text:
Marina Warner
Marina Warner is writing an 'unreliable memoir' about her father's bookshop in Cairo in the years after World War Two.
From The Paper (52)
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Imps and Ogres
Marina Warner, 6 June 2019
In 1956, Lorenza Mazzetti, then a student at the Slade, made a film called Together, with her fellow artists Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi playing the main parts. She shot it in the bombed-out East End, which gaggles of children had made their territory; her camera catches the wild scrambling, dash and hurtle of scores of boys and girls playing together in the puddles and the...
Big and Small: A Cultural History of Extraordinary Bodies
by Lynne Vallone.
In 1956, Lorenza Mazzetti, then a student at the Slade, made a film called Together, with her fellow artists Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi playing the main parts. She shot it in the...
The Politics of Translation: Translate this!
Marina Warner, 11 October 2018
In the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it's mainly Hockney's own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed...
This Little Art
by Kate Briggs.
by Mireille Gansel, translated by Ros Schwartz.
Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto
by Mark Polizzotti.
2 more books reviewed
In the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers,...
Flightiness: Airborne Females
Marina Warner, 30 August 2018
At the furthest edges of the known world, medieval travellers encountered creatures who held a single giant foot over their head as a makeshift parasol and fearsome hybrids with eyes peering out from their chests or set in the middle of their foreheads: they were classed as wonders, close kin to the monsters and dragons of classical genealogies. When Thomas Browne was considering the...
Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics and Other Airborne Females
by Serinity Young.
At the furthest edges of the known world, medieval travellers encountered creatures who held a single giant foot over their head as a makeshift parasol and fearsome hybrids with eyes peering...
At Tate Liverpool: Surrealism in Egypt
Marina Warner, 8 March 2018
Art et Liberté was a movement that came into being in 1938 in Cairo. It was affiliated to Surrealism through contact with André Breton in Paris, and shared Surrealism's spirit of rebellion and provocation, its desire for dream knowledge and penchant for manifestos. 'Long live degenerate art' was the title of its opening blast, printed in Arabic and French...
Art et Liberté was a movement that came into being in 1938 in Cairo. It was affiliated to Surrealism through contact with André Breton in Paris, and shared Surrealism's...
Diary: Literary Diplomacy
Marina Warner, 16 November 2017
Last December, in Russia for the first time, I saw a small panel painting in the Hermitage showing The Vision of St Augustine: the saint, in full episcopal fig, is sitting on a riverbank near a child who is scooping up water with a spoon and pouring it into a hole in the sand. According to the story, which is usually set on a beach, the saint is asking the little boy what he thinks...
Last December, in Russia for the first time, I saw a small panel painting in the Hermitage showing The Vision of St Augustine: the saint, in full episcopal fig, is sitting on a riverbank near...
Back from the Underworld: The Liveliness of the Dead
The dead are hard to think about – and, in many ways, to read about. Unlike animals, which Lévi-Strauss declared were not only good to eat but bon à penser, too, I found that I averted my eyes, so to speak, several times as I was reading this book. Not because of the infinite and irreversible sadness of mortality, or because of the grue, the fetor, the decay, the pervasive morbidity, but because the dead present an enigma that can't be grasped: they are always there in mind, they come back in dreams, live in memory, and if they don't, if they're forgotten as so many millions of them must be, that is even more disturbing, somehow reprehensible.
The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains
by Thomas Laqueur.
The dead present an enigma that can't be grasped: they are always there in mind, they come back in dreams, live in memory, and if they don't, that is even more disturbing, somehow reprehensible.
Anglo-Egyptian Attitudes
Marina Warner, 5 January 2017
The balconied rooftop apartment in Zamalek on the island of Gezira which my father rented when we arrived in Cairo in 1947 looked over the Nile to the east and Gezira Sporting Club to the west. I learned to count to ten by timing the sunset each night, the sand in the air making the sun a scumbled, smouldering ball, dropping fast and heavily, as if overcome by its own heat. My father had...
The balconied rooftop apartment in Zamalek on the island of Gezira which my father rented when we arrived in Cairo in 1947 looked over the Nile to the east and Gezira Sporting Club to the west....
Those Brogues
Marina Warner, 6 October 2016
When my father, Esmond Warner, known as 'Plum' after his father the cricketer, came back at long last from the war, my mother was already in London. She had arrived a few months before from Bari, her home town in southern Italy, flying in on one of the first passenger flights to land in the newly demilitarised airport at Heathrow, and making her own way with her small...
My father splashed out on the celebrated Peal's bespoke brogues for his newly arrived young Italian wife; she was to have the best of English classic design, sturdier by far than a glass slipper, but as clear an expression of his hopes for his bride and his own status. Ilia realised the seriousness of the gift.
Diary: Medea
Marina Warner, 3 December 2015
Collectors of dinosaur bones and ammonites, nautilus shells, sawfish teeth, narwhal tusks and other such wonders used to display them in elaborate tableaux or augment them with fancy settings of jewels and gilt; they imagined fabulous stories for them, too. Then, in the more empirical mood of Victorian archaeology, adornment was stripped away and bones were displayed as bones, fossils as...
Collectors of dinosaur bones and ammonites, nautilus shells, sawfish teeth, narwhal tusks and other such wonders used to display them in elaborate tableaux or augment them with fancy settings...
At the V&A: Alexander McQueen
At La Mécanique des dessous ('The Mechanics of Undergarments: An Indiscreet History of the Silhouette'), an unexpected exhibition about underwear in Paris two years ago (Jenny Diski wrote about it in the LRB of 10 October 2013), there was a room where you could try on bustles and lobster tails and panniers and waist cinchers and other cunning elements of the...
At La Mécanique des dessous ('The Mechanics of Undergarments: An Indiscreet History of the Silhouette'), an unexpected exhibition about underwear in Paris two years ago...
Learning My Lesson
Marina Warner, 19 March 2015
A university is a place where ideas are meant to be freely explored, where independence of thought and the Western ideals of democratic liberty are enshrined. Yet at the same time as we congratulate ourselves on our freedom of expression, we have a situation in which a lecturer cannot speak her mind, universities bring in the police to deal with campus protests, and graduate students cannot write publicly about what is happening. Gagging orders may not even be necessary.
We have a situation in which a lecturer cannot speak her mind, universities bring in the police to deal with campus protests, and graduate students cannot write publicly about what is happening.
Performances for Sleepless Tyrants: 'Tales of the Marvellous'
When Marie-Antoinette couldn't sleep, she would ring for a lady-in-waiting to come and read to her; a rota of lectrices was on call at Versailles at any time of day or night; before radio or talking books, this was one of the luxuries of the Ancien Régime. The queen could have lit her bedside candle and read to herself, but it wasn't just a rich woman's indolence...
Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange
translated by Malcolm Lyons, introduced by Robert Irwin.
When Marie-Antoinette couldn't sleep, she would ring for a lady-in-waiting to come and read to her; a rota of lectrices was on call at Versailles at any time of day or night; before...
Diary: Why I Quit
Marina Warner, 11 September 2014
What is happening at Essex reflects on the one hand the general distortions required to turn a university into a for-profit business – one advantageous to administrators and punitive to teachers and scholars – and on the other reveals a particular, local interpretation of the national policy. The Senate and councils of a university like Essex, and most of the academics who are elected by colleagues to govern, have been caught unawares by their new masters, their methods and their assertion of power. Perhaps they/we are culpable of doziness.
The rankings of research, even if much improved, will bring universities less money this time round than last. So the tactics to bring in money are changing.
Forty Thousand Kilocupids: The Femfatalatron
Marina Warner, 31 July 2014
One of Baudelaire's Petits Poèmes en prose, 'Le Joujou du pauvre' ('The poor child's plaything'), opens with the remark that very few amusements are free of guilt, but he knows of an 'innocent entertainment': a flâneur out for a stroll can fill his pockets with fairings – a rider on a horse with a whistle for a tail, or a...
The Erotic Doll: A Modern Fetish
by Marquard Smith.
One of Baudelaire's Petits Poèmes en prose, 'Le Joujou du pauvre' ('The poor child's plaything'), opens with the remark that very few amusements are...
Story-Bearers: Abdelfattah Kilito
Marina Warner, 17 April 2014
'I speak all languages but in Yiddish,' Kafka remarks in his Diaries; and when it came to writing, he might have chosen any one of them, besides German. We now read him in all languages, receiving glimpses, like faraway signals at sea, of the original German, and beyond the German of the other languages that made up Kafka's mindscape, with Yiddish beating out a bass...
Je parle toutes les langues, mais en arabe
by Abdelfattah Kilito.
'I speak all languages but in Yiddish,' Kafka remarks in his Diaries; and when it came to writing, he might have chosen any one of them, besides German. We now read him in all...
Short Cuts: The Flood
In the most ancient stories of the Flood the gods are annoyed by humans making a racket and keeping them up at all hours: these gods are unreconstructed adults who don't hold with negotiating but relish inflicting punishment, while humans are lawless, partying teenagers. The poem Atrahasis, written down at some point between 1702 and 1682 BCE by 'Ipiq-Aya, Junior Scribe' (we know his name!) tells how Enlil starts his regime of terror against humanity by plugging the springs and bolting the earth and the air and the sea.
In the most ancient stories of the Flood the gods are annoyed by humans making a racket and keeping them up at all hours.
Wrong Kind of Noise: Silence is Best
