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Southern California Science Fictional Thinking in Mundos Alternos
Art and Science Fiction in the Americas
Boom California	on September 19, 2017
Tyler Stallings
History is written in retrospect. Patterns are sought among seemingly unrelated events at the time of their occurrence. There is never just one historical narrative. Historians make choices about what events to represent and from which perspective, often to the disadvantage of people on the losing end—for example, the colonized or enslaved. Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas provides a space-time continuum for reimagining the past from the perspective of the "alienated" and the "other," from the peoples marginalized by the powerful. The exhibition includes over thirty contemporary artists who explore interactions of science fiction and the visual arts in Latin America, the U.S., and the intergalactic beyond; collectively laying out a provocative view of arts in the Americas told in the present but with an eye toward future, alternate Americas.
Mundos Alternos is an 11,000-square-foot exhibition, with an accompanying book of the same title, presented at University of California, Riverside's downtown UCR ARTSblock, which includes two adjacent venues: the California Museum of Photography; and the Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts. Myself and the two other co-curators, Robb Hernández and Joanna Szupinska-Myers,[1] have brought together works from across the Americas that use science fiction to imagine new realities and alternate worlds, utopian and dystopian. The exhibition is part of The Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, which is an exploration of the global intersections of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Southern California, with many of its seventy-plus exhibitions opening Fall 2017.
ARTSblock's project was inspired by two facts: UCR Library's Special Collections and Archives possesses the Eaton Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection, one of the world's largest archive of its kind; and UCR is designated as a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI), defined by 25% or more of its student body falling within that demographic.[2] The power of nomenclature is an important aspect of the Mundos Alternos title. The use of the word "Americas" in its subtitle was significant in order to point to a hemispheric approach in which the exhibition's original location, the United States, is realized in a broader milieu of cross cultural connections including Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.
In the exhibition, artists employ science fiction tropes in their works, most created in the last two decades, such as alternate history and time travel, organized under themes such as "Post-Industrial Americas" and "Indigenous Futurism," suggesting diverse modes of existence and representing "alienating" ways of being in other worlds. Latin American, Latina/o, and Chicana/o science fiction is a burgeoning area of study that has gained momentum within the past ten years, with an emphasis mostly in literature and film. In light of this, our curatorial team selected artists from across the Americas (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico and Puerto Rico, as well as California, Florida, New Mexico, New York, Virginia, and Texas) who have created artworks that point to mundos alternos ("alternate worlds"), where self-determination and autonomy can occur in a present that is quickly becoming a past pointing to a future.
Considering that dystopia and utopia are often two polarities of a single, metaphorical world, the artists in Mundos Alternos explore equally multi-faceted issues around immigration, queer futurism, indigenous futurism, information control, the border, and so on. An underlying concept is the "alienated alien," or the "other," and how they reimagine themselves in a world in which they are not marginalized anymore.
Simón Vega (La Libertad, El Salvador), Tropical Mercury Capsula, 2010/ 2014, Sculptural installation (wood, aluminum, tin roofing sheets, cardboard, plastic, TV, fan, icebox, boombox, found materials; 67 x 129 inches (capsule), 118 x 236 inches (total floor installation area). Collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miama, Gift of Mario Cader-Frech and Robert Wennett.
The Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy, UC Riverside
Before I rewrite the history of my own writing, I would like to loop back around to a major source of inspiration for Mundos Alternos and a significant resource in California for science fiction studies scholars: The Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy.
It is one of the largest publicly accessible collections of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and utopian literature in the world, and is housed in the UC Riverside Library's Special Collections & University Archives in the Tomás Rivera Library on the main campus. It features more than 300,000 holdings that include over 100,000 hardback and paperback books; full runs of pulp magazines; nearly 100,000 fanzines; film and visual material, including 500 shooting scripts from science fiction films; comic books, anime, and manga; and collectible ephemera and regalia, including cards, posters, pins and action figures.[3] The Collection contains several manuscript collections of essential Southern California-based speculative fiction writers, including papers of UC Irvine physicist and science fiction writer Gregory Benford's, and those of David Brin who wrote Uplift War and Sundiver.
Another major science fiction collection is held at the University Archives & Special Collections of California State University, Fullerton's Pollak Library,[4] which includes original science fiction manuscripts, books and related materials of several U.S. authors including Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, and Ray Bradbury. As a side note, Dick died in nearby Santa Ana, and I once made a trek to his last known address. It is the site where he supposedly received the pink beam of light from God that revealed that the Roman Empire had never ended.[5] Additionally, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino holds the papers of Octavia E. Butler,[6] author of Kindred (1979), and arguably the most prominent African-American woman in the field of science fiction.
Over the years there have been periodic academic conferences of science fiction studies held in Riverside, sometimes connected directly to the Eaton Collection and other times organized by faculty like Sherryl Vint, a professor in UCR's Media and Cultural Studies Department, who specializes in technoculture and science fiction film history.
These conferences are usually less for the fan and more for the scholar of science fiction and fantasy. Without the exuberance of Comic-Con[7] or the World Science Fiction Convention[8] that has been going strong for seven decades, no one dresses as their favorite Star Wars or anime character; rather, unkempt clothes and mussed hair are the scholarly fashion. Additionally, it is not a gathering spot for Hollywood's film industry, which is one aspect of Comic-Con's metamorphosis. Instead, it is the serious underbelly to the glitz, and a place for the absorption of true cutting-edge ideas and writing in the field of science fiction, or speculative fiction, studies.
The most recent conference at UC Riverside in 2016 was sponsored by the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA).[9] Its overarching theme, "Unknown Pasts/Unseen Futures," was meant to stimulate reflection on the future of scholarship of marginalized authors and subjects. It also reflected upon how science fiction studies at UCR are challenging the genre's canons. This is exemplified with panel papers that included titles[10] like Cole Jack Pittman's "Crip (Community) Futurism: Science Fiction as a Method for Analyzing Disabled Community Building, Networking, and Resource Sharing"; Joshua Odam's "Fear of a Black Universe: Afrofuturism, Speculative Fiction, and the Black Liberatory Imagination"; Joan Haran's "California Dreaming: Dystopian and Utopian Calls to Action in Parable of the Sower and The Fifth Sacred Thing"; and Kathryn Page-Lippsmeyer's "Excessive Cyborging: Using Techno-Orientalism to consider Oshii Mamoru's Ghost in the Shell: Innocence." Additionally, the conference's keynote speaker was author Nnedi Okorafor, writer of fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction, who is perhaps best known for her Binti series that entwines African culture into a future imaginary. Okorafor's work can also be couched historically under Afrofuturism, which underpins Mundos Alternos.
Sun Ra in California and Afrofuturism
Afrofuturism uses science fiction and cyberculture in a speculative manner, just as cyber-feminism does. It is an escape from the externally imposed definition of what it means to be black (or exotically African) in Western culture, and it is a cultural rebellion drawing on techno-culture, turntables and remixes as technological and instrumental forms. By placing black man in space, out of the reach of racist stereotypes, Afrofuturism allows for a critique of both the history of the West and its techno-cultures.
The tenets of Afrofuturism became a foundation on which notions of Mundos Alternos have been built. Coined in 1994 by Mark Dery in his essay, "Black to the Future,"[11] Afrofuturism refers to a creative and intellectual genre that emerged as a strategy to explore science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and Pan-Africanism, perhaps best exemplified by African-American musicians such as Sun Ra and George Clinton, and writers like Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Steven Barnes, Octavia Butler, and Samuel Delany.[12]
Space Is the Place, organized in 2016 by New York City-based Independent Curator's International, traveled the U.S. as a group exhibition with artists' work inspired by nostalgia and speculation about outer space. The title was taken from a 1974 science fiction film of the same name that featured Sun Ra and his Arkestra.
During the late 1960s and early '70s, Sun Ra traveled to California and taught a course titled, "The Black Man in the Cosmos," at UC Berkeley. The film is based, in part, on the lectures he gave there in which he articulated many nuanced views like "I'd rather a black man go to Mars… than to Africa… because it's easier,"[13] referring to the difficulty of a westernized African-American seeking roots back in Africa. The basic plot is that Sun Ra lands on a new planet in outer space and decides to settle African-Americans there. Seven years later, in 2013, the Studio Museum in Harlem presented The Shadows Took Shape, an interdisciplinary exhibition exploring contemporary art through the lens of Afrofuturist aesthetics.[14] Since then, one of the exhibition's curators, Naima J. Keith, has become the deputy director for exhibitions and programs at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. In one of the exhibition catalogue essays, nearly twenty years after Dery, Tegan Bristow updates a definition of Afrofuturism:
Afrofuturism uses science fiction and cyberculture in a speculative manner, just as cyber-feminism does. It is an escape from the externally imposed definition of what it means to be black (or exotically African) in Western culture, and it is a cultural rebellion drawing on techno-culture, turntables and remixes as technological and instrumental forms. By placing black man in space, out of the reach of racist stereotypes, Afrofuturism allows for a critique of both the history of the West and its techno-cultures.[15]
These examples stretching between 2001 and 2015 indicate how the visual arts have historically looked at race and social difference through a lens of science fiction cultural production. Mundos Alternos proceeds from here.
As one reads the book and peruses the exhibition, we hope viewers feel like their thoughts and experience become part of proto science fiction Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges' unbounded library, or that inklings of the Aztec empire existing on the Moon are experienced. Or perhaps participants may walk the streets of Los Angeles anew and feel moments of being part of the first Xicano science fiction novel by East L.A. born Ernest Hogan, where in Cortez on Jupiter (1990)[16] Pablo Cortez sprays graffiti across L.A. and paints in zero gravity, all in an effort to make a masterpiece for the universe and his barrio.
Erica Bohm (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 21 works from the "Planet Stories" series, 2013, Instax Fujifilm, 12 x 11 inches each (framed). Courtesy of the artist and THE MISSION, Chicago.
How A Meteorite Inspired Twenty Years of Curating from the Cosmos
I came to the recent realization that a particular news story affected many exhibitions that I organized over the past twenty years, which touched upon outer space themes: it was the possible discovery of fossilized Martian bacterial life in 1996, based on the observation of carbonate globules in a small section of a meteorite called the Allan Hills 84001 (usually abbreviated as ALH 84001). It was found several years earlier in Allan Hills, Antarctica in 1984 by U.S. meteorite hunters, but it was not until much later that careful analysis was applied to it.[17] In September 2017, with the opening of Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the America, I now realize the impact that the meteorite has had on my curatorial endeavors.
My first curatorial venture inspired by the Martian meteorite was Are We Touched, Identities from Outer Space (1997). It coincided with NASA's first lander on Mars and the 50th anniversary of the reported U.F.O. crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. The exhibition featured a range of artists, including those fascinated by the cultural phenomenon of U.F.O.'s but would not label themselves as believers, such as Southern California artists Deborah Aschheim and Connie Samaras, to artists who felt they may have had an unexplained experience that provided inspiration for their work, but would not admit to it openly for fear of rejection. And there were also people who would not call their work "art" but rather a visual representation of an experience that they felt they did occur, like with alien abductee and artist David Huggins.
The pop cultural highlight for me was when Huggins was invited as a guest on a daytime talk show based in Los Angeles, Leeza, which is no longer in production. The artist claimed to have interbred with an extraterrestrial that he named Crescent, as she came to him only when there was a crescent moon, producing upwards of 200-plus hybrid human/extraterrestrial offspring. In 2014, a documentary was released about his alien sexual encounters, Love and Saucers: The Far Out World of David Huggins. Huggins states, "The reason why extra-terrestrials are interested in me is not because of my physical body but what's inside—my soul."[18]
Are We Touched was followed by Cyborg Manifesto, or The Joy of Artifice (2001), which featured twenty-six artists who explored changes in a tech-driven age. Theorist Donna Haraway coined the first part of the title, "Cyborg Manifesto." I found kinship with her viewpoint of the cyborg as a metaphor for discussing hybridity, whether in terms of gender issues, genetics, or cross-cultural encounters. In other words, I was less concerned with thinking of the cyborg as a humanoid robot in which human and machine merged. Rather, I was interested in the impossibility of the notion of purity.
Accordingly, I thought it possible that Martian meteorites landed on an ancient earth and provided an important element to the primordial soup that gave rise to life. So, when looking through a telescope at planet Mars, we actually see an abandoned home. In this way, any human sense of feeling pure dissolves. Once we consider ourselves apart from Earth, we are all aliens and immigrants.
In 2009, I co-organized with artist Rachel Mayeri, Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art. It was a group exhibition of twenty international artists exploring human interaction with animals through a collection of provocative video installations, photographs, paintings, and sculptures. I saw this exhibition having a further development of the desire to make contact with other sentient beings. In this case, ones already present on Earth.
Artists in the exhibition collaborated with cockroaches, pigeons, dogs, cats, ants, bears, baboons, rats, spiders, and trout, which may have been domesticated, imaginary, laboratory, modeled, or wild. Curious about the animal's point of view, artists designed their projects as a form of conversation or inquiry about the nonhuman world. Their artwork challenged the anthropocentric perspective of the world, placing human perception on par with other animals. Inspired by Darwin, the environmental movement, and species collapse, Intelligent Design envisioned a paradigm shift in which human beings are no longer the center of the Universe.
Rigo 23 (Los Angeles), Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program, 2009—resent (ongoing). Mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco.
Another paradigm shift, this time in U.S. policy, that would allow private companies to go into outer space inspired the 2013 exhibition, Free Enterprise: The Art of Citizen Space Exploration,[19] which I co-organized with artist Marko Peljhan. Civilian space travel and space exploration represents a major political and cultural shift away from sponsorship by the federal government and toward a private enterprise model. The possibility of fulfilling the human dream to fly into space has been encouraged by a major political and cultural shift away from state-sponsored space activities, which were controlled by agencies such as NASA in the USA, JAXA in Japan and RKA in Russia, towards a private enterprise model.
Its presentation in 2013 arrived at a time when several private enterprise ventures had come to fruition. They included the successful launch in May 2012 of the Falcon 9 vehicle and the Dragon space capsule by Elon Musk's Space X company based in Hawthorne, California, which rendezvoused with the International Space Station, the soon-to-be-completed spaceport in New Mexico that will be the launch site for Virgin Galactic's space tourism program, and the burgeoning efforts of XCOR Aerospace, a Mojave-based company, north of Los Angeles near Edwards Air Force Base.
These developments signal that we are at a dawn of a new radical change in near-Earth space exploration. Engaging artists directly in this discussion at an early stage is extremely important: it is the technology and capital that allow for exploration, but it is the imagination and the spiritual capital that create a new state of mind open to a broader awareness of humanity and other life, both on Earth and beyond.
One of my favorite projects in Free Enterprise was by artist Richard Clar, based in northern California, which links back to my interests developed with Intelligent Design. He turned toward art-in-space in 1982 with a NASA-approved art payload for the U.S. Space Shuttle, Space Flight Dolphin (SFD). Approved by NASA, SFD was an interdisciplinary art-in-space SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project designed to be deployed in low-Earth orbit from the cargo bay of the U.S. Space Shuttle. The dolphin sculpture/satellite would have transmitted a signal modulated by dolphin "voices" that might have been detected or sensed by extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). As the sculpture/satellite orbited the Earth, the dolphin voices would have been monitored in various museums around the world and on the Internet, providing a link between different peoples and cultures on our own planet. The project suggested that humans might first consider trying to communicate with other very intelligent beings on Earth before considering extraterrestrial communication.
Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas represents the most recent project inspired by the 1996 Martian meteorite bacteria imaginary. Perhaps it is the meteorite's transcendent materiality—an object likely older than humankind—that has stuck with me. Mundos Alternos focuses on the materiality of being present in artists' studios and exploring science fiction, not through literature and film, but through the uncanny presence of an art object that seems transcendent too.
Slipstream Islands of Strange Things: Building Mundos Alternos in the Americas[20]
World building is a major element of the science fiction genre. History, geography, economics, demographics, physics, cosmology, transportation, religion, technology, food, and the culture of an imaginary world are elements under consideration by authors, filmmakers, and game makers. The test for a reader, viewer, or participant is to suspend their present-day logic so that they can feel present in a virtual future. The challenge for the maker is to reconsider ongoing tropes, like anything called "Empire" being absolutely evil; an entire world being defined as if it had one purpose, such as the desert world of Arrakis in Frank Herbert's novel Dune (1965); and then the altogether prevalent, homogenous alien race that may populate an entire planet or galaxy. Embracing diversity is a major underlying theme of Mundos Alternos.
It is hard to say whether there is a particular genre of science-fiction fine art, per se, at least within the context of the international, contemporary art world that the Mundos Alternos artists inhabit. Here, I separate the world of the more familiar cover art, movie posters, comic books, and illustrated stories, arguing that the contemporary art-making endeavor represents a kind of science fictional process that results in a slipstream artifact, or strange thing.
Gyula Kosice, Maquette I, Maquette K, Maquette L, 1965-75, Exhibition prints. Courtesy of Kosice Museum, Buenos Aires.
Slipstream Immigration
"Slipstream," a phrase coined by science fiction author Bruce Sterling and colleague Richard Dorsett in 1989, applied primarily to literature that includes elements of science fiction, also called speculative fiction, in order to create a sense of the uncanny, of weirdness in the world, of dissonance between what one thinks is real and the feeling that other layers exist beyond the senses upon which we rely. More than twenty-five years ago, Sterling wrote in the essay in which he coined the term, "It seems to me that the heart of slipstream is an attitude of peculiar aggression against 'reality.' These are fantasies of a kind, but not fantasies which are 'futuristic' or 'beyond the fields we know.' These books tend to sarcastically tear at the structure of 'everyday life.'"[21]
A recent and notable Latin American slipstream example is Junot Díaz's novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Its settings range from New Jersey to the Dominican Republic, featuring a science fiction-obsessed boy who eventually dies, though the reasons for the death are ambiguous. The result of a fukú curse? The lingering vestiges of a corrupt society as result of the Dominican Republic's former dictator, Rafael Trujillo? Or perhaps an inseparable mixture of both family, political scourges, and colonialism as filtered through the allegory of the science fiction genre?
Commenting on his falling for science fiction, Díaz said in a recent interview, "I fell for [the] genre because I desperately needed it—in my personal mythology, [the] genre helped me create an operational self. I suspect I resonated with the world-building in many of these texts because that's precisely what I was engaged in as a young immigrant." He then added, "Alien invasions, natives, slavery, colonies, genocide, racial system, savages, technological superiority, forerunner races and the ruins they leave behind, travel between worlds, breeding programs, superpowered whites, mechanized regimes that work humans to death, human/alien hybrids, lost worlds—all have their roots in the traumas of colonialism."[22]
Beatriz Cortez (Los Angeles). Memory Insertion Capsule, 2017 (in progress). Mixed media, c. 144 x 144 inches, exact dims tbd. Courtesy of the artist.
Contemporary Art as Speculative Technology
For a visual artist, the magic of their own making occurs when a preconceived notion takes a different turn during the process; leading them down a road that they could not have expected without taking the first step of manipulating materials with their hand. It is a method that intertwines haptic, optic, and cognitive processes. In regard to contemporary visual art, an artist's methodology of process and product are inseparable from one another and therefore slipstream inherently. This slipstream aspect in visual art to which I allude is where the difference lies between it, writing, and filmmaking. There is a physical manifestation of the artist's idea into the world—that is, it does not remain an imaginary one in a reader's mind nor an untouchable screen image. Rather, it is a physical object that rests in a world where viewers can interact with it through touch, smell, and sound, or perhaps walk back and forth from it, around it, or through it.
Los Angeles-based art critic Jan Tumlir expressed a similar notion about the relationship between contemporary art and science fiction when he wrote about the Orange County Museum of Art's 2007 California Biennial. He said, "The young artists on the West Coast are operating in an idiom closely linked to science-fiction."[23] He goes on to list some of the science fiction tropes with which they are engaged: future and alien civilizations, time travel, colonization, "the redefinition of the idea of the human in response to the other, either alien or handmade," and so on. More specifically, he wrote that, due to the materiality of visual art, "Intensive concentration on these various artifacts is aimed at somehow 'breaking through.'"
The emphasis on artist made physical objects, or slipstream, science fictional artifacts, is the major reason for the absence in the exhibition and book of classic visual memorabilia that one associates with the science fiction genre: book cover art, comic books, and movie posters, to name a few. This is as opposed to the unique object generated by visual artists that can exist in only one location; thus, it requires a pilgrimage to the site, such as a gallery, museum, collector's home, public plaza, or artist studio.
A turn towards re-engagement with materiality, and its place within an increasingly screen-based cultural environment, is underscored by a recent exhibition at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria. The Poetics of the Material (2016) was a group exhibition in which "contemporary art, which can be regarded as being aligned with 'new materialism,' attempts to give expression to the interpenetration of material phenomena and immaterial aspects of reality. The latter reveal themselves in the meaning of language or in the influence of cultural narratives on the perception of reality."[24]
In a sense, I have felt often, throughout the visits with artists for Mundos Alternos, that I have engaged in a type of "retro-labeling," as described by Rachel Haywood Ferreira in her seminal book, The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction (2011). She outlined the process towards defining a science fiction genre in Latin American literature in light of the genre's already prescribed nature in the United States and Europe. Haywood wrote, "Although the genealogy of science fiction has been actively traced in its countries of origin since the moment Gernsback formally baptized the genre, in Latin America this process did not get underway until the late 1960s and continues today."[25] Initially, her process identified texts in the late 19th and 20th centuries in Latin America, primarily in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, due to the strength of publishing in those countries, where there were science fictional tendencies. The most immediate and prominent examples of retro-labeled works were the ubiquitous and highly marketed "magic realism" novels and short stories of Argentine Jorges Luis Borges's A Universal History of Infamy (1935), Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Chilean Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits (1982).
In this regard, my two co-curators and I sought contemporary visual artists in Mundos Alternos who employed science fictional or slipstream thinking rather than literal science fiction elements. Driven by the theme of the show, we saw in their work, and through conversations during studio visits, that they demonstrated a commitment and influence from science fiction literature and film. The main theme that occupied them was a consideration of the future, focusing on post-colonization, labor, surveillance, environment, and hemispherical connections, viewed through the lens of art. However, what remains to be the biggest difference, and what I hope to be the contribution of this exhibition and book to the burgeoning scholarship around Latino and Latin American science fiction studies, is the effect of the material nature of visual art whose subject matter is science fictional.
Visual art exists as though a magical or a yet-to-be speculative technology has in fact manifested itself from the future into the present. They are strange objects whose message(s) are ambiguous. It requires work on the part of its viewer, who must be willing to engage with said object in order to receive meaning from it. I am not suggesting that there is a single, hidden meaning to be ascertained, but that its meaning is determined in part through a viewer's interaction with it, as if a close encounter of the third kind, in which contact is made with alien beings, whose language we not yet know.
Meaning being determined in part by a book's reader, for example, is a characteristically postmodern notion that accounts for paradox, unreliable narrators, and undermining the authority of the writer through metafiction techniques. However, I employ it here in order to demonstrate that this postmodern methodology can be different when dealing with strange objects versus literature and film.
Fighting for the Future
One difference between Anglo and Latino science fiction is that making it to the future is something that can't be ignored. The future isn't a given, it will have to be fought for. And if you don't fight for it, you might not get there.
The artistic inclination to pastiche disparate materials and ideas together generates uncanniness through its physical manifestation. This technique creates a slipstream or science fictional effect of "cognitive estrangement," to borrow a phrase from science fiction theorist Darko Suvin, where the material and conceptual smashups provide a platform for viewers to look at their immediate society differently. Suvin might suggest that one's viewpoint could be shifted to the point that there is recognition of one's oppression and therefore, with a new view of the world, begin to resist, which is the major subtext for Mundos Alternos.[26]
To illustrate further, East L.A. born Ernest Hogan, author of the seminal Chicano science fiction novel, High Aztech (1992), wrote ten years after its publication in his blog on Latino science fiction, La Bloga, "I've always been more interested in science fiction as a confrontation with changing reality rather than escapism. And as a Chicano, I'm plugged into cultural influences that most science fiction writers don't have access to."[27] Three years later, after participating in "A Day of Latino Science Fiction" symposium at UC Riverside, he wrote in another La Bloga post: "One difference between Anglo and Latino science fiction is that making it to the future is something that can't be ignored. The future isn't a given, it will have to be fought for. And if you don't fight for it, you might not get there."[28]
I would add that Hogan's use of the phrase "plugged into" is embodied, literally, by Mundos Alternos with Los Angeles-based artist Alex Rivera's film, Sleep Dealer (2008), which finds nodes inserted into one's body to allow Mexican workers to work in the U.S. virtually, and thus the United States get its labor, but doesn't have to deal with their bodies. It was preceded by Rivera's more experimental videos that featured what he called, the "cybracero," which is a clever, techno inflected twist on the bracero program in the U.S. from1942 to 1965 which brought millions of Mexican guest workers to the U.S.[29]
Sherryl Vint, UC Riverside professor of English, science fiction studies scholar, and Mundos Alternos research team members and contributor to this book, invited both Hogan and Rivera to UC Riverside's campus. As organizer of "A Day of Latino Science Fiction," she said, "Our event will foster discussion of the specific ways Latino writers negotiate science fiction's relationship to the colonialist imagination, and its possibilities for imagining more ethnically inclusive futures."[30]
Accessing Gateways or Las puertas
As curators, and with the visual arts in general, it is necessary to travel in order to see the work. This is a different experience than with film or literature where one can go to the local cinema or read in the comfort of a home where, theoretically, any engaged individual would be reading or viewing the same text or image shared by others. This is not the case in the visual arts where, at least in the context of this show, the materiality of a unique, strange object requires one's presence. This means that, as a curator, my colleagues and I had to travel to the objects' location. Rather than being deskbound or screenbound, footwork was involved to access gateways, or las puertas, to mundos alternos.
The future is their inseparability yet, at least for the moment, the artists in this show who focus on their slipstream artworks, present islands of materiality for salvation. For those of us who have not succumbed to screen-culture completely, we may commiserate on these islands throughout the Americas and plan the next world to build where water is free and flows.
Much further south of the border, a more recent revolution in Chiapas, Mexico, was explored by Portuguese-born, Los Angeles-based artist Rigo 23. For several years, he worked with indigenous groups in Chiapas, which aim for equal rights or autonomy from the Mexican government. Rigo 23 chose to extend Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation's (EZLN) use of poetics through workshops with the Good Government Junta of Morelia, Chiapas.[31]
Through this art making with Rigo 23, they envisioned autonomy as having occurred already. They asked how they would then represent themselves beyond Earth, on an intergalactic level, emphasizing an indigenous, technoculture imaginary, calling their project the Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program (2012). Rigo 23 suggested that to imagine autonomy and to begin to materialize strange objects around this notion puts one on the path towards generating a new vocabulary in the present-time to be used in the future, similar to how indigenous communities in Chiapas might negotiate with the Mexican government.
In this context, Rigo 23's cornhusk spaceship from the project, which arose from Southern Chiapas, was destined to become an interplanetary traveling vegetable that nurtured recognition of any being, whether on Earth, or elsewhere, as one who deserved freedom, justice, and equality. From an intergalactic sensibility, social justice for the indigenous in Chiapas translates to all Earthlings who become collectively indigenous in the context of encountering other beings beyond our blue dot in the solar system.
In an ART21 interview, Rigo 23 recognized the value of traveling and through his presence becoming a wormhole in which he collapsed geo-political events in order to generate kinship:
I have come to realize that, often, the further one comes from an area of intense conflict, the more likely the locals are to give you the benefit of the doubt. So, as one talks about Leonard Peltier in East Jerusalem, or about going to Palestine in Wounded Knee, links and kinships that are invisible to most manifest themselves in wonderful and affirming ways. There is a mutual recognition that one is globalized in an entirely different way.[32]
In kinship with Rigo 23, Salvadoran-born, Los Angeles-based artist and professor of Central American studies, Beatriz Cortez, created several projects in which she aimed to enunciate a positive, future imaginary for an Indigenous population.
Guillermo Bert (Los Angeles), The Visionary, 2012; Tarn, natural dyes, wood, 82 x 52 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Cortez's La máquina de la fortuna or The Fortune Teller Machine (2014) is an interactive sculpture, developed in collaboration with the Guatemalan Kaqchikel Maya collective Kaqjay Moloj, and prints fortune messages in Kaqchikel and in Spanish. When a viewer presses a button, a thermal printer ejects a message from their collective desires that were programmed into the fortuneteller machine. The messages are written in a future perfect verb tense, as if predicting what will become, hopefully, a reality soon. A sample list of possible, future-tense messages that a viewer may receive from this portal to the future include:
Xtik'oje' jun raxnäq k'aslen
Habrá justicia
There will be justice
Xtiqetamaj achike ru ma xe kamisäx ri qawinaq
Sabremos la verdad
We will know the truth
Xtiqaya' ruq'ij ri kib'anob'al ri qatit qamama'
Estaremos orgullosos de nuestro pasado
We will be proud of our past
Xti ak'axäx ri k'ayewal qa chajin
Nuestra voz será escuchada
Our voice will be heard
Chiqonojel xtiqil ru b'eyal ri qak'aslen
Tendremos oportunidades
We will have opportunities
Xtik'oje' jun qak'aslen ri man xkojyax ta pa k'ayewal
Seremos libres
We will be free
Brought together under the Mundos Alternos moniker, Beatriz Cortez and Rigo 23, the former from El Salvador and the latter from Portugal, demonstrate cross-cultural affinities as they engage technology closely tied to Indigenous communities. This approach is mindful of Indigenous knowledge and expertise with devices, which have often been cast as archaic and unsophisticated within Western colonization. Another Mundos Alternos artist, Guillermo Bert, born in Chile, but living in Los Angeles, has also worked closely with native communities to inform and realize their work. Bert's Encoded Textiles tapestries were inspired by his observation that Quick Response (QR) code patterns often resemble the textile patterns woven by the Mapuche of Chile. He commissioned the woven works on view, which bear functional QR codes that link to dictums by tribal elders. He marries the encryption technologies of Indigenous woven textiles with contemporary digital ones, achieving the same goals but through different pathways.
Science Fictional Connectedness
From a curatorial perspective, the necessity of travel in cars, trains, planes, and by foot throughout the Americas became an experience in which the circulation of the kind of artwork that we sought became slipstream islands of materiality. Our radars were attuned to artists who viewed their art as platforms for investigating and questioning the immediate culture that surrounded them and the world at large, that is, embodying Suvin's aforementioned cognitive estrangement.
In this regard, our visits became ones where citizens of alternative worlds found one another and cemented bonds through face-to-face meetings. We were surrounded by the artists' slipstream artwork in their studios or their galleries, which became las puertas. It was by traveling through these wormholes, found throughout the Americas to islands of materiality (as opposed to "islands in the net," to coin another phrase from Bruce Sterling's 1988 novel with the same title), that I found an overall utopian experience of connectedness through material presence, rather than a dystopian one of disembodied connection through the telepresence of texts and screens. In other words, we were in true locations of the future, rather than just sensing, at an untouchable distance, the things to come.
In other words, we were in true locations of the future, rather than just sensing, at an untouchable distance, the things to come.
Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas is on view from 16 September 2017 through 4 February 2018. The opening party for Mundos Alternos is 30 September 2017 from 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. at UCR ARTSblock (http://artsblock.ucr.edu). UCR ARTSblock is open Tuesday – Thursday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.; Friday– Saturday, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m., and closed Mondays. Open late until 9 p.m. every first Thursday of the month. Admission is $5.
All photography taken by Sydney Santana.
[1] The Mundos Alternos curatorial team includes Robb Hernández, assistant professor of English at UCR; Tyler Stallings, artistic director of the Culver Center of the Arts at UCR ARTSblock; and Joanna Szupinska-Myers, California Museum of Photography (CMP) senior curator of exhibitions at UCR ARTSblock. Kathryn Poindexter, CMP assistant curator, is the project coordinator; and Sherryl Vint, director of the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science program at UCR, curated an accompanying film program and contributed an essay to the book. A heavily illustrated, 160-page book accompanies the exhibition, including original essays by the curators, contributions by Kathryn Poindexter and Rudi Kraeher, with additional essays by Kency Cornejo, Itala Schmelz, Alfredo Suppia, and Sherryl Vint, leading voices in science fiction studies and contemporary art of the Americas.
[2] The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), https://www.hacu.net/assnfe/cv.asp?ID=191.
[3] The Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy, http://eaton.ucr.edu.
[4] University Archives & Special Collections, Pollak Library, California State University Fullerton, http://www.library.fullerton.edu/services/special-collections.php.
[5] See Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, eds. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).
[6] The Huntington's Octavia Butler archive, http://www.huntington.org/octaviabutler/.
[7] Comic-Con International in San Diego, http://www.comic-con.org
[8] World Science Fiction Convention, http://www.worldcon.org.
[9] Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), http://www.sfra.org/sfra-annual-conference.
[10] Science Fiction Research Association 2016 conference program, http://www.sfra.org/Conference-Program.
[11] Mark Dery, "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose," in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 180.
[12] The passages in this section, "Sun Ra in California and Afrofuturism" are excerpted from Robb Hernández and Tyler Stallings, "Introduction" in Robb Hernández and Tyler Stallings, eds. Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas (Riverside, CA: UCR ARTSblock, 2017), 13-14, 18-19.
[13] Recorded lecture from 1971 when Sun Ra served as artist-in-residence at UC Berkeley and offered the course, African-American Studies 198, "The Black Man in the Cosmos," https://ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/ra_sun/Ra-Sun_Berkeley-Lecture_1971.mp3.
[14] For more on "Shadows Took Shape" see, Naima J. Keith, and Zoe Whitley, eds. The Shadows Took Shape (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2013).
[15] Tegan Bristow, "We Want the Funk: What is Afrofuturism to Africa?" in Naima J. Keith, and Zoe Whitley, eds., The Shadows Took Shape, (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2013), 81.
[16] Ernest Hogan, Cortez on Jupiter (New York: Tor Books, 1990). Out of print. Now available for digital download at https://www.createspace.com/5026216.
[17] "Meteorite Yields Evidence of Primitive Life on Early Mars," Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA, 7 August 1996, https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/snc/nasa1.html.
[18] Sara C. Nelson, "Alien Abductee David Huggins 'Lost His Virginity To Extra Terrestrial Woman Named Crescent'," Huffington Post, 16 October 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/10/16/alien-abductee-david-huggins-lost-virginity-extra-terrestrial-woman-crescent_n_5995334.html.
[19] Online catalogue from 2013 for Free Enterprise: The Art of Citizen Space Exploration, http://sites.artsblock.ucr.edu/free-enterprise/.
[20] Excerpts from Tyler Stallings, "Slipstream Islands of Strange Things: Building Mundos Alternos in the Americas" in Robb Hernández and Tyler Stallings, eds., Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas (Riverside, CA: UCR ARTSblock, 2017), 130-143. An emphasis is placed on artists from California in these excerpts and includes additional text on artist Guillermo Bert that was not in the original published essay, along with a few additional comments that emphasize the California connection.
[21] Bruce Sterling, "Catscan 5: Slipstream," sf Eye 5 (July 1989), online at https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/Catscan_columns/catscan.05.
[22] Taryne Jade Taylor, "A Singular Dislocation: An Interview with Junot Diaz," Paradoxa 26 (2015): 97-110.
[23] Jan Tumlir, "Sci-Fi Historicism, Part I: The Time Machine in Contemporary Los Angeles Art," Flash Art 40 (March-April, 2007): 102-105.
[24] Leopold Museum, http://www.leopoldmuseum.org/en/exhibitions/78/the-poetics-of-the-material.
[25] Rachel Haywood Ferreira, The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 1.
[26] Darko Suvin, "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre," College English 34 (December 1972): 372-82.
[27] Ernest Hogan, "Chicanonautica: Prophesy, High Aztech, and Nerve Jelly," La Bloga, 5 February 2011, http://labloga.blogspot.com/2011/02/chicanonautica-prophesy-high-aztech-and.html
[28] Ernest Hogan, "Chicanonautica: Voyage to a Day of Latino Science Fiction," La Bloga, 15 May 15, 2014, http://labloga.blogspot.com/2014/05/chicanonautica-voyage-to-day-of-latino.html.
[29] The Bracero History Archive, http://braceroarchive.org/about.
[30] "Latino Science Fiction Explored, UCR Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Program hosts April 30 event," UCR Today, https://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/21579.
[31] "The Good Government Juntas represent both the poetic, populist and the practical nature of the Zapatista struggle to build workable alternatives of autonomy locally, link present politics to traditional ways of organizing [sic] life in indigenous communities, and contrast with the 'bad government' of official representational politics in Mexico City." See Paul Chatterton, "The Zapatista Caracoles and Good Governments: The Long Walk to Autonomy," State of Nature (2007). http://www.stateofnature.org/?p=6119.
[32] Thom Donovan, "5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Rigo 23," ART21 Magazine, 20 January 2011, http://magazine.art21.org/2011/01/20/5-questions-for-contemporary-practice-with-rigo-23/#.Wb2PHtGX02x.
Tyler Stallings is artistic director at the Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts at UCR ARTSblock. He was chief curator at Laguna Art Museum prior to his arrival at UCR in 2006. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts. His curatorial projects focus on contemporary art, with a special emphasis on the exploration of identity, technology, photo-based work, and urban culture. For more information see http://tylerstallings.com.
Copyright: © 2017 Tyler Stallings. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Posted in: Articles, Photography/Art
Tagged in: Art, Immigration, Literature, Science
Ayahuasca-naut: A Zen Student's Experiment with Shamanic Medicine
What is a River in California?


