacturing GDP represents only a slight increase since independence. Expansion of the sector after independence, initially rapid, has stagnated since the 1980s, hampered by shortages in hydroelectric power, high energy costs, dilapidated transport infrastructure, and the dumping of cheap imports. However, due to urbanisation, the industry and manufacturing sectors have become increasingly important to the Kenyan economy, and has been reflected by an increasing GDP per capita. Industrial activity, concentrated around the three largest urban centres, Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu, is dominated by food-processing industries such as grain milling, beer production, and sugarcane crushing, and the fabrication of consumer goods, e.g., vehicles from kits. Kenya also has an oil refinery that processes imported crude petroleum into petroleum products, mainly for the domestic market. In addition, a substantial and expanding informal sector engages in small-scale manufacturing of household goods, motor-vehicle parts, and farm implements. About half of the investment in the industrial sector is foreign, with the United Kingdom providing half. The United States is the second largest investor.
Kenya's inclusion among the beneficiaries of the US Government's African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) has given a boost to manufacturing in recent years. Since AGOA took effect in 2000, Kenya's clothing sales to the United States increased from US$44 million to US$270 million (2006). Other initiatives to strengthen manufacturing have been the new government's favourable tax measures, including the removal of duty on capital equipment and other raw materials.
The largest share of Kenya's electricity supply comes from hydroelectric stations at dams along the upper Tana River, as well as the Turkwel Gorge Dam in the west. A petroleum-fired plant on the coast, geothermal facilities at Olkaria (near Nairobi), and electricity imported from Uganda make up the rest of the supply. Kenya's installed capacity stood at 1,142 megawatts a year between 2001 and 2003. The state-owned Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen), established in 1997 under the name of Kenya Power Company, handles the generation of electricity, while the Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC), which is slated for privatisation, handles transmission and distribution. Shortfalls of electricity occur periodically, when drought reduces water flow. In 1997 and 2000, for example, drought prompted severe power rationing, with economically damaging 12-hour blackouts. Frequent outages, as well as high cost, remain serious obstacles to economic activity. Tax and other concessions are planned to encourage investment in hydroelectricity and in geothermal energy, in which Kenya is a pioneer. The government plans to open two new power stations in 2008, Sondu Miriu (hydroelectric) and Olkaria IV (geothermal), but power demand growth is strong, and demand is still expected to outpace supply during periods of drought.
Kenya has recently found some hydrocarbon reserves on its semi arid northern region of Turkana after several decades of intermittent exploration. Prospecting also continues off Kenya's shore. In the meantime, Kenya currently imports all crude petroleum requirements. Petroleum accounts for 20 to 25 percent of the national import bill. Kenya Petroleum Refineries—a 50:50 joint venture between the government and several oil majors—operates the country's sole oil refinery in Mombasa, which currently meets 60 percent of local demand for petroleum products. In 2004 oil consumption was estimated at 55,000 barrels (8,700 m3) a day. Most of the Mombasa refinery's production is transported via Kenya's Mombasa–Nairobi pipeline.
Kenya's services sector, which contributes about 63 percent of GDP, is dominated by tourism. The tourism sector has exhibited steady growth in most years since independence and by the late 1980s had become the country's principal source of foreign exchange. In the late 1990s, tourism relinquished this position to tea exports, because of a terrorism-related downturn. The downturn followed the 1998 bombing of the U.S Embassy in Nairobi and later negative travel advisories from Western governments. Tourists, the largest number from Germany and the United Kingdom, are attracted mainly to the coastal beaches and the game reserves, notably, the expansive Tsavo East National Park and Tsavo Wast National Park (20,808 square kilometres) in the southeast. The government and tourist industry organisations have taken steps to address the security problem and to reverse negative publicity. Such steps include establishing a tourist police and launching marketing campaigns in key tourist origin markets. Tourism has seen a substantial revival over the past several years and is the major contributor to the pick-up in the country's economic growth.
Tourism is now Kenya's largest foreign exchange earning sector, followed by flowers, tea, and coffee. In 2006 tourism generated US$803 million, up from US$699 million the previous year.
Kenya is East and Central Africa's hub for financial services. The Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE) is ranked 4th in Africa in terms of market capitalisation.
The Kenya banking system is supervised by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK). As of late July 2004, the system consisted of 43 commercial banks (down from 48 in 2001), several non-bank financial institutions, including mortgage companies, four savings and loan associations, and several score foreign-exchange bureaus. Two of the four largest banks, the Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) and the National Bank of Kenya (NBK), are partially government-owned, and the other two are majority foreign-owned (Barclays Bank and Standard Chartered). Most of the many smaller banks are family-owned and -operated.
In 2006 Kenya's labour force was estimated to include about 12 million workers, almost 75 percent in agriculture. The number employed outside small-scale agriculture and pastoralism was about 6 million. In 2004 about 15 percent of the labour force was officially classified as unemployed. Other estimates place Kenya's unemployment much higher, even up to 40 percent. In recent years, Kenya's labour force has shifted from the countryside to the cities, such as Nairobi, as Kenya becomes increasingly urbanised.
The labour force participation rate in Kenya has been constant from 1997 to 2010 for both women and men. In 1997, 65 percent of women were employed in some type of labour and 76 percent of men were employed. In 2005, 60 percent of women and 70 percent of men were in the labour force, and in 2010, 61 percent of women and 72 percent of men were a part of the labour force.
Family farm labour
In the past twenty years, Kenyans have moved away from family farming towards jobs that pay wages or to start small businesses outside of agriculture. In 1989, 4.5 million Kenyan's, out of a total working population of 7.3 million, worked on family farms. In 2009, only 6.5 million Kenya's, 45 percent, out of a total working population of 14.3 million, work on family farms, as compared to Tanzania, where 66 of the working population worked on family farms. More than half of family farm workers in Kenya are women, 3.8 million, compared to men who make up 2.7 million.
According to the World Bank 2012 Kenya Economic Update, "Men are much more likely than women to hold wage jobs, and women are more likely to work on family farms. Twice as many men as women hold wage jobs, and more men work principally in wage jobs than on family farms. Most Kenyans are now striving get modern, wage jobs." Modern wage jobs include being a "engineer, telecommunication specialist, cut flower worker, teacher, construction worker, housekeepers, professionals, any industrial and manufacturing job, and port and dock workers." In 1989, there were only 1.9 million Kenyans employed in wage work, in 2009, 5.1 million Kenyans work in modern, wage jobs. In wage jobs, men dominate over women. In 2009, 3.4 million men held wage jobs, while only 1.3 million women were employed in wage jobs.
Non-farm self-employment has risen from 1989 to 2009. The World Bank characterises non-farm self-employment to include jobs being a "street vendor, shop owner, dressmaker, assistant, fishmonger, caterer, etc." Non-farm self-employment has risen from a total of 0.9 million working in 1989 to a total of 2.7 million workers in 2009. There is almost an equal amount of men and women in the non-farm self-employment category. The men make up 1.4 million workers, and the women 1.3 million.
Currency, exchange rate, and inflation
As at June 2012 Kenya's inflation rate is 10.05%.
Revenue and spending
In 2006 Kenya’s revenues totalled US$4.448 billion, while its estimated expenditures totalled US$5.377 billion. Government budget balance as a percentage of gross domestic product—a low −5.5 percent in 2004—had improved to −2.1 percent in 2006.
As at 2012, Kenya set a record high budget of 1.459 trillion KES.
In 2006 Kenya had a current account deficit of US$1.5 billion. This figure was a significant increase over 2005, when the current account had a deficit of US$495 million. In 2006 the current account balance as a percentage of gross domestic product was −4.2.
In 2006 Kenya's external debt totalled US$6.7 billion. The debt is forecast to be a manageable 30 percent of gross domestic product in 2007.
Foreign economic relations
Since independence, Kenya, a nonaligned country, has seen both substantial foreign investment and significant amounts of development aid (total aid was $943 million in 2006, which was 4% of GNI), some from Russia, some from China and others from the high developed countries. Between 60 and 70 percent of industry is still owned from abroad.
Kenya's development assistance has come from increasingly diverse sources in recent years with China taking an increasingly higher prominent role than the west. The share of funding provided by the United Kingdom has fallen significantly, while that of multilateral agencies, particularly the World Bank and the European Development Fund, has increased. The most active investors currently are the Chinese.
Kenya is active within regional trade blocs such as the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the East African Community (EAC), a partnership of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. The aim of the EAC is to create a common market of the three states modelled on the European Union. Among the early steps toward integration is the customs union which has eliminated duties on goods and non-tariff trade barriers among the members.
Kenya's chief exports are horticultural products and tea. In 2005, the combined value of these commodities was US$1,150 million, about 10 times the value of Kenya's third most valuable export, coffee. Kenya's other significant exports are petroleum products, sold to near neighbours, fish, cement, pyrethrum, and sisal. The leading imports are crude petroleum, chemicals, manufactured goods, machinery, and transportation equipment. Africa is Kenya's largest export market, followed by the European Union.
The major destinations for exports are the United Kingdom (UK), Tanzania, Uganda, and the Netherlands. Major suppliers are China, India, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. Kenya's main exports to the United States are garments traded under the terms of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Despite AGOA, Kenya's apparel industry is struggling to hold its ground against Asian competition and runs a trade deficit with the United States. Many of Kenya's problems relating to the export of goods are believed by most economists to be caused by Kenya's export of inexpensive goods that saturate the global market but do little to substantially raise the amount of money coming into the country.
Balance of trade
Kenya typically has a substantial trade deficit. The trade balance fluctuates widely because Kenya's main exports are primary commodities subject to the effects of both world prices and weather. In 2005 Kenya's income from exports was about US$3.2 billion. The payment for imports was about US$5.7 billion, yielding a trade deficit of about US$2.5 billion.
Foreign investment policies
Kenyan policies on foreign investment generally have been favourable since independence, with occasional tightening of restrictions to promote the Africanization of enterprises. Foreign investors have been guaranteed ownership and the right to remit dividends, royalties, and capital. In the 1970s, the government disallowed foreign investment unless there was also some government participation in the ownership of an enterprise.
Notwithstanding some restrictions, between 60 and 70 percent of industry is still owned from abroad, a significant portion of which can be traced to fraudulent asset transfers by the colonial Britain during transition to independence. This denied Kenyans the opportunity to progress economically – relegating most of them to poverty and creating conditions that would lead to dependency on foreign aid. However, Kenyan has had more economic success and more success raising its own quality of life than some of its neighbours in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Current economic standing
As of 18 June 2012, the Kenya Economic Update launched in Nairobi, indicating that the economy is stabilising due to government action in the third quarter of 2011. The actions taken consisted of a raise in interest rates that in turn brought inflation down. The latest World Bank economic report is projecting an economic growth of 5 percent in 2012, but the economy is still vulnerable to shocks that may reduce growth to a lower 4.1 percent. Johannes Zutt, the World Bank County Director for Kenya, quoted--”Kenya's per capita income has exceeded US$800 for the first time, and Kenyans have an opportunity to enjoy better standards of living as the economy progresses towards middle-income status in the coming years." Jane Kiringai, the Bank's Senior Economist for Kenya, makes a point that--“Structural weaknesses, including a widening current account deficit, pose a significant risk to Kenya's economic stability. Another oil price shock, poor harvest, or contagion in the Euro zone could easily create renewed economic turbulence and reverse the recent gains." Although these problems are currently taking place, the East African Community is creating opportunities to reduce the shocks occurring in Kenya's economy.
Economic planning: Vision 2030
The Vision 2030 is Kenya's current blue-print for the future of economic growth. The long-term goals of this vision are to create a prosperous, and globally competitive nation with a high quality of life by the year 2030. To do this, it aims to transform Kenyan industry all the while creating a clean and secure environment. The vision is separated into three different pillars: economic, social, and political governance.
The Economic Pillar
The Economic Pillar is seeking to achieve growth in the Gross Domestic Product of 10 percent by 2012. The economic areas that the Vision 2030 is targeting are: tourism, agriculture, wholesale/retail trade, manufacturing, IT enabled services, and Financial Services.
The Social Pillar
The Social Pillar of Vision 2030 has the objective of improving the quality of life for all Kenyans. It aims to do this by targeting human and social welfare programs, specifically: education and training, health, environment, housing and urbanisation, children and social development, and youth and sports.
The Political Pillar
The Political Pillar of Vision 2030 objective is to move to the future as one nation and envisions a democratic system that is issue based, people centred, results oriented, and is accountable to the public. It targets five main areas: The rule of law – the Constitution of Kenya, electoral and political processes, democracy and public service delivery, transparency and accountability, and security, peace building and conflict management.
Criticism and challenges
The economy’s heavy dependence on rain-fed agriculture and the tourism sector leaves it vulnerable to cycles of boom and bust. The agricultural sector employs nearly 75 percent of the country's 38 million people. Half of the sector's output remains subsistence production.
Kenya's economic performance has been hampered by numerous interacting factors: heavy dependence on a few agricultural exports that are vulnerable to world price fluctuations, population growth that has outstripped economic growth, prolonged drought that has necessitated power rationing, deteriorating infrastructure, and extreme disparities of wealth that have limited the opportunities of most to develop their skills and knowledge. Poor governance and corruption also have had a negative impact on growth, making it expensive to do business in Kenya. According to Transparency International, Kenya ranks among the world's half-dozen most corrupt countries. Bribery and fraud cost Kenya as much as US$1 billion a year. Kenyans, 23 percent living on less than US$1 per day, pay some 16 bribes a month—two in every three encounters with public officials. Another large drag on Kenya's economy is the burden of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS). Prospects significantly improved under the Kibaki government, whose policy aims include budgetary reforms and debt restraint.
Despite early disillusionment of western donors with the government, the economy has seen a broad-based expansion, led by strong performance in tourism and telecommunications, and acceptable post-drought results in agriculture, especially the vital tea sector. Kenya's economy grew by more than 7% in 2007 and its foreign debt was greatly reduced. However, it is possible to underscore that situation in Kenya will be stable over foreseeable future and it will result in stable economic growth, in 2014 it is expected to reach 4% and more in 2015 due to growing flow of foreign investment, prospective promotion of Kenyan goods on global markets and increment in demand for agricultural products, especially, for tea and cut flowers. Western donors are now adopting a less paternalistic attitude towards their relations with African nations. However there is still significant improvement to be done. 2007–2008 post election violence also impacted a lot to Kenyan economy, these prove for the down swing of Kenya business cycle within the period.
- "Kenya (GDP Nominal)". International Monetary Fund. Retrieved 1 October 2014.
- "Kenya (GDP Purchasing-Power-Parity - PPP)". International Monetary Fund. Retrieved 1 October 2014.
- "Economy rankings". Doingbusiness.org. 2012-10-23. Retrieved 2014-10-01.
- "Export Partners of Kenya". CIA World Factbook. 2012. Retrieved 27 July 2013.
- "Import Partners of Kenya". CIA World Factbook. 2012. Retrieved 27 July 2013.
- "Sovereigns rating list". Standard & Poor's. Retrieved 26 May 2011.
- Rogers, Simon; Sedghi, Ami (15 April 2011). "How Fitch, Moody's and S&P rate each country's credit rating". The Guardian. Retrieved 31 May 2011.
- "Kenya Company Registration". Healy Consultants. Retrieved 2 September 2013.
- Himbara, David (1993). "Myths and Realities of Kenyan Capitalism". Journal of African Political Economy 31 (1): 93–107.
- David Bigman (2002). Globalization and the Developing Countries: Emerging Strategies for Rural Development and Poverty Alleviation. CABI. p. 136. ISBN 978-0-85199-575-5.
- KenInvest supports small businesses to become engines of growth in Kenya | dandc.eu
- Kenya country profile. Library of Congress Federal Research Division (June 2007). This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
- Labor participation rate, female (% of female population ages 15+) | Data | Table
- Kenya Economic Update: Kenya at work: Energizing the economy and creating jobs. World Bank. December 2012.
- Daniel Branch (15 November 2011). Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963–2011. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-14876-3.
- Kenya Inflation Rate http://www.knbs.or.ke/cpi/cpi062012.pdf
- Kenya Budget http://www.pwc.com/ke/en/pdf/kenya-budget-2012-revenue-and-expenditure-highlights.pdf
- https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ug.html Uganda country profile, CIA World Factbook)
- https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/rw.html Rwanda country profile, CIA World Factbook
- Vision 2030 http://www.vision2030.go.ke/index.php
- "The Economic Pillar" http://www.vision2030.go.ke/index.php/pillars. Retrieved 25 November 2012
- "The Social Pillar" http://www.vision2030.go.ke/index.php/pillars/index/social. Retrieved 25 November 2012
- "The Political Pillar" http://www.vision2030.go.ke/index.php/pillars/index/political. Retrieved 26 November 2012
- "Enria.org" http://enria.org/economic-analysis/kenya-s-economic-growth-in-2014-and-2015. Retrieved 27 February 2014
- Kitching, Gavin (1980). Class and Economic Change in Kenya. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-02385-5.
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Economy of Kenya.|
- CBIK – the Center for Business Information in Kenya, a division of the Kenya Export Promotion Council
- KenInvest; the Kenya Investment Authority, formed by the government of Kenya in 2004
- Kenya Economic Development at DMOZ
- Kenya latest trade data on ITC Trade Map
- Bio Jane Kiringai
- About Johannes Zutt
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Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. It was totally my birthday today.
KISHIMOTO, you cheap s.o.b!
You've stiffed me for years on a gift, but you know what'd make up for all of that? The rights to Naruto. Look into your heart; your black, black heart. You'll know the right thing to do.
And then I want you to do the exact opposite, and give me the rights.
Chapter 14: The Stains of Time
Time passed, lives carried on, and as was the ebb and flow of the ninja world, the hotbed that was the Elemental Nations settled down and reheated several times over.
As the saying went, 'Rome wasn't built in a day,' whatever Rome was, and neither was a functional village where several if not dozens of clans from all over could come together and pool their resources instead of fighting over them.
An idea of that nature took a lot of planning, a lot of work, and someone had to do the actual legwork.
Two figures darted quickly through a heavily forested tropical wilderness. The southern islands of the continent had been the location of the standing mission that they and their third partner had undertaken. From the speed with which they were leaving the island, it had not gone well in this particular area.
The mission: to gauge the interest in the idea of a combined ninja village for a particular clan. The Kaguya Clan.
"Okay, I guess we can mark them off of the list," A fourteen year-old Naruto groused, wiping a speck of blood off of his cheek. Significantly taller in height, he wore a pair of navy-colored pants, brown sandals, a sleeveless mesh undershirt, and a snug brown pocket-less vest that was more armor than apparel. All marks of the Uzumaki Clan had vanished from any trace of his clothing, "Does anyone even hire these psychos for anything? How are they a clan?"
"I dunno. My guess is abduction and inbreeding. A fair amount of both I'd say," Tenten said warily, looking over her shoulder as she fled at Naruto's side, "I'm pretty sure fifteen's old enough for them to take me and… well, you know."
While Tenten hadn't grown out of her twin-bun hairstyle, she had grown out of wearing her pink top and instead changed over to a loose-sleeved white blouse with red fasteners and outline with a large scroll strapped to her back. Her black trousers had been traded in for a pair of puffy red pants that exposed the outsides of her bandaged thighs up to her waist. Her conventional ninja footwear had also been swapped for open-toed sandals, and on her hands rested a pair of black fingerless gloves.
Naruto's eyebrows turned up at the thought of the freaks chasing them forcefully procreating by stealing away women and having their way with them. As horrifying as the thought was, they did seem to be the type, "…I guess I really shouldn't let them catch you, should I?"
"At least not alive. That'd be nice," The bun-haired girl replied, "We really should have asked more questions before we sailed out here. I'll take the heat on that one. I totally forgot that there are some people out there that won't even hear us out before attacking us."
"To be fair to you, I'm pretty sure they didn't even know who we were before this whole thing started," Naruto reasoned with a cheeky grin, "I don't think it would have mattered who we were. They would have tried to cut our heads off on-sight," It was eerie how calmly he'd accepted this fact, "Well look at the bright side."
"What bright side?"
"I'm keeping this vest," Naruto said, pressing his hands to his chest and giving the well-fitting padded armor covering his torso a good thump, "I'm actually glad to be your guinea-pig for once. It kind of saved me today."
Tenten rapped Naruto on the arm with the back of her hand as they ran for dear life, "I think the words you're looking for are 'thank you'," Tenten chided half-heartedly, "But seriously, how does it feel compared to the plate armor? You've had the whole mission to try it. What do you think? Is it functional?"
Blue eyes rolled around in Naruto's sockets. She was asking him now? A really good time for it while they were running for their lives wasn't it?
She was always like that though, always wanting him to test her weapons and other tools out, but it was endearing in a way. It meant a lot that he was the only one she trusted with her prototypes though. She didn't have enough materials to produce large quantities of many items, so knowing when she had a pliable idea or not was very important to her.
They were older, but nothing had changed with what she wanted out of life. Inventing ninja tools and weapons was still her passion, and she'd only gotten better at it over time.
Naruto took a moment to think about the question as they continued to run, "Getting hit in plate armor doesn't hurt as much, but I can move better in this," It wasn't as protective as plate armor when it was hit, but it also didn't have the easy to exploit weakness of slipping a blade underneath a plate to stab through the leather underneath. The vest had full protection, "I ain't expecting it to stop a bolt of lightning or something, just a short blade. And it does, so it's great."
"It sure stopped that sword," Tenten pointed out, indicating a stab mark in the vest underneath Naruto's right arm, "Your mom's gonna flip when she sees that you got stabbed. That's like the fifth time this year isn't it?"
"That was not my fault. You were all like, 'Look out!'" Naruto said, mimicking a girly tone of voice, "You totally distracted me."
"Because you were about to get run through from behind with a sword, jackass!" Tenten responded irritably, "You're lucky I brained the guy from thirty yards away before he stepped in for the kill or you'd have really been testing that vest."
The two stopped whatever disagreement they were on the verge of having as they could hear metal objects hitting the trees behind them with a thunk. Some of their pursuers were quicker than they thought. Either that, or berserkers didn't need to pace themselves on long chases.
Either way, they were almost home free.
The moderately-sized vessel they'd taken to reach the island was in clear view through the thick trees, as was the sole person sitting onboard. His features were mostly obscured by a green open hooded jacket that hung down to his knees, and a dark high-collared shirt garment underneath that covered the lower portion of his face. His eyes were covered with a mysterious pair of goggles and he seemed to be sitting on the edge of the ship with one of his fingers extended.
…Probably speaking with one of his kikaichu. Shino had never really dropped that hobby, but whatever floated his boat. Heh, Naruto snickered at his own internal joke before ducking a hatchet thrown at the back of his head. Reality had a nasty habit of trying to bury itself into your skull or spinal column when it had the chance.
"SHINO! START THE BOAT!" Naruto shouted, covering his head as he dodged sharp weaponry raining down from above, "START THE BOAT MAN, OR WE'RE GONNA DIE ON THIS ROCK!"
With Naruto's distinctive and inhumanly loud voice cutting through the tranquility of the wilderness, Shino seemed to perk up from his apparent silent conversation with one of his insects sitting on his finger and calmly nodded, creating a few insect clones to head up and loosen the sails for departure.
As the ship began to move at a steadier pace, Naruto and Tenten bolted out of the forest, still with a good half-mile left to run across an open field before reaching their way out. With the loss of trees as cover, the weapons being thrown at them came closer and closer.
"If there's one thing about these guys, they're pretty good killers!" Tenten pointed out, getting a nick in the long sleeve of her blouse from the never-ending wall of weapons flying their way, "They don't really seem good for anything else though."
A happy sound of triumph came from Naruto as he and Tenten caught up to their boat and ran alongside it, jumping on just as the sails were released to full mast. The moment his feet touched the deck, Naruto wheeled around and flipped off the Kaguya Clan members that had been outpaced by the seacraft only to turn back around and see that they had to sail through a pass in order to leave the island.
A long pass where the waterway would be surrounded on two sides by high cliff walls.
The sense of ecstasy was quickly lost.
And the resounding curse that echoed through the open air reached for miles.
Steering the ship, Shino shook his head before speaking up in his quiet manner, "I remember why this is the first mission I've taken with you two in four months. Why you may ask?"
"-Because it always ends something like this," Naruto finished for him, not even needing to hear why. They did seem to have bad luck when the three of them all chose to team up together, "It's not even our fault this time."
As they travelled between the cliff walls they could see the Kaguya Clan members barreling over the sides, running down the walls to outright rush their ship and undoubtedly kill them once they got aboard. The look in the beady, maniacal eyes that they all seemed to share and the vicious shrieks that they all cried out with as they charged left no arguments to the contrary.
With a sigh of resignation, Naruto cracked his knuckles and prepared to forcefully kick as many homicidal lunatics off of the boat as he could.
It was a rental from the nearest fishing community, and he wanted their damn safety deposit back.
"Let's do this," Naruto said, looking over at Shino for support, "You ready?"
"I'm steering," Shino pointed out, insects flying out from the openings of his clothes to do his part without necessarily needing to move, "Unless you would prefer being dashed against the walls, I think I should stay at the wheel."
With a frown, Naruto looked at their immediate surroundings, "Let's save that for if we get overrun."
While Naruto had accepted that they were about to engage in an intrusive display of hand-to-hand combat in close quarters, Tenten was at wit's end.
They had been travelling to the southern ass end of the Elemental Nations for weeks, had to pull together money on their own doing odd jobs to get a boat to run the mission, she'd wasted a ton of weapons dealing with enough of the Kaguya Clan members already, and she was quite certain one of them had grabbed her chest and her ass while they had been trying to kill her.
She wanted a nap in a comfortable inn bed, she wanted a long soak in a nice warm tub, and she wanted to be out of a situation where defeat meant being sexually assaulted and murdered… and potentially not even in that order. The opposite actually would have been nicer in that circumstance.
"You guys should have just left well enough alone," Tenten hissed through her teeth, arms covering her nose and mouth, revealing a pair of seals on the backs of her gloves with the kanji for 'blade' on them, "Nobody has time for this!"
Quickly swiping the index and middle fingers of both hands on the backs of the others, shuriken and other small throwing tools found their way into her hands to throw with rapid-fire speed and uncanny accuracy. Every time she moved her hand past the seals more weapons entered her hands.
"Kuchiyose: Raiko Kenka (Summoning: Lightning Flash Blade Creation)!"
Nothing missed its target. A slew of bodies numbering past the dozens rained from the air and hit the surface of the water with harsh splashes. Naruto could only watch wide-eyed until it all came to an end. He had no idea that she'd have wound up using the gift he'd made her like that, in all of its delicious fuuinjutsu-infused glory.
Abject slaughter had never looked so magnificent.
…Probably because they hadn't really been that close to it.
Everyone remained silent for an extended period of time until they'd left the pass and reached the open ocean, gulls cawing in the air and waves breaking against the side of their boat.
"Um," Naruto said, breaking the tranquility of escape and survival, "Happy birthday?"
Tenten rolled her eyes, "My birthday was weeks ago Naruto, and thanks," She said, holding up her hands to show him the backs of her gloves, "Literal lifesavers," With the adrenaline of the chase leaving her system, she sank against the column that held the steering wheel, with Shino still operating it, "Ugh."
There was still blood on the deck, but that would come out with a quick enough scrub. Other than that, all there was to do was bask in the tranquil silence of the boat ride. A welcome reprieve from the terrifying shrieks from the horde of killers after them mere moments ago.
"So that was the Kaguya Clan," Shino said before basically summarizing their entire day in a single sentence, "I think any ninja village would be better off without them."
"That didn't work out at all!" Tenten exclaimed, pointing back at the island they had barely escaped with their lives, "Hah, fuck that clan! What was that!?"
Naruto pointed over his shoulder back at the island that they were hurriedly gaining distance away from, "Somebody had to know we were walking into that! People suck! We asked around about them before we sailed out here and nobody said anything. We asked the guy we borrowed the boat from!"
"We didn't even receive a warning," Shino said, adding on, his voice slightly miffed at how things turned out.
"We didn't even get a goddamn warning!" Naruto repeated in so many words, "Can I hit that guy when we get back to shore?"
Evil sounding laughter sprang up inside of Naruto's head, obviously from his tenant within, "Muahahahahaha!" Kurama cackled evilly, "Ahh… that was fun. Let's go back."
'No Kurama, we're not going back there. Ever,' Naruto thought, getting a response of 'killjoy' from the biju, 'Why didn't you sleep in a hiding place on that island if you like it so much?'
"Because I was actually trying to sleep when I stayed on yours," Kurama defended, "If I'd have slept on these morons' island and one of them had found me they would have just kept trying to kill me instead of bugging me awake every so often like you did. They remind of two other psychotic humans I ate before honestly."
'I wish you'd have eaten that bastard in the mask,' Naruto thought with a deep scowl on his face, 'A lot of things would be different if you had.'
"True enough," Kurama said, speaking seriously for the serious tone of the conversation, "But many of the things that would be different wouldn't necessarily be for the better. At least as far as you and your friends are concerned."
Tenten opened her eyes, bringing herself back from the state of almost dozing off as she noticed the look on Naruto's face, "What's the matter?" They weren't dead and they were getting far away from there. It was the best news she figured they could have gotten at that point.
Whenever Naruto was grumpy and wasn't actually willing to rant about what it was that was bothering him, those close to him learned that it was always one thing.
Tenten pulled her knees to her chest, frowning as she spoke, "You're thinking about the guy in the mask again, aren't you? You have the same look on your face every time you do."
The infamous masked man that no one had a name for, and no one other than Naruto had ever seen hide nor hair of. Shino had been around for more than long enough to be privy to the backstory there, "You constantly refer to the man in the mask," Shino said, eying Naruto speculatively, "It has been four years hasn't it? And have we seen or heard of any sign of this person? I would say that we have not. Perhaps he is dead?"
That would have been great, if the man were dead, but luck didn't run that true in Naruto's family. And honestly, Naruto would have felt cheated if the man had died or been killed without facing him again.
He beat him senseless and victimized him when he was smaller and not very powerful. He took advantage of a chance vulnerability in Kurama and Naruto's own weakness, and for what? Naruto still had no idea what it had all been for.
It kept him up sometimes. For four years. Would the masked man ever come back? Would he do anything to Minato or Kushina? Would he try his hand at taking advantage of Naruto again in a moment of weakness, or would he go after the newest, most helpless member of his family just because he could?
Either way, they had to get back to the mainland as soon as they could. The wind was turning and none of them wanted to be caught out on the water during a storm. It was definitely the season for it.
(One Day Later – Southwestern Hi no Kuni)
Six separate sets of feet ran across the muddy mountainside trail, the only thing separating a cliffside from a long spill down into a thick forest.
Soaked to the bone, a pair of siblings ran as if the devil were behind them. And they might as well have been for all the good that would come if they were caught with what they had.
A wild-eyed teenage boy with messy brown hair and red fang markings on his cheeks. He wore brown pants and a black leather jacket covered in nicks and scrapes from years of conflict and hard living. Running at his side was a floppy-eared white dog large enough for the ninja to ride if he chose.
An older young woman next to him ran as well, surrounded by three grey-furred dogs with white undersides. She had brown hair tied in a single ponytail and similar red marks on her cheeks. Her eyes were calmer and more confident than her brother's and her facial features were more delicate than was normal for even women of her clan. She wore a leather-fashioned battle dress with green and red accents, the back nonexistent revealing the bare back of her torso to the elements.
"Bastards," The girl growled out, referring to their enemies, "Kiba! Don't let them get the damn canister back!"
Self-consciously, Kiba held onto the strap securing the bag over his back, willing to keep it in his grasp at all costs. The boy looked back over his shoulder as if trouble would be upon them any second, "I know sis!"
They were well aware of how the Uchiha had eradicated the Fuuma Clan. They hadn't been a big deal in decades. Not since the secrets of their trademark shuriken became common amongst every ninja in existence. Even so, they had held out into the common era and had shrugged off Uchiha Clan influence, choosing to fight against them instead.
Until a few years ago when they all died in the course of a few weeks. And it only happened because while not as powerful, they occupied a position too well-defended to attack directly. It was noted as biological warfare, as what got to them wasn't a poison and more of a disease.
And in the hands of the Inuzuka siblings was a canister containing even more of what had killed the Fuuma Clan.
The Uchiha Clan had been poised to use it on them. They had pulled their advance teams that had been prodding the deep forest territory of the Inuzuka Clan and in the guise of such had been about to dispatch a small squad to do to them what had been done to the Fuuma.
At least until they were noticed crossing the unofficial demilitarized zone and were ambushed. It broke down and everyone wound up separated, but Kiba and his sister wound up getting the most valuable piece of that particular puzzle and immediately fled with it once they realized what they had.
They couldn't let them get it back, and they couldn't let it be opened.
The smell of burning filled their potent noses before a kunai with an explosive tag attached landed in front of their intended path. Both brother and sister, as well as the four animals with them, all stopped and jumped as far away from the high explosive as they could. The detonation didn't catch the two, but they had to cover up to protect themselves from debris and potential shrapnel.
Either way, it caused them to stop and allowed the enemy the chance to close the distance and cut them off at the pass, taking a position on a small ridge positioned at a curve in the mountain path.
"Fuck," Kiba said, "Hana, this ain't good."
There was only one. A young man wearing a white short-sleeved shirt that went down into a dark blue cloth around his waist that went down to his knees. Underneath that he darker blue pants and black stirrups that went down to his sandals. On his wrists he wore a pair of armguards that stretched up to reach and cover his biceps from harm.
He stood with his back to the two, his black hair matted down by the rain, allowing them to see the large crest on his back, that of the Uchiha. The ninken immediately bared their fangs and dug their claws into the mud. Only the orders of their human partners kept them from trying to tear him apart.
"Don't look into his eyes," Hana said to Kiba immediately, "Look at the ground if you have to. Trust in Akamaru and your other senses if it comes to it, but don't make eye contact," She was fully aware that they were facing the youngest son of the current Uchiha clan head. An objective of their raid had been to kill him if they could. They found something more important during the attack though, and broke off the attack to leave with it.
He'd caught up with them, and he'd done it all alone. They couldn't smell any backup coming for him.
"Hand it back over," Sasuke said in a no-nonsense tone of voice. He didn't have any interest in some sort of genocide, "If you do you'll see the end of all of this. If you don't you'll probably die before anyone else in your clan does."
Kiba smirked while all of the ninken amassed just growled, barely restraining pure bloodlust, "You're the only one that caught up?"
Sasuke shook his head, "Well the others had to stay back and clean up what was done to your other teammates," They had smelled the spilled blood being quickly mixed into the mud by the rain, but didn't turn back. They had been hoping that it hadn't been as Sasuke was saying, but hearing it only made them angrier, "You Inuzuka should have just given up earlier."
But that would never have been a possibility.
The Inuzuka Clan didn't operate under one uniform system. Control was broken into numerous packs consisting of a few dozen people each, all with various lands throughout the unsettled woodland and grasslands that they called home. The leaders of each pack came together to form something of a weighted confederation, with power leaning toward those who had more people to take care of, and land under their control.
All of this made the process of war against them quite messy. While there were some who wished to surrender to the Uchiha Clan and adhere to their concessions in order to keep what they could, as the Uchiha weren't going to outright drive the Inuzuka off of the lands they lived on and cherished, there were other packs willing to fight tooth and nail to the bitter end.
Sometimes there were both sides in great numbers in single packs, and that had a propensity to tear families apart.
Not in Hana's and Kiba's pack though. Everyone stood with their mother in fighting back as hard as they needed to in order to rend the enemy asunder, even if they had to fight against turncoat tribes that were willing to side with the Uchiha to keep from being killed by them like so many others.
"Most of the other clans understand," Hana said, "The one thing you don't do is step over the Inuzuka Clan's territory like it's yours, so what makes the Uchiha think they can?"
"Your lands inside of that forest are too good of a natural stronghold to ignore. It's perfect for a new fortress," Sasuke explained the reasoning of his clan leader's actions, "If it wasn't going to be us, it was going to be the Senju. We just figured out how to get to you without getting torn to shreds trying to take your territory first."
It wasn't as if destroying the Inuzuka happened to be their aim. Such a thought was giving a clan of savages far too much credit. But they were fighting a dogged enemy that wouldn't back down. Well if they wanted a fight to the finish, they would get one.
Everything was just another step to stay ahead of the Senju Clan. That was what mattered. The next great outbreak of open war was coming soon. As far as clashes with clans like the Inuzuka went, it was a field exercise in comparison.
"You're forgetting something really important right about now," Kiba said with a particularly vicious grin on his face, "Your guys aren't here. It's six-on-one," As far as he was concerned, that was enough for the talk. If he was going to try and stop them, "Get my back Hana. Let's go Akamaru! Gatsuuga (Fang Over Fang)!"
Kiba and his large white ninken charged forward several quick steps before blazing their way up the ridge at Sasuke, their bodies spinning quickly enough to take on the form of living drills.
"Hm," Sasuke formed a single hand-seal, causing the entire cliff underneath him to detonate and explode.
The moment he'd gotten their attention and had them look up at him, he'd already caught them in a genjutsu. He wasn't particularly good with them though. Not like Itachi. Instead of something complex, all he did was conceal the explosive tags he'd dropped and allowed to scatter all over the ridge while he'd been talking and squaring off with the siblings.
Kiba had charged right into the blast. All Sasuke had to do was survive the collapse of his little perched position, which was easy enough.
He left enough of the space around him clear that he was able to ride a single portion of land down the collapsed ridge until he landed safely on the rubble blocking the cliffside mountain pass that had
"You forgot something important too," Sasuke pointed out after nastily rebuking Kiba and Akamaru's attack, "Numbers or not, don't attack an opponent with the high ground."
There was no possible way that Kiba could intelligently respond. Half-buried under rubble, what remained visible of him was not a sight worth seeing. His right arm was entirely gone, and the right side of his ribcage had been blown open and exposed. His face was mangled and burned raw. The rocks and mud surrounding him were stained red with his blood, and possibly Akamaru's as well. He was nowhere to be found.
There was just enough left of Kiba for Sasuke to search his devastated body. The canister containing the virus was far too tough to be damaged by an explosion. They were constructed to endure almost any sort of trauma without rupturing.
"You are fast. You're really fast. But to me-," Sasuke said, reaching down to pluck the canister from what was left of Kiba's bag, "-You're moving in slow motion."
Feeling a heavy, metallic object, the same shape of the virus canister, Sasuke removed what he thought to be what he was after, only to widen his eyes in fear at pulling out a decoy. But, he knew one of those two had taken off with it! The other Inuzuka members that had taken part in the raid were accounted for with the rest of his squad.
Throwing the useless canister down on the ground in anger, Sasuke stomped to the edge of the path and looked over where there were still rocks and debris falling into river far down below.
The last thing Kiba saw was the expression on Sasuke's face when he realized that Hana had the real container and he'd blown her off of the overhang, and despite the horrible agony he was in, as everything started to go dark for the last time he was able to pass on with a smug grin.
Hana always told him he rushed in too quickly for his own good. Hopefully she'd be able to get the virus far, far away from their home and the Uchiha Clan planning to use it on them.
(Some Time Later – Southern Coast at Hi no Kuni/Kawa no Kuni Border)
"Kaiza you asswipe!" Naruto yelled over the rain, feeling a distinct urge to hop off of the side of the boat before Shino could even finish docking at the jetty.
Looking up from where he was fixing his nets, a muscular fisherman with an 'x' shaped scar on his chin, short spiky black hair, and a rope tied around his head saw the return of one of his ocean vessels and smiled, not at all affected by the light rain falling from the sky, "Well, well, well. Look at you. You came back!"
Leaning over the side of the vessel with a twitching eye, Naruto's head followed Kaiza even as they pulled past him and slowed to a stop. He didn't even wait for the gangplank to go down before jumping out and back onto (mostly) dry land again, "You didn't say anything about those Kaguya guys!"
"You guys looked like the types who knew what you were doing," The fisherman said with a big grin, only to find himself doubled over from a quick punch to the belly, "Oof! I'll accept that…"
"Naruto," Tenten chided, "Him telling us wouldn't have kept you from going anyway," It would have prepared them for the first person they saw to try and slip a knife into their bellies, but they still would have went, just to see it for themselves, "Minato-sama wouldn't want you to do that."
"Yeah, but the old man could have just teleported himself out of that if he really wanted too," Naruto responded before frowning and helping Kaiza back upright, "Sorry Kaiza… I shouldn't have hit you. Do you want to hit me back?"
Kaiza just grinned and laughed a deep laugh, "I'm not punching a fourteen year-old kid, even if he does hit like a grown man. Contrary to popular belief, all sailors aren't roughnecks," He patted Naruto on the shoulder and shooed the teenagers off, "If your village idea ends up being a place with a water route for supplies, drop me a line would you? Sounds like living in a ninja village would be interesting."
It seemed that the civilians who learned of the budding concept of a village of ninja clans seemed more intrigued by the idea than a good number of the clans that were privy to the idea. Even in a place that was never really touched by shinobi activity such as Nami no Kuni, where they'd stopped on the way to the death trap island that housed the Kaguya Clan.
They had been making some progress on the front of finding interested parties. Not enough though. Only two clans had really committed and that in of itself was fickle. A change in the wind and all of that could change as well.
Thinking about it made you wonder how Minato didn't have wrinkles yet. The man always seemed, cool, calm, composed, and in good spirits. Of course that probably had to do with a tiny influence that he usually kept close around as he traveled lately.
With an upward nod and a smile, Naruto headed off, followed by Shino and Tenten down the street with a clear view of the ocean. It was a nice view and a great main street area for town vendors and businesses.
It was an easy place for them to meet back up with Naruto's family since most of the hotels were also positioned on that street. Sooner or later as long as they walked around they would have eventually been seen by someone that would have come out to get them out of the rain.
Speak of any of the devils.
Naruto rolled his eyes and grinned, but braced for impact regardless. There were only two ways this was going to end; either with a cheerful little kid attaching herself to his lower body or aiming for his neck and coming up way short. Fortunately for the aforementioned child, she had learned her lessons and aimed for the lower half on that occasion.
"What's up Kana?" Naruto asked, continuing to walk as a tiny redhead wrapped her limbs around his leg.
The small girl had long red hair, her bangs framed away from her face and back with the rest of her hair in a loose ponytail with two blue hairclips. She wore burgundy shorts and a sleeveless burgundy garment over a long-sleeved white shirt.
Almost four years ago, shortly after the trip to the Sarutobi Clan domains, Naruto had been taken for a short amount of time by Jiraiya in order to teach him and let him get more mission experience. It had lasted around three months and upon returning he had been presented with the surprise of his mother's slightly swollen belly and news that he would be getting a sibling.
To that very day he retained that he hadn't swooned or fainted upon finding out. He had passed out. There was a difference.
Roughly nine months later he had been more than happy to welcome Namikaze Kanako into the family and the world, and Naruto had a new reason to try and make it better if he could.
She had been given Minato's surname because Kushina technically wasn't of the Uzumaki Clan any longer the way she had been when Naruto had been born, and giving your kids a clan's surname when you weren't one of them was a quick way to piss them off and send them after you.
They had enough problems without that becoming another one again.
"Where you been?" The little redhead asked, as her brother walked her into the inn her family had been staying in, an eager shine in her blue eyes. She was a sucker for a good story, and there weren't many better than ninja mission tales.
"Doing stuff," Naruto responded vaguely, stopping to pick the little girl up onto his hip before he continued to walk. He was not about to tell her about busting his way through dozens of homicidal lunatics, mostly because he didn't want to give her nightmares, and otherwise because a story about running away wasn't very cool.
The answer did not satisfy Kana though, causing her to wrinkle her nose at him in aversion, "What stuff?"
"'You're too little to do it,' stuff."
"D'ya bring me a present?"
"I did not bring you a present," Naruto replied, reaching down and picking her up off of his leg, "There really wasn't anything there to bring back for you from where we were," Besides, he spoiled her enough as it was already.
Shino and Tenten sat down at a table in the front pub where they saw Kushina watching over her youngest child from, at least until she'd seen her brother outside in the rain and ran straight for him. After a long trip to get a boat they could use to explore a few islands before returning to the tiny nation to meet up with the main party, they were quite tired.
"Mission complete Kushina-san," Shino said, reporting to what was technically the second-in-command of his employer.
Taking her de facto status seriously, Kushina nodded and prepared to hear out the most professional member of her son's favored working unit, "And what are you thinking about the Kaguya clan?"
"They… are not exactly the type suitable for what we have in mind," Namely, they didn't have the bloodthirsty, savage, raider sort in mind as possible clans to take part in the village plan.
That would be another clan to strike from the list. Coming off of their cooldown period and trying to get things going again was proving to be troublesome to get some traction going.
A few years ago they'd made a lot of messes. Between the sealing of Kurama inside of Naruto, as well as trouble with the Uzumaki Clan and other dust-ups. They had to lay low and avoid open conversation with clans Minato had stricken up relationships with before taking his family on with him. The Senju Clan was growing increasingly more reactionary, and if smaller clans had been noted as supporters of the village idea, they would run a risk of having to meet the Senju Clan in battle.
No one wanted a piece of that, even with a clear butting of heads occurring behind the scenes with what was traditionally thought to be their sister clan in the Uzumaki. They were growing testy and were more willing to leap when they felt froggy.
The clans who were ideal for the village scenario were taking a wait and see approach to gauge just how badly doing such a thing would set off the powerhouses of the world, and the clans without the foresight to do so were so twisted that one wouldn't necessarily want to be partially represented by them anyway.
Case in point, the Kaguya Clan.
Tenten let out a sigh as she watched Naruto play with Kana in the more open area of the pub, away from other guests and patrons. She wished she had siblings, "Kanako is so cute."
Kushina clicked her tongue and shook her head, "Lucky kid's the exact opposite of Naruto," She said, "Minato's facial features, but my dominant traits, and she acts more like Minato too," Daddy's girl that she was, "Granted, that definitely makes easier to handle than Naruto was, so I'm thankful for that."
"Really?" Tenten asked with an intrigued grin, "Kana's better than Naruto was. Go figure," Her sarcasm was fully on display, but she was earnestly interested. Knowing things about her best friend's life before she met him fascinated her.
"Oh yeah. I love him to death, but Naruto was a tough brat to raise," Kushina grinned at the thought even though he'd given her fits at the time, "He was good when he was a baby, but around the time he turned… I want to say four, he started acting up. A lot. And he never stopped."
Some of that she wanted to blame on Naruto being her first child, and the fact that she had been a single mother raising a boy. In the end though, she knew her son, and knew that sometimes he liked being a handful.
Naruto appeared, still bouncing his little sister up on his hip, "That's because that's when Karin stopped being nice and started being a-," He censored himself and watched his language in front of Kana, only because Kushina gave him a look, one that Kana tried to give him as well. It wasn't nearly as effective, "Alright, alright, I won't say it."
Knowing Tenten probably had no idea who Karin was, Kushina gave a curt explanation, "My niece. Naruto's cousin, and his closest family back on Uzu no Kuni."
"-Which was kind of pathetic because she didn't even like me," Naruto added before shifting the conversation away from the awkward silence, "So! What's next?"
Kushina grinned at her eldest child, her cheeks in her hands with her elbows planted on the table, "Your father is heading off to meet with Anko about that mission he gave her. She says she's finally got something for him to see this time."
Anko's mission had been extremely simple in theory, if not utterly time-consuming and more complicated than one could have figured when put into actual practice. All that had been asked of her was to find the best possible set of locations she could that would be able to support a village the scope of the type Minato wanted to build.
…It was a more dangerous job than one would have thought at first. Anko definitely found that out after accepting what she'd originally thought to be an easy contract.
When you were searching for a place to stake a land claim, there were oh so many complications that could arise. Maps seemed to be rewritten every other week when it came to land holdings and national borders, and it was laughably easy to step on the toes of several different parties if you found yourself in the wrong place when the wrong person had some sort of claim over whatever turf you were on.
Anko had gotten herself and Fuu into a lot of fights over land-related misunderstandings over the years.
"She says she's got something we need to see every three months," Tenten said, "Where's she saying you should build the village this time? Swampland?"
"No," Naruto chimed in, bouncing a grinning Kana on his hip as she seemed to mimic his own mischievous expression, "The foot of an active volcano right?"
"The middle of seasonal tornado lands?" Tenten ventured, slowly grinning at the past misses of Anko's attempts to get paid by finding Minato the perfect land to build a village for ninjas on.
Naruto laughed before another one came to mind, "Ooh, how about that place with all of the landslides and earthquakes! I kicked a rock sitting on the ground and sent half of the place over a cliff."
"That wasn't as bad as the time she tried to get Minato-sama to take that spot at the edge of the Earth Daimyo's personal lands. 'He won't notice until the place is halfway built,'" Tenten said, mimicking Anko's cadence before huffing, "That was a real blast. Poor Fuu. She's got to be some sort of saint or something to stay on with Anko for as long as she has."
Kushina decided to cut off the teasing right then and there, not because it wasn't exactly nice, but because she herself wasn't included in the festivities, "Alright, that's enough of that. But anyway, either Minato will come back, or he'll have us meet him wherever this place is. So until then, relax."
Naruto looked at his mother, and then to his little sister in his arms who looked back at him with the brightest smile. Kanako was most certainly not going to leave him alone for the next few hours, not after he'd just gotten back after being away for a few weeks, but he wanted to go lie down, "Right. Come on Kana, let's go take a nap."
"Aww, I don' wanna take a nap," The others could hear Kanako pout as Naruto carried her off, "Mama, do I have to?"
"Naruto can play with you when it stops raining Kanako," Kushina said, knowing that she wouldn't push the issue. Like she said before, Kanako was a good girl instead of a hellion like Naruto was, "If you go sleep for a bit you won't have to wait for as long. Naruto, you're rooming with her until we leave."
He was always diligent in watching her, and if push came to shove he was the best bet there was for someone willing to fight tooth and nail to keep Kanako safe.
"Really?" Kanako asked, wiggling fitfully in Naruto's grasp, "Yay!"
"Siblings usually tend to dislike sharing living space," Shino pointed out after seeing the little ninja-spawn's exuberant outlook on the situation.
"Well Kana doesn't, because I'm a great fuc-, err, freakin' brother," Naruto said, editing himself when he saw Kanako give him another firm gaze as they went up the stairs, "You're gonna stop giving me that look."
"Bad words are bad onii-chan."
"Who are you supposed to be, mom?"
"So what do you think boss-man?"
Anko had seemed incredibly pleased with herself by the time Minato had made his way to the coordinates where she'd requested to meet up with him. He was a tad skeptical after a few years of start-and-stops when it came to her finding him a good place to build a village.
After arriving and being led a short distance through open fields, rolling green hills, and all-around fantastic natural aesthetics, confusion reigned for the aspiring leader when he found himself taken into a quiet little village that he couldn't remember having visited before. That had been when Anko had asked him the question.
"You can't build a village where there already is one Anko," Minato said in a deadpan tone. He traveled two days for this?
"Thanks for stating the obvious," The purple-haired kunoichi replied, "But really, I think this has been going the wrong way the entire time," Anko said with a grin on her face, as if she'd been planning out her pitch for quite some time, "Looking for open land to build a village from scratch just keeps starting trouble. Instead, we should find a place with a village that already exists and see if they'd want to have us build your little ninja utopia around them."
It was what ninja clans did with other towns to begin with, setting up satellites so to speak. Only this would be them basically taking a consenting village and instead of using it as an outpost it would be the main stronghold.
Anko could see the expression on Minato's face show that he was if nothing else giving thought to the idea, "Think about it! Even if this place isn't your idea of where you want to go, another village could think of it as built-in security from marauders and being collateral damage in ninja wars. Merchants would get an easier source of clientele, and a close source of the security of their choice when they go outside to do business. If you do this right, it could really be an economic game-changer."
Minato couldn't help but stare at Anko in a bit of amazement. He was aware that she was crafty and damnably professional about her work, but admittedly hadn't taken her for much of a thinker beyond the surface, "You've really given this a lot of thought, haven't you?"
If Anko had been offended, the lopsided grin on her face didn't show it, "Hey, I'm more than just bloodlust and a rockin' bod, ya know?"
It was at that moment Fuu descended from the sky and landed in the road right by them, wings of chakra disappearing as she did so. Brushing off her skirt, she turned and faced Minato with a smile, a shimmer of life in her orange eyes that she hadn't possessed a number of years ago. Other than growing up, she hadn't changed very much since she'd been younger, at least not from appearance.
"Showoff," Anko remarked once Fuu had landed.
Her grumpy attitude was thoroughly ignored by the green-haired jinchuuriki as her eyes panned around in search of someone, "Minato-sama, it's good to see you again," She said, her greeting poorly disguising her desire to see her younger friends, "Fuu was just wondering if you came all this way alone."
Minato bade the girl a smile as she walked the rest of the way over. She was certainly a far cry away from the eerie little girl she'd been when he'd met her, "I'm afraid so. Naruto had a mission and he was actually able to take his team this time, so no escort from the kids."
Fuu's countenance dropped at hearing that her favorite people weren't present while Anko rolled her eyes, "When are you going to stop speaking in the third person?" The older woman asked.
"When it stops bothering you that Fuu does it," Fuu answered, perking right back up at the prospect of exasperating Anko.
(East Coast of the Elemental Nations Mainland)
The meetings between the Senju Clan and the Uzumaki Clan were becoming less and less hospitable. Over the years things had changed from a welcoming sort of hospitality that had existed in the past whenever the two sides were to meet. Tsunade hadn't set foot inside of the Uzumaki Clan Village in almost four years.
This year she wasn't even setting foot on the island nation of Uzu no Kuni itself.
Instead, Nagato was coming to her, technically. She wasn't bringing him to the main Senju stronghold, and if that were the case she wouldn't be welcome back in the comfortable setting of the Uzumaki clan head's mansion either.
The two met onboard a ship a mile or so away from shore so that Tsunade could feel some measure of security and control over the setting, even though it was Nagato's ship.
The proceedings were strained, to say the least.
"…What?" Tsunade's voice could cut have cut steel. It was clearly the rebuttal of a woman entirely unused to being told 'no' when it came to anything.
Especially things of a military nature. Navally based in this instance. She wanted free reign to use the quick waterways that the Uzumaki Clan had traditionally secured for merchants as a secret attack method against the Uchiha Clan in a region that they were beginning to dominate. The newest war wasn't going to be fought in central Hi no Kuni, if it was going to remain in Hi no Kuni at all, and the mobility of the seas that the Uchiha Clan could never have would have been the supreme advantage.
Nagato had been her ace in the hole. And now she was being told the exact opposite of what she wanted.
"You think you've won the little 'race to the coast' because you've had us keeping them away from the area, don't you?" Nagato asked, the bare minimum of light reflected in his Rinnegan eyes. He stared at her, never blinking or showing anything other than blank tolerance, "What if I told you that you're not getting any sort of outlet to the sea for your war games?"
This had become increasingly commonplace over the years.
Nagato's responses to his clan's involvement in any of the Senju Clan's affairs always boiled down to three concerns in any given situation. Are we going to be reimbursed for the fight? Is [insert enemy's name here] a direct threat to us if we don't fight them for you? Are you saying there will be consequences from you if I say we're not fighting?
In order to spur any positive action, the answers to the first two questions always had to be yes, and simply hinting that yes was the answer for question number three was grounds for Nagato to immediately call the meeting to an end to call her bluff. He was done deferring to Tsunade's whim. The jinchuuriki episode was perhaps the most emasculating affair the Uzumaki Clan had ever endured, and they had lost face around the Elemental Nations as a result.
That wasn't even counting that Nagato's more accepting side had withered and died in the time following Minato's outright blitz on the village to leave with Kushina. Those things combined left him with markedly less patience and willingness to defer to the whims of their sister clan.
Both Tsunade and Nagato were well aware of the common perception that the Uzumaki Clan was barely more than the little sibling of the Senju. A stigma came with that, one that had never been debunked by anyone on the Senju's side. They were lesser to the Senju, not equals.
After the fallout that had occurred with Naruto becoming the most recently created jinchuuriki, the relationship had been horrendously strained.
"I don't like what I think you're saying Nagato," Tsunade said. Something had been wrong with him for quite some time. Over the years he'd grown more distant, confrontational, less willing to abide by her requests than he had in the past since taking over as the head of his own clan. It was as if the man was finally becoming fully aware of just how much power he had at his fingertips, "We need to work together to stop them from-."
"You're not doing this to stop anyone from reaching this coast," Nagato declared, cutting her off bluntly, "You want free reign of the water routes and our assistance with transport so you can ferry supplies and ninjas around the southern bend of Hi no Kuni and fight them there when you think they'll come. We have sources of information of our own. We're not quite the hicks you would like us to be."
The Uchiha Clan had gone straight through the countryside and were currently embroiled in battle after battle as they tried to solidify secure strongholds in the previously untouched wilderness area.
They were done reacting to one another's actions. Now instead of fighting aimlessly for business to build up capital, it seemed like the two age-old enemies were taking prerequisite measures to prepare for open war. It was almost that time again, for the two of them to square off and try to wipe one another from the annals of history.
If you weren't with either of them when it started you were to be stepped on or rolled over.
Tsunade's fingers drummed on the railing of the deck, holding back her irritated strength from smashing right through it with the thunderous taps, "Well, well, well," She said, taking a drink of the beverage she'd brought along. She of course wouldn't be trusting any sort of food or drink from anyone else, "…If I didn't know any better, I'd say your Uchiha was showing."
"Now, now, that's just a rumor," Nagato said, not bothered at all at the 'subtle' jab at his lineage, "But even if it was true, what does it matter to you?"
"It matters when the leader of the clan meant to be our distant relatives is the child of an Uchiha man."
And there it was; the primary reason why the relationship between the Senju and the Uzumaki had been eroding for years. After Nagato's Rinnegan had surfaced, things had changed, and when he'd taken over leadership things only deteriorated from there.
"If you believe the stories, the patriarchs of both clans originate from the same individual," It had always amazed him just how paranoid over the bloodlines mixing the Senju and Uchiha Clans had been.
It had cost his parents their lives and almost his in its infancy had it not been for the sympathy of the Uzumaki Clan his mother had come from. It was funny, because they had been put together in a bid for peace, but the scramble over who the child of their union would go to caused it all to splinter.
Instead of one of them getting the progeny of that marriage, they were more comfortable with being assured that neither would have it, hence the assassination of his parents before they could be with child. He was told the truth after his Rinnegan had awakened, on that damnable mission he'd been given the credit for. The one that had signified the beginning of his climb to clan leadership, and the one that scribed in stone Kushina's affections for Minato instead of him.
He had never harbored any ill will over it after finding out about it. He had no memories of his parents, and he'd been raised as a clan child same as any other. But it did always bother him just how absurd the blind aggression between differing clans could be, for no reason that he could ever find. Justification barely ever went any further than, 'They're different from us, so they don't deserve what they have over us.'
"You should be careful Nagato," Tsunade warned, "Those pretty eyes of yours don't make you the messiah you know."
"It's closer than you or the Uchiha make yourselves out to be," Instead of trying to put out the growing flame, Nagato stared the buxom blonde leader down with advice of his own, "And you should be careful Tsunade. Being the leader of the strongest clan doesn't mean you can simply take on anyone you choose and expect to win."
After decades, the historically one-sided relationship between the two clans was all but over.
(Southern Coast at Hi no Kuni/Kawa no Kuni Border)
With a short break in the rainfall, Naruto had taken Kanako out for a short walk around. He wasn't going to get any sleep until she fell asleep, and the two of them shared lineage, which meant that she wasn't just going to get tired like a normal person; he had to actually tucker her out.
She wasn't anything close to being frenzied mess that he had been even when he was her age, but she had the inherited vitality of the Uzumaki Clan, so when she had her mind set on being active it took quite a bit of it to wear her down.
Fortunately, Kanako was still very young, so it wasn't very difficult for someone like Naruto to tire her out.
For the K.O. he took her to the beach and walked around with her until she went out like a light, head on his shoulder as he carried her around. It was almost too easy to take much pride in.
Naruto couldn't get the grin off of his face as the only sound he could hear on the nigh empty beach was that of the crashing waves and Kanako's soft breathing, "So easy," He whispered to himself.
"I can't get over it, every time I see you two together," Tenten said, walking up behind them quietly after noticing that the little girl was asleep, "Before your parents had Kanako, I never thought you would have been the type to be good with kids."
"I'm not. It's just with her. When Mom had Kana I really had to try and shape up," Naruto said with a smile as he stared out at the water, "Not just for me. If it was just me I could have been fine with being a brat. But it was for her. Ready or not, I had to be ready to actually take care of somebody."
"Well, Kana adores you," The weapon-user said, before adding in a joke, "And another plus, she isn't anything like you!"
"She'd better not be like me. Mom and the old man left her with me a lot when there was something that they couldn't send me on," Naruto could still remember all of the early times he'd been left alone with his infant sister, "Do you know how scary it is to look at your own flesh and blood, and realize that everything that happens to her is on you?"
Even if it was just for a week? Even if it was just for a day?
No, he didn't want Kanako to be anything like him. Naruto was the way he was because the only source of affection and encouragement he got growing up was from Kushina. She was the only positive relationship he could really say he had amongst his clan. It wasn't until he left and the core of his personality had been formed that he'd met more people that gave him a chance to win them over.
That wasn't going to happen with her. Not if Naruto had anything to say about it. It was another reason to get the whole village idea done with; tons of kids her age for Kanako to interact with and grow up with. Having a stigma with one clan wouldn't stunt her entire social life for a decade the way it did his, because in a place with shinobi of multiple backgrounds there was always a chance to find someone somewhere. It was just another experience he'd had that could be added onto the list of things that would never touch her.
Tenten managed to catch herself staring at the brother and sister silently to the length that it had been uncomfortable for her to realize it. Feeling the pinch of awkwardness, she cleared her throat and brought up something to distract herself, "What was your home like?" The sudden question got Naruto to look at her in abject confusion, "You know. Uzu no Kuni. Your village. What was that place like?"
It took until asking the question for Tenten to realize that she'd never asked him about where he'd grown up before. She also realized that he'd never brought it up, and he never seemed too markedly concerned that for all intents and purposes he could never go back.
Thank goodness he was kind of dumb, otherwise he probably would have called her out to make fun of her.
"Well it's peaceful there, or at least it was when I left. More peaceful than anywhere else we've been since for sure," Naruto explained, wondering what brought along Tenten wondering about his home all of a sudden, "In the village, we were so close to the river and the ocean, you could hear it all the time. I think that's why Kana always falls asleep so easily when she's around running water. Like home or something, you know?"
That certainly sounded like a sweet and profound riposte. It was almost enough to make you look at the speaker differently simply from hearing it.
But Tenten already knew the speaker well, and was quick to point out something off about Naruto's statement.
"How exactly could this remind her of home? Kanako's never even seen Uzu no Kuni," Tenten said with a sly look on her face, as if knowing she'd caught him slipping.
"…Uh, I said 'or something'!" Naruto said, hurriedly making up an excuse, lowering his voice after remembering that he was still holding his sleeping sister, "Don't finish my thoughts for me Tenten!"
"Aww, too bad. You almost made yourself look cool just now," The older girl continued. His reactions to being called out were just too great sometimes. If you waited long enough, you could always count on Naruto to say or do something dumb, "You held in your dork for as long as you could, didn't you?"
"Wha-? A dork?" The words didn't seem to compute, "No I'm not! Kana doesn't think I am!" It was perhaps the weakest argument in the history of their entire relationship.
"Kanako is three. Give her time. She'll learn."
Naruto just scowled and let things lie as they were. He knew he was awesome. Thunder sounded out in the distance, which meant the rain was probably about to start up again soon. It was time to return to the inn before they were all caught in the downpour. If Kanako got sick, Kushina would murder him.
Gesturing with his head, Naruto motioned for them to return to shelter and made to leave while Tenten took one last long look at the ocean. Judging from the weather they'd been having, chances were that the next set of rains wouldn't let up until after they left and she wanted to take in the view and the feel while she could.
While looking down the stretch of beach, her sharp eyes picked up something sprinting right toward them, causing her to focus on it as it got closer and closer. It was fairly large to be moving so fast to boot, "Hey, do you see that?"
Naruto turned and looked as well, squinting his eyes as they weren't as good as Tenten's were, "Uh, are you talking about that huge dog running right for- OOF!"
Tenten had been able to take Kanako out of Naruto's arms before he was unceremoniously tackled to the ground by the large, frantically whining, and seemingly extremely intelligent grey-furred huskie. The impact had been quite impressive. Almost reminiscent of a speeding cart hitting a deer on a highland road if one had to compare it to something on-the-spot.
Kanako on the other hand woke up in the unfamiliar grasp of her brother's teammate and looked over with bleary eyes, only to fully wake up when she saw Naruto being grabbed and pulled through the sand by his sandal at the jaws of the powerful, clearly well-trained creature, "No fair Ruto-nii! I wanna play with the puppy too!"
It wasn't playing, it wanted to show them something. That wasn't just some run-of-the-mill family pet. That was a fighting dog, and if it was that hysterical, to grab Naruto and drag him off to do whatever to help, it had to mean there was trouble afoot.
"Yep," Tenten said, debating whether or not to immediately catch up, or take Kanako back to the inn first. No matter what she decided, at least there was a drag trail through the sand to follow, "He's just that lucky isn't he?"
Alright, that's chapter.
Now, I've advanced things by four years, because there was no more story I could tell within that time frame. I had set up the players for the future, had given Nagato his 'losing his smile' series of events, and had pretty much introduced the world as it is as best I could.
There are things I started that must now manifest themselves in the future, because that's how stuff works! Oooooooohhhhh...
So, now I'm going to go celebrate my birthday in style. By working.
Then after I get off at midnight I'm going to go plug in a few hours on that new EA Sports UFC game that just dropped. Because it's Wednesday, and nobody parties on a Wednesday.
Now that my friends, is the reason for the season.
Hope you enjoyed. Kenchi out. | <urn:uuid:c62210d5-4e16-4b39-bc46-1e9790157dd7> | CC-MAIN-2015-14 | https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9304878/14/Naruto-Great-Clan-Days | 2015-03-27T05:43:35Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131295084.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172135-00278-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.99134 | 14,143 |
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0 TRoKRILT I Operator's Manu Storm Snow Thrower Models 7524 & 8526 IMPORTANT : Read safety rules and instructions carefully before operating equipment . Warning : This unit is equipped with an internal combustion engine and should not be used on or near any unimproved forest - covered , brush - covered or grass - covered Iand unless the engine's exhaust system is equipped with a spark arrester meeting applicable local or state laws ( if any ) . If a spark arrester is used , it should be maintained in effective working order by the operator . In the State of California the above is required by law ( Section 4442 of the California Public Resources Code ) . Other states may have similar laws . Federal laws apply on federal lands . A spark arrester for the muffler is availabIe through your nearest engine authorized service dealer or contact the service department , P . O . Box 361131 Cleveland , Ohio 44136 - 0019 . TROY - BILT LLC . P . O . BOX 361131 CLEVELAND , OHIO 44136 - 0019 PRINTED IN U . S . A . FORM NO . 769 - 00394B ( 6 / 2003 )
TABLEOFCONTENTS Content Page Important Safe Operation Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Assembling Your Snow Thrower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Know Your Snow Thrower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Operating Your Snow Thrower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Making Adjustments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Maintaining Your Snow Thrower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Servicing Your Snow Thrower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Off - Season Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Troubleshooting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Parts List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 FINDINGMODELNUMBER This Operator's Manual is an important part of your new snow thrower . It will help you to assemble , prepare and maintain the unit for best performance . Please read and understand what it says . Before you start assembling your new snow thrower , please locate the model plate on the equipment and copy the information from it in the space provided below . The information on the model plate is very important if you need help from our Customer Support Department or an authorized dealer . You can locate the model number by standing behind the unit in the operating position and looking down at the dash panel . A sample model plate is explained below . For future reference , please copy the model number and the serial number of the equipment in the space below . Copy the model number here : O _ l _ B _ lr . TROY _ BILT LLC Copy the serial number here : P . O . BOX 361131 www . troybilt . com CLEVELAND , OH 44136 330 _ 558 _ 7220 866 _ 840 _ 6483 ENGINEINFORMATION The engine manufacturer is responsible for all engine - related issues with regards to performance , power - rating , specifications , warranty and service . Please refer to the engine manufacturer's Owner's / Operator's Manual packed separately with your unit for more information . CALLINGCUSTOMERSUPPORT Please doNOTreturntheun # to the retailer fromwhereit waspurchased , withoutfirstcontactingCustomerSupport . If you have difficulty assembling this product or have any questions regarding the controls , operation or maintenance of this unit , please call 1 - 866 - 840 - 6483 or 1 - 330 - 558 - 7220 to reach a Customer Support representative . Please have your unit's model number and serial number ready when you call . See previous section to locate this information . You will be asked to enter the serial number in order to process your call .
SECTION1 : IMPORTANTSAFEOPERATIONPRACTICES WARNING : This symbol points out important safety instructions which , if not followed , could endanger the personal safety and / or property of yourself and others . Read and follow all instructions in this manual before attempting to operate this machine . Failure to comply with these instructions may result in personal injury . When you see this symbol - - heed its warning . or emit chemicals known to State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other , _ WARNING : Engine Exhaust , some of its constituents , and certain vehicle components contain reproductive harm . DANGER : This machine was built to be operated according to the rules for safe operation in this manual . As with any type of power equipment , carelessness or error on the part of the operator can result in serious injury . This machine is capable of amputating hands and feet and throwing objects . Failure to observe the following safety instructions could result in serious injury or death . Never attempt to make any adjustments while engine is Training 7 . running , except where specifically recommended in the 1 . Read , understand , and follow all instructions on the operator's manual . machine and in the manual ( s ) before attempting to Let engine and machine adjust to outdoor temperature assemble and operate . Keep this manual in a safe place 8 . before starting to clear snow . for future and regular reference and for ordering To avoid personal injury or property damage use extreme replacement parts . 9 . care in handling gasoline . Gasoline is extremely 2 . Be familiar with all controls and their proper operation . flammable and the vapors are explosive . Serious Know how to stop the machine and disengage them personal injury can occur when gasoline is spilled on quickly . yourself or your clothes , which can ignite . Wash your skin 3 . Never allow children under 14 years old to operate this and change clothes immediately . machine . Children 14 years old and over should read and a . Use only an approved gasoline container . understand the operation instructions and safety rules in b . Extinguish all cigarettes , cigars , pipes and other this manual and should be trained and supervised by a sources of ignition . parent . c . Never fuel machine indoors . 4 . Never allow adults to operate this machine without d . Never remove gas cap or add fuel while the proper instruction . engine is hot or running . 5 . Thrown objects can cause serious personal injury . Plan e . Allow engine to cool at least two minutes before your snow - throwing pattern to avoid discharge of material refueling . toward roads , bystanders and the like . f . Never over fill fuel tank . Fill tank to no more than 6 . Keep bystanders , helpers , pets and children at least 75 ½ inch below bottom of filler neck to provide space feet from the machine while it is in operation . Stop for fuel expansion . machine if anyone enters the area . g . Replace gasoline cap and tighten securely . 7 . Exercise caution to avoid slipping or falling , especially h . If gasoline is spilled , wipe it off the engine and when operating in reverse . equipment . Move machine to another area . Wait 5 Preparation minutes before starting the engine . 1 . Thoroughly inspect the area where the equipment is to i . Never store the machine or fuel container inside be used . Remove all doormats , newspapers , sleds , where there is an open flame , spark or pilot light boards , wires and other foreign objects , which could be ( e . g . furnace , water heater , space heater , clothes tripped over or thrown by the auger / impeller . dryer etc . ) . Allow machine to cool at least 5 minutes before 2 . Always wear safety glasses or eye shields during j . operation and while performing an adjustment or repair to storing . protect your eyes . Thrown objects which ricochet can cause serious injury to the eyes . Operation Do not put hands or feet near rotating parts , in the auger / 3 . Do not operate without wearing adequate winter outer 1 . impeller housing or discharge chute . Contact with the garments . Do not wear jewelry , long scarves or other rotating parts can amputate hands and feet . loose clothing , which could become entangled in moving The auger / impeller clutch lever is a safety device . Never parts . Wear footwear which will improve footing on 2 . bypass its operation . Doing so makes the machine slippery surfaces . unsafe and may cause personal injury . 4 . Use a grounded three - wire extension cord and The clutch levers must operate easily in both directions receptacle for all units with electric start engines . 3 . and automatically return to the disengaged position when 5 . Adjust collector housing height to clear gravel or crushed released . rock surfaces . Never operate with a missing or damaged discharge 6 . Disengage all clutch levers before starting the engine . 4 . chute . Keep all safety devices in place and working .
5 . Neverrunanengineindoorosrinapoorlvyentilated telephone 1 - 866 - 840 - 6483 for assistance and the name areaE . ngineexhausctontaincsarbomn onoxidaen , of your nearest servicing dealer . odorlesasnddeadlgyas . Maintenance & Storage 6 . Donotoperatme achinwehileundetrheinfluencoef 1 . Never tamper with safety devices . Check their proper alcohoolrdrugs . operation regularly . Refer to the maintenance and 7 . Mufflearndenginbeecomheotand can cause a burn . Do adjustment sections of this manual . not touch . 2 . Before cleaning , repairing , or inspecting machine 8 . Exercise extreme caution when operating on or crossing disengage all clutch levers and stop engine . Wait until the gravel surfaces . Stay alert for hidden hazards or traffic . auger / impeller come to a complete stop . Disconnect the 9 . Exercise caution when changing direction and while spark plug wire and ground against the engine to prevent operating on slopes . unintended starting . 10 . Plan your snow4hrowing pattern to avoid discharge 3 . Check bolts and screws for proper tightness at frequent towards windows , walls , cars etc . Thus , avoiding intervals to keep the machine in safe working condition . possible property damage or personal injury caused by a Also , visually inspect machine for any damage . ricochet . 4 . Do not change the engine governor setting or over - speed 11 . Never direct discharge at children , bystanders and pets the engine . The governor controls the maximum safe or allow anyone in front of the machine . operating speed of the engine . 12 . Do not overload machine capacity by attempting to clear 5 . Snow thrower shave plates and skid shoes are subject to snow at too fast of a rate . wear and damage . For your safety protection , frequently 13 . Never operate this machine without good visibility or check all components and replace with original light . Always be sure of your footing and keep a firm hold equipment manufacturer's ( HEM ) parts only . " Use of on the handles . Walk , never run . parts which do not meet the original equipment 14 . Disengage power to the auger / impeller when specifications may lead to improper performance and transporting or not in use . , i . compromise safety . 15 . Never operate machine at high transport speeds on 6 . Check clutch controls periodically to verify they engage slippery surfaces . Look down and behind and use care and disengage properly and adjust , if necessary . Refer to when in reverse . the adjustment section in this operator's manual for 16 . If the machine should start to vibrate abnormally , stop the instructions . engine , disconnect the spark plug wire and ground it 7 . Maintain / replacesafety / instruction labels , as necessary . against the engine . Inspect thoroughly for damage . 8 . Observe proper disposal laws and regulations for gas , Repair any damage before starting and operating . oil , etc . to protect the environment . 17 . Disengage all clutch levers and stop engine before you 9 . Prior to storing , run machine a few minutes to clear snow leave the operating position ( behind the handles ) . Wait from machine and prevent freeze up of auger / impeller . until the auger / impeller comes to a complete stop before 10 . Never store the machine or fuel container inside where unclogging the discharge chute , making any there is an open flame , spark or pilot light such as a water adjustments , or inspections . heater , furnace , clothes dryer etc . 18 . Never put your hand in the discharge or collector 11 . Always refer to the operator's manual for proper openings . Always use the clean4ool provided to unclog instructions on off - season storage . the discharge opening . Do not unclog discharge chute YourResponsibility while engine is running . Before unclogging , shut off engine and remain behind handles until all moving parts Restrict the use of this power machine to persons who have stopped completely . read , understand and follow the warnings and 19 . Use only attachments and accessories approved by the instructions in this manual and on the machine . The manufacturer ( e . g . wheel weights , tire chains , cabs etc . ) . safety labels are shown below for your reference . 20 . If situations occur which are not covered in this manual , use care and good judgment . Contact your dealer or
SECTION2 : ASSEMBLINGYOURSNOWTHROWER roller guides . Make sure the spring ( found at the Unpacking end of each cable ) is attached to its actuator Remove staples from the top , sides , and ends of bracket . the shipping crate . Secure the upper handle and lower handle with the Set panels aside to avoid tire punctures or personal two plastic wing nuts , saddle washers and carriage injury . bolts previously removed . Attach these hardware Remove and discard plastic bag that covers unit . on the lower hole in the handles . See Figure 2 . Roll the unit out of the crate . Tighten the two wing nuts already in place on the Check the crate for loose parts before discarding . upper holes and secure the handles firmly . Slide the shift rod connector down over the end of the LooseParts lower shift rod . Tap the connector until it locks over the lower shift rod . See Figure 2 . The augers are secured to the auger shaft with two shear bolts and hex lock nuts . If you hit a foreign NOTE : If the connector is not properly assembled , the object or ice jam , the snow thrower is designed so shift rod will pivot and you will not be able to change that the bolts may shear . Two replacement shear speed or direction of movement of the equipment . bolts and nuts are provided for your convenience . See Figure 1 . Store these safely until needed . [ _ _ Hex Lock Carriage Bolt _ _ Shear Bolts Saddle iv / Nuts Figure 1 IMPORTANT : NEVER replace the auger shear bolts with standard hex bolts . Any damage to the auger gearbox or other components from using standard bolts will not be covered by your snow thrower's warranty . Upper Chute ItemsRequiredForAssembly Crank 1 . Pair of pliers " pin Clip 2 . Engine oil 3 . Fresh gasoline ge Bolt Lower Chute Crank BeforeAssembly Disconnect spark plug wire and ground it against the engine to prevent unintended starting . NOTE : All references in this manual to the left or right Figure 2 side of the snow thrower is from the operating position only . Exceptions , if any , will be specified . AttachingChuteCrank AssemblingHandle Remove the hairpin clip from the upper chute crank and slide the upper chute crank into the lower chute For shipping purposes , the upper handle is secured loosely to the lower handle with four wing nuts . crank . A pair of pliers may help in this job . Align the two holes on both chute cranks and insert Remove the lower plastic wing nut , saddle washer the hairpin clip removed earlier , through these and carriage bolt from each side of the lower holes . See Figure 2 . handle . See Figure 2 . If not already attached , slip the chute cables Raise the upper handle assembly until it locks over ( running from the handle panel to the discharge the lower handle . chute ) into the cable guide located on top of the Look at the lower rear of the snow thrower frame to engine . See Figure 3 . be sure all the cables are aligned with the cable
NOTE : If the tire pressure is not equal in all tires , the Cable Guide unit may pull to one side or the other . _ WARNING : Maximum tire pressure uunderre any circumstance is 30 psi . Equal tire press should be maintained at all times . Excessive pressure ( over 30 psi ) when seating beads may cause tire / rim assembly to burst with force sufficient to cause serious injury . Traction Control & Shift Lever Move the shift lever into sixth ( 6 ) position . Perform the following test to check for proper adjustment : 1 . With the traction control released , push the snow Figure 3 thrower forward , then pull it back . The machine should move freely . ConnectingAlternatorLead 2 . Engage the traction control and attempt to move the machine both forward and back . Resistance ( Model 8526 Only ) should be felt . Unwrap the headlight wire which is attached to the 3 . Move the shift lever into the fast reverse ( R2 ) headlight , beneath the handle panel . Wind the position and repeat the previous two steps . headlight wire around the lower right handle until If you experienced resistance in the first or the third excess slack is removed . See Figure 4 . case , or no resistance in the second case , adjust Plug the wire from the headlight into the alternator traction control . To adjust , proceed as follows : lead coming from the right side of the engine underneath the fuel tank . Loosen the jam nut on the traction control cable and unthread the cable one full turn . III I Recheck adjustment . - Alternator Lead Retighten the jam nut to secure the cable when correct adjustment is reached . NOTE : For more details , refer to Traction Control Adjustment on page 10 . AugerControl Check the adjustment of the auger control as follows : Lamp Wire Right Handle When the auger control is released and in the disengaged " up " position , the cable should have Figure 4 very little slack , but should not be tight . ChuteClean - OuTt ool _ WARNING : Do not over - tighten the cable . Over - tightening may prevent the auger from This tool , along with the electric cord , may be disengaging and compromise the safety of the fastened with a cable tie to the rear ofthe auger snow thrower . housing for shipping purposes . In that case , cut the In a well - ventilated area , start the snow thrower cable tie and remove the electric cord now . engine as instructed on page 8 . Make sure the throttle is set in the fast position . FinalAdjustments While standing in the operator's position ( behind Make these final adjustments before operating your the snow thrower ) engage the auger . snow thrower for the first time . Failure to follow these Allow the auger to remain engaged for instructions may cause damage to the snow thrower . approximately ten ( 18 ) seconds before releasing the auger control . Repeat this several times . NOTE : If you have a question about the terms used in With the engine running in the fast position and the these instructions , refer to the descriptions and auger control lever in the disengaged " up " position , illustration starting on page 7 . walk to the front of the machine . Tire Pressure ( Pneumatic Tires ) Confirm that the auger has completely stopped The tires are overinflated for shipping purposes . rotating and shows no signs of motion . Check tire pressure . Maintain pressure as recommended on the sidewall of the tire .
IMPORTANtTh : eIfaugershowsanysignsofrotating , Auger rimmediaterlyeturntotheoperator'spositionandshute offtheengineW . aitforallmovingpartstostopbefo readjustintgheaugercontrocl able . Toreadjustthecontrocl able , loosenthehexjam nutontheaugercontrocl able " Z " fitting . sRotatethecouplingendofthecablelack . Fcounterclockwitsoeprovidemoreigure5 . Retightetnhehexjamnut . Seeverifyadjustment . RepeaAt ugerControTl estto Auger Figure 5 SECTION3 : KNOWYOURSNOWTHROWER _ WARNING : Be familiar with all the controls on the snow thrower and their proper operation . Know how to stop the machine and disengage them quickly . Compare the figure below and description of controls in this section with your equipment before starting unit . Shift Lever Traction Control / Chute Tilt Control Auger Control Lock Auger Control Headlight * Chute Directional Control Fuel Tank Fuel Cap Chute Clean - Out Tool P Iugil Fill 1 Electric _ Starter Handle Au / r _ Skid Shoe * Model 8526 only Figure 6 throwing process . If the auger control is engaged Traction Control / Auger ControlLock simultaneously with the traction control , you can The traction control is located on the right handle . release the auger control ( on the left handle ) and the Squeeze the traction control to engage the wheel drive ; augers will remain engaged . Release the traction release to stop . control to stop the augers and wheel drive ( the auger This same lever also locks the auger control so you can control must also be released ) . operate the chute crank without interrupting snow
IMPORTANATlw : aysreleasethetractioncontrobl efore ChuteTilt Control changingspeeds . The distance snow is thrown can be AugerControl changed by adjusting the angle of the The auger control is located on the left chute assembly . Move chute tilt control handle . Squeeze the auger control to forward to decrease distance , and toward the rear to increase distance . engage the augers ; release to disengage . Traction control must also be released in order to stop the auger . ChuteClean - 0utT001 Shift Lever The chute clean - out tool is designed to clear a clogged The shift lever is located in the center 6m discharge chute . Refer to page 10 for details . of the handle panel and is used to 5 = determine ground speed and direction 4 = _ WARNING : Never use your hand to clear da clogged discharge chute . Shut off engine an of travel . It can be moved into any of 3 = remain behind handles until all moving parts eight positions . 2 = have stopped before unclogging . IMPORTANT : Always release traction 1 = the control before changing speeds . SkidShoe Forward : The snow thrower has six The skid shoe position has to be determined by the Rt - - condition of the ground from where snow will be forward ( F ) speeds . Position one ( 1 ) is removed . Higher the snow level , lower will be the skid the slowest and position six ( 6 ) is the R2 - - fastest . shoe . Adjust it accordingly . Reverse : The snow thrower has two Headlight reverse ( R ) speeds - - R1 is the slower ( Model 8526 only ) of the two . The headlight is on whenever the engine is running . DischargeChute Throttle Control The angle of the upper discharge chute controls the The throttle control is located on the engine , it regulates distance that snow is thrown . Tilt the discharge chute the speed of the engine . up for greater distance ; tilt it down for less distance . ChuteCrank SafetyIgnition Key The chute crank is located on the left The safety ignition key must be fully inserted in the side of the snow thrower . Use it to switch before the unit will start . Remove key when snow change direction in which snow is thrower is not in use . Do not turn the key . CLOCKWISE TO thrown . Avoid targetting persons , DISCHARGELEFT COUNTERCLOCKWISE animals or cars and buildings . TO DISCHARGERIGHT SECTION4 : OPERATINGYOURSNOWTHROWER IMPORTANT : Your snow thrower is Read and understand all instructionsand warnings on the machine and in this manual before operating the equipped with a plastic fuel tank insert for snow thrower . shipping purposes . Please discard it before filling up gasoline for the first time . Gas & OilFill - Up ToStartEngine Service the engine with gasoline and oil as instructed in the engine manual shipped with the NOTE : If unff shows any sign of motion ( drive or snow thrower . augers ) with the clutch grips disengaged , shut engine WARNING : Use extreme care when off immediately . Readjust as instructed in the Final Adjustments in the Assembly Section . handling gasoline . Gasoline is extremely flammable and the vapors are explosive . Never Attach spark plug wire to spark plug . Make certain fuel machine indoors or while the engine is hot the metal loop on end of the spark plug wire ( inside or running . Extinguish cigarettes , cigars , pipes the boot ) is fastened securely over the metal tip on an other sources of ignition . the spark plug .
Makecertaintheaugeranddriveclutchleversare ToStopEngine inthedisengage ( dreleasedp ) osition . Run engine for a few minutes before stopping to Movethrottlecontroul pto FASTposition . help dry off any moisture on the engine . Insertignitionkeyintoslot . Becertainitsnapsinto To prevent possible freeze - up of starter : place . Donotturn key . Electric Starter : Connect power cord to switch box NOTE : Engine will not start unless ignition key is on engine , then to 120 volt AC receptacle . With the inserted into ignition slot in carburetor cover . engine running , push starter button and spin the starter for several seconds . The unusual sound ElectricStarter made by spinning the starter will not harm engine Determine that your house wiring is a three - wire or starter . Disconnect the power cord from recepta - grounded system . Ask a licensed electrician if you cle first , and then from switch box . are not certain . Recoil Starter : With engine running , pull starter rope with a rapid , continuous full arm stroke three WARNING : The electric starter is equipped or four times . Pulling the starter rope will produce a with a grounded three - wire power cord and loud clattering sound , which is normal . plug and is designed to operate on 120 volt AC Move throttle control to " stop " or " off " position . household current . It must be used with a Remove ignition key . Do not turn key . Disconnect properly grounded three - prong receptacle at all the spark plug wire from the spark plug to prevent times to avoid the possibility of electric shock . accidental starting while equipment is unattended . Follow all instructions carefully for preparing to operate the electric starter . NOTE : Keep it in a safe place . Engine will not start without ignition key . If your home wiring system is not a three - wire grounded system , do not use this electric starter Wipe all snow and moisture from the carburetor under any conditions . cover in the area of the control levers . Also , move If your home electrical system is grounded , but control levers back and forth several times . a three - hole receptacle is not available , one should be installed by a licensed electrician before ToEngageWheelDrive using the electric starter . With the engine running near top speed , move the If your home is equipped with a grounded three - shift lever into one of the six FORWARD positions prong receptacle , proceed as follows : or two REVERSE positions . Select a speed Rotate choke knob to OFF position . appropriate for the snow conditions that exist . Push the primer three times , fully covering the vent . Connect power cord to switch box on engine . Plug NOTE : Use slower speeds in higher snow , and until the other end of power cord into a three - hole , you are familiar with the operation of the snow thrower . grounded 120 volt AC receptacle . Squeeze the traction control against the right Push starter button on top of the engine to crank handle and the snow thrower will move . Release it engine . As you crank the engine , move choke knob and the drive motion will stop . to FULL choke position . When engine starts , release starter button , and IMPORTANT : Never move the shift lever without first move choke gradually to OFF . If engine falters , releasing the traction control . Doing so will cause move choke immediately to FULL and then premature wear on the drive system's friction wheel . gradually to OFF . When disconnecting the power cord , always unplug ToEngageAugers from the three - prong receptacle first and then from To engage augers and start snow throwing , the snow thrower . squeeze the auger control against the left handle . RecoilStarter To disengage power to the augers , release both the Rotate choke knob to FULL choke position ( cold auger control and the traction control , if engaged . engine start ) . If engine is warm , place choke in OFF The auger control can be locked so you can turn the position instead of FULL . electric chute directional control without interruptingthe Push primer button two or three times . If engine is snow throwing process . warm , push primer button once only . Grasp starter handle and pull rope out slowly , until OperatingTips it pulls slightly harder . Let rope rewind slowly . Pull starter handle rapidly . Do not allow handle to NOTE : Allow the engine to warm up for a few minutes . snap back . Allow it to rewind slowly while holding The engine will not develop full power until it reaches firmly . Repeat until engine starts . operating temperature .
Use the shovel - shaped end of the clean - out tool to remove any snow and ice in the discharge chute . d _ lb WARNING : The temperature of the muffler and the surrounding areas may exceed 150 ° F . Re - fasten the clean - out tool to the mounting clip on Avoid these areas . the rear of the auger housing and restart engine . While standing in the operator's position ( behind For efficiency in job , remove snow immediately the snow thrower ) , engage the auger clutch lever after it falls . for a few seconds to clear any remaining snow or Discharge snow downwind whenever possible . ice from the discharge chute before continuing to Slightly overlap each previous path . clear snow . Set the skid shoes 1 / 4 " below the shave plate for normal usage . Adjust it upward for hard - packed / / , Chute Clean - Out Tool snow and downward when using on gravel or crushed rock . ChuteClean - OuTt ool The chute clean - out tool is conveniently fastened to the rear of the auger housing with a mounting clip . Never use your hand to clean a clogged chute or chute opening ; use this clean - out tool instead . Release both the auger control lever and the traction / auger control lock lever . Stop the engine by removing the ignition key . Remove the clean - out tool from the clip which secures it to the rear of the auger housing . See Figure 7 . Figure 7 SECTION5 : MAKINGADJUSTMENTS Remove the hairpin clip and flat washer from the shift handle under the handle panel . See Figure 8 . _ WARNING : NEVER attempt to clean chute or make any adjustments while engine is Place shift lever in sixth ( 6 ) position or fastest running . forward speed . Push shift arm assembly down as far as it will go . ShiftRod Rotate the ferrule up or down on the shift rod as necessary until the ferrule lines up with the upper hole in the shift lever . See Figure 8 . Shift Lever Insert ferrule from the left side of the snow thrower / into the upper hole . See Figure 8 inset . Reinstall the hairpin clip and the flat washer . IMPORTANT : Before operating the snow thrower , make sure the shift rod is adjusted according to instructions Hairpin Clip & on page 6 . Fiat Washer NOTE : For adjustment of auger control , skid shoe and chute assembly , refer to Final Adjustments in Section 1 . TractionControl ShiftArm Ferrule \ If you are uncertain about correct adjustment , proceed as follows : Clutch Rod Connector Drain the gasoline out of your snow thrower's engine , and place a piece of plastic film under the gas cap to avoid spillage . Figure 8 10
Tip the snow thrower forward , allowing it to rest on Skid Shoe the auger housing . See Figure g . The space between the shave plate and the ground can Frame Cover be adjusted by raising or lowering the skid shoes . For close snow removal , as when using on a smooth concrete or asphalt driveway , place the skid shoes in the low position . Use the middle or high position for the skid shoes when the area to be cleared is uneven . When operating on gravel , always put skid shoes in the high position . See Figure 11 . Adjust skid shoes as follows : Loosen , but do not remove , the three hex nuts which fasten the skid shoe to the auger housing . Raise or lower the skid shoe to desired position . Retighten the hex nuts loosened earlier . Repeat on the other side of the snow thrower . Auger Housing Figure 9 Remove the frame cover underneath the snow thrower by removing six self - tapping screws . With the traction control released , check if there is clearance between friction wheel and drive plate in all positions of the shift lever . See Figure 10 . With the traction control lever engaged , check if the friction wheel fully contacts the drive plate . See Figure 10 . If not , adjust as follows . Hex Nuts Loosen the jam nut on the traction drive cable and Skid thread the cable in or out as necessary . Shoes Retighten the jam nut to secure the cable when correct adjustment is reached . Figure 11 Reassemble the frame cover . NOTE : Make certain the bottom surface of skid shoe is If you placed plastic film under the gas cap earlier , flat against the ground to avoid uneven wear . remove it now . AugerControl Refer to AugerControTl est on page 6 to adjust the auger control . Make certain to check for correct adjustment as instructed before operating the snow thrower . ChuteAssembly The distance snow is thrown can be adjusted by Gear Shaft _ adjusting the angle of the chute assembly . Refer to page 8 for instrcutions . The remote chute control cables have been pre - adjusted at the factory . Move the remote chute lever on the control panel back and forward to adjust angle of the chute assembly . Wheel Figure 10 11
SECTION6 : MAINTAININGYOURSNOWTHROWER Vent WARNING : Before lubricating , repairing , or inspecting , disengage all clutch levers and stop engine . Wait until all moving parts have come to a complete stop . Disconnect the spark plug wire and ground it against the engine to prevent unintended starting . GeneraRl ecommendations Always observe safety rules when performing any maintenance . The warranty on this snow thrower does not cover items that have been subjected to operator abuse or negligence . To receive full value from the Figure 12 warranty , operator must maintain the snow thrower AugerBearingsandShaft as instructed in this manual . Every season lubricate the auger bearings and the Periodically check all fasteners and hardware to bearings on the side of the flame with lightoil . See make sure these are tight . to Figure 12 . Lubrication Engine Refer to the engine manual for instructions . DriveandShifting Mechanism DischargeChute At least once a season or after every 25 hours of The base of the discharge chute and the spirals on the operation , remove rear cover . Lubricate any chains , chute crank should be lubricated at least every 25 sprockets , gears , bearings , shafts , and the shifting hours of use . Apply the lubricant under the base of the mechanism at least once a season . Use engine oil chute and where the spirals contact the discharge or a spray lubricant . Refer to Figure 10 . chute . See Figure 13 . IMPORTANT : Avoid spillage of oil on rubber friction ff wheel and aluminum drive plate . Gear Shaft Lubricate the gear shaft with 6 - in - 1 grease ( part number 737 - 0170 ) at least once a season , or after every 25 hours of operation . Refer to Figure 10 . IMPORTANT : Keep all grease and oil off the rubber friction wheel and drive plate . Chute Crank ) irals Gear Case The gear case is lubricated with grease at the factory and it does not require checking . If disassembled for any reason , lubricate gear case with 2 ounces of Shell Alvania grease EPR00 , part number 737 - 0168 . Before reassembling , remove old sealant and apply new sealant . chute base IMPORTANT : Do not overfill the gear case , since Figure 13 damage to the seals could result . Be sure the vent plug is free of grease in order to relieve pressure . Traction Control / Auger ControlLock The cams on the ends of the control rods which AugerShaft interlock the traction drive and auger drive clutches At least once a season , remove the shear bolts must be lubricated at least once a season or every 25 from the auger shaft and spray lubricant inside the hours of operation using a multi - purpose automotive shaft . See Figure 12 . grease . The cams can be accessed beneath the handle panel . See Figure 14 . 12
excessive wear , cracks , or loose fit on the friction wheel drive hub . Also engage the traction control and check if the friction wheel is making contact with friction plate . Refer to Figure 10 . If it does not make contact , adjust the traction drive cable and recheck the e Panel friction wheel . Replace friction wheel rubber if necessary . Refer to instructions on page 15 . DriveBelts Check the condition of the drive belts every 50 hours of operation . Contr £ 1Rods _ _ _ _ _ Lube Cams Here Remove the plastic belt cover on the front of the engine by removing the three self - tapping screws . Figure 14 Visually inspect for frayed , cracked , or excessively worn out belts . FrictionWheelRubber Replace belts as necessary as outlined in Service Follow the instructions below to check the condition of Section on page 14 . the friction wheel rubber every 25 hours of operation . Remove the six self - tapping screws from the frame cover underneath the snow thrower . Visually inspect the friction wheel rubber for SECTION7 : SERVICINGYOURSNOWTHROWER NOTE : The skid shoes on this machine have two wear edges . When one side wears out , they can be rotated _ 1 insApRecNtiInNgG , : diseBngeafogree saellrcvliucitncgh , lereveprasirianngd , ostrop 180 ° to use the other edge . engine . Wait until all moving parts have come Shear Bolts to a complete stop . Disconnect spark plug wire and ground it against the engine to prevent unintended starting . Augers The augers are secured to the spiral shaft with two shear bolts and hex lock nuts . If you hit a foreign object or ice jam , the snow thrower is designed so that the bolts may shear . Refer to Figure 12 . If the augers do not turn , check if the bolts have sheared . Two replacement shear bolts and hex lock nuts have been provided with the snow thrower . Refer to Loose Parts in the Assembly Section . Carriage Bolt Skhave IMPORTANT : NEVER replace the auger shear bolts with Plate standard hex bolts . Any damage to the auger gearbox Figure 15 or other components , as a result of doing so , will NOT be covered by your snow thrower's warranty . Remove the six carriage bolts , belleville washers and hex nuts which attach two skid shoes tothe ShavePlateandSkidShoes snow thrower on two sides . See Figure 11 . Reassemble new skid shoes with the hardware The shave plate and skid shoes on the bottom of the removed earlier ( concave side of belleville washer snow thrower are subject to wear . These should be against the skid shoes ) . Make certain the skid checked periodically and replaced when necessary . shoes are adjusted to be level . 13
To remove the shave plate , remove the carriage bolts , belleville washers and hex nuts which attach Friction Wheel the shave plate to the snow thrower housing . See Figure 15 . Reassemble the new shave plate , with heads of carriage bolts to the inside of the housing . Tighten securely . Suppo _ BeltReplacement AugerBelts Belt NOTE : It is necessary to remove both auger belts in order to change either one . If changing just one belt , be certain to check the condition of the other belt . Remove the plastic belt cover on the front of the engine by removing the two self - tapping screws . See Figure 16 . Pulley Auger Spring Spring Pulley ig _ elt ' _ , over Figure 18 Back out the stop bolt to allow the belts to slip between the bolt and auger pulley . See Figure 19 . Screws NOTE : It may be necessary to loosen the six hex nuts that fasten the frame to the auger housing . Lift the rear auger belt from the auger pulley , and slip belt between the support bracket and the auger Figure 16 pulley . See Figure 18 . Repeat this step for front auger belt . Drain the gasoline from the snow thrower , or place Replace both auger drive belts by following a piece of plastic under the gas cap . instructions in reverse order . Tip the snow thrower up and forward so that it rests Drive Belt on the housing . Follow steps 1 through 4 of previous instructions . Remove six self - tapping screws from the frame cover underneath the snow thrower . Pull idler pulley up , and lift belt off engine pulley and Roll the front and rear auger belts offthe engine friction wheel disc . See Figure 17 . Back out the stop bolt until the support bracket pulley . See Figure 17 . rests on the auger pulley . See Figure 19 . Rear Auger f _ _ , _ _ _ - - Drive Friction Friction Wheel Belt \ , _ " _ , rf = = = _ . _ Belt Engine \ / Pu , , ey _ f ' ( ' _ _ " _ , _ : _ FrontAuger Idler _ l _ J _ r _ _ / / Belt Bolt Pulley \ ' _ ff _ . _ ' J Jf Support Bracket / Pulley \ " _ L _ _ Figure 19 Figure 17 Slip belt between friction wheel and friction wheel disc . Remove and replace belt . Reassemble Unhook the idler spring from the hex bolt on the following the instructions in reverse order . auger housing . See Figure 18 . NOTE : The support bracket must rest on the stop bolt after the new belt has been assembled . See Figure 19 . 14
Lightly tap the hex nut to dislodge the ball bearing ChangingFrictionWheelRubber from the right side of frame . Remove the hex nut and The rubber on the friction wheel is subject to wear and bell washer from left end of shaft . should be checked after 25 hours of operation , and Slide the gear shaft to the right and slide the friction periodically thereafter . Replace the friction wheel rubber wheel assembly from the shaft . if any signs of wear or cracking are found . Remove the four screws from the friction wheel Drain the gasoline from the snow thrower , or place a assembly . Remove the friction wheel rubber from piece of plastic under the gas cap . between the plates . See Figure 21 . Tip the snow thrower up and forward , so that it rests Plates on the housing . See Figure 20 . Bearing Screws Hub Rubber . _ Hex Nut and Bell Washer Figure 21 Reassemble new friction wheel rubber to the friction Note : The unit is _ shownresting on wheel assembly , tightening the four screws in its auger housing rotation and with equal force . Auger Y / - Position the friction wheel assembly up onto the pin Figure 20 of the shift rod assembly , and slide the shaft through the assembly . Reassemble the wheels and the Remove the klick pins which secure the wheels , and frame cover . remove the wheels from the axle . Remove the six self - tapping screws from the frame cover underneath the snow thrower . Engine Using a wrench to hold the shaft , loosen , but do not Refer to separate engine manual for all engine completely remove , the hex nut and bell washer on maintenance procedures . left end of gear shaft . See Figure 20 . SECTION8 : OFF - SEASOSNTORAGE Wipe equipment with an oiled rag to prevent rust . If unit is to be stored over 30 days , prepare for storage Remove spark plug and pour one ounce of engine as follows : oil through spark plug hole into cylinder . Cover spark Remove gasoline from carburetor and fuel tank to plug hole with rag . Crank engine several times to prevent gum deposits from forming on these parts distribute oil . Replace spark plug . and causing possible malfunction of engine . Remove all debris from the exterior of equipment . Follow lubrication recommendations on page 12 . WARNING : Drain fuel into an approved Using a light oil or silicone , rust - proof the equipment , container outdoors , away from an open flame . especially any chains , springs , bearings and cables . Allow engine to cool . Extinguish cigarettes , Always store the snow thrower in a clean , dry area . cigars , pipes , and other sources of ignition prior to draining fuel . Run engine until fuel tank is empty and engine stops due to lack of fuel . Drain carburetor by pressing upward on bowl drain , located below the carburetor cover . NOTE : Fuel stabilizer is an acceptable alternative in minimizing the formation of fuel gum deposits during storage . Do not drain carburetor if using fuel stabilizer . 15
SECTION9 : TROUBLESHOOTING Problem Cause Remedy Engine fails to start . 1 . Fuel tank empty , or stale fuel . 1 . Fill tank with fresh gasoline . 2 . Blocked fuel line . 2 . Clean the fuel line . 3 . Choke not in ON position 3 . Move switch to ON position 4 . Faulty spark plug . 4 . Clean , adjust gap or replace . 5 . Safety key not in ignition switch on engine . 5 . Insert the key fully into the switch . 6 . Spark plug wire disconnected . 6 . Connect spark plug wire . 7 . Primer button not being used properly . 7 . Refer to the engine manual . Engine runs erratic . 1 . Unit running on CHOKE . 1 . Move choke lever to OFF position . 2 . Blocked fuel line or stale fuel . 2 . Clean fuel line and fill tank with clean , fresh gasoline . 3 . Water or dirt in fuel system . 3 . Drain fuel tank and carburetor . Refill with fresh fuel . 4 . Carburetor out of adjustment . 4 . Refer to the engine manual . Loss of power . 1 . Spark plug wire loose . 1 . Connect and tighten spark plug wire . 2 . Gas cap vent hole plugged . 2 . Remove ice and snow from gas cap . Be certain vent hole is clear . 3 . Exhaust port plugged . 3 . Refer to the engine manual . Engine overheats . 1 . Carburetor not adjusted properly . 1 . Refer to the engine manual or have the carburetor adjusted by an authorized engine service dealer . Excessive vibration . 1 . Loose parts or damaged auger . 1 . Stop engine immediately and disconnect spark plug wire . Tighten all bolts and nuts . If vibration continues , have unit serviced by an authorized service dealer . Unit fails 1 . Traction control cable in need of adjustment . 1 . Adjust traction control cable . Refer to to propel itself . Adjustments . 2 . Drive belt loose or damaged . 2 . Replace drive belt . Unit fails 1 . Discharge chute clogged . 1 . Stop engine immediately and disconnect spark plug wire . Clean discharge chute and to discharge snow . inside of auger housing . 2 . Foreign object lodged in auger . 2 . Stop engine immediately and disconnect spark plug wire , Remove object from auger . 3 . Auger control cable in need of adjustment . 3 . Refer to Final Adjustments in Assembly Section . 4 . Auger belt loose or damaged . 4 . Refer to Adjustments , 5 . Shear bolt ( s ) sheared . 5 . Replace shear bolt ( s ) . NOTE : Far repairs beyond minor adjustments listed above , contact the local dealer . 16
SECTION10 : PARTSLISTFORMODELSSTORM7524 & STORM8526 2O 2 4O 3 12 13 39 Ref . No . Part No . Part Description Ref . No Part No . Part Description 1 . 731 - 2635 Hex Nut 3 / 8 - 16 Mount , Chute Clean - out Tool 22 . 712 - 0798 2 . 731 - 2643 Chute Clean - out Tool 23 . 712 - 3068 Hex Nut 5 / 16 - 18 3 . 684 - 04002 Pin 26 " Housing Assembly 24 . 715 - 0114 684 - 04001 24 " Housing Assembly 25 . 731 - 1379C Chute Adapter 4 , 736 - 0188 Flat Washer . 76 x 1.49 26 . 732 - 0611 Extension Spring 5 . 605 - 5193A Lock Washer 5 / 16 26 " Spiral Assembly LH 27 . 736 - 0119 605 - 5189A Flat Washer . 565 x 1.25 x . 02 24 " Spiral Assembly LH 28 . 736 - 0167 6 , 741 - 0493A Shoulder Screw Flange Bushing 30 . 738 - 0281 7 . 741 - 0245 Hex Flange Bearing 31 . 741 - 0309 Ball Bearing 8 . 784 - 0399 Flat Idler Bearing Housing 32 . 756 - 0178 9 . 712 - 0429 Lock Nut 5 / 16 - 18 Thd . 33 . 784 - 5632B Auger Idler Brkt . 10 . 712 - 3010 Hex Nut 5 / 16 - 18 Thd . 34 . 736 - 0320 Flat Washer . 38 x 1.38 11 . 736 - 0242 Bell Washer 35 . 784 - 5038B Skid Shoe 12 . 05931A Housing 36 . 710 - 0276 Carriage Screw 5 / 16 - 18 13 . 684 - 0065 Chute Crank Brkt . Impeller Assembly 37 . 784 - 5647 14 . 795 - 5226 Reinforcement Chute 38 . 605 - 5192A 26 " Spiral Assembly RH 15 . 710 - 0451 Carriage Bolt 5 / 16 - 18 x . 75 605 - 5188A 24 " Spiral Assembly RH 16 . 710 - 0459A 26 " Shave Plate Hex Cap Screw 3 / 8 - 24 x 1.59 39 . 784 - 5579A 17 . 710 - 0726 AB Screw 5 / 16 - 12 x 9.75 784 - 5581A 24 " Shave Plate 18 . 710 - 0703 Carriage Screw 1 / 4 - 20 x . 75 40 . 746 - 0897 Auger Clutch Cable 19 . 710 - 0890A Shear Bolt 5 / 16 - 18 x 1.5 41 . 736 - 0169 Lock Washer 3 / 8 20 . 712 - 0116 Lock Jam 3 / 8 - 24 42 . 741 - 0475 Plastic Bushing 21 . 712 - 3027 Hex Flange Nut 1 / 4 - 20 17
ModelsStorm7524 & Storm8526 20 39 38 Drive Clutch Cable 5 Auger Clutch Cable 4 37 13 7 6 3 J 3O 14 26 25 9 10 28 I 8 4 1 11 5 Auger Clutch Cable 35 I I I 1 1 18
ModelsStorm7524 & Storm8526 Ref . No PaN No . Ref . No . PaN No . Part Description Part Description 1 710 - 1652 25 715 - 0249 Roll Pin TT Screw , 1 / 4 - 20 x . 625 26 714 - 0143 Klik Pin 2 784 - 5688 Drive Cable Guide Bracket 3 784 - 5687A 27 684 - 0042C Auger Clutch Cable Bracket Friction Wheel Assembly 4 756 - 0625 Cable Roller 28 656 - 0012A Friction Disc Wheel 5 738 - 0924 29 684 - 0013B Hex Screw 1 / 4 - 28 Wheel Shift Rod Assembly 6 784 - 5630B 30 710 - 0599 rT Screw , 1 / 4 - 20 x . 5 Frame Assembly 7 741 - 0563 31 748 - 0190 Ball Bearing Spacer 8 736 - 0105 Bell Washer 32 684 - 0021 Friction Wheel Bracket Assy . 9 712 - 0116 33 732 - 0264 Lock Jam Nut Extension Spring 10 741 - 0598 34 712 - 0711 Jam Nut 3 / 8 - 24 Hex Flange Bearing 11 736 - 0188 35 746 - 0898B Drive Cable Flat Washerl - 12 784 - 5689A 36 738 - 0869 Axle 13 " Wheels Front Support Guide Bracket 13 710 - 0538A Lock Hex Screw 738 - 0830 Axle 16 " Wheels 14 736 - 0242 Bell Washer . 340 ID x . 872 OD 37 790 - 00010 Friction Plate 15 714 - 0474 Cotter Pin 790 - 00011 Friction Plate w / Extrusion 16 736 - 0160 Flat Washer . 536 ID x . 930 OD 38 735 - 0243B Friction Wheel Rubber 17 710 - 0809 39 718 - 0301A TT Screw , 1 / 4 - 20 x 1.25 Friction Wheel Hub 18 784 - 5590 Frame Shift Bracket 4O 618 - 0063A Friction Wheel Bearing 19 784 - 5638 Frame Cover 41 711 - 1364 Clevis Pin , 1 / 4 x 1.3725 20 710 - 1652 42 736 - 0142 Hex Washer TT Screw 1 / 4 - 20 Flat Washer , . 281 x . 5 x . 063 Flat Washer . 760 ID x . 50 OD 43 714 - 0507 21 736 - 0351 Cotter Pin , . 75 22 717 - 1445 44 712 - 0703A Gear Insert Nut , 5 / 16 - 18 23 714 - 0126 45 716 - 0102 Key Snap Ring 24 717 - 04094 7 - Tooth Shaft t Use more than one washer on either side , only if necessary to reduce axle - play . 3 WHEEL CHART 1 Model No , Wheel Size IRef . 1 ( Spacer ) Ref , 2 ( Wheel Comp , ) J Ref . 3 ( Wheel Comp , ) 7524 13x5 / 731 - 04044 634 - 04012 / 634 - 04011 / 8526 16 x 4.8 | 731 _ 04043 634 _ 04014 | 634 - 04013 | NOTE : A wheel assembly includes one tire , one air valve , one painted rim and two sleeve bearings . 19
ModelsStorm7524 & Storm8526 7 6 45 20 43 13 13 2O
ModelsStorm7524 & Storm8526 Ref . Ref . Part No . Part No . Part Description Part Description No . No . 24 . 1 . 731 - 04067 736 - 0451 Saddle Washer Handle Panel ( 8526 ) 25 . 2 . 731 - 04059 720 - 0284 Knob Handle Panel ( 7524 ) 26 . 3 . 710 - 1003 710 - 0449 Special B Screw ( 8526 ) Carriage Screw 5 / 16 - 18 , Gr . 5 27 . 4 . 725 - 1672 750 - 0963 Shift Rod Connector Lens Assembly ( 8526 ) 28 . 5 . 747 - 1136 711 - 0677 Ferrule Lamp Retainer ( 8526 ) 6 . 725 - 1658 29 . 710 - 0458 Halogen Lamp ( 8526 ) Carriage Bolt 30 . 736 - 0242 7 . 629 - 0059 Bell Washer Lamp Wire Harness ( 8526 ) 31 . 712 - 3068 8 . 726 - 0100 Hex L - Nut 5 / 16 - 18 Thd . Push Cap 32 . 720 - 0232 Shift Knob 9 . 720 - 0201A Chute Crank Knob 33 . 10 . 747 - 0737 710 - 3015 Upper Chute Crank Hex Hd . Cap Screw 1 / 4 - 20 34 . 11 . 684 - 0053B 714 - 0145 Click Pin Chute Crank Assembly , Lower 35 . 12 . 736 - 0185 FI - Wash . . 375 I . D . x . 738 O . D . 712 - 0116 Jam L - Nut 3 / 8 - 24 Thd . 36 . 13 . 714 - 0104 732 - 0193 Hairpin Clip Compression Spring 37 . 14 . 741 - 0475 736 - 0105 Plastic Bushing Spring Washer 15 . 705 - 5266 38 . 710 - 0459A 2 pc . Chute Crank Brkt . Hex Cap Screw 3 / 8 - 24 Thd . 39 . 749 - 0951 Lower Handle 16 . 736 - 0270 Bell Washer 40 . 749 - 0953A 17 . 712 - 0287 Hex Nut 1 / 4 - 20 Thd . Upper Handle , LH 41 . 749 - 0952A 18 . 736 - 0275 FI - Wash . . 344 I . D . x . 688 O . D . Upper Handle , RH 42 . 19 . 736 - 0119 L - Wash . 5 / 16 712 - 0271 Hex Sems Nut 43 . 20 . 710 - 0643 710 - 1880 Hex Patch Screw 5 / 16 - 18 Thd . Hex Hd . Cap Scr . 5 / 16 - 18 Thd . 44 . 21 . 710 - 0788 747 - 0620A TT - Tap Screw 1 / 4 - 20 Thd . Upper Shift Rod 45 . 22 . 684 - 0008A 720 - 0274 Shift Arm Assembly Foam Grip 23 . 747 - 0621 Lower Shift Rod 21
ModelsStorm7524 & Storm8526 31 14 22 28 / 15 6 18 26 23 Ref . Part No . Description Refi PaN No , Description No , No . 1 . 05896A Idler Brkt . 18 . 748 - 0360 Pulley Adapter 2 . 710 - 1245B Hex Hd . Cap Screw 5116 - 24 Thd . 19 . 754 - 0346 WBelt 3 / 8 3 . 710 - 0230 Hex Hd . Cap Screw 114 - 28 Thd . 20 . 754 _ 0430B Belt 4 . 710 - 0627 21 . 756 _ 0313 Hex Hd . Cap Screw 5116 - 24 Thd . Flat Idler Pulley 5 . 710 - 0654A TT _ TapScrew 3 / 8 - 16 Thd . 22 . 756 _ 0569 Half Pulley 6 . 710 - 0696 Hex Hd . Screw 3 / 8 _ 24 23 . 756 _ 0967 Auger Pulley 7 . 710 - 1652 24 . 756 _ 0986 TT _ TapScrew 1 / 4 - 20 Thd . Half Pulley 8 . 710 - 3005 Hex Hd . Cap Screw 318 - 16 Thd . 25 . 756 _ 0987 Half Pulley 9 . 712 - 0181 Jam Nut 26 . OEM _ 390 _ 987 Electric Start Kit 10 . 731 - 1324 Belt Cover 27 . 684 _ 04011 Spark Plug Cap 11 . 732 - 0710 Extension Spring 28 . 629 _ 0071 Extension Cord 12 . 736 - 0242 Bell Washer 29 . Part of Engine 13 . 736 - 0247 Fl _ Washer . 406 I . D . x 1.25 O . D . 30 . 732 _ 0705 Cable Control Wire 14 . 736 - 0270 Bell Washer 31 . 712 _ 3004A Flange Lock Nut , 5116 _ 18 Thd . 15 . 736 - 0331 Bell Washer 32 . 710 _ 04082 Screw , # 10 - 16 x . 75 16 . 736 - 0505 Fl _ Washer . 34 I . D . x . 50 O . D . 33 . 684 _ 04014A Engine Shroud ( Incl . Ref . 27 ) 17 . 748 * 0234 Shoulder Spacer 22
ModelsStorm7524 & Storm8526 i , , . . . . . . . . . I39 Ref . 33 Part No , Description 22 No . 1 . 710 - 04071 Carriage Screw 2 . 710 - 0262 Carriage Bolt 5 / 16 - 18 x 1.75 " 3 , 710 - 0805 Hex Bolt 5 / 16 - 18 x 1.5 " 4 . 710 - 0895 HiLo Screw 1 / 4 - 15 x . 75 " 6 5 . 710 - 3015 Hex Screw 1 / 4 - 20 x . 75 " 6 . 712 - 0429 Hex Lock Nut 7 . 712 - 3027 Hex Flange Lock Nut 8 . 731 - 04427 Upper Chute 9 . 731 - 0851A Chute Flange Keeper 10 . 731 - 1313C Cable Guide : Chute Tilt 11 . 731 - 1300B Lower Chute 12 . 784 - 5680 Handle Suppt . Bracket 5 / 8 RH 13 . 736 - 0159 5 / 16 Washer 15 . 736 - 0506 Special Washer 16 . 746 - 0896 Chute Control Cable 17 . 746 - 0901 Chute Cable w ! Clip 18 . 784 - 5594 Cable Bracket 19 . 784 - 5604 Chute Tilt Handle 10 20 . 684 - 0102 Handle Panel Assembly w / Tilt 21 . 710 - 0459A Hex Bolt 3 / 8 - 24 x 1.5 " 16 22 . 710 - 0599 TT Screw 1 / 4 - 20 x 0.5 " 23 , 711 - 0653 Clevis Pin 24 . 712 - 0116 Jam Nut 25 . 784 - 5682 Handle Suppt . Bracket 3 / 8 RH 26 . 714 - 0104 Cotter Pin 27 . 732 - 0145 Spring 28 , 732 - 0193 Spring 29 . 732 - 0746 Torsion Spring 30 . 735 - 0199A Rubber Bumper 31 . 736 - 0105 Bell Washer 32 . 784 - 5681 Handle Suppt . Bracket 3 / 8 LH 33 , 736 - 0509 Special Washer 34 . 747 - 0877 Cam Rod 35 . 748 - 0362 Cam : Handle Lock 36 . 748 - 0363 Pawl : Handle Lock 37 . 784 - 5619A Shift Handle 38 . 784 - 5679 Handle Suppt . Bracket 5 / 8 LH 39 . 714 - 0507 Cotter Pin 40 . 746 - 0778 Z Fitting Cable 41 . 710 - 0116 Hex Jam L - Nut 3 / 8 - 24 Thd . 42 . 684 - 0037B Handle Ass'y LH 43 . 684 - 0036A Handle Ass'y RH 23
ModelStorm7524 12 17 \ 10 5 13 9 1,1 \ 8 13 18 R _ . Part No , Description No . 1 . 618 - 0414A Auger Gearbox Ass'y Comp . 2 . 618 - 0123 Housing Assembly , RH 3 . 618 - 0418 Housing Assembly , LH 4 . 710 - 0642 Screw , 1 / 4 - 20 x . 75 5 . 711 - 0908A 24 " Auger Axle 6 . 714 - 0161 Hi - Pro Key 7 . 715 - 0143 Spirol Pin 8 . 717 - 0526 Worm Shaft . 75 O . D . 9 . 717 - 0528 Worm Gear 20T 10 . 718 - 0186 Thrust . 75 I . D . x . 415 O . D . 11 . 721 - 0325 Plug 1 / 4 x . 437 12 . 721 - 0327 Oil Seal . 75 I . D . x 1.73 O . D . 13 . 736 - 0351 FI - Wash . . 760 I . D . x 1.50 . D . 14 . 736 - 0369 FI - Wash . . 508 I . D . x 1.00 . D . 15 . 736 - 0445 FI - Wash . . 76 I . D . x 1.50 O . D . 16 . 737 - 3000 Lube Fitting 3 / 16 Drive 17 . 741 - 0662 Flange Bearing 18 . 741 - 0663 Flange Bearing 24
ModelStorm8526 12 17 15 \ 10 5 \ 13 9 t 14 X 18 8 13 Ref . Part No , Description No . 1 . 618 - 0415A Auger Gearbox Ass'y Comp . 2 . 618 - 0123 Housing Assembly , RH 3 . 618 - 0418 Housing Assembly , LH 4 . 710 - 0642 Screw , 1 / 4 - 20 x . 75 5 . 711 - 0909A 26 " Auger Axle 6 . 714 - 0161 Hi - Pro Key 7 . 715 - 0143 Spirol Pin 8 . 717 - 0526 Worm Shaft . 75 9 . 717 - 0528A Worm Gear 20T 10 . 718 - 0186 Thrust . 75 x . 415 11 . 721 - 0325 Plug 1 / 4 x . 437 12 . 721 - 0327 Oil Seal . 75 x 1.73 13 . 736 - 0351 FI - Wash . . 760 x 1.5 14 . 736 - 0369 FI - Wash . . 508 x 1.0 15 . 736 - 0445 FI - Wash . . 76 x 1.50 16 . 737 - 3000 Lube Fitting 3 / 16 Drive 17 . 741 - 0662 Flange Bearing 18 . 741 - 0663 Flange Bearing 25
MANUFACTURER'S LIMITED WARRANTY FOR : 0 TPD R _ ILT ' _ _ The limited warranty set forth below is given by Troy - Bilt LLC d . Troy - Bilt does not extend any warranty for products sold with respect to new merchandise purchased and used in the or exported outside of the United States , its possessions United States , its possessions and territories . and territories , except those sold through Troy - Bilt's authorized channels of export distribution . " Troy - Bilt " warrants this product against defects in material e . Replacement parts that are not genuine Troy - Bilt parts . and workmanship for a period of two ( 2 ) years commencing f . Service completed by someone other than an authorized on the date of original purchase and will , at its option , repair or service dealer . replace , free of charge , any part found to be defective in g . Transportation charges and service calls . materials or workmanship . This limited warranty shall only apply if this product has been operated and maintained in No implied warranty , including any implied warranty of accordance with the Operator's Manual furnished with the merchantability of fitness for a particular purpose , product , and has not been subject to misuse , abuse , applies after the applicable period of express written commercial use , neglect , accident , improper maintenance , warranty above as to the parts as identified . No other alteration , vandalism , theft , fire , water , or damage because of express warranty , whether written or oral , except as other peril or natural disaster . Damage resulting from the mentioned above , given by any person or entity , installation or use of any part , accessory or attachment not including a dealer or retailer , with respect to any product , approved by Troy - Bilt for use with the product ( s ) covered by shall bind Troy - Bilt . During the period of the warranty , the this manual will void your warranty as to any resulting exclusive remedy is repair or replacement of the product damage . as set forth above . Normal wear parts or components thereof are subject to The provisions as set forth in this warranty provide the separate terms as follows : All normal wear parts or sole and exclusive remedy arising from the sale . Troy - Bilt component failures will be covered on the product for a period shall not be liable for incidental or consequential loss or of 90 days regardless of cause . After 90 days , but within the damage including , without limitation , expenses incurred two year period , normal wear part failures will be covered for substitute or replacement lawn care services or for ONLY IF caused by defects in materials or workmanship of rental expenses to temporarily replace a warranted OTHER component parts . Normal wear parts and product . components include , but are not limited to : batteries , belts , Some states do not allow the exclusion or limitation of blades , blade adapters , grass bags , rider deck wheels , seats , incidental or consequential damages , or limitations on how snow thrower skid shoes , shave plates , auger spiral rubber , long an implied warranty lasts , so the above exclusions or and tires . limitations may not apply to you . HOW TO OBTAIN SERVICE : Warranty service is available , In no event shall recovery of any kind be greater than the WITH PROOF OF PURCHASE , through your local authorized amount of the purchase price of the product sold . Alteration service dealer . To locate the dealer in your area , check your of safety features of the product shall void this warranty . Yellow Pages , or contact Troy - Bilt LLC at P . O . Box 361131 , You assume the risk and liability for loss , damage , or injury to Cleveland , Ohio 44136 - 0019 , or call 1 - 866 - 840 - 6483 or 1 - you and your property and / or to others and their property 330 - 558 - 7220 , or log on to our Web site at www . troybilt . com . arising out of the misuse or inability to use the product . This limited warranty does not provide coverage in the This limited warranty shall not extend to anyone other than following cases : the original purchaser or to the person for whom it was a . Engine or components thereof . These items may carry a purchased as a gift . separate manufacturer's warranty . Refer to applicable HOW STATE LAW RELATES TO THIS WARRANTY : This manufacturer's warranty for terms and conditions . limited warranty gives you specific legal rights , and you may b . Log splitter pumps , valves , and cylinders have a separate also have other rights which vary from state to state . one year warranty . c . Routine maintenance items such as lubricants , filters , IMPORTANT : Owner must present Original Proof of blade sharpening , tune - ups , brake adjustments , clutch Purchase to obtain warranty coverage . adjustments , deck adjustments , and normal deterioration of the exterior finish due to use or exposure . Troy - Bilt LLC , P . O . BOX361131CLEVELAND , OHIO44136 - 0019 ; Phone : 1 - 866 - 840 - 6483,1 - 330 - 558 - 7220 | <urn:uuid:c80f6e57-c626-47bc-8a92-9189140c426c> | CC-MAIN-2015-14 | http://www.hammerwall.com/Manuals/Troy-Bilt/Description/7524/Troy-Bilt%20Storm%20Snow%20Thrower/L0403309/ | 2015-03-29T10:36:04Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131298464.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172138-00226-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.751448 | 15,664 |
SIGGRAPH 2012 Courses should emphasize learning, developing residual skills, and suggesting directions for further personal development. Sales presentations, user-group meetings, or other specialized discussions are not appropriate formats for courses and are more appropriate as Exhibitor Tech Talks or Birds of a Feather sessions.
Courses should have a well-defined pedagogical goal and identify a specific, unified set of skills or knowledge that the course is intended to communicate. For freer discussions, submit a proposal to Panels.
Courses are either short (1.5 hours) or half-day (3.25 hours) sessions. We recommend one lecturer for a short course and one or two lecturers for a half-day course.
You may submit multiple course proposals on the same topic (for example, a Fundamentals course and a follow-up Applications course) if you feel the time-frame is too short for your topic.
In addition to courses related to traditional topics in computer graphics and interactive techniques, SIGGRAPH 2012 encourages proposals for courses that explore:
- Game techniques, game play, and game post-mortems. Game technology and production are core elements of all SIGGRAPH 2012 programs.
- Graphics, interactive techniques, and game technologies for mobile devices.
Log in to the SIGGRAPH Information System, select "Begin a New Submission," and then select "create" for the General Submission form. You will be asked for:
- Basic information about your submission (page 1)
- Permissions (page 2)
- A presentation format (page 3). To propose a Course, please select Course as your presentation format. You will then be taken to the forms specific to this presentation format. Please see below for more information about required information and materials for this presentation format.
Your submission must include the following materials and information:
- Basic submission information, including lecturer names, affiliations, and contact information, as well as title of the course, and a single-sentence summary (50 words or fewer).
- One "representative image" suitable for use in the conference web site and promotional materials. See Representative Image Guidelines.
- Statement of permissions to use the submitted materials.
- Course Description, Syllabus/Schedule including duration of topic sections and lecturers.
- Length of the course (1.5 hours or half day: 3.25 hours).
- Intended audience, prerequisites, and level of difficulty.
- Bio Form. Please provide short bios for each of your lecturers or panelists. At most, a course should consist of a moderator and 3-4 lecturers. We recommend one lecturer for a short course and two lecturers for a half-day course.
- Sample of course notes. This is an outline of materials and a representative sample of the type of Courses Notes that you plan to provide if your course is accepted. The review sample need not be long or complete, but it should be clear and concise, and it should demonstrate the expected quality of the learning materials that will be available during and after the conference.
Course Notes Examples
- Special presentation requirements, if any.
- Submission categories and keywords to help ensure your submission is reviewed and juried appropriately.
Optional: You may also provide examples of other materials, demonstrations, or exercises that support the course topics.
Non-native English speakers may use the English Review Service to help improve the text of submissions. Please note that this process takes time, so plan far ahead.
All submitters must complete the Submission and Authorization Agreement (formerly the Acceptance Agreement) before the submission deadline. Incomplete submissions will not be reviewed or accepted.
Educator’s Resources Submission option. Those submitting content to a SIGGRAPH conference have the option of donating materials of educational value to ACM SIGGRAPH online resources for the benefit of the education community. Learn more
For more information about uploading files for your submission, please see Uploading Files.
For additional submission information, please see F.A.Q. (tab above).
Courses can fulfill one of several educational roles. The first is an introduction to an area, suitable for someone with little, or no, background in that area. These courses can range from introductory topics through more advanced concepts. The important criterion for this type of course is that it should guide the attendee through the material in a sensible way. A second type of course introduces the attendee to an area that is related to graphics but is not considered "core" graphics. In this case, the materials must clearly demonstrate how a computer graphics researcher would benefit from the information in the course. Finally, a course may consolidate a new and emerging research trend. This type of course can help facilitate transfer to practical applications and guide new researchers in the area.
Well attended, strong courses may be re-submitted in subsequent years. Recently taught courses must provide justification for why the course should be repeated. If the course was taught a while ago, please explain why the material should be visited again, and what the advancements in the area are.
Some reasons courses are rejected:
1. Example notes or slides do not communicate key ideas in a clear and informative manner.
2. The materials focus on only a narrow subset of the approaches in a particular area. The course outline should provide a comprehensive overview of a specific area.
3. The material has been covered sufficiently in previous years, or the material is not of interest to a broad audience.
Jurors are asked to evaluate your submission using four criteria: Concept, Novelty, Interest, and Quality. The final submission score is based on a combination of these factors. For example, a submission that is high quality, has broad appeal, and contains something new is likely to be accepted, while a submission that is incremental, of interest to only a small number of people, and poorly written will probably be rejected.
How exceptional are the ideas, problems, solutions, aesthetics, etc. presented in this submission? How coherently does the submission convey its overall concept? Is the concept similar to existing ones, or does it stand out? This criterion is particularly applicable to submissions that put together existing technologies into a single course proposal (for example, demos, animations, art pieces). Submissions of this type, where the individual technologies are not necessarily new but their combination is, are evaluated on both the final product and how well-proposed technologies integrate to meet the desired goals. Many submissions in this area are rejected because they do what existing systems do, and they do not demonstrate that the proposed approach will produce a superior course.
How new and fresh is this work? Is it a new, ground-breaking approach to an old problem, or is it an existing approach with a slightly new twist? You must demonstrate to the jury that your course is sufficiently different from other approaches to the topic.
Will conference attendees want to attend this course? Will it inspire them? Does it appeal to a broad audience? This is partly a measure of how broad the potential audience is and partly a measure of the overall clarity and novelty of the proposal.
Quality, Craft, and Completeness
This is a measure of the course proposal's quality of expression, clarity of thinking, and how clearly and compeltely it explains the course and its intentions.
You will be notified of acceptance or rejection of your course proposal in mid-April 2012.
You will be able to update your basic submission information and any final materials so that it can be included in the conference program and web site. This information needs to be finalized two weeks after acceptance, in early May 2012. Please be prepared to deliver your final versions of your information and work on or before that date.
You must provide an updated version of the course description and schedule/syllabus for inclusion in the conference web site and program.
You must provide final course notes by 18 May 2011.
You will receive information on when and where your course will be presented.
Course presenters will receive recognition as specified in the SIGGRAPH 2012 Recognition Policy.
Deadline for all General Submission forms and upload of materials.
22 February - 25 March
Assignment and online review of all General Submissions.
Jury meeting for all General Submissions.
30 March - 22 April
Final selection and scheduling for General Submissions.
Acceptance and scheduling information or rejection notices are sent to all General Submissions submitters.
Deadline to make any changes to materials for publication.
Final Course Notes due to Stephen Spencer.
SIGGRAPH 2012, Los Angeles
What is General Submission?
SIGGRAPH 2012's General Submission is a unified mechanism for Talks, Posters, Panels, Courses, Emerging Technologies, and Studio submissions. This allows you to create a single submission form that includes multiple proposed presentation formats about your work (for example, you could submit a proposal for an Emerging Technologies demo along with a proposal for a Talk about the technology). And it allows us to review all submissions at the same time, so we can select the best range of content for the conference.
General Submission does not include Technical Papers and Art Papers, because those go through a more formal journal-quality peer-review process. General Submission also does not include the Art Gallery, the Computer Animation Festival, SIGGRAPH Dailies!, or the various contests and competitions, because those require different mechanisms for submission and jurying.
What is Late-Breaking Submission?
Late-Breaking Submission is similar to General Submission, but it offers a later submission deadline, so people who complete their work in the spring can submit their work to the conference. For logistical reasons, only Talks and Posters are eligible for Late-Breaking Submission, and there may be a limited number of openings for them.
What is the General Submission deadline for SIGGRAPH 2012?
21 February 2012 at 22:00 UTC/GMT. To determine what time that is where you are, you can use a converter such as The World Clock.
What is the Late-Breaking Submission deadline for SIGGRAPH 2012?
1 May 2012 at 22:00 UTC/GMT. To determine what time that is where you are, you can use a converter such as The World Clock.
Can I submit after the deadline?
No. The deadlines are absolute. All submissions receive equal consideration up to the published deadline. Please respect other contributors and allow time for unforeseen circumstances in your submission, including (but not limited to) network connectivity, equipment failures, job impacts, life or family events, etc. These are outside of SIGGRAPH 2012's direct control and cannot be accommodated fairly.
Why is this so absolute?
Firstly, the answer is fairness and equal opportunity for consideration. This respects the contribution process for all submissions. Secondly, the deadline was set as late as possible while still allowing sufficient time for quality review, production, and delivery at SIGGRAPH 2012. Immediately after the submission deadline, we start processing and reviewing the submissions on a very tight time schedule, and we cannot accommodate stragglers.
How will SIGGRAPH 2012 address server-side network failures?
SIGGRAPH 2012 is only responsible for the availability of the submission server. If necessary, the conference chair will authorize an appropriate adjustment (and will prominently post notices at several locations online). All other network failures between your location and the SIGGRAPH server will not affect the submission deadlines. Please submit early to avoid connectivity-support problems or last-minute submission-server performance issues.
In an effort to conserve server resources and bandwidth, file uploading and downloading may be disabled as the submission deadline nears. If uploading and downloading are disabled, all submitters will be required to use the MD5 Checksum mechanism. We don't know the exact time when this might take effect. It will be determined by server loads to ensure that all submitters are able to access their submission(s).For complete information, see MD5 Checksum of Uploaded Materials.
The SIGGRAPH 2012 English Review Service failed our schedule, so it is SIGGRAPH's fault that our proposal is late. Can I have an extension?
No. The English Review Service makes no guarantee for service turn-around. It is also administered separately from the conference program. Please schedule your work appropriately. For the best chance of having your submission reviewed by the English Review Service, please make sure it is submitted and marked "complete" in the submission system at least 14 days before your program's submission deadline.
How should I write up work that is based on a recent paper I wrote but extends that work?
Please reference the original paper(s) and clearly explain how the new work differs from, extends, or improves the previous work.
Can I submit work that I did for my thesis?
Yes. See Work Submitted Elsewhere (below) if some or all of your thesis work has been formally published.
My company sells educational software. Can we make a sales presentation?
No. The Exhibition is the best place for that.
I have a great idea for a presentation, but I'm not sure if it's appropriate (too basic, advanced, fuzzy, etc.) for SIGGRAPH 2012.
Please send it in and let the SIGGRAPH 2012 jury make the decision.
Can my company have a dedicated session in which we present a collection of talks about various aspects of a large project?
Possibly. You are welcome to submit a collection of related submissions. However, the scheduling and grouping of accepted material will ultimately be decided by the SIGGRAPH 2012 committee.
My Technical Paper was rejected. Can I submit an abstract about the same work for possible presentation elsewhere in the conference?
The general submission submission deadline will be closed by that time. However, if you continue to develop the work and get new results, you are welcome to submit Late-Breaking Work.
My company has a great new product that is of general interest to the SIGGRAPH community. Can I submit an abstract about it?
A simple product announcement or sales pitch would not be appropriate for the conference program. However, a methods or systems description that presents the engineering design and algorithms behind the product could be appropriate. If you are an exhibitor, and you are interested in a presentation on all aspects of your new product, please contact Exhibition Management about organizing an Exhibitor Tech Talk.
English is not my first language. Can I submit and present in another language?
No, but ACM SIGGRAPH's International Committee can provide some help with English. Please see the English Review Service.
I'm a sixth-grade teacher, not an expert in computer graphics or interactive techniques, but I have designed something using computer graphics software, interactive techniques, games, etc. that really helps my math, English, dance, etc. students. Should I submit it?
Yes. SIGGRAPH educators are very interested in how new techniques can be used for pedagogical purposes. Submissions in this area that have the best chance for acceptance demonstrate clearly how learning is improved with computer graphics or interactive techniques.
Why is it necessary to specify an intended audience for a course? The intended audience should be the average SIGGRAPH-conference attendee, no?
No. The attendee population is very diverse. Your detailed audience identification helps both proposal evaluation by the review committee (program balancing) and proper marketing to interested conference attendees.
We have a great idea for an educational session on an unusual topic. Should we submit it?
SIGGRAPH 2012 seeks innovation both in topic and presentation! New ideas that relate to some aspect of computer graphics and interactive techniques are most welcome. Your proposal should clearly explain this relevance.
What are the session titles for SIGGRAPH 2012?
We don't know yet. The jury selects submissions without regard to sessions and titles. After the selection process is finished, we will group talks into sessions. This means that unlike other conferences in which the session topics are set in advance, the jury never needs to accept or reject submissions in order to fill slots. This also means that occasionally there are sessions that lack a strongly coherent theme.
Should all submissions be prepared anonymously, like Technical Papers?
No. The review process is single blind, which means the reviewers will know who the authors are, but the authors will not know who the reviewers are. Your submission should be as close to its final form as possible (see Completeness, Work in Progress, below), including the names of all collaborators on the work and their institutions. Potential conflicts of interest are taken into account when submissions are assigned to reviewers.
Can I (or my company) submit more than one work to SIGGRAPH 2012?
Yes, please do. The jury will evaluate and decide on each (unrelated) submission separately. Please bear in mind, though, that the committee will be evaluating all of the accepted submissions as a whole. So it is not appropriate to break up a potentially strong piece of work into smaller components in an effort to increase the number of works you have accepted.
Can I submit a work to be considered for multiple formats?
Yes, please do. SIGGRAPH 2012 encourages synergy between different parts of the conference. The general submission form allows you to check off any number of presentation formats for a single submission. For example, you may be willing to install your hardware and/or give a talk about it and/or present a poster about it. The jury will decide which format(s) to accept.
Are partial or incomplete submissions considered?
Incomplete submissions will not be reviewed. Contributors are required to minimally meet all submission requirements by the published deadline. The jury will evaluate the merit of each completed proposal as it was submitted at the deadline, even if it does not meet the author's personal quality objectives. Please allow enough time to meet your own quality goals.
Can I submit a Technical Paper and also submit the same work to the General Submission process?
Yes. SIGGRAPH 2012 encourages synergy between the Technical Papers and other parts of the conference. For example, you may wish to submit an installation or demo of the project you describe in your paper. The general submission form has a checkbox to indicate work submitted elsewhere; please check this box and explain that the work was submitted as a Technical Paper for SIGGRAPH 2012.
If your work is accepted as a Technical Paper, a general submission of an additional talk or poster will not be accepted, unless the talk or poster describes details or aspects that are not included in the paper. In this case, make sure the general submission clearly states how the proposed talk or poster differs from the paper.
Work Submitted Elsewhere
Can I submit work that I've published or presented, or has been accepted for publication or presentation, elsewhere?
Yes, though with some caveats. First, you must indicate the prior appearance via the checkbox on the general submission form and provide a description of how and where the work appeared. Second, be aware that SIGGRAPH attendees expect to see things they've never seen before. The jury will decide if the novelty and impact of the submission warrant acceptance despite its appearance elsewhere. Generally speaking, it's OK if your work has been presented in a small workshop or colloquium, and it's OK if your work has been published in journals in other fields. However, work that has appeared in a major computer graphics journal or a mainstream computer graphics conference should not be submitted.
Can I submit work to SIGGRAPH 2012 and also submit a more complete description to other conferences (for example EGSR, SGP, or SCA) while the submission is still in review?
The other conference or journal is likely to consider this an unacceptable "dual submission", so you must check with them. If they are OK with it, SIGGRAPH 2012 is OK with it. But if you intend to submit this work elsewhere before the conference, you must indicate this intent via the checkbox on the general submission form and provide a description of where you intend to submit and when it would appear.
Can I submit work that was presented at a previous SIGGRAPH conference?
The general submission form has a checkbox that requires you to indicate this fact. The jury will decide if the novelty of the submission warrants acceptance regardless of prior presentation or publication. Submissions in most formats require novelty and will not be accepted unless the work has progressed since last time. However, Courses and Panels may remain valuable from year to year and will be considered by the jury, but proposals should clearly offer compelling reasons for repetition.
What is the purpose of submission keywords and categories?
The jury is comprised of experts from many areas of computer graphics, and choosing appropriate keywords helps ensure that the best-qualified jurors will review your work in the early rounds of the jury selection process. Please do NOT submit the same piece multiple times under different categories using different online submission numbers. You should select whichever keywords most closely match your work. The submission categories help the jury group submissions together for apples-to-apples comparisons.
What is a poster, anyway?
A poster was traditionally formed from a collection of individual letter-sized sheets of paper, each containing a slide or image, all attached to a piece of posterboard. With modern graphic-design applications, it is possible to create a single large-format document and print it on a large, single sheet of paper. Attendees find single-sheet posters signficantly easier to read and understand; please avoid using multiple letter-sized sheets whenever possible.
At the conference, posters will be mounted on display panels, with two posters on each 8-foot x 4-foot display panel. SIGGRAPH 2012 will supply the display panels and push-pins (though presenters may want to bring a few push-pins of their own if they want to pin up flyers or other information in addition to the poster).
For more information, see Posters.
There are so many SIGGRAPH programs. I don't know which one to submit my work to.
SIGGRAPH 2012 includes a variety of publication programs: research papers (Technical Papers, Art Papers), educational programs (Talks, Courses, Posters, and Panels), exhibition programs (Computer Animation Festival, Real-Time Live!, SIGGRAPH Dailies!, Art Gallery, Emerging Technologies, and Studio). It is useful to compare your submission to publications from previous SIGGRAPH conferences.
The research paper programs (Technical Papers, Art Papers) are for theoretical or critical work that thoroughly cites relevant previous work and rigorously demonstrates the validity of its conclusions. Although all SIGGRAPH submissions are peer-reviewed, research papers undergo a more formal, journal-quality review process and are published in citable archives.
The research paper programs are differentiated from each other by their subject matter. Technical Papers focus on the science and engineering aspects of computer graphics and interactive techniques. Art Papers focus on the social and cultural aspects of art and art-making.
The educational programs (Talks, Courses, Posters, and Panels) let you educate the graphics community about your work and related topics without writing a formal publication. In these programs, SIGGRAPH 2012 attendees learn about interesting, useful, and novel techniques and principles in all areas of computer graphics and interactive techniques, including art, design, animation, visual effects, video games, interactive music, research, interactivity, and engineering. The educational programs are differentiated by format and emphasis:
- Talks are 20 or (rarely) 40-minute presentations. Talks can present
anything novel that would interest and inspire SIGGRAPH 2012 attendees: late-breaking research developments, ideas still in progress, the creative and technical thinking behind recent games and films, and more.
- Courses are longer (1.5 or 3.25 hours) instructional sessions. A
SIGGRAPH Course teaches a topic of interest to the computer graphics community and is typically presented by international experts in the field.
- Posters offer a light-weight, low-tech method for presenting student, in-progress, and late-breaking work. They are displayed throughout the conference; poster authors meet and discuss their work with attendees during Poster Sessions. The Posters program also hosts the ACM Student Research Competition.
- Panels are forums for discussion, disagreement, controversy, and audience interaction. They are 1.75 hours long, and include a moderator and three or four panelists.
Finally, you can exhibit your creations in the various exhibition programs. Clips from any type of computer-generated video sequence (computer animation, visual effects, video games, scientific visualizations, etc.) can be submitted to the Computer Animation Festival. Real-time applications can be shown in the Real-Time Live! program. Very short clips showcasing specific work (such as a model, a shader, or an animation) can be presented at SIGGRAPH Dailies!. Interactive demos or installations can be submitted to the Art Gallery (if they are artistic in focus) or Emerging Technologies (if the innovation is primarily technical). If you have developed a new and interesting method for other people to create things, the Studio would be the appropriate program.
My time-based media presentation makes use of commercially recorded music. Is this OK? What if I use my own rendition of someone else's song?
Using commercially recorded music in an animation is only acceptable if you acquire synchronization rights for the recording you are using, or performance rights if you use your own rendition of someone else's song. Such rights are your responsibility, and SIGGRAPH will not purchase these rights for you. While in many cases music rights can be obtained inexpensively, well-known popular music is often difficult to license. For that reason, many submitters choose to work with composers and have scores designed specifically for their work.
Synchronization licenses must be secured for inclusion of copyrighted musical compositions in film or video presentations. Securing synchronization rights involves approvals from both the music publisher and the record label that owns the original master recording. This process is sometimes straightforward, sometimes painful, and sometimes, often for well-known popular recording artists, impossible. In the past, submitters of accepted pieces have had to cancel their participation in the SIGGRAPH conference due to music-licensing issues. Other submitters have had to replace their music tracks in a way that compromised their work. For these reasons, all submitters are encouraged to secure music rights for their work as early as possible in the production process. For more information on music licensing, and to find the necessary contacts for the recording you would like to use, see the ASCAP and BMI web sites:
You can also consider using public-domain music; various web sites provide listings and even some downloads. But be aware that although a song itself may be in the public domain, a particular recording of that song could be copyrighted.
There's an illustration in my paper of Elvis in "Clambake," which I got on the internet. Is that okay?
No, either get written permission to use the image or take it out. A reference in the text is OK.
Some of the supplmentary material we intend to use in our submission is available or will be available as a publication. Do we need to discuss this in our submission?
Yes. Please discuss whether you have permission from the publisher to include this material in your SlGGRAPH 2012 published materials, and if not, what alternate form you will provide.
I work for a large company, and I can’t get the Submission and Authorization Agreement reviewed by our attorneys before the submission deadline.
We will not be able to accept submissions without a properly executed Submission and Authorization Agreement. This is to ensure that the process is fair to all submitters as well as to protect the work of our submitters. No extensions will be allowed for this. We recommend you download the PDF of the Submission and Authorization Agreement and review it with your legal department well in advance of the submission deadline.
My company’s attorney has questions about the agreement. Who should they contact?
They should send a message to Conference Administration, and an actual human being will respond as quickly as possible.
My company policy prohibits me from signing the Submission and Authorization Agreement. What should I do?
On the submission form, you can delegate a representative to execute your agreement. Please remember it is your responsibility to ensure that the acceptance agreement is executed before the submission deadline or your submission will be deemed incomplete and NOT reviewed by the jury.
Review and Upon Acceptance
Do you have any advice on how to write my abstract so that my submission will be accepted?
First of all, make sure your submission conforms to the submission guidelines. The jury has a small amount of time to review a large number of submissions. To maintain fairness, we have to be very efficient. Submissions that do not abide by the submission guidelines will be rejected without review. Authors should prepare their abstracts according to the ACM SIGGRAPH formatting instructions. For more information about ACM publication requirements, please review Instructions for Authors.
Non-native English speakers may wish to make use of the English Review Service to check for grammar and readability before submitting their abstracts. Please don't wait until the last moment to use this service.
It should be immediately obvious at the beginning of your abstract what the new contribution is. Just one or two sentences such as: "We present a new method that's N times faster." Or: "We have conducted a new study comparing A and B." Or: "Effect X in feature film Y presented a new challenge." Or something similar.
Try to focus on one or two key ideas. Remember that the jury members have very limited time to "get it," so keep it simple. If you propose to present work that extends previous work of your own, cite the previous work and explain what is different. For example: "We build on our previous work by ..." If there has been previous work by several others, choose one major work to cite and state why your work is different. For example: "Unlike previous work, such as , we ..."
How does the jury select pieces?
All submissions are juried together, and there are no strict rules for acceptance. The jury primarily looks for a combination of innovation and excellence. A longer list of traits the jury typically looks for includes originality, artistic achievement, technical accomplishment, technical innovation, production value, creativity, design, educational value, aesthetic appeal, community building, and social responsibility.
What makes a good proposal great?
Topics and proposals come in all shapes and sizes. Well-written proposals effectively communicate their ideas so that reviewers can assess the submission's benefits to SIGGRAPH 2012 attendees. Strong proposals clearly answer questions regarding relevance, content, and background.
The reviews we received from the jury were highly positive and outstanding, and we still didn't get accepted. Why is this?
Ideally, everyone would have a chance to present their best work at the conference. It would certainly make the selection process easier! Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Many great proposals do not make the cut because we lack rooms, resources, and schedule time. Here are some possible reasons for rejection:
- The work is not sufficiently outstanding to justify its presentation length.
- The submission did not show enough improvement over previous presentations.
- The submission overlapped with better proposals in a similar area.
- The submission overlapped with topics that have bigger anticipated attendance in a similar area.
- The work was not strong or relevant.
Does SIGGRAPH 2012 tend to favor or avoid specific levels of material (beginning, intermediate, advanced)?
SIGGRAPH 2012 will serve a wide international audience of many capabilities. The richest, most engaging submissions are desired, no matter what their level.
Can I submit earlier papers or technical reports as materials?
Yes, earlier papers or technical reports may be submitted as supplementary materials. However, the jury is under no obligation to read these materials.
Can I submit a URL pointing to my work rather than the work itself?
No. It's OK to include a URL in your submission so that we can get additional information about your work if needed. But in order to ensure fairness and adherence to our deadline restrictions, the jury will not examine the information at that URL when evaluating the submission.
Do I have to submit a supporting video of my work?
You're not required to, but it is often a good idea. The power of a video during the jury process cannot be stressed enough. The jury has a small amount of time to review a large number of submissions. Seeing the video can answer many questions that the jury might ask after just reading the abstract. It is a shame if the phrase "I wish they had provided a video" is uttered during the jury meeting. If your submission has an interactive, animation, or simulation component, we strongly encourage you to submit a video demonstrating your work in action, as it is very difficult to evaluate your work without this.
My submission is about production visual effects, but the studio won't give permission to submit supporting images or video because the movie hasn't been released yet. What should I do?
First, be certain that you will have permission to show the actual material at the conference.
Upload whatever demo, test, or stand-in images or video that you can in order to illustrate the techniques in question. The submission with the uploaded materials should stand alone as much as possible so that reviewers can properly evaluate it. Include a note explaining that the final images or footage will be shown at the conference.
In some cases some studios that don't allow uploads will allow a special delivery of a DVD to show the jurors at the jury meeting. If so, contact the SIGGRAPH 2012 Production and VFX team to discuss possible arrangements. However, as much as possible, the content on the DVD should serve only to provide confirmation to the jurors of the final quality of the work, rather than primary technical material to review.
I know your "real" email address. Is it okay to write you there?
No. Please use this email form. This ensures that all members of our committee are properly copied on your messages. Our response quality will invariably be higher if you respect this convention.
Should I use a specific filename convention for my submission material (for example, abstract, image, video)?
No. You do not have to worry about this. The SIGGRAPH Information System (SIS) will take care of that for you when you upload your material.
I'm having trouble uploading the high-resolution digital image required for online submission. What should I do?
If, due to bandwidth restrictions, you cannot upload a high-resolution image or supplemental movies, please instead upload a lower-resolution version. If we need to include a higher-resolution version for jury review or publication stills, we will contact you to make arrangements. For more details, see Uploading Files.
My email address will be changing soon. How can I notify you of the update?
You will be able to change your email address in the online submission system. Please take advantage of this feature to ensure you are notified of your submisison status in a timely manner. This will also give you the best chance of meeting our publication deadlines.
I've completed the online submission form, but the system still allows me to edit my account. Am I done?
Yes. However, you are allowed to edit your online submission account until the submission deadline.
What file formats are acceptable for video submissions?
We only accept uploaded videos in QuickTime MPEG-4 or DivX Version 6 formats, and the file size should not exceed 100 MB. The file must be uploaded using the online submission system. The Computer Animation Festival and Live Real-Time Demos have different requirements for video submissions. If you are a Computer Animation Festival submitter, please review the Computer Animation Festival Submission Guidelines for details. See Real-Time Live! if you are submitting to that program.
I'm trying to upload my video file through the online submission system, and I can't tell if it's working. It's been over an hour since I clicked the Submit button.
Uploading a large video file requires a significant amount of time even on a fast network connection. Even if it does not look like anything is happening, your movie file very likely is still uploading. Please test the system (and ideally, upload your final video) many days in advance of the submission deadline to gauge the upload time required for your material. Note that network performance may decrease close to the deadline due to the large number of submissions. Once your material is uploaded, a web page will indicate the successful upload, and you can return to the electronic submission page to re-download your material and verify that it uploaded properly. For more details, see Uploading Files.
Do you accept anything other than PDF for text-based submissions? It is easier for me to provide files in [your file type here]. Everyone can read those, right?
No. Please submit in PDF format. We expect our reviewers to support at least one review type that is self-contained and available on many operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, Unix, Linux, etc.). PDF provides easy standardization (universal viewer support, graphics, embedded fonts, etc.) for both the reviewer and the proposer. For example, it preserves intentional formatting by the submitter. Even ASCII clear text is not "universal" due to carriage-return differences, column widths, lack of graphics, etc.
My video files are larger than 100 MB. What should I do?
Do everything possible to make them smaller. The total size of your uploads should be below 100 MB. Jurors in various locations around the world will need to download the submitted videos, and we need to keep the total size of all submissions reasonable.
First, try decreasing the image resolution and/or using a better compression technique and/or settling for higher compression at the cost of somewhat reduced image quality. If you have tried very hard to do all this but still can't get the size down, contact us and explain the specifics of your situation in detail, and we'll see what we can work out. | <urn:uuid:80741846-2edd-438a-a9a2-69122584ae5e> | CC-MAIN-2015-14 | http://s2012.siggraph.org/submitters/courses | 2015-03-29T17:19:01Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131298660.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172138-00058-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936608 | 7,853 |
Geoffrey Hill: Unparalleled Atonement
The recently published edition of Geoffrey Hill’s Selected Poems appears to be an attempt by Yale University Press to atone for Hill’s unpardonable lapse from print on these shores, and I must begin by applauding them for doing so. It is also — as I think all selected editions are, to some extent — an attempt to introduce, or re-introduce, the writing of this unparalleled poet to the reading public. Perhaps no re-introduction is more warranted, necessary, or welcome. Every reader of poetry ought to be acquainted with Hill’s verse, and a slimmer, less overwhelming selected edition is certainly more appealing to many readers than the task of sifting through his individual collections, many unavailable in the United States. Unfortunately, those who are unfamiliar with Hill will find no guide to his work in this volume. Yale's edition contains no foreword or introduction, nor a note from any editor, nor even a few words by the author — only a table of contents listing the poet’s collections, in chronological order, into which the reader blindly dives.
Although they include poems from (nearly) every collection, the editors of this volume clearly prefer Hill’s early career. Two of his first four collections — Mercian Hymns and The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy — are the only ones which appear uncut; a mere twenty-two poems from Hill’s final two book-length collections are included; and his most recent collection, A Treatise of Civil Power, is ignored altogether. (The last slight is perhaps pardonable, as this volume was lifted, down to its page layout, from a Penguin UK edition that appeared before Treatise. Still, the omission shows a sad lack of care on Yale’s part.) Some of the selections that the editors made strike one as immediately comprehensible — in trimming Speech! Speech! and including the Mercian Hymns whole, particularly — but many of the individual choices were otherwise perplexing. Several times I felt that editors had cut key pieces, such as in Tenbrae and The Triumph of Love, without a sense that there was any underlying rationale. Although it remains a valuable edition, and one that allows a point of entry into a large, daunting body of work, a poet of Hill's caliber certainly deserves better.
For more than half a century, Geoffrey Hill has produced verse acclaimed by critics, beloved by fellow poets, but still little-known to most of the American reading public. Some book reviewers, such as William Logan, have argued that this disparity is due to Hill’s erudite density — that the poet engages such a menagerie of allusions and references, such complexities of thought and emotion, that even intelligent readers find themselves unable to comprehend. It is an all-too-common criticism laid against Hill and his work and, to my mind, it is nothing more than a convenient scapegoat: there are simply too many poets writing today who are widely read and well-loved despite their apparent difficulty (Jorie Graham, CD Wright, and John Ashbery come to mind).
There are certainly other elements at play that prevent the high esteem for Hill from translating to the poetry arriving in readers’ well-prepared hands. Notable among them, I believe, is Hill’s honest, intellectual, and unfashionable engagement with religion and the Christian tradition. His unabashed faith is a faux pas in the age of postmodernism. It is an element to be dismissed, or questioned, or patronized, but not to be given justice as a meaningful basis for poetry. This irreligious posture is a bias that is stronger in circles of “serious poetry” than in the culture at large, but, within that subgroup of critics, is acceptable and widespread: in an April 2009 review of Paul Mariani’s Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, Denis Donoghue in The New Criterion scolds Mariani for not scrutinizing whether Hopkins’ vocation hampered his poetic gifts. One can infer that Donoghue’s opinion was in the affirmative, and I believe a “flaw” similar to that of Hopkins would be found by many critics in the work of Geoffrey Hill.
I admit that Hill’s unabashed expressions of faith were an obstacle for me as well. Because of the religious themes, I was disinclined to return to the poems, to struggle with the difficulties of a poet whose philosophical premises were so unlike, even antithetical to, my own. However, I did eventually come to realize that my irreligious disposition is a prejudice to be overcome, not unlike any other. It is foolish to wish that the work were otherwise, as Donoghue seems to do of Hopkins. Hill’s work can as little be separated from his religious nature as wetness could from water: one is the essence of the other, the texture of its existence. What I happily discovered, once I overcame that dissonance in myself, was the sheer power of his work. This is not the story of a religious conversion. I remain now the way I began, but I had to forcibly open myself to the possibility of an engagement — intellectual, emotional, aesthetic — with such spiritual and religious poetry. Like his great influence Gerard Manley Hopkins before him, the value of Hill’s work is as much in the elaboration of a brilliant mind considering matters of faith as it is in his poetic language and its willfully crafted power.
Still, it is true that the poems are extremely dense, difficult, and complex. What ought to give readers hope in the face of their confusion is that the density one finds in this work is not ad hominem, does not refer to an inaccessible interior life. As W.H. Gardner wrote in his Introduction to the Fourth Edition of Hopkins’ complete poems, “His dark passages are never entirely opaque, and the meaning, when it is made out, will usually (as he said it should) ‘explode’.” It was true of Hopkins as it is of Hill, and in this way Hill's work stands apart from that of his contemporaries: the impenetrability of many modern poets is due in large part to the use of language as an abstract medium like paint, clay, or music; Hill remains emphatic that the fundamental role of language is communication and expression, no matter how difficult the form.
As is the case with so many artists, the best preparation for grappling with Hill’s poetry can be found in his own critical writing, particularly in the new Oxford edition of his Collected Critical Writings . Like his verse, the essays are examples of a brilliant, encyclopedic mind at work. They often require having read more than some of the classics and make liberal use of any number of lesser-known theologians, poets, and thinkers. They are not guides to his poetry in any sense — Hill does not explain or annotate his own work — but they do engage with the same problems of language and value as the poems, and many of the same key concepts. On several occasions I found that an essay's explication of a concept could have easily applied as well to a poem or collection. In the essay “Poetry as ‘Menace’ and ‘Atonement’,” I came across a particularly useful passage for a reading of Hill’s entire corpus. He writes, “the technical perfecting of a poem is an act of atonement, in the radical etymological sense — an act of at-one-ment, a setting at one, a bringing into concord, a reconciling, a uniting in harmony.” In other words, the reconciliation of content with form, the painstaking act of expression contained in verse, the “at-one-ment,” is the moment at which the content and form are as one, perfectly fitted to one another in terms of the words and their arrangement into lines and stanzas.
It is similar to Hopkins’ idea (itself perhaps the basis) of “inscape,” but where the inscape of a poem seems to be drawn from the essential, almost Platonic, forms in the world, and is thus mimetic, Hill’s atonement is a wrought thing, man-made, constructed of language with the mind, heart, and will. Hill further expands his idea to take on an ethical bearing,
I would suggest, however, that the proof of a poet’s craft is precisely the ability to effect an at-one-ment between the "local vividness" and the "overall shape," and that this is his truth-telling. When the poem "comes right with a click like a closing box," what is there effected is atonement of aesthetics with rectitude of judgment.
At both his best and at his least successful, Hill’s concept of atonement can always be detected as an attempt to atone whatever disparate elements are under scrutiny in the poem. It is only a guiding premise, however, not a skeleton key to grasping every implication and meaning. Once understood, there is almost always still work to be done. But coming to understand Hill's concept of atonement will alleviate, to some degree, the frustrated encounter with a poem that treats historical moments or religious faith with equal focus and imagination as personal emotions and biographical events.
Hill’s career began in 1959, with the publication of his remarkably accomplished For the Unfallen. It was the middle-age of modern literature, an uncomfortable moment of cultural schism, and the height of the influence of New Criticism. It was an era in which biography was finding acceptance in verse and in which formal mastery, erudition, and ambiguity were the unparalleled, semi-scientific standards by which poetry was being judged. Between the vaunted ambiguity of William Empson, Hopkins’ inscapes, and Hill’s atonement, there is a certain affinity of unification that seems more than accidental. All of these are reflected in the two early volumes by Hill and all remain at least in echoes throughout Hill’s career. Yet even the very early work seems to overcome the sterility and melodrama that is associated with the clinical New Critics or the confessional poets of that age, and I tend to think it was the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins that pushed him away from the tropes of that era. Consider sections one and two from Hill’s “Genesis,” which opens both this selected edition as it did his first major collection, For the Unfallen,
Against the burly air I strode,
crying the miracles of God.
And first I brought the sea to bear
Upon the dead weight of the land;
And the waves flourished at my prayer,
The rivers spawned their sand.
And where the streams were salt and full
The tough pig-headed salmon strove,
Ramming the ebb, in the tide’s pull,
To reach the steady hills above.
The second day I stood and saw
the osprey plunge with triggered claw,
feathering blood along the shore,
to lay the living sinew bare.
And the third day I cried: “Beware
The soft-voiced owl, the ferret’s smile,
The hawk’s deliberate stoop in air,
Cold eyes, and bodies hooped in steel,
Forever bent upon the kill.”
One can hear the influence of Allen Tate, to a degree. The opening lines of Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” — “Row after row with strict impunity / The headstones yield their names to the element” — are echoed slightly in the cadences of “Genesis.” The word “burly” strikes me particularly as echoing Hopkins’ line from “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” “Burdened, in wind’s burly and beat of sea.” Hill was young, of course, and it is common to see young poets struggle with their influences. There is a nascent concept of atonement, though not as completely integrated as it would come to be, in the merging of first and final act here, and especially in “bodies hooped in steel” that gracefully encompasses both human and serpent, murder of both body and soul.
In this debut collection, and this poem in particular, we find a mastery of form finding the “at-one-ment” with content: the violence of nature breaking rhymes strongly inferred by “saw” and “claw;” the serpent described but yet-unnamed, “hooped in steel, / forever bent upon the kill,” a choice which reinforces the newness of the “miracles” of existence and their unification with the ultimate miracle, evoked later in the poem with “where Capricorn and Zero cross” and “the phoenix burns as cold as frost,” finally given expression in section five with, “by Christ’s blood are men made free / though in close shrouds their bodies lie / under the rough pelt of the sea.” Every choice of image and form engages the overall theme, and each other.
The four early collections, For the Unfallen, King Log, the astounding Mercian Hymns, and Tenebrae, are Hill’s most accessible work. The poems of these four books are intelligent and dense, but lyrically pleasurable without any need for comprehensive understanding of allusion or analysis. The Mercian Hymns won Hill his first universal critical acclaim. The collection is a series of short prose-poems that meld Hill’s own life with that of Offa, medieval king of Mercia, the region where Hill was raised.
For the Unfallen, King Log, and Tenebrae are more traditional collections of lyric verse, in which Hill’s vivid language and erudition are well-balanced by his ear for meter and use of traditional forms. His “Lachrimae” sequence of sonnets from Tenebrae, in which the poet grapples with issues of faith and pathos, is a particularly moving example of this balance of intellect, emotion, and musicality — the finale, “Lachrimae Amantis,” is on par with any sonnet in the language, yet incomprehensibly not included in the Selected Poems,
What is there in my heart that you should sue
so fiercely for its love? What kind of care
brings you as though a stranger to my door
through the long night and the icy dew
seeking the heart that will not harbour you,
that keeps itself religiously secure?
At this dark solstice filled with frost and fire
your passion’s ancient wounds must breed anew.
So many nights the angel of my house
has fed such urgent comfort through a dream,
whispered “your lord is coming, he is close”
that I have drowsed half-faithful for a time
bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse:
“tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him.”
The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy and, more emphatically, Canaan, represent a shift in Hill’s poetic approach. Where before the poems were, in the most basic sense, personal lyrics, they become at this stage of Hill’s career a type of public lyric; they solidify around the concept of “at-one-ment,” making the immediacy of societal and historical elements as central as the traditional lyric self. Peguy is a short but masterful poem sequence that considers the life of Catholic thinker Charles Peguy, and by extension the conflicts between personal and public: the way “history commands the stage” and the “violent contrariety of men and days.” There is still a lyric voice here, an occasional moment of reflection by the speaker that winds its way through the work, as in, “No wonder why we fall to violence out of apathy.” But it is fainter than before, and under a new type of critical scrutiny: “who are ‘we,’ since history is law.”
Canaan solidifies Hill’s new approach, and took more than ten years to complete, for reasons personal as well as poetic. It is a jarring collection, one that is specifically English in its cultural touchstones. Canaan is certainly not “political,” although one can see from even a quick gloss of his titles — “Mysticism and Democracy,” “Churchill’s Funeral,” “Of Constancy and Measure” — that it does deal with issues of a political nature, in the Aristotelian sense of human interaction, organization, and ethics. Hill coins this public world “respublica,” after the Roman term for the state, and the Selected Poems includes his poem of that same name,
The strident high
of misrule. It is
what we stand for.
of common men:
spent in the ruck
their remnant witness
is granted them
like a pardon.
And other fealties
broken as named —
its archaic laws
and destroyed hope
that so many times
is brought with triumph
back from the dead.
Like so much of Canaan, the poem is both an admonition and a corrective, leaving open the possibility of a Christian-esque redemption. The lines are short, enjambed both for unease of reading — reinforcing the strain of speech — and also to create poignant lines such as “of misrule. It is,” and “distinction. Courage.” The poem, despite its apparent prosaic nature; despite its essayistic formulations, is yet unclear. Clearly there is a technicality of meaning in words such as “witness,” which seems to stand in this poem as the crux of possible redemption. In his essay, “Language, Suffering, and Silence,” Hill discusses “witness,” which in this poem is “granted them / like a pardon,” a “remnant” of their former “courage.” He writes in the essay, “the achieved work of art is its own sufficient act of witness,” and goes on to elaborate a “theology of language” which would examine the claim that “the shock of semantic recognition is also the shock of ethical recognition.”
Whether Hill actually achieves either this proposed theology or the effect of semantic and ethical shock in either this poem or the whole of Canaan is for each reader to discern (I believe that the poems vary in quality, but the collection is greater than the sum of its parts). It seems certain that this is his goal: a radical act of witness through poetry, a specifically public act, one that can bind semantics and ethics. Yet this high-concept premise, this engagement with the less beautiful aspects of human nature, does not, as might often be the case, necessarily preclude moments of gorgeous verse; such as these lines from the second section of “De Jure Belli Ac Pacis” (or, “Law of War and Peace”),
The iron-beamed engine-shed has chapel windows.
Glare-eyed, you spun. The hooks are still in the beam;
a sun-patch drains to nothing; here the chocked
blade sluiced into place, here the abused blood
set its own wreaths.
Time passes, strengthening and fading.
The following three collections — The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech! and The Orchards of Syon — remain fully engaged with respublica, if obliquely. It is worth noting here that, in a matter of just a few collections, Hill has completely revolutionized his formal approach. Seeing this transformation unfold in a volume such as this is one of the real joys of a slimmer, more readable selected edition. In Tenebrae, we encounter traditional lyric forms, sonnets and short free-verse pieces in standard, if complicated, syntaxes; in Canaan, Hill shifts to the uncomfortable semantic structures of postmodern free-verse. He incorporates the gaps of semantics and logic that are a hallmark of postmodern poetry, and that would only intensify from here forward.
The Triumph of Love strikes one as being uncomfortably personal at times — yet, in its syntax and range of allusion, in its allegorical motifs, it is a heightened form of the respublica. Traversing Hill’s leaps of logic and syntax are necessary to engage this collection; whole passages make sense only if the reader’s mind is accosted by the movement from sentence to sentence and line to line, such as in section V:
Obstinate old man — senex
sapiens, it is not. What is he saying;
why is he still so angry? He says, I cannot
forgive myself. We are immortal.
Where was I? Prick him.
This is certainly a reflexive lyric meditation: Hill is taking on the voice of a critic or other observer, regarding himself and his own work. It is public in that the gaze originates in many different points of view, many voices; yet it is of course still personal, a self-critical and dramatic mind at work. On one hand there are ample instances of this postmodern meta-textual self-criticism; on the other hand, there are also permutations of lyric choruses such as “I lose / courage but courage is not lost,” descriptions of the English countryside, including the haunting “a livid rain scarp,” as well as references to Augustine, Angelus Silesius, Bach, and Mierendorff. The modes of these disparate elements seem too incompatible to succeed in a single work, and yet they coalesce through the breadth of Hill’s imagination and control. The variety of modes are mediated by the attempt to overcome and transcend both Modernism and Postmodernism through a refiguring of the Biblical psalms, whose content is as various as Hill’s is. He writes, in section XXIII,
What remains? You may well ask. Construction
or deconstruction? There is some poor
mimicry of choice, whether you build or destroy.
But the psalms — they remain
This seems to me to be the very heart of this collection, yet it was one of the sections that were omitted. The editors seem to have failed to recognize this as a key, that it expresses the dynamic of Modernism and Postmodernism, of the persistence of the lyric and the religious. They focus instead on other repeated themes and motifs in the sequence. It’s an inherent weakness of selected editions: that one is a slave to the judgment of invisible editorial minds. In the case of Triumph of Love, their choices seem to have damaged the cumulative power of Hill’s moving sequence.
While Triumph of Love seems to be an honest, if still critical, reckoning, Speech! Speech! is a pastiche: a scathing comedy of the fatuitous language of our modern world. The collection is almost shockingly contemporary in its style. The poems incorporate silences and absences within their syntax and construction in a way that resembles the best of late twentieth century experimental verse, and Hill’s dark humor and penchant for puns is somehow reminiscent of Frederick Seidel as well as D.A. Powell, as in section 26:
No time at all really | a thousand years.
When are computers peerless, folk
festivals not health hazards? Why and how
in these orations do I twist my text?
APPLY FOR FAST RELIEF. Dystopia
on Internet: profiles of the new age;
great gifts unprized; craven audacity’s
shockers; glow-in-the-dark geriatric
wigs from old candy-floss (cat-calls, cheers).
Starved fourteenth-century mystics write of LOVE.
When in doubt perform. Stick to the much-used
CHECKMATE condom (laughter, cries of “shame”).
One can see the mind free-forming these connections, but the tissue is invisible; the thought process has to be inserted by a reader. There is a whole new, ecstatically contemporary set of references in this passage: the pun on peer-to-peer internet; an amusing brand of condoms; the advertisements for dyspepsia medicine. They are unserious by any standard, and alone any one of them would likely fail. Cumulatively, though, they attack our lazy use of language broadly so that it strikes a deeper criticism. The poems of Speech! Speech! also use an internal set of phrases, such as “living as they have to,” that appear and reappear in what could be considered a type of musical rounds. They assume the voice of a critic in postmodern times — “self-making otherness by recognition” — as well as the poet in rebuke at others — “ACCESSIBLE / traded as DEMOCRATIC, he answers / as he answers most things these days | easily” — and there are also a set of unfamiliar metrical markers: vertical lines that seem to indicate a pause (as in the previous passage, where it seems to mark a punch line) and stress marks that indicate a pattern for reading aloud (of course, the spoken word motif should be no surprise, given the collection’s title), both of which were used similarly by Hopkins before Hill.
In one of his essays, Hill explains what he sees as the relationship between language and society, “My language is in me and is me; even as I, inescapably, am a miniscule part of the general semantics of the nation; and as the nature of the State has involved itself in the nature that is most intimately mine.” Thus, a perceived sickness of language, a perversity in language, is thereby representative of and causing an illness of the society: the self is linked to, and made at-one with, the society through language.
Speech! Speech! boils over with an almost entirely unfiltered anger, a bitterness that cannot be entirely obscured by the humor and word games. It is the major long poem that is least injured by the work of the editors. What is lost in the process of editorial selection is not necessarily missed, which is not to say that it was inconsequential. For the uninitiated, or those whose philosophical outlook does not resemble that of Hill, the collection will be a stumbling block. A natural response will be frustration and confusion — if there is any consolation to be found in a first encounter, it is that your frustrations are both intended and shared by the poet.
The Orchards of Syon, on the other hand, awards a welcome relief. This long poem sequence is still allusive — I’m sure at this point that hardly needs to be said — but Orchards is not “wantonly obscure,” as Hill charges himself to be in Speech. These represent a more grounded-in-the-world approach to the themes of value, freedom, and poetry. The premise is a consideration of the orchards at Syon House, London, a location intimately connected to British imperialism and national identity. Hill’s return to descriptions of the natural world provide the most brilliant and immediately enjoyable passages, such as section XIV,
The full moon, now, rears with unhastening speed,
sketches the black ridge-end, slides thin luster
downward aslant its gouged and watered scree.
Awe is not peace, not one of the sacred
duties in meditation. Memory
finds substance in itself.
The beautiful dynamic natural scene initiates and is balanced by an equally moving consideration of inner peace and the imaginative space of memory. The closing lines of section XXIII foreshadow Hill’s latest themes, of life’s twilight and the value there might be in a life’s work.
Last days, last things, loom on: I write
to astonish myself. So much for all
the plain speaking. Enter
sign under signum, I should be so lucky,
false cadence but an ending. Not there yet.
Perhaps due to considerations such as this, or maybe because in retrospect this is the last in a consecutive series of long poems, The Orchards of Syon strikes me at times strongly as the culmination of a larger project. If that were so, then it would prove to be the final entry of a trio that began with The Triumph of Love — all three volumes attempt to atone history and self, intellect and emotion, private recollection and public speech, imaginative space and natural spaces. It is worth considering as one makes their way through these three titles in the selected edition. Allow the phrases and references that you recognize to set the themes for your reading.
Believing those three collections are a unit means displacing Hill’s next collection Scenes from Comus, a tri-part poem sequence, meditating on the masque Comus, written by a young and yet unknown John Milton. The collection deals with, as Hill writes, “the personality as a mask; / of character as self-founded, self-founding; / and of the sacredness of the person.” Milton’s original masque dealt most directly with womanly virtue, or virginity, and Hill’s meditation does as well, if only obliquely via the expanded idea of the “sacredness of the person.” Even those who are well-read will not necessarily have encountered Milton’s work before, and it being so central to an understanding of Hill’s poems certainly deflates the potency of his verse. The sequence does not — as the previous three did — stand on its own. From the free-floating logic of many poems, one reckons that they represent Hill’s own mind while viewing the masque, as in section 26,
The corrupter, the abuser, the liverish
ravager of domestic peace. The soi-disant
harmless eccentric. Nobody’s harmless.
Neither is comedy. Maybe the polka
injured thousands. In this depleted time
revive me, take me to a blue
movie, hold my hand in the dark.
Presumably, the speaker views Comus on stage, the would-be ravager of our virtuous heroine, and from that sight begins a line of associations that leads him or her to desire escape from the ethical clarity of the masque out into our morally-unconfined contemporary culture. It’s really a deft narrative maneuver, with the touch of absurd humor; but neither the individual poems nor the sequence ever build enough emotional or intellectual depth to overcome the arbitrariness of the premise. Like The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy (which appears entirely unedited), Hill’s Comus is an equation in which the reader must know the variable (Milton, Peguy) in order to reach a completely fruitful reading. Unlike Peguy, though, Hill’s consideration of Milton is so aslant, there is no enjoyment or narrative, as there was in the Peguy poem. In the end, it is arbitrary rather than frustrating, and the editors chose well in pruning it to barest stalk.
In the final collection to be included in this edition, Hill returns to the free-standing short lyric poems with which his career began: Without Title is full of sadness and grief, which burst through beautiful lyrics as if the poems themselves were sobbing. Take, for example, “In Ipsley Church Lane (I),”
More than ever I see through painters’ eyes.
The white hedge-parsleys pall, the soot is on them.
Clogged thorn-blossom sticks, like burnt cauliflower,
to the festered hedge-rim. More than I care to think
I am as one coarsened by feckless grief.
Storm cloud and sun together bring out the yellow of stone.
But that’s lyricism, as Father Guardini
equably names it: autosuggestion, mania,
working off a chagrin close to despair,
ridden by jealousy of all self-healed
in sexual love, each selving each, the gift
of that necessity their elect choice.
Later, as in late autumn, there will be
the mass-produced wax berries, and perhaps
an unearthed wasps’ nest like a paper skull,
where fragile cauls of cobweb start to shine.
Where the quick spider mummifies its dead
rage shall move somnolent yet unappeased.
The form and tone is reminiscent of “September Song” from King Log in its elegiac and self-conflicted turns, and the poem engages perfectly the questions it wants to ask: what is the connection between painterly distance and feckless grief? What type of beauty exists in spite of sadness? How is lyricism a form of madness? These are probably the least allusive pieces of the poet’s career — or, rather, these are the poems in which the connections to the past are least essential. The atonement here is not of the public world and the personal but of the way experience is both painfully individual and yet shared. It is another unexpected turn from a poet whose career seems to be, if nothing else, a series of dramatic shifts and successful remakings. Though essentially incomplete without A Treatise of Civil Power, the editors have done well enough in this edition to give readers a glimpse into the course of Hill’s long and multifaceted career.
I could have begun this review by reciting a chorus of critical praise from every corner of the English-speaking world, but that would have brought this essay to bear on just the surface of the issue at hand, occasioned by the Selected Poems. What lies beneath all the well-earned applause is something far more important: not the poet whose genius and erudition we admire and upon whose motives we postulate, but the work itself — too often forgotten in the praising of authors who live and breathe.
What will be left, when the reviews and the criticism are nothing but ink-blackened dust, will be the finest body of poetry produced in this age. This selected edition, despite its several omissions and flaws, bears this out. Geoffrey Hill is our great poet, as much as Whitman and Milton were to past generations. I make this claim not lightly, and not without overcoming my own suspicious, resistant nature: greatness is a claim too easily bandied about in critical reviews; too often it is claimed lightly that so-and-so is the most accomplished certain species of verse-maker in this particular ever-narrowing timeframe. If one has to erect too many qualifications to argue for greatness, they very likely are not.
Hill, however, may have no living peer; may even have no counterpart in the last century. There is no qualification necessary. This is not to say that he has never written a poem that was flawed, or failed — he is human, and one does not want to give the impression of infallibility. However, more than any other poet writing today, Hill’s vision of poetry is powerful, meaningful to every edge and nook of our society, and idiosyncratic: that radical atonement of emotion, intellect, history, and language, is an unparalleled achievement in our time.
I cannot help but seek a closest counterpart, in terms of the course of a career; and as I do so, I continually return to Milton. It is somewhat astonishing how similar the two are: both precocious, stern young poets; both, in their way, reconciling the workings of God to man; both masters of short lyrics and long forms; both known for their verse as well as their essays (Hill recently won the Capote Award for Literary Criticism for his Collected Critical Writings), and both attempt not only to make beautiful things but to make great and beautiful works, to produce a body of writing that would “explode.” It is likely — in fact it is almost certain — that Hill’s vision of poetry will affect future poets no less than Milton’s did. Yet, still, the comparison does a disservice to both poets, not by a paling in comparison, but because each of their singular accomplishments require no contrast, and because each have no equal. | <urn:uuid:9df3e6e5-83c8-4c8b-870c-4ea774bc82b4> | CC-MAIN-2016-30 | http://www.criticalflame.org/verse/0509_pritchard.htm | 2016-07-23T09:06:37Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257821671.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071021-00030-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96355 | 7,732 |
A farmer’s decision on whether to control a pest is usually based on the perceived threat of the pest locally and the guidance of commercial advisors. Therefore, farmers in a region are often influenced by similar circumstances, and this can create a coordinated response for pest control that is effective at a landscape scale. This coordinated response is not intentional, but is an emergent property of the system. We propose a framework for understanding the intrinsic feedback mechanisms between the actions of humans and the dynamics of pest populations and demonstrate this framework using the European corn borer, a serious pest in maize crops. We link a model of the European corn borer and a parasite in a landscape with a model that simulates the decisions of individual farmers on what type of maize to grow. Farmers chose whether to grow Bt-maize, which is toxic to the corn borer, or conventional maize for which the seed is cheaper. The problem is akin to the snow-drift problem in game theory; that is to say, if enough farmers choose to grow Bt maize then because the pest is suppressed an individual may benefit from growing conventional maize. We show that the communication network between farmers’ and their perceptions of profit and loss affects landscape scale patterns in pest dynamics. We found that although adoption of Bt maize often brings increased financial returns, these rewards oscillate in response to the prevalence of pests.
A farmer’s decision on whether to control a pest is usually based on the perceived threat of the pest locally and the guidance of commercial advisors. Therefore, farmers in a region are often influenced by similar circumstances, and this can create a coordinated response to a pest. This coordinated response, although not intentional, can affect ecological systems at the landscape scale. Using the European corn borer as an exemplar system, we develop a framework to explore the feedback mechanisms between pest populations and farmers’ decisions. We show that the form of communication network and the farmers’ perceptions of profit and loss influence the decisions made on pest control. Our work has implications for other systems, whereby the ecology of a system is driven by individual decision makers following similar heuristics and experiencing similar influences. Indeed, by understanding the feedback mechanisms between pest populations and farmers’ decisions we can predict landscape-scale dynamics and determine how to manipulate these to sustain control.
Citation: Milne AE, Bell JR, Hutchison WD, van den Bosch F, Mitchell PD, Crowder D, et al. (2015) The Effect of Farmers’ Decisions on Pest Control with Bt Crops: A Billion Dollar Game of Strategy. PLoS Comput Biol 11(12): e1004483. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004483
Editor: Mark M. Tanaka, University of New South Wales, AUSTRALIA
Received: February 23, 2015; Accepted: July 27, 2015; Published: December 31, 2015
Copyright: © 2015 Milne et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Data Availability: Data on Bt uptake, ECB prevalence and calculated losses from ECB are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Detailed data on ECB numbers are available from Hutchison et al. DOI: 10.1126/science.1190242. Data on crop stats are available from the USDA.
Funding: This research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) grant number S5198. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
The European corn borer (Ostrinia nubilalis) (ECB), a serious pest of maize, cost the American economy an estimated 1 billion US dollars annually at its worst in the early 1990s [1, 2]. In 1996, Bt maize, a transgenic crop that expressed insecticidal proteins from the soil-dwelling bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, was introduced for control of the pest. Since then, farmers have had to choose whether to plant conventional or Bt maize (Fig 1). Their decisions rest on the economic viability of Bt, given that future infestations of ECB cannot be predicted. Specifically, farmers must predict whether increased returns from Bt will exceed the technology fee, a financial premium for buying the transgenic seed [3, 4]. In some situations, farmers believe that the economics favor conventional seed; more than half of them believe that the price of Bt maize is too high to merit purchase [1, 5], particularly if their crops have not recently been infested.
A schematic illustrating the influences on farmers' decisions on what varieties of maize to grow, and how this impacts the population dynamics of the European corn borer and the profitability of farming at a landscape scale. The width of the green arrows indicates the approximate appropriation of agricultural resources.
Hutchison et al. showed that Bt maize generated an estimated $230 million annual benefit to maize growers in Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Much of this economic benefit (75%) accrued to farmers who did not plant Bt maize; these farmers did not pay technology fees but still benefitted from the area-wide suppression provided by those farmers who cooperated to use Bt to reduce pest densities . Other systems, such as cotton, have shown similar benefits from area wide suppression of pests .
As such, the control of ECB can be evaluated through game theory because the mechanisms of cooperation, such as reciprocity, reputation and spatial structure are embedded in the farmer networks that mediate the population dynamics of the pest [7–10]. The system is akin to a ‘snow drift’ game . The snow drift game is a metaphor for a situation whereby the benefit that an individual, in this case a farmer, obtains for a given strategy depends on the actions of others. In particular, if a farmer chooses to grow conventional maize in a landscape where the pest is supressed by other farmers growing Bt maize, then this individual will benefit from the pest suppression without paying the technology fee. On the other hand, in a situation where the pest is not suppressed at landscape scale it is likely to be more profitable for an individual to grow Bt maize.
When deciding whether to plant Bt maize, farmers negotiate between ‘expert’ and ‘local’ knowledge (Fig 1). For example, Kaup’s hierarchy of influences showed maize-seed dealers and crop consultants appeared to have substantial influence, neighbors had moderate influence, and extension agents had little influence on the farmers’ decisions to plant Bt maize. More than 50% of farmers who anticipated having ECB problems chose to plant Bt maize. The results emphasize an important principle in pest control: farmers’ perceived risks, rather than actual losses, play an important role in pest management [5, 11, 12]. This principle of 'risk perception' is crucial. If farmers’ underestimate the risk of infestation and grow conventional maize then the pest will flourish and diminish yields. If on the other hand farmers exaggerate the risk and plant too much Bt maize then there is an increased risk that the pest will adapt to its new host and threaten the long-term production of maize.
Here we build a framework for exploring the intrinsic feedback mechanisms between the actions of humans and the dynamics of pest populations in a structured landscape, and use the European corn borer in maize as an example. Our example is intended to demonstrate the plausibility of the framework and so is illustrative rather than predictive. Our models are kept simple to both aid the elucidation of our results and to reduce the runtimes of the simulations. This particular example was chosen because there is a rich source of data to support it. We build a mechanistic model of the population dynamics of ECB in a 700-km long strip of the US Corn Belt. The models are parameterised to reflect a maize system similar to that in the part of the US Corn Belt that passes through Minnesota and Wisconsin. The model of the population dynamics includes the life cycle, dispersal and ecology of the pest including its relationship with the pathogen Nosema pyrausta (Microsporidia: Nosematidae), which is one of the most important natural enemies of the ECB; this parasite reduces the number of surviving offspring, and is cited as the primary reason for the observed cycle in the population density [13–16]. The landscape model is spatially-explicit and parameterized so that one half has similar county sizes, farm sizes, and density of maize crops to those in Minnesota and the other to those in Wisconsin. We show how this model captures the behavior of the ECB-population dynamics in the observed empirical data at a coarse spatial scale. Importantly, analysis of the model shows that even when the infected population is reduced to small numbers, it retains the capacity to recover and so the natural control persists.
We then introduce a sociological layer to the model. We simulate the processes by which individual farmers decide whether to grow Bt maize or conventional maize. The decision is based predominantly on likely profit: the probability that a farmer will chose a given strategy is based on the information that he or she has on the profits achieved under Bt maize and conventional maize in recent seasons. For any given farmer, the source of this information will depend on the network of communication. Here we explicitly model four different networks of communication. In particular we explore how the form of the network affects the uptake of Bt maize over time, the pest population dynamics and the long term profits of the farmers in the landscape. We show that the form of the network impacts the feedback mechanism between pest populations and farmers' decisions that affect landscape-scale dynamics. We show that independent decision makers that follow similar heuristics and are influenced by the same circumstances can create an apparent coordinated response which affects ecological systems at landscape scales. This coordinated response is not intentional, but is an emergent property of the system.
Below we present the components of the model framework, including the pest dynamics model, the farmer decision model and four different communication networks. We then use this framework to explore the effect of the different communication networks and the responsiveness of the farmers to loss on (i) the pest dynamics, (ii) the uptake of Bt maize and (iii) the long term losses of the farmers.
European corn borer and Nosema pyrausta model
We developed a model to explore the population dynamics of ECB and its natural enemy, the pathogen Nosema pyrausta, and the impact of ECB on maize crops in a landscape. This landscape was based on national agricultural census statistics from 1997, 2002 and 2007 on county sizes, farm sizes and numbers, harvested areas and the area of maize grown in Wisconsin and Minnesota [17–19]. We used a grid of 300 x 1400 cells that equates to a 150km x 700km strip. Each cell represents 25 ha (0.5km x 0.5km), similar to the typical size of maize fields in the region. One half of the simulated landscape was parameterised to be similar to Wisconsin and the other to Minnesota. We partitioned the two states into counties, with county sizes reflecting the actual distribution of county sizes in each state. We defined farms as connected cells in which arable crops could be grown. The number of farms in each simulated county, and the distribution of their sizes, reflected the true distribution of arable land on farms in each state. Simulated farms were fitted into the county, along with uncropped areas at random (see S1 Text). The landscape was generated stochastically and so is a realisation of a random process.
Crops were assigned county by county. On average, maize accounted for 44% of the cropped area in Minnesota and 37% in Wisconsin [17–19]. Cropped cells were then allocated at random as maize or other. Each year, the proportion of maize in a given county was resampled, and cropped cells allocated again at random to maize or other. This process allowed for a proportion of fields to have maize crops grown consecutively and others to have rotations with a non-host crop for ECB. We made the simplifying assumption that ECB only develops in grid cells with maize. In each of these cells we use an abundance-based population model to describe the development of a population of ECB that is susceptible to the pathogen N. pyrausta and one that is infected. Our model did not include the effect of other natural enemies of ECB or climate, and so was not expected to accurately describe the historic dynamics of the ECB. Rather, its purpose was to capture the population cycle attributed to N. pyrausta and to simulate the effect of Bt maize on larval survival.
In the model, eggs hatch into larvae that pass through five instar stages. The survival of the larvae through to pupation is density dependent. We assume that the Bt toxin reduces the number of larvae that reach instar 3 by 99.9% . We do not consider insecticides as a control measure as these are considered largely ineffective because after the neonate stage, the ECB larvae are concealed within the maize plant, thus avoiding direct contact with an insecticide's active ingredients. Adults emerge following pupation, then disperse and mate, and then females disperse before oviposition and the cycle starts again. We assume two generations of ECB per year, as is typical in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The larvae from the second generation overwinter in stalks, and so their survival rate is lower than that of the first generation. Infection by N. pyrausta travels through both horizontal and vertical pathways. We assume that infected adult males do not pass infection to their young, but that females pass on infection to 85% of their eggs . Infection passes horizontally through the population during the larvae stage when susceptible (uninfected) larvae come into contact with frass from infected larvae. The infection rate is modelled as density dependent. The survival of the infected population at each stage is smaller than the healthy population. The parameter values of the model were based on the body of work by Onstad and colleagues [12, 21, 22] (see S2 Text for full model description).
We modelled the dispersal of the populations in four stages: pre-mating dispersal, mating, post-mating dispersal of females, and oviposition. The dispersal functions represent the integration of the movement of moths over a period of days. The dispersal of insects is often modelled with an exponential dispersal kernel which has a mode at the origin. The literature [23–24] suggest that in the case of the corn borer, however, this may not be appropriate as instinct and environmental factors force large numbers of adults from their natal fields. For this reason, and for computational efficiency we chose to model dispersal using a beta distribution, which has a flexible mode. We assume dispersal is the same in all directions, and that at the boundary of the landscape the moths are reflected back.
We base our dispersal estimates on observations in the literature which demonstrate seasonal differences in the dispersal of spring and summer adults [23–26]. Crop rotation and lack of adequate humidity in crops during the day time can force newly emerged adults to move from their overwintering field before initiating sexual activity . The probability density function (PDF) that describes the pre-mating dispersal in spring has a mode of 10km and 90% of the population travelling less than 30 km. The dispersal of infected moths is reduced by 80%. Dispersal in summer is more conservative with a mode of 1km and 90% of the adult moths fly less than 15km. Under typical conditions, the pre-oviposition period has a mean of 3.6 days . Thereafter the mean oviposition period is approximately 10 days with oviposition decreasing with time. During this time a female could cover a considerable area. We assumed that for spring the mode of the post-mating PDF was 35 km and that 90% of the population travel less than 60 km, and that in summer the mode was 5 km with 90% of the population traveling less than 30 km (see Fig 2).
The model of the ECB population density expresses the cycle of infestation caused by N. pyrausta observed in the field data with a similar wavelength . When Bt was introduced into the landscape, the cycle collapsed and the pest was suppressed in a way similar to observed patterns (Fig 3).
The dispersal functions for adult moths pre- and post- mating in spring and summer.
Average numbers of overwintering lavae from Minnesota over time (solid black line) during a period where the proportion of Bt maize broadly increased (dashed red line). Our simulation model (solid blue line) captures the behavior observed in the field with a cycle in the population of similar wavelength to that observed in the data. The introduction of Bt maize results in this cycle being damped but still persisting (the cycle is under-damped in this case—see S2 Text).
Modelling the decision process
In the model, farmers growing maize face the decision of whether to plant Bt or conventional maize. As described above, the decisions on which type of maize to grow directly impacts the survival of the ECB larvae and so the population dynamics of the pest. Kaup surveyed 4000 farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota and found that the most common reasons for growing Bt maize were: (i) to increase yield; (ii) to control insects better; and (iii) they anticipated ECB problem. The most common reasons for not using Bt maize were (i) the price of Bt seed was too high; or (ii) no ECB problem was anticipated. Although growers may misconceive the financial impact of the drivers described above, these drivers imply a profit-based decision. Other factors including farm size, age, education and available market information have been shown to influence the adoption of GM crops and complex empirical models have been proposed to describe these effects on farmer decisions . To both ensure the easy interpretation of our results, we chose to use a simple model based on perceived profit.
We assumed that the decision process is driven by the financial impact of ECB, and that farmers make decisions based on recent years’ experience . We used data from Wisconsin and Minnesota on the estimated benefit ($ ha−1) from Bt maize and the increase in the area of Bt maize grown (as a percentage of total maize grown) between 1995 and 2009 to model the probability (p) of farmers changing cropping strategy (Hutchison et al., ). The following exponential function was used based on empirical and theoretical considerations: (1) Here β is a parameter, rF is the reward the farmer perceives was attained under the chosen strategy and rA is the reward the farmers perceives would have been attained under the alternative strategy, so that the difference rA−rF measures the perceived net benefit for Bt maize adoption. This model is not only more parsimonious than a more traditional logistic model, but also has better goodness of fit criteria (see S1 Fig). Furthermore, the exponential model is a constant absolute risk aversion utility function for the representative farmer with parameters estimated to fit the observed state-level Bt maize adoption data and estimated benefit [29, 30]. The parameter β quantifies farmer responsiveness to the perceived gain from Bt maize adoption (or equivalently, ECB loss). The regression estimate for β was 0.0055 with a standard error of 0.00174 with no evidence to support separate parameters for each state. In practice it would be possible to influence farmer responsiveness (i.e. β) through subsidy, taxation or education. For example if farmers were encouraged to be cautious about returning to conventional maize then farmers growing Bt maize would be less responsive when they experienced an apparent benefit reduction. We used the fitted value ± three standard errors to define the range of values for β that we explored in our analysis.
For each season, we sample an individual farmer’s decision from a distribution whereby the probability of changing strategy is p (as defined in Eq 1). This allows us to implicitly include a range of individual behaviors from the intransigent farmer who finds a preferred strategy and will not change, to the receptive farmer who will try new practices. It also implicitly includes other social factors which we do not explicitly account for.
The farmer’s reward is given by the average financial reward from his maize fields calculated as (2) where Y is the expected yield in a ECB-free crop (t ha−1), YL is the loss in yield due to the ECB (t ha−1), mp is the crop price ($ t−1) and F is the technology fee ($), which is the seed price difference between conventional and Bt maize. We do not include varietal effects that could modify yields slightly, but assume that all maize crops have the same expected yield (10 t ha−1). We assume that this yield is reduced by ECB according to the function given in the supplementary information of Hutchison et al., : (3) where x is the average number of overwintering larvae per plant. To be consistent with the data used to parameterise the landscape model we assume F = 16 $ ha−1 and a crop price (mp) of 99 $ t−1 which are averages for Minnesota and Wisconsin between 1996 and 2009 .
Given that we can calculate the reward (r) for growing maize in any particular field we must consider how to calculate the reward the farmer perceives was attained under each strategy (i.e.rF and rA). The reward for a given strategy may be calculated from the rewards obtained for this strategy over a given area of the landscape, i.e. a farmer’s perceived reward depends on the network of communication and how much credence the farmer gives to the information available to them. Kaup showed that growers who had reported an insect problem in one year were likely to grow Bt maize in the next, which is consistent with farmers who grow other Bt crops . In Kaup’s study the state-reported insect levels did not significantly influence behavior. Therefore we assume that a farmer perceives that the reward for their chosen strategy (rF) is given by the average reward from across their fields, taking no account of the success of that strategy in their neighborhood.
To inform on the perceived reward from the alternative strategy we consider four networks of communication that we shall refer to as: (i) landscape-network; (ii) neighbor-network; (iii) Kaup-network and (iv) varying-response-network. There are two theoretical extremes: the first is where each farmer has information from across the whole landscape, akin to accessing web-based crop data. In this scenario the perceived reward for the alternative strategy is the average of the rewards for the alternative strategy across the landscape. We call this the ‘landscape-network’. The second is where each farmer has information only from farms that neighbor their own, which may reflect how traditional farming decisions are made alone or within cooperatives. In this scenario the reward for the alternative strategy is given by the average reward that this strategy attains in farms that neighbor the farmer. We call this the ‘neighbor-network’.
Research shows that when farmers decide which varieties to grow they may consult family and friends, other farmers, commercial newsletters, county extension agents and university specialists. Kaup reports that 40.2% of farmers acknowledged that a major reason to grow Bt was that it was recommended by their seed dealers or consultants. Similarly 7.9% of farmers acknowledged recommendation by a neighbor, and 3.4% acknowledged recommendation by university or extension agencies. Normalizing these percentages to sum to 100%, we simulate a communication network whereby a farmer has a probability of 0.78 of being influenced by a consultant, a probability 0.15 of being influenced by a neighbour and a probability of 0.07 of being influenced by a university. According to those probabilities each farm is assigned a communication network type. For those assigned to be neighbor-influenced we calculate the reward of the alternative strategy by averaging the scores of this strategy from farms within 1km. We assume consultants operate over a county, and so for farmers assigned to be consultant-influenced we calculated the reward as the average reward across a county. Finally we assume universities operate at the state level and so the reward for those assigned to be university-influenced is given by the average reward across the state. This network, which we refer to as the ‘Kaup-network’, is arguably more common in today's farming environment than the two former scenarios. For each network we set the responsiveness parameter β (Eq 1) to 0.0055, 0.0003 and 0.0108, which are the value fitted to the data, and that value ± three standard errors.
Kaup showed that if farmers had planted Bt in the past then they were more likely to use it in the future. This tendency is incorporated into the model by scaling β in Eq (1) so that farmers who have used Bt maize in the past are more responsive to loss of profit. Our final network, the ‘varying-response-network’, incorporates a reluctance for farmers to change back from Bt-maize to conventional maize. It assumes a Kaup-network with the probability of a farmer switching to Bt maize, having previously tried it given by Eq (1) with β = 0.0055 otherwise β = 0.0003.
Implementing the model
We ran each simulation for 100 seasons. At the end of each season the reward rF(i) is calculated for each farm i along with the perceived reward for the alternative strategy rA(i). The probability that the farm strategy will change is calculated according to the farmer’s responsiveness to loss. This probability is used to determine if they change strategy. Crops are rotated and fields growing maize are assigned to Bt or conventional maize according to the calculated strategy.
Analysis of the European corn borer and Nosema pyrausta model
To explore the behavior of the solutions of the model we considered the equations without the spatial component. Ignoring dispersal, the model equations (listed in S2 Text) reduce to the following set of difference equations: (4) where S(t) and P(t) represent the number of susceptible and infected eggs in year t, for the first generation respectively and and are for the second generation. The first pair of equations describes the summer generation and the second pair the autumn-spring generation. Many of the parameters result from combinations of biologically meaningful parameters from the full model (see S2). Parameters a = 929.8 and k = 85.6 capture the population increase from births modulated by survival rates for susceptible and healthy populations respectively. Parameter c = 0.15 is the proportion of susceptible eggs produced by an infected female. The term (1−e−αP(t)) determines the proportion of the healthy population that becomes infected, where α = 0.72 controls the infection transfer from the infected to susceptible population. Parameter b = 2.31 relates to the survival of this recently infected population. The carrying capacity parameter ν = 130.7 controls the density dependent survival of the larvae, parameters ω1 = 0.081 and ω2 = 0.02835 relate to the overwintering survival of the susceptible and infected populations respectively.
Analysis of these equations shows three steady-states, i.e. solutions where the rates of change of healthy population (S) and the infected population (P) are zero: (C1) [P* = 0, S* = 0], (C2) [P* = 0, ], and (C3) [P* = P0, S* = S0], where both P0 and S0 are positive real values. Linearization around these points determines the behavior of the solutions of the equations . The first steady-state (C1) relates to the trivial solution whereby both healthy and infected populations become extinct; the second (C2) relates to the solution where the infected population becomes extinct; and the third steady-state (C3) relates to the solutions where both the healthy and the infected population densities are larger than zero and the total population cycles. It can be shown that (C3) exists, implying that N. pyrausta survives in the system, for parameter combinations such that , where . For the model parameters used, and a wide range around these parameters, the steady-state (C3) always exists supporting the hypothesis that even if ECB is suppressed to low levels, the infected population will survive and the natural control given by N. pyrausta persists.
The snow-drift game
Under the landscape-network simulation shown in Fig 4a and 4b, the percentage of Bt maize oscillates between approximately 1% and 95% over time. Larval populations are driven by the Bt adoption and oscillate similarly, with the largest levels prior to the maxima in the Bt cycle. Increasing farmer responsiveness to economic loss (i.e. increasing the parameter β in Eq 1) increases the frequency and amplitude of the oscillation; reducing farmer responsiveness reduces the frequency and amplitude of the oscillation. The average larval density is held near or below the economic threshold (0.06 larvae per plant for the model parameterization reported here), however, in some parts of the landscape the density was much higher. The results from the Kaup-network are similar to the landscape-network, but with a slightly higher oscillation frequency and slight dampening (see S2 Fig).
The top pane of each pair shows the proportion of Bt maize and bottom panes show the average number of overwintering larvae per plant across the two areas of the landscape, one in Wisconsin and the other in Minnesota. The simulation was started with 1% of the maize as Bt distributed randomly in the landscape.
In the neighbor network the solution slowly converges to a state where the proportion of Bt maize is approximately 0.67 in Minnesota and 0.24 in Wisconsin (Fig 4c). The difference in adoption rate results because the neighborhood connections are stronger in Minnesota than in Wisconsin due to a greater density of farms in Minnesota. Indeed, in the simulated Wisconsin landscape, more farms are likely to be isolated and so have no neighbors growing Bt maize to compare profits with (see Fig 5a). Simulated ECB populations in Minnesota are lower than those in Wisconsin, where adoption of Bt maize was smaller (Fig 4d). Fig 5b shows the average number of overwintering larvae per plant in each cell for a single year of the simulation. The average numbers of larvae in Wisconsin reach larger levels, and even for isolated farms in Minnesota the pest is supressed by the larger amount of Bt maize grown in the surrounding area. For example between years 30 and 50 of the simulation shown in Fig 4 the maximum number of ECB in any cell was 8.12 larvae per plant for Wisconsin and 2.69 for Minnesota. The responsiveness of the farmer to loss (parameter β) affects the convergence rate with smaller values of β taking longer to converge.
(a) The land use in year 73 of simulated landscape under the neighbor-network. The left half of the landscape represents Minnesota (abscissa from 0 to 350 km) and the right Wisconsin (abscissa from 350 to 700 km); (b) shows the corresponding average number of overwintering larvae per plant. Enlarged sections show the spatial distributions in more detail.
Results from the simulation where farmers were more responsive to loss from conventional maize if they had experience of growing Bt maize (varying-response-network simulations) are shown in Fig 4e and 4f. The simulation illustrates that adoption of Bt maize is more rapid than that of conventional maize.
Table 1 lists the average losses ($ ha−1 year−1) across the landscape between year 20 and 100 under each simulation, and the average proportion of the maize that is Bt. Initial years were excluded to allow the simulation to stabilize. Losses (L) were calculated from a baseline whereby conventional maize was grown in an ECB-free landscape, i.e., L = YLmp+F, where YL is the yield loss caused by the ECB, mp is the crop price and F is the technology fee. These results are based on 10 realisations of each simulation. The average proportions of Bt maize are similar across the networks ranging between 0.41 (when β = 0.0108) and 0.67 (when β = 0.0003). The standard deviation of the proportions of Bt maize were generally smaller for the less responsive farmers (β = 0.0003). For the values β considered, mean losses are least in the varying-response-network scenario and greatest in the neighbor-network scenario. We also simulated losses under scenarios where the proportion of Bt in the landscape was fixed at a given proportion, with the smallest simulated losses averaging 11 $ ha−1 year−1 with a proportion of Bt of 0.61. The sensitivity of our results to model assumptions is discussed in S3 Text.
The standard deviations are given in parentheses.
Comparison of the dynamics of farmer behaviour with data
To test the plausibility of the results from our model, we compared the observed and simulated dynamics of the relationships between loss incurred by growing conventional maize (calculated as above) and the percentage of maize that was Bt (Fig 6). The relationship between these two variables changes year on year depending on the corn borer population in the landscape. The dynamics observed in the data from Minnesota and the simulations for the varying-response-network are broadly similar (Fig 6a and 6e). The percentage of Bt maize grown increases until it is not profitable to grow Bt, then farmers start to move back to conventional maize only to return to Bt maize as losses increase later. The period of dis-adoption shown in Fig 6a is unlikely to be solely driven by the farmers’ perceptions of loss from corn borer infestation as it coincides with a period where there was a drop in confidence for the marketability of Bt maize, however our analysis gives support to the hypothesis that farmers’ perceptions of loss might explain dynamics. The Minnesotan data shows a second small drop in adoption over a two year period when the losses reach −13 $ ha−1 thereafter there is a steady increase in the percentage of Bt maize grown with no relationship to loss. Observed dynamics for Wisconsin show slower uptake of Bt maize compared with Minnesota (Fig 6b). This may reflect the fact that maize is grown on a much larger scale in Minnesota compared to other states including Wisconsin, which in turn may have implications for the way in which information is shared and how fields are managed in these states . Similar to the neighbor network we also see that levels of Bt maize that initially control losses are subsequently less effective at the landscape scale and so the use of Bt is increased. No ECB resistance to Bt maize has been reported and so these changes in loss result from other factors such as climate or N. pyrausta.
Liu et al. highlighted the importance of linking sociological influences to ecological systems. In our simulation we show how economic conditions can result in the suppression of a pest throughout a landscape. Our results accord with the findings of Bell et al. who observed the impact of a coordinated response to ECB, and showed the planting of Bt maize in Minnesota led to a collapse in the cycle of ECB caused by N. pyrausta. In Wisconsin, however, where less Bt maize was grown, the cycle persisted. Similarly, Hutchison et al. showed that farmers who grew conventional maize benefited from the area-wide suppression from Bt maize in the region. Our model shows a similar phenomenon, particularly exemplified in the neighbor-network simulation where a smaller proportion of Bt maize in Wisconsin resulted in a larger density of ECB compared with Minnesota, so that ECB population density continued to exhibit the N. pyrausta driven cycle. The landscape scale effects of the decisions made by individuals have been observed in other agricultural systems in which farmers’ decisions are influenced by social or economic factors or both and appear to be coordinated. The farmers’ behaviors results in substantial impacts on the population dynamics of species across landscapes. For example, Bianchi et al. reported that coordinated changes in landscape composition negatively impact natural pest control, and Klein et al. showed how agricultural intensification threatens wild bee pollination services at the landscape scale.
In our example, we show that decisions made by farmers on an individual basis impact ECB populations and the profitability of growing maize in the landscape. These decisions are driven by a range of external influences, from the advice of neighbors to information from extension specialists. We showed that the form of the network and the farmer responsiveness to loss substantially impact the dynamics of the system at all trophic levels. Generally we found that Bt-maize adoption oscillated in response to the prevalence of ECB in the landscape, and that the communication network and responsiveness of the farmer to loss influenced the amplitude and frequency of this oscillation. As the scale of communication networks increased so did the rate at which change occurred. This phenomenon was observed by Lambin et al. who reported that rapid land-use changes often result when global influences replace local drivers. For example the global markets demand for certain commodities may rapidly change landscapes from longstanding diverse land-use patterns to more uniform cropping.
Of the networks we considered, the varying-response-network performed the best in terms of minimising losses and showed a reasonably constant proportion of Bt maize grown across time (Table 1). The farmers in this simulation had good access to information from across the landscape and were quicker to re-adopt Bt maize at the first sign of losses from ECB, yet slower to return to the more risky strategy of growing conventional maize. Importantly, our simulations show that to avoid extreme events some resistance to change must be inherent in the system. The varying-response-network did not outcompete the simulation with a fixed percentage of 61% Bt maize however. This outcome is compatible with the initial US-EPA resistance management requirements for ECB of at least 20% non-Bt maize planted each year, to serve as a refuge to maintain non-Bt selected susceptible moths in the landscape .
One aspect that we did not consider is that seed companies use market power to protect against the sales of Bt maize oscillating by selling the ECB-Bt maize seed bundled with other desirable seed traits and by reducing ECB-Bt maize prices so that farmers continue to buy the ECB-Bt-maize . Similarly, seed dealers may promote Bt maize seed over conventional because they themselves receive a better rate of commission for Bt maize. The effect of such actions would be to inflate the reward farmers perceive is obtained from growing Bt maize, and so increase the adoption of Bt maize and drive the trajectories shown in Fig 6 to the right. Indeed any volatility in the price of seed or the harvested crop will impact the dynamics of the system. Increases in the price of maize or a reduction in the technology fee result would result in a lower tolerance to corn borer larvae. Another area not included in our analysis is the effect of farmer decisions on the evolution of resistance ECB to Bt maize. A recent review by Tabashnik et al. found no evidence of a decrease in the susceptibility of ECB to Cry1Ab in Bt maize in the field. Others have used modelling to evaluate the effect of refuge planting strategies and including two or more toxins within a cultivar (pyramided toxins) on the rate of resistance evolution [22, 40–42]. These studies aim to guide regulatory policy designed to mitigate the threat of resistance. It is generally held that the greater the density of Bt maize in the landscape the faster the evolution of resistance. It follows that within the context of farmer behaviour, social factors that increase the use of Bt maize in the landscape would increase the rate of the evolution of resistance. Increased resistance of ECB to Bt maize would in turn result in farmers seeking alternative methods of control perhaps in the form of new toxins, or cropping strategies.
Our work has implications for other systems, whereby the ecology of a system is driven by individual decision makers following similar heuristics and experiencing similar influences. Examples include important systems where co-ordinated control can result in area-wide suppression of a pest or diseases. These systems typically involve insect pests that either cause damage to crops by herbivory (e.g. Meligethes aeneus F, Spodoptera exempta Walker) or act as a vector for disease . The model framework presented here also has application to other areas such as disease prevention in a public health setting. There are clear parallels between landscape suppression of pests and diseases, and the herd immunity afforded when sufficient numbers of the population vaccinate. A number of modelling studies have been done to explore behaviour in the context of vaccination to try to understand the conditions that cause vaccine coverage to fall [44–46]. The conceptual difference between the vaccination studies and our study is that in our study the host of the insect pest is fixed in space and the insect moves across space, whereas in the case of human diseases the hosts move and transmit disease to one another. Our decision model was based on the farmers’ perceived profits. However, other social factors such as perceived food safety, the threat to non-target species and resistance management can effect decisions . These factors often do manifest as economic factors but where they do not, they could be included in a model framework such as the one described by using opinion dynamics models . Vaccination uptake is an example of a situation where often decisions are based on a perception of the safety rather than financial incentives (44). By understanding the dynamics of farmer decisions we can determine how to manage better the system, through improved communication, subsidy or taxation, to achieve robust and cost effective area-wide control, while minimizing the risk of the evolution of resistance to control strategies.
S1 Text. The landscape model.
S2 Text. The European corn borer model.
S3 Text. Sensitivity of results from snow drift game to model assumptions.
S1 Fig. The data used to support the decision model.
The increase in area of Bt grown as a proportion of the area of non-transgenic maize between year t and t+1 plotted against the net benefit of growing Bt calculated for year t (Hutchison et al., Science 2010; 330: 222).
S2 Fig. Results from Kaup-network simulation.
(a) the percentage of maize grown in the landscape that is Bt and (b) the average number of larvae per plant across the two areas of the landscape. The parameter β = 0.0055.
S1 Data. Data on the maize yields, Bt uptake, average ECB per plant.
Data on maize yields, Bt uptake and average ECB per year for Minnesota and Wisconsin with estimates of loss due to ECB. These data and calculations were reported in Hutchison et al., Science 2010; 330: 222.
We thank Shelby Fleischer (Penn State Univ., PA), Terry Hurley (Univ. of Minnesota, MN), and David Onstad (Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, IL) for early reviews.
Conceived and designed the experiments: AEM JRB APW. Performed the experiments: AEM. Analyzed the data: AEM FvdB. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: AEM JRB WDH PDM DC SP APW. Wrote the paper: AEM JRB WDH FvdB PDM DC SP APW.
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- freely available
Toxins 2012, 4(8), 605-619; doi:10.3390/toxins4080605
Abstract: Botulinum Neurotoxin A (BoNT-A) injections have been used for the treatment of muscle contractures and spasticity. This study assessed the influence of (BoNT-A) injections on passive biomechanical properties of the muscle-tendon unit. Mousegastrocnemius muscle (GC) was injected with BoNT-A (n = 18) or normal saline (n = 18) and passive, non-destructive, in vivo load relaxation experimentation was performed to examine how the muscle-tendon unit behaves after chemical denervation with BoNT-A. Injection of BoNT-A impaired passive muscle recovery (15% vs. 35% recovery to pre-stretching baseline, p < 0.05) and decreased GC stiffness (0.531 ± 0.061 N/mm vs. 0.780 ± 0.037 N/mm, p < 0.05) compared to saline controls. The successful use of BoNT-A injections as an adjunct to physical therapy may be in part attributed to the disruption of the stretch reflex; thereby modulating in vivo passive muscle properties. However, it is also possible that BoNT-A injection may alter the structure of skeletal muscle; thus modulating the in vivo passive biomechanical properties of the muscle-tendon unit.
Spasticity is a debilitating and complex hyperkinetic syndrome characterized by excessive excitability of the stretch reflex (myotatic reflex) and loss of neuronal control leading to muscle overactivity with the inability of the muscle to rest [1,2,3]. In post-stroke patients, spasticity affects the extremities, with clinical impairment in up to 40% of patients . Cerebral palsy is caused by injury to the developing central nervous system, often resulting in reduced health-related quality of life [5,6,7,8,9]. Lesions to upper motor neurons, regardless of etiology or mechanism, affect the ability of the central nervous system to synchronize motor unit recruitment and to relax skeletal muscle . Activation of the peripheral stretch reflex alters resting posture of the affected limb and impairs passive function , which leads to structural muscle changes over time that increase muscle stiffness and contribute to the clinical symptoms of spasticity .
Physical therapy and rehabilitation of patients with spasticity involves stretching of stiff muscle-tendon units that resist manipulation. Stretching has been shown to influence skeletal muscle by altering active contractility, passive biomechanical properties, and neural excitability . Previous studies have documented decreased stiffness [12,13,14], improved movement control , and fewer contractures after therapeutic stretching interventions in spastic patients.
BoNT-A application as an adjunct to physical therapy in patients with spasticity has been shown to reduce pain, improve gait pattern, and improve range of motion . The rationale for the use of BoNT-A injections into spastic muscle is to decrease muscle overactivity and correct postural deformity . BoNT-A is endocytosed by the distal neuron and prevents the pre-synaptic vesicular fusion mediated by SNARE proteins (synaptobrevin, syntaxin, and synaptosomal-associated protein-25) and thus the release of acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junction inhibiting normal synaptic transmission and neural-mediated muscle contraction . Injection of BoNT-A induces a temporary and reversible paresis of skeletal muscle with a decrease of motor action potential (CMAP) of up to 80% one week after injection depending on dose and volume applied . The adjunctive application of BoNT-A to physical therapy of patients with muscle spasticity has been shown to improve clinical outcomes and decrease symptoms .
While BoNT-A has been used clinically as an effective adjunct to physical therapy in patients with spasticity , limited basic science studies have examined the influence of BoNT-A on the in vivo passive properties of skeletal muscle and the influence of BoNT-A injection on the myotatic or stretch reflex. Animal models of spasticity with experimental induction of an upper motor neuron lesion are not well established, and those spastic disease animal model systems that have been described are inherently variable as spastic disease states have pathologic myotatic or stretch reflexes [18,19]. The use of healthy, non-spastic muscle to study effects of BoNT-A on in vivo biomechanical properties isolates the effects of BoNT-A without the variability inherent in spastic disease. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of BoNT-A injection on passive biomechanical muscle properties in normal mouse gastrocnemius (GC) muscle in response to repetitive, non-traumatic stretching. This study hypothesized that BoNT-A modulates in vivo skeletal muscle tone and disrupts the myotatic or stretch reflex, thereby decreasing muscle stiffness during stretching.
2. Materials and Methods
Thirty-six male CD1 mice weighing 25.56 g ± 0.64 g (Charles River, Wilmington, MA) were used for this study. The experimental protocol was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee in accordance with the standards required by the National Institutes of Health. Animals were kept in a controlled temperature vivarium with a 12-h light/dark cycle, with food and water provided ad libitum.
Animals were randomly assigned to two experimental groups; the study group (n = 18) received BoNT-A at a dose of 6 U/kg in a volume of 10 µL into the GC muscle, the control group (n = 18) received an equal volume of normal saline solution (0.9%). Volume and dose of BoNT-A were chosen to provide maximal denervation, and all biomechanical assessments were performed eight days following injection to reach maximal denervation based upon previous dose-volume experimentation in our laboratory using this animal model system [17,20].
2.1. Botulinum Toxin A and Saline Injection
The animals were anesthetized with 1.5–2.0 vol.% isoflurane (Webster Veterinary, Patterson Companies Inc., Sterling, MA) during the injection procedure. The reconstitution of BoNT-A (Allergan, Irvine, CA) and the percutaneous gastrocnemius-soleus injection were performed using previously described methods [17,20,21]. Normal saline solution was injected in the same manner using the same volume as the toxin injection for control animals.
2.2. Surgical Approach and Experimental Set Up
The experimental apparatus and the surgical approach were similar to previous reports [21,22]. Briefly, eight days post-injection, the saline-injected control animals (n = 18) and BoNT-A experimental animals (n = 18) were anesthetized with isoflurane (1.5–2.0 vol.%). The animals were then placed on a linear translating stage and secured with a body strap and Kirschner wires through the knee, foot, and adjacent soft tissue to eliminate movement artifact. The calcaneus was transected, the soleus muscle dissected from its calcaneal insertion, and the gastrocnemius-Achilles-calcaneus (muscle-tendon-bone) unit connected to a force transducer (model FORT100; World Precision Instruments Inc., Sarasota, FL) with stainless steel suture. The force transducer was connected to an amplifier (model ps100W-2, EMKA Technologies Inc., Falls Church, VA) through an interface controller (EMKA Technologies Inc., Falls Church, VA) and connected through an analog-to-digital converter card (model PCI-6023E, National Instruments, Austin, TX) to a personal computer.
For in vivo biomechanical testing, the sciatic nerve was exposed and stimulated with a bipolar hook electrode (FHC, Bowdoinham, ME) connected to a pulse generator (model Tenma TGP110, BioSurplus Inc., San Diego, CA). The force of muscle contraction and the passive muscle-tendon unit properties were recorded continuously (IOX software, Slow Wave Analyzer, EMKA Technologies Inc., Falls Church, VA). A heat lamp was used during the entire experimental protocol to maintain animal body temperature.
2.3. Muscle Force Assessment/Load-Relaxation Assessment
For each animal, a range of stimuli from 0.8 V to 1.6 V was delivered to the sciatic nerve in order to determine the supra-maximal voltage required to produce maximal single-twitch contraction. In all instances, 1.2 V was used during the active force of contraction protocol [20,21,22]. For tetanic contraction force, a square wave stimulus of 1.2 V at a frequency of 100 Hz for 1 s was used. A recovery time of 30 s was allowed between stimuli . Muscle force assessment was conducted to verify that the BoNT-A injection was effective in decreasing active muscle force of single twitch and tetanic contraction.
After the active muscle force testing protocol was completed, a muscle preconditioning protocol was used prior to passive load-relaxation testing with a strain rate of 0.6 mm/s for all experiments. The muscle-tendon unit is visco-elastic tissue; therefore it was necessary to continuously record the developed passive tension after a displacement, since the tissue would relax in response to a stress. Three non-destructive in vivo stretching protocols were utilized to examine the passive, biomechanical muscle-tendon unit response to BoNT-A and saline injection.
2.3.1. Protocol 1
The muscle-tendon unit was stretched from a baseline displacement of 0mm to displacements of 1 mm, 2 mm, and 4 mm. Passive tension was continuously recorded for 210 s at each displacement interval. Between loading cycles, the muscle-tendon unit was returned to 0 mm displacement and allowed to recover for 180 s. Protocol 1 was designed to investigate differences in the in vivo stiffness of the chemically denervated muscle-tendon unit, when compared to saline-injected controls. This investigation was based upon a linear-regression analysis of the in vivo linear portion of the passive tension versus displacement curve. This method expands upon a previously published method in the mouse GC muscle ; however, it includes a more thorough biomechanical consideration of the visco-elastic tissue, in that both peak and equilibrium stiffness were examined.
2.3.2. Protocol 2
The muscle-tendon unit was stretched from 0 mm to 4 mm, while passive tension was continuously recorded for 210 s. Then, the muscle-tendon unit was returned to 0 mm displacement and allowed to recover for 180 s. The entire stretching cycle (4 mm displacement returning to 0 mm baseline displacement) was repeated for four cycles. This protocol was designed to investigate differences in biomechanical behavior of denervated muscle and normal muscle during repeated stretching.
2.3.3. Protocol 3
The muscle-tendon unit was stretched from 0 mm to 1 mm of displacement and passive force was continuously recorded for 240 s. The passive force generated at the initial 1 mm displacement, prior to the rest of the stretching protocol being performed, was used as the “baseline” passive tension for the muscle-tendon unit at a length of 1 mm. Then, the muscle-tendon unit was stretched from a baseline displacement of 0 mm to 4 mm of displacement, where it was held for 120 s. The muscle-tendon unit then was returned to a “displacement” of 1 mm, and passive tension was continuously recorded for 240 s. This protocol was designed to study the recovery of passive tension in the muscle-tendon unit after it returned to a shorter length after being held in a stretched position.
