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No, Queer Women Aren't "Just Experimenting"
They aren't "just going through a phase," either. But female queerness continues to be qualified, belittled, and disbelieved.
Shannon Keating
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Michael Buckner / Getty Images
PATRICK DEMARCHELIER / Vogue
Courtesy of Demi Lovato / Instagram
In Vogue's July cover story, model and actress Cara Delevingne told writer Rob Haskell that she's particularly happy with who she is these days because she's in love with her girlfriend, Annie Clark, better known by her stage name St. Vincent. This was the first time Delevingne had talked about her relationship publicly, and yet, on the heels of her revelation, Haskell thought it appropriate to editorialize: "Her parents seem to think girls are just a phase for Cara, and they may be correct." He then gave Delevingne advice on how to better trust men.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the first sexual relationship I had with another woman wasn't just drunk meaningless fun, but something legitimate, something that mattered — and part of the reason it took me so long is because people with cultural power, like Haskell, are so quick to dismiss queer female relationships as "just a phase."
Whenever I made out with girls during college, my boyfriend didn't mind. I was "just curious." I was "just experimenting." It's not like I was fooling around with guys (that would be cheating!). Girls simply get drunk and kiss each other, according to the pervasive college trope. But it isn't real. It's just an extension of girls' naturally occurring intimacy. It's just for fun. It's just until we graduate — then we can finally settle down with a dude banker or dude lawyer or dude doctor (who cares what he does at the end of the day, as long as he's a dude?).
Ever since amicably parting with that boyfriend upon realizing my inclination to kiss girls wouldn't go away after walking across the graduation stage, I know now that — at least for me, for the vast majority of queer women — the "just experimenting" trope is a garbage fallacy. As the average coming-out age continues to drop, I'm hopeful that more and more teenage girls will march into freshman year (relatively) confident in their sexualities, so that their queer hookups aren't clouded by doubt and shame the way mine were. But the myth of girl-on-girl experimenting only for experiment's sake lives on.
This isn't to say that women and teen girls shouldn't be experimenting. Everyone at least remotely intrigued by queer sex deserves the freedom to indulge their curiosities. But at what stage does that curiosity, indulged or not, give someone the permission to call themselves queer? For women, we've set that bar ridiculously high.
Haskell's comments in the Delevingne profile aren't an isolated incident, but part of a widespread trend. Even when women explicitly say that they're in relationships with women (or when they don't say so, but we can basically assume as much), they're told that their queerness may as well be a passing fad. The actual sex part of their sexuality is often glossed over entirely. Last year, when agender rapper Angel Haze was tired of the media calling them and their then-girlfriend Ireland Baldwin "best friends," Haze clarified to The Independent: "We fuck, and friends don't fuck." Queer women and queer people assigned female at birth who date each other are reduced in the public eye to nothing more than gal pals: unthreatening, heteroflexible at most, together only for the moment.
I couldn't imagine the experimenting/"just-a-phase" trope being foisted on men. Guys who have sex with other guys, despite youth or inexperience, are rarely if ever thought to be "just fooling around" — we see them as queer, no question, whether gay or bi or any other label besides straight. Nobody ever thought Lance Bass was going to go back to women eventually. (Though queer and questioning men, for whom sexual exploration remains more taboo, are themselves limited in the completely opposite direction.)
Queer women have to do far more than own up to sleeping with other women to be recognized as queer. This phenomenon is amplified when one or both of the women are more feminine, like I am. Men have hit on me at bars, thinking I'm just another straight lady, seemingly blind to my girlfriend next to me even with my hand on her back. I once had a male boss who kept making references to the sorts of guys he thought I'd be interested in, even after I repeatedly told him my dating life is a no-guy zone. Bisexual women have it even worse in this arena than lesbians do — dating men some part of the time translates in the popular consciousness to dating men all the time, exclusively, forever.
The onus placed on queer women to prove their own queerness is exhaustive. And since women have a hard enough time asserting their sapphism when they're in relationships with other women, claiming queerness in the amorphous world of crushing, dating, and casual sex is quite another task entirely.
Because the media and other powers that be so often refuse to call female queerness what it is, some women who might otherwise embrace an LBQ identity eschew queer identification altogether. They can get away with not identifying in a way that queer men can't — it's both a blessing and a curse.
There's a paradoxical way in which the current culture is celebrating some vague idea of female sexual fluidity, without allowing that fluidity to tip over into full-fledged queerness. In many ways, that's long since been the case — women "experimenting" has always been a titillating show for the straight male gaze. It's only when women are sexual with one another without regard for male pleasure that their sexuality becomes a problem. Fluidity is innocent, temporal. But queerness is a threat.
Sexual fluidity of all stripes became a hot topic when the release of Orange Is the New Black's third season on Netflix introduced mainstream culture to someone lesbians have loved for years: the gender-fluid DJ, model, and actress Ruby Rose. Everyone lost their collective shit over this very attractive, very androgynous person. Women who otherwise identified as straight flocked to social media to declare that Rose was making them question their sexuality. If you're a lady who's only been into guys until now, and Ruby Rose's unbearable hotness is inspiring you to consider switching teams (or playing for multiple), that's a pretty great thing.
Here's where this gets tricky, though. Plenty of women took care to clarify that they would "go gay" for Ruby Rose, and Ruby Rose alone. Rose doesn't identify as a woman, which makes the gay comment enough of an issue in itself. But beyond the limits of language, queer women were uncomfortable with straight women coopting their identities — they argued that you can very easily recognize someone's attractiveness without saying you'd go gay for them. I'm sure a good number of women had a full-on sexual awakening when, thanks to Orange Is the New Black, androgyny in the form of Rose's character Stella was depicted as sexy and desirable (and of course, we've already seen the show's queering powers in action: When Lauren Morelli was writing for the first season, she figured out her own gayness). But I also suspect that there were plenty of women who said they'd go gay for Rose, but haven't been inspired to look at other women any differently — let alone sleep with them, date them, build lives with them.
Queer women who judged straight-identified women for fawning over Rose were chewed out in many corners of the internet for policing other people's sexuality — it's just hyperbole, stop being so sensitive. There's been a grand virtual consensus, apparently: Protect a woman's right to sexual fluidity. I strongly believe in protecting that right, but I'm also wary of its ability to drown out the desires of queer and questioning women who'd like to go beyond conjecture and actually, physically have queer sex. There are blurry overlaps between the fluid/questioning/queer camps, to be sure, but a lot of the time when people talk about fluidity, that's what it remains: just talk.
Just Ruby Rose.
Just a phase.
That's what person-specific and situation-specific fluidity feeds into: the misconception that lady-on-lady action is a flight of fancy, something small and passing and easily contained. The New York Times Vows column about Brittney Griner and Glory Johnson's wedding described their marriage as "between a gay woman and a straight woman" and quoted Johnson as saying: "I'm not a lesbian. But Brittney is different." (The couple has since separated.) In a similar vein, one of my friends once had a girlfriend who didn't identify as queer — "I'm just gay for you," she'd say. And maybe that's true. Or maybe Johnson and my friend's ex-girlfriend are rather tragically limiting themselves, foregoing life's great gay potentials, because it's easier to package female queerness into a single box: one-time-only, one-person-only. It's easier because the world would rather champion a sexually fluid woman — widely considered a straight woman who has only temporarily strayed — than a dyke.
Demi Lovato, who co-wrote her latest song "Cool for the Summer" with four male songwriters, is furthering the one-time-only vibe by describing a same-sex fling — which, cleverly, doesn't sound a loud queer alarm.
"I'm a little curious too," she sings. Off to a good start. "Got a taste for the cherry." K, there is definitely some exciting gay stuff going on here.
"Just something that we wanna try / 'Cause you and I / We're cool for the summer."
Womp.
Lovato croons that she "just [wants to] have some fun with you." Great. Experimentation is awesome. But she qualifies, qualifies, qualifies with all those "justs" — softens the potential queerness, making the message more palatable to a mainstream audience. Maybe the message here will warm a listening teen girl to the idea of experimentation, but it could just as easily confuse her into thinking that experimentation is just that — something to test out, until the summer ends and everything goes back to (hetero)normal. "Cool for the Summer" doesn't suggest that being sexually fluid will remain "cool" beyond the limits of the fun, flingy season, beyond the limits of the song's fantasy.
Lovato has defended herself against claims that she ripped off Katy Perry — "I think more than one female artist can kiss a girl and like it" — but "Cool for the Summer" does feel somewhat like like "I Kissed a Girl" 2.0. Props to Lovato, though, for not explicitly mentioning a dude and his gaze like Perry does.
"Demi's just young and having fun," a representative for Lovato told BuzzFeed Music when asked if the song constituted a coming-out. "She's in the driver's seat for the first time in her career, and she's going to sing about whatever she wants to sing about."
Which, fair. She can do whatever the hell she wants. But still, to me, there's something repellent in the way "Cool for the Summer" plays up the classic bad girl narrative — "Tell me if it's wrong, if it's right, I don't care." Trying out girls in this fantasy universe is dangerous, secret, exciting. That's sexy for a song, but when I translate Lovato's whispered "Don't tell your mother" into real life, I think about an ex whose house I was never able to go to, whose extremely religious family I was never able to meet, because I quite literally couldn't tell her mother. There's nothing sexy or cool about queerness coming head-to-head with a world that still vehemently rejects it.
Qualifying queerness in all these ways — just for the summer, just for college, just for the moment, just for this one celebrity, just for this one relationship, just for this one short-lived phase — protects women, in a way. They can dip their toes into queer experience without having to fully commit to queer identity and the slew of anti-gay vitriol that comes along with it. Of course, there are going to be women for whom a dip or two will remain the full extent of their same-sex experiences, to which they are more than entitled. But qualifying queerness at large doesn't protect most queer women in the long term, who want more than "just."
And this isn't to say that queerness must equal all ladies, all the time. Bisexual and otherwise-identified queer women can and should proudly claim queerness no matter the gender of the person they're dating at the moment — all the more reason to define it beyond the limits of one-time-onlies. So when people like Rob Haskell assume things like Cara Delevingne's relationship with a woman might be "just a phase," they give credence to the reckless assumption that female queerness is inauthentic and dismissible. That assumption is dull, and feeble, and limiting. And we deserve better than limits.