Marina Warner, 19 December 2013
By a bizarre twist, G.K. Chesterton may be en route to sanctity: it was reported in August that the Bishop of Northampton has begun a suit for his canonisation. Diarmaid MacCulloch doesn't invoke Chesterton's miracle-working powers, but he opens this expanded version of his 2012 Gifford Lectures with a Father Brown story, 'The Oracle of the Dog': by howling at a...
Silence: A Christian History
by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
By a bizarre twist, G.K. Chesterton may be en route to sanctity: it was reported in August that the Bishop of Northampton has begun a suit for his canonisation. Diarmaid MacCulloch doesn't...
At Camden Arts Centre: Kara Walker
Silhouettes are polite, a parlour art, practised in gemütlich Vienna and Berlin among families who also formed quartets and played the piano; they were often made by the same accomplished daughter who would perform at home for a soirée. The art's antecedents are Asian: an Egyptian shadow puppet, dating back millennia, featured recently in the British Museum exhibition about...
Silhouettes are polite, a parlour art, practised in gemütlich Vienna and Berlin among families who also formed quartets and played the piano; they were often made by the same accomplished...
Death in Plain Sight: Emily Davison, Modern Martyr
Marina Warner, 4 July 2013
Emily Wilding Davison was born in 1872 in a substantial house in Greenwich, the middle daughter of her speculator father's second marriage. She was red-haired and liked sweets; her pet name at home was Weet Weet. At the age of 19 she won a scholarship to Royal Holloway, where she could read for the Oxford degree in English. But during her second year her father died and, in a Dickensian twist, he left the family skint; Davison's mother took her children north and opened a shop. Davison became a governess and worked on her books at night.
Impatient with the dissension and indecision – and the fruitlessness – of the suffrage movement, Emily Davison went it alone, mischievously, daringly.
At the V&A: 'Hollywood Costume'
Dressmakers' dummies are favourites with photographers of haunting; Eugène Atget, who rarely shows the inhabitants of a Parisian street or room, dwells on the smiling mannequins in shop windows, wearing aprons and housemaids' caps, or on an effigy of madame in a string of pearls and a tilted trilby. Fixed expressions and rigid bodies give the images an uncanny aura –...
Dressmakers' dummies are favourites with photographers of haunting; Eugène Atget, who rarely shows the inhabitants of a Parisian street or room, dwells on the smiling mannequins in...
Everybody's Joan
In 1954, I was a pupil at Les Dames de Marie, a French-speaking convent school in an expansive and pastoral suburb of Brussels. Every morning, as we crocodile-filed into our classrooms, we sang patriotic hymns. One of these, the 'Marche Lorraine', has a rousing chorus; in rapid ascending arpeggios as in a trumpet voluntary, we blasted out a paean to 'the young shepherdess in...
In 1954, I was a pupil at Les Dames de Marie, a French-speaking convent school in an expansive and pastoral suburb of Brussels. Every morning, as we crocodile-filed into our classrooms, we sang...
Our Lady of the Counterculture: The Virgin Mary
Marina Warner, 8 November 2012
As a child, I searched out lives of great women. Some of my heroines appeared on the back page of the comic I read then, called Girl: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale and Marie Curie mingled with Albert Schweitzer and Davy Crockett; their stirring words were blazoned in balloons, against backdrops of crenellated castles, jungles, battlefields. In the pages of the...
As a child, I searched out lives of great women. Some of my heroines appeared on the back page of the comic I read then, called Girl: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale and...
In Hell: Wat Phai Rong Wua
In 1975 Benedict Anderson first visited the extensive monastery of Wat Phai Rong Wua, one of dozens in central Thailand; he returned in the 1990s and again a few years ago. Any wat is an imagined community, and this one, a Buddhist Disneyland, presents a special case for Anderson, whose curious book, The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand, enlivened with startlingly...
In 1975 Benedict Anderson first visited the extensive monastery of Wat Phai Rong Wua, one of dozens in central Thailand; he returned in the 1990s and again a few years ago. Any wat is an imagined...
Once a Catholic…: Damien Hirst
In 1991 the art critic Louisa Buck rang me up – she was my sister-in-law and in those days we didn't text – and said I really should go along to Bond Street and see the butterflies hatching in some disused premises that the artist Damien Hirst had rented. 'It's a truly beautiful installation,' she enthused. She described it: the dishes of melting nectar, the chrysalises stuck to the walls, and the startling epiphanies as the creatures unfurled, fluttered – tropical, iridescent, huge, ineffable. I didn't get there in the end, but not because I didn't want to.
Hirst is a natural allegorist, a lover of vanitas images – a clear case of once a Catholic.
The Labile Self: Dressing Up
A 17th-century comic print known as The Cure of Folly shows a surgery-cum-alchemical cabinet in which a doctor is treating patients: one is being administered mind-altering drugs; another is being fired and recast in a furnace. This one, a 'gallant' in a most elegant get-up, with little pointy moustaches, a lace ruff with multiple layers, soft boots with spurs, and a silk tunic...
Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe
by Ulinka Rublack.
A 17th-century comic print known as The Cure of Folly shows a surgery-cum-alchemical cabinet in which a doctor is treating patients: one is being administered mind-altering drugs; another is...
At the Hayward: Tracey Emin
Quilts used to be made from baskets of scraps; old clothes were cut up, the worn and stained bits discarded, the best parts kept for reuse. Every household where a woman lived had such a container – a midden of memories – and when the scraps had become a patchwork quilt, spotting this old dress or that old pair of curtains or that old cushion was part of the pleasure of the bed, a...
Quilts used to be made from baskets of scraps; old clothes were cut up, the worn and stained bits discarded, the best parts kept for reuse. Every household where a woman lived had such a...
In the Time of Not Yet: Going East
Edward Said first met Daniel Barenboim by chance, at the reception desk of the Hyde Park Hotel in June 1993; Said mentioned he had tickets for a concert Barenboim was playing that week. They began to talk. Six years later, in Weimar, they dreamed up the idea of a summer school in which young musicians from the Arab world and from Israel could play together. They hoped, Said remembered in Parallels and Paradoxes, that it 'might be an alternative way of making peace'.
Edward Said first met Daniel Barenboim by chance, at the reception desk of the Hyde Park Hotel in June 1993; Said mentioned he had tickets for a concert Barenboim was playing that week. They began to...
Did she go willingly? Helen of Troy
The way the Greek myths have been told has disguised the joins and touched up the weirdness. Writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne in Tanglewood Tales and Charles Kingsley in The Heroes, who enthralled me when I was a child devouring the stories under the bedclothes by torchlight, patched and pieced the myths into the coherent plots that we are familiar with. Writers continue to work a ragbag of scraps into whole cloth, disentangling the threads and recomposing the patterns. Very few readers today go back to the sources, to handbooks like Apollodorus' The Library, or to the work of Quintus of Smyrna, who in the fourth century wrote a sequel to the Iliad in 14 books.
Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood
by Laurie Maguire.
The way the Greek myths have been told has disguised the joins and touched up the weirdness. Writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne in Tanglewood Tales and Charles Kingsley in The Heroes, who...
A View of a View: Melchior Lorck
Marina Warner, 27 May 2010
Melchior Lorck went to Turkey in 1555 at the height of Suleiman the Magnificent's power, when the Ottoman Empire stretched from Algeria to the west, Mecca to the south, Baghdad to the east and the River Don to the north, adjoining – and often aggressing – the Habsburgs' own colossal empire. Suleiman had besieged Vienna twice and, though he had retreated, the threat...
Melchior Lorck
edited by Erik Fischer, Ernst Jonas Bencard and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen.
Melchior Lorck went to Turkey in 1555 at the height of Suleiman the Magnificent's power, when the Ottoman Empire stretched from Algeria to the west, Mecca to the south, Baghdad to the east...
Witchiness: Baba Yaga
Baba Yaga is the true Witch of the North, the supreme scare figure of the Russian nursery, a monstrous old hag who haunts children and eats them. She doesn't exactly appear in character here, but she hovers off stage, and directs the action. Old women are Ugrešić's heroines and old womanhood her theme.
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg
by Dubravka Ugrešić, translated by Ellen Elias Bursác, Celia Hawkesworth and Mark Thompson.
Dubravka Ugrešić's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is the latest, most inventive and most substantial volume in Canongate's series of revisioned myths. The first was Margaret...
Ventriloquism: Dear Old Khayyám
Marina Warner, 9 April 2009
A glass-fronted Regency bookcase in a corner of the London Library opposite the lift holds a collection of rare and beautiful editions of Edward FitzGerald's poem, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Since its first publication in 1859, it has appeared in every size and shape, giant and toy, on vellum and silk, in fabulous bindings stamped with peacocks' tails and nightingales' eyes.
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
by Edward Fitzgerald, edited by Daniel Karlin.
A glass-fronted Regency bookcase in a corner of the London Library opposite the lift holds a collection of rare and beautiful editions of Edward FitzGerald's poem, Rubáiyát of...
Travelling Text: 'The Arabian Nights'
Like a dance craze or a charismatic cult, The Arabian Nights seized readers' imaginations as soon as translations first appeared – in French between 1704 and 1717, and in English from 1708. Oriental fever swept through salons and coffee-houses, the offices of broadsheet publishers and theatrical impresarios; the book fired a train of imitations, spoofs, turqueries, Oriental tales,...
The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights
translated by Malcolm Lyons, with Ursula Lyons.
'The Arabian Nights' in Historical Context: Between East and West
edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum.