To evaluate the in vivo stiffness and the effects of stretching on the passive tension of the muscle-tendon unit, experimentation was conducted in the linear portion of the stress-strain curve. The muscle-tendon unit was displaced to a range of 0 mm, 1 mm, 2 mm, and 4 mm to avoid gross-injury to the muscle-tendon unit. This range of displacements avoided the failure region or yield-region of the muscle-tendon unit stress-strain curve .
2.4. Statistical Analysis
All results are expressed as mean ± standard error of the mean. Student t-tests were used to analyze the results of muscle force testing (e.g., maximal single twitch and tetany twitch). For the results of the load-relaxation assessment (peak tension, equilibrium tension and visco-elastic parameters), a mixed model ANOVA followed by a Tukey post-hoc test was performed. A linear regression analysis was performed on the elastic peak tension and equilibrium tension versus time. All statistical tests were performed using SigmaStat (Systat Software, Inc., San Diego, CA).
The BoNT-A injected GC muscle produced less active single-twitch (p < 0.05, Figure 1A) and tetanic contraction force (p < 0.05, Figure 1B) when compared to the saline-injected control group. The BoNT-A injected group produced an average of 0.079 N ± 0.03 N for single twitch force and an average of 0.302 N ± 0.108 N for tetanic contraction force. The saline injected group produced an average of 0.651 N ± 0.038 N for single twitch force and an average of 1.87 N ± 0.095 N for tetanic force.
Sample time histories for muscle-tendon unit displacements to 1 mm (Figure 2A), 2 mm (Figure 2B), and 4 mm (Figure 2C) during Protocol 1 showed that the BoNT-A injected muscle-tendon unit generated less passive tension throughout the displacement protocol. When compared to the saline-injected controls, the BoNT-A injected experimental group produced less average peak tension (p < 0.05, Figure 2D) and less average equilibrium tension (p < 0.05, Figure 2E). The average muscle-tendon unit peak stiffness of the BoNT-A injected group was 0.520 ± 0.06 N/mm, compared to the saline injected group, which was 0.764 ± 0.036 N/mm, representing 31.9% decline of in vivo stiffness one-week following chemical denervation with BoNT-A (p < 0.05, Table 1). The average muscle-tendon unit equilibrium stiffness of the BoNT-A injected group was 0.346 ± 0.038 N/mm, compared to the saline injected group, which was 0.459 ± 0.012 N/mm, representing 24.6% decline of in vivo stiffness one-week following chemical denervation with BoNT-A (p < 0.05, Table 1).
|Saline Control Group ( n = 7)||0.764 ± 0.036||0.990||0.059|
|BoNT-A Group ( n = 6)||0.520 ± 0.06 *||0.992||0.046|
|Saline Control Group ( n = 7)||0.459 ± 0.012||0.992||0.012|
|BoNT-A Group ( n = 6)||0.346 ± 0.038 *||0.991||0.048|
Linear regression analysis performed on peak passive tension vs. displacement data (Figure 2D) and equilibrium passive tension vs. displacement data (Figure 2E) in accordance with previously published analysis . All data expressed as mean ± standard error of the mean. * p < 0.05.
A sample time history of passive force generated and the stress-relaxation behavior of the muscle-tendon unit after repeated stretching to 4 mm of displacement (Protocol 2) is shown (Figure 3A). The initial generation of peak tension, followed by a relaxation of the passive generated force to an equilibrium tension over the time course of the experiment, was observed in all stretched muscle-tendon units (Protocol 2, Figure 3A). Repeated stretching of the muscle tissue resulted in a declining average passive force throughout the time history after each cycle of stretching (Figure 3). The BoNT-A injected muscles generated less passive tension after stretching (Protocol 2), when compared to saline-injected controls, throughout the time history (Figure 3A, p < 0.05), for peak tension (Figure 3B, p < 0.05), and for equilibrium tension (Figure 3C, p < 0.05). The BoNT-A group generated less passive tension throughout the stress-relaxation period (Protocol 2), regardless of cycle number, when compared to the saline injected controls at each cycle (Figure 3).
When the recovery of passive tension in the muscle-tendon unit was evaluated after it was returned to 1 mm baseline length after being held in a stretched 4 mm displacement (Protocol 3), the muscle regained some passive tone as indicated by increased passive tension generated as time increases (Figure 4). The BoNT-A injected group had reduced passive tension (p < 0.05, Figure 4) compared to the saline-injected group at all time points. Further, BoNT-A impaired the passive recovery of the muscle-tendon unit after it was returned to initial length; the BoNT-A injected group only recovered 15% of the pre-stretching baseline tension, while the saline injected group recovered 35% of the pre-stretching baseline tension (p < 0.05, Figure 4).
BoNT-A injection affected the passive soft-tissue properties resulting in significantly reduced in vivo peak and equilibrium muscle stiffness compared to controls during repeated stretching. Injected muscle was more compliant compared to saline controls. In particular, BoNT-A injections reduced in vivo stiffness of the muscle-tendon unit by approximately 30%, which is similar to previous findings [21,22]. In these reports, the authors suggested that BoNT-A injection might improve the excursion of the muscle-tendon unit by modulating stiffness [21,22]. Based upon the findings of the current study, BoNT-A has a favorable effect on skeletal muscle during repeated stretching, improving the compliance of the muscle-tendon unit and altering resting muscle tone, ultimately allowing for greater relaxation following stretching. The present study expands upon previous work by specifically examining the influence of BoNT-A injection during in vivo stretching of muscle-tendon units and the myotatic or stretch reflex.
The effect of BoNT-A on passive properties of skeletal muscle may be mediated through different mechanisms. The quantification of the central nervous system’s influence on in vivo soft-tissue biomechanical properties has not been extensively studied, despite the clinical knowledge that individuals with nervous system dysfunction undergo passive property changes of their muscle-tendon units [3,5,6,7,8,9]. Historically, passive muscle properties have been attributed to structural elements of the muscle-tendon unit, such as connective tissue, contractile components (e.g., actin, myosin), and intracellular components (e.g., titin, desmin) . Leonard and Herzog performed single myofibril experiments in which passive force enhancement after stretching was observed following maximal activation and complete stretching past actin-myosin cross-bridging. Based upon their results, the authors postulated that the protein titin, not just actin-myosin cross-bridging, likely contribute to the passive force enhancement observed upon returning to a shorter displacement after stretching . Many published reports have studied the individual structural components that contribute to the passive tension generated by a muscle-tendon unit after stretching; however, many of these studies were limited by in vitro or ex vivo experimental settings and assessment of neuronal influence on the muscle-tendon unit was not possible [25,26,27,28].
Recent reports have implicated the protein titin as playing a crucial role in the passive tension developed in muscle tissue after stretching; titin is reported to bear most of the passive load in the muscle [25,26]. In particular, differences in the elasticity between heart and skeletal muscle are related to the isoform of titin expressed in the two tissues . Recently, Thacker et al. noted that BoNT-A injection alters the collagen content of muscle, changes the expression of the protein titin, and finally results in fiber type switching from fast to slow twitch myosin heavy chain expression . The authors concluded that these molecular mechanisms may contribute to BoNT-A’s effect on skeletal muscle passive mechanical properties . Thacker et al. offer a plausible molecular explanation to some of the factors that may contribute to BoNT-A efficacious influence on stretching and physical therapy protocols . However, differences in muscle elasticity cannot be attributed to titin alone. Although the stiffness in single spastic muscle fibers is increased compared to non-spastic muscle fibers and the muscle cells in spastic muscles are shorter than in normal muscle tissue , the titin isoform expressed in healthy and spastic muscle cells are similar . Another study showed that composite single muscle-fibers can have similar passive tension profiles and load-bearing protein composition, yet differences in passive tension profiles are still detected at the muscle bundle level when whole muscles are compared . The present study has the advantage of examining passive properties in an in vivo setting of the intact muscle-tendon unit. The present study design has the limitation that identification of a specific molecular or structural mechanism by which BoNT-A influences passive biomechanical properties was not studied. However, the data demonstrate that the soft-tissue biomechanics are influenced by BoNT-A injection and the data are consistent with the structural changes observed by others and the proposed mechanisms by which passive properties are proposed to be molecularly modulated as previously published in the literature [10,27,28,29,30].
For the study of the physiological mechanism by which BoNT-A injections reduce invivo passive tension in the muscle-tendon unit, Protocol 3 was designed to evaluate differences in the recovery process after the muscle-tendon unit was stretched and returned to the initial length. The BoNT-A injected experimental group was found to exhibit a significantly reduced passive tension throughout recovery and a less robust recovery of the “resting passive tension”. The denervated muscle regained 15% of its initial resting tension, compared to a 30% recovery in the control, saline-injected muscle. We conclude that the adjunct BoNT-A injection modulates muscle tone, thus improving the ability of the muscle-tendon unit to stretch and to allow the muscle to return to the initial displacement length through chemical denervation. There are several other plausible mechanisms related to BoNT-A influencing the stretch reflex, which may, in conjunction with changes in muscle structure, contribute to its effect on muscle-tendon unit stretching.
The lengths of resting skeletal muscle and its response to changes in the length are regulated by the stretch reflex (Figure 5). The stretch reflex loop consists of the Golgi tendon organ, the intrafusal muscle fibers, afferent and efferent neural connections to the α- and γ-motoneurons, as well as inter-neurons. The intrafusal muscle fibers act to detect muscle length, and can adapt to changes in muscle length by causing responsive muscle contraction to restore the original length. This length adapting mechanism is controlled by the γ-motoneurons and their efferent innervation of the intrafusal muscle fibers. The γ-activation of the intrafusal muscle fibers utilizes the same neurotransmitter (acetylcholine) as the normal extrafusal muscle fibers; therefore, γ-motoneurons are susceptible to the inhibiting effect of BoNT-A . Specifically, differences in the recovery of stretched muscles may result from the inhibition of the efferent arm of the γ-motoneuron. This inhibition would prevent the intrafusal muscle fibers from adapting to length change, rendering the length sensor for the muscle dysfunctional. This possible mechanism prevents the muscle from contracting to its original resting length after stretching exercises, thus, maintenance of resting tone or resting length may be impaired following BoNT-A injection.
A second mechanism thought to be involved in the reduced recovery tension after BoNT-A injection is related to the efferent arm of the α-motoneuron mediated reflex (Figure 5). The Golgi tendon organs sense stretching of the muscle-tendon unit and, in response, excite the α-motoneurons to activate muscle contraction in order to protect the muscle from damage due to excessive strain. Independent of intrafusal muscle fiber function, the efferent arm of the α-motoneurons is inhibited by the injection of the BoNT-A which acts through pre-synaptic inhibition of acetylcholine vesicular fusion and release into the neuromuscular junction, impairing synaptic activation of the muscle. Therefore, the percentage of tension initially produced at resting length is decreased in chemically denervated muscle due to pharmacological neuromuscular blockade of synaptic transmission resulting in decreased muscle contractility.
A third mechanism by which BoNT-A injection may modulate passive in vivo muscle-tendon unit properties is related to the structure of the titin protein . Titin has the ability to adapt its stiffness based upon the concentration of intramuscular cytosolic calcium . Increased amounts of calcium in the cytosol following muscle contraction have been reported to lead to a stiffer configuration of titin, increasing the stiffness of the muscle up to 25% . Following BoNT-A injection, muscle contractility decreases, producing less force. The concentration of intracellular calcium in BoNT-A denervated muscle is therefore reduced compared to the non-denervated control muscle. This reduced calcium concentration potentially leads to a less stiff titin configuration in the BoNT-A denervated muscle, contributing to decreased passive tension after the stretched muscle is returned to the initial displacement (Protocol 3). The quantification and relative contribution of the three possible mechanisms (α-inhibition, γ-inhibition, decreased Ca2+ for titin) by which adjunct BoNT-A injection modulates the passive properties of the muscle-tendon unit will be the subject of future investigations.
There are limitations of this study, which utilized young, healthy mice. Although there are similarities between human and mouse GC muscle, the muscles differ in weight, size, and fiber type composition. Further, healthy muscle and spastic muscle differ in structure; thus, interpretation of our data in the context of spasticity is limited and future studies are needed to assess BoNT-A injections in a spastic muscle model system. BoNT-A was injected intramuscularly, which can potentially cause damage to the muscle or the tendon due to incorrect injection technique. Only a single dose, volume, and post-injection time point was evaluated during the present study due to availability of BoNT-A. The dose and volume of BoNT-A were based on previous reports on BoNT-A injection of mouse GC muscle [17,20] and experimentation was conducted one week after injection, in order to provide maximal skeletal muscle paresis, with limited muscular changes. However, one week following the dose and volume of BoNT-A used in this report, an approximate 20% decrease in muscle mass can be expected , which needs to be taken into consideration when comparing passive biomechanical properties . Therefore, the changes in the passive properties may not be attributed to the chemical denervation entirely. The histological and molecular changes have been described by others and were not subject of this investigation .
This study investigated the acute effects of stretching a GC muscle-tendon unit. The long term effects and benefits of stretching exercises for patients with spasticity remain unknown. Despite the positive effects of stretching on altering passive muscle properties, through modulation of excitability and active contraction , a recent report demonstrated no clinical differences after stretching intervention was implemented in the treatment of patients with neurological conditions . Another limitation of our study is that only a single, relatively short period of stretching was studied. Clinically, physical therapy protocols often include repetitive stretching exercises performed over a longer periods of time. However, to evaluate the influence of adjunct BoNT-A therapy on stretching, a shorter experimental time period was sufficient to demonstrate differences between study groups. Future studies are required to study the influence of time from injection on the passive properties of the muscle-tendon unit. Further studies also are needed to assess the influence of various stretching protocols on passive muscle-tendon unit properties. Animals were anesthetized during testing, which has the potential to alter the passive properties of the muscle-tendon unit. However, experimentation conditions, including dose and duration of anesthesia were the same for both of the experimental groups.
BoNT-A significantly influences muscle-tendon unit in vivo biomechanical properties. While BoNT-A injection has been shown to alter the molecular structure of skeletal muscle, the current study suggests an influence of BoNT-A on the stretch reflex as well (Figure 4) . This study evaluated the effect of BoNT-A on the passive biomechanical properties of healthy muscle during stretching, which may provide a possible explanation of the clinical success of adjunct BoNT-A injections to stretching during physical therapy in patients with spasticity. However, the findings of this study will need to be confirmed in spastic animal models, in which the experimental system has inherent pathology of the myotatic or stretch reflex.
We would like to thank Eileen Martin and Beth P. Smith for their support in the planning and execution of our experiments. This project is taken in part from a dissertation submitted to the Medical Faculties of the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Medicine.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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Return to Transcripts main page
QUEST MEANS BUSINESS
New Rail Construction Project; Silicon Valley Spats; Digital Disney; Room Rates; Rare Earth Row Pits Europe, Japan, US Against China; Rare Earths Explained; US Trade Rep on Rare Earth Case; Rare Earths Global Chair Weighs In; US Fed Report; Dow Holds Above 13,000; Oil Prices Rising; The Millennials
Aired March 13, 2012 - 15:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
NINA DOS SANTOS, HOST: Rare earths and regular mud-slinging. The United States, the EU, and Japan accuse China of breaking international trade rules.
More jobs, more spending, and inflation it seems, at least, is at bay. Hopes from the Fed in its latest statement as rates stay low.
And defriended. Yahoo sues Facebook, taking patent wars into social media.
I'm Nina Dos Santos in for Richard Quest, and this is QUEST MEANS BUSINESS.
Good evening. Europe, the United States, and Japan are all accusing China of hoarding raw materials vital to the technology sector and they're asking the World Trade Organization, now, to intervene.
The nations say that China's policy on the export of rare earths breaks WTO rules. China has a virtual monopoly in this field, accounting for some 97 percent of the world's total population.
This country, however, has been tightening export restrictions on the materials since back in 2010, forcing up the price of rare earths around the rest of the world. Europe, Japan, and the US now want those restrictions lifted.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Now, if China would simply let the market work on its own, we'd have no objections, but their policies currently are preventing that from happening, and they go against the very rules that China agreed to follow.
Being able to manufacture advanced batteries and hybrid cars in America is too important for us to stand by and do nothing. We've got to take control of our energy future, and we can't let that energy industry take root in some other country because they were allowed to break the rules.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DOS SANTOS: China insists that it isn't breaking any rules, here. Its Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been saying this: "China has worked out its own policy when it comes to managing rare earths, which is in line with those WTO regulations."
Now, despite being called "rare earths," these elements in question are actually not all that rare at all. In fact, they occupy vast swathes of the periodic table. Places like this, as you can see over here, and also this large chunk all the way over at the bottom of the periodic table down there.
If we hone in on some of these particular elements and just show you exactly why they're so important, you get an idea. Because what they do is they go into all sorts of everyday items that we use.
Let's start out with this first item, lanthanum. It's a particular substance of which huge amounts is needed for the production of batteries used in hybrid cars.
And as we all know, as people are more keen to become more environmentally friendly, well, those hybrid cars are becoming increasingly popular. One of the reasons why producers of those cars from the United States wants to see more of that lanthanum on the market.
Up next, if we take a look at this one, it's Yttrium. This is a particular substance used to make light-emitting diodes and also fiber optic cables. In our age of the internet, well, obviously, fiber optic cables, and access to the materials we need t produce them is paramount.
And then, finally, I want to move onto this particular element, here. It is neodymium. This element is used to make very strong magnets and hard drives. As we know, in this age of computer technologies, hard drives are really crucial to that cycle.
But also, they have a particular use in wind turbines and, crucially, for some of you who like music out there, they give that extra oomph to headphones and speakers in cars and also in your headphones, if you listen to in iPad, and so on so forth. So, these are some pretty crucial elements, here, in the supply chain for high-technology products.
Now, some critics say that the US made a mistake initially by letting China corner the market for rare earths and also, on the other hand, bear the brunt of the environmental damage that goes with producing these materials.
Ron Kirk is the US trade representative, and earlier today, he told me that this dispute isn't just about monopolies, it's about playing by those WTO rules.
RON KIRK, US TRADE REPRESENTATIVE: The issue, first of all, Nina, is not about China cornering the market. The issue is about China living up to the commitments that it made when we granted them permanent normal trade relations status and voted to admit them into the WTO ten years ago.
And as part of that, China coveted to not negate in certain behavior in their export restraints on raw materials, which we challenged two years ago, and rare earths, we think, operate counter to that and have the potential to horribly distort the market, and also be another tool that China has used to try to force American manufacturers to relocate to China.
DOS SANTOS: But --
KIRK: So, we don't have any -- we're not challenging the amount they produced. We are challenging the way we believe they've unfairly distorted the market.
DOS SANTOS: But critics would also say that the United States decided not to produce rare earths themselves because it's extremely detrimental to the environment. You can't have it both ways.
KIRK: Well, you can -- listen. Again, we're not challenging China's actions to protect their environment, and to be certain, the United States is not alone in raising this concern. We were joined by the European Union and Japan in this case. When we challenged China's export restraints on raw materials, we were joined by Mexico and others.
Because we all recognize and understand China's being a part of this global economy can be a powerful tool to liberalize trade, but it isn't going to work if China only uses it to their advantage.
And the United States is going to look for alternative sources of materials, but that doesn't change and will not lessen our resolve to ask China to do one simple thing: you've got to play by the same rules as everybody else does.
DOS SANTOS: There aren't an awful lot of other producers in the world of rare earths. You don't have many options here.
Now, if China were to say, "Well, you know, we're limiting the supply of rare earths because it's detrimental to the environment," some of the byproducts are really very nasty, some of them are even radioactive. What if for environmental reasons, they want to curtail that supply themselves. You can understand why they'd want to do that.
KIRK: We -- again, Nina, I can't make it any more clear. This has nothing to do with legitimate steps China -- that China may undertake and probably should undertake to make sure that their mining of these materials is done in an environmentally responsible way. We applaud that.
But that's not what this is about. This is about China deploying a number of strategies over a period of years to artificially lessen the supply of these rare earths while making sure they are available in abundant supply to their own manufacturers.
And I think you can understand the damaging effect that has on the market, and especially when China expressly coveted not to engage in this type of behavior when we admitted them into the World Trade Organization.
So, you can absolutely have proper environmental stewardship, but you can also provide these materials in a way that's not discriminatory or market distorting.
DOS SANTOS: Well, this dispute is driving a wedge between the world's major trading partners. Chinese trade with the United States was worth more than $450 billion in 2010. And on the other side of the equation, trade with Europe came to about $500 billion.
Ivor Shrago is the non-executive chairman of the Chinese mining company, Rare Earths Global, and he joins us now, live in our London studio.
First of all, Ivor, it seems as though the United States trade ambassador is forgetting something. They do have some rare earths themselves, don't they?
IVOR SHRAGO, NON-EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, RARE EARTHS GLOBAL: There are a total of about 110 million probable, extractable rare earth elements. He is forgetting that 19 million of those are actually in the US.
The US took a deliberate decision some 20, 25 years ago not to use its own product, but to buy the completed product. As a consequence, China has developed a particular skill and expertise in extracting and, more importantly, refining the rare earth from the rare earth oxides in their separation plants.
That skill is with my company, and we in fact welcome more rare earth from outside because we are able to export our skills in helping them to develop their own mines.
DOS SANTOS: That really is one of the issues, here, isn't it? It's the technology that was involved 20 years or so ago to get what was then a rather unpopular byproduct of the mining industry out of the ground, is also toxic doing so, isn't it? To the environment.
SHRAGO: No, it's not. The way we do it with the mine that we extract the rare earth from, we do it by in-situ leaching method, which is a method by which -- holes are drilled at the top of the mountain and then the result in -- and filled with a solution of water and ammonium carbonate. And then it is --
DOS SANTOS: Soaked through --
SHRAGO: -- soaked through, and then carried into containers, which is then dried, filtered out through a further solution of water and ammonium sulfide. And then, eventually, it is taken off to our separation plant, and then filtered out into the separate elements.
DOS SANTOS: But originally, about 20 years ago, when places like the United States were deciding whether or not to develop this particular skill, it was considered environmentally dicey at that point.
Now, if we talk about where we stand now in terms of the supply chain, isn't it a question of a lot of people want to use high-technology, touch- screen phones, touch-screen tablets and, to a certain extent, the United States has just found itself on the wrong side of this equation?
SHRAGO: Well, there is. They took a wrong decision. And if you look at, say, this iPhone, without this dysprosium, this would be about four or five times its size. We'd still be back in the 1980s in terms of size with our electronic equipment.
DOS SANTOS: Just ever so briefly before I go, they're saying that this isn't about just rare earths, it's about the rules of trade in accordance with the WTO. What's your comment to that? They're saying just, places like China aren't playing fairly by the rules that they've signed up to.
SHRAGO: It's an election year.
DOS SANTOS: OK, Ivor Shrago, thanks ever so much for joining us.
Now, the Fed statement is out, and there's a warning over the price of oil, as some analysts have been expecting, some might say. We'll take you to the ins and outs of what Ben Bernanke has to say about it next.
DOS SANTOS: The Federal Reserve says that the United States is heading for a spell of higher than expected inflation, and that's basically because of the recent spike in the price of oil and gas. Policymakers released their statement about an hour or so ago and, in it, they say that inflation is likely to rise in the short term, as oil and gas head in the same direction.
There's better news when it comes to the unemployment front, though, because the jobless rate is expected to fall, albeit, though, gradually. And, as expected, the Fed also decided to keep interest rates on hold at their current, ultra-low levels.
Well, investors are focusing not only on the Fed's decisions, but also crucial to this is the language that it decided to use to communicate what it said today. Maggie Lake has been taking a look over the report, and she joins us, now, live in New York. Any surprises, Maggie?
MAGGIE LAKE, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Only at the margin, Nina. And let's be really clear about that language, because it matters so much. For the most part, the Fed really sticking with its assessment of a sort of moderately improving economy, even though the data stream we've seen lately has been pretty darn good.
When it comes to inflation, which you mentioned in the intro, though, let's talk about that. They did admit that, in the short term, they acknowledge the fact that gas and oil prices are going up, but they were very careful about what they said.
Inflation has been subdued in recent months, although prices of crude oil and gasoline have increased lately. Longer term, inflation expectations, however, have remained stable.
Now, that means that they're not worried about it. They see it at the register, just like we do, but they're telling the market they're not worried about it.
The other difference in this, the departure from the statement we saw last time around, was interesting what they had to say about the global situation. This, of course, had been a big concern, what's been happening in Europe, the fact that everyone was worried about contagion.
This time around, they say that the strains in global markets have eased although, they go on to say, they still think the situation presents downside risk.
All in all, the Fed has been a little bit more reluctant, Nina, to sort of acknowledge what most analysts see as an improving US economy because they're worried, I think, about the market running ahead of them.
And in fact, if you took a look at what happened in the market reaction today, stocks were already in rally mode, so the reaction wasn't really felt there. It was in the bond market. We saw yields on the ten- year benchmark bond yields here in the US rise higher.
Why? Because the Fed didn't make any mention of any more quantitative easing, they didn't say anything at all, in fact, and a lot of people are beginning to think, given what we've seen going on with the economy, that that stimulus may be coming to an end, and you're seeing bond yields go up.
The Fed doesn't want that to happen. They want to keep borrowing costs low through 2014, they reiterated that calendar date again. They don't want the market to get ahead of them. It presents an interesting conundrum for the Fed.
The one last thing I'll tell you is that, while there was no mention of quantitative easing of any kind this time, that Operation Twist, that buying of longer-term maturities is going to end in June.
Most market participants think in that April meeting, the next meeting, they're going to have to telegraph what they plan to do about that. We didn't get any hint this time, but that means that next meeting becomes all the more important to the market. And again, you're already seeing the bond market running up in anticipation of that. Nina?
DOS SANTOS: Yes, you certainly do, especially given the fact that Operation Twist was supposed to flatten that all-important yield curve. Maggie Lake, as always, good to see you. Many thanks for that.
Well, Maggie was just telling us about the market reaction in response to the Fed. She was just saying that markets -- equity markets were already in rally mode before this, but the Dow was actually already at a 13,000 -- above 13,000 just before that statement came out. As you can see, it's currently at 13,128, up by 168 points, or 1.3 percent.
Let's go over to Alison Kosik, who's live at the New York Stock Exchange, to tell us why and what the market reaction was.
Alison, you made some pretty good predictions this time yesterday saying that they probably weren't going to talk about quantitative easing, obviously weren't going to talk about moving rates. So, the market has seemed to be pretty strong. It seems that they were already in buying mode before.
ALISON KOSIK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, exactly. So, the market is actually rallying for three reasons. What you'd -- what we've seen sort of happen in the past, literally 20 minutes, is the market kind of shoot higher on news from JPMorgan Chase that it's going to go ahead and buy back up to $15 billion in shares and offer its dividend.
This, of course, coming ahead of the results coming out from the Fed's bank stress test of US banks to find out if these banks are strong and in good condition. So, JPMorgan Chase making this announcement.
Immediately, we've seen bank stocks shoot higher, anywhere from 3 to 5 percent, Goldman Sachs up more than 5 percent, Bank of America shares up 3.5 percent. JPMorgan Chase shares up almost 6 percent on this news. That's why you're seeing this extra push higher on the Dow, as we see it, 167 points higher.
But even before that, yes, the market was rallying before the Fed had its meeting. What investors pretty much liked about this is that the Fed didn't take another stimulus off the table, that the Fed wound up leaving the door wide open about a stimulus, and that the Fed really didn't say anything unexpected.
There was also some relief that Operation Twist remains in place. Of course, that's about shifting that $400 billion from short-term to long- term bonds.
But yes, we did see the market rally for those two reasons, and then a third reason: retail sales in the US made their biggest gain in five months in February, rising 1.1 percent. It's showing that American consumers, especially, are buying cars and trucks, even though they're paying more for gasoline.
So, that retail sales number really giving the market that initial push, because it shows that consumers are holding up spending-wise, despite the fact that gasoline prices head higher on a daily basis. Nina?
DOS SANTOS: OK, great. Alison Kosik joining us there, live at the New York Stock Exchange. Many thanks for that.
Now, oil prices continue to rise in today's session. It's something that both Maggie and also Alison were talking about in their respective pieces just before.
Let's have a look at how NYMEX crude is trading at the moment. As you can see, it's adding another 70 cents or so on the barrel at the moment. It's up more than 12 percent over the course of the last three months alone.
And if we take a look at the main European contract, which is often more reactive to some of the geopolitical events that underlie this high oil price, well, Brent is currently up above $126 a barrel, it's up more than 20 percent since just the start of this very year.
Up next, we meet two more of our Millennials. App -- the gap years might sound like fun to some, but for these guys, it's a question of serious business and for this firm to succeed. Stay with us to find out what they do.
DOS SANTOS: Tonight, we continue our series on The Millennials. Last week, we introduced you to 22-year-old Michael Burbach in New York, a photography assistant and also an aspiring actor, as well as Milli Bongela in Johannesburg, the 26-year-old fashion blogger.
And this week, we bring you two more. In London, Joe Braidwood, 26 years old here, and already he's chief marketing officer for SwiftKey, that's an award-winning app.
And in Santiago, Chile, we have David Lloyd. He is 27 years old and already managing director of his own company. These two are both part of a new generation that's bent on success -- on its own terms, though.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They are young and confident, educated and ambitious. Born in the 1980s, they are the new generation entering the workforce, and their thirst for success knows no bounds. Meet The Millennials.
JOE BRAIDWOOD, CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER, SWIFTKEY: I just want to keep you in the loop on that.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: In London, 26-year-old Joe Braidwood, chief marketing officer for tech start-up SwiftKey.
Morning has broken. Already, commuters are hurrying to work. Behind them, the view is imposing, as St. Paul's Cathedral makes its mark on London's historical landscape. Hoping to leave his own stamp on his workforce is this 26-year-old.
BRAIDWOOD: I'm Joe Braidwood, I'm the chief marketing officer of SwiftKey.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: Joe's trajectory has been typically Millennial: out of university and with a law degree in hand, he jumped right into the workforce, working as a journalist for British broadcaster Sky News.
BRAIDWOOD: I was this sort of young, fresh-faced person with not much experience at all coming in and saying, "But this is all wrong. We should be doing things, thinking about the instant audience of people that you can communicate with online."
So, I helped introduce Twitter at Sky News when I was there, and there were a lot of people in the industry at the time who would say, "Oh, it's just Twitter," and "I don't think this is anything that's going to last, it's just a fad, you kind of geeky child obsessed with new technology."
We need to delay the promotion. So, I just wanted to keep you in the loop on that.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: In the loop and on Twitter, Joe's got all the Millennial jargon, and he's using it at work, promoting and marketing SwiftKey, a tech start-up that creates apps using linguistic technology. In other words, predicting what you're going to write next.
BRAIDWOOD: What's so great about this company is that it's acknowledged that we're all Millennials that founded it, we all worked together to build something that we don't rest on our laurels, but we don't come to the table with any preconceived ideas about what we're going to achieve.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: There's no doubt this maturity will push him to new levels.
BRAIDWOOD: I wouldn't say necessarily that I work harder, but I think that I'm more dynamic.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: But it will be his Millennial ambition that will take him places.
BRAIDWOOD: Thinking ambitiously, I don't think, is a bad thing.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: As the company grows, Joe knows there's a chance that they may be bought out.
BRAIDWOOD: I quite like the idea of a kind of a guide.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: Can he control his own destiny?
DAVID LLOYD, MANAGING DIRECTOR, INTERN LATIN AMERICA: What time can we meet?
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: In Santiago, Chile, meet 27-year-old David Lloyd, managing director of Intern Latin America.
Santiago, Chile. One of Latin America's most vibrant economies, a hotbed of entrepreneurship, land, and new opportunity.
LLOYD: We can keep a theme in TMI.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: Looking to make it here is this young Englishman.
LLOYD: I'm David Lloyd, I'm 27, and managing director of Intern Latin America and Intern London.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: Starting up a business in Chile is not the first big leap this Millennial has made. Two years ago, he quit his job on the trading floor at Merrill Lynch in London and became his own boss.
LLOYD: Obviously, you trade kind of security and financial security for doing something which is potentially kind of a lot more exciting and challenging, and that's kind of a balance that you have to -- that I had to make.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: David took a typically Millennial gamble. He spotted an opportunity and ventured to South America, where he launched his own company, Intern Latin America, providing students with internships throughout the continent. In no time, he was doing press for Colombian TV.
(LLOYD SPEAKING SPANISH)
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: Today, it seems, his gamble has paid off. David has received a $40,000 grant from Start Up Chile, a government program.
LLOYD: Obviously, the money is the thing that stands out, but the reality is that the connections, environment, and everything in Start Up Chile for me is by far the biggest benefit.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: Taking the grant means this Millennial has everything to prove.
LLOYD: You do so something off the kind of normal path, and you instinctively can feel a bit defensive, potentially, and you really want the thing to be a success.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: A simple task for someone who's always been an overachiever.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How ambitious would you say you are?
LLOYD: Very ambitious. Work's priority, 100 percent.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: Keeping up with his own ambition, now that could be more challenging.
LLOYD: I've got no interest in kind of doing nothing, being lazy. Achieving nothing would be very disappointing for me.
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: Next week on The Millennials.
(LLOYD SPEAKING SPANISH)
UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT: Networking in a foreign language, David works the salsa floor looking for business opportunities in Santiago.
And working your profile. Joe takes us with him to Las Vegas as he takes on the Consumer Electronic Show.
DOS SANTOS: And, of course, you can join in the conversation on Twitter or Facebook. Get in touch, let us know what you think of our Millennial series. The big questions we're asking out there is, do they inspire you, or do they just make you feel, well, frankly, old? The hash tag is #cnnmills, or you can also access our Facebook site at facebook.com/cnnquest.
Up next, Europe's biggest construction project blasts off.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DOS SANTOS: The mayor of London sounds the horn to start the tunneling. We'll go underground to bring you the full story.
DOS SANTOS: Hello.
I'm Nina dos Santos.
You're watching QUEST MEANS BUSINESS.
And these are the main news headlines this hour.
As Afghans protest Sunday's alleged massacre of 16 civilians, we're learning more now about the American soldier accused of the rampage. Officials say that the suspect is on his fourth deployment but his first in Afghanistan. They also say that he suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2010 in Iraq, but was subsequently cleared for duty.
A Syrian opposition group says the security forces have killed at 36 people this Tuesday. Video posted online appears to show a recent explosion in Homs. Another opposition group says that defecting soldiers killed 12 troops during an ambush in Southern Daraa Province.
In Southern Bangladesh, at least 32 people are dead after a ferry carrying at least 20 -- 250 people capsized on its way to the capital, Dhaka. As of Tuesday evening, officials say that around 35 people have been rescued and at least 60 people remain missing. The ferry sank after colliding with another craft.
New arrests in Tuesday in London in connection with the U.K. phone hacking scandal. Well, police say that six people were taken into custody on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. One of them is Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the now defunct "News of the World" tabloid newspaper, who is also a News International executive.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has just arrived in Washington for official talks with Barack Obama. The two leaders are expected to focus on a timetable for troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and also to talk about the conflict in Syria.
Two budget deficit blowouts and two very different responses from the European Union. The EU is suspending $650 million worth of aid to Hungary. It says that Budapest has failed to show that it can bring its deficit under -- under 3 percent of GDP by the year 2013.
Well, the EU says that it will reconsider only if Hungary manages to pass more budget cuts by the month of June. This is Spain's finance minister, though, receiving an unusual greeting here from the Euro Group president, Jean-Claude Juncker, in Brussels today. Now, despite appearances, European leaders are giving Spain an extra breathing room here, because they've agreed that the country should cut its deficit to 5.3 percent of its GDP this year. That is still well above its original target of what I believe was 4.8 percent before.
Well, German investors are also breathing a little easier these days, according to the latest numbers from the ZEW Index. Well, the German think tank says that its reading of investor confidence is currently at its higher level -- highest level in nearly two years.
Europe's main markets are at an eight month high. The Xetra DAX, obviously the market in Germany, broke through the 7000 mark, to finish up more than 1 percent.
Markets had already closed by the time Fitch decided to upgrade Greece's own sovereign debt rating to a level of B minus, with a stable outlook. Do remember that this follows Monday's debt swap, but it has upgraded it to from a "restricted" default rating, which was only put on on the 9th of March.
Europe's largest construction project is underway. Digging has started on the $23 billion Crossrail scheme to link East and West London.
Jim Boulden caught up with London's mayor, Boris Johnson, to take a look at the giant drills that are likely to carve out a significant route under the British capital.
JIM BOULDEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Sounding the horn for London and kick-starting one of Europe's biggest construction projects. These boring machines will soon tunnel under London to add a fast east-west train service far below the capital's creaking Victorian-era transports.
(on camera): In all, there will be eight of these giant machines, creating 21 kilometers, or 13 miles, of tunnel under London. The plan is to have the entire railway operational by the end of 2018.
(voice-over): Never one to miss a photo opportunity, the mayor is touting improvements to London's transport during his reelection campaign.
BORIS JOHNSON, LONDON MAYOR: That east-west corridor will be massively improved. It's going to be like the RER in Paris, only much, much better.
BOULDEN (on camera): And you've had to scale back the budget a bit, though. And you have to be a bit more realistic, I guess, within that sort of budget?
JOHNSON: Yes. We've -- we've taken cost out in a pretty relentless way. In the end, though, you've got to go ahead with the project. This is an amazing thing. This will -- this will liberate loads of Londoners from the -- the oppression of being jammed together in the tube.
BOULDEN (voice-over): Crossrail has been in the planning stages for decades. Now, firms from the U.K., Germany and Spain are heading the tunneling portion of the $23 billion rail line.
Britain was once burdened with a reputation of big projects being late and over budget. Crossrail could Crossrail could literally build on build on Britain's more recent reputation of getting big projects like the Olympic Park completed on time and on budget.
PHILIP CAVE, KIER CONSTRUCTION: Whether you're doing the Olympics or you're doing Crossrail, you need to work with a whole range of people, from the design experts to the clients on the land-based side of life, also to the contractors, where we understand the costs and the risks which are associated with a project. Yes, it creates work and volume of work through the business, but it also builds reputation. We can take that reputation and we translate that to work both in the U.K. and internationally.
BOULDEN: The train service will have limited stations in Central London. So it will cut the journey from Heathrow Airport to London's financial center in half, to 32 minutes, with no need to change trains.
ANDREW WOLSTENHOLME, CEO, CROSSRAIL: For one ticket at Heathrow, for instance, just go right their way across London. It has a huge opportunity to connect to the existing line. So it relieves the lines that are already here.
BOULDEN: If the 73 mile line can be opened with little hassle and within budget, there are plans for a second Crossrail, running southwest to northeast London.
Jim Boulden, CNN, London.
(END VIDEO TAPE)
DOS SANTOS: Now, Yahoo! has updated its status with Facebook this morning. And, yes, you guessed it, it's complicated. So much so, in fact, that they're going to the federal courts. We'll explain why after the break.
DOS SANTOS: Well, if you've seen "The Social Network," you'll know that Facebook is no stranger to the world of lawsuits. Well, now, it seems to have another one on its hands. And this time, it comes from Yahoo!.
Now, Yahoo! has been saying that Facebook owes it money for 10 patents to do with things like online messaging and social networking. As a result, it's taking it to the federal court, marking the first big patent dispute in the world of social media.
These kind of lawsuits have been the hottest trend for smartphones for years now, it seems, with everybody in Silicon Valley suing one or the other. And this is just kind of a snapshot of the picture that we have at the moment.
Let's start out with Yahoo!, because it's one of the protagonists today. Yahoo! sued Google back in 2004. And that ended with Yahoo! being awarded millions of Google's shares.
Since then, Google's Android software has seen several lawsuits and counter-suits involving Apple.
Now, speaking of Apple, the late Steve Jobs once said that he would wage, quote, "a thermonuclear war" against Android. He thought that it was based on stolen ideas between Apple's own IOS system.
And Apple has filed a string of lawsuits itself against all sorts of companies that do use Android, like, for instance, HTC and also Samsung. And, also, let's not forget Motorola, which decided to sue Apple back in 2010. Google is so worried about patent lawsuits, that it seems to be spending about $12.5 billion just to buy Motorola's own mobile business, Motorola Mobility.
So it really seems to be a veritable merry-go-round, or some might say vicious circle, among all these companies with various suits pending between each other.
Now, Colleen Chien is the assistant professor at Santa Clara in Silicon Valley.
And she specializes in these kind of patent disputes.
Obviously, some of these companies are ones that she's probably familiar with, as we all are.
And she joins us via Skype.
First of all, Colleen, this suit from Yahoo!, some analysts have been saying that it smacks of desperation, the sort of company that's, you know, seeing its business model die and it's just clutching at the last embers of what it can.
Do you agree with that?
COLLEEN CHIEN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, SANTA CLARA LAW:
Well, I think what's become more common recently is that as patents have become much more valuable and you've seen these large purchases take place, then a number of companies are looking more carefully at their portfolios and asking, how can we make money off of the portfolio?
And I think from a, you know, kind of common sense perspective, that makes sense. You know, you spend a lot of money on R&D. You spend a lot of money on patenting. And so corporate boards are now looking at portfolios and saying that's not an asset that's been used, can we try to - - to monetize it?
DOS SANTOS: It sounds like they're spending an awful lot of money on lawyers, as well as R&D, though. Perhaps a little too much here. If they're each suing each other, it's probably counter-intuitive or counter- productive.
CHIEN: Well, I think that is a great point. And I think the cost of doing business in, you know, in technology has -- has risen greatly now because of these patent suits. For many years, although there were a lot of patents on these different technologies, companies tried not to -- to fight in the courtroom. They'd rather duke it out in the marketplace.
But now, as you do see more assertions being more common, it's becoming more acceptable to -- to go through that, even though it's very disruptive for the company that brings the suit, that invites countersuit and it takes a lot of resources, as you said, away from kind of the main business.
But as it becomes more lucrative to do so, companies find themselves considering this possibility.
DOS SANTOS: Now, for the average layperson like me, who's not necessarily a technophile, what I would have thought is common sense dictates that some of these patents will be obsolete by the time these cases actually are solved.
CHIEN: Well, the interesting thing about patents is that, especially in the software and Internet spaces, they're often written with such broad and vague language that even though the technologies change, the patents can also adapt and, in some sense, cover later developed technology that the inventor didn't have in mind at all when they wrote the patent.
So, for example, you're -- you know, you might wonder why are old patents over pagers relevant?
Well, because they might involve messaging between two headsets. Well, those two headsets can be construed as pagers, but they can also be thought of as smartphones. I know we see, in the Internet space, some of these ideas have been around for a long time but the patents are still enforced and can be construed to cover technology that's been developed more recently.
DOS SANTOS: OK, Colleen Chien there, professor at Santa Clara Law in Silicon Valley.
Many thanks for helping us to decipher the legal code of all these patents. It seems almost as complicated as the computer and binary code that's used to program them.
Now, with such high stakes involved in the tech world, it's no surprise that some companies, like Disney, are looking to get in on a piece of the action, as well. And that's why this firm is focusing on more mobile games, like, for instance, Where's My Water?, the latest offering.
I spoke to the head of its mobile unit, Bart Decrem, and I asked him why Disney was buying into the world of apps these days.
BART DECREM, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT & GM, DISNEY MOBILE: There's 250 million iPhones or IOS devices and 300 million Android devices out there. So a whole generation of kids -- we call them guests -- is growing up and this is their first screen. And then there's whole markets -- a billion and-a-half people in China, a billion people in India. And for many of those folks, this is their first screen.
So this is a really important new distribution channel, way of connecting with our guests.
DOS SANTOS: One thing that, just on an anecdotal basis, I remember is, you see my younger nephews, about three. I've also got young cousins who are about seven. Whereas in my day and age, parents would put their child in front of the television, now they put them in front of the iPad.
DECREM: Yes. It's just a lot of fun. It's very intuitive and it's more interactive.
In the case of, for example, Where's My Water?, it's a puzzle so the kids are engaged and you're actually using your brain and, you know, solving problems.
DOS SANTOS: Now, one position that Disney is in is that it has very recognizable cartoon characters that it can roll out into application gains.
So you're going to be doing that with things like The Little Mermaid, WALL-E, some of the really famous Disney characters that could now become parts of games, not just cartoons.
DECREM: Yes, absolutely. In addition to creating new characters like Swampy, on these devices, we also want to bring our existing characters to life on what's really a set of magical devices.
DOS SANTOS: Now, if we're talking about applications, you have a bit of experience of setting up companies that make those applications. You sold one of them to Zingo, which is a formidable success story, that one.
DOS SANTOS: It's using the famous...
DOS SANTOS: -- farm, though (ph).
Is this going to be a significant portion of Disney's revenues going forward?
DECREM: I think right now, the dollars are still modest by Disney's standards. But, you know, in another year or two, there will be a billion people on these devices. So as a network, it's a massive opportunity for companies like Disney.
DOS SANTOS: What are the ingredients toward creating one of the most successful apps?
DECREM: Well, the most important thing is people love their iPhone, their iPad, their smartphone. And they feel like they're these amazing, magical devices. So if you want to be successful, you've really got to offer something delightful, fun and sort of with a sense of perfectionism behind it.
DOS SANTOS: And, also, you've got to keep updating these games...
DOS SANTOS: -- once you put them forward now. So you have a look at Swampy, your character...
DOS SANTOS: -- in Where's My Water? -- I happen to know this now, after having rooted around on the Internet a little bit. You've had to upgrade those puzzles.
DOS SANTOS: When it comes to selling these things to people, I think your application only costs about 99 cents. That's not a lot of -- a lot of money.
DECREM: Ninety-nine cents. But there's a billion people out there that might go buy it, right?
And so we've added a lot of company. We've put the game out. It had 80 levels. Now, you get 200 levels. So every few weeks, we add more conthins (ph) so people will keep coming back.
(END VIDEO TAPE)
DOS SANTOS: The business trip is back. While next, the president of Hotels.com will be here to tell us why recovering corporate travel is pushing room rates higher.
DOS SANTOS: Hello and welcome back to the show.
Well, hotel room prices rose by an average of 4 percent last year, according to Hotels.com. It says in particular that strong corporate travel has been helping to push up room rates right around the world, although, on the whole, prices are still a little bit cheaper than they were back in 2005.
There are a whole set of reasons why we're seeing this particular trend.
Let's start out with this. We've seen prices drop particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, places like Egypt, Tunisia, Qatar. And in particular, if we home in on Egypt, the resort of Sharm El-Sheikh has been about 30 percent lower than 2010 in terms of volumes and rates. Obviously, the main reason for this is -- yes, you guessed it, the Arab spring uprising that we saw last year.
Now, we've also seen a series of issues in Greece that have undermined prices, notably, the unrest and backlash against austerity as this country has had to apply for two bailouts. The average room rate in Athens has been dropping, to the tune of about 10 percent. And it now stands at $125 per room. and now, we get to the brighter news here. It's not often we get a chance to tout London's fortunes, because, obviously, sometimes the weather is a little bit dicey here. But if we take a look at the forecast when it comes to what could be coming through on the London Olympics front, well, it does look pretty rosy, because rooms expect to double in price from 2011 and to prices that could be around about $330 per room per night. So that's a pretty expensive price. It could be doubling just because of the likes of things like the Olympics, and also, let's not forget, the queen's Jubilee.
Now, David Roche is president of Hotels.com, which did that survey.
Thanks very much for coming on QUEST MEANS BUSINESS.
DAVID ROCHE, PRESIDENT, HOTELS.COM: Thanks for having me.
DOS SANTOS: It's always interesting to read your surveys, because for the last few quarters, obviously, the Arab Spring uprisings and also the issues in Greece have been taking their toll.
Just how much will it take to get people to go back to those kind of places?
ROCHE: I think that's very interesting. And I think that has a lot to do with people's perceptions about the safety there and the -- the visibility, the forward visibility of the safety. And I think the hotel trade there is doing what it can do to drop prices, make it still more attractive. And I suppose those countries have got to just hang in there, continue to promote a very positive image and let time heal those wounds.
DOS SANTOS: You know, one of the interesting things that we were looking at there was Greece. I suppose what's putting people off going to Greece is, obviously, the backlash against austerity, perhaps a little bit of security concerns. This is a country that's having to curtail all sorts of public spending, street sweeping, etc. And yet it's still within the Eurozone, so it's not cheaper to go to.
ROCHE: Well, one of the things that you don't have in Greece is you don't have currency risk if you're coming from the Eurozone. And that is, in a sense, a comfort and a problem. It's a comfort for consumers traveling there. They know that they can pay in euros. They know exactly what they're going to pay. And it is a problem for hoteliers there who can't adjust their prices down particularly.
So, look, there are going to be a continued, you know, issue in Greece, but it will offer very good value in the summer, which is clearly the very big season now.
DOS SANTOS: Now, when it comes to the summer, the real big one here is London, of course, isn't it?
DOS SANTOS: We don't get the chance to tout London's fortunes as often as when the Olympics or the queen's Jubilee comes around, twice in one go. It's going to be a whopping great summer for London hoteliers, isn't it?
ROCHE: Well, I -- I -- I think it will be. But you've got to remember that the background here is in 2011, London only went up in price 1 percent, right?
So you might say, if you're a hotelier, you're due a bit of good news about now, right. So we are seeing, in Central London, prices have gone up more than 100 percent, on average. And we think that the last few rooms that are still available -- and that's not many -- in Central London, will probably see far higher year on year gains than that.
DOS SANTOS: Gosh, expensive prices, indeed.
Great speaking to you.
Thanks ever so much.
ROCHE: Thanks for having me.
DOS SANTOS: David Roche there from Hotels.com.
Now, speaking of the London Olympics, and, of course, the queen's Jubilee, all of will be taking place in summer here in the British Isles. And sometimes the weather is a little bit unreliable there.
But for the moment, it's blue skies and sunshine. And that also means there's a drought.
Let's go over to Jenny Harrison, who's standing by to tell us all at the CNN International Weather Center -- Jenny.
JENNY HARRISON, ATS METEOROLOGIST: You know, Nina, there's always a down side, isn't there?
It's lovely to enjoy the blue skies and the sunshine. And you think wow, what a great sort of water, what a great start to spring.
But my goodness, the down side, as you said, is very much the drought. Now it really has already reached serious levels across much of the U.K., certainly much of England. And you can see here, less than 50 percent of the average rainfall has come down in the last winter season across, you can see here, these areas in the ogee, the amber color. This is after two very dry winters. So this is a problem that actually goes deep down under the ground. It's not just a case of the reservoirs are a little bit low. The reservoirs are low. The reservoirs are also very low.
And, of course, the problem is that as we go into spring and summer, we're actually anticipating this drought to potentially get worse. There's no rain in the forecast for the immediate future.
And so the water restrictions are going to begin as early as April, certainly across the southeast of England. Remember, as well, it does come down to sort of population density in the southeast, where we do have the most dense population.
But East Anglia in Britain, its driest six months since 1921, when they began to take records. So it gives you an idea of just how serious this problem is.
So what will happen when it comes to the Olympics?
All these people flocking to London. I think different estimates give you slightly different numbers, but at least five million people are expected to come on a sort of daily basis throughout those two weeks, an extra five million, and as many as half a million will be staying in London.
So we've got to find some way to actually sustain the forces that are there. And that means harvesting rainwater from rooftops. It's a very simple one. You can do this yourself in your garden. It's so easy. Put out a big barrel and collect the water off the drainpipes.
Also, more efficient fixtures, you know, such as lavatories, also, sinks, that sort of thing. And then swimming pool backwash recycling. This is all the water that gets filtered from a swimming pool. That can then be recycled and used again, never as drinking water. And, in fact, a lot of this recycling that's going to take place is at a new plant, next to the Olympic Plant. And that will be, again, the water, two flush toilets to actually water and irrigate the land.
This is the forecast as we go into the next few months. And, of course, just not forgetting the southwest of Europe, as well, an extreme drought in some places there already.
But it's not looking good, really, it has to be said, Nina.
It might make for a nice summer...
DOS SANTOS: OK.
HARRISON: -- but a dry one.
DOS SANTOS: I know. Yes. And -- and we haven't even got anywhere near spring yet.
DOS SANTOS: Jenny Harrison, as always, good to see you.
Thanks ever so much.
We'll have a final check on the world's stock markets in just a moments time.
Stay with us.
QUEST MEANS BUSINESS continues after this break.
DOS SANTOS: Hello and welcome back.
You're watching QUEST MEANS BUSINESS.
For all of you out there waiting to hear about the stress tests that have been imposed on the 19 largest U.S. financial institutions, we're now hearing, according to the Reuters News Agency, that the Federal Reserve will be releasing its details on that latest round of stress tests in a few hours from now, a little bit earlier than some had been expecting.
The Fed is, of course, requiring some of the nation's largest lenders here to prove that they have enough capital to withstand another major economic shock in the future, like the one we saw after the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers back in 2007 to 2008.
Let's have a look at how U.S. stocks are faring at the moment, because what we're seeing is they're heading for a bit of a higher close at the moment. As you can see, the Dow Jones Industrial average well above that 13000 mark. As you can see, at 13177.87, up to the tune of about 200 points and rising at the moment.
We're currently up about 1.75 of 1 percent at the moment. And that's largely thanks to comments that the Federal Reserve has made, but also, they did caution that the oil price remaining high could be a threat to the kind of economic recovery we're seeing.
And that's it for this edition of QUEST MEANS BUSINESS.
Thanks ever so much for joining us.
I'm Nina dos Santos in London.
Stay with CNN.
The news continues after this. | <urn:uuid:6d64062a-6716-4ba5-8d61-5c23aaef2532> | CC-MAIN-2016-30 | http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1203/13/qmb.01.html | 2016-07-29T12:30:33Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257830066.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071030-00205-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96965 | 11,556 |
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|Publication number||US6223145 B1|
|Application number||US 09/200,194|
|Publication date||Apr 24, 2001|
|Filing date||Nov 25, 1998|
|Priority date||Nov 26, 1997|
|Publication number||09200194, 200194, US 6223145 B1, US 6223145B1, US-B1-6223145, US6223145 B1, US6223145B1|
|Inventors||Marti A. Hearst|
|Original Assignee||Zerox Corporation|
|Export Citation||BiBTeX, EndNote, RefMan|
|Patent Citations (5), Non-Patent Citations (9), Referenced by (164), Classifications (11), Legal Events (5)|
|External Links: USPTO, USPTO Assignment, Espacenet|
The present application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/066,960, filed Nov. 26, 1997.
The present invention relates to an interactive interface. More particularly, the present invention relates to an interactive interface for specifying search queries.
A. Organizing Retrieval Results
Increasingly, the public accesses text collections and their information electronically, identifying desired documents by submitting a search query. The standard approach for displaying search results for electronic text collections is to present, in ranked order, a list of document titles. Often shown alongside each title is a numerical score signifying the degree of match between the document and the query, or the estimated relevance of the document to the query. On-line bibliographic systems show meta-data about the documents, such as author and publisher, alongside the title. Search engines associated with the World Wide Web commonly show short summaries or excerpts from the retrieved documents, typically extracted from the first few lines. Some systems show lines extracted from the document that match terms in the query. Document titles can also be annotated with graphics that show the correspondence between the retrieved documents and the query.
Use of category taxonomies to impose organization upon retrieval results has received little attention, even though some are associated with valuable document collections. For example, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has developed a hierarchy of approximately 1200 category labels and authors are required to assign multiple categories from this taxonomy to their journal articles. Indexers for major medical journals use the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) taxonomy of over 18,000 main subject headings to annotate articles. Category taxonomies like these are arranged in a hierarchy meant to reflect the set of concepts that define the field. For this reason, those who know the relevant domain easily understand the associated categories. Categories are restricted to a fixed set and so help reduce the space of concepts by which documents can be characterized. Categories can summarize a document's contents and by virtue of being assigned to a document, or not, distinguish those concepts that are discussed at length versus those just touched in passing.
Little use has been made of category labels in conjunction with the presentation and organization of retrieved documents other than to simply list the associated categories. Simply listing categories associated with documents is inadequate in a number of situations. One such is when many documents are assigned to a particular category so that the category does not differentiate between the retrieved documents. Another such is when many categories are associated with a set of retrieved documents so that higher level commonalties among the categories are not represented. Thus, the available categories do not capture the main themes of the retrieved documents. Finally, the categories available may not be adequate because they do not characterize the information in a way that interests the user.
Yahoo's search engine for the World Wide Web provides category labels which users may use to issue search queries. These category labels are presented as an alphabetical list, with no indication of the relationship of the categories to one another, forcing users to read through them one by one. This poor presentation of the hierarchy frustrates a user when the predefined categories do not meet the user's needs. The user is forced to either navigate through irrelevant portions of the hierarchy or abandon use to the hierarchy altogether, issuing instead a search on the topic of interest.
The problems just discussed are exacerbated when documents are best characterized by multiple category labels. For example, a document whose title is “Immediate breast reconstruction after mastectomy” is not about either breast reconstruction or mastectomy alone, but about the conjunction of these topics. Each of the constitutive topics could occur without the other. There are many different ways that topics like these can combine that, for a large category set, navigating a structure containing all potential combinations is untenable.
Thus, an unfulfilled need exists for a means of using categories to specify search queries. Another unfulfilled need exists for a means of using categories to display search results when the retrieved documents are associated with category labels. This need is greater when each retrieved document is associated with many category labels.
B. The Cone Tree
A method for generating a cone tree using a computer system is described in detail in U.S. Pat. No. 5,295,243 to Robertson et al. entitled “Display of Hierarchical Three-Dimensional Structures with Rotating Substructures.” Displayed on the monitor of a computer system, the cone tree is perceived by computer user as three-dimensional. Briefly described, the cone tree provides a three-dimensional node-link structure with a hierarchical geometry within which the relative positions of nodes and links, as viewed from the primary viewing position in front of a computer monitor, can change without losing the perceived constancy of the structure as a whole. When a user selects a part of the structure, the selected part can be brought to a primary viewing position by changing the geometry of the structure without loss of object constancy.
FIG. 1 illustrates a three dimensional, horizontally oriented, hierarchical structure 60 displayed on a computer monitor. Structure 60 has conic substructures that can rotate while preserving object constancy. Structure 60 includes conic substructures 62, 64, 66, 68 and 70 in hierarchical levels. Several cues within structure 60 allow a human eye to perceive it as three-dimensional. For example, the bases or directories of the conic substructures, illustratively elliptical as can be seen from base 72 of conic substructure 62, are perceptible as tilted circles receding from the viewing point. Also, the links, illustratively of different lengths as can be seen from links 74 and 76, are perceptible as having equal length due to some links being closer to the viewing point than others. The nodes, illustratively including selectable units of different sizes as can be seen from nodes 78 and 80, are perceptible as of equal size dues to some nodes being closer to the viewing point than others.
An image of structure 60 on a computer monitor could be followed by a sequence of images in which each of the conic substructures is replaced by a series of similar conic substructures that are perceptible as slightly rotated continuations, rotating about horizontal axes. For example, if a user indicated node 82 and requested that it be moved to the primary viewing position closest to the viewer, conic substructures 70, 68, 66 and 62 could rotate to move node 82 to the requested position. Viewing structure 60 from above, the rotation to move node 82 to the primary viewing position could be as follows: Substructures 70, 68 and 66 could rotate counterclockwise. Substructure 62 could rotate clockwise. These rotations could be concurrent, and continue until links 84, 86, 88 and 90 are all aligned toward the primary viewing position.
The user can request that a node be moved to the primary viewing position by selecting that node's selectable unit. Node 100, in addition to including selectable unit for requesting that it be moved, includes selectable unit 102, called a grow tab. By selecting a grow tab the user requests presentation of the children nodes of the selected node, which are not displayed while the grow tab is displayed. This explains why node 96 does not include a grow tab in FIG. 1—children nodes 94 and 95 are already displayed.
For additional discussion of the cone tree and it implementation in a computer system refer to U.S. Pat. No. 5,295,243.
C. The WebBook
A book metaphor is used to browse a list of linked documents in U.S. Ser. No. 08/525,936 to Robertson et al. entitled “Display System for Displaying Lists of Linked Documents.” Briefly described, an interactive interface, called the WebBook, presents a list of pages to a viewer of a computer monitor in a book metaphor, thus conveying a relationship between the different pages. Each page in the WebBook represents a page in the list of linked documents.
FIG. 2 illustrates the computer instructions 100 for generating and using the WebBook with a computer system. The first step 101 is to generate or otherwise obtain a list of Web Pages. This can be accomplished in various ways. One way is to analyze a page, such as a home page, and follow and download all the relative links on the home page. This is repeated for each subsequent page. Following relative links is useful since these pages will typically be closely related. Each page on a chain of relative links would then be included in the set of pages. Variations on this would limit the number of relative links traversed. This list of pages will be in the order that they would appear in the book.
Next, during step 102, page objects for each web page are generated. A page object is the internal representation of a web page for use in the book metaphor. Page objects and their contents are described in greater detail below. Next, during step 103 the WebBook is generated from the page objects. The WebBook has a basic structure which lists the pages and provides various controls. When a user opens the WebBook, during step 104 the WebBook rendered by the computer controlled display system and displayed on a display. The first time the book is opened, the cover will be displayed, or alternatively a first page (depending on whether the book has a cover). Subsequent instances of opening the book will cause it to be opened at the point where it was last closed. As will be described in detail below, only those pages corresponding to a particular page in a book are visible. Other page objects are marked as not displayed.
The user during step 105 then traverses the WebBook using page turning operations and marking interesting pages until through viewing or using the WebBook. The page turning operations are animated so as to give the user a sense of an actual page turning. When the user is done, the page in the WebBook last open is marked in the WebBook, step 106, and WebBook is closed, step 107. Optionally, during step 108 the WebBook may be stowed. Stowing the WebBook is equivalent of putting a book on a bookshelf.
WebBooks themselves may be organized as collections and stored as icons on a bookshelf. This would permit the storing of multiple WebBooks each having their own related subject. WebBooks may also be transferred and used by other users. Finally, pages may be added to a WebBook. This would require creation of a page object(s) for the added page(s) and regeneration of the WebBook.
FIG. 3 illustrates a WebBook as displayed on a display of a computer system. The WebBook 110 includes a first page 112 and a second page 113, each having an identical structure. The first page 112 is an instance of a left page and the second page 113 is an instance of a right page. Pages 112 and 113 each includes links 111 to other pages within the WebBook. As is typical, links 111 are indicated by underlined text. For example, clicking on link 111 a opens the WebBook to a page containing a paper about cone tree visualization. Vertical scroll bars 114 and 115 provide for vertical scrolling on their respective pages. Horizontal scroll bars 116 and 117 provide for horizontal scrolling on their respective pages. Superimposed within the horizontal scroll bars are page references 132 and 133 which indicate the page number in the book for each page. Scaling bars 118 and 119 enable font scaling on the respective pages. Each of the pages also has a title bar 120 and 121 which is used to indicate the title of the respective page. The content and layout of the page is determined by the HTML macros defining the page.
Book control buttons are presented at the bottom edge of the WebBook 110. Close button 122 provides for closing the book. Back button 123 provides for looking at a prior page. History button 124 provides for reviewing the history of pages looked at. Mark button 125 provides for creating a bookmark for a page being viewed. Illustrated in FIG. 3, bookmark 130 indicates that page 14 has been marked. Help button 126 provides for invoking various help functions for the WebBook 110. The help functions are in the form of text describing how to perform particular functions in the WebBook. Options button 127 provides for specifying various operational parameters in the WebBook. An example is specifying the timing for flipping pages in the WebBook. Labeled “Scan <”, button 128 provides for automatic scanning of pages to the lower numbered pages. Labeled “Scan >”, button 129 provides for automatic scanning of pages to the higher numbered pages. Re-sizing boxes 131 may be used to re-size the WebBook 110 using a point and drag function.
Finally, book edge areas 132 and 133 are used to provide a visual indication of relative positioning within the book, e.g. the number of pages on that “side” of the book. The book edge areas 132 and 133 will change in size as the pages are traversed. Also, the book edge areas may be used as a means for directly accessing pages in the book (e.g. mimicking the activity of thumbing through the book in groups of pages). This is accomplished by a point and click operation pointing to the edge.
Referring to FIG. 4 when displayed with a cover, the contents of the WebBook is hidden. Display of a cover may be useful for security purposes, wherein a password or other security mechanism may be required before the book may be opened. Further, when displayed with a cover, the first page will be a left page in the WebBook because when opened two pages are displayed.
C.1. Generating a List of Pages
A list of pages for the WebBook can be obtained in any one of many ways. As mentioned above, one way is to gather all the relative links that originate from a particular home page. It has been determined through observation that the use of relative links is a common indicator of pages that are related. This is because the use of relative links makes a collection of pages easily transportable (e.g. to move the pages from one server to another). During this process of following the relative links, each page is retrieved and stored. In this technique the pages would be ordered so as to retain relationships. In other words, for a first relative link on a home page, all subsequent relative links are ordered sequentially. They would be followed by a second relative link on the home page followed by all its subsequent relative links. This ordering will allow related pages to be grouped sequentially within the WebBook. An exception is that relative links that are specified two or more times are represented in the list only once (e.g. typically the home page is specified on each page).
Other techniques for creating lists of pages may be used so long as they produce a list that is ordered in the way that the pages would appear in the WebBook.
The WebBook is created from the list of page objects. The WebBook is merely a control structure for manipulating and controlling the page objects. The page objects are positioned in a 3-D space so that that they are co-planer.
The WebBook data structure is dynamic and changes as the book is changed. Preferably, object oriented programming techniques are used to realize the WebBook. So the data structure represents a WebBook object in that context. In any event, the data structure is comprised of a graphical control portion, a list of page objects and WebBook status information. The graphical control portion contains various information for controlling interactive graphical objects. Such information includes transient properties for animation control, 3-D rendering information and a list of “children” objects. The children objects are graphical objects that are manipulated when the WebBook is manipulated. Such objects would include page objects and the graphical objects representing the control buttons and page markers. The list of page objects is merely a page sequence reference to the page objects. The WebBook status information contains various information about the state of the WebBook at a point in time.
The information contained in the objects further specify software routines which utilize the information contained in the object to actually perform the desired function.
C.3. Page Object
FIG. 5 illustrates a page object, a left page object specifically, from a spatial perspective. This figure shows a page object as a plane 141 in 3-D space with respect to axes 144. The plane 141 represents the actual “page” of information on which content is displayed. The plane 141 has associated with it content 142 and an axis of rotation 143 along the right edge (from the viewers perspective). The axis of rotation 143 indicates where the page will be turned (i.e. the spine of the WebBook). The content 142 is the HTML formatted text and image information for the page. FIG. 6 illustrates a right page object. Plane 151 has associated with it content 152. The significant difference is that the axis of rotation 153 is on the left edge of the plane (from the viewers perspective). So when the page turns, it will occur in the opposite orientation then for a left page. For each page object, the content is rendered onto the plane. Generally, the plane is the size of the book (which can be re-sized by the user), so the user will scroll through the content.
A visually appealing aspect of the WebBook is the turning of pages, which is animated. This provides the user with a visual effect approximating the physical activity of turning a page in a book. Generally, the sequence of steps is to rotate the page to be turned about the axis of rotation, rotate the page on the other side of the page to be turned about the axis of rotation, at a point orthogonal to the viewer turn off the page to be turned and turn on the page on the other side, turn off the page being covered, and turn on the new page being revealed by the page turn.
Page “turning” may be accomplished in various ways. One is through a point and click operation on a page or page edge using a cursor control device. In the currently preferred embodiment, pointing and clicking on the left page (or left page edge) will cause the next lower pair of pages to be turned to. Conversely, point and clicking on the right page (or right page edge) will cause the next higher pair of pages to be turned to. Of course other means of interacting with the page, e.g. the use of gestures such as drag cursor left or drag cursor right could be used to implement page turning in the corresponding direction. Page turning may also occur through use of the scan operation provided with the WebBook. The scan operation will cause the pages to turn at a predetermined rate.
FIGS. 7 and 8 illustrate the steps in a page turn. Referring to FIG. 7, a page turn operation of page 113 of FIG. 3 has been initiated. Although not illustrated a first step in accomplishing a visually pleasing page turn is to offset page 113 with the page being revealed. It has been determined that during a page turn, if the pages become co-planer, the content of the page being turned becomes jumbled. This is because the page being revealed two pages hence or before has content that is also being revealed. In any event, as page 113 rotates along an axis 162 corresponding to the spine of a book, page 161 is being revealed. Note that page 113 remains in a rigid plane as it turns. As noted above, the user may modify the speed at which this turn occurs. Referring to FIG. 8, at a point in the rotation of page 113 its “other side”, page 163 becomes visible. Page 161 also appears. At predetermined points during the page turn, the content of pages 112 and 113 are turned off indicating that the page is turned. Although not illustrated, the rotation of pages continues until pages 161 and 163 are revealed, completing the page turn animation.
During a page turn, two page objects rotate. Conceptually, left and right pages are positioned back to back. So a page turn involves rotating each in unison to simulate the actual turning of a page.
The animation sequence for turning pages or ruffling pages is generally the same. Ruffling can be thought of as multiple concurrent page turns. FIG. 9 illustrates a step in the ruffling through the pages of a WebBook, during which a plurality of pages are being turned concurrently. A difference in ruffling is that intermediate pages are never fully visible to the user since it is quickly being overlaid by a next page. Ruffling in the currently preferred embodiment is invoked by pointing to a page and holding down the button on the cursor control device for at least a predetermined time. When the button associated with the cursor control device is released, the ruffling will stop.
The interactive interface of the present invention possesses a number of advantages. The interface of the present invention provides users with a fluid, flexible two-way interaction between documents and categories when generating search queries. This interaction aids users by suggesting related, unanticipated category labels in their defining context. Further, when category labels associated with a document are unfamiliar, their meaning can be deduced by examining other category labels higher in the hierarchy. The interactive interface of the present invention also provides user with multiple avenues for interaction. Users can click on category labels on link pages of a SearchBook and cause the corresponding category of a Cat-a-Cone, a labeled cone tree representative of the hierarchy of category labels, to rotate to a primary viewing position. The animation of the movement of the Cat-a-Cone helps users retain the context of categories.
The interactive interface of the present invention allows users to create a search query for a corpus of machine-readable documents, each of which is associated with at least one category of a category hierarchy. The interactive interface includes a cone tree generation component, a query specification component, a begin search component, and a query generation component. The cone tree generation component generates and displays a cone tree representing the category hierarchy. The cone tree represents each category of the category hierarchy as a node having a selection object for indicating inclusion of the category in a one of a first group, and a second group. Each selection object is responsive to a cursor control device. The query specification component generates and displays a query specification object including a first group object and a second group object. Each group object is responsive to the cursor control device and indicates members of the group. Each group includes a one of a term included within the corpus and a category of the category cone tree. The begin search component generates and displays a begin search object responsive to the cursor control device. The query generation component generates a query for searching the corpus to find documents that include at least one member of the first group and at least member of the second group.
Other objects, features, and advantages of the present invention will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and detailed description that follows.
The present invention is illustrated by way of example and not by way of limitation in the figures of the accompanying drawings. In the accompanying drawings similar references indicate similar elements.
FIG. 1 illustrates a prior hierarchical three-dimensional structure.
FIG. 2 illustrates computer instructions for a prior WebBook.
FIG. 3 illustrates a prior WebBook as displayed on a computer monitor.
FIG. 4 illustrates a prior cover for a WebBook.
FIG. 5 illustrates a prior left page object.
FIG. 6 illustrates a prior right page object.
FIG. 7 illustrates a first step in a prior page turn operation.
FIG. 8 illustrates a second step in a prior page turn operation.
FIG. 9 illustrates a step in a prior ruffle operation.
FIG. 10 illustrates a computer system for implementing the interactive user interface of the present invention.
FIG. 11 illustrates instructions for enabling a computer system to support an interactive interface for specifying search queries using a categorical hierarchy.
FIG. 12 illustrates instructions for generating an interactive interface for specifying search queries using a categorical hierarchy.
FIG. 13 illustrates an interactive interface for query construction.
FIG. 14 illustrates instructions for using the interactive interface of the present invention to specify a search query.
FIG. 15 illustrates the appearance of a query construction object and a Cat-a-cone after completion of query construction.
FIG. 16 illustrates instructions for generating an interactive interface for reviewing retrieval results associated with a large category hierarchy.
FIG. 17 illustrates the interactive interface for browsing search results associated with a category hierarchy.
FIG. 18 illustrates instructions for browsing search results using the interactive interface of the present invention.
FIG. 19 illustrates the interactive interface after a SearchBook has been opened to a first pair of pages.
FIG. 20 illustrates the interactive interface after the SearchBook has been opened to a second pair of pages.
FIG. 10 illustrates in block diagram form computer system 30 in which the interactive user interface of the present invention is implemented by executing instructions 200. Instructions 200 alter the operation of computer system 30 enabling presentation of an interactive user interface for specifying search queries for a document corpus associated with a large category hierarchy. Briefly described, the interactive interface uses information visualization technology to better and separately represent a categorical hierarchy. The interactive interface of the present invention includes a Cat-a-Cone, a query specification object, and a begin search object. The Cat-a-Cone, as suggested by its name, is a cone tree that separately represents a categorical hierarchy independent of a corpus of documents with which it is associated. The Cat-a-Cone represents each category of the category hierarchy as a node, each of which has a selection objection to indicate whether the category is to be included as a member of a first group or a second group. The query specification object looks like a book cover and includes a multiplicity of group objects, or group windows. Using a mouse or other cursor control device, the user may insert into the group object the text terms to be grouped together. While a group object is active, the user may also use the mouse to select categories of the Cat-a-Cone to be included in the same group. The user indicates the query is complete by clicking on the begin search object, or search button. In response, the system generates a search query for all documents in the corpus that include at least one member of each group. Afterward, the search query is presented to a search engine.
Prior to a more detailed discussion of the present invention, consider computer system 30. Computer system 30 includes monitor 32 for visually displaying information to a computer user, as well as a graphical user interface. Computer system 30 also outputs information to the computer user via printer 33. Computer system 30 provides the computer user multiple avenues to input data. Keyboard 34 allows the computer user to input data to computer system 30 by typing. The computer user may also input information to computer system 30 by writing on electronic tablet 38 with a stylus 40 or pen. Alternately, the computer user can input data stored on a magnetic medium, such as a floppy disk 43, by inserting the disk into floppy disk drive 42. Scanner 44 permits the computer user to input an electronic, binary, representation of hard copy of the image of document 46
Yet another avenue for the user to input information to system 30 is mouse 36. By moving mouse 36 the computer user is able to move pointer 37, displayed on monitor 32. The graphical user interface (GUI) enables the user to use mouse 36 to perform operations like “point and click.” A “point and click” operation is one where cursor 37 is positioned over a desired area of monitor 32, such as an icon, using mouse 36. Once cursor 37 is appropriately positioned, a button/switch associated with mouse 36 is quickly depressed and released. These “mouse-up” and “mouse-down” events create electrical signals that cause predetermined and context dependent operations to occur. Other operations supported the icon, mouse combination include a “drag” where the button/switch is depressed to “pick-up” and move an icon and released to “drop” the icon.
Processor 31 controls and coordinates the operations of computer system 30 to execute the commands of the computer user. Processor 31 determines and takes the appropriate action in response to each user command by executing instructions stored electronically in memory, either memory 45 or on a floppy disk 43 within disk drive 42. Typically, operating instructions for processor 31 are stored in solid state memory, allowing frequent and rapid access to the instructions. Semiconductor logic devices that can be used to realize memory include read only memories (ROM), random access memories (RAM), dynamic random access memories (DRAM), programmable read only memories (PROM), erasable programmable read only memories (EPROM), and electrically erasable programmable read only memories (EEPROM), such as flash memories.
B.1. Generating the Interactive Interface for Specifying Search Queries
FIG. 11 illustrates in flow diagram form preparations 190 to ensure that computer system 30 can support the interactive interface of the present invention for specifying search queries. Users of computer system 30 must select both a categorical hierarchy, step 192, and a large corpus of machine-readable documents to which that categorical hierarchy is relevant, step 194. For example, medical personnel doing computerized text searches may find useful the MeSH categorical hierarchy while searching MedLine, a large collection of medical journals. The particular categorical hierarchy and corpus of documents chosen does not effect the interactive interface of the present invention. Any categorical hierarchy and document corpus may be chosen during steps 192 and 194, so long as they are relevant to each other.
After the categorical hierarchy is chosen, during step 192 a cone tree is created and labeled with the category names, thus enabling separate visual representation of the categorical hierarchy associated with the chosen corpus. U.S. Pat. No. 5,295,243 to Robertson et al. entitled “Display of Hierarchical Three-Dimensional Structures with Rotating Substructures”, which is incorporated herein by reference, describes a cone tree and its creation. This labeled cone tree is called Cat-a-Cone herein. Labeling a cone tree with category labels to create a Cat-a-Cone is obvious to one of ordinary skill in the computer and, therefore, will not be described in detail herein. Computer system 30 is now able to provide user with a separate visual representation of the categorical hierarchy that is perceptible as three-dimensional.
After selecting the corpus of documents during step 194, additional work may be necessary. If the corpus is not already in machine-readable form, then it must be converted and stored in memory. Further, if the documents of the corpus do not already include category labels, then during step 196 at least one category label must be associated with each document. Preferably, multiple category labels, if relevant, are associated with each document of the corpus. Upon completion of preparations 190, computer system 30 is ready to support the interactive query specification interface of the present invention.
FIG. 12 illustrates in flow diagram form instructions 200 for generating the interactive interface for specifying search queries. Instructions 200, as well as all other instructions discussed herein, may be stored in solid state memory or on a floppy disk placed within floppy disk drive. Instructions 200, as well as all other instructions discussed herein, may be realized in any computer language, including LISP and C++.
Execution of instructions 200 begins with step 202, during which processor 31 generates a query construction object and displays it on monitor 32. The query construction object uses a book cover metaphor, which cover includes several windows, to facilitate query construction. Subsequently, during step 204, processor 31 also generates and displays on monitor 32 a search button. Preferably, the search button is displayed such that it appears to be part of the query construction object or appears very near the query construction object. By activating the search button the user signals that query construction is complete and that a search of the corpus for documents satisfying the query should begin. Finally, during step 206 processor 31 displays the Cat-a-Cone associated with the selected corpus of documents, which was previously generated during step 192. Preferably, the Cat-a-Cone is displayed near the query construction object to facilitate its use in query construction.
FIG. 13 illustrates the interactive interface for query construction 210 as displayed on monitor 32. Interface 210 is presented as a window 212 including Cat-a-Cone 214, query construction object 216 and search button 218. Cat-a-Cone 214 is a cone tree whose leaves 215 have been labeled with the categories of a categorical hierarchy, for example, as A, B, C, D, etc. For simplicity, category leaves 215 will be referred to simply as categories. Thus, Cat-a-Cone 214 provides a representation of the categorical hierarchy that is perceptible both as three-dimensional and as separate from the collection of machine-readable documents with which it is associated. Each category 215 of Cat-a-Cone 214 has an associated query selection unit 213, which allows a user to select the associated category as a query term by “clicking on” the query selection unit.
Query construction object 216 uses a book cover metaphor. According to this metaphor, the user determines the title on the cover of a SearchBook by constructing a Boolean query that may include terms found in the documents of the corpus to be searched, as well as categories represented by Cat-a-Cone 214. Use of Cat-a-Cone 214 allows easy specification of multiple disparate categories to be included, in or excluded from, the query. Query construction object 216 includes several group objects 220, which have the appearance of small windows or slots. Each group object 220 groups together text terms and/or categories selected by the user that are to be treated as disjuncts.
A group object 220 can be activated to allow input of members in a variety of ways. A user may click on a group object 220 or its associated selection unit 222. Once a group object 220 is activated, text terms (that is terms to be searched for in document text) input via keyboard via will be displayed in the group object 220. A category label 215 be selected as a group member by activating the associated query selection unit 213 while the desired group object 220 is activated. All of the descendent or children categories of a category 215 are included as group members if those children are displayed at the time of the category's selection. On the other hand, if a category's grow tab 102 is displayed and none of its children are, then none of the children categories will be included as members of a group in which the parent is selected.
Query construction object 216 visually indicates that the query constructed with it will be a conjunction of disjuncts via display of the word “AND” 224 in between adjacent group objects 220. Other symbols, such as “&” can be used also to indicate visually that the disjuncts defined by group objects 220 will be conjoined.
Query construction 216 includes a NOT group object 230, which like objects 220 has the appearance of a slot or window. The function of NOT group object 230 is visually indicated via its selection object 232, which includes the word “NOT.” Alternately, the function of NOT group object could be indicated via other symbols indicative of exclusion, such as “X”. By grouping terms and categories in NOT group object 230, the user indicates that documents including the member terms and associated with the member categories should not be returned in response to the query.
Preferably, each group object 220 and its selection unit is associated with a unique color, to allow users to quickly visually distinguish between the different groups of the search query. In this embodiment, when a category 215 has been selected for inclusion in a group 220 its query selection unit 213 is then displayed in the color associated with that group. Alternately, each group object 220 and its associated selection unit 222 may be associated with a unique visual symbol. In this embodiment, when a category 215 has been selected for inclusion in a group 220 then the display of the associated query selection unit 213 includes the visual symbol unique to that group 220.
The present interactive interface also includes search button 218. Search button 218 responds to activation or a “click on it” by taking the text terms and categories associated with each group object 220, constructing a query that is a conjoining of disjuncts, and submitting that query to the associated search engine. Search button 218 may be displayed on query construction object 216 or near it.
B.2. Using the Interactive Interface for Specifying Search Queries
FIG. 14 illustrates in flow diagram form steps 240 for using the interactive interface 210 to construct a search query. First, as shown in step 242, the user determines the number of groups 220 she wishes to be conjoined together. She then selects the disjuncts, or members, of each group 220. As discussed above, the user does so by activating a group object 220, typing in the desired text terms via keyboard 34 and by “clicking on” the desired categories 215.
After the user has identified the members of all the desired groups 220, she starts the search by “clicking on” search button 218. In response, during step 244 processor 31 constructs a query using the information associated with each of group objects 220, conjoining the two groups of disjuncts. That is to say, processor 31 constructs a request for each document that includes at least one member of each group 220 having members. That done, during step 246 processor 31 submits the query just constructed to the associated search engine, which then searches the associated corpus for documents that satisfy the constraints of the query. Upon completion of the search, the search engine returns the results to the user during step 250.
FIG. 15 illustrates the appearance of Cat-a-Cone 214 and query construction object 216 after the user has selected the members of two groups 220 a and 220 b. The members of group object 220 a include text terms “erasure” and “repair.” The members of group object 220 a also include category 215 a, “O”, which is indicated visually by the inclusion of the symbol “x” in both query selection unit 213 a and selection unit 222 a. Note that none of the children categories of category 215 a are selected as members of the group because grow tab 102 a is displayed. (This is different than saying that documents including the children categories are not to be returned.) The members of group object 220 b include text terms “memory” and “flash”. The members of group object 220 b also include category 215 b, “E”, and category 215 c, “H”. The interface visually indicates the inclusion of categories 215 b and 215 c in group object 220 b by displaying the “.” symbol in query selection unit 213 c and selection unit 222 b. Note that all of the children categories of category 215 c are also member of group 220 b because they are displayed rather than a grow tab.
Interactive interface 211 of the present invention separates, but links, the viewing and browsing retrieved documents from the viewing of an associated categorical hierarchy. Interactive interface 211 uses information visualization technology, a Cat-a-Cone, to better display a categorical hierarchy and the relationship of that hierarchy to the retrieved documents. The representation of the categories via a Cat-a-Cone, is separate from, but linked to, the representation of retrieved documents. Interactive interface 211 also uses a virtual book, called a SearchBook, to present the retrieved documents as a group. The SearchBook is a modification of U.S. Ser. No. 08/525,936 to Robertson et al. entitled “Display System for Displaying Lists of Linked Documents,” previously described in the Background.
Together, the Cat-a-Cone and SearchBook provide users with a fluid, flexible two-way interaction between documents and categories. This interaction aids users by suggesting related, unanticipated category labels in their defining context. For example, a user who retrieves documents associated with the lumpectomy category can discover unexpectedly that MeSH contains categories relating to coping with the psychological distress consequent from the surgery. When the meaning of the categories associated with a document are unfamiliar to the user, she can look higher the hierarchy toward the more general, and likely more familiar, words without losing the context of the categories in the document. Interactive interface 211 also provides the user with multiple avenues for interaction. Users can click on category labels in the link page of the SearchBook and cause the corresponding category of the Cat-a-Cone to rotate to the primary viewing position. The animation of the movement of the Cat-aCone helps users retain the context of categories.
C.1. Generating the Interactive Interface for Viewing Retrieval Results
FIG. 16 illustrates in flow diagram form instructions 300 that enable computer system 30 to generate interactive interface 211 for viewing retrieval results. Instructions 300 assume that a Cat-a-Cone 214 has previously been generated to visually represent the relevant categorical hierarchy, as discussed previously with respect to step 206 of FIG. 12. Processor 31 responds to receipt of retrieval results from a search engine by branching to step 302.
During step 302 processor 31 first examines the documents retrieved and identifies the categories associated with each document. Processor 31 uses this information to “prune” the Cat-a-Cone 214 used during the search, thus creating retrieval Cat-a-Cone 214 a. That is to say, processor 31 eliminates from the Cat-a-Cone 214 representing the entire corpus the representation of those categories that are neither ancestors, nor descendants, of the categories associated with the retrieved documents. The number of categories associated with the retrieved documents is quite likely to be greater than the number of categories in the search query when multiple category labels are associated with the documents of a corpus. In other words, if each document j has cj categories assigned to it, and the search returns di documents, then a total of approximately di*(cj-1) categories will be associated with the di documents retrieved. Step 302 thus enables the interactive interface to show only the relevant categories of the Cat-a-Cone 214 a while maintaining the context of those categories within the hierarchy.
Having generated a pruned Cat-a-Cone 214 a, with step 304 processor 31 turns its attention to generating a visual representation of the retrieved documents, called a SearchBook. As suggested by its name, the SearchBook uses a book metaphor to organize and visually represent the documents retrieved by the search engine. The SearchBook includes two pages for each document retrieved: a link page and a content page. Each link page includes links to the categories of the Cat-a-Cone associated with a particular document, while the content page includes content from the document. To allow the SearchBook to display link pages, during step 304 processor 31 creates a link page object for each document retrieved. A link page object is a particular type of page object, which is the internal representation of a page for use in the book metaphor. During step 304 processor 31 creates an object that has the visual appearance of a page of a book upon which the category names associated with a document are listed. These category names are visually highlighted to indicate to the user that they function as links, references to the Cat-a-Cone 214 a. Processor 31 may specify the links in either absolute or relative terms. A link specified in absolute terms refers to its entire Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A link specified in relative terms assumes a certain portion of the URL is the same as a reference URL. Preferably, while generating each link page object processor 31 includes the title of each document as part of the link page. Preferably, processor 31 generates each link page object so that each one appears to be a left hand page.
After completing the link page objects, processor 31 advances to step 306. Processor 31 now turns its attention to generating content page objects, one for each document retrieved. Each content page includes as much of the text of the document as possible. Preferably, if available, a summary or abstract included within the document is chosen as the content to be displayed on the associated content page. Preferably, each content page object is generated so that when displayed it appears as a right hand page.
After generating all the link page objects and content page objects, processor 31 turns its attention during step 308 to using these to generate the SearchBook. The SearchBook has a basic structure which lists the link pages, content pages and provides various controls. The SearchBook controls the display of page objects, displaying only two pages at a time—the link page and content page associated with a single document. Processor 31 completes the SearchBook in step 310 by creating a cover for the SearchBook. The cover is a single instance of a right hand page upon which is displayed the query that led the set of documents in the SearchBook to be retrieved. After completing generation of the book cover, computer system 30 displays the cover of the SearchBook and the pruned Cat-a-Cone 214 a on monitor 32, enabling the user to interact with the interface. At this point, the user may open the SearchBook and begin examining the documents retrieved or the user may store the SearchBook for later examination.
C.2. The Appearance of the Interactive Interface
FIG. 17 illustrates interactive interface 211 for browsing the search results retrieved in response to the query of FIG. 15. Interactive interface 211 includes window 212 displayed on monitor 32. Within window 212 are Cat-a-Cone 214 a and SearchBook 217 with cover 225 displayed. Window 212 also includes query object 236, used to return to the interactive interface 210 for constructing queries.
Cat-a-Cone 214 a has not been pruned as compared to Cat-a-Cone 214, shown in FIG. 15, because all of the categories represented are either categories associated with the documents of SearchBook 225 or ancestors of those categories. When representing larger categorical hierarchies, this will not be the case. Pruning serves a valuable function by emphasizing relevant categories while maintaining their context in the hierarchy. Cat-a-Cone 214 a displays a greater number of categories than those specified in the query of FIG. 15. Five categories were included in that query: O, E, H and its descendants i and J; yet Cat-a-cone 214 a represents fifteen categories. This disparity between the number of categories searched and the number represented by interactive interface 211 because all categories associated with SearchBook documents and their ancestors are displayed. The inclusion in Cat-a-Cone 214 a of categories unspecified by the user aids the user by suggesting related, unanticipated categories for further refining searches. For example, if the interactive interface of the present invention were used in conjunction with the Medline corpus and its categorical hierarchy, MeSH, a user who retrieved documents associated with the lumpectomy category could discover unexpectedly that MESH contains categories relating to coping with the psychological distress consequent of the surgery. Those categories of Cat-a-Cone Cone 214 a associated with the documents of SearchBook 225 are highlighted in Cat-a-Cone 214 a by heavy dark lines of the boxes surrounding the category name. Other means of highlighting the categories may be used consistent with the present invention, including displaying the names of categories associated with the documents in SearchBook 217 in a different font, different color, different symbol, etc.
Visually cover 225 resembles query construction object 215 in many ways. Cover 225 of SearchBook 217 indicates that the query that generated it included two groups of disjuncts. Cover 225 preferably identifies each of the disjuncts using the colors or symbols previously used by the query construction object 216. Thus, in FIG. 17 one group is distinguished by the “X” symbol while the other is identified by the “.” symbol. The members of each group are listed with categories labels indicated by the notation “category:name”. When the group member was both the category and its descendants this is indicated via the notation “category+:name.” Consistent with the present invention other types of notation may be used to distinguish between group members that are text terms and those that are category labels. Unlike query construction object 216, on cover 225 members of the disjunct groups are not displayed in a window or group object, such as 220 a and 220 b. Additionally, while mouse events within group object 220 cause processor 31 to respond in some way, processor 31 does not respond to mouse events near group members displayed on cover 225. Like query construction object 216, cover 225 indicates the disjunction between the various members of each group is indicated by including the word “OR” or an equivalent symbol in the listing of group members. Cover 225 indicates the conjoining of the two groups is indicated via the word “AND” displayed between the two group listings or an equivalent symbol.
C.3. Using the Interactive Interface to Browse Retrieval Results
FIG. 18 illustrates in flow diagram form instructions 400 for browsing retrieval results using SearchBook 217 and Cat-a-Cone 214. In response to clicking on SearchBook 217 or its associated Cat-a-Cone 214, or movement of SearchBook 217 into the center of interface window 210, processor 31 advances to step 402 and displays SearchBook 217 and its associated Cat-a-Cone 214 nearby, as well as query object 236.
Once SearchBook 217 occupies the center of window 210, processor 31 advances to step 404 to await a mouse down event. Once processor 31 detects a mouse down event, it branches to step 406 to begin the process of determining what type of request that event represents. First, processor 31 examines the possibility that the user requested a page turn. That is to say, processor 31 determines: 1) whether the mouse down event occurred over cover 225 or one of the scan buttons at the bottom of cover 225; and 2) whether the mouse down event was of sufficient duration.
If the user requested a page turn, processor 31 advances to step 408 and executes page turn animation while concurrently modifying the display of Cat-a-Cone 214. During step 408, processor 31 prunes Cat-a-Cone 214 a so that it displays only those categories associated with the document pages that SearchBook 217 currently displays. By animating the page turn animation, interactive interface 210 provides the user with a visual effect approximating the physical activity of turning a page in a book. Generally, the sequence of steps is to: 1) rotate the page to be turned about the axis of rotation, 2) rotate the page on the other side of the page to be turned about the axis of rotation, 3) at a point orthogonal to the viewer turn off the page to be turned and turn on the page on the other side, 4) turn off the page being covered, and 5) turn on the new page being revealed by the page turn. Implementation of page turn animation is described in greater detail in the Background.
On the other hand, if during step 406 processor 31 decides the mouse down event is too long to have been a page turn request then processor 31 advances to step 410. Processor 31 now considers whether the mouse down event has lasted a long enough time to constitute a page ruffle request. (Ruffling can be thought of as multiple concurrent page turns.) If so, processor 31 advances to step 412 and executes ruffle animation concurrently with execution of animation of a rotation of Cat-a-Cone 214. Execution of the page ruffle animation continues until processor 31 perceives a mouse up event. By executing ruffle animation processor 31 causes monitor 32 to display a plurality of SearchBook 217 pages being turned concurrently. During ruffling intermediate pages are never fully visible to the user because each page is quickly overlaid by a next page.
While processor 31 animates the ruffling of the pages of SearchBook 225, during step 412 processor 31 also animates the rotation and modification Cat-a-Cone 214 a. As the pages of SearchBook 225 are moved from one side of the book to the other during the ruffle, processor 31 modifies the categories displayed by Cat-a-Cone 214 so that the categories associated with the currently displayed link page 226 are displayed. This process might be thought of as “ruffling” Cat-a-Cone 214 a. Ruffling Cat-a-Cone 214 a shows the user how tightly or loosely distributed the category labels are for each document retrieved by the search query and how widely distributed the categories are between the retrieved documents.
Processor 31 advances to step 414 from step 412 or step 408 in response to a mouse up event, which event indicates that the user has selected the pages to be displayed. During step 414 processor 31 causes SearchBook 217 to display the selected link page 226 and content page 228. Cat-a-Cone 214 now displays the categories listed by link page 226.
Upon reaching step 418 processor 31 now determines whether the mouse down event represented a request to rotate Cat-a-Cone 214. Processor 31 considers any mouse down event over a category of Cat-a-Cone 214 a a request to rotate Cat-a-Cone 214 a. If processor 31 identifies such a request, processor 31 rotates the selected category into the primary viewing position during step 420. Subsequently, during step 422 processor 31 searches SearchBook 217 for a link page 226 listing the category just moved into the primary viewing position. If processor 31 identifies such a link page, then during step 422 processor 31 causes SearchBook 217 to display that link page 226 and its associated content page 228.
Processor 31 returns to step 404 to await another mouse down event after having completed a page ruffle request, a page turn request, or a request to modify the display of Cat-a-Cone 214. Processor 31 branches through the steps of instructions 400 as longs as SearchBook 217 remains in center of window 212.
FIG. 19 illustrates interactive interface 211 after SearchBook 217 has been opened, either in response to a page turn or page ruffle request. Because SearchBook 217 is open, cover 225 is not displayed, and link page 226 and content page 228 are. Link page 226 includes the title of one of the documents retrieved by the search engine—in this case “Circuitry and Method of Suspending the Automated Erasure of Nonvolatile Semiconductor Memory”. Link page 226 also includes a listing of the categories associated with the titled document: B, F, C, J, M, and O. Each category listed on link page 226 is underlined to indicate that each category name listed functions as a link to a category of Cat-a-Cone 214 b. Other methods of indicating that a word or symbol functions as a link may be used consistent with the present invention. Content page 228 a displays an abstract associated with the document whose title is listed on link page 226 a. The content displayed on content page 228 helps the user identify which categories listed on link page 228 are most relevant to the search. When scroll bars are included on link page 228, the user can browse the entire text of the document.
Cat-a-Cone 214 b now displays only those categories associated with link page 226 a. Listing the categories as links on page 226 while simultaneously displaying the categories in their context within Cat-a-Cone 214 b provides the user with multiple avenues for interaction. The user can click on a category link on link page 226 and cause the corresponding category of Cat-a-Cone 214 b to rotate into the primary viewing position. The user could then expand the categories of Cat-a-Cone 214 around that category, select a new set of categories for a search and initiate the construction of a new query by “clicking” on query construction object 236.
FIG. 20 illustrates interactive interface 211 displaying the link page 226 b and content page 228 b associated with yet another document retrieved in response to the query of FIG. 15. Link page 226 b lists different categories than those listed by link page 226 a of FIG. 19. Consequently, Cat-a-Cone 214 c also displays less than all the categories of Cat-a-Cone 214 a and different categories than those displayed by Cat-a-Cone 214 b.
In the foregoing specification, the invention has been described with reference to specific exemplary embodiments thereof. It will, however, be evident that various modifications and changes may be made thereto without departing from the broader spirit and scope of the invention as set forth in the appended claims. Accordingly, the specification and drawings are to be regarded in an illustrative rather than a restrictive sense.
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|U.S. Classification||703/22, 707/E17.067, 707/999.003, 707/999.005, 707/999.004|
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|Jun 28, 2002||AS||Assignment|
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Seeds of Rebellion (Beyonders Series #2)by Brandon Mull, Jeremy Bobb
The second epic installment of Brandon Mull’s #1 New York Times bestselling fantasy series!
After the cliffhanger ending of A World Without Heroes, Jason is back in the world he’s always known—yet for all his efforts to get home, he finds himself itching to return to Lyrian. Jason knows that the shocking truth he learned/i>/b>/i>
The second epic installment of Brandon Mull’s #1 New York Times bestselling fantasy series!
After the cliffhanger ending of A World Without Heroes, Jason is back in the world he’s always known—yet for all his efforts to get home, he finds himself itching to return to Lyrian. Jason knows that the shocking truth he learned from Maldor is precious information that all of his friends in Lyrian, including Rachel, need if they have any hope of surviving and defeating the evil emperor.
Meanwhile, Rachel and the others have discovered new enemies—as well as new abilities that could turn the tide of the entire quest. And as soon as Jason succeeds in crossing over to Lyrian, he’s in more danger than ever. Once the group reunites, they strive to convince their most-needed ally to join the war and form a rebellion strong enough to triumph over Maldor. At the center of it all, Jason and Rachel realize what roles they’re meant to play—and the answers are as surprising as they are gripping.
Read an Excerpt
On a warm August morning, Jason Walker crouched behind a young batter and a little catcher, eyes intent on the invisible rectangle of the strike zone, a mask limiting his view. Some of the umpires in this league braved home plate without the mask, but Jason’s parents had insisted he wear one. Based on the symptoms Jason had described back in June, doctors had concluded that a concussion must have initiated the mysterious disappearance that ended when he showed up at a farmhouse in Iowa, claiming he had no recollection of the prior four months.
The small pitcher went into his stretch. He glanced at the runner on third, then at the runner on first. The pitcher was in a tight spot. It was the third round of the summer league playoffs. His team led by one run, this was the final inning, there were two outs, and the count was three balls, two strikes. The pudgy kid at the plate was the second-best hitter on the opposing team.
The runner on first was taking a huge lead. The pitcher stepped off the rubber and winged the ball to the first baseman. The runner dove to make it back to the bag, then asked for time so he could stand.
The pitcher got the ball back. Again the runner on first took a greedy lead. The pitcher threw to first again, but the first baseman dropped the ball. Although the baseball did not roll far, the runner on third dashed for home. The batter backed away.
“Throw home!” the pitcher yelled as the first baseman grabbed the ball.
The ball streaked through the air to the catcher, who had the runner beat. The runner dropped his shoulder, plowing into the catcher as he got tagged before stepping on home plate. The little catcher flopped backward into the dirt, the ball dropping from his mitt.
“You’re out,” Jason called, pumping his fist.
The players on the field cheered. The coach of the opposing team, a skinny man with a dark suntan and a darker mustache, charged over to Jason. The coach was already hollering before he reached home plate, eyes bulging, spittle flying from his chapped lips. “What’s wrong with you, ump? What kind of call was that? This is our season! Are you blind? He dropped the ball!”
Taking off his mask, Jason stared at the outraged coach. Within the past six months, Jason had confronted a giant bloodthirsty crab, outfoxed a brilliant chancellor, dueled a vengeful duke, and defied an evil emperor. He was not intimidated by Coach Leo. The coach kicked dust at him and gestured wildly. Veins stood out in his neck. Apparently he was emulating the tantrum of some major league manager he had seen on television.
Matt, the first base umpire, hurried over. He got between Jason and the furious coach. “Hey, settle down,” he insisted.
“It’s okay,” Jason said, stepping around his friend. “Look, do you want to listen to me or get banned from this league?”
The coach closed his mouth, hands on his hips, eyes smoldering. His expression warned that nothing Jason could say would appease him.
“The rules of this league demand that the runner slide for a close play at home.”
“What kind of rule is that?” The coach remained angry, but sounded less certain.
“A rule to prevent nine-year-old catchers from being hospitalized. If your runner had beaten the throw, I’d make an exception, but he was tagged and only made it home because he didn’t slide. Next season, learn the rules, then teach them to your players.”
“Ump’s right, Leo,” the scorekeeper drawled from behind the backstop.
The coach sneered but had no reply. He glanced around at the parents staring at him from the aluminum bleachers, then turned to glare at Jason, as if blaming him for the embarrassing display.
Jason raised his eyebrows.
The coach returned to his dugout.
“Good job,” Matt said, clapping Jason on the back. “Way to keep cool.”
“I have to remind myself these guys are just somebody’s dad, desperate to see their kid win. In a way it’s nice that they care.”
“Sports turn a lot of people into hotheads,” Matt said.
Jason took a deep breath, trying to dismiss the incident. “Should we get out of here?”
“Sure.” They started walking toward their bikes. The teams huddled up to shout cheers. “Are you coming to Tim’s party tonight?”
“The pool party? I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Come on,” Matt urged. “It’ll be fun. It won’t stay warm forever.”
“Which means no,” Matt sighed. “At some point you should consider rejoining the living.”
Jason was unsure how to respond. How could he explain what was really troubling him? His friends assumed that his reclusive behavior was due to his newfound infamy following the four months when he had dropped off the map. His disappearance had made the national news, as had his sudden reappearance after most had assumed he was dead. True, his absence had created some serious hassles. There had been dozens of interview requests. While some reporters were supportive, others had accused him of faking the incident, of deliberately hiding. Plus, the lost time had complicated his schooling. After counseling with his parents and teachers, Jason had spent much of the summer finishing packets of work that would enable him to advance to the next grade in the fall.
His real problem was not being able to tell anyone the truth. He had been to another world. He had made friends there, and enemies. He had risked his life and had accomplished great deeds. And he had returned home against his will, leaving behind tons of unfinished business. He had left a girl from Washington stranded there. And he knew a vital secret that would change how the heroes of that world tried to resist the emperor Maldor.
How could he explain any of this to Matt? To his parents? No matter what evidence he produced or details he supplied, nobody could possibly believe him. These burdens had to remain private. Although his experiences in Lyrian consumed his thoughts, if he tried to share what had really happened, he would wind up in a mental hospital!
Of all his friends, Matt had tried the hardest to be there for him. After returning from Lyrian, Jason had quit playing baseball. His prior goals as a pitcher had seemed insignificant compared to his new concerns. But he still loved the game, so he had volunteered during the summer as an umpire for a couple of the younger leagues. The volunteer gig carried little pressure and required much less time than actually playing and practicing. Matt had volunteered as well, just to hang out with him.
“I’m sorry,” Jason said. “I’m no fun anymore. I’ve warned you, my head is a mess. I wish I could explain.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Matt said, grabbing his bike. “Who wouldn’t feel a little different after all you’ve been though? Nobody minds. Nobody who matters. If you could just relax, you’d see that not so much has changed. Who cares whether you pitch or not? Everyone wants you around again.”
“Thanks,” Jason said, stuffing his umpire gear into a sports bag. “I’ll try to come.”
Matt studied him. “We could go together. Want me to swing by?”
Matt nodded knowingly. “How about some lunch? You hungry?”
“I’m good. Maybe I’ll see you tonight.”
Matt shrugged. “Have it your way. Catch you later.”
Matt pedaled away on his bike. Jason climbed onto his own bike and headed home. If he wasn’t careful, soon he’d have no friends left. Was he deliberately pushing everyone away? Having unfinished business in Lyrian did not guarantee he would find a way back there. Like it or not, he might need to start living an actual life in this world again. After all, school would resume in less than a month. A regular schedule would make it much tougher to behave like a hermit.
When Jason got home, he left his bike in the garage and looked out back for Shadow, his Labrador. He came up empty. Nobody was home. His parents had grown closer to the dog during Jason’s absence and had probably taken him for a walk.
Jason retreated to his room. He had spent a lot of time there lately. He went to his closet and got down a shoe box from the top shelf. From a drawer he collected a spiral notebook and a pen. Removing a pair of rubber bands, he opened the shoe box and took out a human hand. The severed wrist revealed a perfect cross section of bone, muscle, tendon, nerves, and blood vessels.
H-E-L-L-O. Jason traced the letters on the palm. He set the hand down and picked up his pen, ready to transcribe.
Not now, the hand spelled hastily in sign language.
Ferrin must be in some sort of trouble again. Jason had established contact with the displacer not long after returning from Iowa. He had taught Ferrin the sign language alphabet using a book from the public library. The tedious communication was his only link to Lyrian, and Jason had faithfully logged all of their conversations.
Jason felt grateful for the living hand. It represented his only tangible evidence of all that had happened. Without it, he wondered if he would eventually have come to believe his months in a parallel universe had been an elaborate delusion.
Back in June, soon after receiving word from their son, Jason’s parents had driven from Colorado to pick him up in Iowa. His father had good insurance, so not long after Jason related his story of a four-month blackout during which he had somehow traveled hundreds of miles to awaken wearing filthy homespun clothes in a cornfield, he was referred to a neurologist. Jason affirmed to the specialist that he recalled nothing after reporting for work the day he was tagged in the head by a baseball, resisting the temptation to fabricate a horrific tale of alien abductors, sterile lights, and invasive probes. When asked how he got to Iowa, Jason had theorized that he might be a narcoleptic sleepwalker.
After an MRI, the neurologist confirmed that if the blow had resulted in a concussion, as she assumed based on the symptoms Jason had described, it had left no lasting visible damage. Jason was diagnosed with some form of anterograde amnesia, which the neurologist explained as an inability to remember events subsequent to brain trauma.
Jason had a hunch that the neurologist didn’t wholly believe the story, but she never went so far as to call him a liar. His parents had been perplexed that given all the media attention Jason’s disappearance had received, nobody had noticed him wandering the country for months as an amnesiac. They had insisted that Jason see a therapist, who had blatantly tried to investigate whether Jason was telling the truth about his lost months, but all Jason confessed to was a dream involving many of the details from Lyrian. In the end, the scrutiny had finally subsided.
Jason had considered confessing everything to his parents and trying to use the severed hand as evidence. But he had finally decided that although the lively hand was an inexplicable oddity, it was far from concrete proof that he had journeyed to another world. The hand would only raise a more lingering batch of unanswerable questions.
After putting the hand back into the shoe box, Jason went to his computer and turned it on. Besides the hand, he had one other source of evidence that his trip to Lyrian had actually happened. He went into his photos folder, then clicked through a maze of folders within folders until arriving at one marked “Rachel.”
Inside that folder, he found images of Rachel Marie Woodruff, a thirteen-year-old girl from Olympia, Washington, who had gone missing in Arches National Park the same day that Jason had vanished. Jason had acquired the images from sites all over the Internet.
Apparently wealth and connections mattered, because Rachel’s parents had managed to turn her disappearance into one of the biggest news stories of the year. The case was particularly baffling because the family had been alone with a guide in such remote country. Rachel had vanished quickly and quietly. The huge team of hastily summoned rescuers had found no body and no trace of violence. Her tracks had led to a natural stone arch where all evidence abruptly ceased.
For earning media exposure, it also didn’t hurt that Rachel was quite photogenic and her family had dozens of recent pictures to display. Not to mention that her father had offered a no-questions-asked million-dollar reward for information leading to her recovery.
Jason studied a color photo of Rachel looking up from a canvas she was painting. Another showed her beside a skinny blonde, both of them wearing track uniforms. A third was just her head and shoulders, taken in a studio. She looked like the cute girl next door, but with a little extra style, both in her haircut and her fashion.
Jason had considered making an anonymous call to her parents, just to let them know that he had seen her and that she was all right. But such contact posed several problems. First off, Rachel might not be okay anymore. Last Jason had heard, she had been on the run with Tark, pursued by imperial soldiers. Secondly, if her parents somehow traced the call to him, he had no alibi. He had gone missing at the same time, which would make him a very appealing suspect if he was ever connected to the case. And lastly, he had no idea if Rachel would ever make it home, so it might be cruel to give her parents false hope.
Switching off his computer, Jason rose and started pacing. He hated being the only person in the world who knew where Rachel had gone. He hated being the only person in the world who might be able to bring her back. He hated being the only person in the world who knew that the secret word that could supposedly destroy the wizard Maldor was actually an elaborate hoax meant to distract and measure his enemies.
Jason undressed and took a shower. After drying off and dressing, he stood and stared at himself in the mirror. He had not regained much of the weight he had lost in Lyrian. In spite of his absence from baseball, Jason had exercised vigorously ever since returning home. He threw pitches in the backyard. He jogged. He did sit-ups, push-ups, and pull-ups. He bought books on karate and practiced in his room.
“You know where you’re going,” Jason told his reflection. “You always go there when you’re feeling like this. No point in waiting around.”
He went and removed the hand from the shoe box and placed it in a plastic grocery sack, which he wadded into a black backpack stocked with provisions. He wore a gray T-shirt and tied a lightweight jacket around his waist. He put on a new pair of sturdy boots, zipped a disposable waterproof camera into a jacket pocket, shrugged into the backpack, and slipped a pocketknife into his jeans pocket, just in case today would be the day.
At the Vista Point Zoo, Jason pulled the season pass from his wallet and flashed it to get inside. Ignoring the crowds, he strode directly to the hippo tank. As he had done on more than twenty occasions since returning to Colorado, Jason took up his regular position leaning against the guardrail.
The first time he had revisited the zoo, Jason had intended to leap into the tank and get swallowed by the hippo again. But as he stood staring at the lethargic beast, doubts had begun to assail him. What if the hippo was no longer a gateway? It could have been a one-time occurrence. What if the hippo refused to swallow him? What if it mauled him after witnesses watched him intentionally enter the tank? He would get locked up.
Jason sighed. Every time he came to the zoo, he wore his boots and brought the hand, the backpack, and the pocketknife. And every time he just stared at the hippo until he eventually went home.
He had considered trying to find the stone archway that had brought Rachel to Lyrian. All he knew for sure was that it was somewhere off in the middle of the Utah badlands. The way Rachel had told the story, it sounded like the gateway was only open for a brief time. He also worried that searching for the arch could end up connecting him to Rachel’s disappearance.
One way or another, he had to return to Lyrian. His friends needed the information he knew about Maldor and the fake Key Word. He needed to show Rachel how she could return home. His current life seemed unbearably mundane and insignificant when weighed against the duties awaiting him elsewhere.
Last year, Jason had not understood why Matt’s older brother, Michael, had wanted to enlist in the military. Jason and Matt had argued that the decision was impractical and dangerous for a guy with so many other options, but Mike had been determined. He had joined the marines a month after graduation. It had been something Mike had wanted to do, in spite of the potential hazards and inconveniences. Now Jason had discovered something about which he felt much the same way.
Perhaps he could learn to ignore his experiences in Lyrian, to pretend that the information he knew was not crucial to the destinies of countless people, including many he cared about. But Jason had no desire to forget what had happened. He had become involved in a struggle much larger than himself, he had people depending on him, he had found a cause worth fighting for, and just when he had gained information vital to that cause, he had been forced to return home.
The hippo was his best hope for returning. He lay at the bottom of the tank, motionless. Jason sighed. Just because he needed to get back didn’t mean the hippo would comply.
A little redheaded kid stood beside Jason on his tiptoes. “Make it come up, Mommy,” he complained.
“The hippo’s resting,” the woman behind him explained. “He can hold his breath for a very long time.”
Jason clasped his hands together. Should he go for it, just dive in? Maybe. At least he would wait until he was unobserved. Even though the zoo was fairly crowded today, an opportunity would eventually arise.
Secretly, though he hated to admit it, he knew he would not jump. He had already passed up countless opportunities. It was just too uncertain.
“What’s that music, Mom?”
Jason glanced at the kid and then listened.
He heard a distant, basso melody, much like a tuba, but somehow richer. Jason’s hands squeezed the railing. How long had it been playing before he had noticed it? The resonant melody was gradually increasing in volume. He looked at the woman beside him.
“You hear that?”
The woman nodded, her brow furrowed. “Is it coming from the tank?”
“I think so.” Jason bit his lower lip. He could have elaborated that the music was originating from a separate reality through the hippopotamus.
Jason felt his heart hammering. Here was evidence. The gate was open. If he was ever really going to do this, the time had arrived. He would be foolish to expect a more obvious opportunity. He gripped the railing more tightly.
Did he really want to go? How would his family feel? He wasn’t much closer to his parents than he had ever been. They had made a real effort after his return, although the attention had mostly made him feel like a psych patient being handled with kid gloves. He appreciated the intent, and had tried to show it, but he and his parents had never really been on the same wavelength. Once the excitement of his return had faded, the same old patterns of life had resumed. Still, a second disappearance would certainly be hard on them. Poor Matt would be stunned.
This trip to Lyrian didn’t have to be permanent, though—he knew a way back. Sure, deadly enemies awaited him. There was a very real chance he would get killed and never make it home. But what he needed to accomplish was worth the risk. He had to let Galloran and Tark and the others know that the Word was a fraud. And he had to rescue Rachel.
Jason glanced back at the Monument to Human Stupidity, a glass case displaying items careless people had tossed into the hippo tank. If the hippo mauled him instead of gulping him into another world, maybe they could hang his corpse in there.
If he succeeded in being swallowed before the eyes of this woman and her son, what would his family and friends think? Surely they’d assume he was dead. They would probably decide he had succumbed to depression and lost his mind. How would people explain the hippo swallowing him whole? Though large, the animal did not look big enough for such a feat.
Then again, as long as he made it back to Lyrian, who cared what others thought? It might be a little harder to explain his reappearance next time, but he could stress about that later.
The volume of the music continued to increase, still just the deep notes of a single instrument. The placid hippo did not stir from the bottom of the tank. Jason rubbed his palms together. He looked over at the woman, who was leaning against the rail, attentive.
She met his gaze and then said, “Isn’t that peculiar?”
“Yep. I’m going to investigate.” Taking a deep breath, Jason flung himself over the railing and plunged into the water. He stroked down to the hippo, which remained motionless. Hesitantly, he touched him on the snout, receiving no reaction.
Jason surfaced. The woman was screaming and her son was crying. A few people were hustling over, attracted by the commotion. Last time the hippo had swallowed him spontaneously. How could a person coax a hippo into doing something like that?
Jason dove under again. He tried to slap the hippo, but could not get much force behind the underwater blow. He jabbed his fingers deep into the animal’s wide nostrils, and prodded at his eyes. The great head suddenly jerked to one side, making Jason flinch involuntarily. The head swung back and forth before becoming still again. Jason gave him a final poke in the nostril, then swam up for air.
Quite a crowd had gathered. The woman continued shrieking. “Get out of there!” a man shouted. “What’s the matter with you?”
Treading water and feeling deeply embarrassed, Jason realized how insane all of this must appear to bystanders. He had a feeling there would be more visits to the therapist in his future. The sluggish hippo evidently had no interest in him, and could not be antagonized. But Jason would try one more time.
Something brushed Jason’s leg. He glanced down. The hippo was rising rapidly from directly beneath him, jaws agape. As the bloated brown pachyderm broke the surface of the water around him, Jason was already mostly swallowed. Huge jaws clamped shut amid a chorus of horrified screams, abruptly terminating Jason’s view of the onlookers.
Sliding feetfirst down a slick, rubbery tunnel, Jason heard the screams recede as the volume of the low-pitched melody increased. All was dark until he came to a jarring halt, his legs protruding from a gap in a dying tree.
He lay inside the hollow trunk, staring up through the top at the stars, his clothes soaked. The deep, resonant melody continued.
Jason scooted out of the gap, his backpack making it awkward, and recognized the scene—the tall trees, the dense shrubs, the wide river. He was back in Lyrian.
He hurried to the riverbank. The night was balmy, so his wet clothes did not really bother him. A gibbous moon hung in the clear sky, illuminating the river. A small craft drifted on the dark water. A single figure stood on the humble raft, wrapped in an enormous horn.
“Tark?” Jason called in disbelief. “Tark!”
The music stopped. “Who’s there?” replied a gravelly voice.
The figure on the raft stumbled. “Lord of Caberton?”
“Are you … his shade?” The voice sounded awestruck.
“No, it’s really me. I’m back.” Jason could hardly believe it himself. “Come over here.”
The short, robust figure struggled to unburden himself of the cumbersome instrument. Once free of the sousalax, he sculled over to the bank, peering forward suspiciously. The raft bumped against the shore. Tark hesitated. “Come forward so I can see you better.”
Jason realized he had been standing in shadow. He stepped sideways into the moonlight.
“How can this be?” Tark gasped. “You were taken by the emperor.”
“I escaped to the Beyond. Now I’m back.”
Tark sprang from the raft and fell to his knees in the mud before Jason, hands clasped over his broad chest, tear tracks glinting on his cheeks in the moonlight. “My heart is going to rupture with joy,” he proclaimed. “How did you escape?”
Mildly stunned at the exuberant reception, it took Jason a moment to answer. “I had help. Where’s Rachel?”
“We parted ways,” Tark said. “A strategic move, suggested by Drake.”
“Drake? Was this before or after he freed me on the road to Felrook?”
“He helped us before and after. Our enemies dispatched a lurker, so the only way to stay ahead of our foes was constant movement.”
“A lurker?” Jason exclaimed. “Ferrin told me that lurkers are really bad news.”
“The lurker made matters much worse. Eventually we split up to confuse and divide our pursuers. Drake and Rachel took horses one way, I rode off in another direction, leading a second mount, and we set loose a few other horses for good measure.”
“What about Jasher?” Jason asked.
“I delivered the amar of the seedman to his people, at one of the gates to the Seven Vales. He should have been planted weeks ago.”
Jason stared down at Tark. “Why are you here alone, playing your sousalax?”
Tark looked away. “Not my sousalax. Mine is long gone. I got this mediocre substitute from a pawnbroker. You see, once I assured the safety of the seedman, I kept running, and eventually found my way home. I had no idea how to rejoin Drake and Rachel. I could only hope that the lurker had deserted them to follow me.”
“They’re also called torivors, right? I don’t know much about them, except for what Ferrin told me.”
Tark shuddered. “The common name is lurker. Since splitting from the others, I’ve glimpsed a dark presence in the distance from time to time, but never got an honest look.”
“So the lurker followed you?” Jason said. “Rachel and Drake may have gotten away?”
“No way to be sure,” Tark replied. “Having never met a torivor, I can’t be certain what exactly tracked me. I pray that I drew away the worst of Rachel and Drake’s pursuers. For the first couple of nights at home, no longer on the move, I expected to be taken. But no enemies ever appeared on my threshold. Instead, I began to stew. My guilt hollowed me out. I would never have left you behind, Lord Jason, had you not entrusted me with the amar. I would have fought to the death at your side.”
It took Jason a moment to realize that Tark truly felt bad for leaving him at Harthenham. “You did the right thing, Tark. We had to give Jasher a chance at survival. And you had to help Rachel. You did what I wanted.”
Tark’s eyes remained downcast. “I couldn’t shake the certainty that in abandoning you to be captured, I had performed my culminating act of betrayal. Not only had I let the Giddy Nine sacrifice themselves without me, I had forsaken the person who had revived my dignity and granted me renewed purpose. Part of me wanted to mount a solitary assault on Felrook, but the undertaking felt too hopeless and too grand. So I purchased a secondhand sousalax, built this small raft, and tonight intended to finish what I started months ago with my comrades.”
“You were headed for the falls? Tark, you have to overcome—”
Tark raised a hand to interrupt. “Waste no words. Even I can read signs this obvious. You are a specter descended from realms ethereal, and for some unfathomable reason you have condescended time and again to rescue me from self-pity.”
“I’m just a regular person.”
Tark snorted a laugh. “Whatever you may be, you are no regular person. Do not protest. In gratitude, I formally vow to serve you until my dying breath.” He prostrated himself further on the muddy bank, bowing his head low. “I pledge to you my fealty. All I have is yours.” The final words were uttered in profound solemnity.
Jason felt touched by the display. He also felt awkward. “Get up, Tark.”
Somewhat troubled, Jason folded his arms across his chest. “Look, there’s something I need to tell you.”
Jason cleared his throat. “It might affect how you feel about me.”
“I can’t imagine holding you in higher esteem.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about.”
Tark huffed a quick chuckle. “Nothing could make me think less of you.”
Jason gave a small shrug. “Remember that night when eight of the Giddy Nine plunged over the waterfall?”
Tark scowled. “How could I forget?”
“Your music summoned me from the Beyond. And once I entered your world, I tried to prevent you from going over the falls!”
Tark sputtered, clutching his head with both hands. “Wait, hold on, you were the accursed interloper who tried to rescue us?”
“I was.” Jason knew that Tark blamed the wannabe rescuer for ruining what was supposed to be a majestic sacrifice by the Giddy Nine.
In the moonlight, Tark’s rugged countenance slowly became illuminated with comprehension. He spoke like a man beholding a vision. “Then we succeeded.” He thrust a finger at Jason. “You were the hero the oracle told Simeon he would summon. And our destruction was not a prerequisite to our success. Quite the contrary … you arrived before any of us had perished, and you tried to save us from our folly.”
“I’m not sure I’m a hero.”
Tark waved the comment away. “This is no occasion for false modesty. I believed that by surviving, I had spoiled the prophecy and hindered the arrival of the hero. But I didn’t.” He paused. “And they needn’t have died.” His jaw quivered, and then clenched tight. He swiped his forearm over his eyes.
Jason laid a comforting hand on Tark’s sturdy shoulder.
“Wait!” Tark whispered in alarm, slapping himself on the forehead. “I am a buffoon! Quick, onto the raft.”
“Hurry, my lord,” Tark hissed. “I’ll explain on the water.”
Jason climbed aboard the small vessel, feeling it rock alarmingly beneath his weight. Tark shoved off, sloshing in the water before vaulting onto the raft, trousers soaked to the thighs.
“Stay down,” Tark cautioned in a low, urgent tone. Jason crouched beside the sousalax. Tark sculled away from the bank, staring hastily about, narrowed eyes searching the night. “I can’t be sure I ever lost the being that has been stalking me.”
“The lurker?” Jason whispered, the night seeming suddenly chillier.
Tark glanced at Jason. “We don’t want to take any chances. It’s a dark, slippery creature. Last time I glimpsed it was yesterday evening. If I were its prey, the villain has had ample opportunities to fall upon me. Perhaps the fiend hoped I would lead it somewhere … or to somebody. To you, I suspect, seeing as you’ve escaped.”
“What do you know about lurkers?”
Tark shivered. When he continued, his whisper was barely audible. “They’re foul personages. Unnatural. Nobody really knows much. Drake advised us not to discuss them.”
“If it might be after me, I need to know.”
“I’m not sure myself. Folks say that if Death took a physical form, he would be a torivor. Whatever has followed me looks like a living shadow, best I can tell.”
Jason furrowed his brow. “What should we do?”
“We must separate. You can’t afford a lurker on your tail. They’re difficult to shake. Believe me, I’ve tried. Drake tried too, and that seedman has forgotten more about woodcraft than I’ll ever know. If we have any luck, the fiend may not yet realize you accompany me. I hesitate, but I think I’ll drop you on the far bank.”
“Why do you hesitate?”
Tark frowned. “Nobody goes into the forest north of the river. They say giants dwell there, and that few who enter ever return.”
“So why send me that way?”
“It’s the last place you would be expected to go. And the last place you would be followed. Aside from the shadowy presence, whatever it is, I have noticed soldiers paying unusual attention to me of late. For all I know, some may be trailing me now. I should have paid closer attention. I wasn’t overly concerned. I thought I was going to my death.”
They were past the middle of the wide river. Jason studied the approaching bank, lined with trees and ferns and shadows. “What about the giants?”
“I have ventured twice into those woods. Not overly far, mind you, but Simeon, our former leader, was curious. There was a man who relished exploration! Anyhow, we went in on two independent occasions for the better part of a day and saw no giants nor any sign of them. There are stories of the old hamlets near the forest being raided, but once the hamlets were abandoned, the stories ceased. Could be the giants moved on. Could be they never lived there.”
They were nearing the far bank. Jason clenched his fists. How was he already in such trouble, not five minutes after returning to Lyrian? Then again, what exactly had he expected? With all of the potential danger, he was lucky to have found a friend so soon, even if they needed to part ways. Jason had an urgent message to share with Galloran, and Tark might be able to help ensure that the message would get delivered.
“If this is our plan,” Jason whispered, “I need you to do something for me.”
“Do you know where to find the Blind King?”
“Certainly. Fortaim. Same place as ever.”
“I’ve got to tell him something. The secret is so dangerous, I probably shouldn’t share it. But it’s incredibly important.”
“Have no fear. I am your man.”
“Only repeat this to the Blind King. Let him decide who else should know. Tell him Lord Jason got the entire Key Word. I used it on Maldor. It’s a fake, meant as a diversion. Also tell him I escaped from Felrook.”
“You came before Maldor?” His voice was filled with grim wonder. “You used the Word?”
“Yes. It failed. The Word is meant as a distraction. Can you remember the message?”
“Absolutely. We’ll have to warn Rachel as well. I shared the syllable you relayed to me. She has the entire Word.”
“Exactly. We have to find her. Hopefully, the Blind King can help us.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, why the Blind King? I mean, he gives good advice, but what do you really expect from him?”
“Maybe he’ll tell you. It isn’t my place.”
Tark tapped the side of his nose. “More to him than greets the eye, I take it. Have no fear, no matter who is hunting me, I’ll find a way to deliver your message.”
The small craft ran aground. Jason and Tark both hopped out to crouch in the bushes near the shore. Jason eyed the dreary forest.
“So where do I go?”
Tark rubbed his chin. By the change in his expression, Jason saw an idea strike him. “I’ll send you to Aram. Set off to the northeast. Stay on that course until you reach the coast on the northern edge of the peninsula. Do you know the lay of the land north of here?”
“I don’t. Except that we’re on a peninsula.”
“Follow the seashore east toward the mainland until you reach the first big town. That will be Ithilum. Near the southwestern extremity of town, right on the wharf, you’ll find the Dockside Inn. Aram works nights there.”
Tark snickered. “A huge fellow, toughest bruiser I’ve ever met. Used to do a lot of mercenary work. Now he keeps things quiet at the Dockside. Our group performed there regularly. We became good friends. He owes me a couple of favors. Tell him Tark sent you. If anybody can keep you safe, he’s the man.”
Tark began rummaging through his pockets. He brought out two drawstring bags.
“This has some money,” he said, giving one of them a little shake. He then opened the second bag. “And this has some keepsakes from Harthenham.”
Jason peered inside. It was full of jewels.
“Despite my recommendation, Aram may resist lending you aid. Though still strong as a bull and no older than I am, he considers himself retired. But every man has a price.”
“So I offer him the jewels?”
“Not all of them. A few should be plenty. Keep them hidden. Carrying that much wealth can be fatal, particularly in a town like Ithilum.”
“What should I do after hiring Aram?”
Tark scratched his cheek. “Have him escort you to a village called Potsug. It’s on the Telkron River, and has a couple of ferries. After I deliver your message, I’ll either rejoin you there or send someone to meet you. I’ll only stay away if I still have enemies after me. The stableman Gurig is trustworthy. Mention my name to him, then await help in his home.”
Jason repeated the names and instructions Tark had related.
“That is right.” Tark heaved a sigh. “I’m overjoyed to see you, Lord Jason. Don’t dally in the woods. Now I must away. Safe journey.”
“Let me shove you off.”
Tark climbed in and Jason pushed him away from the shore. Tark remounted the sousalax on his shoulders and began playing while skillfully manipulating the long oar. Jason swept his eyes along the riverbank, looking for living shadows or hidden soldiers. All appeared still. After one last look at Tark, Jason crept away from the river, into the gloom of the trees.
Meet the Author
Brandon Mull is the author of the Beyonders series, as well as the New York Times, USA TODAY, and Wall Street Journal bestselling Fablehaven series. He resides in Utah, in a happy little valley near the mouth of a canyon with his wife and four children. Brandon’s greatest regret is that he has but one life to give for Gondor.
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I've read all of Brandon Mull's books and in the second book of the Beyonders, he continues to weave a great story ending with a need to immediately read the next one! The characters continue to mature with each book. It's a must read!
After reading all his books, I really can't give Brandon Mull anything less than 5 stars. I felt this book didn't have as much of a substantial plot as others, but still very exciting. Perfect cliff hanger. Can't wait for the third book! Wow!
I predict this book will be amazing like the other but the auther needs to hurry up with the series and get another one started because I and I'm surtain others are addicted to your writing, so hurry up!
All of the books he's wrote are EPIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This one will be too.
Read this now ....... or else
This book is very exciting and thrilling you never what's going to happen next BTW there are no books om Edomic so don't even bother looking :p
Really enjoying the story so far. I have read book 1 and am now on this one(book 2). Hope book 3 to be just as good.
I am 9 and already enjoying the suspence
If you read this book you should read thr Fablehaven series it is the best book ive ever read in my life. The Fablehaen book is about a girl named Kendra and her brother Seth and they had no clue that there grandparents ran a secret magical world. They had to figure out about all of the magical creatures like fariys and a witch named Murial. Together they had to find out how to defeat all of these horrid creatures and demons! They had to risk there lifes. Thats why I think you should read the Fablehaven series. Which is the best book you have probley ever read!
I you like this book read the red pyrimid, the unwanteds, the jack blank series or any thing else by rick riordan,brandonmull,or matt myklush
Kiss your hand 3 times and post this on 3 different bokks and look under your pillow
The first book was great, but I could hardly tell this book was by the same author.
YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE SUCH A IDIOT NOT TO LOVE THIS BOOK,BANDON MULL YOU GO MAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This hippity hoppity book brings tears to my heart...i wish i could take this book anywhere and then cuddle up on a park bench with my blanky in the winter and read 25chapters of it then cry with the pigeons. This book makes the angels sing and the frogs jump and I can't wait to make my own book one day. Thanks for inspirering me Brandon Mull!
Hmm........i am a naughty 12 yr old....so, how u been?
I realy want this book
Ive read the first book and i am more than halfway through seeds of rebelion. Cant wait to finish the trilliology! Itll b hard to let go of all the charecters ive met through at LEAST a month!!!! :) Rachel and jason eccpescially!!!!
COME UP WITH THAT? Anyways the whole series was great. I read this a long time ago, and the ending was sad/awesome because some people died, some people didn't, and Jason stayed in Lyrian and Rachel didn't... well this series led me to Wings of Fire, then Spirit Animals(I'm waiting for the 6th book of Wings of Fire and the fifth book of Spirit Animals), then the Menagerie. I still have tons of books to read!
This book is amazing! I would highly reccomend reading it. I also would reccomend reading ........ to br continued
Oh my god...she is the BEST CHARACTER EVER! I saw her picture in the Interviews booklet that came with this, and I am obsessed over her. We're both homeschooled. :D (This book is awesome. A little plotless, though; it felt like they just wandered around to pick up groups of people to fight Maldor. But all disappointments aside; the goma worms balanced everything out. Make sure to remember what they are, as it will have an influence over one of the characters in the next book.) | <urn:uuid:1c0610e4-5186-4b2f-ae6f-c154a30f11c5> | CC-MAIN-2016-30 | http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/seeds-of-rebellion-brandon-mull/1100407250?ean=9781442346383 | 2016-07-30T00:29:08Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257832399.72/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071032-00243-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984333 | 10,378 |
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OLD SERIES VOL. 16.
CLARKSVILLE, TENN., FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 1868.
OLD SERIES, NO. 33.
JOHN. J. THOMAS & CO.
TAB UNDERSIGNED HAVE FORMED
partnership under the above style, for the
purpose of doing a general ,
Forwarding, Storing and Com
Tint warehouse li situated a few hundred
Yard below Trice's, on Comberlund river ;
it is Fire-proof, and entirely above high
water mark.: There in a Rood turnpike
road leading to it, and it ii the nearest point
on the river to Christian county.'
JOHN J. THOMAS will give bi undivi
ded time and attention to the receiving,
weighing, inspecting end telling all the To
bacco consigned to the home.
A comfortable aale room will be fitted up
iu Proviuenc. JpuSalei every week. .....
JOHN J. THOMAS,
JAMES W. PARISH.
RAM I, O. BUCKNERV
Linwood Landing, Tenn, Aug. 9, 'CT-tf.
W. J. M'CORMAC,
Wholesale and Retail Grocer,
AND DEALtft IN
ALL -USDS OF I'Ot'JfTBY PRODICE,
11W XHIrtl Ntrcct,
' Order for Goods O' Manufactured Articles,
filled with promptneu and at the lowest
market prtoe. CoBsignraenU of every de
scription carefully attended to.
. June 11, 1807-tf
I) It. J. M. LA.1HCIISH
may be found at hie office, ad floor of the
Chronicle building, at all hours, unless pro
March 1, 18S7-tt
" DR. H. M. ACXEE,
Office on corner uf 3d and Madison streets,
imuiediatuly between the Railroa4 Passen
ger Depot nnd tbo Court-house.
Jan. 11, '67.
W. H. ARMSTRONG,
WKST SIDE Pl'BMC SQUARE,
ClnrUwvlll, To ii ii.
March 1, 1807-tf.
TUKNBULL, KIRBY & CO.
Cotton and Tobacco Factors
C iiImnIoii iUcrcliantH
o. f, Vision Street,
Mi. ?. C. Seat, Agent, will attend to ma
king ud.nhees on Produce consigned to this
Sept. 14, 1807-ly.
FOX & SMITH,
. 1IIALKM IN
Iron, Guns and Wagon Timbers,
SIGN OK BIG PADLOCK,
EEP ON HAND A FULL STOCK OF
(nrH'!itcrV Tools, too r' T oh,
Axf, Cbalnx, Hmh, Collars, Hacieit,
Locks, llliigt's and Screw i.
Hammers, Aniriirs, ' Chisels,
Saws, Coffee Mills, Cot
ton Cards, Grind
slones.Shovels. Spades, Forks and Mattocks,
Iron and Stool.
WAGON AM BlUUY 1I111S,
SPOKES AM) FELLOES,
DOIBLK AND SINGLE GINS,
IMSTuLH, POWDER, SII(T, LKAD AND
f.VPS, POCKET KNIVES, (fine and com
mn KNIVES AND FORKS, SPOONS,
. and n full liue of
All of wbii li we are anxioui to sell, and
vi ill tell right.
FOX & SMITH.
Sept. 57, 1G7.
Uuve juil received, a.id are now opening,
New and Cheap Store,
On Franklin Strrrt, nrxt to the Piwt-tlffirr,
A Urge aud new auortuicut of
STAFLE AND FANCY GOODS,
BOOTS AND SHOES,
(lothlnff, Huts, Queenswure,
ULASS, tiUUCKKIKS, fcTt , KT( .
All which wears detemlufl to sell, with
eul rfjervu. at such uriars as will defy ooiU'
petition. All we a-A ii to have you cull ami
t'X.i'iiino oiirgootls ana prices.
We hvre oouipctcnt clerk, who will Uike
pUasure in sliiin uig our slink.
THOMPSON ti SCOTT.
fX. All kinds of country prodm-e taken
)tl rxiliaui.e nr yootbt Hi itiaikt-t pruc.
11XE PLANTATION TO LEASE.
One c" tlie verv U'.t firms ill Stewart
CuuBlj . 100 aerr, of oiu laud, well alpt
eJ to lnWai, tiiaii.i and jjnii of all 'it.,
mij mi'iiij: ki". lv Ii c.ui U bad on go I
leinio, uir Uc )rnit nr mole. M ml'e le
I . rt,.y. A lire". Mr, M f V l -vlii-
E. C. ROACH & CO.,
Cotton and Tobacco Factors,
So. 29, Carondelet Street,
Nov. 9, 1807 ly
A. P. Smith, taf o Smith $ Tttrnlry.
D.B. HrrcniNoa, lattof Uukhingtj Ormttr
SMITH & IIUTCHINGS,
" CUMBERLAND WlRKBOrSE,"
CLARKSVILLE . TKNXEBSEE.
Nov. 8, 1867-ly. ...
W: II. Ti-rklit, Mi of Snath J- TurnUy.
E. W. Wiathibs, ' Todd Ounhj, Ay,
TURNLET & WEATHERS,
Known as 7k Ilutcliirtgt & Grinler
- . Warchouu, . . , .
Special attention paid to the sale of
Tobacco, Receiving and Forwarding Mer
chandise and produce generally. Proceeds
promptly remitted.' Make Ml consignments
to TPRNLEY WEATHERS.
Nov. 22, 1867-ly.
SIM. K ROGERS,
Will attend to the Sale of Property,
either on the street or in the country.
Dec. 6, 18U7-Cm. . . , .,
PLANTER'S PRIZE SCREWS, SHINGLE
MACHINES, SI (5AR MILLS;
BRASS AND IRON
Prompt attention given to orders for repairs
And all kinils of Machinery, am! Machine
Ulaeksmittiing neatly ami promptly dune.
J. A UATKS410.
March 8, lG7-ly.
Horaci II. LrnroN,
V. C. MArev,
LURTON & MAURY,
ATTORNEYS AT LAW
OIurliMvillo, Ten n.
Special attention paid to practice in Courts
8e"9u Office, on Strawberry Alley opposite
tue I onrl bolide.
Pb. IS, '67-tf
C. J. 811 ITII. J. W. ANDKHSON, J. Sl'HNR.
SMITH, ANDERSON & CO.,
1.'.8 Went Fourth et., nnd 110 Kim St.,
All goods warranted of the best material
flU Manufactory. Nortb-weJt cor. Pearl
aud blm streets.
Oct. , l-67-m.
W. H. & D. M. DORRIS,
Stores, Tinware, Castings,
Grates, and House fur
nishing (J 00(1.
Every description of tlsi-wiiro
made up in good style.
UOOriNO and ClITEBIXC promptly
StT II. P. DORRIS will superintend Qit
woi k and salem-uom.
Sept. U, 1867-tf
SOMETHING NEW !
ROBINSON'S PATENT RET0LV-
1G PHOTOGRAril ALBIMS,
Just the Thing Long Needed!
Xolblng More Appropriate for a Hol
iday or Chriktma Present.
'"all and eiamlne tliera at my Gallery,
We. t siilu ckiuare, I'larkavtlle, Tenn.
W. II. ARMSTRONG.-
Nov. 20, '87 tf.
I'LANTKKS, ATTENTION t
liolker with W'ouden iVun SrrtKi at an EnL
We are now prepared to furnish Planters
with a durnUe Iron 1'iuo Screw of our own
Mauiifci lure, complete, at the low price of
Those Screws are suitable tor small,
Kitrn I.;re Sue manufactured, as uiaal
complete, Hi if JO.
These Screw s ere adapted to the use of
Country Kiijers and large planters.
t ti'rvt i-v t . i. i
II. Tt. U K.M.U Is preparedto grind corn
meal, iu any quantity, at his mill, near the
i:.g l'o.i.l, mi I'.ai.Uiti Street.
A HUKS CO,
Has not Arrived, but .
C. II. MORRISON & Go's
m stock or
have, and it comprises all the nnetaatlal as
well a the choicest luxnrfee to be ft and in
any establishment of the kind in the city.
We have on band an
STAPLE AND FANCY
All of the Choicest Brand! and Su
Families would do well to pur
chase their Supplies from
us, as all our Goods arc
and will be sold
C-l L A XD EXA MISE O VR STOCK!
C. II. MORRISON & CO.,
Nearly Opposite the Court Ilouae,
Dec. C, lH7-3m.
First National Bank,
0(7 CLABKSVILLE, TENN.
Corner of Public Square, opposite Nalionn
WILL DO k
Issues no circulation Incurs no risks.
Special attention paid to collections and re
mittances msue on day or payment.
Geo. II. Wsrtield, Thos. F Pettis, B. W.
Mitcrae, Jrn G. W. Hillman.
S. F. BEAl'MONT, Preit.
W. Pi HUME, Cashier.
NATIONAL HOTEL !
T. D. SCOTT,
Feb. 0, '60-tf
HIIOIIT St CO.,
Cotton and Tobacco Factors
1SG7.-TERMS, INVARIABLY TASU.-1S67.
tirecn llher Planing Mills
BOWLING GUKEN, KY. ,
Sl'ILDIR AKR If AKrFACTl'RKS Ot
Sash, Doors, Blinds. Door and Wln
dow Frames, Moldings,
Architraves, Uose Hoards, Brackets, Mantels,
Stair Uailings, Ualuslers, Newel Posts ;
White Pine, Yellow Pine, Poplar and Cedar
I Flooring; Dressed weatherboarding, Shelving
every description; Store Doors, Store Front
na -show ma.le to order. All kiu.is
of Kipping. ip itting and
with nratu a. id diipatcb.
k. II, lH(17-lf.
FARM TOR SALE I
1 offer for tale my fhrm, S miles Irom
Clarksville, on the Port Kcval Turnpike,
containing i;o acres, wen uiuorreu; irome
wi tf tw)mti 0UlhouW4('tllc,Ueul
ci,ipr0l lee bouse, potato bous, Barn,
' Stftb'efor 8 borers. Buggy house aud Corn
t'r.b. Terms liberal. Apply lo
The wicked Radicals, in Congress,
have gloated over the cry of distress
which reaches their ears from' the
South ; but when that cry is echoed
and re-ocboed from New England,
thej are terro-striken at the probable
consequences of their brutal legisla
tion. Their black protoges under
the management of their yankee
overseers, are likely to starve id the
South, but this would not disturb
their equniinity, because all they want
is to vote the negroes in one Presiden
tial election, and whether successful or
not', they will be glad to get rid of
their elephant by starvation, or any
other means. But when the whites
of the North, thrown out of employ
ment by tens of thousands, titter a
cry of distress the case is different.
They now begin to discover that their
malignant efforts to ruin the whites
of the South have a retro-active force
which was neither ' calculated nor
forseen, and it also strikes them that
however widely the Union may be
severed, there is a unity of suffering
between the two sections. The Rad
ical leaders are beginning to be aware
of the additional fact that if this mu
tual cry of distress is cariod into the
next canvass, it will be the death
knell of . their, party.. Ilence their
demoralisation and frantio efforts to
ave themselves by elingingtoQrant'a
coat-tail, and the effort to raiso some
new issue by which the peoplo may
be cheated into their further support.
But they can no longer disguise their
infamous character and designs ;
their destiny is fixed and popular
vengcanoe can not be averted.
The glare of military fame is often
mistaken for the inaninifebtaUon of
the higest qualities of the statesman as
well as the purest patiotism and love
of justice and liberty. This mistake
has recently been made in two nota
ble instances. The names of Grant
and Sherman have both been men
tioned iu connection with the Prcsi
deney. To-day, we publish a letter
from each, in which the former en
dorses the foul crimes committed by
Stanton and Sheridan, and. the latter
assumes the responsibilty for the
cold blooded murders and systematic
robberies of Iiurbridgo. It is a sin
gulur coincidence as well as.fortu
nato disclosure for the country. No
nnntako can now bo mado iu estima
ting the ohuroterof these two ehoul
dcr strapped aspirants to the Pres
idency, and a voto for either is a vote
for a deliberate' defender of the most
atrocious crimes agaiust lifeJibcrty
It may be that the enquiry about
to be instituted by the Legislature of
Kentucky, Into the conduct of Bur
bridge may commit Sherman to more
than he bargained for, but is too
late to recede: his endorsement is
Every honest patriot must be tired
of the northern clamor for protection
to American citizens abroad, at a time
when ten millions of American citi
sous, at home, are groaning under i
despotism unsurpassed, for lawlosness
and insulting cruelty, by anything
of the kind on reoord. It is not sym
pathy for England that suggest these
remaks, but the hypocritcal pretense
of love of justio upon which that
clamor is based. A naturalized citi
sen may go abroad and violate the
laws of tho country in which he is
sojourning, but must not be punish
ed because he is an Ameican'citizen.
A Southern man, though a native ciU
izon, who stays at homo, violuting no
law of his country, is inBulted,a des
poiled and trampled upon just be
cause he is a native, but, unluckily,
was not born in tho frigid aono of
Puritanism, nor idoctrinated in that
Radicalism which seeks to uproot the
tho very foundations of ChUtianity,
morality and civil liberty.
Read the comments of the N. York
Tribuuo upon the situation in Ten
uessee. They are in harmony with
our comments upon a Btnte Conveu.
vention, and foreshadow the same
practical results of the extreme Radi
cal despotism to which we are sub
jectod. That result must be a sub
version of tbo existing tyranny either
through the force of public opinion
or the force ot arms. WhatCireoly
Toudeiun as extreme oppression can
not bo otherwise than intolerable to
jtho Victims of bis party S Villainies.
, TIio removal of l'opo and Swsync
and Or J looks something like au ef
fort by the President to stay the tide
of di'i-potiniu cro it sweeps off tbe last
vestige of liberty in tho foutli, leav
ing nothing but ruin behind it.
, , ......
A man by tho name of Hamilton,
wt0 w. tho RaJioul representative
f 8lh oUio jji,trict. was killed
nil the tilt., by hie son who was
THE BELLE OFSENOC.
At the foot of ' beautiful ran ire of moun
tains, ut rather hills, in the southern part of
England, Is a little village, composed almost
exclusively of fishermen's huts, scattered
bore ana tbere In Irregular order. Bock
from the brow of a steep declivity, looklnir
down almost perpendicular upon the water,
sits a snug little hut, built many yean be
fore br old Tan Beteon. Old Tan was now
dead, but the but was still , retained by his
two sons, sanay and Tom, since grown to
be yonng men. who easily snnoorted them
selves bj fishing in the bay near tbelr little
home. Sandy was passionate, sensitive and
inclined to the suspicions, while Tom was
open, frank and full of brotherly love.
a nour two weeks artcr tbe time or which
We now speak, quite an excitement had been
occasioned in the village by the appe trance
ot tne oaugliter or one of the old fishermen,
who, by some means never fully known, had
lain by a competency. Be . had sent his
only daughter to ladies' seminary, to get
an eoucauon, wnicn woum, in tbe course
of time, enable her to take a better position
in society, tone was tall and graceful, and
while the humble fishermen's sons loved her,
they admired her reverently, for her tastes,
her knowledge, ber wealth, all convinced
them that she would never condescend to be
tbe wife of a fisherman.
Ella for that was ber name seldom ap
peared in public, only when she eailed in
ber little boat with ber father upon the bey,
and this seemed ber greatest delight In one
of Uwee little excursions, she baa attempted
to go alone, but far oot upon the bay a storm
arose that rendered ber situation somewhat
perilous. In this emergency, Sandy, who
waa near by In but larger boat, proffered hie
assistance. Of coarse, under these circum
stances, it was accepted, and this incident
Klla and Sandy were made acquainted. She,
with a woman's curiosity, desired to visit
Sandy's home, and was here introduced to
Tons. She was immediately struck with his
gentlemanly unaffected manner, and after-
war as would sometimes call with ber old
father, and rest at their little door. Sandy
was now desperately in love with Ella, "tbe
belle of the Senoc," as she was called, and
frequently gained the privilege of Silting
who uer and art lather upon tbe waters ot
tbe bay. Ella herself began to look upon
sandy and but brother iu a different manner,
and saw much in tbcm which she could ad
mire. One evening Sandy returned to bis
but after a pleasant sail with Ella and ber
father, and by bis excited manner immedi
ately attracted the attention of his brother,
who, suspecting tbe cause, said nothing, but
went about preparing tueir evening meal,
Before, they retired, Sandy declared that
"the more be saw of Bella Ella, tbe more he
"To-day," said he, "she was very kind to
me, and, Tom, I really believe that she be
gins to love me,"
Tom said nothing. He, too. loved her.
but be thought, with a sigh, "If Ella, loves
Sandy, I am willing; I won't stand in their
Late one afternoon, .while Tom and
Sandy were mending their nets, Tom sud
"Uistr said he, "didn't yon hear a cryr
. "No. Did you?" auswered Sandy.
"Yes; I thought I beard some oue shout
ing for help, ill go down and see what it
"I guess it is nothing but the wind," said
So Tom took up bis hat, and holding it so
that the rough wind would not blow it off,
he went down to the beach, and tbere, away
out, struggling iu ber litUe bout to make a
landing, was Ella, every wave threatening
to overturn the frail craft. She was in Im
minent danger. Tom Instantly ran to a
boat lying on the beach, and quickly pushing
it oil, wiu soon far out on tbe waters. As
lie diew near to Ella, the wind became more
boisterous, and as Turn drew still nearer,
Ella rose to grasp the bow of bis boat, but a
sadden gust of wind cansed ber to lose ber
balance the boat careened, and throwing
her weight on the half-sunken side, it keeled
completely over, and she was instantly
struggling In the water. She sank I Tom
plunged wildly into tbe serging waves, and
grasping her arm, brought her again to the
surface, apparently lifeless. He chafed ber
bands, bringing renewed action and warmth
to her system. She soon opened ber blue
eyes and smiled tbe thanks the could not au
dibly express. As soon as Tom reached the
shore be bore her to his hut, bidding her to
occupy tbe chamber of bis mother, and pre
pared ber some warm herb tea, which soon
revived her. Sandy was also astldiout in
his attentions. When ber father, full of
anxiety concerning ber, appeared to tnke her
bonie, sne smiled to sweetly and tnanaea
Tom so sincerely, that the envy and Jealousy
of Sundy were aroused, and compressing his
lips, with evil thoughts rankling in his breast,
be turned away eli tried into tbe attic. He
looked out of lbs window, aad ber anew
torment awaited him, for Tom was getting
into the light conveyance and going borne
with Ella and ber futher. Muttering a dura
threat, Sandy turned from the window.
" 'Tis a plot a mean plot that Tom bos
laid I He knows that I love ber I Ob I be
thinks that he can trifle with met He baa
coaxed ber away I But I'll be revenged I I
He grasped a large billet of wood tight
ly, and descending from the garret walked
quickly away, and hid behind a cliff near
the rood. Here be awaited, muttering curse
as if be were a madman. Anon, the tears
would flow from his wild eyes, and tben grasp
ins the billet, be would shake It with a
smothered laugh, so suggestive of despera
tion, that it would cbill the blood of the
At length Tom Is seen walking down the
road on his way borne. He is smiling, aud
seems to be thinking of some pleosnnt antic
ipations, witu bis bead bent to tne wind.
He posses the cliff where, with dilated eye
aud an eager countenance, Sandy crouches,
tightly grasping his clubl lie passes. Dan
dy springs up, aud dealing him one powerful
blow, fell hi in to the e&itb; then excitedly he
fllubs awuv the dub. and frrasnlnff the lift-
less body of Tom, he dr. gs him to the top of
the CUR, and burls him beadiong oown mio
the deep tossing water bs falls with a heavy
nlunire. and Sandy, turning towards the dark
spot, smiles a ghastly smile, and then bis face
blanches: be seems to be awaking from nis
mad fremy. as with a frightened gas he
looks around, and then with lightened sneed
rushes to his but throws himself upon the
couch In his little chamber in agony, crying,
"Oh, Ood I I've killed blm I ' tie rocks to
and fro in a wild frenzy of grief. Boon tbe
tears begin to mlr; somewhat relieved by
these buruiug tokens of grief, and wearied
iu body and soul, he falls Into a troubled
slumber, muttering in bis dreams uf the sad
rate or bis brother.
Tbe next day Sandy dared not go forth from
bis cottage, and, fur three days aud nights, be
did uut Wuvottiis door, until at icugth buuger
drove blm forth. He met Llla, tuu ner tnav
hi hmLhar hiiil frnna unou a luuff ioUrUSV
rwriiiuiiw..Mi. and he did not know
whn ha mi!,l n.iurn. Tha neit be turned
hii hra.t and th hni ocaldincr tears oo u red
down bit tunbiirt face.
Tbe newt of Tom's disappearance toon
nntaft ahrn.fl rmi ufl Tom and Handy loved
esch other w th tbe deeneet love, noue sua-
peeled the horrible truth
About five yean after this time, a stranger
arrived in the village. He frequently tailed
aUmt upon the bay, snl was emu f'.urvl
None knew who b we. Sandy bad seen
bim, bat there was always something la the
look of tbe stranger that cansed Sandy to
shun bim. At length, one day when Sandy
went to get bis boat, be sw the stranger out
upon the waters drawing near to where he
was standing, Sandy could not bear the
gaze of the yonng man, so be aadly turned
and walked towards bis deserted borne.
Again, late in the afternoon, when be return
ed from fishing out on tbe the bay .unexpected
ly met tne stranger upon tbe snore. Tbey
looked at each other for a bretf moment
when Sandy, fearing that by some means the
young man knew 'the truth, be, conscience
troubled, turned and flew to his cottage as
the deer flies from the huntsman. ' When be!
reached bis little dreary home he closed the
door, bolted the windows, and in a frenzy of
excitement, nung bimseir npoa his couch.
Standing op be wildly cried i
What If he knows of my brothert Why
does he follow me 7 Oh I my brolberlmyj
brother 1" And groaning lath bitterness
of bis remorse, be lay upon the cot antil
midnight Hi agoney teemed to increase,
autil at lost starting from bis couch, be gave l
one shriek, and filled with a ridden mad
ness, be tore open but door, and ran down
tbe path toward the fatal cliff from whence
bis brother bad been burled. A be rushed
toward tbe spot be cried, "Oh 1 my brother I
Tom I Tom i I'll go down in the dark, cold
water to yon, and 1 11 ask yon to forgive me."
At length be stood near the edge of the cliff,
and wildly gazing upon the dork waters be
low, seemed to be spell boned to the spot
tben lilting bis arms on blgh, be turned to
ward tbe projecting point, and preparing to
jump, be bent bit knees foe tbe fatal leap.
uut suddenly a arm band grasped bis collar.
and drew him with an irresistible power
from the cliff. Sandy turned to tee who the
"Greet God I" he gasped "the stranger I"
Tbe stranger tenderdy laid bios on tbe
ewarlu, aad hastened to briug tome water in
bis cap to bain bi brow, bendy soon re
covered. "Why do yon follow me?" be said, 'Jlav
I ever wronged you 7"
That one word was enough. He gazed
but for an instant upon the face of tbe
stranger, and cried :
"My brother I, My Tom I"
It was all be could say. ne attempted
to clasp his brother's neck but failed in the
Tenderly Tom leaned over his prostrate
body and chafed tbe bronzed btndt of bit
When Sandy revived he begged Tom's for
giveness, tie confetwO all, and pleaded with
deep importunity to be torgtven. HJebrotti
er clamed bim in bis arms.
"Sandy, I forgive you. Com to our little
home, and I'll tell you all."
He gently led bit brother to bis little hot.
end then in the darkness, sitting on the old
couch, be told Sandy the whole story.
After I rescued Ella, I thought it might
be ratbrr mean in me to take advantage of.
inat taci, to claim ner love, l loved her,
Sundy, but I knew that yon had loved her
first, aud as I came down tbe road that night,
I resoled that I would not stand in your
way. While I wot thinking of i'lit I beard a
footstep and I knew it was yours, but before
1 could speak, I was left in painlul darkness,
aud all was blank. When I revived 1 found
myself struggling in the bay, and. instantly
comprehending the cause of my situation, 1
resolved that you should never see my face
again. I traveled far away to Australia,
and there in Melbourne I sought and receiv.
ed a situation at porter in a large store.
Since tben 1 have risen to be partner with
my old emyloycr't son, and, Sandy, I am
worth ten thousnnd pounds! While 1
away I wanted to return and tee you, nnd
at length I could not bear to stay to long
irom you, so i came uere. 1 stayed around at
first to see it you wished my return, I saw
Klla and loved beraguii.; and when I found
that you led a hermit's lit hern, I sought
ber band and 1 vjs gained it. To-uiglit when
we met upon the shore, I thought 1 would
follow vou to your home and see how you
spent your time, and whether you thought of
ot me. I stayed there listening to your
grief for me; until I thought yon would go
mad. When yen rushed out, I followed, but
vou ran to fust I could not keep op; I
I strained every nerve, however, and reached
you just in time; and now, Sandy, you ask
me to forgive you 7 '
Sandy pleaded with his eyes.
' "I have told you that I am now wealthy,
that I am soon to be married, and then, San
dy, you shall coma and live with me, and 1
say to you at Joseph said to bit brethren,
"now, thertove, De not grieved nor angry
with yourself, for God did send me before
yon to preserve life." Caui. Noxom.
There are probably more than 00,000
white men in Tennessee who cannot vote.
The significance of this fact is heightened
by the general admission ot the blacks to
the exercise of the right of franchise. So,
between tbe wide exclusion of the whites
and the universal enfranchisement of the
blocks, Tennessee is a political Pandemoni
um; and, until the suffrage it to regulated that
all men who ars not excluded by the recon
struction acts of Congrne, are admitted to
tbe enjoyment of ail their political rights, we
shall have no bope of cordial and enduring
peace. It may as well be plaiuly stated here
as vaguely biuted at, that tbe llepubllcao
party of the North bat never, so fur at we
know, contemplated the permanency of any
arroiigemeut like that which now afilicts
Tennessee : that it bat never inteuded to Jus
tify iu eueniK'i iu tbefr accuiatiou that it
might tyrauuize over and oppress the whites;
and that if the Southern ilcpublicaiu,
black aud white, thiuk the tupport of the
North worth wiuning, tbey niml put their
legislation on tome other basis thua that of
sell-seeking and revenge, loe time lor on
fraocbiscment of any but clashes emtiracing
few Individuals, and those confessedly dis
loyal and dangerous, has gone by. Tbe
baleful pastious tngeudurud by the war are
dying out The country is addressing itself
to the problem or peace ana we ueueve niai
all men who have not deep persounl ai.tmos
ilies to gratify, or some unworthy personal
motive to serve, or who are not insane with
rage aud; bale, are willing todr.iw a sponge
over the post and comineuce anew, provided
that both freedom and justice can be made
the basis of future eudeavor. We beliore
that when we say this, we spsak for nine
tenths of the Republicans of the Northwest.
Uf their devotion to the cause of their party
aud the country, there can no doubt -V. 1".
Dkatm or Gssc. Fonanrr's Moths. Mrs
Mariaiu Lux ton, tbe mother of General For.
rest, died at Navasota, Texas, on the 1 lib
ult. The Memphis Avulanrtu says of her;
She was barn in Marshall county, Ten
nessee, and all the days from the time she
first budded into womanhood were passed Iu
the uructice of those Christian end matronly
Christian by practice and profession, she
beat the strength of ber vigorous eiampt
to the encouragement of thos virtues which
I makes the possessor of them happy ou earth,
land worthy of happiueas bereaftrr. She
wot the mother of fltteea children, aud those
i nut snatched from her bv tbat power which
Das ti lengio ciaiuiea. soe
trained in such a manner as to make them
tsZS all that is ood and bvetiliful in
woman eud of all tbat i knightly and noble
19 tni liro'
fsintoit.. Ms IU :oJ .-oil Vp:
Aa Affecting Temperance Speech.
A speech, a speech from
the thoughtless fellows.
" He can't make a speech on cold water.
defy Dim," eaid ore of their number.
"My friends," began Wilton.
"Hear, hear I he s really in for It now,"
cried a young man wbeee flushed cheeks
gave pitiful signs of bit devotion to tbe bet
lie. Wilton it on bit feet"
The comrade they called Wilton was a
voung man tome tweoty-tbree year! of age.
Upon bit face within bit eyes, a settled melan
choly rested; hit manners were as grave at
those of an old man. He was ofun eallcd
"Wilton tbe Steady," en account of bit quiet
adherence to principle.
1 be head partner or tbe firm In whose
employ Wilton was, gave a gieat party once
a year, and it wot to this gathering Wilton
bad been pursuaded to come.
in vain bfa companions tempted him with
the wine that flowed freely. The "firm"
considered themselves good Christians, as.
indeed, did the world generally. They gave
largely to charities and to their church,
where their teat were seldom empty. They
did a great deal of good with their money,
yet in placing this fiery temptation before
young men, tome of whom were as yet with
out fixed principle, tbey committed a gross
and almost lutal error. Looking about him.
Wilton taw already many facet flushed al
most to Inebriation, many eye that, spite of
their flash and sparkle, moved with difficul
ty, and that dire unsteadiness.
Jiy mends," be said, and tben paused.
ss if to give greater emphasis to what might
follow, ' i am going to make a confession."
Some of the company smiled at this, but
by far the greater number ware awed at tbe
sod yet earnest tones of his voice.
"Five year ago I bad a brother, a bright,
beautiful lad, in whom the hope of a targt
family circle centered. He wat called a ge
nius, and he was one. Sensitive, gtntle
hearted and generous to a fault, he also gave
promise of an extraordinary vigor of Blind.
Oue night several in the village where I was
born resolved to bave a frolic. Tbe party
was to be a secret one, and we were each to
carry from our homes, if we could', provis
ions and wine, it came off witb success.
There was good cheer, there were bright and
flowing liquors we were all young and
buoysut My brother bad never tasted
wine. Whether It was a disinclination
caused by natural dislike, or whether it wes
in Intuition that led him to avoid it as danger
ous to him, I do not know. I only know
and tbe recollection at this moment it burning
in roy brain that we all thought that if we
could get Herbert drunk It would be fine
fun. Fiends could not hare set themselves
more Ingeniously at work to compass this
object than we did. I will not excuse my
self, nor in aught paliute my conduct 1
Knew be had a manuscript poem at borne,
that bad been pronounced remarkable by
competent critics; I knew he could impro
vise almost without mental eOort, and ex
pected under the stimulus of the tirery ser
pent whose sting 1 dread more than 1
dieod death bis brain would be quickened,
and we should be charmed, perhaps amazed
at the exhibitions of bis rare gift
"At Mil we prevailed, but instead of
quickening, the wine tlupified bit faculties.
A lew glasses reduced bun to a slat of utlei
"The party broke np. , W e were all wild
with drink and excitement he alone was
immovable and quite insensible. Tbere was
no arousing him from the state of deathly
sleep into which he bad fallen. I dared not
take bim home that uight, fearing our frolic
might be found out in consequence of the
trouble we should bave in getting him to
his room. So e left him there, lying as
comfortably as we could place him bis
handsome face flushed and almost purple,
his active brain, for once, completely stupi
aed. "In the morning I was awakened by tbe
sound of tub. A white, scared face stood
over me ; a trembling, weak voice cried out :
"Oh, Philip, your poor brother."
"I sprung from my bed. My friends, I
kuew the truth Soon enough. Herbert had
recovered consciousness in the night,
sufficient to uiisluud him. He had fallen
from the window, a beight of twenty feet.
He wot still living. Iu raiu my prayers
and tears and anguish." Hit Voice fultered.
"Young men, he It living yet but an in
curable Idiot Mow, wilt yon ask me to
take the accursed stuff 7 Yes, .iha - curse of
tbe living God rest upon it It boa bur
dened my life it hot ruined as noble a in
tellect as wat ever ready to do battle with
the faults and follies of the world. Do you
ttill jeer and laugh, because I will not be
jovial 7 I tell you if it wot a living thing
1 would strangle It; and there is nothing
upon earth I bat with Such a deadly ha
tred." Tbere was a deep silence. Not one In all.
the company seemed indiued to drink again
"Washisotoh, D. C, Dec, 19, 1867.
"Geuural S. G. Uurbridge, Lexington,
"Dsas GsasaAt I now have tbe pleasure
to inclose you a copy of the letter 1 ad
dressed you on the 21st of June, 1804, when
you were commanding bs Kentucky, subject
to my orders
"The instructions contained in that letter
were commands to yon, binding on you un
der the Articles of War, and lor which you
were no more responsible than for the exe
cution of any other order. lon mm res-
ponMbU, and 1 liar no feur but my orders
were ncutaiid appropriate.
"I bear the people ut Kentucky blame you
tor yoirr acts under my order. If so, tliey
am very fooli h, for tome of them should bo
thankful tbat you were too lenient
"I recall with pleasure your early efforts
in ihe cause of our country in 1801. You
were one of tbe first Kcnluckisiisto take up
arms in defease of our couiaou nationality,
I remember yon, also, wheu commanding a
brigade dnriiif sill th operations at Vicks
barg; and also when commanding in Ken
tucky while 1 wo engaged dowu iu Geor.
"For these services yon are entitled to the
thanks and gratitude of every well-wisher
of hit country, a id 1 doubt not you will yet
receive Uiem. Very truly, your f'rieud.
"W. T. SUKUM.VN, LtGen l."
Ntt'RALOiA. We have rut from tbe Alta
California a receipt for the cure of neural
gia, which the editor of that paper daims lo
have been enectlve in several case lo Ins
own knowledge. He saytt
"Some lime ago we published, at the rr
quest of a frieud, a receipt to cure neuralgia'
Hall a dracbiu of sal ammonia in an ounce
of camphor water, to be taken a tcafpoonful
ata dote, and the dose repealed several limes
at iulcrvalsof live minutes, if the pain be
not relieved at ouce. Haifa dozen dinurentjeord another similar accident 1 oa
persons have since tried lbs receipt, and mladopud the above plan in my family, and
very cos au immediate cure has been effeo. ) find that 1. All the gat created by th
tod, la one, tue suliercr a lauy uad oeen ai
iau wot uuable to alleviate her sufferings,
hen a solution of sal ainuiouia In campuur
wawr rv'lieveo uer hi a lew tninuuu.
Isnaowiso Too-Nai. This U a very!
tMitihltt.Li nnd aoaietlinaj danizeroui Ihiim. '
The cure is very siuuile. Take a sharp
pointed knife, and cut a Utile furrow
r . . i . t
.along in top oi loe uau lengiuwu. a
! it fill " scrap it out tgaiu. Tbi will
cause tbe nail In contract at I be top, and
"' s 0014 iroia in ce;.. rr.i
Correspondence of the Liberal Cbrittian.1
The Talgarltf of Load Talking and
I se in your excellent paper a tittle para
graph on good manners, in which spilling
and lounging are described as proof of .
semi-barbarous state of society, and must
beg leave lo note another peculiarity of onr '
social manner, equally Indicative of a low
stale of civilization. I allude to loud talking
and screeching laughter. This is so peculiar '
to Americans that they are .known by it la -Europe,
and, as well bred people, tbey never
tolerate it Even in the most social circles
11 it considered a mark of Hi-breeding be-,
longing only to tbe lowest class.
Aside from this conventional protest
against It there is a regul.; objection to It, iu
the Injury it does to tbe vocal organs
Talking through an evening, at the top of the
voice, it very painful and fatiguing, and ytt
the noise made by the whole company it so
great that no one can be beard who speaks
low, or In a natural tone. Jlany throats
are made core and many beads are made tu .
ache by this unnessary noise, and persons sub
ject to bronchitis are obliged to avoid it en
n all European society the voice ara
kept lower than usual in Urge parties, and '
a general hum prevails, in which every per
son it easily heard by those he addreate.
Tbe loudness of Americans is very marked,
and produces disgust and indignation when ,
It breaks the stillness of picture-galleries and
other public places, where nothing but whis
per are allowed. Wbea a loud voice la
beard from an American traveler, every one
it startled and looks round ' to tee whence It
comet, and tbe comment on this breach of
good manners are very severe.
I oace Introduced some very refined and
cultivated Americans to a gentleman in Lou
dou, who could have done much for their
amusement and procured their admission to
many private galleries of paintings and sculp
ture; but after one experience of their voci
ferating, in a public exhibition, he woald
not again expose himself to the pain aad the
shame they then caused him. Ha wrote to
me to excuse himself fur hot- baring done
more for my friends, by saying that their
loud talking made them not presentable In
refined society, and not bearable in publio
places. He added that he had made a dinner
party for them, of Americaus only, and
they laughed and talked to loud that ho
was afraid the police would come in and see
what tut row waa.
A Mournful Complaint from New Eng
land. From tbe Boston Commercial Bulletin. -In
no part of the country it industry at to
low an ebb, capital so nnremiiuerativa in it
investments, and their joint products so
poorly paid for, as her in New England at
the present time. The specialities of skilled
labor, which were once a source of wealth '
to th capitalist and profitable employment
to the people, are now a drug in the market,
sad refuse to go into consumption at any
price. Tbey ar relatively much cheaper
than tbe agricultural products of th West
and South, or tbe raw mineral products ot
the Middle State. Not only are our manu
factories closed, or running on tbort time,
and our mechanics and laboring men by
thousands thrown out of employment, but
our commercial classes! are suffering Im
mense losses from the stagnation of trade
and shrinkage iu merchandise value.
Tbe latter are obliged to "carry' not only
the products of New England commerce aud
industry, bnt also, to a great exteut, those of
every other section of th conutry. Hence,
upou their shoulders the depreciation in pri
ces principally falls. And the situation with
us is rendered tl ill more severe and trying
from the fact that our foreign commerce and
its dependent Interests continue in a de
pressed aud cripled Condiiiou. In foot lb
uobie race of ijiporting and shipping mer
chants, once the pride and boast of our New
England seiorts whose shiis ploughed tho
waters of e'ery sea, and poured into eur mar
kets the weul til of every cllmo, are now, alas,
falling Into comparative decay. Our mer
uhauiile mariue, swept from tbj ocean dur
ing Ihe late war, Involving a Ioji of millions
of dollars of capital not ' shared by any
other seclien of tbe country, tkowt no sigus
of recovery from Die blow.
Our shipyards all along the coast, once re
sonant wiiu the Ovely chorus of th aj aud 1
the bummer, are now silent aud solitary as
oar graveyards. Tbe Canadian Reciprocity
Treaty, which once brought a large and profi
table tredo to our seaboard market in
cluding cheap lumber for shlp-buildlng
has bVen abrogated, and raw products of
Canada and the Maratime Provinces, wliidi
were once tent here to excl.snge for our
West India goods and home maautociuros,
now pass by n to other market. Thif it it
faint picture of the Eastern situation, aud of
what New England bas been called to suffer
on Bwouut of Ihe war and iu sequences.
Tbe Lexington (Mist.) Advertiter proposes
the establishment of a spinning and carding
factory in that plae at a cost of 3 j00. It
hal is it lo be great folly to wait until J0,00o
or 9100,000 can be got to commence with,
"A factory (costing the insignificant
amount we have named) ran card all tho
wool in tbe county, mike Lowells aud do
mestics lo supply three times our population,
and witb a gin attached could pin all the
gleanings of Ihe great staple at a figure that,
would immediately tujrrsedt burse power.
We have in our community a gentleman of
recognizee genius, of an iuveulive turn of
mind, well iosted in mechanics and inochiue
ry, who, for moderate compensation, coull
be Induced to take charge of the business of
such a laoiory and conduct it tu ihe graudest
result possible 'o be attained.
To which the New Orleans Itcmjmt adu
'When our Ila'lrburst friends a year or
lw ago were trying lo start a factory ami
stopped short because the sum of $100,000
could not he (ulscd, we told Idem to have a
dug power factory if lUey could get no other.
ludrcl, every a000 acres or cultivated Unit
should have its on gfo Slid cotlou factory
combined, and it Would be all lit better if
the farmers' daughters should do the weav
ing at home on llis Improved looms of-thu
day. Small plantations sud small Ucloric
muat gu together." . . - .
A PnxvsKTivs A gentleman of St. Louis
sends the following ronimunicUlon to onu
of tbe papers there. We have teea hit plan
tried, andean recommend It, as making llio
oil buru longer and give a brighter fUuiei
Air in th good people of your oity to fill
their coal-oil lamp, about one- ouitli full of
common salt and you will never nerd lo re-
- luralof the flame is consumed. 1, llienama
is much brighter aud clearer. 3. The oil
; tiurns away much slower. 4. It never e-
p lodes. Try it.
Riiktmatic Rrasnv. On ot the most
ncoeWul physicians in Augusta couuty,
now dead, lued with great cfloci lue luinm.
' ing remedy for Rheumatism, which we give
all ft the beoeul of all who are Iroumea witu
..... j- . ..-r.l. 'I . ... -.a fY-..
uuiuisw. ' TTVa7
oil 1 ounce of rbloroform, 1 ounce of laudu-
to nam, onoe of aqua ammania. V"
aiouooi uj , u.
xml | txt | <urn:uuid:859f9b2f-d3af-48aa-982a-c704d36edbe3> | CC-MAIN-2016-30 | http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88061077/1868-01-10/ed-1/seq-1/ocr/ | 2016-07-26T14:35:20Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257824994.73/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071024-00277-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.897703 | 12,388 |
2nd Amendment to the Constitution of The United States of America
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
"I ask sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people except for a few politicians."
- George Mason (father of the Bill of Rights and The Virginia Declaration of Rights)
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
OK, nobody is perfect and I don't expect any manufacturer to have zero defects. Lets see how they handle this. Quick call this morning they told me just to ship it to them with a letter explaining the default. Problem is this is the barrel for a different rifle for which it was purchased, going to have to get the receiver back from my friend and put it all back together now....and then deal with mailing it - never done that before. At least the NH location that this is being shipped to is closed down next week so I have a few days to get this all together.
Hope this doesn't impact Appleseed..
Here is the vid.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
My old Sergeant Major emailed me a video I would like to share. Its by a British company called SJH Projects which is the defense contracting field and this was a video that they did for one of their projects. Please note that these target drums are not the 55 gallon drums that we Americans are used to but 60 liter drums. They are about 2 feet tall by 16” in diameter…
Good video showing the relative effects of each round. Gotta love that .338 Lupua Magnum round, designed as a dedicated sniping round, it falls between the standard military .308 and the .50 in this role. It provides enough “oomph” to get the job done well past what most shooters are normally tasked to do with it but is light enough that is can be fired out of a weapon considerably smaller than the .50 round requires. This makes it a mobile and versatile killer on the battlefield for us.
Note that the “wimpy” 9mm round easily penetrates the barrel out of a Glock also. Just goes to show, don’t hide behind water barrels…or car doors apparently also.
Monday, June 27, 2011
The pictorial proof that this man is a douche bag just keeps on mounting...
What totally kills me here is that the charge is for things he has done to his own people and not the thousands he has aided in killing around the world...including US citizens... Again, I guess if you have enough money you can buy your reputation back on the world stage and get top US performers to play for you like trained monkeys....more douchebaggery...
Gadhafi...never liked him...never will....
First off, thinking about trading or selling the XPS-2 Halo on the AR for a Red Dot....shooting it yesterday on the range I was just having a problem focusing on the target through it. The aiming circle is made of of individual dots and some people's brain sees them as one circle, apparently I am in the other group and see them as a circle of dots, distracting. Note that this happens when I try and snap into the sight for a quick shot, if I simple aim through it it is better....but that is not what I train for now. I think maybe a Micro T1 or Vortex Sparc might do the trick, one dot to worry about.
Secondly, maybe thinking about trading the LC9 for the Kahr CM9...what?!? I thought you already made that choice? Yes I did and I still think the LC9 is a good pistol. I am having some issues getting used to the safety and the trigger was hurting me on the range yesterday past 3 yards or so. Also, the thing that seems to bring people to this blog are my reviews, which do not appear nearly as often as I would like. This would be another chance to preview a product and get a few more people to wander over this way.
I would appreciate any input on the subject....
Anyway, once a Buckeye always a Buckeye (unless your name is Pryor these days) and Colonel Manifold has morphed into Coach Manifold for a few weeks to help out his alma mater (latin for "nourishing mother"..never say you didn't come here and didn't learn any culture) and former room mate and current OSU tight ends coach John Peterson.
So first I was like...
And then I was like...
One thing I like about the article is how he credits coach Earle Bruce for helping him stay the course to a career as an Air Force officer. Coach Bruce was the man who had the daunting task of taking the reigns from Woody Hayes upon his ouster from one of the most visible jobs in college football. Despite losing by 1 point in the national championship in 1980, a winning record over Michigan and 4 Big 10 titles in 8 seasons, the coach fell out of favor with the administration and fans and was fired after the 1987 season, but not until he beat Michigan one last time in Ann Arbor. Something his successor, John Cooper never did do. Its nice to see a good coach get credit where its due. Like his predecessor and mentor, Coach Bruce knew that the military produced good men of character and encouraged that trait in their players.
Friday, June 24, 2011
...well, there is one thing......
When you decide to design (or copy and produce, whatever) a defensive pistol for CCW use, could you do us a favor and GIVE US A SECOND MAGAZINE! I know you are not the only ones doing the single mag thing (looking at you Kahr and Kimber) but you are the company whose products I am using now. Yes, I know the SR9c comes with 2 and that is great and all. But a lot of shooters (like myself) will choose the easy of carry of the LC9 over the increased firepower of the SR9 because the concealability is how you guys market it. If its a cost thing trying to keep the pistol at a competitive price point thing, well, what I always point out to people is that when I looked at the price of the LC9 I factored in the additional cost of the extra mag in the purchase price. I am sure if you could include the second one in the package itself you could provide it for much cheaper than what I was charged by the retailer at the counter. That would be appreciated by many of us.
I am not a professional gunfighter. I do not foresee myself duplicating a scene from a John Woo movie and going through hundreds of rounds in a armed encounter. Truthfully, I hope I never get into one in the first place. But if I just so happen to do get into one, I would like the peace of mind to know my 7+1 in the LC9 is backed by another 7 in my pocket for a total of 15, now that is a decent number to fend off wolves who often attack in packs.
Just a thought fellas...otherwise sending much love down to Arizona to you all....
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Ironic, just last week I heard an interview with Shaun of the Dead's Simon Pegg on a local radio station. I really liked that movie, a comedy with zombies and characters you could not help but to fall in love with. Now today on a forum I found a link to a piece he did on the UK Guardian web site bemoaning the fast zombie characterized in many of today's zed flicks. I must agree, the running zombie, while certainly frightening, is not any better than the slow, shambling creature that we traditionally view in the role. Article link below....
Before the zombie was a prepper euphemism for those that would be knocking on the prepper's door after the SHTF unprepared as a threat...the zombie held another place in our subconcious mind...that of the fear of dying ourselves. Pegg puts it excellently in this paragraph...
More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.
Yes, the slow zombie can bring so much more tension to a story plot as far as I am concerned. So for me, bring on the shamblers!!
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
So, I guess next time I decide to go all douche to Krogers with my LC9 and iPhone and get into a raging gun battle in the vegetable section I shouldn’t use my iPhone for cover….
My co-worker, who I have worked with for 10 years and currently am stationed with as the only two techs at our location, posted this on Facebook this evening…my response is the second one….one of my steel plate buds is the first one…
Its been over a hour and he hasn’t responded…kind of pissed, I mean being called a douche by your coworker, whether directly and deliberately or not, irks my ire. I mean, I have never with held from him that I was a gun guy or had a CCW and he and I often exchange comments on FB, he must have known I would read this…
My prediction for tomorrow weather….chilly….
Guess what I am contemplating now.....
Over at Hellinahandbasket.net, fellow Central Ohio blogger James tells of a fellow named Mike who told him of his low opinion of the Glock platform based upon the opinions passed onto him by others. James did probably the smartest thing he could of done in that situation...he took the guy to shoot a Glock rental pistol at a range. His opinion was changed after finding out that the Glock did not have the worst trigger in the world...
I am hardly surprised.
Yes, I am a fan of the Glock design...otherwise I would not own multiple pistols by the company.
- The pistols are simple, only 37 parts, even a person with minimal technical prowess can understand how it works with minimal instruction.
- The basic design sacrifices some aesthetics for functional form. It may not be the most pretty pistol in the case but the design has been tested in real life scenarios for 30 years to be durable and trustworthy. It was designed as a military service pistol where the individual conformed to the weapon, and not the other way around.
- Despite its naysayers, the pistol does have 3 safeties on it (although the trigger safety is not what I would solely rely on in and of itself), all deactivated when the trigger is pulled and reactivated when it is reset. Try pushing firing pin through a piece of steel 3/16" thick and you get an idea of the force that it would require to defeat the plunger safety on this pistol. The lack of external safeties was also a design consideration to keep the overall part count lower on the pistol to ease manufacturing and maintenance.
- The majority of glocks are accurate enough, if not more so, for their intended purpose. Although some have been tuned to be fine "race guns" for competition, the pistol was designed as a service sidearm and in this regard it is well withing the normally expected accuracy for that type of weapon. The hexagonal or octagonal (depending on caliber) profile barrels not only provide for tighter spiraling to increase accuracy but also a better gas seal behind the bullet for better overall ballistic performance.
- The Tenifer finish on the slides is known for its durability. Matter of fact the entire pistols durability is almost a standard which other pistols are compared to. I have posted links and vids before of Glock pistols being subjected to ruthless torture but still being able to fire afterwards.
- For me, and any other .Mil, LEO or Fire/EMS type, they are economical. Basic models will run you about $400 with the Glock First Responder discount...base prices for the general public are higher but still competitive with most other similar pistols in the case.
Of course not all that glitters is gold and Glocks are not without their drawbacks....
- They are not perfect, despite the self imposed "Glock Perfection" label that is used with the company. I think this is some of the beef that the "anti-fanboys" level at Glock, and it is justified to me. I mean, if "Glock Perfection" was in the 3rd Gen pistols, why go to a 4th? It is a mechanical device and is subject to failures, as is any mechanical design. The use of ISO 9001 manufacturing methods, CNC machining and skilled labor greatly reduces the risk for failure, but it will happen eventually to any design.
- The sights, while functional, are still plastic and are known to be fragile under harsh use. Many people make replacing the sights a priority on a new pistol.
- They are THICK! Carrying one IWB takes some getting used to, but that is the price you pay for those large capacity magazines.
- The grip (and overall look) is blockish. Some people simply do not like the feel of the grip.
- And, as I have stated before, Glocks web site needs some serious updating...
Getting back to the lack of external safety issue, people carried DAO revolvers for years that did not have a safety lever a la 1911 on it and everyone was fine with that due to the long DA trigger pull. Since replacing parts is relatively easy, you can install a NY-1 trigger spring in it to recreate that double action trigger goodness to your Glock and be "safe" all you want...that and choose a holster that has sufficient coverage of the trigger guard area, as any good holster should.
The best piece of advice I can give about Glocks though is this...do like James and go rent one or borrow one and try it yourself. They are not perfect, but for me they work and I will continue to own them for the foreseeable future.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Pfc. Brian Backus, 21, of Mich./Spc. Tyler R. Kreinz, 21, of Wis./Sgt. Alan Snyder, 28, of Mass./Sgt. Edward Dixon, 37, of Mo./Sgt. 1st Class Alvin A. Boatwright, 33, of S.C./Spc. Scott Smith, 36, of Ind. All K.I.A. on 6-20-2011...and you "Miss Ryan Dunn"
Puts that kind of media attention to Dunn in perspective doesn't it?....
RIP, (L) Kristofferson Lorenzo, KIA May 23, 2011 (R) Charles Wyckoff, KIA June 6, 2007
Both of these soldiers were friends of Erik's. I never knew either of them. As odd as it seems I remember Wyckoff's name from the casualty reports in june of 2007 while in the CAC in Kuwait, I believe his name was similar to somebody I knew or something like that. To put another face to a name sometimes sucks with my memories of that time. Sometimes that level of obscurity between the names we processed and the reality of their lives and death was truly comforting. It would of made for a really depressing year to have to deal with nothing but injured and dead faces all the time. Makes me feel for the folks in the medical branches.
Of course to Erik the connection is all to real and painful. He has a lot of names and faces that he can attach to the word "sacrifice".
This is not to take the death of Ryan Dunn lightly or to say his loss to his family and friends is any less devastating than that of the two soldiers above to their own family. Its just when a nation's media takes more time and space to pay attention to someone who's claim to fame was being a "jackass" compared to the service and loss of six soldiers on the same day...I got to scratch my head and think maybe our perspective on life is a little skewed....
To his credit, Dunn (in the green shirt in the vid) did contribute to one of the (I think) most bad assed stunts pulled on the Jackass movies, standing in front of a "less than lethal" claymore mine....
RIP to all of our fallen service members and may God protect all of those still in harms way...until victory brings them home.
Monday, June 20, 2011
A&E picked up The Glades for a second season that started a few weeks ago. Having a 8 year old in the house means that most of what the wife and I get to watch on the boob tube consists of Disney and Nickelodeon type material except for the few shows that we can watch that Netflix carries that we like. We like the show a lot and overall its really entertaining. But the show, like a lot of TV shows, puts style over substance. It just makes better TV and allows them to do a show in the time allowed. I mean, I am sure that there are real homicide detectives out there that would die to have clues come together and fall into their lap and line up like they do on the shows.
One thing that the show keeps doing is making mistakes about firearms….and now the military.
This weekends episode dealt with the murder of a Navy recruiter. Apparently on TV military personnel carry their “issued revolvers” at all times. Yes, you hear that right….”service revolver” is what the show called it. Hell, even in a combat zone the issuance and carry of a weapon is regulated…and some commands are going as far as to require personnel coming home from a combat zone to surrender (at least voluntarily) for a period of time after they return. And this guy was a recruiter to boot, I don’t even know if recruiters in the Army have a TO&E with weapons on it, let alone the Navy. And its 2011, when was the last time the military issued a revolver to begin with?
Also, this guy had to be the best recruiter in history because it seems like the Navy wouldn’t let him off the “trail”. One of the suspects is the father of one of sailors the guy recruited that was killed in Afghanistan “a few years later”. The guy was suspected of killing the recruiter when he came back into town again. Not helping the believability factor was a picture of the supposedly deceased son in Navy Officer white dress in front of a F-18…seriously, some Petty Officer has to hound 18 year olds to fly fighter jets…which are the elite of Navy aviation by the way…..but this guy could recruit kids off the street to fly them apparently.
Oh yeah, in an autopsy they pull a bullet fragment out of the victim and the coroner declares “A hollowpoint” to which the female lead in the show responds “yeah, cop killers”……<insert facepalm here>. Hey writers, I carry hollowpoints in my CCW piece…they work on criminals much better than cops……
Love your show…maybe I am noticing this stuff too much because I am a “gunnie” but it wouldn’t bee too hard to have somebody check this stuff out, really, even in California they have some people that know about guns….despite all you wackos out to remove them from society out there….
Remember last week that I told you that a company called Mounting Solution Plus was offering free swag to any established blogger that posted some advertising for them? I normally have stated that I would refrain from such advertising activities, but since this would be a one time type deal I went ahead and posted their coded add on the page last Wednesday and emailed them….
Well, Friday I had a package waiting for me….can you say FAST!!
I still have to do some field testing and review the sight, it’s a NC Star reflex style, 4 reticle sight. NC Star makes some of the lower end optics gear available. I find their quality and price point to generally match up. The scope I have on my 10/22 is a NC Star model and it works well. For a hobby shooter or casual weekend warrior type, the NC Star brand is generally a safe bet when you want a sight that won’t break the bank.
Thanks to MSP for getting this to me so quickly. If this is any indication of your customer service level we just might do some more business in the future…..
2 day shipping time from Florida to Ohio via USPS…not too shabby…
On the outside the sight appears to be fairly solid, I will have to do some field trials before I can say for sure about its build.
About all the “field work” I have had time to do with it so far…
I really didn’t know what I would put this on…have an EOTech on the AR and another NC Star optic on the 10/22….then I had an idea…..
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Yeah, it happens…in the woods, no Porta-potty in sight (or in my case long before they even contracted stuff like that), its 0200 and nature calls…and calls loudly…
The ninja shits…..dark, deadly and sneak up on you without you knowing….its happened to everyone that has taken to the field at one time or another and there was no amount of dehydrated pork patties or fruit cocktail that you could eat to stem their tide…they were indeed troubling. Todays deployed troop will have a bevy of restroom facilities available on their designated base or FOB provided due to the generous nature (and even more generous government contracts) of your local KBR crew. Still, off the FOB these issues do arise.
But what to do? In many a war a man has simply let fly in his trousers when natured called and he was in the middle of defending his life against the enemy. No shame there. I know several folks that have jumped out of a perfectly good airplane only to have the jolt of their chute opening turn their pants a more tactical shade of brown…. But this wasn’t war or an training situation where you had to pay attention to stay alive. It was just “the field”…that mundane existence that started one day and ended many similar days later and you really couldn’t remember how many had come between and even if you did it wouldn’t matter. In the field life was different for a grunt. Gone were the luxuries of hot water, TV, soft beds, telephones and dedicated crappers. In its place were poncho liners and ponchos on the hard ground, cold chow, cold PTA washes with a washcloth and canteen cup, entertainment that was derived from your fellow soldiers rather than a Xbox….and no shitters….
Oh the horror….
Savvy troops brought copious amounts of quality toilet paper with them in ziplock bags…better to have and not need then….you get the point. Others relied on the generosity of the Army and the foresight of their supply sergeant to make sure enough super fine sandpaper…aka Army generic toilet paper…or the 3 or 4 tissue like pieces that your MRE provided to do the job (shudder) . Others used leaves and sticks like they were right out of a chapter of the early frontier…you know the Ranger types and such….
But as to the method….
Well, ideally whenever you set into a position for the night or dug a defensive perimeter your command element types would indicate a “pee tree” (for going #1 on) and a slit trench area. The pee tree was simply a tree or bush centrally located that everyone would walk to and pee on…like dogs marking their territory. At night a chem light would generally be hung off it, or more tactically, a hole dug and it dropped in so that you had to be pretty much on top of it to see it. The slit trench was just that…as shallow trench about a entrenching tool blade wide by a etool deep that would be nearby the pee tree that you simply straddled, dropped your pants, sunk your battleship, and then scooped dirt on top of it for courtesy’s sake of the next guy. Ideally you would have some type of para cord or bungie frame around in via trees and such with ponchos to give you some privacy. It would also (hopefully) include a hand washing station which might simply be a 5 gallon can of water and a bar of soap. Nothing fancy but it works.
If you were really lucky and were in a static location they might actually pull out the field toilet, which was a collapsible plywood box with a hole in the top that would be placed over the slit trench…glorious….in the land of the blind the one eye man truly is the king.
In other situations you might have to improvise a bit.
- Generally, the hole squat was the most basic. I could never master the simple concept to dig a hole, drop my BDU’s and squat. A lack of coordination (I didn’t get the nickname “Baby Huey” for nothing) and rightfully founded fear of dropping a load back into my own pants in the dark made this my least favorite option.
- The sump dump…while in a defensive position, commonly called the fox hole, it is standard procedure to dig a hole at the bottom that angles down and away from the personnel called the grenade sump. Its purpose is so that you can kick a grenade into it, hopefully before it explodes, if one happens into your position. Do I need to explain what happens here? OK, you drop a round down it…hopefully on your lst day in the field before you fill it in and not one of your first so you can admire your work, so to speak, for the remainder of your time in the field…..Of course its common knowledge you never go in your OWN foxhole….
- Some people preferred the tree method where you found a sturdy tree, dug a hole at the base and squatted using the tree for support, either hanging off of it with your arms or leaning against it with your back. Functional but left you for the want of a tree when you may or may not have that luxury.
- The “Gallagher”…named after the comedian, this method involves forethought and the use of props. A pair of MRE boxes propped on either side of the hole, a 5 gallon bucket, a folded entrenching tool, the infamous folding chair with a hole cut in the seat or some form of rope seat have all been known to be in my presence in the field. For mech guys and the like that have the ability to carry stuff like that in their vehicle more power to you, but for legs and light guys this approach was usually a logistical nightmare.
- My personal favorite was the modified tree approach. It took a bit more searching than the simple tree but was usually well worth the time if you could afford it. Look for two small saplings growing right next to one another (maybe 6 to 8 feet in length), drop trousers, approach from the rear and simple walk back over them running one tree under each thigh, thusly forming a seat over a pre-dug hole (you need a little engineering foresight to figure the angle of the dangle of the tree in relation to the target area and such before you start).
- The “Bandito”…sneak around until you find some other REMF units fixed position and sneak in and use their facilities…stealing all the available TP that you can on the way out.
- The “Snake Eater/sniper”…only for the most tactically hardcore types….this method is emplyoyed while laying prone and is only for the hardcorest of hardcore. Basically it is rolling to your side, dropping pants and doing your business then rolling back over and laying there next to your product. I have done the #1 version of this drill but never the deuce thankfully.
So for those of you who have never had to step off the beaten path in uniform to take care of the call of nature, there is a run down of some of the more creative ways the modern grunt has learned to take care of their business. Its not pretty, but it is life as I knew it in the Infantry in my day. And some people still wonder why I migrated to the Administrative branch later in my career….
The “Ninja Mag” is just for show for the most part, only use it in one part of Appleseed for a fun shoot type event for a voucher to free training later, I got one last time!
Ah, another year another shot at Appleseed. Been to two so far, had a good time each go around but have failed to shoot a 210 needed to qualify as a “Rifleman” by their standards. Yes, I know that it doesn’t mean squat to anyone outside of the organization, but then again a lot of my life has been like that. Does anybody give a rats patootie about a overseas service ribbon or the like that isn’t in the military? And no, I do not hang out on the Appleseed forums (although I have posted there) and don’t really consider the people that do it year round my “peers” so to speak. Lets just say I want to accomplish this goal to chalk one up in the win column for “Team Personal Pride”.
They say that excuses are like butts, everyone has one and they all stink. I guess I am a two butted guy because I got two excuses, both my own fault for not qualifying the past two times.
- First Appleseed, eyesight. I didn’t take into consideration how bad my eyesight has gotten. Part of its from age (mine is getting progressively worse) and part is from some corneal scarring that I have in my eyes from only Lord knows what. the first time out I set up a trainer rifle with the excellent Tech-Sights 10/22 setup that puts GI style sights on your .22. I figured that since I was a former GI I was in like Flint. Wrong. My eyes couldn’t not focus on the front sights and still keep a decent enough image of the target in the background…hell, I couldn’t see the smallest targets at all. Damn. Since scopes are allowed I decided to go that route the next time.
- Second Appleseed, equipment. You know, putting a scope on your rifle isn’t hard. Sighting it in at 25 meters isn’t hard. Going to Appleseed and finding out that your eye relief is totally different when locked in a sling behind the rifle compared to sitting comfortably behind it on a bench, finding out your scope will not move forward enough to adjust and then trying to qualify….very hard. I had not taken into account how close my eye would be to the eyepiece when I was properly snugged in with a sling. It was like trying to sight down the inside of a drinking straw. Total fail. The fact that I could not adjust my gear, total fail and frustration. CHECK YOUR EQUIPMENT PRIOR TO GOING!! We called it PMCS in the military, preventive maintenance checks and services.
Now I think I am ready. Got a new barrel on it courtesy of a deal I made with a friend. It’s the barrel off of a new 10/22 tactical and has the threaded barrel with a flash hiders on it (like the .22 needs it!) but I am thinking of maybe putting on a can (suppressor) later. The scope has been replaced with one that Kev had lying around and gives more eye relief on the same rail space. Most of all, I took it to the Posse shoot in April and it worked like a charm when I put the sling on with it. Now just to do a little zero verification and a clean and lube before the shoot and I think I am good to go…of course I said that the LAST two times as well.
Anyone in Ohio interested in attending one with me let me know. I am just now getting around to looking at the dates but would like to go in July to September as a time frame.
My Dad, veteran U.S. Army, Reserve
Happy Fathers Day Dad, glad I have had my entire life to get to know you as we both have grown. Some times I stand in awe of you, some times I just stand and shake my head. Always I love you. I am luckier than some, including my wife.
Some 21 years ago my Father-in-Law Glen Lyons passed away. This was many years before my wife and I even met. Today would not only of been Fathers Day but also his 70th birthday. While digging through some stuff in the basement I came across one of his old Army fatigue shirts that the wife has kept of his after all these years. The kid just had to try it on….
I never got a chance to meet or know Glen but I like to think that he and I would have hit it off. Seeing my daughter in his uniform kind of cements a bond there between me and him. RIP Glen Lyons, sorry we missed each other this time around..
And on a side note, in the age of digital camo and such can you even fathom that fact that the Army once thought that full color nametapes, patches and white t-shirts were a field uniform?!?!
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Note: Posted this the other morning but had to take it down when I tried to edit it and it caused the blog to stop working, think its fixed now…just a fluff piece anyway…
Watched Killers tonight…it’s a “OK” movie about a former assassin who tries to go legit with a regular wife and life but finds himself the target of some unknown assasination attempt some 3 years later. The movie is entertaining but not really something I will probably watch again. The Glock does find itself in many scenes in the movie which is good to go in my book.
The interesting thing is the two main male actors, Ashton Kutcher and Tom Selleck, are both real life gun guys. Ashton has publicly posted vids and pics with him and wife Demi Moore with their guns…but yet somehow was in a pro Obama video….what gives Ashton? Maybe going down the stretch into his lame duck period when he unleashes his hounds in full against the 2nd Amendment you will catch on. Tom has been a long standing proponent of the 2nd Amendment and even took Rosie “Doofus” O’Donnell to task on the matter when she ambushed him on his show….you don’t mess with Magnum…
I really need to make the time to watch his Jesse Stone movies….
Suck it Rosie!! She is an idiot that, along with her buddy Penny Marshall, was a spokesperson for KMart who sells guns and ammo….they were dropped by Kmart, dumb cow….
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
- Ohio will become the "wild west", none of our neighboring states that allow restaurant and bar carry have had any dramatic increase in gun violence.
- Bar owners are "powerless" to stop patrons from carrying, despite the provision that extends the current policy of business owners posting signs prohibiting carrying that are legally binding.
- Some bar owners have complained that they will have to act as police and hire additional security to make sure that all patrons are adequately searched and screened before entering their businesses. Really? In no part of the bill does it say that their responsibility goes that far...and besides how about the people already carrying illegally (and I would be without a CCW to begin with) in many of these same establishments...what have they done to prevent that?
Please note you must be a active blogger with 3+ months history. Also NO Myspace and Facebook blogs are accepted due to it being a closed network. All blogs are subject for review, quality and relevance. Valled for only US address.I think I meet that measure...
So I post the code below and hopefully I will have one of these on my doorstep soon to review for you....
Rifle Scope and Sights at Mounting Solution Plus (MSP)Mounting Solutions Plus (MSP) is both a manufacturer of quality firearm accessories, as well as a distributor of firearms related products. Mounting Solutions Plus, is happy to grow there slection of Rifle Scopes and Red Dot Sights to the rest of our tactical accessories. Included in our current lisitng are: Aimpoint, BSA Scope, Bushnell Scopes, Elcan, Eotech, Horus Vision, NcStar , and TrijiconIn addition to our Rifle Scopes we carry a verity of Scope Mounts & Scope Rings.
Click Here to learn more.
Well, since I just got myself a M1 Bayonet for my Garand I had to send him a link to my post about it for his opinion. The information he returned to me was very interesting...
- Your UFH from CMP is a Greek issued just like your rifle. The SN on the crossguard is Greek.
- You're scabbard is a US issue M7 scabbard (Purpose made, not a shortened M3 scabbard fro the M1905 bayonet) and the metal tip is a Greek repair for a damaged tip. The US never bothered repairing these, it was considered a wear out item.
- Poor fit and rattling- Not a wear issue, it's just typical and was considered perfectly acceptable per the specs. This condition went back to the original M1905s and has been US standard all this time. If it doesn't fall off it's acceptable.
- Sharp edge- They are not supposed to be TOO sharp. Just sharp enough for utility purposes. Most countries up through WWII had NON sharpened bayonets and they were not intended to double as a knife. Strictly to be used as a bayonet. The US, Britain and Japan were the only major powers who specified sharpened bayonets as standard. In most other armies sharpening one's bayonet was a punishable offense.
- Marine bayonet training- Not only do they continue this training but they have their own bayonet which is very different from the M9. It was designed to fit their martial arts program and is intended to defeat low level body armor.
Like I said, he has probably forgotten more about the subject than I will ever know to begin with. If you want to know more go check out his site from the link above. He is a good guy and you should not have any worries about doing any business with him. Also check out his Airborne stuff he has for sale...he is Mr. Paratrooper...got married under a canopy and went to the 82nd Airborne reunion for his honeymoon...true story..
Update from Otto: Otto kindly asks that you please do not send him requests for evaluating your stuff without considering his knowledge is worth the small fee he charges for it. Again, he knows this stuff and knows it well. I don't know what your time is worth to you, but the amount of time it would take me to do all the research he has done on the subject over the years is well in excess of $20...
and he also says although he likes Otto the Simpson's bus driver, this Otto cartoon character is more to his liking...
What gives folks...it was back in January that I got to 100,000 page hits which took over a year, and now it looks as though I might double that number in only 6 months?
I hope its because you like what you read here. I don't get any hate mail about this site so I guess the majority of you either like it or are like "meh" and wander off to other sites without much of a thought. For whatever reason this blog keeps growing, and I like that.
Thanks to everyone that has clicked on this page to add up to that 200,000 mark.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
And apparently the majority of you do, about 80% (276 to 67 who leave the pipe clear) according to the numbers. That is too be expected I guess with a gun friendly crowd as I believe visits my little corner of the 'net.
For those of you "Israeli carrying" don't worry, you're not "wrong" or anything like that. When and how you carry is a personal preference based upon your own evaluation of the threat present, your training level and other considerations. You carry as YOU feel comfortable doing so.
The thing is, whether you are carrying in Condition 1 or Condition 3, at least you are out there exercising your right to carry to begin with.
It take's different strokes to rule the world as they say...
I reviewed the CMMG kit previously and had a pretty good eval of it. Since then I have learned that it is kind of ammo sensitive, which sucks since the ammo it doesn't like I bought 3,000 rounds worth on sale this Spring.
Anyway, good copper jacketed ammo still seems to feed through it well and it may be worth a look to you.
Over at The Firearm Blog they take a look at the unit and come to some similar conclusions about it. Notice how all the ammo in his pics is copper jacketed. Lead round nose bullets have been giving me issues I think. Worth a read.
Monday, June 13, 2011
And the winner is….
Thanks again to Crusader Weaponry and to all that entered!!
The Army has decided to ditch the beret and modify the ACU uniform...
...its a good start, article link.
I had to wear the ACU and beret combo, didn't really make me feel special. I admit that the ACU was fairly comfortable to wear and I liked not having to shine my boots and such, but the beret as a functional piece of headgear sucks. Overseas you wear a helmet, patrol cap, boonie cap or other soft headgear such as a watch cap or other. Never saw a beret in theater, don't even think that they were authorized. A former General who shall remain nameless (but his name does rhyme with Sinsheki) gave them to the Army to signify the "specialness" of everybody in it or some crap...the problem is once everyone is "special", no body is.....
The ACU is a decent uniform design minus a few things that they look like they are correcting...
- Ditch the velcro and replace with buttons...good idea
- Sew on nametapes and skill badges, velcro on for stuff that changes (unit patches, ISAF crap and the like)...only makes sense and is how it should have been...
Now if they would only get rid of that damn digital pattern.....oh yeah, and I would totally redesign the ACU belt to be more of a stiffer webbing design and mandate that all troops carry and multitool while on duty.
Caveat Emptor – Latin for “buyer beware”
Saw this product for sale on Gunlistings.org today. The devise is marketed as allowing you to place a gun where you want it to be accessible. It does not look to be very sophisticated or made from the highest quality materials or is a very finely finished product, but then again the guy is only selling them for $20 and that is probably an honest price with parts and labor factored in. Don’t want to begrudge the guy trying to make a honest dollar but this following pic from his website that was in his add for Ohio is just wrong…
In Ohio, any weapon carried in a holster in a vehicle by a licensed CCW holder must be carried on their person, not as shown. As silly as it seems it is fine to have them banging around inside a glove box as long as its closed but in a holster with trigger guard coverage as shown under the dash is illegal. From the State of Ohio Attorney Generals CCW handbook in the section that pertains to CCW in a vehicle…
“The loaded handgun is in a holster secured on the person”
Instead of being jerk and doing the entire posting hate thing like I have complained about before going on these buy/sell boards, I simply emailed the poster pointing out his mistake. I did not recognize the area code he had on his site and found out it was from Missouri. I figured that they probably rock and rolled a different way down there and that was legal in his state. I pointed out the violation and suggested that he change pictures to avoid any trouble down the road. He politely responded and thanked me for the information. See, civility does work on those sites folks.
Bottom line, if you buy something online its YOUR responsibility to ensure that it is legal to own in your area. Obvious items are high cap mags in California and other places which most people seem to already known. Other less obvious things may be a wallet holster that converts your mouse gun to a AOW according to the BATF. I know of one manufacturer on YouTube that claims theirs does not and says that they have an ATF letter to prove it, but others out there might not be so on the level. Anyway, you get pulled over or stopped with one of these and jailed its on you, not the manufacturer.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
KEV!! Congrats Man!
Just so everyone knows Kev is my shooting buddy here in Columbus but to make sure you all know the contest wasn’t rigged I submit the following video for your consideration…
Again, even at its full price of $60 the Slipstream permanent treatment is well worth it as an investment in your rifle…
Thanks to everyone that participated, I had hoped for more than 20 entrants, but please spread the word for next time…
Thanks to Magpul!!
Yep, the same folks that brought me all of the add ons and tacticool stuff for my AR also make a case for the iPhone. I guess Chris or Travis or someone else there had an iPhone and wanted a matching case for it to go with all the stuff they make and we get to benefit as well. In addition to being made by a rock solid outfit, the case works. It is not something that I would trust to protect my iPhone4 if it fell off the side of 2 story building, but for day to day protection against abrasions and scratches it is spot on. The case is made of the same material as the original magazine pullers that made Magpul famous and is thin, flexible and strong all at the same time. It fits the phone like a glove and allows access to all buttons and ports either through properly placed cutouts in the material or via a push button type rubber section on the side. The phone just simply snaps into the case in a few seconds and is firmly held in place by the case holding on around the rim of the screen. The original iPhone4 cases had issues with the Verizon model of the iPhone4 because the mute button is slightly different than the AT&T version. That has been fixed, mine fits like a glove although I do have to dig a little deeper with my finger to get to the button, no biggie. The design on the outer edges not only mimics the ribs on a Pmag but also provide you with a secure grip as well. `The cases are available in the normal tactical colors such as black, flat dark earth and foilage green. They are also available in a few other colors such as orange and pink (which I got for my wife). I would think that they should make a case in white for the Mac purists that insist on buying the white version of the iPhone. I wouldn’t doubt if the boys in Colorado aren’t working on that as I type (well, probably not, it is Sunday after all). Maybe best of all its only $9.99! Nothing at Verizon was even close to that price and none I doubt would have the quality of this product.
Now, far from being a status symbol of latte’ sipping liberals in Starbucks driving VW bugs, the iPhone is actually a pretty cool piece of gear. In addition to just being a great multimedia phone there are some awesome firearm related apps for it. Maybe the most famous use of it in shooting is an attachment on the M110 sniper rifle utilizing it as a ballistics calculator, now that is geeky-shooty cool!
There are some cool shooter type games for it as well. My current favorite is a unique aircraft shooter called AC-130 that puts you in the seat of a AC-130 Specter gunship (“Puff the magic dragon”) shooting at targets on the ground in green and white thermal imaging. It looks eerily similar to many of the videos released from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan….
From the game…
And from real life…spooky
Anyway, my iPhone is now more tactical than your iPhone so deal with it….or just go buy a Magpul Tactical Field Case….Huey tested and very much Huey approved!! | <urn:uuid:7308d406-c668-41b7-b182-8f0a6c96d80d> | CC-MAIN-2016-30 | http://hueysgunsight.blogspot.com/2011_06_01_archive.html | 2016-07-31T09:20:11Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257828314.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071028-00121-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976244 | 10,381 |
BSL Watch 2010: Here’s What Happened
|April 29, 2011||Posted by russmead under Breed Bans|
Toledo, Ohio adopted a groundbreaking breed neutral ordinance that also does away with the label "dangerous" for dogs and focuses on encouraging owners to take responsibility before there is a serious injury. Animal Law Coalition working with Ohio Coalition of Dog Advocates proposed many of the key provisions adopted by the City. For more…..
Go to Pet News and Views for a series on pit bulls.
In 2010 Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell added a provision to a Virginia bill that would make it illegal for public shelters to euthanize dogs solely based on breed. Virginia bill, H.B. 281, passed the legislature and actually has nothing to do with breed discrimination. The Speaker of the House, however, declared the new provision "not germane" to the legislation, and the legislature would not consider it.
The prohibition added by the governor was identical to a bill that failed earlier in the session. When he was the state attorney general, Gov. McDonnell issued an opinion that euthanasia of dogs solely based on breed is illegal in the state.
Denver, Colorado – The city council declined to allow an exemption under the onerous pit bull ban for service dogs. The move to create an exemption was prompted by the U.S. Dept. of Justice rules issued earlier this year under the Americans with Disability Act that rejected breed limitations for service dogs. The DOJ also decided it was "neither appropriate or consistent with the ADA to defer to local laws that prohibit certain breeds of dogs". Like Denver’s broad ban on "pit bull" dogs.
Delta, British Columbia, Canada – The town repealed its 9 year old breed discriminatory law that required owners of "pit bulls" including mixes to keep their pets leashed and muzzled when outside, maintain a $1 million liability insurance policy, and pay much higher license fees and fines than other dog owners.
Under a new law just approved this month, November, 2010, dogs will be classified as dangerous or aggressive based on behavior, not breed.
To be declared dangerous or aggressive, a dog must have "pursued, attacked or bitten another animal or person" without provocation.
Dearborn Heights, MI
The city already has a number of restrictions on "pit bulls" in Sec. 6-164. Then the city council considered a total ban on "pit bulls". After a first reading of a bill to ban "pit bulls", the city decided to study the matter further.
McMinnville, Tennessee – The town council decided during a November 9, 2010 meeting to delay a vote on a law to restrict pit bulls. The animal control director has said he is not interested in singling out pit bulls but in drafting a law that will hold owners responsible for their dogs.
Blair, Nebraska – The town’s new breed discriminatory ordinance is now in effect as of Nov. 16, 2010. Find a copy here. The new law provides, "It shall be unlawful for any persons owning, harboring or having the care of a pit bull to permit such dog to be outdoors unless confined in a securely fenced yard or unless the dog is under the control of a person 19 years of age or older, restrained securely by a harness and leash no longer than six feet and properly muzzled to reasonably prevent the dog from biting".
Pit bulls are defined to include "American Pit Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, Dogo Argentina, Presa Canario, Cane Corso, American Bulldog, or any dog displaying the majority of such physical traits of any one or more of the above breeds (more so than any other breed), or any dog exhibiting those distinguishing characteristics which substantially conform to the standards established by the American Kennel Club or United Kennel Club for any of the above breeds."
The city council is considering pit bull restrictions similar to those that were enacted in Lynn earlier this year. For more on Lynn’s ordinance, scroll down….
Send your well-reasoned arguments opposing BSL:
Malden City Council
200 Pleasant Street, Room 609, Malden, MA 02148
Telephone: (781) 397-7130; Fax: (781) 397-7004
Council emails: [email protected], mailto:[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
City Council meetings are held every Tuesday in the Council Chamber at Malden Government Center.
Ypsilanti Township, MI
Update Oct. 20, 2010: Ypsilanti Township Board of Trustees voted to approve an ordinance mandating the spay/neuter of "pit bulls". The Board put a sunset provision in the ordinance and indicated that by the end of the year there should be in place ordinances to regulate the commercial breeders. Typically, purebreds account for about 25% of animals in shelters.
Under the ordinance owners must sterilize their pit bull ‘type’ dogs. A violation could mean a $500 fine and jail up to 90 days. For more on breed specific mandatory spay/neuter laws and mandatory spay/neuter laws in general, visit this site. This information was provided by Animal Law Coalition to Ypsilanti Township Board of Trustees in opposition to this measure.
Douglasville, GA – On Oct. 4, 2010, by a vote of 4-3 (it was close!) the city council defeated a proposed pit bull ban. A committee was appointed to draft a dangerous dog ordinance and present it by Oct. 28.
Topeka, Kansas – The city has repealed entirely its extensive ordinance regulating "pit bulls"! Pit bull restrictions proved too costly. The city reported its budget for animal control averaged $27,000 each year in cost overruns primarily for confining dogs suspected of being pit bulls. The city has adopted instead a breed neutral ordinance that creates a new definition of dangerous dog and procedures for determining whether a dog is dangerous and handling of such dogs. The bill bans chaining without supervision except for 15 minutes at a time and strengthens and clarifies animal care requirements for owners. Read the ordinance here.
Sheboygan, Wisconsin – A large crowd including a number of dogs appeared to protest a proposed ordinance to place restrictions on "pit bulls" and their owners. As of October, 2010, the council agreed not to consider the ordinance further and is now drafting a new breed neutral ordinance. That’s one for the dogs!
Morton, Mississippi – Mayor Greg Butler has announced, "On October 7, all breeds of dogs pertaining to the American Pit Bull Terrier, the Staffordshire bull terrier, the American Staffordshire terrier and the Wolf-dog hybrid will be banned. The breeds may not be owned, harbored, or kept within the city limits of Morton".
Port Washington, Wisconsin
A local resident planned to submit a demand for an ordinance targeting "pit bulls". But as of October, 2010, the council had rejected the idea.
Sylvan Park, MI
The town of Sylvan Park, Michigan has passed an absolute ban on "pit bulls" though "pit bull" dogs already there can stay subject to a number of restrictions. The restrictions require licensing, tattooing, an onerous $100,000 insurance policy to cover any damages caused by the dog, and housing that is "secure" with sides and a top, and dogs must be muzzled and leashed when out and under the control of an adult. For more…..
The ordinance also includes an elaborate scheme for determining whether a dog is a "pit bull". Basically, 2 officers will agree on whether a dog is a pit bull and will refer to "standards" and "shall become familiar with the pit bull terrier, as defined, by reference to photographs, physiological diagrams and breed behavior patterns." Part of the determination can be based on the officer’s having observed "pit bulls" previously. A dog can also be determined to be a pit bull if the owner or keeper, a veterinarian or a witness designate the dog as such.
An archaic, unreliable method of identifying dogs that will surely result in the deaths of untold numbers that are not pit bull or only a small percentage of one of the "pit bull" breeds. Maybe they haven’t heard of DNA testing. For more on the difficulty of identifying dogs by breed, read Animal Law Coalition’s materials at the end of this forum.
Of course, the ban itself of dogs based on breed and appearance will not make the town safer. Dogs don’t bite because of the way they look or their breed. Aggression issues develop because of the owner’s irresponsibility or even criminal conduct. For more, read Animal Law Coalition’s materials at the end of this forum.
Blackman Townhip, Michigan
Blackman Township was said to be considering a pit bull ban, but as of October, 2010, the council indicated a ban was not under consideration.
Worcester, Massachusetts A breed specific ordinance has been in the works for some time now in Worcester, and passed on Sept. 7, 2010 by a 9-2 vote.
The ordinance which was actually requested by several members of the City Council is similar to the Boston pit bull law. The ordinance was amended at the last minute to apply for the most part to all "dangerous dogs" including pit bulls. When it goes into effect next April, it will require pit bull owners to register and license the dogs with a higher fee for pit bulls and "dangerous dogs"; harness, leash or muzzle their dogs or place them in a secure enclosure when off the owner’s property; and post warning signs. Tenants will be required to obtain their landlords’ permission to keep a pit bull or dangerous dog.
Colerain Township, Ohio
The town’s Board of Trustees was considering adding restrictions possible a ban that targets "pit bull" dogs. About 100 people showed up on Sept. 14, 2010 for the Board’s meeting to discuss the ban. There was a heated, divided debate, and no decision has been reached.
Ohio state law already defines "vicious dog" to include dogs commonly known as "pit bulls" and places a number of restrictions on dogs and their owners.
The City Council has passed an ordinance to mandate the sterilization of all Chihuahuas and "pit bulls" in city limits.
This is in response to a recent report by the Hollister Animal Control stating that there has been a significant increase in shelter intake, euthanasia, and dog attacks among these breeds, although the term "pit bull" is not defined.
Sterling Heights, Michigan
A resident has demanded a ban on all "pit bulls". The town officials were evaluating the current ordinances to determine if changes should be made.
A public Pit Bull Workshop on Wednesday, Sept. 29 at the Senior Activity Center drew a passionate crowd. Officials were provided with input concerning breed restrictions.
A copy of the current law can be found here, Chapter 8, Animals, Art. II, Sec. 8.
City council meetings are held the first and third Tuesday of each month beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the City Hall Council Chambers, 40555 Utica Road, Sterling Heights, Michigan 48313; 586.446.CITY (2489).
A public forum to hear from the public about a proposed ban on the ownership, sale or transport of pit bulls on October 18 was well-attended. Pit bull dogs already living in the town would be allowed to stay. A violation could mean a $200 fine and, of course, confiscation of the dog. A vote on the proposal may be held at any time.
From Jodi Priess, Bless the Bullys, http://www.blessthebullys.com/ "Kirksville, Missouri is currently considering an ordinance that would regulate the ownership of ‘pit bulls’ and ‘other animals deemed vicious.’ While the ordinance being drafted includes a grandfather clause, Councilman (and Mayor Pro Tem) Richard Detweiler is pushing for a total ban with no grandfather clause…. ‘Kirksville has a generic vicious dog ordinance which, if properly enforced, would adequately address any vicious dog – not only those labeled as ‘pit bulls.’
"From 2006 to 2010, there were 63 reported dog bites, 17 of which did not break the skin. Of the 46 that did, only three were said to be from "pit bulls".
Rochester Hills, Michigan
It was rumored the City Council would consider a breed ban or other breed restrictions at its March 1, 2010 meeting, but that didn’t happen. Then the city council did consider it but as of October, 2010 had rejected the idea.
Update Sept. 6, 2010: Go here for a look at how Elgin’s new breed neutral animal control ordinance is working.
Update Mar. 11, 2010: In the end, the Elgin city council backed away from enacting breed discrimination! Before a packed city council chamber this week, it was announced the council would adopt many of the changes previously approved but they would apply to all dogs determined to be dangerous or vicious and not pit bulls per se.
Here are some highlights of the new law: Owners of dogs declared dangerous or vicious must obtain a 3 year $100 license, keep the registration and rabies shot tag on the dog at all times, along with proof of spay/neuter and micro-chipping. These dogs must be kept within an enclosure with a 6-foot-tall locked fence. The owner of a dangerous dog must have $100,000 in liability insurance, and an owner of a vicious dog $500,000 in liability insurance.
The ordinance requires that dangerous dogs on public property must be muzzled and on a short leash under the control of an adult 18 years or older. A vicious dog is not allowed on public property at all. Go here for a complete copy of the new ordinance.
Illinois state law prohibits breed discriminatory ordinances, 510 ILCS 5/24, but the city of Elgin took the position there is an exception for cities organized under "home rule" that allows the city to decide to pass breed bans or breed discrimination regardless.
The Elgin City Council had passed by a 4-3 vote an ordinance that restricted "pit bulls". The final vote was thought to be a formality. Fortunately, well-reasoned arguments won the day.
After a public hearing on July 13, 2010, the Lynn City Council approved a proposal to require regisration and restrictions on pit bulls. Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy [email protected]
781-598-4000, has delayed a decision on whether to veto the ordinance. The new law would describe American Pit Bull Terriers or Staffordshire Terriers as "dangerous animals" with "powerful instincts for dominance" and "unyielding aggressiveness."
The ordinance limits each address to 2 pit bulls and owners must fill out a registration form describing the dog, its health records and providing a separate sign-off provision for a landlord renting to a tenant who owns a pit bull. The registration fee is $50.
The ordinance requires owners to muzzle the dogs or make sure they are "securely led and leashed" before taking them to public places.
Violators would face fines up to $300.
Ironically, in 1989 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued an opinion in the case American Dog Owners Association, Inc. v. City of Lynn, 404 Mass. 73, 533 N.E.2d 642 (1989). The issue was whether ordinances passed in Lynn, Massachusetts violated due process because they were unconstitutionally vague. The ordinances regulated or banned pit bulls. The court found the definition of "pit bull" was too vague to give people notice fair notice of the law or the kinds of dogs affected by it, to wit:
Unlike an ordinance which generally prohibits the keeping of a ‘vicious dog,’ enforcement of which involves questions of fact whether the particular dog is vicious or known by its owner to be vicious…, the Lynn Pit Bull ban ordinance depends for enforcement on the subjective understanding of dog officers of the appearance of an ill-defined "breed," leaves dog owners to guess at what conduct or dog "look" is prohibited, and requires "proof" of a dog’s "type" which, unless the dog is registered, may be impossible to furnish. Such a law gives unleashed discretion to the dog officers charged with its enforcement, and clearly relies on their subjective speculation whether a dog’s physical characteristics make it what is "commonly understood" to be a "Pit Bull."
The new proposed ordinance in Lynn is similar to the Boston pit bull law in effect since August 1, 2004.
Lynn Council President Timothy Phelan and Ward 1 Councilor Wayne Lozzi are responsible for the new pit bull restrictions.
Russellville, Kentucky – Go here for information about the city’s recently announced plan to round up "pit bulls".
A number of local governments in California have recently passed or are considering breed specific legislation. California prohibits breed discrimination California Food & Ag. Code Div. 14, Chpt 9, Art. 5 §31683 except see Cal Health & Saf Code §122331 which allows local governments to require spay/neuter of particular breeds. San Bernardino County discussed more fully on this page, recently passed an ordinance requiring spay/neuter of pit bull breeds. Auburn and Contra Costa County seem to have dropped the idea in 2010; Hollister, California, passed the ordinance though owners can seek an exemption. (See below.)
Yucaipa also passed a breed discriminatory law. (See below.)
Santa Clara is still debating a breed discriminatory law that will require spay/neuter of pit bull breeds.
Brandon and Flowood, Mississippi
After rescinding a pit bull ban in 2006, city officials in Brandon have now along with those in Flowood adopted restrictions on pit bulls or dogs having the "majority" of the characteristics of pit bull breeds. In July, 2010, the cities passed ordinances requiring owners of these dogs must keep them in a 100-square-foot pen with a concrete floor and enclosed with at least a six-foot chain-link fence and a roof. In Brandon, the pen must be inside a fenced backyard. Owners must also obtain a permit and $100,000 in liability insurance.
Violations can mean a fine up to $1,000 and jail up to 3 months.
The restrictions appear to have resulted from complaints about dogs running loose. Wouldn’t a strong leash law have made more sense?
City officials were considering breed discriminatory laws during a series of meetings but then seem to have abandoned the idea.
Sioux City, Iowa
Update June 20, 2010: An effort to overturn the Sioux City, Iowa pit bull ban was narrowly defeated on June 28 by a 3-2 city council vote. Council members Aaron Rochester, John Fitch, and Keith Radig voted against repeal of the ban while Mayor Mike Hobart and Council member Tom Padgett voted in favor of a proposal to restrict "pit bull" dogs as "high risk".