documents indicating a right of ownership (such as stocks, bonds, letters of credit, bills of exchange, checks, and bills of lading) that may only be redeemed upon their presentation. The various categories of securities are (1) securities made out in the name of a specific person, (2) securities made out in the name of the first purchaser and "at his order" (meaning that the person indicated thereon is entitled to transfer the securities by endorsement), and (3) securities that are payable to the bearer and do not indicate in whose name they were issued.
The loss of securities usually means loss of the right to redemption expressed therein. In some instances, however, measures are indicated to protect the rightful owner. Thus a procedure is established in Soviet legislation by means of which the rights of the bearer may be restored upon loss of a savings book.
In capitalist society the principal types of securities are stocks and bonds issued by capitalist enterprises and state loan bonds. Mortgage deeds issued by mortgage banks on land, houses, and other immovable property are a special kind of bond. Securities may represent a capital share in an enterprise or may be evidence of money lent out, and they may confer the right to a regular income in the form of dividends or interest.
The issuance of securities is one of the most important operations of finance capital; it is used by monopolies to extract maximum profits—for example, the huge amounts of founders' profits obtained from the issuance of securities of newly organized stock companies. Since securities yield an income to their owners, they are bought and sold at specified prices on the stock exchange.
As China's financial market is opened step by step, the merger and restructuring in China's future securities industry will show the following tendencies: Firstly, mixed operation will become the mainstream.
Chapter Nine offers an analysis of the development trends of China's securities brokerage market in terms of industry restructuring, the transforming business model and increasing foreign participation.
Finally, a complete directory of China's securities companies, regulators and related organizations can be found in the Appendix.
Midas Securities has already begun work with Bridge Securities to implement interface of the Midas Global Direct Access Network into Bridge Securities' existing system with the newly developed architecture of Quote and Order servers.
Midas Securities is the first company to provide a direct link between Korean investors and the U.
In September 2006, it reached an interim agreement that has returned stability to the market, and the value of hybrid securities has rebounded.
Hybrid securities have been around for decades and play an important role in Insurers' investments.
We are not convinced that a compelling case has been made at this time for legislative action that does not thoroughly address the basic framework that governs the securities activities of banks.
Generally, the activities of banks, including those securities activities that are conducted in the bank, are regulated under the banking laws by the banking regulators, and securities firms are regulated under the securities laws by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and self-regulatory organizations (SROs).