In the countries of the book's origin, the stories were considered popular trash, and excluded from the canon. In Europe, a similar sense that they had negligible status as literature came about because so many of their early enthusiasts were women.
Doubly Damned: literary riddles
Marina Warner, 8 February 2007
Oedipus the riddle-breaker finds himself caught in a riddle; the coils of the enigma 'What am I?' tighten around him until he comes to the horrific knowledge that he is himself insoluble: husband of his mother, brother of his daughters. The question of his true identity is related to the Sphinx's original riddle – 'What walks on four feet in the morning, two feet...
Enigmas and Riddles in Literature
by Eleanor Cook.
Oedipus the riddle-breaker finds himself caught in a riddle; the coils of the enigma 'What am I?' tighten around him until he comes to the horrific knowledge that he is himself...
Pick the small ones: Girls Are Rubbish
Marina Warner, 17 February 2005
Dryden and D'Avenant's debonair travesty of The Tempest pairs the innocent heroine, Dorinda, with Hippolito, a male juvenile lead of equal springtime guilelessness. While Miranda knows only Prospero and Caliban, and barely remembers her mother, neither Dorinda nor Hippolito has ever seen any other member of the opposite sex. Hippolito finds that Prospero left behind a single book,...
Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet: Women in Proverbs from around the World
by Mineke Schipper.
Dryden and D'Avenant's debonair travesty of The Tempest pairs the innocent heroine, Dorinda, with Hippolito, a male juvenile lead of equal springtime guilelessness. While Miranda...
Into Thin Air: Science at the Séances
The medium in trance, herself ghosting the presence of another, is haunted by the oracles of ancient Greece, and by the shamans and behiques of Africa and the Caribbean, whose magical powers over souls had been noted in the earliest ethnography to come out of these regions.
The Invention of Telepathy
by Roger Luckhurst.
Eva C., one of the most sensational 'materialising' mediums of the early 20th century, was much photographed in the act of producing spirits in the form of ectoplasmic structures, or...
A New Twist in the Long Tradition of the Grotesque: the monstrousness of Britart
The heavy in shirtsleeves on the door of the disused Strand tube station was working the phone to a reluctant client who had rented the premises for a rave that didn't happen and now didn't want to pay. The man's job title was something like Manager of Decommissioned Underground Material and I had gone to see him with Michael Morris, one of the directors of Artangel, a company that puts on art events in different media in unusual places. He was trying to get permission to use the runnels and platforms for The Vertical Line, a performance piece devised by John Berger.
High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s
by Julian Stallabrass.
This is Modern Art
by Matthew Collings.
The heavy in shirtsleeves on the door of the disused Strand tube station was working the phone to a reluctant client who had rented the premises for a rave that didn't happen and now...
In Trinidad
The Bocas Literary Festival in Port of Spain draws its distinctive character from the way poetry, storytelling, satire, performance, recitation and masquerade are bound up together in the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, and in the lives of the vast diaspora of Caribbean people. The festival is inclusive: even descendants of former colonials, like me, are invited (my grandfather, the cricketer Plum Warner, was born in Trinidad, and I still have cousins there, called Cadiz).
In Rochdale
Working with porcelain, the artist Rachel Kneebone makes whiteness reverberate to the depths. Shining, delicate and visceral, transcendent and perturbing, her work looks back to origins and forward to ends.
At the Gogol Centre
'Can you speak Russian? No? So why go to the theatre when you can't understand a word?' My challenger (English) was incredulous that I'd asked one of the Russian helpers on the British Council tour, whose mother had been a principal dancer with the Kirov, to find me, if at all possible, a ticket to a play. There was a performance of Anna Akhmatova's poetry, she'd told me. The legendary Alla Demidova would be performing; the director was Kirill Serebrennikov, a daring force in the Russian avant-garde; and it would be taking place in the Gogol Centre, a former warehouse designed in industrial cool with gorgeous Constructivist lettering that makes the word Гоголь look like the limbs of an Alexandra Exter puppet.
In Doha
The Museum of Islamic art is closed on Tuesdays, the taxi driver tells us. En route to the Melbourne Writers Festival, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Jacqueline Rose and I, soon to be joined by Andrew O'Hagan, have stopped for the night in Doha for this collection, to see the medieval lamps, the carpets, the emeralds, the Kaaba curtains, the manuscripts of the Quran, the maps of the world – maybe the map of Qatar when it was a pearl fishing port and an infamous haven for pirates. After all my browsing on the museum's site, how could I have missed the opening times? We resolve to find a way: personnel must be on duty even during closing hours. Guards present. Temperature controls purring. Lighting on to protect against stealthy intruders. We email and text anyone who might have an entrée. I am a little embarrassed.
A Statue for Emily Davison
The Wilding Festival, organised by mostly young artists, teachers and activists, took place earlier this month in St George's Bloombury, the Hawksmoor church which is crowned by a ziggurat and backs on to Little Russell Street, opposite the offices of the LRB. Emily Wilding Davison's funeral took place there a hundred years ago, the magazine was collaborating with the festival, and I was asked to give a talk about female heroism.
Is there another place from which the dickhead's self can speak? the body and law
Anatomical cabinets, displaying bodies bottled whole or in segments, are gripping artists' and writers' imaginations: the Enlightenment's relish for physical data banks excites awe, fascination and horror in inverse relation to the disembodiment and intangibility of knowledge in the contemporary computerised classroom. A pigmy woman, who died in childbirth in London, where she had been brought to be exhibited, is preserved, in a complete half-section, in the Hunterian Museum. She inspired one of the last, unfinished works of the artist Helen Chadwick, who wanted to restore the unnamed pigmy to history, memory and human status as a person – to personhood, in short. University museums and hospital teaching departments are richly stocked with such specimens: a whole black man in a glass box in Chicago; quintuplet foetuses floating upwards, open-mouthed, like Donatello choristers, on a shelf in the Hunterian. Zarina Bhimji, another artist who, like Chadwick, expresses her challenge to common, unexamined responses through photography, has made a highly enigmatic, disturbing image of a black woman's breast, disfigured by a hideous slash. This exhibit comes from the forensic archive of a London hospital, where it is used to illustrate the effects of stabbing for the benefit of medical students: but the injury is itself framed by the jagged partition where the breast was severed from the anonymous victim – the scalpel repeating the pincers that appear, for example, in paintings of St Agatha's martyrdom.'
Bodies of Law
by Alan Hyde.
Anatomical cabinets, displaying bodies bottled whole or in segments, are gripping artists' and writers' imaginations: the Enlightenment's relish for physical data banks excites...
Suffering Souls: ghosts in the middle ages.
Marina Warner, 18 June 1998
A young priest called Walchelin, returning home one clear night in Normandy around a thousand years ago, heard a great clash and din of an army approaching; he assumed it was the soldiers who followed a local warlord, and hid himself in fear behind some medlar trees. But what he saw, instead, was a ghostly troop: first the lay folk, on foot, weighed down by terrible burdens; then the clergy, bishops as well as monks, all black-cowled and weeping; another black-robed, fiery army of knights then rode by, on black chargers. All these numbers of the dead were suffering horrible tortures, the women especially, for they were riding saddles of burning nails, and were being lifted in the air by invisible forces and dropped down again onto the points. Walchelin recognised the procession: it was the familia Herlequini, or Hellequin's rabble, the grim and unquiet crowd mustered by the lord of the dead, about which he had heard many stories.
Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society
by Jean-Claude Schmitt, translated by Theresa Lavender Fagan.
A young priest called Walchelin, returning home one clear night in Normandy around a thousand years ago, heard a great clash and din of an army approaching; he assumed it was the soldiers who...
Peroxide Mug-Shot: women who kill children
'Snatched,' said the Sun's headline about the baby stolen three hours after her birth. This is the old word for what the feared raiders of the nursery, the child stealers, the cradle-snatchers, get up to. The Egyptians devised a special god of the lying-in room, the grotesque Bes, to protect women and babies. Bes was squat and ugly and poked out his tongue and his penis to repel intruders: he was a true scarecrow, and he saw off women who were childless, his myth implies, and filled with envy of the fortune that a new life brings. Lilith is the exemplary cradle-snatcher in Judaic legends; she was spurned by Adam when she refused to lie down underneath him to make love and was supplanted by the fertile Eve. Barren and spiteful, Lilith preyed on children; amulets, posies, charms and lullabies warded off her malign spells. The coral branch often worn by the child Jesus in Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child is a survival of this pre-Christian Middle Eastern apotropaic magic. The mother in the judgment of Solomon, who steals another's baby and claims it as her own, presented a threat whose recurrence in history has been neglected.'
'Snatched,' said the Sun's headline about the baby stolen three hours after her birth. This is the old word for what the feared raiders of the nursery, the child stealers, the...
Its Own Dark Styx
'Memory says: Want to do right? Don't count on me.' So writes Adrienne Rich in a poem from An Atlas of a Difficult World, opening an unpunctuated sequence of horrors: lynchings, pogroms, Auschwitz, Berlin, Palestine, Israel:
The Nature of Blood
by Caryl Phillips.
'Memory says: Want to do right? Don't count on me.' So writes Adrienne Rich in a poem from An Atlas of a Difficult World, opening an unpunctuated sequence of horrors: lynchings,...
Noonday Devils
The French historian Arlette Farge has described coming across a letter, written on linen in a fine strong hand, in which a prisoner, long incarcerated in the Bastille, writes to his wife, affectionately, imploringly; he adds a message, to the laundry woman who will find it among his washing, asking her to embroider a blue cross on one of his socks to tell him she has managed to pass it on. But the document's continued melancholy presence in the Bastille archive attests to the failure of his ruse.