The council also rejected City Attorney Andrew Mai’s recommendation to strengthen provisions to make pet owners more responsible.
Some changes to the vicious animal ordinance won first round approval: a change in location of hearings from the police department to the local court; animals declared vicious could be relocated rather than simply killed and would be micro-chipped; and owners could keep their pets during an appeals process.
The original proposal would have repealed the current ban on pit bulls and adopt the following restrictions:
1) Places pit bulls in the high risk category and removes the pit bull ban.
2) Amends the definition of irresponsible animal owner to provide that two violations of licensing laws makes a person an irresponsible animal owner.
3) Increases the regulations related to keeping high risk animals in the City by requiring warning signs on properties which have a high risk animal and requiring the animal to be micro chipped.
4) Provides for a three step process for high risk animals whereby a high risk animal that is seized for the second time must be removed from the City and a high risk animal that is seized for the third time must be euthanized.
Here are the ordinances with the proposed changes.
Marshfield, Wisconsin – City officials floated the idea of banning pit bulls, but nothing more happened.
The town government has now banned pit bull dogs. Pit bull dogs already living there are grandfathered in but are subject to restrictions. Ohio state law already defines "vicious dog" to include dogs commonly known as "pit bulls" and places a number of restrictions on dogs and their owners.
New Bedford, Massachusetts
Council member Debora Coelho has proposed an ordinance also similar to Boston pit bull law.
Contact city officials with your well-reasoned arguments opposing BSL:
City Clerk Rita Aruda, [email protected]
New Bedford City Hall, 133 William Street, New Bedford, MA 02740
Mayor Scott Lang, [email protected]
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Rockville Centre Village, NY
Update July 8, 2010 – The village has suspended enforcement of its breed specific ordinance pending further evaluation. The public outcry forced officials to take a look at New York law which prohibits breed discrimination and also at the evidence that breed profiling simply doesn’t work to reduce dog bites or attacks.
Update: July 1, 2010 – Residents turned out en masse to protest the new breed ban that went into effect June 8.
Original Report: The village officials decided to ignore New York state law which prohibits breed specific legislation and have passed an ordinance banning "pit bulls" and rottweilers. New ones, that is. All "pit bulls" or rottweilers currently in the village can stay. There are exceptions for people driving thru the village with "pit bulls" or rottweilers, veterinarians who treat or care for the dogs, dog shows and shelters.
The village officials took this arbitrary action despite the fact there have been no bites or complaints filed involving these breeds.
Hinds County, Mississippi (Jackson)
The county supervisor, George Smith, pursued a pit bull ban and instead the Board of Supervisors has unanimously approved a requirement that "pit bull" owners must obtain a permit and a $500,000 insurance policy. Read below for the efforts to pass BSL in Jackson.
San Bernardino County, CA
The county Board of Supervisors has now approved an ordinance that will require spay/neuter of all pit bulls over the age of 4 months. The ordinance applies to unincorporated areas of the County. The county supervisors claim they are overrun by "pit bulls" causing injury and even death.
The county does not have a vicious or dangerous dog ordinance.
California Health and Safety Code Section 122330-122331 allows local agencies to enact breed specific programs for spaying/neutering.
Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin
Prairie du Chien already restricts pit bull breeds and dogs that are "partially" those breeds. A town ordinance defines pit bull breeds and mixes as "vicious" and subjects the dogs to the same restrictions as "vicious" dogs. A copy of the current law is here at Sec. 12.30.
Mayor Hemmer asked the Protection and Health Committee to consider a pit bull ban. The Committee has voted to table that proposal and at its July 1, 2010 meeting the committee voted unanimously to offer a resolution at the council’s July 20th meeting that would remove pit bulls from the definition of "vicious" dogs, meaning these dogs would no longer be deemed "vicious" simply because of breed or appearance.
Crawford County, Arkansas
Update July 5, 2010: It appears Justice of the Peace Sharon Partain’s plan to introduce a bill to ban all pit bulls has failed. The current plan is to offer a breed neutral dangerous dog ordinance.
Butte-Silver Bow, Montana
There was discussion including some public comment on July 1 at the Health Dept. by the Animal Services Board about a proposal to restrict "pit bulls".
Commissioner Terry Schultz proposed an ordinance that would require that "pit bulls" be leashed or tethered. There would be a $100 fine on a first offense and $250 fine and seizure of the dog for a second offense.
Fortunately, it was agreed not to proceed with this ordinance, but there is still a possibility a new ordinance may restrict dogs by breed.
Local residents, including Samantha Collier, owner of All About the Dawg dog daycare, has organized opposition to any breed discrimination. Contact Samantha, [email protected] for more info.
Center officials have banned all dogs commonly known as "pit bulls" including mixes. Dogs that look like pit bulls or that officials think are pit bulls will, as usual, be targeted. Residents have 30 days to remove prohibited dogs from the town. The law was effective immediately when it was passed on June 2.
Lincoln Parish, Louisiana
Lincoln Parish’s Police Jury has approved an ordinance that requires "dangerous" dogs and "pit bulls" to be confined inside or in an enclosed pen. Warning signs must be posted. If the dog must be muzzled and also leashed or restrained in some way if he is off the owner’s premises.
There are exceptions, such as when dogs are used for hunting or herding other animals.
Violators face a fine of up to $500 and 60 days in jail.
Though Texas law prohibits breed specific laws, Sec. 822.047, there is this news release from the city of Garland, Texas: Garland Animal Services is preparing to enforce new fencing requirements for pit bull dogs or pit bull crossbreeds. Pit bull dogs or crossbreeds thereof have been responsible for the most dog bites since statistics have been kept (2004).
Additionally, 27% of the dogs caught while running at large are pit bull dogs. In response to this growing public safety problem, Garland Animal Services has developed an ordinance based directive that requires owners of pit bull dogs to maintain the animals within a six foot fence.
Specifically, the fence must meet the following requirements:
- The fence must be six feet tall, measured from the ground.
- The fence must be constructed of wooden planks at least ½ inch thick or 11 gage chain link fencing.
- There may be no gaps or openings larger than 2 inches.
- Fencing must be firmly attached to brace posts buried no less than 18 inches deep.
- All gates must have a locking mechanism that keeps the gates securely closed.
These directive requirements become effective August 1, 2010.
Pit bull dog owners are exempt from the aforementioned requirements if their dogs are properly registered prior to August 1, 2010 and if they maintain compliance with all applicable Animal Service Ordinances such as the display of city tags and not allowing the dogs to run at large. Pit bull dogs not registered prior to August 1, 2010 must be maintained within an enclosure that meets these requirements. Owners who obtain pit bull dogs after August 1st must consider the cost of fence construction as a cost of owning a pit bull dog.
The city has not been adopting out pit bulls, arguably another violation of Texas law. The city says with this directive, animal control can adopt out pit bulls.
The city has enacted a harsh ban of pit bulls and pit bull mixes. There is no grandfather clause. The city’s mayor Jimmy Wallace, announced, in fact, officials would begin rounding up pets deemed to be pit bulls or mixes. The ban applies to American pit bulls, Staffordshire bull terriers, American Staffordshire terriers, any dog which substantially conforms to any of these breeds and any pit bull mix, any dog commonly referred to or recognized as a pit bulls, and any dog whose owner believes or has registered the dog as a pit bull.
The law even directs animal control to "capture" these dogs.
City attorney Alan Rhea was quoted as saying "By putting in the ban on the specific breeds….you eliminate having to prove the dogs are dangerous."
Clarksdale, Mississippi – The local government was discussing an ordinance that may ban or restrict pit bulls and rottweilers.
Barnhill Village, Ohio
Barnhill Village city council has adopted breed discriminatory laws, claiming the ordinances were adopted as "emergency" measures. The emergency is apparently the existence of a pit bull rescue that recently opened in town. Under the new laws citizens will be limited to one "pit bull" per household. To keep even one pit bull dog, the residents will be required to pay a $50 registration fee, obtain liabity insurance, and provide a secure enclosure.
The town council met on May 8 and heard opposition to the new ordinance. Many believe there was no "emergency" and that the new ordinance was passed to shut down a pit bull rescue in town. Catherine Parrish, operator of the rescue, said she was not contacted at all prior to passage of the ordinance and it was based on a misinformation about her dogs.
Despite opposition to the new ordinance, after the May 8 hearing, the town council remained resolved and refused to rescind it.
Garfield, New Jersey
Update May 15: After a public outcry against breed discrimination, the Garfield, New Jersey City Council has tabled the proposed pit bull restrictions.
Original report: Though breed discrimination is illegal in New Jersey, the city of Garfield has announced a final vote on May 11 on an ordinance that the council has already approved to restrict "pit bulls".
The measure defines "pit bull" as "any canine bred or used for fighting with other animals or with people" and includes Staffordshire Bull Terriers, American Staffordshire Terriers, American Pit Bull Terriers, and "dogs that have the appearance and characteristics of being predominantly of these breeds of dogs."
The ordinance requires the owners of "pit bulls" to obtain special licenses, $100 for the first one and $75 for each subsequent license.
The ordinance requires the dogs to be muzzled and leashed when off the owner’s property. The leash must have a "minimum tensile strength of 300 pounds" and restrict the dog from moving 3 feet from the owner. Only one pit bull can be walked at a time.
Owners of "pit bulls" must obtain $50,000 in liability insurance to cover injuries and damages inflicted by the dogs.
No one under 18 years old can own, care for or even walk a "pit bull". Any minor who violates this provision will be considered to have committed an "act of delinquency".
Violations can mean fines up to $1,000 and six months in jail.
Lodi, New Jersey
Update: Lodi, like Garfield, has decided to table further discussion of breed discrimination.
Breed discrimination is illegal in New Jersey, but, like Garfield, Lodi officials were considering restrictions on pit bulls. The restrictions are like those listed above that were to be included in the Garfield ordinance until a public outcry prompted officials in that city to table the matter.
Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana
Parish Police Juror Russell Young is pushing the parish to adopt a ban on pit bulls, German shepherds, Doberman pinschers, Rottweilers, boxers, Akitas, chow chows, and maybe other "breeds".
A legislative committee has proposed restrictions on these breeds as well as dogs declared dangerous and which include registration, micro-chipping, proof of current vaccinations, payment of a $50 fee; also, owners would be required to be at least 18 years old and never convicted of a felony, keep the dog secured at home or behind a fence and also muzzled and leashed when in public. Violations could mean fines up to $500 for the first offense, a minimum fine of $300 for the second offense and a minimum fine of $500 for a third and subsequent violations.
The parish attorney is reviewing the proposal, and at a police jury meeting on May 25, members appear unpersuaded by arguments against breed discrimination. The police jury has asked the City of Roads, the largest city in the parish, to adopt the restrictions as well.
Send your well-reasoned arguments to these parish officials:
Pointe Coupee Parish Police Jury
P.O. Box 290, New Roads, Louisiana 70760
(225) 638-9556 – Fax (225) 638-5555
District 1: Allen Monk
P.O. Box 285, Batchelor, LA 70715
District 2: John Pourciau
3768 La. Hwy. 419W, Batchelor, LA 70715
District 3: Russell YoungÂ
9005 Mandela Drive, New Roads, LA 70760
District 4: Glenn Ray Cline
14110 Chenal Road, Jarreau, LA 70749
District 5: Willie Olinde
P.O. Box 256, Ventress, LA 70783
District 6: Melanie Bueche
11850 Hwy 416, Lakeland, LA 70752
District 7: Albert Dukes
8979 Rodney Drive, New Roads, LA 70760
District 8: Cornell Dukes
309 Railroad Street, New Roads, LA 70760
District 9: Janet Vosburg
9431 False River Road, New Roads, LA 70760
District 10: Kurt Jarreau
P. O. Box 383, Livonia, LA 70755
District 11: Joseph Bergeron, Sr.
P. O. Box 90, Fordoche, LA 70732
District 12: Clifford Nelson
P. O. Box 336, Ventress, LA 70783
An ordinance has passed and defines these breeds as "vicious": "American Pit Bull Terrier, Staffordshire Pit Bull Terrier [sic], American Staffordshire Terrier, Rottweiler Breed Standard, Doberman Pinscher Breed Standard and Chow Chow Breed Standard."
Vicious dogs in Laurel must be kept in a secure building or fenced area or under the control of the owner. Violations would mean a fine of $250 for a first offense and $500 for a second offense.
Warwick, Rhode Island
The city council has approved a plan to require spay/neuter for all pit bull breeds except those held by licensed breeders or which are entered in shows or other competitions.
Update: Following an April 5 public hearing, Europa’s city council and mayor approved the breed discriminatory ordinance. The provision requiring liability insurance was struck from the final ordinance though persons must show proof of such insurance after one violation of this law.
The ordinance states a dog of one of the following breeds is "prima facie" dangerous:
1. Pit Bulls
4. Chow Chows
6. Any type or breed of "guard dog" (a/k/a German Shepherds, Belgian Malinois, etc.); and
7. Wolf hybrids
Dangerous dogs would be required to be registered as such, spayed/neutered, and have current rabies vaccinations. Owners must be at least 21 years old, pay a $50 fee and upon one violation, maintain $50,000 in liability insurance to cover injuries and damages caused by the dog. The dog must be kept in a locked enclosure with a top or a fenced yard with protection from the weather, and a photo of where the dog is kept must be provided to the clerk.
When these dangerous dogs are walked, they must be on a leash and muzzled. No such dog could be walked within 50 feet of a school, public event, park or playground.
Members of the Board of Aldermen and the police chief cited loose dogs and an increase in people fighting dogs as reasons for the new law.
Mitchell, South Dakota
There was a growing call in Mitchell, South Dakota for a pit bull ban. This began after 3 dogs escaped from their owner’ yard, and a frightened resident encountered one of the dogs said to be a pit bull mix. The dog did not injure the resident but she reportedly held him at bay with a shovel until help arrived.
The dog was declared dangerous and ordered to be removed from the city or euthanized. The owner, Susie Contreras, has said the dogs are not dangerous but has removed the one so declared from the city. The owner also says the dogs are boxers, not pit bulls.
The Mitchell City Council meets the first and third Monday’s of each month. City Council meetings begin at 7:30 pm in the Council Chambers at City Hall, 612 N. Main.
California law prohibits breed discrimination except with respect to spay/neuter requirements. Yucaipa has adopted such an ordinance.
Regent, North Dakota
St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana
Despite that not one resident spoke in favor of the proposed ordinance and many opposed it during a hearing this week, BSL passed unanimously in St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana. The new ordinances, effective July 1, places a number of restrictions on pit bull dogs in the unincorporated areas of the parish including: (1) the owner must pay a one time license fee of $50 per "pit bull", be at least 21 years old and live at the same physical address at which the dogs are housed; (2) there must be proof of rabies vaccinations; (3) the dog must be micro-chipped, (4) keep the dog in a secure kennel with a concrete floor, (5) "Beware of Dog" signs must be posted on the property.
Beatrice City Council member Jason Moore proposed during a city council meeting this week that the city adopt a ban on all dogs that are part pit bull. Moore explained such dogs currently in the city could stay as long as the owner purchase $500,000 in liability insurance and muzzle their dogs when off their property.
Council member Al Fetty pointed out it is not possible to tell if a dog is a pit bull or other breed without a DNA test. Indeed.
BSL has been averted, but Moore may persist.
Livingston County, Michigan
Some good news for dogs. Livingston County officials are considering allowing pit bull dogs to be adopted. Currently, animal control determines if a dog resembles a pit bull in which case the dog is not allowed to be adopted. At a county commission hearing this week, members heard testimony about the difficulty, if not impossibility, of identifying breeds based on appearance and that as a result, many non-pit bull dogs are not adopted. They also heard from a researcher that pit bulls are not more violent than other breeds and their bad image is undeserved.
The county did adopt an ordinance that was breed neutral, banning adoption of aggressive dogs.
Poplar Bluff, Missouri
The city has banned pit bull dogs except those currently living there can stay as long as their owner has the dog registered and micro-chipped and provides animal control with a photograph of the dog. Animal control will maintain a file on each dog believed to be a pit bull. April 1 was the deadline for compliance.
Update Mar. 9: A city council rules committee has killed a proposed pit bull ban. Council President Frank Bluntson said the proposed ban was discriminatory and unenforceable. "You can’t even pick up the dead dogs, how can you enforce it with the live ones?" he asked Gerald Jones, animal control supervisor, during a meeting where supporters and opponents faced off on the issue. The dogs won!
Update Mar. 24: The city council decided to amend the dangerous animal laws but did not target "pit bulls" as planned. The ordinance amendments contain no BSL!
Basically, owners of dogs declared dangerous because of a bite history or demonstrate aggressive behavior towards peopole by lunging, must obtain $500,000 in liability insurance and pay a one time $25 fee.
The city council was moving quickly to develop an ordinance either to ban or restrict "pit bulls". The idea was dropped, however, upon advice of the city attorney.
The city plans to review and perhaps revise its dangerous dog ordinances which are found here in Chapter 4 and may consider a ban or restrictions on pit bulls. It is not clear at this point, however, that there are any actual proposals for breed discrimination.
Putnam County, West Virginia
The county passed an ordinance in December, 2009 that defines "vicious" dogs to include dogs "commonly referred to as pit bull" or "clearly a mix thereof". The ordinance requires vicious dogs to be held on a 4 foot leash when off their owner’s property and behind a 6 foot secure fence when at home.
Violators can be fined up to $1,000 for the first offense, and a $300 to $2,000 fine for the second offense. A third offense could mean up to a year in jail and a $300 to $2,000 fine.
Because of protests to the new law, the county council may consider overturning it if provided with alternatives.
County officials to contact:
County Commissioners Gary Tillis, Stephen Andes, Joseph Haynes
Ph: (304) 586-0201
Fax (304) 586-0200
Update April 28: A dangerous dog ordinance was passed but it is not breed specific. The new ordinance classifies dogs that demonstrate aggression on one of two levels:
Level 1: Any dog engaging in unprovoked attacks on humans that require a defensive action to prevent bodily injury, or that cause minor injury to other dogs.
Level 2: Any dog engaging in unprovoked attacks on humans that result in minor to moderate injury, or that cause moderate to serious injury to other dogs.
Whether the dog is dangerous or vicious at all would be determined at a hearing. The disposition of a dog determined to be dangerous including any restrictions would also be decided at a hearing.
Original report: Though California prohibits breed bans, (California Food & Ag. Code Div. 14, Chpt 9, Art. 5 §31683 except see Cal Health & Saf Code §122331 which allows local governments to target certain breeds for spay/neuter requirements) the city is considering an ordinance that would impose onerous licensing and confinement requirements on certain breeds, but mainly "pit bulls". The original proposal is being re-drafted, however.
California prohibits breed discrimination California Food & Ag. Code Div. 14, Chpt 9, Art. 5 §31683 except see Cal Health & Saf Code §122331 except that local governments may require spay/neuter of particular breeds. Hemet may consider a breed ban or restrictions though at the moment the mayor is hoping to avoid that. | <urn:uuid:3c414544-8934-4c86-a8e1-b8214e51729c> | CC-MAIN-2016-30 | http://animallawcoalition.com/bsl-watch-2010-heres-what-happened/ | 2016-07-27T01:49:23Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469257825358.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723071025-00315-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941304 | 9,148 |
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Indybay FeatureRelated Categories: California | North Coast | Environment & Forest Defense
Contaminate Migration Expected Under SB 4 “Well Stimulation Regulations” for California
Well Casing Failures a.k.a. Sustained Casing Pressures - It's really quite simple to understand, cement shrinks, and cracks. Five per cent of all wells drilled show a cement failure immediately. Based on the history of conventional wells, and recent peer reviewed research: “Probablistically, the range of events expected for longer wells, with higher pressures, larger volumes of frac fluids, and more wells per pad, are that we should expect a higher accident rate. And that is what we're seeing.”
Dr. Anthony Ingraffea discusses gas well construction, hydrofracking, micro annular casing leaks.
Published on Jun 20, 2012, 23 minute video
“Because the annulus, between the casing and the rock, is now open from below to above, we now have a migration pathway so that anything that's down there in the way of salts, heavy metals, other deleteious things that were stored in the rock now have a pathway, a vector, and something to carry them upwards. And there will be methane migration.”
The California Well Stimulation Regulations in SB 4 have language that concurs and states: "the stratigraphic depths of protected waters, and the stratigraphic depths of low-permeability zones that will function to slow the migration of fluids towards protected waters or the surface."
Northern California and North Coast Shales, Tight-Sands, Tight-Gas, Natural Gas Extraction Onshore and Offshore
This Is Your Brain On Meth(ane)
Perhaps California has only received half the legal description of 'New' Interim Well Stimulation Regulations required under the intent of SB 4. There is not enough actual information to undertake a Statewide EIR. It therefore seems appropriate to halt all hydro fracking in California and acid fracking well stimulation techniques.
Yes that's spelled M-O-R-A-T-O-R-I-U-M.
Right, and they used to use mercury to settle out the gold dust from rivers in the Sierra. And on that subject, hydraulic mining of our rivers was outlawed. The reasons to outlaw the use of water for the extraction of hydrocarbons are so numerous. From 'Wellbore Welfare' Enhanced Oil Recovery Federal subsidy dollars to exempted aquifers, and the release of GHG emissions from Steam Injection Wells and full field (oil field) steam flood scenarios lasting weeks, including Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage EOR combining vertical steam injection wells and dual horizontal wellbores.
Expect Contaminate Migration, under SB 4 “Well Stimulation Regulations” for California.
As defined and stated under groundwater monitoring requirements:
A well-specific (also referred to as “well-by-well”) or area-specific (also referred to as “oil or gas field-specific”)
groundwater monitoring plan shall include all of the following:
(1) A map and cross section of the well borehole(s) to undergo well stimulation treatment, showing the well name(s),
extent and orientation of the planned fracture network, "the stratigraphic depths of protected waters, and the
stratigraphic depths of low-permeability zones that will function to slow the migration of fluids towards protected
waters or the surface."
As a point of fact, a lot was left out of the regulations. Hydroflouric acid in frac fluids? Acid Fracking may be excluded by the 7% concentration threshold requirement. Reporting the use of Hydroflouric acid and Hydrochloric acid fracking fluids, is more important than anyone may realize. Fracture acidizing, involves pumping highly pressurized acid into the well, physically fracturing the reservoir rock and dissolving the permeability inhibitive sediments (like quartz).
The regulations only cover Hydroflouric acid. Industry uses both.
Minimal Impacts Linguistics Approach, Psy-Ops of Community Confusion
1780. Purpose, Scope, and Applicability.
(a) The purpose of this article is to set forth regulations governing well stimulation treatments, as defined in Section 1761, subdivision (a)(1), except that the requirements of this article do not apply to acid matrix stimulation treatments that use an acid concentration of 7% or less. Nor is an operator required to obtain a permit under Public Resources Code section 3160, subdivision (d), prior to performing an acid matrix stimulation treatment that uses an acid concentration of 7% or less.
(c) For purposes of this article, a well stimulation treatment commences when well stimulation fluid is pumped into the well, and ends when the well stimulation treatment equipment is disconnected from the well.
1783.4. Groundwater Sampling, Testing, and Monitoring.
A contingency plan for reporting information in the event of a well failure. A “well failure” means instances where the well casing has been compromised producing a subsurface leak into water bearing zones and is a potential threat to groundwater quality.
How Much Acid Can California Geologic Strata Take?
Stimulation operations can be focused solely on the wellbore or on the reservoir; it can be conducted on old wells and new wells alike; and it can be designed for remedial purposes or for enhanced production. Its main two types of operations are matrix acidization and hydraulic fracturing. Most matrix stimulation operations target up to a ten foot radius in the reservoir surrounding the wellbore.
“Hydraulic fracturing, which includes acid fracturing, involves the injection of a variety of fluids and other materials into the well at rates that actually cause the cracking or fracturing of the reservoir formation. Major technology developments in (non)proppant-fracturing well stimulation, as evidenced by the numerous publications over the last few years, have been primarily in carbonate acidizing.”
“However, the industry uses a lot of acid in the noncarbonates. One of those areas is in spearheading fracturing treatments to reduce near-wellbore tortuosity, most of these in sands and shales.” [Tortuosity: the near wellbore pressure loss due to multiple fractures.] These multiple fractures nearest the wellbore cement casing exterior, are the result of the proximity of the propagation of the initial shockwave of fracture technique. Hope that is close enough for the professionals out there reading this.
This Is The Ground Beneath Your Feet On Acid
A type of stimulation treatment, acidizing is performed below the reservoir fracture pressure in an effort to restore the natural permeability of the reservoir rock. Well acidizing is achieved by pumping acid into the well to dissolve limestone, dolomite and calcite cement between the sediment grains of the reservoir rocks.
There are two types of acid treatment: matrix acidizing and fracture acidizing.
A matrix acid job is performed when acid is pumped into the well and into the pores of the reservoir rocks. In this form of acidization, the acids dissolve the sediments and mud solids that are inhibiting the permeability of the rock, enlarging the natural pores of the reservoir and stimulating flow of hydrocarbons.
While matrix acidizing is done at a low enough pressure to keep from fracturing the reservoir rock, fracture acidizing involves pumping highly pressurized acid into the well, physically fracturing the reservoir rock and dissolving the permeability inhibitive sediments. This type of acid job forms channels through which the hydrocarbons can flow.
Sands versus Carbonates
In pursuing heavy oil and bitumen resources, the energy industry historically focused on sand deposits. Beginning in the 1960s the oil sands were developed through a combination of surface mining and underground or in situ development. In situ development initially utilized vertical wells in a cyclic steam stimulation (CSS) process and, more recently, has used horizontal wells in the SAGD process Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage.
Diatoms are part of the marine plankton that make their shells from hydrated amorphous silica (opal). Under certain conditions, their remains can dominate the pelagic sediments. These conditions prevailed throughout most of California's sedimentary basins during most of the Tertiary Period.
In deep basins that are anoxic at depth, the diatoms accumulate in fine millimeter-scale or thinner layers, and the organic material is preserved. With burial and heat, the amorphous opal (opal-A) of the original diatoms is converted progressively to opal-Ct (opal-cristobalite) and eventually to quartz. There is a commensurate decrease in rock volume and porosity and an increase in brittleness.
Original opal-A has a real rock porosity of 60% or more, since there is porosity inside the diatom shells as well as around them. Opal-Ct has porosity ranging from 35%-45%, and quartz phase rocks can have porosity from 0% to about 25%. With these ranges of porosity, diatomaceous rocks can have tremendous storage potential, and by using modern methods of well completion and stimulation Monterey-type rocks all over California are good producers.
Geologically, It's A Whole Other World
Carbonates are sedimentary rock such as limestone formed from decayed organisms like coral and plankton. If exposed to high salinity water over millions of years and under the right conditions, limestone transforms into dolomite. Dolomite reservoirs typically offer better porosity and permeability systems than limestone reservoirs as they are more susceptible to karsting, a process whereby slightly acidic rainwater dissolves or leaches the rock. Many super-giant conventional reservoirs such as Ghawar, Saudi Arabia and Kirkuk, Iraq are carbonates
It is estimated that more than 60% of the world's oil and 40% of the world's gas reserves are held in carbonate reservoirs. The Middle East, for example, is dominated by carbonate fields, with around 70% of oil and 90% of gas reserves held within these reservoirs.
California Focus: Fracking, Acidizing with Hydroflouric Acid
“In California, at least, the obsession with fracking may be misplaced. In recent months, policymakers have begun to realize that the debate about fracking may be a distraction from the technology that’s the more likely candidate for tapping the Monterey Shale: A technique, already widely in use in the oil industry, known as acidizing.”
Dave Quast, of California Energy in Depth (TakePart interview) that acidizing uses generally between 750 and 2000 gallons, 85 percent of which is water. Acidizing with Hydroflouric Acid (HF) works much better than fracking in the Golden State because the oil-bearing shale is already naturally fractured and buckled from tectonic activity. “We know it’s dangerous, but we don’t know what it does downhole. There are known and unknown dangers.”
So much isn't known about hydrofluoric acid use by the Oil and Gas Industry. Three things are: the concentrations used by oil companies, what happens over the long term to the rock when a rock-dissolving chemical is injected into geologic sub-strata, and what happens to those 2000 gallons of hydrofluoric acid-laced water? September 02, 2013 By RL Miller
A climate blogger, RL is chair of the California Democratic Party’s Environmental Caucus.
There are two types of acid treatment: matrix acidizing and acid fracking.
From Distracted By Fracking, Robert Collier August 2013 Next Generation
Drilling the Monterey Shale Parts 1 & 2: The Most Dangerous Chemical You’ve Never Heard Of
A matrix acid job is performed when acid is pumped at low pressure into the oil well and into the texture of the reservoir rocks. The acids dissolve the sediments and mud solids that are inhibiting the permeability of the rock, enlarging the natural pores of the reservoir and stimulating the flow of oil. The acids physically fracture the reservoir rock and dissolve the sediments that are blocking the flow of oil.
Because Hydroflouric acid is so successful at dissolving anything it touches, drilling companies add other substances to the mix to prevent the acid from dissolving the oil well’s steel casings (intended) to keep the oil and chemicals from leaching into the surrounding rocks and water table.
A low-volume form of acidizing has long been used nationwide, including in California. This process typically occurs in aging oil wells during the final stages of production, as a means of coaxing out the last dregs of oil before the well is abandoned. In contrast, the tactic now being pioneered in California appears to involve much higher volumes of injected acid as a primary technique for new wells. (To alleviate tortuosity)
Both Hydroflouric (HF) and hydrochloric acid (HCl) are used, and are sometimes combined, depending on the geology. However, the sandstones and silicates that are prevalent in the Monterey Shale lend themselves especially to HF use. In many cases, HF acid is created at the oilfield by mixing hydrochloric acid with ammonium fluoride and immediately injecting the mix down the well. Creating the HF acid on site is accepted as safer than offsite production, as it reduces the risk of transport accidents.
In The Arid Productive Farmlands Of California Drought Solution Numero Uno
TURN THE STEAM OFF IN THE OILFIELDS
60 Million Gallons Turned To Steam Per Day in one oilfield.
60 million gallons a day taken from the California Aqueduct.
Compared to the water usage of a single family of four, in a 3 bedroom household, that's roughly equivalent to the yearly water usage of 700-1000 families in California, each day.
The 2013 California Green Building Code Water Use Modifications states:
“A new 3 bedroom single family home with 4 occupants is modeled to use, 174,000 gallons of water per year. The majority of this is for landscaping.”
In one week, in one oil field, the yearly water usage of between 5,000 – 7,000 California families is pumped down into the ground, as steam. It comes back out with the oil, as toxic produced water.
In the video Mixing Oil & Water, it is shown how just one oil company injects steam into the ground for 7 days in a row, then there is a soaking period followed by a production cycle. As production falls off, steam injection is again, applied – hence the term “Cyclic Steam Injection”.
Mixing Oil & Water: 4 min video
Kern County Farmer Fred Starrh stars in this interesting short video. When his almond trees died after he irrigated them with local ground water Fred Starrh sued nearby Aera Energy (Shell/ExxonMobil venture) for polluting the water.
The math below is pretty close, though slightly rounded.
1.4 million barrels a day. 42 (gallons) x 1.4 million is 58,800,000 almost 60 million gallons. That's 184 acre feet each day. A seven day cycle equals 1288 acre feet of water usage, and with 12 cycles per year, that's 15,456 acre feet of water per year turned to steam, and injected underground.
Compared to the water usage of a single family of four, in a 3 bedroom household, that's roughly equivalent to the yearly water usage of 700-1000 families in California, each day.
In one week, a quantity of water which could serve the yearly needs of 5,000 – 7,000 California families is pumped down into the ground, as steam. It comes back out with the oil, as produced water. As production falls off, steam injection is again applied, hence the term “Cyclic Steam Injection”. That means that in one year, in one oil field in California, the quantity of water used to steam the earth would serve 60,000 to 70,000 households (single family of four, 3 bedroom) including landscape needs.
Under full-scale cyclic steam injection operations, it is probable that about 100 to 120 million barrels of oil could be recovered; if continuous steam displacement is applied successfully, recovery could approach 200 to 240million barrels.
From Kern County, California to the Alaskan Tundra Big Oil Is Steaming The Planet's Surface, and releasing GHG emissions. How many mercury toxic CFL light bulbs does it take to save one billion kW per hour?
Extreme Oil Drilling (National Geographic)
“It takes 81 trillion btu’s everyday just to warm the ground at Kern. 25 square miles to 1600 feet deep. It takes so much energy, enough to power one large air conditioner for every human being on the planet.” 81 Trillion btu's per day to heat Kern County to 200 degrees.
Kilowatt Hours (Kwh) to btu (british thermal unit) conversion table shows the most common values for the quick reference.
1 Kwh = 3,412.14163 Btu/hr
81 Trillion btu's per day
81 trillion divided by 24 (hours) =
3,375,000,000,000 btu per hr
3,375,000,000,000 btu divided by 3,412 btu/hr =
989,155,920.281 kwh - almost a billion KW per hour
For the sake of our water, our air, our rivers, our food, and our communities, we need to
Ban Fracking in California. A Fracking Moratorium would create a time frame for expanded development of existing sustainable portfolios of energy, and not trade maximum exploitation rate loan guarantees against environmental impacts for international market edge.
On the subject of California Water usage statistics, watch the 2012 the KQED film "State of Thirst" video on California Water Management. It contains a clear animation of the flow of water throughout the State!
No, neither oil nor gas are mentioned. Oil and water don't mix, but toxins leech, and contaminates migrate. Oil And water aren't usually mentioned together in funded research or special edition news segments, and not even in recent educational videos on California Water Management. When it comes to water resources in the State, one never hears any mention of oil and or gas production. Like twin tunnel vision, there's a duality of mental states of denial.
The Frackinator Denominator In Water Conservation
1) The agricultural sector uses around 80 percent of all of the water withdrawn in California.
2) The agricultural sector uses around 80 percent of all of the water withdrawn for human use in California (34.2 million acre-feet per year agricultural use divided by a total human use of 43.1 maf).
This California number is the same as the global estimate of agricultural water use: 80% of the water humans use goes to agriculture. Using this number, agriculture only uses around 41% of the state's water. From: San Francisco Chronicle The denominator problem: Misleading use of water numbers...Dr. Peter Gleick, President, Pacific Institute
In California, where nearly half of the nation's fruits and vegetables are grown with water from as far away as the Colorado River, the perennially cash-strapped Golden State's governor is proposing to spend $25 billion to divert more of the Sacramento River from the north to the south. Near Bakersfield, a private project is underway to build a water bank, essentially an artificial aquifer.
Still, more than 100 exemptions for natural aquifers have been granted in California, some to dispose of drilling and fracking waste in the state's driest parts. Though most date back to the 1980s, the most recent exemption was approved in 2009 in Kern County, an agricultural heartland that is the epicenter of some of the state's most volatile rivalries over water.
In 1981, shortly after the first aquifer exemption rules were set, the EPA had to lower the bar for exemptions as part of settling a lawsuit filed by the American Petroleum Institute. Since then, the agency has issued permits for water not "reasonably expected" to be used for drinking. The original language allowed exemptions only for water that could never be used.
Oil companies have been the biggest users of aquifer exemptions by far. Once an exemption is issued, it's all but permanent; none have ever been reversed. Permits dictate how much material companies can inject and where, but impose little or no obligations to protect the surrounding water if it has been exempted.
The EPA and state environmental agencies require applicants to assess the quality of reservoirs and to do some basic modeling to show where contaminants should end up. But in most cases there is no obligation, for example, to track what has been put into the earth or, except in the case of the uranium mines to monitor where it ends up.
Underground Safe Drinking Water vs Underground Injection of Hazardous Wastes
An Eloquent Argument For The End To Aquifer Exemptions
In August of 2012, On behalf of Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (“ENDAUM”) a letter of intent to challenge the Aquifer Exemption Issued to Hydro Resources, Inc. for Church Rock was sent to Senators and the EPA. The Navajo Nation challenged an Aquifer Exemption permit application which is well below the EPA threshold, at 3,000 TDS. The language of their legal arguments shine a light on the process as only native voices could.
Based On The Statutory Language
“The Act’s requirements for protecting USDWs are found in 42 USC § 300h. Specifically, the Act provides that drinking water programs have requirements that, at a minimum, assure that no underground sources of drinking water will be endangered by any underground injection. Id. at 300h(b)(1), 3(C).
The Act further provides that underground injection endangers drinking water sources if:
1) such injection may result in the presence in underground water which supplies or can reasonably be expected to supply any public water system of any contaminant, and
2) if the presence of such contaminant my result in such system’s not complying with any national primary drinking water regulation or may otherwise affect the health of persons.
H.R. Rep. 95-338, 123 Cong. Record 3658-3659 (1977) (emphasis added); see also, Phillips
Petroleum Co. v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 803 F.2d at 560 (concluding that if a
requirement on injecting activities is necessary to assure that underground sources of drinking
water are not endangered, whether that requirement impedes mineral recovery is irrelevant
because the “clear and overriding concern” of Congress in passing the Act was to assure the
safety of “present and potential sources of drinking water”).
California Fracking May Produce Radioactive Wastes And Release Radioactive Gas
Fracking not only uses chemicals that can contaminate drinking and groundwater, it also releases large amounts of natural radioactivity from the ground into the air, including Radium-226, which has a half-life of 1,600 years.
Horizontal hydraulic fracturing for dry natural gas in California has the potential to result in the production of large amounts of waste materials containing Radium-226 and Radium-228 in both solid and liquid mediums. This type of radioactive material is particularly long-lived, and could easily bio-accumulate over time and deliver a dangerous radiation dose to potentially millions of people long after the drilling is over.
In NY it has been found that the brine that returns to the surface can contain up to 16,000 picoCuries per liter of Radium-226, research shows. The discharge limit in effluent for Radium 226 is 60 pCi/L, and the EPA’s drinking water standard is 5 pCi/L.
The New York Times has reported that 116 of 179 Marcellus wells in Pennsylvania had high levels of radiation in wastewater samples. Water used to hydraulically fracture the deep, 380 million-year-old shale layer and release the natural gas it holds, comes back as radioactive wastewater.
Public Drinking Water Intakes Do Not Often Test For Radiation Levels
Radiation Sources in Natural Gas Well Activities
The risk is from exposure to increased concentrations of ionizing radiation, which is naturally present in the ground in the forms of radium, thorium, uranium, lead, and/or radon (Horn, 2009; EPA, 2011). The secretary of Energy's 2009 final report mentioned the potential for radioactive isotopes only once in the 23-page report. However, the study by Horn (2009) and subsequent investigations by The New York Times (Urbina, 2011) have resulted in more attention to the matter by the Department of Energy (DOE) (McMahon, 2011).
Sources of Radiation: The Earth itself is radioactive, and the ground contains a variety of radioactive isotopes. Coincidentally, deposits of natural gas tend to have higher concentrations of radioisotopes, and this fact has been used by geologists to locate natural gas deposits (EPA, 2011). This naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) is typically composed of one or more of the following elements:
Uranium and its decay products (including Radon)
Thorium and its decay products
Radium and its decay products
The metals usually do not exist in their free metallic form but are found in the geology as salts. Uranium salts are generally not soluble in water, but radium salts are. Thus, the water existing within the rock formations, called formation water, has high concentrations of both salts, hence the term "brine water" and radioactivity.
When A Well Is Installed, Radioactivity Can Come To The Surface In Several Ways:
Drilling fluid- During the drilling process, the rock cuttings must be removed so drilling can continue. To this end, drilling fluid is used to bring the rock cuttings to the surface. The drilling fluid can be a liquid, a gas, or a combination of the two. Drill fluid itself is usually a mud-like substance that contains the rock cuttings, which may have radioactive solids, and formation water, which likely has radioactive salts (Resnikoff, et al., 2010).
Fracking- Anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of the water used in fracking comes back up the well (Urbina, 2011) carrying formation water and concentrations of salts that dissolve in the frack water, which includes NORM.
Production- Formation water, which contains high concentrations of salts and radioactivity, is brought to the surface along with the extracted gas and oil. Radon gas is also extracted along with the natural gas.
Underground and Background Radiation: NORM; TERM; TENORM
The natural radiation of the Earth, generally not a cause for concern, is called background radiation, or normally occurring radioactive material. However, any process that concentrates natural radiation produces technologically enhanced NORM, or TENORM, technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material. TENORM poses a higher risk to people due to higher concentrations of radioactive materials.
The work involved in drilling and maintaining wells produces TENORM, such as:
Scale- Salts have a specific solubility in water. Once that solubility level is reached, no more of that salt will dissolve in the water. Excess salt, including radioactive salts, will precipitate out on nearby solid surfaces, including the well head and casing. Other areas that can have radioactive scale deposits include the water lines associated with separators, heater treaters, and gas dehydrators.
Recycling water- Radioactive salts are not easily filtered out of water. Each time the water is sent down the well, the concentration of radioactivity in the water increases. In addition, if chemical scale inhibitors are used, the concentration of radioactivity remains in the water.
Companies typically use recycled water in many different ways in an effort to be environmentally conscious and efficient. Companies will routinely spray recycled water on unpaved roads several times a day as a dust suppressant, which could expose workers and the environment to increased radiation levels. In the winter, recycled water can also be sprayed on roadways to de-ice the roads, having a similar result.
When injected as waste into underground 'exempted aquifers' they can settle to the bottom where they will reside for a long time. A Beneficial Use Designation under law allows this brine water to be used for de-icing paved road surfaces, dust control on dirt roads etc.*
Separation pits- Separation pits are used to divide the solids, including drill cuttings, from the liquids (formation water and drilling fluids). As the solids settle out, they may contain increased concentrations of radioactive material. The liquids may also have increased radioactive concentrations. A similar concept to the separation pits, shale shakers are used to separate solid and liquid wastes. Both the liquid and solids may contain elevated radioactivity.
Filters- Often cloth or bag filters are employed in the process of cleaning the water before reuse. The fine sediment that collects in the screen or filter may contain elevated radioactivity.
Sludge- Sludge is composed of dissolved (potentially radioactive) salts that precipitate from produced water as its temperature and pressure change.
Equipment- As a result of work processes that spread radioactivity over the work site, the equipment can become contaminated with radiation. Gas processing equipment with the highest radiation levels includes reflux pumps, propane pumps and tanks, and more (EPA, 2011).
Radioactive Levels, Regulations, Recyling and Re-Use
Many studies have been done across the United States to determine the concentration of NORM within specific natural gas formations, in Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania Geology, 2008), Arkansas (Arthur et al., 2008), and Louisiana (STRONGER, 2011). Some of these same studies have reported radioactivity levels for NORM at natural gas wells. However, other studies report widely different values for radioactivity at wells in the United States based on geographic location (EPA, 2011), radioisotopes studied (Rahon, 2010), and processes studied (Smith et al., 1996).
The New York Times reported that hydraulic fracturing wastewater at 116 of 179 deep gas wells in the state contained high levels of radiation and its effect on public drinking water supplies is unknown because water suppliers are required to conduct tests of radiation only sporadically.
There is no safe level of toxins, "The current scientific consensus postulates that there is no known safe level of exposure to radioactive materials."
TENORM is defined by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences as: Technologically Enhanced Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials are any naturally occurring radioactive materials not subject to regulation under the Atomic Energy Act whose radio nuclide concentrations or potential for human exposure have been increased above levels encountered in the natural state by human activities.
While federal and state agencies have tried to develop ways to protect humans and the environment from harmful exposure to the radiation in such materials, TERM remains a challenging problem in the United States. Because many industries and types of products potentially contribute to excess radiation production, including mineral extractions and refining, oil and gas production, drinking water treatment processes and wastewater treatment plants, scientists, researchers and legislators are struggling to find viable solutions.
Highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself. While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.
Recycling and Re-use Concentrates Radiation, Then Disperses It To Road Surfaces
What Beneficial Use Designations are allowed under California law that serve to mitigate costs of disposal of otherwise hazardous materials? Is there really a cost savings? Beneficial Use Designations (BUD) of Fracking Flowback and Wastewater starts in California's Water law. Using brine to water roadways to control dust or as a de-icing agent
People can be exposed to radioactive materials from drilling and fracking operations when trucks hauling waste materials travel past their homes, when crops are grown on contaminated soil, and when farm animals ingest radioactive deposits on plants.
Today's Investment In Oilfield Water Management (Recycling)
Much Is Made Of Investment In Oilfield Water Management but; recycling of wastewater and decontamination of produced water is still just a hopeful myth at the end of 2013.
“After two years searching for a blockbuster investment in oilfield water management, fund manager Judson Hill is still holding on to his money. Hill’s NGP Energy Capital Management saw potential in what looked like a hot growth area in energy: treating and recycling the 21 billion barrels of wastewater flowing annually from U.S. oil and natural gas wells, particularly from shale.
Instead, it found the market “too fragmented and too frothy,” said Hill, a managing director at the private equity firm in Texas whose latest fund has invested $3.6 billion. It’s not as though we look back and say, WOW, half the ones we passed on were just home runs. They weren’t.”
Fracking Bonanza Eludes Wastewater Recycling Investors
Picking a winner in water treatment eludes even Schlumberger Ltd. (SLB), the world’s largest oilfield services provider. Schlumberger jumped into water recycling years ago envisioning a fast-growing, vibrant new specialty. “We’ve spent millions and millions of dollars evaluating virtually every available and reasonable-looking technology out there, always hoping we’d find the silver bullet, said Mark Kidder, who runs Schlumberger’s oilfield water management unit. We've found nothing.”
As of October, November, and December of 2013 there were only “recurring losses to other investors that sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into companies that promised to solve water concerns by treating water. Publicly traded targets including Nuverra Environmental Solutions Inc. (NES), GreenHunter Resources Inc. (GRH) and Aqua-Pure Ventures Inc. (AQE) which have all reported a succession of losses since 2011. Shares of the three companies have fallen an average 46 percent during the past 21 months.”
Of the $31 billion spent each year on managing water resources in U.S. and Canadian oilfields, $2.8 billion, less than 10 percent, is spent on recycling. PacWest Consulting Partners LLC.
BUD- Beneficial Use Designation
Besides recycling, another method of turning liability to profit is the 'beneficial use designation' under both California DTSC and California Water Law. No matter the name of the State in which unconventional gas reservoirs are fracked, there are a variety of methods employed to manage Shale Gas Extraction Wastewater (SGEW). These range from disposing of it (untreated) deep underground in injection wells, treatment as necessary to allow it to be re-used in other hydrofracturing procedures, and treating it to a degree necessary that it can be discharged to surface waters or surface evaporation ponds (pits).
Considerations have included that:
1) “It is desirable to identify a beneficial use for the concentrated salt solution, or brine, as well as the dried salt cake that may be produced by the various treatment processes. One apparent possible use is the application to roads as a winter de-icing agent.”
“Brine from traditional oil and gas drilling has been used for years as a de-icing agent. There are also brine wells specifically for brine production. Traditional, in this sense, generally means drilling that does not use the hydraulic fracturing process (no chemical additives). However, concern has been raised that the brine, or salt cake obtained from treated SGEW may contain trace amounts of chemicals from the hydrofracturing process as well as constituents dissolved in the produced water and brought to the surface by the gas extraction.”
“Research from the Bureau of Oil and Gas Management (PA) indicates that Shale Gas Extraction Wastewater (SGEW) includes a high content of hazardous heavy metals, such as barium and strontium. There is also concern about radioactivity. The Marcellus Shale play is known to generally be more radioactive relative to other geologic formations.”
2) “Of course, the radioactivity of deeply buried shale is of no concern. However, what is natural or normal at that depth is not natural on the surface of the ground and concern is being expressed about the radioactivity of products resulting from Marcellus Shale extraction. These previously buried materials are referred to as naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORMs). When materials containing NORMs are processed or refined, the radioactive material may become more concentrated to create technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive materials (TENORMs). The primary radionuclides of concern are Radium 226 (Uranium-238 decay series) and Radium 228 (Thorium-232 decay series)“.
Excerpts From: Chemical Analysis Of Major Constituents And Trace Contaminants Of Rock Salt and SGEW salt (BUD) Bureau of Water Standards, Pennsylvania
High Concentrations Of Both Barium And Strontium
“Rock salt is a sedimentary rock, which is classified as an evaporate. Naturally occurring rock salt is formed from the evaporation of inland seas. The rock salt contains the minerals found in that particular body of water; mostly sodium, chloride, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sulfate. These are the major elements found in rock salt. All of these substances are highly soluble in water.”
“Shale is also a sedimentary rock: however, it is classified as a clastic rock layer. Clastic sedimentary rocks are composed predominantly of broken pieces of older weathered and eroded rocks and are classified based on grain size, clastic and cementing material (matrix) composition, and texture. Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock composed of mud that is a mix of flakes of clay minerals and tiny fragments (silt-sized particles) of other minerals, especially quartz and calcite. Many of the minerals that make up shale are insoluble in water.
“Marcellus Shale is black shale, a dark, thinly laminated carbonaceous shale, exceptionally rich in organic matter and sulfide and often containing unusual concentrations of certain trace elements such as uranium, vanadium, copper, and nickel. Conversely, data from the SGEW analysis indicates that high concentrations of both barium and strontium are usually present.”
Naturally occurring rock salt was formed from the evaporation of inland seas. Its primary constituents are sodium, chloride, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sulfate. Rock salt generally contains between 90 to 98% sodium chloride. The salt content in SGEW may exceed 7 times that of sea water. Approximately 77% of the rock salt used in the US is used for highway de-icing.
California Also Uses Rock Salt On Mountain Passes In Winter Snow Or Ice Conditions.
This BUD Is Definitely Not For You
For the sake of our rivers and streams, groundwater recharge basins, and watershed drainages, there should be No Beneficial Use Designation for Frac Wastewater Applications To Road Surfaces – whether dirt, rocked, or paved allowed anywhere in California.
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North Coast resident
As a point of fact, a lot was left out of the regulations. Acid used in 'pre-frac preparation' may be excluded along with mud-acid. The 7% concentration threshold requirement would not apply. Concentrations of pre-frac acids can be 28% per cent to base fluid.
The regulations seem to cover acidization. Except that acids are used in drilling muds (MUD-ACID), and as pre-frac fluids in preparation for 'well stimulation' in concentrations to 28%.
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The Ed Show for Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
Read the transcript to the Tuesday show
Guests: Sherrod Brown, Joe Sestak, Joe Crowley, Reverend Al Sharpton, Karen
Hunter, Tony Blankley, Joan Walsh, Arlen Specter
ED SCHULTZ, MSNBC ANCHOR: Good evening, Americans, and welcome to THE ED SHOW tonight, live from Minneapolis.
These stories are hitting “My Hot Buttons” at this hour.
A political threat to start the holiday season. Mitch McConnell says Republicans will work with President Obama, but only when the president does exactly what they want. So, how does that square with this No Labels group in Washington?
My commentary on that, plus reaction from Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Congressman Joe Sestak coming up.
The 9/11 first responders went to Washington today and put the heartless Senate Republicans to shame. This was powerful, and everyone needs to hear it. I will play it for you, coming up.
And Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is trying to walk back his glowing review of pro-segregation groups in the South. Reverend Al Sharpton has something to say to the governor about that at the bottom of the hour.
And outgoing Senator Arlen Specter, his amazing chop block on some of his Senate colleagues. This is a senator who really is concerned about what has happened in the institution of the Senate that he so clearly loves.
Senator Specter will join us in “The Playbook” tonight. Just why did he do that on his last day in the Senate?
And this is the story that has me fired up tonight, folks.
President Obama is on the verge of another major victory in the waning days of the lame-duck session of the Congress. The START treaty will get an up-or-down vote as early as tomorrow, Wednesday. A few Republican senators drifted across the aisle to help move the vote forward.
But, folks, don‘t kid yourselves. The Republicans are still out there to destroy President Obama and the Democratic Party and the progressive movement in this country.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued this year‘s—this new year‘s threat to the Democrats: “There‘s much for them to be angst-ridden about. If they think it‘s bad now, wait until next year.”
Gosh, Mitch, why don‘t you put coal in their stocking right away?
McConnell has been acting like Vito Corleone ever since the midterms. First, he bragged that he wanted to make President Obama a one-termer. And then, of course, he held Americans hostage on the tax cuts.
McConnell has just doubled down against the president, saying this:
“Any time the president is willing to do what we think is in the best interests of the American people, we have something to talk about.”
OK, Mitch. I guess you‘re going to be making us an offer that we just can‘t refuse.
Well, you know, I think liberals tonight are saying, you know, how do you deal with these people? There is no reasoning with these folks, because the only thing that they understand is power.
Senator Arlen Specter took to the Senate floor to say good-bye and to tear into the mess Republicans have made of the Senate.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. ARLEN SPECTER (D), PENNSYLVANIA: In some quarters, “compromise” has become a dirty word. Senators insist on ideological (INAUDIBLE) as a precondition. Politics is no longer the art of the possible when senators are intransigent in their positions.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SCHULTZ: Specter is exactly right. Republicans have turned “compromise” into a dirty word.
Remember John Boehner in his most recent interview? He couldn‘t even use the word.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. JOHN BOEHNER ®, MINORITY LEADER: I am not going to compromise on my principles, nor am I going to compromise the will of the American people.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SCHULTZ: Anything else need to be said?
Republicans have turned American politics into a never-ending attack machine. The crazier they get, the meaner they get, they think the better off they are. This leaves the Democrats with a choice. Now, Democrats and liberals can either roll over and play dead, or they can fight fire with fire.
Now, the new Washington group No Labels, here they come to the rescue.
They want Democrats to lay down and play nice with these Republicans.
Folks, we are living in really tough political times. We are in an ideological fight for the country right now. We either want to reserve the institutions that made this country great or we want to go off and worship the God Almighty dollar.
Let me tell you about these absolutes. I think this No Labels group in Washington is a joke.
I don‘t think they are connected to political reality of the time. And it‘s easy to get on cable and talk about how we are going to get everybody to play together on this, but here‘s the absolute.
They are absolute on the right wing about their tax cuts. They are absolutely going to try to repeal health care reform, which is going to hurt millions of Americans. They are absolutely going to attack labor like they have been doing for the last 25 years. They absolutely are going to go after and support the union busters.
And, of course, they love this most recent ruling by the Supreme Court of unlimited funds going into campaigns. And, of course, the little guy is going to have his voice squashed out in America‘s democracy.
So, you No Labelers out there, can we carol together this holiday season? I don‘t think so. I don‘t want to get along with you.
I think you are wrong, and I think you are naive. And I think we need debate in this country.
And I think that we can go back to just a few weeks before the start of the Iraq War, our invasion, when Robert Byrd stood up on the Senate floor and said, “This chamber is ominously silent.”
We went into war, and you know the rest of the story. There was no debate. We bought everything hook, line and sinker.
So, I think this No Labels group wants to just wear down liberals in this country and say, you know, you‘re angry. You know, you‘re off the rails, you‘re out of line, you‘re over the top.
Wait a minute. Because I‘m for Social Security, and because I think I have an audience that watches, that believes in the institutions of America, just because I support that and universal health care, and I think the rich should pay their fair share, doesn‘t mean that I‘m out of touch. And it doesn‘t mean that me associating with the No Labels crowd is going to preserve all those great institutions in this country.
The ideological fight for America is on. This president has had a great first two years, far better than your good buddy Ronald Reagan, over there on the right. Far more legislative accomplishments affecting more people‘s lives.
And you know what really gets you Republicans? You‘ve got your tax cuts. In fact, you got everything you wanted.
President Obama has delivered the mail time and time again. He may not have taken the path that we like, and maybe he hoodwinked a few of us along the way, but you cannot—you cannot argue with this lame-duck session of the Congress, and you cannot argue with the historical perspective of the performance of this Senate the way they have obstructed at a record number of filibusters.
So if the No Labels folks want to call Ed and be on the program, when it comes to understanding, as Clint Eastwood said in his movie, “I‘m fresh out.”
Tell me what you think in our telephone survey. The number to dial tonight is 1-877-ED-MSNBC.
My question tonight is: Do you think the number one priority for the Republicans is to defeat President Obama in 2012? Press the number 1 for yes, press the number 2 for no. And I‘ll bring you the results later on in the show.
Joining me now is Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown.
Senator, good to have you with us tonight.
SEN. SHERROD BROWN (D), OHIO: Good to be back, Ed. Nice article about you by Howard Kurtz today, man. You are my hero.
SCHULTZ: We‘ve got to tell it like it is, Senator. We can‘t back down. Thank you.
BROWN: I like that story about the—I like the story about the homeless shelter, Ed, but go on. Sorry. Great story.
SCHULTZ: Well, it‘s the truth. Thank you. I appreciate that, sir.
BROWN: It tells me something about the kind of person you are.
SCHULTZ: Well, and I think from the record of what we‘ve seen of Mitch McConnell here in his most recent comments, after you compromised and you voted with the president and a lot of Republicans, this is what you get from Mitch. He is putting out a political threat in this holiday season, saying you better work with them again, or next year is going to be worse.
How do you feel about that?
BROWN: Well, I feel the same way I do when I hear Mitch McConnell say that his number one goal is that Barack Obama be a one-term president. I mean, he has voted against almost everything.
He has tried to block the START treaty. I think he is going to lose on that.
He tried block “Don‘t Ask, Don‘t Tell.” He did lose on that.
He tried to block the DREAM Act. Unfortunately, he won on that.
But it‘s clear to me that this guy, no surprise, his major goal is for Barack Obama to fail. And he tried block unemployment benefits. I mean, all the things that—it is not just the stuff Democrats care about, it‘s stuff that a large swath of the American people, the great majority of Americans, care about things like this.
They wanted “Don‘t Ask, Don‘t Tell” repealed. They wanted unemployment benefits. They want the START treaty, as does the entire establishment that knows these issues—former secretaries of state, all that.
So, pretty clearly, his view is that if he blocks everything, Republicans win, even if he is blocking what the American people want. Because people haven‘t really quite figured out what this guy is about and what their strategy is about.
It‘s up to us. It‘s up to you on this show. It‘s up to senators and congressmen and activists to make sure the public gets it, what this guy is doing, because he is going to try to do it for the next two years. And it‘s going to be a real clear choice, whose side are you on in 2012, and we‘ve got to convince the public what this guy is doing and what we stand for.
SCHULTZ: Senator, do you have any hope at all for the No Labels group that wants to bring Republicans and Democrats together in Washington in this political climate? Is that possible, in your opinion?
BROWN: Well, I would think it‘s possible if I would see Republicans compromise occasionally.
You know, there‘s no—somebody pointed out a couple of things. One is, the Republican—the Democrats keep moving to the center and the Republicans keep moving to the center. I mean, that really is what happens. So why do we keep moving to the center?
The other thing is there are no real, with maybe the exception of two or three, there are no real moderates in the Republican Party. They are all way over here. I guess to your viewers, they are way over here.
And the Democrats have people sort of in the whole spectrum. I mean, there are moderate Democrats, there are progressive Democrats. There are even some conservative Democrats.
So Republicans are way out on your right wing here where they don‘t compromise, they are scared of their base. Clearly, you watch these votes, they are scared of being criticized by—they are scared of primaries.
I mean, Dick Lugar showed great courage by being for “Don‘t Ask, Don‘t Tell” and—I‘m sorry, yes, supporting “Don‘t Ask, Don‘t Tell”—or no, he supported the DREAM act, I‘m sorry. By supporting the DREAM Act and by supporting START. And this is probably going to hurt him in Indiana with somebody like me admiring his courage, because the right wing is probably going to come after him, because they tolerate --
SCHULTZ: Sure they will.
BROWN: -- no dissent. And that scares most of these guys that don‘t have as much guts as Dick Lugar, are just moving to the right, moving to the right, because they are scared.
And so, you know, that makes this more dysfunctional. But in the end, it comes back to us showing what we stand for, in making that contrast, and whose side are you on?
SCHULTZ: Senator, good to have you with us tonight. I appreciate your time on this subject.
BROWN: Thanks, Ed.
SCHULTZ: And we are hopeful for something positive to take place with this next session of Congress.
BROWN: Well, I‘m optimistic for the next two years. I appreciate that.
SCHULTZ: Thank you. Thank you very much.
SCHULTZ: Congressman Joe Sestak, Pennsylvania, joins us. He was invited to be the featured speaker at the No Labels launching ceremony.
Congressman, your thoughts on No Labels? I mean, the Republicans don‘t act like they are really looking to compromise on anything. It‘s their way or the highway. So are you hopeful for this group?
REP. JOE SESTAK (D), PENNSYLVANIA: I don‘t know how the group is going to end up, but I heard what Mr. Boehner said, and you played it. He said he wouldn‘t compromise his principles.
I don‘t think anybody should. But I do think there should be a principled compromise. Let me give you an example, what I think should be done.
Senator Kennedy, I don‘t think you could have a more progressive senator than that. But he was able to effect, with Senator McCain and later on, President Bush, pretty conservative guys, a principled compromise on immigration, and actually would have put behind us a problem that still sits there.
Now, my point is this, is what I told No Labels. It isn‘t enough to say you are going to try to reach across the aisle.
What I look at with disdain in Washington, D.C., is once they brought that principled compromise in, nobody would touch it in either party because, heaven forbid, if it affected your base all the way. And I feel that that lack of accountability, Ed, is what most troubles our nation.
People aren‘t willing to lose their job over a health care bill. They are not willing to lose their job over doing what‘s right in a principled, compromised way.
SCHULTZ: But the bottom line here is, Congressman, is that this country wasn‘t built on people who were political fence-riders. This country was built by strong personalities who took a stand that fought for people. And this No Labels is, in my opinion, no progress.
SESTAK: No, I don‘t know where No Labels is going to go, but I do know this—I come from the U.S. military, Ed, and you know that. And in there, it‘s all ideas are on the table. And at the end of the day, you do what‘s right.
Look, I came down here as a Democrat. And you know me. I didn‘t compromise in either my primary or my general elections—
SCHULTZ: No, you didn‘t.
SESTAK: -- on one position. But I was willing in my district, which is 53 percent Republican, 33 percent Democrat, to let them know I understood their concerns.
In fact, after spending $3.5 million in my first election, we only spent $28,000 in my second election. And my point is this—it‘s Hatfields and McCoys here.
Now, do I believe that progress needs to be made, and that often, it‘s the progressive movement that does it? Sure. Think about it.
SESTAK: It did it from freedom to suffrage to civil rights to equality. Let‘s take “Don‘t Ask, Don‘t Tell.” But there‘s a way, I think, to effect it.
It means bitter debate. Don‘t bend your principles. But I think like Ted Kennedy did on education with George Bush, you can get principled compromise.
And I think in the meantime, what‘s happened is—
SCHULTZ: Congressman, good to have you with us tonight.
SESTAK: -- we‘re not moving forward. Thank you.
SCHULTZ: No, we‘re not.
Congressman, great to have you on. Thanks so much. I appreciate your time tonight.
SESTAK: Always a pleasure, Ed.
SCHULTZ: Coming up, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is trying to walk back his shocking racist comments. Reverend Al Sharpton won‘t let him get away with it. He sounds off in “The Battleground” story tonight.
Heartless Republican senators are blocking health care for 9/11 heroes. When it comes to tax cuts, well, that cost doesn‘t seem to bother them, but helping the heroes is another story. Republicans at their worst, coming up.
Plus, Senator Arlen Specter goes without a bang today. He joins me live in “The Playbook.”
You‘re watching THE ED SHOW on MSNBC. Stay with us.
SCHULTZ: Welcome back to THE ED SHOW, and thanks for watching tonight.
The Republicans in the Senate have come up with yet another excuse not to help heroes of 9/11. For all the stunts that they have pulled the past two years, I still can‘t believe that we are in a place in this country where the Republicans are playing politics with the health of those men and women who raced to Ground Zero to save fellow Americans after the terrorist attack took place.
The Republicans love to wrap themselves in the flag come election time, don‘t they? But they just don‘t give a damn about the first responders bill and, you know, an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor. Why is it taking so long?
The latest excuse comes from Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn, who is blocking the bill because he doesn‘t like the process.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. TOM COBURN ®, OKLAHOMA: This bill hasn‘t even been through a committee. We haven‘t had the debate in our committee on this bill to know if it is the best thing to do. We haven‘t had the testimony to know whether—this is a bill that has been drawn up and forced through Congress at the end of the year on a basis to solve a problem that we didn‘t have time to solve and we didn‘t get done.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SCHULTZ: Senator, were you living underneath a rock back on September 11, 2001?
Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi is helping him. He claims the GOP just wants to fix it. Enzi told Politico, “I‘m not trying to fight it, I‘m just trying to get it right.”
Give me a break. Tell it to the people who were at Ground Zero.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DET. GLEN KLEIN (RET.), 9/11 RESPONDER: Fourteen of our guys died that day. And I—we continue to see our friends dying on a day-to-day basis. I have lost at least six other friends since 9/11, guys in their 50s, 40s, and even some in their 30s.
This is not a game. OK? This is human life that we are talking about.
CAPT. PHIL RIZZO (RET.), 9/11 RESPONDER: For me, it‘s sad what I see here. You know, in six or seven months, that pile was cleaned up by the people behind me and hard working American citizens. And now we come down here to this political football.
JOHN FEAL, 9/11 RESPONDER: I implore Senator Coburn—and, correct me if I am wrong, the senator is a doctor, right? So, I‘m not the smartest guy in this room, but a doctor who is against helping people that are sick, figure that out.
Who in this room has been to 44 funerals in the last four years?
Raise your hand. Anybody? Me.
Who is here, donated to each family of the loved ones that lost?
Raise your hand. Me.
If I could do this, why can‘t the Senate?
DEP. CHIEF RICHARD ALLES, UNIFORMED FIRE OFFICER ASSN.: “Cancer” is a scary word, but my biggest fear right now is that senators and Congress reps will be leaving town, and that‘s unconscionable and contrary to their sworn oath to the very people that elected them. I urge them to stay in town, to get the deal done, and protect these heroes that are standing behind me.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SCHULTZ: Those were 9/11 responders on Capitol Hill today.
Joining us now is New York Congressman Joe Crowley.
Congressman, our government told us back then that it was OK for the responders to go back into that area because the air was OK. What responsibility does the government bear, in your opinion, and why has this taken so long?
REP. JOSEPH CROWLEY (D), NEW YORK: I think the government has every responsibility to make sure that these victims are compensated for what they went through.
I lost my first cousin that day, Battalion Chief John Moran (ph). His last known words were, “Let me off here at Tower Two. I‘m going to try to make a difference.”
We in Congress now have the chance to make a difference in those victims‘ lives, in these people‘s lives. It‘s the holiday season. Christmas is coming.
It‘s not just about the victims themselves. Their children, their families need to know that their government will stand behind them when they stood behind this government back on 9/11.
SCHULTZ: And what kind of a chance do you give it at this point, with time running out on this lame-duck session, that these first responders will get what‘s coming to them?
CROWLEY: I believe we can still get this done. It may not happen tonight, but I believe we can get this done by tomorrow. And I‘m willing to stay here for as long as we possibly have to, even through Christmas, to make it happen.
It is that important to me, it‘s that important to the New York delegation. And I think it is important to the country as well that we accomplish this mission.
SCHULTZ: Congressman, good to have you with us tonight.
CROWLEY: Thanks, Ed. Good to be with you.
SCHULTZ: Joe Crowley from New York, here on THE ED SHOW.
CROWLEY: Thank you.
SCHULTZ: You bet.
Coming up, the kids on “Fox & Friends” had a great time making fun of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. But I‘m getting the last laugh on this one.
Gretch, Dooc (ph) all in “The Zone” next. Stay with us.
SCHULTZ: And in “Psycho Talk” tonight, the brain wizards over at “Fox & Friends” took a quick break this morning from whining about the war on Christmas to launch some cheap shots at the Obama administration‘s counterterrorism efforts.
Gretchen Carlson and Steve Doocy, well, they went crazy over a slip of the tongue by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
STEVE DOOCY, “FOX & FRIENDS”: Janet Napolitano said this jaw-dropper
JANET NAPOLITANO, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: And what I say to the American people is that we are—and thousands of people are working 24/7, 364 days a year to keep the American people safe.
GRETCHEN CARLSON, “FOX & FRIENDS”: Oopsy daisy.
DOOCY: Three hundred and sixty-four days a year. So, the key is what day, Madam Secretary, does the Department of Homeland Security take off?
CARLSON: Well, maybe it could be Christmas Day, because that‘s kind of what happened last year, when that almost Christmas bomber was able to pull off a major stunt on an airplane.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SCHULTZ: First of all, Gretch, the key word there is “almost.”
The Christmas bomber didn‘t get away with it, but righties still love to use that incident to slam the Obama administration.
And second, Gretch and Doocy are the last people who should be making fun of someone for misspeaking. In fact, for those two to mock Secretary Napolitano‘s slip of the tongue when most of what they say is complete nonsense is laughable “Psycho Talk.”
Coming up, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is backtracking on some racist comments. Kind of a pattern here, isn‘t it? I don‘t buy it. He is playing the classic Republican race card.
Reverend Al Sharpton blasts off on the governor in just a moment in “The Battleground” story.
“Caribou Barbie” rolled into her home state for a book signing and nobody showed up. I guess they quit on her the way she quit on them.
“Rapid Fire Response” coming up in a moment.
Plus, the bully across the river, Chris Christie, meets his match;
President Obama is coming back strong; and it might really be over for Brett Favre. Can‘t we talk him into one more year?
You‘re watching THE ED SHOW on MSNBC. Stay with us.
SCHULTZ: Welcome back to THE ED SHOW, the “Battleground” story tonight, amazing, isn‘t it? Civil rights groups are outraged at Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour after he praised pro-segregation white citizens‘ councils in the south. In an interview with “The Weekly Standard,” the governor of Mississippi said this, “You have heard of the citizens councils. Up north, they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from, it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City, they passed a resolution that said, anybody who started a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan would get their ass run out of town.”
Well, citizens‘ councils were formed in the 1950s as a mainstream way to fight for racial segregation, after the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Today, Barbour put out a statement to clarify those citizens councils were a bad thing. He says, “To my point, was that the town rejected the Ku Klux Klan but nobody should construe that I mean—I think the town leadership were saints either. Their vehicle, called the citizens council is totally indefensible, as it is segregation.”
It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country and especially the African-Americans who were persecuted in that time. I don‘t buy it. Barbour is a seasoned politician from the south. I think that he knew exactly what he was saying and it was that same old republican race card, plus, he has a pattern of racial slipups. What does he really think? Where is the Republican Party on this?
Reverend Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, joining us tonight. Reverend, on the surface, your thoughts on this and do you accept his statement in the aftermath of his first comment?
REV. AL SHARPTON, NATIONAL ACTION NETWORK: Well, I think what we—you know, all of us in earlier years, we have said things that we regretted, this wasn‘t a slip of the lip. This is him making a detailed defense of the White Citizens‘ Council and trying to distinguish their role in the segregation era. And I think that it is something clearly he had to backtrack on. But the question is, had he not become an issue would backtrack, and whether not the strategy of throw something out there and then pull it back after you kind of wink and send a signal. This organization he is referring to was founded as a result of the brown versus board of education of the decisions against segregation. So how you can try and act as though they were something different and then come back to it three days later after the uproar, I think it is very, very troubling especially when you‘re looking at key figure in the midterm elections and the Republicans win this year. So, you are not talking about somebody that we don‘t have the right to question.
SCHULTZ: Reverend, there seems to be a pattern of behavior here in these missteps because doing confederate history month of last year, there was no mention of slavery. And of course there were racial concerns about that. And Haley Barbour said that that didn‘t amount to diddly. How many times—go ahead.
SHARPTON: Well, he said that didn‘t amount to diddly. He also said in this same interview over “The Weekly Standard” that civil rights wasn‘t a big problem during his time and that he remembers going to a speech of Dr. King and they were more interested in the girls. So, I mean this whole pattern here of the person that is at the helm now of this republican victory, clearly, can you imagine if President Obama had said something even remotely like that on the other side what they would be doing. So, I think that you have the absolute right to raise the questions on Barbour, particularly because there is pattern of statements here and particularly because we are not talking about the slip of the lip but we‘re talking about an analysis of the social order of that time that I think that is very telling, if that‘s his views today of what happened in the ‘50s.
SCHULTZ: Would something like this deep six his political aspirations when it comes to the presidency because he has talked about it?
SHARPTON: Well, I think that if it doesn‘t deep six it, it ought to deeply question it and I think that he needs to answer the whole pattern and not just send out a statement after this kind of detailed analysis, coupled with he said before. I think that clearly if he is going to step in the ring, he needs to have to deal with all of the blows and the insensitivity. Imagine those that in that time, I was born in ‘54. Imagine those in that time, my mother‘s generation and others that were in the back of the bus, that suffered these indignities and it‘s no big deal? Or the White Citizens‘ Council is better when they were advocating the same thing of segregation now and forever? Imagine their feelings when they hear Governor Barbour act like that‘s just some pooh-pooh issue that he can sidetrack.
SCHULTZ: Reverend, always a pleasure, good to have you with us tonight speaking out again.
SHARPTON: Thank you.
SCHULTZ: Thanks so much.
SHARPTON: All right.
SCHULTZ: Now, let‘s get some rapid fire response from our panel on these stories. I will get their take on Governor Barbour‘s comments about citizens‘ councils in the south.
The Palin media machine planned a big book signing event in Anchorage and I guess you could say it was a total bomb. I want to know if Sarah Palin‘s overexposed or the people she quit on just tired of her and does it affect her presidential ambitions?
And a blow for blue states. The new census data shows a shifting population, which means a lot of northern states will lose U.S. House seats in 2012, while the South and West stand to gain.
With us tonight, Karen Hunter, a journalist and publisher, and also Tony Blankley, syndicated columnist. Great to have both of you with us tonight. Let‘s talk first, Tony about, if I can, the census. Is this a big pick up, in your opinion for the Republicans and does it makes it tougher on President Obama to win re-election? How do you think it breaks down?
TONY BLANKLEY, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: I don‘t think it affects the president‘s re-election but it does probably give the Republicans five, six, seven extra congressional seats. This was predicted, I mean, everybody knows the general growth pattern in the country. Now, some of the growth, of course is with Hispanic or Latino Americans, so how they end up re-dividing the vote in states like Texas, we will see whether the next seat for the Republicans or not. But generally it is good news at the congressional level for the Republicans.
SCHULTZ: Arizona, Florida, picks up a couple. Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Texas is the big winner. They have four. Utah gets another seat and so does Washington. And the House loser, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey and New York will lose two seats. Two seats also from Ohio and Pennsylvania one. Those are some pretty strong democratic strongholds. Those are states that President Obama won, Karen. How do you see this?
KAREN HUNTER, JOURNALIST: Yes, but you know it has gone back and forth, depending on who is running, depending on what is going on at the country at the time, depending on whether jobs are taking a forefront or economics or health care. A lot of it depends on what is happening in the country at the time that these folks are running for office and I think that there‘s a lot of kind of homogeneous activity across the country. Doesn‘t matter if you are from the north or the south, it is about the issues that affect people and I agree with Tony if we have a lot of Latinos and certain areas that may also tip the scales. So, I don‘t think it is as, you know, big a deal as we are making it out to be.
BLANKLEY: One of the problems that will occur is that in the northern states, where largely Democrats are going to lose seats, it will create some friction as the Democratic Party has to try to figure out who is the sacrificial lamb. So, like in Massachusetts, they are going to lose one, there is some rumor that Barney Frank may not run for re-election and thereby, let the rest of his fellow Democrats not have the to fight it out but that‘s the kind of thing, some of a huge deal but it also create some friction in the party.
HUNTER: Well, in the state like New Jersey where we now have a republican governor, you know, it could go either way and we have gone back and forth over the years. So you know, let‘s see.
SCHULTZ: All right. Haley Barbour‘s comments, Karen Hunter, did he rectify the situation in your opinion?
HUNTER: No he didn‘t. Because out of the heart, you know, overflows out of your mouth. So, I mean, he is who he is and I was saying to Reverend Sharpton in the greenroom, this is man of a certain time, a certain age when a lot of folks, you know, we want to forget, Ed. And I think this is why we need to have a real dialogue in this country about race, it is not black and white. This is a time he grew up in where white supremacy and holding onto this whiteness was pointing that was just part and parcel of what this country was about.
BLANKLEY: This is really unfair to Haley. I actually read the article in “The Weekly Standard” and I have it with me, where he was asked a question, why was Yazoo City which is a city he lived in, his brother was mayor, his older brother, why was Yazoo City apparently the only municipality in Mississippi and elsewhere that did not have a problem with integration and his response specifically to that was, well, in his town, the council had opposed the Klan and he didn‘t say, in the article I read in “Time” magazine back in 1970, they said that they actually encouraged white people to support the public schools and not run away from them. So he was responding.
HUNTER: He‘s going away from the reality of history. The council were racist organizations founded on racist—you can‘t say it is unfair.
BLANKLEY: You are absolutely right. The white council was racist but in Yazoo City, he was asked particular question and he gave the answer which was in his particular town, at that moment, they supported the integration.
HUNTER: So, what‘s unfair, Tony?
BLANKLEY: What‘s unfair is he‘s saying that he was.
HUNTER: Yes or no?
BLANKLEY: He wasn‘t defending white councils across the south.
HUNTER: Sure, he was.
BLANKLEY: No, I read the article. Here is the article right here.
HUNTER: Yes. I read it, too. Yes.
BLANKLEY: And he was asked this specific question.
HUNTER: What are you saying is we didn‘t lynch people, the council didn‘t lynch people.
BLANKLEY: No. That‘s not what he said.
HUNTER: No, as brutal as the Klan. We didn‘t like the Klan. They were making bad for us.
BLANKLEY: You are making that up. He didn‘t say that, he gave a very specific answer to that question. Now, look, there‘s another matter. Most people, I don‘t think Haley was a hero or villain and most people, north and south, black and white, were not heroes or villains in the struggle. There were some of each, but when you look for instance, at Martin Luther King‘s campaigns, in Albany, in Birmingham, he had to struggle hard to get enough black people out to demonstrate on behalf.
SCHULTZ: All right.
(TALKING OVER EACH OTHER)
HUNTER: It‘s a very complex issue. We need to have a discussion about it. I think mandatory reading.
SCHULTZ: You can‘t deny it. Tony Blankley, great to have you back with us.
BLANKLEY: Good to be back.
SCHULTZ: Karen Hunter, always a pleasure.
HUNTER: Thank you.
SCHULTZ: Thank you so much. Good to have you with us tonight.
Coming up, there are some real signs now that the people of New Jersey are standing up to their bully governor.
And Senator Arlen Specter‘s amazing farewell speech today, where he ripped everyone from Jim DeMint to the Supreme Court. Wait until you hear about it. And Senator Specter joins us in the playbook. Stay with us. We are right back on THE ED SHOW.
SCHULTZ: Still not too late to let us know what you think. The number to dial tonight is 1-877-ed-msnbc. Tonight‘s telephone survey question is, do you think the number one priority for the Republicans is to defeat President Obama in 2012? Press the number one for yes, press the number two for no. And again, the number to dial is 1-877-ed-msnbc.
SCHULTZ: And in my playbook tonight, this just in Senator Schumer of New York just said that there will be a vote tomorrow for the 9/11 first responders. That vote will take place in the Senate.
Meantime, is Senator Arlen Specter spent a 30-year career in—I think just did a fabulous job over the years but he is not going out quietly. Today, he gave his closing argument on the Senate floor and with the Senate colleagues seated around him, he railed against the destructive partisanship in Washington. His first target was the Supreme Court.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. ARLEN SPECTER (D), PENNSYLVANIA: The Supreme Court has been eating Congress‘ lunch by invalidating legislation with judicial activism. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito repudiated their confirmation testimony given under oath and provided the key votes to permit corporations and unions to secretly pay for political advertising. Thus effectively undermining the basic democratic principle of the power of one person, one vote. Chief Justice Roberts promised to call just balls and strikes and then he moved the bases.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SCHULTZ: The republican turned democrat also took aim at members of his old party for their extremism in the recent election.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SPECTER: President Reagan‘s big tent has frequently been abandoned by the Republican Party. Senator Lisa Murkowski lost her primary in Alaska. Congressman Mike Castle was rejected in Delaware‘s republican primary. Republican primary in favor of a candidate who fought in necessary to defend herself as not being a witch. Republican senators contribute to the primary defeats of Bennett, Murkowski and Castle. Eating or defeating your own is a form of sophisticated cannibalism.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SCHULTZ: Joining us now is Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter here on THE ED SHOW. Senator, I think you did the country a favor today. You had a fabulous career. You did a lot for a lot of people over 30 years in the Senate and your final good-bye on the floor, you pointed out what‘s got to get better. And I think you did more for the discourse than probably anybody has in recent months. I want to congratulate you on that and I appreciate you doing it, from one American to another.
SPECTER: Well, Ed, I made some tough comments but they were accurate. The compromise has become a dirty word. And politics is the article of the possible but you can‘t engage in constructive political activity if people are intransigent.
SCHULTZ: Why has it gotten like this, senator?
SPECTER: Well, it has gotten like this because collegiality and civility has gone. Senators of one party go into the states of another senator‘s party to try to defeat him and even senators try to defeat colleagues within their own party. Now, if you‘re trying to do some constructive work as legislators, pretty tough to do business with people who try to defeat you simultaneously. And senators have been cut off from their opportunity to offer amendments. I was very candid about both political parties.
SCHULTZ: Senator, what if they don‘t change? What if they don‘t change? What if it‘s more of the same?
SPECTER: Well if they don‘t change, Ed, then the voters have to change them. Nobody around the Senate has life tenure. We are not—we are not Supreme Court justices. Listen, Senator Murkowski showed the way. She was defeated by her own colleagues in a Senate primary. She went out and had a spectacular victory. And what did Murkowski‘s victory show? It showed that if you arouse the electorate, if you get them out to vote, if you get them off their dead ends, they still want to be governed from the center. So, it is up to the voters.
And I call—I sounded the clarion call today to try to awaken America‘s voters as to how bad it is around here, how the Supreme Court is taking over, destroying the concept of separation of powers, how we are not appropriating money, where the priorities are with NIH. How we are not engaging in constructive dialogue with our adversaries. We have earned the title of ugly Americans and how the institution of the Senate has changed enormously and I was very specific in the differences between my arrival here to the world‘s greatest deliberative body 30 years as ago. It just isn‘t so anymore, Ed.
SCHULTZ: No it isn‘t.
SPECTER: I can‘t give it all to you in a sound bite. But anybody who wants to get the detailed text, it is all in the record.
SCHULTZ: Senator, great to have you with us tonight, thanks for serving the country. I think you did the country a favor today. I appreciate it.
SPECTER: It‘s a great privilege. Great privilege to be a senator, even yet. Thank you.
SCHULTZ: Some final pages in my playbook tonight. The garden state is finally starting to wise up to their bully of a Governor Chris Christie. New Quinnipiac poll shows Christie‘s job approval rating falling to 46 percent compared to 51 percent on November 9th, this guy keeps bashing New Jersey unions and teachers, his numbers are going to continue to go right into the garbage dump.
Coming up, call him the new comeback kid. Republicans are trying to destroy him but the new numbers show that President Obama‘s job approval is surging. Joan Walsh from Salon .com sounds off next. Stay with us.
SCHULTZ: Finally tonight, President Obama‘s poll numbers are going up and he is being called the comeback kid after chalking up several big wins during this lame duck session of the Congress. Fifty five percent of Americans now think the president‘s policies will move the country in the correct direction. In January, that number was six points lower at 46 to 49 percent. No, that was November, not January. And more good press for the White House. PolitiFact.com has found that the Obama administration has either completed or is near completing almost 80 percent of the campaign promises.
For more, let‘s bring in Joan Walsh, editor at large, Salon.com.
Joan, here‘s the list that has passed in the lame duck session of Congress. The tax bill compromise, whether you like it or not, the unemployment extension. The repel of Don‘t Ask, Don‘t Tell. The food safety bill and on the verge of S.T.A.R.T. And we told tonight by Senator Schumer that there will be a vote for the 9/11 responders tomorrow in the Senate. What do you make of all of this?
JOAN WALSH, EDITOR AT LARGE, SALON.COM: Well, I think it shows us, Ed what a smart strategy it really was for the Republicans to become the party of‘ no because they decided, you know, the minute President Obama was inaugurated that if they could tie him up, if they could tie him in knots and prevent him from moving forward and helping the country move forward, they would do well politically and that happened. Now that we have seen a little bit of progress, you and I did not like the tax cut compromise but we will leave that aside for the moment, you‘re seeing this people have more optimism and people think that the president‘s doing a good job because he is getting the tools, he is getting the votes to take action on things that the country believes should happen.
SCHULTZ: So, the numbers are encouraging. So what is this—does this set the table for President Obama to turn back to his base and say, look what we‘ve done. Now it‘s time to fight the Republicans and get them on a level playing field, now that they are going to have the house, the majority, they are going to have to make some decision and be more politically active. What do you think?
WALSH: Well, it‘s going to be interesting. I continue to worry, first of all, a lot of these wins, you know, even five years ago, let alone ten years ago, these would have been easier wins. I mean, we should not still be fighting over the 9/11 responder bill. And we still haven‘t won that, let‘s hope Senator Schumer can bring it in. “Don‘t Ask, Don‘t Tell,” the majority of military leaders say, they wanted it. S.T.A.R.T. was bipartisan. So I‘m not sure that these—that these wins really portend big change in the Republican Party.
WALSH: And you know, once they have the House, I think the president is going to be dealing with some very, very aggressive and recalcitrant people. So I‘m not super optimistic.
SCHULTZ: Eighty percent of his promises from the campaign trail have become reality. Why aren‘t his ratings higher? Quickly, what do you think?
WALSH: Well, because I think that the Republicans have succeeded in turning him into some wildlife socialist for too many of their—of their followers of which you and I know is not true. And because they did tie him in knots and they didn‘t get enough done, although we got a lot done this year.
SCHULTZ: Joan, thanks so much. Joan Walsh, salon.com.
WALSH: Tonight in our phone survey, I asked, do you think the number one priority for the Republicans is to defeat President Obama in 2012? Ninety eight percent of you said yes, two percent said no that‘s THE ED SHOW. I‘m Ed Schultz. “HARDBALL” starts right now. We‘ll see you tomorrow night.
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386 F2d 718 Myzel v. Fields Myzel
386 F.2d 718
Benjamin (Benn) MYZEL et al., Appellants,
Harry FIELDS, Appellee.
Benjamin (Benn) MYZEL et al., Appellants,
Samuel H. KING, Appellee.
Benjamin (Benn) MYZEL et al., Appellants,
Rita VERTELNEY, Special Administratrix, etc., Appellee.
Benjamin (Benn) MYZEL et al., Appellants,
Gordon M. COHEN, Appellee.
United States Court of Appeals Eighth Circuit.
Oct. 12, 1967. Rehearing Denied Nov. 7, 1967, Certiorari
Denied March 4, 1968, See 88 S.Ct. 1043.
Conrad M. Fredin, R. B. Reavill and John J. Killen, Jr., Duluth, Minn., for appellants, Arthur Karger, New York City, Daniel R. Kaplan, New York City, of counsel.
Lindquist, Magnuson & Glennon, Edward M. Glennon, William B. Stukas, Minneapolis, Minn., Leonard A. Wilson, Jr., Cloquet, Minn., for appellees.
Before MATTHES, MEHAFFY and LAY, Circuit Judges.
LAY, Circuit Judge.
The four cases here considered are actions brought under Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 10b-5, 17 C.F.R. 240.10b-5 (hereinafter Rule 10b-5), which implements Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, 15 U.S.C. 78a et seq., arising out of the sale of stock of a closed corporation. Trial was held before a jury and jury verdicts totaling $411,000 were returned in favor of the plaintiffs.1 Honorable Earl Larson, the trial judge, overruled the defendants' motion for new trial and judgment notwithstanding the verdict. The defendants have appealed. We affirm the verdicts and judgment below.
The basic issues are: (1) jurisdiction over intrastate sales, (2) sufficiency of the evidence to support the verdicts, (3) the liability of 'controlling' persons and (4) the proper measure of damage.
I. JURISDICTION. Both Section 10 of the Act (15 U.S.C. 78j(b)) and Rule 10b-5 require as a jurisdictional basis 'the use of any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce or of the mails, or of any facility of any national securities exchange.'
The evidence is undisputed that the telephone was used only on an intrastate basis in the solicitation or purchase of each of the appellees' stook. Appellees claim that federal jurisdiction exists because the telephone is an 'instrumentality of interstate commerce' and, therefore, the cases fall within the prohibition of the statute. Despite reasoning to the contrary,2 we are convinced that Congress, in the interest of fairly regulating interstate commerce, intended to supervise those intrastate activities in violation of Rule 10b-5 which are 'inimical to the welfare and public policy of the country as a whole.' Nemitz v. Cunny, 221 F.Supp. 571, 574 (N.D.Ill.1963). We hold, consequently, that intrastate use of the telephone comes within prohibition of the Act. See also Bredehoeft v. Cornell, 260 F.Supp. 577 (D.Ore.1966); Lennerth v. Mendenhall, 234 F.Supp. 59 (N.D.Ohio 1964). In interpreting other grants of federal power, it has long been acknowledged that Congress may regulate intrastate activity if simultaneously it is an integral part of or constitutes an instrumentality of interstate commerce. Alstate Constr. Co. v. Durkin, 345 U.S. 13, 73 S.Ct. 565, 97 L.Ed. 745 (1953); Overstreet v. North Shore Corp., 318 U.S. 125, 63 S.Ct. 494, 87 L.Ed. 656 (1943); Pedersen v. Delaware, L. & W.R.R. Co., 229 U.S. 146, 33 S.Ct. 648, 57 L.Ed. 1125 (1913). Thus, in order to protect interstate commerce, intrastate telephonic messages have been placed under the statutory prohibition pertaining to unauthorized publication or use of communications under 47 U.S.C. 605. Weiss v. United States, 308 U.S. 321, 60 S.Ct. 269, 84 L.Ed. 298 (1939). We recognize that the telephone system and its voice transmission by wire is an integrated system of both intrastate and interstate commerce. Cf. Lipinski v. United States, 251 F.2d 53 (10 Cir. 1958). As such, proof of the interstate telephonic message is not a prerequisite to jurisdiction over a Section 10(b) action. As long as the instrumentality itself is an integral part of an interstate system, nothing in the Constitution requires Congress to exclude intrastate activities from its regulatory control. See Weiss v. United States, supra.
But there exists additional grounds to sustain jurisdiction. It is the rule that where any interstate use is made to perpetuate the original fraudulent concealment or transaction, even though not part of the original solicitation or inducement of sale involved, that nevertheless the subsequent use of interstate facilities in furthering the scheme is sufficient to establish federal jurisdiction. /3/ Creswell-Keith, Inc. v. Willingham, 264 F.2d 76, 80, 82 (8 Cir. 1959); see also Thomas v. United States, 227 F.2d 667, 670 (9 Cir. 1955) (use of automobile); Ellis v. Carter, 291 F.2d 270, 274 (9 Cir. 1961) (use of plane); cf. Boone v. Baugh, 308 F.2d 711 (8 Cir. 1962).
Appellees contended that they were fraudulently induced to sell their stock to the appellants, that the purchases were made by parties (the Myzels) other than the true buyers (the Levines) and that an Illinois corporation owned by some of the appellants was used as a conduit of concealment. The transfers of the stock to the Illinois corporation, although occurring several months and even years later, involved the delivery of checks written by the Illinois corporation on Chicago, Illinois banks to a Minnesota citizen. Cf. Little v. United States, 331 F.2d 287 (8 Cir. 1964). Thus, under appellees' theory, there was also sufficient evidence of interstate transactions to sustain jurisdiction.
II. SUFFICIENCY OF EVIDENCE. By reason of the jury verdict, and in view of defendants' motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict, we set forth from the conflicting evidence, the facts in the light most beneficial to the appellees. See, e.g. Breeding v. Massey, 378 F.2d 171 (8 Cir. 1967).
Lakeside Plastics and Engraving Co., hereinafter called 'LPE,' was organized in 1946 in Duluth, Minnesota, by cousins, Zelman and Clarence Levine. The company was organized as a small plastics corporation to make advertising signs. Upon its original issue there were 1,140 shares of common stock issued to some 17 persons, at a par value of $50 per share. Among the original Purchasers were the appellee-plaintiffs, Harry Fields (30 shares), Joseph S. Vertelney (100 shares), Samuel H. King (30 shares), and Gordon M. Cohen (40 shares). In 1948, a sales agency, independent of LPE and entitled Lakeside Plastics Sales Co., hereinafter called 'LPS,' was organized in the State of Illinois by Orrin and William Levine, who were also original stockholders and directors of LPE from its inception. Both Orrin and William were brothers of Clarence Levine. From 1953 to sometime in 1957, the stock of LPE became totally vested in the hands of the four Levines and the Illinois corporation, LPS. By 1958, 640 shares of LPE were owned by LPS. At about that time, for a nominal consideration ($600 each), a one-fourth interest in LPS was sold to each of the Minnesota Levines. Then, in December 1961, the 640 shares of LPE were re-acquired by LPE as treasury stock, pursuant to a merger with LPS's wholly owned subsidiary, Lakeside Properties, Inc., hereinafter called 'LPI,' which had received the shares from LPS in July 1959. LPE then retired the 640 shares. The remaining 500 shares of LPE stock, then owned one-quarter each by the Levines, was in turn exchanged for 500,000 shares of a newly formed corporation called Lakeside Industries, Inc., hereinafter called 'LII.' In 1962, 150,000 shares of LII were offered to the public at $9 per share. The appellant-defendants herein are each of the four Levines, Benjamin Myzel, Philip Myzel and LII.
Philip (Phil) and Benjamin (Benn) Myzel, brothers and first cousins of Zelman Levine, were living in Duluth, Minnesota. The evidence shows that Benn Myzel was a close friend to each of the appellees. Benn was an early director of LPE, going off the board in 1949 and again assuming a directorship in 1954. According to the appellees, Benn Myzel originally solicited each of them to purchase stock in LPE, portraying it as an opportunity 'to get in on the ground floor.' Upon Benn's advice, each of the appellees made his purchase in 1946 of the shares in question at $50 par value.
For some time thereafter the growth of LPE was somewhat typical of any small, closely held corporation. From 1946 to 1951, the evidence showed a struggle for sales, a very marginal profit picture and a total lack of return to the appellee stockholders on their investment. Appellees, as well as other stockholders, expressed continued concern throughout this period as to the ultimate soundness of the investment involved. At the 1949 stockholders' meeting, appellee Fields even moved to dissolve the company in order to salvage a pro rata share of everyone's investment. LPE had an accumulated deficit in earned surplus at the end of 1951 of some $51,000. Sales in that year were $94,000. In 1952, the gross sales rose to some $249,000. This level had been reached before, in 1948. At the end of 1952, the profit was only $7,500 for the year, whereas the earned surplus deficit was still some $43,000. This 1952 financial picture was fully disclosed at a stockholders' meeting attended by some of the appellees in June of 1953. It was also known that in 1951 a large new contract was made with the Blatz Brewing Company for advertising signs. Each of the appellees, as well as the other stockholders, in order to secure a bank loan needed for the accomplishment of this contract, was required to pledge his stock.
In the first four months of 1953, principally because of the completion of the Blatz contract, the company showed a $30,000 profit and had nearly topped the total sales of the highest previous year. In the June 1953 meeting this fact, i.e. the promising interim financial statement, dated April 30, 1953, was not disclosed nor was there any evidence or testimony reflecting discussion of this particular accomplishment. Despite the fact that the total sales in 1953 were over $541,300, almost double the figure for 1952, the total profit for the year was only $20,000 because of an alleged loss in the last eight months.4 Nevertheless, in 1953 and thereafter, the sales zoomed but the profits remained slim with a reported deficit still in 1956. There were increases in salaries to the various officers, as well as increased commissions to the sales agency during this period. The first earned surplus of the company was $6,700 reported in 1957. As indicated, the total sales in 1953 doubled from 1952, and thereafter in 1954 they were increased to approximately $732,000, reaching a total of over $2,069,000 in 1957. The Levines were fully aware of the sales picture and prospects at all times. In 1958 there was $65,000 profit after taxes.
None of the appellees realized that the others had sold their LPE stock until after the reorganized company issued a prospectus in 1962. In denying the motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict, the trial judge, Honorable Earl Larson, emphasized the failure of the purchasers in buying up the appellees' stock to disclose the April financial statement showing the $30,000 profit. As will be discussed, Benn Myzel was a close business associate of Zelman Levine. It is claimed that Benn Myzel was acting for the Levines throughout his purchases of stock from the plaintiffs in the Levines' overall scheme to obtain all of the outstanding stock of LPE. We will discuss the various representations and transactions in terms of the individual claimants.
Samuel King. King's 30 shares of stock were purchased directly by Benn Myzel in August 1953. According to King, Benn Myzel represented to him at that time that (1) the stock was not worth anything, (2) the company was making no money, and (3) Myzel had sold his own stock. The evidence showed that King had previously sold his stock in 1950 to his employer for $200, but had bought it back because he did not want to see his employer lose any money on the transaction. It is not clear whether King approached Benn Myzel or whether Benn solicited him, but the evidence is clear that Benn did purchase the stock in August 1953, for $200. Equivalent book value of the shares at the close of 1953 would have brought King $882. The evidence shows that Benn Myzel was issued a new certificate of stock on May 26, 1954, and then this stock was retransferred to LPS on an unknown date sometime prior to December 1954. The actual date of the transfer was not shown on the certificate.
Joseph Vertelney. Vertelney had a B.S. degree in Business Administration from the University of Minnesota, and also had some experience in the buying and selling of stocks. He was first approached by Zelman Levine in August of 1953 to sell his stock. He refused. Later he was approached by Phil Myzel in September 1953. Phil admitted at the trial that at all times in the solicitation and purchase of the Vertelney stock that he was acting for his brother Benn. This fact was not disclosed to Vertelney at any time. Phil Myzel represented to Vertelney that the company was not going anywhere, that his brother Benn was therefore going to get out, and that the company was going to go bankrupt. Vertelney was a director at this time. The last meeting he attended was in June of 1953. The evidence shows that Vertelney had been active as a director in the years up to and including 1953. According to the minutes of the meetings of the corporation, he had participated in many of the business discussions and transactions. At the time he was approached by Phil Myzel, Vertelney asked whether Benn knew more then he did and Phil Myzel told him, yes, but that the Levines were not telling all they knew even to Benn, suggesting that the company was actually going broke. Subsequently, Vertelney agreed to sell to Phil Myzel his stock, negotiating a price of about $35 per share, approximating $3,500.
The evidence showed that although Phil Myzel was at all times acting for Benn, nevertheless Phil Myzel did not retransfer the stock certificate to Benn until May 26, 1954. At that time, and on the same day, Zelman Levine issued a new certificate to Benn Myzel. He in turn endorsed the stock certificate to LPS, and in December 1954, another new certificate was issued to LPS representing in part the Vertelney stock. LPS at that time was owned exclusively by the two Levine brothers in Chicago, William and Orrin.
Gordon Cohen. This stock was bought by Benn Myzel in the latter part of November 1953. According to Cohen, although Benn Myzel did not represent the stock as worthless or the company in bankruptcy, he nevertheless did not offer any encouragement, and in fact represented to him that (1) the company was in a 'very difficult condition,' (2) it may or may not make it, (3) he (Myzel) gets nothing from the company and he was sure that Cohen would not either, and (4) that it did not look any better for the future. On this basis Cohen sold the stock to Benn, receiving $1,800 for his 40 shares. Myzel agreed to pay Cohen so much a month, and completed paying for the stock in mid-1954. The stock was transferred on the books to Benn in October 1955. This stock was assigned by Myzel to LPS at an unknown date, but sometime before March 12, 1958, when a new certificate representing this stock was issued to LPS.
Harry Fields. His 30 shares were bought by Phil Myzel, acting undisclosed for Benn. Phil represented to Fields in early 1954, that LPE (1) was doing very badly and (2) was on the verge of bankruptcy, and on March 9, 1954, Fields sold his stock to Phil Myzel for $900. LPE issued the certificate to Phil Myzel on May 26, 1954. This was not transferred to Benn Myzel until October 20, 1955. At sometime before March of 1958, the Fields' stock was ultimately assigned to LPS along with Cohen's.
We will briefly touch upon other significant factual evidence. From August through December 1953, Benn Myzel received checks from LPS in various amounts ranging from $500 to $1,532.50 and totaling some $4,453.93. Benn Myzel expressed surprise in receiving these checks but added that they were some form of a commission paid for a favor to the Levines in getting some monies due from LPE to LPS released in connection with a factor's lien on a bank loan. Orrin Levine thought the checks were for loans extended to him. The entire matter is shrouded in contradictions by the appellants. Appellees claim the checks were commissions for buying the stock without disclosing that the true purchasers were the Levines. As the trial court observed, 'the timing and the manner of payment were significant' and the proper inference was for the jury under the circumstances.5
Benn's sale of all his stock to LPS was pursuant to two transactions. In the first lot involving 140 shares, he was paid approximately $10,000 by LPS, through cash and a note payable. His transfer of Vertelney's (and possibly King's) stock to LPS took place on May 26, 1954. LPS made payment of $3,750 by check, dated January 19, 1955, and a note for $7,000 executed January 5, 1955. Payments on the note, starting April 8, 1955, and continuing through December 13, 1956, totaled $7,312.37. Secondly, according to a 1958 agreement, Myzel transferred 255 additional shares to LPS in consideration of $10,000 in cash from LPS. LPS as early as June 1957 was considered to be equally owned by the four Levines. A contract for $35,000 payable by LPE was executed in June 1957 ostensibly as a fee for Benn's services as 'management consultant.' At the trial it was admitted by the Levines and Benn Myzel that the $35,000 was at least partially a consideration for the transfer of some of the stock involved in the March 1958 agreement with LPS.
During the period of 1953 to 1958, LPS and the Levines, through various transactions, purchased all remaining shares from all other minority stockholders. These transactions are not before us, nor do we intend the jury verdict, or our holding, in any way to reflect upon the acquisition of stock from other stockholders.
For simplification, we have charted the various acquisitions below.
NOTE: OPINION CONTAINS TABLE OR OTHER DATA THAT IS NOT VIEWABLEIn reviewing the sufficiency of the evidence in a jury trial, we said in Commercial Union Assurance Co. v. Berry, 359 F.2d 510, 516-517 (8 Cir. 1966):
'In considering the sufficiency of the evidence, we must take that view thereof which tends to support the conclusion of the jury and must accept as established all inferences favorable to that result.' 'The mere possibility that the jury could have found otherwise than they did is not enough to upset its findings where such are based on substantial testimony and are not entirely unreasonable. Circumstantial evidence may point to different and opposite results. It is for the jury to say which is the correct one.'
In Lavender v. Kurn, 327 U.S. 654, 653, 66 S.Ct. 740, 744, 90 L.Ed. 916 (1946), the Supreme Court laid down the rule followed by courts of appeal.
'Only when there is a complete absence of probative facts to support the conclusion reached does a reversible error appear. But where * * * there is an evidentiary basis for the jury's verdict, the jury is free to discard or disbelieve whatever facts are inconsistent with its conclusion.'
See also Bankers Life & Casualty Co. v. Kirtley, 307 F.2d 418 (8 Cir. 1962).
The sufficiency of the evidence and the integrity of the verdict are best reviewed in the light of those cases arising under Rule 10b-5, in terms of (1) misrepresentation or nondisclosure, (2) materiality, (3) some form of scienter or intent and (4) reliance.
A. Misrepresentation or non-disclosure.6 Proof of affirmative misrepresentation, generally an essential element of common law fraud, is not required in actions brought under Rule 10b-5, since the rule expressly prohibits material omissions as well. See 3 Loss, Securities Regulations 1456-65 (2d ed. 1961) (hereinafter cited as 'Loss'); Kardon v. National Gypsum Co., 73 F.Supp. 798 (E.D.Pa.1947); List v. Fashion Park, Inc., 340 F.2d 457, 462 (2d Cir. 1965). Cf. SEC v. Capital Gains Research Bur., Inc., 375 U.S. 180, 201, 84 S.Ct. 275, 11 L.Ed.2d 237 (1963). Several undisclosed facts in the present case assume relevance when coupled with the factual statements and reckless opinions offered by the Myzels. Cf. SEC v. Broadwall Securities, Inc., 240 F.Supp. 962, 968 (S.D.N.Y.1965). Among facts the jury could find not disclosed in the purchases were (1) the increased sales in 1953, (2) the April 1953 interim financial statements showing the successful Blatz contract and $30,000 profit, (3) the potential of 1954 sales or at least Zelman Levine's (President of LPE) optimism over prospects for the future and (4) the identity of the controlling purchasers.
B. Materiality.7 These nondisclosures assume materiality when considered in the context of the affirmative representations made severally to the appellees. Phil Myzel's statement to Vertelney that Benn was 'going to get out' of the company could be considered actionable as a misstatement of another's intent or state of mind. See Restatement of Torts 530 and 525, comment b (1938). Benn's statements to King that he himself had sold his stock, that it was worthless and that the company wasn't making any money were misleading. See (e.g., Janigan v. Taylor, 344 F.2d 781 (1 Cir. 1965); cf. Rogen v. Ilikon Corp., 361 F.2d 260, 266-267 (1 Cir. 1966). Phil's statements to Fields that the company was on the 'verge of bankruptcy' or 'in bad shape' were material in view of the nondisclosures. And Benn's statements to Cohen that 'he was not getting any money from the company' become significant with the discovery of Benn's commissions commencing in August 1953. Evidence that Benn consistently avoided mentioning his continued possession of the stock or his directorship in LPE and that when questioned by appellee Fields in 1955 he responded, 'it's a good thing we got out of it,' was undoubtedly damaging to his credibility.
Materiality encompasses those facts 'which in reasonable or objective contemplation might affect the value of the corporation's stock or securities * * *' to the seller. Kohler v. Kohler Co., 319 F.2d 634, 642, 7 A.L.R.3d 486 (7 Cir. 1963). See also List v. Fashion Park, Inc., supra. But it also should be considered that material information 'need not be limited to information which is translatable into earnings. * * *' SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co., 258 F.Supp. 262, 280 (S.D.N.Y.1966).
A sale of stock preceded by a statement that business was 'about the same' was sufficient to sustain a Rule 10b-5 action by stockholders and directors against another director in Janigan v. Taylor, supra, 344 F.2d at 785. The court said:
'Viewed against a background of past fluctuations, we might not find the misrepresentation to be of the importance intimated by the court's opinion. Certainly it could not be claimed that the change presaged the dramatic improvement that occurred subsequently in the company's affairs, or that the defendant could have any thought that it did. On the other hand, even as a new upswing not uncharacteristic of the business, plus some promising overtones, we could not find that as a matter of law the true situation was fairly disclosed, within the heavy requirements of the Act, by the single statement that things were 'about the same."
Under the circumstances the jury had a right to consider whether the estimates of LPE's financial prospects uttered by both Myzels were given in bad faith for the purpose of misleading.8
C. Scienter. Proof of 'scienter,' i.e., knowledge of the falseness of the impression produced by the statements or omissions made, is not required under Section 10(b) of the Act. In Dale v. Rosenfeld,229 F.2d 855, 858 (2 Cir. 1956), the court of appeals said: 'Readiness and willingness to disclose are not equivalent to disclosure.' See also Ellis v. Carter, supra, 291 F.2d at 274; SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co., supra, 258 F.Supp. at 277. However, under the court's instructions the jury was required to find 'deceptive or manipulative conduct' consisting of 'misrepresentations or omissions' made with 'the intent of inducing plaintiffs to sell their stock.' By this phrasing, which in fact was more demanding than the broader express terms of the statute and the rule, the jury was in effect told that appellants had to be found conscious wrongdoers before liability ensued. We fail to see any prejudice to appellants here.
D. Reliance.9 Professor Loss points out that in cases of nondisclosure, if reliance is a prerequisite of a Rule 10b-5 action, it is 'little more than a formal requirement.' 3 Loss 1765. However the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in List v. Fashion Park, Inc., supra, 340 F.2d at 463, best states the rule that should govern this phase of a Rule 10b-5 suit:
'On the other hand, we do not agree with certain overtones in the opinion of the trial court concerning the meaning of 'reliance' in a case of non-disclosure under Rule 10b-5. The opinion intimates that the plaintiff must prove he actively relied on the silence of the defendant, either because he consciously had in mind the negative of the fact concealed, or perhaps because he deliberately put his trust in the advice of the defendant. Such a requirement, however, would unduly dilute the obligation of insiders to inform outsiders of all material facts, regardless of the sophistication or naivette of the persons with whom they are dealing. * * *
'The proper test is whether the plaintiff would have been influenced to act differently than he did act if the defendant had disclosed to him the undisclosed fact. Speed v. Transamerica Corp., 99 F.Supp. 808, 829; Kardon v. National Gypsum Co., 73 F.Supp. 798, 800 (E.D.Pa.1947). To put the matter conversely, insiders 'are not required to search out details that presumably would not influence the person's judgment with whom they are dealing.' Kohler v. Kohler Co., supra, 319 F.2d at 642. This test preserves the common law parallel between 'reliance' and 'materiality,' differing as it does from the definition of 'materiality' under Rule 10b-5 solely by substituting the individual plaintiff for the reasonable man.'
Compare Hafner v. Forest Laboratories, Inc., 345 F.2d 167 (2 Cir. 1965), and Kohler v. Kohler Co., supra, with Dale v. Rosenfeld, supra, and Vine v. Beneficial Finance Co., 374 F.2d 627 (2 Cir. 1967).
Fields, Cohen and King were not familiar with the business. They were entirely dependent upon the advice of the Myzels when they bought and when they sold. Their uncertainty about the company, as well as their total trust in one one who was not only their close friend but also a financial advisor and relative to the operators of the company, raises questions of fact that could only be resolved by the jury. Would these particular men have been impressed with the truth of the total sales picture when they were solicited to sell their stock? Would they have reacted differently had they known of the company's $30,000 profit in the first four months of the year? Would they have inflated their views of value had they known the true purchasers of the stock? All of these questions might have been answered 'no' but here, upon sufficient evidence, they were answered 'yes.' See Rogen v. Ilikon, supra. See also Prosser, Torts 103 at 732 (3d ed. 1964):
"The design of the law is to protect the weak and credulous from the wiles and stratagems of the artful and cunning, as well as those whose vigilance and security enable them to protect themselves,' and 'no rogue should enjoy his ill-gotten plunder for the simple reason that his victim is by chance a fool."
We are faced with a more difficult problem in the recovery of appellee Vertelney. Here was a man trained in financial matters, who was active on the Board of Directors of LPE through the June 1953 meeting. The trial court informed the jury that he was an 'insider' as a matter of law. As such he presumably had superior knowledge of the financial status of the business, as well as its prospects and business policies. As stated in Kohler v. Kohler Co., supra, there is no duty to disclose information to one who reasonably should already be aware of it. Nor is there the necessity for one insider to 'search out details' for another insider, in the same sense that such a duty might exist toward others less informed. See Hafner v. Forest Laboratories, Inc., supra.
Hindsight reaction to an improvident sale by an insider to a stranger or even another insider, based upon nondisclosed facts equally known or available to both parties, ordinarily would not be considered within the protective basis of Rule 10b-5.10 Cf. Heckenkamp v. Kennedy, 267 F.2d 887 (8 Cir. 1959). In Shappirio v. Goldberg, 192 U. S. 232, 241-242, 24 S.Ct. 259, 261, 48 L.Ed. 419 (1904), it was stated:
'When the means of knowledge are open and at hand or furnished to the purchaser or his agent and no effort is made to prevent the party from using them * * * he will not be heard to say that he has been deceived to his injury by the misrepresentations of the vendor.'
If Vertelney had been misled solely by Phil Myzel's statements or nondisclosures regarding the company's value, and on that basis alone had sold his stock, recovery would be denied. On the surface, at least, he was more conversant with the financial affairs of the company than Phil Myzel. He was in a position to investigate or make an effort to inform himself as to corporate values. As a director Vertelney is chargeable with a degree of notice of those facts which the corporate books and the directors' meetings would fairly disclose.11 Kohler v. Kohler Co., supra, 319 F.2d at 641-642; cf. Hafner v. Forest Laboratories, Inc., supra, 345 F.2d at 168; see also 3 Fletcher, Cycl. Corp. 1169 at 861-62 (1965) and 19 C.J.S. Corporations 762, at pp. 109-110 (1940). Yet the record is silent as to any effort on his part to call Benn Myzel or the Levines or to make any valued judgment of the situation. If anything, Vertelney was grossly negligent. The time gap, 1953 to 1962, between the sale and the discovery of the fraud seriously bothers us not only as to Vertelney, but as to all of the appellees. At times the appellees' testimony joins that of appellants in taxing even the most credulous mind. Yet, we cannot usurp the traditional function of the jury as to credibility, so that when sufficient evidence appears, if the jury believes it we are bound to accept the factfinder's verdict, even though we might have found otherwise.
However, there are circumstances involved here which we feel create a jury question as to Vertelney's naked reliance in this particular case. Accompanying Phil Myzel's pessimism about the financial status of LPE was the affirmative statement that Benn was 'going to get out' for the reason that 'he doesn't think they are going anywhere.' The evidence showed this was important to Vertelney. Here again represented was the picture of the trusted friend and advisor who had lost faith in the enterprise. When this misrepresentation is conjoined with the nondisclosure of Phil's agency for Benn, a new consideration emerges. Cf. Strong v. Repide, 213 U.S. 419, 433, 29 S.Ct. 521, 53 L.Ed. 853 (1909). The testimony of both Phil and Benn Myzel demonstrates unequivocally that Phil was making the purchase secretly for Benn. In addition, the jury could determine from all the facts that Benn was 'controlled' by the Levines. Vertelney had just the month before refused to sell to Zelman Levine. As previously stated, the test of justifiable reliance in Rule 10b-5 actions is a subjective test, and not simply a 'reasonable man' test. List v. Fashion Park, Inc., 340 F.2d 457, 463 (2 Cir. 1965). By such labyrinthine transfers (see chart, supra), the true identity of the purchaser wes effectively hidden from even a most alert director or insider. The jury could reasonably infer that the subsequent circuitous transfer of the stock from Phil to Benn eight months later, with immediate reassignment to LPS, then controlled by the Illinois Levines, was intended as an artifice to effectuate concealment from a person known by the appellants to be a man with business acuity.
The jury could well consider under the particular setting involved that there was created a diminished necessity in Vertelney's thinking of such inquiry as he might have made had he known that Benn or the Levines wanted to increase their holdings. Phil Myzel was a close friend of Vertelney. Although this in itself does not here, in our opinion, necessarily create a fiduciary relationship, it is a factor to be considered. See 23 Am.Jur., Fraud and Deceit 159 at 966-67; 1 Harper & James, Law of Torts 7.8 at 563 (1956). Vertelney knew that the Levines and Benn (not Phil) were intimately involved in the success or failure of LPE. The nondisclosure of the identity of the true purchasers assumes greater significance with Vertelney than with the other appellees. He valued Benn's relationship to the Levines and knew of his early expectations and enthusiasm toward the company, for he relates 'He (Benn) is the one who pushed it so far, I would have thought that if he would get out, I better get out too.' In a similar fact situation the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that a concealed insider who was the true purchaser of stock '* * * was bound to disclose the facts within his knowledge which the seller would naturally want to know and would learn if not diverted from inquiry. He could, in short, deal openly and leave the seller to investigate as he chose or deal secretly and be bound to disclose the facts pertinent on the question of value.' Broffe v. Horton, 172 F.2d 489. 494 (2 Cir. 1949); see also Barnes v. Eastern & Western Lumber Co., 205 Or. 553, 287 P.2d 929 at 943 (1955).
Under the circumstances we conclude, although not without great difficulty, that all of the appellees presented sufficient proof of an 'assortment' of nondisclosures and positive misrepresentations to carry their respective cases to the jury.
III. LIABILITIES OF CONTROLLING PERSONS. The trial court instructed that the Levines were liable for the acts of Benn and Phil Myzel 'if they knew or should have known' that the Myzels were 'purchasing' the stock for the Levines 'or with the intention of reselling' to them. The court referred to appellees' contention that 'a plan' existed to obtain the stock for the Levines, and added that if such existed the Levines would be liable for any fraud that the Myzels committed. The trial court emphasized that the Levines must 'know and approve' of the Myzel activities in order to be liable. The court added that there could be no liability of the Levines 'if they had not sought to have the Myzels obtain it.'
The liability of the Levines is governed neither by principles of agency nor conspiracy. The trial court obviously was not aided by appellees' vacillation on the conspiracy argument. Nor are we. Section 20 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, 15 U.S.C. 78t, reads simply:
'(a) Every person who, directly or indirectly, controls any person liable under any provision of this chapter or of any rule or regulation thereunder shall also be liable jointly and severally with and to the same extent as such controlled person to any person to whom such controlled person is liable, unless the controlling person acted in good faith and did not directly or indirectly induce the act or acts constituting the violation or cause of action.
'(b) It shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, to do any act or thing which it would be unlawful for such person to do under the provisions of this chapter or any rule or regulation thereunder through or by means of any other person.'
Although it might now be argued that it would have been better to instruct in the language of the statute, neither side requested it. Appellants claim that the court should have instructed on the Levines' exculpation by reason of 'good faith' or 'not inducing' the acts. This argument must fail under Fed.R.Civ.P. 51, requiring specific objection at the time of trial. Hindsight argument is not helpful. In view of the given instruction, there existed apparent justification for appellants' trial counsel not to request, but to avoid the language of the statute. The statute is remedial and is to be construed liberally. It has been interpreted as requiring only some indirect means of discipline or influence short of actual direction to hold a 'controlling person' liable. See Hawkins v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane, 85 F.Supp. 104 (W.D.Ark.1949); Lorenz v. Watson, 258 F.Supp. 724 (E.D.Pa.1966); Geismar v. Bond & Goodwin, Inc., 40 F.Supp. 876 (S.D.N.Y. 1941). Cf. Brennan v. Midwestern United Life Ins. Co., 259 F.Supp. 673 (N.D.Ind.1966); MacClain v. Bules, 275 F.2d 431 (8 Cir. 1960); Whittaker v. Wall, 226 F.2d 868, 871-872 (8 Cir. 1955).
We are then faced with the problem whether the instruction as given was prejudicial in view of the exception appellants made at the trial. Since the language of the statute is less restrictive than the court's instruction, the statute encompasses the direction given, and no prejudice to appellant could have resulted. Cf. 3 Loss 1808-11. Furthermore, under common law principles, a principal is liable for the deceit of his agent committed in the very business he was appointed to carry out. This is true even though the latter's specific conduct was carried on without knowledge of the principal. See Oddo v. Interstate Bakeries, Inc., 271 F.2d 417, 423 (8 Cir. 1959).
The objection appellants raised is that the instruction omits as a prerequisite to liability that under the 'plan' the Levines also must know that the method to be used by the Myzels would be unlawful, relying upon common law conspiracy cases.12 However, where the evidence shows the 'controlling person' is the actual intended beneficiary of the stock purchase, 'control' under the Act does not require knowledge of the specific wrongdoing any more than a principal must know in advance of his agent's fraud. All that is required is that the controlling person 'directly or indirectly' induces the purchase. Under such circumstances, if the direct purchaser fails to disclose material information in violation of Rule 10b-5, the 'controlling person' cannot excuse himself, even under the 'good faith' clause of Section 20(a). To hold otherwise would vitiate the plain meaning of Section 20(b), that one cannot do indirectly through another what he cannot do himself. Therefore, even assuming arguendo, that there was failure to properly instruct under a civil or criminal conspiracy theory, the language of Section 20 obviates any possible prejudicial effect. Furthermore, the court not only required the Levines to know of Myzels' activities, but required 'approval' of them, before they were responsible. Such requirements are neither explicit not implicit in the Act. We think this qualified instruction adequately protected the rights of all appellants.
IV. 'INSIDER' INSTRUCTION.
The trial court charged the jury that Benn Myzel was 'an insider' as a matter of law. The court then added:
'An insider is a person who because of his position or intimate association with a corporation has greater knowledge of the financial affairs of the corporation. Because of his superior knowledge, an insider has a duty to disclose known facts not available to the plaintiffs and which he should reasonably have known would be important to the plaintiffs in determining the value of the stock which they held.'
The court also made the definition applicable to Vertelney. The definition is accurate. The problem is its necessity and applicability.
Appellants made specific objection to the charge and renew it here. It is urged that at the very least, whether Benn Myzel was an insider is a question of fact. Section 10 and its counterpart Rule 10b-5 do not relate only to 'insiders' as restrictively defined in Section 16(b) of the Act, 15 U.S.C. 78p(b). See 3 Loss 1445. Section 10(b) relates to 'any person' who uses 'manipulative or deceptive' practices. Proof of a purchaser's status as 'an insider' is, therefore, not essential to a Rule 10b-5 violation.
Of course, if Benn Myzel was acting for or on behalf of the Levines in the stock purchase, under those circumstances he was chargeable with the duties of an insider as a matter of law. See 3 Loss 1452, n. 26. The Levines, as well as Vertelney in 1953, were all directors, and therefore may be charged with a greater knowledge of the financial condition of the corporation. But whether Benn Myzel was acting for the Levines was itself a jury question. It would have been error to charge that Benn Myzel was an insider on this theory alone.
Although it has been said that construction of Rule 10b-5 'has imposed special burdens upon insiders'13 (see Cochran v. Channing Corp., 211 F.Supp. 239, 242 (S.D.N.Y.1962)), and that 'the aim of * * * Rule 10b-5 is to deter misconduct by insiders * * *' (List v. Fashion Park, Inc., supra, 340 F.2d at 463), nevertheless the expressed policy of the Act is to prevent fraud by 'any person.' Congress did not intend for courts to become lost in conclusory language, but to effectuate the desirable ends of the Act. See also Knauss, A Reappraisal of the Role of Disclosure, 62 Mich.L.Rev. 607 (1963-64); O'Neal, Close Corporations, 8.16 at 153 (1958); Fischer v. Kletz, 266 F.Supp. 180, 187-188 (S.D.N.Y.1967).
As a practical matter, the rule has been applied primarily to insiders. As stated in Kohler v. Kohler Co., supra, 319 F.2d at 642:
'Corporate insiders must scrupulously disclose to outsiders those material facts about a corporation's business which in reasonable and objective contemplation might affect the value of the corporation's stock or securities and which the insiders should reasonably believe are unknown to the outsider.'
See also Speed v. Transamerica Corp., 88 F.Supp. 808, 828-829 (D.Del.1951).
The lower court's instruction indicates that 'because of (the insider's) superior knowledge' he has a duty to disclose. This is only partially accurate. Actually, his duty arises because of Rule 10b-5. Thus, the instruction applies regardless of the status of the person charged with violation of the Act. Therefore, the objection could only relate to the court's direction that because Myzel had 'intimate association' with LPE he had, as a matter of law, 'a greater knowledge of the financial affairs' of it or had 'superior knowledge.'
But these general facts are not really disputed by appellants. Zelman Levine and Benn Myzel both described Benn as a 'financial consultant' and 'advisor' to the corporation. Zelman Levine 'constantly' talked business with Benn. When Zelman Levine was cross-examined we find ample description of the relationship:
'Q. At least from a very early time he (Benn Myzel) acted-- whether as a close friend or not-- he did act as a surety or endorser on certain obligations of L.P.E.? A. Definitely.
'Q. Almost from the very beginning of its inception? A. Yes, sir.
'Q. With respect to whether he was a close friend or not-- he was a blood relative-- and he was also at some time a business confidant? A. Definitely.
'Q. A consultant and advisor, and I assume that he intimately knew the affairs of your company? A. Yes.'14
Where facts are undisputed and the evidence is susceptible of but a single inference, the question of one's status or relationship is one of law for the court. See, e.g., Wooddale, Inc. v. Fidelity & Deposit Co. of Md., 378 F.2d 627, 630-631 (8 Cir. 1967).
Objection is made that the court's charge implies that Benn Myzel had actual knowledge of the specific misrepresented or nondisclosed financial figures, e.g., the interim financial statement of April 30, 1953. This contention is based on a misreading of the instruction. The court simply charged that Myzel had 'a duty to disclose known facts * * *' leaving to the jury determination whether or not Myzel's knowledge encompassed any of the particular facts that would be material to the appellees.
V. DAMAGES. Plaintiffs prayed for alternative relief of either recision or money damages. Upon a motion by defendants to have plaintiffs elect remedies,15 the district court ruled that the actions for recision or money damages were not inconsistent, since defendants admitted having disposed of the LPE stock involved, making its return impossible. The trial court treated the action as one at law for money damages. In their complaint and throughout the trial, the plaintiffs insisted upon their right of trial by jury, and the court, relying upon Dairy Queen, Inc. v. Wood, 369 U.S. 469, 82 S.Ct. 894, 8 L.Ed.2d 44 (1962), and Beacon Theatres, Inc. v. Westover, 359 U.S. 500, 79 S.Ct. 948, 3 L.Ed.2d 988 (1959), properly refused to strike the case from the jury docket. See Halladay v. Verschoor, 381 F.2d 100 (8 Cir. 1967); cf. also Richland v. Crandall,259 F.Supp. 274 (S.D.N.Y.1966).
The problem encountered on the damage question which bothered appellants' trial counsel, and which is again raised on appeal, was how recision and recisional damages could be determined by a jury,16 when the remedy of recision is available solely in an equitable action. Black v. Boyd, 248 F.2d 156 (6 Cir. 1957); Union Pac. R.R. Co. v. Syas, 246 F. 561 (8 Cir. 1917); Wilhelm v. Consolidated Oil Corp., 84 F.2d 739 (10 Cir. 1936); see McClintock, Equity 84 (2d. 1948). Appellees urge in reply that law and equity are fused under modern federal practice (Fed.R.Civ.P. 2) and, therefore, they have the right to disaffirm the contract and still seek damages at law. However, although legal and equitable causes have lost their procedural distinctions, and may now be joined in one action, the substantive and remedial distinctions still properly persist. See Estate Counseling Service, Inc. v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., 303 F.2d 527 (10 Cir. 1962); Bradley v. United States, 214 F.2d 5, 7 (5 Cir. 1954); Bereslavsky v. Kloeb, 162 F.2d 862, 863 (6 Cir. 1947); McClintook, supra, 20, 2 Moore, Fed. Pract. P2.02 (1966). See also SEC v. Capital Gains Research Bur., Inc., 375 U.S. 180 at 193, 84 S.Ct. 275, 11 L.Ed.2d 237. The nature of the relief sought, not the statute which creates the right, determines the legal or equitable remedy. Straley v. Universal Uranium & Milling Corp., 289 F.2d 370, 373 (9 Cir. 1961). Thus, a jury still cannot rescind a bargain, and without recision accomplished, the bargain stands in the way of restitution. But in an action at law a jury may award recisional damages if the contract has already been mutually rescined or is otherwise set aside by law. See, e.g., Lydle v. Scott, 157 F.Supp. 729 (N.D.Ohio 1957); Annot., 95 A.L.R. 1000 (1935); see also Schaefer v. Telex, Inc., 132 F.Supp. 140, (D.Minn.1955). Here, neither the jury nor the court was required to rescind the agreement, Section 29(b) of the statute itself declares the sale void, once there is found a violation of Rule 10b-5. 15 U.S.C. 78cc(b); cf. Goodell v. Accumulative Income Corp., 185 Minn. 213, 240 N.W. 534 (1932). If the contract was void as a matter of law, the plaintiff was entitled to restitution of what he sold, or, since restoration of the stock was here impossible, an equivalent money judgment. The law is well settled that 'where an action is simply for the recovery and possession of specific real or personal property, or for the recovery of a money judgment, the action is one at law.' Whitehead v. Shattuck, 138 U.S. 146, 151, 11 S.Ct. 276, 277, 34 L.Ed. 873 (1891); 3 Loss 1851. See Halladay v. Verschoor, supra; cf. Blazer v. Black, 196 F.2d 139 (10 Cir. 1952).17
Appellants also argue that they were entitled to the equitable defense of laches, an issue upon which neither the judge nor the jury passed. However, the doctrine of laches is not applicable where the action was properly tried at law to a jury. See Straley v. Universal Uranium & Milling Corp., 289 F.2d 370 (9 Cir. 1961). The applicable measure of the timeliness of the suit was the Minnesota statute of limitations, and the trial judge correctly instructed on that basis. See Holmberg v. Armbrecht, 327 U.S. 392, 395, 66 S.Ct. 582, 584, 90 L.Ed. 743 (1946), wherein it is said:
'As to actions at law, the silence of Congress has been interpreted to mean that it is federal policy to adopt the local law of limitation.'
The fact that plaintiffs' original prayer was for recision or for damages in the alternative would not change the applicability of the state limitations statute as opposed to laches. See Cope v. Anderson, 331 U.S. 461, 463-464, 67 S.Ct. 1340, 91 L.Ed. 1602 (1947); Lydle v. Scott, D.C., 157 F.Supp. 729; 3 Loss 1772-1773.
Recision calls for cancellation of the bargain, and the return of the parties to the status quo ante; where this is impossible because of the disposal or retirement of the stock, then equivalent value of the stock at the time of resale (cf. In re Liebig, 2 Cir., 255 F. 458 (1918)) or at the time of judgment (cf. Strong v. Repide, supra, 213 U.S. at 421-422, 29 S.Ct. 521), should be the proper measure of damage.18
But where there exists no market value of the stock, the stock is no longer in existence, and there clearly has been a fluctuation in value since the time of the original sale, then what restitutional damages are to be awarded must depend upon the facts of the particular case. As stated in the Restatement of Restitution 151:
'Where a person is entitled to a money judgment against another because by fraud, duress or other consciously tortious conduct the other has acquired, retained or disposed of his property, the measure of recovery for the benefit received by the other is the value of the property at the time of its improper acquisition, retention or disposition, or a higher value if this is required to avoid injustice where the property has fluctuated in value or additions have been made to it.'19
See also Restatement of Restitution 65 and illustrations 17 and 18.
The Levines converted each share of LPE into 1,000 shares of Lakeside Industries, Inc. (LII) in 1961. The market price of LII was $9 per share when originally issued for public sale in 1962. If the highest restitutional damage had been allowed on the basis of market price at the time of the notice of the conversion, Vertelney's verdict could have been $900,000; Cohen's verdict, $450,000; and King and Fields could have recovered $270,000 each. The book value of LII stock at the time of public sale in 1962 was, according to appellants' evidence, $1.53 per share. The actual value found by the jury for damages shows that Vertelney received $2.12 per share of LII; Cohen, $2.125 per share of LII; Fields, $2.266 of LII per share; and King, $1.533 per share of LII. We refuse to speculate on the reasons for the variances in the valuations awarded. Approximation is all that is necessary. Palmer v. Connecticut Ry. & Lighting Co., 311 U.S. 544, 61 S.Ct. 379, 85 L.Ed. 336 (1941); see also American Fire Apparatus Co. v. NLRB, 380 F.2d 1005 (8 Cir. 1967). Since the awards are well within the provable damages possible we cannot agree with appellants' contention of excessive damages.
Appellants claimed at trial that appellees had positively elected to affirm the contract by seeking a jury trial and thereby had limited their recovery to damages at law based upon the 'out of pocket' measure governing actions for tortious deceit. As we have observed, this supposition was not correct. Nevertheless, the trial court informed counsel that since the stock could not be returned he was treating the action as one for money damages.20 We think it is clear that the court disregarded appellees' claim for recisional damages and instructed the jury in terms of tort damages as applicable to property of undetermined, fluctuating value.
The court's instructions effectively (for the facts at hand) combine forms of recovery which are encompassed in several possible legal theories: deceit, conversation by fraud, money had and received and unjust enrichment (quasi-contractual obligation lying in assumpsit at common law.)21 Yet the court instructed upon the tort concept that to be recoverable the damages must be proximately caused by the defendants.22
The court told the jury23 (1) that the least amount that could be recovered would be 'the difference between the selling price of the stock and the actual value of the stock when sold.' This, of course, is similar to the traditional 'out of pocket' theory of damages recoverable for deceit. A party may seek this as his measure of damage rather than rescind where the stock has depreciated in value or the wrondoer has later sold the stock at a loss. See 3 Loss 1793. Since the stock increased rather than decreased in value, this measure of damage was actually contra to appellees' interest in full restitution. We fail to see any prejudice to appellants under this part of the instruction. (2) A higher amount could be recovered if the jury found that upon full disclosure the plaintiffs would nevertheless have sold to defendants, but at a higher price. Then the measure of the damages would be the difference between what they actually received and the higher price. (3) And finally, if the jury found that the plaintiffs, upon a complete disclosure, would have retained the stock, then the jury could consider 'the subsequent increases in the value of the stock over * * * a reasonable period.'
Appellants' specific exceptions at the time of the trial were directed to the court's allowing the jury to determine the actual value at the time of sale by considering the subsequent history of the company for a reasonable time after the sale. Appellants argued that the court had failed to state any limitation as to what 'a reasonable time' period included, and further urged that there was no evidence of any events occurring after the sale which would have a bearing on the value at the time of the sale.
The 'out of pocket' theory is the measure of damages early adopted in pre-Erie Federal cases involving fraud and deceit. See, e.g., Smith v. Bolles, 132 U.S. 125, 10 S.Ct. 39, 33 L.Ed. 279 (1889); Sigafus v. Porter,179 U.S. 116, 21 S.Ct. 34, 45 L.Ed. 113 (1900); Towle v. Maxwell Motor Sales Corp., 26 F.2d 209 (8 Cir. 1928). However, where fungibles such as corporate stock have no ready market value and actually fluctuate in value, different measures or modified versions of the same theory become more appropriate. Galigher v. Jones, 129 U.S. 193, 200, 9 S.Ct. 335, 32 L.Ed. 658 (1889); In re Salmon Weed & Co., 53 F.2d 335, 340-343 (2 Cir. 1931). As stated in Hawkins v. Mellis, Pirie & Co., 127 Minn. 393, 149 N.W. 663, 664 (1914):
'When stock in a corporation has not figured in the markets, and there have been no sales or dealings therein, its actual value must be determined at the fair price which a person who desires to buy would be willing to pay, taking into consideration the original capital, how far there has been profit or loss in the business carried on, the assets and liabilities, the future prospects, and everything that goes to affect the value of the shares of stock.'24
Actually, damage for tortious conversion by deceit provides a comparable legal remedy. Roehrich v. Holt Motor Co., 201 Minn. 586, 277 N.W. 274 (1938); Holland v. Bishop, 60 Minn. 23, 61 N.W. 681 (1895); In re Franklin Saving & Loan Co., 34 F.Supp. 585 (E.D.Tenn.1940); Annot., 95 A.L.R. 615 (1935); 89 C.J.S. Trover & Conversion 41. Cf. Nephi Processing Plant, Inc. v. Talbott, 247 F.2d 771 (10 Cir. 1957). The federal courts have historically approved a rule of damages for conversion of stock measured by the price at the time of conversion or the highest intermediate value reached within a reasonable time after notice of the conversion by the plaintiff,25 whichever is greater. In Galigher v. Jones, supra, 129 U.S. at 200, 9 S.Ct. at 337, the Supreme Court said:
'Other goods wrongfully converted are generally supposed to have a fixed market value at which they can be replaced at any time; and hence, with regard to them, the ordinary measure of damages is their value at the time of conversion, or, in case of sale and purchase, at the time fixed for their delivery. But the application of this rule to stocks would, as before said, be very inadequate and unjust.'
In SEC v. Capital Gains Research Bur., Inc., 375 U.S. 180, 194, 84 S.Ct. 275, 11 L.Ed.2d 237 (1963), the Court commented:
'There has also been a growing recognition by common-law courts that the doctrines of fraud and deceit which developed around transactions involving land and other tangible items of wealth are ill-suited to the sale of such intangibles as advice and securities, and that, accordingly, the doctrines must be adopted to the merchandise in issue.'
In Janigan v. Taylor, 344 F.2d 781 (1 Cir. 1965), the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit faced a similar problem of damages where the seller of securities was the party defrauded. As Chief Judge Aldrich realistically points out, in such an instance justice required that the 'out of pocket' theory reflect future accretions.26 Cf. Staker v. Reese, 82 W.Va. 764, 97 S.E. 641, 646. But appellants urge the Janigan rule has its limitations, where the wrongdoer himself creatively contributes to the value of the property, such as an artist who paints a valuable picture with wrongfully acquired paints. However, such factors are not any more present here than in Janigan. As in the latter case, the appellants all functioned as directors and salaried officers of their respective corporations in building up the business of LPE. It is argued that 'extraordinary contributions' were made by the Levines, such as their personal guaranties on bank loans for working capital and their introduction of new lines of business. But these are not totally unforeseeable in the growth of a closely held corporation. But foreseeable or not, as stated by the court in the Janigan case:
'If the property is not bought from, but sold to the fraudulent party, future accretions not foreseeable at the time of the transfer even on the true facts, and hence speculative, are subject to another factor, viz., that they accrued to the fraudulent party. It may, as in the case at bar, be entirely speculative whether, had plaintiffs not sold, the series of fortunate occurrences would have happened in the same way, and to their same profit. However, there can be no speculation but that the defendant actually made the profit and, once it is found that he acquired the property by fraud, that the profit was the proximate consequence of the fraud, whether foreseeable or not. It is more appropriate to give the defrauded party the benefit even of windfalls than to let the fraudulent party keep them.' 344 F.2d at 786.
It is also argued by appellants that the Janigan theory is solely an equitable remedy for accounting27 similar to the theory of constructive trusts. Cf. Marcus v. Otis, 168 F.2d 649 (2 Cir. 1948). The objection raised is that 'conscious wrongdoing' must be involved and that none exists here. Appellants contend, therefore, that damages for innocent non-disclosure do not extend to accretional value but only to 'out of pocket' losses. The same argument can traditionally apply to cases of innocent conversion. See Restatement of Restitution 154, 155, 203.
But there exists no apparent reason to apply different rules of damage to different violations under the Act. The act of nondisclosure is the evil proscribed, not the motive that induced it. Appellants' argument fails to consider that the common law concept of fraud under the security laws has now been enlarged under Rule 10b-5 to include even innocent nondisclosures which may amount to manipulative or deceptive conduct. See Ellis v. Carter, 291 F.2d 270 (9 Cir. 1961); Dale v. Rosenfeld, 229 F.2d 855 (2 Cir. 1956); compare S.E.C. v. Capital Gains Research Bur., Inc., 375 U.S. 180, 200, 84 S.Ct. 275, 11 L.Ed.2d 237 (1963). Such conduct is prohibited within the definition of Rule 10b-5. The violation of the rule connotes 'unfairness' or 'wrongdoing.' And as the Supreme Court said in SEC v. Capital Gains Research Bur., Inc., supra, 375 U.S. at 195, 84 S.Ct. at 284:
'Congress intended the investment Advisers Act of 1940 to be construed like other securities legislation 'enacted for the purpose of avoiding frauds,' not technically and restrictively, but flexibly to effectuate its remedial purposes.'
However such arguments may run, they are to no avail here. We have previously observed in discussing 'scienter' that the trial court required the jury to find that the 'manipulative or deceptive' conduct consisting of misrepresentation or nondisclosures under Rule 10b-5 be done with the 'intent of inducing' the sale. This sufficiently refutes appellants' contention that there was no finding of 'conscious wrongdoing.'
Complaint was made of the trial court's cautionary instruction directing the jury not to consider the financial condition of LPS unless the relationship of LPS and LPE was found to bear upon the determination of the value of the LPE stock. Consideration of (1) the total business interdependence of the two companies, (2) the valid inference of participation in the fraud by LPS and its alter egos, William and Orrin Levine, (3) the use of LPS as a conduit of the fraudulent drive for total ownership, (4) the use of LPE funds to pay Benn Myzel for LPE stock transferred to LPS, (5) the exclusive sales arrangement between LPE and LPS and (6) the ultimate 'gratuitous' division of LPS and LPE among the Levines, demonstrates that the companies could have sufficient 'relationship' to one another to affect value of the LPE stock not only in 1953 but in subsequent years as well. And although we are dealing with an instruction, appropriate is our observation that relevancy of evidence is a matter upon which the discretion of the trial judge will remain undisturbed absent clear finding of abuse. Frohmann v. United States, 380 F.2d 832 (8 Cir. 1967); Cotton v. United States, 361 F.2d 673 (8 Cir. 1966).
Appellants final attack on the damage instruction urges that the Securities Exchange Act, 28(a), 15 U.S.C. 78bb(a), provides and also limits recovery to 'actual damages' as follows:
'No person permitted to maintain a suit for damages under the provisions of this chapter shall recover * * * a total amount in excess of his actual damages on account of the act complained of.'
However, we feel the only effect of this provision is to prohibit punitive damages, which otherwise might be available in some states in civil actions under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. See 3 Loss 1624; see also, Pappas v. Moss, 257 F.Supp. 345 (DN.J.1966); Meisel v. North Jersey Trust Co. of Ridgewood, New Jersey, 216 F.Supp. 469 (S.D.N.Y.1963); Mills v. Sarjem Corp., 133 F.Supp. 753, 770 (D.N.J.1955). Express civil relief is not provided under Section 10(b) or Rule 10b-5, notwithstanding the long existence of section 28(a).28 Nevertheless federal law provides a remedy. Cf. J.I. Case Co. v. Borak, 377 U.S. 426, 84 S.Ct. 1555, 12 L.Ed.2d 423 (1964). In Kohler v. Kohler Co., 208 F.Supp. 808, 825 (E.D.Wis.1962), aff'd 319 F.2d 634, 7 A.L.R.3d 486 (7 Cir. 1963) (relying upon 'buyer' cases); and Estate Counseling Service, Inc. v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., 303 F.2d 527, 533 (10 Cir. 1962) (a 'buyer' case) it was stated that the term 'actual damages' limits recovery to the 'out of pocket' measure. We feel that the philosophy of Janigan v. Taylor, supra, 344 F.2d at 786-787, is more suitable as reflecting an approach to damages involving defrauded sellers and in no way violative of Section 28(a). It is not 'punitive' to award a plaintiff the equivalent value of his stock, where the jury finds that with full disclosure he would have retained it until the higher price gained by the wrongdoer was reached. This is 'the antithesis of punishment.' Compare Sunbeam Corp. v. Golden Rule Appliance Co., 252 F.2d 467 (2 Cir. 1958). See Speed v. Transamerica Corp., 135 F.Supp. 176, 186-194 (D.Del.1955), modified on other grounds, 235 F.2d 369 (3 Cir. 1956).
Although the trial court fashioned and submitted to the jury a remedy for the particular facts, we fail to see any prejudice to appellants. The damages given essentially reflect a proper measure of damages for deceit based upon an unknown fluctuating value of stock of a closed corporation under the particular circumstances surrounding the case. The trial court was faced with great difficulty in instructing upon these issues and did an excellent job. His approach on instructions was fair to the appellants under the circumstances prevailing.
VI. THE SUCCESSOR CORPORATION. In December 1961 the four Levines transferred all their holdings of LPS stock to LPE. Lakeside Properties, Inc. (LPI), a subsidiary of LPS, transferred the 640 shares of LPE stock to LPE at the time LPI was merged with LPE. The merger company was renamed Lakeside Industries, Inc., a Minnesota corporation, and subsequently a new Delaware corporation of the same name, Lakeside Industries, Inc., became the successor of the merged company. It was at this time that the Levines exchanged their 500 shares of the merged corporation's stock for 500,000 shares of common stock of LII, the currently existing Delaware corporation.
Appellants urge that the newly organized corporation is not liable as a successor corporation, since (1) LPE did not itself receive anything of value in the stock exchanges, (2) if any fraud existed, the corporation itself was a victim, since corporate funds were used in purchasing the corporation's stock for the officer's own benefit, and (3) to impose liability on the new corporation would prejudice the rights of bona fide public stockholders.
The corporation laws of Minnesota provide:
'Liabilities not affected. The liabilities of the constituent corporations or of their shareholders, directors, or officers, shall not be affected nor shall the rights of creditors or of any persons dealing with such corporations be impaired by the consolidation or merger, and any claim existing or action or proceeding pending by or against any of such constituent corporations may be prosecuted to judgment as if such consolidation or merger had not taken place, or the consolidated or surviving corporation may be proceeded against or substituted in its place.' M.S.A. 301.45(1) (1945).
The fact that bona fide public stockholders might indirectly be prejudiced by the corporation's payment of indebtedness incurred by a predecessor corporation is not persuasive. Stock-holders are presumed to invest with knowledge of proper corporate liabilities. If any harm exists by reason of the corporation's legal liabilities wrongfully caused by its officers or directors, such damage can be corrected through proper proceedings.
Appellees posited their case upon a 'plan' by appellants to get sole control of LPE by 100% Ownership of stock. The jury accepted this theory of the case. In so doing, it considered evidence that LPS acquired part of the stock with monies paid by LPE. LPS carried the stock as assets. LPE eventually gained possession of its own stock and upon the vote of the only other holders of stock, the Levines, this stock was retired. It is well settled that acts of managing officers or directors constitute 'business * * * of the corporation, though unauthorized by its charter.' See Ballantine, Corporations 111 at 273 (Rev.ed. 1946). Thus, any deceit practiced by the corporation's officers or agents acting on behalf of the corporation, even though ultra vires, binds the corporation. See Brennan v. Midwestern United Life Ins. Co., 259 F.Supp. 673, 681 (N.D.Ind.1966).
And, in an action for tortious damage, the fact that LPE retired the treasury shares rather than selling them is immaterial. It has long been held that a party is responsible for tortious wrongdoing though, as perpetrator thereof, he realized no benefit from it. See James-Dickinson Farm Mtg. Co. v. Harry, 273 U.S. 119, 123, 47 S.Ct. 308, 71 L.Ed. 569 (1926). The same rule has been upheld in Rule 10b-5 cases. See e.g., Fischer v. Kletz, 266 F.Supp. 180, 187-188 (S.D.N.Y.1967).
VII. GOLDFINE AND ROSE TRANSACTIONS. Objection is made as to the relevancy of Zelman Levine's purchase, through Benn Myzel, of Ida Goldfine's stock and LPS's acquisition, again through Benn, of Maurice Rose's stock. We have examined these transactions and find that they could be relevant to the entire picture involved. The admitted undisclosed control of Myzel by Zelma Levine in dealing with the Goldfine stock could properly aid in weighing the credibility of the Levines' denial of control of Myzel in dealing with appellees. The jury disbelieved that denial. The Goldfine and Rose transactions give credible support to the accepted inference of undisclosed control throughout all the transactions. The evidence again is well confined within the discretionary finding of relevancy by the trial judge. Frohmann v. United States, 380 F.2d 832 (8 Cir. 1967).
Many of the questions presented upon this appeal turned upon the sufficiency of the evidence to support the verdict. Appellees, therefore, submitted a supplemental printed record consisting of 583 pages. Appellees also moved for a dismissal of the appeal or at least that the scope of review be limited because of the alleged inadequacy of the appellants' printed record. Cf. Sublette v. Servel, Inc., 124 F.2d 516 (8 Cir. 1942). However, very little of the supplemental record was of help to the court in deciding the case. Under the circumstances our rules (Eighth Circuit Rule 10(c)) provide a means to amend or supplement the record when necessary. Cooperation of counsel in this regard should not be a problem. We feel counsel for appellants were in good faith in preparation of the original record. The great majority of the supplemental record is superfluous and violative of our Rule 10(c). Under the circumstances, we hold that appellees' costs for preparation of the supplemental record should not be taxed against the appellants. See Milwaukee Ins. Co. v. Kogen, 240 F.2d 613, 618 n. 2 (8 Cir. 1957).
Plaintiff Rita Vertelney is suing in her capacity as special administratrix for the estate of her deceased husband, Joseph, who was originally a plaintiff
See Rosen v. Albern Color Research, Inc., 218 F.Supp. 473 (E.D.Pa.1963). The Rosen case relies upon Northern Trust Co. v. Essaness Theatres Corp., 103 F.Supp. 954 at 964 (N.D.Ill.1952), wherein the district court states:
'The purpose of Section 17(a) of the 1933 Act and Section 10(b) of the 1934 Act are similar and the phraseology employed is substantially similar.'
Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, 15 U.S.C. 77q(a), provides in part:
'It shall be unlawful for any person in the offer or sale of any securities by the use of any means or instruments of transportation or communication in interstate commerce or by the use of the mails, directly or indirectly * * *.'
Judge Kraft in the Rosen opinion reasons that it is the interstate communication which is the essence of the offense. Despite the similarity there is a crucial omission from 10(b) of the 17(a) requirement that there be a communication in interstate commerce; the requirement of 10(b) is 'by the use of any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce.' The legislative history does not serve to explain the difference in the wording of the two statutes. As we indicated in Little v. United States, 331 F.2d 287, 292-293 (8 Cir. 1964), the use of the mails is not the gist of the offense:
'That the scheme to defraud is the evil intended to be controlled and remedied by passage of the Securities Act, supra, cannot be in doubt. * * *'
See also Creswell-Keith, Inc. v. Willingham, 264 F.2d 76, 80, 82 (8 Cir. 1959). All the other sections of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 incorporate similar language, as does the Act controlling investment companies, 15 U.S.C. 80a-1 et seq. In each case the language reads 'use of the mails and means and instrumentalities of interstate commerce.' The Supreme Court when faced with an analogous argument under Section 605 of the Communications Act of 1934, 47 U.S.C. 605, stated:
'In making the alterations in the phraseology of the similar section of the earlier act the Congress must have had some purpose.' Weiss v. United States, 308 U.S. 321, 329, 60 S.Ct. 269, 272, 84 L.Ed. 298 (1939).
In Pereira v. United States, 347 U.S. 1, 8-9, 74 S.Ct. 358, 363, 98 L.Ed. 435 (1954) the Supreme Court said:
'Where one does an act with knowledge that the use of the mails will follow in the ordinary course of business, or where such use can reasonably be foreseen, even though not actually intended, then he 'causes' the mails to be used.'
In ruling on post-verdict motions, the trial court made this practical observation:
'The last eight month period covers the period of three of the stock purchases, September to December, 1953. The figures in the four month interim statement were tentative and not final. The practice of many companies assuming the available information indicates a profitable year, is to make any number of year end adjustments to reduce profits and thus reduce income taxes which must be paid in cash. The record indicates that this was done here. Defendants' repeated contention that the last eight months produced a net loss of $10,000 is not in accord with the facts or business practice.' R. 904.
See also O'Neal & Derwin, Expulsion or Oppression of business Associates: 'Squeeze-Out' in Small Enterprises, c. 5 (1961).
It was acknowledged that in an undisclosed purchase of the Goldfine stock, discussed infra, for Zelman Levine, Benn was paid a $452 commission in 1957
Judge Larson instructed that the appellees must prove:
'That the defendants, or some of them, did use or employ manipulative or deceptive conduct in buying the plaintiffs' stock. More specifically, (a) that they made an untrue statement of a material fact; or (b) that they omitted to state a material fact which was necessary to prevent statements they did make from being misleading; or (c) that they failed to disclose a known fact which was not available to the plaintiffs and which they should reasonably have known would be important to the plaintiffs in determining the value of the stock which the plaintiffs held.'
Subsection (c) of the court's instruction seemingly goes beyond subsection (2) of Rule 10b-5. No issue is raised by appellants whether nondisclosures to be actionable under Rule 10b-5 must of 'necessity' be related to affirmative statements. Unless subsection (3) of the rule encompasses bare nondisclosed facts, this requirement may be necessary to qualify nondisclosures as manipulative or deceptive under Section 10. Compare 3 Loss 1766. On the other hand, material nondisclosures without accompanying statements have been held actionable; see e.g. Cady, Robert & Co., 40 S.E.C. 907, 913, and discussion thereof in 52 Iowa L.Rev. 777, 781 (1967).
The court instructed the jury that appellees, in order to recover, must prove:
'That the misrepresentations or omissions, if any, (must be) concerned or related to a material fact or facts. A fact or omission of fact is material if it concerns something that a reasonable man would consider important in deciding what he should do in a particular transaction.'
The trial court instructed in these terms:
'Statements about the future growth and development of a company are classed as opinions or facts, depending upon the circumstances under which they were made. No recovery may be based on an expression of opinion by the defendants unless the opinion was completely unfounded and reckless, or unless it was deliberately intended to be misleading. The plaintiffs can also recover if you believe that the defendants gave any definite opinions or assurances about the future which they thought were false when they made them.'
As a prerequisite to recovery, the trial court instructed the jury:
'That the plaintiffs (must have) relied on the alleged misrepresentation or omission. There is reliance by a plaintiff if the claimed wrongful conduct was or would be a substantial factor in determining the course of conduct which resulted in the claimed loss.'
However, such a generalization does not apply where, for example, one director has exclusive knowledge of facts affecting the value of the stock. See Janigan v. Taylor, supra, 344 F.2d at 785; Nemitz v. Cunny, 221 F.Supp. 571, 575 (N.D.Ill.1963); cf. Staker v. Reese, 82 W.Va. 764, 97 S.E. 641. See also the discussion of the 'special facts' rule in 52 Iowa L.Rev. 777 (1967)
There is some doubt whether a responsible role was given to other directors of LPE by the Levines. Zelman Levine stated that stockholders who were 'troublemakers' were often put on the board simply to keep them quiet
However, it is well settled even under civil or criminal conspiracy that one who knowingly joins a conspiracy even at a later date takes the conspiracy as he finds it, with or without knowledge of what has gone on before. Cf. Nassif v. United States, 370 F.2d 147 (8 Cir. 1966)
At common law, the courts were divided on the issue whether an 'insider' had a fiduciary duty of disclosure in the purchase of stock of his corporation. See 3 Loss 1446
Counsel for the Levines stated in his closing argument:
'Zelman confided in Benn on business matters affecting the company, and Benn became * * * the confidant of Zelman Levine in business matters. * * *
'Zelman relied upon Benn's advice in company matters. They were first cousins. They were personal friends. They were business friends.'
Whereas, in federal diversity cases, although the doctrine of election of remedies is considered procedural, if choice of remedies affects the outcome of the litigation it has been held that state law controls. See Berger v. State Farm Mutual Auto Ins. Co., 291 F.2d 666 (10 Cir. 1961). However, in actions premised upon a federal right, federal law is controlling. J. I. Case Co. v. Borak, 377 U.S. 426, 84 S.Ct. 1555, 12 L.Ed.2d 423 (1964). Rule 8 of the Fed.R.Civ.P. allows pleading 'relief in the alternative or of several different types * * *' and 'separate claims * * * regardless of consistency and whether based on legal, equitable, or maritime grounds.'
But the pragmatic concept of federal pleading does not abandon the doctrine of election of remedies altogether. When it becomes prejudicial to the defendant to allow plaintiff to pursue inconsistent forms of relief, the doctrine is still applied. Nakdimen v. Baker, 100 F.2d 195, 196-197 (8 Cir. 1938); Abdallah v. Abdallah, 359 F.2d 170, 175 (3 Cir. 1966).
During the trial appellees urged that although they sought recision of the contract they were not required to make an election. The rule followed in both federal and state proceedings is that a party upon notice of the grounds of recision must immediately elect to affirm or deny the contract. Estate Counseling Service, Inc. v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., 303 F.2d 527 (10 Cir. 1962); see also Albert v. Kopplin Molding Corp., 247 F.2d 107 (8 Cir. 1957); Annot., 1 A.L.R.2d 1084, 1085 (1948). There are practical reasons why he should not be able to do both. The logic of this rule is particularly compelling when the property in dispute consists of stocks or fungibles of fluctuating value. A party could otherwise sit back without notification to the wrongdoer and, within the allowable period to sue, watch the market go up or down, thereby speculating on the success or value at the total risk of the wrongdoer. If the market went up, he would ultimately rescind at the time of the trial and seek the stock or its equivalent high value. If the market went down, he would later choose to affirm and sue for its higher value under a theory of tortious conversion. Although the law does not favor a wrongdoer, neither does it promote speculative damages at his expense.
Yet, such election is based upon an equitable choice, and is not so harsh as to prevent a party from later asserting an alternative inconsistent ground, where under mistake of fact or law, the elected theory is no longer available. See Inland Waterways Corp. v. Doyle, 204 F.2d 874 (8 Cir. 1953); cf. Friederichsen v. Renard, 247 U.S. 207, 38 S.Ct. 450, 62 L.Ed. 1075 (1918).
See Sylvania Indus. Corp. v. Lilienfeld's Estate, 132 F.2d 887 (4 Cir. 1943), holding that an action for 'recision' and one for 'money damages' were inconsistent. However, treating 'money damages' in the case before us as recisional damages (since the stock was nonexistent), it is easy to reconcile the statement of Judge Nordbye, who ruled on the pretrial motion to elect, that the two prayers are not inconsistent
Appellant relies on Judge Cardoza's statement in Falk v. Hoffman, 233 N.Y. 199, 201, 135 N.E. 243, 244:
'Suing at law, the plaintiff would be restricted to the value of his shares, if the rescinded (Rothschild v. Mack, 115 N.Y. 1, 8, 21 N.E. 726), or to the difference between the value and par (the amount paid to him by the defendants), if he affirmed (Reno v. Bull, 226 N.Y. 546, 124 N.E. 144). Suing in equity, he may reach the proceeds of the resale, securities and cash, though the price upon resale is found to be greater than the value. * * *'
The Rothschild case actually refutes appellants' position that recisional damages can only be obtained in equity. It involves the common law theory of waiving the tort and suing in assumpsit at law. This approach blends into the concept of electing to affirm the contract, suing for damages thereon, or disaffirming it and seeking recisional value. As we have previously discussed, such an election is still recognized (see also Mr. Justice Black's dissent in Prima Paint Corp. v. Flood & Conklin Mfg. Co., 388 U.S. 395, 87 S.Ct. 1801, 18 L.Ed.2d 1270 (1967)), although in modern federal pleading we do not concern ourselves with forms of action. Fed.R.Civ.P. 2.
The reason equitable powers of the court are sometimes needed, is, as illustrated in Falk v. Hoffman, the desire to trace or reach the proceeds, consisting of other securities as well as cash, obtained upon resale of plaintiff's stock. Such equitable relief could not have been obtained by a money judgment alone.
See Barnes v. Eastern & Western Lumber Co., 205 Or. 553, 287 P.2d 929, for an interesting parallel situation involving the kind of relief available under similar circumstances. The Supreme Court of Oregon refused to recognize plaintiff's claim of recision since the corporation in which the stock was involved had been dissolved. The court held under such circumstances recision was impossible. The court affirmed a restitutional basis of recovery on quasi-contractual principles, although recognizing that the action was not one at law for money damages, without consideration that recisional damages might be awarded as the equivalent of the return in specie of the stock
Restatement of Restitution 151, comment c:
'Where the subject matter is of fluctuating value, and where the person deprived of it might have secured a higher amount for it had he not been so deprived, justice to him may require that the measure of recovery be more than the value at the time of deprivation. This is true where the recipient knowingly deprived the owner of his property or where a fiduciary in violation of his duty used the property of the beneficiary for his own benefit. In such cases the person deprived is entitled to be put in substantially the position in which he would have been had there not been the deprivation, and this may result in granting to him an amount equal to the highest value reached by the subject matter within a reasonable time after the tortious conduct. This is done if he can prove that he probably would have made a sale while the subject matter was at its highest point in value.'
The court indicated to counsel that his instruction:
'* * * won't be the usual tort rule, because it will not be the out-of-pocket rule, and it will not be limited to the time of the sale. In other words, I'm going to tell the jury, I think, that they may consider all the evidence as to damages which follows the date of sale. They may consider that in determining value.
'Now maybe this is going to get close to a rescissional measure of damages, but I'm not going to put it in those terms. Now I may to some extent be going beyond a reasonable time, too. But I have in mind going beyond the usual damage instruction where we talk about damages must be determined to a reasonable certainty even though they can't be determined to an absolute certainty. They can reject speculation and conjecture. And the usual instruction, too that they can assess damages which are the natural, direct, and proximate result of the alleged wrong.'
An essential difference is to be found in all the theories in common law actions involving fraud. The problem generally faced is whether the awarded relief should be joint and several or several only. Cf. Barnes v. Eastern & Western Lumber Co., 205 Or. 553, 287 P.2d 929, 948, 956 (1955). Thus an action for money had and received or for unjust enrichment differs at common law from tortious conversion primarily on the basis that all the defendants may be held jointly liable in tort, while only those who have benefited are liable, and then only to the extent thereof, in an action for unjust enrichment. Restatement of Restitution 5, comments (a) and (b) (1937). But, in the present case this distinction cannot be considered prejudicial for several reasons, most important of which is that the appellants insisted at the trial on treating the action as one for tortious damages, which involves joint and several liabilities regardless of benefit gained
Although recision is sought as relief, it has been properly observed that an action, under Rule 10b-5 lies in tort and not on contractual grounds. Crist v. United Underwriters, Ltd., 343 F.2d 902 (10 Cir. 1965). Yet some commentators suggest that if recision alone is sought, problems of 'privity' may still apply. See Painter, Inside Information: Growing Pains for the Development of Federal Corporation Law Under Rule 10b-5, 65 Colum.L.Rev. 1361, 1376 n. 56 (1965). See excellent discussion concerning problems in recision in Rule 10b-5 cases in Comment, Private Remedies Available Under Rule 10b-5, 20 Sw.L.J. 620, 625-26 (1966)
'The general rule of damages is that the seller of stock is entitled to recover the difference between the actual value of the stock at the time it is sold and the price the seller, or plaintiff or plaintiffs here, sold that stock for. The actual value of the stock at the time it is sold is not necessarily determined by its value at the time of the sale, but may be determined in the light of all the circumstances, including the subsequent history of Lakeside Plastics & Engraving Company.
'If a plaintiff is entitled to damages, he is entitled to recover all the damages which the defendants' conduct has actually caused him.
'As I have suggested, the least amount to which a plaintiff may be entitled is the difference between the selling price of the stock and the actual value of the stock when sold. I have suggested also that you may consider the subsequent history of the company in determining this actual value.
'In determining whether the plaintiffs are entitled to any greater amount, you must decide what the plaintiffs would have done with their stock if there had been no misconduct on the part of the defendants. That is, you must determine the extent to which the defendants' conduct can be said to have been the proximate cause of plaintiffs' claimed losses.
'If you believe that upon full disclosure the plaintiffs, or any of them, would merely have sold their stock at a higher price, then the measure of their damages is the difference between what they received and the higher price.
'In determining what would have happened, you should consider whether the defendants would have paid a higher price, what the future outlook of the business really looked like to an investor at that time or within a reasonable time thereafter, and whether the plaintiffs had any investment opportunities which they thought might be more profitable.
'In other words, you must determine whether, if the claimed misrepresentations had not been made, the plaintiffs would have retained their stock to share in the possible future growth of the company.
'If you believe that the net result of full disclosure would have been that a plaintiff would have retained his stock as an investment rather than selling it to defendants at a higher price, you should consider the subsequent increases in the value of the stock over what you consider a reasonable period as part of the losses of a plaintiff which he is entitled to recover.
'What constitutes a reasonable period is for you to determine upon all the facts of this case. You should bear in mind that the statute is not intended to provide investors with an insurance policy against market changes. It does, however, seek to prevent those who have engaged in fraudulent or illegal conduct from benefiting by that conduct.'
See O'Neale & Derwin, op. cit. 2.16 at 35, where the problem of valuation of an interest in a closed corporation is appraised. As part of the damage instruction, the trial judge told the jury:
'The company stock was until the spring of 1962 closely held by a limited number of individuals. The stock was not traded publicly and there seems to have been no market for it prior to the spring of 1962 over-the-counter or otherwise.
'In determining the actual value of stock which is not traded publicly, there are a number of factors for you to consider. You may consider, among other factors, the following:
'1. The current net worth or book value of the stock per share at the time of the sale and for a reasonable time thereafter.
'2. The past and current record of growth or lack of growth of sales, net worth and earnings. Have the company's sales, net worth and earnings been increasing over the years or has the company been in continual financial difficulty.
'3. The prospects of the company for a reasonable time in the future from the time of the sale of the stock of increased sales and net worth and earnings.
'4. The past dividend record and the prospects for dividends for a reasonable time in the future from the time of the sale of the stock.
'5. The particular products which the company manufactured or sold at the time of the sale and for a reasonable time thereafter.
'6. The nature of the competition which the company had in the market at the time of sale and for a reasonable time thereafter.
'7. The skill of the management at the time of the sale of the stock, and for a reasonable time thereafter. In weighing these factors, you should consider the purposes for which the stock might be purchased or retained by a plaintiff as an investor.'
In cases where defendant is plaintiff's broker or agent, different considerations may arise. In McKinley v. Williams, 74 F. 94 (8 Cir. 1896), this court held the proper measure of damages to be the highest value which stock has reached between the date of conversion and reasonable time after notice of it, even though the higher value was reached before notice. This rule is criticized in In re Salmon Weed & Co., 53 F.2d 335 (2 Cir. 1931), in which recovery was limited to the value at the time of the conversion or the highest intermediate value reached between the time of notice of the conversion and a reasonable time after notice. See also Satterwhite v. Harriman Nat'l Bank & Trust Co., 13 F.Supp. 493 (S.D.N.Y.1935); 11 Fletcher, Cycl. Corp. 5117 (1958)
See Restatement of Restitution 151, illustration 3, where it is stated:
'By fraud as to his financial condition, A purchases shares from B on January first, the market value of the shares being $3000 which A promises to pay. A week later the shares rise to $4000 at which time B would have sold them if A had not bought them. They then drop back to $3500, when B discovers the fraud and demands restitution. B is entitled to receive $4000 from A.'
Even an action for accounting can state a legal cause for legal damages and a jury. See Beacon Theatres, Inc. v. Westover, 359 U.S. 500, 79 S.Ct. 948, 3 L.Ed.2d 988 (1959)
One early issue faced by the courts was whether the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 provided any civil remedy at all for violation of Section 10(b). See Kardon v. National Gypsum Co., 73 F.Supp. 798, 802 (E.D.Pa.1947); see also Greater Iowa Corp. v. McLendon, 378 F.2d 783, 791 (8 Cir. 1967) | <urn:uuid:25db1e26-771c-43af-9a15-3b3b3973d7aa> | CC-MAIN-2016-30 | http://openjurist.org/386/f2d/718 | 2016-07-30T22:47:34Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-30/segments/1469258943369.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20160723072903-00319-ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954489 | 21,889 |
She tried to tell them about Michael Garrett. But nobody listened.
She tried to tell them how it was, the threats and the cocaine and all that. How he broke into her house one night after she'd kicked him out for good. How she'd lived in fear ever since, wondering if he would be waiting for her when she got home.
She had the tapes, if anybody wanted to hear them. Nobody did, but she had them, tapes of Garrett's voice on her answering machine, calling her all kinds of names and telling her all the ways he was going to beat her.
"He has done stuff to me," she said. But she never got a chance to explain what the stuff was. How he bit her on the shoulder, dragged her by the hair, struck her in front of the children. How, the night of the break-in, he was waiting for her with a knife.
No, Chanda Johnson didn't get much of an opportunity to explain. In July last year, she sat in the hectic, crowded confines of Denver County Courtroom 117-M -- where justice is served up quick and sloppy, like bowls of gruel doled out to a hungry mob -- and waited for the judge to call her name. When it was her turn, she stood up, a soft-spoken, 29-year-old woman, and tried to tell it all -- despite the room full of strangers, the killer glare of her ex-husband, the impassive faces of the heard-it-all-before court professionals.
She wasn't permitted to step up to the podium and speak into the microphone, like a person who mattered. She had to stand at the gate that divides the participants in the trial process from the spectators and speak her piece from there.
She didn't get very far. Judge Robert B. Crew Jr. interrupted her. Michael Garrett taunted her.
"I had to go buy a gun because I was scared in my own home," she said. "He broke into my house after he left rehab.... I ended up getting out of the house and calling my mother on the cell phone and got out of town. And then he started driving up and down the street at my mother's house.
"He went to his family in Memphis, came back a month later and just had me terrified. He called me the whole time he was in Memphis -- I have this on tape -- he called me the whole time and told me what he was going to do to me. He's had me scared this whole time.... Then he's just daring me to do something about it."
"Girl, if you're going to do it, just do it," Garrett said.
"Let her talk," Judge Crew said.
"He's daring me to do something," Johnson continued. "He calls me at work, harassing me. I put him on speakerphone. Everybody at work hears it, including my boss."
"Are you finished?" Crew asked. "Thank you. You can sit down."
But Johnson wasn't finished. When Garrett started to tell his side, she interrupted him to challenge his claim that she'd sold his Jeep -- it was her Jeep, she insisted. Garrett asked the judge, "Will you make her shut up?"
Crew cautioned Johnson to be silent. And when she spoke up again, so softly as to be almost inaudible on the tape of the hearing, Crew ordered her to leave the courtroom. She was ejected -- not for terrorizing anyone or causing a disturbance, but for speaking out of turn.
She never came back.
Charged with five counts of violating the restraining order Johnson had obtained against him, Garrett took a plea deal that included a jumbo-sized package of suspended sentences, supervised probation and domestic-violence counseling sessions, but little actual jail time. In Colorado, violating a civil restraining order is a crime on par with urinating in public -- less than a misdemeanor -- and Garrett ended up serving only 36 days behind bars. Over the next four months, he violated his probation repeatedly and landed briefly back in jail but was quickly released again, free to do whatever he was going to do.
Garrett got every break imaginable. His victim got ejected from the courtroom.
Chanda Johnson no longer lives in fear. In January she was gunned down in her driveway, shot again and again in front of a horrified eyewitness, a man she'd been dating for six months. Police say that her assailant was Michael Garrett, who rushed to a cousin's house that night, announced that he'd just shot Chanda, then shot himself in the head.
Garrett survived. Johnson died.
Aside from its brutal ending, the Garrett case is fairly typical of the 5,000 domestic-violence cases heard in Denver's county courts every year. Many of the cases involve violations of restraining orders or probation, and there was nothing unusual about the circumstances of Johnson's complaint or the sentence that Garrett received. If the case hadn't ended in murder, no one would have ever paid any attention.
But it did end badly, with the death of one woman and the ruination of several lives. And so the case has prompted internal reviews behind closed doors, from the judge's chambers to the city attorney's office to Project Safeguard, a community advocacy group for battered women. Privately, several people who've studied the matter have acknowledged that it was mishandled, but it's not an opinion they're eager to make public.
In fact, no one connected to the Garrett case is keen on talking about it. A curtain of silence has descended on what happened in Courtroom 117-M last year, as if it never happened at all. Judge Crew declined to comment on the case, other than to say that he was "saddened" by its outcome. City employees involved in the Garrett matter have been instructed to refer all questions to Assistant City Attorney Jim Thomas, who emphasizes the changes in policy his office has made to try to prevent the situation from repeating.
Chanda Johnson's boyfriend and her family declined to talk about her, out of fear of compromising the homicide case against her ex-husband. Similarly, Garrett's public defender offered few comments about her client, citing the upcoming murder trial, scheduled for November.
But court records provide more than a few clues about what went wrong in Crew's courtroom, where Garrett appeared four times in six months. The case is riddled with prosecutorial and judicial missteps, errant procedures involving sentencing and victim notification, breakdowns in communication and wrongheaded assumptions. If so much can go wrong in a "typical" minor case, how many other potentially lethal mistakes are being committed every day?
In some ways, Denver's efforts to curb domestic violence are now suffering from too much success. The city has long been hailed by victims' advocates for being on the cutting edge of domestic-violence prosecutions, as well as for being a pioneer in the shelter movement and mandatory treatment programs for batterers ("Hard Lessons," June 18, 1998). Having widened the net to encompass a vast range of domestic disputes, from the mundane to the horrific, prosecutors now find themselves choking on a caseload that scarcely allows any defendant to receive his hour, let alone his day, in court. Amid all the frenzied plea bargaining -- designed, in part, to keep the jails from bursting -- much of what is important about a case, including the victim's safety, can get lost.
"If I could wish for anything, I would wish that they had more resources in Denver," says Susan DeFreitas, coordinator of a court-monitoring program for Project Safeguard. "More judges. Another courtroom. Less of a caseload for the people who work there. These guys have thirty or forty cases a day sometimes. They're negotiating all over the place."
No court system is flawless, and not every domestic tragedy can be prevented. But Chanda Johnson's efforts to seek protection from Michael Garrett didn't just fall through the cracks; from the outset, the case went haywire, sending the wrong message to both victim and defendant. Some of the confusion may be the fault of Judge Crew, a veteran jurist with his own peculiar style, a way of defusing the incessant grimness of his courtroom that may have backfired in this instance. But DeFreitas and several other observers believe the real culprit is the crush of cases bearing down on judges and prosecutors alike, an overload that transforms courtrooms into bazaars and victims into statistics.
Chanda Johnson deserved better. At the very least, she deserved to be heard.
Michael Garrett and Chanda Johnson were together for almost seven years. In Garrett's view, it was not a bond that could be broken easily. Although he admitted in divorce court that he had made Chanda's life "a living hell," he also claimed a deep attachment to the child he'd had with her, Mychel, as well as Chanda's daughter from a previous relationship, Elonca. Having children changed everything; as he told Judge Crew, it meant that he and Johnson would "be in each others' lives for the rest of our lives."
Doubtless Johnson felt differently about the matter. She'd known disappointment before, knew the challenges of starting over. She had dropped out of high school but later took college-level computer-science courses. According to her divorce lawyer, she had been married before, to a man who is now serving time in the Texas prison system. Various people knew her as Chanda Johnson, Chanda Richardson and, briefly, as Chanda Johnson-Richardson. At the time she became involved with Garrett, she was 23 years old and the sole support of her one-year-old daughter. Garrett was 25 and eking out a living as a truck driver.
In 1995, Garrett was arrested on misdemeanor assault, menacing and domestic-violence charges. The available paperwork doesn't indicate whether Johnson or some other girlfriend was the complainant in the case, but the charges didn't dissuade Johnson from living with Garrett. Their common-law marriage began officially in August that year, the same month that the assault case was dismissed on a motion of the prosecutor.
Mychel was born the following summer. Working as a customer-software administrator for a telecom firm, Johnson made twice as much money as Garrett did in his driving jobs -- when he was working, that is. For long periods of the marriage, he was unemployed and referred to himself as a "stay-at-home parent," but Johnson also paid her mother for help with child care. She also paid the mortgage, as well the cost of movies, trips to the zoo and museums, swimming and gymnastics lessons, and everything else she thought her children should have.
"She was a hardworking girl," says Larry Carroll, her divorce attorney. "She really tried in the relationship to have something of a family, but she was unable to because of his drug use."
By early 2001, the marriage was falling apart -- due, Carroll says, to Garrett's escalating crack use. Money problems had dogged the relationship for some time. (In 1998, Johnson had been charged with shoplifting in what appears to have been a scheme to raise some quick cash by returning pilfered items for a refund; she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and received six months' probation.) The breaking point came after Johnson discovered that Garrett had forged checks on her account totaling $263.
She says she "put him out" of her house on February 26, 2001. Garrett entered a drug-rehab program at a local hospital, paid for by Johnson's insurance, but left after two days. A few nights later, Johnson came home and found a window broken and a door busted open. All of the lights were off; the television was flickering with the volume turned down. Garrett was waiting for her, she would later say, with a knife in his hand.
She fled. In the request for a temporary restraining order she filed two days later, she described confrontations with her husband in which he'd dragged her by the hair and bitten her. She asked that Garrett be kept at least 1,500 yards away "from wherever I am." Garrett returned to rehab.
Studies indicate that the danger faced by battered women increases when they seek to end the relationship, either by filing divorce papers or seeking protective orders. However, a recent study by the University of Washington suggests that the victim's risk of assault can drop significantly once the process of seeking protection through the courts is followed through. Of course, it doesn't always work that way.
Johnson's restraining order became permanent on April 3, the same day that she filed for divorce. The next day, she came home from work, spotted Garrett outside and called the police. He was gone by the time they arrived. Three days after that, during Elonca's seventh birthday party, he made another unexpected appearance. "Go tell Mommy, Daddy's in the garage," Elonca told one of her guests.
Three more violations of the restraining order were reported over the next two months. There were probably other, unreported contacts. As they waited for the divorce case to make its way through the system, Johnson and Garrett apparently made their own informal arrangements for him to visit the children -- arrangements that Garrett rarely complied with, but that complicated the matter of enforcing the restraining order. Garrett would later claim that Johnson called him on occasion, harassed him and even pulled a gun on him at Elonca's party -- a .380 handgun that she was careful to list among her assets in the divorce filing.
"It's obvious they went through a very tumultuous relationship," says deputy public defender Hollynd Hoskins, who is representing Garrett in the homicide case. "It's a sad situation. There was confusion as to whether he could continue visitation with the children, and it appears that there was an ongoing agreement, regardless of what was going on in court. A person can get a restraining order, but then they feel they can call the other party when they want to. People need to understand it applies to both parties."
But Carroll, Johnson's divorce attorney, says he never had any doubts that his client wanted Garrett to be kept far away from her. "She was very afraid of him," he says. "You could see a change in her demeanor when he entered the courtroom. Just his presence made her tighten up."
That June, following a threatening phone call that constituted his fifth reported violation of the restraining order, Garrett was arrested. Johnson's effort to get him out of her life was now a matter for the courts.
Last year the Denver City Attorney's Office prosecuted more than 4,900 domestic-violence cases. For the most part, these were not felony cases (which are handled by the district attorney) or even misdemeanors; the vast majority of them were filed in Denver's general-sessions courts, which also preside over cases involving petty theft, disturbing the peace, shoplifting, loitering and other municipal-ordinance violations.
The domestic-violence cases piped into general sessions are not the stuff of movies-of-the-week. The plot, what there is of it, usually consists of drunken arguments, restraining-order violations and an occasional bruise. The star players are people who won't stop drinking and don't show up for their court-ordered domestic-violence classes and can't seem to keep appointments with their probation officers. These are small-time dramas, mostly, but there is no shortage of them.
Five thousand cases a year, six prosecutors, three judges. Do the math. That's close to a hundred cases a week, divided among three courtrooms, wedged in among the bar fights and the whizzing-on-the-sidewalk complaints. Everybody is entitled to a trial, but there's no way the system can handle a hundred trials a week, or even twenty. So everybody is offered a deal, and almost everybody takes it. Upwards of 95 percent of the cases never get to trial.
Judge Robert Crew's courtroom is located in an obscure corner of the Denver City and County Building, a forlorn outpost down the hall from the parking-fines cashier. In his 25 years on the bench, Crew has served in practically every cranny of the county court, including arraignments, traffic court and protective orders. These days he's shouldering one-third of the domestic cases, which means his job consists largely of signing off on deals already reached by prosecutor and defendant, quizzing those who plead guilty to determine if they understand their rights, and deciding what to do when the deals don't work out.
The cases move briskly. Attorneys shuffle files and weave among the defendants, calling out names. It's not unusual for a plea offer to be made, weighed and accepted only moments before the case is supposed to go to trial. Some defendants fail to appear when their names are called, and warrants are issued for their arrest. In other instances, it is the complaining witness who has disappeared, which usually results in a prompt dismissal of the case.
The pace can be startling -- and unrelenting. On a recent Monday morning, Crew called fourteen cases in thirty minutes. Defendants one and two didn't show; bonds forfeited and bench warrants issued, Crew announced. Number three pleaded guilty to a charge of disturbing the peace on condition of an assault charge being dismissed; ninety days in jail suspended, Crew ruled, and a year of probation and 56 hours of public service.
Number four, in custody in another case, complaining witness not cooperating; this case dismissed. Number five, complaining witness didn't appear; case dismissed. Number six pleaded guilty to assault, a charge of disturbing the peace dismissed; 200-day suspended sentence, probation, domestic-violence counseling. Seven was a no-show; bench warrant issued. Eight requested a new lawyer; request denied, case continued. Nine pleaded guilty to assault; ninety days in jail, probation, DV classes. Ten, complaining witness passed away; case dismissed.
Number eleven rejected his plea deal; case continued, the city attorney to seek a contempt citation for a witness who failed to appear. Twelve and thirteen were postponed because they were in custody elsewhere. Fourteen failed to appear; bench warrant issued.
Crew is a bluff, fatherly figure on the bench, more prone to cajolery than stern lectures in dealing with his errant flock. When a slack-jawed, bearded batterer appeared before him dressed in his Sunday best -- an Eddie McCaffrey jersey -- Crew took the occasion to encourage the man to complete his domestic-violence classes, noting that the classes would help him control his anger not only at home, but also "in case of a bad boss, or someone beating the Broncos."
The judge's hail-fellow-well-met approach rarely flags, even during revocation hearings, when defendants with spotty probation records offer a variety of hard-luck stories in an effort to stay out of jail. Having frequently expressed concern about the overcrowded state of the county jail, Crew will look for any ray of sunshine in a straying defendant's record -- a stab at restitution, a steady attendance record in DV or anger-management classes, a vote of confidence from an employer -- in order to consider giving the wayward one another chance. Stern sentences are imposed and suspended, but hardly anyone does much of the mythical jail time.
"I would rather have you sitting in class than sitting in the jailhouse," he told one recent offender, who'd managed to get arrested on a fresh assault charge while on probation in a previous domestic-violence case. "Had you been involved in those classes, the whole intent was that you not pick up a new case."
Two years ago, the Second Judicial District Commission on Judicial Performance gave Crew a strong vote of confidence, urging his retention in the 2000 election. The panel described the judge as "a strong believer in victims' rights...conscientious about controlling his docket and attending to the many pending cases," and gave him high marks for his "diligence, efficiency and minimal delay."
"Judge Crew is no bleeding-heart liberal," says his colleague Raymond Satter, the presiding judge of Denver County Court. "He's one tough guy."
But some prosecutors who've appeared before Crew regard him as surprisingly lenient in domestic cases, and some defense attorneys consider him to be erratic. Both qualities were in evidence when Michael Garrett stepped into his courtroom last year.
Garrett was scheduled for trial on July 31, 2001, on all five reported violations of Johnson's restraining order against him, designated as five separate cases. Had anyone involved in the process looked closely at the totality of the circumstances -- the underlying allegations of the restraining order itself, the established pattern of calls and threats, at least one break-in -- it's possible that the cases would never have come before Crew at all; arguably, the charges could have been filed as a single felony stalking case in district court. But that would have required an exceptional effort by the police officers involved or the city attorney's office, and there's no guarantee that the district attorney's office would have accepted such a filing.
"It's easier for the cops to file these cases as municipal charges," Judge Satter says. "I've seen attempted murder filed as simple assault."
Crew was handed five skimpy files on a low-level defendant who, as Garrett reminded the judge on more than one occasion, had "never been in trouble with the law before." Like a lot of assertions Garrett made in court, that claim wasn't strictly true. He had no prior convictions, but his 1995 arrest for domestic violence would have been part of the official record available to prosecutor and judge. Yet that arrest was never mentioned in Crew's courtroom, and it seems unlikely that anyone noticed it, allowing Garrett to skate through the proceedings as if he was just one more first-time (albeit multiple) offender.
"Anytime you see that someone has a prior arrest, you can factor that in as an aggravator," says Assistant City Attorney Thomas, manager of the office's prosecutions unit. "Whether that was considered or not, I don't know. My general impression is that this was not the type of case that would be charged as a felony."
So rather than facing a felony beef in district court, Garrett was allowed to plead down his cases in front of Judge Crew. The arrangement wasn't an unusual one, says Project Safeguard's DeFreitas.
"A lot of women don't report everything to the police, so the only information the victim's advocate has is the information that's in the police reports," DeFreitas notes. "It's not uncommon to see this number of violations stay at a city level. Phone harassment is the hardest one to get a conviction, too. It's often a 'he said, she said' thing: Who dialed the phone? And getting the phone records isn't as easy as it looks on TV."
The prosecution's decision to pursue the case at the municipal level may have been routine, but what happened next was odd by anyone's standards. Noting the absence of a prior record, Crew asked Garrett what had gone wrong the past two months, how he'd ended up violating a court order five times. Garrett characterized the whole mess as a dispute over his "visitation rights" with Elonca and Mychel, saying he didn't know how he was supposed to pick up the girls on weekends without Chanda calling the law on him for violating the restraining order.
"We shouldn't even have got out of hand like that," Garrett said. "We ought to be -- we're going to be in each other's lives for the rest of our lives."
Crew discussed the visitation problem with Garrett sympathetically for several minutes, suggesting various ways to mediate the dispute. Temporary orders in the divorce case did allow Garrett limited visitation rights, but he'd failed to take required parenting classes or pay child support ordered in the case. (Permanent orders would soon bar Garrett from any unsupervised contact with the children until he'd completed classes and a substance-abuse evaluation.) And if the judge and the prosecutor had consulted a calendar, they would have seen that most of the restraining-order violations occurred on weekdays -- not, as Garrett claimed, during weekend visitations.
When it was her turn to speak, Chanda Johnson tried to explain as much, saying that the visitations were part of a "verbal agreement" between them, and that Garrett rarely showed up when he was supposed to take the kids, anyway. But both Crew and Garrett interrupted her repeatedly. Garrett insisted on his rights -- "It is a court order. It is a court order," he said -- while Crew seemed intent on arranging a visitation for Garrett before he went to jail on the restraining-order violations.
Johnson stood her ground. "Your honor, I have a question," she said. "He is a crack fiend. On drugs. I don't feel comfortable for my children to be out -- "
"I have already done my rehab," Garrett shot back, interrupting her again. "And what are you?"
Johnson stared him down. "A working mother," she said.
"Okay, that's enough, that's enough," Crew said.
Crew was far less tolerant of Johnson's interruptions than of Garrett's taunting of her. After the exchange over who sold whose Jeep, the judge cautioned her to be quiet. A few seconds later, as Garrett returned to the subject of his visitation rights, claiming that Johnson had pulled a gun on him on Elonca's birthday -- "I mean, I ain't afraid of no gun. I ain't no punk" -- she tried to respond and was ejected.
The rest of the hearing consisted of hammering out the terms of Garrett's plea deal. He had agreed to plead guilty to three counts of violating a court order in exchange for the dismissal of all other charges. The cases involved three separate periods of probation. On the first case, Garrett would receive a sentence of one year in jail, all but sixty days of it suspended, conditional on completing 36 weeks of domestic-violence classes. He would then be on probation for a year in each of the other two cases, with 180-day suspended jail sentences hanging over his head if he failed to comply.
Assistant City Attorney Chris Lujan, widely regarded as a tough and able prosecutor, noted that there was nothing in the record to suggest that the restraining-order violations had anything to do with a dispute over visitation rights. He requested that the probation terms be served consecutively, putting Garrett under the control of the court well into the year 2005.
Judge Crew agreed. But he also decided to grant Garrett work release during his jail time -- in other words, he'd be allowed to continue working during his sixty-day sentence, reporting to jail only at night and on weekends. Such leeway is almost never offered in domestic-violence cases unless the victim specifically requests it because of the family's dependency on the offender's paycheck. Johnson hadn't asked for work release, but Lujan didn't argue against it. ("Our policy is to oppose work release unless the victim is in favor of it," says Assistant City Attorney Thomas. "I wasn't aware that he was on work release.")
In fact, the only person urging Crew to keep Garrett out of jail was Garrett himself. Crew gave him a week to "get your affairs in order" before he'd have to report to the sheriff. "You've got to stay cool," the judge told Garrett, indicating the door through which Johnson had exited. "Go out that door, and don't say anything if those ladies are all out there. I don't want there to be any trouble."
Garrett didn't keep his end of the deal. He failed to report to the jail the following Monday morning, as he was supposed to, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. It was canceled that afternoon, after he showed up at Crew's clerk's office and begged for another week. He didn't show up the following week, either, leading to another arrest warrant. This one was canceled, too, after he submitted a hand-scrawled letter to the judge explaining that he'd run into some problems on the road as part of his job.
Garrett finally turned himself in late in August, leading to another hearing in Crew's courtroom. After listening to Garrett's mumbled excuses about getting his dates mixed up, Crew decided to send him to jail for a month, then set a reconsideration hearing. He ordered Garrett to take domestic-violence classes in the jail.
"Come in and show me you've done your classes," Crew said. "Tell me what you've learned, and I might consider getting you back to your original deal, where 300 days are suspended on the condition of [additional] domestic-violence classes."
On September 28, after a month in jail, Garrett appeared before Crew a third time. He dutifully reported what he'd learned from his jailhouse classes, as if reciting a catechism: "I just learned that domestic violence destroys the whole structure of the family.... It's not worth it. It's costly, and it's doing it to the whole family."
"What are you going to do if she doesn't do something right?" Crew asked. "If she burns the toast?"
Garrett responded that there wouldn't be a next time, since the divorce became final in August. Crew pressed him: "Give me one way that you're trying to keep your temper under control."
"I think before I act or react," Garrett said. "Use caution with words. Very cautious with words."
"Can I trust you not to be in trouble again?"
"Fine. I'll suspend the balance of your jail time. You're out."
"You're welcome. Nice job in completing those classes."
By being very cautious with words and giving the right answers, Garrett managed to turn a year's sentence into one month. The prosecutor was even more cautious; he or she didn't say a single word during the perfunctory three-minute hearing. (The record of the September hearing is so sketchy that even Jim Thomas isn't certain which member of his staff was present.)
Chanda Johnson didn't say anything, either, for the simple reason that she wasn't there. Not during the August or September hearings and not in December -- when, after failing to report to probation or attend any more classes, Garrett was arrested again and faced possible revocation. It doesn't appear that Johnson was notified of any of these proceedings.
Colorado's victims'-rights law requires that victims be notified when offenders are scheduled for trial, sentencing or possible release, but the law exempts municipal prosecutions. "Our caseloads are so heavy that the requirements [of notification] would be unduly burdensome," explains Thomas. "But we try to give the best service we can."
The city attorney's office does send out letters to victims, explaining how they can register for a computerized system operated by the county jail that lets them know by phone when a perpetrator is released. It's not clear whether Johnson ever received such a letter, though. "The victim's advocate doesn't have any recollection of having any contact with her," says Thomas. "It's not a normal practice by our office to make that contact."
Records from her divorce case indicate that Johnson was told in August that Garrett had violated his probation and would have to serve out the 360-day jail sentence Crew had imposed but suspended. That was certainly the understanding of Judge Robert Hyatt, the judge assigned to the divorce case, and of Carroll, Johnson's attorney. Actually, except for a brief detour in December, Garrett had been on the streets ever since Crew told him he was "out" at the September reconsideration hearing.
"Our records show that he wasn't supposed to be released until March 18, 2002," says Carroll. "We were shocked when Chanda's mother called us and told us that Chanda had been murdered."
Last December, the system had one final opportunity to review Michael Garrett's situation. But the consideration Garrett received at that hearing made all the breaks he'd already been granted -- the plea bargain, the work release, the shortened sentence and early release, the ejection of Johnson from the courtroom and failure to notify her of subsequent proceedings -- seem minor by comparison.
Garrett never reported to probation after his release in September, never signed up for the 36 weeks of domestic-violence classes Crew had ordered him to take. His probation officer sought a warrant for his arrest. He was brought back into Crew's courtroom for a revocation hearing on December 17, after spending two nights in jail.
Garrett insisted that there was some mistake. "I did my time and everything," he told the judge. "You asked me the question, what did I learn about domestic violence, I told you, you cut me loose.... You didn't give me probation, sir."
Perplexed, Crew studied the case files. Garrett had, in fact, visited him in his clerk's office a few days after the September hearing to check on his status, and Crew had decided to toss out the year's probation on the case for which Garrett had already served 36 days in jail. This unusual ex parte negotiation had occurred without the presence or knowledge of anyone from the city attorney's office. The only record of the decision was a one-line entry placed in the case file in October: "No probation is needed, def. did his jail sentence, per Judge Crew."
But Crew hadn't intended for his generosity to apply to the other two cases in which Garrett had pleaded guilty, for which he was supposed to serve consecutive probation terms. "I was just talking about one case," he said. "I didn't know about the other two cases."
Garrett adopted an air of innocent confusion. He tried to argue that the probation terms were supposed to be concurrent, not consecutive. ("I think Michael Garrett knew how to play the system," observes Project Safeguard's DeFreitas. "He knows the difference between 'consecutive' and 'concurrent.' He's a bit of a con artist.") He reminded the judge of their off-the-record discussion.
"I came back that Monday, when you guys were having a party, and I talked to you about it, to see if I had to have probation," he recalled. "You told me no, I'm done with it. It was back in October -- "
"Don't mention that party," Crew quipped, "because some people may not have been invited."
It was an awkward situation. Garrett had violated his probation and could have been facing up to a year in jail. But Crew had already wiped out one 360-day sentence -- not in a public hearing, but during a brief chat at an office party -- and was puzzling over what to do with the other cases. Assistant City Attorney Chris Ramsey came to his rescue with a decidedly lenient, if expedient, suggestion: Why not allow Garrett to "confess to revocation," without penalty, and start serving his two other probation terms right now?
"Very good recommendation," Crew said. Turning to Garrett, he continued, "I feel I've invited some confusion because I didn't talk to you about those other two cases when I let you out of jail on the first case.... I understand the confusion you have. But these other two cases being alive and well, you need to comply with probation and go to those formal classes."
When he realized that Crew was going to release him, Garrett readily agreed to the arrangement. Significantly, no one from the probation office was in the courtroom to argue in favor of sending Garrett back to jail. Revocation hearings are usually held in Crew's courtroom on Thursday afternoons, but Garrett had been arrested over a weekend and brought into court on a busy Monday morning.
Assistant City Attorney Thomas says his office has since adopted a new policy regarding so-called walk-in revocation hearings. "If somebody is before the court on what is not a normally scheduled probation-revocation hearing day, we'll object to the matter being heard," Thomas says. "We want a probation officer present so that all the information is available in making the decision."
At the conclusion of the hearing, Crew cautioned Garrett that he would face consecutive 180-day jail sentences if he didn't report to probation and complete his DV classes. He scheduled another hearing to review the matter in February and urged Garrett to remind him about the consecutive probations at that time. "You're the man who's keeping track of how many cases you have, not me," he said.
Thomas acknowledges that keeping track of multiple cases is the job of the prosecutor and the judge, not the defendant. He cannot explain why Crew would say he "didn't know" about the other two cases and expect Garrett to remind him, given the county court's computerized tracking system and the cross-referencing indicated in the files of individual cases. "I know that our file makes reference to his other cases, and I would expect that the court's file would contain similar references," Thomas says.
Given yet another "last chance," Garrett failed to report to probation. He didn't keep his February court date, either. By that time he was in a locked ward at Denver Health Medical Center, recovering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Barely a month after the December hearing, in the early hours of January 20, Chanda Johnson returned home from a friend's birthday party. Her boyfriend followed in a separate car, as he often did, to make sure that she arrived home safely. They were talking outside the garage when a man with a gun walked up the driveway and "started shooting like crazy," the boyfriend told the Rocky Mountain News.
The boyfriend pulled Johnson to the ground and tried to shield her. The assailant drew close and fired three more times, but he was out of bullets. "I got you, bitch, I fucking got you," the man said, then drove off.
Johnson was pronounced dead at University Hospital. The police found Garrett shortly afterward, bleeding from the head outside his cousin's house.
The exact sequence of events that night remain in dispute. According to Garrett's attorney, witness statements indicate there may have been an argument before the driveway shooting and that Johnson was also armed. But Denver police sources say that no gun was found with Johnson and that the attack came out of nowhere.
"It was an ambush-type thing," says police spokesman Lieutenant Jon Priest. "He waited for her. When she got home, he shot her."
Susan DeFreitas remembers seeing the case listed on the court docket last summer: Garrett, Michael, five restraining-order violations. As coordinator of Courtwatch, a program launched by Project Safeguard that uses volunteers to track domestic-violence cases through the courts, DeFreitas has a keen interest in potentially high-risk, "red flag" cases, and five violations of a restraining order struck her as red-flag material.
But DeFreitas didn't make it to the hearing that day. Nor did anyone else from Courtwatch. After Johnson's murder, DeFreitas ordered transcripts of all of Garrett's hearings and tried to figure out what had happened. She met privately with Judge Crew and others involved to discuss possible changes in procedure. She was particularly troubled by the treatment Chanda Johnson had received, having to address the court from the gallery and then being ejected for speaking up at the wrong moment.
A judge has every right to keep order in his courtroom, DeFreitas notes. Nevertheless, "I think a victim should be in the courtroom," she says. "I was concerned that she was kept at the gate."
But DeFreitas is reluctant to discuss the Garrett matter in any detail with a reporter. Project Safeguard has a "working relationship" with court officials and doesn't want to offend them, she explains.
"Part of my hesitancy in talking to you is that I feel like some good things happened out of this," she says. "I've seen better sentencing, the victims coming to the podium, more careful review of [criminal] history. I really feel that there has been some good that's happened, and I'm afraid that, if there's an article, it might go back to the way it was."
DeFreitas praises the people who work in Denver's domestic-violence courts as dedicated professionals who "do the best they can" with limited resources. This year they have a new weapon at their disposal, a technological innovation derived from global positioning satellite (GPS) technology. Denver now has approximately sixty offenders -- most of them on probation for domestic-violence offenses such as violating restraining orders -- on GPS monitoring systems. Unlike the conventional ankle bracelet, the GPS equipment allows probation officers to track the offender's movements and can automatically page a victim if the offender strays into a forbidden area, such as the victim's neighborhood.
"If we could have had somebody like Michael Garrett on GPS monitoring, particularly from the December hearing on, that might have made a difference," DeFreitas says.
But GPS is just another tool in the arsenal; like a restraining order, it's useless unless properly applied and enforced. The courts can't offer absolute protection to anyone, any more than they can determine with precision which low-level offenders are going to become violent.
"There are so many hundreds of cases coming in, and it's so hard to pigeonhole human conduct," says Judge Satter. "Every judge creates his or her own system for dealing with the situation."
Like every judge, he's released people on bond who went on to commit further crimes, Satter says. He's also given defendants another chance, over the vigorous protests of the domestic-violence professionals, and seen them successfully complete their probation and lead productive lives. "Most of the time, we're successful," he adds.
But "most of the time" isn't good enough for Chanda Johnson's family. The mistakes in her case -- mute prosecutors, an absent victim, a one-year sentence that disappears without a public hearing, and much more -- are so plentiful as to raise questions about the soundness of the entire system. Last month the family's attorney filed notice of intent to sue the City of Denver over the death of Chanda Johnson on behalf of her daughters, eight-year-old Elonca and six-year-old Mychel.
While her family seeks to hold the city responsible for bungling the case, the man accused of murdering Chanda appeared in district court two weeks ago for his arraignment. Michael Garrett moved slowly, his hands cuffed to an aluminum walker. An ugly, vertical slash of scar tissue could be seen on the back of his skull.
Garrett sat quietly while the lawyers talked, his head bowed to the table. His head rose periodically only to slowly drop again, as if he were dozing fitfully. He seemed to have trouble following the proceedings and winced when spoken to, like the words were giving him a headache. His attorney says he's still suffering the effects of the gunshot wound, including impaired memory.
After a few moments, his not-guilty plea entered and trial date set, Garrett hobbled out of the courtroom. He was never quite there to begin with. Whatever poor excuse for justice he knew had already been accorded to him, worked out between him and his unheeded victim -- not in a courtroom, but in the streets.
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When a new drug gets tested, the results of the trials should be published for the rest of the medical world -- except much of the time, negative or inconclusive findings go unreported, leaving doctors and researchers in the dark. In this impassioned talk, Ben Goldacre explains why these unreported instances of negative data are especially misleading and dangerous.________________________________
Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.
IN 2001, RUMORS were circulating in Greek hospitals that surgery residents, eager to rack up scalpel time, were falsely diagnosing hapless Albanian immigrants with appendicitis. At the University of Ioannina medical school’s teaching hospital, a newly minted doctor named Athina Tatsioni was discussing the rumors with colleagues when a professor who had overheard asked her if she’d like to try to prove whether they were true—he seemed to be almost daring her. She accepted the challenge and, with the professor’s and other colleagues’ help, eventually produced a formal study showing that, for whatever reason, the appendices removed from patients with Albanian names in six Greek hospitals were more than three times as likely to be perfectly healthy as those removed from patients with Greek names. “It was hard to find a journal willing to publish it, but we did,” recalls Tatsioni. “I also discovered that I really liked research.” Good thing, because the study had actually been a sort of audition. The professor, it turned out, had been putting together a team of exceptionally brash and curious young clinicians and Ph.D.s to join him in tackling an unusual and controversial agenda.
Last spring, I sat in on one of the team’s weekly meetings on the medical school’s campus, which is plunked crazily across a series of sharp hills. The building in which we met, like most at the school, had the look of a barracks and was festooned with political graffiti. But the group convened in a spacious conference room that would have been at home at a Silicon Valley start-up. Sprawled around a large table were Tatsioni and eight other youngish Greek researchers and physicians who, in contrast to the pasty younger staff frequently seen in U.S. hospitals, looked like the casually glamorous cast of a television medical drama. The professor, a dapper and soft-spoken man named John Ioannidis, loosely presided.
One of the researchers, a biostatistician named Georgia Salanti, fired up a laptop and projector and started to take the group through a study she and a few colleagues were completing that asked this question: were drug companies manipulating published research to make their drugs look good? Salanti ticked off data that seemed to indicate they were, but the other team members almost immediately started interrupting. One noted that Salanti’s study didn’t address the fact that drug-company research wasn’t measuring critically important “hard” outcomes for patients, such as survival versus death, and instead tended to measure “softer” outcomes, such as self-reported symptoms (“my chest doesn’t hurt as much today”). Another pointed out that Salanti’s study ignored the fact that when drug-company data seemed to show patients’ health improving, the data often failed to show that the drug was responsible, or that the improvement was more than marginal.
Salanti remained poised, as if the grilling were par for the course, and gamely acknowledged that the suggestions were all good—but a single study can’t prove everything, she said. Just as I was getting the sense that the data in drug studies were endlessly malleable, Ioannidis, who had mostly been listening, delivered what felt like a coup de grâce: wasn’t it possible, he asked, that drug companies were carefully selecting the topics of their studies—for example, comparing their new drugs against those already known to be inferior to others on the market—so that they were ahead of the game even before the data juggling began? “Maybe sometimes it’s the questions that are biased, not the answers,” he said, flashing a friendly smile. Everyone nodded. Though the results of drug studies often make newspaper headlines, you have to wonder whether they prove anything at all. Indeed, given the breadth of the potential problems raised at the meeting, can any medical-research studies be trusted?
That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed.
His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.
THE CITY OF IOANNINA is a big college town a short drive from the ruins of a 20,000-seat amphitheater and a Zeusian sanctuary built at the site of the Dodona oracle. The oracle was said to have issued pronouncements to priests through the rustling of a sacred oak tree. Today, a different oak tree at the site provides visitors with a chance to try their own hands at extracting a prophecy. “I take all the researchers who visit me here, and almost every single one of them asks the tree the same question,” Ioannidis tells me, as we contemplate the tree the day after the team’s meeting. “‘Will my research grant be approved?’” He chuckles, but Ioannidis (pronounced yo-NEE-dees) tends to laugh not so much in mirth as to soften the sting of his attack. And sure enough, he goes on to suggest that an obsession with winning funding has gone a long way toward weakening the reliability of medical research.
He first stumbled on the sorts of problems plaguing the field, he explains, as a young physician-researcher in the early 1990s at Harvard. At the time, he was interested in diagnosing rare diseases, for which a lack of case data can leave doctors with little to go on other than intuition and rules of thumb. But he noticed that doctors seemed to proceed in much the same manner even when it came to cancer, heart disease, and other common ailments. Where were the hard data that would back up their treatment decisions? There was plenty of published research, but much of it was remarkably unscientific, based largely on observations of a small number of cases. A new “evidence-based medicine” movement was just starting to gather force, and Ioannidis decided to throw himself into it, working first with prominent researchers at Tufts University and then taking positions at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health. He was unusually well armed: he had been a math prodigy of near-celebrity status in high school in Greece, and had followed his parents, who were both physician-researchers, into medicine. Now he’d have a chance to combine math and medicine by applying rigorous statistical analysis to what seemed a surprisingly sloppy field. “I assumed that everything we physicians did was basically right, but now I was going to help verify it,” he says. “All we’d have to do was systematically review the evidence, trust what it told us, and then everything would be perfect.”
It didn’t turn out that way. In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.
But beyond the headlines, Ioannidis was shocked at the range and reach of the reversals he was seeing in everyday medical research. “Randomized controlled trials,” which compare how one group responds to a treatment against how an identical group fares without the treatment, had long been considered nearly unshakable evidence, but they, too, ended up being wrong some of the time. “I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says. Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.
This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”
Perhaps only a minority of researchers were succumbing to this bias, but their distorted findings were having an outsize effect on published research. To get funding and tenured positions, and often merely to stay afloat, researchers have to get their work published in well-regarded journals, where rejection rates can climb above 90 percent. Not surprisingly, the studies that tend to make the grade are those with eye-catching findings. But while coming up with eye-catching theories is relatively easy, getting reality to bear them out is another matter. The great majority collapse under the weight of contradictory data when studied rigorously. Imagine, though, that five different research teams test an interesting theory that’s making the rounds, and four of the groups correctly prove the idea false, while the one less cautious group incorrectly “proves” it true through some combination of error, fluke, and clever selection of data. Guess whose findings your doctor ends up reading about in the journal, and you end up hearing about on the evening news? Researchers can sometimes win attention by refuting a prominent finding, which can help to at least raise doubts about results, but in general it is far more rewarding to add a new insight or exciting-sounding twist to existing research than to retest its basic premises—after all, simply re-proving someone else’s results is unlikely to get you published, and attempting to undermine the work of respected colleagues can have ugly professional repercussions.
In the late 1990s, Ioannidis set up a base at the University of Ioannina. He pulled together his team, which remains largely intact today, and started chipping away at the problem in a series of papers that pointed out specific ways certain studies were getting misleading results. Other meta-researchers were also starting to spotlight disturbingly high rates of error in the medical literature. But Ioannidis wanted to get the big picture across, and to do so with solid data, clear reasoning, and good statistical analysis. The project dragged on, until finally he retreated to the tiny island of Sikinos in the Aegean Sea, where he drew inspiration from the relatively primitive surroundings and the intellectual traditions they recalled. “A pervasive theme of ancient Greek literature is that you need to pursue the truth, no matter what the truth might be,” he says. In 2005, he unleashed two papers that challenged the foundations of medical research.
He chose to publish one paper, fittingly, in the online journal PLoS Medicine, which is committed to running any methodologically sound article without regard to how “interesting” the results may be. In the paper, Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time. Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views. “You can question some of the details of John’s calculations, but it’s hard to argue that the essential ideas aren’t absolutely correct,” says Doug Altman, an Oxford University researcher who directs the Centre for Statistics in Medicine.
Still, Ioannidis anticipated that the community might shrug off his findings: sure, a lot of dubious research makes it into journals, but we researchers and physicians know to ignore it and focus on the good stuff, so what’s the big deal? The other paper headed off that claim. He zoomed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years, as judged by the science community’s two standard measures: the papers had appeared in the journals most widely cited in research articles, and the 49 articles themselves were the most widely cited articles in these journals. These were articles that helped lead to the widespread popularity of treatments such as the use of hormone-replacement therapy for menopausal women, vitamin E to reduce the risk of heart disease, coronary stents to ward off heart attacks, and daily low-dose aspirin to control blood pressure and prevent heart attacks and strokes. Ioannidis was putting his contentions to the test not against run-of-the-mill research, or even merely well-accepted research, but against the absolute tip of the research pyramid. Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable. That article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
DRIVING ME BACK to campus in his smallish SUV—after insisting, as he apparently does with all his visitors, on showing me a nearby lake and the six monasteries situated on an islet within it—Ioannidis apologized profusely for running a yellow light, explaining with a laugh that he didn’t trust the truck behind him to stop. Considering his willingness, even eagerness, to slap the face of the medical-research community, Ioannidis comes off as thoughtful, upbeat, and deeply civil. He’s a careful listener, and his frequent grin and semi-apologetic chuckle can make the sharp prodding of his arguments seem almost good-natured. He is as quick, if not quicker, to question his own motives and competence as anyone else’s. A neat and compact 45-year-old with a trim mustache, he presents as a sort of dashing nerd—Giancarlo Giannini with a bit of Mr. Bean.
The humility and graciousness seem to serve him well in getting across a message that is not easy to digest or, for that matter, believe: that even highly regarded researchers at prestigious institutions sometimes churn out attention-grabbing findings rather than findings likely to be right. But Ioannidis points out that obviously questionable findings cram the pages of top medical journals, not to mention the morning headlines. Consider, he says, the endless stream of results from nutritional studies in which researchers follow thousands of people for some number of years, tracking what they eat and what supplements they take, and how their health changes over the course of the study. “Then the researchers start asking, ‘What did vitamin E do? What did vitamin C or D or A do? What changed with calorie intake, or protein or fat intake? What happened to cholesterol levels? Who got what type of cancer?’” he says. “They run everything through the mill, one at a time, and they start finding associations, and eventually conclude that vitamin X lowers the risk of cancer Y, or this food helps with the risk of that disease.” In a single week this fall, Google’s news page offered these headlines: “More Omega-3 Fats Didn’t Aid Heart Patients”; “Fruits, Vegetables Cut Cancer Risk for Smokers”; “Soy May Ease Sleep Problems in Older Women”; and dozens of similar stories.
When a five-year study of 10,000 people finds that those who take more vitamin X are less likely to get cancer Y, you’d think you have pretty good reason to take more vitamin X, and physicians routinely pass these recommendations on to patients. But these studies often sharply conflict with one another. Studies have gone back and forth on the cancer-preventing powers of vitamins A, D, and E; on the heart-health benefits of eating fat and carbs; and even on the question of whether being overweight is more likely to extend or shorten your life. How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.
For starters, he explains, the odds are that in any large database of many nutritional and health factors, there will be a few apparent connections that are in fact merely flukes, not real health effects—it’s a bit like combing through long, random strings of letters and claiming there’s an important message in any words that happen to turn up. But even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect, and that may be as likely to harm you as help you. Even if changing that one factor does bring on the claimed improvement, there’s still a good chance that it won’t do you much good in the long run, because these studies rarely go on long enough to track the decades-long course of disease and ultimately death. Instead, they track easily measurable health “markers” such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and blood-sugar levels, and meta-experts have shown that changes in these markers often don’t correlate as well with long-term health as we have been led to believe.
On the relatively rare occasions when a study does go on long enough to track mortality, the findings frequently upend those of the shorter studies. (For example, though the vast majority of studies of overweight individuals link excess weight to ill health, the longest of them haven’t convincingly shown that overweight people are likely to die sooner, and a few of them have seemingly demonstrated that moderately overweight people are likely to live longer.) And these problems are aside from ubiquitous measurement errors (for example, people habitually misreport their diets in studies), routine misanalysis (researchers rely on complex software capable of juggling results in ways they don’t always understand), and the less common, but serious, problem of outright fraud (which has been revealed, in confidential surveys, to be much more widespread than scientists like to acknowledge).
If a study somehow avoids every one of these problems and finds a real connection to long-term changes in health, you’re still not guaranteed to benefit, because studies report average results that typically represent a vast range of individual outcomes. Should you be among the lucky minority that stands to benefit, don’t expect a noticeable improvement in your health, because studies usually detect only modest effects that merely tend to whittle your chances of succumbing to a particular disease from small to somewhat smaller. “The odds that anything useful will survive from any of these studies are poor,” says Ioannidis—dismissing in a breath a good chunk of the research into which we sink about $100 billion a year in the United States alone.
And so it goes for all medical studies, he says. Indeed, nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest. The exciting links between genes and various diseases and traits that are relentlessly hyped in the press for heralding miraculous around-the-corner treatments for everything from colon cancer to schizophrenia have in the past proved so vulnerable to error and distortion, Ioannidis has found, that in some cases you’d have done about as well by throwing darts at a chart of the genome. (These studies seem to have improved somewhat in recent years, but whether they will hold up or be useful in treatment are still open questions.) Vioxx, Zelnorm, and Baycol were among the widely prescribed drugs found to be safe and effective in large randomized controlled trials before the drugs were yanked from the market as unsafe or not so effective, or both.
“Often the claims made by studies are so extravagant that you can immediately cross them out without needing to know much about the specific problems with the studies,” Ioannidis says. But of course it’s that very extravagance of claim (one large randomized controlled trial even proved that secret prayer by unknown parties can save the lives of heart-surgery patients, while another proved that secret prayer can harm them) that helps gets these findings into journals and then into our treatments and lifestyles, especially when the claim builds on impressive-sounding evidence. “Even when the evidence shows that a particular research idea is wrong, if you have thousands of scientists who have invested their careers in it, they’ll continue to publish papers on it,” he says. “It’s like an epidemic, in the sense that they’re infected with these wrong ideas, and they’re spreading it to other researchers through journals.”
THOUGH SCIENTISTS AND science journalists are constantly talking up the value of the peer-review process, researchers admit among themselves that biased, erroneous, and even blatantly fraudulent studies easily slip through it.Nature, the grande dame of science journals, stated in a 2006 editorial, “Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth.” What’s more, the peer-review process often pressures researchers to shy away from striking out in genuinely new directions, and instead to build on the findings of their colleagues (that is, their potential reviewers) in ways that only seem like breakthroughs—as with the exciting-sounding gene linkages (autism genes identified!) and nutritional findings (olive oil lowers blood pressure!) that are really just dubious and conflicting variations on a theme.
Most journal editors don’t even claim to protect against the problems that plague these studies. University and government research overseers rarely step in to directly enforce research quality, and when they do, the science community goes ballistic over the outside interference. The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly retest each other’s results—except they don’t. Only the most prominent findings are likely to be put to the test, because there’s likely to be publication payoff in firming up the proof, or contradicting it.
But even for medicine’s most influential studies, the evidence sometimes remains surprisingly narrow. Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested. Perhaps worse, Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades. He looked at three prominent health studies from the 1980s and 1990s that were each later soundly refuted, and discovered that researchers continued to cite the original results as correct more often than as flawed—in one case for at least 12 years after the results were discredited.
Doctors may notice that their patients don’t seem to fare as well with certain treatments as the literature would lead them to expect, but the field is appropriately conditioned to subjugate such anecdotal evidence to study findings. Yet much, perhaps even most, of what doctors do has never been formally put to the test in credible studies, given that the need to do so became obvious to the field only in the 1990s, leaving it playing catch-up with a century or more of non-evidence-based medicine, and contributing to Ioannidis’s shockingly high estimate of the degree to which medical knowledge is flawed. That we’re not routinely made seriously ill by this shortfall, he argues, is due largely to the fact that most medical interventions and advice don’t address life-and-death situations, but rather aim to leave us marginally healthier or less unhealthy, so we usually neither gain nor risk all that much.
Medical research is not especially plagued with wrongness. Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right). And needless to say, things only get worse when it comes to the pop expertise that endlessly spews at us from diet, relationship, investment, and parenting gurus and pundits. But we expect more of scientists, and especially of medical scientists, given that we believe we are staking our lives on their results. The public hardly recognizes how bad a bet this is. The medical community itself might still be largely oblivious to the scope of the problem, if Ioannidis hadn’t forced a confrontation when he published his studies in 2005.
Ioannidis initially thought the community might come out fighting. Instead, it seemed relieved, as if it had been guiltily waiting for someone to blow the whistle, and eager to hear more. David Gorski, a surgeon and researcher at Detroit’s Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, noted in his prominent medical blog that when he presented Ioannidis’s paper on highly cited research at a professional meeting, “not a single one of my surgical colleagues was the least bit surprised or disturbed by its findings.” Ioannidis offers a theory for the relatively calm reception. “I think that people didn’t feel I was only trying to provoke them, because I showed that it was a community problem, instead of pointing fingers at individual examples of bad research,” he says. In a sense, he gave scientists an opportunity to cluck about the wrongness without having to acknowledge that they themselves succumb to it—it was something everyone else did.
To say that Ioannidis’s work has been embraced would be an understatement. His PLoS Medicine paper is the most downloaded in the journal’s history, and it’s not even Ioannidis’s most-cited work—that would be a paper he published inNature Genetics on the problems with gene-link studies. Other researchers are eager to work with him: he has published papers with 1,328 different co-authors at 538 institutions in 43 countries, he says. Last year he received, by his estimate, invitations to speak at 1,000 conferences and institutions around the world, and he was accepting an average of about five invitations a month until a case last year of excessive-travel-induced vertigo led him to cut back. Even so, in the weeks before I visited him he had addressed an AIDS conference in San Francisco, the European Society for Clinical Investigation, Harvard’s School of Public Health, and the medical schools at Stanford and Tufts.
The irony of his having achieved this sort of success by accusing the medical-research community of chasing after success is not lost on him, and he notes that it ought to raise the question of whether he himself might be pumping up his findings. “If I did a study and the results showed that in fact there wasn’t really much bias in research, would I be willing to publish it?” he asks. “That would create a real psychological conflict for me.” But his bigger worry, he says, is that while his fellow researchers seem to be getting the message, he hasn’t necessarily forced anyone to do a better job. He fears he won’t in the end have done much to improve anyone’s health. “There may not be fierce objections to what I’m saying,” he explains. “But it’s difficult to change the way that everyday doctors, patients, and healthy people think and behave.”
AS HELTER-SKELTER as the University of Ioannina Medical School campus looks, the hospital abutting it looks reassuringly stolid. Athina Tatsioni has offered to take me on a tour of the facility, but we make it only as far as the entrance when she is greeted—accosted, really—by a worried-looking older woman. Tatsioni, normally a bit reserved, is warm and animated with the woman, and the two have a brief but intense conversation before embracing and saying goodbye. Tatsioni explains to me that the woman and her husband were patients of hers years ago; now the husband has been admitted to the hospital with abdominal pains, and Tatsioni has promised she’ll stop by his room later to say hello. Recalling the appendicitis story, I prod a bit, and she confesses she plans to do her own exam. She needs to be circumspect, though, so she won’t appear to be second-guessing the other doctors.
Tatsioni doesn’t so much fear that someone will carve out the man’s healthy appendix. Rather, she’s concerned that, like many patients, he’ll end up with prescriptions for multiple drugs that will do little to help him, and may well harm him. “Usually what happens is that the doctor will ask for a suite of biochemical tests—liver fat, pancreas function, and so on,” she tells me. “The tests could turn up something, but they’re probably irrelevant. Just having a good talk with the patient and getting a close history is much more likely to tell me what’s wrong.” Of course, the doctors have all been trained to order these tests, she notes, and doing so is a lot quicker than a long bedside chat. They’re also trained to ply the patient with whatever drugs might help whack any errant test numbers back into line. What they’re not trained to do is to go back and look at the research papers that helped make these drugs the standard of care. “When you look the papers up, you often find the drugs didn’t even work better than a placebo. And no one tested how they worked in combination with the other drugs,” she says. “Just taking the patient off everything can improve their health right away.” But not only is checking out the research another time-consuming task, patients often don’t even like it when they’re taken off their drugs, she explains; they find their prescriptions reassuring.
Later, Ioannidis tells me he makes a point of having several clinicians on his team. “Researchers and physicians often don’t understand each other; they speak different languages,” he says. Knowing that some of his researchers are spending more than half their time seeing patients makes him feel the team is better positioned to bridge that gap; their experience informs the team’s research with firsthand knowledge, and helps the team shape its papers in a way more likely to hit home with physicians. It’s not that he envisions doctors making all their decisions based solely on solid evidence—there’s simply too much complexity in patient treatment to pin down every situation with a great study. “Doctors need to rely on instinct and judgment to make choices,” he says. “But these choices should be as informed as possible by the evidence. And if the evidence isn’t good, doctors should know that, too. And so should patients.”
In fact, the question of whether the problems with medical research should be broadcast to the public is a sticky one in the meta-research community. Already feeling that they’re fighting to keep patients from turning to alternative medical treatments such as homeopathy, or misdiagnosing themselves on the Internet, or simply neglecting medical treatment altogether, many researchers and physicians aren’t eager to provide even more reason to be skeptical of what doctors do—not to mention how public disenchantment with medicine could affect research funding. Ioannidis dismisses these concerns. “If we don’t tell the public about these problems, then we’re no better than nonscientists who falsely claim they can heal,” he says. “If the drugs don’t work and we’re not sure how to treat something, why should we claim differently? Some fear that there may be less funding because we stop claiming we can prove we have miraculous treatments. But if we can’t really provide those miracles, how long will we be able to fool the public anyway? The scientific enterprise is probably the most fantastic achievement in human history, but that doesn’t mean we have a right to overstate what we’re accomplishing.”
We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough. But as long as careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is, scientists will keep delivering exactly that.
“Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,” he says. “I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”
David H. Freedman is the author of Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them. He has been an Atlantic contributor since 1998.
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
Dr. Angell cites the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. She explains:
“Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose, and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.”
Biederman’s own studies of the drugs he advocates to treat childhood bipolar disorder were, as The New York Times summarized the opinions of its expert sources, “so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive.”
In June 2009, an American senate investigation revealed that drug companies, including those that make drugs he advocates for childhood bipolar disorder, had paid Biederman$1.6 million in “consulting” and “speaking” fees between 2000 and 2007.
“Two of Biederman’s colleagues received similar amounts. After the revelation, the president of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the chairman of its physician organization sent a letter to the hospital’s physicians expressing not shock over the enormity of the conflicts of interest, but sympathy for the beneficiaries: “We know this is an incredibly painful time for these doctors and their families, and our hearts go out to them.”
Biederman’s failure to disclose his Big Pharma payments to his employers ar Harvard (as is required for all Harvard employees) has been under investigation* for the past two years by Harvard Medical School, in as journalist Alison Bass describes this: “what must be the longest investigation in that school’s history”).
Dr. Angell’s article contains bombshell after bombshell, all gleaned during her tenure asNEJM editor. For example, on the subject of doctors who are bought and paid for by Big Pharma, she writes:
“No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top 9 U.S.-based drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year in North America alone.By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease.”
Revelations like this from medical profession insiders cast serious doubt on more than what’s printed on the pages of these medical journals.
Your physician reads these journals, treatment decisions are changed, care is affected, drugs are prescribed – all based on Big Pharma-funded medical ghostwriter-prepared journal articles from physicians who fraudulently claim to be the study authors. Then you walk out of your doctor’s office with a prescription for a drug that may or may not kill you, based on treatment protocols written by doctors like Biederman who are on the take from Big Pharma.
A very recent example of the sad reality over at the once-prestigious New England Journal of Medicine is their decision to publish a drug company-funded review article. This review attempts to discredit emerging research suggesting that many years of using Merck’s Fosamax or Procter & Gamble’s Actonel (both osteoporosis drugs in a class called bisphosphonates) could actually result in more leg bone fractures.
Not surprisingly, drug manufacturers of bisphosphonates are fighting back ferociously against this emerging (independent) research. A Merck-funded review paper published in the NEJM on March 24, 2010 concludes:
“The occurrence of fracture of the subtrochantericor diaphyseal femur was very rare, even among women who had been treated with bisphosphonates for as long as 10 years.”
Sounds promising for Big Pharma. But if you look very, very closely, the article’s fine print confesses:
“The study was underpowered for definitive conclusions.”