text:
The Na Tcha Exhibition Room
The time-honoured Na Tcha Customs and Beliefs of Macao, having been passed down from generation to generation, were inscribed on the National Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2014. To manifest the diversity of Macao's culture, and contribute to the long-standing safeguarding and sustainable transmission of Na Tcha Customs and Beliefs, the 'Na Tcha Exhibition Hall' was unveiled in 2012. Choreographed by the Cultural Affair Bureau and supported by the Na Tcha Temple Association and residents nearby, this initiative enabled locals and visitors to grasp the festivities, history and customs related and dedicated to this Deity.
The exhibition room in Na Tcha Temple, a construction that brings together the traditional and the modern, has a total area of around 70 m2. This room presents the legend of Na Tcha and its festivities and exhibits several objects used in the celebration of the deity's birthday, such as religious incense burners, couplets, objects used in religious processions, like the Sedan-Chair of Na Tcha, the ceremonial umbrella, lion heads, and also firecrackers for the religious festivities, among others. Furthermore, the Cultural Affairs Bureau has created a video about Na Tcha's festivities and has compiled, on an eBook format, photographs of commemorative activities in honour of this deity taken during the last decades, allowing the visitors to witness the history and the evolution of these traditions. The exhibition showcases eight drawings explaining the origins of Na Tcha's legend in a didactic way, being the work of a local popular cartoonist, named Ah-Cheng. Through these objects, the visitors can better understand the meaning of the Na Tcha beliefs and traditions, as well as experience the festive atmosphere of its celebrations. Also exhibited in this space are artifacts and construction remains found during archaeological excavations, believed to have belonged to the western wing of the Church of Mater Dei.
Address: Pátio do Espinho no. 6
(No admission after 5:30 pm. Closed on Wednesdays. Open on the remaining days of the week, including on public holidays)
Please call (853)28366866 during office hours
Email: webmaster@icm.gov.mo
Visitor capacity: The Exhibition Room can accommodate a maximum of 20 visitors at any one time.