Tituba Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies
by Elaine Breslaw.
The French historian Arlette Farge has described coming across a letter, written on linen in a fine strong hand, in which a prisoner, long incarcerated in the Bastille, writes to his wife,...
You must not ask
Bachelor uncles can be popinjays who wear moustache trainers in bed in order to cut a dash the next day, as in Fellini's Amarcord; or they might take the children aside at Christmas and show them how to trumpet a tune in farts, as in Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. In stories like that of Freud's 'Katharina', they interfere with little girls, though for many reasons Freud substituted Katharina's uncle for her father. Perhaps an uncle seemed a more plausible or even acceptable perpetrator. But the kind of bachelor uncle formed in England over the decades by the university ruling that dons should not be married offers a study in psychological and national identity that has no counterpart abroad. He lingered on – still does – though the rambling houses of North Oxford built to accommodate the new families of married fellows stand as monuments to the social changes that inaugurated his decline. His love objects were not usually girls, though John Betjeman, sighing over thighs, caught the authentic tone of enraptured and impotent yearning.'
Lewis Carroll: A Biography
by Morton Cohen.
The Literary Products of the Lewis Carroll-George MacDonald Friendship
by John Docherty.
Bachelor uncles can be popinjays who wear moustache trainers in bed in order to cut a dash the next day, as in Fellini's Amarcord; or they might take the children aside at Christmas and...
Harmoniously Arranged Livers
When a djinn appears in one of A.S. Byatt's fairy tales and grants the fifty-ish academic heroine any wish her heart desires, she asks for her body 'as it was the last time she really liked it'. And lo, she finds herself once more housed in the 'serviceable and agreeable' form she possessed some fifteen years earlier, bearing some marks of experience (an appendix scar), but otherwise compact, neat, strong. She feels wonderful. 'I can go in the streets, she said to herself, and still be recognisably who I am … only I shall feel better, I shall like myself more.' She proceeds to great adventures of an earthly variety with the djinn himself.…
The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity 200-1336
by Caroline Walker Bynum.
When a djinn appears in one of A.S. Byatt's fairy tales and grants the fifty-ish academic heroine any wish her heart desires, she asks for her body 'as it was the last time she really...
Diary: Gone Bananas
The frond of the banana has straight seams, as a good pair of nylons used to have, so it's easy to tear along them and make squares of bright luminous green, nature's own shot silk. Which is what Adam and Eve probably did when they made shift with 'aprons' to hide their shame from God in the garden. In some countries where Spanish and Portuguese are spoken – which means parts of the Caribbean as well as Latin America – the word for fig is used of the banana, so this may be another example of those inspired clerical slips which result in widespread conventions. That the figleaf is hard to fix to the body every child confronted with a Renaissance statue has noticed. Banana leaves, on the other hand, can be draped and threaded – like cloth.'
The frond of the banana has straight seams, as a good pair of nylons used to have, so it's easy to tear along them and make squares of bright luminous green, nature's own shot silk....
This small book contains multitudes. It fits to the hand like one of those knobbed hoops that do concise duty for the rosary, each knob giving the mind pause to open up to vistas of meditation on mysteries and passions; in the compass of a scant 135 pages it provokes, inspires and illuminates more profoundly than many a bulky volume, and confronts the great subjects – death, illness, reason and unreason, family strife and family bonds, friendship and betrayal, today's political abdication and philosophical cowardice, the limits of feminism, of happiness – and it delivers what its title promises, a new allegory about love.'
Love's Work
by Gillian Rose.
This small book contains multitudes. It fits to the hand like one of those knobbed hoops that do concise duty for the rosary, each knob giving the mind pause to open up to vistas of meditation on...
Magic Zones
When Pasolini, disgusted with the fatted values of post-war capitalism in Italy, was dreaming up an alternative in his late Trilogy, he found the imagery he needed in old collections of stories, and made The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron and The Arabian Nights. By turning from the uncanny, contemporary metaphysics of a film like Theorem, he was making common cause with the vulgar imagination and placing his hope in its vigour, in what he perceived to be its unabashed appetites and its laughter. The Arabian Nights, which sadly seems to have survived in this country only in a mutilated and dubbed print, is a period piece of Seventies hedonism. It opens with a jostling crowd in a souk in the Yemen and the auction of a slave girl; there follows much nudity, much touching and grinning in various combinations of partners, and under the aching desert moon, much passionate flesh. Some of the film is set in the jalousied interiors of Moorish bedrooms, or in desert cities such as Sana'a, with its towers of baked mud decorated with white scrolls and borders like piped icing. But on the whole, the freedoms of the flesh Pasolini dreams up take place in the open air, free of clothes or inhibitions – free of stone.'
Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilisation
by Richard Sennett.
When Pasolini, disgusted with the fatted values of post-war capitalism in Italy, was dreaming up an alternative in his late Trilogy, he found the imagery he needed in old collections of stories,...
What the children saw
The Ave Maria society, based in London, recently issued a book the size of a telephone directory called Supernatural Visions of the Madonna 1981-91. The desktop publication was heralded by large ads in various papers featuring the visionary. Sister Marie or Sofia Marie Gabriel: her revelations and secrets could save mankind. In the book, the author includes a poem, called 'Child Mystic Child of Destiny':
Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany
by David Blackhourn.
The Ave Maria society, based in London, recently issued a book the size of a telephone directory called Supernatural Visions of the Madonna 1981-91. The desktop publication was heralded by large...
The Virtue of Incest
The romance of Apollonius of Tyre opens with the classic fairy-tale couple: the king and his daughter. Antiochus is powerful, she is beautiful, and of marriageable age – there is no mother. The difference is that, in this variation, she will not leave home to marry a prince, for her father Antiochus 'began to love her in a way unsuitable for a father … Since he could not endure the wound in his breast, one day … he rushed into his daughter's room and ordered the servants to withdraw … Spurred on by the frenzy of his lust, he took his daughter's virginity by force, in spite of her lengthy resistance.''…
Elizabeth's Glass
by Marc Shell.
The romance of Apollonius of Tyre opens with the classic fairy-tale couple: the king and his daughter. Antiochus is powerful, she is beautiful, and of marriageable age – there is no mother....
Watch your tongue
If SS Jerome or Ambrose or Augustine or any of the grim Fathers had been watching television in spring this year, they wouldn't have had much trouble seeing Marlene Dietrich for what she was. Those lids, those lips, that pillowy mink, those sidelong glances, those shimmering legs and – above all – that voice, would have rendered her lightly accented modern English as plain as the Latin of the Mass to the patriarchs and their friends and forerunners in the penitential Thebaid. The world, the flesh and the devil embodied in a woman, and speaking in a woman's voice: the siren incarnate against whom you have to plug your ears or else, like Adam, you will feel the plunge as you fall. It is odd how wholeheartedly women have given themselves to playing this part – to believing it, too. Or perhaps it's not all that odd: the femme fatale offers more opportunities than several of the other sacrificial parts in the repertoire. But it is remarkable how the constituent elements of the contemporary fatal woman, the stories that underpin her charms, as well as the ornaments she assumes, match the fulminations of two thousand years ago against the counterfeit of women's fascination and the seductions of their tongues.'
Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love
by Howard Bloch.
Women of the Renaissance
by Margaret King.
The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographical Romances of the 13th Century
by Brigitte Cazelles.
If SS Jerome or Ambrose or Augustine or any of the grim Fathers had been watching television in spring this year, they wouldn't have had much trouble seeing Marlene Dietrich for what she...
That which is spoken
The poor man's wife flourishes, the Sultana gets thinner and scrappier by the minute. So the Sultan sends for the poor man and demands the secret of his wife's happiness. 'Very simple,' he replies. 'I feed her meat of the tongue.' The Sultan buys ox tongues and larks' tongues; still his wife withers away. He makes her change places with the poor man's wife and she immediately starts thriving, while her replacement soon becomes as lean and miserable as the former queen. For the tongue meats that the poor man feeds his wives aren't material, of course. They're stories, jokes, songs; in this fable from Kenya, this is what makes women thrive.
The Virago Book of Fairy-Tales
edited by Angela Carter.
Sisters and Strangers: A Moral Tale
by Emma Tennant.
The poor man's wife flourishes, the Sultana gets thinner and scrappier by the minute. So the Sultan sends for the poor man and demands the secret of his wife's happiness. 'Very...
In 1894, the same year that the Children's Charter extended new legal protection to the young, the English painter Thomas Gotch portrayed his young daughter in majesty like a Madonna by Duccio, with a huge nimbus around her head, and called the image The Child Enthroned. Concurrently, the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler celebrated the birth of his son with an equally awed work, The Chosen One, in which the newborn and naked baby lies on the ground like a Christ Child in a Nativity painting, with a watch of winged spirits hovering a foot off the ground around him. In both images, mothers are altogether absent, and fathers are present only by implication, as votaries before the icon they are creating. The child is isolated in glory, a being in human form but quasi-divine, not quite contiguous with the adult world. As Robert Rosenblum observes in his stimulating and characteristically original essay, The Romantic Child, Hodler's celebration – like Gotch's – lacks some of the raw and peculiar passion of the early Romantics. The children are still represented as preternaturally different, still cast as creatures possessed with a virtuality that their progenitors can never match, but sentimentality has blurred the unsettling adoration of the primitive found in the art of the German visionaries Philip Otto Runge and Karl Friedrich Schinkel.'