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Covid: Antibodies 'fall rapidly after infection'
27 Oct 20 27 Oct 20 FmH1 Comment
Levels of protective antibodies in people wane "quite rapidly" after coronavirus infection, say researchers. …The Imperial College London team found the number of people testing positive for antibodies has fallen by 26% between June and September. They say immunity appears to be fading and there is a risk of catching the virus multiple times.
— BBC News
The loss of antibodies with time is greater in seniors and in those with asymptomatic infections as compared with those with fullblown Covid-19. Exactly how this correlates with active immunity is unclear, as there are other components of the immune system besides antibodies. However, antibody levels in general appear to be predictive of who is protected. There are four other coronaviruses which cause disease in humans (causing common cold symptoms), each of which we can catch multiple times in our lives.
There have been very few documented cases of people getting Covid-19 disease twice, but that may be because immunity is just now beginning to fade since the peak infection rates in the spring. It is hoped, although not clear, if a second infection will be milder than the first because of residual "immune memory."
If antibody levels and protective immunity fade after an infection, what are the implications for the induction of immunity after vaccination? Researchers say that the vaccine response may behave differently than the response to a natural infection. But it is possible, as for certain other immunizations, that even if the vaccine works people might need follow-up booster doses to restore fading immunity over time.
Supreme Court: Amy Coney Barrett's legitimacy crisis, in just 2 numbers
Barrett and soon-to-be ex-Sen. Mitch McConnell
'In 2016, President Trump lost the national popular vote to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. He lost it by a lot — 2,865,075 votes, to be precise.
Meanwhile, the Senate just voted to confirm Trump's third nominee to the Supreme Court. The vote was almost entirely along party lines, with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) crossing over to vote with all 47 members of the Senate Democratic caucus.
Yet, while pro-Barrett senators control a majority of the Senate, they represent nowhere near a majority of the entire nation. Indeed, the senators who voted against Barrett represent 13,524,906 more people than the senators who voted for her. (I derived this figure using 2019 census estimates of each state's population. You can check my work using this spreadsheet.)
These two numbers — 2,865,075 and 13,524,906 — should inform how we view the actions Barrett will take now that she is one of the nine most powerful judges in the country. Barrett owes her new job to two of our Constitution's anti-democratic pathologies…'
We May Need the Twenty-fifth Amendment If trump Loses
27 Oct 20 27 Oct 20 FmH2 Comments
Jeannie Suk Gersen in The New Yorker reviews the lack of political will to apply the provisions of the 25th Amendment to trump despite abundant and widespread concern about his mental fitness for office, even before his Covid infection and steroid treatment. But at first I thought it would veer off into the question of Biden's possible cognitive decline, in line with the theme which has run through the campaign of the "two septuagenarians." In fact, she argues for a new willingness to use the provisions of the amendment as a tool to remove trump from office if he refuses to give up power after losing on November 3:
'If, as seems likely, voters deliver a loss for Trump, the Twenty-fifth Amendment comes into different focus, as an essential support to the democratic electoral process rather than an end run around it. In the event that the President's mental state leads him to try to circumvent the election result in order to stay in power, having Congress remove him via the Twenty-fifth Amendment as "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office" would be as legitimate a function of constitutional democracy as can be imagined….'
— Jeannie Suk Gersen in The New Yorker
Arguably, the period from November 3 to Inauguration Day is likely to be, in the words of psychiatrist John Gartner, "the most dangerous moment" in trump's presidency. Enraging a malignant narcissist by public humiliation will inevitably lead to their desire to regain power by acting out through sadistic aggressive action. Gartner likens the US to the victim of domestic battering by an abusive spouse. The most dangerous moment in the relationship inevitably comes when the hitherto paralyzed victim finally summons up the will and the resources to leave their abuser.
[Editor's note: Surely you have noticed by now my shift to using lower case in referring to the Orange Menace here. I hope it is clear that this is not a typo but a small symbolic enactment of my inability to show him any respect.]
Reverence For Hallowe'en: Good for the Soul
27 Oct 20 FmHLeave a comment
A reprise of my traditional Hallowe'en post of past years:
It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year's Eve, Samhain (pronounced "sow-en"). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time.
With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows' Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe'en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows' Eve.
All Saints' Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe'en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840's. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.
The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for "soul cakes," made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul's passage to heaven.
English: A traditional Irish turnip Jack-o'-lantern from the early 20th century.
Jack-o'-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North America, given how plentiful they were here. The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree's trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.
According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.
Nowadays, a reported 99% of cultivated pumpkin sales in the US go for jack-o-lanterns.
Folk traditions that were in the past associated with All Hallows' Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year's customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition, and liminality.
The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one's shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one's future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards
The Witches' Sabbath aspect of Hallowe'en seems to result from Germanic influence and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (You may be familiar with the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain.)
Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe'en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well. As this article in The Smithsonian reviews, 'In the United States, Halloween is mostly about candy, but elsewhere in the world celebrations honoring the departed have a spiritual meaning…'
Reportedly, more than 80% of American families decorate their homes, at least minimally, for Hallowe'en. What was the holiday like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has now become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? Before the era of the pay-per-view 'spooky-world' type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from several years ago [via walker] put it, monogrammed jack-o'-lanterns and the like? One issue may be that, as NPR observed,
'"Adults have hijacked Halloween… Two in three adults feel Halloween is a holiday for them and not just kids," Forbes opined in 2012, citing a public relations survey. True that when the holiday was imported from Celtic nations in the mid-19th century — along with a wave of immigrants fleeing Irelands potato famine — it was essentially a younger persons' game. But a little research reveals that adults have long enjoyed Halloween — right alongside young spooks and spirits.'
Is that necessarily a bad thing? A 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled "Why Bother to Save Hallowe'en?", argues as I do that reverence for Hallowe'en is good for the soul, young or old.
"Maybe at one time Hallowe'en helped exorcise fears of death and ghosts and goblins by making fun of them. Maybe, too, in a time of rigidly prescribed social behavior, Hallowe'en was the occasion for socially condoned mischief — a time for misrule and letting loose. Although such elements still remain, the emphasis has shifted and the importance of the day and its rituals has actually grown.…(D)on't just abandon a tradition that you yourself loved as a child, that your own children look forward to months in advance, and that helps preserve our sense of fellowship and community with our neighbors in the midst of all this madness."
That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Hallowe'en certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. 'Amateur scholar' Isaac Bonewits details academically the Hallowe'en errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe'en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of 'ritual Satanic abuse' that swept the Western world in the '90's.
The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe'en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling "scariest films", you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).
The Carfax Abbey Horror Films and Movies Database includes best-ever-horror-films lists from Entertainment Weekly, Mr. Showbiz and Hollywood.com. I've seen most of these; some of their choices are not that scary, some are just plain silly, and they give extremely short shrift to my real favorites, the evocative classics of the '30's and '40's when most eeriness was allusive and not explicit. And here's what claims to be a compilation of links to the darkest and most gruesome sites on the web. "Hours and hours of fun for morbidity lovers."
Boing Boing does homage to a morbid masterpiece of wretched existential horror, two of the tensest, scariest hours of my life repeated every time I watch it:
'…The Thing starts. It had been 9 years since The Exorcist scared the living shit out of audiences in New York and sent people fleeing into the street. Really … up the aisle and out the door at full gallop. You would think that people had calmed down a bit since then. No…'
Meanwhile, what could be creepier in the movies than the phenomenon of evil children? Gawker knows what shadows lurk in the hearts of the cinematic young:
'In celebration of Halloween, we took a shallow dive into the horror subgenre of evil-child horror movies. Weird-kid cinema stretches back at least to 1956's The Bad Seed, and has experienced a resurgence recently via movies like The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, and Cooties. You could look at this trend as a natural extension of the focus on domesticity seen in horror via the wave of haunted-house movies that 2009's Paranormal Activity helped usher in. Or maybe we're just wizening up as a culture and realizing that children are evil and that film is a great way to warn people of this truth. Happy Halloween. Hope you don't get killed by trick-or-treaters.'
In any case: trick or treat! …And may your Hallowe'en soothe your soul.
Tricks, Treats and Traditions – Some Useful Tips for Hallowe'en (southeasttourguides.co.uk)
Weighing In on Hallowe'en (4mothers1blog.wordpress.com)
Preparing for All Hallow's Eve (sporeflections.wordpress.com)
OCTOBER FINALE! Hallowe'en! (pm27.wordpress.com)
Tricksey Treats (jasperlocalfood.wordpress.com)
Hallowe'en Night divination game. (jenniferlinton.com)
Hallowe'en Weekend (sporeflections.wordpress.com)
All Hallows' Eve (ramblingratz.wordpress.com)
About Samhain or 'All Hallows' (bethtrissel.wordpress.com)
Halloween: A Brief History (lakeside.com)
13 Facts You Never Knew About Halloween (businessinsider.com)
A Tarot Circle Game/Encounter for Samhain (jameswells.wordpress.com)
Hallowe'en; The Do's And The Don'ts (jackcollier7.com)
Get ye gone, ye evil spirits (annabelfrage.wordpress.com)
'It was a dark and stormy night…' – Resources for Hallowe'en (davidbradshawenglish.org)
Hallowe'en! (thepiepatch.wordpress.com)
Paradoxical Undressing and Hide-and-Die Syndrome

