On behalf of DeVries + Kelly Law Office posted in complex property division on Wednesday, February 27, 2019.
Married couples in Indiana who choose to get divorced will likely need to figure out what to do about the marital home. The first step in making a decision is determining how much the home is worth. That can be done by getting an appraisal, and each spouse should get their own appraisal to ensure that it is done in an accurate manner. Once the home's value has been determined, a couple can choose how to split the equity.
On behalf of DeVries + Kelly Law Office posted in campus crimes on Wednesday, February 13, 2019.
Students in Indiana who are convicted of drug-related crimes could find that the conviction affects their ability to get federal financial student aid. Students who are getting aid in the form of a work-study program, loans or grants at the time of the incident leading to the conviction could lose their eligibility.
On behalf of DeVries + Kelly Law Office posted in dui/ovwi defense on Friday, February 1, 2019.
Safe driving to avoid accidents is paramount to the people of Indiana. To this end, severe penalties have been instituted for those driving under the influence. Besides possible jail time, the economic costs can be staggering.


Tara Browning is a Missouri native. She received her BA in Spanish in 2008 and an MA in TESOL in 2012, both from Southeast Missouri State University. She has taught reading, writing, listening, speaking, and pronunciation from the beginning to the advanced levels. When she's not teaching, Ms. Tara might be found reading, hiking, eating, drinking coffee, playing with her dogs, or on some crazy adventure somewhere in the world.


One of the privileges I have this year in our Co-op is to teach a Drama class to mostly middle schoolers. They are full of energy and wildness and potential, and that is so much fun to see develop. Well, when it came down to choosing a play for them to perform mid-year, I had a little trouble. I needed to find something that would fit our group of 14. I needed it to be cheap – actually free, I needed it to be free. I needed it to be something we could perform on a tiny budget of almost nothing. I needed something that allowed me to borrow almost everything as far as costumes and props and anything else to be made cheaply and easily. And no sets to speak of. Although I did enjoy my stagecraft days of building, painting, and spackling flats in college, I literally had nothing to work with.
Except my brain, I had my brain – or at least the part that the kids didn't take from me, LOL! And out of my brain came out this little bit of funny. My students laughed, sometimes hysterically, as they auditioned. I can't wait to start rehearsing this week, it's going to be a lot of fun.
And so, because I enjoyed writing this so much, and because my students are enjoying it so much, I want to give it away to others who might also have a tiny budget – or no budget at all.
"A Christmas Dream" is a one-act farce with a Gospel message. It's a lot of fun, a lot of jokes, several hilarious characters, and at the end, the presentation of the Gospel. As written, performance time should be about 20 minutes. It has a flexible cast of 14 up to 17 actors.
Any church, homeschool group/co-op, classroom, school, or any other amateur group who would like to perform this play may do so royalty-free, as long as they are not charging an admission fee to the performance. More details about performance rights and royalties are on page 2 of the free download.
Sign up below to receive "A Christmas Dream" for FREE! Don't worry, you can easily unsubscribe any time you want!


With the introduction of new excitation/detection schemes in microscopy, such as confocal, multiphoton and total internal reflection, and the advances in fluorophore technology, fluorescence microscopy is today the most rapidly growing light microscopy technique, both in medical and biological sciences. In-vivo imaging with high lateral and axial resolution and large penetration depth can be obtained with confocal microscopy . This technique is selecting the signal from a slice of the object around the focal plane by using a pinhole in the detection that attenuates out-of-focus light. However, confocal microscopy is exciting a large sample volume, and detecting only a small fraction of it (the focal volume), thus creating significantly more photoexcitation than needed. This problem can be overcome by using two-photon (i.e. non-linear) fluorescence microscopy in which two photons with a wavelength in near-infrared region are absorbed . Significant two-photon absorption is reached only in the focal volume where high photon densities are present, allowing for an intrinsic 3D spatial resolution. Moreover, near infrared light is less scattered than the visible light, with consequent improvement of the image contrast and penetration depth.
Besides its many advantages, fluorescence microscopy has some limitations. Background fluorescence originates from endogenous object constituents (autofluorescence) or from unbound or non-specifically bound fluorescent probes (reagent background), and fluorophores under light excitation are prone to irreversible degradation (photobleaching).
Recently, colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) have been demonstrated as innovative fluorophores because of their unique optical properties . CQDs are semiconductors nanocrystals (e.g. CdSe core / ZnS shell) of a few nanometers in diameter. The wavelength of the emitted light depends on their size and shape that can be controlled during their synthesis (see Fig. 1) . They show an increasing absorption towards shorter wavelengths, resulting in a broad absorption spectrum, in stark contrast to organic dyes, which feature an absorption peaked about 50-100nm blueshifted to the emission, strongly decaying twoards shorter wavelengths. It is therefore much more practical to excite CQDs emitting at different wavelength by a single monochromatic light source, simplifying multiple marker imaging (Fig. 2). Furthermore, the emission spectrum of CQDs is narrower than that of dyes, enabling an improved spectral discrimination of the emission from multiple CQD markers.
CQDs are also attractive for two-photon fluorescence microscopy due to their high two-photon absorption cross-section. CQDs exhibit high photostability as compared to organic dyes, however surface defects in the crystal structure can act as temporary traps for carriers, preventing their radiative recombination. Furthermore, charging of the CQDs can significantly reduce their quantum yield, The temporal sequence of charging and trapping events often results in intermittent fluorescence (photoblinking) , a limitation for CQDs application in fluorescence microscopy.
Beyond fluorescence, we can use CQDs excited in resonance it fundamental absoprtion peak to create a strong non-linear signal called four-wave mixing (FWM) which is due to its third-order non-linearity . The aim of this project is to study the applicability of such resonant FWM signal from CQDs as biomarkers both in-vitro and in-vivo, to obtain a novel type of multi-photon imaging, with intrinsic sectioning capability without the need of a detection pinhole to reject out of focus light, alternative to two-photon fluorescence microscopy. Since FWM is a coherent signal directly linked to the third-order polarization, it has the benefit of detection free from any incoherent fluorescence background. Moreover, the spatial resolution can be increased beyond the diffraction limit due to the optical non-linearity.
Implementation of a set-up to measure and image the transient resonant FWM on biocompatible CQDs in solution with sub-micron three-dimensional spatial resolution.
Quantitative evaluation of the sensitivity of the technique and the related CQD photostability by investigating the FWM signal intensity and long-term stability versus CQD density and excitation power.
Determination of the lateral and axial spatial resolution of the technique by imaging of reference structures such as patterned arrays of CQDs in polymer matrices.
Imaging of cells (both fixed and living) labelled with CQDs to assess the applicability of the technique to cell biology.
Demonstration of zero-background imaging performance by the implementation of a three-pulse FWM.
CdSe/Zns colloidal quantum dots emit different color wavelenghts depending on their size.
Absorption and emission spectra of CdSe/Zns colloidal quantum dots with different size.


The seasoning with cardamom powder enhances the flavor of sweet Fini multi-fold and lends it a rich aroma.
The luscious delicacy-Fini (shredded noodles) made from flour, lightly sweetened with sugar syrup and garnished with almonds, pistachio, cardamom powder tastes wonderful. The taste is available from 07:00 a.m. to 09:00 p.m.
Savoured as a sweet delicacy all across India, Fini/Pheni- the traditional form of thread like noodles spun together is a vermicelli made from unleavened dough of semolina and rice flour deep-fried in ghee (clarified butter). It can be sweetened in a sugar syrup and can be relished as such. The unsweetened Fini/Pheni can be consumed with hot milk. Garnishing with finely cut almonds, pistachio and cardamom powder renders it a wonderful flavour.
Gajanand Gulabchand Halwai is a famous shop in the Laxmi Chowk area of Ajmer. It provides a clean ambiance to its customers.


RallySport Direct is proud to offer you the Tomei Duracon Type S Shift Knob.
This Tomei shift knob is made from the ever popular Duracon synthetic material which is commonly used in performance products. This material is popular because of its high strength and resistance to heat. This material's finish not only suits the look you are after but it also feels very comfortable in your hand.
There are 2 versions of this knob; short and long. They both will place the knob at the same height, but the long version will go down lower on the shift lever. If your car has a shift boot that sits lower, the long version is probably better for you.
This particular knob is the 70mm version, and it will come in the M12 X 1.25 thread pitch. Make sure you know your shift knob size before determining that this will work with your application.
In the description it states that it is the 90mm version but that version does not come in M12x1.25, the max is 70mm. I've searched everywhere for the 90mm and ended up buying this one to see if it was like it stated, but wasn't. Also FYI for 2015+ Subaru WRX/STI owners, you may experience an issue with the reverse lever not going high enough to be able to go into reverse.


