The Restaurants Association of Ireland (RAI) has urged the Government to retain the 9% VAT rate for the hospitality industry in the wake the Department of Finance yesterday calling for the lower rate the be scrapped.
The RAI has stated that the reduction in the VAT rate to 9% has improved the competitiveness of the accommodation and food services sector since it was introduced, and has also helped ensure the viability of many businesses that have been going through challenging times.
The RAI has asked Minister for Finance & Public Expenditure, Paschal Donohoe, not to return the VAT rate to 13.5%.
Chief Executive of the RAI, Adrian Cummins, said: "Seventeen out of 19 Eurozone countries have a VAT rate of below 10%. A 9% VAT rate in Ireland is not only the correct rate for our country, but it is also in line with the rest of Europe. We need this VAT rate particularly now as Brexit negotiations begin, to remain competitive".
Both Minister for Transport, Tourism & Sport, Shane Ross, and Minister of State for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Brendan Griffin, have said that 9% VAT should remain.
Cummins continued: "Against this background of intense uncertainty for the Irish economy in general and the Accommodation & Food Services sector in particular, it does not make sense to increase the VAT rate, given the extra vulnerability that has arisen from the Brexit vote. "
The RAI went on to say that while some parts of the sector are now experiencing improved trading conditions in line with the economic recovery, it is not universal and many businesses are still under significant pressure.
As highlighted by the RAI last month, there is a significant shortage of trained workers in the industry, raising the VAT rate will put a further strain on business owners who are already struggling, it added.
The RAI said that since the introduction of VAT at 9% in 2011, 33,600 direct jobs have been created in the industry, with the taxes accruing to the exchequer from this employment totalled €160 million by the end of 2016.


Many children in the 3 to 4 year age group like to pretend that they are animals or creatures. Tap into that interest and have them learn at the same time with these activities on insect life.
Dramatic play themes often involve costumes, and preschoolers can transform themselves into bugs by making antennae headpieces. The students can wear their antennae during all of the dramatic play activities.
1) Assist the children in bending the bottoms of the pipe cleaners so that they will lie flat against the headband surface. Leave plenty of space for the rest of the pipe cleaners to stick straight into the air.
2) Ask the children to glue their pipe cleaners onto the headbands. When the glue dries, give each child two black pom-poms to glue onto the tops of their pipe cleaners.
Choose some songs about insects, spiders, and other creatures to play during the bug theme dramatic play session. Suggestions include "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider", "The Ants Go Marching", and "Itty Bitty Bug Song".
This activity allows preschool children to work together in creating multi-legged bugs. Instructors can also use this opportunity to teach a counting lesson.
1) Divide the students into groups of three. Ask the children to sit facing forward in a straight line, with one student directly behind another. Tell the children to stretch their legs to the side, forming "six-legged" creatures. Discuss the names of different insects and ask the students in each group to count the legs of their "bug".
This bug theme dramatic play activity allows preschool children to pretend that they are ants in search of food. Teachers can introduce this game by telling the students that ants are drawn to food that is left outdoors and that they can carry pieces of food on their backs.
1) Set up a "picnic table" with a checkered tablecloth, a picnic basket, and plastic food items from a play kitchen set. Use a variety of plastic foods, including pieces of bread, apples, hot dogs, vegetables, and cookies.
2) Ask the children to position themselves on their hands and knees and to line up single-file.
3) Stand at the picnic table and call the "ants" over one by one. As each preschooler crawls to the picnic table, place a piece of plastic food on the child's back. Tell the "ants" to carry their food back to the middle of the room.
4) When all of the children have returned to the middle of the room, they can set the plastic food down on the floor and pretend to have their own "ant picnic".
Engaging in dramatic play with a bug theme allows preschoolers to have fun while learning about how insects look and behave. Teachers may wish to take pictures of the "preschool bugs" to display in the classroom for parents to view.


CLAYTON, NC – The Clayton Rugby Football Club has announced the date for their 3rd Annual General Meeting of Membership. The annual event is the only time that the club meets as a group to discuss club business, review 2016, and look at goals for the upcoming year. The AGM also serves to elect and appoint new Executive Committee members and appoint members to the General Committee. Executive Committee position that are open for election in 2017 are Vice President, Secretary, and Youth Liaison.
The AGM is being held at Deep River Brewing Company on Saturday January 14th, 2017 at 10:00am. Anyone interested in learning more about the Clayton RFC is invited to attend, but only 2016 Dues Paid Members of the club may vote on club matters.
The event will be immediately followed by a social and rugby viewing party at Deep River.
For more information, please see the attached announcement.


Due to a change in circumstances, an incredible opportunity to purchase a new Lagoon 450S at up to 10% off is available.
This new catamaran can still be specified to your requirements until May 30th.
Pick up in Europe in October or take delivery in Australia, the perfect early Christmas gift. Delivery this quick is unprecedented!
The Multihull Groups range has two very exciting world premieres at sea.
This is a story of an adventure taken onboard John Pruims 410.
The Louisiades is made up of thousands of island in Papua New Guinea where the people live traditionally.
Forth time Lagoon owner John Pruim has just become the first Lagoon 50 owner in Australia!!!


text:
See It First: Jessica Wilkerson, John Nichol, and Claire Luana
March 8, 2018 Jenna Chalfonte Comments 0 Comment
We love introducing Instafreebie readers to great stories and big ideas. Take a chance on new authors and try great stories from old favorites. See it first every day with Instafreebie and be free to discover authors you'll love. We're thrilled to share the latest and greatest from our teen and young adult genres!
Phantom Light by Jessica Wilkerson
"If you hold onto this world hard enough, you'll get a grasp on it. But it will get a grasp on you, too, and you won't be able to decide anymore that you're ready to go."
When Valerie Young wakes up from a horrific accident to a world gone gray and cold, she wants to believe anything but the truth of what happened. But as she struggles to accept the dreaded d-word, time is slipping away for her to move on to the afterlife. When she realizes her younger sister has been irreparably altered by the accident, Valerie must choose between a chance at peace and the cold reality of existence as a restless spirit.
Phantom Light is a prequel novella to the Phantoms novel series.
Sacha Martin's Rocket-Ship by John Nichol
Thomai Dion, author of Think-a-Lot Tots Sascha Martin is eight years old, but he's not your average Year Two schoolboy. He lives in the spookiest part of town near his best friend Luca and his not-friend Mary-Alice, and he invents amazing things in a secret lab beneath his room. Sascha's first News of the year is a thumping great rocket that towers over everyone, including the teacher, and there's a button on the side that says: "Don't touch!" Well in a class full of children, that's just a red rag to a bull, isn't it? This maiden flight is a delicious journey into chaos as Sascha Martin's Rocket-Ship crashes through buildings and roars into the skies above Landfill Public School with Sascha, two screaming teachers, an oven full of pies and a growing tail of books and toys and classroom equipment swept along in its wake. With beautiful illustrations by Manuela Pentangelo, and a foreword written by record-breaking rocketeer Sam Ridgway (the first woman in Australia internationally accredited to fly Level 3 High Powered Rockets), this is a book to surprise, delight and inspire both children and their parents. Sascha Martin's Rocket-Ship is a wild, funny, deliciously silly adventure wrapped in rhyming verse and Manuela Pentangelo's beautiful full colour illustrations. Flying pies meet screaming teachers high above Landfill Public School in this debut disaster featuring Sascha Martin, an eight-year old boy whose genius knows no responsibility.
Burning Fate: A Moonburner Novella by Claire Luana
Azura, heir to the throne of Miina, is resigned to her fate. She must marry her mortal enemy in the hopes of ending a centuries long war. But when a handsome and enticing stranger appears on the horizon, she is swept up in an illicit but undeniable romance.
When a false accusation puts her new love's head on the chopping block, Azura must give up all she knows in a daring and desperate plot to save him.
Book Giveaways, Children's, Fantasy, Paranormal, Teen and Young Adult
author giveaways, childrens, claire luana, fantasy, free books for ereaders, free childrens book giveaway, free ebooks online, free fantasy books online, free fantasy reads, instafreebie, Jessica Wilkerson, John Nichol, paranormal, teen and young adult, young adult
See It First: Jillian Ashe, Emma Evans, and Carrie Pulkinen
See It First: Kristi Patrice Carter, Tansy Rayner Roberts, and Beverley Courtney

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I got my Ravelry invite this evening!!!!! Woohoo!!!!! Happy dance!!!!!!
Other than that, I'm supposed to be studying for quizzes that I have this weekend...blah.
I won't have a chance to add anything to my Ravelry stuff until next week when I'm back from school but I now at least have hours and hours of fun ahead of me roaming around in the groups rather than listen to my lectures. Hee hee..
Off I go again...I WILL post regularly, one of these days...let me get that silly piece of paper in my little hand and then watch out!
"I thought there were just knits and purls?"


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Ellen DeGeneres Wears Cher's Famous Sheer Bodysuit in Hilarious Picture
By Joyce Chen
Ellen DeGeneres shared a hilarious photo of herself with Cher wearing matching racy outfits on her Instagram on Tuesday, Apr. 30. courtesy of Ellen DeGeneres
The Queen of Nice has a bone to pick with Cher. Ellen DeGeneres shared a hilarious photo on her Instagram account on Tuesday, Apr. 30, in which she and the legendary singer donned matching racy, barely there outfits.
"I had to change my outfit before the show," the talk show host joked in the caption one day ahead of the singer's sit-down interview. "Cher and I were wearing the same thing. Don't miss tomorrow!"
PHOTOS: Other famous controversial celebrity outfits
In the image, DeGeneres' head is Photoshopped onto the singer's body, wearing the infamous sheer-and-sparkly black leotard and motorcycle jacket that the "If I Could Turn Back Time" singer most recently wore at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards.
DeGeneres, 55, looks ecstatic as she stands next to the singer, a grin on her face and a sailor cap on her head.
PHOTOS: Funniest female stars in Hollywood
Cher, 66, originally wore the iconic outfit for the music video for her 1989 hit "If I Could Turn Back Time," in which she straddled a cannon aboard the battleship USS Missouri and belted out her song to a large group of sailors. The video caused a major controversy over her skimpy costume, and MTV banned the video upon its release, only later airing a censored version during prime time.
During the actual show on Wednesday, May 1, however, the conversation got serious when DeGeneres and Cher talked about the singer's son Chaz Bono's recent weight loss and his decision to come out as transgender.
PHOTOS: Celebrity couples who dress alike
"That's a big deal to come out to the grandmother," DeGeneres said when Cher revealed that it was her own mother, Georgia Holt, who was the first to know.
And DeGeneres' bond with Holt seemed to extend beyond the show. After the show aired, Cher tweeted: "Mom just said 'Thrilling Babe, but Ellen's on, gotta go' did she just throw shade?" to which DeGeneres jokingly responded, "Cher, you know I — sorry, your mom's calling."


Which one is better, AlertPay or PayPal?
I have both AlertPay and PayPal, I haven't sent or withdraw money on either account. Currently I use them only for receiving and sending money from/to PTC sites. I see AlertPay is completely free while PayPal will charge a fee when I receive money (deducted at PTC). I'm wondering... if AlertPay is really free, why people still use PayPay. There has to be a reason. What's your opinion?
No they didn't removed but they should use a secrity for avoid being attacked.
Fortunately the money is not lost. I'd better use less AlertPay.
Paypal is most trusted site than alertpay and many site for shopping online use paypal for money transaction. I have both account but paypal is little bit better in shopping online.
yes, Paypal is more popular in online shopping.


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Trial Lawyer Talk, Episode 67, with Cliff Atkinson
In this episode I'm talking with Cliff Atkinson. I've read Cliff's books, including the fourth edition of Cliff's phenomenal book, Beyond Bullet Points because it has been such a wealth of knowledge and wisdom. I'm delighted to have Cliff with us here today to share his wisdom and knowledge with you. Cliff is a leading expert in visual storytelling in trial. When he started out, his first case was with Mark Lanier which became a humongous verdict and really was a game changer for a lot of lawyers around the country in how to approach opening statements and how to visually tell stories. And since working with Mark Lanier, Cliff has been working with hundreds of lawyers throughout the country. I hope you enjoy the podcast.
https://media.blubrry.com/trial_lawyer_talk/p/content.blubrry.com/trial_lawyer_talk/EP_67_Clif_Atkinson.mp3
Scott Glovsky:
The future. Welcome to Trial Lawyer Talking. I'm so happy to be talking with Cliff Atkinson. I've had Cliff's book and I should say books because I'm now on the fourth edition of Cliff's phenomenal book, Beyond Bullet Points and it has been such a wealth of knowledge and wisdom that I'm super, super happy to have Cliff with us here today to share his wisdom and knowledge with you. Cliff is a leading expert in visual storytelling in trial. And he started out, his first case was with Mark Lanier that became a humongous verdict and really was a game changer for a lot of lawyers around the country in how to approach opening statements and how to visually tell stories. And since working with Mark Lanier, Cliff has been working with hundreds of lawyers throughout the country and really, Cliff, thanks so much for being with us.
Cliff Atkinson:
Thank you Scott. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be with you and to share with your audience some of our expiration of story and storytelling in trial.
Wonderful. Well, let's get going. Tell us, what is the story
That is just a phenomenal question. I mean, so simple yet very profound at the same time. And I think I would probably start the conversation here. That story has become a big thing. And I think probably in our culture at large, we are just in a time of just such an expansion of knowledge and facts and information. And I think with all the proliferation of knowledge, we're wanting some way to make sense of it. And that's what I would say it's a story. A story is a way to make sense out of information, often disconnected information, seeing patterns, seeing structures, seeing something that has some sort of underlying deeper meaning that can connect with.
And so there's so much today in the business world about story, storytelling, how businesses tell story about brands, how brands tell story. And it's so wonderful that as I've been working with attorneys in the last 16 years, that story has always been and continues to be a really central theme, a topic, a tool that people are wanting to learn and to learn more about because I think it's just something that humanity is always used to communicate and make sense out of things. And I think that today more than ever, it's really an important topic for us to explore.
Lawyers get a case and they've got a set of facts and thousands of documents often and witnesses that are saying different things. How do you approach developing a story out of all of the disjointed facts and the legal elements and all of the issues and information that we have floating around in the case?
Scott, there's some really interesting lots of different angles on this. I think one of the most intriguing to me is, I don't know if you remember back in the '70s, there was this whole thing about when they first started doing brain research, there was a whole thing about left brain, right brain. Left brain was supposed to be analytical, right brain was supposed to be creative. And those became kind of inconstant popular culture in our understanding of the brain. But those were just the initial findings or understandings of what the brain has done in those hemispheres. We definitely have two hemispheres. And since then, the research has continued and the latest understanding we have about these hemispheres is that the right brain… I'm sorry, the left brain is about all the details. It's about dissecting, about cutting things into pieces. And we could relate this to the evidence. I mean, it's about the facts. It's about these individual pieces and the detail.
And what we know about the right brain now is it's actually more about this big picture rather than the detail. It's about having this understanding of the whole thing and being able to connect all those dots. So there's one angle where you could look at this where you could say that the field of the law is really about… It's about the law, about the written law, about the concepts, about many abstractions and about these specific details and the pieces of evidence. And really when we start to talk about story and the transformation of that information into story, we're really now moving into this hemisphere about finding that big picture, about being able to tell this in a captivating, engaging way and making an emotional connection.
So I think it's really important because I think that obviously in law school, nobody is teaching any of these methods or techniques or skills of transforming the small pieces into a coherent whole, into telling a story. So I think that if we start to look at it that way, that this is actually helping to stretch our capacity of our brains and our communication to now take this core set of information and now make it more compelling and interesting and connecting those dots. It's really almost a personal development exercise for us because we're getting better at being able to connect the dots and see the big picture. So it's a big question. How do you take all that detail and turn it into a story? And we'll look at that. I think that's going to be a core theme of what we talk about today, how you practically do that.
But I do have to say if there were a couple of basic criteria that that I work with my lawyer clients often, it's about distilling. A big question I might ask when I'm working with a client in one of our full day sessions, yeah, I might start out looking for what are the three most important things you want the jurors to remember after they've heard your opening statement? So that single question, it's like oh, wait, wait a minute. I've got 6 million documents. What do you mean three? That question in itself helps to know, shift and reshift and make you think about things in a different way. And that helps, what I would say is one of the central techniques or tools or ways to work with this. It's about distillation.
It's about taking the 6 million documents and now distilling it down to the three most important things you want somebody to remember. All this is critical thinking work and it's the really hard work that we have to do up front because I think there's that saying, I think it was at Mark Twain, who said, "I would've written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have enough time." The gist of it was something like that that it actually is super, super hard work to be able to make something distilled and boil it down to its essence. So that's really always the upfront and hardest work. When I work with clients, it's probably 60% of that day that we spent together is a critical thinking process of distilling something to its essence and then laying out the chronological framework for what happened in that story.
Okay. Well, let's assume we've got the answers to the three most important things that we want the jurors to remember about our case. What's the next step in the approach to develop a persuasive story?
Well, next it's about finding the chronology, telling the story from beginning to middle and end/ and that then becomes the backbone for the information. Let's say you've got 45 minutes for an opening statement. You've got a beginning, the very first few moments that in minutes to capture the jurors, your audience's attention, to be able to frame what you're going to talk about, to make them feel connected, to make it easy for them to understand. And then you've got the chronology of events. And so ideally as you are working and shaping your ideas and your evidence in this sort of structure from the beginning, middle and end, these classical elements of story need to be there. You've got to have a main character. So I most often work with plaintiff's attorneys. So there's got to be a bad guy and the bad guy is the defendant.
And so I as I work with clients to tell the story about the bad guy, then every statement that we write, everything that we write has got as the subject of that is the bad guy, the name of the defendant. And then the defendant is a big company that's hungry for profit and it is under pressure to deliver. And so it cuts corners and then they hurt somebody. Something like that could be an essential structure for a story, but you've got to figure out and map your facts to some sort of sensible chronological structure laying out what happened from beginning to middle and end. Where was that point that they knew the rules and they decided to break them so that they could make more money. How did they hurt this person? What did they take from them?
So these are those crucial elements of having a plot, who the main character is, the bad guy in this case, what they did, what happened over the course of time, how they tried to cover up. You're looking for telling this story in a chronological sequence. And that really is that imprint of the story structure. In order for people to understand and to connect with the story, it's got to have this story structure. And it's got to be recognizable and that's a core thing that I've been realizing lately is that when you read a lot of these books about screenwriting in Hollywood, they talk about genre. And what they mean like that by genre is a type of stories. Is it a murder mystery? Is it a comedy? Is it a sci-fi? What's the genre?
But part of the reason for having genres is that these are types of stories that people recognize and then either jurors or anybody you talk to needs to be able to recognize the type of story that you're about to tell. So you're not pulling all this stuff out of nowhere. How you craft and structure the story has to have a preexisting framework. It has to have some sort of familiar structure that the folks you're talking to can actually understand and follow along with.
And in cases where lawyers are going up against large corporations that are greedy, for example, what genre would you describe that as?
Well? So I would always say… I would say that some of the interesting things about, especially like I mentioned, I normally work with plaintiffs attorneys, civil cases. So that torque type of story that you're telling is actually technically a tragedy and a tragedy is about a character who might set out doing something with the best of intentions, but then at some critical point, they make a decision that's actually a bad decision and then they end up hurting somebody. And so I would say that tragedy is the underlying story structure. And so with that, one of the interestings about that is this character went, they consciously knew the right things, they made this crucial decision to do the wrong thing. And now you and the jury, so this is the implicit context for this story that you're actually the one that can do something about this. You can prevent them from continuing to harm people in a similar way. You can hold them accountable for what they did.
And so with a sort of tragedy structure, it's so important. And this is the discernment, I think. With Hollywood movies, with fictional movies, the story is almost a complete package. It's all like a… Some of them are maybe even a morality tale. You watch the story from beginning, middle and end and you see what happens. And at the end you clap or you don't clap or you just… You've had some sort of emotional impact and then you move on with your life, but you don't actually do anything at the end.
But one of the core distinctions with the story to a jury is that they actually… And one of the big opportunities is to make the jurors really feel the truth of the situation is that they are actually participants in the story. So with this a tragedy story structure, at the end of it, the jurors actually have through their completion and the creation of an ending to the story, they can bring this to justice. They could hold the bad guy accountable. And so this is so important that it is actually more interesting, I would say, than Hollywood movies because you do get to immerse them, have the opportunity to immerse them and let them feel that they are the main characters of the story. So although there's the bad guy on a loose, they can be the good guys themselves and they can bring the situation to justice for their community.
So the jurors are actually the heroes as written about by my friend, Carl Bettinger?
That's right. So the jurors, you want to make the jurors the heroes for sure. And that is so important because in… So you really have to make the jurors care about this. They have to be able to first of all… One of the hard things you have to do, especially in some of the most difficult cases or patent cases, but you've got to take that to the core facts of the information, the evidence and frame it in a way that's relatable to the jurors. So in that patent example, maybe this is about stealing, taking something that doesn't belong to you, but you've got to frame it in a way that makes it relatable that the jurors can actually see this happening in their everyday lives. They can understand it. And then they have the ability to be able to do something meaningful, right? So you've got to connect it emotionally with the folks you're talking to. They've got to care.
And if they don't care and if they don't feel an emotion about this, then you've really lost them. So the opportunity is to frame the information and the story in a way that makes them care, makes them involved, makes them feel like they are, like you just said, the hero of the story. And when they're the hero, then you can't really get more involved and connected than that.
How do we do that? In other words, how do we get the jurors to care, to feel that they're a participant in the story and to really want to be moved, to be connected and emotionally connected and to ultimately take action?
And without violating the golden rule, right? Without being explicit about the saying you and speaking directly to them. So I would say my story to share on that was actually this very first case I worked on. So a little bit of my back story. So my background is English journalism. I did work. I was in the military, did work that's pretty similar to corporate communications. And then I figured out after PowerPoint came out that you could actually tell a story, get to the point and also make it visual at the same time. So I figured out PowerPoint and began writing these articles about how you can… You don't have to put text on the screen. It could be visual. It could be like a film.
And then Microsoft invited me to write a book about it. And I wrote Beyond Bullet Points that it came out in 2005 and it was written for a business audience. And Mark Lanier was working on his first Vioxx case. He read my book and invited me to come out to help him with that case. And I said I've never worked with lawyers, I've never been in a courtroom, I don't even know how to do this. And he said, no, in your book, I see what I would like to do in this case. I want to distill this, I want to make an impact on the jury, I want to make it visual. I want to use PowerPoint to do this. So I flew out, worked with him and then created this… To create this opening statement that he delivered. And I described that in chapter one of the Beyond Bullet Points book.
And in that, so the gist of his opening that he gave, so this is the very first Vioxx trial and it was Carol Ernst who was the plaintiff and she was suing a pharmaceutical company for prescribing Vioxx to her husband who then took it and it was a cause of his heart attack. So if you could picture this, on the big 10 foot screen behind him was just a picture of Bob and Carol out on a date. And then Mark just said, well, let me tell you the story about Bob and Carol. They were both single late in their lives. Hadn't expected to meet anybody at this point, but Carol's daughter introduced her to Bob on a blind date and they hit it off. And pretty soon, they fell in love and they got married and they were married together for 11 months. So then on the screen, there's this picture of the two of them on a date and then suddenly the picture of Bob disappears.
And then there's a chalk outline. And then Mark says, he clicks and then the next image is the CSI logo. And he says you get to be like CSI detectives. You get to follow the evidence and figure out what killed Bob Ernst. So with that very… There were just very, very simple images at the beginning, but the story is set up in a way. Actually, it sounds very simple, but rhetorically and strategically and tactically below the surface is a lot happening. And one thing is that it's just introducing this story with just the backdrop of a big picture of this couple. Suddenly the background disappears and there's a chalk outline, which is now rhetorically shifting the case from a product liability case to a different kind of case that has a chalk outline around a body.
And then now click going to the next slide with the CSI logo, now you get to be like CSI detectives. So this has reframed this case. Now it's a more like a murder mystery, just like a CSI show, which is framing that the jurors already understand and get that. And now they get to be detectives. So that would be an example those. This was just the very first minute, two minutes of this opening, but already that's one practical example of how it is that you can draw a jury, your audience into the story and make them feel really involved. So that particular theming, which by the way, came from jury questionnaires when we'd asked them, well, what's one of your favorite TV shows? Well, a lot of people put CSI. So we were just taking from those questionnaires and from the jury themselves, a familiar framing. This is a framing that's already in popular culture.
The genre of a murder mystery already in a crime scene investigation is already imprinted, already exists. So that's, again, what I was referring to earlier, having some sort of framing and a genre that the audience already understands. And then now by connecting those two, now the jury gets to be involved. They get to feel like they get to be the detective. So the rest of the opening, the rest of the trial, then they are empowered to be able to go forward and look at all the evidence and hear both sides of the story. So that's just a practical example, but other ways. So that was a very front loaded in terms of we made it more explicit, but that would be just one very practical way that you can do that.
Yeah. What a great, great example. Can you think of any other examples of ways that you've integrated story to make the jurors feel connected, involved, part of it?
Yeah. So I'd say another, recently on a trucking case. So the technique here was to have a picture. And this was working with photographs that had already been entered as evidence. So this was a photograph of a very busy road, like a highway that had big trucks going both ways. And so the beginning of the story was just this picture and the intent behind it as the lawyer is beginning to tell the story is to bring the jurors into being on the road and driving. And all of us have had these big 18 wheelers just passing by us at 70 miles an hour. There's this feeling of stress and of danger of having these big trucks around. And so with this as the backdrop, it's about saying it could be… There are many ways to verbally, to tell this story, but one might be the big picture, big trucks could be January 2013. Sue and Bob and their three kids were in their truck going to visit their grandmother for one of the kids' birthdays.
They assume that everybody on the road was driving safely. We all count on the laws and for companies to be able to follow the rules and be safe for everybody on the road. In a split second, the 18 Wheeler you see on your left cross the median hit them head on and instantly kill the entire family. They never got to see the grandma. So with that, it's just implicitly kind of painting a picture, having like… All of us have been on these roads and seen the big trucks coming in the other direction. The idea behind it is just to be able to bring in the audience, make them feel like this is something that they've experienced or that, that could happen at any point.
And so at the end of this story, to loop it back around, the company had cut a lot of corners and put unsafe drivers on the road. And by the end of it, to loop it all around, the jurors felt empowered that when they held this company accountable for what they did, the roads would then be safe for themselves, for others, for anybody else that's driving. So the general gestalt of it is to tell a story, paint a picture that the jurors can relate to and then connecting all of those dots to the facts and the specifics of your case.
Let's talk about visual storytelling. I know you are the expert in visual storytelling. First, can you share with us what that means?
Well, so let me put it this way. I would say that a story is a story. And as I mentioned with this day long consulting session I do, 60% is just on the structure of the story, just on the words. How are we going to… What's the theme? How are we going to tell the story? What's the chronology? What's the evidence that's going to back up what we're saying before we get into the slides. So by the end of that half a day, 60% of the day, if the lawyer just stood up and told that story verbally without visuals, it would be a clear, concise, easy to understand, strong theme, big anchor points to grab onto with just words alone. So I would at a fundamental level, just say that a story's got to stand on its own with just words.
And once you've got those words in place, you've got a solid theme, you've painted the word pictures, then when you add visuals to continue to magnify that story, you now take things into the next stratum, the next dimension because we live in such a visual culture today. There's a reason why now all of us can pick up a phone and go through Instagram, look at pictures. Our eyesight is just such a predominant, such a huge way that we perceive information through visuals. So there's so much research about how powerful visuals can be, but just looking at our phone, it's just we've become such a visual culture at such an accelerated rate that once you've got the verbal structure in place, visuals are going to make it that much more powerful.
So in that Vioxx case that I mentioned, so Mark's team interviewed the jurors six months later, they still remembered the opening statement. They still remembered visuals and themes from the opening statement. So visuals are going to help make things sticky. Visuals can help communicate information. They say picture is worth 1,000 words, meaning that it can communicate instantly what many words would take a lot longer to do. So we can accelerate communication. It can be used… Visuals can be used just an explicit way saying here's a truck and then here's a picture of the truck, but it could be used in a way where you just put up a picture of a truck that's clearly barreling down recklessly at 90 miles an hour and that without even saying anything about the truck speeding, a picture can get across that this is a dangerous vehicle going down the road.
So it can not just communicate explicit information, but also can get across a lot more information than even what you might say verbally. So it's going to accelerate communication, it's going to make your ideas stickier. It's going to communicate information in often a more efficient way than just words alone. But I would always say that there has got to be the verbal foundation and then the visuals are now going to take it to the next dimension.
I know you have a great section in your book about using storyboards to develop the story, but what would you say is the process from once you have your story to approaching and developing your visual story?
So if you've never well worked in PowerPoint, there's a view in PowerPoint. At the ribbon at the top, it says View and then you pick slides sorter. And then from this perspective, usually you might, if you worked in PowerPoint, you might just work on a single slide. When you go to view slides sorter, you see all the slides together at once. So when you first open a brand new PowerPoint with nothing in it, you can take and ideally this would just be a slide with a white background. You just duplicate that 40 times and look at slides order and you just see what looks like just 40 blank index cards, 40 blank screens, 40 blank frames of a movie. And that is, I would say, the number one place to start. When you look at a blank, I call that a storyboard, but just 40 blank slides in a row, then you can look at the upper left corner and say what's, if as I have my story in place, what's the very first thing I'm going to show and say?
And then the lower right, you're going to say what's the very last thing I'm going to show and say. And then what are the three most important things I'm going to show and say in between? So that, by beginning to look at it from the big visual picture, then you can start planning out from the first thing you show to the last thing you show and everything in between in a visual way. And you can start to plan, is this going to document, a photograph? Is this going to be just a blank screen? There at that point as you're looking at the big picture, you can start to plan out the visuals beginning, middle to end.
And how do you figure out what visuals to use?
Well, the bulk of the visuals you use are going to be the evidence to you've got. So this will be an email, then a zoom on a part of that email. This will be a still from a video deposition where somebody is speaking and then you do a pull quote over to the right. Yes, we knew the safety rules, but we did not follow them, as an example. So it's going to be documents, it's going to be videos, video clips, any illustrations, 3D animations that are showing a brain injury, for example, showing the impact, showing what happened to the brain, showing medical records, showing anything else. So family photos of before and after, what they looked like before, what they looked like after. So the bulk of the visuals that you have should be… Probably 70% would be the actual evidence and showing the documents, emails, video clips, illustrations as well.
In addition to that, if you do have some thematic elements, then you might use a very simple image to try to convey that. So for example it's a big theme in many of these cases about money that a company was pursuing money. And so some ways to illustrate that money might be let's say they've got an annual report and their revenues that year were $3.6 billion and so you do a zoom of the $3.6 billion. Could be that you just put the number $3.6 and then billion. Just that text right there could operate as a graphic. Or if you're able to use it, it could be a big stack, big mound of $100 bills sitting on a slide. If you would be able to do that with the judge you're working with and that jurisdiction. Some folks can do that, some folks cannot.
So with that, the bulk of your graphics and your visuals will be the evidence and zooming and putting that sort of information as visuals. And then it might be a combination of creating some custom animations or illustrations. It could be some stock, I would say, limited stock photography. Problem comes up with stock photos and that everybody's using them or they become cheesy. So you're just wanting something to be something the jurors find relevant and interesting. But other sources of visuals could be your own phone. If you were able to go to the crash side or if you could do go take a picture of a car or a truck or any damage that happened, you're wanting to use as much from the actual case. That's much photographs as much of the actual documents as you can because that's going to be the core of your visual credibility.
So you're wanting this to be the actual evidence and it's important that that's the bulk of it because there may be a tendency to just use clip art or just to do cute and funny things that I might have found this cute clip art from the internet. Having too much of that, then it diminishes that visual credibility. And there's not really the concrete backup for that. So you want to as much visual evidence as you can to use. And I'm not saying that it has to be sitting on a PowerPoint slide. I do want to emphasize that if you've got a document, it may be that at some point in the presentation, then you switch your screen from your PowerPoint over to your Elmo or your IPEVO and you show the actual document that you have sitting on a table and you take out a highlighter or you underline it and then you switch back to your presentation.
So when we're looking at visuals, it's not just PowerPoint, but it might be showing on the screen your document projector. It could be using a physical prop. You could have a red flag sitting up. There are many, many different kinds of visuals to that you could use. And it's not just limited to PowerPoint. There's lots of opportunity to mix it up and it's really important that you do do that. It's important to mix up the media to really take a approach here you're wanting to make this interesting and varied and to be switching from the PowerPoint to the IPEVO and back to a board, you're wanting to connect the story with the visuals, but have a lot of visual variety in the way you present your ideas.
Let's talk a little bit about the first three minutes of an opening statement because I know you do a lot of work in that area and that would help us also I think understand a lot of the larger issues that we're talking about.
So I think a great way to explore this, I just got a subscription to the Courtroom View Network that does recordings of opening statements or trials. And that's a great resource. If you don't have a subscription there, I'm not selling it. I don't have any stake in that, but I just think it's great to be able to go in and watch people give opening statements and closings and watch what they do in between. And so I think that I actually is a really interesting thing to do just from my perspective. My interest is in just looking at the first three minutes of opening statements and just seeing what people are saying. And it's so interesting because I think that we can generally agree with what psychologists and learning experts, people in film and television. Oh, there's actually a great interview if you've got that Masterclass account. If you have heard of Masterclass, it's a learning platform where different people, experts teach various topics.
And one of the classes is by Ken Burns, the guy who's the big documentary maker and he has one of his classes about the very first things you say when you open up a story. And I think across all of those different types of learnings and understandings about the beginnings of stories, there's a general agreement that at the very beginning, you've got to get a lot done. You've got to make an impact, most often by having a hook at the beginning, something that's intriguing and interesting. Just think of the beginning of just about every television show where you start watching it and something interesting is happening. That's you might not understand completely, everybody who's there, what's happening, but it's something really interesting and intriguing that's grabbing you in.
So there's a general agreement I think, is that with an audience, especially on television where, streaming services, there's so much opportunity to go do somewhere else to click somewhere else. So there's got to be some… You've got to grab people's attention and hook them and pull them in. So I think that that's a general principle to have a hook, to draw them in. And that also, at this very beginning point. So it is so important in the first three minutes to be able to capture your audience's attention, to hook them in and to draw their interest forward to help them feel an emotion about what you're talking about, to lay out a framework where you're going to take them, to make them feel relaxed, to make them feel engaged, to make them feel like they care about what's happening.
It's so important especially these days with so much media out there. People could quickly start watching something, they're not interested and they move on to something else. So some underlying principles that folks who study this generally apply is that you've got to hook somebody, you've got to grab their attention and to make them care about what you're talking about out, to relate it to something they're interested in. So I think across many, many different professions, folks who study this, this would be educational psychologists, this would be people who study the psychology of persuasion and influence, that the general principles are about that. About the first thing you say is going to be super important. The primacy principle, what you say first is important. But also, especially these days, the need to be able to hook people into the content that you're talking about to make them feel like they're engaged, interested and to draw their attention and have them lean forward.
So doing that would be all these elements. You've got to frame what you're talking about, to tell a story, make it interesting and that you really do have this narrow window of opportunity because people will zone out very quickly. So, so important. You could write it in entire book just about the first three minutes, but I would say that it's just super important that the first things you say have the greatest impact. And it's really important because I think that often especially in many of the openings I've watched or been a party to, is that very often the very first things could be full of fluff and something that's not really important where the opportunity really is to do the hook to grab somebody's attention.
And that's why I would say, so we've talked about story a lot and that's the theme of what we're talking about and about your podcast, but that's actually a wonderful way to begin an opening is actually just jump right into a story. You could do that by just saying August 15th, 2019, John was headed in his car to go see blah, blah, blah. So that with that painting of the story and just saying the date, somebody's going somewhere, then boom, something happened. How did that happen? Well, let's back up and we'll tell the story. So that's a concept or the idea of front loading that you very quickly get to the emotional heart of it. And this is the technique in television shows where you turn on the TV and something at the beginning of the episode, something is happening, something very dramatic. You don't know who everybody is, but then the show is going to back up and unpack that for you and guide you through the process.
So what you say at the very beginning is the most crucial and important things that you're going to say because that's really working with this very small window of opportunity to grab the attention of your jurors, your audience and to make them care about this so they're going to hang on with you through the rest of the story.
Wow. Well, cliff, this is amazing. Your insight is really fantastic. And I firmly believe that every trial lawyer should have your book, Beyond Bullet Points on their desk. In a way, PowerPoint is simply an outlining program and it's sort of a blank slate on which a lot of lawyers, myself included, in the past, have just sort of used as a crutch to sort of make a list. And what I think is so powerful about your book is not only do you really have a step by step guide of how to approach story, develop story, tell story, show story. It's really just a tremendous resource that trial lawyers should look at every case through. And I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today and I'm looking forward to learning from you more. And I hope one day you'll come back and hopefully soon share with us some more of your insight.
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me and yeah, I feel that we're just opening the first chapter of a book about stories. So definitely I would love to come back and chat with you more about a lot of this stuff, but thank you so much for having me, Scott. I appreciate it.
Oh, thank you.


text:
The Corruption of Parenthood
Consequences of Protestant Tampering with the Ten Commandments
by Friedrich Hansen (January 2022)
Rembrandt van Rijn, who lived from 1606-1669 in Leiden and Amsterdam, identified himself with the Counter-Reformation. He can probably be taken as a forerunner of family resilience and an opponent of state interventionism avant la lettre. At the time he was reacting to the Dutch reform of the fifth commandment predated by the even more radical German national revolution. The Reformation of Martin Luther had basically handed over personal conscience to the state as it was codified after the Thirty Year War. The state where you happened to live, determined how you would have to worship. This is the political context which prompted Dutch Reformers in the 17th century to downgrade the obligation to honour your parents from the duties toward the divine which are codified in the first half of the ten commandments.
The original Jewish fifth commandment stressed a firm connection between tradition and freedom as it can only preserved in the family. It also refers to the importance of personal choices following Moses' option for life/law over death/impulse. Importantly the fifth commandment, as codified in the Torah, is the only one that comes with a reward: a long life in the Promised Land. For the land Israel contains the fruits of God's creation needed to feed his creatures. Yet in order to live sustainably these resources have to be used carefully which in turn demands experience transmitted over many generations. Hence only children informed by their parents' prudence can make good choices. After all if children and adolescents are left to their own devices they will take lots of unnecessary risks.[1]
Unfortunately the Reformation would not have any of this. It is for this reason that it cancelled the primacy of ritual and deed which had sustained Judaism over many millennia. The reformers obscured them with the internalization of Jesus Christ. But as the British say: you cannot eat your cake and have it too. The source of divine bliss cannot be devoured as Protestantism claimed. It has to remain external if it is to be sustainable and permanent. This Jewish principle had been abandoned by universal Catholicity which is why its condition remains precarious today. Even worse is the situation of Western Protestantism thanks to the abandonment of traditional liturgy and rituals in the Reformation.
Rembrandt: "Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law," 1659
Thanks to its inward turn, instead of looking after your neighbour and honouring your parents, looking after themselves became the Protestant raison d'etre - enhanced by the indulgence of music. Rather than charitable deeds, faith was the important thing: "sola fide" as Martin Luther would put it. Since piety became invisible when it was turned "inward", outward awe against one's parents became invisible too and would eventually fade away. In the long process of secularisation, stretching over five centuries, it would be substituted by the liberal and self-referential virtues of "honesty and sincerity" in the phrase of Lionel Trilling.
Following the inward turn the Reformers not only disentangled the rewards for piety but also the objective criteria for religious observance. The beneficial subordination to parental experience vanished and a culture of immediate gratification of instincts was encouraged, putting the West on the path of a smorgasbord of addictions. The denial of external and intangible divine blessing and ritual would rebound with the dependency from ritualized external tangible substances. Soon after the Reformation alcohol consumption reached an average of four litres of met/vine a day, as we learned from a recent German exhibition on the Thirty Years War. It is for this reason that modern emancipation from "religious superstition" and parental authority would pave the way for modern additions to identity, including sexual identity which keep undermine common sense, good will and Western constitutionalism. Even the latest awakening of the undying Protestant indulgence in self-righteousness, wokism, points to a Puritan legitimacy gap reaching back to the European break of generational continuity reflected in the Protestant Reformation.
As they arrogated themselves the Jewish claims to "God's chosen people," Protestants in fact turned themselves into its very opposite: the proverbial "self made man." As a result they would gradually forget about the duty of honouring traditions and devotion ot parenthood. Another way of looking at this while presupposing that the Reformation involved a process of "internalization" is that Christ took the place previously inhabited by one's parents. This gendered Christian succession of Judaism is the most likely candidate for driving the feminist craving for justice. This would be perhaps the most detrimental result of the Reformation.
All this illustrates the importance of the downgrading of the Jewish fifth commandment from "duties against the divine" toward mere duties against the neighbour, which make up the second half of the ten commandments. This crude intervention removed the divine aura of parenthood from the Christian creed and also ruined the privileged role of the family as the pillar of nationhood. By levelling divine with human duties the Reformation set Europe on the road toward secularisation.
Rembrandt was one of the first to recognize the danger of these changes and with his Moses painting he reminded everyone to the original Jewish rendering of the fifth commandment. He would have certainly supported today's homeschooling which has sprang up again fairly recently in the Anglosphere. Only in Germany still dominated by Lutheran doctrines it is still forbidden, in keeping with legislation created by the state-centred Nazis. This Protestant blunder with the sanctity of the family follows the prior Catholic blunder with regard to the Jewish egalitarian gender dyad by creating a male representative of God in the netherworld. The Torah fashioned the gender dyad in the particularist Mosaic synthesis of monotheism with monogamy as the marriage of complementarity and unity between the natural sexes.
This delicate institutional frame was destroyed by the universalist and emancipatory "passio Christi" of Pauline Theology. Originally serving as a symbolic mitigation of the Greek same-sex dyad Pauline principles were reflecting the existential alienation between the sexes in Athens. That male-male affinity stretched loyalty beyond the family into peer groups and polytheism. The effect was to flatten out the vertical of authority which in antiquity used to inform many generations of the family under monotheism. Drawing on the culture of Hellenism one of the leading effects of the Reformation was upending the biblical male-female relationship of transcendent unity.
After the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem Jesus Christ had substituted the Jewish biblical dyad of the sexes with a male-centred theology which inspired the dreadful crusades in the medieval world of knights. Its misogynic Christian undertones were rooted in Paul's famous letter to the Corinthians. Thus the centripetal orientation of the Jewish family was lost very early on. In auditive Judaism the centripetal family is maintaining the precarious balance between love and justice. Under Christian Hellenism this balance has been inverted into centrifugal peer relations depending on the visual sense, centred on power and envy.
Paul's letter to the Corinthians is still the most influential example for transcending the family nexus of generations based on oral parental transmittance of divine revelation. This is encapsulated in the unique particularist and centripetal setting of the Jewish "auditive paradigm" representing the proximity of family bonds. Pauline quasi-horizontal universalism aimed at replacing this vertical setting of the family, its particularism of oral transmittance of divine revelation as the glue of the generations. All this speaks to the similarity between divine and parental authority which is wedded to the auditive paradigm. The religious image ban protects parental authority by the prohibition to see one's parents naked. By contrast the Pauline attempt to remove divine revelation from the family context was prone to transgress the natural reach of the spoken word. Inevitably and predictably it is from the Pauline universalist ambitions that the need for visual proofs of divinity emerges. Hence Christ stands for the transgression of the family bounds by which the female connotation of the Jewish God, named shekinah, gets lost. Spatial Pauline expansion and the reach for universal immanence instead betray the substitution of family love with church power which emerged from Mediterranean Hellenism associated with the male gender. It is for this reason that the imagery mobilized with Jesus Christ in the netherworld was bound to unravel the concept of transcendental authority which was rooted in the divine imprimatur of Hebrew's aversion to written vowels.
Seen from a different angle, Christ's incarnation made it difficult to keep the monotheist "image ban" in place. For Christ has relativized the sanctification of time over space given the enchanted biographical places of Jesus. The attachment to places and corporeality condemned Christians to wait for gratification and punishment in the afterlife making it difficult to learn from mistakes in this life. Michael Wyschogrod noted astutely that the notions of divine eternity and Jewish hope had been compromised by the fact that Christ had already made an appearance on earth once. The proxy saviour literally disrupted the natural order of the family with an androgynous mixed character, a tertium comparationis inserted between male and female roles, which to this day confuses natural gender complementarity. In no uncertain terms Christ emerged as a metaphysical projection into visibility of the transcendent, i.e. exclusively audible, Jewish God. Visibility was meant to provide certainty through tangible proof in the universal imagery of Christ. But the price to be paid for this was abandoning the particularistic Jewish family and love of life which seems to be tied to the limited range of the human voice.
Michelangelo Pieta 1498/99, St Peter Basilica Rome
Particularism and Piety
Universalism disrupts the natural bond of proximity between hearing and obeisance constituting the divinatory family. In its Greek visual rendition the word "divining" means foresight tied to the gods. This was a setback against the Jewish concept of divination on the level of the auditive sense internalized as "promise," subject to the personally kept word. The Christian disruption of this concept occurred first with Paul, would then be deepened by Augustine only to be made irreversible with Luther and Calvin during the Reformation. This brings us back to the changes of the ten commandments, initiated by the Dutch reformers, to which Rembrandt took offence.
In its Jewish version it obliged the pious person to honour one's parents as the image of the divine following the pious obligation of imitatio dei. It teaches us to let go of appetites, postpone desires and sacrifice personal will for the sake of peace in the family. This attachment to divinity is consoling parents who by nature are called first to make sacrifices when raising children. The sacrifices of parents for their children are derivative to the Rabbinic internalization of the animal sacrifice in late antiquity, sacrifices which were at the heart of traditional Jewish Temple service. This is of course a complicated matter. Suffice it to say that these parental sacrifices are as far from the Oedipus-complex as it goes in particular concerning any supposed rivalry or envy between parents and children or fathers and sons.
The significance of Moses is this: only thanks to him the monotheism of Abraham advanced beyond the polygamous arrangements of the Old Testament and embraced the world of monogamy revealed at Sinai. Only in the monogamous family human envy is mitigated through internalization and by this refined to jealousy. While envy works through power, jealousy works through love. Unapologetic divine jealousy was penetrating the patriarchal order and its visual shame culture but would be contained within the family upon the emergence of mosaic guilt culture at Sinai.
All this is said to help understand the order of the ten commandments. Primacy of the auditive paradigm in Judaism means that within the family children are subject to jealousy and guilt while envy is reserved for non-animated matter, things and typologies of shame. This crucial distinction informs the separation of the divinely first half of the commandments (one through five) from the neighbourly second part (six through ten).
Which brings us back to the ambitious operation of the Protestant North concerned with political control of the "wild" mediterranean Renaissance brimming with individualism. For this end Luther and Calvin would shift personal conscience to the state. They accomplished this by lowering conscience from the transcendent auditive to the metaphysical visual paradigm which in turn necessitated the lowering of the fifth commandment from the divine to merely civilian human, conducive to the birth of the republican spirit of cooperation. Yet the Reformers not only profaned parenthood but they almost ruined the concept of the immortality of the soul – something that concerned Counter-Reformers like Rembrandt. For they knew this would endanger the divinely ordered continuity of family names and the flow of property between the generations.
Inevitably schools would take over the parental role of oral transmittance of biblical revelation toward the next generation. Yet to listening to your parents as a child deserving of love is entirely a different matter than learning in school, let alone the consequences of the state seizing control of the conscience of its citizens. We cannot go into this further, suffice it to say that the disenfranchisement of religious conscience was of fundamental importance because it undermined parental authority and the biblical foundations of the family. Which brings us back to Rembrandt von Rijn. His rendering of Moses, descending from mount Horeb, has his face radiating. What is shining through here is the divine countenance and the unique power of the family to contain the fear of death. By contrast the "radiating" Moses carved out of stone by Michelangelo a century earlier, shows him with horns and made him look like the devil.
Now Rembrandt's painting of "Moses" shows not the whole man but only a close-up. It exhibits an emphasis on the tablets, Moses hands, and his face, with the rest executed rather hastily. The Hebrew letters of the fifth commandment are rendered in meticulous detail in order to expose the Jewish version of the ten commandments as opposed to the reformed version. Looked at from the edge of family life the ten commandments reflect the tension of a bridge over the hiatus of the sexes which are spread between the two poles of divine jealousy and human envy. As aready mentioned, jealousy dominates the first half of the ten commandments and envy the second. Now if you cut the fifth commandment from the jealousy section, as the Dutch Reformers did, and shift it to the envy section, the divine blessing of the gender dyad is being corrupted. As a result family life is made difficult because it loses the centripetal pull of divine love. Jealousy turns out to be the carrier (chariot) of the centripetal pull of the Jewish family. The Christian lowering of the divine to the visual paradigm reverses the centripetal pull into the universal and centrifugal Pauline Jesus. For jealousy and love are the preserve of the transcendent God and the family partakes in it through parenthood by conveying its focus on love of life, procreation and transmittance of Torah. Now the first half of the commandments, the inner jealousy section, addresses the transcendent realm reserved for obeisance to God. In this vein the auditive paradigm protects the vertical authority of traditions and intergenerational continuity. Outward human envy rules the second half of the commandments and the netherworld of property while the first half with the gender dyad puts up a fence toward reification and profanation.
Rembrandt knows how to engage us with this fence against reification. Following the trend of his time he uses for this purpose the motive of the night. In the iconography of nocturnal scenery animated human features such as faces are enhanced and non-animated things are hidden under drapery or fading away. This is meant to evoke the charisma of the Orient, the home of monotheism. In the Semitic cultures the day begins in the evening and ends in the morning and the night is the natural refuge of love. It seems safe to suggest that dark backgrounds in Renaissance paintings refer to the Eastern legacy of occidental monotheism which persists in the magic of the night. Rembrandt is dwelling on the secret religious affinity of nightlife if read literally as the realm of divine invisibility under the auditive paradigm. What Rembrandt's Orientalism reveals to us, it would appear, is that limits and morals emerged from Jewish separations such as the distinction between night and day which transferred to the West may elicite a unique fascination. Rembrandt also seems to suggest that the control of instincts is not a given in the absence of tradition. This has to do with our limited intelligence, compensated as it is only by sharing the wisdom of others, namely our ancestors, ultimately resulting in tradition and common sense.
Immortality or Identity
The fifth commandment ties parenthood to divine authority derived from eternity by creating the notion of an immortal soul, carried as it is by family names through the generations. Thus fear of death is contained by neutralizing or eclipsing the fact of individual mortality. In the monotheist tradition the human body partakes only in the netherworld while the human soul is considered part of infinity. But Christ as internalized by the Reformation spoiled this precious consolation by obscuring the difference between human finitude and divine infinitude. As a result of this our obligation to listen to our parents and the commandments gave way to visual imitation and the Lutheran infatuation with the senses, namely music. This gradually diminished the sanctifying charisma of parenthood and oral transmission of tradition by delivering education from the family context. Equally obsolete became the immortality of the soul and its role in the coherence of generations of families. While this seems more true for Christianity, in Judaism the same happened with assimilation. This set off after the dissolution of Jewish ghettos in the wake of the French Revolution. The latter is sometimes labelled as the Second Reformation suggesting that it brought the disruptions of Christian visualisation to Judaism.
With the enlightenment, the West developed an awareness of the ontological gap between hearing and viewing but it also eclipsed the idea of the inner religious self. Ever since antiquity the inner self has been associated with divinity, eternity, unchangeable human nature in contrast to volatile scientific truths. Rembrandt's scriptural topos of the radiating Moses allows us a glimpse into the inner workings of charisma informed by divine transcendence. It is irreducibly tied to oral revelation and the auditive paradigm.
Rembrandt's rendering of Moses with the tables, arranged in the old order of two parts – duties towards God vs duties toward humans – is apt to maintain some measure of the monotheist image ban. It protects both, divine and parental authority, which belong naturally to the realm of hearing and its mental representation to which I have been referring as the auditive paradigm. Rembrandt raises the voice of the moral inner Self defending the auditive paradigm as well as the primacy of ritual. It includes the Jewish preference of deeds over cognition and of binding promises over lofty Protestant confessions.
In conclusion, for good reasons it is often said that Jews only listen to their God but never see him. As a result of this auditive Jewish particularism family love is able to redeem tangible envy into intangible jealousy. Just as the monotheist God by virtue of transcendence is void of any attributes, so are monogamous parents utterly selfless at least ideally. Based on the latter the family sustains the auditive and intangible guilt culture, which ultimately depends on oral transmission of revelation. Moses' revelation of monogamy replaces irreconcilable envy of the old patriarchal and polygamous shame culture.
The Christian church, however, shifted the focus away from the particularist family towards the individuality of Christ understood as universal proxy redeemer and represented by the oblate in the Christian supper service. Which is why according to the novelist Umberto Eco, the church imagines its clients as individuals "fallen from heaven" - in Latin ex coeli oblatus - as if existing askance of family bounds. The Christian oblate has an entirely different purpose than Jewish Manna. It survived in the notion of human "thrown-ness" (into this world) defined as the ontological principle of the Nazi-philosopher Martin Heidegger, which is hostile to the family.
By contrast Rembrandt in his rendering of Moses' "radiating face" to the patriarchal display of the iconic divine face of Eastern Christianity. Much closer to Judaism than the Western churches with regard to the image ban, Eastern Orthodoxy preserved the Rabbinic mix of priest and family man. This brings us back to Michelangelo's sculpture above for it represents the transition from medieval patriarchy to the matriarchate of the Renaissance. In Michelangelo's "Pieta" the mother is holding a creature in her arms that looks like a hybrid between child and husband. In the first millennium the Christian evening lands had been represented by the male Jesus, but the second millennium belonged to Mary. This attempt to counter the gender bias of the Christian gospel continues in political feminism, which sells out immortality and family for volatile sexual identity.
[1] https://www.city-journal.org/conservatism-populism-peter-berkowitz.
Friedrich Hansen is a physician and writer. He has researched Islamic Enlightenment in Jerusalem and has networked on behalf of the Maimonides Prize. Previous journalistic and academic historical work in Germany, Britain and Australia. He is currently working in Germany and Australia.
Norman Berdichevsky
This is an engaging, profound and as far as I am aware, entirely novel analysis of how New Testament theologians basing their approach on Paul's letters, replaced the dyad relationship of the God of the Old Testament who is the father with a feminine aspect (the "shekinah" presence) and establishes a transcendent unity of the two sexes that created family life with a holly misogynic vengeful culture inherited from Hellenism with its obscene Oedipus complex and thereby downgraded the family orientation ethic of Judaism based on the auditive faculty (We have heard therefore, we obey) with the visual focus of images of the blood and flesh immortalized in culture, art and literature by both the crucifixion and pornography. There is so much food for thought in this essay that I found that each time I red it, in spite of its length, I encountered new material of significance. How was the fifth commandment to honor one's parents so downgraded? Hansen tells a convincing story with support from Rembrandt's art and the linguistics of the Hebrew language without its vowel signs, introduced much later than the earliest versions of the Tanach" (Old Testament). Hansen has created one of the most effective rejections of the sexual content of "wokism" and the growing fad to "transit" from one gender identity to another and its severe attacks on the male role in the social order. Their way was prepared by those Christian theologians who substitute a Jesus who became Christ that spanned all the generations of the past (Father), present (son) and Future (Holy Spirit) and helped erode parental authority.


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Wild Horse Rodeo is a 1937 American Western film directed by George Sherman and starring Robert Livingston, Ray Corrigan, and Max Terhune. Written by Oliver Drake and Betty Burbridge, based on a story by Drake and Gilbert Wright, the film is about a champion rodeo rider who returns to his home town in search of a legendary wild horse called Cyclone. The film is part of the Three Mesquiteers series of B-movies produced by Republic Pictures. Wild Horse Rodeo was the first film directed by George Sherman, who later directed numerous Western films for Republic, Columbia Pictures, and Universal Pictures.

Cast
 Robert Livingston as Stony Brooke
 Ray Corrigan as Tucson Smith
 Max Terhune as Lullaby Joslin
 June Martel as Alice Harkley
 Walter Miller as Colonel Nye
 Edmund Cobb as Hank Bain
 William Gould as Harkley
 Jack Ingram as Jim
 Roy Rogers as Singer (as Dick Weston)
 Henry Isabell as Slim

References

External links

1937 films
1937 Western (genre) films
American black-and-white films
1930s English-language films
Films directed by George Sherman
Films shot in Lone Pine, California
Republic Pictures films
Three Mesquiteers films
American Western (genre) films
Films produced by Sol C. Siegel
1930s American films

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


We welcome you to our church, our worship services and our lives. We hope and pray that you will experience in us the love of God, which is the greatest power in the world, and that you will join us in sharing that love with a world in need. WELCOME HOME!
We are a church that prides itself as being friendly and loving. We hope that when you come to our services you feel inspired and a part of our church family from the very beginning.
Don't worry. We have a class led by one of the Pastor's about what it means to come to worship here at Faith. We also have small groups that dig into the Bible and that is a great place to learn what it means to be a follower of Christ.
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Rudolph Care Sun Body Lotion SPF 30 — Eco. Love. Beauty.
A protective and soothing lotion with SPF 30, that protects you against the Sun's harmful UVA and UVB rays. Rich in Active natural ingredients – among other things sea buckthorn, which has proven anti-ageing effect, soothing Chamomile and firming and moisturizing cucumber extract.
Sun Body Lotion has a mild scent of summer and a nice light texture. The skin absorbs it fast, and is not sticky or greasy.


Reliable quality and good credit standing are our principles, which will help us at a top-ranking position. Adhering to the tenet of "quality first, customer supreme" for Professional Design SV-618 Acetic Glass Sealant to Israel Factory, welcomes all overseas friends and merchants to establish collaboration with us. We will provide you with honest, high quality and efficient service to meet your requirements.
This video is to bring you a closer look at the National Guard Products 5050C Charcoal Silicone Bulb Self-Adhesive Gasketing.
This happens to be a 17′ roll, this is how it looks like when it comes.
Here is the profile of it like a tear drop, on the back side is a self adhesive tape.
Dimensionally there is a image below this video showing everything important about it.
Made of silicon, very durable and able to handle exposure to UV or high temperature.
5050 stands for self adhesive tear drop shape seal.
The C means that is Charcoal and that's the color.
This is for smoke seal sort of doors.
There is a link below this video to Product Brochure which shows this item and it's sister related products so you can see exactly, you see the different colors and how it's installed.
There is a link also called Installation so read that before you put it on.
The frame it self must be clean if it's been painted make sure the paint is clearly cure, a week will be recommended and the temperature of the frame must be at least 50 degrees.
Measure and cut the pieces don't try to run this material into continues run inside the frame, cut the piece and put it right there on corners.
Is saying remove the peel film 1 to 2 feet at the time, i like to work with smaller pieces plus i don't want to have the weather striping unintentionally on it's seal come in contact with the frame prematurely because pulling off is a point of failure as well.
Positioning on the frame as is show goes on the face of the stop on the lock side.
When you put it on you don" want to stretch the material, you want to apply straight pressure.
The door has to operate correctly, you can't compromise the door closing capability, hinges etc.
National Guard Products is a full line manufacturer of all kinds weather striping related not only adhesive seals like this.
Moving back to step two i forgot to mention this is a wipe to help you clean the frame helping you to clean the frame really good.
From my experience is being patience taking time to get it really straight.
This material is used for smoked control and being applied to fire rated openings.
I find it very effective on holding transition of dust.
This material helps very well holding dust and transmission of noise down.
I recommend putting this material in addition to other weather striping materials.
If you have any questions regarding National Guard Products 5050C Charcoal Silicone Bulb Self-Adhesive Gasketing or any other National Guard Products product please feel free to reach out to us.


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Home > Research > LuxeCO Intelligence: Panoramic Research on Beauty Incubators and Accelerators
The global beauty market has not slowed down since the pandemic. As a matter of fact, it is evolving faster than ever. Facing fierce competition in the industry, every company/brand is accelerating its innovation process, not only to overcome current challenges such as slowing demand in the COVID market, but also to seize future opportunities.
The research team at Luxe.CO Intelligence has been obsessively tracking innovation trends in the global fashion and beauty industry. After 500 hours of in-depth analysis and careful editing, we bring you this exclusive 70-page research report - through 31 beauty brands and 134 investment stories, you can have a comprehensive understanding of the global beauty industry's incubation/acceleration process, and access our unique analysis and business insights. This is the world's first panoramic research report on beauty incubators and accelerators.
We have found that starting from 2020, global beauty giants have increased their investment in R&D in the Chinese market. Multiple cases have shown that China is becoming the hottest source of innovation in the global beauty industry:
In January, Shiseido Group opened the "Shiseido Zhimei Innovation Center" in Shanghai.
In March, Unilever's incubator for the Chinese market, the Unilever Excubator, was officially launched.
In June, L'Oréal China held the first BIGBANG Beauty Tech Startup Challenge, focusing on three key areas - consumer experience; supply chain operations; and future products with new forms, new effects, and new experiences.
In July, Nivea's parent company Beiersdorf AG announced that it would open an R&D center in Shanghai, which is also its largest R&D center besides its Hamburg headquarters.
In addition to incubators/accelerators created by large corporate groups, platform-based companies with incubation/acceleration as their sole operational purpose are also emerging. Many of our familiar "it" brands are created by them, such as:
Seed Beauty, the incubator behind the Kardashians' beauty brands KKW Beauty and Kylie Cosmetics.
Deciem, the parent company of The Ordinary, the favorite skin care brand of skincare gurus.
Los Angeles beauty incubator Hatch Beauty - its incubated men's shaving and grooming brand Dollar Shave Club was acquired by Unilever for approximately $1 billion USD in 2016.
Guive Balooch, global vice president of the Connected Beauty Incubator at L'Oréal Research and Innovation, once said, "many R&D people in large beauty groups will say that 10 - 20% of their time is spent on innovation. But in fact, in the field of beauty technology, we need to focus 100% on innovative projects."
As Balooch said of the beauty industry, incubators/accelerators not only signify a company's commitment to innovation, but also show how an organization understands, explores, and practices innovation. Behind a successful beauty incubator/accelerator must be a combination of capital, industry insights and resources, clear vision, and accurate grasp of the growth pattern of startups.
The content above is taken from the latest "Global Beauty Incubator/Accelerator Research Report" released by "Luxe.CO Intelligence".
Please click here or scan the QR code in the picture above to download the Chinese report for a fee.
| By Jun Liu & Lydia Zhang


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The price of gold inched lower Monday on a stronger US dollar but remained above $1,300 an ounce as mounting tensions over Ukraine and Gaza sustained safe-haven demand for the precious metal.
Spot gold changed hands at $1,303.30 an ounce around 1:30 p.m. EST, down $5.00 from Friday's close of $1,308.30.
Gold futures for August delivery traded at $1,307.00 per ounce in the afternoon on New York's Comex, up $1.70, or 0.13%, from $1,305.30 seen Friday.
Signs that the US economic recovery is strengthening boosted the dollar and lessened demand for gold as an alternative asset.
According to Reuters, the dollar floated near six-month highs against a basket of major currencies Monday, with speculation about an early US interest rate hike due to an improving jobs situation putting downward pressure on gold.
But fighting in Ukraine on Sunday between pro-Russian rebels and troops loyal to Kiev, along with Washington organizing to impose sanctions on Moscow, kept the yellow metal from falling below the $1,300 level.
Traders said gold is likely to remain around that level until Comex gold options for August expire later in the day, according to the news agency.
No end in sight
Continued conflict in Gaza has provided gold with additional support.
Although clashes there abated Sunday, no comprehensive deal to end the fighting between Hamas militants and Israel is in sight, the news agency said.
Investors tend to buy gold as a kind of insurance during times of political or financial turmoil.
Gold has experienced double-digit gains this year, hitting a 3.5 month high on July 10.


Lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who initially accused newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, revealed Friday their client will not pursue additional action against Kavanaugh.
Chief Justice John Roberts will administer the constitutional oath and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, who Kavanaugh is replacing, will administer the judicial oath in a private ceremony.
"A week that will live in infamy for the US Senate, permanently diminishing its stature", said Michael R. Bromwich. "A vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh", McConnell continued, is a vote about the Senate itself, where "the facts matter" and the "politics of personal destruction do not win the day".
The Democrats" "strategy to capitalize on the "Me Too' movement for the political purposes backfired on them", Republican strategist Alice Stewart said.
"Obviously, I was really sad about the whole process", Flake said before Graham smashed a pie in his face and exclaimed, "Seriously, this one is about the fans". I mean, who would have thought a thing like that could have happened, what he's been through?
Political strategists in both parties suggest the GOP's enthusiastic embrace of Kavanaugh despite the allegations may have shifted the political landscape - at least temporarily - by injecting new energy into the most passionate Republican voters a month before the election.
Bush also reaffirmed his commitment to Kavanaugh after Ford and other accusers brought allegations of sexual misconduct against the nominee. Top billing will go to a Republican president and his allies in the Senate who were willing to allow norms to be steamrollered and justice to be short-changed in the pursuit of a reliable conservative majority on the court.
The cold open drew to a close as Republicans sprayed Miller High Life, the "champagne of beers", all over and Graham called Kavanaugh the "Natty Light of judges", adding that he hoped we, as a country, "keep this horny male energy going 'til the midterms!"
Kavanaugh attended high school in Maryland, where he met Christine Blasey Ford, now a 51-year-old academic in the area of research psychology.
Under tremendous political pressure, Trump ordered a last-minute Federal Bureau of Investigation supplemental inquiry.
Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Trans Equality, concluded that the proceedings were a "moral failure", especially following criticism of a "limited" FBI investigation which failed to interview many key witnesses. "It's hard to know what 1987 would have looked like if we had the technology that we have today".
By a vote of 50-48, the Senate gave a lifetime job to Kavanaugh, 53, after weeks of fierce debate over sexual violence, privilege and alcohol abuse that convulsed the nation just weeks before congressional elections on November 6.
SC senator Lindsey Graham, who was one of the most ardent supporters of the Kavanaugh nomination, was also accosted activists lamenting his role in the process.
Trump, flying to Kansas for a political rally, flashed a thumbs-up gesture when the tally was announced and praised Kavanaugh for being "able to withstand this terrible, awful attack by the Democrats".
"It's a good day for America and an important day for the Senate", McConnell said, adding the division throughout this process was something the Senate and country would move past. It's a attractive thing to see'. "Very happy about it. It was a great vote, a very historic vote", Trump said. At one point some protesters ran up the steps and banged on the court's ornate doors. Hundreds of other demonstrators watched from behind barricades.
The moment conservatives have dreamed about for decades has arrived with Brett Kavanaugh joining the Supreme Court.


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newswire article reporting global 11.Aug.2011 17:35
imperialism & war | indigenous issues
The Shortwave Report 08/12/11 Listen Globally
author: Dan Roberts e-mail: outfarpress@saber.net
A weekly 30 minute review of international news and opinion, recorded from a shortwave radio and the internet. With times, frequencies, and websites for listening at home. 3 files- HIGHEST QUALITY BROADCAST, regular broadcast, and slow-modem streaming. Free to rebroadcast. China, Japan, Spain, Germany, and Russia.
Dear Radio Friend,
The latest Shortwave Report (August 12) is up at the website http://www.outfarpress.com/shortwave.shtml in 3 forms- (new) HIGHEST QUALITY (128kb)(27MB), broadcast quality (16MB), and quickdownload or streaming form (6MB) (28:59) Links at page bottom
(If you have access to Audioport there is a highest quality version posted up there {27MB} http://www.audioport.org/index.php?op=producer-info&uid=904&nav=&)
This week's show features stories from China Radio International, NHK Japan, Spanish National Radio, Radio Deutsche-Welle, and the Voice of Russia.
From CHINA- China's inflation rate was the highest last month in three years, and their government urged other nations to trim fiscal deficits and resolve debt problems. China is restricting the mining of rare earth minerals because of environmental consequences.
From JAPAN- It has been 5 months since the earthquake and nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima. On the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, the mayor made an appeal for a shift away from nuclear power. A rally was held in Ho Chi Min City in Vietnam for the 50th anniversary since US forces first sprayed Agent Orange on their lands.
From SPAIN- The economic crisis is having a negative effect on the popularity of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Then a Spanish press review on the London riots and the unprecedented demonstrations in Israel.
From GERMANY- An analysis from Tuesday on the underlying causes of the riots sweeping across London and other cities in England.
From RUSSIA- On the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan many are questioning the lack of interest the current American government has in stopping the development of nuclear weapons- and there were plans drawn up in 1996 to use so-called "small" nuclear bombs on Libya.
There is an article about the Shortwave Report by Cassandra Roos on line -
http://www.campusprogress.org/soundvision/780/big-stories-shortwaves
I was interviewed for an informative weekly radio show Mediageek, available at http://radio.mediageek.net
All that plus times and frequencies for listening at home. It's free to rebroadcast, please notify me if you're airing it and haven't notified me in the last month, please mention the website if you only air a portion. If you just want to listen and have a slow connection, try the streaming version- lower sound quality but good enough and way easier if you don't have a high-speed internet connection. If streaming is a problem because of your slow connection, download the smaller file- it takes 20 minutes or less, and will play swell in any mp3 player application (RealPlayer, Winamp, Quicktime, iTunes, etc) you have on your computer.
This program will be aired on Friday evening at 6:30pm (PDST) on KZYX/Z Philo CA, you might be able to stream via < http://www.kzyx.org > Beginning next week, the show will be aired on KZYX on Sunday at 4pm. It will continue to be posted at the website on Thursday night.
There are several other streams that work better- < http://www.freakradio.org >Freak Radio Santa Cruz now streams this program on Friday at 9:00am.(PDST)
NEWLY CORRECTED!!! The Shortwave Report may be downloaded as a podcast from < feed://radio.indymedia.org/en/podcast?keys=shortwave++
I hope you'll listen and air this if you're connected with a radio station. I am still wondering how to get financially compensated for the 25 hours I put into this program weekly- any ideas are appreciated. Any stations rebroadcasting this (or listeners) are welcome to donate for production costs. You can do so through the website. Many thanks to those that have donated! No Guilt! (maybe a little)
links for this week's edition-
< http://www.outfarpress.com/swr_08_12_11_128.mp3 > (27 MB) HIGHEST QUALITY
< http://www.outfarpress.com/swr_08_12_11.mp3 > (16MB) Broadcast Quality
< http://www.outfarpress.com/swr_08_12_11_24_22.mp3 > (6MB) Slow Modem streaming
Website Page-
< http://www.outfarpress.com/shortwave.shtml >
¡FurthuR! Dan Roberts
--"In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli."
- Howard Zinn
homepage: http://www.outfarpress.com
address: PO Box 1162 Willits CA 95490


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