The Romantic Child: From Runge to Sendak
by Robert Rosenblum.
Caldecott & Co: Notes on Books and Pictures
by Maurice Sendak.
Dear Mili
by Wilhelm Grimm, translated by Ralph Manheim and Maurice Sendak.
In 1894, the same year that the Children's Charter extended new legal protection to the young, the English painter Thomas Gotch portrayed his young daughter in majesty like a Madonna by...
Villa Lampedusa
In The Leopard, the prince embraces Angelica at the moment of her engagement to his nephew Tancredi, 'and he felt as if by those kisses he were taking possession of Sicily once more, of the lovely faithless land which now … had surrendered to him again, as always to his family, its carnal delights and golden crops.' Though the prince's personal powers are never in question in the novel, his creator is mindful, at the moment of that embrace, of his hero as the representative of family and its ancient rights of possession. Lampedusa was not stirred by people as much as by things, by what Sicilian peasants in the stories of his compatriots, Verga and Pirandello, called la roba, a word encompassing everything a man was worth, from the land itself to the least stick and stone on it. For Lampedusa, the monkeys on a painted wall, the sachet of sweet-smelling bran releasing its fragrance into the bath, a set of English razors, or 'the stony hills and fields of mown corn, yellow as the manes of lions' were indeed good. From such material detail, rather than any incidents of moment, from the conflict between dispossession and prestige, rather than new loves or old, the character of The Leopard's originator emerges in David Gilmour's entertaining and astute biography. There is at times, but only at times, an excess of reserve – caught from his subject's own fastidiousness?'
The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe di Lampedusa
by David Gilmour.
In The Leopard, the prince embraces Angelica at the moment of her engagement to his nephew Tancredi, 'and he felt as if by those kisses he were taking possession of Sicily once more, of the...
The Elegant Dr Pozzi
Luc Sante wonders if the red coat that the elegant Dr Pozzi is modelling in Sargent's painting is perhaps a dressing-gown rather than a coat (LRB, 5 March). I'd like to suggest instead that the painting may be reprising the magnificent robe worn by Cardinal Richelieu in the portrait by Philippe de Champaigne, which still hangs in the Louvre. The draped curtain behind the cardinal, the...
Lawrence Dunn writes about the distinctions between Pygmies, San and Khoi (Letters, 20 June). I first came across the terms 'San' and 'Khoi' in the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town, where some of these peoples' art, the most ancient art in the world, is displayed (as resin casts, since the images are mostly drawn or carved on rock). My interest was especially caught...
The Politics of Translation
Tim Marr rightly fine-tunes my account of the massacre of the Ephraimites in the Bible, emphasising that differences in pronunciation of the word for 'river' (shibboleth) were used to separate Them from Us (Letters, 22 November). He also refers to the more recent episode when Haitians in Dominica in 1937 were ordered to say 'parsley', perejil, and those who couldn't roll...
The Liveliness of the Dead
Instances of 'medicinal cannibalism', described by John Shipley, would seem a survival of a religious cult (Letters, 5 October). There is even a word, 'myrrhoblyte', for a saint whose body exudes oil long after burial (I owe this piece of information to the late Dom Sylvester Houédard, aka dsh, concrete poet, lexicographer and ecumenical campaigner, whose knowledge of...
Dress like an Abyssinian
Peter Fernandes is right to remind us of Hergé's Belgian colonialist attitudes (Letters, 2 February). However Tintin is a reporter not an empire official – though I admit I was probably over-wishful in distinguishing the press from the governing powers. He wears a kind of golfing outfit – plus fours and light colours, jersey, and maybe brogues – and together with his...
No Broguing
The shoes in question may lack defining holes, but I'm a bit punctured by Baer Pettit's good-natured relabelling of my mother's pair (Letters, 20 October). And yet 'broguing', as a term for the pricked patterns in leather, appears in Wikipedia but isn't known (as far as I can see) in the OED or any other dictionary; it sounds like a neologistic back formation, picking...
Under the Shadow of Rhodes
Amia Srinivasan writes about the Rhodes Must Fall campaigns in Cape Town and Oxford (LRB, 31 March). The artist William Kentridge has thought a lot about South Africa's past and the people who made it, and has evolved methods of drawing – smudging and overscribbling and erasing – which retain the memory of what went before while at the same time rubbing it out, literally. Transmuting...
Our Joan
Andrew McCullough, in his response to my piece about Joan of Arc, ends by saying, 'If the right want her they can surely have her'; R.W. Johnson seems to be tarring her with the same brush, recalling a dim heroine of colonial propaganda from the French war in Indochina (Letters, 20 December 2012 and Letters, 3 January). Both show startling complacency about mythical and political symbols...
In Hell
I never imagined I'd be swapping observations of genitalia with Benedict Anderson, but I am puzzled when he writes that the privates of the praeds are 'the only body parts which are never mutilated or disfigured' (Letters, 27 September). On p. 72 of The Fate of Rural Hell, an 18th-century painting showing a torture victim, with his elephantiasis-afflicted penis loaded over his shoulder,...
Of Time and Temples
John Gale rightly points out that the word temenos, a word frequently used for a shrine or sacred precinct, depends on an underlying metaphor of cutting and demarcating, from the Greek verb temno, used literally for slicing and hewing and wounding, and metaphorically for a ship cutting the waves or a plough furrowing a field (Letters, 2 August). The difficulty that imagining or describing time presents...
There after all
For many years I attended the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, in the same building where Tracey Emin had the operation she describes in her film How It Feels. It was a brand-new extension when my consultant first moved there, and the small building was a bubble of 1960s utopian style, strikingly pop in its bright lime-green plastic and curved perspex. One of the reasons I mentioned its disappearance...
'A Little Kohl-Rimmed Moon'
Martin Harris (Letters, 22 February) scolds me for praising Eleanor Cook's commentary on James Merrill's riddle-poem 'b o d y' without realising that Laura Quinney had discussed it in similar terms in an earlier issue (LRB, 8 February). It's not unlikely that I read Quinney's review of James Merrill's Collected Poems: Merrill used an Ouija board – and...
I regret that in my review of Love's Work (LRB, 6 April) I gave the wrong surname for Gillian Rose's sister Diana; I should have written Diana Stone.
Down with incest
When I wrote that incest occurs 'often tragically', I was using my words carefully, contrary to Michael Cotsell's opinion (Letters, 4 November). There have been survivors of child abuse, and for the sake of the victims themselves, it seems to me important to remember that it is possible to survive, to keep in mind that their story isn't ineluctably destined to end in tragedy....
See moreShow oldest
Marina Warner shows how higher education in the UK has been betrayed, in her 2015 LRB Winter Lecture.
Emily Davison, Modern Martyr
Marina Warner delivers her lecture on Emily Davison's legacy as the suffragettes' first martyr.
Marina Warner watches Damien Hirst's butterflies hatch.
Pieces about Marina Warner in the LRB
One's Thousand One Nightinesses: 'The Arabian Nights'
Steven Connor, 22 March 2012
There can be no new reader, and therefore perhaps no wholly new reading of the collection of stories known as The Arabian Nights. Not because they have been exhausted by retelling and...
Hatching, Splitting, Doubling: Smooching the Swan
James Lasdun, 21 August 2003
A memorable image in Robert Musil's Man without Qualities likens the impact of a certain character to that of a powdery avalanche. The effect of reading Marina Warner's magisterial...
Some Evil Thing
James Davidson, 18 February 1999
Marina Warner's No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock is an impossible book. It circles around monsters and the frightening of children, but it also has chapters on the...
Once upon a Real Time
Wendy Doniger, 23 March 1995
If women are the ones who tell fairy tales, why do fairy tales paint such ugly pictures of women? Or, as Marina Warner puts it, 'If and when women are narrating, why are the female...
Fear of Rabid Dogs
Margaret Anne Doody, 18 August 1994
In his last days, the exiled and ageing Aristotle wrote to a friend: 'The lonelier and the more isolated I am, the more I have come to love myths.' We may puzzle over what Aristotle...
Sea Changes
Patrick Parrinder, 27 February 1992
The British, a nation of Sancho Panzas, like to dream of governing an island. The majority of ideal states both ancient and modern have been imaginary cities rather than sea-girt lumps of rock,...
Making and Breaking
Rosalind Mitchison, 21 December 1989
Nobody could call Frank Honigsbaum's book 'user friendly'. Some reasons for its indigestibility are inherent in the topic: the moves, some effective, most frustrated, by civil...
Let's get the hell out of here
Patrick Parrinder, 29 September 1988
Here, in these three novels, are three representations of the state of the art. In The Satanic Verses the narrator, who may or may not be the Devil, confides that 'what follows is tragedy....
The nude strikes back
John Bayley, 7 November 1985
The psychologist John Layard – 'Loony Layard', as he is affectionately termed in one of Auden's early poems – is said to have told a submarine officer that he had...
John Sutherland, 6 May 1982
A new novel by Günter Grass invites comparisons of a national kind. If a British writer of fiction wished to engage with the big stories of the day – the kind of thing Brian Walden...
Joan and Jill
V.G. Kiernan, 15 October 1981
In 1870, Daumier drew a cartoon of soldiers filing past a monument of the fatherland, with the caption: 'Ceux qui vont mourir te saluent.' Wandering about quiet French churches, one...