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Monica Ferro, Director of UNFPA Geneva, said the figures were "worrisome" and it was essential to raise the level of consent and access to vital health services, for millions of women around the world. "Don't forget: each one of these numbers is a person", she added. The findings, relating to women aged 15-49, are being published for the first time, as part of UNFPA's State of World Population 2019 report. The report shows that an estimated 214 million women cannot easily access contraceptives because of cultural and economic obstacles - despite their increasing availability - while more than 800 women die every day from preventable causes during pregnancy and childbirth.
According to the analysis, the absence of reproductive and sexual rights has a major and negative repercussions on women's education, income and safety, leaving them "unable to shape their own futures". Those women and girls left behind "are typically poor, rural and less educated", Ms Ferro said, adding that "two-thirds of all maternal deaths today occur in sub-Saharan Africa".
In addition to economic concerns, girls who marry early face serious health risks too, added the senior official: "If she is married at 10, the probability is, that she will start child-bearing before her body is even ready for that, not to talk about her mind...This will also increase the possibilities of her going through complications in pregnancy, and complications in childbirth." Additional health risks caused by barriers that block women's access to contraception also include a "staggering" 376 million new infections of chlamydia, gonorrhoea or syphilis every day, among people between the ages of 15 and 44, the UNFPA Geneva Director added.