You might justifiably ask yourself why a medical journal would stoop to publishing a meaningless scientific paper that the paper’s own authors admit lacks any conclusion. Even more troubling than a journal article that was itself bought and paid for by Merck, is the conflict of interest disclosure list at the bottom of this NEJM article. It reads like aWho’s Who of Big Pharma.
Of the 12 study authors listed in the NEJM article, at least three are full-time employees of Merck or Novartis. Each one of the other nine admit owning equity interests in or receiving cash, travel expenses, or “consulting and lecture fees” from companies including Merck, Novartis, Amgen, Roche Nycomed, Procter & Gamble, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Medtronics, Nastech, Nestle, Fonterra Brands, OnoPharma, Osteologix, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Sanofi-Aventis, Tethys, Unilever,Unipath, Inverness Medical, Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, OSIProsidion, or Takeda.
Why is the New England Journal of Medicine or any other credible medical journal accepting for publication articles submitted by paid employees of pharmaceutical companies?
As a cardiac patient, I’m gobsmacked by what appears to be this systemic corruption of not only medical journals who continue to publish what they clearly know is tainted research linked to drug marketing, but of the very doctors whom patients trust to look out for us.
Since my heart attack in 2008, I take a fistful of cardiac meds every day, and I have no clue which of them were prescribed for me based on flawed research or tainted medical journal articles funded by the very companies that make my drugs.
And worse, neither do my doctors.
Happily, there are other decent physicians out there who, like Dr. Angell, are just as outraged as she is. Her targets are not just guilty of unethical conflict of interest – they are criminals who should be charged with endangering our health while padding their wallets.
Read Dr. Angell’s article from the New York Review of Books, called Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption.
* NEWS UPDATE: “Massachusetts General Hospital Discloses Sanctions against Three Psychiatrists for Violating Ethics Guidelines”, July 1, 2011: The Boston Business Journal said today that three psychiatrists have been sanctioned for failing to adequately report seven-figure payments they received from drug companies.
Drs. Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens disclosed the disciplinary actions against them in a note to colleagues. According to a copy of the note made public upon request by the hospital, the three doctors:
• must refrain from “all industry-sponsored outside activities” for one year
• for two years after the ban ends, must obtain permission from Mass. General and Harvard Medical School before engaging in any industry-sponsored, paid outside activities and then must report back afterward
• must undergo certain training
• face delays before being considered for “promotion or advancement.”
The three doctors have been under the political microscope since June 2008 when Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, began investigating conflicts of interest involving clinicians. Biederman and Wilens have since admitted to accepting $1.6 million from drug companies whose drugs they were promoting; Spencer took $1 million.
Senator Grassley said, according to an online version of the Congressional record:
“These three Harvard doctors are some of the top psychiatrists in the country, and their research is some of the most important in the field. They have also taken millions of dollars from the drug companies.” | <urn:uuid:e3135a05-9937-4a8e-a0bf-8f62ee83c83b> | CC-MAIN-2017-34 | http://everythingyouknow-iswrong.blogspot.com/ | 2017-08-20T04:00:36Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886105970.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20170820034343-20170820054343-00630.warc.gz | en | 0.969756 | 9,646 |
Monday, December 22, 2008
as i find myself home for Christmas break, i can't believe how quickly my last first semester at school went. it seems like just yesterday i was packing up my room to head to school for RA training, but now i am faced with the hard reality that i only have four months left at the place i have come to call home over the last three and a half years. how is that even possible? and how can one even begin to explain the emotions that accompany that?
i'm excited to see what the Lord has in store, so incredibly excited, but at the same time not excited for all that i will be drastically changing. not only will the fact that the comfortability of being in the classroom compared to being in the work place no longer will hold true for my life, but also some of the most precious and most cherished relationships i've ever had in my life will be changing as well. no longer will i have the privilege of living in such close community with people who know me well, people to go to meals with, people to consistently hang out on the weekends, or people to stay up until the wee hours of the morning talking about the hard issues of life.
i don't think anyone can prepare you for this stage in life.
however, i am so thankful for the fact that the Lord has continued and will continue to give me the strength to love boldly. not only for the next four months, but also after graduation. sure, i am aware of the fact that things will look different, but that doesn't mean the value of the relationships will change nor does it mean that the blessing they have been to me will look any different.
it's kind of like what i have gone through with not being with my kids in India. some days the pain is intense and i can't express anything except through tears, and even though i always think of them, i know that i must continue entrusting them into the Lord's care. i hate that i am not there to laugh with them, to sing with them, to hold them, to play games with them, or any of that, but i am thankful that the Lord still is there giving them joy, protecting them, teaching them, holding them close, and loving them so deeply. i love that. and i love that he does that in all areas of life.
i love that the Lord meets us where we are at time and time again. i love that he takes me out of the miry clay and sets my feet upon the rock and reminds me of his love no matter how many times i seem to forget. i love that he knows me intricately; that he knows my weaknesses, my strengths, my thoughts, my failures, my successes, my dreams and desires, the things that make me laugh, the things that bring me to tears, the things i am struggling through, and the things that i am learning. what an honor it is to be his child.
this past week i read a book that had been sitting in my bookcase since the beginning of the semester: The Shack. unfortunately, i didn't have a pen in hand as i made my way through the pages, but it was one of the most amazing, ficitional books i have read in a long time. ranking right up there with Redeeming Love. as i turned page after page, i was taken on a journey with a man who God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit met with. i was awed, almost brought to tears, and brought to a deeper understanding of how the Lord views me. how i truly am his beloved. how he understands so much more than i often will give him credit for and how patient he truly is.
even though i didn't have a pen in hand, there one small part that i made sure to remember where it was. it starts with the man talking to God saying, "I hate all of this--this crying and blubbering like an idiot, all of these tears." and God replied with, "Oh, child, don't ever discount the wonder of your tears. They can be healing waters and a stream of joy. Sometimes they are the best words the heart can speak."
wow...i read that conversation once and then i had to reread it. it made me think of the last five months of my life and i felt like the conversation the main character of the book was having the God was one that God and i could have had. often times i find myself hating the fact that i have become more emotional, able to cry at the drop of the hat. but what a comfort it was to read those lines of the book. sometimes tears truly are the best words the heart can speak and how healing they truly often are. and how thankful i am the Lord has opened my eyes to that...it's taken time, and i'm not sure i've arrived at the desination yet, but do we ever truly arrive while we're here on earth?
oh life...there never seems to be a dull moment.
may i continue learning, growing, trusting blindly, loving boldly, making the most of each day, dreaming for the future but living in the present, living simply instead of simply living, and finding joy in the little things.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
some days i am so thankful for it; others i resent it.
how can you resent it one may ask? simple. how can i not? how can i not resent the fact that the unknown is scary? how can i not resent the fact that following the Lord often times is difficult and requires sacrifice?
maybe resent isn't the right word. but for tonight, that's what describes how i am feeling. that doesn't mean that i am not still trying to seek the Lord's will for my life, because i am, but i think sometimes we all need to be reminded that dangerous surrender is exactly that: dangerous.
i don't know what my future holds for me, but this week i have been reminded that just because i make plans doesn't mean that they are going to happen. i have been reminded of the importance of holding on loosely to the things that mean so much to me, and i have been reminded of the love the Lord has placed in my heart for people, a culture, and a country halfway around the world from me.
on tuesday afternoon, i convinced a few of my friends to watch born into brothels with me. the movie is set in calcutta, india and tells the story of children whose mothers work as prostitutes. i knew watching the movie would be hard, but i didn't know what i had gotten myself into. the tears started about five minutes into the movie, and they didn't stop until a good fifteen to twenty minutes after the movie was over.
i cried for the children in the movie, and i cried for the children whose stories still remain untold. i cried for the mothers who are stuck in prostitution, and i cried for the men who see nothing wrong with what they are doing. i cried for the poverty, i cried for the brokenness, and i cried for the caste system. i cried for my children at Hope Home, and i cried because i missed my Thatta. i cried because of the vivid memories that were brought back to life, and i cried because of what the future may hold for me.
after the movie ended, i clicked on the extra scene of "three years later". the lady who lived among these children traveled back to the place this movie took place and was able to catch up with the children she spent so much time with three years earlier. as i watched her walk into the entrance of the boarding school where some of the girls now lived, i saw them run to her. i saw them run into her arms and her hold them tight.
for a second, i felt like i was back in india. i felt like i had just returned from the hospital this summer when we had spent a week away from the children and they were dropping their school books and running into my arms. and then i imagined what it really will be like when i am able to return to 120 of the most beautiful children in the world...and more tears continued to fall.
like i said earlier, i'm not sure what my future holds for me, and while it's scary at times, i will continue to remember the importance of trusting blindly and entrusting others into His care. and in this process i know that i will continue learning what dangerous surrender truly looks like, and i am sure that my heart will continue to break for what breaks his. may i be obedient wherever He leads.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Savior I come
Quiet my soul remember
Where Your blood was spilled
For my ransom
Everything I once held dear
I count it all as lost
Lead me to the cross
Where Your love poured out
Bring me to my knees
Lord I lay me down
Rid me of myself
I belong to You
Lead me, lead me to the cross
You were as I
Tempted and trialed
The word became flesh
Bore my sin and death
Now you're risen
rid me of myself, i belong to you...wow.
there simply are no words tonight.
may i let this song be my prayer.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
as i sat in chapel today, i can't even fully explain to you the things i was thinking, besides the fact that the God i serve is so big. and i can't comprehend him. my heart is burdened for the brokenness i have seen, for friends who are struggling, and for the simple fact that there are people all around this nation and world who don't know the loving power of Jesus.
but, i am thankful for that burden. as a matter of fact, i consider myself blessed with it.
i know that some days the road i am traveling on might be lonely, but i'm thankful that He walks with me hand in hand, that he sees the tears that fall, that he laughs when i laugh, and that He has the answers to all of life's questions.
i'm learning, i'm living, and i'm loving, and i wouldn't want it any other way.
may the Lord continue to teach me how to be present where He has me in the here and now and to rejoice in his divine appointments.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
i wouldn't change it for the world.
there are certain points during the day that i catch myself daydreaming, thinking about what the children are doing, what johnson is doing, or what i would be doing if i were there right then, but then i am quickly brought back to reality when i am hit in the face with the harsh reality that i am halfway around the world from them.
i wish i could click my heels three times and be there, laughing with johnson, playing with the children, joking with the staff, eating with my fingers, and sitting on the roof pouring our my heart to the Lord. if only it were that easy.
i think over the course of the last two weeks i have been completely and utterly overwhelmed with the brokenness i see all around me each and everyday. and i hate it and love it all at the same time. i hate it because i hurts but i love it because it truly is giving me a glimpse of what the Lord sees on a daily basis.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
i'm not going to be spending christmas with my children. i never thought of it before, but as soon as i realized it, my eyes welled with tears and they haven't stopped since. today, i feel like i did when i was on the airplane leaving the country. the pain is real and fresh despite the fact that it has been three and a half months. i can still close my eyes and picture each of the children, the staff members, and johnson. if only i could touch them...if only i could hold them...if only i could laugh with them.
may i learn what it means to embrace this pain rather than pretend like it isn't there, and as i am embracing it, may i also remind myself that i must continue to entrust them into his care.
Friday, October 31, 2008
i think this quote is a quite fitting summary of the week.
it's so interesting to me how the Lord continues to be faithful all the time despite my unfaithfulness. i know that i have by no means been making the Lord the first priority in my life, and as much as i hate it, i cannot change it. however, i'm thankful i finally woke up to that this week. i have been blessed beyond what words can describe this week through unexpected conversations with people, through laughter, through being spontaneous, through chicken curry in baldwin, and through simply being reminded of the fact that i am His beloved.
isn't that just like him to show up in the most unexpected ways?? sort of life in practicum this week...
as i rode in the car with my case manager and client, i couldn't help but laugh when the client called his neighbor an "ass hole" for not sharing his tomatoes with him even though he stole them in the middle of the night. but when i looked deeper at the client, my heart broke into thousands of pieces. i saw a man who was so paranoid he could barely function, i saw a man who wanted to support and love his family so well, but his illness often prevented him from doing so. what would it be like to live a life like his, in constant fear, constant confusion?
her hair was dyed and frizzy. she sat next to my case managers desk with her wrinkled hands folded nicely on her lap, and with her deep and raspy voice she began to explain her story. as i listened to her worries and her struggles, i began to question; why her? why not me? she doesn't deserve this, and how in the world am i going ever going to make a difference in her life; let alone in anyone else's life that i come in contact with in the field of social work?
and then it hit me.
it isn't my responsibility to relieve other people's pain nor could i if i even tried, but i love what i'm doing so much there is no reason i should even question whether or not i am making a difference, because the Lord's plans are far better than mine.
i love where i am at. i love what i am learning. i love being a girl on a journey to draw closer to the Lord each and every day. what a blessing, honor, and privilege it is to know i am His and His alone. who knows where he is going to lead me next...
Sunday, October 26, 2008
for a second, when i closed my eyes, i felt like i was back there.
the ache of missing the children and everyone else there has not changed. i suppose all i can do, though, is continue to pray that i will be able to go back there next summer or sometime soon. how sweet it is and will continue to be to trust in the One who is always faithful.
Friday, October 17, 2008
oh how i miss my children...
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
since india, i have consistenty been praying that the Lord would give me a sense of wonder, and He has definitely done just that. as i sat in my social work class this morning at the awful hour of 7:50, i looked out the window and saw the contrast of the leaves changing color with the dark grey sky, and i was astounded. it was beauty at its finest and probably simplest as well, but breathtaking beauty to say the least. last year i may have noticed the colors and appreciated how it looked, but i don't think i would have had a second thought about how those vibrant, contrasting colors truly show the Lord's creativity and desire to woo us into a deeper relationship with him.
another prayer that i have consistenty been praying since india is that my heart would break for what breaks his. now, i am fully aware of the danger that comes with that prayer, but it is one that i have not been able to get out of my head or off my heart for quite some time now. and as i sat in an apartment this afternoon with my case manager, i think it is safe to say that i had another heartbreaking moment that gave me just a small glimpse of what the He goes through each and every second.
his walls were yellow, stained with smoke; the only white spots on the walls were where pictures must have once hung. his bookshelf was filled with bibles and commentaries with layers of dust covering them. his living room consisted of two chairs covered with sheets, a television, a makeshift desk and a stool with a rip in it. his black cat is the fattest cat i have ever seen, and more than likely his refrigerator was half empty due to him being more worried about paying his bills than eating, because after all, the last time he ran out of food for three days, he lost 11 pounds.
as i sat there, listening to him and my case manager discuss how he was going to handle his finances for the month of november, i saw him in agony as he was overcome by anxiety. i listened to him talk about being afraid of going down to the "club", because he knew he was going to either get shot or beat up. i listened to him say over and over again that he would never buy another thing because he had really screwed up this last time, but when you cope with your anxiety by buying things how else is one suppose to survive? when you are a paranoid schizophrenic who has severe anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder how do you function in a world that is not made for you and has little to no tolerance for people like you either?
it isn't fair.
he didn't ask for these illnesses, and although i may never understand why these things have had to happen to him or to any of the other clients i have interacted with over the last four weeks, i do know that the Lord has used them to impact my life; in these cases, He has used the clients to break my heart for what breaks his, to have empathy like never before, to become completely uncomfortable in homes that aren't the cleanest and with people who smoke, and to have strength to laugh so i don't cry when the days get rough.
and although i know my heart is only going to continue to break as i continue to embark on my journey to social work and in what the Lord has for me, i will praise him for the fact his power is made perfect in my weaknesses, and that although i might not be able to change the whole world, perhaps i can help change some individual's worlds and in turn leave the world a better place when i am gone.
may he continue giving me the strength to love boldy, to entrust people into his care, and to trust so very blindly.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
i think that once you catch the vision of the needs there are all around the world, your life is drastically changed for the rest of forever.
it's hard when most people would describe you as rather unemotional to know that when you see pictures of people in third-world countries that your eyes are almost guaranteed to well with tears and that you just want to be with them in order to know their stories and in order to be a support to them in a way that they may have never experienced before. it doesn't matter if you can or can't speak their language; you know you could communicate with them enough to hopefully make them feel special, unique, loved, and appreciated.
the three of us girls talked to our beloved Thatta this past week. thinking of hearing his laughter on the phone still brings a smile to my face; i hate, though, that we weren't there to see him throw his hands up above his head or his belly jiggle as we were talking and laughing. he told us that the children are now bathing in the canal that runs alongside the road of the orphanage. i can just imagine them playing in the water together, laughing and chattering the whole time.
i miss their joy. i miss the simplicity. i miss the warm nights, under the stars, sitting on the steps, waiting for the children to pile on my lap after they ate dinner.
i hate that i am becoming restless in the unknown of what next summer may hold. i need to be reminded of the importance of trusting blindly, and i need to remember how important confident hope is. may i never forget the lessons i learned this summer or the people who are truly my family living halfway around the world from me, but may i rest in the fact that his ways are far above mine.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
it's so interesting relearning the same lessons over and over again. sometimes it's annoying and frustrating, but i think i have realized that each and every time although the lessons may seem the same in the beginning there is always something different that goes into them. and when i walk away from the lessons i always seem to come away with something different.
as i flipped back through my journal from last week i found these two quotes that i had written during the last summit service:
"Take the fig leaf facade off and allow the Lord to use you--allow your fears and failures to be seen by the body of Christ in order to encourage others and spur them on their relationship with Christ. Stop being selfish and prideful, admit your weaknesses to yourself, the Lord and to those who can hold you accountable. Let the Lord teach you what it means to surrender, to do the things you are afraid of, and to be everything you are afraid of being. Draw near to Abba and He will draw near to you because the One who calls you is faithful, and He will do it."
"He's going to hold you when you come to him, but He wants ALL of you; not just what you're comfortable giving Him, but ALL that you are. Take his hand that He is offering to you and TRUST that a life surrendered to him will be far more glorious than anything we could possibly imagine doing on our own."
as i reread those quotes, i see so much truth in them; however, sometimes i think the truth is scarier than what any of us are willing to admit.
the three of us girls met with the american board of directors for the orphanage this sunday. when two of the board members talked about leaving for india in two and a half weeks, i didn't think i was going to be able to hold it together. my heart aches so much to be back there; so much that i can't even put words to it. i miss so much about the country and so much about the people and so much about their culture. but not just that, i miss the fact that the distractions there seem like nothing compared to the distractions here in the states.
Jesus is so real to them. not that He isn't to us, but it is in such a different way. it's in a way where regardless of what you are doing you feel His presence right beside you, where there is no hesitation to praise Him one minute and bring petitions to Him the next, where you see His image truly reflected in the children's eyes. Jesus became so real to me this summer, and I think part of me is afraid I am going to forget that.
it's hard to believe that i've been home longer than i was in India now, and it's even more difficult to realize that i'm no where near being done processing through everything i experienced or felt. i suppose, though, i need to continue reminding myself that not only do i need to continue entrusting people into his care, but i also need to be willing to entrust myself to him...
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Being that 1 Peter is one of my favorite books of the Bible, i can't tell you how many times i have read those verses; however, tonight, they spoke to me in a way they never had before. and i think that most of that was due to the fact that i took the time to read what my application portion said about these two verses. it reads as follows:
One characteristic all children share is that they want to grow up...When we are born again, we become spiritual newborn babies. If we are healthy, we will yearn to grow. How sad it is that some people never grow up. The need for milk is a natural instinct for a baby, and it signals the desire for noursihment that will lead to growth. Once we see our need for God's Word and begin to find noursihment in Christ, our spiritual appetite will increase, and we will start to mature.
talk about the Lord speaking to and teaching me through two seemingly simple verses.
since going to india and growing more in my relationship with Christ in those six weeks than i ever have before, i've struggled so much since being home not feeling like i have been growing or learning anything at all. sure, i've been able to see the way the Lord still answers my prayers here in the states just as he did in india, but there's just been something different, and i never could quite put my finger on it.
i think those two verses have helped me understand more, though.
i had such a HUGE taste of the Lord's kindness this summer and i have continued to have tastes of his kindness in other areas of my life, but i wasn't crying out for the nourishment quite like i should have been after tasting how good, wonderful, marvelous, magnificent, and sovereign he truly is.
i have a long way to go, but i'm excited for the journey. i want to continue learning what it means to extend grace, trust blindly, and love boldly...but more than anything i want to have childlike faith and i want the nourishment He wants to give me in order to be made more and more into his image.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
today, i miss india and my children so much more than i ever thought possible. and i have a feeling it may continue to intensify over the next few months.
everyone from the orphanage has been on my heart and mind so much this week, and i long to hold the children in my arms and to have coffee with johnson so much more than ever. i've fought back tears like never before, and if someone would pay for me to fly there tomorrow, i would jump at the chance.
although i have loved being at school, it has not come without challenges. those challenges range from being overwhelmed with the abundance of food in baldwin to the discovery of US gold medalists in the states receiving $25,000 per medal, from seeing how full my closet is of clothes to walking around on a campus where a building is being constructed that i'm not even sure i want to know how much it costs, and from being able to engage in one on one conversations where i speak the same language as those all around me to driving down the road to the new sonic for dessert one night.
now, of course, none of those are bad things, culturally speaking, but it is through such instances that i have been able to better recognize that my worldview has truly, truly been altered. i'm not sure if it is going to last for the rest of my life, but i continue to pray that the Lord would etch the lessons from india deep in my heart. and i have to continually remind myself that my convictions are mine and not anyone else's.
i long to be back in a culture where the time spent in worship is irrelevant, and it is simply Spirit lead. i long to be back in a culture where it doesn't matter how good of a singer you are, but yet, everyone knows that it is a sweet song in the Father's ear. i long to be back in a culture where one egg can show how deep someone's faith is. i long to be back in a culture where people aren't simply living, but where people are living simply. i long to be back in a culture where the people take the time to stop every day for tea and coffee, where children call me sister, and where i can sing down the path to the home with my thatta.
i long to be back in india.
i am continually hoping, continually praying, and continually trusting that if it is the Lord's will for me to return; it will happen.
i received an email today from one of the men we worked with while we were in india. he said to me, "I would like to see you back in india in order to do the Lord's ministry." my heart leaped at his statement, and then my eyes filled with tears. and then my next hour proceeded to be filled with looking at pictures and sharing stories with a friend about my time there.
now i don't want you to think that i'm not finding joy in each day, because i am, and i am so thankful for the ways that the Lord has continued to show up since being home and the ways He has continually answered my prayers. i think, now, i am just learning what it means to truly be burdened for his people and to have a heart that breaks for what breaks his. i am so thankful he is willing to entrust me with a small part of that. and again, i am reminded of how great of a God we serve...what a blessing.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
i leave for school tomorrow, and how that is possible i am not sure either. i am reminded of the journey the Lord took me on last year in discovering that my dream of going back to India was going to become a reality, and i can only hope and pray that the journey He takes me on this year will be just as exciting. and who knows, maybe next summer, i'll again find myself back at the place where i left an even bigger part of my heart this time.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
I keep your picture in my passport, but it's not the same.
Still there's joy in this sadness; in my heart and in this place.
In the hope of the longing, the tears cannot erase,
and I'm hoping that you're sleeping ok.
I miss you...I miss you...I miss you...
Some say joy in the sadness, others say bittersweet, I say buy me a one way ticket to go back.
No, but really, although I would love it more than anything to go back, to hold my children once again, to laugh with Johnson, to be laughed at for not being able to stomach the spices and not being able to eat with my hand very well, to hear Dihvya sing sweetly in my ear, to be called sister, and to be surrounded by the mountains, windmills, and coconut trees, I am trusting with all that I am that the Lord is taking better care of them than I ever could.
It's fair to say, though, that the tears have been abounding lately, and I have to admit every night when I go to bed I think about what the children are doing or what the staff is doing and I pray that the Lord would encourage them in a new way that day, that He would comfort those who are feeling lonely, and that He would give the staff strength and patient endurance as they love the children.
The hole in my heart that I have experienced in these past three and a half weeks is nothing I have ever experienced before. The way I am more aware of how present the Lord truly is in all of our lives each and every day is something I never have experienced here in the states quite like this. And on the opposite end of that, I am now so much more aware of darknesses that are present here in the states rather than just thinking the only places darknesses are truly prevalent is in third world countries where they aren't classified as "Christian" nations.
I don't think we really realize how privileged we are to be able to walk to our refrigerators or pantries and see an abundance of food staring back at us. I don't think we realize how privileged we are to be able to sleep on comfortable matresses with pillows and blankets. I don't think we realize how privileged we are to not be under constant persecution for our faith. I don't think we realize how privileged we are to have money in our bank accounts. I don't think we realize how privileged we are to have closets and dressers full of clothes. I don't think we realized how privileged we are to brush our teeth every morning and night with a toothbrush and toothpaste. I don't think we realize how privileged we are to have love marriages. I don't think we realize how privileged we are to have brothers and sisters in Christ living all around the world or right down the street. And I don't think we realize how privileged we are to be serving a God who doesn't need to use us to reach others for him, but yet He chooses to use us anyway.
As much as I would love to hear the voice again of the children, I am so thankful that the God who transcended all cultural and language barriers while I was in India is going to continue transcending the new barrier of distance between my sisters and brothers in Christ and myself.
And as my eyes well with tears, I pray that the Lord would continue teaching me what it means to entrust people into his care, to extend grace, to love boldly, for faith like a child, and to break my heart for what breaks his.
May we all be on the lookout for the ways He wants to use us even if it means stepping out of our comfort zones and for the divine appointments He has set up for us in advance. And may all of us not only be able to say, "Abba, I love you," but also, "Abba, I trust you with all that I am."
Thursday, July 31, 2008
today for lunch i had a butter and cheese sandwich. if only it would have been from cake world it would have been much more delicious. and although my beverage of choice was orange, it was far from mirinda. and the cashews weren't the same without the coffee and biscuits.
someday, i hope and pray with all that i am to be back with the people i absolutely love and adore not only sharing in their lives, but also sharing some of their typical foods that can't be found here in the states.
oh Lord, give me the strength to continue loving boldly and entrusting people into your care.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Thursday, July 17, 2008
i haven't really let myself think about the children, the staff, or johnson much besides what they are doing at different moments in time. (for example, right now, they are sleeping b/c it is almost 1:45 in the morning there...) and i know that if i think about them too much my heart will ache more than it already does, and that is something i don't think that i want to go through until i am at my house.
we will be leaving mexico tonight, and then flying out of california tomorrow. upon my arrival home, i promise to update more extensively as i know i have much to share. until then, may you continue resting in His truths and promises.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
I don't have much time but I wanted to take the time to update this to let you all know that I am still alive and loving my time here in India.
I cannot believe that we are departing on Sunday, and it has been quite the challenge to fight back tears everyday so far this week. I have a feeling Sunday my eyes are going to be bloodshot and my face tear stained, but I am still so thankful for the opportunity I have been given to be here for a little over five weeks.
The children are still amazing, beautiful, and loving, but they, along with the staff, are not happy we are leaving. I had one girl tell me the other day as we sat under a coconut tree that I just needed to move to India and finish my studies here and live with them for the rest of my life. I wanted to tell her I would in a heartbeat, but at the same time, I know that isn't what the Lord has for me right now.
So, for now, I will just continue praying that the Lord would show up and give me his strength to get through the next few days, and I will also continue praying that the Lord will give strength to these people here who have truly become my family. I have so many stories, so many things I have learned to share with each and everyone of you. Although the transition back to America may be difficult, I am looking forward to how the Lord continues to use this trip to not only bless me, but bless others, and I will continue praying expectantly for the Lord to show up not only in my life in ways I have never experienced but in your life too.
Be blessed today, my friends.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
this week was spent in the hospital, and let me just tell you it wasn't my favorite time. actually, it has probably been the hardest four days of the trip thus far. not only am i not the biggest fan of hospitals in the states, but hospitals in foreign countries definitely are not my cup of tea, this hospital especially. i'm sure in other places in india there are more advanced hospitals, but this one was founded in 1838 and although i know the technology and equipment is not that old, a lot of it seems like it. i know i can't paint a good word picture for you as to what it looks like, but the best thing i can think to describe it is a hospital that you would have seen in movies from the 1950s or so where all the wards are separate and all the patients are in one big room on uncomfortable metal beds. the nurses all wear white saris and they still wear hats.
regardless, as challenging as it has been, it has also been a blessing. i was able to hold some adorable babies in the nicu, catch the very tale end of a mother giving birth, and pray for patients throughout the entire compound. it was humbling, challenging, frustrating, and an incredible growing and learning experience that is for sure.
i am quite excited to get back to the orphanage though, that is for sure. i can't tell you how excited i am for the children to be climbing up me for me to hold and for me to end up having two of them in my arms at once! nor can i tell you how excited i am for the older girls to teach us more tamil words, to eat chapattis, and spend time with our tattha (johnson), to continue encouraging the staff in their english, and to essentially be in the middle of a haven the Lord has created as the mountains and windmills surround us.
regardless, the Lord has continued to show up, and i cannot tell you how thankful i am to be here serving Him in the capacity He has deemed fit for the summer. while these last four days were a definite struggle, i began to truly learned what it meant to give thanks in all circumstances, and i was reminded of 1 Thess 5:24 (i believe) that says, "He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it."
that verse has spoken to me on two specific different occassions as i have been on this trip; the first being when i was incredibly overwhelmed at the beginning of the trip when we were trying to figure out our programming for the staff at the orphanage and the second being the second morning before we headed to the hospital. i was so blessed by that verse each time i read it that i almost cried...
tomorrow morning i will be preaching at a church, and the remainder of our day will primarily be spent working with people from the congregation; sharing some of our stories with them and hopefully hearing some of theirs. we aren't completely sure what it is going to look like, but i have no doubt that the Lord is going to show up. He has in so many ways thus far, there is no need for me to doubt now.
i can't wait to share with you the ways He has answered my prayers for a sense of wonder nor can i wait to share with you about how the Lord used an egg to speak to me. i am amazed, astounded, blessed beyond all measure, and so thankful; yet, i know i am nothing without Him and continue singing praises to Him for the simple fact that His power is made perfect in my weaknesses. we are all inadequate, but we also must be grateful that he chooses to use us anyway.
i'm not sure when i will have access to the internet again, or if i will before we leave india, but please keep praying for us as we are here. and know that you are being lifted up in prayer as well. what a blessing it is to be halfway around the world from all of you and know that we are still serving the same Almighty Father. be blessed today, my friends.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
it is crazy to think that tomorrow our trip is officially half over...actually it has brought tears to my eyes many times just thinking about it. i can't imagine leaving the people i keep falling more and more in love with and i just keep praying that i will be able to live in the here and the now and soak up every available moment while continuing to love boldly.
this week was full of some ups and some downs. the three of us girls spent an absolutely amazing time out on the roof marveling at the lord's creation one night this week and the staff seems to be improving on their english. the children are always a joy to be around and seriously they are so beautiful. i can't wait to show you all pictures. they have completely captured my heart even though they can't have more than a two sentence conversation with me. it has been so encouraging though because the little girl (who isn't so little as she is in 7th grade now) my family sponsors finally has warmed up to me and i now call her my tangai (tan-guy) or little sister and she called me her akka or older sister. it's a blessing and i smile just thinking about her...
on a negative note...i somehow managed to get a little sick this week. i'm better now, but for a few days i was very thankful for the fact we had a western toilet in our bathroom. i only ran a fever for one day, praise the lord, and am not feeling much better. good enough actually to try and eat indian food again :)
this tuesday we leave for the hospital, and wednesday our work begins there. it will be quite challenging, but at the same time, i am looking forward to how the Lord is going to use us there and how He is going to move. please be praying for us--especially for me and jess as we are not too excited about having to leave the children and work in a hospital. and also, a week from sunday i will be preaching at a church, i definitely could use your prayers on that one!!!
there's so much more i wish i could tell you, but my time is limited. i want you to know that i appreciate all of your prayers so very much and know that this trip would not be possible without you. i mean that...
i'm not sure when we are going to be able to access the internet again, but know that all of you will continue to be in my thoughts and prayers untill i can communicate with you again. may He bless you and keep you until i am able to talk with you again. i can't wait to share so many more stories and pictures with you when i return to the states!
Saturday, June 14, 2008
regardless...our first week of time with the staff and children went so well. it's hard to believe we've been here for nearly 10 days, but it's also hard to believe that we have another four weeks here. i am absolutely overwhelmed at that thought but know that i am going to be crying like a baby when the time comes for us to have to say goodbye to the children and the staff.
it's such a privilege to be here, and i have cried many tears while i am here. to some of you who know me, that will come as a surprise because you know i don't cry often, and let me tell you it's come as a surprise to me as well. however, i know that so much of me is overwhelmed at the fact that i am back at the place where i left my heart 3 years ago and where i know i am going to have to say good bye to again not knowing when the Lord will open up the door for me to return or if he ever will.
i do ask for your continued prayers; thankfully, i have not gotten sick since we've been here but that has not held true for stacey, jessica, or my dad. i am thanking the Lord currently that i don't like vegetables because jess and my dad are convinced that it was some vegetables they ate for dinner that made them sick.
terry and jeeva, the couple who runs the orphanage, have been such a blessing. although their english isn't very good, they still manage to make us feel more honored than anyone in america could ever imagine. it's difficult though, because we want to serve them, but in their culture they don't necessarily understand that and are so hospitable...and we don't want to be rude and tell them no. oh, cultural barriers.
i feel like i have so much to share, and actually, i know that i do, but words on a blog don't do what i am learning justice. the Lord is so faithful and i am so very, very blessed and honored that He has chosen me. His grace is far more sufficient than I ever realized and i cannot explain to you how freeing it has been to come to that understanding.
regardless. your prayers and thoughts are appreciated more than i can express. i ask that you would continue praying and that you would specifically be praying for me as i am to be writing a sermon to give at a church in two weeks. not necessarily my cup of tea, but we'll see in what ways the Lord moves on this one :)
i will be updating again hopefully next saturday, so until then, know you are all in my thoughts and prayers!
Monday, June 9, 2008
there have been multiple times where i have been overwhelmed, exhausted, completely drained, and have absolutely no confidence in myself, but how amazing is it that He meets us where we are at??
as soon as we set foot in the airport when we first arrived, i remembered why i fell in love with this country, and when we arrived at the home, i was reminded of that again in an even stronger way. the children have clearly captured my heart, again, and i love them each so much even though i cannot pronounce their names or speak any of their language. i wake up every morning thanking Him for the beauty that surrounds me; mountains, banana trees, palm trees, and windmills, and then i thank Him again for the fact that there is ALWAYS a breeze where we are and for the fact that when the power goes out it doesn't stay out for long. i could do without frogs in the toilet and scorpion looking thing in the sink though. but regardless, what a blessing it has been to be back here with the people i admire and have prayed for consistently for the past 3 years.
i am amazed at how He has moved and how He has worked...seriously. i never understood what it meant for Him to be made strong in our weaknesses until i have been here. i have cried out to Him on so many occassions and He has shown up. i know i am not doing this on my own strength and i cotinue hoping that He gets ALL the glory, honor, and praise.
i wish i had more time, but unfortunately i do not. next time though, i am sure there will be more. i cannot wait to share in person with each one of you about everything when i return home. until then, i will continue trusting blindly and loving boldly.
Monday, June 2, 2008
one thing i do want to share before i go to bed is that yesterday in the course of packing i happened to find my journal that i kept when i went to india my senior year of high school. it was amazing to read back on my experiences there and i am so thankful the Lord was able to use that to remind me why my heart is where it is and ignite the fire in my heart again for what us girls are going to be doing for the next six weeks.
to anyone who may be reading this, your prayers are appreciated more than you realize. you have no idea the difference it has made, and the difference it has the potential to make. please keep praying as we actually begin our travels. i will be updating as time allows.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
although i'm sitting quite comfortably in my living room as i write this, i know that back in my bedroom there are suitcases that need to be packed, dirty clothes that need to be washed, picture frames that need to be made, insurance that needs to be bought, devotions that need to be planned, phone calls that need to be made, and the list could go on and on. even though i am a planner and have tried my hardest to not to get behind on stuff, my to do list hasn't seemed to get any shorter these past few days. i guess that's just how life goes sometimes. i have no doubt, though, that everything will all get done in the next 48 hours.
in other news. life at the Fleck household is never dull, especially when my dad is either out of the country or preparing to go out of the country. and now that he's gone and i'm preparing to go, i guess i should probably breathe a sigh of relief that nothing too huge has happened or gone wrong--praise the Lord. take for example the tornadoes that were in wabash this week. yes, tornadoes are a big deal so that is huge, but the thing of it is there really wasn't much damage done at our house...a few pieces of our fence around the pool were blown out and a branch from the maple tree in our front yard was broken. but travel down the road to where my grandparents old house is less than 1/4 of a mile and you would find tops of huge pine trees were broken off, big branches from their maple trees completely snapped off, the old-school TV antennae laying flat on the ground that was taller than the house, and if you would travel another 1/2 mile to our other neighbors house around the corner you would find trees that had been uprooted in their yard that were bigger around than barrels and taller than a two story house. and although we were without power for 15 hours, at least it came back on; our church was cancelled this morning because of the fact there still was no power there and the telephone poles were still down. all that to say, i am very thankful i serve a very big God who is my protector.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
i'm still overwhelmed at how the Lord has brought the three of us girls together to work as a team, but i am also beyond thankful.
it's crazy to think back at how the Lord has answered so many of our prayers. from the other two girls having raised more than enough support to the Holy Spirit speaking to us about what the different focuses each of us girls are going to have while we are at the orphanage. and yet, even from the beginning the Lord heard my prayers about this summer and answered it in bigger ways than i could have ever imagined.
i've also found that it is so interesting how the Lord can use songs to speak to us, it seems that each week a different song has encouraged or spoken to me in some way or another, and yesterday, on the way to anderson, i heard and old camp favorite that at one part says, "...set apart for you my master, ready to do your will..." what a blessing it is that the Lord has set me apart and how exciting it is for me to continue discovering what his will for me is.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Friday, May 16, 2008
in 17 days, i will be boarding the plane in indy to fly to chicago only then to board another plane to fly to mumbai, and 18 hours later, when we arrive in mumbai, we will board another plane to fly to another city where we will be met by my dad and someone else to drive us another 3 hours to the orphanage. and finally, we will arrive at the place we will call home for 6 weeks.
in the 17 days that are still remaining before my dream truly becomes a reality, i will continue praying that the Lord would open my eyes to what He has in store for us, and what He is going to do in and through us while we are gone. and not only that, but i will praise Him for the opportunity and for the fact that He trusts me with a task that seems far too large for me. and the only reason i am going with confidence is because i know that i am not alone, nor will i ever be.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
I come into this place burning to receive your peace. I come with my own chains. From wars I've fought for my own selfish gain. You're my God and my Father. I've accepted your son. But my soul feels so empty now what have I become?
Lord come with your fires, burn my desires--refine me. Lord, my will has deceived me please come and free me. Refine me, refine me.
My heart can't see When I only look at me. My soul can hear. When I only think of my own fears. They are gone in a moment you're forever the same. Why did I look away from you. How can I speak your name?
Lord, come with your fire burn my desires refine me. Lord, my will has deceived me please come and free me. Come rescue this child for I long to be reconciled to you. Refine me..All I can do is lift my heart and soul to you. And pray oh I will pray...
what perfect timing it was for me to hear this song.
and i will continue praying, that is for sure.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
it's surreal that four weeks from today i am leaving. i truly can't wrap my mind around it. and as much of a roller coaster these past few months have seemed to be, i am beyond thankful for the fact that i have finally recognized the importance of hope, and i am learning what it means to be humbly willing on so many different levels. praise the Lord for his faithfulness.
"He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls."
1 Peter 2:24-25
Friday, May 2, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
time has been flying by lately. wednesday is the last day of the semester, and then i am officially a senior. where have these last three years gone?
regardless, as each day passes i continue getting more and more excited. the two girls and i had the opportunity to meet with the american board of directors two weekends or so ago. it was so comforting being in the presence of people who you know have been praying for you on a daily basis, and it was so encouraging for stacey and jess to meet these people and vice versa.
it still doesn't seem like it's really going to be happening, and it probably won't seem real until i'm at the airport on june 3 leaving behind everything i find comfort in and everything that i think is normal. but, until then i just keep praying that the Lord would be preparing my heart as well as the hearts of those i am going to encounter in India.
Monday, March 10, 2008
as i scroll through my pictures from India, periodically, my heart is warmed, and my excitement continues to grow day by day.
since my last post, i feel like quite a bit has happened. God has continued to show up, and He is putting everything exactly in place.
the first big thing is that stacey made the decision to go with us this summer. the second big thing is we now have a translator, nivya, and dad found stacey's preceptor for her nursing requirements. our tickets will be purchased within the next couple weeks; it seems unreal.
i am continually amazed, and i am so excited to continue learning and for the Lord to continue preparing my heart. and for now, i'm going to end with a quote that stuck out to me from Bill Hull's book The Disciple Making Church,
"I am not sure why evangelicals experience so much angst over God’s will: It always seems clearly communicated when needed. So many Christians want to know too much too soon; they would rather walk by sight, knowing what is going to take place beforehand. However, God requires us to walk by faith, not knowing the unnecessary. Part of resting in Christ and finding his contentment involves the willingness to live in a fog over future details."
i pray that i will continue learning what it truly looks like to walk by faith, and that i will find contentment while living in the fog.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Monday, February 4, 2008
Friday, February 1, 2008
wow. how powerful and how true.
this excerpt came from Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World, and i couldn't have read it at a better time. i feel like i have finally realized this week that the distraction, doubt, and especially discouragement are the ways in which satan has been attacking me as of late. it's been so interesting, because, truly, being discouraged was draining me of all my hope, of all my visions, and of all my dreams.
everything is still up in the air in regards to this summer, and i've been reminded this week how much i hate the unknown. and i could give you all the sunday school answers in the world about trusting the Lord and about surrendering to him, and to an extent, i think i probably have done that--but i guess not completely because of how much not knowing frustrates me.
perhaps that is something to work on more this week.
oh what a journey it has been...and continues to be.
Monday, January 21, 2008
almost a week has passed since i wrote that in an email to the board of directors for the Hope Home in India. and it is exactly a week today that i found out that my dream is starting to become more of a reality. it's hard to explain in words the way i've felt over the course of this past week. overwhelmed, excited, anxious, joyful...and the list goes on.
it's hard to believe that seven months ago i began praying for the Lord to open doors for me to spend my summer overseas if that is where he wanted me. there were times when i was completely convinced he wanted me in India, and other times i was completely convinced he wanted me in Guyana, and other times i was completely convinced i was going to be in Indiana, still. and even though i knew the Lord was going to work this situation out according to his purpose, i still felt as if i had no guidance nor answers for such a long time. and now, thinking of the potential of three other girls joining me for six weeks this summer is far bigger than i could have ever even imagined.
praise the Lord that even when our prayers seem to go unanswered his ways are still far above and better than anything we could ever imagine. and now, i must continue praying and trusting that He is going to allow the rest of the details to fall into place. | <urn:uuid:d8650fba-2da4-4c4b-a4f2-6261a84d78bd> | CC-MAIN-2017-34 | http://eliznicole.blogspot.com/2008/ | 2017-08-18T16:11:46Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886104704.64/warc/CC-MAIN-20170818160227-20170818180227-00310.warc.gz | en | 0.9837 | 12,580 |
The first signs came early.
Most infants can't do much, and I was no exception, according to grown-ups who were present at the time. But there was one area in which I dominated at a very young age: I was a crackerjack cuddler. Given a supple shoulder or a warm lap, I showed all of the necessary skills—the burbles, the sighs, the tiny hand-grabs, the determination to get cozy for hours on end. I snuggled all comers. I drooled in their faces.
And I had a strong will to cuddle. When I got my first big-boy bed, I devised a successful strategy of running around the house at bedtime until I was furnished with a parental snuggle partner. Later, I enlisted my little brother: If there was He-Man to be watched, it was easy enough to convince him to serve as a pillow. (I still find him useful in this respect.)
By the time I started cuddling regularly with girlfriends, in college and thereafter, it was clear I possessed an outsize appetite for sedentary touch. While some of my partners found my cuddliness endearing, it caused problems too: Showers started later and appointments were blown. For some of my associates, morning productivity declined—or so they said—and the narcotic properties of my skin were blamed.
This was nonsense on its face; it takes two to snuggle up. Besides, I viewed cuddling as a productive activity in and of itself, like going to the gym or scrubbing the toilet bowl. A snuggle a day might keep the doctor away.
Yet even as I defended myself, I also harbored insecurities about my tactile needs—doubts that have never gone away. I will confess that a great canoodling session is not the apex of human achievement. No doubt the architects of the Roman Aqueduct were not snuggle-maniacs. If the building of civilization had been left in the hands of unreconstructed cuddlers, the project might have suffered delays.
More vexing than the laziness question, however, is a fractured feeling I sense deep in my cuddly heart. For me, the urge to cuddle is Janus-faced: At times I can play the snuggler-protector—the father figure who enfolds, defends and marches into the future; yet my default setting, if I am being honest, is the cuddle-receiver—an infantile and insecure sensory insufficiency from the distant past. The crux of the problem is this: I want to be held, and it is an awful, wussy feeling.
Oh, Lord! Why must I cuddle so?
Someone must be blamed. I want to blame someone for my cuddlesome predicament. Who can I blame?
My parents seem like the obvious choice: They cuddled me too much. They spared the rod; they spoiled the child. Spartan treatment has been the prescription for making men manly since antiquity. Didn't Rome fall because its men got soft? And anti-snugglism has a strong tradition in this country: A century ago, physicians were telling moms to keep their cuddle-hungry hands to themselves. Did my folks ignore this important history?
The era of snuggle antagonism—the War on Cuddling—had its origins in the 1894 publication of The Care and Feeding of Children, a book by the eminent pediatrician Luther Emmett Holt that was among the first "scientific" guides to mothering. Holt's baby book, which would be issued in 15 editions over the next 40 years, provided a strict roadmap to parenting in a new century rife with tuberculosis, swarms of suspicious immigrants, and invisible killers called germs. Scientific regimentation seemed to chart the safest path forward—both in the efficient factory and the economical home—and babies were expected to get with the program.
Holt was obsessed with hygiene, and eschewed promiscuous tactile techniques. On whether rocking was necessary, he wrote, "By no means. It is a habit easily acquired … and a very useless and sometimes injurious one." On playing with babies, he declared, "The less of it at any time the better." Holt helped the Labor Department craft a 1914 pamphlet on mothering—3 million copies were distributed—that emphasized discipline and warned that germ-laden smooches could kill. Yet not all touch was taboo: To ensure timely bowel movements, Holt suggested "introducing just inside the rectum a small cone of oiled paper or a piece of soap" while dangling the kid over a chamber pot.
Early reports on the War on Cuddling showed stunning results. A 1910 story published in the Washington Post described a "scientific baby" named Leonard who had been brought up without "all the manifestations of motherly affection, such as cuddling, kissing, exhibition, and fine garments." Yet Leonard was a bull. Average babies observed by Holt did not hold their heads up or laugh until the third or fourth month. Leonard held his noggin erect by the third week, according to the Post story, and was laughing his little nards off nine weeks later.
Some baby! Just think: If my parents hadn't indulged my pathetic yearnings, I might have been like Leonard.
The war escalated. By the 1920s, a new school of psychology called behaviorism suggested that cuddling wailing infants would "condition" them to become lifelong crybabies. The behaviorist John B. Watson argued that mollycoddled toddlers grew into weak and whiny adults. In a chapter entitled "Too Much Mother Love" in his 1928 book Psychological Care of Infant and Child, he explained what was good for infants: "Treat them as though they were young adults. … Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning."
It's not clear how many Depression-era infants enjoyed morning handshakes, but the anti-cuddling paradigm was promoted in women's magazines well into the 1930s. Then it started to fade. The demise of snuggle antagonism grew out of the work of a few renegade doctors who noticed that isolated foundlings often wasted away—a condition called "hospitalism"—but could sometimes be brought back from the brink by a nurse's loving affection.
It was the first hint that the cuddle haters were wrong—very wrong—and the reason why I have to give my folks a pass for their snuggle-positive parenting. Startling experiments in the 1950s showed that baby monkeys will sometimes forego food for contact comfort. Later research on human preemies indicated that massages help babies gain weight. Now scientists may have found a pathway for these love transmissions: special cuddle receptors in the skin that are attuned to social touch. Today, snuggling is seen as so important for babies that many hospitals run infant touch programs staffed by volunteer cuddlers.
These insights prove that Leonard was exceptional indeed. Most cuddle-proofed kids surely suffered as a result. Some blamed their parents: After Life ran an article on the legacy of behaviorism in 1950, John B. Watson's son went to the trouble to write a terse letter to the editor thanking the magazine for dispelling the "illusion" of nonemotional child care. The children of another anti-cuddling zealot —a German physician who also advocated strapping kids into mechanical devices to ensure good posture—fared far worse: One shot himself in the head, and another started thinking that all of his body's physical processes, down to the blinking of his eyes, were being manipulated by cruel external forces.
So, in fact, my parents' snuggles might have saved my life. Maybe the cuddliness they fostered in me was even a wonderful thing—something I could be proud of. Was it was time to get out there and start flexing my cuddle muscles?
I knew I was an able snuggler, but how good was I? Was I primetime material—as I strongly suspected—or more of a junior-varsity type? To find out, I decided to take my talents to an event thrown by Cuddle Party—an organization dedicated to the delicate practice of nonsexual snuggling. My goal was simple: I wanted to dominate. I wanted to snuggle up and watch as my cuddles crushed the competition. Perhaps it sounds silly to approach a Cuddle Party like a sporting match, but what can I say? Winners win.
Cuddle Party was started in 2004 by sex educator REiD Mihalko (the small 'i' in his first name denotes an other-directed focus) who came up with idea while tending bar in New York City. Mihalko has floppy blond hair, the build of a tight end—his dad played the position for the Steelers—and a chill bearing that exudes cutaneous confidence. I first met him at a lecture where he was hawking a DVD that promised to help you earn your "black belt" in relationships. The cover depicted a shirtless Mihalko surrounded by topless ninjas.
Cuddle Party's conception came in a flash, says Mihalko. He was already throwing massage parties for his friends in the holistic health community, and some of his bar regulars were curious but too intimidated to attend. "One day I just kind of jokingly quipped back, 'If you're not going to come to a massage party, then grab your pillows and your blankets and your teddy bears and come to my house and I'll throw you a cuddle party.' "
It was like a meteor strike. "Oh. My. God. I'm like, we need to throw cuddle parties. And they're like, what? I'm like, cuddle parties, man. Like, that's what we need to do." The Yoda of Cuddling was born.
Mihalko raced home to draft the first set of snuggly by-laws, and he threw the first Cuddle Party a few weeks later with the help of his partner, Marcia Baczynski. Not long after, the gossip Web site Gawker took note, and a media storm ensued: GQ, People, the Washington Post, Current TV, and countless others ran stories on the trend. CSI: New York built an episode around a cuddle party. Today, Cuddle Party is an international organization with facilitators in the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Denmark, Belgium, Germany, and Hungary. Some 30,000 people have cuddled at their gatherings.
On a fall evening in New York City, I entered my first Cuddle Party feeling confident that I would be greeted like a baby polar bear. In addition taking a measure of my cuddling prowess, I was eager to see what it was like to canoodle dispassionately with strangers. I hoped that by getting trained in pure, nonsexual snuggling, I might learn to cuddle less like a baby and more like a samurai. The party commenced in a sparsely decorated West Village apartment with blanket-wrapped air mattresses on the floor. Thirteen cuddlers were assembled, most of them in their 20s and 30s. There was one older cuddler who bore a passing resemblance to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He looked comfortable in his pajamas, and his appearance caused me to wonder for the first time what Scalia's feet look like. I made for the bathroom to don my PJs. Per Cuddle Party protocol, the festivities began with a "Welcome Circle" where the instructor laid out the ground rules. To wit: Ask first if you want to touch anyone. Also: If you ask to touch someone and they say no, you must abide. We practiced asking each other if we could have a cuddle, and then saying no.
I turned to the person next to me and said, "Can I give you a back rub?"
"No," the cuddler replied. This was meant to prepare us for the cuddly communication challenges that lay ahead.
Other rules: Keep your clothes on. And: Signs of "arousal" have been known to appear. If a sign pops up near you, do not be alarmed—just stay still and hope it goes away. Also: No dry humping! Plus: It's OK if you don't feel like cuddling and just want to sit in the corner. Finally: Cuddle Party is a private space; if you bump into one of your co-cuddlers on the street, don't mention your shared history. Now, break! Cuddle up!
At this, about half of the assembled cuddlers, myself included, made a beeline to the snack table. Chips, hummus, celery sticks, carrots, water, juice. The mood was indistinguishable from a seventh-grade dance. I quickly decided it was time to get aggressive, so I offered back rubs to several ladies in quick succession. One accepted: a friendly and funny full-figured female.
We retired to an adjoining back room, which held a proper mattress and some burning votive candles. She lay down on her side.
"Um, don't you want a back rub?" I said.
"Sure, or we could just start like this," she proposed, suggesting a frontal approach. I plunged in. We cuddled tummy-to-tummy, with our arms wrapped awkwardly around each other's flanks. I heaved a leg over her waist, John Lennon-style. Gently I began to massage and stroke and scratch and knead her back, working her flesh with mounting fervor, and she squealed when I hit a tender spot. Before long, she was reduced to jelly.
A couple of other people came into the room: A hyper, redheaded female and a sweet-faced dude in an orange T-shirt. Did we want to cuddle feet, asked the redhead? Totally! We did!
The four of us brought our feet together in a pile. We wriggled and flapped them like beached pinnipeds. It was not clear why we were doing this. The experience reminded me of a time in second grade when my best friend Peter and I decided to touch butts. We just dropped our pants and backed into each other. Butt smushed butt in transcendent symphony. Then we fell on the floor and peed our pants laughing. If you ever have to decide between cuddling feet and touching butts, definitely go with touching butts.
While we cuddled feet, the redhead explained that she was into the fetish scene. She liked to get whacked on the bottoms of her feet. One time she'd had staples put in her soles. Another time she and a dominatrix had partied with one of Hollywood's cuddliest men in a Greenwich Village hotel. A cigar was involved. She was psyched to be at a cuddle party!
Pretty soon more cuddlers joined us on the bed, and someone suggested we do a six-person spoon. So we did: Boy-girl-boy-girl-boy-girl. I was on the end, cuddling the redhead, who felt small and soft and sexy in my arms. She commented that we were like a bunch of squirming eels. She was right. We were like eels, or those black-headed translucent grubs that you sometimes find in shallow mud, writhing in their own goo. The mass of bodies created thermoregulatory challenges, and before long the spoon gang split up.
As I lay back and watched the redhead bound out of the room toward the snack table, I realized that I wanted very badly to cuddle with her one-on-one. These gathering feelings threatened to derail my training in pure, nonsexual cuddling. For a half-second, I actually cared.
Here's a question: Is it possible to snuggle in a nonsexual way? The Cuddle Party people claim their events are not about sex: "As adults, we have fully-formed prefrontal cortexes … we can control ourselves," Mihalko insisted when we spoke. But the temptations associated with mashing one's body against the flesh of another are undeniable. Was my training in "pure cuddling" doomed from the start?
In fact, this very conundrum weighed on the minds of certain early American purity experts—the Puritans—who practiced an odd form of nonsexual snuggling known as "bundling." Bundling occurred when a courting young man wound up at his love interest's home in the evening, and was invited to spend the night in bed with her. They were given separate blankets, and sometimes placed on either side of a "bundling board" that ran along the mattress from head to toe, so as to impede hanky-panky. If the bundling board did yield, and pregnancy occurred, the couple was expected to marry.
The British mocked bundling as a tawdry American tradition, but in fact there is evidence it came from Europe and was practiced from Britain to Holland to Switzerland, perhaps dating as far back as Roman times. In Colonial New England, bundling made practical sense due to a scarcity of beds, poor heating, and long rides between towns. It was only practiced in the winter.
Predictably, the practice stirred passions. Controversy over bundling erupted in the 1770s, when a New England preacher began to insist that it was unchristian. Young men returning from the French war seemed to have brought with them "loose camp vices" and a disregard for the church that made them ill-suited for bundling. Several towns tried to ban the practice, to the dismay of mothers and daughters, who thought bundling was totally cool. A glimpse into the debate can be viewed in an excerpt from an anti-bundling ballad published in a 1785 almanac:
A bundling couple went to bed,
With all their clothes from foot to head,
That the defence might seem complete,
Each one was wrapped in a sheet.
But O! this bundling's such a witch,
The man of her did catch the itch,
And so provoked was the wretch,
That she of him a bastard catch'd.
History's greatest bundling scholar, Henry Reed Stiles, the author of a definitive 1871 volume on the origins of the practice, credited this song with so stigmatizing bundling that it caused its downfall. (Improved living conditions and warmer houses following the American Revolution also played a role.) The tradition died out in the late 19th century, and it is rare indeed today; a 1969 campaign to revive bundling, mounted by a group of clever Pennsylvania teens, did not catch on.
This history confirms that the line between snuggling and sex is indeed slippery—a fact further demonstrated in the 1970s by Vanderbilt psychiatrist Marc Hollender. Having invented a questionnaire-based body contact score to reflect "the wish to be held," Hollender found that many women truly ached to be snuggled; one stated that she would rather canoodle than be given a Cadillac convertible. Yet some women avoided cuddling when they were not in the mood for sex, because snuggling too often converted to shagging. The blame often was placed on the man, and on his penis in particular. As one subject put it, "Being held is an end in itself for women, but for men it is only the beginning."
Back at the snack table. The redhead and I chatted over celery sticks, and she proposed that we go for a cuddle. We lay down and I burrowed in deep, determined to unleash my full snuggly voltage. We got all wrapped up, our legs pretzeled. For the first time since arriving at the party, I relaxed.
And then I felt a feeling. A stirring stirred. Something in my physiology—something about two stops down from the solar plexus—sought to express its special purpose.
A century ago, the pioneering German sexologist Albert Moll described two elementary sexual impulses: the contrectation-impulse—the urge to cuddle—and the detumescence-impulse—the urge to alleviate swelling in one's johnson. It was in this moment that I very clearly perceived how easily the one can tip into the other.
I was grateful for this embodied insight, but worried about the growing crisis in my pants. Luckily, my nervousness paid off: anxious-making juices flooded my system long before blood started flowing south in any quantity, and the incipient erection retreated, like a turtle to its shell. The redhead remained oblivious to the disaster narrowly averted.
Then she had an idea: She should give me a massage! I agreed and flipped onto my stomach, thrilled at the discretion afforded by the new posture. She proceeded to give me a flimsy back rub. A bonus arrived when my first cuddle partner asked if she could play with my hair. Yes, no problem! I was being cuddled by two women at once. I was commanding a double team. I was the LeBron James of cuddling!
But after nearly three hours of lying around, our allotted cuddle time was almost up, and the organizer let us know that it was time for a ceremonial "puppy pile." As I stood up, I saw that about half of the partygoers were not cuddling at all; they were sitting and talking about their dogs. I also noticed a talkative male cuddler who was about six-and-a-half feet tall and seemed to be getting a lot of female attention. If I was the King James of cuddling, he appeared to be the Shaq.
A puppy pile erupted. We stacked like Lincoln Logs, or like seven-layer dip but with only three layers. I was in the top layer. Then the party broke. I changed back into my jeans, and went to say my goodbyes. To my sorrow, I saw that the redhead—the target of my tumescence—was engaged in a long hug with Shaq. He was standing and she was swinging around his neck like a Do-Not-Disturb sign. I sensed that they were going to leave the party together. At the cuddle party, I had canoodled with panache, but had I dominated? I was not sure that I had.
My cuddle party adventure had forced awkward truths to the surface. I was not the peerless cuddler I thought I was. Rather than snuggling like a cold-blooded shinobi, I had performed like an overeager teenager. For me, it was apparent that the yen to cuddle welled from some deep, urgent, animal place that I could barely control.
Cuddling is a beastly habit, to be sure: Scientists often turn to our primate kin to learn more about the practice. Some have sought clues in social grooming, a sort of animal analogue to human snuggling. Grooming is a big part of primate life, with some species devoting 20 percent of their waking hours to cleaning fur and tweezing ticks. It's partially about hygiene—teaming up to clean one's back makes sense. But primates spend far more time doing it than is necessary for cleanliness. They're also grooming to make friends.
Humans don't have much hair, and we outsource many of our grooming needs to barbers and beauticians. Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar argues that in our primitive past, the emergence of language and gossip largely replaced social grooming as a means of adult bonding. Back scratching went from literal to figurative. But we still engage in some pro-social touch—picture a man brushing lint off his buddy's suit jacket, or a woman running her fingers through her lover's hair. Like our primate relatives, we don't normally groom or snuggle with strangers. That's why Cuddle Party is unusual: It invites people to cuddle with people they don't know and then decide if they want to be friends, rather than vice-versa.
Most people don't fast-track cuddling in this way; traditionally it is practiced after sex—long after decisions about likeability have been made. Yet post-coital cuddling can bring its own tricky politics: Evolutionary theories of sexuality often suggest that women should love to cuddle more than men, because they put more on the line when they have sex. Evolution shaped their minds, so the notion goes, to seek mates who will provide resources and help with the parenting. That means they'll want to snuggle in the sack so as to draw their partners into an emotional bond. Men, by contrast, have less skin in the mating game, so they may try to make a "hasty post-copulatory departure" and get on to the next hook-up. One recent and well- publicized study on snuggling after sex claims to confirm these stereotypes.
For me, this was bad news. God, apparently, had made me nutso for pair-bonding. I was behaving in an evolutionarily inappropriate—and unstudly—manner. I was cuddling like a girl.
How did this happen? I didn't choose this life. According to my parents, my infantile hunger for epidermal reassurance—whether from a parent, a brother, or a beloved redheaded doll named Dolly who never, ever failed to snuggle me back—was evident fresh from the oven.
Not all babies are like this; in fact, some find snuggling totally disgusting. "Non-Cuddlers," observed a pioneering 1964 typology, "unfailingly protested at, resisted, and avoided" all entreaties to cuddle "whatever the circumstances and whatever the condition of the child." "Wriggles and arches back, and only stops when put down again," said one mother of a snuggle-hating, freedom-loving infant. In contrast, "Cuddlers" were motivated only to cuddle. "Laps it up," explained a parent. "Holds quite still and puts on a soppy face," said another.
About 15 percent of developmentally normal babies might be classified as Non-Cuddlers according to psychologist Michael Lewis, who has studied child temperament for 50 years. Lewis described one Non-Cuddler who was born "stiff as a board"—his daughter—and how he learned that she could tolerate touches to her back, but not to her stomach. It's not clear why babies differ cuddle-wise; some scientists think it may be related to differences in the distribution of reward receptors in the brain—the same kinds of variations that make some people into ski jumpers and others into actuaries. Among adults, there is some evidence that anxious people tend to be the real cuddlers. (These are my people.)
In any case, touch temperament is at least partly genetic. One study found that a mother's cuddliness gets passed down to her newborn children, and another showed that twins tend to be similarly endowed in the snuggle department. No doubt I inherited the cuddle gene.
If snuggling can be in your DNA, what does that say about gender differences? Is there evidence that girls are innately cuddlier than boys? In 1999, an intrepid research team tried to find out by staging a kind of newborn-snuggle-battle-of-the-sexes in a Montreal hospital. Healthy, full-term newborns—awake and alert—were cradled and cuddled by two experimenters who were blind to the sex of the child. (Freshly circumcised boy babies were excluded on grounds that the procedure might give rise to uncuddly feelings.) Then the researchers rated the babies' desire for contact on a scale from rigid to cuddly.
In the end, the girls significantly outsnuggled the boys, although it must be said that neither team cuddled well; both averaged out closer to rigid than to cuddly. There was also a good deal of variability—there were cuddly boys and rigid girls—and the researchers conceded that it was impossible to know whether all of the babies had been in the mood. So it's hard to conclude that girls are any cuddlier than boys, overall; in fact, several temperament experts interviewed for this story argued that they absolutely aren't.
For a girly cuddle-bro like me, this was cause for hope. Could it be that my sorry, soppy, snuggly disposition was not so perverse, after all?
In 1976—my second cuddly year on this tender planet—Vanderbilt snuggle scientist Marc Hollender got around to considering men. He ran a study that examined the "wish to be held" and the "wish to hold" across genders, hypothesizing that the former would be greater in women, and the latter in men. "[A]ccording to our prevailing viewpoint, it is unmanly to want to be held or cuddled; only women are permitted or encouraged to express such 'feminine' wishes," he explained.
But the data weren't lining up. Men were just as stoked to be on either side of the spooning. And they were barely any less cuddle-hungry than the ladies. Hollender was especially stunned by some of the wussy statements coming from his male subjects: "To have this woman hold me is like the world is gone," said one. Here, finally, were some soppy-faced dudes who seemed to think like me. Unfortunately, they were also a bit nuts—the research had been conducted on psychiatric patients. (One man who said he preferred to be held also thought his penis was shrinking.)
Some evolutionary psychologists are now reaching the same conclusion as Hollender: that cuddle-wise, men and women just aren't that different. "I think that the explanations for males doing it are quite similar for the reasons that women do it," said Binghamton University's Justin Garcia, who is trained in both evolutionary biology and anthropology and studies hook-up culture on college campuses. Both just want intimacy and validation, he says—and to feel it in their skin.
In a recent unpublished survey of nearly 700 college students, Garcia found that an identical proportion of men and women—97 percent—said they liked to cuddle in romantic relationships. In a hook-up scenario, 52 percent of men and 61 percent of women wanted to snuggle. "This idea that men want to disseminate their seed and women want love and babies is utter bullshit," he said. "That is total bullshit."
Indeed, the idea that evolved biology ought to drive cuddling behavior does not really fit with the evidence. The imprint of culture has always been apparent in touch: Biology does not explain why buddies hold hands in public in the Middle East, but not in the United States. No gene explains why men shake hands more than women. (Although female handshaking must be on the rise.) Some touch traditions defy analysis: Why do women ballplayers go in for more hand slaps, whereas gentlemen prefer butt slaps?
None of this means the world is safe for cuddly men. It isn't. During the current "mancession," it has become trendy to wonder aloud about why more men don't seek out jobs in caretaking professions like nursing. One reason, certainly, is that men intuit that they are not cut out for touch-oriented work: Studies of male nurses show they are cautious caregivers because they fear accusations of inappropriate touch. Lawsuits have made nursing wards—and classrooms—into hostile environments for men.
But there are hints that attitudes may be changing. A 2004 U.K. poll, for instance, found that today's dads think they adopt a cuddlier approach to parenting than their fathers did. Films and novels today abound with sensitive, touchy-feely men. A pro-snuggle stance can even be seen in the highest reaches of government: our last president was so committed to tactile diplomacy that he could not resist giving German Chancellor Angela Merkel a hearty but poorly received back rub. Our current leader also seems to have the snuggle gene, if the long and sweet bear hug he gave to departing chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is any indication.
In fact, future generations may view the Obama-Rahm sandwich as a watershed moment in snuggling history. When CNBC's Larry Kudlow wrote a column in October calling the embrace "a hug too far" and claiming that it "lacked dignity" and revealed weakness to the world, few commentators took his side. Most argued that Kudlow was a jackass for his sensitivity to man-hugs, and that he needed to toughen up and put on his "man pants."
What happened here? Are we becoming a nation of shameless snuggle-bunnies? I believe that we are. In the new era, cuddly men will no longer be deemed wimps. Instead, society will have to designate a new generation of wusses to fill the void: people like Larry Kudlow, people who tremble at the sight of gay men cuddling, people who are terrified to have their junk touched. Today let us bring our epidermises together under a soft banner of cuddliness. The revolution will be staged, conveniently, from bed. Or at least that's where you'll find me—snuggling like the day I was born.
Correction, Dec. 8, 2010: This article originally misidentified John B. Watson as "James B. Watson" on the second mention of the name. | <urn:uuid:c45db128-e706-47e3-a249-9f78340f1ade> | CC-MAIN-2017-34 | http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/12/just_hold_me.single.html | 2017-08-23T04:37:44Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886117519.92/warc/CC-MAIN-20170823035753-20170823055753-00270.warc.gz | en | 0.977713 | 7,049 |
Monday, August 31, 2015
The Taoist out of body exercise is self-explanatory.
Same as with the western magic, the Taoist also has his/her own way of going out of body. The Taoist calls this the 'soul exits' (出神). Of course, there are many different ways on how one's soul can exit one's body: though meditation, through mantra recitation and through rituals.
The most proper way of out of body (OOB) method is called the 'yang soul exiting' (出阳神). This can only be done through proper meditation methods. Only when one's soul is purified completely and it is transformed into golden body that his/her soul is able to travel freely in and out of his/her body without any hindrances.
Another method of out of body is called the 'yin soul exiting' (出阴神). In this type of OOB, a person's soul can exit his/her body through certain rituals. For example one can use a mirror, incantations, spirits and talismans to travel out of his/her body. In this case, since the person has not purified his soul into golden form; hence his soul is weak and prone to psychic attack.
A third method of going OOB is through the use of Big Dipper Steps (七星罡). This is the somehow 'restricted' type of OOB as one normally travels out and up to the heaven through the ascending of the Big Dipper to meet with his/her Taoist master for advice and guidance.
I have not ventured to use it in any other way but for a more creative you, perhaps you may travel OOB using this method and let me know your experiences. Since I am bound by my oath of not using this Bid Dipper Steps for any other purposes but not you. So you may do as you wish but please remember how you ascend, then the descending should be in a reverse order.
Another note is that, ascending the Big Dipper is normally to meat with spirits of heavenly orders and it is quite safe. But one has to be pure hearted and sincere as the gods and goddesses are at times arrogant and quick tempered. So try not offend them in any way...
Sunday, August 30, 2015
My friend Ah Long is a loan shark who stays in a high rise apartment near Penang jetty down town. Since there area is a residential area where majority of the tenants are labourers and hawkers, Ah Long’s business is always good. People who failed to repay their debts are scared of Ah Long because he has many means to squeeze money out of his debtors. I would at time pay Ah Long a visit when he needs some consultations.
This is a story about Ah Long’s strange encounter with flying white shirt.
This year’s ghost festival is nearing the end. One midnight Ah was sitting in the living room watching ghost movies. His TV is located below the apartment main window and the main window is always opened for one reason: this eases Ah Long to see whoever walk pass his apartment especially those defaulters and potential money borrowers.
So the story goes, in the midst of the night and Ah Long was gazing at the TV aimlessly. Suddenly he saw a white shirt ‘flying’ across Ah Long’s window towards the left end of the corridor. At first, Ah Long thought it was his hallucination. But after a few minutes, the same white shirt again ‘flew’ in front of the window towards the right end of the corridor…
Although Ah Long is not a timid man, he is a superstitious one; he immediately thought that he has seen a ‘good brother’. Perhaps he has not make offerings this year due to his ‘poor’ business and gambling luck or perhaps he pissed in the street a few nights before after drinking too much in a pub down town.
The then panic Ah Long immediately turned his TV volume into burst mode and jumped into his bed and covered his body with blanket until the next day. Soon the news of Ah Long’s encounter with the flying white shirt spread all over the community.
At this time, Ah Long already bed ridden suffering fever and at times chill all over. His mother asked a few spirit mediums to perform exorcism ceremonies in Ah Long’s place and according to them Ah Long didn’t make offerings to the good brothers so they ‘show’ themselves to warn Ah Long. So Ah Long need to pay to perform a grand food offering rituals to appease the spirits and that would cost $3,600.
On hearing the cost, Ah Long’s mid immediately awakened and he gave me a call as my charge is only $100, which is more economical. So I answered Ah Long’s call and within 20 minutes, I was in front of his place with a compass. Before I opened my compass… One of Ah Long’s neighbours known as Mr. Tan saw me and pulled me aside. Mr. Tan said:
“Haiya! That was me who passed through Ah Long’s window with a piece of white shirt that night. I owed Ah Long $200 and had no money to pay him as yet. That night, I was having supper in the mamak store but I forgot to bring my wallet. So, I returned home to get some money. Unfortunately, I had to pass through Ah Long’s window as the route is shorter. In order that Ah Long would not realize that was me, I took off my white shirt in the hope to block his view…”
After listening to what Mr. Tan has said, I told him not to worry as I would pay his $200 debt with Ah Long. Mr. Tan thanked me and went into his house.
After that, I went to see Ah Long and told him that he has offended a headless white shirt sprit and needs $200 to perform the food offering ceremony. Since my offer is cheaper, Ah Long agreed.
Before I returned home, I took a detour and visited Mr. Tan to thank him for his candid confession; at the same time also to pass him $200 so that he can pay his debt. Surprising enough, Ah Long recovers after my visit. He is so grateful that he offered me a loan with special interest rate but I only declined with a smile.
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
The mysterious tumour transference method.
Tumour transference method is a simple Taoist folk ritual used to remove boils, carbuncles, tumours quite effectively. This method can also be used to remove spirits that possess a person.
A factory manger had dangerously high blood pressure and arrhythmia. He was hospitalized five times within two months time for emergency treatment and consequently spent hundred thousand dollars. Yet the cause of his problem remained unknown. After some detailed diagnosis, the doctor told his wife that the manager’s brain has a 1cm tumour but it was virtually impossible to operate. He came to my master and he only treated the manager thrice and the manager subsequently recovered and lived for another 10 years.
I have not learnt this ritual though I know the method. In order that this ritual is not lost in time, I share it with you here.
The method is pretty simple but it needs to be carried out at night and at a place where trees are growing and not so many people around. First, the patient is asked to be seated and the Taoist only needs to draw the ‘transfer talisman’ with mudra 1 at the place where tumour is located. After this is done, the Taoist should quickly walk to a tree and then use mudra 2 to draw the ‘transfer talisman’ at the tree trunk. For a person who is terminally ill, the tumour can be transferred into a chicken. This will not kill the chicken, instead it will live healthier.
Of course, one must be initiated as a Taoist and be connected with his/her lineage gurus before this ritual can be used to cure others effectively. Please don't try it as I just skim through the ritual as I am too lazy to type out the complete ritual.
Monday, August 24, 2015
Now days, no one practically learn about incantations or ‘khata’ in Traditional Thai Medicine (TTM) anymore. I think it is not complete to dismiss the spiritual sides of TTM and only goes for the physical treatment aspects. But it is not for me to advocate the use of incantations to general public although I personally use many of the ‘khata’ in treating my own illnesses with excellent results.
Instead of giving a list of ‘khata’, let us go over how these ‘khata’ are used.
A formula for preventing illnesses in winter such as flue, cough and digestive problems needs to grind the following herbs together:
· Coriandrum Sativum (芫荽)
· Holarrhena Antidysentiea Wall (止泻木)
· Acorus Gramineus (菖蒲)
· Momordica Charantia (野苦瓜)
The pulverized herbal formula is then consumed with Citrus Medica (佛手).
In old TTM, those herbs need to be empowered before hand with the below ritual:
First the guru is invoked to bless the healer and the patient with the below khata (abridged):
Wantiduwa sivasapati sipang tipamantaneng sindijaiyang palindumie (3x)
Then the king of herbs, in this case the Citrus Medica is invoked with the below khata:
Siddhigenjang siddhikan siddhigalatathagatang siddhi tejena ganmiena ahjaliyang namamihan! (3x)
And then the four ingredients above are empowered with the below khata:
Orkana mahakana orana maharana jijupengpan paya tiweinasiandhi soha!
Finally all of the herbs are again empowered to enhance their healing effects:
Satusuniantu panto sivate rukawana wasianto amasami sitisajatumie mamawenti! (3x)
Of course the TTM is not the only healing school using incantations, the Ayurveda, Taoist cults and Tibetan healing systems etc. also practise one kind of incantation or another. Perhaps we can explore other systems in future.
On the surface, it seems the above are mumbo jumbo to modern folks, but perhaps we have missed out the main point: we human are not made of just physical body. If we only treat our body and ignoring the spiritual sides; how then can we be healed completely? No wonder why modern folks suffer from so many incurable sicknesses! That is something for us to think about…
The mysterious Big Dipper in Taoism.
For the benefits of those friends who have practiced the Seven Star Steps, I would now disclose how the Seven Stars can be utilized in helping our daily rituals. Below is additional information for your reading pleasure. I have intentionally left out details of altar set ups and the Taoist ‘guru yoga’ for simplicity. Having said so, this may still be quite difficult to read for many people due to the ritualistic nature of the wordings.
Basically the Seven Star Steps are performed before Taoist rituals proper for various reasons. There are 8 methods on how the Seven Star can be used:
First, the ‘top and bottom steps’ (戴履斗):
This star steps is used to chase away and to burn out all evil spirits prior to any Taoist rituals. In performing this star steps, a Taoist should hold a ritual sword in front of his chest and then walk the star steps. In addition, he/she should visualize that the Big Dipper (北斗) is on top of his/her head and that he/she is walking on the Big Dipper. During the star walk, the person should think there is a fire ball at the tip of his/her ritual sword. This fire ball grows bigger for each step this person walks until the fire ball chases away all evil spirits.
But let me just hold you at this point as it is enough to chase away the evil spirits and not to kill them. So the visualization should stop just right after the spirits are gone and not letting the sword fire fills the universe!
Second, the ‘meeting the immortal steps’ (朝真斗)：
Ideally one should have a Taoist communication tablet (神简).
In this exercise one should just imagine that his/her soul is exiting the top of his/her head while walking the seven steps. This is like the soul is climbing a ladder to reach to the heavens where the Taoist immortals are staying. After one’s soul has said what he/she wants, it must descend back into the person’s body.
Thirdly, the ‘summoning of heavenly general steps’ (召将斗)：
After a Taoist has met with his/her heavenly masters and obtained approvals, he/she shall be able to summon the heavenly generals to help in his/her rituals. In this exercise, the person should again hold his/her ritual sword and walk the seven star steps while commanding these heavenly entities to obey his/her orders.
The fourth is the ‘ascending steps’ (升斗)：
During and after the Taoist rituals, a Taoist must keep his/her meditative concentration. In order to maintain this concentration, he/she should visualize the seven stars is shining brightly on his/her head protecting him/her form disturbance of evil entities.
The fifth is the ‘sleeping steps’ ( 卧斗)：
A person’s soul is the weakest when he/she sleeps. So, in order to prevent spiritual disturbances during sleep such as hag ride one should imagine that he/she is blanket by the seven stars.
I often practise this ‘sleeping steps’ before I sleep and it is an excellent method to ward off any spiritual interferences.
The sixth is the ‘house steps’ (舍斗)：
This step is normally used when one meditates same as with the fifth steps.
The seventh is the ‘remembering guru steps’ (存真斗)：
The ‘remembering guru steps’ is an important procedure because a Taoist shall be able to consult his/her guru whenever in need or in emergency. In this step, same as with the ‘ascending steps’, one imagines that he/she has ascended up to heaven and hence accepts advices from the heavenly masters.
The eighth step is the ‘subduing steps’ (制伏斗)：
When one is disturbed during meditation by spirits or black magic, then he/she should first calm his/her mind and imagining that he/she is wearing the seven stars as clothing and remains in meditative mode. All attacks shall be revoked automatically.
All of the above are very brief descriptions on how the Seven Star Steps are used in ritual and daily life. Traditionally, Taoist rituals are taught face to face and it is difficult to describe them in detail. I supposed it is sufficient for the moment until next time.
Saturday, August 22, 2015
Luban magic as we have discussed before is magic learnt by previous artisans and some Feng Shui masters in old days. If we are to compare, then Luban magic should be learnt by civil engineers or the like.
Previously I did not have too much information on how Luban magic practitioners are initiated until a few weeks ago an old man from China came to me and passed me some Luban magic books. Amongst the titles are Luban Sutras (鲁班经) and Smallwood Sutra (小木经). The old man said that he doesn’t want to bring these Luban magic rituals to his grave and that he wanted to go peacefully. So, he wanted to pass this burden onto my shoulders… Lucky me!
Well, for the knowledge of MagicSEA readers, I shall impart this awful secret just for sharing purposes. It is not recommended anyone to try the star steps or bad consequences may happen to the persons who tried these initiation steps. Traditionally the one who wishes to learn Luban Magic must make a vow and the vow varies according to various Luban traditions. In order that one’s magic works, a disciple must make a vow of: cripple (残), poor (贫) or lonely (孤). In some instances, one of the three elements is replaced with short life (夭).
First one should set up a Luban Master Tablet (鲁班先师位) on the Southern side of his/her house. When everything is ready, then the person should burn some incense in front of the Luban Master at noon time requesting to be impart the secrets of Luban magic. After that, facing the Master Tablet, the inspired person should walk the Later Heaven Bagua Steps (后天八卦步) to honor the master:
After that he/she continue to walk the Former Heaven Bagua Steps (先天八卦步) for protection:
Now, the disciple should face the east and use his sword mudra (剑指) to draw the Chinese characters 立残 (Immediately cripple) on the ground and then steps onto these characters, and then he/she faces the west and draw 立孤 (immediately lonely) and do the same, and the north 立贫 (immediately poor) and finally the south 回原 (return to normal).
There are more mantras and steps same as other folk cults such as requesting for magical power and spiritual assistant. For brief, I shall not go into the details at this time.
According to the old man, once a person has walked the star steps, he/she is deemed worthy of inheriting all Luban magic in the books he has given to me. I thanked for the old man’s generosity but declined to learn his Luban magic. But I promised him that I shall put his Luban works beside my altar and burn incense daily for as long as I can.
Seriously, just a fair word of warning: please don’t practise any of the star steps for I am not sure what will happen to the persons who tried them as I have no idea of the after effects.
Thursday, August 20, 2015
My friends went to India to perform exploration from North to South. So I asked them to bring me some local plant seeds. And indeed, one month later, they passed me some seeds and I planted some of the seeds into my flower pots and this is what I get one month after planting those seeds...
Arisaema Jacquemonti seedlings 1 month old.
I planted 24 seeds and 6 germinated. It is amazing as Arisaema Jacquemonti can be found at 2400m in the Himilayas which needless to say, is at extreme cold temperature. Bearing in mind, Malaysia is hot and warm all year round. What attracted me is how the seeds are germinated... If you look carefully at the centre seedling you will notice that a leaf came out from the back of the seedling giving one the impression that it is parasitic nature. That reminded me of the movie 'Alen' where small aliens came out of the stomachs of their victims...
Arisaema Jacquemonti mature plant
Another interesting plant that has also germinated is the Arisaema Murayi from south-west side of India. Arisaema Murayi can be found at below 1200m level Indian forests.
New Arisaema Murayi shoots just emerged yesterday... Nothing much to see at this point.
Arisaema Murayi mature plant is one of the most beautiful Arisaema plant known.
I don't know if both plants can grow alright in hot Malaysian weather... but let's stay tune...
Monday, August 17, 2015
A dear friend sent me a message:
“A local Mau San master said- black magick can be used to treat a haunted house, or even a spellbound victim. As long as the intention of a magick practioner is positive, regardless white or dark forces are invoked…”
So what is my take?
My stand point is clear:
“All magic rituals are essentially black in nature.”
As a matter of fact, all major religions denounce the practice of magic regardless of how the magic is being used. The reason is simple: although spirits can be used to assist us in certain matters, they are not beings of pure light. These spirits have no reason to help us unless we have a pact with them and make offerings to them in the exchange of their service.
If we seek help from these ignorant spirits, then their karma would also affect us. As we also aware that spirits of lower realms carry with them bad karma and the longer they stay with us, then our luck and health would be affected. Religious teaching insisted that since the spirits have their own problems, then how can these problematic spirits assist us in boosting our life?
There is no reason why we should resort to magic ritual if our problems can also be tackled with standard religious rituals proper. Unless we want to have something that are not rightfully ours and the things we want is forbidden by religions. In such cases, it is certainly appropriate to use magic to satisfy our worldly lust. So, I say that all magic is black in nature as magic rituals are mainly used to satisfy our desires.
In that matter one can find many black magic elements in Mantrayana rituals if one has followed the SEA Translate Blog closely. Proponent calls these magic rituals to achieve worldly desires Kriya Yoga even though those rituals were not really passed down by the Buddha. In Kriya Yoga, black magic rituals are used as a means to learn about Buddha’s dharma for there is no good to talk about dharma if one is worry about his income or that his/her wife/husband is running away. Of course, I would not comment on the question if those rituals are indeed workable because those rituals only reflect local beliefs of that time.
Thursday, August 13, 2015
I forgot to mention that if anyone who has tried the star walk, he/she should have some psychic experiences during or after the star walk exercise. A friend has tried the star walk and told me his personal experience:
Apparent our friend is very sensitive to psychic entities. Anyway, the star walk exercise opens up doors to spiritual realms. Each step of the star walk means that the person enters a spiritual door. So, there are 7 doors to the spiritual world.
It is not a surprise to have goose bumps, shivers or seeing spirits during or after the exercise because by performing the star steps; the person has effectively entering and exiting the spiritual world. In the eyes of spirits, this practitioner is merely a stranger who consistently entering and exiting their world.
At times, spirits would pass messages to the star walk practitioner in his/her dreams if one has no psychic ability yet. When a message is from spirits that means something in the practitioner’s life is changing. So, please pay some attention to these messages but don’t worry too much about them because as one engages more into the practice, his/her psychic ability would be sharpened and subsequently this person would be able to predict future events in his/her life and avoid them subconsciously.
One thing for sure, one should not overlook the effectiveness of this star step which was passed down by Taoist masters of old. Same old words, try to experience it and believe it! Oh, please avoid horse play or problems will happen too…
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
The sevens steps exercise can improve one's luck and prevent disasters.
My friend said that he is an accident prone person and that he is very easy to get injured. Apparently he had many accidents over the years and the question is if there is a way to remove this life time curse.
In fact, I am also a person who is very much prone to accidents. Out of 50 persons in my class, I was the one who tripped and fall. My car was bumped by others 3 times a year so I continue to use it as what is the point of getting a new car and have it scratched by others?
No worries. There is a method to avoid or lessen one’s damage. This method is called the ‘seven steps method’. If one is persistent in practising it constantly then I can guarantee that most of one’s life disasters can be eliminated if not lessened. The seven steps method will increase one’s aura and increase the sharpness of one’s subconscious mind which in turn will automatically hinted a person to stay away from troublesome spots.
This exercise is ideally being carried out at night between 7pm to 9pm when the stars can be seen in the sky. Of course, it is best to do the exercise under the sky but this is not necessary.
When the time is right, the person should wear loose clothing and start walking the seven steps as shown in the diagram above. When a person starts to walk the steps, his/her hands should make the gesture as if pushing open windows. At times, one can also hold a ritual sword with both hands in front of one’s chest. A sword is normally used when the practitioner feels disturbed by some entities during the star walk exercise.
There is a mantra that accompanies each step:
(The white chi is pouring into my shape.)
(The star steps enable me to ascend to the 7 stars.)
(While the heaven and earth rotates, I travel across constellation.)
(Star steps enable me to be at par with 9 types of spiritual beings.)
(I subdue demons and stunned all evils.)
(The gods help me to escape from peril situations.)
(No harms shall befall upon me.)
There is no limitation on how many times one should walk the 7 steps. I normally walk 7 to 49 rounds. Of course, the more one performs the steps; the faster one can expel filthy aura from one’s body and indirectly transforms one’s health and luck too.
Monday, August 10, 2015
My friend’s house is situated near the central wet market. As expected he is tormented by rats due to leftover foods in the rubbish dump. So he asked me if there is any magic to solve his predicament…
Well, actually there are many rituals out there! But the best is to get rid of rats with dream magic! Below is originally a dream magic meant for fun but it has proven its practicality. According to my Taoist master that if a person’s house is infested by mice, then he/she can transform his/her soul into a cat to chase away all mice.
The method is very simple:
First the person should draw the shape of a cat on a piece of yellow paper and then cut the shape out with scissors. Keep this paper cat in the drawer and wait for an appropriate day known as ‘the removal day’ (除日).
When everything is in order and before he/she goes to sleep, the person should hold the paper cat with his/her left/right hand and making the ‘sword mudra’ (剑指) with his/her right hand.
The person should recite the below mantra:
(Cat oh cat! The soul possesses me to kill these mice so that I can be victorious with this amazing super mantra!)
After reciting the mantra, the paper cat should be paste at one’s right waist before one sleeps. In this way the person’s soul will turn into cat and chase out any mice in his/her house. If this ritual can be performed regularly, then his/her house will be free from the torment of mice. Do you believe it or not?
Many people come to me wanting to learn about magic ritual that can make them rich free and easy.
Well, I don’t have a sure magic that can make a person rich as wealth is God given or if you believe in karma; then what one gets this life time is the resultant of what he/she did in his/her previous lives…
While I can’t guarantee anyone to get rich with magic, but there is a sure way that would make a practitioner to live in easy life the cheap way; a life free from mundane worries at least.
In order to get a worry free life, we have to look into Vietnamese Ngai magic for help… If and only if one is brave enough to perform the ritual:
If a magician wishes to have an easy life, then he/she can go to a sacred mountain to pray to the mountain spirits. He/she must meditate in the mountain until a vision or a dream hinting where to find a plant to bring home.
Once a hint is obtained, then the magician can go to the place with some food offerings and incense to pray before digging out the plant which may be a banana plant near a river, or a type of wild flower.
The magician should ideally plant the plant/flower in his/her house compound and take good care of the plant as if his own wife/husband. Everyday he/she should talk to the plant/flower and tell it his/her problems. The plants should be worshipped with incense and food offerings twice a month.
If the magician performs the ritual faithfully, then he/she should find that he/she might not get rich; he/she would certainly free from major illnesses and monetary problems. However, it the plant withered; then this would be an indication of bad lucks approaching. In this case, the magician should return to the scared mountain and asks the mountain spirits for assistance.
Another way to go about is to get just any ordinary plants such as gingers, lilies etc. and plant the plants on a grave of a recently deceased for about 100 days. Within this period, the magician must go to the grave to water the plant and perform chanting to ask the spirit of the grave to enter the plant. After 100 days, the dead soul should attach onto the plant and ready to be deployed.
My friend has problems with his staff and he wanted to kick the person out. So I gave him a haunted plant and his staff automatically resigned within one week’s time. Strangely, the plant suddenly vanished from the friend’s safekeeping before he was declared bankrupt. Strange but true!
Of course, this method is not for the faint hearted. Please don’t try if you are not ready to come face to face with spirits.
Saturday, August 8, 2015
My friend sent me this very interesting story:
“This morning I read newspaper concerning there is a house in my town which is very haunted, it has mysterious fire meaning that the items in house will catch fire by itself automatically like curtain, windows, doors and chairs etc. When fire brigade came to put out the fire; the more they put the bigger the fire it is. In addition firemen saw a dark shadow and they shouted at it and it subsequently disappeared inside the wall.
The owner of the haunted house is an Indian man he is not a master but he learnt some black magic spell before. According to what he has said recently someone anger him, so he cast black magic spell on the person but the person retaliated by sending back the spell to him so both fought using black magic spells. Finally this Indian man lost and from that day onwards he started to suffer from this mystery fire problem. The State assemblyman also went to the place at night at see the place caught fire…”
So I was asked to comment if ghosts can start a fire…
My point of view is that there are many reasons why fire can start:
In Feng Shui fire incidents can be started when the flying stars combined into fire element and that the person has stagnant air such as that of in an enclosed space; then there are high percentages that fire incident will occur. In this case, one only needs to put a pot of soil in the room and a bowl of water. This shall prevent forthcoming fire.
Another more scientific explanation is the presence of methane gas emitted from underground. When the flashing point of methane is achieved, then fire shall start automatically. Places such as formerly swamp area, rubbish reclaim area or pig barns would have large quantity of methane gas. When this gas slowly leaked upwards and met with heat, it will burn automatically.
When I was studying in Taiping, I like to fish for Tilapia fish at Aulong tin mine lakes nearby. There were many pig barns and the animal manure was being discharged through drains. Every time when I walked by the drains behind pig barns, I can see gas bubbles emitted from the drain water. At times when I felt playful, I would light a piece of match and throw towards the bubble. Almost instantly a bluish flame can be seen floating in the air. It was quite amazing now think of it.
If we go back to the mysterious fire incident, I doubt that any spirits can start a fire these days although spirits indeed can make our house hold electrical appliances to be short circuited.
Friday, August 7, 2015
Many people asked me this question:
“Since we can purchase dried herbs in large quantities now days, why do you still spend so much time tending my herbal garden; and insisting on using fresh herbs?”
My answer is always simple:
“Those who know how to use herbal medicine would understand that the healing property of these herbs changes slightly according to the way they are preserved.”
In Traditional Chinese and Thai medicine:
Fresh herbs are naturally balanced with distinctive properties. For example a fresh ginger rhizome is warm in Chinese medicine; and it belongs to fire and earth elements. However, when ginger rhizome is dried; then the increase in elemental energy would depend on how the ginger rhizome is dried.
In Tradition Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Thai medicine, if ginger rhizome is wind or sun dried; then it carries more heat energy. In this case, dried ginger should not be given to patient who is ‘hot based’ as that would cause the hot based person to experience fever.
Of course, ginger is not a good example to show the significance of how fresh herbs and dried herbs are used. Traditionally, fresh herbs are used in treating fresh injuries, animal and insect bites because they carry moisture and those fresh herbs have more cooling effect. Also, fresh herbs can be used to make medicinal creams and they can also be consumed fresh as vegetables. Dried herbs on the other hand, need to be used in conjunction with other elements such as alcohol, rice wine, vinegar or water so that their essences can be released fully.
This is the same case when rosemary is used fresh or dried in western culinary practices. I am sure fresh rosemary leaves would give the taster a refreshing aroma than dried ones. So, care must be taken not only on which herbs to use in treating illnesses; but also on how they are processed. Our forefathers knew this, why shouldn't we?
Monday, August 3, 2015
This posting is to answer queries of an enthusiast:
‘Tenaga Dalam’ (TD) literary refers to ‘internal energy’, i.e. it is a type of exercise once popular in Malay Archipelago that is believed to bestow its practitioners with invulnerability. Basically practices of TD flourished during Indonesian war of independence around 1945 to 1946. I think perhaps local folks need some kind of practices that could bestow invulnerability against the Dutch whom were better armed. This is the same as the Chinese Boxer Rebellion against Christians in the 1890s. If we look further into the Chinese history, Boxer Group (义和团) members practices ‘fists of god’ (神拳) because they believed that this type of cult could bestow them with invulnerability against the western bullets.
Same as with Indonesian TD, the Chinese Folk Cults can be subdivided into many schools: Mao Shan (茅山)，Liu Ren (六壬)，Jin Ying (金英) etc. People would confuse these folk cult sects as part of traditional Taoism because these folk cults used names of traditional Taoist deities just like standard Taoist schools. Some scholars try to differentiate both systems as ‘Ceremonial Taoism’ (道教) and ‘Cult Taoism’ (法教).
The Ceremonial Taoism as its name implies, performs elaborate Taoist ceremonies and traditionally had the patronage of Chinese imperial families. So, Ceremonial Taoism is normally out of bound to ordinary folks as only royal families and the rich and famous of that time have the money and time to support a whole group of Ceremonial Taoists. Since folks of lower social status needed some kind of spiritual pursues too; Cult Taoism was hence devised.
Cult Taoism generally services general folks through simple magic rituals to solve their day to day problems: safety, protection, healing, exorcism, divination etc.
A this point, I just want to give you an idea how standard Taoist ritual vs. cult ritual like: a standard Taoist ceremony can last from 3 days to 7 days with many Taoists; a simple Taoist cult ritual only lasts for less than an hour and one Taoist would be sufficient to do the job.
In order to enhance the credential of a cult Taoist, patron gods/goddesses are invoked into the Taoist’s body to perform miracle such as walking over fire, climbing up the knife ladders, invulnerability to sharp objects etc. Just same with the TD counterpart, when gods/goddesses possessed a Taoist, he/she would be able to perform dancing or kung fu stances. Whatever cases that may be: all of the above seemingly invulnerability feasts are only meant to show: the god/goddess has indeed possessed the body of the Taoist and it is the god/goddess that has bestowed the power for healing etc. The purpose is of course to gain trust and donation from the spectators.
With the emigration of Chinese labourers in the 18th to 19th centuries, these Taoist cults also being transmitted all over the world especially into the Southeast Asia regions. The Jin Ying (金英) sect is said to contain heavy Singapore and Malaysian flavours though traces of other sects could also be found across the region. Having said so, not many people continues to practise cult Taoism and many people has become spirit medium known as ‘Tangki’. Of course, these Taoist cults remain as popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong still. | <urn:uuid:868f2009-2825-4d3b-abb7-57f4c48201a6> | CC-MAIN-2017-34 | https://liewsp1-magicsea.blogspot.com/2015/08/ | 2017-08-18T03:00:05Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886104560.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20170818024629-20170818044629-00350.warc.gz | en | 0.95738 | 8,316 |
Pro and Con 1535
A SIGN? "Longest solar eclipse for 1,000 years turns Sun into a blazing ring of fire"
By Daily Mail Reporter, 16th January 2010
The sun is reduced to a ring of gold against the black sky as the Moon slips between it and Earth.
This solar eclipse yesterday lasted for 11 minutes and eight seconds, setting a record that will not be beaten until December 23, 3043.
Such events, which only blot out the middle of the Sun, are known as annular eclipses. They occur about 66 times a century and can only be viewed in the narrow band on the Earth’s surface below their path.
Incoming e-mail, Re: I can show evidence of a pretrib rapture
I mean no disrespect, but I have to disagree with you on a few things.
I do believe in bible prophecy of course, but I don't think that the tribulation has started at all.
I can show evidence of a pretrib rapture.
(1 Thessalonians 4:16,17 and 1 Corinthians 15:50-56) obviously explains the rapture, but then if you turn to Rev 3:10, it says that God will keep us from the hour of trial, hence a pretrib rapture!
1 Thessalonians 1:10, Jesus also says he will deliver us from the wrath to come.
1 Thessalonians 5:9, God has not appointed us to wrath (this verse follows the strongest passage on the rapture in chapter 4)
If you also look at the original hebrew, "ek" is used multiple times which means out of.
One other Major point is that the church is absent in Revelation 4-18, however the church is mentioned 17 times in the first 3 chapters. After John, a member of the church, is called up to heaven in chapter 4, he looks down at the events of the tribulation.
So I'd like to hear what you think, and if you have any good arguments i'd like to hear from you. Thanks :)
It's ok to disagree. Maybe we can get farther by putting our thoughts together.
> > I can show evidence of a pretrib rapture.
I can too. How about Luke 21:36 and Rev. 3:10? I have believed in a Pre-Trib Rapture at least ever since 1960, until just lately, when I awoke to the realization that we seem to already be in the 2nd year of the Tribulation, and how could that sneak up on me? Doesn't a peace treaty kick off the Tribulation? I'd better review the pertinent scriptures.
Right now, this seems to be the layout of the 7-year Tribulation: (1) 5769, (2) 5770, this year, (3) 5771, (4) 5772, (5) 5773, (6) 5774 and (7) 5775, a Sabbatic Year. If Jesus is to return at the beginning of a Jubilee Year, and I think he will, the 7th year of the Tribulation would have to be a Sabbatic 49th year. The next year, 5776, would be the Jubilee Year. It looks like the Day of God's Wrath will be Tishri 1, 5776, the Feast of Trumpets, and the Second Advent will be Nisan 1, 5776, Saturday, the Sabbath, April 9, 2016, the first day of the Jubilee Year. It makes sense. Jesus said he is Lord of the Sabbath.
28 AD was a Jubilee Year. The Jubilee cycle is a 49-year cycle. The next year is both the Jubilee and the first year of the next cycle. That would make 1940, 1989 and 2038 Jubilee years. That seems impossible. Therefore, they must have started over either in 1948 or 1967. 1948 + 49 + 1 = 1998. That has passed. The Six-Day War in 1967 + 50 = 2017. That just might nail it.
Since Daniel is to stand in his lot in Israel on the 1335th day (Dan. 12:12,13), it seems that it would be in a Jubilee Year, when they would all return to their possession.
It looks like the Day of God's Wrath could be the next day after 5775 ends. That would be Tishri 1, 5776, the Feast of Trumpets (Joel 2:1-3), and the Second Advent would be 7 months later (Eze. 39:12,13), on the first day of the Jubilee Year, Nisan 1, 5776, having been announced on the previous Day of Atonement, Sept. 23, 2015. That would make sense if the Day of God's Wrath was Sept. 14, 2015, the Feast of Trumpets (Joel 2:1-3).
What changed my mind? the Sabbatic and Jubilee Years seem to have pushed my figures for the Tribulation up against a brick wall. Right now, I can't see how they could be slid any further into the future. They were to count 50 years after they entered the land. Fifty years after they took the rest of Jerusalem and the Temple area in 1967 will be 5776. That seems perfect. 5 June 1967 = 26th of Iyyar, 5727. The year 5727 + 50 = 2017.
Maybe you can help me see this differently. I'm sure open for suggestions. All I want is to understand the timing correctly, and right now, there are a couple of possible glitches I can see. We have no Temple yet, and we have no finalized peace agreement. Since we are the Temple of the Holy Spirit, maybe we have to be gone before the literal Temple can be built, but what about Dan. 9:27? Some kind of a covenant is to be strengthened in the 70th week of Daniel.
Most people think this agreement is a final peace agreement between Israel and the PA. However, there were agreements between Israel and Arafat and between Israel and the Pope in 1993.
"In 1993...John Paul II agreed to the Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and Israel establishing relations between the two states and, in 1997, the Legal Personality Agreement recognizing church officials in Israel."
In 2005, "Pontiff (Benedict) said he was very 'eager' to see the 'fulfillment' of the 1993 Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Israel."
See "Pope eager to see Fundamental Agreement between Holy See and Israel fulfilled" by Arieh Cohen
Also, see "Pope’s Pilgrimage (May 11-15-2009) and the Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Israel"
The “Fundamental Agreement” was on December 30, 1993.
"If the 18th-century rabbinic authority the Vilna Gaon was right, on March 16, 2010, construction will begin on the third Temple. His projection states that the auspicious day will coincide with the third completion of the Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter." Time will tell on that.
Since I think the Rapture will be on Sunday (Rev. 1:9,10), it only fits Ascension Day this spring. That will be on May 9, 2010. If the Temple construction does begin on March 16, it would sure make May 9 look good for the Rapture.
Dan 9:27 says, "And he (i.e., the prince that shall come) shall confirm (or strengthen) the covenant with many for one week (of years, 7 years): and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations (idols) he shall make it desolate (Mt. 24:15), even until the consummation, and that determined (i.e., the Wrath of God) shall be poured upon the desolate."
We know that when Israel came into the land, they were to keep the Sabbatic and Jubilee Years.
Lev 25:10 says, "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year (starting on Nisan 1), and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a JUBILE unto you; and YE SHALL RETURN EVERY MAN UNTO HIS POSSESSION".
I'll try to think this through again. Maybe something I missed will pop out at me as I go. Daniel is one of those that will return to his possession in the Jubilee Year. According to Dan 12:12,13, Daniel is to stand in his lot in Israel on the 1335th day following Mid-Trib. That would be in the Jubilee Year that would start at the Second Advent.
Dan 12:12,13 says, "Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days. But go thou thy way till THE END be: for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days."
Israel declared her Independence May 14, 1948 (Iyar 5, 5708). 1948 + 50 = 1998 (5708 + 50 = 5758). That year passed without event. Therefore, we must consider the Six-Day War the starting point.
In Mt. 24:32-34, we are shown that the generation born in 1967 will not pass away until the Tribulation has taken place. A generation in Mt. 1:17 is 48.33 years (2030 years divided by 42 generations). 1967 plus 48.33 years is 2015.33, or Tishri 1, 5776 (Sept. 14, 2015). I think that day will be the Day of God's Wrath, the day Gog's army will attack Israel. Christ will follow the type laid down when Solomon purged his kingdom at the outset.
It looks like Christ will receive his kingdom that day (Tishri 1, 5776) in Heaven, be crowned King of kings and sit as judge at the Judgment Seat of Christ. The saints will receive their rewards at the same time the unbelievers on Earth will receive the wrath of God (Rev. 11:15-18).
It does seem that the year of the Second Advent would be a Jubilee Year, because the Israelites will regain their inherited plot of land in Israel. Therefore, the preceeding year would have to be a Sabbatic Year. 5775 is Sabbatic, so 5776 could be the Jubilee Year, which would be announced on the Day of Atonement, Sept. 23, 5776 and begin the following Nisan 1, 5776.
There are 7 months between the Day of God's Wrath (Eze. 38:18-20) on Tishri 1, 5776 and the Second Advent (Eze. 39:12,13) on the following Nisan 1, 5776. That ties in beautifully, because the year 5776 is a LEAP YEAR with a 13th month.
THAT LOCKS EVERYTHING INTO PLACE
The year 5775 is Sabbatic, and 5776 is both a Leap Year and probably the Jubilee Year. How often would that happen?
Ron Reese found the type that fits the Tribulation years. Jacob and the rest of Joseph's family came to him in the 2nd year of the 7 years of famine, which represent the 7-year Tribulation.
In Gen. 45:6, Joseph said, "For these TWO YEARS hath the famine been in the land: and YET THERE ARE FIVE YEARS, in the which there shall neither be earing nor harvest."
I think the Rapture is likely to take place this year, on Ascension Day, Sunday, May 9, 2010, Iyar 25, 5770. None of the spring feasts will be on Sunday this year, but Ascension Day will fall on Sunday.
Why Sunday? The script of "The Revelation of Jesus Christ" is written as if the first of the two Raptures (First Trump of God (I Thess. 4:16,17; Rev. 4:1) and Last Trump of God (I Cor. 15:51,52; Rev. 6:17; 7:9,14) is at hand. The First Rapture is near in both the 1st and last chapters.
Rev 1:3 says, "Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for THE TIME IS AT HAND."
Rev. 22:10 says, "And he saith unto me, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for THE TIME IS AT HAND."
After the Introduction, in the Preview of the First-Trump Rapture, Rev. 1:9-11 says, "I John, who also am your brother, and COMPANION IN TRIBULATION, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos (meaning mortal), for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ. I was (lit., became) in the Spirit (i.e., when raptured) on the Lord's day (Sunday), and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet (i.e., the first trumpet of God, I Thess. 4:16,17 and Rev. 4:1), Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last" (YHWH king of Israel and YHWH of hosts, the Redeemer; Isa. 44:6).
Being one of the 24 elders (Rev. 4:4), John was caught up to Heaven (as in Rev. 4:1). When he turned to see who was speaking, he saw Christ with the star performers of the churches still in his hand. The churches, represented by their candlesticks (Rev. 1:20), were there with the Lord. At that point, the first Rapture had taken place, and there was a hint that the Tribulation had already started. John had said, "I John, who also am your brother, and COMPANION IN TRIBULATION".
To the church when the Rapture is near, Rev. 2:8-11 says, "And unto the angel of the church in Smyrna (meaning myrrh, bitterness, WHICH HAS TO BE CRUSHED TO BRING OUT ITS SWEET SCENT) write; These things saith the first and the last, which was dead, and is alive; I know thy works, and TRIBULATION, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not (members of British Israelism?), but are the synagogue of Satan. Fear none of those things which THOU SHALT SUFFER (future tense): behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and YE SHALL HAVE TRIBULATION ten days (then the Rapture will probably take place): be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the CHURCHES"
The Tribulation seems to have started Tishri 1, 5769, when the Dow dropped to 777.68 on Elul 29, 5768, just 3 hours before the Feast of Trumpets began in New York. Because of the different time zone, Tishri 1, 5769 had already arrived in Israel.
7 YEARS OF TRIBULATION - A SABBATIC CYCLE
(1) 5769, (2) 5770, (3) 5771, (4) 5772, (5) 5773, (6) 5774, and (7) 5775 (Sabbatic Year)
FIRST YEAR OF THE MILLENNIUM
THE FIRST-TRUMP RAPTURE IN THE SECOND YEAR OF THE TRIBULATION
The type: Nu 10:2-4 says, "Make thee TWO TRUMPETS (i.e., they stand for two Raptures) of silver; of a whole piece shalt thou make them: that thou mayest use them for the calling of the ASSEMBLY, and for the journeying of the camps. And when they shall blow with them (i.e., with both), ALL the assembly shall assemble themselves to thee at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And if they blow but with ONE trumpet, then the princes (ELDERS), which are heads of the thousands of Israel, shall gather themselves unto thee."
The First-Trump Rapture (I Thess. 4:16,17) will probably take place on the Lord's Day (Sunday).
Ascension Day, the Lord's Day, Sunday, 40th day of the Omer, Iyar 25, 5770 = May 9, 2010.
DAY OF THE LORD, DAY OF GOD'S WRATH
Monday, Feast of Trumpets, Tishri 1, 5776 = Sept 14, 2015.
THE LAST-TRUMP RAPTURE
It will probably take place early on the Day of the Lord, Tishri 1, 5776.
First on the agenda that day, the Sign of the Son of Man is seen in the sky as the Last-Trump Rapture (I Cor. 15:51,52) takes place. All saints are gathered to the General Assembly in Heaven (Heb. 12:23) (Mt. 24:31; Mark 13:27).
Mt 24:30,31 says, "And then shall appear the SIGN OF THE SON OF MAN in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect (that were Raptured in the 2nd year) from the four winds, from one end of HEAVEN to the other."
Mark 13:26,27 says, "And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds (i.e., the Sign of the Son of Man, Jesus sitting on his throne, is seen in the sky) with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the EARTH (this is the 2nd Rapture) to the uttermost part of HEAVEN."
Rev 6:16,17 says, "And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from THE FACE OF HIM THAT SITTETH ON THE THRONE, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?"
Jesus is crowned King of kings and Lord of lords in Heaven. Then there is silence in Heaven (Rev. 8:1) and on Earth (Hab. 2:20) while Jesus is being seated as judge at the Judgment Seat of Christ.
SEVEN MONTHS BETWEEN THE DAY OF GOD'S WRATH AND THE SECOND ADVENT
There are 7 months between Tishri 1 and Nisan 1 that year (Eze. 39:12,13), because 5776 is a Hebrew Leap Year with the 13th month, Adar II.
THE JUBILEE AND REGNAL YEAR
The Jubilee Year, Nisan 1, 5776 (Saturday, April 9, 2016) to Nisan 1, 5777 (Tue, March 28, 2017), would be announced on the previous Day of Atonement, Wed., Sept. 23, 2015.
THE SECOND ADVENT
It looks like the Second Advent will be Nisan 1, 5776 (the very appropriate Saturday Sabbath, April 9, 2016). "For the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath day" (Mt. 12:8).
THE BLOOD-MOON LUNAR ECLIPSES MARK 2014 AND 2015
2014 Apr 15 Total (Nisan 16, 5774) FIRSTFRUITS
2014 Oct 8 Total (Tishri 15, 5775) TABERNACLES
2015 Apr 4 Total (Nisan 15, 5775) UNL. BREAD
2015 Sep 28 Total (Tishri 15, 5776) TABERNACLES
THERE ARE ALSO FOUR SOLAR ECLIPSES IN 2014 AND 2015, ALL ON THE 29TH OF A HEBREW MONTH
Apr 29, 2014 Total: (Nisan 29, 5774)
Oct 23, 2014 Partial: (Tishri 29, 5775)
Mar 20, 2015 Total: (Adar 29, 5775) EVE OF NISAN 1, FIRST DAY OF REGNAL AND SACRED YEAR
Sept 13, 2015 Partial: (Elul 29, 5775) EVE OF TISHRI 1, 5776, FIRST DAY OF CIVIL YEAR
DAY OF THE LAST-TRUMP RAPTURE, THE DAY OF GOD'S WRATH
Probably Tishri 1, 5776, which starts at 6 PM on Sept. 13, 2015
The last day of 5775, Elul 29, our Sept. 13, 2015, is marked by a Partial Solar eclipse at the dark of the Moon. To recheck, I went to Fred Espenak's Solar Eclipse list for NASA. It is not after 6 PM, as I had thought. I then went to YourSky. At 8 AM on Sept. 13, 2015, the Sun will be at 11h 24m 2s and the Moon will be at 11h 24m 45s Right Ascension. That's the eclipse. I think it marks the day preceeding the Day of God's Wrath.
Tishri 1 should start when the New Crescent Moon is sighted in Virgo. That phase could take up to two days, but I am going by the Hebrew Calendar, which lists Sept. 14, 2015 as Tishri 1, 5776.
That date seems right because the 2300 days (Dan. 8:13,14) preceding it, counted by inclusive reckoning because it is a block of time, set May 29, 2009, Pentecost, as the beginning of the Shortened Tribulation.
Of the Day of the Lord, the Day of God's Wrath, Rev 6:12 says, "And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the SUN BECAME BLACK as sackcloth of hair, and THE MOON BECAME AS BLOOD".
Zeph 1:14,15 says of that day, "The great DAY OF THE LORD is near, it is near, and hasteth greatly, even the voice of the DAY OF THE LORD: the mighty man shall cry there bitterly. That day is a day of WRATH, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a DAY OF DARKNESS and gloominess, a day of clouds and THICK DARKNESS".
Isa 13:9,10 says, "Behold, the DAY OF THE LORD cometh, cruel both with WRATH and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it. For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: THE SUN SHALL BE DARKENED IN HIS GOING FORTH, AND THE MOON SHALL NOT CAUSE HER LIGHT TO SHINE."
1897, when the first Zionist Congress met, plus 120 years equals 2017.
Gen 6:3 says, "And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years." That just might happen again in our days.
1917, when Gen. Allenby took Jerusalem, plus 100 years also equals 2017.
1967, when the Six-Day War took place, plus 50 years also equals 2017.
I expect the Jubilee Year to run from Nisan 1, 5776 (Sat, 9 April 2016) to Nisan 1, 5777 (Tue, 28 March 2017).
I hope this helps you understand why the passage of time has changed my mind about a Pre-Trib Rapture.
But, what we are to be kept out of?
Luke 21:25-36 says, "And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars (we have had those; besides the pictures on my Home Page, think of Jupiter getting hit with 21 pieces of a comet that broke up and the tremedous Gamma Ray Bursts that got our attention); and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring (think of the mammoth tsunamis that hit the Indian Ocean area and maybe killed 200,000); Men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory (this is the Sign of the Son of Man, seen in the sky). And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh. And he spake to them a parable; Behold the fig tree (Israel), and all the trees (other nations); When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand (the Six-Day War started June 5; summer began June 21). So likewise ye, when ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand. Verily I say unto you, This generation (i.e., 48.33 years) shall not pass away, till ALL be fulfilled. Heaven (ouranos, the heavens, the air) and earth shall pass away (parerchomai, perish): but my words shall not pass away. And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so THAT DAY (when the heavens and the earth shall pass away) come upon you unawares. For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy TO ESCAPE ALL THESE THINGS THAT SHALL COME TO PASS, and to stand before the Son of man."
So far, we have just seen the signs and the terrific blow to the economy when the Dow went down to 777.68 and marked the beginning of the 70th week of Daniel 9:27. The worst is yet to come. I think we will get out of here soon, hopefully May 9.
About 10 days before the Rapture, in Rev 3:8-10, Jesus says, "I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door (i.e., that will still be open at the Rapture), and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name. Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee. Because thou hast kept the word of my patience (hupomone, patient endurance), I also will KEEP THEE FROM THE HOUR OF TEMPTATION, WHICH SHALL COME UPON ALL THE WORLD, to try (peirazo, test, tempt) them that dwell upon the earth."
This hour of temptation does not have to be 7 years long. It could be when the False Prophet will require people all over the world to take the Mark of the Beast to be able to buy or sell. We should be caught up before that. This second year should end Tishri 1, 5771, Sept. 9, 2010.
Haiti's 7.0 earthquake
There shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. (Matthew 24:6-8)
According to Bonnie Gaunt’s “Jubilee Study” in her Aug. 10, 2006, letter on Five Doves, and several others, the autumn of 2015 begins not just a new Sabbatical year but also a JUBILEE YEAR!!!
"These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have TRIBULATION; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."
1 Thessalonians 5:9
"For God did not appoint us to suffer WRATH but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ."
1 THESSALONIANS 1:10
"and to wait for His Son from Heaven, whom He raised from the dead - Jesus, who rescues us from the coming WRATH."
I would appreciate your thoughts on this. Agape
A post on the Five Doves site
Laurie Hane (13 Jan 2010)
"Bruce W- Divisions of time in the book of Rev. according to Rev 1:19"
Bruce, ...let me get on to Rev. 1:19. Excerpts are from a radio programs by former A. E. Wilson
"In vs. 19 we have the division of the book of Revelation given unto us by the Lord God Almighty.....Here is the Lord's own outline of the division of the book; here is the Lord's own summary of the contents of this book. Accepting the Lord's summary, accepting the Lord's outline, it becomes comparatively easy to understand The Revelation.
There are three divisions in the book..three major divisions. Notice in this vs. 19; "write the things which thou hast seen," (that's division #1) "and the things which are,"(that's division #2) "and the things which shall be hereafter" (that's division #3). That there are these three divisions is evident by the fact that the word things occurs three times in this 19th vs. in the Greek text. Very few translators translate these three words. Here is on instance where the King James translation is superior to the majority of modern translations. "Write the thing (#1) which thou has seen, and the things (#2) which are, and the things (#3) which shall be hereafter.
Now notice: "Write the things which thou hast seen" up until this point John has seen nothing but the seven golden candlesticks and the Lord in the midst of them with the seven stars in His right hand. That's all that John has seen and that's all that is included in the first division and that's right here before us in chapter #1. Therefore, division #1 of the book of The Revelation is chapter #1--the things which John had seen up until the point tof the writing of vs. 19. Write the things which thou hast seen.
Now the third division begins with the expression "the things which shall be hereafter." Turn to chapter 4 of The Revelation. "After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven." That is a distinct break, a distinct division in the book of The Revelation. John, seeing the door opened in heaven, "and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter." Notice the expression "things which must be hereafter." Look again in the 19th vs. of the 1st chapter and the third division; "The things which shall be hereafter. "There can be no mistake, there can be no misunderstanding--"The things which shall be hereafter" begin in chapter 4 and continue on to the end of the book. That gives us two divisions, the first and the third.
The first division of the book is "the things which thou hast seen," and all that John had seen up until that moment was the vision or the revelation in chapter 1. The third division, "Write the things which shall be hereafter." In chapter 4 John sees the door opened into heaven and he hears the voice speaking which says, "Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter."
There is the first part of Revelation accounted for--division #1. Then chapter 4 to the end is the third division. That leaves only chapters 2 and 3; and in vs. 19 we have but one division left. That is the second or the middle division which is described in the 19th vs. of the 1st chapter, "The things which are." Now the things which shall be hereafter are the things which are going to come to pass swiftly or rapidly when put in motion. And that begins with chapter 4. Therefore, the things mentioned and described in chapters 2 and 3 constitute a study, a history, an account of the things pertaining to the church...the church of the living God, having come into existence the day of Pentecost and continues until the time in which it is caught up into the heaven, which synchronizes with chapter 4 of the Revelation; "Come up hither." The calling up of John into the heavens is symbolic or typical of the calling up of the church. So that chapters 1,2 and 3 of the Revelation cover the things transpiring from the time that John saw the revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ in the midst of the seven candlesticks until the time that the church is caught up into the heavens--chapters 1,2 and 3. So that this is the division given us by God Almighty.
Hope you have enjoyed this study. It is written from a radio show in the 80's I believe so the language is as if he is speaking to you. A little different, but I'm sure you get the point.
Re: Divisions of time in the book of Rev. according to Rev 1:19
Here is my take on Rev 1:19. It says, "Write the things which thou hast seen (before the Rapture, Rev. 2 and 3), and the things which are (at the time of the Rapture, Rev. 4:1), and the things which shall be hereafter (after the Rapture, Rev. 4:2 on until the end, where Jesus signs off).
The setting of "The Revelation of Jesus Christ" is when the Rapture is near. Jesus looks at things from that viewpoint. When he signs in and off, it is when the Rapture is near.
Rev. 1:3 says, "Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time (i.e., of the Rapture) is at hand."
Rev. 22:10 says, "And he saith unto me, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time (i.e., of the Rapture) is at hand."
Jesus signs off with Rev 22:20, "Surely I come quickly. Amen." He comes quickly at the Rapture.
Addressing foolish virgin types in Rev. 2:5, he says, "Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent."
I John 1:9 explains what to do when we repent. It says, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
All OLD SINS are forgiven when we first accept Jesus Christ as our own personal Saviour. All sins after that need to be confessed to bring them under the blood of Christ.
2Peter 1:9 says, "But he that lacketh these things is blind (i.e., like the Laodiceans), and cannot see afar off (Heaven), and hath forgotten that he was purged from his OLD SINS."
This lesson is what the Tribulation saints have finally learned in Rev 7:14. It says, "These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."
In Rev 22:7, Jesus says, "Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book."
In Rev 22:12, he says, "And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be."
You can see the divisions of "The Revelatiobn of Jesus Christ" reflected in Rev 4:1. It says, "After this (things before the Rapture) I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither (the Rapture), and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter" (after the Rapture).
When John announces the author of "The Revelation of Jesus Christ" in Rev. 1:4, the divisions are a bit different. He says, "John to the seven churches which are in Asia: Grace be unto you, and peace, from him which is (i.e., at the time of the Rapture), and which was (at the First Advent), and which is to come (at the Second Advent); and from the seven Spirits which are before his throne."
The divisions are a bit different in Rev 11:17 too. It says, "We give thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, which art (i.e., on the Day of the Lord, which is the Day of God's Wrath on Earth and Coronation Day in Heaven), and wast (at the First Advent), and art to come (at the Second Advent, 7 months later (Eze. 39:12,13); because thou hast taken to thee thy great power, and hast reigned." Agape
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Monday, September 22, 2008
We just got done with Ganesh's birthday. And in between, we have had the sundries of Onam, Tatsunokuchi, and Tipukaka's birthday. And as we plod through the holy month of Ramzan towards Id and the whole series of festivities that make up Dussehra and Diwali, and lead us towards the new year across Christmas, it struck me how little attention is paid to preserving our civilization from the horrors that we have created in the form of weapons of mass destruction.
This was what George Bush used to justify the war in Iraq, searching for weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, they couldn't find any, even after the whole world had to go look for them, and a lot of people were killed doing so. It is ironic that the United States should be searching to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, since it is the only country in the history of mankind to have used nuclear weapons ever. Even pacifists who were against death penalty were forced to stand up and voice their condemnation of this dastardly act. You can read Toda Sensei's declaration against nuclear weapons here.
While it is important to strive for human revolution and growth, if we do not confront and eliminate the forces that lie within each of us to be powerful and to dominate and control one another, we will not have the courage to stand up against politicians and powerbrokers who play common mortals against each other's fears and insecurities while they continue to pursue their selfish motives of greed and avarice.
And just an afterthought, listening to your babble and sometimes long sentences that we cannot figure out, I was reminded of the fact that when I was a kid, I used to have my own language. Once I grew up some more, I found it embarrassing whenever mom would bring the topic up, until I came across Don Martin and his language of things happening. Enjoy. The only true law is mystic anyway. Ptooing!
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Friday, August 22, 2008
Friday, August 15, 2008
My dear Parth, my wicked gumdrop,
15th August is Independence Day in India. This is the day that Jawaharlal Nehru took office as the first Prime Minister of the Republic of India and announced our independence from the colonial rule of the British.
Colonies were like little pockets of land, resources, trade routes, and political power that the early European nations would set up in what is largely referred to as the developing world. So, nations like those of Africa, India, and why, even North America, suddenly found themselves belonging to Great Britain, France, Holland, Portugal, etc. Over the years, as the people realized what was happening, they started voicing their views, and like in India, a freedom struggle evolved. The Indian Independence Struggle is one of the most glorious periods in our recent history, a time when people were actually willing to put aside personal motives and differences and work towards the building of our nation. Of course, every glorious period has its share of goof-ups and dubious characters, but then, in the end, we did get our freedom at the midnight hour of August 14, 1947. August 14, 1947 was also the day that Daisaku Ikeda, just 19 years old then, met Sensei Josei Toda.
It is 61 years that we are a free nation, but we still find it difficult to proclaim that our land is the land that Tagore wished it to be when he wrote, Where the mind is without fear, Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action -- Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
It is darkest before dawn, and in this age of violence, materialism, selfishness, violation of basic rights, and terrorism, it is the thinking person who is standing up and asking, what can I do to make things right. More and more young people are taking a stance for world peace, demanding that their governments stop creating arsenals of folly by arming the military to the teeth and building weapons of mass destruction "as deterrent only," and instead spend more on preserving the delicate ecology of the planet, education, health, shelter, and food.
More and more, people are waking up to the fact that we are more alike than different, that one future and one planet binds all of us together, that there is nowhere we can run away to, and that only a new awareness, a new human revolution can save us from the devils that we have nurtured among ourselves.
The one prayer that we all should have is that we be able to foster among the youth, capable leaders who will turn the tides on the destruction that we, in our ignorance, greed, and selfishness, have brought upon ourselves. I trust you will grow up and study the mystic law and take the great vow to lead every sentient being to enlightenment and happiness.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
Heard that you had a wonderful time with your grandparents, uncle Tipu, aunt Chandreyee, and cousin Mia. I am so glad that you were able to meet up with this side of your family. A family is an unit or group that has a shared kinship or relationship. One has many kinds of family. The first family we come to know of is the family we are born into. Mom, Dad, brothers and sisters if there are any. Then we realize that there is more to it, there are aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents. We also have families like that of all the people living in an apartment building. Then you have your family of schoolfriends. You have families of fans who like the same thing, like music, or sports. Can you thing of some more families that you are a member of?
Here are some pictures of your time with Mia (Mihika), Mama Mia (Chandreyee), and Barey Mian (Tipu), Cousin Titi, and also your nutty Thammi (Manju) and Thakurdada (Surajit).
It is important that you find and stay in touch with your family, because that is where we find meaning in our lives, as we discover other people who are alike and who want to achieve the same things in our lives.
Tipu and I never got to know each other too well when we were kids. He was born when I was twelve, and by the time he grew up to be a person, I was deeply engrossed with my research into pharmaceuticals. We really started relating to each other after he grew up. Once I grow up, we will relate even more I guess. And once you grow up too, we will have a big party.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
These are some of his films that I liked.
Gold Rush (1925)
City Lights (1931)
Modern Times (1936)
The Great Dictator (1940)
These videos are tribute mixes by chaplinsviolins on youtube. Nice Job.
Friday, June 6, 2008
May 31, 2008
My Dear Parth, Sultan of my heart,
Hyderabad has two patches of summer, the dry blistery March to May and then the sultry August to October. May ends with a few pre-monsoon showers that brings the temps below 40 for the first time in weeks (it is likely this will change by the time you read this. everything changes!). Occasionally an entire summer will go past with periodic spells of rain that will keep the temperature bearable. But at its peak, Hyderabad summers can be a challenging task. Ants will creep into the tightest sealed kitchen container in search of moisture, vegetables will hardly look at you, lying with their eyes downcast on the store shelves, auto drivers will sling water bottles cloaked in wet jute casing, fights and brawls and road rage will rise, beltlines will itch, roads will float mirages that envelop you like an oven, bedding will stay warm late into the night. And then the monsoon will hit the Kerala coastline and the countdown will begin for the greatest show on earth. The Indian monsoon. Anyway, till then...
Some other features of Hyderabad that are as iconic as its summer includes the Charminar, the pearls, the IT hub that is now referred to as Cyberabad, biryani, and of course, the Golconda Fort. Hyderabad was earlier known as Bhagyanagar in memory of Bhagmati, wife of Quli Qutb Shah. The Qutb Shahi dynasty had come into being as a spin off from the Bahmani Sultanate and ruled the Telengana region from Golconda. Golconda fort, the Charminar, and the bridge over the river Musi are three of his legacies. Thanks to their popularity as tourist sights, whenever anyone visits, they ask to be taken to Golconda. As a result, if I ever am hard pressed for a job, I guess I could moonlight as a tourist guide at the Fort. Five rupees a ticket, unless you are carrying a video camera, and please carry enough drinking water, the climb will drain you out even in the coolest day of winter, 100 bucks and I will tell you tales no one else knows. Or else you will just look at rocks and walls and come back, okay ninety rupees.
Well, jokes apart, a visit to the Fort leaves one awestruck at the innovative technology, architecture, and art of war that was practiced in those ancient times. There are the impressive gates, many of whom you have to drive through to reach the entrance, one of which is the fateh darwaza, the victory gates, that could prevent the hardest of attacks, with spikes on the doors so that elephants could not be used to batter the gate down, and a rolling ball maze style buttressing outside the fateh darwaza so that in event of an attack, ground level defence was in place till the last minute with an exit route in place. As a matter of fact, had it not been for a traitor who opened the fateh darwaza to Aurungzeb's army, the fort would have remained forever unconquered. Three layers of walls protected the inner fort with bastions (burz) at regular intervals with guns mounted on them.
When you enter the fort, before you can say wotsuh the deal, you will find people standing in the inside porch and clapping and looking upwards. It is not some superstition or religious vow being made or kept, but it is a display of the fine architecture and technology that was in use even in those days. If you look up towards the top the hill from here, the highest structure you can see is called the bala hisar pavillion, which you reach at the end of your climb up. The accoustics at the gate are built in such a way that any sound made there can be heard from the top of the hill, a good couple of kilometers away!!
Another amazing display of technology is the use of stepped water tanks at intervals and clay water pipes and water wheels and lifts to lift water to the top of the fort.
As you climb up, and it is quite a steep climb, you get to see the city as it builds up away from the hill. You also pass the prison cell where Ramadas, a revenue collector in the time of Tana Shah (also called Tani Shah, or benevolent ruler, while Tana Shah means child saint, go figure!), was imprisoned for using state funds to repair a rama temple at Bhadrachalam. No, this is not the Ramadas who inspired Shivaji, that was Samarth Ramdas. This is not the Ramdas who planned and built Amritsar (then named Ramdaspur after him) and was known for creating a structure for sikh societal life. This is not the friend of Neem Karoli Baba who got thrown out of his teaching job for being friends with Timothy Leary, that was Richard Alpert, or Bubba Rama Dass. This was Ramadasu of the Keerthanas, the ramdas of bhakti, who wrote songs of devotion to rama that were so overpowering that that it is believed rama sent his two sons to pay the money back and release him from prison, perhaps hoping he would stop writing once he was released, but his luck was not so good. Ramadas continued to write heartwrenching songs of devotion, and good thing he did so, since he later turned out to be the inspiration for Thyagaraj, one of the three pillars of carnatic music.
You better carry enough drinking water, since you will get all thirsty and sweaty by the time you reach the top and rest in the cool breeze and try and identify city landmarks all around. You can see the charminar, and you can see cyber towers, at least at the time of my writing you can. There is also a hindu temple adjacent to the bala hisar which dates to the kakatiya period and has a kali temple which is called the madanna temple. You can choose to come down the same way you came up or you can climb down the other side of the hill which will lead you through the womens quarters or rani mahal. If you stay for the sound and light show, you will need to take your seats before it gets dark, and rub mosquito repellant (which golconda veterans will always carry in their bags when visiting the fort), while you wait for the show to begin. It is a nice show, one that should not be missed, and it gives you a thorough run down of history, geography, politics, poetry, architecture and music associated with the sights you have been seeing up and down the hill.
As you drive away towards the city, you look back and see the fort silhouetted against the night sky, standing testimony to the grandeur and majesty of the days of yore. On the way, we see contractors cutting down trees that look like they would have witness to Aurungzeb's army marching towards the fort, or to the sound of music in the nearby Taramati Baradari. Road widening, we are told.
May your roads not be so wide that you cannot find your way,
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Friday, May 30, 2008
My Dear Parth, My Little Ringmaster,
Over men & horses, hoops & garters, and lastly through a hogs-head of real fire. What fun it was to visit the circus. The first glimpse of the huge tents, the overpowering smell of leftover tiger food, elephant sweat, and horse shit. The light catching the dust as it sneaks out from between joints of the tent. In smaller towns, like when I was at school in a small town in what was then Bihar, now Jharkhand, they would have real powerful searchlights sweeping up into the night sky so that you could see it from miles away, and there would be marches through the town with the jokers and acrobats, horses and elephants, camels and suited-booted billy goats, cyclists and juggler rocking the streets with the band playing old ventures tunes or Hindi film tunes, lots of brass, lots of wind, lots of loud drums and snares, throwing leaflets in the air behind the procession, block printed leaflets on cheap colored paper that taunted you with the mysteries of the female lion tamer from Russia (once you got to the circus, you learned that he trained female lions only), the human fire thrower from Persia (yes, Persia), the lady with the beard, the lady with a snakes body, the two humped camel, the husband and wife knife-throwing act (it wasn't an act really, he just had terrible aim, that's all), and the like.
In the city it was less of a build up. As a matter of fact, one of the popular locations in Kolkata for the circus to set up in is called Park Circus Maidan, though I don't know if the circus sets up there any more. One morning, Dad or Mom would announce, we are going to the circus on Friday, and that would be the start of sleepless nights, and discussing with friends the merits and demerits of the circus then in town, or if there were more than one, debating which was better, and pestering dad to get tickets for the other one, it had the great Iranian wizard who could make a man turn into any height he wanted. You mustn't miss the human cannonball, and remember to close your ears when they do the motorcycle spinning act, and the clown on the trapeze is the best, he is actually the most skilled trapeze guy, but they make him a clown just for impact, in the end, they pull his pants off, and you get to see him running away covering his bum, ha ha ha.
And then the day would come, water bottle and tiffin box firmly packed and slung over, hand hurting from Mom holding it so tightly because of the mad crowd, the dust getting into your mouth, and the smell in your nose, finally make our way into the tent, down shabbily carpeted aisles to our rickety seats, the sections cordoned off by gaudily painted dividers, black, red, yellow, stripes and dots. Then you start looking around and you see how huge and how high the place is, the ring, the entrance to the ring with shiny velvet drapes that get lifted magically whenever someone comes through, the bandstand on top of the entrance, the band, dressed in sgt peppers costumes, and oompah-oompahing away, the huge towers with the trapeze stands, the ladders that seemed to be endless.
The show begins, the jugglers, the clowns, the horses, the dogs, the parrots, the cockatoo, the donkey who can do arithmetic, and then, tara-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra, the flying trapeze, the heartbeat skipping near misses in mid air, and the colorful lithe bodies setting up a gentle symphony against the dark of the circus tent, and of course the clown and his bum. As it gets over, and you look down again, lo and behold, huge iron grills, chained together to form a cage for the whole circus ring, and fires blazing around them, yes, the lions and the tigers. They don't have lions and tigers now, but in those days, they did, and they would make them sit on stools and crack the whip, and invariably, one of the lions or tigers would be very rebellious, but in the end they would sit, jump through hoops, sit on their hind feet, etc. In Enid Blyton stories, inevitably the crucial clue would be hidden away in the boards of the lion's cage, and only the boy who cleaned the cage and fed the lion would be able to find it, and it would turn out that he was actually the son of a wealthy man who had got lost in a carnival as a kid and had moved with the circus and would in the process end up saving his father who was now being framed by the owner to cover up for his losses.
Because a circus is a business, often conditions are not so good, the workers and the animals have to survive somehow, and often the animals would get ill-treated and abused, sometime underfed, or put up in unhygienic conditions. Over the years, most of the circuses have been forced to drop animal acts, especially with wild animals or with endangered species.
There would be stilt walkers, motorcycle stunts, dancing horse, cart-pulling dogs, balancing acts on a unicycle, a human cannonball, and lots of clown acts. I would scream and shout and laugh till I was hoarse, and then the band would start playing the national anthem, which meant the show was over. One arm sticking up where either mom or dad would hold it almost like they would break it, empty water bottle dangling from my neck, i would stumble out between trousers and skirts and sarees of grown ups and other kids, all with one arm sticking in the air and water bottle dangling. Outside, the air would be full of wailing kids, either suffocated, or scolded because they wanted to have pani puris or ice-cream which their parents would not buy them. I had got used to the Bengali tradition of "pet kharab hobe" and "thanda lege jaabe" quite early in life and had resigned myself to mom-made tomato cucumber sandwiches and my water bottle, so I just looked at sympathetically at those kids as they stood still with one arm sticking up, which wasn't unusual, even my arm was up, waiting for taxis and buses to take their tired bodies home to bathe (you had to wash off the dirt and the germs of the circus), eat, and fall asleep, dreaming of running away from home to join the circus and learning how to play the fife from the Ukrainian girl in the tight shiny dress.
The circus, like in the work of Enid Blyton, has been used by many creative people as the setting for their work. Raj Kapoor's Mera Naam Joker is a classic, as is Federico Fellini's film La Strada. When I started trying to write about Janardan, one of the many crazy things that I made him do was to run away from a nagging wife and join the circus, becoming a successful and famous clown. Years later, when the circus came back to town, at one show, Janardan's wife see him during his act, recognizes him from his red nose and goes hysterical trying to get his attention, and to get him to quit the circus and come back home. The audience thinks it is part of the act, and roars with laughter and approval. From that day on, she comes to the circus, for all three shows, and once Janardan's act starts, she starts hers. The audience roars with laughter and approval. The circus moves on. It is time for the next crazy thing.
As one gets older, the magic of the circus wears off. In today's world, the Age of Empires seems more exciting, it seems more fun to sit at a computer and browse the internet rather than to brave the dust and smell and go watch a circus show. By the time you grow up and read this, you might not even know what Age of Empires was, but in our times, it was one of the more exciting (and educational) games for the digital world. But once in a while, one is taken back to days when mystery lurked round every corner, when secret clubs were formed with strange passwords that would allow you into their meetings, where bonfires burnt bridges, and kisses healed hurt, when the wind spoke to you and plants had first names, when the stars in the night sky were your dead ancestors, and the web was what spiders spun. That is when with a flourish of the drums and trumpets, the horses would fly out with the sequined young girls standing in the stirrups into the air above the ring from behind the curtains and you knew for sure that wishes really were wings.
Dont rub your eyes when you get dust in them, just let it tear up from the irritation and wash out on its own.
Till next time,
PS: This post has continued to pick up significant traffic over the years. Many of the links have had to be removed over time since the sites are no longer up. Please leave a comment if you find any of the links broken.
Friday, May 23, 2008
My Dear Parth, My Champion,
You might remember that I started out writing this after reading a similar letter elsewhere. I thought I should share some stuff from that letter, since it is really very nice. I found it at zenhabits, a wonderful blog about achieving goals, productivity, being organized, GTD, motivation, eliminating debt, saving, getting a flat stomach, eating healthy, simplifying, living frugal, parenting, happiness, and successfully implementing good habits.
Dear Seth, he starts, You’re only three years old, and at this point in your life you can’t read, much less understand what I’m going to try to tell you in this letter. But I’ve been thinking a lot about the life that you have ahead of you, about my life so far as I reflect on what I’ve learned, and about my role as a dad in trying to prepare you for the trials that you will face in the coming years.
You won’t be able to understand this letter today, but someday, when you’re ready, I hope you will find some wisdom and value in what I share with you.
You are young, and life has yet to take its toll on you, to throw disappointments and heartaches and loneliness and struggles and pain into your path. You have not been worn down yet by long hours of thankless work, by the slings and arrows of everyday life.
For this, be thankful. You are at a wonderful stage of life. You have many wonderful stages of life still to come, but they are not without their costs and perils.
I hope to help you along your path by sharing some of the best of what I’ve learned. As with any advice, take it with a grain of salt. What works for me might not work for you.
Life Can Be Cruel
There will be people in your life who won’t be very nice. They’ll tease you because you’re different, or for no good reason. They might try to bully you or hurt you.
There’s not much you can do about these people except to learn to deal with them, and learn to choose friends who are kind to you, who actually care about you, who make you feel good about yourself. When you find friends like this, hold on to them, treasure them, spend time with them, be kind to them, love them.
There will be times when you are met with disappointment instead of success. Life won’t always turn out the way you want. This is just another thing you’ll have to learn to deal with. But instead of letting these things get you down, push on. Accept disappointment and learn to persevere, to pursue your dreams despite pitfalls. Learn to turn negatives into positives, and you’ll do much better in life.
You will also face heartbreak and abandonment by those you love. I hope you don’t have to face this too much, but it happens. Again, not much you can do but to heal, and to move on with your life. Let these pains become stepping stones to better things in life, and learn to use them to make you stronger.
But Be Open to Life Anyway
Yes, you’ll find cruelty and suffering in your journey through life … but don’t let that close you to new things. Don’t retreat from life, don’t hide or wall yourself off. Be open to new things, new experiences, new people.
You might get your heart broken 10 times, but find the most wonderful woman the 11th time. If you shut yourself off from love, you’ll miss out on that woman, and the happiest times of your life.
You might get teased and bullied and hurt by people you meet … and then after meeting dozens of jerks, find a true friend. If you close yourself off to new people, and don’t open your heart to them, you’ll avoid pain … but also lose out on meeting some incredible people, who will be there during the toughest times of your life and create some of the best times of your life.
You will fail many times but if you allow that to stop you from trying, you will miss out on the amazing feeling of success once you reach new heights with your accomplishments. Failure is a stepping stone to success.
Life Isn’t a Competition
You will meet many people who will try to outdo you, in school, in college, at work. They’ll try to have nicer cars, bigger houses, nicer clothes, cooler gadgets. To them, life is a competition — they have to do better than their peers to be happy.
Here’s a secret: life isn’t a competition. It’s a journey. If you spend that journey always trying to impress others, to outdo others, you’re wasting your journey. Instead, learn to enjoy the journey. Make it a journey of happiness, of constant learning, of continual improvement, of love.
Don’t worry about having a nicer car or house or anything material, or even a better-paying job. None of that matters a whit, and none of it will make you happier. You’ll acquire these things and then only want more. Instead, learn to be satisfied with having enough — and then use the time you would have wasted trying to earn money to buy those things … use that time doing things you love.
Find your passion, and pursue it doggedly. Don’t settle for a job that pays the bills. Life is too short to waste on a job you hate.
Love Should Be Your Rule
If there’s a single word you should live your life by, it should be this: Love. It might sound corny, I know … but trust me, there’s no better rule in life.
Some would live by the rule of success. Their lives will be stressful, unhappy and shallow.
Others would live by the rule of selfishness — putting their needs above those of others. They will live lonely lives, and will also be unhappy.
Still others will live by the rule of righteousness — trying to show the right path, and admonishing anyone who doesn’t live by that path. They are concerned with others, but in a negative way, and in the end will only have their own righteousness to live with, and that’s a horrible companion.
Live your life by the rule of love. Love your spouse, your children, your parents, your friends, with all of your heart. Give to them what they need, and show them not cruelty nor disapproval nor coldness nor disappointment, but only love. Open your soul to them.
Love not only your loved ones, but your neighbors … your coworkers … strangers … your brothers and sisters in humanity. Offer anyone you meet a smile, a kind word, a kind gesture, a helping hand.
Love not only neighbors and strangers … but your enemy. The person who is cruelest to you, who has been unkind to you … love him. He is a tortured soul, and most in need of your love.
And most of all, love yourself. While others may criticize you, learn not to be so hard on yourself, to think that you’re ugly or dumb or unworthy of love … but to think instead that you are a wonderful human being, worthy of happiness and love … and learn to love yourself for who you are.
Finally, know that I love you and always will. You are starting out on a weird, scary, daunting, but ultimately incredibly wonderful journey, and I will be there for you when I can. Godspeed. Love, Your Dad
And now, here is the recipe for some curry leaf gunpowder that I learned to make. I have also been nice enough to include a link to a blog where I originally learned it from, and then tweaked it to my liking. When you find time, you can try both out, and I know which one you will like more.
Till I get time to write you again, take care and stay out of the sun till it cools down some more.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
May 20, 2008
My Dear Parth, My Little Buddha,
Yesterday was the birthday of Gautama Buddha. He was born during the full moon many hundred years ago as a prince to King Suddhodhana and Queen Mayadevi. He went on to study and understand the nature of life and death and everything between and beyond these two events, and his teachings form what we know today as Buddhism. Maybe some day you will read up on his summary of the nature of things in a way very similar to what modern science has to say.
The moon looked wonderful as it played hide and seek beyond dark clouds left over from the thunderstorm in the early morning. From the beginning of human time, men have wondered and created myths and stories about things that are awesome and difficult to understand like the moon, the stars, the sun, the wind, the rain. People see what they look for, and sometimes, even in the face of facts, they see only what they want to. The moon, like our planet earth, has seas and mountains (though the seas are dry), and from far, these look like irregular blotches on the moon. But since I grew up hearing about the man in the moon, and the rabbit in the moon, when I looked, and sometimes when I look now too, that was what I saw. I remembered how you and I would look at the moon from our balcony and thought I would share a a story I heard as a kid about the funny figure that shows up when you look at the moon.
Once there was a blacksmith who was unhappy with his work and was always complaining. He felt his work was too tiring and it was too hot, and he wished he could be a rock in the shade of a tree on the mountain side, where it was cool and the wind blew. God heard his wishes and said, so be it. And, poof, he became a rock under a tree on the mountain side.
In the meantime, along came a stone cutter looking for stones to cut, and he came upon the rock that had been the blacksmith and began to cut at it. The rock cried out that he did not want to be a rock, he wanted to be a stonecutter. God said, so be it, and, poof, a stone cutter he became.
As he went seeking stones to cut, he grew tired, his feet hurting, and sweat dripping from his brows in the hot sun, he wished he could be the sun, and god said, so be it. And, poof, he became the sun.
But the sun was warmer than anything he had been before, so he cried, this is too warm, I wish I would be the moon, and god said, so be it. And he became the moon. (poof!!)
But soon he realized that even the moon was warm from the sun's light all the time, and he realized that his life as a blacksmith was the best and wished he could return to being a blacksmith. But this time, god said, poof!! I am tired of your wishes. You wished to be the moon, so the moon you will remain. And so he stays in the moon till this day. If you look hard, you can still see him on a big moon night. Next time, remind me to tell you about the razor in exchange of nose story.
Play carefully and hold hands when you cross the street.
Monday, May 19, 2008
My Dear Parth, my Lion Cub,
I trust all is well with you. It is more than two months since I have been able to meet you, and I have no idea how long it will be before we get to spend some time together, so I thought I would write to you. I know you cant read yet, but I am sure you will understand some of the things when your mother reads out to you. Also, as you grow and learn to read, you will be able to relive these days when we were not able to be together. And once you are a big guy, you will possibly look back over these letters and apply some things to your life. If nothing more, maybe these letters will make you smile some day. What more can I ask for?
May in Hyderabad is always more cruel than April, though the dry air does moisten up a little as the monsoon nears, but often it only makes the heat more difficult to bear. I remember how you would run till you were tired and then stop only to stock up on water from your sipper, so I know I dont have to remind you to stay well hydrated during these months, starting out in January, when though it is cool and one doesn't feel thirsty, the relative humidity can go way below the 25% mark and you will dry out even before you know it, and all the way through June till the rains start. It makes more sense to have small sips frequently (like you do) than to down a lot of it at one time (makes you want to go to the loo more than anything else). Also, increased water intake tends to wash away the electrolytes from your system, as does excessive sweating, so do try and get in some salty and something sweet from time to time. Fizzy drinks dont help a lot, but if you must have them, add a pinch of salt to them, tastes more fun and helps more than harms.
It is very important to look after your health. This gift of life that has been given to us is very precious, we can do a lot with this life, but only if we are fit enough to be able to do what we want. When I was a young person, I was not clear what I wanted to do with my life, and so I often neglected myself by doing all the things that I thought was fun, and it took a heavy toll on my health. What helped me a lot was the words of a great thinker, who said,W hat kind of future do I envision for myself? What kind of self am I trying to develop? What do I want to accomplish in my life? The thing is to paint this vision of your life in your heart as specifically as possible. That "painting" itself becomes the design of your future. The power of the heart enables us to actually create with our lives a wonderful masterpiece in accordance with that design.
As you grow up you will realize what a challenging time we have been born in and how each one of us can do our bit to influence the future of mankind. It is very overwhelming, but once we realize the immense potential within us, we can find the courage to take one step at a time to fulfill the mission of our lives.
On a personal front, I am very happy that the Kolkata unit is finally shaping up and we will have an office of our own after almost two years of running out of a leased facility. Today, people from Hyderabad will reach Kolkata to start the interiors and furniture work and the computer network and electrical work. It is a big step for my boss, Ramakrishna, but he says it is not as much as he aspired to do, so it is no reason to get excited. When you and your mother visit Kolkata, do make it a point to visit the office, and make sure everyone is comfortable.
I must be gone now. I must tell you that since I have been on my own, I have a new found respect for the working homemaker. Funny how life teaches you the lessons you need to learn even when you do your best not learn them. I was so excited when I made rasam for the first time on my own. Your mother would have been so proud had she tasted it (not version 0.1 though). She spent a lot of energy trying to get me to learn how to make it, but I never did, till I had to on my own. I know that you are much wiser than I could ever have hoped to be and you will study well, and master your lessons and apply what you learn to make the world around you a land of tranquil light. Do let me know how your rasam version 0.1 turns out.
Bye for now, may the force always be with you (this is a popular phrase from Star Wars, a double trilogy that set the tone for many of the people from my generation, maybe someday you will watch and enjoy them) | <urn:uuid:41cf3bce-9c32-4294-9127-4930bd8a0da3> | CC-MAIN-2017-34 | http://thestoryofparth.blogspot.com/2008/ | 2017-08-20T00:23:42Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886105955.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20170819235943-20170820015943-00070.warc.gz | en | 0.976015 | 8,515 |
If you have not yet heard of microformats, chances are that you will not only hear more about them, but also be using them in the very near future. Microformats, while not necessarily a transformation technology has a very good chance of being a staple for web developers and those that practice SEO. While microformats have been around for several years, they are now building up stream and the big search engines such as Google and Yahoo have taken notice. Below, you will find a quick review and some tips on how to use this simple, but promising technology to your advantage. What is a Microformat? While web developers today primarily use html code to create web pages and convey data from a website to an end user and search engine robots, for those looking to make the information on their web pages more easily readable, better understood and more relational, one web based approach that is quickly becoming popular is the microformat. A microformat is a basic, but effective way to create a semantic markup. Meaning, a microformat is a snippet of code that a browser or search engine can read and actually understand what it is- instead of simply displaying it. A microformat can easily convey all types of information that can be collected, read, understood and automatically processed by a wide range of software. The types of information that microformats can currently convey include contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, reviews, products, social relationships (XFN) and more. Microformats Help Structure Your Information Easily When a search engine robot views your webpage, it might fully be able to read and display the information on it, but it doesn’t necessarily understand the information or relationships within this information. Microformats help to parse information located on your website. A microformat is a snippet of information that not only offers content, but also a relationship which search engines are now able to understand. For instance, Google currently understands and can utilize the hProduct microformat for publishing details of a product as part of their Rich Snippets tool. Below is a sample of a hProduct microformat: <div> <span >ACE</span> <span >Power Tools</span> <span >Rechargeable Drill</span> <span >$39.99</span> <span >Hands Free Rechargeable Drill for all types of home improvement jobs.</span> <span >http://ace-rechargeable-drill.example-website.com</span> </div> As you can see from the above sample there is plenty of information included in this hProduct microformat. It includes the brand, category, fn (product name or title), price, description, and URL. However additional information is optional including image, review, identifier, etc. This way, when Google’s robots view your web page, they just don’t see an entire page of possibly unrelated information, they now are able not only to read the information quickly and easily, but understand that this is a microformat snippet and that all the information within it relates to each other. Now, Google understands that the $39.99 in the above snippet is not just a random number, but the actual price of the Ace rechargeable drill. This way, Google will index this information differently so that it can be displayed in search results more effectively. For instance, if you do a search in Google for “Sony TV”, you will see up at the top, a group of listings of Sony TV sets, that also include the price and reviews. This information is structured with the help of the hProduct microformat. Other Key Uses for Microformats Besides the hProduct microformat, one of the most basic and possibly useful microformats is the hCard. The hCard microformat makes it easy to structure contact information about a person or business. This way, an end user along with the search engines can easily find this info, recognize it easily and for search engines use it appropriately for a wide range of services. For instance, Google Maps, can use your hCard info when doing a search for a specific location, the same is true with the geo microformat. Using Microformats and SEO There are plenty of benefits for using microformats and for those that practice SEO, you should definitely keep track of how the search engines are integrating this technology and using it to rank and share this info with the end user. Just some of the benefits of using microformats is that it helps not only the search engines, but users find and parse information about your website, business, products, etc (anything within the microformat). For businesses that are looking to optimize their site for a local area, microformats can possibly increase results found in local directory listings for all the big search engines. Microformats also help the search engines understand your website better. A microformat can offer precise information to a search engine helping you rank quickly and more effectively. As you can see, microformats are a relatively easy way to convey specific information in a snippet that search engines and end users can instantly understand the relevance of. With more and more web developers implementing this technology on their pages, you can be sure that the search engines will expand on how they use this information. Already, Yahoo, Google and others big search engines and websites are using microformats in a wide variety of ways which will make the web much more semantic and ultimately give the end user a better search experience. As far as implementation, including microformats on web pages is fairly straightforward and definitely worth the effort, especially if you are selling products (hProduct), offer reviews (hReview), would like to offer contact information (hCard) or planning an event (hCalendar). The microformat has definitely shown its value and you can be sure that the search engines will be looking for more ways to use it and integrate it into their services.
Google and Bing: Recent Search Engine Innovations[ October 10, 2009 ] With all the hoopla surrounding Microsoft’s Bing introduction over the last few months, Google has been recently flexing their muscles as well, letting the surfing community know that they are still relevant. Actually, everyone knows that Google is quite relevant, but you can surely bet, that they want to continue to be the top dog and continue to have the momentum of being the search engine brand that is most innovative. Google has continually been perceived over its relatively short existence as the media’s sweetheart by constantly creating innovative, interesting and sometimes more effective ways to search the web. However, now with MS’s Bing actively (and aggressively) trying to steal market share from Google, the spotlight now doesn’t shine as bright on Google as in the past. But, Google is determined to keep the spotlight, on itself and to be honest; the competition between these two corporate behemoths should reap many rewards, many of which will benefit the casual along with advanced search engine user. Here are just some of the ways that both search engines (Google & Bing) are competing with one another, which will hopefully bring a better search experience to the web community. Bing’s Visual Search Function With the recent release of Microsoft’s Bing, many users and critics have been equally impressed by the relevance of the results, the comprehensiveness of their search engine and the many bells and whistles that add value not only to ordinary web surfers, but for those that require powerful tools for advanced search queries. Microsoft Bing is widely viewed as a high quality search engine, and while maybe not on par with Google – it does offer enough to give Google a run for its money. While there are a wide range of features (which I discussed in my previous MS Bing article), recently as the search engine wars have heated up, Bing has released its Visual Search tool. Visual Search While most people are used to searching for items or information by simply typing in select keywords, searching visually has always been a dream of many. For those that are looking for certain images and information that matches these images, searching contextually can take time and be frustrating. However, with Bing’s Visual Search, this task has just gotten much easier. How Visual Search Works Visual search is definitely an innovative way to search and it is a welcome addition to the surfer’s search tool box. Using Bing’s Visual Search is quite easy. You visit their main Visual Search page: www.bing.com/visualsearch and you will find that you can enter a keyword into a search box. Many articles that I have read about Visual Search use the example of someone searching for a breed of dog using an image. So for instance, one would enter the keywords “dog breed” into the search box and click enter. Now is where the fun begins, Bing’s Visual Search returns the results of images that are interactive and highly intuitive. A huge gallery of images that are categorized by breed is now available and by hovering over each image with your mouse or by using the sort functions on the side of the page, one can easily view and search a wide range of dog breeds visually with ease. It should be noted that currently there are over 100 visual galleries available at Bing and you can be sure that there will be more to come in the future. Google Fast Flip While Bing has recently announced its Visual Search, Google also has been creating waves with its new product- Fast Flip. While Fast Flip is still in its experimental stage, currently part of Google Labs, it is interesting to see the many products that Google puts out there in order to test the waters. This product is no exception. While Google already has its wildly popular Google News and Google Reader, the new Fast Flip, does offers something a little bit different than these other two services. Google has received plenty of flack from many publishers regarding its Google News service. The issue mainly is that those that use Google News to browse headlines (effectively reading about a paragraph or less of content) sometimes don’t visit the publisher’s site (resulting in lower revenue for publishers). With Fast Flip, Google is trying to offer a possible incentive (along with making a profit) from those surfers that like to browse headlines or stories. For instance, you can visit the main page for Fast Flip at http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/ and you will see the general layout which looks like several rows of images of a front page or main article of a newspaper or magazine. Google has made it quite easy to browse many of the top stories or pieces of news, plus you can even search using keywords in the search box at the top. In addition, you can also rank your results by most recent, most popular, recommended, headlines and more. From my experience browsing the many images, it looks like Google is trying to deliver in-depth articles and coverage of news issues instead of the breaking news type snippets currently offered on Google News. Once you flipped through the results, you can easily click on any of the images and you will be sent to the homepage of the article or headline. Currently, Fast Flip is in its test phase and consists of 39 print and online publishers. Some of these publishers include The New York Times, NewsWeek and several popular blogs. Google believes the benefits of this service will allow those that like to browse or scan many of the major news organizations and magazines to enjoy a more efficient experience. For many, it might seem as though they are flipping through a magazine instead of clicking through web pages. Visual Search, Fast Flip and SEO While these two products offered by MS and Google are in their early stages, they can prove highly successful and affect the SEO industry. For instance, as Bing’s Visual Search gallery grows in categories, more and more people will experience and seek out visual search tools, obviously optimized images can play a part, as for Google’s Fast Flip, it is really too early to tell whether this will have any affect on the way in which many choose to search for news and information. Right now, the testing phase consists of only 39 publishers- and in some respects it has a lot to do with driving revenue rather than offering relevant search tools to the public, however if this type of search does become popular and Google opens it up to a wide range of publishers, it may definitely grab the interest of the SEO industry.
What Does the Bing/Yahoo! Deal Mean for SEO?[ August 3, 2009 ] Well, you have probably heard the news that Microsoft and Yahoo!, finally after years of fighting one another have come to a substantial agreement to partner together on Search and online ads. While the reaction from many in the SEO community has varied, after a few days of the news being out and more and more information coming forward, most search engine optimizers are starting to see the dust settle and are beginning to realize what this partnership between these two search and advertising behemoths might look like. So, here are just some of the items that those in the SEO industries should consider. Key Points of the New Deal It’s important that before we start discussing the possible affects of this new partnership may lead to, we should reiterate, the key points of this new agreement. Here just some of the items that one should be familiar with: First off, this deal has a term of 10 years, which is literally an eternity in search. During these 10 years, Microsoft will have an exclusive license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies. This is important, because MS would love to try to integrate these technologies into Bing’s platform. This deal also means that when it comes to algorithmic search and paid search, Bing will be the exclusive provider. And while Bing will become a beefier search engine with Yahoo!’s help, Yahoo!, on the other hand will be the exclusive sales force. Yahoo! will handle sales for premium search advertisers. However, while Yahoo! will be the sales provider, it will utilize Microsoft’s ADCenter platform and Microsoft’s ad prices- which are currently automated via its auction process. In addition to the above points, it should also be noted that both company’s respective display advertising will continue to be maintained by each company, also Yahoo!’s other properties such as email, etc will continue to be run by Yahoo!, and while Yahoo!’s search website will have its unique online persona- it will be powered by Bing. One last point, Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! for traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to Yahoo!. During the first five years, MS will pay out 88% of the search engine revenues generated on Yahoo!. It is especially important to note that this partnership will be fully implemented once and if the US government gives its regulatory approval. The timeline that MS and Yahoo! have set up is from about 18 to 24 months that full implementation of the above partnership should occur. So this is important- we are talking about 18-24 months for full implementation if and when this new partnership is given regulatory approval- and don’t forget to expect some legal maneuvering from search giant Google. What this Deal Means for SEO? While this deal will no doubt have affects on SEO, don’t expect huge changes overnight. It will no doubt take some time for MS and Yahoo! to get its bearings and start working together as one. Secondly, for those that already optimize for Bing, this is an excellent time to put some more resources into it. Bing and its earlier search engine carnations (Live) were definitely capable search engines, however since they lacked market share, many SEO’s tended to focus on Google and Yahoo!. So with Yahoo! getting pushed out of the picture and Bing taking over its share, it’s now a good time to acquaint yourself with Bing. Bing is a smart, efficient engine, even though most would agree it doesn’t reach the sophistication level that Google has achieved. However, what it has shown is that it definitely has the right stuff. I would focus on the basics and industry best practices for now including fresh content, decent keyword density, productive link building and a focus on keywords in titles including possibly your URL or sub URL and blogs that you create. And by the way, just as Google has Blogger.com, take advantage of Microsoft’s Spaces (http://home.spaces.live.com), which offers users the ability to create blogs and manage friends, contacts, etc. Wait and See It’s important to be prudent when it comes to figuring out the melding of both Bing and Yahoo!. Besides, the possibility of a 2 year implementation process, it is important to consider that optimizing for Bing does not always mean also optimizing for Google or vice versa. In fact, many in the SEO community are concerned about the possibility of using strategies that may be beneficial in Bing, but may be disadvantageous in Google. The 800 Pound Gorilla While we all may be looking for some big changes to come in the near future, let’s never forget that not only might this deal never come to fruition due to regulatory approval, but that Google is sure to make sure its presence is known and will defend its market share and revenue. Expect Google to put up a fight and defend itself at every possible turn. For Search Engine Marketers While this article focuses on the optimization aspect of this new partnership between Yahoo! and Microsoft, it should be noted that this deal will have huge implications regarding search engine marketing. For those in the industry, it will be important to keep up to date on how exactly this partnership will affect paid search.
BING is Here![ June 15, 2009 ] Since the end of May, there has been quite a lot of chatter regarding a new product being released by Microsoft. No it’s not Windows 7 or a high tech Zune player, but it turns out that something called Bing is Microsoft’s newest search engine. As anyone who has followed Microsoft over the last couple of years knows there have been several search engines that have come to market. The first was MSN Search, which tried to keep the millions with dial up internet access using the Microsoft Network for search. A couple of years ago Microsoft renamed this search engine and called it Windows Live Search which over the next couple of years was renamed again to simply Live Search. While definitely a quality search engine, Microsoft didn’t exactly set the industry on fire and now Live is ultimately being updated and again renamed to what is now being called Bing. On June 3, 2009 Bing finally went live. This search engine is definitely different than its predecessor and with an $80 to $100 million dollar ad campaign, Microsoft is very eager to get the word out. So for us in the SEO and/or SEM industry, how does Bing stack up to their earlier releases and how will it affect the search environment now and in the near future, here are just some of the possibilities. While, it is obviously a new product and its implications won’t be known for some time, here is some insight into Bing and how it might ultimately affect our industry.
What’s New in Bing?There are plenty of features that make Bing not only a powerful search engine, but also stand apart from both Google and Yahoo. While earlier versions of Live Search were modeled after Google with a plain white background with minimal text, Bing offers a background image that changes daily. In fact, when you roll over your mouse on this image, you can read and learn more about it. Besides a background image, searching in Bing is not only easy, but made to be convenient and logical. Bing is extremely quick in responding to the user’s queries, but the search results are definitely a high quality and after several searches, I found it either on par or close to the quality that one would find at Google. In addition to its high quality search results Bing offers a few surprises that are quite useful including its video thumbnail preview. When you do a search and results come back that include videos, it is easy to preview the thumbnail of the video simply by hovering your mouse pointer over it. It’s also easy to find all your content neatly organized, which is classified by sections including map, local weather, fan-sites, wall paper and much more. When results are shown to the viewer, instead of the normal two column format we are used to in Google where the results are shown on the left and paid contextual ads are on the right- Microsoft uses a three column format with your normal results in the center, paid results to the right and relevant links to the left. Other features include an easy way to scroll through images with a variety of ways to adjust the settings of the images for the size, layout, color, etc. It also makes it easy to search for videos depending on length, resolution, source, etc.
Bing For SEO and SEMWith Microsoft being one of the big 3 when it comes to search, many SEO’s and SEM’s obviously need to keep a close watch on how Bing will affect their campaigns. There has been a lot of chatter and since Bing has only been out for less than a month, it is still way too early to tell, if there will be any big changes in how Microsoft conducts search. However, it is clear, that with its roll out, Microsoft is making sure to update its search as often as possible and it is extremely likely that with its roll out Microsoft has been tweaking its search algorithm. For instance in the beginning of June, there was plenty of chatter going on that the search results were in flux and that every day results for first page rankings were changing- obviously this is to be expected, and it will take at least a few months to see how everything settles. While this can be frustrating for SEO and SEM professionals, there are plenty of things that are surely to stay the same with little if any disruption.
Optimizing for BingIt should be noted that with all the fanfare of Bing’s launch and the expected state of flux due to possibly a new algorithm and constant updates, those optimizing or marketing for the long term shouldn’t switch any of their strategies just yet. In fact, throughout all the evolutions of Microsoft’s search products, they have always relied on the many aspects of optimization that has made Google and Yahoo continually return quality, relevant results. Best practices such as freshly updated content that for the most part is unique, quality link backs- especially when receiving quality link backs from an authority site, on page optimization utilizing meta tags, errorless coding- making it easy for their crawlers to read and decent keyword density to ensure crawlers realize quickly keywords that are targeted on page. In addition, Microsoft has always put a tad more emphasis on specific keywords located in a URL. So whether you are creating a new blog or domain name, choose its name wisely trying to include a keyword or keyword phrase in its URL.
Possible Advertising Benefits on BingMicrosoft has stated that it would like to move into second place behind Google within 5 years and while this goal is feasible, it is also making a big push in helping advertisers get a better ROI. Instead of simple search text ads, it is trying to maximize a web searcher’s intent to buy by utilizing richer and more relevant results. For instance, Microsoft will be focusing heavily on geographical and demographic ad targeting and will be putting in place an easy way to search and purchase a product directly from search (think Amazon’s one click, except on Bing).
Google vs. BingIt is natural to match up Bing against its competitors and obviously there is a lot of talk about Bing trying to be a “Google Killer”. However, most would agree that Microsoft is well too realistic to think they can steal enough market share away from Google to be #1. As far as search goes, Google does a great job and there hasn’t been any kind of product that is so revolutionary to drive users away from it. So even with plenty of bloggers typing away on their sites (remember Wolfram Alpha) trying to create a juicy buzz that Bing is the next Google Killer- don’t believe the hype.
Bing vs. YahooWhile Bing definitely is not a Google killer, Yahoo was surely on Microsoft’s radar. In fact, since the Yahoo and MS search merger went bust, Microsoft has been trying to come up with a way to achieve its goals by circumventing Yahoo. Bing may finally be the product to do the trick. In the first few days, it was reported that market share for Bing topped Yahoo. And while Yahoo is now back in the second place spot, I can guarantee you the folks at Yahoo are quite concerned. So for the most part, while Bing is a solid performer, it will definitely take some time to see if Bing is here to stay, if it will continue to grow in market share, if Microsoft is extremely serious about having a world class search engine and how well they innovate it so that Bing becomes a top draw for advertisers- which is what ultimately all search is about to Google, Yahoo and MS.
Is Twitter for SEO & SEM Companies?[ May 12, 2009 ] If you are remotely interested in the web, you probably already hearing daily about a Web 2.0 site that has been experiencing exponential growth. Twitter- the micro-blogging site has taken the web by storm over the last couple of years and today it ranks third in its membership (right behind MySpace.com and Facebook.com). For those in the SEO and SEM industry, you are probably asking yourself how can Twitter benefit my business and clients. And while it is important to note that Twitter is a different beast than both search engines such as Google and social networking sites such as Facebook.com, there are tremendous opportunities available.
What is Twitter?Even if you have heard about Twitter, you are probably like many people that are scratching their heads and wondering what this new technology is that has taken the world by storm. Twitter is a micro-blogging site first and foremost. A person or company creates a free account at Twitter.com and is able to create what is called a micro-blog. Unlike a regular blog site where a person can rant and rave or create posts that are thousands of words long, Twitter keeps it very short- only allowing a post of up to 140 characters. 140 characters is hardly enough to write anything meaningful you might say, but just like SMS on a mobile phone, many people are able to exchange quite a lot of meaningful (and yes utterly useless) information with this micro-blogging format.
The Social Networking Aspect of TwitterTo understand how to use Twitter for SEO and SEM, it is important to understand the social networking aspects of this technology, it is here that Twitter can accomplish things that most technologies can’t touch. While a website is generally static, sometimes being updated weekly or monthly and blogs being more dynamic being updated possibly daily, Twitter takes the cake with its micro-blogging format- being able to be updated by a user minute by minute, or at least several times per day. There is a lot of little events that go on in life between blog posts and daily or weekly updates and this is where Twitter can really help you connect with an audience that cares or is at least interested in your life. For instance, when you sign up for a Twitter account, you can start finding friends, co-workers, family and those that share the same interests or hobbies as you. By building a network of friends that either are updated by you daily or in which you read their posts on a daily basis, you form a stronger bond with them and learn much more about their lives than could be possible with other types of technology. For instance, by simply posting things that you are currently doing such as reading a book, listening to music, going on a trip, taking a walk, etc, you are able to convey your true personality and interests to others. Many of your social network contacts will find you absolutely fascinating, while others could be bored to death, but the connections you do make can be quite strong- stronger than connections one can make with email or a web site or blog.
Twitter and SEOFor those search engine optimizers that are for the most part looking to create links and rank higher in the SERPs, Twitter will be of little use to your business and clientele. First off, Twitter links are NoFollow, meaning no link juice will be passed along when you post links on Twitter. Secondly, any URL that is longer than 30 characters is usually shortened to fit- meaning longer URLs will be compressed so that even the keywords won’t be visible to the search engines. So for those that are looking to take advantage of link building or receiving link juice from Twitter, this technology is not worth the time and effort.
Twitter and SEMFor certain marketers Twitter can be a dream come true- the ability to build a close relationship with those interested in your products and services that cater to hobbies and interests of a specific audience. For instance, if you operate a restaurant in a city, you can easily draw plenty of business using Twitter. For instance, building an audience within your community and for people that are interested in cuisine, cooking and nightlife might be a great start. However, the important thing to note about Twitter is that it can’t be faked. Twitter is different from the typical web marketing that many of us do. Unlike sending a well written email with the daily specials for the week or sending out a monthly magazine with free coupons and an article or two about fruits or vegetables in season, when a person Twitters on a daily basis, it’s got to be real and legitimate- otherwise people simply unsubscribe to your feed (unsubscribing, as well as subscribing to members is very easy). This means that every post can’t be spam, it can’t be about a constant soft sell. Instead, what members that have signed up to your tweets want to hear about real life- your life. It could be about shopping for food at the local farmer’s market, or about taking a wine tasting trip during the week to find new local wines. Not only will your audience see you personally as a real, approachable person, but you can build up a loyal following and a loyal customer base that would be very difficult or at least very expensive without Twitter.
Tips on Using Twitter for Your BusinessIt’s not easy to market using Twitter, not only does it take a lot of time to build an audience, you have to tweet messages that are interesting. This is why for many businesses, Twitter can be a waste of time, especially if you are not willing to put yourself out there and be authentic about it. One spammy message can turn your audience off. This technology is really for people that are able to connect with others or have a desire to share their life with others on a daily basis. In fact, this is why those that are most popular on Twitter tend to be celebrities, professionals with interest jobs (such as a journalist covering the President, a musician playing a musical festival or a scientist working at CERN). However, don’t be discouraged if you don’t have millions or even thousands of followers, using Twitter in the beginning can lead to a wide variety of contacts that you would never dream of making. Since Twittering won’t help you with link building or Google for that matter, what Twitter will help you with is with live traffic to your site. For instance, if you created a video that would like to go viral, Twitter might be a great way to spread the word. If it’s good a few dozen of your close Twittering audience will watch it and pass it on to others- hopefully in the process the video will go viral. If you are a small contractor or freelancer, Twitter might help you connect with an opportunity or others that can help you further your goals and business. So, to recap, Twitter while a new and interesting technology is not a useful technology for building links used for Google and other search engines, but can drive lots of live traffic to your site (ultimately raising your Alexa ranking in the process). And while this technology can be used to create a community, marketers looking for an easy way to spam or even soft sell their audience should be aware that unsubscribing to your feed is extremely quick, easy and effective.
Is Google Promote an SEO Killer?[ April 1, 2009 ] Google has been quite busy this past year developing and offering a wide range of new products. This year included Android, which is an operating system for mobile phones, Google Chrome, which is a new browser and a host (and we mean plenty) of features and small apps to ultimately increase the user experience. One such feature that Google has added which has received plenty of attention from the SEO and SEM community is Google Promote.
What is Google Promote? Google Promote is a simple way for Google users to instantly rank web pages to their own preferences. In order to utilize this option, you must be a registered Google user and be signed in. When you conduct a web search for any keyword the results will be listed as usual, however next to the result there will be three boxes with icons. The first box has an up arrow to “promote”, the second box has an X to “remove” and the third box when clicked offers the ability to make a comment on the listing. So, if you do a search and you like the listing you see, you can easily promote the listing to the top of the page, if you have visited the webpage and seen it to be lacking or the listing seems out of place for your search term, you can easily remove the listing from your results. Essentially, it’s a way for a person to customize their search results- or as some have stated instant page rank!
Is it the End of Page Rank as We Know It? Before you start stressing out, what Google Promote appears to be on first glance and what it is actually is- are two different things. The idea as a way to give listings instant page rank or remove them forever from Google’s SERP can and does scare anyone in the SEO industry. However on closer inspection, there are plenty of reasons why Google Promote is essentially a paper tiger. I am not looking to attract hubris, but in its current incarnation, there are quite a few limitations built into this feature that do make it pretty harmless in the scheme of things. So here are just a few reasons why Google Promote is not an SEO killer.
You have to be a Google User to Access this Feature First thing you should know is that in order to take advantage of this feature, you need to have a Google account and be signed in. So this feature only applies to those that both have a Google account and are already signed in and searching.
Conducting a Search for a New Keyword or for Sites that are not Regularly Viewed The vast majority of web users have several sites that they visit regularly, whether it is Wikipedia, CNN, Amazon, etc. The overwhelming majority of these users never do a search for the keyword CNN, they either have the site bookmarked or know its URL and simply type it into their browser. So for the most part authority sites or sites that are used by a user regularly will never receive the opportunity for a Google Promote. Realistically, will you do a search for the keyword “CNN” and then rank the web pages to fit your preference- it wouldn’t make sense.As for infrequent sites that we visit or keywords that we do input into Google’s search box, it should be noted that for the vast majority of these keywords our goal is to find the site with the information that we need as quickly and efficiently as possible and then move on. If I do a search for the keyword “red sweater”, I think most would agree that once you see the results you will be more inclined to visit the site that looks best to you and continue your shopping experience instead of rearranging the results of a search engine ranking page that in all likelihood you will never return to again.
Does Google Take a User’s Personal Rankings into Consideration This is another important factor to consider; does Google collect data from Google Promote and analyze this data for use in its algorithms? Google is in the business of collecting data, so the short, easy answer is yes, Google definitely collects data from Google Promote. However, there is no evidence to suggest that their algorithms have been changed to include Google Promote into search results. Not only is Google Promote too subjective, but as a fairly new feature it would take plenty of time to remove any deficiencies that could ultimately game the system.
Gaming the System This is what SEO’s and SEM’s are scared of the most. Case in point, a client of yours runs a website for remote control toys. A competing website realizes with Google Promote he or she can now not only promote his or her own website all the way to #1, but also use Google Promote to remove all of his competitor’s websites from his SERPs. In fact, to your client’s competitor, Google Promote looks like the best thing since sliced bread. He hires 1,000 contract employees to create 1,000 new Google accounts and to specifically promote his website and remove the keyword for the search term “remote control car”. Well, before you get any ideas, you should note that Google is not Digg, where a relatively large group of people digging up a story up can alter the ranking on their site. First off, Google would have to be utilizing the results of the Google Promote feature in their main algorithm and secondly, a small group of 1,000 or even 10,000 employees removing results would have to be able to have an effect. This clearly is not the case. Throughout Google’s existence, their search algorithms are not arbitrarily based on a select few web surfers, it is based on science and mathematics. Google’s search is not run on majority rule!But let’s say for example’s sake that these relatively small group of people could have an affect on your SERPs, they would not only have to go after one keyword, but many. Most SEO’s don’t spend their entire campaign optimizing just one, single keyword, but maybe 10 or 20 various keywords. Secondly, taking the entire web community as a whole, if one million people would take the time to search for the word “remote control car” and either promote your website, remove it or make a comment- the law of averages would even it out. Maybe half would find the content on the site sub par and remove it, others would find the site useful and promote it. So in theory, in the long term, a decent website with relevant content would bear no effect on the web audience at large, just each individual personal user. In addition, let’s say Google (which already knows that people will try to game their system) put some controls in. Maybe Google says that in order for a Google Promote ranking to be relevant, the Google account in which it was made must be used regularly. Now when you hire 1,000 people overseas to create an account to game Google Promote, you have to worry about having enough money to continue paying a team of 1,000 employees to not only promote and reward sites, but use the account for 3 months, 6 months or a year. An easy control such as “a user sandbox” would make this type of gaming the system much more difficult and expensive. Finally, the last reason which I will talk about (there are others) why Google Promote is not an SEO killer is that most web users won’t continue to use any application or feature unless it shows direct value. There was an article recently about customers that purchased Apple iPhone applications from the App store. The incredible revelation of this article was that of all the apps that are downloaded, less than 5% are used after only one month has passed since the initial download. It should also be noted that doing research for this article, I have noticed several postings that said, (paraphrased- yeah, I used Google Promote for a few days or a week and then got bored of it). So, unless this feature gives the user value which can be seen immediately, the chances that a person will continually seek out a keyword and then start removing or promoting listings that are only searched for once in a blue moon will be extremely low.
Benefiting from Google Promote While in its current state, Google Promote is not an SEO killer, there are ways that one can still benefit from this feature. First off, quality content is the key. Make sure you continue to provide quality, relevant content to your potential audience. In addition, optimize your content for relevant keywords and categories. This is a no brainer, if a person searches for the term “remote control car” and receives as the first listing “diamond necklace” the user will be more apt to be peeved and remove your listing. However, if your content is right on target for what it is optimized for, you may have a user that is so impressed with your website they not only return or bookmark it, but also promote it.Google Promote is in its early stages and like most apps and features that Google creates, it is very difficult to know where they will lead. Google has a lot on its plate and will ultimately choose features and applications that will not only give the web surfer the best experience and relevant results, but those apps and features that will ultimately be the most profitable and practical for Google’s business which is selling contextual ads.
Optimize Your Website for Profits[ July 24, 2007 ] The saying “if you build it, they will come” does not ring true for most web sites online. Many entrepreneurs put lots of time and effort into developing and building fully functional and fantastic looking web sites only to have a handful of people visit their web site each month. If you are looking to develop your site or have already built it and you want to make sure that your site is profitable and not ignored by the masses, you will need the help of SEO services. The SEO in SEO services stands for search engine optimization. This is the practice of optimizing a web site and web pages so that search engines such as Google and Yahoo will find your web site easily and rank them high on their web sites. There are many SEO services available that can help your web site attract visitors, some of them include on page optimization, link building and even using pay per click advertising to draw hundreds or even thousands of visitors to your site each and every month. What is extremely important to remember is that without specific SEO services a website owner can not attract visitors, and ultimately create a profit from their web site. One of the most basic SEO services available is on-page optimization. On-page optimization is an SEO service that includes making sure the content on your site matches select keywords and keyword phrases that many people use to search the search engines. For instance, using this SEO service if you would like to attract people to your site that sells golf equipment, you would focus your content and keywords on specific words that visitors use on search engines such as golf clubs, golf balls, etc. Besides keywords, there are also other on page SEO services that include tweaking META keywords, META description, etc. Another important SEO service to lure visitors to your site is making sure your site is linked properly. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo calculate your web sites importance and relevance by checking which other sites on the web link to your site. Linking means that another web site has your URL (ex: http://www.yoursite.com) on their web site. The more links that point to your site from other sites, the importance of those sites and the category of the sites that point to your site all are calculated by the search engines to determine your web site’s importance. The SEO service of linking is crucial in making sure your site is ranked as high as possible. The more important and relevant your web site is deemed by the search engines, usually the higher in the search engine rankings your site will be listed, the more traffic you will receive and ultimately the more you will be able to monetize your web site. If you have a new web site or would like to see an immediate jump in visitors, one of the most effective means to accomplish this is with the SEO service called Pay Per Click (PPC). PPC is one of the most effective SEO services because it works fast and it is extremely easy to implement. With this SEO service you literally start drawing hundreds or thousands of visitors to your site within minutes of starting your campaign. PPC requires a web master to create a small text advertisement which includes their URL link. These small ads are tied to specific keywords and keyword phrases. PPC is an SEO service that does require a budget; however you can manage it closely to fit your budgetary needs. If you are looking for a great way to draw online visitors and increase your profits for your new site or established site, make sure to look into the above SEO services. | <urn:uuid:6eb75e24-a550-42f9-a755-107e80f30db5> | CC-MAIN-2017-34 | http://www.fairmarketing.com/blog/fair-marketing-news/microformats-and-seo/ | 2017-08-24T08:28:47Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886133447.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20170824082227-20170824102227-00470.warc.gz | en | 0.957333 | 9,287 |
Translated by Nina Zumel
In the year 1815 all the great heads of Europe were gathered in Vienna: the continent's brightest minds and most brilliant diplomats. Our tale begins towards the conclusion of this historic Congress.
The royalist emigres were preparing to return to their chateaus, and the Russian warriors to return to their forsaken homes. A few disgruntled Poles hoped to shelter their desire for freedom under the dubious independence granted to Krakow by Prince Metternich, Prince Hardenberg and Count Nesselrode.
It was like the waning hours of a lively ball. The once vibrant crowds that filled the streets and establishments of the city had dwindled to a small number of people still seeking diversion, still fascinated by the charms of the Austrian ladies, reluctant to pack up and go their separate ways.
This pleasant company, of which I was part, would meet twice a week in the castle of the Dowager Princess of Schwarzenberg, a few miles from the city, beyond a small village named Hitzing. Our hostess' aristocratic manner, her gracious kindness, and the nobility of her spirit and of her intellect, made our soujourns to her castle quite agreeable indeed.
Our mornings were spent on pleasant rambles; in the afternoon we dined together in the castle or within its environs. In the evenings, sitting by a good fire, we amused ourselves in conversation and story-telling. Discussion of politics was strictly forbidden — everyone had had enough. The stories we told were borrowed from the legends of our respective countries, or from our own memories.
One evening everyone had been telling ghost stories, and our minds were in a restless, uneasy state that was increased by the evening's darkness and silence. The Marquis d'Urfé, an old emigre whom we all loved for his youthful gaiety, and for the colorful stories he told of his adventures and various changes of fortune, took advantage of a moment of silence and spoke:
"Your stories, gentlemen," he said, "are no doubt amazing, but in my opinion they lack an essential quality — I mean that of authenticity. I don't think that any of you have seen with his own eyes the wonderful things that you narrate, nor can you atttest to their truth with your word as gentlemen."
This we were obliged to admit, and the old man continued, straightening his cravat:
"As for me, gentlemen, I have had but a single adventure of this kind; but it is so strange, so horrible, and — yes — true, that it will strike terror in even the most incredulous among you. I was unfortunately both witness and actor, and I though I normally don't like to remember it, I would be happy to tell you the story, if it pleases the ladies to allow me."
The approval was unanimous. A few of us glanced nervously around at the moonlit tiles of the parquet floor, and our circle drew closer to listen to the Marquis' tale. M. d'Urfé took a pinch of snuff, sniffed and slowly began with these words:
"First of all, mesdames, I beg your pardon if I mention the affairs of my heart more often in my story than a man my age should, but the romance is an essential part of the narrative. Besides, old age has its moments of forgetfulness — and it's your fault, mesdames, that you are all so beautiful that I forget that I'm no longer a young man. So let me begin.
"In 1759, I was madly in love with the beautiful Duchess de Gramont. This passion, which seemed so deep and enduring at the time, gave me no rest day or night, and the way that the Duchess played the coquette — as many beautiful women do — only added to my torment. Finally, in a moment of despair, I sought out and obtained a diplomatic mission to the Gospodar [Lord] of Moldavia, who was in negotiations with Versailles over business that it would bore you to hear about. On the eve of my departure, I presented myself to the Duchess. She received me less teasingly than usual, and said to me, with some emotion:
"'D'Urfé, you are committing a great folly. But I know you and I know you'll never change your mind. So I ask you only one thing: please accept this small cross as a token of my friendship, and carry it with you until you return. It's a family relic that we value highly.'
"With a gallantry that was perhaps misplaced at such a moment, I kissed not the relic, but the charming hand that she gave me, and I passed the cross around my neck, and have worn it ever since.
"I won't bore you, mesdames, with the details of my trip, or with my observations of the Hungarians and Serbs, those poor but brave and honest people. Even enslaved by the Turks, they never forgot their dignity or their former independence. Suffice it to say that having learned a little Polish during a visit I made to Warsaw, I was also able to acquire a bit of Serbian, as these two languages (and Russian and Bohemian as well) are, as you probably know, so many branches of a single language called Slavonic.
"And so I knew enough of the language to make myself understood, when one day I arrived in a village whose name will not interest you much. I arrived on a Sunday, a day which the Serbian people generally devote to amusements like dancing, sharpshooting, wrestling, and so on. So you can imagine my surprise when I reached the house where I planned to stay, and found the inhabitants in an extremely anxious state. Guessing that the situation was due to some recent misfortune, I started to withdraw from the house when a man of about thirty, a tall and imposing figure, approached me and took me by the hand.
"Enter, stranger, please, come in," he said. "Don't be alarmed at our sorrow; you'll understand when you know the cause."
"He then told me that, on rising one morning several days before, his elderly father, Gorcha, a restless and stubborn man, had taken from the wall a long Turkish musket.
"'Children,' he said to his two sons, one named Dorde, the other Petar, 'I'm going up to the mountains to join the brave men who are chasing this dog Alibek (this was a Turkish robber who had been ravaging the countryside for some time). Wait for me for ten days, and if I don't return by the tenth, have a Mass said for my soul, because I'll be dead.'
"Then old Gorcha added, in a deadly serious tone, 'But if — God forbid — I come back after ten days, for your own sakes do not let me in. If this happens, I command you to forget that I was your father, no matter what I say or do, and to impale my heart with an aspen stake, because I will be a cursed Vourdalak returning to suck your blood.'
"I should explain to you, mesdames, that vourdalaks, as the Slavic peoples call vampires, are believed in those countries to be dead bodies that come out of their graves to suck the blood of the living. Their habits are similar to those of all vampires, from any country, but they have one characteristic that makes them even more dreadful. The vourdalaks, mesdames, prefer to suck the blood of their closest relatives and dearest friends who, once dead, become vampires in turn. They claim that in Bosnia and Hungary entire villages have become vourdalaks. Father Augustin Calmet, in his curious book on ghosts and apparitions, cites many frightening examples. Several times, the Emperors of Germany have appointed commissions to investigate outbreaks of vampirism. The commissioners tell of exhuming bodies engorged with blood, which they stake in the heart and then burn in the village squares. The magistrates who were present at these executions attest — with oaths and signed statements — that they heard the dead howl at the moment that the stake was plunged into their hearts.
"Knowing this, it will be easy to understand, mesdames, the effect that old Gorcha's words had on his sons. They both threw themselves at his feet and begged him to let them go in his place. In reply, he turned his back and left, humming the refrain of an old war song. The day I arrived in the village was precisely the end of the ten days, which of course explained his family's concern.
"They were a good and honest family. Dorde, the eldest son of the two, seemed a serious and resolute man. He was married with two children. His brother Petar, a handsome young man of eighteen years, had a face full of gentleness and courage, and was evidently the favorite of their younger sister, Sdenka, a classic Slavic beauty. I was struck not only by Sdenka's undeniable loveliness, but also by a certain resemblance she had to the Duchess de Gramont. They both had a delicate line on their foreheads, a characteristic that I've only ever noticed on these two women. This feature may not seem very appealing at first, but the more you noticed it, the more irresistible it became.
"Perhaps it was because I was so young then, but this resemblance, combined with Sdenka's charming and naive air, was truly irresistible. I had only known Sdenka for two minutes, but already I felt a sympathy for her that threatened to become a more tender emotion if I lingered too long in the village.
"We were all gathered in front of the house, around a table topped with cheese and bowls of milk. Sdenka spun, her sister-in-law was preparing supper, the children were playing in the sand. Petar whistled nonchalantly as he cleaned his yatagan, or Turkish longknife. Dorde sat silently with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. His eyes devoured the highway.
"I felt overcome by the general melancholy, and could only watch sadly as the evening clouds framed the golden background of the sky and the silhouette of a monastery half hidden by the black pine forest.
"This monastery, as I learned later, had once been famous for a miraculous image of the Virgin, which according to legend, was brought by angels and placed on an oak . But when the Turks invaded the country at the beginning of the last century, they slaughtered the monks and ransacked the monastery. All that was left were the walls, and a chapel served by a mysterious hermit. He gave tours of the ruins to the curious, and sheltered pilgrims who, as they traveled on foot from one holy site to another, liked to stop at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Oak. As I said, I learned this all much later; that night I had other things on my mind besides Serbian archeology. As often happens when you let your mind wander, I thought back to times past, to my childhood, to the beautiful France that I had left behind for this remote, wild country.
"I thought of the Duchess de Gramont, and — why not admit it? — I also thought of other ladies, contemporaries of your grandmothers, whose images, without my knowledge, had crept into my heart, following the image of the lovely Duchess.
"Soon I had forgotten my hosts and their worries.
"Suddenly Dorde broke the silence.
"'Woman,' he asked his wife, 'what time did the old man leave?'
"'At eight o'clock,' his wife answered. 'I heard the monastery bell.'
"'Good,' said Dorde, 'it can't be later than half past seven.' And he fell silent, fixing his eyes again on the highway which disappeared into the forest.
"I forgot to tell you, mesdames, that when the Serbs suspect someone of vampirism, they avoid calling him by name or referring to him directly, for fear it will summon him from the grave. So for some time, when speaking of his father, Dorde had only called him the old man.
"A few moments of silence passed. Suddenly one of the children tugged on Sdenka's apron.
"'Auntie, when is Grandpa coming home?'
"A blow from Dorde was the answer to this untimely question.
"The child began to cry, but his brother said, with an expression of surprise and fear:
"'Father, why can't we ask about Grandpa?'
"Another blow silenced the child. The two children began to bawl, and the rest of the family crossed themselves.
"At this point, I heard the monastery clock begin slowly to strike eight. Hardly had the first chime sounded in our ears than we saw a human form emerge from the woods and advance towards us.
"'That's him! God be praised!' cried Sdenka, Petar, and their sister-in-law at once.
"'God keep us!' Dorde said solemnly. 'How do we know if the ten days have passed or not?'
"Everyone looked at him fearfully. Still the figure advanced towards us. He was a tall old man with a silver mustache, and a pale, stern face, limping painfully along with a stick. As he approached, Dorde's face became darker. When the newcomer was near us, he stopped and surveyed his family with eyes that seemed to look right through them, they were so dull and sunken in their sockets.
"'Well,' he said in a hollow voice, 'no one stands up to greet me? What is this silence? Don't you see that I'm hurt?'
"I then noticed that the the old man's left side was bloodied.
"'Help your father,' I said to Dorde, 'and you Sdenka, bring him some spirits, he's about to faint!'
"Father,' Dorde said, as he approached Gorcha, 'show me your injury, I will try to help you…'
"He tried to open Gorcha's coat, but the old man pushed Dorde away roughly, holding both hands over his side.
"'Clumsy oaf,' he said, 'you're hurting me!'
"'You've been wounded near the heart!' cried Dorde, his face pale. 'Take off your coat, now, you must, I tell you!'
"The old man stood up straight and stiff.
"'Watch yourself,' he said in a low voice. 'If you touch me, you'll regret it!'
"Petar got between Dorde and his father.
"'Let him be,' he said. 'Can't you see he's in pain?'
"'Don't defy him,' said Dorde's wife.'You know he won't tolerate that!'
"At that moment we saw a cloud of dust: it was the herd returning home from their grazing. Perhaps the dog that accompanied them didn't recognize her old master, or maybe she was agitated for other reasons, but as soon as she saw Gorcha she stopped, hair bristling, and began to growl as if she saw something uncanny.
"'What is wrong with that dog?' said the old man, looking more and more annoyed. 'What does all this mean? Have I become a stranger in my own home? Have ten days in the mountains changed me so much that my own dogs don't recognize me?'
"'Do you hear?' Dorde said to his wife.
"'He admits that the ten days have passed!'
"'But didn't he return at the appointed time?'
"'Yes, well, I know what has to be done.'
"The damned dog is still barking! Kill it!' cried Gorcha. 'Well, did you hear me?'
"Dorde did not move, but Petar stood up with tears in his eyes, and seizing the musket from his father, he shot the dog, who fell, rolling in the dust.
"'She was my favorite dog,' Petar whispered. 'I don't know why Father wanted her killed!
"'Because that's what she deserved.' said Gorcha. 'It's getting cold, I want to go inside!'
"While this was going on outside, Sdenka had prepared for the old man a drink made from pears, honey and raisins, but her father refused it in disgust. He showed the same aversion to a mutton rice dish that Dorde offered him, and went to sit by the hearth, muttering between his teeth unintelligibly.
"A pine fire crackled in the fireplace, casting its flickering light on the figure of the old man, who was so pale that without the fire's glow, he could have been taken for dead. Sdenka sat down beside him.
"'Father,' she said, 'you don't want anything to eat, and you don't want to rest. Perhaps you can tell us your adventures in the mountains?'
"The girl knew that she could get on his good side by asking that, because the old man liked to talk about his battles and exploits. A kind of smile appeared on his colorless lips, though without reaching his eyes. He ran his hand through her beautiful blond hair.
"'Yes, my daughter, yes, Sdenka. I will tell you what happened to me in the mountains, but some other time, because I'm tired today. But I will tell you that Alibek is no more and that it was by my hand he perished. If anyone doubts this,' continued the old man, looking around at his family, 'here is the proof!'
"He opened a bag that hung behind the two of them, and pulled out a head, pale and bloody — though not quite as pale as his own. We turned away in horror, but Gorcha handed it to Petar.
"'Here,' he said, 'hang it over the door, so that everyone who passes will know that Alibek is dead and the roads are purged of robbers — except of course, the Sultan's Janissaries!'
"Petar obeyed, picking up the head with revulsion.
"'Now I understand,' he said. 'The poor dog that I killed was upset because she smelled dead flesh!'
"'Yes, she smelled dead flesh.' replied Dorde gloomily. He had slipped away without anyone noticing, and now he entered the house, holding in his hand an object that he placed in a corner and which looked to me like a stake.
"Dorde,' his wife said in a low voice, 'you don't intend, I hope …'
"'My brother,' said his sister, 'what are you planning to do? But no, you won't do anything, will you?'
"'Let me be,' said Dorde, 'I know what I have to do, and I won't do anything that isn't necessary.'
"When night fell, the family went to bed. The part of the house where they slept was separated from my room by a very thin wall. I confess that what I'd observed that evening had affected my imagination. With the lights out, the full moon shone into the room through a small low window close to my bed, casting a pale glow on the floor and walls — much as it does now, mesdames, in this room where we sit. I tried to sleep, but couldn't. I attributed my insomnia to the moonlight, and I looked for something to serve as a curtain over the window, but I found nothing. Then, hearing muffled voices behind the wall, I began to listen.
"'Go to bed, woman,' said Dorde. 'And Petar and Sdenka, you too. Don't worry about anything, I'll keep watch."
"'No, Dorde,' said his wife. 'I should watch; you worked until late last night, and you must be tired. Besides, I have to watch our oldest. You know he's been ill since yesterday!'
"'Be quiet and go to bed,' said Dorde. 'I'll keep watch for both of us!'
"'But brother,' said, Sdenka in her softest voice. 'There's no need to watch. Father is already asleep — see how calm and peaceful he looks!'
"'You don't know what you're talking about, either of you,' Dorde said in a tone that brooked no argument. 'I told you to go to bed and let me watch!'
"There fell a profound silence. Soon I felt my eyelids droop and sleep overcame me.
"I thought I saw my door open slowly, and old Gorcha appear on the threshold. It was very dark in that corner of the room; I couldn't really see him, but only suspected that the figure was his. His eyes followed the movement of my breath, and seemed to be trying to guess my thoughts. Cautiously, he crept towards me, on tiptoe. Suddenly he loomed above me, at the side of my bed. I felt an inexpressible fear, but some invisible force held me there, immobile. The old man leaned over me, his livid face so close to mine that I thought I could feel his cadaverous breath. With a supreme effort, I forced myself awake, bathed in sweat. There was no one in my room; but glancing out the window, I clearly beheld old Gorcha with his face against the pane, staring at me with dreadful eyes.
I had the strength to suppress a scream, and the presence of mind to lie calmly, as if I had not seen anything. However, it seemed the old man only wanted to make sure that I was asleep, because he made no attempt to get in, but walked away from the window after scrutinizing me. I heard footsteps in the next room. Dorde was asleep, snoring to shake the walls. The child coughed at that moment and I could make out Gorcha's voice.
"'You're not sleeping, little one?' he said.
"'No, Grandpa,' said the child, 'and I want to talk to you!'
"'And what shall we talk about?'
"''I want you to tell me how you fought the Turks. I want to go fight the Turks, too!'
"'Yes, I thought so, child, and I brought you a little yatagan that I'll give you tomorrow.'
"'Oh, Grandpa, give it to me now!'
"'But why, my little one, did you not talk to me when it was daylight?'
"'Because Father wouldn't let me!'
"'He's cautious, your father. So you want to have your little yatagan?'
"'Oh yes, I would! But not here, in case father wakes up.'
"'But where then?'
"'If we go outside, I promise to be careful and not make any noise!'
"I seemed to hear Gorcha chuckle, as the child got out of bed. I did not believe in vampires, but my nightmare had frayed my nerves; wanting nothing to reproach myself for later, I got up and slammed my fist against the wall between myself and the room where the others were.
The noise should have been enough to wake the Seven Sleepers, but I heard no response. I rushed for the door, determined to save the child, but I discovered that it was closed and locked, and would not yield to my efforts to open it. As I tried in vain to escape, I could see the old man through my window, leaving with the boy in his arms.
"'Get up, get up!' I shouted with all my strength, pounding the wall, which shook with the force of my blows. Only then did Dorde wake up.
"'Where's the old man?' he called.
"'Quickly!' I shouted at him, 'he just took your son!'
"With a kick Dorde burst open the front door, which, like mine, had been barred from the outside, and ran in the direction of the woods. I finally managed to wake up Petar and Sdenka. We gathered in front of the house, and after a few minutes' wait, we saw Dorde return, carrying his son. He'd found the boy unconscious by the side of the road. The child soon recovered, and seemed no worse for the experience. To our questions, he said that his grandfather had done him no harm; they had gone outside together to be more at ease. Once outside, he had lost consciousness, without remembering how. As for Gorcha, he was gone.
"The rest of the night, as you might imagine, passed without sleep.
"The next day I learned that the Danube, which cut the main road a mile from the village, had begun to freeze over, which always happens in that region in the late fall and early spring. This prevented travel for a few days, and I had to delay my planned departure. Yet, even if I could have left, curiosity, combined with a more powerful attraction, would have kept me there. The more I saw Sdenka, the more I loved her. I am not one of those romantics, mesdames, who believe in the sudden and irresistible passion that we read about in novels, but I think there are cases where love blossoms more quickly than usual. Sdenka so remarkably reminded me of the Duchess de Gramont, with that faint line traced on her forehead— the same line that, in France, had made me suicidal with longing. I'd fled Paris to escape her, and yet here she was again, in picturesque costume and speaking a harmonious foreign tongue. It was this resemblance, together with the strangeness of my situation and the mysteries that surrounded me, that kindled in me a desire that, in other circumstances, would have been vague and fleeting.
"In the course of the day I overheard Sdenka talking to her younger brother.
"'What do you think of all this?' she asked him. 'Do you also suspect our father?'
"'I dare not suspect him,' replied Petar, 'especially since the boy said that he wasn't hurt. As for Father's disappearance, you know that he never tells us of his comings and goings.'
"'I know,' Sdenka said, 'but something must be done, because you know Dorde …'
"'Yes, I know. It would be useless to try and talk him out of it, but if we hide the stake, he can't get another one, because there's not a single aspen on this side of the mountains!'
"'Yes, let's hide the stake, but don't tell the children because they might tell Dorde!'
"'We'll keep it to ourselves,' said Petar. And they parted.
"Night came; still no news of old Gorcha. I lay awake, sprawled out on my bed, watching the moon shining brightly into my room. As sleep began to blur my thoughts, I suddenly felt, as if by instinct, the old man's approach. I opened my eyes and saw his ghastly face pressed against my window.
"This time I tried to get up, but it was impossible. It seemed as if all my limbs were paralyzed. After watching me carefully, the old man slipped away. I heard him go around the house and gently tap at the window of the room where Dorde and his wife slept. The child rolled over in his bed and moaned in his sleep. A few minutes of silence passed, then again I heard a knock at the window. The child moaned again and woke up ...
"'Is that you, Grandpa?' he asked.
"'It's me', a low voice replied. 'I've brought your little yatagan.'
"'But I daren't go out; Father's forbidden me to!'
"'You needn't go out, just open the window so you can come kiss me!'
"'The child got up and I heard him open the window. Calling upon all my energy to break my paralysis, I jumped out of bed and pounded on the wall. In a minute Dorde was awake. I heard him swear; his wife shrieked. Soon the whole house was gathered around the unconscious child. Gorcha had disappeared again. Our ministrations managed to revive the child, but he was weak and could hardly breathe. The poor boy did not know why he had fainted. His mother and Sdenka blamed it on the fear of being caught talking to his grandfather. I said nothing. After the child grew quiet, everyone except Dorde went back to bed.
"Toward dawn I heard him wake his wife; the two talked quietly. Sdenka joined them and I heard the two women sobbing.
"The child was dead.
"I needn't speak of the family's despair. No one yet attributed the death to old Gorcha. At least, no one spoke of it openly.
"Dorde was silent, but his still, dark expression had taken on a terrible quality. For two days, the old man did not reappear. On the night after the third day (the day of the child's funeral) I thought I heard footsteps around the house, and a voice of an old man who called out to the deceased boy's younger brother. For a moment, I seemed to see Gorcha's figure outlined against my window, but I could not tell if it was reality or my imagination, because that night, the moon was covered by clouds. In any case, I thought it my duty to tell Dorde. He asked the boy, who replied that, yes, he had heard his grandfather calling him, and had seen him looking through the window. Dorde sternly ordered his son to wake him if the old man appeared again.
"'Even all these circumstances did not stop my love for Sdenka from growing even more.
"In the day, I couldn't speak with her without the others overhearing. When night came, the thought of my imminent departure pierced my heart. Sdenka's room was separated from mine by a passage that overlooked the street on one side and the courtyard on the other.
"One evening, as the household retired for the evening, I decided to take a walk in the countryside to distract myself before sleeping. As I passed through the passage from my room, I saw that Sdenka's door was ajar.
"I stopped involuntarily. The familiar rustling of her dress made my heart pound. I heard words sung in a whisper. It was the song of a Serbian king about to leave for battle, bidding his beloved farewell.
'Oh, my young poplar,' said the old king,
'I'm off to war and you will forget me!'
'Your waist is more lissom than the slender young trees
that grow at the foot of the mountain.
'Your lips are redder than rowan-berries.
'And I, I'm like an old oak stripped of leaves;
my beard is whiter than the foam of the Danube!
'You will forget me, O my soul, and I shall die of grief,
for the enemy will not dare to kill the old king!'
And the beautiful maid replied:
'I swear to be faithful to you and to never forget you.
'And if I break my oath, may you wake from the dead
to suck all the blood from my heart!'
And the old King said: 'So be it!'
And he went to war. And how soon his lover forgot him! ...
Here Sdenka stopped, as if she were afraid to finish the song. I couldn't contain myself any longer. Her voice, so sweet, so expressive, was the voice of the Duchess de Gramont ... Impulsively, I pushed open the door and entered. Sdenka had removed her overblouse; she wore nothing but a chemise embroidered in gold and red silk that clung to her waist, and a simple checkered skirt. Her beautiful blonde tresses were unbraided, and her undress made her appear even more ravishing. Instead of being irritated at my sudden entrance, she seemed confused and blushed slightly.
"'What are you doing here? What will they think if they catch us?'
"'Sdenka, my soul,' I said, 'don't worry, everyone is asleep, only the crickets in the grass and the beetles in the air can hear us.'
"'Oh, my friend, fly, fly! If my brother catches us, I'm lost!'
"'Sdenka, I'll go when you promise to love me forever, like the beautiful maiden promised her king in the ballad. I'm leaving soon, Sdenka, who knows when we shall meet again! I love you more than my soul, more than my salvation ... my life and my blood are yours ... can't you give me one hour in exchange?'
"'Many things can happen in an hour,' Sdenka said, thoughtfully, but she left her hand in mine. 'You don't know my brother,' she continued with a shudder, 'I have a feeling he'll find us.'
"'Calm yourself, my Sdenka,' I told her. 'Your brother is tired from his day's work, he sits drowsing to the sound of the wind playing in the trees; his sleep is deep, the night is long, and I only ask you for a single hour! And then, farewell ... perhaps forever!'
"'Oh, no, not forever!' Sdenka cried, then recoiled as if afraid of her own voice.
"'Oh, Sdenka,' I cried, 'when I see you, when I hear you, I can't control myself — I obey a superior force. Forgive me, Sdenka!' And like a fool I pressed her to my heart.
"'Oh, you're not my friend!' she said, breaking free of my arms and escaping deeper into her room. I don't know how I replied to her, because I was confused by my audacity — not that sometimes, on similar occasions, it hasn't worked for me — but despite my passion, I still had a sincere respect for Sdenka's innocence.
"'In fact, I started to regale her with those dashing phrases that had always worked so well for me with beautiful ladies, but then, ashamed of myself, I stopped. The girl's simplicity kept her from understanding what I hinted at, though all of you ladies, as I see by your smiles, have easily guessed.
"So I stood there before her, unsure what to say, when suddenly I saw her flinch and stare at the window with a look of terror. I followed the direction of her eyes and distinctly saw the motionless figure of Gorcha, watching us from outside.
"At that moment, I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. I turned. It was Dorde.
"'What are you doing here?' he asked.
"Rattled by his brusque question, I pointed to his father peering in at us through the window. Gorcha disappeared as soon as Dorde saw him.
"'I heard the old man and I came to warn your sister,' I said.
"Dorde's stare bored through me as if he were reading the depths of my soul. He took me by the arm and led me to my room, then left without a word.
"The next day, the family was gathered in front of the house around a table laden with milk and cheese.
"'Where is the boy?' asked Dorde.
"'In the courtyard, said his mother. 'Playing his favorite game of fighting the Turks.'
"Hardly had she uttered these words when to our great surprise we saw Gorcha's imposing form, coming from the bottom of the woods and walking slowly towards us. He sat down at the table as he had done on the the day that I arrived.
"'Father, welcome,' murmured his daughter-in-law in a barely audible voice.
"'Welcome, father,' repeated Sdenka and Petar quietly.
"'Father," Dorde said in a firm voice, though his face had lost its color, 'we'd like you to say grace.'
"The old man turned away, frowning.
"'Say grace this instant!' repeated Dorde, 'and make the Sign of the Cross, or by St. George …'
"Sdenka and her sister-in-law leaned toward the old man and begged him to say the prayers.
"'No, no, no!' said the old man. 'He has no right to order me around, and if he insists, then I curse him!'
"Dorde got up and ran into the house. Soon he returned with fury in his eyes.
"'Where is the stake?' he cried, 'where did you hide the stake?'
"Sdenka and Petar exchanged glances.
"''You dead thing!' Dorde said to the old man, 'What have you done with my eldest boy? Why did you kill my child? Give me back my son, you corpse!'
"And as he spoke, he became increasingly pale, and his eyes blazed. The old man glared at him, motionless.
"'The stake, where is the stake!' cried Dorde. 'May all our misfortune fall on the head of whoever hid it!'
"At that moment we heard the merry laughter of the youngest child and we saw him come towards us, riding the big stake like a horse and raising his little voice in the battle cry of the Serbs.
"Dorde's eyes lit up. He snatched the stake from the child and rushed towards his father. The creature screamed and ran in the direction of the wood with a speed practically supernatural for his age.
"Dorde chased him through the fields and we soon lost sight of them.
"The sun had set by the time Dorde came home, deathly pale, with his hair disheveled. As he sat by the fire, I seemed to hear his teeth chattering. Nobody dared question him. By the hour when the family was accustomed to retire for the evening, he seemed to recover his energy. Taking me aside, he said in the most natural way:
"'My dear sir, I have just seen the river. The ice has cleared, there is nothing to prevent your departure. There's no need,' he added, glancing at Sdenka, 'to say goodbye to my family. On their behalf I wish you all the happiness in the world, and I hope that you also remember us fondly. Tomorrow, at daybreak, you will find your horse saddled and ready to follow your lead. Farewell, remember your host sometimes, and forgive him if your stay here has not been as trouble-free as he would have liked.'
"'At that moment, the hard lines of Dorde's face took on an almost cordial expression. He escorted me to my room and shook my hand one last time. Then he shivered, and his teeth chattered as if from the cold.
"Left alone, I was too preoccupied to sleep, as you can imagine. I had loved many women in my life. I had experienced tenderness, and spite, and jealousy; but never, not even when leaving the Duchess de Gramont, had I felt the intense sadness that tore my heart at that moment. Before the sun had appeared, I put on my traveling clothes, hoping for one last conversation with Sdenka. But Dorde was waiting for me in the hallway. Any chance to say farewell to her was gone.
"I jumped on my horse and rode away, promising myself that I would return to the village on my way back from Jassy. My anticipation for the future — as distant as it was — gradually drove away my worries. I imagined my return with satisfaction, picturing all the details of a future meeting with Sdenka. Suddenly my horse started, almost throwing me out of the saddle. The beast stopped short, its forelegs braced, and snorted in alarm, as if danger were nearby. Looking around, I saw a wolf about a hundred paces in front of me, digging in the earth. Hearing me, it fled. Spurring my horse forward to the spot that the wolf had abandoned, I saw a fresh grave. I thought I could distinguish the tip of a stake, protruding a few inches above the earth that the wolf had disturbed. I didn't stay to make sure, but quickly rode away."
Here, the Marquis paused, and took a pinch of snuff.
"Is that all?" asked the ladies.
"Unfortunately, no!" replied M. d'Urfe. "The rest of the story is a painful memory for me; one I would give much to be free of."
"The business that brought me to Jassy kept me there longer than I had expected: a full six months. What can I say? It is a sad truth to admit— but a truth nonetheless — that there are few lasting emotions on this Earth. The success of my negotiations, the encouragement I received from the cabinet of Versailles — in a word, all the unpleasant politics that have annoyed us so much of late — in all of this my memory of Sdenka soon began to fade. And then there was the wife of the Gospodar, a very beautiful woman who speaks our language perfectly, and who had honored me on my arrival by singling me out from all the other young foreigners who were staying in Jassy. As steeped as I am in the principles of French gallantry, my Gallic blood would have revolted at the idea of repaying the kindness she showed me with ingratitude. So I responded obligingly to her advances, and — to put myself in a position to advance the interests and rights of France — I devoted myself to her as attentively as if I were the Gospodar himself.
"When I was recalled to France, I took the same route back that had led me to Jassy.
"I was not thinking of Sdenka or her family when one night, riding through the countryside, I heard a church bell strike eight. The sound seemed familiar, and my guide told me there was a monastery nearby. I asked him the name, and he told me that it was The Virgin of the Oak. I urged my horse on, and soon we were knocking at the door of the monastery. The hermit opened the door and led us to the guest house. It was so full of pilgrims that I had no urge to spend the night there, so I asked if I could find a house in the village.
"'You can find more than one,' the hermit replied with a deep sigh. 'Thanks to that infidel Gorcha there is no shortage of empty houses!'
"'What does that mean?' I demanded of him. 'Is Gorcha still alive?'
"'Oh, no; he's well and truly buried, with a stake through his heart! But he sucked the blood of Dorde's son. The child came back one night, crying at the door, saying he was cold and wanted to come in. His foolish mother, although she had seen him buried with her own eyes, didn't have the courage to send him back to the cemetery, and opened the door. The boy threw himself on her and drained her blood until she died. They buried her as well, but she returned to suck the blood of her younger son, and then her husband, and then that of his brother. All are dead.'
"'And Sdenka?' I said.
"'She went mad with grief, poor child. Let's not speak of her!"
"The hermit's answer was not encouraging and I didn't have the courage to repeat my question.
"'Vampirism is contagious,' continued the hermit, crossing himself. 'Many families in the village have been affected, many families have been completely killed off, and if you want my advice, you'll stay the night in the monastery. For though in the village you may not be devoured by vourdalaks, the dread will be enough to turn your hair white before I finish ringing the call to the Morning Mass.
"'I'm just a poor hermit,' he continued, 'but the generosity of travelers has enabled me to provide for their needs. I have exquisite cheeses, raisins that will make your mouth water just just to look at them, and a few bottles of Tokay as fine as the wine of His Holiness the Patriarch!'
"It seemed to me at this point that the hermit had turned into an innkeeper. I suspected that he was purposely telling me fairy tales to convince me to stay, and to make myself agreeable to heaven by imitating the generosity of those travelers who enabled the holy man to meet their needs.
"But the word 'fear' has always affected me like a bugle affects a warhorse. I would have been ashamed of myself if I had not left for the village immediately. My guide, trembling, asked permission to stay at the monastery, which I willingly granted.
"It took me about half an hour to reach the village. I found it deserted. Not a light shone in any of the windows, not a sound or a song could be heard. I passed in silence before all these houses, most of which I recognized, and finally arrived at Dorde's home. Whether from sentimental memory or from the recklessness of youth, I decided to spend the night there.
"I dismounted and knocked at the gate. Nobody answered. I pushed on the gate; it opened, creaking on its hinges. I entered the yard.
"I tied my horse, still saddled, in a shed, where I found a sufficient supply of oats for one night, then I walked resolutely towards the house.
"All the doors were open, yet all the rooms seemed uninhabited. Sdenka's room looked as if it had been abandoned only the day before. Some of her clothes were still lying on the bed. On a table, I saw some jewelry that I had given her, shining in the moonlight. I recognized a small enamel cross that I had bought in Budapest. I could not deny to myself, though my heart sank at the thought, that my love for her was a thing of the past. Still, I wrapped myself in my coat and lay on her bed. Soon sleep overcame me.
"I don't remember the details of my dream, but I know that I saw Sdenka, as beautiful, innocent, and loving as before. I blamed myself for my selfishness and fickleness. I wondered how I could have abandoned this poor child who loved me, how I could have forgotten her. In my dream, her image merged with the Duchess de Gramont until I saw the two of them as one and the same person. I threw myself at her feet and begged her forgiveness. All of my being, all of my soul, was filled with an ineffable feeling, a mixture of melancholy and happiness.
"I was deep in my dream, when I was half-awakened by a melodious sound, like the rustling of a wheat field in the breeze. The rustling wheat seemed to mingle with birdsong, with a rolling waterfall, with whispering trees. Then all these confused sounds resolved themselves into the rustle of a woman's skirt and, as that thought came to me, I awoke. I opened my eyes and saw Sdenka near my bed. The moon shone so brightly that I could see every detail: adorable traits that were once so dear to me, and which in my dream I had prized even more. Sdenka seemed more beautiful and alluring than I remembered. She wore the same attire as before: the simple chemise embroidered with gold and silk thread, and a skirt that wrapped tightly around her hips.
"'Sdenka!' I said, as I sat up in the bed, 'is it really you, Sdenka?'
"'Yes, it's me,' she replied in a soft, sad voice. 'It's your Sdenka whom you had forgotten. Oh, why didn't you come sooner? It's too late now, you must go, a moment longer and you're lost! Farewell, my friend, goodbye forever!'
"'Sdenka,' I said, 'so much has happened, I've been told of your tragedies. Come, let's talk together; let me comfort you.'
"'Oh, my friend,' she said, 'don't believe everything they say about us, but go, go as quickly as possible, because if you stay here, your doom is certain.'
"'But Sdenka, what danger threatens me? Can't you give me an hour, just one hour, to spend with me?'
"'Sdenka started, and a strange change came over her features.
"'Yes,' she said, 'an hour, an hour, just like when I sang the ballad of the old king and you walked into this room! Is that what you mean? Oh yes, I will give you an hour! But no —' she said, recovering himself, 'go, go away! Go, why don't you? — I tell you, run away! ... flee while you can!'
"A wild energy animated her features.
"I didn't understand the reason for her words to me, but she was so beautiful that I decided to stay in spite of what she said. Finally, yielding to my entreaties, she sat down next to me, recalling old times, and blushingly telling me that she had loved me from the day that I arrived. Gradually, though, I noticed a change in her. Her former reserve had given way to a strange recklessness. Her eyes, once so shy, were now rather bold. At last, I realized with surprise that her manner towards me was far from the ladylike modesty of the past.
"Is it possible, I thought, that Sdenka was not the pure and innocent young girl she seemed to be six months ago? Had she only worn that guise because she was afraid of her brother? Could I have been so grossly deceived? But then why did she beg me to go? Was this just a more subtle form of coquetry? I wondered, but it didn't matter. If Sdenka wasn't the Diana that I thought she was, well, I would compare her to another goddess, one no less charming, thank God! And I preferred the role of Adonis to Acteon.
"If these classical references seem old-fashioned, mesdames, please remember that what I have the honor to tell you happened in the year of Our Lord 1758. Mythology was then all the rage, and I prided myself on being with the times. Things have changed since then, and it was not so long ago that the Revolution overthrew the relics of paganism, along with the Christian religion, putting the the Goddess of Reason in their place. This goddess, mesdames, was never my mistress when I found myself in your presence, and at the time of which I speak, I was even less inclined to offer her sacrifices. I surrendered without hesitation to my desire for Sdenka and went joyously into her arms.
"Some time had passed in sweet intimacy when, amusing myself by adorning Sdenka with all her jewelry, I tried to put the small enamel cross that I had given her around her neck. When I moved to do so, Sdenka recoiled with a shudder.
"'Enough of that childishness, my friend,' she said. 'Let those trinkets alone and tell me about what has been happening with you.'
"Her reaction started me thinking. Looking at her more carefully, I realized that she no longer wore around her neck, as she had in the past, the numerous little icons, relics, and sachets of incense that the Serbs wear from childhood to the grave.
"'Sdenka,' I said, 'where are the icons around your neck?'
"'I've lost them,' she replied impatiently, and immediately changed the subject.
"A vague foreboding, of I knew not what, dawned on me. I wanted to leave, but Sdenka stopped me.
"'What is this?' she demanded. 'You asked me for an hour, and now you're leaving after only a few minutes!
"'Sdenka,' I said, 'you were right to ask me to leave. I thought I heard a noise, and I'm afraid that someone will catch us!'
"'Don't worry, my friend, everyone is sleeping; only the crickets in the grass and the beetles in the air can hear us!'
"'No, Sdenka, I must leave …!'
"'Stop, stop,' Sdenka said. 'I love you more than my soul, more than my salvation, you told me that your life and your blood were mine!'
"'But your brother, your brother, Sdenka! What if he catches us?'
"'Calm yourself, my soul; my brother is drowsing to the sound of the wind playing in the trees. His sleep is deep, the night is long and I only ask you for an hour!'
"As she said that, Sdenka looked so beautiful that the vague terror that had been agitating me began to give way to my desire to stay with her. A mixture of fear and indescribable pleasure filled my whole being. As I faltered, Sdenka's manner became even more tender; I gave in, promising myself all the while to be on my guard. But as I said earlier, I've never been good at doing things by halves, and when Sdenka, noticing my reserve, suggested that we chase away the chill of the evening with a few generous glasses of wine that she told me she had gotten from the good hermit, I accepted her offer with an eagerness that made her smile. The wine had its effect. By the second glass, the bad feeling I had over the cross and the missing icons had vanished completely. Sdenka, half-dressed, with her hair unbraided and her jewelry glittering in the moonlight, seemed irresistible. Unable to contain myself, I took her into my arms.
"And then, mesdames, there occurred one of those mysterious miracles that I cannot explain, but whose existence my experiences have forced me to believe in, as much as I hate to admit it.
"The force with which I'd embraced Sdenka drove the point of the cross I was wearing — the one that the Duchess de Gramont had given me — into my chest. The sharp pain went through me like a bolt of lightning. I looked at Sdenka and saw that her features, though still beautiful, were as stiff as death, that her eyes seemed not to see me, and that her smile was convulsed like the grin of a corpse. At the same time, I noticed in the room a nauseating stench, like that of a poorly sealed crypt. The awful truth stood before me in all its ugliness, and I remembered too late the hermit's warnings.
"I realized, too, how precarious my position was; everything depended on my courage and composure. I turned away from Sdenka to conceal the horror on my face. My eyes fell on the window, and I saw the infamous Gorcha, leaning on a bloodied stake and staring at me with the eyes of a hyena. At the other window I saw Dorde's pale face, bearing at that moment a frightening resemblance to his father. Both of them were watching my movements and I had no doubt that they would attack me if I made the slightest attempt to escape. I pretended not to see them, and making a violent effort, I continued — yes, mesdames — I continued to caress Sdenka just as I had been before my terrible discovery. Meanwhile, I anxiously planned my escape. I noticed that Gorcha and Dorde exchanged impatient glances with Sdenka. From outside, I heard the voice of a woman and the cries of children, frightful howls like those of wildcats.
"'It's time to go,' I thought, 'and the sooner the better!'
"I said to Sdenka, in a voice loud enough for her hideous kin to hear:
"'I'm quite tired, my child. I'd like to lie down and sleep for a few hours, but first I should make sure that my horse has been fed. Stay here and wait for me.'
"I kissed her cold pale lips and went out. In the shed, I found my horse agitated and covered with foam. He had not touched his oats, but his neighing as he saw me coming made me afraid that he might give my away. Luckily the vampires had heard my conversation with Sdenka, and weren't alarmed. I checked that the gate was open, sprang into the saddle, and dug my spurs into the flanks of my horse.
"As I passed out the gate, I had time to see the large band gathered around the house with their faces pressed against the windows. The suddeness of my exit must have kept them from noticing right away, because for some time all I could hear in the silence of the night was the steady gallop of my horse. I was congratulating myself on my escape when I heard a sound behind me, like a storm beating against the mountains. A thousand confused voices shouted, screamed and seemed to argue with each other. Then everything fell silent all at once, and I heard a trampling behind me like a troop of infantry approaching at a run.
"I urged my mount on, my spurs tearing into his flanks. My heart beat, and I burned as if with fever, desperately trying to keep my presence of mind. Behind me, I heard a voice calling out:
"'Stop, stop, my friend! I love you more than my soul, I love you more than my salvation! Stop, stop, your blood is mine!'
"At the same time, a cold breath brushed my ear and I felt Sdenka throw herself onto my horse, behind me.
