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Deathless questions and other interviews
Cosmic war on a global scale: An interview with Mark Juergensmeyer
by Nathan Schneider July 23, 2010
As director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Mark Juergensmeyer brings the sociology of religion to bear on the analysis of violent conflict in the contemporary world. His recent books include Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State and Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, both published by University of California Press, and he is currently working on God and War, based on his 2006 Stafford Little Lectures at Princeton University. Together with the SSRC's Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, he is a co-editor of the forthcoming volume Rethinking Secularism (Oxford University Press). We spoke at his home office at UCSB, perched atop a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC's project on Religion and International Affairs.—ed.
NS: After your tenure last year as president of the American Academy of Religion, what do you think are the deepest challenges facing the study of religion today?
MJ: That's an interesting question, because, in some ways, religion has never been of greater interest to a greater number of people than it is at present. Whenever something blows up, religion seems to be in the news. But, on the other hand, scholars are less and less sure about what religion actually is, and it has become an increasingly problematic subject to study. The self-confidence that an earlier generation had in the ideas of the "secular" and the "religious" has come into question. Because of globalization, we're intensely aware of all of the diversity of perspectives in the world, and we're increasingly aware that our perceptions are not necessarily the only ones, the right ones, or the dominant ones. The way we have come to conceive of religion in the post-Enlightenment West—as something reified and essentially different from the secular—is falling apart. Maybe the religious and secular never really existed in quite the ways that we thought about them. Religious studies remains, in large part, what it has always been—the study of religious literature, ritual, organizations, and the like—but at the heart of it, there is the very difficult conceptual question of how to think about religion in a globalized world.
NS: You've worked in a number of different departmental settings, including Asian studies, divinity schools, religion departments, and now global studies. Do you think that religion needs its own department? Or can it be addressed, fruitfully, in other contexts?
MJ: The answer is both. It's like mathematics. You can't imagine mathematics not having its own department, but you also can't imagine physics, or accounting, or even political science and sociology without it. In the same way, I think religion has a part to play in other ways of understanding the contemporary world—whether political, anthropological, social, or economic—but there is also the danger that it can become too easily slivered off into pieces. Departments of religion allow people to look at the whole. Not everybody in those departments studies everything, of course, but they're aware of what one another are doing in a way that they wouldn't be if they were separated in different departments.
There have been attempts to make religious studies into a discipline or a science, and I'm not sure that has entirely worked. But the same is true about political science and sociology. Academic life is a coffeehouse with a whole bunch of tables, and there are different people sitting around the tables discussing different things, and each table is a field or a discipline. You can pick up and go from one table to another and talk about the same thing but find that you're in a different conversation. Religious studies deserves its own table.
NS: What, then, can those conversations offer outside of the academic coffeehouse? I remember when Madeleine Albright came to the AAR and said that religion experts should participate more in matters of international policy, for instance.
MJ: I agree. When people like me, who study religion and violence, are called upon to advise an intelligence agency, or the State Department, or people in the military, I think that's great. But it's not like I'm telling them something different from what I'm telling anybody else. All I know is what is in my books. I don't have a treasure chest of secret information that intelligence agency people would want. Probably the most valuable thing I can offer a government agency is an outsider's perspective about the way in which other people view the world.
NS: Is there a particularly urgent message that you try to convey to them?
MJ: What I've found is that I'm most useful for alerting them to the one thing that they don't have, and don't want to deal with: a view of America's role in the world, and the way in which our actions affect the actions of others. People don't act in a vacuum. They respond to their perceptions of us, and the role that they see us playing in the world. If we're perceived as the Great Satan—whether we think we are or not—it's very important to know that, because it helps us understand why people respond to us as if we were. Within their sphere of perception, they're simply responding to an image that they have of us.
NS: Is this a lesson that you've learned from the terrorists and religious militants you've talked with over the years?
MJ: Sure. To be a good social scientist, I have to try and understand another person's frame of reference. My job in those interviews is not just to get information from these people but to try to get into their minds, into their views of the world, into their worldviews. As a sociologist, and also as a religious studies scholar, I'm what Ninian Smart used to call a "worldview analyst." In the course of a conversation, I try to understand the other person's frame of reference. I try to find out how they want to present themselves to me. That helps me understand them.
A good example of this is Mahmud Abouhalima, one of the key people in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. I had a series of remarkable interviews with him in prison after he was convicted. He's an affable, friendly, very talkative fellow. The way he explained the role of religion in his life and in society gave me a profound window into his view of the world. He regarded Islam as having rescued him at a couple of points in his own past—from an aimlessness when he was a kid in Egypt to another aimlessness when he was in Germany and was being wooed by the easy pleasures of Western life and Western women. He was struggling for a sense of identity and coherence in a world that is fractured and immoral. He made an attempt to justify himself—including several horrible murders of Muslim clerics in Brooklyn—by casting himself as a soldier for virtue in a war in which immorality and secular irreligiousness are the great enemy. At one point he leaned over to me and whispered intensely, "Mr. Mark, you just don't get it. There's a war going on, Mr. Mark. There's a battle between good and evil and right and wrong. You just don't see it!" And so I asked him if that was why people blow buildings up, to try to make that point. And he looked at me and smiled and said, "Well now you see, don't you? Now you see." His violence was meant as a demonstration to the world, to make visible for everybody else that we are living in a war and that we need to wake up.
NS: Is such religious violence fundamentally different from violence understood in secular terms? Is it necessary to draw a distinction there?
MJ: I hesitate to use the words "religious violence," because it sounds as if I'm promoting the idea that religion causes violence. I don't believe that for a moment. I sometimes have to defend myself and remind people that I don't say that. I think that violence happens for a complex variety of social and political and economic reasons.
On one level, violence is violence; it is a social phenomenon. What religious images and language can bring to a violent situation, though, is a structure of justification and meaning. It can be an ethical justification, or it can also be a more dramatic, visual one, touching on the symbolism of the cosmic war, the great battle between good and evil, right and wrong, religion and irreligion. I call it "cosmic war" rather than "holy war," because I mean to imply, not just a fight fought for religious reasons, but the image of a broader conflict between good and evil. Or, in many Eastern traditions, it's a battle over chaos and order, as in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
NS: Religion has become the language of resistance against modern states much more in recent decades than at the height of the Cold War, when secular economic or social theories tended to be structuring the ideologies of resistance movements. What might be the consequences of such a shift from secular to religious ideologies?
MJ: In some cases, as in Egypt, it's the same people; they just take off their Marxist hats, put on their Muslim hats, and they're good to go. One needs a great ideological template of moral struggle with which to justify a challenge to power, authority, and order. Marxism supplied that, and so does a certain kind of politicized religious language. They're both ideologies of order. But the way in which you perceive the nature of a struggle makes a huge difference. If you think of it in religious terms, the timelines can be vast. They can be eternal.
I'll give you an example. When I was interviewing Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the political head of the Hamas movement, I brought up the futility of using suicide bombing against the Israelis. I pointed out that Israel has one of the strongest armies in the world, and certainly the strongest in the Middle East. These suicide attacks can certainly annoy them, but it's not going to topple the political institutions of Israel or create a Palestinian state. He just looked at me and smiled, as if he were speaking to a small child, and said, "Well, maybe not in my lifetime. Maybe not in my children's lifetime. Maybe not in my children's children's lifetime. But in my children's children's children's lifetime, it might succeed. We cannot lose. This is God's war." If you think it's God's war, then you're able to put up with temporary failure. If this is God's war, that changes the whole equation of the struggle. And, of course, cosmic war justifications exist in all religious traditions—you see this difficulty not just on the Muslim side of the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian situation but also on the Jewish side, often with people associated with the settler movement. If you're a certain kind of messianic, Zionist Jew, your actions, like those of the Muslims on the other side, are for much greater reasons than mere conquest. A temporary setback doesn't matter because it is an eternal war.
NS: So how does one address another's cosmic claims? Some want to ignore them and focus on underlying political and economic conditions; others say these people cannot be reasoned with and must be answered with violence.
MJ: There's a third option: a conversion from within the religious community, one that persuades people that they are not engaged in a cosmic war and should redirect their activities. I think there has to be a combination between the first and the third. Addressing the social and economic issues that help to give rise to tensions in the first place can play a part in disarming the ideology. I have no doubt that if there were to be a solution tomorrow to the Israeli-Palestinian situation, it would deflate a lot of the jihadi rhetoric in the Middle East. Getting the U.S. military out of Iraq and Afghanistan would be an even bigger pin in that bubble, because then you wouldn't have the same Great Satan doing Great Satanic things. The second choice, which is to fight fire with fire, only magnifies the image of cosmic war.
This is what the "war on terror" did. Even calling it a "war" was a mistake. I've gone back to look at the newspapers on 9/11, and none of them used the word "war." It didn't appear in the newspapers until the next day, 9/12, in quotation marks: "Acts of war," said the headlines. That, of course, came from President Bush's speech. Suddenly, the war against terror became the image that defined our response to the attacks, and that has been driving our foreign policy ever since. My thought was then, and has been ever since: Why on earth are we promoting the ideology of Osama bin Laden? We're taking that jihadi view of the world and validating it with our own rhetoric and our own actions. If you want to deflate the impression of being an enemy in a cosmic war, there's a very simple way of doing it: stop acting like the enemy that they think we are. I have no doubt that the whole thing would then begin to collapse. It takes two to do this kind of bellicose tango. Radical religion can dissipate as quickly as it was created, like a summer storm. In that sense, I'm an optimist.
NS: Have you seen this happen in any of the conflicts you've studied?
MJ: During the 1980s a spiral of hideous violence arose between young Sikhs and the Indian government. But after a decade, it just unraveled. Yes, the Indian government exerted strong police pressure, as they always had. What really changed in the end, though, was that people in the villages no longer supported the radicals, and the movement fell apart. Just a couple of years later, I went to one of those villages where virtually all of the young people of a certain generation had been wiped out. I asked their families, "What about the cause they were fighting for?" One of the fallen Sikh militant's brothers, who had become the head of his village, was obviously embarrassed to be talking about it. "What about your dead brother?" I asked. "Oh, we loved him." he said. "We paid our respects." Now the surviving brother was busy trying to work with the government to get more benefits for the town, to improve the road—doing all the normal things that people do. And what about the Sikh revolution? It was simply over. It was gone. The image of great warfare had vanished and worldly matters had returned. The same thing could happen with the great jihadi war.
NS: How does your early work on Gandhi and nonviolence affect your analysis of religious violence?
MJ: In several ways. It helps explain why I became interested in violence in the first place. Pacifists like myself are often fascinated with social violence because it seems so odd. What is there in the human imagination that allows us to switch gears so easily between the normalcy of civil society and the overdrive of warfare? I wanted to understand what happens in people's minds when they're so seized with passion about a struggle that they'll go out and kill in such horrible ways.
What I've learned most from my understanding of the Gandhian mode of conflict resolution is the importance of trying to understand another's perspective. For Gandhi, this was the fun of conflict—and I do mean fun, because Gandhi loved conflict. He was a pacifist, but that doesn't mean he was passive. Conflict, as Gandhi pointed out, is one time when you're forced to see the world from another person's point of view. Unless somebody challenges you forcefully, in a way that makes you stop and think, you'll just go idly about your business. We all know that from our own relationships; it's not until somebody comes at you from a different point of view, seemingly from left field, that you really begin to question yourself and look carefully at what you're doing.
I began my work on religion, politics, and violence by trying to understand worldviews that clash with ours—and by that I mean not only theirs but ours as well. I did so with the awareness that my way of seeing the world is not necessarily the only way. It was, in a sense, a Gandhian project.
NS: And you also studied with Reinhold Niebuhr at Union?
MJ: Niebuhr was probably my greatest single influence as a professor. I was literally his last student. My first year at Union was the last year he taught a seminar, and I was in it. The second year, there was a group of us who met in his apartment every Friday afternoon. Then, the third year, the other two had left Union, and I went up there on my own. One of the things that drew me to Niebuhr—though it was his ideas that drew me more than anything else—was that his family and my family came from the same German immigrant community in central Missouri.
NS: He was someone who began as a pacifist but went on to develop a critique of pacifism. How did Niebuhr's thought play into how you think about violence?
MJ: Well, I disagree with Niebuhr on his analysis of Gandhi. I think he didn't understand Gandhi. He regarded Gandhi as a sentimentalist, the same way he regarded Marx as a sentimentalist: as someone with vaunted expectations about human nature. But Gandhi was more of a realist than Niebuhr assumed, and his method of conflict resolution involves exerting a certain kind of pressure. This is not exactly the coercion Niebuhr accused him of, because Gandhi tried to make a distinction between coercive and non-coercive force. Force that is coercive doesn't give you any choice about accepting or not accepting your opponent's position. Non-coercive force is about making you dramatically aware of a situation while leaving you to make a choice on your own. Gandhi would want concessions to be made out of free will rather than by coercion. Actually, I don't think that Niebuhr was as different from Gandhi as he thought.
NS: For both, a deep moral sensibility seems to have kept their realism from falling into cynicism.
MJ: That's what I liked about Niebuhr, of course. He tried to take seriously the moral dimension of public life and to understand where it could come from in a world that is, alas, populated by sinful humans. And, despite his understanding of Original Sin, he knew that we can be capable of fellowship and of selfless love. But collectivities are less morally adept, because they're never capable of selfless love. A corporation might say it's sorry, but it would never try to show its contrition in a way that would bring about its own demise. Parents sacrifice for their kids, soldiers perform acts of bravery in warfare, but collectivities can't do that, and that was Niebuhr's great insight. He insisted on the necessity for us to create buffers against the power of collectivities like nations and corporations: he thought that we needed structures of justice, on the one hand, and countervailing powers, like labor unions, on the other.
NS: What kinds of things did you talk about with him?
MJ: He told stories about his time in Detroit and what he learned as a pastor there. His last book was on the nature of man and his communities. Niebuhr felt that churches actually have a greater moral capacity than other collectivities do. He tried to make that argument. Sometimes I doubt it, with the way churches eat each other and are, in my mind, subject to the same terrible limitations as other kinds of human enterprise. It's so depressing to see churches on the wrong side of the moral issues in our day. Occasionally you see them on the right side, and that at least gives me some hope.
conflictDeathless questionsinternational affairsIslamMahatma GandhipoliticsReinhold Niebuhrreligious studies
Nathan Schneider
Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he directs the Media Enterprise Design Lab and is a resident fellow at the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture.
Vincent Pecora 13 years ago
I respect Mark Juergensmeyer immensely, and have followed his work for some time. But his sense that religion alone cannot cause violence does a disservice to religion. He is a student of religion, and (understandably) would rather not speak ill of it. But if he is going to persist in believing that religion can do great good—a proposition I would agree with—he must also agree it can do great evil. Alas, you cannot have one without the other. So, he must somehow make room is his wonderfully ecumenical viewpoint for the idea that religion—pure and simple—can do evil. Otherwise, it has no power at all. Most of all, it has no power to do whatever good he thinks it can do.
Winnifred Sullivan 13 years ago
I was struck by Vincent Pecora's response to the interview with Mark Jurgensmeyer, disputing what he takes to be Juergensmeyer's view that "religion alone cannot cause violence." I have learned much from both scholars but I have been uncomfortable with this locution for some time—the separation and balancing of good and evil as the possible fruits of religion—a common one among religious studies scholars, often intended, I think, to marginalize both the critics and the advocates of religion in favor of scholarly neutrality. I also believe that it has been particularly prevalent since 9/11. (For many, I think, although certainly not for Pecora and Jurgensmeyer, it is a coded way of dividing good religion from bad religion, maybe even good religions from bad religions, Christianity from Islam. Certainly it implies that the speaker know when religion causes violence and when religion causes good.)
To say that "religion can do great good" OR that "religion can do great evil" is to suggest that something identifiable as religion can do things, and in some cases, to imply that humans have the capacity to control what will be done. The evidence would suggest rather, in my view, that the power and persistence of religion, to the extent that it is separately identifiable, comes in part from its capacity to encompass the full range of human activity, that is, to represent the tragedy of human existence. In other words, one of the things that the study of religion reminds us is that the two are inseparable. To speak otherwise is to preach.
I probably agree with Winnifred Sullivan more than my earlier response suggests. I certainly do not believe that some religions are "good" and others "evil" (though I must admit I find Scientology terribly unappealing—but that's a different criterion). And I am not Manichean—I do not believe there are "good" and "evil" forces active in the world. Religions are, of course, mixed bags, embedded in worldly concerns: the same Evangelicals who fought the slave trade helped spread the British Empire. But I would take exception to the idea that judging a religion's actions descends into preaching. If we can't say the Inquisition was evil or that Mormon discrimination against non-whites was evil, and acknowledge that both policies were systematically pursued by the respective Church hierarchies, then we abdicate moral responsibility altogether. Judgment, carefully done, is not dogma or self-righteousness. My point, both here and earlier, is that my one-time UC colleague Mark Juergensmeyer tends to shy away from saying that "religion" alone has the power to motivate people to do things that are extreme (such as violence against others). In most cases, he is probably right. But not in all. I would simply note that acts of great selflessness as well as terrible violence against others can be motivated, at times, by religion alone. If we do not admit this, then we might as well go back to the old days (pre-post-secular, as it were) when we all agreed that religion existed but hardly counted for much in terms of what people actually chose to do.
I am not opposed to preaching. Good preaching. But preaching is not the same project as assessing the role of religion in human history. Preaching is witnessing to God's word. Assessing the role of religion in history involves a coming to terms with what we mean by religion and religion(s). To return to Mark Juergensmeyer's interview, I would agree with him that "scholars are less and less sure about what religion actually is, and it has become an increasingly problematic subject to study." I think this is a healthy development. We are in a time of re-assessment of the project of studying of religion even while it is flourishing.
I don't believe it is abdicating moral responsibility to say that it is very difficult to sort out whether it is religion that caused Mormon racial discrimination or the activities of the Inquisition. I am not sure what it means to say that "religion alone" motivates violence or acts of great selflessness. There is no shortage of evidence that violence is part of religion. There is no shortage of evidence that violence is part of being human. To say that we cannot (and dare I say, ought not) speak of "religion alone" is not to say that religion "hardly counts for much in terms of what people do." On the contrary, we cannot understand people without understanding religion.
Winnifred Sullivan may find it difficult to tell whether the Inquisition was religious in origin or intent, but the Catholic Church does not, and has in many places taken responsibility. This is how it does so (while of course distinguishing its true essence from its false accidentals) on the web site http://www.catholic.com, which carries the Imprimatur of Robert Brown, Bishop of San Diego, Aug. 10, 2004:
Don't Fear the Facts . . . . The Church has nothing to fear from the truth. No account of foolishness, misguided zeal, or cruelty by Catholics can undo the divine foundation of the Church, though, admittedly, these things are stumbling blocks to Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
What must be grasped is that the Church contains within itself all sorts of sinners and knaves, and some of them obtain positions of responsibility. Paul and Christ himself warned us that there would be a few ravenous wolves among Church leaders (Acts 20:29; Matt. 7:15).
"Admittedly," also, the size of these "stumbling blocks" is always an issue. And the Inquisition's persecution of Cathars, Jews, Muslims, and other heretics had many phases over the course of the 12th to the 16th centuries, some worse than others. But I wonder what we gain by trying to gloss over the historical responsibility of a faith for its wrongs even more than the faith itself does (the LDS too takes responsibility today for its historical racism). This was precisely the strategy of those of us on the left for decades—religion merely thought itself important, but in reality it was always just a cover for the material, socially-based forces (class conflict, geo-political struggle, nationalism, and so on) that caused "real" history to occur. I now think we were wrong on this point. Religion is indeed an important part of a "mix." Is it as hard to separate religious studies from sociology as it is to separate sociology from economics or math from physics, as Juergensmeyer might observe? Of course. But then, we should not let our insight that our disciplines have humanly-constructed and somewhat arbitrary boundaries deprive us of understanding the power of religion to motivate those who strongly affiliate themselves—for a variety of reasons, to be sure—with a belief or church or sect. Bishop Brown's religious authority also carries worldly power (as in the Catholic Bishops' intervention against abortion-funding in health care reform). But that does not mean it is simply impossible to tell what is religious about what he does or says—or approves. His Imprimatur is a religious act, as surely as the Inquisition's defense of the Roman Church and its doctrines against any who threatened them was a religious act. In our very important effort to re-open the question of what religion means and how it works, we should not let all that is solid melt into air.
I think perhaps we are talking past one another a bit.
I do not suggest that religion merely thinks itself important. In my view, religion is vastly important—maybe indispensable for human life. To be careful in calling something religious or not is not to "gloss over the historical responsibility of a faith [another difficult word] for its wrongs." The leaders of the Roman Catholic Church have a lot to answer for, some of which they have acknowledged. I wished rather to suggest that to use the word "religion" or "faith" to generalize in a bounded way about very different sets of historical institutions, ideas and practices, and sort them, is to imply a kind of equivalence that obscures real differences as well as possibilities for human life. Religious texts, practices, and persons make powerful claims about the world and about how humans should behave. The categories the Catholic Church uses to describe its responsibilities and the authorities it cites are specific and appropriate to its tradition. Sin. Worldliness. Paul.
That I differ from the Catholic bishops on what counts as religion seems entirely natural to me. They don't have authority over my language. And I don't seek their imprimatur.
One of the reasons that I am concerned about how the word religion is used is because of its currency in legal and political contexts today. I think scholars of religion have a responsibility to be careful about how they serve such contexts. I am, by the way, reading a book that tries to sort these things out in early Islam and to describe how Islam became "a religion"—which I highly recommend: Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers.
Mark Juergensmeyer 13 years ago
This has been an interesting discussion and I have learned much from both sides, and agree with many of the points that have been made. But let me make my own position perfectly clear: I doubt that there is such a thing as "religion" that can "cause" anything—good or bad, nonviolent or violent. Our use of the word "religion" can mean many things—religious organizations, leaders, ideas, identities, practices, rites and symbols—all of which are human inventions. Like many theologians, I think that what we do and think in the name of religion may be responses to our sense of the sacred, but are themselves quite human. This, I think, is one of the points that Winnifred Sullivan was making. Just as with everything else that humans do, religious ideas and activity can be both creative and destructive, positive and negative, life-affirming or quite deadly. But since religious ideas and practices are touched with a sense of absolutism, all of these things are often thought and done in the extreme. And it is also true, as Vincent Pecora argues, that religious ideas and structures—though humanly invented—sometimes take on a life of their own, and great masses of people act as if religion were a reified entity that could command authority and dictate behavior. It is for this reason that the religious imagination can produce both magnificent visions of peace, and propel otherwise decent persons into the most wretched acts of bloodshed.
Leslie Eppler 12 years ago
Vincent Pecora refers to the historical actions of the church (Roman Catholic, LDS) as well as the contemporary involvement of Bishop Brown in this year's health-care legislation, and he makes the point, from this understanding, that religion has been a force in those actions/beliefs. I am assuming he meant that as opposed to the motive of those actions being power, bigotry or greed. Certainly, I can understand and do, in fact, agree with this point to some extent; however, at what point do we stop calling it religious influence and start calling it political control, colonization, or genocide? When does religion stop guiding our behaviors and our behaviors start guiding our religion?
Khru 12 years ago
I find it interesting how Juergensmeyer seems to lump all religions together when it comes to violence (his books: Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State and Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence) when essentially it is the three Abrahamic religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity that perpetrate 99% of the offenses.
Buddhism, on the other hand, has a much better track record of peace and is not mentioned.


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Bulloch Hall
Home › Visit › Heritage Sites › Bulloch Hall
180 Bulloch Avenue
Roswell, GA 30075, USA
Website: www.bullochhall.org/ »
Bulloch Hall, a fine example of temple style Greek Revival architecture, was completed in 1839 for Maj. James Stephens Bulloch and his family. Bulloch Hall is a house museum, featuring period rooms open for tours seven days a week. The home was the site of the December 1853 marriage between Martha "Mittie" Bulloch and Theodore Roosevelt, the elder, of New York. Their son, Theodore, was the 26th President of the United States, and their granddaughter was First Lady Anna Eleanor Roosevelt. The grounds include a reconstructed slave cabin and slave garden, summer house, privies, and demonstration garden. The surrounding historic district features many structures of the Civil War period including Smith Plantation, Barrington Hall, and The Roswell Presbyterian Church. The former locations of several mills burned by Federal troops on their march to Atlanta are marked.
Old Western and Atlantic Railroad Tunnel and Clisby Austin House
Dalton, Georgia | The site harbors the oldest railroad tunnel in the Southeast. The tunnel was a major link in the supply line of the Confederate armies until 1863.
Green-Meldrim House
Savannah, Georgia | This historic site, the restored and furnished mid-nineteenth-century Gothic Revival-style home of Charles Green, served as the headquarters for Union General Sherman during the winter of 1864-65.
Gordon-Lee Mansion
Chickamauga, Georgia | Prior to the Battle of Chickamauga, this historic site served as headquarters to the Union Army of the Cumberland's Gen. William Rosecrans, until it was captured by the Confederates on the second day of battle.
The Old Governor's Mansion
Milledgeville, Georgia | Completed in 1839, this historic site is one of the finest examples of High Greek Revival architecture in the nation.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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HomeOpinionStudent complaints about community service exaggerated
Student complaints about community service exaggerated
It has become common occurrence to hear students complain about the community service requirement to graduate and how they have yet to complete it. As the year comes to a close, some Carmel High seniors are still scrambling to complete their community service graduation requirement of 60 hours, which over the course of four years isn't much.
Take someone who volunteers at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula. Students at CHOMP are required to volunteer for two hours a day, twice a month. It'd only take a volunteer 30 visits to complete her service hours. That's a fraction of your high school life.
It is also not a hassle to find volunteer opportunities, with Carmel High providing community service on and off campus.
Up until this school year, the freshman class typically earned eight hours of community service by cleaning up the beach or gleaning fields, making the environment healthier and maintains the beauty of nature, equivalent to 13 percent of each student's required service hours completed in only one day. This year, the freshman class is participating in the Empty Bowls project to help Ag Against Hunger, for which each student receives four hours for completing a bowl and four hours for selling them during Open House.
Even outside of the mandatory community service projects during freshman year, the school provides opportunities for students to help others, like the blood drive, run by the Red Cross Club, which supplies blood to CHOMP and the Red Cross, so students shouldn't be at a loss when they need to find community service.
Outside of earning required hours for graduation, community service provides other personal benefits including work experience and scholarships for college. By volunteering at CHOMP, I have met my community service requirement and obtained work experience in a hospital and the opportunity to earn a $1,000 scholarship.
The Dec. 13 issue of The Sandpiper reported on a volunteer opportunity for students to enhance their public speaking, interpretation skills and knowledge on sea life at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. No matter what your community service is, the work you do can influence what career you chose to pursue or boost your résumé.
According to the State of California Department of Industrial Relations, minors under the age of 18 cannot work without a work permit, which can limit a student's experience they can put on a résumé, but by volunteering, students can put their service as previous employment or work experience. An employer is more than likely to hire someone with any form of work experience, whether it is paid or volunteer work.
Despite these benefits, students still complain about the volunteer requirement for graduation, but CHS is not the only school to offer community service opportunities and require a certain amount of hours to graduate.
Sara D. Sparks reported in August 2013 to "Education Week" that Maryland requires students to fulfill 75 hours of community service hours, 15 hours fewer than our school's requirement. While Maryland is the only state to require universal service learning, Sparks reported that several large districts, including Chicago, Atlanta and Philadelphia require community service hours for graduation.
CHS students are not alone with dealing with a community service requirement for graduation, and in the long run it is not a big deal. By volunteering, students earn work experiences, earn possible scholarships and help their community. The worse case scenario is you lose a fraction of your high school life by helping people in need.
-Caitlin Chappell
Caitlin Chappell
CHS students dish about experiences in local work force
College admissions turned upside-down in past decade
Carmel High cracks top 1 percent nationally
'Amazing Spider-Man' sequel stuns, overloads viewers
Rodriguez family brings awareness to rare disorder
'Winter Soldier' kicks off blockbusters with a bang
Carmel grads suffer from DUI collisions
Community shocked by death of 2011 grad


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Photo of victim uncovered 112 years after bridge lynching
ROSANA HUGHES Chattanooga Times Free Press
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (AP) — Lost to Chattanooga history for 112 years, a photograph of Ed Johnson was finally uncovered on the anniversary of his lynching.
Joseph Malley, a Dallas-based attorney who has been researching Ed Johnson's Supreme Court Case for a book, found one photo with the help of Chattanooga residents Mariann Martin, Sam Hall and David Moon. Hall then was able to find a better quality version of the photo, which ran in a wire story titled, "U.S. Supreme Court couldn't stop lynching."
Johnson was lynched from the Walnut Street Bridge in 1906 after he was accused of raping a white woman. Johnson's attorneys, Noah Parden and Styles Hutchins, argued his case before the U.S. Supreme Court, persuading the court to grant him a stay of execution. But a mob broke into the jail and took matters into their own hands.
Johnson's case was the first time in history the Supreme Court gave a stay of execution and the first and only time the high court held a criminal trial, which ended with Hamilton County Sheriff Joseph F. Shipp being held in contempt of court. The justices said Shipp failed to keep Johnson safe, noting some of his deputies took part in the lynching, according to a book called "Contempt of Court."
To researchers' knowledge, the photo has never been printed in a Tennessee newspaper. Malley and Moon said one possible explanation for that is because, at the time, Tennessee newspapers generally did not publish photos of African-Americans.
The photo shows the door where the mob entered the jail and a headshot of Johnson in a separate circle frame to the side. The man standing at the entrance of the jail is not Johnson, Moon said. A superimposed drawing of a letter that represents the Supreme Court's order is shown with the silhouette of a hanging man shadowed over it.
A drawn object that resembles a wrist watch is attached to the bottom of the drawing, but Moon said it's not likely a wrist watch, as they were not popular until after the first World War. If the artist was trying to depict time, a pocket watch would have been more likely, he said.
Malley, a history buff and attorney specializing in constitutional law, began his hunt for the photo after attending a seminar and hearing former Chattanooga Times reporter and co-author of the book "Contempt of Court" Mark Curriden's presentation on the case.
He said he was fascinated by the case and the history and had always wanted to write a book. But he wanted to see a picture of Johnson, especially because Malley kept reading that many photos had been taken of Johnson while he was jailed.
Through his research, he learned that most of the photos and documents relating to Johnson were destroyed after the lynching. This was because federal authorities began investigating the lynching and several people were in danger of being jailed.
So Malley searched for six months before Martin mentioned how Southern newspapers typically didn't publish photos of African-Americans. Malley then began searching newspaper archives further west and struck gold with a Fort Worth Telegram article.
The night he found the article, he said an eerie coincidence happened.
"I knew the courthouse was hit by lighting in 1910, destroying most of the records. In jest I thought, Johnson sent a message," Malley said in an email. "On the night I found the picture of Ed Johnson recently, it was storming in Dallas, raining and lightning."
As he hit the search button to look for Johnson's picture on a few websites, a bolt of lightning hit close to his building and right then, one of the searches returned successful.
"I thought, did Johnson send me a message?" he said jokingly.
Later, Hall was able to track down the better copy of the photo in the Topeka (Kan.) Daily Herald.
Hall, of DeepZoom Chattanooga, and Moon, of Picnooga, two online historical photo databases, helped Malley authenticate the photo by cross-checking the entrance of the jail with other photos of that time to verify it was indeed the Hamilton County Jail.
Moon said the photo is one of the three most important missing pieces in Chattanooga's history.
He hopes the photo spurs people to look into their own collections and maybe even find more photos of Johnson that people might not have known they had. He also hopes it's a step toward improving race relations in Chattanooga.
Information from: Chattanooga Times Free Press, http://www.timesfreepress.com
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El Salvador Second Round Election Too Close to Call
Written bySilvia Viñas
Posted 10 March 2014 16:58 GMT
Read this post in Español
Salvadorans went to the polls on Sunday, March 9 to vote in a run-off presidential election, but results are so close that both candidates have declared themselves winners and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal has announced that they will do a complete recount in the coming days. In a report about election day, Tim's El Salvador Blog explains:
In El Salvador's presidential election on Sunday, the preliminary victor is Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the left-wing FMLN [Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front], but by the slightest of margins, and with a final count of the votes yet to come. Preliminary results are released on the Supreme Electoral Tribunal ("TSE") website very quickly after the votes are counted at polling places. Five hours after the polls were closed, 99.8% of the votes had been counted and Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the FMLN had a very slight 6264 vote lead out of almost 3 million votes cast.
The TSE website [es] still shows Salvador Sanchez Ceren with a small lead over conservative candidate Norman Quijano from the ARENA (Nationalist Republican Alliance) party.
Tim adds:
There was no doubt that ARENA had pulled off a major turnaround in just 5 weeks from its poor showing in the February 2 first round where Norman Quijano trailed Sánchez Cerén by 10 points, and in opinion polls in the past few weeks trailed by 13 to 18 percentage points. Quijano managed to poll 437,000 more votes than he received on February 2, an increase of more than 40%. In contrast, Sánchez Cerén only increased his vote total by 175,000 votes.
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Peru 2 weeks ago
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← Spotlight & Giveaways for Entangled Ignite's July Releases
Book Blitz~Sale & Giveaway for Tortured Souls (The Orion Circle # 1) →
Book Tour: Review, Guest Post & Giveaway for Last Day of My Life (Freebirds # 4)
Last Day of My Life (Freebirds # 4) by Lani Lynn Vale
Genre: Contemporary MC Romance / Military Romance/ Adult Fiction
She's been known as Jane for the last seven years. Have you ever felt lost? Well she knows lost. She's the definition of lost. Cruelly beaten within an inch of her life? Check. No memory of anything that's happened since she woke up from that beating? Check. Losing a child, especially one she didn't remember conceiving? Check. Jane has been sent away from her home of the past seven years by a hot older biker that tells her that her life's in danger. His solution is to send her to a place that's the home of a man that she feels a connection with instantly. A bone deep connection.
Jacks spent the last seven years in a depression. After the death of his young wife while on his first tour of duty in Afghanistan, he hasn't seen the appeal of participating in the world around him. He's lost everyone that's ever meant anything to him. His mom. His dad. His sister. His wife. Why make any more connections? They're just going to die. The only things keeping him on this earth with boots firmly planted are his brothers who fought with him during hell on earth, and his best friend, the man that was there for his wife when he couldn't be. The one who promised to keep her safe, and didn't. Then he loses one of those things, and Jack really has nothing left. He comes home to an empty bed, and dreams of what used to be, caught up in a never ending nightmare that never ends. Until she screams his name, that is.
A name is the first memory that has surfaced in her brain in the last seven years. That name is Jackopa. Her husband.
I'm a sucker for books featuring heroes who ride bikes, and when you add in a tight-knit group of former military men who run a motorcycle shop and secretly help women escape from domestic abuse, well, I can't help but be drawn to the story, and this was exactly the case with Last Day of My Life. Although I hadn't read any of the previous books in this series, based on the book's description, I thought I would be fine jumping into this fourth installment, and, for the most part, I was easily able to follow the featured couple's journey to find their way back to each other after a mysterious tragic situation tore them apart seven years ago.
The structure of the book was different from what I expected, and the narrative stretches over a lengthy period of time. The book opens with a prologue that summarizes how a young Winter and Jack meet and fall in love. Jack is a soldier heading back for his second deployment, and the couple's tearful goodbye is only meant to be temporary, but their designated course together isn't meant to be. The actual story really begins seven years later and is narrated by a woman who calls herself, "Jane" since a violent, horrific "accident" years ago left her with amnesia and the need for a lot of rehabilitative therapy.
Although readers are aware "Jane" is Winter, we don't know any of the circumstances leading up to the life-threatening trauma she experienced all those years ago and why someone still wants her dead. The plot of the story centers on the unexpected reunion between Winter and Jack, the rekindling of their romance, and the search for answers about what happened to Winter while Jack was away on deployment. I liked the second chance at love aspect of the novel, but I did have trouble feeling the strong connection and bond these two have in the here and now, and I think this may be because of the plot's structure. The prologue only summarizes the love and passion that grew between them, so I never really experienced the depth of their feelings for each other.
I found Jack's character to have greater dimension and complexity in comparison to Winter. His range of emotions, from joy that the woman he has always loved is alive to the guilt he feels for not being there to protect her, are clearly and realistically depicted. On the other hand, there are instances where I felt Winter lacked the appropriate reactions or emotions that a scene warranted. For example, she doesn't seem all that worried or concerned that someone wants to cause her harm, and sometimes her behavior is much too light-hearted for the gravity of the situation. The author does do a good job of narrating the story from both Winter's and Jack's POVs, and the shift in perspectives is always clear.
After finishing the book, I wish I had started at the beginning of the series, since the author doesn't provide as much exposition and details about the origination of the Freebirds and the supporting cast of characters who play important roles in the story. Despite my issues with characterization, the mystery behind Winter's amnesia and physical scars kept me motivated to read on, and when the truth is finally revealed at the end, it is even more unsavory than I imagined. The author provides a lengthy epilogue which nicely wraps up this couple's journey and satisfied my curiosity.
Source: I received an ARC of this book from the author to provide an honest and fair review.
If you want to know more about the book's hero, Ms. Vale has provided a more detailed profile of Jackopa Stoker:
"A Character Profile of Jackopa 'Jack' Kennedy Stoker"
Name: Jackopa 'Jack' Kennedy Stoker
Nationality: ½ White, ½ Native American
Current Residence: Kilgore, TX
Occupation: car/motorcycle mechanic
Birth order: middle child
Siblings: Catori-Older sister (Died while Jack was in the army.) Taima-baby brother.
Spouse: Winter Stoker- They married young. He's loved her since the moment he saw her licking queso off her fingers at his father's bar. They married after knowing each other for only three months. Of course, something happens while he's deployed, and he doesn't see her again for seven long years, but he never forgets her and loves her just as much as the last time he saw her.
Children: Catori (named after big sister) and Adam (Named after best friend who died)
Weight: 223 pounds
Race: Native American
Skin color: light brown
Lani Lynn Vale is a married mother of three living in the greatest state in the world, Texas. She is currently a student pursuing her bachelor's degree in nursing. When she's not cooking, cleaning, wiping dirty faces free of permanent marker stains, going to school, or running errands, you can find her at her computer lost in her fictional character's world.
Blog: http://lanilynnvale.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lani-Lynn-Vale/441845419269557
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LaniLynnVale
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7154678.Lani_Lynn_Vale
Last Day of My Life is available from the following retailers:
Amazon: Last Day of My Life (Freebirds Book 4) | Barnes & Noble: http://bit.ly/1iNtDBt
Check out the other books in the Freebirds series
BOOMTOWN, Book #1 –Boomtown (Freebirds)
HIGHWAY DON'T CARE, Book #2 – Highway Don't Care (Freebirds)
ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST, Book #3 –Another One Bites the Dust (Freebirds)
One winner will receive a signed copy of the first two books in the Freebirds series (U.S. only)
One winner will receive the first 4 books in the Freebirds series (International)
Follow the Tour at Author's Tap Room
By Barbara Ann • Posted in Adult Fiction, Adult Romance, ARC Reviews, Author Guest Post, Biker Romance/ MC Clubs, Contemporary Romance, Fiction, Giveaways, Military Romance, Romance, Series	• Tagged Adult Fiction, Contemporary MC Romance, Freebirds Series, Giveaway, Lani Lynn Vale, Last Day of My Life, Military Romance, Review
One comment on "Book Tour: Review, Guest Post & Giveaway for Last Day of My Life (Freebirds # 4)"
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Q: replace  with  depending on browser width So I have a table in html, it has two cells. I would like for these cells, depending on the width of the browser, to be arranged either vertically or horizontally.
I have tried looking for a DOM function to get the job done, but came up with no solution so far.

A: Tables are bad juju for this exact reason. You should switch to a responsive layout. There are numerous libraries for this purpose; here are two that I have used extensively: http://www.responsivegridsystem.com/, http://getbootstrap.com/.
If you're not looking to use a library, check the possible dup
Here's how I would do it in bootstrap:

            Half the page

            Other half

*

*Example JSFiddle

A: Don't use a table. Use div's or some other non-table element, styled as an inline-block with a fixed width.

something

else

If that doesn't suit you, start looking for other responsive design strategies.

A: You can use bootstrap responsive tables for this.
http://getbootstrap.com/css/#tables-responsive

   ...

Just add plugin, add simple code like above and voila.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Did you know your carpet is the biggest air filter in your home? What are you breathing? Dirt, stains, hair, grease? Those are just a few that hover at the surface where you can see them. What about the ones you can't see? Your carpet is the biggest air filter in your home. Pollutants in the air, filter through your carpet. The carpet traps them so you don't breath them over and over. But what happens when your carpet filter gets full? Your family starts breathing dust mite debris, pollens, pollutants, fungus, bacteria and a long list of other really gross stuff. Once your carpets natural filtering ability gets full, it's time for a thorough cleaning for your family's health. Is the air in your home starting to smell stale?
Clean every six months and you will breath easier.
✓ Vacuum, vacuum, vacuum. This cannot be stressed enough. You should vacuum at least twice a week, more often if you have pets. Vacuuming can help remove some of the following: dust, dust mite feces, animal hair and dander, human hair and dead skin, mold spores, dead bugs, sand and soil.
✓ Don't sweep your hard surface flooring. Sweeping redistributes allergens to the air.
✓ Have a no shoes policy in your home. This will keep outdoor pollutants from entering the home.
✓ Have your carpets professionally cleaned every 6 months.
Follow these tips and you will have a healthier home & your carpet will last longer.
You can always give us a call and we will make your carpets clean, fresh, healthy, and safe for your friends and family to enjoy.
It takes a professional carpet cleaner with the right equipment and knowledge to get rid of all harmful contaminants and creepy crawlers from your carpets.


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Institutional Communications
Social media at McGill
Principal's Prize
Six McGill Students Receive Canada's Largest Science, Technology, Engineering And Math (STEM) Scholarships
Published: 27Aug2020
A record number of McGill students have been named recipients of Canada's largest scholarship program, Schulich Leader Scholarships. This year, the program has doubled in size from 50 to 100 annual scholarships. In total, six Schulich Leader scholars will begin their studies at McGill in September (up from two last year) with the majority coming from high schools in Western Canada.
Out of a pool of more than 300,000 potential candidates across Canada, 1,500 high school students are nominated annually, of which 100 receive this award. Of the 100 recipients, 50 will receive $100,000 to pursue an engineering degree and 50 will receive $80,000 to pursue a science, technology or mathematics degree at one of 20 Canadian partner universities.
McGill's cohort of 2020 scholarship recipients includes three Faculty of Engineering students: Anne Sarah Dickman, Zhi Xin Joey Koay and Ana Eugenia Quintero Garcia. Both Koay and Quintero Garcia are from Alberta, while Dickman is a Montrealer. Each will receive a $100,000 scholarship.
The 2020 contingent also includes three Faculty of Science students: Christopher Chong, Louis-Philippe Robichaud and Maggie QingFeng Xiong. Both Chong and Xiong hail from British Columbia, while Robichaud is from Quebec City. Each will receive an $80,000 scholarship.
"I'm incredibly grateful to McGill University and the Schulich Foundation for changing my life and believing in me and my ability to make an impact," says Chong, 17, a graduate of David Thompson Secondary School in Vancouver.
In addition to his academic success, Chong created Hydrofinity, a patent-pending project that recovers water from thermoelectric power-plants. He also founded a nonprofit organization that spreads awareness of STEM scholarships and opportunities.
"Attending McGill is really a dream come true as this institution is renowned for its pursuit of excellence and has been my top choice university for a long time," says Quintero Garcia, 18, a graduate of West Island College in Calgary. "I think that having the opportunity to join a community of immensely driven and diverse individuals will yield many opportunities that will contribute to my success in the future."
An accomplished student and active member of many sustainability groups (including Dr. Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots), Quintero Garcia is already a veteran of numerous engineering competitions. In 2019, she was a member of a student team that won a Silver Award in the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA) Science Olympics. The team built a fluidized bed using a leaf blower (fluidized beds cause solid particles to behave as fluids and are widely used in many industrial applications). Until COVID-19 curtailed activities, she was working with a team building an autonomous car for the 2020 APEGA Science Olympics.
The selection of this year's six recipients brings to 24 the number of Schulich Leader Scholarships awarded to incoming McGill students since the program's inception in 2012.
"Schulich Leader Scholarships are the largest STEM scholarships in Canada. With 100 outstanding students selected in Canada, it is all but guaranteed that this group represents the best and brightest Canada has to offer," says program founder Seymour Schulich, a business leader, philanthropist and McGill graduate. "These students will make great contributions to society, both on a national and global scale. With their university expenses covered, they can focus their time on their studies, research projects, extracurriculars, and entrepreneurial ventures. They are the next generation of technology innovators."
About Schulich Leader Scholarships Canada
Schulich Leader Scholarships are prestigious entrance scholarships awarded to 100 high school graduates enrolling in a Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) undergraduate program at 20 partner universities in Canada. Each year, every high school in Canada can submit one Schulich Leader Nominee based on academic excellence in STEM, entrepreneurial leadership and financial need.
Recognizing the increasing importance and impact that STEM disciplines will have on the prosperity of future generations, business leader and philanthropist Seymour Schulich established this $200 million scholarship fund in 2012 to encourage our best and brightest students to become the next pioneers of global scientific research and innovation.
For more information visit: schulichleaders.com
or contact Dara Newton
dnewton [at] uja.schulichleaders.com
McGill Media Relations Office
cynthia.lee [at] mcgill.ca
Secondary Contact Information
Schulich Foundation
Secondary Email:
dgoodman [at] schulichfoundation.org
Protective gene variant against COVID-19 identified
New insights into seasons on a planet outside our solar system
Federal government announces 17 Canada Research Chairs for McGill
Experts: COVID-19
Experts: One-year anniversary of the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot
Published: 5 Jan 2022
Experts: 2021 Holiday Season
James Administration Building
Reference services including photo archives
Use of the McGill logo
McGill facts
Campus Map / carte
McGill Publications


Medicare is health insurance … what are the different Parts? (Note: Medicare does NOT pay for Long Term Care except in very limited cases!! That is what Long Term Care Insurance is for).
When are you eligible for Medicare and when must you enroll ? (the 3 months before, the month of, and 3 months after your birthday is your general window).* Getting Medicare started.
Note that you can enroll in Medicare and not be receiving Social Security benefits (they're different benefit programs). However, you can enroll in Medicare at your Social Security office.
*Exceptions may apply if you are still working covered by an employer health plan that qualifies … suggest if this applies to you, that you contact Social Security during the general enrollment window to confirm if your employer plan qualifies (I would not assume that it does – best to find out for sure).
2 Responses to Medicare … what and when?


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Owning a grain mill is great if you plan on grinding a lot of grains for baking either with gluten or gluten-free. The electric grain mill makes quick work of large batches and can often grind the finest flour (even before sifting.) These machines run anywhere from around $200 upwards of $700 for a top of the line model.
Lister Grinding Meal Machines Zimbabwe Harare 4.6 - 6837 Ratings ] The Gulin product line, consisting of more than 30 machines, sets the standard for our industry. We plan to help you meet your needs with our equipment, with our distribution and product support system, and the continual introduction and updating of products.
lyster grinding mill - educationcare.in. Mill (grinding) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. A mill is a device that breaks solid materials into smaller pieces by grinding, crushing, or cutting.
With a NutriMill grain mill, ... flour wheat grind bread grinding loud grains machine grinder dust milling kitchen grinds ground bowl noise berries mess motor mills.


Net blotch caused by Pyrenophora teres is a major barley (Hordeum vulgare) leaf disease in Australia resulting in potential losses of up to 40% to the barley grains industry. It is estimated that this disease costs Australian agriculture $60 million a year. Pyrenophora teres occurs as two forms, namely those having net-like symptoms referred to as Pyrenophora teres f. teres (Ptt) and others having spot-like symptoms referred to as Pyrenophora teres f. maculata (Ptm). Progeny have been successfully produced from crossing these two forms in the laboratory and hybrids have also been collected from barley fields. To date the potential evolution of new virulences from crosses between different isolates of the same form and between crosses of isolates of the two different forms has not been investigated. The aim of this study is to a) evaluate a new method (DLA – spray method) for phenotyping net blotch, b) identify the virulences in artificially produced Ptt x Ptt and Ptt x Ptm crosses and c) to fine-map the QTL region containing virulence genes in one of these crosses. To achieve this, different virulence assays were trialled and compared to determine which method is the most suitable and reliable. These trials indicated that the DLA – spray method is a reliable and accurate novel method that can replace both the seedling assay and DLA – droplet method for phenotyping net blotch of barley. Virulences were determined in three existing Ptt x Ptm crosses and one Ptt x Ptt cross by screening ascospores across a differential set of eight barley varieties. Results indicated that the progeny of these populations express virulences different to their parents'. A genetic map had been developed for Ptt x Ptt population NB29/NB85 and phenotypic data used to map the virulence genes in this population. For this study a SSR marker was added to this QTL region. Improved knowledge concerning the occurrence of recombination and the potential for new virulences to be produced can be used to better manage disease incursions and to implement control through deployment of resistances.
Master of Science (Research) thesis.


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The best little red bag!
I love my new small red leather shoulder bag! It's just was I had been looking for, the perfect leather and the right shade of orangey red. It matches a cute pair of driving moccasins that I bought on Amazon and is going to be such a fun color to wear all summer!


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The Unbearable Rightness of Being
Rich Hannon
Listen to this story:
One of the oddest, most entrenched and even perverse characteristics of humans is our deep-felt need to be right. Perhaps it starts in early childhood when we first recognize, albeit dimly, the huge gap between our size, freedom, but most of all, competence, compared to our parents. I see this, for example, in my 10-year-old grandson, who gloats when he wins a board game and makes statements (that make adults smile) like "I'm really good at this." And you know he's not. Sometimes, when playing with little kids, adults throw the game. Being wrong can equate to being a loser. And we want our kids to grow up with healthy self-esteem.
Hopefully, most of us do grow up and have a reasonably realistic self-esteem. But it seems to me, from life experience, that the need to be right lingers and pops up continually and unexpectedly, like a personal, mental game of whack-a-mole. Except that, too often, we not only don't want to "whack" our hubris down, we don't recognize it at all. Can you even remember the last time you knew you were wrong about something? Because, if you knew you were wrong, you would change your belief. So you might have a long nagging worry that a belief was questionable, but to actually hold a known error is difficult to resolve with our internal morality. We would have the self-image of a liar, which, for most, would be intolerable.
But, quite ironically, we quickly and easily admit that we've been wrong many times. Just not presently, and no longer. It's odd that we would somehow realize how many mistakes we overcame in the past but struggle to admit that there might be a whole lot more of them in the future. Do we think we've "arrived" at an all-correct belief system? And the "unbearable" word in my title has two parts. First is the unbearability of holding tight to such a counter-factual perspective. This takes denial and cognitive dissonance. But second is the (potentially insufferable) ripple effect of our rightness on others if it morphs into smug self-delusional pride in how factually and morally justified we really are. We've all experienced people who seem to so qualify. But, can we ever detect it in ourselves? Well, maybe a bit when we were young and naïve. But these days we're usually right. Right?
To the extent that this apparently universal blind spot has social implications, its negativity is magnified within a religious subculture. With some religions structured — both doctrinally and socially — in ways that are particularly problematic. And Adventism so qualifies, I assert. Ironic for a group that was founded on a mistake.
Historically, Adventism grew in the 19th century within a broader Christian culture. And one of the features of SDA evangelism in those days included trying to demonstrate doctrinal positions that were righter than the alternative denominations. In today's world I think there is a much greater emphasis within Adventism on grace and recognizing that salvation is an unmerited gift. But a continuing strain of "rightness" in SDA culture remains solidly present and has been a social and doctrinal focus, visible and usually active, in every Adventist context I've witnessed. I might even speculate that people who have a greater-than-average affinity for being right get attracted to Adventism in disproportionate numbers. That's harsh and unprovable. Maybe it's just the "unbearable" part of people who project how much they enjoy having the high moral ground. But I'm guilty too; we all are. I suspect it's a foundational component to our humanness.
The problem also shows up sometimes when people leave the church. If SDAism is the "truth," then it's not hard to feel lied to if you change your view and conclude that it's not. And the anger might be significant. People can even feel like they were made fools of. Chumps. As if there was some institutional conspiracy to con them. Perhaps the seminary has a class exegeting P.T. Barnum, titled: "Adventist Evangelism: There's a sucker born every minute."
Obviously not. Leadership is not populated with con-artists but with true believers. Yet, for someone who leaves, the psychological reaction can be out of proportion. Why? I think it is in part because we have been culturally conditioned, as humans, to be deeply embarrassed at our errors. And if you have invested years in a position, like many lifelong SDA Christians have, seeing flaws of any kind risks loss of face as well as fear of a slippery slope. See, if this is wrong, then what else about my beliefs might also be wrong? It's scary. We not only don't want to get close to that slope, but we can even shoot the messengers who suggest the possibility of error.
One significant step in mitigating this inclination is to consider two different models1 of dealing with our errors: pessimistic and optimistic. I'm suggesting we tend to naturally gravitate to a pessimistic model where our screw-ups are damaging. Situationally perhaps, but more fundamentally to our self-esteem. Conversely, an optimistic model first recognizes that we all make mistakes, continually. But without mistakes there would be no learning and no growth. We have been so deeply acculturated to hide, deny, minimize, and ultimately learn nothing from our mistakes that it can be very difficult to reframe this lifelong inevitability as something positive. But the benefits of doing so are plentiful and freeing. It becomes easier and easier to jettison unwarranted ideas. We become more curious about our world (what else don't I see right?). And, not least, we might set down a load of guilt.
One of the on-going struggles in the Adventist doctrinal universe is the idea of human perfectibility. And one unfortunate misunderstanding — all too frequent — occurs when we conflate being wrong generally, with being morally wrong. Have you ever been concerned that, if you were wrong about some doctrine, then you were at risk for salvation? Or at risk for growing into perfection? Many have, I contend. But if, foundationally, we abandon a pessimistic model of being wrong, we also can (finally) realize that we will always carry some wrong ideas. It's a consequence of not having a God's-Eye View. And we can let go of a distorted perception of perfectibility that produces self-deception, denial, and entrenchment into positions.
Kathryn Schultz, Being Wrong (New York, HarperCollins, 2010), Chapter 2.
Rich Hannon, a retired software engineer, is Columns Editor for SpectrumMagazine.org.
Previous Spectrum columns by Rich Hannon can be found at: https://spectrummagazine.org/authors/rich-hannon
Image Credit: Unsplash.com


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Boreal Songbird Initiative Welcomes New Board Member Tim Richardson
Photo by: Chris St. Michael
We are excited to welcome new Boreal Songbird Initiative board member Tim Richardson. Tim brings a wealth of experience and expertise in the fields of conservation and campaign management. He will be a tremendous asset as BSI furthers its mission of helping to establish Canada's boreal forest as the best conserved landscape on Earth. Tim will serve as BSI secretary and treasurer and, together with the rest of the board, will provide guidance on BSI's management and operations.
Tim is a Washington D.C.-based, multi-client government affairs and media consultant with a special focus on ecosystem-scale wildlife and fisheries issues. Among his roles, Tim is the only consultant to work both the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon restoration efforts on behalf of grant applicants and his Alaska Native corporation and Texas coastal clients have received over $500 million in restoration funding.
Tim has also served as government affairs director for Wildlife Forever for the last 26 years engaging extensively in legislative issues and land trust conservation, including recent efforts to purchase coal and timber inholdings in Alaska's Copper River Delta as well as critical wildlife habitat within the Mississippi River watershed. Tim has helped Wildlife Forever produce nearly two billion conservation education impressions about harmful invasive species.
He is co-author of the book Kodiak Bears & The Exxon Valdez and was a consultant on the National Geographic film "Giant Bears of Kodiak Island," broadcast to a global audience of more than one billion people in 90 nations. Early in his career, Tim was an assistant to US Senator Lloyd Bentsen (D-TX) and retains many Texas clients and connections.
Boreal Forest Provides Hope in the Face of an Insect Apocalypse »
Connect With BSI


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Li Baiyao () (564–647), courtesy name Zhonggui (重規), formally Viscount Kang of Anping (安平康子), was a Chinese historian and an official during the Chinese Sui Dynasty and Tang dynasties. He was honored for his literary abilities, and he was known for completing the official history of Northern Qi, the Book of Northern Qi, which his father Li Delin had started.

Northern Qi people
Northern Zhou people
Sui dynasty politicians
Tang dynasty politicians
Sui dynasty historians
Tang dynasty historians
7th-century Chinese historians
564 births
647 deaths

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


NerfTank by LoialOtter is licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution - Non-Commercial license.
This is a work in progress of an RC nerf tank I'm working on. It uses some advanced gear designs, printed tracks, mainly printed components overall, will look cool and should be very functional.
Oh, and the gear is supposed to run backwards to push the treads forwards. That is by design... I think it looks cooler that way.
I use a numbering system with the format so I'll be referring to everything by number.
Assembly is a bit of a pain but can be done. Make sure all parts are free of stuff first.
The drive may require some wear-in using a drill or other high torque motor.
Assemble the tracks, you'll need 42 links per side.
Say thanks by giving LoialOtter a tip and help them continue to share amazing Things with the Thingiverse community.


On Friday, December 8th we were down in Louisville, Kentucky for Linda's graduation from Southern Seminary. Having completed her Doctor in Education degree–including comprehensive exams and her dissertation–she walked the stage and received her diploma from Southern president, Albert Mohler.
Here's the link to the graduation ceremony. If you want see Linda receive her doctoral diploma, fast forward to the 1 hour and 41 minute mark in the ceremony.
The graduation ceremony was a joyful celebration of a significant milestone in Linda's life. We are grateful for the way the Lord strengthened her throughout the three year journey. Her advisors complemented her for doing excellent work on her dissertation which focused on training programs for women at complementarian seminaries and colleges. The education she received will be useful in her role of directing the Heritage Centre for Women in Ministry.
This entry was posted in Heritage, Leadership, Ministry Matters, Personal. Bookmark the permalink.
Congratulations, Linda! What a great milestone! Merry Christmas!
Congratulations, Linda! May the Lord bear even more fruit through you!


This extremely limited edition comes with numerous extras.
Metallica's Kirk Hammett has announced the very limited release of the ESP LTD Kirk Hammett Nosferatu guitar.
"Nosferatu has arisen, and now you can take him home to create your own Symphony of Horror!" says Hammett.
But only if you're able to purchase one of the just 13 editions on offer. That's right: 13. Now that's limited!
The cost is $2,400 to the lower 48 states, $2,500 worldwide, shipping and insurance included.
Each guitar is hand numbered and signed by Hammett. In addition, you get a photo of him with your actual guitar, a limited-edition Basil Gogos giclée of Nosferatu signed by Basil Gogos, a limited-edition Famous Zombies Jr Kirk Von Hammett Zombie AKA "Lil Kirk" and a Certificate of Authenticity signed by Hammett.
You can get more info here and watch the video below to hear the guitar.


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Conviction for Refusing to Submit to DUI Test Reversed
The Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution generally prohibits misleading conduct of government officials. Such conduct must be misleading to a person of average intelligence and misleading under the totality of the circumstances.
Brief of Article: Federal Conviction for Refusing to Submit to DUI Test Reversed When Yosemite Park Ranger Gives Wrong Admonition.
In the context of a DUI on federal property, federal law provides that "refusal by an operator to submit to a test is prohibited and proof of refusal maybe admissible in any judicial proceeding." 36 Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.) § 4.23(c)(2).
This is different than under California law. Under California law, refusing a chemical test for DUI is only punishable if the suspect is later found guilty of DUI. Under federal law, this misdemeanor can be prosecuted even if defendant is found not guilty of DUI or the DUI is dismissed.
In 2011, a federal park ranger in Yosemite observed Sean Harrington in a "non-public area" of the park at night. Harrington's car was stopped, but its lights were on and the engine was running. Harrington was sitting in the driver's seat.
According to the park ranger, Harrington refused a field sobriety test and was then arrested for DUI. Once at the police station, Harrington refused to submit to a breath test or to provide a blood sample. Another park ranger then read Harrington the California admonition, which specifically advised that refusal or failure to complete such a test will result in a fine or imprisonment if the arrest results in a conviction for DUI. This was read twice more to Harrington. No test was performed. Harrington confirmed he refused to submit.
Harrington was later arraigned on six charges in U.S. District Court. The charges included being in possession of an open container and possession of marijuana, which he pled guilty to. The DUI charge was dismissed. However, he chose to go to trial on one count, the refusal to submit charge.
Harrington's defense at trial was that the park ranger gave him the wrong admonition and that this violated his right to due process. The case went to a bench trial before a magistrate judge, who found Harrington guilty. She then sentenced him to 36 months of unsupervised probation and 120 days of confinement with 90 days suspended pending probation.
Harrington then appealed to the Fourth Appellate District Court of Appeal. In United States v. Sean Harrington (2014 DJDAR 4828), the court began its analysis by noting "the fundamental fact" that the park ranger misinformed Harrington three times as to the criminal consequences of his refusal. It also emphasized that federal law, not California law, applied.
The federal admonition that should have been read was that if he refused a test, "you will be charged with an additional offense for refusing the test." The admonition further advises the suspect that the charge carries with it a maximum penalty of six months in jail and/or a $5,000 fine. It also includes notice that such a charge is in addition to any DUI charge that may be alleged.
The Fourth Appellate District began its legal analysis by observing that the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides, "[N]o person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law." However, due process is a flexible concept, yet still grounded in "fundamental fairness." Walters v. Nat'l Ass'n of Radiation Survivors (1985) 473 U.S. 305, 320-321.
Here, there is no doubt that Harrington's sentence of 120 days in jail was a deprivation of his freedom. Moreover, the court noted there is a "stark difference" between the consequences of refusal as described by the park officials and the real (federal) consequences. In fact, the DUI charge against Harrington was ultimately dropped.
Moreover, had Harrington been properly admonished, the court noted, he might have submitted to a test.
In closing, the Fourth Appellate District commented that the First Circuit, in Roberts v. Maine (1st Cir. 1995) 48 F. 3d 1287, ruled in a similar case that such a wrong admonition in a DUI was a due process violation.
Consequently, the lower courts sentence was vacated and the judgment reversed. Harrington certainly must have been very happy.
We think this case is significant for anyone facing a DUI because officers often fail to admonish a suspect or do so without reading from any card that had the proper admonition printed. The officer may be tired, frustrated with the suspect or simply self-confident that he or she can recite the admonition from memory, when this is untrue.
The citation for the Ninth Circuit ruling discussed above is United States v. Sean Harrington (9th Cir., 2014) 749 F.3d 825.
For more information about DUI, click on the following articles:
10 Things to Do if Stopped for DUI
What Happens if Police Say I Refused a Breath or Blood Test?
U.S. Supreme Court Rules Police May Not Draw Blood Without a Warrant When Suspect Refuses Breath or Blood Test
Conviction for Refusing to Submit to DUI Test Reversed :: Redondo Beach, California DUI Test Refusal Lawyers Greg Hill & Associates


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Application Developers
Support & instructions
Installation & user guide
Downloadable files
Support & instructions installation & user guide
The equipment is delivered to the site of operations pre-readied for use and connected to the desired application supplier's application. A device may have a GSM-2G SIM card in place, or the user is required to obtain it personally and install it.
Before connecting the power supply, a SIM card is installed in the device from which the PIN code inquiry has been cancelled.
The device is mounted on the wall with four screws, preferably indoors, and the power source is connected to an indoor electrical outlet. The device initializes itself within a few minutes and is then ready for operation.
Its IMEI number is entered in the application to the desired work object and, if required, the identifiers it uses are also registered there. The IMEI number is found beneath the mount sleeve on the left side as well as in the dispatch note.
Device maintenance
If the device does not function correctly, please check the following matters before you contact the application supplier:
– Is the device getting electricity, do the indicator lights glow and can the device read the IDs?
– Is the fault only in the fact that the stamps are not seen in the application? In that case, the fault is most likely in the SIM card or the Internet connection (in this case, check if the SIM card is activated and the PIN code inquiry has been cancelled).
Report the serial code (HW number and IMEI code) of the device when you make your maintenance request and how the fault comes up, as well as when it started.
In maintenance situations, the device is usually exchanged, whereupon the application supplier or device manufacturer sends a replacement unit in which the 'old' SIM card is installed, and the device requiring servicing is returned in the exchange device transport package. In this case, the replacement unit must be registered like a new device in the application.
If it is only the power unit of the device that is defective, the base of the device can be exchanged: in this instance, the device need not be repaired separately for the application.
The device can be transferred from one work site to another: in this case, the IMEI code in the application must be re-registered for the work object.
Inoptics Ltd.
Backed by 25 years of experience, Inoptics Oy has earned its secure position as a leading Time&Attendance terminal supplier for construction sites. The company operates at Oulu's Technology Village (Technopolis) – a locale with a dynamic history in the global development of wireless data transfer.
Teknologiantie 14 D, 90590 Oulu, FINLAND
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High quality from Finland
Inoptics Oy's products are designed to function under the rigorous conditions of Northern Europe, while reliably and tirelessly transmitting working-time data to application partners' systems. The products enjoy international approvals (CE, FCC, PTCRB) and were the first to obtain a certificate for compatibility with the Valtti Smart Card on construction sites.
Inoptics' AAA credit rating May 2, 2017
Inoptics Oy delivers 4,000th construction site terminal October 17, 2016
Inoptics Oy's Data Terminal Also Reads Swedish ID06 ID Cards September 18, 2015
© 2019 Inoptics Ltd.


Flipside Movie Emporium :: View topic - Star Wars III, hottest actress??
Posted: 05.13.2005 5:07 pm Post subject: Star Wars III, hottest actress??
Is this what shilling has come to?
Interesting. I guess boasting the same for the high-profile likes of Natalie Portman wasn't in the studio plan.
I'm just happy that jedione12 let us know about this Episode III thing. This is actually the first I've heard about it. Neat.
I know! Blue light sabers really turn me on, man!
I thought the "saber" reference was a metaphor. You mean this movie actually contains blue light sabers? I gotta check this out! W00t!!!1!


CALGARY (CP) -- The Calgary-based company with an oil and gas exploration portfolio in the Ghadames Basin of Libya said its board has begun "a process to identify, examine and consider a range of strategic alternatives available to Verenex to maximize shareholder value."
While such statements often indicate a company is considering putting itself up for sale, Verenex said it has not yet made any decisions on whether that will ensue or it will pursue some other alternative.
Verenex has a current market value $328.5 million.
The company is currently exploring Area 47 in Libya, where it has made a commerciality application for an initial development phase.
"Verenex does not intend to make any further announcement regarding the process unless and until its board of directors has approved a specific transaction or other course of action or otherwise deems disclosure of developments is appropriate," the company said in a statement.
Vermilion Energy Trust (VET.UN) holds a 42.4% interest in Verenex's outstanding shares.
Fannie & Freddie Bail Out: Is This The End of The Dollar Rally?