text:
Plan Offered on U.S. Aid for High Schools
The National Association of Secondary School Principals has outlined a detailed, and expensive, agenda for ways the federal government can help improve high schools—from dramatically boosting federal aid for adolescent literacy to establishing a big, flexible spending pot to help low-performing high school students.
"Legislative Recommendations for High School Reform" is available online from the NASSP.
While some of the agenda has echoes, if much costlier ones, of President Bush's plans for high schools, notably absent is any support for his call to mandate more testing in the high school grades.
In all, the plan issued by the Reston, Va.-based NASSP would involve about $5 billion annually in new federal spending for high schools. The group notes that high schools currently receive less federal aid than middle schools and far less than elementary ones.
But the hefty price tag on the organization's proposal is likely to be a tough sell in Washington's current fiscal climate, with high budget deficits and added demands for military and homeland-security spending putting the squeeze on domestic programs. The entire Department of Education discretionary budget increased by less than $1 billion for fiscal 2005, and President Bush, while calling for new spending for high schools, has requested a slight dip in the department's overall budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.
Read the accompanying item,
Read the related story,
States Take Steps to Put More Rigor Into High Schools
Gerald N. Tirozzi, the executive director of the NASSP, said in an interview last week that the impetus for his group's legislative plan was to respond to the president's high school agenda, especially its emphasis on expanding federal testing requirements at the secondary level.
"It starts really with a significant concern we have that the administration … is making some very strong statements to push forward with No Child Left Behind into the high schools," said Mr. Tirozzi, who was an assistant secretary of education under President Clinton.
"I personally think that defies logic," he said of the president's testing proposal. "We have to stop this business of taking [students'] temperature over and over again to find that they're ill. … We never provide the intervention strategy."
'Long Overdue'
The NASSP proposal, which the group discussed in special briefings for Congress on Feb. 15, seeks to channel far more federal aid into high schools than is currently provided. "To date, federal resources in support of school improvement have mainly been targeted at the elementary level and to some extent the middle level," says the NASSP plan. "The next and long-overdue stage in the evolution of school reform must be the improvement of the nation's high schools."
High School Planner
The National Association of Secondary School Principals has proposed ways the federal government could help improve American high schools. Among the highlights:
• Provide a new and separate funding stream of $3.6 billion annually to address the academic needs of low-performing high school students.
• Dramatically scale up the Striving Readers program, which supports interventions for struggling middle and high schoolers, to $1 billion a year. It now receives $25 million.
• Restructure the Smaller Learning Communities program into a "high school per-sonalization" program and increase funding to $174 million annually.
• More than double funding for the Elementary and Secondary School Counseling program from the current $35 million a year to $85 million.
• Provide a dedicated funding of $100 million a year to help improve the quality of principals and other leaders within schools.
• Encourage all high schools to increase their academic rigor by expanding the State Scholars program to $12 million, raising federal aid for Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses, and other measures.
SOURCE: National Association of Secondary School Principals
The group notes that high schools receive only about 5 percent of federal aid under the Title I program for disadvantaged students, the centerpiece of the No Child Left Behind Act, even though they enroll about 28 percent of K-12 students nationwide.
President Bush in his budget request for fiscal 2006 outlined a series of high school plans. He wants to spend $250 million to help states meet his proposal to mandate two more years of high school testing. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states currently must test students each year in grades 3-8 in mathematics and reading, and once in high school in both those subjects. ("Bush's High School Agenda Faces Obstacles," Feb. 9, 2005.)
Mr. Bush also wants to set up a $1.2 billion High School Intervention program that would offer states and districts considerable flexibility in devising means to help low-performing students. And he has called for more spending on other items, such as providing $52 million for making Advanced Placement courses more available to disadvantaged high schoolers, and dramatically increasing the Striving Readers program—an intervention for struggling middle and high school students—to $200 million.
Not to be outdone, the NASSP would give the Striving Readers program a much more robust boost, bringing its funding to $1 billion, an amount more on par with federal aid for elementary school reading. Congress provided $25 million for Striving Readers this year.
"Striving Readers comes out to like $4.50 per kid," Mr. Tirozzi said. "It's disgraceful."
The costliest recommendation in the NASSP proposal is the creation of a separate funding stream of $3.6 billion to address the academic needs of low-performing high school students.
That money would help states, districts, and high schools meet the accountability and teacher-quality demands of the No Child Left Behind law, the group says. It arrived at the $3.6 billion figure by calculating how much high schoolers would currently receive if Title I aid were "accurately distributed on the basis of student populations and student need."
Mr. Tirozzi argues that a big problem with President Bush's High School Intervention fund is that the money would come from abolishing the $1.3 billion now spent for federal vocational education programs.
"The answer is not to borrow from Peter to pay Paul," he said.
Wrong Venue?
Krista Kafer, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, said the NASSP package contains some sound ideas. But she argued that Capitol Hill was the wrong place to pursue them.
"There's no reason why these should be necessarily federally funded," Ms. Kafer said. "Every single one of these recommendations could be achieved at the local, state, or private level."
She also doubted, given the current fiscal realities in Washington, that lawmakers are likely to heed the pricey suggestions.
"Are we ever surprised when special interest groups call for more money?" she said. "It's kind of what they do. … The money is just not there."
High School Federal Policy
A version of this article appeared in the March 02, 2005 edition of Education Week as Plan Offered on U.S. Aid for High Schools
Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas greets high school students at a town hall meeting on high school reform Feb. 1 in Conway, Ark. The meeting was a part of the preparation for this month's summit.
Kirk Jordan/Courtesy of Arkansas governor's office
School & District Management High Schools in Limelight for Summit
Lynn Olson, February 23, 2005
Rep. Michael N. Castle, R-Del., right, makes a point about the No Child Left Behind Act last week. With him on a panel are Raymond J. Simon, left, and Henry Johnson.
Hector Emanuel for Education Week
Federal Bush's High School Plan Off to Rocky Start
School & District Management District Initiative Key to Improving High Schools, Study Says
Lynn Olson, February 8, 2005
Disruptions were more acutely felt in districts with more affluent and white students, but there weren't always clear-cut political lines.
Denisa R. Superville
School & District Management Divisive Politics Are Harming Schools, District Leaders Say
A new survey reveals how tough the politics are for some leaders, especially in the suburbs.
Illustration by Laura Baker/Education Week, SvetaZi, and iStock/Getty
School & District Management Leading a City School District Is Tough. A New Program Aims to Ease the Way
Its creators hope to drive down big-city superintendent turnover by preparing candidates for the stresses of leadership.
Evie Blad
iStock/Getty Images Plus
School & District Management 5 Tips for Switching From Snow Days to Remote Classes
Two district leaders say communication, flexibility, and adaptability are key to success.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: Version Compatibility in Spark and Hbase-client I am trying to write a Spark batch job. I want to package it to a jar and use it with spark submit. My program works perfectly in spark-shell, however I get the following error when I try to run it with spark submit:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: scala.Predef$.$conforms()Lscala/Predef$$less$colon$less;
    at HBaseBulkload$.saveAsHFile(ThereInLocationGivenTimeInterval.scala:103)
    at HBaseBulkload$.toHBaseBulk(ThereInLocationGivenTimeInterval.scala:178)
    at ThereInLocationGivenTimeInterval$.main(ThereInLocationGivenTimeInterval.scala:241)
    at ThereInLocationGivenTimeInterval.main(ThereInLocationGivenTimeInterval.scala)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62)
    at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
    at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:498)
    at org.apache.spark.deploy.SparkSubmit$.org$apache$spark$deploy$SparkSubmit$$runMain(SparkSubmit.scala:731)
    at org.apache.spark.deploy.SparkSubmit$.doRunMain$1(SparkSubmit.scala:181)
    at org.apache.spark.deploy.SparkSubmit$.submit(SparkSubmit.scala:206)
    at org.apache.spark.deploy.SparkSubmit$.main(SparkSubmit.scala:121)
    at org.apache.spark.deploy.SparkSubmit.main(SparkSubmit.scala)

According to this answer the problem originates from version incompatibility. I also found this, but my spark version is 1.6.0 Here is my .sbt file for the project:
name := "HbaseBulkLoad"

version := "1.0"

scalaVersion := "2.10.5"

resolvers += "Cloudera Repository" at "https://repository.cloudera.com/artifactory/cloudera-repos/"

libraryDependencies += "org.apache.spark" %% "spark-core" % "1.6.0"
//libraryDependencies += "org.apache.hbase" % "hbase-common" % "1.2.0-cdh5.9.0"
//libraryDependencies += "org.apache.hbase" % "hbase-client" % "1.2.0-cdh5.9.0"
//libraryDependencies += "org.apache.hbase" % "hbase-server" % "1.2.0-cdh5.9.0"

libraryDependencies += "org.apache.hbase" % "hbase-client" % "1.1.2"
libraryDependencies += "org.apache.hbase" % "hbase-server" % "1.1.2"
libraryDependencies += "org.apache.hbase" % "hbase-common" % "1.1.2"

My imports and the code segment that causes the error is as follows:
    /SimpleApp.scala/
    import org.apache.spark.SparkContext
    import org.apache.spark.SparkContext._
    import org.apache.spark.SparkConf
// HBaseBulkLoad imports
import java.util.UUID

import org.apache.hadoop.conf.Configuration
import org.apache.hadoop.fs.permission.FsPermission
import org.apache.hadoop.fs.{Path, FileSystem}
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.{KeyValue, TableName}
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.client._
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.io.ImmutableBytesWritable
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.{HFileOutputFormat2, LoadIncrementalHFiles}
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.Bytes
import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.Job
import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.lib.partition.TotalOrderPartitioner
import org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD
import org.apache.spark.Partitioner
import org.apache.spark.storage.StorageLevel

import scala.collection.JavaConversions._
import scala.reflect.ClassTag

// Hbase admin imports
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.{HBaseConfiguration, HTableDescriptor}
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.client.HBaseAdmin
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.mapreduce.TableInputFormat
import org.apache.hadoop.fs.Path;
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.HColumnDescriptor
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.Bytes
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.client.Put;
import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.client.HTable;
import java.util.Calendar

val now = Calendar.getInstance.getTimeInMillis
//val filteredRdd = myRdd.filter(...
val resultRdd= filteredRdd.map{ row =>  (row(0).asInstanceOf[String].getBytes(),
                                scala.collection.immutable.Map("batchResults" ->
                                        Array( ( "batchResult1", ("true", now) ) )
                                )
                        )
        }
println( resultRdd.count )