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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The Old Headquarters of Murder, Inc. in Brooklyn, New York
On the corner of Saratoga and Livonia Avenues in Brownsville, Brooklyn, there used to be a 24 hour candy store.
During the 1930s and 40s, the Midnight Rose Candy Store, located under the elevated portion of the 3 subway train, was run by a little old lady in her 60's, Mrs. Rosie Gold. It's hard to imagine a more innocuous and unoffending picture. But all was not as it seemed at the Midnight Rose, for this was the secret headquarters of one of the most infamous and deadly groups in the history of organized crime: Murder, Inc.
Murder Incorporated was created in the 1930s to act as the execution squad of the newly formed National Crime Syndicate. The death squad was comprised of mostly Jewish and Italian gangsters centered around the Brownsville neighbourhood of Brooklyn. Exact numbers aren't known, but it is estimated that Murder Inc., carried out 400-1000 executions, making the innocent looking candy store responsible for more murders than anywhere else in the United States.
The National Crime Syndicate was the ruling elite of East Coast organized crime, counting amongst their ruthless members Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and Dutch Shultz. Murder Inc. was run by Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and Albert Anastasia, known as the 'Lord High Executioner'. The group of killers were paid a basic retaining salary and a freelancer fee for each hit of anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000. Rosie Gold kept a wall of pay phones along the back wall of the candy store; the members of Murder Inc., would pass the time at the Midnight Rose, sipping on Rosie's malted milks until one of the phones rang, giving the details of the hit.
The group included such cold blooded killers as Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss, Allie "Tic Toc" Tannenbaum, and Martin "Buggsy" Goldstein. As the murders were carried out by men unknown to the victims, Murder Inc., was able to remain unassociated with executions that took place all along the East Coast, and as far west as Detroit. Strangers were often dispatched at the whim of the National Crime Syndicate with the preferred weapon of choice for Murder Inc., the ice pick.
The assassins eventually met their downfall in 1940 when "Kid Twist" Reles was caught by a police informant. Ratting on each of his colleagues, the majority of members of Murder Inc., would go on to meet their own grisly ends in the electric chair at Sing Sing. On November 12th, 1941, whilst staying at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island under 24 hour police supervision, Kid Twist was found dead after falling seven stories from his room. The case was never solved, but it seems likely that he paid the price for turning informant. As one member of the National Crime Syndicate is supposed to have said of Reles, "the canary could sing, but he couldn't fly."
With most of its members in prison or executed, Murder Inc., faded into memory; but immortalized in film, literature, and television shows such as "Boardwalk Empire" and Neil Kleid & Jake Allen's comic book "Brownsville" (2006), their name has passed into legend.
Rosie Gold disappeared into obscurity, but her corner candy store is still there, on the corner of Saratoga and Livonia. For the past three years it has been a 24 hour bodega. The current owner when interviewed had no idea that his corner deli was once the headquarters of one of the most feared collection of assassins in American history. The row of telephones have gone, and with it the ring of an incoming call that would have meant the end of someone's life at the deadly hands of Murder Incorporated.
Bellevue Hospital in New York, New York
Vale da Lua in Goiás, Brazil