"'My heart, my soul!' she said to me, 'When I see you, when I hear you, I can't control myself. I obey a superior force. Forgive me, my friend, forgive me!'
"And wrapping her arms around me, she tried to pull me to her and bite me in the throat. A terrible struggle ensued between us. Finally I managed to grab Sdenka by her braids in one hand, with my other arm around her waist. Bracing myself on my stirrups, I threw her down!
"Immediately my strength left me and delirium seized me. A thousand insane, terrible, grimacing images pursued me. First Dorde and his brother Petar skimmed the road and tried to bar my way. They failed, and rejoicing, I turned and saw old Gorcha, hurtling down the road, using his stake like the Tyrolean mountaineers use poles to propel themselves across chasms. Him, too, I left in the dust.
"Then his daughter-in-law, who dragged her children after her, threw one of her boys onto the point of his stake. Using the stake as a throwing-stick, Gorcha flung the child at me with all his strength. I avoided getting hit, but with truly bulldog-like instinct, the little toad clamped his jaws onto the neck of my horse; I pulled him off with difficulty. The other boy was hurled at me the same way, but he fell beyond the horse and was crushed under its hooves. I don't remember anything else, or how I survived; but when I came to, it was broad daylight and I found myself lying on the road next to my dying steed.
"And so ended, mesdames, a love affair that should have cured me forever of the desire for romance. Some of the contemporaries of your grandmothers could tell you whether I was any wiser in the future.
"I still shudder to think that if I had succumbed to my enemies, I would have become a vampire as well. But heaven did not allow that to happen, and far from thirsting for your blood, mesdames, I ask nothing better than that, old as I am, I should still shed mine in your defense!"
"As agreed at the first Treaty of Paris in 1814, a congress of the Great Powers of Europe met at Vienna to settle the future boundaries of the continent. Almost every state in Europe was represented. The emperors of Austria and Russia, the kings of Prussia, Denmark, Bavaria and Württemberg and many German princes including the Elector of Hesse, the Grand Duke of Baden and the dukes of Saxe-Weimar, Brunswick and Coburg, attended in person."
Marjie Bloy, "The Congress of Vienna, 1 November 1814 — 8 June 1815"
The Free City of Kraków or Republic of Kraków was a city-state created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and controlled by its three neighbours (Russia, Prussia, and Austria). It was a center of agitation for an independent Poland. In 1846, in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Kraków Uprising it was annexed by the Austrian Empire. (Wikipedia)
In French, the brothers are named Georges and Pierre. In Fedor Nikanov's 1969 translation, they are George and Peter (and their sister is named Zdenka). I decided to use more Serbian renderings: Dorde and Petar.
The French version says here "un trait caractéristique au front". I followed Nikanov's 1969 translation and rendered this as "a delicate line on their foreheads."
The French term used here is "couvent" - convent. But the residents of the "couvent" are referred to as monks, not nuns, so I followed Nikanov and used the word "monastery" instead.
The Janissaries (from Ottoman Turkish yeniçeri meaning "new soldier") were elite infantry units that formed the Ottoman Sultan's household troops and bodyguards. Sultan Murad I created the force in 1383. It was abolished by Sultan Mahmud II in 1826. (Wikipedia)
The Seven Sleepers, commonly called the "Seven Sleepers of Ephesus", refers to a group of Christian youths who hid inside a cave outside the city of Ephesus around 250 AD, to escape a persecution of Christians being conducted during the reign of the Roman emperor Decius. Another version is that Decius ordered them imprisoned in a closed cave to die there as punishment for being Christians. Having fallen asleep inside the cave, they purportedly awoke approximately 180 years later during the reign of Theodosius II, following which they were reportedly seen by the people of the now-Christian city before dying. (Wikipedia)
Iași (also referred to as Jassy or Iassy) is one of the largest cities and municipalities in Romania, and traditionally one of the leading centers of Romanian social, cultural, academic and artistic life. The city was the capital of the Principality of Moldavia from 1564 to 1859, then of the United Principalities from 1859 to 1862, and the capital of Romania from 1916 to 1918. (Wikipedia)
In the French, it says "two years ago." But M. d'Urfé was only in Jassy for six months, so this is Tolstoy's error in the text.
Adonis was a beautiful young man over whom Aphrodite and Persephone fought. To settle the dispute Zeus ordered him to spend a third of the year with Persephone, a third with Aphrodite, and a third wherever he chose. He chose to spend two-thirds of the year with Aphrodite. Acteon was a hunter who accidentally saw Diana naked as she bathed. Diana turned him into a stag as punishment, and he was torn to death by his own hounds.
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Synoptic Discussion - December 2017
Note: This Synoptic Discussion describes recent weather events and climate anomalies in relation to the phenomena that cause the weather. These phenomena include the jet stream, fronts and low pressure systems that bring precipitation, high pressure systems that bring dry weather, and the mechanisms which control these features — such as El Niño, La Niña, and other oceanic and atmospheric drivers (PNA, NAO, AO, and others). The report may contain more technical language than other components of the State of the Climate series.
The Earth's ocean-atmosphere system continued in a La Niña state during December 2017. The upper-level circulation pattern experienced several shifts over the contiguous United States (CONUS) during the month, changing back and forth between a westerly zonal flow and ridge/trough pattern. This caused extremes in temperatures, with much warmer-than-normal temperatures during some weeks and colder-than-normal temperatures other weeks, with the month ending on a very cold note. This variability resulted in a confused-looking monthly temperature anomaly pattern which masked the weekly extremes. Warmer-than-normal temperatures slightly dominated at the monthly scale, especially from the Southwest to northern Plains. Both the westerly pattern, and the northwesterly flow over the central CONUS associated with the ridge/trough pattern, blocked moist air masses, so drier-than-normal conditions dominated the month; they also inhibited the development of severe weather. The lack of precipitation resulted in a significant expansion of drought and abnormal dryness, especially from the Southwest to Mid-Mississippi Valley, and from the Southeast to Northeast. The upper-level circulation, temperature, and precipitation anomaly patterns suggested that the atmospheric drivers originating in the equatorial Pacific (i.e., La Niña and MJO), North Pacific (PNA), Arctic (AO), and Hudson Bay (TNH) had a controlling influence on the month's weather, some throughout the entire month (the La Niña "base state") and others during various weeks (MJO, PNA, AO, TNH). See below for details.
Animation of daily upper-level circulation for the month.
Animation of daily surface fronts and pressure systems for the month.
In the Northern Hemisphere, December is the first month of climatological winter which is the time of year when solar heating is at its minimum due to the low sun angle, and an expanded circumpolar vortex results in the furthest southern extent of the jet stream. Polar air masses dominate the weather over the contiguous U.S. (CONUS), and the warm, dry subtropical high pressure belts have their least influence.
The upper-level circulation was very active this month with several short-wave troughs migrating across the CONUS in the jet stream flow. The overall general (or "long-wave") circulation pattern, through which the short-wave troughs migrated, underwent several shifts during the month. A zonal circulation pattern held sway during the first week of December. A zonal circulation is generally a west-to-east flow that keeps cold air masses bottled up to the north and warmer air masses concentrated to the south. It reduces north-south movement of air masses and inhibits the atmosphere's efforts to transfer heat from the tropics towards the poles to balance out the distribution of heat across the Earth. The circulation pattern shifted to a meridional state the following week. A meridional circulation consists of large undulations of the jet stream to the north and south, frequently resulting in stable long-wave troughs and ridges. Troughs transport colder air masses from the poles southward, and ridges transfer heat from the low latitudes to higher latitudes, thus balancing out the Earth's surface heat in the long run. A generally zonal flow followed during roughly the third week, with some undulations due to closed lows frequently passing over the Southwest. The month ended with the Hudson Bay Low expanding southward into the CONUS, intensifying a long-wave trough which dominated the central and eastern parts of the country. Each of these patterns was characterized by specific weather phenomena, temperature anomalies, precipitation anomalies, and impacts.
500-mb circulation anomalies* for the CONUS for December 1-5, 2017.
Temperature anomalies (departure from normal) for the CONUS for December 1-5, 2017.
Precipitation anomalies (percent of normal) for the CONUS for December 1-5, 2017.
- * A westerly flow shows up on the 500-mb anomaly map as below-normal heights in the West and above-normal heights in the East because the climatological ("normal") pattern is a ridge in the West and trough in the East. A westerly flow is manifested by a weakened western ridge and weakened eastern trough, which is what this anomaly pattern reflects.
A generally westerly flow in the jet stream held sway during the first week, keeping colder air masses bottled up north of the Canadian border, resulting in a warmer-than-normal week for much of the CONUS. Pacific weather systems mostly kept to a northerly track, bringing above-normal precipitation to the central and northern Rockies, northern Plains, and western Great Lakes, and laying down a mountain snowpack across the higher elevations of the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies. A front near the end of this period tapped Gulf of Mexico moisture to drop above-normal precipitation across parts of coastal Texas and the Lower Mississippi Valley. The rest of the CONUS was moisture-starved and drier than normal.
500-mb circulation anomalies for the CONUS for December 6-12, 2017.
Temperature anomalies (departure from normal) for the CONUS for December 6-12, 2017.
Precipitation anomalies (percent of normal) for the CONUS for December 6-12, 2017.
During the following week, a western ridge/eastern trough pattern dominated the upper-level circulation. This pattern deflected storm systems away from the West and enabled colder Canadian air masses to plunge south into the eastern CONUS. The western ridge, and associated chinook wind patterns along the east slopes of the Rockies, brought above-normal temperatures to the northern and central Plains. Even though a ridge dominated the circulation pattern over the West, the mountain snowpack likely contributed to below-normal temperatures in the interior West, as did cold pooling from strong temperature inversions. With no Pacific moisture or storms, the West was dry, and a northwesterly flow in the upper levels of the atmosphere kept moisture out of the central CONUS. Weather systems moving along cold fronts in the Deep South tapped Gulf of Mexico moisture to bring above-normal precipitation to southern Texas, across the Gulf coast, to the southern Atlantic Coast states. The air was below freezing with these air masses, so a swath of snow was deposited across southern Texas and the Southeast; this far south, the snowpack melted after just a few days.
500-mb circulation anomalies for the CONUS for December 13-22, 2017.
Temperature anomalies (departure from normal) for the CONUS for December 15-21, 2017.
Precipitation anomalies (percent of normal) for the CONUS for December 15-21, 2017.
The upper-level circulation pattern flattened out again roughly during December 13-22, although a ridge tried to hold on over the West. Pacific fronts and weather systems penetrated the western ridge, flattening it, with some of them moving across the southern states, while others tracked across the north. The western ridge had enough strength to keep much of the West drier than normal. The Pacific systems dried out as they crossed the Rockies, and the westerly flow blocked Gulf of Mexico moisture, so the central Plains was drier than normal during this period. But the Pacific systems that tracked across the north brought above-normal precipitation to the northern parts of the Pacific Northwest and northern Plains as well as the central Rockies. The southern weather systems brought Gulf of Mexico moisture up against cold fronts lying in the South, resulting in above-normal precipitation from the southern Plains to southern Appalachians. A low pressure system and cold front on the 19th-20th generated tornadoes across the Lower Mississippi Valley to Southeast. While some precipitation did fall across the Midwest to Northeast, the weather systems largely tracked north or south of this region so this period was mostly drier than normal here. The westerly flow kept the really cold air bottled up in Canada, so most of the CONUS was warmer than normal; the warm temperature departures were especially significant across the northern Plains.
500-mb circulation anomalies for the CONUS for December 23-31, 2017.
Temperature anomalies (departure from normal) for the CONUS for December 25-31, 2017.
Precipitation anomalies (percent of normal) for the CONUS for December 25-31, 2017.
By December 23, a huge omega block-type ridge had developed in the upper-level circulation along the western coast of North America. This helped displace, or intensify, the Hudson Bay Low, which set the stage for the return of a western ridge/eastern trough pattern over the CONUS. The associated due-northerly flow in the upper atmosphere funneled very cold Arctic air masses across Canada and into the heart of the CONUS. The pattern became entrenched, sending wave after wave of brutally cold air across the central and eastern CONUS for the rest of December and well into January. The western ridge kept the Southwest warmer than normal but also dry. Weather systems moving in this convoluted flow pattern brought above-normal precipitation to the northern parts of the Pacific Northwest and into the northern Plains. Precipitation fell across the Great Lakes to Northeast, and along the Gulf Coast states, but it was still generally below normal for the period. The central Plains to Mid-Atlantic states were caught in between these storm tracks and received little to no precipitation. With below-freezing air, the northern weather systems laid down a snowpack from the northern and central Rockies, across the Plains and Ohio Valley, to the Northeast, and the relentless blasts of arctic air behind each new cold front kept most of the snowpack from melting.
When conditions are averaged across the entire month, the circulation anomalies associated with the ridge/trough weeks tended to dominate the monthly pattern, while the monthly temperature anomaly pattern reflected a chaotic merging of the anomaly patterns of the various weeks. The precipitation anomaly pattern for the month represented an additive result of the anomaly patterns for the various weeks. The circulation during this month was also reflected in snow, drought, and regional records.
- Monthly temperatures were unusually warm across the Southwest, where four states had the tenth warmest, or warmer, December in the 1895-2017 record. The cold snaps in the central and eastern parts of the country were counterbalanced by warm periods, so that the statewide monthly temperatures were near average, except for some Great Lakes and Northeast states which were in the cool third of the historical record.
- When daily temperature records are examined, the extreme warmth was a little more extreme, frequent, and/or widespread than the extreme cold. When integrated across the month, there were 4,110 record warm daily high (2,359) and low (1,751) temperature records. This was about 1.4 times the 2,903 record cold daily high (2,033) and low (870) temperature records.
- As noted earlier, December marks the beginning of the Northern Hemisphere climatological winter, the coldest season when heating demand peaks in the United States. Even though the last week of December 2017 was extremely cold in the high population centers of the Midwest and East, with high heating demand during that period, the temperatures were warmer than normal at other times during the month, reducing heating demand during those times. The aggregate effect was a REDTI (Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index) value for December 2017 which ranked only 38th lowest in the 123-year historical record for December.
- With only Arkansas and Montana wetter than average this month, most of the CONUS was drier than normal. Thirty-three states ranked in the driest third of the historical record for December, including twelve states in the top ten driest category. The twelve spanned the country from coast to coast and included California (second driest), Oregon (eighth driest), Nevada (ninth driest), Colorado and New Mexico (both seventh driest), Kansas (fourth driest), Iowa (fifth driest), Illinois (seventh driest), West Virginia (eighth driest), Virginia (fourth driest), and Delaware and Maryland (both fifth driest). More than a fourth (30.1 percent) of the country was very dry (had December precipitation in the driest tenth of the historical record). When averaged across the CONUS, December 2017 ranked as the ninth driest December in the 1895-2017 record.
- Above-normal precipitation fell across Montana and Wyoming, in the north, and across southern Texas to the Lower Mississippi Valley and parts of the Southeast, in the south, which helped to contract drought and abnormal dryness in those areas. Drought also improved in Hawaii. But below-normal precipitation dominated most of the CONUS. This continued a pattern of dryness which has persisted for the last two to three months, and even longer in some areas. As a result, drought and abnormal dryness expanded across the Southwest to Mid-Mississippi Valley and across parts of the Southeast to Northeast on the U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) map. Expansion outweighed contraction, so at the national level drought expanded from 21.1 percent of the CONUS at the end of November to 27.7 percent of the CONUS at the end of December (from 17.7 percent to 23.2 percent for all of the U.S.).
- The month began with several large wildfires burning in the southern Plains and southern Appalachians. These fires were mostly extinguished by mid-month, but new large wildfires had developed in southern California. These fires were mostly tamed during the last half of the month.
- As noted earlier, some of the weather systems and air masses were cold enough to produce snow instead of rain. December began with 9.2 percent of the CONUS experiencing a snow cover. Pacific weather systems moving across the Northwest and northern Plains increased the snow cover area to about a fourth of the CONUS early in the month. A westerly flow kept the snow cover extent within 22 to 30 percent over the next two weeks. The snow cover area rapidly increased when the pattern shifted at the end of the month, peaking at about 49.0 percent of the CONUS on December 25. The month ended with 41.9 percent snow cover. The satellite-based observations of snow cover extent duration showed above-normal snowpack across the Northeast, below-normal across the southern CONUS, and a mixed anomaly pattern from the Pacific Northwest to northern Plains. When integrated across the month and across the CONUS, December 2017 ranked as the 20th lowest snow cover extent in the 52-year satellite record.
- The atmospheric circulation needed to create the instability and dynamics favorable for severe weather consists largely of a southwesterly flow across the central part of the CONUS. With an upper-level ridge (over the West), northwesterly flow (over the central CONUS), and westerly flow dominating the upper-level circulation this month, severe weather was inhibited, with only 13 tornadoes reported this month (based on preliminary reports), which is below the December average of 24. Most of the tornadoes developed on December 19-20 in the Lower Mississippi Valley and Southeast when a low pressure system and front tracked across the Gulf of Mexico.
Typically tropical cyclone activity is enhanced in the Eastern North Pacific and inhibited in the North Atlantic during El Niños, and inhibited in the Eastern North Pacific and enhanced in the North Atlantic during La Niñas, due mostly to changes in vertical wind shear during the two extreme events. The relationship is unclear during ENSO-neutral events. The tropical Pacific Ocean continued in a La Niña state during December 2017.
- The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1st through November 30th and the Eastern North Pacific hurricane season runs from May 15th through November 30th. No tropical storms or hurricanes developed in these basins during December. No tropical cyclones formed in, or moved into, the central North Pacific.
- Two named tropical systems (Tropical Storm Kai-Tak and Typhoon Tembin) and one tropical disturbance were active in the western Tropical Pacific near the U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Islands (USAPI) in Micronesia, but none of them had any significant effect on the USAPI. Tropical Storm Kai-Tak and Typhoon Tembin originated as areas of convection over western Micronesia at mid-month, but didn't intensify until they crossed into the Philippine Sea. Both tropical cyclones moved over the Philippines before traversing the South China Sea and encountering Southeast Asia. Another area of convection (99W) developed over western Micronesia at the end of the month; it developed into Tropical Storm Bolaven in early January after crossing the Philippines.
The upper-level circulation pattern during December, when averaged for the month, consisted of a ridge over the western CONUS and trough over the eastern CONUS. The ridge was the most significantly stronger than normal all along the western coast of North America where the 500-mb height anomalies were largest. A deeper-than-normal trough extended from the Hudson Bay to the Great Lakes and northeastern CONUS.
December was wetter than normal across Montana and Wyoming, parts of the Upper Mississippi Valley and western Great Lakes, parts of the southern Plains to Lower Mississippi Valley, and parts of the coastal Southeast, but drier-than-normal weather dominated most of the CONUS. Alaska had a mixed precipitation anomaly pattern, Hawaii was mostly drier than normal, and December was drier than normal in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Monthly temperatures were warmer than normal in the southwestern CONUS and in Alaska, near to warmer than normal across most of the Plains and Southeast, and cooler than normal in parts of the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies, and from the Great Lakes to Northeast.
Global Linkages: The upper-level (500-mb) circulation anomaly pattern over North America was part of a complex long-wave pattern that stretched across the Northern Hemisphere. East-west trough/ridge pairs (or couplets) and anomaly couplets could be found in the monthly maps, especially over Eurasia, North America/North Pacific, North America/North Atlantic/Europe, and Siberia/North Pacific; and latitudinally (eastern North America/Arctic, Western Europe/Arctic, and Arctic/eastern Siberia to Sea of Japan). The above-normal 500-mb heights were associated with upper-level ridging at the mid-latitudes; below-normal precipitation (over western North America, parts of Russia); below-normal snow cover (over parts of Asia, western Europe, southwestern CONUS); above-normal surface temperatures over the southwestern CONUS, Alaska, western Russia, and extreme northern Siberia; and warm SST anomalies in the eastern North Atlantic and parts of the North Pacific, South Pacific, South Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. The areas of below-normal 500-mb heights were associated with upper-level troughing; near- to below-normal surface temperatures over southeastern Canada to northeastern CONUS, Sea of Japan coastal areas, Scandinavia; cool SST anomalies in parts of the central North Pacific and Sea of Okhotsk; above-normal precipitation over Scandinavia and Eastern Europe to western Russia; and above-normal snow cover over northeastern CONUS, Scandinavia, and Sea of Japan coastal areas. Parts of eastern North America, Eurasia, northern Africa, and the Arabian peninsula were near to cooler than normal, and parts of the equatorial Pacific, eastern South Pacific, and South Atlantic had cooler-than-normal SST anomalies. But with large parts of the continents still having warmer-than-normal temperatures, and large portions of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans having warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures, the December 2017 global temperature was still above normal.
Subtropical highs, and fronts and low pressure systems moving in the mid-latitude storm track flow, are influenced by the broadscale atmospheric circulation. The circulation of the atmosphere can be analyzed and categorized into specific patterns. The Tropics, especially the equatorial Pacific Ocean, provides abundant heat energy which largely drives the world's atmospheric and oceanic circulation. The following describes several of these modes or patterns of the atmospheric circulation, their drivers, the temperature and precipitation patterns (or teleconnections) associated with them, and their index values this month:
El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
- Description: Oceanic and atmospheric conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean can influence weather across the globe. ENSO is characterized by two extreme modes: El Niño (warmer-than-normal sea surface temperature [SST] anomalies in the tropical Pacific) and La Niña (cooler-than-normal SST anomalies), with the absence of either of these modes termed "ENSO-neutral" conditions.
- Status: La Niña conditions were present during December 2017 with below-average SSTs across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.
- Teleconnections (influence on weather): To the extent teleconnections are known, the typical temperature and precipitation patterns associated with La Niña during December include above-normal temperatures across the southern Plains to Lower Mississippi Valley; below-normal temperatures across the northern Plains to Upper Midwest and parts of the West; near-normal temperatures from the central Plains to East Coast; above-normal precipitation in the Pacific Northwest to northern Rockies and much of California; and below-normal precipitation across most of the Southwest, in the central and southern Plains, Mid-Mississippi Valley, Lower Mississippi Valley to Southeast, and Mid-Atlantic region.
- Comparison to Observed: The December 2017 temperature anomaly pattern does not agree with the teleconnections for La Niña. The December 2017 precipitation anomaly pattern agrees in the central Plains to Mid-Atlantic regions and most of the Southeast, but not in southern Texas, the coastal Carolinas, and the West Coast.
Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO)
- Description: The MJO is a tropical disturbance or "wave" that propagates eastward around the global tropics with a cycle on the order of 30-60 days. It is characterized by regions of enhanced and suppressed tropical rainfall. One of its indices is a phase diagram which illustrates the phase (1-8) and amplitude of the MJO on a daily basis. The MJO is categorized into eight "phases" depending on the pattern of the location and intensity of the regions of enhanced and suppressed tropical rainfall. The MJO can enter periods of little or no activity, when it becomes neutral or incoherent and has little influence on the weather. Overall, the MJO tends to be most active during ENSO-neutral years, and is often absent during moderate-to-strong El Niño and La Niña episodes.
- Status: The MJO Wheeler-Hendon index began the month in phase 5, transitioned through phased 6 and 7 before going slightly incoherent for a few days (as it transitioned through phases 8 and 1), and ended the month in phase 2. Other aspects of the tropical ocean-atmosphere system (referred to in the CPC reports as the background or low frequency [i.e., La Niña] state, Kelvin and Rossby waves, and tropical cyclone activity) appeared to play a role in influencing the month's climate (especially Rossby waves and the base state, as well as Kelvin waves) (MJO updates for December 4, 11, 18, 25, and January 1).
- Teleconnections (influence on weather): The MJO's temperature and precipitation teleconnections to U.S. weather depend on time of year and MJO phase. To the extent teleconnections are known, the December (November-January) teleconnections for temperature are shown here and for precipitation are shown here.
- Comparison to Observed: The MJO is transitory and can change phases (modes) within a month, so it is usually more closely related to weekly weather patterns than monthly. In the case of December 2017, the monthly temperature anomaly pattern does not match the temperature anomaly patterns associated with the MJO phases experienced this month. The weekly temperature anomaly patterns, however, closely match the corresponding MJO phase teleconnections for December 3-9 (phases 5-6), 10-16 (phase 6), and (mostly) 24-30 (transitioning near the unit circle through phases 8 and 1 to phase 2). Neither does the monthly precipitation anomaly pattern match the precipitation anomaly patterns associated with the MJO phases experienced this month. But the weekly precipitation anomaly patterns show some agreement. December 3-9 (phases 5-6) was dry in the West; December 10-16 (phase 6) was dry across most of the CONUS; and December 17-23 (phase 7) was dry in the central Plains and wet in the northern High Plains.
- The Pacific/North American (PNA) pattern
- Description: The PNA teleconnection pattern is associated with strong fluctuations in the strength and location of the East Asian jet stream. PNA-related blocking of the jet stream flow in the Pacific can affect weather downstream over North America, especially the West and especially in the winter half of the year.
- Status: The daily PNA index was positive for most of the month, especially the first half, averaging positive for the month as a whole. The 3-month-averaged index was negative.
- Teleconnections (influence on weather): To the extent teleconnections are known, a positive PNA for this time of year (January on the quarterly teleconnection maps) is associated with below-normal temperatures across the southern Plains to East Coast; above-normal temperatures across the West Coast and northern Plains to Alaska; below-normal upper-level circulation anomalies over southeastern North America; above-normal upper-level circulation anomalies over western North America; and below-normal precipitation in the Northwest, Great Basin, and most of the CONUS along and east of the Mississippi River.
- Comparison to Observed: The December 2017 upper-level circulation anomaly pattern is similar to the teleconnections for a positive PNA, except the negative anomalies in the eastern CONUS are shifted a bit northward. The monthly temperature anomaly pattern mostly doesn't match, but the weekly temperature anomaly pattern for December 6-12 (when the daily PNA was at its peak positive values) is a very good match. The monthly precipitation anomaly pattern is also a good match.
- The Arctic Oscillation (AO) pattern
- Description: The AO teleconnection pattern relates upper-level circulation over the Arctic to circulation features over the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes and is most active during the cold season.
- Status: The daily AO index was negative for the first half of the month and positive the last half, averaging near zero for the month. The 3-month-averaged index was slightly positive.
- Teleconnections (influence on weather): To the extent teleconnections are known, a near-zero AO in December (November-January in the AO Composites table) is typically associated with drier-than-normal conditions in the central Plains to Southeast, wetter-than-normal conditions from northern California to western Washington, and near-normal moisture conditions elsewhere in the CONUS (but the patterns are similar for a positive and negative AO); above-normal temperatures in the northern Rockies to central Plains and near-normal temperatures elsewhere across the CONUS; and near-normal upper-level circulation anomalies over North America and the adjacent oceans (Arctic, North Pacific, North Atlantic).
- Comparison to Observed: The December 2017 monthly upper-level circulation and temperature anomaly patterns show little agreement with the teleconnections for a near-zero (neutral) AO. The monthly precipitation anomaly pattern matches in the Southeast, but not in the West. However, the weekly temperature anomaly pattern for December 15-21 (when the daily AO was at its peak positive values) is a very good match for the teleconnections for a positive AO.
- The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) pattern
- Description: The NAO teleconnection pattern relates upper-level circulation over the North Atlantic Ocean to circulation features over the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes.
- Status: The daily NAO index was near zero to slightly positive throughout the month, and averaged positive for the month. The 3-month-averaged index was slightly positive.
- Teleconnections (influence on weather): To the extent teleconnections are known, a positive NAO during this time of year (January on the quarterly teleconnection maps) is associated with above-normal upper-level circulation anomalies over the central to eastern CONUS, extending across the North Atlantic to Western Europe; above-normal temperature anomalies from the Plains to East Coast; below-normal circulation anomalies over northern Canada to Greenland; and drier-than-normal precipitation anomalies in California to Nevada, but the precipitation teleconnections are weak.
- Comparison to Observed: The December 2017 precipitation anomaly pattern agrees with the teleconnections over California and Nevada, but that may be a coincidence since the precipitation teleconnections are weak. The upper-level circulation and temperature anomaly patterns show little agreement to the teleconnections.
- The West Pacific (WP) pattern
- Description: The WP teleconnection pattern is a primary mode of low-frequency variability over the North Pacific and reflects zonal and meridional variations in the location and intensity of the (East Asian) jet stream in the western Pacific.
- Status: The monthly WP index was positive, as was the three-month average WP index.
- Teleconnections (influence on weather): To the extent teleconnections are known, a positive WP during this time of year (January on the quarterly teleconnection maps) is typically associated with above-normal temperatures from the Midwest to Northeast; below-normal temperatures in the Southwest; above-normal circulation anomalies over eastern North America; below-normal circulation anomalies over the western CONUS; and above-normal precipitation from Oklahoma to the Ohio Valley.
- Comparison to Observed: The December 2017 monthly upper-level circulation, temperature, and precipitation anomaly patterns do not match the teleconnections for a positive WP.
- The Tropical/Northern Hemisphere (TNH) pattern
- Description: The TNH teleconnection pattern reflects large-scale changes in both the location and eastward extent of the Pacific jet stream, and also in the strength and position of the climatological mean Hudson Bay Low, and is dominant in the winter months. The pattern significantly modulates the flow of marine air into North America, as well as the southward transport of cold Canadian air into the north-central United States.
- Status: The TNH index was positive during December.
- Teleconnections (influence on weather): To the extent teleconnections are known, a positive TNH is typically associated with cooler-than-normal temperatures for much of the country as well as eastern Canada, drier-than-normal conditions in the West, and slightly wetter-than-normal conditions in the Tennessee Valley. The upper-level circulation anomalies for a positive TNH are below-normal 500-mb geopotential heights over the eastern two-thirds of Canada and the north central U.S., and above-normal heights over the northeastern Pacific and Gulf of Mexico into the western North Atlantic.
- Observed: The December 2017 monthly temperature temperature anomaly pattern does not agree with the teleconnections for a positive TNH, although there is some similarity with the weekly temperature anomaly pattern for the last week in December. The precipitation anomaly pattern does not agree over the Tennessee Valley but does over the West, but that may be a coincidence. The upper-level circulation anomaly pattern is a good match over the North Pacific to North America, but not over the Gulf of Mexico to North Atlantic.
|December 10-16||MJO, PNA||MJO|
|December 24-30||MJO, TNH||—|
Examination of the available circulation indices and their teleconnection patterns, and comparison to observed December 2017 weekly and monthly temperature, precipitation, and circulation anomaly patterns, suggest that La Niña had some influence on the weather over the CONUS in December, but that it shared this influence with other drivers originating in other parts of the world. There was some agreement between the observed precipitation anomalies and the teleconnections for La Niña, but the temperature anomalies did not match. The other equatorial driver (associated with the MJO), however, had good agreement between the observed weekly anomalies and the corresponding teleconnections for most weeks. The PNA, NAO, WP, and TNH were all positive for the month. The observed anomalies showed little agreement with the teleconnections for the NAO and WP, so the drivers behind these indices likely had little influence on this month's weather. The upper-level circulation anomaly patterns had some similarity to the teleconnections for the PNA and TNH, which suggested the Pacific jet stream and Hudson Bay Low strongly influenced the circulation over North America. There was also a good match between the observed precipitation anomalies and the teleconnections for the PNA and TNH. The AO was negative for the first half of the month and positive for the second half. There was little agreement between the AO teleconnections and the observed upper-level circulation anomalies, and just some agreement with the observed precipitation anomalies. The temperature anomalies showed little agreement with the AO teleconnections, except for the third week of the month. Likewise, the observed temperature anomalies generally did not match the teleconnections for the PNA and TNH, except for certain weeks. The PNA matched well during the second week (when the PNA index was strongest) and the TNH matched during the last week.
This month illustrates several things. First, it illustrates how the weather and climate anomaly patterns can be influenced by atmospheric drivers (or modes of atmospheric variability) originating in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, North Pacific Ocean, and northeast North America (Hudson Bay Low). Second, it demonstrates how the circulation anomaly patterns can result from a complex interaction of many drivers operating at different time scales, and how some drivers can have influence at certain times of the month while others have influence at other times of the month. Third, it shows the importance of selecting an appropriate time scale to examine and how signals can be masked when averaging over a monthly time scale. | <urn:uuid:acdd9d59-fd61-4fab-8ac8-ad33d0c975c1> | CC-MAIN-2018-34 | https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/synoptic/201712 | 2018-08-20T00:59:06Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221215487.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20180820003554-20180820023554-00390.warc.gz | en | 0.937651 | 7,219 |
Jewish Lords' Witness
Web-sites of General Interest in the Mind/Brain Subject Area:
Despite the author’s insistence that biological systems have been built by evolution, this is an interesting paper mapping out a future long-term project for building robots based on knowledge of how natural intelligence and motivation operate. It is to be hoped that this project will, in itself, demonstrate the foolishness of evolutionary theory:
High Level Structure of the Human Brain
1. The proposition is that if the power of the Spiritual Mind and Heart is as scripture indicates then the Spirit effectively delegates the physical human brain to little more than an automated control centre.
2. The spirit is located in the brain and is downloaded from the matrix at an early age.
3. The high level structure of the human brain is described together with how it may interface with the human spirit at a functional level.
4. The state of the brain/mind pseudo sciences is far from convincing.
5. The extensive literature available on the topic of mental illness again appears to be driven into a parlous state of mind/brain thinking and knowledge. It certainly cannot disprove the spirit/brain proposition of this paper and arguably all its internal disagreements and paradoxes may be addressed if the spiritual model were to be adopted as the true reality.
6. Human and angelic spirits are identical; it is their brains that are different albeit fully compatible.
7. How a man’s soul may co-exist with Holy Spirit.
8. The nature of demonic possession and its implications for the host soul.
9. Animals also have spirits
Image: Bible Pictuire Gallery
Daniel in the Lions Den by Peter Paul Rubens c1615
Let us examine further the multiple possessions of Legion but now from the point of view of the unfortunate herd of swine. There is little doubt that this one account is intended to provide us with much insight into the nature of spirits:
12 So they entreated him, saying: “Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them.”
13 And he permitted them. With that the unclean spirits came out and entered into the swine; and the herd rushed over the precipice into the sea, about two thousand of them, and they drowned one after another in the sea. (Mark 5)
Now a Roman legion was typically made up of around 5,000 soldiers in the early decades of the first century AD. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the spokesman for the possessing spirits called himself Legion to denote that was the number of the spirits possessing the man and subsequently the pigs. Given that the size of the herd of swine was 2,000 then we can further assume that each pig was possessed by two or three spirits each.
The LW understanding as to why the pigs then threw themselves over the cliff was to indicate that, while the sharing of the human brain between their full complement was preferable to returning to Tartarus, the demons’ prison, the sharing of a pig’s brain between a mere two or three of their number turned out to be far more restrictive than their spiritual jail. They committed suicide as a result so that they could escape from the pigs and return to Tartarus.
What else can we learn from this rather ‘interesting’ behaviour? While it clearly was not very pleasant for them, the demons’ spirits could certainly exist and function to a limited extent in the brain of pigs. They were able to decide on the course of suicide and were able to work the pigs’ bodies to jump over the cliff. This demonstrates a certain compatibility between the spirits of the demons and the pigs’ brains. Since demons are the fallen sons of God, their spirits are the same as those of angels and, therefore, of men. So this tells us men’s spirits could reside in the brains of pigs. When we looked earlier at how the brain had ‘developed’ from lower order animals to humans it appeared that the same basic structure was being built upon. So, although the higher order functions of the human brain are not available in the animalistic brains, a certain spiritual compatibility is nonetheless evident.
Taking this one step further it then becomes clear that animals, not just pigs, also have spirits that reside in their lower function brains. This would appear to be confirmed explicitly in Ecclesiastes:
19 For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.
20 All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.
21 Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth? (Ecclesiastes 3)
Whilst the writer is not aware of any other scriptural accounts that are clear examples of animal possession, there are numerous examples of animals being directed by angelic spirits. Balaam’s speaking ass is one such:
28 And the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times? (Numbers 22)
As is the example of God closing lions’ mouths:
22 My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions' mouths, that they have not hurt me: forasmuch as before him innocency was found in me; and also before thee, O king, have I done no hurt. (Daniel 6)
These and other examples (Elijah’s ravens, Elisha’s bears, Jonah’s whale) are a clear demonstration that a variety of animals also have spirits which, whilst of a lower order than that of mankind, nevertheless have an interface into the spiritual realms and, therefore, a likely communication via the same spiritual matrix as previously proposed. Furthermore, if animalistic spirits can exist on earth then why not in heaven? It would seem that the angels also have lower life forms to give them pleasure in heaven as we have pets and our earth’s natural wildlife to enjoy. God’s creation knows no bounds in heaven or on earth!
There are several accounts in scripture which indicate that demons have possessed human bodies in biblical times. Perhaps these accounts can lend some further insight into the nature of the spirit/brain interface. Probably the least understood and rarely discussed demon possessions mentioned are those in the brief Old Testament reference in the pre-Flood account in Genesis:
2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
5 And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. (Genesis 6)
The sons of God are angels. From this scripture, it is by no means clear whether these angels were provided with new large (albeit human) bodies or whether they possessed existing fleshly bodies. What is clear, however, is that these bodies were able to successfully procreate with human females, which means they were completely human. So these angels were able to exist successfully in human bodies which had human brains and have human offspring with human spirits. Again further proof that the spirits of angels are equivalent to those of mankind. Furthermore it is clear that these angels were in fact demons since they were not on the earth for God’s purposes but for their own fleshly gratification. This is clear evidence, if needed, that demons and angels are all sons of God who have equivalent spirits to those of mankind.
We are much more familiar with the accounts of demon possession in the New Testament and the tales of Christ and the Apostles exorcising them from their human victims:
15 So he touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she got up and began ministering to him.
16 But after it became evening, people brought him many demon-possessed persons; and he expelled the spirits with a word, and he cured all who were faring badly; (Matthew 8)
There is an interesting differentiation between Christ’s healing of the sick compared with the expulsion of possessing spirits. As described previously, the power of Holy Spirit for healing purposes was via the physical touching of hands. Demons, however, could be exorcised by Christ’s word.
It also appears that different evil spirits brought specific sicknesses of spirit or particular spiritual ‘talents’ with their possession as if they were visiting their own spiritual sickness onto the possessed one. There are several examples in scripture of this specialisation:
32 Now when they were leaving, look! people brought him a dumb man possessed of a demon;
33 and after the demon had been expelled the dumb man spoke. Well, the crowds felt amazement and said: “Never was anything like this seen in Israel.” (Matthew 9)
22 Then they brought him a demon-possessed man, blind and dumb; and he cured him, so that the dumb man spoke and saw. (Matthew 12)
16 And it happened that as we were going to the place of prayer, a certain servant girl with a spirit, a demon of divination, met us. She used to furnish her masters with much gain by practicing the art of prediction.
17 This [girl] kept following Paul and us and crying out with the words: “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who are publishing to YOU the way of salvation.”
18 This she kept doing for many days. Finally Paul got tired of it and turned and said to the spirit: “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour. (Acts 16)
Let us now consider the unusual case of Legion and their infamous multiple possession of one man:
2 And immediately after he got out of the boat a man under the power of an unclean spirit met him from among the memorial tombs.
3 He had his haunt among the tombs; and up to that time absolutely nobody was able to bind him fast even with a chain,
4 because he had oftentimes been bound with fetters and chains, but the chains were snapped apart by him and the fetters were actually smashed; and nobody had the strength to subdue him.
5 And continually, night and day, he was crying out in the tombs and in the mountains and slashing himself with stones.
6 But on catching sight of Jesus from a distance he ran and did obeisance to him,
7 and, when he had cried out with a loud voice, he said: “What have I to do with you, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I put you under oath by God not to torment me.”
8 For he had been telling it: “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit.”
9 But he began to ask him: “What is your name?” And he said to him: “My name is Legion, because there are many of us.”
10 And he entreated him many times not to send the spirits out of the country.
11 Now a great herd of swine was there at the mountain feeding.
12 So they entreated him, saying: “Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them.”
13 And he permitted them. With that the unclean spirits came out and entered into the swine; and the herd rushed over the precipice into the sea, about two thousand of them, and they drowned one after another in the sea.
14 But the herders of them fled and reported it in the city and in the countryside; and people came to see what it was that had happened.
15 So they came to Jesus, and they beheld the demon-possessed [man] sitting clothed and in his sound mind, this [man] that had had the legion; and they grew fearful.
16 Also, those who had seen it related to them how this had happened to the demon-possessed [man] and about the swine. (Mark 5)
There is much that can be learned from this strange account. Firstly it appears that only one of the unclean spirits was acting as spokesman for the rest. As an absolute minimum this spiritual spokesman had control over the parts of the brain that handled the communication functions of the mouth and ears. It is by no means obvious whether the other spirits were dormant and awaiting their turn at the helm or whether they were all conscious and vying for control at the same time. This latter could no doubt explain the victim’s wild behaviour prior to Christ’s intervention. This can be likened to running a multi-user OS on a computer. It does not change the physical properties of the brain or body but does enable more than one mind/spirit to make use of the computing power available albeit by contending for the available resources. There is the possibility of multi-processing where there is the constant contention for resources versus time-sharing where each user/spirit gets a time-slice in which to carry out its own functions or perhaps each spirit may have had its own span of control of a (necessarily small) portion of brain/body function?
It is interesting to compare this account with today’s accounts of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Again as a complete novice in the field I have now done a little reading around the subject. Whilst the scriptural example was clearly a case of multiple spirits inhabiting the human body, since they were dispersed into a herd of pigs, my own view on today’s MPD symptoms is that the majority of cases represent a single sick human spirit. It appears through case history that the bulk of such sickness may have been caused by abuse to the individual during childhood. The sick spirit invents a self-protection mechanism to protect itself from the pain of the abuse by creating a new personality, or alter ego, that is capable of mentally dealing with the trauma associated with the abuse. Many such personalities can exist within the one spirit each with its own memories and, in some cases, with knowledge of the other ‘alters’. This is not such a strange notion since any one normal individual fulfils many different roles during the course of a day, e.g. a hard-nosed business man during the working day and a loving father and husband during the evening. This mix of roles is considered to be perfectly normal, the difference from MPD being that the spirit is whole with the same memories shared between the different roles without the need to hide any of its experiences.
Whilst some commentators would be prepared to believe that some cases may represent some form of spiritual possession, my scriptural training would suggest that this has not been the case since the first century AD. God would not allow demon possession, except in circumstances where exorcism through the power of Holy Spirit, were also enabled. The current understandings of the Lords’ Witnesses would suggest the latter is not the case in the modern age.
Next we must consider what actually happens to the host spirit upon demonic possession. The account of the ultimate example of demonic possession, the satanic possession of Judas Iscariot, provides us with the best clue:
3 Then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve. (Luke 22)
21 But, behold, the hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table. (Luke 22)
3 Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders,
4 Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that.
5 And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself. (Matthew 27)
In this account it would appear that Satan possessed the body of Judas Iscariot from the point in time just prior to the last supper until his death by suicide. Since we are not told that Satan exited Judas’ body prior to death it is reasonable for us to believe that it was in fact Satan’s spirit that actually committed suicide in Judas’ body. If that is the case then it seems likely that the host human spirit of Judas was transferred to a temporary angelic body upon possession where, I expect, he resides to this day until his prospective resurrection. So, on this basis, it would seem that a dispossessed human host spirit is transferred to a temporary angelic body for the duration of the demonic possession of its human body and is transferred back into the latter upon the exit of the demonic spirit(s). All these transfers would presumably need to take place via the matrix described at http://jewishlordswitness.com/id6.html. This matrix must clearly have broadband capacity!
In comparing demonic possession with the angelic possessions considered earlier, it is less clear that there is complete compatibility between the possessing spirit and the possessed human brain in these cases. This could explain why the behaviour of at least some of the possessing demons described in the New testament is somewhat other than normal. It may be that God and his holy hosts are less prone to fully assist the activities of the demons than they are for their heavenly brethren who possess humans in keeping with God's purposes. Therefore it is possible that no re-configuring program precedes the downloaded spirit. Indeed how would a brain be configured with multiple logical partitions to accommodate Legion? I think we must assume that the demons have to fend for themselves upon human possession and need to make the best of a poor fit. It is a bit like demons having to make do with an 'off the peg' suit whereas the heavenly angels get a bespoke tailoring fit.
Those readers, who are especially intrigued by the topic of demonic possession, may be interested in my later paper which looks at the subject from a slightly different perspective: Demonic Possession.
How Does The Holy Spirit Co-exist with The Host Spirits of Men and Angels?
Not all of the non-Adamic angelically possessed bodies have performed superhuman feats. Michael in Jesus clearly did, but Gabriel in John the Baptist did not. Is this latter because Gabriel could not or did not? But then of course we discover that mere Adamic men can be given the power of the spirit; the apostles after Jesus’ death were such:
13 Simon himself also became a believer, and, after being baptized, he was in constant attendance upon Philip; and he was amazed at beholding signs and great powerful works taking place……
17 Then they went laying their hands upon them, and they began to receive Holy Spirit.
18 Now when Simon saw that through the laying on of the hands of the apostles the spirit was given, he offered them money,
19 saying: “Give me also this authority, that anyone upon whom I lay my hands may receive Holy Spirit.” (Acts 8)
So the apostles were capable of performing signs and great powerful works through the power of the Holy Spirit. There is no reason to believe that the mechanism by which they gained these powers was any different to that of the angels or Jesus Christ. Christ himself gave the Holy Spirit to his disciples in the same way that his father had given it to him:
21 Jesus, therefore, said to them again: “May YOU have peace. Just as the Father has sent me forth, I also am sending YOU.”
22 And after he said this he blew upon them and said to them: “Receive Holy Spirit (John 20)
As far as we are aware the apostles were mere mortal men with Adamic bodies; they were not non-Adamic, so they were just like you and I. So through the ability to carry out miracles by both angels and men via the Holy Spirit we see even more that the spirits of men and angels are equivalent. Somehow the Holy Spirit is presumably able to access the physical brain and body via the matrix to impart its power into the spiritual heart interface of the man or angelically possessed human. The power of the Holy Spirit then somehow ‘flows’ from the physical human body into the item or person being miraculously altered in some way.
Let us look to scripture to provide us with further insight into this process. Firstly how is the Holy Spirit provided to prospective miracle workers? These scriptures give several different methods:
2 and suddenly there occurred from heaven a noise just like that of a rushing stiff breeze, and it filled the whole house in which they were sitting.
3 And tongues as if of fire became visible to them and were distributed about, and one sat upon each one of them,
4 and they all became filled with Holy Spirit and started to speak with different tongues, just as the spirit was granting them to make utterance. (Acts 2)
21 Jesus, therefore, said to them again: “May YOU have peace. Just as the Father has sent me forth, I also am sending YOU.” 22 And after he said this he blew upon them and said to them: “Receive holy spirit. (John 20)
17 So An·a·ni'as went off and entered into the house, and he laid his hands upon him and said: “Saul, brother, the Lord, the Jesus that appeared to you on the road over which you were coming, has sent me forth, in order that you may recover sight and be filled with holy spirit.” (Acts 9)
6 And when Paul laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they began speaking with tongues and prophesying. (Acts 19)
So there appear to be three distinct mechanisms by which miracle workers may be imbued with the necessary Holy Spirit: (1) Its appearance directly from heaven and visibly settling onto the recipients; (2) Its being breathed by a holy one onto the recipient (perhaps in like manner to God’s breathing life into Adam); and (3) by humans through the physical laying on of hands. Also from the above scriptures, it seems that the miracle worker’s very soul becomes ‘filled’ with Holy Spirit. The following scriptures throw further light on what this might actually mean:
16 What! Do YOU not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body? For, “The two,” says he, “will be one flesh.”
17 But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit.
18 Flee from fornication. Every other sin that a man may commit is outside his body, but he that practices fornication is sinning against his own body.
19 What! Do YOU not know that the body of YOU people is [the] temple of the holy spirit within YOU, which YOU have from God? Also, YOU do not belong to yourselves, (1 Corinthians 6)
8 but YOU will receive power when the holy spirit arrives upon YOU, and YOU will be witnesses of me both in Jerusalem and in all Ju·de'a and Sa·mar'i·a and to the most distant part of the earth.” (Acts 1)
We have talked elsewhere of the Holy Spirit having access to a man’s spiritual heart via the heavenly matrix. As far as discussions in previous papers went, this was solely for the purpose of a two-way communication with that man’s spirit. It appears from the above scripture that the miracle workers under consideration in this paper have a much closer tie into the Holy Spirit. What we appear to have here is a partial and willing possession by Holy Spirit of that man’s very soul. Presumably the Holy Spirit is somehow able to download its presence and power across the matrix to the recipient human soul. The concept of one flesh is something that mankind can understand; it describes a relationship in which there are two individual beings which are drawn intimately close together to form a bond which is greater than the sum of the two parts, whilst each part still retains its own individuality. It would seem that the Holy Spirit forms such a relationship with the spirits of faithful mankind. However I find it hard to accept that Holy Spirit itself fills the human soul; rather its power does so. The nature of that power however would no doubt create an intimate bond with its recipient.
Let us now consider how the Holy Spirit can operate within a man’s soul. We established above that Holy Spirit was transferred from one human recipient to the next by the laying on of hands. It is worthy of note that scripture symbolises God’s provision of Holy Spirit to be also from his hands:
20 But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you. (Luke 11)
29 And now, Jehovah, give attention to their threats, and grant your slaves to keep speaking your word with all boldness,
30 while you stretch out your hand for healing and while signs and portents occur through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” (Acts 4)
11 Well, then, look! Jehovah’s hand is upon you, and you will be blind, not seeing the sunlight for a period of time.” Instantly a thick mist and darkness fell upon him, and he went around seeking men to lead him by the hand. (Acts 13)
I practise tai chi and am therefore aware of the sensations surrounding chi energy. I have myself experienced the warming sensation one gets in the palms of the hands whilst practising and, whilst I would not necessarily subscribe to some of the wilder claims of today’s so called healers, there is no doubt in my mind that this could well be the mechanism, using the body’s meridians as channels, through which Holy Spirit may have been able to exercise its power in the first century apostles. Indeed perhaps the power is in the human’s own body but needing to be fully energised by Holy Spirit. Actually this latter notion appeals to me greatly since it demonstrates that the human body was specifically designed to be inhabited by the Holy Spirit’s power. A further thought is that deep breathing is an important factor in tai chi; a good breathing technique helps to stimulate the chi energy in one’s body. In this context it strikes me as more than a little interesting that the definition of the word soul is ‘nephesh’ in Old Testament Hebrew and ‘psuche’ in New Testament Greek; both words are literally translated into the English word ‘breather’. Clearly the concept of breathing is literally of vital importance to our God.
The potential in all this was made very clear to me in one chi kung class that I attended when I was asked to pass my hands over a lady’s body. (Before the reader jumps to the obvious schoolboy conclusions I should like to point out that she was seriously middle-aged, unattractive, fully clothed and my hands hovered at least an inch above her personage!). All was well until I passed my right hand over her upper left arm. Through my hand I sensed a disruption in her chi energy field. Given that this was my first attempt at such an exercise and was performed by me with little knowledge of what I was really doing, it turned out that I had correctly discovered that this lady had broken her upper arm more than ten years previously and it had not knitted back well. I would not want to make too much of this but it did indicate to me the possibilities. With Holy Spirit it would appear that such a mechanism as chi energy can provide the power to heal or damage and not just monitor the state of the recipient as it seems that mere mortals can achieve even today.
On a very personal note I feel that the Holy Spirit has been in communion with me since an infant. The first time I had the sensation of its power within me was when a girl in my class at first school (I seem to remember her name was Ruth) was showing me some work she had prepared. I did not know what it was but I felt a physically cooling sensation coursing through my body and a sense of well-being mentally. Despite the fact that I shivered and got goose bumps all over my body I found it a very pleasant and comforting sensation. This has happened to me on numerous occasions subsequently when I have had a sense of well-being when sharing something with another individual. I believe that the physical sensation is similar to the feeling that many people express as ‘someone just walked over my grave’ but it is a rather more gentle purely internal sensation coming in waves over a period of time not in a single physical shivering event. I used to put it down to a purely physical response to the enjoyment of sharing something that was important to another human being rather than myself. I suppose one might describe it in a small way as a selfless feeling of love for, or a real contact with, another human being. Perhaps this was not too far from the reality but, since I have been baptised as a Lords’ Witness, I now know that feeling is the power of the Holy Spirit working within me, suffusing my whole being. I now get that shivering sensation on a very frequent basis when some spiritual emotion enters my consciousness and usually no longer when I am with another human being.
The Compatibility of the Associated Angelic Brain
In a previous section we identified how the nascent human spirit tailored its brain to its own ‘program’. We now need to consider the implications of this for mankind’s death and eventual resurrection. As mentioned in the previous section mankind is provided with an associated angel when he is born again. Upon being born again it would now be essential that an ‘image’ of the spirit-configured human brain is involuntarily uploaded to the associated angelic brain. This would presumably occur via the matrix and would need to ensure full compatibility between the two brains so that the future occupation by the human spirit in the angelic brain would be a perfect ‘fit’. This process would be a key component of being born again and it would be this that marks out that associated angel as the human spirit’s very own individual angel.
At the point of the human’s death his spirit would then involuntarily be uploaded via the matrix to his associated angel that would already be tailored and ready for its new owner. Upon any resurrection presumably the reverse process would be effected. It should be noted that this process assumes fully formed angelic and human resurrected brains that enable the ‘configuring’ process to occur rapidly in the same way as God’s original ‘blowing in Adam’s nostrils’, rather than the more convoluted foetal build. A swift process for possession would certainly be necessary to enable the possessing spirit to immediately interface fully with the recipient brain. A spirit only has to grow up once I would expect; this same being true of the angelic sons of God when first created.
However we also need to consider the untimely death of a human prior to its spirit being born again. Since none is lost by our divine shepherd it looks likely that a ‘temporary’ angel is provided for all of mankind from birth which is stamped with the individual’s characteristics as is its human counterpart. At death the human spirit would transfer to this temporary angel as above and would be used as a vehicle for resurrection. This temporary angel would be retained until such time as its status is changed to a more ‘permanent’ associated angel upon the human spirit eventually being born again.
Angelic possession would also require a similar mechanism. The key example, of Michael’s possession of the body of Jesus, would of necessity have effected the transfer of the spirit of Immanuel into his associated angel at the point of Jesus’ baptism by John. We also need to consider the level of 'tailoring' that takes place between Michael's spirit and Immanuel's brain upon his angelic possession of Christ's body. My guess is that the spiritual 'download' comes complete with its pre-requisite set-up program which re-configures the brain swiftly and immediately prior to its occupation by the possessing angelic spirit. This would enable full and perfect control to be exercised by the angelic spirit upon the human body. Demonic possession is likely to be a rather different process and I cover that later in this paper.
A definition of the point at which death occurs is worth considering before we close on this section. At what point does the spirit evacuate from the brain? Well a probable cause would likely be the death of that brain. Whilst there is much discussion in medical circles about brain death I think that, for our purposes, a simple and straight forward definition can be found at the following web-site: http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Brain-death/Pages/Introduction.aspx. I see no reason to doubt that, when the conditions defined here for the death of the brain stem are met, the spirit literally ‘gives up the ghost’ and gets transported into its new home. Under these conditions of brain stem death, the spiritual attributes previously defined could theoretically function in the upper brain areas; however, the cessation of the automatic bodily functions would equally apply to other physical causes of death that would cause blood to be denied to the brain stem. So the cause of death through heart failure, for example, would also cause loss of blood to the brain stem as well as to the upper brain functions.
The Spirits of Men and Angels
The Lords’ Witnesses have determined from their biblical understandings that when men are born again in the spirit they are provided with an associated angelic body reserved for them in heaven for the time when they will eventually take residence in that estate of God: http://www.biblecodeintro.com/intro12.html (How is One Born Again without Dying?)
This tells us that men’s spirits can reside in the body of angels and presumably can work those bodies through the interface of the equivalent of an angelic brain. If this is the case then the spirits of angels are the same as those of men and it is only through the angelic body and brain, not the spirit, that angelic superhuman powers are effected.
To confirm this equivalence of spirit, there are several accounts, in the bible, of angels possessing human form. The two angels that visited with Lot being one example:
1 And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom: and Lot seeing them rose up to meet them; and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground;
5 And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them.
11 And they smote the men that were at the door of the house with blindness, both small and great: so that they wearied themselves to find the door. (Genesis 19)
These three verses from that account tell us a number of things. Clearly the angels came in human form since they were recognised as such by the Sodomites but perhaps were perceived in some way as special or beautiful to them. So angel spirits seem to be able to function in human bodies and therefore are able to interface with human brains. However we are not told how the angels came to be in human form. Did they possess existing humans temporarily or were they made temporary bodies by God for the purpose of their visitation to Lot?
A further clue is that the angels clearly had some superhuman abilities in that they were able to strike the Sodomites with blindness. So clearly they had more abilities than your average human being. These additional abilities could only come from the spirit or the body (encompassing the brain) or the combination of the two or by drawing on the power of the Holy Spirit in some manner.
Now the Lords’ Witnesses have determined from scripture that there have been several angelic possessions of existing human beings during the course of biblical history:http://www.truebiblecode.com/understanding506.html (The 5/6 earthly identities of Michael, Gabriel and Melchizedek). These particular possessions have been made into ‘non-Adamic’, i.e. perfect, human bodies. However, what we know of these bodies would be via some quite small variations in the DNA sequencing which are unlikely to have resulted in any large scale change in physical make-up. Indeed if that had not been the case I am quite sure that Christ’s mother Mary might have noticed something physically unusual in her infant child. So let us work on the basis that perfect non-Adamic brains and the Adamic brains of imperfect men are structured and function in the same way. If this is a correct assumption then we can also assume that there is no difference between the spirit of an angel and the spirit of a fleshly man. Genesis comes to mind even more markedly than it has previously:
26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (Genesis 1)
In making man in ‘our image’ then it must refer at least to the spirit of man being in the image of that of the angels. Consequently verse 27 goes on further to liken the spirit of man to God’s own spirit. Christ, after his death in the form of the angelic spirit Michael, then went on to resurrection into a divine body. This provides further evidence that Adamic man, angels and God all have essentially the same spiritual makeup albeit with more knowledge and experience as they have existed longer through that sequence and likewise with more capable bodies and brains to inhabit.
So it would appear that the angelic spirit application software can run on the human brain operating software and hardware as well as its native angelic brain operating software and hardware. The equivalent statement can also be said of the human spirit application software.
It is interesting for this beginner in the field to read some of the erudite and expert opinions surrounding the causation of mental illnesses such as depression and to have found out, much to his genuine surprise that neuroscientists generally do not seem to have any really clear and substantiated views about the relationship between mind and brain. As a result many of them would deny the existence of mind separate from brain (duality). To this writer this demonstrates the wonderfully intricate and intimate integration that exists between the spirit and the brain which prevents mankind’s finest from determining the exact nature of the relationship between the two.
Before my retirement I was involved with the provision of operational computing services to commercial customers. It is worth drawing a comparison between computer problems and mental health problems. With the increasing complexity of computing systems, when we experience technical problems with these systems it is often very difficult to determine the root cause. Sometimes it is software, sometimes it is hardware and sometimes it is the communications. The most intractable problems are usually those that involve combinations of different individual problems with more than one element of the total system. So it would not be surprising to learn that problems with the spirit, brain or nervous system were also difficult to understand and diagnose. Without doubt the mind/brain combination is far more complex than any existing computing facility built by man so it is equally unsurprising that we appear not to understand its nature particularly well. If we have difficulty understanding the faults that develop in systems that we have designed ourselves what chance do we really have to understand the faults that develop in even more complex structures that we have had no hand in building?
What is clear in all this is that it is not currently possible for science to disprove my thoughts on the spirit’s relegating the brain to a relatively low level (but wonderfully intricate) processing machine. A wonderful machine the brain may be but it is not who we are but a tool that our spirits use to help us express who we are through what we physically do and say. The following web-site provides some interesting views and further links on clinical depression and related topics for the interested reader. Even a cursory reading of this material demonstrates the confusion and lack of consensus for the causation of mental illness and the consequent thinking of the mind/brain structure: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2005/05/is_depression_a_brai.html
Whilst it is clear that physical brain damage can cause manifold forms of mental and physical illnesses, scripture also indicates that anything less than a clean heart in a spirit can cause a sickness of that spirit. The many accounts of demon possession in the New Testament would indicate this to be the case. There is little doubt in my mind that many so called psychosomatic illnesses, that we recognise today, are similarly caused by a sickness of the spirit rather than a physical impairment of the brain:
24 And his fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them. (Matthew 4)
32 As they went out, behold, they brought to him a dumb man possessed with a devil.
33 And when the devil was cast out, the dumb spake: and the multitudes marvelled, saying, It was never so seen in Israel. (Matthew 9)
22 Then was brought unto him one possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb: and he healed him, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw. (Matthew 12)
Let us consider mental illness in a little more depth in terms of its implications for the spirit. It would appear that physical damage to the brain or biochemical imbalances within it appear to cause effects in any one or all of the domains of the spirit:
* Heart – How we feel, who we really are;
* Mind – How we think;
* Conscience – How we behave;
* Memory – How well we remember and act upon our recollections.
It is clear from the above that the physical impacts on the brain can have direct implications for the human spirit. The computer analogy gets a little stretched at this juncture since I cannot think of many hardware problems that would cause an application program to adopt different behaviour other than just stop running with an abnormal error code. The human brain/spirit combination is much more resilient than this; it will continue to operate as best it can albeit producing undesirable results in many cases further increasing mankind’s distress with the current Adamic system of things.
A simple example of how a biochemical reaction in the brain can cause different behaviour from the norm in any individual is in the everyday occurrence of alcohol induced drunkenness. Most of us have experienced, at first hand, the feeling of inebriation at some time or other in our lives. My own personal (but very occasional!!) drunken state has caused me to think and behave in ways that represent a suppression of my normal inhibitions, as dictated by my conscience, but hopefully without too disastrous a set of consequences. Once the drunkenness has passed, usually via an unpleasant hangover, we return to our normal personalities. So I can readily comprehend how the First New Covenant (1NC) saints can judge us from the normal state of our (non-alcoholic) spirits. However I can also think of other examples of mental impairment which do not so easily render the spirit to be judged or to be saved intact.
I recently watched the UK television production ‘Mo’, a biopic on the now deceased British Secretary of State Mo Mowlem, whose claim to fame was the successful brokering of the famous Good Friday Agreement, which paved the way for peace in the troubled province of Northern Ireland. The programme rightly made much of Mo’s malignant frontal lobe tumour and enacted a meeting between Mo and her physician Doctor Glaser some years after she left politics and had become very ill. This meeting was confirmed by Glaser during the programme’s creation: ‘Then they get to talking about her condition, and Glaser mentions the idea that she might have had the tumour years, even decades, before it was diagnosed. Mowlam looks at him and, through the fog, suddenly understands what this means. "[So] good old Mo, larger than life Mo... it could all be because of the tumour? [But] which part's the real me?"’ This last point I find extremely difficult to contemplate. Here we had a senior member of the British government successfully operating in an extremely hostile political environment wondering, after the event, if it was the tumour that had altered her personality both before and during her time in office! Even she did not know who the real Mo Mowlem was! Which will be the real Mo Mowlem whose spirit gets resurrected, the one with or the one without the tumour? I wonder how Mo will like her real spirit upon her resurrection!
I can only trust that the 1NC Saints are so much smarter than we mere mortals to the extent that they know us better than we know ourselves. Needless to say scripture, as always, comes to the rescue and confirms to us that such judgment will certainly exceed our own poor abilities:
12 For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Hebrews 4)
Interestingly this scripture only makes specific reference to that element of the spirit represented by the heart. I think this is intended to indicate to us that the real core of our spirits are represented by our spiritual hearts and it is this which is the sole arbiter in our being judged for the next system. I suspect that it is this one element of our personalities which is the one that may remain untouched by the physical mental maladies under discussion.
One category of mental impairment, worthy of separate discussion, is represented by short and/or long term memory loss. The spiritual problem I have with this is that the memory is a fundamental part of who we are and is the main reason for our living in the current imperfect system of things. Our memory is in place to ensure that we learn from our mistakes, as well as those of others, by having to live through their often awful consequences. The parable of the rich man in Hades makes this very clear:
25 But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. (Luke 16)
And, unsurprisingly, it was expected by the faithful evildoer, on the cross next to Jesus, that our Lord’s spirit would retain His memory after His physical death:
42 And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. (Luke 23)
Clearly, in the case of serious and permanent memory loss, this purpose would be entirely lost on us. At this point I can only consider how a computer system, properly designed, would deal with such a problem: remote storage and backup. I can only imagine that our memories are somehow stored remotely via the matrix even though they may be lost forever from our imperfect and mortal brains. Upon resurrection our spirits would be repaired with the backed up memories stored remotely throughout our lives. I can think of no other remedy to this problem unless our spirits are actually capable of storing all our memories independent of brain function and that memory loss is merely the inability of the physical brain to access those memories.
As is no doubt evident to the reader, I have found the explanation of our spiritual salvation in the face of all manner of mental illnesses to be a rather challenging subject. Once again we need to remain faithful that our Holy Father has made more than adequate provision in this regard for his mentally impaired human children. Amen.
The State of the Mind/Brain (Pseudo) Sciences
Having first spent a little time looking at the relatively incontrovertible scientific facts associated with brain structure and function (albeit with a little spiritual ingredient added for good measure!) I thought it best to next spend my time reviewing some of the existing wisdom relating the science of the brain to that of the mind. A very different and, to this uninitiated student, surprising picture emerges.
Most authors in this subject area seem to consider the mind as the product of the brain. This is no doubt due to their being mostly secular atheistic thinkers who take as a given that the development of the brain has been via evolution rather than an intelligent design. No wonder they cannot make sense of how the mind/brain combination really works. If they started to consider that the brain is actually a product of the mind (of God’s Mind actually) they might start to understand the flaws in their theories.
Whilst I have whole-heartedly grasped the analogy of the computer model of the brain for my dissertation of the spirit, it seems to me that cognitive scientists try too hard to liken the mind/brain combination to the software/hardware computer model. They discuss artificial intelligence but are not able to consider the far more important topic of defining a sentient and innovative being rather than a purely intelligent one. So their ‘software’ is rather more limited than mine. Also because they only talk of intelligence they are rather more rigidly attached to the computer model, the so called Turing Machine, which is defined to slavishly follow a set procedure based on a fixed starting state and a response from a further input whilst in that state. Quite a correct description for a piece of man-made computing equipment but they forget that humans are full of surprises; we do not always react to a situation as others might expect or indeed we may react to the same set of circumstances in different ways at different times. Computers, on the other hand, do not surprise except when they are programmed incorrectly with error –prone software. This latter condition could arguably mirror mental health problems perhaps?
Let us consider so called artificial intelligence a little further. A very powerful computer coupled with some clever software, capable of following the logical rules of chess and learning what works and what does not work to win a game, can beat a human chess master. So what does that prove? The machine has no intelligence. It is programmed to learn how to win by its human programmer but the chess master, even though beaten, wanted to win and was presumably upset that he lost. That is the intelligence. What was the state of mind of the computer (Deep Blue). I do not think it had one. Anyway the chess master could have pulled the plug out of Deep Blue and settled the matter for good; I do not think that the computer could be so devious. So clearly it does not have a sense of good or evil either. Two more necessities to define true intelligence I would have thought. And list goes on…
This author’s view of the spirit/brain model is purely conceptual in that the driving force behind the brain’s, and therefore the body’s, activities is the spirit. We should not forget that in my earlier understandings the spirit is also the seat of the heart as well as the mind. I would not attempt to define exactly how the science of the mind works in my understanding since I am not sure that science can be applied to the human spirit. I find this by no means an embarrassing admission to make since, from what I have seen in the field so far, there appears to be a complete void of knowledgeable science in that area. In my humble and naïve opinion, no-one else has a real clue of mind science either despite some deep philosophising and the coining of some rather long pseudo-scientific terminology. The mechanism by which the spirit drives the brain is certain to be far more complex than any computer theorist or psychologist could likely imagine.
A computer software programme says more about the programmer that wrote it than the computer upon which it is running. The programmer can be very inventive as to how he achieves any particular computing objective. The only real restrictions he faces are those introduced by the computer hardware, e.g. one cannot write a tape backup system for a computer that has no tapes attached. In the same way, whilst a man’s spirit says a lot about his Creator, it also says a lot about itself through its uniqueness and its free will. No programmer ever wrote a program that was designed to do its own thing in the computer into which it was read. Our spirits are created in the image of our creator and therefore have his characteristics. A software program is not so created; it is written to perform a specific task and that only.
This following paper reflects my criticisms perfectly: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/msb.html. Whilst written in the mid-1990s, I have found this paper by Ned Block of New York University to be particularly informative and educational for my naïve understanding of the brain/mind sciences; hopefully the uninitiated reader will also. Bear in mind, however, that he very clearly dismisses my spiritual proposition out of hand. Once again unfortunately, in unerring and monotonous unison with the genre, the author descends to the ‘evolution and learning’ rationale between mind/brain interaction rather than the ‘creation by design’ view proposed by my own paper. I comment further on this later in this paper.
In analysing the Turing Test specifications, one could reasonably expect that a young child might fail due to his or her poor grasp of human language. Does that make the child unintelligent? Additionally the author correctly argues that the Turing Machine’s intelligence is only derived from that of the programmer that produced the software to run it. I think that again proves the point. The more I look at it, the Turing Test argument is naïve and fatally flawed and the writer of the above paper clearly agrees. Moreover he realises that there is more to the computer model than just raw intelligence in that he recognises ‘intentionality’ which is his term which roughly correlates to my thought of desire or motivation.
Interestingly he seems to be proposing that the mind thinks in symbols. This fits very well with scripture and the Bible Code, from which we know that pretty much everything is represented symbolically, such as the well known dreams of Pharaoh as interpreted by Joseph. A further example is the story in the bible surrounding Abraham’s wives which is explicitly identified as an allegory or symbolic narration in scripture:
24 Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. (Galatians 4)
For the interested reader the full analysis of this symbolic representation can be found at: http://www.truebiblecode.com/understanding210.html
Now that I think about it, I find myself wondering how much of this physical life is actually real compared with the spiritual life that we will all eventually inherit if we need to be spoon fed with symbols rather than the apparent physical reality. Presumably we would not be able to comprehend spiritual reality at this early stage in our spiritual development making this physical existence nothing more than a symbolic stepping stone towards that end. I think most bible scholars would agree that Scripture certainly seems to paint that picture (how’s that for a symbolic statement!). To further support this view the writer asks the reader to consider how much symbolism he uses and he hears in his everyday affairs. It is truly amazing how little of our day to day conversations contain no symbolism; it is the way we think and the way we see things in this life.
It seems to me that the so called cognitive sciences try far harder than any other field of scientific endeavour that I have come across to reject the concept of the human spirit and creation theory out of hand. Given that there is nothing on the physical earth more God-like than the human mind and brain, these pseudo scientists go to extraordinary lengths to mystify their trade with unbelievably contorted and fallacious argumentation that simply ignores the plain and simple truth. (Actually this behaviour parodies that of a mainstream church as much as anything overtly secular.) Since their's is the ‘science’ of the brain and human thought this seems to me a clear case of ‘the lady protesting too much’. It is almost as if they are panicking at the prospect that there might actually be a God. The more I have studied this topic in my naïve (but not stupid) way the more confirmed have I become in my faith. I thank you guys for your obviously unintended assistance in this! The following essay is quite definitive in explaining how the brain sciences have rejected the concept of spirit entirely out of hand and with little more than a ‘religious’ pretext in their quest for a ‘scientific’ explanation of the mind/brain organism (check out bullet 3): http://www.massline.org/Philosophy/ScottH/mindsoft.htm.
The essayist goes so far as to describe the Christian God as a ‘chimera’. In so doing he has completely rejected his own humanity without even realising it. If the writer of that paper is to be believed then he clearly thinks of himself as a robot . Well I’m NOT!!!!! Interesting that the writer denies the existence of God and in the very next sentence accepts that evil exists. What a very strange thing to do; presumably he does not want to appear to the casual reader to be an immoral atheist? Needless to say he does not bother to define what evil actually is! Oh, and by the way, just how our atheistic friends believe that the purely random process of evolution would build a conscience in the human mind on the basis of survival of the fittest is completely beyond me. I hope one of you will contact me with the explanation; it should make interesting reading!
At least the writer strenuously defends the computer hardware/software analogy of the mind/brain combination although his ‘physicalisation’ of software goes a step too far for my spiritual argumentation. He does not appear to address the concept of original human thought in his software analogy; where does he imagine this comes from in his physical model of software? In the computer model of the brain, it seems that scientists only consider the mechanics of the computer itself; they do not appear to include what goes on outside the computer. After all someone wrote the software and designed the hardware. The bigger picture needs paralleling here not just the computer science. How can the mechanics alone arrive at a concept of a computer being self-aware and asking questions and having emotions and desires and a conscience? Only a spiritual view can provide cogent answers. This point of conscience is a particularly powerful one in that a computer can only act on the basis of the software running on it and the inputs that it is given thus making the outcome totally predictable. Not so with the human mind. A computer will always follow its ‘conscience’ since that is what it is programmed to do. A human's mind may (and often does) knowingly go against his conscience and therefore not do what he is programmed to do. This is what free will is all about. We have an in-built program that we often ignore or deliberately disobey. The human mind can make a free and conscious decision to do right or wrong given any one set of circumstances at any one particular time. So whilst the mind’s relationship to the physical brain is analogous as software is to the computer hardware, it is also different in that it is able (and does frequently) make decisions that would be recognised as running outside the normal operational parameters of computer software in this respect. This surely is how ‘evil’ is defined. So how the writer can mention evil in his context in which it is not allowed to exist needs some considerable explanation (and no doubt some very long pseudo-scientific words). I apologise to the reader for my cynicism in this but I have really despaired at what I have been reading over the last few weeks in this field of so called human endeavour.
So I conclude this iconoclastic section by re-stating the main assertion of this paper that the human spirit contains more functionality compared with its analogous software and helps to demonstrate further that the brain is relegated to much more of a purely physical entity than many writers on the subject would allow. The spirit provides the consciousness; the brain merely the tool by which the spirit drives its body. Certainly there are the reflex body functions such as temperature control. These are akin to the firmware in a computer and therefore are under the automatic control of the brain since no conscious decision-making is required for these from the human spirit possessing the body. This in no way compromises the overall argumentation but helps to expand upon the similarities between the mind/brain and software/hardware analogues in a somewhat broader sense.
It is probably appropriate to start by looking at the functions of the brain at a high level to determine what capability science and pseudo-science has thus far attributed to the various elements of the brain structure. Since the writer is a complete novice in this topic area I would not attempt to disprove any of the accumulated knowledge from the past century or so but intend to examine how these functions stem from the spirit’s use of the brain over which it is able to exercise control, i.e. in the same way that a software programme exercises control over the various elements of the computer’s hardware.
Established thinking considers that Evolution was responsible for building the human brain in three stages: reptilian, mammalian and human. Since the writer clearly believes in divine creation rather than evolution these descriptions would certainly apply to how the human brain is constructed rather than how it developed. I would have to concede, however, that God may have wanted to go through the various design phases in building up the total capability of the human brain. However this latter concession would be a specific intelligent, directed and discrete engineering design process rather than the continuous development over time of a purely random process. Actually the more the writer thinks about this doesn’t the theory of evolution sound frankly daft and merely a subterfuge by those who wish to deny their creator? Their time will come God help them!
The oldest and most primitive part is the reptile brain, the brain stem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_stem. It controls behaviour related to our survival such as sexual desire, the search for food and the aggression responses of “fight-or-flight”. It is instinctive and automatic. Territory is acquired by force and defended. Might is right. There are no emotions. This is a cold-blooded essence of reptile brains, which forms this innermost part of our brain. This may well be an area of the brain that does not need any direct higher level control from the spirit since it seems merely to manage basic body functions. Perhaps it contains its own computer firmware or operating system which contains the same elements of automatic control from one person’s brain to the next regardless of the nature of the spirit inhabiting the soul. The spirit through the conscience may only control the extent to which the brain stem function vies against the higher level moral functions delivered via the other higher level elements of the brain. Mammals added a new outer shell to the reptile brain called the limbic system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbic_system.
The limbic system enables:
Mammals are more consciously aware of themselves in relation to the environment and less rigidly controlled by instincts than their reptilian counterparts. This part of the brain caters for the human spirit’s desires and emotions in terms of how these get translated into our behavioural patterns under varied circumstances. This could perhaps be where the spiritual heart resides which also suggests that mammalian species, lower than mankind, have the heart component of the spirit. We will discuss animal spirits later in this paper.
The mammalian brain ‘became’ the human brain by adding the massive grey matter or neocortex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocortex) which covers most of the older brain and amounts to about 85 per cent of the human brain mass. This massive addition consists mostly of two hemispheres and became an effective thinking and learning machine, which could also deal with complex social emotions like morality, trust and behavioural control via the prefrontal cortex - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_cortex. This grey matter allows us to think, speak and perceive via the cerebral cortex - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_cortex. The cerebral cortex sounds like the brain part occupied by the spiritual mind. The frontal lobe provides the executive functions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobe which also make us socially responsible and keep us from doing inappropriate things; otherwise, we would not work, respect other people and obey company policies. This sounds like the processing area required by our spiritual conscience, which appears to work in conjunction with our spiritual hearts resident in the mammalian limbic system. So our higher function human conscience works with our lower function mammalian heart. These three structures are highly interconnected and cause complex human behaviour to be manifest from the instructions provided by the spiritual heart/mind/conscience (software) to the brain (processor) into the manifold physical input/output devices which are represented by our bodily actions, emotional responses and communications with our fellow beings.
The brain is also divided into the Left and Right Hemispheres which appear to provide two differing processor platforms inside the brain. Whilst we should take some care in differentiating the functions of the two hemispheres (since a damaged cortex can switch function between the two) it generally appears that the right and left halves of the human brain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_hemispheres) are different in how they communicate with the spirit. The left hemisphere communicates by using words, has highly developed verbal abilities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area), is logical and analytical and therefore, arguably, is driven directly by the spiritual mind. The right hemisphere communicates using images, is holistic, intuitive and imaginative, concerned with emotions and feelings and therefore, by the same token, could be argued to be driven directly by the spiritual heart. So it would appear that the brain is split into a dual processor configuration which caters for the two spiritual software programmes of heart and mind. The writer finds that to be an interesting coincidence if it was not actually part of God’s design in enabling the human spirit to successfully reside in the human body. Well perhaps it is no coincidence since God gives us a clue in the Old Testament Hebrew. The Hebrew word for heart is 'labe' (lamed beth) whilst the Hebrew word for mind is 'bal' (beth lamed). Both words contain only two Hebrew consonents and those two letters are reversed between the two main spiritual elements. Is this God confirming what this paper has already conjectured, that the two elements sit on opposite sides of the brain each in its own of the two hemispheres? Well, needless to say this has subsequently proven to be an over-simplification. Having carried out further research on the subject, it now appears that the mind/heart combination is somewhat spread over the two hemispheres. This view is now covered in the later paper on this site: The Right Hand of God.
Another noteworthy fact within the Old Testament Hebrew is that whilst the heart (labe) is used frequently within the Old Testament, the word for mind (bal) only appears once throughout the whole of the Old Testament in Daniel:
14 Consequently the king, as soon as he heard the word, it was very displeasing to him, and toward Daniel he set [his] mind (bal) in order to rescue him; and till the setting of the sun he kept on striving to deliver him. (Daniel 6)
So this very verse that is the only Old Testament verse to contain the Hebrew word for 'mind' is telling us that the king was emotionally effected by his displeasure (in his heart) and it was his heart that set his mind to logically plan Daniel's rescue. This graphically demonstrates the relationship between heart and mind. It is the heart that takes precedence over the mind and sets the goals for the mind to achieve through logical thought and consequent action. So perhaps the comparative frequency of the Hebrew word for 'heart' over 'mind' in the Old Testament scriptures is God's way of telling us that the heart transcends the mind. Also as we saw above the spiritual heart would appear to be on the right hand side of the brain; numerous biblical scriptures dictate that the right side of God takes precedence over the left:
19 So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God. (Mark 16)
69 Hereafter shall the Son of man sit on the right hand of the power of God. (Luke 22)
31 Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins. (Acts 5)
Also the majority of human beings are right-handed are they not? I wonder why that would be? Could this be another example of man's being created in God's image? [As a complete aside, in the early years of my IT career as a computer programmer, one of the computer languages that I used extensively was IBM 360/370 Basic Assembler Language. Yes you got it, BAL (Old Testament Hebrew for 'mind'). Is this yet another cryptic clue from our God that our computer analogy of the brain/spirit model presented in this paper has his blessing?]
The right hemisphere (spiritual heart) links the older mammalian brain using the images, which in turn is linked to the primitive reptilian brain. Human emotional responses depend on this link and can be more powerful than any attempts at action by our cerebral self control. The two hemispheres process the same data differently - left brain processes in a linear, or sequential manner, the right brain processes data simultaneously, or in parallel. The right brain (spiritual heart) does not provide explanations to our conscious (spiritual) mind. We have to use the left brain (spiritual mind) for the interpretation of our beliefs, decisions and the provision of cogent explanations for what comes forth from our spiritual heart. I often find myself providing excellent post factum reasoning for my decisions and actions without any understanding of the real cause of them except that it felt right at the time. Clearly a case of my (spiritual) heart ruling my (spiritual) mind which I believe is God’s way. Whilst we are logical creatures, love should rule our every action.
Another factor to consider is how effective is our verbal communication with other people. This relies on the left brain (spiritual mind) to exchange knowledge and experience. Is this a reason for popular believe that words account only for 7% of communication (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Mehrabian)? It would appear that the right brain (spiritual heart) may contribute more through non-verbal communication. Given that it is the spiritual heart that appears to be the main communications device through which the heavenly host keep in accurate touch with mankind, it does not seem inconceivable that this is also the part of man’s spirit that, albeit via a relatively intangible mechanism, is more attuned to communication with our own kind than we can at first perceive.
Let us now consider controlled versus automatic behaviour which would equate to a single threaded software program and the brain's operating software. We have two process systems in the mind – controlled and automatic. Most mental processes happen automatically, without need for conscious attention or control – breathing, digesting, the heart pumping blood around the body. These are likely to equate to the firmware in our physical brains since it is a requirement of the body not of the spirit. We can liken this firmware to the standard operating software of the computer hardware component whereas it is the components of the spirit that provide the application software. The operating software enables the computer/body to maintain its necessary core physical/bodily functions whereas the application (spirit) instructs the hardware/body as to what higher level tasks it is to carry out.
Where Does the Spirit Reside in the Human Body and When and How does it Get There?
Our model of the soul does not yet explicitly locate the spirit within the human body. To the writer’s mind it seems that one’s very being is actually in the head since it is the head that contains the brain and the means of communication with the outside world and controls the rest of the body via the central nervous system. So it would seem reasonable to conclude that the spirit is actually somehow contained within the brain itself. In terms of the computer model this is reasonable since computer software, whilst originating from an external source to the computer hardware, does indeed reside within the memory of the computer hardware once operational to make it accessible to the computer’s central processing unit.
The rest of our bodies other than the head ‘merely’ enable us to move around our four dimensional world, carry out physical tasks within it and provides a means by which we can physically maintain our brains and bodies by taking on board the necessary nutrients for life. If we think of the spirit as being the driver, of the vehicle that is our human body, then we arrive at the analogy that the brain is akin to the vehicle’s cockpit or driving seat with direct access (via the central nervous system) to all the controls to steer the vehicle.
As an aside, this raises a thought in my mind that I have never really considered before; something I am sure that most of us take for granted. The exploits of the likes of Uri Geller raise the question as to whether the mind can move matter. Whilst I am not qualified to comment on Mr Geller’s work, the mind does have real power over matter. I merely have think that I want to throw a ball and I can throw that ball merely by willing my arm to do so. This is a little like Newton discovering gravity by watching a falling apple. The world’s population took falling to earth for granted little knowing that Newton’s reflecting upon it would lead to one of the greatest discoveries of mankind. Perhaps our ability to will our bodies to take physical action should similarly not be so taken for granted and we should all reflect a little further on the implications? From consideration of this ability of a man's mind's control over his body and his physical environment, it then becomes easier to comprehend the plausibility of God's spirit being capable of creating His own body and, indeed, the whole of physical creation.
To return to the main theme, a further consideration is that we can lose any number of limbs and yet retain our souls. Serious damage to any of the key organs in our trunks may cause death but today many of these may be replaced by man-made functional replicas and will keep our souls intact. A serious injury to the head, however, is unlikely to retain a viable soul. This adds further weight to the notion that the spirit is actually located in the brain.
To conclude that the spirit is in the brain could lead us to consider that the spirit is a physical entity so let us go find one in a live human subject! However I think the computer analogy has even more to teach us about the nature of the spirit. The software resident in a computer is not three dimensional of itself but nonetheless does exist in the magnetic settings of the appropriate region of the computer’s memory store. So by suggesting that the spirit is in the brain we really mean that the spirit has effected the main operational settings of the brain and will thereon dictate the detailed conscious workings of the brain. A ‘hunt for the spirit’ will therefore likely prove quite fruitless unless we are able to predict its ‘magnetic signature’ in a similar manner to antivirus software seeking out its prey. Thinking about it, one could argue that antivirus software would equate to another (detective) spirit if one were to take the computer analogy to its full conclusion! So one would set a spirit to catch a spirit. I do not think that God has given us that capability since we would be sure to abuse it.
In consideration of when the spirit of a man gets into his brain it is worth revisiting how God created Adam:
7 And Jehovah God proceeded to form the man out of dust from the ground and to blow into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man came to be a living soul. (Genesis 2)
In keeping with the above scripture, the current Lords’ Witnesses’ (LW) understanding is that God’s breath of life enters the Adamic human foetus and becomes active at twenty weeks after conception when the two sides of the brain are connected to enable a viable soul to exist: http://www.truebiblecode.com/joining.html#J13.
After 3.5 weeks the brain has been initially formed in the foetus but will continue development right through pregnancy until after birth: http://www.hon.ch/Dossier/MotherChild/postnatal/brain_dev.html
From this it is quite reasonable to accept that the LW understanding of the spirit entering the foetus at twenty weeks is correct since the brain may well be in a state of readiness to accept the nascent spirit into its early build condition. In considering the computer model further one can think of the analogy of the configuration software used to build the fully operational computing platform. The configuring software is only invoked at the operational build stage of the computer. Thereafter it becomes redundant in favour of the application software running on the fully configured operational computer. In this analogy the nascent spirit provides the configuring capability tailoring the brain’s connections according to its own innate specifications, i.e. the spirit ensures a bespoke interface to the brain of its own predilections. This activity would likely be a semi or fully sub-conscious process on the part of the spirit prior to its being mature enough to start taking on the full spectrum of human conscious activity. Typically the average human being cannot consciously recall memories much prior to the age of three or thereabouts so this profile of early spiritual influence over its host brain does seem to fit.
As to how the spirit enters the human brain in the first place we need to return to our old friend the spiritual matrix concept that was developed in my previous ‘Mind, Heart and Spirit' understanding: http://jewishlordswitness.com/id6.html. Now in that paper we developed the notion that the spiritual heart is man’s interface into the spiritual matrix. However if we are now arguing that the spirit does not enter the human brain until twenty weeks after conception then what is the mechanism by which the spirit can enter the brain? Clearly the spiritual heart is not yet in place to fulfil a connection to the matrix. So again we consider the computer model to provide a further analogy. In the same way that the nascent spirit can fulfil the purpose of configuring the brain as a one-time activity, so it would seem not unreasonable that some form of hard-wired spiritual bootstrap program is physically in-built into the partially developed brain. This would provide the initial interface to enable the human spirit to be downloaded from the matrix into the foetal brain. This would be an involuntary act on the part of the foetus’ brain which would take a passive role in the process thus equating the download to ‘blowing into the nostrils’. From that point on the spiritual heart is in place to provide the more permanent and mature link into the matrix thereby making the bootstrap redundant.
A Quick Reprise of the Key Elements of the MHS Paper
It is worth reminding ourselves of the relevant points from my earlier paper:
1. The heart is the seat of emotions and desire.
2. The mind facilitates logical thought processes.
3. The spirit comprises heart and mind.
4. The heart is the interface through which spirit creatures can communicate with man
5. Scripture identifies all the important emotions and desires of man as defined through the heart condition.
6. Memory is contained within the heart and is accessed by the mind.
7. The conscience is a further component of the heart which marks the spirit for judgement.
So from this we are now proposing that since the spirit (a.k.a. software of the brain) provides the logic, memory, conscience, emotions and desires of its owner, it therefore controls the way the brain (and therefore ultimately the whole soul comprising spirit and body) interacts with its environment, its fellow beings and the circumstances in which it finds itself. It provides the driving force behind acting out the soul’s plan for life.
Brain is Hardware; Mind is Software
If my ‘Mind, Heart, Spirit’ paper is even half-correct then it effectively relegates the physical human brain to little more than an (admittedly complex) automated control centre managed by the human spirit inhabiting it. There are numerous well-documented attempts on record to try to liken the brain to computer hardware and the mind to computer software which effectively gives instructions to the hardware as to what actions to take. This provides an initially attractive idea to the writer by switching the total concept of the spirit (comprising heart and conscience as well as mind) into the role of the software.
I enter this arena with some trepidation since I claim zero knowledge in the brain/mind sciences although my Masters degree in computer science should enable me to carry through the computer analogy with some confidence. Also it is likely that this will be my first theologically based paper that contains relatively few biblical references, whilst relying heavily on those scriptures already identified in the ‘Mind, Heart, Spirit’ paper http://jewishlordswitness.com/id6.html. This is clearly yet another significant voyage of discovery for the writer. I pray that the Holy Spirit, as always, will come to my rescue to ensure yet more of the true nature of God’s creation is revealed to us to help us prepare our way to his Kingdom.
This paper is in its original form as presented as an offering to the Lords' Witnesses. Some elements of it have been incorporated into a confirmed doctrinal understanding on the official web-site of the Lords' Witnesses at: http://www.truebiblecode.com/understanding257.html.
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To Return With Honour
by Joan C.
The moon laid down a shining path of silver leading back to Spain as the cutter Josephina drew away from the shore. Horatio leaned against the rail and watched as the land first became a shadow, then a thin misty line on the far horizon, and then slowly vanished into darkness, leaving only the phosphorescent wake like a trail of dreams. Horatio sighed and straightened, uncertain in his emotions. Freedom -- yes, he had craved it, had nearly died to insure that his men would gain it. But his gaoler had opened the door willingly; indeed, had helped his caged birds flee at no small risk to himself. Don Alfredo de Massaredo had been everything a gentleman of honour could be, and more. Horatio would miss him. He could no longer see the land, but he remained looking out across the waters, wondering where the wind would carry him now.
Archie Kennedy came from the tiny cabin he and Horatio would share for however long they remained on board the Josephina. He saw Horatio standing by the rail and hesitated a moment, uncertain that he would be welcome company. Freedom did strange things to a man's mind, Archie thought. It made one feel very small, to have the whole wide world to choose from -- like a starving man suddenly seated at a banquet table. So many choices, and unable to decide which course to take. Paralyzing, really. He wondered if Horatio could understand that. Deliberately scuffing his feet across the deck to warn Horatio he was approaching, Archie stood beside his friend.
"We really are free," he said, unable to suppress his wonder at the word. He had been in one prison or another for the past three years; had gone into captivity as a boy, and was now returning as a man. Returning to what? he wondered.
"Are we?" Horatio sighed and turned to look at Archie. "We are British Naval officers on board a Spanish ship -- one smuggling contraband, yet. That does not seem to me to define freedom."
"Better than a cell, or a cave." He drew a deep breath of sea air.
Horatio turned, his dark eyes unreadable in the dim light. "I will not feel free until I am on the Indy. There is too much I cannot see, too much that is unknown. And I am responsible for the men, still."
Archie frowned. "What do you think will happen?"
"I don't know." He sighed and tried to suppress a yawn.
Archie cast him a sidelong glance. The imprisonment in Spain had been harder on Horatio than he would admit and he looked thin and exhausted. "I don't suppose anything will happen tonight, Horatio. Go to bed before you drop overboard."
Horatio opened his mouth to argue, then recognizing the truth in Archie's words nodded. "Are you coming down?"
"No. I thought I'd stay up here a bit longer. Savor the moment, as it were."
"Goodnight, Archie." Horatio turned and went belowdecks. The cutter was so small that there was only a thin screened partition between the officers' quarters and those of the sailors. The Josephina was well crewed, and the addition of nine extra men and two officers was straining her to the seams. And in the cargo hold were fifty barrels of contraband liquor, bound for the wine cellars of England. Close quarters, indeed. He could understand Archie's preference for the deck; but at the moment he was so weary, he could have slept on a "parrot's perch," as Kitty Cobham had once called the swinging cots on the Indefatigable.
He was about to open the partition when the captain of the Josephina called his name. Captain Eduardo Cortes was a tall, rather stout gentleman whose only concession to his rank was a tarnished silver cockade fastened haphazardly to his round hat. "Ah, Senor Hornblower, you and your men are settled, then?"
"Yes, sir. Thank you."
"Bueno. Will you join me in a glass of wine before you retire?"
Horatio thought longingly of his hammock, and then dismissed it. Common courtesy alone would require him to join his host, and he did have some questions about their voyage that needed to be addressed. He nodded. "It would be an honour, sir." He followed the captain to his tiny cabin, scarcely large enough to hold a small table, two chairs, and a hammock. It reminded him of his cabin on the Caroline, only this one did not smell of cow dung.
Cortes poured two mugs of wine. "My apologies for such a poor service. But crystal is not a wise choice on these seas. Perhaps the wine will compensate for it." He raised his mug to Horatio. "To your liberty, Senor Hornblower."
"Thank you, sir. And to fair winds and smooth sailing." He sipped his wine. It was a pleasant vintage. "One of Don Massaredo's wines?" he asked.
"Si." He seated himself across the table from Horatio and fixed him with a frank, curious gaze. "I have known Don Massaredo for many years, senor. And I have never seen him so concerned for the welfare of another, as he is for yours."
Horatio was powerless to control the blush heating his cheekbones. "The Don is very kind, sir. I merely honoured my parole."
Cortes chuckled. "Yes, I am certain that is all you did, senor." He steepled his fingers. "And I imagine you must have some questions you wish to pose."
"Y-yes, sir." He tried to order his thoughts, to frame his queries in such a way as to not insult his host, who though benevolent, was still England's enemy. "Sir, I -- my men -- we wish nothing more than to return to our ship, but how that is to be done ..."
"Ah, indeed." Cortes nodded sagely. "To sail to England would seem to be out of the question. My poor Josephina would fare most poorly against one of your warships. Is that what you are thinking?"
Hornblower smiled. "That thought had occurred to me, sir."
"What would you do, were the decision yours?"
It was not what Horatio had been expecting, and it was a few moments before his tired brain could come up with a logical reply. "I should sail to the nearest neutral port, sir. And since we are heading south, I would guess that it would be somewhere in Portugal."
Cortes smiled. "That is possible." He watched as Hornblower passed a hand over his forehead. It was not fair to bedevil the lad with questions when he was exhausted. In truth, Cortes had already made his plans for the voyage, but Massaredo had spoken so highly of this young man's qualities, that he could not resist putting him to the test. "You are weary, sir. My apologies for not seeing that earlier."
"Thank you, sir. The wine was excellent."
He had scarcely sipped it, Cortes noted. But instead of insult, he felt pity. "I bid you good night, Mr. Hornblower. The dawn will come before we know it."
Horatio nodded, stumbled his way to the tiny cabin he shared with Archie, and collapsed into his hammock with all the elegance of a limp rag.
On the other side of the screened partition, Styles lay awake. Nearby, he could hear Oldroyd snoring, but Matthews was quiet, and most likely as wakeful as he. "Oi, Matty!" Styles whispered. "You awake, mate?"
"Aye, I reckon I am, now."
Styles could hear the humour in his voice, and it brought forth an answering grin. "Think we'll make it home this time?"
"Mr. Hornblower will see to it, won't he?"
"We're not 'ome, yet," Styles replied, his tone grim.
"Yer worryin' fer naught." Matthews punched his hard pillow into a more forgiving shape. "G'night, mate." And that was that, Styles thought. Only it wasn't, and wouldn't be until he set foot on the bloody Indy.
Oporto. White houses with red tile roofs, a neat harbour bustling with activity, vineyards in green and gold tiers on the hillsides, and on this day glittering beneath a perfect blue sky. Paradise. Archie grinned at Horatio as the Josephina made her way into the port. Today was the first day that he felt his world righted from the canted and crazed plane it had existed on since the day he was fished unconscious from the sea. "Have you ever seen anything like it, Horatio?"
"What?" Horatio said absently. He had been studying the ships at anchor, trying to find one flying a broad pendant, or at the very least the British flag. They were mostly merchant vessels, taking on the cargo that would bring them gold from ports around the world. A ship flying the stars and stripes of the American colonies met his eye. A pretty flag. He had never met an American, despite being born on that infamous day they had declared their independence. She was a vessel to match her flag -- sturdy, yet sleek, with a delicacy to her lines that was almost feminine. He shielded his eyes and tried to make out her name. Skylark.
"Horatio!" Archie jogged his elbow.
"Wherever you are, it isn't on the deck of the Josephina," Archie commented.
Horatio sighed and straightened away from the rail. "No. Captain Cortes can take us no farther, and I was hoping to find a ship -- preferably British."
Archie looked at the pennants on display in the harbour. Everything from German and Dutch to Spanish and Italian, but not British. "It's a long way to England, Horatio. And the French and Spanish fleets are prowling about."
"I know." He turned his gaze back to the Skylark. "I wonder where she's bound?"
"The American? She's a real beauty, that one. But it wasn't that long ago that we were at each other's throats. Think she'd take on nine British seamen and two officers in His Majesty's Navy?"
Horatio did not have time to answer. Captain Cortes came up on deck to order the Josephina to drop anchor. For a few minutes, the Josephina was a welter of activity as the sails were furled, and hands scrambled to order cables and lines. The Josephina glided to a graceful halt, and sat rocking gently on the waters of Oporto harbour. When he was satisfied that all was as it should be, Cortes approached Hornblower and Kennedy.
"Well, gentlemen. Our voyage together is at an end."
Horatio held out his hand. "Sir, how can we thank you?"
"That will not be necessary. It was a favor to my old friend, Don Massaredo. Over the years, I have accumulated many such debts to him. It is only right that I be able to repay them."
Horatio did not know how to reply. He cleared his throat. "I consider him a friend as well, sir. And you."
"Then when we meet on the seas, you will not intercept my cargo?" Cortes asked, his eyes glinting.
"What cargo?" Horatio asked, all innocence.
Cortes clapped him on the shoulder. "I will ready the ship's boat for you, if you wish to go ashore to pursue arrangements to return to England."
"Thank you, sir." He turned to Archie. "Well, shall we see if we can beg our way aboard a ship?"
They descended from the Josephina to the boat, and the coxswain headed towards the shore. An hour later, after a visit to the port officials and customs house, Horatio and Archie were back in the ship's boat being rowed out to the American sloop. Luck was with them. Despite the rather cool relations between the two countries, the Skylark was bound for England.
As they came nearer, Horatio's eyes drank in every detail of the Skylark. If the Americans were turning out ships like this, then they were going to be a force to be reckoned with in the future. The Skylark was a sloop, carrying twelve guns and stern and bow chasers. Her masts were raked and her brightwork shone newly polished and untarnished by salt and sea air. Every detail of her appearance was a delight to his seaman's eye, and he felt envious of the man who had her command.
"What would you give for a ship like that?" Archie asked, seeming to read Horatio's thoughts.
Horatio smiled. "Someday, Archie. Someday. But right now, all I want is to get all of us back safely to the Indy." He shaded his eyes against the sun as the Skylark's sides loomed above them. "Ahoy, there!" he called.
"Boat ahoy!" An answering hail came from the deck of the Skylark.
"I am Lieutenant Horatio Hornblower of His Majesty's Navy. Is your captain aboard?"
"Aye, he is. What's your business with him?"
"Permission to come aboard and speak to him."
A hesitation of a moment, then a reply. "Come aboard."
The boat came alongside the entry port, and Horatio was up the ladder followed closely by Archie. The were greeted by an officer wearing a uniform not dissimilar to their own -- navy jacket with brass buttons and white duck trousers. The face above the white stock was young, and the dark eyes wore an expression of frank curiosity. "I am Lieutenant Ross Carlyle. Welcome to Skylark, Mr. Hornblower." He offered his hand.
As always, when faced with an open greeting Horatio felt his own reserve acutely. He took Carlyle's hand firmly but cautiously. He introduced Archie and then asked to meet the Skylark's captain. "It is a matter of some urgency, Mr. Carlyle," he explained.
Carlyle nodded and turned to the tall, slender man who had come to his side. He wore a dark blue coat trimmed with with gold braid. A captain's epaulette glittered on his shoulder. His red hair was tied back in a queue and his grey eyes were slightly narrowed as he appraised Hornblower. "I am Captain Nicholas Campion. You require some assistance?"
Horatio drew in a breath. "Sir, I am Lieutenant Horatio Hornblower, late of His Majesty's ship Indefatigable and this is Midshipman Archie Kennedy, of the same."
"Late of?" Campion's sandy brows rose, and Horatio flushed under that keen regard. Campion's thoughts were quite clear. They could be anything -- deserters, mutineers, God knows he and Archie scarcely looked like the officers they claimed to be. "Sir, if I may explain?"
"Please," Campion drawled. "But let us do so in my cabin." He nodded to Lieutenant Carlyle and they followed him from the deck to the great cabin of the Skylark.
The Captain's quarters were simply furnished, and plain. The walls were painted eggshell, the planking on the decks was unfinished, and there was no mistaking the presence of the twin twelve pounders which occupied a good deal of the Captain's personal space. To Horatio, it felt like home.
Campion offered them ale, which they both refused, and then water, which they accepted gladly knowing that as long as the Skylark was in port, it would be fresh. When they had settled, Campion fixed them with his sharp gaze. "What can I do for you, Mr. Hornblower?"
"Sir, Mr. Kennedy, myself, and nine seamen from the Indefatigable have been recently released from a Spanish prison in El Ferrol. We have been given passage to Oporto on the Josephina -- the cutter that entered the port this morning. However, she can carry us no farther. I was hoping that perhaps you might be able to take us to England."
"If I were going to England," Campion said quietly. "You seem to assume that I am."
"The customs agent on shore informed me that you are sailing for London later today."
Campion's smile was slightly strained. "Damned obliging of the fellow to make so free with my plans. However, as you can see, the Skylark is not a large ship. Berthing might be difficult."
"Sir, after spending six months in prison, I assure you, even cramped quarters will seem a palace. And the men with me are all prime hands eager to work off their inactivity."
Campion looked from Hornblower's intent, serious face, to Kennedy's. He had remained quiet through the interview, deferring to Hornblower's more forceful presence. He was only a midshipman, of course, and Hornblower a commissioned officer, but there was more to their story, of that he was certain. He clasped his hands in front of him on the desk. "Very well. Nine seamen, and you two. With the autumn storms coming up, I suppose I might be grateful for the extra help." He rose and extended his hand to Hornblower. "Welcome aboard, Lieutenant Hornblower, Mr. Kennedy. We weigh anchor at four."
Horatio returned the handshake firmly. "Thank you, sir. You won't regret it."
"We shall see, Mr. Hornblower."
Apprehension coursed through Horatio. But he could not refuse this passage. It might be their last chance for weeks to return to England and the Indy, and he could not let it pass. "I will have our dunnage and the men sent over as soon as possible, Captain."
"Dunnage? I thought you had been in prison, Mr. Hornblower?" He watched as a blush coloured Hornblower's cheekbones.
"Sir, I -- we, were serving out our parole, given to the commandante of the prison in El Ferrol."
"Oh?" Campion's brows rose. "I can see that if nothing else, you will earn your passage by telling me this story over dinner, Lieutenant. But for now, you had better move things along on the Josephina. Time and tide wait for no man."
Campion watched as the two Englishmen left the Skylark. Carlyle came to his side. "Sir, you're taking them on?"
"What about the French, sir?" Carlyle asked doubtfully.
"That is a question, isn't it?" Campion gnawed at his cheek. "A risk, certainly. But I have a curiosity about Mr. Hornblower, and since we have no quarrel with England at the moment, there is no reason on earth why we should not extend this courtesy, the French be damned. Their new government is nothing more than a rabble despite their claims of liberty."
"And the cargo, sir?"
That innocent question caused a flush of anger to rise in Campion's face. "That cargo, Lieutenant, is confidential, and you would do well to remember it, lest you find yourself confined to quarters for the duration of this voyage. Is that clear?"
"Aye, aye. Sir." Carlyle's eyes were wide in his pale face. Captain Campion's temper was legend; it burned to match his hair, and though controlled by an iron will, Carlyle had seen it often enough to give him pause. "I beg your pardon, sir."
"Be wary, Carlyle. We cannot afford carelessness. Literally."
"Aye, aye, sir."
"Make certain that we have hammocks enough for our guests. Nine men and two officers. You and Meade will have to share a berth. And have the cook prepare a decent meal. Lamb, I think. We'll be on sea rations soon enough. Then double check the security on the cargo hold and make the usual preparations to weigh anchor."
"Aye, aye, sir." Carlyle left the quarter-deck, and Nicholas Campion stared out over the waters towards the cutter Josephina. *Damn the French, damn the politicians, and damn me, for agreeing to take on Hornblower and the Indefatigables.* He could hear his father, Admiral Thomas Campion, USN, cursing him for inheriting his mother's red hair and all the emotional baggage it implied. Campion smiled then, and shrugged. Something about Hornblower suggested that it would not be a dull voyage.
Styles scowled at the glistening sides of the Skylark's hull as they drew closer. Yanks, he thought. He'd known a few. Bloody arrogant bastards. And none o'them too charitable towards His Majesty's Navy. You could never tell about former enemies ... they'd as lief turn coats as do you a favor. Still, orders was orders, and when Mr. Hornblower gave 'em, you obeyed. 'Twasn't like the lad weren't taking the same risks ... He had stood up in front of them on the Josephina, looking as severe as Capn' Pellew, and said plain like, what he expected of them. "We're not goin' aboard as guests, men, but as seamen willin' ta lend a hand where needed." Same for him and Mr. Kennedy, too. What could they do but knuckle their foreheads and say 'Aye, aye, sir?' Styles sighed heavily as the boat glided towards the Skylark.
"She's a right beauty, that one." Matthews observed. "Bet she sails smooth as butter."
"Aye," Styled agreed dourly. "But I don't like the idea of servin' in the bloody Yank navy."
Matthews chuckled. "Ye don't like the idea of servin' in King George's neither, mate."
"Yeah, but I bloody know who's goin'ta be shootin' at me," Styles whispered. They were alongside the Skylark now, the boat drawn up close to the entry port. "Well mates, in fer a penny, or in fer a pound." He reached up and began the climb to the deck.
Horatio stood on the deck of the Skylark with Archie, waiting for the men to ascend the ladder. He knew what they were saying, and he could not blame them for their doubts, for they were his as well. He disliked being beholden to any man; having to bend in supplication. But he could not allow his pride to stand in the way of his crew's welfare, and his own feelings carried no weight when weighed in that balance.
At last, all nine Indefatigables formed up. Only nine, Horatio thought bitterly, feeling again the shock of young Dawlish's murder by Etienne DeVergesse. They had been eleven, now two were dead. The only thing that kept him from utter despair was Archie's presence at his side -- a near miraculous resurrection. He drew in a breath and straightened his shoulders as Captain Campion approached.
"Sir, these are my men."
He said it with pride. Campion appraised the group of British sailors. They looked like any others, he thought, and then in a quick reassessment amended his impression. Physically, they seemed like the usual rough customers, but they stood with pride, their eyes on Hornblower and Kennedy. Their deference was not due to fear, or mere duty, it was due to the respect they bore for the young men who were their officers. And that was rare indeed. Campion touched the brim of his cocked hat.
"Welcome to the Skylark. Mr. Hornblower tells me that you are willing to work. And I have work for you to do." He allowed a grin to touch his mouth. "Our voyage to England is likely to be arduous, and perhaps dangerous. If you are called on to fight, I will expect you to obey my orders as if they were issued by your illustrious Captain Pellew." He caught Hornblower's start of surprise and suppressed a chuckle. "Yes, his reputation precedes him. Will you do this?"
The men's eyes went to Hornblower and only when he nodded his assent did they murmur in unison, "Aye, aye, sir."
"Good. I regret that you will be in close quarters below decks. The Bosun will acquaint you with the watches and mess arrangements, so that we will not be tripping over each other night and day. You may dismiss your men, Mr. Hornblower. As soon as they are settled, we will weigh anchor."
Horatio nodded. "Aye, aye, sir." The amusement he saw in Campion's eyes was unexpected and welcome. Perhaps his decision was a wise one, after all. He turned to Archie. "Well, shall we move our dunnage below?"
Archie nodded, watching Campion's form as he ascended to the quarter-deck. "I like him, Horatio."
"Yes, so do I. I only hope we can trust him as well."
"Has anything happened to tell you otherwise?" Archie asked in faint alarm.
"No," Horatio shook his head. "It is just my nature to doubt, Archie. Still ..."
"Did you ever wonder what an American sloop of war is ferrying to London?"
And because he had not, Archie did not reply immediately. "Why don't you ask?" he finally said.
Horatio grinned. "Oh, yes. I'm sure Captain Campion will disclose that!" He shouldered his pack and followed Lieutenant Carlyle down the companionway to the cabin he and Archie would share.
As he descended belowdecks, he was struck by how new the Skylark was. The Justinian had been old, in her last years of service when he had boarded as a Midshipman, and not well maintained. Even the Indy, as spruce as Pellew kept her, was approaching middle age reckoned in the life of a vessel. The Skylark was young and fresh, still smelling of sawn oak and pine pitch. The damp had not penetrated her bones; the very way she rode on the waves was buoyant. Horatio felt his heart stir at the thought of unfurling her sails and letting her run with the wind. That thrill alone would be worth his doubts and concerns.
Archie stowed his pack and looked around the cabin. Tiny. If he and Horatio turned at the same time, they would collide. He imagined they would spend their days in the wardroom, or on deck, as long as the weather held. He was not fond of cramped quarters; his years in prison and the month he spent in the oubliette had honed his awareness of space until his nerves tingled when confined for too long. He looked from the cot to the hammock, which had been slung to provide the extra berthing. "I suppose as the junior officer, I inherit the hammock," he suggested.
Horatio shook his head. "We'll trade off."
"Only if you'll take the cot first."
"I don't need coddling, " he protested.
Archie just smiled. "Well, I'm going up," he said and left Horatio alone.
He sighed and shoved his belongings in the bin that would keep them from tumbling about if the Skylark were in heavy seas. The one item he took out was the small book Don Massaredo had given him. *The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.* As he held it in his hands, he thought of his father. What had Dr. Hornblower made of his imprisonment, escape, and voluntary return? Perhaps nothing, perhaps he had cursed him for a fool. He did not allow himself the hope that perhaps the doctor had felt pride and concern. Horatio laid the book on his cot and returned to the deck.
Captain Campion surveyed his ship as the final preparations to weigh anchor were completed. He had been watching the Indefatigables, and nothing he had seen thus far had dispelled his original impressions. They were prime seamen who clearly knew their way around the deck of any ship; if all the Indefatigable's hands were like that, then Pellew was fortunate indeed. And his officers? Hornblower was a man born to lead, you had only to look in those dark eyes to see the strength in his heart. And he was yet young. Give the man another five years experience and he would be a formidable commander. As for Kennedy? He could not say. The men treated him with proper deference -- more than deference -- their attitude was almost protective, as if he were fragile somehow. Yet he did not seem weak. That, he supposed was part of the story.
"Captain Campion, sir!" Lieutenant Carlyle called for his attention. "All stations are ready, sir."
"Very well, Lieutenant. Man the capstan and prepare to make sail." In two hours they would be away from the harbour and into the open sea. As pleased as he was at the thought, he knew it was just the beginning of his perilous mission. "Lieutenant, invite Mr. Hornblower and Kennedy to join us on the quarter-deck."
"Aye, aye, sir." Carlyle snapped a salute, and went to complete his orders.
As he stood next to Campion, Horatio watched his men. He was not concerned that they would perform poorly, for he had never seen them fail in their duty, but he marveled that they melded so seamlessly with their American counterparts. Even Styles, a tough nut to crack in the best of circumstances, went about his way easily, laughing with his shipmates as well as the Skylarks. Horatio cast a glance at the man next to him. He approved of Campion's style of command. It was as firm as Pellew's, but less lordly. Of course, he had no title other than Captain -- a strange thought that all men were created equal -- at least until money and power came into play. So in America, a man might rise from the ranks without prejudice, without patronage. He wondered if it were true, or merely an ideal. He would ask perhaps, when he knew Campion a bit better. He wondered what Archie, the son of Lord Aylesford, would think of such an idea.
His thoughts were interrupted by Campion's orders to set sails. It was the moment he had been waiting for, and as the Skylark's sails filled, his own lungs expanded with sheer pleasure. He could feel the response of the Skylark rising to the wind like the bird she was named for, and the song of the rigging and ropes was the only music which appealed to his ear. He turned to Archie, whose blue eyes were wide with wonder. "Lord, but she's a sweet ship, isn't she?"
Campion heard the remark and responded before Archie could draw a breath.. "She is that, Mr. Hornblower."
"Have you ever had to fight her, sir?" Archie asked.
"Only in practice. The only real threat I've faced was a Dutch schooner set on taking me with a letter of marque. We outran her handily -- it was scarcely good sport."
"Yes. But her guns have never been tested in battle." Campion sounded regretful.
"Sir, I hope you won't take offense if I wish that she may not be tested until after we reach England," Archie said lightly, but with an undertone of tension that Horatio sensed, even if Campion did not.
"That is my fervent wish, as well, Mr. Kennedy." Campion's reply was surprisingly serious. Horatio felt a frisson of unease ripple through him. Then Campion laughed to dispel the shadows. "I would like to invite you gentlemen to dine with me this evening. As long as my cook has fresh food to work with, we shall do quite well."
"Thank you, sir. It will be an honour."
"Excellent. Now I imagine that you and Mr. Kennedy would like to take some rest."
Horatio started to demur, but Archie spoke up before he had a chance to object. "Thank you, sir. We shall be glad to do so. Horatio?"
"Yes, thank you, sir." Grudgingly. Once belowdecks and in the cabin, however, Horatio lay down on his cot gratefully. As usual, the first hours at sea after a spell on land were not easy for him. A victim of seasickness that shamed him deeply, he had never been able to overcome his symptoms by will alone; only by rest, and gradual accommodation of his body to the motion of the waves. He closed his eyes and was soon sleeping.
Archie lay in his hammock, reading Horatio's copy of Gibbon. It was dry as dust to him, but for some reason Horatio was fascinated by the rise and fall of the ancient civilization. Archie wondered why, when it was scarcely enough to keep him awake. Perhaps it was the reminder that no matter how far one rose, the return to earth was inevitable -- a philosophy that Horatio would parallel with his own life. Pride goeth before a fall, and that nonsense.
Unable to work up much enthusiasm for Caesar Augustus, Archie closed the book, slid from the hammock, and left the cabin. He wandered down the companionway towards the stern of the ship, curious about the arrangement belowdecks: where the mess and wardrooms were, the galley, and the sick berth. It had been so long since he had been at sea, that he found himself feeling a bit lost. As he reached the end of one passage, and considered descending the ladder, he heard voices approaching the hatch, and for some reason, backed away into a shadowed recess between the ribs of the ship.
"All secure?" Carlyles's voice floated up the hatchway.
"Aye, aye, sir." An unknown voice, perhaps one of the ship's small complement of Marines. Archie recalled Horatio's comment about the mission of an American warship in London. It hadn't made much sense then, and it was still a mystery.
"Sergeant Michaels will be relieving you?"
"Aye, sir. At the end of the watch."
"The cargo is not to be left unguarded, not for a minute."
"Aye, aye, sir. My men understand that well."
"Good. That is particularly important since we have added several guests to our roster."
"The Brits, sir?"
"I wasn't referring to Portuguese fleas, Sergeant McNally," Carlyle said acidly, and headed towards the ladder. Archie held his breath and waited until Carlyle's blue back vanished into the forward part of the ship before he stepped out from his hiding place. A secret cargo? Now *that* was something to tell Horatio. He would give him the information later, before they joined Captain Campion for dinner. He wondered if any of the Indefatigables had heard rumours. *Archie, my boy,* he warned himself, *this may not be the wisest thing you've ever done.* But it was the most intriguing.
On deck, he sought out the company of Matthews. If anyone would have gained the confidence of the Americans it would be the old sailor. He was undeniably trustworthy. Even the guards at Massaredo's prison had told him things that no prisoner had any right to know. Matthews was leaning against the rail, his weathered face raised to the sky as if he could not get enough of the warmth and the feel of the wind on his skin. When he saw Archie he straightened and knuckled his forehead. "Mr. Kennedy, sir."
"At ease, Matthews."
"What do you think of the ship, Matthews?"
"She's a right fine goer, sir. As pretty a ship as I've ever seen."
"And her crew?"
"They know what they're about, sir. They was a bit wary like at first, sir, 'til we proved we knew what we're doin'. I reckon we'll suit well enough 'til we get 'ome."
Archie fell silent and gnawed at his lip. Matthews gave the young man a concerned look. "Sir, beggin' yer pardon for askin', but is somethin' wrong? Is Mr. 'Ornblower all right?"
"Yes, Hor -- Mr. Hornblower is fine." *Damn, but Horatio would know how to ask the next question.* "Matthews, have you heard any talk amongst the Americans about their cargo?"
"Cargo, sir? In a warship?" Matthew's incredulity made Archie wonder if he had misunderstood the scene he had witnessed in the hold.
"I know it sounds odd, but keep your eyes and ears open, Matthews. If you do hear anything, come to Mr. Hornblower or to me immediately."
"Aye, aye, sir." If Matthews had doubts, he was wise enough not to reveal them to Kennedy. The lad might have had a rough go of it most of his life, but Matthews sensed a solid core of strength growing beneath that fragile-seeming exterior, and if Kennedy believed there was summat not right with the Skylark, then he was willing to make an effort to find out if it were true. "I'll do that, sir. And if you don't mind, I'll clue Styles in, sir. He's got a way of talkin' to the Yanks that makes'em ease up a bit."
"Thank you, Matthews."
"Sir, 'ave you told Mr. Hornblower?"
Archie felt a slight exasperation at Matthews' question; as if he were not entirely to be trusted in matters of command, but it evaporated when he recalled how long it had been since Matthews, or any of the Indefatigables had seen him as an officer. How could he expect them to have confidence in him, when his confidence in himself was shaky at best? "No, but I will. Perhaps he will say that it is not our concern, in which case you can laugh at my worries."
Matthews looked hurt. "Sir, if you say summat is wrong, then that's good enough for us." Kennedy smiled, and Matthews thought how young he looked -- younger than Mr. Hornblower, certain sure. He made his small, discreet salute, and Archie nodded, moving away casually, as if their conversation had brooked nothing more serious than the weather. | <urn:uuid:a4060bd0-c7b6-4c99-b83f-b5568a285914> | CC-MAIN-2018-34 | http://www.hhfic.com/honor1.html | 2018-08-20T02:56:48Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221215523.56/warc/CC-MAIN-20180820023141-20180820043141-00670.warc.gz | en | 0.988092 | 8,306 |
The Auslander bijections: how morphisms are determined by modules
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Let be an artin algebra. In his seminal Philadelphia Notes published in 1978, Auslander introduced the concept of morphisms being determined by modules. Auslander was very passionate about these investigations (they also form part of the final chapter of the Auslander–Reiten–Smalø book and could and should be seen as its culmination). The theory presented by Auslander has to be considered as an exciting frame for working with the category of -modules, incorporating all what is known about irreducible maps (the usual Auslander–Reiten theory), but the frame is much wider and allows for example to take into account families of modules—an important feature of module categories. What Auslander has achieved is a clear description of the poset structure of the category of -modules as well as a blueprint for interrelating individual modules and families of modules. Auslander has subsumed his considerations under the heading of “morphisms being determined by modules”. Unfortunately, the wording in itself seems to be somewhat misleading, and the basic definition may look quite technical and unattractive, at least at first sight. This could be the reason that for over 30 years, Auslander’s powerful results did not gain the attention they deserve. The aim of this survey is to outline the general setting for Auslander’s ideas and to show the wealth of these ideas by exhibiting many examples.
KeywordsAuslander bijections Auslander–Reiten theory Right factorization lattice Morphisms determined by modules Finite length categories: global directedness Local symmetries Representation type Brauer–Thrall conjectures Riedtmann–Zwara degenerations Hammocks Kronecker quiver Quiver Grassmannians Auslander varieties Modular lattices Meet semi-lattices
Mathematics Subject Classification (2010)Primary 16G70 18E10 18A25 18A32 16G60 Secondary 16G20 18A20 06C05 14M15 19A49 03C60
There are two basic mathematical structures: groups and lattices, or, more generally, semigroups and posets. A first glance at any category should focus the attention on these two structures: to symmetry groups (for example the automorphism groups of the individual objects), as well as to the posets given by suitable sets of morphisms, for example by looking at inclusion maps (thus dealing with the poset of all subobjects of an object), or at the possible factorizations of morphisms. In this way, one distinguishes between local symmetries and global directedness.
The present survey deals with the category of finite length modules over an artin algebra . Its aim is to report on the work of Auslander in his seminal Philadelphia Notes published in 1978. Auslander was very passionate about these investigations and they also form part of the final chapter of the Auslander–Reiten–Smalø book: there, they could (and should) be seen as a kind of culmination. It seems to be surprising that the feedback until now is quite meager. After all, the theory presented by Auslander has to be considered as an exciting frame for working with the category , incorporating what is called the Auslander–Reiten theory (to deal with the irreducible maps), but this frame is much wider and allows for example to take into account families of modules—an important feature of a module category. Indeed, many of the concepts which are relevant when considering the categories fit into the frame! What Auslander has achieved (but he himself may not have realized it) was a clear description of the poset structure of and of the interplay between families of modules.
Auslander’s considerations are subsumed under the heading of morphisms being determined by modules, but the wording in itself seems to be somewhat misleading, and the basic definition looks quite technical and unattractive, at least at first sight. This could be the reason that for over 30 years, Auslander’s powerful results did not gain the attention they deserve.
It is easy to see that the poset is a lattice, thus we call it the right factorization lattice for .
Looking at maps , we may (and often will) assume that is right minimal, thus that there is no non-zero direct summand of with Note that any right equivalence class contains a right minimal map, and if and are right minimal maps, then any with has to be an isomorphism.
Of course, to analyze the poset is strongly related to a study of the contravariant -functor , however the different nature of these two mathematical structures should be stressed: is an additive functor whereas is a poset, and it is the collection of these posets which demonstrates the global directedness.
What is the relevance? As we have mentioned, usually the lattice itself will not satisfy any chain conditions, but all the lattices are of finite height and often can be displayed very nicely: according to (2) we deal with the submodule lattice of some finite length module over an artin algebra (namely over ) and it is easy to see that any submodule lattice arises in this way. Using the Auslander bijections , one may transfer properties of submodule lattices to the right -factorization lattices this will be one of the aims of this paper. Given a submodule of , let be a right -determined map ending in such that . The composition series of the factor module correspond to certain factorizations of (to the “maximal -factorizations”), and we may define the -type of so that it is equal to the dimension vector of the module (recall that the dimension vector of a module has as coefficients the Jordan–Hölder multiplicities of the various simple modules occurring in ).
Submodule lattices have interesting combinatorial features, and it seems to interesting that Auslander himself looked mainly at combinatorial properties (for example at waists in submodule lattices). But we should stress that we really are in the realm of algebraic geometry. Thus, let us assume for a moment that is a -algebra where is an algebraically closed field. If is a finite-dimensional -module, the set of all submodules of is the disjoint union of the sets consisting of all submodules of with fixed dimension vector . It is well-known that is in a natural way a projective variety, called nowadays a quiver Grassmannian. Given -modules and , the Auslander bijections draw the attention on the -module , let be its dimension vector and let be dimension vectors with The quiver Grassmannians corresponds under the Auslander bijection to the set of all right equivalence classes of right -determined maps which end in and have type . We call an Auslander variety. These Auslander varieties have to be considered as an important tool for studying the right equivalence classes of maps ending in a given module.
We end this summary by an outline in which way the Auslander bijections (2) incorporate the existence of minimal right almost split maps: we have to look at the special case where is indecomposable and and to deal with the submodule of . The bijection (2) yields an element in such that ; to say that is right -determined means that is right almost split.
The survey is divided into three parts. Part I presents the general setting, it comprises the Sects. 2 to 10. The Sects. 11 to 15 form Part II, here we show in which way the Auslander bijections deal with families of modules. Finally, in Parts III, we discuss some special cases; these are the Sects. 16 to 18.
I. The setting
2 The right factorization lattice
Let be a -module. Let be the class of all homomorphisms with arbitrary modules (such homomorphisms will be said to be the homomorphisms ending in). We define a preorder on this class as follows: Given and , we write provided there is a homomorphism such that (clearly, this relation is reflexive and transitive). As usual, such a preorder defines an equivalence relation (in our setting, we call it right equivalence) by saying that are right equivalent provided we have both and , and it induces a poset relation on the set of right equivalence classes of homomorphisms ending in . Given a morphism , we denote its right equivalence class by and by definition if and only if As we will see in Proposition 2.2, the poset is a lattice, thus we will call it the right factorization lattice for .
It should be stressed that is a set, not only a class: namely, the isomorphism classes of -modules form a set and for every module , the homomorphisms form a set; we may choose a representative from each isomorphism class of -modules and given a homomorphism , then there is an isomorphism where is such a representative, and is right equivalent to
Recall that a map is said to be right minimal provided any direct summand of with is equal to zero. If is a morphism and such that and is right minimal, then is called a right minimalisation of f. The kernel of a right minimalisation of will be called the intrinsic kernel of f, it is unique up to isomorphism.
Every right equivalence class in contains a right minimal morphism, namely , where is a right minimalisation of . Given right minimal morphisms and , then are right equivalent if and only if there is an isomorphism such that .
Let be a homomorphism ending in . Write such that and is right minimal. Let be the canonical inclusion, the canonical projection. Then and (since ). We see that and , thus and are right equivalent and is right minimal. If the right minimal morphisms and are right equivalent, then there are morphisms and such that and . But implies that is an automorphism, and implies that is an automorphism, thus have to be isomorphisms (see I.2).
Monomorphisms are always right minimal, and the right equivalence classes of monomorphisms ending in may be identified with the submodules of (here, we identify the right equivalence class of the monomorphism with the image of ).
The poset is a lattice with zero and one. Given and , say with pullback , the meet of and is given by the map , the join of and is given by .
(a trivial verification) Write . We have and , thus and . If is a morphism with and , then and , thus there are morphisms with , for Since , the pullback property yields a morphism such that for . Thus shows that , thus This shows that is the meet of and .
Second, denote the canonical inclusion maps by , for , thus and therefore for Assume that there is given a morphism with for . This means that there are morphisms such that for . Let (with ). Then shows that , thus This shows that is the join of and .
It is easy to check that the map is the zero element of and that the identity map is its unit element.
It should be stressed that ifandare right minimal, say with pullback, then neither the mapnor the direct sum mapwill be right minimal, in general. Thus if one wants to work with right minimal maps, one has to right minimalise the maps in question. Here are corresponding examples:
All path algebras of quivers considered in the paper will have coefficients in an arbitrary field , unless we specify some further conditions. When dealing with the path algebra of a quiver , and is a vertex of , we denote by (or also just by ) the simple module corresponding to , by and the projective cover or injective envelope of , respectively.
Take as maps the canonical projection , this is a right minimal map. The pullback of and is a submodule of which is isomorphic to . Since any map is zero, there is no right minimal map .
Also, the map is not right minimal, since we have
As we have seen, the poset is a lattice. What will be important in the following discussion is the fact that we deal with a meet-semilattice (these are the posets such that any pair of elements has a meet). Note that all the semilattices which we deal with turn out to be lattices, however the poset maps to be considered will preserve meets, but usually not joins, thus we really work in the category of meet-semilattices.
The lattice is modular.
yields a map such that thus the map belongs to .
the map Open image in new window is an element of .
Here, we can assume that all the kernels are equal to , where is a fixed indecomposable module of length . Also, if the ground field is infinite, then there is such a chain of epimorphisms such that all the kernels are pairwise different and of length . In the first case, the kernels of the maps are all indecomposable (namely of the form for ), in the second, they are direct sums of pairwise non-isomorphic modules of length 2.
3 Morphisms determined by modules: Auslander’s First Theorem
The existence of the dashed arrow on the left for all possible maps shall imply the existence of the dashed arrow on the right (of course, the converse implication always holds true: if for some morphism , then for all morphisms ).
Assume that . Then is right -determined if and only if is right -determined.
If is right -determined, then is also right -determined.
We denote by the set of the right equivalence classes of the morphisms ending in which are right -determined. We will see below that also is a lattice, thus we call it the right C-factorization lattice for .
Note that is usually not closed under predecessors or successors inside . But there is the following important property:
The subset of is closed under meets.
Let and be right -determined. As we know, the meet of and is given by forming the pullback of and . Thus assume that is the pullback with maps and and let We want to show that is right -determined. Thus, assume that there is given such that for any , there exists such that . Then we see that for any , we have , thus factors through . Since is right -determined, it follows that factors through , say for some . Similarly, for any , the morphism factors through and therefore for some . Now implies that there is such that and . Thus shows that factors through .
We should stress that usually is not closed under joins, see the examples at the end of the section. One of these examples is chosen in order to convince the reader that this is not at all a drawback, but an important feature if we want to work with lattices of finite height.
where runs through all the -modules (or just through representatives of all multiplicity-free -modules) and this is a filtered union of meet-semilattices.
By definition, the sets are subsets of . By Proposition 3.1(a), we know that only depends on , thus we may restrict to look at representatives of multiplicity-free -modules . Proposition 3.1(b) asserts that both and are contained in , thus we deal with a filtered union. According to Proposition 3.2, we deal with embeddings of meet-semilattices. The essential assertion of Theorem 3.3 is that any morphism is right determined by some module, the usual formulation of Auslander’s First Theorem. A discussion of this assertion and its proof follows.
There is a precise formula which yields for the smallest possible module which right determines . We will call it the minimal right determiner of , any other right determiner of will have as a direct summand.
Since the image of is not contained in the image of , we see that is non-zero, thus is a submodule of
(Determiner formula of Auslander–Reiten–Smalø) Let be a morphism ending in . Let be the direct sum of the indecomposable modules of the form , where is an indecomposable direct summand of the intrinsic kernel of and of the indecomposable projective modules which almost factor through , one from each isomorphism class. Then is right -determined if and only if .
Any morphism is right -determined by some , for example by the module
We have to show that is a direct summand of . The intrinsic kernel of is a direct summand of , thus if is an indecomposable direct summand of the intrinsic kernel of , then is a direct summand of Now assume that is a simple module such that almost factors through . Then is a submodule of , thus is a direct summand of
(Auslander) The module right determines .
Let be a projective module and a right minimal morphism. Then is right -determined if and only if is a monomorphism and the socle of the cokernel of is generated by .
This is an immediate consequence of the determiner formula: First, assume that is right -determined. Then the intrinsic kernel of has to be zero. Since we assume that is right minimal, must be a monomorphism. If is a simple submodule of the cokernel of , then almost factors through , thus is a direct summand of . This shows that the socle of the cokernel of is generated by . Conversely, assume that is a monomorphism and the socle of the cokernel of is generated by . Since is a monomorphism, is the direct sum of all indecomposable projective modules which almost factor through . Such a module is the projective cover of a simple submodule of . Since generates the socle of the cokernel of , it follows that is a direct summand of . Thus is in , therefore is right -determined.
A right minimal morphism is a monomorphism if and only if it is right -determined.
Let be non-zero maps for , these are monomorphisms, thus they are right -determined. The join of and in is given by the map . Clearly, this map is right minimal, but it is not injective. Thus is not right -determined.
Here, the modules are the indecomposable representations of length 2, one from each isomorphism class and all the arrows are inclusion maps.
The join in of two different maps in the height 2 layer is just the identity map , whereas the join of in is the direct sum map More generally, if there are given pairwise different regular modules of length 2 with inclusion maps , then the join in is the direct sum map . Let us stress that all these direct sum maps are right minimal (thus here we deal with a cofork as defined in Sect. 13). Thus, if the base field is infinite, the smallest subposet of closed under meets and joins and containing the inclusion maps with regular of length 2 will have infinite height.
Let be a morphism. If is an indecomposable direct summand of , then
By definition, there are two kinds of indecomposable direct summands of , the non-projective ones are of the form , where is an indecomposable direct summand of the intrinsic kernel of , the remaining ones are the indecomposable projective modules which almost factor through . Of course, if is an indecomposable projective module which almost factors through , then .
If we assume that , then , thus factors through the kernel of , say Consequently, . But is injective, thus and therefore . But this means that is split mono, a contradiction. It follows that , thus
Proposition 3.9 asserts that all the indecomposable direct summands of the minimal right determiner of a map satisfy . Actually, according to , Proposition XI.2.4 (see also ), such a module is equipped with a distinguished non-zero map which is said to “almost factor through” . At the beginning of this section we gave a corresponding definition in the special case when is projective. See also the Remark 3 at the end of Sect. 4.
4 The Auslander bijection. Auslander’s Second Theorem
Let be objects. Let . We always will consider as a -module. For any module , we denote by the set of all submodules (it is a lattice with respect to intersection and sum of submodules).
Here is a reformulation of the definition of .
Let . Then is the set of all which factor through . This subset of is a -submodule.
We have mentioned already, that is a -submodule of . Also, if , then factors through . And conversely, if factors through , then belongs to
If and , then
A trivial verification: First, let us show that is injective. Consider maps and such that Since is right -determined and , we see that . Since is right -determined and , we see that . But this means that , thus
Auslander’s Second Theorem (as established in ) asserts:
of the inclusion map and the map defined by is a lattice isomorphism.
Convention. In the following, several examples of Auslander bijections will be presented. When looking at the submodule lattice of a module , we usually will mark (some of) the elements of by bullets and connect comparable elements by a solid lines. Here, going upwards corresponds to the inclusion relation.
For the corresponding lattices , we often will mark an element (with a right minimal map) by just writing and we will connect neighboring pairs by drawing an (upwards) arrow . On the other hand, sometimes it seems to be more appropriate to refer to the right minimal map with kernel and image by using the short exact sequence notation .
Note that the lattice has two distinguished elements, namely itself as well as its zero submodule. Under the bijection the total submodule corresponds to the identity map of , this is not at all exciting. But of interest seem to be the maps in , we will discuss them in this will be discussed in Proposition 5.5
The special case. It is worthwhile to draw the attention on the special case when .
The special case of the Auslander bijection is the obvious identification of both and with .
First, consider : The determiner formula asserts: a right minimal morphism is right -determined if and only if it is a monomorphism. Thus is just the set of right equivalence classes of monomorphisms ending in , and the map yields an identification between the set of right equivalence classes of monomorphisms ending in and the submodules of .
Next, we deal with . Note that and there is a canonical identification (given by for ), thus (with for a submodule of ).
As a consequence, we see that all possible submodule latticesoccur as images under the Auslander bijections. This assertion can be strengthened considerably, as we want to show now.
By definition, an artin algebra is an artin -algebra for some commutative artinian ring (this means that is a -algebra and that it is finitely generated as a -module). Such an algebra is said to be strictly wild (or better strictly-wild), provided for any artin -algebra , there is a full exact embedding . If is a -module and is a -module, a semilinear isomorphism from to is a pair , where is an algebra isomorphism, and is an isomorphism of abelian groups such that for all and . It is clear that any semilinear isomorphism from to induces a lattice isomorphism
Let be an artin -algebra which is strictly -wild. Let be an artin -algebra and a -module. Then there are -modules such that the -module is semilinearly isomorphic to . Thus there is a lattice isomorphism .
Let be a full embedding (we do not need that it is exact). Let and . Let as well as both be given by applying the functor . Since is a full embedding, is an algebra isomorphism and is an isomorphism of abelian groups. The functoriality of asserts that we also have for all and . This shows that the pair is a semilinear isomorphism.
but even if is exact, such a bijection will not be given by applying directly . Namely, if is right minimal and right -determined, then the kernel of belongs to , thus the kernel of belongs to , whereas the intrinsic kernel of any right -determined map has to belong to and the -modules and may be very different, as the obvious embeddings of the category of -Kronecker modules into the category of -Kronecker modules (using for one arrow the zero map) show.
Note that under a full exact embedding functor , submodule lattices are usually not preserved: given a -module , the functor yields an embedding of into , but usually this is a proper embedding. Actually, for any finite-dimensiona algebra , there are submodule lattices which cannot be realized as the submodule lattice of any -module. Namely, assume that the length of the indecomposable projective -modules is bounded by and take a finite-dimensional algebra with a local -module of length . Then is a modular lattice of height with a unique element of height (the radical of the module ). If is of the form , then has to be a local -module of length , thus a factor module of an indecomposable projective -module. But by assumption, the indecomposable projective -modules have length at most .
Let then the subsets of are actually -submodules and there is an isomorphism of -modules . Thus maps the lattice bijectively onto the submodule lattice . The lattice contains as a sublattice and both have the same height. However, may be a proper sublattice of , since isomorphisms of subfactors of the various modules yield diagonals in .
When dealing with the Auslander bijections , we always can assume that is multiplicity-free and supporting, here supporting means that for any indecomposable direct summand of . Namely, let be the direct sum of all indecomposable direct summands of with , one from each isomorphism class. Then, on the one hand, (since a map ending in is right -determined if and only if it is right -determined. On the other hand, there is an idempotent such that and , and there is a lattice isomorphism given by , where is a submodule of .
Both objects and related by the Auslander bijection concern morphisms ending in . Of course, in Proposition 3.9 we have seen already that all the indecomposable direct summands of the minimal right determiner of a map satisfy
We use the next two sections in order to transfer well-known properties of the lattice of submodules of a finite length module to the right -factorization lattices, in particular the Jordan–Hölder theorem. In Sect. 5, we introduce the right -length of a right -determined map ending in , it corresponds to the the length of the factor module In Sect. 6 we will define the -type of as the dimension vector of
5 Right -factorizations and right -length
The Auslander bijection asserts that the lattice is a modular lattice of finite height, thus there is a Jordan–Hölder Theorem for ; it can be obtained from the corresponding Jordan–Hölder Theorem for the submodule lattice . In Sects. 5 and 6, we are going to formulate the assertions for explicitly. Here we consider composition series of submodules and factor modules of .
Let be maps, where with composition . The sequence is called a right C-factorization of f of length t provided the maps are non-invertible and the compositions are right minimal and right -determined, for It sometimes may be helpful to deal also with right -factorizations of length ; by definition these are just the identity maps (or, if you prefer, the isomorphisms).
If is a right -factorization of a map , then any integer sequence defines a sequence of maps with for . We use the following lemma inductively, in order to show that is again a right -factorization of and we say that is a refinement of . In particular, any right -factorization of is a refinement of .
We only have to check that cannot be invertible. Assume is invertible. Then is a split epimorphism. Since is right minimal, it follows that is invertible, a contradiction.
We say that a right -factorization is maximal provided it does not have a refinement of length .
This is a direct consequence of Auslander’s Second Theorem.
Any right -factorization has a refinement which is a maximal right -factorization and all maximal right -factorizations of have the same length.
This follows from Proposition 5.2 and the Jordan–Hölder theorem.
In particular, any right minimal right -determined map has a refinement which is a maximal right -factorization, say and its length will be called the right-length of , we write for the right -length of . There is the following formula:
where denotes the length of the -module and the length of its -submodule .
The right equivalence class As we have mentioned in Sect. 4, it is of interest to determine the maps in the right equivalence class
Let be modules. Up to right equivalence, there is a unique right -determined map ending in with maximal. The submodule of is the zero module. If is any right -determined map ending in , then for some .
The lattice has a unique zero element, namely . Let for some right minimal map . Then, the right -length of has to be maximal and for any right -determined map ending in .
In general it seems to be quite difficult to describe the maps such that But one should be aware that such a map always does exist: any pair of -modules determines uniquely up to right equivalence a map ending in , namely the right minimal, right -determined map with
Let be modules. The set is the right equivalence class of the zero map if and only if belongs to .
This is a direct consequence of Corollary 3.7.
The special case ofbeing projective. For an arbitrary projective module , there is the following description of the right -length of a right minimal, right -determined morphism . Here, we denote by the Jordan–Hölder multiplicity of the simple module in the module , this is the number of factors in a composition series of which are isomorphic to .
Let be projective. The right minimal, right -determined maps are up to right equivalence just the inclusion maps of submodules of such that the socle of is generated by .
The minimal element of is the inclusion map , where is the intersection of the kernels of all maps , where is a simple module with a direct summand of .
Let be the set of modules , where is a simple module with a direct summand of . Let be the intersection of the kernels of all maps with Since is of finite length, there are finitely many maps with , say , such that Then embeds into , thus its socle is generated by . It follows that the inclusion map is right -determined. On the other hand, if is right minimal and right -determined, then it is a monomorphism, thus we can assume that it is an inclusion map. In addition, we know that the socle of is generated by , thus embeds into a finite direct sum of modules in . It follows that is the intersection of some maps , where , thus
There is the following consequence: The-length of any inclusion map (such a map is obviously right minimal and right -determined) is precisely the length of
For further results concerning the right -length of maps, see Sect. 9.
6 The right -type of a right -determined map
Recall that we consider as a -module, where The indecomposable projective -modules are of the form , where is an indecomposable direct summand of , thus the simple -modules are of the form
Given an artin algebra , we denote by its Grothendieck group (of all -modules modulo all exact sequences), it is the free abelian group with basis the set of isomorphism classes of the simple -modules . Given a -module , we denote by the corresponding element in , called the dimension vector of . Of course, can be written as an integral linear combination where the coefficient of is just the Jordan–Hölder multiplicity of in . The elements of with non-negative coefficients will be said to be the -dimension vectors. If is a -dimension vector and is a -module, we denote by the subset of consisting of all submodules of with dimension vector
Let us return to the artin algebra , where is a -module. Thhe Grothendieck group is the free abelian group with basis the set of modules , where runs through a set of representatives of the isomorphism classes of the indecomposable direct summands of . We are interested here in the dimension vectors of and of its factor modules. Actually, we want to attach to each right -determined map ending in its right -type so that We start with pairs of neighbors in the right -factorization lattice , since they correspond under to the composition factors of .
Let and be right minimal, right -determined maps. We say that the pair is a pair of C-neighbors provided Note that the pair in is a pair of -neighbors provided and there is no with (of course, it is the condition which implies that there is a map with ).
Let us consider a composition , where both are right minimal and right -determined. It can happen that is also right minimal and right -determined, but is not right -determined. Also it can happen that both maps and are right minimal and right -determined, whereas is not right -determined. Here are corresponding examples.
First, let , thus and both and are right -determined, whereas is not right -determined.
Second, let thus . Then both and are right -determined, whereas is not right -determined.
Let and such that is a pair of neighbors. We say that is of type (or better of type ) where is an indecomposable direct summand of , provided there is a map such that does not factor through . Such a summand must exist, since otherwise would factor through , due to the fact that is right -determined. The following proposition shows that is uniquely determined.
If is a pair of -neighbors of type , then is isomorphic to the simple -module Thus, the type of a pair of -neighbors is well-defined.
Thus, if is a pair of -neighbors of type , we may write
We note the following: Ifis a pair of-neighbors and, thenmay be neither injective nor surjective. Let us exhibit examples with .
As in the examples 5, let be the linearly directed quiver of type and take now as the path algebra of modulo the zero relation .
Now consider a right minimal right -determined map ending in . As we have mentioned, we want to attach to an element
into a finite number of disjoint subsets.
for every -dimension vector .
Assume now that is an algebraically closed field and that and are -algebra. If is a -module and a dimension vector for , we write instead of . Note that is in a natural way an algebraic variety, it is called a quiver Grassmannian. Namely, all the -modules with dimension vector have the same -dimension, say (if , then ). Denote by the usual Grassmannian of all -dimensional subspaces of the vector space Using Plücker coordinates one knowns that is a closed subset of a projective space, thus is a projective variety. Now is a subset of defined by the vanishing of some polynomials (which express the fact that we consider submodules with a fixed dimension vector), thus also is an algebraic variety and indeed a projective variety (but usually not even connected).
Proposition 6.3 can be reformulated as follows:
for every -dimension vector .
In particular, we see that the set is a projective variety: these Auslander varieties (as they should be called) furnish an important tool for studying the right equivalence classes of maps ending in a given module. As we have mentioned at the end of Sect. 2, the study of the set of right minimal maps ending in a fixed module can be separated nicely into that of the local symmetries described by the right automorphism groups and that of the global directedness given by the right factorization lattice. Auslander’s first theorem describes the right factorization lattice as the filtered union of the right -factorization lattices, and, as we now see, these right -factorization lattices are finite disjoint unions of (transversal) subsets which are projective varieties, the Auslander varieties.
It seems that quiver Grassmannians first have been studied by Schofield and Crawley-Boevey in order to deal with generic properties of quiver representations. In 2006, Caldero and Chapoton observed that quiver Grassmannians can be used effectively in order to analyse the structure of cluster algebras as introduced by Fomin and Zelevinsky. Namely, it turns out that cluster variables can be described using the Euler characteristic of quiver Grassmannians. In this way quiver Grassmannians are now an indispensable tool for studying cluster algebras and quantum cluster algebras. We should add that quiver Grassmannians were also used (at least implicitly) in the study of quantum groups, see for example the calculation of Hall polynomials in . A large number of papers is presently devoted to special properties of quiver Grassmannians.
There is the famous assertion that any projective variety is a quiver Grassmannian, see the paper by Reineke (answering in this way a question by Keller) as well as blogs by Le Brujn (with a contribution by Van den Bergh) and by Baez . Actually, the construction as proposed by Van den Bergh in Le Bruyn’s blog is much older, it has been mentioned explicitly already in 1996 by Hille dealing with moduli spaces of thin representations (see the example at the end of that paper), and it can be traced back to earlier considerations of Huisgen-Zimmermann dealing with moduli spaces of serial modules, even if they were published only later (see , Theorem G, but also , Corollary B, and , Example 5.4). It follows from Proposition 4.6 above that given a strictly wild algebra and any projective variety , there are -modules and a dimension vector such that is isomorphic to . We will show in that this holds true for all controlled wild algebras.
7 Maps of right -length 1
By definition, a right minimal right -determined map has right -length 1 provided is not invertible and given any factorization with right minimal right -determined, then one of the maps is invertible. Let us denote by the set of right equivalence classes of the maps ending in which have right -length 1.
Warning: an irreducible map is of course right minimal, but if is irreducible and right -determined, we may have For example, consider the Kronecker quiver, take . The irreducible map has (note the factorizazion ).
Here is an immediate consequence of Proposition 5.4.
Let be right minimal and right -determined. Then if and only if is a maximal -submodule of .
In order to analyze maps of right -length 1, we will need the following lemma.
If is right minimal and is a split epimorphism, then also is right minimal.
Observe that it is not enough to assume that is an epimorphism. As an example, take the indecomposable injective Kronecker module of length , let be a submodule of length 2, and Then is right minimal. But the induced sequence is just the short exact sequence which splits.
Denote the kernel of by , thus we can assume that such that is the canonical projection with kernel . Assume that , where is contained in the kernel of , thus Since , there are submodules of both containing such that and , with and
Consider , this is a submodule of the kernel of . Also, (using the modular law). Thus we have and . This shows that is a direct summand of which is contained in the kernel of . Since is right minimal, we see that Since , it follows that
Let be a module. Let be a right minimal right -determined epimorphism with . Then the kernel of is indecomposable.
Since is right minimal and is a split epimorphism, lemma 7.2 asserts that is right minimal. Since is also right -determined, we see that a contradiction.
with the upper row being the sequence . Since the lower sequence does not split, the map is right minimal. The kernel shows that is also -determined. Since is not invertible, the factorization shows that is a -factorization of of length at least , thus a contradiction. This shows that belongs to the -socle of
where again the upper row is . Write with endomorphisms . If all belong to the radical of , then all the sequences induced from by the maps split, thus also the lower sequence splits, since it is induced from by Thus, at least one of the maps has to be invertible and therefore is a split monomorphism.
If , then the lower sequence splits off a sequence , but this means that is not right minimal. Thus But then is an automorphism, thus is invertible, a contradiction. This shows that
We say that an epimorphism is epi-irreducible, provided for any factorization with a proper epimorphism, the map is a split epimorphism (the dual concept of mono-irreducible maps has been considered in ).
Let be indecomposable, non-projective and let . If is an epi-irreducible epimorphism with kernel , then belongs to .
Since is a proper epimorphism, also is a proper epimorphism, thus is a split epimorphism. But this implies that also the exact sequence induced from by splits.
We will need some basic facts concerning the Gabriel–Roiter measure of finite length modules, see . The Gabriel–Roiter measure of a module will be denoted by We recall that any indecomposable module which is not simple has a Gabriel–Roiter submodule , this is a certain indecomposable submodule of and the embedding is called a Gabriel–Roiter inclusion. Recall that a Gabriel–Roiter inclusion is mono-irreducible: this means that for any proper submodule of with , the inclusion splits. As a consequence, given any nilpotent endomorphism of , the sequence induced from using splits. Also, it follows that the cokernel of a Gabriel–Roiter inclusion is indecomposable (and not projective).
Of course, we may use duality and consider a Gabriel–Roiter submodule of , the corresponding projection will be called a co-Gabriel–Roiter projection. By duality, a co-Gabriel–Roiter projection is an epi-irreducible epimorphism with (non-injective) indecomposable kernel.
Let be an indecomposable module which is not simple and let be a co-Gabriel–Roiter projection, say with kernel . Let Then is right minimal, right -determined and thus belongs to .
If is indecomposable and not simple, we also may consider a Gabriel–Roiter submodule of , say with projection and consider Then is right minimal and right -determined, however in general there is not a fixed number such that belongs to or to . A typical example is example 8 presented in the next section. The two modules and both have as a Gabriel–Roiter submodule with factor module . Let The projection belongs to whereas the projection belongs to
8 Epimorphisms in
The set of right equivalence classes where is an epimorphism is obviously a coideal of the lattice we denote it by . Since the pullback of an epimorphism is again an epimorphism, we see that is closed under meets. Also, for any module , the subset of consisting of the right equivalence classes of all right -determined epimorphisms ending in is a coideal which is closed under meets. Since is a lattice of finite height, we see that has a unique minimal element, say and our first aim will be to describe
Before we deal with this question, let us point out in which way the projectivity or non-projectivity of indecomposable direct summands of are related to the fact that right minimal right -determined morphisms are mono or epi. If is a monomorphism, then is right minimal and right -determined (see Corollary 3.8), thus right -determined for some projective module . Conversely, if is projective, then any right minimal, right -determined morphism is a monomorphism (see Corollary 3.7). Namely, if is an indecomposable direct summand of the kernel of , where is right minimal, then is not injective and is a direct summand of any module such that is right -determined. Of course, since is not injective, is an indecomposable non-projective module. One should be aware that a morphism may be right -determined for some module without any indecomposable projective direct summand, without being surjective.
As in example 6, we take as the path algebra of the linearly directed quiver of type , modulo the zero relation . Again, let and . As we have mentioned already, the non-zero maps are not surjective, but right -determined, and, of course, is not projective. (As we will see below, it is essential for this feature that the kernel of has injective dimension at least 2; for a general discussion of maps which are not surjective, but right -determined by a module without any indecomposable projective direct summands, we refer to ).
The submoduleof We denote by the set of morphisms which factor through a projective module. Note that is a -submodule of .
Assume that is right -determined. Then is surjective if and only if .
One direction is a trivial verification: First assume that is surjective. Let belong to , thus where and with projective. Since is surjective and is projective, there is such that Thus shows that belongs to
The converse is more interesting, here we have to use that is right -determined. We assume that . Let be a projective cover of . Consider an arbitrary morphism . The composition belongs to , thus to . Since is right -determined, it follows that itself factors through , say for some . Now the composition is surjective, there has to be surjective.
Let us denote by the subset of given by all elements with an epimorphism.
Here, the vertical maps are the canonical inclusions.
It is well-known that given a module and a submodule , then the lattice of submodules of the factor module is canonically isomorphic to the lattice of the submodules of satisfying This is the vertical map on the right.
More generally, dealing with a morphism which is right -determined, we can recover the image of as follows:
Let be right -determined. Then one recovers the image of as the largest submodule of (with inclusion map ) such that
Let be the image of with inclusion map and (with surjective). First of all, we show that Let and (the maps obtained in this way generate additively). We want to show that factors through . Since is surjective, there is such that (since is projective). Thus Thus factors through
On the other hand, let be a submodule of such that . Let be a projective cover. Consider the map It has the property that for all maps the composition factors through (namely belongs to ). But is right -determined, thus we conclude that factors through say for some Thus the image of is contained in the image of . This is what we wanted to prove.
We recover in this way Proposition 8.1. Namely, if is surjective, then is the image of , thus is one of the submodule with , thus
Conversely, if then is one of the submodules with and therefore the image of contains , thus is equal to . This shows: If f is right C-determined, then f is surjective if and only if
All maps in are epimorphisms if and only of
Kernels with injective dimension at most.
The injective dimension of is at most .
If is any module, then all maps in are epimorphisms.
We have for all modules .
Recall from , 2.4 that has injective dimension at most if and only if Thus, if has injective dimension at most and is an arbitrary module, then this shows that (i) implies (iii). Conversely, assume the condition (iii), thus for all modules . If the injective dimension of would be at least , then But . This contradiction shows that (iii) implies (i). For the equivalence of (ii) and (iii) see Corollary 8.4(a).
Let be hereditary and a module without any indecomposable projective direct summand. Then any right -determined morphism is an epimorphism.
Let . Since has no indecomposable projective direct summand, it follows that Since is hereditary, the injective dimension of any module is at most . Since the injective dimension of is at most , it follows from the proposition that all right -determined maps are epimorphisms.
Of course, we also can show directly that Namely, let be in . Then with , where is a projective module. The image of is a submodule of , thus, since is hereditary, the module is also projective. Thus, we have a surjective map with projective. Such a map splits. This shows that is isomorphic to a direct summand of . It follows that and therefore
In terms of the Auslander bijection, we may deal with these data in several different ways: namely, we may look at the right equivalence classes of both and in as well as at the right equivalence class in In case we deal with , one should be aware that this map is the join of the two maps and in .
In addition, we also may concentrate on the possible maps and (sometimes called steering maps).
When dealing with epimorphisms in , Riedtmann–Zwara degenerations play a decisive role, as the following proposition shows: | <urn:uuid:d8d8fd32-b282-4dec-ac9b-17bf2abb9721> | CC-MAIN-2018-34 | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13373-013-0042-2 | 2018-08-14T22:19:42Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-34/segments/1534221209585.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20180814205439-20180814225439-00470.warc.gz | en | 0.914713 | 10,979 |
“Coonin” is slang for hunting raccoons, and no one in the world hunts raccoons as good as my daddy. But Daddy didn’t hunt raccoons just for sport and/or food. His primary purpose was collecting coon bounties from the farmers who were bothered by coons and other various critters that would wreak havoc on their farms. Most of these were of the nocturnal variety. Most farmers work hard all day and need their sleep, and didn’t want to be bothered with staying up all night hunting pests. So that is where my daddy came in. He charged fifty bucks a head and got to keep whatever varmint crossed into his sights. He worked anywhere within fifty miles of our home, which was halfway up a steep hill along a dirt road, and guaranteed his work. A good week was five kills. An average week was two to three kills. A bad week was one or less kills. You could count the number of bad weeks on the fingers of one hand in my lifetime. Daddy had a secret.
Daddy never said more than a single word at a time. Once in a great while he would say two, but that was rare. He was tall and stout and had black eyes and wild black hair. He believed in keeping things simple. He did not like complications. We had no running water in the house, no electricity and definitely no Internets, and no TV’s, Ipods, radios or clocks. Daddy paid cash for everything and had no bank accounts or credit cards. He drove a ’56 Chevy short-bed, step side pick-up truck and had been since 1955 when he bought it new. He was an excellent provider. Ma and me had everything we needed and never ever went hungry.
Ma was something else. Daddy always called her Princess and with good reason. She was beautiful and graceful and hard-working and passionate and humorous and level-headed all at the same time. She absolutely owned me and daddy, and she kept us in line and made us bloom a little more every day. I’ll be talking a lot about Ma.
You may think even five coons a week might not be much even at fifty bucks a throw, but you would be wrong. On top of the fifty buck bounty, we got the meat and the skin. The meat daddy would trade sometimes for fish, or beef, or pork or something just to give us some variety in our diet. On top of all that, Ma, being as industrious as she was given to be, made coon skin caps out of the hides and selling them off the back of the Chevy alongside the road by town. Ma made stuff from squirrel skins, raccoon skins, rabbit skins, fox skins, coyote skins, deer skins, beer skins and even some snake skins. We kept some livestock at the house, and when the beef steer got slaughtered, she tanned that hide and made clothing and stuff out of that. So anyways, this was our home economy.
I was shooting a twenty-two caliber rifle at four years old. I shot my first coon when I was five and a half, and daddy made me clean it. I threw up a few times, and cut my finger, but other than that I must have done well. “Good,” said daddy. By the time I was twelve I had shot and killed literally every available kind of critter in a hundred mile radius. When I shot my first bear daddy said, “YeeHah!” Ma made me an apple pie.
Ma had a garden and a green thumb. Daddy and I never paid it no mind because we didn’t need to. Ma also tended to the chickens, but the men had to tend to the yearly steer. Oh yeah, we had three hound dogs and a couple tom cats.
Our house was actually part log cabin and part mobile home. It’s hard to explain. There were no rooms. It was kind of like a teepee. The fireplace was in the middle and vented up through the cone daddy erected on part of the mobile home. I slept on the tin side of the house, and ma and daddy slept at the opposite end in the log cabin part. We all slept on bear skins.
This story really gets going when I turned twelve and daddy put his hands on my shoulders, stared me straight in the eyes and said, “Man now.” Six nights a week, every week, daddy took me out bounty hunting for varmints, which in our area was coons. But, this night was different. This night daddy taught me how he bred raccoons and released them next to vulnerable farms. For years he had been slowly building a large network of farmers, business and homeowners who suddenly became beset with raccoon problems. Sometimes he would even put foamy soap on their chins. Daddy could only be reached via word of mouth because we had no phones, but that didn’t slow him down one bit, of course. It always seemed as soon as we cleared out one coon from one place, some farmer would chase us down and want another coon killed someplace else. They called daddy, Coon Man.
The county judge had a chicken farm, and coon problems every March. Daddy never charged the judge.
The prosecuting attorney had a horse farm, and had coon problems every November. Coon shit is not good for horses. The DA happily paid in advance a hundred bucks. He loved his horses and they were expensive.
Norm Buckley called every June. Something ate another cat and was tearing up the missus’ garden again.
The key to this operation was this seven acres on the back of our plot where daddy found a cave and kept at least a dozen trapped critters in cages for future release, slightly drunk, in the area near a customer. When I turned twelve I had to lug all the food back there and clean out the cages and entertain the critters. Daddy taught me how moonshine entertained them more than anything. We soaked apples in it. Occasionally someone would get lucky and shoot the critter before we arrived, but daddy always talked them out of the meat and the hide.
Daddy would get actual customers, too. Daddy would drive real slow like through town every day yodeling with the radio and waving at anyone passing by. “Hey Coon Man!” people would yell! The cops even used to hire daddy to handle jobs they didn’t feel like doing like getting cats out of trees or rabid dogs out of alleys. Daddy could climb like a monkey for kitties and rabid dogs got flat out shot with a 12 gauge. Since Ma was home schooling me, I got to ride with daddy a couple days a week. I had the greatest life in the world, and then Ma came along and spoiled it all.
“It’s time you went to a real school,” she declared absolutely.
“Yup,” agreed daddy.
They had given me zero days notice. The next morning Ma had me up early ad out the door and drove me personally to the school, gave me fifty bucks and these words, “Make your Mama proud,”
I was scared as Hell, but what I didn’t know was that Ma had taught me a few grades beyond my years already. Except for gym, I could have taught every class I was in. Without even trying I was getting all A’s and B’s. Everyone thought I was some kind of country bumpkin dork nerd creep. I wore mostly jeans and flannel shirts, and that didn’t help I suppose, but I really didn’t care. I just hooked in with a couple other dudes who weren’t popular and we hung out. It wasn’t so bad. I still got to coon hunt with daddy every night, and school was easy, and my new buds were dorky but not boring. I introduced them to moonshine and we had a ball. Life was good again.
And then everything came crashing down around me one brisk autumn afternoon when Robbie Lynn Reiger stepped blindly into my path in the hallway outside the library and unwittingly stole the entirety of my heart and soul. Oh yeah, this was senior year so some time had passed. Now I wasn’t a total rookie. I was a virgin, but not a total rookie. No girl would ride in the pick-up truck, but I talked a few into meeting me at the mall or the movies or something. BUT, Robbie Lynn Reiger was the queen of the high school and she dated the captain of the football team. Her parents were filthy rich (she drove a Beamer to school.), and she was very talented and charming and had hair woven of the finest golden strands. Every boy in the school wanted her, including the teachers. And she had just run smack dab into my face with hers, in mid-sentence with her mouth open, and I put my hands in the standard stop position and boom.
We helped each other up from the floor and both apologized and both felt awkward and just as I was about to introduce myself her stupid boy-friend showed up and asked me what me deal was. I had no idea what this guy meant by that, but I thought of an insult but that got blared out by the bell. The next thing I know the queen of the high school is scurrying down the hall in the grips of sissy boy, but did she steal a quick peek over her shoulder? And now I knew exactly how them coons felt when we shot them.
Daddy made special coon and critter ammo. The slugs he machined from carbon steel rods at his brother Jake’s machine shop downtown. He balanced and hand polished every single round we shot, which was rarely more than seven per week. We used this kind of slug because it did not come apart or mushroom on impact. If one of these rounds did completely penetrate a critter, it came out the other side the same size it went in. You had to watch your background carefully but it was worth the risk due to these slugs not tearing up the pelt as much as hollow points or wad cutters. Plus, they were damn accurate, and we always aimed for the heart.
None of that really mattered much though because we always knew where the critters were and where the best place to shoot them would be, because we put some moonshine apples there. We rarely took a shoot more than fifty feet. It was duck soup. Daddy built a silencer for the rifle so dogs didn’t start yelping every time we bagged us a coon. Daddy might have been a little more skilled in Jake’s machine shop than he let on.
Probably 99% of our kills came between midnight and one-thirty. Then we just picked up that critter and threw him in a burlap bag and toted him back home for cleaning and skinning. Daddy always demanded payment in advance and it was never a problem. Customers did not want to see that critter or my Daddy again if they didn’t have to. Half the time they just left a wad of bills in the mailbox.
Ma had one of those foot pedal sewing machines and whenever she was sewing she was singing and she had the voice of a songbird. And she could sew anything. She was also good at tooling leather and played the fiddle, mandolin and flute—and she had one of each. She handled all the family money and that is all I knew about that. She was also a natural born doctor and mid-wife. We never went to a regular doctor and never saw a regular dentist and were in perfect health and had all our teeth. She even hand made our toothbrushes out of pine and goat whiskers. There seemed to be no end to Ma.
Daddy could fix anything and hunt anything and smell anything and see everything, and build anything. That is about the best way to describe him. Once in a while he’d swing a wrench for the tractor repair garage or hook in on some construction job for a few weeks. The money was good but we really didn’t need it. He’d come home drunk and want to dance with Ma, who gladly obliged and the party was on. Daddy blew the jug. He was our rhythm section. I played guitar, and not very well.
I never asked where we were going to hunt. Daddy would just say, “There.” But, when we pulled into the rich neighborhood I did sit up in the seat. My heart started throbbing and I started sweating and daddy was giving me strange looks and before I knew it, we were in Robbie’s driveway and her daddy was walking down the drive. It was a mansion, and some critter killed a cat or something. Daddy charged the rich people one hundred dollars a critter. And then Robbie appeared in the big picture window and she was wearing a fuzzy pink bath robe and was brushing her hair with long graceful strokes. My whole body began to tingle as I slipped real cool like out of the truck. I tipped the bill of my hat back with the barrel of the rifle trying to look even cooler. I could see Robbie smiling in the window. And then I was floating along next to daddy and walked right by that picture window and my eyes were so stuck on Robbie, I walked right into an oak tree face first. I wasn’t hurt much, but daddy grabbed the rifle from me. When I looked back Robbie had gone. I remember nothing else about that night.
The next day at school the football captain confronted me in the hallway for being a coon hunting hillbilly. I failed to see the insult and that made him even angrier. We don’t even have running water I proclaimed, or electricity. At that, everyone in the immediate area came to a complete halt and went silent. Football captain was confused, and to tell you the truth so was I. Some teacher happened along and we all started moving and talking again. I saw Robbie walking off with football captain and once again, she peeked over her shoulder at me and smiled. I wasn’t worth a shit the rest of the day.
Ma noticed right away. I wasn’t hungry and just wanted to go to bed. She made me eat and then made me chop wood for an hour, and then I had to feed the business critters, and then daddy took me hunting, but when we got back Ma sat me down and broke me open like a monkey does a coconut. Ma listened patiently for a few minutes, and then she asked me if she could change my diaper. “Don’t be a crybaby, Sugar. You go out and get that girl if that’s what you really want.” And, for the next few hours Ma told me exactly how to accomplish this. She could really connive when she wanted to. We ended up on the roof watching the sun rise. “That right there is all you need,” Ma said.
Daddy refused to buy gasoline whenever he could afford not to. He rigged a siphon hose, powered by the Chevy battery that he concealed behind the seat. He never got greedy. He never left anyone high and dry completely. He just took enough and didn’t make a complete pest of himself. This is why he always parked the truck next to the customer’s car. Before we left, we’d take a few gallons in the still of the night. He loved stealing gas, and so did I.
About a week later I ran into Robbie in the school office. I was dropping off a permission slip and she was dropping off her yearbook deposit. I ignored her, even when she dropped her math book. When she bent over to pick it up I leaned a little in her direction so when she came up her head hit my elbow and all the books flew out of my arm. She was pissed! So we scurried around trying to gather our stuff and finally I got out an invitation for dinner. She looked at me like I was retarded, but I didn’t let her speak. “Think about it,” I said, and turned on my heel. I had her French book and calculator under my arm, and resisted with every ounce of energy inside me the urge to take a peek over my shoulder. I proved impossible for her to find for the rest of the day.
That night I lay in my bed alternately playing with the calculator and reviewing that French book. It was raining, and daddy didn’t much like hunting in the rain, so I had a few extra hours. The calculator, of all things, suddenly got my attention. I was thinking of things to add and multiply when I decided to count critters hunted. Averaging five skin-able critters per week for a year comes to about 260. In my lifetime, that would be 4,680 critters. At fifty dollars per, that is 234,000 dollars, which is about 13,000 dollars a year. I learned in school that is below poverty level, but I hadn’t yet figured in all the stuff Ma sold—which was basically uncountable. But I did know she got five hundred dollars per coonskin cap, and two or three of those went out of the house every week when she went to the post office. So, let’s say two just to be on the safe side. That’s 936,000 dollars. My perspective on life changed a lot that night, but I never said a thing.
The next morning Robbie was waiting for me at the door to my math class. She did not look happy. I told her the French book was in my locker and handed over the calculator, but now it was in a sleek, black leather pouch—initialed and everything. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed. “Where did you get this?”
“I made it last night,” I replied, then turned on my heel. “My locker is up on the second floor.”
“Vos désirs sont mes ordres, ma princesse. Mes pieds sont comme des ailes”, I said while handing Robbie that French book. Ma had been teaching me French since I could talk, but Robbie didn’t know that. Robbie knew I was taking Spanish because her best friend was in class with me. She stood there like a statue until out of nowhere comes football captain and I just walked away. This guy had some stupid good radar.
On the coldest day in January Robbie’s car ran out of gas about a mile from the school. I had siphoned out all but about a half a gallon. I happened by about thirty seconds later in the Chevy and asked what the problem was. “What are you doing here?” she asked. It was a legitimate question. I lived in the hills in the opposite direction, but I had an answer ready. “I’m going to the mall to get a birthday present for my Ma,” I half-lied. I took a minute or two pretending to diagnose Robbie’s car problem before discovering the gas gauge. “I have a five gallon can in the back. I can hook you right up.”
Robbie tried giving me a wad of money, but I wouldn’t take it. Finally, she says, “Let me do something at least.” I smiled. “Okay, I do need some advice on something,” I said. “Can you help me pick out a birthday present for my Ma? It has to be extra special, and money is no object.”
She looked at me as if I had just spit in her face. “No sense in both of us driving, park your Beamer in that Burger King lot and we’ll take my truck.” And then I walked back to the Chevy and climbed in. I didn’t look back. I drove directly to that Burger King and parked. Sure enough, Robbie slid in next to me, but she waved for me to come to her car. She even said I could drive. I just shook my head and drew her in with my index finger. I reached over and opened the passenger door and that is when she got her first look at the bear skin seat cover in the Chevy. Quite clearly, it stunned her. “Is that real?” she asked. “It doesn’t bite anymore,” I replied. “Get in.”
The Chevy had a floor shifter and the knob was a raccoon paw and a big one. It kind of freaked Robbie out until I let her touch it and then she couldn’t let it go. I got to touch her hand every time I needed to shift, which I made sure to do often. She had never ridden in a shift vehicle before and it was exciting for her. Before we knew it, we were at the mall and Robbie knew right where to go, of course. She was firing questions at me left and right about Ma. I was trying to keep up, but she started answering her own questions and I just shut up and listened. And then I heard it.
Captain jock was at the freaking mall. I turned on my heel and walked away and didn’t look back. I had a huge smile on my face. This could not have worked out better if I had planned it. Ma about cried laughing so hard when I told her, and Daddy even let out a hoot.
That night Daddy and I shot an entire family of raccoons. It was a totally unplanned Bonanza. Daddy didn’t even charge the old farmer. In fact, I could have sworn I saw Daddy hand a wad of cash to that old farmer guy. I never did get the full story on that one. The last thing I needed to worry about was money. It is hard to explain the comfort of having a ton of money and not needing any of it. All I can tell you is, it’s hard to keep the smile from your face. Daddy and Ma had known this feeling for much longer than I had.
The only place Ma’s home schooling had failed me was with computers. I never touched one before being sent to a real school. Those dork friends I made initially came right to my rescue however, and in a few short weeks I was competent enough and by my senior year I was downright expert. I never had an interest in owning one because outside of school, I didn’t need one. But, I said all that to say this, and that is I had a Book of Face account just so I could follow (stalk) Robbie better and that is how I found out her birthday. May first.
April proved to be an eventful month.
First of all, Daddy was getting excited about my exploits wooing Robbie, and he wanted to help—but he didn’t tell anyone. What happened turned out to be only incidental to his intentions, but still extraordinary.
Secondly, captain jock and I had an epic confrontation resulting in suspensions and hospital trips.
Thirdly, I got to bestow the fleece of the Gods on the princess of my dreams.
The second thing actually happened first. I avoided Robbie as much as possible for a few weeks after the incident at the mall. I had no idea of what happened after I fled, but that flame didn’t quite need stoking presently. April first, which was totally appropriate, captain jock caught me flirting with Robbie in the hallway or someplace and finally made real his threats of tearing me a new asshole or skull fucking me or choking me with my own dick. “Are you gay or something?” All those sexually oriented insults were making me uncomfortable. Captain jock got so mad right then he threw a vicious right cross that connected squarely with the edge of the door to my locker causing his arm to explode in bone and blood and havoc to pop. Captain jock’s loyal best friend then took a shot at me and I ducked that as well, only when he missed me he connected with Robbie’s best friend forever’s face—who was always trying to keep Robbie away from me. Boom, down goes Sally in a spray of blood and screams. The crowd was moving like angry hippos and people were getting knocked to the floor and run over. Captain jock’s friend didn’t let up. I kept ducking his punches and then, out of the corner of my eye, I see Robbie starting to get pushed into the wall and with one great leap I caught her, wrapped her up and twisted between her and the wall. Boom, my head bounces off the wall and that brick puts out my lights. I actually don’t remember any of this. I got to see the security camera footage later.
Ma told me I had a slight concussion. Her and Daddy had seen the video of the brawl. “She sure is pretty, that one,” said Ma. “Yup,” agreed Daddy. “Purdy.”
Even though I hadn’t thrown a punch, and had saved Robbie from a concussion, they threw me out of school for a few weeks just like captain jock and his idiot friend. Seeing Robbie now would be nearly impossible and I was pining like a little girl until Daddy kicked me in the butt to go hunting one evening. This is the second thing. Daddy drove right to Robbie’s house. He’d planted a coon there the night before. I could tell he was rightly proud of himself, and I couldn’t have been happier. It went exactly like the first time to the letter, except for one thing. Robbie blew me a kiss. I walked straight into a tree again.
What happened next was the thing. Just as me and Daddy crossed into the woods behind Robbie’s house to set up for the evening we heard the distinct growl of a bear and turned around—and there he was—probably a six hundred pound male black bear and he was eating a raccoon—and looked drunk. In fact, the bear keeled over and fell into the swimming pool. (moonshine apples) “Shit,” Daddy says, and heads off toward the bear. “All we have is a 22, Daddy”, I said, but he didn’t stop. In fact, he threw the rifle down, and then jumped into the pool on top of that bear. It was in the deep end and Daddy was holding its head under trying to drown it. He yelled, “Boy!” and I jumped in on top of the bear, too. That bear tried everything to shake us, but when it rolled over onto its back it must have got a mouthful of pool water and he flipped back over and had sucked in too much water to fight any longer. Daddy dragged me out of the pool through the shallow end. I couldn’t stop shaking—not from the cold, mind you but from realizing what I had just done. And then I looked up and saw Robbie’s entire family standing in the patio door windows. At least two of them had camera phones going. Robbie was the only family member missing. My heart sunk.
We dragged the bear out of the pool and revived it. It was obvious that thing had spent his very last ounce of piss and vinegar. Robbie’s dad let us back the Chevy up to the pool and the three of us hefted it onto the bed. Robbie’s dad offered Daddy five thousand dollars for the skin. He had his wife take some pictures of him with the bear in the back of the truck. “Maybe”, says Daddy. I was depressed the whole drive home, but didn’t show it. Daddy was too proud of himself. He turned off the Chevy engine and spoke an entire sentence. “Don’t tell Ma we pretended to drown dat bar,” he said.
My first day back to school Robbie marched right up to me and said, “Are you crazy?” only it wasn’t really a question. Her best friend forever, who was now wearing a face brace, yanked Robbie away before I could plead my case. My depression deepened. On top of that people now took to calling me, Bear. I got home from school that afternoon and Ma noted my disposition immediately. She called me into her sewing corner and sat me down. “Tomorrow, give Robbie this,” she said, and held up the most beautiful fabric I had ever seen. It was pure white and light as a feather and felt like it might melt in your hand. “It’s a shawl,” Ma explained. “It’s made from the beard hairs of the wild ibex and comes from Kashmir, India. I traded some coon caps for it for the thread and wove it myself. Robbie will love it.”
In Spanish class the next day I showed it to Robbie’s best friend forever who was clearly wowed. “It’s gorgeous,” she said. “Where did you get it?” I just asked her if she thought Robbie would like it. “Yes,” she said. “Who wouldn’t?”
I was wearing it when I caught Robbie closing her locker door—I thought that might get at least a smile. Before she could say a thing I wrapped the shawl around her shoulders and said, “Je l’avais fait spécialement pour vous.” That earned me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Joyeux anniversaire, ma princesse.”
Bang! Hook, line, sinker. She told that football captain to fuck off, transferred into my Spanish class, and bought me a twelve millimeter gold chain. “I love you Beary much!” she claimed. Life was good.
Of course, nothing lasts forever especially for teenagers but not lasting forever can sometimes be a good thing, of course. So, one day while out riding in the Chevy I swung by the homestead. It was hard to read Robbie’s reaction at first. Her face kind of got a deathly pale color but her neck veins were pulsing like fire hoses. She looked at me and asked, “You actually live here?”
I got to give the girl credit though she actually got out of the Chevy and followed me into the house. It smelled of lavender as it usually do because Ma likes that odor. I don’t think I told you about the skylights yet, but there were several and the natural light streamed in like it was a cathedral or something. A burping fire bounced in the stone fire pit. Above it hung an iron pot emitting brief whiffs of steam. Ma sat at the supper table cleaning Daddy’s bear rifle. She smiled and said, “Why hello there. I know you’re Robbie. Come on over here and sit down, Child.” To me she said, “Get your mother and the lady something cool to drink.” And then I was sent out to hunt dinner, but they were just trying to get rid of me. Girl talk.
A few hours later I returned and they were sitting on the porch still gabbing away. As I approached Robbie jumped down and said, “Teach me how to drive that truck or lose me forever!” So I did. And then I taught her how to shoot. And then I taught her how to hunt. And then I tried to teach her how to field dress an animal and she told me to fuck off. But then, she field dressed me and I knew for certain I had been slaked rather completely. We slaked a lot after that, and weren’t exactly shy about where we slaked. That led to a little trouble. After the bear incident Robbie’s father had cameras installed and they were motioned operated and well, they caught some motion one night in the Chevy. Robbie daddy rushed out of the house swinging a golf club and cussing up a storm which gave me just enough time to fire up that Chevy and scram the Hell out of there. Actually, Robbie was driving but the result was the same.
I thought Ma would be all cool and understanding when we told her what happened, but she flew through the freaking roof. Daddy had to calm her down even and he isn’t very good at it because he has never had to do it before. Either had I. And Robbie, well she didn’t have a chance either. Finally Ma wore down a bit and put down the cleaver and six-shooter. She was most upset that we had been so flagrant with our love making. She said if we got caught it was because we wanted to get caught and that was just plain sick! But I pointed out that I once caught her and Daddy and that was probably the closest she ever came to actually striking me. Robbie’s brain must have kicked in about then because she said the magic words that got us all over the hump of this problem. She said, “I’m sorry, Ma. I was stupid and selfish and I will never, ever do anything like this again. Please forgive me!”
The apology didn’t mean shit to Ma. She’d heard me and Daddy apologize our asses off before and always knew they were bullshit. Nope, what got her is Robbie actually calling her, Ma, for the first time. She was butter in a crock pot after that.
But farting on frogs Robbie’s daddy would not get over this debacle no matter how many times I tried apologizing and calling him, Pa. It seemed it just made him angrier so I stopped. I sent letters instead. One day a lawyer in a fancy car showed up with some cease and desist orders. Mama brung the young man into the house, fed him lunch and some special coffee and sent him on his way with two coon skin caps under his arm. Mama had twelve hundred dollars tucked into her bra. She told me, “Stop apologizing to that man already.”
Robbie’s daddy was rich and powerful and everything, but nothing can control a teenage girl but that very same teenage girl and his teenage girl was no exception. She was smart about it, too. She kept up her grades, kept under her limit on her credit card, made curfew most every time, and didn’t get pregnant to the best of everyone’s knowledge. Of course, nothing gets by Mama either. “What are you going to do?” she asked Robbie. “I’m going to have that baby. Never for a second did I think any differently.” That was all Mama needed to hear. It was all Robbie’s daddy needed to hear, as well. He wrote her out of the will and cut off all contact with her. I’d be lying if I said Robbie wasn’t hurt, but she hid it well.
Anyway, the baby came a spell later and unfortunately it looked like Daddy. But then Mama said ugly babies need love too so we all changed our tune. Robbie opted for a hospital delivery instead of a mobile home log cabin delivery and Mama was fine with that as everything turned out well. After about a month the baby’s features softened and it started looking more like me and we were all relieved. By now we were both high school graduates. I was supposed to go into coonin’ and Robbie was supposed to go to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan to study law. One way or another it worked out exactly that way. Mama wrote some letters and bing, bang, boom it was so. Robbie drove the truck to school near every day and me and Daddy drove it nearly every night working. It was a perfect arrangement. Then Robbie’s daddy showed up one day and as usual he was pissed. He was angry because he never saw the grand kid, so we let him. He was angry because we stole his daughter’s future from her, and we told him about the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was running out of steam at this point and all he had left was a video of Daddy siphoning gas out of his Cadillac. Daddy said, “I done it.” Three whole words in a row. Of course, then I topped Daddy’s truth with a bald face lie. “It was late at night and there’s no gas stations open. We didn’t want to wake you to ask,” I stammered as guiltily as I could. I could see Mama shaking her head out of the corner of my eye, but Robbie’s daddy bought it. Daddy offered him a drink and the party was on. He slept next to the fire in a deer skin that night and said he never slept better. Mama made flapjacks for breakfast. We ate like pigs.
That’s pretty much all there is to tell in this little story. You can imagine how things proceeded. Once you’ve found something that works it is just not wise to change it unless you absolutely have to. We turned that little happiness crank until it plum wore out, and then we fashioned another. Everything is what it is and what it is is what you make of it. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, and it all starts with coonin’.
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Last updated: SEPTEMBER 11, 2018
135 colleges & universities from 15 countries!
Click here for a directory of colleges/universities by table number.
Agnes Scott College Decatur, Georgia, USA Agnes Scott College is a liberal arts college for women recognized as one of the 40 Colleges That Change Lives and ranked as US News & World Report’s #2 Most Innovative Liberal Arts College. Through our signature SUMMIT curriculum every student, regardless of major, will be prepared to be an effective change agent in an increasingly global society.
The American University of Paris Paris, France Since its founding 56 years ago, The American University of Paris (AUP) has provided an American-style university education, in English, for students from around the globe. Set in the heart of Paris and renowned as an international center for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary teaching and learning, AUP shapes global citizens for the 21st century. Ours is education for one world. This year, we are hosting 110 nationalities on campus; our faculty numbers 30 nationalities; 80 languages and dialects are spoken on campus; our graduates live and work in 141 countries worldwide.
Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona, USA Arizona State University is a public research university on five campuses across the Phoenix metropolitan area. ASU is home to more than 60,000 undegraduate students and offers over 350 majors. The 2018 university ratings by U.S. News & World Report ranked ASU as No.1 among the Most Innovative Schools in America for the third year in a row.
Augsburg University Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA Nestled in vibrant and lively Minneapolis, students from multiple U.S. States and countries call Augsburg home. Our campus community is shaped by our urban and global settings and defined by excellence in the liberal arts and professional studies. Auggies have the opportunity to experience hands-on learning, discover their callings, and serve their neighbors.
Australian Institute of Music Melbourne and Sydney, Australia Celebrating our 50th year as an education provider, the Australian Institute of Music (AIM) is Australia’s largest tertiary music institution. It is renowned as a leading independent education provider in the music, entertainment and performing arts industries.
Babson College Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA As the No.1 leader in entrepreneurship for 25 consecutive years, Babson is a globally recognized business school. More than 2,100 undergraduate and 900 graduate students are attending Babson, representing more than 80 countries. Forbes ranked Babson #1 Best U.S. College for International Students (2017).
Barnard College of Columbia University New York, New York, USA Founded in 1889 as one of the original Seven Sister schools to the Ivy League, Barnard College was the first college in New York City – and one of the few in the world – where women could receive the same liberal arts education available to men. Today, as the most sought-after women’s college in the United States, Barnard aims to provide the highest quality liberal arts education to promising and high-achieving young women, offering the unparalleled advantages of an outstanding residential college in partnership with a major research university. Through Barnard’s unique and historic partnership with Columbia University, students can register for more than 1,500 courses, use a system of 22 libraries, get involved with more than 500 organizations, participate in NCAA Division I athletics, and attend high-profile events.
Binghamton University, SUNY Binghamton, New York, USA Binghamton University is a Public Ivy and the #1 public university in New York. Our students receive an interdisciplinary, liberal arts education while earning degrees in 130 majors and specialized programs, including degrees in business and engineering. About 18% of Binghamton's students are international, and we have a worldwide network of over 120,000 alumni.
Bocconi University Milan, Italy Founded in 1902, Bocconi was the first university in Italy to offer degrees in business and economics, and today, after over a century of development and expansion, Bocconi is widely recognized as one of the top European institutions of higher learning and research in the fields of management, economics, finance and social science.
Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA Jesuit and Catholic by tradition and conviction, Boston College calls its students to develop their talents and grow in excellence, achievement, and service to others. With 9,300 undergraduates, Boston College students embrace a Liberal Arts core curriculum, choose from over 50 majors from 4 academic divisions, and across disciplines, engage in research that examines the complex problems of our contemporary world, proposing new solutions and new ways of thinking about religion and culture, science and technology, art and education, business and ethics. Currently, the top four largest majors are Economics, Finance, Biology and Political Science.
Boston University Boston, Massachusetts, USA Boston University is in the heart of Boston, and is ranked #39 of Global Universities by U.S. News & World Report. In recognition of its undergraduate education and research, BU was named to the prestigious Association of American Universities. More than 250 programs of study are offered, and students study with award-winning faculty including Fulbright Scholars, MacArthur Fellows, or Nobel Prize winners. The student to faculty ratio is 10:1, and the average class size is 27. Students benefit from extensive global research and internship opportunities and a network of more than 300,000 alumni in 189 countries.
Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts, USA Brandeis University is a student-centered mid-size research university in the suburbs of Boston. Founded upon principles of diversity and inclusion, critical thinking, and social justice, Brandeis encourages students to explore without boundaries and use their education to make a difference in the world.
California Lutheran University Thousand Oaks, California, USA California Lutheran University is a private university of the liberal arts, sciences and professional studies. CLU is ranked in the top 20 Western Regional Colleges and Universities in U.S. News & World Report annual rankings. CLU offers 36 undergraduate majors and 28 minors. Scholarships between $5,000 - $30,000 are available for undergraduate students with or without the SAT/ACT.
California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo, California, USA For the 25th consecutive year, California Polytechnic State University (a part of the California State University System) has been named the best public, master’s-level university in the West by U.S. News & World Report. Our signature Learn by Doing approach gives you a powerful combination of academic and hands-on experience. Cal Poly maintains a strong connection to industry, allowing for greater opportunities for students. It is no coincidence that within one year of graduation, 89 percent of our graduates are employed full-time or are in graduate school.
Calvin College Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA Calvin College is Christian liberal arts school with over 100+ majors including Engineering, Business, Nursing and Education. With students from over 60 countries and 48 U.S states, we hope to equip students to think deeply, act justly and live wholeheartedly.
Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Located on a beautiful riverside campus in Ottawa, Canada's capital city, Carleton has earned a reputation as one of Canada's leading institutions in the fields of public affairs, management, and high technology. We offer a variety of hands-on experience through co-operative education and internships. Generous scholarships and guaranteed residence opportunities attract undergraduate and graduate students from over 140 countries.
Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio, USA Case Western Reserve University is a private, research insitution located in the City of Cleveland, Ohio, halfway between Chicago and New York City. Our campus is located in the University Circle Neighborhood of Ohio, the most culturally dense neighborhood of the United States. Students study 75 programs within the Case School of Engineering, College of Arts and Sciences, Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, and Weatherhead School of Management.
Chapman University Orange, California, USA Located in Orange, California, Chapman is a mid-sized, private university ideally situated within an hour's drive of Los Angeles. In addition to an ideal location, Chapman University strives to connect academic areas of inquiry through interdisciplinary study, as well as connecting students to faculty for a personalized and relevant education.
Charleston Southern University Charleston, South Carolina, USA Charleston Southern University is a private, 4 year, Christian liberal arts university located in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. 58 undergraduate degrees, Division 1 sports, less than 4,000 students, on a beautiful residential campus in a safe, suburban area.
City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong City University of Hong Kong is ranked 55th in the world and 8th in Asia in 2019 by QS. It is centrally located at the heart of Hong Kong.
Colby College Waterville, Maine, USA Students pursue intellectual passions, choosing among 58 majors or developing their own. Independent and collaborative research, study abroad, and internships offer robust opportunities to prepare students for postgraduate success. Founded in 1813, Colby is home to a community of 2,000 dedicated and diverse students from around the globe. Its Maine location provides easy access to world-class research institutions and civic engagement experiences.
Colgate University Hamilton, New York, USA Colgate is a highly selective, residential, coeducational, liberal arts university located in Central New York. With 56 majors, over 100 off-campus study programs, and a Division I athletic program, Colgate’s offerings and reach are more typical of a larger university, while the average class size of 17 offers a learning experience found at small colleges. Members of the faculty delight in teaching undergraduates and engaging students in their own research and scholarship through our extensive undergraduate research program.
College of Charleston Charleston, South Carolina, USA The College of Charleston is a medium-sized, liberal arts university located in the heart of historic Charleston, South Carolina. With over 130 majors and minors, the College of Charleston provides an excellent opportunity to find the right fit for whatever you may be thinking about studying.
The College of New Jersey Ewing, New Jersey, USA Since 1855 The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) has been a leader in American higher education. Of 4,000 U.S. universities, TCNJ ranks among Money magazine’s top ROI designees, the Department of Education’s Top 15 Public Schools for high graduation rates and incomes, and U.S. News & World Report’s #1 Public University (Northeast Region) for more than 20 years! Our diverse student body, dedicated advisors, and international merit scholarships help make TCNJ an optimal destination for students from around the globe.
Davidson College Davidson, North Carolina, USA Davidson College, located 20 miles from Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of the top liberal arts colleges in the United States. Its 2000 students create a community of scholars from 48 of the 50 U.S. states and over 50 countries. From Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Interdisciplinary Courses, and a required course on Community, Equality, and Justice, Davidson puts its students at the focus of all community decisions. Ask the Davidson AO about the Failure Fund, the Alvarez Access Program, how Migration affects Economics, and the way our students learn about the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Denison University Granville, Ohio, USA Founded in 1831, Denison University is an undergraduate, residential four-year liberal arts and sciences college in Granville, Ohio, a picturesque village just 25 mi (40 km) east of Columbus, the 14th largest city in the United States. Denison’s diverse student body of 2,300 represents all 50 states and over 40 different countries. Denison offers programs in over 50 subject areas, including new majors in global commerce and data analytics, and excels in faculty mentorship, student support, and personal and professional outcomes.
Dickinson College Carlisle, Pennsylvania, USA Chartered in 1783 by Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a prominent Philadelphia physician, Dickinson was the first college established in the new United States of America.
Duke Kunshan University Kunshan, Jiangsu, China Durham, NC, USAStudents receive degrees from Duke University and Duke Kunshan University. Liberal arts curriculum designed with a dual structure that consists of broad-based interdisciplinary core components and a disciplinary focus. Study and living in both China and the US.
Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne Lausanne, Switzerland Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne is the leading hospitality management school; founded in 1893, it was the first hotel school in the world. Today, it trains and develops students to become the future leaders and managers of the international hospitality industry. Our graduates find careers directly within the hotel, leisure and tourism industry or related fields that require hospitality expertise such as banking, consulting and real estate. The diverse campus comprises of 2970 students from 115 different nationalities.
École Polytechnique Palaiseau, France École Polytechnique is a leading French institute which combines top-level research, academics, and innovation at the cutting-edge of science and technology.
Elon University Elon, North Carolina, USA Elon University is a mid-sized, private, liberal arts institution known for enriching, experiential-focused learning. With an average class size of 20, the classroom is an interactive environment in which to learn. Elon prides itself on community and relationship building, creating a student-focused environment that lends itself to staff, faculty, and student mentorship.
Emory University Atlanta, Georgia, USA Emory University is a private, major research university in Atlanta. 7,000 undergraduates across four colleges - Liberal Arts, Business, Nursing - call our residential campus home. Like Atlanta, Emory's campus is globally diverse and welcoming.
Erasmus University College Rotterdam, The Netherlands Erasmus University College (EUC) is the international undergraduate honour's programme of Erasmus University Rotterdam offering a three-year programme (BSc) in Liberal Arts and Sciences. We keep group sizes to 12 students for tutorials, so that you are always intensively involved in your education according to the Problem Based Learning method. Additionally, we are a residential programme, meaning you live together in the lively city centre with your fellow first-year students from around the world. We look forward to meeting you!
ESCP Europe Business School Paris (France) / London (United Kingdom), Berlin (Germany), Madrid (Spain), Turin (Italy), Warsaw (Poland) Established in 1819, ESCP Europe is the world’s first business school. With its six urban campuses in Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris, Turin and Warsaw, ESCP Europe's true European Identity enables the provision of a unique style of cross-cultural business education and a Global Perspective on international management issues. Along with a range of general and specialised Masters, at an undergraduate level ESCP Europe offers the Bachelor in Management (BSc) – a unique interdisciplinary three-year, three-campus programme that combines management subjects with liberal arts and languages.
Fordham University New York, New York, USA We are one Jesuit, Catholic university on two New York City campuses in the Bronx and Manhattan. Our undergraduate colleges of arts and sciences, and business, are rooted in Fordham’s core curriculum, steeped in Jesuit traditions, and stocked with opportunities for independent research, experiential learning, and civic engagement. Our graduates go on to be transformative figures in politics, education, business, literature, game design, the performing arts, and so on. This is who we are; this is what we’re about: opportunity, possibility, a brighter future for you and the world you’ll build.
Franklin University Switzerland Lugano-Sorengo, Switzerland Franklin University Switzerland is an American liberal arts institution located in Switzerland, with dual accreditation from the United States and Switzerland. The university offers 22 undergraduate majors including International Relations, Management, Economics, Banking & Finance, Communication and Media Studies, Environmental Studies, Psychology and many more.
Goldsmiths, University of London London, United Kingdom Creativity has always been the hallmark of Goldsmiths. With world-leading research and high-quality teaching, we offer undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in the arts, humanities, social sciences, business and computing from our single-site campus in London. The QS World Rankings place us in the top five UK Universities for Art & Design and Communication & Media Studies.
Goucher College Baltimore, Maryland, USA Goucher College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college of 1,500 students located in Baltimore, Maryland. Its history of innovation and commitment to social justice, civic engagement, diversity, and global understanding creates a broad platform for a distinctive liberal arts education. In addition, at Goucher College, all students are required to participate in a study abroad experience.
Hobart and William Smith Colleges Geneva, New York, USA Hobart and William Smith Colleges is a liberal arts and sciences university located on the shore of Seneca Lake in Geneva, New York. Known for its top academics, global education, and career services programs, HWS boasts small classrooms and a diverse student body.
Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hong Kong Located at the heart of Hong Kong, ranked 19th in Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings 2018, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) offers the first of its kind in Hong Kong, *Service Learning (https://www.polyu.edu.hk/osl/) and *Work-Integrated Education (WIE: https://www.polyu.edu.hk/caps/) as compulsory elements for all undergraduate students. We offer entry scholarships to outstanding students up to full tuition waived plus a living subsidy of HK40,000 per annum. The scholarship is renewable throughout the normal duration of study (4 years) with academic attainment each year.
IE University Madrid/Segovia, Spain Located in Madrid and Segovia, Spain, IE University is marked by its international campus, entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to educate young professionals and experts for an international vocation.
Imperial College London London, United Kingdom Imperial is unique in the UK as the only university to focus solely on science, engineering, medicine and business. We’re consistently counted amongst the best universities globally – ranking third best in Europe and eighth best in the world in The Times Higher Education Rankings 2018.
International College of Liberal Arts Kofu, Yamanashi, Japan Located in Yamanashi, the home of Mt. Fuji, International College of Liberal Arts (iCLA) is a four-year American style residential college with courses offered in English. Students can immerse themselves in the Japanese language and culture while pursing a Bachelors degree in International Liberal Arts.
Iowa State University Ames, Iowa, USA Iowa State University is a public, land-grant university, where students get a great academic start in learning communities and stay active in 800-plus student organizations, undergrad research, internships and study abroad. They learn from world-class scholars who are tackling some of the world's biggest challenges -- feeding the hungry, finding alternative fuels and advancing manufacturing.
Jacobs University Bremen Bremen, Germany Jacobs University is an English-language research university in Germany. Boasting a 75% international student body, Jacobs University is a home to students from 116 nations. Our 16 undergraduate programs are top-ranked and taught by over 250 professors and faculty members. Small class sizes ensure close contact to faculty and teaching staff. Our transdisciplinary, liberal arts approach gives students the opportunity to study and research in all areas of natural sciences and engineering, as well as the humanities and social sciences.
Keio University Tokyo, Japan Established in 1858 by Yukichi Fukuzawa as a small school of Western learning, Keio has a history as Japan’s very first private institution of higher learning. Over 150 years since its founding, Keio has thrived under its founder’s motto of jitsugaku (実学), or empirical science, as it continues to transform Japan as a modern nation through contributions to education, research, and medicine. Keio currently offers the following two undergraduate degree programs in English: Programme in Economics for Alliances, Research and Leadership (PEARL) from the Faculty of Economics; and the Global Information and Governance Academic (GIGA) Program from the Faculties of Policy Management and Environment and Information Studies. With an extensive worldwide network and some of the best academic and research opportunities in the country, Keio University is where the world’s next generation of global leaders come to grow.
King's College London London, United Kingdom King’s College London is a world-leading university in the heart of London. Rated among the world’s top 35 universities, King’s is ranked sixth in the UK for the quality and quantity of its research activity and 11th in the world for its international performance and outlook. Since its foundation in 1829 King’s has defined itself in terms of its service to society, forming and leading international conversations in policy, government, law, culture, religion, medicine and business.
Knox College Galesburg, Illinois, USA Knox College is a nationally ranked, private, residential liberal arts college of 1,400 students located 3 hours west of Chicago. Founded in 1837 by social reformers strongly opposed to slavery, Knox was one of the first colleges in the United States open to all, regardless of race, gender, or financial means. Knox is a vibrant and creative community of remarkable diversity—the 10th most international college in the United States.
Lake Forest College Lake Forest (Chicagoland), Illinois, USA Globally diverse student body of 1600 undergraduates living on a historic residential university campus 45 minutes from downtown Chicago. Business, English, Sciences are most popular majors. Career guidance is a strength.
Lancaster University Lancaster, Northern England, United Kingdom Lancaster University is a UK Top 10 University, offering courses across the disciplines of Management, Science & Engineering, Arts & Social Sciences and Medical Sciences. Lancaster is currently one of only nine universities in the UK to be ranked in the top 10 across all national league tables of UK universities. Lancaster was also awarded University of the Year by The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide (2018) and it holds its highest ever institutional ranking of 6th place within the guide's national table. Lancaster University's Management School is one of a small group of business schools in the world to have achieved quadruple accreditation by the leading international business school accreditation organisations: AACSB (USA), EQUIS (Europe), Association of MBAs (UK), and Small Business Charter (UK).
Leiden University College The Hague The Hague, The Netherlands Leiden University College (LUC), is the honors and residential college of Leiden University located in The Hague. We offer a Liberal Arts and Sciences degree focusing on various Global Challenges (Peace & Justice, Sustainability, Diversity and Prosperity). Out student body is made up of 50% international students offering a unique international experience.
Lewis and Clark College Portland, Oregon, USA Lewis & Clark is a private college with a public conscience and global reach. The school offers 29 majors and 27 minors spanning the traditional disciplines of the arts, humanities, social sciences, mathematics and natural sciences. Located in the city of Portland, Oregon on the west coast, students engage with local organizations through internships and volunteering, as well as taking advantage of fun activities in the city and in the beautiful nature nearby.
Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, California, USA Loyola Marymount University offers rigorous undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs to academically ambitious students committed to lives of meaning and purpose. We benefit from our location in Los Angeles, a dynamic city that brings into sharp focus the issues of our time and provides an ideal context for study, research, creative work, and active engagement. By intention and philosophy, we invite men and women diverse in talents, interests, and cultural backgrounds to enrich our educational community and advance our mission.
Luther College Decorah, Iowa, USA Founded in 1861, Luther College is a four-year, university-level, residential institution of 2,000 students. One of the outstanding colleges in the U.S., Luther offers more than 60 majors and pre-professional programs leading to the Bachelor of Arts degree. Luther is located in Decorah, Iowa, a picturesque community of 8,500 people. The college welcomes nearly 170 international students from over 70 countries to campus each year.
Manhattan College Riverdale, New York, USA New York City is where people of all backgrounds and experiences come to pursue big dreams. The city offers an exciting, ever-changing and vibrant backdrop to any story. At Manhattan College, you get all of that and more. What sets us apart from the New York City that you know is our unique community. Whether you're an incoming freshman, a graduate student, an international student or an adult learner, rest assured that our expert faculty, kind administration and successful network of alumni will be there to support you along your journey.
Maryville College Maryville, Tennessee, USA Maryville College (MC) is a four-year liberal arts college. Founded in 1819, it is the 12th oldest institution of higher learning in the South. Maryville College is nationally ranked and successfully joins the liberal arts and professional preparation. It is known for offering its students a rigorous and highly personal experience. Maryville College offers more than 60 programs of study, seven pre-professional programs and an ESL Pathway program. All admitted international students receive substantial merit scholarships and the chance to compete for a full-tuition scholarship.
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS University) Boston, Massachusetts, USA Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS University) is the oldest university in Boston and offers more than 100 degree programs in the sciences and healthcare fields. According to the U.S. Department of Education, MCPHS students earn $112,700 ten years after enrolling, making them the top earners in New England and #4 in the United States!
Miami University Oxford, Ohio, USA Miami University is a mid-size, public institution located in Oxford, Ohio. It is the #1 public university for undergraduate teaching nationwide. We focus on strong outcomes as our students graduate on time and are well-prepared for the job market or for graduate school.
Monash University Melbourne, Australia Monash University is a prestigious Group of Eight (Go8) university located in Melbourne, Australia. Ranked in the world's top 100 universities, Monash has ten schools or faculties including Art and Design, Arts and Humanities, Business, Education, Engineering, IT, Law, Medicine, Science, and Pharmacy.
Mount Holyoke College South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA Mount Holyoke College is a highly selective, research liberal arts college for women enrolling 2,200 students, of whom 27% are international. The College is located in Western Massachusetts with easy access to Boston and New York City. Students benefit from the Five College Consortium which brings together students from Amherst, Hampshire, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts who may cross-register and participate in co-curricular activities. Mount Holyoke considers all students for both merit-based scholarships and need-based financial aid and meets 100% of demonstrated financial need.
Nagoya University Nagoya, Japan Nagoya University (NU) is a nationally-funded and research-intensive university with strong focus on science and engineering. NU plays home to more than 16,000 students from Japan and around the world. The International Undergraduate Programs, currently offering 11 majors fully taught in English, have been integrated in October 2011 and every year around 50 undergraduate students enroll. Since all programs are taught in English, no Japanese language proficiency is required at the time of admission.
Nagoya University of Commerce & Business Nagoya City, Aichi, Japan Come and study an AACSB Accredited Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) in Japan, one of a few universities to offer a business degree fully in English! Find out more about our campus (1.5x the of Tokyo Disneyland!), study abroad options, and our unique teaching styles.
NCUK - The University Consortium Manchester, United Kingdom NCUK is unique in UK higher education. We are a consortium of leading UK universities dedicated to giving international students guaranteed access to universities worldwide and helping you succeed when you get there. Our qualifications are recognised by our own universities and by most others across the UK, including many in the Russell Group, and also by universities internationally. Our qualifications and guaranteed access are the best there are, they are designed in collaboration with our universities, and combine high academic standards with language, study, social and cultural skills. Following the NCUK International Foundation Year Qualification, students can choose from thousands of degree programmes across a range of institutions.
New York University New York, New York, USA; Shanghai, China; Abu Dhabi, UAE NYU is a university without walls. Our students are comfortable anywhere and effective everywhere. All NYU students find their home at one of three distinct degree-granting locations: New York, Abu Dhabi or Shanghai, but are able to travel seamlessly across the global network during their undergraduate studies. With over 230 courses of study to choose from, our students are able to pursue their interests and passions while drawing upon the resources of some of the world's most vibrant and innovative cities.
The New School New York, New York, USA Discover a new kind of university in New York City, one where scholars, artists, and designers come together to challenge convention and create positive change. Our university takes full advantage of its location in one of the most vibrant and diverse cities in the world, and our undergraduate colleges include Parsons School of Design, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, the College of Performing Arts, and Parsons Paris.
Northumbria University Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom Northumbria University is located in the heart of Newcastle upon Tyne, which has regularly been voted the number one student city in the UK. Northumbria was shortlisted for 'University of the Year' (THE Awards 2017).
Nottingham Trent University Nottingham, East Midlands, United Kingdom Winner of the University of the Year 2017 at the Times Higher Education Awards and The Times and Sunday Times Modern University of the Year 2018, Nottingham Trent University (NTU) is proud to be recognised as a leading UK institution and is home to over 27,000 students. Based in the heart of England in the vibrant student city of Nottingham, NTU provides a quality university experience and outstanding employment prospects for students from across the world.
Nova Southeastern University Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA Top 200 private research university offering programs in biology, business, psychology or the arts. We offer many scholarship opportunities.
Oberlin College Oberlin, Ohio, USA Oberlin is a place of intense energy and creativity, built on a foundation of academic, artistic, and musical excellence. With a top-ranking liberal arts college, a world-class conservatory, and a first-rate art museum all on a single campus, and its longstanding commitments to access, diversity, and inclusion, it is the perfect laboratory in which to study and design the world you want.
Oklahoma State University Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA Oklahoma State University is a large, public, four-year research institution with over 200 majors. Ranked as Top 80 Public School, OSU offers international students generous scholarships up to $10,000/year. Featured majors include aviation, accounting, hospitality, sports management, chemical engineering and architecture.
Otis College of Art and Design Los Angeles, California, USA Established in 1918 in Los Angeles, California, Otis College of Art and Design was the first professional art school in southern California. The College offers 7 majors and 19 minors in various art and design disciplines, from Fashion Design to Animation and even Toy Design. Alumni and faculty are Fulbright, MacArthur, and Guggenheim grant recipients, Oscar awardees, legendary costume designers, leaders of contemporary art movements, entrepreneurs, and design stars at Apple, Pixar, DreamWorks, Mattel, Nike, and Disney.
Otterbein University Westerville, Ohio, USA Founded in 1847, Otterbein University is a comprehensive, private, liberal arts institution that offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees and a doctor of nursing practice degree. Otterbein is home to approximately 3,000 students located in Westerville, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. Nationally recognized for its innovative curriculum, it is one of only six schools to serve as a site for the Association of American Colleges and Universities project on experiential learning.
Penn State University Park, Pennsylvania, USA Penn State is a large, comprehensive, research intensive university consistently ranked among the top universities in the world. Hosting students from over 130 countries, offering over 250 academic programs and abundant extra-curricular opportunities, Penn State is an ideal place to prepare for your future.
Pepperdine University Malibu, California, USA Pepperdine University is a mid-sized, private liberal arts university in the Los Angeles area. Situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica mountains, it has been named the most beautiful campus in the US. Recognized as a top 50 institution, it offers students an academically rigorous education, while also equipping them for lives of purpose, service, and leadership.
Plymouth State University Plymouth, New Hampshire, USA Plymouth State University is nestled in the White Mountains and Lakes Region of New Hampshire just two hours north of Boston where students are finding a new approach to education.Plymouth is changing how degree programs work. We have taken our 50 majors and integrated them into 7 clusters for an ever-changing world. Through our integrated clusters approach, you’ll gain the knowledge and skills to create a better world. You’ll apply your creativity and practical problem–solving skills to create, develop and implement solutions to real-world challenges.
Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana, USA Since 1869, Purdue University has been at the forefront of innovation in delivering higher education, both inside and outside the classroom, giving students access to some of the most effective and modern teaching and learning approaches that better prepare them for real-world careers.
Queen Mary University of London London, United Kingdom Queen Mary University of London is a leading Russell Group university based in London’s vibrant East End. Study abroad year and placement year are available across different academic schools. First-year accommodation guaranteed for all first-year undergraduates who meet our eligibility criteria.
Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University Beppu City, Oita, Japan APU is a unique university where has a truly diverse community. We have 49% Japanese students and 51% international students, living and learning together, exchanging their cultures and languages. We invite you to shape your world and the world around you at APU.
Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester, New York, USA RIT offers top-ranked academic programs, emphasis on career preparation, experienced faculty, and balance of teaching and research. RIT is a university connected to business and industry, and our safe, modern residential campus featuring easy access to cutting-edge technologies.
Rollins College Orlando, Florida, USA Rollins College, founded in 1885, is a comprehensive liberal arts college. Located in picturesque Winter Park in the heart of Central Florida only ten minutes from downtown Orlando. Rollins offers the opportunity to study at a top-ranked school with global reach, while living and learning within close proximity of an international city. Rollins offers an inclusive full-time liberal arts program with 36 majors and 14 minors, with courses ranging from International Business to Biology. Rollins engages students in international learning in a close-knit community and offers small classes, study abroad, internship opportunities, community service engagement and more than 150 student organizations and exciting events and activities throughout the year. The undergraduate population consists approximately 2000 students, and the average class size has about 17 students. Rollins’ mission is to educate students for global citizenship and responsible leadership, empowering graduates to pursue meaningful lives and productive careers.
Ryerson University Toronto, Ontario, Canada Ryerson University is Canada’s leader in innovative, career-focused education. Located in the heart of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America, our students gain real-world knowledge through co-operative education and internships and amplify their studies through zone learning and specialized minors. Ryerson is internationally renowned for its boundary-pushing programs and research in the areas of: Arts; Science; Business; Communication & Design; Community Services; Engineering and Architectural Science. We also offer an intensive ESL Foundation Program. Urban, culturally diverse and inclusive, Ryerson is home to 43,000 undergraduate and graduate students, representing over 146 countries.
Saint Anselm College Manchester, New Hampshire, USA Founded in 1889 and located one hour north of Boston, Saint Anselm College has a rich history of preparing undergraduate students to lead fulfilling lives of purpose that drive social change. We are home to the U.S. Primary Presidential debates, encouraging all student to be civically engaged. Popular majors include: International Relations, Politics, Marketing, Business, Communication and Nursing.
Saint Mary's College at Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana, USA Saint Mary's College is an all-women's, liberal arts, Catholic institution located in Notre Dame, Indiana. We have been educating women for 175 years. Our top majors include business, education, nursing, engineering, biology, and psychology.
San Jose State University San Jose, California, USA San Jose State University (SJSU) is located in the Silicon Valley of California. We are part of the California State University system. Our popular Bachelors' Degrees include Computer Science, Engineering, Business and Sciences.
Santa Clara University Santa Clara, California, USA Santa Clara University, a comprehensive Jesuit, Catholic university offers its more than 5,400 students rigorous undergraduate curricula in arts and sciences, business, and engineering. With the fourth-highest graduation rate among all U.S. master’s universities and being California’s oldest operating higher-education institution, its values of ethics and social justice provide humanistic education that leads its students toward an informed, ethical engagement with the world. The average class size is 23 with a faculty-to-student ratio of 1:13. Santa Clara University is located 1 hour south of San Francisco and in the heart of Silicon Valley. The location and preparation provides access to over 75% of SCU students completing an internship and the top 3 employers of SCU grads are Cisco, Apple and Google.
Sarah Lawrence College Bronxville, New York, USA Sarah Lawrence is a prestigious, residential, coeducational liberal arts college. Founded in 1926 and consistently ranked among the leading liberal arts colleges in the country, Sarah Lawrence is known for its pioneering approach to education, rich history of impassioned intellectual and civic engagement, and vibrant, successful alumni. In close proximity to the unparalleled offerings of New York City, our historic campus is home to an inclusive, intellectually curious, and diverse community.
Savannah College of Art and Design Savannah, Georgia, USA The Savannah College of Art and Design exists to prepare talented students for professional careers, emphasizing learning through individual attention in a positively oriented university environment.
Seattle University Seattle, Washington, USA Located in the heart of one of the United States' most thriving cities, with top-ranked programs and limitless opportunities, Seattle University is a welcome destination for students from around the world.
Simmons University Boston, Massachusetts, USA Simmons University is a liberal arts, women's college of 1800 students in the heart of Boston. With a focus on empowering future leaders and professional preparation, 100% of our students complete internships, clinicals, research, or field work related to their major. Our consortium with the Colleges of the Fenway provides additional academic and extracurricular opportunities, further supplementing our campus community and life in Boston.
Singapore Management University Singapore SMU is a premier university, internationally recognised for its world-class research and distinguished teaching. SMU aspires to generate leading-edge research with global impact as well as to produce broad-based, creative and entrepreneurial leaders for the knowledge-based economy. SMU is committed to an interactive, participative and technologically enabled learning experience. Towards this end, it will provide a rewarding and challenging environment for faculty, staff and students to kindle and sustain a passion for excellence.
Smith College Northampton, Massachusetts, USA Smith College is located two hours west of Boston, Massachusetts, and educates women of promise for lives of distinction. Renowned for its vibrant intellectual and cultural community, Smith has an open curriculum that allows students to choose from 1,000 courses in more than 50 areas of study.
Stony Brook University Stony Brook, New York, USA Since its founding in 1957, this young university has grown to become a flagship as one of only four University Center campuses in the State University of New York (SUNY) system with more than 26,000 students and 2,600 faculty members, and 18 NCAA Division I athletic programs. Our faculty have earned numerous prestigious awards, including the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Indianapolis Prize for animal conservation, Abel Prize and the inaugural Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. The University offers students an elite education with an outstanding return on investment: U.S. News & World Report ranks Stony Brook among the top 50 public universities in the nation. Its membership in the Association of American Universities (AAU) places Stony Brook among the top 62 research institutions in North America.
Syracuse University Syracuse, New York, USA Syracuse University is a private research University of extraordinary academics. With a gorgeous campus in the heart of New York State, 20,000 students from all 50 U.S. states and 120+ countries, and 150 years of history, this is what University should feel like.
Temple University Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Temple University is a public, four-year research university in Philadelphia and a national leader in education, research and healthcare. With more than 140 undergraduate majors to choose from, you’ll be able to follow your passion or find your calling. With Main Campus only a mile from the city center, job and internships opportunities abound.
Temple University, Japan Campus Tokyo, Japan TUJ offers the unique opportunity to receive an American university education in Tokyo. Small classes of around 21 students each encourage student participation and allow faculty to provide individualized attention. Internships and independent research provide plenty of hands-on experience. TUJ students study towards their college degree in English while immersing themselves in the culture, language and history of Japan outside the classroom.
Texas Christian University Fort Worth, Texas, USA TCU offers the opportunities of a large university with the close mentoring relationships of a smaller college. TCU is known for its school spirit, loyalty and pride. The culture focuses on leadership and ethics, while respecting diverse personal and religious viewpoints.
Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland Located in a beautiful campus in the heart of Dublin’s city centre and founded in 1592, Trinity is Ireland’s highest ranked university. It is home to 17,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students across all the major disciplines in the arts and humanities, and in business, law, engineering, science, and health sciences.
Trinity University San Antonio, Texas, USA Founded in 1869, Trinity University is a private, independent, residential, highly selective liberal arts and sciences university located in San Antonio, America's 7th-largest city. Our students come from 48 states and 65 countries to explore a rigorous, flexible curriculum—48 majors, 59 minors, including Business, Engineering, Communications, Computer Science and Education. Trinity’s $1.2 billion endowment allows us to offer resources usually only found at much larger institutions, including the #7 ranked science facilities in the US, one of the nation’s top 10 undergraduate research libraries, and a $6 million USD student managed investment fund.
Union College Schenectady, New York, USA Founded in 1795, Union College was named to reflect the founders' desire to create a welcoming academic community open to all religions and nationalities. Union was the first liberal arts college to offer an engineering degree. This academic integration continues today as engineering, science, economics, social science, humanities and the arts go hand-in-hand.
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York Buffalo, New York, USA Founded in 1846, the University at Buffalo (UB) is a nationally-ranked public research university with an international reputation for academic excellence; UB faculty has included Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners. Ranked as a best value and "best buy," UB offers nearly 400 academic programs and research opportunities. Its global focus prepares students for work and collaborative, diverse leadership opportunities across the world. The large-university opportunities and the small-school benefits of studying with world-famous research faculty make UB the #1 choice.
University College Roosevelt Middelburg, The Netherlands University College Roosevelt (UCR) is one of Utrecht University's international Liberal Arts and Science Colleges. We offer you the opportunity to compose your own curriculum by combining courses in the Social Sciences, Sciences and Arts & Humanities, while living on campus in the city of Middelburg with 600 fellow students.
University College Utrecht Utrecht, The Netherlands University College Utrecht (UCU) is one of the international honours colleges of Utrecht University (Times Higher Education Ranking 2017 #86). UCU offers a liberal arts and sciences undergraduate education where students compose their own curriculum combining disciplines from humanities, science and social science. Almost all 700 students, of whom half come from abroad, live together on an American-style campus ten minutes--by bike!--from the historic city centre of Utrecht.
University of Akron Akron, Ohio, USA With 23,000 students and more than 300 associate, bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate and law degree programs, The University of Akron offers career-focused and experiential learning helps students get ahead in the job market. The most popular majors among international students include business, engineering, health sciences, and natural sciences. We are also home to the world’s largest polymer science program.
University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC and Kelowna, BC (Okanagan Valley), Canada The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a global centre for research and teaching, consistently ranked among the top 40 universities in the world. It is a globally influential university, with students from all over the world choosing UBC for its wide selection of programs of study, expert faculty, research opportunities, world-class facilities for learning, international perspective, and vibrant student life. It holds an international reputation for excellence in advanced research and learning, offering unique and innovative undergraduate programs. Students at UBC are a diverse group of scholars from 156 countries—each with a unique perspective to share.
University of California, Davis Davis, California, USA UC Davis is the home of the Aggies. Since 1908, we have been serving the world with quality of teaching, public service and renowned research. Our school offers over 100 majors under four colleges, over 90 graduate programs and six professional schools. The 5,300-acre campus is located in Northern California, a vibrant college town located about 20 minutes away from the state capitol.
University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA, USA Unique. Exceptional. Just like you. At UCI, we believe in the infinitely curious. Our students are the tinkerers, the dreamers, and the courageous of thought.
University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, California, USA Located on the California seashore 90 minutes north of Los Angeles, UC Santa Barbara is part of the 10-campus, University of California system. Ranked the # 8 public university by US News & World Report, UCSB is home to 6 Nobel Prize winners.
University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, California, USA Named to the 2017 US News & World Report Top 50 Global Universities, University of California, Santa Cruz has earned international recognition both for the impact of its research and for its long-established commitment to quality undergraduate instruction, combining the intimacy of a small, liberal arts college with the depth and rigor of a major research university. Undergraduates pursue course work in 65 majors in the arts, engineering, humanities, physical and biological sciences, and social sciences.
University of Connecticut Storrs, Connecticut, USA Founded in 1881, the University of Connecticut is ranked as one of the best public universities in the United States. With a combination of dynamic faculty, strong athletic pride and an extraordinary sense of community, UConn is a university like no other. A broad range of academics choices are provided with over 120 majors and 90 minors. Over 100 countries are represented in the study body creating a diverse and welcoming environment.
University of Florida Gainesville, Florida, USA University of Florida is a large research institution with over 50,000 students. We are currently the 9th-ranked public institution in the nation with over 6,000 international students. We offer over 120 undergraduate degrees and more than 250 graduate degrees.
University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa, USA The University of Iowa is a comprehensive research institution, one of the top 35 public universities in the US. We have 200+ areas of study and we are located in one of America's best college towns. Come see what it means to be a Hawkeye.
University of Kent Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom Top ranked for teaching, research, and employment, the University of Kent was ranked 21st overall in the Times Higher Education 'Table of Tables' 2017, and has several undergraduate programs ranked in the top 10 (including Design, Architecture, English and Creative Writing, Politics, Media and Film Studies, and many more). Furthermore, both the Kent Business School and the Kent School of Law benefit from an unparalleled international reputation, as does our unique postgraduate Brussels School of International Studies.
University of Leicester Leicester, United Kingdom The University of Leicester is a world-leading university, with a vibrant and friendly campus and the passion and facilities to help you thrive. With over 300 courses, you're sure to find a course that interests you. We've been ranked the best University in the UK for preparing its graduates for the world of work.
University of Manchester Manchester, United Kingdom The University of Manchester is a large, research-intensive, Russell Group university located in the UK's 'capital of the north'. Learn more about studying one of our 400+ degree programmes and become one of our 40,000-strong student community! #purpleandproud
University of Missouri Columbia, Missouri, USA The University of Missouri is a major public research institution, with over 300 programs to pick from, and where students and faculty work together to find solutions and improve lives.
University of Montana Missoula, Montana, USA University of Montana is Montana's flagship public university and one of the top 150 public schools in the US according to U.S. News & World Report rankings. UM offers students both the opportunities of a large research university and the personalized attention and access to services of a small, private college. Nestled in the culturally vibrant city of Missoula, Montana with nearby hiking, skiing and water recreation, UM educates agile, purposeful learners who are prepared to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
University of New England Biddeford, Maine, USA The University of New England is a small, private institution located on the coast of southern Maine, USA. As the only medical and dental school in the state of Maine, UNE is known for their health sciences, life sciences and liberal arts. Popular majors include Medical Biology/Pre-Med, Marine Biology and Business.
University of Nottingham Nottingham, United Kingdom The University of Nottingham is a founder member of the UK’s prestigious Russell Group with a global reputation for academic excellence, pioneering research and employability. Nottingham is ranked in the world’s top 100 universities and the UK’s top 15 by the QS World University Rankings 2018, and is rated gold in the UK’s Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). Nottingham’s award-winning campuses in the UK, China and Malaysia are home to over 44,500 students. The University offers students excellent on-campus facilities for study, leisure, sport, and faith, and is in the world’s top 60 universities in the QS Graduate Employability Rankings 2018.
University of Plymouth Plymouth, Devon, United Kingdom Plymouth University is one of the largest universities in the UK, with over 23,000 students, including around 2,000 international students from over 100 countries, enrolled. Plymouth was awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize in 2012 for its worldwide reputation for marine and maritime education and research and 11 subjects were recently rated among the top ten in the UK for student satisfaction. The city is also ranked 11th in the UK for most cost-effective places to study.
University of Queensland Brisbane, Queensland, Australia Ranked in the top 50* universities in the world, The University of Queensland (UQ) is one of Australia's finest higher education institutions with more national awards for teaching excellence than any other Australian university; exceptional program choice across a wide range of study areas at undergraduate, postgraduate and higher degree by research levels; opportunities for students to gain practical experience and make valuable connections with prospective employers through internships and work placements; and the chance to study part of their degree overseas at one of the University’s many highly ranked partner institutions. With campuses based in and around the city of Brisbane, you will enjoy a diverse community of over 52,000 students, including over 15,400 international students from 141 countries. The University’s outstanding 250,000-plus alumni include a Nobel laureate, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, an Academy Award winner, and leaders in government, law, science, public service and the arts.