A: The working .sbt file is as follows:
name := "HbaseBulkLoad"

version := "1.0"

scalaVersion := "2.10.5"

resolvers += "Cloudera Repository" at "https://repository.cloudera.com/artifactory/cloudera-repos/"

libraryDependencies += "org.apache.spark" % "spark-core_2.10" % "1.6.0-cdh5.9.0"
libraryDependencies += "org.apache.hbase" % "hbase-common" % "1.2.0-cdh5.9.0"
libraryDependencies += "org.apache.hbase" % "hbase-client" % "1.2.0-cdh5.9.0"
libraryDependencies += "org.apache.hbase" % "hbase-server" % "1.2.0-cdh5.9.0"

If you are using cloudera, you can find the jars and corresponding versions in the following directory:
/opt/cloudera/parcels/CDH-5.9.0-1.cdh5.9.0.p0.23/jars

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Pianista: The Legendary Virtuoso is a high-end piano music game. Play premium sounds in a game designed exclusively for Nintendo Switch. Beautifully-tuned music and marvelous technique awaits. Lay your fingers on the controller to explore the sound of the piano.
Pianista: The Legendary Virtuoso was released on Switch 179d ago in the US and the UK.
Notify me when Pianista: The Legendary Virtuoso is available.


text:
Balooba Software
Don`t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don`t hesitate to make it fun to use.
Balooba software develops and distributes software applications for the Apple platforms. The products range from games to system utilities. Balooba Software's goal is to make software that are recognized by (hopefully) beautiful design, simple and straight-forward interface, are easy to learn and use, and always price-worthy.
Most Downloaded Software: Bubblegym
Most Famous Software: Bubblegym
Website: http://www.balooba.se/baloobasoftware/index.html
Services: Mac and iOS applications; software development; marchandise;
An interview with Peter Berglund
FW Editor: Balooba Software has an impressive portfolio. Can you tell us more about your most important applications?
Peter Berglund: Sure! Balooba makes apps both for the Mac and for iOS devices. On the Mac side, Safari Prairiefire is currently our largest product in terms of sales. If we go back 3+ years, this title went to BubbleGym which actually was the first tilt motion-controlled app for any computer! That is hard to believe these days with all motion controlled apps available for the iPhone. But when BubbleGym was made there wasn't even a Wii console yet so this was truly a novel concept for people, and it got a ton of attention. Another interesting product that got hundreds of thousands of downloads was the Mirror Widget. It was the first software mirror that used the iSight camera and this function was featured in the Devils wear Prada movie. On the iOS side, Skip Ahead is our best-seller. It is an app that allows people to operate the iPod player even though he/she is occupied with something else. It is therefore very popular among folks that listen, usually to podcasts, while driving a vehicle.
FW Editor: Beside software, you have also released a 'clothing line' which includes shirts, kids clothing, pets clothing and some funny stuffs. Can you tell us more about this concept? What's the connection between software and clothing?
Peter Berglund: Haha! I'm not sure if there is a logical connection at all. This idea really came from realizing how popular the cure Babylooba icon (beautifully drawn by Andreas Ekberg, www.byandreas.com) became when the app was first released. Parents and kids thought it was cute to have it on a mouse pad, mug or a baby toys or shirt for example :) It is obviously a tiny part of our business and generates to profit whatsoever for us, but we think it's fun and cool so we see no reason to take it away.
FW Editor: Babylooba is one of your most popular applications. Can you tell us a few things about it?
Peter Berglund: I decided to make it for a friend of mine when he got his daughter. We noticed that there were plenty of games made for kids at the age 2 years and above but almost nothing out there that was suitable for babies. And surprisingly this is still the case! Typically, these apps are supposed to be good for "learning" which means that the developer thinks the kids will enjoy having let's say a Monkey popping up when the kid hits the M key because the word 'Monkey' begins with the letter M. In general, the companies selling these apps hope that parents will buy advanced products hoping that their kids will become more advanced users. While these apps can be fun for toddlers, they are far too complicated and confusing for babies. A baby has never seen a monkey and has no reason to look at individual keys on the keyboard, these skills are developed many months later in life. A 4 month old will typically find that the most interesting piece of the new teddybear is the wash label! But still, the computer, iPhone or iPad can be made into an amazing toy for a baby with the right software. What makes Babylooba so fun for babies is that it so dramatically teaches the baby that there is a connection between an action (hammering the keyboard or iPhone display) and what happens on the screen. My 7 month old nephew will smile and hyper ventilate as soon as he sees my sister's iPad or iPhone. The game is a huge success on the Mac and in our beta testing it has been even more popular for the babies when run on an iOS device. The intimate connection between the hand and the touch display make it perfect for iOS. The key is the scaled-down interface and the entertaining sound effects. For these babies, less is clearly more in terms of UI. As a fun side note, the sounds were all created by my friend with the baby I created the game for (Branimir.net).
FW Editor: Safari Prairiefire allows you to manage a Safari Bookmark without going to Safari. How is that possible?
Peter Berglund: The bookmarks are all stored in a preferences file in the users Library folder. Normally this file isn't something a user will ever open but Safari Prairiefire parses, reads and writes directly to this file. This also has the advantage that it automatically can and will create a backup copy. Therefore, the original bookmarks are never lost even if the user decides to delete or modify some. Every bookmark site is actually loaded internally by Safari Prairiefire during the scan. This happens without actually rendering a page so it's blazing fast.
FW Editor: Based on which filters are identified and removed the 'dead links'?
Peter Berglund: The most commonly known error for a dead link is the "404 - Not found" error which most people have seen. But servers can respond with a large number of error codes depending on what went wrong or almost wrong. Safari Prairiefire displays these codes and explains them so the user can make an informed decision whether to keep, delete or modify the bookmark links. For example, it is common to bookmark a sites we visit without realizing that actually bookmarked a link to a specific news article, for example, when we actually intended to bookmark the link to the actual news site. The user might have though he/she bookmarked http://cnn.com but because of how Safari works, the bookmark was pointed to "http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/11/09/facebook.firing/index.html?hpt=T2", because that happened to be the precise page loaded when the site was bookmarked. These links are of course often removed from the servers and represents one of the most common reason to why we hae so many dead links that clutter our browsers. Safari Prairiefire will display the links and error causes clearly and the user can then manually choose to edit them if he or she wants.
FW Editor: Safari Prairiefire comes with a Demo version. Are there any major differences between Safari Prairiefire Demo and Safari Prairiefire Full (beside time limitation)?
Peter Berglund: There is actually no time limitation. People hate demo versions, especially when they make the user irritated by suddenly quitting for example. Safari Prairefire is distributed as a shareware but we decided to make the demo version as useful as possible and give a clear feel for what the full version will do. In the demo version, the user can scan a large portion of the bookmarks, but not the whole enchilada. Also, no permanent changes to the bookmarks are made in the demo version. But nothing will for example prevent a user from scanning his/hers bookmarks and then manually change them inside of Safari itself. That brings this part of the functionality for free and that is perfectly fine with us. We hope that some users will appreciate the convenience of being able to do everything in the same window and that they will want to pay for that. The full app is currently $6 so for most users this is considered affordable.
About this interview
Safari Prairiefire 1.9.3 Build 56
Babylooba 1.1.0
Bubblegym 1.1
Bubblegym


For water conveying Process-Control-System (PCS) use this stand-alone heat exchanger for CellVessel and BactoVessel. RUJ is designed for servo motor mounted on the head plate (HPD). RUJ is required for SUF optional operating pressure up to 500 mBar.
Re-Usable-Jacket (RUJ) for CellVessel or BactoVessel size OD 110 – OD 200. Select the water connection adaptor / coupling set you need.
Servo motor stand / support kit as standard included in the RUJ kit. A servo motor is troublesome for high RPM applications like coupled to BactoVessel. This kit is designed for Applikon P100 and a range of Kollmorgen servo motors. Such as 6SM and AKM models. If you have the Kollmorgen 6SM models you also need a conversion kit #2252. Servo motor stand / support kit alternatively included in the RUJ kit.
Adapter - plastic adapter G3/8" male thread (with O-ring seal) to GL18 glass male thread for various STR, such as UniVessel.
Adapter - plastic adapter G3/8" male thread (with O-ring seal) to OD 10 mm hose barb for Applikon, Pierre Guerin, NBS, etc. Coupling - Rectus 21.
Direct adaptation to Biostat orange/red hoses, such as used combined with UniVessel glass/steel STR.