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Trump Administration Preparing To Stay In Afghanistan For The Long Haul
America's longest war seems likely to soon turn into America's never-ending war.
Doug Mataconis · Sunday, September 17, 2017 · 13 comments
Just a few weeks after President Trump laid out his strategy going forward in a war in Afghanistan that will reach its sixteenth anniversary next month, The New York Times reports that the United States appears to be digging for the long haul:
KABUL, Afghanistan — Soon, American Embassy employees in Kabul will no longer need to take a Chinook helicopter ride to cross the street to a military base less than 100 yards outside the present Green Zone security district.
Instead, the boundaries of the Green Zone will be redrawn to include that base, known as the Kabul City Compound, formerly the headquarters for American Special Operations forces in the capital. The zone is separated from the rest of the city by a network of police, military and private security checkpoints.
The expansion is part of a huge public works project that over the next two years will reshape the center of this city of five million to bring nearly all Western embassies, major government ministries, and NATO and American military headquarters within the protected area.
After 16 years of American presence in Kabul, it is a stark acknowledgment that even the city's central districts have become too difficult to defend from Taliban bombings.
But the capital project is also clearly taking place to protect another long-term American investment: Along with an increase in troops to a reported 15,000, from around 11,000 at the moment, the Trump administration's new strategy for Afghanistan is likely to keep the military in place well into the 2020s, even by the most conservative estimates.
No one wants to say when any final pullout will take place, because the emphasis now is on a conditions-based withdrawal — presumably meaning after the Afghan government can handle the war alone. But President Trump has kept secret the details of those conditions, and how they are defined.
"Until he says what the conditions are, all that means is we'll be there as long as we want, for whatever reason we want," said Barnett Rubin, a longtime Afghanistan expert who advised the Obama administration. "And they don't have to lie to do that, because the conditions will never be good enough to say we're absolutely not needed."
In practical terms, it means that the American military mission will continue for many more years, despite its unpopularity with the American public. Many military strategists, in America and Afghanistan, have already penciled in plans well into the '20s, and certainly past any Trump re-election campaign.
At the NATO summit meeting in Warsaw last year, the allies, including the United States, agreed to fund the development of the Afghan security forces until the end of what was termed "the transition decade," meaning from 2014, when Afghan forces began to take charge of their own security, until 2024.
"I would guess the U.S. has to plan on being inside Afghanistan for a decade or more in order for there to be any type of resolution," said Bill Roggio, editor of Long War Journal. "It's definitely past his first term in office, no two ways about it."
The Green Zone expansion is aimed at making it possible for America and its NATO allies to remain in the capital without facing the risks that have in the past year made Kabul the most dangerous place in Afghanistan, with more people killed there than anywhere else in the country — mostly from suicide bombers.
In Kabul, thousands of Afghans still commute to jobs and even schools inside the zone, with only light searches for most of them, mindful of the resentment stirred by the Soviets' heavily militarized central zone during their Afghan occupation. And the Green Zone in Baghdad has, its critics maintain, created an out-of-touch ruling class and Western community, and provided a magnet for protests while just moving enormous bombings elsewhere, further stoking popular discontent with leaders and foreigners.
The Kabul Green Zone expansion, which will significantly restrict access, was prompted, according to both Afghan and American military officials, by a huge suicide bomb planted in a sewage truck that exploded at a gate of the current Green Zone on May 31, destroying most of the German Embassy and killing more than 150 people. The loss of life could have been far worse, but Germany had evacuated its embassy a week before the bombing, apparently tipped off by intelligence sources.
The military recently appointed an American brigadier general to take charge of greatly expanding and fortifying the Green Zone. In the first stage of the project, expected to take from six months to a year, an expanded Green Zone will be created — covering about 1.86 square miles, up from 0.71 square miles — closing off streets within it to all but official traffic.
Because that will also cut two major arteries through the city, in an area where traffic congestion is already rage-inducing for Afghan drivers, the plans call for building a ring road on the northern side of the Wazir Akbar Khan hill to carry traffic around the new Green Zone.
In a final stage, a still bigger Blue Zone will be established, encompassing most of the city center, where severe restrictions on movement — especially by trucks — will be put in place. Already, height restriction barriers have been built over roads throughout Kabul to block trucks. Eventually, all trucks seeking to enter Kabul will be routed through a single portal, where they will be X-rayed and searched.
Unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump has suggested that American forces would remain in Afghanistan until victory.
But even his own generals have conceded that a complete military victory in Afghanistan is not possible. The only solution most see is to persuade the Taliban to sit down to peace talks — something they have refused to do as long as American soldiers remain in the country. And with the insurgents gaining ground steadily in the past two years, the Taliban have even less incentive to negotiate.
"It seems America is not yet ready to end the longest war in its history," said the Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, after Mr. Trump announced his new policy. "As Trump stated, 'Americans are weary of the long war in Afghanistan.' We shall cast further worry into them and force American officials to accept realities."
The Afghan ambassador to Washington, Hamdullah Mohib, said that talking about how much longer Americans may stay in Afghanistan obscures how different the years to come will be from the first 16 years.
"I think a lot of the discussions when people talk about American presence in Afghanistan, the memory comes of when they were actively involved in combat and bodies were coming back to the United States. That is no longer the case," Mr. Mohib said. "The majority of those soldiers are helping us improve our logistics, organizational capabilities, putting systems in place. While yes, there is an element of counterterrorism operations, it's largely airstrikes supporting the Afghan special forces."
Here;'s a map of downtown Kabul showing what the expanded Green Zone and proposed Blue Zone would look like:
Given the fact that constructing these security zones and setting up the security protocols that will be used to police them will take the better part of a year or more, it seems rather clear that the Trump Administration and the U.S. military is planning for a long-term occupation in Afghanistan generally and Kabul specifically that has no end date in sight. It's also a sign that, despite the fact that the United States has been involved in this war for nearly sixteen years now, and that the Taliban have been out of power for nearly that entire period, the insurgency that they lead has not only not been eradicated or confined to the mountain redoubts that it once could be found in, but it seems to be getting ever stronger. The frequency of bombings in Kabul, which is the most heavily patrolled city in the country, and other cities in the country, seems to have been on the uptick in recent years, and the number of civilians killed has gone steadily up. Additionally, as noted above, some of these attacks have even taken place inside or just outside the supposedly secure "Green Zone" where they've killed and injured mostly civilians but also on occasion American military personnel and diplomats. The only thing that expanding the "Green Zone" and implementing the "Blue Zone" seems likely to do is to result in these attacks being carried out in parts of the city that are more residential, thus meaning that more civilians will suffer while the Afghan Government and its American protectors sit securely inside what amounts to a modern version of a medieval castle. That's likely to increase civilian discontent with the government and the ongoing and seemingly endless American military presence.
Given the U.S.'s history in Afghanistan over the past sixteen years, none of this should be a surprise. What started as a war to retaliate against al Qaeda for the September 11th attacks and to kill or capture its leaders soon morphed into a war against the former Taliban government and, then, direct involvement in what became a civil war between the government in Kabul and the Taliban, who fought alongside tribes in the north that it was able to either bribe or compel to provide fighters. As the war settled into that pattern, it largely disappeared from the front pages of American news coverage, overtaken instead by reporting from Iraq, which was a much more active combat zone that was far easier for networks to get reporters into. That doesn't mean the war ended, of course, it continued largely in the shadows and soon earned the title of "America's forgotten war."
By 2008, Barack Obama was campaigning on the twin promises of finally ending American involvement in Iraq and stabilizing a situation in Afghanistan that was quickly spinning out of control as the Taliban were able to push back against government forces that proved to be less than adequate. This led to the troop surge of the early part of Obama's first term and, for a time at least, it appeared that things were finally starting to stabilize in the country to the point where we could start pulling troops out. While the U.S. did begin to bring troops home and, so far at least, has not returned to the troop levels we saw immediately after the surge, things didn't exactly go well as time went on.
In 2014, President Obama announced an agreement with the Afghan government that would result in a gradual draw down of American forces and end to the war from the American point of view. , most if not all American troops would be out of the country by the end of 2016, with the possibility left open that a small training force would be left behind. Almost immediately, though, the Obama Administration began pushing back the pace of that withdrawal to the point that it soon became clear that the promise of an end to the war by the end of 2016 was not going to happen. As was the case with the gradual upgrade in American involvement in the war against ISIS, President Obama gradually began slowing down the pace of the American withdrawal, and walking back previous promises that we would be direct involvement in the war.
Consider this timeline:
November 2014 – President Obama announces that American forces would continue to be involved in combat operations.
March 2015 – President Obama announces that t the pace of withdrawal would be slowed even further on the occasion of a visit from newly elected Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
April 2015 – Various news sites report that American forces were involved in more than just the counterterrorism operations that President Obama's original plan had said they would be limited to.
October 2015, President Obama announced that the withdrawal of U.S. forces would be halted due to the ongoing threat posed by a resurgent Taliban in several Afghan provinces.
February 2016 — President Obama announces that that American troops would be deployed back into areas of Afghanistan where active combat was occurring
In July 2016, President Obama announced that American troops would be deployed back into combat areas in the country, a reversal of previously announced policy that had stated that American forces would largely be restricted to advisory and training roles while the Afghan Army took over direct combat with the Taliban.
August 2017 – President Trump announces "new" strategy in Afghanistan that will require increasing American troop presence by at least 5,000 troops from its current level of roughly 12,000 personnel.
a pattern that I predicted would unfold in All of this sounds all too close to a pattern I predicted would unfold:
At this rate, it seem inevitable that we'll reach a point some time this year when the President will announce, no doubt with frequent use of the word "regretfully" or some similar word, that the previous commitment to remove most American troops by December 31st cannot be met. That announcement will likely come either early in the year or after the election so as to minimize the political impact, but it is the inevitable next step in all of the delays to withdrawal that the Administration has announced over the past fourteen months. More likely than not, the President will simply punt the matter into the future, perhaps by delaying the "official" withdrawal date for six months or so, thus leaving the matter for the next President to decide. All of this will occur contemporaneously with likely future increases in American commitments in Iraq and Syria related to the fight against ISIS, thus leaving quite a lot on the plate for the next President that could very well significantly distract them from being about to carry out any domestic agenda.
That was written in February 2016, and so far I've been proven correct. This latest report is an indication that America's Longest War is going to last even longer, that it will still be going on when voters head to the polls in November 2020, and that it will likely last long after that.
Quite honestly, this seems like a strategy that is guaranteed to fail. Yes, it's true that we have ongoing military commitments that have lasted far longer than our involvement in Afghanistan has, but that misses the point. American forces have been in Europe, principally Germany and the United Kingdom, since the end of World War Two, for example, but they haven't been involved in anything approaching active combat for seventy-two years now. The same goes for the American forces in Japan, although our bases there did serve in a support role during the Korean War and, to some extent, during the Vietnam War. We've had troops in South Korea since the armistice was signed in 1953, but again there hasn't been anything approaching a combat situation there in sixty-four years. The same is true about commitments elsewhere in the world for the most part. American forces in Afghanistan, though, have been involved in combat in some form or another on a non-stop basis for sixteen years, and that doesn't even count the activity that may have been engaged in by Special Forces or CIA assets during the Soviet occupation and the years leading up to the September 11th attacks. And it looks like this status will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. Doesn't there come a time when we just have to tell the Afghans that we can't do this anymore and they're going to have to learn to either resolve their differences through negotiation or handle this civil war on their own?
As I said last month, we're at the point now where the sons and daughters of men who fought in the early years of the war will be old enough to enlist in the military themselves. Many of those who were born before the September 11th attacks already are. This kind of multi-generational war is unlike anything we've seen in the past, and clearly can't be healthy for the nation. Despite that, only a handful of voices in Congress and outside politics are even talking about the need to talk about the end of our involvement in Afghanistan. That pretty much guarantees that this war will continue as long as we're willing to continue fighting it. Since it's a war that doesn't get shown on television very much and thus exists largely outside the consciousness of most Americans, that's likely to end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
FILED UNDER: Donald Trump, Military Affairs, National Security, Politicians, US Politics, Afghanistan, Afghanistan War
Sunday, September 17, 2017 at 14:27
Before we assume this has anything to do with strategy (however loosely defined), let's see the contracts for the construction work. I want to see how much of those billions will end up in Trump's pockets because I guarantee you he'll try, and given the open corruption of the Trump regime he'll likely succeed.
Slugger says:
Empires require far flung military engagements. This was true of the French, British, and Soviet empires. At some point the cost of supporting those empires became unbearable, and the sun set on the British empire, Algeria stopped being French, and the USSR collapsed. I wonder if any of you know of a good cost/benefit analysis of the US military undertakings since 1945?
Mister Bluster says:
Today's History Lesson: Two Hundred Thirty Years Ago
Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 11: The Congress shall have Power…To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
"On the whole, Sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention, who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument." He then moved, that the Constitution be signed by the members, and offered the following as a convenient form, viz: "Done in Convention by the unanimous consent of the States present, the seventeenth of September, &c. In witness whereof, we have hereunto subscribed our names."
Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787
by James Madison
A couple points:
Just a few weeks after President Trump laid out his strategy going forward in a war in Afghanistan
trump has no strategy, for anything. He does not do strategy. He just reaches for the latest shiny thing, then gets bored with it and forgets it.
it seems rather clear that the Trump Administration and the U.S. military is planning for a long-term occupation in Afghanistan generally and Kabul specifically that has no end date in sight.
The idea that the US military is planning for a "long term occupation" of Afghanistan ( 252,072 square mi) with a paltry 15,000 troops is so ludicrous on it's face I can't believe you wrote that with a straight face Doug. I really can't say WTF our military leaders are doing there outside of "not leaving". They sure as hell aren't prosecuting a war, it's not even a police action as we have largely abandoned any idea of control or any kind of influence in 95% of Afghanistan. As best I can tell they are merely securing the largest US embassy compound in the world for a prolonged relationship with a govt that governs in name only.
teve tory says:
Donald J. TrumpVerified account
Let's get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.
10:55 AM – 11 Jan 2013
CSK says:
@teve tory:
Yeah, well, now he has to prove he has a bigger dick than his predecessors.
The videos of the defense of the US embassy in 'Saigon' during Tet would be instructive. Also the book 'The Emerald City' about the US occupation of Baghdad.
And as a cynical VietNam veteran, I'll match Michael above by saying that promotions in the Army are without a doubt dependent on Afghan service. As the rising star class in the Army said about that war in the 60's': It's a dirty little war but it's the only war we've got.
@michael reynolds:
I don't think his companies do this kind of construction work. Whenever he's constructed a building in New York, it's always been contracted out to subcontractors. For projects like this, there are a number of multinational companies (like Browning and Root) that have sister corporations that do this kind of contract work overseas.
It's a fair question, though.
MarkedMan says:
Nothing a Republican says m and anything. It is all just talk
He doesn't need to manage the work himself, just parcel out the contracts to friends. Betcha Erik Prince ends up with bulging pockets for providing security for the construction. And given that Afghanistan is even more corrupt than the Trump regime has had time to become, there can be kickbacks galore. Trump wants to be Putin, and Putin gets to wet his beak. There are no ethical watchdogs left, so I'd be surprised if Trump doesn't end up a lot richer off his wall and off this massive program.
Daniel Hill says:
"We've always been at war with East Asia."
There are far too many powerful interests who thrive on the state of perpetual war. The entire dark state, the military hierarchy, much of the Republican Party…
Paul Hooson says:
Monday, September 18, 2017 at 03:11
It was a huge foreign policy mistake for both the Carter and Reagan Administrations to oppose the Soviet's entry into Afghanistan that was requested by the Communist government in that country back in 1979. The Soviet move into that country meant the Soviets having to offer foreign aid and support to that country as well as opposition to the Taliban who supported themselves by the poppy heroin trade. Instead, both the Carter and Reagan Administrations funneled arms and support through Pakistan to Islamic fighters against the Soviets, where the Taliban and al Qaeda both received arms and money directly or indirectly from the U.S. – All of this brings up the present situation where the U.S. now owns the Afghanistan mess and needs to help police this situation to prevent it growing out of control with al Qaeda using it as a base to promote terrorism, or the Taliban to promote Islamic extremism or contribute to the world heroin drug problem or other evils coming from this near prehistoric nation.
Sleeping Dog says:
Queue: Waist Deep in the Big Muddy…
Trump was right in 2013 and he's been bamboozled by his generals today. They whispered to him, "you don't want to go down in history as the President who lost Afghanistan to the terrorist do you?" And like Lyndon Johnson, Trump will continue and expand the war he inherited. It is now Trumps War.
U.S. To Withdraw Up To 7,000 Troops From Afghanistan
Trump And Afghanistan: New President, Same Policy
U.S. To Halt Withdrawal Of Forces From Afghanistan
It's Beyond Time To Get Out Of Afghanistan
Trump's Military Advisers Want Him To Expand America's Longest War