Now that your teeth are whiter, what is the proper way to take care of them? No more daily bleaching for as long as four hours. Do you have to brush your teeth now? What can you drink and eat, should you floss and rinse and if yes, how often and how?
Whitening systems are created to meet the specific requirements and needs of individuals. You can find various teeth whitening systems online, designed by competent cosmetic dentists. But which one do you choose? The choice will not be easy without support and some prior knowledge. It is important to be realistic about what you want and can be achieved. The first thing to determine is the level of whitening, based on your preferences. Some people want to restore the natural color of their teeth, while others want to make them much whiter. You cannot get a movie-star smile; if this is what you want, don't waste your time and money. This type of whiteness is achieved with the help of special lighting effects.
It is normal to have unevenly colored teeth after bleaching, but that depends on the extent to which it occurs. With time, the color will appear more even. Yet, the reason for uneven color may be what you do. The first thing to do is avoid many common mistakes people make post-bleaching, such as consuming products known to stain teeth like wine, coffee, soy sauce, coke, and so on.
Yellow teeth look extremely repulsive and while there is a consensus on this statement people still have doubts what causes yellow teeth. Spotting the cause is inevitable to treat the problem, since if you know well about the causes of yellow teeth you may be in a better position to uproot the problem.
Do you have yellow teeth and would like a sparkling smile without having to visit the dentist? Well, the most simple and cost-effective method is to get teeth whitening strips. They are a preferred choice of a lot of people and are also quite simple to use. Cheap and easily available, these strips are also makeup for your teeth. If you have to attend any occasion (where you are forced to smile!) you can simply apply the strips for a white shine.
Discolored teeth can be very embarrassing in case you dare smile with them in a social gathering. With the increasing consumption of nicotine and alcohol, the cases of teeth discoloration are also drastically increasing, though certain other factors also contribute like improper tooth brushing or altogether negligence in this respect.
Teeth whitening is a costly method that can cost anyone around $400 to $2000 depending primarily on the type of treatment one gets and the dental clinic one chooses. Moreover, since the bleaching teeth costs are not covered by insurance plans; therefore, you would have to spend this amount in direct cash. Teeth whitening done at a dental office may include scaling (removing grime from the gums) and other particle removing techniques that may be uncomfortable and also painful. Therefore, if you are in no mood to burn a hole in your pocket or endure pain, better grab some teeth whitening products readily available in the stores near your home or online.
Having discolored or yellow teeth is a contributing factor to being depressed or being anti-social, as you wouldn't dare to smile or laugh around people. Who wouldn't love a set of beautiful, white teeth, but the ever needed caffeine drinks, the smoky puffs, the soothing alcohol, all adds up to discolored teeth. An average person often ignores his dental health, as he is not able to afford the high fees of dentists. But hold on; is this the only way out?.Well it should not be, since there are so many procedures of teeth whitening at home which are not just cost effective but also convenient.
Smile is the most captivating thing in an individual's personality. But wait! It is only the most beautiful attribute if it is a shining, glowing smile!. Isn't this the case; would you like to see someone passing big smiles let alone laugh out loud with disgusting yellow or discolored teeth showing off to the world.
No matter where people live they want to have a glistening pair of teeth and would try out anything to make sure their teeth are free of repelling stains. There are different types of whitening products that are used by people with yellow or discolored teeth like the whitening trays, whitening strips, home remedies and whitening toothpastes etc.


The Nokia 6010 is a solid entry-level mobile phone with a color user interface.
While on a call keeps dropping out or the sound is garbled.
The Nokia 6010 was released on both the AT&T and T-Mobile networks in 2004. The phone was popular because it was affordable, nearly indestructible, and had great reception and sound quality, making it a solid choice for an entry-level phone. This phone was the successor of the Nokia 3595; it was styled in the typical Nokia candy bar style and supports a 4,096-color screen and some level of user customization in the format of themes. The phone's memory can store up to 500 contacts (each with 5 numbers).