text:
German Deunification
Gerhard Schršder, Angela Merkel, and the Liberal Roots of German Neofascism
by Ingar Solty and Darko Vujica and interview by
Topics: Democracy Fascism Marxism Movements Political Economy Places: Europe Germany
German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrives to deliver a special address at the 50th World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 23, 2020. [Photo/China Daily]
Ingar Solty is a Senior Research Fellow at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung's Institute for Critical Social Analysis in Berlin. He is the author and editor of several books, including Auf den Schultern von Karl Marx (Westfälisches Dampfboot Verlag, forthcoming) and Der kommende Krieg (RLS, 2020). Darko Vujica is an MA student in sociology at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Sarajevo. He is the editor of the Bosnian portal Prometej.ba and a member of the editorial board of Novi Plamen.
Darko Vujica: In 2021, Angela Merkel's fourth and last term as the chancellor of Germany will end. How would you evaluate the policies that she and her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), have pursued since 2005? More specifically, what have been the effects on domestic and foreign policy?
Ingar Solty: Angela Merkel came to power in 2005 following the first center-left government since 1982, the government of Gerhard Schröder (Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD). To understand Merkel's domestic and foreign policy, one must understand the country she inherited.
Merkel was in the fortunate position of becoming chancellor after a coalition government of social democrats and Greens had done the devil's bidding of implementing very unpopular neoliberal policies to the sole benefit of German capital and the rich. The key goal of the Schröder government was to rediscipline the German working class and lower the burden on capital in the name of global competitiveness, based on the neoliberal ideology of trickle-down economics. According to this idea, giving resources to the capital-owning class and providing a business-favorable situation would create a healthy investment climate for German capital to compete in globalized capitalism. Per the social-democratic message, Germany had to surrender to global market forces and dismantle social services in order to maintain the welfare state. In other words: this was not "having your cake and eating it too," it was throwing the cake out of the window and enjoying the idea that deep down you were still a cake-lover.
Called Agenda 2010 and the Hartz reforms, the programs were implemented when the predecessor of the Left Party (DIE LINKE), the East German Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), had been ousted from the Bundestag for three years—with the exception of two directly elected candidates. This meant that the only opposition to these measures came from the liberal and conservative right (CDU/Christian Social Union in Bavaria, CSU, and the Free Democratic Party, FDP), which wanted the restructuring to go even further.
The Schröder government's main initiative was to end German welfare as we knew it. A tremendous campaign by the political class, in alliance with the corporate media, proclaimed Germany to be the "sick man of Europe."1 The welfare state was overburdening German competitiveness, the narrative went.
The interests of the capitalist class were promoted, first of all, by dismantling the traditional public pension system. Heretofore, capital and labor had carried the same burden of paying equally into the public pay-as-you-go system. In the name of competitiveness, this reform dissolved the old formula, cut the contribution capital had to make, lowered the overall pension level from 52.9 to 46 percent of previous incomes by 2020 and 43 percent by 2030, increased the pension age from 65 to 67 years old, and requested that people pay into private pension plans (Riester-Rente)—a profitable business model for surplus capital in search of profitable investment opportunities. The effect was a rapid growth in old-age insecurity and poverty. Suddenly, old people going through public and private trashcans in their search for empty bottles that would give them 8 cents each popped up everywhere. They are the visual manifestation of Agenda 2010. The average German pension today amounts to €906 (2018). In France, it amounts to about 50 percent more (averaging €1,400). This, however, does not stop the German press from informing the French general strikers of 2019–20 that they need to reform their pension system and follow the German model.2 Meanwhile in Germany, more and more people depend on soup kitchens. In 2019 alone, the number increased by 10 percent and doubled among retired people, amounting to a total 1.65 million people.3 Many people can no longer pay their bills. For instance, in 2018, 344,000 households had their electricity cut off. Yet, instead of fighting the epidemic spread of nonunionized, low-wage sector jobs, which are old-age poverty in the making, or helping poor people replace their energy-intensive old refrigerators (for example), what did the government do? In Baden-Württemberg, the coalition government of Greens and conservatives spent public money on teaching the poor how to save energy, as if they were little children.4
The second initiative was to rediscipline the working class as a precondition to increasing the rate of exploitation and driving down German wages. Accompanied by another corporate media campaign, the government identified and targeted a few bad apples in the German welfare system in order to dismantle the social security system for all. The media and upper-middle class journalists happily partook in the witch hunt against the notorious "Florida Rolf," who took advantage of the system, instead of analyzing the consequences of such reforms.5 The old unemployment insurance, developed as a common social security system against the systemic risks of capitalism, was smashed and replaced by neofeudalist poor laws. The new system of Arbeitslosengeld II, which mimicked Bill Clinton's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (1997), essentially means that, after twelve months of unemployment (or eighteen months, if you are an older worker), you lose everything you paid into the system through taxes on labor incomes and are rendered to a punitive system of workfare. In essence, the Hartz reforms were a form of dispossession of labor incomes. And what used to be social rights in a system based on working-class solidarity is now essentially a system of alms granted by the state in a paternalistic system akin to a parent-child relationship: if you behave well and don't act up, you receive a lump sum that is too much to die on and too little to live on like a human being. If you do not behave, the state sanctions you with even lower payments. And up until a Supreme Court decision in November 2019, it was legal to cut welfare payments beyond 30 percent. This system has, over the course of the past fifteen years, traumatized millions of people, wiped out economic existences, and perpetually violated the first article of the German Constitution according to which the dignity of a human being is "inviolable."
It says a lot about the hegemony of neoliberalism that Third Way social democracy (New Democrats in the United States, New Labour in the United Kingdom, Neue Mitte in Germany) enforced these measures according to the deeply pessimistic and conservative anthropology of the Austrian School, which essentially considers workers to be egotistical gangsters while approaching global capital (big banks and insurance companies) with the utmost trust, deregulating labor and financial markets for private, profit-maximizing corporations. In other words, here were left-wing parties that mistrusted their own core constituencies as "lazy free riders" and "self-serving cheats," but simultaneously had faith that the capitalist class would act in the best interest of society despite pursuing the worst objective ever imaginable: profit maximization. The question really is: Who needs procapitalist, authoritarian right wingers if this is the already existing emancipatory, prolabor left?
It also says a lot about the predominant upward-mobility mentality within German social democracy and the thoroughly bourgeois character of the German Greens that, when it came to the poorest of the poor in society, the Hartz laws employed an army of public officials to tear up every carpet and wooden floorboard in the houses of the poor, dead set on finding even the last hidden penny that would allow the state to refuse to pay money to unemployed workers, which, as I said, they themselves had previously paid into the system. At the same time, the government downsized public oversight of capital, which facilitated the tremendous degree of tax evasion and tax fraud among the super rich, including the European value-added tax scandal and the Cum-ex scandal (which German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble knew about since 2011 and didn't do anything about until 2016, and which the SPD in Hamburg apparently let the Warburg investment bank get away with after the bank managers donated extensively to the party).6 To the German taxpayer, the costs of these two schemes alone are estimated to amount to between €6 and 13 billion for the value-added tax scandal and between €10 and 30 billion for Cum-ex.7 To put this into perspective, the entire budget of the German Ministry for Education and Research was €18.27 billion in 2019. Public spending for social housing programs amid the biggest housing crisis since the Second World War amounted to merely €1.5 billion.
The Hartz laws were one of the biggest crimes, if not the biggest crime, in postwar German history and they embody the key rupture in German history since the fire-sale privatizations of East Germany's publicly owned companies that followed so-called reunification in 1990. Everything that followed, including the rise of the far right, cannot be explained without reference to Agenda 2010 and the Hartz laws. The German social scientist and former presidential candidate Christoph Butterwegge is correct when he argued that the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a belated "present" of the Hartz reforms, because it has purposely driven the fear of economic declassing and marginalization deep into the center of society.8 After all, the new laws mean that no matter how high your wage earnings are right now—and for the core labor force in the industrial export industry they are still quite high—you are always just twelve months of unemployment away from total exclusion from social life and loss of personal sovereignty, and just twelve months away from dependence on charity. Essentially, if you lose your job, you lose your credit-financed home and cars, then you may lose your family as a result of the emotional strain, and, in the end, you lose your dignity as a human being in the German workfare system.
The Hartz laws thus are sanctioning the marginalized poor, but—and this is crucial—they have disciplined the entire German working class, disciplined it into concession bargaining, individually accepting the worst kinds of precarious jobs, which the Schröder government itself enabled (Leiharbeit and Werkverträge). As the University of Jena sociologist Klaus Dörre has pointed out, this kind of precarization functions like "communicating vessels," penetrating society in general and dispersing existential fears and a sense of economic powerlessness throughout the subjective middle class of professional, highly qualified, and still very well-paid workers.9 And that was the conscious purpose: because people who are this dead scared of losing their jobs will make all sorts of concessions in bargaining procedures, just like the German metalworkers union was doing—even before the COVID-19 recession—in the 2020 collective bargaining round that offers no wage demands in exchange for job guarantees from German industrial capital amid rampant capital-driven automation rationalizations.
So, add digitalization and robotization to the equation and the fact that today many workers cannot say whether their job will still exist ten years from now, including the jobs of lawyers, medical doctors, translators, and journalists, and you can understand how that disciplining has worked. And while the neoliberal center essentially says that there is no alternative to this situation, that we can only adapt and that it's every person for themselves, the far right reclaims "sovereignty" and utilizes social fears and powerlessness for its own völkisch visions of a racially and socially homogeneous society.
Today, some neoliberals and right-wing SPD cadres as well as the bourgeois media are still defending the Agenda 2010. They argue that in the early 2000s, Germany had been suffering from mass unemployment and, the narrative goes, labor markets and workers needed therefore to become more "flexible" in order to boost employment. The logic itself is ironic: it ought to be easier to fire workers in order to employ more of them, all in the name of "labor market resilience." It reveals the nature of capitalism that, for it to function properly, workers must be afraid. However, even on its own terms, this logic was a lie. When you look closely, you can see that the number of hours worked did not increase at all. Instead, what increased was the number of involuntary part-time jobs within the widely expanded low-wage sector, the largest in all of Europe (with every fourth job in it). Furthermore, many of the jobs created do not pay into the social systems at all; on the contrary, the reforms simply increased the number of jobs supplemented by government copayments. In other words, the government is subsidizing private for-profit superexploitation, including the replacement of yesterday's unionized public sector jobs by so-called "€1 jobs" provided by public-private partnerships in the social work sector.
So, Merkel was very fortunate to come to power when all those neoliberal measures in the interest of the capitalist class had been implemented by a social democratic and Green government. These measures destroyed the SPD and its legitimacy to a point that the social democrats have been unable to regain their credibility and might never recover from the disillusionment they fostered. The SPD was kind of like the subservient dog that did everything its master asked it to and was then discarded because of old age at some highway resting place. Due to its policies against its own working-class base, since 1998, when it still received 20.2 million votes, the SPD has lost more than ten million disillusioned voters to voting abstention, DIE LINKE, the Greens, and lately even the AfD. In 2017, the SPD received 9.5 million votes and 20.5 percent of the voters' share. Today, it stands between 11 and 17 percent in the polls. Ever since the Schröder government entered office in 1998, the SPD has lost almost half its membership, down from 755,000 to 419,000 today. The SPD leaders and mainstream political sociologists will say that this is due to Bowling Alone, that is, post-1968 individualization, the erosion of social-moral milieu, and the distrust in political parties and social institutions in general. This is bullshit. They simply don't want to face the reality that this is not a natural disaster but a human-made disaster, a disaster of the neoliberalization of social democracy. The UK Labour Party example shows that this is not a secular but rather a political development; ever since the Jeremy Corbyn socialist grassroots revolt enthused the Labour Party base, it has almost tripled its membership, up from 201,293 on May 6, 2015, the day before the general election, to 580,000 in January 2020. The UK Labour Party today is the biggest social-democratic mass party in the world. While the SPD's membership is literally dying, the UK Labour Party is propelled by a new generation of young socialist activists.
In the 2000s, Margaret Thatcher famously said that Tony Blair and New Labour were her biggest achievement. Likewise, Schröder ought to say that Merkel was his worst achievement. The only unfair thing is that the Greens, whose base—the left-liberal new petty bourgeoisie—was much less affected by the Hartz laws, essentially remained unscathed from the neoliberal politics of the Schröder government and are now poised to form solidly bourgeois governments with the conservatives.
DV: So, you're saying that the rise of the far right is actually of Merkel's making and will be her lasting legacy? What is the relationship between her concrete politics and the rise of the far right? How did Merkel govern from here?
IS: Merkel's luck of being an heir to center-left neoliberalization, the heir to a super-competitive German capitalist class, transformed into a very particular style of ruling. At the Leipzig CDU party convention of 2003, Merkel, who was CDU chairwoman at the time, had still presented herself as a neoliberal hawk and right-wing hardliner. It was the time when she promoted the model of Deutsche Bank and Allianz professor Paul Kirchhoff, a model of a flat tax that would fit "on a beer coaster." It was also the time when she flew to the United States and apologized to George W. Bush for Germany's refusal to openly partake in the disastrous 6.4 trillion-dollar U.S. "war on terror" in Iraq. Her article from back then, "Schroeder Doesn't Speak for All Germans," published in the Washington Post, is one for the history books.10 Domestically, her hardline libertarianism hurt her badly and was part of why she almost lost the 2005 national elections in spite of the incredible dissatisfaction with the Schröder SPD. Her electoral disaster and Schröder's adrenaline-driven reaction in the live postelection television debate with Merkel (Berliner Runde) is another one for the books. And the way he attacked her and the ensuing siege mentality might have saved Merkel from sniper fire from her own party.
As a result, Merkel then developed a presidential, opportunistic kind of ruling, leaving the hard work to her ministers, blaming unpopular decisions on them, and shifting positions whenever it seemed opportune. This involved a moderate way of liberal modernization, including a semifeminist maternity and paternity leave, day care, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and so on. For instance, after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe of 2011 (with 10 to 20 percent of the radioactive emissions of Chernobyl and the displacement of 150,000 people), and faced with tremendous antinuclear energy protests, Merkel suddenly switched positions from the planned extension of the operating licenses of German nuclear power plants to the ad hoc declaration that Germany was going to end nuclear energy. This was not hard to do since, at the time, it was a political goal that had the support of three quarters of the population. At the same time, this co-optation and absorption of the demands of political opponents from the neoliberal left had the effect of asymmetrical demobilization. In the end, the switch in nuclear energy policy did not, as had been intended, prevent the predicted rise of the Greens to their first minister president in Baden-Württemberg, the former Maoist-turned-very-conservative Winfried Kretschmann, but in general Merkel showed a flexibility not seen since the Prussian king in 1848: There's a revolution against you? Simply turn around and say that you're leading it!
But Merkel did not lead. By and large, she represented the status quo, especially in terms of political economy. That status quo created by the Schröder government, however, was untenable. The center could not hold. Something had to give. The fear of declassing inside German society, if undealt with, had to find an exhaust pipe. The loss of faith in social democracy, this situation of indistinguishability between political parties, this crisis of representation, had to find a vessel. And that vessel was, for a while and to some extent, DIE LINKE, which managed to return to the Bundestag with the help from the popular tribune, former SPD chairman and neo-Keynesian finance minister Oskar Lafontaine, once deemed the "most dangerous man in Europe" by the British tabloid press because, in 1998, he had intended to re-regulate the eurozone's financial markets.11 For a while, DIE LINKE enjoyed or endured the notion of the pariah party, being viciously antagonized by all others, especially by the social democrats, and by almost the entire media. And yet, DIE LINKE only captured about one third of all the votes that the social democrats had lost. The crisis of representation mostly meant growth in nonvoting behavior, and it has been mostly from nonvoters and the CDU that the far-right AfD has gained its following.
By not undoing the damage done by her predecessors, Merkel will go down in history as the chancellor who failed Germany. And not only Germany, but also Europe and the world. She and her cabinet failed by refusing to deal with what, in a forthcoming chapter in the 2021 Socialist Register, edited by Leo Panitch and Greg Albo, I call the global six-dimensional crisis of the world today.12 This global crisis stretches across six levels, each of which has the potential to barbarize society. This crisis is obviously an economic one, and as such it has returned fast with the acceleration of COVID-19. Before the virus led to the collapse of international supply chains and the lockdown, German growth rates were as low as they had been in 2009—the high point of the biggest crisis of global capitalism since the 1930s Great Depression, which back then led to the rise of European proto- and neofascism.
At the same time, the current crisis is not just one of the capitalist economy and its financial architecture. It is, secondly, also a crisis of politics and social cohesion (think precarization, digitalization, and the way marketization leads to very unequal development across geographical regions). It is, thirdly, a crisis of gender relations and social reproduction, given how the feminization of labor markets occurred under neoliberal conditions of low wages and old-age poverty, and given also how austerity policies further burdens the nuclear family with the brunt of the unpaid social reproductive labor of cooking, washing, cleaning, shopping, and caring for young and elderly relatives. It is, fourthly, a crisis of democracy, given how neoliberal policies have eroded postwar party systems and traditional parties, transformed them into multiple party systems, and have led to the rise of the far right, up to the point that the far right is now capable of seizing power and winning majorities globally—from Brexit and the Donald Trump election in 2016 to India's Narendra Modi, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary's Viktor Orbán, Poland's Jarosław Kaczyński, Austria, Italy, and so on. Fifthly, the current crisis is a crisis of world order, resulting from the hegemonic decline of the U.S. Empire, the rise of China, and the high-tech rivalry in which they are engaged. And, sixthly, the crisis is a civilizational crisis of ecological sustainability and impending climate catastrophe.
Now, I won't go into details, but if you look at how the Merkel government addressed the various levels of the crisis, you see very timid and structurally conservative policies, a politics of muddling through but no vision of society that takes everybody along, such as that of the socialist Green New Deal. But without such a vision, I am absolutely convinced that the rise of right-wing authoritarian nationalism will be unstoppable. And the way in which the Merkel government is obstructing the so-called coronabonds and reinforcing European desolidarization during the crisis, risking the disintegration of the eurozone once again, underscores that her politics haven't changed.
DV: What is the state of the CDU today? Has the rise of the far right led to a change in course?
IS: The CDU/CSU used to be the natural partner of the bourgeoisie and the natural ruling party. Since 1949, the CDU/CSU formed and led the national government for fifty-four out of seventy-one years. It is the party of governance and that habitus characterizes all CDU members. You would expect such a party of winners to have a general claim to leadership and a bold vision for leading Germany out of the current civilizational crisis. However, up until the potentially short-lived boost in the polls following the COVID-19 crisis, tolling the bell of the "hour of the executive" all around the world, the party leadership was in a state of panic because it is being cannibalized from the left by the Green Party, representing a modern transnationalized bourgeoisie and cosmopolitan new petty bourgeoisie adapted to globalized capitalism, and by the far right, representing noncompetitive, fossil energy-intensive, and domestically oriented capital in combination with a popular regressive revolt against the particular current of modernity. This regression is caused by the centrifugal forces of neoliberal marketization. The political economy of the past two decades has torn apart society socially and economically. The market does what the market does best: instead of tending toward equilibrium and creating "spontaneous orders" of optimal resource allocation (as suggested by Friedrich Hayek and neoclassical economics), it creates tremendous imbalances and chaos. It creates tremendous wealth inequality and the divergence of regions between the capitalist core of the Global North and its periphery of the Global South, between the eurozone core and its periphery, between Germany's south and Germany's east and north, between Germany's metropolitan regions and the rural wasteland, between prosperous inner-city neighborhoods and the emerging banlieues and ghettos on the outskirts.
For the CDU and Merkel's style of consent politics, this, of course, carries tremendous consequences. It is impossible to be a consent-oriented party in an economically polarized society. Economic polarization is followed by political polarization, between subjective winners and losers of modernization, between those who embrace and those who must fear modernization. And the winner-loser divide is not just a plain economic one in terms of fears of downward mobility, but it is also a symbolic one. Because insofar as the rapid pace of globalizing capitalism usually develops faster than people's mentalities and their ability to adapt to necessary, even inevitable, cultural modernization, this creates a rift between the old and outdated symbolic center of society and the new one. This, I guess, is the background for the divide between so-called cosmopolitans, who embrace capitalist globalization, and so-called communitarians, who revolt against it, which is to a certain degree also a generational divide. This generational divide can be observed in many instances, including in the December 2019 UK election where the Tories would have won one measly seat if the millennials had been the only ones able to vote, and in the United States in the way voting behavior unfolded between Bernie Sanders supporters and the rest in the Democratic primary field.