We've tried to make entering an account to sell to us as easy as possible. If during your quote/sale experience you see a way we can make this better for the future please let us know.
[highlight type="standard, dark"]Step 1.[/highlight]Entering information on the Sell Final Fantasy Account page. Enter contact information, first name, asking price, total currency on account and a detailed description of the characters and any special items, no longer available items or rare equipment or mounts your account has. The more descriptive the better so we can easily appraise your accounts value.
Step 1. Enter Final Fantasy Account Description.
[highlight type="standard, dark"]Step 2.[/highlight] Once you enter all of the information for step 1. an account will automatically be created for you on the Game Supply. This will allow you to easily edit information in the future, add new accounts you would like to sell for FFXIV or even different games that we support.
Entering Characters name and World. Unlike other games, once you enter a characters name and world multiple entries might be available. Simply select yours via the drop down. This was quite difficult to create and we would appreciate any feedback on ease of use or how we could make it better.
[highlight type="standard, dark"]Step 3.[/highlight] After entering your characters name(s) and server(s) at the bottom you can request a quote via live chat or email. Live chat is available between 10am and 10pm EST. (GMT -5) daily. If after hours or live chat is not available please request quote via email and we will email this quote out to you as soon as possible.
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This entry was posted in MMO Account Sales, Player Driven Economies, Sell Final Fantasy XIV Account, Selling Your MMO Account and tagged how to sell ffxiv account, sell ffxiv account, sell final fantasy ARR account, sell final fantasy xiv account.
They aren't fans. They aren't fans of GameStop buying and selling used games either but doesn't seem to slow them down. I've yet to have a publisher contact me regarding the sale of accounts so they cannot be that interested though.
Very interested in selling my account. Is there any chance of the game admins getting mad at us for this?
Is it really that easy? Thanks for posting this and for posting the examples also, that really helps a lot of us out. I always thought that it was too difficult so I never even tried it but now I think I can handle it, with your post of course!
very useful article. this will solve many problems that potential sellers had.
For someone who has never sold an account before, what sort of amounts are we talking for selling? What is the lowest and what is the highest do you think? Thanks!
This is a pretty new market for this game. The previous FF titles were extremely "grindy" and the best items were very difficult and time consuming to obtain-sometimes taking months, even years to acquire.
FFXIV A Realm Reborn has rethought that way of thinking. It is an extremely easy game to get through the main storyline, which everything is based upon, and the raids are not that difficult. There are no super rare or difficult items to acquire and so the pricing is lower than on say FFXI or even World of Warcraft.
So far our pricing has gone from $50 up to $300 depending on gear, mounts, companions, player housing and currency on the character. As time goes on if this remains a popular title that may increase based upon current interest in the game but for now there is a very limited market for this title and aftermarket account sales.
Thanks for the detailed reply CHADWICK575!
I can't believe how easy you guys have made this process. I've tried through other vendors and given up because it was all too hard. This seems simple and painless!
Thank you, it took a bit of time to create this system and are thankful that people are utilizing it.