Surviving spouses are not required to pay inheritance tax, and taxes are not assessed on living trusts or on gifts up to a value of £715, per U.S. law as of October 2010. But if you['re not a spouse or a recipieint, how do you legally avoid inheritance tax? If you set up an irrevocable trust, your heirs and beneficiaries can avoid paying any inheritance tax at your death. A trust is a... Negotiating inheritance's death and taxes An inheritance can often mean having to handle life's two grim inevitables.
Inheritance taxes are unavoidable, but there are a couple of ways to help reduce the amount of taxes your beneficiaries will pay on your property in France. You might consider making a lifetime gift of the property. While the tax rates and allowances are generally the same for a recipient of a lifetime gift, the tax rate will be reduced by 50% if you are under age 65 or 30% if you are between... Hopefully, this free QNUPS guide will help you reduce your capital gains tax, income tax and inheritance tax exposure on your worldwide assets. A QNUPS can be an umbrella to protect your worldwide assets from unnecessary assets.
To see all the allowances and relief available to help mitigate you potential Inheritance Tax Liability please go to our Inheritance Tax Allowances – How to avoid the taxman section To receive qualified and ethical advice in relation to any aspect of your Scottish Will-Writing and Estate Planning requirements, please visit our contact page .... National inheritance taxes exist in many other developed countries, such as the UK, USA, Germany, Belgium, the Republic of Ireland, France, and Japan (see next chart via Fairfax).
Personal Allowances Each person has £325,000 called the Nil Rate Band, anything over this is taxed at 40%. Spouse's Exemption There is no Inheritance Tax payable on transfers (gifts), whatever the value, between married couples or civil partners.
The inheritance tax, in some respects like the real estate tax, is a lien against any real estate which is subject to the tax. It can therefore, if unpaid, create title problems.
A guide to Inheritance Tax Only a small percentage of estates are large enough to incur Inheritance Tax (IHT), but you mustn't forget to factor this tax into your plans when you make your will. Our guide explains what IHT is, how to work out what you need to pay and when, and some of the ways you can reduce this tax.
Indeed, if you plan ahead, you can legally reduce your inheritance tax bill. Clearly the best way forward is to avoid paying any tax altogether and that is to reduce your estate value to below the current threshold of £325,000. Start enjoying your retirement is always the first piece of practical advice.


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text:
witch hunts Dec. 15, 2016
Senate Report Calls on the Department of Justice to Investigate Planned Parenthood
By Lisa Ryan
Planned Parenthood supporters. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
The Senate Judiciary Committee released a new report on Tuesday, calling on the Department of Justice to investigate Planned Parenthood over claims the organization and medical-research companies sold fetal tissue. The report is merely the latest in a series of ongoing attacks against Planned Parenthood by Republican lawmakers.
Committee chairman Senator Chuck Grassley, a man who is perhaps best known for his inane tweets, accused the organization of "turn[ing] a blind eye" to its affiliates' alleged practice of selling aborted fetuses for medical research. Yet, in October 2015, Planned Parenthood took steps to ensure that the "handful of health centers" involved in fetal-tissue research no longer receive any reimbursement for the reasonable and legal expenses associated with tissue donation.
At the time, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards said in a statement that the new policy should remove "beyond the shadow of a doubt the ludicrous idea that Planned Parenthood has any financial interest in fetal tissue donation." The policy change should also show that the GOP's ongoing investigation into the matter has nothing to do with fetal-tissue research and "everything to do with banning abortion in the U.S."
However, in a Tuesday statement, Senator Grassley accused Planned Parenthood of enabling the practice to continue. "I don't take lightly making a criminal referral. But, the seeming disregard for the law by these entities has been fueled by decades of utter failure by the Justice Department to enforce it," Grassley said. "And, unless there is a renewed commitment by everyone involved against commercializing the trade in aborted fetal body parts for profit, then the problem is likely to continue."
Planned Parenthood Is Preparing to Be Defunded Under Trump
abortion rights
GOP Wants DOJ to Investigate Planned Parenthood


But it's not. Don't despair, my dear friends, here are some real examples. Heck ya, I've got a badass moose pulling my sleigh.
Wish I could see this exhibit. Women of Vision: National Geographic Photographers on Assignment. Are you lucky enough to live in DC? Go forth and see it!
Usually they say the oldest kid in the class has the advantage, but here's a new take on that. Youngest kid, smartest kid?
I've never worked in the Restaurant industry so have no formal perspective, but as a patron, I'd gladly embrace this policy: What Happens When You Abolish Tipping. I pretty much tip 15%, no matter the quality of service. Why would I like it automatically included in the bill? Because I hate doing the math. Yes, pure laziness.
Are you shopping for previously used/vintage/flea market home decor pieces but hate combing through garage and estate sales? Then FleaPop is for you. It's an online site where decorators sell the stuff that won't fit in their homes anymore. Most people will ship and some stuff is local. Which is great if you're in Los Angeles, not so fabulous if you're in Seattle (a search of my area turned up...nothing).
Parenting: The Sound of Silence = Trouble. Yes, yes, yes.
Another article on the whole work/life balance debate. I'm Not Ambitious and That's OK.
Three Rules for Bedtime Reading [Thanks Melinda!].
Tear-jerker of the day. In Sickness and in Health: A Wedding in the Shadow of Cancer. Worth looking it, if even just for the photos.
When to visit Urgent Care vs. the Emergency Room. Knowing the difference could save time and money.
Love this modern pre-fab house. From a Seattle firm!
And while we're talking modern...taking it to the garden.
Hey look! One of my relative's is selling her cottage. Right. That would be the other side of the Dorrance family tree, not mine. Damn it.


text:
Норфолк () — місто () в США, в окрузі Медісон штату Небраска. Населення —  осіб (2010).

Географія
Норфолк розташований за координатами  (42.034488, -97.421039).  За даними Бюро перепису населення США в 2010 році місто мало площу 27,93 км², з яких 27,69 км² — суходіл та 0,24 км² — водойми.

Демографія

Згідно з переписом 2010 року, у місті мешкало  осіб у  домогосподарствах у складі  родин. Густота населення становила 867 осіб/км².  Було 10625 помешкань (380/км²).

Расовий склад населення:

До двох чи більше рас належало 2,0 %. Частка іспаномовних становила 12,1 % від усіх жителів.

За віковим діапазоном населення розподілялося таким чином: 24,5 % — особи молодші 18 років, 60,9 % — особи у віці 18—64 років, 14,6 % — особи у віці 65 років та старші. Медіана віку мешканця становила 35,5 року. На 100 осіб жіночої статі у місті припадало 96,2 чоловіків;  на 100 жінок у віці від 18 років та старших — 94,2 чоловіків також старших 18 років.

Середній дохід на одне домашнє господарство  становив  доларів США (медіана — ), а середній дохід на одну сім'ю —  доларів (медіана — ). Медіана доходів становила  доларів для чоловіків та  доларів для жінок. За межею бідності перебувало 16,5 % осіб, у тому числі 24,0 % дітей у віці до 18 років та 6,5 % осіб у віці 65 років та старших.

Цивільне працевлаштоване населення становило  осіб. Основні галузі зайнятості: освіта, охорона здоров'я та соціальна допомога — 24,1 %, виробництво — 15,9 %, роздрібна торгівля — 12,4 %.

Примітки

Джерела

Міста Небраски
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What does kale + orange + omega3 equal? A beautifying, satisfying, detoxifying and brain-boosting lunch. This recipe was all that and more! Forget the old notion that healthy food is tasteless, bland and boring because this couldn't be further from the truth. If you are stuck in sandwich-lunch-land then you must join me on my healthy island of delicious lunch bowls.
Last night I made this salad dressing at dinner to go with my leafy greens and then again today for lunch because it was SOOO freakin delish!
4 tbsp orange (naturally) flavoured Omega 3 fish oil. (Note: This does NOT have a fishy taste. I used the Genuine Health brand and I bought it from Whole Foods). If you don't have this or you are vegan, then use hemp or flax oil.
Method: Place all your dressing ingredients into a food processor and blend till the mint is completely chopped up, about 30 seconds. Place your leafy greens into a large bowl and toss with the dressing. Sprinkle with walnuts and orange slices.
This salad is great for a cloudy or damp day because it will brighten your spirit, not only because the omega 3s are so brain-loving, but it has such a fresh and uplifting taste.
ps. Last week I made a Kale Quinoa Sweet Potato Bowl and enjoyed it for a few lunches.
What a pretty dish of food bet it tasted wonderful!
What is your opinion about kale containing a measurable amount of oxalates and how that affects our bodies? I come from a culture that consumes a lot of kale, so I'd be interested in hearing your take on eating raw kale...good or bad?
Ps. I eat both raw and cooked - just depends what I'm in the mood for. Cooking doesn't do much to the oxalates.


In this lesson, we'll be focusing on the harmony of the Dorian scale.
Although there are other minor scales out there (especially the natural minor scale which is the traditional scale of the minor key), the Dorian scale remains one of the greatest scale option for minor chords because of its harmony.
In the next few segments, we'll be looking at the chords that are associated with the Dorian scale and you'll see why the Dorian scale is important.
Alright! Now that we've refreshed our minds on the Dorian scale, let's proceed to studying its harmony.
Jermaine Griggs will always say "scales form chords" and the Dorian scale is one of the minor scale options that cannot be ignored because of it is compatibility with several chord sizes (or widths).
Let's go ahead and explore the harmony of the Dorian scale starting from the most basic chord width (the triad) to extended chords (like the thirteenth).
Attention: Due to the fact that the Dorian scale is a minor scale, all the chords or harmonies associated with it will inherit the minor quality. For example, the triad of the Dorian scale is the minor triad, while the seventh chord of the Dorian scale is the minor seventh chord.
…consisting of D, F, and A.
…consisting of D, F, A, and B.
…consisting of D, F, A, and C.
…consisting of D, F, A, C, and E.
…consisting of D, F, A, C, E, and G.
…consisting of D, F, A, C, E, G, and B.
Go ahead and memorize all the chords associated with the Dorian scale in all the keys and also experiment with them.
Attention: If you have a suggestion, contribution, or comment, please feel free to enter it in the comment box below.
Who Else Wants To Understand How The "1-4" Idea Transposition Works?