University of Redlands Redlands, California, USA University of Redlands is a dynamic private liberal arts and sciences university located in Redlands, Southern California, a one-hour drive from Los Angeles. Redlands' 2,450 students from 43 countries study in 40+ programs. Students enjoy a residential campus with over 120 student organizations and a 60% study abroad participation rate.
University of Rochester Rochester, New York, USA The University of Rochester is one of the country's leading private research universities. Rochester operates on a personal scale, creating exceptional opportunities for interdisciplinary study and close work with faculty. The University consistently ranks among the top in federally financed science, engineering, medical, and other research. The unique Rochester Curriculum invites students to learn what they love, allowing for both focus and flexibility. Its College, School of Arts and Sciences, and Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences are complemented by the Eastman School of Music, Simon Business School, Warner School of Education, and Schools of Medicine and Nursing.
University of San Francisco San Francisco, California, USA The University of San Francisco is located in the heart of one of the world’s most innovative and diverse cities, and is home to a vibrant academic community of students and faculty who achieve excellence in their fields. Its diverse student body enjoys direct access to faculty, small classes and outstanding opportunities in the city itself. USF is San Francisco’s first university, and its Jesuit Catholic mission helps ignite a student’s passion for social justice and a desire to “Change the World From Here.”
University of Sheffield Sheffield, Yorkshire, United Kingdom With over 27,000 of the brightest students from 150 countries, learning alongside over 1,200 of the best academics from across the globe, the University of Sheffield is one of the world's leading universities. A member of the UK's Russell Group of leading research-led institutions, Sheffield offers world-class teaching and research excellence across a wide range of disciplines. Students can enjoy a world-class education alongside a fantastic student experience and the City of Sheffield is one of the most popular study destinations in the UK. Living in Sheffield combines a vibrant, modern city with beautiful national park, and we have been welcoming students from Taiwan for many years.
University of Southern California Los Angeles, California, USA The University of Southern California (USC) is a private research institution located in the heart of Los Angeles, California. A global center for commerce, innovation, and business, Los Angeles connects USC students to practical experiences in the workplace to reinforce the theory taught in the classroom.
University of Sussex Brighton, United Kingdom The University of Sussex is a campus university located in a national park on the outskirts of the fashionable seaside city of Brighton and Hove, UK. It is ranked first in the world for international development (QS 2018) and overall top 20 in the UK (THE Table of Tables 2018). Popular subject areas include social studies, arts&humanities, life sciences, media, psychology, engineering and law.
University of Sydney Sydney, Australia 1st in Australia and 4th in the world for graduate employability by the QS Graduate Employability Rankings 2018.
University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario, Canada Established in 1827, the University of Toronto is one of the oldest universities in North America. One of the most internationally recognized universities, U of T is ranked the top university in Canada, and 22nd in the world by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. With over 80K students, including over 10K international students, U of T is the largest university in Canada, and the country’s leader in higher education. U of T offers about 700 undergraduate programs across three campuses in Humanities & Social Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical & Mathematical Sciences, Commerce & Management, Computer Science, Engineering, Kinesiology & Physical Education, and Music and Architecture, along with professional programs requiring some university preparation in Education, Nursing, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Law and Medicine.
University of Tulsa Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA The University of Tulsa is a private doctoral institution of approximately 4,400 students located in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the central United States. Ranked as a Top 100 National University, TU offers over 60 undergraduate fields of study across four colleges. With a diverse student population that is 20% international, the university also offers small class sizes averaging 19 students and a student-to-faculty ratio of 11:1.
University of Washington Seattle, Washington, USA The University of Washington is a large public research institution located in Seattle, a city of innovation and technology. The University seeks to enroll outstanding students who will contribute to and benefit from the wealth of academic and cultural opportunities, dynamic energy, and rich diversity of experiences. Applicants are reviewed through an individualized selection process, looking beyond grades and test scores, considering rigor of curriculum, academic achievements, educational background, and each student's unique personal qualities and perspectives.
Waseda University Tokyo, Japan Founded in 1882, Waseda University is one of the most prestigious universities in Japan. Not only famous for its education quality, but also for Waseda's many notable alumni, including seven Prime Ministers of Japan. Lately, Waseda University has made all-out effort to build a international-student-friendly environment, including forming more than 50 degree programs taught in English, and has become the most internationalized university in Japan.
Washington University in St. Louis St. Louis, Missouri, USA Washington University in St. Louis, a premier research institution located on a beautiful suburban campus, is home to approximately 7,000 undergraduates. First-year-entry degree programs are offered in Architecture, Art, Arts & Sciences (liberal arts), Business and Engineering. It is common for students to combine some of our 90+ majors and minors within and across our colleges and schools. WashU is well known for offering a high quality of life in both the academic and residential aspects of the college experience: 97% retention rate, 8:1 student-faculty ratio, and four years of guaranteed housing with 80% of undergrads annually in residence.
Western University London, Ontario, Canada Since 1878, Western University has been a destination of choice for the world’s brightest minds seeking the best learning experience at a Canadian research university. Western offers more than 400 undergraduate programs and 88 different graduate degree programs, allowing students to tailor their education to personal strengths and career ambitions. At Western, you will learn from nationally and internationally renowned professors and researchers. You will also have the opportunity to complement your academic program with an exceptional range of curricular and co-curricular activities, including leadership and learning opportunities both on and off campus.
Wheaton College Norton, Massachusetts, USA Wheaton College is located in Massachusetts, 30 miles from Boston and 15 miles from Providence, Rhode Island, and is home to 1,700 students from 72 countries and 40 US states. We create possibilities for our students by offering a full range of studies in the arts, sciences, humanities, mathematics and social sciences. Our approach to the liberal arts emphasizes active learning in the classroom, on the campus and in the real world.
Yale-NUS College Singapore Yale-NUS is a liberal arts and sciences college in Singapore created by a collaboration between the National University of Singapore and Yale University in the United States. We are a small, diverse student community with students from 60 different countries around the world! | <urn:uuid:bafbf303-ff02-469c-9d03-e970c6db6ce0> | CC-MAIN-2019-35 | https://www.counselingassociationoftaiwan.org/2018-attendees | 2019-08-19T22:23:11Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027315132.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20190819221806-20190820003806-00350.warc.gz | en | 0.930863 | 12,705 |
Case Study Analysis
Fifteen years after Google had a remarkable ascent, the company began facing unpredictable aspirations; Google Glass which had been developed in open beta started making mobile apps and its web was made accessible within a the eye glasses of its users. Initially this was purely science fiction but by the year 2014 the product was on the shelves of down town stores for instantaneous purchase in customized colors and designs. The company’s self driving cars were also incredible; for they had covered millions of miles without the assistance of drivers on streets and highways. It is believed that this concept was too bold. This stems from the fact that Google had plans for a space elevator in which companies would use to cheaply launch their satellites. However, this plan was shelved when it was realized that the available materials were inadequately strong (Aaker, 2010).
These opportunities were a privilege to Google which enjoyed exploring them because its primary business relentlessly produced free cash flow and adequate profits. By serving an incredible number of searches in the developed nations it captured a huge chunk of advertisers’ funds. Advertising through search engines had become successful in the sales of every good and service. As a matter of fact, advertisers would come back to reinvest; yet on the horizon there was a lot of rumbling.
Fundamentally the market move to mobile devices was a threat to Google’s position. Instead of making information requests and purchases through searches at Google.com users mostly made use of specialized apps from their mobile devices thus decreasing the profits Google would make through appropriate referrals in the end the company’s advertising revenues were remarkably reduced. In addition, process for advertising on mobile devises were outstandingly lower than those of Google. This reflected the unwillingness of paying to reach users that were no longer using desktops (Berkun, 2010).
The company which is now based at Mountain View in California had gross revenues accruing to $59 billion coupled with an operating income of $15 billion in 2013. By the 2014 second quarter Google had 52, 000 employees with cash and equivalents of above $60, billion. This company that was incepted in 1999 completed its IPO in 2004 at $86 for every share. Its share prices were above $570 in the third quarter of 2014 which gave it company a $390 billion value in the market (Brooks, 2014).
In 2014 the company benefited from a 67% of all the American searches. Its biggest competitor which is Microsoft’s Bing.com only managed a paltry 19% of the market searches. Ever since it had its IPO the company started launching a number of products that started expanding its domain well beyond its web search. These products include Google Checkout, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Fiber, Google Books and Google Finance. As much as this was a strategy to deal with the competition from mobile devices there is still more to be done as explored in this paper. In doing so, this paper will adopt a qualitative approach of analysis in order to come up with sound findings.
Chapter One Case Study Background
As the world word web started expanding there was a sudden growth in the need for search services. Yahoo which is amongst the earliest search services picked and organized sites into categories of human editors. The classification of the directory became imminent with the growth of the web. Technology that automated searches using software crawlers was invented by Alta Vista. This produced a page contents searchable index alongside algorithms that which ranked the relevance pages founded on the frequency of key words. Alta Vista’s algorithmic was added by yahoo as a search engine however, it replaced this with Inktomi in 1998; this employed parallel processing to provide a larger index and a higher rate of processing (Chad, 2003).
As search algorithms were exploited by website developers who repeated keywords on these pages searches rapidly returned inappropriate listings which frustrated users. In 1999 this problem was tackled by two Stanford graduate students Larry and Sergey. Their algorithm in page ranking supported referenced pages that had been linked to different pages. These links were a sign that other page designers perceived that the focal pages needed attention. The significance of the focal pages was established by the number of its inbound links (Neal, 2009).
In the year 1999 the two Stanford Students realized their first round funding for Google which was then a startup and were supported by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia which are still very influential capital firms. In 2000 Google substituted Inktomi as the search Engine favored by yahoo after establishing 1 billion web pages. The company’s revenues were by then derived mainly from leasing its technology to yahoo amongst many sites. The company in the beginning was not involved in advertising and a number of portals only provided it search results with no communication tools. Contrastingly, most portals provided many add-ons to support users in lingering which yielded many page views and huge advertising revenue (John, 2005).
A new model came up to monetize paid listings. Established by overture an acquisition of Yahoo they became succinct text ads and they were labeled as sponsored links which appeared either contiguous or mixed together with the search results. The bid for key words by advertisers established the top to bottom categorization of ads on web pages. Paid listings were characteristically sold on a per click basis. Advertisers only paid after users had clicked on their adverts. The success of overture was founded on a number of factors; firstly, from marketers view point leads from users search engines always researched products and services they had intended to soon purchase. It was estimated by marketers that 71% of e-commerce transactions stemmed from web searches while 41% of these searches were commercially motivated. Secondly, the ordering of paid listings based on cost per click yielded considerable revenue to overture as it met numerous users needs (Page and Brin, 2004).
The Statement of the Problem
With the growth of Google came a number of challenges from both users and advertisers. Google advertisers often made complaints about charges they perceived to be improper. Advertisers were always worried of being slapped by charges. This paper aims at finding out the extent to which the organizational culture at Google plays a role in ensuring the company effectively deals with future challenges. The case of Google is a dream comes true for everyone in the entrepreneurial world. At its1998 launch in Stanford University the company already portrayed potential and two decades later this has been more than realized. Its first profits were made in 2001 and today its profits are not only larger but increase after every year (Clutterbuck, 2003).
The generation of such profits in these tough economic times is enviable, however, the challenges is faced with lots of future challenges that must be tackled sooner rather than later if it is to stay afloat. Its considerable reliance on one product advertisements on its website have made it vulnerable changes in the market. This is because the windows of opportunity it thrives on are being seen by its competitors who are already curving in. The company therefore needs to work with more intangible company elements such as its organizational culture for they cannot be easily copied. Being abstract in nature it may be difficult to work with organizational culture, however, it could also be a critical resource and provide the company a fundamental competitive edge because of the fact that it influence significant areas for instance it attracts the best employees, it furthers innovation and ensures an effective workforce (Sullivan, 2013).
Secondly, Google has faced lots of competition from emerging social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Facebook particularly is a big threat given that it has closed its platform for Google’s search engine. The growth of Facebook has realized enlarged information which has become difficult for Google to retrieve on behalf of its users (Whit, 2007).
Thirdly Larry Page Google’s cofounder was recently named as its CEO; this is a big challenge since it is always a potential problem to come up with a CEO from within the company’s rank and profile. This is because having been there for many years it would be challenging for insiders to perceive any required changes since they do not possess the outside perspective.
Fourthly, there is an ardent need for Google to attend to competition authorities globally. Its existing situation is more like a monopoly and any form of regulation from external forces could be detrimental in terms of cost and convenience. The cell phone market is the fifth and biggest challenge for Google; Android which is Google’s operating system has not yet realized its niche in the market and competition has become fierce. If Google sticks to its core products it will get the power to focus however, if its starts spreading its activities this will help it avoid complacency (Blake and Steven, 2013).
- Fifteen years after Google had a remarkable ascent, the company began facing unpredictable aspirations. How true is this statement?
- Google is very ethical and has a deeply entrenched social responsibility principal. How true is this statement?
- Google has already left the red oceans and it is operating in the blue oceans where it gains lots of profits without competition. How true is this statement?
- The adoption of an external CEO was a setback to Google’s cultural organizational structure. How true is this statement? Aims
The aim of this paper is to evaluate Google’s organizational structure in relation to the challenges it has faced over the years and come up with strategic management models that could ensure it improves on its performance. The paper will also explore the challenges that Google has faced over the years and provide possible solutions. Apart from that it would provide a business plan that can be used to implement the solutions to Google’s problems.
- To find out if Fifteen years after Google had a remarkable ascent, the company began facing unpredictable aspirations.
- To investigate if Google is very ethical and has a deeply entrenched social responsibility principal.
- To explore if Google has already left the red oceans and if it is operating in the blue oceans where it gains lots of profits without competition.
- To analyze if the adoption of an external CEO was a setback to Google’s cultural organizational structure.
Chapter Two Case Brief
With Google’s growth its co founders having been guided by heir venture capitalists started searching for a seasoned executive to assist in leading the company. Erick Schmidt who was formerly a chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems and later Novells’s CEO joined the company as CEO in 2001. This pushed the cofounders to assume presidency of products and technology. Initially the company management had dismissed a public offering however; pressure was insurmountable for employees and investors with options to access liquidity. An IPO was announced in 2004; however, in its prospective Page gave unique remarks that the company was not traditional in nature and did not want to become one (Farmer, 2008).
Google has had a lot of pressure to engage in other business activities apart from advertising in order not to close shop if its competitors master their game as was the case with IBM. The company has since started hosting videos and books, communication applications, mobile phones and tablets, as well as productivity applications. Other products includes Google’s chrome web browser that allowed users to request websites with addresses, Google checkout enabled users to make safe online payments (Hartley, 2010).
Expansion Of Products
There are various ways in which Google could expand its products for instance through acquisitions, mergers and even line extensions. As much as its prudent to diversify in new line of products sticking to the main product also always offers the power of focus. However, research and development (R&D) coupled by innovation will ensure that the company does not become complacent. Given that Google’s profits are majorly from advertising have made a number of investors get worried that it will remain an advertising company all its life disguised as a tech firm. 5% of its profits stems fro the sales of its Google Apps; however, this venture is facing competition from Microsoft’s 2010 word version (Herman, 2011).
Competitors And Innovation
Google came up with Buzz a social network to counter Facebook but this has hit a dead end since it has no followers. The two companies compete for the personalized online marketing niche even though their services immensely differ. Facebook has a focus on online networks while Google concentrates on a number of online service needs fundamental to it is the Google.co m its search engine. As much as the two do not offer similar products and thus not essentially competitors the fact that Facebook has not allowed Google to search its websites is a big challenge to Google. This is because Google can find anything for its users and now that Facebook with such a large following has denied it access its a huge setback.
Consequently, as long as Facebook remains the world’s main social network and continues to maintain privacy of its digital platform, Google will not be in a position to claim being part of the revenues accruing from social network sites. The promotion of an innovative culture is likely to solve this problem by synchronizing and outpacing other companies through the provision of economic merits (Morrison, 2006). Management
It is a big challenge for the company to nominate a CEO within its ranks. It is advantageous because this kind of CEO knows both employees and the organization very well. This includes the go to persons, the lines of authority and unspoken rules. In addition the CEO does not have to use time and energy on forming an ethos to win people over given that company employees already know him.
Apart from that it enhances motivation since the employees are made to know that they are important. However, the CEO could be affected by personal emotions given that he is deeply involved in the company’s history. Given that the current CEO is the cofounder of Google this risk is extraneously very high. Larry Page is faced with the uphill task of managing a culture that is part and parcel of his person and he risks being captivated the status quo that he created (Rogers, 2003). Ethics And Monopolies
Authorities in international competition are a big threat to Google. This is because they can regulate a company’s power against its will and if their directions are ignored they could impose hefty fines. If Google is perceived as a monopoly this would result to forced changes that would reduce its autonomy. However, a company that has had a long time in monopolistic status tend to become conceited, complacent and conservative (Schein, 2010).
Trust and safety
The cell phone market is a very big concern for Google. Having began in the software market the market still intends to stay there. Production of the best smart phones is not in its niche since this is the hardware market. However, the company has produced a competitive operating system called Android which has given Microsoft and Apple’s operating systems a run for their money. This is because it possesses an application store the Android market which is founded on open source technology. This means that anyone can find tools for developing these applications online thus realizing numerous applications. The number of applications has expanded rapidly over the years compared to other app stores making the Android market the app store with the highest number of applications. However, this has the risk of anyone making a virus in the form of a free game. Google thus has a moral obligation to gain the trust of its users. It can only do so through proving that its services are credible and accountable (Sullivan, 2013).
Chapter Three The Problems
Google faces many challenges other than those mentioned in Chapter two. The company whether in its advertising or technology niche operates in a very volatile environment that is subject to continuous innovations for it to survive in this environment it must have the capacity to adapt first and fast. As much as the company is growing rapidly it still needs to stay in the lean mindset. It prospered very fast because it started when there was no substitute to its search engine it thus gained a big chunk of the market share effortlessly (Tellis, 2002).
Customers have been accustomed to its brand and thus use it out of habit rather than reason. Google is now challenged with retaining its customers because today there are other usable options in the market. The company is already spending a huge sum of money on marketing to deal with this threat. This paper presumes a functional perspective on the culture of Google as an organization and proposes to use two models to solve its expansion and competition problems these are hofsted’s cultural theory and the innovation circle theory (Kirkpatrick, 2007).
The Models/ Theories /Planning Tools to Be Used To Analyze the Case
Hofsted’s Cultural Theory
National culture has been found to affect fundamental business activities ranging from group performance to capital structure. Cultural awareness could realize huge successes for global business ventures while the absence of it could realize their failure. Geet Hofsted researched on a number of issues pertaining to cultural disparities. His model was founded on a study done on IBM employees in more than 50 countries. He came up with five dimensions that signified disparities between various national cultures. They include; long term orientation, power distance, masculinity/ felinity, uncertainty avoidance and individualism/ collectivism (Hofstede, 2005).
Power distance tends to define how social inequality is comprehended and accepted in various cultures. Hofstede (2005) shows how in high powered distance cultures there is the raising of children with more emphasis on the respect for elders that is usually maintained up to adulthood. Therefore in Google which is more centralized employees like an autocratic leadership style where subordinates expect orders from above, however, there are glaring wage gaps in the hierarchy structure. However, in low power distance cultures people shun inequality decision making involves consulting employees which can only be done by a resourceful and liberal leader.
Individualism is where people prefer to be involved with loosely knit societal grouping where significance is founded on self and independent. In individualists organizations like Google employees should be allowed the autonomy to work freely and they should always desire challenging work. This is perceived as more critical than any other relationship for it assists them realize self actualization .In the collectivist organizational cultures management structures are accountable for the organization’s employees and collective cohesion.
Masculinity is perceived by Hofstede as a representative of different gender roles where the men have an inclination to rewards, success and competition. Women on the other hand, concentrate on tender values such as modesty and life quality. Managers are more self-assured and influential in masculine cultures. More insightful managers that confer disputes and enhance participation are bred in feminine cultures.
Uncertainty avoidance is the level by which people in a culture perceive they are threatened while in unfamiliar circumstances. In cases of high levels of uncertainty avoidance most people go for structured settings complete with set rules and policies. Hard work is then embraced with a high sense of anxiety amongst employees. In weak uncertainty avoidance rules only exist where it is a must because they create fear and discomfort. People on these cultures are more relaxed and thus work at their own pace. Long term orientation defines the degree by which individuals have a dynamic and future based perspective instead of focusing on the present and previous occurrences (Hofstede, 2005).
Innovation Circle Theory
The seven circles of innovation theory highlights the fact that to obtain innovation requires a number of connected innovation mechanisms founded on sound innovation principals at the corporate level but closely related to market and customers. They all stress that obtaining innovation excellence is not about concentrating on it as a product but as a mechanism that calls for an optimized corporate structure (Bendell, 2009).
The model holds that innovation must always be entrenched in the market. And all innovations must be build on sound principles such as; competencies, culture, structure and strategy. However, growth facilitate by innovation only occurs after the five learning and development circles of implementation, ideas, planning, evaluation and prototyping are set in motion, embedded in the market, where they build on the fundamentals and connect and overlap with one another in the creation of a developmental, continuous and learning loop. Greiner's Growth Model
Greiner’s growth model holds that every revolution’s dissolution tie interval establishes whether a company will get to the next evolution phase or not. The end of every growth phase is the beginning of the crisis in these phases. This theory has five phases the first one is evolutionary dimension where the company experiences a stable and calm growth, the second one is revolutionary dimension where every phase triggers a new phase. The future of a company such as Google is more likely to be determined by external forces rather than its history. The company tends to come to a breaking point when pressure and buildup in one phase is calm while revolution is being generated to establish radical dynamics in organizational culture (Flamholtz,, 2000).
The organizational structure that changes solves the challenges at that point in time and prepares infrastructure for likely future challenges. Organizational structures that are in growth phases are likely to adapt to new circumstances in the process of establishing new phases. Revolutions are the times when the company is at the point of considerable turmoil in its life. For instance centralized structures may at one point call for decentralization. In addition the nature of a company’s solutions to every revolutionary period establishes whether it moves to the next evolutionary growth stage (Greiner, 1972).
Blue Ocean Strategy
This model opines that the way in which companies can sustain their performance is not through competing in industries that are overcrowded rather it is by creating blue oceans of market spaces that are uncontested. Research has confirmed that there are no permanent incredible companies in the same way that there are no permanent incredible industries. The blue ocean strategy thus is a challenge to Google to break out from the bloody competition in the red ocean and create an uncontested market space that will realize an irrelevant competition (Tellis, 2002).
Rather than divide up the current and mostly shrinking demand that benchmarks competitors Blue Ocean is out to grow demand and make Google break away from the competition. On the other hand stiff competition in the red oceans limits growth and profitability. There are ample opportunities in the blue oceans for growth and they are not just profitable but also rapid in nature. In some cases the company could create a completely new industry however, in most cases blue oceans are demarcated from red oceans when an existing industry has its boundaries altered by a company (White, 1981).
Chapter Four Findings from the Analysis (Using The Tools)
Google’s Hofsted’s Cultural Theory
Google’s practitioners who are coming up with several software to beat the mobile service competition such as Google Maps, the android, as well as the hosting of video and books are facing challenges of design across numerous cultures across the globe. The worst part of this is that they have little tools upon which they can rely for guidance. The fact that Google offers its products on the worldwide web has enabled it to exponentially grow beyond its Mountain View headquarters in California (Yunker, 2003). The company now sales most of its products beyond the USB its home borders.
The construction of systems for its now rapidly global markets and diverse audiences has posed challenges which if dealt with will realize un-cultural intensive designs with likely harsh and pricey consequences (Aykin, 2005; Yunker, 2003). A glaring mistake was done Windows 95 which indicated that the disputed Jammu Kashmir area was not in India this resulted in the Indian government banning the software (Brown, 2004). If Google is to design cultural sensitive and suitable products it has to comprehend audiences in targeted cultures. Google’s research on designs that have cross cultural user inter-phase has concentrated on evaluating the current designs and attempting to comprehend their perceptible disparities in form of cultural models. For instance this strategy has been in the comparison of different countries websites (Gould, Zakaria and Yusof, 2000; Callahan, 2005) while explaining how different countries accept and adopt its technologies (De Angeli, Athavankar, Joshi, Coventry and Johnson, 2004; Barnett and Sung, 2005; Maitland and Bauer, 2001). Even though this strategy has led to more comprehension of culture coupled with i9nterphase design there is still more that Google needs to do. Hofstede’s (2005) cultural model is being applied to better understand and solve this problem.
Google’s Virtuous Innovation Circle Theory
The innovation circle theory can be applied to Google in terms of supporting its network neutrality. The virtuous circle stems from the concept that as it grows its content and software applications it arouses demand for internet subscriptions that generate the company’s revenues which are invested in its infrastructure. For instance Google began hosting content when it acquired You Tube in 2006 at $1.6 billion. While the company’s main search business indexed materials which were placed on other company’s sites the acquisition of You Tube placed it in the content host role where it stored materials on its servers (Yunkers, 2003).
This hosting provided the company legal setbacks which alleged that it infringed on copyrights when it had unauthorized videos get posted on its servers without the right holders authentication. However, You Tube became even more popular with almost 6 billion views by the end of 2008. It single handed dealt with 41% of all online video streams. Analysts credited the decision of Google to withhold most You Tube video adverts pending confirmation of the right to disseminate such adverts for it shielded Google from likely liability.
This strategy firstly had huge losses the company lost about $469 million in 2009 due to low ads revenues coupled with high costs of bandwidth. However, as of 2012 the company had obtained the right to showcase ads on all videos by 2013 the company’s revenue from You Tube alone had clicked $5 billion. The company began hosting and even searching digital copies of any books. By 2010 it already had over 1 million books that people could access on its servers. This again attracted litigation fro disenfranchised right owners However; the courts found Google’s practice as fair use with no copyright infringement since it only briefly showed excerpts and not complete copies of these books. These cases are ongoing in various countries today with the final decision pending on this matter (Sullivan, 2013).
In 2009 the company introduced its pioneer paid listings that were sold on cost per impression. In 2002 it adopted overtures cost per click. It soon became a big threat to Yahoo’s overtures given that yahoo had refused to buy it at $1 million in 1998.It was amongst the top ten visited websites in the US in 2001 with over 24 million visitors per month yet it was not doing any advertising of its services. Eventually yahoo’s share in the market reduced to a paltry 17% compared to Google’s 66% by 2009. Google prevailed in a number of fundamental deals for instance paying for ad space to kick out its rivals in the market such as Microsoft it paid AOL $1 billion because it believed in the power of virtuous innovation.
Google’s Greiner's Growth Model
With Google’s growth the founders decided in 2001 to get a CEO to manage the company’s affairs on their behalf. This evolution was followed by a revolution from the company’s management who voted against a public offering. However, more pressure was exerted for employees and investors to be provided liquidity. In the early years of the company its core founders instilled unique corporate values. However, they were met with mixed reactions from the concerned public. The structural changes in Google’s life as a company have brought it various challenges but it has withered it all through changing its management style and adapting modern management theories that have enabled it to post continuous growth in the face a competitive environment (Schein, 2010).
Don’t be evil meant the company could not advertise for guns or alcohol but they accepted to advertise wine products. This was considered not ethical because wine is believed to be an alcoholic beverage. Some analysts critiqued the authenticity of page rankings, however, Page clarified that the company does not manipulate these results to place its partners higher for no better page rank can be bought.
Google’s Blue Ocean Strategy
Having been in the red ocean for a long time where it faced lots of competition from yahoo Google decided to move into the blue ocean by paying for advertising space. Apart from that it launched a personal search tool which enabled people to order results through evaluating users prior searches as well as clicks. This also provided search history that indicated the achieves of users previous searches with links to the outcomes they had accessed. It established dozens of offices locally and abroad to reach users everywhere thus attracting more advertisers. Consequently, US enterprises spend more than $88 billion on Goole adverts annually (Aykin, 2005).
Google analytics was set up to help advertisers improve their features and track the key words that were most profitable. These are amongst the refinements that made Google move into the Blue Ocean earning much more beyond what its closest rivals earned. By 2005 the company had expanded this margin in profits by 38%, while it earned 60% from paid adverts yahoo followed by a paltry 22% by 2005. The reasons that realized this move included the fact that it improved on Overture’s principal of ranking paid listings using bids by considering the relevance of these listings. Advertisers left Overture and joined Google when they realized it had increased its traffic and thus lower minimum bids (Aaker, 2010).
Chapter Five Recommendations
Given that Google has beat all its competitors it should increase the margin in its profits to its closest competitor by branching into new areas. For instance it can transform into a full portal like Yahoo and MSN through the aggregation of content to thematic platforms. The company should also expand its checkout functions that facilitate transactions. It should not stop challenging Microsoft’s dominance of the PC market through the development of more software that can compete with office and Windows.
The company should also construct warehouse that can store seller’s goods and try same day deliveries. To ensure it is in profits without competitors ‘blue waters’ it should reinvest in its new products such as the self driving cars as well as the Google glass. Google has been christened the fastest growing company in world history; however, sustaining this is a major problem. To ensure that it does not wither it should do what is enshrined in its first fundamental principal: making money without necessarily doing evil (Barnett, 2005).
The company should start thinking of new ways of making money; it should come up with strategies to face emerging challenges. It should be in a position to perceive new opportunities in line with the Blue ocean principal. In spite of its incredible achievements the copanybis facing a wide range of challenges it is now getting difficult to get things done effectively because of the gigantic nature of the company. The company became so huge that it attracted litigation from government operatives who wanted to break it up in 2008 when they hired investigators to look into its deal to serve Ads on yahoo as well as how it has managed to dominate the advertising industry.
However, If Google does not seal its internal loopholes it could lose its customers trust once it starts misusing their data or starts to capitalize on its customers’ indispensability as a chokehold to earn extra money through charging them. In case of ethical issues the company should respond to the public through its CEO rather than through PR companies. The company should invest in its customers for instance what it is doing through Google ad sense it can enable them form their own companies for the sake of building relationships (Berkun, 2010).
In relation to the Hofstede’s cultural theory Google should start supporting the minority in society so that in turn they could feel appreciated and engage deeply in Google’s activities. When the company becomes a part of its employees lives it will start gaining more meaning rather than just a place of work. Its employees would become more entangled in its affairs with more passion to obtain the company’s long term strategic goals. This is so because it is not easy to bring about efficient employees through organizational structures and rules.
Google like IBM which depended on computer frames in the 90s faces the challenge of depending in one product advertisement revenues and is likely to go to sleep thinking all is too well. As a matte rof fact IBM was in the blue ocean large profits with no competition. Google is in this league in 2008 alone it had 71% of US searches, and 97% UK searches. Upon acquiring Double Click in 2008 it managed to control 70% of online ad serving and 25%v of internet Ad revenues.
Its revenues surpassed that of the largest TV channel in the UK in 2008. The company no longer accounts for the number of servers it has which run into neither millions nor the number of pages it monitors. Yahoo and SN which were once Kings on the online hill are now by contrast has beens. Compared to the two Google is not and is not likely to become a portal. Given that it goes to people it is a networking platform (Blake, 2013). However, as much as the company upholds innovation as very critical it has not innovated in the recent past and this could work against it unless this is taken seriously in line with the virtuous innovation circle theory it adopted at its onset. Google’s management can trigger innovation by finding efficient ways in which they can motivate their employees to work hard. If the work force feels motivated their mindsets would become self fulfilling and this can be attained by the management adopting a liberal attitude where it should believe in employees to effectively do their work independently.
On the other hand if the management strictly controls its employees they could become passive in the absence of supervision which would work against the company’s objectives. This is in line with Hofsted’s cultural theory Power distance domain where in low power distance cultures people shun inequality and decision making involves consulting employees which can only be done by a resourceful and liberal leader. The company abolished its centralized structure and adopted a decentralized power structure to ensure that everyone is involved in decision making (Brown, 2004).
The Google company management displayed this initiative when it permeated most of its employees a lot of self management. The employees have been offered 20% of their working hours to do their own projects. Christened the Pet Projects this initiative has shown that the company employees are capable of managing themselves. The outcome of this project legally belongs to Google and employees have been motivated to be innovative since the number of people bringing their ideas into life has been increased (Callahan, 2005).
This is in line with the innovative cycle theory which holds that growth facilitated by innovation only occurs after the five learning and development circles of implementation, ideas, planning, evaluation and prototyping are set in motion, embedded in the market, where they build on the fundamentals and connect and overlap with one another in the creation of a developmental, continuous and learning loop (Maitland and Bauer, 2001).
Google should also be ethically responsible in order to continue attracting customers worldwide. The company through its do no evil slogan perceives itself as ethically responsible which has assisted it attract resourceful workers as well as improve its reputation. However, it should not brand itself as ethical just for marketing value rather it should implement this fact on the ground. As much as Google’s slogan: don’t do evil sounds good it is passive in nature and does not provoke actual moral actions (Brooks, 2014).
As much as it is known for good employee welfare it is known to have negative tax politics. Like many multinationals it tends to evaluate tax regimes in different nations in order to be given the favorable tax rates which it has maintained at a rate of 2.4. Given that corporate social responsibility holds for all involved stakeholders then this is not morally right. The company needs to discontinue its procedures of evading taxes in order to avoid being painted in the wrong light (Bendell, 2009).
Business Plan For Google
|Issues and Objectives||Plan/ Approach||Date|
|Hofsted’s Cultural Theory||More decentralization of management structure through adopting a horizontal organizational structure||29th September 2015|
|Virtuous Innovation Circle Theory||Increase time allocated to employees to do their own inventions||15th October 2015|
|Greiner's growth model||Ensure that there is a seamless transition from evolution period to revolution period||15th November 2015|
|Blue Ocean Strategy||Buy out all yahoo and MSN advertising platforms||15th October 2015|
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Culture, Technology, Communication Towards an Intercultural Global Village (pp. 87-128). Alabny, NY: State University of New York Press.
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Yunkers, J. (2003). Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies. Indianapolis: New Riders. | <urn:uuid:7d4b0d0e-2604-4e72-af44-13e62f9986f6> | CC-MAIN-2019-35 | https://www.academicwritersbureau.com/samples/194-case-study-analysis | 2019-08-17T10:53:45Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027312128.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20190817102624-20190817124624-00470.warc.gz | en | 0.960164 | 8,318 |
Forbidden to you are your mothers, and your daughters, and your sisters, and your aunts paternal and maternal, and a brother's daughters, and a sister's daughters; and your milk-mothers, and your milk-sisters; and the mothers of your wives; and your step-daughters - who are your foster children - born of your wives with whom you have consummated your marriage; but if you have not consummated your marriage, you will incur no sin [by marrying their daughters]; and [forbidden to you are] the spouses of the sons who have sprung from your loins; and [you are forbidden] to have two sisters [as your wives] at one and the same time - but what is past is past:* for, behold, God is indeed much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace.
And how many a prophet has had to fight [in God's cause], followed by many God-devoted men: and they did not become faint of heart for all that they had to suffer in God's cause, and neither did they weaken, nor did they abase themselves [before the enemy], since God loves those who are patient in adversity;
It is not conceivable that a human being unto whom God had granted revelation, and sound judgment, and prophethood, should thereafter have said unto people,* "Worship me beside God"; but rather [did he exhort them], "Become men of God* by spreading the knowledge of the divine writ, and by your own deep study [thereof]."
Verily, it is We who bestowed from on high the Torah, wherein there was guidance and light. On `its strength did the prophets, who had surrendered themselves unto God, deliver judgment unto those who followed the Jewish faith;* and so did the [early] men of God and the rabbis, inasmuch as some of God's writ had been entrusted to their care;* and they [all] bore witness to its truth. Therefore, [O children of Israel,] hold not men in awe, but stand in awe of Me; and do not barter away My messages for a trifling gain:* for they who do not judge in accordance with what God has bestowed from on high are, indeed, deniers of the truth!
Why do not their men of God and their rabbis* forbid them to make sinful assertions and to swallow all that is evil? Vile indeed is what they contrive!
All praise is due to God alone, the Sustainer of all the worlds,*
It is they who follow the guidance [which comes from their Sustainer; and it is they, they who' shall attain to a happy state!
O MANKIND! Worship your Sustainer, who has created you and those who lived before you, so that you might remain conscious of Him
Behold, God does not disdain to propound a parable of a gnat, or of something [even] less than that.* Now, as for those who have attained to faith, they know that it is the truth from their Sustainer - whereas those who are bent on denying the truth say, "What could God mean by this parable?" In this way does He cause many a one to go astray, just as He guides many a one aright: but none does He cause thereby to go astray save the iniquitous,
AND LO!* Thy Sustainer said unto the angels: "Behold, I am about to establish upon earth one who shall inherit it."* They said: "Wilt Thou place on it such as will spread corruption thereon and shed blood -whereas it is we who extol Thy limitless glory, and praise Thee, and hallow Thy name?" [God] answered: "Verily, I know that which you do not know."
Thereupon Adam received words [of guidance] from his Sustainer, and He accepted his repentance: for, verily, He alone is the-Acceptor of Repentance, the Dispenser of Grace.
who know with certainty that they shall meet their Sustainer and that unto Him they shall return.
And [remember the time] when We saved you from Pharaoh's people, who afflicted you with cruel suffering, slaughtering your sons and sparing [only] your women* - which was an awesome trial from your Sustainer;
And [remember] when you said: "O Moses, indeed we cannot endure but one kind of food; pray, then, to thy Sustainer that He bring forth for us aught of what grows from the earth - of its herbs, its cucumbers, its garlic, its lentils, its onions." Said [Moses]: "Would you take a lesser thing in exchange for what is [so much] better?* Go back in shame to Egypt , and then you can have what you are asking for!"* And so, ignominy and humiliation overshadowed them, and they earned the burden of God's condemnation: all this, because they persisted in denying the truth of God's messages and in slaying the prophets against all right: all this, because they rebelled [against God], and persisted in transgressing the bounds of what is right.*
VERILY, those who have attained to faith [in this divine writ], as well as those who follow the Jewish faith, and the Christians, and the Sabians* -all who believe in God and the Last Day and do righteous deeds-shall have their reward with their Sustainer; and no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve.*
Said they: "Pray on our behalf unto thy Sustainer that He make clear to us what she is to be like." [Moses] replied: "Behold, He says it is to be a cow neither old nor immature, but of art age in-between. Do, then, what you have been bidden!"
Said they: "Pray on our behalf unto thy Sustainer that He make clear to us what her colour should be. "[Mopes] answered: "Behold; He says it is to be a yellow cow, bright of hue, pleasing to the beholder."
Said' they: "Pray on our behalf unto thy Sustainer that He make clear to us what she is to be like, for to us all cows resemble one another; and then, if God so wills, we shall truly be guided aright!"
For, when they meet those who have attained to faith. they say, "We believe [as you believe]" - but when they find themselves alone with one another, they say. "Do you inform them of what God has disclosed to you, so that they might use it in argument against you, quoting the words of your Sustainer?* Will you not. then, use your reason?"
Neither those from among the followers of earlier revelation who are bent on denying the truth, nor those who ascribe divinity to other beings beside God, would like to see any good* ever bestowed upon you from on high by your Sustainer; but God singles out for His grace whom He wills-for God is limitless in His great bounty.
Yea, indeed: everyone who surrenders his whole being unto God,* and is a doer of good withal, shall have his reward with his Sustainer; and all such need have no fear, and neither shall they grieve.*
And [remember this:] when his Sustainer tried Abraham by [His] commandments and the latter fulfilled them,* He said: "Behold, I shall make thee a leader of men. "Abraham asked: "And [wilt Thou make leaders] of my offspring as well? "[God] answered: "My covenant does not embrace the evildoers."*
And, lo, Abraham prayed: "O my Sustainer! Make this a land secure, and grant its people fruitful sustenance - such of them as believe in God and the Last Day." [God] answered: "And whoever shall deny the truth, him will I let enjoy himself for a short while -but in the end I shall drive him to suffering through fire: and how vile a journey's end!"
And when Abraham and Ishmael were raising the foundations of the Temple , [they prayed:] "O our Sustainer! Accept Thou this from us: for, verily, Thou alone art all-hearing, all-knowing!
"O our Sustainer! Make us surrender ourselves unto Thee, and make out of our offspring* a community that shall surrender itself unto Thee, and show us our ways of worship, and accept our repentance: for, verily, Thou alone art the Acceptor of Repentance, the Dispenser of Grace!
"O our Sustainer! Raise up from the midst of our off spring* an apostle from among themselves, who shall convey unto them Thy messages, and impart unto them revelation as well as wisdom, and cause them to grow in purity: for, verily, Thou alone art almighty, truly wise!"
When his Sustainer said to him, "Surrender thyself unto Me!" - he answered, "I have surrendered myself unto [Thee,] the Sustainer of all the worlds."
Say: "We believe in God, and in that which has been bestowed from on high upon us, and that which has been bestowed upon Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and ,their descendants,* and that which has been vouchsafed to Moses and Jesus; and that which has been vouchsafed to all the [other] prophets by their Sustainer: we make no distinction between any of them.* And it is unto Him that we surrender ourselves."
Say [to the Jews and the Christians]: "Do you argue with us about God?* But He is our Sustainer as well as your Sustainer - and unto us shall be accounted our deeds, and unto you, your deeds; and it- is unto Him alone that we devote ourselves.
We have seen thee [O Prophet] often turn thy face towards heaven [for guidance]: and now We shall indeed make thee turn in prayer in a direction which will fulfil thy desire. Turn, then, thy face towards the Inviolable House of Worship; and wherever you all may be, turn your faces towards it [in prayer]. And, verily, those who have been vouchsafed revelation aforetime know well that this [commandment] comes in truth from their Sustainer; and God is not unaware of what they do.
the truth from thy Sustainer!* Be not, then, among the doubters:
Thus, from wherever thou mayest come forth, turn thy face [in prayer] towards the Inviolable House of Worship-for,. behold, this [commandment] comes in truth from thy Sustainer; and God is not unaware of what you do.
It is they upon whom their Sustainer's blessings and grace are bestowed, and it is they, they who are on the right path!
O YOU who have attained to faith! Just retribution is ordained for you in cases of killing: the free for the free, and the slave for the slave, and the woman for the woman.* And if something [of his guilt] is remitted to a guilty person by his brother,* this [remission] shall be adhered to with fairness, and restitution to his fellow-man shall be made in a goodly manner.* This is an alleviation from your Sustainer, and an act of His grace. And for him who, none the less,* wilfully transgresses the bounds of what is right, there is grievous suffering in store:
[However,] you will be committing no sin if [during the pilgrimage] you seek to obtain any bounty from your Sustainer.* And when you surge downward in multitudes from `Arafat,* remember God at the holy place, and remember Him as the One who guided you after you had indeed been lost on your way;*
And when you have performed your acts of worship, [continue to] bear God in mind as you would bear your own fathers in mind-nay, with a yet keener remembrance!* For there are people who [merely] pray, "O our Sustainer! Give us in this world" -and such shall not partake in the blessings of the life to come.
But there are among them such as pray, "O our Sustainer! Grant us good in this world and good in the life to come, and keep us safe from suffering through the fire":
And their prophet said unto them: "Behold, it shall be a sign of his [rightful] dominion that you will be granted a heart* endowed by your Sustainer with inner peace and with all that is enduring in the angel-borne heritage left behind by the House of Moses and the House of Aaron.* Herein, behold, there shall indeed be a sign for you if you are [truly] believers."
And when they came face to face with Goliath and his forces, they prayed: "O our Sustainer! Shower us with patience in adversity, and make firm our steps, and succour us against the people who deny the truth!"
ART THOU NOT aware of that [king] who argued with Abraham about his Sustainer, (simply] because God had granted him kingship? Lo! Abraham said: "My Sustainer is He who grants life and deals death." [The king] replied: "I [too] grant life and deal death!" Said Abraham: "Verily, God causes the sun to rise in the east; cause it, then, to rise in the west!" Thereupon he who was bent on denying the truth remained dumbfounded: for God does not guide people who [deliberately] do wrong.*
And, lo, Abraham said: "O my Sustainer! Show me how Thou givest life unto the dead!" Said He: "Hast thou, then, no faith?" (Abraham) answered: "Yea, but [let me see it] so that my heart may be set fully at rest." Said He: "Take, then, four birds and teach them to obey thee;* . then place them separately on every hill [around thee]; then summon them: they will come flying to thee. And know that God is almighty, wise."*
They who spend their possessions for the sake of God and do not thereafter mar* their spending by stressing their own benevolence and hurting [the feelings of the needy] shall have their reward with 'their Sustainer, and no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve.
Those who spend their possessions [for the sake of God] by night and by day, secretly and openly, shall have their reward with their Sustainer; and no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve.
THOSE who gorge themselves on usury* behave but as he might behave whom Satan has confounded with his touch; for they say, "Buying and selling is but a kind of* usury" - the while God has made buying and selling lawful and usury unlawful. Hence, whoever becomes aware of his Sustainer's admonition,* and thereupon desists [from usury], may keep his past gains, and it will be for God to judge him; but as for those who return to it -they are destined for the fire, therein to abide!
Verily, those who have attained to faith and do good works, and are constant in prayer, and dispense charity - they shall have their reward with their Sustainer, and no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve.
O YOU who have attained to faith! Whenever you give or take credit* for a stated term, set it down in writing. And let a scribe write it down equitably between you; and no scribe shall refuse to write as God has taught him:* thus shall he write. And let him who contracts the debt dictate; and let him be conscious of God, his Sustainer, and not weaken anything of his undertaking.* And if he who contracts the debt is weak of mind or body, or, is not able to dictate himself,* then let him who watches over his interests dictate equitably. And call upon two of your men to act as witnesses; and if two men are not available, then a man and two women from among such as are acceptable to you as witnesses, so that if one of them should make a mistake, the other could remind her.* And the witnesses must not refuse [to give evidence] whenever they are called upon. And be not loath to write down every contractual provision,* be it small or great, together with the time at which it falls due; this is more equitable in the sight of God, more reliable as evidence, and more likely to prevent you from having doubts [later]. If, however, [the transaction] concerns ready merchandise which you transfer directly unto one another, you will incur no sin if you do not write it down. And have witnesses whenever you trade with one another, but neither scribe nor witness must suffer harm;* for if you do [them harm], behold, it will be sinful conduct on your part. And remain conscious of God, since it is God who teaches you [herewith] - and God has full knowledge of everything.
And if you are on a journey and cannot find a scribe, pledges [may be taken] in hand: but if you trust one another, then let him who is trusted fulfil his trust, and let him be conscious of God, his Sustainer. And do not conceal what you have witnessed* - for, verily, he who conceals it is sinful at heart; and God has full knowledge of all that you do.
THE APOSTLE, and the believers with him, believe in what has been bestowed upon him from on high by his Sustainer: they all believe in God, and His angels, and His revelations, and His apostles, making no distinction between any of His apostles;* and they say: We have heard, and we pay heed. Grant us Thy forgiveness, O our Sustainer, for with Thee is all journeys' end!
God does not burden any human being with more than he is well able to bear: in his favour shall be whatever good he does, and against him whatever evil he does. O our Sustainer! Take us not to task if we forget or unwittingly do wrong! "O our Sustainer! Lay not upon us a burden such as Thou didst lay upon those who lived before us!* O our Sustainer! Make us not bear burdens which we have no strength to bear! "And efface Thou our sins, and grant us forgiveness, and bestow Thy mercy upon us! Thou art our Lord Supreme: succour us, then, against people who deny the truth!"
He it is who has bestowed upon thee from on high this divine writ, containing messages that are clear in and by themselves - and these are the essence of the divine writ - as well as others that are allegorical.* Now those whose hearts are given to swerving from the truth go after that part of the divine writ* which has been expressed in allegory, seeking out [what is bound to create] confusion,* and seeking [to arrive at] its final meaning [in an arbitrary manner]; but none save God knows its final meaning.* Hence, those who are deeply rooted in knowledge say: "We believe in it; the whole [of the divine writ] is from our Sustainer - albeit none takes this to heart save those who are endowed with insight.
"O our Sustainer! Let not our hearts swerve from the truth after Thou hast guided us; and bestow upon us the gift of Thy grace: verily, Thou art the [true] Giver of Gifts.
"O our Sustainer! Verily, Thou wilt gather mankind together to witness the Day about [the coming of] which there is no doubt: verily, God never fails to fulfil His promise."
Say: "Shall I tell you of better things than those [earthly joys]? For the God-conscious there are, with their Sustainer, gardens through which running waters flow, therein to abide, and spouses pure, and God's goodly acceptance." And God sees all that is in [the hearts of] His servants -
those who say, "O our Sustainer! Behold, we believe [in Thee]; forgive us, then, our sins, and keep us safe from suffering through the fire" - :
when a woman of [the House of] `Imran prayed: "O my Sustainer! Behold, unto Thee do I vow [the child] that is in, my womb, to be devoted to Thy service. Accept it, then, from me: verily, Thou alone art all-hearing, all-knowing!"
But when she had given birth to the child,* she said: "O my Sustainer! Behold, I have given birth to a female" - the while God had been fully aware of what she would give birth to, and [fully aware] that no male child [she might have hoped for] could ever have been like this female* - "and I have named her Mary. And, verily, I seek Thy protection for her and her offspring against Satan, the accursed."
And thereupon her Sustainer accepted the girl-child with goodly acceptance, and caused her to grow up in goodly growth, and placed her in the care of Zachariah.* Whenever Zachariah visited her in the sanctuary, he found her provided with food. He would ask: "O Mary, whence came this unto thee?" She would answer: "It is from God; behold, God grants sustenance unto whom He wills, beyond all reckoning."*
In that self-same place, Zachariah prayed unto his Sustainer, saying: "O my Sustainer! Bestow upon me [too], out of Thy grace, the gift of goodly offspring; for Thou, indeed, hearest all prayer."
[Zachariah] exclaimed: "O my Sustainer! How can I have a son when old age has already overtaken me, and my wife is barren?" Answered [the angel]: "Thus it is: God does what He wills."
[Zachariah] prayed: "O my Sustainer! Appoint a sign for me!" Said [the angel]: "Thy sign shall be that for three days thou wilt not speak unto men other than by gestures.* And remember thy Sustainer unceasingly, and extol His limitless glory by night and by day."
O Mary! Remain thou truly devout unto thy Sustainer, and prostrate thyself in worship, and bow down with those who bow down [before Him]."
Said she: "O my Sustainer! How can I have a son when no man has ever touched me?" [The angel] answered: "Thus it is: God creates what He wills* when He wills a thing to be, He but says unto it, 'Be' - and it is.
and [will make him] an apostle unto the children of Israel ."* "I HAVE COME unto you with a message from your Sustainer. I shall create for you out of clay, as it were, the shape of [your] destiny, and then breathe into it, so that it might become [your] destiny by God's leave;* and I shall heal the blind and the leper, and bring the dead back to life by God's leave;* and I shall let you know what you may eat and what you should store up in your houses.* Behold, in all this there is indeed a message for you, if you are [truly] believers.
"And [I have come] to confirm the truth of whatever there still remains* of the Torah, and to make lawful unto you some of the things which [aforetime] were forbidden to you. And I have come unto you with a message from your Sustainer; remain, then, conscious of God, and pay heed unto me.
"Verily, God is my Sustainer as well as your Sustainer; so worship Him [alone]: this is a straight way."
O our Sustainer! We believe in what Thou hast bestowed from on high, and we follow this Apostle; make us one,* then, with all who bear witness [to the truth]!"
[This is] the truth from thy Sustainer; be not, then, among the doubters!
Say: "O followers of earlier revelation! Come unto that tenet which we and you hold in common:* that we shall worship none but God, and that we shall not ascribe divinity to aught beside Him, and that we shall not take human beings for our lords beside God."* And if they turn away, then say: "Bear witness that it is we who have surrendered ourselves unto Him."
but do not [really] believe anyone who does not follow your own faith." Say: "Behold, all [true] guidance is God's guidance, consisting in one's being granted [revelation] such as you have been granted."* Or would they contend against you before your Sustainer? Say: "Behold, all bounty is in the hand of God; He grants it unto whom He wills:* for God is infinite, all-knowing,
And neither did he bid you to take the angels and the prophets for your lords:* [for] would he bid you to deny the truth after you have surrendered yourselves unto God?
Say: "We believe in God, and in that which has been bestowed from on high upon us, and that which has been bestowed upon Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and their descendants, and that which has been vouchsafed by their Sustainer unto Moses and Jesus and all the [other] prophets: we make no distinction between any of them.* And unto Him do we surrender ourselves."
[And remember] when thou didst say unto the believers: "Is it not enough for you [to know] that your Sustainer will aid you with three thousand angels sent down [from on high]?
Nay, but if you are patient in adversity and conscious of Him, and the enemy should fall upon you of a sudden, your Sustainer will aid you with five thousand angels swooping down!"*
And vie with one another to attain to your Sustainer's forgiveness and to a paradise as vast as the heavens and the earth, which has been readied for the God-conscious
These it is who shall have as their reward forgiveness from their Sustainer, and gardens through which running waters flow, therein to abide: and how excellent a reward for those who labour!
and all that they said was this: "O our Sustainer! Forgive us our sins and the lack of moderation in our doings! And make firm our steps, and succour us against people who deny the truth!" -
But do not think of those that have been slain in God's cause as dead. Nay, they are alive! With their Sustainer have they their sustenance,
[and] who remember God when they stand, and when they sit, and when they lie down to sleep,* and [thus] reflect on the creation of the heavens and the earth: "O our Sustainer! Thou hast not created [aught of] this without meaning and purpose.* Limitless art Thou in Thy glory! Keep us safe, then, from suffering through fire!
"O our Sustainer! Whomsoever Thou shalt commit to the fire, him, verily, wilt Thou have brought to disgrace [in this world];* and such evildoers will have none to succour them.
"O our Sustainer! Behold, we heard a voice* call [us] unto faith, `Believe in your Sustainer!' - and so we came to believe. O our Sustainer! Forgive us, then, our sins, and efface our bad deeds; and let us die the death of the truly virtuous!
"And, O our Sustainer, grant us that which Thou hast promised us through Thy apostles, and disgrace us not on Resurrection Day! Verily, Thou never failest to fulfil Thy promise!"
And thus does their Sustainer answer their prayer: "I shall not lose sight of the labour of any of you who labours [in My way], be it man or woman: each of you is an issue of the other.* Hence, as for those who forsake the domain of evil,* and are driven from their homelands, and suffer hurt in My cause, and fight [for it], and are slain - I shall most certainly efface their bad deeds, and shall most certainly bring them into gardens through which running waters flow, as a reward from God: for with God is the most beauteous of rewards."
whereas those who remain conscious of their Sustainer shall have gardens through which running waters flow, therein to abide: a ready welcome from God. And that which is with God is best for the truly virtuous.
And, behold, among the followers of earlier revelation there are indeed such as [truly] believe in God, and in that which has been bestowed from on high upon you as well as in that which has been bestowed upon them. Standing in awe of God, they do not barter away God's messages for a trifling gain. They shall have their reward with their Sustainer - for, behold, God is swift in reckoning!
O MANKIND! Be conscious of your Sustainer, who has created you out of one living entity, and out of it created its mate, and out of the two spread abroad a multitude of men and women.* And remain conscious of God, in whose name you demand [your rights] from one another, and of these ties of kinship. Verily, God is ever watchful over you!
But nay, by thy Sustainer! They do not [really] believe unless they make thee [O Prophet] a judge of all on which they disagree among themselves, and then find in their hearts no bar to an acceptance of thy decision and give themselves up [to it] in utter self-surrender.*
And how could you refuse to fight* in the cause of God and of the utterly helpless men and women and children who are crying, "O our Sustainer! Lead us forth [to freedom] out of this land whose people are oppressors, and raise for us, out of Thy grace, a protector, and raise for us, out of Thy grace, one who will bring us succour!"
ART THOU NOT aware of those who have been told, "Curb your hands,* and be constant in prayer, and render the purifying dues"? But as soon as fighting [in God's cause] is ordained for them, lo, some of them stand in awe of men as one should stand in awe of God - or in even greater awe - and say, "O our Sustainer! Why hast Thou ordained fighting for us? If only Thou hadst granted us a delay for a little while!" Say: "Brief is the enjoyment of this world, whereas the life to come is the best for all who are conscious of God - since none of you shall be wronged by as much as a hair's breadth.
O mankind! The Apostle has now come unto you with the truth from your Sustainer: believe, then, for your own good! And if you deny the truth - behold, unto God belongs all that is in the heavens and all that is on earth, and God is indeed all-knowing, wise!
O MANKIND! A manifestation of the truth has now come unto you from your Sustainer, and We have sent down unto you a clear light.
O you who have attained to faith! Offend not against the symbols set up by God, nor against the sacred month [of pilgrimage], nor against the garlanded offerings,* nor against those who flock to the Inviolable Temple, seeking favour with their Sustainer and His goodly acceptance; and [only] after your pilgrimage is over* are you free to hunt. And never let your hatred of people who would bar you from the Inviolable House of Worship lead you into the sin of aggression:* but rather help one another in furthering virtue and God-consciousness, and do not help one another in furthering evil and enmity; and remain conscious of God: for, behold, God is severe in retribution!
[But] they said: "O Moses! Behold, never shall we enter that [land] so long as those others are in it. Go forth, then, thou and thy Sustainer, and fight, both of you! We, behold, shall remain here!"
Prayed [Moses]: "O my Sustainer! Of none am I master but of myself and my brother [Aaron]: draw Thou, then, a dividing-line between us and these iniquitous folk!"
Even if thou lay thy hand on me to slay me, I shall not lay my hand on thee to slay thee: behold, I fear God, the Sustainer of all the worlds.
And the Jews say, "God's hand is shackled!" It is their own hands that are shackled; and rejected [by God] are they because of this their assertion.* Nay, but wide are His hands stretched out: He dispenses [bounty] as He wills. But all that has been bestowed from on high upon thee [O Prophet] by thy Sustainer is bound to make many of them yet more stubborn in their overweening arrogance and in their denial of the truth. And so We have cast enmity and hatred among the followers of the Bible ,* [to last] until Resurrection Day; every time they light the fires of war, God extinguishes them ;* and they labour hard to spread corruption on earth: and God does not -love the spreaders of corruption.
and if they would but truly observe the Torah and the Gospel and all [the revelation] that has been bestowed from on high upon them by their Sustainer, they would indeed partake of all the blessings of heaven and earth. Some of them do pursue a right course; but as for most of them -vile indeed is what they do!*
O APOSTLE! Announce all that has been bestowed from on high upon thee by thy Sustainer: for unless thou doest it fully, thou wilt not have delivered His message [at all]. And God will protect thee from [unbelieving] men: behold, God does not guide people who refuse to acknowledge the truth.
Say: "O followers of the Bible! You have no valid ground for your beliefs -unless you [truly] observe the Torah and the Gospel, and all that has been bestowed from on high upon you by your Sustainer!"* Yet all that has been bestowed from on high upon thee [O Prophet] by thy Sustainer is bound to make many of them yet more stubborn in their overweening arrogance and in their denial of the truth. But sorrow not over people who deny the truth:
Indeed, the truth deny they who say, "Behold, God is the Christ, son of Mary" - seeing that the Christ [himself] said, "O children of Israel! Worship God [alone], who is my Sustainer as well as your Sustainer."* Behold, whoever ascribes divinity to any being beside God, unto him will God deny paradise, and his goal shall be the fire: and such evildoers will have none to succour them!
For, when they come to understand what has been bestowed from on high upon this Apostle, thou canst see their eyes overflow with tears, because they recognize something of its truth;* [and] they say: "O our Sustainer! We do believe; make us one, then, with all who bear witness to the truth.
And how could we fail to believe in God and in whatever truth has come unto us, when we so fervently desire that our Sustainer count us among the righteous?"
[And,] lo, the white-garbed ones said: "O Jesus, son of Mary! Could thy Sustainer send down unto us a repast from heaven?"* [Jesus] answered: "Be conscious of God, if you are [truly] believers!"
Said Jesus, the son of Mary: "O God, our Sustainer! Send down upon us a repast from heaven: it shall be an ever-recurring feast for us - for the first and the last of us -and a sign from Thee. And provide us our sustenance, for Thou art the best of providers!"
Nothing did I tell them beyond what Thou didst bid me [to say]: `Worship God, [who is] my Sustainer as well as your Sustainer.' And I bore witness to what they did as long as I dwelt in their midst; but since Thou hast caused me to die, Thou alone hast been their keeper:* for Thou art witness unto everything.
ALL PRAISE is due to God, who has created the heavens and the earth, and brought into being deep darkness as well as light:* and yet, those who are bent on denying the truth regard other powers as their Sustainer's equals!
Yet whenever any of their Sustainer's messages comes unto them, they [who are bent on denying the truth] turn their backs upon it:*
Say: "Behold, I would dread, were I [thus] to rebel against my Sustainer, the suffering [which would befall me] on that awesome Day [of Judgment]."
Whereupon, in their utter confusion, they will only [be able to] say: "By God, our Sustainer, we did not [mean to] ascribe divinity to aught beside Him !"*
If thou couldst but see [them] when they will be made to stand before the fire and will say, "Oh, would that we were brought back [to life]: then we would not give the lie to our Sustainer's messages, but would be among the believers!"
If thou couldst but see [them] when they shall be made to stand before their Sustainer [and] He will say, "Is not this the truth?" They will answer: "Yea, indeed, by our Sustainer!" [Whereupon] He will say: "Taste, then, the suffering that comes from* your having refused to acknowledge the truth!"
And they say, "Why has no miraculous sign been bestowed on him* from on high by his Sustainer?" Say: "Behold, God has the power to bestow any sign from on high." Yet most human beings are unaware of this*
although there is no beast that walks on earth and no bird that flies on its two wings which is not [God's] creature* like yourselves: no single thing have We neglected in Our decree. And once again:* Unto their Sustainer shall they [all] be gathered.
and [in the end,] the last remnant of those folk who had been bent on evildoing was wiped out.* For all praise is due to God, the Sustainer of all the worlds.
And warn hereby those who fear lest they be gathered unto their Sustainer with none to protect them from Him or to intercede with Him, so that they might become [fully] conscious of Him.*
Hence, repulse not [any of] those who at morn and evening invoke their Sustainer, seeking His countenance.* Thou art in no wise accountable for them-just as they are in no wise accountable for thee* -and thou hast therefore no right to repulse them: for then thou wouldst be among the evildoers.*
And when those who believe in Our messages come unto thee, say: "Peace be upon you. Your Sustainer has willed upon Himself the law of grace and mercy* - so that if any of you does a bad deed out of ignorance, and thereafter repents and lives righteously, He shall be [found] much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace."
Say: "Behold, I take my stand on a clear evidence from my Sustainer-and [so] it is to Him that you are giving the lie! Not in my power is that which [in your ignorance] you so hastily demand:* judgment rests with none but God. He shall declare the truth, since it is He who is the best judge between truth and falsehood."
SAY: "Shall we invoke, instead of God, something that can neither benefit us nor harm us, and [thus] turn around on our heels after God has guided us aright? -like one whom the satans have enticed into blundering after earthly lusts, the while his companions, trying to guide him, call out unto him [from afar] ,* `Come thou to us!"' Say: "Verily, God's guidance is the only guidance: and so we have been bidden to surrender ourselves unto the Sustainer of all the worlds,
Then, when the night overshadowed him with its darkness, he beheld a star;., [and] he exclaimed, "This is my Sustainer!" -but when it went down, he said, "I love not the things that go down."
Then, when he beheld the moon rising, he said, "This is my Sustainer!"-but when it went down, he said, "Indeed, if my Sustainer guide me not. I will most certainly become one of the people who go astray!"
Then, when he beheld the sun rising, he said, "This is my Sustainer! This one is the greatest [of all]!" - but when it [too] went down, he exclaimed: "O my people! Behold, far be it from me to ascribe divinity, as you do, to aught beside God!
And his people argued with him. He said: "Do you argue with me about God, when it is He who has guided me? But I do not fear anything to which you ascribe divinity side by side with Him, [for no evil can befall me] unless my Sustainer so wills.* All things does my Sustainer embrace within His knowledge; will you not, then, keep this in mind?
And this was Our argument* which We vouchsafed unto Abraham against his people: [for] We do raise by degrees whom We will.* Verily, thy Sustainer is wise, all-knowing.
Such is God, your Sustainer: there is no deity save Him, the Creator of everything: worship, then, Him alone -for it is He who has everything in His care.
Means of insight have now come unto you from your Sustainer [through this divine writ]. Whoever, therefore, chooses to see, does so for his own good; and whoever chooses to remain blind, does so to his own hurt. And [say unto the blind of heart]: "I am not your keeper."
follow thou what has been revealed unto thee by thy Sustainer - save whom there is no deity - and turn thy back upon all who ascribe divinity to aught beside Him.
But do not revile those [beings] whom they invoke instead of God,* lest they revile God out of spite, and in ignorance: for, goodly indeed have We made their own doings appear unto every community* In time, [however,] unto their Sustainer they must return: and then He will make them [truly] understand all that they were doing.
AND THUS it is that against every prophet We have set up as enemies the evil forces from among humans as well as from among invisible beings that whisper unto one another glittering half-truths meant to delude the mind* But they could not do this unless thy Sustainer had so willed: stand, therefore, aloof from them and from all their false imagery!
[say thou:] "Am I, then, to look unto anyone but God for judgment* [as to what is right and wrong], when it is He who has bestowed upon you from on high this divine writ, clearly spelling out the truth?"* And those unto whom We have vouchsafed revelation aforetime know that this one, too, has been bestowed from on high, step by step, by thy Sustainer.* Be not, then, among the doubters-
for, truly and justly has thy Sustainer's promise been fulfilled.* There is no power that could alter [the fulfilment of] His promises: and He alone is all-hearing, all-knowing.
Verily, thy Sustainer knows best as to who strays from His path, and best knows He as to who are the right-guided.
And why should you not eat of that over which God's name has been pronounced, seeing that He has so clearly spelled out to you what He has forbidden you [to eat] unless you are compelled [to do so]? But, behold, [it is precisely in such matters that] many people lead others astray by their own errant views, without [having any real] knowledge. Verily, thy Sustainer is fully aware of those who transgress the bounds of what is right.
And undeviating is this thy Sustainer's way.* Clearly, indeed, have We spelled out these messages unto people who [are willing to] take them to heart!
Theirs shall be an abode of peace with their Sustainer; and He shall be near unto them in result of what they have been doing.
AND ON THE DAY when He shall gather them [all] together, [He will say:] "O you who have lived in close communion with [evil] invisible beings! A great many [other] human beings have you ensnared!* And those of the humans who were close to them* will say: "O our Sustainer! We did enjoy one another's fellowship [in life]; but (now that] we have reached the end of our term-the term which Thou hast laid down for us - (we see the error of our ways]!" [But] He will say: "The fire shall be your abode, therein to abide-unless God wills it otherwise."* Verily, thy Sustainer is wise, all-knowing.
And so it is that thy Sustainer would never destroy a community* for its wrongdoing so long as its people are still unaware [of the meaning of right and wrong]:
for all shall be judged according to their [conscious] deeds* - and thy Sustainer is not unaware of what they do.
And thy Sustainer alone is self-sufficient, limitless in His grace. If He so wills, He may put an end to you and thereafter cause whom He wills to succeed you - even as He has brought you into being out of other people's seed.
Say [O Prophet]: "In all that has been revealed unto me, I do not find anything forbidden to eat, if one wants to eat thereof,* unless it be carrion, or blood poured forth, or the flesh of swine-for that, behold, is loathsome-or a sinful offering* over which any name other than God's has been invoked. But if one is driven by necessity - neither coveting it nor exceeding his immediate need -then [know that], behold, thy Sustainer is much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace."*
And if they give thee the lie,* say: "Limitless is your Sustainer in His grace; but His punishment shall not be averted from people who are lost in sin."
Say: "Bring forward your witnesses who could bear witness that God has forbidden [all] this!"* -and if they bear witness [falsely], do not bear witness with them; and do not follow the errant views of those who have given the lie to Our messages, nor of those who believe not in the life to come, and who regard other powers as their Sustainer's equals!*
Say: "Come, let me convey unto you what God has [really] forbidden to you: "Do not ascribe divinity, in any way, to aught beside Him; and [do not offend against but, rather,] do good unto your parents;* and do not kill your children for fear of poverty - [for] it is We who shall provide sustenance for you as well as for them;* and do not commit any shameful deeds, be they open or secret; and do not take any human being's life-[the life] which God has declared to be sacred -otherwise than in [the pursuit of] justice: this has He enjoined upon you so that you might use your reason;*
AND ONCE AGAIN:* We vouchsafed the divine writ unto Moses in fulfilment [of Our favour] upon those who persevered in doing good, clearly spelling out everything,* and [thus providing] guidance and grace, so that they might have faith in the [final] meeting with their Sustainer.
or lest you say, "If a divine writ had been bestowed from on high upon us, we would surely have followed its guidance better than they did."* And so, a clear evidence of the truth has now come unto you from your Sustainer, and guidance, and grace. Who, then, could be more wicked than he who gives the lie to God's messages, and turns away from them in disdain? We shall requite those who turn away from Our messages in disdain with evil suffering for having thus turned away!
Do they, perchance, wait for the angels to appear unto them, or for thy Sustainer [Himself] to appear, or for some of thy Sustainer's [final] portents to appear?* [But] on the Day when thy Sustainer's [final] portents do appear, believing will be of no avail to any human being who did not believe before, or who, while believing, did no good works.* Say: "Wait, [then, for the Last Day, O unbelievers:] behold, we [believers] are waiting, too!"
SAY: "Behold, my Sustainer has guided me onto a straight way through an ever-true faith-the way of Abraham, who turned away from all that is false, and wa,. not of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside Him."
Say: "Behold, my prayer, and (all] my acts of worship, and my living and my dying are for God [alone], the Sustainer of all the worlds,
Say: "Am I, then, to seek a sustainer other than God, when He is the Sustainer of all things?" And whatever [wrong] any human being commits rests upon himself alone; and no bearer of burdens shall be made to bear another's burden.* And, in time, unto your Sustainer you all must return: and then He will make you. [truly] understand all that on which you were wont to differ.*
For, He it is who has made you inherit the earth,* and has raised some of you by degrees above others, so that He might try you by means of what He has bestowed upon you.* Verily, thy Sustainer is swift in retribution: yet, behold, He is indeed much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace.
"Follow what has been sent down unto you by your Sustainer, and follow no masters other than Him.* How seldom do you keep this in mind!
Thereupon Satan whispered unto the two with a view to making them conscious of their nakedness, of which [hitherto] they had been unaware;* and he said: "Your Sustainer has but forbidden you this tree lest you two become .[as] angels, or lest you live forever."*
-and thus he led them on with deluding thoughts. But as soon as the two had tasted [the fruit] of the tree, they became conscious of their nakedness; and they began to cover themselves with pieced-together leaves from the garden. And their Sustainer called unto them: "Did I not forbid that tree unto you and tell you, `Verily, Satan is your open foe'?"
The two replied: "O our Sustainer! We have sinned against ourselves -and unless Thou grant us forgiveness and bestow Thy mercy upon us, we shall most certainly be lost!"
Say: "My Sustainer has [but] enjoined the doing of what is right; and [He desires you to] put your whole being into every act of worship,* and to call unto Him, sincere in your faith in Him alone. As it was He who brought you into being in the first instance, so also [unto Him] you will return:
Say: "Verily, my Sustainer has forbidden only shameful deeds, be they open or secret, and [every kind of] sinning, and unjustified envy, and the ascribing of divinity to aught beside Him - since He has never bestowed any warrant therefor from on high and the attributing unto God of aught of which you have no knowledge."
[And God] will say: "Join those hosts of invisible beings and humans who have gone before you into the fire!" [And] every time a host enters [the fire], it will curse its fellow-host -so much so that, when they all shall have passed into it, one after another, the last of them will speak [thus] of the first of them:* "O our Sustainer! It is they who have led us astray: give, them, therefore, double suffering through fire!" He, will reply: "Every one of you deserves double suffering* -but you know it not."
after We shall have removed whatever unworthy thoughts or feelings may have been [lingering] in their bosoms. Running waters will flow at their feet;* and they will say: "All praise is due to God, who has guided us unto this; for we would certainly not have found the right path unless God had guided us! Indeed, our Sustainer's apostles have told us the truth!" And [a voice] will call out unto them: "This is the paradise which you have inherited by virtue of your past deeds!"
And the inmates of paradise will call out to the inmates of the fire: "Now we have found that what our Sustainer promised us has come true; have you. too, found that what your Sustainer promised you has come true?" [The others] will answer, "Yes!"-whereupon from their midst a voice* will loudly proclaim: "God's rejection is the due of the evildoers
And whenever their eyes are turned towards the inmates of the fire, they will cry: "O our Sustainer! Place us not among the people who have been guilty of evildoing!"
Are [the unbelievers] but waiting for the final meaning of that [Day of Judgment] to unfold?* [But] on the Day when its final meaning is unfolded, those who aforetime had been oblivious thereof will say: "Our Sustainer's apostles have indeed told us the truth! Have we, then, any intercessors who could intercede in our behalf? Or could we be brought back [to life] so that we might act otherwise than we were wont to act?"* Indeed, they will have squandered their own selves, and all their false imagery will have forsaken them.
VERILY, your Sustainer is God, who has created the heavens and the earth in six aeons, and is established on the throne of His almightiness.* He covers the day with the night in swift pursuit, with the sun and the moon and the stars subservient to His command: oh, verily, His is all creation and all command. Hallowed is God, the Sustainer of all the worlds!
Call unto your Sustainer humbly, and in the secrecy of your hearts. Verily, He loves not those who transgress the bounds of what is right:
As for the good land, its vegetation comes forth [in abundance] by its Sustainer's leave, whereas from the bad it comes forth but poorly. Thus do We give many facets to Our messages for [the benefit of] people who are grateful!
Said [Noah]: "O my people! There is no error in me, but I am an apostle from the Sustainer of all the worlds.
I am delivering unto you my Sustainer's messages and giving you good advice: for I know [through revelation] from God what you do not know.
Why, do you deem it strange that a tiding from your Sustainer should have come unto you through a man from among yourselves, so that he might warn you, and that you might become conscious of God, and that you might be graced with His mercy?"
Said [Hud]: "O my people! There is no weak-mindedness in me, but I am an apostle from the Sustainer of all the worlds.
I am delivering unto you my Sustainer's messages and advising you truly and wells.*
Why, do you deem it strange that a tiding from your Sustainer should have come unto you through a man from among yourselves, so that he might warn you? Do but remember how He made you heirs to Noah's people, and endowed you abundantly with power:* remember, then, God's blessings, so that you might attain to a happy state!"
Said [Hud]: "You are already beset by loath some evils* and by your Sustainer's condemnation! Do you argue with me about the [empty] names which you have invented* - you and your forefathers - for which God has bestowed no warrant from on high? Wait, then, [for what will happen:] verily, I shall wait with you!"*
AND UNTO [the tribe of] Thamud [We sent] their brother salih* He said: "O my people! Worship God alone: you have no deity other than Him. Clear evidence of the truth has now come unto you from your Sustainer. "This she-camel belonging to God shall be a token for you: so leave her alone to pasture on God's earth, and do her no harm, lest grievous chastisement befall you.*
The great ones among his people, who gloried in their arrogance towards all who were deemed weak, said unto the believers among them: "Do you [really] know that salih has been sent by his Sustainer?" They answered: "Verily, we believe in the message which he bears."*
And then they cruelly slaughtered the she-camel* and turned with disdain from their Sustainer's commandment, and said: "O Salih! Bring about that [punishment] with which thou hast threatened us, if thou art truly one of God's message bearers!"
And [Salih] turned away from them, and said: "O my people! Indeed, I delivered unto you my Sustainer's message and gave you good advice: but you did not love those who gave [you] good advice."
AND UNTO [the people of] Madyan [We sent] their brother Shu'ayb .* He said: "O my people! Worship God alone: you have no deity other than Him. Clear evidence of the truth has now come unto you from your Sustainer. Give, therefore, full measure and weight [in all your dealings], and do not deprive people of what is rightfully theirs;* and do not spread corruption on earth after it has be, en so well ordered: [all] this is for your own good, 'if you would but believe.
We should be guilty of blaspheming against God* were we to return to your ways after God has saved us from them! It is not conceivable that we should return to them-unless God, our Sustainer, so wills.* All things does our Sustainer embrace within His knowledge; in God do we place our trust. O our Sustainer! Lay Thou open the truth between us and our people -for Thou art the best of all to lay open the truth!"*
And he turned away from them, and said: "O my people! Indeed, I delivered unto you my Sustainer's message and gave you good advice: how, then, could I mourn for people who have denied the truth?"
And Moses said: "O Pharaoh! Verily, I am an apostle from the Sustainer of all the worlds,
so constituted that I cannot say anything about God but the truth. I have now come unto you with a clear evidence from your Sustainer: let, then, the children of Israel go with me!"
[and] exclaiming: "We have come to believe in the Sustainer of all the worlds,
the Sustainer of Moses and Aaron!"
They answered: "Verily, unto our Sustainer do we turn-
for thou takest vengeance on us only because we have come to believe in our Sustainer's messages as soon as they came to us. O our Sustainer! Shower us with patience in adversity, and make us die as men who have surrendered themselves unto Thee!"
[But the children of Israel ] said: "We have suffered hurt ere thou camest to us and since thou hast come to us!* [Moses] replied: "It may well be that your Sustainer will destroy your foe and make you inherit the earth: and thereupon he will behold how you act."*
And whenever a plague struck them, they would cry: "O Moses, pray for us to thy Sustainer on the strength of the covenant [of prophethood] which He has made with thee! If thou remove this plague from us, we will truly believe in thee. and will let the children of Israel go with thee!"
whereas unto the people who [in the past] had been deemed utterly low, We gave as their heritage the eastern and western parts of the land that We had blessed.* And [thus] thy Sustainer's good promise unto the children of Israel was fulfilled in result of their patience in adversity;* whereas We utterly destroyed all that Pharaoh and his people had wrought, and all that they had built.*
And [he reminded them of this word of God]: "Lo, We saved you from Pharaoh's people who afflicted you with cruel suffering, slaying your sons in great numbers and sparing [only] your women - which was an awesome trial from your Sustainer."*
AND [then] We appointed for Moses thirty nights [on Mount Sinai ]; and We added to them ten, whereby the term of forty nights set bye, his Sustainer was fulfilled.* And Moses said unto his brother Aaron: "Take thou my place among my people; and act righteously, and follow not the path of the spreaders of corruption."
And when Moses came [to Mount Sinai] at the time set by Us, and his Sustainer spoke unto him, he said: "O my Sustainer! Show [Thyself] unto me, so that I might behold Thee!" Said [God]: "Never canst thou see Me. However, behold this mountain: if it remains firm in its place, then - only then - wilt thou see Me.* And as soon as his Sustainer revealed His glory to the mountain, He caused it to crumble to dust; and Moses fell down in a swoon. And when he came to himself, he said: "Limitless art Thou in Thy glory! Unto Thee do I turn in repentance; and I shall [always] be the first to believe in Thee!"*
although [later,] when they would smite their hands in remorse,* having perceived that they had gone astray, they would say, "Indeed, unless our Sustainer have mercy on us and grant us forgiveness, we shall most certainly be among the lost!"*
And when Moses returned to his people, full of wrath and sorrow, he exclaimed: "Vile is the course which you have followed in my absence! Have you forsaken* your Sustainer's commandment?" And he threw down the tablets [of the Law], and seized his brother's head, dragging him towards himself. Cried Aaron: "O my mother's son! Behold, the people brought me low* and almost slew me: so let not mine enemies rejoice at my affliction, and count me not among the evildoing folk!"
Said [Moses]: "O my Sustainer! Grant Thou forgiveness unto me* and my brother, and admit us unto Thy grace: for Thou art the most merciful of the merciful!"
[And to Aaron he said:] "Verily, as for those who have taken to worshipping the [golden] - calf - their Sustainer's condemnation will overtake them, and ignominy [will be their lot] in the -life of this world!" For thus do We requite all who invent [such] falsehood.*
But as for those who do bad deeds and afterwards repent and [truly] believe-verily, after such repentance* thy Sustainer is indeed much forgiving, a dispenser of grace!
And when Moses' wrath as stilled, he took up the tablets, in the writing whereof there was guidance and grace for all who stood in awe of their Sustainer.*
And Moses chose out of his people seventy men to come [and pray for forgiveness] at a time set by Us. Then, when violent trembling seized them,* he prayed: "O my Sustainer! Hadst Thou so willed, Thou wouldst have destroyed them ere this, and me [with them]. Wilt Thou destroy us for what the weak-minded among us have done? (All] this is but a trial from Thee, whereby Thou allowest to go astray whom Thou willest, and guidest aright whom Thou willest. Thou art near unto us: grant us, then, forgiveness and have mercy on us - for Thou art the best of all forgivers!
And whenever some people* among them asked [those who tried to restrain the Sabbath-breakers], "Why do you preach to people whom God is about to destroy or [at least] to chastise with suffering severe?" -the pious ones* would answer, "In order to be free from blame before your Sustainer, and that these [transgressors, too,] might become conscious of Him."
And lo! Thy Sustainer made it known that most certainly He would rouse against them, unto Resurrection Day, people who would afflict them with cruel suffering: verily, thy Sustainer is swift in retribution - yet, verily, He is [also] much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace.
AND WHENEVER thy Sustainer brings forth their offspring from the loins of the children of Adam, He [thus] calls upon them to bear witness about themselves: "Am I not your Sustainer?" - to which they answer: "Yea, indeed, we do bear witness thereto!"* [Of this We remind you,] lest you say on the Day of Resurrection, "Verily, we were unaware of this";
THEY WILL ASK thee [O Prophet] about the Last Hour: "When will it come to pass?" Say: "Verily, knowledge thereof rests with my Sustainer alone. None but He will reveal it in its time. Heavily will it weigh on the heavens and the earth; [and] it will not fall upon you otherwise than of a sudden." They will ask thee - as if thou couldst gain insight into this [mystery] by dint of persistent inquiry!* Say: "Knowledge thereof rests with my Sustainer alone; but [of this] most people are unaware."
IT IS HE who has created you [all] out of one living entity, and out of it brought into being its mate, so that man might incline [with love] towards woman.* And so, when he has embraced her, she conceives [what at first is] a light burden, and continues to bear it. Then, when she grows heavy [with child], they both call unto God, their Sustainer, "If Thou indeed grant us a sound [child], we shall most certainly be among the grateful!"
And yet, when thou [O Prophet] dost not produce any miracle for them, some [people] say, "Why dost thou not seek to obtain it [from God]?* Say: "I only follow whatever is being revealed to me by my Sustainer: this [revelation] is a means of insight from your Sustainer, and a guidance and grace unto people who will believe.
And bethink thyself of thy Sustainer humbly and with awe, and without raising thy voice, at morn and at evening; and do not allow thyself to be heedless.
Behold, those who are near unto thy Sustainer* are never too proud to worship Him; and they extol His limitless glory, and prostrate themselves before Him [alone].
Believers are only they whose hearts tremble with awe whenever God is mentioned, and whose faith is strengthened whenever His messages are conveyed unto them,* and who in their Sustainer place their trust -
it is they, they who are truly believers! Theirs shall be great dignity in their Sustainer's sight, and forgiveness of sins, and a most excellent sustenance.*
EVEN AS thy Sustainer brought thee forth from thy home [to fight] in the cause of the truth, although some of the believers were averse to it,
Lo! You were praying unto your Sustainer for aid, whereupon He thus responded to you: "I shall, verily, aid you with a thousand angels following one upon' another!"
Lo! Thy Sustainer inspired the angels [to convey this His message to the believers]: "I am with you !"* [And He commanded the angels:] "And, give firmness unto those who have attained to faith [with these words from Me]:* `I shall cast terror into the hearts of those who are bent on denying the truth; strike, then, their necks, [O believers,] and strike off every one of their finger-tips!"*
[To those sinners shall happen] the like of what happened to Pharaoh's people and those who lived before them: they gave the lie to their Sustainer's messages - and so We destroyed them in return for their sins, and caused Pharaoh's people to drown: for they were evildoers all.
Their Sustainer gives them the glad tiding of the grace [that flows] from Him, and of [His] goodly acceptance, and of the gardens which await them, full of lasting bliss,
They have taken their rabbis and their monks-as well as the Christ, son of Mary-for their lords beside God,* although they had been bidden to worship none but the One God, save whom there is no deity: the One who is utterly remote, in His limitless glory, from anything to which they may ascribe a share in His divinity!
But if those [who are bent on denying the truth] turn away, say: "God is enough for me! There is no- deity save Him. In Him have I placed my trust, for He is the Sustainer, in awesome almightiness enthroned."*
Do people deem it strange that We should have inspired a man from their own midst [with this Our message]:* "Warn all mankind, and give unto those who have attained to faith the glad tiding that in their Sustainer's sight they surpass all others in that they are completely sincere-?* [Only] they who deny the truth say, "Behold. he is clearly but a spellbinder!"*
VERILY, your Sustainer is God, who has created the heavens and the earth in six aeons, and is established on the throne of His almightiness,* governing all that exists. There is none that could intercede with Him unless He grants leave therefor.* Thus is God, your Sustainer: worship, therefore, Him [alone]: will you not, then, keep this in mind?
[But,] verily, as for those who have attained to faith and do righteous deeds - their Sustainer guides them aright by means of their faith. [In the life to come,] running waters will flow at their feet* in gardens of bliss;
[and] in that [state of happiness] they will call out,* "Limitless art Thou in Thy glory, O God!"-and will be answered with the greeting, "Peace !"* And their call will close with [the words], "All praise is due to God, the Sustainer of all the worlds!"
AND [thus it is:] whenever Our messages are conveyed unto them in all their clarity, those who do not believe that they are destined to meet Us [are wont to] say, "Bring us a discourse other than this, or alter this one."* Say [O Prophet]: "It is not conceivable that I should alter it of my own volition; I only follow what is revealed to me. Behold, I would dread, were I [thus] to rebel against my Sustainer, the suffering [which would befall me] on that ,awesome Day [of Judgment]!"
AND [know that] all mankind were once but one single community, and only later did they begin to hold divergent views.* And had it not been for a decree- that had already gone forth from thy Sustainer, all their differences would indeed have been settled [from the outset].*
NOW THEY [who deny the truth] are wont to ask, "Why has no miraculous sign ever been bestowed upon him from on high by his Sustainer?"* Say, then: "God's alone is the knowledge of that which. is beyond the reach of human perception.* Wait, then, [until His will becomes manifest:] verily, I shall wait with you!"
seeing that He is God, your Sustainer, the Ultimate Truth?* For, after the truth [has been forsaken], what is there [left] but error? How, then, can you lose sight of the truth?"*
Thus is thy Sustainer's word proved true with regard to such as are bent on sinful doings: they will not believes*
Now this Qur'an could not possibly have been devised by anyone save God: nay indeed,* it confirms the truth of whatever there still remains [of earlier revelations] and clearly spells out the revelation [which comes] -let there be no doubt about it-from the Sustainer of all the worlds.*
And there are among them such as will in time come to believe in this [divine writ], just as there are among them such as will never believe in it;* and thy Sustainer is fully aware as to who are the spreaders of corruption.
And some people* ask thee, "Is all this true?" Say: "Yea, by my Sustainer! It is most certainly true, and you cannot elude [the final reckoning]!"
O MANKIND! There has now come unto you an admonition from your Sustainer, and a cure for all [the ill] that may be in men's hearts,* and guidance and grace unto all who believe [in Him].
AND IN whatever condition thou mayest find thyself, [O Prophet,] and whatever discourse of this [divine writ]* thou mayest be reciting, and whatever work you [all, O men,] may do -[remember that] We are your witness* [from the moment] when you enter upon it: for, not even an atom's weight [of whatever there is] on earth or in heaven escapes thy Sustainer's knowledge; and neither is there anything smaller than that, or larger, but is recorded in [His] clear decree.
Whereupon they answered: "In God have we placed our trust! O our Sustainer, make us not a plaything* for evildoing folk,
And Moses prayed: "O our Sustainer! Verily, splendour and riches hast Thou vouchsafed, in the life of this world, unto Pharaoh and his great ones-with the result, O our Sustainer, that they are leading [others] astray from Thy path!* O our Sustainer! Wipe out their riches, and harden their hearts, so that they may not attain to faith ere they see the grievous suffering [that awaits them]!"
And [thereafter], indeed, We assigned unto the children of Israel a most goodly abode,* and provided for them sustenance out of the good things of life. And it was not until knowledge [of God's revelation] was vouchsafed to them that they began to hold divergent views: [but,] verily, thy Sustainer will judge between them on Resurrection Day regarding all on which they were wont to differ.*
AND SO, [O man,] if thou art in doubt about [the truth of] what We have [now] bestowed upon thee from on high,* ask those who read the divine writ [revealed] before thy time:* [and thou wilt find that,] surely, the truth has now come unto thee from thy Sustainer. Be not, then, among the doubters -
Verily, they against whom thy Sustainer's word [of judgment] has come true* will not attain to faith -
And [thus it is:] had thy Sustainer so willed, all those who live on earth would surely have attained to faith, all of them:* dost thou, then, think that thou couldst compel people to believe,
SAY [O Prophet]: "O mankind! The truth from your Sustainer has now come unto you. Whoever, therefore, chooses to follow the right path, follows it but for his own good; and whoever chooses to go astray, goes but astray to his own hurt. And I am not responsible for your conduct."
Ask your Sustainer to forgive you your sins, and then turn towards Him in repentance - [whereupon] He will grant you a goodly enjoyment of life [in this world] until a term set [by Him is fulfilled];* and [in the life to come] He will bestow upon everyone possessed of merit [a full reward for] his merit.* But if you turn away, then, verily, I dread for you the suffering [which is bound to befall you] on that awesome Day*
Can, then, [he who cares for no more than the life of this world be compared with* ] one who takes his stand on a clear evidence from his Sustainer, conveyed through [this] testimony from Him,* as was the revelation vouchsafed to Moses aforetime-[a divine writ ordained by Him] to be a guidance and grace [unto man]? They [who understand this message-it is they alone who truly] believe in it;* whereas for any of those who, leagued together [in common hostility],* deny its truth - the fire shall be their appointed state [in the life to come]. And so,* be not in doubt about this [revelation]: behold, it is the truth from thy Sustainer, even though* most people will not believe in it.
And who could be more wicked than they who attribute their own lying inventions to God?* [On the Day of Judgment, such as] these shall be arraigned before their Sustainer, and those who are called upon to bear witness [against them]* shall say, "It is they who uttered lies about their Sustainer!"* Oh, verily, God's rejection is the due of all evildoers*
Behold, [only] those who attain to faith and do righteous deeds and humble themselves before their Sustainer - [only] they are destined for paradise, and there shall they abide.
Said [Noah]: "O my people! What do you think? If [it be true that I am taking my stand on a clear evidence from my~ Sustainer, who has vouchsafed unto me grace from Himself - [a revelation] to which you have remained blind-: [if this be true,] can we force it on you even though it be hateful to you?*
"And, O my people, no benefit do I ask of you for this [message]: my reward rests with none but God. And I shall not repulse [any of] those who have attained to faith.* Verily, they [know that they] are destined to meet their Sustainer, whereas in you I see people without any awareness [of right and wrong]!
for, my advice will not benefit you -much as I desire to give you good advice - if it be God's will that you shall remain lost in grievous error.* He is your Sustainer, and unto Him you must return."
So he said [unto his followers]: "Embark in this [ship]! In the name of God be its run and its riding at anchor! Behold, my. Sustainer is indeed much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace!"
And Noah called out to his Sustainer, and said: "O my Sustainer! Verily, my son was of my family;* and, verily, Thy promise always comes true, and Thou art the most just of all judges!"
Said [Noah]: "O my Sustainer! Verily, I seek refuge with Thee from [ever again] asking of Thee anything whereof I cannot have any knowledge! For unless Thou grant me forgiveness and bestow Thy mercy upon me, I shall be among the lost!"
"Hence, O my people, ask your Sustainer to forgive you your sins, and then turn towards Him in repentance-[whereupon] He will shower upon you heavenly blessings abundant,* and will add strength to your strength: only do not turn away [from me] as people lost in sin!"
Behold, I have placed my trust in God, [who is] my Sustainer as well as your Sustainer: for there is no living creature which He does not hold by its forelock.* Verily, straight is my Sustainer's way!*
"But if you choose to turn away, then [know that] I have delivered to you the message with which I was sent unto you, and [that] my Sustainer may cause another people to take your place,* whereas you will in no wise harm Him. Verily, my Sustainer watches over all things!"
And that was [the end of the tribe of] `Ad, [who] had rejected their Sustainer's messages, and rebelled against His apostles, and followed the bidding of every arrogant enemy of the truth.*
And they were pursued in this world by [God's] rejection, and [shall finally be overtaken by it] on the Day of Resurrection.* Oh, verily, [the tribe of] `Ad denied their Sustainer! Oh, away with the `Ad, the people of Hud!
AND UNTO [the tribe of] Thamud [We sent] their brother Salih.* He said: "O my people! Worship God [alone]: you have no deity other than Him. He brought you into being out of the earth,* and made you thrive thereon.* Ask Him, therefore, to forgive you your sins, and then turn towards Him in repentance-for, verily, my Sustainer is ever-near, responding [to the call of whoever calls unto Him]!"*
He retorted: "O my people! What do you think? If [it be true that] I am taking my stand on a cleat evidence from my Sustainer, who has vouchsafed unto me grace from Himself -[if this be true,] who would shield me from God were I to rebel against Him?* Hence, what you are offering me is no more than perdition!"*
And so, when Our judgment came to pass, by Our grace We saved Salih and those who shared his faith; and [We saved them, too,] from the ignominy of [Our rejection on] that Day [of Resurrection]. Verily, thy Sustainer alone is powerful, almighty!
as though they had never lived there. Oh, verily, [the tribe of] Thamud denied their Sustainer! Oh, away with the Thamud!
[But God's messengers replied:] "O Abraham! Desist from this [pleading]! Behold, thy Sustainer's judgment has already gone forth: and, verily, there shall fall upon them a chastisement which none can avert!"
[Whereupon the angels] said: "O Lot! Behold, we are messengers from thy Sustainer! Never shall [thy enemies] attain to thee! Depart, then, with thy household while it is yet night, and let none of you look back;* [and take with thee all thy family] with the exception of thy wife: for, behold, that which is to befall these [people of Sodom] shall befall her [as well].* Verily, their appointed time is the morning [and] is not the morning nigh?"
marked out in thy Sustainer's sight [for the punishment of such as are lost in sin]. And these [blows of God-willed doom] are never far from evildoers*
He answered: "O my people! What do you think? If [it be true that] I am taking my stand on a clear evidence from my Sustainer, who has vouchsafed me goodly sustenance [as a gift] from Himself - [how could I speak to you otherwise than I do]?* And yet, I have no desire to do, out of opposition to you, what I am asking you not to do:* I desire no more than to set things to rights in so far as it lies within my power; but the achievement of my aim depends on God alone. In Him have I placed my trust, and unto Him do I always turn!
Hence, ask your Sustainer to forgive you your sins, and then turn towards Him in repentance - for, verily, my Sustainer is a dispenser of grace, a fount of love!"
Said he: "O my people! Do you hold my family in greater esteem than God? -for, Him you regard as something that may be cast behind you and be forgotten!* Verily, my Sustainer encompasses [with His might] all that you do!
for, no wrong did We do to them, but it was they who wronged themselves. And when thy Sustainer's judgment came to pass, those deities of theirs which they had been wont to invoke instead of God proved of no avail whatever to them, and brought them no more than utter perdition.
And such is thy Sustainer's punishing grasp whenever He takes to task any community that is given to evildoing: verily, His punishing grasp is grievous, severe!
therein to abide as long as the heavens and the earth endure-unless thy Sustainer wills it otherwise:* for, verily, thy Sustainer is a sovereign doer of whatever He wills.
But as for those who [by virtue of their past deeds] will have been blest with happiness, [they shall live] in paradise, therein to abide as long as the heavens and the earth endure -unless thy Sustainer wills it otherwise* -as a gift unceasing.
And, indeed, [similar was the case when] We vouchsafed the divine writ unto Moses, and some of his people set their own views against it;* and had it not been for a decree that had already gone forth from thy Sustainer, judgment would indeed have been passed on them [then and there]:* for, behold, they were in grave doubt, amounting to suspicion, about him [who called them unto God].*
And, verily, unto each and all will thy Sustainer give their full due for whatever [good or evil] they may have done: behold, He is aware of all that they do!
For, never would thy Sustainer destroy a community* for wrong [beliefs alone] so long as its people behave righteously [towards one another].*
And had thy Sustainer so willed, He could surely have made all mankind one single community: but [He willed it otherwise, and so] they continue to hold divergent views'*
[all of them,] save those upon whom thy Sustainer has bestowed His grace.* And to this end has He created them [all.* But [as for those who refuse to avail themselves of divine guidance,] that word of thy Sustainer shall be fulfilled: "Most certainly will I fill hell with invisible beings as well as with humans, all together!"*
And God alone comprehends the hidden reality of the heavens and the earth:* for, all that exists goes back to Him [as its source]. Worship Him, then, and place thy trust in Him alone: for thy Sustainer is not unaware of what you do.
For, [as thou hast been shown in thy dream,] even thus will thy Sustainer elect thee, and will impart unto thee some understanding of the inner meaning of happenings,* and will bestow the full measure of His blessings upon thee and upon the House of Jacob -even as, aforetime, He bestowed it in full measure upon thy forefathers Abraham and Isaac. Verily, thy Sustainer is all-knowing, wise!"
And [it so happened that] she in whose house he was living [conceived a passion for him and] sought to make him yield himself unto her; and she bolted the doors and said, "Come thou unto me!" [But Joseph] answered: "May God preserve me! Behold, goodly has my master made my stay [in this house]! Verily, to no good end come they that do [such] wrong!"
And, indeed, she desired him, and he desired her; [and he would have succumbed] had he not seen [in this temptation] an evidence of his Sustainer's truth:* thus [We willed it to be] in order that We might avert from him all evil and all deeds of abomination -for, behold, he was truly one of Our servants.*
Said he: "O my Sustainer! Prison is more desirable to me than [compliance with] what these women invite me to: for, unless Thou turn away their guile from me, I might yet yield to their allure* and become one of those who are unaware [of right and wrong]."
And his Sustainer responded to his prayer, and freed him from the threat of their guile:* verily, He alone is all-hearing, all-knowing.
[Joseph] answered: "Ere there comes unto you the meal which you are [daily] fed, I shall have informed you of the real meaning of your dreams,* [so that you might know what is to come] before it comes unto you: for this is [part] of the knowledge which my Sustainer has imparted to me. "Behold, I have left behind me the ways of people who do not believe in God,* and who persistently refuse to acknowledge the truth of the life to come;
"O my companions in imprisonment! Which is more reasonable:* [belief in the existence of numerous divine] lords, each of them different from the other"* -or [in] the One God, who holds absolute sway over all that exists?
"[And now,] O my companions in imprisonment, [I shall tell you the meaning of your dreams:] as for one of you two, he will [again] give his lord [the King] wine to drink; but as for the other, he will be crucified, and birds will eat off his head. [But whatever be your future,] the matter on which you have asked me to enlighten you has been decided [by God]."
And [thereupon Joseph] said unto the one of the two whom he considered saved: "Mention me unto thy lord [when thou art free]!" But Satan caused him to forget to mention [Joseph] to his lord, and so he remained in prison a few [more] years.
And [as soon as Joseph's interpretation. was conveyed to him,] the King said: "Bring him before me!" But when the [King's] messenger came unto him, [Joseph] said: "Go back to thy lord and ask him [first to find out the truth] about those women who cut their hands-for, behold, [until now it is] my Sustainer [alone who] has full knowledge of their guile!"
And yet, I am not trying to absolve myself: for, verily, man's inner self does incite [him] to evil,* and saved are only they upon whom my Sustainer bestows His grace.* Behold, my Sustainer is much forgiving, a dispenser of grace!"
He said: "I shall ask my Sustainer to forgive you: He alone is truly forgiving, a true dispenser of grace!"
And he raised his parents to the highest place of honour;* and they [all] fell down before Him, prostrating themselves in adoration.* Thereupon [Joseph] said: "O my father! This is the real meaning of my dream of long ago, which my Sustainer has made come true.* And He was indeed good to me when He freed me from the prison, and [when] He brought you [all unto me] from the desert after Satan had sown discord between me and my brothers. Verily, my Sustainer is unfathomable in [the way He brings about] whatever He wills:* verily, He alone is all-knowing, truly wise!
"O my Sustainer! Thou hast indeed bestowed upon me something of power,* and hast imparted unto me some knowledge of the inner meaning of happenings.* Originator of the heavens and the earth! Thou art near unto me in this world and in the life to come: let me die as one who has surrendered himself unto Thee, and make me one with the righteous!"
Alif. Lam. Mim. Ra.* THESE ARE MESSAGES of revelation:* and what has been bestowed upon thee from on high by thy Sustainer is the truth-yet most people will not believe [in it]?*
It is God who has raised the heavens without any supports that you could see, and is established on the throne of His almightiness;* and He [it is who] has made the sun and the moon subservient [to His laws], each running its course for a term set [by Him].* He governs all that exists. Clearly does He spell out these messages, so that you might be certain in your innermost that you are destined to meet your Sustainer [on Judgment Day].*
BUT IF thou art amazed [at the marvels of God's creation], amazing, too, is their saying, "What! After we have become dust, shall we indeed be [restored to life] in a new act .of creation?"* It is they who [thus show that they] are bent on denying their Sustainer;* and it is they who carry the shackles [of their own making] around their necks;* and it is they who are destined for the fire, therein to abide.
And [since, O Prophet, they are bent on denying the truth,] they challenge thee to hasten the coming upon them of evil instead of [hoping for] good* although [they ought to know that] the exemplary punishments [which they now deride] have indeed come to pass before their time. Now, behold, thy Sustainer is full of forgiveness unto men despite all their evildoing:* but, behold, thy Sustainer is [also] truly severe in retribution!
However, they who are bent on denying the truth [refuse to believe and] say, "Why has no miraculous sign ever been bestowed on him from on high by his Sustainer?"* [But] thou art only a warmer; and [in God] all people have a guide.*
Say: "Who is the Sustainer of the heavens and the earth?" Say: "[It is] God." Say: "[Why,] then, do you take for your protectors, instead of Him, such as have it not within their power to bring benefit to, or avert harm from, themselves?" Say: "Can the blind and the seeing be deemed equal? -or can the depths of darkness and the light be deemed equal?" Or do they [really] believe that there are, side by side with God, other divine powers* that have created the like of what He creates, so that this act of creation appears to them to be similar [to His]?* Say: "God is the Creator of all things; and He is the One who holds absolute sway over all that exists."
of those who have responded to their Sustainer with a goodly response, and of those who did not respond to Him.* [As for the latter,] if they possessed all that is on earth, and twice as much,* they would surely offer it as ransom [on the Day of Judgment] :* a most evil reckoning awaits them, and their goal is hell: and how evil a resting-place!
CAN, THEN, he who knows that whatever has been bestowed from on high upon thee by thy Sustainer is the truth be deemed equal to one who is blind? Only they who are endowed with insight keep this in mind:
and who keep together what God has bidden to be joined,* and stand in awe of their Sustainer and fear the most evil reckoning [which awaits such as do not respond to Him];
and who are patient in adversity out of a longing for their Sustainer's countenance, and are constant in prayer, and spend on others, secretly and openly, out of what We provide for them as sustenance, and [who] repel evil with good.* It is these that shall find their fulfilment in the hereafter:*
NOW THOSE who are bent on denying the truth [of the Prophet's message] say, "Why has no miraculous sign ever been bestowed upon him from on high by his Sustainer?"* Say: "Behold, God lets go astray him who wills [to go astray],* just as He guides unto Himself all who turn unto Him-
Thus* have We raised thee [O Muhammad] as Our Apostle amidst a community [of unbelievers] before whose time [similar] communities have come and gone,* so that thou might propound to them what We have revealed unto thee: for [in their ignorance] they deny the Most Gracious !* Say: "He is my Sustainer. There is no deity save Him. In Him have I placed my trust, and unto Him is my recourse!"
Alif. Lam. Ra.* A DIVINE WRIT [is this -a revelation] which We have bestowed upon thee from on high in order that thou might bring forth all mankind, by their Sustainer's leave, out of the depths of darkness into the light: onto the way that leads to the Almighty, the One to whom all praise is due -
And, lo* Moses spoke [thus] unto his people: "Remember the blessings which God bestowed upon you when He saved you from Pharaoh's people who afflicted you with cruel suffering, and slaughtered your sons, and spared [only] your women* -which was an awesome trial from your Sustainer.
And [remember the time] when your Sustainer made [this promise] known: 'If you are grateful [to Me], I shall most certainly give you more and more;* but if you are ungrateful, verily, My chastisement will be severe indeed!"'
But they who denied the truth spoke [thus] unto their apostles: "We shall most certainly expel you from our land, unless you return forthwith to our ways.* Whereupon their Sustainer revealed this to His apostles:* "Most certainly shall We destroy these evildoers,
[This, then, is] the parable of those who are bent on denying their Sustainer: all their works* are as ashes which the wind blows about fiercely on a stormy day: [in the life to come,] they cannot achieve any benefit whatever from all [the good] that they may have wrought: for this [denial of God] is indeed the farthest one can go astray.*
But those who shall have attained to faith and done righteous deeds will be brought into gardens through which running waters flow, therein to abide by their Sustainer's leave, and will be welcomed with the greeting, "Peace!"*
yielding its fruit at all times by its Sustainer's leave. And [thus it is that] God propounds parables unto men,' so that they might bethink themselves [of the truth].*
AND [remember the time] when Abraham spoke [thus]:* "O my Sustainer! Make this land secure,* and preserve me and my children from ever worshipping idols* -
for, verily, O my Sustainer, these [false objects of worship] have led many people astray! "Hence, [only] he who follows me [in this my faith]~ is truly of me;* and as for him who disobeys me - Thou art, verily, much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace!
"O our Sustainer! Behold, I have settled some of my offspring in a valley in which there is no arable land,* close to Thy sanctified Temple, so that, O our Sustainer, they might devote themselves to prayer: cause Thou, therefore, people's hearts to incline towards them* and grant them fruitful sustenance, so that they might have cause to be grateful.
"O our Sustainer! Thou truly knowest all that we may hide [in our hearts] as well as all that we bring into the open:' for nothing whatever, be it on earth or in heaven, remains hidden from God.
"All praise is due to God, who has bestowed upon me, in my old age, Ishmael and Isaac! Behold, my Sustainer hears indeed all prayer:
[hence,] O my Sustainer, cause me and [some] of my offspring to remain constant in prayer!* "And, O our Sustainer, accept this my prayer:
Grant Thy forgiveness unto me, and my parents, and all the believers, on the Day on which the [last] reckoning will come to pass!"
Hence, warn men of the Day when this suffering may befall them, and when those who did wrong [in their lifetime] will exclaim: "O our Sustainer! Grant us respite for a short while, so that we might respond to Thy call and follow the apostles!"* [But God will answer:] "Why - were you not aforetime wont to swear that no kind of resurrection and retribution awaited you?*
and, behold, it is thy Sustainer who will gather them all together [on Judgment Day]: verily, He is wise, all-knowing!
And lo! Thy Sustainer said unto the angels: "Behold, I am about to create mortal man out of sounding clay, out of dark slime transmuted;
Said [Iblis]: "Then, O my Sustainer, grant me a respite till the Day when all shall be raised from the dead!"
[Whereupon Iblis] said: "O my Sustainer! Since Thou hast thwarted me,* I shall indeed make [all that is evil] on earth seem goodly to them, and shall most certainly beguile them-into grievous error -
[Abraham] exclaimed: "And who-other than those who have utterly lost their way-could ever abandon the hope of his Sustainer's grace?"
verily, thy Sustainer is the all-knowing Creator of all things!*
But, by thy Sustainer! [On the Day of Judgment] We shall indeed call them to account, one and all,
but extol thou thy Sustainer's limitless glory and praise Him, and be of those who prostrate themselves [before Him] in adoration,
and worship thy Sustainer till death comes to thee.*
And they carry your loads to [many] a place which [otherwise] you would be unable to reach without great hardship to yourselves. Verily, your Sustainer is most compassionate, a dispenser of grace!
and [who], whenever they are asked, "What is it that your Sustainer has bestowed from on high?"-are wont to answer, "Fables of ancient times!"*
But [when] those who are conscious of God are asked, "What is it that your Sustainer has bestowed from on high?" -they answer, "Goodness supreme!" Good fortune awaits, in this world, all who persevere in doing good;* but their ultimate state will be far better still: for, how excellent indeed will be the state of the God-conscious [in the life to come]!
ARE THEY [who deny the truth] but waiting for the angels to appear unto them, or for God's judgment to become manifest?* Even thus did behave those [stubborn sinners] who lived before their time; and [when they were destroyed,] it was not God who wronged them, but it was they who had wronged themselves:
those who, having attained to patience in adversity, in their Sustainer place their trust!*
or take them to task through slow decay?* And yet, behold, your Sustainer is most compassionate, a dispenser of grace!*
they fear their Sustainer high above them, and do whatever they are bidden to do.*
yet as soon as He has removed the harm from you, lo! some of you [begin to] ascribe to other powers a share 'in their Sustainer's divinity*
And [consider how] thy Sustainer has inspired the bee:* "Prepare for thyself dwellings in mountains and in trees, and in what [men] may build [for thee by way of hives];
and then eat of all manner of fruit, and follow humbly the paths ordained for thee by thy Sustainer."* [And lo!] there issues from within these [bees] a fluid of many hues, wherein there is health for man. In all this, behold, there is a message indeed for people who think!
And when they who were wont to ascribe divinity to beings other than God behold [on Judgment Day] those beings to whom they were wont to ascribe a share in His divinity,* they will exclaim: "O our Sustainer! These are the beings to whom we ascribed a share in Thy divinity, and whom we were wont to invoke instead of Thee !"* -whereupon [those beings] will fling at them the retort: "Behold, you have indeed been lying [to yourselves]!"*
Behold, he has no power over those who have attained to faith and in their Sustainer place their tray trust:
Say: "Holy inspiration* has brought it down from thy Sustainer by stages, setting forth the truth, so that it might give firmness unto those who have attained to faith, and provide guidance and a glad tiding unto all who have surrendered themselves to God."
And yet, behold, thy Sustainer [grants His forgiveness] unto those who forsake the domain of evil after having succumbed to its temptation,* and who thenceforth strive hard [in God's cause] and are patient in adversity: behold, after such [repentance] thy Sustainer is indeed much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace!
And once again:* Behold, thy Sustainer [shows mercy] to those who do evil out of ignorance and afterwards repent and live righteously: behold, after such [repentance] thy Sustainer is indeed much forgiving, a dispenser of grace.
[and know that the observance of] the Sabbath was ordained only for those who came to hold divergent views about him;* but, verily, God will judge between them on Resurrection Day with regard to all on which they were wont to differ.*
CALL THOU (all mankind] unto thy Sustainer's path with wisdom and goodly exhortation, and argue with them in the most kindly manner-* for, behold, thy Sustainer knows best as to who strays from His path, and best knows He as to who are the right-guided.
Your Sustainer may well show mercy unto you; but if you revert [to sinning], We shall revert [to chastising you]. And [remember this:] We have ordained that [in the hereafter] hell shall close upon all who deny the truth.
And We have established the night and the day as two symbols;* and thereupon We have effaced the symbol of night and set up [in its place] the light giving symbol of day,* so that you might seek to obtain your Sustainer's bounty and be aware of the passing years* and of the reckoning [that is bound to come]. For clearly, most clearly, have We spelt out everything!*
And how many a generation have We [thus] destroyed after [the time of] Noah! For, none has the like of thy Sustainer's awareness and insight into His creatures' sins.
All [of them] -these as well as those -do We freely endow with some of thy Sustainer's gifts, since thy Sustainer's giving is never confined [to one kind of man].
for thy Sustainer has ordained that you shall worship none but Him. And do good unto [thy] parents.* Should one of them, or both, attain to old age in thy care, never say "Ugh"* to them or scold them, but [always] speak unto them with reverent speech,
and spread over them humbly the wings of thy tenderness,* and say: "O my Sustainer! Bestow Thy grace upon them, even as they cherished and reared me when I was a child!"
Your Sustainer is fully aware of what is in your hearts. If you are righteous, [He will forgive you your errors]:* for, behold, He is much-forgiving to those who turn unto Him again and again.
Behold, the squanderers are, indeed, of the ilk of the satans - inasmuch as Satan has indeed proved most ungrateful to his Sustainer.*
And if thou [must] turn aside from those [that are in want, because thou thyself art] seeking to obtain thy Sustainer's grace and hoping for it,* at least speak unto them with gentle speech.
Behold, thy Sustainer grants abundant sustenance, or gives it in scant measure, unto whomever He wills: verily, fully aware is He of [the needs of] His creatures, and sees them all.
The evil of all this is odious in thy Sustainer's sight:*
this is part of that knowledge of right and wrong with which thy Sustainer has inspired thee.* Hence, do not set up any other deity side by side with God,* lest thou be cast into hell, blamed [by thyself] and rejected [by Him]!
HAS, THEN, your Sustainer distinguished you by [giving you] sons, and taken unto Himself daughters in the guise of angels?* Verily, you are uttering a dreadful saying!
for, over their hearts We have laid veils which prevent them from grasping its purport, and into their ears, deafness.* And so, whenever thou dost mention, while reciting the Qur'an, thy Sustainer as the one and only Divine Being,* they turn their backs [upon thee] in aversion.
Your Sustainer is fully aware of what you are [and what you deserve]: if He so wills, he will bestow [His] grace upon you; and if He so wills, He will chastise you. Hence, We have not sent thee [unto men, O Prophet,] with the power to determine their fate,*
seeing that thy Sustainer is fully aware of [what is in the minds of] all beings that are in the heavens and on earth. But, indeed, We did endow some of the prophets more highly than others* -just as We bestowed upon David a book of divine wisdom [in token of Our grace]*
Those [saintly beings] whom they invoke are themselves striving to obtain their Sustainer's favour - [even] those among them who are closest [to Him]* - hoping for His grace and dreading His chastisement: for, verily, thy Sustainer's chastisement is something to beware of!
And lo! We said unto thee, [O Prophet:] "Behold, thy Sustainer encompasses all mankind [within His knowledge and might]: and so We have ordained that the vision which We have shown thee* -as also the tree [of hell,] cursed in this Qur'an - shall be but a trial for men .* Now [by Our mentioning hell] We convey a warning to them: but [if they are bent on denying the truth,] this [warning] only increases their gross, overweening arrogance."
"(And yet,] behold, thou shalt have no power over [such of] My servants [as place their trust in Me]:* for none is as worthy of trust as thy Sustainer."
YOUR SUSTAINER is He who causes ships to move onward for you through the sea, so that you might go about in quest of some of His bounty: verily, a dispenser of grace is He unto you.
And rise from thy sleep and pray during part of the night [as well], as a free offering from thee,* and thy Sustainer may well raise thee to a glorious station [in the life to come].
And say [in thy prayer]: "O my Sustainer! Cause me to enter [upon whatever I may do] in a manner .true and sincere, and cause me to leave [it] in a manner true and sincere, and grant me, out of Thy grace, sustaining strength!"
Say: "Everyone acts in a manner peculiar to himself -and your Sustainer is fully aware as to who has chosen the best path."*
AND THEY will ask thee about [the nature of] divine inspiration.* Say: "This inspiration [comes] at my Sustainer's behest; and [you cannot understand its nature, O men, since] you have been granted very little of [real] knowledge."
[Thou art spared] only by thy Sustainer's grace: behold, His favour towards thee is great indeed!
or thou have a house [made] of gold, or thou ascend to heaven - but nay, we would not [even] believe in thy ascension unless thou bring down to us [from heaven] a writing which we [ourselves] could read!* Say thou, [O Prophet:] "Limitless in His glory is my Sustainer!* Am I, then, aught but a mortal man, an apostle?"
Say: "If you were to own' all the treasure-houses of my Sustainer's bounty,* lo! you would still try to hold on [to them] tightly for fear of spending [too much]: for man has always been avaricious [whereas God is limitless in His bounty].*
Answered [Moses]: "Thou knowest well that none but the Sustainer of the heavens and the earth has bestowed these [miraculous signs] from on high, as a means of insight [for thee];* and, verily, O Pharaoh, [since thou hast chosen to reject them;] I think that thou art utterly lost!"
and say, "Limitless in His glory is our Sustainer! Verily, our Sustainer's promise has been fulfilled!"*
When those youths took refuge in the cave, they prayed: "O our Sustainer! Bestow on us grace from Thyself, and endow us, whatever our [outward] condition, with consciousness of what is right!"*
[And now] We shall truly relate to thee their story:* Behold, they were young men who had attained to faith in their Sustainer: and [so] We deepened their consciousness of the right way*
and endowed their hearts with strength, so that they stood up* and said [to one another]: "Our Sustainer is the Sustainer of the heavens and the earth. Never shall we invoke any deity other than Him: [if we did,] we should indeed have uttered an enormity!
Hence, now that you have withdrawn from them and from all that they worship instead of God, take refuge in that cave: God will spread His grace over you, and will endow you - whatever your [outward] condition - with all that your souls may need!*
And so, [in the course of time,] We awakened them;* and they began to ask one another [as to what had happened to them].* One of them asked: "How long have you remained thus?" [The others] answered: "We have remained thus a day, or part of a day."* Said they [who were endowed with deeper insight]: "Your Sustainer knows best how long you have thus remained.* Let, then, one of you go with these silver coins to the town, and let him find out what food is purest there, and bring you thereof [some] provisions. But let him behave with great care and by no means make anyone aware of you:
AND IN THIS way* have We drawn [people's] attention to their story,* so that they might know - whenever they debate among themselves as to what happened to those [Men of the Cave]* that God's promise [of resurrection] is true, and that there can be no doubt as to [the coming of] the Last Hour. And so, some [people] said: "Erect a building in their memory;* God knows best what happened to them." Said they whose opinion prevailed in the end: "Indeed, we must surely raise a house of worship in their memory!"
[And in times to come] some will say,* "[They were] three, the fourth of them being their dog," while others will say, "Five, with their dog as the sixth of them" -idly guessing at something of which they can have no knowledge -and [so on, until] some will say, "[They were] seven, the eighth of them being their dog." Say: "My Sustainer knows best how many they were. None but a few have any [real] knowledge of them. Hence, do not argue about them otherwise than by way of an obvious argument,* and do not ask any of those [story-tellers] to enlighten thee about them."
without (adding], "if God so wills."* And if thou shouldst forget [thyself at the time, and become aware of it later], call thy Sustainer to mind and say: "I pray that my Sustainer guide me, even closer than this, to a consciousness of what is right!"
AND CONVEY [to the world] whatever has been revealed to thee of thy Sustainer's writ. There is nothing that could alter His words;* and thou canst find no refuge other than with Him.
And contain thyself in patience by the side of all who at morn and at evening invoke their Sustainer, seeking His countenance, and let not thine eyes pass beyond them in quest of the beauties of this world's life;* and pay no heed to any whose heart We have rendered heedless of all remembrance of Us* because he had always followed [only] his own desires, abandoning all that is good and true.*
And say: "The truth [has now come] from your Sustainer: let, then, him who wills, believe in it, and let him who wills, reject it." Verily, for all who sin against themselves [by rejecting Our truth]* We have readied a fire whose billowing folds will encompass them from all sides;* and if they beg for water, they will be given water [hot] like molten lead, which will scald their faces: how dreadful a drink, and how evil a place to rest!
And neither do I think that the Last Hour will ever come. But even if [it should come, and] I am brought before my Sustainer,* I will surely find something even better than this as [my last] resort!"
But as for myself, [I. know that] He is God, my Sustainer; and I cannot attribute divine powers to any but my Sustainer."*
yet it may well be that my Sustainer will give me something better than thy garden -just as He may let loose a calamity out of heaven upon this [thy garden], so that it becomes a heap of barren dust
And [thus it happened:] his fruitful gardens were encompassed [by ruin], and there he was, wringing his hands over all that he had spent on that which now lay waste, with its trellises caved in; and he could but say, "Oh, would that I had not attributed divine powers to any but my Sustainer!"
Wealth and children are an 4dornment of this, world's life: but good deeds, the fruit whereof endures forever, are of far greater merit in thy Sustainer's sight, and a far better source of hope.*
And they will be lined up before thy Sustainer, [and He will say:* ] "Now, indeed, you have come unto Us [in a lonely state], even as We created you in the first instances* - although you were wont to assert that We would never 'appoint for you a meeting [with Us]!"
And the record [of everyone's deeds] will be laid open; and thou wilt behold the guilty filled with dread at what [they see] therein; and they will exclaim: "Oh, woe unto us! What a record is this! It leaves out nothing, be it small or great, but takes everything into account!" For they will find all that they ever wrought [now] facing them, and [will know that] thy Sustainer does not wrong anyone.
AND [remember that] when We told the angels, "Prostrate yourselves before Adam,"* they all prostrated themselves, save Iblis: he [too] was one of those invisible beings,* but then he turned away from his Sustainer's command. Will you, then, take him and his cohorts* for (your], masters instead of Me, although they are your foe? How vile an exchange on the evildoers' part!*
for, what is there to keep people from attaining to faith now that guidance has come unto them, and from asking their Sustainer to forgive them their sins - unless it be [their wish] that the fate of the [sinful] people of ancient times should befall them [as well], or that the [ultimate] suffering should befall them in the hereafter?*
And who could be more wicked than he to whom his Sustainer's messages are conveyed and who thereupon turns away from them, forgetting all [the evil] that his hands may have wrought?* Behold, over their hearts have We laid veils which prevent them from grasping the truth, and into their ears, deafness; and though thou call them onto the right path,* they will never allow themselves to be guided.
Yet, [withal,] thy Sustainer is the Truly-Forgiving One, limitless in His grace. Were He to take them [at once] to task for whatever [wrong] they commit, He would indeed bring about their speedy punishment [then and there]:* but nay, they have a time-limit beyond which they shall find no redemption*
and so we desired that their Sustainer grant them in his stead [a child] of greater purity than him, and closer [to them] in loving tenderness.
"And as for that wall, it belonged to two orphan boys [living] in the town, and beneath it was [buried] a treasure belonging to them [by right].* Now their father had been a righteous man, and so thy Sustainer willed it that when they come of age they should bring forth their treasure by thy Sustainer's grace. "And I did not do (any of] this of my own accord:* this is the real meaning of all [those events] that thou wert unable to bear with patience."
He answered: "As for him who does wrong [unto others* ] - him shall we, in time, cause to suffer; and thereupon he shall be referred to his Sustainer, and He will cause him to suffer with unnameable suffering.*
He answered: "That wherein my Sustainer has so securely established me is better [than anything that you could give me];* hence, do but help me with [your labour's] strength, [and] I shall erect a rampart between you and them!
Said [the King]: "This is a mercy from my Sustainer! Yet when the time appointed by my Sustainer* shall come, He will make this [rampart] level with the ground: and my Sustainer's promise always comes true!"*
it is they who have chosen to deny their Sustainer's messages and the truth; that they are deseined to meet Him." Hence, all their [good] deeds come to nought, and no weight shall We assign to them on Resurrection Day.*
SAY: "If all the sea were ink for my Sustainer's words, the sea would indeed be exhausted ere my Sustainer's words are exhausted! And [thus it would be] if we were to add to it sea upon sea."*
Say [O Prophet]: "I am but a mortal man like all of you. It has been revealed unto me that your God is the One and Only God. Hence, whoever looks forward [with hope and awe] to meeting his Sustainer [on Judgment Day], let him do righteous deeds, and let him not ascribe unto anyone or anything a share in the worship due to his Sustainer!"
AN ACCOUNT of the grace which thy Sustainer bestowed upon His servant Zachariah:*
When he called out to his Sustainer in the secrecy of his heart,*
he prayed: "O my Sustainer! Feeble have become my bones, and my head glistens with grey hair. But never yet, O my Lord, has my prayer unto Thee remained unanswered.*
who will be my heir as well as an heir [to the dignity] of the House of Jacob; and make him, O my Sustainer, well-pleasing to Thee!"
[Zachariah] exclaimed: "O my Sustainer! How can I have a son when my wife has always been barren and I have become utterly infirm through old age?"
Answered [the angel]: "Thus. it is; [but] thy 'Sustainer says, `This is easy for Me -even as I have created thee aforetime out of nothing.*
[Zachariah] prayed: "O my Sustainer! Appoint a sign for me!" Said [the angel]: "Thy sign shall be that for full three nights [and days] thou wilt not speak unto men.*
[The angel] answered: "I' am but a messenger of thy Sustainer, [who says,] `I shall bestow upon thee the gift of a son endowed with purity.'"
[The angel] answered: "Thus it is; [but] thy Sustainer says, `This is easy for Me;* and [thou shalt have a son,] so that We might make him a symbol unto mankind and an act of grace from US.* And it was a thing decreed [by God]:
Thereupon [a voice] called out to her from beneath that [palm-tree]:* "Grieve not! Thy Sustainer has provided a rivulet [running] beneath thee;
And [thus it was that Jesus always said]: "Verily, God is my Sustainer as well as your Sustainer; so worship [none but] Him: this (alone] is a straight way."*
[Abraham] replied: "Peace be upon thee! I shall ask my Sustainer to forgive thee: for, behold, He has always been kind unto me.
But I shall withdraw from you all and from whatever you invoke instead of God, and shall invoke my Sustainer [alone]: it may well be that my prayer [for thee] will not remain unanswered by my Sustainer."*
who used to enjoin upon his people prayer and charity,* and found favour in his Sustainer's sight.
AND [the angels say]: "We do not descend [with revelation], again and again, other than by thy Sustainer's command: unto Him belongs all that lies open before us and all that is hidden-from us and all that is in-between.* And never does thy Sustainer forget [anything]
the Sustainer of the heavens and the earth and all that is between them! Worship, then, Him alone, and remain steadfast in His worship! Dost thou know any whose name is worthy to be mentioned side by side with His?"
And so, by thy Sustainer, [on Judgment Day] We shall most certainly bring them forth together with the satanic forces [which impelled them in life]* and then We shall most certainly gather them, on their knees, around hell;
And every one of you will come within sight of it:* this is, with thy Sustainer, a decree that must be fulfilled.
And God endows those who avail themselves of [His] guidance with an ever-deeper consciousness of the right way;* and good deeds, the fruit whereof endures forever, are, in thy Sustainer's sight, of far greater merit [than any worldly goods], and yield far better returns.*
Verily, I am thy Sustainer! Take off, then, thy sandals! Behold, thou art in the twice hallowed valley,*
Said [Moses]: "O my Sustainer! Open up my heart [to Thy light],
The two [brothers] said: "O our Sustainer! Verily, we fear lest he act hastily with regard to us,* or lest he [continue to] transgress all bounds of equity."
Go, then; you two unto him and say, `Behold, we are apostles sent by thy Sustainer: let, then, the children of Israel go with us, and cause them not to suffer [any longer].* We have now come unto thee with a message from thy Sustainer; and [know that His] peace shall be [only] on those who follow [His] guidance:
[But when God's message was conveyed unto Pharaoh,] he said: "Who, now, is this Sustainer of you two, O Moses?"
He replied: "Our Sustainer is He who gives unto every thing [that exists] its true nature and form. and thereupon guides it [towards its fulfilment].*
[Moses] answered: "Knowledge thereof rests with my Sustainer [alone, and is laid down] in His decree;* my Sustainer does not err, and neither does He forget."*
[And so it happened* and down fell the sorcerers, prostrating themselves in adoration,* [and] exclaimed: "We have come to believe in the Sustainer of Moses and Aaron!"
As for us, behold, we have come to believe in our Sustainer, [hoping] that He may forgive us our faults and all that magic unto which thou hast forced us:* for God is the best [to look forward to], and the One who is truly abiding."*
VERILY, as for him who shall appear before his Sustainer [on Judgment Day] lost in sin - his [portion], behold, shall be hell: he will neither die therein nor live;*
He answered: "They are treading in my footsteps* while I have hastened unto Thee, O my Sustainer, so that Thou might be well-pleased [with me]."
Thereupon Moses returned to his people full of wrath and sorrow, [and] exclaimed: "O my people! Did not your Sustainer hold out [many] a goodly promise to you? bid, then, [the fulfilment of] this promise seem to you too long in coming?* Or are you, perchance, determined to see your Sustainer's condemnation fall upon you,* and so you broke your promise to me?"
And, indeed, even before [the return of Moses] had Aaron said unto them: "O .my people! You are but being tempted to evil by this [idol] -for, behold, your [only] Sustainer is the Most Gracious! Follow me, then, and obey my bidding!"*
AND THEY WILL ask thee about [what will happen to] the mountains [when this world comes to an end]. Say, then: "My Sustainer will scatter them far and wide,
[Know,] then, [that) God is sublimely exalted. the Ultimate Sovereign, the Ultimate Truth* and [knowing this,] do not approach the Qur'an in haste,* ere it has been revealed unto thee in full, but [always) say: "O my Sustainer, cause me to grow in knowledge!*
And so the two ate [of the fruit] thereof: and thereupon they became conscious of their nakedness and began to cover themselves with pieced-together leaves from the garden. And [thus] did Adam disobey his Sustainer, and thus did he fall into grievous error.*
Thereafter, [however,) his Sustainer elected him [for His grace], and accepted his repentance, and bestowed His guidance upon him,
[And so, on Resurrection Day, the sinner] will ask: "O my Sustainer! Why hast Thou raised me up blind, whereas [on earth] I was endowed with sight?"
For, thus shall We recompense him who wastes his own self* and does not believe in his Sustainer's messages: and, indeed, the suffering [of such sinners] in the life to come shall be most severe and most enduring!
Now were it not for a decree that has already gone forth from thy Sustainer, setting a term* [for each sinner's repentance], it would inescapably follow [that all who sin must be doomed at once].*
Hence, bear with patience whatever they [who deny the truth] may say, and extol thy Sustainer's limitless glory and praise Him before the rising of the sun and before its setting; and extol His glory, too, during some of the hours of the night as well as during the hours of the day,* so that thou might attain to happiness.
And never turn thine, eyes [with longing] towards whatever splendour of this world's life We may have allowed so many others* to enjoy in order that We might test them thereby: for the sustenance which thy Sustainer provides [for thee] is better and more enduring.*
NOW THEY [who are blind to the truth] are wont to say, "If [Muhammad] would but produce for us a miracle from his Sustainer!* [But] has there not come unto them a clear evidence [of the truth of this divine writ] in what is [to be found] in the earlier scriptures?*
For [thus it is:] had We destroyed them by means of a chastisement ere this [divine writ was revealed], they would indeed [be justified to] say [on Judgment Day]: "O our Sustainer! If only Thou hadst sent an apostle unto us, we would have followed Thy messages rather than be humiliated and disgraced [in the hereafter]!"*
Whenever there comes unto them any new reminder from their Sustainer, they but listen to it with playful amusement,*
Say:* My Sustainer knows whatever is spoken in heaven and on earth; and He alone is all-hearing, all-knowing."
had there been in heaven or on earth* any deities other than God, both [those realms would surely have fallen into ruin! But limitless in His glory is God, enthroned in His awesome almightiness* far] above anything that men may devise by way of definition!*
Say: Who could protect you, by night or by day, from the Most Gracious?"* And yet, from a remembrance of their Sustainer do they stubbornly turn away!
And yet, if but a breath of thy Sustainer's chastisement touches them, they are sure to cry, Oh, woe unto us! Verily, we were evildoers!"
who stand in awe of their Sustainer although He is beyond the reach of human perception,* and who tremble at the thought of the Last Hour.
He answered: Nay, but your [true] Sustainer is the Sustainer of the heavens and the earth - He who has brought them into being: and I am one of those who bear witness to this [truth]!"
AND [remember] Job, when he cried out to his Sustainer, Affliction has befallen me: but Thou art the most merciful of the merciful!"*
AND [thus did We deliver] Zachariah when he cried out unto his Sustainer: O my Sustainer! Leave me not childless! But [even if Thou grant me no bodily heir, I know that] Thou wilt remain when all else has ceased to be!"*
VERILY, [O you who believe in Me,] this community of yours is one single community, since I am the Sustainer of you all: worship, then, Me [alone]!*
Say:* O my Sustainer! Judge Thou in truth!'' - and [say]: ''Our Sustainer is the Most Gracious, the One whose aid is ever to be sought against all your [attempts at] defining [Him]!"*
O men! Be conscious of your Sustainer: for, verily the violent convulsion of the Last Hour will be an awesome thing!
These two contrary kinds of man* have become engrossed in contention about their Sustainer! But [thus it is:] as for those who are bent on denying the truth* garments of fire shall be cut out for them [in the life to come]; burning despair* will be poured over their heads,
All this [is ordained by God]; and if one houours God's sacred commandments, it will redound to his own good in his Sustainer's sight. And all [kinds of] cattle have been made lawful to you [for sacrifice and food], save what is mentioned to you [as forbidden].* Shun, then, [all that God has forbidden and, most of all,] the loathsome evil of idolatrous beliefs and practices;* and shun every word that is untrue,
those who have been driven from their homelands against all right for no other reason than their saying. Our Sustainer is God!" For, if God had not enabled people to defend themselves against one another,* all] monasteries and churches and synagogues and mosques - in [all of] which Gods name is abundantly extolled - would surely have been destroyed [ere now].* And God will most certainly succour him who succours His cause: for, verily, God is most powerful, almighty,
And [so, O Muhammad,] they challenge thee to hasten the coming upon them of [God's] chastisement:* but God never fails to fulfill His promise - and, behold, in thy Sustainer's sight a day is like a thousand years of your reckoning.*
And [God renders Satan's aspersions null and void] so that they who are endowed with [innate] knowledge might know that this [divine writ] is the truth from thy Sustainer, and that they aught believe in it, and that their hearts might humbly submit unto Him. For, behold, God does guide onto a straight way those who have attained to faith
UNTO every community have We appointed [different] ways of worship,* which they ought to observe. Hence, [O believer,] do not let those [who follow ways other than thine] draw thee into disputes on this score,* but summon [them all] unto thy Sustainer: for, behold, thou art indeed on the right way.
O YOU who have attained to faith! Bow down and prostrate yourselves, and worship your Sustainer [alone], and do good, so that you might attain to a happy state!
Said [Noah]: O my Sustainer! Succour me against their accusation of lying!"
And say: 'O my Sustainer! Cause me to reach a destination blessed [by Thee]* for Thou art the best to show man how to reach his [true] destination!' "*
[Whereupon the prophet] would say: O my Sustainer! Succour me against their accusation of lying!"
And, verily, this community of yours is one single community, since I am the Sustainer of you all: remain, then, conscious of Me!*
Verily, [only] they who stand in reverent awe of their Sustainer,
and who believe in their Sustainer's messages,
and who do not ascribe divinity to aught but their Sustainer,
and who give whatever they [have to] give* with their hearts trembling at the thought that unto their Sustainer they must return:
Or dost thou [O Muhammad] ask of them any worldly recompense? But [they ought to know that] recompense from thy Sustainer is best, since He is the best of providers!*
And, indeed, We tested them* through suffering, but they did not abase themselves before their Sustainer; and they will never humble themselves
Say: Who is it that sustains the seven heavens and is enthroned in His awesome almightiness?"*
SAY: O my Sustainer! If it be Thy will to let me witness* [the fulfillment of] whatever they [who blaspheme against Thee] have been promised [to suffer]
do not, O my Sustainer, let me be one of those evildoing folk!"
And say: O my Sustainer! I seek refuge with Thee from the promptings of all evil impulses;*
and I seek refuge with Thee, O my Sustainer, lest they come near unto me!'
[AS FOR THOSE who will not believe in the life to come, they go on lying to themselves]* until, when death approaches any of them, he prays: O my Sustainer! Let me return, let me return [to life],*
They will exclaim: O our Sustainer! Our bad luck has overwhelmed us, and so we went astray!*
O our Sustainer! Cause us to come out of this [suffering] - and then, if ever We revert [to sinning], may we truly be [deemed] evildoers!"
Behold, there were among My servants such as would pray, 'O our Sustainer! We have come to believe [in Thee]; forgive, then, our sins and bestow Thy mercy on us: for Thou art the truest bestower of mercy!'*
[KNOW,] then, [that] God is sublimely exalted, the Ultimate Sovereign, the Ultimate Truth:* there is no deity save Him, the Sustainer, in bountiful almightiness enthroned!*
Hence, he who invokes, side by side with God, any other deity [- a deity] for whose existence he has no evidence - shall but find his reckoning with his Sustainer: [and,] verily, such deniers of the truth will never attain to a happy state!
Hence, [O believer,] say: O my Sustainer! Grant [me] forgiveness and bestow Thy mercy [upon me]: for Thou art the truest bestower of mercy!"
a promise given by thy Sustainer, [always] to be prayed for?"
AND [even] before thee, [O Muhammad,] We never sent as Our message-bearers any but [mortal men] who indeed ate food [like other human beings] and went about in the market places: for [it is thus that] We cause you [human beings] to be a means of testing one another.* Are you* able to endure [this test] with patience? For [remember, O man,] thy Sustainer is truly all-seeing!
But those who do not believe that they are destined to meet Us are wont to say,* Why have no angels been sent down to us?" or, Why do we not see our Sustainer?" Indeed, they are far too proud of themselves, having rebelled [against God's truth] with utter disdain!
AND [on that Day] the Apostle will say:* O my Sustainer! Behold, [some of] my people have come to regard this Qur'an as something [that ought to be] discarded!"*
For so it is that against every prophet We have set up enemies from among those who are lost in sin:* yet none can guide and give succour as thy Sustainer does!
Art thou not aware of thy Sustainer [through His works]? - how He causes the shadow to lengthen [towards the night] when, had He so willed, He could indeed have made it stand still: but then, We have made the sun its guide;
And He it is who out of this [very] water has created man,* and has endowed him with [the consciousness of] descent and marriage-tie:* for thy Sustainer is ever infinite in His power.
And yet, some people* worship, instead of God, things that can neither benefit them nor harm them: thus, he who denies the truth does indeed turn his back on his Sustainer!
Say: For this, no reward do I ask of you [- no reward] other than that he who so wills may unto his Sustainer find a way!"
and who remember their Sustainer far into the night, prostrating themselves and standing;
and who pray: O our Sustainer, avert from us the suffering of hell - for, verily, the suffering caused by it is bound to be a torment dire:
and who, whenever they are reminded of their Sustainer's messages, do not throw themselves upon them [as if] deaf and blind;*
and who pray O our Sustainer! Grant that our spouses and our offspring be a joy to our eyes,* and cause us to be foremost among those who are conscious of Thee!"
SAY [unto those who believe]: No weight or value would my Sustainer attach to you were it not for your faith [in Him]!"* And say unto those who deny the truth:] You have indeed given the lie [to God's message], and in time this [sin] will cleave unto you!"*
But, verily, thy Sustainer - He alone - is almighty, a dispenser of grace!*
HENCE, [remember how it was] when thy Sustainer summoned Moses: Go unto those evil doing people.
He answered: O my Sustainer! Behold, I fear that they will give me the lie,
And go, both of you, unto Pharaoh and say, 'Behold, we bear a message from the Sustainer of all the worlds:
and I fled from you because I feared you. But [since] then my Sustainer has endowed me with the ability to judge [between right and wrong], and has made me one of [His] message-bearers.*
Said Pharaoh: And what [and who] is that 'Sustainer of all the worlds'?''*
[Moses] answered: [He is] the Sustainer of the heavens and the earth and all that is between them: if you would but [allow yourselves to] be convinced!"*
[And Moses] continued: [He is] your Sustainer, [too,] as well as the Sustainer of your forefathers of old!"
[But Moses] went on: [He of whom I speak is] the Sustainer of the east and the west and of all that is between the two"-* as you would know] if you would but use your reason!"
[and] exclaimed: We have come to believe in the Sustainer of all the worlds,
the Sustainer of Moses and Aaron!"
They answered: No harm [canst thou do to us]: verily, unto our Sustainer do we turn!
Behold, we [but] ardently desire that our Sustainer forgive us our faults in return for our having been foremost among the believers!"
He replied: Nay indeed! My Sustainer is with me, [and] He will guide me!"
And yet, verily, thy Sustainer - He alone - is almighty, a dispenser of grace!*
Now [as for me, I know that,] verily, these [false deities] are my enemies, [and that none is my helper] save the Sustainer of all the worlds,
O my Sustainer! Endow me with the ability to judge [between right and wrong], and make me one with the righteous,
when we deemed you [false deities] equal to the Sustainer of all the worlds
But, verily, thy Sustainer - He alone - is almighty, a dispenser of grace!*
And no reward whatever do I ask of you for it: my reward rests with none but the Sustainer of all the worlds.
Their reckoning rests with none but my Sustainer: if you could but understand [this]!*
[Whereupon] he prayed: O my Sustainer! Behold, my people have given me the lie:
But, verily, thy Sustainer - He alone - is almighty, a dispenser of grace
And no reward whatever do I ask of you for it: my reward rests with none but the Sustainer of all the worlds.
But, verily, thy Sustainer - He alone - is almighty, a dispenser of grace!
And no reward whatever do I ask of you for it: my reward rests with none but the Sustainer of all the worlds.
But, verily, thy Sustainer - He alone is almighty, a dispenser of grace!
And no reward whatever do I ask of you for it: my reward rests with none but the Sustainer of all the worlds.
keeping yourselves aloof from all the [lawful] spouses whom your Sustainer has created for you? Nay, but you are people who transgress all bounds of what is right!"
[And then he prayed:] O my Sustainer! Save me and my household from all that they are doing!"
But, verily, thy Sustainer - He alone - is almighty, a dispenser of grace!
And no reward whatever do I ask of you for it: my reward rests with none but the Sustainer of all the worlds.
Answered [Shu'ayb]: My Sustainer knows fully well what you are doing."
But, verily, thy Sustainer - He alone - is almighty, a dispenser of grace!*
Now, behold, this [divine writ] has indeed been bestowed from on high by the Sustainer of all the worlds:*
But when he came close to it, a call was sounded: Blessed are all who are within [reach of] this fire, and all who are near it!* And limitless in His glory is God, the Sustainer of all the worlds!"
Thereupon [Solomon] smiled joyously at her words, and said: O my Sustainer! Inspire me so that I may forever be grateful for those blessings of Thine with which Thou hast graced me and my parents,* and that I may do what is right [in a manner] that will please Thee; and include me, by Thy grace, among Thy righteous servants!"
God, save whom there is no deity - the Sustainer, in awesome almightiness enthroned!"*
Answered he who was illumined by revelation:* [Nay,] as for me - I shall bring it to thee ere the twinkling of thy eye ceases!"* And when he saw it truly before him, he exclaimed:* This is [an outcome] of my Sustainer's bounty, to test me as to whether I am grateful or ungrateful!* However, he who is grateful [to God] is but grateful for his own good; and he who is ungrateful [should know that], verily, my Sustainer is self-sufficient, most generous in giving!"
[After a while] she was told: Enter this court!" - but when she saw it, she thought that it was a fathomless expanse of water, and she bared her legs.* Said he: Behold, it is [but] a court smoothly paved with glass!"* Cried she: O my Sustainer! I have been sinning against myself thy worshipping aught but Thee]: but [now] I have surrendered myself, with Solomon, unto the Sustainer of all the worlds!"
Now, verily, thy Sustainer is indeed limitless in His bounty unto men - but most of them are bereft of gratitude.
But, verily, thy Sustainer knows all that their hearts conceal as well as all that they bring into the open:
Verily, [O believer,] thy Sustainer will judge between them in His wisdom - for He alone is almighty, all-knowing.
[SAY, O Muhammad:] I have been bidden to worship the Sustainer of this City * Him who has made it sacred, and unto whom all things belong: and I have been bidden to be of those who surrender themselves to Him,
And say: All praise is due to God! In time He will make you see [the truth of] His messages, and then you shall know them [for what they are]." And thy Sustainer is not unmindful of whatever you all may do.
[And] he prayed: O my Sustainer! Verily, I have sinned against myself! Grant me, then, Thy forgiveness!" And He forgave him - for, verily, He alone is truly forgiving, a dispenser of grace.
Said he: O my Sustainer! [I vow] by all the blessings which Thou hast bestowed on me: Nevermore shall I aid such as are lost in sin!"*
So he went forth from thence, looking fearfully about him, and prayed: O my Sustainer! Save me from all evildoing folk!"
And as he turned his face towards Madyan, he said [to himself]: It may well be that my Sustainer will [thus] guide me onto the right path"*
So he watered [their flock] for them: and when he withdrew into the shade and prayed: O my Sustainer! Verily, in dire need am I of any good which Thou mayest bestow upon me!"
But when he came close to it, a call was sounded from the right-side bank of the valley, out of the tree [burning] on blessed ground:* O Moses! Verily, I am God, the Sustainer of all the worlds!"
[And now] put thy hand into thy bosom: it will come forth [shining] white, without blemish.* And [henceforth] hold thine arm close to thyself, free of all fear.* These, then, shall be the two signs [of thy bearing a message] from thy Sustainer* unto Pharaoh and his great ones - for, behold, they are people depraved!"
Said [Moses] O my Sustainer! I have slain one of them, and so I fear that they will slay me.*
And Moses replied: My Sustainer knows best as to who comes with guidance from Him, and to whom the future belongs!* Verily, never will evildoers attain to a happy state!"
And neither wert thou present on the slope of Mount Sinai when We called out [to Moses]:* but [thou, too, art sent] as an act of thy Sustainer's grace, to warn people to whom no warner has come before thee, so that they might bethink themselves [of Us];
and [We have sent thee] lest they say [on Judgment Day], when disaster befalls them as an outcome of what their own hands have wrought, O our Sustainer, if only Thou had sent an apostle unto us, we would have followed Thy messages, and would have been among those who believe!"
and whenever it is [clearly] conveyed unto them, they [are bound to] profess, We have come to believe in it, for, behold, it is the truth from our Sustainer - and, verily, even before this have we surrendered ourselves unto Him!"
Yet, withal, thy Sustainer would never destroy a community without having [first] raised in its midst an apostle who would convey unto them Our messages;* and never would We destroy a community unless its people are wont to do wrong [to one another].*
[whereupon] they against whom the word [of truth] shall thus stand revealed* will exclaim: O our Sustainer! Those whom we caused to err so grievously, we but caused to err as we ourselves had been erring.* We [now] disavow them before Thee: it was not us that they worshipped!"*
AND [thus it is:] thy Sustainer creates whatever He wills; and He chooses [for mankind] whatever is best for them.* Limitless is God in His glory, and sublimely exalted above anything to which they may ascribe a share in His divinity!
And thy Sustainer knows all that their hearts conceal as well as all that they bring into the open:
VERILY, [O believer,] He who has laid down this Qur'an in plain terms, making it binding on thee,* will assuredly bring thee back [from death] to a life renewed.* Say [unto those who reject the truth]: My Sustainer knows best, as to who is right-guided* and who is obviously lost in error!"
Now [as for thyself, O believer,] thou couldst never foresee* that this divine writ would [one day] be offered to thee: but [it did come to thee] by thy Sustainer's grace. Hence, never uphold those who deny the truth [of divine guidance],
and never let them turn thee away from God's messages after they have been bestowed upon thee from on high: instead* summon [all men] to thy Sustainer. And never be of those who ascribe divinity to aught but Him,
Now there is among men many a one who says [of himself and of others like him], We do believe in God" - but whenever he is made to suffer in God's cause, he thinks that persecution at the hands of man is as [much to be feared, or even more than,] God's chastisement;* whereas, if succour from thy Sustainer comes [to those who truly believe]* he is sure to say. Behold, we have always been with you!" Is not God fully aware of what is in the hearts of all creatures?
Thereupon [his brother's son] Lot came to believe in him and said: Verily, I [too] shall forsake the domain of evil [and turn] to my Sustainer: for, verily, He alone is almighty, truly wise!"*
[And] he prayed: O my Sustainer! Succour Thou me against these people who spread corruption!"
And yet they say, Why have no miraculous signs ever been bestowed upon him from on high by his Sustainer?" Say: Miracles are in the power of God alone;* and as for me - I am but a plain warner."
those who are patient in adversity and in their Sustainer place their trust!
Have they never learned to think for themselves?* God has not created the heavens and the earth and all that is between them without [an inner] truth and a term set [by Him]:* and yet, behold, there are many people who stubbornly deny the truth that they are destined to meet their Sustainer!
NOW [thus it is:] when affliction befalls men, they cry out unto their Sustainer, turning unto Him [for help]; but as soon as He lets them taste of His grace, lo! some of them [begin to] ascribe to other powers a share in their Sustainer's divinity,*
It is they who follow the guidance [that comes to them] from their Sustainer; and it is they, they who shall attain to a happy state!
O MEN! Be conscious of your Sustainer, and stand in awe of the Day on which no parent will be of any avail to his child, nor a child will in the least avail his parent! Verily, God's promise [of resurrection] is true indeed: let not, then, the life of this world deludes you, and let not [your own] deceptive thoughts about God delude you!*
The bestowal from on high of this divine writ issues, beyond any doubt, from the Sustainer of all the worlds:
and yet,* they [who are bent on denying the truth] assert, [Muhammad] has invented it!" Nay, but it is the truth from thy Sustainer, enabling thee to warn [this] people to whom no warner has come before thee, so that they might follow the right path.
For, [many are] they [who] say, What! After we have been [dead and] lost in the earth, shall we indeed be [restored to life] in a new act of creation?" Nay, but [by saying this] they deny the truth that they are destined to meet their Sustainer!*
Say: [One day,] the angel of death who has been given charge of you will gather you, and then unto your Sustainer you will be brought back."
If thou couldst but see [how it will be on Judgment Day], when those who are lost in sin will hang their heads before their Sustainer, [saying:] O our Sustainer! [Now] we have seen, and we have heard! Return us, then, [to our earthly life] that we may do good deeds: for [now], behold, we are certain [of the truth]!"
ONLY THEY [truly] believe in Our messages who, whenever they are conveyed to them, fall down, prostrating themselves in adoration, and extol their Sustainer's limitless glory and praise; and who are never filled with false pride;
[and] who are impelled to rise* from their beds [at night] to call out to their Sustainer in fear and hope; and who spend on others out of what We provide for them as sustenance.
And who could be more wicked than he to whom his Sustainer's messages are conveyed and who thereupon turns away from them? Verily, We shall inflict Our retribution on those who are [thus] lost in sin!
VERILY, it is God alone who will decide between men* on Resurrection Day with regard to all on which they were wont to differ.*
And follow [but] that which comes unto thee through revelation from thy Sustainer:* for God is truly aware of all that you do, [O men].
And they will say: O our Sustainer! Behold, we paid heed unto our leaders and our great men, and it is they who have led us astray from the right path!
O our Sustainer! Give them double suffering, and banish them utterly from Thy grace!"*
And yet, they who are bent on denying the truth assert, Never will the Last Hour come upon us!"* Say: Nay, by my Sustainer! By Him who knows all that is beyond the reach of a created being's perception: it will most certainly come upon you!" Not an atom's weight [of whatever there is] in the heavens or on earth escapes His knowledge; and neither is there anything smaller than that, or larger, but is recorded in [His] clear decree,
NOW THEY who are endowed with [innate] knowledge are well aware that whatever has been bestowed upon thee from on high by thy Sustainer is indeed the truth, and that it guides onto the way that leads to the Almighty, the One to whom all praise is due!
AND UNTO Solomon [We made subservient] the wind: its morning course [covered the distance of] a month's journey, and its evening course, a month's journey.* And We caused a fountain of molten copper to flow at his behest;* and [even] among the invisible beings there were some that had [been constrained] to labour for him by his Sustainer's leave* and whichever of them deviated from Our command, him would We let taste suffering through a blazing flame -:
INDEED, in [the luxuriant beauty of] their homeland, the people of Sheba had an evidence [of God's grace]* two [vast expanses of] gardens, to the right and to the left, [calling out to them, as it were:] Eat of what your Sustainer has provided for you, and render thanks unto Him: a land most goodly, and a Sustainer much-forgiving!"
But now they would say, Long has our Sustainer made the distance between our journey- stages!" - for they had sinned against themselve | <urn:uuid:384e3d76-cf65-43d2-97ae-b1f859b6ccbe> | CC-MAIN-2019-35 | http://quranix.org/c/rbb | 2019-08-25T06:40:56Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027323221.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20190825062944-20190825084944-00310.warc.gz | en | 0.963378 | 35,724 |
Terms and Conditions
These Tealium Reseller Terms and Conditions (the “Terms and Conditions”) form part of the Reseller Master Services Agreement (“RMSA”) by and between Tealium Inc., (“Tealium”) and Reseller (as identified in the RMSA – Part A referencing these Terms and Conditions). These Terms and Conditions will apply to Reseller’s use and resale of the Services and to all Service Orders that are entered into by Tealium and Reseller. To the extent there is any conflict or inconsistency between the terms of a Service Order and the terms of these Terms and Conditions, the terms of the Service Order will control solely with respect to such conflict or inconsistency.
2. Definitions. Capitalized terms in the RMSA will have the following meanings:
2.1 “Additional Usage Fee” or “Overage Fee” means the fee or fees identified on the applicable Service Orders that will apply if Reseller or Customer’s use of the Services exceeds the Authorized Usage Level.
2.2 “Attribute” means a unique characteristic of a Visitor or a particular visit to Customer’s Authorized Domain that collects in the Tealium customer data platform. Examples of Attributes include visit duration, favorite product, active browser, badged visitor, exit URL, and date of purchase. Attribute limitations will be specified in the applicable Service Order.
2.3 “AudienceStream Connector” means an optional Tealium provided feature within the AudienceStream Service enabling Customer to transmit designated AudienceStream provided data to a selected recipient.
2.4 “Authorized Domain” means a domain owned or administered by Reseller or Customer.
2.5 “Authorized Usage Level” means the maximum number of Sessions, Events, Attributes or other usage units (as specified on the applicable Service Order) that can be initiated using the Services without incurring an Additional Usage Fee.
2.6 “Cloud Connector” means a server-to-server connection between Tealium servers and a Customer-selected vendor’s servers as implemented in connection with the Tealium Cloud Delivery Service. “Connector Call” means an Event data transmitted from a Tealium server via a Cloud Connector.
2.7 “Authorized Tealium Service” means the Services that Reseller is certified to resell within the Territory as a result of Reseller completing and maintaining certification for each Authorized Tealium Service as specified in the Reseller Certification Standards set forth in Exhibit A.
2.9 “Confidential Information” means any information disclosed by one party to the other in writing and marked “confidential” or disclosed orally and, within ten (10) business days of disclosure, reduced to writing and marked “confidential” and information which is not marked as “confidential” which should, under the circumstances, be understood to be confidential by a person exercising reasonable business judgment. Without limiting the foregoing, Tealium Technology will be deemed to be the Confidential Information of Tealium.
2.10 “Data Retention Period” means the period of time event related or audience related data will be retained in a Customer-selected Tealium data storage Service. If a specific Data Retention Period is not specified on a given Service Order, the applicable Data Retention Period will be one (1) month from the data collection date.
2.11 “Customer” or “End-User” means the customer of the Reseller with whom the Reseller forms a contractual relationship for purchase and use of Services.
2.12 “Discount” or “Reseller Discount” has the meaning set forth in Section 3.1 of RMSA – Part A.
2.13 “Event” means any call made to Tealium’s data collection servers, or any row of data uploaded to Tealium by or on behalf of Reseller or a Customer using Tealium’s omnichannel capability, or any Connector Call or other API call made to Tealium by or on behalf of Customer.
2.14 “Fees” means Tealium’s price for Services to be provided under and specified in a Service Order. Fees will be derived from Tealium’s then current price list but will be dependent upon and may vary based upon the Services to be provided under and the project associated with each particular Service Order.
2.15 “Pages” means web or mobile pages on Reseller’s or a Customer website or mobile application to which the Code has been added.
2.16 “Price” or “Service Order Price” means the Fees for any particular Service Order less the then applicable Reseller Discounts.
2.17 “Service Order” means the documents for placing orders hereunder that are entered into between Reseller and Tealium from time to time, including addenda and supplements thereto. Service Orders will be completed using the form shown in Attachment 1 to RMSA Part A and each completed and fully executed Service Order will be deemed incorporated herein by reference.
2.18 “Services” has the meaning set forth in Section 1.1 of RMSA – Part A.
2.19 “Session” means a discrete visit to an Authorized Domain by a Visitor where the Visitor does not leave the Authorized Domain and no more than thirty (30) minutes of inactivity between two (2) consecutive Visitor actions on the Authorized Domain occurs.
2.20 “Technology” means any proprietary technology, including internet design, content, software tools, hardware designs, algorithms, software (in source and object forms), user interface designs, architecture, class libraries, objects and documentation (both printed and electronic), know-how, trade secrets, and any related intellectual property rights throughout the world and any derivatives, improvements, enhancements, or extensions of such technology conceived, reduced to practice, or developed during the term of this RMSA by the owner of such technology.
2.21 “Territory” has the meaning set forth in Section 1.2 of RMSA – Part A.
2.22 “Visitor” means an individual who accesses Pages on which the Services are implemented.
2.23 “Visitor Profile Data” means Tealium provided non-personally identifiable data concerning Visitors associated with Tealium’s AudienceStream Service.
2.24 “Visitor Profile Term” means the trailing period of time in which a Visitor must visit Pages in order to be included in a given set of Visitor Profile Data. If a specific Visitor Profile Term is not defined on a given Service Order, the applicable Visitor Profile Term will be defined to be the four (4) month period immediately preceding the time of measurement.
3. Reseller Appointment Terms
3.1 Covenants and Representations.
(a) Covenants of Reseller. Reseller will: (1) comply with the terms and conditions of this RMSA and with all applicable Tealium procedures and policies provided to Reseller that further define the resale and use of the Services, (2) identify and register Customers in accordance with the terms hereof, (3) be responsible for Customers’ compliance with the terms and conditions of this RMSA, (4) prevent unauthorized access to or use of the Services and notify Tealium promptly of any such unauthorized access or use of which Reseller is aware, (5) use the Services and assure Customers use the Services only in accordance with applicable laws, regulations and Tealium’s Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) set forth in Exhibit B (attached hereto and incorporated herein by this reference), and (6) operate as technical support desk for Customers and act as the first point of contact for all technical queries relating to implementation of the Services. Reseller will not, and will not allow Customers or third parties to: (i) make the Services available to anyone other than Customers; (ii) share, sell, resell, rent or lease the Services other than as set forth herein; or (iii) access the Services for purposes of monitoring their availability, performance, or functionality, or for any other benchmarking or competitive purposes. Reseller further covenants that it will remain in full compliance with the Reseller Certification Standards set forth in Exhibit A (attached hereto and incorporated herein by this reference) and if any job requires that any aspect of the Services, such as Code implementation, be performed on Reseller’s or Customer’s premises, Reseller will supply or require that Customer supplies Tealium personnel with such reasonable information, resources, and assistance as Tealium may request. Reseller will notify Tealium of all custom extensions built by Reseller for integration into the Services (“Custom Extensions”) and will provide such cooperation as Tealium may reasonably request in the event Tealium elects to test any such Custom Extensions. In addition, Reseller agrees that upon Tealium’s written request, it will grant to Tealium a perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide right and license to distribute Custom Extensions, both directly and through subdistributors, in future releases of the Services.
(b) Representations of Reseller. Reseller hereby represents that: (1) it has sufficient personnel and resources to promote, support and resell the Services; (2) it will perform its duties and obligations hereunder in a diligent and businesslike manner and refrain from any activity or action that may damage Tealium’s reputation or the reputation of the Services; (3) it will use its best efforts to promote the Services; (4) it will not build a solution that competes with the Services during the term of this RMSA and for a period of two (2) years after the termination or expiration of this RMSA; and (5) at all times during the Term, it will remain in compliance with the Reseller Certification Standards set forth in Exhibit A and such updated versions of the Reseller Certification Standards as Tealium may release from time to time at its sole discretion.
3.2 Authority. Subject to the terms of this RMSA, Tealium engages Reseller to solicit and contract with Customers in the Territory. Reseller acknowledges and agrees that (a) this RMSA does not grant Reseller exclusive rights in any territory and (b) Customers will only receive access to the Services after Tealium and Reseller execute a Service Order that identifies the Customer. Each party represents that it has all requisite power and authority to enter into and perform this RMSA, and that it has no agreement with any third party or commitments or obligations which conflict in any way with its obligations hereunder.
3.3 Limits on Reseller Authority. Without Tealium’s prior written approval, Reseller will not (a) incur any expenses or obligations in the name of Tealium or (b) except as otherwise provided in this RMSA, publish any printed material regarding the Services or Tealium’s business.
3.4 Reservation of Certain Rights. Tealium may remove, modify, abridge, or discontinue any Service(s), at any time and at Tealium’s sole discretion. Tealium will not be liable to Reseller for any loss, damage, or penalty arising from or on account of any said modification, abridgment, or discontinuance; provided, however, that Tealium will use commercially reasonable efforts to notify Reseller of its intent to discontinue said Service a minimum of sixty (60) days prior to the effective date of said discontinuance. Tealium will have no liability for deficiencies or delays in delivery of the Services resulting from the acts or omissions of Reseller, its agents, or employees, or Customers, or performance of the Services in accordance with Reseller’s instructions.
4. The Services; Reseller Assistance
4.1 The Services. During each applicable Service Term (as such term may be defined in one or more Service Orders executed by the Parties), Tealium will provide the Services to Reseller or Customers. Reseller will at all times ensure that either (a) Customers’ use of the Services does not exceed their respective Authorized Usage Levels or (b) if Customers’ use of the Services exceeds their respective Authorized Usage Levels, Reseller will pay the Additional Usage Fee invoiced by Tealium according to the terms of the applicable Service Order. Each Service Order will become part of this RMSA upon execution by the Parties.
4.2 Tealium Support. Subject to Reseller’s continuing compliance with the Reseller Certification Standards, Tealium agrees to provide Reseller with technical support in the form of reseller knowledge base access and scheduled certified reseller training.
4.3 Fees and Payments. Tealium agrees to supply the Services to Reseller in exchange for the Fees set forth in each Service Order less the specified Reseller discounts, if any, set forth in Section 3 of RMSA – Part A (the Service Order Price). Tealium reserves the right to amend the specified Reseller discounts (set forth in Section 3 of the RMSA – Part A) at any time and at its sole discretion. Reseller has sole discretion to set the prices it charges Customers. Reseller will pay the Service Order Price(s) set forth in each Service Order within 30 days of invoice. Failure to so pay will constitute a material breach of this RMSA. Any payment not received when due will accrue interest on the outstanding amount at a rate of one percent (1%) per month or the highest rate allowed by applicable law, whichever is lower. Reseller will be solely responsible for billing and collecting applicable fees from Customers. Reseller will pay to Tealium all expenses incurred by Tealium in exercising its rights to payments under this RMSA, including, but not limited to, reasonable attorneys’ fees and the fees of any collection agency retained by Tealium. Reseller will pay all taxes and similar fees imposed on the delivery of the Services, except for taxes on Tealium’s net income in the United States. Except as expressly otherwise provided, all fees due hereunder are non-refundable and are not contingent on any additional services or products to be provided by Tealium. If Reseller is late in paying fees that are due, Tealium may, without terminating this RMSA, deny or otherwise suspend the Services until Reseller makes the overdue payments.
5. Intellectual Property Ownership. Tealium, or its licensors, will, at all times, retain all right, title and interest in and to: (a) all Technology that Tealium makes, develops, conceives or reduces to practice, whether alone or jointly with others, in the course of performing the Services; and (b) all worldwide copyrights, trademarks, service marks, trade secrets, patents, patent applications and other proprietary rights related to the Tealium Technology. All suggestions, enhancements requests, feedback, recommendations or other input provided by Reseller or Customers or any other party relating to the Services will be owned by Tealium. Neither this RMSA nor its performance transfers from Tealium to Reseller or Customer any Tealium Technology. Neither this RMSA nor its performance transfers from Reseller to Tealium any Reseller Technology, and all right, title, and interest in and to Reseller Technology will remain solely with Reseller. Tealium reserves all rights not expressly granted under this RMSA, and there are no implied rights granted by Tealium hereunder, whether by estoppel or otherwise.
6. Restrictions. Reseller will not do or attempt to do, or permit any Customer or other third party to do or attempt to do, any of the following: (a) make the Services, including its content or documentation, or any portion thereof available for use or access to or by any third party; (b) modify, reverse engineer, disassemble, decompile, reproduce or create derivative works from or in respect of the Services, Tealium Technology, or any component thereof; (c) use or access the Services or any part thereof in order to (i) develop a competitive or similar product or service or (ii) otherwise copy any ideas, features, functions or graphics of the Services, or the underlying software; (d) interfere with or disrupt or attempt to interfere with or disrupt the integrity or the performance of the Services or any information or materials therein; or (e) gain or provide unauthorized access to the Services or its related systems or networks. Reseller will use the Services only for purposes of marketing the Services and providing related training and support to Customers. Other than as required for such marketing, training, or support activities, Reseller will not use the Services for its own internal business operations.
7.1 Obligations. During the Term, each party may have access to certain non-public information of the other party, which information a reasonable person would consider confidential given the nature of the information and the circumstances of disclosure or which is otherwise marked or identified as “confidential” or “proprietary” by the disclosing party. Each party agrees that it will (a) hold the other party’s Confidential Information in confidence using the same standard of care as it uses to protect its own confidential information of a similar nature, but in no event less than reasonable care; (b) not disclose the Confidential Information of the other to any third party without the other’s prior written consent, except as expressly permitted under this RMSA; (c) limit access to the other’s Confidential Information to those of its employees or agents having a need to know who are bound by confidentiality obligations at least as restrictive as those set forth herein; and (d) use the other party’s Confidential Information solely to perform its obligations or receive its benefits under this RMSA. Notwithstanding the foregoing, (i) either party may make disclosures as required or requested by a court of law or any governmental entity or agency, including but not limited to disclosures required by the Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States or any similar authority in any other country, provided that, to the extent permitted under applicable law, such party provides the other with reasonable prior notice to enable such party to seek confidential treatment of such information; and (ii) either party may disclose the terms and conditions of this RMSA solely to potential investors, acquisition partners and its legal counsel and accountants in connection with a proposed financing or acquisition, provided that each such third party is bound by confidentiality obligations at least as restrictive as those set forth herein. The obligations set forth in this Section will apply during the Term set forth in Section 10.1 and will continue for a period that will end five (5) years after the expiration or termination of this RMSA.
7.2 Exclusions. The restrictions on the use and disclosure of Confidential Information will not apply to any Confidential Information, or portion thereof, which (a) is or becomes publicly known through no act or omission of the receiving party; (b) is lawfully received from a third party without restriction on disclosure; (c) is already known by the receiving party at the time it is disclosed by the disclosing party, as shown by the receiving party’s written records; or (d) is independently developed by the receiving party without reference to the disclosing party’s Confidential Information, as shown by the receiving party’s written records. This Section will not preclude a receiving party from using any of its general knowledge, skills and experience, as well as any ideas, concepts, know-how and techniques developed as part of its ordinary and customary business, provided such use is without reference to or use of the disclosing party’s Confidential Information.
7.3 Injunctive Relief. Each party acknowledges that a breach or threatened breach of this Section would cause irreparable harm to the non-breaching party, the extent of which would be difficult to ascertain. Accordingly, each party agrees that, in addition to any other remedies to which a party may be legally entitled, the non-breaching party will have the right to seek immediate injunctive or other equitable relief in the event of a breach of this Section by the other party or any of its employees or agents. Upon termination of this RMSA, the each party will promptly either return or destroy all Confidential Information of the other party.
8. Representations and Warranties; Disclaimer
8.1 Warranties. Each party warrants that it has the right and power to enter into this RMSA and an authorized representative has executed this RMSA. Tealium warrants that the Services will be performed in a professional and workmanlike manner in accordance with recognized industry standards. Reseller must notify Tealium of any warranty deficiencies within sixty (60) days after performance of the relevant Services in order to receive warranty remedies. Regarding any Services provided by Tealium that are advisory, no specific result is assured or warranted by Tealium.
8.2 Reseller Warranties. Reseller will comply with all applicable local, state, federal and foreign laws in its use of the Services. Reseller represents and warrants that with respect to its and its Customers’ use of such Services under this RMSA, that it will not provide any medical information, criminal history, race, ethnicity, national origin, information about sexual orientation or activity, political opinions and religious beliefs (“Sensitive Information”) or any personal information whose unauthorized disclosure or use could reasonably entail enhanced potential risk for the data subject (“Highly Sensitive Information”) including Social Security number, national insurance number, passport number, driver’s license number, or similar identifier, or credit or debit card number, and/or financial or medical account authentication data, such as passwords or PINs to Tealium nor will it require Tealium to process any such Sensitive Information or Highly Sensitive Information.
8.3 Warranty Disclaimer. EXCEPT FOR THE WARRANTIES EXPRESSLY SET FORTH IN SECTION 8.1 ABOVE, THE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED SOLELY ON AN “AS IS,” AND “AS AVAILABLE BASIS” WITHOUT REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED UNDER APPLICABLE LAW, TEALIUM EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL OTHER WARRANTIES, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, TITLE, OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE; NONINFRINGEMENT; AND THAT THE OPERATION OR USE OF THE SERVICES WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE.
9. Limitation of Liability; Indemnification
9.1 Limitation of Liability.
(a) EXCEPT FOR LIABILITY ARISING FROM A BREACH OF SECTIONS 3.1 (RESELLER COVENANTS AND REPRESENTATIONS), 3.3 (LIMITATIONS ON AUTHORITY), 4.3 (PAYMENTS), 5 (INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OWNERSHIP), 6 (RESTRICTIONS), 7 (CONFIDENTIALITY), 8.2 (RESELLER WARRANTIES), AND 9.2 (INDEMNIFICATION); NEITHER PARTY’S AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF THIS RMSA OR ITS PERFORMANCE HEREUNDER, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT, WARRANTY, OR OTHERWISE, WILL EXCEED THE AMOUNT OF FEES PAID OR PAYABLE BY RESELLER TO TEALIUM UNDER THIS RMSA DURING THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS PRECEDING THE CLAIM.
(b) NOTWITHSTANDING ANY PROVISION OF THIS RMSA TO THE CONTRARY, NEITHER PARTY WILL BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OF DATA, LOSS OF BUSINESS PROFITS, DEPRECIATION OF STOCK PRICE, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, OR OTHER SPECIAL, PUNITIVE, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR INDIRECT DAMAGES ARISING FROM OR RELATING TO THE SERVICES, OR OTHERWISE UNDER THIS RMSA, HOWEVER CAUSED AND REGARDLESS OF THEORY OF LIABILITY. THIS LIMITATION WILL APPLY EVEN IF SUCH PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OR IS AWARE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
9.2. Indemnification. Reseller will indemnify and defend Tealium, its subsidiaries and affiliates, and its and their directors, officers, employees and agents (the “Tealium Indemnified Parties”) from and against all losses, liabilities, damages, costs, fees, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising from or related to any claim that alleges that Reseller or its Customer have used the Services in a way that violates applicable law, regulation, or the RMSA (a “Claim”). Reseller’s indemnification obligations set forth in this section are conditioned upon Reseller being notified promptly in writing of the action (provided that failure to provide such prompt notice will not relieve Reseller from its liability or obligation hereunder, except to the extent of any material prejudice as a direct result of such failure) and having sole control of the defense and all negotiations for its settlement or compromise (provided, however, that Reseller must obtain the prior written consent of Tealium before settling a Claim against Tealium to the extent that said settlement fails to fully release Tealium from liability for the Claim or includes an admission of guilt by Tealium). At Reseller’s request, Tealium will provide Reseller with information and assistance (at Reseller’s expense) for the defense of such a Claim including any settlement.
10. Term and Termination
10.1 Term. The term of this RMSA (the “Term”) begins on the Effective Date and continues until the expiration of all the Service Terms of all Service Orders executed hereunder unless earlier terminated in accordance with this RMSA.
10.2 Service Terms. Each Service Order will provide for a service term (a “Service Term”). At the end of the Service Term of any Service Order, unless either party gives written notice to the other party of its intention not to renew at least ninety (90) days before the end of a Service Term, the Service Term will automatically renew for successive twelve (12) month periods. Termination of one Service Order will not affect the term of any other Service Order.
10.3 Termination for Breach. Either party may also terminate this RMSA upon written notice to the other party, (a) for any material breach by the other party if such breach is not cured within thirty (30) days following written notice of such breach from the non-breaching party; (b) if the business of the other party is adjudicated bankrupt or said other party enters into voluntary or is entered into involuntary bankruptcy proceedings or similar proceedings under state law; (c) if the other party becomes insolvent or makes an assignment for the benefit of creditors; or (d) if the business of the other party terminates.
10.4 Effect of Termination. Upon expiration or termination of this RMSA, Reseller will (a) provide Tealium with all outstanding reports and payments due Tealium; (b) cease marketing the Services; (c) assign to Tealium all rights (including but not limited to rights to provide support under support agreements), if any, to existing and prospective Customers; (d) report to Tealium in reasonable detail the status of all pending Service Orders, and relationships with existing and prospective Customers; and (e) return to Tealium all promotional and other materials and other information of Tealium in any form (proprietary or otherwise) in Reseller’s possession or under its control. Reseller and Tealium will cooperate to effect an orderly transition of the Customers to Tealium for the remainder of their respective Service Terms. Any payment obligations of Reseller, and the provisions of Sections 2, 3.1(b)(4), 4.3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10.4, 10.5, and 11-21 inclusive will survive termination or expiration of this RMSA.
10.5 Liability on Termination. Neither Party will be liable to the other for any loss or damage arising from or as a result of the nonrenewal or termination of this RMSA in accordance with its terms. Reseller hereby waives any and all compensation or damages relating to or arising from, directly or indirectly, such termination and agrees that it will have no rights to damages or indemnification of any nature, specifically including any commercial severance pay related to loss of future profits, expenditure for promotion of the Services, or payment of goodwill or other commitments in connection with the business and goodwill of Reseller.
11. Notices. All notices permitted or required under this RMSA will be in writing, and will be deemed effective when: (a) delivered by personal delivery, (b) confirmed by the recipient, for notices delivered by electronic mail or facsimile transmission, or (c) three (3) days after being sent by certified or registered mail (return receipt requested) or overnight courier. Notices will be sent to the addresses set forth in this RMSA or such other address as either party may specify in writing.
12. Publicity and Co-Marketing. During the Term, Reseller agrees that Tealium may refer to this RMSA in a press release and use the Reseller’s logo on its web site and in other promotional material for the limited purpose of identifying Reseller as a user of Services. If requested by Tealium, Reseller will participate at its expense in one or more annual Tealium user conferences.
13. Law and Venue. This RMSA will be construed and enforced in accordance with the laws of the State of California without regard to its conflict of laws principles; provided, however, that the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act will not apply even if adopted as part of the laws of the State of California. The Parties expressly disclaim the application of the United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods to this RMSA. Except for any action for injunctive or other equitable relief (which may be brought at any time in any court of competent jurisdiction), exclusive venue for any dispute will be San Diego County, California, and each party agrees to personal jurisdiction in such venue, and waives any objection thereto.
14. Severability; Waiver. If any term or provision of this RMSA is held to be invalid or unenforceable by any court of competent jurisdiction, such provision will be construed to effectuate to the greatest possible extent the Parties’ expressed intent, and the remainder of this RMSA will not be affected and will remain valid and enforceable. The failure of either party to exercise or enforce any right or provision of this RMSA will not constitute a waiver of such right or provision, and any waiver granted by a party in one instance does not constitute a waiver for other instances.
15. Independent Contractors. The relationship between the Parties is solely that of independent contractors, and neither party will have any authority to bind or commit the other and each party agrees not to assume, create or enter into any obligation, agreement or commitment on behalf of, or for the account of the other in any manner. Nothing in this RMSA will be deemed or construed to create a joint venture, partnership, employment, or agency relationship between the Parties for any purpose.
16. Assignment. Neither this RMSA nor any of the rights or duties arising out of this RMSA may be assigned by Tealium or Reseller without the prior written consent of the other Party, such consent not to be unreasonably withheld; except that Tealium may, without such consent, assign this RMSA and its rights and duties arising out of this RMSA to the transferee, or other successor in interest, in connection with the sale or transfer of all or substantially all of its assets or in connection with any merger, acquisition, re-organization or consolidation. Any attempted assignment in violation of the foregoing will be void.
17. Attorneys’ Fees. In the event legal action of any kind is instituted arising out of the RMSA, the substantially prevailing party will be entitled to recover reasonable attorney’s fees from the non-prevailing party.
18. Headings. The headings used for the sections of this RMSA are for information purposes and convenience only and in no way define, limit, construe or describe the scope or extent of the sections.
19. Entire Agreement. This RMSA constitutes the complete and entire agreement between the Parties with regard to the subject matter hereof, and supersedes and replaces any prior or contemporaneous agreements between the Parties regarding such subject matter. No oral or written representation that is not expressly contained in this RMSA is binding on Tealium or Reseller. Except as expressly set forth herein, no amendment to this RMSA or any Service Order will be binding on either party unless in writing and signed by both Parties.
20. Third Party Beneficiaries. This RMSA does not and is not intended to confer any rights or remedies upon any person or entity other than the Parties.
21. Force Majeure. Neither party will be liable for any breach of the RMSA, other than any default in payment obligations, for any delay or failure of performance resulting from any cause beyond such party’s reasonable control (“Force Majeure”), including but not limited to the weather, unavailability of utilities or communications services (including access to the Internet), civil disturbances, acts of civil or military authorities, or acts of God.
RESELLER CERTIFICATION STANDARDS
1. Sales & Marketing
Reseller will require at least two (2) individuals within its sales and marketing organizations to participate in Tealium Sales and Marketing certification training and any ongoing training as provided from time to time by Tealium for each Authorized Tealium Service. Said individuals will be responsible for training Reseller’s sales and marketing team to ensure all team members involved in the sales and marketing of the Services are capable of representing Reseller’s offering of the Services.
2. Deployment & Service Support
Reseller will designate at least two (2) individuals within their project deployment, services and customer support organizations that will be required to successfully complete the Tealium Service Deployment and Support Certification for each Service that Reseller desires to maintain Authorized Tealium Service designation. Tealium may require recertification from time to time, as Services enhancements are made generally available.
Reseller will demonstrate that it maintains sufficient resources to adequately support the delivery of the Services to Reseller’s customers without causing undue service deployment and support delays.
Tealium may revoke Reseller’s Authorized Tealium Service status in whole or on a service-by-service basis in the event Reseller fails to demonstrate its ability to properly deploy and support the Services within the Territory at its sole discretion.
TEALIUM ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY
This Acceptable Use Policy (this “Policy”) describes prohibited uses of the web services offered by Tealium Inc. and its affiliates (the “Services”). The examples described in this Policy are not exhaustive. By using the Services, you agree to this Policy. If you violate the Policy or authorize or help others to do so, we may suspend or terminate your use of the Services.
No Illegal, Harmful, or Offensive Use or Content
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Effects of Transformational Leadership on Organizational Knowledge And Innovation
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- DECLARATION VI
- DEDICATION V
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS VI
- ABSTRACT VII
- TABLE OF CONTENTS IX
- LIST OF FIGURES XI
- LIST OF TABLES XII
- LIST OF APPENDICES XIII
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1
- 1.1 Background 1
- 1.2 Introduction 2
- 1.3 Research Objectives 3
- 1.4 Problem Statement 4
- 1.5 Significance 4
- 1.6 Limitations 5
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 6
- 2.1 Organizational Knowledge 7
- 2.2 Innovation 10
- 2.3 Transformational Leadership 13
- 2.3.1 Idealized Influence 15
- 2.3.2 Inspirational Motivation 15
- 2.3.3 Intellectual Stimulation 15
- 2.3.4 Individual Consideration 16
- 2.4 Relationships 17
- 2.4.1 Transformational Leadership and organizational knowledge 17
- 2.4.2 Transformational Leadership and Innovation 20
- 2.4.3 Organizational Knowledge and Innovation 24
CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 26
- 3.1 Population and Sampling 29
- 3.2 Data Collection 29
- 3.3 Data Analysis 31
CHAPTER 4: ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATIONS 32
- 4.1 Demographic Statistics 32
- 4.2 Frequencies and Analysis 35
- 4.3 Correlation Analysis 57
- 4.3.1 Transformational Leadership and Knowledge Sharing 57
- 4.3.2 Transformational Leadership and Innovation 58
- 4.3.3 Knowledge Sharing and Innovation 59
CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS 60
- 5.1 Discussion 60
- 5.2 Recommendations 64
- 5.3 Suggestions 66
LIST OF FIGURES
- Figure 1: Guiding Conceptual Model
- Figure 2: Hypothesis Model between Transformational Leadership and Knowledge Sharing
- Figure 3: Hypothesis Model between Transformational Leadership and Innovation
- Figure 4: Research Model between Knowledge Sharing and Innovation
- Figure 5: Hypothesized Models
LIST OF TABLES
- Table 4.1.1: Demographic Characteristics of the Respondents
- Table 4.1.2: Industry Frequency
- Table 4.1.3: Research Interview Questions Frequencies
- Table 220.127.116.11: Correlation Analysis of Transformational Leadership And Knowledge Sharing
- Table 18.104.22.168: Correlation Analysis of Transformational Leadership Innovation
- Table 22.214.171.124: Correlation Analysis of Knowledge Sharing and Innovation
Effects of Transformational Leadership on Organizational Knowledge And Innovation explains that Leadership has been evoked to be a substantial factor affecting organizational knowledge and innovation. Sort of researches have exhibited that transformational leadership significantly influences organizational knowledge and innovation. Nevertheless, there is an insufficiency of studies examining the characteristics or aspects under which this effect results or is augmented. Hence, this research directed to investigate the effect of transformational leadership attributes on organizational knowledge acquisition, transform, articulate, creation and to ascertain whether this dissemination of organizational knowledge influences innovations in the organizations.
Organizational knowledge is a structured fusion of skills, experiences, relational information, and a professional insight that renders a foundation for assessing and incorporating new ideas, experiences and information (Tsoukas & Vladimirou, 2002) this attitude of the organizations, tends to develop new structures, policies, services and products and it pay-dirt in bringing forward these structures, products and services to the market (Gumusluoglu & Ilsev, 2009). Transformational leadership attributes; Idealized influence, Inspirational motivation, Individual consideration and intellectual stimulation (Politis, 2002 ; Garacia – Morales et al., 2008) was hypothesized to have a positive association on organizational knowledge ; Explicit and Implicit (Smith, 2001) and organization innovations (Radical, incremental and Process).Moreover, proposed an effect of organizational knowledge on innovations.
In relation to analyze these hypothesizes, data were gathered form 262 employees, management and executives of 36 private and government Pakistani organizations from services, production , IT and R&D industries. Questionnaires were utilized to collect the data comprising the measures of transformational leadership, organizational knowledge and innovation. Transformational leadership measures adopted using a Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire.
Correlation analysis technique applied to determine the hypothesized effects. The results of the analysis contributed a significant relationship between transformational leadership and organizational knowledge. Intellectual stimulation showed insignificant association with tacit knowledge of the individuals in the organizations. The results of transformational leadership provided a positive influence on organizational innovation; furthermore organization knowledge also displayed a significant association with innovations of the organizations.
The results of this research notably valuable for top brass management of the companies that plan to operate the companies.
Key Words: Transformational Leadership Attributes; organizational knowledge; knowledge sharing process; creativity; process innovation; radical innovation; incremental innovation
Transformational leadership theory is salient representative of new evolved theories that have a central position in leadership exploration in the last decade. Subordinate’s maturation as well as subordinate’s performance growth is the aim of such leadership (Dvir, Eden, Avolio, & Shamir, 2002). “Leadership” as a topic to study has been a center of the scholars for a very long time. Earliest studies targeted “Leaders” to study regarding their personality features, and considered as a trait theories of leadership. Now it is rotated towards studying behavior and attributes of leaders, and an age of behavioral theories took place with a context of leader’s interaction with others. Leadership deportment is a more familiar and renowned researched area in different field of studies. Transformational leaders, who manifest the charismatic behaviors, incite the inspirational motivation, contribute an intellectual stimulation and play an individualized consideration with the followers, and translate them to reach full level of potential and explore high positions of performance (Bass, 1990). Effect of transformational leadership has been connected to transformational leader’s capacity to inspire followers to perform more than the set projections for the performance.
In previous 20 years, research of knowledge creation in the firms comes into existence as theoretical and empirical work (e.g. Nonaka et al., 1995). In this fast moving economy knowledge accepted as an important resource for the organizations. In knowledge – based perspective applying resource-based view, organizations considered “organizational knowledge” is a key to gain competitive edge (Chennamaneni, 2007) because it is intimated, a unique and non- exchangeable intangible assets. Number of applied and practical contributions resulted that leadership exhibits substantial part in knowledge processes like transforming, acquisition, sharing, creation and capturing (e.g. Politis, 2002) and productive execution of knowledge management practices for organizational knowledge (Von Krogh, Nonaka, & Rechsteiner, 2012). Organizational creation theory is a favorable framework for different reasons such as, it is widely applied in management, thoroughly covers all kind of organization knowledge processes and enable detect the area where leadership effect on knowledge creation. Von Krogh et al., (2012) explained organization knowledge is the uninterrupted process in which connect knowledge created by individual with organization’s knowledge system and transformed it in a new context, new picture of the ideas and acquired new knowledge further organization transformational leadership provide an attributable facilitation for this process.
Innovation through employing creative knowledge absolute necessary for long term success and first moving advantage of the organizations as well as for powerful and developed economies of the 21st century. Leadership is among the most significant factors affecting innovation (Gumusluoglu & Ilsev, 2009). Leaders assist their subordinates to set out higher levels of creativity at job, develop a creativity supportive environment. Many studies have visualized transformational leadership positively influence the organization innovation (e.g. Jung et al., 2003). Nevertheless, there are lack the studies in which examine the contextual factors under which this impact occur. Gumusluoglu et al., (2003) snap out little about, these contextual factors like, organization externally built relationships for the aim to acquire new knowledge and resource acquisitions in the organization might be fundamental sources of organizational innovation.
This study designed to widen the area of transformational leadership dimension’s relationships with organizational knowledge for enhancing the innovation capability of firms.
In this present day ever-changing economy, Pakistan is the essential competitive part not local, but global in nature. If any considerable change held in the socio – politico – economic areas of the western economy, its effect also is recognized at organizational health of companies in the eastern part of the world. To sustain and strengthen the efficacy within this globalized power of economy; organizations have to mobilize organizational knowledge (Solea & Applegateb) and be creative at all individual, group, local, national and global levels of the changing world (Zhang, Tsui, & Wang, 2011) ,many organizational procedures are adopted to achieve this goal, most significant among all is leadership practices of the organizations (Singh. 2008). Transformational leadership communicate an association through supervisors and subordinates involve mutually in utilizing a combine objective in the tracks; that translate and promote their incitement, actions and other inspirations to do work (Simola, Barling, & Turner, 2010). This style of leadership has four fundamental dimensions i.e. charisma or idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individual consideration. Gumusluoglu et al., (2003) particularized those transformational leaders by employing “charisma” instills esteem, regard, commitment and priorities the combined sense of mission. Through inspirational motivation, define the future vision and missions also articulate the “will of can do” and ways to achieve these set goals. By intellectual stimulation, invigorate followers to think problems in different perspectives, and using individual consideration leaders understand the follower’s needs, expertise and skills. In origination of working teams in production and services organizations leadership is progressively changing off from information and knowledge gatekeeping to knowledge creation and knowledge sharing (Politis, 2002) that’s lead up to creativity in the organizations (Yeh & Chen, 2012).
Challenging situation for transformational leaders to emerge competency in followers by developing a mood in which acquiring, transforming, articulating, creation and sharing of organizational knowledge is encouraged. This study contributes the relationships of transformational leadership factors to organizational knowledge sharing and innovations in the firms.
1.3 Study Objective
The intention of this study is to express and analyze a worthwhile impact of transformational leadership style on firm’s industrial information and enhancing the innovation competency. It will empower different sector of industries (Services, production, R&D, IT. Banking) to consider all facets of transformational leadership style for generating, articulating and sharing of organization knowledge in other individuals of the organization and how this dissemination, transformation and acquisition of knowledge lead organizations towards creativity, inventions and new ideas. To accomplish this goal of study following objectives have been set.
- Investigating “intellectual stimulation” attribute of transformational leader’s positive or negative association in sharing of individual’s tacit knowledge among other individuals and work team members in the organizations.
- Analyzing the “individual consideration” a dimension of transformational leader’s intimacy to translate individual tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge of employees in the firms.
- Analyzing the “inspirational motivational” intercorrelation in enhancing the knowledge acquisition ability of work teams and individuals.
- Analyzing the transformational leader’s idealized influencing behavior correlation in creation of knowledge sharing mechanism in the organization.
- Analyzing the effect of “Intellectual Stimulation” and “Individual Consideration” correlation in creativity of new ideas among the employees at individual and teams level with the organizations.
- Analyzing charismatic attribute of leading by transformational leader has positive association in enlarging the process innovations within organization.
- Describing the transformation and acquisition of individual tacit knowledge positively correlated with radical and incremental innovations in the companies.
- Expressing a positive relationship of knowledge sharing process with capability of inventions of the firms.
1.4 Problem Statement
Different studies have conducted about transformational leadership towards investigating the direct and indirect effect on organizational knowledge and innovation capabilities of the organizations, there are little studies on how transformational leaders use their attributes to articulate this organizational knowledge in the form of creativity and novice ideas. The aim of this study is to determine how transformational leaders employ their ingredients (Idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration) to disseminate organizational knowledge in inter – firms to enhance organizational innovations.
This research contributes to transformational leadership theory by investigating the transformational leadership factors play an effect in managing organizational knowledge, and on utilizing this managed knowledge firms leads itself to creative new ideas. If company’s leadership at operational, strategic and tactical levels gets some ideas of such considerable dimensions then they could try modifying their decisions and linked accomplishment objectives to these decisions in order in a very positive way. This paper is also beneficial in a way if a firm is skillful and expert in utilizing specific dimensions, then this discussion might be facilitating in considering factors that must be developed in relation to strength the effectiveness of that important mechanism.
Further study could also be done in determining other sort of innovations such as marketing, administrative etc. in relation to transformational leadership factors selections and whether these factors have a positive and negative association with the defined innovations at organization’s levels.
While considering the limitations of this research time limit is big hurdle. Defined limited time, some deeper dimensions of the study will be under specified because shortage of time not let me to elaborate them in further detail as much I want and as well as they required to be discussed. Organization’s confidential policies did not allow me to get some important and private information about the organizations, which has not provided me a facilitation to discuss other important factors of the research. Some vital positions of management of the organizations not willing to participate their time for our discussions and interviews about their position’s roles for the company, which made a difficulty to collect primary data for study.
Stimulation of knowledge to achieve the organizational objectives is a capacity of an organization to gain success in the change driven market (Solea & Applegateb) . Knowledge is the important part for both to develop change and for organizational procedures, which are stuck to execution of this change Eardley and Uden (2010) the source of success; organizations have to manage it, to remain competitive and successful in the markets. Jennex (2007) demonstrated knowledge is the sum of growing cognitions, experience, facts, and expertise that contribute the procedures for evaluating and assimilating new skills and new knowledge. Well-managed organizational knowledge; initiate organizations towards innovation and competition (Eardley & Uden 2010). O’Sullivan (2007) Knowledge management is a way to control cognitive strength, Eardley and Uden (2010) utilizing the resources in that way in which employees acquire, distribute and employ the information to increase their knowledge. Knowledge is the intangible asset of the organization that must to be managed in particular mechanism. Academic scholars and practitioners also intensified their concentration toward firm’s capacity to explore, engage, create, divide and gather knowledge (Z. Wang & Wang, 2012). Knowledge sharing activities within the organizations have considered accumulating the organizational potential, as innovation, which is pivotal to organization’s performance (Z. Wang & Wang, 2012). Liu and Phillips (2011) Some empirical studies also examined the knowledge sharing relationship with organizational innovativeness in an ample framework.
Organizations think to bring new ideas in the market, creation of these ideas require a confinement of “creative processes” in the organizations ultimately that lead to innovation (Jully, 2003;Urab,Child,& Kagono, 1988) innovation inspire the production, when we put forward something new to our customers (Tucker, 2002; Urabe, Child, & Kagono, 1988; O’Brien & Shennan, 2009) core-expertise of an organization (Dundon, 2002 ; Drucker, 2006) a “contemporary” normally “uncommon” intensified to “change” a track differentiate the organizations (Abramson & Littman, 2002). Customers need something special which can put them a contrasting, to accomplish this organization must to give something dissimilar and unparalleled, an exceptional swap (Tucker, 2002; Robbins Stephen, 2005). Innovation is a common action, it is not limited to particular group of arrangements like “the creative class” or the persons belong to R&D sector (Fuglsang, 2008). Developing a “plan” or “idea” is the primary part of innovation and creating a new product, providing new services or management is the secondary part giving refined form to unrefined “idea” (Tucker, 2002). This demand of new products, market competition and short life cycles of products added market orientation in the objectives of innovating organizations (Kok & Biemans, 2009).
Competition direct to organization for suitable procedures that can provide to its performance like innovations, culture and proper execution of these procedures (Poter, 1985). A firm’s competitive strategy is a force that facilitates it to gain competitive advantage in the market. Afterwards studies argued that peculiar assets of the firm originate it to competitive position (Zhou, Brown, & Dev, 2009). Currently organizations facing extremely competitive environment and need to bring new products in advanced shape for the customers. Worldwide competition, latest technological innovations shift shorter product life cycle and extended the need of quick and advanced production of products in markets (Carbonell & Rodriguez, 2006).
2.1 Organizational Knowledge
Knowledge is a framed combination of experiences, cognitions, context information and expertise that give a plan to estimate and bringing out new skills and information (Breitenoder, 2009; Jennex, 2007; Ipe, 2003). In an organization context, Wang and Noe (2010) elaborated , knowledge is the pivotal organizational asset that contribute a continuous comparative advantage in the fast moving economy for the organization or Liestner (2010) interpreted, all kind of documents within the firm also belongs to term “knowledge”. The term “information” and “Knowledge” mostly in literature used similarly while some authors used these differently (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) defines data is just the “flow of messages” and knowledge is generated when this move of messages become the truth and commitment of its occupant. Primarily “Knowledge” entails iteration and communication among the individuals and team members (Howell & Annansingh, 2012). Schmitz (2011) within organization, knowledge is typed in various ways “tacit knowledge” and “explicit knowledge”. Tacit knowledge or individual knowledge or embrained knowledge or procedural knowledge which cannot be transferred or demonstrate to another person in written form and instead Explicit knowledge or tangible form of knowledge is that which can be transmitted or move to other persons in specific way like procedures, documentations, policies (Yang, 2007; Scmitz, 2011) . Within organizations, knowledge occurs on various levels like individual, group, division, department and organizational levels (Ipe, 2003; David, Long & Fahey, 2000; Roos & Von Krogh, 1992) . In this study focused within the organizational level.
Stock of knowledge among the individuals and groups substantial but it is also more significant to creating new knowledge and generating ideas. Generation of new knowledge can be created by scattering, interacting and disseminating the existing knowledge. “Knowledge sharing” characterize as contributing and communicating the present knowledge among the individuals and teams of organization and getting new knowledge in the organization members from external market. (Breitenoder, 2009; Liestner, 2010; Yang, 2007; Howell & Annansingh, 2012; De Vries, Van den Hooff, & de Ridder, 2006). Knowledge sharing is a way, through with organizational employees interchange and converse their knowledge, fundamentally that lead to proper application of the knowledge, innovation and competitive advantage for the organization (Z. Wang & Wang, 2012; Wang & Noe, 2010). Organization employees have the knowledge relate to their job extents that must also move to other level of individuals, groups and as a whole organization this prospective lead organization to management of knowledge (Ipe, 2003).
Organizations adopt different approaches to making a managed interchange of knowledge among the employees. Exploiting the advantages of knowledge sharing organizations spend large amount of time into knowledge managing strategies considering the knowledge management practices; which facilitate in accumulating, holding and dissemination of knowledge (Wang & Noe, 2010). The procedure of innovation excessively depends upon the knowledge because knowledge expresses all kind of information, data and logics in fact provide a complete subjectivity for learning activities (Gloet & Terziovski, 2004). The management of knowledge and intellectual capital is the substantial part for all brand of businesses to explore innovations and making business strategies (Stewart & Ruckdeschel, 1998).In result large number of corporations, notably knowledge concentrated organizations, has established knowledge management system on the part to utilize knowledge resource more excellently and thoroughly (Zboralski, 2009). Du Plessis (2007) characterized “Knowledge managment” as a systemization of and a reach to skills, experience, expertise and knowledge that generate the new abilities, facilitates better performance, promote innovation and animate the customer values. Gloet and Terziovski (2004) elaborated “knowledge management” as a roof for interwoven terms like Knowledge generation, knowledge appraisal, knowledge classification, knowledge retention, dissemination and sharing. Cummings (2003) explained, knowledge management encompasses all the arrays and processes to getting maximum output from organization tacit and explicit knowledge. In general context, knowledge management embedded in how organization generate, retain and interchange knowledge (Cummings, 2003). Different knowledge management systems formulated to extracting the individual knowledge so that organizations can gain advantages from its distribution. Research supported to knowledge management by suggesting different kind of advantages achieved by the organizations from implementing knowledge management approaches. J. Yang, (2008) characterized the benefits 1. Reducing loss of intellectual knowledge in any employee leaves, 2. enhancing the job performance by recovering the knowledge, 3.enlarging the employee’s commitment and satisfaction by getting knowledge from others, 4.giving good quality product and services, deciding good decisions. Xu and Quaddus (2011) organizations develop a structure in the form of knowledge management to getting, acquiring, interchanging and communicating tacit and explicit knowledge from employees so as other organization members or employees can apply it valuably and in more productive way for their work and enhance the organization knowledge. Management of knowledge within the organization provides a better track for sharing knowledge among the employees.
Knowledge sharing among the organizations for all kind of employees and work teams plays a vital role to gain competitive advantage and for each employee to become a “Knowledge worker” (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2005). Studies have shown that knowledge sharing positively effect in minimizing manufacturing costs, timely completion of new items launching projects, teamwork performance, enhancing the organization inventing potential and overall efficiency of organization also parting the growth of sale, returns from new products and services (Wang & Noe, 2010; Z. Wang & Wang, 2012). Employees in organizations inevitably create and share knowledge, so “knowledge sharing” deemed as natural activity of workplace, a part that performed automatically (Ipe, 2003).
Knowledge sharing influenced by the number of factors in an organization such as essence of knowledge, motivation, opportunities to share knowledge and culture support for sharing knowledge to other individuals (Ipe, 2003). Motivational factors can separate into interior and exterior for an individual. Self-reward given to an individual defines the interior motivation and external outcomes give the exterior motivation (Vuori & Okkonen, 2012). Vuori and Okkonen (2012) characterized the major motivational factors that positively affect and increase the knowledge sharing are:
- Enhance the organization success;
- Enhance the rewards;
- Enhance authorization;
- Reciprocity for getting knowledge;
- Enhance the self- reputation;
- Enhance the value of knowledge;
- Give reliance that sharing is valuable;
Motivation as well as organizational culture also affects the knowledge sharing. Organizational culture is one of the important factors that provide assistance or hindrance in knowledge sharing in the organizations (Suppiah & Sandhu, 2011). Within organization, “culture” entails six classifications individuals, procedures, leadership style, reward and incentive system and structure of the organization (Al-Alawi, Al-Marzooqi, & Mohammed, 2007; Gupta & Govindarajan, 2000). Suppiah and Sandhu (2011) expressed, mostly leaders acknowledge organizational culture as an obstacle in creation and sharing of knowledge, generally employees are motivated to store knowledge instead of its transformation in other organization to keep sustained competitive advantage. Nevertheless Al-Alawi et al. (2007) scholars debated that a “culture” that gives support to knowledge sharing can build up through good rewards & incentives and leadership style. In this study, focus made how leadership affects knowledge sharing.
Innovativeness is the main tool for organizations strategically stepping in the new markets, to strengthen the market share and getting the competitive advantage. Highly competitive markets and fast moving technology give a motivation to companies adding values to their products and services.
Literature support innovation with a sort of definitions, nevertheless most of definitions present a common insight. Occasionally innovation and invention intimate same as that it became difficult to separate one other, invention is the first happening of an idea and innovation is the try to give a shape or practice to that idea in the form of product or good (Fagerberg, Mowery, & Nelson, 2006). Organizations entail a combination of different types of abilities, expertise, skills, knowledge and resources; like knowledge about productions, different markets, skills, distribution systems and financial resources etc. (Fagerberg et al., 2006).
Innovation expressed as an uncovering the new ideas, products, services, procedures and proper execution of all these concepts to get new outcomes (Andreeva & Kianto, 2011; Kamasak et al., 2010; Alegre & Chiva, 2008; Garcia-Morales, et al., 2011) (García-Morales, Jiménez-Barrionuevo, & Gutiérrez-Gutiérrez, 2011) (García-Morales, Jiménez-Barrionuevo, & Gutiérrez-Gutiérrez, 2011). Something that is generated new or enhancing the improvements by an organization to add the values directly for the organization or for its customers (Gloet & Terziovski, 2004; Hult et al., 2004) launching a new good or novel attribute of a good (Edquist et al., 2001). Alegre et al, (2008) comprehend innovation as individual and enterprise learning procedures in aim to expose new tracks to solve problems. It proceeds innovation depends on organization’s capacity to learn from new knowledge, new ideas, its sharing to others and proper implementation. Hult et al., (2004) suggested competency of organization to develop new concept, idea and product as innovativeness.
Fostering innovation is generally a motivation for enhancing the firm’s performance and strength (Hult et al., 2004). Darroch et al., (2002) accounted innovation in different kinds like radical and incremental. Each type of innovation entails different capacities and resources to show any effect. Radical innovation necessitates the creation of new knowledge to make novel changes in a product’s technology and market (Un,2010; Darroch et al., 2002; Herrmann, et al., 2007) contrastingly incremental innovations or marginal innovations (Fagerberg et al., 2006) see to generation of knowledge for little changes or simple adaptations in product’s exiting technology and market (Un, 2010; Darroch et al., 2002). The main dissimilarity between radical and incremental innovations is new knowledge and technology requirement for the organization (Herrmann et al., 2007) can reflect radical innovation as technology-push innovation and incremental as market-pull innovation (Darroch et al., 2002).
Radical product innovations are more uncertain and risky for the organizations because these relied on unexploited knowledge, technology, operating in unfamiliar business field and not properly expressed the customer demands (Darroch et al., 2002; Kelley, O’Connor, Neck, & peters, 2011) failure of radical product innovations led organization to falling position and disappear it from the market (Herrmann, et al., 2007) in relation incremental innovations are more parallel to customer needs (Darroch et al., 2002). Radical innovations modify the balance of power of firms in current markets and led them to the new markets. To approaching the radical innovations organizations require to think little, amount greater than the current capabilities and enhance their dynamic capabilities to support these innovations (Kelley et al., 2011). Kelley et al., (2011) described company’s dynamic capabilities as strategic procedures that convert the organizational knowledge into valuable form. Radical innovation happen through specific kind of obstinate individuals that can resistive to forces, Kelley et al,. (2011) define these individuals by naming them “radical innovation leaders”. Innovation leaders are interpreted highly knowledgeable, have ability to work under uncertain situations, and use their influence to cope opposition in their respective projects (Kelley et al., 2011).
Term innovation not just relates products or processes, it also define marketing and organizational innovations. Günday et al., (2011) and Fagerberg et al., (2006) expressed innovations in different types like; generating the new products, inventing new ways to production, new measures of supply, exploration of new markets and organizing business by new tracks. International foundation for giving guidance in (EUROSTAT & Luxembourg, 2005) sorted four different kinds of innovation i.e. product innovation, process innovation, marketing innovation, and organizational innovation (Günday et al., 2011). Technological changes lead to product and process innovation. In EUROSTAT & Luxembourg (2005) expressed product innovation as introducing a new good or service that completely new and considerably improved with respect to its particulars, uses, technical specs, material wise or other basic features.
Product innovation engaged in two parts first is “creativity” and other “transformation” i.e. giving a vision, conception, or generation to new idea or invention then making application of that invention to generate valuable output in the form of product (Un, 2010; Annique, 2007). Shavinina (2003) demonstrated product innovation as to made changes in the end consumer’s product and service. Product innovations gave a new market capability and change to firms, predestination of company invariably connected to this change (Herrmann, et al., 2007). Term product curtains to both good and service. Günday et al., (2011) expressed; product innovation that employ new created knowledge or techniques, or may also be the new applications based on existing knowledge and techniques.
A process innovation characterized as application of the new, considerably changed production ways, and distribution methods by making technical, equipment or software changes (Günday et al., 2011; Edquist, Hommen, & Mckelvey, 2001(Shavinina, 2003)(Shavinina, 2003); Shavinina, 2003; Sisaye & Birngerg, 2012) improving the methods of producing goods and services (Fagerberg et al., 2006). Process innovation used to lessen the production or distribution unit cost, to expanding the quality of production and distribution in new developed product (EUROSTAT & Luxembourg, 2005; Fagerberg et al., 2006) also comprise the management accounting reporting and control systems (Sisaye et al,. 2012). In case of management, accounting control systems process innovation comprises incremental change strategies that in nature may be technical or administrative innovations. Sisaye et al., (2012) explained technical innovation as making enhancements in technical capabilities to collecting, processing and reporting the operating or production activities. Administrative innovations expressed as within the organization applying the new ways in recruiting the employees, allocation of resources, reward systems, and making the changes in strategic policies and organizational structure (Shavinina, 2003; Sisaye & Birngerg, 2012).
Another type of innovation marketing innovation expressed by Günday et al,. (2011) executing the marketing mix tool in a new way by the organizations, enclosed to make advancements in design of product, placement, promotion and its pricing strategies (Naidoo, 2010; EUROSTAT & Luxembourg, 2005; Kotler, 2010). Marketing innovations mostly address the customer needs in better way and provide solutions relating to lesser risk product modifications, product additions and design changes (Naidoo, 2010). The intention of marketing innovation is to enhance growth of sales by segmentation of customers according to demands of customers in a better quality of products.
Within organizations, new created knowledge and information processed throughout the whole company addressing it diffusion of innovation (Sisaye et al,. 2012) this diffusion give a new change to firms in the form of organizational learning. A good learning capacity of firms facilitate in best employment of innovation for competing the markets (Sisaye et al,. 2012).
Long term success and competitive sustainability produced a reason for organization to be an innovative in the market (Darroch & McNaughton, 2002). Organizations adopted different procedures of proper management for organizational knowledge and intellectual capital resources, publications are started to appear that expanded different possible reasons for innovation (Darroch & McNaughton, 2002; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Innovation excessively depends on knowledge because knowledge presents a deeper picture more than just an information or data, subjectivity of knowledge give a vast support to learning (Gloet & Terziovski, 2004). Purpose of this study is to explore that product innovation and process innovation considerably depends on the sharing of existing knowledge and creation of the new knowledge in the organizations. Kamasak et al. (2010) expressed, when groups or individuals made transformation of knowledge among other groups in the organization, one-group ideas give a new appearance to other groups and vice versa.
2.3 Transformational Leadership
Employees within an organization seek a person, who give them motivation, provide an inspiration, explore their knowledge for better utilization and delegate a vision and passion to perform and attain the set targets by vaccinating a zest of determination and energy. Garcìa-Morales, et al., (2011) defined transformational leadership as a leadership style that strengthen the combined interest among members of the organizations, assist them in achievement of combined objectives, Berson & Avolio (2004) line up the employees, individuals with the vision, mission and combined objectives of the company . The one who employ motivation to individuals, explore more to do than their intentions and even more than the existing possibilities (Barbuto,2005; Locke, 1999). Transformational leaders enliven the followers not just to presume leader actions, but transfer a firm faith of their own talent to insight and create a progressing long-term future for the company (Daft, 2009; Simola et al., 2010; Bertocci et al., 2009) made repairs as whole policy, systematic measures and culture of the organization (Jain, 2005).
Transformational leadership in a way is an amplification of “transactional leadership”; that stress a transection or swap, held among the leaders, employees and followers for specifying rewards, appraisals and incentives followers would receive on accomplishment of the objectives (Barbuto, 2005; Marturano & Gosling, 2007; Bass, Avolio, Jung & Berson, 2004) also recognized as by its major components i.e. management by exceptions active, management by exception passive and contingent rewards. (Bertocci & Bertocci, 2009; Bass et al., 1999; Bono et al., 2004; Bass & Riggio, 2006; Simola et al., 2010). Simola, Baling, and Turner (2010) characterized transactional leadership employs interchangeability benefits, with followers in psychological, political and economic ways. Barbuto (2005) expressed major types of transactional leadership in response to transformational leadership are laissez-faire, (Jain, 2005) management –by- exceptions and contingent rewards.
Transformational leadership differentiated from transactional leadership by a special facet i.e. creating an innovation by acknowledging follower’s needs and practices, defining them new ways to coup up with old problems, and motivating them to eradicate status quo in the organization in response transactional leaders make clarification of tasks and role for the subordinates , provide a ground to work, initiate a balanced reward and met their needs (Daft, 2009). Marturano & Gosling (2007) and Locke (1999) expressed transformational leadership and transactional leadership is not the contrary ends of leadership style but are the two different concepts, Bertocci et al., (2009) both are revolve around the rewards and incentives for subordinates but do so by using different ways and in varied forms.
In that, changed moving markets, organization’s essentials also changed, to overcome these changes two theories have surfaced; transformational leadership and transactional leadership. Both theories based upon little aspects of situational theories especially with relationship-focused leadership styles and goals- oriented behaviors, that enhance the performance of employees (Bertocci & Bertocci, 2009). Transformational leadership also has link to charismatic style of leadership ( Bertocci et al., 2009) communicated, charismatic leaders have a high quality to pursue their followers in that way, so they could perform more than the levels, and provide them a vision that can explore the hidden qualities. Later on the term, “charisma” for transformational leadership got lot of critic views as this not fulfills the compatibility with transformational ideas, then in complete range for leadership model “charisma” changed to idealized influence (Barbuto, 2005).
The ingredients or key components to operationalize the transformational leadership are; idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration (Barbuto, 2005; Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999; Bono & Judge, 2004; Riaz, Akram & ijaz; Bass & Riggio, 2006; Simola, Baling & Turner, 2010; Bass, Avolio, Jung & Berson, 2004; Jain, 2005).
2.3.1 Idealized Influence
This Component leads leaders to provide eagerness, devotion, belief, loyalty for organization and trust in followers (Frazier, 2006). Gumusluoglu and Ilsev (2009) expressed; by practicing charisma leaders develop recognition, self-esteem, regard, fidelity and define a combined sense of mission for the followers (Ellis, 2007) build a trust and respect as a role model , followers intimate this role of leaders as an inspiration and achieve desired results at a greater level of performance. Jain (2005) characterized charisma as the sound enthusiastic attachment of leaders with followers.
2.3.2 Inspirational Motivation
Make inciting communication with followers to rising high expectations and define substantial objectives in very clear and easy way (Frazier, 2006). Leaders use inspiration as a tool for followers to give them mirrored vision and mission, define a path to achieve mission and give a stimulation that they have ability to accomplish the objectives (Gumusluoglu et al., 2009) enhance empowerment of subordinates to cope with existing and new challenges (Ellis, 2007).
2.3.3 Intellectual Stimulation
Leader enhances the intellectual abilities for their subordinates to find out the solution for all kind of problems (Frazier, 2006). By intellectual stimulation, leaders define a track for subordinates, promote their interests, and help them to solve problems (Gumusluoglu et al., 2009) reinforce intellectual abilities to think personally what should be the best solutions against the problems, generate ownership to seek solutions (Ellis, 2007) building up the creativity in followers (Jain, 2005).
2.3.4 Individualized Consideration
Leaders give an individual care; attention and regard to all the followers as everyone feel I am the only particular for leader (Frazier, 2006). Utilizing individual consideration leaders fabricate a cohesive relationship among the followers; take into consideration requirements and demands of subordinates’ individually (Gumusluoglu et al,. 2009) exalt subordinate to think beyond the average performance , employ their full level of abilities (Ellis, 2007).
Without the establishment of a broad and extensive framework of assignments, leaders are uncertain and at risk to adopt newest style of leadership according to the changes take place so as, Hacker and Roberts (2003) transformational leadership is the combination of integrated leadership capacities, required for individuals, teams and organizations to evolve transformation by step- functional improvements. Transformational Leaders display a significant role in directing organizational knowledge by formulating a vision, mission and policies; provide motivation , inspiration at individual, groups and organizational levels within the organization (Bryman, 2011; Savageau, 2007; Bayode, 2008) through three means of action creating, sharing and exploiting knowledge (Bryman, 2011) evolved a high quality innovations in the subordinates (Bayode, 2008). Savageau (2007) expressed; transactional leadership provides facilitation to exploit knowledge at organization level,(Bryman, 2011) particularize, inspiration settled with goals achievement; in relation to specific rewards, due to this followers cannot be motivated if assigned them any task more than the set objectives. In order to manage organizational knowledge, leaders communicate specific requirements to manage knowledge at different levels (Lussier & Achua, 2009). Bryman (2011) and Lussier et al., (2009) illustrated individual, group and organizational levels for knowledge dissemination and to get creative vantage of that knowledge Bayode (2008) elucidated, at all these levels leaders provide vision, motivation, policies and structures that facilitate the conversion of knowledge into productive knowledge. How transformational leaders employ their influencing, motivational, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration characteristics at these three levels, explain one by one;
Porter, Angle, and Allen (2003) specified, at individual level transformational leadership, modify motivational aspects of the followers for action (Jung, Chow, & Wu, 2003) identified the set of factors such as personality, technical knowledge, skills, expertise objectives and senior’s feedback style Bryman (2011) directed , transformational leaders consider individual level as a knowledge creation level. Bryman (2011) explored at individual level stage; transformational leaders rendered intellectual stimulation (define the tracks, reinforce, evoke creativity and empowerment) to subordinates to be innovative, by using “charisma” impel, motivate and encourage them to share their ideas and knowledge to others. Porter et al., (2003) manifested four fundamental effects of transformational leadership at individual level to set forward the desired tasks. First, transformational leaders give a keen awareness, importance and significance about the set goals and objectives and for related ways to reach them, at second; elevate the levels of activated needs in followers’ psyches from lower to higher orders third, mold their own self-interests for sake of group and whole organization and finally leaders pursue the favor of their vision and mission.
Team develops the process to share knowledge among all the members and integrate individual level created knowledge into more cohesive form, Jung et al., (2003) elaborated this kind of knowledge such as, task structure, communication types and task autonomy Bryman (2011) conveyed, transformational leaders give a facilitation to this process and provide empowerment to groups to be innovative , solve problems and generate solutions.
Created and shared knowledge at individual and group level institutionalized at organizational level Jung et al., (2003) classified organizational level factors, such as strategy, organization structure, culture, environment and available resources. Transformational leadership style based on the situational and behavior conducts with reference to relationship-oriented leadership style and charismatic leadership behavior (Bryman, 2011; Bertocci & Bertocci, 2009).
2.4.1 Transformational leadership and Organizational Knowledge
Policies regarding the managing knowledge raise organization values by stimulating innovation and innovativeness. Esterhuizen, Schutte, and du Toit (2011) emphasized that knowledge is creative, exists within employees, and there must be encouragement style in the organizations for the employees to develop and share knowledge appraise them for doing so. Well-suited leadership is a very important driver to urge this process. Transformational leaders motivate organization members to think diversely, to see problem in new ways, to diagnose alternate solutions for that problems, facilitate members to express their own thoughts and ideas (Zhang, Tsui, & Wang, 2011). These styles of leadership provide ladder to members to share information and knowledge among the whole teams (Garacia-Morales, Llorens-Montes, & Verdu-Jover, 2008). Perspective of this study is to investigating influence of transformational leadership on organizational knowledge sharing i.e. Crawford (2005) explained organizational knowledge as Explicit knowledge refer to codification , documentation etc. within organization and Implicit Knowledge refer to intangible knowledge that is not easy to express and transfer, limited just to individual person. Without sharing knowledge an individual or work, teams in the organization cannot approach to cognitive resource of other members or group. . Politis (2002) proposed; tacit knowledge is also transform and learned directly as tacit knowledge through observations and practicing. Zhang, Tsui and Wang (2011) made research to influence the transformational leader on knowledge sharing. In this study Zhang et al., (2011) implied a positive relationship of transformational leadership and individual member knowledge sharing (explicit & implicit) to group members in the organization. They applied SEM model and selected population is consisted on 163 work groups and 973 group members from 12 China’s companies. In this study, we approached transformational leadership factor Intellectual stimulation plays a significant role in sharing of individual tacit knowledge.
Hypothesis 1: Individual tacit knowledge sharing capacity positively correlated with intellectual stimulation behavior of transformational leadership.
Sharing of organizational knowledge empower managers to maintain individual learning flow all over the organization and to incorporate it for practical applications, that will of sharing knowledge occur when an individual is ready to facilitate its skills to other as well as to acquire others knowledge in the establishment of new capacities (J. Yang, 2007). Transformation of knowledge from one employee to another requires that tacit knowledge be to convert into explicit knowledge by sharing information, skills, discussions and expertise Politis (2002) designed a study to positivity correlating acquisition of knowledge with transformational leadership (charisma, Individual consideration and intellectual stimulation) by comparing transformational leadership effect on knowledge acquisition with transactional leadership behavior. This study was consisted of 280 self-managed employees from aerospace technology manufacturing organization form Sydney (Australia) and applied confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Politis (2002), established framework for his study transformational leadership factor’s behavior effect on knowledge acquisition remained unexplored inspirational motivation ingredient’s influence on acquisition of knowledge from other members. To fill this vacuum a hypothesis can be formulate as follows:
Hypothesis 2: Knowledge acquisition positively correlated with inspirational motivation behavior of transformational leadership.
Sing (2008) detailed that leaders at all levels of the organizations play a vital role in managing knowledge, CEO of the company has a greater level of importance to be involved in the knowledge-sharing processes. If boss conveys a serious consideration to knowledge, the rest of the company will follow automatically. In support of knowledge-based view Shao, Fang, and Liu (2012) directed “knowledge” is the primary source to attain the competitive advantage in the market and a prime deriver of firm’s value. Shao et al., (2012) further expressed; organizational knowledge primarily exists in the individuals, cheerfully sharing this knowledge with others in an organization by individuals purely defines the potential value of the knowledge. In the organizations combination of employees have different kind of knowledge like tacit and explicit knowledge relating to their duties. About two third of job duty information and ideas steadily transformed into tacit knowledge through different means like internships, apprenticeships, table dissections, mentoring and casual conversations etc. (Smith, 2001). Individuals that have technical tacit knowledge; are considered unconsciously skilled and have a sound grip at their cognition so they are unaware to what they need to do be successful. Smith (2001) idealized that management employ its tacit knowledge, tactics and common sense to manage their difficult subordinates. Birasnav, Rangnekar, and Dalpati (2011) proposed the systematic literature review based study and find out transformational leadership based management play significant role in enhancing the organization performance being into brought employees intellectual capital resources (tacit and explicit knowledge). In proposed study Birasnav et al., (2011) advocated that management create the intellectual capital of individuals into consideration and sustained the organization performance. Acknowledging the Birasnav et al.,(2011) study ; our research endorse a relationship transformational leadership “individual consideration” factor in transformation of individuals tacit knowledge “We know more than we can tell” into explicit knowledge “the skill that a master craftsman has its figure tips” (Smith, 2001; Kelloway & Barling, 2000) and hypothesized the argument as;
Hypothesis 3: Individualized consideration behavior of transformational leadership positively correlated with articulating tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.
In recent scenario academics and scholarly research, did heed the knowledge management; configuring its aspects such as managing intellectual capital, managing the individuals and sharing the skills, expertise and information to others (J. Yang, 2007; Singh, 2008). Crawford (2005) presented that; within an organization leaders (CEO, CFO, management etc.) leaders are the entities who launch a culture that respects the knowledge, promote its sharing and application, retains its people and construct fidelity to the organization. From that context Garcia-Morales et al., (2008) conceived transformational leadership managed the organizations using a system; based on “knowledge”, a system that facilitate in circulation of information and organizational knowledge (knowledge acquired outside of the organization or existing knowledge of the organization). Nguyen and Mohammad (2011) engaged a study investigating a positive influence of transformational leadership behavior on managing the organizational with moderating role of culture. To probe this relationship Nguyen et al,. (2011) selected a population of 1000 middle level managers from different small and medium enterprises (SMEs) of Australia. They applied a multiple regression technique to estimate the desire results. In an organization Placement of a culture that could provide a facilitation in enhancement of knowledge sharing is a sentiment that fasten to the leadership abilities (Crawford, 2005), in our study we eliminating this moderating effect of culture, derive a positive influence of “Charisma / Idealized influence ” (core competency of transformational leadership behavior) on process of knowledge sharing. De Vries, et al., (2006) defined knowledge sharing is the process through which individuals interchange their (tacit and explicit) knowledge and mutually create a new knowledge. This argument articulates the following hypothesis.
Hypothesis 4: Knowledge sharing process positively correlated with idealized influence of the transformational leadership behavior.
2.4.2 Transformational Leadership and Innovation
Organization Managers, CEOs and other supervision lead their followers in an inspirational and motivational ground and provide them an opportunity to create solutions more than the possibilities. Miscellaneous studies analyzed this kind of studies (e.g. Gumusluoglu, et al., 2009) gathered data from 163 employees including their 43 leaders in Turkey software development companies. They established a positive relationship between transformational leadership (owner, managers, and immediate supervisors) and individual level employee’s creativity and at organizational level innovative behavior. Another study conducted by (García-Morales, et al., 2011) in automotive and chemical sector Spanish firms. They also found a positive relationship between transformational leadership and organizational innovation. In the same way Jung, Chow and Wu (2003) presumed a direct relationship between transformational leadership and organizational innovation. Jung et al., (2003) elaborated transformational leaders provide an employee empowerment and innovative mood in the organization. They selected 32 Taiwanese electronics / telecommunication firms in support the said relationship. Within organizations, leader’s behavior occupied a much consideration I relation to their subordinates to stimulate them in generation of new ideas and its appropriate execution in the markets. De Jong and Den Hartog (2007) carried out a study to investigate leadership behaviors that provoke employees, idea generation and application behavior. To direct this investigation (De Jung et al., 2007) selected different brands of Dutch Knowledge-intensive-Service firm’s (e.g. IT/ Software designers, Consultants, Researchers, Engineers, Advertising, and Lawyers etc.) managers, entrepreneur (Owners) as a participants inventory (front-runner group) to apply Quantitative Research Technique. De Jung et al., (2007) rendered positive influence of Leaders behaviors (intellectual stimulation, Motivating & Inspiring, Planning & Organizing problem solving, clarifying roles & objectives, innovative role modeling) to generation of new ideas at individual levels.