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I was searching for a Property and found this listing (MLS® #21618566). Please send me more information regarding 1621 S E Street, Elwood, IN, 46036. Thank you!
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text:
layout: post
title: The End is Nigh?
date: '2008-06-12 08:34:41 -0700'
mt_id: 1296
blog_id: 1
post_id: 1296
basename: the-end-is-nigh
categories:
- current-events
---

ABC is thinking that we're starting the last century of civilization {via}, which coincidentally is the subject of their upcoming special entitled Earth 2100. Sadly, this time around we're minus one Julian Simon to counter this silliness. It is absurd to me that anyone could seriously believe that we will turn from the rapid march of progress to the descent into ruin in seven years. Actually, that is a possibility if Al Gore gets his wish and we start down the path to a 90% reduction in carbon dioxide generation.

In the comments attached to this article, there's a great question:

When we remove natural resources from the earth, what impact does this have on the insulation between the raging heat of the core and the surface of our planet? I would love have [sic] a scientist's answer to this question.

That, in a nutshell, is why I think people will believe anything in this climate change debate. (Oh yes, I said "debate." I know in the current climate—pun intended—it is positively unfashionable to think the matter is anything less than absolutely settled and beyond doubt, but absent a Global Warming Inquisition I'm sticking to some skepticism. That's the subject for another post.) "crocketteer" asks an ignorant question in an online forum and gladly welcomes a "scientist's answer," presumably in the same forum.

We have here a nexus of ignorance and gullibility at work. People, seemingly, will believe anything if it has the aura of authority and the imprimatur of science. How else can you explain the claim that "Experts say that extreme changes in climate, combined with dwindling resources, famine, war and disease have the potential to create a post-apocalyptic world in less than a hundred years?"

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Trade Slowly Erodes Global Poverty
Our Correspondent Nov 5, 2011
The Asian Market in Rockville, Maryland, has a pallet by the wall that is stacked six feet high with 25-kilo bags of Angkor Rice – a high-quality jasmine, stamped in blue with the iconic five-tower silhouette of Angkor Wat. Harvested this spring, it is part of Cambodia's first batch of rice sales to the United States since the 1960s.
Two miles away at the Home Depot's garden desk in Silver Spring, one can buy smaller bags of Niger seed, a top-end birdseed favored by finches and other songbirds, grown in the Ethiopian highlands as a staple crop for thousands of years and now harvested for American bird-lovers.
Mundane stories of trade like these rarely draw much attention. But the humble bags of rice and birdseed deserve a space among the genuinely big developments of the new millennium. Such exports are the tangible evidence of one of the last decade's remarkable trends: the revival of the world's poorest countries, and a vast, little-noticed decline in poverty.
Ethiopia and Cambodia are charter members of a depressing club – the United Nations' list of "least developed countries," or LDCs. First published in 1971, this list now includes 49 LDCs: seven in Asia, 34 in sub-Saharan Africa, six Pacific island states, Haiti, and Yemen.
Countries make the list by meeting three qualifications. First, they have little money. Their per capita incomes average $905 or less – meaning in real terms, a farmer, hotel maid, or itinerant peddler supporting a family of five on $15 per day. Second, their people are often sick and mostly uneducated. LDC life expectancy is 59, a dozen years less than the world's average; in 2000 their primary-school graduation rates were half the world average. And third, with governments often disorganized or unable to offer help in emergencies, they are unusually vulnerable to economic upheaval and natural disasters.
These countries rarely get much of the world's attention, except during sensational crises. Only then do G-20 leaders hold meetings schedule meetings and high-minded rock stars and celebrities hold charity concerts – from George Harrison's 1971 Concert for Bangladesh through the 1985 Live Aid appeal for Ethiopia to Bono and Angelina Jolie today. Few experts expect lasting improvements. In fact, Paul Collier's justly celebrated 2007 book on their troubles, The Bottom Billion, closed on a typically pessimistic note:
"A billion people stuck in desperate conditions. … Conflict, natural resources, being landlocked, and bad governance have kept these countries stagnant for forty years, and I do not see much reason for the next couple of decades to be any different."
His judgment had history behind it. Only three countries have escaped the UN's LDC list in the 40 years since its first edition. And they are anomalies: Two small island states, the Maldives and Cape Verde, got off by cultivating high-end beach tourism; Botswana did it by careful management of income from a huge diamond find.
Collier found persuasive reasons to argue that the rest faced a brutal slog over decades. China, middle-income Asean states and Latin America had captured the rich-country farming and light-manufacturing markets that let them escape deep poverty. Energy and metal wealth in Africa was more likely to corrupt and impoverish than to raise living standards. Migration was likely to bleed talent and wealth. Aid often went wrong, and even geography was against the LDCs.
But the pessimistic case could be wrong. In almost every important way – citizens' health, the poverty count, the effectiveness and relevance of government – the LDCs concluded the new millennium's first decade better off than they began it.
Economies began picking up. LDC GDP growth rates rose from the 3.1 percent average of the 1990s – essentially even with population growth – to 5.4 percent over the last decade. This year's figures are typical, above the world average and especially strong in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, and East Timor.
Higher growth rates over time brought larger real-economy output. World Bank figures show LDC manufacturing production up from $20 billion in 1999 to $44 billion in 2009, and farm production doubling with it. Cambodian farmers are an example. They produced 2 million tons of rice in 2000. Now they are at 8 million tons, enough to sell a half-million tons on the world market, and hoping for 15 million by 2015.
With rising output came better life. World Bank tables find low-income country malnutrition rates dropping by 20 percent since the 1990s, and primary-school completion up from 44 percent to 63 percent. Caseloads in many communicable diseases – leprosy, tetanus, malaria, cholera – have plummeted, while anti-retroviral medicines serve 3.2 million people in poor countries, up from 50,000 in 2000. Across the 49-country LDC list, life expectancy rose by seven years between 2000 and 2009, including jumps of eight years in low-income Asia, seven in West Africa and the Sahel, and eight in Haiti.
The list of poor countries may soon start shrinking. The UN's most recent meeting about the list, held last May in Istanbul, concluded that 22 countries might escape it by 2020.
No single explanation seems adequate to explain why this has happened.
Within the LDCs, 1990s-vintage political and economic reforms have taken a beating as a stale "Washington consensus," but appear to be earning slow but real rewards. Poor-country governments have encouraged investment by labor-intensive manufacturers, worked with donors to improve ports and farm-to-city roads, and put more effort into public health and primary education.
Rich-country policies are friendlier. Interested presidents – Clinton, Bush, Blair, Sarkozy – spurred by groups like Oxfam and DATA, and events like Live 8, bulked up their aid programs and made trade policy easier on the poor. Rich-country aid to the poorest countries jumped from $12 billion in 2000 to $38 billion in 2009, and private charities like the Gates Foundation added more. In America's case, the Bush administration not only raised aid levels but added two imaginative new programs – the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which provides extra aid to proven reformers, and the President's Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR.
Trade reforms, though spottier, have relieved much of the pre-2000 tariff burden on LDCs' manufacturing exports. Examples include America's African Growth and Opportunity Act and Haitian HOPE, Europe's "Everything but Arms" and similar tariff waivers in Japan, Canada and Australia.
China, and to a lesser extent, India rather than squeezing poor countries out of world markets, have emerged as big buyers of their goods. Their appetites for energy, metals, rubber and other commodities have improved poor countries' terms of trade worldwide, and China matched the United States this year as the world's largest agricultural importer.
Altogether, LDC policies have improved. The global system has become a bit kinder. And poor countries have capitalized on this with a remarkably good decade. More of their children survive infancy. More teens graduate from school. More adults earn good incomes. And more families expect life to be stable, decent and safe.
The visible evidence may seem mundane or dull. But the few bags of rice and birdseed in suburban Maryland markets signify economic reforms, better roads and new ports for rural Cambodia and upland Ethiopia, and ultimately an astonishing and inspiring story stretching across 49 countries and a billion people: In the poorest countries and the unluckiest places, life is better.
(Edward Gresser is director of the ProgressiveEconomy project at the GlobalWorks Foundation in Washington, DC. This is reprinted with permission from the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.)


Synopsis: Boone (Craig Sheffer) may be a troubled young man, but his troubles are just beginning. Set up as the fall guy in a string of slasher murders, he decides he'll hide by crossing the threshold that separates "us" from "them" and sneak into the forbidden subterranean realm of Midian. Boone will live among the monsters. Hellraiser creator Clive Barker writes (adapting his novel Cabal) and directs this vivid leap into horror that asks: in the battle of man vs. monster, who's really the monster? The answer supplies flesh-crawling suspense, sudden fear, a colorful Danny Elfman score and a creepy array of shape-shifting beings. They are the Nightbreed, denizens of a world beyond death, beyond the imagination, perhaps beyond anything you've seen.
Scream Factory: We begin with an official statement from Clive Barker's team on this extraordinary project: "The Nightbreed Director's Cut is an entirely different film than the one which was released in theaters. Its 20 minutes longer than the theatrical cut, but it contains over 40 minutes of new and altered footage. Clive oversaw the reconstruction and edit himself, personally ensuring that, at long last, he was able to tell the story he always wanted to tell, but until now, had never been given the chance. Once the scenes were reordered, and the original film footage restored, the entire film received a brand new sound mix and color pass. It is, in every way, a different movie. It contains more story, more monsters, and there's even a musical number. Ultimately, what we've delivered is a love story 25 years in the making."
**NOTE: Those who order the Limited Edition and Special Edition sets directly from us at www.ScreamfactoryDVD.com will also receive an exclusive 18"x24" poster of the newly designed artworks (available while supplies last) plus a 2-week early ship on 10/14.
Official Synopsis: A community of mutant outcasts of varying types and abilities attempts to escape the attention of a psychotic serial killer and redneck vigilantes with the help of a brooding young man who discovers them. Based on the novel "Cabal" by Clive Barker.