As a consequence, the CDU/CSU, an aging party losing around one million voters every election cycle due to old age, is being torn apart by the Greens, who represent the modern bourgeoisie, and the AfD, which represents the revolt against this modernity. And, as a result, the CDU has become a particularist, self-interested party of internal divisions, including the emergence of the staunchly conservative, five thousand-members-strong Values Union (Werte-Union) founded in 2017. For instance, during the East German state elections of 2019, its leaders celebrated as a victory that they were still the strongest party and still capable of forming a coalition against the emergent AfD. Meanwhile, in Thuringia, they opened up to the far right of the openly fascist party chairman Björn Höcke, who, in his book Nie zweimal in denselben Fluss (2018), has openly declared a program of mass murder including the dictatorially enforced "remigration" of Muslim minorities and a "bloodletting" of political opponents. Back then, the CDU considered coalition talks and on February 5, 2020, a mere week after the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, the CDU caved alongside the libertarian FDP by getting the FDP candidate Thomas Kemmerich elected to prime minister with the votes of Höcke's AfD, simply to oust a very popular and quite moderate DIE LINKE prime minister. For the time being, these openings to the extreme right have failed. They came too early. Kemmerich, the FDP candidate, only lasted twenty-five hours and Merkel's successor to the CDU leadership, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, had to resign five days later. For the time being, the COVID-19 crisis is strengthening the governing parties in the polls at the expense of the Greens. This stabilizes both the government and the CDU/CSU and it is possible that this could last into 2021. Yet, the general trend is different and shifts Germany toward the CDU and Green Party national coalitions. Even if Friedrich Merz, BlackRock's now former Europe manager and a libertarian right winger, seizes the party leadership with the support of the tabloid mass publication "BILD," the next German government (after the 2021 national elections) is likely to be a bourgeois government of conservatives and Greens. And the Greens see no problem with Merz. On February 12, 2020, the Green Party's Bundestag Faction chairwoman Katrin Göring-Eckardt announced that a national coalition with a CDU headed by Merz is an option.13 Keep in mind, this is not just the guy who helped BlackRock squeeze workers on behalf of shareholder value and had the audacity to call himself "middle class" even though he travels by private jet. This is also the guy who, in the week after a far-right terrorist murdered nine alleged "foreigners" in a shisha bar in Hanau after a long series of racist campaigns against shisha bars, went on Twitter and announced that "the CDU must be the party of law and order and the rule of law. Lawless spaces or clan structures must not exist anywhere. And where those structures exist, they must be consequently broken up no matter how much protest this elicits." And when he was asked later at a press conference whether his statement meant that "your way of fighting right-wing extremism is by talking about clan crime and lawless spaces?," he simply responded: "the answer is yes."
Now, after what has happened in Thuringia and with COVID-19 partially reshuffling the political system, the CDU and Greens must hope, of course, that they will have a majority without the FDP. In any case, because a coalition government of CDU and Greens will be one of market-driven development, it will deteriorate the economic and social imbalances in German society and thus will continue to foster the social and economic origins and roots of the rise of the far right. This is because only a gargantuan global reform program with hundreds of billions in public investments tackling, in a comprehensive manner, the social question as well as climate change can fend off fascism's appeal. The UK Labour election program of 2019 is the minimum of what needs to be done. However, since a bourgeois party coalition of the CDU/CSU and Greens is not going to diverge from the neoliberal course but will follow a kind of green-authoritarian neoliberalism like the current coalition of conservatives and the Greens in Austria, such a coalition government or an extension of the CDU/CSU-SPD coalition in Germany is likely to lead to a conservative and far-right coalition government in the following elections, which will take place in 2025 or earlier. This is particularly going to be the case when the bill for the ongoing corporate bailouts is presented to the public in another round of austerity, which is already shaping up. Seventy-five years after the liberation from German fascism and a German-led world war that destroyed Europe and most of Germany's cities, and killed close to eighty million people worldwide, the German far right is back. And when the leaders of the old parties point fingers at the far right, the fingers are pointing right back at them: these are your offspring, you did this!
Of course, such a global radical reform program—the necessary minimum to rein in the specter of fascism—would start in Europe and the eurozone. However, the German government gave into U.S. pressure and led the confrontation against Russia alongside the Eastern European governments—led it by constantly tugging at Ukraine and essentially blackmailing and splitting the country with an either-the European Union-or-Russia choice, splitting the country into a bloody civil war. As a result, the old Gorbachevian visions of the "House of Europe" and "good neighborhood" relations were destroyed. Instead, enabled by Brexit and using Trump as a pretext, Germany and the European Union have accelerated the buildup of military capacities, started to advocate "Europe's strategic autonomy," and are now conducting the biggest military maneuvers since the end of the Cold War in the shape of 2018's Trident Juncture and the Defender 2020 maneuver of spring 2020. The global arms race, of which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states are the driving force, is channeling crucial resources away from tackling climate change and into preparations for war—the kind of war we seemed to be very close to in January 2020 when the Trump administration drone-killed Qassim Solimani, the second-most powerful leader of Iran, and the Iranian government responded by bombing two, albeit mostly empty, U.S. military bases in Iraq and downed a civilian plane headed to Ukraine.
This global arms race is wasteful and really dangerous. Amid the COVID-19 crisis, Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, a social democrat, announced that he was dead set on fulfilling NATO's demand of spending 2 percent of GDP on the military. By 2024, Germany will have a bigger military budget than Russia. The combined NATO military expenditures are more than twenty times as much as those of Russia. Meanwhile, Russia, in return, has itself shifted to a (albeit defensive) politics of empire in Ukraine (the secession of Crimea) and Syria (backing the Bashar al-Assad government, which had called Russia for help) and is being pushed into the arms of China in what increasingly looks like a new Cold War between a China-oriented and a U.S.-oriented world—with the weakened European Union, which has now declared China a "systemic rival," as U.S. appendix.
Why is the European Union weakened? Because the neoliberal path of integration followed ever since the 1985 European Single Act, which enforced unanimity with regards to economic regulations, and the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which disciplined European states into pursuing promarket neoliberal policies, did not lead to economic equilibrium and convergence as the neoliberal orthodoxy young people are taught in business schools around the world proclaims. As was mentioned earlier, it led to the exact opposite. It deindustrialized the European Union's south and peripherized Southern and Eastern Europe, including the former German Democratic Republic territory, which now functions as a supplier of cheap and servile nonunion labor similar to the U.S. South, while the profits generated particularly in Eastern Europe are repatriated to the European centers where corporate headquarters are located, lining the pockets of capital owners, including the new record-high number of 627,000 Germans who, according to official Statistische Bundesamt data, do not work because their incomes come solely from capital dividends and rents extracted from German renters. 627,000 people in a country with a working-age population of 51.8 million! That is 1.2 percent. (As you know, some people say that the 99 percent versus the 1 percent metaphor first used by the Occupy Wall Street movement was lacking class-analytical precision and, for sure, it does. But this little calculation tells me that it is not actually that far off from some realities of contemporary class society.)
In any case, as you also know, Merkel, as the government leader of the economically dominant country in the eurozone, and her finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble oversaw the particular way in which the European Union resolved the eurozone crisis, namely through a strategy of internal devaluation of costs and wages. They were key orchestrators of the austerity turn in the euro area that followed after the short-lived Keynesian resurgence of 2008–09 and the hopes for a Green New Deal had been buried. As a result, the Fiscal Compact, that is, the new economic governance in the eurozone, reinforced the EU neoliberal architecture with its Sixpack surveillance mechanisms, reinforced punishment of government debt, the rolling back of workers' collective bargaining agreements, and more. And when these kinds of policies and their accompanying austerity measures turned out to be really unpopular among the southern EU periphery, leading to the strongest class-based protest movements since the 1970s, the European governments stuck to their course. And when these movements managed to gain political power in Greece in 2015 and suggested a eurozone exit strategy of internal up-valuation instead of devaluation, the democratically unaccountable troika (the European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund) credit-strangulated Greece into submission.
However, the defeat of the European left in July 2015 really functioned as a catalyst for the rise of the far right in Europe. It is not just a temporal coincidence that the refugee crisis followed immediately after the defeat of Syriza. The rise of xenophobic, right-wing authoritarian nationalisms in Europe was facilitated by the prevention of a social Europe exit strategy from the eurozone crisis. If a solution for all was no longer supposed to be possible, it should be a solution for some, a solution for those with the right passport, the right haircut, the right front yard, and the right taste in music, so to speak. Because, as the Greek-French state theorist Nicos Poulantzas argued in his 1974 Fascism and Dictatorship, under generally untenable conditions, it is not the particular strength of the left that propels fascism, but rather the left's inability to seize power and really change the material living conditions for the working-class majority that creates a political vacuum that is then filled by the völkisch far right. As the late and great British historian Eric Hobsbawm concluded in his book on the horrors of the twentieth century and his predictions for the twenty-first: "the alternative to a changed society is darkness."
DV: So, what are the potentials of left renewal in Germany today? I noticed that the SPD recently changed its leadership. What can be expected from the new leadership of the SPD? Is there a potential for a re-social democratization of the SPD?
IS: It is true that the new SPD leadership, Saskia Eskens and Norbert Walter-Borjans, is not the leadership for which the party establishment had hoped. Just as much as German capital elites, which call for Friedrich Merz and Olaf Scholz as "chancellor candidates," the SPD establishment wanted German finance minister and vice chancellor Olaf Scholz, a diehard neoliberal and staunch defender of balanced budget amendments (Schwarze Null).14 The leftist candidates in the party member referendum were Hilde Matheis and Dierk Hirschel. Still, it is true that Eskens and Walter-Borjans ran on a platform critical of Schwarze Null and demanded an active industrial policy, public investments, and a minimum-wage increase. So far, so good. However, once elected, Eskens and Walter-Borjans reached out to the internal right and made a number of significant concessions at the party convention, even though the internal right, the so-called Seeheim Circle, had previously threatened a "civil war" should Eskens and Walter-Borjans be elected.15 The little momentum that was there is now already gone, especially because the new leadership refrained from canceling the grand coalition with Merkel, which has destroyed the party. Meanwhile, the bourgeois media and the neoliberal right within the party have already begun to discredit and disempower Eskens and Walter-Borjans. The inner-party "civil war" is therefore long underway and the neoliberals appear the likely winners.
I think the most important thing to understand, however, is that Germany cannot be compared to the United States or the United Kingdom. What seems possible with regard to center-left party renewal in the United States and the United Kingdom is not going to happen in continental Europe. It is clear that a left-wing shift in Germany is extremely important for Europe given the sheer size of the German economy and the country's economic dominance in Europe. And yet, people in Europe should not cultivate hopes that German social democracy is now in a situation similar to U.S. Sanderism or Momentum/Corbynism in the United Kingdom. There are two reasons for this. The first has to do with the differences in electoral systems. The United States and the United Kingdom have first-past-the-post majority voting systems. In those systems, the Democratic Party and the Labour Party could be taken over by class conflict-oriented social democrats because the left in those countries had little to no chance of establishing a class-based third party against the existing former social democratic parties. You could hardly be anything but an entryist in those countries. The U.S. and UK lefts were the most pitiable lefts in all of the "West" and their misery was epitomized by the decay of the UK Socialist Workers' Party as a result of an internal rape scandal cover-up. The cunning of history had it, however, that the global financial crisis has weakened the neoliberal center to such a degree that its conservative parties could be taken over from the far right (Trump) and that its social-democratic parties could be taken over by the left, for real (Corbyn) or at least potentially (Sanders). Corbyn could be elected leader of the Labour Party because the backbencher Corbyn had to stick with his neoliberalized party for lack of a better alternative, voting against the party line more than five hundred times between 1983 and 2015.
On the contrary, the German electoral system is an every-vote-counts proportional representation system. This means that it enabled the establishment of an antineoliberal socialist left party against the neoliberalized social democrats and Green Party—based on a merger between the East German Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the Labour and Social Justice—The Electoral Alternative (founded by SPD dissidents and left trade unionists). In 2021, when there will be new parliament elections in Germany, the SPD will have been in power for nineteen of the past twenty-three years and have implemented the thorough neoliberalization of German society and its shift toward militarism and imperialism abroad. You can imagine that during those years, it was essentially DIE LINKE that absorbed all the young leftist idealists, visionaries, critics of neoliberalism, and social movement and antiwar activists, while the SPD attracted people with neoliberal and opportunistic mindsets and a technocratic understanding of politics. In short, to the detriment of despairingly old-aged SPD hopes of renewal, DIE LINKE absorbed most of the capacities for renewal. And given the transformation of the German party system into one with six parties, the SPD will also not be able to garner the enthusiasm that comes with the notion that real government takeover is an option. Eskens and Walter-Borjans are not the Sanders and Corbyn of Germany.
The second and even more important reason is that the political economy of Germany is very different. Socioeconomically, the United States and United Kingdom have much more in common with Spain, Italy, and Portugal than with Germany. The German title of Oliver Nachtwey's book The Hidden Crisis of Germany (2019) is Downwardly Mobile Society. But even Nachtwey conceded that Germany is not a society in which the middle classes have been factually declassed. As I argued earlier, Germany is among the countries where the problem for the wage-dependent middle classes is not actual declassing, but rather the fear of being declassed as a result of the processes outlined above: capital relocation, digitalization, and old-age unemployment. Nachtwey's metaphor of a downward escalator is quite useful. The hidden crisis is essentially that people, quite literally, have to work harder and harder in order to stay in the middle income group that still enjoys the "American way of life": owning your own suburban house with two cars, swimming in Mallorca, and dreaming of snorkeling in Bali. The difference between Germany on the one hand and the United States and the United Kingdom on the other is that while in Germany the erosion of the middle class is merely feared, in the United States and the United Kingdom this erosion has long taken place, especially for millennials. This is due to three key factors: (1) deindustrialization, (2) relative trade-union weakness, and (3) student debt, and in the United States private health care debt on top of that. Youth in the Anglo countries can turn left because they have little to nothing left to lose. As Grace Blakeley argues, the youth in Britain is anticapitalist because they are unlikely to ever own capital. On the contrary, in Germany, where there still exists a strong industrial base with collective-bargaining coverage (providing high industrial wages), where, after strong education strikes, higher education is free again, and where health care is also still largely free, youth are turning right because they still have a lot to lose. Widespread status panic tends to lead the middle classes to join right-wing, top-middle coalitions, like in most EU core countries at the onset of the crisis, whereas declassing enables the educated working class to join left-wing, bottom-middle coalitions, like, for a long time, in the southern and western EU periphery (Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, and to a certain extent also Italy).
In Germany, unfortunately, we are very far away from constructing a bottom-middle coalition. So far, the far right is more dynamic than the left because its message resonates with large segments of the frightened middle. This message partly amounts to the conservative idea that everything can stay the way it is if the middle class is only ruthless enough against the hungry mouths from Syria (refugees), Greece (uncompetitive "lazy" Europeans), and the poor. There is, however, no alternative to creating a counterhegemonic bloc of the working-class majority in Germany that stretches from the job-secure, high-earning sections of the working class in the West German export industry via the precarious, often East German workforce in this very export industry to the expansive 25 percent of workers stuck in the service industry low-wage sector. And as I wrote in my paper for DIE LINKE's 2020 Strategy Conference, an intelligent combination of both a new feminist, antiracist, ecological class politics and an inclusive left populism will be key to creating such a counterhegemonic bloc.16 And one of the key fields of struggle for a bottom-middle coalition will be housing, because Germany is a country of renters, not homeowners, and the shift of surplus capital searching for profitable investment outlets in the German housing market and the resulting inflationary bubble is affecting the middle income groups as well, and strongly so. It is a site of class struggle because it is in the sphere of reproduction that capital is expropriating labor incomes and wage gains made in the sphere of production.
DV: So, if the SPD's renewal is unlikely, where does that leave the German left? And what about DIE LINKE? DIE LINKE's party program states that the party's goal is to build democratic socialism. The transition from capitalism to socialism implies that the means of production will be owned by those who create (new) value, that is, by the workers. The capitalists are the ones who have these means of production and history has shown us that the expropriation of the means of production has never happened through institutional games imposed by the bourgeoisie, but by open class struggle. However, from the outside, DIE LINKE appears to be a party betting more on electoral success rather than sharpening class struggle. What is your comment on that?
IS: I agree that socialism will be brought about by class struggle. It will be brought about by those who, first of all, have an objective interest in socialism—because they are the propertyless, wage-dependent workers—and who, secondly, have the means of enforcing socialism, because as a class they wield the only power that can challenge the power of capital: the power of withholding their labor power through collective organization and the strike. Because when workers realize that it is they, together with nature, who create all existing social wealth, when they realize that capital is nothing without them, that capital needs them more than they need the capitalists, then socialism becomes a reality, or at least a very real possibility.
The key question, I guess, is what open class struggle means. Generally speaking, I am convinced that social revolution in advanced capitalist societies today depends more on "wars of fixed positions" and less on "wars of movement," more on transforming the capitalist state into a democratic state rather than storming the Winter Palace. Revolution in the West today is not a question of picking up arms against the capitalist state. If you do that, you will be slaughtered by security forces increasingly interwoven with the far right, as the book Extreme Sicherheit shows. And not only that—you will enter the state only to find out that the real power still lies outside the state, lies with capital.
In my view, the class struggle for socialism today needs to organize itself as the left wing of the actually existing labor movement and it needs to form class-based parties. Unions are the workers' shields, the party (or parties) are the workers' sword. DIE LINKE is a socialist party. Its goal clearly is to overcome capitalism and replace it with a socialist society. Even the German social democrats are oriented toward "democratic socialism" on Sundays. And the German Constitution allows for such a transition, as the West German constitutional lawyer Wolfgang Abendroth famously argued during the 1950s Abendroth-Forsthoff debate.
At the same time, recovering from the defeat of the neoliberal turn and rebuilding the labor movement and the socialist left is a very long-term project. It does not make it any easier that the climate crisis, a crisis caused by capitalism and its systemic dependency on growth, does not allow for that time. It actually is a horrid, hard-to-swallow thing. But there are no shortcuts in history, or they come at tremendous costs, such as the Soviet Union's collectivization and industrialization under Joseph Stalin, when revolution in the West had failed and socialism in one country, one underdeveloped and besieged country, was tried.
For DIE LINKE, the key question will be whether its ideational orientation toward democratic socialism is matched with the appropriate strategy. Transformative strategy today goes beyond the old reform/revolution and also beyond the movementism/parliamentarianism rupture. It includes a politics inside, outside, and against the state. My paper for the 2020 Strategy Conference of DIE LINKE calls for an end to the false dichotomy of the new class politics of a connective party on the one hand, and left populism on the other. In my view, outlined in that paper, I call for a dialectical combination of both, partly because we don't have much time left before the crisis of global capitalism, the global rise of the far right, and the impending climate catastrophe leads us to a kind of barbarism that can dwarf the barbarisms of the past three big crises of capitalism: the First World War, the Second World War, and the neoliberal turn from the Volcker Shock to 1989, which was a barbarism in its own right.
↩ Erwin Grandinger, "Deutschland ist inzwischen der kranke Mann Europas," Welt , January 6, 2003.
↩ Ulrike Herrmann, "Renten rauf – auch in Deutschland," Taz , December 9, 2019.
↩ "20 Prozent mehr Rentner gehen zur Tafel," Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 7, 2019.
↩ Markus Pfalzgraf, "Bedürftige sollen lernen, Strom zu sparen," SWR Aktuell , November 21, 2019.
↩ Christian Baron, "Sollen sie doch Ratten jagen," der Freitag , November 13, 2018.
↩ Volker Votsmeier and Sönke Iwersen, "'Wir fühlten uns wie die Größten,'" Handelsblatt , November 1, 2019; Martin Hesse and Anne Seith, "Schäuble wusste früh von Steuertricks der Banken," der Spiegel , February 3, 2017; "Hamburger SPD erhielt Spenden von der Warburg-Bank," Welt , February 17, 2020; Karsten Seibel, "Die 307-Milliarden-Lücke entlarvt Europas großen Mehrwertsteuerbetrug," Welt , January 8, 2020.
↩ Christian A. Conrad, "Der Cum-Ex-Prozess zeigt, dass die Branche wenig gelernt hat," Handelsblatt , November 1, 2019; Seibel, "Die 307-Milliarden-Lücke entlarvt Europas großen Mehrwertsteuerbetrug."
↩ Christoph Butterwegge, "'Die Agenda 2010 war ein Nährboden für den Rechtspopulismus,'" Zeit Online , February 10, 2017.
↩ Klaus Dörre, Prekarität und Soziale Macht , (Vienna: Institut für Soziologie, 2010).
↩ Angela Merkel, "Schroeder Doesn't Speak for All Germans," Washington Post , February 20, 2003.
↩ Sue Arnold, "The Saturday Profile: Oskar Lafontaine: Europe's Most Dangerous Man?," Independent , November 28, 1998.
↩ Ingar Solty, "Die welt von Morgen – Szenarien Unserer Zukunft Zwischen Katastrophe und Hoffnung," Zeitschrift LuXemburg , December 2019.
↩ "Grüne: Bündnis mit Merz denkbar," NTV , February 13, 2020.
↩ Sasan Abdi-Herrle, "Wirtschaftselite für Kanzlerkandidaturen von Merz und Scholz," Zeit Online , November 21, 2019.
↩ "Stichwahl wird wegweisend für den Kurs der SPD," SWR , October 27, 2019.
↩ Ingar Solty, Für Die Verbindende, Neue Klassenpolitik und Für Einen Klugen Linken Populismus (Berlin: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2019).
2020, Volume 72, Issue 02 (June 2020)
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The good-for-business wars
The Brazilian Crisis and the New Authoritarianism
COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism , John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi
How Che Guevara Taught Cuba to Confront COVID-19 , Don Fitz
The Brazilian Crisis and the New Authoritarianism , Anthony Robert Pahnke and Marcelo Milan
The good-for-business wars , Marge Piercy
Culling the herd , Marge Piercy