In this study, we mirrored four major transformational leadership-influencing ingredients (idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individual consideration) to develop a relationship with innovation (idea generation, creativity etc.). Elaborated studies in upper context showed influencing relationships “transformational leadership versus innovation” as a whole leadership style and innovation framework. Our research held to answer the question, what kind of “individual stimulation behavior” of transformational leadership style put impact on “individual intellectual capacity towards creativity”? To bridge this gap we particularize the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 5: Employee intellectual capacity to generate new idea positively correlated with intellectual stimulation at individual level.
Enhancing the capability to meet rapidly changing markets and highly competitive environment, organizations need to be creative at individual, team and organizational levels (Zhang, Tsui, & Wang, 2011). What factors play an effective role to create creativity at all those levels is a challenge for the organizations. Zhang et al., (2011) discussed, mostly scholars relates creativity with individual traits, abilities and cognition capacities. Aligning and complying at individual level views with the whole workgroup may discourage the creativity that is essential for innovation (Zhang et al., 2011; De Dreu, & west. 2001). De Dreu et al., (2001) characterized group innovation as an idea, product , process or strategy that is new for the team. Zhang et al., (2011) directed a study to analyze transformational leadership behavior in influencing the group creativity. To develop this study they selected 12 companies from different industries (pharmaceutical, manufacturing, telecommunication and information technology) from China’s four cities. The selected population was on 1269 employees (1052 were group members of 217 workgroup) from these companies. Practicing a structural equation modeling (Zhang et al., 2011) instigated a positive relationship for transformational leadership indicators (charisma, individual influence, intellectual stimulation, individual consideration) behavior on group creativity. Enhancing that transformational leadership positive behavior towards group creativity we tried to seek out the answer: whether “individual consideration” (transformational leadership indicator; coaching and mentoring employees individually) directly effect to group creativity? For this, we hypothesized the following relationship:
Hypothesis 6: Creativity at group level positively correlated with “individual consideration” behavior of transformational leadership.
Chief executives in companies face a big challenge to stimulate innovation, selecting the right manager with right skills of leadership, charisma and determination to lead major innovations. Research gave us a credential support to define an influence of transformational leadership style on organizational innovation applying various moderating and mediating effects (climate, support for innovation, culture etc.) for innovation (Sarros, Cooper, & Santora, 2008; Eisenbeiss, Van Knippenberg, & Boerner, 2008). Sarros et al., (2008) put forward a study to establishing an indirect relationship between transformational leadership and innovation through organizational culture. They applied six factors of transformational leadership (defining vision, providing an appropriate role model, fostering the acceptance of goals individual consideration, intellectual stimulation, high performance expectations) on innovation through creating a culture support to organizational innovation. For that Sarros et al., (2008) surveyed managers as leaders of Australian Institute of Management. Applying structural equation modeling Sarros et al., (2008) developed a positive relationship between two factors of transformation leadership (defininf vision, individual consideration) and innovation. Another study conducted by Eisenbeiss et al., (2008) to developing an indirect relationship between transformational leadership and team innovation employing mediating and moderating variables (support for innovation and climate for excellence) respectively. For that study Eisenbeiss et al., (2008) selected 33 R&D teams, working in different industries (automotive, semiconductor, packaging and scientific instruments) applied aggression analysis techniques. They elaborated transformational leadership by four components idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individual consideration. In this study Eisenbeiss et al., (2008) established a positive relationship indirectly of transformational leadership on team innovation. These studies lack direct relation of transformational leadership ingredients (charisma, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individual consideration) on organizational innovations (product, process innovation etc.).
Our research focused to find out the direct relationship of transformational leadership factor “charisma” on team innovation (Findikli & Yozgat, 2012; Murphy & Ensher, 2008). Paulsen, Maldonado, Callan and Ayoko (2009) developed a positive relationship of transformational leadership’s ingredient “Charasima” on team innovation. For this study Paulsen et al., (2009) picked out largely public funded R&D organizations and use multifactor leadership questionnaire for 178 employees of 34 research teams response.
Hypothesize the following relationship;
Hypothesis 7: Transformational leadership factor “Charisma” positively correlated with process innovation at group level.
Organizations seek a style of management, which can enable organization to achieve high performance and could provide a new sustained competitive advantage in the market. Transformational leadership dominates the fundamental attitudes and beliefs of organization’s employees, establish a common vision to attain the company’s objectives. Transformational leadership has a significant effect on prediction of organization performance and innovation (Osborn & Marion, 2009) transformational leaders use comprised factors Idealized influence. Antonakis, Avolio, and Sivasubramaniam (2003) elaborated that; transformational leaders use comprised four factor stance i.e. idealized influence (Charisma) signify the charismatic actions of leader in defining values, beliefs and a sense of mission Inspirational motivation factor use leader to energize the subordinates communicate them a motivation for achievement of vision and goals intellectual stimulation refer to develop creativity and find solutions to difficult problems Individual consideration use to provide personal attention and self-actualization in the followers. In this study we approached to find out the positive influence of transformational leadership (applying four ingredients of transformational leadership) on innovation at organizational level. Garacia-Morales, Llorens-Montes and Verdu-Jover (2008) framed transformational leadership positively on innovation and organization performance. For that study Garacia-Morales et al., (2008) selected CEO, s of 408 organizations of Spain from different sector of industries (food, farming, manufacturing, construction and services). We hypothesized our relationship:
Hypothesis 8: Transformational Leadership positively correlated with innovation at organizational level.
2.4.3 Organizational Knowledge and Innovation
Idea of “Organizational knowledge” affixed with the concept “Intellectual capital” to signifying the value of intangible assets of the organization and furthermore to express the idea of “value creation” and sustaining the organization performance. An organization’s overall economic, strategic and innovation performance is reliant on to what extent organization put into use the created knowledge for enhancing the value-creation activities (Harlow, 2008). Harlow (2008) explained the knowledge sharing as; creation of new knowledge, valuation knowledge from outside the firm, employing the created knowledge in policies, decision makings and processing it in products development, showing it into explicit form and transforming to other parts of the firm. Knowledge sharing is the behavior of two terms i.e. knowledge transfer and knowledge acquisition (De Vries et al., 2006) radical and incremental innovations are the two foundational innovations (Herrmann et al., 2007).
Kamasak et al., (2010) demonstrated a research; in which they presented a positive influence of knowledge sharing (knowledge donating and knowledge collecting) behavior on innovation (exploratory and exploitive). In this Kamasak et al., (2010) choose the 246 middle and top-level managers from Turkey and applied multiple regression analysis model to investigate the results. In our study we linked Knowledge sharing (Knowledge transfer, Knowledge acquisition ) ingredient with radical innovation to exanimate the positive influence of knowledge sharing on innovation and hypothesized the our argument as:
Hypothesis 9: Transfer of individual tacit knowledge positively correlated with radical innovations at group level.
Hypothesis 10: Acquisition of individual explicit knowledge positively correlated with incremental innovations at group level.
Calantone, Cavusgils and Zhao (2002) described the firm’s innovation ability in two views. The first as a behavioral variable i.e. how much organization adoptive to innovation and second is organization willingness to change. The innovation adopting capability of the organizations depend upon the in which sector organization want to make innovations like entrepreneurial, technical and strategic. In 2007 Leskovar – Spacapan and Bastic elaborated innovation capability as a higher-level integration capacity, that is, the ability to incorporating firm’s key capacities and resources to successfully stimulate innovation. Knowledge sharing develops the opportunities to enhance the firm’s abilities to meet and creates the solutions. In 2007 Lin expressed positive relationship considering “knowledge sharing” (Knowledge donating and knowledge collecting) as mediating role on firm innovation capability. For this study, Lin (2007) considered organizational factors, individual factors and technological factors as dependent variable on mediating role of knowledge sharing effect for firm innovation capability. To drawing, the desired results Lin (2007) selected 50 organizations from top listed 1000 Common Wealth magazine and applied structural equation model (SEM). In our recent study we incorporated the knowledge sharing process (Knowledge creation, knowledge acquisition and knowledge transforming) direct positive effect on innovation capability and hypothesized the argument as;
Hypothesis 11: Innovation capability of organization positively correlated with the knowledge sharing process at organizational level.
The purpose of this current study is to delineate the effect of transformational leadership on organizational knowledge among the employees and this organizational knowledge contribute employees to innovate novice ideas, structures, procedures and methods for the organization. Correlation analysis utilized to investigate association of developed hypothesis. The reason to apply correlation methodology is that, this research is of exploratory form in which we tried to explore the existence or correlation of relationships between phenomena, and if it correlates to what extent.
Weather management or leading authorities in the organizations engage transformational leadership dimensions for their employees enhance their knowledge sharing opportunity with other and provide them an opportunity to think creative ideas and more than the expectations, cross – sectional descriptive field study based on adopted questionnaire conducted for association correlations.
Following relationship model between transformational leadership, organizational knowledge and innovation developed.
In order to reach the desired objective of the study, we distributed the transformational leadership further into its demotions i.e. idealized influence, inspirational motivation, Intellectual stimulation and individual consideration. Organizational knowledge broke into explicit knowledge, implicit knowledge, transformation and acquisition of basic knowledge (explicit & implicit), and knowledge sharing process. The third variable of this innovation divided into creativity, process innovation, incremental innovation and radical innovation. In this study, we made a positive association of transformational leadership characteristics with organizational knowledge subscales and innovation measuring scales; developed hypothesis are as follows.
H1: Individual tacit knowledge sharing capacity positively correlated with intellectual stimulation behavior of transformational leadership.
H2: Knowledge acquisition positively correlated with inspirational motivation behavior of transformational leadership.
H3: Individualized consideration behavior of transformational leadership positively correlated with articulating tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.
H4: Knowledge sharing process positively correlated with idealized influence of the transformational leadership behavior.
The figure 3 presented relationship of transformational leadership and innovation in the organizations that are linked objective of this study.
H5: Employee intellectual capacity to generate new idea positively correlated with intellectual stimulation at individual level.
H6: Creativity at group level positively correlated with “individual consideration” behavior of transformational leadership.
H7: Transformational leadership factor “Charisma” positively correlated with process innovation at group level.
H8: Transformational Leadership positively correlated with innovation at organizational level.
In fig.4 summarized developed relationships between knowledge sharing and innovation among the company’s employees.
H 9: Transfer of individual tacit knowledge positively correlated with radical innovations at group level.
H10: Acquisition of individual explicit knowledge positively correlated with incremental innovations at group level.
H11: Innovation capability of organization positively correlated with the knowledge sharing process at organizational level.
3.1 Population and Sampling
Non-probability convenience sampling was utilized for the companies. The population of this study consists of (n = 262), employees and their leaders in 36 public and private sector Pakistani firms from the services, manufacturing, banking, IT and R&D industries from different cities. 262 questionnaires are distributed among both public and private sector organizations with ratio of 10 questionnaires each organization. Managerial level executives’ uses as the key respondents for this study because management of the organizations set the policies, develops the structures, access to key information of their company, understanding with culture and company environment and lead their teams and individuals for successful accomplishments of the objectives. Junior level employees and combine working teams also considered the informants from different departments since they are very useful source to evaluate the different variables of the organization.
3.2 Data Collection
Questionnaires sent to different company’s managers and employees from various sources. 234 purposeful questionnaires collected, 46 not responded and 28 questionnaires employed for direct discussion with company’s managers, CFO and other senior employees. Approximately 85% response rate was presented out of 308 questionnaires sent and 262 were properly filled. Survey instrument developed from thorough review of different literature. Transformational leadership style measured from five attributes i.e. idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individual consideration using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, which measures transformational, transactional and passive leadership styles. This questionnaire assists in research perspective to find out individual leadership styles. The questionnaire composed of four sections. First section assessed the leadership style of the individuals, second about finding the organizational knowledge dissemination, third for innovation capacities of the organizations. Self- rating five point likert scale (1 2 3 4 5) used for current survey.
1 – Strongly Agree
2 – Disagree
3 – Neutral
4 – Agree
5 – Strongly Agree
The instrument includes 60 items, four factor of transformational leadership measured by 20 item scales, organizational knowledge sharing is measured by 20 item scales (Yang, 2007; Garacia-Morales et al., 2008; Wang & Wang, 2008; Calantone et al., 2002), and innovation measured using 19 item scales (Jung, Wu, & Chow, 2008; Garacia-Morales et al., 2008; Garacial-Morales et al., 2011; Maldonado, Callan, & Ayoko, 2009; Calantone, Cavugil, & Zhao, 2002; Hermann et al., 2007). These items are as follows.
Idealized Influence (Attribute and Behavior)
- I talk about my most important values and beliefs.
- I instill pride in others for being associated with me.
- I go beyond self-interest for the good of the Group.
- I act in ways that build others’ respect for me.
- I consider the moral and ethical consequences of decisions.
- I display a sense of power and confidence.
- I emphasize the importance of having a collective sense of mission.
- I talk optimistically about the future.
- I talk enthusiastically about what needs to be accomplished.
- I articulate a compelling vision of the future.
- I express confidence that goals will be achieved.
- I re-examine critical assumptions to question whether they are appropriate.
- I seek differing perspectives when solving problems.
- I get others to look at problems from many different angles.
- I emphasize the importance of having a collective sense of mission.
- You share your past working experiences with your colleagues.
- In this organization, information sharing has increased your knowledge.
- Combining the knowledge amongst staff has resulted in many new ideas and solutions for this organization.
- Top management repeatedly emphasizes the importance of knowledge sharing in our company.
- This organization gives me free time to pursue creative ideas during the workday.
- People around here are expected to deal with problems in the same way.
- Organization spends money on new product or service development activities.
- Work team’s activities are always supportive for transforming innovative ideas.
- Our company is often the first to market with new products and services.
3.3 Data Analysis
To test the entire hypothesis, questionnaires answers are coded and analysed using SPSS 16.0 version software. Before applying the model we verified measures validation using frequency analysis. In this study we employed correlation analysis model to develop the relationships, taking transformational leadership ingredients as independent variables, and organizational knowledge dimension and innovation sorts as dependent variables. This model provides us a significance of the relationships expressing Pearson correlation and probability among the variables. Figure 4 displays the model and hypothesis to be associated.
Analysis and Interpretations
Some kind of personal information about the participant also include in the questionnaire such as age, gender, qualification, experience, sector and designation. This information may be providing facilitation in making comparison as per differences relating to personal working style. The Demographic characteristics of respondents are as follows.
4.1 Demographic Statistics
Male to female proportion was 9:1 presented in the table 4.1.1. They were the finance managers, audit managers, marketing managers, national sales managers, procurement officers, work teams and employees of the companies. More of the participants were male (90%), and female (10%); split into ages less than 25 years old (9.9%) between 25-40 years old (62%) and above 40 years old (28% approximately). Average age of the participants was 35 years old. Varied frequencies for experiences showed less than 2 years (11%), between 2-5 years (33%), between 6-10 years (36%), and above 10 years is 20%. The average tenure of participants for the companies is 5%.
With respect to industry selection criteria, major focus of this study is on manufacturing (approximately 57%) and services (approximately 36%) sectors of the market. Production and services providing firms are more knowledge – intensive for assessing the leadership style, knowledge sharing and innovations. De Jong and Den Hartog (2007) defined Knowledge- intensive firms as “companies where of the work can be said to be of an intellectual nature and where well – qualified employees form the major part of the workforce”
Most of participants to this stud had college and university qualifications (88%) and nearly 6% professional qualified. This study centered on those members of the organizations who have more knowledge and well qualified for their positions. De Jong et.al., (2007) characterized Knowledge – workers “those employees or management positions whose work mainly intellectual and non-routine in job descriptions, and which involves the application and creation of knowledge.”
Table 4.1.6 presented frequencies about the participant’s nature of job frequencies. Relating to frame work of selection; majority of the respondents are permanent (81.7%) and 17.9% contract based. Permanent organizational members have much knowledge about company’s culture, environment, working style and management practices, as temporary or contract based members.
4.2 Frequencies and Analysis
Transformational leaders provide a confidence to subordinates and build a trust between them by presenting a sense of identity. Analyzing this view of transformational leadership 75.5-percentage share of response of the management within organizations agreed with this item and fulfills their objectives following this style, 11.8% disagreed and 12.6 % not responded.
Management involves their subordinates in problems and develops a changing awareness to solve these problems among the followers. 83% participants rate a agree response to this style of work, only 5.4% disagreed with this item scale and 12.2 % responded neutrally.
Heads define a clear and inviting picture of the future to subordinates and motivate them, by employing different perspectives to achieve the set objectives. During our interviews for this item scale, 69.4% respondents agreeably accepted this proactive behavior in establishing optimistic view about the future, before the followers, approximately 8% disagreed and 22.9% provided a neutral view.
Table 4.2.5 explained how much seniors, team leaders and management transfer a work association among their subordinates. In establishing a frequency about this transformation of work association 73.7 % members of the organizations given a agree response, 7.7% disagreed and only 18.7% persistent neutrally.
Managers perform their assignments in a much-sustained way and develop an excitement, inspiration in the employees about the tasks. In our interviewing discussion with different organization’s managers, 80.5% agreeably accepted this trait to accomplish the tasks, only 6.1% disagreed and 13.4% established their neutral opinion.
In table 4.2.7 approached about specification of tasks and importance that management build in their employees. During our discussing with the managers whether they prioritize the tasks according to their importance and role; 85.5% of managers agreeably respond to this sense of behavior, only 5.7% disagreed and 8.8% were neutral.
Employees seek different kind of trainings and coaching according to the changing market conditions and other technological changes etc. interviewing this statement with managers whether they trained and spend their time individually development of the subordinates; that they seek with the market changes, 69.8% management concerns agreed with that item , 6.5% disagreed and 23.7% neutrally respond.
Table 4.2.9 explained the discussion with management, whether they set aside their personal interests for the sack of organizational aims. 69.1 % agreed with this attribute, 5.7 % disagreed and 66% neutralize the statement.
Supervisors assign the tasks in a group based on their talent, capability, knowledge and intention to do work, also considered their needs to fulfill the given assignment. In our discussion with the different managers, supervisors and team leaders variably respond to this statement, 67.6% participants agreed with this statement, 11.9% disagreed and 30.2% neutrally respond.
When you perform your duties with the subordinates, treat them in a that way, in response they build a respect, loyalty and trust for you. Discussing about this statement 82.9% of the seniors agreeably respond about this attribute of their work, only 4.6% disagreed and 12.6% established neutral view. In most of the organizations management adopt a helping and very proactive attitude to do work with the followers, develop a confidence in their minds.
All decisions that you are going to made for the organization, also took into account moral and ethical values of that decisions, with respect to future effects of the decisions. About 85.1% of the employees agreed with that item scale to seek idea for outcome determination of the decisions, 7.7% disagreed and 7.3% respond neutrally.
Table 4.2.13 demonstrates the frequencies about the discussion held with the organization members, during their job the act confidently and optimistically before the followers. They display a commitment for their work. 82.8% of members agreeably accepted this attribute of demonstration for their work, 6.1% disagreed and 11.1 naturally showed their attitude.
This statement characterized about organization’s management and leading roles; when they fulfill their duties properly translate the vision of tasks and define how to attain that vision in a sympathetic way. In our interview, about 74.1 % interviewees agreed with this motivational aspect of their job, 9.6% disagreed and 16.4% neutrally respond.
Transformational leaders regard each subordinate as a whole individual, instead just an organization employee. He or she listen each associates need and concerns, consider the follower’s talents and knowledge to decide what duty more suitable for him or her to reach more than the expectations. Approximately 85% executive level employees agreed with consideration sense of attribute, only 4.6% disagreed and 14.9% neutrally opined.
Responding to my discussion with managers about 78.6% agreed that in the organization, you choose way to approach your subordinates in which he or she can think a problem in a new, and more innovative way, articulate a capability to solve problem in various ways, 3.9% disagreed and 17.6% neutrally respond.
Management runs their teams by communicating a combined vision in both economic and ideological senses so that subordinates could fulfill their tasks in more confidence and in meaningful way. Executives develop a clear depiction of good future that enhances follower’s imagination.82.4% of management members agreed with this behavior that they build confidence on both personal and subordinate’s end, 9.5% disagreed with this item scale and 8% opined it natural.
Table 4.2.18 frequencies about discussion held with the executives, that they provide a proper support of work to their followers by assisting them, introducing new ways to accomplish the assignments.84.3% of the management agreed with that attribute of their duties, 8.4% disagreed and only 7.3% established neutral view.
In the organization, work teams are the products of the team leaders, managers and other executives. Managers groom all their subordinates in that way in which they could perform collective and combined mission for the organization. Interviews with the management and employees give us 76.7% an agreed frame about this behavior that they follow, 11.4% disagreed and 11.5% was neural.
During job when employees are in running process to fulfill the desired tasks, executives also give them an opportunity to enhance their strengths and capabilities. 83.6% of the executive brass agreed with this statement, 8.4% disagreed and only 8% neutrally opined us.
Table 4.2.21 shows the frequency of knowledge sharing among the individuals. The stated item scale in our questionnaire survey adopted to getting the result of knowledge sharing within the organizations. Organization individuals, teams and management share their different sort of experiences during the job about past career in the different organizations, 83.9% of employees agreed with this statement, 7.2% disagreed and only 8.4% was neutral.
In the organization at different level of management and employees, share their knowledge with each other this knowledge may be information, an expertise, past procedure of work at any angle etc. that enhance your existing knowledge, 86.2% of the respondents agreed with this discussion 6.9% disagreed and 6.9% neutrally attributed.
When a talked with employees about their knowledge enhancement, learning stages in the respective organizations, such as they strength most of their knowledge after working with colleagues, groups and in different departments , they gained sort expertise from their mates during the duties and of duties, 65.6% employees agreed with this discussions, 10.3% disagreed and 24% was neutrally respond.
Table 4.2.24 results pictured the frequencies about information sharing and knowledge development in the organization. Employees during work transfer and acquire different ideas and information to do it generate new knowledge for the employees , 71.4% or the employees agreed with that statement about in their job duties, 7.3% disagreed and 21.4% neutrally respond.
When acquired skills, expertise and information , employees share with each other it result new ways to do things, increase the knowledge and generate new ideas among the individuals, teams and other members of the organizations. 67.9% individuals agreed with that discussion also respond; sharing of ideas provide us more confidence to perform the duties, 24% neutral and 8% were disagreed.
In this advanced and technological reign, everyday there comes a new sort of technology sophistications, new ideas generated, new policies are developed at different levels in markets. Organizations also improve and define procedure to bring their related knowledge in the organization, properly distributed the roles of employees in which they cans acquire new developer knowledge. 72.5% frequency of the employees agreed with that discussion about their enterprises, 8.8% disagreed and 18.7% neutrally opined.
Organization structure provides full support to utilize new acquired knowledge in the organization in very effective way. Discussing this stance with the individuals 73.7% agreed, 4.6% disagreed and 21.8% neutrally respond.
How an individual will perform his or her tasks at work place. That work of performance cannot be easily elaborated in the written form. 46.9% of employees agreed with this statement, 28.6 disagreed and 24.4% naturally respond.
Necessary projects started in the organizations to fulfill the desire objectives to future concern, proper documentations are made for these production process. Responding to this statement 30.8% of executives agreeably considered this attribute to manage documentation in the organization, 39.2% disagreed and 30.2% neutrally respond.
All the existing reports and official documents in the organization shared within the department and to other department work teams.45.8percentage participants agreed with this kind of nature to do work, 27.8% disagreed and 26.3% neutrally opined.
In the organization all members at all levels share their knowledge that they gained from different place of market 67.9% of employees and other executive members agreed with this statement, 4.6% disagreed and 27.5% neutrally respond.
Employees of the organizations frequently collect and share their information within the department, with other teams that they gather from different sector of industries and from different professionals. 58.4% share of employees agreed with this item scale, 14.9% disagreed and 26.2% neutrally respond.
Your organization has a specific and supportive structure of knowledge management at each level of organization i.e. unit-to-unit, team-to-team, department-to-department and division to division. 75.2% of management executives agreed with this function about their companies, 9.2% disagreed and 15.6% naturally respond.
Management of that organization prominently emphasized for creation of an environment, which will be provide an opportunity to members for sharing their knowledge in the organization. 71% of employees agreed with that statement, 8.4% disagreed and 20.6% neutrally respond.
Organizations during job timings of employees also emphasized them to peruse creative ideas, new ways and policies for their job enhancements. 57.2% of employees agreed with this practice in their organization, 17.5% disagreed and 24.8% neutrally respond.
Organizations frequently introduce new products and services in the markets ad develop first mover recognition for their rivals. 74% of the organizations agreed with this statement, 11.4% disagreed and 14.5% neutrally respond.
Policies and procedures that are used to introduce products and services in markets are mostly newly invented in the organization. 67.2% employees agreed with this statement for market contribution, 11.1% disagreed and 21.8% neutrally respond.
Organization’s radical and incremental innovations are faster as compare to their rivals in the markets. 78.3% employees agreed and officers agreed with this statement, 3.1 disagreed and 18.7% neutrally respond.
Organization promotes their product, services development, and defined a separate pool of investment to enhance their innovation capability. 76.4percentage of the organization agreed with that statement, 8% disagreed and 15.6% were neutral.
Working teams perform their assignments and objectives in an innovative and changed way, also transform the creative ideas to organization. Approximately 75.5% of employees agreed with that statement, 7.6% disagreed and 16.8% naturally respond.
Table 4.2.44 described the statement to make an idea about how much organizations are well- known for novice products or services in the market. 60.3% of executives agreeably accepted this statement for their organization, 16.4% disagreed and 23.3% naturally respond.
4.3 Correlation Analysis
4.3.1 Transformational Leadership and Knowledge Sharing
The above table presented the Pearson’s Correlation among the Transformational Leadership and Knowledge Sharing variables. The results indicated that there is a significant relationship between transformational leader ship and organizational knowledge as r = 0.514 and P < 0.01.
Summarized results in the table 126.96.36.199 predicted insignificant between intellectual stimulation and tacit knowledge sharing capacity of the employees in the organizations (r = -0.011, p >0.01) so we reject our hypothesis H1.
The results (r = 0.223, p < 0.01) also showed positive association of inspirational motivational behavior with knowledge acquisition in the organizations.
Transformational leaders provide an individual consideration to their subordinates and inspire them to articulate their existing tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge for other colleagues in the organizations but the results (i.e. r = 0.06 & p > 0.01) showed insignificant relationship between individual consideration and articulation of individual knowledge so, we reject our hypothesis H3.
Idealized influence attribute of transformational leaders significant association with knowledge sharing process as (r = 0.231 & p < 0.01).
4.3.2 Transformational Leadership and Innovation
In table, 188.8.131.52 demonstrated the correlation results between transformational leadership behavior and organizational innovation among the organizations. The results showed that intellectual stimulation had a significant effect on creativity at individual level (r = 0.307, p < .01). Therefor we accept our hypothesis H5.
To test our six hypotheses i.e. individual consideration attribute of transformational leadership positively correlated to enhance creativity at group level in the organization of different sector (manufacturing, services). Presented results (r = 0.260, p < .01) showed a significant effect of transformational leadership on creativity at group level.
“Charisma” or “Idealized Influence” attribute of transformational leadership positively correlated with process innovation in the organizations. Predicted results (r = 0.204, p< .001) supported this relationship in favor of H3.
For hypothesis eight summarized results in the table 184.108.40.206 transformational leadership positively correlated with organizational innovation (r = .341, p < .001). Therefore, in current study transformational leadership has significant effect on innovation among the employees in the organization.
4.3.3 Knowledge Sharing and Innovation
Sharing of knowledge among the peer, mates and individuals in the organizations leads employees toward creativity. The table 220.127.116.11 summarized the results relating to developed hypothesis between knowledge sharing and innovation. Intercorrelations showed that radical innovations significantly and positively correlates with individual tacit knowledge transfer (i.e. r = .367, p < 0.01) same as individual tacit knowledge transfer positively affect the incremental innovations (r = .450, p < 0.01) in the organizations. The results for third hypothesis also presented positive and significant of Knowledge sharing process (KSP) on enhancing innovation capability (r = .325, p < 0.01).
Discussion and Recommendations
Managers encourage and utilize their teams to solve the issues according to the market condition, define them, different ways to seek out best solution for the organization. This research has tested the direct effect of transformational leadership attributes on organizational knowledge and innovation. Results significantly supported direct and positive relationships of transformational leadership management on organizational knowledge parts and kind of innovations. Management run their organizational tasks collectively, they provide a motivational support to subordinates in accomplishing the said tasks about future. Prioritizing the objective accomplishment provides a flow of work, mostly in the organizations employees set their tasks according to their preferences like competition, fear of extra cost charges and timely fulfillment of the customer’s demands etc. for the organization.
Frequency about training and coaching of the employees from management not properly held in the organizations, because top brass give more intention to achievement of the targets within time in any style of work and also at some extent employees show reluctance to adopt changed way for given target accomplishments. Approximately 24% response of the manager was natural to this item scale.
Employees at much amount agreed with the discussion, when they take the decision also consider very deeply about its aftermath, consequences but some management viewed at some extent that, they ignore these considerations such as when there involved political acts, and government acts etc.
Mostly in the organizations management keep itself updated with new technology but little organizations which are not risk takers avoid to change status quo in the organization, about 4% disagreed frequency fall in that position.
Most of the employees in the organizations have lust of capabilities to achieve the desired objectives but they seek little edge of confidence and inspirations to show of all their abilities.
The discussion that held with the management about importance of collective sense of mission, most of the members of organization’s agreed and accepted this attribute. Managers said they try their best to have a complete and defined mission of the organizations and to maximum extent, they succeeded in that aim, but at some extent culture and policies, structure of the organizations hurdled this combined objective.
Table 4.2.23 demonstrated 65.6% agreed percentage to our statement about knowledge development of the employees. Most of the organizations not supportive to this kind of knowledge improvements because there fall different issues such as leg pulling , other promotion factor , under estimation of the other individual capabilities etc.,
Enterprises at much extent try to be a first mover into to the markets, they distribute suitably employee’s responsibilities in which they could adjust with the market enhancements, and induce different kind of knowledge in the organization.
As much structure of the organizations supportive to human asset thoughts for organization, as it will be grow in the markets. Employees bring different sort of knowledge such as new software customization, new audit techniques , new reporting ways and new vouching statistics etc., enterprise also have updated capabilities to implement these applications in the organization framework. 73.7% of individuals, officers, executives from different organizations agreed with this capacity of their organizations.
Dissection held with organization individuals weather their assignment, assigned them according to their skills, expertise and professional knowledge, 22.9% disagreed with because in different organization duties are not defined in relation to related knowledge or the individuals. A marketing specialist person positioned in the administration department, and an accounts professional individual positioned in human resource department.
To what sector of industry, an organization belongs like some organization are IT based and some or production based some provides services to customers. IT and services based organizations mostly opted at tacit knowledge of the employees that is little tough to written, how they will perform their tasks. As compared to production oriented organization how an individual will perform its duties can be transfer through proper training and mentoring session within the organizations. In our study the major share of the respondents are from manufacturing concern, approximately 28.6% disagreed with this stance of discussion.
Discussion held with the executive members about management of the knowledge for different projects that they initiate in the organization such as” extension of production, financing agreements with banks, import and export of goods projects or extension of sales target achievements etc. In the organization, they maintained proper documentation of all these process for the future presentation and assessing the next forecasting of other projects. Varied frequencies came from different organization’s style of work. Some organizations not effectively maintain the records of their projects, they just using internet and with phonic conversations fulfill the projects like IT and services oriented companies.
Getting an idea about to what extent within the organizations explicit kind of organizational knowledge sharing (collecting and transferring), approximately 46% ratio of employees agreed with this document sharing to other members and 27% disagreed. Because every department like marketing, procurement, finance and audit has, their own confidentialities that are only are concerned with related departments.
In table, 4.2.32 presented the frequencies against getting an idea about tacit knowledge transformation and acquisition among the employees of the organizations. Management, officers and executives during duties and of duties share their experiences of job. Members when perform the group duties in their department share their ideas, information that gained from in handling different issues and in performing other jobs. Experiences and expertise are the tacit form of organizational knowledge it cannot be elaborated in documentations.
Working groups in the organization accumulate basic organizational knowledge (explicit and tacit) from different other organizations it may be services sector manufacturing sector of banking where they are already working, and different professional like project managers, finance specialists, analysts , marketing managers etc. They articulate these all information, knowledge like which they adopted there to taking decisions, how they maintained documentations, what mechanism were used there to employ techniques; to other members within organizations because after disseminating this knowledge will give them an initiative to process new ideas and new ways. In course of this discussion from different sectors of organization gave mutual response approximately 58% agreed to employing this technique of sharing knowledge and about 15% disagreed.
Careers of the professionals developed through different mistakes, these mistakes increase their experiences in response these experiences lesson their further mistakes, and they get much amount of success from this learning attitude.
Executives of the organizations rendered a full support to their employees for collecting and transforming the organizational knowledge to other employees. Because this sharing of knowledge among members will enhance the confidence level of the employees to do work in more sustained way and there will be create a new ideas and policies, which may be more helpful for company objectives. About 71% of the executives from different organizations agreeable accepted this sort of opportunity that provides to employees.
When leaders give some free time to their employees to think more than the duties they are performing, insist them to pursue innovative ways for their work; this policy increase the employees recognition towards their job description in response organization’s power creativity also increased. Results are varied for this discussion; some organization employees agreed and oppositely supported this discussion. They individuals not have excess time to think other than the job activities. In our planning lot of project’s accomplishment are in queue and timely accomplishment of these projects necessarily important. 17.5% of participants of our discussion disagreeably opposed our point of view.
Mostly in the organizations employees are resistant to change, working teams rely only on already running procedure to solve the problems. Culture of the organizations also not provides an opportunity to employees think differently for their work. Another matter that is concerned with these results i.e. some organizations are not risk taker for any change. 61.4% of individuals agreeable accepted status quo in their organization.
Individuals, executives and management members very deeply put concentration on new inventions in the organization. Interviewing different management members about new products introduction rate in the market, 74%participants agreeably respond about their company’s indulgence for innovations. Production, services and banking sector management persuasively take initiatives to make different innovations like introducing new products, going more than the customer’s requirements, and new financing opportunities for their customers etc.
Employees uphold our discussion with them about polices, methods and procedures that they employ to present sort of products for their customers are change for each product. They put concentration to adopt new techniques, new statistics and new measures for their organizations competing to market trends. 67.7% agreed with this framework, management viewed they keep their policies newest with market conditions.
In the organization when the employees share knowledge with each other, there being created the new inventions among the members and they fulfill their assignments in more productive way. More companies are trying in their working departments this sort of inventive ways to perform the tasks.
Weather companies are considered a radical innovation provider to the market. Mostly company’s executives positively participated in this discussion for their innovative initiatives for their customers. Companies highly regarded to produce innovative products for their customers, provide a competitive move and enhance the good-will strength. These innovations take place when employees share their ideas and skill with each other and companies transfer a good investment R&D sector of organization. Approximately sixty share of percentage came positive for the organizations that used this framework for innovation and regarded as a best provider of unique ideas in the market.
Leaders feed intellectually, provide a personal consideration to their subordinates and create a knowledge sharing capacity with their colleagues and teams. Study, results not showed association of intellectual stimulation with knowledge sharing capacity of the employees in the organization. This association not positively correlated because there is a lack of trust among employees to share information, skills and expertise. Mostly organization not set proper reward compensations for employees that are directly tied to cooperation and sharing of knowledge. Also in the organizations, there is not provided the interactive learning environment for employees and not analyzed them how much they are involved and immersed with the assigned projects to meet prioritized needs. Management not exactly states the expectations of sharing and dissemination of personal knowledge with other members. Some organizations have week technological updates for storing the organizational knowledge in other forms.
- Leaders must bring the changes in the organizations, provide individual consideration to their employees and find out their lagging aspects of the work.
- Leaders present an inspirational edge among the followers to get results more than the setlines by delineating vision of responsibilities.
- Management evolves the confidence in their employees to think more than possible solution of the issues.
- To achieve and maintain high standard of the products quality and to meet the market demands there must be combined set of objectives.
- Executive provide a personalization and individual consideration to the followers to enhance the power of strengths and capabilities.
- Working in the groups articulate helped to individual in enhancing the existing knowledge.
- During work performance merger of knowledge among the staff members originates new solutions, ideas and increase the power of knowledge.
- Clearly defined position, activities and responsibilities of the employees tracked them toward new era of knowledge effectiveness.
- Effective and timely employment of the new knowledge provides an opportunity for organization to get a new long lasting framework.
- Responsibilities should be assigned with the professional knowledge of the employees.
- Policies and procedures to perform duties should be properly presented to individual before starting the duties.
- All brands of projects that company going to start or working on to made initiation for these project must be maintain proper log of documentation at every step.
- Frequently sharing and collecting of existing reports within the members provide a help for enhancing the knowledge of all organization members.
- All level of employees of the organizations frequently share their information, expertise and skills to other members that they have gained through different experiences.
- Collecting and transformation of existing knowledge among other individuals the organization provide facilitation to generate new knowledge.
- Top executives of the organizations several of time should support a mechanism of knowledge sharing within organizations.
- Management gives free time to their employees to pursue novice ideas for the organization relating to their skills, expertise and knowledge.
- Leaders develop their employees in a way in which they can create new invention of task accomplishments.
- Implementation of new policies and structures lead organization towards innovation.
- Chief executives and decision-making authorities invest on product development activities.
- Organizations should enhance their innovation capabilities and lead their products with novice ideas for the customers and in related markets.
- Management requires creating a trust among the individuals and peers relationships, to work collaboratively for achievement of tasks. Sharing of knowledge, expertise and skills or any kind of value information among other colleagues must be properly rewarded to enhance this sharing capacity of the employees. How much individuals and teams indulged are interestedly accomplishing the said tasks, systematically analyzed. Organizations invest money to employ latest technology for best storage of organizational knowledge.
- What new techniques came into the market, leaders should introduce it in the company and define its importance to accomplish the tasks.
- Employees would have the freedom of expressions and must being appreciated when they bring any new way of accomplishing the task.
- Management would build a friendly environment for their followers in which they could act and perform their duties more confidently.
- A combined mission for the whole organization can be achieved by employing a SMART technique of specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely achievable setting the objectives for the company.
- Management pay proper concentration to follower’s needs and concerns, express word of appreciations even for the little achievements, give them individually congratulation notes to heighten the confidence, made a fair tasks distribution among all and provide them proper mentoring and counseling of career achievements.
- Colleagues share their information, skills and other ways, which strengthens the individual capabilities to do work more than innovative way.
- Enterprises more depends on teamwork and collective knowledge, knowledge is the only handful of individuals, which they can hold their peers and bosses to ransom. Employees would combine their knowledge within the teams it defines the new tracks to do work.
- An individual who perform tasks in the marketing department, organization also provide him or her access to employ marketing gimmicks that he owned from the market. For financial sector, provide them a motivation to raise skills according to market conditions.
- Organization capability to utilize new generated knowledge completely consisted on how much IT department updated, to what extent management take into consideration for new acquired knowledge, is the already developed policies are flexible or supportive to implement new techniques of market.
- Human resource department in the organization is backbone in utilization of human asset activities. The department made hiring, recruiting and assignment of the responsibilities. Proper functions definition enhances the employee’s career for the organization.
- Orientation, training and mentoring session for employees arranged with the passage of time to enhance the existing and new knowledge of the individuals.
- Proper files should be maintain for each copy of the documents relating to agreements, project and extensions etc. Because within company when any executive or management level employee left his or her job and move to other place, then the new hired representative for that seat can get the idea about all projects after viewing all these files also it will be helpful for starting new plan of work in the organization.
- In this fast moving economy, organizations all time keep up to date to face all that changes take places in the markets and merge itself into the new techniques. Today organization prepared their employees multi-functional for fulfilling all brand of tasks and the management share and involve all member in different tasks for the organization using job enlargement and job rotation techniques.
- If there causes any problem to resolve any issue among the team members, all members of the team employ their experiences to handle that issue, they express it within the whole team without treating any sort of reluctance and jealous factor i.e. if I share this knowledge to other members it may demote me after gaining this skill.
- Individuals think the techniques and style of work they were using in the past fields is better than these organizations must utilize it in their current fields and leaders provide them a facilitation, support and confidence to implement these approaches.
- Management weekly or monthly assign tasks to their employees that should be based on some kind of projects for generating a new idea like a project on cost analysis in which individuals create the ways to minimize unit cost of the products. Same as variance analysis based projects or what best ways should to adopt to report all history of the day about work for directors etc.
The research gathers the knowledge about how transformational leaders utilize their attributes according to organizational knowledge dissemination requirements in the subordinates. Such as which individual required individual consideration to acquire new knowledge, and how this acquisition of knowledge utilizing a motivational aspect will participating a contribution towards thinking new ideas, knowledge, creativity and enhancements in work teams, employees and whole organization structure. It enhance a literature on transformational leadership style and on organizational innovation capability by considering knowledge utilization, and present a picture of effective transformational leadership models within the organizations.
Also see this:
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- Research article
- Open Access
- Open Peer Review
Patient Disease Perceptions and Coping Strategies for Arthritis in a Developing Nation: A Qualitative Study
BMC Musculoskeletal Disordersvolume 12, Article number: 228 (2011)
There is little prior research on the burden of arthritis in the developing world. We sought to document how patients with advanced arthritis living in the Dominican Republic are affected by and cope with their disease.
We conducted semi-structured, one-to-one interviews with economically disadvantaged Dominican patients with advanced knee and/or hip arthritis in the Dominican Republic. The interviews, conducted in Spanish, followed a moderator's guide that included topics such as the patients' understanding of disease etiology, their support networks, and their coping mechanisms. The interviews were audiotaped, transcribed verbatim in Spanish, and systematically analyzed using content analysis. We assessed agreement in coding between two investigators.
18 patients were interviewed (mean age 60 years, median age 62 years, 72% women, 100% response rate). Patients invoked religious and environmental theories of disease etiology, stating that their illness had been caused by God's will or through contact with water. While all patients experienced pain and functional limitation, the social effects of arthritis were gender-specific: women noted interference with homemaking and churchgoing activities, while men experienced disruption with occupational roles. The coping strategies used by patients appeared to reflect their beliefs about disease causation and included prayer and avoidance of water.
Patients' explanatory models of arthritis influenced the psychosocial effects of the disease and coping mechanisms used. Given the increasing reach of global health programs, understanding these culturally influenced perceptions of disease will be crucial in successfully treating chronic diseases in the developing world.
Arthritis is a leading cause of pain, functional limitation and disability worldwide [1–3]. Little is known about the burden of arthritis in developing-world settings. However, a substantial body of research has illuminated ways in which patients in developed countries are affected by arthritis. For example, osteoarthritis (OA) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) often lead to physical limitations and depression [4–7]. Also, women with OA tend to report more severe pain and functional limitation as compared to men with similarly advanced disease . Research on how patients in the developed world manage their arthritis has categorized coping strategies as active, involving attempts to manage or alter the course of the illness, and passive, characterized by disease avoidance and relinquishment of disease control . Active coping strategies include participating in physical therapy, while passive coping includes withdrawing from social activities . Active coping is typically associated with lower levels of pain and psychosocial distress than passive strategies [11, 12]. Patients in developed countries use active coping strategies more frequently than passive strategies .
Given the increasing prevalence of arthritis worldwide [14, 15] and the increasing reach of global health programs dedicated to alleviating the burden of chronic disease, research is needed to examine whether conclusions from research in developed countries also apply to developing countries. The objective of this study is to examine the illness experience of arthritis, including disease perceptions, physical and psychosocial effects of disease, and coping strategies of economically disadvantaged patients with advanced arthritis in the Dominican Republic, a society in which resources are scant, belief systems about disease differ from those of Western cultures, and gender roles are rigidly delineated .
We used semi-structured qualitative interviews to examine how patients' perceptions of the etiology of their arthritis influence how they are affected by the disease and the strategies they use to cope with their illness. Our specific research questions included: How do patients conceptualize their disease and its etiology? To what extent does arthritis affect patients' abilities to continue fulfilling their social roles? Do informal and intangible resources - such as family, friends and religion - play prominent roles in managing arthritis in a setting in which professional care is difficult to obtain? And lastly, do men and women differ in the ways that they experience and cope with the disease? The overarching motivation for our work is that understanding how patients with limited resources in the Dominican Republic perceive, are affected by, and cope with their illness will help to improve treatment outcomes and the design of care delivery systems for individuals with arthritis in developing nations.
The Dominican Republic occupies the eastern 2/3 of the island Hispaniola, located between the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean. The population of the nation is approximately 9.8 million, with roughly 4.1 million citizens (42.2%) living below the international poverty line. The Dominican Republic is divided into 31 provinces and the National District. More than 60% of the population lives in urban areas and the population density is 197 persons per square kilometer. The adult literacy rate is approximately 85%. The economy is largely based on the service and agricultural sectors, yielding a per capita GDP of $8,300, or roughly 17.9% of that in the United States. In addition, marked financial inequalities exist: the poorest half of the population accounts for less than 20% of the national GDP, while the richest tenth possess more than 40% . While all citizens are covered by a public healthcare system, only basic healthcare needs are included in this plan and advanced treatments such as total joint replacements are generally not accessible to the poor.
Significant advances in gender equality have occurred in the Dominican Republic over the past three decades. The organization Mujeres en Desarollo Dominicana Inc (Women for Dominican Development, MUDE), established in 1980, works to improve the quality of life for Dominican Women. Beginning in 1990, government parties started to incorporate women's issues into their political agendas. In 1997, Congress passed two important laws promoting women's private and public rights. The first, La ley contra la violencia intrafamiliar (Law against family violence) made all forms of domestic violence illegal and punishable by law. The second law established a quota system that required women to comprise 25% of city council candidates; this quota was increased to 33% in 2000. In 2000, the citizens of the Dominican Republic elected its first female president, Milagros Ortiz Bosch .
However, Dominican women continue to face gender-related challenges. Physical violence against women continues to occur, despite the 1997 law against domestic violence. According to a study by Dominican Today of 3,400 women, 44% have been victims of physical or non-physical abuse, typically at the hands of the women's husbands and boyfriends . Women perform the majority of unpaid domestic work within families, limiting their freedom to seek employment opportunities outside of the household. Furthermore, the women who do earn salaries are more likely than men to be employed in the informal and services sectors, which are traditionally lower paid, less stable and have poorer working conditions. Thus, the culture of machismo, defined as a strong sense of masculine pride or exaggeration exertion of masculinity continues to exist and women remain more socially and economically vulnerable than men .
The study was conducted with patients participating in OpWalk Boston, a philanthropic, not-for-profit, volunteer organization that provides pro bono total joint replacement (TJR) to patients with limited financial resources in the Dominican Republic. The OpWalk Boston team, consisting of about 50 individuals has established a partnership with Hospital General de la Plaza de Salud in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and has been travelling to this hospital for the past 4 years to perform the surgeries. We operate on approximately 55-60 joints in ~ 45 patients annually, a number limited by the financial and human resources of the program and the size of the inpatient unit where patients are admitted.
Patients participating in OpWalk Boston learned of the program through advertisements on television, newspaper and radio, by word of mouth, or by physician referral. There was no formal test for financial eligibility. Patients were deemed eligible if they did not have health insurance that would cover the joint replacement and could not purchase the surgery out of pocket. To determine medical eligibility, patient radiographs and case histories were reviewed by Dominican and American surgeons. Patients were required to have symptomatic, radiographically advanced knee and/or hip arthritis. The first 50 patients who were both financially and medically eligible were selected into the program.
All 47 patients enrolled in OpWalk Boston 2010 were admitted to Hospital General de la Plaza de la Salud on March 18, 2010. Their surgeries occurred over the next few days. A bilingual investigator, who was a medical student from Boston working with the OpWalk Boston team approached patients during this pre-operative period and provided a written invitation to participate in the study. Patients were selected randomly to minimize bias. We chose to sample patients pre-operatively because we felt that their perspectives on arthritis might change in their post-operative state. Given time and personnel constraints, we were not able to approach all patients in OpWalk Boston for interview. We randomly approached 18 pre-operative patients to obtain our study sample of 18 individuals (100% response rate). Once a patient had surgery, he or she was no longer eligible for the study. We enrolled until there were no further patients remaining who had not yet undergone surgery. Candidates were given a Spanish consent form and consent was obtained from all participants.
One-to-one, semi-structured interviews were conducted in the participants' hospital rooms. Semi-structured interviews allow for focused, yet conversational communication and offer flexibility to elaborate on issues or raise new discussion topics .
The structure of the interview followed a moderator's guide (Table 1) developed through discussions with Dominican surgeons, clinicians and Dominicans immigrants living in the US. Broad topics included the patient's family and social support networks, the patient's understanding of disease etiology, and coping mechanisms used. The interviewer broached topics using broad, open-ended questions. For example, to understand the patient's explanatory model, the investigator asked "How do you think arthritis works?" To encourage further conversation on a particular topic, the interviewer asked more detailed questions. For example, follow-up questions regarding the patient's understanding of disease included "Why do you think you have arthritis?" The interviews were conducted in Spanish and lasted approximately 45 minutes. All were recorded on audiotape and transcribed verbatim in Spanish.
Our analysis was based in grounded theory, which does not assume a pre-conceived theoretical perspective. Rather, grounded theory allows theories and hypotheses to arise from the data during the qualitative analysis process. In our research, patients were probed about broad topics related to their disease, and we formulated hypotheses regarding patients' belief systems after considering the narratives as a whole.
The transcripts were analyzed in Spanish by American, bilingual coders using content analysis, a method that allows the researcher to systematically classify large amounts of textual material into themes in order to make valid inferences without assuming cause and effect relationships between segments of text . Three investigators read two randomly selected transcripts to gain a general sense of thematic content. The investigators then met to discuss themes and develop a preliminary coding method. We used open coding to create a scheme that consisted of three levels of abstraction . Categories of words comprised the first level of abstraction. These categories corresponded to different portions of the moderator's guide and were formed through discussions among investigators. For example, one category under the section on explanatory models of arthritis was 'religion,' which included words such as 'church' and 'spirit.' Sentences containing these words were next read to determine context and subsequently to identify shared concrete themes among patients. For example, one theme in the category for religion included the belief that arthritis was a test from God. As similarities between themes were uncovered, they were grouped to form more abstract themes, such as patients' passivity toward the disease due to their belief that God controlled their fate.
One investigator then coded six more interviews, adding new themes and categories as they arose. After nine interviews were coded, three investigators met again to generate a final coding scheme. One investigator then re-coded all of the interviews using the finalized coding scheme. Coding agreement between two investigators, assessed for 198 themes in three interviews (66 themes per interview), was 92% (95% CI = 88% - 96%). The Cohen's Kappa coefficient for inter-rater agreement was 0.84 (95% CI = 0.76 - 0.92). The investigators reviewed the differences in coding and resolved them.
Throughout the analysis process, we remained aware that our Western conceptions of illness and disease could influence our interpretation of patients' narratives. To mitigate the effects of this potential bias on our results, we worked directly from the interview transcripts, rather than from our overall interpretations of patients' words and interviewer notes. In addition, we included a Dominican clinician as an investigator to ensure culturally appropriate and accurate objective interpretations of the text.
Quotations included in the manuscript text were translated into English.
Interviews were recorded on a tape recorder and were converted to mp3 files kept on a password-encrypted computer nightly. Patient identifiers were removed from interview transcripts, which are also kept on a password-encrypted computer system in the US. All study activities were approved by the institutional review boards at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Hospital General de la Plaza de la Salud.
Of the 47 patients participating in OpWalk Boston 2010, 18 were approached for an interview and all 18 consented. The remaining patients had their surgeries before they could be approached. Of the 18 patients interviewed, 13 (72%) were women. Six (33%) received total hip replacement (1 bilateral) and 12 (67%) received total knee replacement (2 bilateral). The mean age of the sample was 60 years (median 62 years, range 21 - 80 years). The gender, joint distribution and age of the 18 patients interviewed did not differ significantly from those who did not participate (72% women, 79% with knee replacement, mean age of 61 among non-participants). 15 patients did not complete secondary school education and 17 were unemployed. All patients followed the Christian religion; Catholicism was the most common denomination (n = 13), followed by Evangelism (n = 3) and the Church of 7th Day Adventists (n = 2). Subjects had experienced symptomatic arthritis for a mean of 13 years prior to surgery (median = 17 years), with 11 patients reporting at least 10 years of symptoms.
Overview of findings
From information gathered through over 20 hours of focused one-to-one interviews, we found significant connections among the 18 patients' beliefs in disease etiology, the impact of illness on their lives, and the coping strategies used to manage their disease. Patients generally invoked faith-based and environmental theories of disease causation including a belief that arthritis was God's will and that the disease arose from exposure to water earlier in their lives including bathing, spending time outdoors in the rain, and performing chores involving water such as washing dishes or clothes. Although all patients experienced pain and functional limitation due to arthritis, the nature of the disrupted social roles differed between women and men. The passive explanatory models appeared to influence the strategies used to mitigate the effects of their illness. These strategies frequently involved prayer and avoidance of chores involving contact with water. Patients also relied on family, church-based and neighborhood social support.
Theme 1: Disease etiology
Over half of the patients (11 out of 18) believed that their arthritis had been instigated by contact with water. For example, when asked why she had arthritis, one patient responded: "Rainwater, from the sky. And the streets were full of water. I was young and I was in the water (age 68)." Other patients believed their arthritis originated from performing chores involving water. While men typically mentioned carrying water as part of their agricultural work, women spoke of household chores such as cleaning and washing: "Being with water a lot ... I was a fanatic about that ... cleaning and washing with a lot of water. Yes, I liked to always wash the floors, wash things, the house. I remember that my mother had said 'you're going to catch arthritis, that's harmful' (age 62). " Several individuals believed that using detergents during chores such as dishwashing and laundry contributed to their subsequent development of arthritis. Other subjects attributed arthritis to the water's cold temperature: "There are many people who suffer from the cold of the water (age 76)."
Half of the patients (9 out of 18) believed that God was responsible for their illness: "I think that God gave me the illness (age 63)." However, none of the patients believed that arthritis was a form of punishment from God. Rather, the patients felt that their arthritis was a test of their strength. According to one patient, "This problem is a test. A test. It's a test to see if I can continue fighting or not (age 21)."
When asked how they had come to believe in these etiologies, almost all patients stated that they had learned about their disease from friends and family, rather than from medical professionals. For example, one patient stated "this woman had arthritis. And I told her about my pain and she explained to me that it was arthritis (age 63)." In contrast, the patients reported that their physicians focused mostly on the fact that there was no cure for their illness: "they always told me that there was no cure, that there was no cure for arthritis (age 63)," and "they told me that there was no solution for me because it cost too much money (age 53)."
Theme 2: Effect of Arthritis
Physical and social effects
While all patients reported severe physical limitations imposed by arthritis, most notably in walking, the social roles affected by these limitations were gender-specific. Women in the cohort described the intrusion of arthritis on their roles as homemakers and church members. Since the majority of patients believed that water had caused their arthritis, they avoided tasks involving water. For example, one woman cooked for her family, but no longer washed, stating, "There are things that I don't do. I don't wash. No liquid. I can cook. Wash no (age 64)." Other female patients took measures to prevent contact with water, such as putting on gloves before cleaning.
The church had an especially strong presence in women's lives as it afforded them leadership and organizational opportunities otherwise unattainable. Many of the female patients in OpWalk Boston were leaders of their prayer groups or church choirs. Arthritis interfered with the womens' church involvement because they were no longer able to walk to church. For those who were able to continue attending church services, many reported that they could not kneel to pray.
Male patients, on the other hand, appeared more concerned about their disrupted roles as wage earners and providers. Arthritis forced all of the men interviewed to leave their paid jobs because according to one of the male patients, "The worst is that if you can't walk, you can't work." One of the males patients felt that his life had been delayed because he could no longer work ("Yes, I have been significantly set back because I can neither walk nor work (age 63)") while another reported feeling sad ("When this disease began to enter my body, I felt sad because I could not work (age 66).") Three of the five men reported that arthritis disrupted relationships with women. One of these patients reported: "Sometimes she wants to do something that I can't do ...or she wants to go out and I can't because of the pain (age 51)." According to another male patient, his disease and lack of occupation had caused his wife's personality to change: "she has changed a lot since I've been like this, sick and not working (age 48)." Another of the single male patients stated that his arthritis had lead him to become unemployed and thereby unable to find a girlfriend; when asked if it was his arthritis specifically that created this difficulty, he responded, "Yes, it's very hard without a job. You have to work to be able to do that (age 62)."
Most patients reported feeling sad or depressed due to the constant pain and physical limitations imposed by the disease: "I was sad, you might guess, because pain is not easy (age 54)." In a society where women were traditionally homemakers, many women expressed sadness in losing the ability to adequately cook and clean. For male patients, the inability to earn a salary and loss of strength threatened their sense of masculinity. As one man stated, "I was a man of vigor, a man of labor, a strong man. When this disease began...I lost my strength. I couldn't lift 40 liters of water (age 66)."
Theme 3: Coping
To manage their disease, patients used a combination of conventional and alternative coping methods that included pharmacologic, social, and faith-based strategies. Whereas all patients sought financial support from family and friends, women seemed to be more successful than men in mobilizing social support networks to cope with the emotional, physical and social consequences of their arthritis.
Since patients' beliefs about disease etiology were mostly faith-based or environmental, they took few measures to prevent functional impairment from their disease, instead focusing on immediate symptom relief. Thus, the most frequently used treatment was pain medication. Almost all reported using diclofenac, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID). Several patients also rubbed menthol creams ('mentoles') on their joints to alleviate pain. Citing their belief that water had caused their arthritis, the patients attached great importance to drainage of knee effusions: "I need to go to the doctor to get the liquid removed (age 63)."
All patients sought financial support for medical care from their family, friends and neighbors. Most patients collected small amounts of money from multiple individuals by asking their children, circling the neighborhood, or calling upon their friends from church. Despite this financial support system, all patients reported difficulty paying for their doctor's visits and as a result, cut down on seeking care: "Sometimes I want to go, but I have to wait. It makes it difficult at times (age 80)." Another patient noted: "After, I stopped seeing him because of the economy. There was not a lot of money in my family (age 21)." Several patients explained that had they not been accepted into the program, they would have died in pain from their disease: "I don't have money for the operation. [Without this program,] I would remain like this, die like this (age 63)" and "There would be no solution, [this operation] costs too much money, I'm poor, what could I do? I didn't have anything (age 53)."
Social support: help to continue fulfilling social roles
Patients mobilized extensive support systems consisting of family, friends and neighbors to assist them through the day-to-day tasks made difficult by arthritis. These support networks differed by gender.
For male patients, the spouse or children typically provided physical support. None of the male patients mentioned seeking emotional support from family or friends. One male patient, who in the past, stated that he had friends and a girlfriend, had even withdrawn from all social relationships since the onset of his disease. When asked if he had friends currently, he responded: "Friends? No. Acquaintances yes, but no friends (age 51)."
Female patients appeared to rely on a stronger social support network of friends and neighbors to help them cope with emotional and physical effects of their illness. For example, one patient said of her friends: "They help me a great deal ... you know, things that motivate you to continue on, to fight (age 21)." Another patient's neighbor helped her with chores: "They help me to do whatever chore in the house (age 67)." Many of the women also received tangible and emotional support from other female members of their church. In addition, one younger female patient belonged to a Dominican organization for women living with disabilities titled Círculo de mujeres con discapacidades (Circle for Women with Disabilities). Notably, when asked about who helped them perform the household tasks that they could no longer do, none of the women mentioned their husbands. Rather, they relied on other female relatives, friends, and neighbors. For example, one woman responded: "My daughter. She is the one who helps me. And my grandaughter. The two of them [help me with] the chores at home. I cook, but they clean the house (age 63)."
Religious coping: to cure the disease
Since many patients believed that their arthritis represented God's way of testing their faith, they trusted that demonstrating their faith would ultimately convince God to cure their illness.
Almost all of the patients prayed. One patient said: "I prayed to God to cure me, to help me with everything, to reach out to me (age 70)." Consistent with their strong social affiliations with their church, several of the female patients reported benefiting from the prayer of others: "I attend a prayer group that helps me a lot too...they pray a lot for my sickness. The prayers help me a lot (age 67)." Thus the patients believed that through prayer, God would alleviate the symptoms of their illness. Furthermore, many patients believed that God had the power to cure arthritis: "I have a God who has the last word... I know that God cures (age 67)."
At the same time, patients also described forming partnerships with God, in which the patients actively prayed to God, in order to acquire the strength to endure their disease. According to one patient, "God has helped me a lot ... I have a lot of faith. He gives strength to people, patience (age 53)." Other patients stated, "God has helped me to learn to live, to deal with the pain (age 54)" and "I put everything in the hands of God. I have always been with Him...through the bad and the good (age 68)." Furthermore, they believed that their prayers convinced God to support them in ways that would not have occurred had they not prayed: "I pray. I put myself in his hands. I believe in him. And he helps me (age 80)," and "My bones don't hurt me so much because I started [praying] with this prayer group (age 67)." These individuals felt empowered from their prayers to God believing that through these prayers, they could gain a sense of control over their illness.
For many of these patients, God's acknowledgement of their struggles and faith came in the form of acceptance into the OpWalk Boston program. According to one patient, God had empowered the OpWalk Boston team to carry out God's will: "God is going to use them and they are going to do their job they way God wanted them to ... [with] wisdom, intelligence, that God has given to the doctors (age 66)." Thus patients turned to God and religion to manage and even cure their arthritis, attributing both their ability to endure their disease and the eventual receipt of their operation to their partnership with God.
This is the first qualitative study we are aware of that examines the burden of arthritis in a developing nation. We found that patients' conceptions of disease etiology influenced the psychosocial effects of arthritis and the mechanisms they used to cope with their illness. Specifically, patients invoked environmental and faith-based theories of arthritis causation, believing that their disease had been caused by contact with water, God's will, or a combination of both. These explanations appeared to allow the patients to accept their illness. The patients' belief that God would one day rid them of their arthritis, combined with the relative inaccessibility of pharmacological and surgical interventions, influenced them to use religious coping mechanisms, such as praying and forming partnerships with God.
We note several gender differences in the social consequences of arthritis and the networks available to help patients endure their illness. While female patients felt that they could no longer continue fulfilling their roles as homemakers and church members, men reported difficulties in functioning as workers and breadwinners. Male patients relied primarily on physical support from family members. In contrast, female patients mobilized a more extensive social network of family, friends and neighbors to help them cope with the physical and emotional consequences of their disease, allowing them to better maintain their social roles.
Our findings add to prior literature on the worldwide burden of chronic disease, specifically regarding conceptions of pain and disease etiology, the role of religious coping, and the importance of social support.
For example, a study of Canadian adults found that individuals with arthritis assigned different meanings to symptoms such as pain, stiffness and fatigue as compared to those without disease. In addition, patients with arthritis typically normalized their disease, viewing arthritis as an expected part of aging . In contrast, many patients in our study attributed their disease to God and environmental origins. Similar to our findings, a qualitative study of 28 Dominican women with lymphatic filiarisis, a mosquito-transmitted parasitic disease, found that women attributed their condition to diverse cause such ranging from pregnancy, to varicose veins, to supernatural causes such as having small birds reside in their leg .
The use of religious coping has been researched extensively. For example, a study consisting of 6,082 face-to-face interviews with healthy, community-dwelling US citizens revealed that African American and Black Caribbean patients who were married or female were more likely to use religious coping as compared to male or single patients. Higher levels of education were associated with lower utilization of prayer during stressful situations such as disease . From our small sample of 18 Dominican patients, we did not observe gender or age disparities in the use of religious coping. However, women appeared to often rely on religious groups, such as church choirs, while the men mostly engaged in individual religious activities, such as praying. Another study, in which 35 patients with rheumatoid arthritis were asked to keep a daily diary of their disease experience for 30 consecutive days, found that individuals who reported daily spiritual experiences, such as praying, had higher levels of positive mood and greater tolerance of pain . A study involving interviews of 109 Latinos (89.5% female) living in the US with musculoskeletal disease found that 38.1% of patients used religion to help them cope with their illness . Similar to the patients in our cohort, these women stated that their faith in God helped them to endure their disease and that their religion provided them with source of comfort and hope. Furthermore, in 2008, Kirmayer et al. described how religion can imbue transcendent meaning to the pain experience. In our study, patients' perception that they were 'chosen' by God to endure the pain of arthritis and ultimately overcome the disease points to a larger role for religion in the explanatory model of arthritis than simply a method of understanding disease etiology and coping with daily pain and functional limitation. The perception of being 'chosen' by God interweaves the arthritis experience with spiritual and ritual realms that influences how patients' of pain and suffering are constructed, articulated and sustained .
Other data have shown the importance of social support in Hispanic patients with chronic disease. A study of 98 Latina women in the US with arthritis found that having emotional support for their illness predicted greater psychological well-being and less psychological distress . In our study, almost all patients relied strongly upon support from family, friends and/or neighbors for both social support and to help them continue fulfilling their social roles.
Several limitations should be noted. Our sample size was limited by the finite number of OpWalk Boston patients and the time constraints of the interviewer. In addition, participants of OpWalk Boston represent a select sample of individuals who successfully sought surgical care for their arthritis. While the interviews show that that these patients possessed a passive view of their illness, as shown in their beliefs in disease etiology and coping mechanisms, these data may actually underestimate the passivity of the Dominican population with arthritis as a whole. The vast majority of individuals with arthritis in the country did not apply to programs such as OpWalk Boston. Therefore, we might have found more passivity among patients with arthritis if we had chosen a different sampling strategy.
Furthermore, the researchers were members of a philanthropic care organization. It is conceivable that study participants were cautious about what they said to the researchers, leading to a reporting bias. In addition, bias in interpretation threatens qualitative studies such as ours. We minimized such biases by working from verbatim text during coding, evaluating consistency in coding and conducting iterative discussions of interview content with the research team. Finally, we acknowledge that our transcription and translation process may miss subtle aspects of language and culture. These would become more apparent in prolonged in-person conversations that permit interpretation of facial expressions and nuanced turns of phrase.
In this qualitative study, we found that patients' conceptions of the etiology of their arthritis, which included beliefs that their disease had been caused by contact with water or God's will, appeared to allow them to accept their illness and influenced them to use religious coping mechanisms such as prayer. Our work has important implications for the care of patients with arthritis in developing nations and in the United States. Implementing arthritis treatment guidelines derived in developed countries for patients in developing nations may be ineffective if they are not introduced in the context of the patients' belief systems and with an understanding of their limited resources. Such plans may combine methods that are culturally congruent, inexpensive and safe -- such as prayer -- with proven interventions such as stretching and muscle strengthening. Consideration of culturally influenced disease perceptions is pertinent not only to international programs such as OpWalk Boston, but also to physicians caring for minority groups in the United States.
Our study is important in increasing sensitivity for cultural variations in perceptions in disease etiology and coping strategies. Future research could incorporate data from a larger group of patients with suitable comparison groups to make quantitative comparisons. Further studies performed on non-hospitalized Dominican patients with arthritis would also be helpful in understanding the burden of arthritis in the country. Understanding the distinctive impact of arthritis in a developing nation will provide insight to improving the care of patients with chronic conditions, which have become more prevalent as populations age across diverse global settings.
Total Joint Replacement
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The pre-publication history for this paper can be accessed here:http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2474/12/228/prepub
Acknowledgements and funding
Our work was supported by: Operation Walk Boston, Massachusetts Arthritis Foundation, Harvard Medical School, Department of Orthopedic Surgery, Brigham and Women's Hospital, NIH K24 AR 02123 and NIH P60 AR 47782.
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
All authors read and approved the final manuscript. NNN, LMB, TST, LAA, RG and JNK contributed to study conception and design. NNN had the primary role of authoring the manuscript and data acquisition. NNN, JNK, AMB and LMB analyzed and interpreted the data. NNN, JEC, TST, LAA, RG, KMO, and JNK drafted and revised the manuscript. | <urn:uuid:d1c0124b-ce70-48f5-a3c9-0d42eeea6d9c> | CC-MAIN-2019-35 | https://bmcmusculoskeletdisord.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2474-12-228 | 2019-08-21T22:22:29Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027316549.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20190821220456-20190822002456-00030.warc.gz | en | 0.956399 | 8,833 |
Metabotropic glutamate receptor
The metabotropic glutamate receptors, or mGluRs, are a type of glutamate receptor that are active through an indirect metabotropic process. They are members of the group C family of G-protein-coupled receptors, or GPCRs. Like all glutamate receptors, mGluRs bind with glutamate, an amino acid that functions as an excitatory neurotransmitter.
Function and structureEdit
The mGluRs perform a variety of functions in the central and peripheral nervous systems: For example, they are involved in learning, memory, anxiety, and the perception of pain. They are found in pre- and postsynaptic neurons in synapses of the hippocampus, cerebellum, and the cerebral cortex, as well as other parts of the brain and in peripheral tissues.
Like other metabotropic receptors, mGluRs have seven transmembrane domains that span the cell membrane. Unlike ionotropic receptors, metabotropic glutamate receptors are not ion channels. Instead, they activate biochemical cascades, leading to the modification of other proteins, as for example ion channels. This can lead to changes in the synapse's excitability, for example by presynaptic inhibition of neurotransmission, or modulation and even induction of postsynaptic responses.
Eight different types of mGluRs, labeled mGluR1 to mGluR8 (GRM1 to GRM8), are divided into groups I, II, and III. Receptor types are grouped based on receptor structure and physiological activity. The mGluRs are further divided into subtypes, such as mGluR7a and mGluR7b.
|Family||Receptors ||Gene||Mechanism||Function||Agonists & Activators||Antagonists||Synapse site|
|Group I||mGluR1||GRM1||Gq, ↑Na+, ↑K+, ↓glutamate||
|mGluR5||GRM5||Gq, ↑Na+, ↑K+, ↓glutamate|
|Group II||mGluR2||GRM2||Gi/G0||mainly presynaptic|
|Group III||mGluR4||GRM4||Gi/G0||mainly presynaptic|
The mGluRs in group I, including mGluR1 and mGluR5, are stimulated most strongly by the excitatory amino acid analog L-quisqualic acid. Stimulating the receptors causes the associated enzyme phospholipase C to hydrolyze phosphoinositide phospholipids in the cell's plasma membrane. This leads to the formation of inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate (IP3) and diacyl glycerol. Due to its hydrophilic character, IP3 can travel to the endoplasmic reticulum, where it induces, via fixation on its receptor, the opening of calcium channels increasing in this way the cytosolic calcium concentrations. The lipophilic diacylglycerol remains in the membrane, acting as a cofactor for the activation of protein kinase C.
These receptors are also associated with Na+ and K+ channels. Their action can be excitatory, increasing conductance, causing more glutamate to be released from the presynaptic cell, but they also increase inhibitory postsynaptic potentials, or IPSPs. They can also inhibit glutamate release and can modulate voltage-dependent calcium channels.
Group II and Group IIIEdit
The receptors in group II, including mGluRs 2 and 3, and group III, including mGluRs 4, 6, 7, and 8, (with some exceptions) prevent the formation of cyclic adenosine monophosphate, or cAMP, by activating a G protein that inhibits the enzyme adenylyl cyclase, which forms cAMP from ATP. These receptors are involved in presynaptic inhibition, and do not appear to affect postsynaptic membrane potential by themselves. Receptors in groups II and III reduce the activity of postsynaptic potentials, both excitatory and inhibitory, in the cortex.
The chemicals 2-(2,3-dicarboxycyclopropyl)glycine (DCG-IV) and eglumegad activate only group II mGluRs, while 2-amino-4-phosphonobutyrate (L-AP4) activates only group III mGluRs. Several subtype-selective positive allosteric modulators that activate only the mGlu2 subtype, such as Biphenylindanone A, have also now been developed.
LY-341,495 and MGS-0039 are drugs that act as a selective antagonist blocking both of the group II metabotropic glutamate receptors, mGluR2 and mGluR3. RO4491533 acts as a negative allosteric modulator of mGluR2 and mGluR3.
Different types of mGluRs are distributed differently in cells. For example, one study found that Group I mGluRs are located mostly on postsynaptic parts of cells, while groups II and III are mostly located on presynaptic elements, though they have been found on both pre- and postsynaptic membranes.
Also, different mGluR subtypes are found predominantly in different parts of the body. For example, mGluR4 is located only in the brain, in locations such as the thalamus, hypothalamus and caudate nucleus. All mGluRs except mGluR6 are thought to exist in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex.
It is thought that mGluRs play a role in a variety of different functions.
Modulation of other receptorsEdit
Metabotropic glutamate receptors are known to act as modulators of (affect the activity of) other receptors. For example, group I mGluRs are known to increase the activity of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs), a type of ion channel-linked receptor that is central in a neurotoxic process called excitotoxicity. Proteins called PDZ proteins frequently anchor mGluRs near enough to NMDARs to modulate their activity.
It has been suggested that mGluRs may act as regulators of neurons' vulnerability to excitotoxicity (a deadly neurochemical process involving glutamate receptor overactivation) through their modulation of NMDARs, the receptor most involved in that process. Excessive amounts of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA), the selective specific agonist of NMDARs, has been found to cause more damage to neurons in the presence of group I mGluR agonists. On the other hand, agonists of group II and III mGluRs reduce NMDAR activity.
Role in plasticityEdit
Roles in diseaseEdit
Since metabotropic glutamate receptors are involved in a variety of functions, abnormalities in their expression can contribute to disease. For example, studies with mutant mice have suggested that mutations in expression of mGluR1 may be involved in the development of certain types of cancer. In addition, manipulating mGluRs can be useful in treating some conditions. For example, clinical trial suggested that an mGlu2/3 agonist, LY354740, was effective in the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder. Also, some researchers have suggested that activation of mGluR4 could be used as a treatment for Parkinson's disease. Most recently, Group I mGluRs, have been implicated in the pathogenesis of Fragile X, a type of autism, and a number of studies are currently testing the therapeutic potential of drugs that modify these receptors. There is also growing evidence that group II metabotropic glutamate receptor agonists may play a role in the treatment of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is associated with deficits in cortical inhibitory interneurons that release GABA and synaptic abnormalities associated with deficits in NMDA receptor function. These inhibitory deficits may impair cortical function via cortical disinhibition and asynchrony. The drug LY354740 (also known as Eglumegad, an mGlu2/3 agonist) was shown to attenuate physiologic and cognitive abnormalities in animal and human studies of NMDA receptor antagonist and serotonergic hallucinogen effects, supporting the subsequent clinical evidence of efficacy for an mGluR2/3 agonist in the treatment of schizophrenia. The same drug has been shown to interfere in the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, with chronic oral administration of this drug leading to markedly reduced baseline cortisol levels in bonnet macaques (Macaca radiata); acute infusion of LY354740 resulted in a marked diminution of yohimbine-induced stress response in those animals. LY354740 has also been demonstrated to act on the metabotropic glutamate receptor 3 (GRM3) of human adrenocortical cells, downregulating aldosterone synthase, CYP11B1, and the production of adrenal steroids (i.e. aldosterone and cortisol).
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Updated 2019 Version Pet Nail Clippers for Small Animals, Best Cat Nail Clippers Claw Toenail Trimmer, Professional Home Grooming Kit for Cats Dog Bunny Rabbit Bird Puppy Kitten Ferret Kitty
Updated 2019 Version Pet Nail Clippers for Small
Monochef -Just for you! We always provide the best product JUST FOR YOU, get a better choice from Monochef, get a better life! 1, Trim your dogs every two weeks is necessary 1), Long and curve toenail will affect the pet's walking. 2), To protect your furniture and floors from scratching. 3), To protect your kids from hurting accidently during playing. 4), Long toenail will easy to hide dirt or bacteria. 2, Tips for clipping: 1). Suggest to do the trimming after shower, the nails will be softer for easier clipping 2). Make your dog/cat get familiar with the nail trimmer by touching before clipping. 3). Fix the palm by your hand, gently pinch the claw. 4). Confirm the correct site to clip, be careful of the blood vessel inside the nail, just cut the curve claw part that about 0.12inch length. 5). During the whole trimming process, you can give your pet a treat or massage to make them relax. 6). Don't forget to use the nail file to grind deburring until it become smooth. 3, Specification Material: Premium stainless steel+ environmental PP Nail Clipper: 3.9*2.5 inch Nail File: 5.52*0.59 inch Weigh (file+ clipper):0.7 oz 4, Package -1 * nail clipper -1 * nail file
- Color: flat blade
- Brand: monochef
- ASIN: B07DNV5ZB7
- UPC: 192687975464
Kaytee Pro-Nail Trimmer
Pet Nail Clippers for Small Animals - Best Cat Nail Clippers & Claw Trimmer for Home Grooming Kit - Professional Grooming Tool for Tiny Dog Cat Bunny Rabbit Bird Puppy Kitten Ferret - Ebook Guide
Pet Nail Clippers for Small Animals - Best
There Are Lots of Reasons Why Professionals Choose Our Pet Paws Nail Trimmer ★ These innovative dog toenail clippers by SHINY PET can be used as a bird nail trimmer, a pair of nail clippers for small dogs or as nail clippers for cats. ★ The blades of dog nail trimmer are made out of stainless steel, while the handle is made out of eco-friendly plastic and finished with an anti-slip coating. ★ Our pet nail scissors can be used on just about any small animal, including bunny rabbits, ferrets, hamsters, birds, hedgehog, parrot, guinea pigs, gerbils, chinchilla, iguana, lizard, chicken, rat and so on. ★ Includes a FREE download of our e-book which walks you through the pet nail trimming process so that you can sharpen your pet grooming skills! TOP FEATURES: Sturdy Steel Angled Blades Safe Nail Clipper Head Anti-Slip Green Handle Comfortable Finger Rests Safe, Easy To Use, Renders Clean Cuts with Each & Every Nail Trimming ☆ Our nail trimmers are safe enough to be used either professionally or at home. ☆ The angled edge of the semi-circular steel blade ensures a clean, precise cut. ☆ Featuring a windowed opening, the design of the blade keeps the nail visible. ☆ A super grip handle prevents sliding or slipping while trimming your pet's nails. ☆ No ...
- Color: Green
- Brand: SHINY PET
- ASIN: B06WWJQ5SS
- UPC: 638455883161
CleanHouse Pets Dog and Cat Nail Clippers, with Pet Safety Guard & Lock | Stainless Steel, Very Easy to Use - Best Cat and Dog Nail Trimmers and Pet Clippers for All Animals (Small)
CleanHouse Pets Dog and Cat Nail Clippers, with
CleanHouse Pro Grade Cat and Dog Nail Clippers with Safey Guard: heavy duty pet nail clippers for big dogs to small cats.♛ Safe & Easy to Use! These stainless steel pet nail clippers come with a built in, adjustable, safety guardSimply press the button near blade to release clippers, and start clipping nails, with the guard there to protect your pet's nails!. ♛ Stylish & Effective We're animal lovers (aka amazing people), so we like nice things.So our high end pet nail clippers not only work great, they look cute too. ♛ Great Nail Clippers for Dogs or Cats of Any Size Whether you want small nail clippers for cats, or a large nail clippers for dogs, we have you covered. ♛ LIFETIME WARRANTY Stainless steel base, comfortable grips. These are high end dog and cat nail clippers and we guarantee them for life.Don't love them - we'll give you a full refund, no questions asked.
- Brand: CleanHouse Pets
- ASIN: B07D9CLFYD
- UPC: 602573709481
Pet Republique Professional Cat Nail Clippers - Claw Trimmer for Cat, Kitten, Puppy, Dog, Hamster, Small Breed Animals (Mini Clipper)
Pet Republique Professional Cat Nail Clippers - Claw
90 Days money back guarantee, and 4 years warranty! When you buy any product from the Pet Republique (Seller), we will donate 15% of the profits to the American Animal Rescue Society, where rescued abandoned dogs and cats are homed and loved. So make sure you are purchasing from the Pet Republique (Seller) before pressing the buy box to support our donation and receive the described product. One of the best cat nail clippers on the market. These nail clippers are designed for small breeds: kittens, cats, and small dogs. Works well as large bird nail clippers too. Optimized design as cat nail cilppers for adult cats and dog nail clippers for small dogs. Our thick stainless steel blades is strong and sharp to last for years. These nail clippers are quality controlled during the process of manufacturing. Parts will not loose or fall apart. The non-slip handles and built-in spring provide fast effortless cuts. Apply baby oil to make the quick of the pet's nail visible. If pet's nails are very long, cut off a small amount and wait a week before cutting again. Clear instructions are printed at the back of the nail clippers package. Keep the nail clippers away from children and pets when no adults are supervising. Enter code LZ3ZVEDF at checkout to save an additional 15% on your o...
- Brand: Pet Republique
- ASIN: B01GBSSKVU
- UPC: 641427585383
Cat Nail Clippers with Razor Sharp Blades - Best Pet Nail Clippers for Small Animals - Professional Claw Trimmer for Tiny Dog Cat Kitten Bunny Rabbit Bird Guinea Pigs Ferret Hamsters - Ebook Guide
Cat Nail Clippers with Razor Sharp Blades -
There Are Lots of Reasons Why Professionals Choose Our Pet Paws Nail Trimmer ★ These innovative dog toenail clippers by SHINY PET can be used as a bird nail trimmer, a pair of nail clippers for small dogs or as nail clippers for cats. ★ The blades of dog nail trimmer are made out of stainless steel, while the handle is made out of eco-friendly plastic and finished with an anti-slip coating. ★ Our pet nail scissors can be used on just about any small animal, including bunny rabbits, ferrets, hamsters, birds, hedgehog, parrot, guinea pigs, gerbils, chinchilla, iguana, lizard, chicken, rat and so on. ★ Includes a FREE download of our e-book which walks you through the pet nail trimming process so that you can sharpen your pet grooming skills! TOP FEATURES: ☆ Sturdy Steel Straight Blades ☆ Safe Nail Clipper Head ☆ Anti-Slip Green Handle ☆ Comfortable Finger Rests Safe, Easy To Use, Renders Clean Cuts with Each & Every Nail Trimming ★ Our nail trimmers are safe enough to be used either professionally or at home. ★ The straight edge of the semi-circular steel blade ensures a clean, precise cut. ★ Featuring a windowed opening, the design of the blade keeps the nail visible. ★ A super grip handle prevents sliding or slipping while trimming your pet's...
- Color: Green
- Brand: SHINY PET
- ASIN: B07GZWGY64
- UPC: 669203987480
The Puppy Professor Pet (Dog, Puppy, Cat, Kitten, Bird, Reptile, Rabbit, Guinea Pig) Small, Compact White Diamond Bit Nail Grinder
The Puppy Professor Pet (Dog, Puppy, Cat, Kitten,
Our nail grinder has been specially designed to deliver a stress free way to trim and shape your pet's nails. Where ordinary clippers risk cutting the quick and leaving your pet traumatized and bleeding, The Puppy Professor Nail Grinder allows for a gentle, quiet alternative. We understand how much product design influences the outcome of a mani-pedi! Our model is lightweight and ergonomically designed to facilitate only the easiest of grooming sessions. It really is the best way to trim, smooth and shape your pet's nails. Though created for dogs of all sizes and nail shapes, The Puppy Professor Nail Grinder is the best option for all of your feathered, scaled or furry friends.
- Color: white
- Brand: The Puppy Professor
- ASIN: B06XRLKXV2
- UPC: 720264930034
Professional Pet Nail Clippers. Pet Nail Clippers & Trimmer for Small Animals:Cat Dog Rabbit Bird Puppy Kitten Ferret Gerbils Rat. Cat Claw Clippers Scissors & Nail Cutter
Professional Pet Nail Clippers. Pet Nail Clippers &
Attention Information Never Cut to the Quick! The pink part of a pet's nail, called the quick, is where the nerves and blood vessels are. Do NOT cut this sensitive area. Snip only the white part of the claw. It's better to be cautious and cut less of the nail rather than risk cutting this area. If you do accidentally cut the quick, any bleeding can be stopped with a styptic powder or stick. It's a good idea to keep it nearby while you trim. Directions Now trim only the sharp tip of one nail, release your cat's toe and quickly give her a treat. If your cat didn't notice, clip another nail, but don't trim more than two claws in one sitting until your cat is comfortable. Then, reward her with a special treat. A nail-trimming every ten days to two weeks is recommended. Customer reviews are important to us and can help more pet friends to understand this product,If for whatever reason, you don't love this cat nail clipper, just contact us, and we'll arrange a full refund for your order.
- Color: green, black
- Brand: Ruri's
- ASIN: B07BR9TNQX
- UPC: 667797887964
H&H Pets Professional Cat Nail Clipper and Small Breed Nail Clipper Professional Small Breed Claw Clipper, Cat Nail Clipper Small, Essential Grooming Tool
BEAUTYBIGBANG 4Pcs Nail Stamping Plate Animals Theme - Dogs Cats Panda Rabbit Owl Image Plates Nail Art Design Stamping Kit Manicure Template Set
BEAUTYBIGBANG 4Pcs Nail Stamping Plate Animals Theme -
Nail Art Stamping Plate - Included 4PCS BEAUTYBIGBANG nail stamping manicure template set. Stainless Steel Stamping Plate - 4.72in*2.36in, Unique patterns Included rectangle, plaids, stripe, splice, lace lines and so on. Begin Your DIY Fun by yourself - Easily use for both beginners and experienced nail artists, you can do it well by yourself.
- Color: Animals
- Brand: BeautyBigBang
- ASIN: B07M84R55C
Hertzko Electric Pet Nail Grinder Gentle, Painless Paws Grooming, Trimming, Shaping, and Smoothing for Dogs, Cats, Small Animals - Portable & Rechargeable, Includes USB Wire
Living World Animal Nail Trimmer, Small
Living World Animal Nail Trimmer,
Trimming your small pet's nails can't be any more simple. Sharp and precise, the Living World Nail Trimmer allows you to cut your small pet's nails in one smooth stroke. Check nails once a week and trim when necessary. Perfectly sized for rabbits, guinea pigs and ferrets.
- Brand: Living World
- ASIN: B00I44K8O2
- UPC: 080605666177
2 Speed Pet Nail Grinder Electric Nail Filer for Animals USB Rechargeable Paw Trimmer Clipper Pet Claw Grooming Kit for Dogs, Cats, Small Animals
2 Speed Pet Nail Grinder Electric Nail Filer
Upgraded Powerful Motor Easier grinding with professional finer diamond grinder bit and powerful motor, giving the pet a quickly Trimming without struggling and yelping. Sweet Color and Bijou Look Special color and face. As small and light as a baseball that it'll sit almost unnoticed in any pocket or bag. Quiet operation without Scared It combines low noise with powerful motor, quiet operation within 60 db, giving your pet a nail trimming with ease. Mobile Portable Design Unique USB charging port, compatible with Android smart phones, tablets and portable chargers to solve the problem of no power on the go. Tips: -It is recommended that the sharp nail or long wear parts should be grinded firstly. But in order to avoid causing bleeding, please don't grind too much if it is the first time for the pet to use nail grinder. -It should not be grinded over 5 seconds for pet's safe. Please be careful to adjust the grooming angle to polish pet nails. Exquisite Box Package Includes: -1 x rechargeable pet nail grinder -1 x nail clipper -1 x Nail File -2 x openings ports -1 x USB Charging Cable -1 X User Manual
- Brand: ENJOY PET
- ASIN: B07MMZYZ5D
Glendan Professional Cat Nail Clippers Pet Nail Trimmers-Suitable for Cat, Puppy, Ferrets, Birds and Even Rabbits,Small Animals Nails Clippers Scissors Tool(Mini Clipper)
Glendan Professional Cat Nail Clippers Pet Nail Trimmers-Suitable
Helps Pets Avoid The Pain, Protect Your PetWhen pet's nails begin to grow too long, they can start to cause pain in their paw pads, keep them from being active, or even scratch up furniture or floors. Our nail trimmer lets you cut back to just the right length so you can maintain your pet's nail health without hitting the wick! Features:1. Our thick stainless steel blades is strong is manufactured with High grade, Sharp, Stainless Steel Blade which ensures that you never do uneven cuts and will stay sharp for stress-free, smooth, quick.2. The pet nail clipper is safely outfitted with a safety stop blade to ensure you do not hurt your pet and greatly reduces the risk of deep cuts leading to bleeding or serious injury.3. Our Pet Nail Scissors Handles feature an ergonomically designed rubber handle for a comfortable grip. The sharp rustless stainless steel one-cut blades are perfect for nails of all shapes and sizes.4.Our dog nail clippers Suitable for Cat, Puppy, Small, Medium, & Large Dog, Large Bird Claws Nails Trimmer Tool. Operation method:1.Hold the pet's claws and then gently hold down the top of the nail and let your pet's nails come out.2.Use your nail clippers to cut the pet's nails, Please carefully not to cut the blood vessels and nerves, if not carefully cut into the bl...
- Color: White+Blue
- Brand: Glendan
- ASIN: B0753LV89Y
- UPC: 716045964084
Dremel 7300-PT 4.8V Pet Nail Grooming Tool
Dremel 7300-PT 4.8V Pet Nail Grooming
The use of dog nail clippers can be painful for your pet. Dremel simplifies pet grooming for owners and animals with this cordless Pet Nail Rotary Tool. This kit allows you to quickly, easily and safely trim your pet's nails. The rechargeable, battery-powered device uses a 60-grit sanding drum to comfortably trim toenails in a manner that is designed to be harmless and humane. With easy to follow instructions included in the kit, you'll be grooming pet nails in minutes.
- Color: Grey
- Brand: Dremel
- ASIN: B003TU0XG4
- UPC: 787721796374
LEKADOL Dog Nail Clipper with Safety Guard Pet Nail Scissors Nail File Set for Medium Large Animals, Grooming Pet Claw Trimmer Tool Nail Cutter, Red
LEKADOL Dog Nail Clipper with Safety Guard Pet
Your pets happiness and health are our most important goals. When pet's nails begin to grow too long, it will affect the pet's walking, and easy to hide dirt or bacteria, and they can start to cause pain in their paw pads, keep them from being active, or even scratch up furniture or floors. This cats nail trimmer lets you cut back to just the right length so you can maintain your pet's nail health without hitting the wick! Also could protect you and your kids from hurting accidently during play with the pets.About this Pet Nail Clippers Set-- Protective Guard: Prevent from "over-cutting".-- Safety Lock: For secure and easy storage.-- Semi-circular angled blade: You see precisely where you're cutting, no guessing. -- PP Environmental Texture:Ergonomically designed non-slip handles provide a secure and comfortable hold.-- Stainless Steel :Sharpness blades are made of stainless steel for cleaner, faster and easier toenail clipping. -- Multifunction: It both suitable for medium and large breeds pet.Product SpecificationName: Pet Nail Clippers SetColour: Red + BlackMaterial: Stainless steel, PPClippers' Size: 16 * 5 cmFiles' Size: 14* 1.5 cmNet Wt.: 126gUse: Trimming pet nailsApplicable: Cats, Dogs etcPackage List: 1*Pet Nail Clipper1*Nail FilePet Nail Scissors Set Usage1. Wash the p...
- Brand: LEKADOL
- ASIN: B07PWWZNK1
- UPC: 741663332601
Boshel Cat Nail Clippers - Professional Cat Nail Trimmer - Safe, Sharp Angled Blade Pet Nail Trimmer & Pet Nail Clippers - Non-Slip Handle Cat Nail Scissors - Cat Claw Clippers For Small Dogs And Cats
Boshel Cat Nail Clippers - Professional Cat Nail
Pet nail trimming and grooming made safe and easy for you and your loved ones. “But. . I could’ve done that at home by myself” it’s a thought we’ve all had when we see how easy it is for Veterinarians to clip the nails of our pets. It usually goes away when you think of doing it yourself and you start to fear of hurting them. . . . And you find yourself the next time right back at the vets OFFICE. . . Well, we have great news for you: With the boshel sharp stainless steel Small pet nail trimmers you’ll be able to cut your pets nails all by yourself easily quality: These nail clippers are constructed with high grade stainless steel for durability. safe The nail trimmer is outfitted with a sharp angled semi-circular open blade for a better experience. The unique design gives you full visibility of what you’re cutting. The unique design and the sharpness ensures nice even cuts by allowing you trim with just one cut comfort: The nail clipper is outfitted with a comfortable non-slip handle for safe and easy grip. with this design it will be comfortable to hold for longer periods of time the non-slip handle will help you avoid accidental nicks and cuts. Ideal for smaller breeds: this BOSHEL nail trimmer is perfect and safe to use on kittens, cats, small dogs, rabbit, guin...
- Color: Deep Blue
- Brand: BOSHEL
- ASIN: B01M3YU74A
- UPC: 685450677431
UR SUGAR 5Pcs Nail Art Stamping Plate Kit -Spring Series Flower Animal Pet Dream Cather Butterfly Star Various Natural Patterns for Manicure Print
UR SUGAR 5Pcs Nail Art Stamping Plate Kit
Item Description: 100% new retail Size: 12.5cm*6.5cm Package Contents : 5pcs UR SUGAR Nail Art Stamping Templates Instructions: The plate is shielded by a thin transparent protective film, please remove the film before use, so that the nail polish can be transferred by the stamper. Feature : 1. Apply base coat or regular polish on the nail. 2. Apply the nail polish to desired image within a plate. (Recommended: Use the Solid Color Nail Polish, so that the texture will be thicker than other nail polish) 3. Make a scraper leaned over 45 degrees and scrape excessive polish off quickly and strongly from inside to outside. 4. Immediately press the stamper with a gentle rolling motion to pick up the design. The image is transferred on the stamp. 5. Stamp the image on your nail with a gentle rolling motion. The image is transferred on your nail. 6. Repeat the above steps for all of your nails. 7. After stamping, apply top coat for lasting wear. Please notice that all products added are exclusively sold by CoulorButtons,shipped and distributed by CoulorButtons.
- Color: Christmas Plate
- Brand: CoulorButtons
- ASIN: B07GVCV6T4
- UPC: 762743196067
Wahl Professional Animal Pet, Dog, and Cat Ultimate Nail Grinder Trimming Kit (#5973)
Wahl Professional Animal Pet, Dog, and Cat Ultimate
Wahl is pleased to release the Ultimate Nail Grinder. Effortlessly grind away unwanted material to achieve the short, rounded nails so desired by the dog show world with the Ultimate professional electric powered nail grinder. Lightweight, ergonomic design with finger grips for added comfort. Variable speed allows power level to effectively and safely grind nails.
- Brand: Wahl Professional Animal
- ASIN: B016AJEFGO
- UPC: 043917597300
Kate and Laurel Sylvie Elephant Black and White Portrait Framed Canvas Wall Art by Simon Te Tai, 18x24 Gray
Kate and Laurel Sylvie Elephant Black and White
Bring the beauty of nature in its pure form and display your love of animals in your home with this striking elephant portrait. Printed and framed in the USA in Waunakee, Wisconsin, this framed floating canvas art will be a pleasure to look at every day in your living room, bedroom, nursery, or any room in the home. Printed on gallery wrapped canvas and framed with a gray polystyrene frame, this animal wall art has two hangers already attached to the black MDF back for easy wall display. The outer dimensions are 24 inches tall by 18 inches wide by 1.5 inches deep. Artist Biography: Simon Te (Russia) is a new artist, just getting his start 2 years ago. He is a self taught photographer and graphic designer. It's been very hard work, but he has come a long way with tutorials and practice. Simon draws inspiration from contemporary art and the freedom of expression. He likes the simplicity of lines and forms created by nature itself. Simon is anticipating an exciting future ahead.
- Color: Gray
- Brand: Kate and Laurel
- ASIN: B01N21VN3X
- UPC: 032231536836
YAVOCOS Professional Dog Electric Claw Nail Grooming Tool Pet Toenail Paws Grinder Clipper Cutter Auto Pedicure Equipment for Animal
YAVOCOS Professional Dog Electric Claw Nail Grooming Tool
1.only one control button, easy to operat, diamond grinding, durable, and will not hurt the dog, it's the ideal grooming tools for your dears! 2.This product offers an effective way to keep your pet's nails neat and trim., which is safer than nail clipper to trim pet nails, reducing the risk of clipping the claws too short or hurt pets. 3.It works quite well. The head spins nice and fast. Super mute motor, pet are no longer afraid. 4.Works on all breeds of cats and dogs with a powerful speed design. Choose the suitable port for your pet based on the pet's size and characteristics of their nails. 5.Rotary tool provides a safe, effective, less stressful alternative to clipping. Its stable and cool performance provides you incomparable comfort experience. Just share your easy grooming. Package included: 1x Pet Nail Grinder 1x Chinese user manual
- Brand: YAVOCOS
- ASIN: B07BLMM255
- UPC: 699935343292
OMORC Dog Clippers, Low Noise Dog Grooming Kit Rechargeable Cordless Dog Shaver Pet Clippers Professional Dog Hair Trimmer with 4 Comb Guides Scissors Nail Kits for Dogs Cats and Other Animals Silver
OMORC Dog Clippers, Low Noise Dog Grooming Kit
Product Description： Do you have a long haired pet that hates to be brush? Does your dog hair clippers get stuck and stop working after use for a few times? Does your pet shears sound noisy and vibrate a lot so as to get your pet overly stressed? Whether you're a professional groomer or a beginner, Omorc pet clippers will make you stay away from all these problems! And it fits for both large and small animlls More Safe to Use Each blade of Omorc pet clippers for dogs is ergonomically designed and the scissors is also well rounded on its head to prevent any injury for both pets and men, thus you can safely trim your sweethearts from different angles and without any fear of hurting them. High Quality Made of first-rate material with technical structure, this anti-slip dog grooming clipper is very handy, durable, portable and looks pretty chic and exquisite in appearance. It's works well and will make you do the grooming job more conveniently and easily. Wide Application Whether you have a dog with coarse and curly fur, or a cat with thick and silky hair, this functional tool will help you do the grooming very well. Perfectly used for dogs, cats, rabbits, horses, as well as Schnauzer, Goldendoodle, Shih Tzus, Labradors, etc. Specification Material: Anti-wear brass Ch...
- Color: Silver
- Brand: OMORC
- ASIN: B07QXZ3WB3
- UPC: 796826511072
Andis 2-Speeds Cord/Cordless Animal Nail Grinder Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Battery
Andis 2-Speeds Cord/Cordless Animal Nail Grinder Rechargeable Lithium-Ion
2-Speeds – normal & Turbo to quickly trim your pet’s nails lightweight and ergonomic design is great for small or large pets Whisper-quiet operation won’t scare pets rechargeable lithium-ion battery – 3-hour run time cord/Cordless operation so it’s ready for use when you are multi-function cap can be used on small or large pets equipped with a fine Grit grinding stone; also includes premium finishing stone 5-piece kit includes: Cordless nail Grinder charging adapter multi-function protective cap grinding stone finishing stone rechargeable lithium-ion battery – 3-hour run time for larger, thicker nails
- Brand: Andis
- ASIN: B07B9Q589F
- UPC: 040102659157
Oster Professional Corded Pet Nail Grinder Kit, Variable Speed (078129-650-000)
Oster Professional Corded Pet Nail Grinder Kit, Variable
Masterfully groom your dog’s nails with the Oster Professional Corded Pet Nail Grinder Kit. Equipped with a variable-speed motor, this electric nail grinder provides the power needed to precisely file pets’ nails--even the large, tough ones of big dogs. Its Whisper-Quiet, low-torque motor minimizes noise output to help keep animals calm during the grooming session. Designed for ultra-safe operation, the nail grinder features finger grips for improved control and safer operation. It comes with everything you need for professional nail grinding results, including two 60-grit grooming bands, two 100-grit grooming bands, a grooming drum, a grinding stone, a power supply, and an instructions manual.
- Color: Blue
- Brand: Oster
- ASIN: B0002DHH42
- UPC: 003426440948
Allary CAT and Small Dog Nail Clippers
Cat Nail Clippers for Small Animals,Cat Claw Clippers Scissors & Nail Cutter -Professional Grooming Cat Claw Trimmer for Cats
Cat Nail Clippers for Small Animals,Cat Claw Clippers
★ QUALITY: ☆These cat nail clippers are constructed with High Grade Stainless Steel for guaranteed durability. ★ SAFE & CLEAN CUTS: ☆ The cat nail trimmer is outfitted with a sharp Angled Semi-circular open blade for a better experience. ☆ The unique design gives you full visibility of what you're cutting. ☆ The unique design and the sharpness ensures nice even cuts by allowing you trimmer with just one cut ★ COMFORT: ☆The cat nail clipper is outfitted with a comfortable non-slip handle for safe and easy grip. ☆With this design it will be comfortable to hold for longer periods of time. ☆ The non-slip handle will help you avoid accidental nicks and cuts. ★ IDEAL FOR SMALLER ANIMAL: ☆This nail trimmer is perfect and safe to use on Kittens, Cats, Small dogs, Rabbit, Guinea pigs, Hamsters, Birds and for most other small animals. ★ PET PARENTS APPROVED ★ PROFESSIONAL GROOMING CAT CLAW TRIMMER★ Now you know it's possible, Start caring yourself for your pet's comfort! Add to cart and order yours today! Material: TPE / PP & Stainless Steel Item Size (L x W): 3.76 X 2.55 in Item Weight: 30g / 1.0oz HOW TO USE: Pets with white nails have a visible pink area of the nail called the quick, simply cut at a 45 degree angle and avoid cutting into the quick. For pets...
- Color: Green
- Brand: MACOIOR
- ASIN: B077W67V6V
- UPC: 743790240644
cyrico Cat Nail Clippers Pet Nail Clippers for Small Animals with Free Nail File-Professional Small Breed Claw Clippers Claw Toenail Trimmer for Cats Puppy Birds Rabbits Hamsters Ferrets (Black/Green)
cyrico Cat Nail Clippers Pet Nail Clippers for
Time to trim your kitty's nail and prevent them from damaging furniture upholstery. cyrico cat nail clippers are designed to suit your cat's needs and are of professional quality. Made with high-quality stainless steel, the cat nail trimmer offers an easy way to help maintain the health of your furry friends.Sturdy Steel Angled and Sharp Blades.The cutting blade is beveled on each of the cutters.Sharp blades of this cat nail clippers stress-free ensure a clean cut and last a long time There is a safety lock to keep the blades tucked away when not in use. Anti-slip handles add even more safety for your cat. The pet nail clipper set itself doesn't make any sound. Compared with electric grinders whose noise will make your kitty nervous, this cat nail clipper are traditional,cost-effective and always get the job done with as little struggle as possibleHow to use cat nail clipper scissors trimmerGently pull the safety lock upward, the scissors will open all the way.Slightly press cat's pad to have claw extend. Find the blood vessel:a pink tint in each of the the cat's nail.Cut above that. The sharp scissors will do the trick quickly and cleanly, so that there is no tugging on nails and cat struggles less. Tips: Have some treats handy or try to do it when your cat has been sleeping or...
- Color: Black/Green
- Brand: cyrico
- ASIN: B07TCZ9YHR
- UPC: 714253108634
Dog Nail Clippers and Trimmer By Boshel - With Safety Guard to Avoid Over-cutting Nails & Free Nail File - Razor Sharp Blades - Sturdy Non Slip Handles - For Safe, Professional At Home Grooming
gonicc Dog Nail Clippers and Trimmer - Razor Sharp Blades, Safety Guard to Avoid Overcutting, Free Nail File - Start Professional & Safe Pet Grooming at Home
gonicc Dog Nail Clippers and Trimmer - Razor
Attention Please:We offer the lifetime warranty, if there are any quality problem, please contact us with our Customer Care E-mail [email protected], we will provide a replacement to you ASAP.Product introduction: - Product Name: Professional Pets Nail Trimmer - Model No.: NT-1001 - Bladder Material: Hardened Stainless Steel - Handle Material: TPE & PP Green material - Colour: Blue & Black Designs and Features - Sharp blades are made of high quality stainless. - Unlock protection prevent children from using it. - Free Hidden Nail File conveniently stored in handle will allow you to polish sharp nails to perfection. - Safety stop blade greatly reduces the risk of cutting nails too short. - Ergonomically designed non-slip handles are strong,lightweight,and comfortable. Trimming Tip - Hold the paw securely while trimming the nails.Quickly cut off the top of the nail with a single stroke. - Sure the handle at the bottom of the file to make the nail smooth. - Do not cut off too much each time.If the pet's nails are very long,cut off a small amount and wait about a week to ten days before cutting again.Repeat every week or ten days until nails are at desired length. Warning - Do not use for other purpose except for pets. - Keep beyond children's touch. OUR SERVICE - 100 % Satisfacti...
- Color: Blue
- Brand: gonicc
- ASIN: B075N83693
JW Pet Company GripSoft Cat Nail Clippers Non-Slip Handle One Size Fits All
JW Pet Company GripSoft Cat Nail Clippers Non-Slip
The JW Pet GripSoft cat nail clippers help provide safer and more comfortable trimming. The short length of the cat claw trimmer allows ultimate precision and control. The small blades of the pet nail clipper allow for safer and more precise trimming. The blades also provide quick and easy clipping for a stress-free experience. Featuring a rubber non-slip handle, the cat nail clipper provides pet parents with a comfortable and stable grip. The GripSoft cat nail clippers are available in one size that conveniently fits all breeds and sizes of cats and can also be used as kitten nail clippers.
- Color: Blacks & Grays
- Brand: JW Pet
- ASIN: B0002DK09G
- UPC: 618940650263
BEAUTYBIGBANG 4Pcs Nail Stamping Plate Summer Animal Theme - Flamingo Unicorn Owl Tiger Image Patterns Nail Art Design Stamp Kit Manicure Template Set
Millers Forge Stainless Steel Dog Nail Clipper, Plier Style
Millers Forge Stainless Steel Dog Nail Clipper, Plier
Durable plier-style pet nail clippers must have for every groomer. Quality-made of stainless steel to withstand years of use. Comfortable red plastic grips and a spring-loaded cutting mechanism for more positive cutting action. Built-in guard can be moved into position to prevent the overcutting of the nails and there is a lock to hold the trimmers closed for storage and maintenance. Nail Clippers can be used for just about all sizes of dog, except very large breeds. Measures 8-inch length by 2-4/5-inch width by 1/2-inch height.
- Color: -
- Brand: Millers Forge
- ASIN: B0002ARUKQ
- UPC: 885156357099
Vankcp Over The Door Single Storage Hook Hanger & Back Door Organizer Rack, No Need Nail, Animals Design, Use in Home and Office, 3 PCS (White)
Vankcp Over The Door Single Storage Hook Hanger
✯ Maximum load: 6.6kg ✯ Width 2 inches ( 55 mm ) ✯ Height 6 inches ( 165 mm ) ✯ Suitable a hang thickness of 1-1.5 inches ✯ Suitable for closet, behind the door, in the bathroom and bedroom, in the office or anywhere you want to hang it up. ➤ NOTE: As the surface of the product using high-temperature baking process requires a fixed wire rotation, can not 100% paint in place, there will be a paint hanging point black spots.
- Color: White
- Brand: Vankcp
- ASIN: B079HHJXG6
- UPC: 694090240349
Andis Pet Animal Nail Clipper, White/Green (65700)
Andis Pet Animal Nail Clipper, White/Green
The Andis Nail Clipper - Pet Grooming Tool is ideal for all size dogs. It has heavy-duty, stainless-steel blades and spring loaded action. The blades come sharpened and heat treated for strength and optimum cutting. It has an anti-slip, easy grip handle for safe and comfortable grooming and a safety stop to prevent over-cutting. Safety lock on handle for safe storage.
- Color: Green
- Brand: Andis
- ASIN: B0083WXSS8
- UPC: 740023305101
Resco Deluxe Dog Nail Clippers, Original Pet Nail Trimmer, Made in USA, Large, Yellow
Resco Deluxe Dog Nail Clippers, Original Pet Nail
Resco Dog Nail Clippers are the professional's choice for nail trimming. Since 1937 Resco’s Dog Nail Clippers have been used by Groomers and Veterinarians worldwide and now they're available to you! What sets Resco apart from the competition is their solid steel construction, easily replaceable cutting blades, and commitment to your pet’s health. Resco guarantees the cleanest cut in the industry – every time. What does a replaceable cutting blade mean for you? No more nail trimmer purchases! With your Resco Dog Nail Trimmer you’ll only need to replace your blade if it gets dull with the PF0400 or PF0440 Resco cutting blade replacement kit. Don’t be fooled by cheap imitations, Resco is the only American-Made, clinical grade, American-steel constructed nail trimmer on the market. Don’t believe us? Just ask your Vet! Choose the original, choose Resco.
- Color: Yellow
- Brand: Resco
- ASIN: B0010O7882
- UPC: 802688875099
Oster Gentle Paws Less Stress Dog and Cat Nail Grinder, 2 Speed (078129-600-000)
Oster Gentle Paws Less Stress Dog and Cat
Groom your pet’s nails quickly and without causing stress using the Oster Gentle Paws Less Stress Dog and Cat Nail Grinder. This powerful 2-speed pet nail grinder features a cordless battery-powered design that provides precise control and operates quietly for stress-free filing. Simply select the opening that is best for your pet’s nail size and begin to gently file each nail. An adjustable safety guard helps ensure that you don’t trim too far and captures filings to minimize mess. And thanks to the included coarse stone, fine band, and two coarse bands, you’ll have everything you need to effectively trim your pet’s nails. This versatile animal nail grinder works on all breeds of cats and dogs.
- Color: Blue
- Brand: Oster
- ASIN: B002JM0DOA
- UPC: 885121669882
Remedy and Recovery Professional Groomer's Styptic Powder for Pets, 1.5-Ounce
Remedy and Recovery Professional Groomer's Styptic Powder for
Cardinal Styptic Powder will quickly stop bleeding due to clipping nails or wings, or for minor, superficial cuts to the skin such as nicks from shaving. It is not recommended for use on deep cuts that require stitches or on severe wounds or in body cavities. Manufactured in the USA in our 100% Solar Powered Facility!
- Brand: Remedy + Recovery
- ASIN: B004PJ55KC
- UPC: 012104426150
INVENHO Pet Nail Grinder Electric Paw Trimmer Clipper Small Medium Large Dogs Cats Portable & Rechargeable Gentle Painless Paws Grooming Trimming Shaping Smoothing
INVENHO Pet Nail Grinder Electric Paw Trimmer Clipper
INVENHO Pet Nail Grinder by for gentle and painless paws grooming, trimming, shaping, and smoothing for dogs, cats, rabbits and birds – portable & rechargeable, includes USB wire pet nail Grinder kit is a easy gripped, light-weighted, and friendly design with a power Engine which is perfect for grinding you pet With dog nail clippers and file to help you to trim their claws smoothly. You can trim your pets nails professional at home without any stress. how to use: * choose a proper port according to your pet's nail characteristic. * when starting grinding, one hand holds the nail Grinder, meanwhile the other Hand holds the pet claws and puts the nail into a port gently for no longer than 5 seconds each time. * take off The grinder cover after trimming, cleaning The grinder wheel surface with an eraser or cloth to remove the nail powder. parameter: - Color: White - Material: ABS - size: 5.79 x 1.2 x 1.2 inch - charging time: 5 hours - running time: 6 hours package including: 1 x Pet nail Grinder 2 x grinding wheel 1 x USB wire 1 x Manual if you have any question or suggestions, please feel free to ask below or contact us. We personally read and answer Our costumer Emails within 12 hours. at last, thanks for coming to dogjog and enjoy your shopping.
- Color: White
- Brand: INVENHO
- ASIN: B07GFBVC98
- UPC: 751940144186
Zen Clipper Pet Nail Trimmers for Kittens, Birds Other Small Animals - The Worry-Free Nail Scissors -Unique Blade Clips The Tip Not The Quick - Stress/Injury-Free Nail Cutting and Grooming - 2m
Zen Clipper Pet Nail Trimmers for Kittens, Birds
If you are you worried about clipping your Pet's nails at home or are tired of expensive visits to the groomer, then you need the Zen Clipper: the worry-tree nail trimmer. Designed with you and your pet in mind, the uniquely designed conical blade only allows a predetermined amount of your pet's nail to be clipped, reducing the risk of you cutting the sensitive quick. The funnel-style design removes anxiety from the nail-cutting process, while providing effortless precision.Unlike other conventional clippers, the sharp, stainless-steel blade is designed to shear your pet's nail and not crush it. This leaves a clean-cut, with no damage to your pet's nail or need for you to file the nail. The Zen Clipper creates a stress-free nail-trimming experience for both you and your precious pet. The Zen Clipper comes in various sizes designed for a wide range of pets.Ergonomically designed with a cushioned, non-slip handle for your ease and convenience, the clippers will make a long-lasting addition to your pet grooming supplies.The Zen Clipper is proudly designed and assembled in the USA. A complimentary sizing guide is included with your purchase. Why not try other Zen Clipper sizes for your other pets or buy as a present for your pet loving friends and family.
- Brand: Zen Clipper
- ASIN: B07BSS6CYW
- UPC: 858506003007
Biutee 19pcs Nail Stamp Plates set 15 plate 1Stamper 2Scraper 1storage bag Nails Art Stamping Plate Scraper Stamper Set Leaves Flowers Animal Nail plate Template Image Plate
Biutee 19pcs Nail Stamp Plates set 15 plate
About BiuteeNail plate: Item Type:Template Template Type:Stamping Size:12cm*6cm Material:304 Stainless Steel Weight:23g Designs:Classical Stripes Leaves Flowers Animals Star Musical Instruments About Biutee storage bag: Material: PU Leather Size: 9*13.5cm Color: blue、pink、black、rose (Random Color.) Usetage:24 pcs nail stamping plates storage About Biutee Stamper + Scraper set: Quantity: 1Pcs Biutee stamper + 2pcs Biutee scraper Stamper height:6.2cm Stamper head diameter : 2.8cm Material: Silicone & plastic Color: Random Color. Package: 15 x Biutee nail plates 1 x Biutee storage bag 1 x Biutee Stamper 2xBiutee Scraper
- Color: Nail Stamping Plates
- Brand: Biutee
- ASIN: B072BYX2HS
- UPC: 698545373989 | <urn:uuid:2aeda99c-6409-495f-b4fe-0610106605ba> | CC-MAIN-2019-35 | http://livesaler.com/small-animal-nail.html | 2019-08-24T15:29:09Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027321160.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20190824152236-20190824174236-00230.warc.gz | en | 0.843881 | 9,867 |
SPECIAL SECTION: GREEN WARS
Year : 2018 | Volume
| Issue : 2 | Page : 105-113
Under Pressure: Conceptualising Political Ecologies of Green Wars
Bram Buscher1, Robert Fletcher2
1 Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University, The Netherlands; and Department of Geography, Environmental Management & Energy Studies, University of Johannesburg, South Africa
2 Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University, The Netherlands
Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University, The Netherlands; and Department of Geography, Environmental Management & Energy Studies, University of Johannesburg
Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None
|Date of Web Publication||11-Apr-2018|
| Abstract|| |
This article introduces the special issue on 'Political Ecologies of Green Wars' and the research papers comprising it. While state-authorised and state-directed forms of violence in support of conservation have been evident in many places for quite some time, the current scope, scale and rhetorical justification of the violent defence of biodiversity seem quite unprecedented in the history of global conservation. We, therefore, ask whether and how the term green wars may be appropriate to describe this new intensity of violence and the changes in environmental governance it signifies. In bringing together a number of important recent discussions around green grabbing, green militarisation/violence, green economy, neoliberal conservation and biopower, amongst others, the special issue emphasises the increasingly central role of environmental and conservation concerns within the global political economy as a whole. In the process, it also points towards an overarching conceptual framing for understanding these conjoined dynamics in terms of an 'intensification of pressure' precipitated by the combined yet uneven magnification and integration of power and capital within the world today. Consequently, we argue that the concept of green wars potentially heralds the new twenty- first century 'real-politik' of the centrality of violence and conflict both to the neoliberal political economy and to environmental conservation, and their integrated socio-ecological manifestations and effects.
Keywords: green violence, conservation, political ecology, intensification, political economy
|How to cite this article:|
Buscher B, Fletcher R. Under Pressure: Conceptualising Political Ecologies of Green Wars. Conservat Soc 2018;16:105-13
| Introduction: “the Mother of All Wars”|| |
Hotspots, a 2008 film documenting Conservation International (CI) campaigns in defence of biodiversity, claims that its subject constitutes “The Mother of all Wars.”1 In this overtly sensationalistic portrayal such rhetoric can be excused as hyperbolic, yet conservation policy and programming in many places increasingly seem to be taking this metaphor seriously. Along with a dramatic rise in global wildlife crime over the past decade and increasing worries about a sixth mass extinction event (Kolbert 2014; Ceballos et al. 2017), conservation actors have intensified the use of military tactics, weaponry and even military personnel to patrol protected areas (PAs) against incursion and to guard endangered species. A quickly growing body of research has begun to document this trend, characterising it as “green militarisation” and “green violence” (Duffy 2014; Lunstrum 2014; Duffy et al. 2015; Büscher and Ramutsindela 2016; Kelly and Ybarra 2016). The growth in physical violence has been accompanied by a rise in violent rhetoric, sometimes advocating extreme forms of punishment for those committing wildlife crimes (Büscher 2016; Lunstrum 2017). We have also witnessed the increasing incorporation of such dynamics within overarching efforts to wage war on “terrorism” and address other issues of global geopolitics by conventional military forces (Duffy 2016).
In one of the latest salvoes in this trend, Niall McCann, Director of Conservation for the non-profit organisation National Park Rescue 2, argues that “The extinction of elephants and rhino and of untold other species is almost unconscionable, and yet, as poaching levels remain so devastatingly high, it is becoming a more realistic prospect as every year goes by. We are not at the eleventh hour, the eleventh hour has gone”.3 As a result of this imminent threat, McCann contends, “without strict regulation, uncontrolled bushmeat hunting will see many communities poach every living thing out of the wild, leaving nothing for future generations”.4 This leads him to argue that professional militarisation entailing violent anti-poaching is the only realistic way forward to save wildlife. McCann and National Park Rescue are obviously not alone in this. From other non-governmental organisations (NGOs) including Big Life and the International Anti-Poaching Foundation to states like Botswana to celebrity elites such as British Princes Charles and William as well as Tom Hardy 5, many actors are now convinced that the situation is so dire that only tough violent measures can help turn the tide. Backing Botswana's shoot-to-kill anti-poaching policy, even scholars such as Mogomotsi and Madigele (2017: 54) believe “parks are war zones and that rules and principles of war ought to be implemented.” The list goes on and on.
State-authorised and -directed forms of violence in support of conservation have been evident in many places for quite some time (Peluso 1993; Neumann 1998). The use of the term “war” in relation to conservation is also nothing new (Leakey and Morell 2001). Important furthermore is to emphasise that many actors in conservation feel highly uncomfortable with the current trends and indeed resist it (Annecke and Masubelele 2016), hence showing the trend is not straightforward. Yet the current scope, scale, and rhetorical justification of violent defence of biodiversity seem quite unprecedented in the history of global conservation. At the very least, we argue, they point towards a particular moment in time when, apparently, violence seems somehow more justified or ‘necessary’ in addressing the state of contemporary conservation. We therefore ask in this special issue whether and how the term green wars may be appropriate to describe this new intensity of violence and the changes in environmental governance it signifies. This is important as the current dynamics, we have outlined, make the characterisation of conservation as the “mother of all wars” much closer to present reality than the producers of Hotspots likely ever conceived.
| Violent Neoliberal Environments|| |
In invoking the idea of green wars we build on, yet also depart from, the term's previous usage by several different researchers, as discussed below. Our initial conceptualisation is meant to extend Foucault's (2003) inversion of Clausewitz's famous dictum that politics can be seen as war by other means into the arenas of environmental and conservation governance. There are two ‘sides’ to this situation. On the one hand, we observe an intensification of dynamics, such as wildlife crime, resource extraction, land conversion and suchlike, with violent effects on (certain forms of) nature. On the other hand, there is the increasingly violent defence of (certain forms of) nature, so as to ensure its conservation and preservation. In practice, as James Fairhead (2018) argues in his contribution to this issue, this seeming dichotomy is not clear-cut and may hide important nuances and differentiations. Yet, behind the intensification of both ‘sides’ are powerful political dynamics that render this violence very profitable, which in turn may intensify violence still further in a vicious spiral, as commentators have recently warned.6 The implications of these dynamics for conservation and environmental governance are as of yet poorly understood and hence deserve urgent research and attention.
The green wars lens provides an entry-point for this special collection to investigate these dynamics. It also enables us to bring together a number of important recent discussions around green grabbing, green militarisation/violence, green economy, neoliberal conservation and biopower, amongst others. Indeed, we argue that the articles collected here not only help to illuminate points of convergence among these burgeoning bodies of research but also begin to point toward an overarching conceptual framing in which they may conjoin. The concept of green wars, however, cannot be that overarching framing. Rather, we argue in this introduction that the term points to something important ‘within’ an overarching conceptual framing that emphasises the increasingly central role of environmental and conservation concerns within the global political economy as a whole (Büscher and Fletcher 2015; Klein 2017). Below we provide some building blocks for this larger framing by pointing to a global dynamic of an 'intensification of pressure' within a broader context of the combined magnification and integration of power and capital, as suggested by Nealon (2008). Within this framing, we argue, the concept of green wars potentially heralds the new twenty- first century “real-politik” of the centrality of violence and conflict both to the neoliberal political economy and to environmental conservation, and their integrated socio-ecological manifestations and effects.
These relations and their effects, however, are anything but straightforward. They always need to be carefully theorised and empirically clarified, and never simply assumed.7 We therefore want to use the remainder of this introduction to further develop the overall framing around the intensification of pressures and how the green wars concept fit into this. On this basis, we will next analyse how the various articles in the special issue relate to both of these. First, however, we want to situate this discussion within the context of the research concerning conservation policy and practice more generally.
| Theoretical and Empirical Context|| |
The study of conservation by social scientists has become increasingly complicated in recent years alongside the phenomena it addresses.8 Several key strands intersect in evermore intricate ways. The long-standing 'people vs. parks' debate has been transcended by the introduction of a wide variety of new proposals, including a ‘landscape’ approach, neoliberal market-based strategies and several land ‘sharing’ and ‘sparing’ plans, including those for large-scale 're-wilding,' among others. At the heart of this complexity lies a growing, heated debate over the so-called “new conservation,” which aims to move decisively beyond a parks versus people dichotomy to ‘mix’ humans and (more or less wild and domesticated) natures in a global “rambunctious garden” (Marris 2011; Kareiva et al. 2012). This, proponents argue, is the proper form of conservation for the brave new era of the 'Anthropocene.' This “new” or “Anthropocene” conservation has in turn been met with a resurgent round of “neo-protectionism” demanding that conservation and development be separated entirely and coercive protection of remaining protected areas resume (Wuerthner et al. 2014, 2015). E.O. Wilson (2016) and others (e.g., Dinerstein et al. 2017) even argue that half of the planet should be set aside for protected nature reserves.
While debates about the future of conservation policy are heating up, so is the practice of conservation under increasing pressures from extraction, wildlife crime and a global (yet highly uneven) resumption of economic growth in the wake of the financial crisis. Scholars have accordingly started chronicling a dramatic recent rise in green violence and militarisation (Duffy 2014; Lunstrum 2014; Büscher and Ramutsindela 2016; Kelly and Ybarra 2016; Massé and Lunstrum 2016; see also Bigger and Neimark 2017) in defence of biodiversity increasingly valued in explicitly monetary terms as a provider of 'ecosystem services' and repository of 'natural capital' (Sullivan 2013; Büscher et al. 2014; Büscher and Fletcher 2015). As these nascent bodies of research struggle to come to terms with these dynamics, they build on, and advance, several earlier lines of analysis in political ecology and connected fields that addressed related phenomena. This concerns, in particular, an extensive literature on the political ecology of violent conflict that takes issue with the determinism of the popular 1990s environmental security perspective (e.g., Homer-Dixon 1994) to explore how political economic structures of inequality help inform conflict over natural resource exploitation and control (see Peluso and Watts 2001; Benjaminsen 2008; Le Billon 2012).9
To bring these discussions together and move them forward, we believe that the use of the term green wars is apposite. While, as noted above, the concept has been employed in previous research, this was done in different ways and this use has been quite limited thus far. In environmental security literatures, for instance, the term refers to violent conflicts stoked by resource scarcity (Homer-Dixon 1994; Benjamin 2000), while Dutt (2014) recently employs it to describe conflicts over conservation and development generally. Even more recently, Ybarra (2017) re-appropriates the term to focus specifically on the ways in which both extraction and defence of “nature,” variously conceived, are increasingly used to justify the mobilisation of economic resources and the use of violent force in complex, intertwined forms. It is this particular understanding that we build on and extend in this special issue.10
| Towards an Overarching Frame: the Intensification of Pressure|| |
Before introducing the collection of articles in more detail, we want to explore the overarching frame within which we believe they can be situated, and to which the green wars concept points. Green wars, we argue, are the logical (although uneven and not deterministic) outcome of the most recent iteration in the historical intensification of power as conceptualised by Michel Foucault and how it affects both humans and the non-human natural environment. In this we follow Jeffrey Nealon's (2008) thesis that Foucault's understanding of historical power is centrally concerned with a dynamic of intensification. As he argues:
On Foucault's account, power inverts and expands the functioning of “intensity,” turning the concept against its ordinary meaning of maximum bodily feeling and thereby abstracting, expanding, temporising, and allowing the concept to access more sites. If intensity means “especially great concentration or saturation,” the word itself expands along with Foucault's analysis: power has become more maximal not merely in the direct bodily sense (that feelings are said to be intense), but in the more descriptive or physics-related sense: intensity as maximum saturation or penetration within a given field. (Nealon 2008: 33)
Following Foucault, Nealon undertakes a genealogy of the intensification of power from the 17th to the 20th century wherein sovereign, social and disciplinary forms of power are, most recently, not merely succeeded but indeed intensified through what Foucault terms “biopower.” Biopower, as is now well rehearsed, is “an even more intense and saturated form of power that works throughout entire populations and takes on its target, ‘life’, quite directly” (idem: 45). It “is a form of power that ‘infiltrates’ and intensifies all others” (idem: 72) and, crucially, aligns closely with and indeed reinforces the intensification of contemporary cultural, platform and financialised forms of capital accumulation. This leads Nealon to conclude, “Such is the global logic of intensity, then, on both the economic and cultural levels: in a world that contains no “new” territory – no new experiences, no new markets – any system that seeks to expand must by definition intensify its existing resources” (Nealon 2008: 63).
Importantly, as the growing literature shows, this includes nearly ‘all’ potential resources: human, natural, mineral, intellectual, emotional and many more. Or, in the stifling terminology of contemporary hypercapitalism: human capital, natural capital, intellectual capital and numerous other forms of ‘capital’ that all need to be governed as ‘efficiently’ and ‘economically’ as possible in order to contribute to the ultimate goals of economic growth and capital accumulation. This, as Fletcher (2010), Biermann and Mansfield (2014) and others have shown, increasingly includes efforts to ‘optimise’ conservation of biodiversity so that it, too, can take its ‘rightful’ place in the twenty- first century economy focused on eternal growth and capital accumulation.
The historical intensification of power of and over ‘life’ and capital accumulation across an increasing range of spaces, sectors and actors of/in the world economy and through complex dynamics of 'uneven geographical development' has now led to our current ‘Anthropocene’ world. As intimated above, the idea of the Anthropocene, and concomitant connotations of a ‘damaged’ (Tsing 2015) and ‘overheated’ (Eriksen 2016) planet, have greatly impacted conservation actors. Many of them also see a world characterised by a 'great acceleration' across many socio-economic and ecological variables that point towards the utter unsustainability of the contemporary global trajectory (Steffen et al 2015; McNeill and Engelke 2016). Whether or how this is true is not something we are able to discuss here (but see Patel and Moore 2017). What is important for us is that the combined intensification of power and capital accumulation leads to an enormous 'intensification of pressure' and that this occurs both on the scale of the global political economy as a whole as well as on myriad local and intermittent levels (as argued by Eriksen 2016).11
Here, then, we must introduce Marx into the discussion. Marx, after all, posited very specifically that the global political economy of capitalism develops into a powerful structure that ‘necessarily’ increases the pressure on people, organisations and (other) resources in its quest for continuous capital accumulation. In Marx's own words, the impetus for this drive comes from the very definition of capital itself, as 'value put forth in order to generate more value', or in short, 'value in process'. Capital, for Marx, is therefore a process of the circulation of commodities that continuously needs to be stimulated on all levels, from the local or individual to the (global) economy as a whole. Or, as Marx put it, capital “has to be mediated not only in each of its moments, but as a whole of mediation, as a total process itself” (1973: 255). The totality of the global circulation of commodities and capital–and hence the modes of (bio)power that go with these–has to be constantly renewed and stimulated. This not only leads to an enormous pressure to speed things up, consume more, travel faster, and so forth, but also to Marx's contention that capital develops into a 'coercive external force' that becomes 'an end in itself' (Marx, 1976: 253, 381).
Here is thus what we mean with the intensification of pressure: a 'coercive force' that (unevenly) impacts people, organisations, environments and animals, and in its intensification with reference to conservation puts increasing pressure on actors to ‘save’ these, and on national states to cope with all of these dynamics. Green wars, then, are the material, symbolic and ‘political’ expression of a global political economy that should be seen as a systemic yet highly uneven 'pressure cooker.' All the articles in this special issue show how, in their respective cases, there is or has been an intensification of pressure on environments and biodiversity and on the actors to save, govern or guide this. At the same time, they show that these pressures test the endurance of people, organisations, ecosystems, animals and indeed the global dynamics of power and capital themselves.
| Political Ecologies of Green Wars|| |
These initial thoughts are meant as a first step towards the overarching frame that we believe needs to be further developed to understand our current situation. Many others, fortunately, are already at work on the elements of this frame, including the various contributions to this special issue. Thus, while not all directly use the green wars concept, they do all contribute to the broader framing within which this concept takes on (new) meaning and raises pertinent questions. Several of these questions include: Is this new reality of green wars merely biopolitical business-as-usual where the ‘optimisation’ of some forms of human and non-human life requires the making live and/or letting die of others? Or is there a novel form of neoliberal biopower at work here? Phrased differently, does this trend signal a new marriage of neoliberalism and violence, or simply more accumulation by dispossession yet again? Are these trends about bringing the logic of war into conservation? Or about incorporating conservation into an overarching war-focused geopolitics (Duffy 2016; Bigger and Neimark 2017)? What is the role of the state in these dynamics? What will happen when the dynamics of intensification continue to be pushed ever further, in the pursuit of the (eternal) renewal of capital and even more effective forms of power? How, finally, might the perspective of political ecology be mobilized to analyse this latest stage in the ongoing saga of environmental conflict and violence?
These are among the key questions addressed by the articles collected here. Yet before we introduce them, we need to further clarify the term green wars and how we approach the term from a political ecology perspective. Central to discussion of ‘war’ in any form is the nature of the key concept ‘violence’. As Nordstrom (2004: 60-61) observes, there remains a strong tendency to assume ‘direct’ violence, that is “the rending of flesh with the intention to harm,” as the “foundational definition of violence” in general. Yet as Nordstrom asserts, this definition obscures a wider understanding of the nature of violence in its manifold forms. As she explains, “violence isn't intended to stop with the crippling of physical bodies. Violence is employed to create political acquiescence; it is intended to create terror, and thus political inertia; it is intended to create hierarchies of domination and submission based on the control of force” (Nordstrom 2004). An expanded definition thus complements direct violence with at least two other forms: ‘structural’ violence, which inheres in social constructs to which many people contribute indirectly but for which no particular person is directly responsible; and 'cultural or symbolic' violence, by means of which other forms of violence are obscured or justified in the realm of discourse or ideology (see esp. Nordstrom 2004; Tyner 2016). While many of our authors focus on direct violence in their specific analyses, it is this expanded understanding that underlies our overarching discussion.
To clarify this point, we move back to the core concern of this special issue: the rise in physical violence in defence of non-human species and ecosystems, referred to as green militarisation or green violence. Crucially, critical analysis of this green militarisation/violence dynamic points out that both its direct and indirect results may well undermine the goals toward which they are deployed, namely the conservation of biodiversity, especially in the long(er) run (Duffy et al. 2015). They also point to the unjust social impacts of green violence (Bocarejo and Ojeda 2016; Ybarra 2017). In a recent response to these critiques, however, McCann argues that they are not just naïve, but actually dangerous. He advances several general arguments to advocate treating wildlife extraction as a crime, and hence subject to the same types of policing as other crimes.12 Notwithstanding the complex social causes of this ‘crime’, he asserts, “armed law enforcement” is simply required “in many cases”. While he acknowledges that atrocities have occurred in the name of nature, he argues that they are relatively few 'bad apples' in an otherwise noble and necessary profession.
But McCann's most trenchant point is that the ‘narrative’ advanced by critics of green militarisation/violence “perhaps most worryingly, does not appear to grasp that wildlife–such as lions, elephants, and rhinos–must be protected today or there will be none left for the future.”13 McCann therefore ends his essay with a section entitled 'There will be nothing left if we don't protect wildlife today', in which he argues:
Of course, we must tackle the drivers of poaching that these articles mention, but if we only focus on tackling these drivers through long-term education and social programs, there will be nothing left to protect in a remarkably short time. Not only is there a legal responsibility to protect wildlife from illegal exploitation, but there is a moral responsibility, too, if we are to prevent the extinction of untold numbers of species on our watch. Although I have focused on poaching of rhino and elephant, it is worth raising the point that unrestricted bushmeat hunting in Africa, Asia, and across South and Central America is a human disaster in the waiting that will precipitate a tragedy of the commons, where nobody benefits in the long-term.14
He thus finishes by proclaiming, “now is not the time to roll back on our efforts to stop the slaughter, now is the time to do all we possibly can to prevent this ecological and moral catastrophe: the destruction of the living planet and the extinction of species”.15
In a nutshell, McCann contends that the emergency of “unrestricted” poaching is so great, the pressure so devastating, that more structural and longer-term analyses and actions are no longer options. Rather, “direct action now” is the only appropriate strategy left. Anything else is “naïve” and, he argues, grounded in armchair “researching conservation” rather than practical “on-the-ground conservation” work. This immediate on-the-ground action, he asserts, must defend the last remaining members of endangered animal species even if this causes human suffering–including loss of life–in the process. And McCann, again, is not alone here. Academics Mogomotsi and Madigele (2017: 57), for example, have the following to say to those who might criticise their position to support Botswana's shoot-to-kill policy:
To the moralists, such a position is very difficult to accept; however, we argue that it is a necessary evil, considering the obligation to protect rhinos from extinction. It appears that poachers will do anything to ensure that they kill these animals, unless they are made aware of the possibility of their own death in the process.
This position raises important questions concerning the relative value and importance of different forms of life in relation to the exercise of green violence. Militant defence of nature, after all, is commonly justified in quite similar terms as McCann's: as an issue of “interspecies justice” (Cafaro et al. 2017) aiming to protect forms of non-human life considered to be unfairly threatened by human action. Taylor (2016) goes so far as to argue that different species should be comparatively valued relative to their absolute numbers, such that the individual members of a highly endangered species (like the black rhino) should be worth much more than any particular member of the human species, who are far more numerous–indeed, for many neoprotectionists, excessively so (see Cafaro and Crist 2012).
This is a thorny issue, deserving of deeper discussion than we are able to offer in the space remaining. Suffice it to point out here that this discussion must address not merely the relative value of different species but what this assessment reflects concerning the underlying values and modes of classification that underpin it. In this a political ecology approach may prove particularly fertile as such issues of value, classification and so forth are the bread-and-butter of its mode of analysis. For people like McCann, the imminent threat of species extinction means that discussions of this sort are a frivolous distraction. Green wars, for him, are simply politics through other means–to again invert Clausewitz' dictum. This sounds familiar when one considers Hannah Arendt (1970), who long ago argued that the capacity for violent acts becomes greatly enhanced when thinking is no longer allowed given the ostensive urgency of the current moment.
Yet it would be too easy to stand on an intellectual high-ground and dismiss these cries for imminent action to protect biodiversity in the face of many all-too-real threats. This, then, is why analysis of political ecologies of green wars, within a broader context of the intensification of pressure, is so important, as it can shed light on the political economic structures and lived experiences of the current wave of green violence and the responses to it. How, then, do the authors in the special issue understand contemporary green wars and help us move towards the overarching conceptual framing that we have called for in this introduction? In the following, we briefly outline the various contributions to our collection.
| The Contributions to the Special Issue|| |
Elizabeth Lunstrum and Megan Ybarra (2018) lead the discussion by taking us to Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP) and Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR) to explore how racist tropes are mobilised to authorise increasingly violent securitisation in both parks. In this way, states are able to incite and exploit racialised difference as the basis for justifying forcible evictions as well as intensified territorialisation both within these parks and beyond. Yet Lunstrum and Ybarra highlight a key difference in the two cases, namely that in Mozambique biodiversity conservation is the explicit motive for securitisation while in Guatemala national security concerns are able to exploit existing conservation laws and structures in pursuit of other ends. Lunstrum and Ybarra thus emphasize the role of racialised difference in framing and understanding green violence, yet also point to important differences that may be present in the relationship between conservation and securitization across sites.
In the following article, Alice Kelly Pennaz, Mouadjamou Ahmadou, Mark Moritz, and Paul Scholte (2018) turn our attention to Cameroon's Waza National Park. Here, the potent narrative of “poacher-as-terrorist”–in terms of which wildlife extraction is asserted to provide a source of finance to terrorist groups such as Boko Haram–has been used to legitimate intensified security measures, which, in turn provoke green wars. The authors argue that this simplistic narrative obscures not only complex local political-economic realities underlying the rural insecurity fuelling wildlife trade, but also that there is in fact no evidence that Boko Haram has actually benefited from this trade. Rather, Pennaz and colleagues show, the group's main source of funding is the violent seizure of cattle owned by mobile pastoralists, whose victimisation by the group is actually obfuscated by the “poacher-as-terrorist” narrative. In this way and fitting with our broader framing, “direct local violence is intensified by narratives of combatting green violence”, while the structural violence underlying the rural wildlife extraction this green violence targets continues unabated.
In the next contribution, Peter Howson (2018) takes us to Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, where REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) initiatives have been introduced to combat rampant deforestation. This REDD+ is framed as a kinder, softer form of governance than historical ‘fortress’ approaches in its aim to motivate behavioural change through simple provision of economic incentives. In reality, however, as Howson shows, the mechanism is itself quite violent in dispossessing smallholders of their land in the interest of improved forest governance while the “main driver of deforestation that adds further pressure on conservation–large-scale extractive enterprise–is largely ignored.” Paradoxically, then, REDD+ actually serves to exacerbate “the violence and environmentally destructive behaviours it claims to discourage” by driving dispossessed smallholders into illicit livelihood activities and/or violent resistance. In short: the intensification of pressure, Howson shows, encourages complex green wars in his case.
The last four articles, while also based on extensive empirical research, propose more general analytics to help us understand both the case-specific dynamics they themselves present and that are highlighted by the previous contributions, as well as the significant connections among these. While the ideas advanced are distinct, taken together they provide further building blocks to help extend and develop the overarching conceptual frame around the 'intensification of pressure' we laid out earlier.
First, Robert Fletcher (2018) calls attention to a different dimension of green violence: that advocated by radical civil society groups in defence of non-human nature. While such groups have often been branded 'eco-terrorists' for their extra-legal actions, Fletcher shows that in reality very few groups have actually advocated violence against people (as opposed to inanimate property) and even fewer have carried this out. Yet these groups' claims to act in defence of nature, he suggests, are quite similar to how states characteristically justify their own monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in defence of the life they claim to serve. This potentially complicates the way Foucault's “biopower” concept has been developed in the vast literature surrounding it, suggesting that non-state actors can also invoke the right to 'make live' as the basis of their own actions. This points towards “growing contestation within the rise of green wars concerning who can legitimately exercise biopower” and the ways it can be used.
Bram Büscher (2018) then takes us in another direction, arguing that aspects of contemporary conservation governance are moving away from biopower entirely towards what Brian Massumi (2015) calls 'ontopower.' Büscher builds on Massumi's contention that biopower, as a mode of power that aims to optimise life across a given population, is giving way to a new mode of power that is more focused on pre-empting threats to life (especially terrorism, climate change, disease epidemics, etc). Büscher argues that we can see this new pre-emptive mode of ‘ontopower’ in practice in the Kruger National Park in South Africa by analysing how park managers aim to overcome the problem of rampant rhino poaching. Here, the central imperative has moved from enabling the optimisation of life across the population of the park to pre-empt the poaching of rhinos before the kill. Büscher asserts that this is leading to two emerging 'conservation geographies of anticipatory/pre-emptive action': the one focused on controlling wildlife crime threats so as to bring back the possibilities for more technocratic biopolitics; the other more openly ‘ontopowerful’ by focusing on all those actions–close by or far away from the park–that could possibly lead to poaching attacks in the future. He concludes that both of these, but especially the latter, portend a dangerous dependence on green wars as a new pro-active (and pre-emptive) way to conserve critical and threatened biodiversity.
Complicating things still further, James Fairhead (2018) goes on to argue that emerging trends in conservation violence may not be “either against nature or in defence of it,” as predominant in the past, but rather are increasingly about dividing “the included” from “rogues” who fall outside of the protected community. Taking the fight against Ebola as his focus, Fairhead shows how this battle is “fought not just against rogue viruses but against rogue bats, rogue deforesters and rogue patients.” This, he contends, entails a newfound transcendence of the classic nature/human divide, facilitated by emerging digital technologies that give rise to novel combinations of humans and non-humans some of which become “included” among those made to live while others are branded “rogues” and targeted for elimination. Green wars, in Fairhead's case, come to be waged based on complex and ambiguous politics of inclusion and exclusion that again transcends the usual ways in which biopolitics has often been conceptualised.
Rounding out the collection, finally, Jared Margulies (2018) introduces a new voice to the conservation debate–Louis Althusser–to explore what a focus on ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) can contribute to research in political ecology and green wars. Honing in on South India, Margulis explores how violent conflicts between local residents and state agents over access to and use of protected area resources are framed by the latter as a campaign to save endangered mega-fauna. This, he argues, demonstrates an ISA at work, functioning to reinforce ideologies privileging state agents and the capital accumulation they facilitate. Analysis in Althusser's terms, Margulis concludes, thus helps to support an emphasis on praxis that political ecologists often advocate but more rarely achieve. The consequence of his analyse, again, points to a further intensification of pressure.
| Conclusion|| |
In conclusion, we believe that the various articles collected here are provocative and insightful in helping to further the vital analysis of the rise of green wars and their implications. However, as we have argued, these can only be the start of a broader search for an overarching frame that brings together various recent debates on the relations between conservation and neoliberalism, green and land grabbing, biopolitics, violence, security, and more. We have suggested that one key to developing this overarching frame might be to expand on the idea of an 'intensification of pressure' as the logical outcome of a global political economy of power that has increasingly become a 'coercive external force' saturating and pressurising many spaces, fields and the actors (both human and non-human) and organisations that inhabit these.
Political ecologies of green wars, as our contributors show, can interrogate these pressures, their structural and agential origins as well as their real-world effects, contradictions and possibilities in particular places and spaces. In this endeavour, an understanding of violence's role in conservation must continue to be expanded, with special emphasis on how and why violence is practised, distributed, negated and/or resisted, and with what effects on different actors and the long(er) term prospects for non-humans. The articles in the special issue offer a valuable first step in this analysis. But since the intensification of pressures deriving from our contemporary political economy of power do not show any sign of subsiding, continued analysis and research remains vitally important.
| Acknowledgements|| |
This special issue grew out of a panel on “Violent Neoliberal Environments: The Political Ecology of Green Wars” that we organised for the conference “Political Ecologies of Conflict, Capitalism and Contestation (PE-3C)” at Wageningen University in the Netherlands from July 7 to 9, 2016. Many thanks to all the special issue authors for their contributions, to all reviewers for enhancing the quality of the articles, to Noella Gray for steering the issue through a rigorous review process, and to James Fairhead, Pete Howson, Libby Lunstrum, Megan Ybarra, Noella Gray and Jared Margulies for helpful comments on this introductory paper. The conference this special issue emanated from was made possible by a Dutch NWO VIDI grant, project nr: 016.155.325.
| Notes|| |
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY08NIXvrxc; Accessed on May 26, 2016.
- https://www.nationalparkrescue.org/, Accessed on October 12, 2017.
- See https://biglife.org/about-big-life/about-big-life--2; https://www.iapf.org/; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/prince-charles/10626071/Prince-Charles-and-Prince-William-unite-for-anti-poaching-video.html; http://www.awf.org/news/jackie-chan-stars-newest-anti-rhino-horn-video; http://killingforprofit.com/2013/08/22/poaching-wars-with-tom-hardy/; amongst others. Accessed on November 13, 2017.
- See https://theconversation.com/the-ivory-war-militarised-tactics-wont-work-19164, and https://theconversation.com/why-southern-africas-peace-parks-are-sliding-into-war-parks-53458. Accessed on 11 October 2017.
- We would like to acknowledge Dr. Judith Verweijen, Ghent University, whose work inspired this statement.
- To be clear: we are here not aiming at providing an overview of the many approaches and directions within the social scientific study of conservation. For overviews, see: Sandbrook et al. (2013) and Bennet et al. (2017).
- Next to these, the collection builds upon and adds to a wide range of recent discussions related to the critical analysis of conservation. It draws on special issues on similar themes recently published in The Journal of Peasant Studies (Fairhead et al. 2012), Development and Change (Arsel and Büscher 2012), Human Geography (Corson et al. 2013), Geoforum (Roth and Dressler 2012; Kelly and Ybarra 2016), Journal of Sustainable Tourism (Devine and Ojeda 2016; Büscher and Fletcher 2017) as well as several previous editions of Conservation and Society (Igoe and Brockington 2007; Brockington 2017). It also relates the discussion more broadly to a growing literature on the role and nature of violence within capitalism generally (Tyner 2016) and neoliberalism in particular (Springer 2010, 2015).
- During the very final stages of proof-reading, we encountered Keucheyan's (2016) book 'Nature is a Battlefield', in which he also employs the term 'green wars'. Although too late in the process to build on this work, it seems that, at first glance, Keucheyan's understanding of green wars comes quite close to ours.
- Importantly, the opposite may of course also be true: that due to the highly uneven forms of capitalist intensification, there may be spaces where there pressure decreases.
- To be sure: we are not arguing that wildlife extraction should never be treated as a crime. We are rather interested in what is happening with its intensification.
- https://news.mongabay.com/2017/10/attacks-on-militarized-conservation-are-naive-commentary/. Accessed on 12 October 2017.
- Idem. This argument that 'otherwise there is nothing left' is a key theme in the neoprotectionist literature. See, especially, Oates (1999).
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Weekly Current Affairs Mains (19th to 25th August 2018)
TOPIC : Health policies to cover mental illness
Topic in syllabus: Government policies and issues related to health.
Why in news:
Insurance regulator IRDAI has issued a circular directing insurers to cover mental illness, which has reached serious proportions in the country.
The Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 — which came into force from May 29 — has made it mandatory to provide “for medical insurance for treatment of mental illness on the same basis as is available for treatment of physical illness”.
But to date, none of India’s 33 insurers has introduced a product that covers ailments such as depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, even though such covers are commonplace in many countries.
The change has been long overdue. This is being seen as a progressive step. This will ensure a life of dignity to those who have mental health issues. It will create awareness, acceptance, and inclusion of mental illness as any other physical ailment. It will ‘normalise’ diagnoses, by reducing associated myths and stigma.
Mental health conditions have always been in the list of exclusions of health insurance policies. The only exceptions to this have been the coverage of development conditions such as autism and Down’s syndrome by the National Health Insurance Scheme, and a few private schemes like Star Health Insurance’s cover for autistic children.
What is mental illness?
As per the Mental Healthcare Act, mental illness means a substantial disorder of thinking, mood, perception, orientation or memory that grossly impairs judgement, behaviour, capacity to recognise reality or ability to meet the ordinary demands of life. It also includes mental conditions associated with the abuse of alcohol and drugs, but does not include mental retardation which is a condition of arrested or incomplete development of mind of a person. The Act further states that every person with mental illness will be treated as equal to persons with physical illness when it comes to healthcare, including health insurance.
Q. It is high time that mental illness be treated at par with physical illness. Comment with regard to recent initiatives taken by the Government in this direction.
TOPIC : Interlinking of Rivers
Topic in syllabus:GS II- Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation
Why in news:
15th Meeting of Special Committee for Interlinking of Rivers was recently Held.
Outcomes of the meeting:
- During the meeting, it was stressed on the need for developing consensus amongst the concerned states on interlinking of rivers so that the water draining unutilized into the sea could be utilized for the needy areas.
- States were called upon to discuss and sort out issues through active consultation so that the projects can be implemented on priority.
Developments so far:
- Steps have been taken for early implementation of five interlinking projects and Memorandum of Agreement for implementation of these projects is being finalised in consultation with the concerned state governments.
- These five projects include Ken-Betwa link project, Damanganga-Pinjal link project, Par-Tapi-Narmada link project, Godavari-Cauvery (Grand Anicut) link project and Parvati-Kali Sindhu-Chambal link.
Need for interlinking of rivers:
The interlinking project aims to link India’s rivers by a network of reservoirs and canals that will allow for their water capacities to be shared and redistributed. According to some experts, this is an engineered panacea that will reduce persistent floods in some parts and water shortages in other parts besides facilitating the generation of hydroelectricity for an increasingly power hungry country.
Benefits and significance of interlinking:
Enhances water and food security of the country and it is essential for providing water to drought prone and water deficit areas.
Proper utilization: River interlinking projects envisage that the surplus water available in Himalayan Rivers is transferred to the areas where water supply is not adequate in the Peninsular India. Also, huge quantities of water from several Peninsular rivers drain unutilized into the sea, and river interlinking projects help transfer this water to water deficit areas of Peninsular India.
Boost to agriculture: The main occupation of rural India is agriculture and if monsoon fails in a year, then agricultural activities come to a standstill and this will aggravate rural poverty. Interlinking of rivers will be a practical solution for this problem, because the water can be stored or water can be transferred from water surplus area to deficit.
Disaster mitigation: The Ganga Basin, Brahmaputra basin sees floods almost every year. In order to avoid this, the water from these areas has to be diverted to other areas where there is scarcity of water. This can be achieved by linking the rivers. There is a two way advantage with this – floods will be controlled and scarcity of water will be reduced.
Transportation: Interlinking of rivers will also have commercial importance on a longer run. This can be used as inland waterways and which helps in faster movement of goods from one place to other.
Employment generation: Interlinking also creates a new occupation for people living in and around these canals and it can be the main areas of fishing in India.
Interlinking of rivers will cause huge amount of distortion in the existing environment. In order to create canals and reservoirs, there will be mass deforestation. This will have impact on rains and in turn affect the whole cycle of life.
Usually rivers change their course and direction in about 100 years and if this happens after interlinking, then the project will not be feasible for a longer run.
Due to interlinking of rivers, there will be decrease in the amount of fresh water entering seas and this will cause a serious threat to the marine life system and will be a major ecological disaster.
Due to the creation of Canals and Reservoirs, huge amount of area which is occupied by the people will be submerged leading to displacement of people and government will have to spend more to rehabilitate these people.
The amount required for these projects is so huge that government will have to take loans from the foreign sources which would increase the burden on the government and country will fall in a debt trap.
National Water Development Agency (NWDA) so far has received more than 40 proposals of intra-state links from 9 States viz. Maharashtra, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh. The successful completion of these projects will lead to reduction in disaster during floods, improved irrigation facilities, employment generation in rural agriculture, and increase in exports and decrease in migration from villages.
Q. Discuss the need for river interlinking in India and the challenges associated with it. Give suitable examples.
TOPIC : Criminalization of Politics
Topic in syllabus: GS II : Salient features of the Representation of People’s Act.
Why in news:
The Supreme Court has proposed to make political parties accountable for criminalising politics by welcoming in “crooks” who may later win elections on party ticket and grab power. The court is hearing a batch of petitions to ban persons charged with heinous criminal charges from contesting elections.
Suggestion made by the court:
- The Court may direct the Election Commission to insist that parties get new members to declare in an affidavit their criminal antecedents and publish them so that the “entire country knows how many criminals there are in a party.”
- The court said the EC could de-register a party or withdraw its symbol if it refused to comply.
- The suggestion was made by the court in a bid to prevent criminals from entering politics or later contesting elections to become parliamentarians, legislators and Ministers.
However, the Centre has opposed this move suggesting the following reasons:
A political party has a right to field its candidate. Mere charges of having committed a crime cannot be used to prevent a person from contesting elections. The suggestion made by the court amounts to prematurely disqualifying a candidate. Besides, the court is taking on itself a matter of the legislature.
Provisions in this regard:
The court based its proposal on the following:
Article 324 and Section 29A of RPA: The power of the Election Commission to conduct an election and register/de-register political parties under Article 324 of the Constitution and Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act of 1951, respectively.
The Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order of 1968. Section 29A requires a party to swear to uphold the principles of socialism, secularism, democracy, sovereignty, unity and integrity of India.
Criminals in Politics:
Protecting the parliamentary system from criminalisation has been the intention of the law from the beginning.
Section 8 of the Representation of the People (RP) Act, 1951 disqualifies a person convicted with a sentence of two years or more from contesting elections. But those under trial continued to be eligible to contest elections. The Lily Thomas case (2013), however, ended this unfair advantage.
Efforts by SC in this regard:
The SC has repeatedly expressed concern about the purity of legislatures.
- In 2002, it made it obligatory for all candidates to file an affidavit before the returning officer, disclosing criminal cases pending against them.
- The famous order to introduce NOTA was intended to make political parties think before giving tickets to the tainted.
- In its landmark judgment of March 2014, the SC accepted the urgent need for cleansing politics of criminalisation and directed all subordinate courts to decide on cases involving legislators within a year, or give reasons for not doing so to the chief justice of the high court.
According to the ADR’s analysis of EC data, 187 MPs in the current Lok Sabha face criminal charges (that is, 34.4 per cent). Of them, 113 face serious criminal charges. The number has gone up from 162 (76 serious) charges in 2009 and 128 (58 serious) in 2004.
Main reasons for Criminalization:
- Vote bank.
- Lack of governance.
What is the way out?
There are three possible options.
- One, political parties should themselves refuse tickets to the tainted.
- Two, the RP Act should be amended to debar persons against whom cases of a heinous nature are pending from contesting elections.
- Three, fast-track courts should decide the cases of tainted legislators quickly.
Opposition to the proposal made by the Supreme Court:
Far from denying tickets to criminals, all political parties seem to have been in competition to give them more and more tickets. They have been unitedly opposing the proposal to debar perpetrators of even heinous offences during pendency of trial on the grounds that false criminal cases may be filed by opponents. This concern is partly valid.
Is this concern justified?
To counter the concern expressed, the proposal has three safeguards.
- First, all criminal cases would not invite the ban — only heinous offences like murder, dacoity, rape, kidnapping or moral turpitude.
- Second, the case should have been registered at least a year before the elections.
- Third, the court must have framed the charges.
Suggested measure to curb criminalization of politics:
- Bringing greater transparency in campaign financing is going to make it less attractive for political parties to involve gangsters.
- The Election Commission of India (ECI) should have the power to audit the financial accounts of political parties, or political parties’ finances should be brought under the right to information (RTI) law.
- Broader governance will have to improve for voters to reduce the reliance on criminal politicians.
- Fast-track courts are necessary because politicians are able to delay the judicial process and serve for decades before prosecution.
- The Election Commission must take adequate measures to break the nexus between the criminals and the politicians.
- The forms prescribed by the Election Commission for candidates disclosing their convictions, cases pending in courts and so on in their nomination papers is a step in the right direction if it applied properly.
Q. Discuss criminalization of politics in India in the wake of Supreme Court judgements. Suggest measures to curb it.
TOPIC : Article 35A
Topic in syllabus: GS II: Functions and responsibilities of the Union and the States, issues and challenges pertaining to the federal structure, devolution of powers and finances up to local levels and challenges therein.
Why in news:
Article 35A of the Constitution is now being vigorously contested with its constitutional validity being challenged before the Supreme Court. It has managed to create widespread legal and political controversy, despite it not even finding a mention in the regular sequential text of the Constitution.
What is Article 35A?
Article 35A is a provision incorporated in the Constitution giving the Jammu and Kashmir Legislature a carte blanche to decide who all are ‘permanent residents’ of the State and confer on them special rights and privileges in public sector jobs, acquisition of property in the State, scholarships and other public aid and welfare.
The provision mandates that no act of the legislature coming under it can be challenged for violating the Constitution or any other law of the land.
How did it come about?
Article 35A was incorporated into the Constitution in 1954 by an order of the then President Rajendra Prasad on the advice of the Jawaharlal Nehru Cabinet.
- The controversial Constitution (Application to Jammu and Kashmir) Order of 1954 followed the 1952 Delhi Agreement entered into between Nehru and the then Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Sheikh Abdullah, which extended Indian citizenship to the ‘State subjects’ of Jammu and Kashmir.
- The Presidential Order was issued under Article 370 (1) (d) of the Constitution. This provision allows the President to make certain “exceptions and modifications” to the Constitution for the benefit of ‘State subjects’ of Jammu and Kashmir.
- So Article 35A was added to the Constitution as a testimony of the special consideration the Indian government accorded to the ‘permanent residents’ of Jammu and Kashmir.
Need for review:
The ‘classification’ created by Article 35A has to be tested on the principle of equality as it treats non-permanent residents of J&K as ‘second-class’ citizens. Such persons are not eligible for employment under the State government and are also debarred from contesting elections. Meritorious students are denied scholarships and they cannot even seek redress in any court of law.
The major sufferers are women who marry outside J&K. Though they retain their Permanent Resident Certificate, their children cannot be permanent residents. This restricts their basic right of inheritance. Further, the issues of refugees who migrated to J&K during Partition are still not treated as ‘State subjects’ under the J&K Constitution.
This matter requires the active participation of all stakeholders. It is necessary to give confidence to the residents of J&K that any alteration in status quo will not take away their rights but will boost J&K’s prosperity as it will open doors for more investment, resulting in new opportunities. Article 35A, which was incorporated about six decades ago, now requires a relook, especially given that J&K is now a well-established democratic State.
Q. Discuss in detail the provisions of Article 35A of Indian Constitution. Recently there has been debate on the need for review of Article 35A. Analyse with respect to recent developments related to the issue.
Topic in syllabus: GS II: Bilateral, regional and global groupings and agreements involving India and/or affecting India’s interests
Why in news:
Negotiations on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), among 16 Asian and Pacific Ocean countries, have entered a decisive phase. And it would like to see a “substantive agreement” on the trade deal by the end of this year.
Countries in East Asia region have thriving trade and economic relations with each other through free trade agreements.
- The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has free trade agreements with six partners namely People’s Republic of China, Republic of Korea, Japan, India as well as Australia and New Zealand.
- In order to broaden and deepen the engagement among parties and to enhance parties’ participation in economic development of the region, the leaders of 16 participating countries established the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).
The RCEP was built upon the existing ASEAN+1 FTAs with the spirit to strengthen economic linkages and to enhance trade and investment related activities as well as to contribute to minimising development gap among the parties.
- Countries of the grouping comprises the 10 ASEAN members and their Free Trade Agreement partners, Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand and Republic of Korea.
- At a meeting in Singapore, countries which still have issues with the outline of the agreements reached so far may be told politely to step aside and allow a smaller group to go ahead with finalising the RCEP, with the option to join it at a later date.
- India is among the countries that will have to take a call at this point considering the seriousness of the situation.
India’s Concerns with member countries:
- Greater access to Chinese goods may have impact on the Indian manufacturing sector.
- India has got massive trade deficit with China.
- Under these circumstances, India proposed differential market access strategy for China.
- There are demands by other RCEP countries for lowering customs duties on a number of products and greater access to the market than India has been willing to provide.
More developed countries such as Australia and Singapore are unwilling to accommodate India’s demands to liberalise their services regime and allow freer mobility of Indian workers.
Some of the RCEP countries, including India, are headed for elections next year, a point where governments traditionally turn protectionist.
The grouping envisages regional economic integration, leading to the creation of the largest regional trading bloc in the world, accounting for nearly 45% of the world’s population with a combined gross domestic product of $21.3 trillion.
- Government must take into account the deeper strategic pitfalls of either slowing down India’s RCEP engagement or walking out of the talks at this stage resulted in the power to cut India out of the rules-making process for the RCEP and give China further space in the regional trade and security architecture.
- RCEP recognises the importance of being inclusive, especially to enable SMEs leverage on the agreement and cope with challenges arising from globalisation and trade liberalisation.
- SMEs (including micro-enterprises) make up more than 90% of business establishments across all RCEP participating countries and are important to every country’s endogenous development of their respective economy.
- At the same time, RCEP is committed to provide fair regional economic policies that mutually benefit both ASEAN and its FTA partners.
- At a time when the U.S. has broken from the global concord on multilateral trade agreements, an Indian walkout would endanger the united message that RCEP countries, which represent 40% of the global GDP, would wish to send out.
- It would also be a sharp departure from India’s “Act East” slogan and its extended outreach to ASEAN.
- RCEP has the potential to deliver significant opportunities for businesses in the East Asia region, given the fact that the 16 RCEP participating countries account for almost half of the world’s population; contribute about 40 per cent of global GDP and over a quarter of world exports.
- RCEP will provide a framework aimed at lowering trade barriers and securing improved market access for goods and services for businesses in the region
Q. Discuss the significance of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and India’s concerns associated with the grouping.
TOPIC: Strengthening the federal link
Topic in syllabus: GS II
- Indian Constitution
- Functions and responsibilities of the Union and the States,
- Issues and challenges pertaining to the federal structure,
- Devolution of powers and finances up to local levels and challenges therein
- State finance commission has been created to rationalise and systematise State/sub-State-level fiscal relations in India. But, there has been inadequate appreciation of the significance of this institution by the Union, States as well as the professional community
State Finance Commissions (SFC):
- The State Finance Commission (SFC) is an institution created by the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments. Its primary task is to rectify growing horizontal imbalances in the delivery of essential public services to citizens.
- At a regular interval of 5 years, under Article 243 I of the Constitution, State Finance Commissions are to be constituted.
- The purpose is to assign it the task of reviewing the financial position of the Panchayats and making recommendations on the sharing and the assignment of various taxes, duties etc.
- It is also to look at grants-in-aid to be given to the Panchayats from the Consolidated Fund of the State.
- The Conformity Acts of the Constitution Amendment Act are required to provide for the composition of the Commission, the qualification for its Members and the manner of their selection.
Importance of State Finance Commissions SFCs:
- The task of the SFC to correct horizontal imbalances is extremely onerous as it has to consider nearly 2.5 lakh local governments to promote minimum essential services in rural and urban areas.
- An SFC is the institutional agency to implement the golden rule of cooperative federalism that every citizen should be assured minimum public goods irrespective of her choice of residence.
- Article 280(3) has been amended to add clauses (b) and (c) in order to take measures to augment the resources of Panchayats and Municipalities on the basis of the recommendations “made by the finance commission of the state”.
- These sub-clauses affirm the organic link between local governments and SFCs to fiscal federalism.
- Articles 243G and 243W give mandate of planning “for economic development and social justice”.
- The Constitution treats a local government on a par with a State government, especially when it comes to sharing of financial resources.
Causes of financial inefficiencies at Local level
- Constitution of finance commission and irregularities
- Article 243I of the Constitution mandated the State Governor to constitute a Finance Commission within one year of the Constitutional Amendment came to force.
- That means, this is to be constituted before April 24, 1994 and thereafter every five years.
- Till date, only Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala have submitted their fifth SFC reports. Many States are yet to cross the third SFC stage.
- The seriousness, regularity, acceptance of recommendations and their implementation are conspicuously absent and moreover the composition of SFCs reveals the overwhelming presence of serving and / or retired bureaucrats rather than academics.
- Problems being faced by SFCs:
- It is important to disabuse the notion among several politicians, policymakers and even experts that SFCs and the local governments they deal with have an inferior constitutional status when compared to the UFC.
- The SFC is undoubtedly modelled on the UFC created under Article 280 and exemplified in Articles 243I and 243Y.
- SFCs face a crucial problem of reliable data: Unlike the financial reporting system of the Union and States, local governments with no proper budgetary system are in deep disarray.
- Constitutional Provisions Ignored by the States:
- Articles 243G and 243W talks about planning for economic development and social justice, Article 243ZD mandates that every State constitute a District Planning Committee for spatial panning and environmental conservation at the sub-State level.
- The Constitutional Amendment left the task of adequately empowering the local Govts. to discharge constitutional obligations to the States.
- Failure of Union Finance Commissions (UFCs):
- UFCs have failed to play a hand-holding role in placing decentralised governance properly in the cooperative federal map of India.
- The hard truth is that no UFC has done its homework in reading and analysing SFC reports.
- Without presenting a consolidated account of the reality at the sub-State level or highlighting which report went wrong, where and how, no UFC can legitimately guide States or contribute to improving the goals of constitutional amendments.
- All the terms of reference of UFCs (since the 11th) iterate the need for suggesting measures to augment the resources of Panchayats and Municipalities as a core task.
- Both centre and state must sit together to make a concrete approach to redeem the situation and work towards a good local governance system.
- Their well-designed grant scheme to incentivise States was not given a fair trial.
- Till now, SFCs have not been provided with the necessary environment to play their rightful role in Indian fiscal federalism. A great opportunity to build regional equity in India should not be undermined but to enhance the opportunity towards the Fiscal and Cooperative Federalism.
- State finance commission has been created to rationalise and systematise State/sub-State-level fiscal relations in India. But, there has been inadequate appreciation of the significance of this institution at Central, state as well as at the level of professional community. Discuss.
TOPIC: Blasphemy law in India
Topic in syllabus: GS-II: Indian Polity
Why in news:
Punjab government proposed to add Section 295AA in IPC to expand and tighten law on Sacrilege
Sacrilege: violation or misuse of what is regarded as sacred.
Blasphemy Law: Deals with the matter pertaining to lack of respect toward God, religion, a religious icon, or something else considered sacred.
Laws related to blasphemy in India
Section 295A of the IPC:
- It penalizes any deliberate intention of insulting the religion or religious beliefs of any class of citizen
- Section 295A is a cognizable offence, which means that the police are authorised to arrest accused persons without the need of a judicially sanctioned warrant.
- This law was added only in 1927. Earlier India never had blasphemy law
- It is often argued that Section 295A is not a section for blasphemy but a section against Hate Speech
- Sections 124A, 153A, 153B, 292, and 293 of IPC also related to blasphemy
- These sections prohibit any words or representations that insult any individual’s or group’s religious beliefs, or that are meant to incite enmity against a particular religion.
Reason for blasphemy law
- To value and respect for sanctity of the God, Religion and Religious belief.
- Religion affects the actions of human beings. Legal protection provided by state to protect religious belief and sentiments leads to stable society and governance.
- Most of the countries implement Blasphemy laws as a reasonable restriction for the maintenance of communal harmony.
- Section 295A was also introduced to control series of communal violence
- Blasphemy law is required by the states that have an official religion like Pakistan
Argument against blasphemy law
- Blasphemy has been described as irreverence towards God or Religion, however the term “Religion‟ itself lacks a proper definition for itself.
- Against the spirit of Fundamental right of Speech and Expressions. USA has no blasphemy law to protect freedom of speech and expressions.
- Blasphemy laws are incompatible with the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
- Blasphemy law is often be used as a tool for the majority to oppress the minority.
- The allegations of blasphemy have been used by vigilante groups and non-state actors to justify and instigate incidents of interreligious violence
Supreme Court Judgment
Ramji Lal Modi v. State of Uttar Pradesh
- The case challenges the constitutional validity of law.
- Case argue that Art. 19(2) only put reasonable restrictions but section 295 A casts its net much wider by criminalizing all speech that was intended to outrage religious feeling
- A five-judge bench of the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Section 295 A
- Supreme court observe that section 295A did not cover all type of Insult but only intentional insults
The Superintendent, Central Prison, Fatehgarh v Ram Manohar Lohia
- Under this case supreme court observes that speech which is prohibited should have a direct connection to disrupt public order and it should not be just a remote connection
- This is contrary to previous judgment (Ram ji Lal Modi case) which gave the order that a slight connection of freedom of speech with public disorder fall under Section 295 A
New Punjab law
- Under new proposed law any “injury, damage or sacrilege to Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Srimad Bhagwad Geeta, Holy Quran and Holy Bible with the intention to hurt the religious feelings of the people” a crime punishable with life imprisonment
Need for Law
- Several incident took place in various part of Punjab related to sacrilege of Holy book of Sikhs.
- Existing provisions of the said Act in Section 295, 295A and 296 though deal with these matters but do not provide deterrent punishment for incidents
Issues with the law
- Protecting Holy book of one religion is anti-secular and discriminatory against other religion.
- Most importantly, section 295-A of IPC deals with religion and religious beliefs, punishment under section 295-AA explicitly for religious text would be disproportionate.
- Misuse of law in guise of protecting religion sentiments may inflict violence.
- If the speech or statement or art of work have an element of incitement of hate, it should be treated as a hate speech under section 153(a) of IPC and not as a Blasphemy.
- Spirit of tolerance among the people of difference sects needs to be promoted.
- To decide whether the blasphemous act have element of hate or violence should be left at the level of tolerance of the society.
- It is believed that the stricter the Blasphemy law, graver the human right violation.
Q. Discuss need for blasphemy law in India and concerns associated with it.
TOPIC: Climate Change in India
Topic in syllabus: GS III- Environment
Why in news?
According to new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earth might move into a high temperature “hothouse earth” pathway from where it would not be able to stabilize climate
Note: Hothouse Earth – Is a period with no continental glaciers, the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are high, with high sea surface temperatures and uncontrollable warning.
Climate Change – a reality
- The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century. According to climate scientists, this change has largely been driven by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere
- There has been warming of oceans by 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969. Further, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent
- According to data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Greenland lost 281 billion tons of ice per year between 1993 and 2016 and Antarctica lost about 119 billion tons during the same time period.
- Global sea level rose about 8 inches in the last century and rate of rise has increased significantly in last 20 years
- There has been a rise in number and intensity of extreme events. For example, scientists attribute the rise in number of high intensity hurricanes in USA to climate change
- With rising global temperatures, mass coral bleaching events and infectious disease outbreaks have become more frequent. For example: In 2016-17, the Great Barrier Reef of Australia suffered extreme coral bleaching which killed around 50% of its corals.
- Wildlife extinction: Australian rodent, Bramble Cay Melomys has been declared extinct due to human-induced climate change
Impact of Climate Change on India:
- Impact on water Resources: Change in climate is expected to have long-term implications on the quality and quantity of water. According to NATCOM there will be decline in runoff in all river basins in India except Narmada and Tapi
- Impact on agriculture and Food resources: According to Indian Agricultural Research Institute, climate change will have adverse impact on Rabi crop- for every 1°C rise in temperature, the estimated loss of wheat is 4-5 million tonnes
- Rise in extreme weather events: Climate change has increased India’s vulnerability of extreme events. The 2017 high intensity Ockhi cyclone and 2018 dust storms in north India was attributed to climate change
- Impact on Human Health: Changes in climate may alter distribution of vector species (malaria mosquitoes) and may increase vulnerability to diseases. Further rising heat waves and cold waves have adversely affected human health.
- Impact on Forest Cover: According to studies, large areas of forest in India are likely to experience shift in forest types due to climate change. For example: xeric scrublands will increase
- Impact on Coastal Areas: A sea-level rise of 46-59cm in India by 21000 is estimated by NATCOM. Rising sea level and increasing tropical cyclone events pose great threat to coastal areas in India
Initiatives taken by India to combat climate change:
Commitment to Paris Agreement on Climate Change, 2015
Under the Paris Agreement, —India stated its proposed commitments to address climate change as part of its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which was submitted for 2015–30-
- Reduce emissions intensity of its GDP by 33-35% by 2030 from 2005 levels;
- Increase the share of non-fossil fuel-based electricity to 40% by 2030;
- Increase renewable energy generation to 175 GW by 2022;
- Enhance its forest cover which will absorb 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030.
National Action Plan for Climate Change
- National Solar Mission: Aims to promote the use of solar energy in India.
- India along with France launched the International Solar Alliance at the UN climate Change Conference in Paris
- National Mission for Enhanced Energy Efficiency: Aims to improve energy efficiency of domestic, commercial and industrial sectors in India.
- Perform Achieve and Trade (PAT) Scheme, Energy Conservation Building Code, India’s Zero Defect, Zero Effect policy aims to enhance energy and resource efficiency.
- National Mission for Sustainable Habitat: Aims at encouraging sustainable urban planning in India
- National Water Mission: Aims to ensure sustainable water supply by conserving water, minimizing waste and ensuring equitable distribution of water resources
- National Mission for Strategic Knowledge on Climate Change: Aims to create a comprehensive knowledge system that informs and supports climate change action in India
- National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture: Aims at improving sustainability, productivity, remuneration and climate resilience of agriculture in India.
- National Mission for Green India: Aims to protect enhance and restore forests and respond to climate change
- National Mission for Sustaining the Himalayan Ecosystem: Aims to enhance understanding of climate change impacts and adaptations required in the Himalayas
Draft National Forest Policy, 2017:
The draft National Forest Policy calls for integration of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures in forest management through the mechanism of REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation plus) so that the impacts of the climate change is minimised.
Promotion of Bio fuels
The Indian government has been promoting Biofuel through various policy interventions. Recently, the Union Cabinet approved the National policy on Biofuel, 2018. The policy aims at contributing to energy security and climate change mitigation by achieving a target of 20% blending of ethanol in petrol and 5% blending of biodiesel in diesel by 2030.
Clean Air Initiatives- Reducing Vehicular Emissions:
- The Indian government has decided to skip BS-V and directly move to BS-VI from 2020. It has further agreed to advance the proposed date for Euro-VI from 2026 to 2020
- FAME (Faster Adoption & Manufacturing go Hybrid and Electric Vehicles) India Scheme: The scheme aims at in creating infrastructure and promoting the use of environment-friendly electric vehicles.
- The National Urban Transport Policy has implemented measures to increase public transport. For example: Expansion of Metro Rail Transportation System in Delhi, Metro Bus Project in Bangalore
Issues and challenges
- Poverty: According to multidimensional poverty index, 53% of Indians are multidimensional poor. Lack of inclusive policies and unresolved debate between environment and development would make poor and tribal people more vulnerable to climate change related activities.
- Funding: Absence of well established green equity and debt markets in India along with USA pulling out of Paris Agreement has further complicated the funding mechanisms.
- Technology: India lacks poorly in power efficient technologies like solar technologies and efficient thermal power plants. Low budgetary allocations towards research and development especially in the field of climate change makes India dependent on developed nations for technology transfer.
- Data: India has inadequate mechanisms to collect data on climate change in India. Example: the changing flowering pattern of plants, breeding seasons of migratory birds, etc.
- Lack of awareness: Despite numerous government initiatives, the solution to climate change lies with the people themselves. However, the lack of awareness among people hinders the success of various initiatives aiming at combating climate change.
- It is important to build resilience among rural and urban communities to deal with natural disasters, adapt to environmental changes, and manage potential risk arising out of climate change
- A public policy for corporate social responsibility should be formulated at national level considering disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation
- Research and development backed with adequate funding should be encouraged to develop and promote green technologies.
- There should be adequate focus on educating people about climate change. Behavioural change among the masses is important to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change
- Climate Change is one of the most alarming issues of 21st century, all the countries should address the issue with a shared perspective
Q. Analyse the impact of climate change on India. Discuss the steps taken by Government to deal with climate change. Suggest holistic measures to address the issue of climate change . | <urn:uuid:4cbc43bd-a4ce-4686-b9e9-52c7f1b1ddb8> | CC-MAIN-2019-35 | https://www.iasjunior.com/weekly-current-affairs-mains-19th-to-25th-august-2018/ | 2019-08-20T22:39:04Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027315681.63/warc/CC-MAIN-20190820221802-20190821003802-00190.warc.gz | en | 0.931046 | 7,998 |
Each transcript is a rough approximation of the message preached and may occasionally misstate certain portions of the sermon and even misspell certain words. It should in no way be considered an edited document ready for print. Moreover, as in any transcription of the spoken word, the full intention and passion of the speaker cannot be fully captured and will in no way reflect the same style of a written document.
It is my great joy to once again minister the Word of God to you this morning. We find ourselves in Romans chapter 13 and in a little while I am going to unpack the text at verses six and seven as we continue what is really the third part of a series as we have studied this text regarding the Christian’s attitude toward civil authorities.
However, given the nature of what has gone on here in our country and the response of so many people with respect to the presidential election, I felt it was necessary for me to give you a biblical perspective of some of these things. Hopefully this will be an encouragement to you. Certainly what you are about to hear you will not hear anyplace else except in churches and pulpits that hold dear the Word of God.
As Christian we grieve over what is happening I our country, the nation that is ultimately the product of the Reformation, founded upon many principles in Scripture. Our founding fathers for the most pat understood the utter depravity of man, his capability of doing all manner of wicked things and therefore they rightly feared the potential tyranny of a centralized government. So they set into places or they set into, I should say, place checks and balances within our government, three distinct branches of government that would hopefully prevent a centralized government from coming into power. And, of course, the final check on those powers of centralized government was the right of secession by the sovereign states within the country. And eventually in order to, quote, save the union, Abraham Lincoln violently subverted the Constitution in order to establish a centralized state which was really his agenda all long despite revisionist history. And that war ultimately abolished the right of secession. And ever since then the highly decentralized limited government established by the founding fathers has been replaced by a highly centralized state. And that is precisely the agenda of the Obama administration.
Sadly in this election Americans have unleashed the powers of centralized government that will ultimately shackle us in the chains of tyranny. We are now well on the road to serfdom. It is fascinating to see how more and more people in our country are content to take confiscated money from tax payers in the name of fairness or some contrived social justice narrative which is really nothing more than a ruse to buy votes.
It is interesting that now we have over 100 million people in the United States of America existing on some form of federal welfare. That is not including social security and Medicare. That is basically a third of the population. And these people, as we see, come out to vote in force.
Now from a Christian perspective the results of the presidential election are deeply disappointing, but I might say they should not be surprising to us. The president and other leaders that God has ordained to rule over us, accurately reflect the majority of citizens in the United States, one that is going to continue to grow numerically, an electorate ruled ultimately by their lusts, an electorate that wants nothing to do with biblical morality and, frankly, has contempt for the one true God.
From the endorsement of same sex marriage to the murder of unborn infants, politicians continue to show contempt for biblical morality. From government controlled healthcare to the rejection of Israel in favor of Isalimists, Christians and all conservative Americans will continue to be forced to endure, frankly, a seismic shift in American alliances and values and freedoms as we become like the failed nanny states of Europe.
Now as irrational and immoral and idolatrous as all of this may be, it is nonetheless, the ominous reality of our day and, frankly, the foreboding course of our future. In the last two presidential elections we have experienced a clash in world views and the secularists and socialists of the entitlement class have won the day. No political party will ever be able to undo these things in my opinion. If the opposing party could not beat an administration with such an abysmal economy, with catastrophic unemployment, with unsustainable debt, with a failed presidency, the will never be able to beat them, unless they become more like them which they will do and the compromise will further accelerate.
Beloved, we are no longer on a slippery slope towards dictatorship and moral and economic ruin. We are in a free fall. This, however, shouldn’t be a surprise to any honest student of Scripture. This is what happens when a nation, when a people rejects the one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Bible. The apostle Paul has reminded us in Romans one and verse 18:
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” | 1 |
And what truth is that? The truth that God is our Creator and he is to be worshipped and obeyed. Certainly our country rejects that totally. Paul reminds us in that text, as we go on and read it—you may recall our study of it—that when people refuse to give honor and give thanks to our Creator God they become futile in their speculations and eventually God darkens their hearts. They profess to be wise, but they are fools. He tells us that they exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for all manner of idols. When man rejects God, God rejects man. Certainly the party in power in the United States has made it clear that they want nothing to do with God and the other party doesn't really understand who God is either.
It is the policy of our government that our educators teach the theory of evolution, that man is nothing more than sophisticated germ that somehow crawled out of some primordial ooze and became what we are, that we are nothing more than the result of random selection. It is now politically correct to mock Bible believing Christians and try to remove every vestige of Christianity from public discourse and even from public sight. Think about it. Nativity scenes and crosses on military graves are now considered offensive. And yet the most vile, reprehensible, unspeakable, lewd acts of homosexuality is acceptable in gay pride parades.
Like a train going down a steep mountain that suddenly loses its breaks, God has lifted his restraint and he is allowing man to fully indulge his lusts here in this country and around the world and we will continue to pick up speed as a nation, racing towards our demise and divine judgment.
Beloved, this is what is called the wrath of divine abandonment, a terrifying fate that will ultimately lead to eternal abandonment for those who refuse to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, our only hope of salvation.
You may also recall in our study of Romans thus far that in chapter one verses 23 through 32 Paul paints a vivid picture of what happens when a man suppresses the truth in unrighteousness, when he rejects God’s revelation of himself in creation and in conscience and chooses, instead to bow down to idols made with his own hands and honors creatures rather than the creator. He tells us in verse 24 of chapter one:
“Therefore God gave them over…” | 2 |
The Greek term παραδιδωμι (par-ad-id’-o-mee), a very strong verb meaning to deliver up. It is used in the New Testament to refer to one who is given into the hands of another to be judged or to be condemned or to be executed, to be tormented, to be put to death. And in this context it describes the wrath of divine abandonment. Beloved, this is where we are in our nation. God has delivered us up. He gives man over to the folly of his sin, to pursue the full extent of his lusts and experience the full consequences of his iniquities in hopes that perhaps he will see the truth of his sin and repent and believe.
And if a man remains indignant towards God, he will eventually cross a line that is only known to God of which he can never return. And when this happens God will abandon him for eternity.
Paul describes three stages of this abandonment, not necessarily found in every individual, but in the collective whole of a culture and with each stage we see a progressive worsening of evil and its consequence.
In that text he describes how he first gave them over to sordid immorality and then, secondly, the shameless homosexuality and finally to shocking depravity. This is a description of our country. And this explains the moral and economic free fall that we now see, because, dear friends, sin always accelerates downward, because sin is a metastasizing corruption it will always lead from bad to worse. It never goes in the opposite direction. The spiral of a man’s life will always be downward, never upward apart from Christ. This is what we witness today as God continues to allow Satan to prepare the world for the ultimate deceptions of the antichrist.
Now the good news is that we, as Christians, are in the world, but we are not of the world. You will recall that Peter, for example, reminds us that we are aliens. You heard me say that many times. And certainly people that do not know Christ when they hear me speak, those that will hear this around the world that do not know Christ they will say, “This guy is from another planet.” He reminds us that we are also strangers. This is not our home. We are citizens of another kingdom. In fact, Paul tells us in Colossians one beginning in verse 13 that he delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
Now before we examine our text this morning, which pertains to our attitude towards civil authorities, I wish to give you some much needed perspective. Beloved, as we watch the storm clouds gathering around us, we must bear in mind that our God is a sovereign God that has ordained the end from the beginning. Nothing is catching him by surprise. In fact, everything is going precisely as he has planned. For this reason in Psalm two the psalmist says
“Why are the nations in an uproar, And the peoples devising a vain thing?” | 3 |
That is to say, resisting the rule of God is futile. It is utter folly. He goes on to say:
“The kings of the earth take their stand, And the rulers take counsel together Against the LORD and against His Anointed.” | 4 |
And what is it that they say?
"Let us tear their fetters apart, And cast away their cords from us!" | 5 |
In other words, let’s free ourselves from the rule of God. And what is God’s reaction?
“He who sits in the heavens laughs, The Lord scoffs at them.” | 6 |
In verse 10 he goes on to say:
Now therefore, O kings, show discernment; Take warning, O judges of the earth. Worship the LORD with reverence, And rejoice with trembling. Do homage to the Son, lest He become angry, and you perish in the way, For His wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in Him! | 7 |
And by implication, how cursed are those who don’t.
Dear Christian, remember this the next time some politician or some political pundit spouts forth something that causes you to bristle with anger. My friends, they are dead in their trespasses and sins. They are deaf and blind to the gospel of grace. They have no capacity to discern spiritual truth and be saved apart from saving grace, apart from the regenerating work of the Spirit. The things of God are foolishness to them. They have given over to a worthless mind to pursue their lusts and experience the full consequences of their sin.
Beloved, we should pity them, not hate them. We should love them, not curse them, because unless they repent they will perish in their sin. That should be the attitude of the Christian.
When I watch the arrogance of our president and others of his ilk, I see two things. One I can see a man in desperate need of Christ who, unless he repents will one day bow before the Lord and confess with his mouth that he is the Lord, because every knee is going to bow. And I also see a man that unless he repents as well as his family and others, he will one day stand before a great white throne of judgment. The heavens and the earth will have passed away and they will see the Lord I all of his glory, not as Savior, but judge. They will be cast away to eternal darkness and to an eternal hell. They will be eternally isolated from every creature, forever separated from God, blaspheming God for eternity, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth in unimaginable torment. This is what I see. This is what we should all see. And it should burden our hearts to pray for these dear people.
Dear Christian, don’t get preoccupied with politics or the inevitable destruction of this nation which is not our home. This world is passing away. Be preoccupied with the gospel, Christ. This is our mission. This is our sacred calling. See the eternal fate of sinners and cry out to God on their behalf that he will be merciful to them and save them, as he has us, because were it not for his grace, we would be right there with them. This should be our attitude toward all men who reject Christ, who remain under his wrath.
Beloved, we are to pray for our president. May I encourage you to do that? Pray for our president. Pray for his family. The apostle Paul instructs us in 1 Timothy two beginning in verse one:
First of all, then, I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men, for kings and all who are in authority, in order that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity. | 8 |
Beloved, pray that God will be merciful to him and to his family and change his heart by the power of the gospel, that he and those that serve with him might experience the forgiveness of sin and be reconciled to the one who gave himself as a ransom for all who believe.
Now I have much to say to you this morning. I believe the Holy Spirit would have me help you understand this election and the current state of affairs in our country in light of God’s plan for the ages. So bear with me for a few minutes.
You will recall back in Romans nine, 10 and 11, Paul digressed from his great revelation of the doctrine of justification and he explained Israel’s election, Israel’s defection and Israel’s salvation in those three chapters respectively. A salvation that will happen when the Messiah King will return in all of his glory and he will ultimately fulfill his purpose I choosing Israel I the first place. You will recall that God declared through his servant Jeremiah in Jeremiah 13:11.
“...that they might be for Me a people, for renown, for praise, and for glory.” | 9 |
Now understanding what God has promised to do with his covenant people Israel is the key to understanding Bible prophecy as well as understanding where we as a people are at historically in God’s plan of redemption. May I remind you, if you go back to Deuteronomy chapter 30 verses one through six God predicted what he had predetermined. And what was that? That Israel would one day reject him, that they would be banished into foreign nations because of their disobedience and because of his great compassion he would eventually restore them to their land and redeem them unto himself according to a new covenant. And all through Scripture we see how God is supernaturally and providentially intending all of human history to accomplish these things.’
For example, you don’t need to turn there. We read from Daniel a few minutes ago, but may I remind you of the prophet Daniel? In the book of Daniel the prophet describes the course of Gentile world history of which in the United States are still a part. God revealed to Daniel the successive stages of Gentile domination over Israel throughout the centuries, a domination that will occur until the King of kings and Lord of lords, the ultimate conqueror, the Messiah returns to defeat all of the nations who oppose him, when he will return to raise his covenant people Israel to their promised place of blessing and preeminence in the world in his glorious millennial kingdom, a time when we, too, will reign with him.
And this, of course, was a source of great encouragement to the exiled Jews in Daniel’s day as it has been to all believers since that time. And because of the promises revealed to Daniel in Daniel chapter two verse 20 we read this.
Daniel answered and said, "Let the name of God be blessed forever and ever, For wisdom and power belong to Him. And it is He who changes the times and the epochs; He removes kings and establishes kings; He gives wisdom to wise men, And knowledge to men of understanding. It is He who reveals the profound and hidden things; He knows what is in the darkness, And the light dwells with Him. To Thee, O God of my fathers, I give thanks and praise, For Thou hast given me wisdom and power.” | 10 |
Now what was it that God revealed to Daniel? The answer in a nutshell is this. That God has sovereignly allowed Gentiles to dominate Israel and will continue to do so until the second advent of Christ when the Lord Jesus will return in power and great glory to reconcile them unto himself and establish his millennial reign upon the earth. God revealed to him the domination of actually six great empires. We read about it a few minutes ago in our Scripture reading in Daniel seven. He told him about Babylon. And then the Medo-Persian Empire, the Grecian Empire, the Roman Empire. And even then a future Roman Empire. Frankly, one in which the United States is a part and will be more so. And then finally the millennial kingdom of the Messiah King.
Now we know from history that as God predicted to Daniel he raised up the Babylonians. He raised up the Medes and the Persians. He raised up the Greeks and he raised up the Romans. And he also tore them all down. Likewise, God revealed to Daniel that he would raise up a revived Roman Empire of which America will ultimately be a part a 10 nation confederacy under the rule of the antichrist. Again, as you read in Daniel seven and as it is expanded much in the book of Revelation. This will be a final Gentile empire made up of an amalgamation of all the previous empires that survived and were absorbed into the final Gentile empire that will gain ascendency, one that will be ruled by the antichrist, one that will seek to once and for all destroy Israel, but one which Christ will destroy in violent abruptness at his second coming. And then he will establish the millennial kingdom.
And in light of that Daniel says in chapter two verse 44:
“And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed, and that kingdom will not be left for another people; it will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, but it will itself endure forever.” | 11 |
And in chapter seven beginning in verse 13 Daniel is given a vision of what will transpire and here is what he saw:
I kept looking in the night visions, And behold, with the clouds of heaven One like a Son of Man was coming, And He came up to the Ancient of Days And was presented before Him. And to Him was given dominion, Glory and a kingdom, That all the peoples, nations, and men of every language Might serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion Which will not pass away; And His kingdom is one Which will not be destroyed. | 12 |
Beloved, no wonder Jehovah God sits in the heavens and laughs at those who scoff at him and how plot against him. You can go to Daniel chapter nine and there you will read the chronological framework from Daniel’s time to Christ’s kingdom as we have studied in great detail before.
Beloved, the point is this. Everything that God predicted, everything that he has foreordained, everything that he sovereignly superintends by his providence is happening precisely the way he said. Thus far all of the prophesies that were to be fulfilled in history have been fulfilled literally, which leads us to believe that all of the rest will be fulfilled in the same way.
Now think of these concepts I Daniel of which I have just hit the very surface and link them to the truths that Paul gave us in chapter 11 and verse 25. He tells us that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in and, thus, all Israel will be saved.
You may recall in our study that this basically means that in the secret counsel of God’s will he sovereignly ordained to harden the hearts of the vast majority of the chosen people of Israel due to their unbelief and we see this today with the Jewish people, but also that he has preserved for himself a remnant of those hardened hearts out of ethnic, national Israel, branches that have been broken off, branches also that will be saved en masse. And this will occur after the fullness of the Gentiles has come into the Church.
By the way, prophetically, this will happen after the Jews are back in their land according to Isaiah 11:11 and 12. Well, where are the Jews today? They are back in their land. I might add just a portion of the land that God has promised them.
Amos sounded Israel’s hope in Amos 9:14. He says:
“I will restore the captivity of My people Israel.” | 13 |
And in verse 15 he says:
“‘I will also plant them on their land, And they will not again be rooted out from their land Which I have given them,’ Says the LORD your God.” | 14 |
What an amazing thing to see how out of the ashes of the Holocaust God has once again brought his people to the very center of everything that is happening in the world. Israel has returned to the land in unbelief. And that is why Paul said in verse 25 of chapter 11 that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in and, thus, all Israel will be saved. What does this mean? It means that God has set a limit on his judgment until—the word until denotes a specific moment in time—until what? The fullness, the idea of completion, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. In other words, until the full number of elect Gentiles are saved. All Israel will be saved when the last Gentile in the Church has come in, he says, εισερχομαι (ice-er’-khom-ahee) in the original language, a very Jesus often used to describe entering into the kingdom of heaven, entering into eternal life.
So when the last Gentile is saved during the church age, Israel’s judicial hardening will be removed on that portion that God has elected to save that remnant and what is left of that remnant which here is called all Israel will once again enjoy its covenant fellowship with God as the prophets have promised.
Now, my friends, today we live in the times of the Gentiles, a time when a vast number of Gentiles are being saved around the world as the Old Testament prophets predicted. And when the last Gentile of the Church age is saved, the Lord is going to snatch away his bridal church and what is called the rapture. We read about this in 1 Thessalonians four, 1 Corinthians 15, John 14, that amazing event for which we now anxiously await.
And then at that point God will once again focus his attention in Israel and what is called Daniel’s 70th week. This will be the final seven years of judgment, many times called the pre kingdom judgments upon Israel. These are judgments upon Israel, not the Church. Daniel 9:24 describes this in great detail. Again, it is also know as the seven tribulation. And Daniel’s prophecy in Daniel nine verse 24 and following reveals the fact that 69 weeks of years of judgments have already been completed on Israel, but there is one more week of years that remains. That is Daniel’s 70th week. And this I might remind you is a distinctively Jewish context pertaining to God’s covenants with Israel. They cannot be describing anything in the Church age. This will be a time when Israel enters into—according to Jeremiah 30 and verse seven—the time of Jacob’s trouble, a period of unprecedented oppression for Israel. The context there describes her final restoration just before her Messiah returns as described, for example, in Revelation six through 19.
So in summary, where are we? Well, the world today is being prepared for a revived Roman Empire that will be ruled by the antichrist. According to Revelation and other passages we see that this will be a time where there will be a one world ruler. And we can see the world clamoring for that today. It will be a time where there is a one world government, a one world economy and there will be a one world ecumenical, apostate, false religious system, the great harlot church. And Israel right now and the events of the world is being prepared of these pre kingdom judgments of Daniel’s 70th week, but first the Church must be removed. And I believe that this could happen at any moment. And when the saints are removed, imagine what will happen in the United States of America. It will be catastrophic destruction.
But, before the Lord’s return Jesus said in Matthew 24:9 that you, referring to Israel, will be hated by all nations on account of my name. All nations would include the United States. The prophecies reveal that eventually Jerusalem will be surrounded by a great army made up of all nations of the world. It is fascinating that in Ezekiel’s prophecy, in Ezekiel chapter 38 and 39 there is description of an alliance of Islamic nations that will swoop down on Israel from the north and the prophet tells us that they will be defeated on the mountains of Israel. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, the holy one in Israel. And we can see that being prepared right before our eyes today.
Today we see Iran and all the other Islamic nations—by the way, they make up 1.3 billion people and they are aligning themselves against tiny little Israel. So prophetically all the nations of the world will eventually come against Israel. And in the hour of their greatest peril Jesus will suddenly return to save them both physically as well as spiritually according to Zechariah 14 and Isaiah 59 verses 20 through 21.
So, again, my friends, we see this stage set for these things right before our eyes as all of the nations of the world increasingly believe that Israel is the cancer of the world, the one that needs to be removed.
So where does this place us in God’s historical plan? Simply this. We, as a nation, see ourselves along with the rest of the world being prepared for the rule of the antichrist, the one world economy and so forth, the one world government, unprecedented persecution against Christians and Israel. So the stage is set.
I find it fascinating by the way that our president is very popular in all of the nations of the world except Israel where he enjoys an approval rating of less than 10 percent. Plus it is interesting that the current administration is far more sympathetic to Islam than to Christianity and certainly than to Israel. And you will see this develop more and more.
So, my friends, we await the rapture of the Church. 1 Thessalonians four verses 16:
For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words. | 15 |
Now I ask you. Are you ready to meet the Lord? This election is simply one more domino that has fallen in the direction of divine judgment. The time of judgment when the Messiah king will return I unimaginable majesty and power and wrath and justice to establish his millennial kingdom upon the earth, which, by the way, is the consummating bridge between human history and the eternal state. And I the rapture you will recall that he comes for his saints, but in the second coming he comes with his saints. According to Colossians 3:4:
“When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory.” | 16 |
And so many other passages that attest to these amazing truths.
As I was contemplating these things over the course of this week, my heart went to Charles Wesley’s great hymn where he said this:
Lo, he comes with clouds descending,
Once of favored sinners slain,
Thousand, thousands saints attending,
Swell, the triumph of his train.
Hallelujah, hallelujah God appears on earth to reign.
Now while we confidently and we patiently await the Lord’s return what should our attitude be towards rulers, the rulers that God has placed over us? Well, thus far, we have learned in chapter 13 that we are to be in subjection to them for the sake of the gospel, because God has ordained governments for our good and his glory.
Now Paul is going to expand upon this in our text this morning that we will look at for the remaining few minutes of our time together.
Notice he says in verse six:
“For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing.” | 17 |
Now I know it is hard to think of the IRS serving in the capacity of God’s ministers, but here we see that, indeed, that is who they are and why he has given them to us.
Now I would also add they certainly don’t understand that in the final analysis they owe their authority to God to whom they are ultimately responsible. However, because of this, we are to honor them as they perform their duty. Of course this would have been a hard pill to swallow for the early Christians most of which were Jews, because the ancient Jews were well acquainted with the excessive taxation from a pagan, despotic and merciless Roman government as well as others that they had endured in days gone by. But, again, that government, like all governments was ultimately God’s ape to accomplish his purposes.
It is also important of you to understand that God instituted and established a very detailed tax system for the nation of Israel and the theocracy of Israel. First there was a 10 percent tithe required to support the Levites. They were the priests and it also supported the civil leaders. You read about that in Leviticus 27:30 and Numbers 18:21-24. And this was basically a tax that funded Israel’s theocratic government. And then, secondly, there was a second 10 percent tithe that was to be given to support annual festivals and sacrifices and the tabernacle, late the temple, a tax for cultivating social and cultural life, for promoting national unity, those types of things. You read about that in Deuteronomy 12 verses 10 through 19. It essentially funded the national religious life of Israel. Then there was a third 10 percent tithe collected to fund social welfare, shall we say, to help, quote, the alien, the orphan, the widow who were in your town, who shall come and eat and be satisfied in order that the Lord your God may bless you in all of the work of your hand which you do, Deuteronomy 14:29. I might add that this was only collected every third year so it really amounted to 3.3 percent tax per year. Then there was a fourth tax which was an annual half shekel tax that was levied on every male Israelite according to Exodus 30:14 that was 20 years old and over and it was to be a contribution to the Lord. And then, finally, there were two more indirect taxes under the Mosaic Law, one that required them to leave a small portion of their crops unharvested to be gleaned by the poor. We read about that, for example, in Leviticus 19 and verse 10.
I might add that the poor had to do the work of the harvesting, ok? That is an important thing to underscore. They just didn't sit at home playing video games and watching television and playing with their phones and so forth and wait for a government check. They had to get out and do something, but there was something provided for them. And then, finally, the second indirect tax required that every seventh year the land was to lie fallow, meaning that it was not to be cultivated. And whatever crop would come up, then the poor were allowed to harvest that crop and livestock were allowed to eat from that crop and so forth.
And so under God’s system, the total of all these six mandatory forms of taxation amounted to about 24 percent a year. Boy, wouldn’t that be nice today?
Now under the Roman rule the theocratic tax structure was disbanded, but the Romans did allow the Jews to collect certain religious taxes. You will recall, for example, how the tax collectors in Capernaum required Jesus and Peter to pay the two drachma temple tax which ultimately, interestingly enough, went into the coffers of the high priest and the chief priests in Jerusalem that would eventually crucify the Lord. Jesus told Peter in Matthew 17:27:
"But, lest we give them offense, go to the sea, and throw in a hook, and take the first fish that comes up; and when you open its mouth, you will find a stater. Take that and give it to them for you and Me." | 18 |
By the way, the fishing deal doesn’t work today, ok? So the Lord is our example. Think about it. As the Son of God he was under no obligation to pay a temple tax. But he did so to avoid offending the civil authorities and also to be an example to his disciples, because, beloved there is something much greater at stake. That is the gospel, the kingdom. Jesus didn’t come to reform government. He came to save sinners.
Now I might also add that the New Testament does not require believers to tithe any amount. We are not under the law. We do not live in a theocracy. We are under no obligation to give a specified amount to our heavenly Father. But Paul does advise us to give regularly. For example 1 Corinthians 16:2.
“On the first day of every week let each one of you put aside and save, as he may prosper.” | 19 |
And in 2 Corinthians nine beginning at verse six he went on to warn that:
“...he who sows sparingly shall also reap sparingly; and he who sows bountifully shall also reap bountifully. Let each one do just as he has purposed in his heart; not grudgingly or under compulsion; for God loves a cheerful giver.” | 20 |
So, again, Paul says:
“For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing.” | 21 |
And he says:
“Render to all what is due them.” | 22 |
In other words, all the civil authorities that collect taxes, all that is due them... What does hat refer to? Well, all. Well, what is all? Well, that is the IRS. That this state taxes. That is sales taxes, property taxes, what? Inheritance taxes, capital gains, all of those things.
Well, that is not fair. Well, of course not. We are in a fallen world. But the issue is not about us. The issue is about what God is doing. Our role is to obey for the purpose of the gospel.
“Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor.” | 23 |
You see, the idea is this, friends. You don’t pay your taxes begrudgingly as if you have been sorely mistreated, all right? That is not the way we are to do this. We don’t write our check to the tax collector, to the IRS and say to them, so to speak, ok, here is your stinking money. Now get out of here. That is not to be our attitude. That is what Paul is telling us, because, remember. They are a minister of God to you for good, verse four. They are rulers, servants of God, verse six. So God is using them to benefit you. So trust him, obey him. Remember all along that you re just a stranger in this land. You are just passing through, because, once again, folks, the bigger issue is the gospel and living for the glory of God that others might see Christ in you, the hope of glory.
I might add as we bring this to a close this morning, that I have never seen a professing Christian who constantly complains about the government, who is constantly belly aching about taxes who is also passionate of evangelism and discipleship. Instead, they are preoccupied with the things of this world. They are just way too attached to the things of this world. And if this is you, if you are honest with yourself, the real issue is you are worried about losing your stuff. You are worried about somehow losing your freedoms and your personal rights. And, beloved, all that I can say to you is that none of that matters in God’s economy. This isn’t our home.
I pray that this election will help loosen our grip on this world and cause us all to cling to the Savior who is coming soon to snatch us away. You know, as Americans we, frankly, we are spoiled rotten. I have been all around the world. You just have no idea how spoiled we are. Even some of the poorest people in our communities live better than ancient kings ever could have imagined. Too many of us, unfortunately, live as this ... as if this world is our home.
By the way, they are easily recognized. Those Christians will look like they are having a gall bladder attack as a result of the election. Folks, get over it. God is at work. Trust him. Watch what he is going to do.
So may I challenge you to live consistently with the priorities, the standards that God has given us in his Word. Have a right attitude toward the civil authorities and be excited dear friends. Jesus is coming again. And he is coming soon. And I just pray that he will find each of us watching and waiting, excited to see him face to face faithfully devoted to serving him in whatever post he has placed us.
Let’s pray together.
Father, thank you for these eternal truths. Thank you for the hope that we have in Christ. And for those that do not know you as Savior, oh, God, will you move upon their hearts with such overwhelming conviction that today will be the day that they will repent of their sins and cry out for undeserved mercy that they will receive so rich and so free. We thank you and we praise you and we ask that you would come quickly, Lord Jesus. Amen.
| 1 | Romans 1:18.
| 2 | Romans 1:24.
| 3 | Psalm 2:1.
| 4 | Psalm 2:2.
| 5 | Psalm 2:3.
| 6 | Psalm 2:4.
| 7 | Psalm 2:10-12.
| 8 | 1 Timothy 2:1-2.
| 9 | Jeremiah 13:11.
| 10 | Daniel 2:20-23.
| 11 | Daniel 2:44.
| 12 | Daniel 7:13-14.
| 13 | Amos 9:14.
| 14 | Amos 9:15.
| 15 | 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18.
| 16 | Colossians 3:4.
| 17 | Romans 13:6.
| 18 | Matthew 17:27.
| 19 | 1 Corinthians 16:2.
| 20 | 2 Corinthians 9:6-7.
| 21 | Romans 13:6.
| 22 | Romans 13:7.
| 23 | Ibid. | <urn:uuid:fb1e5f1f-7f3c-480d-a0fa-260e15bd877b> | CC-MAIN-2019-35 | https://cbctn.org/sermon/427/Presidential_Election_Perspective.html | 2019-08-24T22:26:34Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027321786.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20190824214845-20190825000845-00550.warc.gz | en | 0.969198 | 8,680 |
Newspaper Page Text
JT. R. STROTHEB,
ATTORNE V AT LAW. A Commissioner f Deeca, &c, for the States of Missouri. Tennessee and Kentucky. Greneviixk, Washington county, Miss. REFER TO Hon. Alex. Montgomery, Caplain Wm. B. Pryor, Messrs. Porterfieid & Co., Vicksbuig. Clerk of the Circuit Court, Washington county. Hon. J . R. fijrrus, Yazoo City. April 27, 1853-25. ACARD. rrillE Rev. Thomas D. Ozanne, Rector of JL St. Philips Church, Kirk wood, Madison co Miss., is desirousof receiving into his family a limited number of Boarding Pupila whom he will instruct in all the branches of a Classical and English Education either preparing thein for College or carrying them through a Collegiate course, as may bo desired. Kirkwood offers every advantage as to healthfulness of locality and retirement of situation, so conducive to study The boarders are in every respect treat ed as a part of the family. The ensuing session will open on the 5th of September next. Tuition 8 40 and $50; French, $20; Spanish, $10 per session of tea months; Boarding with washing &c, $ 150. REFERENCES. Bt Rev Wrn M Green, Bishop of Miss., Jaekon; Rev Meyer Lewin, Rector of St Andrews Ch., " Col Wm McWiilie. Kirkwood, Madison eoMiss 11 Vauffhan. Esq., Benton, Yazoo co. " M W Ewing, Satari ia, Vazoo co. M W C Smedes, Vicksburg, G SYergrer, Esq., Jackson, July 20-37-2m- Mr. J. C Chappell became a member of our firm on the 1st inat. The business will be conducted under the style of WRiGHT, W HALEY & CO. Vicksburg, July 9, 185?. C WRIGHT, THOS. WHALEY, J. C CHAPPEI.I.. WRIGHT. WHALEY & CD. DEALERS IN Jeane, Linscys. Lowells, Bussetts, Boots, Shoes, cfc. Washington Street. Vicksburo, Miss. Notice. ALL persons interested in lotsNos. 117 and 118 fronting on Washington street, in Vazoo City, county of Yazoo, and State of Mis sissippi, are notified that the following petition will be presented to the Probate Court of Ya zoo countv, at the September term thereof, 1S53. THE S TATE OF MISSISSU PI, J Yazoo Co u n t y . Probate Court September Term, 1853. To tlie Honorable George B. Wilkinson, Judge of said court. YOUR petitioner, Sarah P. Head, widow of Emanuel Head deceased, respectfully rep resents unto your honor; that her husband, the said Emanuel Head, died intestate on the day of 1839, leaving several children, all of whom your petitioner is informed, are dead or non-residents of this State; that at the time of his death, the said Emanuel Head" was seized and possessed of "the following lands and tene ments. 1 inr and being in the county of Yazoo, State afordQpd. fo-wit: Lots designated as num her one hundred and seenteen, (117) and one hundred and eighteen, fron'jngon Washington s reet, in the town of Yazoo City . That James v V . Barnett who administered, on the stud de cadent's estafe, which was declared insolvent, has closed his a lministratjon by final seUle iuei.t, with the Probate Court of Yazoo county, and surrendered his letters at the November term thereof, 1842. V'our petitioner has never received her dow er in said lots, nor any equivalent therefor, but is still milled to the same. She therefore prays your honor to award a writ commanding tne Sheriff of Yazoo county, to set apart, and allot, her dower in said above described prem ises. And as in duty bound your petitioner will ever pray. &c. . JONES &, BOWMAN, Aug. 10, '53.-40. -4t. Sol'rs for petitioner. 1853. 1853. iDooper's Well. 'IHE U'idersigued lias taken the ENTIRE l. management arid control of. COOPER'S WELL, and is now prepared to accommod ite the pub lic, . , . A rtew dining room has been eiectr. SLEEPING ROOMS plastered snd ritfeu with new furniture and BEDDING, and a Complete renovation effected Ample Accommodations will feE Provided fok FIVE HUNDRED GUESTS; and rib more will be received trjan can be com ibrtiLply accommodated. , EOR INVALIDS there cari be no more ad vantageous retreat. The water is highly recom mended by the medical faculty, and the wonder ful cum effected bv its Use almrst surpass be- Hfr. Amnle details of several astonishing cures mav he obtained oh aDDlication at the Well. The terms will be moiterate, and no exertion J will be s Da red to make guests comfortable. The VirkRburff arid Jacksorisfid Raymond Railroad will convey passengers to Raymond, ... 11 . r, l i i hence 3 m miles to tins Well, in W. H. Smith's line cf. NEW FOUR HORSE STAGES. The time of trip is less than 3 hours from Vicks burg. Through tickets from Vicksburg to Cooper's well, can oe ooiainea ai ine nan depot, Vicksburg ; price $2 20. June 15th No-32 JOHN THATCHER. Removal. 9m 7o.,ii rnootC.tlv infnrm hiifripmlo nn tstomers, that he has just temoved to the . . Spacious Store, HO, cflNAL STREET, where he will constantly keep a supply of Plantation, Household & Fancy Dry Goods which will enable him to fill a bill through, at the lowpri cei which have always characterized this house O. M. SIMPSON, 116, Canal Street, Touras Row, New Orleans May 4, 1863. N. B. Cou itry orders pi omptiy filled Copartnership Notice, M R. WILLIAM M. PINCKARD, formerly of Vicksburg, Miss., became a member oi ine rirm ci "Lteoko. rmAnu on the 4th April last. The COTTON FACTOR . 1 n. r rf", ill ll...r.f. . nn A. V. " AGE and COMMISSION BUSINESS will be conducted as heretofore, under the same Style and Firm, st No. 110 Camp Street, New Orleans. GEO. M. PINCKARD, HENRY A. CAIRNES, WM. M. PINCKARD. (7-Messrs. E. D. Downs & Co will act as oilr agents at Vicksburg, Miss., and are prepar ed to make Cash Advances, ind ftu-num sup plies to Plaoters Shipping Ct.tton to our House GEO. M. PINCKARD & Co. New Orleans, June 15, 1853-6m. WHISKEY 5a barrels Dexter's celebrated " whtskev for sale by Ji-x 22, 1853 SHROPSHIRE & MASSE Y. PIANO FORTES. U C. TYLER, Agent for the sale of Pi aro Fortes from the most celebrated Factories in New York and Boston. Piano Fortes .will be found constantly on hand, and for sale at the Manufacturer's retail price. Also on hand, a goon assortment of Sheet Mu sic. Yazoo City, April 20, 1853-ly. New Cheap Cash Store. LEWIS FRANKLIN, Next door to Link df Harrison, Main Street, V17"OULD respectfully inform his friends, customers and the public in generrl, that he has op ned a new uid select assortment of SPRING and S MMER GOODS, comprising of the following articles: Bendy made Clothes, of ill descriptions Hat Boots Shoes Trunks and Dry-Goo flatters himself' that lie can underset the same liueo. business in 'own. Yazoo city, March 1853-ly. 03"Profeasof Lutx, C. Uarsv's 1 erous. Or Medicated Compound, f r md in KRY 8 1 BIOSH M-. i r Beautj Restoring an lying, uriuiif. rresen streogthing the Hair, Reli vi Di the skin. Curing Rheumatic Pains, and Heal ing External Wounds. Bounded hy n geo graphical lines, the reputation of Barry's Tricopherous pervades the Unjon. The sales of the article f late years have increased in a ratio that almost exceeds belief. Professor Barry, after a careful examination of his sales book, finds that the number ofl ottlea delivered to order, in quantities of from hah a gross up ward, during the year 1852, was within a trifle of 950.000. It is unnecessary to present at length the evidences of the wonderful properities of the Tricopherous, when the public have furnished such an indorsement as this. The cheapness of the article and thfKplanations given of its chemical action upon the hair, the scalp, and in all cases oi superficial irritaii n, hrst recom mended it to the attention of the people. This was all that the inventor desired. Every bottle advertised itself. The effects of the fluid excee ded expectation. It acted like a charm. The ladies would not be without it. Country deal ers in every section of the United States found they must have it; and thus was built up n wholesale trade of an extent hitherto unhead of as regards articles of this kind. The highest point has not yet been reached and it is believ ed that the sales this year will b' a milii m an I a half of bottles. Depot and Manufactory. No. 1 -17 Bro&dwa . New-York. Retail pi ice, 2 cents a large ot tle. Liberal discount to purchasers by the quan tity. Sold by all the principal merchants and druggists throughout the United States and Canada, Mexico, West Indies, Great Britain, France, &e. June 15th, Gm-32 1S53. REGULAR UNITED STATES MAIL PACKET. ' plIE Steamer S. S. P R E N L T I S S, Ca'pt. P. C. Wallis, leaves for Vicfcburir, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, at 12 o'clock M., pone tually , connecting with the ew )rleans puck eta OB arrival. For freight or pa-sai;e pr . W. WYMAN. Agent. CC tne 8, o. frentiss is entirely new a no superior to any boat oat in. th" trade; built express between Vicksbunjj tad Vazoo v lor a n ail boat City, Her accommodations .ire of th; finni rdev. She is provided with everything requir ed by the BW raw life boai, life preservers, three fire engines, (two working by steam,) and offers every accommodation and securitv to passengers. August 3-l-o;i-39-tl. Vicksburg1, Vazoo and Tillatoba WEEKLY PACKET. Vicksburg, Satarlia. Yazoo City, Thai f o!is. y Tittatoba r : T raUght stea m ej; Greenwood THE NE1 G E . STOK KS 9 c P T N H 11 U A i Get c IS V J Tuea Wntdm Leaves Vicfcabujg, " Yazoo Ci y, Grpeiiwoou, " Leflore, rhursday. .7 10 A J1. A.M. A. M-M-P.M. P. M. A.M A.M DESCENDING Leaves Tillatoba, Friday, 4 o'clock, M Leflore. 12 Greenwood. V 2 tidon, " 4 Yazoo City, Saturday P " Sata'tia, . 10 PORTERFIELD& CO., Aeents, Vicksburg, VV. WYMAN Agent, Yazoo City. June 22, 1853-33tf. Vicksburg and New Orleans Packet ECLIPSE, E. L. Sturgeon. Master. THIS magnificent steamer will run as a legujar packet between the above named ports, commen- ( hi? on the 21st September next, leavinjr Vicksburer ever Wednesday evening at 5 o'clock returning, leaves New Orleans Satur i . in i. day at 10 o'clock A. M.. I or freight or passage, apply on board or to PORTER FIELD fit CO. Vicksburg, May 18th, 153. Rcsrnlar New Orleans and Ticks burg racKet. THE fine steamer N ATC H EZ T. P. Leathers, Master, will leave Vickabure for New Orleans and intermediate ports, regularly, ev ery Tuesday, at 12 o'clock, precisely. PORTERFIELD 6c CO, Agents. Vicksburg, May 4, 553. Vftckshurgand New Orleans Packet THE very fast and entirely J- new steamer PRINCESS, T. C. Holmes, Master, will leave for New Orleans and all landings on the coast, regularly every Friday, at 12 o'clock, M. PORTERFIELD fic CO., Agents. Vicksburg May 4, 1853i Shropshire and Massey JRYUitODS AND PROiiUCK MERCHANTS: Yazoo City, Mississippi, Vune22, 1853. T HEundersned will make liberal advances nrt Tntton. shiDDed to Messrs. lai oz- mei, Ma, nleaiiB. SHROFM11KJS CSC MAD - w m j - in-Hmf il V" w- w . tJjjjlljjsC June 22, 1853. WILSONS & HYATT, ccrrat(.cti, produce sua roms MERCHANTS, Vazoo City, Mississippi. (2F Will advance Plantation Supplies and Cash on Cotton to be shipped through them to heir friends in New Orleans, Feb. 16. 1853. DENTISTRY. H. LAURENCE DENTIST. OFFCE on Main Street, next door to Winn's Hotel. A list of prices for anv operation on the teeth, can be consulted at the office. Feb. '2, 1658. WE have to daj received the bain nee of the Spring and Summer stock of staple and fancy goods, carefully selected ih the eastern cities, and a re ready and anxious to wait on ail who may be pleased to give us a call. May 2, l-f4. J AS. THARP & CO. J. C. SMITH ER & CO. Wholesale and Retail Grocers, SO AN A L S1KEET, New Orleans , e em bet 15, 1")2. . . .vlh WRIGHT. ABRAHAM J. WRIGHT. A. .J. WRIGHT & CO., CO'lTON FACTORS COMMISSION AND FORWAREING MER CHANTS, No. 67, Gravier Street, New Orleans. February 4, 1853-ly Hardware and Queens ware. WE keep a full assortment of the above arti cles always on hand. fay. Mav -2, 18o3. J. THARP & CO. WATT, SYKES & NOBLE, AND GENERAL CORIIHIssION & FORWARDING MERCHANTS New-Orleans. rxytos. M. Watt, Greenwood, tiss.- A. J. Sykes. Wolumbus, Miss. E. Pickens Noble, Charleston, Miss. Mav 25,1853 New Firm. CHARLES T. MANN. J. H. ANDREWS, M. D. Vazoo Ci'.y, Ulississippi. V r ! Hid Retail i ers in Urus, .Vied ieinea id C""inie.ih, P.iints. Oils, Var iittibes, ' ri ndi vv Gl ips nrf Putty. LANDRBTH'S GARDEN SEEDS Dye-iutTs and U lass-Ware, Fine Perfu mery, Soaps and Brushes, School Books, Steel Pens, Qui is, and Stationery, Letter and Cup Paper, .Medical and Mis . sellaneous Books. Blank B(Kksy Superior Inks, Ptiper Hangings. -Pure, Wines Sf Brandies. Prescriptions and orders will receive particu lar attention at all hoorsot'the day & niifhi. X'lENTSfor nil the valuable fmnily med'nrines in use Buyers w II riffrayn find h"re fresh and uQadile rated WeJleinea, We are deteraihied s"lf u low a -my es tabliahment in Newt Or If mi or 'lse- wtiere in '5, 18 Somh West. Flic Slate of lississlppi, ( Vazoo County, J PROBATE COURT JUNE TERM, 153. To ail persons interested in the Estate of John Hunter, deceased. S7"OUare hereby cited to be and appear at the Septestber Term. 1853. of the Probate Court of Yuoo county, at the Court House of said county -then ttnd th re to shew cause if any you rattj .vhv tiie final account of Wm. Y. Gad berty ndminlstrator of said estate, should not !. a owed, :-iid hi letters surrendered. d further In do and .suffer such things as i i !e ci -l -! and ordered by ou' said nr in the premitiea. . And it i- tyrrtHn r, raer-d by the Court, that dicstion 4 if i an n ,e made in the Ya zo ! mocrdl for the space of sixty days; s . ss, Ho Probata ' ' G.m,. R Wilkinson, Judge Yazoo countv. the 4th 1 -"-. ind seal of said emrt. of Julv. A. D. 1H53. iES it. BELL, Clerk. 1st J MES H. PATTERSON, C'OH IH I SSI ON MERCHANT, No 9, Loeval street, tST. ZOUIS, MISSOURI. : to Messrs. Shropshire & Massey, and R.R. Williamson 81 Co., Yazoo City. Oct. 13, 1852: Removal. WE have removed our dry goods store to the newbrick blo k, where Winn's Hotel for merly stood opposite L Thrp & Co July 27, 1853 HOBSON & LAMKIN. n nu-ss and saddle Horses. U.ST received a superior lot 01 saddle and harness Horses, tor sale. Selected by a first rate judge of stock, from Bourbon countv, Ky. The are. the finest 1 nave ever been ab'w to urchse f"r this market. Ihey are for sale, as I have dec ined the general hire incr business! C J. BLACKMAN. Negro Dogs. MH, JUNES is stationed t my VVhi e Hi ll Place, one mile west of YhSoo ciiy.'ith my dogs, and d's celebrated .negro dogs, for the pur pose ot hunting runaway yl;ives on reasoiiaOie tfrme. Apply to trie or Mr. Jones, C. J. BLACKMAN. UST RECEIVED A few negroes for sale. C. J. BLACKMAN. A. V- Dunbar & Co Manufacturers, and Wholesale Dealers in BOOTS, SHOES AND BROGANS, No. 54 and 56, Common Street, NEW ORLEANS. October 1st 1852 ly Cattle, Sbeep and Hogs. I CAN ' turnish planters and O'hers with the best kind ol cattle, sheep nnd hogs, they may desire, ort reasonable terms. C. J. BLACKMAj To Casli Purchasers. ITEfiffiir inducements eqml to ny t v houe, in Drv Gimds.wrid Produce. other Aug. 10, '53. SHROPSHIRE 5l MASSEY. Mew Wheat Floor. BARRELS Extra Cresent Mills, OU 25 Scotia Mills, for sale by Aug, 10, SHROPSHIRE & MASSEY. Mr. B NEW-ORLEANS CARDS, Thoe. Waters, J. B. Camden, Chan. Water WATERS. C1IIII ft U COTTON FACTORS AND ommifij0ion JHercl)ant0, NO. 102 POYDRA8 STREET, "tZtto Qdtar.. YAL EiTJ r K CO Importers and Wholesale Dealers in fawq anb Staple . SILK GOODS! MILLINERY ARTICLES, Ribbons, Laces, Gloves and Dress Qoodi NO 27. MAGAZINE STREET, Between Common and Ghravier Streets,) New Osleans. At.so Imported and Domestic Straw Goods. Dec. 15, 1852. n6iy. Feet. Simms & OO. IMPORTERS and Wholesale DEALERS W NO 23 and 25, MAGAZINE STREET NEW ORLEANS. Dec. 15, 1S52. ly. Brooks & Randolph. WHOLESALE GROCERS A ND Commission illercljants, Dealers in Tobacco, Foreign & Domestic LIQUORS &e. No. 26 New Levcc, December, 15, 1852. ly. JOSEPH H. PALMER. JAMKS H. MASSEV. J osepli II. Palmer & Co. IMPORTERS & WHOLESALE DEALER? I N FOREIGN & DOMESTIC W (3 CS UZ 33 47 Camp Street, above Gravier, Dec. 15, 1352. New-Orleans NEW-ORLEANS " Carriasre M3m W are - House. I. MARSH, DEN MAN & CO. 81 & 8 3, Common Street, oppotdtt Verandah Hotel. IE oMest and largest establishments inthit a city. Our stock consists of some 200 Car riages, comprising Caleches, Coaches, Rocka v.ays, Barrouchesand Buggies, with and with out Tops. And almost every variety used iu the United "-tates, manufactured in New Jersey, and for sale cheaper than at any other eptablish ment in this city, for cash or city acceptance. Purchasers will please call and examine our stock and judge for themselves, I, MARSH, DENMAN & CO. December 15, 1852. NEW SHOE STORE. Z3Ei S 2a G2 dfe Dealer in CAPS No. 70, Gravier Street, December 15, 1S52. Ktw Orleans FANTON & TURLEY, Wholesale and Retail Dealers in Fancy and staple wry Goods, CLOHH1NG. BOOTS. SHOES, HATS, CAPS, bablslfrs, Carriage dmmings, &r. &rc. Comer of Washington and China Streets, VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI. BRUNER & SON, Commission, Kcceivingr and For warding Merchants, Mulberry Street, Vicksburg, Mississippi, KEEP. constantly on hand, Plantation Sup plies of all kinds. Wagons, Plows &c, &,c. Liberal advances made on cotton, snippea to our friend, J. H. HEALD, 34 Natchez Street. New Orleans. December 15, 1852. Notice. 'riHE Co-partnership, heretofore existing ii 1. this city, under the firm of Thornhill 4 Mcllhenny having expired by limitation 31s' ult., the same has been dissolve 1. The under signed informs his friends, that he will con tinue a Cotton Factorage and General Co mission buaiNESS.at No, 29, Carondclet Street under the style of THORNHILL & CO. 3 . JNO. THORNHIBL. New Orleans, June 15, 1853 -6m. WRIGHT, WILLIAIVIS & CO. COTTON FACTORS, 61 UNION Row, Caronoelet Street, ' NEW ORLEANS. 1 CONTINUE to ship to this House, and wil be always ready and willing to make liberal cash advances on consignments to them. Wil also furnish plantation supplies &c. , P. O'DONNELL. Yazoo City, Oct 6, 1852. WATCHES & JEWELRY. 1 UST received and for sale at reduced prices, J anew subnlv of superior quality and style watches and jewelry. Watches repaired ano warranted as usual. January 12, 1853. S. H WILSON. C. O. JACKSON, JAS. K. PUTNAM, W. W. CAItBisus c. o. Jackson & co. DEALERS IN STAPLE AND FANCY DRV GOODS, BOOTS, SHQES. HATS, &c., Successors to E. W. Jack. Washington Street, Vicksburg, Mis. IABId C5IL 160 Gallons No. 1 LardO Jt Just received by Feb. 16, 1853. Dry-Hoods at Reduced Prices. I" ARGE assortment will be sold low for cash JLi or to prompt customers on tne usual Time june 23, '53. SHROPSHIRE & MASSEY. IN BANDS 1,000 feet Gin Bands, 8, 9 VJT and 10 inch. Just received and for sale by Aug. 17, 1853 WILSON & H If ATT. HATS, jl Franklin Iron Foundry. CAS TINFS A c JOHN ROBB Jr. RESPECTFULLY announces to planters, and the public generally, that the old es tablished FRANKLIN FOUNDY, Vicksburg, is again in full operation, ready to execute, promptly, orders for Castings of all dencrlpl lions. Mill, and Gin (Irons, Engine work, 1-, kinds of repairing, &c. Also. Agent Hotch-t kiss.. PateSt Veftical Water Wheol. which is rapidly suporceedlng all others. Patten. j for furnishing three sixes may be seen at the j n1 rt? ft, A I t n itilitatitAAAM At ,! rill ntiiava' pointed out. Ihanklul for past favors, the proprietor fi-: licits a continuance. Dromieinrr to execute all 1 orders in his Jiac, in a manner no, to besur- passed at any Fouudery in the South or West JOHN HOHH. Jr. N. B. All orders left with Messrs. Allen & Barksdale, Yazoo City, will meet with prompt attest! in, Vlchsburg, Aug. 6, l840.-37-9m Jewelry Music Store, H-4f. TYLEB) MAIN ST. THE COMM NEXT D003 10 fMtt BANK, f TTASon hand good assoi ( nent of al MidFauc iioods. and M.JL kinds of Jewel rv f.uA Fnnn wilJconatantly be supplied witht 1 moat fash onble styles and patterns fromt le North. WATCHES 4- JEWELRY RE PAIRED f WARRANTED. Piano For ten. H C. T., &. Co., are agent fur the saieoT thelfHr- Watches. Clokp. Ti "Horst pattent Ion Pianos which are the best pianos now manufactured for the Southern Cli- mate. Also for Adam Stoddart's pianos. In- struction books of all kinds. A good assort' mcnt of sheet music. Violins and Accorde - ons. fetnngs for Guitar and Violin. Yazoo City, Dec. 11-1852-tf. MUSKETTO Bars for sale by june 22, 1853. S. & M. ALLOW For sale by C.J. BLACKMAN. SILK and june 22. ILK. and Gu:hain Umbrellas for sale bv S. & M. 6 DOZEN Kid Gloves for sale by june 22. S. 6c M. DAVIS' HAMS Just received a lot of Da vis' Extra Hams, for sale by Feb. 16, '53. WILSONS & HYATT. M OR FORD PLOWS Just received seven-ty-rive Morford Plows, for le by Feb. 16, '53. WILSONS & HYATT. VALUABLE LAND FOB ALE. WILL rILL sell on low terms. 660 seres ofJand situated above high water mark) on the river, in Sunflower county, Township I JL O i a zoo 16, Range 2, west For fbrther information apply through R. K. Pickett or F. Bostick to-the ui designed. S. A. GARNETT Yazoo City, Jon 26, '1653-12. i;v hoi ;si!. (HAVING taken into co-partnership Mr. Jas. M. Lamkin, we will continue the Dry Goods IB connexion with tlie Produce and Grocery bu siuess at my old slaud, under the style of HOBSON & LAMKIN. Dry Goods and Groceries. Having juFi commencoa me rroduce m ron- bexion with our Dry Goods business, we take pleasure in informing our' friends aod the public generally, that we are now receiving a full stock of Western Produce, Groceries, Family supplies, fire. We intend to keep always on baud, articles of the ''first water" in both blanches, at reasona . . . . . " - ' ble rates to gooq customers on time, and "unrea sonably low" fur the dimes in hand. HOBSON fit LAMKIN. Yaoo city, Jan. 19, 1853. White Lead, Window Sash Etc. fc4 W I Lbe. Pure No. 1 white Lead, AUUUiat) Gs. Linseed Oil, 500 Lbs. Putty, 2000 Lights window Sash, . For sale by WILSONS & HYATT. February 16. 1853. Crushpd ills. Extra Sundries. CJUGAR Clarified, Brown, Loaf k7 FLOUR 50 Bbla. Missouri M 10 " Bupernne, at. r . 150 " " Ohio, POTATOES 150 Irish, London Eauv, OATS 50 Sacks. IARNESS, Bridles, Hoes, Trace Chains, and a general assortment of Family and Plantation Supplies, for sale by 1-eb. 10, '3- WILSONS & HYATT. For Sale. f(Q ACRES LAND, situated about nine UUe7 miles from Yazoo City and about seven miles from Benton on the new Lexington rose, in the neighborhood of Rev. J. W. Purvis.- - There are about two Hundred 01 fifty acres of thlt tract under fence, and in a high state of culti. , vation, a fine crop having been grown on th j place the present year. There is also a good mill and gin, and comfortable negro quarter and dwelling house on the place. This is a - nne tract ot land, and a good bargain wiilbe given to any one who wishes to purchase. for further information, refer to Thomas G Clark, Benton, and P. O'Donnell, Yasoo City. JJece. iot 1802.-0 G. SWAYZE. A. SWAYZE. C. J. Blackman & c Auctioneers and dealers in negroes, stock and property of all de scription Yazoo city, Sept. 24th 1851. THRESH TEAS A choice lot of fresh Teas, JL just received by WILSON & HYATT. February 16, 1853. QSACKJ iJ june 25 best Riq Coffee for sale by . - SHROPSHIRE & MASSEY MOLASSE 20 Bis. Reboiled Molasses for for sale by SHROPSHIRE Ax M ASSEY . PISTOLS! PISTOLS!! REVOLVING self-cocking end other su perior quality pistols, for sale by December 24th 1&51. S. H. WILSON 1 , 1 , m I .1 y i Carpenter's and Plantation TMlsw Wb, have a very excellent assortment of tools of all Kinds oh hand, and for sale. May 3d, 1853. J. THARP o CO. VAN LOON, PAXTON A, CO. LEVEE STREET, VICKSBURG. Machinists, Iron and Brass Founders, ENGINE AND CAR BUILDERS, Gin and Mill Work, and all kinds of Planta tion and Steamboat work promptly ex ecuted and fully guaranteed. February 16, 1853-ly. SALT 300 Sacks Salt for sale by jone 22. SHROPSHIRE fr MASSEY IRESHcorn meal, and feed for cows, and corn, milk and butter for sale by C. J. BLACKMAN. OAMS-1.500 Lbs, Elder V Sugar cured XXInms, for sale by Aug. 10. SHROPSHIRE A MASSEY. - rrT(J T TT " Ti Gtnl tl11" S5oPTlHKrMAS;FV i00 22 SHROPSHIRE 6c MAS j?( a Xlt lillC- AGENT. roW9TN, WaNI) a ?vD ment of FINE WaTCJES of eve """r,u" iffJiu 0: (i envcr AJantel clocks; and Mttffk rox es, Gold Guard, Fob, Vest chain and Chatalains, Watch Seals Keys, and Channti, Msm Ruby, Emerald, Opal and Garnet Rii gs Tius, Ear IUngn, Brac It l Cuff Pins, Belt Buckles. Cold Pens and Pencils, topnhtr with u great varietv of other Jcwelrr, Fancy Coods" Plated Vnre; etc., etc., etc ., Sliver Tes Setts, Pi'cb crs, Coblcts, Sp )onE, Caps, Fcrl , Jadht?, Aepkin King.-, AaltCel lers, etc., Fine Scissor, Pen and P cket Knives Or This Stock of God8 bciv? im com mission will be sold at very small pr'.V;, for CASH, or good city pp r 0JE. A. T. can always manufacture, t short notice, almost any o'rtic! of ft welry Silyor Ware that may be wanted Dia.m a&d other valuable Gems reeet: Canks mbuntcd, etc. 'Specimens of Wu workcanal- u'dvp hp. Rrpn nt the tfr . j sic-bo.xcs of every dewcriptiun, cat j paired and tcarr ranted. Jewelry Repaired. Old (JuM and taken in Exchange. 1 ;ew Orients, October 10, 1- BROWN & AVERY. Next drtfr above the Bank butding Mvin X'rcct Yaxoo city KEEr constantly on hand nn exfentive op. so t el t of all kinds of tin-ware . Tl y are aaractiri ng a fie article of dhower- bathe and t athing-tu'irf. They krop Alvyi JyffiVf?!? fJl rl' BtT ! C Y llU,&r d ' cht,P' fcT CaU 5?s W&Zi. r' f"''""' : Ii. FT'TZ. lu u" 0 1 K,:ia.s ' "lirr," 1 Buu uvi n;hcri piion oijon-worK w mi im'ht I nFs and dispatch. Prrpons wishing an thing in their line would do w c 1 1 to -them a call before purcbaaiug t lsew here. inanktui for the patroiifge which lias here- I ,of?re been liberally bestowed, they hoi c to recer c a cosilnuancc of the -a mo. Yazoo 11 , August 20th l'-ol ly jtiw Firm. HIG G1NB O 'I HAM : XJ - ' m nu tv We the uuderfignrd ha;e formed a partner shipfor the purpote of trHnsacting a Genrm ) Produce, Grocery o:id Liquor business W wtll keep constauty on hand a genern hfsoi t i mnt of f n 1 YJ . A . . I ' . mhj , . ' ill- k' , L'lM'lull'B Hardware, CuUery and Queenswarc which we v, ll bcU verv law. . T. T. HIGG1NBOTHAM. O. W. HENDERSON. Dcc'r 3d 1851. LITTLES VERMIFUGE. ' A sure remedy to cure children of worms, re quiring no other medicine io fullew it; and be sides, it will soon restore puny or drooping children to health agnin. It can be given to j the most delicate child with perfect safety, nntf is not surpassed, if equalled, by any other, .Put up in vials double the usual tiz, and hImi I 5 lftrge b,,ttle8 for plantation use, and mo 'tnHn 50 per cent cheaper than any other. rorsaie ny inu.UfeUJN f-JU. Ai'ent J. E. SHROPSHIRE s Yazoo City July 2d 1851 D. Tamborine. DEALER IN Wines, Liquora. Ccdials. &c. AND FAMILY GROCER. Main St. Yazoo City. Miss. Constantly on hand s Urge assortment c( Foreign and Domestic Liquors, FrenchWinee, Cordials, Fruits: in Juice, Sardjnes, Confectionary, Segaca ., Tobaccoi London Porter, Scotch Ale, and every var iety of Family Gioceries. Coparl utTHiilp R. M. WINN & A. 8. GRAVES HAV E this day (14th Feb. 1853) formed copartnership, under the firm of WlfiN Gl GRAVES, lor the purpoe of carrying on the Livery Stable Business at the old stand Mr. Craves will give hie entire persona atten tion to the business, in all its various branches, and hopes by strict application, and the m or accommodation that will now be offered, to merit and receive a liberal share of the public patronage. Yazoo City, Feb. 16, 1853. Great American Remedy. Bosbyshell's Stimulating Panacea RECOMMENDED by the Faculty; and pre scribed by Physicians ! Nwfamily should be without it. It is a certain prevention and cure of the following diseases : Asiatic Chol era, Cholera Morbus, Diarrhcea, Bloody Flux, holera Infantum, Summer complaint, Deliri um Tremens, Sick Stomach, Loss of Appetite, Irritable nerves and cramp Colic. The above remedy is tor sale at the Dru Store of MANN & ANDREWS, . . . i , Yaoo City, Miss. . WHere abundant testimony of its virtues from high sources, can be seen April 27, 1863. Jaat Received from Parts A arjre assortment of Embroideries, consis ting of Chemisettes, Paletots, Undersleeves, Col lars. Caps and Handkerchiefs. M1CHON&SARRAT. Vicksburf , Feb. 9, 1659. | <urn:uuid:4f10582d-6c95-414e-bfe6-0fc7905c0e93> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87065704/1853-09-14/ed-1/seq-2/ | 2020-10-21T00:06:03Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107874340.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20201020221156-20201021011156-00110.warc.gz | en | 0.866999 | 8,986 |
United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense/III. B. Role and Obligations of State of Vietnam
One principal controversy over the Geneva Accords of 1954 stems from the view that Vietnam under the Bao Dai regime was actually still a French colony, and hence was obligated by the agreements reached by France at Geneva. Specifically, it is argued, Article 27 of the agreement signed by the French fixed responsibility for observance on the signatory governments "and their successors." The answer to the charge that the State of Vietnam thereby became a guarantor of the Accords is partly a matter of international law — a contentious point of law, given the relatively new phenomenon of former colonial states assuming full sovereignty. But it is also a matter of fact and of declaratory policy. In fact, the GVN was an independent state before the Accords were signed, and was treated as a separate state throughout the conference. It signed nothing at Geneva. To the contrary, in its declarations it clearly repudiated the Accords, and declined to accept any responsibility for observing or enforcing them.
The GVN had been given full independence from France on 4 June 1954 and was accepted as an equal by the other governments at Geneva. Therefore, the GVN was not automatically obligated by the July agreements between the Viet Minh and France. From the beginning of the conference, the GVN interests clashed with French desires. The French wanted to end the Indochina fighting even if disengagement entailed serious concessions to the Viet Minh. Hard-line GVN counterproposals, running against the prevailing spirit of compromise, were rejected by both the communist powers and the West. The final wording of the agreement on the cessation of hostilities was drawn up as the French and the Viet Minh would have it. The U.S., intent on promoting some constructive outcome of the conference, offered little support to the GVN. The U.S. did refuse to act on France's behalf to pressure the GVN, and did urge the French to be more receptive to the GVN delegates. But since U.K. and French delegates were ready to make substantial accommodations with the communists to achieve a quick end to the fighting, and with little U.S. backing, the GVN negotiating position was foredoomed (Tab 1).
France, the dominant Western power in the disputed area, and the Viet Minh were the designated executors of the Accords. Neither the armistice agreement nor other aspects of the settlement were practicable without DRV and French compliance. The GVN delegates at Geneva were emphatic in their repeated refusal to accept GVN responsibility for accords signed by France, especially with reference to partition and elections. No precipitate withdrawal of French military and diplomatic power from Vietnam was foreseen, so that the Accords embodied the anomaly of ignoring the sovereign GVN, even with respect to enforcing the Accords on its territory (Tab 2).
|III. B.||Tab 1 – GVN Status and Negotiating Position at Geneva|
|Tab 2 – French and GVN Responsibilities after Geneva|
|a.||Status of GVN Changes||B-5|
|b.||Talks Lead Toward GVN Independence||B-5|
|c.||GVN Independent After 4 June 1954||B-6|
|d.||GVN and DRV Status at Geneva Differ||B-6|
|a.||GVN Requests Written Assurance Country Will Not be Partitioned||B-7|
|b.||France Assures GVN it Will Not Seek Partition||B-8|
|c.||DRV Admits Feasibility of Partition||B-8|
|d.||French Opposition to Partition Collapses||B-9|
|a.||Vietnamese are Stubborn and Unyielding||B-9|
|b.||GVN Consistently Opposes Partition||B-10|
|c.||GVN not Informed of French–DRV Agreements||B-11|
|d.||Note to French Delegation Rejects Partition||B-12|
|e.||Vietnamese Register Opposition to Elections||B-12|
|f.||GVN Rejects Draft of Final Declaration||B-13|
|g.||GVN Presents Counter-Proposals||B-13|
|h.||GVN Unable to Influence Outcome||B-14 |
|a.||U.S. Refuses to Influence GVN for France||B-15|
|b.||French Disregard U.S. Requests, Remain Aloof from GVN||B-15|
|c.||U.S. Declines to Support Final GVN Position||B-16|
The sovereign independence of Vietnam was a constant source of irritation and contention between France and the U.S. From the conclusion of World War II until the Geneva Conference, Washington continually urged Paris to follow the nationalist winds and establish an independent State of Vietnam. Coupled with pressures from Vietnamese nationalists, France did move in this direction — albeit as slowly as possible.
In June, 1948, Bao Dai was persuaded to become political leader of a "State of Vietnam," incorporating Cochin China, Tonkin, and Annam, which would be "independent...within the French Union." A treaty to this effect, the Elysee Agreements, was drawn up and approved by both sides in March, 1949, but was delayed in ratification by the French Assembly until 29 January 1950. There were a number of qualifications on the meaning of "independence" in the French Union, including complete freedom of movement of French military forces throughout the countries of the Union and legal immunity for French enterprises on the territory of other Union nations. On 3 July 1953) the French were pressured into announcing plans to negotiate and redefine Franco–Vietnamese political relations. But it was not until March, 1954, that these negotiations began, producing on 28 April a joint declaration recognizing what it called "total independence" for Vietnam. Buttinger calls this "a shabby independence." The country became fully sovereign on 3 June 1954.
It is important to remember that French procrastination, among other reasons, on setting the demands for full Vietnamese independence led to hesitancy on the part of the U.S. to intervene militarily in support of the French. With all, the status of the Bao Dai government did begin to change prior to the conclusion of the Geneva Conference — too late to figure in Franco–American deliberations about "united action," but soon enough to make Vietnam an independent state before the Conference agreed to a settlement of the war.
Between July, 1953, and April, 1954, French and Vietnamese representatives had a series of talks on ways to complete the independence of Vietnam promised in France's 3 July 1953 declaration. On 8 March 1954, the final round of talks began in Paris, and at a meeting on 28 April, agreement was reached by a Franco–Vietnamese political committee on the text of separate treaties of independence and association, with the latter (consisting of seven articles) to be spelled out in subsequent conventions. Premier Laniel and Vice President Nguyen Trung Vinh signed, a common declaration that same day which specified that the treaties would come into force upon ratification by the two governments. But, the ratification process was delayed for over a month. The U.S. Mission in Saigon was clearly annoyed that the long-awaited break in the Franco–Vietnamese deadlock did not lead immediately to ratification. The Mission speculated that the French were delaying to keep a free hand at Geneva by making no commitments on Vietnam until the outcome of the conference could be known. The Mission noted, that in so doing, the French were only feeding the doubts and suspicions of the Vietnamese about future French intentions toward Indochina.1 Washington, for its part, refused to consider the 28 April initialling of agreements as satisfying its pre-condition on complete Vietnamese independence.2
Not until 4 June, did the French National Assembly finally ratify the two treaties.3 By the Treaty of Independence, Vietnam was recognized "as a fully independent and sovereign State invested with all the competence recognized by international law." Vietnam agreed to replace France "in all the rights and obligations resulting from international treaties or conventions contracted by France on behalf or on account of the State of Vietnam or of any other treaties or conventions concluded by France on behalf of French Indochina insofar as those acts concern Vietnam." In other words, the GVN assumed responsibility for all agreements executed to ratification of the independence treaty. Under the accompanying Treaty of Association, Vietnam's status as an equal in the French Union was acknowledged for the first time, and with it the right (subsequently re-confirmed) to determine its extent of participation in the Union. The State of Vietnam was, therefore, a fully independent entity by 4 June 1954. France's international obligations in or for Vietnam were freely taken over by the GVN. This was in contrast, it might be added, to the DRV's abrogation of agreements concluded in Vietnam's behalf by France when Ho's regime took power on 2 September 1945.4
The final communique of the Berlin Conference (18 February 1954) specified that the Indochina phase of the Geneva deliberations would be attended by the United States, Great Britain, Communist China, the Soviet Union, France, "and other states concerned." Invitations to participants, it was further agreed, would be issued only by the Berlin conferees (U.S., UK, USSR, and France).
There had been some doubt as to the status of the DRV at the upcoming Indochina convention, but subsequent talks between Molotov and Bidault in April clarified the position of the DRV.5 Although the DRV was still considered a rebel group by the West, rather than an interested State, admission of the Viet Minh to the conference was never a serious problem. As one of the principal combatants whose consent to a cease-fire was considered indispensable, the Viet Minh could hardly be ignored. Moreover, the Soviet Union indicated to the French that it would not accept the presence of delegates from the Associated States unless the DRV were admitted to the conference.6 The principal Western objection concerning the DRV was that the invitation had been tendered to the Viet Minh not only by the Soviet Union but also by Communist China, a move admitted by Molotov at the first plenary session on 8 May and protested by France and the United States.7
Word of the DRV's admission naturally angered the Bao Dai government. When informed of Franco–Soviet Agreement on the DRV's admission, the Bao Dai government decided that Vietnam would go to the conference only upon invitation of the Western Big Three — that is, only if the SVN status differed from that of the DRV. On 2 May the invitations arrived, with the Soviets being informed that GVN participation would in no way confer 8 Although the Bao Dai government could not bar the DRV from the conference table, it did not accord Ho's regime anything more than the status of a belligerent.recognition on the DRV.
There was, then, a distinction between the status of the DRV and the GVN at the Geneva Conference. Whereas all the major powers implicitly or explicitly recognized the full status of the GVN as a state, the Western powers conceded only belligerent status for the DRV/Viet Minh. In practice, however, the Viet Minh were much more a part of the negotiating process, particularly as regards military arrangements. The GVN, in its own right, pursued a consistent public line, emphasizing its independence and its hope for the continued political unity of Vietnam — under Bao Dai.
At the time the Conference began, the State of Vietnam was concerned and suspicious about the possibilities of a partitioning of the country. Mindful of past instances of partition in Korea and Germany, and deeply in doubt of French willingness to stand firm against Viet Minh territorial claims, the GVN urged the French government to give written assurance that Paris would not seek a division of Vietnam. On 25 April, Bao Dai had served notice on the French that his government would not tolerate partition. GVN representatives in Paris issued a communique in the name of Bao Dai's cabinet which noted various plans in the air for a partition of Vietnam. The communique stated that a partition "would be in defiance of Vietnamese national sentiment which has asserted itself with so much strength for the unity as well as for the independence of its country. Neither the Chief of State nor the national government of Vietnam admit that the unity of the country can be severed legally..." In calling for French assurances that they would not negotiate a sacrifice of Vietnamese interests with the "rebels," the communique implied that the Vietnamese government would not sign the April treaties until such assurances were received. And, the GVN cabinet warned that a compromising agreement would never receive Vietnam's approval:
- "...neither the Chief of State, nor the Vietnamese Government, will consider themselves as bound by decisions running counter to the interests, i.e., independence and unity, of their country that would, at the same time, violate the rights of the peoples and offer a reward to aggression in opposition to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and democratic ideals."9
In response to this clear-cut statement, the French came forward with both oral and written promises. On 3 May, Maurice Dejean, the Commissioner General for Indochina, said, in Saigon:
- "The French government does not intend to seek a settlement of the Indochina problem on the basis of a partition of Vietnamese territory...Formal assurances were given on this subject last April 25 by the French minister for foreign affairs to the minister for foreign affairs of Vietnam, and they were confirmed to him on May 1."10
Written assurance came from Bidault on 6 May, when he wrote Bao Dai that the task of the French government was to establish peace in Indochina, not "to seek here [at Geneva] a definitive political solution." Therefore, the French goal would be, said Bidault, to obtain a cease-fire with guarantees for the Associated States, hopefully with general elections in the future. Bidault continued:
- "As of now, I am however in a position to confirm to Your Majesty that nothing would be more contrary to the intentions of the French government than to prepare for the establishment, at the expense of the unity of Vietnam, of two states having each an international calling (11 )."
In their talks with the Viet Minh, however, the French found their adversary as stubborn at the bargaining table as on the battlefield. The negotiations during most of May made insignificant progress; but toward the end of the month, the Viet Minh made their first major concession when they strongly hinted that, given the right conditions, they might lift their demand for a united Vietnam. This, it can be speculated, was seen by Paris as a way of getting itself off the hook. While it may have been unacceptable to negotiate all of Vietnam away, half of Vietnam could be sold to the U.S. as a realistic compromise.
On May 24, Hoang Van Hoan, DRV Ambassador to Peking and spokesman of the DRV delegation, informed a special envoy of the French newspaper (Jean Schwoebel) that a military settlement through a cease-fire need not, as the Viet Minh had previously insisted, be preceded by a political settlement. Hoan reportedly stated: "it is first necessary to have a cease-fire. We do not pose a single prior political condition. If, in the plan of M. Dong, political proposals precede those which concern the cease-fire, it is solely a question of presentation..."12 Hoang Van Hoan's statement was confirmed the next day when Pham Van Dong, speaking at the sixth restricted session, referred for the first time to territory under Viet Minh control. Dong's proposals included specific reference to areas under the control of each Vietnamese state; in regrouping forces of the two sides, he suggested that territorial readjustments also be made so that each side would be able to have complete economic and administrative, as well as military, control. So as not to be misunderstood, Dong further urged that a line of demarcation be drawn that would be topographically suitable and appropriate for transportation and communication within each state.13 Thus, quite contrary to French and Vietnamese expectations, the Viet Minh had opened the way toward partition, and appeared willing to contemplate the creation, albeit temporary, of separate zones of political control.
French support of GVN opposition to partition, which Bidault upheld privately to Smith and Eden at Geneva,14 collapsed once the new government of Pierre Mendes-France took over in mid-June. Mendes-France, keenly aware of the tenor of French public anti-war opinion, was far more disposed than his predecessor to make every effort toward achieving a reasonable settlement, and he quickly foresaw that agreement with the Viet Minh was unlikely unless he accepted the concept of partition. His delegate at Geneva, Jean Chauvel, and the new Commissioner General for Indochina, General Paul Ely, reached the same conclusion.15
At a high-level meeting in Paris on 24 June, the new government thoroughly revised the French negotiating position. The objectives for subsequent talks, it was decided, would be: (1) the regroupment of forces of both sides and their separation by a line at about the 18th parallel;16 (2) the establishment of enclaves under neutral control in the two zones, one for the French in the area of the Catholic bishoprics at Phat Diem and Bui Chu, one for the Viet Minh at an area to be determined; (3) the maintenance of Haiphong in French hands in order to assist in the regroupment. At this same meeting, it was also decided that, for the purpose of psychological pressure on the Viet Minh, if not military preparedness for future contingencies, France should announce plans to send a contingent of conscripts (later determined as two divisions) to Indochina.17
The State of Vietnam delegation at Geneva was determined to be intimidated neither by the DRV and its communist allies, nor by the Western powers. The GVN representatives continually referred to their sense of responsibility to the Vietnamese people and to national aspirations for unity and freedom. The obvious dependence of the GVN on the military power of the West was not mirrored by an accompanying political spirit of accommodation: the GVN attitude at Geneva must be characterized as stubborn, unyielding, and idealistic. The GVN was the one nation at Geneva that remained completely unmoved by the spirit of compromise.
The attitude of GVN toward the Geneva Settlement was the product not only of its non-recognition of the DRV, but also of its hostility to partition and its opposition to national elections held in a divided country. Evidently quite independent of American instigation or pressure, the Saigon government concluded well in advance of the Conference termination on 21 July that it could not accept what it regarded as a set of agreements contracted in defiance of Vietnamese aspirations and without GVN consent. Nguyen Quoc Dinh, speaking for the GVN in the third plenary session (12 May) at Geneva, first read into the record in detail the new treaty guaranteeing GVN independence, then laid down his country's unyielding opposition to any agreement which would tend to split the country either geographically or politically. Any document tabled for consideration, said Quoc Dinh, "Must not lead to partition, either direct or indirect, final or provisional, de facto or de jure, of the national territory." Free elections can be held, he asserted, "as soon as the [UN] Security Council has decided that the authority of the State has been established in the whole of the territory, and that conditions of freedom have been obtained."18 In the fifth restricted session, on 24 May, Quoc Dinh again stressed the GVN's total independence from France:
- "...the problem of the independence of Vietnam dominates all events in Indochina whether considered from the point of view of the independence which the state of Vietnam [has] secured as a result of negotiations with France, or from that of the independence which Vietnam must defend from all foreign invaders."19
On the following day, Quoc Dinh repeated in the Sixth Restricted. Session, that the GVN "would not agree to any plan which would result in the partition of Vietnam." Any partition, he said, would incur "the grave danger one would gradually move down a path which would lead to what his people feared most."20 On the 27th of May, Quoc Dinh once again spoke on partition. He reminded the other delegates that the GVN had finally achieved independence, the first of its aspirations. The second, aspiration, also achieved, was territorial integrity. The GVN could not now accept partition "without betraying its own people":
- "With reference to Vietnam, the Vietnam delegation wished to warn the conference against any measures tending to divide the national territory. If a division of Vietnam were to be sanctioned, the result would not be peace but only a pause before fresh hostilities... Partition would therefore mean sooner or later — probably sooner — a renewal of war."21
On 29 May, speaking in rebuttal to the DRV delegation, Quoc Dinh stated, "it is impossible for a people to accept of its own free will a mutilation of its country...No Vietnamese patriot could accept partition." This marked the fourth successive meeting in which the GVN delegate emphasized his country's point of view on partition, elections, or both subjects. This emphatic repetition continued. In the Seventh Plenary Session, on 10 June, speaking of a statement made by Molotov, Quoc Dinh accused the USSR of laboring under certain misunderstandings of the GVN and, for the fifth time since tabling his proposals, he repeated the DRV position:
- "I noted in his statement...what I suppose was a mistake of inadvertent omission. He said that only the Viet Minh delegation had proposed that a free general election should take place in Vietnam. I'm sorry that I must contradict. The Delegation of the State of Vietnam also had the honor to propose such elections; the difference being that, whereas the Delegation of Viet Minh proposed that there should be no international supervision which, in the present circumstances, means that elections could not possibly be honest and true, the Delegation of the State of Vietnam has proposed that elections should take place under international supervision."22
Quoc Dinh then reasserted the complete independence of GVN from France, referring to the treaty of 4 June 1954. A week later, the Vietnamese delegate was again pushing his case on the floor of the conference:
- "As regards the independence of our country, it is a well-known fact that we have indicated the contents of two treaties we had with the French on that...As regards the elections, we ourselves, in our proposal of May 12, have taken the initiative of proposing elections in Vietnam. These elections must be free, sincere, and supervised. The best control would be exercised by the UN."23
The GVN insistence on territorial integrity and on elections only after full control was pressed with great energy — almost with vehemence — up to the very last moment of the Geneva Conference.
The evidence suggests that it was not until sometime in early July that the Bao Dai government learned of France's readiness to partition the country, given an acceptable demarcation line. According to a CIA source, based upon the report of a nationalist southern Vietnamese with "extensive" political contacts. Diem was greatly troubled in early July over France's apparent inclination to abandon the North rather than seek to retain a foothold there.24 Diem was said to be convinced that partition would be suicidal, since it would put an end to active anti-Viet Minh resistance. Moreover, Diem was convinced that the French intended to maintain a hold on the South only through manipulating independent irregular forces, such as the armed sects to whom the French allegedly were providing rifles.
GVN anger at hints of a possible French sellout on the partition issue was reflected in a note handed the French delegation (and, without France's knowledge, to the U.S. delegation also) by Nguyen Huu Chau of the Vietnamese delegation on 17 July 1954. The note maintained that not until 16 July did Vietnam learn that at the very time the French High Command had ordered the evacuation of troops from important areas in the Tonkin Delta, the French had also "accepted abandoning to the Viet Minh all of that part situated north of the eighteenth parallel and that the delegation of the Viet Minh might claim an even more advantageous demarcation line." The Vietnamese delegation protested against having been left "in complete ignorance" of French proposals, which were said not to "take any account of the unanimous will for national unity of the Vietnamese people." Disparaging the regroupment plan and the "precarious" nature of the cease-fire being considered, the note again urged that a cease-fire be accompanied by the disarmament of "all the belligerent forces in Vietnam." This would be followed, by provisional United Nations control of all Vietnam "pending the complete re-establishment of security, of order and of peace...which will permit the Vietnamese people to decide their destiny by free elections." UN control of a unified Vietnam, the note stated, was preferable to "its maintenance in power in a country dismembered and condemned to slavery."25
The long-standing GVN hostility to partition, expressed well in advance of final agreement to that arrangement, was paralleled by a wariness of a nationalon unification. In June, 1954, the Saigon Mission cabled Washington that a national election:
- "...to which Department quite rightly attaches importance...is now of less significance in Vietnam than before owing to general feeling of panic and anxiety lest entire country be lost through unfortunate armistice terms. Press has announced that decrees will presently be signed by Bao Dai providing for municipal elections and, with exception of Saigon-Cholon, for direct election of mayors. This should to some extent meet Department's requirement in this regard although it is far less than national elections or preparations for National Constituent Assembly."26
The GVN protest note to the French of 17 July asserted that a cease-fire without disarmament was incompatible with a plebiscite. They held further that the regroupment of the armed forces of the belligerents into separate north-south zones compromised in advance the freedom of any future elections. Moreover, in the GVN view, elections could be considered only after internal security and peace had been re-established, thereby excluding a set time-frame.27 In short, the GVN argued strongly against any scheduled post-settlement national election, and warned that a plebiscite to determine a government for a unified Vietnam could hardly be envisaged with the northern zone controlled by communist armed forces.
On 18 July, GVN, in a conference session, Foreign Minister Tran Van Do spoke out against the draft Final Declaration of the Conference which had been circulated among the delegations. He said that Vietnam could not associate itself with the declaration, and pointed in particular to the conditions for a cease-fire, which stipulated a division of the country, and to Vietnam's lack of an opportunity to present its own proposals. Tran Van Do requested the right to offer Vietnam's own draft declaration at another plenary session.28
The next day, 19 July, the Vietnamese delegation offered its proposals, an elaboration of the ideas contained in the note to the French delegation. The proposal warned that the French, Soviet, and Viet Minh drafts all spoke of a provisional partition, whereas the inevitable result would in fact be "to produce in Vietnam the same effects as in Germany, Austria, and Korea." The proposal went on: "it would not bring the peace which is sought for, deeply wounding the national sentiment of the Vietnamese people; it would provoke trouble throughout the country, trouble which would not fail to threaten a peace so dearly acquired." The delegation then renewed its plan for a cease-fire in small regroupment zones; the disarming of irregular troops and, after a fixed period, of all Viet Minh troops; the withdrawal of foreign troops simultaneous with disarmament of the Viet Minh; and UN control of the cease-fire, the regroupment, the disarmament and withdrawal, the elections which would follow the restoration of order, and national administration.29
Tran Van Do's proposal did not receive consideration at the final plenary session of the Geneva Conference on 21 July.30 The delegation head protested this as well as the "hasty conclusion of the Armistice Agreement by the French and Viet Minh High Commanders only..." Furthermore, Tran Van Do protested the abandonment of national territory to the Viet Minh even though still occupied by Vietnamese troops, and the setting up of a date for national elections by a command without Vietnamese agreement. He concluded: "...the Government of the State of Vietnam wishes the Conference to take note of the fact that it reserves its full freedom of action in order to safeguard the sacred right of the Vietnamese people to its territorial unity, national independence, and freedom." After other delegation leaders had indicated consent to the military agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities and Final Declaration, Tran Van Do spoke again. He requested the Conference to incorporate in the Declaration the following text:
- "The Conference takes note of the Declaration of the Government of the State of Vietnam undertaking: to make and support every effort to re-establish a real and lasting peace in Vietnam; not to use force to resist the procedures for carrying the cease-fire into effect, in spite of the objections and reservations that the State of Vietnam has expressed, especially in its final statement."31
Tran Van Do's final effort was dismissed by Eden (as chairman), who urged that, the Final Declaration having already been printed, the conferees take note of Do's statement. Nevertheless, Do's comments then and previously clearly established his government's opposition to the Geneva Accords. That the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement was signed by the French and Viet Minh military commands, the main belligerents, accommodated the fact that the GVN did not recognize the political existence of the DRV. The French, correctly anticipating adverse reactions from the GVN, avoided seeking GVN official consent to the armistice. The French also knew that the GVN would never accede to a partition arrangement, and formal approval of the armistice by the military commands removed the possibility of GVN obstruction of a cease-fire.
The French had good reason for avoiding communication with the Vietnamese during the last days of the Geneva Conference: scheduled elections were prominent among the concessions that France had to make in order to obtain a settlement at all; and the reunification of Vietnam was deferred by the device of the promised plebiscite. As the Conference drew to a close, and time was running out for the French, they traded on the Viet Minh desire for the future "integrity of the Vietnam state" in order to salvage what they could from their own tottering situation. The French finally agreed to Vietnam-wide elections within two years. As in the partition agreements, the GVN was not able to influence that decision to any appreciable degree. In the larger sense, GVN aspirations were sacrificed to the position of France versus its Communist antagonist. Each side was determined not to allow all of Vietnam to fall into the hands of the other. France agreed to elections, knowing — as the USSR and. China also knew — that elections might never be held.32
French readiness to accept a divided Vietnam — a disposition which before the end of June culminated in abandonment of the enclave alternative in favor of a north-south partition — was not communicated to the GVN. To the contrary, then and throughout the conference, the GVN delegation and government were informed of shifts in position, if at all, as 33 In the same month, Chauvel, evincing understanding that the U.S. would prefer to disassociate itself from a partition settlement, nevertheless asked if the U.S. would soften Bao Dai opposition by indicating it was the best solution obtainable. Chauvel described Diem and Buu Loc as "difficult," unrealistic, and unreasonable in their opposition, and likely to upset the delicate negotiations.34 The U.S. consistently reacted negatively to these approaches, in the undoubtedly correct belief that the French were merely attempting to identify the U.S. with the partition concept in Vietnamese eyes. For example, Secretary Dulles instructed the U.S. Ambassador on 2 July concerning Diem as follows:. During June, for instance, Chauvel on several occasions approached the U.S. with news of the "underground" negotiations with the Viet Minh and with the hope that, once partition had been fixed, the U.S. would "sell" that solution to Saigon.
- "It seems to me that the new Vietnamese Prime Minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, who has the reputation of uncompromising nationalist, is quite in the dark about developments critically affecting country he is trying to lead. We fear that if results of French negotiations with communists are revealed to him as a 35 , the very reaction French wish to avoid will result. You should therefore indicate our concern to the French and ascertain their own intentions with respect to consulting him or minimizing his resentment and their views with respect to plans and prospects for maintaining order in South Vietnam."
By refusing to act as intermediaries for the French, the U.S. in turn kept free of entanglement in a "French solution" to the Vietnam problem.
French aloofness from the GVN continued into July. Despite U.S. requests of the French delegation that the GVN be kept informed of developments, the French remained wary of contact for fear of provoking a GVN reaction that, in turn, might fracture the delicate French discussions with the Viet Minh. Chauvel consequently informed U. Alexis Johnson that "he was handling this [liaison with the GVN] through members of his staff and was avoiding direct contact with Vietnamese in order not to have to answer their questions."36 When Offroy, another member of the French delegation, suggested that the U.S. placate the Vietnamese with assurance of free world political, economic, and military support after the settlement, U. Alexis replied that this was a matter which the French had to handle.37
When the penultimate session of the Conference recessed, Tran Van Do and another member of his delegation, Tran Van Chuong, explained Vietnam's position to U. Alexis Johnson. Even though they admitted that they recognized the impracticality of the GVN proposals, the GVN delegation felt that "they must make the moral position of their government clear to the world and to the Vietnamese people. If the other side rejected it, the position of their government would have been improved." U. Alexis Johnson observed that time was short for another plenary session; he suggested that they ask Mendes-France for an extension of his self-imposed deadline for concluding the negotiations. After some hesitation, they did so, and Mendes-France, although he urged the Vietnamese to circulate their proposal, stated he definitely could not ask the French National Assembly for more time at Geneva. Johnson at this point "reminded Mendes-France of the U.S. position on GVN concurrence with any agreement. Mendes-France [said] he was very conscious of this and was asking De Jean [sic] immediately to go to Cannes to see Bao Dai."33 Nothing came of this exchange.
In summary, however, it must be said that while the GVN attained none of its major objectives, and while it received little support from the U.S., it continued to exist. Its territorial and political integrity below the 17th parallel was assured, after a fashion, for at least two years by the Geneva Accords.
III. B. 2.
|a.||GVN Does Not Inherit French Responsibilities||B-21|
|b.||GVN Position is Anomalous||B-27|
The fact that French Union forces were still in Vietnam at the time the Geneva military agreements were signed, and that they remained there during and after the Conference, need not be interpreted as evidence of lack of Vietnamese sovereignty. French Union forces could hardly have left the country immediately without surrendering all Vietnam to the communists, and without inviting the slaughter of the Vietnamese National Army. French officers and noncommissioned officers led the latter troops. Clearly, only a gradual withdrawal of the French Expeditionary Corps was reasonable in view of the prevailing military situation. The GVN accepted these realities and recognized, the need for continued French presence. The French government, in granting the GVN independence had agreed that the Expeditionary Corps would be pulled out of Vietnam at the request of the GVN — although no doubt it hoped to delay that day. In fact, the French moved swiftly after Geneva, under American urging, to relinquish to the GVN the full trappings of the sovereignty granted in June, 1954. By mid-September, the turning over of the civil service, police, and other public administration in South Vietnam was formally completed. By February, 1955, the Vietnamese Army was placed under the command of Vietnamese leaders, and the French accepted American primacy in advising, training, and equipping GVN armed forces.
Article 27 of the Armistice agreements signed by France states in part: "The signatories of the present Agreement and their successors in their functions shall be responsible for ensuring and observance and enforcement of the terms and provisions thereof..." That clause seemed to obligate the State of Vietnam in the event France abrogated its responsibilities — but even if construed thusly, the obligation extended only to "the present [military] Agreement," and not to the political provisions included in the unsigned Final Declaration. It is also possible to construe the reference to "successors" as a binder on the procession of French governments likely to follow Mendes-France. In any event, the State of Vietnam explicitly denied responsibility for all the agreements concluded by France at Geneva, although it pledged not to interfere with the cease-fire.1. The declarations of Vietnamese disavowal were early, repeated and specific. Moreover, these declarations included warnings that the partition and elections provided for by the Geneva Conference would lead to renewed violence. Examples of these statements follow:
|2||12 May 54||Geneva Conference "must not lead to partition, either direct or indirect, final or provisional, de facto or de jure, of the national territory."||Elections can be held "as soon as the [UN] Security Council has decided that the authority of the State has been established in the whole of the territory, and that conditions of freedom have been obtained..."|
|3||25 May 54||State of Vietnam "would not agree to any plan which would result in the partition of Vietnam." Partition involved "grave danger."|
|4||27 May 54||"...The Vietnam delegation wished to warn the Conference against measures tending to divide the national territory. If a division of Vietnam were to be sanctioned, the result would not be peace, but a pause before fresh hostilities: There was no example of a country torn physically apart which had not endeavored to recover its unity and its historic frontiers. Partition would therefore mean sooner or later — probably sooner — a renewal of war."|
|5||29 May 54||"We do believe that there are certain principles which should guide us. Among these principles is the political and territorial integrity of the Vietnamese country. When it was agreed that representatives of Vietnam should attend this conference, it is obvious that one could not ignore the consequences of this attendance. It is impossible for a people to accept of its own free will a mutilation of its country... No Vietnamese patriot could accept partition."|
|6||10 Jun 54||"The delegation of the State of Vietnam...had the honor to propose...elections;...whereas the Delegation of Viet Minh proposed that there should be no international supervision which, in the present circumstances, means that elections could not possibly be honest and true, the Delegation of the State of Vietnam has proposed that elections should take place under international supervision."|
|7||16 Jun 54||The GVN, "in our proposal of May 12, have taken the initiative on proposing elections...these elections must be free, sincere, and supervised. The best control would be exercised by the U.N."|
|8||17 Jun 54||"The de facto partition...does not take any account of the unanimous will for national unity of the Vietnamese people...Vietnam would prefer...provisional control by the United Nations over a truly unified and independent Vietnam to its maintenance in power in a country dismembered and condemned to slavery."||"Regroupment...reinforces the threat that they constitute to the free expression of the will of the people. Therefore not only does such a cease fire not-lead to a durable peace, since,. ignoring the will for national unity, it provokes the people to 'unify' the country, but, by the consolidation of the armed forces now facing each other, it violates in advance the liberty of the future elections...The cease fire...far from leading to peace, makes peace improbable and precarious."|
|9||18 Jul 54||"In order to avoid any misunderstanding [Tran Van Do] wished to state firmly that Vietnam delegation could not associate itself with any discussion of this [Final Declaration]...Vietnam does not agree to conditions advanced for cessation of hostilities...Delegation of Vietnam can only protest the idea of partition...Vietnamese delegation flatly rejects both drafts submitted to the conference...Vietnamese delegation cannot accept declaration or agreement where Vietnam, which [was] invited to the conference as [an] existing state, [is] not even mentioned."||
|10||19 Jul 54||"French, Soviet and Viet Minh drafts all admit the principles of a partition of Vietnam in two zones, all of North Vietnam being abandoned to the Viet Minh. Although this partition is only provisional in theory, it would not (repeat not) fail to produce in Vietnam the same effects as in Germany, Austria, and Korea. It would not bring the peace which is sought for, deeply wounding the national sentiment of the Vietnamese people, it would provoke trouble throughout the country, trouble which would not fail to threaten a peace so dearly acquired."||"The Vietnamese Delegation therefore proposes:
This proposal made on the formal instructions of His Majesty Bao Dai, and of President Ngo Dinh Diem, shows that the Chief of State of Vietnam once more places the independence and the unity of his country above any other considerations, and that the national government of Vietnam would prefer this provisional UN control over a truly independent and United Vietnam to its maintenance in power in a country dismembered and condemned to slavery."
|11||21 Jul 54||"Mr. Tran van Do (State of Viet-Nam) (interpretation):
Mr. Chairman, the Delegation of the State of Viet-Nam when it tabled its proposal, saw an armistice without a partition, even provisional, of Viet-Nam through disarmament of all belligerent forces after their withdrawal into perimeters as limited as possible and by the establishment of a provisional control by the United Nations on the whole of the territory, while the re-establishment of order and peace would enable the Vietnamese people to decide its fate through free elections.
"The Delegation of the State of Viet-Nam protests against the fact that its proposal has been rejected without an examination, a proposal which is the only one to reflect the aspirations of the Vietnamese people. It requests urgently that the demilitarization and neutralization of the Catholic communities, the Bishoprics of the Delta in North Viet-Nam be at least accepted by this Conference.
"It solemnly protests against the hasty conclusion of the Armistice Agreement by the French and Vietminh High Commanders only, whereas the French High Command does command Vietnamese troops only through a delegation of powers given by the head of the State of Viet-Nam, whereas especially many provisions of this Agreement are of a nature to be seriously detrimental to the political future of the Vietnamese people.
"It further solemnly protests against the fact that this Armistice Agreement abandons to Vietminh territories some of which are still occupied by Vietnamese troops and which are, nevertheless, fundamental to the defense of Viet-Nam against a greater Communist expansion, and results practically even in depriving the State of Viet-Nam from its right to organize its defense by other means than by the maintenance of the foreign army on its territory.
"It also solemnly protests against the fact that the French High Command was pleased to take the right without a preliminary agreement of the Delegation of the State of Viet-Nam to set the date of future elections, whereas we deal here with a provision of an obviously political character. Consequently, the Government of the State of Viet-Nam requests that this Conference note that it does protest solemnly against the way in which the Armistice has been concluded and against the conditions of this Armistice which have not taken into account the deep aspirations of the Vietnamese people.
"And the Government of the State of Viet-Nam wishes the Conference to take note of the fact that it reserves its full freedom of action in order to safeguard the sacred right of the Vietnamese people to its territorial unity, rational independence, and freedom.
"...as regards the final Declaration of the Conference, the Vietnamese Delegation would request the Conference to incorporate in this Declaration after Article 11, the following text:
It was generally recognized at Geneva that the position of the GVN was, at best, contradictory. The GVN asserted its desire for international status by demanding concessions which the other nations considered impossible. The GVN also was severe in criticism of the French, while at the same time acknowledging a debt to France for its very existence in the face of Viet Minh military and political pressures — which even France, at that time, could barely sustain. The unsupported opposition of the GVN was understood by the other nations as a small country's fight for survival.
Partition, regroupment, and cease-fire conditions intended to lead to a final political settlement at Geneva, were all imposed on Saigon. While it is true that the alternatives offered by the GVN were impractical and unacceptable given the extent of Viet Minh territorial and population control, the salient fact is that the GVN, speaking from what it regarded as an independent position, held fast against every proposal that departed from its concepts of national unity and self-determination. The limitations on the GVN's role as an independent participant at the Conference stemmed from French determination to conclude a settlement in line with French interests. France commanded the power to attract Conference support; the GVN did not. However, the GVN was neither obligated by previous commitment, by its legal status, nor by the Accords themselves to abide by the Franco–Viet Minh agreements which emerged. This anomaly ultimately made France, and French presence in Vietnam, pivotal to the fulfillment of the Geneva agreements. | <urn:uuid:0e4318f5-9b51-45dc-a559-a4e49a6ff14f> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_%E2%80%93_Vietnam_Relations,_1945%E2%80%931967:_A_Study_Prepared_by_the_Department_of_Defense/III._B._Role_and_Obligations_of_State_of_Vietnam | 2020-10-26T17:08:14Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107891428.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20201026145305-20201026175305-00430.warc.gz | en | 0.967423 | 9,907 |
Nazi plunder refers to art theft and other items stolen as a result of the organized looting of European countries during the time of the Third Reich by agents acting on behalf of the ruling Nazi Party of Germany. Plundering occurred from 1933 until the end of World War II, particularly by military units known as the Kunstschutz, although most plunder was acquired during the war. In addition to gold, silver and currency, cultural items of great significance were stolen, including paintings, ceramics, books and religious treasures. Although most of these items were recovered by agents of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA, also known as the Monuments Men), on behalf of the Allies immediately following the war, many are still missing. There is an international effort underway to identify Nazi plunder that still remains unaccounted for, with the aim of ultimately returning the items to the rightful owners, their families or their respective countries.
Adolf Hitler was an unsuccessful artist who was denied admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Nonetheless, he thought of himself as a connoisseur of the arts, and in Mein Kampf he ferociously attacked modern art as degenerate, including Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism, all of which he considered the product of a decadent twentieth century society. In 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he enforced his aesthetic ideal on the nation. The types of art that were favored amongst the Nazi party were classical portraits and landscapes by Old Masters, particularly those of Germanic origin. Modern art that did not match this was dubbed degenerate art by the Third Reich and all that was found in Germany's state museums was to be sold or destroyed. With the sums raised, the Führer's objective was to establish the European Art Museum in Linz. Other Nazi dignitaries, like Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Foreign Affairs minister von Ribbentrop, were also intent on taking advantage of German military conquests to increase their private art collections.
Sale of art confiscated from German museums
Art dealers Hildebrand Gurlitt, Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Moeller and Bernhard Boehmer set up shop in Schloss Niederschonhausen, just outside Berlin, to sell a cache of near-16,000 paintings and sculptures which Hitler and Göring removed from the walls of German museums in 1937–38. They were first put on display in the Haus der Kunst in Munich on 19 July 1937, with the Nazi leaders inviting public mockery by two million visitors who came to view the condemned modern art in the Degenerate Art Exhibition. Propagandist Joseph Goebbels in a radio broadcast called Germany's degenerate artists "garbage". Hitler opened the Haus der Kunst exhibition with a speech. In it he described German art as suffering "a great and fatal illness".
Public burning of art
Hildebrand Gurlitt and his colleagues did not have much success with their sales, mainly because art labelled "rubbish" had small appeal. So on 20 March 1939, they set fire to 1,004 paintings and sculptures and 3,825 watercolours, drawings and prints in the courtyard of the Berlin Fire Department, an act of infamy similar to their earlier well-known book burnings. The propaganda act raised the attention they hoped. The Basel Museum in Switzerland arrived with 50,000 Swiss francs to spend. Shocked art lovers came to buy. What is unknown after these sales are how many paintings were kept by Gurlitt, Buchholz, Moeller, Boehmer and was sold by them to Switzerland and America – ships crossed the Atlantic from Lisbon – for personal gain.
Public auctions and private sales in Switzerland
The most infamous auction of Nazi looted art was the "degenerate art' auction organized by Theodor Fischer (auctioneer) in Lucerne, Switzerland, 30 June 1939 at the Grand Hotel National. The artworks on offer had been "de-accessioned" from German museums by the Nazis, yet many well known art dealers participated as well as proxies for major collectors and museums. Public auctions were only the visible tip of the iceberg, as many sales operated by art dealers were private. The Commission for Art Recovery has characterized Switzerland as "a magnet" for assets from the rise of Hitler until the end of World War II. Researching and documenting Switzerland's role "as an art-dealing centre and conduit for cultural assets in the Nazi period and in the immediate post-war period" was one of the missions of the Bergier Commission, under the directorship of Professor Georg Kreis.
Nazi looting organizations
While the Nazis were in power, they plundered cultural property from every territory they occupied. This was conducted in a systematic manner with organizations specifically created to determine which public and private collections were most valuable to the Nazi Regime. Some of the objects were earmarked for Hitler's never realized Führermuseum, some objects went to other high-ranking officials such as Hermann Göring, while other objects were traded to fund Nazi activities.
In 1940, an organization is known as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die Besetzten Gebiete (The Reichsleiter Rosenberg Institute for the Occupied Territories), or ERR, was formed, headed for Alfred Rosenberg by Gerhard Utikal. The first operating unit, the western branch for France, Belgium and the Netherlands, called the Dienststelle Westen (Western Agency), was located in Paris. The chief of this Dienststelle was Kurt von Behr. Its original purpose was to collect Jewish and Freemasonic books and documents, either for destruction or for removal to Germany for further "study". However, late in 1940, Hermann Göring, who in fact controlled the ERR, issued an order that effectively changed the mission of the ERR, mandating it to seize "Jewish" art collections and other objects. The war loot had to be collected in a central place in Paris, the Museum Jeu de Paume. At this collection point worked art historians and other personnel who inventoried the loot before sending it to Germany. Göring also commanded that the loot would first be divided between Hitler and himself. Hitler later ordered that all confiscated works of art were to be made directly available to him. From the end of 1940 to the end of 1942 Göring traveled twenty times to Paris. In the Museum Jeu de Paume, art dealer Bruno Lohse staged 20 expositions of the newly looted art objects, especially for Göring, from which Göring selected at least 594 pieces for his own collection. Göring made Lohse his liaison-officer and installed him in the ERR in March 1941 as the deputy leader of this unit. Items which Hitler and Göring did not want were made available to other Nazi leaders. Under Rosenberg and Göring's leadership, the ERR seized 21,903 art objects from German-occupied countries.
Other Nazi looting organizations included the Sonderauftrag Linz, the organization run by the art historian Hans Posse, which was particularly in charge of assembling the works for the Führermuseum, the Dienststelle Mühlmann, operated by Kajetan Mühlmann, which Göring also controlled and operated primarily in the Netherlands, Belgium, and a Sonderkommando Kuensberg connected to the minister of foreign affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop, which operated first in France, then in Russia and North Africa. In Western Europe, with the advancing German troops, were elements of the 'von Ribbentrop Battalion', named after Joachim von Ribbentrop. These men were responsible for entering private and institutional libraries in the occupied countries and removing any materials of interest to the Germans, especially items of scientific, technical or other informational value.
Art collections from prominent Jewish families, including the Rothschilds, the Rosenbergs, the Wildensteins and the Schloss Family were the targets of confiscations because of their significant value. Also, Jewish art dealers sold art to German organizations – often under duress, e.g. the art dealerships of Jacques Goudstikker, Benjamin and Nathan Katz and Kurt Walter Bachstitz. Also non-Jewish art dealers sold art to the Germans, e.g. the art dealers De Boer and Hoogendijk in the Netherlands.
By the end of the war, the Third Reich amassed hundreds of thousands of cultural objects.
Art Looting Investigation Unit
On November 21, 1944, at the request of Owen Roberts, William J. Donovan created the Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) within the OSS to collect information on the looting, confiscation and transfer of cultural objects by Nazi Germany, its allies and the various individuals and organizations involved; to prosecute war criminals and to restitute property. The ALIU compiled information on individuals believed to have participated in art looting, identifying a group of key suspects for capture and interrogation about their roles in carrying out Nazi policy. Interviews were conducted in Bad Aussee, Austria.
Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) Reports 1945–1946 and ALIU Red Flag Names List and Index
The ALIU Reports detail the networks of Nazi officials, art dealers and individuals involved in the Hitler's policy of spoliation of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. The ALIU's final report included 175 pages divided into three parts: Detailed Interrogation Reports (DIRs), which focused individuals who played pivotal roles in German spoliation. Consolidated Interrogations Reports (CIRs), and a "Red Flag list" of people involved in Nazi spoilation. The ALIU Reports form one of the key records in the US Government Archives of Nazi Era Assets
Detailed Intelligence Reports (DIR) The first group of reports detailing the networks and relations between art dealers and other agents employed by Hitler, Göring and Rosenberg are organized by name: Heinrich Hoffmann, Ernst Buchner, Gustav Rochlitz, Gunter Schiedlausky, Bruno Lohse, Gisela Limberger, Walter Andreas Hofer, Karl Kress, Walter Bornheim, Hermann Voss and Karl Haberstock.
Consolidated Interrogation Reports (CIR) A second set of reports detail the art looting activities of Göring (The Goering Collection), the art looting activities of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), and Hitler's Linz Museum.
ALIU List of Red Flag Names
The Art Looting Intelligence Unit published a list of "Red Flag Names", organizing them by country: Germany, France, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Luxembourg. Each name is followed by a description of the person's activities, their relations with other people in the spoliation network and, in many cases, information concerning their arrest or imprisonment by Allied forces.
To investigate and estimate Nazi plunder in the USSR during 1941 through 1945, the Soviet State Extraordinary Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating the Crimes Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices was formed on 2 November 1942. During the Great Patriotic War and afterwards, until 1991, the Commission collected materials on Nazi crimes in the USSR, including incidents of plunder. Immediately following the war, the Commission outlined damage in detail to sixty-four of the most valuable Soviet museums, out of 427 damaged ones. In the Russian SFSR, 173 museums were found to have been plundered by the Nazis, with looted items numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
After the dissolution of the USSR, the Government of the Russian Federation formed the State Commission for the Restitution of Cultural Valuables to replace the Soviet Commission. Experts from this Russian institution originally consulted the work of the Soviet Commission, yet continue to catalogue artworks lost during the war museum by museum. As of 2008, lost artworks of 14 museums and the libraries of Voronezh Oblast, Kursk Oblast, Pskov Oblast, Rostov Oblast, Smolensk Oblast, Northern Caucasus, Gatchina, Peterhof Palace, Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin), Novgorod and Novgorod Oblast, as well as the bodies of the Russian State Archives and CPSU Archives, were catalogued in 15 volumes, all of which were made available online. They contain detailed information on 1,148,908 items of lost artworks. The total number of lost items is unknown so far, because cataloguing work for other damaged Russian museums is ongoing.
Alfred Rosenberg commanded the so-called Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg [ERR] für die Besetzten Gebiete, which was responsible for collecting art, books, and cultural objects from invaded countries, and also transferred their captured library collections back to Berlin during the retreat from Russia. "In their search for 'research materials' ERR teams and the Wehrmacht visited 375 archival institutions, 402 museums, 531 institutes, and 957 libraries in Eastern Europe alone". The ERR also operated in the early days of the blitzkrieg of the Low Countries. This caused some confusion about authority, priority, and the chain of command among the German Army, the von Rippentropp Battalion and the Gestapo, and as a result of personal looting among the Army officers and troops. These ERR teams were, however, very effective. One account estimates that from the Soviet Union alone: "one hundred thousand geographical maps were taken on ideological grounds, for academic research, as means for political, geographical and economic information on Soviet cities and regions, or as collector's items".
After the occupation of Poland by German forces in September 1939, the Nazi regime attempted to exterminate its upper classes as well as its culture. Thousands of art objects were looted, as the Nazis systematically carried out a plan of looting prepared even before the start of hostilities. 25 museums and many other facilities were destroyed. The total cost of German Nazi theft and destruction of Polish art is estimated at 20 billion dollars, or an estimated 43% of Polish cultural heritage; over 516,000 individual art pieces were looted, including 2,800 paintings by European painters; 11,000 paintings by Polish painters; 1,400 sculptures; 75,000 manuscripts; 25,000 maps; 90,000 books, including over 20,000 printed before 1800; and hundreds of thousands of other items of artistic and historical value. Germany still has much Polish material looted during World War II. For decades there have been mostly futile negotiations between Poland and Germany concerning the return of the looted property.
Main article: Nazi storage sites for art during World War II
The Anschluss, joining, of Austria and Germany began on March 12th in the year 1938. Churches, monasteries, museums were home to many pieces of art before the Nazis came but after, the majority of the artwork was taken. Ringstrasse, which was a residence for many people but as well as a community center, was confiscated and all of the art inside as well. Between the years 1943 and 1945, salt mines in Altaussee held the majority of Nazi looted art. Some from Austria and others from all around Europe. In 1944, around 4,700 pieces of art were then stored in the salt mines.
After Hitler became Chancellor, he made plans to transform his home city of Linz, Austria into the Third Reich's capital city for the arts. Hitler hired architects to work from his own designs to build several galleries and museums, which would collectively be known as the Führermuseum. Hitler wanted to fill his museum with the greatest art treasures in the world, and believed that most of the world's finest art belonged to Germany after having been looted during the Napoleonic and First World wars.
Hermann Göring collection
The Hermann Göring collection, a personal collection of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, was another large collection including confiscated property, consisted of approximately 50 percent of works of art confiscated from the enemies of the Reich. Assembled in large measure by art dealer Bruno Lohse, Göring's adviser and ERR representative in Paris, in 1945 the collection included over 2,000 individual pieces including more than 300 paintings. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's Consolidated Interrogation Report No. 2 states that Göring never crudely looted, instead he always managed "to find a way of giving at least the appearance of honesty, by a token payment or promise thereof to the confiscation authorities. Although he and his agents never had an official connection with the German confiscation organizations, they nevertheless used them to the fullest extent possible."
Nazi storage of looted objects
The Third Reich amassed hundreds of thousands of objects from occupied nations and stored them in several key locations, such as Musée Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Nazi headquarters in Munich. As the Allied forces gained advantage in the war and bombed Germany's cities and historic institutions, Germany "began storing the artworks in salt mines and caves for protection from Allied bombing raids. These mines and caves offered the appropriate humidity and temperature conditions for artworks." Well known repositories of this kind were mines in Merkers, Altaussee and Siegen. These mines were not only used for the storage of looted art but also of art that had been in Germany and Austria before the beginning of the Nazi rule. Degenerate art was legally banned by the Nazis from entering Germany, and so ones designated were held in what was called the Martyr's Room at the Jeu de Paume. Much of Paul Rosenberg's professional dealership and personal collection were so subsequently designated by the Nazis. Following Joseph Goebels earlier private decree to sell these degenerate works for foreign currency to fund the building of the Führermuseum and the wider war effort, Hermann Göring personally appointed a series of ERR approved dealers to liquidate these assets and then pass the funds to swell his personal art collection, including Hildebrand Gurlitt. With the looted degenerate art sold onwards via Switzerland, Rosenberg's collection was scattered across Europe. Today, some 70 of his paintings are missing, including: the large Picasso watercolor Naked Woman on the Beach, painted in Provence in 1923; seven works by Matisse; and the Portrait of Gabrielle Diot by Degas.
Plunder of Jewish Books
One of the things Nazis sought after during their invasion of European countries was Jewish books and writings. Their goal was to collect all of Europe's Jewish books and burn them. One of the first countries to be raided was France. There the Nazis took 50,000 books from the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 10,000 from L’Ecole Rabbinique, one of Paris's most significant rabbinic seminaries, and 4,000 volumes from the Federation of Jewish Societies of France, an umbrella group. From there they went onto taking from the Lipschuetz Bookstore a total of 20,000 books and another 28,000 from the Rothschild family's personal collection. They then scoured the private homes of Paris and came up with thousands of more books. After sweeping France for every Jewish book they could find, the Nazis moved onto the Netherlands where they would take millions more. They raided the house of Hans Furstenberg, a wealthy Jewish banker and stole his 16,000 volume collection. The Nazis then moved onto Amsterdam where they took 25,000 volumes from the Bibliotheek van het Portugeesch Israelietisch Seminarium, 4,000 from Ashkenazic Beth ha- Midrasch Ets Haim, and 100,000 from Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. In Italy, the central synagogue of Rome contained two libraries, one was owned by the Italian Rabbinic College and the other one was the Jewish community Library. In 1943, the Nazis came through Italy, packaged up every book from the synagogue, and sent them back to Germany.
The Allies created special commissions, such as the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) organization to help protect famous European monuments from destruction, and after the war, to travel to formerly Nazi-occupied territories to find Nazi art repositories. In 1944 and 1945 one of the greatest challenges for the "Monuments Men" was to keep Allied forces from plundering and "taking artworks and sending them home to friends and family"; When "off-limits" warning signs failed to protect the artworks the "Monuments Men" started to mark the storage places with white tape, which was used by Allied troops as a warning sign for unexploded mines. They recovered thousands of objects, many of which were pillaged by the Nazis.
The Allies found these artworks in over 1,050 repositories in Germany and Austria at the end of World War II. In summer 1945, Capt. Walter Farmer became the collecting point's first director. The first shipment of artworks arriving at Wiesbaden Collection Point included cases of antiquities, Egyptian art, Islamic artefacts, and paintings from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. The collecting point also received materials from the Reichsbank and Nazi-looted, Polish, liturgical collections. At its height, Wiesbaden stored, identified, and restituted approximately 700,000 individual objects including paintings and sculptures, mainly to keep them away from the Soviet Army and wartime reparations.
The Allies collected the artworks and stored them in collecting points, in particular the Central Collection Point in Munich until they could be returned. The identifiable works of art, that had been acquired by the Germans during the Nazi rule, were returned to the countries from which they were taken. It was up to the governments of each nation if and under which circumstances they would return the objects to the original owners.
When the Munich collection point was closed, the owners of many of the objects had not been found. Nations were also unable to find all of the owners or to verify that they were dead. There are many organizations put in place to help return the stolen items taken from the Jewish people. For example: Project Heart, the World Jewish Restitution Organization, and The Claims Conference. Depending on the circumstances these organizations may receive the art works in lieu of the heirs.
Further reading: United States restitution to the Soviet Union
Although most of the stolen artworks and antiques were documented, found or recovered "by the victorious Allied armies ... principally hidden away in salt mines, tunnels, and secluded castles", many artworks have never been returned to their rightful owners. Art dealers, galleries and museums worldwide have been compelled to research their collection's provenance in order to investigate claims that some of the work was acquired after it had been stolen from its original owners. Already in 1985, years before American museums recognized the issue and before the international conference on Nazi-looted assets of Holocaust victims, European countries released inventory lists of works of art, coins and medals "that were confiscated from Jews by the Nazis during World War II, and announced the details of a process for returning the works to their owners and rightful heirs." In 1998 an Austrian advisory panel recommended the return of 6,292 objets d'art to their legal owners (most of whom are Jews), under the terms of a 1998 restitution law. Nazi concentration camp and death camp victims had to strip completely before their murder, and all their personal belongings were stolen. The very valuable items such as gold coins, rings, spectacles, jewellry and other precious metal items were sent to the Reichsbank for conversion to bullion. The value was then credited to SS accounts.
Pieces of art looted by the Nazis can still be found in Russian/Soviet and American institutions: the Metropolitan Museum of Art revealed a list of 393 paintings that have gaps in their provenance during the Nazi Era, the Art Institute of Chicago has posted a listing of more than 500 works "for which links in the chain of ownership for the years 1933–1945 are still unclear or not yet fully determined." The San Diego Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art provide lists on the internet to determine if art items within their collection were stolen by the Nazis.
Stuart Eizenstat, the Under Secretary of State and head of the U.S. delegation sponsoring the 1998 international conference on Nazi-looted assets of Holocaust victims in Washington conference stated that "From now on, ... the sale, purchase, exchange and display of art from this period will be addressed with greater sensitivity and a higher international standard of responsibility." The conference was attended by more than forty countries and thirteen different private entities, and the goal was to come to a federal consensus on how to handle Nazi-Era Looted Art. The conference was built on the foundation of the Nazi Gold Conference held in London in 1997. The U.S. Department of State hosted the conference with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum from November 30 to December 3, 1998.
After the conference the Association of Art Museum Directors developed guidelines which require museums to review the provenance or history of their collections, focusing especially on art looted by the Nazis. The National Gallery of Art in Washington identified more than 400 European paintings with gaps in their provenance during World War II era. One particular piece of art, "Still Life with Fruit and Game" by the 16th-century Flemish painter Frans Snyders, was sold by Karl Haberstock, whom the World Jewish Congress describes as "one of the most notorious Nazi art dealers." In 2000 the New York City's Museum of Modern Art still told Congress that they were "not aware of a single Nazi-tainted work of art in our collection, of the more than 100,000" they held.
In 1979 two paintings, a Renoir, Tête de jeune fille, and a Pissarro, Rue de village, appeared on Interpol's "12 Most Wanted List," but to date no one knows their whereabouts (ATA Newsletter, Nov. '79, vol. 1, no. 9, p. 1. '78, 326.1–2) The New Jersey owner has asked IFAR to republish information about the theft, with the hope that someone will recognize the paintings. The owner wrote IFAR that when his parents emigrated from Berlin in 1938, two of their paintings "mysteriously disappeared." All of their other possessions were shipped from Germany to the U.S. via the Netherlands, and everything except the box containing these two paintings arrived intact. After World War II the owner's father made a considerable effort to locate the paintings, but was unsuccessful. Over the years numerous efforts have been made to recover them, articles have been published, and an advertisement appeared in the German magazine, Die Weltkunst, May 15, 1959. A considerable reward has been offered, subject to usual conditions, but there has been no response. Anyone with information about these two paintings is asked to contact IFAR.
However, restitution efforts initiated by German politicians have not been free of controversy, either. As the German law for restitution applies to "cultural assets lost as a result of Nazi persecution, "which includes paintings that Jews who emigrated from Germany sold to support themselves, pretty much any trade involving Jews in that era is affected, and the benefit of the doubt is given to claimants. German leftist politicians Klaus Wowereit (SPD, mayor of Berlin) and Thomas Flierl (Linkspartei) were sued in 2006 for being overly willing to give away the 1913 painting Berliner Straßenszene of expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, which was in Berlin's Brücke Museum. On display in Cologne in 1937, it had been sold for 3,000 Reichsmark by a Jewish family residing in Switzerland to a German collector. This sum is considered by experts to have been well over the market price. The museum, which obtained the painting in 1980 after several ownership changes, could not prove that the family actually received the money. It was restituted to the heiress of the former owners, and she had it auctioned off for $38.1 Million.
In 2010, as work began to extend an underground line from Alexanderplatz through the historic city centre to the Brandenburg Gate, a number of sculptures from the degenerate art exhibition were unearthed in the cellar of a private house close to the "Rote Rathaus". These included, for example, the bronze cubist style statue of a female dancer by the artist Marg Moll, and are now on display at the Neues Museum.
From 2013 up to 2015 a committee researched the collection of the Dutch Royal family. The committee focussed on all objects acquired by the family since 1933 and which were made prior to 1945. In total 1300 artworks were studied. Dutch musea had already researched their collection in order to find objects stolen by the Nazis. It appeared that one painting of the forest near Huis ten Bosch by the Dutch painter Joris van der Haagen came from a Jewish collector. He was forced to hand the painting over to the former Jewish bank Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co in Amsterdam, which collected money and other possessions of the Jews in Amsterdam. The painting was bought by Queen Juliana in 1960. The family plans to return the painting to the heirs of the owner in 1942, a Jewish collector.
Effects of Nazi looting today
Approximately 20% of the art in Europe was looted by the Nazis, and there are well over 100,000 items that have not been returned to their rightful owners. The majority of what is still missing includes everyday objects such as china, crystal or silver. The extent to which looted art was taken was seen according to Spiegler as, “The Nazi art confiscation program has been called the greatest displacement of art in human history.” the end of World War II, “The United States Government has estimated that German forces and other Nazi agents before and during World War II had seized or coerced the sale of one fifth of all Western art then in existence, approximately a quarter of a million pieces of art.” Because of the such wide displacement of Nazi looted art from all over Europe, “to this day, some tens of thousands of artworks stolen by the Nazi’s have still not been located.”
Some objects of great cultural significance remain missing, though how much has yet to be determined. This is a major issue for the art market, since legitimate organizations do not want to deal in objects with unclear ownership titles. Since the mid-1990s, after several books, magazines, and newspapers began exposing the subject to the general public, many dealers, auction houses and museums have grown more careful about checking the provenance of objects that are available for purchase in case they are looted. Some museums in the United States and elsewhere have agreed to check the provenance of works in their collections with the implied promise that suspect works would be returned to rightful owners if the evidence so dictates. But the process is time-consuming and slow, and very few disputed works have been found in public collections.
In the 1990s and 2000s, information has become more accessible due to political and economic changes as well as advances in technology. Privacy laws in some countries have expired so records that were once difficult to obtain are now open to the public. Information from former Soviet countries that was previously unobtainable is now available, and many organisations have posted information online, making it widely accessible.
In addition to the role of courts in determining restitution or compensation, some states have created official bodies for the consideration and resolution of claims. In the United Kingdom, the Spoliation Advisory Panel advises the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on such claims. The International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), a not-for-profit educational and research organization, has helped provide information leading to restitution.
1992 International Archives for the Women's Movement discovery
On 14 January 1992, historian Marc Jansen reported in an article in NRC Handelsblad that archival collections stolen from the Netherlands including the records of the International Archives for the Women's Movement (Dutch: Internationaal Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging (IAV)), which had been looted in 1940, had been found in Russia. The confiscated records were initially sent to Berlin and later was moved to Sudetenland for security reasons. At the end of the war, the Red Army took the documents from German-occupied Czechoslovakia and in 1945–46, stored them in the KGB's Osobyi Archive (Russian: Особый архив), meaning special archive, which was housed in Moscow. Though agreements were drafted almost immediately after the discovery, bureaucratic delays kept the archives from being returned for eleven years. In 2003, the partial recovery of the papers of some of the most noted feminists in the pre-war period, including Aletta Jacobs and Rosa Manus, some 4,650 books and periodicals, records of the International Council of Women and International Woman Suffrage Alliance, among many photographs were returned. Approximately half of the original collection is still unrecovered.
2012 Munich artworks discovery
In early 2012, over one thousand pieces of artwork were discovered at the home of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, of which about 200–300 pieces are suspected of being looted art, some of which may have been exhibited in the degenerate art exhibition held by the Nazis before World War II in several large German cities. The collection contains works by Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, and Henri Matisse, Renoir and Max Liebermann amongst many others.
2014 Nuremberg artworks discovery
In January 2014, researcher Dominik Radlmaier of the city of Nuremberg announced that eight objects had been identified as lost art with a further eleven being under strong suspicion. The city's research project was started in 2004 and Radlmaier has been investigating full-time since then.
2015 Walbrzych, Poland rumored armored train
In Walbrzych, Poland two amateur explorers — Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter — claim to have found a rumored armored train that is believed to be filled with gold, gems and weapons. The train was rumored to be sealed in a tunnel in the closing days of World War II before the collapse of The Third Reich. Only 10% of the tunnel has been explored because much of the tunnel has collapsed. Finding the train will be an expensive and complicated operation involving a lot of funding, digging, and drilling. However, to support their claims the explorers said experts have examined the site with ground-penetrating, thermal and magnetic sensors that picked up signs of a railway tunnel with metal tracks. The legitimacy of these claims has yet to be determined, yet the explorers are requesting 10% of the value of whatever is within the train if their findings are correct. Poland's deputy culture minister, Piotr Zuchowski, said he was "99 percent convinced" that the train had finally been found but scientists claim that the explorers' findings are false.
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- "Christie's Auction raises ghosts painting confiscated by the Nazis sold for $38.1 Million". Cite journal requires
- Hickley, Catherine (1946-09-27). "'Degenerate' Art Unearthed From Berlin Bomb Rubble". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2010-11-10.
- Black, Rosemary (November 9, 2010). "Rescued pre-WWII 'degenerate art' on display in the Neues Museum in Berlin". Nydailynews.com. Retrieved 2010-11-10.
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- "Koninklijke familie bezit roofkunstwerk". Retrieved 2015-04-01.
- Bradsher, Greg (November 1997). "Documenting Nazi Plunder of European Art". The National Archives of the United States.
- Spiegler, Howard (Spring 2001). "Recovering Nazi-Looted Art: Report from the Front Lines". Connecticut Journal of International Law: 298.
- Spiegler, Howard (Spring 2001). "Recovering Nazi-Looted art: Report from the Front Lines". Connecticut Journal of International Law: 298.
- Spiegler, Howard (Spring 2001). "Recovering Nazi Looted Art: Report from the Front Lines". Connecticut Journal of International Law: 299.
- "Maintaining world-leading national museums and galleries, and supporting the museum sector". Retrieved 23 December 2014.
- Rollason, Kevin (February 7, 2013). "Art Sleuths on Nazi Trail". Winnipeg Free Press. Retrieved February 23, 2014.
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- de Haan, Francisca (Winter 2004). "Getting to the Source: A "Truly International" Archive for the Women's Movement(IAV, now IIAV): From its Foundation in Amsterdam in 1935 to the Return of its Looted Archives in 2003" (PDF). Journal of Women's History. Johns Hopkins University Press. 16 (4): 148–172. doi:10.1353/jowh.2004.0082. Archived from the original (PDF) on 28 April 2017.
- de Haan, Francisca; Mevis, Annette (2008). "The IAV/IIAV's Archival Policy and Practice: Seventy Years of Collecting, Receiving, and Refusing Women's Archives (1935-2005)". In Wieringa, Saskia (ed.). Traveling Heritages: New Perspecitves on Collecting, Preserving, and Sharing Women's History. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press. pp. 23–46. ISBN 978-90-5260-299-8.
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- Aly, Götz (2007). Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. Metropolitan Books. ISBN 978-0-8050-7926-5
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- Feliciano, Hector (1997). The Lost Museum. New York: Harper Collins.
- Hadden, R. L. (2008). "The Heringen Collection of the US Geological Survey Library, Reston, Virginia". Earth Sciences History : Journal of the History of the Earth Sciences Society. 27, no. 2: pages 242–265.
- Harclerode, Peter and Pittaway, Brendan (1999). The Lost Masters: WWII and the Looting of Europe's Treasurehouses. London: Orion Books.
- Löhr, Hanns Christian (2005): Das Braune Haus der Kunst: Hitler und der Sonderauftrag Linz, Akademie-Verlag,ISBN 3-05-004156-0
- Löhr, Hanns Christian (2018): Kunst als Waffe – Der Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, Ideologie und Kunstraub im „Dritten Reich“, Gebr. Mann, ISBN 978-3-7861-2806-9.
- Nicholas, Lynn (1994). The Rape of Europa. London: Macmillan Publishers.
- O'Connor, Anne-Marie (2012). The Lady in Gold, The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, ISBN 0-307-26564-1.
- OSS Report: Activity of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg in France, 15 August 1945
- Petropoulos, Jonathan (1996). Art as Politics in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
- Petropoulos, Jonathan (2000). The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany. London: Penguin Press.
- Roxan, David; Wanstall, Ken (1965). The Rape of Art: The Story of Hitler's Plunder of the Great Masterpieces of Europe. New York: Coward-McCann. OCLC 846620.
- Schwarz, Birgit (2004). Hitler's Museum. Die Fotoalben Gemäldegalerie Linz, Wien, Böhlau Verlag. ISBN 3-205-77054-4
- Simpson, Elizabeth (1997). The Spoils of War – World War II and Its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Bard Graduate Center.
- Slany, William Z. "U.S. Interagency Report on U.S. and Allied Wartime and Post Postwar Relations and Negotiations with Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey on Looted Gold and German External Assets." American University International Law Review 14, no. 1 (1998): 147–153.
- Yeide, Nancy H. (2009). Beyond Dreams of Avarice: The Hermann Göring Collection. Laurel Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9774349-1-6 (Foreword by Robert M. Edsel)
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Nazi looting in World War II.|
- NY Times, Holocaust and the Nazi Era (Archived)
- Nazi Plundering from Holocaust Survivors' Network—iSurvived.org
- Looted Art Recovery
- Department of National Heritage, Wartime losses
- Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO) of the New York State Banking Department
- The Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation (Commission pour l'Indemnisation des Victimes de Spoliations), CIVS, France
- The Holocaust Victims' Information and Support Center (HVISC), Austria
- Washington Conference Principles On Nazi-Confiscated Art
- Council of Europe Resolution 1205
- Vilnius International Forum Declaration on Holocaust Era Looted Cultural Assets
- European Parliament Resolution and Report of Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market
- Nazi Gold and Art – Hitler's Third Reich in the News
- Project for the Documentation of Wartime Cultural Losses – Website of the Cultural Property Research Foundation, Inc.
- Article The DIA does the Right Thing
- The Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property 1933–1945
- International Foundation for Art Research
- Rape of Europa – documentary about the Nazi plunder of Europe.
- Greatest Theft in History – an educational program about Nazi plunder of Art (Unavailable)
- Exhibition: Looted Art in the Netherlands/Roofkunst voor, tijdens en na WO II, Deventer, The Netherlands 2017
- Records about Recovery of Holocaust-Era Assets available in the Archival Research Catalog of the National Archives and Records Administration
- Glickman, Mark (2016). Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books. The Jewish Publication Society. pp. 124–135. | <urn:uuid:5af9f197-f288-4637-879b-729251a45c97> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | https://zims-en.kiwix.campusafrica.gos.orange.com/wikipedia_en_all_nopic/A/Nazi_plunder | 2020-10-24T03:23:13Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107881640.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20201024022853-20201024052853-00550.warc.gz | en | 0.932481 | 10,885 |
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First 3 Chapters of Restoring Dermot
I slowly turned to face the Dermish warrior behind me. There was no need to draw a weapon. Yet.
“What excuse could a Rivanian soldier have for climbing up the side of the king’s sacred mountain?”
I was dressed in plain clothing, my visible weapons no more than an average traveler. The slashes shaved in the sides of my beard and hair were most likely what had identified me as a soldier of Rivania. Although I had left Rivania and was no longer bound to that country, bare gaps of exposed skin were ever present—partly from habit and partly because it helped me to maintain some level of respect on board the ship that brought me to Dermot.
“I asked you a question, Soldier. What are you doing here?”
“I was headed home before you stopped me.” Or at least, it had been home to me ten years ago. I still was not sure what kind of welcome I would receive once I made it there.
His brow wrinkled. “Home? No one lives on Mount Cullan. This is the king’s mountain, and it is illegal to pass over without his permission. I suspect you were sent here as a spy. Am I right?”
“I am no spy. I am no longer a soldier either. My service to Rivania has ended. I was on my way home to Gilvary.”
One side of his thin lips curled up in obvious doubt. “You must take me as a fool. Once you are sworn in as a soldier of Rivania, that service never ends.”
He was right. Every able-bodied adult male without a viable trade was pressed into service, where he usually fought until his dying breath. A soldier may be released if he lived through any great injury, but very few made it to retirement. None of those reasons had bought my freedom.
I gave no response as I studied the man in front of me. He wore a basic uniform with leather-covered armor embellished with the Dermot eagle. A scabbard hung from his side, and he held a primitive staff in his hand. I could render him weaponless in a matter of minutes with nothing but my bare hands, but I would not do this. I had truly come here in peace.
“Head back down the way you came, Soldier, and do not think to try anything. I will be right behind you.”
No protest fell from my lips. I knew how this would end. I would go before the king, my intentions would be revealed, and then I would be sent on my way. Yes, it was an annoying delay, but I would make it home eventually. No one was expecting my return anyway.
Regardless of what my immediate future held, I could not help but to soak up the serenity of the landscape around me. In mid-March, I expected the mountains to be nearly impassable, covered with drifts of snow. As it was, there was less than a foot present here and thinner still at the base of the mountain. The original plan was to take the ship all the way to Aisling and enter Gilvary from there. But I could not endure being cooped up on that crowded vessel any longer. When we docked in Dermot, I noticed the milder than expected temperatures and decided to take my chances crossing the Kearnley mountain range instead.
There was such a vast difference between this mountainside and the country I had left behind, a place crowded with buildings and people where peace could never be found. I had once loved living in Rivania. I was in my teens when I first arrived and there was excitement to be found in every corner. By the time I was pressed into service, I was ready. After all, I was already living the life of an adult, depending only on myself. Now here I was at the age of twenty-five, and it felt as if I was at the end of my life instead of closer to the beginning.
I paused when we reached the bottom of the mountain, expecting to be taken directly into the brownstone castle to face the king. Instead, I was relieved of my weapons, along with my bag, and was placed in one of the outside cells. I was not worried. Perhaps King Farris was too busy to deal with me now, but surely, I would not be imprisoned for long.
Four weeks, three days and approximately two hours—that is how long I languished in that frigid prison. The cell was actually just a cave-like hole dug into the side of the mountain with a rusted iron gate across the front. The walls, ceiling, and floor had been cemented to keep prisoners from digging their way out. This only added to the prisoner’s discomfort since no bed nor even a blanket had been provided. The only protection I had been offered from the cold was my own cloak. I spent every night and part of my days curled into a tight ball trying to cover my head as well as my feet.
But I had not remained idle the entire time. There was not enough room in the cell to make pacing profitable, so I exercised. I had been trained for the possibility of capture. It was essential that I keep my muscles from shriveling up to nothing. I was taught to keep my body prepared to fight should the chance avail itself.
The only person I had seen since entering this prison was the youth that slid food through the opening of the cell door. I tried to speak with him on several occasions, but he just stared blankly at me, if he looked at me at all. I took him for a deaf-mute and gave up after the first few days of trying.
Every meal was the same—watered down stew with stale bread. I had a feeling the leftovers from each meal were thrown into a pot with enough liquid to be considered stew. I suppose it was better than nothing. Anticipating my noon portion of the slop, I watched as a warrior showed up with only the keys to my cell in hand.
“The king is ready to see you now.”
I looked down at my clothes. Everything about me was covered in a month’s worth of filth. How was I going to convincingly state my case before the king looking like this?
As if reading my mind, the warrior pointed toward the barracks located behind the cells. “You can’t go before His Majesty looking like that. You need a bath first. You stink.”
Whose fault was that?
“Head out. I’ll be right behind you.”
I headed toward the front of the barracks.
“No, go around to the back.”
I changed direction without question. What other choice was there? When I got to the back of the building, I was surprised to find a natural hot spring with steam coming from it. It was apparent that there had at one time been a wall surrounding the spring. Now there was only a crumbling foundation that would in no way hide a bather.
He gestured toward the water. “Get in.”
I stripped off my clothing right there in the open for all to see. Modesty was nonexistent for soldiers. Hoping I would never have to don them again, I dropped the filthy rags into a pile. There was a change of clothing in my bag. If they were not presented to me, I could stand before the king as I was for all I cared.
I eased down into the warm water, letting out a sigh of relief. Maybe I would feel warm for the first time since arriving here.
“You don’t have all day. This bath is for the benefit of the king, not yourself. Make haste.” A bar of lye soap came hurling toward my face, and I caught it just in time.
It was good to see that the cold my joints had suffered had not affected my reflexes. I dipped down until my head was submerged. My blond hair and beard had become shaggy without the use of the equipment needed to care for my grooming. I lathered myself from head to toe, thankful for the unforgiving soap. I scraped what I could from nails that were too long. I expected the warrior to give another complaint that I was taking too long. He did not say another word as he leaned against the back of the barracks.
Reluctantly, I climbed out of the water. Somehow, I still did not feel clean, but it would do until I was once again on my way toward Gilvary. No doubt, I would soon be released. I raked my hands through my hair, releasing the excess wetness.
The warrior patted the stack of clothing on the bench next to him. “Get dressed.”
The clothes were mine. The rest of my belongings were nowhere to be seen. I used my tunic to dry myself off before getting dressed. The cold was already starting to seep into my bones once again. With damp hair and clothes, I would be fortunate to come out of this without suffering illness. My cloak had been left in the cell. It could stay there as far as I was concerned. A new one could be purchased after I was released.
I headed around to the entrance of the castle as instructed, with the warrior following close behind. I recognized the ancient looking man waiting for us just inside the door. I could not remember his name, but he had been the general over the warriors here in Dermot when I was a child. He seemed close to retirement even then. Judging by the ensign on his uniform, he still held that position. I was hard put to see how he could still be effective.
Authority sounded in his voice that did not match his appearance. “In a moment, you are to go before His Highness, King Farris. You are not to speak unless he asks you a direct question. Even then, you are only to answer the question asked, and your reply better be in a respectful manner. Do you understand?”
“I have done nothing to warrant the treatment I have received here. He will hear about it before I leave.”
The unexpected hit from the staff of the warrior standing behind me had me lying prostrate on the floor. The warriors of Dermot were the only ones I had ever known to use the primitive staff as a weapon. No longer would I question their effectiveness.
“You will not speak until spoken to. If you cannot comply, you may not make it out of Dermot. Do you understand?”
I gritted my teeth. “Yes.” There was no use arguing with this man. The king would be the one to reason with.
“Get him up, and tie his hands.”
I got up on my own before the warrior had a chance to touch me. There was no resistance as he tied my hands behind my back.
Following the general into the throne room, I looked up to where the king and queen of Dermot sat on the dais in their elaborately carved wooden seats. King Farris looked even more ancient than his general. A brazier burned on the stone floor in front of him. His thin face was the only part of him visible beneath the pile of furs covering his body. The king’s once dark hair was mostly white now. He studied me with his watery blue eyes.
A man stood to the right of the king. He could have been an advisor, but he did not look like a Gilvarian. With his dark hair and eyes, he could be from just about anywhere, but his clothing was that worn by the men of the neighboring country of Cordelia. His long tunic was embroidered and beaded around the edges. A look of boredom covered his face as he stood there with his arms crossed over his chest.
I looked to the left of King Farris expecting to see his wife, but it seemed that a much younger beauty had replaced Queen Babree. The king’s first wife had also been from Cordelia, and it looked as if King Farris had found his second wife there as well. Long black hair cascaded in waves that reached past her waist. She wore a long, heavily embroidered blue tunic that split just below the waist to reveal a loose pair of silky looking charcoal gray pants. Contempt shown in her smoky brown eyes as she glared at me.
I glanced at King Farris and then back to the woman beside him. She was younger than my twenty-five years. What was a young woman like this doing married to a man as old as the king? Was the title of queen enticing enough to warrant such a gap in age?
The general took a step closer to me and spoke in a low tone. “I suggest you train your gaze away from Princess Adrika. It would do you well to study the floor beneath you.”
In my shock at hearing those words, I jerked my head around toward the warrior before I looked down at the floor as he had advised. I was tempted to take another peek at the princess, but even a quick glance would not go unnoticed.
Was the princess still the brat she was when I knew her? She had bitten my brother once. A snicker almost escaped at the memory. It was doubtful that reaction would be well received as I stood shackled before the king, awaiting a verdict concerning my immediate future.
“Your Highness, I bring before you, Gunther Manlius, accused of climbing the sacred Mount Cullan. He is believed to be a spy sent from Rivania.”
I stole another glance at the general. I had not been asked my name since being imprisoned. That information had to have been gathered when they went through my bag. Surely, they would have found the parchment releasing me from my duties as a Rivanian soldier. Was that enough to prove that I was not a spy? It was doubtful. There was no need to worry. Once I had a chance to speak to the king, he would know of my innocence.
“And what did he claim as his reason for being on that mountain?”
It was annoying that he had not asked me that question. I was impatient to have this over with so I could move on. I glanced up to find the king studying my face even as he spoke to his general.
“Your Highness, he claimed that he was on his way home to Gilvary. I present that if he were truly a citizen of Gilvary, he would have known enough of our laws not to be on that mountain.”
“Gilvary, you say?” The king leaned forward as if to get a better look. My gaze automatically went up to meet his. I felt a tap on the back of my calf from the general’s staff causing me to once again stare at the stone floor beneath my feet.
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Look at me, prisoner.”
Was he about to sentence me without giving me the benefit of defending myself? I boldly looked the king in the eye and held his gaze.
“You have the eyes of your brother, King Reagan, but even with your beard, you look too much like your mother to be mistaken. I suggest you tell me what I already know to be true. What is your name?”
A gasp from the princess had me stealing another glance in her direction before looking back at the king. “I have been living in Rivania as Gunther Manlius these last ten years, but my real name is Rian Barnali, as I am sure you know, Your Highness.”
The man standing behind King Farris made a sound in his throat that had me glancing his way once again. His brows were drawn together above the glare he now wore. Everyone in the room was probably wondering why they were just hearing this information. If I had seen anyone besides the boy who brought me food, this would have been over with a month ago.
The king rubbed his hand across his thin gray beard. He seemed in deep study of my face as he leaned forward. I had no clue what he could be thinking. “I believe you, Prince Rian. Now if you would, enlighten me as to why you were crossing Mount Cullan. You must have known it was forbidden. Not to mention the fact that it would have been easier to go through Nolan Pass.”
For the first time, I feared that things would not go in my favor.
He leaned back in his seat as he continued, his voice firm and foreboding. “For that matter, I was told you came here by sea. If you were already aboard ship, why not wait and get off in Aisling? You have a brother ruling that kingdom as well. Rumor has it that no one in your family has even had one word from you during your exile. I am sure King Garrett would have welcomed you with open arms and helped you on your way back home to Gilvary, if that was your desire.”
This part would be hard for anyone to understand but myself. I decided to be as honest as I could and let the chips fall where they may. “I was fifteen years old when I left the country of Kearnley. I left Gilvary by coming across Mount Cullan and catching the first ship away from here. Someone would have been watching for me to go through the pass and the thought of crossing over the forbidden mountain without being caught seemed like a thrill to my childish mind at the time.
“I left the ship once I returned to your shores because, frankly, I did not think I could stand another minute on that boat. It was a nostalgic and obviously foolish notion, but having honestly forgotten about the law I decided to return to Gilvary the same way I left. I promise you that I had no malicious intent in crossing your mountain, and I would be glad to take the pass into Gilvary now.”
“Be that as it may, you are my prisoner. I am not inclined to allow you to leave at this time. Guard, untie the prince and have one of the servants show him to a room.”
He cannot be serious?
My hands released with a jerk as the general cut the rope behind me. “I do not understand. Why are you keeping me here?”
“You may be a prince, but I am the king. You will do well to keep that in mind when you address me.”
Panic pressed upon me. My jaw clenched as I tried to keep a neutral face. “Your Highness, I mean no disrespect, but I have done your kingdom no harm. What do you think will happen when my brothers find out that you are holding me here?”
“Your brothers have no jurisdiction over this kingdom.” He nodded to the general behind me. “Take him away. I grant him permission to move about the grounds, but make sure a guard is with him at all times.”
There was no use in arguing further. My brothers were sure to hear of this. They may not have jurisdiction here, but it would not bode well for the king of Dermot to have the other two kingdoms of Kearnley against him.
The guard took hold of my arm and pulled me toward a door on the left side of the chamber. Princess Adrika came into view, and I allowed my attention to linger this time. I may not be on level with the king, but regardless of the fact that I was being held prisoner, she and I were on equal standing. At first her mouth hung open as if she was as shocked as I was at her father’s command. Then she lifted her proud chin in order to look down at me, and I winked just to see if the shocked look would return. I smiled as if I had not a care in the world before turning away from her glare.
I was a child of seven when I last encountered Prince Rian. He seemed much older then, at twice my age. He had given the impression that he hated everyone at that time. It was hard to reconcile that teenager with the man who had stood in my father’s court this morning. The gap in age no longer seemed significant.
I tried to not show interest in what had transpired as I waited, hoping my father would say anything about the prince. To have the lost prince of Gilvary show up here after all of these years was the most exciting thing to happen in this kingdom since . . . well, since before Mother’s death a couple of years ago. It seemed everything good in my world disappeared the day she passed away.
Why would Father keep Prince Rian prisoner? Did he not fear retaliation from the two brothers? I had seen the condition of our prisons. Just the time the prince had spent in one of those cells was enough to bring the wrath of his entire family down on our kingdom. If a battle ensued, we would lose. Our warriors did not compare to those of the rest of the country. It was also surprising that Prince Rian had not earned further punishment for his brazen actions as he flirted with me on his way out.
One stolen glance at my father told me that he was deep in thought. My uncle made a noise as if he meant to speak, but Father lifted his hand in a command for silence. Knowing him, he had started making some plan as soon as he figured out the identity of our prisoner. Father was always making plans. Most were harmless, as they never made it into action. My father was a thinker more than anything else.
Only when he spoke to me was I allowed to look at him directly without fear of reprimand. “Daughter, I would like for you to become reacquainted with Prince Rian.”
I knew this was not a request but a command. “Do you want me to . . .”
“No questions. Just do as I say. You are dismissed.”
“Yes, Father.” I stood and curtsied before making my way quietly from the room.
Uncle Galik began speaking in a low rapid speech as soon as I started walking away. I knew better than to dawdle. I only heard do you think that is wise considering . . . Considering what? That we knew nothing of Prince Rian? That he could bring harm to this kingdom’s only heir? That my uncle had an agenda that had nothing to do with the prince?
Father obviously wanted me to spy on Prince Rian, but how was I to know what information I was to try and garner if he would not tell me? I stomped up the stairs, taking out my frustration. There was no need to hide it now that I was away from Father’s presence.
I entered my bed chamber and began stripping off my silken court attire as soon as I shut the door. The clothes I wore when presented in public were designed after the clothes worn in Cordelia—my mother’s homeland. The blue tunic, embellished with embroidery and beads on the gleaming silk fabric, had me looking like a foreigner to this country, rather than its princess.
Every activity in my life had a special outfit to go with it. Why could I not just go through my wardrobe and choose whatever I fancied for that moment like any other woman would?
Damini came in with a gasp just as my outfit slid to the floor. She ran to the glass door leading out to the veranda and jerked the drapes closed. “Did you not think to close the drapes or ask me to do it before you stripped? What if someone saw you?”
“So, let them look.” Truthfully, I had not given the open drapes a thought as I undressed, but I would never admit to such foolishness.
She mumbled under her breath as she picked up my clothes and began placing them neatly in my wardrobe. I wanted to remind her of how many times she had reprimanded me for the same thing. The servant had been with me since I was born. My mother had wanted a nursemaid from her home country to look after her daughter, one to train me in the “old ways.” It was so frustrating to be handed a different set of rules from anyone else living in Kearnley, and this in addition to the ones set for royalty.
I sat at my dressing table, staring into the ornate mirror as I brushed my hair. I twisted it into a knot and used one of my hand painted picks to weave through the knot, holding it in place. I could see Damini’s reflection shaking her head in disapproval.
“How am I to get your evening dress over your head with that thing sticking out of your hair?”
That was not the problem. The problem was that my mother deemed it inappropriate for a woman not yet married to wear her hair up. I was never sure if it was one of the old ways or just another of the many rules Mother had made up. Two years gone, and I was still being stifled by her teachings.
“I am going for a walk before supper.”
“We do not say supper. You know this. You just like to vex me.”
“All of Kearnley says supper, but I must call it the evening meal. You know, maybe I would not vex you if you stopped treating me as a child.”
“You will be a child until you are married, then your husband will tell you what to do. I just hope your future spouse has the constitution to finally put you in your place.” She snatched my hiking clothes from a hanger and slung them across the bed.
I slipped into the sturdy pair of trousers and pulled the sweater over my head. A snicker sounded from behind me when it caught on the stick holding my hair up. I twisted it up with less care this time and replaced the hair ornament. I slid my feet into my boots and began tightening the straps.
“I heard your father was going to try the prisoner today. He was not released, was he?”
“You have not heard? It turns out that our prisoner is none other than Prince Rian Barnali of Gilvary. You know, the one who has been missing. Father should have let him go, but instead he is holding him here. The prince was offered a room in the castle, though I doubt that will make up for how he has been treated up until this point.”
Damini looked up from rearranging dried flowers in the vase on my bedside table. “It is not up to you to question your father, and he cannot be blamed for what he did not know. I am sure the prince would have been given accommodations sooner had his identity been revealed upon his arrival.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Do you think his family will see it that way?”
“That is none of your concern. Let your father worry about appeasing the other kingdoms, and you just worry about yourself.” She came to me and placed her hand on my cheek. “Maybe you should refrain from going on a hike until we get to know this prince. What if he should approach you?”
“Actually, Father has asked me to spend time with Prince Rian. Maybe I should be the obedient daughter and seek him out now. I wonder which room he was placed in.”
“Oh, just go on your hike already. You are wasting time.” She crossed her arms and sat down on the side of my bed.
Damini knew I was baiting her. I would never go searching for the prince. If I happened to be in his presence, then I would gather any information that might appease my father. Otherwise, I would keep to myself as usual.
I bent down and placed a kiss on her cheek. “Mini, please do not fret so. I am going on my hike now. I will have my staff and can take care of myself. I will be back in plenty of time to dress for the evening meal.”
I had made life difficult for her these last eighteen years, but I still cared deeply for the woman, and I knew she cared for me. My life would be much lonelier than it already was without her.
Wrapping myself in my cloak, I took up my staff and stepped out onto the veranda. I breathed deeply of the crisp mountain air. Snow was usually still thick on the ground in mid-April here in Dermot, but not so in recent years. With the drought we suffered these past five years, everything had changed. The snow left now was more of a muddy slush in the more frequently traveled places.
The castle was built into the lower part of Mount Cullan. The private verandas leading out from each room on this side were nothing but squares of packed earth. It was more of a tiered garden than anything else. Paths wound around the foot of the mountain. They were off-limits to everyone but the occupants of the castle. I tried to spend a little time out here daily. It was the only form of exercise I was allowed.
I walked across the flat surface and was about to take a step down to the path when I was startled by the voice of our prisoner. “I would not go there if I were you. You may be treated to a stay in one of your lovely prison cells if you dare to step foot on the sacred mountain.”
Rian was standing near the castle wall on the veranda next to mine. He was without a cloak. His arms were crossed at his chest, causing his tunic to pull tight across his broad shoulders. He had the build of a warrior. Come to think of it, none of our warriors were built like him. I felt a moment of panic at being alone with him. At my quick glance around, I noticed a warrior on the path just off from where the prince was standing.
“Do not worry, Princess, you are safe with me.”
I could feel the heat rising to my face at being caught. I hated that he had noticed my fear. I hoped to convey contempt rather than embarrassment as I glared up at the smirk on his face.
“Let me assure you, Soldier, I can take care of myself.” I thumped the end of my staff on the ground for emphasis.
“Are you trying to imply that your parents allowed you to be trained to use that stick? I find that highly unlikely.”
As a matter of fact, they had. It was the only thing outside the normal strictures placed on me that my mother had allowed. She wanted her only child to be protected at all times. Since I had a tendency of wandering off at an early age, she had reluctantly agreed to the lessons. I refused to answer his question. It was probably best for him to think me completely helpless.
“How would you know anything about what my parents would allow?”
He looked up toward the peak of the mountain and then back at me. “I was a teenager when I left Kearnley. I remember plenty from my time here.” The meaning behind this statement seemed to run deeper than our current conversation. “You were still an infant then. You probably do not even remember me.”
“There are only seven years between us. That would hardly make me an infant when you left Kearnley. And I do remember you. You are just as mean spirited and cocky as you were back then.”
The smile slid from his face, and his brows knitted in concern. I had not expected my words to affect him but they obviously had. “I am truly sorry that you think so of me. I cannot deny the person I was back then, but I hoped I had matured since that time. Please forgive me.”
I did not know what to say. Should I apologize for my words? I remembered then that my father had asked me to get to know this man. I felt I had somehow failed and had no idea how to redeem myself. In the time it had taken me to contemplate any further action on my part, he had decided to end this meeting.
He bowed low before me. “I will keep you no longer from your journeys, Princess.” He then turned and went back inside the castle.
What a strange thing for him to say. I noticed before that his accent and phrasing were a little off from the people of Gilvary. Maybe that was what made him seem more interesting to me than he should be. What had he been doing these past ten years? General Cormac said he had been a soldier in the country of Rivania. I could not imagine why a prince would take on such a role.
I had been standing there staring at his door for too long. What if he saw me through the window? Hastily, I turned to make my way down the path. I had become chilled from my lack of activity, and I had promised Damini I would be back in time to dress for the evening meal—two reasons for more vigorous action. I glanced back at his door one more time before it was cut from my view. For the first time, it struck me as surprising that Father would allow him to be so close to my own chambers. What could he be thinking?
I had to wonder if King Farris was losing his mind to old age. What could he have been thinking to hold me as prisoner? And then to place me in a room right next to his daughter? If I had a daughter . . . I would think a loving father would protect his child from men like me.
The truth was she could not have been any safer in my presence, but King Farris had no way of knowing that. Any fool should have been able to guess that I had been out in the world for the past ten years. I had been a soldier for the Rivanian army. A certain reputation went along with that status, and it is to my shame that I had lived up to most of it. Hopefully, I had learned from my mistakes, but I must admit, the Dermish princess was tempting.
Through the gap in the drapes covering my window, I could see her staring back at my door for the longest time. What did she think of me? There was a time when I would not have given it another thought. Adrika Mahon had been a brat of a child back when I knew her. She still showed spunk, but she was definitely a woman now.
I took in the sway of her womanly curves as she made her way down the path. She made one last turn to look my way just before the trail took her out of my sight. I knew interest when I saw it. I would have to be careful. This woman was not part of my plan. I was not even sure what the plan was myself. For the first time in my life, I was depending on God to show me the way. If there was a woman in my future, she would come in the form of a wife. Of that I was sure.
For now, I only knew I was headed to Gilvary. I wanted to spend time with my family and then maybe settle down in a manor in the country. I would not mind a view of these mountains. One thing was for certain, I could not imagine living back in the castle of Gilvary permanently with my brother. I loved Reagan and his wife, Gwen, and respected their position, but I was no longer a child. I had led troops into war. I knew I would want to be a man of my own household. This was as far into the future as my thoughts had carried me.
I was allowed to eat in the dining hall that night like everyone else. I made myself slow down and enjoy the meal after nearly choking on the first bite. There was no need to try and swallow everything on my plate at once. I wondered what they did with the leftovers when they were without a prisoner to torture. My guard sat several seats away as if he might catch some otherworldly disease if he got too close.
It was not as if the room was crowded. Years of training had blessed me with a keen sense of observation. Since I had been allowed entrance into the castle, I noticed that much of the structure’s maintenance had been neglected and this room was no different. Had the whole country fallen on hard times in my absence, or was it just Dermot? Maybe it was a case of there not being enough workers. Unlike here, the castle at Gilvary had been bustling with people.
I looked up at those sitting on the dais above me. This table was usually reserved for royalty. If my brothers were here, they would be sitting up there on each side of the king. On this night, it was just King Farris, his daughter, and the man from Cordelia who had been present during my trial.
It was easy to read the hate in the Cordelian’s dark eyes every time his gaze met mine, but I had no idea why he should feel anything toward me. To my memory, we had never met. He shared deep conversation with the king while the princess sat silently on the other side. She never seemed to look at anyone in particular. She just sat there stone-faced, eating her meal as if she were the only person in the room.
When the king stood, his two dining companions rose with him. I watched as the princess curtsied and stepped out through a door at the back of the room. The two men headed in my direction. King Farris turned suddenly and spoke to the Cordelian man, who then bowed and walked back in the opposite direction, leaving through the same door the princess had used. The king made his way to where I was sitting.
He glanced at me as he came even with my table. “Walk with me.”
I took one last sip from my goblet before falling into step beside him, my guard trailing behind us. Hopefully, the king had come to his senses and would release me. He waited until we were in the hallway before speaking.
“Rivania is not known for letting go of their soldiers so easily. I am curious to know how you gained release—if you were indeed released.”
My mind scrabbled for what to say. I was no deserter, but saying so would only bring up the fact that I had abandoned my own kingdom. I doubted he would be too impressed with the fact that I had only been fifteen at the time.
“Once the emperor was made aware of the fact that I was the long-lost prince of Gilvary, he decided to allow me to return home as an act of good faith.” Would he take the hint and do the same?
King Farris stopped and looked directly at me. “Tell me what else have you been up to these last ten years? Perhaps you left a family back in Rivania as well?”
My gut tightened. “No family. Soldiering took everything I had to give.”
“Maybe now you will look toward settling down.” His smile made me nervous.
That was exactly what I had in mind—not that it should concern him in any way. Where is he going with this conversation? “That is a possibility.”
“There is nothing like the comfort of a good wife.”
I studied the man beside me for a moment as we meandered aimlessly through the hallways. He seemed to be giving great thought to my future, which was unsettling. I decided to focus the conversation back on him. “I know you must miss yours. I was sorry to hear of Queen Babree’s passing.”
The slight smile he had worn melted from his face. “Yes, I never expected to be the last to go.”
“At least you still have Princess Adrika.”
The smile returned brighter than before. “Yes, she has been a blessing to me. Now, there is someone who would make a good wife for one very fortunate man.”
I tried to picture the princess with a husband, but the only image I could conjure was the one of her on the terrace, her smoldering brown eyes looking up at me through thick, dark lashes, and full lips that . . . I shook my head to dispel the image.
“I am sure she would. Do you have someone in mind for the princess?” I knew this king would be the one to choose a husband for his daughter. I only asked to make conversation. I truly did not care who that man would be.
He turned and smiled up at me. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
A bolt of unease filtered through me. Surely, he did not mean me. That seemed to be the implication, but I could easily change his mind by giving details of my personal life up until now. I was probably the only man in the country who carried a title equal to his daughter, but I was not the prince he had in mind. Calm down, he is not thinking of you.
“In that case, I wish the couple every happiness. When do you plan to release me?”
His thin lips pressed together at my abrupt change of subject. I was tired of the small talk. His daughter’s future was of no concern to me. I was more than ready to get on with my own life.
“We will discuss that at another time. I am ready to retire to my room.”
“Will you at least get word to my family that I am here?”
“That can be arranged, but as I said before, your brothers have no say over how I run my kingdom. Good night, young Prince.” He made a few shuffling steps to the door I assumed led to his chambers and entered in.
I thought over his last words as I made my way to my own chambers with my guard trailing behind. He had not given me a definitive answer. I had my doubts that my family would be contacted. Regardless of what he said, if either of my brothers showed up, I was certain it would affect his decision in holding me here.
I peeked out through the window of my bedchamber. Toward the west, a purple glow spread out across the edge of the earth where the sun had just set, but the rest of the sky was dark. I pulled one of the blankets from my bed to use as a cloak before stepping out onto the veranda. A brazier was burning out on the mountain path where a guard stood warming his hands as he peered through the darkness at me.
I took a deep breath of the clean crisp air. My bondage here was more than a little irritating, but still nothing compared to being in that prison cell. I walked over to the edge of the terrace where the princess had stood earlier that day. I could have sworn I still smelled her jasmine scent lingering.
“Are you planning your escape, Prince Rian?”
I jerked my head toward the sultry voice. The princess sat on a bench near the door to her room. How had I not known she was there? A soldier should be more aware of his surroundings.
“I could ask you the same, Princess.” I walked over closer to her, expecting the guard to call a halt to my steps at any time.
She patted the seat beside her. “Join me.”
I sat down and pulled the blanket closer around me. Instead of an invitation, I would have thought my comment would have provoked more of the banter we had shared earlier. I tried not to analyze my wish to see her riled up again.
“Did you enjoy your supper?” She had not looked pleased during the meal. I wanted to see what she would say about it.
“It fulfilled a need. I do not believe I would use the word enjoy. How about you? Did you enjoy your evening meal?”
“Very much so. It was a feast compared to what I have been eating lately.”
She looked down at her lap. “I know the accommodations of our prison leave much to be desired.”
“That is one way of putting it. No offence, but your father should try it out for himself some time.”
“Were you unable to talk Father into releasing you?”
“He had other things on his mind.”
She turned her head slightly and glanced at me from the corner of her eye. “Like what?”
“We talked about you, as a matter of fact.”
She slapped her gloved hand against her chest. “Me? What could he possibly have to discuss about me with you?”
“We talked about the spouse he has picked out for you.”
She sucked in her breath as she turned to face me. “Did he say who it was?”
“You mean you do not know?”
The door opened beside us. “Rika . . . I am sorry, My Lady, I did not realize you had company. I just wanted to alert you to the hour. It will soon be time for you to retire for the night. You must come in and make ready.”
I recognized the old nursemaid. It was not unusual for one to stay around after their ward was grown, but their job usually changed to that of a handmaiden. This woman still treated the princess as a child.
“Give me another minute, please.”
As soon as the nursemaid was gone, she grabbed my arm. “Did he give a name? Tell me quickly.”
I tried to study her features, but the light from the moon shone from behind her. “What is your father planning to do, introduce you on your wedding day?”
“Did he give a name?” Her voice was laced with panic.
“No, he only said he had someone in mind.”
She stood. “We will talk about this more later.”
“Good night, Princess.”
She stopped just before she got to the door. “Good night, Prince Rian.”
I continued sitting there after she entered the castle and thought about my conversations with her and her father—both had been strange. For the first time, I felt a little sorry for the girl. From what I had seen today, she lived a lonely existence. Few within the castle were close to her age. Even when she had taken her meal sitting next to her father, she had been alone. And I could not imagine what it would be like to have no say in choosing the person you would spend the rest of your life with.
I reminded myself once again that none of this was my concern. I needed to put my efforts into getting away from here. I was more than ready to put my past behind me and reconcile with my family. | <urn:uuid:0f6c2d7d-2761-403e-9024-eb384771fd23> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | https://www.andreaboyd11.com/post/2017/04/12/first-3-chapters-of-restoring-dermot | 2020-10-24T14:34:03Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107883636.39/warc/CC-MAIN-20201024135444-20201024165444-00670.warc.gz | en | 0.993156 | 10,046 |
At last…we here in Florida…have a day that feels just a little like Fall. The states further North are certainly enjoying this cooler time and looking forward to the glorious Fall colors. It is the time when orange pumpkins dot the hillsides in the Blue Ridge and other places. Get out the scarves and enjoy a walk!
My last post was about Japan and the Fall there is among the most beautiful. Enjoy from Boyer Writes!
From time to time, I think it is good to reflect on the beauties of the world rather than spend so much time on the difficulties and tragedies that exist. It is good for the soul and especially good for the emotions and good mental health. The Holy Scripture tells us of the beauty of God’s creation for which we are caretakers. His glory is seen in all the earth.
The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers. Psalm 24:1,2
Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, that you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture; and to drink of clear water, that you must muddy the rest of the water with your feet? Ezekiel 34:18
For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Isaiah 55:12
Therefore, today, I’d like to take you to a place that my husband and I have enjoyed in the past...JAPAN. Even though we did not visit this particular place, Tsumago, we did have the opportunity to see the Fall leaves and Mt. Fuji.
In Tsumago, Japan, the restoration effort over the last fifty years or more has been to restore the buildings as they would have been hundreds of years ago. From the 1950’s, they started to get rid of all concrete buildings and as a reformer said, “We must reverse the trend to Americanize the village…”
This is what they have done and brought back the old crafts that have been part of their heritage. Great cypress trees grow there that could reach to a thousand years old. However, the cutting of the trees has led to much younger trees that Japan has now made a national treasure. No cutting is allowed without a permit.
“It was in 1950 that the inhabitants of Tsumago decided to take matters in hand and restore the historic buildings in this once busy village. Like its neighbor, Magome, it was an important stop on the Nakasendo road during the Edo period, one of the five paths used by merchants and knights on the Tokyo-Kyoto route. The results of the restoration are quite surprising when you visit Tsumago, the “time machine” effect works perfectly due to a blend of careful renovations and strict rules (such as cars not being allowed in the main street, and invisible electric cables, because they are buried underground. ” (Taken from Japan Experience)
The video, below, also shows how people of Tsumago came together to make their town historically correct as they removed many of the eye-sores such as advertisement signs and unsightly wires and poles. The Japanese have great respect for their customs, history and nature. They make an effort to use the woods of their forests respectfully and to keep God’s beautiful world a thing of joy for many generations to come. Deciding to slow down the pace of life and reflect on the great beauties around us is a wonderful example and lesson to learn.
Turn up your sound. ( Click and watch on You Tube if says “blocked.”)
For your weekend, the beautiful music of relaxation and peace with outstanding photography. Fall is in the air!
Blessings, Boyer Writes
“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” John 16:33
Click this link and turn up your sound.
This morning I ate my breakfast. As usual, I poured my non-fat milk over the beautiful, round blueberries that floated atop my cereal. This has been a habit for some time since I’m told that blueberries are really good for us.
Why talk about breakfast and blueberries? The reason is that we give little thought about these great fruits that are readily available to us in the grocery stores or the people who picked them. Aside from the hefty price on some of these “little darlings,” they are usually readily available most of the year. This may not be so true in the future…as some vegetables and fruits have been rotting in the fields. Why? The workforce is declining…as with other things in industry. (My doctor told me the other day that he is having a hard time getting inserts for his foot patients. No, shoe inserts have nothing to do with blueberries…but the labor force does.)
After I listened to an aspiring medical student, Gianna Ninno, who has picked blueberries since she was a young child with her family, I thought it was time to write something about these “heroes” of the marketplace. They are usually minority…both American and from other places.
Her statement, “The people who pick the berries can’t actually afford to buy them in the stores.” This puts a new slant on the farm workers that make it possible for me to enjoy my blueberries each morning. All I can say is “THANK YOU!”
I thank them for their labor, but also the fact that they are willing to put their lives on the line to do the job. During the virus epidemic, it was revealed that many of the farm and factory workers were showing growing numbers of contacting the COVID-19. This was especially true in the meat packing houses.
When we lived part of the year in Virginia, USA, I noticed that most of the workers there were not Americans, but immigrants that get short term visas to be part of our labor force. They lived in the small accommodations provided by the farm owner and rode to work in crowded vans. This, of course, was an invitation for sickness. Now, that travel bans have occurred, it is questionable if they will be able to help Americans with their harvest. We worried about paper goods during the first days of the Pandemic, but the foods we eat may be the next shortage. It might be wise to start a garden in your backyard, if you have the room.
Whatever money the farm workers make usually is wired home to their families in various countries. When the picking season is over, the farm owners fly them back home until the next season. It was explained to us that all of the paperwork was done correctly with the government. They are issued short-term work visas. These workers are appreciated because they are very hard workers.
The immigrants don’t receive welfare benefits from our government. Some of our own citizens are obviously unwilling to do the back-breaking work that these people are eager to do in order to take care of themselves and their families. Unfortunately, to their health and welfare, there has been a cost. We hope that they will be able to return as long as they are here legally and the farmers can afford them.
The laborers of the fields need the honor and wages due them. What does the Holy Scripture tells us about this?
“You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy, whether he is one of your brothers or one of the sojourners who are in your land within your towns. You shall give him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets (for he is poor and counts on it), lest he cry against you to the Lord, and you be guilty of sin. Deuteronomy 24:14-15
The video that you are about to see was made by a young woman who wanted everyone to know that many of our American, minority farm workers have a similar plight to those who come from out of the country. She is trying hard to earn extra money in order to finish her medical school education by doing the work that many others avoid. I will let her give you her story in this short video.
As for me, I will continue to enjoy my blueberries each morning as long as they are available. I now appreciate even more their beautiful, round, blue shape and their wonderful taste because I understand better that there are special human beings willing to work extremely hard to get them to me.
I bet you won’t think of a blueberry the same.
Click the link. (from ABC News If you are trying to watch on a phone, unfortunately, her video may not come up after the ad…which by the way, I’m not endorsing. Sorry if this happens…watch on your computer if possible.)
SUN.…Have you walked outside the air-conditioning and just felt the warmth of the summer sun on your face? There is something relaxing about drinking in the gift of God…bright, calming sun.
FLOWERS…Today we are going to think about all the beauty that summer brings…FLOWERS. My rose garden is a delight. When I reach for a new, glorious bud or an open bright, red bloom, I can truly say that all other thoughts leave my mind. They are perfection as they raise their long stems toward the heavens.
Oaks….The trees that shade us from the hot, summer sun and give the birds their perch…we honor you for you will probably still stand long after we are gone to God above.
BIRDS…The song of BIRDS are clearly heard each morning. Occasionally, I am at the right place and time to photograph a bird…not just any little bird…but the unusual, big birds.
BUTTERFLIES... Plant some seeds in your garden. You will be amazed at how fast they will grow into colorful blooms that the butterflies love. After they bloom, collect the old blossoms for the seeds. Shovel some dirt over the old flowers and watch them come up again. Giant sunflowers will do the same.
Rain that showers down the blessings of a fresh day. Filling our lakes and rivers that run into the oceans blue.
WAVES…If you love the sound of the waves lapping on the shore, the stretch of Beaches and the soft, smooth sand, you have found the perfect summer. Here, in Florida, we also have sand dunes. Once I encountered a 6 ft. alligator coming up the beach and slowly making his way into one of the sand dunes. He seemed to pay no attention that humans were sharing this lovely spot with him. THE JOY of SUMMER CAN BE ALL YOURS!
LOOK AROUND YOU AT GOD’S CREATION.
Enjoy the summer video below.
VIDEO FOR YOUR PLEASURE Turn up your sound
This is a short blog to give you a rest from all the difficulties of life. Listening to and thinking about too much in the news with total negativity can make your mind, not only depressed, but filled with dread and doubt about our lives on planet earth. God has something better for you to think about…HIS LOVE ND HIS CREATION! The music is LOOK AT THE WORLD by the great Christian composer, John Rutter.
FOR YOUR TOTAL ENJOYMENT AND REASSURANCE FROM BOYER WRITES
GOD BLESS YOU!
The truth of the butterfly is much like the truth of the Christian new birth. There was a time in my life when my senses about God and His Son were as dormant as it is in a caterpillar that doesn’t know it is to become something designed by God. Many Christians have this feeling.
The fact is that very caterpillar has to die before it can become a butterfly. The same is true with our old life.
Science tells us: “In order to be able to become a butterfly, the caterpillar has to fall apart completely, decompose down to its very essence, devoid of any shape or consciousness. It literally dies. There is nothing left of it. And from this liquid essence, the butterfly starts to put itself together, from scratch.”
There are many different caterpillars that make a unique type of butterfly in color and design.
People are also different. God will take our special personalities and use us how He chooses. His plan is to take your life and mine and make us in his honor. Just as the butterfly, He unfolds a new life in us. The old life will pass away, like that of the caterpillar. God’s goal is to make every Christian’s life more beautiful than could ever be imagined. The butterfly is our example.
Will the butterflies of various colors be with us forever?
A German study gives some difficult news of fewer butterflies than ever before…down by two thirds:
“Our study emphasizes the negative impact of the conventional, industrialized agriculture on the butterfly diversity and shows the urgent need for ecologically sustainable cultivation methods. Additional field studies may aid in identifying individual factors responsible for the insect die-back and in implementing appropriate countermeasures,” (Science Daily).
It is difficult to think that such beauty could someday be extinct from the earth, as have many of God’s other creatures.
Will the Christian be always on the earth to see it through rough times?
Apparently not, for God has promised the most beautiful place that He is preparing for us. When this will happen, we do not know. We are only told to watch and be ready. We are not promised, however, that we will not go through horrific times on earth before Christ’s coming. We are only promised that He will be with us and courage will be ours.
“But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Matthew 24:36
Can we imagine that all the perfect parts of nature will be in this new, heavenly place that God is preparing? We will also be joined by those we have loved on earth…including our beloved pets. We are told also the lion will lay down with the lamb in perfect harmony.
I can only imagine the heavenly gardens with all the colorful butterflies that only heaven can produce! A new heaven…and this new earth made perfect by God with no more sin, fighting, or tears.
As scientists warn about global changes, the Holy Scriptures also gives fore-warnings about the ways of the world. We are not to be caught unaware… as we watch our earth decline…scientifically and within the lives and actions of people and nations world-wide.
“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever” (1 John 2:15-17; NIV).
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:22; ESV).
God’s promise about heaven and earth to John in a vision on the Greek Island of Patmos, is recorded in Revelation 21:1-6
“Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life.
To the Butterflies…Thank you for your lesson of life to us.
Video: Background music for your special pleasure. Turn up sound.
“All that glitters is not gold.”
Do you know where this term originated? For our Thanksgiving post, I’d like to share with you a bit of history…and say that this is a most true statement. We think of solid gold that has great value, as in jewelry or other ornaments. Sometimes we even speak of people as being “worth their weight in gold.” Gold is a precious commodity. Nations have fought over it. Great gold pieces have been stolen from one land to another. Gold miners hoped to strike it rich and bet everything in their lives to seek its source. Yet, there are some things that are even more wonderful than gold.
“The original form of this phrase was ‘all that glisters is not gold’. The ‘glitters’ version long ago superseded the original and is now almost universally used.
“Shakespeare is the best-known writer to have expressed the idea that shiny things aren’t necessarily precious things. The original editions of The Merchant of Venice, 1596, have the line as ‘all that glisters is not gold’. ‘Glister’ is usually replaced by ‘glitter’ in modern renditions of the play…
Various different ways of expressing the idea that ‘all that glitters/glisters is not gold’ were in general circulation well before Shakespeare’s day and it was a common enough notion to have been called proverbial by the 16th century. The 12th-century French theologian Alain de Lille wrote:
“Do not hold everything gold that shines like gold”.
Geoffrey Chaucer also expressed the same idea in Middle English in the poem The House of Fame, 1380 –
“Hit is not al gold, that glareth”.
Nevertheless, it is Shakespeare who gave us the version we now use.” (The Phrase Finder)
So often the color, yellow, is associated with gold. The sun shines a ray of golden light onto the earth to bring us the things that do not sparkle, as may real gold, but can be enjoyed by both rich and poor. It is God’s gift to share with us the beautiful golden colors of Fall and throughout the universe with the golden twinkle of a star. A stripe of gold may adorn a small bird, a little flower, a sunset and many other things on earth. Even the color on my “golden” retriever, Gracie, is a special beauty…and she did not glitter…but oh, was so precious. We have “golden” anniversaries and friendship that we would not trade for even a tiny speck of gold. We are blessed beyond the price of gold with God’s love to us through His Son, Jesus Christ. Yes, not all gold glitters..or in Shakespearean days, “glisters.”
Boyer Writes brings you one of the most beautiful works of photography in this video entitled: “Sun Paints us Gold” by Tim Janis
Even here in Florida, we are experiencing a cold snap…so for all the readers who are experiencing more extreme cold…get your cup of hot chocolate and sit by the fire. Enjoy the cozy times.
This music is for you from Boyer Writes.
My last blog was in honor of a dear friend who passed away five years after brain surgery. It led me to think about those who were more fortunate to live a very long, productive life…even to 100 years or more.
One of those centenarians was 107 years old Raffaella Monne from a village in Sardinia. She had a great statement, which is part of a very interesting book called The Blue Zones by Dan Buettner. This is what she said that she would like to tell people today:
“Life is short. Don’t run so fast you miss it!”
National Geographic was part of the research on why some people live longer in different parts of the world. All these so-called “Blue Zones” had several things that were important to them:
- Diet: Mainly of home-grown vegetables, nuts, fish and sometimes meat. They were not strict vegetarians.
- Strong family and friend support system…taking time to chat and relax.
- Worked hard and walked a great deal, but slowed down to take a daily nap…less stress was important
- Strong faith in God and belief system
- Let the past be the past and live happily…with something interesting to wake up to each day.
Throughout the book, the American or Western lifestyle is challenged because of not only our unhealthy lifestyle, but the stress that brings on pre-mature disease and death. It is not hard to look around us at even the young who are carrying loads of fat on their bodies.
In the parts of the world that had a history of longevity, as soon as the Western-style businesses with fast foods became part of their lives, the death rate began to go up. I highly recommend that for a more thorough understanding of the things listed above, that you give this book a read. I am grateful that a friend recommended it to me. The Blue Zones
Dr. Amit Sood, MD of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. had this to say about missing life. “A Mind in Hurry hurries past the present. I am in a hurry when I am getting late. I am in a hurry when I am on time. I find myself hurrying even when I am before time. Hurry for me has become a habit.”
Determine to slow down…for it could be the best thing you ever did. Take a moment to look at the beautiful clouds, a rainbow, a bird on a branch, a small colored leaf or a child’s sweet smile. Say a prayer to God and thank Him for all these things. Breathe a fresh breath of life.
Raffaella, of Sardinia, had wisdom beyond her 107 years…for not missing life. We could call her short statement a God-sent, for we all would like not to miss the good things that life has to offer… simply by rushing around too fast to even notice.
“Life is short. Don’t run so fast you miss it!”
Music for a stress-free living from Boyer Writes
We look around us at pollution of our waters and land. There is much political debate about how the gases in our air will change the world. When our animals are suffering from lack of polar ice or fires in the Amazon, that provides not only habitat, but the air we breathe. Some of the world’s cities are blanketed with smog. It will take a worldwide effort to change much of what we have brought upon ourselves.
The question remains: How long does the world have to make changes that should have been made long ago?
Strangely, I found a video of one indigenous person here in the U.S.A. who has his own view of the situation. This Native American believes his ideas and those of the Hopi Indians in North America are the right ones. He even sees them as “prophetic.” He believes that when the first Europeans came to America to settle the land, they didn’t give honor to the pure water and sacred places of the earth made by the Creator and now we are paying for it.
Katherine Locke is quoted in the Navajo Hopi Publication as saying the following about the court fight and water rights that the Hopi Nation must have to sustain their life around the Little Colorado River Basin:
“The adjudication is designed to quantify each claimant’s water rights, both federal and state law rights and to determine claimants’ priority to the limited water in the Little Colorado River basin. This case does not involve claims to Colorado River water, which is outside the basin.
The Hopi Tribe’s water rights will be tried in several phases, the first to determine the Hopi Tribe’s past and present uses of the Little Colorado River basin. The second phase will begin in December 2019 and the court will hear testimony about the amount of water necessary for the Hopi Reservation to serve as a livable and permanent homeland for future generations. A third phase, which will be set for 2020 or later, will focus on the ranch lands south of the Hopi Reservation.
“Water sustains Hopi life,” a press release from the Hopi Tribe said. “There are many competing demands for water. The judicial proceeding will determine water rights for our children and grandchildren.”
The Hopi Tribe said during the trial, the long history and unique culture of the Hopi Tribe in Arizona will be presented by both witnesses and documents.
“Over a millennium, the Hopi Tribe has endured enormous hardships to sustain its way of life and developed a unique agriculture to sustain itself in a harsh and dry environment,” the Hopi Tribe said. “There is still a long road and many trials ahead before resolution of all claims. At each step of the way, the Hopi Tribe will continue to seek a just resolution of claims with its neighbors in the Little Colorado River basin.”
My thoughts are that environmental problems should be looked at with great concern for all of us. History tells a real story of what we have done to our lakes, rivers, streams and even our oceans. Our air didn’t become unpure overnight. All have been in the making for decades. What we have considered being an advancement to society, the industrial revolution may have become the world’s downfall. Factories belch black smoke and people around the world wear masks. It can’t come soon enough to clean up after ourselves of man-made pollution. We must find and initiate the answers before it is too late.
The Hopi Native American in the video below also believes that we have lost our understanding of the spirit within us and the spirit of all living things made by the great Creator of us all. He may well have a point.
Video on thoughts from a Native American (Turn up your sound)
If you are working, sleeping, reading a book, or doing something special, I highly suggest you turn off your phones, TVs with all the bad news, and relax with the video below. Less stress may even lengthen your life.
This morning, I went out and looked at my sunflowers with tiny bees (or insects..hard to say) enjoying their breakfast. God’s world of nature is totally relaxing. I thought you might like to see a picture…enlarged for viewing details.
Many of the pictures shown in the video below, with the beautiful music, are of Fall leaves. For all of us here in Florida and elsewhere in the country…and the world that have sweltered through the summer, a breath of Fall air would be a wonderful relief.
God’s blessings to all of you. from Boyer Writes
Video of relaxing music:
The troubles we encounter sometimes bring us to wonder if there is any way out. Life, in many cases, is not fair. Standing our ground; never giving up hope, and sometimes just plain fighting back is the only way.
I recently saw the video below and it reminded me of this fact. In this case, a baby elephant had been separated from its mother and was attacked by a large number of lions. It is breath-taking to watch. He is a tough little guy and the odds certainly are against him. Nature is harsh and relentless. Survival is not always possible in nature, but within the animal and in man there is the God-given spirit to fight off the offender and not only survive, but to live…truly live another day.
Isn’t that the case with difficult situations? We just have to “tough” them out. Solutions are not always easy. To find a solution may be through our own searching or through the help of others…but there usually is an answer to the heart-ache or trial that besets us. Whatever yours may be, don’t give up. Remember, there is usually someone wanting to help you by lending a hand.
In our video, the 14 lions attack an elephant from behind…climbing on the elephants back…trying to bring him down. You may notice that the elephant had a strategy. He led the lions into the water…chasing them back…dropping back into a safer area…and continuing this fight time and time again. Toward the end of the film, the elephant’s strategy has worked, but he returns to the same place of danger. We are left fearful that he will be attacked again. Perhaps one thing we know is that if we are moving away from the dangerous things in our lives and then return again to the same place, it may not be the smartest move. I’ll have to tell you that it was reported that in the end he was reunited with his elephant family.
The lions attack from behind and hang on, hoping to wear the elephant down. Isn’t it the case when life’s troubles attack? They often come from behind when we are not expecting them. As they hang on, we are made weary or even in some cases become sick from the anxiety. Troubles may be something of our own makings, such as a wrong decision or even drug or alcohol abuse. Then again, it may be family or work difficulties.
The “fight back” is not revenge or plans to get even, but one that will get the “monkey off the back”…(or the lion in the elephant’s case) and to find peace and rest. Some things you can’t change for they are out of your hands. If this is your situation, stop beating yourself up about the matter. God knows far better than you how to change something that you can’t. Therefore, seek Him out in your thoughts and prayers. Put your life in His hands.
Just for fun, it might be good to get a cool lemonade, sit back and sing along:
IN THE GOOD OLD SUMMER TIME
You’ll notice that the words are supposed to be romantic even if it is 99 degrees outside. I don’t know where you are, but in Florida…holding someone’s hand in hot weather means a sweaty palm and hot between the fingers! So, if you want to be romantic with Tootsie Wootsie, head for the air conditioning.
Most people will also not know that “Tootsie Wootsie”, who is the loved one in “Good Old Summer Time”…or a term of endearment to many…is really a demeaning Australian term for a woman. Of course, we know that we would never mean anything demeaning to the women we know, or especially to this cute little girl in our video below. We’ll not let that term in this summer time song get under our already hot skin. We’ll just go with the flow!
So here goes, sip your lemonade and sing to the top of your lungs. Your dog will probably howl, your kids will run to their rooms and your wife or husband will look at you like you are nuts…and maybe even the neighbors if you have your laptop out by the already too warm water in the pool. Keep smiling and keep going on for summer is here whether we like it or not…and August is a long time from now. It is what it is!
Turn up your sound and click here. 2 videos:
Eternity is a word without a real meaning. If we look it up, the closest definition would be something like this: “…a state to which time has no application; timelessness.” The simple words would be “forever and forever” which is definitely difficult to understand.
Almost all religions have a belief in an eternity. Some think that they have to work for it. Others believe that it is a gift of God, through His Son Jesus Christ. Another faith thinks that life just begins again and they hope that they will return as a more elevated human and not one of the lowly animals or insects. The whole concept is so broad and “endless” that the mind cannot comprehend. The question then is whether we should even be concerned about something in which we do not have a real answer? I think so. We plan ahead for many things: Our wedding day, our place of residence, our finances, our grave-site…but why not think about the eternal? Somehow I think it should be thoughts of joy instead of foreboding…especially when we have had loved ones who have gone before us.
We know we were born. We also know that we will all die eventually. Our love for each other draws a great well of desire to want to see each other again in eternity. Do we have the perfect answer to eternity…no…not in ourselves, but yes, in the Holy Scriptures we have promises. We are told, “...to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” (2nd Corinthians 5:8) That verse alone should give us great hope. We are promised a resurrection of the body, just as Christ was resurrected. When I decided on cremation after death, my thought was to wonder how all of those dust pieces were going to be put back together. How juvenile a thought was that! If He can sling the stars into orbit and match up molecules, He will have no trouble with the resurrection!
As a Christian, I believe in eternity. It may be hard for an atheist who thinks when one dies it is the end of everything, but I have always felt that if there could possibly be any truth in this belief, I would have lived a happier life because of my own joy in believing in God and the comfort it has given me. How sad and morbid to believe that there is no one who will enjoy eternity with the Maker of our most glorious universe. Those who have had a near-death experience recall a wonderful feeling of love. They speak of seeing someone that appears to be God waiting for them in a bright light. According to some records, surprisingly, 75% of those thinking they were dying as atheists have told of this same experience.
Recently, I saw a special on the amazing new parts of the universe that have only been identified by the most powerful telescope sent into space. The most familiar and powerful so far has been the Hubble Space Telescope. Nevertheless, there is “a new kid” in the making.
The newest and most powerful telescope is the James Webb Space Telescope. It is to be the successor to the Hubble telescope and will be launched in 2021. Here are a few facts concerning the future launching:
The James Webb Space Telescope will be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket. The launch vehicle is part of the European contribution to the mission. The Ariane 5 is one of the world’s most reliable launch vehicles capable of delivering Webb to its destination in space. The European Space Agency (ESA) has agreed to provide an Ariane 5 launcher and associated launch services to NASA for Webb. (Nasa)
Why do I digress from writing about eternity to telescopes? It is with delight that I think those who are experiencing their eternity are having a perfect understanding of the formation of the universe and all there is on other planets. If there is life on other worlds, our loved ones would have the joy of knowing this. (Forget about the Hollywood version of the “little green man with a pointed head.”)
Thinking of the possibilities makes “eternity” seen a little shorter than “forever”…mainly because it would take forever to know all there is to know, which is impossible without the mind of God. Could it be that He will provide His mind for us to know and understand all these glories, that we have only slightly seen through the telescope, and be able to experience the glories for eternity?
(A side-thought: I can’t imagine that we will be going from planet to planet as on some fast-moving whirlwind because the Scriptures also says that there will be a place of peace. He promises that the lion will lay down with the lamb. Could that mean that at the Savior’s return to earth that He will also bring those with Him who have died and bring absolute peace onto a new earth? )
And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little boy will lead them. Isaiah 11:6 (NASB)
Jesus also prayed a prayer to his Father in Heaven, who made the universe that He wanted us to know the glories of the universe: “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.” (John 17:24)
Regardless of what eternity may mean, we will draw our last breath and then we will know it all. TO GOD BE THE GLORY
VIDEO (Turn on sound)
The JOY OF LISTENING to calm the soul
In memory of those lost in Hurricane Florence and those in Distress
Beautiful nature photographs by N.W. B. (See right side /”Visit Site”)
Music and Nature are a perfect combination for your listening pleasure. May you make time to contemplate on both. The road of life may seem long, but actually it is quite short…so enjoy it and be glad.
VIDEO (turn up sound) by Mark Knopfler
Today I want to introduce my readers to a man who has found his direction in a most unusual way. I write about him because in my previous blog, I talked about “New Directions.” This man has followed his passion after leaving a profession as a sailor and it has led him to more than he could have ever imagined. His name is Caras Ionut (or Ionuţ Caraş in the Romanian language ) His specialty is manipulating photography in a surreal style.
“In his work, he uses his own photographs, which he inserts, composes and colorfully adjusts in a suitable way. In his dream works, physically impossible scenes arise, such as a little girl hanging on a swing hundreds of feet above the ground, an elephant riding a bicycle, a little girl riding on the back of a huge fish, and the like. Ionut often puts man in his paintings. Often they are small children, but also special people not fit into the standard society. Roamers, beggars, comedians, and so on. Their image is enhanced by a dark landscape with old trees, dark sky, mist, mountain scenery or rainy weather. Often, the element of umbrella, ships, water, rocks or birds (such as ravens) is repeated in his work. Ionut’s inspiration for his works draws from his dreams in the night, from the colors of autumn and winter. He works as a professional photographer and a retoucher, offers courses and tutorials for those who want to learn how to digitally manipulate photos… Many of his images have been used for book covers, audio cd, bank advertisements, website materials, local publications, prints, and many other uses. He now has many clients…such as Stephen King and others…” (Wikipedia)
Below are three sets of slides for you to enjoy. Take your time and study them for the creative side is excellent. I’m not certain if the child he often incorporates in his photography is his own, but the combination of the “impossible” with the real is somewhat chilling, but very interesting.
- THE IMPOSSIBLE
- DRAMATIC NATURE
- THE WARMTH OF ORDINARY PEOPLE
Look around you for the beauty that is in YOUR path…
Credit: All photography by Caras Ionut
Our home in Virginia, USA, is just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. We have deer strolling throughout our yard at most any time of day. They are beautiful and besides the fact that they eat our day lilies, we love them! Here is a picture of the most recent one. We’re not certain why she has a split ear, but she seems healthy enough Perhaps she got it caught on a barbed wire fence.
We’ve had rabbits, birds and a bear with three cubs during our time here. It is the deer that are graceful that is truly lovely to watch.
I’m sure that should one of them have a fawn in our yard, as did this man, I would not have the patience to see it through to adulthood…but I thought this video might brighten your day. It is somewhat lengthy, but it has a good ending…and worth the watch.
My growing up home place was in the Brushy Mountains outside Wilkesboro and N. Wilkesboro, N.C. Keep this city name in mind for there is a treat at the end of this blog.
After high school, I left with my parents to live in Florida. I never expected that I would one day go back to the mountains. Since Fall is my favorite season and unfortunately, in Florida, we only get a few brown leaves in mid-winter, we have to be in the mountains to enjoy that season. Don’t misunderstand for I’m not complaining about the beautiful green, citrus fruit, or warm weather in Florida. It’s still a great place even with the frequent hurricanes.
Riding just a little further up the mountain to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, my husband and I felt it was a wonderful place to enjoy at least for a few months of the year. Winter is a little too cold for us “flat-landers”, as we are sometimes called. The time we stayed on after the Fall to see the first snow, we bundled up like we were in Alaska to take our dog, Gracie, out for her final evening bathroom break. She would stand and stare into the woods, sensing the deer were close by. Their eyes would sometimes shine in the dark…and the wind biting at our noses sent us racing back inside the house.
Nevertheless, I think that the “country girl” was still in me. Coming back to Virginia and North Carolina, it was evident that I had a great affinity for the way of life and the people of these mountains.
Why do I say this? I only know that the people have a warm disposition and a sense of humor that I have not found to such a degree anywhere else around the world. I have been fortunate enough to visit or teach in places like Mongolia, Guatemala, Ukraine, Switzerland, France, and Japan. Still, these hills and the valleys, where a person can look deep into a ravine, keep calling me back. Fourteen cousins and my Uncle John still call the VA-N.C. mountains and foothills their home…so it’s probably a genetic “family thing” as well.
The Blue Ridge has it all…steep mountain cliffs and valleys, rolling hills filled with vegetable crops and orchards of delicious fruit.
The bear, deer, rabbits, and other “critters” also make it their place of residence. The humming- birds fly to the sweet-smelling sugar water put out in the gardens and the rabbits help themselves to whatever… wherever. Speaking of bear, one came up to our front porch to push over and have her fill at our feeder. No longer do we provide such a delicacy.
From my window, I can hear the cows, donkeys and lambs in the fields. At night the stars are clear and brilliant. When the moon is full, the coyotes roam about making their distinctive sound while looking for something to bring back to their little ones in the den.
The Spring along the Blue Ridge Parkway is filled with wild-flowers and the white and pink rhododendron bushes line the road. Small barns, churches, and family graves stand as a testament to those who have lived here in generations past. Some mountain people with roots back to the Civil War, still proudly fly their Confederate flags and dare anyone to tell them that they can’t. They also just as strongly hold to their “guns and their religion.” They are a proud people, that I have found, will come to one’s help at anytime or any hour.
Someone may ask why I am writing about the Fall when it’s Spring and Summer is just around the corner? Perhaps I’m giving an invitation to make your plans now to see this glorious place. Not so long from now, the leaves will flutter about and turn to a deep orange and red. The pumpkins will lay over acres and acres of the hillsides turning the farms into a special hue of gold. The tractors will slowly make their way from the fields to the barns. Sometimes those same tractors take family or friends on flatbeds to enjoy the countryside. Visitors from far and wide stop and take in the breath-taking views of the Blue Ridge Parkway.
It’s also the Fall that brings the people to these mountains.
Maybe my next book will be for all these visitors who come this way … to give them heads up and a little advice to what it’s like to visit or live in the mountains. I’m thinking it will be titled, “What Everyone Needs to Know Before Visiting or Planning to Live in the Blue Ridge Mountains.”
This might be a part of this new book.
“Don’t come thinking that you’ll be treated like in New York City…or Paris…or somewhere. You’ll have to slow down, enjoy English laced with a warm, Southern drawl, and be greeted just like you are family. When you go to a small, family-run restaurant, walk right in, greet the people sitting there with “Hey there. How’s everybody? Got anything good to eat in here?” (Not “Hi There”…for it’s N.Y City sounding to their ears..and remember this is “Rebel” territory.)
They’ll know you aren’t from the Blue Ridge, but they’ll be friendly- like and greet you with some jolly response. Don’t worry if someone comes over to your table and asks your name or finds out what brought you to these parts. When you finish eating, look around, wave and tell everyone, “Goodbye…see you next time!” They’ll appreciate it.
When you drive back to where you are staying and a truck rounds the corner giving you a “one finger wave,” (NOT the middle)… just wave back. They aren’t flagging you down…but saying “Hello.”
Want to know more? Be looking for my book title sometime in the near future on the internet. As I close this blog, I think I will let the Kruger Brothers sing what it’s like to be in “Carolina in the Fall”….and I would also add… Virginia. Hope to see “Y’all” up this way someday.
VIDEO (Turn up sound)
While much of the nation has been piled with snow, the eagles have weathered it all until their little ones could be hatched. Here is the great event from the live cam above Washington, D.C.
God’s world is so amazing. We give thanks for all its glory. Welcome to our world, little eagles…for you make it a better place!
Video Credit: Turn up sound Cheryl Loheit. © 2018 American Eagle Foundation
When we are in Virginia, we receive an email telling us when the Space Station will be flying over our home and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Because we have no street lights, it is quite clear and the Station can be seen moving on the path above our heads.
The video I’m sharing with my readers today shows a working relationship between the U.S., Russia and Japanese astronauts. It is a good thing that they are professionals and want to do their work and experiments without political interruption. Hope you enjoy this as much as I did.
The tour of the Space Station is given by Sunita Pandya Williams, an American astronaut and U.S. Navy officer of Indo-Slovenian descent. She formerly held the records for total spacewalks by a woman (seven) and most spacewalk time for a woman (50 hours, 40 minutes). Sunita was assigned to the International Space Station as a member of Expeditions 14 and 15. In 2012, she served as a flight engineer on Expedition 32 and then commander of Expedition 33. (Wikipedia)
Thank you, Sunita Williams, for your great tour. As we watch from the ground, we know better what the crews in the Space Station are experiencing amid the stars. Long live international cooperation!
VIDEO (Turn up sound)
Is sound able to be visualized? Technology has made it possible.
Some have said that even our voices and the speech that goes out of our lips and into the air…moves further and further out from us… until it goes into infinity. We can stretch our minds and wonder…Does it go into a black hole or up to the throne of God?
It is certainly a scary thought if every word or sound I utter should continue to travel and someday be gathered from outer space and brought back to let me hear my every word.
Please, God, help me to be more careful in anything I say…should you want to restore it…and ask me when I meet You Face to Face, “Are these your words?”
Want to visualize this music produced in our technical world?
Hungarian Rhapsody by Liszt
( Technical acknowledgment: andy fillebrown, Oct 2012, This video was made using Blender (http://blender.org). The MIDI file used to make the Blender model is by Bernd Krueger (http://www.piano-midi.de/midi_files.htm).
Often we hear a philosophy or belief in a specific culture that makes a great deal of sense. For instance, the Japanese believe that when a person turns 60 years old, they are able to start a new cycle of life. They call this special age, kanreki.
It is a time for people to arrange things in a proper place. Some Americans may call it “getting things in order…or even downsizing.” The Japanese think it is a time of celebration and the beginning of a new life cycle, so they celebrate the 60th birthday by giving gifts that are red and having a party. The gift could be a red shirt, scarf, or even red underwear.
Now the color red is a vivid color that has energy and stands out from other colors. Perhaps this infers that this new phase of life should be taken on with a new enthusiasm and with new prospects for the future.
According to Japanese Society, “achievements are celebrated and a lifetime’s troubles are forgotten as the celebrated individual enters a new stage of life with all the joy and possibilities of a newborn.”
Perhaps we Americans should think more along this line and have more fun. We often hear people say things like “Getting old..or older…is not for the faint-hearted.” This seems pretty pessimistic to me. Life is not over…it is just a new chance at a new beginning.
The Japanese also refer to this year as a Year of Reflection.
60-year olds are expected to use this year as a year of reflection. They are to look at their lives and achievements and use this time as a good opportunity to plan the direction in which they would like to move as they begin their second sixty-year cycle of life. Beyond the Kanreki, they celebrate the Koki (70 years old), Kiju (77 years old), Beiju.(88 years old), Sotsuju (90 years old), Kajimaya.(97 years old), Hakuju (99 years old), and Hyakusai No Ga (100 years old). (from online Japanese culture)
As a Christian, we would say to be “Thankful” for a long life and give God honor for all He has blessed us with in life. The Japanese think it is a time to forget the past and move on…leaving it behind. This seems like a very good philosophy of life. If you are passed the age of 60, you can still celebrate…for you have lived longer. If you are not age 60 years old, dedicate your life to the beauty of living…for the years that you may have before you.
Another thing I read about recently was the way the Japanese look at a snowflake. It is a perfect example of symmetry and each one is different. The pictures below were made by Wilson Bentley.
As you can see, each snowflake has a different shape. We could compare them to the fact that every human is made differently and wonderful. The snowflake is beautiful as it floats from the sky to the ground. The time of its forming until it melts on the ground is a short time. So is life. The days of men and women are numbered and short, but much of life is beautiful…especially if we try to see that beauty. Your life was specifically formed to be only you. Each one of us will live and each one will die…as the snowflake sheds beauty on the world until it is no more.
Even the Japanese cherry blossoms come only for a short time in all their glory. Sometimes they even look like snow drifting …drifting…gently drifting. Shortly they will reach the ground, sharing their beauty one more time.
Try to share your special beauty with someone around you today. Celebrate Life!
Enjoy Kyoto in the Snow video. Turn on sound.
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Featuring video presentations and photography (unless otherwise noted)
by Molly Sheridan
Conversation transcribed by Julia Lu
Back in the fall of 2000, a 1976 LP with the curious title Electronic Music Winners got something of a second life when it was revealed that Radiohead had sampled two of the tracks from it in the song “Idioteque” from their then just-released album Kid A—specifically Arthur Krieger’s Short Piece and Paul Lansky’s earliest computer composition mild und leise, both of which were on the album’s second side. The story goes that Jonny Greenwood found the LP in a used record bin while on tour in the United States. While the news sent folks scrambling around to look for the then long out of print record (which now can still fetch a fair sum on sites like eBay and Discogs, presumably because of the Radiohead connection), it actually got me to buy Kid A (and soon thereafter everything else in Radiohead’s discography) because I was a big fan of that Electronic Music Winners LP, having bought my copy for a dollar at a Salvation Army store when I was in high school. But it also made me wonder what might have happened had Greenwood sampled material from the album’s first side, specifically a piece with a rather formalistic name, Electronic Composition No. 1, by Daria Semegen, which had always been my favorite track on it. That piece, along with a longer electronic piece called Arc, which I had fallen in love with when I listened to it on LP at the Columbia University music library as an undergrad, had long been the only music I had ever heard by Daria Semegen, but I always wanted to hear more.
Then about a little over a month ago, I attended the BMI Student Composer Awards ceremony and reception. It’s always a great evening, not just because it’s an opportunity to meet all the new awardees, but also because, from time to time, people who have won the award in previous years show up to honor their new award compatriots. When BMI Foundation President Deirdre Chadwick announced from the podium that one of the previous winners in attendance that evening was Daria Semegen, my jaw dropped. Semegen, it turns out, won the award twice, in 1967 and 1969, for compositions that had nothing to do with electronic music—a duo for flute and piano and two song cycles (for soprano and baritone respectively, both scored for large chamber ensembles). So as soon as the ceremony ended, I rushed up to Semegen, whom I had never previously met, and told her what a fan I was of those two electronic pieces. And she said, “Well, if you ever want to see a real electronic music studio, come out and visit me at Stony Brook University.” She went on to describe some of the vintage synthesizers and oscillators there, as well as the splicing stations for reel-to-reel tapes, and I was transfixed.
Frustratingly, there isn’t a ton of detailed information about Daria Semegen either online or off-line. There has never been a commercially released recording (on LP or CD) devoted exclusively to her music, and the handful of pieces by her that appear on compilations are now mostly out of print. She doesn’t have her own website, and the page about her on Wikipedia is somewhat scant, as is the entry in the 1980 Grove Dictionary of American Music. But she does figure prominently in Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States: Crossing the Line (Routledge 2006) by Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner (whose 1991 D.M.A. dissertation for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was devoted to Semegen’s output), although not in most of the standard musicological literature on electronic music. And scores for nine of Semegen’s acoustic compositions—solo piano pieces as well as works for chamber ensembles (including the pieces for which she received her two BMI Student Composer Awards)—are available through the American Composers Alliance (who proved extremely helpful to me in preparing my talk with her). Other than that, there’s a short biography of her on the website for Stony Brook University, where she has taught since 1974.
But I got the sense after spending a fascinating afternoon chatting with her that the typical goalposts by which so many careerist composers measure their success do not really matter to her. “Basically I share, but that is not my main drive,” she quipped toward the end of our talk. “I don’t sit around and think about, “Hey, I’m going to be sharing this.” You listen to Electronic Composition No. 1¸ and that gets pretty bizarre. When I was making some of those sounds, I would say, “Whoa, this is really kicking it around here. Gee, I wonder how an audience would react?” But then I’d basically let them worry about it. I’m not going to tell them what to do or how to react. That’s not my job!”
I do, however, feel that part of my job in life is to call attention to people who have created extraordinary music and have insightful things to say about it, and Daria Semegen is certainly one of them. I wish we could have continued talking for several hours, and I look forward to revisiting her studio one of these days and learning more. But in the meantime, there’s a lot of information to process here.
Frank J. Oteri: I think you were five or six years old when you immigrated to the United States. Do you have any early memories from before you arrived here?
Daria Semegen: Oh yeah, definitely. I remember riding on a baby elephant at a zoo. For me it was a really out-of-this-world experience, so I’ll never forget that. I also remember running on a low wall and then falling on the right side of my face. That’s something to remember, childhood accidents. And then other traumas—my dad committed suicide in the refugee camp we were in. He was sick. He had appendicitis and peritonitis. They did not have enough antibiotics in those days, and so he possibly had an infection in the brain. So that happened and that was a very bizarre experience because I also experienced the different way people were behaving, as well as different ways of dressing—the whole ceremonial thing with funerals. Then for a year, I was wearing a black band on my left arm signifying a death.
FJO: I know there are people who wear all black for a period of time after a death of someone significant in their lives, but I had never heard of wearing just a band.
DS: It isn’t done these days, but I wore the band. I also generally had dark clothes. I choose to wear dark clothes now for a variety of reasons, one of them being that I see the world outside myself as where I want to see colorful things. It would be too much if I had to deal with managing a colorist wardrobe. I also relate in a different way to colors such as black and white. I even tell my students that one technique to understand something is to push away a lot of other things from one’s consciousness. I go into a mode automatically that I taught myself, especially when I want to appreciate sonic things, any kind of sounds, which is really like starting from a blank sheet of paper. So it’s a very important technique, especially when re-hearing sounds and appreciating them—meaning understanding them and feeling them intuitively or technically, depending on what purpose you set out to approach these sounds. I do it as tabula rasa, which means an erased blackboard, a blank sheet of paper. It’s a wonderful mode to be able to snap into without having other things crowding you. Your judgment can be fresher and you can really enjoy that experience or not, depending on what is going on with these sounds. You can have a more authentic experience rather than being influenced all the time by everything, because we’re constantly being assaulted by so many other things going on.
If you’re someone who’s sensitive in different ways, you will have so many awareness pixels going on at the same time that you have to manage the situation in order to have a really authentic, focused awareness of whatever you’re dealing with as an artist. I think our audio and visual world, as well as our reactions to it, are coming from defense mechanisms. Say I’m walking in the woods and I become more alert. It’s because it’s unfamiliar; it’s really a kind of experimental environment if I don’t know this place or have any particular set expectations. The alertness is there in terms of the appreciation of different things. Beauty and danger is this type of alertness that is there when I’m dealing with appreciating—meaning really experiencing and trying to understand—visual and audio art.
FJO: It’s amazing how you arrived at such a deeply conceptualized approach to creating and experiencing other people’s creations all from telling the story of wearing a black arm band after your father died and then deciding to wear dark clothes throughout your life. That experience was clearly very significant for you.
DS: That was just one landmark event. I also have the experience of being someone who could not speak the language of the country I was in because in the home, we were speaking a different language. Out there was either West Germany or America, these two different places. So I had to observe, I had to listen and watch, in order to understand what was going on. When I first went to an American school, I could not speak English. It’s a very different experience, and it involves listening and learning, especially kids being very curious about their world, their situation, and people’s expressions, their tone of voice, all of these things. I would watch and listen much more than verbally communicate.
FJO: So what language did you grow up speaking at home?
DS: I would speak Ukrainian. I also can manage different Slavic languages, because it’s really a family of languages. During my Fulbright scholar year, I went to Poland specifically to be with Lutosławski, whose music I had heard at orchestral concerts as an undergrad at the Eastman School of Music. We had Rochester Philharmonic performances, so I had heard his Trois Poèmes d’Henri Michaux and also Jeux Vénitiens and I was totally blown away with the sound, the complexity, and the expression, the nuances, and the subtleties; this is without having seen any of the scores. Anyway, when I applied for a Fulbright, I actually passed Czechoslovakian language. I had to be language approved and at the University of Rochester, they only had a Czechoslovak scholar, so I had to speak and read in that language that I had never read before, but later I had to really learn Polish.
FJO: They had Czech, but they didn’t have Ukrainian or Russian?
DS: Well, maybe they had Russian, but the person they had was a professor of Slavic languages.
FJO: But of course, we’re jumping way ahead in your life story, so let’s go back to your speaking Ukrainian at home growing up. Aside from what you were saying about that language sounding totally different than the German and English you were exposed to in the outside world, it also looks different since Ukrainian doesn’t use the same alphabet.
DS: Of course not. It’s Cyrillic.
FJO: So you had a double whammy. In addition to not being able to understand the language, you couldn’t even read the letters to get a sense of how it sounded.
DS: That’s right.
FJO: Perhaps in some way this made you susceptible to being more open to and empathic towards completely new ways to experience sound.
DS: Empathic, to me, means becoming more connected, and appreciating, to me, means understanding more in different situations and at different times, because we are every day and every moment, a different listener and a different viewer, a different observer. So I never have a fixed idea of things being only a particular way. They could be a little bit different the next time I experience them. And I’m not upset by that fact. I’m intrigued by the fact that these things can be different and varied. There is an interesting variance when I re-appreciate different art objects, for instance such as paintings or videos. They’re all different, unique experiences within the general aspect of supposedly knowing these things.
FJO: Of course with a painting or a video, although your perception of it will vary each time you experience it, the work is an unchanging set object.
DS: That’s correct.
FJO: But with music, you have this extra layer. If it’s a performed piece of music, a piece of music that is interpreted by musicians other than yourself (and even if it’s yourself), it’s never going to be exactly the same twice. Of course, that becomes a different issue in fixed media electronic music, and navigating between these two realms has been a duality in your creative life. If you’re writing pieces for musicians who are going interpret it, maybe they’re going to hold a note a little longer, play it a little faster, put some sort of element of themselves in it. This is very different from something that exists in an invariable form. Yet, as you point out, perception will always be different when you come back to it.
DS: Yes, it is. I don’t place particularly one value or another on fixed media or performed works. I think these are different experiences in terms of how they’re being thought about, conceived, and what they are as finished products. Fixed media to me is really having the opportunity to get things the way you’d like them without compromising, which is what I usually end up having to do if I’m dealing with live performance.
But in my pieces with instruments and electronic sounds, I don’t want the electronic sounds to sound like an accompaniment to a live instrument. That’s just doesn’t work for me. I tend to compose the electronic part as a piece almost on its own. And I like to have the instrumentalists, if possible, improvise, so their creativity is involved with the fixed media. It’s a kind of response and also a combination of complement and contrast to different degrees as the player chooses to interpret.
FJO: It’s also really highlighting the fixed and non-fixed natures of these two different realms. The piece involves fixed media which, by its nature, always stays the same, but the player brings something new to it each time.
FJO: To bring this conversation back to your childhood for just a little while longer, I’m curious about your earliest musical memory.
DS: One memory I have is my reaction to very early piano lessons when I was seven or eight.
FJO: But you were already in the States by then.
FJO: Do you have any music related memories from before you came to America.
DS: Well, I know that people sang. I usually would be around adults having meetings because my father was involved in journalism. He was a lawyer originally, and also he taught school as my mother did. But we were in a refugee camp. We lived in three or four of these places, being moved to different ones. So that was an interesting disruption and interruption, and meant traveling around. I thought that this was a normal way of being, and it was interesting for me. Perhaps adult refugee people would be miserable, but I think for kids, this was a very interesting oddball experience.
I remember one particular thing—a guy moving a ladder around, and the sounds that that made. What he was doing was improvising electrical wiring connections between different living spaces, made up rooms whose walls were Army blankets. You’d have a large hall in a building, which had these separate dwelling places, whose walls were blankets. And this guy was making some kind of shielding. Later on I figured out what he was doing, but it was fascinating to me. I guess he was connecting light bulbs with each other. Suddenly these lights went on. I thought it was fantastic. It was really fun to see that, and see how somebody can make something like this as really an improv. Of course, when you’re a kid, you don’t know what that is, or what steps it takes, but this thing is happening, and later on, I understood better what was going on. And I remembered the interesting noise-scraping sounds on the floor with this ladder. He would move it along several times. I was totally fascinated with this odd experience.
FJO: I love that this earliest musical memory is of something really experimental and unusual. And one could claim that it pre-destined you for a life devoted to exploring sonic phenomena.
DS: Well, that’s called interpretation.
FJO: Of course, but those kinds of early memories are the things that stick and have a lasting impact. It’s like the famous story of La Monte Young listening, fascinated, to the drones that were created by the electrical power transformers in Idaho as a little boy, which eventually left an indelible mark on all of his music.
DS: There’s a wonderful scene in a Satyajit Ray movie with electrical wires humming on these electronic grids in the middle of vast fields with a train that’s coming in the distance, and then you hear the sound, and it’s kind of a Doppler effect. The Doppler effect is also in the Pierre Schaeffer piece, the train piece.
FJO: One of the earliest examples of musique concrète.
FJO: Which was actually created right around the time you were born, entering into an existence when that way of making music became a possibility.
FJO: But of course at that time you wouldn’t have known about any of that. And soon after that, you left Europe and came to the United States where you mentioned something about piano lessons when you were seven or eight.
DS: Oh, that was very interesting to me. My mother decided to get a piano as basically a piece of furniture, because this was in vogue—everyone should have a piano and a kid who’s practicing or can play tunes. So I was taking piano lessons. It was particularly convenient for me because we were living on the third floor of an apartment building and the piano teacher was on the first floor. So I merely had to slide a banister a couple of times to get to my piano lessons.
As a child, you’re learning the different note names, coordinating with your body positions, and learning what’s called technique. But I found out that music had something to do with paper. It was like a drawing to me. And so right away I wanted to try to this out. All this stuff started coming together, but I was always being drawn away from the idea of only focusing on the instrument itself and instead was really starting to focus on how these things looked. So it was a visual experience, as well as connecting it with sounds. The possibility of varying these things became very interesting to me. So I would re-write some of these tunes that I was learning, and since this was taking up some of my time, my piano teacher wasn’t always thrilled when I’d come in with a little sketch of something, because that was not considered the goal of what I was supposed to be paying attention to as a piano student, which was practicing and perfecting, not necessarily varying something and being creative with it.
FJO: So your teacher never remarked that maybe you’re a composer.
DS: Oh, hell no.
FJO: So when did the concept of being a composer enter your consciousness?
DS: I gradually did these things on my own. And after listening to recordings, I became interested in what this music looked like. So I ordered some pocket scores so I could see the music notation. I had a few different scores—Haydn symphonies, Mozart and Beethoven string quartets. I decided to make a little project for myself. I asked the music shop person to order me music paper so I could copy the scores, which were tiny, into a bigger size. I don’t know why I did that. I just wanted to be with this stuff as notation and to try to understand it in some way. It was a kind of experiment, but I actually learned a hell of a lot from that in terms of how the material is organized, which instruments are playing when and why, and how this expression is being managed by the composer. When I was a kid, I was not necessarily having all of these descriptions or vocabulary come to me right away, but I was getting intense impressions and non-verbalized insights that built a kind of intuitive base for appreciating, meaning knowing different things, and also comparing.
FJO: And at some point, it morphed into composition.
DS: Oh, this was going on all the time because I would be writing small pieces for piano and then I wrote a couple of string quartet movements. These things were done on my own, including two orchestral movements. Then, when I was a freshman in high school, I asked to study theory and so I began studying with a school music supervisor in my area who was also an Episcopal organist and a choir director, and he was the conductor of the civic symphony. So they played these orchestral movements. At one of their concerts, they played Respighi and a Beethoven symphony. I went to their rehearsals. It was great for me to do that because I had listened to these pieces on recordings. I was given a set of Toscanini Beethoven Symphonies with the NBC Symphony. My stepfather was associated with a radio station. He was given a Saturday show, a Ukrainian program on which I sometimes would recite poetry, by the way. That’s another thing. But this was interesting, going to rehearsals and learning the musical culture—what the etiquette is and how things are managed. Observing is a fascinating experience for me.
FJO: It’s extraordinary that you had an experience hearing music you wrote for orchestra live so early in your life.
FJO: It’s interesting to me because orchestral music doesn’t seem to have remained a focus for you as a composer, even though you had this early experience.
DS: Well, it was. Later on, as an undergrad at Eastman, I had written a three-movement, large orchestral piece called Triptych for Orchestra that had won an award. They had a symposium and that piece was played there. I also have a piece for orchestra and baritone voice. I have different ensemble pieces, as well as instrumental music. My first experiences were really with instruments. They weren’t with electronics, except for a record player. This came later, from my tendency to experiment and search for new things. It’s basically curiosity, being inspired by certain things and asking a few questions—what can I do with this? And how? I would not worry about everything being perfect right away. It’s possible to not have certain kinds of boundaries, which makes it then possible to think and experience beyond the current stage of experiences that I’ve had. And that was very interesting for me.
When I was a [college] sophomore, I think, because this was 1965, one of my upperclassmen was Bob Ludwig—the audio engineer who’s got a zillion Grammys by now. He was given a couple of Ampex portable machines by, I think, his uncle. He became interested in doing some kind of project, so he came to me and he said, “Hey, you have any ideas for what we can do with these machines? I want to record et cetera, and try to learn how to edit.” So I said, “Okay, let me get an idea.” I put together a kind of spatial notation piece for six instruments and then had the idea where these instruments would play and we would record. So we recorded. Then we would mess around with the tape, meaning editing. We took splicings and changed the tape in different ways. We’re talking really basic, non-studio work, really very experimental, approaching some kind of tape music. We literally glued together the tape part, then had the instruments play live from the score with the tape parts. The piece is called Six Plus.
FJO: I’ve read about it. I’ve never heard it, but I know of its existence. When you did that, were you aware of Pierre Schaeffer and all the musique concrète pieces?
DS: No. I had never heard the words “electronic music.” There were no courses in this thing. This was basically experimenting from scratch. What happened after that is some students in town who were from the Rochester Institute of Technology, RIT, were in photography and other visual arts. And by the way, the term visual arts didn’t exist. These students had this big studio where they’re taking slides and sorting them. And they were going to have a show with five projectors. They explained to me what they had in mind. They wanted a composer who would work on a sound score. So I said okay. I didn’t think of it as writing the music from scratch. I said, “What do you have here as sounds that you want me to work with?” And they said, “Well, here’s a bunch of records.” I made a soundtrack for them using tape, but it was really ad-libbing and trying things out, seeing what would happen, and basically learning how to organize and create an expression or expressions that would respond to and be compatible, or not, in different ways with what was going on in their visual expression.
FJO: I’ve looked at some of your earliest instrumental scores. There’s one that probably pre-dates this. You have a series of pieces that you compiled in the 1960s, but I imagine they’re significantly earlier than that, the Five Early Pieces for solo piano.
DS: I must have been a sophomore or a junior at Eastman. They were written after I got bored with the kinds of student piano literature that existed. One of my friends, who was teaching at the Hochstein Music School in town, went away for a few weeks and said, “Will you take my piano students?” My instrument was piano, so I said okay. I went over there and decided that if I’m going to do this for a bunch of weeks, and they have this boring music to play as etudes, let me write my own stuff. That’s where the Five Early Pieces come from. So these were not virtuoso pieces.
FJO: Sure. But don’t be too dismissive of them. When Peter Schickele gave the keynote address at the Chamber Music America conference some years back, he lamented that so few composers exploring new compositional techniques wrote easier pieces for young players.
DS: Oh yeah?
FJO: Such pieces are really a way to introduce these techniques to musicians. And I think your pieces do that. One of them is in septimal time, and the last one is actually a 12-tone piece.
DS: That’s right. It’s a 12-tone piece for kids. And it’s actually not unpleasant to play it. It has lyricism in it as well. I have another piece that I wrote, which is something like a 17-minute long movement for piano and violin, called Music for Violin and Piano. And I used a few phrases from that 12-tone study for piano students. I used these phrases toward the end of the piece, because they are very lyrical and they fit into that place in the piece.
FJO: The other thing I was wondering about when I was looking at the score for that piece is how you were first exposed to 12-tone music? Was it when you were at Eastman?
DS: It was actually a dilemma for me at Tanglewood. I was a student there. So many things happened to me the summer after freshman year and also during sophomore year. But I think the summer after freshman year, I ended up at Tanglewood with people around like Aaron Copland, Donald Martino, Gunther Schuller, and Elliott Carter who was giving talks on his Double Concerto, which was presented there. So this was very fascinating for me, and it was like hitting a wall of this suddenly very complex, chromatic music. So I had little conversations with Schuller asking about 12-tone music. I was interested in knowing why people chose this way of expression. And he really couldn’t answer this. That is stuff that I had to discover on my own. I had spent two solid years in that phenomenal Sibley Music Library at Eastman, looking and listening to every 20th-century piece I could get a hold of, and in this way learned a lot merely from observation. Much more than from taking a class, let’s say. At that point, it really was the most valuable thing I could have done because that gradually revealed to me lots of details. Then I started trying these things out on my own. More than reading a book about something, or being told about something, it was really experiencing a certain reality and coming to different realizations.
FJO: Of course the other thing that happened when you were at Eastman is you studied with Samuel Adler, who is one of the most significant authorities on orchestration. Did that have any impact?
DS: He was a very perceptive person, and he would let me do whatever I was going to do because I was doing things with intent. Although what I was writing was not at all in his stylistic practice, and I was doing experimentation, he could appreciate my situation let’s say. I was just doing what I was doing. So it was not a matter of teaching so much as a matter of suggestion here and there, which I think is very valuable—to have someone stand out of the way, and then make different comments here and there, and in some cases, little practical things such as maybe not two double basses, but three double basses because of certain pitch situations where possibly they may be perceived out of tune or out of focus. So these little tidbits, and later on, I think in junior year, I got into the graduate orchestration class which I wanted to be in, which I knew would be a lot better than being in instrumentation class.
I tried a couple of weeks of that with Aldo Provenzano, who was visiting from Juilliard and was a chain smoking, Henry Mancini/101 Strings-type arranger and composer. I really did not need what I considered baby shit level. By that time I had written a couple of orchestra movements and was into a long orchestral piece with everything in it, including contrabassoon. It was ridiculous. I wanted to show that I could get into an orchestration class. How absurd. I was told, well you’ve got to write an orchestral piece, so I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” This is the way they want it, here it is. Boom!
In that class with grads, there was a lab orchestra every week. That was the deal. So I could do my experimental organizing and arranging and trying out orchestral effects with an orchestra there. I had volunteers in my dorm. My dorm friends copying the parts for my one-minute, or two-minute, or three-minute musical experiments every week.
DS: I think that kind of thing was also fabulous because Sam Adler was conducting and we were getting recordings. It would be taped.
FJO: One of the most ambitious pieces you wrote during that time was Lieder auf der Flucht, a song cycle for soprano and eight instruments with German poetry, which actually got you your first BMI Student Composer Award back in 1967.
DS: Yeah. That was one. And then there was another one. I guess there were several. And I think for that, I had sent in a couple. In a way, I was very inexperienced as a freshman and sophomore. I remember meeting Sam Adler for a lesson and he asked me, “Are you applying to BMI? Are you applying to something else?” And I said, “I don’t know. What is that?” And he said, “Don’t come back for a lesson next week unless you’ve mailed out this stuff.” He was behaving in a very annoying way— like, “What do you mean you didn’t apply?” So I said, “Well, I didn’t apply because the piece I wrote was kind of short. Don’t they want really long pieces?” He said, “Come on. Send this thing in.” So I said, “Maybe I’ll send in two pieces.”
FJO: You must have also sent in your flute and piano duo, Quattro, because that piece was also acknowledged that year.
And I said, ‘I don’t know. What is that?’ And he said, ‘Don’t come back for a lesson next week unless you’ve mailed out this stuff.’”
DS: Oh, there’s also that. They were written very near each other, and they’re cool pieces. So I sent that in with the song cycle, but my idea was, “Unless a piece is 15-minutes long, why bother sending it?”—which is absurd.
FJO: A striking aspect of that song cycle, which was your first really substantive vocal piece, is that you chose to set another language instead of English. You set German.
DS: That’s because what English feels like for me is not the same as German. And it’s not the same as French. I also have songs in French. I have songs in English, but English for me has a different intensity than much more intense languages like German, French, and Polish for instance. Once I learned Polish, I was reading Polish poetry; it’s no wonder that they have Nobelists who were poets, because it’s really splendid stuff. Even the sound of it, the nuances are way beyond anything in English. It may be not nice to say that, but in terms of the comparative experience, the nuances in different languages vary. And the details in languages such as Polish give it much more intensity for me. It’s a kind of increased thesaurus of feelings that are available in certain languages.
FJO: So you’re fresh out of Eastman. You’ve got your degree. You’re off to Poland on a Fulbright after you pass the Czech language exam and therefore, weirdly as we discussed, you were allowed to go to Poland to study with Lutosławski. You’d mentioned that you really admired his Jeux Venitiens. There’s a piece of yours called Jeux des Quatres; it’s a chamber piece, but it’s scored for a very odd instrumental combination.
DS: Clarinet, cello, piano, trombone.
FJO: It’s full of extended techniques, and there’s indeterminacy in it as well. One of the pages looks like a sort of mobile.
DS: This highly drunk page of gestures, which is one of the movements.
FJO: There definitely seems to be a relationship to Lutosławski in that piece. Was that one of the pieces you were working on when you were studying with him?
DS: No, that was the year after. At that point I was at Yale as a grad student. So this was a piece which was different from Lutosławski, but having experienced Lutosławski was part of that difference. I was pushing in this other way, this other direction of writing scores. The visual object was very important to getting the sonic result—why that notation and why not some other notation?
FJO: But then when you got to Yale, you became really deeply immersed in electronic music.
DS: I started becoming involved. There was a very rudimentary studio. There was this oddball situation of an ARP synthesizer. A big whopper ARP, so not a mini, and I thought it was awfully clumsy in different ways. I also found the ARP sonically too homogenous, believe it or not. I didn’t describe it to myself that way because it was too early for me to realize why I wasn’t terribly attracted to this thing, which seemed to be able to do all sorts of things. But in terms of expression, it was not the most exciting thing. What I did have in there were a few oscillators, which could be made to fool around with each other in different ways. And these were not part of a synthesizer; they were just an analog, mini-studio. Then there were filters and noise generators, and also a spring reverb that was kind of strange sounding. But the strangeness actually enhanced some of my loop sounds that I was making from scratch, from splicing. I did a lot of splicing. It gave me enough time to hear things and be able to get an up-close-and-personal experience with the sounds because there was absolutely no automaticity involved.
FJO: You already mentioned doing this piece at Eastman for the six players and messing around with tape, so that was really your first electro-acoustic piece.
FJO: But it was quite a transition to go from being a composer who was involved with playing the piano and working with an orchestra who did one experimental piece involving manipulating taped sounds to being somebody who knows how to cut and splice tape and mess around with oscillators. These seem like totally different skill sets.
DS: Oh, I think it’s part of putting things together. I also realize, for instance, my Electronic Composition No. 1, which is pretty elaborate, is named that because it is an experience that to me was in a way parallel to visual art composition. It was much more about construction, rather than a conventional musical composition that stays in its own little prescribed world of what’s expected and what will be subject to a lot of rules and regulations.
We know, for instance, that tonal music is a world that has definite, prescribed behaviors, etiquettes, and expectations. On the whiteboard is [the phrase] “tonal obligations,” which is what I advise students to be aware of when they are writing music which is essentially not tonal, and then they put in something which creates the psychological expectation of tonal music. Awareness is so vital in terms of the sonic expression. So I was dealing with this other array of possibilities that was not coming from that world and that I could organize in different ways instead of dealing with absolute pitches and absolute rhythms. Working in this way was a fascinating experience for me.
FJO: Writing music for you stemmed from being obsessed with figuring out how notation works and how that then gets translated into sound. But electronic music is conceptualized in a very different way. There have been attempts to notate it, but it sort of defies notation, even though there are these bizarre scores for some of the early electronic pieces by Ligeti and Stockhausen, which could probably never be used to recreate a performance.
DS: Oh, it’s absurd.
FJO: Right? Crazy. But once upon a time, it had to be written down in some form in order to obtain a copyright for it.
DS: That’s right. Even if you wrote BS, which a lot of these scores were, only a title page where you scribbled something, and then wrote copyright C and your name. As you point out, otherwise you couldn’t get a copyright.
FJO: So is there a score for Electronic Composition No. 1 floating around?
DS: You don’t need a score.
FJO: No, but is there one?
DS: No. Why would I need it? It’s impossible to notate all of the things that are going on in the piece. It would just be a superficial skeletal sketch. I’ve had students who would write analyses of that piece. For instance, one student analyzed densities. The piece has so many parameters going on. And for me, a parameter is any area that’s available to be varied that you can realize and work with. That means you have to be aware that a certain area is a viable, working zone for that particular piece.
FJO: So, in the creation of it, did you make any written-down sketches?
DS: No need. For me, the most important thing in doing electronic music is that I don’t need some kind of thing on paper. This is purely a sonic art, just as visual art would be in working with colors, rather than painting by numbers. You can have a lot of in between things happening, which are not having to comport with conventional ways of writing or visualizing the thing. You can be as specific or as vague as you need to be for musical expression at any moment in your sonic work.
FJO: So in a way, it must have been greatly liberating for you since you were so fixated on notation.
DS: Oh, it was not the intent—”Hey, I’m bored with notation; let me break away.” This was like, “Wow, I don’t even have to pay any attention to notation. I can just listen.” Now that’s the thrill of it all in the studio. For me, this is really the purest way of dealing with musical sounds, where you’re only dealing with the sounds. You’re not being distracted by visual stuff, even though I’ve done soundtracks with visual things and also with choreography. But creating the electronic music pieces by themselves is not dependent on having to translate a notation or to re-translate the sounds into a notation except if somebody wants to do this for analytical purposes. The visual stuff is not the piece.
FJO: Then of course, the other thing is you had the experience of participating in an orchestration lab where you had musicians play whatever you brought in for them every week. Most people have to wait a lot longer than that. Even folks who receive a commission to write an orchestra piece usually have to turn in the piece many months in advance, and then they eventually get to hear the piece or simply hear a lot of people struggling. Others may write a piece and it could be more than a decade before they hear it. Whereas if you create an electronic thing—
DS: It’s there. So the immediacy of that is very much like mixing your own colors if you’re a painter. Or creating shapes if you’re a sculptor, or even in working with light as a medium, which is an interesting kind of thing. Years ago I became aware of light in museum exhibits, and I realized this is an extremely important factor in creating the expression of the visual art, whether it’s a sculpture or whether it’s a painting hanging on a wall. The color of the light, the shading—the Kelvins now as we say—is part of the expression in showing a visual art piece.
FJO: To get back to Electronic Composition No. 1. You gave it that title, but it’s not the first electronic piece you did.
DS: There’s actually a sketch before that which is from Yale. In Electronic Composition No. 1, I use sounds from the Yale studio, but the rest of the sounds and manipulation is from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.
FJO: So was Trill Study a Yale piece?
DS: Oh, no. Trill Study was after. It was during the composition of a score for an animation called Out of Into. Trill Study is an intense loop piece. The trill is literally spliced. Would you believe that it is more intense a trill than anything from a synthesizer? It’s very easy on a Buchla synthesizer to create a trill. But it’s not got the same bite—meaning the timbral color of the attack points when you’re alternating from one note to another note of the two-note trill.
By comparative listening, I said, “Hey, what would this trill be like if I actually spliced the freaking thing together?” It’s a lot more work, but once you have it spliced, you have this beautiful sounding passage and then you can do all kinds of looping and variable speed to create different lengths of loops, and have several loops on different tape recorders, just making sound clouds.
Then recording the result of that, doing some improv and then organizing phrases from that by chopping stuff out and putting it in a different order. So it’s a lot for me like the visual arts. There’s something that you can experience with that, but the ultimate thing is: what does it sound like? If the mechanical uniformity of something like a repeated pattern on any synthesizer or system is too perfect, it doesn’t sound nuanced.
Now mind you, I’m not trying to sound like natural instruments. I’m trying to appreciate the aesthetic qualities that I experience with those instruments and trying to break the uniformity and the expectation of uniformity in the more mechanistic musical world of electronic gadgets—which can make very perfect things for you, but those things can be too perfect. So it’s better for me to have spliced that trill. That’s my one loop splice; one loop can create other loops in variance with that.
FJO: Electronic Composition No. 1 was a watershed piece for you in a lot of ways. At that point, you were working at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center established by Luening and Ussachevsky, which is a legendary place.
DS: Mostly Ussachevsky, who actually had training in engineering from Pomona College, California, and a Ph.D. from Eastman later on. He was very much instrumental in the actual kinks of the place, and the tone, the ambience, the welcoming nature of that place, in encouraging composers, really worldwide, who could come and work there if they were interested. I think it was run in a way that encouraged creative possibilities.
FJO: Now when you were at Yale, you didn’t have access to a studio on that level, but you did work with Bülent Arel, who had also created work at the Columbia-Princeton center.
DS: That Yale studio was rudimentary, and it also had that giant Arp which was not engaging to work with. I think it was an ergonomics issue. I had a similar issue with Peter Zinovieff’s machine from his electronic music lab in Britain, which he had loaned to Ussachevsky. This giant synthesizer was put into our faculty studio that I worked in. And so there it was. It had wonderful capabilities, but was somewhat ergonomically tedious to work with.
I need a certain degree of immediacy. Getting sonic results now in some of the things that I do obviously takes more time, but when some systems become ergonomically too gadgety, it does not intrigue me very much. Software often has problems in that way, because the people who design the software have a different way of working than I do, different degrees of intuiting what they go for first and what happens next. Remember I was talking about starting tabula rasa, and then putting certain things in. I’m also focused on organizing things that I choose if the software allows me to. When things are too classified, it become impractical. So I like to organize my gadgets for each piece in a different way. In a way, it’s organizing your own studio of materials in the software.
FJO: Of course it’s funny talking about this in the context of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, because the whole thing got started with the ergonomically impractical giant Mark II.
DS: Yes. That RCA Mark II used rollers, kind of like a piano roll that you would type. So they had two typewriters with rolls for that.
FJO: Did you ever work on that?
DS: No, very few people did. Milton Babbitt. And then Wuorinen had a piece on there, but that was a one-time deal. It was a machine that Milton worked on.
FJO: So what machines were you working on then?
DS: Oh, the analog studio. And there was a Buchla 100 there, and that was terrific. And that’s used in the Out of Into score. So yes, a lot of sounds from that place with some beautiful machines, including a terrific filter that was so incredibly discreet. It was a slider, a kind of graphic filter-type machine, where I could get wonderful sound changes in time. If I wanted my sound expression in filtering to change in a certain kind of intensity, I could get that from this type of filter. It was one of a kind. I’m sure that it’s in storage somewhere. I don’t think anybody would want to throw it out.
There are some incredible pieces of equipment sonically, like Elektro-Mess-Technik plate reverb units. We have one of those here, which is this large gray box with a handle. That’s a very special sound. We also have several models of the giant reverb plate from the same company, EMT, that are in storage. Those have to be in a separate room, because otherwise such a reverb unit will pick up sounds from the studio through the walls of the unit.
FJO: To go back to the early 1970s at the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center, you had also mentioned that you were still cutting and splicing reel to reels when you were there.
FJO: But since synthesizers were now on the market and were getting smaller and smaller—to the point that people were starting to set up studios in their own homes and even travel around with Moogs and Buchlas—wasn’t it somewhat old fashioned at that point to still be working that way?
DS: I think that perhaps is a typical perception of things, but I think in terms of the experience creatively, of working with devices. I tend not to like to work boxed into one box. Whatever work I’m doing on a Buchla or any software, that is only the beginning of what I do. I have to do a tremendous amount of editing and varying in order to get to a completion with a lot of these sounds that I use. Patterns, textures, and combinations of timbre—it’s not enough for me to limit myself to the Buchla and for my piece to be about that. It is not going to be my piece sticking with only one type of expression or one unit. It involves different types of comparative listening and different listening techniques, which are not conventional ear training. Then choosing sounds, characteristics, and expressions through comparisons. Comparative listening is very important.
There are all these techniques that are involved in editing sound materials, and paying attention to things like attack characteristics and the expression of simultaneities—slices of sound, as well as how long the sound landscapes work. And then what their densities are as they vary and what sorts of expressions they create. For instance, for me, sonic intensity is only one single parameter. So I’m aware of that through the piece and in designing and choosing different sound components. I feel that my sound sources regardless of what they are, or even whether they are analog or digital, doesn’t matter as much as having the possibility to control these things in different ways once they are stored, let’s say. Because I work with stored sounds, basically on tape or digitally. Editing is a constituent part of what my pieces are about.
FJO: I’m going to jump ahead to 1990 then, because what you just said reminds me of a fascinating statement you made in the CD booklet notes for the recording of a piece for MIDI grand piano that you wrote for Loretta Goldberg called Rhapsody: “These new tools cannot change or solve the perplexing compositional problems often encountered in creating a new work, whose ultimate purpose is to communicate with my audience once more with feeling.”
DS: That’s right.
FJO: That sentiment is worlds away from “who cares if you listen”!
DS: Oh, I know. But I think Milton would say that this was overblown, or improperly interpreted, et cetera. And, of course, he felt it was sensationalized in various ways. But in giving a bit of a perspective on that—who is the initial audience to my sounds? Who is that? Me. I have to be the first listener to my sounds. And I modify them according to the reactions that I have as a listener who is, again, approaching the experience of listening without being, let me say, possessive about the sounds. I tell my students that you cannot own your sounds or your work too much and be so possessive that you will not change things and ignore your intuitive reactions. I think intuitive reactions are vital in creating a personal fingerprint on your art instead of being so possessive that you own it too much to improve it.
FJO: Now in terms of taking work and giving it a personal fingerprint, one of the pieces of yours I find super fascinating and wonderful is Arc. And yet this was a piece that was created to accompany dancers, and the choreography was already completed before you composed this piece. You had to make your music precisely fit with that.
DS: That’s right. It was very interesting. I was given large graph paper, almost like Chinese scrolls, and each square was a beat. I had these little graph paper squares with annotations by the choreographer Mimi Garrard indicating things like lighting changes—because this choreography was also synchronized with a digitally controlled lighting system which was called CORTLI, as in courtly dancing, but it was also an acronym.
It was put together at Bell Labs by James Seawright, who was the head of visual arts at Princeton and was also on the staff at Columbia-Princeton as one of their technical people. He’s a phenomenal kinetic sculptor. Just amazing. I remember as a kid at Eastman I would look through Time magazine and I saw a picture of Jimmy Seawright. I didn’t know who he was, but he was there with one of his electronic sculptures, and there was a little write up about it. I had no idea that six or so years later I’d be collaborating with James Seawright and doing two scores for two different choreographies, including Arc. Anyway, the scores that I came up with had to be really on target in terms of the tempo and their work. Arc consists of an A-B-C-B-A tempo shape, let’s say, starting with slow movements on the outer ends and then faster, and then the fastest.
FJO: Arc has deeply resonated with me for decades, and I’ve sometimes wondered—especially after reading that comment of yours about communication and feeling—whether a piece like this could somehow serve as a gateway for listeners who love the standard orchestra and chamber music repertoire but might not be initially amenable to electronic music.
DS: It’s more accessible. It’s more familiar. But the timbral world there is not; it’s other earthly, let’s say, when compared with instrumental sounds. It’s a simpler score in different ways than something like Electronic Composition No. 1 and things like Arabesque, which is way different. Arc has more clearly displayed sounds that you can hear as they change and modify, morph in expression with timbre, which was interesting. And it’s a Buchla piece.
FJO: Arabesque is a much more recent piece. But when I was looking at a score of the second movement of your set of Three Piano Pieces from the 1960s, the one that jumps all over the place, I was struck by how reminiscent it was to Arabesque.
DS: That aesthetic?
DS: You got it!
FJO: Of course, in the electronic realm there are many things that you can do that you couldn’t do in quite the same way in a solo piano piece. You’re not limited to the timbres of a piano. You’re constantly manipulating timbre, and the electronic medium is also not limited to 12-tone equal temperament. Arabesque is filled with all sorts of microtonal intervals. But the gestures are still somewhat similar. It also doesn’t sound like any other electronic music I know from what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, the post-analog era. You’re still continuing to explore all those wonderful old-school electronic music sounds, yet your music has continued to evolve within that medium.
DS: I don’t think of old school and new school or in between schools. I simply relate to the material in my piece rather than worrying about or being aware of this or that school. What you describe in this piano piece that’s way early is a musical behavior that is toccata-like. Well, there you go. If you’re going to compare it to body language musically, then you can say, “Well, yeah. This piece [Arabesque] is kind of toccata-like.” But it’s only a section of the piece and that describes a sort of body language, which I’m aware of in terms of how things move musically.
FJO: Okay, old school and new school are probably the wrong words for me to be using to explain this, but here we are, we’re sitting in this amazing studio with reel-to-reel machines. You know, I haven’t really seen a lot of those around elsewhere so much these days.
DS: Well, maybe people don’t know how to work with them! And, of course, this is only one part of the experience. We also have the digital world. We also have digital editing available. To my taste, people don’t use it intricately enough. They could be experimenting with digital editing in a way that goes deeper and gives a greater array of possibilities to choose from, and that is an exciting thing to do. That’s what I like to do with digital editing because it quickly expands the choices that I have, but I have to instigate the changes myself, because hey, the job of a composer is to choose!
FJO: So one of the choices you’ve made is to still work with reel to reels.
DS: Yes, depending on what techniques I’m using. Because, for instance, I can very easily make elaborate improvisations in a studio that create more complex material or generations of complexity. Let’s say you’re starting with original simpler material, going to several generations of layers. And then you can extract chunks from that to be used in other ways.
I think of improv as a very viable technique. When you hear my pieces, they don’t sound improvised; they sound deliberate because the sounds were deliberately chosen. But then we go to consider how these sounds were made. That’s where anything goes. It could be improv. It could be something that’s just the opposite, something very precise. I go between these two different worlds of improvisation and precision, using randomness as a tool to generate material of different characters. And not staying in one particular catechism of rules.
FJO: That’s a very inspiring thing, not only from a creative standpoint but also from a pedagogical one. So we should conclude by talking a bit about teaching. You’ve been here at Stony Brook since 1974.
FJO: That’s a very long time—44 years.
FJO: And although the studio has grown and has lots of newer equipment, there is equipment here that goes back to when you first got here, and stuff from even earlier than that, that you still use and that your students can also use.
DS: That’s right. It’s nice to have an array of possibilities available. The instruments that you have also influence your perception, your thinking, and the way you can work. For instance, my digital editing has a lot to do with my experiences splicing tapes. I used to mess around, changing transients, by cutting slivers off the attack points of tape just to see what the heck would happen. And then using different angle cuts on the tape attacks or sometimes endings. So doing these little playing-around experiments are all lessons in sonic experiences. Because ultimately that’s what happens: You make changes. You listen to it. My digital editing is very much influenced by this. I also have one piano piece, which is influenced by working with electronic sound textures. I explained that a little bit in a program note. These two seemingly disparate worlds are all interconnected here and there, sometimes more intensely or less intensely. All these things exist. So it’s having in my head these various experiences, including this.
FJO: So a final question. You said the audience begins with you.
DS: Yeah, I’ll be the first listener. Then basically I share, but that is not my main drive. I don’t sit around and think about, “Hey, I’m going to be sharing this.” You listen to Electronic Composition No. 1¸ and that gets pretty bizarre. When I was making some of those sounds, I would say, “Whoa, this is really kicking it around here. Gee, I wonder how an audience would react?” But then I’d basically let them worry about it. I’m not going to tell them what to do or how to react. That’s not my job! | <urn:uuid:8c8597e3-ed9b-4f72-a5e0-d25d31be9caa> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/daria-semegen-so-many-awareness-pixels-going-on-at-the-same-time/ | 2020-10-23T03:12:30Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107880519.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20201023014545-20201023044545-00150.warc.gz | en | 0.981704 | 13,409 |
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Initial studies show hypnosis to be extremely beneficial for cancer patients and loved ones who battle anxiety, difficulty sleeping, and other secondary symptoms associated with traditional cancer treatments. Chemotherapy and radiation can have harmful side effects such as nausea, appetite loss, and intestinal upset. Hypnosis has been shown to improved the capacity of patients to manage these symptoms.
You may be interested to read this overview on Hypnotherapy as a Powerful Tool in Complementary Cancer Care.
Psychiatr Med. 1992;10(1):119-31. The use of hypnosis with cancer patients. Levitan AA. University of Minnesota, Fridley.
Hypnosis has proven to be extremely valuable in the treatment of cancer patients. Specific applications include: establishing rapport between the patient and members of the medical health team; control of pain with self-regulation of pain perception through the use of glove anesthesia, time distortion, amnesia, transference of pain to a different body part, or dissociation of the painful part from the rest of the body; controlling symptoms, such as, nausea, anticipatory emesis, learned food aversions, etc.; psychotherapy for anxiety, depression, guilt, anger, hostility, frustration, isolation, and a diminished sense of self-esteem; visualization for health improvement; and, dealing with death anxiety and other related issues. Hypnosis has unique advantages for patients including improvement of self-esteem, involvement in self-care, return of locus of control, lack of unpleasant side effects, and continued efficacy despite continued use.
Oncology (Williston Park). 1997 Aug;11(8):1179-89; discussion 1189-95. Imagery and hypnosis in the treatment of cancer patients. Spiegel D, Moore R. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, California, USA.
Many patients with cancer often seek some means of connecting their mental activity with the unwelcome events occurring in their bodies, via techniques such as imagery and hypnosis. Hypnosis has been shown to be an effective method for controlling cancer pain. The techniques most often employed involve physical relaxation coupled with imagery that provides a substitute focus of attention for the painful sensation. Other related imagery techniques, such as guided imagery, involve attention to internally generated mental images without the formal use of hypnosis. The most well-known of these techniques involves the use of "positive mental images" of a strong army of white blood cells killing cancer cells. Despite claims to the contrary, no reliable evidence has shown that this technique affects disease progression or survival. Studies evaluating more broadly defined forms psychosocial support have come to conflicting conclusions about whether or not these interventions affect survival of cancer patients. However, 10-year follow-up of a randomized trial involving 86 women with cancer showed that a year of weekly "supportive/expressive" group therapy significantly increased survival duration and time from recurrence to death. This intervention encourages patients to express and deal with strong emotions and also focuses on clarifying doctor-patient communication. Numerous other studies suggest that suppression of negative affect, excessive conformity, severe stress, and lack of social support predict a poorer medical outcome from cancer. Thus, further investigation into the interaction between body and mind in coping with cancer is warranted.
J Adolesc Health Care. 1980 Dec;1(2):132-6. Use of hypnosis for multiple symptoms in an adolescent girl with leukemia. Ellenberg L, Kellerman J, Dash J, Higgins G, Zeltzer L.
An adolescent girl with chronic myelogenous leukemia was treated with hypnosis for several disease- and treatment-related problems during the last 4 months of her life. Data were collected before and after hypnosis on the nature and intensity of the patient's acute pain and anxiety during bone marrow aspirations, chronic headache and backache, nausea and vomiting during chemotherapy, anorexia, and the discomfort associated with spiking temperatures. Comparisons of baseline and posthypnosis reports suggest that hypnosis was successfully used for acute and chronic pain, anxiety, unpleasant body sensations and, possibly, nausea and vomiting. The hypnotic techniques used, the limitations of hypnosis and clinical issues in this case are presented and discussed.
J Adolesc Health Care. 1983 Jun;4(2):85-90. Adolescents with cancer. Hypnosis for the reduction of the acute pain and anxiety associated with medical procedures. Kellerman J, Zeltzer L, Ellenberg L, Dash J.
Eighteen adolescents with cancer were trained in hypnosis to ameliorate the discomfort and anxiety associated with bone marrow aspirations, lumbar punctures, and chemotherapeutic injections. Two patients rejected hypnosis. The remaining 16 adolescents achieved significant reductions in multiple measures of distress after hypnosis training. Preintervention data showed no pattern of spontaneous remission or habituation, and, in fact, an increasing anticipatory anxiety was observed before hypnotic treatment. Group reductions in pain and anxiety were significant at levels ranging from p less than 0.02 to p less than 0.002 (two-tailed t-tests). Significant reductions were also found in Trait Anxiety. A non-significant trend toward greater self-esteem was present. The predicted changes in the Locus of Control and General Illness Impact were not found. Comparisons between hypnosis rejectors and successful users unusually showed higher levels of pretreatment anxiety in the former. The pragmatic nature of hypnosis as part of comprehensive medical care in oncology is noted.
J Support Oncol. 2004 Sep-Oct;2(5):419-26; discussion 427-9. Complementary therapies for cancer-related symptoms. Deng G, Cassileth BR, Yeung KS. [email protected] Integrative Medicine Service, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, 1275 York Avenue, Box 303, New York, New York 10021, USA.
Relief of cancer-related symptoms is essential in the supportive and palliative care of cancer patients. Complementary therapies such as acupuncture, mind-body techniques, and massage therapy can help when conventional treatment does not bring satisfactory relief or causes undesirable side effects. Controlled clinical trials show that acupuncture and hypnotherapy can reduce pain and nausea. Meditation, relaxation therapy, music therapy, and massage mitigate anxiety and distress. Pilot studies suggest that complementary therapies may treat xerostomia, hot flashes, and fatigue. Botanicals or dietary supplements are popular but often problematic. Concurrent use of herbal products with mainstream medical treatment should be discouraged.
Am J Clin Hypn. 2004 Jul;47(1):29-42. Can hypnosis reduce hot flashes in breast cancer survivors? A literature review. Elkins G, Marcus J, Palamara L, Stearns V. Scott and white Hospital and Clinic, Temple, TX 76508, USA. [email protected]
Hot flashes are a significant problem for many breast cancer survivors and can cause discomfort, insomnia, anxiety, and decreased quality of life. In the past, the standard treatment for hot flashes has been hormone replacement therapy. However, recent research has found an increased risk of breast cancer in women receiving hormone replacement therapy. As a result, many menopausal women and breast cancer survivors reject hormone replacement therapy and many women want non-pharmacological treatment. In this critical review we assess the potential use of hypnosis in reducing the frequency and intensity of hot flashes. We conclude that hypnosis is a mind-body intervention that may be of significant benefit in treatment of hot flashes and other benefits may include reduced anxiety and improved sleep. Further, hypnosis may be a preferred treatment because of the few side-effects and the preference of many women for a non-hormonal therapy. Two case studies are included to illustrate hypnosis for hot flashes. However this intervention has not been adequately studied. We discuss an NIH-funded randomized clinical trial of hypnosis for hot flashes in breast cancer survivors that is presently being conducted.
J Dev Behav Pediatr. 2004 Jun;25(3):207-13. The efficacy of hypnosis in the reduction of procedural pain and distress in pediatric oncology: a systematic review. Wild MR, Espie CA. Section of Psychological Medicine, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. [email protected]
Children who suffer from cancer have to endure regular, painful medical procedures that are associated with a considerable degree of psychosocial distress. Hypnosis has been successfully employed in the management of pain and distress in the adult population, but is not well studied in pediatric populations. This review systematically evaluates the systematic research conducted in the field of procedure-related pain management in pediatric oncology within the context of a nationally agreed framework for the assessment of research evidence. It is concluded that there is not currently enough robust research evidence to recommend that hypnosis should form part of best practice guidelines for the management of procedure-related pain in pediatric oncology. However, there is sufficient evidence to justify larger-scale, appropriately controlled studies. A number of recommendations are made regarding future research.
Am J Clin Hypn. 2004 Jan;46(3):201-13. Hypnosis and existential psychotherapy with end-stage terminally ill patients. Iglesias A.
Existential Psychological Theory was employed as a conceptual and theoretical foundation for the use of hypnotically facilitated therapy in the management of intractable pain, nausea, and vomiting in 3 end-stage, terminally ill cancer patients. The existential principles of death anxiety, existential isolation, and existential meaninglessness were addressed with a combination of classic and Ericksonian techniques. The intractable nature of the presenting physical symptoms was conceptualized as a possible manifestation of the impact of the terminal prognosis. Direct hypnotic suggestions for the management of pain, nausea and vomiting were avoided. It was hypothesized that, as the existential conflicts associated with the patients' terminal status resolved, the physiological symptoms would become responsive to medication. After 6 sessions grounded in the principles of Existential Psychotherapy, the intractable status of the physical symptomatology remitted, and the patients responded to medical management. This paper addresses the usefulness of Existential Psychotherapy in hypnotic interventions for mediating somatic and psychosomatic symptomatology.
Integr Cancer Ther. 2003 Dec;2(4):365-70. Related Articles, Links The integration of hypnosis into a model of palliative care. Marcus J, Elkins G, Mott F. [email protected] Mind-Body Cancer Research Program and Center for Cancer Prevention and Care, Scott and White Memorial Hospital and Clinic.
There exists a need for a broad and inclusive model of integration of mind-body interventions for palliative care. Symptoms relating to psychological distress and existential concerns are even more prevalent than pain and other physical symptoms among those with life-limiting conditions. The hypnotic model's purpose is to improve the patient's total psychological, social, and spiritual well-being. A 4-stage model of interventions is offered to assist the clinician in developing and implementing appropriate hypnotherapeutic treatment for noncurative patients. The focus of the hypnotherapy is to ameliorate the effects of pain and dyspnea to restore a level of psychological and physical wellbeing. Within this model of therapy for patients with active, progressive, far-advanced disease and a short life expectancy, the goals of the hypnotic intervention are to provide relief from pain and shortness of breath. Other focuses include assisting the patient with the psychological adjustment to their noncurative and ultimately final state.
Int J Clin Exp Hypn. 2003 Jan;51(1):4-28. Clinical hypnosis in the alleviation of procedure-related pain in pediatric oncology patients. Liossi C, Hatira P. [email protected] Department of Psychology, University of Wales, Swansea, UK.
This prospective controlled trial investigated the efficacy of a manual-based clinical hypnosis intervention in alleviating pain in 80 pediatric cancer patients (6-16 years of age) undergoing regular lumbar punctures. Patients were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 groups: direct hypnosis with standard medical treatment, indirect hypnosis with standard medical treatment, attention control with standard medical treatment, and standard medical treatment alone. Patients in the hypnosis groups reported less pain and anxiety and were rated as demonstrating less behavioral distress than those in the control groups. Direct and indirect suggestions were equally effective, and the level of hypnotizability was significantly associated with treatment benefit in the hypnosis groups. Therapeutic benefit degraded when patients were switched to self-hypnosis. The study indicates that hypnosis is effective in preparing pediatric oncology patients for lumbar puncture, but the presence of the therapist may be critical.
Eur J Cancer Care (Engl). 2003 Jun;12(2):137-42. Hypnotherapy and cognitive-behaviour therapy in cancer care: the patients' view. Taylor EE, Ingleton C. [email protected] East Lancashire Integrated Health Care Centre, Rossendale Hospital, UK.
Psychological intervention is not widely available for emotionally distressed patients with cancer. The purpose of this study is to investigate and report on the experiences of eight patients who participated in a programme consisting of hypnotherapy and cognitive-behaviour therapy. Following the 12-session intervention, qualitative analysis of interview data demonstrated that patients had acquired the skills to enable them to cope, both with invasive medical procedures and the psychological traumas they faced. The findings also indicated some initial misconceptions about hypnotherapy and the need to provide a therapy setting sensitive to the needs of cancer patients undergoing active medical treatment.
Womens Health Issues. 2003 Mar-Apr;13(2):74-8. Mind control of menopause. Younus J, Simpson I, Collins A, Wang X. [email protected] London Regional Cancer Centre, Ontario, Canada.
The primary objective of this study was to observe the effect of hypnosis on hot flashes (HF) and overall quality of life in symptomatic patients. A secondary objective was to observe the effect of hypnosis on fatigue. Ten healthy volunteers and four breast cancer patients (total 14 patients) with symptoms of HF were treated with four, 1 h/wk sessions of hypnosis. The same physician, with the help of a nurse, conducted every session. All subjects recorded frequency, duration, and severity of HF in a HF diary. The QLQ-C30 and Brief Fatigue Inventory forms were used to assess the impact on quality of life and fatigue, respectively. The statistical evaluations were performed, including analysis of variance and nonparametric procedures. The frequency (p < 0.0001), duration (p < 0.0001), and severity (p < 0.0001) of HF were significantly reduced. The overall quality of life was also improved (p = 0.05). The subjects enjoyed better sleep and had less insomnia (p = 0.012). There was a significant improvement on current fatigue level (p = 0.017), but we did not find a statistically significant reduction in the total fatigue level. We conclude that hypnosis appears to be a feasible and promising intervention for HF, with a potential to improve quality of life and insomnia. Although improvement in current level of fatigue was observed in this pilot study, total fatigue improvement did not reach statistical significance.
J Psychosom Res. 2002 Dec;53(6):1131-7. The effect of hypnotic-guided imagery on psychological well-being and immune function in patients with prior breast cancer. Bakke AC, Purtzer MZ, Newton P. [email protected] Department of Pathology, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR 97201, USA.
OBJECTIVE: To determine the effect of hypnotic-guided imagery on immune function and psychological parameters in patients being treated for Stage I or II breast cancer. METHODS: To determine the effects of hypnotic-guided imagery on immune function and psychological parameters, the following study was undertaken. Psychological profiles, natural killer (NK) cell number and activity were measured at baseline, after the 8-week imagery training program and at the 3-month follow-up. RESULTS: There were significant increases in improvement in depression (P<.04) and increase in absolute number of NK cells, but these were not maintained at the 3-month follow-up. Hypnotic-guided imagery did cause some transient changes in psychological well-being and immune parameters. However, these changes were not retained after the treatment ended. CONCLUSIONS: Many studies during the last 15 years have demonstrated interactions between the central nervous and the immune systems. While a negative effect of stress on immune responses has been demonstrated, there have also been published reports that psychological treatments can positively alter the immune system. However, given the complexities of immune system kinetics, the transient nature of any psychological effect and the insensitivity of immune assays, our study indicates that there is a role for hypnotic-guided imagery as an adjuvant therapy.
Int J Clin Exp Hypn. 2002 Jan;50(1):17-32. Brief presurgery hypnosis reduces distress and pain in excisional breast biopsy patients. Montgomery GH, Weltz CR, Seltz M, Bovbjerg DH. [email protected] Ruttenberg Cancer Center, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY 10029-6574, USA.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of women undergo excisional breast biopsies for definitive diagnosis. Not only do these patients experience pain associated with the procedure, but they also endure distress associated with the threat of cancer. Hypnosis has been demonstrated as effective for controlling patients' pain in other surgical settings, but breast surgery patients have received little attention. To determine the impact of brief presurgical hypnosis on these patients' postsurgery pain and distress and to explore possible mediating mechanisms of these effects, 20 excisional breast biopsy patients were randomly assigned to a hypnosis or control group (standard care). Hypnosis reduced postsurgery pain and distress. Initial evidence suggested that the effects of hypnosis were mediated by presurgery expectations.
Am J Hosp Palliat Care. 1999 Sep-Oct;16(5):665-70. Hypnosis: useful, neglected, available. Douglas DB. Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, New York, USA.
Hypnosis is presented as a valuable and frequently neglected resource for many patients with chronic and terminal illness. Particular attention is given herein to the use of hypnosis in attaining relaxation, overcoming insomnia, helping the patient achieve pain relief, and, most particularly, teaching the patient to work with relatives and other persons close to them, as caregivers in a special relationship that can be a very important source of relief to the patient. A brief overview of indications, contraindications, errors, and safeguards is given. Sources of education and training are briefly reviewed and a bibliography is included to identify the nature of professional societies, three in the United States and one international, together with some standard publications. The purpose of this article is to affirm the value of hypnosis as a complementary or alternative therapy for hospice patients, to summarize its clinical applications, and to list the most standard and best known professional societies and publications.
Oncology. 2000 Aug;59(2):100-4. Hypnosis in the treatment of anticipatory nausea and vomiting in patients receiving cancer chemotherapy. Marchioro G, Azzarello G, Viviani F, Barbato F, Pavanetto M, Rosetti F, Pappagallo GL, Vinante O. Department of Oncology, Local Health Unit No. 13, Noale, Italy.
AIMS AND BACKGROUND: In addition to nausea and vomiting following chemotherapy treatment, cancer patients can experience these side effects prior to a treatment session, the so-called anticipatory nausea and vomiting. As various psychological and neurophysiological aspects have been claimed to be implied in its etiopathogenesis, the present paper aims to shortly review the etiological, epidemiological and therapeutical assumptions on the topic, in particular the psychological-behavioral therapies. PATIENTS AND METHODS: The present study was carried out on 16 consecutive adult cancer patients affected by chemotherapy-induced anticipatory nausea and vomiting who had received at least four treatment cycles. All of them were submitted to induction of relaxation followed by hypnosis. RESULTS: In all subjects anticipatory nausea and vomiting disappeared, and major responses to chemotherapy-induced emesis control were recorded in almost all patients. CONCLUSIONS: The experience highlights the potential value of hypnosis in the management of anticipatory nausea and vomiting; furthermore, the susceptibility to anticipatory nausea and vomiting is discussed under the psychoanalytic point of view.
Am J Clin Hypn. 1999 Oct;42(2):122-30. Empowering the patient: hypnosis in the management of cancer, surgical disease and chronic pain. Lynch DF Jr. [email protected] Eastern Virginia School of Medicine, USA.
In the past decade, the increasing acceptance of hypnosis as a therapeutic adjunct by physicians and health care professionals both within and outside of the mental health community has resulted in broader use of the technique with patients in both hospital and outpatient settings. In our recent experiences with urologic patients, our staff has found that many bring a surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of clinical hypnosis to the office and often have had experience with some form of therapeutic hypnosis prior to consulting us. Consequently, we find we often encounter a surprising openness to the use of hypnosis as a part of the treatment programs we employ. As a result we have been able to utilize clinical hypnosis successfully in several treatment areas to the benefit of our patients. This paper will describe several programs in place at our practice which utilize clinical hypnosis as an adjunct to treatment.
J Consult Clin Psychol. 1999 Aug;67(4):481-90. Alteration of memory in the reduction of children's distress during repeated aversive medical procedures. Chen E, Zeltzer LK, Craske MG, Katz ER. Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
The present study sought to reduce children's distress during aversive medical procedures using a brief, cost-effective intervention aimed at reframing memory. Fifty children diagnosed with leukemia (25 treatment, 25 attention control, aged 3-18) were observed as they underwent 3 consecutive lumbar punctures (LPs; baseline, postintervention, and follow-up). Self-report, physiological, and observable distress measures were collected before and after each LP. At posttreatment, children in the intervention group showed reductions in anticipatory physiological and self-report ratings relative to the control group. At follow-up, these effects generalized to reductions in procedural distress. These results suggest that (a) a simple memory-based intervention is efficacious at reducing children's distress and (b) benefits from this intervention are maintained over 1 week even without continued intervention.
Am J Clin Hypn. 1999 Apr;41(4):319-26. The use of cognitive-behavioral treatment including hypnosis for claustrophobia in cancer patients. Steggles S. Supportive Care Program, Northeastern Ontario Regional Care Centre, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
Two case studies are reported to illustrate the use of a comprehensive cognitive-behavioral approach to treat claustrophobia in cancer patients undergoing external beam radiation therapy. Hypnosis was an essential component of the cognitive-behavioral approach. Both patients responded favorably to the psychological intervention and completed the required external beam radiation therapy.
Int J Clin Exp Hypn. 1999 Apr;47(2):104-16. Clinical hypnosis versus cognitive behavioral training for pain management with pediatric cancer patients undergoing bone marrow aspirations. Liossi C, Hatira P. University of Sunderland, United Kingdom.
A randomized controlled trial was conducted to compare the efficacy of clinical hypnosis versus cognitive behavioral (CB) coping skills training in alleviating the pain and distress of 30 pediatric cancer patients (age 5 to 15 years) undergoing bone marrow aspirations. Patients were randomized to one of three groups: hypnosis, a package of CB coping skills, and no intervention. Patients who received either hypnosis or CB reported less pain and pain-related anxiety than did control patients and less pain and anxiety than at their own baseline. Hypnosis and CB were similarly effective in the relief of pain. Results also indicated that children reported more anxiety and exhibited more behavioral distress in the CB group than in the hypnosis group. It is concluded that hypnosis and CB coping skills are effective in preparing pediatric oncology patients for bone marrow aspiration.
Nurs Stand. 1997 Sep 17;11(52):44-6. Hypnotherapy: complementary support in cancer care. Pattison J. Chemotherapy Day Unit, Sunderland Royal Hospital.
The psychological and physical consequences of cancer threaten patients' wellbeing and quality of life (Fallowfield 1991). Patients' needs are wide ranging and can include both personal and physical demands as well as support, relaxation and distraction. This article describes how many of these needs can be cared for by the skillful use of hypnotherapy.
J Dev Behav Pediatr. 1994 Aug;15(4):258-64. Hypnosis in the prevention of chemotherapy-related nausea and vomiting in children: a prospective study. Jacknow DS, Tschann JM, Link MP, Boyce WT. Department of Pediatrics, University of California San Francisco, School of Medicine.
To study the effectiveness of hypnosis for decreasing antiemetic medication usage and treatment of chemotherapy-related nausea and vomiting in children with cancer, we conducted a prospective, randomized, and controlled single-blind trial in 20 patients receiving chemotherapy for treatment of cancer. Patients were randomized to either hypnosis or standard treatment. The hypnosis group used hypnosis as primary treatment for nausea and vomiting, using antiemetic medication on a supplemental (p.r.n.) basis only, whereas the control group received a standardized antiemetic medication regimen. Nausea, vomiting, and p.r.n. antiemetic medication usage were measured during the first two courses of chemotherapy. Anticipatory nausea and vomiting were assessed at 1 to 2 and 4 to 6 months postdiagnosis. Patients in the hypnosis group used less p.r.n antiemetic medication than control subjects during both the first (p < .04) and second course of chemotherapy (p < .02). The two groups did not differ in severity of nausea and vomiting. The hypnosis group experienced less anticipatory nausea than the control group at 1 to 2 months postdiagnosis (p < .02). Results suggest self-hypnosis is effective for decreasing antiemetic medication usage and for reducing anticipatory nausea during chemotherapy.
Pain. 1992 Feb;48(2):137-46. Comment in: Pain. 1992 Aug;50(2):237-8. Hypnosis or cognitive behavioral training for the reduction of pain and nausea during cancer treatment: a controlled clinical trial. Syrjala KL, Cummings C, Donaldson GW. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA 98104.
Few controlled clinical trials have tested the efficacy of psychological techniques for reducing cancer pain or post-chemotherapy nausea and emesis. In this study, 67 bone marrow transplant patients with hematological malignancies were randomly assigned to one of four groups prior to beginning transplantation conditioning: (1) hypnosis training (HYP); (2) cognitive behavioral coping skills training (CB); (3) therapist contact control (TC); or (4) treatment as usual (TAU; no treatment control). Patients completed measures of physical functioning (Sickness Impact Profile; SIP) and psychological functioning (Brief Symptom Inventory; BSI), which were used as covariates in the analyses. Biodemographic variables included gender, age and a risk variable based on diagnosis and number of remissions or relapses. Patients in the HYP, CB and TC groups met with a clinical psychologist for two pre-transplant training sessions and ten in-hospital "booster" sessions during the course of transplantation. Forty-five patients completed the study and provided all covariate data, and 80% of the time series outcome data. Analyses of the principal study variables indicated that hypnosis was effective in reducing reported oral pain for patients undergoing marrow transplantation. Risk, SIP, and BSI pre-transplant were found to be effective predictors of inpatient physical symptoms. Nausea, emesis and opioid use did not differ significantly between the treatment groups. The cognitive behavioral intervention, as applied in this study, was not effective in reducing the symptoms measured.
Int J Clin Exp Hypn. 1991 Oct;39(4):215-26. Guided imagery, hypnosis and recovery from head and neck cancer surgery: an exploratory study. Rapkin DA, Straubing M, Holroyd JC. University of California, Los Angeles 90024.
The value of a brief, preoperative hypnosis experience was explored with a sample of 36 head and neck cancer surgery patients. 15 patients volunteered for the experimental hypnosis intervention. 21 patients who received usual care (no hypnosis) were followed through their hospital charts and were used as a comparison group. Hypnotic intervention and usual care groups were comparable in terms of relevant demographic variables. Postoperative hospitalizations for the hypnotic intervention group were significantly shorter than for the usual care group. Within the hypnotic intervention group, hypnotizability was negatively correlated with surgical complications and there was a trend toward a negative correlation between hypnotizability and blood loss during surgery. Findings suggest that imagery-hypnosis may be prophylactic, benefitting patients by reducing the probability of postoperative complications and thereby keeping hospital stay within the expected range. Recommendations are presented for a controlled, randomized, clinical trial with a sufficiently large sample to provide the opportunity for statistical analysis with appropriate power.
J S C Med Assoc. 1990 May;86(5):303-6. The role of imagery in the hypnotic treatment of adverse reactions to cancer therapy. Feldman CS, Salzberg HC. Pain Evaluation & Treatment Institute, Pittsburgh, PA 15213.
Previous research suggested that behavioral interventions have been helpful in reducing patients' adverse reactions to cancer chemotherapy. The present study attempted to improve on past research by replicating this finding within the context of a more rigorous methodology. This study attempted to control for the wide range of nuisance variables inherent in research of this nature. It was expected that behavioral treatments would be superior to traditional treatment in reducing symptoms of nausea, emesis, and anxiety related to chemotherapy. The ability to detect differences between traditional and treatment groups with respect to nausea and emesis was limited due to low prevalence rates of these symptoms. Prevalence rates of pre-chemotherapy anxiety were low, but behavioral treatment subjects reported less state anxiety following chemotherapy than traditional treatment subjects. Although no evidence was found for the superiority of one form of behavioral intervention over another, these patients tended to fare better than those without a behavioral intervention.
Int J Clin Exp Hypn. 1989 Jan;37(1):6-14. Hypnosis in the management of symptoms in a young girl with malignant astrocytoma: a challenge to the therapist. LaClave LJ, Blix S.
This paper presents the case of a 6.5-year-old girl with malignant astrocytoma of the left brain hemisphere. During the course of her chemotherapy treatment, severe vomiting developed to the degree that on several occasions she became dehydrated. Discontinuation of chemotherapy was being considered when she was referred for hypnotherapy. Despite severe neurological impairments which excluded many traditional techniques, hypnosis was successful in eliminating emesis. Hypnosis was also utilized to decrease pain and to improve sleep patterns. Drawings are presented to help show how this child resolved anxiety associated with treatment and fears surrounding the knowledge of her impending death. | <urn:uuid:c80eaf7d-7159-4a42-a9ee-68b2f23cd5eb> | CC-MAIN-2020-45 | https://www.sanfranciscohypnotherapy.com/post/copy-of-stress-and-digestion-10-things-you-should-know | 2020-10-27T12:20:48Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-45/segments/1603107894175.55/warc/CC-MAIN-20201027111346-20201027141346-00390.warc.gz | en | 0.929331 | 6,747 |
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