Brain bending puzzles, conundrums and challenges that encourage teams to use their analytical skills.
For smart people only! Teams have to channel their 'inner nerd' to solve a selection of brain teasers, conundrums and manipulative puzzles to win the Nerds Revenge!
Check out some of our Happy Nerds!
"David provided an excellent night of events, and kept us entertained for the whole night. He was genuinely very funny, and the various team building activities he organised on and off the bus managed to keep the laughs going for the entire trip - which is not an easy task given that politicians can be an exceptionally tough audience."


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No, this is not about immigrants or armies invading America. Besides, Chinese troops would have to swim the Pacific since China's navy isn't large enough to move a force that size, since China does not have America's military capabilities.
This post is about China's classic novel, "Journey to the West".
There are four novels that are considered Chinese classics—Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Dream of Red Chamber, Journey to the West and The Outlaws of the Marsh (some of these classics have been released in other titles).
In fact, there are three Chinese books titled "Journey to the West".
One Journey to the West is nonfiction about K'iu Ch'ang Ch'un, who visited Genghis Khan in Persia between 1221 and 1224.
The second Journey to the West is another nonfiction account about Hsuan Tsang, a Buddhist monk who travels to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures.
The third Journey to the West is a fictional romance that introduces the Monkey King and his friend the Pig on their journey to the West.
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 31st, 2010 at 08:00 and is filed under China, Chinese arts and music, Chinese Culture, Chinese history.	You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


ESET, a global leader in cybersecurity, today launches a new online licensing management system to provide MSPs visibility into customer licenses, their usage and activated devices, allowing them to better serve their customers.
The new ESET MSP Administrator (EMA) is another example of how ESET aims to provide seamless, non-disruptive and quick solutions to businesses' cybersecurity needs. Within one aggregated dashboard – complete with drill down functionality – MSPs can now create multiple customers and license holders, and manage their specific settings. What's more, as customers' needs change, MSPs can rapidly upgrade or downgrade seat counts accordingly. Coupled with ESET's daily billing-monthly invoicing model and aggregated volume pricing, ESET's MSP Program provides the best experience and potential to increase their profit margins for MSPs.
EMA, used in combination with ESET's Direct Endpoint Management plugins - for RMM tools such as ConnectWise Automate, SolarWinds N-Central or Autotask AEM – or with ESET Security Management Center – offers MSPs an unparalleled user experience, while saving time on back office processes.
EMA's flexibility is also supported by integrated billing reports that enable the MSP administrators to manage billing information for each customer and estimate expected costs.
For added convenience, EMA is designed for use on tablets and mobile devices for easy access, but remains secure by requiring two-step authentication for every user created.
For further information on ESET MSP Administrator, the latest ESET plugins for MSPs and other resources related to the ESET MSP program click here.


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20Q is a computerized game of twenty questions that began as a test in artificial intelligence (AI). It was invented by Robin Burgener in 1988.[1] The game was made handheld by Radica in 2004, but was discontinued in 2011 because Techno Source took the license for 20Q handheld devices.[citation needed]
A red 20Q by Radica
Electronic game
iOS iPad App
customized knowledgebases
Robin Burgener [2]
Radica (2004 - 2011)
Techno Source (2011-2015)
Uncle Milton Industries (2015–2017)
Irwin Toys (2017-present)
The game 20Q is based on the spoken parlor game known as twenty questions, and is both a website[2] and a handheld device. 20Q asks the player to think of something and will then try to guess what they are thinking of with twenty yes-or-no questions. If it fails to guess in 20 questions, it will ask an additional 5 questions. If it fails to guess even with 25 (or 30) questions, the player is declared the winner. Sometimes the first guess of the object can be asked at question 14.
Principle and historyEdit
The principle is that the player thinks of something and the 20Q artificial intelligence asks a series of questions before guessing what the player is thinking. This artificial intelligence learns on its own with the information relayed back to the players who interact with it, and is not programmed. The player can answer these questions with: Yes, No, Unknown, and Sometimes. The experiment is based on the classic word game of Twenty Questions, and on the computer game "Animals," popular in the early 1970s, which used a somewhat simpler method to guess an animal.[3]
The 20Q AI uses an artificial neural network to pick the questions and to guess.[1][4] After the player has answered the twenty questions posed (sometimes fewer), 20Q makes a guess. If it is incorrect, it asks more questions, then guesses again. It makes guesses based on what it has learned; it is not programmed with information or what the inventor thinks. Answers to any question are based on players' interpretations of the questions asked. Newer editions were made for different categories, such as music 20Q which has the player think of a song, and Harry Potter 20Q, which has the player think of something from the world of the Harry Potter series.
The 20Q AI can draw its own conclusions on how to interpret the information. It can be described as more of a folk taxonomy than a taxonomy. Its knowledge develops with every game played. In this regard, the online version of the 20Q AI can be inaccurate because it gathers its answers from what people think rather than from what people know. Limitations of taxonomy are often overcome by the AI itself because it can learn and adapt. For example, if the player was thinking of a "Horse" and answered "No" to the question "Is it an animal?," the AI will, nevertheless, guess correctly, despite being told that a horse is not an animal.
Patent applications in the US and Europe were submitted in 2005.[5]
In August 2014, 20Q.net Inc., with Brashworks Studios, developed and released an iOS iPad version available at the Apple iTunes store.
Handheld deviceEdit
The built Artificial Neural Network is not resource intensive either to store or to compute, thus it could be embedded in small, less powerful devices. Currently, there is a handheld version of the AI. The device contains a small portion of the original 20Q website knowledge base; unlike the online versions of the game, the handheld version does not have the ability to learn.
The 20Q artificial intelligence is different from less flexible, and extremely large, expert systems. Its modularity, adaptability, and scalability means that it can be applied to other, more complex devices, for more complex uses.
Game showEdit
Main article: 20Q (game show)
On June 13, 2009, GSN began a TV version of the game, hosted by Cat Deeley, with Hal Sparks as the voice of the computer.
^ a b Burgener, Robin. "Engineering Colloqium: 20Q The Neural Network Mind Reader". Goddard Space Flight Center. Archived from the original on 2013-02-16. CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)
^ Official 20Q Website
^ with information from: LiCalzi O'Connell, Pamela. "Vegetables And Minerals On The Radar" The New York Times. March 27, 2003; Burgener, Robin, computer architect, inventor.
^ Official 20Q Q&A
^ US application 102,105 [1] and EP 1710735
Official 20Q Website
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=20Q&oldid=898134765"


For Asian-inspired fare at its best, Oriental Pearl serves a unique blend of flavors to those visiting the Haddonfield district of Haddonfield. Oriental Pearl is our corner of happy and healthy with rich flavors and bold ingredients. Perfect for parties on the larger side, Oriental Pearl also has a private area available for use.
Oriental Pearl tosses the jacket-and-tie dress code convention in favor of a more casual dining experience. With delivery and take-out options, you can enjoy this restaurant's cooking from the comfort of your own living room.
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Our food is cheap in price but luxurious in flavor. So get ready for some inventive Asian cooking at Oriental Pearl where every dish blends together a number of cultures.
Groupon has verified that the customer actually visited Oriental Pearl.


