MedWire News: Lacosamide reduces pain associated with diabetic neuropathy more than placebo and is well tolerated, report researchers.
However, in this study the benefits of lacosamide were not statistically significantly greater than placebo, they add.
Dan Ziegler (Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany) and colleagues randomly assigned 246 diabetic patients (Type 1 and Type 2) with moderate-to-severe neuropathic pain to receive placebo or oral lacosamide 400 or 600 mg/day in a 1:2:2 fashion.
The patients completed a 1-week washout period, followed by a 6-week titration period to the dose in question, and then a 12-week maintenance period.
The primary efficacy outcome of the study was intra-individual change in average daily pain score from baseline to the mean score over the last 4 weeks of the maintenance period.
Writing in the journal Diabetes Care, the team reports that the primary efficacy outcome was not met, as pain reduction was numerically, but not statistically greater with lacosamide treatment (400/600 mg/day) compared with placebo.
Both doses of the drug were significantly more effective than placebo over the titration, maintenance, and whole treatment period. At 18 weeks the mean reduction in pain score from baseline was 1.35, 1.50, and 1.70 points in the placebo, lacosamide 400 and 600 mg/day groups, respectively.
The authors say that "high placebo responses are not unusual in neuropathic pain studies" and suggest that an increased placebo response over the last 4 weeks of the study could explain the nonsignificant primary endpoint results.
Lacosamide was generally well tolerated, but at least 5% of the participants treated with lacosamide did experience adverse effects such as dizziness, fatigue, nausea, vertigo, headache, and vomiting, most of which appeared to be dose related.


text:
7th District candidates square off once again
With just days until the primary election, the two candidates in Philadelphia's 7th District Council race are fighting a familiar battle.
Maria Quinones Sanchez is frustrated. The incumbent councilwoman has the endorsement of Mayor Michael Nutter and District Attorney Seth Williams, but the city's ward leaders are backing her opponent, Danny Savage.
In the last council election, Quinones Sanchez defeated Savage.
"He had all the unions and all the ward and party support, and we kicked his ass. We're now the incumbent," said Quinones Sanchez, adding she has aided more than 6,000 constituents and worked with 130 groups."
Sitting in an office near Fifth and Lehigh in North Philadelphia, Quinones Sanchez said she feels more momentum this time.
"The fact that the party didn't support me, I think, has outraged voters. It's like all of a sudden she's the only incumbent who doesn't get endorsed because I'm a strong woman, because I'm a Latina, because of the way I look? It really speaks against the party," she said.
Quinones Sanchez is running on her record of working with police to add bike and foot patrols to the district and trying to reform business taxes.
Savage announced his candidacy while standing on the corner of Kensington Avenue and Somerset Street.
"I decided to run because I grew up here, I love this community, and I don't like the direction that it's headed and I think I'm the person that can really head it in the right direction," he said.
Savage, who said he believes Quinones Sanchez has not done a good job, said he has the support of some Latino politicians.
He also said he's running on his record.
"Although I was in office for a brief period of time, I'm proud of what I accomplished," said Savage who previously held the 7th District council seat. "I was able to restore our business corridors, including a special service district in Frankford. I called for more adult probation and parole officers."
Savage said if elected he will support small businesses and crack down on deadbeat landlords.
Latino groups in Delaware protest pilot program they say would limit their ability to get state contracts
Latino leaders and business owners gathered at the Legislative Hall in Dover this week to oppose a measure they fear would harm their businesses.
Dozen's stood in protest outside Thursday's FDR Park redevelopment meeting in South Philly after being denied entry. A virtual meeting is scheduled for March 1.
Spotlight PA
Hopes of bipartisan cooperation give way to complete deadlock in the Pa. House
The Pa. state House will likely stay deadlocked until next month — which means voters won't see constitutional amendments on the May ballot.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: Realm instance for observable query is closed by another query I have problems with realm my realm instances. I only use realm default instance. For each query/update operation, I get a realm instance with Realm.getDefaultInstance(), and I close it when I finish the operation.
My problem is that one of those queries is an observable query. I only close this realm instance when the subscription is finished. Meanwhile, other operations can close its realm instance. I know that realm instances are obtained from a cache, so I think that one of this operations are closing the same realm instance that I get when I create my observable query, because after some operations, my observable query stops emmiting items, and when I finish my subscription, I get an exception saying that my realm instance is already closed. Does it have sense? How can avoid that?
I think this is what is happening:
1. Start observable query -> Realm observable instance opened
2. Start database update 1 -> Realm query1 instance opened
3. Finish database update 1 -> Realm query1 instance closed

...
4. Start database update X -> Realm observable instace opened again <- PROBLEM
5. Finish database update X -> Realm observable instance closed
6. Finish observable query -> Realm observable instance closed again -> EXCEPTION

This is the code where I perform my observable query:
Realm realm = Realm.getDefaultInstance();

return realm.where(Message.class)
        .findAll().asObservable()
        .filter(RealmResults::isLoaded)
        .map(realm::copyFromRealm)
        .doOnUnsubscribe(() -> realm.close());

Is there any way to get a brand new realm instance which is not cached so that nobody can get the reference and close it?

A: Actually, Realm's Rx integration uses the RealmResults's RealmConfiguration to increase the Realm ref-count internally (inside the Observable), so you don't need to do such magic. You could do:
try(Realm realm = realm.getDefaultInstance()) {
    return realm.where(Message.class)
        .findAll()
        .asObservable() // synchronous query is always loaded
        .map(realm::copyFromRealm)
}

And it'd work. Although I don't know for sure if it helps solves your problem.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Jinger Duggar has earned the reputation of being the Duggar family's biggest rebel. On several occasions, Duggar has proven that while she still has a strong relationship with God and the church, she is also trying to live her best life — and that means not being chained down by her parents' super strict views and values. Recently, Duggar defied her parents even more by supporting her brother-in-law's new film — here's why Michelle and Jim Bob would not approve.
Throughout the years, the Duggars have gained the reputation of being one of America's strictest families. The Duggar parents, Michelle and Jim Bob, set extreme rules in place for their children, which were highlighted on their TLC show 19 Kids and Counting. The daughters had to wear skirts so as not to show off any curves, and the kids couldn't engage in any intimate activity until they were married. But once Duggar got out on her own, she began to defy her parents a bit. She moved to Laredo, Texas, which is hundreds of miles from her Arkansas home. Duggar started wearing pants and even recently posted a photo of her wearing a tank top.
Duggar is sporting a tank top, which was always against her family's rules.
Duggar and her husband, Jeremy Vuolo, recently announced that they're moving to Los Angeles in order for Vuolo to pursue graduate classes. Los Angeles is notoriously a very accepting city, and it's a lot more liberal than the Arkansas town where she was raised. While Duggar and Vuolo have both stuck to their religious roots in a lot of ways, they've also branched out to accept plenty of other walks of life.
According to reports, Duggar's brother-in-law recently made a film about an immigrant struggling with a transgender identity. Duggar reportedly left a comment on a private Instagram account praising the film and her brother-in-law's hard work. While it doesn't necessarily say that Duggar supports the LGBTQ community, it does suggest that she supports a movie highlighting LGBTQ causes, which comes a lot closer to acceptance than her parents ever would. And if Duggar watched the film, which it appears she did, she must not have a strong aversion to the LGBTQ community. It's important to note that since the comment was from a private account, it isn't accessible to see and hasn't been proven.
Duggar was raised in an extremely religious household, and there is no chance her parents would ever endorse anything regarding the LGBTQ community. The Duggar family often expresses their distaste in left-leaning social issues, such as abortion rights and gay or transgender rights. But with Duggar moving to Los Angeles, she may be trying to open her eyes a bit to different kinds of people, since the big city is nothing like small-town Arkansas.


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text:
Ernhard inducts Junior Nation into the NASCAR Hall of Fame
The last missing 78-year-old man seen on the northwest side was found, SAPD says.
Faced with several options, Biden should divert North Korea
Whoopi Goldberg is back as Guinan in Star Trek: Picard Season 2
Home/Texas/France's Macron expects Lebanon's progress at Saudi Arabia's talks
France's Macron expects Lebanon's progress at Saudi Arabia's talks
edmundeysenbachDecember 3, 2021
File Photo: French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes guests at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, on December 1, 2021.Reuters / Salameisonier
Dubai (Reuters) – French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday that he hopes the talks in Saudi Arabia will help ease tensions between the Gulf countries and Lebanon.
Lebanese intelligence minister George Kordahi resigned on Friday to help end diplomatic quarrels with Saudi Arabia over comments criticizing Saudi Arabia's role in the war in Yemen, which urged Riyadh to ban imports of Lebanon. rice field.
"We meet at the end of this trip-and I remain cautious-but my wish is to re-engage all Gulf countries in relation to Lebanon, both economically and politically, and they Being able to help get out of this, Macron said in Dubai for a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman before traveling to Saudi Arabia.
"We hope to see progress in the coming hours," he said, hoping that Prime Minister Najib Mikati would be able to convene the government and push forward with a deadlocked economic reform effort.
Saudi Arabia expelled Lebanon's envoy, recalled the ambassador from Beirut, and banned Lebanese imports after comments from the Minister of Information. Riyadh said it was a sign that Iran-backed Hezbollah had seized Lebanon.
Sunni Islamic Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran seek influence in the region, including Lebanon, which is suffering from a serious economic crisis and is in desperate need of financial support from regional and international donors. I've been fighting for a long time.
(Report by John Irish, edited by Peter Graff)
Source link France's Macron expects Lebanon's progress at Saudi Arabia's talks