Why Does the Obama Administration Want to OUST Netanyahu?
"We write to express strong concerns over the recent media reports that a U.S. taxpayer funded 501(c)(3) non-profit organization called OneVoice is actively working with a campaign operation called V15 or 'Victory 2015' in an effort to influence the outcome of the elections in Israel on March 17, 2015," wrote Cruz and Zeldin.
Obama has sent an army of organizers to Israel to influence the elections that he hopes will oust Benjamin Netanyahu from office. In my opinion the reason for this is because Netanyahu is uncompromising when it comes to the maintaining Israel's now existing borders. He will never go back to the 1967 borders as this is indefensible and the HAMAS, Hezbollah and the Iranians know this…. as well as Obama.
Netanyahu stands in the way of Obama dismantling the state of Israel. I will go so far as posit the idea that Obama was backed by the Saudi government in 2008, and was elected to office to stand down and do nothing when the times to come to wipe Israel off the map. To much conspiracy for Super Bowl weekend? How about this link which uncovers the ??truth?? about Obama?
The sending of political hatchet men and women to Israel may be unprecedented. If Obama is actually a Moslem, which many people believe, then this explains his actions. Why does his administration refuse to call the actions of radical Islamists, terrorism?
As most of you who come here on a regular basis know, Israel is surrounded by those who pose a direct existential threat to her. Netanyahu is one tough leader who knows what his country is up against and will do anything to protect her. The picture at the top of the blog shows Netanyahu in front of the United Nations holding the blueprints for the Auschwitz concentration camp, which I wrote about in an earlier post this week. His wife lost most of her family in the camp. Over 1 million people died in that horrible place.
Let's be honest here. The only reason to oust Netanyahu is to pave the way for some leader who will kowtow to the bidding of Obama in the last two years of his presidency. Most likely to persuade this "new Israeli president" to go back to the 1967 borders, which we all know are indefensible. There is an agenda here that is subversive and I hope Ted Cruz blows the whistle on it!
In closing todays post. Super Bowl Sunday is only two days away and I will be watching the Katy Perry half time show and taking copious notes. Check out the BLOG on Monday morning for my report. In the meantime we need to pray and stand with Netanyahu.
I'm closing the comment section again as I have grown weary of the infighting and off topic remarks. L.A.
The US Petro-dollar – Collapsing Soon?
Switzerland had just abandoned its peg of the Swiss Franc to the Euro. The result was mayhem with an immediate 30% drop in the value of the Euro against the Franc, and billions of dollars of trading losses by banks and investors around the world.
I guess the big story—the distraction of the week—is deflated footballs in last weeks big game. Meanwhile the currency wars continue and the Swiss Frank leapt 30% against the Euro, just like that.
Our currency is propped up artificially and at some point it will collapse. As I have stated before on this blog, the sanctions against Russia stems from their leading the charge of the BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—to move the worlds default currency from the dollar. This is a no-no and this is the real reason gas prices are down, to cripple Russia as she is the worlds second largest exporter of black gold.
So what happens when the dollar crashes?
In closing todays Update: The graph above shows us the decline of our purchasing power with our hard-earned dollars. We are being managed by those who care little for our families, and the well-being of this country. I would put forth there is a dark agenda—The Mystery of Iniquity—working behind the scenes. Like old man Potter, in It's A Wonderful Life, these men and woman want to control every facet of our lives. Avarice is there middle name. This is one reason why we have NASA spying on Americans. Welcome to the Orwellian age, where you work your tail off and never really get ahead. If you live in Europe you wake up and find your savings depleted by 30%, and why? Because the game is rigged. Collapse of the dollar in 2015? Perhaps….
Guest Blogger – Richard Shaw!
This is an article written by the Director and Producer of the Watchers series and the newly released Torah Code film. In keeping with the Sunday Bun, I thought it would be pertinent to post it here. It will also be featured in our Monthly E-News Magazine.
I had to write about a disturbing trend.
I do believe in Freedom of Speech that is at the core of our Constitution. It means that unsuspecting souls can listen to haughty and arrogant people and that is okay. You can be rude, impolite, uncouth, crass and conniving and it's all legal. It also means that simple-minded people can be enlightened by very smart people with good ideas and pure intent. I love it when that happens.
We live in a rapidly advancing technological civilization that is having unintended consequences on a global level.
We watch old movies where people seem to stay the same age generation after generation. 100 years ago, we made Stars out of people for the first time back in the silent picture days. Actors and actresses were turned into icons — advancing into stardom in a way that mankind had never experienced before. Why? Because before all that happened, there was no film, no radio, no way of getting audio and visual information disseminated worldwide in a few days. Now, it's instantly available, virtually anywhere. Immediate, and expected. It's been shot on someone's cell phone and uploaded. Big events are seen by millions overnight. This is a virtually new phenomena. There is no longer time for an evaluation of the facts. It is also a new development when the governments of the world are basically no longer really in charge, but huge mega corporations with billions in revenue can foster change and mandate rules that can turn entire nations into serfs. It was revealed that 1% of the world's population now have 99% of the world's wealth. This also is a shocking figure with dire consequences. If it continues, the level of greed will reach a pinnacle where the people of the world will become enslaved.
With the rise of YouTube, little fiefdoms have sprung up. Manned by individuals that should never be on TV in the first place, many are argumentative. Shouting at the camera. Know it alls. Unpleasant and strident. Guys in front of their webcams holed up in their sometimes messy bedrooms that suddenly have the power to share their poison to a larger community. Most of the time when I look at this stuff, it just looks ridiculous. Many just want to gain YouTube subscribers at any cost, like "crazy Al's" will do anything to build their business, ministry, or whatever. With all dignity and humility abandoned, they air their grievances about others in an open forum with the dangerous potential of thousands of world-wide viewers — using this platform to cut others down, openly disagree with their ideas and research — criticizing things of which they have no intimate knowledge or have ever attempted themselves. The more degrading and provocative, the greater number of YouTube hits they receive. Essentially, being "rewarded" for being truly obnoxious antagonists. When all they actually do is sit on their butts in front of a webcam. It's extraordinary.
The problem with this is that many unsuspecting folks may take this information at face value instead of seeing what is really going on. Such rantings are not filled with light, but often make you feel uncomfortable, and at worst case, depressed. Some revel in hearing it, as though by cutting down someone else, justice is somehow served. Others, steeped in boyhood church dogmas that they've never taken apart and studied themselves, rise up and join the critique. In a way reminiscent of mob violence, corresponding comments from viewers are rife with incredibly bad English, obscenities, and insults — towards people that they don't even know. It's inept, unChristlike, and in short, plain ignorant. Yet, the internet is filled with this rage, and it is growing as fast as Islam.
Some that are rich, tend to try and exploit those who are doing real ministry work. Making high-sounding promises that are not kept, while formulating their own businesses by building off the work of others and calling it their own. They must not think we notice what they're doing.
Spiritual things are usually not black and white. We can't totally understand them but if we are humble and search with pure intent there are those times when real trues seem to come tumbling out when you least expect it. The rules are often hidden from view. The scriptures pounded and quoted in rants all over the net are often spoken out of context, often by the one who yells the loudest or has the most subscribers, or the most money. This is not in keeping with how we're supposed to act. In fact, it's the total opposite. In my opinion, those who make their daily routine the criticism of others, or of others work, should be summarily ignored. A steady diet of constant ridicule is not intelligent or healthy, and makes one wonder what the true motivations of such a thing really is. We seem to be falling into an abyss of abusive and denigrating comments.
With all that is happening in the world that seems to be weirdly and strangely prophetic, we waste time arguing about the dumbest things. Were the footballs rigged by not filling them with enough air? Who could have done this?? It's embarrassingly moronic. Yet it persists in the media and re-hashed over and over for days ad nauseam.
Many times, those that rant about others are the most unlikely participants; pastors with ministries, guys with doctorates in front of their names — people you wouldn't expect to actually have time to use such tactics to get YouTube hits or new subscribers to their blogs. But often, these same people don't seem to have much to talk about unless they are cutting someone else down, and that's pretty pathetic in my opinion. At a certain point, it feels like an act of desperation, and sometimes desperate people are like the girl at school that no one wants to date and resorts to unconventional tactics.
Because there is a national lack of trust in the media, or our government, and other related factions, it tends to make us wonder if some of these people are paid disinformation operatives. We know this is going on, but we don't know who those corps are that are promoting them, or why they would agree to do such a thing for money. But then, I'm amazed at what people will do for cash these days. Greed in a sanctuary once was the only thing that caused Jesus to take a whip and drive out the money-changers. It was the only time we ever read that he did anything other than show love to others.
I'm not talking about standing up for freedom or our rights as a citizen. I'm not arguing about making your voice heard when it could make a difference in a positive way. I'm referring to argumentative people who thrive on making themselves look large by standing on the shoulders of others they criticize.
I'd rather be discovering something — doing an experiment in the lab, spending time with a few rabbis in Israel where they're showing me what they're finding in the Torah Codes, listening to those who have had miracles happen in their life — that sort of thing. To me, that's enormous fun. We can sort out the details later.
There are secrets now being revealed, but not to those who already think they know all the answers — that miracles were for another time. It's even more fun when you can explore in an air of openness and non-critical attitudes — voice an opinion knowing that it won't be immediately cut down by some arrogant dude in the room. Imagine all that could be done in such an environment? Throw anything on the table, no matter how improbable, and there might be a new idea brewing there. Being able to share and explore anything and showing how great something could be is how Steve Jobs forever changed the computing world. I'm not saying we have to be idiots and never have a different point of view, but we can present those in a way that fosters more and even greater ideas. Encouraging others without tearing someone else down. This brings me to a discussion I had with one of the most brilliant and humble men I have ever known, professor Eliyahu Rips in Jerusalem.
The last time I spent with this genius, this mathematical wizard, the developer of the Torah Codes, I was actually able to show him a segment from WATCHERS 8. I also brought a casting of the baby mummy skull with me to Israel and set it on his table. The night before, I was talking with him on the phone and gently relating the discoveries that L.A. and I were doing. Gently, because I didn't know what his reaction might be to the topic of UFOs and the possible Nephilim examples in Peru. He began an impassioned speech on the phone. His voice raised and he said something as best I can remember (I was so shocked at the time that I had to just sit an listen), "people have no idea of what is really going on in this Universe." He went on, and it felt that the phone had somehow become electrified and the hair stood up on my arms. I will never forget it. Of course, he was correct. He knew we were living in amazing times and believed that only the smartest people would retain an open mind and yet he knew there was also a lot of fakery going on as well.
1) King Abdullah died today, and the powers that be in Yemen stepped down. Systems in the Middle East are collapsing.
2) oil prices are at record lows, and Russia and Iran are under extreme financial and diplomatic pressure.
3) Switzerland removed the pegs from the Franc, and the Euro is losing its value.
4) The US is now over $18 trillion in debt, and the dollar could topple at any moment, regardless what the Stock Market is doing.
5) China has become the world's most powerful economy, over the U.S.
6) Israel is surrounded by warring factions wanting to kill Jews, while the rest of the world seems to always be on the side of the Palestinians and Hamas, (a terrorist organization). Obama has displayed his propensity towards being Islamic, and Boehner invited Netanyahu to the US without even telling Obama. What is Obama's real agenda?
7) ISIS is growing, and France doesn't realize how intrenched their Muslim population is.
8) Fraud is in the internet and every aspect of economic funds transfers. Hackers are finding new ways to break into credit card accounts and private files. As more and more transactions are done on mobile devices or wireless means, the possibility of fraud or invasion of personal information increases.
9) the governments of the world are using every means to track, surveil and identify everyone, whether they are a known terrorist or not. Drones are getting more sophisticated, and facial recognition software is rapidly becoming more sophisticated. Now, there is software that can be used to control groups of drones, in swarms, and they will all fly as a coordinated cluster.
10) scientists are playing with the DNA of man and of plants and animals. If not dealt with soon, we could become permanently transformed with unknown results as new generations are exposed to toxins, genetically modified foods, radioactivity, and other known and unknown chemical or virus-related illnesses.
11) Fukushima continues to quietly release tons of radioactive water per day into the Pacific Ocean. Now, they're finding whales beaching themselves as other weird sea creatures wash up on California shores. We could lose more sea life. Scientists are becoming alarmed.
12) there is daily geo-engineering going on around the world as planes continue to spray aerosols into the atmosphere to control the weather. This has been confirmed, that nano-sized particles of aluminum, barium and boron are being sprayed in enormous volume into the atmosphere. Then, the stock market is betting on its effects to crops and the world, and the elite make billions.
I wrote some of these things to rabbi Glazerson this evening, since he is the one looking for Codes on the Messiah, as well as professor Rips and Art Levitt.
I find myself stopping just to pray about whatever that's concerning me, whenever the moment strikes. I know something is about to happen, and yet I could be wrong. I've been fooled before. All I know is that I've never seen a time quite like this. I find it disturbing and unsettling, and I'm sure someone will read this and say that I am a f—ing idiot, among other expletives that are now commonplace on the net.
Don't have the Monthly E-News Magazine? Go to www.lamarzulli.net and sign up for it today!
Notice what Yashua/Jesus says here, that people will know we His disciples by the love we have for one another. This is our ultimate witness to those around us. Being His disciple is not about how many books we've read, or all the head knowledge or degrees that hang on our walls.
Sometimes we can lose sight of Jesus' admonition and become absorbed in what we think we know. However, I would posit that in the end it all comes down to the love that we show to those around us. This love can not be manufactured. It's not something we can somehow turn on by ourselves. This love–Agape in the Greek—comes from the indwelling of the Spirit of the Living God. He can fill us with this love on a daily basis, but we can also choose not to be filled.
Holding bitterness in out hearts toward anyone or any circumstance in our lives, can be a deterrent to God's love working through us. In other words if we are consumed by bitterness it's hard for His love to come through us, as we have chosen to block it by our own actions.
We love each other because He first loved us. We love each other because the same spirit that resides in us resides in others who have believed in Him who was sent to redeem the whole world, through his giving of his body on Calvary for the saving of our souls.
This love can be a witness to those around us. People watch us to see how we react. When a situation doesn't go our way do we react in love? When someone cuts us off on the freeway do we pray for the driver or flip him or her the bird?
The Body of the Anointed One—or those who believe on Him who was sent—is at best fractured. Recently I posted on the Cepher Bible and a certain radio host blasted away at me essentially hitting me over the head with the King James Only claim. He never contacted me, he just blasted away. How does that match up with the above phrase? I love the King James, but I read many translations including the Interlinear Bible. I realize the importance of scripture and certainly put the King James Bible in a class by itself, but does this warrant the blasting away that happened?
In some ways it's not what we accomplish or how "right" we may be, it's the interaction between people that we encounter along the way. It's about the love we show toward one another.
8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there beknowledge, it shall vanish away.
In the end it all comes down to the love we show each other….
L. A. Marzulli Appears on Prophecy Watchers! On the Trail of the Nephilim II.
L. A. Marzulli on Prophecy Watchers!
Gary is at his best in this interview!


text:
Remembering Daddy (GuyFawkes)
Daddy's Den
Legacy Review Site (Formerly daddysreview.com)
Public Images
No Cum Shot, But Still Important
By + Lucky
September 27, 2007 in The Lounge
This topic is 5601 days old and is no longer open for new replies. Replies are automatically disabled after two years of inactivity. Please create a new topic instead of posting here.
+ Lucky
+ Supporters
Lucky Member
This thread is about a pretty big decision made by a Federal Appeals Court, but it is not going to really bore you unless you are a creditor. You see credit reporting agencies like Experian have become gods. Anyone can make a bad credit report against you and they can put it on your record and you're screwed the next time you want credit, even if they put something untrue up there. The top three credit reporting agencies have become like gods. Creditors don't have to take you to court and win, they just ruin your credit rating. There is no easy remedy for you to fight them once they get you.
So a Federal Court just ruled AGAINST the little guy, as usual when it comes to money, but then they took the shocking step of overruling themselves and ruling FOR the little guy in the same case. Now Experian and the others might have to be a little more careful. Read the story and see:
Court reverses itself - finds credit agency violated man's rights
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
A federal appeals court has reversed itself and ruled that a Southern California man's rights were violated by a credit agency that put an erroneous court filing on his record, refused to change it when he complained and wrecked his hopes of starting a business.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco had voted 2-1 in May to dismiss Jason Dennis' lawsuit, saying the credit agency had conducted an adequate investigation of his case. But on Tuesday, the same panel, by a 3-0 ruling, not only reinstated the suit but also found the agency negligent for failing to correct the error.
The court told a federal judge who had previously dismissed the suit to decide how much Dennis should receive in damages and attorney's fees from Experian Information Solutions, a credit reporting agency. The court also said Dennis was entitled to a trial on his claim that Experian failed to adopt reasonable procedures to assure accurate reporting, which could lead to additional damages.
"This case illustrates how important it is for Experian, a company that traffics in the reputations of ordinary people, to train its employees to understand the legal significance of the documents they rely on," Judge Alex Kozinski wrote. Kozinski had dissented from the ruling in May, by Judges Diarmuid O'Scannlain and Carlos Bea, that threw out the lawsuit.
The court issued its new ruling after Dennis' lawyer, Louis Dell, filed a request for rehearing. Dell said Wednesday that his filing pointed out evidence that the court may have previously overlooked - a document that should have cleared up Dennis' record - but he doesn't know why the panel changed course. The court gave no explanation for its reversal.
Credit reporting agencies have the power to "put you in a financial prison," Dell said. He said the ruling should send a message to agencies that "once you find out that you're reporting inaccurate information, you can't keep reporting that error."
Experian spokesman Don Girard said the company doesn't comment on pending cases. (Damn easy to see why...Lucky)
Dennis was sued by his landlord over rental payments in 2002. The case was later settled, with the landlord dismissing the suit in exchange for Dennis' agreement to pay $1,959. But a document in the Los Angeles Superior Court file mistakenly stated that a legal judgment had been entered against Dennis, a report that Experian picked up when it conducted a credit check of Dennis.
Dennis told the company of the error and said the settlement and dismissal were reported in another document in the court file. He said Experian's refusal to alter its conclusion left him with a blot on his record that prevented him from getting loans for a planned film production business and also prompted his next landlord to demand a higher security deposit.
He sued Experian under a federal law that requires credit agencies to take reasonable steps to verify the accuracy of credit reports, and to reinvestigate reports that have been challenged. The panel majority ruled in May that the company had acted reasonably by relying on the court record, but reached a different conclusion Tuesday.
Because the first court document was inaccurate, Kozinski said, Dennis is entitled to a trial on whether Experian took reasonable steps to guard against inaccuracies. And he said the company was negligent in misunderstanding or ignoring the second document that showed the case had been dismissed.
Guest PWIT
Very interesting. I haven't had to worry about my credit for a while but lately have been thinking of selling and moving. So I thought I would seek out and get copies of my credit report at each of three credit reporting agencies. I had two blips on each of the report. Both negative reportings were in error. One, with the bank I have used for 19 years was very easy to get cleared up. The other, with my internet service provider, has been a pain. In the latter case, the ISP actually owed me a credit that got reported as a delinquent bill. You wouldn't believe the number of calls it has taken to clear up.
Bottom line, take advantage of the free annual report you can get from each of the reporting agencies. If you find errors, be sure to dispute the entries. Below is site where you can go to get your free credit reports.
http://www.annualcreditreport.com
Gay romance or mystery novels
By + glennnnn
Who chooses their sexual orientation?
By pubic_assistance
Cruisin' for a Bruisin'...Does Paul Pelosi have a gay past?
By Kippy
By Whitman
NEIGHBOURS SON !!
By joethomas
By marylander1940
Started April 8, 2019
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