text:
wjads
Pakistani Taliban cancels ceasefire amid military offensive in North Waziristan
The Pakistani Taliban has declared an end to a ceasefire that allowed the government to begin its military operation in the restive tribal region of North Waziristan, according to a statement released by the…
Written by: Austin
The Pakistani Taliban has declared an end to a ceasefire that allowed the government to begin its military operation in the restive tribal region of North Waziristan, according to a statement released by the group. The operation began on Sunday, the exact timing of which had not been announced until Friday. "The ceasefire between the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan Taliban has come to an end today," read the statement.
It is not yet clear whether the Taliban represents the power once held by the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, or if it is simply a splinter group. However, it does reflect the broader shift in political dynamics on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border over the past year. Prime Minister Imran Khan made a strong statement in favor of an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace process in January, while the Afghan Taliban has taken a less confrontational approach.
"It was nice that the [Pakistani Taliban] called their ceasefire because they were under pressure from the government and there were rumors that the government might attack their hideouts. In fact, the government wanted this peace process as well. But once again it has proved that our enemies have not accepted the writ of the government," said Army Chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa.
For its part, the Afghan Taliban has always indicated an openness to peace talks with the government in Kabul. However, following the announcement of a three-month ceasefire on May 2, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid hinted that his group was ready to make good on its pledge. "We are ready to participate in any peace talks, but the efforts needed to end the bloodshed in Afghanistan have to be put into place by the Afghan government. If it really wants to start peace talks, the process is not in vain if the Afghan government demonstrates a determination to start a serious dialogue and initiate serious negotiations with the Taliban," he said at the time.
Read the full story at USA Today.
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It is a story for people who follow their dreams and make their own rules; a story that has inspired people for decades.
For most seagulls, life consists simply of eating and surviving. Flying is just a means of finding food. However, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is no ordinary bird. For him, flying is life itself. Against the conventions of seagull society, he seeks to find a higher purpose and become the best at doing what he loves. It is a fable about the importance of making the most of our lives, even if our goals run contrary to the norms of our flock, tribe or neighbourhood. Jonathan's story shows us that, if we follow our dreams, we too can soar.
With over 60 million copies of his books sold, Richard Bach remains one of the world's most beloved authors. A former USAF fighter pilot, Air Force captain and latter-day barnstorming pilot, Bach continues to be an avid aviator-author, exploring and chronicling the joys and freedom of flying.


The jury evaluation meeting of the photography competition themed as "Blue", which was organised by the University of Kyrenia Foundation was held on Saturday, 30th April, 2016 at the University of Kyrenia campus.
According to the press info release issued by the Directorate of Press and Public Relations of University of Kyrenia, the presiding juror was photograph artist Kadir Kaba and other jury members were Tijen Erol Yakup, Mehmet Ali Serak (photograph artist), Assist. Prof. Dr. Ediz Tuncel (Near East University), Academic Member Mustafa Ersenal (Near East University), Assist. Prof. Dr. Erdoğan Ergün (Near East University) and Mustafa Müezzinoğlu. It was expressed that the jury members had held a meeting where they evaluated photographs to be exhibited and photographs to be rewarded.
Furthermore, it was pointed out that the Chairman of the University of Kyrenia Foundation, Mutlu Soykurt, had proudly stated that the evaluated pieces were going to be exhibited at the exhibition to be held on Monday, 23rd May, 2016 at University of Kyrenia campus; and that a total of 110 participants had participated in the competition with their 504 photographs.
Moreover, as a result of the evaluation of the jury, 6 photographs were valued to be awarded and 35 others were chosen to be exhibited at the exhibition soon to be held. Chairman of the University of Kyrenia Foundation, Mutlu Soykurt, ended his words by thanking everyone for participating in the photography competition.
It was stated that the awards of the competition would be given out at the exhibition to be opened on Monday, 23rd May, 2016 and that those interested were welcome to come visit the exhibition.


First, navigate to your appearance settings, you can find these by typing the name of the application in the search bar of the menu. Then, click on the fonts tab. You will now see that the "application font" section has a number next to it, which reads "0". Click on this section and then go down where you can change the value of the point size, select any size of font that you would like (10-12pt seems to be a good average value). After that you will be able to see the fonts in every application.
This bug seems to be caused by the default theme having a bug in the default application font size. Hopefully they will fix it soon, knowing the speed of development when it comes to Arch Linux / Antergos.
Anyways, that's all I have for you guys today, just a small fix for an annoying bug!
Previous Article RBG LED Driver Board for Your 3D Printer!


By Dave Winer on Sunday, May 29, 2011 at 5:48 AM.
TechCrunch reports that Facebook is hiring a team in Seattle to work on "desktop" software. If you think about it for five seconds, it's got to be a browser. Of course they're building one, just as clearly as Google was working on a browser before they launched Chrome.
If you want to play at the level that Google and Facebook are, you have to be able to customize the user experience, beyond what you can do in HTML. That means you have to have a browser.
Facebook probably has a camera in development too. And every other thing that can be simplified by assuming you're only communicating with Facebook. And maybe clicking on an occasional link to a news story or catalog outside Facebook.
Update: I did a quick podcast to explain why Facebook is a force for vertical integration.
© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last update: Sunday, May 29, 2011 at 5:56 PM Eastern. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:05:36 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."


Pitches for curated retailers can be added to an order in Creating an Order: Step 2.
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For all skin types, especially Vata/Pitta.
Excellent substitute for soap. Comprises of soap pod, soap nut, vetiver and other precious herbs. Does not strip the skin of its own natural oils. It has been used successfully in minimising skin irritations.