Since opening the doors to the sales office, the sales team has experienced a rush of home-hunters clambering to purchase at Elements, and as a result over 60 percent of available land has been sold in less than a week! Click below to view exclusive footage from the launch.
Although they're yet to celebrate a first division winner, the team behind the Tarneit Gardens Lotto loves to build up relationships with their customers and are certain that one day soon the winning numbers will come up for some of their local clientele.
Aptly named, the Rose Grange Convenience Store is your one-stop-convenience-shop for everything from bread and milk on the way home from work, through to last minute birthday card buys.
If you ever find yourself hosting a dinner party and in need of some gourmet deli foods, or maybe you feel the urge to splurge on some decadent cheese and biscuits yourself, Milu's Deli in Wyndham Village has all your antipasto needs sorted.
Family holidays are a great time to escape the hustle and bustle of our busy lives and spend some quality time with those we love most. But what happens when you can't take the family pet along for the journey?
Vachik Shah knew he wanted to run his own business, so after researching a number of potential locations in Melbourne's west, decided on Tarneit as the ideal location to jump head first into his first franchise, Bubba Pizza.


text:
Emory UniversityEmory News Center
All News Topics
Emory soil analysis project leads to EPA site investigation
By Carol ClarkDec. 6, 2019
Emory professor Eri Saikawa (left) in the field with Historic Westside Gardens member and Westside resident Rosario Hernandez (center) and Xinyi Yao (right), an Emory student pursing a master's degree in environmental sciences who is involved in the research project.
An Emory University collaboration with members of Atlanta's Westside community, to test urban soil for contaminants, has led to a site investigation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The ongoing community collaboration is funded by Emory's HERCULES Exposome Research Center, dedicated to understanding how environmental exposures affect health and community well-being.
The EPA told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that it is continuing to collect samples and has so far identified 64 sites where the soil contains elevated levels of lead — a dangerous neurotoxin. The agency plans to begin decontaminating properties, possibly by removing and replacing soil, in the first quarter of next year, at no expense to residents or homeowners, according to the AJC. The report also appeared in Georgia Health News.
"It's important for people to know that soil contamination by heavy metals can be serious," says Eri Saikawa, an associate professor of environmental sciences at Emory and the lead researcher on the original project that sparked the EPA investigation. "If you are thinking about gardening in an urban area, or if children are playing in your yard, it makes sense to test your soil and make sure that it's not contaminated."
The Emory project began in the spring of 2018. Sam Peters, a PhD student at Rollins School of Public Health and a member of Saikawa's lab, decided to investigate levels of heavy metal and metalloids (HMM) in the soil of urban gardens, based on community need. The project was co-designed with Historic Westside Gardens, a HERCULES partner in the community that installs gardens in residents' yards and provides training, mentorship and a food market collective. Residents wanted more information about the condition of their soil.
"This is true community-engaged, community-based research, driven by what the community is interested in — testing and improving their soil to help them grow healthy food," Saikawa says. "They are passionate about improving their community."
More than a dozen other Emory students from Saikawa's lab, including undergraduates and graduate students, soon became involved in the labor-intensive effort, which included making and distributing flyers to explain what they were doing and why they were doing it. In collaboration with community members, 355 soil samples from neighborhood home gardens and yards were collected and analyzed for lead, arsenic, chromium, cadmium and other HMMs.
The samples were analyzed via X-ray fluorescence, a handheld instrument that can test for more than 25 heavy metals in 90 seconds. The results showed that most of the samples were above the University of Georgia's low-risk levels for agriculture of 75 parts per million (ppm). And a few were above the EPA's low-risk residential screening level of 400 ppm. The samples above 400 ppm were generally near older housing and not used for growing food. Samples from garden beds and active growing sites were lower than those without beds or anything growing.
Sharing data among the project members led to small remediation efforts. One community member, for example, was able to lower the concentration of lead in one garden bed from above 400 ppm to below 75 ppm by adding in new soil and plants.
A type of industrial smelting waste known as slag, a possible source of lead contamination, was also identified in at multiple vacant lots in the area, further raising concerns. "Children ride their bikes up these piles of dirt containing slag in vacant lots," Saikawa says.
The potential for heavy metal contamination of soil is not just an Atlanta issue, Saikawa stresses, but an urban problem in general. "Emissions from industry and power plants, lead-based paints, fertilizer, sewage sludge, pesticides and deposits from the atmosphere are some of the ways that heavy metals can make their way into soil," she says. Many studies have also shown the increased risk of exposure to heavy metals among youth in low-income families in urban areas, Saikawa adds.
The project members from Emory and the community met with the EPA and Georgia Department of Public Health to discuss strategies.
The EPA initiated an investigation which expanded the area of potential contamination to 368 properties. The agency is still in the process of collecting soil samples. It is offering free soil testing for residents and property owners in the Westside area encompassing properties between Joseph E. Boone Boulevard NW, Chestnut Street NW, James P. Brawley Drive, Cameron Alexander Boulevard NW and an old CSX rail line.
The decontamination process, set to begin early in 2020, could involve removing and replacing soil. The initial costs are capped at $2 million over 12 months, according to a memo of the state Environmental Protection Division, obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Community collaboration continues
Meanwhile, Emory continues to support efforts by the community, funded by HERCULES. Sam Peters has since graduated and works for an agricultural company in Boston. A dozen other Emory students from the Saikawa lab, both undergraduates and graduate students, are currently working with members of the community on awareness and remediation efforts.
"We want to ensure that people know about ways to reduce their risk, by washing their hands and removing dust from their clothing after coming in contact with soil and removing their shoes before entering a residence," Saikawa says. "It's especially important that children do not play in contaminated soil."
Although lead exposure has been substantially reduced during the past few decades, elevated blood-lead levels are still linked to intellectual disabilities in more than half a million children globally every year, she notes.
The project team members are recruiting families with children under the age of 12 to provide toenail clippings from the children to analyze how much exposure they may have had to heavy metals.
Another ongoing study by Emory and the community is testing whether growing various species of plants in the soil can reduce some of the contamination to less risky levels — a process known as phytoremediation. Preliminary results from experiments conducted in the field and in a greenhouse on the Emory campus show that growing sunflowers in the soil may help to significantly reduce heavy metal concentrations, but more research is needed, Saikawa says.
The experience of working closely with a community has changed the perspective of students involved in the project, Saikawa says.
Xinyi Yao, a graduate student in environmental sciences, had originally planned to just get a master's degree and work in industry. "This project showed me how research can directly help improve people's lives," Yao says. "I find that really rewarding."
Yao now plans to pursue a PhD and a career in public health research.
"Talking with residents has helped us think differently and more creatively about our work as scientists," Saikawa says. One community member who is an artist, for example, suggested using art to help raise community awareness.
"We're putting together a grant proposal to include the work of local artists to educate residents about the need to test soil for contamination and how to avoid exposure to heavy metals," Saikawa says. "We'd also like to involve local middle school and high school students in the project so that they learn more about the issue, while also learning what scientists do."
Emory Hercules Exposome Research Center
Artificial intelligence helps Emory scientist, students examine air pollution
Yak dung burning pollutes indoor air of Tibetan households


Location: Situated along SW side of farmyard.
Earlier C19 long single-storey range with arched openings, probably cow-houses as fronting onto walled yards.
Earlier C19 long range of cow-houses, rubble stone with corrugated asbestos roof. From right, an enlarged opening with C20 metal door, then six elliptical-arched entries with cut Cilgerran stone voussoirs, the first infilled, then door with timber lintel set close between first and second, adjoining cow-yard wall, second is infilled with window, the other four are open. Beyond, opening onto smaller yard at higher level, are four close-spaced round-arched openings with square piers and Cilgerran stone voussoirs. The outer two are blocked. At the left end is an added short section with door and stone voussoirs to head.
Seven-bay roof at right end, then ten bays, tie-beam trusses possibly replaced, then four-bay roof with collar-trusses and three-bay added end section. Rear of ten-bay section has a blocked arch.
Included for group value, enclosing upper end of farmyard.


text:
Review of the Month
The New Geopolitics of Empire
by John Bellamy Foster
(Jan 01, 2006)
Topics: Imperialism , Political Economy , Stagnation
This article is a much expanded version of a plenary address delivered to the Fifth Colloquium of Latin American Political Economists in Mexico City on October 27. Parts of this argument were also presented in talks sponsored by Black Sun Books in Eugene, Oregon on November 16 and at the Stop the War Conference at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles on November 19.
Today's imperial ideology proclaims that the United States is the new city on the hill, the capital of an empire dominating the globe. Yet the U.S. global empire, we are nonetheless told, is not an empire of capital; it has nothing to do with economic imperialism as classically defined by Marxists and others. The question then arises: How is this new imperial age conceived by those promoting it?
The answer, I am convinced, is to be found in the dramatic resurrection of geopolitics as an imperial philosophy. What Michael Klare has called in these pages "The New Geopolitics" has become a pragmatic means of integrating U.S. imperial goals in the post-Cold War world while avoiding all direct allusions to the "economic taproot of imperialism."1
As Franz Neumann indicated in Behemoth, his classic 1942 critique of the Third Reich, "geopolitics is nothing but the ideology of imperialist expansion."2 More precisely, it represents a specific way of organizing and advancing empire—one that arose with modern imperialism, but that contains its own peculiar history that is reverberating once again in our time.
Geopolitics is concerned with how geographical factors, including territory, population, strategic location, and natural resource endowments, as modified by economics and technology, affect the relations between states and the struggle for world domination. Classical geopolitics was a manifestation of interimperialist rivalry and emerged around the time of the Spanish–American War and the Boer War. It constituted the core ideology of U.S. overseas expansion articulated in Alfred Thayer Mahan's Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Frontier in American History" (1893), and Brooks Adams's The New Empire (1902)—as well as in Theodore Roosevelt's "Rough-Rider" policies.3 The term "geopolitics" itself was coined in 1899 by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén, after which it quickly emerged as a systematic area of study. The three foremost geopolitical theorists in the key period from the Treaty of Versailles through the Second World War, were Halford Mackinder in Britain, Karl Haushofer in Germany, and Nicholas John Spykman in the United States.
Classical Geopolitics
Mackinder was a geographer, economist, and politician. He was Director of the London School of Economics from 1903 to 1908 and a Member of Parliament from Glasgow from 1910 to 1922. He began to develop his geopolitical ideas in 1904 with his essay "The Geographical Pivot of History."4 Mackinder was a strong advocate of British imperialism, arguing that colonies in Africa and Asia constituted a safety valve for European society, and that a closure of the world to European imperialist expansion would lead to the unleashing of uncontrollable class forces within European societies. Central to his analysis was the recognition that the frontiers of the world were closed, resulting in heightened interimperialist rivalry.
"The great wars of history," Mackinder wrote in Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919), "are the outcome, direct or indirect, of the unequal growth of nations." Geopolitical reality was such as "to lend itself to the growth of empires, and in the end of a single World-Empire."5 A primary concern motivating Mackinder's theoretical contributions was the decline of British economic hegemony, leading him eventually to conclude that British capital needed protectionism and military power to back it up. Britain "no less than Germany," he claimed, "became 'market-hungry,' for nothing smaller than the whole world was market enough for her in her own special lines….Free-trading, peace-loving Lancashire has been supported by the force of the Empire….Both Free Trade of the laissez-faire type and Protection of the predatory type are policies of Empire, and both make for War."6
Mackinder is best known for his doctrine of the "Heartland." Geopolitical strategy was about the endgame of controlling the Heartland—or the enormous transcontinental land mass of Eurasia, encompassing Eastern Europe, Russia through Siberia, and Central Asia. The Heartland, together with the remainder of Asia and Africa, made up the World Island. The Heartland itself was defined by its inaccessibility to sea, making it "the greatest natural fortress on earth."7 The Columbian Age dominated by sea power, Mackinder argued, was coming to an end to be replaced by a new Eurasian age in which land power would be decisive. The development of land transportation and communication meant that land power could finally rival sea power. In the new Eurasian Age whoever ruled the Heartland, if also equipped with a modern navy, would be able to outflank the maritime world—the world controlled by the British and U.S. empires.
In Democratic Ideals and Reality Mackinder designated Eastern Europe as a strategic addition to the Heartland—the key to the command of Eurasia. Thus arose his oft-quoted dictum:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:
Who rules the World-Island commands the World.8
Mackinder insisted that the most immediate foreign policy objective for the British Empire was to prevent any kind of alliance or bloc between Germany and Russia, and to keep either one from dominating Eastern Europe. Hence strong buffer states needed to be formed between these two great powers.
In 1919 the British government appointed Mackinder high commissioner for south Russia to help organize British support for General Denikin and the White Army in the Russian Civil War. Following the Red Army's defeat of Denikin, Mackinder returned to London and reported to the British government that, although German industrialization was rightly feared by Britain, Germany could not be allowed to collapse economically and militarily since it constituted the chief bulwark against Bolshevik control of Eastern Europe. Mackinder was knighted for his efforts on behalf of the empire.9
Mackinder's geopolitical analysis was to have an even greater impact on German than on British war planning. The founder of the German school of Geopolitik was Friedrich Ratzel, whose most important works appeared in the 1890s. Ratzel sought to connect the Darwinian struggle for existence with the geopolitical struggle for space through an organic theory of the state. States were not static but naturally growing, borders were simply a skin that could be shed. It was Ratzel who first introduced the term "lebensraum" (or living space) as an imperative for the German polity. "There is in this small planet," he wrote, "sufficient space for only one great state."10
The foremost German geopolitical thinker, however, was Karl Haushofer, who drew upon both Ratzel and Mackinder. Haushofer insisted that Germany needed to enlarge its lebensraum, the requirements of which were evident in the disproportion between the German population and the natural geographic space necessary to accommodate it. He regarded the United States, with its ideology of Manifest Destiny, as the country that had most successfully employed geopolitics within its region. In this regard he saw the Monroe Doctrine, which stipulated that the United States had hegemony in the Americas and would not suffer the competition of any foreign power (along with the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary through which the United States claimed "international police power" in the Western Hemisphere) as the greatest practical implementation of geopolitics, pointing to the need for a parallel German Monroe Doctrine. Haushofer and his followers viewed Pan-Americanism as a geopolitical grouping through which the United States exercised its regional hegemony. He argued that similar regional hegemonies could be established around other great powers, notably Pan-Germanism or a Pan-Europe dominated by Germany.11
British imperialism was for Haushofer the greatest threat to German power. One of his books included a world map showing a giant octopus located in the British Isles with its tentacles stretching out into every corner of the globe. The development of German strength to counter the British and American maritime world, he argued, lay in the creation of a great Eurasian intercontinental power bloc with Russia and Japan, in which Germany would be the senior partner. The alliance with Japan would counter British and American naval power in the Pacific. With the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 he wrote: "Now finally, the collaboration of the Axis powers, and of the Far East, stands distinctly before the German soul. At last, there is the hope of survival against the Anaconda policy [the strangling encirclement] of the Western democracies." Although relying primarily on geopolitics, Haushofer was to unite his ideas with the Nazi doctrine of "master-races."12
Haushofer served as a brigade commander in the First World War, with Rudolf Hess as his aide-de-camp. He retired from the military with the rank of major general and took up a position as a lecturer at the University of Munich in 1919, where Hess continued as his student and disciple. Through Hess, Haushofer had direct contact with and served as an adviser to Hitler. After the failure of the Nazi Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 Hitler and later Hess were confined in the Fortress of Landsberg. As Hess's mentor, Haushofer frequently visited Hitler there while the latter was dictating Mein Kampf to Hess. Many of Haushofer's ideas, including his treatment of lebensraum, were thus adopted by Hitler and incorporated into Mein Kampf. In 1933 after the Nazi rise to power a professorship of defense geography was created for Haushofer at the University of Munich where he directed his Institute of Geopolitics. In the following year Hitler appointed him president of the German Academy. After Hess's flight to Britain in 1941 Haushofer's influence with Hitler waned. He was consigned briefly to the Dachau concentration camp. His son, Albrecht (also a leading Nazi geopolitical analyst) was executed by the SS for involvement in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Haushofer committed suicide after being interrogated by the Allies in 1946.13
Nicholas John Spykman was a Dutch-American political scientist, sociologist, and journalist. Spykman wrote two major geopolitical works: America's Strategy in World Politics (1942), completed just before the U.S. entry in the Second World War, and his posthumous work, The Geography of the Peace (1944). He opposed a "rimland" thesis to Mackinder's Heartland doctrine, arguing that by controlling the amphibious rimlands of Europe, the Middle East, and the East Asia-Pacific Rim region, the United States could limit the power of the Eurasian Heartland. Spykman insisted that the United States should build North Atlantic and trans-Pacific naval and air bases, encircling Eurasia. Responding to Mackinder, Spykman wrote: "If there is to be a slogan for the power politics of the Old World, it must be 'Who controls the rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.'"14
In America's Strategy in World Politics Spykman insisted that U.S. policy must be "directed at the prevention of hegemony," defined as "a power position which would permit the domination of all within its [the hegemon's] reach." But in practice this meant the promotion of U.S.-British dominance.15 By 1942 with the British Empire weakening and the U.S. Empire growing, an "American-British hegemony" of the globe, Spykman contended, was in the offing—provided that the German-Japanese attempt at world hegemony could be defeated. Although the Soviet Union was then an ally of the United States and Britain, Spykman nevertheless suggested in The Geography of the Peace that the primary goal must be to ensure that the Soviet Union not "establish a hegemony over the European rimland." The Soviet Union's "own strength, great as it is," he observed, "would be insufficient to preserve her security against a unified rimland" under U.S. hegemony, the existence of which would give the United States global supremacy.16
Spykman's views were widely read in U.S. policy circles, but beginning in 1942 the term "geopolitics," if not the concept itself, was increasingly off limits in the United States due to the alarms that had been raised in the U.S. media about German geopolitical thinking and Haushofer's influence on Hitler. It would be a quarter-century or more before the term would re-enter public discourse. Although Spykman's rimland concept is often seen as providing the intellectual background behind George Kennan's notion of "containment," explicit references to Spykman's ideas in this context were notable by their absence.
The Geopolitics of Pax Americana
In 1939 State Department planners in conjunction with the Council on Foreign Relations initiated under conditions of extreme secrecy a high level War and Peace Studies (WPS) program, which continued to meet for the remainder of the war. The Rockefeller Foundation provided $44,500 in funding for its first year of operation. The WPS envisaged a geopolitical region that it designated as the "Grand Area," and which consisted initially of the British and U.S. empires. "The Geopolitical analysis behind" the Grand Area, Noam Chomsky has explained, "attempted to work out which areas of the world have to be 'open'—open to investment, open to the repatriation of profits. Open, that is, to domination by the United States."17
The new Grand Area was thus to constitute an informal empire, modeled after U.S. domination of Latin America, involving the free flow of capital, under the economic, political, and military hegemony of the United States. Since Germany then occupied Europe, the Grand Area was at first conceived as restricted to the U.S. imperial region, the British Empire, and the Far East (assuming the U.S. defeat of Japan in the Pacific). By the end of the war it had expanded to encompass all of Western Europe as well. Isaiah Bowman, a leading U.S. political geographer (sometimes referred to in the press at the time as "the American Haushofer"), and a key figure in the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in 1941: "The measure of our victory will be the measure of our domination after victory."18
In 1943 Mackinder published an article entitled "The Round World and the Winning of the Peace" in the Council on Foreign Relations' journal Foreign Affairs, which stated that "for our present purpose, it is sufficiently accurate to say that the territory of the USSR is equivalent to the Heartland."19 For the first time, he argued, the Heartland was fully garrisoned and dangerous. The goal for the United States was therefore to counter the Soviet Heartland power. As Colin Gray observed in his Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era (1977), viewed in geopolitical terms, the Cold War was essentially a contest "between the insular imperium of the United States and the 'Heartland' imperium of the Soviet Union….for control/denial of control of the Eurasian-African 'Rimlands.'"20
Although explicit references to geopolitics were rare from the late 1940s to the 1970s, an exception to this was to be found in the work of James Burnham. Formerly a prominent leftist, Burnham played a major role in developing a geopolitics of anticommunism in the Cold War era. His postwar anticommunist blockbuster, The Struggle for the World (1947), was originally drafted as a secret study for the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) in 1944, and was intended for use by the U.S. delegation to the Yalta Conference. It was, he insisted, "an axiom of geopolitics that if any one power succeeded in organizing the [Eurasian] Heartland and its outer barriers, that power would be certain to control the world." Following Mackinder, Burnham claimed that the Soviet Union had emerged as the first great Heartland power, with a large, politically organized population, that was a threat to the World Island and hence the entire world. "Geographically, strategically, Eurasia encircles America, overwhelming it." The United States was an empire, yet refused to call itself such; therefore various euphemisms needed to be found. "Whatever the words, it is well also to know the reality. The reality is that the only alternative to the communist World Empire is an American Empire, which will be, if not literally world-wide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control." Henry Luce actively promoted The Struggle for the World in Time magazine, and urged President Truman's political aide, Charles Ross, to get Truman to read it. Ronald Reagan presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Burnham in 1983, declaring that he had "profoundly affected the way America views itself and the world."21
Geopolitics was to owe its resurrection as an explicit, even official, doctrine of U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s to the influence of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Faced with the debacle in Vietnam and the need to restore U.S. power in the context of a growing imperial crisis, Kissinger and President Nixon reached out to the concept of geopolitics. The thawing of the Cold War relations with China following the Sino-Soviet split and the initiation of détente with the Soviet Union were both presented as "geopolitical necessities." Kissinger's references to geopolitics were pervasive throughout his 1979 memoirs, The White House Years.22
The 1970s witnessed along with the Vietnam defeat, economic stagnation and declining U.S. economic hegemony. By 1971 the U.S. empire had created such a huge dollar overhang abroad that Nixon was forced to decouple the dollar from gold, weakening the position of the dollar as the hegemonic currency. The energy crisis associated with the Arab oil boycott in response to the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the rise of the OPEC oil cartel demonstrated the growing dependence of the U.S. automobile-petroleum complex on Persian Gulf oil. The recession of 1974–75 initiated a secular slowdown of the U.S. economy that has continued with minor interruptions for three decades.
With the entire U.S. empire in crisis beginning in the 1970s, and with its war machine effectively immobilized due to what conservatives labeled the "Vietnam Syndrome" (the unwillingness of the U.S. population to support military interventions in the periphery), countries throughout the third world sought to break out of the system. Much of the attention during this period was directed at Washington's attempts to counter revolutions and revolutionary movements in Central America and the Caribbean, the "backyard" of the U.S. empire. But the biggest defeat experienced by the U.S. empire in the years following the Vietnam War was the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the Shah of Iran, hitherto the lynchpin of U.S. strategy in the Persian Gulf. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—against which the CIA immediately launched the greatest covert war in history, recruiting fundamentalist Islamic forces (including Osama Bin Laden) for a modern jihad—only served to reinforce the view within U.S. national security circles that control over the Middle East and its oil was in jeopardy.
A massive attempt was therefore made in the 1980s and '90s to reconstitute overall U.S. hegemony, especially the position of the United States in the Persian Gulf. The signal event was the Carter Doctrine, issued by President Carter in his State of the Union speech in January 1980, in which he declared that, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." Modeled after the Monroe Doctrine, the Carter Doctrine was meant to extend the umbrella of direct U.S. military hegemony over the Persian Gulf.
All of this was intended to meet the geopolitical imperatives of U.S. multinational corporations. For Business Week in January 28, 1980, it was crucial that the United States develop a "geopolitics of minerals," in response to the forces challenging U.S. power around the world: "In the 1980s, beset by demands among the post-colonial regimes for a 'new international economic order' and a related antagonism toward the multinational resource corporations," the United States was increasingly "vulnerable" to loss of strategic materials and "world oil and raw material routes." This, Business Week contended, would "force Washington to make some painful compromises between idealistic foreign policy goals and the revival of geopolitics."23
In 1983 the Reagan administration responded to such demands by establishing the U.S. Central Command (Centcom). Centcom is one of five regional "unified commands" governing U.S. combat forces around the globe. Its authority covers twenty-five nations in south-central Asia (including the Persian Gulf) and in the Horn of Africa. Its primary responsibility from the start was to keep the oil flowing. In the two decades of its existence, Klare notes, "Centcom forces have fought in four major engagements: the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the Afghanistan War of 2001, and the Iraq War of 2003[—]."24
The New Geopolitics
But it was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that was to constitute the sea change for the U.S. empire. The U.S. assault on Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, was made possible by the erosion of the balance of power in the Middle East in the wake of the weakening of Soviet power. At the same time, the Soviet meltdown and signs of its possible breakup constituted one of the chief reasons why the United States refrained from invading and occupying Iraq during the Gulf War. Geopolitical uncertainties associated with the collapse of the Soviet bloc were such that Washington could not afford to pin down large numbers of troops in the Middle East. Nor could it risk the possibility that an invasion and occupation of Iraq might serve to revive Soviet concerns about U.S. imperialism, and thus delay or reverse the massive changes then occurring in that country. The Soviet Union's demise came only months later in the summer of 1991.
The "new world order" that followed was soon dubbed a "unipolar world" with the United States as the sole superpower. The Department of Defense lost no time in initiating a strategic review known as the Defense Planning Guidance, directed by Paul Wolfowitz then undersecretary of defense for policy. Parts of this classified report, leaked to the press in 1992, stated in Spykman-like language that "Our strategy [after the fall of the Soviet Union] must refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor." Wolfowitz also took a leaf from the Heartland doctrine, arguing that "Russia will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States."25 The Defense Planning Guidance proposed a global geopolitical goal for the United States of permanent military hegemony through preemptive actions. Yet, strong objections from U.S. allies forced Washington to back off from the draft report's explicit commitment to unilateral domination of the globe.
Over the following decade an intense debate took place within U.S. national security and foreign policy circles concerning the extent to which the United States should pursue the goal of indefinite planetary hegemony. Eugene Rostow, undersecretary of state for political affairs from 1966 to 1969, responded in 1993 to the collapse of the Soviet Union by pointing out that it was necessary to contain "the [Russian] Heartland area, [which] constitutes an enormous center of power from which military forces have attacked the coastal regions of Asia and Europe (the Rimlands, in Mackinder's [sic.] terminology)." Similarly, Kissinger wrote in 1994: "Students of geopolitics….argue, however, that Russia regardless of who governs it, sits astride what Halford Mackinder called the geopolitical heartland, and is the heir to one of the most important imperial traditions."26 The express goal of such leading national security analysts was to secure the rimland as a means to global power. Much of the controversy in this period centered not so much on the endgame itself, but on whether the United States should rule the globe jointly with its junior partners in the triad (Western Europe and Japan) or should unilaterally seek its own empire of the earth.27
In the end the debate on the new world order was made academic by the actual exercise of U.S. military power abroad, as the United States in the George H. W. Bush and Clinton years actively sought to renew and extend its economic hegemony by military means. The immediate goal was clearly one of securing the perimeter to the Eurasian heartland following the Soviet demise. Thus military interventions occurred in the 1990s not only in the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa but in Yugoslavia in Eastern Europe, where NATO under the leadership of the United States bombed for eleven weeks (in the case of Kosovo) and then landed ground troops, leading to the establishment of permanent military bases in an area that had formerly been part of the Soviet sphere of influence. In the Persian Gulf Iraq was faced with an economic embargo and daily bombings by the United States and Britain. Meanwhile, the United States sought military bases in Central Asia in areas surrounding the oil-and-natural-gas-rich Caspian Sea basin, formerly part of the Soviet Union.
In 1999 Mackubin Thomas Owens, Professor of Strategy and Force Planning at the Naval War College, authored a landmark article for the Naval War College Review entitled "In Defense of Classical Geopolitics." Building on Mackinder and Spykman, while criticizing Haushofer, Owens insisted that the overwhelming geopolitical goal of the United States in the post–Cold War world remained that of preventing "the rise of a hegemon capable of dominating the Eurasian continental realm and of challenging the United States in the maritime realm."28
Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, emerged in this period as one of the most avid proponents of the geopolitics of U.S. empire. In his Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997) he alluded directly to the Heartland doctrines promoted by Mackinder and Haushofer (and what he called "the much vulgarized echo" of this in "Hitler's emphasis on the German people's need for 'Lebensraum'"). What had changed was that, "geopolitics has moved from the regional to the global dimension, with preponderance over the entire Eurasian continent serving as the central basis for global primacy. The United States…now enjoys international primacy, with its power directly deployed on three peripheries of the Eurasian continent"—in the West (Europe), the South (south-central Eurasia, including the Middle East) and the East (East-Asia Pacific Rim). "America's global primacy," Brzezinski argued, "is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained." The goal, he argued, was to create a "hegemony of a new type," which he called "global supremacy," establishing the United States indefinitely as "the first and only truly global power."29
During the Clinton administration both neoliberal globalization and imperial geopolitics governed foreign policy, but the former often took precedence. In the George W. Bush administration the double commitment remained, but the emphasis was reversed from the start, with more direct attention given to strengthening U.S. global primacy through the exercise of geopolitical/military as opposed to economic power. This shift can be seen in two key position statements issued at the time of the 2000 elections. The first was a foreign policy paper entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses released in September 2000, at vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney's request, by the Project for the New American Century (a strategic policy group that included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, and George Bush's younger bother Jeb). This report strongly reasserted the overtly imperialist strategy of the Defense Policy Guidance of 1992. The other was a speech entitled "Imperial America," delivered on November 11, 2000 by Richard Haass, who was soon to join Colin Powell's state department as director of policy planning. Haass insisted that the time had come for Americans "to re-conceive their role from a traditional nation-state to an imperial power." The main danger threatening the U.S. global order was not one of "imperial overstretch" as suggested by Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers but "imperial understretch."30
The immediate response of the Bush administration to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was to declare a universal and protracted global war on terrorism that was to double as a justification for the expansion of U.S. imperial power. The new National Security Strategy of the United States, delivered by the White House to Congress in September 2002, at the very same time that the administration was beating the war drums for an invasion of Iraq, was modeled after Wolfowitz's earlier Defense Planning Guidance of 1992. It established as official U.S. strategic policy: (1) preventing any state from developing military capabilities equal to or greater than the United States; (2) carrying out "preemptive" strikes against states that were developing new military capabilities that might eventually endanger the United States, its friends or allies—even in advance of any imminent threat; and (3) insisting on the immunity of U.S. officials and military personnel to any international war crime tribunals. Once again the language mirrored Spykman's declaration that the goal should be "directed at the prevention of hegemony"—though in this case the explicit goal was to prevent any future challenges to U.S. global supremacy.
Domination of Persian Gulf oil, through an invasion and occupation of Iraq, offered the quickest way of enhancing U.S. imperial power, ensuring that it would have a stranglehold over the world's major petroleum reserves in a time of growing demand and declining supply of oil worldwide. The fact that the preponderance of long-term oil and natural gas supplies are concentrated in the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin, and West Africa allows U.S. "vital interests" in this broad region to be dealt with more circumspectly in the language of geopolitics with little mention of the fossil fuels themselves.
In May 2004, Alan Larson, under secretary of state for economic, business, and agricultural affairs, issued a report entitled "Geopolitics of Oil and Natural Gas," which declared that "it is almost an axiom in the petroleum business that oil and gas are most often found in countries with challenging political regimes or difficult physical geography." Here the geopolitics of oil and natural gas was seen as creating vital U.S. strategic interests in the Persian Gulf, Russia and the Caspian Sea basin, West Africa, and Venezuela.31
The new geopolitics shares with classical geopolitics the aim of world domination, but entails a strategic shift aimed in particular at south-central Eurasia. "The purpose of the war in Iraq," according to Michael Klare, "is to redraw the geopolitical map of Eurasia to insure and embed U.S. power and dominance in the region vis-à-vis…other potential competitors" such as Russia, China, the European Community, Japan, and even India. "The U.S. elites have concluded that the European and East Asian rimlands of Eurasia are securely in American hands or [are] less important, or both. The new center of geopolitical competition, as they see it, is south-central Eurasia, encompassing the Persian Gulf area, which possesses two-thirds of the world's oil, the Caspian Sea basin, which has a large chunk of what's left, and the surrounding countries of Central Asia. This is the new center of world struggle and conflict, and the Bush administration is determined that the United States shall dominate and control this critical area."32
In a special July 1999 supplement entitled "The New Geopolitics," the Economist magazine explicitly adopted Brzezinski's "grand chessboard" analysis, arguing that the key geopolitical struggle for the "empire of democracy" led by the United States after Kosovo was the control of Eurasia and particularly Central Asia. Both China and Russia were seen as potentially extending their geopolitical influence into the energy rich Caspian Sea basin. U.S. imperial expansion to preempt this was therefore necessary.33
U.S. geopolitical strategy accepts no bounds short of Brzezinski's "global supremacy." It thus reflects what Mackinder called the tendency to a "single World-Empire." So brazen has this new geopolitics now become among today's empire enthusiasts that Atlantic Monthly correspondent Robert Kaplan began his recent book, Imperial Grunts, by celebrating the Pentagon's global military map of five "unified commands" in terms of its "uncanny resemblance" to a map "drawn in 1931 for the German military by Professor Karl Haushofer, a leading figure of Geopolitik." Lest his meaning remain unclear, Kaplan proceeded to refer to Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden" as embodying "idealistic" values, and he went on to characterize his own journalistic "odyssey through the barracks and outposts of the American Empire" as a tour of the new "Injun Country."34
The Failures of Geopolitics
The unpopularity of geopolitical analysis after 1943 is usually attributed to its association with the Nazi strategy of world conquest. Yet the popular rejection of geopolitics in that period may have also arisen from the deeper recognition that classical geopolitics in all of its forms was an inherently imperialist and war-related doctrine. As the critical geopolitical analyst Robert Strausz-Hupé argued in 1942, "In Geopolitik there is no distinction between war and peace. All states have the urge to expand, and the process of expansion is viewed as a perpetual warfare—no matter whether military power is actually applied or is used to implement 'peaceful' diplomacy as a suspended threat."35
U.S. imperial geopolitics is ultimately aimed at creating a global space for capitalist development. It is about forming a world dedicated to capital accumulation on behalf of the U.S. ruling class—and to a lesser extent the interlinked ruling classes of the triad powers as a whole (North America, Europe, and Japan). Despite "the end of colonialism" and the rise of "anti-capitalist new countries," Business Week pronounced in April 1975, there has always been "the umbrella of American power to contain it….[T]he U.S. was able to fashion increasing prosperity among Western countries, using the tools of more liberal trade, investment, and political power. The rise of the multinational corporation was the economic expression of this political framework."36
There is no doubt that the U.S. imperium has benefited those at the top of the center-capitalist nations and not just the power elite of the United States. Yet, the drive for global hegemony on the part of particular capitalist nations and their ruling classes, like capital accumulation itself, recognizes no insurmountable barriers. Writing before September 11, 2001, István Mészáros argued in his Socialism or Barbarism that due to unbridled U.S. imperial ambitions the world was entering what was potentially "the most dangerous phase of imperialism in all history":
For what is at stake today is not the control of a particular part of the planet—no matter how large—putting at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower….This is what the ultimate rationality of globally developed capital requires, in its vain attempt to bring under control its irreconcilable antagonisms. The trouble is, though, that such rationality…is at the same time the most extreme form of irrationality in history, including the Nazi conception of world domination, as far as the conditions required for the survival of humanity are concerned.37
In the present era of naked imperialism, initiated by the sole superpower, the nature of the threat to the entire planet and its people is there for all to see. According to G. John Ikenberry, Professor of Geopolitics and Global Justice at Georgetown University, in his 2002 Foreign Affairs article "America's Imperial Ambition": the U.S. "neoimperial vision" is one in which "the United States arrogates to itself the global role of setting standards, determining threats, using force, and meting out justice." At present the United States currently enjoys both economic (though declining) and military primacy. "The new goal," he states, "is to make these advantages permanent—a fait accompli that will prompt other states to not even try to catch up. Some thinkers have described the strategy as 'breakout.'" Yet, such a "hard-line imperial grand strategy," according to Ikenberry—himself no opponent of imperialism—could backfire.38
From the standpoint of Marxian theory, which emphasizes the economic taproot of imperialism, such a global thrust will be as ineffectual as it is barbaric. Power under capitalism can be imposed episodically through the barrel of a gun. Its real source, however, is relative economic power, which is by its nature fleeting.
The foregoing suggests that interimperialist rivalry did not end as is often thought with the rise of U.S. hegemony. Rather it has persisted in Washington's drive to unlimited hegemony, which can be traced to the underlying logic of capital in a world divided into competing nation states. The United States as the remaining superpower is today seeking final world dominion. The "Project for the New American Century" stands for an attempt to create a U.S.-led global imperium geared to extracting as much surplus as possible from the countries of the periphery, while achieving a "breakout" strategy with respect to the main rivals (or potential rivals) to U.S. global supremacy. The fact that such a goal is irrational and impossible to sustain constitutes the inevitable failure of geopolitics.
Marxian theories of imperialism have always focused on the importance of geoeconomics even more than the question of geopolitics. From this standpoint, uneven-and-combined capitalist development results in shifts in global productive power that cannot be controlled by geopolitical/military means. Empire under capitalism is inherently unstable, forever devoid of a genuine world state and pointing to greater and potentially more dangerous wars. Its long-term evolution is toward barbarism—armed with ever more fearsome weapons of mass destruction.
What hope remains under these dire circumstances lies in the building of a new world peace movement that recognizes that what ultimately must be overcome is not a particular instance of imperialism and war, but an entire world economic system that feeds on militarism and imperialism. The goal of peace must be seen as involving the creation of a world of substantive equality in which global exploitation and the geopolitics of empire are no longer the principal objects. The age-old name for such a radical egalitarian order is "socialism."
↩ Michael Klare, "The New Geopolitics," Monthly Review, vol. 55, no. 3 (July–August 2003), 51–56. The phrase "economic taproot of imperialism" is taken from John Hobson's classic 1902 work Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 71.
↩ Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 147.
↩ Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, 1890); Brooks Adams, The New Empire (London: Macmillan, 1902); Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1921). The Turner book contains his original 1893 article and his 1896 Atlantic Monthly analysis in which he extended the argument to encompass the need for U.S. overseas expansion—see The Frontier in History, 219.
↩ Halford Mackinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History," Geographical Journal, vol. 23, no. 4 (April 1904), 421–44.
↩ Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1919), 1–2.
↩ Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, 179–81. For the evolution of Mackinder's economic views see Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1960), 157–68.
↩ Halford Mackinder, "The Round World and the Winning of the Peace," Foreign Affairs, vol. 21, no. 4, (July 1943), 601.
↩ Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, 186.
↩ Brian W. Blouet, Halford Mackinder (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), 172–77.
↩ Ratzel quoted in Robert Strausz-Hupé, Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1942), 31.
↩ Strausz-Hupé, Geopolitics, 66, 227; Neumann, Behemoth, 156–60.
↩ Haushofer quoted in Strauz-Hupé, Geopolitics, 152; Neumann, Behemoth, 144.
↩ Derwent Whittlesey, "Haushofer: Geopoliticians," in Edward Mead Earle, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 388–411; German Strategy of World Conquest (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1942), 70–78; Andreas Dorpalen, The World of General Haushofer (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942), 70–78; David Thomas Murphy, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997); Saul B. Cohen, Geopolitics in the World System (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 21–22.
↩ Nicholas John Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1944), 43.
↩ Nicholas John Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1942), 19, 458–60.
↩ Spykman, Geography of the Peace, 57.
↩ Noam Chomsky, "The Cold War and the Superpowers," Monthly Review, vol. 33, no. 6 (November 1981), 1–10; Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalizaton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 325–31.
↩ Smith, American Empire, 287, 329.
↩ Mackinder, "The Round World and the Winning of the Peace," 598.
↩ Colin S. Gray, The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era (New York: Crane, Russak, and Co., 1977), 14.
↩ James Burnham, The Struggle for the World (New York: John Day, 1947), 114–15, 162, 182; Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), 22–25; Francis P. Sempa, Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 25–63. Like Burnham, Raymond Aron referred to the Soviet Union as a danger to the World Island in his Century of Total War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 111.
↩ Leslie W. Hepple, "The Revival of Geopolitics," Political Geography Quarterly, volume 5, no. 4 (October 1986), supplement, S21–S36.
↩ "Fresh Fears that the Soviets Will Cut Off Critical Minerals," Business Week, January 28, 1980, 62–63; Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War (New York: The New Press, 2003), 180–81.
↩ Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004), 2.
↩ "Excerpts from Pentagon's Plan: 'Preventing the Re-Emergence of a New Rival,'" New York Times, March 8, 1992; "Keeping the U.S. First," Washington Post, March 11, 1992; Dorrien, Imperial Design, 40–41.
↩ Eugene V. Rostow, A Breakfast for Bonaparte (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1993), 14; Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 814.
↩ Renewed interest in Mackinder's work in this context led to the reprinting of Democratic Ideals and Reality by the National Defense University in 1996.
↩ Mackubin Thomas Owens, "In Defense of Classical Geopolitics," Naval War College Review, vol. 52, no. 4 (Autumn 1999), http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/review/1999/autumn/art3-a99.htm.
↩ Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 3, 10, 30, 38–39.
↩ See John Bellamy Foster "'Imperial America' and War," Monthly Review, vol. 55, no. 1 (May 2003), 1–10.
↩ Alan Larson, "Geopolitics of Oil and Natural Gas," Economic Perspectives, May 2004 http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/ites//0504/ijee/larson.htm.
↩ Klare, "The New Geopolitics," 53–54.
"The New Geopolitics," ↩ Economist, July 31, 1999, 13, 15–16.
↩ Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts (New York: Random House, 2005), 3–15.
↩ Strausz-Hupé, Geopolitics, 101.
"The Fearful Drift of Foreign Policy," ↩ Business Week, April 7, 1975, 21.
↩ István Mészáros, Socialism or Barbarism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 38.
↩ G. John Ikenberry, "America's Imperial Ambition," Foreign Affairs vol. 81, no. 5 (September–October 2002), 44, 50, 59.
2006, Volume 57, Issue 08 (January)
About John Bellamy Foster
View all posts by John Bellamy Foster →
What Will We Do?: The Destruction of Occupational Identities in the 'Knowledge-Based Economy'
January 2006 (Volume 57, Number 8)
January 2006 (Volume 57, Number 8) , The Editors
What Will We Do?: The Destruction of Occupational Identities in the 'Knowledge-Based Economy' , Ursula Huws
What Was the Matter with Ohio?: Unions and Evangelicals in the Rust Belt , James Straub
Heroes and Villains in the Cold War Battle for the United Electrical Workers , Peter Gilmore
Lost and Found: The Italian-American Radical Experience , Marcella Bencivenni


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The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (the DPA) together form a new framework for regulating the processing of personal data in the UK from 25 May 2018, replacing the former Data Protection Act 1998.
Our Privacy Notices
Our Corporate Privacy notice provides information about how the Scottish Parliament processes personal data and the rights that you have. You can find our Privacy notice, together with individual privacy statements covering all of our processing activities on our privacy notice page
More information on how the SPCB ensures that it complies with data protection legislation is set out in our Data Protection Policy
Data Protection Policy (86KB pdf)
How to request information that the Parliament holds about you
Privacy notices on new website
Most of our privacy notices are only available our new website. The privacy notices on this page will be moved to the new website shortly.
Read privacy notices on new Scottish Parliament website


Au Noir designer shirts really stand out when it comes to their detailing. Every shirt features embroidery below the cuff and above the top button hole inside the shirt. These little details are a subtle demonstration of the excellent quality and designer name being worn.


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Butyronitril (ook wel n-butyronitril of ''n''-propylcyanide) is een organische verbinding met als brutoformule C4H7N. De stof komt voor als een licht ontvlambare en giftige vloeistof met een amandelachtige geur, die slecht oplosbaar is in water.

Voorkomen
In 2009 werden butyronitril en ethylformiaat gedetecteerd in de moleculaire wolk Sagittarius B2 nabij het centrum van de Melkweg. Deze moleculen behoorden tot de meest complexe die tot dan in de interstellaire ruimte waren waargenomen.

Synthese
Butyronitril kan bereid worden door de hydrocyanering van propeen: dit is de additie van waterstofcyanide (blauwzuur) aan propeen.

Een andere mogelijkheid is de ammoxidatie van butyraldehyde of 1-butanol. Dit is de reactie van butyraldehyde of butanol met ammoniak in de aanwezigheid van zuurstofgas en een geschikte katalysator.

Butyronitril kan ook bereid worden met de Kolbe-nitrilsynthese door reactie tussen 1-propylbromide en natriumcyanide.

Toepassingen
Butyronitril is een bouwsteen van amprolium, een diergeneeskundig middel voor pluimvee. Het wordt ook soms gebruikt als oplosmiddel.

Zie ook
 Isobutyronitril

Externe link
  MSDS van butyronitril

Nitril
Ontvlambare stof
Toxische stof

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Lush and luxurious, California's Napa and Sonoma Valleys are known for their top-notch wine making. The unsung heroes of the industry are the vineyard workers and small producers, who lovingly oversee all aspects of the wine-making process, from vine to vintage. Unfolding over the course of one of the most dramatic harvests in history, Bernardo Ruiz's film follows three people whose lives are rooted in wine making, immersing the audience in the challenging and unpredictable process.
New York: Nov. 8 - 15. Full lineup and details here.


When you check out and place your order, you can choose to pay by debit or credit card or your PayPal account.
What should I do if I want to change some of the details on my account?
You can change your account details by clicking on My Account at the bottom of the webpage.
Which kits are suitable for making with children?
We've designed our full range of chocolate making kits to be suitable for children to make under adult supervision. The Dinosaur and Safari Animal painting kits are great fun for children to paint their own colourful designs. The bumblebee and Santa transfer sheet lollies are magical as they appear on the lollies! All these kits are perfect for birthday presents and children's parties.
What should I do if I experience problems logging into my account?
We're here to help so just complete the contact form on the Contact Us tab at the bottom of our website and we'll be in touch.
No it's completely optional. When you check out you will be given the option to proceed as a guest without logging in. However, if you would like to set up an account you can do so by clicking the account set up option at the bottom of the check out page.
There are many benefits to registering such as the facility to view your order history, track current orders and receive exciting new product and chocolate news!
Where can I find the recipe card for my chocolate making kit?
All copies of the chocolate kit recipe cards can be downloaded from the product description boxes in the relevant kit. To view them please click on Shop, Chocolate Making Kits and then the kit you require the recipe for.
Will I be required to wait in and sign for my order?
You will get an email and/or text message from our courier service, DPD, allowing you to select your delivery date or have the parcel left with a neighbour. On the day itself, you will be given a one hour time slot for the expected delivery. DPD will require a signature.
Subject to stock availability, our chocolate making kits are usually dispatched within 1-2 days on a next day service for mainland UK to be delivered within 2-3 days. Please note that deliveries to the Scottish Highlands & Islands, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man may take longer.
If you are concerned about your order being damaged, please make a note when you sign for the parcels and inform us as soon as possible via the form in the contact us section of our website. We will replace the damaged items and follow this up with DPD directly.
Unfortunately we are unable to accept the return of food items however, we can accept returns of non food items which will need to be sent back at your own cost for a full refund of the product price.
In no circumstances will we accept goods back if they have been opened or returned to us in poor condition or with the original packaging marked or damaged.
Where can I view a copy of Chocolate at Home's terms and conditions?


For the last five years, Miranda has been living in the shadow of her bad girl sister Xanda, while she wonders what secrets did she take to her grave and what really happened to her sister. Miranda is about to have all of her dreams come true. She has a best friend that can help her unlock her sister's world, a ticket to art school, and a boyfriend that can take her away from all that she has known.
But Miranda has her own secret. There are two lines on a pregnancy test that confirm her worst fears as she is stripped of her former good girl image. Now she must make a choice with tremendous consequences and finally face her sister's demons and her own.
The plot of Tell Me A Secret was amazing. I was engaged from the first line, because when grief comes, it consumes who you are. It changes you and Cupala made that perfect in Tell Me A Secret. I found it to be a real page turner that captured my attention as I devoured each page. I was a fascinating read that was both realistic and unique. Cupala is an amazing writer that leaves you wanting more. I would highly recommend this book to people that loved Stephenie Kuehnert and Ellen Hopkins. I think that anyone with a sister would love this book.
...This book should be amazing. I need to read it, but I think it would be amazing.
That looks amazing! I'm hearing good things about this book. I don't understand your math tho. It looks like 98/100.


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Home / General / When it was possible to actually tax rich people: A Journey Through the Past
When it was possible to actually tax rich people: A Journey Through the Past
Here's another little teaser for my forthcoming Harry Truman article: What was Truman's effective federal tax rate — this is his AGI divided by what he paid in federal taxes — when he started making big money? Note that Truman never made much money until he joined the Senate in 1935. For more than a decade prior to then he had been making $3,500 per year as a county-level administrator just outside Kansas City. This was which was actually a pretty large salary for the time, but Truman was still financially hard-pressed because because he spent all those years trying to pay off his debts from his failed haberdashery business from the early 1920s. Unlike his partner Eddie Jacobson, Truman never declared bankruptcy, because he knew doing so would be bad for his political ambitions. The great advantage of his government position was that his salary couldn't be garnished, so Truman paid off parts his very large — equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2021 money — debt in little bits and pieces, until he got elected to the Senate, when for some reason the bank holding it decided to settle the new senator's outstanding balance at ten cents on the dollar.
By the way there's a fun article to be written about Truman and his Jewish friends. In a draft will from 1950, he directs Bess and Margaret to raise money to build a Masonic Lodge on the Truman farm property by getting "Eddie Jacobson of KC and Abe Feinberg of New York to raise money among my Jewish friends" for this purpose. (FYI despite Harry's ecumenical attitudes, Bess Truman was apparently a pretty bad anti-Semite, even for the time: in the mid-1960s David Susskind came to Independence to interview Harry, and wasn't allowed into the house, because, he was told, Bess Truman would never allow a Jew to enter her house. These research rabbit holes never end).
Where was I? Ah yes, Harry's effective federal tax rate.
When Truman got elected to the Senate, the annual salary for that position was $10,000 per year, which to use the technical economic jargon was just a whole big pile of money at that time. For example, in 1936, $10,000 per year was more than 99.17% of all American households were earning. But here's the thing: for the first three decades of the existence of the federal income tax, which was made possible by the passage of the 16th amendment in 1913, nobody paid any federal taxes except the EXTREMELY wealthy. How progressive was the tax system back then? Take a gander at Harry Truman's effective tax rate for his first five years in the Senate, when again he was literally at least on the bleeding edge what today we call the one percent:
1935: 2.7%
1936: Return not available
1938: 1.77%
Then there was some sort of significant development or the other that changed things quite drastically indeed:
1942: 18.9%
Then Truman became president, and his salary took a massive leap upward, to $75,000 per year. This was comparable to what the CEOs of America's largest companies were pulling down at the time — the POTUS was a vastly higher paid position, relatively speaking, back in those days, than it is today, when a "billionaire" like Donald Trump had to find a way to scrape along on Amy Chua's salary. Oh right, he donated it all to charity. You're killing me Smalls.
OK lets stay on task here. Truman's effective federal tax rate during his first term as president:
What is this, communist Russia?
1948: 38.3%.
Then during his second term Truman's income took another massive leap forward, for legal, semi-legal, and definitely illegal reasons, but that's a subject for another day.
Anyway, there's obviously an extremely significant cultural shift here that takes place over a very short time, when suddenly high upper middle class to lower upper class people (Truman from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s) went from paying essentially no federal taxes, to suddenly having to fork over more than a quarter of their income to Uncle Sam, just like that. I suspect this shift played a huge role in the rise of nascent movement conservatism (God and Man at Yale etc.) in the 1950s, when effective tax rates on rich people remained vastly higher than they are today.
Opinion: Kyrsten Sinema: I Think You Are a Total Dumbshit
guerillasurgeon He's acknowledged this – but somehow can't connect the paucity of women with his statements about women. Like they all want to be dominated or you can't argue with them or something. And yet, he's...
Jordan Peterson's flounce · January 21, 2022
Should still be lurking I think it's an interesting representation of a real political realignment - white male rage wasn't politicized in the 90s the way it is now. When I was a kid (and I was a little too young for...
EduardoFlores That's not really what it's about. The "machine" means controlling the public discourse. Repubs yell "Gov't" is bad and Dems respond w/ "No, gov't is good!" That's simply Reps...
Eric Scharf This is why I can't find a new graphics card.
GeorgeBurnsWasRight Put all your chips into it!!
LGM Podcast: The Divisional Round


After reviewing work samples of professional RGD Members who expressed interest in the project, the RGD Communications Committee has selected Sudbury-based design firm Design de Plume to design the RGD Member Sticker for 2015.
The Sticker will be distributed to Registered Graphic Designers (RGD) to be added to their RGD certificates and membership cards, representing another year of commitment to professional standards, ethical conduct and industry best practices.
Founded by RGDs Melissa Deschenes, Meggan Michaud and Jennifer Taback, Design de Plume is an aboriginally owned, award-winning independent graphic design firm specializing in branding, photography, print and web design.
"In the past year, all of our principal designers here at Design de Plume have become certified members of RGD. We felt like this was a great time to step up and become more involved with the Association and its initiatives that benefit everyone in the design sector. We're really excited to participate in this initiative and to continue our collaboration with RGD."
As the 2015 Sticker designer, the firm will receive 3 free registrations to the 2015 DesignThinkers Conference, in addition to a profile to accompany the sticker and recognition for their creative contribution to the Association and their local design community.
For more information on the selection process for the 2015 Membership Sticker designer, click here.


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24/7's second episode shows us Bruce Boudreau might actually have a handle on things
By Joe YerdonDec 23, 2010, 8:00 AM EST
The second episode of HBO's 24/7 goes to show us that judging teams based on one episode is akin to judging a book by its cover. Caps coach Bruce Boudreau faced a lot of criticism after the first episode and it appeared that all of those questions raised about his preparedness as a coach and his ability to hold the attention of his team in the room were answered emphatically.
Many talked about how Boudreau didn't appear to have meticulous notes on the whiteboards for the Caps before games making it seem like he was an ill-prepared madman. In Wednesday's episode we see more of Boudreau the coach with game plans written out with care and seeing him work player-to-player on everything from fighting to injuries to playing psychologist as much as he is a coach. For a team mired in a losing streak doing that is just as important as laying out the x's and o's.
In our three things to look out for before the airing of tonight's episode we found out that the layout of tonight's episode was indeed easy to pick out but seeing how it was laid out in front of us makes it all more fun. Capping off the episode with Washington beating Ottawa and ending their losing streak to get off their eight game schneid and celebrating to DJ Pauly D's "Beat Dat Beat" proves that winning can cure everything.
There was a moment that raised eyebrows though and, again, it's the Caps doing the work. Caps GM George McPhee commented on the negative publicity surrounding the team in their losing streak and said that if those commenting knew anything about hockey they'd be working in it. I get that those on the inside know how things work better when it comes to running a hockey team, but if you're expecting the local sports talk shows to clam up while the team plays bad hockey, you're crazy.
Those in the media, whether it's blogs, newspapers, or talk radio, it's our job to comment on what we see out on the ice and if what we see stinks, you'd better believe it's going to be told that way. For McPhee to expect to either be ignored (perhaps in favor of the local NFL failures) or not talked about at all is just crazy and unrealistic.
When you win, you get praised and when you lose you are opened up to criticism, it's that simple and it's how the business works. If the Caps are able to keep winning and put that losing streak behind them for good, I'm sure he'll be quite happy hearing the praise rather than the negative comments. We may not be hockey insiders in the media, but we know a struggling team when we see it.
Not everything McPhee showed in this episode was like this though. McPhee showed that he's clearly the man in charge of the Capitals and how things are run in D.C. and that whatever happens there is by his design one way or another. Seeing him react to the team falling behind and then coming back against Boston before eventually losing their eighth game in a row is like something out of a feature film. Leave no doubt in your mind that George McPhee is the man running the Capitals.
As for the more fun and light-hearted and enlightening stuff to take away from episode two,there's a few things:
Sidney Crosby's superstitions are both fascinating and gross. From taping his sticks at a certain time and having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before a game to seeing that Sid wears the same athletic supporter he has since he was 16 years-old provides some insight as to how quirky even the biggest star of the game is.
Alex Ovechkin still living with his parents in Washington provides a nice down home look at the other biggest superstar in the league. Seeing Alex's mother prepare his dinner for him before hitting the road while seeing him pack lightly only bringing his PS3 reminds you that these guys are still just kids.
Penguins agitator Matt Cooke pranking his old friend and Internet superstar Paul Bissonette of the Coyotes by snipping his skate laces and stuffing Dubble Bubble bubble gum into the fingers of his gloves shows that even an on-ice villain can make us laugh.
The speech Caps forward Mike Knuble gave after the first period of their game against Boston where the Caps were already down 3-0 might have been the one locker room speech they needed the most to wake them up. He's not the assistant captain for nothing.
Caps fighter Matt Hendricks' eye after getting punched up by Rangers agitator Sean Avery is one of the grossest and manliest things you'll ever see on TV.
Mike Green has an interesting mode of transportation.
Seriously, the Caps celebrate victories to this song and have a locker room Jersey Shore fist pump dance-off. My mind is blown.
Next week's third episode figures to be the crowning glory of the four episode set as the teams will be preparing to face each other in their game that happens on Thursday night the 23rd. Having the NHL schedule makers set this up so nicely to amp up the drama will make next week's episode even more of a must-watch.


text:
extern java::lang::Class *class_(const char16_t *c, int n);

java::lang::Class* poi::ss::usermodel::TableStyle::class_()
{
    static ::java::lang::Class* c = ::class_(u"org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.TableStyle", 38);
    return c;
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Michigan has allowed its citizens to play the online lottery for several years now. Here's a look at the Michigan online lottery program.
Using our exclusive Michigan lottery promo code: PLAYMICHIGAN you can get 10 free games!
Join now at Michigan Lottery and get a $100 bonus plus 10 games free!
When did Michigan authorize online lottery games?
Michigan's online lottery went online on August 11, 2014.
Michigan jumped into online lottery without a law being passed by the legislature. The state was able to authorize online lottery sales without legislative approval due to the broad authority given to the Michigan Lottery to approve new games.
The state's path to online lottery was anything but a smooth ride.
In February 2013, the Michigan Lottery announced it would begin selling lottery tickets online in the not too distant future. The original plan was to offer online subscriptions by the spring, where customers could purchase multiple tickets for draw games. This would be followed by a broader rollout of single ticket sales, instant win games, and even Keno by the end of 2013.
The plans were put on hold when opposition in the legislature tried to pass legislation prohibiting online lottery sales. When the effort failed, the Michigan Lottery resumed its plans, and online lottery games were introduced in the summer of 2014.
The online lottery games in Michigan are run by the Michigan Lottery, and are subject to the same regulations and oversight as the state's traditional lottery games.
How do I create an online lottery account?
To register an online Michigan Lottery account you must be a US resident, a resident of Michigan and 18 years or older to play.
After a player verification process, you'll be able to deposit money into your online account and can start purchasing online tickets.
Online lottery sales have been a boon for Michigan, and perhaps surprisingly, to existing brick-and-mortar lottery retailers.
Less than a year into the experiment, the results were eye-opening. Over the first 10 months, 133,000 online lottery accounts had been created, and over 300,000 instant tickets were being purchased online every single day.
By mid-2015, sales had grown to over $1 million per day, according to a report by Digital Gaming Group.
As noted above, brick-and-mortar retailers have seen sales rise since online lottery was introduced in Michigan. Lottery retailers have vehemently opposed online lottery, fearing cannibalization. But the results in Michigan are pretty conclusive, and should put to rest the cannibalization fears.


What to improve your skills and become a better soccer player? You can never be too good at a sport; It is always good to practice your craft. Whether you are an amateur who loves the game, or a serious professional, whether it's shooting, free kicking, or fitness, it is a sport with endless possibilities. Want to improve your skills with Soccer training and become a great player? You have to start somewhere, and no one becomes a Zidane or Beckham overnight, it takes dedication, practice, and determination.
Training – The Beginnings of a Great Player There are some who are born with great athletic ability which is geared toward soccer, It is also a fact that anyone can become a great player, it is also a fact that any talent level can be developed into superior playing status with enough training. A lot of professionals you see today are not born with natural talent, but have spent lots of time training to get to where they are today. With the help of this article you will find training tips, drills and tactics on how to play the beautiful game so that one day, maybe you will play like the Pro's.
Training will help you improve your skills and is absolutely essential to being the best soccer player you can be. Learning to kick a ball properly is the difference between a good and a great player. A racquetball court is also a great place to work on shooting. Repetition is a key ingredient in developing an accurate shot, and in a racquetball court, the ball always returns to you.
When you begin, don't just start hitting the ball with all your might. Work on the proper technique and motion. You will be able to clearly see how well you've struck the ball by the way it comes off the wall. Be sure you are hitting it cleanly. Similar to when you hit a tennis ball or baseball well, you'll feel it when you strike it right.
You can combine shooting with receiving by trying to collect your shot off the wall and preparing to hit it again. When you get really advanced, you'll be able to hit your rebound back at the wall without settling the ball first.
You don't think you can do it? Of course you can!!
Learning to shoot like a pro isn't easy. It takes a lot of practice to get it right.


Graduate-level education focused on the core foundations of business.
Courses centered on the entrepreneurial process and lean thinking.
Connections and advice from leading Seattle entrepreneurs and investors.
The Foster School is launching the MS ENTRE due to increased demand for one-year master's in entrepreneurship programs, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC).
The MS ENTRE will be offered in conjunction with the Foster School's Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, building on the already strong track record of entrepreneurship at Foster. The Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship is ranked #16 in graduate entrepreneurship by Entrepreneur Magazine/Princeton Review and #23 in graduate entrepreneurship by U.S. News & World Report.
This degree also reinforces the innovative culture at the University of Washington, which was recently named the #4 most innovative university in the world by Reuters.
Learn more about MS ENTRE and sign up to receive updates on the program.
Very interesting degree! Is it offered online for distance learnings? I'm located in Southern California.
This program is only offered in-person at the University of Washington, partly because of the focus on mentorship and connections with Seattle based entrepreneurs and investors.


In the ever-onwards quest to find the gold at the end of the Moore's Law rainbow, researchers are continuing to push the boundaries in terms of how small we can actually make the dies that power our processors. The latest development in that trend has seen IBM and the State University of New York produce the world's first 7nm chip with functioning transistors.
Don't get too excited just yet, though, as it's expected that the commercial application of any of the work IBM is doing at the moment is at least two years away. This is more of a proof of concept than anything, but it's still incredibly significant. This is the first time anyone has demonstrated the creation of a sub-10nm chip that could have potential commercial applications.
IBM's breakthrough is particularly significant in light of recent rumors than Intel may be abandoning plans to push its next generation of Core architecture to a 10nm node due to production difficulties. Intel normally leads the world in chip production, but it seems IBM may have stolen its competitor's thunder, at least for now.
The process uses a production technique called extreme ultraviolet lithography, which as Ars points out, is important because it's thought likely to be the go-to process for future wafer creation. This chip was also made with silicon-germanium, rather than with traditional silicon – a material that is likely to be the mainstay of sub-10nm chips.
With different production methods comes changing standards too, and IBM reports that despite the manometer measurement of the die 'only' being reduced by three nanmeters, the surface area of the chip has actually been reduced by almost 50 percent when compared with 10nm processes.
This, IBM believes, will make it possible to reduce heat and improve performance by as much as 50 per cent over planned 10nm hardware. The difference between this and the double-sized 14nm chips in use today will be even more significant.
And the biggest takeaway from this news is that this is planned as a commercial product. IBM isn't just trying to show off to competitors like Intel and Samsung, it's seeking to viably produce 7nm hardware.