text:
Litetronics Helps Javo Beverage Drink in the Benefits of an LED Upgrade
Based in Vista, CA, Javo Beverage has been a leading provider of fresh and premium coffee, tea, and botanical extracts, concentrates, and flavor systems since its founding in 1995. Proudly offering a variety of Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance Certified, Kosher, and Certified Organic products, Javo Beverage is dedicated to crafting clean, authentic products using pure and simple methods. With such a long-standing focus on precision and technical excellence at the product level as well as a dedication to environmental responsibility and sustainable practices in their operations, it came as no surprise that Javo Beverage would apply the same steadfast resolve to upgrading the lighting system at its Indianapolis, IN-based plant — a 240,000 square-foot manufacturing facility that the company acquired in late 2017 to support its growing demand.
"The lighting we inherited when we took possession of the plant was older HID and fluorescent technology, which had a yellow, dark, and dingy look that didn't support our high-tech production process and Clean-in-Place systems," confirmed Jerry Gray, Director of Manufacturing, of the lighting in the 1960s/1970s-era building. In addition to requiring regular maintenance and cleaning (which was difficult because the fixtures were sealed), "the previous lighting also had a long restrike period, which created downtime on production runs after a power outage, and resulted in excessive energy costs due to its inefficiency," he said.
Based on the successful lighting upgrade he'd overseen years earlier as the head of an auto manufacturing plant, Gray knew that LEDs were the way to go, both for the plant and the environment. He enlisted the support of Travis Martindale, Project Manager at Flex Green Energy & Lighting, an 11-year-old Indianapolis-based provider of energy/lighting services and upgrades at factories, schools, and other businesses.
Download the PDF here
Following a thorough audit of the plant's lighting in early 2018, Martindale agreed that an LED upgrade was in order. "The acrylic lenses on the existing HID fixtures were tarnished and yellow and almost a quarter of the fixtures had blown out and were dead," Martindale said. "As a result, footcandle levels throughout the plant were extremely low."
After evaluating product options, Martindale and Gray agreed that LEDs from Litetronics — a 50-year-old Bedford Park, IL-based manufacturer long known for its innovative, easy-to-install lighting solutions – would optimally support the plant's wide variety of interior lighting applications. Among those, "we replaced outdated 400-Watt metal halide lamps in the warehouse and production/mixing rooms with Litetronics' powerful 185-Watt and 140-Watt LED Linear High Bays," Martindale said. "In the plant's packaging rooms, we replaced 250-Watt metal halide lamps with Litetronics' four-foot, 40-Watt LED Strip Fixtures and replaced four-foot troffers housing 164-Watt T12 fluorescent lamps in the Inspection Room/Quality lab with Litetronics' sleek 50-Watt LED Flat Panels."
The results of the upgrade, completed over several weeks in December 2018, were impressive. According to Martindale, "we were able to replace a total of 482 HID and fluorescent lamps inside the plant with just 412 LEDs from Litetronics (a 15% reduction in fixture count) and slashed lighting energy consumption from 133,000 Watts to 44,000 Watts, delivering energy savings of 67%." Thanks to the efficiency and targeted light distribution of the new LEDs, footcandles soared by as much as three to five times their previous levels (increasing from just six footcandles to 35 in the warehouse and from 40 footcandles to over 130 in the Inspection Room/Quality Lab).
As a result of the upgrade, "Javo Beverage will save over $36,500 in annual energy costs alone, not to mention additional savings they'll accrue from the avoidance of maintenance, labor, and disposal/recycling costs," shared Martindale, who added that the plant's eligibility for over $50,000 in product rebates from local utility Indiana Power & Light will result in a project payback period of just over two years.
"A PERFECT WIN-WIN"
In a facility that relies on outstanding illumination to ensure the utmost quality throughout each phase of production, from manufacturing and testing to packaging, cleaning, and more, Gray couldn't be more excited about their new lighting system. "We're very conscientious about every aspect of our operations and our new lighting is excellent," Gray confirmed. "Thanks to our Litetronics LEDs, our lighting is so much brighter and whiter than before and will deliver a payback period that made our decision a no-brainer."
"With their high color-rendering index (CRI) and optimal color temperature, Litetronics LEDs make facilities look bright and their spaces easier and safer for employees to work in and clean," Martindale agreed. "We also appreciated the company's attractive 10-year warranty, the efficiency of their supply chain and speed of their delivery, and the quality, reliability, and long life of their products." Overall, he said, "Javo Beverage's plant looks like a brand new facility just by upgrading the lighting to Litetronics LEDs."
Gray couldn't agree more. "With these cost savings, payback period, reduced maintenance, and reduction in our carbon footprint," he concluded, "our upgrade is a perfect win-win."
End User Javo Beverage's manufacturing plant (Indianapolis, IN)
Project Description Replacement of 482 outdated metal halide and fluorescent lamps throughout the plant's warehouse, packaging rooms, quality/inspection lab, etc. with a mix of 412 LEDs from Litetronics
Lighting Specialist Flex Green Energy & Lighting (Indianapolis, IN)
The plant reduced lighting energy consumption from 133,000 Watts to 44,000 Watts, a 67% energy savings
The plant will save over $36,500 on lighting energy costs annually
The project will pay itself back in just 2.2 years
Lighting footcandle levels were increased by 3-5 times throughout the plant
Interior fixture count was reduced by 15%
Benefits Litetronics' long-life LED Linear High Bays consume significantly less energy than equivalent HID and fluorescent lighting systems while delivering greater color integrity, improved illumination, and a far greater lifespan. Backed by an outstanding 10-year warranty, the LED solutions from Litetronics are quick and easy to install and will deliver years of maintenance-free operation to Javo Beverage.


text:
La chapelle Sainte-Thérèse est située dans le , dans l'enceinte du siège des Apprentis d'Auteuil. C'est le premier sanctuaire qui a été dédié à Thérèse de Lisieux, en 1925, après sa béatification. On y trouve des reliques de sainte Thérèse et le tombeau du bienheureux Daniel Brottier.