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About us We are a a civil society alliance committed to ending statelessness and ensuring that stateless people living in Europe are protected.
We are a a civil society alliance committed to ending statelessness and ensuring that stateless people living in Europe are protected.
Statelessness in Europe Learn about our work and how statelessness affects people living in Europe.
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Updates & resources Browse through our library of news, events, blogs and publications
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Get involved Here are some of the ways you can get involved in our work.
Here are some of the ways you can get involved in our work.
Updates & Resources
Seizing new opportunities to address statelessness in the Dominican Republic
Bridget Wooding - Director, Observatory Caribbean Migrants, Dominican Republic
/ 7 mins read
Following a decade of restrictive measures on migration and nationality matters, in late 2013 the Constitutional Tribunal in Santo Domingo issued a ruling, which effectively denationalised over 130,000 Dominicans of mainly Haitian ancestry. At the turn of a new decade, two developments - the COVID-19 pandemic, and a new government - provide new opportunities and challenges for addressing statelessness in the Dominican Republic.
Photo: Constitutional Court in Virtual Public Hearing, October 2020 (https://www.tribunalconstitucional.gob.do/)
Following a decade of restrictive measures on migration and nationality matters, in late 2013 the Constitutional Tribunal in Santo Domingo issued a ruling, which effectively denationalised over 130,000 Dominicans of mainly Haitian ancestry. Despite some limited pushback achieved by civil society actors and their allies at home and abroad, this egregious violation of human rights remains a blot on the national landscape. Compared with international norms for addressing statelessness, the legal framework that has been in place in the Dominican Republic since 2014 is inadequate but gives human rights defenders some room for manoeuvre to restore the rights of nationality-stripped persons.
At the turn of a new decade, two new developments have altered the policy environment. Clearly, the pandemic has aggravated pre-existing inequalities, highlighting the plight of stateless persons, along with other groups in vulnerable situations. Secondly, during the global health crisis, a new government came to power in the Dominican Republic, interrupting almost two decades of hard-line responses on migrant and nationality questions on the part of the outgoing administration. In this complex context, the challenge remains to intensify advocacy in a way that means civil society and human rights activists may address statelessness more effectively than has been done so previously.
In 2013, a judgement of the Constitutional Tribunal in Santo Domingo attempted a mass denationalisation of Dominicans, mainly of Haitian ancestry. UNHCR noted that over 130,000 Dominican citizens were affected. This builds on a century of Haitian labour migration to the neighbouring Dominican Republic and well-documented abuses of human rights of migrants and their descendants born in the Dominican Republic. Modest pushback by Dominican civil society organisations and their allies abroad influenced the Dominican Congress' approval of Law 169, the so-called 'naturalisation law'. This was intended to remedy the situation for both those registered and who had been stripped of Dominican papers going back to 1929; and those never registered but who had the right to Dominican nationality under the Constitution when born.
The Dominican authorities assert that there is no statelessness in the Dominican Republic and that the legal framework in place suffices to cover those at risk of statelessness. When UNHCR convened States at the High Level Segment on Statelessness in late 2019 to discuss statelessness and attaining their campaign goal of eradicating statelessness by the end of 2024, the Dominican representation in Geneva reiterated this mantra.
However, an official 2018 study on the descendants of migrants born in the Dominican Republic reveals that individuals with two Haitian parents experience significant difficulty in integration because some 37% do not have identity documents. Official figures in country suggest that the operation of the so-called naturalisation law has been sluggish at best. Under 30,000 denationalised persons have been authorised to regain their Dominican papers and none of those who had the right to Dominican nationality but had never been registered, have been naturalised as prescribed by the law.
This timid implementation of the law is in part due to pressures from ultra-nationalists who espouse anti-Haitian sentiments and use the so-called "Haitian question" as a perennial distraction from domestic problems, such as rampant corruption. Moreover, the operation of the law coincided with a national regularisation plan for foreigners with an irregular migratory status. Thus, those who do not favour the right to nationality for those born to Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic confuse, conveniently for their purposes, the rights of Haitian migrants born in Haiti, and the rights of their children born in the Dominican Republic.
Nevertheless, the outgoing administration (whose PLD party had been in power for the better part of two decades) engaged in a magnanimous gesture, as they would see it, in a decree issued a week before the new government took power. This presidential decree of President Medina authorised a path to naturalisation for some 750 children of Haitian descent who applied to be naturalised and submitted their files accordingly.
A new government amid a health crisis and ongoing challenges
On August 16th 2020, the incoming government of President Abinader's PRM party stepped into a challenging context where the Dominican Republic is both the single largest case of statelessness in Latin America and the Caribbean and the epicentre of the pandemic in the Caribbean.
There is a new window of opportunity with this political change, although it will not be plain sailing to try to override entrenched positions of ultra-right groups. Theoretically, the transition gesture on the naturalisation front enables the incumbent government to move forward, while sidestepping ultra-nationalist pressure to backslide. However, this is not a given, not least since there has already been a legal challenge to the decree from these groups, alleging it is anti-constitutional. President Abinader has tried to make light of this strategic litigation but it will require some clever legal footwork to ensure that the decree can indeed be materialised.
Furthermore, exceptional Covid-19 measures inherited from the previous government continue until the end of the year and protection gaps facing stateless and other groups in vulnerable situations ineligible for State aid will continue to be visible. Lack of documentation is a barrier to obtaining official social protection. Affected persons lack medical insurance and clean drinking water, while conditions are dire in impoverished communities. Small, overcrowded housing with shared toilet facilities work against social distancing. Likewise, the cost of renting is high meaning that many feel obliged to go out and earn a living despite quarantine and a state of emergency (with curfew) in place.
Many Dominicans of Haitian ancestry who are beneficiaries of Law 169 have their files in process and are unable to apply for assistance from the central government established under Covid-19. They are excluded from Quédate en casa (Stay at Home), a humanitarian aid programme to benefit families in vulnerable situations affected by Covid-19 measures; the FASE programme providing monetary assistance to employees in the private sector who have been suspended; and Pa Ti, a government programme for informal sector workers.
Civil registry disruption during Covid-19 has exacerbated barriers to birth registration, and will have lasting effects in the future. Reports show a differential negative impact on women, according to testimonies on intra-family violence and gender-based violence under confinement conditions. In the island context, some scapegoating and discrimination of those of Haitian origin is occurring, although Haiti so far has a far lower rate of Covid-19 infection and mortality than the Dominican Republic.
All these difficulties will require attention from the new Government. Additionally, the Government is committed to examining the regularisation plan for foreigners (2014-2020) that has failed according to its stated aims. Were it to have achieved residency status for the majority of those who applied, this could potentially reduce statelessness, since they could register their children born in the Dominican Republic as Dominicans.
A way forward for civil society
Strong strategic alliances at home and abroad are required to leverage pressure on the Dominican Republic to assume better protection standards and a domestic legal framework with which to effectively address statelessness. Dominican civil society must engage with the government on the 750 children whose naturalisation has been authorised, while international allies must focus on the inadequacies of the Dominican Republic's legal framework. Accordingly, civil society can keep the door open for continuity with the previous Administration regarding the operationalisation of the naturalisation law, whilst also attempting to pave the way for dialogue with the new authorities on sustainable solutions to statelessness more generally.
Under pressure from the "usual suspects", President Abinader's Government started up cross-border deportations on September 21st, interrupting the suspension in place since the pandemic started. Civil society is contesting this premature "back to normal" measure, since Covid-19 is far from being contained or controlled nationally. On the one hand, undocumented Dominicans of Haitian ancestry may be unwittingly subjected to arbitrary detention, and potentially expelled from "their own country". On the other, inter-State health protocols between the Dominican Republic and Haiti are absent but should be indispensable given the ongoing pandemic.
An ongoing and onerous task continues to be the need to document the pre-existing inequalities worsened by the pandemic. Pre-COVID, some 1.5 million Dominicans were beneficiaries of social protection programmes, for all of which, stateless people are by definition excluded due to their lack of a Dominican ID. International aid has filled some gaps caused by the State's negligence of certain groups for whom expansive social assistance has not been forthcoming under Covid-19. However, civil society should not let the authorities off the hook for populations on their territory for whom they are responsible and for whom they have a historic debt.
Deprivation of nationality
A victory for human rights in Zhao v. the Netherlands (the 'Denny case'): Nationality from birth, without exceptions
In its first-ever decision on the right to nationality, issued in late December, the UN Human Rights Committee calls on the Netherlands to enact a…
14 Jan 2021 / By Laura Bingham, Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) and Jelle Klaas, Public Interest Litigation Project of the International Commission of Jurists (NJCM)
Will Malta's accession to the 1954 Convention help change a culture of 'outright exclusion' of stateless persons?
Malta finally acceded to the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons on 11 December 2019 after numerous calls from civil society…
7 Jan 2021 / Jo Venkov - Lawyer and writer on statelessness, identity, citizenship and belonging
Festive greetings to all
Thank you for following ENS blog updates in 2020. We'll be taking a short break and are resuming our blog in January. Meanwhile, we wish you all the…
16 Dec 2020 / ENS Team
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If you are looking for a Landscaper or Landscaping Company in Springville ,you are in the right place. The FindLocal-Landscapers Directory displays Springville,AL Landscapers & Landscaping Companies. We also display Landscapers & Landscaping Contractors throughout the United States.
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U.S. President Donald Trump is cracking down on illegal immigration, claiming that undocumented immigrants are a drag on the economy.
But thousands have argued they contribute to the economy often without being able to benefit from government programs.
U.S. President Donald Trump is cracking down on illegal immigration, claiming that undocumented immigrants are a drag on the economy. But thousands have argued they contribute to the economy often without being able to benefit from government programs. CGTN's Andrea Arenas report.
Alberto Moncada left his home country of Honduras a year ago. Since then, he's been living in Maryland, and working at an immigrant organization called CASA where he helps other newcomers adjust to American life – including paying taxes.
Alberto filed his taxes for the first time this year.
"One of the new experiences I have had this year, has been to be able to pay my taxes for the first time in the United States" Moncada said.
Low-income families can come to CASA and get help filing their taxes for free.
A 2017 report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that about 8 percent of what each undocumented immigrant earns in the U.S. goes to pay income taxes. And regardless of their status, immigrants contribute approximately $80,000 more in taxes than the government services they use during their lifetime.
"A lot of the people who come to file are of course very nervous being undocumented to pay taxes, but they also understand their obligation to pay taxes, so they still pay, despite that fear," CASA Tax Coordinator Catherine Paul said.
In 1997, the IRS came up with a Tax ID number for those who don't have a work permit but make a living in the United States. Since then millions of undocumented immigrants have used this number to file their taxes.
Obtaining an individual tax identification number, called an ITIN, is the first step toward completing their taxes.
Many undocumented immigrants hope their contributions to the country's economy can help them gain legal status, if immigration reform laws are passed in the U.S.
According to the IRS, immigrants with an ITIN, paid an estimated $9 billion through payroll taxes every year – something many workers hope will gain wider recognition in the future.


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Бизь — река в России, протекает в Свердловской области. Устье реки находится в 21 км по правому берегу реки Вогулка. Длина реки составляет 30 км.

Данные водного реестра
По данным государственного водного реестра России относится к Камскому бассейновому округу, водохозяйственный участок реки — Сылва от истока и до устья, речной подбассейн реки — Кама до Куйбышевского водохранилища (без бассейнов рек Белой и Вятки). Речной бассейн реки — Кама.

Код объекта в государственном водном реестре — 10010100812111100012524.

Примечания

Притоки Вогулки (притока Сылвы)
Реки Шалинского городского округа

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia