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June 1st, 2014 | Issue one hundred eight
An Interview with Peter Matthiessen
[Author]
"Almost never have I been considered funny."
Also appearing in this interview:
Michael Rockefeller
A yellow warbler
A white shark
by Jonathan Meiburg
Illustration by Charles Burns
Jonathan Meiburg
At first, the cab driver couldn't find it; the empty fields to the left and the low trees to the right were covered in snow, and there was no looming Hamptons mansion at the end of the road. "I don't think there's anywhere else here," he said. But then it appeared: a modest, low-slung house glimpsed through a tunnel in the trees. As we pulled into the drive, it was clear that Peter Matthiessen's home for the last six decades wouldn't be considered a normal home anywhere. An enormous skull—the cranium of a fin whale—was braced against a wall of the house, and clusters of other artifacts rested half-buried in the snow: driftwood, stumps, shells, small boulders, sculptures. I rang the doorbell and no one answered, and for a moment it was completely quiet: rain dripped off a row of icicles hanging from the roof. And then a kindly, deeply lined face peered through the glare in a pane of the front door.
What to say about Peter Matthiessen? There was no one quite like him: a writer and thinker, a naturalist and activist, and a fifty-year student of Zen Buddhism who, as his publicist put it, "lived so large, and so wild, for so long." He was the only person ever to win the National Book Award for both fiction (Shadow Country, 2008) and nonfiction (The Snow Leopard, 1979), along with a bushel of medals and prizes for his elegant but unsentimental books (of which there are at least thirty), most of which concern the wild places, animals, and people "on the edge," as he said, of the farthest parts of the globe, where pre-human landscapes and premodern pasts are (or were) still visible.
These edges are, more or less, where he spent his adult life. A précis of his travels is a bewildering list, and includes the Himalayas, the islands of the South Pacific and the Caribbean, the Mongolian steppe, Africa from the Serengeti to the Congo basin, South America from the Andes to the Amazon, the boreal forests of North America and Siberia, and a "musk ox island in the Bering Sea"—and that's far from exhaustive. These travels would be remarkable enough, but he also cofounded the Paris Review, in 1953 (while working undercover for the nascent CIA); a few years later he was a struggling novelist and commercial fisherman using nets and dories off Long Island's South Shore. Sixteen years after that, he was working as a labor activist with Cesar Chavez, and thirty years on, his book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI's War on the American Indian Movement (1983) resulted in multimillion-dollar lawsuits against him and his publisher by a former governor of South Dakota and a former FBI agent (both lost their cases). And in Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark (1971), he followed a team of divers trying to capture the first underwater images of the animal. The resulting film, Peter Gimbel's Blue Water, Blue Death, is credited with inspiring Jaws.
Above all, Matthiessen followed his own muse, and though he avoided repeating himself, all of his books combine his searching, acerbic intelligence with his gift for evoking landscapes and people, and all are shot through with glimpses of a reality beyond human understanding—a bit like what Werner Herzog calls "ecstatic truth." It's a marriage of the dignified and the avant that can make his writing seem, at times, like a really good translation from another language. Both nature writing and what's now called creative nonfiction owe him a huge debt, though his pure fiction tends to be overlooked (Far Tortuga, the experimental novel that preceded The Snow Leopard, doesn't get the notice it deserves). His last book, the novel In Paradise (Riverhead, 2014), probes a different edge; it takes place at a Zen meditation retreat in Auschwitz, following his own experiences there at similar retreats in the late '90s.
Inside his house, everything was orderly, earth-toned, and wooden, both genteel and rough-hewn. Photographs of the people of the New Guinean highlands he visited in 1961 (vividly recalled in Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea), some of them taken by expedition mate Michael Rockefeller, surrounded a weathered baby grand piano; a pair of binoculars rested on its back on the piano's lid. Smooth river stones, one of them incised with an elongated face that might be the Buddha's, lined the sills of tall windows, among potted maidenhair ferns and a blooming Christmas cactus. In the backyard, two wooly-coated deer flecked with ice craned their necks to suck bird seed from a feeder, displacing a little cloud of cardinals and white-throated sparrows.
We sat in a cramped spare room he was using as a study, since the small outbuilding where he'd done the bulk of his writing was losing a battle with mold. He took a swivel chair beside the computer where he was working on yet another book: a memoir. It was a form he regarded with suspicion, and he was still finding its structure, which he compared to the branching leaves of giant kelp. I had to place my recorder close to him to catch his deep, conspiratorial rasp, but there was plenty it didn't capture: he talked with his face and his hands as much as his voice, widening his eyes in surprise or crinkling them in mirth, fluttering his fingers to dismiss the encrustations of "lush writing" or opening his palms in surrender to a great line of prose. Or he enlisted all his features in sudden imitations of people or animals: an Inupiat pilot swatting a mosquito, a grizzly bear recoiling at the sight of a human, a white shark trying to swallow an outboard motor. The landscape of his creased forehead, wild eyebrows, and silver hair suggested stormy weather, but his eyes were a surprisingly mild, even innocent, blue. Only a month before his death, at the age of eighty-six, he was still clearly the man from the jacket flap of The Snow Leopard, and his memory for the smallest details of books he wrote half a century ago was ironclad. The pad of his right thumb was stained with green ink.
THE BELIEVER: So those are Michael Rockefeller's photos on the wall out there?
PETER MATTHIESSEN: Those aren't all Michael's, but I can show you the ones that are. Over the doorway you can see two of the spears: there, those incredible long spears.
BLVR: They look like they mean business.
PM: They didn't like to throw those spears right away, because they were too much trouble to make. There's no metal at all, you know—they make them by taking these saplings into cold mountain water and scraping them with stones; that was a few weeks of work. Their technique was to use a bow and arrow until the guy was really helpless and then they would come forward and throw it. They were scared somebody from the other side would come up and run away with it!
BLVR: That book, Under the Mountain Wall, might be the strangest of all your work.
PM: Yeah.
BLVR: Why did you write it in the way that you did?
PM: Well, actually, I went out there and I had no such intent at all. Remind me to go back to New Guinea, but it's kind of like Far Tortuga. Far Tortuga came out of a fact article for the New Yorker, called "To the Miskito Bank." I had to keep going back to Grand Cayman, partly because of the rascality of my contact down there, who was a sea captain of somewhat the same persuasions as Copm Raib [a character in Far Tortuga]. Anyhow, I piled up a lot of expense money, so it was very embarrassing for me. I came back after one year, and I went in to see [New Yorker editor William] Shawn. And I said, "Mr. Shawn, I have your fact piece, and I think it's going to be OK, and I just want to tell you since you spent a lot of money on my expenses"—and I pride myself on keeping my expenses low, so he knew I wasn't gouging him—"I'm going to save my best stuff for a novel." I said, "I'm so powerfully affected by a feeling down there that I'll give you your fact piece, but I'm saving the best stuff back."
And Shawn said something—and I've been dealing with magazines for years, and fighting with editors all the way over cuts and edits, and no pay, and whatever—but Shawn, without any hesitation at all, said [in a Shawn voice], "Mr. Matthiessen, you do what's best for your work!"
And tears just—arced out of my eyes, you know. I was so moved and touched by that.
So I did. But then I went even further with it. I not only took stuff out for a novel, but I began to see that I didn't want any of the furniture of a novel. I didn't want any "he said"s or "she said"s, ordinary similes and metaphors. Just—get all that out of there. And I think that was partly because of At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which I think is pretty well written, but it's ornate by comparison. It's full of metaphor and simile and, you know, lush writing [laughs]. For Far Tortuga, I wanted it absolutely spare. Just a line of birds on the horizon.
My great question, I would say, comes from Turgenev, from Virgin Soil. One of the characters kills himself, but he leaves a note, and the note says: "I could not simplify myself." [Drops jaw] Boy, that's like that Akhmatova line, the epigraph from In Paradise—
BLVR: "Something not known to anyone at all—"
PM: "—but wild in our breast for centuries." Yes, you know. Oh! [Groans as if smacked in the chest] I know that feeling so well. It's been my great, great aim in life, simplification. Total failure.
BLVR: You wanted me to draw you back to the highlands of New Guinea.
PM: I figured if I brought the anthropologists in, then you almost automatically have to deal with the personalities involved. And there's a great deal more complication. I hated the National Geographic style of writing, you know: "Suddenly I heard a noise behind me." I didn't want to write another expedition. I just wanted the sense of a pure Stone Age culture.
BLVR: Why did you go in the first place?
PM: We were trying to discover why people go to war, in a circumstance where people went to war regularly—loosely, once a week. [The men of neighboring tribes] would challenge each other and go out and fight and then take nothing; they did this just for their own pecking order or status, or whatever. And they would adjust the combat so it was fair—one side could bring in more men if the terrain was more favorable for them, for example. It was fascinating to watch it.
And the women would come up out of the trenches where they were working, and they would sit on the hillside and kinda—cheer. But the cheering was mostly jeering: "He can't even get it up!"—you know. And they'd kill one guy, or even come close to killing him, and then—they'd go home. They didn't have to have mass slaughter. So in a sense it was very civilized. And we found them enormously gentle and kind with their own little kids, and they were lovely with old people. They really had a very strong civic sense; they took care of people who needed help.
BLVR: What did you learn about war?
PM: It's a simplification to say that the men went to war to maintain their dominance over the women. The men would help dig agricultural ditches because they were superb farmers. That was very heavy lifting work. But then they just preened themselves, and put bird-of-paradise plumes [in their hair], and smoked dope.
BLVR: A thread that runs through In Paradise is the tension and connection between erotic love and a kind of sacred love, or maybe what [the central character] Olin calls "earth apprehension." You refer to mankind in the book as "this two-legged crotched creature that knows it must die." And somehow crotched is the most jolting word in that sentence.
PM: Well, the great penalty for whatever we do is knowing that we're going to die. There's no other animal that knows that. They never do. Even the ones that are scarce and rare, if they don't feel good, they just get up under a rock so that they're not preyed upon so easily. But we're the only one that knows… it's curtains [grins].
BLVR: I guess what I wanted to get at there, though, is a submerged erotic element in your writing. I feel like that's more overt in In Paradise than it is in almost any other book of yours. Which is funny for a book that's set—
PM: —in Auschwitz.
BLVR: In Auschwitz.
PM: Well, is it more overt, or is it that it's so out of keeping with what should be the spirit there, from a PC point of view? That it seems to stand out more, just because it's already reacting with, well, "This is Auschwitz; you can't do this." Olin has to recognize that there is a strong, erotic—that he is drawn to this girl, this woman. And he's horrified at himself, because he has plenty of rigorous, New England training.
BLVR: The Snow Leopard also touches on the loss of Eros, or the loss and regaining of it. Near the end, as you're sort of reentering the world, you mention that you're ready to eat, sleep, make love, so it's in there, too.
PM: It is. But it's in life, isn't it? I think I'm quite a normal person in this regard—but I don't want to dwell on it. I don't like so-called "sex scenes," unless you're getting some kind of comic thing out of it. There's a couple of funny scenes in Shadow Country that are totally ribald and outrageous—and in a way, I also see erotic love in that way. It just makes fools of us, you know, physically and emotionally. I also very rarely write about cities or urban people—especially urban people of our own region. 'Cause it's too well covered, my god! I mean, the New Yorker has saturated the world with this stuff for years, and I never wrote fiction for them; I didn't want to. I wrote nonfiction for them. I like my own beat—I like to be out there on the edge with people who, as I say somewhere, haven't got time to be neurotic.
BLVR: Neurotic is a funny word to use, though, because when you accepted the National Book Award for Shadow Country, you said you'd always had a "neurotic" feeling that your fiction wasn't as appreciated as your nonfiction.
PM: Well, yeah—did I say "neurotic"?
BLVR: You did!
PM: Well, that's OK. I can have my neuroses, but I'm not particularly interested in writing about them, because it is exhausted, you know, between all these memoirs and tell-alls—and novels. It's not the stuff that I like.
BLVR: What do you think people haven't noticed in your writing?
PM: Humor.
BLVR: Humor?
PM: Almost never have I been considered funny. Once, at a book signing, a man came up and said I made him laugh, and I just [mimes bear hug] embraced him! When they did that documentary about me a few years back, they came here to the house for a private screening. And at the end of it, [Matthiessen's wife] Maria said, "It's very good, it's very generous, but you've missed two things: you've missed that he's funny, and you've missed that he's a rascal."
BLVR: Your work often seems haunted by a longing for a lost paradise—one that can be glimpsed but never quite regained. Sometimes this is embodied in actual places or people; I'm thinking of Samling monastery, for instance, which you couldn't reach in The Snow Leopard, or the leopard itself, or the woman in the da Vinci painting in In Paradise. But most interesting to me is that you seem to feel its absence because of a sense of having known its presence. Can you talk about where that comes from, or where you've seen it, in your life?
PM: Yeah, yeah. [Long pause] I think I saw it earlier, in my youth, and maybe also as a very small child. [Widens eyes, leans back, and becomes almost preverbal] All this… incredible stuff roaring by, you know, noises and lights and matter, and you're eating worms and stuff—"What is all this?" You know?
And that, in a way, is a kind of an early paradise that we do lose, the nondiscriminatory—we don't discriminate, we try everything. But then you have to discriminate and sort out what you don't like and whatever, but gradually when you do that then the bad crusting-over comes. Opinions, and anger, and indignation—as we say in Zen, "greed, anger, and folly."
But in addition to that, I have an inner memory of flashes of light happening during my youth. I had a definite one on a troop ship going from the Golden Gate to Pearl Harbor. A twelve-day storm. And I was up on deck, I had fire watch, if you can believe it, and you couldn't hardly hang on through the waves! But I'm glad I did, because I had a shelter under an Ellis, one of the landing craft, across the bow. And the rest of the ship smelled so bad, vomit, you know, it was awful. But during that time, there was one night when it was so incessant, these waves crashing. And it sort of—obliterated me. I was suddenly a part of the wave. There's sort of an attempt to describe it in [Matthiessen's third novel] Raditzer, on the voyage out.
Then, of course, I did drugs, for most of the '60s. But they don't ever quite qualify. It's wonderful, but it's like you're watching from an aisle seat, you know, and you're not quite there, because your ego is—pshht! It's gone; you're like a kid in a sandbox. Everything's manifesting, and you're manifesting, too, but you don't know it, or you no longer know it.
BLVR: There's that scene in Far Tortuga that seems almost like a warning, when the characters actually do reach one of these Olympian places, this perhaps-mythical island—
PM: —but they reach it as it's being despoiled.
BLVR: I was angry at you for that.
PM: [Grins] Well, Desmond, you know—he had to have his moment.
BLVR: When you look at what we've done to the planet, and seem hidebound to continue to do these things, it's hard to avoid the feeling that this place is going to be better off without us. How do you avoid this line of thinking?
PM: Kurt Vonnegut used to live up the street, and he came down here one day, and he put a sticker on my truck. And it said: YOUR PLANET'S IMMUNE SYSTEM IS TRYING TO GET RID OF YOU. I still have it out there—it's coming off; it's tattering. He's the one who gave me that model of the HMS Beagle. [Motions to a glass case by the front door]
BLVR: I wondered where that came from.
PM: It's a good model, too! I think he didn't know what was going to happen to it, and he didn't have much faith that he was going to live much longer. And one morning, he just appeared. It's got a little sign in there and it just says: "This is my gift for Peter Matthiessen." It was wonderful. And he wouldn't even stay for lunch.
BLVR: What did you think about Jaws when it came out?
PM: The movie, or the book?
BLVR: Either one.
PM: I've always heard that [the writer] Peter Benchley was a very nice man, so I have nothing against him except for possibly borrowing the mood of my white shark description in the beginning. But I thought it was—I mean, it's not my kind of book. I read it only because of the movie we made [Blue Water, White Death], because Jaws made the money and we subsided into obscurity [laughs]. The movie… you know, Quint is based on a guy called Frank Mundus, who was a Montauk guy; he was the big shark hunter. That's where that film [Blue Water, White Death] really began, because [filmmaker] Peter Gimbel was down on the docks there. He was at Salivar's bar, and they had a mounted head of a white shark, and Gimbel immediately put himself to that test: Would I be afraid of that? And I thought—God. I mean, if you're not afraid of that, you're an idiot.
BLVR: And yet you took the test, too. You got into a cage and went down.
PM: Yes. I wanted to see it. And I was frightened, because I was the one holding the bait [stretches out his arms, eyes averted], and this—fucking thing was hitting the bar like the Orient Express, I mean, just—whaaam!—and it was just aluminum—Jesus! [Laughs] We had one scene there where [cameraman] Peter Lake was in the cage and the shark just opened it up like a tin can. He could have picked Lake out of there so easy. But he wasn't after Lake. He was after the flotation tanks, which glint.
BLVR: I think of Blue Meridian as the point at which our cultural obsession with great white sharks really began.
PM: That's giving me more credit than I deserve. I think that Jaws came out of our movie, but that wasn't my movie. My book was Blue Meridian, and I was alone on that expedition. I was only, you know, a chronicler. Blue Meridian actually appears, though, in a stack of books in the captain's cabin.
BLVR: In the movie Jaws.
PM: That was to console me, I guess [laughs].
BLVR: What do you feel most fortunate to have seen in your life?
PM: [Long pause] It might be the whole panorama of the high Himalayas. When it's in all its glory, and you're up there at fifteen thousand feet. It's just so… it's so stunning. But I've also been at sea with a hurricane, with all the big waves coming over the bow. I don't know. I find the whole thing so wondrous. I can be very excited by something I find in my own yard, you know: "What can this be?" So—I don't know. I'd have to think about that.
BLVR: It's not really a fair question. I've kind of resisted keeping a list of birds for that reason—I love birds, but I don't want a life list, or a top ten, or whatever.
PM: At one time I was a lister, good and proper. I mean, I really enjoyed looking at birds, too, but I had all the birds on the eastern list, and a lot of birds on the western list as well. But then I lost that Peterson Field Guide, and I never tried to refill it. And now when I go and do a field trip, I keep only a sort of vague list of that trip. I don't even know why I do it; I never look at it again. And I don't have a world list. I think that as soon as you start doing that, you're in it for the wrong reason.
BLVR: One of the images in your work that's stuck with me is a little yellow bird. Do you know the one I'm talking about?
PM: In the Urubamba River, in the gorge [in Peru, in The Cloud Forest].
BLVR: Yes.
PM: Probably a yellow warbler, you know, that time of the year.
BLVR: Why did you choose fiction for In Paradise, when it's drawn so directly from your own experience?
PM: I knew I couldn't convey anything of what I felt in nonfiction; I couldn't go deep enough. Like the old artist said, it has to go through art to see it again, to feel it, to make it new. And even now, wait and see, I'm going to get a lot of flak, just like Styron, poor Styron. He went through hell on Sophie's Choice because Sophie was Polish [Catholic], not Jewish. I mean, "The Jews own the Holocaust"—there's a lot of feeling like that.
BLVR: It seems like one of the points of In Paradise is that everyone owns the Holocaust.
PM: Not only does everyone own it, but ultimately [everyone] could be on either side.
BLVR: So much of your writing's been concerned with animals, with wild landscapes and creatures, that it was a little strange to me to read a book of yours in which there weren't any.
PM: No. Olin sees a falcon when he's out on the platform.
BLVR: Now I have to throw out my theory.
PM: And he also sees those rooks, and some of those crows, the hooded crows of central Europe. And then there are the deer prints. I couldn't believe that when I saw it, these deer prints in the snow around the crematoria—it was extraordinary. I climbed down into one of the gas chambers, and I was astonished at the microbial and fungal life already—I say "already," after sixty years—claiming it, reclaiming it. I loved that.
BLVR: You've expressed some discomfort with memoirs in general before. When I saw you speak in Texas a few years ago, you said, "The problem is that you always come out looking pretty good." And yet here you are working on one. What do you think you can reveal about your life that you haven't already?
PM: I don't know, very little of interest! It's just that I have an awful lot of sorta great stories and encounters, and it would be fun to have 'em set down. But you risk all that name-dropping, and vaunting yourself. Even when you don't intend to, you tend to slide things in your own favor. The only way I can do it is to be really self-deprecating, and laugh at myself at every opportunity.
BLVR: Does that ever feel false?
PM: Mm, no. I can take a hit. The guy who was really good at that was George Plimpton. He was an expert in self-deprecation.
BLVR: Are you surprised at the longevity of the Paris Review?
PM: I once tried to get Plimpton to quit after [the Paris Review] had been in New York a number of years; I led a little resistance, or rebellion. Every time we've gotten a new editor, I've sort of thought, This is a good time to, you know, wrap it up! [Laughs] But I didn't realize—I mean, I knew George, of course, since we were little boys, but I didn't know how built into his life that magazine was—that he needed it very badly. And putting it to death would be like putting him to death.
BLVR: Has there been a book you thought would connect with an audience that didn't?
PM: [Pause] No. But then I've always thought my books pretty much got what I expected them to get. I'm not a best-seller writer. The only best seller in the pack is The Snow Leopard, and The Snow Leopard had a horrible beginning. It was like the beginning of this last Super Bowl.
PM: No, really! You know how the book section [of the New York Times] comes out a week early, and all the editors get it. So on the Monday of the week it was supposed to be reviewed, my editor Joe Fox called up and said, "Get ready. Buy yourself a yacht." You know, "You've hit the big one!" Because it had the whole front of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. And in those days, they would make sandwich boards, and they'd put them around, and they'd put one up by the counter [at stores], and whether you read it or not, you bought it, I don't know why. Everybody had to—you had to have that book. And it would have gotten that.
But no one ever saw that review, or that issue, because it came out on the first day of the New York Times's ninety-day strike. So there went my chance for a best seller. Now, I'm not complaining; over the years it sold pretty well, and it won the National Book Award eventually, or whatever, but it wasn't biiiig, you know—the kind of seller that would put you on the best-seller lists for book after book.
BLVR: In music we wrestle with this, too, of course; you spend all this time making a record, and then you put it out, and you brace yourself for the reviews, and it's impossible to know whether you're going to be exalted or condemned.
PM: It can be. We had a book, The Tree Where Man Was Born [about East Africa]; Dutton published that, and they got Eliot Porter to do the photographs, and combined the two. And that was reviewed for the New York Times by Peter Beard. Now, Peter Beard [was considered] the young American who owned East Africa. He was the authority and the ego, I guess. And they gave it to him to review, and he trashed it, really, he just trashed it. And we didn't know that; we didn't know what was coming up.
But Truman Capote, who lived out here, he did know. And he called me up and said [in a Capote voice], "Oh my god! What they've done to you!" He—Truman, he was such a funny mix of things. He hated his friend being reviewed that way. But he also loved it [laughs]. But either way, he tipped me off, so I called up the publisher, and I said, "Listen, we've been sandbagged." And [Dutton publisher] Jack Macrae said, "My god, I put a fortune"—he was a tightwad—"I put a fortune in this book!" You know, he'd sent it to Italy for the printing—and it was a good job, no question. And, I said, "Well, I can only tell you we're getting trashed on Sunday." So he called them up ahead of time, and I'm glad he did. But he really blew a gasket. He said, "How can you? You knew damn well when you gave it to Beard that it was gonna get trashed, and that's not good editing. That's a hatchet job." And they never ran that review.
BLVR: To return to The Snow Leopard one last time, sales aside—do you remember how you felt about it before it went to press? I went to see the manuscript at the Ransom Center, in Austin, partly because I was curious how much of the finished text was in your field notebooks. And I noticed that most of the pages were crossed out in different colors of ink, sometimes with what I imagined might have been some vehemence, or impatience.
PM: No. It was to keep my own mind clear, because I had my own system in there. I put all the "data," so-called, on the right-hand page, and then anything I think of later on the left, so all of that's in the same area. It makes it much easier to rewrite; I recommend the method. But you often do plagiarize yourself—you think you've done it and you haven't, or vice versa. So if I know it's in the text and I've included it, I scratch it out.
BLVR: What did you make of it when you were done?
PM: Very early in that book I said, If I can't get a good book out of this, I ought to be taken out and shot.
Maria Matthiessen, Peter's wife for over thirty years, gave me a lift back to the train station. (You might recognize her name from a recent episode of This American Life built around her guidelines for boring subjects to avoid in conversation.) Her German and English parents, who raised her in East Africa, were easy to see and hear in her precise accent and no-nonsense manner, and she's as strong a flavor as her husband; I wished I'd interviewed them together. Earlier, during lunch in their kitchen, I'd been struck by how sturdy their partnership appeared, but also—remarkably—how distinct they'd remained as individuals, even after many years together.
We talked a little about Peter's recent illness, which loomed over both of their lives but also seemed to have put them in a fighting mood. She was frustrated by feelings of dependence that didn't sit well with either of them. "You can't go anywhere, you can't do anything," she said. "You're in god's waiting room."
At the station, the morning's snow and ice had turned to light rain, and the sky, the road, and the bare trees were soggy, smeared, and gray; a pair of crows chased each other around the empty parking lot. Maria decided to wait with me, wrapped in her green-trimmed black overcoat, and we talked until the train came. I took a seat by a window, where I could see her standing on the edge of the platform, and she was still there, waving, when the train pulled away.
Jonathan Meiburg is the singer for the band Shearwater. He also studies striated caracaras in the Falklands and Tierra del Fuego.
More by Jonathan Meiburg
An Interview with Kenneth Lonergan
Lucas Kavner
What You Write Is Nobody's Business, An Interview with Wong May
Zachary Schomburg
A Nice Game and a Beautiful Game, An Interview with Judit Polgar


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Anna Heyligers is one of many women in Australia who has decided that the life of 9-5 working for someone else isn't what she wants. As a result, she joined the online world and set up a business called Gladys Mack which creates and distributes gift boxes online. There are gift boxes for both men and women, so no matter what the occasion, Gladys Mack can cater for you. The idea is that the gifts will brighten up the day of the recipient and that the giver will feel satisfaction from bringing joy into someone else's life. The gifts can either be given to people you know such as friends, or family members, or even colleagues and businesses to say thank you for the service you've received.
So where is Gladys Mack based? The packing centre is in Wollongong of New South Wales and people are free to visit. All visits are available from Thursday – Saturday or must be arranged by appointment however delivery is available at all other times.
There are gifts for special occasions such as Father's Day or Baby Showers as well and they can be handpicked based on the recipient's preferences, so it's possible that no two gift boxes will be the same, which makes the gifts even more special than if they were mass produced. When you give the gift it will really resonate with the recipient and will be more meaningful. For those who just want a quick decision, there are some ready made gift boxes available as well.
You may be wondering why someone would start a gift box business, well for Anna it was really quite simple. She had been working in Insurance and needed a change, she saw a gap in the market of gifting. That's where the idea was born. She wanted to fill that void and give consumers what they were missing. Basically, everything seemed to lack soul and wasn't personalised. It's been very important for Anna that everything has the end customer in mind and that it's unique.
Given she was a partner in an Insurance firm prior to setting up the business, she had a strong network of acquaintances, colleagues, friends and clients. It was through that network that she was able to grow the business and reach out to people who may benefit from buying one of the gift boxes.
Since then, the business has taken on a new direction and she now allows people to come to the studio in Wollongong. She's also liaising with retailers and holding various workshops to get the message out there and build the customer base. Of course, there's a website as well so people can find the business if they search for it, but like all small businesses, it has started at a local level and seems to have grown organically from there.
Anna says that although it's important to have a plan in business, the fact of the matter is that you can't plan in advance because things are constantly changing and she says that even a short term weekly or monthly plan is essential to help you maintain your focus.
Click here to view Gladys Mack contact page.


For knights and princesses across the land. Turn your scooter into a medieval steed or pretty pony with these fab handlebar toys.
A wonderful gift to give your green fingered friends or those who like to keep a roll of string close at hand.


This course provides training for users who need to create professional quality corporate marketing materials and engaging communication pieces using the industry standard tool for vector graphic design.
This training enhances our Illustrator Essential Skills I class, and is specifically tailored for business professionals. Skills you will acquire are applicable for both small and large organizations.
You will use Illustrator to quickly manipulate and create Acrobat PDF documents, create mocks and dashboards for prototyping, create logos, brochures, and much more. This course starts at a fundamental level and works through intermediate concepts including color, typography and all of the "Live" features such as Live Type, Live Trace, Live Paint, and Live Color.
Ariel is a high school teacher that works with students to create rich communication pieces using the Adobe Creative Cloud tools. Hear what she had to say about her training experience with Lumenbrite.


text:
The High Price of Patriotism
Derek Pasquill, the Foreign Office whistleblower who leaked documents on its collusion with Islamists, now faces ruin
Nick Cohen
Derek Pasquill was a Foreign and Commonwealth Office man to his core. He was born to a diplomat father and service wife, weaned in its embassies, trained in its boarding schools and polished by its fine minds until he was ready to represent liberal Britain to a hostile world. The FCO was the only institution he really knew, and he took its benevolence for granted. His mother was German and his parents did not want to spend their days at drinks parties with cliquey expats who would not treat the overwhelming majority of their compatriots as their social equals, let alone foreigners. They toured his father's postings instead. When he was on holiday from his English boarding schools, they took him to the Roman ruins at Baalbek in Lebanon and the palaces of Ctesiphon, Iraq. Pasquill had an isolated but privileged childhood and he looks back on it with gratitude. His whole life had been leading him towards a career in the diplomatic service. It was his natural home.
Today, the FCO views him as the most devastating whistleblower in its recent history. Between August 2005 and January 2006, he leaked 40 bundles of documents. So many papers poured out in brown envelopes and email attachments that his contact, my then colleague on the Observer Martin Bright (now the political editor of the Jewish Chronicle), begged him to slow down.
"Traitors," "moles," "double-agents": we think we know how the story of an establishment renegade runs from the betrayals of the Cold War. Yet although the characters are the same — the Whitehall mandarins who cannot believe that one of their own would betray them, the public schoolboy who learns to despise his class — the story's moral could not be more different.
The FCO was not and is not standing up to the totalitarian ideas of the Islamist extreme Right, as it stood up to the totalitarianism of the socialist extreme Left in the second half of the 20th century. On the contrary, the establishment has appeased political Islamism abroad and interfered in the domestic affairs of its own country by mounting a covert operation to aid and abet it at home.
Pasquill betrayed the institutions of liberal democracy by standing up for liberal democracy. He defended it from its enemies, who were not only in far-away countries but closeted in the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street and the offices of Whitehall. As striking a difference between Pasquill and the establishment renegades of the 20th century (indeed, from every other whistleblower I have known) is that he wanted to be caught. He wanted the police to take him to the cells and arraign him at the Old Bailey for breaking the Official Secrets Act. He did not regard jail as a punishment he hoped to avoid, but sought out the risk of imprisonment the better to highlight the scandal. When the police came to his Pimlico home, he admitted everything. In truth, they did not have a hard job finding him. By the end, he was sending documents from his work email to his home computer and the dullest copper in England could have collared him.
"The Observer and the New Statesman were printing my revelations," he told me, "but they were not having an effect. I thought that being caught would be useful because the FCO would have to prosecute. That was part of my strategy, to get publicity in open court; to make people realise how bad it had got. What is so maddening about our attitude to radical Islam is that it is a classic example of group-think. Cognitive dissonance is stopping serious engagement. Leaking documents was my attempt to break the dissonance, my form of engagement."
I am sure you can understand why he so frightens the FCO. The normal threats an employer can make against an employee — the loss of home, salary, position and, in Pasquill's case, liberty — could not intimidate him. He was a man with the inner freedom the Stoics so valued. He had trained himself to be indifferent to the threats and blandishments of official society. Even though governments around the world read his revelations with varying degrees of horror, the FCO dropped the prosecution. Legally, its case was watertight. Pasquill had admitted leaking official secrets with pride. But Whitehall knew all too well that he would use the dock as a platform to appeal to the jury and the wider public.
Now Pasquill is bringing what to my unqualified eyes looks like a hopeless claim of unfair dismissal. On the face of it, a civil servant who passed a filing cabinet full of official secrets to the press cannot seriously claim that the state exceeded its powers by firing him. Yet if you look at his revelations, his claim makes more sense.
As his affidavit to the employment tribunal dryly remarks, "The documents that I disclosed showed that the FCO and other UK government departments were continuing to work with and assist organisations that promote extreme Islamist politics. My concern was that this policy would have the effect of legitimising and supporting groups with extreme Islamist politics and that such an effect was entirely contradictory to FCO and UK government policy of attempting to prevent the radicalisation of young British Muslims. Furthermore, I believe that the FCO and other government departments pursue a policy of portraying these organisations as mainstream and moderate."
Who is the traitor and who the patriot in these circumstances: the dissident civil servant or the two-faced government? Who, to be blunt, is more deserving of summary dismissal?
Journalists covet whistleblowers for the mercenary reason that they fill our pages and make our names. Only after we have wrung them dry do we want to know why they risked their careers to reveal their employers' crimes and follies. I thought that Pasquill could supply a lucid answer. He is an ascetic intellectual: a thin, quiet man, who thinks carefully before speaking and upholds the English intelligentsia's customary disdain for smart clothes and dental hygiene. Yet my attempts to prod him into giving me a pat explanation got nowhere. He had studied the Holocaust, he told me, and learned the importance of documenting state crimes from Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. The scene in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, when Hilberg holds up a timetable listing the trains that took Jews to extermination camps, stayed with him and taught him that you must get official papers on the public record at any cost. Yet when I asked him if it was the transfer of Tsarist and Nazi anti-Semitism from Europe to the clerical fascists of the Muslim world that moved him to take on the FCO, he looked blank. The thought never occurred to him.
He is too much of an intellectual to allow me to think that a neat, coherent motive explains his actions. Instead, he says without elaboration that he found the behaviour of Jack Straw and the wider liberal establishment he had served so loyally "shocking".
The FCO seconded him to its "Engaging with the Islamic World" unit. From the moment he arrived, everything felt wrong. He was standing in for Mockbul Ali, an allegedly non-political civil servant. Yet, with official approval, Ali had taken time off to help Labour fight the 2005 general election campaign. Specifically, he was trying to persuade Muslim leaders to support Labour, when many of them were in no mood to do so after the second Iraq war. There has always been a Tammany Hall streak in Labour. Many an aspiring politician has found that buying off ethnic block votes by dropping a few principles is a small price to pay for his advancement in inner-city politics. A refusal to condemn the Ayatollah Khomeini's death threat against Salman Rushdie, for instance, saved several cowards' seats.
Pasquill found something more than ordinary compromises, however. Ali was hardly a loner. The entire FCO hierarchy from Jack Straw, then the Foreign Secretary, downwards was supporting a policy of encouraging the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies.
The usual gap between rhetoric and reality had become a dizzying gulf. On the one hand, Labour pretended that it was upholding the 1997 mission statement Robin Cook gave the FCO "to spread the values of human rights, civil liberties and democracy which we demand for ourselves". On the other, it was bending over backwards to appease movements which believed in the subjugation of women, the racist conspiracy theories of the Okhrana and the SS, the murder of homosexuals and apostates, the denial of democracy and the dismissal of human rights as an imperialist imposition on the godly.
Before moving into the unit, Pasquill decided to research the Muslim Brotherhood in the British Library. A small step, perhaps, but as he investigated its totalitarian ambitions it proved to be a decisive one, not because of what he found but because of how he found it. When he left the FCO for the library's reading rooms, he left the received wisdom of his hierarchy behind and returned to work ready to think for himself.
As he went through the files Ali had left in his desk, he realised that the FCO under a left-of-centre government was classifying an organisation founded by the admirers of European fascism and sustained by the adherents of a brutish theocracy as "moderate". The result was a policy at once sinister and naïve. The decayed autocracies of the Middle East were producing an Islamist rather than a liberal opposition, the FCO argued, which Britain must "engage" with at any price. The FCO did not ask how Arab liberals and democrats would feel if Britain embraced men who would happily kill them. Nor did it sigh and say with regret that religious reaction was a deplorable reality Britain had to learn to live with. Instead, it actively sought to promote and fund extremism. As an official argued, "Given that Islamist groups are often less corrupt than the generality of the societies in which they operate, consideration might be given to channelling aid resources through them, so long as sufficient transparency is achievable." In its enthusiasm for appeasement, the FCO did not know or want to know that theocracy is inherently corrupt. By soaking society in piety, it can present its demands for money as the demands of God. As the examples of Saudi Arabia and Iran show, the more Islamist a country is, the more corrupt it becomes.
As his superiors betrayed the liberal Muslims of the Middle East, Mockbul Ali worked to marginalise their counterparts in Britain. Although the domestic affairs of our country are not any of the FCO's business, it sponsored a road show, which purported to be representative of British Muslim voices but was in reality a Muslim Brotherhood front. Ali followed up by lobbying the Home Office to allow extremists into Britain. Eric Taylor, of the India-Pakistan
Relations Desk, was one of the few officials to protest. He pointed out that a gruesome Bangladeshi politician Ali was recommending had provoked riots on his last visit and, according to a report from a Bangladeshi human rights organisation, Drishtipat, had compared Bangladeshi Hindus to excrement, while appearing to defend attacks on the country's persecuted Ahmadiyya Muslim community, regarded as apostates by the Islamists.
The more Pasquill read, the more driven he became. He roamed the FCO's corridors picking up Ali's files, first taking them to Soho to copy and post, then just emailing them home and printing them out. I won't say that his leaks had no effect. The story went round the world. In Britain, Hazel Blears, Ruth Kelly and Jacqui Smith — all women, significantly, who were appalled by the official endorsement of misogyny — read Bright's reports and tried to save what was left of the honour of the British Left by fighting back. But I cannot pretend that their stand was anything other than an isolated example. Pasquill's revelations had no impact on a wider liberal society. It did not want to see how hypocritical it had become or to survey the damage it had wrought. The achievement of political Islam in Britain has been to suborn the liberal Left and cut off the most promising escape route for dissidents in the process. An abused woman, a young man fighting religious authoritarianism, an Iranian exile seeking to gain support for the campaign against the Archbishop of Canterbury's and Lord Chief Justice's endorsement of Sharia law or a British Bangladeshi trying to bring the Islamist criminals who massacred civilians in the war of independence to justice, would once have looked left for succour. If they do so now, they will find that progressives take their cue from the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, rather than the best of the liberal Left's traditions, and dismiss Muslims who fight for values they profess to hold as being at best irrelevances and at worst stool-pigeons for imperialism.
Do not make the mistake of believing that such attitudes are confined to the FCO. Only recently, the supposedly left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research was trumpeting "non-violent" Islamism as "the best organised and most popular opposition to existing authoritarian regimes in the Middle East". What "non-violent" Islamists would do to Arab liberals when they achieved power was not a question that detained the British leftists of the IPPR for a second.
As his illusions about the benign nature of the FCO crumbled, Pasquill tried a thought experiment. He asked himself, "Is the Foreign Office a Muslim Brotherhood front organisation?" Obviously, it was not, he replied, although looked at in a certain light, it might as well have been. The light metaphor stayed with him until "one day I was looking at the ivy growing in my garden and it struck me that it was phototropic — growing in the direction of the sun. I realised that the FCO is Islamotropic: it grows towards Islamic extremism, always searching for reasons to excuse it." At the age of 50, Derek Pasquill is now on the dole with no pension, no savings and no prospects. The FCO responded to his revelations by promoting Mockbul Ali. Like ivy on a wall, the liberal establishment still creeps towards the reactionary forces that despise it, entwining itself with its enemies and leaving its friends to wilt in the dark.
Auschwitz's antechamber Labour plays the blues

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


This seems like a pretty straight forward question, but it is not as simple as should you hire someone or should you not.
The simple answer is: It depends on what type of business you have and how much the SEO company wants to charge for their SEO Service.
Let's break it down so you can decide for yourself if hiring a company to do SEO and SEM for your business makes sense.
One of the first things you need to evaluate is the type of business you have. If it is a service-based business such as a professional dog trainer, a dentist, doctor, chiropractor, plumber, remodeler, etc. then SEO is pretty easy to answer. But, for every answer there is always the exception to the rule, and we will try to discuss a couple exceptions in a moment.
In today's online market, websites are more of an online business card than a storefront for most small businesses in the service industry. What that usually means is you have your Home Page, About Us Page, Services Page and a Contact Page. Overall, those are about all that's really needed for most businesses. If you want to enhance your site, you could add a Testimonials Page and a Blog. Anything more than that, good luck having ANYONE ever go through all your pages.
Since a service-based business has a fairly static website, there isn't a lot of monthly changes going on. Sure, you may add a monthly Coupon or Discount, but as far as adding a lot of content or products to your website, that isn't happening on a month-to-month basis.
The real problem we have with most SEO companies is they charge a pretty significant fee on an ongoing basis. If there's a lot of work that needs done on an ongoing basis, that's fine; but if the SEO company is doing what they were paid for in the first place there should be little to almost no ongoing work needed.
Here's what we mean by that. You hire an SEO company to optimize your website. The first thing they do is analyze it. There's software we use to do this, so it's fairly simple although there is a bit of a cost to subscribe to the software. The report will highlight the critical areas that need addressed and they show you everything wrong with the website. You hire them to work on your site for a three or six month or God forbid, a year long contract to optimize your site.
The rub here is the report said what's wrong. Month one, if your site is a standard site that we highlighted above, all those changes should be done in a week or two at the most. That means Your Website Is Done. It is Optimized. Why would you pay them for month two to do something they should have done in the first two weeks of month one unless they are intentionally drawing the work out; which many SEO companies do. That would be like hiring a dog trainer to teach your dog to sit and this month they teach him to squat and tell you next month they finish teaching him how to sit. Your dog either sits or he doesn't, and your website is either optimized or it is not. There's no ambiguity.
Now, we know some are screaming right now that you need the site to stay relevant. The ones screaming are most likely the ones that sell SEO services. Fine, we'll give you that one. But if it is a standard, simple four to seven-page website with no extra pages within Tabs and the Navigation Bar, how hard is that to knock it out in a few days? Not hard at all. The only thing needed now is a quarterly check up to ensure the website stays relevant to any algorithm changes by the search engines. If it is discovered during the quarterly check up that 2 or 3 items need addressed, fix them. End of story and it should not take more than one to two hours at most if the website was really optimized in the first place.
If you're paying $1,000 or more a month for ongoing SEO, you're paying WAY too much. SEO should be a one-time event for a reasonable fee, and maybe $1,000 or $2,000 is reasonable for that ONE time. After that, a quarterly checkup for a much lower cost than $1,000, like just a couple hundred dollars. Frankly, if you are paying anything more, you are flat out being overcharged! We don't charge anything near what SEO companies charge for we'd feel like we were taking advantage of our clients. In fact, if we are managing our clients online and social marketing, we do their SEO for free.
There's always an exception or two. Here are a couple exceptions that would require a robust and ongoing SEO / SEM solution. You have a website that has LOTS of pages and even pages within pages. Just the shear volume of your site would necessitate more time and management to get it up to date and keep it there. The real question is why is your website so big? Perhaps you should streamline it so it is more user friendly. Since the average attention span is 8 seconds, do you really need 16 pages on your website?
If you have an ecommerce website you will most likely need an SEO / SEM company for you have a lot of items on your site that need key words, long tail and short tail strings, etc. to make sure you are relevant and competitive in the online market space you are competing in. Add to that the fact you are most likely adding and removing products on a routine basis, this requires constant optimization. For ecommerce, SEO management usually does make a lot of sense.
If you're considering paying for SEO, keep these points in mind. Some companies will tell you that they can't make a lot of changes at once for the search engines will penalize your website and drive you down in the search results. There is some truth to that but there is also truth to the fact that constantly making changes keeps your site down as well. We've found it is best to knock the changes out in one big swoop, take a couple week hit in rankings while your site gets crawled and indexed and then benefit from having your entire website optimized instead of a piecemeal approach over several months!
So to answer the question if SEO is worth paying for: yes, to a certain degree it is not only worth it, but it is necessary. Just don't get hoodwinked into paying for an ongoing service that should have been done right and done from the start. Dragging SEO out means your website is truly never optimized, and if that's the case it is being done that way by design!
Next Google Algorithms Hurting Your Business?


The 1-year MBA is an advanced program of study for students who desire a greater understanding of business management. Completion of the in-depth program may give job seekers a competitive edge in the marketplace.
MBA is a program designed for students who want to further their academic skills and apply them to actual real-life business situations. It guides students to reflect and reposition themselves in terms of choosing their future careers. Students gain a broad understanding of the key functions of a range of business areas and use these skills to contribute to the strategic direction of a business.
The United States of America is a large country in North America, often referred to as the "USA", the "US", the "United States", "America", or simply "the States". American colleges are funded by "tuition" charged to the student, which is often quite expensive, very commonly reaching into the tens of thousands of dollars per year.


We're working on scheduling the final alpha test for the game, which means we will very quickly be moving into beta testing. Initially, we'll be working as a closed beta, and looking to find some local gamers from all backgrounds that would be interested in being a part of some regular testing. If you or someone you know is interested, please let me know. Once we move out of closed beta and in to open beta, we'll be looking for a LOT more people to get involved and make sure this game is as fun as I think it is. And I think it is a LOT of fun. I honestly haven't had this much fun playing a tabletop game in a long time; I can tell you the games I've tried lately definitely were not this easy to play, yet had the same depth of skill, as what we've got going.
With our last alpha test, the goal is really to lock in the dice and the core mechanics, which means we'll also be looking to place some dice orders in the coming weeks. I don't know about you, but trying to find custom dice in the quantity we need, at a reasonable price, is really challenging. But hey, if this was easy, everyone would be doing it! So right now, we've got our prices way way down, but we're going to be ordering thousands of dice. So uh… if anyone wants any custom d10's, I might know a guy with a few extra to spare.
In additional news, we're finally getting our first models printed! We had a momentary hiccup around the scale of the models, but now they are correct (and much larger!) and look amazing. We'll be getting the first few hundred in April as part of our demo armies, and can't wait to start showing them off both on the website and as we start hitting the convention circuit. They look amazing.
Lastly, I want to talk a little bit about the full scope of the game we're playing. I won't go in to too many details, but one of the core pieces of our game is our living story line that is driven by the results of tabletop game results. To make that all work, we're building a really amazing, truly engaging online experience that will enable interested players to really take their Chronicles experience to the next level. This will be an add-on to the core game, but as players look to get more involved with a game during the time between live interactions, this new way to play will be really really cool. More on that to come.
Thanks for reading, things are really heating up, and I hope everyone can tell just how excited I am, and maybe share some of that excitement on their own!


text:
Streetfurniture
Oostzaanstraat 45, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Museum Het Schip shows an exhibition in the museumgarden about streetfurniture Amsterdam School.
The architects from the Amsterdam school were important. They also developed a new style in the design of the streetfurniture.
Museum Het Schip has a garden with streetfurniture designed by architects of the Amsterdam School. Here is also an exhibition with information about the history of the streetfurniture.
Street Furniture of the Amsterdam School Spotlighted Street furniture is everywhere around us. We are used to it so much that we rarely notice the presence of these objects in our daily surroundings. Yet, all the public lavatories, post boxes, streetlamps and litterbins make up a part of an interesting history of styles. The turning point in this history came when the architects and artists of the Amsterdam School contributed to street furniture design. In the mid-1910s, designers of the Amsterdam School stepped into the limelight and strove to undertake important commissions. At that time, the municipality of Amsterdam advocated for well-maintained streetscapes.
'Amsterdamse School, Verbeelde Idealen'
The permanent collection of the museum initially consists of the buildings in which the museum and the visitors centre are housed. A rich and diverse range of craft objects complements the...
Our Lady of the Rock
Savina Monastery
Portreti slovenskih impresionistov
TMNT tetovaža / TMNT tattoo padobran
Play with clay
Fotografska zbirka Ivana Dvoršaka
FOTOGRAFSKA - PETER LAMPIČ


text:
Aiden of the Care4Calais Access Team
In February 2020, I did something that changed my life.
I'd volunteered with Care4Calais in Calais, and back in the UK I found myself supporting a Kurdish refugee who was having a rough time. The Home Office had said he was over 18 years old when this was not true, and there was no way for him to appeal. I knew this was wrong, so I helped him to find a lawyer and go through the tortuous process of claiming asylum. It took a year, but we got his claim heard – and at last he was granted asylum.
It gave me a good feeling to have accomplished something meaningful, and I was still feeling pleased about it when I saw an advert for volunteers for the Care4Calais legal access team on the website. I emailed them and signed up.
The legal team helps refugees get the right paperwork together, find solicitors and deal with the asylum system. We also provide emotional support. There was a two-week induction, and the team was fantastic, always providing someone to answer my questions, point me in the right direction or give me a phone number. I was never made to feel slow or stupid, and they were grateful I was there helping.
I've been with them about 14 months now, and never looked back.
I am retired so have the luxury of spending quite a bit of time on the job. I've probably seen over 200 refugees and have maybe 160 active cases. You have to be quite organised, as there can be a lot of paperwork involved, and you need to enjoy solving problems. Being determined is helpful too. You don't need legal training – I have had none, I just know how to read and interpret long words and jargon so that refugees can understand it.
I do believe I make a difference and as a team we make a massive difference to the disadvantaged people who end up on our shores. It's important to me that I do something. I don't just disagree with the government's policies, I do something about it. Something to change how Britain engages with the world and to welcome migrants rather than export war.
That idea of doing something has been important to me for a long time. I've been in education most of my life, as a teacher, and then working for the DFE. As a civil servant I was lucky to be able to retire early, but I still wanted to do something, something back in the classroom with real learners. So I started teaching English to refugees, and as I got to know my learners I discovered most of them were victims of war of violence. I'm passionately anti-war, so that resonated with me.
I'd started by helping with the Syrian refugees who came to Brighton on the Vulnerable Person Resettlement Scheme, but when both my daughters volunteered in Calais in 2016 I decided I could also do that. That was the beginning of the Care4Calais journey that has led me to where I am now.
I don't really have a speciality with the Access Team, but I must admit there is a soft spot in my heart for the ones who have come over from the Calais camps. I've been to Calais numerous times and met the people living in the appalling camps there. An experience that never leaves you. I think I first went in 2017, and I went back many times before Covid hit. With the Access Team I feel like I'm continuing the process started in Calais; helping the same people I used to try to find a pair of shoes for.
There have been difficult times when people are rejected, made destitute and made to feel worthless and completely overwhelmed by an incomprehensible system. The people we help have had pretty horrible lives, seen dreadful things and have left everything dear to them behind, so to see how they are treated here infuriates me. So I do this work – it's my commitment to how the world ought to be.
But then of course there are the highs, when people get asylum. Most don't speak great English, so I have become an expert with Google Translate. Some days I'll get a WhatsApp message with a photo and a question asking, "What is this letter?"
It's fabulous when I can say: "You have been granted leave to remain."
I have also helped in many other ways too; knowing who to call for food, support, language classes and housing has become part of my day! Care4Calais has grown exponentially in the last year all thanks to its massive volunteer base, and now the network spreads across the UK and continues to grow, and weaving together communities who want to help.
I'll continue with the legal team for now as I know we're really helping people, giving them access to a solicitor when they could easily just be lost in a system. I think in all we have 2000 people on our books.
But I'll also get back to Calais when I can.
If you'd like to get involved with the Care4Calais Access Team, please email [email protected] and we'll get you started.
Aiden, volunteer, Care4Calais Access Team
Tags volunteer


SonicWave 7.1 GH337 takes gaming audio to a new height. Equipped with 7.1 virtual surround sound and expertly-tuned sound curve configuration, the GH337 is your ultimate weapon for localized, and accurate sound, picking up enemies' footsteps, special attack cues, and more on the "battlefield," giving you the advantage over your rivals.
Experience ultra immersive 7.1 gaming surround sound through the bundled software Sound Engine.* Enhancing your awareness and attack with precision, unlike you, your enemies won't hear you coming, which can mean the difference between killing or being killed.
*For Windows PC only. AVerMedia Sound Engine includes other functions such as equalizer, treble and bass enhancers, ambient noise remover, voice processing and more.
With dual-microphone noise reduction technology, the GH337 filters out ambient noise and picks up clear voice audio, keeping your communication loud and clear at all times.
Designed to isolate you from the outside world in order to keep you 100% focused, its hard enclosure and closed-back design helps keep distractions out so all that's left is you and your game.
The GH337 is as versatile as can be. With its USB connector you can conveniently connect to a Mac, PC or PS4 to enjoy rich audio and voice chat wherever you are, whenever you want.


Beneficence is the second TJ/BC fundamental bioethical principle I shall evaluate from a libertarian rational natural-rights ethic viewpoint.
Beneficence is commonly defined as action intended to benefit or promote the good of others. Thus, beneficence is an action taken by a medical professional that serves the best interests of a patient. However, because "the good of others" and "best interests" are subjective concepts, there is no gold standard for beneficence in the physician/patient interaction. The plumbline libertarian has no objections to this definition of beneficence.
However, many bioethicists, after defining beneficence appropriately, then proceed to elevate the physician's subjective evaluation of the patient's "best interests" over the patient's subjective evaluation of the patient's "best interests" when the subjective evaluations of the physician and patient differ (paternalism). The plumbline libertarian opposes paternalism.
Proponents of paternalism assert that paternalism is justified when at least one of several conditions are satisfied. I shall evaluate those farcical conditions in a future blog post.


Review of Schlafly Pale Ale | Beer Apprentice - Craft Beer News, Reviews, Interviews and Info.
For today's craft beer review I'm going to be trying another brew from the St. Louis Brewing Company located in St. Louis, Missouri called the Schlafly Pale Ale.
Heck with all the filler, let's get to the website, schlafly.com, and find out all we can about this brew.
Our flagship Pale Ale is a smooth, balanced, copper-colored session beer with mildly spiced flavor and aroma from the East Kent Goldings hops. The bready, lightly caramel malt complements the hint of fruitiness contributed by the London Ale yeast, making it satisfying and authentic; the perfect flagship beer for Schlafly.
The brew comes in a 12 oz. bottle and it stands in at a relatively light 4.4% ABV.
This Pale Ale poured a fairly clear, amber to orange color with some burnt yellow highlights around the edges and bottom of the glass. The collar was off white and of good size. It was soft, rocky and fluffy with an excellent retention time and lacing that was more than satisfactory. It didn't look too bad at all.
The nose brought forth very light and subtle hints of caramel malt combined with slightly toasted bread crust hints. Tones of grain along with some fruity aspects of apricot. The overall components smell rather earthy, but docile, and the balance was commendable.
The taste was more of the same. Savors of caramel malt, grain and toasted breads. It was kind of sweet once that fruity apricot reared its head. It never became dominant though. Very meek to tell the truth. The hop characteristics were light, earthy and herbal. The bitterness was kept at a minimum to say the least. All in all, very tame an submissive I thought. Not bad, but just not a lot going on here.
The mouthfeel was medium to medium/thin. It was smooth, crisp, refreshing and somewhat dry. The carbonation was decent and a creditable amount of flavor was left behind on the palate after each quaff.
Well, this beer was ok. It was super easy to drink and it would make a killer session brew. Perfect for warmer weather when surrounding the BBQ pit or sharing with friends. It would be no problem to down several of these and not even think twice about it. Above all else, it was nothing too complicated or complex, however it did present a few nice aspects that could be discussed and pondered. I don't know that I would seek out the Schlafly Pale Ale when beer shopping, however I wouldn't turn it down if it were offered. If you see it, it wouldn't hurt to pick it up and give it a try. You may find it to be the perfect brew for your session.
Thanks for reading and commenting folks. I appreciate it.


A quick and easy recipe pan fried cajun fish. This flaky cajun fish that is loaded with flavour makes the perfect week day meal and is ready in under 10 minutes!
Crispy Cauliflower Salad – A vegetarian salad with cauliflower, roasted spiced chickpeas and a quick yummy dressing.
Kale Pesto Pasta with Vegetables – A quick, simple and delicious Kale Pesto Pasta with Pine Nuts and Parmesan.
This Winter warming roast garlic, sweet potato and coconut soup is healthy, a little spicy and yummy.
This wholewheat and chocolate banana bread is moist, delicious and nutritious. It kinda smells like a cozy home. You know those homes with a crackling log fire, huge armchair and a knitted blanket. Yeah those homes. Also it has chocolate chips in it so you don't have a choice but to make it.


The last thing anyone wants in the summer is to find out they can't take any more photos or videos of special occasions because their iOS device's storage is at maximum capacity, clogged up by large apps. AppleInsider shows how to use iOS functions to get rid of apps that take up too much space.
A core feature of devices like the iPhone and iPad is the ability to download and install apps. The giant app industry creates such a wide variety of different downloadable tools and other items that it can be quite easy to quickly fill up an iOS device with them.
Add the fact that some apps can individually take up a considerable amount of space, and that some older devices have considerably less storage capacity than current generation devices, and the problem suddenly becomes worse.
While the obvious solution is to simply uninstall apps from the device, iOS 11 introduced the option to "Offload Unused Apps" from the device. Unlike uninstallation, offloading an app will delete the app itself from the iPhone or iPad, but keeps the app icon visible for later reinstallation and usage.
The offloading process will keep any user-specific data, including files created by the app, intact while removing the app itself. This means that the app will be ready to go from the state of its last usage, once it has been redownloaded and set running again.
To use the function automatically, enter the Settings app and select General. Scroll down to iPhone Storage or iPad Storage, and select it.
Select Enable next to Offload Unused Apps, which will be near the top of the page. In the text below, iOS advises of how much storage capacity could be freed up by the function once enabled.
Using this option is a good idea for most users, as it won't take effect until iOS believes the device is at a low storage capacity, otherwise they will be left alone. The option will also start the offloading process with apps that are used the least, so those using only a few core apps probably won't be negatively affected by its actions for some time.
An alternative to the automatic version, it is possible to select apps to offload yourself. This would be handy in cases where you know an app is consuming a lot of data, but are comfortable with removing it straight away. As with the automatic version, the icon and data will still remain for the app.
Within the same Storage page, scroll down to the list of apps installed on the device, which will be arranged in size order with the biggest at the top. For reference, the listing will also include when the app was last used, in order to help with your decision process.
Select an appropriate app that you want to offload.
On the next page, iOS will advise of the app's actual size, and the size of documents and data associated with it. Take note of the App Size, as this is the amount of space you will reclaim, not the total size shown on the Storage page.
For example, the Storage page could list the Podcasts app as using gigabytes of storage, but the actual app size itself is only a few megabytes.
Once you have decided you wish to remove the app, tap Offload App, then in the confirmation prompt, tap Offload App again.
When an app is offloaded, its icon appears on the iOS home screen as normal, except for a small cloud symbol next to the app's title. A tap of the icon will show a similar clock-style graphic viewed when apps are downloaded from the App Store for the first time.
Once the clock has expired, the icon is bright and undimmed, and the cloud symbol has disappeared, the app is available for use once again.
The app can also be reinstated by heading to the same point in the manual offloading instructions to show the app's data sizes, then selecting Reinstall App.
This is just one of a number of ways a user can reclaim their iPhone or iPad's storage. Other ways can include removing high-capacity documents and files associated with apps, such as podcast archives.
Users of cellular-connected devices or with ample Wi-Fi access could consider taking advantage of cloud storage services like iCloud to hold onto data, rather than storing it all locally.


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HomePoliticsPolish judges call for the Court of Justice of the EU against the parliamentarian democracy
Vojtěch Filip: "The ones in favor of privatisation and Soros' NGOs are the ones demonstrating against the government"
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Tomasz Przesławski (Polish Supreme Court judge): "Many of the current actions of representatives of the legal professions can be seen as a threat to basic legal values"
Polish democracy defends itself against EU-supported judges
/ October 17, 2018
Polish judges call for the Court of Justice of the EU against the parliamentarian democracy
By Olivier Bault.
Poland – The mechanism of the preliminary ruling that allows any court to turn to the Court of Justice of the European Union, is instrumentalized by Polish judges struggling with the reforms of the judicial institution voted by the Parliament.
This is a little group of judges of the Polish Supreme Court that triggered the hostilities at the very beginning of August as they asked the Court of Justice of the European Union for a preliminary ruling. Meanwhile, other judges from courts of inferior level have begun to do the same. The method consists in using an affair being examined to ask the Court of Justice of the European Union whether the new Polish laws reforming the Justice and voted by the PiS majority in the Parliament do guarantee the respect of European right. All this to say that this request of a preliminary ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union has not much to do with the affair concerned.
Regarding the one sent by the Supreme Court on the 2nd of August, the judges at the origin of this request had moreover the pretentiousness to suspend some paragraphs of the laws adopted by the Parliament, while the Polish Constitution does not recognise them such an ability. But those judges relied on the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union according to which a request for a preliminary ruling should have a suspending effect on the national laws for the answer given by the judges in Luxembourg to those requests have some sense.
Let's precise here that in Poland, the Supreme Court is not the Constitutional Court that is only empowered to invalid laws voted by the parliament. This is a court of cassation for civil and criminal affairs as well as for labour laws that is only empowered to precise the correct interpretation of the laws for the courts of a lower level which it does supervise. When we have seen at the beginning of August in Western medias that the Supreme Court had sent a request to the Court of Justice of the European Union concerning the conformity with European laws of the reforms of Justice made by the PiS, there were in fact seven judges of its Labour and Social Insurance Chamber (out of 72 active judges at the Supreme Court at this time) who addressed five requests to the European Court. To put it in a simple way, those seven judges, of which two have reached the age of 65, have considered that it was necessary that the Court of Justice adjudicates on the validity of the lowering of the pension age of the judges from 70 to 65 years according to European law and particularly according to the article 47 ("Right to an effective remedy and to a fair trial") of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. This is the article with which each one of those five requests is dealing. The case that is supposed to motivate those five requests concerns – are you ready? – the obligation to pay contributions to the social security when a Polish citizen has a company in Czechia or in Slovakia. The requests of the seven judges to the Court of Justice have therefore nothing to do with the affair itself but it is the reason why those seven judges consider themselves entitled to suspend the application of some paragraphs of the law and particularly the one that harmonises the pension age of judges with the common law.
The Polish law is naturally still valid as on the contrary, Poland would not be a parliamentary democracy any more but a dictatorship of judges. The president of the Constitutional Court said herself that those seven judges of the Supreme Court had acted in violation of the Constitution and of the Code of Civil Procedure and recalled that the Constitution and the laws of the Republic of Poland do not entitle the Supreme Court to suspend the application of any legal stipulation.
But it seems indeed that it is a voluntary and coordinated operation of a minority of judges who are trying this way to stop the three big reforms of the judicial institutions voted by the Polish parliament: the reform of the Supreme Court (that obviously needed to be reformed), the reform of the National Court Register (KRS) and the reform of common law courts. And indeed, last June, the information portal wPolityce.pl denounced the organisation by the Warsaw Bar Association (Okręgowa Rada Adwokadcka, ORA), the association of judges Iustitia (that is politically engaged against the PiS) and the Helsinki Foundation for human rights (financed inter alia by the Open Society Foundations of George Soros) of trainings to teach the judges how they might lead – while sending massively requests to the Court of Justice of the European Union – to an obstruction of the effective implementation of the new laws voted by the parliament!
The same organisation of judges Iustitia had also called without success to boycott the procedure of recruitment of 44 judges by the Supreme Court announced in the Official Journal of Laws (Dziennik Ustaw) by the Polish President Andrzej Duda within the reform of this institution. A part of the judges of the Supreme Court indeed retired while this court has also got new chambers, and particularly a disciplinary one that will be in charge of sanctioning the judges who might commit abuses, what would be something absolutely new in this country where since the fall of communism the indelicate judges only appeared in front of their peers who were nominated by other judges and were this way quite systematically protected by the corporatism spirit of the profession. With the reform of the National Court Register that counts 15 judges among its 25 members – those 15 judges will be furthermore chosen by the Parliament and not by other judges anymore. Yet it is this very National Court Register that selects the candidates to the Supreme Court to be proposed to the Polish President.
The judge Igor Tuleya from the court of Warsaw is himself well-known since years for being engaged against the PiS. Within a criminal affair concerning gangsters appearing for organised criminality, this judge also turned toward the Court of Justice of the European Union – with the effect of interrupting the process against the gangsters – for asking if the EU laws that impose to the member states to provide to each citizen the right of appeal against court decisions might be incompatible with the new legal stipulations that "suppress the guarantees for an independent disciplinary procedure toward the judges in Poland". What he calls a suppression of an independent disciplinary procedure is thus the fact that the National Court Register that selects the candidates for the new disciplinary chamber of the Supreme Court is not anymore dominated – since the PiS reforms – by judges nominated by other judges but by judges nominated by the parliament.
A part of the opposition and some judges consider therefore this reform as incompatible with the Polish Constitution, but if it were the case, it would be the Constitutional Court that should be entitled to act. The same people consider however that this court is not independent anymore since its reform by the PiS and the conflict around the nomination of its judges. This is the same argumentation that is given by the European Commission when it decides to consider itself entitled to be a kind of constitutional court for Poland, even if the European treaties principally do not allow it. Based on this pretext, the parliamentary opposition and the protesting judges of the Supreme Court turn to the European institutions that are not competent for those questions while they would have the right to call the Polish Constitutional Court that is the only competent one. Let's precise furthermore that if the Polish Constitution clearly states that the National Court Register must always have 15 judges among its 25 members (art. 187.2), it does not state by whom those 15 judges have to be nominated but in the contrary that the Parliament has to define by the law a modus of nomination for the members of the National Court Register (art. 187.4). Those stipulations of the Polish Constitution are very clear for any honest person who is able to read Polish, what is surely not the case of the First Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans who is leading both ongoing procedures against Poland (in front of the Council and in front of the Court of Justice, this second procedure still being on September 14 at the preliminary step of injunctions addressed to the government in Warsaw).
Like the seven judges of the Supreme Court, the judge Tuleya has invoked – in his request to the Court of Justice of the European Union – the Charter of Fundamental Rights joined to the European treaties through the signature of the Treaty of Lisbon. Within another affair concerning a financial litigation between the City of Łódź and the voivode of the region, the court of Łódź has also invoked – for quoting its press office – the Charter of Fundamental Rights and "decided to address a request for a preliminary ruling in relation with the strongly politicised new disciplinary system concerning the judges and in relation with the laws relating to the common law courts, the Supreme Court and the National Court Register". The invoked pretext is that if the court in Łódź would render a judgment unfavorable for the state, the judges at the origin of the judgment might be the object of "a politically motivated disciplinary procedure".
One does not really see how the government of Mateusz Morawiecki might do it just because the Parliament has nominated judges to the Court Register that has then proposed to the Polish president the candidates to the disciplinary chamber of the Supreme Court and that the president then nominated the candidates he accepted (without being able to revoke them afterwards). What is clearly politically motivated are the requests for preliminary rulings of the court in Łódź, of the judge Tuleya in Warsaw, of the seven judges of the Labour and Social Insurance Chamber of the Supreme Court as well as of other Polish courts that have decided in the last time to overflow – like three very engaged organisations proposed them to do in last June – the Court of Justice of the European Union with requests for preliminary rulings with the only goal of blocking the application of the laws voted by the Parliament.
Furthermore, while invoking the Charter of Fundamental Rights against their own country (as did the European Commission), those judges act as if they would consider as null and void the Protocol No. 30 of this charter that clearly states that "the Charter does not extend the ability of the Court of Justice of the European Union, or any court or tribunal of Poland or of the United Kingdom, to find that the laws, regulations or administrative provisions, practices or action of Poland or of the United Kingdom are inconsistent with the fundamental rights, freedom and principles that it reaffirms." This exemption had been obtained by London and Warsaw during the negotiations on the Treaty of Lisbon. One sees today how right these both capitals were to fear abusive recourses based on this charter.
Logically, the Court of Justice of the European Union should reject all those requests but the past experience shows that the judges of Luxembourg might go very far in the interpretation of the European treaties in order to push the EU on the way to federalism and to extend the competences of Brussels to the disadvantage of the member states. Their reaction is therefore to be followed very near by all Europeans, as if the Court of Justice would agree with this group of Polish judges in open rebellion against their own parliamentary democracy, this might have very serious implications in terms of sovereignty and democracy for all the member states of the EU. Are we progressively going toward a dictatorship of the judges or will we be able – like Poland is trying – to restore a democratic control on a third power that is getting more and more expansive?
Translated from French by the Visegrád Post.
Tags:article 7CJEUCourt of Justice of the European Unionjusticemateusz morawieckiolivier baultPiSpolandreform of justicerule of lawWarsaw
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The Scotland County golf team brought home a third place finish from the Schuyler County Invitational golf tourney held at the Lancaster Golf Course on April 6th.
Milan won the event finishing with a team score of 388 to edge La Plata with a 395. The Tigers finished third at 401, besting Schuyler County (408), Putnam County (425) and the Kirksville junior varsity (433).
Milan's Caleb Weaver took top individual honors with a score of 86 while teammate Jarrett Courtney was runner up with an 88, tying for second with La Plata's D.J. Hemmerling.
Brock Aylward carded a 93 to lead Scotland County. Conner Harrison shot a 96 and Hunter Carter finished with a 105. Lathe Bair shot a 107 and Gabe Shultz shot a 113 to round out the Tigers' varsity score card.


Sometimes, Tracy feels like a circus performer. Every day, she juggles work, kids, aging parents, and she often says she needs an extra pair of hands to do it all. This week, she feels like it's all become too much.
Before things get worse, she's decided to talk to someone who can help her.
She heard about the Employee Assistance Program at work. So she calls them, and someone's right there to listen to her and give her the guidance and support she needs.
She also could have checked out her employer's health and wellness or group insurance programs, or her provincial health line or a support group. All these resources are easy to access and they're 100% confidential.
Don't play around with your health. If you feel you're about to lose your grip, do what Tracy did, ask for help right away. And remember, it doesn't cost a thing to call.


All Howth and Sutton Horticultural Society lectures and gardening courses are held in Howth Yacht Club at 8pm, and include refreshments, raffle and plant swop. Non members and visitors most welcome.
A course of 6 evening classes covering all the basics of gardening and learning how to get the most from your garden. Marie Staunton is Gardening Columnist for the Irish Independent and regular contributor to the gardening slot on the RTE Radio Sean O'Rourke Show and lectures in the Botanic Gardens. As well as working with private clients she maintains a garden on a voluntary basis for St. Michael's House in Sallowood.
Marie's infectious enthusiasm will inspire you with new ideas for maintaining and creating your own garden paradise. Each class will have plenty of time for questions, discussion and refreshments.
23rd January : What Plant Where?
20th February: The Magicof Spring.
27th February: Wall & Climbing Plants.
Cost: €100 includes HSHS membership for 2019.
HSHS AGM followed by "Ireland's Garden Birds", an illustrated talk from Birdwatch Ireland. This is Howth and Sutton Horticultural Society's 75th AGM, so we invite all our members to celebrate our 75th birthday with a glass of bubbly & a slice of birthday cake!
Klaus Laitenberger formally of The Organic Centre, Co Leitrim will be giving HSHS members and friends a talk on "Growing Healthy Vegetables". Klaus is one of Ireland's and Europe's most respected vegetable growing horticulturists and has written and published 3 bestselling books on vegetable growing. He is a patron and advisor to Ireland's GIY organisation.
Members and non members are most welcome to attend and/or exhibit at the annual HSHS Spring Show. There will be a plant sale, book stall, raffle and refreshments for all to enjoy on the day.
Admission to Show: €2. Entry for HSHS Members, visiting exhibitors and children is free. Wheelchair access to all parts of the show.
HSHS members and friends will enjoy a private guided tour of the walled gardens at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham, and a visit to the tea-rooms afterwards.
A full day-trip to Co. Wexford where we will enjoy a guided tour of Frances & Ian MacDonalds garden, lunch in Kilmurray Nursery in Gorey and another guided tour of the private garden of Noel & Eilish Gilleece; a Victorian garden created about 20 years ago.
We will depart Howth by coach, take the ferry to the UK, visit Ashwood Nursery for lunch with a tour of John Massey's beautiful garden on the way to our hotel. Monday 15 July: Guided tour of Highgrove Gardens followed by a guided tour of Hidcote. Tuesday 16 July: Travel back to Howth with a stop off at Bob Brown's gorgeous gardens & nursery www.cfg.net.
Members and non members are most welcome to attend and/or exhibit at the annual HSHS Autumn Show. There will be a plant sale, book stall, raffle and homemade cakes, and refreshments for all to enjoy on the day.
Every entry makes a show so don't be reluctant to have a go this year. One entry or more from every member or visitor will guarantee a super show and there are classes to suit all. Download your copy of the Autumn show schedule here.
"So many Plants, so little Space". Bob Brown from Cotswold Garden Flowers is coming to talk to us about his well-known garden and nursery in Evesham, Worcestershire .
This event will be held in The Marine Hotel, Sutton, Dublin 13.
A visit from Helen Dillon and a talk "How to leave one's mistakes behind". Helen is coming to tell us about why she left her lovely garden in Ranelagh and created a new garden in Monkstown.
"My Wexford Retreat – developing a rural garden". A talk by Philip Hollwey, a Garden Designer who uses his years of practical gardening and design experience to maximise the potential of his garden in Deansgrange. HSHS Christmas Social Evening mulled wine, tea and coffee.
Please bring a small cake or savouries to share.
If you would like to join HSHS click here.