Histoire de la chapelle
En 1923, le père Daniel Brottier devient responsable des Orphelins d'Auteuil, sis 40 rue Jean-de-La-Fontaine (Paris), et décide d'y faire construire une chapelle pour remplacer une plus ancienne : . Il choisit de la consacrer à Thérèse de Lisieux, estimant lui devoir sa survie lors de la Première Guerre mondiale. Cependant, il n'a aucun fonds et l'œuvre d'Auteuil est dans une situation financière précaire. Il lance une souscription. Une bienfaitrice apporte la somme nécessaire pour lancer les travaux et le carmel de Lisieux offre des reliques de sainte Thérèse.

La première messe y est célébrée le 25 décembre 1925.

Le père Daniel Brottier y est inhumé. Un transept lui est dédié.

Architecture
La chapelle, dessinée par les architectes Henri Chailleux père et fils, est de style néo-gothique, avec la Sainte-Chapelle comme inspiration.

Les activités des orphelins d'Auteuil sont sculptées sur les chapiteaux.

Vitraux

La chapelle compte une cinquantaine de vitraux de la société Mauméjean frères, réalisés en 1927.

Les neuf vitraux du chœur figurent des anges munis des instruments de la Passion du Christ, tandis que les douze baies de la nef font référence aux litanies de la Vierge.

Dotées de baies, les deux grandes rosaces du transept illustrent la canonisation de sainte Thérèse ainsi que l'accord du cardinal Dubois pour créer ce lieu de culte. La rosace de la façade évoque quant à elle la  qu'avait annoncée sainte Thérèse (). Quatre baies de taille plus réduite figurent des lys et des roses.

Quatorze baies évoquent des saints présentés comme des modèles pour les orphelins d'Auteuil : Antoine de Padoue, Geneviève de Paris, Jeanne d'Arc, Vincent de Paul, ainsi que des missionnaires.

Œuvres de la chapelle
Le chemin de croix a été réalisé en mosaïques par la maison Mauméjean.

L'autel et l'ambon sont du sculpteur Sébastien Touret.

Évènements
Depuis 2007 sont organisées quatre fois par an les « Soirées T* », dédiées à la prière autour de sainte Thérèse. Par ailleurs, avant le 1 octobre, date à laquelle est fêtée la sainte, a lieu chaque année la « Semaine Thérésienne ».

Références

Article connexe
 Liste des édifices religieux de Paris

Liens externes
 La chapelle sur le site du Sanctuaire Sainte Thérèse
 La chapelle sur le site de l'observatoire du patrimoine religieux

Sainte Therese
Édifice religieux dans le 16e arrondissement de Paris
Édifice religieux achevé en 1925

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Court documents show that prosecutors contend Manafort passed polling data related to the presidential campaign to Kilimnik during the campaign, and that the two worked on a poll in Ukraine in 2018. The hearing was to determine whether Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, lied to prosecutors during debriefings after he pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate.
The meeting is of such interest still to the prosecutors that Manafort testified about it before a federal grand jury late a year ago.
Manafort has said he never lied to prosecutors. Manafort faces a separate sentencing in Virginia for bank- and tax-fraud convictions.
Mueller's prosecutors, who have charged more than 30 people, are investigating whether anyone in the Trump campaign conspired with Russians. It makes clear that prosecutors have homed in on the repeated contacts between Manafort and his longtime associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, who the Federal Bureau of Investigation says has ties to Russia's military intelligence agency. Gates also spoke to investigators about Manafort sharing the polling data, according to the transcript.
Kilimnik flew on the private jet of Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska for at least one leg of the trip to attend the August 2, 2016 meeting with Manafort, Vice News has reported. This, quite directly, implies that Trump has an interest in one of his former aides engaging in a criminal cover-up - a circumstance that is hard to imagine unless the president himself is at least indirectly implicated in criminal behavior.
The transcript also reveals that Manafort met with Kilimnik at Trump's January 2017 inauguration, which is reportedly under investigation separately by the Southern District of NY. The New York Times has reported the payment involved Manafort's use of money from a pro-Trump political action committee to help pay his legal bills.


Site Regulation: Informal. HPAC Insurance and Local Club Waiver required.
Description of Site: The Tea House site is located close to Halifax and often provides flyable conditions for ridge soaring. The area is a popular destination for people to walk, surf and swim, so flights often attract attention and interest in the sport.
Launch Description: Large open area immediately north of the Tea House allows for multiple wings and ground handling.
Transportation: Short walk from the parking lot.
Specific Hazards: Power lines are located behind the launch closer to the road.
Beware of tide levels as high tide reduces beach landing, and rocky beach has large cobbles.
Tips and Hints: Ridge is often flyable with +20 km. Watch potential rotor from trees on northern edge of ridge. Western end of ridge fades in height.
LZ Description: Top landing from either side of launch. Watch potential rotor far back, and power lines near road. Alternate landing option when wind is strong is on the grassy slope in front of launch, towards the bottom of the slope where the wind is lighter.


In the pitch darkness, a single light reflected over the shallow waters of the Tumen river.
All that was visible on the far shore was a pair of giant portraits: of North Korean founder Kim Il-sung and his son and successor Kim Jong-il. In the distance, beyond the barren hills, dogs barked, as if in rhythm. Two weeks later, I stood on the desolate, dusty hills cocooning the U.S. nuclear test site in Nevada, listening to the calming, eerie ring of silence. I seemed to hear those same dogs.
I had come to find traces of humans' encounter with nuclear bombs – the only weapon that can destroy humanity in a single blow. In October 2017, I drove the quiet, empty border between China and North Korea, photographing across the two rivers and one mountain that divide them. I searched out locations closest to North Korea's nuclear test sites, missile manufacturing facilities and military bases. Two weeks later, I traveled through equally quiet stretches of the western United States, from snowy North Dakota, where an all-seeing pyramidal radar complex stands, to the white heat of the cratered test site in Nevada's desert. I climbed into missile silos, crawled out of bomber escape hatches, and wandered around command and control centers used during the Cold War.
I was looking for parallels – visual, historical, factual, symbolic – between these landscapes. North Korea is the only country to have tested nuclear weapons in the 21st century. The United States is first country to test and only country to use them, in 1945. They are also locked in a rhetorical war attacking each other, with President Donald Trump taking swipes at North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as 'Little Rocket Man,' while his counterpart called him a 'gangster fond of playing with fire'. Much of this takes place in the abstract – on Twitter, in newspapers or in theory. I wanted to see what the actual nuclear infrastructure looks like. I wanted to understand how these weapons work, what the command chain was, how we used them and might do so again. I wondered about the morality: what do we make of the repeated calls to ban these weapons on the one hand, and those who argue we need them for deterrence?
With each site I visited, I felt the beauty and the weight of these landscapes and these quiet machines. I had studied Cold War history at university, reading books and texts about that dangerous era, but suddenly these events came alive in the metres-thick concrete blast doors of the missile silos and in the rusty complexes far below ground. North Korea's nuclear ambitions can be gauged only through satellite images, seismic tests, and propaganda pictures. That forced me to look through barbed wire fences, mountains and villages, metaphorically trying to see the missile sites and the Punggyi-ri nuclear test site where Pyongyang has conducted six nuclear tests since 2006. The lat-est and largest test had taken place just a month before my journey, causing buildings to shake, knifes to rattle in kitchens and schools to evacuate in neighbouring Chinese towns.
In some ways, the landscapes were from a different era: farmers pushing carts at a gentle speed, single-storey houses with stacks of corn out front, steam-powered tractors, workers bicycling back to factories after lunch hour, and factory chimneys with wisps of smoke rising into the night sky. But the sense of tension was palpable: the regular guard posts on the North Korean side, and on the Chinese side the constant checkpoints and border police forbidding photography.
In the U.S., I was welcomed in to look at decommissioned facilities preserved for tours and education, and sites that have been abandoned after having served their purpose. Only at the 3,500 square kilometer Nevada National Security Site – a still – active site – was I kept outside the fence as well. Over 900 nuclear weapons tests were done here between 1951 and 1992, creating a series of giant craters in the ground resembling a moonscape visible in satellite images. It was seeing an archival US military photograph of the largest of these – the Sedan crater – that first led me to think I could create a series of anonymised landscapes of these two countries that when placed side by side might let us suspend our sense of place and enter the realm of reflection and imagination.


Top stories posted in 2015 at graceconnect.us again centered around the family nature of the Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches.
Deaths of those related to the Grace Brethren family were also at the top of the list as most-accessed stories. Obituaries for long-time Grace College professor Don Ogden; Carol Hocking, the wife of former Grace Brethren pastor, Dave Hocking; and Randy Todd, former Grace Brethren pastor, all ranked at the top of the most-viewed list.
They were among many stories that were accessed on the site a total of more than 70,250 times during the year, with 59,363 unique page views (the number of visits during which a specified page was viewed at least once).
Also on the list was the Flinch Photo Wall, which includes social media images that contain the hashtag #flinch2015 and were taken at Flinch Conference, the national conference of the Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches, which was held in late July at the Newark Liberty International Airport Marriott in New Jersey.


Welcome to Shadyside High School! I believe that Shadyside Local School District has three incredible schools with terrific teachers, students and families. I consider myself privileged to be a part of this district.
My educational background is rooted in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where I studied mathematics and physics at Saint Vincent College. After graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in the aforementioned fields, I completed my teaching certification requirements through Saint Vincent. Additionally, I hold a Master of Science degree from Franciscan University in Steubenville in Educational Administration. I have taught mathematics and physics at the high school level and mathematics at the middle school level for several years prior to coming to Shadyside. I have also acted in administration capacities through various Athletic Departments.
Last year, as my first year as principal at Shadyside High School, I got to know the students and staff as well as learn what tradition, honor, and family means to the town of Shadyside. The supportive relationship between the town and the school is incredible. I promise to uphold the values championed throughout the district and provide a safe, challenging, and professional environment for your son or daughter to thrive.
If you ever have any questions or concerns of any kind, please do not hesitate to contact me through email at john.poilek@omeresa.net or by phone at 740 – 676 – 3235. I will work diligently to create open lines of communication between the school and the community and build a positive relationship for the benefit of all. I look forward to meeting you and working to make Shadyside High School the best that it can possibly be.


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Issue July 2016
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Issue October 2016
Content Overview: English Titles and Abstracts:
Andreas Wirsching: Hitler's Authenticity. A Functionalist Interpretation.
Oliver Jens Schmitt: Who Were the Romanian Legionnaires? A Case Study on Fascist Cadres in the Countryside Surrounding Bucharest 1927 till 1941.
Hans Goldenbaum: National Socialism as Anti-Colonialism. German Propaganda Broadcasts for the Arab World.
Mario Daniels: Brain Drain, Global Economic Competition, and National Security: The Campaign of the West German Chemical Industry Against Knowledge Transfers to the United States During the 1950s.
Heiner Möllers: The 1984 Kießling Affair. On the Role of the Media in the Scandal about the Dismissal of General Dr. Günter Kießling.
Andreas Wirsching, Hitler's Authenticity. A Functionalist Interpretation
The point of departure of this article is the concept of authenticity, which has increasingly gained importance for the construction of Bourgeois individual identity since the second half of the 19th century. The question regarding which elements of a personality can be seen as authentic, i.e. as real and credible, has also been raised about Adolf Hitler. It is thus an essential facet of the history of his ascent, which of his characteristics and biographical experiences he himself viewed or constructed as authentic and which were attributed to him as such by his environment. This encompasses aspects of Hitler's youth and his time in Vienna and Munich, as well as the question, when and under what conditions the foundations of his racist "world view" were laid. The article argues, that, in Hitler's case, a number of layers of authenticity have to be distinguished, whereby the wish to become an artist or architect plays a prominent role. His world view, which Hitler labels as authentic in "Mein Kampf", is conversely a dimension which was added later. This emphasises the functional character of Hitler's political-ideological conditioning, which also influences the overall interpretation of the Nazi regime and the motivations of its perpetrators.
Oliver Jens Schmitt, Who Were the Romanian Legionnaires? A Case Study on Fascist Cadres in the Countryside Surrounding Bucharest 1927 till 1941
The social history of the Romanian "Legion of the Archangel Michael", one of the most important fascist mass movements in interwar Europe, has yet to be studied in any great detail. This article discusses a sample of 1,500 legionary cadres in the rural Greater Bucharest area, where legionary mass mobilization began rather late in comparison to other regions of Romania, in the second half of the 1930s. A main finding of the analysis is a clear distinction between two generations of cadres: so-called village intellectuals (priests, teachers) led the first phase of mobilization during the movement stage (1927–1938); the regime stage (6 September 1940-21 January 1941) however was dominated by militant young peasants. Village intellectuals were gripped more strongly by Legionary mysticism and its transcendent message of collective national resurrection, while cadres of the short-lived National Legionary dictatorship strove for social revolution.
Hans Goldenbaum, National Socialism as Anti-Colonialism. German Propaganda Broadcasts for the Arab World
Contrary to what one would expect after recent debates, we still know very little about National Socialist impact and propaganda in the Near East. Based on hitherto unconsidered German and Israeli archival records, the article will attempt to give, for the first time, an overview of the origin, institutional background, structure and, particularly, content of Arabic propaganda broadcasts from Nazi Germany. News programs focused on the strength of the Reich and the weakness of its adversaries in the political, economic and military arena. At the same time, the broadcasts linked National Socialist policies with the situation in the Near and Middle East: The "long-suffering" and "oppressed" German nation, now embroiled in a struggle for sovereignty against the colonialist Western powers, addressed the colonized. On the whole, the propaganda discourse can be conceptualized as a specifically National Socialist "anti-colonialism" or "anti-imperialism" founded in antisemitism. Furthermore, the article expounds how the transmissions were received. The German broadcasts undoubtedly had a certain influence, but the information and explanations they offered had to compete with those issued by other international and regional broadcasts and print media. The reception process can be characterized as committed and active; diverse actors received, interpreted and appropriated the content within their own "horizon of expectations", relating it to their issues. The key question remains how far the propaganda offered explanations for conflicts and experiences of crisis and promoted a semantic shift which contributed to antisemitic ideologisation and practice.
Mario Daniels, Brain Drain, Global Economic Competition, and National Security: The Campaign of the West German Chemical Industry Against Knowledge Transfers to the United States During the 1950s
Was the U.S. spying on German know-how? During the 1950s, the West German chemical industry became deeply concerned about the attempts of American companies and the U.S. military to hire German scientists and establish R & D facilities in Germany. In their estimation, such activities amounted to nothing less than a form of industrial espionage. Leading industry representatives claimed that the loss of knowledge posed a serious threat to West Germany's economy at the very moment of the country's return to world markets after World War II. Also a surprisingly large part of their rhetoric was dominated by fears that American knowledge acquisitions endangered German national security.
This article takes a closer look at the brain drain and the discourse surrounding industrial espionage during the 1950s within the context of a profound reassessment of the political significance of knowledge production and dissemination during the early Cold War on both sides of the Atlantic. It shows how and why the chemical industry's vigorous countermeasures to fend off perceived threats of espionage failed to mobilize the support of the West German government. Moreover, it makes visible the many fault lines and points of tension that resulted from competing national economic and security interests within the Western Cold War alliance in its formative phase.
Heiner Möllers, The 1984 Kießling Affair. On the Role of the Media in the Scandal about the Dismissal of General Dr. Günter Kießling
The Kießling affair of 1984 is one of the most striking examples for the function of the media as the "fourth estate": In this case the West German Federal Ministry of Defence and Minister Wörner completely lost control of events after the premature discharge of General Kießling, who was considered homosexual and thus in danger of being blackmailed, due to the strong echo in the media. The lack of influence of the minister on the media also resulted from his information policy, which was incapable of reacting to new developments due to its isolation from external influences and fixation on a single chain of reasoning. Thereby it was not even capable of convincingly countering the insistent media strategy of the dismissed general. Ultimately Wörner was redeemed by the intervention of Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl – and retained his office against all odds.
Hermann Müller als Außenpolitiker der Weimarer Republik
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